Eight theories of religion

The title of this entry is also the title of a book by Daniel Pals, a professor at the University of Miami.

Strictly speaking, the first edition, in 2006, was called "Seven theories of religion." Pals has included an eighth, and thus the new title, for the just-printed second edition.

The eight theories, identified by their most prominent theorists, and by the brief explanatory phrase for each he uses as his table of contents, are:

1. E.B. Tylor and James Frazer (animism and magic)
2. Sigmund Freud (religion and personality)
3. Emile Durkheim (society as sacred)
4. Karl Marx (religion as alienation)
5. Max Weber (A source of social action)
6. Mircea Eliade (The reality of the sacred)
7. E.E. Evans-Pritchard (Societies 'construct of the heart')
8. Clifford Geertz (Religion as cultural system).

The new chapter in that lot is the fifth, on Weber.