I

This article attempts to account for the absence of a Weberian legacy in the study of Greek religion, taking its cue from a revealing statement by Jean-Pierre Vernant (1914–2007) in his 1975 inaugural lecture for the chair of comparative history of ancient religions at the Collège de France. In this programmatic address, delivered before an audience of France's leading academic luminaries, Vernant championed comparatism and evaluated several theorists whom he considered to have played roles of exceptional importance in the study of ancient religion and society. Invoked alongside Claude Lévi-Strauss, Albert Réville, Ernst Cassirer, Karl Jaspers, Georges Dumézil, and other ranking figures, was the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who received, at first glance, a relatively lukewarm assessment. Combining encomium with invective, Vernant ultimately criticized Weber for denying Greek religion the authenticity he grants to other religious traditions:

Given Vernant and Weber's shared interest in comparative religions, the theme of occidental rationalization, and Marxism and neo-Marxist thought,Footnote ² the acerbic nature of this passage occasions some surprise.Footnote ³ At least two features from this excerpt call for immediate comment. First, although the Weberian ideal-typical method was not expressly named, Vernant certainly had this in mind, and he discredited, however diplomatically, its totalizing analytical aspirations since it failed to account for Greek religion. Second, Vernant intimated that Weber essentialized ancient Greece as fundamentally political and economic, implying that Weber's sociology could be rendered useful only by economic or political historians, and not by historians of religions.

We could, of course, quarrel with Vernant's characterization of Weberian ideal types, or with his implicit claim that Weber disconnects the religious from the political; it is evident, for example, that Weber's interest in the interplay of the religious and economic (and other) value spheres in Sociology of Religion (1920) and The Protestant Ethic (1905) complicates Vernant's judgment of Weber's historical sociology. However, Vernant's comments about Weber represented the communis opinio among classical scholars in postwar France; what is more, they presage the enduring absence of Weber in most research on Greek religion beyond the 1960s and to the present day on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote ⁴ Even the great Moses Finley, who attempted to revitalize Weber's status in classical scholarship, cites a remark of Alfred Heuss's to substantiate Vernant's opinion: “the special disciplines pertaining to antiquity have gone their way as if Max Weber had never lived.”Footnote ⁵

My primary concern is to show how Vernant's attitude toward Weber does not derive strictly from differences in methodological approach, but owes much to Vernant's immediate political context and intellectual genealogy which—comprising, inter alia, the Durkheim school and Ignace Meyerson (1888–1983)—had a long, though perhaps not overtly polemical, history of maintaining a critical distance from Weber and German scholarship in general.Footnote ⁶ A central claim of my article is that the methodological specificities of Vernant's projects are correlated tightly to, and are indeed inextricable from, his complex heritage and attraction to the Durkheimians. On a higher level of generality, I hope that my discussion will elicit deeper reflection on the ways in which historical contingencies can become assimilated into the articulation of sociological theory (in the cases of Weber and especially of the Durkheim school) and in the act of historical interpretation (in the case of Vernant).

To bring into sharper relief the political and intellectual commitments in Vernant's historical treatment of classical antiquity, I begin with his enormously prolific work on the advent of positivist thought in ancient Greece. After tracing Vernant's ideas to Durkheimian perspectives on religion and society, I compare Vernant's position to Weber's theories of rationalization in order to foreground salient points of disagreement. My aim in reading Vernant in light of Durkheim and then Weber is to uncover the underlying historical conjunctures and operative forces in early to mid-twentieth-century France that conditioned Vernant's views of Weberian sociology. I show why and how Vernant, in developing and repackaging social theories specific to the political-theological concerns of the Third Republic, also inherited, for better or worse, the idealist imaginaries and ideological burdens of their original producers. Further, I explore how one significant strand of postwar French classical scholarship, rooted in the ideal of civic equality and often considered the expression of a purely French republican world view, owes its contours to early twentieth-century Franco-German sociological debates about historical logic, the function of religion in modern social life, and the capacity of social-scientific research to respond to contemporary political upheavals. I conclude by reflecting briefly on the broader historiographical implications of this genealogy for the study of religion.

II

The French school of Classics redefined the study of Greek religion not only in Europe but also in Anglo-America.Footnote ⁷ With roots in the exemplary work of Louis Gernet (1882–1962),Footnote ⁸ a specialist in ancient law and student of Durkheim (1858–1917), the school coalesced into a robust scholarly équipe in the second half of the twentieth century under the leadership of Vernant along with Pierre Vidal-Naquet (1930–2006), Nicole Loraux (1943–2003), Marcel Detienne (1935–), and others.Footnote ⁹ Abandoning the unrestrained comparatism of the Frazerian mode that had up to then characterized most work on classical religions, these French historians of the Hellenic world—based in the Centre Louis Gernet at the École des hautes études—developed a sophisticated anthropological approach to antiquity that absorbed (though not uncritically) the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss. This fact is uncontroversial, but recent scholarship tends to underemphasize that Vernant's inquiries into myth and ritual can be understood as descendant from two relatively independent legacies. There is reason to believe a dominant Lévi-Straussian influence in their study of myth, whereas—quite separately—their point of departure for the study of ritual was the école durkheimienne, especially the work of Durkheim's nephew and collaborator Marcel Mauss (an argument to which I will return).Footnote ¹⁰

It is not hard to hear the echoes of Lévi-Strauss and structuralism in Vernant's conceptualization of the Greek pantheon. Vernant showed in a probing article on the divine couplet Hermes–Hestia that the logic of the Greek pantheon expressed in the myths of the poets could be made intelligible by identifying the similarities and differences between the various Greek deities and their domains and prerogatives.Footnote ¹¹ The underlying synchronic architecture of the pantheon and the “interlocking body of concepts” derived from the most essential stories of the ancient Greek world, Vernant further suggests, was mirrored exactly in the Greeks’ social and religious practices: rituals of sacrifice, age-grade initiation, and the design of precise alimentary codes, among others.

