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STRUCTURING RELIGION
by Emrah Gker

GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Taking an academic shape after the second half of the nineteenth century, the criticism and analysis of religion and religious social structures (from particular lifestyles to institutional power structures) developed and got more and more sophisticated as the Western paths of modernization evolved. Today, in close relation with what has been happening in culture, economics and politics, the sociology of religion has found new paths of investigation; paths not necessarily critical of religion, but which try to understand the persistence, even, re-publicization of various religious communities. Nevertheless, I believe that the extreme relativist and particularistic readings of faith, of religious cognitive structures and of sects, which have developed as certain radical skepticist ideas entered into academic circulation in a blinding speed in the last three decades of the century, should be critically reconsidered for the development of a sound sociology of religion. As more and more sociologists and anthropologists felt satisfied with post-modern experimenting on fragments with respect to religion, as novel ideas (like schizo-analyzing religious ecstasy) could stay on the stage no more than fifteen minutes, as, thanks to people like Baudrillard, social science was rendered to playing with the pieces (Baudrillard, 1984: 24), some fundamental aspects, some essential points of departure, established by figures like Weber, Marx or Durkheim (among others), were undermined if not forgotten.

In this series of papers, I will track the early development of the sociology of religion, by focussing on the three founding fathers of contemporary sociology, Marx, Durkheim and Weber. I do not aim a conservative defense of the classics, but I do believe, as I am going to try to suggest in each of the papers, that we should recall some of the main postulates offered by these three foundational figures, and thus, rebuild on them. In these papers, I will attempt to comment on the authors sociology of religion from a metatheoretical perspective which situates the discussion in terms of structure and agency in religion.

PART ONE: MARX

After over 150 years of circulation inside the intellectual field, Marx and Engels works are very difficult to handle academically without applying one of the rival paradigms on them, and thus, usually, doing injustice to this or that element of their theories. In this first part of the series of short papers, I will try to give a brief account of Karl Marxs (and in a way, Friedrich Engels) views on religion. In doing this, I will attempt to bring out the sociological relationship between structure and agency which Marx and Engels embed into their criticism. Therefore, my own brief interpretation, by privileging that specific polarity, is likely to be another problematic simplification. However, this and the coming two papers on Durkheim and Weber on the same theme aim to cast some light on a better contemporary sociological understanding of religion (i.e., my agenda is essentially different than that of the founding fathers). Moreover, as it will be clearer later, I find the duality between part and whole, between structure and agency, between primary representations of religion and religious (social) structures indispensable for a

serious sociological investigation. Like many phenomena worth studying sociologically, religion also has a double life: A subjectivist, cognitive dimension and an objectivist, structural dimension. Trevor Ling (1980: 3) suggests three stages in Marxs intellectual relationship with religion. For practical (and simply, biographical) reasons Ill follow him in order to give a form to my discussion, and Ill add a fourth stage, shortly mentioning Engels position after late 1870s. 1. CHRISTIAN MARX This earliest stage is irrelevant for my purposes in this paper, yet this stage is a biographical fact of Marxs intellectual development and thus deserves mentioning (for a more detailed account, see McLellan, 1972). For his Abitur to finish the High School he attended in Trier, his birthplace, Marx wrote a number of essays, some of which included Christian themes (Ling, 1980: 5). In these writings, Marx defended a theistic, rather than fundamentalist interpretation of Christianism, and Ling (1980: 6) notes that even at such an early stage (1830s), we can tell about the influences of French liberal ideas (particularly of Rousseau) on his theological views. These shadow years of Marx end by 1836, when he begins studying in the University of Berlin. 2. ATHEIST MARX-I Hegel, until his death in 1831, has been a professor of philosophy in the University of Berlin, and thus his ideas were very influential within the university; after his death, he had many followers among academics and students. Marx, when he began studying law

there, and reading more and more philosophy, became involved in the Young Hegelians group, befriending a number of the affiliates (Ling, 1980: 7). Young Hegelians mainly applied philosophy to contemporary religious and theological ideas, and they produced radical rejections of conventional Christian beliefs. Bruno Bauers destructive criticisms of the Gospels and Jesus must have excited and influenced Marx a lot, who had newly mastered the Hegelian system. He soon became acquainted with the work of Feuerbach, whose philosophical argument defending a materialist standpoint was more developed. At this stage, Marx was confronting religious speculation with philosophical speculation, trying to prove why individual minds ought to reject theological ideas, which were in fact nothing but the minds abstraction from the reality of the natural world. Feuerbach held that humanbeings were obsessed by the delusion of religious speculation because they were alienated from their own true beings. The theme of self-alienation was also used by Bauer and was a favorite theme of the Young Hegelians. While Marx engages into a reconstructive criticism of the crude materialism of his philosopher friends later, he makes use of central themes developed by them in his analysis of religion. Therefore, as Marx became a true atheist, rejecting all propositions, thought systems and institutions related with religion, his materialism first allied with the Young Hegelians. Demonstrating why mental structures of religion were philosophically irrelevant for agents would later help him to explain the reasons why these ideas, beliefs, myths, fears, emotions, etc. were successful to influence people: The lessons taught by Young Hegelians would later aid him in establishing a connection between structure and agency in religion and leave the speculative dimension of the individual mind (or the

human essence) behind. Yet of course, as I will try to show, Marxs own biases will limit his analysis of the double life of religion. 3. ATHEIST MARX-II Ling (1980: 4) suggests that Marxs intellectual relationship with religion enters its third and final phase by 1842, when Marx began to publish radical articles in the newspaper Rheinische Zeitung. Although this third stage can be analyzed under two periods (his views on religion before and after he develops his criticism of political economy and capitalism), his fundamental perspective, which uses the criticism of the philosophical materialism of Young Hegelians as a springboard, remains almost the same. My strategy in giving an account of Marx in his mature phase will be the following: I will deal with his (and Engels) key texts, extracting the crux of their analysis, commenting on that core, and then in a concluding section of the paper, I plan to give a shape to the whole discussion from my previously stated metatheoretical perspective. Just before he published his criticisms of Feuerbach and Bauer, there is a key article published as the leading article in the Rheinische Zeitung, in July 1842. Here, Marx, with his famous sharp tongue and brilliant sarcasm, attacks a right-wing conservative, Herr Hermes, editor of Klnische Zeitung, who, in an early article, criticized the philosophical criticism of religion in newspapers and called for censorship for such sacrilege. In his reply, Marx gives the signs of his departure from philosophical materialism and develops a criticism of Christianitys relationship with an oppressive state. Marx draws his sword and raises his shield as he charges upon the right-wing defenders of the status quo, who aim to monopolize religious ideas and institutions in

order to secure the heavy hand of the state. So, for the first time he begins to critically evaluate the actual political effects that are rooted in religion (both structurally and mentally). Furthermore, he challenges Hermes statement, who said: A sharp distinction must be made between what is required by the freedom of scientific research, which can but benefit Christianity itself, and what is beyond the bounds of scientific research (quoted in Marx, 1964a: 21). Marx viciously attacks Hermes call for dictating boundaries to science so that science could agree with religion, stating that scientific (or, worldly) reason has, historically, clashed with religious reason, falsifying religious babble and politically challenging its institutions (Marx, 1964a: 24-5). Marx criticizes the legitimation of social oppression (in the form of threatening the freedom of press, defending states tyrannical intervention, hindering scientific progress) via the use of religion. In doing that, he corrects Hermes ahistorical claims on the religious essence of European states, by recalling the Revolutionary Constitution of 1789, and even the secular articles of the Prussian Landrecht (Marx, 1964a: 26-7). He further goes on to criticize Hermes views on the religiosity of state-administered marriage and public education, pointing out that the historical tendency is the separation of Church and State, which renders the cries for consecrated marriage and religious public education meaningless. Marx then comes to the central argument of his article, which would later be developed in his accounts of Bauer and Feuerbach: He makes the deadly move as he answers the question, Should philosophy discuss religious matters also in newspaper articles?
Philosophy, above all German philosophy, has a propensity to solitude, to systematical seclusion, to dispassionate self-contemplation which opposes it from the outset in its

estrangement to the quick-witted and alive-to-events newspapers whose only delight is in information. Philosophy, taken in its systematic development, is unpopular; its secret weaving within itself seems to the layman to be an occupation as overstrained as it is unpractical; it is considered as a professor of magic whose incantations sound pompous because they are unintelligible. [Marx, 1964a: 30]

Yet, he argues, philosophers belong to this world, they do not grow out of the soil like mushrooms, they are influenced by the material processes of the world as anyone. So, the time must come when philosophy not only internally by its content but externally by its appearance comes into contact and mutual reaction with the real contemporary world (my emphasis; Marx, 1964a: 31). Although he does not criticize Young Hegelians yet (having defended them against Hermes), Marxs departure is clear when he argues that as the philosophical criticism of religion gets more and more publicized, it must connect its criticisms with real, political, cultural issues of the day. As Marx developed this line of criticism, he also, in 1842-43, began to ask questions about what (and whose) interests the Prussian state represented, which, for the first time, led him to consult property laws and the local political-economic life. Thus, his clash with the Prussian state gained another momentum, along with the criticism of religion. In the autumn of 1843 comes his articles on Bauers work (Marx, 1978), where he first spills the beans and lays out the (preliminary) theoretical foundation which would lead to the writing of German Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach. Shortly, Bauer argued that the strength of the opposition between Christians and Jews was a religious one, if the weakness of both Christianity and Judaism was exposed, no ground would remain upon which Christians could exercise their self-claimed superiority over Jews. So the Jews should both accept philosophical attacks on Christianity and on Judaism, then, all would stand together as citizens.

