The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Émile Durkheim was, along with Max Weber and in a different sense Karl Marx, the founding figure of sociology and anthropology. Born David Émile Durkheim in Épinal, France, as the son of Moïse Durkheim, the chief rabbi of Vosges, Durkheim broke family tradition and left rabbinical school in 1879 to study philosophy in Paris, entering the École normale supérieure in the same class as Henri Bergson. In 1887, Durkheim began teaching—at the University of Bordeaux—in the field that developed into sociology. Between 1893 and 1912, during which time he gained wide recognition and gained a position at the Sorbonne in Paris, Durkheim published a series of pivotal works that articulated and modeled two essential claims. The first, a foundational theoretical point formalized in his 1895 Rules of Sociological Method, was that human life and will are constrained and shaped by institutions of our own making; we live in a world of “social facts” that constrain and shape us no less than natural facts of life—hence the study of human social and cultural life has to be a study of society as a supra-individual reality that acts upon individuals, a sociology. Second, Durkheim’s guiding concrete interest throughout his work was to understand the mechanisms that made possible and sustained social solidarity, trans-individual social order, and camaraderie. Concern that the complexities of modern life were making such solidarity difficult led him to his seminal study of suicide as a socially conditioned phenomenon (excerpted here). Interest in the origins of this human capacity to create a society drove him toward the study of “primitive cultures” and the social functions of religions in his 1912 Elementary Forms of Religious Life, thus making Durkheim a founding figure of anthropology as well as sociology. Durkheim was a fervent French Republican and largely indifferent to Judaism and Jewishness, although he never severed ties with the Jewish community. He was moved to engage seriously with the Jewish Question and the rise of antisemitism during the Dreyfus Affair. Overall, there seems to be little linkage between his sociological thought and any Jewish influences, though some scholars have discerned suggestive homologies between Judaism and Durkheim’s special attention to the ways communities are formed and reformed through ritual.