Marx, Durkheim, and Weber

Durkheim, Emile
1995 [1913] The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Karen E. Fields, trans. New York:
Free Press. Introduction; Book 1, Chapters 1 and 2; Conclusion

Marx, Karl
1978 "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," "Theses on Feuerbach," "The
German Ideology: Part I," "The Grundrisse," "Capital. Vol. 1," and "The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" In The Marx-Engles Reader. Second Edition. Robert C.
Tucker, ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Weber, Max.
[1905] 1992. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. London:
Routledge. Introduction; Chapters 1, 2, and 5.

One major thread that runs through these readings is the causal place of ideas in the processes that
produce historical change over time. German philosophy prior to Marx had followed the Hegelian
framework of privileging the dominant intellectual currents of the day (Geist) as the fulcrum upon which
universal history turned. Taking this as his point of departure, one way to frame Marx’s scholarly project
is the development of historical materialism, or the approach that “the real ground of history...explains the
formation of ideas from material practice” (164). Marx recognized that underlying more complex forms
of human social and political relations, such as the State, was the family, and this first example of human
society oriented towards life sustenance and reproduction was the generative site out of which forms of
civil society and government later emerged. This formulation, starting from the ground of life and
working its way upward, worked against the mystification of abstraction that Marx identified in the
Hegelian framework that figured notions of the State sovereignty as the ideal forms that provide content
to civil society and the family, rather than as the predicate that proceeds from simpler forms of human
organization. Keeping with this premise, Marx concluded that democracy is the only form of government
in which the content matches the form, where the political actions of the populace function as enunciative
acts and directly change the constitution of state power.

The Marxian insistence upon historical materialism grounds any analysis of history by centering its focus
upon the economic relations that result amongst humans as they produce “the means to satisfy” the needs
of eating, drinking, shelter, and clothing -- “ the production of material life itself" (156). As a result,
scholars should not only give weight to the beliefs and ideas of people, but also to practices and sensual
forms of human activity, as “social life is essentially practical” (145). The empirical grounding of
historical materialism is continued in Weber and Durkheim, who seek to further elaborate the dynamic
relationship between beliefs and practices. Weber sought to explain how the ethical modes of being
entailed in Northern European Protestantism became inculcated with the emergence of rationalized
capitalism following the Enlightenment. Through this framing, Weber argues how the ideas and beliefs of
a religious worldview catalyze certain practices or dispositions that then become enfolded within the
material processes and demands of life, and migrate across life realms away from discretely “religious”
contexts. Weber’s work is also important because it pushed back against the universalist teleology of
world history maintained from Hegel through Marx’s theory on economic development, and instead
viewed the "Western bourgeois class" and its "peculiar modern Western form of capitalism" (xxxvii) as
contingent and emergent.

For his part, Durkheim took up the methodologies of historical materialism and scientific empiricism to
analyze the religious orientation of humanity, noting that "there are no religions that are false" insomuch
as all religions describe and interact with the same objective reality and “could not endure” if they were
not "grounded in the nature of things" (2). Durkheim identified the collective representations that make up
religious symbolism, positing that religion is an “eminently social thing” (9). This social grounding of
religious beliefs and the rituals that instantiate such beliefs once again maintains within its modeling a
dynamic feedback loop between the shared practices that humans engage and the representations and
significance afforded to such activity.

The main takeaway from all of these readings seems to be this: the human body operates as the interface
where the realm of the ideal is converted into material action.