Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and sacrifice: An historical context for the elementary forms of the religious life

Journal OJ the Hirrory OJ rhc Bthovioml Sciences 17 (1981): 114.205.

ROBERTSON SMITH, DURKHEIM, AND SACRIFICE: AN HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR

THE ELEMENTARY FORMS OF THE RELIGIOUS LIFE ROBERT ALUN JONES

The influence of William Robertson Smith’s Lectures on d e Religion of the Semites on Emile Durkheirn’s sociology of religion was profound; and since that 1889 work was largely concerned with the origin and meaning of the institution of sacrifice, an examination of the contemporary literature concerned with that rite is of considerable value in understanding Durkheirn’s intentions in writing certain portions of the E1ementory.Form.s of the Religious Life. The discussion of sacrifice is thus traced with particular emphasis on Tylor, Wellhausen, Smith, Frazer, Hubert, and Mauss. Within this intellectual context, Durkheirn’s treatment of sacrifice in the Elementory Forms appears a rather unlikely combination of a speculative reconstruction of early Hebrew society, an ambiguous body of Australian ethnographic data, and a reformulation of Kantian ethics. Some concluding remarks are made concerning the value of such reconstructions of intellectual context in the study of the history of the social sciences.

In a manner typical in the history of classical social theory, the recent literature on Emile Durkheim’ has again raised the question of the relative continuity or discontinuity from his early to his late work; and just as typically, little consensus on this issue has been forthcoming. On one question; however, there seems to be some agreement-that Durkheim’s early treatment of religious phenomena was rather shallow and mechanical, and thus contrasts sharply with the monumental achievements of the Elementary Forms of the Religious LVe (1912). Steven Lukes has thus referred to the “thinness and in- conclusiveness” of Durkheim’s early discussion of religion.’ In 1886, for example, Durkheim admitted that he felt “unqualified to speak” on the history of religion, seemed ignorant of totemism, and inclined to accept the naturistic hypothesis of Albert Reville. He also emphasized the regulatory function of religion which, like that of law and morality, was “to maintain the equilibrium of society and to adapt it to environmental conditions.”s In 1887, Durkheim again pointed to the “confused synthesis” of early moral, legal, and religious customs, and criticized Jean-Marie Guyau for ignoring “the obligatory nature of religious proscriptions.”’ And in 1893, Durkheim complained that “we do not actually possess any scientific notion of what religion is,” though he linked it to the conscience collective and granted it a declining role in social life with the evolution of organic solidarity.6

This is not to say that early glimmerings of Durkheim’s later arguments cannot be found; on the contrary, he urged the study of primitive religious origins rather than more evolved institutions, opposed all “intellectualist” approaches to religious practices and, emphasizing the symbolic functions of the divinity, argued that “what must concern

This paper was prepared with the assistance of Research Grant SOC 78-0731 I , Program in the History and Philosophy of Science, Division of Social Sciences, National Science Foundation; and smaller grants from :lie Research Board of the Graduate College, University of Illinois, Urbana. Illinois.

ROBERT ALUN JONES is Associote Professor of Sociology 01 the University ojlllinois. Urbono, IL 61801 USA. He is the co-editor (with Henriko Kuklick) of Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present, and outhor of o number of essoys on the relotions between religion and sociol theory. He is currently writing o book on the influence of the Reformotion on nineteenth century sociol science.

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us. . . is not the symbol but what it hides and expresses.”d But once again, in Durkheim’s early work these observations represented half-formulated insights rather than fully argued propositions. How, then, are we to account for the subsequent expansion of these fragmentary insights into the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life-whatever its faults, one of the few works in the history of sociological theory to acquire and retain designation as a “classic text”? Through what intellectual process, and within what social context, did this transformation take place?

The answer to the first would seem to present no formidable difficulties, for in a lamentably rare autobiographic passage, we have Durkheim’s own testimony on the matter. In 1907, in response to Simon Deploige’s “accusation” that his thought was essentially German in its inspiration, Durkheim stated:

. . . it was not until 1895 that I achieved a clear view of the essential role played by religion in social life. It was in that year that, for the first time, I found the means of tackling the study of religion sociologically. This was a revelation to me. That course of 1895 marked a dividing line in the development of my thou ht, to such an

to harmonize with these new insights. . , [This reorientation] was entirely due to the studies of religious history which 1 had just undertaken, and notably to the reading of the works of Robertson Smith and his school.’

extent that all my previous researches had to be taken up afresh in or d er to be made

Considering the relative paucity of such unequivocal acknowledgments of intellectual debt in Durkheim’s writings (the only competitor would seem to be Charles Renouvier), the statement assumes a prima facie credibility.

But with the second question-the precise nature of Durkheim’s “revelation”-we face more serious obstacles. The first of these is simply our ignorance of the work of Robertson Smith, in particular, and the history of religion in general. But the second obstacle stems from the widespread assumption that questions of intellectual influence can be dealt with according to the ordinary processes of historical explanation. We are thus told that Durkheim was dependent on Smith (but not entirely dependent) and that their ideas were alike (but not exactly alike); and such statements are then supported by the citation of passages from Smith’s work reminiscent of the Elementary Forms, the reader being left to judge the plausibility of the causal connection thus implicitly, if not explicitly, claimed.* But if this curious attachment of an agnostic Alsatian Jew for the work of a devout Scottish Presbyterian is to be understood at all, we must grant more serious attention to what Robert Merton has called the “complex filiation of sociological ideas,”e even at the risk of entertaining ideas which were not properly “sociological” at all (see conclusion).

It is true, of course, that Durkheim granted uncritical acceptance to a number of Smith’s views. In the Elementary Forms; for example, Durkheim applauded Smith’s argument that magic is opposed to religion as the individual is opposed to the social.’O He also credited Smith rather than J. F. McLennan for first recognizing that totemism involves something beyond mere plant and animal worship, particularly by connecting it to the communion feast;” and, among others, Smith was praised for recognizing the “con- tagiousness” of the sacred.’l But Durkheim’s more typical posture toward Smith, as toward almost all his predecessors, was dialectical-i.e., in the classical sense of the “art of conversation,” in which questions are posed and alternative answers critically evaluated, as the proper means to ultimate philosophical truths. While Durkheim noted that Smith had rejected animistic origins, for example, he was still criticized among those who had not, as well as for deriving the “cult of nature” from the “cult of the dead;”I8

186 ROBERT ALUN JONES

while citing Smith’s description of the nature of expiatory rites, Durkheim denied Smith’s argument that they appear only late in the evolution of religious institutions;” and where Durkheim agreed with Smith on the essential ambiguity of the sacred, he criticized Smith for failing to account for it.1s For the most part, however, these observations and criticisms were rendered en pussant. The only truly substantial confrontation with Smith appeared with Durkheim’s discussion of the “positive cult” in Chapter 2, Book I1 I-specifically, in Durkheim’s assessment of Smith’s “revolutionary” theory of sacrifice.”

The concentration on sacrifice is hardly surprising to anyone familiar with Smith’s classic Lectures on the Religion ofthe Semites (1889). There Smith flatly asserted that “the origin and meaning of sacrifice constitutes the central problem of ancient religion,”” a judgment to receive the more recent consent of Alfred Loisy,18 E. E. Evans- Pr i t~hard,’~ and T. 0. Beidelman.20 Similarly, Durkheim regarded primitive sacrifice as “a great religious institution. . . destined to become one of the foundation stones of the positive cult in the superior religions. . .”21 But to understand the sense in which Smith’s interpretation of the rite was “revolutionary,” it is necessary to go back somewhat in time.

One of the earliest efforts to interpret the meaning of this ancient ritual is found in Plato’s Euthyphro. There, like Smith, Socrates assumed that sacrifice is the symbolic ex- pression of “piety” (Le., the true relationship between mortals and gods); but this interpretation of the meaning of the ritual was quite different. Socrates began by leading the remarkably acquiescent Euthyphro to the conclusion that sacrifice involves “a sort of commerce between gods and men,”” in which gifts are given to the gods in return for divine rewards or to avoid divine displeasure; and he then forced Euthyphro to face the disturbing corollary to this conception: that however omnipotent, the gods must thus in some sense be dependent upon mere mortals for their sustenance. Hence the “gift- theory” of sacrifice, traditionally expressed in the Latin formula do ur des “I give that you may give”) a form of commutative contract; and hence the “disturbing corollary” which the devout Presbyterian Smith was to condemn as a “detestable. . . view of the nature of the gods.18

Sacrifice, of course, was of central importance to the ancient Hebrews as well; but its practice was eventually restricted to the Temple, and with the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, sacrifice ceased to be a part of Judaism altogether.2‘ Except in its spiritualized version, of course, the rite was never a part of Christianity, so that in the early period of Roman domination there was a good deal of Christian as well as non- Christian (e.g.. Porphyry) polemic against what was now an essentially pagan rite.26 With the Julianic reaction of the 4th century, however, Sallustius made an effort to rescue this “genuine part of the Hellenic tradition” in Concerning the Gods and the Universe.” Following Iamblichus, Sallustius maintained that the gods were changeless and impassive, and thus could hardly be swayed by human gifts. The honors we pay them, Sallustius reasoned, are thus for our benefit rather than theirs; but benefitf can be enjoyed only by those who are fit, and we become fit only by imitating the gods. How is this done? Like all things, Sallustius argued, life has been given to us by the gods; but their own life remains of a higher sort. To approach the gods we thus require a mediator, and the mediator between a higher and a lower life must also be a life, the sacrificial victim. Sacrifice, Sallustius thus concluded, is essential because it is a gift of life, offered in imitation of the original gift of the gods in the effort to achieve communication with them.n The view differs from the earlier Greek conception in two ways-by ascribing a

ROBERTSON SMITH, DURKHEIM, A N D SACRIFICE 187

passionless state to the gods, and by denying their dependence on the “gifts” of mortals-and it is a view found again in the later work of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss.2n

The later Christian writers have generally not shared this pagan interest in the origin and meaning of the rite.20 The notable exception here was Arthur Sykes’s Essay on rhe Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifice (1748), which at least hinted that the rite involved a meal shared in fellowship with the god, and that its function was to symbolize, renew, and reaffirm social bonds.m But Sykes still did not challenge the prevalent “gift- theory,** and in the anonymous Encyclopaedia Britannica entry of 1859 (8th edition), “sacrifice” was still defined as an offering designed to please or placate an omnipotent deity.

