The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Much of the taken-for-granted substance of contemporary sociology is due to Emile Durkheim. His influence is greater than that of Marx or even the often cited and much lauded Max Weber. Read the prominent contemporary work of Pierre Bourdieu, commonly characterized as a Weberian, and you'll find that he is a Durkheimian through and through, particularly with regard to his best known concepts, cultural capital and social capital.The question that guided Durkheim throughout his fruitful career was "how is society possible?" In other words, how do we explain social cohesion, avoiding the pathologies and divisiveness attendant to egoism (social isolaltion) and anomie (cultural deregulation), terms introduced by Durkheim in The Division of Labor in Society and effectively applied in his book Suicide?The Elementary Forms of Religious Life makes a profound contribution to answering questions as to the basis of social cohesion. Though limited almost exclusively to simple, largely undifferentiated societies based on a collective consciousness, Durkheim's account of the emergence and role of elementary religious influences has lessons applicable to contemporary times.Specifically, Durkheim's discussion of the totem, an animal, plant, natural physical force, or simple material artifact, used to represent a clan or tribe can be likened to the American flag in the U.S., a symbol that has quasi-religious significance. When the flag is displayed, especially to comparatively large aggregates of Americans, it elicits a shared emotional response reflecting a commonly held moral ideal and set of shared beliefs. The shared response, moreover, serves to reaffirm and rejuvenate the moral code and belief system on which the response is based.The same might be said of the crucifix for Christians, the Star of David for Jews, or a crescent and star on a green background for Muslims. As material artifacts the symbols are of little intrinsic value. However, as symbols of a collectively shared, morally binding world view they provide much-needed psychological sustenance, especially when invoked for aggregates gathered together to celebrate the rightness of a commonly held perspective.Readers of Durkheim's earlier work will recognize that such assemblages and displays of a totem will be most effective in simpler societies where experiential commonality gives rise to a well developed collective consciousness. In more complex societies, where a vast diversity of life experiences diminishes the content and efficacy of the collective consciousness, symbols that have totemic influence are hard to find. While the American flag remains one such symbol in the contemporary U.S., the rancorous social, cultural, and political differences that separate Americans make clear that the flag as a totem means different things to different people. This diminishes its value as a source of social cohesion that reminds us of shared beliefs and common outlook. The diminished value of the flag as a totem is both a consequence and a cause of exaggerated diversity, not to be found within simpler organizational forms such as the clan or tribe among Nineteenth Century aboriginal Australians.Having read The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, one can see the social provenance of commonly held, taken-for-granted ideas of space, time, number, cause and effect, and other fundamental categories. Moreover, Durkheim's conclusion that when people worship their totem they are, in effect, worshiping their clan or tribe is insightfully compelling. As already noted, however, one wonders if increasingly complex and diverse societies are foredoomed to dysfunction and dissolution because the cultural commonality that is manifest in the totemic principle is hard to find in highly differentiated social systems.Durkeheim's genius, as manifest in his life-long commitment to finding intrinsically social explanations for a broad range of phenomena that are too often erroneously reduced to psychologisms, is abundantly evident throughout The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. His contribution to sociology as a discipline is enormous and typically under-valued.As an addendum, it is surprising that Durkheim did not use fundamental concepts such as mechanical solidarity, organic solidarity, and collective consciousness (used once), as well as anomie, egoism, altruism, and fatalism in a large number of perfectly suitable ways throughout The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Perhaps they were lost in this translation. Their absence works against establishing explicit continuity with his earlier work.