Marx strongly disagreed, turning his attention towards the social and economic forms with which both religions are associated. He criticized Bauer for only seeing the theological side of the issue: To be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation (Marx, 1978: 32). Religion may be expelled from the public sphere and be turned into a private issue, a mere individual right, yet this is no true emancipation, because the socioeconomic life remains unchanged and thus religion survives there. It is important to note here how Marx has transformed the philosophical criticism of religion into both a matter of social revolution and a novel account of the sociology of rights.
None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest. [Marx, 1978: 43]

This is why he attacks Judaism so forcefully, not because he is anti-Semitic, but because he dislikes (and for total emancipation, he wants to abolish) the legitimation of selfish economic interests through religion. Once the religious social structures are degrounded (even from the private sphere), he believes, the mental structures upon which the capitalist socioeconomic reality stands would collapse. It should quickly be added that Marx never engaged in a detailed sociology of totalities like Judaism or Protestantism, giving us, unlike Weber, no verifications for the alliance between capitalism and religion at the interactional dimension. In other major writings, too, Marx sacrifices detailed sociological analysis of religion to ideological fervor. In 1844, finally, in his introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, he announces that the criticism of religion, which is the premise of

all criticism, is complete in Germany, implicitly referring to Strauss, Bauer and Feuerbachs works (Marx, 1964b). Now what? Now, the arms of criticism should be directed, among other issues of course, towards the use of Christian religion by the socially and economically exploitative Prussian state for furthering capitalist ends. Now is the time of practically talking about revolution. In this introduction, Marx opens direct fire, spelling those famous words, which have been quoted millions of times until now, about religion being the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress, an illusory happiness refracted from the reality of the world in order to sooth the very material pains of humanity. Therefore, Marx tries to expose how symbolic representations of Christianity serve the states and capitalists interests against the people (people, for now, being an ambiguous category for Marx, including all the poor). To clear the way before political action for social change, Marx wants to render religious sources of speculation and delusion baseless and irrelevant. However, I should note that in doing this, he does not establish a relationality between religious structures and agents. William Lloyd Newell (1986: 24) notes that Marxs critique of religious hermeneutics is similar to that of Nietzches: Christians talk too much and act too little. I think that rather than acting too little, for Marx, they act for the good of those in power. And religious people cannot help but conform to or ally with capitalists interests because, if I may recall Durkheim, Marx also thinks that religion does not know itself. Yet Marx has a very different way of telling religion what it is really. His will be more a political criticism than a scientific one, being connected to his account of the reality of the world,

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which was, by 1944, being shaped in his mind as he read more and more political economy. In this period, before he has elaborated on the labor theory of value, Marx has a holistic view of religion:
This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted-world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point dhonneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolidation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. This struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a fight against this world of which religion is the spiritual aroma. [MECW, vol. III, 1975: 175]

Therefore, as we become aware of the nature of religion, as we realize philosophy in this world, Marx thinks that we will be radicalized, in the literal sense of the term: We will reach the roots, the basis, fundamental material aspects of all the misery and injustice in the world. So it is not surprising that he defends a road to revolution in the same introduction, of whose main agent will be the proletariat. Marx (and as they come together in 1844, Engels) elaborate these themes in three primary works written between 1844 and 1846: Marx and Engels The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism and German Ideology, and Marxs Theses on Feuerbach. I note two thematic shifts: The first being the full-fledged criticism of Feuerbachian materialism, the second being the elaboration of class analysis. What is offered by them, in these works, to replace philosophy, is praxis, which would refurbish materialism by fusing its historically separated modes of existence:
As Feuerbach represented materialism in the theoretical domain, French and English socialism and communism in the practical field represented materialism which coincided with humanism. [emphases in original; Marx, 1964c: 60]

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Thus against Feuerbach, in his famous Theses, Marx argues that the active, practical, subjective dimension of materialism, in direct relationship with socioeconomic processes should not be neglected. So the criticism of religion in Feuerbach is incomplete (despite its philosophical completeness). Once it is shown that, abstractly, religious representations are illusions refracted from the real world, thus drifting the human essence toward self-alienation, it remains to be shown, radicalizing materialism, that this contradiction should be abolished through political practice, namely, revolution. Marx notes that religious sentiments are social products, not ideas alienating humans out of the blue. Altering social structures would thus put an end to the ideological reproduction of religions mental structures which envelop people. Later, in German Ideology, Marx and Engels elaborate on the true nature of these social structures to be revolutionized. In this work the seeds of their theory of history are thrown:
It shows that history does not end by dissolving itself in self-consciousness as the spirit of the spirit but that there is present in it at every stage a material result, a sum of production forces, a historically created relation to nature and of individuals to one another handed down to each generation by its predecessor, a mass of production forces, capitals and circumstances which, on the one hand, are modified by the new generation but which, on the other hand, prescribe to that generation their own conditions of life and give it a definite development, a special character that circumstances, therefore, make man just as much as man makes circumstances. This sum of productive forces, capitals and forms of social intercourse which every individual and every generation finds already in existence is the real basis of what the philosopher imagined to be the substance and essence of man, what they apotheosized and fought against, a real basis which is not in the least disturbed in it action and influence on the development of man by those philosophers, as self-consciousness and ego, rebelling against it. [Marx and Engels, 1964d: 78]

As this lengthy extract from German Ideology shows, although there is yet little elaboration on the theory of labor and class relations, humans relation with nature and with other humans, socioeconomically speaking, forms the basis of all social structures and institutions. At this point, I should also note that, having neglected the diversity

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within a religion and among religions, Marx and Engels primary concern was to confront the alliance between religions and exploitative, unjust, unequal social and political structures. That point becomes more meaningful in Marxs journalism and polemical writings. In an article titled The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter, published in 1847 in Deutsche-Brsseler Zeitung, Marx viciously attacks the conservative ideas of a Consistorial Councillor by polemically mocking the social principles of Christianity. His merciless remarks go, for some paragraphs, like that:
The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish the former will be charitable. () The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either the just punishment of original sin and other sins or trials that the Lord in his infinite wisdom imposes on those redeemed. [Marx, 1964e: 84]

Proletariat, he argues in that article, as a sturdy and malicious boy, will not let itself be fooled by the pro-establishment preachings of religion (Marx, 1964e: 86). If we could ask Marx what he thought about the forms of protest developed by folk religion against oppression and poverty, about the possibility of progressive elements within religion, I do not think he would make a face. Simply, his agenda was different. Until his death, Marx would not reconsider his main stance regarding religion, because political economy was the legitimate area of analysis for him, he commented on all other issues like culture, art, politics, colonialism, etc. using the guideline of political economy criticism and with an ideology of anti-capitalism. As the criticism of religion, philosophically, is long finished (and if we confine ourselves within the domain of philosophy only, Marxs point is still defendable), religion becomes a topic for him only in terms of its conformist relationship with capitalism. And as long as religion cannot be

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reflexive on its historical conditions of existence, Marx thinks that it is bound to be conformist. Reminding us of Weber, Marx writes in Capital:
The religious world is but the reflex of the real world. And for a society based upon the production of commodities, in which the producers in general enter into social relations with one another by treating their products as commodities and values, whereby they reduce their individual private labour to the standard of homogeneous human labour for such a society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion. [Marx, 1964f: 135]

Consequently, until his death, Marxs atheism consistently develops the historical materialist critique of religion, but not elaborating more on the complexity of religion, but elaborating on the social structures which gave birth to that complexity. 4. ATHEIST ENGELS Actually, the two friends agreed on almost everything. I will not go into a discussion of whether Engels vulgarized Marxs work after his death by regarding it as a pure science. I just wanted to do justice to Engels, by both drawing attention to some of his ideas on religion and on his writings on the topic after 1883. A first notable remark by Engels is about the political problems of attacking religion on the whole. He was aware of the fact that religion embraced most of the public sphere, and that naturally included the proletariat. On the other hand, he knew that religion is not criticized for the sake of an intellectual-philosophical victory. It was criticized in order to gain advantage in the fight against capitalist oppression, exposing the institutional and discursive sources reproducing capitalism. Thus, in 1874, in his Emigrant Literature, he argued against Blanquist radicals, who preached about totally prohibiting religion, who rejected any religious involvement within the Commune, and who suggested repressive measures against any religious organization:

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And this demand that men should be changed into atheists par ordre du mufti is signed by two members of the Commune who have really had opportunity enough to find out that first a vast amount of things can be ordered on paper without necessarily being carried out, and second, that persecution is the best means of promoting undesirable convictions! This much is sure: the only service that can be rendered to God today is to declare atheism a compulsory article of faith and to outdo Bismarcks Kirschenkulturkampf laws by prohibiting religion generally. [Engels, 1964a: 143]

Later in Anti-Dhring, during Marxs lifetime, and Dialectics of Nature, written in a long period between 1873-86, Engels reiterates Marxs main arguments by focusing on the history of religious categories and criticizing them from the standpoint of contemporary science. One year before Marxs death, Engels writes an article in Der Sozialdemokrat, to commemorate Bruno Bauer, who had died a short while ago. In Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity, he does something different than Marx (not theoretically, though), and gives an historical account of the emergence of early Christianity, by focusing on its main religious teachings and its practices, also praising the contribution of Marxs old friend to that topic. He concludes that the novel aspects, and the renovated aspects (borrowed from Greek philosophy) of Christianity, made it the proper religion for the development of capitalism. Unlike Marx, Engels explains this, crudely, by the Darwinistic triumph of Christianitys ideology over other world religions and sects (Engels, 1964b). The final contribution of Engels to the criticism of religion, for the purposes of this paper, is his 1886 piece Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Engels, 1964c). Here, Engels returns to the topic after 40 years and elaborates on their theories they had developed in Theses on Feuerbach and German Ideology. The importance of this piece, although saying nothing radically new about their criticisms of Feuerbach, Stirner and Bauer, is that it is written long after Marx and Engels

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have (almost) fully developed their criticism of political economy, and gives an orderly shape to the relationship between the philosophical tenets of historical materialism and the critique of capitalism. Engels establishes the Hegelian connections in the German critique of religion and in their theory, in a lot more detail than Marx has done. Yet he brings in the arguments he has developed in Dialectics of Nature and proposes to justify Marxs sublation of classical materialism and its application to the history of capitalism as the foundations of a true science. It is notable that for Marx, falsifying religion was above all strategically important for political-practical reasons; whereas Engels, after Marxs death, perhaps disillusioned by the victories of capitalism everywhere, seems to attack religion for the sake of science and scientific truth. CONCLUSION Marxs hypothesis that religion has its material foundations, its categories, practices, institutions in the historical development of social structures is one of his main contributions to the sociology of religion, although I think the true credit should be given to Durkheim and Weber. That is because Marxs account lacked elaboration on three levels: 1. On the subjectivist level, that is, when the question of religion came to how agents identified themselves with religious ideas, forming interactional loyalties, group identities, etc., Marx is on the whole silent. He believed that religious structures were unable to arm the agents with the ability to formulate intelligible and reasonable relations with everyday realities. In that sense, religion was narrow. However, this point Marx made contradicts with his notion that religious categories and beliefs are the products of social structures, of history in the sense that it is the very socialness of religion that

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supplies the agents with a discursive matrix, through which they can give a meaning to their life and be critical about many aspects of it which has nothing to do with the supernatural. 2. On the objectivist level, Marx is too holistic, he does not question the over-general categories he uses, like Christianity, Judaism, Oriental Islam, etc., which leads him establishing only a pragmatic connection between capitalism and structural dynamics of religion. I mean pragmatic in the sense that Marx talks about these structures in terms of their confirmation of, alliance with, or conformity to the capitalist social formations (and its powerful agents). Although he is (arguably) aware of the fact that through the circulation of symbolic representations (or practices, beliefs, rites, art, music, etc.) related to religion, the structure becomes something more than its parts, he neglects that this does not render religion false or a mere inversion. The very endless process of the being and becoming of structures, their embodiment by the believers, is the reality itself. 3. Finally, because of the first two points, establishing a relationality between the two modes of religious existence is almost impossible for Marx. He had a perfect opportunity to do that by expanding his account of political economy to the economy of symbolic goods, thus pinpointing similar power relations within the complexity of religion. But of course, he did not even have time to finish his criticism of bourgeois economics. Nor did he leave a consistent theory of class relations, which would give us an idea about how he understood the connection between culture and economy. Finally, I do think that the points raised by Marxs limited accounts are still with us. Although in most of the civilized world, Church and State has been separated, there are many vital cases where religion is abused to further capitalist interests or state power.

