Bringing Tocqueville in: Remedying a Neglect in the Sociology of Religion

Abstract

This essay grew out of a seminar taught by Phillip Hammond in Fall, 1991, at the Universit,y of California, Santa Barbara. The other authors, all graduate students in religious studies at UCSB, were members of that seminar. The originating idea for the seminar was the fact that of 23 self-declared textbooks in the sociology of religion found on Hammond's shelves (dating from Joachim Wach's text of 1944), only one (Thomas F. O'Dea's Sociology and the Study of Religion) contains references to Tocqueville, all four very brief. Two others (Glenn Vernon's Sociology of and J. Milton Yinger's The Scientific Study of Religion) mention Tocqueville but only in reference to the work of Seymour Martin Lipset. The situation found in seven edited readers in the sociology of religion is hardly better. One (Louis Schneider's Religion, Culture and Society) contains a one-page excerpt from Tocqueville's Democracy in America. Three (Joseph Faulkner's Religion's Influence in Contemporary Society, Patrick McNamara's Religion: North American Style, William Newman's The Social Meaning of Religion) reprint Robert Bellah's (1967) essay, Civil in which refers briefly to Tocqueville, and this accounts for Tocqueville's name in their indexes. Two others (Faulkner again and Richard Knudten's The Sociology of Religion) reprint Hammond's 1963 JSSR essay Religion and the 'Informing' of Culture, which relies rather heavily on Tocqueville's Democracy in America. 1 Since this representation seemed to be far less than Alexis de Tocqueville deserves,2 the seminar set for itself not only the task of reading the French scholar's monumental work (plus a number of successor volumes) but also the task of discerning Tocqueville's enduring contributions to theory in the sociology of religion. The following pages offer our findings and observations: First, a brief overview of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, followed by a discussion of five areas where his thinking is abstract enough to be blended into general social theories about religion, and then a brief comparison of Tocqueville with Max Weber.