Durkheim,Religion,and the Postcolonial Critique of Sociology’s Eurocentrism

The postcolonial critique of sociological Eurocentrism and the problematic status of the classical canon of sociology

If sociology had for some time remained relatively immune (Bhambra, 2007a: 872; Kurasawa, 2013: 189; Savransky, 2017: 12) or indifferent (Go, 2013: 25) to the postcolonial critique of the discipline’s epistemological foundations, there is no doubt that the situation has changed over the past decade. The critiques that postcolonial scholarship has directed at sociology have gained greater attention within the discipline over the past few years. Projects that explicitly seek to elaborate a postcolonial, or at least a postcolonial-sensitive, sociology have attracted more and more sociologists from different parts of the globe. If, in the 2000s, the echoes of postcolonialism already resonated in more transversal initiatives, such as those related to the construction of a global and public sociology (McLennan, 2010a: 119), this tendency seems to have grown in recent years. Current debates on how to develop a global sociology capable of accounting for the cultural diversity to be found within and beyond the West more or less explicitly take up the challenges posed by postcolonial theory (see for instance: Akinyede and Puddephatt, 2021; Bhambra, 2010, 2014a; Bhambra and Santos, 2017; Connell, 2007a; Hanafi, 2020; Santos, 2014; Savransky, 2017). Since Burawoy (2005) published his influential article, the debates on what a public sociology should look like have also been responsive to these criticisms (Arribas Lozano, 2018). Likewise, a large share of the ongoing debate on postsecularism is sensitive to the postcolonial critique of sociology’s historicism, naturalism, and secularism, which questions both the epistemological and the ontological presuppositions which underpin the sociological study of religions, and, ultimately, the legitimacy of such investigative practices (Chakrabarty, 2008: 16; Lloyd and Viefhues-Bailey, 2015; McLennan, 2010b). In general, the self-reflexivity that usually enables sociological theorization is today, and certainly more than ever, aware of the charges directed at sociology by postcolonialism.

Developed around the early 1980s in some literary studies university departments in the USA, postcolonialism encompasses different theoretical sensibilities, and the concerns that it raises are, consequently, multiple and varied. However, the presentation of sociology—amongst other forms of Western knowledge—as a Eurocentric social science is a central claim for both leading postcolonial theorists such as Bhabha (2002), Chakrabarty (2008), Spivak (1988) and cognate decolonial thinkers often referenced in postcolonial sociological works, such as Quijano (1992), Mignolo (2002: 85–91), or Dussel (2000). Although sociologists have long been preoccupied with the possible Eurocentric bias of their work, this old concern finds new forms of justification in the light of postcolonial criticism. The arguments on which this accusation is based do not always coincide, but they commonly denounce the universalist pretentions of the repertoire of sociological theories and categories, which ultimately embody a unilateral generalization of European particularisms. Postcolonial sociologists and political theorists have largely incorporated this reasoning into their critiques of the classical canon and the central categories of the discipline (see, e.g.: Bhambra, 2007b; Boatcă and Costa, 2010; Go, 2013: 32–33; Keim, 2008: 561; Patel, 2006: 382–383, 2015: 53–60; Santos, 2014: 19–46; Seth, 2014: 316–319, 2009: 335–336).

Often, such accusations of Eurocentrism and parochialism materialize in a broader critique of the use of the comparative method in both sociology and the social sciences in general. From this perspective, sociological comparisons are held to misapprehend cultural and historical singularities which simply go unnoticed or are deemed irrelevant from the Euro-American or Western perspective that informs the comparative analysis, but which nonetheless represent important aspects of the cultural identities and histories of the colonized. Ultimately, beneath such considerations frequently lies a more general aversion to classification and generalization, which, in part at least, might well result from longstanding disciplinary requirements and habits that have typically constrained historiographic and literary research, that is, the very areas of knowledge in which postcolonialism arose and started to take shape as a mode of thought. Indeed, fears of overgeneralizing clearly shape Said’s seminal critical work (Said, 1994), and Chakrabarty’s reflections on the “untranslatability” of “life-worlds” into abstract, Marxist analytical categories (Chakrabarty, 2008: 72–96; for a critique, see McLennan, 2010a: 129–130). Current postcolonial sociologists have frequently incorporated these criticisms in their revisions of the theoretical and conceptual tools that form the legacy of the classical sociologists (regarding Durkheim’s use of the comparative method, see, for instance, Connell, 1997; Magubane, 2005: 94–95).

Another central concern raised by postcolonialism is sociology’s primitivism and Orientalism. Drawing on Said, the postcolonial critique of the Orientalist nature of sociology has sometimes been justified with diverging reasoning (Chua, 2008; McLennan, 2003: 122–125). However, the racial, essentialist, evolutionary-driven stereotyping of non-Western colonial otherness and the implicit legitimation of Western imperialism are two important charges that postcolonial sociologists often make of the discipline under this rubric (see e.g. Bhambra, 2007a, 2007b, 2014a; Connell, 2007b: 3–26, 1997; Go, 2013: 32; Patel, 2015: 52–57; Seidman, 2013: 46–49).

The neglect of the imperial and colonial realities and forms of domination throughout the institutionalization of sociology and, principally, the misrecognition of their sociological relevance in the work of the triumvirate of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, also justify the third main postcolonial reproach. As it has been complicit with imperialism and colonialism, sociology would have been unable to provide an adequate understanding of European and Western modernity, its main object of investigation and, allegedly, its very raison d’être as a scientific discipline. The elaboration of such an understanding should in any case eliminate the erroneous premise of an endogenous historical development, the very same premise that inspired the work of the founding fathers of sociology and which sustains most of today’s sociological work (Bhambra, 2010, 2014a, 2016; 34–37, 2007b; Connell, 2007b: 13–16, 1997: 1115–1521; Go, 2013 29–34; Mugabene, 2005, Boatcă et al., 2010: 1–3; Gutiérrez Rodríguez et al., 2010; Seidman, 2013).

In light of these postcolonial criticisms, the classical canon of sociology and its “contemporary residues” have therefore become highly problematic. Several questions inspire an ongoing debate: Is the postcolonial critique of sociology justified? If so, to what extent? And if sociology needs to reform itself, what should we do with a legacy that continues to inspire much of today’s sociological research? How much of the classical canon that defines the discipline should be abandoned and what would it be possible, and desirable, to keep (Amelina et al., 2021: 306; Burawoy, 2021: 246; Kerner, 2018: 556–558; McLennan, 2010a: 122)? Can sociology really take up the postcolonial challenge, or is it impossible for it to meet the demands made by postcolonialism while maintaining its identity as a discipline, as some postcolonial social scientists (Seth, 2009, 2014) and critics of postcolonialism (McLennan, 2010a: 121, 2006: 84) suggest?

Religion and Eurocentrism in Durkheim’s sociology: Postcolonial assessments

The questions with which the preceding section closed invite a critical re-examination of the classical canon of sociology, taking into account both general postcolonial critiques of the social sciences and more specific critiques advanced by postcolonial sociologists about the contributions of the discipline’s “founding fathers.” However, the legacies of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim happen to have received unequal attention from postcolonial critics. As concerns Durkheim, the postcolonial revision of his sociological contribution seems rather fragmentary, and its overall assessment is ambivalent and inconclusive at least, if not contradictory. Postcolonial evaluations of Durkheim’s sociological Eurocentrism have delivered a fluctuating diagnosis of the potential relevance of the author’s legacy for today’s discipline, ranging from a nuanced optimism to a clear pessimism and even an outright dismissal. Interestingly, the critical consideration of Durkheim’s sociological conceptualization of religion, which is absent in some of these assessments, does not seem to tip the balance in favor of any particular conclusion.

According to some postcolonial scholars, Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion integrates theoretical tools which potentially allow today’s social scientists to overcome the limitations imposed by Eurocentric epistemologies and the legacies of colonialist thought. For Fitzgerald, who unambiguously militates against the suppression of departments of religious studies and their inclusion in the more far-reaching and less Eurocentric cultural studies departments (Fitzgerald, 2000: 10), Durkheim’s pro-laïcité commitments do not compromise the value of his conceptualization of the sacred/profane dichotomy, which has the merit of avoiding the common, uncritically assumed identification of the socio-psychic processes to which these terms refer with, respectively, the religious and the secular domains of social activity (Fitzgerald, 2007a: 76, 81, 84). Similarly, Bhambra and Holmwood (2021) seem to value the demarcation of Durkheimian sociology from the premise of an inevitable conflict between the religious and the secular, a central aspect that makes “space for an engagement with postcolonial sociology” (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021: 171). In line with these considerations, there is little doubt about the distance between Durkheim’s sociology and 19th-century secularist forms of evolutionism that endow the Euro-American West with some form of cognitive or moral superiority over non-Western peoples. This would stand in favor of its usefulness in elaborating non-Eurocentric cross-cultural and comparative analyses within and beyond the West (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021: 150, 156, 171; Fitzgerald, 2007a: 76, 81, 84; in this respect, see also Kurasawa, 2004: 98–100, 2013: 199–2014).

