1One of the most striking features of Weber’s writings on religion is the frequency with which he uses the word “rationality” and its derivatives (Rationalisierung, Durchrationalisierung, etc.). It follows from this that the sociological explanation of religious phenomena and religious beliefs, for him, as with an explanation of any social phenomenon, comes from an interpretive method. According to the fundamental postulate of the metatheory on which this interpretive method is based, the cause of an individual’s beliefs coincides with the meaning these beliefs have for him or her. According to Weber, for the sociologist to explain that a certain category of people adheres to a certain belief is to show that these beliefs make sense to these people.

2Weber’s writings on the sociology of religion remain relevant because of their methodological and theoretical framework. Like those of Durkheim, the data on which they draw has aged. Scholars and theorists of Indian society are critical of what Weber wrote concerning Indian castes, particularly concerning the Untouchables (Deliège 1993; Baechler 1988). In addition, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide information on ancient Judaism and early Christianity unavailable to Weber. His writings are also mostly posthumous, and it is not certain that they have come to us in a form that Weber would have considered definitive. However, the scope of the methodological and theoretical lesson they hold for us (both dimensions of scientific activity standing in reciprocal relation to one another) remains intact. It is this lesson, above all, that is worth emphasizing today, in the case of Weber’s writings on the sociology of religion, as in that of Durkheim’s Elementary forms (1912/1965). [1] This will be my purpose in the following remarks.

Two Main Categories of Theories of Religion

3Although Weber applies the metatheory of understanding to the analysis of religious beliefs in a particularly conscious and systematic manner, he is not the only one to do so. If we take a broad overview of the ways in which religious beliefs are explained by the social sciences, we can discern two main categories of theories. On the one hand, discontinuist theories regard religious beliefs as fundamentally distinct from other kinds of human thought. They explain these beliefs by assuming that the believer is subject to laws of thought distinct from those governing scientific thought. Lévy-Bruhl’s “primitive mentality,” Levi-Strauss’ “savage mind,” and now Shweder’s “magical thinking” or d’Andrade’s “cognitive anthropology” fit into this framework. [2] Shweder (1991) later abandons the concept of “magical thinking” that he had previously used, but under the label of “cognitivism,” he develops a discontinuist theory of thought, assuming that different cultures use distinctive patterns of thought.

4The “primitive mentality” and the “savage mind” are distinct concepts, certainly, but both postulate the existence of forms of collective thought that depart from the rules governing the modern human being’s ordinary thought process. According to Horton, this category of concepts mainly reflects the attitude—condescending at the turn of the century, deferential since the mid-century—which generally prevails among anthropologists toward non-Western societies and especially societies without writing. Indeed, in the passage from the “primitive mentality” to the “savage mind,” it seems that there is moral rather than scientific progress (Horton 1993).

5These discontinuist theories repeat, in an erudite tone, notions we find in Comte (the Three Stages—theological, metaphysical and positive thought—stripped of their evolutionary dimension), in Pareto (the “non-logical” as distinct from both logic and the “illogical”), and, reaching even further back in time, in Voltaire (1767/1961).

6Weber’s metatheory, by contrast, is continuist: adherence to any belief, religious or scientific as well as juridical, is explained by the fact that the subject has strong reasons to believe it, and that this belief makes sense to him or her. Therefore, it is up to the sociologist to reconstruct (nachbilden) these reasons. This assumes that the observer and observed share the same rules of thought.

7Weber is not alone in adopting this theoretical framework. Tocqueville before him shares the same theoretical and methodological principles. He shows that the macroscopic differences observed between the United States and France in the content and distribution of religious beliefs are “understandable”: the Americans have reasons that the French do not for remaining attached to their traditional religious beliefs (de Tocqueville 1845/2004). Renan (1863/1955), too, shares these principles, especially in his Life of Jesus. It is the same with Durkheim’s Elementary forms of religious life: we cannot explain religious beliefs as illusions; scientific interpretations stand in a continuum with religious interpretations of the world.

8It may be noted incidentally that the Voltaire of Lettres philosophiques also adopts this framework. To him, the ideas of Penn, the Quaker founder of Pennsylvania, seemed perfectly “understandable”: he wishes to impose tolerance, respect for the dignity of others, and the supremacy of being over having as core values; Voltaire (1734/2003, 16) only reproaches Penn with translating them into a “ridiculous” symbolism; Penn “would have secured them [his ideas] respectability in Europe if men were able to respect virtue when it lies beneath a ridiculous exterior.” In his Tombeau du fanatisme, Voltaire, well informed of the scholarship of his own times on the history of religions (Pomeau 1956), attributes to those whom we would now call “intellectuals” the fact that ideas based in Christianity have given rise to speculations that eventually make them unrecognizable: “It was only when they tried to Platonize that they became lost in chimerical ideas [Voltaire has in mind the doctrine of the Trinity]” (Voltaire 1767/1961).

