The Sacred and the Law: The Durkheimian Legacy

There is little doubt about the importance of Emile Durkheim’s work and the influence it had on the social sciences. His insights into the realms of normativity in particular remain an inspiring mine of information for theoretical reflection and empirical analyses. While his strengths, as we know nowadays, might not have always laid in systematic arguments, his main concerns have shaped the development of social thought in fundamental ways: the question of changing social bonds and the problem of integration; belief and unbelief in societal values; acceptance and rejection of the law, obligation and rights; inner tensions of normative orders; the problem of aligning the polymorphism of normativities with the polymorphic structures of society – and, hence, the project of normative and social pluralism. The Sacred occupies an important dual position in this context: marking an autonomous sphere of the Holy, endangered and upstaged by processes of modernization, and at the same time a fundamental trait of sociality, culture and normativity in general, thus providing the basis even still for modern, ‘secularized’ forms of collective beliefs. The current volume is comprised of contributions from a variety of disciplinary perspectives dealing with a wide range of topics in the realm of normativity in order to recall these important issues and demonstrate the influence and moment of Durkheim’s thinking on matters of the Sacred and the law.