Religion And Politics: Cultural Perspectives (International Studies in Religion and Society)

Religion and Politics International Studies in Religion and Society VOLUME 3 Religion and Politics Cultural Perspect...

Author: Bernhard Giesen | Daniel Suber

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Religion and Politics

International Studies in Religion and Society VOLUME 3

Religion and Politics Cultural Perspectives

Edited by

Bernhard Giesen and Daniel ”uber

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BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2005

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Religion and politics : cultural perspectives /edited by Bernhard Giesen and Daniel Suber. p. cm.—(International studies in religion and society, ISSN 1573-4293 ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 90-04-14463-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Religion and politics—Congresses. I. Giesen, Bernhard, 1948–. II. Suber, Daniel. III. Series. BL65.P7R43232 2005 201’.72—dc22 2005045742

ISSN 1573-4293 ISBN 90 04 14463 3 © Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ......................................................................

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Politics and Religion: An Introduction .................................... Bernhard Giesen and Daniel ”uber

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PART A

POLITICS AND RELIGION: CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES The Transformations of the Religious Dimension in the Constitution of Contemporary Modernities .......................... Shmuel N. Eisenstadt

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‘Axial’ Breakthroughs and Semantic ‘Relocations’ in Ancient Egypt and Israel .................................................................... Jan Assmann

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Politics and Religion from an Anthropological Point of View: An Interview with Mary Douglas ........................ Daniel ”uber and Marco Kaiser

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Religion and Morality in Modern Europe Compared to the Religious Situation in the United States of America .................................................................................. Thomas Luckmann Tales of Transcendence: Imagining the Sacred in Politics .... Bernhard Giesen

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PART B

RELIGIOUS ORIGINS OF MODERNITY Monotheism and Its Political Consequences ............................ 141 Jan Assmann

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contents

The Religious Origins of Modern Radical Movements .......... 161 Shmuel N. Eisenstadt Political Theology: Religion as Legitimizing Fiction in Antique and Early Modern Critique .................................... 193 Jan Assmann PART C

ASPECTS OF MODERN SECULARIZATION Temporal Foreshortening and Acceleration: A Study on Secularization .................................................................... 207 Reinhart Koselleck Secularization: German Catholicism on the Eve of Modernity ................................................................................ 231 Rudolf Schlögl Religion, Philosophy and Social Science: The Rise of Modern Social Science from the Point of View of Conceptual History ................................................................ 249 Daniel ”uber Politics and Religion in European Nation-States: Institutional Varieties and Contemporary Transformations ...................................................................... 291 Matthias Koenig Index ............................................................................................ 317

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The present volume assembles the results of work that a number of colleagues and collaborators have committed over the last six years. It originated from a series of conferences organized at the university of Konstanz between 1999 and 2003 under the label ‘Konstanzer Meisterklasse.’ Our original idea was to provide an interdisciplinary forum where two generations of scholars, graduate and post-graduate students on the one side and master figures of specific academic fields on the other, could join in a mutually stimulating dialogue. Over the span of six years it gave us the chance to discuss some of the most thrilling questions of the humanities with probably the most outstanding and influential representatives within this domain. We thus want to thank not only those participants who provided us with a written testimony of their scholarly force, but also the ‘masters’ who, solely for reasons of substantial consistency, did not contribute to this book. They are Jeffrey C. Alexander, Zygmunt Bauman, Lord Ralf Dahrendorf, Clifford Geertz, Karl Otto Hondrich and Claus Offe. Ever since the first ‘edition,’ the ‘Konstanzer Meisterklasse’ relied on the work and the support of colleagues and institutions that shall not be neglected. Over the years we received a continuous funding by the DFG research center ‘Norm & Symbol ’ chaired by Rudolf Schlögl and the ‘Zeit-Stiftung’. Lord Ralf Dahrendorf has continuously been a source of inspiration and spiritual encouragement. We are also indebted to Dr. Wiebke Ernst, Martin Sauter, and Sigmar Papendick for organizational assistance, to Robin Celikates, James Ingram, and Angela Davies for linguistic assistance, to Matthew W. Miller who polished the language in all manuscripts (exept those by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt), and, of course, to Joed Elich for his patience in waiting for the finalized versions. Finally our thanks go out to all ‘fellows’ who have helped to create the unique social intellectual atmosphere which has turned the ‘Konstanzer Meisterklasse’ into such a stimulating event to look forward to each year. Dec. 2004, Bernhard Giesen and Daniel ”uber

POLITICS AND RELIGION: AN INTRODUCTION Bernhard Giesen and Daniel ”uber The distinction between politics and religion has entered a core position in contemporary intellectual debates. It not only provides a classificatory clue to cultural evolution and, in particular, to the evolutionary threshold that separates tradition and modernity, but it has become increasingly salient in the analysis of contemporary political crusades and violent conflicts: fundamentalism and its terrorist offshoots are commonly related to a breakdown of the boundary that is to separate politics from religion in modern societies. Issues that, for a century, had been removed from the center-stage of public attention came to the fore, and require not only practical action but also theoretical reassessment. Trauma1 and disorientation in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 have yielded a boost of quickly launched publications by self-appointed analysts.2 Few of them, however, knew that they were leaning on issues which had already been raised well before. Exploring the position of religion in modern society is not a recent and unprecedented turn of scholarly interests. Rather, ‘religion’ has been among the most prominent subject matters of sociology since its establishment during the second half of nineteenth century. Durkheim’s study on suicide as well as the venture to explain modern capitalist Western societies against particular historical-religious roots, manifest in the works of M. Weber, W. Sombart and E. Troeltsch, are only the most prominent cases in point.3 Authors like E. Shils, S.N. Eisenstadt, M. Douglas, T. Luckmann, P.L. Berger,

1 We are referring to a newly established concept of collective and cultural trauma. See for instance Caruth (1996), Neil (1998), Sztompka (2000), Alexander et al. (2004) and Giesen and Schneider (2004) and Giesen (2004). 2 See among others Hoffmann and Schöller (2001), Benoist (2002), Neuland, Olivier and Venter (2002), Sauermann (2002), Gökay and Walker (2003), Brunn (2004), Hunter (2004). 3 For a general overview see Krech and Tyrell (1995). It should be mentioned that the career of ‘religion’ on the field of political science tells a distinct story. Even today, ‘religion’ is most often reduced to a side-category. For an overview see Minkenberg and Willems (2002: 6; 2003: 13).

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bernhard giesen and daniel “uber

and R.N. Bellah have continued this classical heritage, and focused on the significance of religion in contemporary Western societies.4 Their research has, however, yielded insights which differ, sometimes considerably, from Weber’s and Durkheim’s presumptions. Luckmann’s reappraisal of the Weberian thesis about the secularization of the modern world is a thoroughly critical assessment of the classical position.5 Speaking in general terms, even in contemporary social science we can face a confrontation between defenders of the secularization paradigm on the one side and so-called de-secularization theorists on the other. The two positions differ substantially, not only in their portrayal of the current global political situation, but also in their evaluation of the cultural roots of modern Western society. In particular, as shall be sketched at least roughly, they display opposite notions of ‘religion.’ An overview of their respective assessments can be helpful in delineating and fixing the contributions collected in this book. Proponents of the secularization thesis agree that, since the beginnings of modernity, religion and politics have been continually disconnected and decoupled on the level of institutions and social structure, as well as in the domain of culture and world views.6 A casual look at the membership figures of Central European Protestantism and Catholicism seems to justify and support this position. Attendance to religious service in churches has been dwindling almost everywhere in Europe. Moreover, confessional divides are no longer mirrored by political party lines. It has even been suggested that science has replaced religion as the warrant of truth invoked by politicians. The new European constitution is to dispense with any reference to religion, and ‘multiculturalism’ reigns as a semi-official public commitment in many Western societies. Functional differentiation rejects politics’ claim to represent the totality of society, as well as religions’ claim to comprehend the totality of the world. Instead, separate domains and different logics are assigned to politics and religion, and their intermingling is regarded as a pathological deviation from the clinically pure pattern of modernity. 4 Shils (1975), Eisenstadt (1968, 1986), Douglas (1966, 1970, 1975, 1987), Luckmann (1967), Berger (1967, 1969), Bellah (1967, 1970, 1975, 1986). 5 Weber (1922: 536–573), Luckmann (1967). 6 This line of reasoning can be traced back, at least, to Comte’s ‘Law of the Three Stages.’

politics and religion: an introduction

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Today, however, this tendency towards a strict separation of religion and politics is challenged from manifold directions.7 The desecularization thesis has spread since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 in the wake of Huntington’s proclamation of a forthcoming ‘clash of civilizations.’8 He held that notably Christianity, as the cases of former Communist regimes had shown, put on an effective vehicle for liberalization and democratization. The return of religious divide and ethnic hatred, however, shaded the vision of a coming “Golden era” of peace and prosperity.9 Soon after the declared ‘end of history,’10 the world witnessed some of the most brutish war atrocities committed in Burundi and Rwanda by Hutu and Tutsi, in former Yugoslavia by Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians, in Sri Lanka by Buddhist Singhalese and Hindu Tamils, in Northern Ireland by Protestants and Catholics, in Israel by Jews and Muslims, and in Kashmir by Muslims and Hindus. Critics of the secularization thesis can also point to the rise of new forms of fundamentalist movements, which have gained adherents among most of the great religious civilizations.11 Along the lines of classical sociological reasoning, these movements are explained as the attempt to compensate for the decay of communal ties, for the anomie and disorientation that came along with modern individualism, ethical relativism and commercialization in modern society as negative byproducts. Thus, modernity would eventually once again give birth to those traditional forms of religion that it set about to replace. Proponents of that view occasionally lament this ‘renaissance of religion’12 as a passing relapse into a dark and bygone period that had been overcome by Enlightenment and science. Against this resolutely modernist stance, which insists on strictly assigning religion to pre-modern stages of evolution, the essays of this volume posit the persistence of a religious or transcendental core in modern societies. While not denying the profound transformations and translations that accompanied processes of modernization, most of the scholars contributing to this volume are skeptical with respect

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For an overview see Gorski (2000). Huntington (1996). Such a hope has been uttered, amongst others, by Weigel (1992). Fukuyama (1992). Marty and Appleby (1991–1995). See for an elaborate account of that thesis Zeidan (2003).


