structuring religion

7/29/2019 Structuring Religion

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STRUCTURING RELIGIONby Emrah Gker

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Taking an academic shape after the second half of the nineteenth century, the criticism

and analysis of religion and religious social structures (from particular lifestyles to

institutional power structures) developed and got more and more sophisticated as the

Western paths of modernization evolved. Today, in close relation with what has been

happening in culture, economics and politics, the sociology of religion has found new

paths of investigation; paths not necessarily critical of religion, but which try to

understand the persistence, even, re-publicization of various religious communities.

Nevertheless, I believe that the extreme relativist and particularistic readings of faith,

of religious cognitive structures and of sects, which have developed as certain radical

skepticist ideas entered into academic circulation in a blinding speed in the last three

decades of the century, should be critically reconsidered for the development of a sound

sociology of religion. As more and more sociologists and anthropologists felt satisfied

with post-modern experimenting on fragments with respect to religion, as novel ideas

(like schizo-analyzing religious ecstasy) could stay on the stage no more than fifteen

minutes, as, thanks to people like Baudrillard, social science was rendered to playing

with the pieces (Baudrillard, 1984: 24), some fundamental aspects, some essential points

of departure, established by figures like Weber, Marx or Durkheim (among others), were

undermined if not forgotten.


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In this series of papers, I will track the early development of the sociology of

religion, by focussing on the three founding fathers of contemporary sociology, Marx,

Durkheim and Weber. I do not aim a conservative defense of the classics, but I do

believe, as I am going to try to suggest in each of the papers, that we should recall some

of the main postulates offered by these three foundational figures, and thus, rebuild on

them.

In these papers, I will attempt to comment on the authors sociology of religion

from a metatheoretical perspective which situates the discussion in terms of structure and

agency in religion.

PART ONE: MARX

After over 150 years of circulation inside the intellectual field, Marx and Engels works

are very difficult to handle academically without applying one of the rival paradigms on

them, and thus, usually, doing injustice to this or that element of their theories. In this

first part of the series of short papers, I will try to give a brief account of Karl Marxs(and in a way, Friedrich Engels) views on religion. In doing this, I will attempt to bring

out the sociological relationship between structure and agency which Marx and Engels

embed into their criticism. Therefore, my own brief interpretation, by privileging that

specific polarity, is likely to be another problematic simplification. However, this and the

coming two papers on Durkheim and Weber on the same theme aim to cast some light on

a better contemporary sociological understanding of religion (i.e., my agenda is

essentially different than that of the founding fathers). Moreover, as it will be clearer

later, I find the duality between part and whole, between structure and agency, between

primary representations of religion and religious (social) structures indispensable for a


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serious sociological investigation. Like many phenomena worth studying sociologically,

religion also has a double life: A subjectivist, cognitive dimension and an objectivist,

structural dimension.

Trevor Ling (1980: 3) suggests three stages in Marxs intellectual relationship with

religion. For practical (and simply, biographical) reasons Ill follow him in order to give a

form to my discussion, and Ill add a fourth stage, shortly mentioning Engels position

after late 1870s.

1. CHRISTIAN MARXThis earliest stage is irrelevant for my purposes in this paper, yet this stage is a

biographical fact of Marxs intellectual development and thus deserves mentioning (for a

more detailed account, see McLellan, 1972).

For his Abitur to finish the High School he attended in Trier, his birthplace, Marx

wrote a number of essays, some of which included Christian themes (Ling, 1980: 5). In

these writings, Marx defended a theistic, rather than fundamentalist interpretation of

Christianism, and Ling (1980: 6) notes that even at such an early stage (1830s), we can

tell about the influences of French liberal ideas (particularly of Rousseau) on his

theological views. These shadow years of Marx end by 1836, when he begins studying

in the University of Berlin.

2. ATHEIST MARX-IHegel, until his death in 1831, has been a professor of philosophy in the University of

Berlin, and thus his ideas were very influential within the university; after his death, he

had many followers among academics and students. Marx, when he began studying law


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there, and reading more and more philosophy, became involved in the Young Hegelians

group, befriending a number of the affiliates (Ling, 1980: 7).

Young Hegelians mainly applied philosophy to contemporary religious and

theological ideas, and they produced radical rejections of conventional Christian beliefs.

Bruno Bauers destructive criticisms of the Gospels and Jesus must have excited and

influenced Marx a lot, who had newly mastered the Hegelian system. He soon became

acquainted with the work of Feuerbach, whose philosophical argument defending a

materialist standpoint was more developed. At this stage, Marx was confronting religious

speculation with philosophical speculation, trying to prove why individual minds ought to

reject theological ideas, which were in fact nothing but the minds abstraction from the

reality of the natural world. Feuerbach held that humanbeings were obsessed by the

delusion of religious speculation because they were alienated from their own true beings.

The theme of self-alienation was also used by Bauer and was a favorite theme of the

Young Hegelians. While Marx engages into a reconstructive criticism of the crudematerialism of his philosopher friends later, he makes use of central themes developed

by them in his analysis of religion.

Therefore, as Marx became a true atheist, rejecting all propositions, thought systems

and institutions related with religion, his materialism first allied with the Young

Hegelians. Demonstrating why mental structures of religion were philosophically

irrelevant for agents would later help him to explain the reasons why these ideas, beliefs,

myths, fears, emotions, etc. were successful to influence people: The lessons taught by

Young Hegelians would later aid him in establishing a connection between structure and

agency in religion and leave the speculative dimension of the individual mind (or the


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human essence) behind. Yet of course, as I will try to show, Marxs own biases will

limit his analysis of the double life of religion.

3. ATHEIST MARX-IILing (1980: 4) suggests that Marxs intellectual relationship with religion enters its third

and final phase by 1842, when Marx began to publish radical articles in the newspaper

Rheinische Zeitung. Although this third stage can be analyzed under two periods (his

views on religion before and after he develops his criticism of political economy and

capitalism), his fundamental perspective, which uses the criticism of the philosophical

materialism of Young Hegelians as a springboard, remains almost the same. My strategy

in giving an account of Marx in his mature phase will be the following: I will deal with

his (and Engels) key texts, extracting the crux of their analysis, commenting on that

core, and then in a concluding section of the paper, I plan to give a shape to the whole

discussion from my previously stated metatheoretical perspective.

Just before he published his criticisms of Feuerbach and Bauer, there is a key article

published as the leading article in theRheinische Zeitung, in July 1842. Here, Marx, with

his famous sharp tongue and brilliant sarcasm, attacks a right-wing conservative, Herr

Hermes, editor of Klnische Zeitung, who, in an early article, criticized the

philosophical criticism of religion in newspapers and called for censorship for such

sacrilege. In his reply, Marx gives the signs of his departure from philosophical

materialism and develops a criticism of Christianitys relationship with an oppressive

state.

Marx draws his sword and raises his shield as he charges upon the right-wing

defenders of the status quo, who aim to monopolize religious ideas and institutions in


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order to secure the heavy hand of the state. So, for the first time he begins to critically

evaluate the actual political effects that are rooted in religion (both structurally and

mentally). Furthermore, he challenges Hermes statement, who said: A sharp distinction

must be made between what is required by the freedom of scientific research, which can

but benefit Christianity itself, and what is beyond the bounds of scientific research

(quoted in Marx, 1964a: 21). Marx viciously attacks Hermes call for dictating

boundaries to science so that science could agree with religion, stating that scientific (or,

worldly) reason has, historically, clashed with religious reason, falsifying religious

babble and politically challenging its institutions (Marx, 1964a: 24-5). Marx criticizes

the legitimation of social oppression (in the form of threatening the freedom of press,

defending states tyrannical intervention, hindering scientific progress) via the use of

religion. In doing that, he corrects Hermes ahistorical claims on the religious essence

of European states, by recalling the Revolutionary Constitution of 1789, and even the

secular articles of the Prussian Landrecht (Marx, 1964a: 26-7). He further goes on tocriticize Hermes views on the religiosity of state-administered marriage and public

education, pointing out that the historical tendency is the separation of Church and State,

which renders the cries for consecrated marriage and religious public education

meaningless.

