The uncontested leader of the sociological school in France in 1900 was Émile Durkheim. Three aspects of his work are of concern to us here.

Durkheim was first of all determined to make sociology a science. His models of science were, like those of his generation, drawn from the natural sciences; hence his slogan about treating social facts as things, the search for “elementary forms” of religious life, and the recourse to stable morphologies. Durkheim also maintained a sharp differentiation between his sociology and psychology, a discipline recently admitted to the holy shrine of approved methodical sciences. This led naturally to his opposition to any of the nascent forms of psychology of religion, which all seemed to him to eschew the only possible rational explanation of religion, namely the sociological. The translation in 1906 of William James The Varieties of Religious Experience did not receive much attention in the group of the Année sociologique.

Secondly, the societies he knew and which nourished his reflection were what we might call societies that considered themselves complete. France and Germany believed they had evolved into a classical form and seemed both determined and able to go on as they were, colonial expansion being the only ambition left for the future. Thus he was not inclined to study evolution and social change but rather the mechanisms of stability in societies that had evolved toward their apparent end-goal.