Recovering Durkheim's 'Second Program

of Research'
Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey C. Alexander
Massimo Rosati

Abstract: Durkheim's 'second program of research' above all refers to his project as developed in Les formes 6l1mentaires de la vie religieuse. This essay examines how it has in turn been developed and taken up nowadays in the work of Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey Alexander. Both of them are concerned with the centrality of ritual and the sacred as active, constitutive elements not just of religion but of all social life, not least modern social life. However, a key difference between them can be found in the issue of the internal dimension of ritual and of the individual's participation in public performance of this. Rappaport emphasizes some sort of general notion of acceptance, in an effort to open up things and get away from the particular epistemological as well as theological commitments of the idea of belief. Alexander still appears to work with the modernist epistemology and 'Protestant' theology of belief. His project of a new Durkheimian cultural sociology has nonetheless itself opened up all kinds of things, and is one of the most creative and dynamic research programs in sociology nowadays. Keywords: Durkheim; Rappaport; Alexander; ritual; the sacred; belief

Introduction
The field of Durkheimian studies is multicoloured. Even if Durkheim scholars are widely spread around the world, it seems to me that one can basically distinguish three macro-areas of Durkheimian studies. France, where scholars are used to focusing on the Durkheim of the Division of Labour, The Rules of the Sociological Method, and Suicide, and where the Durkheim of The Elementary Forms of ReligiousLife is almost neglected; England, where on the contrary, the most discussed book is the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and - more recently - the thought of some Durkheimians such as Marcel Mauss; and the United States, sharing with England the interest
DurkheimianStudies, Volume 13, 2007: 105-121, Durkheim Press doi: 10.3167/ds.2007.130105 ISSN 1362-024X

Massimo Rosati

in the later Durkheim. However, at least in recent decades, France and England share a more historical, contextualist and philological approach to Durkheim's thought, whereas in the United States scholars prefer a more theoretical and presentist reading of the French sociologist.1 These substantial and methodological differences are quite a mystery to me, and I really feel they should be discussed. However, leaving aside my own substantial and methodological preferences and convictions, what I intend to do is try to discuss, briefly, two contemporary ways of developing Durkheim's 'second program of research', to borrow the expression of Philippe Steiner (1994) Both start from the sociological and/or anthropological study of religion understood as 'the missing key to open all the sociological doors' (Pickering 1984), to state something both supposedly universalabout society in general, and more particular about modern and contemporary societies. I am going to sidestep 'classical', American interpretations of Durkheim, such as offered by Parsons, Coser, Nisbet, and restrain myself to the works of Roy Rappaport and Jeffrey C. Alexander. More particularly, I will focus on their ways of recovering and expanding Durkheim's thought and intuitions, rather than on their reading of Durkheim tout court. I consider their works among the most interesting and useful contemporary ways to recover and theoretically develop Durkheim's second program of research. In my view, they have at least another common denominator, namely the emphasis on ritual as the 'basic social act', the infrastructure of social life (Scubla 2003), a brick of the intellectual building of the Elementary Forms highly reconsidered in contemporary interpretations of Durkheim, above all in a culturalist milieu.