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to the neat separation between, on the one hand, traditional religion which could claim to comprehend the world thoroughly, and, on the other, rationalized, secularized cultures, which confine religion to the private search for consolation in existential crisis. They advocate a more refined and differentiated approach, which discloses the hidden religious core behind layers of secularization and tries to explore the manifold translations and amalgamations between what is commonly phrased as ‘religious’ and ‘anti-modern’ and what, in contrast, is termed ‘modern’ and ‘secular.’ Among others, authors like E. Voegelin, S.N. Eisenstadt, M. Douglas and J. Assmann have revealed the ‘elective affinities’ (M. Weber) between seemingly antimodernist movements and some ideas that are at the core of the Western project of political modernization. Instead of a radical rupture and opposition, they discover hidden continuities and mutual references. Scholars like T. Luckmann, P.L. Berger and C. Taylor have, furthermore, questioned the pervasiveness of secularization by separating religious experience from its institutional forms: religious sentiments are constitutive for any human conception of the world, and therefore modern society, too, could not dispense with them.13 Rather than disappearing with the dwindling practices in traditional churches, these sentiments were taken up by novel, privatized forms of religious experiences that stand beyond the confines of traditional institutional practices of churches. An ‘invisible religion’ (Luckmann) had replaced the traditional ceremonial forms of religious practice. A third major argument against the decline of religion in modern society points at a different direction. Instead of a strict separation between private religious commitment and public political commitment, R.N. Bellah discovered a remarkable merging of religious and secular political principles in the US.14 He coined the term ‘civil religion’ for the peculiar blending of religiously founded ethics and everyday virtues of American citizens.15 This civil religion is not only appealed to by politicians, but also referred to as the central values and practiced unquestionably by the American people. It con-

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Luckmann (1967), Berger (1969), Taylor (2002). Bellah (1967). See Giesen and ”uber (2005) for a more detailed appraisal of Bellah’s thesis.


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tained the ‘heart,’ to use the metaphor Bellah adopted from Tocqueville, upon which the nation was built.16 Invisible religion, civil religion and the hidden religious core of modern politics converge in the claim that religion persists in modern society—although changing its dress. These three concepts sparked controversial debates that cannot be outlined here even in an incomplete and fragmented way. It would be a misleading simplification to assume a consensus or clearly delineated trend resulting from these debates. Not only with respect to the subject matter of religion and politics, but also with regard to its analytical conception we have to admit a bewildering ‘non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous.’ The present volume contributes to the debate about the relationship between politics and religion with particular objectives. First, it exclusively features authors who share a distinctive commitment to cultural analysis as a heuristic for historical explanation.17 All of them focus on the significance of religious, philosophical, or transcendental visions and ideas for the shaping of contemporary social institutions. Such cultural presuppositions of institutions may be dealt with in various forms; for instance, sacred scriptures (Assmann, Douglas), stable worldviews (Luckmann, Eisenstadt, Koenig), or as semantic and symbolic elements that vary their meaning depending on context and sequence (Koselleck, Schlögl, ”uber). Although this volume brings together leading scholars from various methodological paradigms and academic fields, such as phenomenological sociology (Luckmann), comparative civilization (Eisenstadt), history of concepts and semantics (Koselleck), cultural anthropology (Douglas), and Egyptology (Assmann), they do meet in a historical perspective, which is not confined to merely exploring the origins of contemporary society or pointing to their novelty. Rather, this perspective is well aware of the fundamental ambivalence of modernity: what presents itself as modern and secularized may be old religion in disguise, what claims to be anti-modern and anti-rational may be just the flipside of modernity. Skepticism towards the conventional master narratives prevails among most essays. The big divide between

16 International varieties of civil religion are presented in Bellah and Hammond (1980). The German variety of civil religion has been explored by Vögele (1994). 17 Certainly the label Cultural Studies would neither be suitable to sum up the class of scholars presented here nor be approved by even the majority among them.

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tradition and modernity is challenged, and the neat divide between the logic of politics and the logic of religion is questioned. This has a bearing on the basic paradigms and metaphors of change: evolution and progress are replaced by translation and ambivalence. Thus, the common reference of the following essays results neither from a unified domain of research nor from a similar methodological commitment, but rather from what may be called an intellectual attitude towards the modern condition. The book is divided into three sections. The first presents basic conceptions of the relationship between politics and religion. Most of them have achieved a classical status in this academic field and have stimulated research programs, even if they hardly present themselves in a programmatic mode. The book starts with Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s outline of his famous thesis on the so-called ‘Axial Age civilizations.’ Eisenstadt shows that even the contemporary discourse on modernity relied upon particular cultural tensions that date back to the emergence of the ‘Axial age civilizations.’ These tensions were generated by groups of heterodox intellectuals promoting a particular transcendental vision of an ideal society which they sought to install in the mundane realm. In the Great Revolutions since the seventeenth century Eisenstadt detects “the most dramatic, and possibly the most successful attempt in the history of mankind to implement on a macro-societal scale utopian visions with strong Gnostic components.” All these revolutionary movements, according to Eisenstadt, displayed a particular “Jacobin” ideology which assumed that society could, in principle, be transformed through totalistic political action. Thus, the old Augustinian and also heterodox vision of ‘bringing the City of God to the City of man’ was turned upside down. However, the Great revolutions contained also a certain utopian element that was inconsistent with the Jacobin vision. This was the right of the individual person to determine her own fate—be it political or private. Eisenstadt concludes that the tension between these two elements and their corresponding views on politics and humanness has been the prime mover for the modern political dynamics in Western societies ever since. He doubts whether it would be possible even for contemporary liberal democracies to dispense with the primordial Jacobin elements at all. Hence, the new fundamentalist movements appear as just another chapter of the old discourse on modernity.


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Jan Assmann continues the debate about the concept of ‘Axial Age,’ originally coined by Jaspers and A. Weber and elaborated by Eisenstadt to a major research program. Drawing on materials from Egyptology, he argues for a chronological reassessment and a substantive reconsideration of the political implications of the concept. Assmann shows in a compelling way that a “breakthrough into a kind of transcendence” already occurred in the aftermath of the decline of the Old Kingdom in Egypt since the last quarter of the third millennium BC. This “semantic relocation” had responded to traumatic experiences in the political sphere. The consequence was the emergence of personal forms of religiosity, Assmann concludes. The pure variety of monotheist theology, however, appeared only in Israel that had to cope with the traumatic breakdown of the Israeli Kingdom and the Temple. Assmann, hence, finds his conjecture of a link between political trauma and religious innovation confirmed. Corresponding questions are addressed in the interview conducted with Mary Douglas. As a cultural anthropologist she had turned to Biblical scholarship in the early 80s. Struggling with experts of theology not only on the conceptual but also on the substantive level, she eventually came up with highly stimulating and provoking arguments which had not even been considered yet by traditional scholars of the Old Testament. The interview spans from the anthropological interpretation of the sacred scriptures to her conception of the impact of religion and transcendental visions on the forming of social institutions. Thus, classical concepts such as the ‘grid-group’ distinction, the idea of ‘cultural bias’ and of various forms of ‘classification,’ which were at the heart of the discourse on the issue of politics and religion, become resituated from a more general outlook. Thomas Luckmann outlines his phenomenological theory of transcendence and compares the relationship between religion and morality in contemporary Europe and the United States. With a particular scorn for the popular concept of secularization (which he shares with M. Douglas), he conceives of religion and morality as “constituent elements of human existence.” Hence, for Luckmann, assuming their disappearance through secularization is utterly misplaced. Instead, he outlines the transformation of certain forms of religion and morality in relation to changing social structural and cultural conditions. He goes on to differentiate (first) archaic societies where religion was diffused throughout the various societal institutions, (second) so-called

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“hydraulic” societies of the Near East where transcendental visions legitimated the order of society in its totality, (third) those social arrangements where religion became confined to one specialized institution among others, and finally (fourth) the modern era, which gave rise to “privatized social forms of religion” and which had been “erroneously interpreted as the spread of secularization.” The latter process, according to Luckmann, had not simply replaced the traditional forms of church religion, but redefined the general socialstructural and cultural context within which the churches were to coexist with other objectivations of religious experience. Based on this macro-sociological typology, he compares new and traditional forms of religion in contemporary European and North-American societies and concludes: “America gives the impression of religious vitality, Europe of religious decline.” This difference is related to the particularly strict separation between church and state which had prevailed in the United States, unlike in Europe, from the very beginning of its constitution. In both regions, however, the new forms of religion and morality intermingled with the established ones. Against the abiding enunciation of individualism, Luckmann claims that privatized religion and morality is still a matter of social praxis. The final essay in this section introduces a general perspective on the process of secularization. Bernhard Giesen advocates a “transcendentalist” perspective, which assumes that like other domains of social reality “all politics relies on a hidden transcendental reference.” Giesen purposefully does not claim that this transcendental core of politics amounts to religion in the strict sense of the term, but still holds that politics rests on a conception of the ‘sacred.’ He outlines four archetypal figures in imagining this transcendental reference: ‘deviance’ as embodied in the figure of the ‘perpetrator,’ the ‘sovereign constitution’ of order as imagined in the figure of the ‘hero,’ the ‘epiphany’ of meaning mediated by the figure of the ‘prophet,’ and finally the ‘void’ of meaning as experienced by the ‘victim.’ These figures of transcendence are related to distinct historical scenarios that, by particular social carriers and their mode of discourse, construct “tales of transcendence.” He goes to show that the promotion of one particular tale of transcendence usually went along with devaluating or even demonizing other ones. Thus, the charismatic rule of the sovereign prince was demonized by the principled rule of the impersonal law which did not allow for exceptions and personal privilege. Likewise, Giesen argues the positivism and immo-


