If religion protects man against the desire for self-destruction, it is not that it preaches the respect for his own person to him with arguments sui generis; but because it is a society. What constitutes this society is the existence of a certain number of beliefs and practices common to all the faithful, traditional and thus obligatory. The more numerous and strong these collective states of mind are, the stronger the integration of the religious community, and also the greater its preservative value. The details of dogmas and rites are secondary. The essential thing is that they be capable of supporting a sufficiently intense collective life. And because the Protestant church has less consistency than the others it has less moderating effect upon suicide.
Sociologism, as we use the term here, is a synthesis of a positivistic methodology with a particular set of substantive theories, for which we have invented the name "agelecism" (from αγελη, meaning "group"). By "agelecism" we mean the general sociological doctrine which maintains the reality sui generis or the causal priority of the social group qua group. Agelecism in its modern form was introduced into the stream of French social thought by Louis De Bonald and [Joseph-Marie] De Maistre, who maintained that the social group precedes and constitutes the individual, that it is the source of culture and all the higher values, and that social states and changes are not produced by, and cannot be directly affected or modified by, the desires and volitions of individuals.
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