L'imaginaire et le sacré dans la sociologie de Durkheim

Abstract

Each era and each civilization has created a more or less abstract reflection of itself, and from Plato to Comte, touching on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, we may multiply as often as we wish those great systems of interpretation which have marked time and the successive generations. But what we would like to show is that above and beyond their proper scientific nature these systems have been cross-fertilized, to a high degree, by mythology. It may be that perhaps it is only after the fact that we divine or recognize this mythological dimension. The scientism of the 19th century is not exempt from this law. Not only do we recognize its ideological charge but we have begun to measure its effect on the social organization itself. By this, I wish to say that it is the mythic dimension that renders an idea dynamic, which allows it to fire enthusiam, thus engendering projects and realizations. In this sense it is as a myth that 20th-century scientism has been able to promote those technical-economic realities with which we are familiar. Drawing on Saint-Simon, Durkheim indeed shows how an idea can be the “initial motor of progress”. In doing so, he speaks of his own time and proceeds from the principle that a society is above all a community of ideas; he thus recognizes the impetus that these ideas give to social development, finding that “institutions are ideas in action”. In this sense, religion for him rests less in theological subtleties than in the aggregate virtues which it is or is not capable of promoting. Thus the “common way of thinking” is of interest to the sociologist mainly because it is the indicator of the birth, apogee and death of particular social groupings and alliances.