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FROM MYTHOS TO LOGOS: JEAN-PIERREVERNANT, MAX WEBER, AND THE NARRATIVEOF OCCIDENTAL RATIONALIZATION

KENNETH W. YU

Modern Intellectual History / FirstView Article / September 2015, pp 1 - 30DOI: 10.1017/S1479244315000323, Published online: 24 September 2015

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How to cite this article:KENNETH W. YU FROM MYTHOS TO LOGOS: JEAN-PIERRE VERNANT, MAXWEBER, AND THE NARRATIVE OF OCCIDENTAL RATIONALIZATION. ModernIntellectual History, Available on CJO 2015 doi:10.1017/S1479244315000323

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from mythos to logos:jean-pierre vernant, max weber,and the narrative of occidentalrationalization∗

kenneth w. yuUniversity of Chicago

E-mail: kenwyu@uchicago.edu

This article begins with a remark by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his inaugural lectureat the College de France about the inadequacy of Max Weber’s historical sociologyfor the study of ancient religions. Despite posing shared research questions and oftenreaching similar conclusions, Vernant, one of the most influential twentieth-centuryancient historians, neither engaged nor acknowledged Weber and thereby secured hisabsence in the field of ancient religions generally. Vernant’s narrative of the historicalemergence of Greek rationality is at direct odds with Weber’s views on the matterin Sociology of Religion and elsewhere, and I argue that, beyond methodologicalconcerns, Vernant’s fundamentally Durkheimian position inherits early twentieth-century polemics between French and German sociologists. Vernant’s relationshipswith Marcel Mauss, Ignace Meyerson, and Claude Levi-Strauss, and his participationin the French Resistance, moreover, reaffirmed his Durkheimian views about societyand committed him to a long tradition of anti-German scholarship. I conclude with abrief coda on the historiographical implications of these observations for the study ofreligion and its relation to social life.

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This article attempts to account for the absence of a Weberian legacy in thestudy of Greek religion, taking its cue from a revealing statement by Jean-PierreVernant (1914–2007) in his 1975 inaugural lecture for the chair of comparativehistory of ancient religions at the College de France. In this programmatic address,

∗ This article has profited from the comments of Wendy Doniger, Jas Elsner, ChristopherFaraone, Andreas Glaeser, Hans Joas, Bruce Lincoln, Francoise Meltzer, and JamesRedfield. I am grateful to them for their suggestions on earlier versions of this paperand for many delightful conversations. For their encouragement and helpful critiques,special thanks must go to the editors of Modern Intellectual History, especially SophieRosenfeld, and to the four anonymous referees, one of whom was subsequently revealedas Peter Gordon. I bear full responsibility for all errors in style or content.

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delivered before an audience of France’s leading academic luminaries, Vernantchampioned comparatism and evaluated several theorists whom he consideredto have played roles of exceptional importance in the study of ancient religion andsociety. Invoked alongside Claude Levi-Strauss, Albert Reville, Ernst Cassirer, KarlJaspers, Georges Dumezil, and other ranking figures, was the German sociologistMax Weber (1864–1920), who received, at first glance, a relatively lukewarmassessment. Combining encomium with invective, Vernant ultimately criticizedWeber for denying Greek religion the authenticity he grants to other religioustraditions:

Take the case of Max Weber, for instance, who from the Hellenists’ point of view has

an exemplary importance. His construction is the most systematic and fullest attempt

to formulate a comparative sociology regarding religion. By the juxtaposition of a

series of dichotomies such as transcendence–immanence, asceticism–mysticism, intra-

or extraworldly orientation, the different religious systems range between two opposite

poles: at one pole, we have Calvinism, which for him represents Christianity at its most

extreme, in its most rigorous and purest form, its religious rationalization brought to

completion. At the other pole we have Buddhism. Somewhat like the antiworld that the

Pythagoreans invented for their purposes and in their desire for symmetry, Buddhism is

the absolute opposite of the preceding model. In Calvinism we have transcendence and

intraworldly asceticism; in Buddhism immanence and an extraworldly mysticism. But in

the checkerboard pattern formed by these various typological combinations, there is no

square in which to enter Greek religion. It hardly appears as a religion at all. In Weber’s

view Hellas takes pride of place as the ideal city in social and political history but is

relegated to the wings and does not come onto the stage of religious history. By what

criterion does one deny the authenticity, granted to other creeds, of a religion that for

more than a thousand years had its followers and its devotees?1

Given Vernant and Weber’s shared interest in comparative religions, the theme ofoccidental rationalization, and Marxism and neo-Marxist thought,2 the acerbicnature of this passage occasions some surprise.3 At least two features from this

1 Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Greek Religion, Ancient Religions,” in Vernant, Mortals andImmortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma Zeitlin (Princeton, 1991), 269–89, at 274.

2 On Vernant’s relation to Marx and the French Communist Party see S. C. Humphreys, “TheHistorical Anthropology of Thought: Jean-Pierre Vernant and Intellectual Innovation inAncient Greece,” Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, 55 (2009), 101–12. For Weber’sviews on Marx see Gunther Roth, “The Historical Relationship to Marxism,” in R. Bendixand G. Roth, eds., Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley, 1971),227–52.

3 Not to mention Weber’s numerous references to ancient Greek and Roman religionsthroughout his corpus, including his 1891 The Agrarian History of Rome in Its Significancefor Public and Private Law. Weber’s absence in Vernant’s scholarship has, to my knowledge,been noticed only once: Andre Laks, “Les origines de Jean-Pierre Vernant,” Critique, 54

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excerpt call for immediate comment. First, although the Weberian ideal-typicalmethod was not expressly named, Vernant certainly had this in mind, and hediscredited, however diplomatically, its totalizing analytical aspirations sinceit failed to account for Greek religion. Second, Vernant intimated that Weberessentialized ancient Greece as fundamentally political and economic, implyingthat Weber’s sociology could be rendered useful only by economic or politicalhistorians, and not by historians of religions.

We could, of course, quarrel with Vernant’s characterization of Weberianideal types, or with his implicit claim that Weber disconnects the religious fromthe political; it is evident, for example, that Weber’s interest in the interplayof the religious and economic (and other) value spheres in Sociology of Religion(1920) and The Protestant Ethic (1905) complicates Vernant’s judgment of Weber’shistorical sociology. However, Vernant’s comments about Weber represented thecommunis opinio among classical scholars in postwar France; what is more, theypresage the enduring absence of Weber in most research on Greek religion beyondthe 1960s and to the present day on both sides of the Atlantic.4 Even the greatMoses Finley, who attempted to revitalize Weber’s status in classical scholarship,cites a remark of Alfred Heuss’s to substantiate Vernant’s opinion: “the specialdisciplines pertaining to antiquity have gone their way as if Max Weber had neverlived.”5

(1998), 268–82. Humphreys, “Historical Anthropology,” 103, draws a parallel betweenVernant’s project on rationality and Weberian rationalization but goes no further.

4 Miriam Leonard’s characterization of Vernant’s influence in the discipline of Classics isnot overstated: “Vernant should undoubtedly be credited as the scholar who made Frenchtheory acceptable to classicists in the Anglo-Saxon world.” Miriam Leonard, Athens inParis: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-war French Thought (Oxford, 2005), 15. Seealso James Redfield, “J.-P. Vernant: Structure and History,” History of Religions, 31/1 (1991),69–74.

5 Moses Finley, “Max Weber and the Greek City-State,” in Finley, Ancient History: Evidenceand Models (New York, 1986), 88–103, at 88. Finley’s relationship with Weber is equivocal.While appreciating much of Weber’s methods, he maintained critical views, especiallyconcerning the notion of legitimate domination for antiquity: “The Weberian schemeis fatally defective” (ibid., 103). Graf similarly discredits Weber for the study of ancientreligions, noting his Christianizing tendencies. Fritz Graf, “What Is Ancient MediterraneanReligion?”, in Sarah Iles Johnston, ed., Ancient Religions (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 3–16, at15. Keith Hopkins and Jeremy Tanner, however, have (independently) engaged Weberianthemes, not to mention Momigliano, for which see Mohammad Nafissi, Ancient Athensand Modern Ideology: Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical Sciences; Max Weber, KarlPolanyi and Moses Finley (London, 2005), esp. 67–72. For attempts to read the ancientdata through Weber see Jan Bremmer, “Rationalization and Disenchantment in AncientGreece: Max Weber among the Pythagoreans and Orphics,” in Richard Buxton, ed., FromMyth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford, 1999), 71–86; and

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My primary concern is to show how Vernant’s attitude toward Weberdoes not derive strictly from differences in methodological approach, butowes much to Vernant’s immediate political context and intellectual genealogywhich—comprising, inter alia, the Durkheim school and Ignace Meyerson(1888–1983)—had a long, though perhaps not overtly polemical, history ofmaintaining a critical distance from Weber and German scholarship ingeneral.6 A central claim of my article is that the methodological specificitiesof Vernant’s projects are correlated tightly to, and are indeed inextricablefrom, his complex heritage and attraction to the Durkheimians. On a higherlevel of generality, I hope that my discussion will elicit deeper reflection onthe ways in which historical contingencies can become assimilated into thearticulation of sociological theory (in the cases of Weber and especially of theDurkheim school) and in the act of historical interpretation (in the case ofVernant).

