Stjepan Meštrović and Michel Maffesoli's ‘Implosive’ Defence of the Durkheimian Tradition: Theoretical Convergences around Baudrillard's Thesis on the ‘End’ of the Social

Abstract

This paper critically examines Meštrović and Maffesoli's attempt to understand postmodernity through émile Durkheim's nonrational link between society, religion and morality. Meštrović (1991, 1997) and Maffesoli's (1996) work draws upon this emotional element when attempting to refute Baudrillard's (1983) cognitively focused, if implicit, critique of the Durkheimian tradition. Despite their best intentions, Meštrović and Maffesoli still fail to exploit the partialities of Baudrillard's critique to the full. While both have some appreciation of the link between emotion and religion as found in Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) they, nevertheless, fall short of grasping its full conceptual importance. This leads them to an implicit acceptance of Baudrillard's thesis on the ‘end’ of the social. This pitfall could have been avoided if Meštrović and Maffesoli had built their respective analyses of the postmodern condition on a closer reading of The Elementary Forms. Reading this text alongside those other insights on emotion and social life as contained within Durkheim and Mauss's Primitive Classification (1903) and Talcott Parsons's subsequent writings on the sociological problem of religion, would have helped to distance the work of Meštrović and Maffesoli from that of Baudrillard, and allowed them to offer a stronger and more comprehensive defence of the said tradition.