By Dominic Green
It is not true that political scientists have no sense of humor. They even have a joke: "Political science is not about politics and it's not a science." Social science has become a joke, though sociologists take themselves too seriously to admit it. Sociology is supposed to supply quantifiable kinds of self-knowledge about life in the mass, but it led the academic drift from describing social behavior to pathologizing political wrongthink. Yet as Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy and law at New York University, observes in the thoughtful and entertaining "Captive Gods," founders of modern sociology such as Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and Max Weber were "preoccupied with religion." Though religion generates quantifiable social activities, it begins and ends in unquantifiable personal experiences. No wonder sociologists prefer to focus on the other subject we must avoid in polite society: politics.
"Captive Gods" describes how the "emerging science of society became at the same time a science of religion." Our concepts of society and religion were born, Mr. Appiah writes, as "twins." The study of society emerged like Jacob after Esau, clutching the heel of the "secular study of something called religion." Though religion was the firstborn, religion as we understand it arrived late. To the Romans, religio meant correct public practice. To Cicero it meant "rules or strictures"; following him, Mr. Appiah writes, St. Augustine observed that it refers not only to worship but to "the observance of duties in human relationships." For Aquinas, it meant monastic life. Our idea of religion is a by-blow of the Reformation, a Protestant concept foregrounding a personal state of mind and creedal beliefs.
Meanwhile, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and Adam Ferguson discovered society. The French Revolution then dynamited Europe's old order and dynamized society as a collective organism, evolving in a "quasi-biological and determinate way." A cohort of German Protestant thinkers such as Friedrich Schleiermacher theorized religion similarly -- change was now progress, and liberal society clearly the heir to medieval religion. The march of science required a band, so a technocratic Catholic liberal, Auguste Comte, coined "sociology." Comte's Religion of Humanity had a priesthood of experts and a science-worshipping liturgy. Today, his gospel hides in plain sight in our faith in technology and in the Comtean motto on the Brazilian flag, "Order and Progress."
The first of Mr. Appiah's modern "creators of 'religion'" is Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), the first Oxford professor of anthropology. In "Primitive Culture" (1871), Tylor used a German concept, "culture," to explain the progress of religious belief from what he called animism -- the tendency of the "lower races" to impute spirits to inanimate objects -- to a monotheistic apogee that happened to resemble his Quaker upbringing. Tylor's contemporary William Robertson Smith (1846-94) disagreed. The "antique religions," Robertson Smith wrote, weren't built on beliefs and creeds but "institutions and practices" that created a "solidarity of the gods and their worshippers as part of one organic society."
Tylor and Robertson Smith agreed, however, that what Tylor called the "essential rationality of primitive peoples" linked the savage past and the civilized present. This implied that the religious traffic ran in both directions. For Sigmund Freud religion is a personal projection in which primitive impulses crack the crust of civilized manners. For Durkheim (1858-1917), religion exercises a similar "constraint over the individual." But it is a représentation collective, one of the "social facts" through which society shapes and understands itself. In "The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life" (1912), Durkheim wrote that religions create a "moral community" by dividing life into the sacred and the profane. Through religious ideas, people "represent to themselves the society of which they are members."
Durkheim argued that the symbolic content of religion conveys the deep truth about society. Simmel (1858-1918) thought that Durkheim dodged the "concrete reality" of faith and experience. In "Sociology" (1908), Simmel called religion "an attitude of the soul," a "certain state of being" that cannot be disproved by science unless it becomes "rigidified into a system of knowledge that somehow imitates" science. The power of religious ideas lies in their "subjective, emotional value." Society mobilizes that power for collective ends, creating conflict between individuals, inside groups and between different groups.
"For Durkheim, the content of religion was society; for Simmel, the form of religion was society," Mr. Appiah writes. For Simmel's friend Weber (1864-1920), however, religions and societies were distinct and plural entities. They shared common origins in "orgiastic" rites but developed differently; it took a Protestant ethic to arouse the spirit of capitalism. Weber's yardstick of religious development was sociological rationalization: taking the magic out of religion ("disenchantment"), generating a coherent worldview and defining religion's ethical stance on worldly matters. In 1917, during World War I, Weber detected an upsurge of irrationality that suggested sociology cannot master religion -- the return of the ancient gods as disenchanted "impersonal forces," notably in the impolite social form of politics.
Sociology began, Mr. Appiah writes, by "explaining itself in the effort to explain religion." Weber closed the circle by explaining social life as mythical combat. Much subsequent sociology has run around this Weberian circuit, powered by new techniques such as quantitative modeling and evolutionary biology. Mr. Appiah summarizes the struggle to rationalize a coherent image of Weber-world, the endless debate on whether sociology can separate itself from religion (it clearly cannot), and the emerging awareness that secularization was a future that came and went. We now inhabit, Mr. Appiah writes, an "epistemologically fallen world" of competing "stakeholders." The Victorians worried about a "world denuded of larger significance," but we suffer from both material surfeit and spiritual abundance, and are captive to a surplus of competing and increasingly angry gods. It really is beyond belief.
--Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 31, 2025 10:53 ET (14:53 GMT)
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