The earliest anthropological arguments merely elaborated this conception. In Primitive Culture (1871), for example, E. B. Tylor suggested three views of sacrifice, each implying that the sacrifice was in some sense a gift: (1) the gift-theory proper, in which the deity takes and values the offering for itself; (2) the homage-theory, wherein the gift has a merely symbolic importance; and (3) the abnegation-theory, in which the value of the gift was measured by the hardship it imposed upon the giver. The second, in- cidentally, had been Socrates’s solution to the problem of interdependence, and neither it nor the third implies the crassly materialistic “bargain for divine favor,’ which so dis- turbed Robertson Smith; but precisely because it wm unclear how the gods really benefit from mortal gifts, Tylor granted the first conception the initial evolutionary position. “That most child-like kind of offering,” he reasoned, “the giving of a gift with as yet no definite thought how the receiver can take and use it, may be the most primitive as it is the most rudimentary sacrifice.””

The distinction of having challenged this longstanding interpretation of sacrifice thus belongs not to anthropology but to scientific Biblical criticism, and particularly to Julius Wellhausen. Extending the project begun by Jean Astruc in 1753, Wellhausen maintained that the Pentateuch could not possibly have been written by Moses alone; on the contrary, he argued, internal evidence of style and reference suggested that the Torah had evolved slowly over centuries, and embodied several “codes” of legislation drafted by several different authors. The Deuteronomic Code, for example, was dated at 621 B.C., while the extreme emphasis on ritual found in the Priestly Code (Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers), was placed still later, only after the Hebrews returned from the Babylo- nian Captivity of 586-536 B.C. Thus the Law could not have been given in its entirety by God to Moses, but was rather the consequence of several centuries of evolution during which it was progressively altered in response to changing historical circumstances. Similar arguments had been expressed before, but it was the complete formulation of this argument in Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte IsraelP which brought the ma- jority of Biblical scholars to the side of these so-called “Higher Critics”88; and with minor modifications, this reversal of the canonical order of the books of the Old Testa- ment remains in vogue today.w

In the Prolegomena, however, this position was joined with another still more con- troversial argument: a major re-interpretation of the original nature of Hebrew sacrifice. “The Priestly Code alone,” Wellhausen began, “occupies itself much with the subject of sacrifice; it alone gives a minute classification of the various kinds of offerings and a description of the procedure to be followed in the case of each; and thus it alone furnishes the normative scheme for modem accounts of sacrifice, into which all other causal notices of the Old Testament have been made to fit as best they can.”*6 The difficulty here was that the Higher Critics had firmly established the Priestly Code as a post-Exilic document, and inferences concerning the evolutionary origin of sacrifice based upon this


evidence were therefore anachronistic. Wellhausen thus attempted to reconstruct the true character of primitive sacrifice on the scant foundation ot pre-Exilic documents-the eighth and seventh century prophets, and the Deuteronomic Code (621 B.C., see Deut. 12:28).

The result was a three-stage theory of the history of Hebrew sacrifice. In the earliest period (before 621 B.C.), Wellhausen argued, worship was a natural and intimate part of daily life, and the Hebrews were more concerned with the acceptability of their offerings than with the specific mechanics of sacrificial ritual. There were only two types of sacrifice: the holocaust (burnt-offering) and the communion sacrifice; and the latter was more common, consisting of intimate, joyous meals shared with family, friends, and gods on such occasions as harvest, shearing, vintage, and war. Finally, there was no clear distinction between sacred and secular practice.” The second period began with the Deuteronomic Reform of Josiah (621 B.C.), which abolished all sacrifice outside the Temple at Jerusalem and thus centralized, unified, and eventually systematized the ritual. Most important, by sanctioning profane slaughtering, Deuteronomic Law for- mally recognized the distinction between the secular family feast and sacred worship in the Temple.s’ The third period began with the Exile, and its primary feature was a passionate concern for the mechanics of ritual. This concern is already evidenced in Ezekiel’s description (c. 593-586 B.C.) of the rites to be followed in the restoration, and particularly in his emphasis upon the idea of expiation. Here, two new forms of sacrifice not mentioned in any earlier text are introduced-i.e., the sacrifices for sin and repara- tion. These emphases were embodied in the Laws of the Priestly Code, which were followed until the Roman destruction of Jerusalem rendered further Hebrew sacrifice impossible.s8

Smith showed little hesitation in following Wellhausen’s lead. His own view of sacrifice as a communal meal appeared as early as the Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1 88 1) and more fully in his Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Sacrifice” in 1886. Simultaneously, however, Smith was gradually forging a link between the earliest Hebrew sacrifices and totemism. The “totemic hypothesis”-i.e., that the earliest societies consisted of homogeneous “stock groups,” that each claimed a kindred animal or plant as the symbol of its unity, and that some mystical connection existed between the groups-had been proposed by Smith’s friend J. F. McLennan in 1867 and again in 1869-1870. As early as 1871, Smith found time to write to McLennan from the Middle East, suggesting the possibility of totem warfare in Coptos and Tentyra;’* and as Smith continued his study of Old Testament documents, he began to suspect that Semitic polytheism had a totemistic foundation. The Arabic texts held “the key to this mystery,” and these were unavailable to Smith in Aberdeen; nonetheless, Smith gave a “provisional” statement of his views in “Animal Worship and Animal Tribes Among the Ancient Arabs and in the Old Testament” (1880). Tried for heresy and dismissed from his Chair at Aberdeen (for reasons only peripherally related to the totem-hypothesis), Smith continued his investigations while accepting co-editorship of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and moving to Cambridge as Lord Almoner’s Reader of Arabic in 1883. There he encouraged a young protege named James Frazer to write the article “Totemism” for the Encyclopaedia, and in 1889, produced what was to be his “classic work”-the Lectures on the Religion of the Semites.

The Lectures contain a number of arguments important in the subsequent scientific study of religion, some held in common by Durkheim. But as we have seen, Durkheim’s discussion of Smith dealt primarily with sacrifice; and in fact, the last six of the eleven Lectures dealt explicitly with the meaning of that ancient ritual. Smith’s argument there


was more anthropologically informed than Wellhausen’s but the similarities were un- deniable. Like Wellhausen, for example, Smith regarded the Priestly Code as late and potentially misleading; but Smith went on to insist that the entire Pentateuch represented a “reshaping and remodeling of more ancient institutions. . . common not only to Hebrews but to their heathen neighbors as well.”4o Smith repeatedly cited Old Testament passages which supported this view of the similarity of Hebrew and heathen institutions; and he was thus able to reap the fruits of the Arabic documents, through free and exten- sive (if ultimately unconvincing) citation of the single reported case of an apparent totemic sacrifice by Saracens in the 4th century A.D., described by Nilus in Nili opera quoedam nondum edita (Faris, 1639:27). It was orl the foundation of this single case, together with a liberal use of the evolutionary “method of survival^,"^^ that Smith reconstructed the history of sacrifice among the Semites generally. In the earliest stage, Smith argued, every sacrifice was a feast and every feast a sacrifice:

The identity of religious occasions and festal seasons may indeed be taken as the determining characteristic of type of ancient religion generally; when men meet their god they feast and are glad to ether, and whenever they feast and are glad the

the habitual temper of the worshi ers is one of joyous confidence in their god, un- troubled by any habitual sense of!um?n guilt; and resting on the firm conviction that they and the deity they adore are good friends, who understand each other perfectly and are united by bonds not easily

Since this religious community was construed as a physical unity, any attenuation of its bonds could be rectified through a physical process. Thus, when famine or plague beset the Hebrews, they assumed that the bonds of kinship between themselves and their god had become relaxed, and they restored them through the sacramental spilling of the blood of a theanthropic animal. This form of sacrifice, of which Nilus’s camel was presumably a survival, thus contained the earliest germ of what later became the ethical and spiritual idea of atonement.“ Still later, Smith argued, the series of political dis- asters which culminated in the Babylonian Exile contributed further to this “more uncer- tain” religion, The Hebrews assumed that their “common good understanding” with Yahweh had broken down, and He had withdrawn from them. Only then, Smith asserted, did the Hebrews resort to the holocaust and piacula as means to atone for their presumed sin; and this, Smith argued, explains why such expiatory sacrifices are not mentioned until Ezekiel, and received a concise description only in the portions of the Priestly Code found in Leviti~us.‘~

