A Century of Dialogue around Durkheim as a Founding Father of the Social Sciences

In 2012 social scientists, philosophers and religious scientists celebrated the centennial of the publication of one of the most seminal books in the modern study of religion, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse , by the then leading French sociologist Emile Durkheim’s (1858–1917); in 2017, we commemorated that author’s untimely death at age 59, broken by World War I in which he lost his only son and many of his beloved students. Educated, first as a Rabinnical student then as a modern philosopher, Durkheim earned his place among French thinkers primarily as a “founding father” of the social sciences. Having recently (on the basis of a life-long preoccupation) devoted a book-length study to Durkheim’s religion theory, I intend in this essay to highlight major aspects of Durkheim as an exponent of French thought. I shall first briefly situ-ate Durkheim in his time and age, with special emphasis on his political views and his ethnic identity as a secularised Jew. Then I turn to Durkheim’s relation with the discipline in which he was originally trained, philosophy. I shall pay attention to the complex relationship between Durkheim and Kant and further highlight his dualism, epistemology, and views on primitive classification, as well as his puzzling realism, the place of emergence in his thought, and his moralist tendencies. I shall finally articulate Durkheim’s transition to sociology and how he gave over the torch of emerging sociology to his main students, having thus created an adequate context in which to discuss Durkheim’s final masterpiece ( Les formes ) and the still dominant theory of religion it expounds.

from practice;7 although in Durkheim's case that would have been, not for the sake of inequalities based on skin pigmentation (that would have been beyond expectations), nor inequalities based on class, but those based on ethnic and religious affiliation -Jewry, in other words. Boldly chiding main-stream sociology as "glib formulas about the 'social construction' of 'collective identities'" and alleging that Durkheim's own insights have nowadays been bowdlerised, Fields sweepingly signals that "we lose sight of the living subjects and active verbs by which Durkheim arrived at the hard-won discoveries of Forms."8 This is a most laudable picture, well-intended and idealised, but also one we could expect from a sociologist who, after mainly-documentary research on Zambian religious movements in the 1970s, subsequently seems to have withdrawn into the tower of high social theory. The truth of Les formes, if any, was surely not learned by Durkheim from his (never too extensive) participation in the Dreyfus affair, but through prolonged fieldwork among the povertystricken, displaced and utterly rejected Australian Aboriginals, with the proverbial sweat, blood and tears that attend all good fieldwork -that which truly makes fieldwork a practice that produces truth. The amazingly nonracialist choice in favour of the Australian Blacks as Durkheim's showpiece of humanity and its religions was lofty and appeals to us Africans and African Americans, but methodologically such "ethnography by proxy" was not in the least a sufficient condition for the production of any truth whatsoever. Did Durkheim truly believe (as many subsequent commentators accused him of) to have captured, with the Australian Aboriginals, the most primitive form of religion? He was well aware that the Australians had millennia of cultural history behind them, "comme tous les peuples connus." 9 Durkheim believed that studying what he thought was a relatively simple form of religion, would bring out the essence of the topic most clearlyalthough his reasons for classifying religions into simpler and more complex varieties remain unspecified, and no doubt are indebted to the evolutionism en vogue in his time. Surely, studies of Australian systems of social and natural classification have revealed the extreme complexities of that continent's cultures,10 which, compared with those of Ancient Greece, Ancient China, modern folk culture in Western Europe, or some African systems of thought, appear to be wonders of simplicity and transparency … And let us not think that, even without fieldwork of his own, Durkheim stumbled ignorantly into the Australian Aboriginal world, or lazily warped the ethnographic data to fit his theories. One and a half decades of library studies and preliminary albeit published reviews and synthetic instalments on vital aspects of social organisation (e.g. clan system, incest) went into the preparation of his final book during which he devoured any scrap of relevant ethnographic information available to him in whatever international language.

Durkheim's Political Views
Durkheim had a keen eye for the political developments in his native country, France, at the time. During his lifetime (1858-1917) that country went through a period of restored monarchy under Napoleon III, was defeated in the war with Prussia (1870), knew internal turmoil (the Commune de Paris) which ended in the Third Republic, and after a period of relative prosperity, bliss and colonial expansion in Africa and Asia, was drawn into World War I (1914)(1915)(1916)(1917)(1918). The question of socio-political stability loomed large in Durkheim's theoretical concerns. Here he expected far more from consensual symbolic/moral integration of a nation than from forceful, possibly violent, contestation along the line of Marxism, then emerging as a major theoretical and social force throughout Europe. Durkheim is often mentioned in connection with the conservative French philosophers Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, who preceded him by a century.11 They certainly helped to construct a framework within which Durkheim's thought about society and the state could take fruition, but they lacked the social and religious emphasis through which Durkheim's work gave a unique impetus to the development of the social sciences.
