Durkheim´s social fact understanding. From the material world to the collective representations domain

Abstract

Which is the understanding of the social fact underlying in The Elementary forms of religious life? Which is the relation of such understanding and the prevailing interpretations that have been generated in The rules of sociological method? These questions are interesting for two reasons: 1) the paradigmatic role that these two books have played in certain key moments in the emergence of sociology (RSM) and of anthropology (EF). 2) The opposition that seems to occur in both books, which would lead to a supposedly antithesis between Durkheim, seen as a positivist sociologist in his first stage (as it is shown in RSM), and Durkheim as a sociologist interlocutor of anthropology, who starts the study of the profound sense of social facts that is shown in EF. In order to avoid this dichotomy, it is possible to analyze Durkheim’s work as a process in which moments of continuity and rupture are put together in the path to the construction of a new general theory of social integration, in which religion takes a strategic role.