15 October, 2026

Review of Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Yale University Press, 2025).

What is religion? Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Captive Gods explores the different answers returned to that question during the heroic period of the rise of modern social science between approximately 1870 and 1920. Originating as the 2016–17 Dwight Harrington Terry Foundation Lectures on Religion in the Light of Science and Philosophy at Yale University, Appiah’s book operates at several levels. The author defines the work as a ‘conceptual genealogy’ of how the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘religion’ developed as ‘conjoined twins’ (2). As Appiah explains, social scientists during the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries did not see religion as simply one amongst a longer list of social phenomena that might be brought within the compass of scientific analysis – as a modern social scientist might treat, say, advertising, or income inequality. Rather, early social scientists saw the question of religion as foundational to the conceptualisation of society. At its core, the book is an intellectual history of how four influential writers treated this relationship between religion and society as objects of social-scientific study: Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber. But the book offers more than history alone. Appiah, who is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, builds upon the more historicist part of his enterprise, to enquire after the frameworks in which, in the present day, it remains possible for us to speak of religion in comparative or cross-cultural terms. He also makes an argument about the place that religious experience and categories might take in contemporary social thought.

The nineteenth-century science of religion, Appiah explains, grew out of the earlier advent of ‘society’ as a problem for European intellectuals. In the eighteenth century, Scottish Enlightenment philosophers had pioneered the idea that society had an existence beyond the sum of the individuals who comprised it. It also developed in orderly stages. But for these writers, society remained ‘essentially static’, as ‘the cumulative result of individual action shaped by human nature and historical circumstance’ (19). Only in the nineteenth century did ‘analysis of group processes and interactive dynamics’ (19) gather momentum through the work of social philosophers such as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Herbert Spencer. The perception that an older European order was eroding, leaving contemporaries, as the cultural historian Peter H. Fritzsche once put it, ‘stranded in the present’, was a crucial inspiration to the creation of a social science that could make a fragmented present intelligible, and mark out a path to the future. Appiah suggests that the developing anxiety, or hope, that modern society might become secular functioned as a crucial precondition for the emergence of more thoroughgoing forms of the sociology of religion towards the end of the century.

Appointed to Oxford’s first chair in anthropology in 1896, the Victorian anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor was instrumental in making religion an object of social-scientific study in this context. Appiah’s account begins in earnest with him. Tylor’s book Primitive Culture (1871) did much to establish the idea that anthropology as a science should be concerned with ‘culture’, or the tissue of beliefs, customs, arts, and habits that man acquired as a member of society. Victorian evolutionary anthropologists such as Tylor freely used phrases that jar in the twenty-first century – ‘savage’, ‘primitive’, ‘lower races’. Unease over the condescending vocabulary of the time should not blind posterity, however, to the intellectual creativity of nineteenth-century anthropological work. Appiah’s chapter on Tylor makes the sensitive and intelligent point that Tylor in fact believed in the internal rationality of primitive humanity, between which and more modern forms of society he saw deep continuities. Tylor, a Quaker by background and suspicious of ritualistic religions in the present day, developed the theory that primitive religion rested on ‘Animism’, or the imputation of spiritual beings to natural phenomena. For Tylor, primitive religion was primarily a matter of belief in spiritual beings, arising as an attempt to explain natural events in ways that made reasonable sense to primitive experience. As Appiah remarks, there seems to have been a residual Quakerism in Tylor’s identification of the essence of religion with belief rather than ritual. One might detect an egalitarian Quaker tinge, too, in Tylor’s delicate hints that the monotheistic religions of more ‘advanced’ peoples were not so very distant from African or Polynesian belief in a Supreme Creator standing over the great gods.

Durkheim significantly departed from Tylor’s mode of understanding the social nature of religion. Grating against the intellectualist treatment of primitive religion as a kind of early science that he found in Tylor and others, Durkheim instead interpreted religion in terms of its social function, as the force that imposed sanctions and obligations upon societies. Whilst the regulating and controlling nature of religion was visible to its fullest extent in primitive societies, religions tended to become less totalising and repressive, Durkheim considered, as societies advanced. Yet as Appiah recounts, society itself remained dependent for its constitution, in Durkheim’s view, on collective representations and collective effervescences, essentially religious in nature, that bound individuals up with a society’s highest ideals. The division between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ was thus not simply a primitive distinction, but remained a fundamental constituent of social order across time. In modern conditions, Durkheim believed, the sacredness of the individual – ‘in which man is at once the worshiper and the god’ (84) – would be the religion of the future. A French Republican, the son of a rabbi, and in fundamental respects the product of Jewish assimilation in nineteenth-century Europe, Durkheim struggled to accommodate the prospect that cruel and inhuman effervescences might instead sweep the nations of Europe. Following the loss of his son and a number of his academic friends on the battlefields of the Great War, Durkheim would die, as he himself recognised, an internally wounded man in 1917.

