There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and
reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and collective
ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking
cannot be achieved except by means of reunions, assemblies and meetings
where individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in
common their common sentiments, hence come ceremonies which do not
differ from regular religious ceremonies, either in their object, the results
they produce or the processes employed to obtain the result.13
With the decline of religion, Durkheim suggests that nationalist sentiment and
national ceremonies provide social cohesion. In Professional Ethics and Civic
Morals 14 Durkheim points to ‘a cult of the state’ worshipped by citizens in
which patriotism, ‘the ideas and feelings as a whole which bind the individual
to a certain state’, performs the function of the sacred.
Another location of sacred, Durkheim suggests, is the ‘cult of the individual’.
As the division of labour becomes more complex, society invests more in each
individual, resulting in the individual becoming sacred. ‘Morality would no
longer be morality if it had no element of religion…The respect which we have
for the human being is distinguishable only very slightly from that which the
faithful of all religions have for the objects they deem sacred’.15 ‘Society has