To bring into sharper relief the political and intellectual commitments inVernant’s historical treatment of classical antiquity, I begin with his enormouslyprolific work on the advent of positivist thought in ancient Greece. Aftertracing Vernant’s ideas to Durkheimian perspectives on religion and society,I compare Vernant’s position to Weber’s theories of rationalization in orderto foreground salient points of disagreement. My aim in reading Vernant inlight of Durkheim and then Weber is to uncover the underlying historicalconjunctures and operative forces in early to mid-twentieth-century Francethat conditioned Vernant’s views of Weberian sociology. I show why and howVernant, in developing and repackaging social theories specific to the political-theological concerns of the Third Republic, also inherited, for better or worse, theidealist 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 ofa purely French republican world view, owes its contours to early twentieth-century Franco-German sociological debates about historical logic, the functionof religion in modern social life, and the capacity of social-scientific researchto respond to contemporary political upheavals. I conclude by reflecting brieflyon the broader historiographical implications of this genealogy for the study ofreligion.

Joseph M. Bryant, “Intellectuals and Religion in Ancient Greece: Notes on a WeberianTheme,” British Journal of Sociology, 37/2 (1986), 269–96.

6 On the relationship of French and German sociology in this period see Reinhard Bendix,“Two Sociological Traditions,” in Bendix and Roth, eds., Scholarship and Partisanship,282–98; and Monique Hirschorn, Max Weber et la sociologie francaise (Paris, 1988).

from mythos to logos 5

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The French school of Classics redefined the study of Greek religion not only inEurope but also in Anglo-America.7 With roots in the exemplary work of LouisGernet (1882–1962),8 a specialist in ancient law and student of Durkheim (1858–1917), the school coalesced into a robust scholarly equipe in the second half of thetwentieth century under the leadership of Vernant along with Pierre Vidal-Naquet(1930–2006), Nicole Loraux (1943–2003), Marcel Detienne (1935–), and others.9

Abandoning the unrestrained comparatism of the Frazerian mode that had upto then characterized most work on classical religions, these French historiansof the Hellenic world—based in the Centre Louis Gernet at the Ecole des hautesetudes—developed a sophisticated anthropological approach to antiquity thatabsorbed (though not uncritically) the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss.This fact is uncontroversial, but recent scholarship tends to underemphasize that

7 On the British side, S. C. Humphreys—influenced by Gernet as well as by Polanyi—aligned with the French insofar as she purported to extract emic models to illumineancient Greek culture; G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation inEarly Greek Thought (Bristol, 1966); Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge, 1990);Richard Buxton, “Imaginary Greek mountains,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 112 (1992), 1–15;and Richard Gordon, ed., Myth, Religion, and Society: Structuralist Essays by M. Detienne,L. Gernet, J.-P. Vernant, and P. Vidal-Naquet (Cambridge, 1981), viii–xvii. Stateside seeCharles Segal, “Afterword: Jean-Pierre Vernant and the Study of Ancient Greece,” Arethusa,15 (1982), 221–34; and Froma Zeitlin’s indispensable introduction in Vernant, Mortals andImmortals. Julia Kindt, “Religion,” in G. Boys-Stones, B. Graziosi, and P. Vasunia, eds., TheOxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (Oxford, 2009), 364–77, esp. 368–71, assesses Vernant’sinfluence. James Redfield, “Classics and Anthropology,” Arion, 1/2 (1991), 5–23, by contrast,argues that this group attracted classicists who embraced similar intellectual ambitionsbut encountered resistance from those with more orthodox philological tendencies. S.C. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks (London, 1978), remains the most decisivetreatment to date on anthropology and the Classics.

8 On Gernet see S. C. Humphreys, “The Work of Louis Gernet,” History and Theory, 10/2(1971), 172–96; Riccardo Di Donato, “L’anthropologique historique de Louis Gernet,”Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, 5/6 (1982), 984–96; and Sitta von Reden, “Re-evaluatingGernet: Value and Greek Myth,” in Buxton, From Myth to Reason?, 51–70.

9 Representative publications include Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Black Hunter: Forms of Thoughtand Forms of Society in the Greek World, trans. Andrew Szegedy-Maszak (Baltimore, 1986;first published 1981); Marcel Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythology,trans. Janet Lloyd (Princeton, 1977; first published 1972); J.-P. Vernant, Myth and Societyin Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, MA, 1990; first published 1974); M.Detienne and J.-P. Vernant, The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, trans. Paula Wissing(Chicago, 1989; first published 1979); Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The FuneralOration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA, 1986; first published1981); and Giulia Sissa and M. Detienne, The Daily Life of the Greek Gods, trans. JanetLloyd (Stanford, 2000; first published 1989).

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Vernant’s inquiries into myth and ritual can be understood as descendant fromtwo relatively independent legacies. There is reason to believe a dominant Levi-Straussian influence in their study of myth, whereas—quite separately—theirpoint of departure for the study of ritual was the ecole durkheimienne, especiallythe work of Durkheim’s nephew and collaborator Marcel Mauss (an argumentto which I will return).10

It is not hard to hear the echoes of Levi-Strauss and structuralism inVernant’s conceptualization of the Greek pantheon. Vernant showed in aprobing article on the divine couplet Hermes–Hestia that the logic of the Greekpantheon expressed in the myths of the poets could be made intelligible byidentifying the similarities and differences between the various Greek deitiesand their domains and prerogatives.11 The underlying synchronic architectureof the pantheon and the “interlocking body of concepts” derived from themost essential stories of the ancient Greek world, Vernant further suggests,was mirrored exactly in the Greeks’ social and religious practices: rituals ofsacrifice, age-grade initiation, and the design of precise alimentary codes, amongothers.

Vernant insists that ancient sacrifice, for example, was a signifying practicethat enabled communication between humans and gods, comprising “ritualsof slaughter and cookery and the preparation of a meal of meat under rulesthat make the consumption of meat in the course of daily life a lawful, evenpious act.”12 More to the point, sacrifice, in Vernant’s line of analysis, constitutesGreek self-understanding insofar as the practice reinforces man’s locus betweenthe realm of the divine and that of animals. Ritualized and rule-bound eatingintersects the diet of the gods (i.e. nonconsumption, but the taking of pleasurein the odor of burning meat) and the beast’s uninhibited devouring of rawflesh. Sacrifice, which Vernant sees as a largely egalitarian act, thus crystallizesthe essence of man and ably “integrates the performers of the rite in thegroups they are part of and trains them for their occupations, both public andprivate.”13

Beyond the obvious Levi-Straussian strain in Vernant’s reading of sacrifice,however, it is in fact more on target to locate Durkheim’s theory of social cohesionand moral solidarity as set forth especially in Elementary Forms of Religious

10 Yet Marcel Detienne, “Back to the Village: A Tropism of Hellenists?”, History of Religions,41/2 (2001), 99–113, at 110, reminds us that Levi-Strauss understood his own structuralanthropology to be inspired by Mauss.

11 J.-P. Vernant, “Hestia–Hermes: The Religious Expression of Space and Movement inAncient Greece,” in Vernant, Myth and Thought, 157–96.

12 Vernant, “Greek Religions, Ancient Religions,” 280.13 Ibid.

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Life and The Division of Labour in Society.14 Just as Durkheim points to therejuvenation of the collective by ritual means, so Vernant argues that ancientGreek 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 ofthe individual:

This integration into the community, and especially into its religious activities . . . occur[s]

in a social framework in which the individual, as he begins to emerge, appears not as one

who renounces the world but as a person in his own right, a legal subject, a political actor,

a private person in the midst of his family or in the circle of his friends.15

Elsewhere, Vernant reiterates, “There is no religious bond between an individualand the divinity other than that exercised through a social mediation . . . Therelation with the divine occurs through a social function.”16 Vernant effectivelyrestates, in the context of Greek sacrifice, Durkheim’s conceptualization of thehomo duplex, according to which individual subjectivity and the social arehomologized by the mediation of collective ritual. Ancient subjectivity, accordingto Vernant, bears within it the prevailing value system, social practices, andcollective mental structures of the community to which the individual belongs.

Vernant’s structural approach to Greek religion helped reveal the organizingconceptual principles undergirding an enormous and wildly heterogeneous setof ancient cult practices and beliefs. Nonetheless, he and his followers have metwith criticism in recent years, for reasons that partially stem, I will argue, fromtheir steadfast devotion to Durkheimian sociology.17 It should be recalled that theDurkheim school’s interest in the collective consciousness and social cohesion,

14 See the discussion of sacrifice in the chapters on le culte positif in The Elementary Forms ofReligious Life (Book 3), which is doubtless indebted to Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’smagisterial “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice,” L’annee sociologique, 2 (1899),29–138.

15 Vernant, “Greek Religions, Ancient Religions,” 283. Cf. Durkheim, Sociology andPhilosophy, trans. D. F. Pocock (London, 1953), 90–91: “Society was presented as a systemof organs and functions, maintaining itself against outside forces of destruction just like aphysical organism . . . Society is, however, more than this, for it is the centre of a moral life[le foyer d’une vie morale] . . . Sentiments born and developed in the group have a greaterenergy than purely individual sentiments. A man who experiences such sentiments feelshimself dominated by outside forces that lead him and pervade his milieu.”

