ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Emile Durkheim's social epistemology springs from his religious investigations will put people in a good position to appreciate his thought on individuals in society. Durkheim's reversal springs not from a radically new understanding of religion per se but from a new understanding of modern society. Durkheim maintains that in traditional societies many collective representations were religious, because they pertained to the entire society. Leon Brunschvicg, the French neo-Kantian philospher, objects to Durkheim's insistence that individual liberties are social institutions. He suggests that the progress of civilization be seen as allowing "individual freedom more and more the exercise of its right of resumption against the material structure of society." Durkheim's understanding of freedom as a moral positioning in society—not outside it—is but another way of affirming that there is no fundamental antinomy between democratic societies and the individual.