Marx then comes to the central argument of his article, which would later be

developed in his accounts of Bauer and Feuerbach: He makes the deadly move as he

answers the question, Should philosophy discuss religious matters also in newspaper

articles?

Philosophy, above all German philosophy, has a propensity to solitude, to systematicalseclusion, to dispassionate self-contemplation which opposes it from the outset in its


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estrangement to the quick-witted and alive-to-events newspapers whose only delight is ininformation. Philosophy, taken in its systematic development, is unpopular; its secretweaving within itself seems to the layman to be an occupation as overstrained as it isunpractical; it is considered as a professor of magic whose incantations sound pompousbecause they are unintelligible. [Marx, 1964a: 30]

Yet, he argues, philosophers belong to this world, they do not grow out of the soil like

mushrooms, they are influenced by the material processes of the world as anyone. So,

the time must come whenphilosophy not only internally by its content but externally by

its appearance comes into contact and mutual reaction with the real contemporary

world (my emphasis; Marx, 1964a: 31). Although he does not criticize Young Hegelians

yet (having defended them against Hermes), Marxs departure is clear when he argues

that as the philosophical criticism of religion gets more and more publicized, it must

connect its criticisms with real, political, cultural issues of the day.

As Marx developed this line of criticism, he also, in 1842-43, began to ask questions

about what (and whose) interests the Prussian state represented, which, for the first time,

led him to consult property laws and the local political-economic life. Thus, his clash

with the Prussian state gained another momentum, along with the criticism of religion. In

the autumn of 1843 comes his articles on Bauers work (Marx, 1978), where he first

spills the beans and lays out the (preliminary) theoretical foundation which would lead

to the writing ofGerman Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach.

Shortly, Bauer argued that the strength of the opposition between Christians and Jews

was a religious one, if the weakness of both Christianity and Judaism was exposed, no

ground would remain upon which Christians could exercise their self-claimed superiority

over Jews. So the Jews should both accept philosophical attacks on Christianity andon

Judaism, then, all would stand together as citizens.


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Marx strongly disagreed, turning his attention towards the social and economic

forms with which both religions are associated. He criticized Bauer for only seeing the

theological side of the issue: To be politically emancipated from religion is not to be

finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not

the final and absolute form ofhuman emancipation (Marx, 1978: 32). Religion may be

expelled from the public sphere and be turned into a private issue, a mere individual

right, yet this is no true emancipation, because the socioeconomic life remains unchanged

and thus religion survives there. It is important to note here how Marx has transformed

the philosophical criticism of religion into both a matter of social revolution and a novel

account of the sociology of rights.

None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as amember of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn intohimself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest. [Marx, 1978: 43]

This is why he attacks Judaism so forcefully, not because he is anti-Semitic, but because

he dislikes (and for total emancipation, he wants to abolish) the legitimation of selfish

economic interests through religion. Once the religious social structures are degrounded

(even from the private sphere), he believes, the mental structures upon which the

capitalist socioeconomic reality stands would collapse. It should quickly be added that

Marx never engaged in a detailed sociology of totalities like Judaism or Protestantism,

giving us, unlike Weber, no verifications for the alliance between capitalism and religion

at the interactional dimension. In other major writings, too, Marx sacrifices detailed

sociological analysis of religion to ideological fervor.

In 1844, finally, in his introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegels

Philosophy of Right, he announces that the criticism of religion, which is the premise of


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all criticism, is complete in Germany, implicitly referring to Strauss, Bauer and

Feuerbachs works (Marx, 1964b). Now what? Now, the arms of criticism should be

directed, among other issues of course, towards the use of Christian religion by the

socially and economically exploitative Prussian state for furthering capitalist ends. Now

is the time ofpractically talking about revolution.

In this introduction, Marx opens direct fire, spelling those famous words, which have

been quoted millions of times until now, about religion being the expression of real

distress and the protestagainst real distress, an illusory happiness refracted from the

reality of the world in order to sooth the very material pains of humanity. Therefore,

Marx tries to expose how symbolic representations of Christianity serve the states and

capitalists interests against the people (people, for now, being an ambiguous category

for Marx, including all the poor). To clear the way before political action for social

change, Marx wants to render religious sources of speculation and delusion baseless and

irrelevant. However, I should note that in doing this, he does not establish a relationalitybetween religious structures and agents.

William Lloyd Newell (1986: 24) notes that Marxs critique of religious hermeneutics

is similar to that of Nietzches: Christians talk too much and act too little. I think that

rather than acting too little, for Marx, they act for the good of those in power. And

religious people cannot help but conform to or ally with capitalists interests because, if I

may recall Durkheim, Marx also thinks that religion does not know itself. Yet Marx has

a very different way of telling religion what it is really. His will be more a political

criticism than a scientific one, being connected to his account of the reality of the world,


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which was, by 1944, being shaped in his mind as he read more and more political

economy.

In this period, before he has elaborated on the labor theory of value, Marx has a

holistic view of religion:

This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted-world-consciousness, because they arean inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopedic compendium,its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point dhonneur, its enthusiasm, its moralsanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolidation and justification. It isthefantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality.This struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against this world of whichreligion is the spiritual aroma. [MECW, vol. III, 1975: 175]

Therefore, as we become aware of the nature of religion, as we realize philosophy in this

world, Marx thinks that we will be radicalized, in the literal sense of the term: We will

reach the roots, the basis, fundamental material aspects of all the misery and injustice in

the world. So it is not surprising that he defends a road to revolution in the same

introduction, of whose main agent will be the proletariat.

Marx (and as they come together in 1844, Engels) elaborate these themes in three

primary works written between 1844 and 1846: Marx and Engels The Holy Family, or

Critique of Critical Criticism and German Ideology, and Marxs Theses on Feuerbach. I

note two thematic shifts: The first being the full-fledged criticism of Feuerbachian

materialism, the second being the elaboration of class analysis. What is offered by them,

in these works, to replace philosophy, is praxis, which would refurbish materialism by

fusing its historically separated modes of existence:

As Feuerbach represented materialism in the theoretical domain, French and Englishsocialism and communism in the practical field represented materialism which coincidedwithhumanism. [emphases in original; Marx, 1964c: 60]


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Thus against Feuerbach, in his famous Theses, Marx argues that the active, practical,

subjective dimension of materialism, in direct relationship with socioeconomic processes

should not be neglected. So the criticism of religion in Feuerbach is incomplete (despite

its philosophical completeness). Once it is shown that, abstractly, religious

representations are illusions refracted from the real world, thus drifting the human

essence toward self-alienation, it remains to be shown, radicalizing materialism, that this

contradiction should be abolished through political practice, namely, revolution. Marx

notes that religious sentiments are social products, not ideas alienating humans out of

the blue. Altering social structures would thus put an end to the ideological reproduction

of religions mental structures which envelop people.

Later, in German Ideology, Marx and Engels elaborate on the true nature of these

social structures to be revolutionized. In this work the seeds of their theory of history are

thrown:

It shows that history does not end by dissolving itself in self-consciousness as the spirit ofthe spirit but that there is present in it at every stage a material result, a sum of productionforces, a historically created relation to nature and of individuals to one another handed downto each generation by its predecessor, a mass of production forces, capitals and circumstanceswhich, on the one hand, are modified by the new generation but which, on the other hand,prescribe to that generation their own conditions of life and give it a definite development, aspecial character that circumstances, therefore, make man just as much as man makescircumstances. This sum of productive forces, capitals and forms of social intercourse whichevery individual and every generation finds already in existence is the real basis of what thephilosopher imagined to be the substance and essence of man, what they apotheosizedand fought against, a real basis which is not in the least disturbed in it action and influence onthe development of man by those philosophers, as self-consciousness and ego, rebellingagainst it. [Marx and Engels, 1964d: 78]

As this lengthy extract from German Ideology shows, although there is yet little

elaboration on the theory of labor and class relations, humans relation with nature and

with other humans, socioeconomically speaking, forms the basis of all social structures

and institutions. At this point, I should also note that, having neglected the diversity


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within a religion and among religions, Marx and Engels primary concern was to

confront the alliance between religions and exploitative, unjust, unequal social and

political structures.