An Open Conception of Rationality

9We must not understand the word “rationality” as Weber uses it in the narrow sense it is now commonly given in the social sciences. Thus, Rational Choice Theory (a term commonly translated into French as “théorie du choix rationnel” (TCR), but more accurately translated as “modèle de l’utilité espérée” or “expected utility model”) conceives of social actors as individuals driven solely by the concern to satisfy their preferences by the means each deems most suitable. Here rationality includes characteristics (on the one hand, egoism; on the other, consequentialism and instrumentalism) which are by no means obligatory ingredients of rationality. Furthermore, as it assumes that altruistic preferences are always a matter of enlightened self-interest, [3] the theory of rational choice confuses rationality per se with instrumental rationality (or, as we might also say, with consequentialist rationality). This entirely unnecessary reduction has the disadvantage of producing a metaphysical image of the social actor, of which one can only see what justifies it from a scientific point of view. Moreover, not everyone shares this view. Thus, the philosopher Nicholas Rescher (1995) states:“[…] rationality is in its very nature teleological and ends-oriented,” adding immediately that the teleological is not to be confused with the instrumental. Indeed, he continues: “Cognitive rationality is concerned with achieving true beliefs. Evaluative rationality is concerned with making correct evaluation. Practical rationality is concerned with the effective pursuit of appropriate objectives.” Thus, it is obviously not instrumental rationality but the rationality that Rescher calls cognitive that gives scientific work its sense (Boudon 2002). In the same vein, the Weberian distinction between “instrumental rationality [Zweckrationalität]” and “axiological rationality [Wertrationalität]” implies that rationality should not be confused with “instrumental” rationality and that the social sciences must take this distinction into account when they propose to explain the beliefs and feelings of social subjects. For those who are troubled by the notion of a plurality of types of rationality, we can see that all of these types posit that a subject believes X or Y because, like all those who find themselves in the same situation (in the broad sense of the term “situation”), he has reasons he perceives as valid to believe X or Y.

10In the chapter “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen” in his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Weber speaks of “rationalization” (Rationalisierung) to describe various cognitive processes. These include the search for coherence—and more generally for credibility—in the explanation of phenomena, but also the search for means tailored to ends themselves inspired by basic needs, the simplification of theories proposed to explain natural or human phenomena, the definition of practices and design techniques derived from these theories, or the codification of these techniques and practices (Weber 1922/1988, 266). Religious thought, like any form of thought, seems to him to be subject to these processes of rationalization. In short, the subject seeks to produce credible explanations (or, according to his or her social “role,” to find them in the marketplace of ideas and take them up) regarding phenomena of interest or concern to him (pain, bountiful harvests, the survival and reproduction of cattle, etc.), so as to discover useful lines of conduct. He then subjects these theoretical explanations to a critical gaze, which of course will be better or worse equipped depending on the state of the knowledge at his disposal. Far from obeying special rules of thought or being enslaved to psychological or social mechanisms operating without his knowledge, such as those highly speculative mechanisms postulated by discontinuist theories, the subject obeys the general rules that characterize ordinary thought, scientific thought, and legal thought.

11Weber is not the only one to observe that the techniques employed by magical practices often have an objective basis; Pareto had seen this as well. There is a contemporary illustration of this thesis: the geophysicist Jelle de Boer of Wesleyan University in Connecticut has demonstrated that the Pythia of Delphi sat above a fault corresponding to the intersection of two tectonic plates from which emanated vapors of methane, ethane and ethylene with effectively hallucinatory properties (de Boer 2000).

12The “rational” conception of religious beliefs that Weber defends does not imply that a person endorses them based on some reasoning on his part. He recognizes that, whatever their nature may be, beliefs are normally transmitted through education and generally by socialization. He notes that the new beliefs are imposed through the mediation of “charisma,” the special authority that subjects accord to the innovators who induce them to accept the new theories and beliefs they offer:

13

Die Deckung allen über die Anforderungen des ökonomischen Alltags hinaus gehenden Bedarfs dagegen ist, je mehr wir historisch zurücksehen, desto mehr, prinzipiell gänzlich heterogen und zwar : charismatisch, fundiert gewesen. Das bedeutet : die natürlichen Leiter in psychischer, physischer, ökonomischer, ethischer, religiöser, politischer Not waren weder angestellte Amtspersonen, noch Inhaber eines als Fachwissen erlernten und gegen Entgelt geübten Berufs im heutigen Sinn dieses Wortes, sondern Träger spezifischer, als übernatürlich (im Sinne von : nicht jedermann zugänglich) gedachter Gaben des Körpers und Geistes. [4]

14In short, this important passage tells us that the response to human needs that go beyond simple economic needs is not usually given by experts or officials, but by innovators with special qualities of body and mind thought not to be accessible to all, and in this sense, Weber writes, to be “supernatural.”

15Like Durkheim, however, Weber does not believe that charismatic authority (any more than traditional authority) is sufficient to ensure the establishment and survival of beliefs. They also must appear to have a foundation—a proposition which follows immediately from the notion of understanding. We must therefore consider “charisma” as a medium, and observe that this medium is not absent from modern societies, although it is most characteristic of societies that have not yet undergone the process of disenchantment. In this sense, Weber could subscribe to Durkheim’s (1912/1965, 486) key assertion: “The concept which was first held as true because it was collective tends to be no longer collective except on condition of being held as true: we demand its credentials of it before according it our confidence.”