In contrast, for other postcolonial scholars, Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion, or his comparative sociology in general, is seriously burdened by “provincialist,” colonialist, and/or imperialistic presuppositions that make his contribution hardly compatible with a non-Eurocentric social science. According to this line of reasoning, the use of Durkheimian theoretical constructs and concepts would inevitably compel today’s analysts to flatten and obscure the historical and cultural particularities of the cases they might compare (see, for instance, Dubuisson, 1998: 233–235; Maguban, 2005: 95; though not directly addressed to Durkheim, Chakrabarty’s critical argument on the “reductionism” intrinsic to sociology of religion as a “historicist” scientific discipline deserves consideration in this respect—see Chakrabarty, 2008: 16). Sometimes this sort of argument stresses the proximity between Durkheimian sociology and 19th-century forms of unilinear evolutionism that present Europe and/or the West as the universal, superior destiny of humanity and simultaneously ascribe some sort of lack or imperfection to non-modern ways of life (Boatcă et al., 2010: 1–3; Connell, 1997: 113–114; Patel, 2015: 53). For some postcolonial authors, Durkheim’s evolutionism is even understood to be grounded on racializing justifications (for a postcolonial critique of the “racializing” orientation of classical sociology’s evolutionism in general, see Patel, 2015: 53–54; concerning more specifically Durkheim’s, see Connell, 2007b: 88–89).

The postcolonial analysis and critique of the Eurocentric load of Durkheimian sociology is certainly divided, and critics of postcolonialism have not elucidated the validity of the multiple arguments that postcolonial scholars have presented in this respect. McLennan (2014, 2010a, 2010b, 2006, 2003) has critically examined multiple aspects of the postcolonial critique of sociological Eurocentrism, though mainly by considering its implications for the Marxist tradition of sociology. Durkheimian sociologists seem to have either remained silent in this discussion, or to have dismissed it rather quickly. Within this tradition, a number of recent works analyze the relevance of The Forms for the construction of a contemporary global sociology (Inglis, 2011; Inglis and Robertson, 2008) and for today’s debates on postsecularism (Weiss, 2017), without addressing the postcolonial critiques of sociology’s Eurocentrism. And, in his critical assessment of Connell’s overall argument in “Why is Classical Sociology Classical?” (1997), Randall Collins—in a rather laconic and expeditious three-line response—contradicts the thesis that The Forms provides a scientific legitimacy to French imperialism (Collins, 1997: 1560). Collins ignores both the arguments raised by postcolonial scholars against the claims of transcultural validity or the applicability of the social sciences and their charges of primitivism and Orientalism.

In this scenario, the ambiguous status of Durkheimian sociology generates suspicions which spread across much of today’s sociological work. Therefore, the examination of Durkheim’s sociology in the light of the postcolonial critique of sociology’s Eurocentrism constitutes a relevant pending task. This article aims to take up this challenge, building profitably on previous contributions in which the re-elaboration of Durkheim’s legacy has been shown to nourish sociological analyses sensitive to power and domination (Osés, 2012, 2013). Is Durkheim’s sociology Eurocentric in the ways denounced by postcolonialism? Considering the discrepancies and opposing views that arise within postcolonialism in this respect, which sort of Eurocentrism, if any, would be applicable to Durkheim’s contribution, and, more particularly, to his sociological approach to religion? And, if Durkheim’s sociology deserves to be qualified as Eurocentric in any of the ways identified by postcolonial scholars, what particular problems does Durkheim’s intellectual legacy pose in light of the discipline’s current epistemological and theoretical challenges? The analyses presented in this article aim to answer these questions by situating Durkheim’s epistemological and theoretical choices—and particularly those in which his sociological approach to the religious question materializes—within both the academic field and the broader socio-political context in which they took shape. From this perspective, the procedures that enable access to the academic field, the conditions of academic exchange and competition, and also the scholarly dispositions that delimit the scientific problems deserving of inquiry and the perspectives considered pertinent, are shaped by specific rules that function as social and logical constraints. These rules can exhibit varying degrees of autonomy with regards to the determinants emanating from the relevant social and political structures (Bourdieu, 1997: 133–136, 1984: 112–120).

Religion, morality, and solidarity in Durkheimian sociology

It has been noted that Durkheim’s interest in the specific worldviews, traditions, and values specific to “religion” was actually secondary and subject to his more general concerns about the social genesis of collective representations and morality (Mellor, 1998: 87–88; Rawls, 1996: 438). This does not make it any less true that his particular reading and sociological re-elaboration of what the anthropologists, religious scholars, and other social scientists of his day understood as “religion” very much influenced his sociology of knowledge, morality, and social solidarity. Durkheim’s sociological approach to the religious question underwent several important changes throughout his career, and one of the major consequences of this intellectual evolution becomes evident in the changing rapports between morality and religion in his work. Taking account of the particular significance that Durkheim’s work attaches to religion, especially in his more mature academic writing, the consideration of this intellectual evolution seems to be essential to the discussion of the Eurocentric nature of Durkheim’s sociology and the implications of his legacy with regards to colonialism and imperialism.

Durkheim’s early sociological reflections on religion mark a substantial departure from received wisdom on the matter, already suggesting that a more radical, all-encompassing phenomenon could both include and transcend the systems of beliefs and practices which, in different parts of the globe—though certainly not everywhere—mobilized beliefs in deities and supernatural beings. Although Durkheim’s explicit early rejection of a theistic understanding of religion already points in that direction, his intuition gained much clarity after the “revelation” that he experienced in Bordeaux in 1895, reading the work of W. R. Smith (Jones, 2005: 83; Lukes, 1984: 236; Pickering, 1984: 61), and particularly later, after 1898, thanks to the close collaborative work in which he engaged with the members of his équipe, and especially with his nephew Marcel Mauss. Durkheim’s intellectual evolution during this collaborative period, which some observers have presented as transformational in this regard (Mucchielli, 1998: 156–157; Strenski, 2006: 87–180, 1997: 53–148), will culminate in The Forms (1991), where the socio-psychic processes in which religion “in general” materializes are illustrated through the analysis of Australian and Amerindian totemic systems of beliefs and practices. At this point of his career, Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion had fully developed its potential through the scientific analysis of the moral challenges, as well as opportunities, of the French Third Republic. France had been seeking to hold a leading position within an aggressively nationalistic European context where imperialist competition was taken for granted and supported by many. It was a political regime of which opponents could be found both on the left and the right, and whose anticlerical orientation had been very much in dispute by its own proponents, while being fiercely contested by its enemies.

The ultimate goals and orientations that guided Durkheim’s project to construct a science of morals, which he declared himself to be interested in developing even at the earliest stages of his career (Durkheim, 2010: 107–113), reveal particularly well the motivations that inspired his sociological approach to religion. In the inaugural lesson of his first social sciences course at the University of Bordeaux, where Durkheim situates the epistemological premises and the theoretical-methodological orientation of the discipline of sociology within the broader field of the social sciences, he vehemently announces the “salvific” political influence of the intellectual task to which he wished to contribute. He made this announcement within an academic system in which he was a newcomer and where political reliability was an important yet not the principal factor in career promotion. This was in a country where “opinions” received too much credit, and where the scientific discipline of sociology was potentially able, more than any other social science, to decisively “enlighten” the legislators in the task of introducing the reforms needed to reinforce a “collectivist spirit” that had been severely weakened. This necessarily entailed the correction of commonplace opinions that erroneously exalted the independence of the individual with regards to society, and correlatively, helping his contemporaries understand and “feel” what society really was, how it fulfilled their needs, and, ultimately, their dependence on it as its constitutive “organs” (Durkheim, 2010: 116). Sociology was therefore called on to take on a leading role in the promotion of social solidarity in all population groups but precisely in order to attain such a significant goal, it needed to develop its explanatory potential within the university (Durkheim, 2010: 117). However, 2 years before the publication of the aforementioned inaugural lesson at Bordeaux, Durkheim had already declared that the new science under construction could not study religious and moral prescriptions separately (Durkheim, 2010: 194). Why was the sociological study of religion so important from the perspective of the science of morals that Durkheim sought to develop from the very beginning of his career?

As Strenski notes, we will probably never know with certainty the specific reasons that prompted Durkheim to be interested in religion (Strenski, 2006: 15). However, it seems evident that this interest was inspired by the “collectivist” inclinations of his early ethical and political sensibility, inclinations which may have been forged, specialists suggest, in multiple contexts, such as his trip to analyze the conditions of scientific work in the German universities and research institutes, in his relationship with both the French socialist and “solidarist” movements and personalities of his day, and also with specific sectors of the French Jewish intelligentsia, or, more generally, through his socialization in a largely nationalistic social environment (for a synthesis of this debate, see especially Strenski, 1997: 16–52). His early conviction that religions were sustained by a moral vitality and force that fulfilled an important regulative and cohesive function in society no doubt played a crucial role—in spite of his atheism, the fascination with Christianity that he cultivated during his formative years may well have contributed to forge this assumption (Jones, 1999: 48–60). Durkheim’s interest in religion was reinforced by his interpretation of ethnographic accounts of the religious life of the “primitive” societies, which started probably, according to Mucchielli (1998: 160–161), with reading Wundt’s own impressions in this respect in his Ethik.

