Who reads Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life?
In 1970, very few sociologists in America did. Today, Elementary Forms is Durkheim’s most influential book for sociologists in America and elsewhere. Elementary Forms became the central totem of culturalist readings of the French master, helping transform “Durkheim,” once the master analyst of modernization, into the “cultural Durkheim” celebrated in the pages of national newspapers for his sociology of moral life that helps us become more aware of the myths and beliefs that brings us together as a community. Paul Vogt is certainly right when he says that “knowledge of Durkheim and his books is a full part of the definition of what a sociologist is in America” (1993: 227), but this evades the more important question of why Elementary Forms became synonymous with Durkheim in the late twentieth century but not before