Rappaport's Cybernetics of the Sacred

Ritual and Religion in The Making of Humanity, Roy Rappaport's most significant work, was published posthumously in 1999 as a result of more than three decades of research on the relationships between religion, society and ecology. It has been judged as a 'milestone in the anthropology of religion', comparable in scope to Durkheim, and indeed as the 'first systematic attempt to address the question which Durkheim left unanswered' (Hart 1999: xiv). This judgment expressed by Keith Hart, a colleague of Rappaport's at the University of Michigan, is shared for example by Robert Bellah (1999: 569). As for my own view, Rappaport's Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity is one of the most significant books I have read in recent years, if not the most significant. If the later Durkheim was a very radical thinker, as I believe, given his obsession that religion was the key to the study of (every) society, Rappaport's investigation of the role of rituals and religion in the making of humanity seems to me in perfect keeping with Durkheim's theoretical radicalism. Consequently, I cannot fail to agree with Hart's and Bellah's judgments.'
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Again, according to Hart (1999: xvi), Rappaport 'acknowledges Durkheim as a founder'. I would speculate that he acknowledges Durkheim as a predecessor well beyond the number of pages he dedicates explicitly to the French sociologist. In his five hundred page volume, Rappaport deals with Durkheim's thought directly in eight pages, more or less, partly with reference to the 'categories', particularly time, and partly to the idea of the sacred. However, besides complex epistemological problems that might differentiate Rappaport from Durkheim, a Durkheimian approach is, in my understanding, the central core of Rappaport's project. Like The Elementary Forms - and maybe more than The Elementary Forms - Ritual and Religion is a very complex work, with many ways into it. However, the author himself suggests we read it as 'a treatise on ritual: first on ritual's internal logic, next on the nature of what (i.e. sanctity) its logic entails, truth, and finally, on the place of ritual and its fruits in the evolution of humanity' (Rappaport 1999: 3). Here we have a slight but important difference compared with The Elementary Forms. In my view, The Elementary Forms is first of all a treatise on the sacred, and only eventually does it become a treatise on ritual, at the end recognized by Durkheim as the dynamo of religion, its most enduring element. On the contrary, Rappaport starts with ritual, from the beginning recognized as the central, basic element of religion, moral obligation and social contract, as I will shortly try to illustrate. Ritual is the dynamo of a hierarchy of regulative elements of social life. Regulation - the centrality of regulation is another important similarity with Durkheim - and its relationship with ritual, can be taken as the most convenient thread to sew together the complex fabric of Rappaport's work. According to Rappaport, social life is regulated by a hierarchy of structures, described as the cybernetics of the Holy, encompassed by ritual. It is top-down cybernetics. Its towering elements are the so-called Ultimate Sacred Postulates (USPs), the linguistic and more rational component of the Holy, namely the sacred - the other being the numinous. Rappaport provides a diagram that represents in an oversimplified form the cybernetics of the Holy, but whose logic can also be expressed as follows: 1. USPs sanctify authorities, institutions, and the various forms of directives constituting regulatory hierarchies; 2. The operations of the regulatory hierarchy influence, to say the least, prevailing material and social conditions; 3. Material and social conditions determine to a great extent, or even define, the well-being of those subject to the sanctified regulatory hierarchy; 4. Those subordinate to the regulatory hierarchy, the members of the community, are the congregations themselves participating in the rituals accepting, and thus establishing, the USPs which, in turn, sanctify the regulatory
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hierarchy and, often, explicitly accept the connection of elements of such

hierarchies to the USPs. Thus, the validity of the USP and the connection of elements of the regulatory hierarchies... to those postulates, is ultimately contingent upon their acceptance by those presumably subject to them... -

Prophets not only may challenge the connections of incumbent authorities to the sources of sanctity but may also claim sanctified status for their own injunctions and even may proclaim new USPs. In sum, if authorities wish to maintain their sanctity, which is to say their legitimacy, and to maintain the sanctity of the regulatory structures over which they preside, they must be sure that those regulatory structures remain in reasonable working order and are reasonably responsive to those
subject to them. (Rappaport 1999: 429-430, original italics)

