Robertson Smith,Durkheim, and sacrifice: An historical context for the elementary forms of the religious life

The influence of William Robertson Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites on Emile Durkheim's sociology of religion was profound; and since that 1889 work was largely concerned with the origin and meaning of the institution of sacrifice, an examination of the contemporary literature concerned with that rite is of considerable value in understanding Durkheim's intentions in writing certain portions of the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. The discussion of sacrifice is thus traced with particular emphasis on Tylor, Wellhausen, Smith, Frazer, Hubert, and Mauss. Within this intellectual context, Durkheim's treatment of sacrifice in the Elementary Forms appears a rather unlikely combination of a speculative reconstruction of early Hebrew society, an ambiguous body of Australian ethnographic data, and a reformulation of Kantian ethics. Some concluding remarks are made concerning the value of such reconstructions of intellectual context in the study of the history of the social sciences.