Durkhein and Weber on Religion

Durkheim (in France) and Weber (in Germany) did their principal writing in the event-packed late 19th and early 20th centuries. Durkheim died in 1917, a sometimes controversial scholar and bereaved father who had lost a son in the Great War. Weber died in 1920, with a vanquished Germany embarking on the ill-starred Weimer Republic whose constitution he helped write.

How Durkheim analyzes the function of religion in society is linked with how he explains social organization itself. He views society as the sum total of various forces interacting within it, an entity that has a life of its own, independent of subsidiary elements existing within it. Thus individual social actors are nothing so much as "features of the collective type" (329), taking personality as it were from the attributes of the social environment. Thus for Durkheim society comprises a "collective consciousness" (84) that supersedes the individual consciousness of particular groups within the whole. That consciousness informs and in part determines the development of individuals within it. However, Durkheim also refers to specialization and individuation within the col

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ed they are configured as social "formula" rather than expressions of social solidarity. Only in what are called primitive societies, which have an especially intense mechanical solidarity, is "social life [] made up almost entirely of common beliefs . . . that draw from their unanimous acceptance a very special kind of intensity" (130). In societies of "higher organization," where the individual is not subsumed by the whole, the religious "organ," as he says, "becomes atrophied because the [socially normative, socially subsumptive] function is no longer exercised" (121). Indeed, Durkheim sees the emergence of the individual as the object of veneration as the heir of communal religious consciousness per se. His analysis of this point is both complex and decisive. First he makes the point that society has adopted as a common value the value of the individual, who holds a place in common consciousness that religion once held. This is the "worship of the dignity of the human person" (122). That worship can be described as a commonly held belief, but by Durkheim's logic such consciousness is not specifically social in character: "Thus it does not constitute a truly social link" (122). Rather the emphasis is on individuality, not on c
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1803
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)