Magic

16Magic provides the context for all the sections in Sociology of Religion and Economy and Society devoted to religion. The theory of magic allows us to grasp its basic principles:

17

The sparks resulting from twirling the wooden sticks are as much a “magical” effect as the rain evoked by the manipulations of the rainmaker. Thus, religious or magical behavior or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive conduct, particularly since even the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic.

18This passage expresses the continuism of thought to which I referred earlier. It tells us that magic is goal oriented: for instance, it aims to draw rain upon the crops. Why these “manipulations” rather than others? Because the shaman and those who call upon his services are convinced that they are effective. And for them, the belief in the efficacy of this method is founded upon a theory.

19But this theory is false, one might object, while that which informs the action of the fire-starter is based on a proven theory. Of course, Weber replies. But we know that rubbing two pieces of wood produces fire because we know that the kinetic energy is transformed into thermal energy. The “primitive,” however, does not know this, so there is every chance that the theory which justifies in his eyes the action of the fire-starter is just as false for us, that is to say, just as “magical” as that which justifies the action of the rainmaker. In short, because of our knowledge, we make a distinction where the “primitive” does not. The action of the fire-starter is “as much a ‘magical’ effect as the rain evoked by the manipulations of the rainmaker” in the sense that the effect is explained in both cases for the “primitive” by a theory postulating the intervention of the “spirits”:

20

Only we, judging from the standpoint of our modern views of nature, can distinguish objectively in such behavior those attributions of causality which are “correct” from those which are “fallacious,” and then designate the fallacious attributions of causality as irrational, and the corresponding acts as “magic.”

21“Primitives” are interested in rain and fire, as both are essential to their daily activities. It follows logically that they are interested in the means of producing them. This means that they are aware of the fire, for a part of the experience, but also theories by which they explain natural phenomena. This is why the “primitive” always combines, in the course of his agriculture, hunting or fishing activities, means that we would call “technical” and means that we would consider “magical.” But the distinction between the two is the product of our own frames of thought. To put it another way, the “primitive” distinguishes between magic and technique, but he believes both to be indispensable. The Zande who stumbles over a root attributes a double causality to the event, mechanical and magical, says Evans-Pritchard (1937/1968), but in this, says the anthropologist, they are indistinguishable from the modern person who, tripping over a root, attributes the event to mechanical causes while also declaring that he was unlucky. Weber’s reasoning here exactly overlaps that of Durkheim (Boudon 1999). [5] Magicians are rational: they have theories, and it is on the basis of these theories that they act. They are cognitively rational. They are also instrumentally rational, since magic is aimed at producing an outcome considered useful. The “primitive” can still be called rational in the sense that, within the limits of his knowledge, he submits the theory in question to criticism. If “primitives” believe in the efficacy of rainmaking rituals, says Durkheim, this is to the extent that the rain actually falls more often in periods when they practice them, thus corroborating their confidence. Social psychology has amply demonstrated that “moderns” are no slower than “primitives” to seek verification of their beliefs in “spurious correlations.”

22The case of religion is like that of magic, says Weber, who always avoided the somewhat pointless discussion—which abounds in the classic anthropological literature—of the relationships between religion and magic: is one anterior to the other? If so, which one? Are they complementary or antithetical? Because, for Weber, religion inevitably contains greater or lesser doses of magic. Moreover, religion and magic both pursue well-defined objectives and try to achieve them by means based on theories that the believer finds acceptable. In the first lines of the chapter on the sociology of religion in Economy and Society, Weber (1979, 399) cites Deuteronomy: we follow the precepts of religion “[t]hat it may go well with thee. .. and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth.” The objectives of Deuteronomy’s prescriptions are no different from those pursued, for example, by religious theories of a Chinese character.

23Like magical theories, religious theories are subject to critique by different categories of social actors. Like Durkheim and Evans-Pritchard, Weber posits that, though the theories to which “primitives” subscribe seem irrational, they are just as concerned as the moderns with verifying the validity of the theories on which they base their beliefs.

24Here, incidentally, let us note a point to which we will return. Weber thinks it is easier to grasp the meaning of religious beliefs in their earliest manifestations, before intellectual speculation takes hold of them. This evolutionism doubtless explains why he is more interested in ancient Judaism, early Christianity or ancient Buddhism than in the later forms of these religions. This is also the perspective of Renan and Durkheim.