Durkheim’s early justification of his interest in studying religion and morals together outlines the relationship of “analogy,” if not “identity,” to be observed between the sanctions that penalize their respective breach, sanctions which provoke, in all cases, the same feelings of “anger” and “disgust” (Durkheim, 2010: 194). Unveiling the specific regulative effects of religion is therefore what mattered to the emerging science of morals into which Durkheim wanted to transform the erratic discipline of sociology:

(. . .) right and morals aim to ensure the equilibrium of society and to adapt it to its ambient conditions. That must be the social role of religion too. If the study of the last corresponds to sociology, it is insomuch as it accomplishes such a regulative function in society. Determining what this influence consists in, comparing it to others, and distinguishing it, here it is the problem that the social science needs to address (Durkheim, 2010: 194–195).

But, if religion and morals often materialize in prescriptions with which associated sanctions are analogous, if not identical, thus provoking similar social reactions that contribute equally to equilibrate and reinforce the social order, how then might both phenomena be differentiated? The critical arguments that Durkheim makes against Spencer’s contribution to the sociological study of religion are indeed particularly revealing, as they clearly demarcate the divisions that separate what needed to be a distinctively sociological approach to this object of study from what Durkheim considered to be the approach corresponding to the scientific discipline of history:

if one reduces religion to anything else than an ensemble of beliefs and practices related to a supernatural being, it becomes then hardly possible to see there something other than a complex set of psychological phenomena. One could even consider that the religious sentiment may have developed away from any constituted society. Here is how Mr. Spencer’s book contains a large number of questions that do not belong to our science. The sociology and the history of religions are and should remain different things (Durkheim, 2010: 193).

Spencer had made several major mistakes. First, his psychological reductionism had prevented him from recognizing what the phenomenon of religion is when viewed principally from a proper sociological perspective: a “social discipline.” As such, it needed to be approached as “an ensemble of forms of acting set by usage” (Durkheim, 2010: 196). Interestingly, in this early text, Durkheim’s rapprochement of religion with other “forms of costume, like right or moeurs” attaches to the former, albeit somewhat hesitantly, a distinctive trait: its particular prescriptive force. In Durkheim’s own words: “what better distinguishes this form from the others is, perhaps, that it imposes itself not only on the conduct, but also on the consciousness. It does not only edict acts, but also ideas and sentiments” (Durkheim, 2010: 196). Durkheim’s insistence on both the constraining nature of religion and its efficacy in terms of affective mobilization would remain constant during his career, yet his subsequent work will also highlight its eudemonistic dimension, which he finally qualified as “dynamogenic” (Jones, 1986, 2005; Schiermer, 2019). As will be highlighted, such an evolution would also shape his sociological conception of morality.

A second important aspect implied in Durkheim’s early epistemological effort to demarcate the horizons of intelligibility of the sociology and history of religion, respectively, has to do with the greater range of applicability of the former, whose non-theistic orientation made it particularly interesting for the science of morals that was required in the context of the Western societies of his day. Contra Spencer, beliefs in God appear to be, from a sociological point of view, one particular form of constraining and mobilizing faith amongst others:

(. . .) religion starts with faith, that is, with faith accepted or imposed upon without discussion. Faith in God is only a particular type of faith. There are many others. Do not most of us believe in progress with the same naivety as our fathers once believed in the good God and the saints? (Durkheim, 2010: 196).

Several comments deserve to be introduced at this point of the discussion. Although, at this incipient stage of his career, a “scientific”—that is, we might infer, a fully sociological—approach to religion still needed to be developed, as Durkheim himself declared a few years later in his doctoral thesis (Durkheim, 2004: 142), Durkheim’s early attempt to approach this object of study in a properly sociological manner already suggests an idea of religion as a system of socially produced constraining and mobilizing beliefs and representations that include, but are not limited to, theistic ones. Durkheim’s assumption about the constraining nature of religion and its mobilizing efficacy was certainly not original, but his suggestion that phenomena analogous to those commonly attached to this category could also be found in the Western domains of secularity contradicted established academic and popular opinions on this matter. Additionally, such beliefs and representations were expected to be, in all cases, the “symbolic” expression of “traditions,” “usages,” and “collective needs” (Durkheim, 2010: 194). At this point, the distance that separates the sociological perspective that Durkheim was already seeking to develop from the sort of anti-ritualist, psychologist, theistic understandings of this phenomenon which prevailed in the largely Eurocentric sciences of religion and anthropology of his day, seems remarkable. The popularization of these understandings, critics suggest, was precisely crucial to the formation of the Western, “mythical” idea of religion as a permanent, universally present, and differentiated domain of social activities which mobilizes inner, private beliefs in divinities, supernatural beings of forces, transcendental realities, or in a more inclusive vein, even ultimate concerns (Asad, 2003a, 2003b; Dubuisson, 1998; Fitzgerald, 2000, 2007a, 2007b; Horii, 2019, 2021; Masuzawa, 2005; Nongbri, 2013).

After the “revelation” that Durkheim experienced during the lectures on religion that he gave in Bordeaux after reading W. R. Smith’s work, and during the period from the formation of his équipe to the publication of The Forms, his sociology of morality and social solidarity was subject to important and substantial theoretical re-elaborations that prove the relevance of his renewed, vivid interest in religion. By the time Durkheim published the aforementioned early text, and in the new context of a general expansion of academic posts within the French universities (Weisz, 1983: 225–269), the production of scientific knowledge on religion had become an enterprise promoted by the French state, which did not accept that Christianity should continue to stand for all religion in France. In order to achieve this goal, in 1886 the French Ministry of Education decided to create the fifth section of the École Pratique, a research institution with its own faculty within the broader University of Paris (Conklin, 2013: 70–71; Weisz, 1983: 21). It was in critical dialog with the representatives of the religious sciences who worked in the fifth section that both Durkheim and the Durkheimians would develop and perfect, once in Paris, their own approach to the matter, which they would try to prove superior (Strenski, 2006: 216–228).

During this period, the thesis of an identical relation between morality and religion in all times and places seemed to gain prominence over the idea of a merely close kinship or analogy and functional equivalence between structurally interdependent yet distinct phenomena that would appear to be undifferentiated only in the context of primitive societies. This shift was already present in the first course in education science that Durkheim gave at Sorbonne University in 1902–1903, where he suggested that the religious dimension of the laïque morality taught in French public schools needed to remain in place, as its elimination risked the dissolution of morality itself (Durkheim, 2015: 15, 23). In the text “Determination of the Moral Fact,” published in 1906, Durkheim soundly affirms the constitutive religious nature of any type of morals in all times and places:

As long as morals appear everywhere in history impregnated with religiosity, it is impossible for them to completely dispose of this character. A fact cannot lose one of its essential attributes without changing its nature. Morals would not be morals if they had nothing religious about them (Durkheim, 2014: 82).

To a large extent integrating the contributions of the members of his équipe, and particularly Marcel Mauss’ reading of the contributions of his doctoral promotor Sylvain Lévy, member of the fifth section, on this subject (Strenski, 2006: 129–133), the social production of moral ideals is now seen through the lens of the sacred, a domain which is set apart from the profane in all times and places (Durkheim, 2015: 15, 2014: 43–44, 57). Durkheim’s former and overly unilateral insistence on the constraining nature of the prescriptive rules in which morality materializes, for which he received much criticism, especially after the publication of The Rules (Mucchielli, 1998: 218–219), is now combined with and tempered by the recognition of its eudemonistic dimension. Constraining obligation and pleasurable, attracting desirability were precisely the two aspects implied in the notion of the sacred, and the applicability of this notion in the domain of the science of morals became not just pertinent, but indispensable (Durkheim, 2015: 15, 2014: 57).

All of these theoretical elaborations would be incorporated and further developed in The Forms. The definition of religion that Durkheim presents here again refuses to include any reference to beliefs in supernatural beings, transcendental realities, or deities (Durkheim, 1991: 81–91), yet, as Strenski (2011) in particular has highlighted, the arguments that he deploys demonstrate the significance of his knowledge of Buddhism and Hinduism, for which he owes a great deal to Sylvain Lévy. Durkheim’s elaboration of the notion of ritual directs the attention of today’s analysts to the particular forms of “effervescent” socio-psychic processes in which the authority of society as a constraining yet desirable moral force is affirmed and renewed. However, the constitution and reconstitution of society cannot do without ideal production:

A society cannot create and recreate itself without engaging, at the same time, in ideal creation. This creation is not a sort of supplementary act by which, once created, it would complete itself; it is the act whereby it makes and remakes itself periodically (Durkheim, 1991: 702–703).

Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion is particularly well-equipped to explain such dynamics: “what defines the sacred is that it is superimposed to reality; however, ideal corresponds to the same definition: we cannot explain one without explaining the other” (Durkheim, 1991: 701). In the end, then, religion in general can be identified with society itself, and only the sort of non-theistic, non-psychologist, ritualist approach to religion that invigorates the emergent and promising sociology of morals is fully capable of accounting for this phenomenon, which is far from being universally present. Indeed, in The Forms, Durkheim warns us against the supposition that the social, symbolic, psychic, and corporeal processes which sustain sacralization and idealization should be expected to arise at all times and places—the troubling situation of anomic France represented, in his eyes, clear and painful evidence of this. In addition, once present, cultural ideals that had been embraced before could fade away in the absence of successful social rituals capable of effectively contributing to their periodic recall, celebration, and reinstatement. Therefore, from this perspective, the very notion of religion and of society—in both its objective and its transfigured and hypostatized dimensions—might only become sociologically applicable under very specific conditions, and should not in any way be associated automatically with a political unit, such as the nation-state (Collins, 1988: 109; Mellor, 2004: 6). Totally freed from the territorial constraints that impose the so-criticized methodological nationalism, it could be asserted that the theory of moral consensus, group-identity making, and solidarity offered in The Forms invites study of precisely what, according to certain postcolonial critics, classical sociology and its contemporary residues are unable to account for—that is, to quote postcolonial sociologist Julian Go, the “interactional constitution of social units” (Go, 2013: 25). It does so, however, by directing the analyst toward the objective, material, and socio-environmental constraints which enable and frame human face-to-face ritual interactions, interactions whose causes and effects tend not to be fully transparent to the social actors themselves. 

During the collaborative period that culminates in the publication of The Forms, the increasing importance that Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion acquires in the promotion of an academic and socio-political project of a science of morals capable of scientifically assessing the objective suitability of the conflicting moral and ideological sensibilities of his time materialized in, amongst other themes, his sociological portrait and defense of his conception of the cult of the human person. This is an important area of controversy in discussions about Durkheim’s attitude toward colonialism and imperialism. It might be justifiable to suppose that Durkheim’s fervent adhesion to the universalist and humanist principles that inspired this cult, which somehow proved the limits of his ethical relativism, actually prevented him from undertaking a systematic analysis of the major difficulties that the effective accomplishment of this cult met both in metropolitan France and in the French colonies. Yet, it is still the case that his sociological approach to religion opened up some interesting opportunities for such projects. Thus, from the point of view of today’s postcolonial concerns, the potential of this legacy appears to be especially interesting for the sociological analysis of interethnic relationships, racism, and xenophobia in the context of liberal capitalistic democracies. But it is also of significant interest for the sociological study of anticolonial struggles and collective mobilizations against dispossession in the Global South.

The cult of the human person had, in Durkheim’s perspective, one specific ideal: a “generic” type of mankind (homme). Yet all societies had a particular representation of the human ideal and the dignity intrinsically attached to the human person and, more generally, the sacralization of the rights of the individual were not natural, universal facts. These particular manifestations of the collective mentality were, instead, “closely related to the structure of the great European societies” (Durkheim, 2014: 72). Here, where the defilement of such principles was contemplated as a sacrilege (Durkheim, 2014: 75), Durkheim states, “the most abstract and impersonal moral goals, those which are detached from all temporal and spatial condition, as well as from all race condition, are also those which are elevated to the highest rank” (Durkheim, 2015: 71). The institutional condition required for such abstract principles to develop was the presence of the nation-state, which was, Durkheim affirmed, the “highest” existing form of human organization, above that of the family and the professional group (Durkheim, 2015: 71; 2015b: 147–172). Durkheim’s justification of such a claim invokes the argument that the modern nation-state, at least up until this point in time, embodied the abstract universalist ideals of humanism in the most perfect way. Indeed, under such socio-historical conditions, the significance of the cult of the human person exceeded the institutional limits of the state: “(. . .) the type of citizen overlaps to a good extent with the generic type of mankind [homme]” (Durkheim, 2015: 77, 2014: 72). And he continues in Moral Education: “it is to mankind as mankind to which we feel attached” (Durkheim, 2015: 77).

Yet, if Durkheim believed that the accomplishment of the abstract, universalistic ideals that inspired the cult of the human person was an important consequence of social evolution (Durkheim, 2015: 168), he also acknowledged the existence of important and challenging obstacles that needed to be overcome. Amongst those present in metropolitan France, Durkheim outlined the insufficient development of the modern state, whose form of democracy was still imperfect and, in many regards, comparable to that of “primitive societies” (Durkheim, 2015: 197, 202). Its regulative function in both the definition and the supervision of the largely unfair existing contractual relations of an also perfectible, “abnormal” division of the social labor was insufficient and improvable (Durkheim, 2010: 278, 2004: 343–390), and this situation had serious limiting consequences. On the one hand, the lack of stability of the objective social conditions required for moral action to become a collective, repeatable habit was, as Spencer had noted, a general problem (Durkheim, 2015: 30–31, 35). On the other hand, the social inequalities and the atomizing consequences derived from the prevalence of utilitarian, individualistic social and economic exchanges and interactions had not been offset by the development of an associative life that, in reality, tended to cause wariness (Durkheim, 2010: 207). But, significantly for the purposes of this article, the effective respect for human dignity encountered other major obstacles that have to do with the social conditions of emergence and development, and also with the consequences of racial prejudices that seemed to visibly mediate interethnic and interreligious relations.

Right before the turn of the century, in the context of a democratic political regime in which the memory of defeat in the Franco-Prussian War was still very present, the anxious preoccupation with the permanent threat represented by Germany and other imperialist European powers suddenly found a scapegoat. How and why did this happen? In the middle of the heated social reactions to the Dreyfus affair, without either mentioning Dreyfus or explicitly condemning French antisemitism, Durkheim’s response to this question in “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (Durkheim, 2010: 263–279) seems to point to two different yet related problems. First, Durkheim warns his readers about the dangers of adhering to an aggressive form of nationalism whose sacralization risked dissolving one of the central functions, if not the most crucial one, of the modern state: the preservation of the dignity of the human person, a sacred right that no form of state reason could legitimately infringe (Durkheim, 2010: 268). Second, as frequently happened in times of rapid social change, certain collective aspirations were delayed in their adaptation to the constraints imposed by the new social conditions. This diagnosis could be especially applied to the attitudes of intransigent conservative sectors of French Catholicism which, in conformity with the orientations of Leon’s XIII’s pontificate, did not accept the laicity of the French state and believed that the retreat from Catholicism would place the country in a state of moral anarchy (Pelletier, 1997: 39–45). Durkheim’s message to these conservative Catholics is very clear: “(. . .) if it is true that a religion is, in a sense, indispensable, it is no less true that religions transform themselves, so that of yesterday could not be that of tomorrow. Telling us in what today’s religion should consist is therefore what matters” (Durkheim, 2010: 272). Durkheim’s subsequent reflections in this text aim to demonstrate the adequacy and necessity of the cult of the human person during the ineluctable progress of the social division of labor and to highlight its all-encompassing nature. Considering that Christianity had greatly contributed to the development of the rationalist and individualist principles and ideals which inspired this new cult, it was not possible to participate in it without honoring the Christian legacy from which it had originated: “we do not repudiate our past; we are simply continuing it”  (Durkheim, 2010: 272).

However, the text does not answer the question of how and why the collective emotions of preoccupation, anxiety, and anger, produced by the worrying form of nationalism that Durkheim identifies, had been directed against Dreyfus. We will find interesting explanatory clues in this respect in The Forms, where Durkheim specifies the conditions under which human sociability is susceptible to crystallize in the social production of vigorously engaging moral and classificatory consensuses. However, in light of the theoretical developments introduced in his last magnum opus, Durkheim’s ardent faith in the universal accomplishment of the abstract ideals of the religion of humanity seem also to appear, paradoxically, as problematic, if not unrealistic. Across the pages of this book, the formation and recreation of the distinctive collective representations, beliefs, and sentiments on which humans construct their social identities and forms of belonging and solidarity seem to be the result of periodical face-to-face ritual interactions in which the exalting mobilization of specific, commonly shared, emblematic symbols, corporeal and otherwise, appears to be quintessential. In a text which recreates an imaginary conversation between Durkheim and Du Bois, Karen Fields assigns to Du Bois the following words of provocation: “you seem to assume, rather than demonstrate, that l’homme can possibly recognize l’homme in the abstract. I thought you showed precisely the opposite in The Forms” (Fields, 2002: 453). Fields rightly notes a major inconsistency in Durkheim’s thought, but at the same time she outlines the significance of his mature sociological approach to religion for the sociological study of racial forms of classification, self-identification, and scapegoating processes in general (Fields, 2002). With regards to the last aspect, Durkheim himself explicitly acknowledged that the insights on scapegoating processes that enrich his theorization of mourning rituals (see especially Durkheim, 1991: 651) were very much inspired by his memories of the Dreyfus affair, as Fields recalls (Fields, 2002: 447).

