The two Durkheim of Parsons and Alexander
Over the last decades, Jeffrey Alexander seemed to have replaced Talcott Parsons as the most influential American sociologist. As it is the case for Parsons’s, Alexander’s work is mainly based on a strong interpretation of the founding fathers of sociology. It is in part by reinterpreting the place of religion in Durkheim’s works that both authors managed to present a voluntaristic theory of social action and a emergentistic theory of social order. This papers shows that above the apparent disagreements of their respective interpretations of Durkheim’s work, Parsons and Alexander both tend to present Durkheim’s theory of religion as a reductive social action theory.