ABSTRACT
Emile Durkheim’s work has always been criticized for reifying the social and situating it in an indeterminate zone between actors’ consciousness and positive facts. In this chapter, however, I am not concerned with exploring whether this criticism of the founder of French sociology’s work is justified. My purpose instead is to show that it is possible to retain some aspects of Durkheim’s conclusions about the nature of religion and of the social with types of argument quite different from those he employed. My framework here is that of modern evolutionary natural science and recent understandings of the specificities of the human mind/brain.