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bility of legalist rule was, in its turn, put under pressure by the collective epiphany of reason as revealed by the public discourse of the Enlightenment. From a postmodern perspective the progress towards a ‘perfect society,’ as promoted by the collective epiphany of reason, is disclosed as producing victims. Thus, the pursuit of total perfection is converted into its opposite: the void of suffering and death. The second section of the book continues the theme of ancient roots of contemporary linkages between religion and politics. Again skepticism about the impact of secularization prevails. Discontinuity and ruptures in the relationship between religion and politics are by no means denied but they are discovered more in ancient history than in the more recent process of secularization. Jan Assmann presents the “Mosaic distinction” as one of the most important cultural breakthroughs that went along with the advent of monotheism. While the polytheism of the sacrificial cults allowed for the coexistence of different religions, the Mosaic distinction separates between ‘true,’ ‘good,’ and ‘just’ religion on the one hand and the ‘false,’ ‘bad,’ and ‘unjust’ on the other. According to Assmann, it gave rise to “a totally new form of religion” and bore a new type of violence that was directed against all those who, in the light of that distinction, appeared as enemies of God. Hence, for the first time it became legitimate and even mandatory to go to war for genuinely religious reasons. Assmann concludes: “Monotheism requires a zealous attitude.” Anticipating potential objections, Assmann claims the merit of serious reflection when dealing with the implications of monotheism, rather than hinting at the metaphoric character of biblical phrasings and ignoring their negative power. Pointing to the persistence of the Mosaic distinction in modern Islam, Judaism and post-Christian secularism, he calls for a “resolute de-demonization of the other.” Although arguing from a different perspective, Eisenstadt’s second contribution to the volume arrives at conclusions that come close to Assmann’s position. Both agree in interpreting the new fundamentalist form of religion as offspring of early modern movements. Eisenstadt, too, assumes that the impact of religion on contemporary collective identities and global politics had not been weakened in the course of modernization, but, instead, that religious nationalethic components have reappeared vigorously in the centers of national and international politics. Eisenstadt is interested in analyzing the similarities and dissimilarities between the new religious programs

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and the Western project of modernization. Most of the fundamentalist movements strive for cultural autonomy and constructions of collective identity which go beyond the confines of the modern national and revolutionary state. Eisenstadt reminds us that such ambitions were not novel phenomena, but were already prevalent during the heyday of the constitution of modern nation-states. Nevertheless, it would be unbecoming to ignore and disregard the genuinely innovative and groundbreaking elements in the contemporary religious movements: they strive for a mode of social integration that would be incompatible with the traditional concept of society, they claim a modern restructuring of the public sphere and use new modes of symbolic representation, and they redefine citizenship in an inclusive way. Instead of declaring the ‘end of history’ or the decline of the modern era, Eisenstadt explores the similarities between the new religious movements and the Jacobin and Communist movements. He concludes that “all these movements do not signal a retreat from modernity but rather attempt to interpret it in new ways.” The section closes with another essay by Jan Assmann. In this contribution, the Egyptologist leaves the confines of his original academic field to trace back the classical conception of religion as ‘ideology,’ i.e. as an instrument at the service of the power-holders. His investigation spans classical Greek and Roman ideas as well as early modern and contemporary variants of critique of religion. On the basis of a close reading of momentous sources of assorted descent, he eventually derives at least five distinct positions concerning the political function of religion. Although they all converge in a skeptical or decisively critical attitude towards political theology and political religion, they differ in what they conceive of as ‘truth’ and ‘legitimate’ religion. The most radical and at the same time most ancient attitude is assigned to the play Sisyphos, presumably authored either by Critias or Euripides. It held that religion in toto was political fiction. Less radical positions, represented for instance by Polybios, presumed that a true and legitimate religion existed alongside of ‘false’ ‘popular’ religion. The Spinozistic tradition maintained ‘natural’ religion in opposition to ‘revealed’ religion as legitimate. An opposite view was purported by Alexander Ross and William Warburton in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, who declared pagan religion to be illegitimate and biblical theology to be valid. Finally, with Schiller we meet with the modern tradition that dis-


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closes religion as a mere illusion. Marx, Bakunin, and Freud were the most prominent proponents of this conception. Here, political theology is rendered into an exclusively polemical term. A somewhat peculiar case is presented by Carl Schmitt, who applied the term “political religion” to a critique of politics. The final section deals with semantic, intellectual and institutional aspects of secularization as it developed in Central Europe since the seventeenth century. Instead of revealing a hidden religious core beneath the surface of secularization, the essays of this section converge to underline the discontinuity and novelty that secularization brought about. Reinhart Koselleck’s ‘Study on secularization’ spotlights a dimension that has not been granted great attention so far: the basic temporal structures assumed in different historical periods. He compares the medieval theological conception of time on the one hand with the perception of modern times (‘Neuzeit’) on the other. In contrasting the Christian apocalyptic notion of ‘temporal foreshortening’ as a sign of the end of the world to the modern concept of ‘acceleration,’ he raises the question whether the modern idea of temporal acceleration had to be interpreted as a secularization of Christian theological concepts. Assessing a vast amount of historical material, Koselleck finally rejects this conjecture. Despite some semantic similarities, the modern concept of historical acceleration cannot be deduced from theological premises. Instead, the modern perception of acceleration was induced by technical and industrial innovations, which had left blatant imprints on everyday life. Thus, in a modern context, temporal foreshortening was not related to divine providence but produced by human action. Symptomatically, since modern times the historical process in general was held as a realm entirely devoid of any metaphysical force. The second essay in this section, authored by the historian Rudolf Schlögl, focuses on institutional and social structural aspects of the process of secularization in Germany between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. He questions interpretations that underrate the impact of secularization by simply pointing to the changing function of religion in the transition from the ancien regime to modern civil society. While the Catholic church had continued to be a sovereign state-like unit within the Holy Roman Empire, it was, after its decline, deprived of all its former state-like qualities and reduced to the legal

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status of ‘one corporation among others.’ Additionally, the Catholic church was gradually transformed into an efficient episcopal organization based on principles of bureaucratic organization. Schlögl considers the integration of the church members into the traditional confessional forms to be the central problem of German Catholicism since the nineteenth century. Because individual piety on the one hand and church membership on the other were moving apart, new forms of observance and ministry gained genuine social salience and religious meaning. Thus secularization had changed the religious practices and attitudes in nineteenth century Germany. Applying a similar conceptual perspective as Koselleck, Daniel ”uber examines the process of ‘scientization of knowledge’ from the late eighteenth century until the emergence of the social sciences. He tells the story of the rise and decline of German Idealism and thus lays bare the theological-philosophical roots of modern human and social science. Originally intertwined and conflated with theological ambitions, science was turned into a secular and autonomous endeavor devoid of political and religious commitments. Focusing on quasi-theological notions, such as Hegel’s ‘Spirit,’ Dilthey’s ‘life,’ and ‘culture’ as promoted by various strands of neo-Kantianism, ”uber marks the stepwise evolution of this genuinely modern concept of ‘science.’ Against the contemporary history of science, ”uber discloses the philosophical impetus driving the epistemological writings of the founding-fathers of modern sociology. Simmel, Weber, and Mannheim, in the same way as their philosophical forerunners, were striving for a theoretical solution of the ‘crisis of knowledge.’ The latter was due to the lacking theory of historical knowledge which Dilthey and Rickert had failed previously to provide. Thus the sociological classics, deliberately and in opposition to the majority of philosophers, rejected any theoretical foundational system that would rest on nonempirical, transcendental ‘super-categories.’ Finally, Matthias Koenig examines the changes in the relation between politics and religion in contemporary Western societies on an institutional level by focusing on Britain, France, and Germany. Discussing several concepts of secularization prevalent in social science, he argues for a conceptual perspective that would allow for a recognition of such institutional frame-works like the nation-state and, thus, go beyond a depiction of religion as an autonomous social fact. He goes to remonstrate that the resurgence of religion on an individual as well as global-political level has to be explained from “the


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nation-state’s loss of charisma and, more precisely, of a structural decoupling of statehood, national identity, and individual rights.” References Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al. (2004). Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bellah, Robert N. (1967). “Civil Religion in America.” In: Daedalus 96, 1: 1–21. ——. (1970). Beyond belief. Essays on religion in a post-traditional world. New York: Harper & Row. ——. (1975). The broken covenant. American civil religion in a time of trial. New York: Seabury Press. ——. (1986). Habits of the heart. Individualism and commitment in American life. New York: Harper & Row. Bellah, Robert N. and Phillip E. Hammond (1980). Varieties of civil religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Benoist, Alain De (2002). Die Welt nach dem 11. September. Der globale Terrorismus als Herausforderung des Westens. Tübingen: Hohenrain. Berger, Peter L. (1967). The sacred canopy. Elements of a sociological theory of religion. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. ——. (1969). The social reality of religion. London: Faber. Brunn, Stanley D. (2004). 11 September and its aftermath. The geopolitics of terror. London: Frank Cass. Caruth, Cathy (1996). Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Douglas, Mary (1966). Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. ——. (1970). Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology. London: Barrie and Rockliff. ——. (1975). Implicit Meanings. Essays in Anthropology. London: Routledge. ——. (1987). How Institutions Think. London: Routledge. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (1968). The Protestant ethic and modernization. A comparative view. New York: Basic Books. ——. (1986). The Origins and Diversity of Axial-Age Civilizations. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Fukuyama, Francis (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York: Free Press. Giesen, Bernhard (2004). Triumph and Trauma. Boulder: Paradigm. Giesen, Bernhard and Christoph Schneider (2004). Tätertrauma. Nationale Erinnerungen im öffentlichen Diskurs. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag Konstanz. Giesen, Bernhard and Daniel ”uber (2005). “Bellah, Robert N.” In: Ritzer, George (ed.): Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Vol. 1. Thousand Oakes: Sage. 49–50. Gökay, Bülent and R.B.J. Walker (2003). 11 September 2001. War, terror, and judgement. London: Frank Cass. Gorski, Philip (2000). “Historicizing the Secularization Debate.” In: American Sociological Review 65: 138–167. Hoffmann, Hilmar and Wilfried F. Schoeller (2001). Wendepunkt 11. September 2001. Terror, Islam und Demokratie. Köln: DuMont. Hunter, Shireen (2004). Strategic developments in Eurasia after 11 September. Portland, Or.: Frank Cass. Huntington, Samuel P. (1996). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Krech, Volkhard and Hartmann Tyrell (eds.) (1995). Religionssoziologie um 1900. Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag.

