Emil Durkheim on the role of religion in public life. Substantiation of the choice of elementary religion

Abstract

The sociological theory of the religion of E. Durkheim, despite the past tense, remains an important source for the study. The understanding of the French sociologist of religion as the most important social institution providing social integration, led him to look for a sociological approach to the study of this social institution. In the works of E. Durkheim embodied the development of ideas about the collective consciousness, that is, collective beliefs and related moral relations, acting as a unifying force in society, as the “highest form of mental life”. An important distinction of E. Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life from his contemporary totemism literature and primitive religion in general became its methodological approach. He consistently examines, criticizes and rejects competing theories of the origin of totemism, analyzes the development of a religious phenomenon in society, examining precisely its social aspects that are available for scientific analysis. In a religious rite, a person fixes his “confused social feelings” on these clear, concrete objects, from which the physical power and moral powers of society are distinguished. E. Durkheim saw the exceptional social appearance of religious facts. Thus, the sequence of short but intense periods of religious “collective excitement” alternates with much longer periods of diffuse secular individual economic activity, and that it was this division that gave rise to belief in two special worlds — the sacred and the secular — both within man and within nature. E. Durkheim’s famous hypothesis — that a deity is nothing more than a deified society — was confirmed by many arguments of its reasoning, but at the same time it does not have any anticlerical or antireligious ideology that would strongly contradict Durkheim’s understanding of the principle of scientific objectivity.