ABSTRACT
The very idea of “sociology” has a deep but vexed relationship with theism. I say “the very idea” rather than “the discipline” because Auguste Comte’s original coinage of “sociology” in the 1830s referred more to a political ideology than an academic discipline. Indeed, he advocated a “positive religion,” or “positivism” (Wernick 2001). Under the circumstances, only the advent of the Third Republic in France in 1870, with its removal of church oversight for public education, made it possible for “sociology” to be incorporated into the school system; hence, the six-decade time lag between Comte’s original proposals and Emile Durkheim’s establishment of the first sociology department in 1895. In Comte’s hands, sociology was designed to mark the culmination of a certain sense of “secularization,” whereby religion does not disappear from social life but the basis of worship is shifted from a transcendent deity to “humanity.” This ideal had already taken concrete form in the great architectural legacy of the French Revolution, Le Panthéon, the mausoleum to the illustrious dead of France that still overlooks the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
