Émile Durkheim’s project for a secular, scientific understanding of religion was bound up with a belief in evolution. Yet in a remark much discussed by commentators, he said that in 1895 his approach to religion had been transformed by a ‘revelation’. However, he said this in a letter over a decade later (Durkheim 1907a: 404), and, apart from the issue of a recollection’s accuracy so long afterwards, it is problematic in two main ways. It is very brief and leaves open the question, not only of what was revealed but also of how it was revealed and if it really arose out of thin air, in a wholly ungrounded moment of insight.
In investigating these matters, it is not enough just to focus on his work around 1895. It is essential to look at things from the perspective of his work around 1907, the year of the appearance of the first known draft of what he eventually published in 1912 as Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. But it is also important to note an intervening intellectual crisis, rooted in developments in 1898 and 1899. Accordingly, in asking about Durkheim’s revelation, my discussion starts with how his approach had changed by the time of these developments, compared with what it had been in his doctoral thesis of 1893, De la division du travail social.
Durkheim’s first main publications on religion after his ‘revelation’ began to appear in the new journal he had founded, the Année sociologique. One was an essay on the origins of the prohibition of incest (Durkheim 1898a), followed the next year with an essay on the definition of religious phenomena (Durkheim 1899b)…