Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science

by Kwame Anthony Appiah

Overview

Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah explores how early social scientists developed our modern understandings of society through their theories of religion
 
The foundations of modern social science were built on the study of religion, the acclaimed thinker Kwame Anthony Appiah argues. Delving into the intellectual currents of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he investigates how formative thinkers—notably Edward Burnett Tylor, Émile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber—grappled with the concepts of society and religion as interdependent categories. Appiah shows how their efforts to define religion, or evade the task, mark the power and limitations of social thought in ways that persist among theorists today. Religion was not merely an object of study but a framework through which early social scientists established sociology as a discipline.
 
Appiah also examines more recent work in both interpretive sociology and evolutionary and cognitive psychology about the mechanisms through which communities form beliefs and values—while underscoring the enduring significance of these earlier debates for contemporary social thought. Throughout, he intertwines storytelling, historical analysis, and philosophical reflection to show how our ideas about society and culture have been, and continue to be, forged in dialogue with religious questions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300233063
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	10/07/2025
Series:	Terry Lectures Series
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Kwame Anthony Appiah is the Silver Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. His books include The Ethics of Identity, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity, The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, and As If: Idealization and Ideals. He writes the weekly “Ethicist” column for the New York Times Magazine.

Editorial Reviews

An accessible, readable book that exhibits deep erudition and extensive learnedness worn lightly. Appiah has an eye for raising the biggest questions about human nature and social existence.”—Angie Heo, University of Chicago

“In this elegant, witty, and often brilliant book, Anthony Appiah explores the fundamental significance of religion for modern development of the very idea of societies. The notion that there might be many religions to be explored comparatively shaped thinking of societies in similar plurality, exploring how religions gave them distinctive categories of thought and culture, how individuals were shaped by and dependent on these contexts, and what happened when they lost their grip.This is a rich and valuable work for all who would understand religion, social science, and modernity itself.”—Craig Calhoun, Arizona State University and Princeton University

“In this characteristically brilliant and learned book, Anthony Appiah has given us a crucial account of the emergence of disciplines in which we seek to uncover how we form and reform our beliefs and values. It is a stunning and urgent inquiry—a masterpiece of intellectual history—and it could not arrive at a better time.”—Jorie Graham, author of To 2040 and [To] The Last [Be] Human

“In Captive Gods, Appiah builds an incisive intellectual history of theories of religion and society through the minds and worlds of four giants. We see how the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘society’ co-created each other in the early twentieth century. This is an exquisite work of reflection as we rethink those captive gods, thundering in our own time.”—Laurie L. Patton, president, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and author, Who Owns Religion? Scholars and Their Publics in the Late Twentieth Century

From the Publisher

2025-07-16
A learned excursus into the sociology of religion.

Appiah, well known for his contributions to social science, here examines the late-19th-century rise of two of its constituent disciplines, sociology and anthropology, and their treatment of religion. Whereas religion had earlier been largely viewed as all-encompassing, it came to be seen as “more a product of political and social forces than a shaper of them,” just another component of culture. Looking closely at pioneers such as Edward Burnett Tylor, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim, Appiah discerns “a larger disciplinary toolkit emerging from their years of wrestling with religion.” Each scholar took different approaches but helped piece together the earliest dicta on how religion works: among “primitives,” as magic; among “civilized,” as a community-building system (“Religion upholds the norms of a community; magic often subverts them”). Weber would move on to dissecting Protestantism as the driving force of capitalism—injecting himself, Appiah holds, in a “social-policy debate” that found German Catholics in minority settings discriminated against economically and socially. Weber also ventured, daringly, that the isolation of individual Protestants vis-à-vis God served to “advance the economic rationality of collective enterprises.” Reading Appiah’s book, which originated as a series of lectures, presupposes background in the social sciences and their history, but he writes clearly and approachably, with interesting asides along the way (Weber, for instance, introduced into the language the term “charisma” as we now use it and “seems first to have seen charisma as the personalization of magic”). He also weighs how considering religion as a “folk category,” as social scientists do, can be alienating to practitioners: “The propositional content of the Nicene or Athanasian Creed is obscure and perhaps incoherent, but the act of avowing it can matter a lot.”

A lucid exploration of how social scientists have come to approach “the things we hold sacred.

Kirkus Reviews