Similarly, there are good reasons to assert that The Forms also presents interesting theoretical-methodological clues that contribute to highlighting the conditions and processes under which the abstract ideals of Durkheim’s universalist humanism happen to be conculcated by the perpetrators of colonial and neo-colonial forms of domination. Indeed, we can regret that his insights on the efficacy of ritual effervescence in the shaping and reinstating of collective beliefs, sentiments, and identities presented in The Forms did not inspire him to systematically explain the brutal forms of European colonialist violence that proliferated in his time, which he overtly condemned in Moral Education. Although the spurious reasons that justified those atrocities pointed to the questionable feelings of racial superiority of the perpetrators, their ultimate cause could be attributed, Durkheim suggests in this text, to a simple lack or insufficient presence of society (Durkheim, 2015: 169). But, if the abstract, universalist moral ideals that inspired the cult of the human person were already embedded in the institutions of the nation-state, did it make sense to attribute the colonial violence led by the 19th-century European powers to this form of anomy? From where did these feelings of racial superiority stem, and how could they have been taken as an evident truth capable of legitimizing colonial domination? However dissatisfying Durkheim’s response to these questions might be, his lack of commitment to systematically addressing them does not obscure the significance of his sociological approach to religion for explaining the social and cultural conditions that enable collective forms of mobilization and revolt against these processes. Additionally, postcolonial sensibilities find in Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion the basis for an overlooked theory of property rights in which normative implications tend toward anti-imperialism. Presenting property as a tabooed, sacred social institution that results from collective religious rituals and beliefs, Durkheim explicitly rejected Locke’s attempt to elaborate a universally valid normative justification of the right of property on the basis of labor by invoking the claim that this modern idea would only be novel and accepted in the Western context in which it appeared (Durkheim, 2015: 291). Instead, he posed the hypothesis that collective forces would always be at the origin of what appears to be defined as property in each socio-historical context, and he went on to admit that, whenever two social groups collide in their attempt to appropriate a territory or land, it is always the anteriority of the settlement or occupation which justifies the legitimacy of its property (Durkheim, 2015: 240, 246).

Durkheim’s comparative sociology, evolutionism, and insights on human emotions and rationality

One of the main concerns expressed in the postcolonial critiques of Durkheim’s Eurocentrism refers to the misapprehension of historical and cultural singularities that Durkheim’s comparatist sociology in general, and his sociological approach to religion in particular, would inevitably entail. In this respect, it is worth examining the different types of argument deployed by postcolonial critics.

Some postcolonial critiques of Durkheim’s sociology seem to question in general terms the drawbacks imposed by Eurocentric, European, Western-born theoretical hypotheses and conceptual tools that cannot do justice to the singularity of the socio-historical processes and cultural phenomena under consideration. In these sorts of critique, claims about the epistemologically limiting implications of Durkheim’s sociology appear to be fairly totalizing and non-specific. This kind of reasoning can be read, for instance, in Magubane’s critique of Durkheim’s comparative sociology, in which the author affirms that the use of a conceptual dichotomy such as that of mechanical/organic solidarity would imply that “it is not important to know the specific history of a particular society in order to understand how it became what it is” (Magubane, 2005: 95). A similar sort of argument can be found in Connell’s claim that Durkheim disregarded and underestimated the cultural differences that exist amongst the Australian aboriginal societies described in The Forms (Connell, 2007b: 78), a reproach that does not specify further the aspects neglected in Durkheim’s last main work. In a similar vein, Dubuisson questions in rather general terms Durkheim’s, Mauss’, and Bourdieu’s sociological hypothesis of the “morphological” and “functional” similarities to be found between religions, claiming that such a supposition would entail an attitude of indifference toward history and would lead to the construction of partial accounts of cultural diversity (Dubuisson, 1998: 233–235).

These non-specific critical arguments seem to face at least three important problems. If the general, and perhaps all too evident, limiting epistemological drawbacks of Durkheim’s sociology must automatically be imputed to the obscuring nature of the intellectual and socio-political concerns that imprinted the European, or Western “context of discovery” in which they were formulated, these sorts of criticisms would be dubiously incurring a genetic fallacy that is often present, as McLennan (2014: 458) notes, in the postcolonial critique of sociology’s Eurocentrism. If, alternatively, what they problematize is the very use of any conceptual or theoretical tool at all, the postcolonial critique of Durkheim’s sociology would then have to face the same problems that can be assigned to the sort of empiricist epistemology that inspired the scientific histoire historisante of religion against which both Durkheim and the Durkheimians precisely stood, as Strenski describes, not without some tensions (Strenski, 2006: 66–86). It is unnecessary to insist here on the problematic nature of the empiricist assumption that a sort of self-explanatory singularity of historical processes and cultural phenomena could be fully constructed in the absence of an analytical perspective that specifies in each particular case what needs to be investigated. Finally, presuming that the cultural productions of human societies, regardless of the approach adopted by the analyst, could not be compared and classified without their irreducible differences being flattened, necessarily implies the ontological presupposition that the social-objective, material conditions in which these emerge, or the “morphological” facts to which Durkheim refers (Durkheim, 2010: 153, 1995: 44), either systematically display incommensurably singular traits or simply do not shape or constrain cultural change in any significant way. In the first case, we would be accepting an untenable atomizing ontology of the social that would make it hard to grasp the varying yet classifiable forms adopted in the development of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism across the globe. Chakrabarty’s argument about the “untranslatability” of life worlds, in light of which the historicist type of explanation provided by the sociology of religion would appear to be unjustifiable (Chakrabarty, 2008: 76), would paradoxically lead to this impasse. Can today’s sociology afford the consequences of such aversion to generalization, classification, and comparison? The second scenario would not be any more promising, as it would trap today’s sociology in a form of idealism (for a more general discussion of the anti-classificatory zeal of postcolonialism and its implications for today’s sociology, see especially McLennan, 2003, 2006; 81–98). In order to overcome these obstacles, I will only outline here the anti-dualistic ontological arguments on which Durkheim himself grounded his comparatist sociology. First, being a part of nature, human societies present sociocultural regularities that can be scientifically assessed, yet, nonetheless, sociological generalizations or laws cannot be reduced, as Spencer and others erroneously supposed, to biological laws (Durkheim, 2010: 99; Durkheim, 2004: 211–266). Second, if the possibility of a sociological nomothetic science was to be denied, it would be at the cost of accepting the questionable thesis that two worlds exist: a natural world susceptible to explanation, and a social one that would represent the realm of contingency and arbitrariness (Durkheim, 2010: 89–91, 121).

Another set of postcolonial appraisals and critiques problematize the eventual transcultural validity of Durkheim’s own theoretical generalizations, which were largely elaborated in response to more specific or “provincial” national or European concerns. Regarding in particular the eventual problems generated by Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion, Fitzgerald’s assessment seems to acknowledge its merits in positing the fecund hypothesis that the cultural ideals onto which a given society projects the best image of itself manages to emerge and survive in the context of specific social rituals which are set apart from other social activities and interactions that are perceived and experienced by the actors involved as being, in varying degrees, ordinary and banal (Fitzgerald, 2007a: 72–76). But, significantly, everything seems to indicate that, in the end, Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion would also have the merit of shedding light on what, according to him, the Western, Eurocentric, “essentializing” approaches to religion have typically obscured, that is, the similarities between the social practices that are socially classified as “religious” and “secular” (Fitzgerald, 2007a: 8). Indeed, it does not seem a coincidence that, in order to find a replacement for an ideologically-loaded conceptual dichotomy that has largely been used to present the social domains to which the terms that it opposes respectively refer as eternally and universally present, and also to “naturalize” their presumed ontological differences, Fitzgerald suggests a Durkheimian-inspired use of the notions of the sacred and the profane in combination with that of ritual (Fitzgerald, 2007a: 21–108, 2000: 14, 28). One of the main objectives of Fitzgerald’s critical perspective on religion is precisely that of challenging such “essentializations,” with the purpose of reaching a better understanding of both premodern societies and Western capitalistic forms of modernization and colonialism, which Western academic reflections on “religion” would have decisively contributed to legitimatizing ideologically (Fitzgerald, 2007a: 12–26).

However, other postcolonial scholars might find Fitzgerald’s aspirations problematic, due to the limiting epistemological effects that Durkheim’s “provincial” concerns and assumptions would have imposed on his sociological approach to religion. In this regard, Chakrabarty’s popular work, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2008), is worthy of consideration for its critique of the metatheoretical assumptions which inform the sociological perspective in general and the sociological study of religion in particular. Although Chakrabarty does not refer explicitly to Durkheim’s sociology here, the immanent type of causal explanation of religion that it promotes would likely represent a variety of Western historicism that could be perceived as contradictory and as incommensurable with the spiritualist ontological assumptions on which many non-Western worldviews are grounded. Indeed, according to him, this type of explanation fails to apprehend what the believers experience as an evident truth, that is, the “agency” of the “gods” and “spirits” they worship (Chakrabarty, 2008: 76–90). Not only that, the Durkheimian thesis of the symbolic representations of the divine as a hypostasis of society would probably represent a perfect example of the “disenchanting” effect of the “language of sociology” (Chakrabarty, 2008: 89). In support of this thesis, it could be added that, as Horii notes, Durkheim’s positive sociological contribution to the elaboration of reformist, pro-laïcité policies aimed explicitly to promote a scientifically grounded rational morality, as is particularly evident in his contributions in the domain of education that Horii (2021: 116–117) cites. In the face of these criticisms, an analysis of Durkheim’s rationalism and insights on the cumulative nature of historical development, alongside a consideration of the actual relations of competition and collaboration in which he and his équipe engaged with those intellectuals of his day who, from different perspectives and social positions, wrote on religion, should help to situate his particular conception of laicity and the distance from anticlericalism that he explicitly manifested (Durkheim, 2010: 282).

