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FROM MYTHOS TO LOGOS: JEAN-PIERRE

VERNANT, MAX WEBER, AND THE NARRATIVE
OF OCCIDENTAL RATIONALIZATION
KENNETH W. YU
Modern Intellectual History / FirstView Article / September 2015, pp 1 - 30
DOI: 10.1017/S1479244315000323, Published online: 24 September 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1479244315000323

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KENNETH W. YU FROM MYTHOS TO LOGOS: JEAN-PIERRE VERNANT, MAX
WEBER, AND THE NARRATIVE OF OCCIDENTAL RATIONALIZATION. Modern
Intellectual History, Available on CJO 2015 doi:10.1017/S1479244315000323
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Modern Intellectual History, page 1 of 30

doi:10.1017/S1479244315000323


C Cambridge University Press 2015

from mythos to logos:

jean-pierre vernant, max weber,
and the narrative of occidental
rationalization
kenneth w. yu
University of Chicago
E-mail: kenwyu@uchicago.edu

This article begins with a remark by Jean-Pierre Vernant in his inaugural lecture
at the Coll`ege de France about the inadequacy of Max Webers historical sociology
for the study of ancient religions. Despite posing shared research questions and often
reaching similar conclusions, Vernant, one of the most influential twentieth-century
ancient historians, neither engaged nor acknowledged Weber and thereby secured his
absence in the field of ancient religions generally. Vernants narrative of the historical
emergence of Greek rationality is at direct odds with Webers views on the matter
in Sociology of Religion and elsewhere, and I argue that, beyond methodological
concerns, Vernants fundamentally Durkheimian position inherits early twentiethcentury polemics between French and German sociologists. Vernants relationships
with Marcel Mauss, Ignace Meyerson, and Claude Levi-Strauss, and his participation
in the French Resistance, moreover, reaffirmed his Durkheimian views about society
and committed him to a long tradition of anti-German scholarship. I conclude with a
brief coda on the historiographical implications of these observations for the study of
religion and its relation to social life.

i
This article attempts to account for the absence of a Weberian legacy in the
study of Greek religion, taking its cue from a revealing statement by Jean-Pierre
Vernant (19142007) in his 1975 inaugural lecture for the chair of comparative
history of ancient religions at the Coll`ege de France. In this programmatic address,

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

2 kenneth w. yu

delivered before an audience of Frances leading academic luminaries, Vernant

championed comparatism and evaluated several theorists whom he considered
to have played roles of exceptional importance in the study of ancient religion and
society. Invoked alongside Claude Levi-Strauss, Albert Reville, Ernst Cassirer, Karl
Jaspers, Georges Dumezil, and other ranking figures, was the German sociologist
Max Weber (18641920), who received, at first glance, a relatively lukewarm
assessment. Combining encomium with invective, Vernant ultimately criticized
Weber for denying Greek religion the authenticity he grants to other religious
traditions:
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 transcendenceimmanence, asceticismmysticism, intraor 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 Webers
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 Webers shared interest in comparative religions, the theme of
occidental rationalization, and Marxism and neo-Marxist thought,2 the acerbic
nature of this passage occasions some surprise.3 At least two features from this

Jean-Pierre Vernant, Greek Religion, Ancient Religions, in Vernant, Mortals and

Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma Zeitlin (Princeton, 1991), 26989, at 274.
On Vernants relation to Marx and the French Communist Party see S. C. Humphreys, The
Historical Anthropology of Thought: Jean-Pierre Vernant and Intellectual Innovation in
Ancient Greece, Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology, 55 (2009), 10112. For Webers
views on Marx see Gunther Roth, The Historical Relationship to Marxism, in R. Bendix
and G. Roth, eds., Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber (Berkeley, 1971),
22752.
Not to mention Webers numerous references to ancient Greek and Roman religions
throughout his corpus, including his 1891 The Agrarian History of Rome in Its Significance
for Public and Private Law. Webers absence in Vernants scholarship has, to my knowledge,
been noticed only once: Andre Laks, Les origines de Jean-Pierre Vernant, Critique, 54

from mythos to logos

excerpt call for immediate comment. First, although the Weberian ideal-typical
method was not expressly named, Vernant certainly had this in mind, and he
discredited, however diplomatically, its totalizing analytical aspirations since
it failed to account for Greek religion. Second, Vernant intimated that Weber
essentialized ancient Greece as fundamentally political and economic, implying
that Webers sociology could be rendered useful only by economic or political
historians, and not by historians of religions.
We could, of course, quarrel with Vernants characterization of Weberian
ideal types, or with his implicit claim that Weber disconnects the religious from
the political; it is evident, for example, that Webers interest in the interplay
of the religious and economic (and other) value spheres in Sociology of Religion
(1920) and The Protestant Ethic (1905) complicates Vernants judgment of Webers
historical sociology. However, Vernants comments about Weber represented the
communis opinio among classical scholars in postwar France; what is more, they
presage the enduring absence of Weber in most research on Greek religion beyond
the 1960s and to the present day on both sides of the Atlantic.4 Even the great
Moses Finley, who attempted to revitalize Webers status in classical scholarship,
cites a remark of Alfred Heusss to substantiate Vernants opinion: the special
disciplines pertaining to antiquity have gone their way as if Max Weber had never
lived.5

(1998), 26882. Humphreys, Historical Anthropology, 103, draws a parallel between

Vernants project on rationality and Weberian rationalization but goes no further.
Miriam Leonards characterization of Vernants influence in the discipline of Classics is
not overstated: Vernant should undoubtedly be credited as the scholar who made French
theory acceptable to classicists in the Anglo-Saxon world. Miriam Leonard, Athens in
Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-war French Thought (Oxford, 2005), 15. See
also James Redfield, J.-P. Vernant: Structure and History, History of Religions, 31/1 (1991),
6974.
Moses Finley, Max Weber and the Greek City-State, in Finley, Ancient History: Evidence
and Models (New York, 1986), 88103, at 88. Finleys relationship with Weber is equivocal.
While appreciating much of Webers methods, he maintained critical views, especially
concerning the notion of legitimate domination for antiquity: The Weberian scheme
is fatally defective (ibid., 103). Graf similarly discredits Weber for the study of ancient
religions, noting his Christianizing tendencies. Fritz Graf, What Is Ancient Mediterranean
Religion?, in Sarah Iles Johnston, ed., Ancient Religions (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 316, at
15. Keith Hopkins and Jeremy Tanner, however, have (independently) engaged Weberian
themes, not to mention Momigliano, for which see Mohammad Nafissi, Ancient Athens
and Modern Ideology: Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical Sciences; Max Weber, Karl
Polanyi and Moses Finley (London, 2005), esp. 6772. For attempts to read the ancient
data through Weber see Jan Bremmer, Rationalization and Disenchantment in Ancient
Greece: Max Weber among the Pythagoreans and Orphics, in Richard Buxton, ed., From
Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought (Oxford, 1999), 7186; and

4 kenneth w. yu

My primary concern is to show how Vernants attitude toward Weber

does not derive strictly from differences in methodological approach, but
owes much to Vernants immediate political context and intellectual genealogy
whichcomprising, inter alia, the Durkheim school and Ignace Meyerson
(18881983)had a long, though perhaps not overtly polemical, history of
maintaining a critical distance from Weber and German scholarship in
general.6 A central claim of my article is that the methodological specificities
of Vernants projects are correlated tightly to, and are indeed inextricable
from, his complex heritage and attraction to the Durkheimians. On a higher
level of generality, I hope that my discussion will elicit deeper reflection on
the ways in which historical contingencies can become assimilated into the
articulation of sociological theory (in the cases of Weber and especially of the
Durkheim school) and in the act of historical interpretation (in the case of
Vernant).
To bring into sharper relief the political and intellectual commitments in
Vernants historical treatment of classical antiquity, I begin with his enormously
prolific work on the advent of positivist thought in ancient Greece. After
tracing Vernants ideas to Durkheimian perspectives on religion and society,
I compare Vernants position to Webers theories of rationalization in order
to foreground salient points of disagreement. My aim in reading Vernant in
light of Durkheim and then Weber is to uncover the underlying historical
conjunctures and operative forces in early to mid-twentieth-century France
that conditioned Vernants views of Weberian sociology. I show why and how
Vernant, in developing and repackaging social theories specific to the politicaltheological concerns of the Third Republic, also inherited, for better or worse, the
idealist imaginaries and ideological burdens of their original producers. Further,
I explore how one significant strand of postwar French classical scholarship,
rooted in the ideal of civic equality and often considered the expression of
a purely French republican world view, owes its contours to early twentiethcentury Franco-German sociological debates about historical logic, the function
of religion in modern social life, and the capacity of social-scientific research
to respond to contemporary political upheavals. I conclude by reflecting briefly
on the broader historiographical implications of this genealogy for the study of
religion.

