| The present thesis is an examination of the work and lives of those members of the Durkheimian/Année sociologique team who were most centrally concerned with the sociology of religion (i.e., Emile Durkheim himself, Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert and Robert Hertz). It endeavors (1) to link the Durkheimian project to the birth of the modern intellectual, and in fact to argue that their project constitutes one of the key moments in that birth, by deciphering in this central kernel of the Durkheimian group a program for simultaneously examining the role of the intellectual in society and acting in the world themselves as intellectuals and (2) in so doing, to explore the possibilities of a nuanced sociology of intellectual knowledge production that makes use of structural and conflict theoretical models (e.g., those of Pierre Bourdieu and Randall Collins) while not losing sight of the importance of experience and the existential quest for meaning in the understanding of intellectual knowledge production.; Through reconstruction of the relevant social worlds and networks in which the Durkheimians lived and worked and subsequent reinterpretation of their writings in light of this sociological perspective, I argue that this group's effort to understand the intellectual's role in society and to construct for themselves an identity as “secular intellectuals” is centered on a uniquely creative professional and personal reappropriation of perhaps the foundational category through which human experience is structured: the sacred. My findings show that the common interpretation of the Durkheimian intellectuals as simply rationalist and secular is unsatisfactory, as they borrowed and creatively reshaped much of the symbolic language and structure of religious thought in producing their own work and constructing their own identities as intellectual and political actors in the face of the crisis of total desacralization of the western world that so many intellectuals of the period recognized as the central problem of their era. These facts significantly complicate the meaning of the Durkheimian project, both intellectually and politically, and the nature of its influence on later thinkers. |