Vernant insists that ancient sacrifice, for example, was a signifying practice that enabled communication between humans and gods, comprising “rituals of slaughter and cookery and the preparation of a meal of meat under rules that make the consumption of meat in the course of daily life a lawful, even pious act.”Footnote ¹² More to the point, sacrifice, in Vernant's line of analysis, constitutes Greek self-understanding insofar as the practice reinforces man's locus between the realm of the divine and that of animals. Ritualized and rule-bound eating intersects the diet of the gods (i.e. nonconsumption, but the taking of pleasure in the odor of burning meat) and the beast's uninhibited devouring of raw flesh. Sacrifice, which Vernant sees as a largely egalitarian act, thus crystallizes the essence of man and ably “integrates the performers of the rite in the groups they are part of and trains them for their occupations, both public and private.”Footnote ¹³

Beyond the obvious Lévi-Straussian strain in Vernant's reading of sacrifice, however, it is in fact more on target to locate Durkheim's theory of social cohesion and moral solidarity as set forth especially in Elementary Forms of Religious Life and The Division of Labour in Society.Footnote ¹⁴ Just as Durkheim points to the rejuvenation of the collective by ritual means, so Vernant argues that ancient Greek anthropology and sociology congeal in the very act of sacrifice and feasting. Sacrifice, Vernant further contends, is a sine qua non in the social formation of the individual:

Elsewhere, Vernant reiterates, “There is no religious bond between an individual and the divinity other than that exercised through a social mediation . . . The relation with the divine occurs through a social function.”Footnote ¹⁶ Vernant effectively restates, in the context of Greek sacrifice, Durkheim's conceptualization of the homo duplex, according to which individual subjectivity and the social are homologized by the mediation of collective ritual. Ancient subjectivity, according to Vernant, bears within it the prevailing value system, social practices, and collective mental structures of the community to which the individual belongs.

Vernant's structural approach to Greek religion helped reveal the organizing conceptual principles undergirding an enormous and wildly heterogeneous set of ancient cult practices and beliefs. Nonetheless, he and his followers have met with criticism in recent years, for reasons that partially stem, I will argue, from their steadfast devotion to Durkheimian sociology.Footnote ¹⁷ It should be recalled that the Durkheim school's interest in the collective consciousness and social cohesion, and its focus on law and religion in the maintenance of society, developed out of the politically turbulent conditions of late nineteenth-century Paris, marked most symbolically by the divisive Dreyfus affair and the crisis of the Third Republic.Footnote ¹⁸ As a fellow Jew and Alsatian, Durkheim sympathized with Dreyfus on both accounts and was animated by the ardent political and ideological debates over French national identity, the duties of citizenship, and the Jewish situation in France.Footnote ¹⁹ Conflicts between the prodemocratic, anticlerical Dreyfusards and the anti-Semitic, military-bolstered anti-Dreyfusards divided the French Republic and galvanized the Durkheimians to alleviate social discord through scientific research.Footnote ²⁰ The aspirations and elaborate methodologies of the Durkheimians were thus responses to an increasingly aggressive form of French patriotism that encouraged both anti-German and anti-Semitic sentiments. It will become evident that Vernant's conception of religion and the social order should be understood against this background as much as that of Lévi-Strauss and the postwar French anthropological tradition.

III

“The Formation of Positivist Thought” (1957) is one of Vernant's most succinct and lucid treatments of Greek rationalization, for him a key process in the Western historical trajectory that ushered in a revolutionary way of conceptualizing the cosmos.Footnote ²¹ The sudden appearance of a sophisticated naturalism in Greek statuary, the emergence of literary genres such as historiography and medical writing, a progression toward democracy, and a transition in cognitive modes from the mythical to the rationalist constitute some of the chief signposts of this new paradigm. Vernant begins the essay by praising the pathbreaking study of F. M. Cornford, who argued, against the then-dominant grain, that Hesiod's conception of the cosmic order had anticipated later metaphysical speculation about the relation of man to the physical and divine world. Cornford thus aimed to minimize the fault line that had been drawn previously by such scholars as John Burnet between philosophy and “antiquated” religious thought, and he dismissed the time-honored notion of “the Greek miracle” as inadequate to cast light on what actually occurred in the late archaic period.Footnote ²²

