Bureaucracy as Praxis: Toward a Political Phenomenology of Formal Organizations

Abstract

My view of Durkheim differs from that of Parsons and others who stress the positivism of Durkheim's Suicide and Rules of the Sociological Method. Instead, I stress the writings of theAnn6e Sociologique and the monumental The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In this I agree fully with Collins and Makowsky (1972: 91), who argue that in place of the old absolutist view of reality 'out there,' Durkheim shows us that the natural world is only a backdrop for the symbolic creations of men and their social rituals.