According to an old saw, the problem of understanding a classic text is above all one of knowing how to ask the right questions. This small piece of wisdom is enormously attractive to the scholar approaching Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912) (hereafter Les Formes élémentaires) - a work that advances two outrageously ambitious theories and at least a dozen subsidiary hypotheses, and whose interpretive possibilities sometimes seem endlessly bewildering. The caution here, of course, is that what is or is not a good question must ultimately be settled, not by the text itself, but by the interests and purposes of the scholarly community. Good questions, in other words, will be those that lead to answers - or perhaps to other and better questions - that are interesting and useful to us. This caveat entered, I begin by asking what seems to be a good question - i.e. What did Durkheim himself consider the most important and distinctive aspects of his classic work? My assumption here is that the effort to answer this question will lead to other questions - some better, some worse - and of course to other answers as well.

On February 4, 1913 - as if anticipating my initial question - Durkheim spoke at a meeting of the Société francaise de philosophie, defending the “two principal ideas” that “dominate” Les Formes élémentaires. The first was what he called the “dynamogenic quality of religion” - i.e. its power to provide, not a speculative source of knowledge, but a real source of action.