16 J.-P. Vernant, “Forms of Belief and Rationality in Greece,” in Johann P. Arnason and PeterMurphy, eds., Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and Its Aftermath (Stuttgart,2001), 118–26, at 122.

17 Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (NewYork, 2002), 45–62. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks, 9–10, has noted that thestructural-functionalist approach suffers on two accounts when applied to Greece: itdownplays historical change, and at times improperly compares the Greeks—whose

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and its focus on law and religion in the maintenance of society, developed out ofthe politically turbulent conditions of late nineteenth-century Paris, marked mostsymbolically by the divisive Dreyfus affair and the crisis of the Third Republic.18

As a fellow Jew and Alsatian, Durkheim sympathized with Dreyfus on bothaccounts and was animated by the ardent political and ideological debates overFrench national identity, the duties of citizenship, and the Jewish situation inFrance.19 Conflicts between the prodemocratic, anticlerical Dreyfusards and theanti-Semitic, military-bolstered anti-Dreyfusards divided the French Republicand galvanized the Durkheimians to alleviate social discord through scientificresearch.20 The aspirations and elaborate methodologies of the Durkheimianswere thus responses to an increasingly aggressive form of French patriotismthat encouraged both anti-German and anti-Semitic sentiments. It will becomeevident that Vernant’s conception of religion and the social order should beunderstood against this background as much as that of Levi-Strauss and thepostwar French anthropological tradition.

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“The Formation of Positivist Thought” (1957) is one of Vernant’s most succinctand lucid treatments of Greek rationalization, for him a key process in the Westernhistorical trajectory that ushered in a revolutionary way of conceptualizing the

method of organizing society was ordinarily through multistranded kinship systems—tocommunities based on single kinship groups.

18 See Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France(Chicago, 2002), 95–131; Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republicto Vichy (Oxford, 2013); and Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: The FrenchJewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971). Dominick LaCapra,Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (Ithaca, NY, 1972), 1–78, discusses Durkheim’swork as an apology for the republican ideals of organic social unity and moral solidarism.

19 Dreyfus’s status as an Alsatian Jew is paramount, for Durkheim could identify with himon two points. Note that this dual identity was shared by Lucien Febvre and the eminentBloch family, among others. See Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews ofAlsace-Lorraine, 1871—1918 (Stanford, 1988), 128. For Durkheim ’s views on Dreyfus seehis “Individualism and the Intellectuals,” in Durkheim on Religion, ed. W. S. F. Pickering(London, 1975), esp. 62; and Durkheim , “L’elite et la democratie,” Revue bleue, 5/1 (1904),705–6.

20 See Victor Karady, “The Durkheimians in Academe,” in P. Besnard, ed., The SociologicalDomain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge, 1983), 71–89;Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice, 156–79; Michele Richman, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheimand the College de Sociologie (Minneapolis, 2002), esp. 1–65; and William R. Keylor,Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge,MA, 1975), esp. 168–70 et passim.

from mythos to logos 9

cosmos.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 fromthe mythical to the rationalist constitute some of the chief signposts of thisnew paradigm. Vernant begins the essay by praising the pathbreaking study ofF. M. Cornford, who argued, against the then-dominant grain, that Hesiod’sconception of the cosmic order had anticipated later metaphysical speculationabout the relation of man to the physical and divine world. Cornford thus aimedto minimize the fault line that had been drawn previously by such scholars asJohn Burnet between philosophy and “antiquated” religious thought, and hedismissed the time-honored notion of “the Greek miracle” as inadequate to castlight on what actually occurred in the late archaic period.22

Vernant strikes a position between Cornford and Burnet, for while not denyingthe emergence of a newfangled manner of world mapping in the sixth century,he vehemently eschews both a simplistic linear progression and a disembodiedtranscendent “Greek miracle.” In contrast, his project—purportedly empiricaland diachronic—sets out to pinpoint the processes by which this epistemic shiftarose. As Vernant understands it, the general world view propounded in mythceased to satisfy the conceptual demands of the community as soon as archaicnoble families disintegrated and the powerful magician-kings of the Mycenaeanand Geometric period (the Homeric basileis) failed to maintain authority overcivic affairs.23 The emergent sociopolitical configuration of the Greek city-statecompelled its citizens to adopt alternative interpretive modes to explain bothnatural and divine phenomena, leaving in its wake minimal room for traditionalmythic thought. In particular, highly empirical accounts of reality, ones thatenlisted physical and naturalist laws, superseded mythic discourse, culminating

21 J.-P. Vernant, “The Formation of Positivist Thought in Archaic Greece,” in Vernant, Mythand Thought among the Greeks, 317–98. His other relevant publications include Les originesde la pensee grecque (Paris, 1962); Vernant, “Forms of Belief and Rationality in Greece”;and Vernant, “The Reason of Myth,” in Vernant, Myth and Society, 203–60. Momiglianoconsidered this topic the raison d’etre of the Paris school. Arnaldo Momigliano, Terzocontributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1966), 291.

22 Francis M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of WesternSpeculation (New York, 1912). See Robert L. Fowler, “Mythos and Logos,” Journal of HellenicStudies, 131 (2011), 45–66, for a history of the scholarship on rationality in ancient Greece.

23 An idea already advanced in J. P. Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, trans. Janet Lloyd(Ithaca, NY, 1982), 51: “This insistence on openness led to the progressive appropriationby the group of the conduct, knowledge, and procedures that originally were the exclusiveprerogatives of the basileus . . . Greek culture took form by opening to an ever-wideningcircle—and finally to the entire demos, “community”—access to the spiritual worldreserved initially for an aristocracy of priests and warriors.”

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in the Ionian physicists and the esoteric philosophical schools of Magna Graecia.24

The shift in regimes of truth rearranged expert networks, whereby philosophers,now the legitimate order of intellectual carriers, debunked the substantive andepistemological claims of charismatic sages and shamans.25 The latter traveledin elite circles and transmitted arcane knowledge selectively; philosophers, bycontrast, addressed the public, circulating their wisdom widely in the serviceof the polis, which revealed the new concern for public argumentation and theincreasing importance of peitho (“persuasion”—both the abstract concept andits personified divine form) in this historical period. Vernant concludes that thechanging political order of the city and the philosopher’s rationalist vision ofreality developed pari passu, both partaking of an expansive emergent ideology.

To illustrate the concomitant effects of positivist thought in the politicalrealm, Vernant highlights the well-known sixth-century geopolitical reformsof Cleisthenes, a “deliberate amalgamation . . . a political unification . . . of thediverse groups and activities of which the city was composed.”26 Indeed, the polisadministration devised and implemented a new civic calendar to accompanythese comprehensive demographic modifications, understanding the efficacy ofa structured social temporality to promote a reconceptualized collective outlook.In a published interview with Maurice Godelier, Vernant considers the developingpolitical 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 overthe seventh and sixth centuries to merge, at the pinnacle of the high classicalperiod, into a composite and undifferentiated institution.27

24 I find this point incomprehensible. Vernant, “The Formation of Positivist Thought,”379, that the dual ontology (the independence of soul from body) posited by WesternGreek philosophers (e.g. Pythagoreans) was a step toward positivist thinking, a kind of“clarification and elaboration.” Even if we wish to call this positivism, it is undeniably ofa different sort than that which obtains in Asia Minor among the naturalists.

25 “Thus the philosopher takes over from the old king-magician, the master of time. Heconstructs a theory to explain the very phenomena that in times past the king had broughtabout.” Vernant, “The Formation of Positivist Thought,” 376.

26 Vernant, “The Formation of Positivist Thought,” 389. Standard accounts of these reformsare Antony Andrewes, “Kleisthenes’ Reform Bill,” Classical Quarterly, 27/2 (1977), 241–48;David M. Lewis, “Cleisthenes and Attica,” Historiai, 12/1 (1963), 22–40; and, in the Frenchstructuralist tradition, Pierre Leveque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Clisthene l’Athenien (Paris,1964).