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And of course, in almost everywhere in the world, religion itself became a commodity; raising funds, making profits, selling images are no longer alien ideas to think together with religion. On the other hand, there is this huge market of authentic religions; Tao and business, pornography and Kama Sutra, medical care and paganism, cooking and Buddha, from now on, can be packaged together and marketed and consumed. Therefore, it is still advisable to call for the specter of Marx and seek his guidance. REFERENCES (FOR PART ONE) Baudrillard, Jean (1984) Games with Vestiges, On the Beach, 5 (Winter), pp.19-25. Engels, Friedrich (1964a) Extract from Emigrant Literature, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York. Engels, Friedrich (1964b) Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York. Engels, Friedrich (1964c) Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York. Ling, Trevor (1980) Karl Marx and Religion in Europe and India, Barnes and Nobles Books, New York. Newell, William Lloyd (1986) The Secular Magi: Marx, Freud and Nietzche on Religion, The Pilgrim Press, New York. Marx, Karl (1964a) The Leading Article of no. 179 of Klnische Zeitung, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York. Marx, Karl (1964b) Introduction to Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York. Marx, Karl (1964c) Extract from The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York. Marx, Karl (1964d) Extract from German Ideology, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York. Marx, Karl (1964e) Extract from The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York. Marx, Karl (1964f) Extract from Capital, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion, Schocken Books, New York.

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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1975) Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. III, Lawrence & Wishart, London. Marx, Karl (1978) On the Jewish Question, in Robert C. Tucker (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader, W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London. McLellan, David (1972) Marx Before Marxism, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

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STRUCTURING RELIGION
PART TWO: DURKHEIM
Although I will elaborate more on the general comparison between the sociology of religion that can be found in Marx, Durkheim and Weber at the end of the third paper, it should be quickly noted here compared to the handling of religion in Marx, Emil Durkheim had a far too complex and sophisticated understanding of the place of people and structures in religion. Of course, almost during the same years with Max Weber, Durkheim devoted most of his academic work to matters directly or indirectly concerning religion, and unlike Marx, the two founding fathers were self-acclaimed sociologists, men of the university. Furthermore, as I will briefly try to show in this second paper, Durkheim was almost religious about religion, both with respect to his tendency to explain almost everything about the social by religion 1 and with respect to the religiosity of his political dispositions. 2 Like I did in the previous paper, I will again try to plan my discussion according to certain periods of development of Durkheims sociology of religion. This time, my task about pinpointing metatheoretical aspects of his theory (agencystructure relationships) will be easier, as Durkheim was the first scholar who had theoretically investigated the relations between individual believers and the mental and social structures of religion. Yet, this strength of his research programme was
1 Paul Lapie, in a letter to Clestin Bougl (both were core members of the Anne group) complains: Basically he [Durkheim] is explaining everything at this moment by religion, the prevention of marriages between relatives is a religious matter, punishment is a religious phenomenon in its origins; everything is religious. I could only offer a weak protest. (quoted in Pickering, 1984: 75). 2 Robert Bellah (1973), not wrongfully, talks about him as the high priest of the civil religion of the Third Republic.

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also its weakness, imprisoning him into insurmountable dichotomies like sacred and profane, individual and society, body and soul, etc. Following W. S. F. Pickerings (1984:50) categorization, I will be dealing with Durkheims texts on religion under three periods: (1) The early period, from 1880 to 1895, from the time he entered the cole Normale Suprieure to his first encounter with Robertson Smiths texts. (2) The middle period, from 1895 to 1906, the period when he elaborates on Smiths ideas. (3) The final formulation, from 1906 to his death in 1917, beginning with his lectures in Sorbonne on the origin of religion. Actually, after the Smithian revelations, Durkheim did not radically change his position on religion, yet the differences are worth mentioning separately. I will also try to make use of the class discussions in Prof. Wacquants course, Durkheim, Mauss, Bourdieu, without entering into the connections between Durkheims and other Anne members views on religion. (Marcel Mauss, for example, has a fundamentally very different reading of the Durkheimian sociologie religieuse, which will not be considered here.) 1. YOUNG DURKHEIM AND THE EARLY PERIOD (1880-1895) As we learn from his intellectual biography by Steven Lukes (1972), Durkheim was born (in 1858) to a religious Jewish family whose males, for at least three generations, were practicing rabbis. In his home town, pinal, he went to a rabbinical school where he studied Hebrew, the Old Testament, the Talmud and other Jewish doctrines. Although it is not exactly known when and how Durkheim did precisely reject the teachings of the rabbinate, Pickering (1984: 6) guesses that he must have made his mind about not being a rabbi like his father at around 12 or 13. Durkheim

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later was accepted in the cole Normale Suprieure, when he was 21, and after failing the entrance exam twice. His enrollment in the prestigious school marks his decisive break with Judeo-Christian religious thought, yet, I personally hold that, deducing from his later (quasi-mystical?) ideas on civic mores and the moral citizen, Catholicism, especially the Jesuit understanding of discipline and suffering, must have had an attractive influence on him. And we know that unlike Marx, he was seldom openly hostile to monotheistic world religions per se. Nevertheless, before he began reading the vast literature on religion and ethnography of his time, Durkheim was already believing that the religious representations of the world and the universe did not belong to the modern era, being a necessary earlier step in the evolution of human societies. His mind was decisively being shaped as that of a rationalist atheist.
Durkheim believed that these doctrines, as proclaimed within the Hebraic-Christian tradition, were totally unacceptable to anyone of an honest intellectual outlook. Nothing that can be called real exists outside the world as defined by the scientific mind or by everyday experience... All that is in the world is the result of natural processes, including of course the work of man. [Pickering, 1984: 9]

Lewis Coser (1971: 162) notes that as Durkheim was an Ashkenazi Jew, his open rejection of the customs and traditions of the religion by which the Durkheims had been identifying themselves for long years, might have pushed him, in his early years in the cole Normale, toward stress and unhappiness; Durkheims heresy, according to the tradition, would bring dishonor to the family. Yet I believe that we can only speculate on such psychoanalytic factors, which might or might not have influenced his later civil-religious doctrines. Durkheim graduated, with very poor marks, in 1885 and got a government grant to visit several German universities immediately after. He married a Jewess, Louise

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Dreyfus, just before he began teaching as a charg de cours of social science and pedagogy in the University of Bordeaux. Following Pickerings (1984) demarcation, I will deal with his writings in this early period (for these writings, see Pickering, 1975) of the development of his sociology of religion, until 1895, just before he reads Robertson Smiths Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. In his earliest publication I will consider here, Review: Herbert Spencer Ecclesiastical Institutions: Being Part IV of the Principles of Sociology (originally published in 1886; see Durkheim, 1975a), Durkheim already sets out a number of preliminary propositions which will later re-appear, elaborated in more detail, in the other two periods. Although at this early stage, the young Durkheim admits that he is hesitant to talk about a field (religion) he is yet incompetent (Durkheim, 1975a: 18), his secular and scientific approach is apparent. He posits that, in defense of sociology as a science, the facts of sociology concern not only individuals but also collective beings (18), and religion, with its physiology and morphology, is such a being, irreducible to being an individual matter:
If... religion is reduced to being merely a collection of beliefs and practices relating to a supernatural agent which is conjured up by the imagination, it is difficult to see in it anything more than a fairly complex aggregate of psychological phenomena.

In criticizing the individualist approach of Spencer, Durkheim invokes his first fundamental dichotomy, around which he later tries to explain religion: On the one hand, the very existence of religions at any level of analysis is possible as a result of the contribution of individual believers through believing and practicing. On the other hand, once this is admitted, religion historically becomes an enmeshing of mental and social structures which dictates to individuals actions, ideas and sentiments, having a

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regulating function in society. Thus, he writes that not individual consciousness, but collective consciousness must be the central object of inquiry (20-21). The second important point which would later be a crucial element of his sociology of religion is the privilege Durkheim gives to beliefs compared to rituals and practices. That is why he posits, in the review, that not God in itself, but what this particular social thing hides and expresses, should be the sociologists concern (19). Thirdly and finally, he also develops here his indispensable epistemological postulate, which is of course directly related with his critique of methodological individualism, that sociology has to break with prenotions and commonsensical speculation:
To turn religion into some sort of idealistic and popular metaphysic, to reduce it to a mere collection of personal and considered judgments on the relativity of human knowledge and on the necessity for an after-life, is to divest it of all social significance. It can only remain a collective discipline if it imposes itself on every mind with the overpowering authority of habit; if, on the other hand, it becomes a voluntarily accepted philosophy, it is nothing more than a simple incident in the private life and in the conscience of the individual. [Durkheim, 1975a: 22]

A year later, in another review of a book on religion by Guyau, Durkheim (1975b) repeats his call for studying religion, separate from theology and history of ideas, as a social phenomenon. Although he is sympathetic to Guyaus emphasis on the increasing significance of morality in modern religion, Durkheim again is critical of intellectualism and a-sociological speculation about the power of ideas in history, depicted by Guyau as having a voluntaristic capability to cause social change.
[E]ach time anyone attempts the study of a collective reprsentation, he can rest assured that a practical and not a theoretical cause has been the determining reason for it. This is the case with that system of reprsentations we call a religion. [Durkheim, 1975b: 34]

Durkheim goes on to point out that these representations are not spontaneous products of the faithful, making conscious and rational choices: They result from the

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interpretations of pre-existing sentiments (which in turn are related to social structures). In order to study religion, these sentiments have to be penetrated: the reprsentations, which only symbolize them and provide them with a superficial shell, have to be discarded (36). Obviously, by 1887, Durkheim has begun to look for elementary forms within the morphology of all religions from ancient times to contemporary modern societies. Yet in this review, he is hesitant again: What is the nature of these sentiments? Spiritual forces? An all-knowing, omnipotent being? Morality? The Uncle has not yet been introduced to the ethnographies of primitive people, so things are not that clear. Nevertheless, the duality in the nature of these sentiments (which he thinks is a universal characteristic) is observed by Durkheim. One species of social sentiments belong to the individual sphere, help the individual conduct his/her daily life, sentiments we have about each other (fear, respect, love and so on). The other species ties the individuals to the wholeness of the collective entity, from this species obligations, laws, rules and constraints arise (36). Contra Guyau, Durkheim holds that the second kind of social sentiments played the key role in the genesis of religions. In 1893, Durkheim publishes his doctoral dissertation, The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim, 1997), where he advances another basic duality between mechanical (pre-modern) solidarity and organic (modern) solidarity, by focusing on how laws, judicial systems and the differentiation of social tasks have evolved. In ancient societies, where there was not a significant division of labor and the principle of sameness prevailed, according to Durkheim, the penal system could not be distinguished from the religious system. The collective being of the society, not the