25From the opening chapter of Economy and Society on religion, Weber (1979) suggests that beliefs that seem strange to us and that we call “irrational” seem to be such because of what Piaget has called “sociocentrism”: we distinguish between the firestarter and the rainmaker because we interpret our observations through our own knowledge (Piaget 1965/1995). To distance ourselves from this, it will suffice to understand that “primitives” would consider both behaviors legitimate because they enact formulas drawn from theories that they believe have a foundation. There is no need to attribute to them a “primitive mentality” or “savage thought,” nor to assume that they are the victims of some “symbolic violence.” We may attribute to them the same rules of inference as ours and simply acknowledge that they have no access to what took Western societies centuries to build. When we distance ourselves from our “sociocentrism,” their beliefs become “understandable” to us; we can explain them by way of acceptable assumptions, referring to cognitive mechanisms readily observable in other contexts (and especially in our own), and not presenting the obscurity and speculative nature of the “primitive mentality,” the “savage mind,” and all of the other “collective concepts” (Kollektivbegriffe) that, for Weber, must be eliminated from sociology, lest it fall into mere verbiage, forfeiting the status of a settled and established science. [6]

The Soul, Demons, Spirits, and Gods

26Apart from the theory of magic, we can illustrate the theoretical framework of Weber’s sociology of religion via his analysis of animism. As with magical beliefs, it is easy for us to see animistic theories as so foreign to our own modes of thought that we tend to attribute them to causes such as a “savage thought” or a “primitive soul”—in short, to mobilize the Kollektivbegriffe that Weber intends to eliminate.

27This is not the direction Weber takes. The concept of the soul, he says, was designed to explain a variety of immediately observable and important phenomena. First, death leaves the body intact; only the breath of life disappears. This is why breath is treated as the cause and condition of life. The notion of soul also explains the doubling of the personality in dreams or ecstatic states, as well as the phenomena of fainting or loss of self-control. Thus, it explains a variety of crucial phenomena. Given its explanatory power, it is understandable that it should be present in all religions. Durkheim says (1912/1965, 66) almost the same thing in Elementary Forms. He rejects the assumption that “the idea of the soul was first suggested to men by the badly understood spectacle of the double life they ordinarily lead, on the one hand, when awake, on the other, when asleep.” He does not accept, in fact, that the notion of soul is an illusion suggested to the social subject by the phenomenon of dreaming. Like Weber, he wants to trace it to a theory about phenomena that cannot escape our awareness. Here, it is of no importance to us that the content of this theorization is different in the two authors, and that Weber imagines this theorization proceeding from an ensemble of psychic phenomena, while Durkheim envisions a theorization of the individual’s duality as a being of passions, instincts, and desires who at the same time feels subservient to moral values.

28Disease in its infinite varieties as well as a person’s longevity are likewise complex and crucial phenomena. No society has ignored them. To act on these phenomena, it is necessary to theorize them. In one form or another, the notion of “spirit” is normally referred to in order to account for them. It is very close to the notion of “force,” Weber tells us. These “spirits” are in fact conceptualized as forces that can act on the body and that can be counteracted or propitiated by what are considered to be the appropriate formulas according to certain theories. The immediate character of these theories, in societies where scientific medicine is unknown, explains the fact that they are found in many societies, without any of these having needed to borrow them from the others. The notion of a “demon” is a variation of the concept of “spirit.” It refers to those spirits that produce consequences perceived as negative by the subject.

29Again, Weber offers a simple explanation that refers to cognitive mechanisms readily observable in contemporary societies. These mechanisms simply consist in accounting for a certain phenomenon by creating an explanatory principle that is normally interpreted as corresponding to a reality. In other words, it is easily hypostasized. Any physicist knows for example that “centrifugal forces,” so seemingly familiar to us, do not exist. The expression simply refers to the consequences of the principle of inertia. Yet, as the concept of “centrifugal force” allows us to unify so many easily observable phenomena, it is easy for us to believe that it designates a particular kind of force. The notions of “spirit” or “demon” issue from the same cognitive mechanisms. Arguably, cum grano salis, the Kollektivbegriffe I mentioned above issue from the same analyses. Like the concepts of “demon” or “spirit,” those of the “primitive mentality” or “savage thought” describe many easily observable phenomena and attempt to subsume them under an explanatory principle to which a “reality” is naturally attributed. In support of the continuist theory of knowledge proposed by Weber (and Durkheim), it may be observed that the history of science is replete with “explanatory” principles of the same kind, commonly used and interpreted in a realistic manner, abandoned as soon as we can do without them (cf. the “vortices” abandoned as a result of Newton’s formulation of the principle of inertia, the “horror vacui” attributed to nature and ultimately abandoned in the wake of Pascal’s “great experiment,” the “ether” invalidated by the theory of relativity, etc.).

30Animism’s inductive concepts are thus explained by simple and universally observable cognitive mechanisms. They testify not to a discontinuity between “magical thinking” and “scientific thinking” but, on the contrary, to the uniformity of rules of thought and to the continuity between religious or magical thinking, on the one hand, and scientific thought on the other (which obviously does not mean that science and magic are to be confounded). The impression of discontinuity we feel is easily explained: it is the result of our sociocentrism, and the universal tendency to attribute substantial causes to certain categories of phenomena (“centrifugal forces,” the “primitive mentality,” “demons,” etc.).

31A concept such as “force” in physics has given rise to endless debates. At the beginning of the century, the Vienna Circle itself was not clear on what to think of it, and in view of its persistent opacity, occasionally proposed to eliminate it. The case is the same with the very notion of the “soul,” and of “spirits” or “demons.” Once such explanatory principles have been posited, it is indeed necessary to clarify them. Moreover, they give rise, a posteriori, to further theories, forming networks. Thus, Weber remarks, the phenomena of “ecstasy” are theorized as contact with demons or spirits.