Here it is worth noting a couple of elements that echo The Elementary Forms. First, politics - the main function of which is the regulation of social life - is only one element of the regulatory system, and it must be encompassed in much broader cybernetics, the key of which is religion. That is why Durkheim at a certain stage stopped writing on politics and shifted to religion, according to Lacroix (1981). Secondly, the sacred and the USPs that have a towering position in the regulatory hierarchy are in the end contingent upon the ritual legitimation on the part of the subjects, exactly as in The Elementary Forms. Durkheim recognized and could explain - in contrast with Robertson Smith - God's dependence upon believers, and society's dependence upon individuals. Ritual, as already noted, is the dynamo of the cybernetics of the Holy. And Rappaport's analysis of the formal and structural logic of ritual is the most significant contribution he gave, in my opinion, to the depth of Durkheim's pioneering investigation. To sum up this analysis in a couple of pages would be almost impossible, so I will simply try to outline a few essential points. 1. The definition of ritual. Ritual can be taken to denote 'the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers' (Rappaport 1999: 24). The crucial elements of this very 'terse' definition - all of them analytically analysed by Rappaport - are 'performance' (and the different kinds of performances similar to ritual, such as theatre, drama, play, athletic contexts), 'formality', 'invariance', 'inclusion of both acts and utterances', and, last but not least, 'encoded by other than the performers'. 2. Ritual, among other things, is a tool that communicates messages and meanings. And he distinguishes between three levels of meanings that have particular importance in ritual: low-order, middle-order and high-order meaning (ibid.: 70-72). Low-order meaning is grounded in distinction, as when we say that the meaning of the word 'dog' is dog, dog being distinct from cat. Taxonomies are the usual way to structure low-order meanings.
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Middle-order meaning, on the other hand, is when we find similarities hidden beneath the surface of distinctions, and when we judge these similarities more important than distinctions. Metaphor is the paradigmatic case of middle-order meanings. Finally, high-order meaning is grounded in identity or unity, 'the radical identification or unification of self with other'. High-order meaning: is not so much, or even at all, intellectual but is, rather, experiential. It may
be experienced through art, or in acts of love, but is, perhaps, most often

