Religion civile et religion de l'humanité: retour sur l'anthropocentrisme durkheimien

Abstract

The study of Durkheim's writings shows clearly how he was profoundly committed to religious or quasi-religious convictions. This paper puts to one side the legacy of his Jewish origins to concentrate upon the kind of faith he himself called “humankind's religion” (“la religion de l'humanité”). The paper starts with a discussion of the literature on “civil religion” (Bellah, Wallace, Schoffeleers) in order to argue that this form of religion constitutes a minimal element of Durkheimian beliefs. The textual analysis proves consistently that neither patriotism nor any kind of internationalism is the object of Durkheimian faith. Durkheim has sometimes professed a faith in science, but in an analogical sense, as we can easily understand. In the last analysis, the real object of the Durkheimain cult is the human condition, “a fully religious ideal”. In opposition to those forms of theocentrism or cosmocentrism which occur in other religions, Durkheim maintains an anthropocentric concern. For him the human being is to the highest degree, a very sacred thing, a being who “possesses this transcendent majesty which the churches of all times attribute to their gods”. To him, this human is never an isolated individual; far from it. Through the individual, one recognizes “humankind which is truly respectable and sacred”. The paper stresses the importance of this insight in order to elucidate Durkheimain sociology and, more generally, the Durkheimain commitment to “the science of human beings”.