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Luckmann, Thomas (1967). The invisible religion. The problem of religion in modern society. New York: Macmillan. Marty, Martin E. and R. Scott Appleby (1991 a). The Fundamentalism project. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (1991 b). Fundamentalisms observed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (1992). The glory and the power. The fundamentalist challenge to the modern world. Boston: Beacon Press. ——. (1995). Fundamentalisms comprehended. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (1993 a). Fundamentalisms and society. Reclaiming the sciences, the family, and education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——. (1993 b). Fundamentalisms and the state. Remaking polities, economies, and militance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Minkenberg, Michael and Ulrich Willems (2002). “Neuere Entwicklungen im Verhältnis von Politik und Religion im Spiegel politikwissenschaftlicher Debatten.” In: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 42–43: 6–14. ——. (2003). “Politik und Religion im Übergang. Tendenzen und Forschungsfragen am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts.” In: Minkenberg, Michael and Ulrich Willems (eds.). Politik und Religion. Sonderheft 33 der Politischen Vierteljahresschrift. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. 13–41. Neil, Arthur (1998). National Trauma and Collective Identity. Armonk, NY: Sharpe. Neuland, E.W., Gerrit Olivier and Daniel Johannes Venter (2002). 11 September 2001. Strategic implications of the World Trade Centre attack. Pretoria: Protea Book House. Owen, Roger (2004). State, power and politics in the making of the modern Middle East. New York: Routledge. Sauermann, Ekkehard (2002). Neue Welt Kriegs Ordnung. Die Polarisierung nach dem 11. September 2001. Bremen: Atlantik. Shils, Edward (1975). Center and periphery. Essays in macrosociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sztompka, Piotr (2000). “Cultural Trauma: The Other Face of Social Change.” In: European Journal of Social Theory 3: 449–466. Taylor, Charles (2002). Varieties of religion today. William James revisited. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Vögele, Wolfgang (1994). Zivilreligion in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlags-Haus. Weber, Max (1922). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. Tübingen: Mohr. Weigel, George (1992). The Final Revolution. The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism. New York: Oxford University Press. Zeidan, David (2003). The resurgence of religion. A comparative study of selected themes in Christian and Islamic fundamentalist discourses. Leiden: Brill.

PART A

POLITICS AND RELIGION: CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVES

THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION IN THE CONSTITUTION OF CONTEMPORARY MODERNITIES* Shmuel N. Eisenstadt I A far-reaching resurgence or reconstruction of religions is taking place in the contemporary world. This resurgence is manifest, among others, in the rise of new religious, especially fundamentalist and communal-national movements, in the crystallization of new diasporas with strong religious identities, as well as far-reaching transformations of the major religious components in the constitution of contemporary collective identities and public arenas. The central focus of such reconstruction or reconstitution of the religious dimension is the transposition thereof from private or secondary public spheres into the various political and cultural arenas and in the central frameworks of collective identities of many societies, thus greatly transforming the basic premises of the classical nation—and revolutionary state. This resurgence of religion does not entail a simple return of some traditional forms of religion, but rather a far-reaching reconstitution of the religious component in new modern settings which transcends the vision of the ‘classical’ cultural and political program of modernity and of the model of the modern nation-state. In the first stages of the crystallization of the post WWII states and societies, it seemed as if several aspects of the religious development in modern societies which were usually stressed in the literature and which were often seen as heralding the continual secularization of modern societies—namely, first, the growing differentiation and specialization of the religious sphere in the modern world, this sphere having become just one institutional and semantic sphere, among many others; second, the weakening or loss of the predominant place * The research on which this article is based has been helped by a grant from the Thyssen Foundation.

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shmuel n. eisenstadt

of religion in the modern world view as compared to earlier periods; and, third, the growing de-ritualization both of central public as well as of private life—became predominant. Truly enough, in terms of some of the basic structural trends to growing differentiation and specialization of religious organizations and activities, as distinct from other arenas of social life, these predictions have seemingly been on the whole borne out. Yet, in fact the relation between the development of these different dimensions or components of religion has been very complex. There developed a rather paradoxical situation, or rather a paradoxical combination of growing privatization of religion through weakening of the hitherto dominant religious organizations and institutions, yet connected with the development of, first, more intensive private religious orientations and sensibilities, and, second, with a growing permeation of religion in the public spheres of their respective societies. All these developments did not give rise to most, or at least to many, of the results predicted or feared in the literature on “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) (Weber),1 indeed to continual secularization. Above all, they have not given to the total disappearance of orientations to the transcendental realm. All these developments did not necessarily denote the disappearance of strong transcendental orientations from the cultural and political panorama. Rather, what has happened was the development of a multiplicity of orientations to the transcendental realm, focusing in different ways on different arenas, thus often giving rise to new religious sensibilities. Such sensibilities have become most visible in the various new role enclaves, as well as in the multiple attempts at finding new definitions of different dimensions of ontological reality. Closely related to these processes has been the transformation of the utopian dimensions or orientations that were predominant in modern societies—whether the totalistic Jacobin utopian orientations that were characteristic of many of the revolutionary movements, or the more static utopian visions which promulgated a flight from various constraints of modern society, presenting an unattainable model of the good society—a model which could be tried out in small, isolated communities or utopian components. There took place a very important shift in the focus of the transcendental and utopian ori1 See Luckmann (1963); Berger (1967); Hadden and Shupe (1989); Casanova (1994); Asad (2003); Fubini (2003).

the transformations of the religious dimension

19

entations predominant in these societies from the construction of modern centers to more heterogeneous or dispersed arenas, often various multicultural and postmodern directions. Thus, there developed, first, a growing multiplication and privatization of religious or transcendent visions and the enhancement of possibilities of choice, by individuals and groups, between such visions; of growing differentiation between different institutional spaces as bearers of such visions, with utopian orientations becoming focused on a search for some creativity or authenticity within multiple dispersed institutional settings, connected with a growing trend to much more diversified, multicultural orientations; and in growing tendencies to new reflexivity within the religious groups; and, finally, a general tendency to the disestablishment of religious institutions and organizations. However, these developments did not necessarily give rise to the disappearance of religion from the public arenas of their respective societies and in the constitution of collective identities. In fact, they were closely connected with the second major trend of development of the relations between religion and the broader social setting— namely with the reentering, as it were, of religion, and very forcibly, into these areas. Indeed, one of the most important developments in the constitution of the political arenas and collective identities on the contemporary scene—attendant on the weakening of transformation of the nation and revolutionary scene—has been the ‘resurgence’ of the religious, as well as national-ethnic components, their move, as it were, into the centers of national and international political activity and in the constitution of collective identities; at the same time changing greatly the relations between the local and the global as well as the relations between overall, grand narratives and more localized— whether in spatial or temporal terms—of such visions. Religion has indeed acquired a prominent, in some cases even central role on the contemporary national and international scene. These changes in the religious arena were closely connected with far-reaching internal developments within all the major religions in their relations to the political formations and arenas and the constitution of collectivities and collective identity.2 In all the major religions there developed attempts to reformulate the relations between

2

See Eisenstadt and Giesen (1995).

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different dimension of religion—the transcendental, the cosmological, the institutional-organizational ones; the structure of authority and that of the individual religious sensibilities and orientations. Concomitantly, there developed within the major religions growing emphasis on their inherent internal authentic universalisms as being independent of, or distinct from—even if interwoven with—the universal orientations of programs of modernity as embodied in the nation or revolutionary state; the resurgence of trans-state religious organizations and a far-reaching shift in the modes of confrontation of the religious groups and their tendencies with the different political and secular institutions. II All these developments were most fully manifest in the growing power of fundamentalist movements and regimes throughout the Muslim world, among many Protestant groups in the U.S.; of communal religious movements in India and in some Buddhist societies,3 and promulgated strong anti-modern, or, to be more precise, anti-Enlightenment ones—and some of them also strong anti-Western themes. Although these movements developed above all in the non-Western societies—especially the fundamentalist ones in different Muslim societies—and the communal religious ones—in the Hinduist and Buddhist ones, they became also visible in Europe and especially in the U.S. where indeed the first modern fundamentalist—Protestant—movements developed already towards the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.4 Concomitantly, there developed in many societies new social sectors—especially new types of diasporas and minorities—which crystallized in the contemporary world in the identity of which the religious component was of great importance. The best known among such diasporas are the Muslim one or ones—especially in Europe and to some extent in the U.S. Parallel developments, yet with significant differences, are to be found among the Chinese and possibly

3

Eisenstadt (1999); Marty and Appleby (1991, 1993, 1994, 1995). See Munson (1998); Burns (1996); Tessa and De Silva (1998); Hansen (1999); Caplan (1995). On modern protestant fundamentalism see Appleby (1997); Brouwer; Gifford and Rose (1996). 4


21

Korean ones in East Asia, the U.S. and also in Europe, as well as among Jewish communities especially in Europe. The new types of minorities that we refer to are best illustrated by the Russian ones in some of the former Soviet Republics—especially in the Baltics and in some of the Asian ones; and for instance such as the Hungarian ones in the former East European Communist states.5 These movements and sectors promulgated demands for growing cultural autonomy for the newly emerging local, regional, and transnationalcultural spaces and conceptions of collective identity—in general in the directions of postmodernity and multiculturalism far beyond the premise of the modern nation- and revolutionary state. Truly enough, even in the period of the presumed hegemony of this model, there existed, even if often in subdued and subterranean ways, a much greater variety and heterogeneity of collective identities than was presumed in the homogenizing models of the nationstate. Regional, ‘cultural,’ religious, linguistic identities and cultural space did not disappear—and they were naturally stronger in those societies like for instance England6 where multi-faceted patterns of collective identity prevailed, or in societies like France7 or the Scandinavian countries8 with their strong secular homogenizing premises. In other societies such as Imperial Germany,9 they could become foci of political contestation. Closely related was the continual reconstruction of seemingly romantic or esoteric or mystic modes of cultural experience. But however strong these variegated patterns were, during the heydays of the constitution of nation- and revolutionary states most of these identities—with the partial exception of the religious, especially the Catholic and to a smaller extent the Jewish ones—were in a way marginalized from the central public domain or arena. They were relegated to the private domain and at most accepted semipublicly in a very limited way. They did not constitute major components of the central cultural and political program as promulgated by the central socializing agencies of the nation- or revolutionary state—such as the educational system, the army and the different

5 6 7 8 9

Malia (1994); Müller (1995); King (2002); Kurtz and Barnes (2002). Thomas (1978); Thomson (1943, 1951). Bien and Grew (1978). Dovring (1978); Graubard (1986); Stein (1975). Gillis (1971, 1978); Hamerow (1958, 1969); Craig (1955).