Smith also addressed the problem of interdependence which had been raised by Socrates, temporarily solved by Sallustius, and begged altogether by Tylor. The notion that the gods receive some physical satisfaction from mortal sacrifices, Smith admitted, is at least implicit in the earliest rites; but so long as sacrifice remained a communal service, he argued, the idea of religious fellowship outweighed this “admittedly crass” im- plication. This really “scandalous” conception of sacrifice emerged only later, when the gradual centralization of the rite (first at the sanctuaries and later at the Temple), the increased emphasis upon ritual, the development of a priesthood, and most important, the institution of private property, all combined to reduce sacrifice to little more than a materialistic bargain for divine favor. Unlike Tylor, therefore, Smith regarded this com- mercial conception, like the more spiritual notions of atonement, sin, and expiation, as a later development, holding no essential role in the original meaning of the rite.46

The implications of this theory for the Catholic Church were obvious to anyone familiar with Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where the Crucifixion is quite

z; desire that the god should be o 1B the party. This view is proper to religions in whic


specifically interpreted as a substitutionary sacrifice of Christ for the purpose of satisfy- ing divine justice and achieving human redemption. Committed to such a view, Smith argued, Christian theologians had greatly overestimated the ethical lessons of the Jewish sacrificial system.‘6 In ancient Semitic sacrifice, Smith insisted, the various ethical conceptions which surround the Crucifixion-e.g., redemption, substitution, purification, atoning blood, the garment of righteousness-were but vague impressions; and

. . . the attempt to find in them anything as recise and definite as the notions at-

one point that comes out clear and strong is that the fundamental i ea of ancient sacrifice is sacramental communion, and that all atcining rites are ultimately to be regarded as owing their efficacy to a communication of divine life to the worshippers, and to the establishment or confirmation of a living bond between them and their god.”

As Frazer was to observe in his eulogy for his former master, Smith had shown that both the doctrine of the atonement of Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist were to be found in a crudely materialistic and mechanical form in pagan and even savage religions:“ “That the God-man dies for His people,” Smith insisted,

. . . and that his Death is their life, is an idea which was in some degree foreshadowed by the oldest mystical sacrifices. It was foreshadowed, indeed, in a very crude and materialistic form, and without any of those ethical ideas which the Christian doctrine of the Atonement derives from a profound sense of sin and divine justice. And yet the voluntary death of the divine victim, which we have seen to be a conception not foreign to ancient ritual, contained the germ of the dee est thought in *the Christian doctrine: the thought that the Redeemer gives Himsel P for his people, that “for their sakes He consecrates Himself, that they also might be consecrated in truth.”‘*

d tached to the same words by Christian the0 P ogians is altogether ille itimate. The

This revision of the Pauline interpretation of the Eucharist and Crucifixion was not a primary issue in the “Aberdeen heresy,” but at least one astute Presbyterian minister felt that it should have been.’O In the midst of that controversy, a Reverend McEwan “argued with some force that Professor Smith’s doctrine of sacrifice involved a new theory of the essential character of the Old Testament religion, and in his judgment cut away the basis on which the whole doctrine of salvation rests.”” Smith’s own biographers,”? as well as later writers,M have been inclined to agree. While Smith was convinced that his views were not heretical, therefore, Evans-Pritchard was undoubtedly correct in saying that, for a Presbyterian minister, this was “getting rather near the bone.”64 It is at least worth noting (as the increasingly skeptical Frazer did) that the long passage cited above was deleted from the revised and otherwise enlarged second edition of the Lectures (1894).“

It is impossible to exaggerate the depth and range of intellectual turmoil inspired by the appearance of the Lectures; for Smith had proposed a scientific theory with enor- mous religious implications, while advancing a theological argument which had apparent scientific justification. The Elementary Forms is thus merely one of the more retrospec- tively visible landmarks of the controversy. In the Preface to the first edition of the Golden Bough (1890) Frazer stated unequivocally that the central idea of that work-i.e., the conception of the dying god-had been taken directly from Smith’s theory of sacrifice, and through Frazer its impact was felt in the writings of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce.66 The Lectures also provided the stimulus for Hubert and Mauss’s Essai sur la nature et lafoncrion du sacrifice (1899), and eventually for Freud’s theory of primal parricide in Totem und Tabu (1913).

ROBERTSON SMITH, DURKHEIM, AND SACRIFICE 191

However productive the controversy, however, it was a fight which Smith was destined to lose, and in plenty of time for Frazer, Hubert and Mauss, and even Durkheim (in part) to know it had been lost. As Evans-Pritchard later summarized, the totemic part of the theory was unacceptable on the simple ground that “there is almost no evidence that can be adduced in support of it, either from the literature concerning the early Hebrews, with whom Robertson Smith was chiefly concerned, or from accounts of primitive peoples, to which he made a~peal.”~’ In fact, as Levi-Strauss later observedP8 the totemic hypothesis was virtually defunct as early as 1910, when A. A. Goldenweiser showed that the three characteristic features of totemism-the organization in clans, the emblematic attribution of animals and plants to the clans, and the belief in a mystical relation between clan and animal-coincide in only a minority of cases, and each may be present without the others.

What if Smith’s theory is taken in its more reasonable form, without asserting the totemic character of the sacrificial victim? Again, Evans-Pritchard has observed that “every competent Old Testament scholar would today admit the accuracy of Buchanan Gray’s conclusions that the idea of gift and not, or at any rate rather than, that of communion is predominant in even the earliest sacrifices known to us, that the ideas of expiation and propitiation are present in these earliest sacrifices, and that by the time of Deuteronomy (621 B.C.), it is clear that an eucharistic intention is p r e ~ e n t . ” ~ ~

What Durkheim and Frazer referred to as “an intuition of genius” was thus an act of speculation based upon the most common excesses of Victorian anthropology:

Bluntly, all Robertson Smith really does is to guess about a period of Semitic history about which we know almost nothing. By doing so he may to some extent have made this theory safe from criticism, but to the same extent it thereby lacked cogency and conviction. Indeed, it was not historical at all, but an evolutionary theory, like all evolutionary theories of the time, and this distinction must be clearly recognized. The evolutionary bias is conspicuous throughout, and is particularly clear in his insistence on the materialistic crudity-what Preuss called Ur- dummheit-of primitive man’s religion, thus lacin the concrete, as opposed to the

as opposed to the personal, character of early religion; thereby revealing the basic assumption of all Victorian anthropologists, that the most primitive in thought and custom must be the antithesis of their own, their own in this case being a brand of in- dividualistic spirituality.”

What is interesting, however, is not that later scholars like Evans-Pritchard and Lkvi-Strauss have recognized the shortcomings of Smith’s hypothesis, but that many of Smith’s contemporaries and followers recognized them as well. While Frazer clearly accepted Smith’s discovery of the Atonement and the Eucharist in non-Christian, heathen forms in 1890, for example, by 1894 he was already questioning the totemic origin of these conceptions: “. . . the evidence thus far,” Frazer cautioned his readers, “does not enable us to pronounce decisively.”B1 And when the evidence did become available, in the form of the classic studies of Australian aborigines by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, these reservations blossomed into full-scale rejection.

Meanwhile, Hubert and Mauss’s attempt to define “the nature and social function of sacrifice” in the second volume of I‘AnnCe sociologique (1899) departed from Smith still further. The Durkheimians in fact agreed with Tylor that “it is certain that usually, to some extent, sacrifices were gifts conferring on the devotee rights over his god. The gifts served also to feed the gods.”a’ Citing three of Smith’s more prominent critics,ds Hubert and Mauss entered at least six distinguishable objections to the theory of sacrifice

spiritual, at the beginning of development; an B k also aying undue stress on the social,

192 ROBERT A’LUN JONES

presented in the Lectures. First, observing that the only known, purely totemic cults were in Australia and America, Hubert and Mauss challenged “the starting point for the whole theory”-the universality of totemism-as “only a postulate,” and “in any case impossible to ~er i fy .”~‘ Second, Hubert and Mauss pointed to the disturbing lack of properly totemic sacrifices: “At the very least,’ they observed, ‘‘a meticulous description of a certain number of these ceremonies is lacking.”66 Third, noting that “the crux of the doctrine is the historical sequence and logical derivation that Smith claims to establish between the communion sacrifice and other kinds of sacrifice,” Hubert and Mauss argued that “nothing is more doubtful. Any attempt at a comparative chronology of the Arab, Hebrew, or other sacrifices which he studied is inevitably disastrous. Those forms which appear to be most simple are known to us only through recent texts [Nilus?]. Their simplicity itself may stem from an insufficiency of documents.”Bd Fourth, Hubert and Mauss pointed out that “in any case, simplicity does not imply any priority in time. If we confine ourselves to the data of history and ethnography we find that everywhere the piuculum exists side by side with cornmuni~n.”~~ Fifth, the Durkheimians argued that the very term piaculum, in Smith’s usage, was extremely vague, including purifications and propitiations as well as expiations. The result was that the crucial notion of expiation was denied a rigorous analysis, and cases of exorcism which should clearly have fallen under the category were consigned to magical or nonreligious processes.68 Finally, Hubert and Mauss attacked Smith’s method: “Instead of analyzing in its original complexity the Semitic ritual system,” they observed, “he set about classifying the facts genealogically, in accordance with the analogical connexions that he believed he saw between them.”6g