Joseph M. Bryant, Intellectuals and Religion in Ancient Greece: Notes on a Weberian

Theme, British Journal of Sociology, 37/2 (1986), 26996.
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,
28298; and Monique Hirschorn, Max Weber et la sociologie francaise (Paris, 1988).

from mythos to logos

ii
The French school of Classics redefined the study of Greek religion not only in
Europe but also in Anglo-America.7 With roots in the exemplary work of Louis
Gernet (18821962),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 the
twentieth century under the leadership of Vernant along with Pierre Vidal-Naquet
(19302006), Nicole Loraux (19432003), Marcel Detienne (1935), and others.9
Abandoning the unrestrained comparatism of the Frazerian mode that had up
to then characterized most work on classical religions, these French historians

of the Hellenic worldbased in the Centre Louis Gernet at the Ecole

des hautes
e tudesdeveloped a sophisticated anthropological approach to antiquity that
absorbed (though not uncritically) the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss.
This fact is uncontroversial, but recent scholarship tends to underemphasize that

On the British side, S. C. Humphreysinfluenced by Gernet as well as by Polanyi

aligned with the French insofar as she purported to extract emic models to illumine
ancient Greek culture; G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in
Early Greek Thought (Bristol, 1966); Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge, 1990);
Richard Buxton, Imaginary Greek mountains, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 112 (1992), 115;
and Richard Gordon, ed., Myth, Religion, and Society: Structuralist Essays by M. Detienne,
L. Gernet, J.-P. Vernant, and P. Vidal-Naquet (Cambridge, 1981), viiixvii. Stateside see
Charles Segal, Afterword: Jean-Pierre Vernant and the Study of Ancient Greece, Arethusa,
15 (1982), 22134; and Froma Zeitlins indispensable introduction in Vernant, Mortals and
Immortals. Julia Kindt, Religion, in G. Boys-Stones, B. Graziosi, and P. Vasunia, eds., The
Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (Oxford, 2009), 36477, esp. 36871, assesses Vernants
influence. James Redfield, Classics and Anthropology, Arion, 1/2 (1991), 523, by contrast,
argues that this group attracted classicists who embraced similar intellectual ambitions
but encountered resistance from those with more orthodox philological tendencies. S.
C. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks (London, 1978), remains the most decisive
treatment to date on anthropology and the Classics.
On Gernet see S. C. Humphreys, The Work of Louis Gernet, History and Theory, 10/2
(1971), 17296; Riccardo Di Donato, Lanthropologique historique de Louis Gernet,
Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, 5/6 (1982), 98496; and Sitta von Reden, Re-evaluating
Gernet: Value and Greek Myth, in Buxton, From Myth to Reason?, 5170.
Representative publications include Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Black Hunter: Forms of Thought
and 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 Society
in 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 Funeral
Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA, 1986; first published
1981); and Giulia Sissa and M. Detienne, The Daily Life of the Greek Gods, trans. Janet
Lloyd (Stanford, 2000; first published 1989).

6 kenneth w. yu

Vernants inquiries into myth and ritual can be understood as descendant from
two relatively independent legacies. There is reason to believe a dominant LeviStraussian influence in their study of myth, whereasquite separatelytheir
point of departure for the study of ritual was the ecole durkheimienne, especially
the work of Durkheims nephew and collaborator Marcel Mauss (an argument
to which I will return).10
It is not hard to hear the echoes of Levi-Strauss and structuralism in
Vernants conceptualization of the Greek pantheon. Vernant showed in a
probing article on the divine couplet HermesHestia that the logic of the Greek
pantheon expressed in the myths of the poets could be made intelligible by
identifying the similarities and differences between the various Greek deities
and their domains and prerogatives.11 The underlying synchronic architecture
of the pantheon and the interlocking body of concepts derived from the
most essential stories of the ancient Greek world, Vernant further suggests,
was mirrored exactly in the Greeks social and religious practices: rituals of
sacrifice, age-grade initiation, and the design of precise alimentary codes, among
others.
Vernant insists that ancient sacrifice, for example, was a signifying practice
that enabled communication between humans and gods, comprising rituals
of slaughter and cookery and the preparation of a meal of meat under rules
that make the consumption of meat in the course of daily life a lawful, even
pious act.12 More to the point, sacrifice, in Vernants line of analysis, constitutes
Greek self-understanding insofar as the practice reinforces mans locus between
the realm of the divine and that of animals. Ritualized and rule-bound eating
intersects the diet of the gods (i.e. nonconsumption, but the taking of pleasure
in the odor of burning meat) and the beasts uninhibited devouring of raw
flesh. Sacrifice, which Vernant sees as a largely egalitarian act, thus crystallizes
the essence of man and ably integrates the performers of the rite in the
groups they are part of and trains them for their occupations, both public and
private.13
Beyond the obvious Levi-Straussian strain in Vernants reading of sacrifice,
however, it is in fact more on target to locate Durkheims theory of social cohesion
and moral solidarity as set forth especially in Elementary Forms of Religious

10

11

12
13

Yet Marcel Detienne, Back to the Village: A Tropism of Hellenists?, History of Religions,
41/2 (2001), 99113, at 110, reminds us that Levi-Strauss understood his own structural
anthropology to be inspired by Mauss.
J.-P. Vernant, HestiaHermes: The Religious Expression of Space and Movement in
Ancient Greece, in Vernant, Myth and Thought, 15796.
Vernant, Greek Religions, Ancient Religions, 280.
Ibid.

from mythos to logos

Life and The Division of Labour in Society.14 Just as Durkheim points to the
rejuvenation of the collective by ritual means, so Vernant argues that ancient
Greek anthropology and sociology congeal in the very act of sacrifice and feasting.
Sacrifice, Vernant further contends, is a sine qua non in the social formation of
the individual:
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 individual

and the divinity other than that exercised through a social mediation . . . The
relation with the divine occurs through a social function.16 Vernant effectively
restates, in the context of Greek sacrifice, Durkheims conceptualization of the
homo duplex, according to which individual subjectivity and the social are
homologized by the mediation of collective ritual. Ancient subjectivity, according
to Vernant, bears within it the prevailing value system, social practices, and
collective mental structures of the community to which the individual belongs.
Vernants structural approach to Greek religion helped reveal the organizing
conceptual principles undergirding an enormous and wildly heterogeneous set
of ancient cult practices and beliefs. Nonetheless, he and his followers have met
with criticism in recent years, for reasons that partially stem, I will argue, from
their steadfast devotion to Durkheimian sociology.17 It should be recalled that the
Durkheim schools interest in the collective consciousness and social cohesion,

14

15

16

17

See the discussion of sacrifice in the chapters on le culte positif in The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (Book 3), which is doubtless indebted to Marcel Mauss and Henri Huberts
magisterial Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, Lannee sociologique, 2 (1899),
29138.
Vernant, Greek Religions, Ancient Religions, 283. Cf. Durkheim, Sociology and
Philosophy, trans. D. F. Pocock (London, 1953), 9091: Society was presented as a system
of organs and functions, maintaining itself against outside forces of destruction just like a
physical organism . . . Society is, however, more than this, for it is the centre of a moral life
[le foyer dune vie morale] . . . Sentiments born and developed in the group have a greater
energy than purely individual sentiments. A man who experiences such sentiments feels
himself dominated by outside forces that lead him and pervade his milieu.
J.-P. Vernant, Forms of Belief and Rationality in Greece, in Johann P. Arnason and Peter
Murphy, eds., Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and Its Aftermath (Stuttgart,
2001), 11826, at 122.
Nicole Loraux, The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens (New
York, 2002), 4562. Humphreys, Anthropology and the Greeks, 910, has noted that the
structural-functionalist approach suffers on two accounts when applied to Greece: it
downplays historical change, and at times improperly compares the Greekswhose