25

individual, was held sacred, and any criminal action (interpreted with the categories supplied by religion) was seen as a sacrilege against this collectivity. Moreover, because of the secondary position of individual consciousness with respect to the common consciousness, the form of criminal punishment aims, in undifferentiated societies, to physically eliminate the unwanted elements. Durkheim (1997: 120-23) argues that as societies develop, the principles of morality and the system of law becomes independent of the irrational governance of religious sentiments and begin to operate under the guidance of reason. Individual consciousness, in modern societies, develops faster than new forms of collective consciousness, and as we know, Durkheim was ideologically against laissez faire liberalism which presupposes a utilitarian, selfish individual. Nevertheless, the evil is not in the category of the individual itself, Durkheim recognizes how modern forms of faith consecrate the individual and offer new ways of binding the society (122). His search for a civic religion is especially evident in his Sorbonne lectures on professional ethics and the state (Durkheim, 1996). Consequently, in this early period, Durkheim has already arrived at a fundamental postulate, which will always govern the Annals Schools writings on religion, that religion is a social phenomenon, having nothing in real to do with the supernatural. Although he did not offer a systematic account in this pre-ethnography period, most of the basic propositions were already formulized. First, he has already divided religious facts into beliefs and practices, and from these he proposes to arrive at structural arguments, trying to expose the social mechanisms governing religious representations. However, the notion of Church is not adequately developed yet, and I

26

would say that unlike Weber, Durkheim never advanced a satisfactory and critical analysis of power and domination with respect to religion. I think that the main reason is his own religiosity about looking for modern principles around which the French nation would unite in harmony, without falling for the primitive forms of religious conservatism. Another reason might be that according to the Uncle (see especially Durkheim, 1960), the body (the ego, the individual consciousness, or the person) cannot but conform to and dominated by the soul (the superego, the collective consciousness, or the society); the fact that he could not epistemologically transcend this dichotomy has limited his sociological scope until the end of his life. One final (and perhaps most interesting) difference from the later two periods is that Durkheim avoids defining religion scholastically:
At the present time we do not possess any scientific conception of what religion is. In order to do so we would need to have dealt with the problem using the same comparative method that we have applied to the question of crime, and such an attempt has not yet been made. It has often been stated that at any moment in history religion has consisted of the set of beliefs and sentiments of every kind concerning mans links with a being or beings whose nature he regards as superior to his own. But such a definition is manifestly inadequate. In fact there are a host of rules of conduct or ways of thinking that are certainly religious and that, however, apply to relationships of a totally different kind. [Durkheim, 1997: 118]

Although I will talk about the problem of definition more when I come to Elementary Forms, let me draw attention to two points. First, it is obvious that Durkheim feels unconfident, having not yet established a methodological relationship with the reality of religion. Second, however, a comparative approach pinpointing common forms of all religions is adequate, he thinks, because reducing a particular set of practices and beliefs, in a particular time and space, to one single category of religion seems fallacious. Curiously, the ethnographic revelations after late 1890s change his mind.

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2. THE MIDDLE PERIOD (1895-1906) This is not only the period Durkheims sociology (and his sociologie religieuse in particular) arrives at a mature state, it is also the time when his influence inside the French academy spreads and sociology, thanks to him and his disciples, becomes a legitimate discipline. Moreover, Durkheims academic position moves from the periphery (Bordeaux) to the center (Paris), and the Anne Sociologique (AS) is founded (1898), which, by 1906, is inhabited by a crowded group of social scientists attracted by the Durkheimian Gospels. The middle period begins by 1895, the year Durkheim first begins lecturing on religion, and most importantly, the year he reads Robertson Smiths Lectures on the Religion of the Semites which, he would later admit (in his 1906 Sorbonne lectures, see Pickering, 1984: 14), was like a revelation to him. Most probably, Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, his disciples, who have begun reading ethnography to further their understanding of religion before Durkheim, introduced the book to their master. First of all, Durkheim took the distinction between religion and magic from Smith. I will elaborate on that in the third section. It should nevertheless be noted here that it was his students who were more successful in explaining the common structural characteristics of magic and religion. Secondly, Durkheims own distinction between rituals and beliefs was also confirmed in Smith, who gave a priority to the analysis of rituals. For Durkheim, who emphasized the historical effects of the social forces related to religion on the faithfuls representations (mental structures), practices and

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beliefs were equally social things, through which religious functions (like the affirmation of the community) were fulfilled. Thirdly, Smiths theory of totemic sacrifice, where he held that the practice was an act of communion with the supernatural powers with which the clan identified itself, and thus through which the collectivity was re-affirmed was positively (but not uncritically) embraced by Durkheim. Different than Smith, though, the Durkheimians were in a structuralist pursuit of universal schemas of sacrifice which could be discovered in all societies. Hed also reject Smiths naturalist approach in the Elementary Forms. Fourthly, Pickering (1984: 68) suggests that the most important insight Durkheim deduced from Smith can be the following methodological motto which governs the Uncles focus on Australian tribes in his magnum opus: One well-studied case can be used to explain all other similar cases. Hence the search for elementary forms. In his most productive period, Durkheim, with the assistance of his disciples, undergoes a systematic reading of anthropological field researches and historical accounts related to primitive tribes of the past and of the present. On the other hand, he is, mostly through lecturing on education and morality, developing his own ideas on what is to be done?, which led him to the dream of the civic religion of moral individuals. In this period, his metatheory concerning the relationality between people and structures takes its final, but alas, most scholastic shape. The disconnected propositions advanced here and there until 1895 are first systematized in The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim, 1982) published that year. There, Durkheim makes

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clear how sociology should break with prenotions, common sense explanations, and with the speculations of psychology and philosophy which cause the academic to close his eyes to the social and to the historical by focusing on only the individual and the mind. For Durkheim, the social world people are born into act upon them, dictating on them and constraining their choices of belief and action; and the nature of this social world, its structures and functions, its history, is the actual object of the sociology of science, without which it is not possible to have a meaningful understanding of what individuals are doing. Durkheims sociology passionately wants to know what external forces are influential in different spheres of life.
A social fact is identifiable through the power of external coercion which it exerts or is capable of exerting upon individuals... [I]f a mode of behavior existing outside the consciousness of individuals becomes general, it can only do so by exerting pressure upon them. [Durkheim, 1982: 56-57]

He has a lot of writings in that period concerning religion. As I have no space (and no time) to go into a full-blown analysis of minute details, I will only deal with the most commonly cited ones which directly address a number of important issues in his sociology of religion. In 1898, Durkheim publishes Individualism and Intellectuals (Durkheim, 1975c), where he deals with the positive and negative aspects of the individualist thought of his time, also declaring what the mission of the intellectuals should be in an era where religion is losing its binding power. In this important article Durkheim posits that symbols, rites, temples and priests are only the external apparatus, the superficial aspects of religion:
Essentially, [religion] is nothing other than a system of collective beliefs and practices that have a special authority. [Durkheim, 1975c: 66]

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Therefore, whether we call the system religion or give it another name, the crucial point is to recognize and account for the indispensable functions this mechanism has to fulfill, for the society to be able to stand on its feet (and following that, for its people to live a sane, meaningful life to which they can be committed). According to Durkheim, these functions are basically twofold: 3 (1) At a macro level, a system of communication is provided through which the society defines and understands itself. (2) At a micro level, social relationships are symbolized and dramatized, sentiments are created; people are supplied, as they believe, sacrifice, commit themselves and suffer, with strength and confidence, a hold on to the world.
Once a goal is pursued by a whole people, it acquires, as a result of this unanimous adherence, a sort of moral supremacy which raises it far above private goals and thereby gives it a religious character. On the other hand, it is clear that a society cannot hold together unless there exists among its members a certain intellectual and moral community. [Durkheim, 1975c: 66]

And in the rest of the essay, Durkheim defends a form of individualism, which, once its system of collective beliefs and practices is established in the modern world, would supply the highly differentiated societies of our world with a novel ideal of morality. The consecration of the individual about which Rousseau and the French Revolution had been talking, very different than the idealization of the selfish, miser, profit-seeking individual of utilitarianism, would then enable a moral and rational reconstructing of the judicial and governmental system. A few years later, both in his 1902 preface to the second edition of The Division of Labor in Society (Durkheim, 1997: xxxi-lix), and in his lectures he had been giving at around the same time (see Durkheim, 1996) the Uncle elaborates on his social engineering project of
3 And regardless of the complexity of the social structures, these functions do not change. Elementary Forms makes use of them again, in the explanation of totemism.