Vernant strikes a position between Cornford and Burnet, for while not denying the emergence of a newfangled manner of world mapping in the sixth century, he vehemently eschews both a simplistic linear progression and a disembodied transcendent “Greek miracle.” In contrast, his project—purportedly empirical and diachronic—sets out to pinpoint the processes by which this epistemic shift arose. As Vernant understands it, the general world view propounded in myth ceased to satisfy the conceptual demands of the community as soon as archaic noble families disintegrated and the powerful magician-kings of the Mycenaean and Geometric period (the Homeric basileis) failed to maintain authority over civic affairs.Footnote ²³ The emergent sociopolitical configuration of the Greek city-state compelled its citizens to adopt alternative interpretive modes to explain both natural and divine phenomena, leaving in its wake minimal room for traditional mythic thought. In particular, highly empirical accounts of reality, ones that enlisted physical and naturalist laws, superseded mythic discourse, culminating in the Ionian physicists and the esoteric philosophical schools of Magna Graecia.Footnote ²⁴ The shift in regimes of truth rearranged expert networks, whereby philosophers, now the legitimate order of intellectual carriers, debunked the substantive and epistemological claims of charismatic sages and shamans.Footnote ²⁵ The latter traveled in elite circles and transmitted arcane knowledge selectively; philosophers, by contrast, addressed the public, circulating their wisdom widely in the service of the polis, which revealed the new concern for public argumentation and the increasing importance of peithō (“persuasion”—both the abstract concept and its personified divine form) in this historical period. Vernant concludes that the changing political order of the city and the philosopher's rationalist vision of reality developed pari passu, both partaking of an expansive emergent ideology.

To illustrate the concomitant effects of positivist thought in the political realm, Vernant highlights the well-known sixth-century geopolitical reforms of Cleisthenes, a “deliberate amalgamation . . . a political unification . . . of the diverse groups and activities of which the city was composed.”Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, the polis administration devised and implemented a new civic calendar to accompany these comprehensive demographic modifications, understanding the efficacy of a structured social temporality to promote a reconceptualized collective outlook. In a published interview with Maurice Godelier, Vernant considers the developing political form of the city-state to be the prima causa of historical change, and, what is more, describes how the domains of religion and politics unfolded over the seventh and sixth centuries to merge, at the pinnacle of the high classical period, into a composite and undifferentiated institution.Footnote ²⁷

The impact of the rise of positivist thought was, Vernant tries to show, palpable at all levels of society, and he elsewhere takes pains to demonstrate its ancillary effects on Greek society writ large: on literature and the arts, the codification of legal structures, the hoplite formation comprising citizen-soldiers, new monetary forms and emerging economies—indeed, a hegemonic historical narrative that subsumes each and every sociocultural sphere under its penumbra.Footnote ²⁸ Apropos of philosophical discourse, for instance, Vernant contends that the polis engendered conditions for a new cosmology (e.g. that of Parmenides) that favored coherence, unity, and the singular (ousia “substance” and to on “being”) over flux and polysemy; moreover, an alternative epistemology followed on the heels of this reformulated metaphysical account. The intellect, as opposed to mere corporeal experience, was regarded as the supreme mode in ascertaining the world: reality “is now no longer seen as the diversity of things apprehended through human experience . . . [but] as the intelligible subject of logos, of reason, expressed through language in accordance with its own principles of noncontradiction.”Footnote ²⁹

Vernant's reading of the narrative of Western rationalization is especially remarkable in those sections of the essay that move from the institutional to the intersubjective; that is, from the analytical perspective of society to the individual. The emergence of rational thought did not only unfold at the macro level. Its effects trickled into the very subjectivities of Athenian citizens, who reshaped the value systems that underpinned social relations and thus fashioned novel forms of social identity:

Vernant is hardly subtle in drawing the line between two opposed social systems, each with its distinct social logic. A society formerly guided by an ideology of harmonia, in which unequal parts of a whole conjoin to form an internally coherent and cooperative body politic, is replaced by isonomia, wherein all constitutive parts of society possess equal share in merit and responsibility. Where meritocracy and social competition characterize the pre-polis Mycenaean universe with its aristocratic palaces and temple economies, the polis of the late seventh century—in which egalitarian civic religion stood at its very core—allowed for the flourishing of civic equality, mutual collaboration, and social belonging. According to Vernant, the demos in the Athenian polis ruled itself not by brute force or exploitation but by reasoned public debate. The demise of social hierarchies that formerly divided citizens furnished space for the proliferation of social and political freedoms and provided more inclusive qualifications for claiming an authentic locus in the world.

IV

Vernant's emphasis on Weber's “dichotomies,” “typologies,” “poles,” and “checkerboard patterns” in my opening passage reveals his one-sided, if not disingenuous, reading of Weber and fails to discern the panoramic narrative that encompasses the entire Sociology of Religion.Footnote ³¹ More than developing typologies for the study of religion, Weber presents, as it were, an elaborate history of religions. A look at Weber's notion of rationalization in relation to the unfolding of discrete value systems in The Sociology of Religion and “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions” will secure us a precise vantage to juxtapose Weber's and Vernant's seemingly incompatible views on the logic of history and the place of religion within society.Footnote ³²