8 kenneth w. yu

and its focus on law and religion in the maintenance of society, developed out of
the politically turbulent conditions of late nineteenth-century Paris, marked most
symbolically by the divisive Dreyfus affair and the crisis of the Third Republic.18
As a fellow Jew and Alsatian, Durkheim sympathized with Dreyfus on both
accounts and was animated by the ardent political and ideological debates over
French national identity, the duties of citizenship, and the Jewish situation in
France.19 Conflicts between the prodemocratic, anticlerical Dreyfusards and the
anti-Semitic, military-bolstered anti-Dreyfusards divided the French Republic
and galvanized the Durkheimians to alleviate social discord through scientific
research.20 The aspirations and elaborate methodologies of the Durkheimians
were thus responses to an increasingly aggressive form of French patriotism
that encouraged both anti-German and anti-Semitic sentiments. It will become
evident that Vernants conception of religion and the social order should be
understood against this background as much as that of Levi-Strauss and the
postwar French anthropological tradition.

iii
The Formation of Positivist Thought (1957) is one of Vernants most succinct
and lucid treatments of Greek rationalization, for him a key process in the Western
historical trajectory that ushered in a revolutionary way of conceptualizing the

18

19

20

method of organizing society was ordinarily through multistranded kinship systemsto

communities based on single kinship groups.
See Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Thought in France
(Chicago, 2002), 95131; Kevin Passmore, The Right in France from the Third Republic
to Vichy (Oxford, 2013); and Michael R. Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: The French
Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford, 1971). Dominick LaCapra,
Emile Durkheim: Sociologist and Philosopher (Ithaca, NY, 1972), 178, discusses Durkheims
work as an apology for the republican ideals of organic social unity and moral solidarism.
Dreyfuss status as an Alsatian Jew is paramount, for Durkheim could identify with him
on two points. Note that this dual identity was shared by Lucien Febvre and the eminent
Bloch family, among others. See Vicki Caron, Between France and Germany: The Jews of
Alsace-Lorraine, 18711918 (Stanford, 1988), 128. For Durkheim s views on Dreyfus see
his Individualism and the Intellectuals, in Durkheim on Religion, ed. W. S. F. Pickering
(London, 1975), esp. 62; and Durkheim , Lelite et la democratie, Revue bleue, 5/1 (1904),
7056.
See Victor Karady, The Durkheimians in Academe, in P. Besnard, ed., The Sociological
Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology (Cambridge, 1983), 7189;
Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice, 15679; Mich`ele Richman, Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim
and the Coll`ege de Sociologie (Minneapolis, 2002), esp. 165; and William R. Keylor,
Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge,
MA, 1975), esp. 16870 et passim.

from mythos to logos

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 from
the mythical to the rationalist constitute some of the chief signposts of this
new paradigm. Vernant begins the essay by praising the pathbreaking study of
F. M. Cornford, who argued, against the then-dominant grain, that Hesiods
conception of the cosmic order had anticipated later metaphysical speculation
about the relation of man to the physical and divine world. Cornford thus aimed
to minimize the fault line that had been drawn previously by such scholars as
John Burnet between philosophy and antiquated religious thought, and he
dismissed the time-honored notion of the Greek miracle as inadequate to cast
light on what actually occurred in the late archaic period.22
Vernant strikes a position between Cornford and Burnet, for while not denying
the emergence of a newfangled manner of world mapping in the sixth century,
he vehemently eschews both a simplistic linear progression and a disembodied
transcendent Greek miracle. In contrast, his projectpurportedly empirical
and diachronicsets out to pinpoint the processes by which this epistemic shift
arose. As Vernant understands it, the general world view propounded in myth
ceased to satisfy the conceptual demands of the community as soon as archaic
noble families disintegrated and the powerful magician-kings of the Mycenaean
and Geometric period (the Homeric basileis) failed to maintain authority over
civic affairs.23 The emergent sociopolitical configuration of the Greek city-state
compelled its citizens to adopt alternative interpretive modes to explain both
natural and divine phenomena, leaving in its wake minimal room for traditional
mythic thought. In particular, highly empirical accounts of reality, ones that
enlisted physical and naturalist laws, superseded mythic discourse, culminating

21

22

23

J.-P. Vernant, The Formation of Positivist Thought in Archaic Greece, in Vernant, Myth
and Thought among the Greeks, 31798. His other relevant publications include Les origines
de la pensee grecque (Paris, 1962); Vernant, Forms of Belief and Rationality in Greece;
and Vernant, The Reason of Myth, in Vernant, Myth and Society, 20360. Momigliano
considered this topic the raison detre of the Paris school. Arnaldo Momigliano, Terzo
contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico (Rome, 1966), 291.
Francis M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy: A Study in the Origins of Western
Speculation (New York, 1912). See Robert L. Fowler, Mythos and Logos, Journal of Hellenic
Studies, 131 (2011), 4566, for a history of the scholarship on rationality in ancient Greece.
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 appropriation
by the group of the conduct, knowledge, and procedures that originally were the exclusive
prerogatives of the basileus . . . Greek culture took form by opening to an ever-widening
circleand finally to the entire demos, communityaccess to the spiritual world
reserved initially for an aristocracy of priests and warriors.

10 kenneth w. yu

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 and
epistemological claims of charismatic sages and shamans.25 The latter traveled
in elite circles and transmitted arcane knowledge selectively; philosophers, by
contrast, addressed the public, circulating their wisdom widely in the service
of the polis, which revealed the new concern for public argumentation and the
increasing importance of peitho (persuasionboth the abstract concept and
its personified divine form) in this historical period. Vernant concludes that the
changing political order of the city and the philosophers rationalist vision of
reality developed pari passu, both partaking of an expansive emergent ideology.
To illustrate the concomitant effects of positivist thought in the political
realm, Vernant highlights the well-known sixth-century geopolitical reforms
of Cleisthenes, a deliberate amalgamation . . . a political unification . . . of the
diverse groups and activities of which the city was composed.26 Indeed, the polis
administration devised and implemented a new civic calendar to accompany
these comprehensive demographic modifications, understanding the efficacy of
a structured social temporality to promote a reconceptualized collective outlook.
In a published interview with Maurice Godelier, Vernant considers the developing
political form of the city-state to be the prima causa of historical change, and,
what is more, describes how the domains of religion and politics unfolded over
the seventh and sixth centuries to merge, at the pinnacle of the high classical
period, into a composite and undifferentiated institution.27

24

25

26

27

I find this point incomprehensible. Vernant, The Formation of Positivist Thought,