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mass-media (newspapers and popular books) and of radio and television later on. For the most part, they did not constitute the central pivot of the defining of formal membership in the nation-state— namely of citizenship, and of the various entitlements attendant on the acquisition of citizenship. Similarly, in this period the ideological cultural and institutional relations between various immigrant communities with their mother countries were to a very large extent mediated by the images of the new nation-state and by its model of citizenship presumably based on universalistic homogeneous criteria. Contrary to many implicit liberal assumptions, citizenship was never culture-blind or culturally neutral. Citizenship usually entailed the participation in a distinct community or nation and the acceptance of, at least, some of its ways of life and collective identities. But such ways of life and identities were usually defined in terms of the homogenizing premises of the nation or revolutionary state and of the ‘civilizing’ process or program of modernity,10 and of the visions of modernity connected with it, as well as with the ideal human type, the ideal ‘civilized person,’ as the bearers of the civilizing processes and with the master historical and ontological narratives of modernity, especially of ‘progress of reason,’ or as in the Romantic versions which shared the developments of the distinct cultural features of different collectivities. But the demands of the new movements and settings went far beyond these ‘original’ premises of the nation- and revolutionary state. These demands entailed far-reaching changes in the constitution of collective identities and of political arenas and activities. The common denominator of many of these new movements and settings is that they do not see themselves as bound by the strong homogenizing cultural premises of the classical model of the nationand revolutionary state, especially by the places allotted to them in the public spheres of such states. It is not that the new social movements or sectors do not want to be ‘domiciled’ in their respective countries. Indeed, part of their struggle is to become so domiciled, but on rather new, as compared to classical models of assimilation, terms. They aim to be recognized in the domestic public spheres, in the constitution of the civil society in relation to the state as culturally distinct groups, and not to be confined only to the private sphere. Moreover they do also make claims, as illustrated among 10

Elias (1978–1982).


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others in the recent debate about laïcité in France, for the reconstruction, both, of new public spaces as well as the reconstruction of the symbols of collective identity of their respective societies. They entailed the transposition of most such hitherto subdued identities—albeit naturally in a highly reconstructed way—into the centers of their respective societies and into the international arenas, contesting the hegemony of the older homogenizing programs of modernity or claiming their own autonomous places in the central symbolic and institutional spaces of their respective societies—be it in educational programs, in public communications and media. Very often they are making also far-reaching claims with respect to the redefinition of citizenship and of rights and entitlements connected with it, all of which went indeed far beyond the classical models of the nation- and revolutionary state.11 These developments posit far-reaching claims to the redefinition of citizenship and the rights and entitlements connected with it; for the construction of new public spaces and for the reconstruction of the symbols of collective identity promulgated in their respective states. They gave rise to strong tendencies to the redefinition of boundaries of collectivities and of new ways of combining local and global, trans-national or trans-state orientations. In many of these movements, as well as among many of the new diasporas or new minorities, the local and the trans-national orientations, often combined in universalistic themes, were often brought together in new ways. Thus, while many of these new collective identities have emphasized local or particularistic themes against the homogenizing universalistic premises of the nation- and revolutionary states, at the same time many of them also promulgated broader, i.e. trans-national or trans-state, identities—often couched in universalistic terms and going beyond those of the nation-state, such as new European ones; or those rooted in the great religions—Islam, Buddhism, even different branches of Christianity—reconstructed in modern ways.12 In this trans-national capacity, the new social movements have also become active on the arena of world politics. Many of the separatist, local, or regional settings, as well as for instance the ecological movements, develop direct connections with trans-national frameworks 11

Evans, Rüschemeyer and Skocpol (1985); Giddens (1987); Tilly (1992); Soysal (1994). 12 Eickelman (1993); Piscatori (1987); Male“eviÆ and Haugaard (2002).

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and organizations such as the European Union. Concomitantly, the various religious, especially fundamentalist movements—Muslim, Protestant, Jewish—rose to prominence on the international scene through the utilization of intensive social networks of an intra-religious or inter-religious character. III These far-reaching changes, decline or transformation of the ideological and institutional premises of the modern nation—and revolutionary states with their strong impact on the place of the religious dimension in the constitution of these premises, developed in a specific historical context. The most important characteristic of this new context was the combination of, first, changes in the international systems and shifts of hegemonies within them; second, processes of internal ideological changes in Western societies; third, the development of new processes of globalization;13 and, fourth, far-reaching processes of democratization, of the growing demands of various social sectors for access into the centers of their respective societies, as well as into international arenas. The most important aspect of the new international scene that developed in this period was, first, the undermining of some of the ‘older’ Western hegemonies and of the modernizing regimes in different non-Western societies; often in situations in which the perception of such weakening became relatively strong among active elites in the non-Western countries—as for instance after the October War and the oil shortage in the West. A crucial event on the international scene was the demise of the Soviet Union and of the salience of the ideological confrontation between Communism and the West— a demise which was sometimes perhaps paradoxically interpreted as an exhaustion of the Western cultural program of modernity and as signaling the end of ‘history.’ Concomitantly, there took place continuous shifts in the relative hegemony of different centers of modernity—in Europe and the U.S., moving to East Asia and back to the U.S.—shifts which became continually connected with growing contestations between such centers around their presumed hegemonic standing. 13

Wagner (2001); Ben-Refael and Sternberg (2002).


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Second, these developments were closely related to the development of what has been called “postmodern” or “post-materialist” orientations; and of the concomitant continual decomposition of the relatively compact image of the ‘civilized man,’ of the styles of life, of construction of life-worlds, which were connected with the first programs of modernity, giving rise to a much greater pluralization and heterogenization of such images and representations, and of new patterns of differentiation and syncretization between different cultural traditions, so aptly analyzed by Hannerz.14 These developments entailed changes both on the structural-institutional and on the cultural levels. On the institutional level there developed a weakening of the former, relatively rigid, homogenous definition of life patterns, and hence also of the boundaries of family, community, or of spatial and social organization. Occupational, family, gender, and residential roles have become more and more dissociated from Stand, class, and party-political frameworks, and tend to crystallize into continuously changing clusters with relatively weak orientations to such broad frameworks in general, and to the societal centers in particular. On the cultural level these developments entailed, first, a growing tendency to distinguish between Zweckrationalität and Wertrationalität, and to the recognition of a great multiplicity of different Wertrationalitäten. Cognitive rationality—especially as epitomized in the extreme forms of scientism—has become dethroned from its relatively hegemonic position, as has been the idea of the conquest of mastery of the environment—whether of society or of nature.15 Third, there developed in this period multiple new processes of economic and cultural globalization, manifest in growing autonomy of world capitalist forces, of processes of intense social and economic dislocations of many social sectors, of growing gaps between different sectors of the population, between global and local cities; and the erosion of many middle-class sectors; of intense movements of international migrations, and of the concomitant development on an international scale of social problems, such as prostitution, delinquency, traffic in drugs and the like. In the cultural arena the processes of globalization were closely connected with the expansion especially through the major media of what were often conceived in many 14 15

Hannerz (1992). Schluchter (1979, 1981, 1989); Honneth (1992).


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parts of the world as uniform hegemonic Western, above all NorthAmerican, cultural programs or visions. Fourth, significantly enough, all these developments were at the same time connected throughout the world with growing demands of many social sectors to greater access to participation in the central frameworks of their societies—i.e. to growing democratization. IV These processes and movements do indeed attest to a far-reaching shift from viewing the political centers and the nation-state as the basic arenas in which the charismatic dimension of the ontological and social visions of modernity are implemented, yet contrary to several interpretations, these developments do not signal the ‘end of history’, the end of the modern program or a retreat from it—seemingly epitomized above all in the fundamentalist and the communal religious movements.16 Truly enough, as is well known, these movements have been portrayed—and in many ways have also often presented themselves— as constituting indeed such a retreat. A closer examination of these movements, especially indeed of the fundamentalist as well as the communal-religious clearly indicate that, in fact most of these movements and visions are distinctively modern, even if they entail farreaching transformation of the visions of modernity and of their institutional repercussions, present a much more complex picture. A closer look at the fundamentalist movements indicates that they evince distinct modern Jacobin characteristics—albeit combined with very strong anti-Western and anti-Enlightenment ideologies—and that they promulgate distinct visions of modernity formulated in the terms of the discourse of modernity, and attempt to appropriate modernity on their own terms. Indeed, as Göle has shown, these movements shared a preoccupation with modernity as their major reference frameworks.17 While extreme fundamentalist movements promulgate highly elaborate seemingly anti-modern—or rather anti-Enlightenment themes, yet they paradoxically share many Jacobin revolutionary components—sometimes in a sort of mirror image way—with the 16 17

Fukuyama (1992). Göle (1996).