felt in ritual and other religious devotions. High order meaning seems to be experienced in intensities ranging from the mere intimation of being emotionally moved, in for instance, the course of ritual to those deep numinous experiences called 'mystical'. (Rappaport 1999: 71) In other words, even if ritual as a tool communicates the whole complex of meanings, it is particularly connected with high-order meanings, the ones related to the less rational component of the Holy, namely the numinous. 3. As with Durkheim and other Durkheimians, ritual is conceived as the dynamo of the cybernetics of the sacred. The sacred is renovated but also produced ex novo by means of ritual, as Durkheim wrote in The Elementary Forms ([1912a] 1995: 32), echoing Bergaigne. Consequently, the survival of the sacred (or of the USPs) is contingent upon an individual's willingness to participate in ritual. However, and this is in my understanding a very crucial - and controversial - point, according to Rappaport participation does not imply belief. The genesis and survival of the sacred, contingent upon the performative nature of ritual, implies acceptance, and not belief. Belief is an inward state, 'knowable subjectively if at all', whereas acceptance is not aprivatestate, but a public act visible both to witnesses and to the performers themselves. People may accept because they believe, but acceptance not only is not itself belief; it does not even imply belief. Ritual performance often possesses perlocutionary force, and the private processes of individuals may often be persuaded by their ritual participation to come into conformity with their public acts, but this is not always the case. Belief is a cogent reason, but far from the only reason, for acceptance. (Rappaport 1999: 120) From the point of view of the individual, ritual is important in shaping a performative identity: the subject in ritual is what he or she is doing (cf. Seligman et al., forthcoming). From the social point of view, ritual is essential because it defines boundaries, margins of collective identities: 'participation in ritual demarcates a boundary, so to speak, between private and public processes. Liturgical orders, even those performed in solitude, are public orders and participation in them constitutes an acceptance of a public
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order regardless of the private state of belief of the performer' (ibid.: 121). Ritual, in other words, is a sort of social compass, but it is also essential in order to maintain public order because it creates and strengthens moral obligations. Once again, contrary to modernist beliefs, moral obligation does not necessarily demand sincerity and belief in moral norms. Moral obligations are the outcome of external actions, publicly performed independently from the depth of subjective adherence. As we read: Acceptance in, or through, liturgical performance may reflect an inward state of conviction; it may also encourage 'the mind', 'the heart', 'the spirit' into agreement with itself. It does not necessarily do either, however, and therefore it does not eliminate all of the shenanigans of which the mind, the heart, the spirit, and other 'backstage artistes' may be capable, but my argument, based on Austin's, proposes that although liturgical performance does not eliminate insincerity, it renders it publicly impotent. It is the visible, explicit, public act of acceptance, and not the invisible, ambiguous, private sentiment, which is socially and morally binding. (ibid.: 122) We cannot trust the backstage artistes, society cannot ask for a full lining up of our inner states with social norms, and at the same time society cannot rely upon the 'shenanigans of which the mind, the heart, the spirit, and other "backstage artistes" may be capable'. This is true not only for modern and complex societies, but even for less complex, more primitive societies, as anthropological research shows. Even mechanical solidarity cannot rest only upon common