That point becomes more meaningful in Marxs journalism and polemical writings. In

an article titled The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter, published in

1847 in Deutsche-Brsseler Zeitung, Marx viciously attacks the conservative ideas of a

Consistorial Councillor by polemically mocking the social principles of Christianity.

His merciless remarks go, for some paragraphs, like that:

The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class,and all they have for the latter is the pious wish the former will be charitable.()The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors against theoppressed to be either the just punishment of original sin and other sins or trials that the Lordin his infinite wisdom imposes on those redeemed. [Marx, 1964e: 84]

Proletariat, he argues in that article, as a sturdy and malicious boy, will not let itself be

fooled by the pro-establishment preachings of religion (Marx, 1964e: 86). If we could ask

Marx what he thought about the forms of protest developed by folk religion against

oppression and poverty, about the possibility of progressive elements within religion, I do

not think he would make a face. Simply, his agenda was different.

Until his death, Marx would not reconsider his main stance regarding religion,

because political economy was the legitimate area of analysis for him, he commented on

all other issues like culture, art, politics, colonialism, etc. using the guideline of political

economy criticism and with an ideology of anti-capitalism. As the criticism of religion,

philosophically, is long finished (and if we confine ourselves within the domain of

philosophy only, Marxs point is still defendable), religion becomes a topic for him only

in terms of its conformist relationship with capitalism. And as long as religion cannot be


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reflexive on its historical conditions of existence, Marx thinks that it is bound to be

conformist. Reminding us of Weber, Marx writes in Capital:

The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon theproduction of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations withone another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce theirindividual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour for such a society,Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developmentsProtestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. [Marx, 1964f: 135]

Consequently, until his death, Marxs atheism consistently develops the historical

materialist critique of religion, but not elaborating more on the complexity of religion,

but elaborating on the social structures which gave birth to that complexity.

4. ATHEIST ENGELSActually, the two friends agreed on almost everything. I will not go into a discussion of

whether Engels vulgarized Marxs work after his death by regarding it as a pure science. I

just wanted to do justice to Engels, by both drawing attention to some of his ideas on

religion and on his writings on the topic after 1883.

A first notable remark by Engels is about the political problems of attacking religion

on the whole. He was aware of the fact that religion embraced most of the public sphere,

and that naturally included the proletariat. On the other hand, he knew that religion is not

criticized for the sake of an intellectual-philosophical victory. It was criticized in order to

gain advantage in the fight against capitalist oppression, exposing the institutional and

discursive sources reproducing capitalism. Thus, in 1874, in his Emigrant Literature, he

argued against Blanquist radicals, who preached about totally prohibiting religion, who

rejected any religious involvement within the Commune, and who suggested repressive

measures against any religious organization:


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And this demand that men should be changed into atheistspar ordre du mufti is signed bytwo members of the Commune who have really had opportunity enough to find out that first avast amount of things can be ordered on paper without necessarily being carried out, andsecond, that persecution is the best means of promoting undesirable convictions! This muchis sure: the only service that can be rendered to God today is to declare atheism a compulsoryarticle of faith and to outdo Bismarcks Kirschenkulturkampflaws by prohibiting religiongenerally. [Engels, 1964a: 143]

Later inAnti-Dhring, during Marxs lifetime, and Dialectics of Nature, written in a

long period between 1873-86, Engels reiterates Marxs main arguments by focusing on

the history of religious categories and criticizing them from the standpoint of

contemporary science. One year before Marxs death, Engels writes an article in Der

Sozialdemokrat, to commemorate Bruno Bauer, who had died a short while ago. In

Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity, he does something different than Marx (not

theoretically, though), and gives an historical account of the emergence of early

Christianity, by focusing on its main religious teachings and its practices, also praising

the contribution of Marxs old friend to that topic. He concludes that the novel aspects,

and the renovated aspects (borrowed from Greek philosophy) of Christianity, made it the

proper religion for the development of capitalism. Unlike Marx, Engels explains this,

crudely, by the Darwinistic triumph of Christianitys ideology over other world religions

and sects (Engels, 1964b).

The final contribution of Engels to the criticism of religion, for the purposes of this

paper, is his 1886 piece Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German

Philosophy (Engels, 1964c). Here, Engels returns to the topic after 40 years and

elaborates on their theories they had developed in Theses on Feuerbach and German

Ideology. The importance of this piece, although saying nothing radically new about their

criticisms of Feuerbach, Stirner and Bauer, is that it is written long after Marx and Engels


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have (almost) fully developed their criticism of political economy, and gives an

orderly shape to the relationship between the philosophical tenets of historical

materialism and the critique of capitalism. Engels establishes the Hegelian connections in

the German critique of religion and in their theory, in a lot more detail than Marx has

done. Yet he brings in the arguments he has developed in Dialectics of Nature and

proposes to justify Marxs sublation of classical materialism and its application to the

history of capitalism as the foundations of a true science. It is notable that for Marx,

falsifying religion was above all strategically important for political-practical reasons;

whereas Engels, after Marxs death, perhaps disillusioned by the victories of capitalism

everywhere, seems to attack religion for the sake of science and scientific truth.

CONCLUSION

Marxs hypothesis that religion has its material foundations, its categories, practices,

institutions in the historical development of social structures is one of his main

contributions to the sociology of religion, although I think the true credit should be given

to Durkheim and Weber. That is because Marxs account lacked elaboration on three

levels:

1. On the subjectivist level, that is, when the question of religion came to how agents

identified themselves with religious ideas, forming interactional loyalties, group

identities, etc., Marx is on the whole silent. He believed that religious structures were

unable to arm the agents with the ability to formulate intelligible and reasonable relations

with everyday realities. In that sense, religion was narrow. However, this point Marx

made contradicts with his notion that religious categories and beliefs are the products of

social structures, of history in the sense that it is the very socialness of religion that


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supplies the agents with a discursive matrix, through which they can give a meaning to

their life and be critical about many aspects of it which has nothing to do with the

supernatural.

2. On the objectivist level, Marx is too holistic, he does not question the over-general

categories he uses, like Christianity, Judaism, Oriental Islam, etc., which leads him

establishing only a pragmatic connection between capitalism and structural dynamics of

religion. I mean pragmatic in the sense that Marx talks about these structures in terms

of their confirmation of, alliance with, or conformity to the capitalist social formations

(and its powerful agents). Although he is (arguably) aware of the fact that through the

circulation of symbolic representations (or practices, beliefs, rites, art, music, etc.) related

to religion, the structure becomes something more than its parts, he neglects that this does

not render religion false or a mere inversion. The very endless process of the being

and becoming of structures, their embodiment by the believers, is the reality itself.

3. Finally, because of the first two points, establishing a relationality between the twomodes of religious existence is almost impossible for Marx. He had a perfect opportunity

to do that by expanding his account of political economy to the economy of symbolic

goods, thus pinpointing similar power relations within the complexity of religion. But of

course, he did not even have time to finish his criticism of bourgeois economics. Nor did

he leave a consistent theory of class relations, which would give us an idea about how he

understood the connection between culture and economy.

Finally, I do think that the points raised by Marxs limited accounts are still with us.

Although in most of the civilized world, Church and State has been separated, there are

many vital cases where religion is abused to further capitalist interests or state power.


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And of course, in almost everywhere in the world, religion itself became a commodity;

raising funds, making profits, selling images are no longer alien ideas to think together

with religion. On the other hand, there is this huge market of authentic religions; Tao

and business, pornography and Kama Sutra, medical care and paganism, cooking and

Buddha, from now on, can be packaged together and marketed and consumed. Therefore,

it is still advisable to call for the specter of Marx and seek his guidance.