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the reign of this moral individualism, by affirming the importance of the state and patriotism and by his proposal of occupational corporations. Therefore, as he also openly declares in the article, his candidate for the new religion of humanity is individualist morality (Durkheim, 1975c: 67). The article curiously ends with his call to other intellectuals into a vanguardist solidarity around the new religion, a call which also silently condemns the rifts created among intellectuals after the Dreyfus controversy:
In these circumstances, does not our duty appear to be clearly marked out? All those who believe in the value, or merely in the necessity, of the moral revolution accomplished a century ago, have the same interest: they must forget the differences which divide them and combine their efforts so as to hold positions already won... As for today, the urgent task, which must be put before all else, is that of saving our moral patrimony; once that is secure, we shall see that it is made to prosper. [Durkheim, 1975c: 72]

Another key article, published in the second volume of Anne Sociologique in 1899 marks the development (and, further scholasticization) of his sociology of religion. In Concerning to Definition of Religious Phenomena (Durkheim, 1975d), an article which can be said to be a rehearsal for the Elementary Forms. Durkheim returns to the problem of definition he left unanswered in 1893. This time, with regard to the question of defining the exact boundaries of the field of the religious, he is bold enough to state that, [n]o matter how unpretentious this problem may be, it will be seen that the manner in which it is solved has some bearing on the general direction the science will take (Durkheim, 1975d: 75). He states that, in total agreement with the premises he has set in Rules, the definition of religion first requires breaking with ordinary, commonsense interpretations, and the idea of the mysterious and the supernatural should be abandoned by the scientist. He investigates Spencers subjectivist definitions, and

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other definitions which stress on the belief in a god, criticizing them for not being able to embrace religion in its complexity. The definition should not confine itself with only divinely beliefs, but should be aware of the existence of rites and beliefs autonomous from the dictates of the supernatural. Durkheim writes that the distinction made between sacred and profane things is very often independent of the idea of the god (Durkheim, 1975d: 87). Therefore, given the contents of religions are infinitely diverse and inexhaustible with a definition, [o]nly the exterior and apparent form of religious phenomena is immediately accessible to observation; it is to this therefore that we must apply ourselves (emphasis mine; 87). One fundamental form from which religious facts can be extracted is representations, which are themselves divided between those belonging to obligatory dispositions and those belonging to daily opinions, and which are mutually related to social structures. Thus, by 1899, the duality between the sacred and profane is inscribed into his sociology of religion. Next, representations manifest themselves, via the individuals, as beliefs and practices, determining the second and third forms a possible definition of religion should include. Durkheim (92) adds that collective beliefs and practices of religion always go together and cannot be separated during the scientific analysis, meaning that religious thought and action are complementary and inseparable. However, while Durkheim holds that beliefs and practices should not be separated, his own opposition of mind against body seems to undermine this proposition. On the one hand, the constraints of collective representations are said to be mediated through collective states of the mind, repressing this-worldly pleasures of the flesh. On the other hand, bodily

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participation itself is said to be no different than beliefs. Apparently, Durkheim required a more social understanding of the body which would abandon dualities. Nevertheless, Durkheim recognizes that the faithful always possess personal moral codes, personal attitudes which differ from the collective morality and offers this final definition: 4
[P]henomena held to be religious consist in obligatory beliefs, connected with clearly defined practices which are related to given objects of those beliefs... In addition, the optional beliefs and practices which concern similar objects or objects assimilated into the previous ones, will also be called religious phenomena. [emphasis in original; Durkheim, 1975d: 92, 98]

I will try to show, as I look at the third period, to what extent this definition is revised (and why) in Elementary Forms. Certainly, in this middle period, when Durkheim was feverishly producing along with other members of the school, he seems to think that he has found the Sociologists Stone in religion. He writes, in the preface to the second volume of the AS, that religion contains in itself from the very beginning, even if in an indistinct state, all the elements which in dissociating themselves from it, articulating themselves, and combining with one another in a thousand ways, have given rise to the various manifestations of collective life... At any rate, a great number of problems change their aspects completely as soon as their connections with the sociology of religion are recognized (Durkheim, 1964: 350351). However, in the third period, and along with the sophistication of the writings of other members of the school, a different interpretation is possible. Although his theory is haunted by an organicist and evolutionist fallacy and shadowed by a non4 Durkheims difficulty resembles the contemporary state of Quantum Theory. There actually is a Theory of Everything today, but the mathematics is very crude if not forced and the number of equations is unnecessarily large, where one equation is very hard to transform into the other. There is no aesthetics, as Stephan Hawking said once. Nevertheless, while it might be possible one day to arrive at a simple, beautiful formula of the universe, it will be dangerous and theoretically unsound to long for the same in sociology.

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reflexive objectivism, Durkheim had laid the very first bricks of a structuralist and rationalist analysis of the social; and many aspects of this theory helped Mauss, LviStrauss, Evans-Pritchard, and even Douglas and Bourdieu among many others, carry on the tradition by ever rebuilding it. 3. THE FINAL FORMULATION (1906-1917) In this final period, Durkheim fully incorporates the empirical data on ancient religions (and tribal religions of his time) into the theoretical framework he has more or less consistently established since late 1880s. In passing, it should also be noted that Durkheims empirical data concerning religion consisted of the ethnographies of colonial administrators, officers, aristocrats and priests, and his nephew in most cases collected and organized this material for Durkheim. His almost ascetic academic labor continues in his final years. Before the Elementary Forms, Durkheims final formulation begins with the 1906-7 Sorbonne lectures on religion, titled Religion: The Origins. Pickering (1984: 79-80) writes that Durkheim began by restating the problem of definition of religion as he did in the 1899 article I have mentioned above. The opposition between sacred and profane is more strongly emphasized and Durkheim underlines the differences between magic and religion in more detail. For the first time in this period, he develops a wellstudied criticism of the animist and naturist theorists of religion like Herbert Spencer and Max Mller and enriches his previous privileging of totemism as the simplest and thus most elementary form of religion, out of which, through evolution, all religions have emerged. In the lectures, Durkheim goes on to elaborate on how collective representations of religion are in fact the transfiguration of society, and thus how

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religious facts are far from being illusions. For a second time, Durkheim defines religion as a system of beliefs and practices related to sacred things beliefs and practices common to a concrete collectivity. Nevertheless, the sharpest and most self-confident definition will be the one found in Elementary Forms. Again, Durkheim has a lot of writings in this period; he focuses on philosophy and pragmatism, he develops his theory (and, most probably, practice, being a bornlecturer) of education, pedagogy and moral discipline. During the war, which ruined his own life by stealing his son and many of his students (some of whom were beloved acolytes of AS) from him, which quickened his death, he wrote pieces on the causes of the war, on patriotism and nationalism. However, for the purposes of this paper, I am going to close the discussion with a brief review of Durkheims pathbreaking book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, originally published in 1912. The book, in fact, was being written by the whole Anne School since 1895. Important parts on magic, sacrifice, prayer, rituals, totemism, etc. were already worked out separately by either himself or some other member of the sociological collective. The subtitle of the original French edition was The Totemic System in Australia, which was replaced later in the first English edition in 1915 by A Study in Religious Sociology. It was only after 80 years that J. W. Swains hurried translation had finally been superceded by Karen E. Fields brilliant re-translation (Durkheim, 1995). Elementary Forms (EF) caused a lot of controversy within the French academy, there were as many booers as there were applauders. Implicitly, the book is still

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another (and perhaps the strongest) political intervention by Durkheim, inside a political field where Third Republic modernism and religious conservatism clashed. I first want to list some of the distinctive aspects of the approach advanced in the book, in comparison to his previous work, especially to the 1906-7 lectures. Firstly, EF makes extensive use of Australian Aboriginal material. Although his disciples have developed a similar methodology before him, EF supercedes all previous religious studies of the school in volume and detail. Secondly, following this, the one well-studied case formula is the backbone of the whole argument. However, it should be noted that EF is weak and not very promising in encouraging a comparative analysis when it comes to contemporary religions, where even the category religion becomes highly problematic to use when dealing with nations, ethnicities, economic markets and political-cultural conflicts. Thirdly, Durkheim greatly expands on rituals and beliefs (Book II and III), especially his analysis of imititative, representative and piacular rites is a great innovation. Fourthly and lastly, before EF, Durkheim has not ever undergone a parallel discussion of epistemology and religion (Book II, Chapter 7), and the book in a way becomes the revision of The Rules of Sociological Method. Let me begin with Durkheims third attempt for defining religion. And although in the 1906-7 lectures he mentioned, in passing, that the exact definition of the essence of religion could only be possible after a rigorous analysis of the empirical data at hand (Pickering, 1984: 79), EF nails down its working boundaries from the very beginning. We can almost hear a mathematical QED at the end of Book I, Chapter I:
A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. [emphasis in original; Durkheim, 1995: 44]

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The idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of the Church, he adds right after that, and thus swallows up the key: He is know in an underwater steel cage, handcuffed and chained, but being ignorant of Houdinis famous survival tricks, he has got only water to breathe. And so he keeps to his definition. Compared to the first definition, which was too shy and deficient, this definition pinpoints religion directly, not its phenomena and gives equal emphasis to beliefs and practices. The second part of the 1899 definition is totally discarded and the domain of the sacred becomes prominent. Compared to the second definition of 1906, the idea of the Church is introduced. From my point of view, there is a dangerous reductionism at work here: Deciding to privilege the sacred pole of the dichotomy, Durkheim marginalizes (if not totally obliterates) both the subjective dimension of agents reception of collective representations (which may lead, under the influence of diverse external factors, to something other than the consecration of the community) and the practical relevance of the profane for the religious field. Durkheim sure does not deny that there is always an individual dimension to religion, but the decisive emphasis on obligation and coercion casts a shadow on his recognition. He is not equipped, for example, to talk about the relationship between agents religious commitments (if you wish, their religious identities or, from a different perspective, their religious habitus) and economy, politics, and even lifestyles. Marcel Mauss, after his uncles death, could write more independently: For one thing, he redefined Durkheims dichotomies which never seemed to make peace.

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Mauss also abandoned Durkheims elimination of body from the constraints of collective representations, by bringing it back as both a structured and structuring mediator of religious or other sentiments. religious or other sentiments. Noting the lack of that particular connection in the Uncle, let me return to EF. A serious analytical and epistemological tension in Durkheim surfaces when we suspect Durkheims definitional recognition of the equality between rites and beliefs. According to my interpretation, Durkheims proposed scientific intervention in EF aims to arrive at the knowledge of certain forces or mechanisms that govern religions (on not only them, the ideal society of Durkheim would depend on a similar system). Certainly, these forces cannot be directly found in reality, they have to be deduced by relating religious facts to other religious facts and arrive at irreducible facts like representations (or sentiments) which would guide the analysis. In addition, these mental structures of religion cannot be explained without relating them to peoples material needs, socioeconomic conditions and other external factors, i.e., social structures. At that point, Durkheims dilemma is this: He wants to assert that religion in thought (beliefs) is as concrete and real as religion in action (rites), that there is a parity between them. Both group of facts are manifestations of representations. However, from what Durkheim tells us about the workings of obligation, discipline and constraint, it seems that the mind, like a categorical imperative which Durkheim cannot get rid of, is the primary channel through which the society asserts its belief-system and thus fences around the playground of actions. Pickering also thinks that the primary status is given to beliefs, noting that they are treated earlier in EF than rituals:

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This gesture ties in with [Durkheims] concept of collective reprsentations being essential for a society to exist. Belief of some kind, there has to be: ritual not so. In some modern forms of religion ritual scarcely exists... [Pickering, 1984: 379]

For one thing, I find Durkheims treatment of religion as a symbolic-material source which supplies people with an endurable, meaningful world illuminating and promising for later reconstructions. I also do not wish to confront his insight that affirmation through beliefs has real consequences for the shaping of the social world. In fact, compared to Marxs quick rejection of the ideology of religion, Durkheim delves a layer deeper when he shows that, despite the irrationality of a particular cosmology (take, for example, the science-fictional theology of Nation of Islam), its related representations, once thrown into circulation, have non-illusory, real consequences (see also Jones, 1998). The problem lies in the persistence of Cartesian divisions in his thought, however sociologized they might be. EF also offers precious research-oriented guidelines for the investigation of the reality of society or of collective entities of smaller scales. As I read Durkheim, the question of society becomes not a matter of philosophical impossibility as Laclau would argue, but a practical question. Yes, we would today have to admit that numerous practical logics which supply people with bodily-mental (or, mentalbodily) dispositions by which they feel at home do not operate as smoothly as Durkheims collective representations. Nevertheless, society would still act upon people, and die once people cease to believe in it, and the knowledge of this process would be available not for a logocentric truths sake, but for the sake of making a critical sense of the objective relationships studied in the real world.

