Religious Sociology Rethinking Durkheim ' s Intellectual Development

In the first part of this paper I established Durkheim’s intense dissatisfaction with the materialism of his earlier work. I demonstrated also how the series of critical reviews of this work embarrassed Durkheim and crystallized his desire to revise his theory. Finally, I showed how a much more subjectivist theory emerged in the 18931896 period. In this second part, I argue that these developments were themselves transitional. Beginning in the published work of 1896, there emerges a much more subjectivist theory still Durkheim calls this his ’religious sociology’ With it, he felt, he could finally present the alternative to matenalism he had always sought, and through it he argued with his critics that he had never been ’materialist’ at all! The ’spiritual programme of Durkheim’s later writings’ has never been appreciated. In the last twenty years of life he sought to rethink and rewrite every aspect of his theory of society. Properly understood, this theory, though badly one-sided, offers a precious legacy to contemporary studies of cultural life. In my conclusion to Part I of this essay, I argued that by the middle of the 1890s Durkheim found himself in a real quandary. From the dramatic shifts which immediately postdated The Division of Labour in 1903, from responses to reviews of this and other early work, and from more personal documents as well, it seems clear that Durkheim realised, consciously or not, that the theory which had informed so much of Division was a drastic mistake But his positivist faith that scientific objectivity must reveal the very consistency of social life, his intellectual pride in the integrity of his theorising, and perhaps also his lack of critical self-consciousness all of these factors prevented Durkheim from acknowledging in the mid-1890s that he was, in fact, embarked upon a drastic theoretical revision. To his understandable but, nonetheless, illegitimate indignation, no one seemed aware of this fateful turn neither his antagonistic critics nor his faithful students If his new path were to be recogmsed if his divergence from the theory of Marxian socialism were ever to be recognised for what it was his innovation would have to be asserted in a more emphatic and radical