One of the most intriguing aspects of Durkheim's work was precisely his failure to say anything in detail about the nature of the sacred in today's society. The Elementary Forms offered a conceptual language for thinking about the sacred, based on the analysis of "primitive" societies. But when writing about the sacred in the modern world, Durkheim tended only to emphasise the transitional quality of the sacred landscape in his day rather than say anything more specifically about its moral contours.

Despite this, there are still glimpses of important insights about it in Durkheim's work. In The Elementary Forms, he wrote about the national flag as the modern equivalent of the totemic symbol of the "primitive" clan, something for which soldiers would fight and die for, even though the flag itself was merely a piece of coloured fabric. Through allusions such as these, Durkheim showed his awareness of the power of the nation as a defining sacred form of modern life. He never fully worked out the implications of his idea. Perhaps he was too immersed in the sacred project of building the nation of the French Third Republic himself to maintain a critical perspective of the growing cultural power of nationalism in his day, something that only became possible for later scholars like Eric Hobsbawm. But alongside his half-articulated sense of the symbolic power of the nation, Durkheim was more explicit about the sacred importance of individual, human life, writing about human rights as a fundamental moral touchstone of modern life.

Durkheim never developed a substantial explanation of how the meanings of the nation or humanity had become sacred in the modern world. But his own life was clearly influenced by their moral power. During the emotionally charged years of the Dreyfus affair, Durkheim played a leading role in establishing a regional branch of La Ligue des Droits De L'Homme, and as we have seen took a clear public stance in support of universal human rights. Less than 20 years later, Durkheim's activism took a very different tone as he committed the last few years of his productive working life to writing patriotic literature in support of the French war effort. Durkheim's nationalism was still inflected with a progressive tone, and one of his primary objections to German nationalism was that it seemed so hostile and alien to the humanitarian spirit that defined true human civility. For Durkheim, the cause of universal human rights and the success of the French republic were ultimately inseparable, just as they had been for many of the participants in the French revolution 100 years before.

The blending of nationalist and humanitarian moral sensibilities was not merely a quirk of Durkheim's personality. It reflects, more generally, the influence of moral visions of the nation and humanity that have run concurrently through the modern west since the 18th-century. In a sacred landscape in which deference to lines of sacred authority leading up into heaven no longer held sway, new forms of the sacred had to be found which were grounded in the deep conditions of modern life. These were to be found in the idea of moral demands that arose from one's membership of a particular national community or that arose from one's membership in a universal family of humanity. Sometimes these moral demands have been experienced as being in intense conflict with each other – think, for example, of disputes that pit the competing moral claims of national survival and universal human rights against each other, from Palestine to post-civil war Sri Lanka. But equally these moral sensibilities could flow together in complex ways, as they did through Durkheim's own public activism.

Durkheim embodied how the society of his day was not simply in a state of moral transition but was profoundly shaped by the moral currents of the nation and humanity. These moral currents continue to move through our lives today, creating ambiguities about the kinds of society we believe we should create, who we think the moral outsiders of our societies really are, and for the limits of our empathy and generosity.