27 J.-P. Vernant, Entre mythe et politique, vol. 1 (Paris, 1996), 108: “Disons qu’il n’y a pasvraiment separation, mais c’est le religieux qui devient politique, au lieu que le politiquesoit purement integre dans le religieux.” See also his interview with M. Mounier-Kuhn,now printed in Vincent Duclert, “Le modele Vernant: Engagements resistants, philosophecombattant,” in M. Olender and F. Vitrani, eds., Jean-Pierre Vernant: Dedans dehors (Paris,2013), 65–97, at 79; and Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 131: “In fact, it was at the

from mythos to logos 11

The impact of the rise of positivist thought was, Vernant tries to show, palpableat all levels of society, and he elsewhere takes pains to demonstrate its ancillaryeffects on Greek society writ large: on literature and the arts, the codification oflegal structures, the hoplite formation comprising citizen-soldiers, new monetaryforms and emerging economies—indeed, a hegemonic historical narrative thatsubsumes each and every sociocultural sphere under its penumbra.28 Apropos ofphilosophical discourse, for instance, Vernant contends that the polis engenderedconditions for a new cosmology (e.g. that of Parmenides) that favored coherence,unity, and the singular (ousia “substance” and to on “being”) over flux andpolysemy; moreover, an alternative epistemology followed on the heels of thisreformulated metaphysical account. The intellect, as opposed to mere corporealexperience, was regarded as the supreme mode in ascertaining the world: reality“is now no longer seen as the diversity of things apprehended through humanexperience . . . [but] as the intelligible subject of logos, of reason, expressedthrough language in accordance with its own principles of noncontradiction.”29

Vernant’s reading of the narrative of Western rationalization is especiallyremarkable in those sections of the essay that move from the institutional to theintersubjective; that is, from the analytical perspective of society to the individual.The emergence of rational thought did not only unfold at the macro level. Itseffects trickled into the very subjectivities of Athenian citizens, who reshaped thevalue systems that underpinned social relations and thus fashioned novel formsof social identity:

The old idea of the social order was based on a distribution, a dividing up (nomos),

of honors and privileges among different groups that were opposed within the political

community, just as the elemental powers were opposed within the cosmos. After the sixth

century, this idea was transformed into the abstract concept of isonomia, equality before

the law for individuals who were all defined in the same way, in that they were citizens of

the same city . . . the city is no longer identified with any one privileged figure or with

any activity or family in particular, but is whatever form the unified group consisting of

all the citizens, without regard to identity, ancestry, or profession, takes. In the order of

political level that Reason was first expressed, established, and shaped in Greece.” Vernantin this same book attributes the original Greek impulse toward egalitarianism to Spartabut quickly emphasizes the more important contributions of the Athenians.

28 On the consequences of rationalization in art, for example, see J. P. Vernant, “Fromthe ‘Presentification’ of the Invisible to the Imitation of Appearance,” in Vernant, Mythand Thought, 333–52. Richard Neer, “Jean-Pierre Vernant and the History of the Image,”Arethusa, 43/2 (2010), 181–95, offers a critical treatment of Vernant’s thoughts on Greekrepresentations of the divine.

29 Vernant, “The Formation of Positivist Thought,” 394.

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the city, social relationships, considered abstractly and apart from personal or family ties,

are defined in terms of equality and similarity.30

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 ofharmonia, in which unequal parts of a whole conjoin to form an internallycoherent and cooperative body politic, is replaced by isonomia, wherein allconstitutive parts of society possess equal share in merit and responsibility.Where meritocracy and social competition characterize the pre-polis Mycenaeanuniverse with its aristocratic palaces and temple economies, the polis of the lateseventh century—in which egalitarian civic religion stood at its very core—allowed for the flourishing of civic equality, mutual collaboration, and socialbelonging. According to Vernant, the demos in the Athenian polis ruled itself notby brute force or exploitation but by reasoned public debate. The demise of socialhierarchies that formerly divided citizens furnished space for the proliferationof social and political freedoms and provided more inclusive qualifications forclaiming 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 notdisingenuous, reading of Weber and fails to discern the panoramic narrative thatencompasses the entire Sociology of Religion.31 More than developing typologiesfor the study of religion, Weber presents, as it were, an elaborate history ofreligions. A look at Weber’s notion of rationalization in relation to the unfoldingof discrete value systems in The Sociology of Religion and “Religious Rejectionsof the World and Their Directions” will secure us a precise vantage to juxtaposeWeber’s and Vernant’s seemingly incompatible views on the logic of history andthe place of religion within society.32

Any study reckoning with Weber’s treatment of rationalization must addresshis main theses on the nature and development of the religious sphere, fromits earliest articulations in prehistory to the major living world religions ofmodernity. The Sociology of Religion contains a chronology that effectively begins

30 Vernant, “The Formation of Positivist Thought,” 388–90.31 On the narrative quality of this text see Hans Joas, “The Axial Age Debate as Religious

Discourse,” in R. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds., The Axial Age and Its Consequences(Cambridge, MA, 2012), 9–29, esp. 17–21.

32 For Sociology of Religion, I cite from the 1995 Beacon Press edition, trans. E. Fischoff; for“Religious Rejections” I consulted From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York, 1946), 323–59.

from mythos to logos 13

in illo tempore, when a magical sensibility directed an individual’s behavior withinthe 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 forcesnot 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 aproductive economy.33 In addition to the imbrication of secular power and sacredauthority, this primordial unity of values is operative in other institutional andprivate relations—namely aesthetics, sexuality, social relations, and economicproduction.34

At the risk of simplifying Weber’s sweeping narrative, we can stillidentify its major thrust: at a certain juncture, the religious sphere—alongwith its constitutive symbols and practices—suddenly undergoes abstraction,activated (at least in the Western tradition) by the conceptual developmentof the notions of the “soul” and “supernatural powers,” ideas towardwhich people begin to systematize their religious behavior. Thus complexsymbols and analogies displace naturalistic explanations in the evaluationof the phenomenal world. Contributions by religious functionaries (priestsand prophets) and by lay intellectuals like philosophers, moreover, weremomentous to the development of the religious sphere in this historicaltrajectory.

As religious ideas become systematized, people’s understandings of theworld and the behaviors and attitudes they adopt begin to turn intothemselves and eventually congeal into autonomous value spheres. As aconsequence of this autonomization, religion follows its own course andconfronts the interests and goals of other domains in the socioculturalfield (viz. the political, economic, intellectual, erotic, and aesthetic, whichthemselves have undergone autonomization), producing an irreversible conflictbetween value spheres (Eigengesetzlichkeit): “The further the rationalization[of] ‘things worldly’ has progressed, the stronger has the tension on the partof religion become. For the rationalization and the conscious sublimationof man’s relations to the various spheres of values . . . have then pressedtowards making conscious the internal and lawful autonomy of the individualspheres.”35

In “Religious Rejections,” Weber is absolutely clear about the rationalizationprocess in the aesthetic domain where “art becomes a cosmos of more and more

33 Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 333.34 See Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 341–43 and Weber, Sociology of Religion, 1 and 13 et

passim.35 Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 328, original emphasis.

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consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right.”36 Thesame disarticulation occurs between religion and politics:

All politics is oriented to the material facts of the dominant interest of the state, to realism,

and to the autonomous end of maintaining the external and internal distribution of power.

These goals, again, must necessarily seem completely senseless from the religious point of

view. Yet only in this way does the realm of politics acquire a uniquely rational dynamic

of its own, once brilliantly formulated by Napoleon, which appears as thoroughly alien to

every ethic of brotherliness as do the rationalized economic institutions.37

The incompatibility of distinct value spheres leads to the fracturing of formerlywhole and self-reliant “cultural beings” (Kulturmenschen), a consequence of “thetotal being of man having been alienated from the organic cycle of peasant life.”38

This internal disturbance, Weber goes on to say, leads individuals to developa methodical, self-disciplined inner consistency, to cultivate a particular ethos,and to maintain an unsympathetic stance toward rival ethics. In a remarkablypurple passage in “Science as a Vocation” Weber likens the adopting of a singleethos to choosing between irreconcilably antagonistic gods (notice Weber’shighly rationalist and Protestant suggestion tucked into the final line of thepassage):

Perhaps [integrity] can only be derived from one such fundamental position, or maybe

from several, but it cannot be derived from these or those other positions. Figuratively

speaking, you serve this god and you offend the other god when you decide to adhere to

this position. And if you remain faithful to yourself, you will necessarily come to certain

final conclusions that subjectively make sense.39

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-a-visrationalization, Talcott Parsons and Roland Axtmann have independently arguedthat structural tension, value pluralism, and a differentiated society constitute (forWeber) principles for change and thus for individual and political autonomy.40

Much ink has been spilled on how Weber’s political and historical context,

36 Ibid., 34237 Weber, Sociology of Religion, 235.38 Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 344.39 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 129–56, at 151.40 Talcott Parsons, “Christianity and Modern Society,” in Parsons, Sociological Theory

and Modern Industrial Society (New York, 1967), 385–421; and Wolfgang Schluchter,Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspective (Berkeley, 1989), at 371–7. Writing in the American context of the 1960s, Parsons, of course, tamed Weber’spessimism and ambivalence regarding capitalism and modernity; see Roland Axtmann,“State Formation and the Disciplined Individual in Weber’s Historical Sociology,” in

from mythos to logos 15

one that was experiencing the tumultuous effects of rapid modernization inthe Wilhelmine and Weimar years, gave impetus to his broader theorizationof the dynamics of society.41 Stephen Kalberg, for instance, has clarified thebackground of Weber’s work, tracing the widening divergence between valuesystems of the public and private spheres in post-Bismarckian Germany, ableak historical moment that was permeated by political fragmentation anda sense of Kulturpessimismus.42 Within this context, the very idea of unity—aterm associated at once with intellectual suppression, dehumanization, and mobmentality—had acquired chiefly negative connotations. Unlike Vernant, whoperceived social integration and value monism to be the telos of the ideal politicalorder, a necessary condition for inclusivity and mutual understanding, Weberfound that it designated a foreclosure of creativity, indeed a reduction of freedomto carry out self-willed decisions.