Durkheim’s interest in the generative capacities of religion for shaping social order owed a significant debt to his time as a student in Germany in 1886: and German thought plays a major role in Appiah’s presentation of the different readings of the relationship between religion and society. Appiah’s chapter on Georg Simmel – perhaps the least known of his main characters – is one of the book’s particularly rewarding achievements. More commonly associated with the philosophy of money, Simmel was also a profound theorist of religion, owing much to Wilhelm Dilthey’s interest in the underlying differences between the human and natural sciences. Dilthey considered that whereas the natural sciences aim to explain (erklären) natural phenomena with reference to causal mechanisms, the human sciences, or Geisteswissenschaften, tried to understand (verstehen) humans in their concrete cultural milieus. Simmel wanted to locate sociology firmly as an exercise in the latter course, rather than try, with many earlier sociologists, to make the field ape the questions and techniques of the natural sciences. Thus interested in the autonomy of the human spirit and its relation to its environment, Simmel understood religiosity an integral part of the human social condition. Unlike Tylor’s conception of religion as something that explained natural phenomena, or Durkheim’s notion of religion as embodying social consciousness, Simmel viewed religion as a dynamic set of interactions between individual feeling and society, with religion mediating between the subjective inner sense and its socially-bound external conditions.

Simmel’s interest in the way interior experience might expand and solidify, through religion, into particular social phenomena represented a kind of parallel between his own work and that of Max Weber, the last of Appiah’s quartet. For Weber, social science had to start from the single individual as the basic atom of analysis. Weber’s work accordingly prioritised working out the consequences of the historically-specific forms of rationality or rationalisation that followed in the wake of individuals’ value-commitments. By means of the rationalities they involved, inner beliefs and ethical principles gradually externalised themselves in social phenomena, such as the spirit of capitalism. Crucially, for Weber, the rationality of a past belief-system was not the same thing as the social scientist’s own conception of what was objectively rational or otherwise in the here-and-now. Rather, past forms of rationality were particular to their own idea, demanding Verstehen as part of the scientific endeavour. As Appiah observes, for all the historical power Weber identified in rationalising processes, rationality could not itself, for him, take the place of the inner experience that constituted the driving force of a person’s life. Part of Weber’s post-Christian fate was to have remained tinged with a strain of romantic mysticism. There was always something incomplete, an ever-not-quite, about Weber’s and other social scientists’ attempt to bring religion within the compass of rational analysis.

Appiah’s book is organised around a series of canonical authors; but it is much more than a closed-in prosopography of a set of great writers. One of the qualities that makes Captive Gods so illuminating and thought-provoking to the historian is the careful contextual attention Appiah pays to the role of a less famous array of intellectual actors who nevertheless substantially influenced the history of social thought. Wilhelm Wundt, today remembered chiefly as a figure in the history of experimental psychology, emerges as an important influence on the rise of social science. Appiah notes that Durkheim’s interest in how early religion generated rules of social conduct that later acquired an independent existence had a background in Wundt’s Ethik (1886). The French philosopher and sociologist Jean-Marie Guyau introduced the notion of anomie into social science, as a term to denote his idea that individual autonomy tended to grow as scientific explanations supplanted religious rites: a term that Durkheim would rework, and make famous, in the more negative sense of a pathological modern malaise of the breakdown of binding social norms. Future histories of social science should follow Appiah’s lead in reckoning more substantially with the role of a less familiar supporting cast of social philosophers who, though no longer read today as Durkheim or Weber are, nevertheless played a crucial historical role in framing the questions and categories of early social science.

Appiah writes compellingly as an intellectual historian, reading his subjects’ major writings against the background of their complex life experiences and intellectual formations. But he interweaves intellectual history with more philosophical reflection on what the fundamental, yet inescapably shape-shifting role of religion in the history of social science might mean for us today. The son of an aristocratic Ghanaian father, and a mother born into a prominent family of English progressives – his maternal grandfather was a Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer under Clement Attlee – Appiah often draws on his Anglo-Asante background to highlight both the relevance and the limitations of European social science for understanding non-Abrahamic religions. He has a humane appreciation of the role of innocuous rites and stories in easing humans’ way through the world. In keeping with this broadly sympathetic stance towards the permanence of religion as a social force, Appiah draws towards the end of the book on recent work in cognitive neuroscience to suggest that ‘prosocial religions’ (222) facilitate cooperation and reduce conflict within groups. This finding is worth heeding, he suggests, in a context where the ability to trust the stranger remains crucial to civilised life: but where such trustfulness often seems to be endangered by a range of countervailing sources of twenty-first-century anomie. In his concern to find a constructive space for religious sensibilities, within a rational account of society that does not presume the acceptance of any one dogmatic system, Appiah’s interests bear something of a resemblance to the later work of Jürgen Habermas (206–9). As western societies continue to struggle with the problem of how to integrate diverse religious philosophies within shared public spheres, efforts to establish a constructive dialogue between religious experience and liberal orders seem set only to increase in prominence amongst philosophers committed to the defence and renewal of liberal traditions. How successful the exercise will be remains to be seen. But the alternatives currently on offer do not seem especially attractive, at least beyond small circles of ideologues.

Captive Gods may serve as an incisive historical introduction to a major, if sometimes under-appreciated aspect of the history of modern social thought. It will also offer stimulus and insight to anyone interested in the question of the role of religion in contemporary politics and society.

Joshua Bennett is Fellow and Tutor in History at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. His research focuses on the consequences of religion and unbelief in modern intellectual history.