With decolonisation, globalisation, the transition to post-capitalism, the rise and fall of the welfare state, the outlines of North Atlantic society today differ greatly from those in Durkheim's time, but his political views continue   Durkheim has been devoted to a section dealing with such political implications under the heading "Solidarity, difference, and morality."13 Recently, James Dingley has even explored the present-day applicability of Durkheim's analyses in the field of political sociology to modern Ireland.14 The history of France in Medieval and Early Modern times was largely the history of the interaction between a secular dynastic state and aristocratic class on the one hand, and on the other hand the Christian Church and its hierarchy, (or rather, since the Reformation in Early Modern times, the Roman Catholic Church as well as Protestant denominations). As late as the seventeenth century the centralisation of the French state was to a considerable extent the work of a high-ranking Roman Catholic official, the Cardinal de Richelieu. However, during the Enlightenent agnostic, even atheist thought gained terrain, the Jesuits -for centuries procurers of the best formal education -were expelled from France in 1764, and the Revolution (1789-1795) proclaimed a secular socio-political order. These developments resulted in the fact that in 1871, and especially with the 1905 Law of the Separation of the Churches and the State, France would write la laï cité (i.e. "the absence of religion from public life") into its very constitution. Considering the ideological and constitutional-legal significance of the notion of laïcité in modern France (recently reinforced by the conflicts on the visibility of Islam in the public sphere), it stands to reason that Durkheim's more recent commentators in particular dwell repeatedly and at length on this topic.15 In Durkheim's time, French society went through a phase when anticlericalism was politically correct, and the constitutional separation of church and state (i.e. laï cité) was self-evident, as were secular schools. On these points Durkheim was simply a child of his time and age. He championed them, and the only thing that needs surprise us is that his statements on the incomparable social merits and truthful reality of religion could attain a pathos only to be expected from a true believer. But was he?

Durkheim as a Jew
Against the background of France's insistence on laïcité, Durkheim occupied a somewhat precarious position as an originally Jewish leading academician (hailing from a Rabbinical family and himself a former Rabbinical student), and as author of a theory radically relegating all religious belief to a societal basis. Therefore the question as to the impact of Judaism on Durkheim's theoretical outlook deserves close attention. 16 After Jews had often been the objects of contempt, exclusion, exploitation, and persecution ever since the Middle Ages, Durkheim wrote at a time of Jewish gradual emancipation in Western Europe including France, despite the notorious Dreyfus affair (1894-1906); Durkheim was among the petitioners clamouring in 1898 for retrial of the evidently innocently convicted Jewish Alsatian Captain Dreyfus. However, scarcely two decades after Durkheim's death in 1917, mounting antisemitism resulted in the Holocaust extermination of European Jewry under Hitler's Third Reich, an unprecedented slaughter of 6,000,000 people within a few years. In the course of the twentieth century the USA, with the largest Jewish population in the world as a result of its late nineteenth century immigration, became the global centre of academic sociological production as well as the liberator (together with the armies of the USSR) of the Nazi concentration camps with their predominantly Jewish prisoners. Any discussion of Durkheim's Jewish antecedents is necessarily to be informed by awareness of Nazi-perpetrated crimes. By the 1970s, the consolidation of the state of Israel upon time-honoured Palestinian lands, two international oil crises, and the Iranian revolution in the name of fundamentalist Islam, tilted the scales again and brought new global pretexts for antisemitism and violence. As a matter of fact, antisemitism is at present dramatically rising again in Europe, causing hundreds of French, German and Dutch intellectuals to petition their government for protective action. But on the other hand, the celebration of the seventeenth anniversary of the state of Israel in 2018 coincided with the killing of more than sixty Palestinian demonstrators, and in more recent years 16 Substantial aspects of this problematic are addressed in Ivan Strenski's book on Durkheim  violence against Palestinians has perpetuated with massive bombing (albeit in the context of mutual exchange) and exclusion from Covid-19 vaccination. Let us safely return to Durkheim's work. What could be so typically Jewish about his conception of the "sacred," which is at the heart of Les formes? The ancient Hebrew root ‫קדש‬ (qdš: sacred) is attributed to Canaanitic, another Semitic language, with the semantics "to separate, to set apart." It is very isolated and does not ascend etymologically to the phylum (Semitic) or macrophylum (Afroasiatic) level, let alone to Borean -the oldest reconstructible language form, considered to have been spoken in Central to East Asia in the Upper Palaeolithic, c. twenty-five thousand years BP. In Norbert Wokart's words: The word "logocentric" is used by post-structuralist philosophers, especially Jacques Derrida, to denote the text-centredness associated with the emergence, around 5 thousand years BP, and the subsequent installation at the heart of society of the package of writing, the state, organised religion and proto-science.