First, as mentioned in the previous section, Durkheim was convinced that the laic moral individualism to be consolidated and perfected under the French Third Republic was largely the result of a socio-historical development to which Christianity, including both Catholicism and Protestantism, had greatly contributed. Ultimately, such a conviction, which mainly lay in Durkheim’s general assumption that the past is somehow incorporated in the present (Durkheim, 2015: 13; Jones, 1999: 45–111; Strenski, 2006: 98–100) inspired his reluctance to endorse any sort of revolutionary political project, anticlerical or otherwise, that aimed to promote an abrupt form of social change. Another reason for Durkheim’s conviction was his belief that Christians and Jews might live harmoniously under the laic French Third Republic as long as they fully adhered, without exception, to the cult of the human person, as he vehemently suggested in the public intervention in the Dreyfus affair published under the title “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (Durkheim, 2010: 274–275). As Bhambra and Holmwood (2021: 173) point out, Durkheim’s laïcist republicanism was not in this respect assimilationist. Rather, it positively valued a pluralism of “religious” (this time, in the commonly accepted sense) solidarities.

Second, although Durkheim was himself an atheist who was enthusiastic about the potential emancipatory function of rationalism, he also was overtly skeptical about the possibility that science would ultimately be able to explain the totality of things (see, for instance, Durkheim, 2015: 11, 235). Unsurprisingly, his sociological texts do not contain any explicit dismissive ontological standpoint on the eventual existence or inexistence of transcendent realities or entities.

Third, in a national, highly polarized socio-political context where the religious question raised intense conflict between opposing ideological sensibilities, Durkheim’s attempt to formalize and differentiate sociology as a distinct, serious, scientific discipline capable of discerning the objective suitability of the moral opinions in dispute may have required him to develop a sociological approach to religion that would differ from the popular atheist tradition of psychological critique of religion. In his time, this tradition was largely embodied by Reinach, a perspicacious popular intellectual whose Voltairean-like books were very much appreciated by the French lay readers, and against whom both Durkheim and the Durkheimians competed with admiration and irritation (Strenski, 1997: 69–72). In contrast, the affinity in terms of intellectual and socio-political interests and discursive styles between both Durkheim and the Durkheimians and their religious modernist theologian colleagues of the fifth section was salient, and would have enabled important collaborative relationships between both groups. As Strenski (2006: 168–176) notes, Durkheim’s colleagues also stood for the modernization of religion, and the symbolic approach to ritual that they elaborated, which implied a rejection of a literalist interpretation of religious doctrines, was in reality very close to his. What distinguished Durkheim’s sociological approach from theirs, however, is the fact that it aimed to explain, in a non-theological register, the specific, immanent, socio-historical conditions under which highly mobilizing systems of beliefs and rites happen to arise and consolidate. This is what Durkheim suggests in the final pages of The Forms, where the role of sociology in the “often-misunderstood” conflict between science and religion is clarified:

Here is what the conflict between science and religion consists in. We often misrepresent it. It is said that science denies religion in principle. But religion does exist. It is a system of given facts; in one word, it is a reality. How could science deny a reality? (Durkheim, 1991: 714).

In reality, Durkheim’s project exceeded the task of analyzing the social and symbolic forms in which the Western-born historical manifestations of what is commonly defined as “religion” could manifest. This is exactly what he seems to suggest when responding to his critics 2 years after the publication of The Forms in a public conference about the “future of religion.” Addressing both freethinkers and the religious modernists of his time, Durkheim reasserted the reality of religion as a non-illusory system of “moral forces” that emerges as soon as humans get together and engage in collective effervescence, also reiterating his argument about the unscientific nature of any attempt to deny the existence of this phenomenon (Durkheim, 2010).

If Durkheim’s sociological rationalism cannot be said to engage a secularist, anticlerical hostility toward religion, it is nonetheless true that Durkheim never disguised the fact that his sociological project inevitably collided with the exclusivist claims of truth held by religious dogmatists who sought to lay the foundation of morals in a transcendental order (Durkheim, 2015: 233, 2010: 311). As he states in The Forms: “Science’s argument with religion is not regarding its right to exist, but rather its right to dogmatize on the nature of things; it is because of the special competence it claims in understanding humanity and the world” (Durkheim, 1991: 714). In line with McLennan’s argument on the impossibility of unifying the mutually excluding truth-claims of an historicist and a theological-religious worldview within a “pluralistic” discursive register (McLennan, 2010a: 129–130), we need to acknowledge the incompatibility between Durkheim’s sociology and any form of religionist or spiritualist discourse that explains human systems of thought or action as being exclusively the result of whichever god’s or supernatural being’s will or decisions. However, in the end, Durkheim’s sociology is compatible with a wide array of metaphysical sensibilities, even amongst the practitioners of the discipline. As a matter of fact, it has inspired both secularist, rather anticlerical, sociological theorizations, such as Bourdieu’s, which seems to be characterized by materialistic atheism à la Marx, but also more spiritualist quests (for some recent examples, see, for instance, Buehler, 2012; Mellor, 2004). It is still the case that, ultimately, none of these metaphysical sensibilities can endow their respective ontological claims with scientific validation without exceeding and contravening the principles of scientific, controllable observation itself. In this respect, Chakrabarty’s commitment to renouncing the sociology of religion (Chakrabarty, 2008: 16) seems to be essentially justified by a prejudiced understanding of the sociological investigative practice.

A different critical appraisal is offered by Horii, who presents Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion as a Eurocentric, secularist-inspired, evolutionist theory which condemns the premodern and “primitive” peoples to a sort of barbarian irrationality, while positing the sociologist’s own analytical perspective, and ultimately the non-religious destiny of the West, as rational (Horii, 2021: 94, 113). In my view, Horii’s assessment of Durkheim’s sociological Eurocentrism is grounded on a questionable understanding of Durkheim’s particular evolutionism, the tensions and contradictions of which cannot be summarized in the terms that he proposes, and more broadly, on an incomplete consideration of his sociological approach to religion. However, Horii’s general suggestion that Durkheim’s laic commitments somehow limited and preconditioned his sociological theorization, and that, more particularly, “the sacred-profane dichotomy reflects the religion-laïque dichotomy” (Horii, 2021: 114) is not erroneous, although his argument fails to present the grounding justification for this claim.

Indeed, Fitzgerald was right in acknowledging the merits of Durkheim’s provision of a sociologically grounded theoretical apparatus that helps to elucidate the similarities or analogies between Western social practices that arise in contexts that are typically associated with the secular domain of politics, and those that are commonly classified as religious. However, what he does not problematize (and nor does Horii, who has a much less benign appraisal of Durkheim’s legacy) is Durkheim’s questionable projection of Western notions of secularity onto activities associated with the profane, which has been noted by some non-postcolonial observers (Isambert, 1982: 267; Rivière, 1999: 138). Concretely, the following of hygiene precepts, medical therapies, precepts of professional technique (Durkheim, 2015: 33) and, more generally, any form of economic activity (Durkheim, 2014: 68–69, 1991: 379) are not fully moral, according to Durkheim, due to the utilitarian nature of the reasons that predominantly motivate these social practices. Durkheim’s projection of his own critical perspective on the nature of capitalistic social antagonisms in France and Europe onto his conceptualization of the sacred/profane dichotomy would leave unexplained, for example, the emotionally loaded forms of ritual which, according to Chakrabarty, sometimes frame the labor processes in modern India, as well as their capacity to generate social belonging and solidarity (Chakrabarty, 2008: 72–83). Likewise, sociologists interested in Durkheim’s theorization have lamented the fact that his classification of sacred and profane social activities forecloses the sociological investigation of the socio-psychic dynamics that generate the “enchanting symbolism” which sustains the fetishism of commodities (Friedland, 2005: 244) and their imaginative value as symbolic representations of collective ideals (Beckert, 2010: 9). However, against such arbitrary generalizations, we can invoke Durkheim’s own hypothetical statement that moral (or “religious”) life potentially starts when humans get together, engage in collective effervescence, and entertain regular habits (Durkheim, 2015: 30).

In contrast with his general objection to Durkheim’s conceptualization of the sacred/profane dichotomy, Horii’s assessment of Durkheim’s evolutionism and his ideas about the relationship between religion and reason are highly questionable. Regarding the first aspect, it is important to outline the fact that Horii’s conclusions, as he declares in his book, are mainly derived from the reading of Durkheim’s doctoral thesis, where the progression of the social division of labor is supposed to entail the decline of religion, which would remain an important cohesive force in the context of “primitive” societies (Horii, 2021: 98). However, Horii does not take into account the significance of religion in Durkheim’s more mature work, which unambiguously extends the relevance of its sociological investigation to the understanding of the moral problems, but also potentialities, of modern, Western societies. Considering his whole intellectual legacy, it would therefore be correct to state, in line with Bhambra and Holmwood’s (2021: 159–160) argument, that the socio-psychic processes in which Durkheim’s ritualist, non-theistic, idea of “religion” materializes should not be understood as distinctive traits of the primitive societies. Instead, these processes would also be present, albeit to varying degrees, in socio-historical contexts where organic forms of solidarity tend to predominate.