379, that the dual ontology (the independence of soul from body) posited by Western
Greek 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 of
a different sort than that which obtains in Asia Minor among the naturalists.
Thus the philosopher takes over from the old king-magician, the master of time. He
constructs a theory to explain the very phenomena that in times past the king had brought
about. Vernant, The Formation of Positivist Thought, 376.
Vernant, The Formation of Positivist Thought, 389. Standard accounts of these reforms
are Antony Andrewes, Kleisthenes Reform Bill, Classical Quarterly, 27/2 (1977), 24148;
David M. Lewis, Cleisthenes and Attica, Historiai, 12/1 (1963), 2240; and, in the French
structuralist tradition, Pierre Leveque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Clisth`ene lAthenien (Paris,
1964).
J.-P. Vernant, Entre mythe et politique, vol. 1 (Paris, 1996), 108: Disons quil ny a` pas
vraiment separation, mais cest le religieux qui devient politique, au lieu que le politique
soit purement integre dans le religieux. See also his interview with M. Mounier-Kuhn,
now printed in Vincent Duclert, Le mod`ele Vernant: Engagements resistants, philosophe
combattant, in M. Olender and F. Vitrani, eds., Jean-Pierre Vernant: Dedans dehors (Paris,
2013), 6597, at 79; and Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought, 131: In fact, it was at the

from mythos to logos

The impact of the rise of positivist thought was, Vernant tries to show, palpable
at all levels of society, and he elsewhere takes pains to demonstrate its ancillary
effects on Greek society writ large: on literature and the arts, the codification of
legal structures, the hoplite formation comprising citizen-soldiers, new monetary
forms and emerging economiesindeed, a hegemonic historical narrative that
subsumes each and every sociocultural sphere under its penumbra.28 Apropos of
philosophical discourse, for instance, Vernant contends that the polis engendered
conditions for a new cosmology (e.g. that of Parmenides) that favored coherence,
unity, and the singular (ousia substance and to on being) over flux and
polysemy; moreover, an alternative epistemology followed on the heels of this
reformulated metaphysical account. The intellect, as opposed to mere corporeal
experience, was regarded as the supreme mode in ascertaining the world: reality
is now no longer seen as the diversity of things apprehended through human
experience . . . [but] as the intelligible subject of logos, of reason, expressed
through language in accordance with its own principles of noncontradiction.29
Vernants reading of the narrative of Western rationalization is especially
remarkable in those sections of the essay that move from the institutional to the
intersubjective; that is, from the analytical perspective of society to the individual.
The emergence of rational thought did not only unfold at the macro level. Its
effects trickled into the very subjectivities of Athenian citizens, who reshaped the
value systems that underpinned social relations and thus fashioned novel forms
of social identity:
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

28

29

political level that Reason was first expressed, established, and shaped in Greece. Vernant
in this same book attributes the original Greek impulse toward egalitarianism to Sparta
but quickly emphasizes the more important contributions of the Athenians.
On the consequences of rationalization in art, for example, see J. P. Vernant, From
the Presentification of the Invisible to the Imitation of Appearance, in Vernant, Myth
and Thought, 33352. Richard Neer, Jean-Pierre Vernant and the History of the Image,
Arethusa, 43/2 (2010), 18195, offers a critical treatment of Vernants thoughts on Greek
representations of the divine.
Vernant, The Formation of Positivist Thought, 394.

11

12 kenneth w. yu

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

iv
Vernants emphasis on Webers dichotomies, typologies, poles, and
checkerboard patterns in my opening passage reveals his one-sided, if not
disingenuous, reading of Weber and fails to discern the panoramic narrative that
encompasses the entire Sociology of Religion.31 More than developing typologies
for the study of religion, Weber presents, as it were, an elaborate history of
religions. A look at Webers notion of rationalization in relation to the unfolding
of discrete value systems in The Sociology of Religion and Religious Rejections
of the World and Their Directions will secure us a precise vantage to juxtapose
Webers and Vernants seemingly incompatible views on the logic of history and
the place of religion within society.32
Any study reckoning with Webers treatment of rationalization must address
his main theses on the nature and development of the religious sphere, from
its earliest articulations in prehistory to the major living world religions of
modernity. The Sociology of Religion contains a chronology that effectively begins
30
31

32

Vernant, The Formation of Positivist Thought, 38890.

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), 929, esp. 1721.
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), 32359.

from mythos to logos

in illo tempore, when a magical sensibility directed an individuals behavior within

the cosmos and toward others. In this indeterminate epoch, Weber explains,
unity obtains among what might be regarded as separate domains of social life;
for instance, early societies depended on magician-kings and superhuman forces
not only to carry out endeavors related to the everyday functioning of the polity,
but also to perform religious rituals that bolstered the cosmic order and secured a
productive economy.33 In addition to the imbrication of secular power and sacred
authority, this primordial unity of values is operative in other institutional and
private relationsnamely aesthetics, sexuality, social relations, and economic
production.34
At the risk of simplifying Webers sweeping narrative, we can still
identify its major thrust: at a certain juncture, the religious spherealong
with its constitutive symbols and practicessuddenly undergoes abstraction,
activated (at least in the Western tradition) by the conceptual development
of the notions of the soul and supernatural powers, ideas toward
which people begin to systematize their religious behavior. Thus complex
symbols and analogies displace naturalistic explanations in the evaluation
of the phenomenal world. Contributions by religious functionaries (priests
and prophets) and by lay intellectuals like philosophers, moreover, were
momentous to the development of the religious sphere in this historical
trajectory.
As religious ideas become systematized, peoples understandings of the
world and the behaviors and attitudes they adopt begin to turn into
themselves and eventually congeal into autonomous value spheres. As a
consequence of this autonomization, religion follows its own course and
confronts the interests and goals of other domains in the sociocultural
field (viz. the political, economic, intellectual, erotic, and aesthetic, which
themselves have undergone autonomization), producing an irreversible conflict
between value spheres (Eigengesetzlichkeit): The further the rationalization
[of] things worldly has progressed, the stronger has the tension on the part
of religion become. For the rationalization and the conscious sublimation
of mans relations to the various spheres of values . . . have then pressed
towards making conscious the internal and lawful autonomy of the individual
spheres.35
In Religious Rejections, Weber is absolutely clear about the rationalization
process in the aesthetic domain where art becomes a cosmos of more and more
33
34

35

Weber, Religious Rejections, 333.

See Weber, Religious Rejections, 34143 and Weber, Sociology of Religion, 1 and 13 et
passim.
Weber, Religious Rejections, 328, original emphasis.

13

14 kenneth w. yu

consciously grasped independent values which exist in their own right.36 The
same 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 formerly

whole and self-reliant cultural beings (Kulturmenschen), a consequence of the
total being of man having been alienated from the organic cycle of peasant life.38
This internal disturbance, Weber goes on to say, leads individuals to develop
a methodical, self-disciplined inner consistency, to cultivate a particular ethos,
and to maintain an unsympathetic stance toward rival ethics. In a remarkably
purple passage in Science as a Vocation Weber likens the adopting of a single
ethos to choosing between irreconcilably antagonistic gods (notice Webers
highly rationalist and Protestant suggestion tucked into the final line of the
passage):
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 Webers social theory vis-`a-vis
rationalization, Talcott Parsons and Roland Axtmann have independently argued
that structural tension, value pluralism, and a differentiated society constitute (for
Weber) principles for change and thus for individual and political autonomy.40
Much ink has been spilled on how Webers political and historical context,
36
37
38
39
40

Ibid., 342
Weber, Sociology of Religion, 235.
Weber, Religious Rejections, 344.
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation, in From Max Weber, 12956, at 151.
Talcott Parsons, Christianity and Modern Society, in Parsons, Sociological Theory
and Modern Industrial Society (New York, 1967), 385421; 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 Webers
pessimism and ambivalence regarding capitalism and modernity; see Roland Axtmann,
State Formation and the Disciplined Individual in Webers Historical Sociology, in

from mythos to logos

one that was experiencing the tumultuous effects of rapid modernization in

the Wilhelmine and Weimar years, gave impetus to his broader theorization
of the dynamics of society.41 Stephen Kalberg, for instance, has clarified the
background of Webers work, tracing the widening divergence between value
systems of the public and private spheres in post-Bismarckian Germany, a
bleak historical moment that was permeated by political fragmentation and
a sense of Kulturpessimismus.42 Within this context, the very idea of unitya
term associated at once with intellectual suppression, dehumanization, and mob
mentalityhad acquired chiefly negative connotations. Unlike Vernant, who
perceived social integration and value monism to be the telos of the ideal political
order, a necessary condition for inclusivity and mutual understanding, Weber
found that it designated a foreclosure of creativity, indeed a reduction of freedom
to carry out self-willed decisions.
Having counterpoised Weber and Vernants ideal social orders, one can
draw out the fact that religion plays vastly dissimilar roles in the social
matrices of their respective theories. Grosso modo, religion for Vernant exerts
a centripetal force, by which the various spheres of social life and its citizens
gravitate toward harmony. For Weber, religiononly one of several normative
dimensions of societyexerts a centrifugal force, constantly challenging other
value domains. If Vernants ideal society, exemplified by the well-ordered polis
of post-mythical Greece, partakes of the Gemeinschaft type, then Webers society
as it develops in his narrative of occidental rationalization is of the Gesellschaft
type.