this essay can offer, the Jewish roots of Durkheim's sacred are now sufficiently identified. In the background we perceive another absolute distinction peculiar to Judaism: the opposition between "clean, permitted" (notably food), and its opposite. However, we must not jump to conclusions on the basis of this short and superficial exploration. In his impressive study of Germanic cultural and political history through the medium of language history, the British philologist D.H. Green claims that a "permitted/prohibited" division similar to the one in Hebrew (as belonging to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic linguistic macrophylum) may be detected at the root of the lexicon of "sacrifice in Germanic (as belonging to the Indoeuropean branch of the Eurasiatic linguistic macrophylum),"19 even though the linguistic -and, considering recent history, emotional -affiliation of the two cases could scarcely be further apart. Also, the great Christian theologian Nathan Söderblom, in his lemma on "holiness: general and primitive" in James Hastings's authoritative Encyclopaedia of Religion andEthics (1909-1921), implicitly maintains that the Israelite conception is rather continuous with much more ethnographic data worldwide. This opens the possibility that, even though undeniably Jewish on the surface, Durkheim's approach may yet not be totally determined by the Jewish/ Israelite heritage alone and may after all contain something of the "elementary forms of religious life." However, scholar's renderings of a religious tradition different from their own cannot be taken at face value, and an alternative reading of the same situation would be that Green's and Söderblom's scholarly interpretations were unintentionally "contaminated" by Durkheim's (whom Söderblom cites) so that the suggestion of a peculiar Jewish/Israelite perspective may stand. In Durkheim's religion theory, a major role is further played by the concept of effervescence: an altered state of consciousness, where individuality is supposed to have given way to great collective excitement over the blessings that society allegedly bestows upon us. Even though Durkheim was fortunate never to have experienced a pogrom, such antisemitic mass slaughters were already going on in Eastern Europe during his lifetime and had triggered a westbound mass migration of Azkenazy Jews. And as a contemporary of Gabriel Tarde and Gustave Le Bon, he might have realised even a few decades before Nazism and World War II and half a century before René Girard, that this kind of "gesundes Volksempfinden" is also what one risks taking on board when putting one's faith in effervescence.20 In Durkheim's time already, every intellectual had access 19 D.H. Green, Language and History in the Germanic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 20 German: "healthy popular pastime/experience" -the Nazi expression for patriotic collective activities propagating Adolph Hitler's Third Reich.
to knowledge about the persecution of Jews in Medieval Western Europe, as well as the Inquisition and the Christian autos-da-fe in the New World when not only Jews but also Muslims and any non-Christians were the victims, while such staged events also emulated an astonishing level of religious mass murder in the form of human sacrifice that, as a matter of fact, had equally been endemic among Aztecs, Incas, and their regional neighbours before the arrival of the Europeans. All these were blatant acts of violence perpetrated in the name of religion. In this light we may ask the following question: Was Durkheim's surprising, dogged belief in the moral powers of religion to bring out the best in humankind perhaps primarily the expression of a Jew's desperate hope that history would not repeat itself? Or, even beyond the anxiety over collective survival which has been part of the shared history of Jewry, are we here dealing with an implicit but constant trait of Jewish diasporic culture across two millennia -an irrational optimism also found in otherwise very different Jewish thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Jacques Derrida, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas,21 to the effect that the human condition is fundamentally not totally hopeless, that all is well as long as existential awareness of the Name is not lost? Fortunately, other commentators have displayed greater subtlety than Miles E. Simpson and George H. Conklin (and probably myself) in their approach to Durkheim against the background of Judaism.22 Adam B. Seligman, in his otherwise extremely enthusiastic review of Donald A. Nielsen's study of Durkheim, sounds the following well-taken note of caution as regards interpreting the French philosopher's work from a Jewish angle: Nielsen makes certain broad claims to the diverse influences on Durkheim, from Aristotle and Bacon to Spinoza and Renouvier. He also attempts to tie his understanding of society and of the individual to Durkheim's Jewish heritage, and he situates Durkheim within a line of Jewish thinkers ranging from Philo of Alexandria through Maimonides to Spinoza. This lessthan-successful tack leaves the reader unconvinced. Philo, Maimonides, and Spinoza were highly complex thinkers and their relation to the Jewish tradition could not have been more diverse. While it is no doubt true that one senses a deep Jewish resonance in Durkheim's writings, especially in his conceptions of the self and its relation to community (as in his idea of the sacred), much more serious work needs to be done in this direction than the casual and unsubstantiated remarks Nielsen throws out.23 An even bolder attempt to fathom the alleged unconscious depth of Durkheim's Jewishness is made by Philip Wexler when he seeks to interpret something as aetherial as the possible significance of the lack of mention of a Jewish Messianic tradition24 -an omission of which both Durkheim and Freud are found guilty. Both were, of course, secular Jews with an almost unrivalled impact on the intellectual life of the twentieth century; Wexler, however, believes he can make out in Durkheim an undercurrent of Ḫasidic thought.
Far-fetched though this may seem in a renegade Jew exploding transcendent religion into a societal device, Wexler may yet have a point. Is Durkheim's effervescence, even though mediated through layers of logocentricity and secularisation, perhaps ultimately a generalised expression for the well-known joyful rapture marking the ritual interaction between the Ḫasidic leader and his followers? With the above-mentioned concept of logocentricity we have already hit upon what is perhaps the most important aspect of Durkheim's Jewish identity. He came from a tradition where textuality/textual study (lernen, according to the Yiddish expression) had for two millennia constituted the principal means of Jewish ethnic diasporic survival, and where textual contemplation in itself is considered to have socially elevating and spiritually redeeming qualities. Against such a background, it comes as no surprise that even a brilliant social analyst such as Durkheim could lose sight of the overwhelmingly nontextual aspects of social and religious life and genuinely believe that he may capture the essence of people on the other side of the globe without sharing their lives and without knowing their language of living their culture, in other words without engaging in prolonged professional fieldwork and by merely working on the basis of an (ethnographic) text. 23 Adam Wexler, "A Secular Alchemy of Social Science," Theoria, 1-21.