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CONCLUSION According to Durkheim, very unlike Webers verstehen approach or Marxs occasional voluntarism (the possibilities of species-being), agents bestow their lives with various meanings, which are, most of the time, before considering their relations to the material aspects of the world, explained by the dictates of a symbolic order. Here, Durkheim cannot escape scholasticism in establishing a relationality between agents and structures: The meanings he thinks the faithful give to their religion and the meanings he himself attributes to concepts like system, organism, religion are the products of his often fallacious armchair perspective. This perspective is also marked by his uncritical affirmation of certain repressive institutions, which in turn is related to his personal ethico-political dispositions (moral individualism, corporatism, civic religion and so on). Having said that, let me make a similar threefold overview of his religious sociology as I have done in Marx: 1. Durkheims insights about the wrong-headed voluntarism of possessive individualism and the necessity to break with prenotions and commonsensical knowledge is an important insight which suggests to rethink the sociological limits of talking about freedom or autonomy in action. On the other hand, Durkheim couldnt complete the break he was talking about, lacking the subjectivist touch his strong objectivism begged for. Therefore, his agents cannot bring the sacred into their individual, everyday lives, nor can they elaborate and improvise, using the profane, on collective representations. In fact, because of the consequences, the latter may not even be desirable. Durkheims faithful agent needs to become a total man who

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should not be epistemologically separated in terms of what he represents physiologically, psychologically and sociologically. 2. Leaving the problems of organicism and evolutionism aside, it was Durkheims structuralist insights and his talents of objectivist analysis which enabled him to propose a sociology which would try to establish a relationship between mental and social structures. Although he tried and did his best from his armchair, his definitions and uses of concepts were not sufficiently research-oriented and they remained logocentric. Compared to Webers domination analysis, Durkheim either insistently ignored the question of power, or when he recognizes its negative effects, power exists in unwanted social orders or those which have been history. He seems to hold that there are forms of domination which should be welcomed. Another weak point of Durkheims objectivism in his religious sociology is the over-burdening of certain categories like religion, and for the sake of identifying universal forms, the sacrificing of complexities. 3. As I have already mentioned, to have a better grasp of doing the sociology of people and structures, Durkheims approach requires the insight which rejects any epistemological division between objectivism and subjectivism, explaining the world by equally seeing things and persons from both ways. In summing up, I want to note that sociologie religieuse is still able to communicate with our contemporary world in two ways: First, its historicization of concepts and categories and the bridges it discovers between religion and science may inspire a reflexive sociology which is capable of turning the very tools it uses upon its

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own. Second, it suggests a way, among few others, to objectify a symbolic economy of beliefs and practices. At least two reasons to remember Mr. Sui Generis. REFERENCES (FOR PART TWO) Bellah, Robert (1973) Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Durkheim, Emile (1997) The Division of Labor in Society, The Free Press, New York and London. Durkheim, Emile (1996) Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, Routledge, London and New York. Durkheim, Emile (1995) The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, The Free Press, New York and London. Durkheim, Emile (1982) The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method, Steven Lukes (ed.), The Free Press, New York and London. Durkheim, Emile (1975a) Review. Herbert Spencer Ecclesiastical Institutions, in W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston. Durkheim, Emile (1975b) Review. Guyau LIrrligion de lavenir, in W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston. Durkheim, Emile (1975c) Individualism and Intellectuals, in W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston. Durkheim, Emile (1975d) Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena, in W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston. Durkheim, Emile (1964) Preface, in Kurt Wolff (ed.), Emile Durkheim 1858-1917: A Collection of Essays, Ohio University Press, Ohio. Durkheim, Emile (1960) The Dualism of Human Nature and Its Social Conditions, in Emile Durkheim, Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, edited by Kurt Wolff, Harper Torchbooks, New York. Jones, Sue Stedman (1998) The Concept of Belief in The Elementary Forms, in N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering and W. Watts Miller (eds.), On Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Routledge, London and New York. Lukes, Steven (1972) Emile Durkheim, His Life and His Work: A Historical and Critical Study, Harper and Row, New York. Pickering, W. S. F. (1984) Durkheims Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston. Pickering, W. S. F. (1975) Durkheim on Religion: A Selection of Readings with Bibliographies, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London and Boston.

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STRUCTURING RELIGION
PART THREE: WEBER
Of the three founding fathers of the sociology of religion considered in this trilogy of papers, Max Weber can safely be presented as the most comprehensive contributor, in terms of both the sheer amount of works dedicated to the subject (and into those studies, a will to cover every religious system was inscribed) and the analytical complexity and the theoretical innovation these works have demonstrated. Besides the fact that social scientists still tackle with the Weberian hypotheses about the origins of Western capitalism, most of the contemporary theories of religion, religious organization and religious action which have been well-received within the academic field are built upon Weberian foundations. Whether any of them has been able to surpass is an interesting topic of research with which I have no space to deal here. In Marx, the problem was not that the theoretical foundations with which he approached religion were bound top crumble to dust, but rather, he did not pay enough attention to the complex world of religious belief and action. Therefore, most of Marxs propositions concerning religion, regardless of the strength of the ring of truth around them, remained unsubstantiated. In Durkheim, religion dominated the center of his sociology, theoretically and empirically, but two factors seemed to obstruct the plausibility of his project for modern religions, Eastern or Western: Firstly, his overwhelming focus on ancient religions and magic for the purpose of seeking elementary and universal forms of religion (which, the Annals School held, are the key to modern religions) led Durkheim to take the complexity of

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contemporary religion for granted. Secondly, and related with the first point, his ethico-political devotion to a civil religion caused him to undermine the question of power, injustice and domination in religion. Good old Weber, on the other hand, started with the most complex forms of religion, be it contemporary Christianity, Judaism or Buddhism, and had an as complex theory as the phenomena he analyzed. On the other hand, somewhat contributing to Marxs analysis, he demonstrated how rationalization can be dominating and oppressive in also religion. I guess this latter innovation has been one of the provoking sociological ideas of this century with respect to the study of religion. Nevertheless, the thickness and complexity of Webers studies on religion are both his strength and his weakness. As he did not have an epistemological notion of sociology as a science whose production of knowledge is essentially superior to that of the agents being analyzed, Weber was certainly not a theoreticist and offered differing and sometimes contradicting interpretations and explanations of particular historical contexts he explored. He followed a certain version of verstehen sociology and had a very different understanding of meaning than the contemporary or previous sociologists; however, he also made use of a critical-structuralist approach. Although it is possible to talk about a thematic unity of his work (e.g., see Schroeder, 1992: 1-32), it is too hard to pinpoint a theoretical unity in Weber: Hence the long-debated controversy about his ideal-types model. I also had difficulties in this paper in bringing together his central positions on religion in a practical way, analyzed under certain periods, like I did in the Marx and Durkheim papers. I guess the main reason for that is, in the previous papers, once I

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had a feeling (verified by secondary literature) that Marxs or Durkheims writings about religion can be traced consistently and chronologically, I saw it appropriate to use the intellectual periodizations offered by the secondary literature. Whereas in Weber, I not only failed to find a consensus on a simple periodization of his works (which would make things easier for me), but also encountered epistemologically differing accounts of his theory which chose to emphasize this or that aspect of the whole sociological project. Bryan Turner (1992; 1996), for example, talks about at least four versions of Webers Protestant Ethic thesis, himself assuming a fifth position which allies Marx with Weber. For all these reasons, I will follow this plan: I will first talk shortly about Webers troublesome life; then, in the second part of the paper introduce the basic theoretical framework of his sociology of religion (with a special emphasis on the agent-structure axis) along with a number of Webers texts to substantiate the arguments. 1. MAX WEBER: THE MAN 5 He was born in Erfurt, Thuringia, in 1864, to a father trained as a jurist and municipal counselor who later became a prominent right-wing liberal politician in the new Reichstag, and a cultured, Protestant mother with a similar bourgeois background. He grew up in an intellectual environment and at very early ages, had become a heavy reader of philosophy, theology and classical literature. When he was 18, he was enrolled in the University of Heidelberg, studying law like his father, mastering at dueling and heavy drinking, and was hard-working, too, a period when

5 I have made use of two key texts in relating to Webers biography: Gerth and Mills (1964: 3-31) introduction and the biography in Cosers (1977: 234-242) famous reader.

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he identified himself with his father. Later, Weber was influenced by his uncle, Hermann Baumgarten and his aunt, during his military service. He began to question the authoritarian liberalism of the Bismarckian era, and thanks to his aunt, he began to be more involved in Protestant virtues and religious life. After his return to home in 1884 to study in the University of Berlin, his relationship with his perfectly bourgeois father became worse. Weber began his career as an economic historian, and until 1893, he was studying frantically, planning his daily schedules by the clock and disciplining himself. He produced an incredible amount of historical work in that period. In 1893, he was appointed to a chair in economics in the University of Freiburg and married Marianne Schnitger, with whom he would have a happy and intellectual relationship until the end of his life. Until his nervous breakdown in 1897, Weber became a distinguished name inside the German academic field, especially through his intellectually striking nationalist political position (though he was also active as a liberal, and was critical of right-wing conservatism). Not until 1903 could Weber recover from his mental disturbance and go back to work. When he did, his performance once again became astonishing. Most of his significant work on religion and on sociological theory are products of this decade, completed (rather, half-completed) until his retirement in 1915. Yet in the period when he was politically most active as a nationalist, he put the finishing touches to his studies on religion by completing The Religion of China, The Religion of India and Ancient Judaism. Unfortunately, he did not live long enough to complete the enormous Economy and Society.