REFERENCES (FOR PART ONE)

Baudrillard, Jean (1984) Games with Vestiges, On the Beach, 5 (Winter), pp.19-25.

Engels, Friedrich (1964a) Extract from Emigrant Literature, in Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York.

Engels, Friedrich (1964b) Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity, in Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York.

Engels, Friedrich (1964c) Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical GermanPhilosophy, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, NewYork.

Ling, Trevor (1980) Karl Marx and Religion in Europe and India, Barnes and NoblesBooks, New York.

Newell, William Lloyd (1986) The Secular Magi: Marx, Freud and Nietzche on Religion,The Pilgrim Press, New York.

Marx, Karl (1964a) The Leading Article of no. 179 ofKlnische Zeitung, in Karl Marxand Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York.

Marx, Karl (1964b) Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophyof Right, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, NewYork.

Marx, Karl (1964c) Extract from The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, inKarl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York.

Marx, Karl (1964d) Extract from German Ideology, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,On Religion, Schocken Books, New York.

Marx, Karl (1964e) Extract from The Communism of the Paper RheinischerBeobachter, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books,New York.

Marx, Karl (1964f) Extract from Capital, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, OnReligion, Schocken Books, New York.


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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1975) Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. III,Lawrence & Wishart, London.

Marx, Karl (1978) On the Jewish Question, in Robert C. Tucker (ed), The Marx-EngelsReader, W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London.

McLellan, David (1972)Marx Before Marxism, Penguin, Harmondsworth.


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STRUCTURING RELIGION

PART TWO: DURKHEIM

Although I will elaborate more on the general comparison between the sociology of

religion that can be found in Marx, Durkheim and Weber at the end of the third paper,

it should be quickly noted here compared to the handling of religion in Marx, Emil

Durkheim had a far too complex and sophisticated understanding of the place of

people and structures in religion. Of course, almost during the same years with Max

Weber, Durkheim devoted most of his academic work to matters directly or indirectly

concerning religion, and unlike Marx, the two founding fathers were self-acclaimed

sociologists, men of the university. Furthermore, as I will briefly try to show in this

second paper, Durkheim was almost religious about religion, both with respect to

his tendency to explain almost everything about the social by religion1 and with

respect to the religiosity of his political dispositions.

2

Like I did in the previous paper, I will again try to plan my discussion

according to certain periods of development of Durkheims sociology of religion.

This time, my task about pinpointing metatheoretical aspects of his theory (agency-

structure relationships) will be easier, as Durkheim was the first scholar who had

theoretically investigated the relations between individual believers and the mental

and social structures of religion. Yet, this strength of his research programme was

1 Paul Lapie, in a letter to Clestin Bougl (both were core members of the Anne group) complains: Basically he[Durkheim] is explaining everything at this moment by religion, the prevention of marriages between relatives is areligious matter, punishment is a religious phenomenon in its origins; everything is religious. I could only offer a

weak protest. (quoted in Pickering , 1984: 75).2 Robert Bellah (1973), not wrongfully, talks about him as the high priest of the civil religion of the ThirdRepublic.


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also its weakness, imprisoning him into insurmountable dichotomies like sacred

and profane, individual and society, body and soul, etc.

Following W. S. F. Pickerings (1984:50) categorization, I will be dealing with

Durkheims texts on religion under three periods: (1) The early period, from 1880 to

1895, from the time he entered the cole Normale Suprieure to his first encounter

with Robertson Smiths texts. (2) The middle period, from 1895 to 1906, the period

when he elaborates on Smiths ideas. (3) The final formulation, from 1906 to his

death in 1917, beginning with his lectures in Sorbonne on the origin of religion.

Actually, after the Smithian revelations, Durkheim did not radically change his

position on religion, yet the differences are worth mentioning separately. I will also

try to make use of the class discussions in Prof. Wacquants course, Durkheim,

Mauss, Bourdieu, without entering into the connections between Durkheims and

other Anne members views on religion. (Marcel Mauss, for example, has a

fundamentally very different reading of the Durkheimian sociologie religieuse,which will not be considered here.)

1. YOUNG DURKHEIM AND THE EARLY PERIOD (1880-1895)As we learn from his intellectual biography by Steven Lukes (1972), Durkheim was

born (in 1858) to a religious Jewish family whose males, for at least three

generations, were practicing rabbis. In his home town, pinal, he went to a rabbinical

school where he studied Hebrew, the Old Testament, the Talmud and other Jewish

doctrines. Although it is not exactly known when and how Durkheim did precisely

reject the teachings of the rabbinate, Pickering (1984: 6) guesses that he must have

made his mind about not being a rabbi like his father at around 12 or 13. Durkheim


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later was accepted in the cole Normale Suprieure, when he was 21, and after

failing the entrance exam twice. His enrollment in the prestigious school marks his

decisive break with Judeo-Christian religious thought, yet, I personally hold that,

deducing from his later (quasi-mystical?) ideas on civic mores and the moral citizen,

Catholicism, especially the Jesuit understanding of discipline and suffering, must

have had an attractive influence on him. And we know that unlike Marx, he was

seldom openly hostile to monotheistic world religions per se. Nevertheless, before he

began reading the vast literature on religion and ethnography of his time, Durkheim

was already believing that the religious representations of the world and the universe

did not belong to the modern era, being a necessary earlier step in the evolution of

human societies. His mind was decisively being shaped as that of a rationalist atheist.

Durkheim believed that these doctrines, as proclaimed within the Hebraic-Christiantradition, were totally unacceptable to anyone of an honest intellectual outlook. Nothingthat can be called real exists outside the world as defined by the scientific mind or byeveryday experience... All that is in the world is the result of natural processes, includingof course the work of man. [Pickering, 1984: 9]

Lewis Coser (1971: 162) notes that as Durkheim was an Ashkenazi Jew, his open

rejection of the customs and traditions of the religion by which the Durkheims had

been identifying themselves for long years, might have pushed him, in his early years

in the cole Normale, toward stress and unhappiness; Durkheims heresy,

according to the tradition, would bring dishonor to the family. Yet I believe that we

can only speculate on such psychoanalytic factors, which might or might not have

influenced his later civil-religious doctrines.

Durkheim graduated, with very poor marks, in 1885 and got a government grant to

visit several German universities immediately after. He married a Jewess, Louise


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Dreyfus, just before he began teaching as a charg de cours of social science and

pedagogy in the University of Bordeaux. Following Pickerings (1984) demarcation, I

will deal with his writings in this early period (for these writings, see Pickering, 1975)

of the development of his sociology of religion, until 1895, just before he reads

Robertson SmithsLectures on the Religion of the Semites.

In his earliest publication I will consider here, Review: Herbert Spencer

Ecclesiastical Institutions: Being Part IV of the Principles of Sociology (originally

published in 1886; see Durkheim, 1975a), Durkheim already sets out a number of

preliminary propositions which will later re-appear, elaborated in more detail, in the

other two periods. Although at this early stage, the young Durkheim admits that he is

hesitant to talk about a field (religion) he is yet incompetent (Durkheim, 1975a: 18),

his secular and scientific approach is apparent. He posits that, in defense of sociology

as a science, the facts of sociology concern not only individuals but also collective

beings (18), and religion, with its physiology and morphology, is such a being,irreducible to being an individual matter:

If... religion is reduced to being merely a collection of beliefs and practices relating to asupernatural agent which is conjured up by the imagination, it is difficult to see in itanything more than a fairly complex aggregate of psychological phenomena.