Introduction
Until fairly recently (i.e. early modern times, as far as the increasingly globalised, intellectual tradition of the northern hemisphere is concerned), most of the branches of science and scholarship now distinguished in academia resorted to the heading of philosophy. Sociology and the other social sciences also went through an incubation time of a few centuries at least, when their subject matter was classified as philosophy -in fact, one of the first sociologists, Ibn Ḫaldun, writing in Tunis in the fourteenth century CE, was primarily a historian whereas the first truly modern philosopher, Immanuel Kant, taught anthropology and most of the natural sciences as a matter of course. At least two of the founding fathers of sociology, Durkheim and Marx, started out as philosophers. Durkheim's fascination for the essence of society and religion was in the first place an (empirically grounded) philosophical fascination. In this light Durkheim's explorations in the fields of epistemology and pre-modern ("primitive") forms of classification straddled the time-honoured stately garden of philosophy and the small cabbage-patch that was only beginning to be cleared for the social sciences. Probably Durkheim's greatest achievement was to articulate the social as an ontological level not to be entirely reduced to individual consciousness and motivation, and to be approached by a methodology, a conceptual apparatus and a theory of its own.25 Besides, Nielsen's Three Faces of God offers a refreshingly original perspective on Durkheim, stressing the latter's Jewish roots,26 presenting Durkheim not so much as a scientific sociologist but as a philosophical monist whose thought comes strikingly close to that of another renegade Jew, Spinoza, already previously mentioned.

3.2
Durkheim and Kant As a product of the French educational system Durkheim's "default" frame of reference in philosophy would be in the first place Descartes's radical 25 Michael rationalism.27 Yet, due to Durkheim's few years of academic studies in Germany and also to the influence of his contemporary, the neo-Kantian Charles Renouvier) Kant was the greatest philosophical influence on Durkheim.
In terms of their significance in the history of ideas, there is a striking similarity between Kant and Durkheim to be considered. In a way, Durkheim did for the social sciences what a century earlier Kant did for modern philosophy: establish the fundamental points of departure, on which there is no longer any going back -for Kant the critical realisation that all knowledge is essentially representation and therefore distortive and partial; for Durkheim the realisation that the social represents a level of existence in its own right, not to be reduced to the individual. The two positions are similar, which allows Alfred Gell to embrace in one argument both Durkheim and what he considers neo-Kantian classic American anthropology of the mid-twentieth century.28 However, in another respect the two positions are fundamentally different, as we shall shortly see, and it is anachronistic to present them as equal and interchangeable, especially since Kant, implicitly and indirectly yet demonstrably, exercised a considerable influence on Durkheim. What is more, Paul K. Hirst brought to light major epistemological shortcomings in Durkheim when tracing the latter's links back to Kant.29 The Kantian connection may also be looked at from a different angle. Robert F. Campany30 follows Terry F. Godlove in a Kantian framework-model perspective on Durkheim (albeit through what is claimed to be a misreading) and further on to the recent philosopher Donald Davidson. But when Godlove thus stresses the extent to which religion offers a framework to interpret the world,31 we should be heedful of Durkheim's admonition: La religion, en effet, n'est pas seulement un système d'idées, c'est avant tout un système de forces. L'homme qui vit religieusement, n'est pas seulement un homme qui se représente le monde de telle ou telle manière, 27 Durkheim wrote an introduction to Octave Hamelin, She elucidates Durkheim's dualism as both "Anti-Kant and Anti-Rationalist" and dwells on Durkheim's notions of the "double man" and of "two layers of knowledge."37 There is a considerable risk of misunderstanding on this point. Dualism may refer to any conceptualisation revolving on a fundamental distinction,38 from the relation between Lower and Upper Egypt, to body-mind dualism (Plato, St Augustine, Descartes), the Zoroastrian and Manichaean cosmology in which good and evil are considered to be complementary, or to a political system that is de facto composed of two major political parties, like for decades in the USA and the UK, etc. Anyway, the meaning that applies here is clearly defined: Durkheim felt so strongly about the centrality of his position on dualism to the argument of The Elementary Forms as a whole, and was so disappointed that the argument was misunderstood, that, in response to criticism of that book, he wrote an article devoted entirely to an explanation of his position on dualism. The article, "The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions" was published in 1914, in the Italian scholarly journal Scientia two years after the publication of Les formes. In the Scientia article Durkheim argued that there are two aspects of each human being: a pre-rational animal being and a rational social, or human, being. These two aspects of the person conflict with one another, producing the internal tension that philosophers across the ages have referred to as dualism.39 The Scientia article was recently separately reprinted.40 Incidentally, Durkheim's central association of evil with the individual, and of good with society could well serve as an illustration of the Jewish undercurrent in Durkheim's thought: e.g. Maimonides in the Guide for the Perplexed expounds the same view.41 Are we justified to draw up the equation that for Durkheim social: sacred = individual: profane…?