Such a critique certainly required a corrective, which Hubert and Mauss quickly offered. Relying primarily on the Bible (particularly and the Sanskrit texts, the Durkheimians observed that every sacrifice involves consecration-a consecration in which the consecrated object is destroyed, and its effect extends beyond this object to “the moral person who bears the expense of the ceremony.”71 Observing that the role performed by such an object is that of an intermediary, Hubert and Mauss arrived at their final definition: “Sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is c~ncerned.”’~ Following Durkheim’s third “rule of sociological method,” therefore, Hubert and Mauss rejected Smith’s derivation of all sacrifice from the original communion rite, insisting that the unity of the system must be sought in those procedures which were “most general” and “least rich in particular elements.”’* These key procedures, which could be used for multiple purposes, were those of sacralization and desa~ralization.~‘

The theory owed a good deal to Smith’s view of the ambiguity of the sacred, but in most respects it differed markedly from the argument presented in the Lectures. In fact, the argument of Hubert and Mauss bore more resemblance to the views of Sallustius (see above) and also to L i v i - S t r a ~ s s ~ ~ than to Smith. When Evans-Pritchard thus reported his observations of sacrifice among the Nuer, he emphasized that it was only in a mystical (Hubert and Mauss) not in a material (Smith) sense that the Nuer ritual involved any “communion” ~hatever .~‘ But if this view of sacrifice as a means of communication between the sacred and profane is adopted, Evans-Pritchard continued, we must accept Georges Gusdorfs” observation that the rite is designed as much to keep the god at a distance as to establish union or fellowship. With the Nuer, this was in fact the case; but ultimately Evans-Pritchard condemned the Hubert and Mauss argument as too abstract, “an unconvincing piece of sociological metaphysics. . . a mixture of mere assertion, con-


jecture, and reification, for which no satisfactory evidence is adduced. They are conclusions not deriving from, but posited on, a brillant analysis of the mechanism of sacrifice, or perhaps one should say of its logical structure, or even its grarnrna~.”’~

The reservations of Frazer and criticisms of Hubert and Mauss cast increased attention on that aspect of the Elementary Forms which sociologists have for the most part ignored-i.e., the ethnographic data on which it is ostensibly based. For Spencer and Gillen offered more than a mere description of that rite in which Durkheim discovered the “foundation stones” of sacrifice; they also offered an interpretation: “We may now describe the ceremonies of Intichiuma,” Spencer and Gillen began in 1899,

as they are performed in the case of certain of the totems. Each totem has its own ceremony and no two of them are alike; but though they differ to a very great extent so far as the actual erformance is concerned, the important point is that one and all

after which the totem is called; and thus, takin the tribe as a whole, the object of

And again in 1904: “The name Intichiuma is applied by the Arunta tribe to certain ceremonies intimately associated with the totems, the object of all of them being that of increasing the supply of the material object from which the totemic group takes its name.”8o

There is no doubt that Frazer had been attracted to Smith’s ritualist account of the totem sacrament ten years earlier; but Frazer was fundamentally a rationalist, and thus he found Spencer and Gillen’s more utilitarian and economic interpretation utterly convincing: ”. . . if we may judge from the Intichiuma ceremonies,” Frazer now argued, “Totemism among the Central Australian tribes appears. . . to be an organized system of magic intended to procure for savage man a plentiful supply of all the natural objects where he stands in need.”81 The crucial word here, of course, is “magic,” which Frazer had previously classed as one of the lower forms of religion. Now, Frazer confessed, “I have come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr. F. B. Jevons in recognizing a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion. More than that, I believe that in the evolution of thought, magic, as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has probably everywhere preceded religion.””

Frazer also hinted that Spencer agreed, and this was in fact the case. In a letter dated October 20, 1898, Spencer wrote to Frazer that “the religious aspect of the totem is the more ancient, and. . . the now existing social aspect has been tacked on at a later period;”8a and a year later, Spencer re-affirmed this judgment, simultaneously accepting Frazer’s substitution of “magical” in the place of “religious.”M Such a view, Frazer concluded, reveals totems as “a thoroughly practical system designed to meet the everyday wants of the ordinary man in a clear and straightforward way. There is nothing vague or mystical about it, nothing of that metaphysical haze which some writers [Hubert and Mauss?] love to conjure up over the humble beginning of human speculation, but which is utterly foreign to the simple, sensuous, and concrete modes of thought of the savage.”86

In the Australian intichiuma, therefore, Frazer felt that he had discovered the totem sacrament which Smith, “with an intuition of genius, divined years ago;”88 but to Frazer, of course, the rite had no communal or social significance whatever.. The introduction to the second edition of the Golden Bough thus denied what was obvious to anyone who had read the first:

There is a misunderstanding. , . which I feel constrained to set right. But I do so with great reluctance, because it compels me to express a measure of dissent from

have for their sole o 1 ject the purpose of increasing the number of the animal or plant

these ceremonies is that of increasing the tota f food s~pp ly . ?~


the revered friend and master to whom I am under the deepest obli ations, and who

sacrifice.. . Mssrs. H. Hubert and M. Maws have represented my theory o the slain god as intended to supplement and complete Robertson Smith’s theory of the derivation of animal sacrifice in general from a totem sacrament. On this I have to say that the two theories are quite independent of each other. I never assented to my friend’s theory, and so far as I can remember he never gave me a hint that he assented to mine.O’

In what Robert Ackerman has generously termed a case of “selective amnesia,”” Frazer went on to deny his acceptance of the universality of totemism and the derivation of sacrifice from it. “These two steps,” Frazer concludes, “I am not yet prepared to take. No one will welcome further evidence of the wide prevalence of a totem sacrament more warmly than I shall, but until it is forthcoming I shall continue to agree with Professor E. B. Tylor that it is unsafe to make the custom the base for far-reaching peculation^."^^ Frazer’s theory received substantial support from Stanley A. Cook;” but with the publication of Spencer and Gillen’s second volume (1904), and in part as a consequence of their continued correspondence,e1 Frazer moved to still a third argument, which ex- plained totemism as the consequence of primitive ideas of conception.e2

As Freud was later to observe, therefore, Frazer’s views on totemism developed over a period of at least fifteen years and resulted in three successive-and mutually incom- patible-theories. But if the amnesia is unforgivable, the vacillation is not. For Frazer’s first theory was quite literally a “guess” based upon the Biblical speculations of Smith; and his second and third theories were formed on the basis of the most recent, albeit extremely ambiguous Australian data. In fact, no “armchair anthropologist” made a better effort to stay au courant with the most recent observations. His extended correspondence with Sir Baldwin Spencer actually began as early as 1897, and by 1898, in what Durkheim misjudged as “une remarquable coincidence,” Frazer, Spencer, and Gillen “arrivtrent spontanement aux memes conclusions.”ea When Goldenweiser later referred to Durkheim as a “veteran in Australian ethnography,” therefore, he surely used a term more applicable to Frazer.M

This is not to say that Durkheim considered the Australian evidence insignificant; on the contrary, the Native Tribes of Central Australia appears as important as Smith’s totemic theories in the gradual progress of the Elementary Forms. Steven Lukes, for example, has noted that Lucien Herr, Librarian of the h o l e Normale, directed Durkheim’s attention to Frazer’s article on “Totemism” as early as 1886; and Durkheim was clearly familiar with Smith’s Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia as early as the Division of Labor.“ Durkheim’s autobiographical statement of 1907 notwithstanding, however, there is no evidence that these works made a substantial impression on Durkheim’s work until well into the twentieth century. In an extended discussion of human sacrifice as a type of altruistic suicide, for example, Smith is not mentioned at all;Bd and Smith was again ignored in “De la definition des phenomtnes religieux” (1899), which immediately preceded the Hubert and Mauss Essai in Volume I1 of I’Anee sociologique (1899). There, in fact, Durkheim’s denial of a superordinate deity as a con- ditional definition of religion suggests that he had yet to grasp the significance of Smith’s theory: “. . , it is not true,” Durkheim stated,

to say that the gods have always been thou ht of in this way; man very often treats

just as much on him. He needs their assistance but they need his sacrifices. So when he is not content with the service they provide, he stops his offerings to them; he cuts

r On has passed beyond the reach of controversy. In an elaborate and 7 earned essa

them as absolute equals to himself. No dou % t he depends on them, but they depend

195 ROBERTSON SMITH, DURKHEIM, A N D SACRIFICE

off their supplies. The relationship between them is of a contractual kind and is based on the principle of do ur des.n

Durkheim’s first appreciation of Smith thus appeared in “Sur le totemisme” (1902), an interpretation of precisely the same Australian data which had led Frazer to depart from Smith; and here Durkheim challenged virtually every conclusion which Frazer had drawn from the observations and correspondence of Spencer and Gillen: e.g., where Frazer had stressed the primitive nature of the almost inaccessible Arunta, Durkheim argued that their present condition revealed considerable “autochthonous development;” where Frazer had relied upon the Arunta’s mythic “traditions” for evidence, Durkheim relied upon a highly speculative reconstruction of earlier Arunta history based upon ritual “survivals”; where Frazer had concluded that the Arunta lacked the two interdictions previously assumed to be essential to totemism-i.e., that against killing and eating the totem, and that against marrying a member of one’s own totemic clan-Durkheim insisted that, in their original state, the Arunta had practiced both; and finally, where Frazer had found in the Arunta intichiuma an economic device designed to increase the food supply through sympathetic magic, Durkheim saw the origin of sacrifice itself-the totemic sacrament which Smith had somehow “divined.”g8