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Though carrying certain characteristics of the German academic field of the early twentieth century, Weber had his peculiarities.
Always and everywhere, Weber followed only the call of his own demon, refusing to be bridled by political expediency. He was first and foremost his own man. Although he repeatedly entered the political arena, he was not truly a political man if we define such a man (as Weber did) as one who is able to make compromises in the pursuit of his aims. ... As a result, Weber found himself isolated in his political activities. He never qualified as a good party man. [Coser, 1977: 243]

On the other hand, his relationship with religion is also interesting. Like Durkheim and Marx, he too was never a believer in any religious teaching, and being an ardent rationalist he did not give any scientific credit to propositions concerning the supernatural. However, like Durkheim, he was always uneasy with the scientific rationalism, whose development and institutionalization was inevitable and unstoppable as capitalist political economy and the logic of bureaucracy became the name of the game, conquered the territories of religion:
The tension between religion and intellectual knowledge definitely comes to the fore wherever rational, empirical knowledge has consistently worked through the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism. For then science encounters the claims of the ethical postulate that the world is a God-ordained, and hence somehow meaningfully and ethically oriented, cosmos. ... Every increase of rationalism in empirical science increasingly pushes religion from the rational into the irrational realm; but only today does religion become the irrational or anti-rational suprahuman power. [Weber, 1964c: 350-351]

What did that mean for Weber? As I gather, given the fact that throughout history (and still today), a decisive majority of any civilization had been this way or that way religious, Weber thought that the meaning-bestowal of people on life through religion, beyond the debate about the supernatural, had always been (and is today) an indispensable element of their being. As religious structures themselves became allembracing, oppressive and bureaucratized, and science progressively gained the upper hand in time, the religious culture of ordinary people, in Webers (1964c: 356) words,

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mans emancipation from the organically prescribed cycle of natural life, was threatened. Weber was never a romanticist though, despite the intellectual influence, and thus he could never transcend his own dilemma between irrationality and rationality in the brave new world:
Culture becomes ever more senseless as a locus of imperfection, of injustice, of suffering, of sin, of futility. ... Viewed from a purely ethical point of view, the world has to appear fragmentary and devalued in all those instances when judged in the light of the religious postulate of a divine meaning of existence. This devaluation results from the conflict between the rational claim and reality, between the rational ethic and the partly rational, and partly irrational values. ... The need for salvation responds to this devaluation by becoming more other-worldly, more alienated from all other structured forms of life, and, in exact parallel, by confining itself to the specific religious essence. This reaction is the stronger the more systematic the thinking about the meaning of the universe becomes, the more the external organization of the world is rationalized, and the more the conscious experience of the worlds irrational content is sublimated. [Weber, 1964c: 357]

Curiously, some scholars, partly moving from this dilemma, partly referring to Webers much-disputed stress on the influence of Christian teachings on the origins of Western capitalism, find a certain religiosity, or rather, spiritualism in Weber himself. Wilhelm Hennis (1998), for example, referring to the influence of William James idealistic studies on the psychology of religion, claims that Weber had a spiritualistic theory of the origins of capitalism. Hennis, in building his argument, quotes passages like the following (from the German edition of Protestant Ethic):
Religious experience is as such of course irrational, like every experience. In its highest, mystic form it is precisely the experience kat exochn and as James has very nicely elaborated distinguished by its absolute incommunicability: it has a specific character and appears as cognition which cannot be adequately reproduced with our linguistic and conceptual apparata. [cited in Hennis, 1998: 90]

Nevertheless, I hold that attempting to abstract Webers interpretation of the influence of ideas upon actions is not meaningful, because if there is a unity to be defined in Webers theory, it can only be understood once we point out that in any sphere of human activity, beliefs are as real and material as actions.

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On the other hand, Martin Albrow (1990) has another claim, emphasizing Webers religiosity. After noting that Weber was writing in a Christian tradition, Albrow underlines Webers own contradictions, who writes:
It is true that in respect of religion I am absolutely unmusical and have neither the need nor the ability to erect some spiritual edifice of a religious character in myself thats not on, or I reject it. But on closer inspection I am neither antireligious nor irreligious. In this respect, I feel myself to be a cripple, an amputee, whose inner fate it is to have to admit this honestly and to come to terms with it so as not to lapse into romantic swindle. [cited in Albrow, 1990: 16]

In fact, from a psychoanalytical point of view, the differences between Webers devoted mother and his pragmatic, rational father may have influenced his own analytical dichotomies (like conscience vs. responsibility, irrationality vs. rationality, culture vs. nature, and so on) which remained insurmountable within his framework. 6 Albrow takes this a little further, claiming that Weber himself possessed the spirit he was talking about, that is why he understood it so well. According to Albrow, although Weber valued the modern scientific methodology, he opposed to the dictation of values and mores upon people through rationality, thinking that science was not equipped to step into that domain. Sociology could only offer explanations which try to stamp orderliness onto a chaotic, unpredictable portion of reality. Weber, for that reason, agrees with Tolstoy, and like him, silent about the answer of the question Tolstoy asked when he said: Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us, What shall we do and how shall we live? I guess that is where Durkheims religiosity and Webers differ:

In fact, his nervous breakdown in 1897 occurred shortly after a very serious quarrel with his father, where he blamed his father to be cruel against his mother. Max Weber, Sr. died a month after this regretful encounter, and a few weeks after, the son fell ill, an illness which would last 5 years.

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Weber cannot think of a scientific formula for the modern society through which a civic morality could be designed. 2. MAIN TENETS OF THE WEBERIAN SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION I will not be delving into the depths of Webers whole project. In a more delicate analysis, one would have to account for the relevance of his history of economics with his analysis of religion. And Webers relationship with social psychology is also neglected in this brief treatise. As I interpret it, Webers sociology of religion is founded upon three key concepts: Verstehen, meaning, ideal-type. Once the proper epistemological relationality is established between these three concepts, Webers sociology of religion is easier to grasp. However, it should also be noted that the resultant theory of knowledge in Weber is not a secure guarantee to the truth of social processes. Rather, Weber holds that he offers only some of the possible explanations of the social through endowing it with constructed orders and regularities. Verstehen is a tool of sociological research which aims at providing more insight than can be had, even by the most precise statistical proof, of the high correlation between a given situation and corresponding course of behavior. Through verstehen, the sociologist asks not only why a certain action has taken place but also why a certain behavior pattern continues to be followed. For Weber, even though the process of verstehen is essentially subjective, the sociologist should engage in a certain degree of detachment for the method to work. Nevertheless, Weber is careful also to stress that despite this level of detachment, interpretation will always be more

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fragmentary and hypothetical than a similar process of causal interpretation in the natural sciences. The bread and butter of verstehen in Weberian sociology is, of course, meaning. Understanding exposes various meanings that are collectively, individually or causally bestowed upon social processes. Here, Weber distinguishes between two kinds of understanding (Weber, 1969): First, we may understand the meaning of a given type of behavior intellectually if the behavior is rational. Such rationality depends on the behavior pattern unfolding in a manner that to us appears to be logical, i.e., it conforms to a predictable sequence of behavior. Second, we may achieve verstehen by empathy of a given type of behavior if such behavior appears to be irrational. Such empathy is achieved by projecting oneself into the irrational situation and experiencing its emotional impact. Furthermore, intellectual and emphatic understanding, in Webers framework, lead to another pair: These two may either result with actual understanding, which is roughly the commonsensical, superficial understanding of familiar actions (e.g., the explanation of near-universal gestures) or with explanatory understanding, where the sociologist digs a level deeper and tries to uncover the motivation behind a certain action (rational or irrational). Here is Webers passion in his sociology of religion: How to explain the irrationality of religious beliefs and actions? And more challengingly, how to account for the motives behind faith? Weber does not promise a garden of Eden here: Basically, any concern with motives is bound to remain incomplete, since even the individual engaging in a certain for of behavior may not always be aware of his or her motivation. Nevertheless, when it comes to religion,

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accounting for motives for Weber may be posed as a methodological question: First of all, they are not mystical essences coming from God (yet I should admit that there is a certain contradiction here: Webers relativism would also allow us to say that we will never be scientifically sure whether God was involved or not), rather, in different historical context, various factors should all be considered together. In Weber, there is an assumption of a social matrix in which ordinary believers give a religious meaning to their lives, but their capacity to do so (in terms of devotion, innovation, heresy or suppression) is limited and constrained under a host of factors which also require the introduction of a structural analysis and the recognition of power and domination. Thus we encounter with the third pillar of Webers metatheory: In all cases in his sociology of religion, he mobilizes his famous ideal types in order to produce statements about the social which in turn establish the relationality between agents and structures. For long years, scholars, from a pretty scholastic point of view, tried to discover the true philosophical foundation of his theory of ideal types, neglecting the fundamental fact that Weber had a very practical, not theoreticist, intention in suggesting this theory. In Weber, an ideal type is constructed in three stages: (1) The sociologist begins with a distinctive subject matter, meaningful action as defined by social actors bestowal of meaning; (2) Then the sociologist limits the category of meaningful action to a particular time and place; (3) Finally s/he selects particular elements of this group of facts and constructs a concept determined by the historical and practical question which is posed during the investigation.
[T]he same historical phenomenon may be in one aspect feudal, in another patrimonial, in another bureaucratic, and in still another charismatic. In order to give a precise meaning

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to these terms, it is necessary for the sociologist to formulate pure ideal types of the corresponding forms of action which in each case involve the highest possible degree of logical integration by virtue of their complete adequacy on the level of the meaning. ... Theoretical differentiation is possible in sociology only in terms of ideal or pure types. It goes without saying that in addition it is convenient for the sociologist from time to time to employ average types of an empirical statistical character, concepts which do not require methodological discussion. But when reference is made to typical cases, the term should always be understood, unless otherwise stated, as meaning ideal types, which may in turn be rational or irrational as the case may be... but in any case are always constructed with a view to adequacy on the level of meaning. [Weber, 1978: 20]

As, most of the time in sociological investigation, full-consciousness of the actors of their subjective actions and meaning-bestowal is not the case, or perfect regularities are nowhere to be found, ideal types assist the sociologist to proceed as if systematization is adequate. In the later stages of the sociologists analysis, it may turn out that the constructions are relevant, or s/he may need to try a different approach. Metatheoretically, Weber makes use of two species of ideal types, (1) those concerning agents behaviors, actions or motives (or a certain personality may be presented as an ideal type) and (2) structural ideal types. Most of the time, his analysis of world religions makes use of specific ideal types designed for a particular religious spatio-temporal scene. Rarely, though, he elaborates on all-embracing structural ideal types. Let me give a number of examples from his work to substantiate the argument. Encountered with the historical question of the transformation of the symbolic realm of the belief in the supernatural (from magic to divine faith), the development of religious organization, and later rationalization of such patterns of organization, Weber makes a distinction between two ideal types, magician and priest, which are then related to corresponding structural ideal types of sorcery and cult:

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The sociological aspect of [the differentiation into gods and demons] is the rise of the priesthood as something distinct from practitioners of magic. Applied to reality, this contrast is fluid, as are almost all sociological phenomena. Even the theoretical differentiae of these types are not unequivocally determinable. Following the distinction between cult and sorcery, one may contrast those professional functionaries who influence the gods by means of worship with those magicians who coerce demons by magical means... [Weber, 1978: 425]