Taking the reader by the hand, Rawls shows rather convincingly that Les formes is, indeed, not in the first place a study of primitive religion or of the sociology of knowledge, but a highly original epistemology and ontology disguised as ethnography waiting to be decoded by readers who (like herself) are both philosophically and sociologically specialised. Thus, she explains (Rawls 2004: 2n) how Durkheim's treatment of categories -which in the light of both Aristotle and Kant is surprisingly selective and notably leaves out classification as an a priori category in its own right -can only be understood and appreciated by the trained philosopher. It is the perennial bane of the social sciences: once having hived off from their intellectual and institutional original basis (i.e. philosophy and the humanities in general) around 1900 CE, social scientists (and particularly anthropologists) have insisted on "going it alone" and have haphazardly (and usually implicitly) applied their gaudy and fragmentary package of naïve common sense to immense problems of individual and social human existence -hilariously unheedful of the work of many centuries done on these crucial topics by philosophers.42 Even more amusingly, virtually all of Rawls' innovative finds and claims are dismissed by another Durkheim scholar of uncontested stature, Warren Schmaus.43 (Unfortunately, the scope of this essay will not allow me to seek to formulate a Judgment of Paris or Judgement of Solomon between these two positions). Nor is Rawls vs Schmaus the only exchange devoted to categories in Durkheim. Nielsen, who explicitly addresses Durkheim in the first place as a philosopher rather than as a theoretical sociologist, writes insightfully on Durkheim's category of totality as an overarching concept in which God, society and religion all seem to come together in the individual experience.

Durkheim's Sociology of Knowledge
In an impressive study, Hirst examined in detail the epistemology underlying Durkheim's Les règles de la méthode sociologique and pronounced it to be simply impossible,44 for it was implicitly based on the Kantian division between natural sciences and cultural sciences and yet seeking a science of man predicated on the non-subjectivist natural-science model that is nonetheless to be non-positivist.45 A few years before the publication of Les formes, Durkheim 42 Wim In a thoughtful overview David Bloor concedes the value of the aforementioned perspective,52 but also reminds us of Charles Elmer Gehlke's and William Ray Dennes's criticisms that Durkheim's approach within the context of a Kantian conception of mind (i.e., as "the subject's system of cognitive faculties") is on this point "ambiguous, even nonsensical."53 The same topic comes back, albeit succinctly, in Jeffrey C. Alexander's consideration of social logic in the light of Marx and Durkheim;54 in Susan Stedman Jones's reconsideration of categories in Les forms,55 and in Tony Edward's contribution to the volume on Durkheim's theory of religion edited by T.A. Idinopoulos and B.C. Wilson. 56 Rawls has not been the only one to claim that Durkheim's theory of the social background of thought was in fact, his principal and lasting contribution to sociology and philosophy.57 Dominick LaCapra also devotes important pages to Durkheim's epistemology, which he considers "a corollary of his social metaphysic."58 Moreover, it is his approach to rules, classifications and causes that made Durkheim one of the great inspirers of a movement prominent among sociologists in the late twentieth century and subsequently subsided, that is, ethnomethodology.59

On Primitive Classification
Tracing in detail the Kantian and neo-Kantian echoes in Durkheim would be rewarding and revealing, but it would require a specialist philosophical study in its own right. However, let me mention one point that has fascinated me ever since my first encounter with Durkheim's work, in 1965. For Durkheim (and Marcel Mauss with whom he pioneered this breakthrough notion),60 the fundamental categories of our thought, i.e., time, place, causation, number, logical operations (among others) are not innate in the human individual but are a product of social life -they emerge from the structuring of reality that is brought about by "the elementary forms of the religious life." For an intellectual whose founding of the sociological discipline did not leave him the time to make, at the same time, major contributions to historiography (contrary to Max Weber),61 this position on humankind's fundamental categories is absolutely seminal -even though it admittedly echoed and rephrased earlier similar pronouncements made by Marx. If our fundamental categories derive from society, then, instead of being innate, universal and immutable, they may vary from place to place, from period to period and from culture to culture. They are inevitably subject to a cultural history whose outlines and remotest periods we may not be able to capture, but whose implications we can at least attempt to think through.
The anonymous reviewer "B." of Rodney Needham's 1963 English edition of Durkheim and Mauss' Primitive Classification for The Journal of the American Oriental Society and using Needham's own words, calls our attention to a remarkable oversight: … it is an odd and perturbing fact that [Durkheim and Mauss' work on primitive classification] is virtually unknown to the majority of professional anthropologists … and even the distinguished gathering of linguists, anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers who met in 1953 to discuss Whorf's hypotheses62 about the relationship of linguistic 60 Durkheim and Mauss, « De quelques formes primitives de classification », 1. 61 Although history was very much implied in Durkheim's approach to society, as historical sociologist Robert N. Bellah asserts; see Bellah, " Durkheim  Archaeology, historical linguistics and molecular genetics are the three sciences that, in the course of the last few decades, have made tremendous progress in reconstructing humankind's remotest past with ever greater confidence and methodological credibility, and of late they have been joined by comparative mythology. 64 We may postulate that the emergence of anatomically modern humans (AMH) in Africa some two hundred thousand years ago or their subsequent spread to other continents, from circa eighty thousand years ago, already concerns a form of humanity in the full -albeit perhaps still implied and unfolding -possession of such fundamental categories akin to the ones that characterise and sustain our human existences today. The existence of hundreds of quasi-universals of culture suggests that the out-of-Africa exodus of AMH spread across the globe an initial cultural package that had been incubated on the African continent for more than one hundred thousand year,65 This is a social and implicitly historical answer to the question of origin and growth inevitably raised by Kant's revolutionary position, when he claimed that these same fundamental categories were not in themselves knowledge and the fruits of knowledge formation, but categories a priori, for which he therefore claimed the irreducible and often misunderstood status of being "transcendental."66 It is here where Kant and Durkheim converge, and where the latter begins to quicken Kant's essentially static, eternal and origin-less transcendental categories with the pulse of the earliest social life and of remotest history -with in other words "the elementary forms of the religious life." In a way, after Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in philosophy, 67 Durkheim's insistence on the social nature of the transcendental categories went one further step that is comparable, in importance, to the theory of relativity.68 Little wonder that Rawls here pins down Durkheim's greatest intellectual contribution.

