The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and their Reforms: on the Diversity of Histories of Sociology
2013
Abstrakt
In the course of two last decades, Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) was several times reinterpreted. In my paper I come back to three of these re-lectures (Jeffrey C.
Alexander, Anne W. Rawls, Robert A.
Jones) and show that their diversity has to be attributed to different practices of doing history of sociology, and not to the demanding nature - as its comprehension is concerned - of Durkheim's work. Historians seldom content themselves with the repetition of the science of the past, they rather aim to an "actual" knowledge.
The production of the "knowledge effect" is the very object of my epistemological interpretation of Durkheim's Elementary Forms.