v
It may already be evident that more is at stake in Vernants narrative of the
rationalization of Greek thought, and we will need to reflect on the political
subtexts that occasionally enter his writings, and to show how Vernant as
theoretician and Vernant as citizen intertwine in his research. Vernants account
of an egalitarian Greek political consciousness at the apogee of Cleisthenic Athens
represents the intellectual offspring of two discursive fields, for it combines the

41

42

Ralph Schroeder, ed., Max Weber: Democracy and Modernization (New York, 1998), 3246,
esp. 4042.
See Bryan S. Turner, Max Weber: From History to Modernity (London, 1992), esp. 111; Sam
Whimster, The Nation-State, the Protestant Ethic and Modernization, in Schroeder,
Max Weber, 6178; and Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination.
Stephen Kalberg, The Origin and Expansion of Kulturpessimismus: The Relationship
between Public and Private Spheres in Early Twentieth Century Germany, Sociological
Theory, 5 (1987), 15064. The notion of Zersplitterung is sometimes used to describe the
fracturing of political homogeneity during these years.

15

16 kenneth w. yu

distinct philosophical tendency of the Durkheim lineage (via Meyerson and

Mauss) with Marxist political ideals anchored in his personal experience in the
French Resistance.
That the work of Meyerson is obscure to most readers can be attributed
to the fact that he did not publish a single monograph save his 1949 thesis
Psychological Functions and Works, at the age of sixty.43 Even during his life,
he was better known for his sixty-year editorship of the prestigious Journal de
psychologie normale et pathologique and as a committed member of the Societe
de psychologie, ascending to its presidency in 1924. Not unlike those of Mauss,
Meyersons primary contributions turned on lhomme total (or lesprit humain)
and its expressionsindeed objectificationsin creative actions and works
(oeuvres).44 Devoting his attention to the historical development of the human
mind and its categories of perception (never fixed but determined by historical
and cultural specificities), Meyerson argued that man-made creationsmore
precisely, the making of creationsuncovered the deepest interiorities of the
human mind. The products of this historically determined poiesis, constituting
five distinct, but structurally interconnected, fieldsmyth and religion, systems
of language, the plastic and visual arts, science, and laws and institutional life
reflect the nature of the human mental makeup, and, somewhat dialectically,
recondition the mind and its capacity to create:
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 mindindeed,
the thought and mind appear to be already transformed by the experience.45

43

44

45

For the work of Meyerson see J.-P. Vernant, Passe et present: Contributions a` une psychologie
historique (Rome, 1995), 347; Riccardo Di Donato, Invito alla lettura dellopera di
Ignace Meyerson: Psicologia storica e studio del mondo antico, Annali della Scuola
Normale superiore di Pisa, 12/2 (1982), 60364; and Francoise Parot, Psychology in the
Human Sciences in France, 19201940: Ignace Meyersons Historical Psychology, History
of Psychology, 3/2 (2000), 104121, esp. 114 et passim.
See Mausss formulation in Questions Put to Psychology, in Mauss, Sociology and
Psychology: Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1979; first published 1924), 2631, at
26: complete, non-compartmentalized man . . . this indivisible, measurable but not
dissectible being.
Ignace Meyerson, Probl`emes dhistoire psychologique des oeuvres: Specificite, variation,
experience, in F. Braudel, ed., Eventail de lhistoire vivante: Hommage a` Lucien Febvre
(Paris, 1953), 20718, at 2078 and 216: Cest ce monde des oeuvres qui est la mati`ere
veritable dune exploration objective de la nature des hommes, il doit e tre pour la

from mythos to logos

Meyerson recruited Vernant to the editorial team at the Journal de psychologie, and
it is no wonder that Vernant shared with him an abiding interest in the reciprocal
relations obtaining between creative human labor and the emergence of the
psychological world, the mental categories of ancient religious man46 hence
Vernants insistence on the rationalization of Greek thought not as miracle but
as poiesis; that is, creative action carried out by political subjects for the common
good. What is important to underscore, moreover, is that Meyerson, to whom
Vernant dedicated his major publication Myth and Thought among the Greeks
(1965), was both a Dreyfusard in the beginning of the twentieth century and
Vernants comrade in the French Resistance in Toulouse. Thus Vernant likely
became familiar with the constellation of beliefs and values surrounding the
Dreyfus affair and its political-symbolic connections to the Resistance through
his intimate and lifelong intellectual association with Meyerson.
Along with Meyerson, Vernants debt to Mauss and the theoretical repertoire
of the ecole durkheimienne is tremendous. I spotlight a passage from Vernants
1975 inaugural lecture:
In [the specialist of Greek religions] 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 connectionswhether 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 cultural

systems from discrete perspectives and precise analytical vantages. His emphasis
on the term faits evokes Mausss total social fact, namely signifying practices
toward which members of a society orient their moral and social lives, and which,
for the historian, crystallize complex systems of belief and action. The fact in
French sociology has origins in Durkheims 1895 The Rules of Sociological Method

46
47

psychologie humaine ce que le monde des phenom`enes de la nature est pour la physique
. . . Solidairement, tout effort humain est un faire, une poiesis, construction tendue vers
leffet: le construit, lobjet . . . Il y a constamment action reciproque de lexperience et de
la raison, de loperation et de la pensee; a` quelque niveau quon les prenne, lexperience
contient dej`a la raison et lesprit, la raison et lesprit apparaissent dej`a transformes par
lexperience. Translation mine.
Vernant, Greek Religion, Ancient Religions, 273.
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),
2731.

17

18 kenneth w. yu

(if not earlier in Fustel, as Momigliano asserts),48 but Parsons has alerted us to the
fact that Durkheim never elucidated how it was to be pursued in social-scientific
practice.49 It was Mauss, rather, who formulated more systematic ideas on the
category in his research on ancient gift-giving and potlatch: In these early
societies, social phenomena are not discrete; each phenomenon contains all the
threads of which the social fabric is composed. In these total social phenomena,
as we propose to call them, all kinds of institutions find simultaneous expression:
religious, legal, moral, and economic. In addition, the phenomena have their
aesthetic aspect and they reveal morphological types.50
Readers will easily see in the concluding pages of The Gift and from the
quotation above, with its nod toward methodological holism (not discrete,
threads, simultaneous expression), that Mauss prescribes wholes and
totalities rather than the individual as the proper unit of social analysis.51
Proposing something like systems theory avant la lettre, Mauss understands
total facts to be empirically real and embedded in social institutions. Not merely
second-order epiphenomena that superficially reflect collective ideas, social facts
indeed actualize ways of behaving in the world: It is only by considering [social
facts] as wholes that we have been able to see their essence, their operation and
their living aspect, and to catch the fleeting moment when the society and its
members take emotional stock of themselves and their situation.52 Following
Mauss, Vernant shows how certain ancient religious practices like sacrifice could
ground social being in objective and totalizing ways. Maussian social facts,
on the whole, are at direct odds with Webers ideal types, which, by contrast,
were open to modification and were not to be taken as ontological, for they
served as heuristic mental constructs (Gedankenbilden) in the service of ongoing
comparative sociological research.53