On the other hand, Horii’s presentation of Durkheim’s particular theory of social change as a unilinear, Comtean-like form of evolutionism seems inadequate, to say the least. Indeed, Durkheim’s relationship with the evolutionary thinking of his time was certainly critical and not without ambiguity, and it remains subject to multiple interpretations and lively debate (Belier, 1999). That he purposely tried not to derive the causal explanation of a single, unilinear, universally applicable model of historical development from the history of any Western society of his time seems unquestionable. His early critiques of Spencer are crystal clear in this respect (Durkheim, 2010: 102, 2004: 211–237]. In his doctoral thesis, he roundly discredited this alternative:

What causes explain the progress of the division of work? Undoubtedly, it is out of the question to find a unique formula accounting for all possible modalities of the division of work. Such a formula does not exist. Every particular case depends on particular causes which need to be determined by means of specific analysis (Durkheim, 2004: 211).

The hypothesis that Comte could have decisively influenced his perspective on this matter does not seem very likely if one considers the robustness and consistency of Durkheim’s critical assessments of his contributions to the development of the discipline. In the social science course given in 1888, he criticized Comte for having formulated a stadial theory of social change that did not take into account the existence of several “social types.” Discarding this explanatory model, Durkheim explicitly postulates the coexistence of multiple yet tendentially similar and therefore comparable paths of historical development (Durkheim, 2010: 96–98). The same argument is reproduced in The Rules:

(. . .) if only one social species exists, individual societies can then only vary in terms of degree, that is, depending on how complete the constitutive traits of this single social species are found in them, according to how perfectly these represent Humanity. Conversely, if qualitatively distinct social types do exist, the manner in which one might relate with another will in no way allow to approach them as the homogeneous sections of a geometric line. Accordingly, historical development will lose then the unicity and simplicity that had been attributed to it and will fragment itself, so to speak, in a multiplicity of branches that, diverging from each other, cannot be linked in a continuous manner (Durkheim, 1995: 95).

Admittedly, Durkheim’s non-unilinear theory of social change is based on the assumption that “primitive” societies would embody the common starting point of historical evolution of human societies. This is particularly evident in the first pages of The Forms, where he presents the manifestations of religious life of Australian aboriginal societies depicted by Spencer and Gillen as the most “simple” and “pure” forms of social life, pairing them with those corresponding to the historical origins of human evolution (Durkheim, 1991: 40–41, 48). Following decolonial thinker Mignolo, one might say that at this point Durkheim’s proximity to this form of 19th-century evolutionism clearly involves a “transformation of geography into chronology” (Mignolo, 2011, 153f; cited in Kerner, 2018: 553). On the other hand, considering his claims about the necessary accomplishment of the ideals of the cult of the human person throughout social evolution, it remains doubtful whether Durkheim would have systematically developed his program of sociological analysis of social change based on the premise of the existence of “social types.” Returning to Durkheim’s use of the metaphor of “branches,” would these ultimately converge in a similar path of historical development? And, according to this scheme, how should the modern forms of colonial domination and imperialism be interpreted? As demonstrated in the preceding section, Durkheim was fully aware of their violent nature, and his attitudes in this regard, though clearly critical, were also somewhat elusive. In my view, postcolonial scholars are right to lament the fact that Durkheim did not fully integrate these matters in his sociological theory of modernization. In line with some postcolonial criticisms, it is also important to recall that the detailed examination of the social organization, forms of thought, and religious life of Australian aboriginal societies to be found in The Forms tacitly but significantly attributes an historical autonomous development to these human societies, neglecting and silencing the consequences of colonial forms of violence, domination, and dispossession in the social, symbolic, and psychic processes under consideration (Kurasawa, 2013: 194; Magubane, 2005: 96).

In any case, it also seems clear that Durkheim explicitly discarded, as he did in his writings on civil morals, the universality of a secular, differentiated domain of politics understood as the “society” formed by those who govern and those who are governed (Durkheim, 2015: 131). On the other hand, Horii’s claim that Durkheim conceptualized religion as a declining phenomenon in Western modernity (Horii, 2021: 97–98) which, essentially, would be in contradiction with reason (Horii, 2021: 116), is confusing because, as he remarks himself, Durkheim insisted that the specific rational, laïque moral that he stood for could itself be considered a religion (Horii, 2021: 116). Horii attributes that contradiction to Durkheim’s own perspective. The conclusions of Horii’s critical assessment of Durkheim’s sociological Eurocentrism are not exempt from inconsistencies, and this raises important questions. If the Eurocentric, imperialistically “contaminated” Durkheimian legacy needed to be put aside in the project of uncovering the nature of “secularity” as a “ritual order” (Horii, 2021: xi), how should we approach the functioning and effects of this order sociologically? And, if the unveiling of the as yet unnoticed similarity between the religious and the secular (Horii, 2021: 8) requires disregarding Durkheim’s sociology, which alternative, better sources might help us to assess their common traits? In spite of his generally negative assessment of the usefulness of Durkheim’s Eurocentric sociology, Horii seems ultimately to acknowledge its explanatory force when, challenging “the idea of soccer games, or sports in general as something secular,” he suggests that these phenomena “can be conceptualized as religious” in a Durkheimian sense of a “collective ritual” (Horii, 2021: 17), or when he asserts that “the Durkheimian notion of collective representation may provide us with a useful interpretative tool to analyze a diverse of human phenomena on an equal platform” (Horii, 2021: 247–248). In this case, Horii’s aporias are particularly evident and even explicit, and as such they seem to illustrate a frequent situation in which postcolonial authors tend to devise alternative approaches that use conceptual tools which invoke the very same Western intellectual canon that they distrust. ¹

Indeed, Durkheim’s sociological insights on the religion of the West are more subtle than Horii implicates in his generally dismissive evaluation of Durkheim’s sociological approach to religion. Horii’s critical argument nonetheless deserves careful attention, as it echoes the thesis, largely accepted amongst some postcolonial sociologists, that the classical legacy of our discipline constrains today’s sociologists to associate the West with “rationality” and “modernity,” and the non-West with the “irrational” and the “traditional.” In combination with a critique of sociology’s foundational primitivism and/or Orientalism, this thesis can indeed be found in some postcolonial revisions of the canon of classical sociology (see, for instance, Boatcă et al., 2010: 1–3). It is important to note that these criticisms sometimes denounce, additionally, the racializing orientation of the Eurocentric contributions of the “founding fathers” of the discipline, including that of Durkheim (Connell, 2007b: 88–89, Patel, 2015: 53–54).

The final criticisms identified above seem unfair in the light of Durkheim’s own views on the racializing orientation of 19th-century forms of evolutionism. The intensity and the systematicity of Durkheim’s critique of the racial paradigm of his day are nowadays subjected to discussion, and this question raises both positive and nuanced considerations (see, respectively, Mucchielli, 1998: 253–316; Reynot-Paligot, 2021: 257–266). However, what seems to be uncontroversial is that Durkheim explicitly denied the explanatory force of race in the sociological analysis of cultural beliefs and practices in some of his major works, including The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim, 2004: 291–318), The Rules (Durkheim, 1995: 119–122), and Suicide (Durkheim, 1999: 54–82). In this respect, it might be worth considering the fact that Durkheim’s own life experience as an assimilated, atheist Jew illustrated well the invalidity of the racially grounded explanations that largely informed the argumentative repertoire of scientific disciplines and subdisciplines such as criminology, physical anthropology, and anthropo-sociology, against which he clearly defined the orientation of his sociological project (see especially Mucchielli, 1998: 253–316).

On the one hand, Durkheim was clearly not a rationalist who believed that religion was the survival of a sort of “primitive” irrationality that needed to be superseded in a fully modern, laic France. Although he clearly promoted a form of rationalism that aimed to potentiate a scientifically grounded morality and the increased self-awareness of society, the success of his project was, as he remarked on several occasions, largely dependent on the participation of the non-rational aspects of the human psyche. Indeed, if Durkheim departed from Kant’s rationalism, it was to a great extent because it unduly neglected the relevance of pleasurable sensibility in the formation of the moral sense of duty, which can only arise in social intercourse (Durkheim, 2014: 53–54, 2015a: 104). Thus, the modern, laic morality for which he stood could in no way legitimize forms of leadership that could not be validated in the experience of the pleasurable emotions that arise when the majestic and respectable authority of society is positively felt, as he made clear in his effort to highlight the pedagogic functions of the teachers of the laic French public schools (Durkheim, 2015).