32Charisma itself is a variation on ecstasy. It describes individuals with qualities inaccessible to ordinary mortals. Because they are perceived as such, they can under certain circumstances give others the impression that what they say is true simply because they are the ones who say they enjoy these abilities. Charisma is a concept that Weber restores to its place among the tools of scientific sociology, but he borrows it from both St. Paul and the German romantics (Abbruzzese 2001, 298–9). The latter believed that “genius” allows access to higher truths inaccessible to ordinary mortals. We still believe this, on occasion.

33The fuzziness of concepts such as “soul” or “spirit” thus gives rise to a cognitive dynamics. The “gods” are an evolution of the concept of spirit. They frequently lack names and are designated only by the processes they control (Weber 1979, 402). They give rise to rituals. The content of these rituals is dictated by the theorization of the desires, sensibility, and psychology of a particular god that is proposed and accepted. Naturally, the psychology attributed to the gods is drawn from social observation. Scheler states, in a very Weberian analysis, that “Mohammed’s God has the character of a fanatic and sensuous sheik roaming about the desert,” that “Aristotle’s God has the character of a self-sufficient, contemplative Greek sage who is satisfied with his own wisdom,” and that “the Christian God of the Germanic tribes more or less has blue eyes and the temperament of a Germanic duke to whom one belongs by trust and without a contract […] quite different from the Romans’ regimental religious representation of God” (Scheler 1985, 292–3). Rituals are fixed from the moment they have demonstrated their effectiveness: “Every purely magical act that had proved successful in a naturalistic sense was, of course, repeated in the form once established as effective” (Weber 1979, 405). [7] Weber sees a process of “rationalization” in the substitution of the gods for the spirits: by this, he means that the “gods” allow for a finer and more complex theorization of the world. This is why the gods always appear after the spirits (Weber 1979, 437). Similarly, the concept of inertia entails a more precise concept of motion, and therefore must emerge later. It should also be noted, however, that the evolution of the spirits into gods does not take place everywhere; the circumstances must favor it (Weber 1979, 437). Weber’s evolutionism is in no way mechanistic. [8] We will return to this point.

34Durkheim, too, notes that the central concepts around which the religious theorization of the world is organized are fuzzy and “inductive,” that this fuzziness is crucial to their efficacy, that it gives rise to a constant movement of theorization in order to clarify them. He also notes that these processes are at work not only in religious thought, but also in ordinary and scientific thought.

The Dimensions of Religious Rationality

An Evolutionary Conception

53These processes of “rationalization” explain the appearance of historical irreversibilities, including the “disenchantment of the world” which is at the forefront of Weber’s interests. His analysis of disenchantment alone would justify classifying Weber among evolutionists. In fact, in the early passages of chapter 5 of Economy and Society devoted to religion, Weber shows himself to be an evolutionist when he describes the passage from “pre-animist naturalism” to “symbolism.”

54The primitive rips the heart from an enemy’s chest or severs his genitals on the basis of a theory: the strength of the enemy has its seat in these body parts. By assimilating them, he takes on the power of his enemy. Symbolic theories are then substituted for theories arising from what Weber called “pre-animistic naturalism.” Fire is conceived first of all as a god: this is the phase of “pre-animistic naturalism.” Then a more abstract conception appears in which it is not the fire itself that is treated as a god, but in which the existence of a god presiding over the fire is postulated. Authority over the fire is maintained by the worship dedicated to him (Weber 1979, 406–7). Unlike the fire itself, the god persists and is endowed with an identity: we enter into the phase of “symbolism” (here in its animist variant).

55The reason why Weber is not mentioned in histories of evolutionism may lie in the fact that his conception of evolution is especially cautious and nuanced. Thus, it is more satisfying than the “classic” versions of Comte, Spencer, or John Stuart Mill, or perhaps even the modern versions of Robert Bellah (1970, 211–44) or Friedrich Hayek, which, beyond all the differences between them, all appear much more mechanical and “fatalistic” than his. Weber deserves to be ranked among the evolutionists insofar as the identification and explanation of historical irreversibilities is a central concern for him. The history of ideas, including religious ideas, reveals innumerable such irreversibilities, and all the pages comprising the sociology of religion are dedicated to them. But he is by no means fatalistic, as he expressly declares time and time again, particularly at the end of The Protestant Ethic, in the notes accompanying the famous metaphor of the iron cage (Stahlhartes Gehäuse). In no way does he see the modern world as doomed to produce only Fachmenschen ohne Geist—specialists without spirit—and Genussmenschen ohne Herz—sensualists without heart—even if it seems to encourage these types of personality.

A Complex Evolutionism: Symbolism or Realism?

58Disenchantment, itself resulting largely from the evolution of religion, invalidated magic and set science in its place, but it has not eliminated magic. Charisma, prophecy, symbolic interpretations of the world understood in a literal manner, and more generally, theories of the world interpreted without distantiation, have not disappeared with disenchantment. New myths are produced, notably by “proletaroid intellectuals.”