Having counterpoised Weber and Vernant’s ideal social orders, one candraw out the fact that religion plays vastly dissimilar roles in the socialmatrices of their respective theories. Grosso modo, religion for Vernant exertsa centripetal force, by which the various spheres of social life and its citizensgravitate toward harmony. For Weber, religion—only one of several normativedimensions of society—exerts a centrifugal force, constantly challenging othervalue domains. If Vernant’s ideal society, exemplified by the well-ordered polisof post-mythical Greece, partakes of the Gemeinschaft type, then Weber’s societyas it develops in his narrative of occidental rationalization is of the Gesellschafttype.

v

It may already be evident that more is at stake in Vernant’s narrative of therationalization of Greek thought, and we will need to reflect on the politicalsubtexts that occasionally enter his writings, and to show how Vernant astheoretician and Vernant as citizen intertwine in his research. Vernant’s accountof an egalitarian Greek political consciousness at the apogee of Cleisthenic Athensrepresents the intellectual offspring of two discursive fields, for it combines the

Ralph Schroeder, ed., Max Weber: Democracy and Modernization (New York, 1998), 32–46,esp. 40–42.

41 See Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber: From History to Modernity (London, 1992), esp. 111; SamWhimster, “The Nation-State, the Protestant Ethic and Modernization,” in Schroeder,Max Weber, 61–78; and Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination.

42 Stephen Kalberg, “The Origin and Expansion of Kulturpessimismus: The Relationshipbetween Public and Private Spheres in Early Twentieth Century Germany,” SociologicalTheory, 5 (1987), 150–64. The notion of Zersplitterung is sometimes used to describe thefracturing of political homogeneity during these years.

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distinct philosophical tendency of the Durkheim lineage (via Meyerson andMauss) with Marxist political ideals anchored in his personal experience in theFrench Resistance.

That the work of Meyerson is obscure to most readers can be attributedto the fact that he did not publish a single monograph save his 1949 thesis“Psychological Functions and Works,” at the age of sixty.43 Even during his life,he was better known for his sixty-year editorship of the prestigious Journal depsychologie normale et pathologique and as a committed member of the Societede 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).44 Devoting his attention to the historical development of the humanmind and its categories of perception (never fixed but determined by historicaland cultural specificities), Meyerson argued that man-made creations—moreprecisely, the making of creations—uncovered the deepest interiorities of thehuman mind. The products of this historically determined poiesis, constitutingfive distinct, but structurally interconnected, fields—myth and religion, systemsof 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:

It is this world of works that is the true subject for an objective study of the “nature”

of mankind; this must be for human psychology what the world of natural phenomena

is for physics . . . Collectively, all human effort is a doing, a poiesis, a construction that

tends towards an effect: what is built, the object . . . There is an ongoing interaction of

experience and reasoning, of execution and thinking; at whatever stage one takes them

under consideration, the experience already contains the thought and the mind—indeed,

the thought and mind appear to be already transformed by the experience.45

43 For the work of Meyerson see J.-P. Vernant, Passe et present: Contributions a une psychologiehistorique (Rome, 1995), 3–47; Riccardo Di Donato, “Invito alla lettura dell’opera diIgnace Meyerson: Psicologia storica e studio del mondo antico,” Annali della ScuolaNormale superiore di Pisa, 12/2 (1982), 603–64; and Francoise Parot, “Psychology in theHuman Sciences in France, 1920–1940: Ignace Meyerson’s Historical Psychology,” Historyof Psychology, 3/2 (2000), 104–121, esp. 114 et passim.

44 See Mauss’s formulation in “Questions Put to Psychology,” in Mauss, Sociology andPsychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1979; first published 1924), 26–31, at26: “complete, non-compartmentalized man . . . this indivisible, measurable but notdissectible being.”

45 Ignace Meyerson, “Problemes d’histoire psychologique des oeuvres: Specificite, variation,experience,” in F. Braudel, ed., Eventail de l’histoire vivante: Hommage a Lucien Febvre(Paris, 1953), 207–18, at 207–8 and 216: “C’est ce monde des oeuvres qui est la matiereveritable d’une exploration objective de la ‘nature’ des hommes, il doit etre pour la

from mythos to logos 17

Meyerson recruited Vernant to the editorial team at the Journal de psychologie, andit is no wonder that Vernant shared with him an abiding interest in the reciprocalrelations obtaining between creative human labor and the emergence of “thepsychological world, the mental categories of ancient religious man”46—henceVernant’s insistence on the rationalization of Greek thought not as “miracle” butas poiesis; that is, creative action carried out by political subjects for the commongood. What is important to underscore, moreover, is that Meyerson, to whomVernant dedicated his major publication Myth and Thought among the Greeks(1965), was both a Dreyfusard in the beginning of the twentieth century andVernant’s comrade in the French Resistance in Toulouse. Thus Vernant likelybecame familiar with the constellation of beliefs and values surrounding theDreyfus affair and its political-symbolic connections to the Resistance throughhis intimate and lifelong intellectual association with Meyerson.

Along with Meyerson, Vernant’s debt to Mauss and the theoretical repertoireof the ecole durkheimienne is tremendous. I spotlight a passage from Vernant’s1975 inaugural lecture:

In [the specialist of Greek religion’s] attempt to break away from the partitioning of

classical studies with each one carving out his own isolated field in the realms of Greek

culture, he joins up with those students of antiquity who acted as pioneers in choosing

another angle of approach, covering all aspects of the social life of the group in order to grasp

the connections—whether with regard to economic facts, like Moses Finley, facts of law,

like Louis Gernet, facts of religion, like Henri Jeanmaire, or facts of history and historical

thought, like Arnaldo Momigliano.47

Vernant endorses a transdisciplinary approach, a grasping of whole culturalsystems from discrete perspectives and precise analytical vantages. His emphasison the term faits evokes Mauss’s total social fact, namely signifying practicestoward 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” inFrench sociology has origins in Durkheim’s 1895 The Rules of Sociological Method

psychologie humaine ce que le monde des phenomenes de la nature est pour la physique. . . Solidairement, tout effort humain est un faire, une poiesis, construction tendue versl’effet: le construit, l’objet . . . Il y a constamment action reciproque de l’experience et dela raison, de l’operation et de la pensee; a quelque niveau qu’on les prenne, l’experiencecontient deja la raison et l’esprit, la raison et l’esprit apparaissent deja transformes parl’experience.” Translation mine.

46 Vernant, “Greek Religion, Ancient Religions,” 273.47 Ibid., 284, emphasis added. Not to mention other essays written in admiration of Mauss,

e.g. J.-P. Vernant “Mauss, Meyerson, Granet et Gernet,” Sociologie et societies, 36/2 (2004),27–31.

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(if not earlier in Fustel, as Momigliano asserts),48 but Parsons has alerted us to thefact that Durkheim never elucidated how it was to be pursued in social-scientificpractice.49 It was Mauss, rather, who formulated more systematic ideas on thecategory in his research on ancient gift-giving and potlatch: “In these ‘early’societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all thethreads 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 theiraesthetic aspect and they reveal morphological types.”50

Readers will easily see in the concluding pages of The Gift and from thequotation above, with its nod toward methodological holism (“not discrete,”“threads,” “simultaneous expression”), that Mauss prescribes wholes andtotalities rather than the individual as the proper unit of social analysis.51

Proposing something like systems theory avant la lettre, Mauss understandstotal facts to be empirically real and embedded in social institutions. Not merelysecond-order epiphenomena that superficially reflect collective ideas, social factsindeed actualize ways of behaving in the world: “It is only by considering [socialfacts] as wholes that we have been able to see their essence, their operation andtheir living aspect, and to catch the fleeting moment when the society and itsmembers take emotional stock of themselves and their situation.”52 FollowingMauss, Vernant shows how certain ancient religious practices like sacrifice couldground 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 theyserved as heuristic mental constructs (Gedankenbilden) in the service of ongoingcomparative sociological research.53

48 For Fustel on the concept see Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Ancient City of Fustel deCoulanges,” in G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell, eds., Studies on Modern Scholarship(Berkeley, 1994), 162–78, at 164.

49 Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1949), 41–2. For Durkheim onthe concept see Margaret Gilbert, “Durkheim and Social Facts,” in W. S. F. Pickering andH. Martins, eds., Debating Durkheim (London, 1994), 86–109.

50 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York,1954), 1.

51 E.g. “We are concerned with ‘wholes’, with systems in their entirety . . . It is only byconsidering them as wholes that we have been able to see their essence, their operationand their living aspect.” Ibid., 77–8.

52 Ibid., 79.53 E.g. Max Weber, “Die Objektivitaet sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer

Erkenntnis,” in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen, 1968;first published 1904), 146–214, at 190: “Er ist nicht eine Darstellung des Wirklichen, aber er

from mythos to logos 19

Vernant’s deployment of Mauss’s total social fact belies a fragile point in hisunderstanding of the historical rise of Greek philosophical thought. Mauss’srendering of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Northwest American total prestationas exemplary expressions of the basis of moral action “common to societiesof the highest degree of evolution to those of the future and to societiesof the least advancement” renders explicit the morphological and synchronicmode of this category.54 When pursuing questions of discontinuity and rupture,the synchronic–functionalist approach entailed in the total social fact becomesproblematic, since it conceives of history as a bounded system, and presupposesthe dynamic of historical logic to gravitate in teleological fashion toward socialcohesion; the total social fact is unable to register, for example, the unintendedconsequences of historical events or the structure-modifying decisions of certaincreative actors.55 In sum, the notion of social fact lacks the analytical precisionto trace the diachronic claims so central to Vernant’s argument about Greekrationalization.