48

49

50

51

52
53

For Fustel on the concept see Arnaldo Momigliano, The Ancient City of Fustel de
Coulanges, in G. W. Bowersock and T. J. Cornell, eds., Studies on Modern Scholarship
(Berkeley, 1994), 16278, at 164.
Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1949), 412. For Durkheim on
the concept see Margaret Gilbert, Durkheim and Social Facts, in W. S. F. Pickering and
H. Martins, eds., Debating Durkheim (London, 1994), 86109.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York,
1954), 1.
E.g. We are concerned with wholes, with systems in their entirety . . . It is only by
considering them as wholes that we have been able to see their essence, their operation
and their living aspect. Ibid., 778.
Ibid., 79.
E.g. Max Weber, Die Objektivitaet sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer
Erkenntnis, in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsaetze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tubingen, 1968;
first published 1904), 146214, at 190: Er ist nicht eine Darstellung des Wirklichen, aber er

from mythos to logos

Vernants deployment of Mausss total social fact belies a fragile point in his
understanding of the historical rise of Greek philosophical thought. Mausss
rendering of Polynesian, Melanesian, and Northwest American total prestation
as exemplary expressions of the basis of moral action common to societies
of the highest degree of evolution to those of the future and to societies
of the least advancement renders explicit the morphological and synchronic
mode of this category.54 When pursuing questions of discontinuity and rupture,
the synchronicfunctionalist approach entailed in the total social fact becomes
problematic, since it conceives of history as a bounded system, and presupposes
the dynamic of historical logic to gravitate in teleological fashion toward social
cohesion; the total social fact is unable to register, for example, the unintended
consequences of historical events or the structure-modifying decisions of certain
creative actors.55 In sum, the notion of social fact lacks the analytical precision
to trace the diachronic claims so central to Vernants argument about Greek
rationalization.
Let me underline three additional problems that arise from Vernants
theoretical reliance on Mauss and Meyerson. First, in depicting a polis whose
separate components cohere in the rationalization process, he does not elucidate
concretely how the tendency toward positivist thought was tied to its material
and social conditions. His account of the origin of Greek thought often reads
like a marvelous piece of Geistesgeschichte, for in attributing historical change to
an undefined entity and in assuming an evenness of historical development,
it never fully accounts for the agency of goal-driven actors (in contrast to
Weber, for whom the individual was fundamental). One of the results of this
omission is that Vernant, following Mausss and Meyersons notion of lindividu
complet, assumes a single identitya reified homo graecus, as it wereto stand
in for a variegated Greek demography, thus masking the oppressive realities of
ancient Athens with its hierarchical structures of gender and political inequality
(cf., for instance, Aristophanes Lysistrata and Demosthenes 59 Against Neaera
respectively). Second, by accepting at face value the views and categories of
ancient cultural producers, Vernant reproduces problematically the imagined
and normative social order that interested politicians (e.g. Cleisthenes) and

54
55

will der Darstellung eindeutige Ausdrucksmittel verleihen. The exact nature of the ideal
type is debated since Weber himself never systematically defined the term; see Walter G.
Runciman, A Critique of Max Webers Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge, 1972), 337.
Mauss, The Gift, 68.
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, two
irreconcilable structures of being, clash.

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20 kenneth w. yu

philosophers (e.g. Parmenides) themselves wished to institute.56 Finally, Vernant

attributes indiscriminately several transformations from the archaic to the
classical period to a monocausal (and largely nonmaterial) Kulturgeist, which in
consequence eliminates serious consideration of other ideological and economic
forces that were instrumental, or in opposition, to the shift in paradigms;
it conceals concurrent but distinct processes that complicate the master
narrative.57
In fact, the classical historian and anthropologist Sally Humphreys has since
refined Vernants narrative, concentrating particularly on the ancient polemical
and apologetic procedures by which categories of rationality and irrationality,
and religion and secularism, slowly took shape across a variety of discourse
types and genres; in her appraisal, the efforts of ancient philosophers and
physicians to lay claim to superior, rational knowledge did not silence priests and
diviners, but rather encouraged the latter to defend the unique salvific features
of their enterprise, features brought into sharp focus thanks to the challenges
of their detractors. Ecstatic and prophetic forms of religion suddenly branded
themselves anew: the more irrational, the more poetic.58 Vernants holistic
interpretation of historical changethat is, of collapsing boundaries between
different institutions and forms of cultural expressionignores such nuances.
In this regard, his method and style of argumentation suggest a closer alliance to
Mauss than to Meyerson since, for the latter, the various cultural fields maintained
relatively independent psychological operations.59
Matters become yet more complicated for, besides these disciplinary
influences, Vernants personal link to Marxist political thought compels us
to consider what effects his involvement in the war had on the formation
of his theoretical conception of society. The speech that Vernant delivered
at his 1999 honorary-doctorate ceremony at the Universit`a degli studi di
Napoli LOrientale reflects on his participation in the French Resistance and
membership in the French Communist Party.60 He starts by professing an early
awareness of the ramifications of socioeconomic disparity and then follows on
56

57

58

59
60

The problem of transferring bias in the original source to the historians own narrative
has been explored splendidly in Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY,
1985), 11.
By contrast see Detiennes textured reading of Orphic sacrifice and how its practitioners
maintained stances contrarian to the mainstream sacrificial paradigm, in Marcel Detienne,
Culinary Practices and the Spirit of Sacrifice, in Detienne and Vernant, The Cuisine of
Sacrifice, 120.
S. C. Humphreys, The Strangeness of Gods: Historical Perspectives on the Interpretation of
Athenian Religion (Oxford, 2004), 5175, at 74.
Meyerson, Probl`emes dhistoire psychologique des uvres, 208.
For Vernants war efforts see Duclert, Le mod`ele Vernant.

from mythos to logos

this with a renewed optimism, recounting the selfless political thinking and action
he 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 aboutneither good nor evilif it
is not shared. And this way of being with others and to feel at one with themhowever
naive it may soundcoincides 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 knewboth workers and intellectualsshared, 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, peacean 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 worlds sense and direction.61

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

62

J.-P. Vernant, Autoritratto, Studi Storici, 41/1 (2000), 2830: Si tratta del bisogno di non
chiudersi in se stessi, di non mettersi in un angolo ma, al contrario, di communicare con gli
altri. Nulla diventa importantenella buona come nella cattiva sortese non e` condiviso
con gli altri. E questa maniera di sentire gli altri e di sentirsi con gli altri, per ingenua
che sia, va al passo con il rifiuto di tutti gli atteggiamenti che sembrano opporsi a questa
fiducia negli uomini e tendere invece a gerarchizzarli o a umiliare e respingere alcuni di
loro . . . I militanti che ho conosciutooperai o intellettualicondividevano, mi sembra,
questa maniera dessere e questo si vedeva anche nel loro comportamento quotidiano,
nella loro maniera dessere e quasi nel loro fisico . . . Avevamo come il sentimento di un
accordo intimo tra il nostro temperamento personale, questo sentimento di fraternit`a con
gli operai, laspirazione a un mondo di giustizia e di pace e una comprensione dordine
quasi intellettuale del mondo in cui vivevamo e delle forze in campo, delle strutture di
ordine economico e sociale che ne orientavano senso e direzione. Translation mine.
Vernant, Origins of Greek Thought, 6061.

21

22 kenneth w. yu

Accordingly, it makes sense that Vernant remained reticent on matters that

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

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

J.-P. Vernant, Speech and Mute Signs, in Vernant, Mortals and Immortals, 30317.
J.-P. Vernant, The Individual within the City-State, in ibid., 31834.
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 of
religion and not infrequently involving a cult of erotic orgies, which of course makes it
utterly remote from a religion of pure faith, such as Christianity, with its continuous and
unshakeable trust in Gods providence. The erotic element in the personal relationship to
the savior in Hindu salvation religion may be regarded as largely the technical result of
the practices of devotion; whereas, in marked contrast, the Christian belief in providence
is a charisma that must be maintained by the exercise of the will of the believer. Weber,
Sociology of Religion, 201.