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Communist ones, the carriers of the most extreme alternative model. They share with the Communist movements the attempts to establish a new social order, rooted in the revolutionary universalistic ideological tenets, in principle transcending any primordial, national or ethnic units and new socio-political collectivities. Both, the Communist and the fundamentalist movements—mostly, but not only the Muslim ones—have been international, trans-national ones—activated by very intensive networks, which facilitated the expansion of the social and cultural visions promulgated by them, their universalistic messages and at the same time continually confronting them with other competing visions.18 Similarly, while the contemporary communal-religious movements, such as those which developed in Indian and in some South and South-East Asiatic societies, do not exhibit such extreme Jacobin characteristics, yet they are in ideological and in some institutional dimension very similar to the earlier fascist one, except that they do indeed promulgate very strongly the religious component in the construction of their national collective identity. In all these manners these movements and their programs constitute part and parcel of the modern political agenda. Moreover, one can identify some very significant parallels between these various religious, including the fundamentalist movements with their seemingly extreme opposites, the different postmodern ones with which they often engage in contestations about hegemony among different sectors of the society. Within all these movements there develop different combinations of diverse cultural themes and patterns, and they continually compete about who presents the proper ‘answer’ for the predicament of cultural globalization and ambivalences to the processes thereof.19 All these movements shared the concern about the relations between their identities and the universalistic themes promulgated by the respective hegemonic programs of modernity. On the contemporary scene this concern about the relation between such ‘authentic’ identities is oriented—significantly enough even in Europe—against the presumed American cultural and political ideological hegemony. This theme of the danger attendant on the expansion of modern cultural and political program to the respective traditions of different

18 19

Eickelman and Anderson (2003). Friedman (1994); Hannerz (1992), (1996); Boli and Thomas (1999).

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societies and groups is not new in modern history and in the discourse of modernity. It constituted a basic component in this discourse as it developed with the crystallization and expansion of modernity from its very beginning. This problematique did develop already within the very onset of the Western program of modernity with different centers and becoming the foci and targets of such with different countries and centers being seen in different periods as constituting the bearers of the hegemonic tendencies, the major dangers to the cultural authenticity of other societies. These confrontations continued as central foci of the discourse of modernity, albeit in a different vein, with the expansion of European modernity to the Americas, and they became even more intensified with the expansion of European, the Western modernity beyond the West—into Asian—Muslim, Chinese, Hinduist and Buddhist societies and into the many societies in Africa. At the same time, in most of these new religious and postmodern movements this fear of erosion of local cultures and of the impact of globalization and its centers was also continuously connected with an ambivalence towards these centers giving rise to a continuous oscillation between this cosmopolitanism and various ‘particularistic’ tendencies. In all these movements and situations the basic tensions inherent in the constitution of modern regimes, in the modern political program, especially those between the pluralistic and totalistic orientations; between utopian or more open and pragmatic attitudes, between multifaceted as against closed collective identities, are placed. The mode in which these tensions work out, especially whether they develop in an open pluralistic way as well as the opposite, highly aggressive and totalitarian directions, with growing inter-ethnic or inter-religious conflicts, depends greatly on the extent to which the aggressive and destructive potentialities inherent in these movements will become predominant or tamed and transformed. Thus indeed all these movements do not signal a retreat from modernity but rather attempts to interpret it in new ways and, above all, to appropriate it in their own terms. Such attempts to appropriate and interpret modernity in their own terms have not been confined to the fundamentalist or communal-national movements. They constitute a part of a set of much wider developments which have been taking place throughout the world, in Muslim, Indian, and Buddhist societies, seemingly continuing, yet indeed in a markedly


29

transformed way, the contestations between different earlier reformist and traditional religious movements that developed throughout nonWestern societies.20 V The continuing salience of the tensions between pluralist and universalistic programs, between multifaceted as against closed identities, and the continual ambivalence to new centers of modernity toward the major centers of cultural hegemony attest to the fact that, while going beyond the model of the nation-state, these new movements have not gone beyond the basic dilemmas of modernity, and such dilemmas constitute a central component in their discourses. They all are deeply reflexive, aware that no answer to the tensions inherent in modernity is ultimate—even if each in its own way seeks to provide final, incontestable answers to modernity’s irreducible dilemmas, but they have reconstituted the problem of modernity in these new historical contexts, in new ways. Thus, all these developments and trends constitute aspects of the continual reinterpretation, reconstruction of the cultural program of modernity; of the construction of multiple modernities and of multiple interpretations of modernity; of attempts by various groups and movements to re-appropriate modernity and redefine the discourse of modernity in their own new terms. But even if the contemporary fundamentalist and communal-religious-national movements are indeed modern, it does not of course mean that they do not evince some distinct characteristics which distinguish them from the earlier modern ones such as for instance the Communist or fascist ones. These movements as well as all the broader changes in the religious arena analyzed above, entail an important, even radical, shift in the discourse about the confrontation with modernity and in the conceptualization of the relation between the Western and non-Western civilizations, religions or societies. The crucial difference between these contemporary movements from the communist and fascist ones with respect to the central component of the modern discourse, lies in their perception of the confrontation between the basic premises of the cultural and political

20

Rudolph-Hoeber and Piscatori (1997).

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program of modernity as it crystallized in the West and the nonWestern European civilization—with very far-reaching implications for the internal and international political arenas. As against the seeming acceptance and of the premises of this program, or at least a highly ambivalent attitude to them combined with the continual reinterpretation thereof that was characteristic of the earlier—such as the various socialist, communist and national movements and regimes which developed throughout the world, the contemporary fundamentalist and most communal religious movements promulgate a seeming negation of at least some premises, as well as a markedly confrontational attitude to the West. In contrast to communist and socialist movements, including the Muslim or African socialists, the contemporary fundamentalist and religious communal movements promulgate a radically negative attitude to some of the central Enlightenment—and even Romantic—components of the cultural and political program of modernity—especially to the emphasis on the autonomy and sovereignty of reason and of the individual. The fundamentalist ones promulgate a totalistic ideological denial of these ‘Enlightenment’ premises, and a basically confrontational attitude not only to Western hegemony but to the West as such, to what was defined by them as Western civilization usually conceived by them in a totalistic and essentialist ways. These fundamentalist movements, while minimizing in principle, if not in practice, the particularistic components of the communal-national ones, grounded their denial of the premises of the Enlightenment or their opposition to it in the universalistic premises of their respective religions or civilizations, as newly interpreted by them.21 The communalnational movements built on the earlier ‘nativistic,’ ‘Slavophile’-like ones—but reinterpreted them in radical political modern communalnational ways. Significantly enough, in all these movements socialist or communist themes or symbols were no longer strongly emphasized. Themes of social justice were usually promulgated in terms of their own traditions—often portrayed as inherently superior to the materialistic socialist ‘Western’ ones. In this context, it is very interesting to note that the activists, especially in various Arab countries, who were drawn to different socialist themes and movements became very active in the fundamentalist and also in some of the communal movements of the eighties and nineties. 21

Khosrokhavar (1996); Jalal (1995).


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Within these movements, the confrontation with the West does not take with them the form of searching to become incorporated into the new hegemonic civilization on its own terms, but rather of attempting to appropriate the new international global scene and modernity for themselves, for their traditions or ‘civilizations’—as they were continually promulgated and reconstructed under the impact of their continual encounter with the West. VI All these developments do indeed attest to continual development of multiple modernities, or of multiple interpretations of modernity and, above all, to the de-Westernization of the decoupling of modernity from its ‘Western’ pattern, of depriving, as it were, the West from monopoly of modernity. In this broad context that European or Western modernity or modernities are seen not as the only real modernity but as one of multiple modernities—even if of course it has played a special role not only in the origins of modernity but also in the continual expansion and reinterpretation of modernities. Such attempts to appropriate and interpret modernity in their own terms have not been confined to the fundamentalist movements or communal national ones. They constitute a part of a set of much wider developments which have been taking place throughout the world, in Muslim, Indian and Buddhist societies, seemingly continuing, yet indeed in a markedly transformed way, the contestations between different earlier reformist and traditional religious movements that developed throughout non-Western societies. In these movements the basic tensions inherent in the modern program, especially those between the pluralistic and totalistic tendencies, between utopian or more open and pragmatic attitudes, between multifaceted as against closed identities, are played out more in terms of their own religious traditions grounded in their respective Axial religions than in those of European Enlightenment—although they are greatly influenced by the latter and especially by the participatory traditions of the Great Revolutions.22

22

Eisenstadt (1978, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1992).

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shmuel n. eisenstadt VII

Thus indeed these new interpretations of modernity that developed on the contemporary scene especially in conjunction with the new religious movements contain some very important new components which are indeed of crucial importance especially in their interpretations of the relations, indeed the confrontations between modernity and the West. These movements—including significantly many of the postmodern ones which developed in the West—attempted to dissociate completely Westernization from modernity. They deny the monopoly or hegemony of Western modernity and the acceptance of the Western modern cultural program as the epitome of modernity. This highly confrontational attitude to the West, to what is conceived as Western, is in these movements closely related to their attempts to appropriate modernity and the global system on their own non-Western, often anti-Western, modern terms. At the same time they entail a shift of the major arenas of contestations and of crystallization of multiple modernities from the arenas, especially from that of the nation-state to new areas in which these different movements and different societies continually interact with each other and cut across each other. All these movements aim for a worldwide reach and diffusion, through numerous networks, through the various media.23 They are highly politicized, formulating their programs in highly political and ideological terms, continually reconstructing their collective identities in reference to the new global context. The debates and confrontations in which they engage and confront each other may indeed be formulated in ‘civilizational’ terms, but these very terms—indeed the very term ‘civilization’ as constructed in such a discourse—are already couched in modernity’s new language, in totalistic, essentialist, and absolutizing terms, and they may entail a continual transformation of these identities and of the cultural programs of modernity. Indeed the very pluralization of life spaces in the global framework endows them with highly ideological absolutizing orientations, and at the same time brings them into the central political arena.

23

See Eickelman and Anderson (2003).