Is there any shame in reading an abridged version of this book? Dear lord, I hope not. You could probably condense the take-away from this book in two sentence: Society creates religion, communication creates society. Durkheim was one of the earliest articulators of the principles of "social constructivism," or as morons like to say, "cultural relativism." I would frankly recommend this particular edition of Elementary Forms of Religious Life BECAUSE it's abridged. Every time I saw the ellipsis [...] indicating that there had been an editing of Durkheim's torturous prose I breathed a tiny sigh of relief. That Elementary Forms of Religious Life continues to be relevant today is more a testament to the philosophical introduction and conclusion that place Durkheim squarely in the tradition of Kantian idealist philosophy (actually, squarely opposed to it.) I find Durkheim's argument that Society can only be analyzed in terms of the relationship between people to be compelling. I find Durkheims subsidiary claim that such analysis ought to be composed in scientific terms to be much, much, much less compelling. Let's face, it the very category of "social sciences" is a joke because you can't perform scientific experiments with society very well. Oh, you can do studies proving the obvious ("Fat people watch more tv.")("Poor children are more likely to commit crimes.") till the cows come home but more often then not you will either be stating the obvious, or just wrong. Durkheim is also methodologically incompetent, choosing to base his observations about indigenous life solely on books that other people wrote. Durkheim wrote an entire book about the religious life of indigenous Australians, but he appears to have never conversed with one. Durkheim probably bears of much of the blame as anyone for the current state of social "science." Elementary Forms is just as interesting today for the epistemology of early twentieth century social science as it is for anything else, since his observations regarding the underlying human relationships of society have been well and truly observed and expanded upon for the last fifty years. In terms of his argument, Durkheim likes to lead with an observation made by a so-called specialist, then he likes to establish a dichotomy/opposition and then he will describe both sides, and draw conclusions based on his categories and observations. What he does not do is challenge the technical authorities that he cites, or challenge the idea that religion might not be describable in simple dialectic categories or challenged the idea that you can describe all of world religion based on Australian indigenous religious practices. In fact, at times you get the distinct impression that he wants to say something about Christianity and/or Judaism but he is scared to challenge Christianity directly. Like Max Weber, the other great early 20th century European sociologist/philosopher, Durkheim is seeking to bring some kind of "scientific" rigor to philosophical/historical type observations of society. It's a move that is grounded in the exponential increase in the need for university professors during that time. It's easy to see how young professors expounding scientific SOUNDING theories about society behaved would have been attractive to those hiring professors and students alike. The 20th century was all about "scientific certainty" and later on, about opposing scientific certainty. Swinging like a pendulum, mirroring the larger recurring philosophical debate between metaphysics and epistemology. Here, in Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim actually kind of starts swinging the pendulum, towards the scientific certainty side but at the same time you can see how truly shaky that argument was, right at the beginning. Time has done his position no favors, but he did outline the debate early on. That's why this book is more relevant for someone reading about 20th century philosophy then someone seeking to become a sociologist in the 21st century.

This is not complete translation so if you need not just to have a general idea about the book but work out Durkheim's aphorism or argument or whatever, I wouldn't recommend to use this edition.

Left in the pouring rain and was damaged beyond recognition.

I'm starting out on a postgraduate MRES sociology course. Durkheim has grown on me, since the days of undergraduate teachers labelling as a 'functionalist', out of date and so on. There is much, much more to him, and he endures in today's social sciences more than I would have thought. How do we explain things that have happened in this supposedly high modern society? Brexit, Trump, Johnson etc. Do the events of the day make sense? This book helps me understand not only what drove Durkheim, but what drives my own sociological imagination. Relion is the key, or more like, understanding what religion actually is. Now I understand what made old Uncle Emile tick, it feels like I've found the missing piece in the jigsaw of my sociological journey so far. A nicely presented book and very accessible.

The content of the book itself is fine, though I am not so keen on the 25% or so of the original work that has reportedly been omitted by the translator, but what is really bothering me about these Oxford Classics I've been buying is the low quality of the paper pages. As careful as I can be in handling them, I have pages tearing at the edges left and right and find myself having to tape them up on a regular basis. I've never had this happen before with any books and find this quality issue very disappointing as I aim to collect them. Most of the books are arriving with wrinkled looking pages and even warped covers as if they are used books. The paper is too thin and frail.

This book is worth reading just for the introduction and the book itself provides a fascinating insight on why societies need religion, how it has developed and the function it performs in society. Any religious person needs to read it as background to their own beliefs while atheists should consider the way in which it illuminates the value of religion in the world.

This book had some great insights into how religions form and develop. It had interesting comments about the value of religion. However, the language used was so difficult to wade through. Ok I'm not a sociologist but I'm not thick either. I wouldn't put anyone off reading it because of its great ideas but be warned I found it like wading through treacle. Does anyone know of a book which has a good summary of his arguments?