LAI ̈CITE ́F I G U R E 1 2 Jules-Fe ́lix Grandjouan: ‘‘Toujours les idoles.’’ (From Pierre Nora, ed.,
Les Lieux de me ́moire[Paris: Gallimard, 1992], 118.)gogy at the Sorbonne; he was also the first to be sensitive to the mediation between
republican morality and the religious heritage, and to detranscendentalize the idols in the
process of acknowledging this mediation. He thought that Republican morality could not
be entirely derived from an imagined, ideal, universal, but ultimately nonexistant reason.
Therefore, he translated Kant’s idea that reason produces the moral law into the idea that
the law is the product of a collective labor. By doing so, he subtly transformed Kant’s
antinomy of morality into a sociological view of humanity.
In Kant’s view, morality implies, on the one hand, that the law should be produced
by reason. In that sense, the law is given to the subject rather than constituted by it: it
implies heteronomy. On the other hand, morality implies that the subject gives him- or
herself the law: it implies autonomy. In his explanation of Kant’s antinomy, Durkheim
translates it into a slightly different one. At the autonomy pole, Durkheim stays close to
Kant: we cannot think that ‘‘the will can be fully moral when it is not autonomous, when
it passively receives a law of which it is not itself the legislator.’’ But in his explanation of
the heteronomy pole, Durkheim distances himself from Kant. According to Durkheim,
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