Any study reckoning with Weber's treatment of rationalization must address his main theses on the nature and development of the religious sphere, from its earliest articulations in prehistory to the major living world religions of modernity. The Sociology of Religion contains a chronology that effectively begins in illo tempore, when a magical sensibility directed an individual's behavior within the cosmos and toward others. In this indeterminate epoch, Weber explains, unity obtains among what might be regarded as separate domains of social life; for instance, early societies depended on magician-kings and superhuman forces not only to carry out endeavors related to the everyday functioning of the polity, but also to perform religious rituals that bolstered the cosmic order and secured a productive economy.Footnote ³³ In addition to the imbrication of secular power and sacred authority, this primordial unity of values is operative in other institutional and private relations—namely aesthetics, sexuality, social relations, and economic production.Footnote ³⁴

At the risk of simplifying Weber's sweeping narrative, we can still identify its major thrust: at a certain juncture, the religious sphere—along with its constitutive symbols and practices—suddenly undergoes abstraction, activated (at least in the Western tradition) by the conceptual development of the notions of the “soul” and “supernatural powers,” ideas toward which people begin to systematize their religious behavior. Thus complex symbols and analogies displace naturalistic explanations in the evaluation of the phenomenal world. Contributions by religious functionaries (priests and prophets) and by lay intellectuals like philosophers, moreover, were momentous to the development of the religious sphere in this historical trajectory.

As religious ideas become systematized, people's understandings of the world and the behaviors and attitudes they adopt begin to turn into themselves and eventually congeal into autonomous value spheres. As a consequence of this autonomization, religion follows its own course and confronts the interests and goals of other domains in the sociocultural field (viz. the political, economic, intellectual, erotic, and aesthetic, which themselves have undergone autonomization), producing an irreversible conflict between value spheres (Eigengesetzlichkeit): “The further the rationalization [of] ‘things worldly’ has progressed, the stronger has the tension on the part of religion become. For the rationalization and the conscious sublimation of man's relations to the various spheres of values . . . have then pressed towards making conscious the internal and lawful autonomy of the individual spheres.”Footnote ³⁵

In “Religious Rejections,” Weber is absolutely clear about the rationalization process in the aesthetic domain where “art becomes a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right.”Footnote ³⁶ The same disarticulation occurs between religion and politics:

The incompatibility of distinct value spheres leads to the fracturing of formerly whole and self-reliant “cultural beings” (Kulturmenschen), a consequence of “the total being of man having been alienated from the organic cycle of peasant life.”Footnote ³⁸ This internal disturbance, Weber goes on to say, leads individuals to develop a methodical, self-disciplined inner consistency, to cultivate a particular ethos, and to maintain an unsympathetic stance toward rival ethics. In a remarkably purple passage in “Science as a Vocation” Weber likens the adopting of a single ethos to choosing between irreconcilably antagonistic gods (notice Weber's highly rationalist and Protestant suggestion tucked into the final line of the passage):

An analogous conflict, so the argument goes, plays out on the interpersonal level, for members of the community end up adopting incompatible ethics.

Despite the apparently pessimistic tone of Weber's social theory vis-à-vis rationalization, Talcott Parsons and Roland Axtmann have independently argued that structural tension, value pluralism, and a differentiated society constitute (for Weber) principles for change and thus for individual and political autonomy.Footnote ⁴⁰ Much ink has been spilled on how Weber's political and historical context, one that was experiencing the tumultuous effects of rapid modernization in the Wilhelmine and Weimar years, gave impetus to his broader theorization of the dynamics of society.Footnote ⁴¹ Stephen Kalberg, for instance, has clarified the background of Weber's work, tracing the widening divergence between value systems of the public and private spheres in post-Bismarckian Germany, a bleak historical moment that was permeated by political fragmentation and a sense of Kulturpessimismus.Footnote ⁴² Within this context, the very idea of unity—a term associated at once with intellectual suppression, dehumanization, and mob mentality—had acquired chiefly negative connotations. Unlike Vernant, who perceived social integration and value monism to be the telos of the ideal political order, a necessary condition for inclusivity and mutual understanding, Weber found that it designated a foreclosure of creativity, indeed a reduction of freedom to carry out self-willed decisions.

Having counterpoised Weber and Vernant's ideal social orders, one can draw out the fact that religion plays vastly dissimilar roles in the social matrices of their respective theories. Grosso modo, religion for Vernant exerts a centripetal force, by which the various spheres of social life and its citizens gravitate toward harmony. For Weber, religion—only one of several normative dimensions of society—exerts a centrifugal force, constantly challenging other value domains. If Vernant's ideal society, exemplified by the well-ordered polis of post-mythical Greece, partakes of the Gemeinschaft type, then Weber's society as it develops in his narrative of occidental rationalization is of the Gesellschaft type.

V

It may already be evident that more is at stake in Vernant's narrative of the rationalization of Greek thought, and we will need to reflect on the political subtexts that occasionally enter his writings, and to show how Vernant as theoretician and Vernant as citizen intertwine in his research. Vernant's account of an egalitarian Greek political consciousness at the apogee of Cleisthenic Athens represents the intellectual offspring of two discursive fields, for it combines the distinct philosophical tendency of the Durkheim lineage (via Meyerson and Mauss) with Marxist political ideals anchored in his personal experience in the French Resistance.