Durkheim's Puzzling Realism in His Approach to Religion Karen Fields not only produced an excellent new translation of Les formes to
replace Swain's of 1915;69 she also enriched the international Durkheim literature with a series of penetrating studies on the topic. Significantly, she opened the long introduction to her translation with a reminder to the effect that for Durkheim, religion is not an illusion, but is founded upon and expresses "the real" -notably, the reality that in religion, society becomes conscious of itself and becomes the object of religious veneration.70 Réalisme in the Durkheimian context does not have the usual, non-specialist meaning "the resignated common-sense attitude of accepting things as they are," but specifically indicates the epistemological position according to which we truly have the capability of knowing reality as it really is -either as projections of concrete models out there (Plato), or as the concrete embodiment of such models (Aristotle). Since Kant, Western philosophy has largely abandoned these complementary conceptions of reality for one of radical idealism and according to which we can only know the images of things we have formed in our mind. Again, we must expose Durkheim as ultimately un-Kantian. In the words of my Rotterdam colleague Henk Oosterling, since Kant we have been "moved by appearances."71 However, it may be more correct and do greater justice to both the fact and the incredible powers of religion to incorporate the Kantian position as only one limiting condition and in a more comprehensive ontology according to which we continuously oscillate -albeit in ways we hardly understand and cannot yet control but which is yet the essence of being in this world -between (a) mere appearances with all the implied ignorance (Kant), and (b) true reality with all the implied true and essential knowledge with all the power that entails. In such an ontology, the Aristotelian logical mainstay of classic scientific thought (i.e., "where is P, there is not not-P") would again be relegated to a boundary condition, and religion would occasionally appear as a social/symbolic technology to tap the unlimited resources of the universe.
interprétation sociologiquement incohérente du Moyen-Age, pour leur intérêt excessif porté au goût, à l'élégance et au style, pour leur adoption des valeurs païennes, à l'origine de la corruption du sens du devoir hérité du christianisme, enfin, pour leur « mentalité mathématique » qui aboutit à un goût trop simplificateur pour les généralisations et l'abstraction. En fait, les mérites que Durkheim reconnaît au réalisme pédagogique de Comenius, Leibniz, W[u]ndt et, de façon plus générale, au protestantisme allemand, opposé au « formalisme » du Moyen-Age et de la Renaissance, constituent le contexte à partir duquel il énonça sa célèbre injonction: considérer les faits sociaux comme des choses. C'est de partir de là aussi qu'il en appela à un « nouveau rationalisme », plus inductif, complexe, historique, et par-dessus tout plus attentif à l'importance première des choses que ne l'était le rationalisme dépassé d'un Descartes.'72 One can understand and corroborate Jones's nutshell summary of European intellectual history but, frankly, contrary to his initial assertion and brainwashed as I have been for half a century by the emic/etic distinction that dominates modern anthropology,73 I fail to see how this compels us "to consider social facts as things" -an imperative already stated in Les règles.74 This, in fact, is what Harold Garfinkel,75 the founder of the sociological movement known as "ethnomethodology," considers to be "Durkheim's aphorism" -upon which, as Garfinkel asserts, the entire programme of ethnomethodology is based. As we have already seen, it is a position that was endorsed by one of the brightest minds in current Durkheim studies, the philosopher/sociologist Anne Warfield Rawls, who edited and introduced Garfinkel's ethnomethodological Program and, throughout several publications,76 maintained that it is not Durkheim's theory of religion or society but his thesis of the social produc neo-Kantians Renouvier and Octave Hamelin and,77 moreover, asserts the complementarity rather than mutual exclusiveness of Kant and Durkheim. But other authors have been dismissive of Durkheim's epistemology from the beginning, and this may explain how Rawls could perceive a general lack of appreciation of Durkheim's merits on this point. When insightfully discussing Durkheim's implicit emergentism,78 Keith R. Sawyer takes the opportunity of pointing out how precisely the above "aphorism" has earned Durkheim the most severe criticism from the part of modern sociologists such as Anthony Giddens, Steven Lukes and Jeffrey C. Alexander.79 Already much earlier Alexander A. Goldenweiser, a vocal American anthropological author on totemism at the time of the publication of Les formes, phrased his misgivings in the following terms: The author's attempt to derive all mental categories from specific phases of social life which have become conceptualized, is so obviously artificial and one-sided that one finds it hard to take his view seriously, but the selfconsistency of the argument and, in part, its brilliancy compel one to do so. In criticism we must repeat …: in so far as Durkheim's socially determined categories presuppose a complex and definite social system, his explanatory attempts will fail, wherever such a system is not available. The Eskimo, for example, have no clans nor phratries nor a totemic cosmogony (for they have no totems); [ 80 ] how then did their mental categories originate, or is the concept of classification foreign to the Eskimo mind? Obviously, there must be other sources in experience or the psychological constitution of man which may engender mental categories; and, if that is so, we may no longer derive such categories from the social setting, even when the necessary complexity and definiteness are at hand. In this connection it is well to remember that the origin of mental categories is