beliefs.' But organic solidarity, and complex and pluralistic societies, cannot be grounded on common beliefs4 : 'Common belief' cannot in itself provide a sufficiently firm ground upon which to establish public orders ... we cannot know if a belief is common, for one thing, and whereas belief is vexed by ambivalence and clouded by ambiguity, acceptance is not. Liturgical orders are public, and participation in them constitutes a public acceptance of a public order, regardless of the private state of belief. Acceptance is not only public but clear ... While ritual participation may not transform the private state of the performer from one of 'disbelief' to 'belief', our argument is that in it the ambiguity, ambivalence and volatility of the private processes are subordinated to a simple and unambiguous public act, sensitive both to the performers themselves and to witnesses. (ibid.: 122) In other words, there is a performative morality intrinsic to ritual's structure': 'ritual establishes morality as it establishes convention. The establishment of a convention and the establishment of its morality are inextricable, if they are not, in fact, one and the same' (ibid.: 132). The relation between ritual, (sincere) belief and acceptance is crucial because it has a deep impact on the reading of modernity and the role of ritual in modern western societies, namely in a culture factually and
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normatively imbued with the values of sincerity and authenticity (cf. Seligman et al., forthcoming). Emphasizing the importance of acceptance as a public, outward basic social act necessary to establish conventions, does not imply the denial of the 'complementary nature' of beliefs: 'Whereas belief, being volatile, hidden and unpredictable, is not in itself sufficiently reliable to serve as the foundation of convention, it is, in the long run, indispensable to the perpetuation of liturgical orders in which conventions are accepted' (Rappaport 1999: 396). The opposition between belief and acceptance, as other similar terms such as ritual and sincerity, law and love, have to be considered as ideal types in tension with one another, more than strict dichotomies (cf. Seligman et al., forthcoming). I would maintain that in The Elementary Forms Durkheim expressed the same idea of ritual, as something that does not imply inner belief and sincerity, but simply acceptance. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Rosati 2005a), this point in Durkheim has something to do with his later mistrust of the cult of the individual, and so also with an understanding of religion less influenced by Christianity and more by Judaism. The lesson of The Elementary Forms, in my view, is more or less the following: if modern societies want to survive and deal with contingency, they must be open to self-reassessment and self-revision. They must be ready to learn what is valid from 'primitive' societies, something that implies scepticism about answers given by mainstream modernity, and in a sense evidenced in Durkheim's own previous works - the cult of the individual, loyalty towards democratic political values - understood for sure as the best available to us, but insufficient to avoid new forms of pathologies. For example, just to mention one element, they have to learn to appreciate more the importance of ritual for social regulation. The lesson of Ritual and Religion doesn't seem to me very different. Both these masterpieces invite us to reflect on the role of the sacred and ritual not only 'then', for the Arunta or the Maring, but also 'now', for us 'moderns'. Both volumes - but I can only touch upon this point now - invite us to reflect in nonreducing terms on the relation between religion and science, faith and reason, thought and praxis. 6 The comparison would have to be much more accurate, given the proximity of the two projects, but at this point, I would like to consider/examine another way of developing Durkheim's second program of research.