That the work of Meyerson is obscure to most readers can be attributed to the fact that he did not publish a single monograph save his 1949 thesis “Psychological Functions and Works,” at the age of sixty.Footnote ⁴³ Even during his life, he was better known for his sixty-year editorship of the prestigious Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique and as a committed member of the Société de psychologie, ascending to its presidency in 1924. Not unlike those of Mauss, Meyerson's primary contributions turned on l’homme total (or l’esprit humain) and its expressions—indeed objectifications—in creative actions and works (oeuvres).Footnote ⁴⁴ Devoting his attention to the historical development of the human mind and its categories of perception (never fixed but determined by historical and cultural specificities), Meyerson argued that man-made creations—more precisely, the making of creations—uncovered the deepest interiorities of the human mind. The products of this historically determined poiesis, constituting five distinct, but structurally interconnected, fields—myth and religion, systems of language, the plastic and visual arts, science, and laws and institutional life—reflect the nature of the human mental makeup, and, somewhat dialectically, recondition the mind and its capacity to create:

Meyerson recruited Vernant to the editorial team at the Journal de psychologie, and it is no wonder that Vernant shared with him an abiding interest in the reciprocal relations obtaining between creative human labor and the emergence of “the psychological world, the mental categories of ancient religious man”Footnote ⁴⁶ —hence Vernant's insistence on the rationalization of Greek thought not as “miracle” but as poiesis; that is, creative action carried out by political subjects for the common good. What is important to underscore, moreover, is that Meyerson, to whom Vernant dedicated his major publication Myth and Thought among the Greeks (1965), was both a Dreyfusard in the beginning of the twentieth century and Vernant's comrade in the French Resistance in Toulouse. Thus Vernant likely became familiar with the constellation of beliefs and values surrounding the Dreyfus affair and its political-symbolic connections to the Resistance through his intimate and lifelong intellectual association with Meyerson.

Along with Meyerson, Vernant's debt to Mauss and the theoretical repertoire of the école durkheimienne is tremendous. I spotlight a passage from Vernant's 1975 inaugural lecture:

Vernant endorses a transdisciplinary approach, a grasping of whole cultural systems from discrete perspectives and precise analytical vantages. His emphasis on the term faits evokes Mauss's total social fact, namely signifying practices toward which members of a society orient their moral and social lives, and which, for the historian, crystallize complex systems of belief and action. The “fact” in French sociology has origins in Durkheim's 1895 The Rules of Sociological Method (if not earlier in Fustel, as Momigliano asserts),Footnote ⁴⁸ but Parsons has alerted us to the fact that Durkheim never elucidated how it was to be pursued in social-scientific practice.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was Mauss, rather, who formulated more systematic ideas on the category in his research on ancient gift-giving and potlatch: “In these ‘early’ societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all the threads of which the social fabric is composed. In these total social phenomena, as we propose to call them, all kinds of institutions find simultaneous expression: religious, legal, moral, and economic. In addition, the phenomena have their aesthetic aspect and they reveal morphological types.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Readers will easily see in the concluding pages of The Gift and from the quotation above, with its nod toward methodological holism (“not discrete,” “threads,” “simultaneous expression”), that Mauss prescribes wholes and totalities rather than the individual as the proper unit of social analysis.Footnote ⁵¹ Proposing something like systems theory avant la lettre, Mauss understands total facts to be empirically real and embedded in social institutions. Not merely second-order epiphenomena that superficially reflect collective ideas, social facts indeed actualize ways of behaving in the world: “It is only by considering [social facts] as wholes that we have been able to see their essence, their operation and their living aspect, and to catch the fleeting moment when the society and its members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation.”Footnote ⁵² Following Mauss, Vernant shows how certain ancient religious practices like sacrifice could ground social being in objective and totalizing ways. Maussian social facts, on the whole, are at direct odds with Weber's ideal types, which, by contrast, were open to modification and were not to be taken as ontological, for they served as heuristic mental constructs (Gedankenbilden) in the service of ongoing comparative sociological research.Footnote ⁵³

Vernant's deployment of Mauss's total social fact belies a fragile point in his understanding of the historical rise of Greek philosophical thought. Mauss's rendering of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Northwest American total prestation as exemplary expressions of the basis of moral action “common to societies of the highest degree of evolution to those of the future and to societies of the least advancement” renders explicit the morphological and synchronic mode of this category.Footnote ⁵⁴ When pursuing questions of discontinuity and rupture, the synchronic–functionalist approach entailed in the total social fact becomes problematic, since it conceives of history as a bounded system, and presupposes the dynamic of historical logic to gravitate in teleological fashion toward social cohesion; the total social fact is unable to register, for example, the unintended consequences of historical events or the structure-modifying decisions of certain creative actors.Footnote ⁵⁵ In sum, the notion of social fact lacks the analytical precision to trace the diachronic claims so central to Vernant's argument about Greek rationalization.

