“Is the Durkheimian concept of religion entirely different from that of his predecessors? Why and how?” (1989)
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Émile Durkheim defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things … which unite into one single moral community called a Church all those who adhere to them. The definition marks a sharp break in how religion is explained, but it borrows heavily from earlier thinkers. The honest answer is: different in explanation, continuous in several insights.
Where Durkheim broke away
| Predecessor | Their view | Durkheim’s objection |
|---|---|---|
| Edward Burnett Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871) | Animism: belief in spirits, born of dreams and death | Makes religion an intellectual error; an illusion could not have lasted through history |
| Friedrich Max Müller | Naturism: awe before nature’s forces, a “disease of language” | Regular, familiar nature cannot yield the sacred; again an illusion |
| James George Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890) | Magic precedes religion and gives way to it, and then to science | Magic and religion differ in kind: magic has clients, not a Church |
| Definitions by the supernatural or by gods | Religion is belief in mystery or deities | Buddhism has no god; the “supernatural” presupposes a modern idea of natural order |
Why the break? Durkheim’s methodological rule was to explain a social fact by other social facts. His predecessors started from the individual mind: fear, dreams, a faulty inference. Durkheim started from the group. Studying Australian totemism (Arunta), he argued that the totem symbolises the clan, so in worshipping god, people worship society. Religion is therefore true, expressing a real force, with lasting functions of cohesion and revitalisation.
Where he built on them
- William Robertson Smith (Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 1889) had already treated early religion as communal, read sacrifice as a communal meal and stressed ritual over creed. Durkheim credited Smith with reshaping his thinking around 1895.
- Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Durkheim’s teacher (The Ancient City, 1864), showed that religion was bound up with family, property and city institutions. Durkheim kept the tie but reversed the causal arrow: society explains religion.
- Auguste Comte’s “religion of humanity” anticipated Durkheim’s cult of the individual and his belief that secular societies would need new sacred ideals. Durkheim added that such faiths grow from collective life and cannot be invented by a philosopher.
- Ludwig Feuerbach saw God as humanity’s projected essence. Durkheim’s god as society transfigured has the same projection logic, but substitutes the concrete group for the human species.
Indian illustration
M. N. Srinivas (Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India, 1952) applied this group-centred analysis, showing how ritual expressed Coorg social structure. The Maha Kumbh 2025 at Prayagraj, with government-estimated cumulative attendance of over 66 crore, shows the “collective effervescence” Durkheim located in mass assemblies.
Critics such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard noted that the Australian data were thin and that totemism was not religion’s “elementary” form.
Conclusion
Durkheim’s concept was not entirely new. Its communal emphasis came from Robertson Smith, its institutional link from Fustel, its secular hope from Comte. Its originality lay in making religion a social fact: explained sociologically, treated as real rather than mistaken, and linked to solidarity and knowledge.