from mythos to logos

I mentioned briefly in section I that the ecole sociologique had already by the
first decade of the twentieth century established itself as a theoretical antipode to
Webers philosophy of history, but a bit more needs to be said about how Vernant
received the consequences of these disputes. I do not imply that Durkheim and
Webers research programs amount to nothing but the products of monolithic
and immutable nationalisms. Yet it is clear that the creation and persistence of
influential sociological methods and types of discourse were indissolubly bound
up with the concentration of formidable researchers at institutional cores, who
were responding to political urgencies on both national and continental levels.66
It has become customary to observe that in the aftermath of the FrancoPrussian Warthat is, pre-dating Vernant by several decadesFrench and
German sociologists began developing theoretical programs with antithetical
impulses for the study of society and religion, and that they rarely collaborated
in a straightforward or sustained fashion (save some exceptions such as Maurice
Halbwachs).67 Durkheim, for instance, though undoubtedly impressed by a select
few Germans (e.g. Adolph Wagner and Gustav von Schmoller, but above all by
Wilhelm Wundts Ethik), perhaps did not read anything by Weberat least he
does not give any indication that he did.68 This is especially perplexing in light of
66

67

68

See Keylor, Academy and Community, esp. 4046, 11416, 13940; Pim den Boer, History
as a Profession: The Study of History in France, 18181914 (Princeton, 1998); Terry N. Clark,
The Structure and Functions of a Research Institute: The Annee Sociologique, European
Journal of Sociology, 9 (1968), 7291; Victor Karady, The Durkheimians in Academe: A
Reconsideration, in W. S. F. Pickering, ed., Emile Durkheim: Critical Assessments of Leading
Sociologists, vol. 1 (London, 2001), 4461, esp. 4755; and for a likely overstated view of
Durkheims nationalism see M. Marion Mitchell, Emile Durkheim and the Philosophy of
Nationalism, Political Science Quarterly, 46/1 (1931), 87106. For a correction to Mitchell
see Josep R. Llobera, Durkheim and the National Question, in Pickering and Martins,
Debating Durkheim, 13458.
Tiryakian, Durkheim and Weber, esp. 31319; 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 Sociological
Domain, 26389, at 280.
Edward Tiryakian, A Problem for the Sociology of Knowledge: The Mutual Unawareness
of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, European Journal of Sociology, 7 (1966), 33036.
Anthony Giddens, Weber and Durkheim: Coincidence and Divergence, in Wolfgang J.
Mommsen and Jurgen Osterhammel, eds., Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London,
1987), 18290, highlights the academic differences between these two scholars. It is useful
to recall, following Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (Cambridge, 1971), 68
n. 15, that although Wagner and Schmoller were founders of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik,
with which Weber was affiliated, Weber disagreed with these German economists precisely
on those aspects that Durkheim found appealing, namely the attempt to create a science
of ethics. See also Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago, 1997), 1652.
I concur with Strenski (contra Vogt, Jones, and others) (ibid., 278) that Durkheims

23

24 kenneth w. yu

the fact that Durkheim must have been aware of Weber, since, after all, Durkheim
wrote a scathing review in the Annee of his wife Marianne Webers Ehefrau und
Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung (1907). In fact, some contemporaries such as
Simon Deploige leveled the criticism against Durkheim that his work was so
influenced by the Germans that it appeared he had imported his ideas wholesale
from Germany, a provocation insinuating German propaganda that Durkheim
vigorously and bitterly denied, insisting instead that Auguste Comte was of much
greater importance.69
Given his Alsatian roots, one cannot help but wonder if Durkheim still
harbored resentment over the German annexation of his birthplace, AlsaceLorraine, a region with a well-established Jewish community.70 Vicki Caron has
recently noted, for example, that an overwhelming majority of elite AlsaceLorraine Jews (unlike their Catholic and Protestant counterparts) not only
maintained pro-French sympathies but was in fact defiantly anti-German well
into the 1870s and beyond.71 Durkheim may well have felt it important to
demonstrate his French patriotism by severing all ties with German scholars,
especially in light of both the Dreyfus affair and the widespread public opinion
that the French of the annexed territories were somehow disquietingly Germanic
in language and culture. Conceivably, the Great War, which claimed the life
of Durkheims 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

69

70

71
72

societism was influenced less by his brief encounter with German scholars than by French
neo-Hegelian socialism.
From the review of Deploige as reported in A. Giddens, Capitalism and Social Theory
(Cambridge, 1971), 71, and 11920, esp. n. 3, for bibliography and an argument against the
consensus about Durkheims unfamiliarity with Weber. Also worth consulting is Robert
A. Jones, The Development of Durkheims Social Realism (Cambridge, 1999), chap. 4; and
Edward A. Tiryakian, Emile Durkheims Matrix, in Tiryakian, For Durkheim: Essays in
Historical and Cultural Sociology (Farnham, 2009), 1158, at 42.
Robert A. Jones, Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works (Beverly Hills,
1986), 1213; and Caron, Between France and Germany, 19: Alsace and Lorraine also
remained the bastion of religious traditionalism in the nineteenth century. The persistence
of ritual observance among rural Jewry is, of course, legendary. Paula E. Hyman, The
Emancipation of the Jews of Alsace (New Haven, 1991), 5, estimates that more than half of
all Jewish French at one point lived in Alsace.
Caron, Between France and Germany, 2744 and 96117.
See Durkheims remarks on German aggression during the war in LAllemagne au-dessus
de tout: La mentalite allemande et la guerre (Paris, 1915).

from mythos to logos

the volumes of lAnnee sociologique resting on Webers shelves.73 Whatever

the truth of the matter, the strained nature of Mausss comment evinces a
systemic mutual distancing between French and German researchers that goes
back at least to the work of Durkheims teacher Fustel, with his rabid antiGerman rhetoric against Theodor Mommsen and German scholarship after
the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. The language and perspective furnished by these
early thinkers laid the groundwork for Vernants almost exclusive conversation
with the French and his disinterest in otherwise relevant hermeneutic
sociologies developed by German scholars.74 A similar argument could be
made about the relative lack of interest in the Annales school among German
historians.75
It has been my argument that Meyerson and Mauss (and the Durkheimians
generally) bequeathed to Vernant a certain national cultural identity and
temperamentin particular, a deliberate nonengagement with Weber and
other German scholars.76 It would appear that the dominant cultural values
espoused by the Durkheimians were long-lasting and remained regnant in
the academic institutions of Vernants Paris. Additionally, Vernants wartime
exploits as a commanding officer in the Resistance led him to sympathize
with the Durkheimian project of social integration and moral solidarity, and
consequently he was drawn to their imaginative sociological vocabulary and
conceptual schemes in his investigations into Greek antiquity. Pursuing these
lines of thought, it is hardly surprising that Vernant never seriously engaged
the scholarship of his coeval Walter Burkert (19312015), a German historian
of ancient religions of the first order. Conversely, it is not unexpected that
73

74

75

76

Runciman, A Critique of Max Webers Philosophy of Social Science, 10; and Reinhard Bendix
and Seymour M. Lipset, Class, Status and Power (London, 1966), 283.
For Fustels anti-German ideology and defense of French patriotism after the fall of the
Second Republic see Momigliano, The Ancient City of Fustel, 1657. For the impact
of La cite antique on French sociology see Robert Alun Jones, Durkheim and La cite
antique: An essay on the origins of Durkheims 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 on
Durkheims Theories of Social Morphology and Social Solidarity, Humboldt Journal of
Social Relations, 11/1 (19834), 5373.
See Gunther Roth, Duration and Rationalization: Fernand Braudel and Max Weber, in
Gunther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Webers Vision of History (Berkeley, 1979),
16693, at 168. One should note the exception of Karl Lamprecht, whose sympathetic views
toward Kulturgeschichte sparked the infamous Methodenstreit that resulted in his isolation
by many German academics.
For a discussion of Huberts veiled critique of German nationalism in his work on European
prehistory, for instance, see Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth (Chicago, 1999), 127, also 1367
and 267 n. 84 for select bibliography on Franco-Germanic academic relations in the 1930s.

