Durkheim on Religion

by Émile Durkheim, W. S. F. Pickering (Editor)

This volume brings together a comprehensive selection of Émile Durkheim's writings on religion. Besides helping to establish the discipline of sociology in France, Durkheim is widely recognized as one of the founding figures in the modern study of religion. Included are important sections of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), some of Durkheim's early reviews, articles, and extracts from books. The volume also contains comprehensive bibliographies, and early reviews of Durkheim's work on religion by such writers as van Gennep, Goldenwieser, Stanner, and the French sociologist Gaston Richard.

Genres: Sociology, Religion

392 pages, Paperback

Published January 2, 1994

About the author

Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology.

In 1896, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.

Durkheim was also deeply preoccupied with the acceptance of sociology as a legitimate science. He refined the positivism originally set forth by Auguste Comte, promoting what could be considered as a form of epistemological realism, as well as the use of the hypothetico-deductive model in social science. For him, sociology was the science of institutions,[citation needed] its aim being to discover structural social facts. Durkheim was a major proponent of structural functionalism, a foundational perspective in both sociology and anthropology. In his view, social science should be purely holistic; that is, sociology should study phenomena attributed to society at large, rather than being limited to the specific actions of individuals.

He remained a dominant force in French intellectual life until his death in 1917, presenting numerous lectures and published works on a variety of topics, including the sociology of knowledge, morality, social stratification, religion, law, education, and deviance. Durkheimian terms such as "collective consciousness" have since entered the popular lexicon.