While “Sur le totemisme” also contained the germ of Durkheim’s sociological interpretation of the meaning of sacrifice, therefore, Steven Lukes’s comment that “Durkheim’s view of totemism looked more to the past than to the futureogB must be characterized as a classic example of English understatement. And in fact, a similar example had followed the appearance of “Sur le totemisme” by less than a year. Writing to Frazer from Melbourne on 24 July 1903, Sir Baldwin Spencer noted:

On slip 50 [of the proof of the Northern Tribes of Central Australia, Spencer and Gillen s 1904 volume] I have added a footnote of considerable length dealing with a oint on which Durkheim in his article in I‘AnnCe sociologique (1902) on Totemism

pays much stress, and in regard to which he is quite astray, as also he is on many other points. It appears to be most difficult to write an account like ours without conve ing a wrong idea. Durkheim writes on sacred goves and caves and spots so sacrdthat they are only approached by the native in fear and trembling. He talks of ‘ce systeme religieux’ and pride in the Achil a (wild cat) ‘une sorte de culte public,

not appear in the least to realize the fact that the Arunta, as you said, simply appear to be different from other Australian tribes because we know more about them. Possibly our present work may help to dispel this illusion, but unfortunately that will be followed by Howitt’s, in which there is no reference to anythi74 like the idea of reincarnation or to ceremonies such as those of the infichiuma.

Durkheim’s view of totemism thus “looked to the past” indeed; in fact, it applied a largely discredited theory of totemismlo’ (itself lacking any empirical warrant beyond a Saracen camel) to an utterly misconceived body of Australian data.

Despite the subsequent appearance of the volume and footnote referred to above, of course, Durkheim’s “illusion” was not dispelled; but there is at least some evidence that it was not shared by his disciples. In 1904, for example, Hubert agreed with Frazer that the primary functions of totemism were economic, although he qualified this with the rather lame argument that, in its embryonic state, society is undifferentiated, and thus even economic and juridical facts had their religious aspect.Ioz

With the appearance of J. Toutain’s review of Renel’s Cultes militaires de Rome ( I 903; reviewed in 1908), such qualifications became less convincing. For in addition to attacking Renel, Toutain criticized Salomon Reinach (Smith’s foremost French sup-

commun A toute la tribu. . .’ His whole artic P e is full of misconceptions, and he does


porter) and Durkheim: “En vain,” Toutain argued, “MM. S. Reinach and Durkheim se sont efforcees de prouver que les observations de MM. Spencer et Gillen ne portaient pas aux id& recues un coup aussi grave qu’il avait paru d’abord.”lOa For Toutain maintained that the three central postulates of totemism had been destroyed by the Australian evidence: first, since two of its central interdictions were not observed by the primitive Arunta (see above), totemism was not itself a primitive form;’04 second, since it was found only in limited geographical areas (here Toutain cited Mauss), it could hardly be a universal social fact;lo6 and third, since even the scientific observations of totemic peoples are different and even contradictory, it was impossible to confirm the religious and social significance of totemism.108

Within a year, Hubert and Mauss responded to Toutain with two specific criticisms. First, Hubert and Mauss noted that Toutain “se plait a joindre le nom de M. Durkheim a celui de M.S. Reinach et confondre dans la meme reprobation. Ces deux savants,’’ the Durkheimians insisted, “dont nous connaissons fort bein la pensix, n’ont rien de commun I’un avec I’autre.’’lm Second, Hubert and Maws completed, Toutain “semble cependant vouloir nous opposer a nous-meme, ou plus exactement a notre maitre, M. Durkheim .r’108

In retrospect, however, both of Toutain’s arguments appear justified. It is true, of course, that in the introduction to Mklanges dhistoire des religions (1909), Hubert and Mauss shared Durkheim’s reservation concerning Smith’s evolutionary derivation of all sacrifice from totemic communion,1os and they placed similar emphasis upon sacredness as the sine qua non of religion.”O But in general, their assessment of totemism and sacrifice was more skeptical than Durkheim’s. Observing that the totem sacrament has been observed only in the Arunta intichiuma, for example, Hubert and Mauss questioned its universality; moreover, since it was a local institution lacking among the Arunta’s neighbors, they questioned whether it was essential to totemism; and finally, noting that it lacks both oblation and attribution to a deity (both conditions of sacrifice according to their 1899 essay), they denied that the intichiuma is a sacrifice altogether.”’

Where, then, was a totemic sacrifice to be found? Hubert and Mauss pointed out that Frazer had discovered one in the sacrifice of tortoises among the Zuni;112 but the tor- toise, they insisted, were not totems, and while they suggested that the Zuni do sacrifice deer as totems, this rite was not primitive.”* Recalling that Smith viewed Christian communion as the spiritualization of sacrifice and thus emphasized the sacrifice of the god, Hubert and Mauss ransacked the evidence of ancient Greece and Rome (Reinach’s), Egypt, India, and Mexico, eventually concluding that the sacrifice of the god was neither the beginning of religion nor even the beginning of ~acrifice.”~ Alimentary communion, Hubert and Mauss admitted, was one factor in sacrifice, but it was neither its necessary nor sufficient condition; on the contrary, as Tylor had said, it was a ritual gift.116 Finally, reaffirming their 1899 definition, Hubert and Mauss argued that it was a ritual gift of considerable complexity, which presumed a previous separation of sacred and profane, and was thus of late evolutionary origin.118

Considering the wealth of argument and evidence which had thus impressed even his disciples, Durkheim’s continued insistence that the intichiuma was a totemic sacrament and the evolutionary origin of sacrifice can only be characterized as obstinate. Indeed, one is reminded of Bergson’s story about his student days at the kcole Normale, where Durkheim was frequently challenged by his contemporaries on the ground that the facts contradicted his theories: “The facts,” Durkheim would say, “are wrong.” But as several historians and sociologists have recently suggested,”’ our task is less to attack where a past thinker was wrong than to explain why he thought he was right.

197 R O B E R T S O N SMITH, DL‘RKHEIM, AND SACRIFICE

At least a part of such an explanation has recently been hinted at, if not convincingly argued, in Edward Tiryakian’s phrase, “a la recherche de la societe perdue.” Following the account of highly integrated and assimilated Alsatian Jews provided by Bourdrel (1974), Tiryakian suggests that Durkheim was quite literally in a situation of “structural ambivalence”;118 i.e., like Simmel’s stranger, Durkheim was both “assimilated” and yet as dkracink as the most avant-garde of the French artists described by Maurice Barres (1897), particularly after the Dreyfus scandal had jarred the apparently secure and secular world of the 1880s. It was in this context, Tiryakian suggests, that Durkheim read Smith’s Lectures with their description of the stable and periodically reaffirmed bonds of the ancient Hebrew community, and thus reacquired both an intellectual and emotional appreciation for the religion of his ancestors which he had lost as a nor- malien. m

A more complete explanation would surely require emphasis upon the figure who is arguably Durkheim’s most important-and most frequently ignored-antecedent. Indeed, while Davy has observed that Durkheim “mistrusted” Kant, Lukes is quite right to say that Durkheim was always well-disposed toward Kantianism.’20 As his famous remark to Maublanc testifies,lZ1 Durkheim was an avid student of the works of the French neo-Kantian Charles Renouvier; and upon his return from his early studies in Germany, Durkheim had remarked that “of all the philosophies Germany has produced, Kantianism is the one which, if wisely interpreted, can best be reconciled with the needs of science.”122 Lukes has thus provided an impressive array of Renouvier’s ideas which may have attracted Durkheim, as well as an insightful suggestion concerning Renouvier’s possible influence on Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge;128 and more recently, Tiryakian has added some additional speculations concerning the probative appeal of Kantian moral philosophy to the early D~rkheim.’~‘ If anything, these early attractions only grew stronger as Durkheim matured and left Bordeaux for Paris in 1902; for as Bougle has suggested, such interests were virtually de rigueur in Parisian intellectual circles after 1870.126 Indeed, Durkheim’s Paris years witnessed the culmination of his views on morality, which had gradually deepened from an early concentration on obligatory moral rules to a notion of moral autonomy through rational understanding.”’ Durkheim now explored his new ideas in a series of lecture courses at the Sorbonne; and with the completion of the Elementary Forms, he began La Morale, whose projected contents read like a full-scale revision of Kant’s categorical imperative.127

Ultimately, therefore, Durkheim’s treatment of sacrifice in the Elementary Forms was a rather unlikely combination of a speculative reconstruction of early Hebrew society, an ambiguous body of Australian ethnographic data, and a reformulation of Kantian ethics-a sort of intellectual bricolage. Durkheim began with a detailed descrip tion of the intichiuma taken primarily from Spencer and Gillen, and then summarized his interpretation of the significance of the rite:

The interest of the system of rites which has just been described lies in the fact that in them we find, in the most elementary form that is actually known, all the essential

rinciples of a great religious institution which was destined to become one of the Foundation stones of the positive cult in the superior religions: this is the institution of sacrifice.1z8

What, then, is the meaning of sacrifice itself? Noting what a “revolution” Smith had brought about in the traditional theory of the rite, Durkheim argued that “its essential element is no longer the act of renouncement which the word sacrifice ordinarily expresses; before all, it is an act of alimentary communion.”12e Durkheim’s sole reservation

I98 ROBERT ALUN JONES

here concerned the efficacy of the rite, which he attributed more to the sacred quality of the food than to the act of communion itself; and in fact, this point had been made by Hubert and Mauss in 1909. But Durkheim also noted that the Australian data conflict with the theory of Hubert and Mauss; i.e., the Australian victim is naturally sacred rather than being made so through consecration. Durkheim treats the difference as in- consequential, but as Marillier had pointed out much earlier,1ao and as Hubert and Mauss apparently understood (l909), the difference implied a completely different relationship between sacrifice and totemism.

