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The Conflicted Origins of Sociology

Kwame Appiah Anthony’s Captive Gods examines how the founders of the discipline responded to a widespread decline in Christianity in the late 19th century.

The presidential call for “unity” is a bipartisan tradition. After Donald Trump was elected in 2016, Barack Obama urged Americans to cultivate “a sense of unity.” Joe Biden made a “plea for national unity” the centerpiece of his 2021 inauguration, and Trump referred to unity as the theme of both his inaugural addresses. Trump was criticized for his hypocrisy in being so divisive himself, but I take him at his word: The Trumpist fantasy is premised on the creation of a particularly cruel united front in which his foes are liquidated, leaving behind only his ardent supporters. (Indeed, his proud declaration of hate for his enemies at the memorial for Charlie Kirk might as well amount to a call for togetherness in the conservative ranks.)

When discussing unity, presidents will often couch it in religious terms, as if longing to dissolve into some great national oneness. Trump, hardly the most devout figure, presented unity as a Christian ideal at his first inauguration: “The Bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity.” Biden, a practicing Catholic who liked to talk about healing the “soul of the nation,” told the crowd at the National Mall, “Today, on this January day, my whole soul is in this. Bringing America together, uniting our people.”

Unity may seem on its face to be socially and spiritually beneficial, and, of course, nobody should want violence, division, or chaos. It’s entirely plausible, though, that we shouldn’t pursue national unity right now; perhaps we should want class conflict, upheavals to an unjust social order, dramatic outpourings of productive disunity. In the wrong hands, ideals like unity—especially when infused with religious sentiment—can distract from a focus on justice and the material struggle needed to improve our societies.

Sociologists have long studied how religious ideals and sentiments permeate social and political norms. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the discipline was founded by intellectuals who argued that religious impulses had shaped how we organized our communities, the capitalist economy, and much else. Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science, which examines the spiritual kernel present in secular society, focuses on four pioneering social scientists who helped invent the field of sociology: the French intellectual Émile Durkheim, the German philosopher Georg Simmel, the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, and the German social theorist Max Weber. These thinkers proposed that “the social and religious…were inextricable categories,” Appiah writes, interwoven in such a way that hidden spiritual impulses could be found in all aspects of society.

In their personal lives, these theorists came themselves to exemplify the uneasy marriage of the social and the religious. When World War I broke out, for example, Simmel and other social scientists saw the conflict as an engine of “spiritual renewal,” becoming rabid champions of the transcendent unity that the war brought to German society. Nationalist politics met their spiritual hunger for collective ecstasy, as the MAGA movement does for Trump supporters, who see him as a messiah. “When we think about society, we still use their lenses,” Appiah writes of his book’s subjects. What can we learn from the mistakes these men made in responding to their times?

Appiah begins from the premise that sociology emerged in the late 19th century in response to the decline of Christianity throughout Europe. As industrialization, urbanization,........

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