Let me underline three additional problems that arise from Vernant’stheoretical reliance on Mauss and Meyerson. First, in depicting a polis whoseseparate components cohere in the rationalization process, he does not elucidateconcretely how the tendency toward positivist thought was tied to its materialand social conditions. His account of the origin of Greek thought often readslike a marvelous piece of Geistesgeschichte, for in attributing historical change toan undefined entity and in assuming an evenness of historical development,it never fully accounts for the agency of goal-driven actors (in contrast toWeber, for whom the individual was fundamental). One of the results of thisomission is that Vernant, following Mauss’s and Meyerson’s notion of l’individucomplet, assumes a single identity—a reified homo graecus, as it were—to standin for a variegated Greek demography, thus masking the oppressive realities ofancient Athens with its hierarchical structures of gender and political inequality(cf., for instance, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Demosthenes 59 Against Neaerarespectively). Second, by accepting at face value the views and categories ofancient cultural producers, Vernant reproduces problematically the imaginedand normative social order that interested politicians (e.g. Cleisthenes) and

will der Darstellung eindeutige Ausdrucksmittel verleihen.” The exact nature of the idealtype is debated since Weber himself never systematically defined the term; see Walter G.Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge, 1972), 33–7.

54 Mauss, The Gift, 68.55 Leonard, Athens in Paris, at 45, rightly notes that Vernant was not interested in historicity

in the linear sense but in “the moment at which two incompatible world orders, twoirreconcilable structures of being, clash.”

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philosophers (e.g. Parmenides) themselves wished to institute.56 Finally, Vernantattributes indiscriminately several transformations from the archaic to theclassical period to a monocausal (and largely nonmaterial) Kulturgeist, which inconsequence eliminates serious consideration of other ideological and economicforces that were instrumental, or in opposition, to the shift in paradigms;it conceals concurrent but distinct processes that complicate the masternarrative.57

In fact, the classical historian and anthropologist Sally Humphreys has sincerefined Vernant’s narrative, concentrating particularly on the ancient polemicaland apologetic procedures by which categories of rationality and irrationality,and religion and secularism, slowly took shape across a variety of discoursetypes and genres; in her appraisal, the efforts of ancient philosophers andphysicians to lay claim to superior, rational knowledge did not silence priests anddiviners, but rather encouraged the latter to defend the unique salvific featuresof their enterprise, features brought into sharp focus thanks to the challengesof their detractors. Ecstatic and prophetic forms of religion suddenly brandedthemselves anew: “the more irrational, the more poetic.”58 Vernant’s holisticinterpretation of historical change—that is, of collapsing boundaries betweendifferent institutions and forms of cultural expression—ignores such nuances.In this regard, his method and style of argumentation suggest a closer alliance toMauss than to Meyerson since, for the latter, the various cultural fields maintainedrelatively independent “psychological operations.”59

Matters become yet more complicated for, besides these disciplinaryinfluences, Vernant’s personal link to Marxist political thought compels usto consider what effects his involvement in the war had on the formationof his theoretical conception of society. The speech that Vernant deliveredat his 1999 honorary-doctorate ceremony at the Universita degli studi diNapoli “L’Orientale” reflects on his participation in the French Resistance andmembership in the French Communist Party.60 He starts by professing an earlyawareness of the ramifications of socioeconomic disparity and then follows on

56 The problem of transferring bias in the original source to the historian’s own narrativehas been explored splendidly in Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY,1985), 11.

57 By contrast see Detienne’s textured reading of Orphic sacrifice and how its practitionersmaintained stances contrarian to the mainstream sacrificial paradigm, in Marcel Detienne,“Culinary Practices and the Spirit of Sacrifice,” in Detienne and Vernant, The Cuisine ofSacrifice, 1–20.

58 S. C. Humphreys, The Strangeness of Gods: Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation ofAthenian Religion (Oxford, 2004), 51–75, at 74.

59 Meyerson, “Problemes d’histoire psychologique des œuvres,” 208.60 For Vernant’s war efforts see Duclert, “Le modele Vernant.”

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this with a renewed optimism, recounting the selfless political thinking and actionhe witnessed during the war years:

It is about the need to not shut oneself off or to put oneself in a corner, but rather to

communicate with others. Nothing important comes about—neither good nor evil—if it

is not shared. And this way of being with others and to feel at one with them—however

naive it may sound—coincides with rejecting all the attitudes that seem to obstruct this

trust in men, attitudes which tend instead to hierarchize, humiliate, and constrain them

. . . The activists that I knew—both workers and intellectuals—shared, it seemed to me,

this mode of being, and one saw this even in their daily conduct, in the way they lived and

even in their very corporeality . . . We felt a close bond in personal disposition, a feeling of

fraternity with the workers, an aspiration for a world of justice, peace—an understanding,

almost intellectual, of the order of our world and its force fields, of the nature of the social

and economic structures that oriented the world’s sense and direction.61

The pathos and nostalgia for the self-transcending sentiments captured by theseremarks is part and parcel, I claim, of his romanticized imagining of an irenicsocial order in classical Athens. A shared collective outlook, an undeterred faithin one’s compatriots, and the refusal to classify countrymen by distinctions ofprofession or class—these are the principal enthusiasms that color much of hishistorical writings. These ideas are evident throughout Vernant’s scholarship, butthe following passage from The Origins of Greek Thought serves to underscore theparallels:

Those who made up the city, however different in origin, rank, and function, appeared

somehow to be “like” each other. This likeness laid the foundation for the unity of the

polis, since for the Greeks only those who were alike could be mutually united by philia,

joined in the same community. In the framework of the city, the tie that bound one man

to another thus became a reciprocal relationship, replacing the hierarchical relations of

submission and dominance.62

61 J.-P. Vernant, “Autoritratto,” Studi Storici, 41/1 (2000), 28–30: “Si tratta del bisogno di nonchiudersi in se stessi, di non mettersi in un angolo ma, al contrario, di communicare con glialtri. Nulla diventa importante—nella buona come nella cattiva sorte—se non e condivisocon gli altri. E questa maniera di sentire gli altri e di sentirsi con gli altri, per ingenuache sia, va al passo con il rifiuto di tutti gli atteggiamenti che sembrano opporsi a questafiducia negli uomini e tendere invece a gerarchizzarli o a umiliare e respingere alcuni diloro . . . I militanti che ho conosciuto—operai o intellettuali—condividevano, mi sembra,questa maniera d’essere e questo si vedeva anche nel loro comportamento quotidiano,nella loro maniera d’essere e quasi nel loro fisico . . . Avevamo come il sentimento di unaccordo intimo tra il nostro temperamento personale, questo sentimento di fraternita congli operai, l’aspirazione a un mondo di giustizia e di pace e una comprensione d’ordinequasi intellettuale del mondo in cui vivevamo e delle forze in campo, delle strutture diordine economico e sociale che ne orientavano senso e direzione.” Translation mine.

62 Vernant, Origins of Greek Thought, 60–61.

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

vi

Despite Vernant’s reservations about Weber, some elements in his work bearan undeniably Weberian imprint. Witness, for instance, Vernant’s essay ondivination in archaic and classical Greece in which he delineates rival knowledgepractices and contrasts the figure of the seer to the king and judge, an oppositionsurely reminiscent of the Weberian antithesis of bureaucratic and charismaticauthority.63 Consider, further, his argument about the historical emergenceof the ancient Greek individual, where, after discovering its fundamentallyintraworldly nature, he traces it into the Middle Ages, concluding that theAugustinian man (i.e. the man of the Western Christian tradition) continuedto cultivate qualities of a primarily intraworldly sort. Diametrically opposite tothis, Vernant maintains, is the homo hierarchicus of India (in the formulation ofLouis Dumont), who epitomizes extraworldliness in his complete renunciationof the world.64 This, I would argue, is the core thesis of Weber’s ambitious TheSociology of Religion, where the master narrative follows two trajectories in thehistory of world religions: at one extreme, the ascetic intraworldiness of Westernmethodical Calvinism; and, at the other, mystical extraworldiness representedmost paradigmatically by Buddhism and Hinduism.65 Yet curiously the name ofWeber does not figure in Vernant’s reflections on these pages.