25

26 kenneth w. yu

Burkert himself drew inspiration predominantly from the work of other Germanspeaking scholars (e.g. Karl Meuli (18911968) and Konrad Lorenz (19031989))
and, as if to return the favor, virtually ignored Vernants theory of sacrifice in his
own magnum opus on the subject.77
In closing, three issues ought to be stressed. First, in the course of my
argument on the Durkheim school (and Meyerson), I have tried somewhat
deliberately to distance myself from the Jewish question, a point of controversy
still among Durkheim experts.78 I have done so for reasons both empirical and
theoretical. I am inclined to agree with Ivan Strenski, who has observed that
the Durkheimianshighly critical of race theoriessaw neither themselves nor
their work as essentially Jewish in tonality. As such, it seemed prudent not to
isolate Jewishness as an explanatory variable but to situate it (particularly the
liberal Alsatian stripe of Durkheim) in the context of fin de si`ecle France in which
the distinction between religious and political motivations for sociopolitical
action and sociological investigation often blurred. Moreover, it makes better
sense to construe certain quintessential aspects of their writingaspects others
categorically designate as typical of Jewish attitudes, such as societismin more
complex social realities.79 Mutatis mutandis, I abstained from an overt discussion
of the religious inclinations of Vernant, who, although not Jewish, curiously
inserted himself into an intellectual legacy dominated by an elite pro-French
Jewish intelligentsia: Durkheim, Mauss, Meyerson, Vidal-Naquet, and LeviStrauss, among others.80 And in so doing, Vernant seems to have inherited
the groups general contempt for the kind of methodological individualism
characteristic of Weberian sociology.
Second, and as one would expect, Vernants oeuvres, like those of Durkheim
and Weber, did not remain static but reacted to circumstances, and it

77

78

79

80

Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and
Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, 1983). See Fritz Graf, One Generation after Burkert
and Girard: Where Are the Great Theories?, in Christopher Faraone and Fred Naiden,
eds., Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice (Cambridge, 2012), 3251, esp. 323; and Bruce
Lincoln, From Bergaigne to Meuli, in ibid., 1331, at 30.
W. S. F. Pickering, The Enigma of Durkheims Jewishness, in Pickering and Martins,
Debating Durkheim, esp. 1039.
Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, 19: This early Jewish social experience perhaps
resulted in Durkheims sociological interest in the family as a category of inquiry. Yet
even when we give weight to Durkheims origins in the Jewry of Alsace or Lorraine, it is
hard 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.
For representations and tropes associated with Jewishness in postwar France see Sarah
Hammerschlag, The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago,
2010).

from mythos to logos

would be a desideratum in future studies to render more clearly whether

he became more or less Durkheimian over time. Riccardo Di Donato speaks
of Vernants nuovo periodo after his election to the Coll`ege de France.81 A
glance at Vernants bibliography indeed indicates that his early preoccupation
with Greek rationalization over the longue duree eventually gave way to more
synchronic interests like comparative theories of divination, ancient visual
representations of the divine, and civic religion in Attic tragedy, but the concern
for collective mentalities nevertheless persists.82 I would submit, however, that the
methodological difficulties associated with Vernants Durkheimian tendencies
diminish in his later career when he abandons the overtly diachronic aspects that
mark his early publications.
Last, one can only speculate in the final analysis how much of Webers
corpus Vernant actually read or knew. It would be difficult to believe that
Weber was entirely unfamiliar to him, but we can ultimately infer from his
scholarly production that he found himself not only tolerated but indeed even
considerably rewarded by the French academic hierarchy, for institutional and
ideological reasons, to privilege Durkheimian approaches over those Weberian.
It deserves mention here that Vernants election to the Coll`ege de France was
in large measure a result of the powerful backing of Levi-Strauss, whose own
enormously influential The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) recalls the
stimulus of Durkheim and his Elementary Forms.83 In deliberately avoiding
Weber, the work of Vernant and his disciples took on a particular cast centered on
the Durkheimians, and, by extension, guided a whole intellectual tradition whose
effects reverberate to this day, as the near-universal adoption of the polisreligion
model in classical scholarship attests.84 Although one should resist the temptation
to see Durkheim as a figure of exemplarity after whom Vernant consciously
styled himself, it is noteworthy that they both found themselves, willfully or
not, celebrated directors of pioneering research equipes, and Vernant, just like

81
82

83

84

Riccardo Di Donato, Un percorco intellettuale, Studi Storici, 41/1 (2000), 715, at 9.

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 in
Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York, 1988; first published 1972).
On this point see Francois Dosse, History of Structuralism, vol. 2, trans. Deborah Glassman
(Minneapolis, 1997), 224.
On the international impact of the Paris school see Nicole Loraux, Gregory Nagy, and
Laura Slatkin, eds., Antiquities: Postwar French Thought, vol. 3 (New York, 2001). For
the polisreligion model, which conceives of religion as embedded in a city-state free of
stasis, see Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, What Is Polis Religion? in Richard Buxton, ed.,
Oxford Readings in Greek Religion (Oxford, 2000), 1337. An important reappraisal of the
model is Julia Kindt, Beyond the Polis: Rethinking Greek Religion, in Kindt, Rethinking
Greek Religion (Cambridge, 2012), 1235.

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28 kenneth w. yu

Durkheim, had a penchant for attracting a great many prolific protegesLuc

Brisson, Francois Hartog, Francois Lissarague, John Scheid, and Jesper Svenbro
among the more influential.

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

86

Important studies that trace the genealogy of the dynamics of secularism in various
historical guises are Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World
(Stanford, 2003), esp. 181201; Jose
(Chicago, 1994), esp. 166; and Gordon Lynch, The Sacred in the Modern World: A Cultural
Sociological Approach (Oxford, 2012).
I recognize that Weber is not wholly representative of a German approach, for from Dilthey
to Troeltsch there are alternatives within Germany. But I take Weber and Durkheim to be
antipodal in the strict sense that the academic study of sociology has, in the last century,
developed along these lines.

from mythos to logos

Indeed, while much recent work in the sociology of religion has variously
attempted to reinvigorate, develop, or supplant the key principles laid out by
Weber and Durkheim (and by the other so-called founding fathers of sociology,
Simmel and Mead), the history of ancient religions continues to proceed along
the distinct theoretical axes laid out by these two classical sociologists.87 Recently,
scholars of ancient religions, particularly those at the Max-Weber-Kolleg fur
kulturund sozialwissenschaftliche Studien at the University of Erfurt, have made
a concerted, and to a certain degree salutary, effort to redirect focus from polis and
civic religionthat 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 and
personal religion in antiquity, even if not normally registered as such by its main
proponents, represents a revival of Weberian sociology in reaction to the legacies
of Vernant and the French tradition, a critical moment in the development of the
discipline.
Let us end with an extraordinary passage from an autobiographical account of
the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Vernants 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

88

For the long-term reception of Durkheim and Weber (and their coexistence as distinct
sociological traditions) see Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago and
London, 1993), esp. 21461; Richard Munch, Understanding Modernity: Toward a New
Perspective Going beyond Durkheim and Weber (London, 1988); and Henrik Jensen, Weber
and Durkheim: A Methodological Comparison (New York, 2012). For a synoptic account of
the development in the sociology of religion particularly see Grace Davie, The Evolution
of the Sociology of Religion, in Michele Dillon, ed., Handbook for the Sociology of Religion
(Cambridge, 2003), 6175.
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 Religious
Individuality: Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian Texts and Practices (Berlin and Boston,
2012); and Veit Rosenberger, ed., Divination in the Ancient World: Religious Options
and the Individual (Stuttgart, 2013). The work at Erfurt is felt in American classical
scholarship, evidenced by panels on personal and individual experience in ancient religions
at, for example, the 2015 American Philological Association and the 2015 International
Association for the History of Religions in conjunction with the Society for Ancient
Mediterranean Religions.

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30 kenneth w. yu

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 his
father, Lucien, was a passionate Dreyfusard who eventually lost his life at
Auschwitz. Although Vernant had a different, though perhaps no less turbulent,
biography (World War I claimed his father, for instance), one senses that the
seismic cultural and religious wars that Vidal-Naquet speaks of so searchingly
resounded in Vernant as well, shaping his academic and personal ethos and
fostering what were to be perduring intellectual allegiances.

89

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Recollections of a Witness: Protestants and Jews during the Second
World War in France, in David Ames Curtis, trans. and ed., The Jews: History, Memory
and the Present (New York, 1996), 23754, at 239. Emphasis added.