In criticizing the individualist approach of Spencer, Durkheim invokes his first

fundamental dichotomy, around which he later tries to explain religion: On the one

hand, the very existence of religions at any level of analysis is possible as a result of

the contribution of individual believers through believing and practicing. On the other

hand, once this is admitted, religion historically becomes an enmeshing of mental and

social structures which dictates to individuals actions, ideas and sentiments, having a


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regulating function in society. Thus, he writes that not individual consciousness,

but collective consciousness must be the central object of inquiry (20-21). The second

important point which would later be a crucial element of his sociology of religion is

the privilege Durkheim gives to beliefs compared to rituals and practices. That is why

he posits, in the review, that not God in itself, but what this particular social thing

hides and expresses, should be the sociologists concern (19). Thirdly and finally, he

also develops here his indispensable epistemological postulate, which is of course

directly related with his critique of methodological individualism, that sociology has

to break with prenotions and commonsensical speculation:

To turn religion into some sort of idealistic and popular metaphysic, to reduce it to a merecollection of personal and considered judgments on the relativity of human knowledgeand on the necessity for an after-life, is to divest it of all social significance. It can onlyremain a collective discipline if it imposes itself on every mind with the overpoweringauthority of habit; if, on the other hand, it becomes a voluntarily accepted philosophy, itis nothing more than a simple incident in the private life and in the conscience of theindividual. [Durkheim, 1975a: 22]

A year later, in another review of a book on religion by Guyau, Durkheim (1975b)

repeats his call for studying religion, separate from theology and history of ideas, as a

social phenomenon. Although he is sympathetic to Guyaus emphasis on the

increasing significance of morality in modern religion, Durkheim again is critical of

intellectualism and a-sociological speculation about the power of ideas in history,

depicted by Guyau as having a voluntaristic capability to cause social change.

[E]ach time anyone attempts the study of a collective reprsentation, he can rest assuredthat a practical and not a theoretical cause has been the determining reason for it. This isthe case with that system ofreprsentations we call a religion. [Durkheim, 1975b: 34]

Durkheim goes on to point out that these representations are not spontaneous products

of the faithful, making conscious and rational choices: They result from the


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interpretations of pre-existing sentiments (which in turn are related to social

structures). In order to study religion, these sentiments have to be penetrated: the

reprsentations, which only symbolize them and provide them with a superficial

shell, have to be discarded (36). Obviously, by 1887, Durkheim has begun to look

for elementary forms within the morphology of all religions from ancient times to

contemporary modern societies. Yet in this review, he is hesitant again: What is the

nature of these sentiments? Spiritual forces? An all-knowing, omnipotent being?

Morality? The Uncle has not yet been introduced to the ethnographies of primitive

people, so things are not that clear. Nevertheless, the duality in the nature of these

sentiments (which he thinks is a universal characteristic) is observed by Durkheim.

One species of social sentiments belong to the individual sphere, help the individual

conduct his/her daily life, sentiments we have about each other (fear, respect, love

and so on). The other species ties the individuals to the wholeness of the collective

entity, from this species obligations, laws, rules and constraints arise (36). ContraGuyau, Durkheim holds that the second kind of social sentiments played the key role

in the genesis of religions.

In 1893, Durkheim publishes his doctoral dissertation, The Division of Labor in

Society (Durkheim, 1997), where he advances another basic duality between

mechanical (pre-modern) solidarity and organic (modern) solidarity, by focusing on

how laws, judicial systems and the differentiation of social tasks have evolved. In

ancient societies, where there was not a significant division of labor and the principle

of sameness prevailed, according to Durkheim, the penal system could not be

distinguished from the religious system. The collective being of the society, not the


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individual, was held sacred, and any criminal action (interpreted with the categories

supplied by religion) was seen as a sacrilege against this collectivity. Moreover,

because of the secondary position of individual consciousness with respect to the

common consciousness, the form of criminal punishment aims, in undifferentiated

societies, to physically eliminate the unwanted elements. Durkheim (1997: 120-23)

argues that as societies develop, the principles of morality and the system of law

becomes independent of the irrational governance of religious sentiments and begin

to operate under the guidance of reason. Individual consciousness, in modern

societies, develops faster than new forms of collective consciousness, and as we

know, Durkheim was ideologically against laissez faire liberalism which presupposes

a utilitarian, selfish individual. Nevertheless, the evil is not in the category of the

individual itself, Durkheim recognizes how modern forms of faith consecrate the

individual and offer new ways of binding the society (122). His search for a civic

religion is especially evident in his Sorbonne lectures on professional ethics and thestate (Durkheim, 1996).

Consequently, in this early period, Durkheim has already arrived at a fundamental

postulate, which will always govern the Annals Schools writings on religion, that

religion is a social phenomenon, having nothing in real to do with the supernatural.

Although he did not offer a systematic account in this pre-ethnography period, most

of the basic propositions were already formulized. First, he has already divided

religious facts into beliefs and practices, and from these he proposes to arrive at

structural arguments, trying to expose the social mechanisms governing religious

representations. However, the notion of Church is not adequately developed yet, and I


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would say that unlike Weber, Durkheim never advanced a satisfactory and critical

analysis of power and domination with respect to religion. I think that the main reason

is his own religiosity about looking for modern principles around which the French

nation would unite in harmony, without falling for the primitive forms of religious

conservatism. Another reason might be that according to the Uncle (see especially

Durkheim, 1960), the body (the ego, the individual consciousness, or the person)

cannot but conform to and dominated by the soul (the superego, the collective

consciousness, or the society); the fact that he could not epistemologically transcend

this dichotomy has limited his sociological scope until the end of his life. One final

(and perhaps most interesting) difference from the later two periods is that Durkheim

avoids defining religion scholastically:

At the present time we do not possess any scientific conception of what religion is. Inorder to do so we would need to have dealt with the problem using the same comparativemethod that we have applied to the question of crime, and such an attempt has not yetbeen made. It has often been stated that at any moment in history religion has consistedof the set of beliefs and sentiments of every kind concerning mans links with a being or

beings whose nature he regards as superior to his own. But such a definition is manifestlyinadequate. In fact there are a host of rules of conduct or ways of thinking that arecertainly religious and that, however, apply to relationships of a totally different kind.[Durkheim, 1997: 118]

Although I will talk about the problem of definition more when I come to Elementary

Forms, let me draw attention to two points. First, it is obvious that Durkheim feels

unconfident, having not yet established a methodological relationship with the reality

of religion. Second, however, a comparative approach pinpointing common forms ofall religions is adequate, he thinks, because reducing a particular set of practices and

beliefs, in a particular time and space, to one single category of religion seems

fallacious. Curiously, the ethnographic revelations after late 1890s change his mind.


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2. THE MIDDLE PERIOD (1895-1906)

This is not only the period Durkheims sociology (and his sociologie religieuse in

particular) arrives at a mature state, it is also the time when his influence inside the

French academy spreads and sociology, thanks to him and his disciples, becomes a

legitimate discipline. Moreover, Durkheims academic position moves from the

periphery (Bordeaux) to the center (Paris), and the Anne Sociologique (AS) is

founded (1898), which, by 1906, is inhabited by a crowded group of social scientists

attracted by the Durkheimian Gospels.

The middle period begins by 1895, the year Durkheim first begins lecturing on

religion, and most importantly, the year he reads Robertson Smiths Lectures on the

Religion of the Semites which, he would later admit (in his 1906 Sorbonne lectures,

see Pickering, 1984: 14), was like a revelation to him. Most probably, Marcel

Mauss and Henri Hubert, his disciples, who have begun reading ethnography to

further their understanding of religion before Durkheim, introduced the book to theirmaster.

First of all, Durkheim took the distinction between religion and magic from Smith.

I will elaborate on that in the third section. It should nevertheless be noted here that it

was his students who were more successful in explaining the common structural

characteristics of magic and religion. Secondly, Durkheims own distinction between

rituals and beliefs was also confirmed in Smith, who gave a priority to the analysis of

rituals. For Durkheim, who emphasized the historical effects of the social forces

related to religion on the faithfuls representations (mental structures), practices and


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beliefs were equally social things, through which religious functions (like the

affirmation of the community) were fulfilled.