On the other hand, if it is inadequate to present Durkheim’s commitment to French laicism as a form of rationalism that strove to emancipate his country, and perhaps the West, from religion and irrationality, then neither can his sociology be understood to project an image of non-Western peoples as irrational or illogical. As is particularly evident in The Forms, in Durkheim’s view, the logical and conceptual activities of human reason, which can only be fully developed in society, are not only inevitably permeable to embodied emotions and affect. Rather, such activities can only prosper insofar as humans engage in the type of “contagious,” emotionally loaded, and effervescent intersubjective communication that defines “religious” rituals, without which society cannot even exist. On the basis of such a transcultural hypothesis, The Forms presents explicit arguments that aim to refute the thesis of an incommensurability between “primitive” and Western, modern thought which, in his text, Durkheim attributes—not without somewhat deforming his original argument—to Lévy-Bruhl (1951); for this controversy, see Merllié, 2012). Far from being the product of innate, anthropologically unvarying psychological conditions that are insensitive to social experiences, or a cultural manifestation found exclusively in the West, logical thought appears to be, in The Forms, a universally present human activity which develops under changing, constraining “social conditions” that are expressed within the context of ritual effervescence, yet in idealized registers, the causes of which are not fully transparent to the social actors themselves (Durkheim, 1991: 410, 414). If the logical thinking of the “primitive” peoples did not match that of the “advanced” Western version, their logic was, from Durkheim’s perspective, nonetheless not illogical. It certainly did not embody the sort of “intrinsic absurdity” that others, such as Frazer, had attributed to it (Durkheim, 1991: 315). The particular social needs and interests that it expressed were simply different (Durkheim, 1991: 414, 616).

Ultimately, Durkheim’s sociological theory of knowledge invites us to approach both the logical consistency of the systems of collective representations to which human societies adhere and their varying, always limited empirical validity as the fallible result of cooperative, affective, and enacted rituals and practices whereby individuals experience and strengthen the moral authority of the group. In this respect, the section entitled “Mimetic rites and the principle of causality” (Durkheim, 1991: 590–619) is particularly revealing. In Durkheim’s appraisal, the imitative rites through which the Australian peoples depicted by Spencer and Gillen recalled and reinstated the plausibility of certain causal connections between events, human actions, and effects were not devoid of reason, contrary to what Frazer, Taylor, and others had claimed. In this respect, Durkheim suggests the identity of the socio-psychic processes that might be considered relevant both in the “primitive” universe on which his analyses focus directly, and in the Western, modern world in which he seems to provocatively place the readers of his book. This paves the way for applying a sociology of human causal reasoning in multiple domains, such as political sociology, the sociology of the environment and risk perception, the sociology of health, the sociology of what is socially defined as “religion,” and the sociology of science. Generalizing Durkheim’s argument, it could be stated that the empirical plausibility attached to the causal connections between the natural events and processes that any human society or group tends to consider meaningful or relevant to its own existence is never independent from the degree of efficacy of the rituals through which the meaning and interpretation of these facts is expressed, recalled, and reinstated, as the natural forces, unlike the social ones, cannot in themselves generate collective beliefs and representations. Such efficacy lies principally in the ability of such rituals to ensure both the reinvigoration of the psychic tonus of the individual participants and the moral energy of the group, which, in turn, serves as a precondition for the (re)affirmation of feelings of belonging and solidarity (Douglas, 2002: 72–90; Durkheim, 1991: 590–619; Friedland, 2005: 245; Rawls, 1996: 442–447). In summary, it seems inadequate and unfair to present Durkheim’s sociology as a Eurocentric intellectual enterprise which delivers a portrait of “primitive” societies as “irrational” or “delusional.” In Durkheim’s view, symbolic systems are, at all times and places, the result of the “pseudo-delirious” projection of collective sentiments and impressions that always express, in their own way, the nature of society (Durkheim, 1991: 398–400).

Conclusions

The postcolonial critique of sociology largely relies on the postpositivist thesis which stresses the positionality of any form of scientific knowledge, its normative dimension, and its necessary articulation of some form of interest. From such a perspective, it would certainly be anachronistic to reproach the classical sociologists for not having left, in compliance with positivist standards, an entire legacy of universally and eternally valid socially unconditioned truths about the social world. All systems of knowledge, scientific or otherwise, are inevitably ethnocentric, and Durkheim’s is certainly no exception. However, if the context in which sociological theories are formulated matters, their pertinence and eventual validity should be evaluated for what in particular they render intelligible and what they ignore or leave obscured. Undoubtedly, it seems fair to acknowledge the fact that Durkheim’s Eurocentric concerns limited his theorization. Indeed, as discussed in this article, his sociological contribution is not exempt from “parochial” assumptions and generalizations. But it would be unfair not to balance this assertion with an appreciation of the value of Durkheim’s legacy for a sociology interested in analyzing, in a non-objectivist and non-subjectivist way, how humans come to feel part of the same group, and how they share common moral standards, beliefs, and representations of both themselves and the world which express, in a particular register, the social conditions of their existence.

When considered in terms of its postcolonial critique, Durkheim’s sociological elaboration and resignification of the Western-born category of religion has both light and shade. If there is no doubt that Durkheim condemned French colonialism and, more broadly, any form of European “aggressive” nationalism with imperialistic aspirations, his sincere commitment to the cult of the human person may have prevented him from approaching the causes and effects of these phenomena using the very frame of analysis that he presumably elaborated, at least to some important extent, in order to facilitate the historical accomplishment of the moral principles that he personally embraced. If he at least considered this option at some point, did he perhaps share the same feelings of disgust that he believed his contemporaries experienced when facing the possibility of submitting their modern, individualistic, and nonetheless fully “religious” creed to the defiling sociological analysis that his own science of morals enabled (Durkheim, 2014: 58) Following Kurasawa’s (2013: 195) argument on the Durkheimian school of sociology’s silent complicity with empire, it is likely that Durkheim’s timidity in this respect, at least to a large extent, can be attributed to a strategy of disciplinary institutionalization. This alternative may not be at all unrealistic, considering both the relative lack of autonomy of his contemporary French academic system with regards to the political field and, additionally, Durkheim’s intense interest in being socio-politcally influential. Another possible cause may lie in the conciliating nature of his own moral dispositions. The truth is that, in his career, Durkheim consistently proved not to be interested in developing a systematic sociology of social conflict. Regardless, if it is evident that Durkheim’s sociological appraisal of French and European colonialism would have benefited from his own science of morals, it is also hardly deniable that the sociological approach to religion that nourished this science and contributed so decisively in shaping it left a legacy of hypotheses and conceptual tools which are of interest for today’s sociology, including the non-postmodern branch of postcolonialism, and should not be disregarded.

In fact—and without minimizing the relevance of the other intellectual sources that played an important role in the formation of his sociological perspective—Durkheim’s legacy would not be what it is had he not followed his own intellectual, ethical, and political inclinations and critically considered the ensemble of contributions on religion in the works of his contemporaries. And, in spite of the evidence that we do not find any critical reflection on the historical genesis and scope of the idea of religion in Durkheim’s sociological work, it is true that his appropriation and original re-elaboration of the intellectual legacy that articulated this modern Western notion was a crucial step in formulating a provocative and “decentering” comparatist sociological perspective. In many ways, this perspective defied the conventional wisdom of the time regarding the nature of modern Western society, politics, and religion as commonly understood. And, significantly (at least for the purposes of this article), it also defies many of the Eurocentric, chauvinistic, and self-indulgent visions of the West and concomitantly diminishing portraits of elsewhere that this wisdom still drives today, in both religionist and secularist registers. In this last respect, Durkheim’s critical appropriation and re-elaboration of the Orientalist and primitivist knowledge of his time did not prevent him from forging a sociology that challenges a stereotypical binary representation of the West as a “rational” universe to be opposed to “irrational” non-Western peoples.

Additionally, it seems correct to posit that totalizing and dismissive postcolonial critiques of the limiting effects that any sociological use of the category of religion would inevitably entail fail to fully admit that what they seek to compensate for was, to a large extent (as Fitzgerald correctly notes), already facilitated by Durkheim’s sociology. Undoubtedly, Durkheim’s historicist legacy might appear to be too exclusionary anyway, especially for those who celebrate a postcolonial, public sociology capable of supporting and perhaps ratifying the ontological standpoints of theocentric sensibilities, mystic groups, or religious fundamentalists (Burawoy, 2005: 264, 266; McLennan, 2010b) who assume the capacity to interpret the agency of supernatural entities and deities. Beyond the impossibility of integrating the mutually excluding truth-claims of an historicist and a fundamentalist, theological-religious worldview within a “pluralistic” discursive register, one might also wonder about the conditions under which sociologists would be capable of confirming the mutually excluding truth-claims of these groups in order to eventually meet such non-Eurocentric standards. In this regard, it is also necessary to acknowledge that the sociological investigation of the socio-psychic and symbolic dynamics involved in the ritual production and reaffirmation of cultural ideals risks inevitably upturning many multiculturalist, religious, but also secularist, essentialist, and representational claims. This is because the sort of “religion beyond religion” (Hiernaux, 2004) that such investigation can explain may or may not be present, both in the field of the more or less appealing socially classified “religions” and in the equally socially popular or unpopular anti-religious, secularist political fields. Durkheim’s pro-laïcité militancy would have not prevented him from noticing the presence of occasional and nominal adherents on both sides of this conflict (Jones, 1999: 32). The provocative potential of Durkheim’s sociology, like its significance, cannot be denied.