59The persistence of these archaisms results from general cognitive mechanisms, in the first place. Human thought and psychology generally include invariants, according to the metatheory on which the interpretive method is based. One of the most important of them is that it is difficult to identify the symbolic; as such we tend to interpret in a realistic fashion. It is true that, even among those who have been socialized in modern scientific culture, it is difficult to escape this shift. We must be convinced that centrifugal forces do not exist. It is difficult to resist hypostasizing “chance” or to abandon the notion of “luck.” It is difficult to admit that a flip of the coin can give the result “tails twenty times in a row” with the same probability as any “disorderly” series of results, because we want the “orderly” series to be not the product of randomness but of some organizing power. We believe in the existence of the “savage mind” or “primitive mentality”; we attribute an explanatory force to these concepts rather than reading them as mere labels identifying issues to be addressed and mechanisms to be discovered. Animism itself remains present in modern societies. Whoever lets himself be injected with “fresh cells” for a supposed rejuvenation effect—to use an example that I obviously do not borrow from Weber—demonstrates a cognitive mechanism that is indistinguishable from that obeyed by the warrior who eats his enemy’s heart.

60Tocqueville (1845/2004) had likewise seen the importance of the distinction between realism and symbolism. In a remark that anticipates Weber, he quietly suggests that the transmigration of souls and the immortality of the soul are symbolic expressions of the same reality and are thus interchangeable, such that we interpret these notions symbolically. [12] This interpretation, however, does not enjoy a wide audience: [13] indeed, since symbolism draws its force from its graphic nature, it is easy to take at face value, which most people do. The result is that they do not understand symbolism for what it is, but rather interpret it in a realist manner.

61Durkheim insists that the concepts of “soul,” “mana,” and “oranda” are many different symbols referring to the same reality. Weber, too, proposes reconciling the notions of “charisma,” of soul and spirit, with the concepts of “mana” and “oranda” (Weber 1952, 140). But these equivalences, while they are perfectly valid, are hardly persuasive to those who take these concepts seriously. They only have a chance of being accepted by persons with sufficient distance from the concepts to perceive their symbolic character.

62The difficulty of grasping the symbolic as symbolic, its typical transposition into the realistic mode, is a fundamental datum for the sociologist. It goes a long way toward explaining the misunderstanding and conflicts that tend to oppose symbolic interpretations of the world, and it explains the persistence of magic and prophecy in the modern world.

63Weberian evolutionism is complex, first of all because it is sensitive to the fragility of the distinction between the symbolic and the realistic modes of interpretation of religious categories. The social subject demonstrates a particular receptivity to the symbolic, but may have difficulty gaining sufficient distance to apprehend it as such. Likewise, in Elementary Forms, Durkheim insists that both religious and scientific theorizations of the world initially take on symbolic forms, and that symbols are only deciphered, if at all, after a rather lengthy process.

A Nonlinear Evolutionism

The Mille-feuille of Religious Evolution

83The fact that within the system of beliefs comprising a religious tradition, such varied ancient elements can coexist, is in the end due to the diversity of publics, the diversity of social positions, resources, and cognitive postures of these publics, and to a good many other factors. One such factor is the cognitive mechanism that gives the social subject a special receptivity to the symbolic, even if the subject is hard pressed to identify it as such.

84In principle, prayer excludes magic, since it is addressed to an almighty God, whom one can seek to please, but whom one cannot influence. However, it is easily seen, especially among the lower classes, as carrying magical effects: i.e., as having the function or at least the effect of promoting the objectives pursued by the believer. Catholicism is opposed to magic, deeply inconsistent with its representation of God, yet the saints have magical virtues, and the celibacy of priests has a magical origin. Indeed, from the earliest times, asceticism has been considered a means of fostering the emergence of charisma, of the ability to contact the higher powers, and chastity was conceived as a way to get closer to God (Weber 1952, 603). The idea of an omnipotent God excludes theogony. Yet Christianity introduced a son of God.

85Modernity has no more eliminated prophecy than it has magic. It has not eliminated the phenomenon of escaping from the world. The latter attitude is even “characteristic of intellectuals,” as disenchantment has produced in them an “inner need.” This distress can be resolved, as in Rousseau, by “escape into absolute loneliness,” by a romantic escape to an idealized “people” supposed to be free from the pollution afflicting the other classes, by a flight into contemplation, or even by escaping through an act aimed at the ethical or revolutionary transformation of the world as it is (Weber 1952, 506). “Agents of proletaroid intellectualism,” whose theories have the function of legitimizing movements of a demagogic inspiration, are also descendants of the prophets, although, due to “disenchantment,” they are merely pale reflections of them. They nourish the growth of ideologies and have a limited influence, one might add, unless they become ideocrats, as was the case following the Bolshevik or Nazi seizures of power. In alluding to these agents of “proletaroid intellectualism,” Weber has in mind the Russian populists, and probably also the intellectuals of 1848, to whom Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and Tocqueville’s Memoirs devote so many incisive pages. Or he may have been thinking of Lukács, whom he knew personally and whose theories, draped in the mantle of the philosophical tradition, especially expressed his rejection of the world and the promise of a future world (Bell 1988). Perhaps Weber would also have seen representatives of “proletaroid intellectualism” in the intellectuals who yesterday sang of a radiant future or who today preach the rejection of “globalization.”