an eternally recurring event; categories come into being within the mental world of every single individual. We may thus observe that the categories of space, time, force, causality, arise in the mind of For empirical evidence to the contrary, see van Binsbergen, Confronting the Sacred, 64n f. the child far ahead of any possible influence from their adult surroundings by way of conscious or even deliberate suggestion. To be sure, these categories are, in the mind of the child, not strictly conceptualized nor even fully within the light of consciousness, but their presence is only too apparent: the individual experience of the child rapidly supplements the congenital predisposition of the mind.81 Goldenweiser here takes an advance on the future outcome of one of the most complex research programmes in developmental psychology. Half a century later, and clearly with Kant's list of a priori categories in mind, Jean Piaget gained world fame with a long series of studies on this point. Their innateness (as suggested by Goldenweiser) is again a moot point -championed by great minds such as Noam Chomsky or Carl Gustav Jung, but also contested by many anthropologists who prefer to restrict the acquisition of culture to a sensorily-supported social communication process. Even so, it looks as if Goldenweiser, when stressing such learning processes in the child, is missing Durkheim's point. The latter's claims as to the social origin of the categories was not just about intergenerational transmission, in other words about the way they are learned by every specific child, but about their very genesis. Without society they would not exist -as if Durkheim was in fact speaking of culture, a concept scarcely elaborated in his time but that was to become the pivotal, theoretical concept in the twentieth century. Remains the problem of émergence -what then produced society in the first place, for it to be able to generate the categories? What looms behind this entire problematic is the question of émergence: if we need a society in order to be venerated in religion, and in order to produce categories of thought and classification, what then produces society in the first place, and how is the threshold of emergence crossed, which leads from incipient, inchoate social relations to the kind of enduring structure that might be able to produce the many effects and characteristics Durkheim attributes to society? Few Durkheim commentators have given any thought to answer this crucial question. Jean-Claude Filloux speaks of a reconciliation of individualism and socialism and of "the emergence of a society founded on the religion of the individual,"82 but from a Durkheimian perspective the latter would be merely begging the question. Far more to the point is Sawyer when he points out that "[t]he concept of emergence is a central thread uniting Durkheim's theoretical and empirical work, yet this aspect of Durkheim's work has been neglected,"83 and continues to discuss the links between Durkheim's implicit emergentism and theories of emergence developed by contemporary philosophers of mind: In recent decades, emergence has been extensively discussed by philosophers of mind, psychological theorists, and cognitive scientists because these fields are increasingly threatened by the potential of reduction to neuroscience. The threat -analogous to the threats of methodological individualism [ 84 ] facing sociology -is that these disciplines will be reduced to explanations and analyses of neurons and their interactions. the scope and force of religion; what he loses is all anchorage in the single most constructive insight in modern philosophy (i.e., Kant's "Copernican Revolution"). In the process Durkheim particularly forfeits a credible answer to those who remind us on quite substantial grounds that, after all, the beings venerated in religious ritual do not exist. In other words, they are not in any way real to begin with (although they may be virtual in the sense of having real effects).87 Impossible as Durkheim's epistemology may seem according to Hirst, it yet captures successfully one side of the religious medal: the capability of generating realities.
It fails, however, to capture the other side and the mechanism behind it: the constant oscillation (which I believe is nothing less than the ontological essence of reality) between the real and the unreal, and between (a) symbols that refer to their referents and (b) symbols that no longer do so -these, situationally, take on a life of their own.
As I argue in detail in my recent book Sangoma Science,88 we have in the studies of religion proceeded beyond the limits of applicability of standard, Aristotelian, binary logic -the one governed by the adage "If P, then not (not P)." Although exposed to the Kantian and Hegelian traditions, Durkheim remained too much of a rationalistic Cartesian to dare admitting that in this oscillation lies the true "elementary form of religious life" more than in any of the institutions and concepts he studied in such detail in Les formes.89

3.6
Durkheim the Moralist The common insistence on Durkheim's theoretical-sociological side and his almost total appropriation by academic sociology (at the expense of philosophy) in the course of the twentieth century, cannot capture the thrust of his thought in its entirety. He wrote not from a detached scientific interest but as a deeply concerned member of western European society around 1900 -a time which he perceived to be one of anomie and of secularisation (of which Durkheim himself was a telling example), even though his attention was admittedly not focused on social inequality, class conflict, the colonial subjugation of large parts of the globe, nor -except towards the end of his life when the issue of peace entered into his writing -on the mounting international tensions that led to World War I (a war that not only saw many of his students killed but also his own son, an event from which Durkheim as a father never recovered and that sent him to an early grave, aged 59).