Alexander's Cultural Sociology

Differently from Rappaport, Jeffrey C. Alexander dedicated to Durkheim deep and reiterated concern. His interpretation of 'Durkheim's intellectual development' (Alexander 1982, 1988) has been one of the most influential
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Massimo Rosati

in the sociological field in recent decades, for two good reasons. First, as an interpretation of Durkheim's thought in itself; secondly, because his reading of Durkheim has been the springboard for the development of Alexander's own project of cultural sociology, one of the most authoritative current paradigms in sociology.7 However, my interest, in this context, is to do neither with Alexander's interpretation of Durkheim's thought in itself, nor with Alexander's cultural sociology in itself. Rather, my concern focuses on Alexander's cultural sociology as a way of developing Durkheim's second program of research. So I will attempt to indicate a few points that are particularly relevant for me in this respect. First of all, Alexander's cultural sociology can be understood as the heir of Durkheim's later sociology - particularly of The Elementary Forms because their nature as intellectual enterprises is the same. The aim of cultural sociology is that of 'bringing to life those cultural unconscious structures that regulate society' (Alexander 2006c: 20). In other words, it is a kind of 'social psychoanalysis' - the task of The Elementary Forms according to Robert Bellah (1959) - making visible the invisible, 'revealing to women and men those myths that shape their existence, so that they can make new myths instead of the old ones' (Alexander 2006c: 21).1 Alexander defends, theoretically and by means of a plethora of empirical studies, the Durkheimian intuition according to which ritual and the sacred are the 'infrastructure of social life' (cf. Scubla 2003), and he maintains that 'love for the sacred, fear of contamination and need of purification have always characterized modern as traditional life', so that 'only by following a cultural sociological path can we discover how and why it is like this' (Alexander 2006c: 26). In the light of this approach, modern linguistic practices - in politics, but also in every other social sphere - can be considered as embedded in 'religious' meanings, and their performative nature still depends, notwithstanding important differences, on ritual interactions. Alexander's theoretical aim seems to be the reconciliation between the two moieties of the 'cultural Durkheim's camp'. As he and Philip Smith maintain in the introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, the new cultural Durkheim approach splits in two partially different directions. On the one hand, there are approaches that draw on pragmatist and network traditions - and I would add, that maintain some connection with rational choice theories - exemplified by Randall Collins (2001), but also, with a totally different background, by Robert Bellah (2005). On the other hand, there are approaches that derive from semiotics and hermeneutics: 'whereas the former stress how practical action and patterns of human association give rise to group norms, beliefs and solidarities, the latter perspective looks more strongly to cultural systems as motivating and constraining behaviour' (Alexander and Smith 2005: 16). However, as stressed
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in the introduction to Social Performance, 'pragmatics and semantics are analytical, not concrete distinctions' (Alexander 2006a: 5). From this theoretical standpoint, he reflects on modernity and its differences with early societies, characterizing three different positions. There are those who believe that modernization and secularization imply the loss of cultural meanings, 'the emergence of free-floating institutions, or the creation of purely self-referential individual actors' (ibid.: 8). There are those, like Durkheim, who by means of the study of early societies, show the importance of ritual and dramatic performances in and for individual and collective agency. And finally there are those who, jumping from Durkheim's early societies to complex ones, maintain that differences between the former and the latter are only residual. It is against a backdrop, on the one hand, of postmodernists, rational choice theorists and disenchanted cynical realists, and on the other, of 'old fashioned Durkheimians' (ibid.: 9), that he wants to place his sociological theory of performance, drawing first of all on Durkheim, but also right at the core - and to mention only a few - on Turner, Geertz, Goffman (Alexander 2006a: 9-16; Giesen 2006: 324-328). According to this sociological theory of performance, social performances, individual and / or collective, can be analysed on the basis of the theatrical model (cf. Alexander 2006b). Social life, material practices included, can be read as a web of social practices. Every social practice like the structure of social action in Parsons - needs a set of elements: (a) a system of collective representations, namely a background of symbols and foreground scripts, (b) actors, individual or collective, (c) an audience, (d) standardized expressive equipments (Goffman), namely what Alexander calls means of symbolic production, (e) a mise-en-scMne, and, finally, (f) social power, whose distribution affects the social performance. Now, Alexander's central thesis is that what distinguishes early and modern societies is not in itself the performative nature of social life, the universal key role of social performances, but the dynamics of the relationship between the elements of social performances within early and modern societies. In simple social organizations, all these elements are fused together, and ritual is the kind of performance that fuses the components of performance further. Performances in simple societies frequently become rituals because this kind of fusion is still possible. On the other hand, it is also the case that 'fused performances creating ritual-like effects remain important in more complex societies' (Alexander 2006b: 42). This is true, he argues, in a dual sense. First of all, rituallike performances are still possible in relatively simple and homogenous contexts, such as primary groups, i.e., families, inter-generationally stable ethnic groups, enclaves of life style. Secondly, fusion remains the goal of performances even in more complex environments, but here it is a much more difficult goal to reach. But what is in fact characteristic of complex
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organizations is the de-fusion of the elements of performances, and particularly: '1) the separation of written foreground texts from background collective representations; 2) the estrangement of means of symbolic production from the mass of social actors; 3) the separation of the elites who carried out central symbolic actions from their audiences' (Alexander 2006b: 45). Social segmentation, the fragmentation of citizenry, is the main barrier to re-fusing social drama and audience (ibid.: 75). However, even if the contemporary social milieu seems to be particularly inauspicious, re-fusion continues to be the aim of social practices. The possibility of making sense of our lives, individually and as societies, depends on our capability of re-fusing performance (ibid.). Given the above mentioned inauspicious conditions of social performances in complex societies, the success or the failure of performances seem to be related to the audience's perception of the actors' authenticity. Re-fusion is reached when the performance appears authentic, sincere: the attribution of authenticity, in other words, depends on an actor's ability to sew the disparate elements of performance back into a seamless and convincing
whole. If authenticity marks success, then failure suggests that a performance