This natural sacredness, Durkheim continued, derives from the common possession, by both victim and worshippers, of the “totemic principle”-a transfigured version of R. H. Codrington’s mana (1891). Like all aspects of nature, Durkheim argued, mana re- quires periodic revivification; and the intichiuma must therefore be analogous to the agrarian rites of the European peasantry described earlier by Wilhelm Mannhardt and granted prominence in Frazer’s Golden Bough (though Durkheim, of course, granted them religious rather than merely magical significance).1s1 The intichiuma, Durkheim thus concluded, is a totemic sacrifice; and sacrifice “was not founded to create a bond of artificial kinship between a man and his gods, but to maintain and renew the natural kinship which primitively united them.”la* Both positions were as far from Hubert and Maws as they were close to Smith as well as Reinach, so that Toutain’s judgment ac- quires a renewed credibility.

As indicated at the outset, however, Durkheim treats Smith dialectically. Specifically, Smith had maintained that communion was not just an essential element, but literally its only original significance. The notions of an offering or expiatory oblation were to him merely later corruptions of the rite, and they presupposed both the materialistic conception of private property and the conception of the god as a “proprietor” to whom gifts were due. Finally, Smith had resorted to this evolutionary reconstruction to avoid what he regarded as both a “logical scandal” and a “detestable” view of the gods, i.e., the ancient notion that an omnipotent deity might also require sustenance from mere mortals.

As Steven Lukes has observed,laa such an appeal to evolution to rescue a hypothesis was not in itself repugnant to Durkheim; indeed, “Sur le totemisme” was almost a parody of the technique. But even Durkheim had to admit that the Australian evidence contradicted Smith’s genealogical reconstruction-the intichiuma was very old and thus surely preceded the notion of private property; the forces it exerted were purely imper- sonal (i.e., mana), and thus implied no notion of an anthropomorphic “proprietor”; and yet the notion of periodic revivification there in evidence implied precisely the scandalous and detestable interdependence of god and worshippers which Smith abhorred. In fact, Durkheim’s view of sacrifice was thus as traditional as his view of totemism: “The rule do ut des,” Durkheim argued, “is not a late invention of utilitarian theorists: it only expresses in an implicit way the very mechanism of the sacrificial system and, more generally, of the whole positive cult.”1M

What is new in Durkheim’s theory is that he viewed sacrifice, not as a system of material exchange, but as a symbolic representation of the duality of human nature:

On the one hand, the individual gets from society the best part of himself, all that gives him a distinct character and a special place among other beings, his intellectual and moral culture. If we should withdraw from men their langua e, sciences, arts and moral beliefs, they would drop to the rank of animals. So the c f aracteristic attributes of human nature come from society. But on the other hand, society exists and lives only in and through individuals. If the idea of society were extinguished in

199 ROBERTSON SMITH, DURKHEIM, AND SACRIFICE

individual minds and the beliefs, traditions and aspirations of the group were no longer felt and shared by the individuals, society would die. We can say of it what we just said of the divinity; it is real only in so far as it has a place in human con- sciousnesses, and this place is whatever one may give it. We now see the real reason why the ods cannot do without their worship rs any more than these can do

pression, cannot do without individuals any more than these can do without society. ISs

Like Kant, therefore, Durkheim viewed human nature in terms of an opposition between sensible appetites and a higher moral consciousness; and also like Kant, Durkheim maintained that when one acted in accord with a moral (i.e., social) rule, one quite literally “transcended” (se dipassi) one’s individual, material existence, and lived in a higher realm. in fact, this was Durkheim’s final conception of the relation between society, religion, and morality, and one which he defended with considerable warmth1ae as he prepared to write La Morale; and of course, it is utterly ingenious. But it is also utterly misleading, insofar as it is taken, quite literally, as a narrowly “scientific” interpretation of the data it ostensibly explains.

CONCLUSION In his splendid Autobiography (1939), R. G . Collingwood made an effort to sum-

marize his earlier ideas on philosophy and history; briefly, these were: ( I ) that truth or falsity does not belong to propositions but rather to complexes of questions and answers; (2) that such complexes rest upon “absolute presuppositions” which are themselves neither true nor false; and (3) that since the business of philosophy is to elicit the absolute presuppositions held by different people at different times, philosophy is really a branch of history.lS’

Whatever the philosophical merits of this position, it possesses at least an heuristic appeal in the case of Durkheim and the Elementary Forms. First, as Everett Wilson has observed,I* the context within which the Elementary Forms was forged was manifestly one of considerable intellectual conflict, and it was conflict, moreover, infused with a strong moral component. Thus, we find the evangelical Smith disparaging both Roman Catholic “superstition” and Protestant sectarianism (while simultaneously being tried for heresy by his evangelical Frazer increasingly doing battle with the ghost of Smith, Durkheim contradicting Spencer and Gillen’s interpretation of their own data, and even the appearance of a division within the Durkheim School itself (though the last was apparently denied to all outsiders)-all within the larger context of the Vic- torian conflict between religion and social science. Moreover, the positions taken by the participants in this heady controversy seem to have been conditioned, if not actually determined, by precisely the sort of “absolute presuppositions’’ discussed by Collingwood-e.g., Smith’s confident view of gradual Christian enlighten~nent,’~’ Frazer’s equally confident rationalism, the “Levitical” conception of primitive religion held by Hubert and Mauss, and the Kantian moralism of their master. Collingwood’s argument thus suggests an extension of the argument made by Peter Berger in 1963 when he noted that “the most fruitful developments in classic sociological theory [have] oc- curred in close association with historical data.”141 Berger argued that Weber’s view of the canonical prophets as socially detached individuals can be accounted for by the limitations of early-twentieth century Biblical scholarship, and with the aid of subsequent scholarship, his theory of charisma and religious innovation improved. But if Weber’s prophets thus “are made to appear as proto-Protestants of an earlier d i spensa t i~n ,”~~~

without t a eir gods; it is because society, of whic r the gods are only a symbolic ex-


surely it is due as much to his own Protestantism as to the existing Biblical literature, and such a view would also explain why Durkheim’s aborigines often bear a closer resemblance to the ancient Hebrews than to anything described by Spencer and Gillen.

But if Collingwood was right to emphasize the role of such absolute presuppositions, then he was also right in suggesting that it is the historian’s task to uncover them; and this implies certain things for the history of sociology generally. For it is obvious that the “complexes of questions” for which Durkheim tried to provide sociological answers came from a much broader intellectual context than that of sociology itself-e.g., history, ethnography, anthropology, classics, theology, and philosophy. But if this is the case, surely we must cease writing the history of sociology as the linear development of a scientific discipline, in which earlier ideas presumably adumbrate and anticipate present “truths;” instead, we must write the history of sociology as but a part of the more general intellectual history to which it properly belongs.“* Otherwise it would seem that the sort of critical moments presently under scrutiny would remain, not only little understood, but quite literally invisible (see Note 138).

Similar suggestions have been made elsewhere,’“ to be answered with the argument that such an approach would be “pedantic, myopic, and antequarian,” and, in any case, of little interest to sociologist^.'^^ To us, on the contrary, such an approach would seem to secure rather than deny the real value of the history of ideas. For if we adhere to more traditional methods, wherein the classic figures of the past actively compete for the honor of being ourselves, it is difficult to see how even the act of reading them can long survive the increasing evidence of their If, on the contrary, we ask the more historical question of why they thought they were right, we would seem to be in a better position to answer the question of why we so often think the same, only to prove otherwise. And this, in turn, might lead to an answer to a still more disturbing question, recently raised (though not, I think, conclusively answered) by Geoffrey Hawthorn’”-whether sociology, by its very nature, is in fact capable of answering questions which are not themselves sociological at all.

NOTES

I . The most recent discussion of this issue can be found in Whitney Pope, “Classic on Classic: Parsons’ Interpretation of Durkheim,” Americon Sociologicol Review 38 (1973): 399-416; Pope, “Parsons on Durkheim. Revisited,” American Sociological Review 40 (1975): I 11-1 15; and Talcott Parsons, “Comments on Parsons’ Interpretation of Durkheim and on ‘Moral Freedom through Understanding in Durkheim,’ ” American Sociological Review 40 (1975): 106-1 11. For a more detailed discussion of the relevant literature, see Robert Alun Jones, “On Understanding a Sociological Classic,” Americon Journol ojSociology 83 (1977): 28 I n6.

2. Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Ltye ond Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 238. 3. Emile Durkheim, Review, “Herbert Spencer-Ecclesiarticol Insrifuiions: Being purr 6 ofrhe Principles

ofSociology (London: 1885),” Rewuephilosophique 22:61.9, tr. 1975 by J. Redding and W. S. F. Pickcring, in Durkheim on Religion, ed. W. S . F. Pickering (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1886). pp. 18. 20.

Emile Durkheim. Review, “Guyau, J. M.-L’lrreligion de I’awenir, erude de sociologie (Paris: Alcan, 1887),” Revuephilosophique 23 (1887): 299-31 1, tr. 1975 by J . Redding and W. S. F. Pickering, in Durkheim on Religion, ed. W. S . F. Pickering (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). pp. 34-35.

5. Emile Durkheim. The Division of Labor in Sociefy (1893; tr. G. Simpson [New York: Macmillan.

6 . Durkheim. Review, “Herbert Spencer.” p. 19. 7. Emile Durkheim, “Lettres au Directeur de La Revue nto-scolastique,” Revue neoscolatfique 14 (1907):

606-607, 612-614. reprinted in Simon Deploige, Le conflict de la morole e f de la sociologie 30 (Louvain: 191 I , 3rd ed., 1923; 1907). pp. 402-403.

4 .

19331). pp. 168-169.

20 1 ROBERTSON SMITH, DURKHEIM, AND SACRIFICE

8. A critique of such procedures can be found in Jones, “On Understanding,” pp. 293-294. For a discussion of the interesting implications of such procedures for narrative synthesis, as well as historical causation, see Murray G. Murphey, Our Knowledge of the Historical Past (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), pp. 123-124.

9. Robert K . Merton, On Theoretical Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 2. 10. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, (1912; Eng. tr. London: Allen and

Unwin; New York: Macmillan. 1915), pp. 611162. See Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: First Series (Edinburgh, 3rd edition, London, 1927; 1889), pp. 264-265.

I I . Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 109. 109nl1, n12. 12. Ibid., pp. 359n96. See Smith, Lectures, pp. 152ff, 446, 481. 13. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 82n33. See Smith, Lectures, pp. 126, 132. 14. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, pp. 453-454. See Smith, Lectures, pp. 388-440. 15. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 458. See Smith, Lectures, p. 347ff. 16. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms. pp. 377-392. 17. Smith, Lectures, p. 27. 18. Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifice (Paris: E. Mourry, 1920). p. 1. 19. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “Foreword” to Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifce: Its Nature and Function (Chicago:

20. T. 0. Beidelman, W. Roberrson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion (Chicago: University o f

21. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 377.

University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 7-8.

Chicago Press, 1974), p. 53.

22. Hugh Tredennick (tr.), Euthyphro, in Pluto: The Last Days of Socrates (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 40. 23. Smith, Lectures. p. 394. 24. G. Murray, The Five Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 227. 25. A. D. Nock, Sallustius: Concerning the Gods and the Universe, tr. A. D. Nock (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1926). p. 83. E. Wynne-Tyson (ed.), Porphyry: On Abstinence from Animal Food, tr. T. Taylor (London: Barnes and Noble, 1965).

26. Nock. Sallustius. 27. Nock, Sallustius. p. 139. 28. H. Hubert and M. Mauss, “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice,” I’AnnOe sociologique 2

(1899): 29-138, t i . W. D. Halls as Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). See Murray, The Five Stages, p. 227n3; E. E. Evans-Pritchard, “The Meaning of Sacrifice Among the Nuer,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 84 (1954): 23. 29. Crawford Howell Toy, Introduction to the History of Religions (Boston: Ginn, 1913), p. 494. 30. Arthur A. Sykes, An Essay on the Nature, Design and Origin of Sacrifices (London, 1748). p. 73-74. 31. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2nd edition 1889 (London, 1871). p. 376. 32. J. Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels (Berlin: Reimer. 1878), 2nd edition published as Prolegomena zur

Geschichte Israels (Berlin: Reimer. 1883), tr. J. S. Black and A. Menzies as Prolegomena to the History of lsruel (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1885).

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

143. 40. 41.

Moses 1. Finkelstein. “Julius Wellhausen,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 15 (1935): 400. Fred Gladstone Bratton, A History of the Bible (Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), p. 324. Wellhausen, Geschichte Israels. p. 52. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 80. J. S. Black and G. Chrystal, The Li/e of William Robertson Smith (London: A. and C. Black, 1912), p.

Smith, Lectures, pp. 3, 216. For an excellent discussion of this evolutionary “method,” see M. T. Hodgen, The DoctrineojSurvivaLF

(London: Alleson, 1936). 42. Smith, Lectures, p. 255. 43. Ibid., pp. 319-320. 44. Ibid.. pp. 238-239. 45. Ibid., pp. 392-396. 46. Ibid.. p. 425. 47. Ibid., p. 439.


48. J. G. Frazer. “William Robertson Smith,’ (1894). in The Gorgon’s Head and Other Literary Pieces

49. Smith, Lectures, p. 393; cited in Frazer. ‘William Robertson Smith,” p. 289. 50. By 1889, of course, Smith had resettled at Cambridge, but his theory of sacrifice had been p r o p o d as

early as 1881, and thus could easily have been an issue in his trial and dismissal. The curious thing is that it was not.

51. 52. Ibid., p. 418. 53.

(London: Macmillan, 1927). p. 288.

Black and Chrystal, The Li/e of William Robertson Smith. p. 417.

S. A. Cook, “Introduction” to 3rd edition of Smith (1889)(New York: MacMillen, 1927), p. 27n2. R. J. Thompson, Penitence and Sacrifice in Early Israel Outside the Levitical Law (Leiden: Brill, 1963), p. 11. Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith, p. 54n93.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 52. In all fairness, we should note that Smith’s most recent biographer (Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith, p.

26) has defended Smith against any charge of expediency or pusillanimity in excising this paragraph from his second edition. Such an alteration under fire would certainly be inconsistent with the previous evidence of Smith’s unyielding adherence to scholarly principle in the face of intense pressure.

54. 55.

56. John B. Vickery, The Literury Impact of the Golden Bough (Princeton: University Press, 1973). 57. Evans-Pritchard. “The Meaning of Sacrifice.” p. 22. 58. C. Llvi-Strauss, Le Totemisme aujordhui (Paris: Presses Universitaircs de France, 1962); tr. R.

59. Evans-Pritchard, “The Meaning of Sacrifice,’’ p. 22. See G. B. Gray, Sacrifice in the Old Testament: Its

60. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, pp. 52-53. 61. Frazer. “William Robertson Smith,” p. 288. 62. Hubert and Mauss, “Essai sur la nature,” p. 2. 63. F. Nitzsch, Die Idee und die Stufen des Opferkultus (Kiel, 1889). C. A. Wilken, “Eene nieuwe theorie

over den oorsprong des offers,” De Gids (1891). L. Marillier, “La Place du totemisme dans I’evolution religieuse.” Revue de I‘histoire des religions 36-37 (1897-1898): 98.

Needham as Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), reprinted in 1969 (London: Penguin), p. 4.

Theory and Practice (1925), pp. 1-82.

64. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid.. pp. 5-6. 67. Ibid., p. 6. 68. Ibid.. pp. 6-7. 69. Ibid.. p. 7. 70.

Hubert and Mauss, “Essai sur la nature,” p. 5 .

In fact, Robertson Smith would probably have characterized Hubert and Mauss’s theory of sacrifice as “Levitical,” on the ground that it presumed a radical separation of sacred and profane, and thus a complicated ritual to establish communication between them. Durkheim’s theory bears a closer resemblance to Smith’s pre- Exilic speculations which in fact were inconsistent with such a radical separation. 71. 72. Ibid., p. 13 .

73. Ibid., p. 95. 74. Ibid.. p. 93. 75. C. LCvi-Strauss, La Pensee sauvage (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1926), tr, as The Savage Mind (London:

76. Evans-Pritchard, “The Meaning of Sacrifice,” p. 23. 77. George Gusdorf, L’experience humain du sacrifice (Pans: Presses Univcrsitaires de France, 1948), p. 78. 78. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, pp. 70-71. 79. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Centml Australia (London, 1899). p. 169. 80. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (London, 19oQ). p. 283. 81. J. G. Frazer, “The Origin of Totemism,” The Fortnightly Review 71 (1899): 664. 82. J. G. Frazer, “Preface to Second Edition” of Golden Bough, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1900). p. 16. 83. Cited in Frazer, “The Origin of Totemism,” p. 665. 84. J. G. Frazer, “Observations on Central Australian Totemism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological

85. Frazcr, “The Origin of Totemism,” p. 836. 86. Frazer. “The Origin of Totemism,” p. 838.

Hubert and Mauss. “Essai sur la nature,” p. 9.

Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1966), pp. 223-227.

Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 28, New Series vol. I (1899): 275.