86Another unexpected effect has favored a stratified evolution of adherents of religions, bringing together elements from quite different ages. The development of the sciences has largely deprived religion of its authority over the explanation of the world. It has also encouraged a revival of mystical forms of thought and religious practice. We might add that it has also favored the emergence of a religiosity characterized by a marked dominance of the moral dimension over the dogmatic dimension, as in the case of American Protestantism, and the popularity of “religions for departing from religion,” such as Buddhism, within today’s Western societies.

Evolution’s Lines of Force

87Despite the complexity of Western religious evolution, we can discern some primary tendencies: disenchantment, the discrediting of magic, and the substitution of ethics for rituals. Yahweh is unmoved by offerings; Calvinism deals the final blow to magic (Weber 1952, 217; 1979, 574). Astrological determinism is marginalized by monotheism as incompatible with the notion of a world governed by God (Weber 1952, 396). Judaism establishes the notion of responsibility. Deuteronomy breaks with collective responsibility and affirms the principle of individual responsibility (Weber 1952, 316). According to Isaiah 3:10, God rewards each according to his merits; earthly happiness is for all to enjoy the “fruit of their doings” (Weber 1952, 284). The ethical notion of just compensation is opposed to priestly ritualism (Weber 1952, 255). The responsibility of each is conceived as going hand in hand with the dignity of the individual, regardless of station; in Deuteronomy 10:17, God “regardeth not persons” (Weber 1952, 255).

88The paradox of an imperfect world and a perfect God has encouraged an organization of the city calculated to promote respect for the dignity of the human being as such. The pursuit of this goal has been facilitated in societies that today we might call “multicultural.” It began to develop among pacified groups, who were ruled by natural laws, trust, the rationalization of social relations, and the consolidation of ethical ties (Weber 1979, 430).

89Calvinism, in distancing the believer from God, facilitated humanity’s intellectual mastery of the world, and created an even greater distance from God by this other indirect effect (Weber 1979, 548). As we know, Merton (1937/1970) devoted a study to probing this Weberian theme. In the field of ethics, Calvinism takes up the universal elements of Jewish law (Weber 1979, 615–6).

90It is ultimately through Judaism and Christianity—early Christianity and Puritanism having a decisive influence here—that the values of individual responsibility, respect for the dignity of the other, and the progressive organization of the city toward taking the interests of all into account were irreversibly implanted. There is no irreversibility of ideas without the selection of ideas, and there can be no selection of ideas unless ideas possess an intrinsic force.

The Metatheory of Understanding: An Effective Theoretical Framework

91From a theoretical and methodological standpoint, what has most interested me here is firstly the sobriety of Weber’s psychology. We detect no influence of depth psychology here, nor any trace of causal psychology (which claims to impute beliefs exclusively from non-rational causes—biological, emotional, social, etc.). Instead, Weber deliberately utilized a “rational” psychology: a psychology based on “classical rationalist categories of volition, will, and individual consciousness” (Nisbet 1966, 110). Lazarsfeld, who, without himself ever using psychoanalysis in his own work, had grown up in Vienna, was intrigued by what he perceived as Weber’s total indifference towards Freud (Lazarsfeld 1993). [18] Weber’s disdain for psychoanalysis in particular and depth psychology in general, however, is not very difficult to explain. It follows that rational psychology is the only one compatible with the metatheory underlying his “comprehensive sociology.”

92Refusing depth psychology and causalist psychology of any kind, Weber falls entirely outside Nisbet’s critique of the social sciences. According to Nisbet, many sociologists thought they could explain the beliefs of the social subject via unconscious psychological mechanisms of a purely conjectural kind which they thought to be sufficiently legitimized, particularly by the authority of psychoanalysis. [19] Thereby, we might add, they only demonstrated that “traditional” and “charismatic” authority is widespread not only in religious thought, but also among intellectuals. In other words, Nisbet suggests, as Weber had understood, that sociology and social thought more generally cannot without danger eliminate the criterion of understanding and thereby reify the mental processes responsible for individual beliefs and actions.

93Weber also escapes the pseudo-explanations proposed by the holistic tendency within the sociological tradition (“savage thought,” the “primitive mentality”). His analysis of religious beliefs is persuasive because it contents itself with psychological assumptions that are uncontroversial and attentive to the facts. The warrior consumes the heart of his enemy because he believes he will draw strength from it, just as the modern person takes an injection of fresh cells because he believes it to be an elixir of youth. The warrior follows a theory that we have strong reasons to find false but that he has strong reasons to find true. The theoretical framework for comprehensive sociology appears here with perfect efficiency. The cause of collective beliefs is good in general, on the grounds that the individual placed in a particular context is to believe, and hence in the sense that they have for him.