will seem insincere and faked: the actor seems out of role, merely to be reading from an impersonal script, pushed and pulled by forces of society, acting not from sincere motives but just to manipulate the audience. (ibid.: 75) For example, the inauthentic nature of social performances is the key to understanding disaffection for politics in democratic societies (cf. Giesen 2006; Apter 2006). If complete authenticity is not possible, the actor, a good actor, should be able to adopt an 'as if' attitude, pretending that the scripted situation is the actor's in real life. So, the difficulties / pathologies of our modern societies can be read as the consequence of defective social performances. Re-fusion is a crucial ingredient of social life, notwithstanding rational biases. As we read: from the normative point of view, performative fusion must be unmasked, and rational deliberation provides the means. From a cultural sociological perspective, however, embracing rationality as a norm does not mean seeing social action as rational in an empirical way. Culture is less toolkit than storybook ... Re-fusion remains critically important to complex societies. One must

insist that social power be justified and that authority be accountable, but one must also acknowledge that even the most democratic and individuated societies depend on the ability to sustain collective belief. Myths are generated by ritual-like social performance. (Alexander 2006b: 80) Accordingly, Alexander's conclusion does not seem to differ so radically from Rappaport's, and is perfectly coherent with the lesson of The Elemen114

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tary Forms. But there are important differences that I wish to stress, albeit rapidly. The main barrier to re-fusing social drama and performance, given contemporary inauspicious conditions of social performance, seems, according to Alexander's viewpoint, to be the inauthentic nature of current performances. Here a slogan might be apt, 'no authenticity, no success in social performances' - that is, no successful social performances (ritual-like practices), no meaningful social and individual life, no collective belief and, at the end of the story, no social life at all. In my view, the whole story is very Durkheimian. With a single 'but', that with Rappaport's help should be stressed. The 'but' has to do with the requirement of sincerity / authenticity - that Alexander wrongly, in my opinion, conflates.9 From Alexander's analysis it is not completely clear to me if actors must be sincere / authentic or, as Goffman maintained, must appear sincere / authentic to their audience, in order to make their social performance successful. But more than this, the point seems to me that Alexander thinks of ritual within a horizon shaped by Christian categories. From the Christian point of view (here I am referring to Christianity as our more or less common cultural horizon), ritual is acceptable only insofar as it is the expression of inner subjective feelings. In other words, as also for part of the anthropological tradition, ritual is the external shape of inner feelings. In this context, a discrepancy between inner feelings and external behaviours can be understood as 'hypocritical' or something similar. For Alexander, it is not primarily a normative, but a sociological matter. Ritual, or ritual-like social performances, do not work in the absence of sincerity. However, Rappaport's analysis of ritual's structure shows how, contrary to modernist beliefs, moral obligation does not necessarily demand sincerity and belief in moral norms. Moral obligations are the outcome of external actions, publicly performed independently from the depth of subjective adherence. Ritual can be performed without belief and full knowledge, exactly because ritual creates an 'as if'. Meaning is the by-product of ritual performances. In my view, this is a crucial theoretical junction. As stated before, it seems to me that the relation between ritual, (sincere) belief and acceptance is crucial because it has a deep impact on the reading of modernity and the role of ritual in modern Western societies, namely in a culture factually and normatively imbued with the values of sincerity and authenticity (cf. Seligman et al., forthcoming). Moreover even if here it can be only a fleeting reference - it also seems to me that The Elementary Forms is closer to Rappaport's analysis of ritual than to the 'modernist' reading of Alexander. My impression is that Alexander's analysis of ritual is biased by a modernist and secularist interpretation. The relationship between ritual, beliefs, inner feelings, individual and collective identity is not the same, I suspect, for a Liberal Protestant, a Catholic, a Jew, a Muslim, an Orthodox, a Confucian, a secularist and so on.
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Alexander's model of ritual and of successful social performance seems to be modelled on mystical forms of ritualism - characteristic of the socalled new religious movements, the nature of which is basically hypermodernist. Crucial ideal-typical elements of mystical ritualism are a) the invented and chosen nature of the community; b) the showy, expressive but at the same time weak kind of ritualism; and, above all c) the narcissistic aim of ritual itself, more a technique of the Self than a self-transcending experience. Fusion with the divinity, rediscovery of the 'Olon', is a way towardsintrospectiveconsciousness. Mystical ritualism is a search for fusion, a con-fusion of margins and identities, because it cannot coexist with ambiguity; it has to make social and individual experience as transparent as possible. On the other hand, the movements of liturgical ritualism are towards exteriority more than towards interiority, even if this is not at all insignificant for individual experience and intimacy. Liturgical ritualism realizes intimacy as 'being among others', 'in the hand so of others' (or The Other), more than being with oneself and with an indistinct whole. Intimacy is understood in liturgical ritualism as the outcome of an outward (external,material, visible) movement / effort. Mystical ritualism is a search for fusion, and so cannot conceive of ritual except as the external expression of inner feelings; one must perform even ritual itself in one's own voice. On the other hand, in liturgical ritualism, ritual is not encoded by the performer (see Rappaport's analysis, above), and it must not be encoded by the performer if it has to connect the performer to canonical orders. The aim of liturgical ritualism is not individual but collective authenticity, the sense of belonging to a tradition, of being part of something broader (and deeper) than one's own introspective conscience. Something that can imply curbing one's own feelings, passions, desires; something that can imply an ordinary, almost existential form of suffering.1" The performer of liturgical ritual cannot be the hyper-modern authentic self, nor the modern autonomous self, but a self that recognizes a heteronomous - or indeed a Heteronomous - legislation.

