Emile Durkheim’s Project of the Sacral Genealogy of Social Institutions in the Contest of Legacy of the College de Sociologie and Mimetic Theory of Rene Girard

This paper analyses the development of the research program directed towards the building of a sacred genealogy of social institutions, implied in Emile Durkheim's theory of religion. The starting point for this project is Durkheim's statement that religion is not just one of the social institutions, but the primal one, and, therefore, it's core opposition — which is the one of the sacred and the profane — is the primal opposition that structures the cultural order. This statement implies that other configurations of cultural order must be one way or another derived from religion. In our research we analyse, how the conceptual means representing this problematics in heritage of Durkheim himself and in theories of some other thinkers, influenced by him — researchers of the circle of College de sociologie and Rene Girard.