63 J.-P. Vernant, “Speech and Mute Signs,” in Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, 303–17.64 J.-P. Vernant, “The Individual within the City-State,” in ibid., 318–34.65 A theme repeated throughout Sociology of Religion, but especially perceptible here: “The

religion of Shakti is a worship of goddesses, always very close to the orgiastic type ofreligion and not infrequently involving a cult of erotic orgies, which of course makes itutterly remote from a religion of pure faith, such as Christianity, with its continuous andunshakeable trust in God’s providence. The erotic element in the personal relationship tothe savior in Hindu salvation religion may be regarded as largely the technical result ofthe practices of devotion; whereas, in marked contrast, the Christian belief in providenceis a charisma that must be maintained by the exercise of the will of the believer.” Weber,Sociology of Religion, 201.

from mythos to logos 23

I mentioned briefly in section I that the ecole sociologique had already by thefirst decade of the twentieth century established itself as a theoretical antipode toWeber’s philosophy of history, but a bit more needs to be said about how Vernantreceived the consequences of these disputes. I do not imply that Durkheim andWeber’s research programs amount to nothing but the products of monolithicand immutable nationalisms. Yet it is clear that the creation and persistence ofinfluential sociological methods and types of discourse were indissolubly boundup with the concentration of formidable researchers at institutional cores, whowere responding to political urgencies on both national and continental levels.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 andGerman sociologists began developing theoretical programs with antitheticalimpulses for the study of society and religion, and that they rarely collaboratedin a straightforward or sustained fashion (save some exceptions such as MauriceHalbwachs).67 Durkheim, for instance, though undoubtedly impressed by a selectfew Germans (e.g. Adolph Wagner and Gustav von Schmoller, but above all byWilhelm Wundt’s Ethik), perhaps did not read anything by Weber—at least hedoes not give any indication that he did.68 This is especially perplexing in light of

66 See Keylor, Academy and Community, esp. 40–46, 114–16, 139–40; Pim den Boer, Historyas a Profession: The Study of History in France, 1818–1914 (Princeton, 1998); Terry N. Clark,“The Structure and Functions of a Research Institute: The Annee Sociologique,” EuropeanJournal of Sociology, 9 (1968), 72–91; Victor Karady, “The Durkheimians in Academe: AReconsideration,” in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Emile Durkheim: Critical Assessments of LeadingSociologists, vol. 1 (London, 2001), 44–61, esp. 47–55; and for a likely overstated view ofDurkheim’s nationalism see M. Marion Mitchell, “Emile Durkheim and the Philosophy ofNationalism,” Political Science Quarterly, 46/1 (1931), 87–106. For a correction to Mitchellsee Josep R. Llobera, “Durkheim and the National Question,” in Pickering and Martins,Debating Durkheim, 134–58.

67 Tiryakian, “Durkheim and Weber,” esp. 313–19; Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism:Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago, 1992), esp. chap. 4; and J. E.Craig, “Sociology and Related Disciplines between the Wars,” in Besnard, The SociologicalDomain, 263–89, at 280.

68 Edward Tiryakian, “A Problem for the Sociology of Knowledge: The Mutual Unawarenessof Emile Durkheim and Max Weber,” European Journal of Sociology, 7 (1966), 330–36.Anthony Giddens, “Weber and Durkheim: Coincidence and Divergence,” in Wolfgang J.Mommsen and Jurgen Osterhammel, eds., Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London,1987), 182–90, highlights the academic differences between these two scholars. It is usefulto recall, following Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge, 1971), 68n. 15, that although Wagner and Schmoller were founders of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik,with which Weber was affiliated, Weber disagreed with these German economists preciselyon those aspects that Durkheim found appealing, namely the attempt to create a scienceof ethics. See also Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago, 1997), 16–52.I concur with Strenski (contra Vogt, Jones, and others) (ibid., 27–8) that Durkheim’s

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the fact that Durkheim must have been aware of Weber, since, after all, Durkheimwrote a scathing review in the Annee of his wife Marianne Weber’s Ehefrau undMutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (1907). In fact, some contemporaries such asSimon Deploige leveled the criticism against Durkheim that his work was soinfluenced by the Germans that it appeared he had “imported his ideas wholesalefrom Germany,” a provocation insinuating German propaganda that Durkheimvigorously and bitterly denied, insisting instead that Auguste Comte was of muchgreater importance.69

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

societism was influenced less by his brief encounter with German scholars than by Frenchneo-Hegelian socialism.

69 From the review of Deploige as reported in A. Giddens, Capitalism and Social Theory(Cambridge, 1971), 71, and 119–20, esp. n. 3, for bibliography and an argument against theconsensus about Durkheim’s unfamiliarity with Weber. Also worth consulting is RobertA. Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social Realism (Cambridge, 1999), chap. 4; andEdward A. Tiryakian, “Emile Durkheim’s Matrix,” in Tiryakian, For Durkheim: Essays inHistorical and Cultural Sociology (Farnham, 2009), 11–58, at 42.

70 Robert A. Jones, Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works (Beverly Hills,1986), 12–13; and Caron, Between France and Germany, 19: “Alsace and Lorraine alsoremained the bastion of religious traditionalism in the nineteenth century. The persistenceof ritual observance among rural Jewry is, of course, legendary.” Paula E. Hyman, TheEmancipation of the Jews of Alsace (New Haven, 1991), 5, estimates that more than half ofall Jewish French at one point lived in Alsace.

71 Caron, Between France and Germany, 27–44 and 96–117.72 See Durkheim’s remarks on German aggression during the war in L’Allemagne au-dessus

de tout: La mentalite allemande et la guerre (Paris, 1915).

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the volumes of l’Annee sociologique resting on Weber’s shelves.73 Whateverthe truth of the matter, the strained nature of Mauss’s comment evinces asystemic mutual distancing between French and German researchers that goesback at least to the work of Durkheim’s teacher Fustel, with his rabid anti-German rhetoric against Theodor Mommsen and German scholarship afterthe loss of Alsace-Lorraine. The language and perspective furnished by theseearly thinkers laid the groundwork for Vernant’s almost exclusive conversationwith the French and his disinterest in otherwise relevant hermeneuticsociologies developed by German scholars.74 A similar argument could bemade about the relative lack of interest in the Annales school among Germanhistorians.75

It has been my argument that Meyerson and Mauss (and the Durkheimiansgenerally) bequeathed to Vernant a certain national cultural identity andtemperament—in particular, a deliberate nonengagement with Weber andother German scholars.76 It would appear that the dominant cultural valuesespoused by the Durkheimians were long-lasting and remained regnant inthe academic institutions of Vernant’s Paris. Additionally, Vernant’s wartimeexploits as a commanding officer in the Resistance led him to sympathizewith the Durkheimian project of social integration and moral solidarity, andconsequently he was drawn to their imaginative sociological vocabulary andconceptual schemes in his investigations into Greek antiquity. Pursuing theselines of thought, it is hardly surprising that Vernant never seriously engagedthe scholarship of his coeval Walter Burkert (1931–2015), a German historianof ancient religions of the first order. Conversely, it is not unexpected that

73 Runciman, A Critique of Max Weber’s Philosophy of Social Science, 10; and Reinhard Bendixand Seymour M. Lipset, Class, Status and Power (London, 1966), 283.

74 For Fustel’s anti-German ideology and defense of French patriotism after the fall of theSecond Republic see Momigliano, “The Ancient City of Fustel,” 165–7. For the impactof La cite antique on French sociology see Robert Alun Jones, “Durkheim and La citeantique: An essay on the origins of Durkheim’s sociology of religion,” in Stephen P.Turner, ed., Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist (London and New York, 1993), 25–51; and Christopher Prendergast, “The Impact of Fustel de Coulanges’ La Cite Antique onDurkheim’s Theories of Social Morphology and Social Solidarity,” Humboldt Journal ofSocial Relations, 11/1 (1983–4), 53–73.

75 See Gunther Roth, “Duration and Rationalization: Fernand Braudel and Max Weber,” inGunther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Weber’s Vision of History (Berkeley, 1979),166–93, at 168. One should note the exception of Karl Lamprecht, whose sympathetic viewstoward Kulturgeschichte sparked the infamous Methodenstreit that resulted in his isolationby many German academics.

76 For a discussion of Hubert’s veiled critique of German nationalism in his work on Europeanprehistory, for instance, see Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth (Chicago, 1999), 127, also 136–7and 267 n. 84 for select bibliography on Franco-Germanic academic relations in the 1930s.

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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 hisown magnum opus on the subject.77

In closing, three issues ought to be stressed. First, in the course of myargument on the Durkheim school (and Meyerson), I have tried somewhatdeliberately to distance myself from the Jewish question, a point of controversystill among Durkheim experts.78 I have done so for reasons both empirical andtheoretical. I am inclined to agree with Ivan Strenski, who has observed thatthe Durkheimians—highly critical of race theories—saw neither themselves northeir work as “essentially” Jewish in tonality. As such, it seemed prudent not toisolate Jewishness as an explanatory variable but to situate it (particularly theliberal Alsatian stripe of Durkheim) in the context of fin de siecle France in whichthe distinction between religious and political motivations for sociopoliticalaction and sociological investigation often blurred. Moreover, it makes bettersense to construe certain quintessential aspects of their writing—aspects otherscategorically designate as typical of Jewish attitudes, such as societism—in morecomplex social realities.79 Mutatis mutandis, I abstained from an overt discussionof the religious inclinations of Vernant, who, although not Jewish, curiouslyinserted himself into an intellectual legacy dominated by an elite pro-FrenchJewish intelligentsia: Durkheim, Mauss, Meyerson, Vidal-Naquet, and Levi-Strauss, among others.80 And in so doing, Vernant seems to have inheritedthe group’s general contempt for the kind of methodological individualismcharacteristic of Weberian sociology.