Let me underline three additional problems that arise from Vernant's theoretical reliance on Mauss and Meyerson. First, in depicting a polis whose separate components cohere in the rationalization process, he does not elucidate concretely how the tendency toward positivist thought was tied to its material and social conditions. His account of the origin of Greek thought often reads like a marvelous piece of Geistesgeschichte, for in attributing historical change to an undefined entity and in assuming an evenness of historical development, it never fully accounts for the agency of goal-driven actors (in contrast to Weber, for whom the individual was fundamental). One of the results of this omission is that Vernant, following Mauss's and Meyerson's notion of l’individu complet, assumes a single identity—a reified homo graecus, as it were—to stand in for a variegated Greek demography, thus masking the oppressive realities of ancient Athens with its hierarchical structures of gender and political inequality (cf., for instance, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Demosthenes 59 Against Neaera respectively). Second, by accepting at face value the views and categories of ancient cultural producers, Vernant reproduces problematically the imagined and normative social order that interested politicians (e.g. Cleisthenes) and philosophers (e.g. Parmenides) themselves wished to institute.Footnote ⁵⁶ Finally, Vernant attributes indiscriminately several transformations from the archaic to the classical period to a monocausal (and largely nonmaterial) Kulturgeist, which in consequence eliminates serious consideration of other ideological and economic forces that were instrumental, or in opposition, to the shift in paradigms; it conceals concurrent but distinct processes that complicate the master narrative.Footnote ⁵⁷

In fact, the classical historian and anthropologist Sally Humphreys has since refined Vernant's narrative, concentrating particularly on the ancient polemical and apologetic procedures by which categories of rationality and irrationality, and religion and secularism, slowly took shape across a variety of discourse types and genres; in her appraisal, the efforts of ancient philosophers and physicians to lay claim to superior, rational knowledge did not silence priests and diviners, but rather encouraged the latter to defend the unique salvific features of their enterprise, features brought into sharp focus thanks to the challenges of their detractors. Ecstatic and prophetic forms of religion suddenly branded themselves anew: “the more irrational, the more poetic.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Vernant's holistic interpretation of historical change—that is, of collapsing boundaries between different institutions and forms of cultural expression—ignores such nuances. In this regard, his method and style of argumentation suggest a closer alliance to Mauss than to Meyerson since, for the latter, the various cultural fields maintained relatively independent “psychological operations.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Matters become yet more complicated for, besides these disciplinary influences, Vernant's personal link to Marxist political thought compels us to consider what effects his involvement in the war had on the formation of his theoretical conception of society. The speech that Vernant delivered at his 1999 honorary-doctorate ceremony at the Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” reflects on his participation in the French Resistance and membership in the French Communist Party.Footnote ⁶⁰ He starts by professing an early awareness of the ramifications of socioeconomic disparity and then follows on this with a renewed optimism, recounting the selfless political thinking and action he witnessed during the war years:

The pathos and nostalgia for the self-transcending sentiments captured by these remarks is part and parcel, I claim, of his romanticized imagining of an irenic social order in classical Athens. A shared collective outlook, an undeterred faith in one's compatriots, and the refusal to classify countrymen by distinctions of profession or class—these are the principal enthusiasms that color much of his historical writings. These ideas are evident throughout Vernant's scholarship, but the following passage from The Origins of Greek Thought serves to underscore the parallels:

Accordingly, it makes sense that Vernant remained reticent on matters that extended beyond the mid-fourth century BCE, when, after the conquests of Alexander, discourses of empire overtook those of the city-state. Vernant was convinced, apparently, that the inquiry into the rise of positivist thought (and Greek thought in general) could be confined to the self-sufficient polis of the high classical age. In short, one has the distinct sense that Vernant's tendentious meditation on the rationalization of Greek thought—itself resembling a form of myth—is as much a celebration of the triumphs of the polis in its golden age as it is a tribute to the acute historical awareness and esprit de corps shared by Vernant and his fellow citizen-soldiers during the war and in its immediate aftermath.

VI

Despite Vernant's reservations about Weber, some elements in his work bear an undeniably Weberian imprint. Witness, for instance, Vernant's essay on divination in archaic and classical Greece in which he delineates rival knowledge practices and contrasts the figure of the seer to the king and judge, an opposition surely reminiscent of the Weberian antithesis of bureaucratic and charismatic authority.Footnote ⁶³ Consider, further, his argument about the historical emergence of the ancient Greek individual, where, after discovering its fundamentally intraworldly nature, he traces it into the Middle Ages, concluding that the Augustinian man (i.e. the man of the Western Christian tradition) continued to cultivate qualities of a primarily intraworldly sort. Diametrically opposite to this, Vernant maintains, is the homo hierarchicus of India (in the formulation of Louis Dumont), who epitomizes extraworldliness in his complete renunciation of the world.Footnote ⁶⁴ This, I would argue, is the core thesis of Weber's ambitious The Sociology of Religion, where the master narrative follows two trajectories in the history of world religions: at one extreme, the ascetic intraworldiness of Western methodical Calvinism; and, at the other, mystical extraworldiness represented most paradigmatically by Buddhism and Hinduism.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet curiously the name of Weber does not figure in Vernant's reflections on these pages.