94Weber also marks, in advance, some decisive points in relation to modern “cognitivist” theories such as those of Needham, Shweder, or d’Andrade, which represent original and refined variants of the holistic tradition: they see different cultures as carriers of specific cognitive systems and schemas (Needham 1972). The theory of understanding suggests, on the contrary, that we can understand any belief, however strange, because it engages universal cognitive mechanisms. For the human mind obeys the same rules among “primitives” and moderns. Everywhere, it meets a number of universal needs (the desire to survive, the desire to understand the world, etc.). Scientific thought, ordinary thought, and religious thought do not rely on different cognitive mechanisms. All that varies from one culture to another, and more generally from one context to another, is what we can agree to call “contextual parameters.” Thus, the “primitive” does not know the laws of energy transformation, but we do. For this reason, we consider the behavior of the firestarter and that of the rainmaker to be of a different nature, while the “primitive” sees them as having the same nature. This misunderstanding ceases when it takes into account the difference in contextual parameters. There is no need to assume that primitive psychology is different from ours, but it is crucial to observe that primitive knowledge is different.

95It must be remembered that Weber is not the only one to adopt this framework: Benjamin Constant, Tocqueville, and Durkheim (if we agree to read the Elementary Forms through a lens other than the neo-Durkheimian kind) also analyze religious beliefs as founded on valid reasons in the subject’s mind. Durkheim’s theory of magic is indistinguishable from Weber’s. His theory of the soul is different, but shares the same inspiration. Closer to us, Evans-Pritchard and, among contemporaries, Robin Horton employ the same framework (Horton 1982 and 1993). It is responsible for the strength of their analysis.

96The cause of adherence to religious beliefs is thus to be found among the reasons that a social subject placed in a particular context has to endorse them. Yet we must see that these reasons belong to a very open range. It is not a question, here, of limiting oneself, as in the case of the proponents of the “rational choice model,” to the Benthamite tradition, nor, as with many “postmodernists,” to the Nietzschean tradition. An affective datum such as ressentiment can help to establish a belief. But above all, religious messages must offer persuasive explanations and useful prescriptions. This is why Weber insists so firmly on the cognitive dimension of rationality: How could a peasant faced with the vagaries of nature easily accept the idea that the universe is the result of a single will? How could an omnipotent God have a need for rituals?

97The bulk of Newton’s work is, as we know, in the field of alchemy. Was he a victim of the “savage mind,” demonstrating a “primitive mentality,” subjected to “symbolic violence” exercised by priests or the tune called by an underground conductor when he posed problems of chemistry, only to become rational when he posed physical problems? This janus bifrons aspect of Newton has long been seen as a mystery, particularly since his case is not isolated—far from it (Roger 1963/1993). This sense of mystery is the effect of our sociocentrism: the alchemist Newton seems “irrational” because we have a sufficient dose of chemistry to measure the distance separating alchemy from modern chemistry.

98Weber’s writings on the sociology of religion may seem to offer a comparative history of religions, one that is well informed but that risks looking a little cavalier to a scholar’s eyes. In any case, this seems to be how Weber is read by some commentators who limit his originality to the creation of a few concepts (“charisma,” “religious virtuosi,” etc.) or to the famous thesis of The Protestant Ethic, or who are content to see Weber as a relativistic and vaguely pessimistic philosopher of history. But of what importance to us are mere opinions and moods concerning historical change, even those of Max Weber? The singular force and precision of his writings comes from the fact that they propose to read the history of religions using an unexpected key, that of rationality, and that this gamble has been successful. This key is highly visible: the word “rationality” and its variants are scattered over hundreds of pages of his Sociology of religion and the rich chapter on religion in Economy and Society. This key cannot be used by those who want to reduce all rationality to instrumental rationality. When we see instead that rationality can also take a cognitive or evaluative form, we understand how Weber was able to achieve this feat: describing the evolution of religious ideas by postulating that it is guided by mechanisms the principles of which are not fundamentally different from those that explain the evolution of legal, economic or scientific ideas. [20]

99Finally, his approach renders moot in advance several nagging questions that haunt the sociological, anthropological, and philosophical literatures, such as the relationship between magic and religion, and it eliminates the false antinomies that speculative thought so easily produces if it tries to pigeonhole the theory of beliefs (labeled “intellectualism,” “expressivism,” “symbolism,” “emotivism,” “rationalism,” etc.). Any of Weber’s concrete analyses (for example, that which deals with the difference in attitude of the Pharisees and Sadducees with regard to the resurrection of the dead) suffices to demonstrate that we must conceive of collective beliefs as resulting from a system of causes and reasons that are closely articulated with one another. In something like the way that a system of equations must include parameters and variables, any individual or collective belief has a rational dimension and a causal dimension, as well as a “cold” side and a “hot” side. The notion of compensation plays an essential role in the minds of the Pharisees, but not in that of the Sadducees, as a result of their respective social roles. The former believe in the resurrection of the dead because it allows them to reconcile their notion of divine justice with the injustices in terms of compensation that they observe around them; the reasons for their beliefs are rooted in affects and give rise to emotions. That said, the core of the analysis is well established, in accordance with the assumption of understanding, by noting the reasons why the former agree with what the latter reject. To avoid any misunderstanding, it should also be noted that these reasons are often metaconscious. According to Weber, action is most often semi-conscious or unconscious of the reasons (and, equally, of the irrational motivations) that constitute its meaning. [21] This unconscious, which has nothing to do with Freud’s, is that which can be observed in the mechanical or “instinctive” behaviors characteristic of everyday life. [22]