Considering ritualism and social practices as closer to mystical ritualism than to liturgical practices is an error caused by our hyper-modernist point of observation. It is an error, in my opinion, for two reasons. First, because from a factual point of view, not every form of ritualism in contemporary Western societies is mystical (post-modern). How can we take pluralism seriously and at the same time misrecognize the liturgical ritualism of millions of the faithful?11 Secondly, because mystical ritualism runs in the same direction as hyper-modernity and only liturgical ritualism runs against this current, it is only liturgical ritualism that can represent a resource against pathologies connected with the hypertrophied development of introspective consciousness.
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Conclusion
In sum, and notwithstanding particular criticisms, it is the work of both Rappaport and Alexander that in different ways offers the best contemporary effort to recover and develop Durkheim's second program of research. This is an urgent task, for many reasons. As already remarked, the lesson to be learned from The Elementary Forms is that of forcing us to rethink modernity in a self-critical way. On my own agenda, this task implies: 1. The need to reinterpret the trajectory of modernity as the history of the development of the introspective conscience or, in Maussian terms, of the idea of the person. Introspective conscience, in a Protestant-style modernity, becomes the new centre of collective identities, the margins of which are interiorized and almost dissolved (cf. Seligman 1994). Contemporary strains and reactive collective identities are a consequence of this process of dissolution of boundaries and margins. 2. The need to rethink public space, and above all the role of collective identities within public space. A good test is rethinking the idea of laicitd, which needs to be taken up differently from its classical French paradigm. 3. The need to rethink in ways that don't just continue to reproduce the individualization of categories, concepts and experiences, such as evil and responsibility. 4. The need to rethink the role of different kinds of rituals in our contemporary public life, including politics. As Mary Douglas remarked many years ago, Luther's shadows have lengthened in modern life, and ritual became a pejorative word 'signifying empty conformity' (Douglas 1963) - not just in a modern everyday common sense, but also in modern sociological theory (Merton 1957). Rituals seem incompatible with the Iexpressive revolution' of the 60s and 70s that gave life to the value of authenticity (cf. Taylor 1992; Ferrara 1993, 1998). But at the same time they seem constitutive of social legacy, so that it is necessary to address the conceptual junction of ritual, sincerity and authenticity. 5. The need to rethink the necessity of regulation - the old quintessential Durkheimian idea - in both social and individual life, and accordingly, re-echoing Durkheim, the role of intermediate groups and traditions as 'conditions of collective life and of individual happiness'. Massimo Rosati teaches and researches at the University of Salerno. He has taken a leading role in a modern Italian effervescence of Durkheimian studies, and is especially interested in the re-working of the Durkheimian project in modern social theory and philosophy. He has produced the new

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Italian edition of Le forme elementari della vita religiosa (2005), and is the author of Solidarietil e sacro (2002), as well as of numerous articles, in English and Italian, on Durkheim. Email: mrosati@unisa.it

Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. On these methodological differences, see Jones (1977a, 1977b, 1999). On Rappaport, see Messer and Lambeck (2001). As Mauss understood, vs. Durkheim. See Allen (2000), chapter three. Rawls (2004) has claimed that the priority of practices over beliefs is a central point of The Elementary Forms, but also attempts to show that the emphasis on practices over beliefs involves The Division of Labour. So, on the basis of her practices-over-beliefs argument, she can criticize the thesis of 'the two Durkheims'. But her book goes beyond an account of The Elementary Forms, since it contains a program for a general sociology, of practices based on a socio-constructivist epistemological approach capable of analysing contemporary issues better than rival contemporary sociological approaches, all of them based at least implicitly on the prominence of concepts, norms, values. Thus her interpretation and application of his work not only challenges philosophical and culturally dominant tendencies of modern Western thought but contradicts the consolidated image of Durkheim as the sociologist of order, values and shared norms. See Rosati (2005b); however, for a critique of Rawls, see Stedman Jones (2006). Religiously, this kind of morality can be quite easily defended from a Jewish point of view, but also - with more difficulty - from a Christian and Catholic point of view: 'Even the most devout, indeed especially the most devout, sometimes harbour doubts or even voice scepticism concerning propositions expressed in liturgies to which they scrupulously conform, and acceptance in this deep sense has much in common with certain Christian notions of faith. Fehean O'Doherty, a Catholic priest, writes: "faith is neither subjective conviction nor experienced certitude, but may be at its best where doubt exists", and as Paul Tillich has said that faith necessarilyincludes an element of uncertainty or doubt. It is also of interest in this regard that Judaism does not require the devout to believe, for belief is not subject to command. It does, however, demand of them that they accept the law, and this acceptance is signalled by, and is intrinsic to, conformity to the ritual observances that pervade all life' (Rappaport 1999: 120). See Durkheim ([1912a] 1995 429-433); Rappaport (1999: 453-460) For a general introduction to cultural sociology, see Smith (2001). Other possible examples include the essays on death by Parsons (1978), and Parsons et al. (1972). See for example Trilling (1972), Ferrara (1993, 1998). See Wilkinson (2005), Rosati (2005/tr. forthcoming).

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
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11. I consider liturgical ritualism proper more of religious (stricto sensu) people than of secularist social performances.

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