Thirdly, Smiths theory of totemic sacrifice, where he held that the practice was

an act of communion with the supernatural powers with which the clan identified

itself, and thus through which the collectivity was re-affirmed was positively (but not

uncritically) embraced by Durkheim. Different than Smith, though, the Durkheimians

were in a structuralist pursuit of universal schemas of sacrifice which could be

discovered in all societies. Hed also reject Smiths naturalist approach in the

Elementary Forms.

Fourthly, Pickering (1984: 68) suggests that the most important insight Durkheim

deduced from Smith can be the following methodological motto which governs the

Uncles focus on Australian tribes in his magnum opus: One well-studied case can be

used to explain all other similar cases. Hence the search for elementary forms.

In his most productive period, Durkheim, with the assistance of his disciples,undergoes a systematic reading of anthropological field researches and historical

accounts related to primitive tribes of the past and of the present. On the other hand,

he is, mostly through lecturing on education and morality, developing his own ideas

on what is to be done?, which led him to the dream of the civic religion of moral

individuals.

In this period, his metatheory concerning the relationality between people and

structures takes its final, but alas, most scholastic shape. The disconnected

propositions advanced here and there until 1895 are first systematized in The Rules of

Sociological Method (Durkheim, 1982) published that year. There, Durkheim makes


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clear how sociology should break with prenotions, common sense explanations,

and with the speculations of psychology and philosophy which cause the academic to

close his eyes to the social and to the historical by focusing on only the individual and

the mind. For Durkheim, the social world people are born into act upon them,

dictating on them and constraining their choices of belief and action; and the nature of

this social world, its structures and functions, its history, is the actual object of the

sociology of science, without which it is not possible to have a meaningful

understanding of what individuals are doing. Durkheims sociology passionately

wants to know what external forces are influential in different spheres of life.

A social fact is identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or iscapable of exerting upon individuals... [I]f a mode of behavior existing outside theconsciousness of individuals becomes general, it can only do so by exerting pressureupon them. [Durkheim, 1982: 56-57]

He has a lot of writings in that period concerning religion. As I have no space (and

no time) to go into a full-blown analysis of minute details, I will only deal with the

most commonly cited ones which directly address a number of important issues in his

sociology of religion.

In 1898, Durkheim publishes Individualism and Intellectuals (Durkheim,

1975c), where he deals with the positive and negative aspects of the individualist

thought of his time, also declaring what the mission of the intellectuals should be in

an era where religion is losing its binding power. In this important article Durkheim

posits that symbols, rites, temples and priests are only the external apparatus, the

superficial aspects of religion:

Essentially, [religion] is nothing other than a system of collective beliefs and practicesthat have a special authority. [Durkheim, 1975c: 66]


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Therefore, whether we call the system religion or give it another name, the

crucial point is to recognize and account for the indispensable functions this

mechanism has to fulfill, for the society to be able to stand on its feet (and following

that, for its people to live a sane, meaningful life to which they can be committed).

According to Durkheim, these functions are basically twofold:3

And in the rest of the essay, Durkheim defends a form of individualism, which,

once its system of collective beliefs and practices is established in the modern

world, would supply the highly differentiated societies of our world with a novel ideal

of morality. The consecration of the individual about which Rousseau and the

French Revolution had been talking, very different than the idealization of the selfish,

miser, profit-seeking individual of utilitarianism, would then enable a moral and

rational reconstructing of the judicial and governmental system. A few years later,

both in his 1902 preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor in Society

(Durkheim, 1997: xxxi-lix), and in his lectures he had been giving at around the same

time (see Durkheim, 1996) the Uncle elaborates on his social engineering project of

(1) At a macro level,

a system of communication is provided through which the society defines and

understands itself. (2) At a micro level, social relationships are symbolized and

dramatized, sentiments are created; people are supplied, as they believe, sacrifice,

commit themselves and suffer, with strength and confidence, a hold on to the world.

Once a goal is pursued by a whole people, it acquires, as a result of this unanimousadherence, a sort of moral supremacy which raises it far above private goals and therebygives it a religious character. On the other hand, it is clear that a society cannot holdtogether unless there exists among its members a certain intellectual and moralcommunity. [Durkheim, 1975c: 66]

3 And regardless of the complexity of the social structures, these functions do not change. Elementary Forms makesuse of them again, in the explanation of totemism.


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the reign of this moral individualism, by affirming the importance of the state

and patriotism and by his proposal of occupational corporations. Therefore, as he also

openly declares in the article, his candidate for the new religion of humanity is

individualist morality (Durkheim, 1975c: 67). The article curiously ends with his call

to other intellectuals into a vanguardist solidarity around the new religion, a call

which also silently condemns the rifts created among intellectuals after the Dreyfus

controversy:

In these circumstances, does not our duty appear to be clearly marked out? All those whobelieve in the value, or merely in the necessity, of the moral revolution accomplished acentury ago, have the same interest: they must forget the differences which divide themand combine their efforts so as to hold positions already won... As for today, the urgenttask, which must be put before all else, is that of saving our moral patrimony; once that issecure, we shall see that it is made to prosper. [Durkheim, 1975c: 72]

Another key article, published in the second volume ofAnne Sociologique in

1899 marks the development (and, further scholasticization) of his sociology of

religion. In Concerning to Definition of Religious Phenomena (Durkheim, 1975d),

an article which can be said to be a rehearsal for the Elementary Forms. Durkheim

returns to the problem of definition he left unanswered in 1893. This time, with regard

to the question of defining the exact boundaries of the field of the religious, he is

bold enough to state that, [n]o matter how unpretentious this problem may be, it will

be seen that the manner in which it is solved has some bearing on the general

direction the science will take (Durkheim, 1975d: 75).

He states that, in total agreement with the premises he has set in Rules, the

definition of religion first requires breaking with ordinary, commonsense

interpretations, and the idea of the mysterious and the supernatural should be

abandoned by the scientist. He investigates Spencers subjectivist definitions, and


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other definitions which stress on the belief in a god, criticizing them for not being

able to embrace religion in its complexity. The definition should not confine itself

with only divinely beliefs, but should be aware of the existence of rites and beliefs

autonomous from the dictates of the supernatural. Durkheim writes that the

distinction made between sacred and profane things is very often independent of the

idea of the god (Durkheim, 1975d: 87).

Therefore, given the contents of religions are infinitely diverse and inexhaustible

with a definition, [o]nly the exterior and apparent form of religious phenomena is

immediately accessible to observation; it is to this therefore that we must apply

ourselves (emphasis mine; 87). One fundamental form from which religious facts

can be extracted is representations, which are themselves divided between those

belonging to obligatory dispositions and those belonging to daily opinions, and

which are mutually related to social structures. Thus, by 1899, the duality between the

sacred and profane is inscribed into his sociology of religion. Next, representationsmanifest themselves, via the individuals, as beliefs and practices, determining the

second and third forms a possible definition of religion should include. Durkheim

(92) adds that collective beliefs and practices of religion always go together and

cannot be separated during the scientific analysis, meaning that religious thought and

action are complementary and inseparable. However, while Durkheim holds that

beliefs and practices should not be separated, his own opposition of mind against

body seems to undermine this proposition. On the one hand, the constraints of

collective representations are said to be mediated through collective states of the

mind, repressing this-worldly pleasures of the flesh. On the other hand, bodily


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participation itself is said to be no different than beliefs. Apparently, Durkheim

required a more social understanding of the body which would abandon dualities.