87. Frazer, “Preface,” p. 18. 88. Robert Ackerman, “Frazer on Myth and Ritual,” JOIUM~ of the Hisrory of Ideas 36 (1975): 129-130. 89. Frazer, “Preface,” p. 19. 90. S. A. Cook, “Israel and Totemism,” The Jewish Quarterly Review I4 (1902): 413-448. 91. R. R. Marett and T. K. Penniman, Spencer’s Scienrifc Correspondence wirh SirJ. G . Frazerand Others

92. Frazer, J. G., “The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism Among the Australian Aborigines,” Fort-

93. Emile Durkheim, “Sur le totemisme,” I’Annte sociologlque 5 (1902): 82. 94. A. A. Goldenweiser, Review, “Durkheim, E., Les Formes ilkmentaires de la vfe religieuse,” American

Anthropologist 17 (1915): 719. 95. Durkheim, The Division, pp. 59nl5,208n9. Lukes’s source here is M. Mauss, “Notices biographiques,”

L’AnnCe sociologique n.s. 2 (1927): 3-9. But it is difficult to see how even Herr would have been familiar with Frazer’s Toremism so early, for it appeared as a volume only in 1887 and as an Eocyclopacdia Britannica article still a year later. The evidence that Durkheim knew of the British speculations concerning totemism very early, however, is quite convincing. Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (1885), for example, contains a complete chapter on the subject (pp. 186-216). 96. Emile Durkheim, Le Suicide: hrude de sociologie (Paris: Alcan, 1897), tr. J. A. Spaulding and G. Simp-

son as Suicide: A Study in Sociology (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1951), pp. 220-228. 97. Emile Durkheim, “De la dkfinition des phknomtnes religieux,” I‘Annk sociologique 2 (1899): 80, ti. J.

Redding and W. S. F. Pickering as “Concerning the Definition of Religious Phenomena,” in Durkheim on Religion, ed. W . S . F. Pickering (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1932).

nightly Review 84 (1905): 162-172, 452-466.

98. Durkheirn, “Sur le toternisme,” pp. 82-121. See also Durkheim, ?%e Elementary Forms, p. 380. 99. Lukes, Emile Durkheim, p, 454.

100. Marett and Penniman, Spencer’s Scienri/ic Correspondence, pp. 84-85. 101. It is impossible to summarize here all of the criticisms which had b u n brought against Smith by 1912. For an effort toward such a summary, however, see Jones, “On Understanding,” pp. 305-306. There seems little question that Smith was wrong, that he was known to be wrong, and that Durkheim knew (in part) that he was wrong. 102. Henri Hubert, Introduction a la traduction francaise du Manuel d’Hisroire des Religions (Chanttpie de la Saussaye. 1904), pp. 39-40. 103. J. Toutain. “L‘Histoire des religions et le totemisme: A Propos d’un livre rCcent,” Revue de I’hisroire des Religions 51 (1908): 352. 104. Toutain, “L’Histoire,” p. 349. 105. Ibid., p. 350. 106. Ibid., pp. 351-352. 107. 108. Ibid., p. 4n2. 109. Ibid., p. 4. 110. Ibid., pp. 16-17. 1 11. Ibid., p. 5. 112. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1890), p. 374. 113. Hubert and Mauss. Mklanges d’histoire, pp. 5-8. 114. Ibid., pp. 11-13. 115. Ibid., p. IS. 116. Ibid. Considering the evidence of the Hubert and Mauss Essai and its I 9 0 9 sequel alone, one is tempted to challenge the traditional view of the “solidarity” of the Durkheim school; and W. Paul Vogt has providcd additional evidence in an excellent paper on Bouglt as “an ambivalent Durkheimian” in a forthcoming issue of the Rewefrancaise de sociologie. The situation is probably better characterized as one of internal disagrcc- ment coupled with solidarity in the face of all outsiders. 117. S. B. Barnes, “Sociological Explanation and Natural Science: A Kuhnian Reappraisal.” European Journal of Sociology 13 (1972): 373-391. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlighrenmenr and Despair: A History of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 373-391. I 18. Tiryakian’s complete argument is presented in “L‘lkole Durkheimienne A la recherche de la socittt perdue: le debut de la sociologie et son milieu culturel,” forthcoming in La Revue fiancaise de sociologie; and more briefly in his chapter on Durkheim in Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds., A Hbrory of Sociological Analysir (New York: Basic Books, 1978), p. 233, note 106. He does not use the term “structural ambivalence,” though his description bears most of the features of Merton’s usage.

H. Hubert and M. Maws (eds.), Melanges d‘hisroire des religions, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1929), p. I lnl .


119. A similar point has been made by Werner Cahnman. who emphasizes that what helped Durkheim in the sociology of religion “was not his faulty notion of the Australian aborigines, but his familiarity with the basic truth of Judaism, namely, that the Jewish people is the corpus mysricum of the Jewish religion. One should note that this aspect of the Elementary Forms has provided a sociological underpinning for Mordecai M. Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization. In addition, Durkheim might have had in mind that in Latin the very word religio refers to “communal ties.” See Cahnman’s contribution to the discussion “Durkheim Today” in Robert Alun Jones and Henrika Kuklick (4s.). Research in rhe Sociology of Knowledge. Sciences and Art, vol. 2 (Greenwich: J A I Press, 1979). 120. Georges Davy, “Emile Durkheim: L‘Homme,” Revue de metophysique et de morale 26 (1919): 186. Lukes, Emile Durkheim, p. 541148. 121. The remark, which has been cited repeatedly, goes as follows: “If you wish to mature your thought, devote yourself to the study of a great master; take a system apart, laying bare its innermost secrets. That is what I did and my educator was Renouvier.” 122. Emile Durkheim. “La Philosophic dans Ies universitts allemandes,” Revue inrernarionale de I’enseigne- ment 13 (1887): 330. 123. Lukes, Emile Durkheim, pp. 55-57. 124. E. A. Tiryakian, “Emile Durkheim,” in A Hisrory of Sociological Analysis, ed. T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978), pp. 208-213. 125. 126. 127. 80. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

C . Bougli, Humanisme. Sociologie. Philosophie (Paris: Hermann & Cle, 1938), pp. 52-53. Lukes, Emile Durkheim, pp. 410-41 1. M. Mauss, “Introduction” to Durkheim, E. “Introduction a la morale,” Revuephilosophique 89 (1920):

Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, p. 371. Ibid., p. 378. Marillier, “La Place,” p. 98. Durkheim. The Elementary Forms, p. 380. Ibid., p. 381. Lukes, Emile Durkheim, p. 454. Durkheim, The Elemenrary Forms. p. 388. Ibid.. pp. 388-389. See, for example, Emile Durkheim, Contribution to Discussion: “Le Probltme religieux et la dualitk de

la nature humaine,” Seance du 4 fevrier, Bulletin de la sociiri francaise dephilosophie 13 (1913): 63-75,80-87, 90-100, 108-1 1 I ; and Emile Durkheim, “Le Dualisme de la nature humaine et ses conditions sociales,” Scieniia

137. R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939). pp. 29-43. 138. This paper was originally prepared for presentation at a session of the American Sociological Associa- tion annual meeting in San Francisco (September, 1978), entitled “Critical Moments in the History of Sociology.” The organizer of that session was Everett K. Wilson, who made the point referred to in the text in private correspondence dated 16 December 1977. Though the paper was never presented in that session, its concluding remarks were intended as contributions to that discussion. 139. The intellectual sources for Smith’s anomalous “irrationalist” conception of primitive religion lie beyond the scope of this paper. Briefly, however, many of these are to be found in the almost reactionary Calvinism of the Free Church of Scotland, together with the peculiar revival of Lutheran theology found in the works of the nineteenth century German theologian Albrecht Ritschl, as well as nineteenth century German biblical scholarship. A more complete account will be found in R o k r t Alun Jones, Reasons Imperfection: William Robertson Smith and rhe Proresrant Origins of rhe Social Scientific Srudy of Religion (in progress). 140. Smith’s view of historical progress was based upon what is now known as the Heihgeschichrlich or non- propositional view of divine revelation. For a description of this position, see Robert Alun Jones, “Introduc- tion” to Robertson Smith’s Prophets of Israel (1882; paperback edition, Transaction Books, forthcoming). 141. P. Berger, “Charisma and Religious Innovation: The Social Location of Israelite Prophecy,” h e r i c o n Sociological Review 28 (1963): 940. 142. Berger. “Charisma,” p. 943. 143. Similar injunctions have been stated recently by Henrika Kuklick, “The Social Context of the Social Sciences,” Sociological Inquiry (forthcoming) and Stefan Collini, in a paper on Henry Sidgwick recently prepared for the Ninth World Congress of Sociology; and both rest, in turn, on the arguments made by Quentin Skinner in “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” Hisrory and Theory 8 (1969): 3-53. 144. Jones. “On Understanding.” 145. Harry Johnson, “Comment on Jones’ ‘On Understanding a Sociological Classic,’ ” American Journal ofSociology 84 (1978): 171-175.

I5 (1914): 206-221.


146. The foremost authority on Durkheirn, for example, has stated: “Actually, I don’t think that it would be an exaggeration to say that practically every major proposition which Durkheirn advanced is probably false.” See Steven Lukes’s contribution to the discussion “Durkheim Today” in Jones and Kuklick, Reseurch. 147. See Hawthorn, Enlightenment.

Documents

Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and sacrifice: An historical context for the elementary forms of the religious life