Second, and as one would expect, Vernant’s oeuvres, like those of Durkheimand Weber, did not remain static but reacted to circumstances, and it

77 Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual andMyth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, 1983). See Fritz Graf, “One Generation after Burkertand Girard: Where Are the Great Theories?”, in Christopher Faraone and Fred Naiden,eds., Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice (Cambridge, 2012), 32–51, esp. 32–3; and BruceLincoln, “From Bergaigne to Meuli,” in ibid., 13–31, at 30.

78 W. S. F. Pickering, “The Enigma of Durkheim’s Jewishness,” in Pickering and Martins,Debating Durkheim, esp. 10–39.

79 Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, 19: “This early Jewish social experience perhapsresulted in Durkheim’s sociological interest in the family as a category of inquiry. Yeteven when we give weight to Durkheim’s origins in the Jewry of Alsace or Lorraine, it ishard to tell how much of his devotion to family was, for example, ‘Jewish’ and how much‘Alsatian’ or provincial. Indeed, the French at large are likewise notoriously familial.”

80 For representations and tropes associated with Jewishness in postwar France see SarahHammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago,2010).

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would be a desideratum in future studies to render more clearly whetherhe became more or less Durkheimian over time. Riccardo Di Donato speaksof Vernant’s nuovo periodo after his election to the College de France.81 Aglance at Vernant’s bibliography indeed indicates that his early preoccupationwith Greek rationalization over the longue duree eventually gave way to moresynchronic interests like comparative theories of divination, ancient visualrepresentations of the divine, and civic religion in Attic tragedy, but the concernfor collective mentalities nevertheless persists.82 I would submit, however, that themethodological difficulties associated with Vernant’s Durkheimian tendenciesdiminish in his later career when he abandons the overtly diachronic aspects thatmark his early publications.

Last, one can only speculate in the final analysis how much of Weber’scorpus Vernant actually read or knew. It would be difficult to believe thatWeber was entirely unfamiliar to him, but we can ultimately infer from hisscholarly production that he found himself not only tolerated but indeed evenconsiderably rewarded by the French academic hierarchy, for institutional andideological reasons, to privilege Durkheimian approaches over those Weberian.It deserves mention here that Vernant’s election to the College de France wasin large measure a result of the powerful backing of Levi-Strauss, whose ownenormously influential The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) recalls thestimulus of Durkheim and his Elementary Forms.83 In deliberately avoidingWeber, the work of Vernant and his disciples took on a particular cast centered onthe Durkheimians, and, by extension, guided a whole intellectual tradition whoseeffects reverberate to this day, as the near-universal adoption of the polis–religionmodel in classical scholarship attests.84 Although one should resist the temptationto see Durkheim as a figure of exemplarity after whom Vernant consciouslystyled himself, it is noteworthy that they both found themselves, willfully ornot, celebrated directors of pioneering research equipes, and Vernant, just like

81 Riccardo Di Donato, “Un percorco intellettuale,” Studi Storici, 41/1 (2000), 7–15, at 9.82 For example, J.-P. Vernant, La mort dans les yeux (Paris, 1985); Vernant , Figures, idoles,

masques (Paris, 1990); and J.-P. Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Myth and Tragedy inAncient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York, 1988; first published 1972).

83 On this point see Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, trans. Deborah Glassman(Minneapolis, 1997), 224.

84 On the international impact of the Paris school see Nicole Loraux, Gregory Nagy, andLaura Slatkin, eds., Antiquities: Postwar French Thought, vol. 3 (New York, 2001). Forthe polis–religion model, which conceives of religion as embedded in a city-state free ofstasis, see Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, “What Is Polis Religion?” in Richard Buxton, ed.,Oxford Readings in Greek Religion (Oxford, 2000), 13–37. An important reappraisal of themodel is Julia Kindt, “Beyond the Polis: Rethinking Greek Religion,” in Kindt, RethinkingGreek Religion (Cambridge, 2012), 12–35.

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Durkheim, had a penchant for attracting a great many prolific proteges—LucBrisson, Francois Hartog, Francois Lissarague, John Scheid, and Jesper Svenbroamong the more influential.

vii

Notwithstanding their differences, the factors common to the aforementionedtheorists are the identification of religion as an endogenous variable withinthe sociopolitical order, and, more specifically, a deep investment in parsingthe role of religion in the dynamics of society and in the constitution of thepolitical subject. Thus a turn away from the Durkheimian primacy of moralsolidarity and collective cohesion would entail a rethinking of the very waywe conceptualize the political dimension of religion.85 Despite having clarifiedplausible reasons for Vernant’s biased repudiation of Weber, I am not, to besure, advocating a transfer of scholarly energy from Durkheim to Weber, for itmakes sense that one can still favor basic Durkheimian ideas about the dynamicsof sacralization over Weber’s disenchantment and rationalization framework.My point is more fundamental: given the obvious impossibility of fixing anahistorical or essential relation between religion and the social-political sphere,how one conceives of them and the dynamics of their intersection is always partialand inevitably influenced by one’s training, social conditions, and idiosyncraticdesire for an alternative, perhaps better, society—a desire, in turn, that canmanifest itself in historical and sociological theorization as nostalgic reflection,unbridled utopianism, or something in between. As such, it seems imperativefor those engaged in the critical study of religion to interrogate the specificcircumstances, subtexts, and implications that underlie our most cherished (butnecessarily fraught) of theoretical approaches. Vernant’s oeuvre—marked by itsthick ethnography, interpretive daring, and attentiveness to the symbolic realm—remains a laudable model of scholarship, but by the same token it cannot besustained as a value-neutral assessment of the ancient world precisely for itsdistinctively Durkheimian spirit (with its equally distinctive anti-Weberian oranti-German bias).86

85 Important studies that trace the genealogy of the dynamics of secularism in varioushistorical guises are Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity(Stanford, 2003), esp. 181–201; Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World(Chicago, 1994), esp. 1–66; and Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World: A CulturalSociological Approach (Oxford, 2012).

86 I recognize that Weber is not wholly representative of a German approach, for from Diltheyto Troeltsch there are alternatives within Germany. But I take Weber and Durkheim to beantipodal in the strict sense that the academic study of sociology has, in the last century,developed along these lines.

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Indeed, while much recent work in the sociology of religion has variouslyattempted to reinvigorate, develop, or supplant the key principles laid out byWeber and Durkheim (and by the other so-called founding fathers of sociology,Simmel and Mead), the history of ancient religions continues to proceed alongthe distinct theoretical axes laid out by these two classical sociologists.87 Recently,scholars of ancient religions, particularly those at the Max-Weber-Kolleg furkultur–und sozialwissenschaftliche Studien at the University of Erfurt, have madea concerted, and to a certain degree salutary, effort to redirect focus from polis andcivic religion—that is, religion as socially constituted and socially constituting—in favor of approaches that treat the individual as a knowing and acting subject.88

My own sense is that this stream of publications on individual conduct andpersonal religion in antiquity, even if not normally registered as such by its mainproponents, represents a revival of Weberian sociology in reaction to the legaciesof Vernant and the French tradition, a critical moment in the development of thediscipline.

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

My life has been marked by the tale my father told me in late 1941 or early 1942 about the

Dreyfus Affair. There is no doubt something strange about dwelling on an injustice done

to an individual at a time when the outrage being committed was collective. But it is also

87 For the long-term reception of Durkheim and Weber (and their coexistence as distinctsociological traditions) see Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago andLondon, 1993), esp. 214–61; Richard Munch, Understanding Modernity: Toward a NewPerspective Going beyond Durkheim and Weber (London, 1988); and Henrik Jensen, Weberand Durkheim: A Methodological Comparison (New York, 2012). For a synoptic account ofthe development in the sociology of religion particularly see Grace Davie, “The Evolutionof the Sociology of Religion,” in Michele Dillon, ed., Handbook for the Sociology of Religion(Cambridge, 2003), 61–75.

88 Among others, Jorg Rupke, ed., The Individual in the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean(Oxford, 2013); Rupke , Religion in Republican Rome: Rationalization and Ritual Change(Philadelphia, 2012); Jorg Rupke and Wolfgang Spickermann, eds., Reflections on ReligiousIndividuality: Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Texts and Practices (Berlin and Boston,2012); and Veit Rosenberger, ed., Divination in the Ancient World: Religious Optionsand the Individual (Stuttgart, 2013). The work at Erfurt is felt in American classicalscholarship, evidenced by panels on personal and individual experience in ancient religionsat, for example, the 2015 American Philological Association and the 2015 InternationalAssociation for the History of Religions in conjunction with the Society for AncientMediterranean Religions.

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through the Affair that not only my political but also my moral and historical education was

formed.89

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

89 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Recollections of a Witness: Protestants and Jews during the SecondWorld War in France,” in David Ames Curtis, trans. and ed., The Jews: History, Memoryand the Present (New York, 1996), 237–54, at 239. Emphasis added.