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VIII While the common starting point of many of these developments was indeed the cultural program of modernity as it developed in the West, more recent developments gave rise to a multiplicity of cultural and social formations which go far beyond the very homogenizing and hegemonizing aspects of this original version. All these developments attested to the growing diversification of the visions and understanding of modernity, of the basic cultural agendas of different sectors of modern societies—far beyond the homogenic and hegemonic vision of modernity that were prevalent in the fifties. The fundamentalist—and the new communal-national—movements constitute one of such new developments in the unfolding of the potentialities and antinomies of modernity. All these movements may develop in contradictory directions—into the more open pluralistic way as well as the opposite hostile directions, manifest in growing inter-religious or inter-ethnic conflicts. Thus, all the processes analyzed above which have been taking place in the contemporary scene, among them the resurgence of the religious component in the construction of national and international collective identities, do not entail either the ‘end of history’ in the sense of end of ideological confrontational clashes between different cultural programs of modernity—or that of ‘clash of civilizations’ which seemingly deny the basic premises of modernity. The importance of the historical experiences of various civilizational ‘traditions’ and historical experience in shaping the concrete contours of different modern societies does not mean that these processes give rise on the contemporary scene to several closed civilizations, which constitute continuations of their respective historical pasts and patterns. Rather these different experiences influence the ways in which continually interacting modernities, which cut across any single society or civilization among which there takes place continual flow and interaction, in which they are constituting continual mutual reference points, crystallize in continually changing ways. While such diversity has certainly undermined the old hegemonies, yet at the same time it was closely connected—perhaps paradoxically—with the development of new multiple common reference points and networks—with a globalization of cultural networks and channels of communication far beyond what existed before.

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Moreover the political dynamics in all these societies are closely interwoven with geopolitical realities which, while needless to say, are also influenced by the historical experience of these societies, are yet shaped mostly by modern developments and confrontations which make it impossible to construct such closed entities.24 Needless to say these processes do not even constitute a—basically impossible—‘return’ to the problematique of pre-modern Axial civilizations. But the fact that all these developments entail the continual reinterpretation of modernity does not necessarily warrant an optimistic view of these developments. Such reinterpretation of modernity and attempts by different societies or movements to appropriate modernity, when combined with geopolitical rivalries, may not necessarily interest the most destructive dimensions of modernity—indeed building on such dimensions of the Axial Civilizations. References Appleby, Scott R. (1997). Spokesman for the Despised. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. Asad, Talal (2003). Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bartholomeusz, Tessa J. and Chandra Richard De Silva (eds.) (1998). Buddhist Fundamentalism and Minority Identities in Sri Lanka. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ben-Refael, Eliezer and Yitzhak Sternberg (eds.) (2002). Identity, Culture and Globalization. Leiden: Brill. Berger, Peter L. (1967). The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bien, David D. and Raymond Grew (1978). “France.” In: Grew, Raymond (ed.). Crisis of Political Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 219–270. Boli, John and George M. Thomas (eds.) (1999). Constructing World Culture. International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Burns, Gene (1996). “Ideology, Culture and Ambiguity: The Revolutionary Process in Iran.” In: Theory and Society 25, 3. 349–388. Brouwer Steve, Paul Gifford and Susan D. Rose (1996). Exporting the American Gospel: Global Christian Fundamentalism. New York, NY: Routledge. Caplan, Lionel (1995). “Certain Knowledge: The Encounter of Global Fundamentalism and Local Christianity in Urban South India.” In: James, Wendy (ed). The Pursuit of Certainty. Religious and Cultural Formulations. London: Routledge. 92–111. Casanova, José. (1994). Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Craig, Gordon A. (1955). The Politics of the Prussian Army. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dovring, Folke (1978). “Scandinavia.” In: Grew, Raymond (ed.). Crises of Political Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 139–162.

24

See The Economist (1999).


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The Economist, (1999). July 31. “The Road to 2050: A Survey of the New Geopolitics.” Eickelman, Dale F. and Jon W. Anderson (eds.) (2003). New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eickelman, Dale F. (ed.). (1993). Russia’s Muslim Frontiers: New Directions in Cross National Analysis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (1978). Revolution and the Transformation of Societies. New York, NY: Free Press. ——. (1980). “Transcendental Vision, Center Formation and the Role of Intellectuals.” In: Greenfeld, Liah and Michel Martin (eds.). Center, Ideas and Institutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 96–109. ——. (1982). “The Axial Age: The Emergence of Transcendental Visions and the Rise of Clerics.” In: European Journal of Sociology 23, 2. 299–314. ——. (1986). The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations. Albany, NY: Suny Press. ——. (1992). “Frameworks of the Great Revolutions: Culture, Social Structure, History and Human Agency.” In: International Social Science Journal 133: 385–401. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. and Bernhard Giesen (1995). “The Construction of Collective Identity.” In: Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 36. 72–102. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (1999). Fundamentalism, Sectarianism and Revolution: The Jacobin Dimension of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elias, Norbert (1978–1982). The Civilizing Process. New York, NY: Urizen Books. Evans, Peter B., Dietrich Rüschemeyer and Theda Skocpol (eds.) (1985). Bringing the State Back in. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedman, Jonathan (1994). Cultural Identity and Global Process. London: Sage Publications. Fubini, Ricardo (2003). Humanism and Secularization: From Petrarch to Valla. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fukuyama, Francis (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York, NY: Free Press. Giddens, Anthony (1987). The Nation-state and Violence: Volume Two of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gillis, John S. (1978). “Germany.” In: Grew, Raymond (ed.). Crisis of Political Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 313–346. Grew, Raymond (1971). The Prussian Bureaucracy in Crises, 1840–1860. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Göle, Nilüfer (1996). The Forbidden Modern. Civilization and Veiling. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Graubard, Stephen R. (ed.). (1986). Norden—The Passion for Equality. Oslo: Norwegian University Press. Greenfeld, Liah and Michel Martin (eds.) (1989). “Transcendental Vision, Center Formation and the Role of Intellectuals.” In: Center, Ideas and Institutions. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hamerow, Theodore (1969). The Social Foundations of German Unification, 1858–1971. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——. (1958). Restoration, Revolution, Reaction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hannerz, Ulf (1992). Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of meaning. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. ——. (1996). Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places. London: Routledge. Hansen-Blom, Thomas (1999). The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Honneth, Axel (ed.) (1992). Cultural-Political Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Jalal, Ayesha (1995). Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia. A Comparative and Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Piscatori, James (1989). “Asian Islam: International Linkages and Their Impact on International Relations.” In: Esposito, John L. (ed.). Islam in Asia: Religion, Politics and Society. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 230–261. Jeffrey. K. Hadden and Anderson Shupe (eds.) (1989). Secularization and Fundamentalism Reconsidered. New York, NY: Paragon Press. Khosrokhavar, Farhad (1996). “L’universel abstrait, le politique et la construction de l’islamisme comme forme d’alterité.” In Wieviorka, Michel (ed.). Une société fragmentée? Paris: Éditions La Decouverte. 113–151. King, Charles (2002). “Post-Communism: Transition, Comparison, and the End of Eastern Europe.” In: World Politics 53, 1. 143–172. Kurtz, Marcus J. and Andrew Barnes (2002). “Political Foundations of Post-Communist Regimes: Marketization, Agrarian Legacies, or International Influences.” In: Comparative Political Studies 35, 5. 524–553. Luckmann, Thomas (1963). Das Problem der Religion in der modernen Gesellschaft. Freiburg: Rombach. Malia, Martin E. (1994). The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991. New York, NY: Free Press. Male“eviÆ, Sini“a and Mark Haugaard (eds.) (2002). Mankind Sense of Collectivity: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Globalization. London: Pluto. Marty, Martin E. and Scott R. Appleby (eds.) (1991). Fundamentalisms Observed. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. ——. (1993). Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family and Education. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. ——. (1993). Fundamentalisms and the State: Remaking Polities, Economies and Militance. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. ——. (1994). Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. ——. (1995). Fundamentalisms Comprehended. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Müller, Klaus (1995). “From Post-Communism to Post-Modernity? Economy and Society in Eastern European Transformations.” In: Grancelli, Bruno (ed.). Social Change and Modernization. Lessons from Eastern Europe. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Munson, Henry (1998). Islam and Revolution in the Middle East. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rudolph-Hoeber, Susanne and James Piscatori (eds.) (1997). Transnational Religion and Fading States. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Schluchter, Wolfgang (1979). Die Entwicklung des okzidentalen Rationalismus. Eine Analyse von Max Webers Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Tübingen: Siebeck. ——. (1985). The Rise of Western Rationalism. Max Weber’s Developmental History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——. (1989). Rationalism, Religion and Domination. A Weberian Perspective. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Soysal, Yasemin Nuhoglu (1994). The Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Stein, Kuhnle (1975). Patterns of Social and Political Mobilization. A Historical Analysis of the Nordic Countries. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Thomas, Keith (1978). “The United Kingdom.” In: Grew, Raymond (ed.). Crises of Political Development in Europe and the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 41–98. Thomson, David (1943). The Democratic Ideal in England and France. London: Cambridge University Press.


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——. (1951). England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815–1914. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Tilly, Charles (1992). Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990 –1992. Oxford: Blackwell. Wagner, Bernd (ed.) (2001). Kulturelle Globalisierung—Zwischen Weltkultur und Kultureller Fragmentierung. Frankfurt: Klartext.

‘AXIAL’ BREAKTHROUGHS AND SEMANTIC ‘RELOCATIONS’ IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND ISRAEL Jan Assmann In the following contribution, I address the question whether and in what sense the ‘Axial Age’ led to a reformulation of the relation between politics and religion. The Axial Age theory was first formulated as early as the late eighteenth century by Anquetil DuPerron, a scholar of Zoroastrianism, who postulated that a “grande revolution du genre humain” took place around 500 BCE, when in East and West great individuals arose such as Confucius and Laotse, Buddha, Zoroaster, the prophets in Israel and the early philosophers in Greece who founded new religions and philosophical systems.1 However, the term ‘Axial Age’ was only taken up and elaborated again after a more than 150 year period of latency by three thinkers: the sociologist Alfred Weber, whose Kultursoziologie appeared in 1935, the philosopher Karl Jaspers, whose Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte followed in 1949, and the political philosopher Eric Voegelin, whose monumental Order and History in 1956 reformulated the theory. Of these three, Jaspers coined the term “Axial Age” and made the theory famous; but it was only Voegelin who gave a comparably clear description of the ‘pre-Axial’ world, the world which Israel and Greece left behind. What in Weber’s and Jaspers’ reconstruction was nothing more than a pale counter-image of Europe, a mere ‘notyet’, assumed a positive coloring in Voegelin’s description as a world of its own right, a positive alternative to monotheism and philosophy. Voegelin’s term for the pre-Axial world was “cosmological.” Voegelin describes the decisive Axial transformation as a breakthrough (or ‘leap in being’) from the ‘cosmological myth,’ leading to ‘history’ and monotheism in Israel, and to philosophy and metaphysics in Greece. He described this breakthrough as a process of conceptual transformation, from ‘compactness’ to ‘differentiation.’ Israel and Greece were able to recognize differences and draw distinctions where the oriental societies used ‘compact’ concepts blurring 1

Metzler (1991).

