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The Making and Representing of Society

Religion, the Sacred and Solidarity among Strangers in a Durkheimian Perspective

University of Perugia, mbrosati{at}libero.it

In this paper different interpretations of the sociological concept of the sacred are analysed and put in relation with the idea of solidarity. In the first section a particular understanding of the Durkheimian conception of the sacred is shown to express both the sociological and the philosophical meaning of the idea of normativity. In the second part Habermas's thought on religion is analysed and shown to develop in four stages. Here the point is that one can understand the emancipatory profile of modernity - which Habermas analysed in terms of communicative reason - as the core of a collective representation that, once idealized, can be understood as a secular form of the sacred. Finally, a third section is dedicated to a self-reflective defence of the nexus between solidarity and the sacred, a self-reflective defence that implies a criticism of the trivial secularized self-understanding of modernity.

Key Words: communicative rationality • reflexivity • the sacred • secularization • social solidarity

Journal of Classical Sociology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 173-196 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/1468795X030032004


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