He goes on to list, one by one, the differences between beliefs and actions of a priest and a magician. This is not an isolationist account, though, because Weber smartly ties these occupational differences to the way Buddhism, Christianity or Confucianism differentiate themselves from magic.
The full development of both a metaphysical rationalization and a religious ethic requires an independent and professionally trained priesthood, permanently occupied with the cult and with the practical problems involved in the cure of the souls. [Weber, 1978: 425]

The analysis would then deepen as we approach the emergence of capitalism in Europe and Weber goes into the analysis of monopolization of religion by a clerical bureaucracy and the homological relationship of these ideal types with the rationalization of commerce and the domination of commercial relationships by a certain kind of economic ethic rooted in Calvinism and Puritanism. Later, he would expand on this latter ideal type:
What is meant by the economic ethic of a religion will become increasingly clear during the course of our presentation. This term does not bring into focus the ethical theories of theological compendia; for however important such compendia may be undercertain circumstances, they merely serve as tools of knowledge. The term economic ethic points to the practical impulses for action which are founded in the psychological and pragmatic contexts of religions. The following presentation may be sketchy, but it will make obvious how complicated the structures and how many-sided the conditions of a concrete economic ethic usually are. Furthermore, it will show that externally similar forms of economic organization may agree with very different economic ethics and, according to the unique character of their economic ethics, how such forms of economic organization may produce very different historical results. [Weber, 1964a: 267-268]

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In another example which is also related with the above one, Weber distinguishes between the prophet and the priest and also elaborates on different types of prophecy. This is where he introduces his analysis of charisma and carries it on to contemporary secular politics of modern society.
We shall understand prophet to mean a purely individual bearer of charisma, who by virtue of his mission proclaims a religious doctrine or divine commandment. ... For our purposes here, the personal call is the decisive element distinguishing the prophet from the priest. The latter lays claim to authority by virtue of his service in a sacred tradition, while the prophets claim is based on personal revelation and charisma. It is no accident that almost no prophets have emerged from the priestly class. ... The priest, in clear contrast, dispenses salvation by virtue of his office. Even in cases in which personal charisma may be involved, it is the hierarchical office that confers legitimate authority upon the priest as a member of a corporate enterprise of salvation. [Weber, 1993: 46-47]

Weber also notes that almost all prophets were associated by the use of magic in the form of miracles, which further strengthen their individuality. As is well known, almost all clerical bodies (or similar offices of authority) in all religions had been at least suspicious (if not actively hostile) against claims about sorcery. Interestingly, Weber follows the evolution of his ideal types and discovers a connection between religious intellectuals, teachers of social ethic and prophets, an important line of inquiry to exploit because most of the key transformations in the history of world religions have their roots within the conflicts between the clergy and reformers led by intellectual figures. There are numerous other examples. They all demonstrate the way Weber rewrites the history of world religions through understanding their meanings at various levels using ideal types and relating them to each other. There is one more originality of Webers theory of religion I want to recall here, an aspect which both Marx and Durkheim neglected (despite, arguably, their being on the right path). On

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the one hand, Weber tells us that the religious beliefs and practices of each agent are also an indispensable element of his or her lifestyle, through those beliefs and practices, the everyday life of each agent is rendered meaningful, including their class and status positions. On the other hand, the homologies Weber established between money economy and religious ethics brought Weber to formulize a fruitful sociological innovation, where he treated the structure of wars between sects or religions within a given society as a symbolic economy. Inside this economy, there were dominated and dominant groups, and power was distributed via a number of channels concerning proper definitions of religious conduct, beliefs and so on. In his famous article The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1964b), he focuses on how active membership to churches in the USA is a source of credit which influences ones status (and commercial success) similar to ordinary economic credit. Furthermore, he also talks about how various Protestant sects are in competition among themselves to lure more members and thus gain the upper hand in monopolizing, in Webers words, religious goods, the proper way of preaching, teaching and practicing Protestantism. CONCLUSION Max Weber made invaluable contributions to contemporary sociology in general and sociology of religion in particular. Yet his legacy has always been up for grabs and is being still claimed by opposing paradigms. Those who follow methodological individualism might praise the hermeneutic elements of his sociology and ally rational choice theory with the way Weber analyzed meaning-bestowal. Those of a more structuralist bend give emphasis to the influence of religious belonging on class

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and status. Post-structuralists may praise his soft approach to science and truth, while Marxist scholars may condemn him by being an ideologue of the bourgeoisie. From my own position inside the academic field (and inside these series of papers), I would praise Weber for the cords he spread between people and structures, without falling for a full-fledged subjectivism or a blind objectivism. Nevertheless, I would not wish to sound decisive on this latter point, because at certain times, one can read a highly subjectivist Weber, talking about emphatic understanding, and at other times, one can read another Weber talking about dominating structures and iron cages. Anyway, I do not think that our job today should be to answer the useless question, where did Weber actually stand? Rather, we should ask, how can Weber be of use in this or that research topic? Weber, as I have already mentioned, has presented, among all three founding fathers I have been engaged with, the most comprehensive metatheoretical framework in terms of relating people to structures. Nevertheless, I have some reservations which I will try to make clear below. 1. At the level of agents, perhaps it could be argued that Weber gives priority to how individuals render their world meaningful, through conscious and calculated action. However, a careful reading would tell us that Weber recognizes that people participate in the world under certain constraints and limits which have their roots either in the way an agent is socialized or in the structures within which s/he acts. On the other hand, there is another curious point: While Weber suggests a hermeneutic methodology to understand irrational action and belief in religion, similar to Durkheim, he is an armchair sociologist. Hence, it cannot be safely said that Weber

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achieves verstehen in accounting for the way religion influences peoples lifestyles. There is a further difficulty here, pinpointed by scholars like Alfred Schutz who were much more involved in the subjective dimension: On the one hand, Weber holds that an actions meaning is supplied by the social actors meaning bestowal; yet on the other hand, because of factors like probability and more importantly irrationality and value-riddenness of these meanings, he also says that meanings most of the time remain beyond knowledge. Schutz (1970), for example, believes that this dimension should be accessible, because once meanings constituted in the consciousness of the actor and meanings constituted in social interaction are separately analyzed (Weber collapses the two), it can be sociologically argued that both are products of intersubjectivity, of shared concepts. 2. I think that like Durkheim, Weber also made great contributions to the sociology of structures, but interestingly he is much less credited for that. His analysis of bureaucratization, domination and development of rationalism, and his elaboration on the status dimension of inequality opened new horizons before the next generations of sociologists. I wish to remind Pierre Bourdieu here, because Bourdieu not only reconstructed the Weberian project of investigating power and inequality in the spheres of politics, economy and culture in his Distinction, he was also inspired Webers analysis of charisma, clergy and domination through monopolization of religious goods (Bourdieu, 1987). Bourdieus field analysis owes a lot to Webers notions of competition over legitimacy and religious interests, from which is derived the idea of symbolic economy later expanded by Bourdieu to art or education also.

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3. And in establishing the web of relations which would tie people to structures and vice versa, although Webers use of ideal types is encouraging, I think that the move itself is not courageous enough. By using ideal types, Weber is either content with definitions that are universal in scope but very rudimentary (and thus cannot sometimes go beyond giving encyclopedic information) or he pinpoints through their usage a great number of differentiating characteristics but has to admit that none of them are clearly definable. From my perspective, we need a further realist leap forward, and posit that our practical object constructions, once equipped with the right tools of reflexivity and a proper methodology, are capable of producing a more appropriate knowledge of the reality, than commonsensical spontaneous knowledge. It seems that the relationality Weber establishes is limited with the intersubjective dimension, but in order to understand what principles, what logics govern religious conducts, we need to construct a relationality between positions agents occupy. Then, I guess, Webers worries about being unable to fully account for irrational action could be surpassed, because practical logics are always imperfect and unstable, and the meanings behind them are always related to the past and present of the social positions agents occupy. All in all, Max Weber had his eccentricities. He was a great scholar and left an almost insurmountable legacy behind him: Many social scientists still struggle among themselves over correct presentations of his theory. Somewhere above, I noted that Weber, unlike Durkheim, would not endorse grand sociological projects to lead people out of their iron cages. Nevertheless, Bryan Turner (1996: 111, 165) notes that when it came to the issue of charisma, prophets and religious intellectuals, Weber did

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not follow his epistemology, being (somewhat ethico-politically) impressed by the capabilities of a charismatic leaders:
Webers admiration for the isolated prophet of doom preaching against the evil of the present is part of Webers personal theodicy as distinct from his sociology of theodicy. ... Weber recognised the public yearning in Germany for political prophecy, but also realised that it was their destiny to live in a godless era. In the speech on Science as a vocation, Weber warns his listeners not to yearn or tarry as Jews calling out, as in Isaiah, Watchman, what of the night?, but to confront the demands of the day. [Turner, 1996: 15-166]

Unlike the Durkheimian civic morality project, though, people cannot seek guidance from science, which is, according to Weber, indifferent to human ends. In a godless society, and given the impossibility of acquiring ethical answers from science, people have to choose in the dark. However, Weber was too quick to stamp the capitalist era as a godless era. Neither religion nor science left the playground of guidance today. REFERENCES (FOR PART THREE) Albrow, Martin (1990) Max Webers Construction of Social Theory, St. Martins Press, New York. Bourdieu, Pierre (1987) Legitimation and Structured Interests in Weber's Sociology of Religion, in S. Whimster and S. Lash (eds.), Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, Allen and Unwin, London. Coser, Lewis A. (1977) Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York et. al. Gerth, Hans H. and C. Wright Mills (1964) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Galaxy Books, New York. Hennis, Wilhelm (1998) The Spiritualist Foundation of Max Webers Interpretative Sociology: Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber and William James Varieties of Religious Experience, History of the Human Sciences, 11 (2), pp. 83-106. Schroeder, Ralph (1992) Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture, Sage Publications, London et. al. Schutz, Alfred (1970) On Phenomenology and Social Relations, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Turner, Bryan S. (1996) For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate, Sage Publications, London et. al.

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Weber, Max (1964a) The Social Psychology of World Religions, in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Galaxy Books, New York. Weber, Max (1964b) The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism, in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Galaxy Books, New York. Weber, Max (1964c) Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions, in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Galaxy Books, New York. Weber, Max (1969) Basic Concepts in Sociology, Greenwood Press, New York. Weber, Max (1978) Economy and Society, University of California Press, Berkeley. Weber, Max (1993) The Sociology of Religion, Beacon Press, Boston.

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POSTSCRIPT I have begun writing a general conclusion for all three papers, yet after eight pages or so, it turned out that presenting a general perspective of what should be salvaged from these three sociologies of religion would require a fourth paper. I have many personal notes, some secondary language which I did not include in any of the three papers regarding comparisons only, and of course, as might be already guessed, I would suggest a reconstruction of a sociology of religion along Bourdieusian lines. I would gladly work on this fourth paper if required.