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The increasing secularity of public culture in advanced societies raises important questions about the nature of secular ideas and commitments and their capacity to act as a cultural glue holding against the centrifugal tendencies of modern life. Emile Durkheim anticipated this problem as early as 1912 in the publication of his last major treatise, Les Forms Elementaires des Vie Religieus The two most plausible secular possibilities to traditional faith in his view were "the cult of science" and "the cult of the individual"-ideologies deriving from twin intellectual impulses of the continental Enlightenment.² Durkheim, in the tradition of Comte, favored the former but he was deeply nervous, all the same, about the ability of either science or individualism to provide a common culture strong and coherent enough to keep an increasingly fragmented society together. It was an important, if not portentous, effort. But the questions remain pregnant with possibility.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-322-96030-6_17

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