The way Durkheim writes about religion is puzzling: he is not preaching any particular creed and remains himself a non-believer in any form of organised religion or any deity; yet he passionately impersonates the believer and the strength the latter derives from religion and from society via religion (as Durkheim thought). This lends to much of his writing a moral dimension, which we cannot sweep under the carpet simply because the present-day academic sociologist no longer sees her or himself as a moralist, a prophet and a healer. view of the social environment [ 95 ] can be interpreted, as I was not aware at the time of writing The Structure of Social Action (1937), as the internal environment of the action system, in a sense parallel to Claude Bernard's concept … [ 96 ] of the internal environment of a complex organism. In my view Durkheim never abandoned this conception of social facts, and it was correct for him to maintain the position he did. [ 97 ] 3.7  107 Challenger's subsequent treatment of major postmodern philosophers leaves too much to be desired to buy his surprising Aristotelian solution lock, stock and barrel. 108 Durkheim was not the only French philosopher with a passion for ethnographic literature and for problems of intercultural comparison and cultural origins. Anthropologists were early alerted to the work of Durkheim's colleague Lucien Lévy-Bruhl through the initially enthusiastic reviews of his work by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, a colonial anthropologist stationed in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Evans-Pritchard would soon, through his writings on the Nuer, the Shilluk and the Azande with special emphasis on their religion, magic, divination and kingship, become one of the most prominent British anthropologists. One of Lévy-Bruhl's principal works was published in the context of Durkheim's seminal journal L' Année sociologique,109 the backbone of the latter's sociological school. Durkheim used one and the same article to present a summary of both Lévy-Bruhl's book and of his own Les formes,110 stressing the continuity between the two approaches. The closeness between Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl may surprise social scientists today. For in today's discourse Lévy-Bruhl (with such book titles as Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (translated as How Natives Think in the English edition) and La mentalité primitive (Primitive Mentality),111 became emblematic of a particular, discarded, apparently racist construction of the colonial subject as inferior to the western European colonisers.112 By contrast, Durkheim, although inviting likewise our criticism because of his systematic avoidance of issues of social inequality, exploitation, class struggle and violence (hence dissimulating the very reasons why today we distance ourselves from the products of colonial science), largely managed to escape Lévy-Bruhl's stigmatisation. This was not in the first place because of the wider scope and relevance of Durkheim's thought, but more specifically because the latter, from today's perspective that inevitably sees such a thought as anachronistic because of political correctness, made the right choice in Les Formes by holding Australian Aboriginals, hitherto classified as "Blacks" and among the most wretched of marginalised peoples around 1900, as exemplary of the whole of humankind and its religion.

3.8
From Philosophy to Sociology Ironically, Durkheim succeeded in creating a viable sociology from his philosophical background precisely by detaching it from philosophy -leaving to subsequent generations the task of creating a viable intercultural philosophy, i.e., one cut to the measure of decolonisation and globalisation, (brought about by a whole range of factors and processes, including the capitalist mode of production, world religions, formal education, modern science, global migration, the emerging global politics of knowledge, digitalised information and communication on a global scale, and so on). When I took over the Rotterdam Chair of Foundations of Intercultural Philosophy in 1998, well over a century after Durkheim had acceded to the first French chair in sociology at the University of Bordeaux in 1887-1888, I came to realise that painfully little progress on this philosophical side had been made in the meantime.113 The social sciences had effectively been established and had reached their highest culmination around the middle of the twentieth century, but by the end of the century the position of academia within postmodern, post-democratic society had already become very weak, and the increasingly volatile, uncontrollable forces of corporate capital in collusion with military and post-imperialist international ambitions had largely deprived academic intellectual production of all hope at relevant, responsible and independent societal impact. What is more, within academia the self-assertive vocality of the social sciences of the 1960-1980s had given way to a guilty aloofness and reticence, as if convinced of their own irrelevance. One of the symptoms of this process was that my new philosophical colleagues at Rotterdam -and, with them, postmodernists throughout the present-day world at large -could afford with impunity to totally ignore or ridicule the empirical basis and methods of the variety of social-science-based intercultural philosophy I had come to represent in their midst. With considerable exaggeration, one might say114 that postmodernism (including the Foucaultian and Deleuzian encroachments and attempts to reinvent the social sciences on a personal basis without being answerable to empirical data and intersubjective method), had exploded the social sciences that Durkheim had created at the cost of excessively hard work and an early death.
Even so, the twentieth century was the century of the social sciences. The latter had supplanted the individual-centred image of humanity that -I repeathad dominated Western thought, art and the belles lettres since Graeco-Roman Antiquity, ( being the very object of Weber's Verstehende sociology -which was more in continuity with the individual-centred orientation of Western thought since Antiquity. 118 Weber's philosophical roots were not so much directly Kantian or Cartesian, but had primarily been pioneered by Wilhelm Dilthey in a bid to establish the Humanities on a more secure epistemological footing by the late nineteenth century.
Durkheim's radical positioning elicited much criticism even as soon as within a year. 119 However, true to life and fortunately for the 20th-c. CE development of the social sciences, Durkheim's application of his own programmatic statements has not been without contradictions and inconsistencies. Thus, in Les formes for instance there is a considerable appeal to the conscious perceptions and motivations of the Australian carriers of the alleged "elementary forms of religious life." We should therefore not be too surprised to see Durkheim listed even among the precursors of interpretative sociology.120

Concluding Words
We have discussed in this essay some of the philosophical strands that informed Durkheim as an exponent of French thought and that enabled him to become one of a handful of founding fathers of the social sciences. We have highlighted more than in most current discussions of Durkheim, his Jewish background and his firm rootedness in the main European philosophical tradition from Descartes to Kant. We touched on his sociology of knowledge, his emphasis on classification, his puzzling realism in regard to religion, and his moralism. Steering away from his original field of academic philosophy so as to establish the new field of the social sciences, Durkheim did not work out these orientations into consistent philosophical discourse; yet they have continued to inform French thought and the social sciences internationally to this very day.