I mentioned briefly in section I that the école sociologique had already by the first decade of the twentieth century established itself as a theoretical antipode to Weber's philosophy of history, but a bit more needs to be said about how Vernant received the consequences of these disputes. I do not imply that Durkheim and Weber's research programs amount to nothing but the products of monolithic and immutable nationalisms. Yet it is clear that the creation and persistence of influential sociological methods and types of discourse were indissolubly bound up with the concentration of formidable researchers at institutional cores, who were responding to political urgencies on both national and continental levels.Footnote ⁶⁶

It has become customary to observe that in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War—that is, pre-dating Vernant by several decades—French and German sociologists began developing theoretical programs with antithetical impulses for the study of society and religion, and that they rarely collaborated in a straightforward or sustained fashion (save some exceptions such as Maurice Halbwachs).Footnote ⁶⁷ Durkheim, for instance, though undoubtedly impressed by a select few Germans (e.g. Adolph Wagner and Gustav von Schmoller, but above all by Wilhelm Wundt's Ethik), perhaps did not read anything by Weber—at least he does not give any indication that he did.Footnote ⁶⁸ This is especially perplexing in light of the fact that Durkheim must have been aware of Weber, since, after all, Durkheim wrote a scathing review in the Année of his wife Marianne Weber's Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (1907). In fact, some contemporaries such as Simon Deploige leveled the criticism against Durkheim that his work was so influenced by the Germans that it appeared he had “imported his ideas wholesale from Germany,” a provocation insinuating German propaganda that Durkheim vigorously and bitterly denied, insisting instead that Auguste Comte was of much greater importance.Footnote ⁶⁹

Given his Alsatian roots, one cannot help but wonder if Durkheim still harbored resentment over the German annexation of his birthplace, Alsace-Lorraine, a region with a well-established Jewish community.Footnote ⁷⁰ Vicki Caron has recently noted, for example, that an overwhelming majority of elite Alsace-Lorraine Jews (unlike their Catholic and Protestant counterparts) not only maintained pro-French sympathies but was in fact defiantly anti-German well into the 1870s and beyond.Footnote ⁷¹ Durkheim may well have felt it important to demonstrate his French patriotism by severing all ties with German scholars, especially in light of both the Dreyfus affair and the widespread public opinion that the French of the annexed territories were somehow disquietingly Germanic in language and culture. Conceivably, the Great War, which claimed the life of Durkheim's only son, André, and those of a large number of his students, including the prodigious Robert Hertz, would have reignited such antipathies.Footnote ⁷²

Nor was Weber induced, so far as we can tell, to engage Durkheim, although Mauss once remarked that on a visit to Heidelberg he noticed all the volumes of l’Année sociologique resting on Weber's shelves.Footnote ⁷³ Whatever the truth of the matter, the strained nature of Mauss's comment evinces a systemic mutual distancing between French and German researchers that goes back at least to the work of Durkheim's teacher Fustel, with his rabid anti-German rhetoric against Theodor Mommsen and German scholarship after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. The language and perspective furnished by these early thinkers laid the groundwork for Vernant's almost exclusive conversation with the French and his disinterest in otherwise relevant hermeneutic sociologies developed by German scholars.Footnote ⁷⁴ A similar argument could be made about the relative lack of interest in the Annales school among German historians.Footnote ⁷⁵

It has been my argument that Meyerson and Mauss (and the Durkheimians generally) bequeathed to Vernant a certain national cultural identity and temperament—in particular, a deliberate nonengagement with Weber and other German scholars.Footnote ⁷⁶ It would appear that the dominant cultural values espoused by the Durkheimians were long-lasting and remained regnant in the academic institutions of Vernant's Paris. Additionally, Vernant's wartime exploits as a commanding officer in the Resistance led him to sympathize with the Durkheimian project of social integration and moral solidarity, and consequently he was drawn to their imaginative sociological vocabulary and conceptual schemes in his investigations into Greek antiquity. Pursuing these lines of thought, it is hardly surprising that Vernant never seriously engaged the scholarship of his coeval Walter Burkert (1931–2015), a German historian of ancient religions of the first order. Conversely, it is not unexpected that Burkert himself drew inspiration predominantly from the work of other German-speaking scholars (e.g. Karl Meuli (1891–1968) and Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)) and, as if to return the favor, virtually ignored Vernant's theory of sacrifice in his own magnum opus on the subject.Footnote ⁷⁷

In closing, three issues ought to be stressed. First, in the course of my argument on the Durkheim school (and Meyerson), I have tried somewhat deliberately to distance myself from the Jewish question, a point of controversy still among Durkheim experts.Footnote ⁷⁸ I have done so for reasons both empirical and theoretical. I am inclined to agree with Ivan Strenski, who has observed that the Durkheimians—highly critical of race theories—saw neither themselves nor their work as “essentially” Jewish in tonality. As such, it seemed prudent not to isolate Jewishness as an explanatory variable but to situate it (particularly the liberal Alsatian stripe of Durkheim) in the context of fin de siècle France in which the distinction between religious and political motivations for sociopolitical action and sociological investigation often blurred. Moreover, it makes better sense to construe certain quintessential aspects of their writing—aspects others categorically designate as typical of Jewish attitudes, such as societism—in more complex social realities.Footnote ⁷⁹ Mutatis mutandis, I abstained from an overt discussion of the religious inclinations of Vernant, who, although not Jewish, curiously inserted himself into an intellectual legacy dominated by an elite pro-French Jewish intelligentsia: Durkheim, Mauss, Meyerson, Vidal-Naquet, and Lévi-Strauss, among others.Footnote ⁸⁰ And in so doing, Vernant seems to have inherited the group's general contempt for the kind of methodological individualism characteristic of Weberian sociology.

