Bureaucracy as Praxis: Toward a Political Phenomenology of Formal Organizations

My view of Durkheim differs from that of Parsons and others who stress the positivism of Durkheim's Suicide and Rules of the Sociological Method. Instead, I stress the writings of theAnn6e Sociologique and the monumental The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. In this I agree fully with Collins and Makowsky (1972: 91), who argue that in place of the old absolutist view of reality 'out there,' Durkheim shows us that the natural world is only a backdrop for the symbolic creations of men and their social rituals.