Nevertheless, Durkheim recognizes that the faithful always possess personal

moral codes, personal attitudes which differ from the collective morality and offers

this final definition:4

I will try to show, as I look at the third period, to what extent this definition is

revised (and why) in Elementary Forms. Certainly, in this middle period, when

Durkheim was feverishly producing along with other members of the school, he

seems to think that he has found the Sociologists Stone in religion. He writes, in the

preface to the second volume of the AS, that religion contains in itself from the very

beginning, even if in an indistinct state, all the elements which in dissociating

themselves from it, articulating themselves, and combining with one another in a

thousand ways, have given rise to the various manifestations of collective life... At

any rate, a great number of problems change their aspects completely as soon as their

connections with the sociology of religion are recognized (Durkheim, 1964: 350-

351). However, in the third period, and along with the sophistication of the writings

of other members of the school, a different interpretation is possible. Although his

theory is haunted by an organicist and evolutionist fallacy and shadowed by a non-

[P]henomena held to be religious consist in obligatory beliefs, connected with clearly

defined practices which are related to given objects of those beliefs... In addition, the

optional beliefs and practices which concern similar objects or objects assimilated into

the previous ones, will also be called religious phenomena. [emphasis in original;Durkheim, 1975d: 92, 98]

4 Durkheims difficulty resembles the contemporary state of Quantum Theory. There actually is a Theory ofEverything today, but the mathematics is very crude if not forced and the number of equations is unnecessarily large,

where one equation is very hard to transform into the other. There is no aesthetics, as Stephan Hawking said once.Nevertheless, while it might be possible one day to arrive at a simple, beautiful formula of the universe, it will bedangerous and theoretically unsound to long for the same in sociology.


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reflexive objectivism, Durkheim had laid the very first bricks of a structuralist and

rationalist analysis of the social; and many aspects of this theory helped Mauss, Lvi-

Strauss, Evans-Pritchard, and even Douglas and Bourdieu among many others, carry

on the tradition by ever rebuilding it.

3. THE FINAL FORMULATION (1906-1917)In this final period, Durkheim fully incorporates the empirical data on ancient

religions (and tribal religions of his time) into the theoretical framework he has more

or less consistently established since late 1880s. In passing, it should also be noted

that Durkheims empirical data concerning religion consisted of the ethnographies

of colonial administrators, officers, aristocrats and priests, and his nephew in most

cases collected and organized this material for Durkheim.

His almost ascetic academic labor continues in his final years. Before the

Elementary Forms, Durkheims final formulation begins with the 1906-7 Sorbonne

lectures on religion, titled Religion: The Origins. Pickering (1984: 79-80) writes

that Durkheim began by restating the problem of definition of religion as he did in the

1899 article I have mentioned above. The opposition between sacred and profane is

more strongly emphasized and Durkheim underlines the differences between magic

and religion in more detail. For the first time in this period, he develops a well-

studied criticism of the animist and naturist theorists of religion like Herbert Spencer

and Max Mller and enriches his previous privileging of totemism as the simplest and

thus most elementary form of religion, out of which, through evolution, all religions

have emerged. In the lectures, Durkheim goes on to elaborate on how collective

representations of religion are in fact the transfiguration of society, and thus how


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religious facts are far from being illusions. For a second time, Durkheim defines

religion as a system of beliefs and practices related to sacred things beliefs and

practices common to a concrete collectivity. Nevertheless, the sharpest and most

self-confident definition will be the one found in Elementary Forms.

Again, Durkheim has a lot of writings in this period; he focuses on philosophy and

pragmatism, he develops his theory (and, most probably, practice, being a born-

lecturer) of education, pedagogy and moral discipline. During the war, which ruined

his own life by stealing his son and many of his students (some of whom were

beloved acolytes ofAS) from him, which quickened his death, he wrote pieces on the

causes of the war, on patriotism and nationalism. However, for the purposes of this

paper, I am going to close the discussion with a brief review of Durkheims path-

breaking book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, originally published in 1912.

The book, in fact, was being written by the whole Anne School since 1895.

Important parts on magic, sacrifice, prayer, rituals, totemism, etc. were alreadyworked out separately by either himself or some other member of the sociological

collective. The subtitle of the original French edition was The Totemic System in

Australia, which was replaced later in the first English edition in 1915 by A Study in

Religious Sociology. It was only after 80 years that J. W. Swains hurried

translation had finally been superceded by Karen E. Fields brilliant re-translation

(Durkheim, 1995).

Elementary Forms (EF) caused a lot of controversy within the French academy,

there were as many booers as there were applauders. Implicitly, the book is still


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another (and perhaps the strongest) political intervention by Durkheim, inside a

political field where Third Republic modernism and religious conservatism clashed.

I first want to list some of the distinctive aspects of the approach advanced in the

book, in comparison to his previous work, especially to the 1906-7 lectures. Firstly,

EF makes extensive use of Australian Aboriginal material. Although his disciples

have developed a similar methodology before him, EF supercedes all previous

religious studies of the school in volume and detail. Secondly, following this, the

one well-studied case formula is the backbone of the whole argument. However, it

should be noted thatEFis weak and not very promising in encouraging a comparative

analysis when it comes to contemporary religions, where even the category religion

becomes highly problematic to use when dealing with nations, ethnicities, economic

markets and political-cultural conflicts. Thirdly, Durkheim greatly expands on rituals

and beliefs (Book II and III), especially his analysis of imititative, representative and

piacular rites is a great innovation. Fourthly and lastly, before EF, Durkheim has notever undergone a parallel discussion of epistemology and religion (Book II, Chapter

7), and the book in a way becomes the revision ofThe Rules of Sociological Method.

Let me begin with Durkheims third attempt for defining religion. And although in

the 1906-7 lectures he mentioned, in passing, that the exact definition of the essence

of religion could only be possible after a rigorous analysis of the empirical data at

hand (Pickering, 1984: 79), EF nails down its working boundaries from the very

beginning. We can almost hear a mathematical QED at the end of Book I, Chapter I:

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to

say, things set apart and forbidden beliefs and practices which unite into one single

moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. [emphasis in original;Durkheim, 1995: 44]


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The idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of the Church, he adds right after

that, and thus swallows up the key: He is know in an underwater steel cage,

handcuffed and chained, but being ignorant of Houdinis famous survival tricks, he

has got only water to breathe. And so he keeps to his definition.

Compared to the first definition, which was too shy and deficient, this definition

pinpoints religion directly, not its phenomena and gives equal emphasis to beliefs

and practices. The second part of the 1899 definition is totally discarded and the

domain of the sacred becomes prominent. Compared to the second definition of 1906,the idea of the Church is introduced.

From my point of view, there is a dangerous reductionism at work here: Deciding

to privilege the sacred pole of the dichotomy, Durkheim marginalizes (if not totally

obliterates) both the subjective dimension of agents reception of collective

representations (which may lead, under the influence of diverse external factors, to

something other than the consecration of the community) and the practical relevance

of the profane for the religious field. Durkheim sure does not deny that there is

always an individual dimension to religion, but the decisive emphasis on obligation

and coercion casts a shadow on his recognition. He is not equipped, for example, to

talk about the relationship between agents religious commitments (if you wish, their

religious identities or, from a different perspective, their religious habitus) and

economy, politics, and even lifestyles.

Marcel Mauss, after his uncles death, could write more independently: For one

thing, he redefined Durkheims dichotomies which never seemed to make peace.


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Mauss also abandoned Durkheims elimination of body from the constraints of

collective representations, by bringing it back as both a structured and structuring

mediator of religious or other sentiments. religious or other sentiments. Noting the

lack of that particular connection in the Uncle, let me return to EF. A serious

analytical and epistemological tension in Durkheim surfaces when we suspect

Durkheims definitional recognition of the equality between rites and beliefs.

According to my interpretation, Durkheims proposed scientific intervention in

EFaims to arrive at the knowledge of certain forces or mechanisms that govern

religions (on not only them, the ideal society of Durkheim would depend on a similar

system). Certainly, these forces cannot be directly found in reality, they have to be

deduced by relating religious facts to other religious facts and arrive at irreducible

facts like representations (or sentiments) which would guide the analysis. In addition,

these mental structures of religion cannot be explained without relating them to

peoples material needs, socioeconomic conditions and other external factors, i.e.,social structures. At that point, Durkheims dilemma is this: He wants to assert that

religion in thought (beliefs) is as concrete and real as religion in action (rites), that

there is a parity between them. Both group of facts are manifestations of

representations. However, from what Durkheim tells us about the workings of

obligation, discipline and constraint, it seems that the mind, like a categorical

imperative which Durkheim cannot get rid of, is the primary channel through which

the society asserts its belief-system and thus fences around the playground of actions.

