Weberian theory and the ideological function of religion.

This article summarizes Max Weber's thought on the religion of social groups, with the idea of extracting some of its major statements. The objective of this article is not to examine Weberian theory as a whole, but to provide the items necessary for understanding the approach followed by the authors in their own research. In the second part of this article, the authors show what this theoretical approach takes from Weber and how the perspective in which they place their analysis forces them to go beyond it. The authors relate that the theory underlying their work on the social functions of religion was initially inspired by Weberian thought and particularly by what Weber develops in paragraph 7 of his sociology of religion. In paragraph 7, Weber analyzes the demand of different social groups: the peasants, the socially and economically privileged classes: the warrior nobility, the bureaucracy, the bourgeoisie and unprivileged groups: the petite bourgeoisie, slaves and farm workers, the modern proletariat. But the authors' research in Sri Lanka and Kerala on the interrelationships between the religious and political fields during the precapitalist period of these ensembles, as well as in the transformation process affecting their structures, were to lead them beyond Weberian theory in an attempt to uncover the objective causes of this expansion.