Second, and as one would expect, Vernant's oeuvres, like those of Durkheim and Weber, did not remain static but reacted to circumstances, and it would be a desideratum in future studies to render more clearly whether he became more or less Durkheimian over time. Riccardo Di Donato speaks of Vernant's nuovo periodo after his election to the Collège de France.Footnote ⁸¹ A glance at Vernant's bibliography indeed indicates that his early preoccupation with Greek rationalization over the longue durée eventually gave way to more synchronic interests like comparative theories of divination, ancient visual representations of the divine, and civic religion in Attic tragedy, but the concern for collective mentalities nevertheless persists.Footnote ⁸² I would submit, however, that the methodological difficulties associated with Vernant's Durkheimian tendencies diminish in his later career when he abandons the overtly diachronic aspects that mark his early publications.

Last, one can only speculate in the final analysis how much of Weber's corpus Vernant actually read or knew. It would be difficult to believe that Weber was entirely unfamiliar to him, but we can ultimately infer from his scholarly production that he found himself not only tolerated but indeed even considerably rewarded by the French academic hierarchy, for institutional and ideological reasons, to privilege Durkheimian approaches over those Weberian. It deserves mention here that Vernant's election to the Collège de France was in large measure a result of the powerful backing of Lévi-Strauss, whose own enormously influential The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) recalls the stimulus of Durkheim and his Elementary Forms.Footnote ⁸³ In deliberately avoiding Weber, the work of Vernant and his disciples took on a particular cast centered on the Durkheimians, and, by extension, guided a whole intellectual tradition whose effects reverberate to this day, as the near-universal adoption of the polis–religion model in classical scholarship attests.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although one should resist the temptation to see Durkheim as a figure of exemplarity after whom Vernant consciously styled himself, it is noteworthy that they both found themselves, willfully or not, celebrated directors of pioneering research équipes, and Vernant, just like Durkheim, had a penchant for attracting a great many prolific protégés—Luc Brisson, François Hartog, François Lissarague, John Scheid, and Jesper Svenbro among the more influential.

VII

Notwithstanding their differences, the factors common to the aforementioned theorists are the identification of religion as an endogenous variable within the sociopolitical order, and, more specifically, a deep investment in parsing the role of religion in the dynamics of society and in the constitution of the political subject. Thus a turn away from the Durkheimian primacy of moral solidarity and collective cohesion would entail a rethinking of the very way we conceptualize the political dimension of religion.Footnote ⁸⁵ Despite having clarified plausible reasons for Vernant's biased repudiation of Weber, I am not, to be sure, advocating a transfer of scholarly energy from Durkheim to Weber, for it makes sense that one can still favor basic Durkheimian ideas about the dynamics of sacralization over Weber's disenchantment and rationalization framework. My point is more fundamental: given the obvious impossibility of fixing an ahistorical or essential relation between religion and the social-political sphere, how one conceives of them and the dynamics of their intersection is always partial and inevitably influenced by one's training, social conditions, and idiosyncratic desire for an alternative, perhaps better, society—a desire, in turn, that can manifest itself in historical and sociological theorization as nostalgic reflection, unbridled utopianism, or something in between. As such, it seems imperative for those engaged in the critical study of religion to interrogate the specific circumstances, subtexts, and implications that underlie our most cherished (but necessarily fraught) of theoretical approaches. Vernant's oeuvre—marked by its thick ethnography, interpretive daring, and attentiveness to the symbolic realm—remains a laudable model of scholarship, but by the same token it cannot be sustained as a value-neutral assessment of the ancient world precisely for its distinctively Durkheimian spirit (with its equally distinctive anti-Weberian or anti-German bias).Footnote ⁸⁶

Indeed, while much recent work in the sociology of religion has variously attempted to reinvigorate, develop, or supplant the key principles laid out by Weber and Durkheim (and by the other so-called founding fathers of sociology, Simmel and Mead), the history of ancient religions continues to proceed along the distinct theoretical axes laid out by these two classical sociologists.Footnote ⁸⁷ Recently, scholars of ancient religions, particularly those at the Max-Weber-Kolleg für kultur–und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien at the University of Erfurt, have made a concerted, and to a certain degree salutary, effort to redirect focus from polis and civic religion—that is, religion as socially constituted and socially constituting—in favor of approaches that treat the individual as a knowing and acting subject.Footnote ⁸⁸ My own sense is that this stream of publications on individual conduct and personal religion in antiquity, even if not normally registered as such by its main proponents, represents a revival of Weberian sociology in reaction to the legacies of Vernant and the French tradition, a critical moment in the development of the discipline.

Let us end with an extraordinary passage from an autobiographical account of the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Vernant's lifelong friend and jumeau de travail (as Mauss affectionately called Hubert):

The poignancy of these words redoubles when placed into the proper context: Vidal-Naquet belonged to a bourgeois, pro-republican Jewish family, and his father, Lucien, was a passionate Dreyfusard who eventually lost his life at Auschwitz. Although Vernant had a different, though perhaps no less turbulent, biography (World War I claimed his father, for instance), one senses that the seismic cultural and religious wars that Vidal-Naquet speaks of so searchingly resounded in Vernant as well, shaping his academic and personal ethos and fostering what were to be perduring intellectual allegiances.