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The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, by Emile Durkheim. Translated by Karen Fields. New York: The Free Press, 1995. 464 pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-02-907936-5
Finally, at long last, there is a new English edition of this great book. The translation is elegant and sophisticated, and the translator's introduction shows full awareness of what was at issue in the years before 1912, intellectually and socially. Karen Fields compares her task with that of the virtuoso jazz trumpeter who reintroduced Duke Ellington. Quite a virtuoso herself, her introduction explains why Durkheim's thought has always seemed so difficult and provoked so much opposition. She succeeds in making it more excitingly relevant to our present concerns than ever before.
She compares Durkheim's rethinking of religion and philosophy with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), the advent of cubism and the revolution in perspective. Her evocation of turn-of-the-century rethinking of the relation between art and reality illuminates brilliantly what Durkheim was saying about reality and religion and reality and science.
Some books are well served by their titles, but this one is not. Suicide is a splendid one-word title that says exactly what the book is about. Primitive Classification is intriguing and true to its subject matter. When it comes to The Division of Labour the title only tells about the book's starting point in a comparison of two kinds of social organization. The title does not warn you that the idea of "the Sacred" is going to turn upside down the received ideas about sentiments underlying justice and law. As for the title of this book, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life is seriously misleading. It sounds like a tract for the times; even in 1912 it was possible to be writing sociology without being specially interested in religion, and the thesis would offend many of those who were; for disinterested readers it...