This research compares and contrasts the approaches that Durkheim and Weber, who were exact contemporaries, have to analyzing religion as a phenomenon of social organization. The research will set forth the intellectual context in which these sociologists functioned and discuss how each of them discussed the way religion functions in societies.
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 collective whole as a division of labor, which he likens to the specialization of the body's organs, the body itself being likened to society as a whole. Specialization inures to the beneficial function of the body as a whole organism--hence Durkheim's use of the term organic solidarity to refer to a society in which the division of labor contributes to organized social function (84-5). Mechanical solidarity, the other side of the same collective-type coin, refers...