Religion and the Political Imagination

Description

The theory of secularisation became a virtually unchallenged truth of twentieth-century social science. First sketched out by Enlightenment philosophers, then transformed into an irreversible global process by nineteenth-century thinkers, the theory was given substance by the precipitate drop in religious practice across Western Europe in the 1960s. However, the re-emergence of acute conflicts at the interface between religion and politics has confounded such assumptions. It is clear that these ideas must be rethought. Yet, as this distinguished, international team of scholars reveal, not everything contained in the idea of secularisation was false. Analyses of developments since 1500 reveal a wide spectrum of historical processes: partial secularisation in some spheres has been accompanied by sacralisation in others. Utilising new approaches derived from history, philosophy, politics and anthropology, the essays collected in Religion and the Political Imagination offer new ways of thinking about the urgency of religious issues in the contemporary world.

Ira Katznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History at Columbia University and Research Associate at the Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Professor Katznelson has published widely on the history of the western liberal tradition. Gareth Stedman Jones is Professor of Political Thought in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. A fellow of King's College, Cambridge since 1974, he is also Director of the Centre for History and Economics and a Member of the Conseil Scientifique of the CNRS. Professor Stedman Jones has published numerous books and articles on Victorian London and modern European political thought.

'The studies making up the collection are motivated by a shared concern to question the unilinear understanding of secularization which forms the weighty heritage of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber to social theory. In pursuit of this revisionist approach the studies that make up the collection put forward many well informed readings of the understanding and the experience of religion in the collective life of societies. Some contributions fall squarely within the field of the history of political thought ... Other studies in the collection focus on classic historical cases of secularization and the interplay of politics and religion in the life of great imperial polities.' Paschalis M. Kitromilides, History of Political Thought