Challenging the Anthropomorphic Master Narrative in The Elementary Forms and Forging a More Materialist Durkheimianism

An implicit goal of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is to show that a viable and effective morality can be developed for modern differentiated societies. Durkheim believed that for this morality to be experienced as obligatory, humankind needed to believe that its source was a living moral being with recognisably similar, albeit, more perfect, attributes to themselves. Durkheim was confident that in reality only society and, as metaphors for society, the monotheistic representations of God, fitted this criterion. Thus he was disposed to select from a range of representations of society sui generis anthropomorphic ones, thereby marginalising much of his previous work. This article draws on critical realists and Antonio Gramsci to critique Durkheim’s notion of society in this text and more broadly to interrogate his use of collective subjects such as the collective conscience. His conceptual system is shown to be incoherent and somewhat tautological. But this clears the way for a new theorization involving an articulation of certain of Durkheim’s valid concepts with a rather structuralist version of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. The intention here is to provide a fresh interpretation of Durkheim and develop a more materialist Durkheimianism.