The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and the relation between Durkheim and Comte: a problematical filiation
Based on a reding of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, this article shows that the relation between Durkheim and Comte is framed by a problematical filiation. While for Durkheim religion is the matrix of human civilization, he distinguishes between «positive» religion (the Religion of humanity) and «elementary» religion (the separation between sacred and profane), and shows the distance – if not the rupture – between these two. The reciprocal integration mechanisms between totemic religion and primitive society provides the key for the social power of religious life as the prime source of «life and efficiency» for the social group (the clan). In this respect, those mechanisms imply the opposition between the Durkheimian institutions (where religious and social life utually structure themselves) and the Comtian fetishism (which have to be discarded time after time, in order to reach the religious synthesis of humanity). For Durkheim, sociology makes more salient «the relations that exist between things» than natural sciences. The confrontation between Durkheim and Comte leads the former close to a «parricide». But then the question returns: what is the meaning and value, for us sociologists and for our entire discipline, of this opposition between them, and of this rupture in the filiation between Durkheim and Comte?