Pickering also thinks that the primary status is given to beliefs, noting that they are

treated earlier inEFthan rituals:


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This gesture ties in with [Durkheims] concept of collective reprsentations beingessential for a society to exist. Belief of some kind, there has to be: ritual not so. In somemodern forms of religion ritual scarcely exists... [Pickering, 1984: 379]

For one thing, I find Durkheims treatment of religion as a symbolic-material

source which supplies people with an endurable, meaningful world illuminating and

promising for later reconstructions. I also do not wish to confront his insight that

affirmation through beliefs has real consequences for the shaping of the social world.

In fact, compared to Marxs quick rejection of the ideology of religion, Durkheim

delves a layer deeper when he shows that, despite the irrationality of a particular

cosmology (take, for example, the science-fictional theology of Nation of Islam), its

related representations, once thrown into circulation, have non-illusory, real

consequences (see also Jones, 1998). The problem lies in the persistence of Cartesian

divisions in his thought, however sociologized they might be.

EF also offers precious research-oriented guidelines for the investigation of the

reality of society or of collective entities of smaller scales. As I read Durkheim, the

question of society becomes not a matter of philosophical impossibility as Laclau

would argue, but a practical question. Yes, we would today have to admit that

numerous practical logics which supply people with bodily-mental (or, mental-

bodily) dispositions by which they feel at home do not operate as smoothly as

Durkheims collective representations. Nevertheless, society would still act upon

people, and die once people cease to believe in it, and the knowledge of this process

would be available not for a logocentric truths sake, but for the sake of making a

critical sense of the objective relationships studied in the real world.


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CONCLUSION

According to Durkheim, very unlike Webers verstehen approach or Marxs

occasional voluntarism (the possibilities of species-being), agents bestow their lives

with various meanings, which are, most of the time, before considering their relations

to the material aspects of the world, explained by the dictates of a symbolic order.

Here, Durkheim cannot escape scholasticism in establishing a relationality between

agents and structures: The meanings he thinks the faithful give to their religion and

the meanings he himself attributes to concepts like system, organism,

religion are the products of his often fallacious armchair perspective. This

perspective is also marked by his uncritical affirmation of certain repressive

institutions, which in turn is related to his personal ethico-political dispositions

(moral individualism, corporatism, civic religion and so on).

Having said that, let me make a similar threefold overview of his religious

sociology as I have done in Marx:1. Durkheims insights about the wrong-headed voluntarism of possessive

individualism and the necessity to break with prenotions and commonsensical

knowledge is an important insight which suggests to rethink the sociological limits of

talking about freedom or autonomy in action. On the other hand, Durkheim couldnt

complete the break he was talking about, lacking the subjectivist touch his strong

objectivism begged for. Therefore, his agents cannot bring the sacred into their

individual, everyday lives, nor can they elaborate and improvise, using the profane,

on collective representations. In fact, because of the consequences, the latter may not

even be desirable. Durkheims faithful agent needs to become a total man who


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should not be epistemologically separated in terms of what he represents

physiologically, psychologically and sociologically.

2. Leaving the problems of organicism and evolutionism aside, it was Durkheims

structuralist insights and his talents of objectivist analysis which enabled him to

propose a sociology which would try to establish a relationship between mental and

social structures. Although he tried and did his best from his armchair, his definitions

and uses of concepts were not sufficiently research-oriented and they remained

logocentric. Compared to Webers domination analysis, Durkheim either insistently

ignored the question of power, or when he recognizes its negative effects, power

exists in unwanted social orders or those which have been history. He seems to

hold that there are forms of domination which should be welcomed.

Another weak point of Durkheims objectivism in his religious sociology is the

over-burdening of certain categories like religion, and for the sake of identifying

universal forms, the sacrificing of complexities.3. As I have already mentioned, to have a better grasp of doing the sociology of

people and structures, Durkheims approach requires the insight which rejects any

epistemological division between objectivism and subjectivism, explaining the world

by equally seeing things and persons from both ways.

In summing up, I want to note that sociologie religieuse is still able to

communicate with our contemporary world in two ways: First, its historicization of

concepts and categories and the bridges it discovers between religion and science may

inspire a reflexive sociology which is capable of turning the very tools it uses upon its


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own. Second, it suggests a way, among few others, to objectify a symbolic

economy of beliefs and practices. At least two reasons to remember Mr. Sui Generis.

REFERENCES (FOR PART TWO)

Bellah, Robert (1973) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, The University ofChicago Press, Chicago.

Durkheim, Emile (1997) The Division of Labor in Society, The Free Press, New Yorkand London.

Durkheim, Emile (1996) Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, Routledge, Londonand New York.

Durkheim, Emile (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The Free Press,New York and London.

Durkheim, Emile (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on

Sociology and Its Method, Steven Lukes (ed.), The Free Press, New York andLondon.

Durkheim, Emile (1975a) Review. Herbert Spencer Ecclesiastical Institutions,in W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings withBibliographies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston.

Durkheim, Emile (1975b) Review. Guyau LIrrligion de lavenir, in W. S. F.Pickering, Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies,Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston.

Durkheim, Emile (1975c) Individualism and Intellectuals, in W. S. F. Pickering,Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, Routledgeand Kegan Paul, London and Boston.

Durkheim, Emile (1975d) Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena, inW. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings withBibliographies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston.

Durkheim, Emile (1964) Preface, in Kurt Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim 1858-1917:A Collection of Essays, Ohio University Press, Ohio.

Durkheim, Emile (1960) The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions,in Emile Durkheim, Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, edited by Kurt Wolff,Harper Torchbooks, New York.

Jones, Sue Stedman (1998) The Concept of Belief in The Elementary Forms, in N.J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller (eds.), On DurkheimsElementary Forms of Religious Life, Routledge, London and New York.

Lukes, Steven (1972) Emile Durkheim, His Life and His Work: A Historical andCritical Study, Harper and Row, New York.

Pickering, W. S. F. (1984) Durkheims Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories,Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston.

Pickering, W. S. F. (1975) Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings withBibliographies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston.


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STRUCTURING RELIGION

PART THREE: WEBER

Of the three founding fathers of the sociology of religion considered in this trilogy of

papers, Max Weber can safely be presented as the most comprehensive contributor, in

terms of both the sheer amount of works dedicated to the subject (and into those

studies, a will to cover every religious system was inscribed) and the analytical

complexity and the theoretical innovation these works have demonstrated. Besides the

fact that social scientists still tackle with the Weberian hypotheses about the origins

of Western capitalism, most of the contemporary theories of religion, religious

organization and religious action which have been well-received within the academic

field are built upon Weberian foundations. Whether any of them has been able to

surpass is an interesting topic of research with which I have no space to deal here.

In Marx, the problem was not that the theoretical foundations with which he

approached religion were bound top crumble to dust, but rather, he did not pay

enough attention to the complex world of religious belief and action. Therefore, most

of Marxs propositions concerning religion, regardless of the strength of the ring of

truth around them, remained unsubstantiated. In Durkheim, religion dominated the

center of his sociology, theoretically and empirically, but two factors seemed to

obstruct the plausibility of his project for modern religions, Eastern or Western:

Firstly, his overwhelming focus on ancient religions and magic for the purpose of

seeking elementary and universal forms of religion (which, the Annals School

held, are the key to modern religions) led Durkheim to take the complexity of


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contemporary religion for granted. Secondly, and related with the first point, his

ethico-political devotion to a civil religion caused him to undermine the question of

power, injustice and domination in religion. Good old Weber, on the other hand,

started with the most complex forms of religion, be it contemporary Christianity,

Judaism or Buddhism, and had an as complex theory as the phenomena he analyzed.

On the other hand, somewhat contributing to Marxs analysis, he demonstrat

structuring religion

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