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these differences in a systematic way. The Egyptian evidence confirms this viewpoint, especially with regard to the distinction between the political and the religious sphere.2 I think that the specific Axial transformation, which the Bible represents as the children of Israel ’s exodus from Egypt and entering into a new religious and political order, in fact concerns the fundamental distinction between religion and politics. This must therefore be reconstructed and interpreted in terms of political theology. What Voegelin, however, failed to see, and what only Egyptology is able to bring to light, is that this ‘Axial’ breakthrough had forerunners or foreshadowings in Egyptian history. This finding must affect the chronological implications of the Axial Age concept, and these forerunners may be explained historically by breakdowns and disappointments in the political sphere—historical experiences of a rather traumatic character. Is there a relation between breakdown and breakthrough, trauma and innovation? I Antecedents in Ancient Egypt 1. The Judgment of the Dead The first of these traumatic experiences concerns the breakdown of the Old Kingdom (2800–2150 BCE), which gave rise of the idea of a general judgment of the dead.3 In the Old Kingdom, judgment after death was modeled on a terrestrial court: it was only in session if there was a litigant. A dead person had to be prepared for any possible accusation, the more so as he/she had to reckon not only with human, but also with dead and divine accusers. However, if there was no accuser, there would neither be any trial. This form of postmortem litigation was considered one of the many dangers belonging to the liminal state between ‘this world’ and the next. But it was not yet considered to be the necessary and inevitable threshold or passage between life and afterlife. The idea that all who died had to pass an examination prior to entering the other world developed only after the fall of the Old Kingdom, at the beginning of the second millennium BC. This examination took the form of a tribunal, to which all had to present

2 3

See Assmann (2000). See Griffiths (1991).

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breakthroughs and semantic ‘relocations’

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themselves after death. The significant difference between the old and the new concept, however, was that now the accuser was a god; but this god did not succeed whoever appeared, as per the Old Kingdom concept of judgment in the hereafter, as litigant and accuser; rather, he played the role formerly taken on by the king and the society. In the tombs of the Old Kingdom, biographical inscriptions began to appear during the latter half of the third millennium in which a tomb-owner addressed posterity and rendered account of his achievements. A common proverb conveyed that “the true monument of a man is his virtue; the evil character will be forgotten.”4 The immortality of the tomb owner depended on the verdict of posterity, on the memory of future generations and their willingness to read the inscriptions and to recall the personality of the deceased. Their judgment was to decide upon his immortality. Regarding their immortality, or at least a prolongation of their existence beyond the threshold of death, the Egyptians believed in the possibility to establish communication with posterity by means of a monumental tomb which would provide the possibility to future generations of visitors to read the inscriptions, regard the scenes and thus to become impressed enough by the virtue of the tomb-owner that would even recite a prayer for his soul. The breakdown of the Old Kingdom in the last quarter of the third millennium, however, shattered this belief in the continuity of social memory and the durability of monuments. In this situation of anxiety and reorientation, the Egyptians ‘divinized’ posterity’s verdict in the form of a divine judgment at the court of Osiris. The idea of such a general judgment of the dead, where divine authority made the decision about immortality or annihilation, might be interpreted as a breakthrough into a kind of transcendence.5 Compared to this-worldly institutions such as king, society and posterity, the divine tribunal doubtlessly had a transcendent, other-worldly character. However, I prefer to speak not of ‘breakthroughs’ and ‘transcendental visions,’ but of ‘semantic relocations’ or ‘transfers’.6 Here, ideas or semiologies are transferred from one sphere to the other— that is, from the socio-political sphere of social memory to the divine 4

For details see Goedicke (1962: 26) and Schenkel (1964: 11 pp.). See Assmann (1990: ch. V). 6 See also Assmann (2000). Johan Arnason suggested the English term “relocation” for the German concept of “Umbuchung.” 5

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sphere. In this case the semantic relocation resulted from severe disappointment in the political sphere. In the Old Kingdom, people had invested all their means into erecting a monumental tomb which they considered to be a safe fundament of immortality. By means of such a tomb, they hoped to continue their existence in the vicinity of their lord, the pharaoh, and in the memory of posterity. The breakdown of the Old Kingdom, with the disappearance of kingship and the pilloring and destruction of the tombs, showed these hopes to be illusory. Longing for safer warrants of immortality, people looked beyond the social sphere. Thus, the ‘breakdown’ of political order caused a ‘breakthrough’ towards meta-political foundations of order. The god Osiris and his court filled the place vacated by the vanished pharaoh of the Old Kingdom, and he continued to stay in office even after pharaonic monocracy was reestablished in the Middle Kingdom. From then on, burial, tomb, and immortality were transferred from the political sphere of pharaonic competence to the divine sphere and laid into Osiris’s hands, who became the lord of death and the afterlife. 2. The Rise of Personal Piety Our next example represents the most conspicuous case of such a relocation in Egyptian religious history. It concerns the rise and the final breakthrough of a religious trend, which Egyptologists call “Personal Piety.”7 An individual formed a special relationship with a certain deity, which in Egyptian is paraphrased in formulas such as “putting god N into one’s heart” and “walking (or acting) on the water of god N.” This new trend finds its first expression in prayers and tomb inscriptions of the fifteenth century where we read sentences like God is father and mother for him who takes him into his heart, He turns away from him who neglects his city, [. . .] But he whom he leads will not loose his way.8

7 See Assmann (1996: 259–277, 2002). The term “Persönliche Frömmigkeit” has been coined by Erman in 1910 and translated as “Personal Piety” by James Henry Breasted, who, in his magisterial and highly influential book The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912), identified this concept as the hallmark of a whole period of Egyptian history (“The Age of Personal Piety”), referring to the Ramesside Age (1300–1100 BCE). 8 Assmann (1983: 228 pp., 1975: No. 75).

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And in a prayer: I gave you into my heart because of your strength. [. . .] You are my protector. Behold: my fear has vanished.9

The language of these texts has a long history.10 Many expressions can be traced back to the First Intermediate Period (2150–2000 BCE), where they describe the relation between patron and client. During the Middle Kingdom (2000–1750 BCE), the ruling dynasty adopted this relation, together with its rhetoric, for modeling of the new relationship between king and official. This was based on the latter’s interior core of motivation, virtue and responsibility: the heart. This attitude, called ‘loyalism,’ was then, after the breakdown of the Amarna revolution, transferred to the divine sphere, and served to describe the relation between god and man. Typical of loyalism’s rhetoric is the opposition of wrath and mercy, the formulae of heart and water, and especially the stylistic device called ‘macarism’ or ‘beatitude’ (“Happy the man who . . .”; “blessed is the man who . . .”), known to all of us from the beginning of the book of psalms. The rhetoric of loyalism had an important revival in the Amarna age around the middle of the fourteenth century BCE where we often read sentences like: Blessed the man who puts you into his heart, For he will spend his old age in perfection.11

The Amarna period is known as an age of religious revolution in Egypt.12 Akhenaten closed the countless traditional cults and put the cult of the one single Aten in their place, the god of light and time. Akhenaten thought himself able to reduce the totality of reality to the workings of light and time; in his eyes, therefore, the other deities appeared as inert, superfluous, fictitious and false, contributing nothing to the explanation of reality. Akhenaten was the first in the history of mankind to apply the distinction between true and false to religion, the same distinction which later, in the form of biblical monotheism, led to a transformation of ‘Axial’ dimensions. Akhenaten changed Egyptian cosmology in a most radical way, but he did not

9 10 11 12

Cairo CG 12217. See also Posener (1975: 206 pp.). Cairo CG 12217. See also Posener (1975: 206 pp.). Sandman (1938: 97.11–12). Hornung (2000); Montserrat (2000); Reeves (2001).

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transcend it. His god was the sun, a cosmic energy, the source of light and time, without any personal and ethical traits. Above all, however, he did not touch the ‘compact’ unity or indistinction of religion and politics. On the contrary, he did everything to cement it and to counteract the beginnings of personal piety, which he seems to have felt as a rift in the politico-religious unity. Whereas Aton acted towards humanity as a cosmic energy, it was Akhenaten who presented himself as the personal god of the individual and the object of personal piety: He shows his wrath against him who ignores his teachings And his favor to him who knows it.13

Whereas personal piety tended to form an immediate relationship between a deity and an individual outside the official institutions of cult and temple, Akhenaten reinstalled the king as the sole mediator between god and man. In this respect, the Amarna religion was more of a restoration than an innovation. However, Akhenaten failed with his project, and this failure led to a complete resurgence of what he originally strove to suppress. After his death, the Egyptians not only returned to their traditional deities; the beginnings of personal piety now developed into the dominant mentality and religious attitude of the time. For this reason, Breasted, as early as 1912, labeled this historical period “the age of Personal Piety.”14 This new form of personal piety is best described as a semantic relocation by which the concepts and rhetoric of loyalism were transferred from the political to the divine sphere, where they served to model the relationship between god and man. God succeeds the role played by Akhenaten in the Amarna period and formerly by the king in the Middle Kingdom and by the patron in the First Intermediate Period, acting as ‘father’ and ‘mother to all’: ‘father of orphans,’ ‘husband of widows,’ ‘refuge for the persecuted,’ ‘protector of the poor,’ ‘good shepherd,’ ‘judge,’ ‘pilot’ and ‘rudder,’ merciful towards his followers, terrible for his enemies. ‘Relocation’ means that something is withdrawn from one sphere and transferred to another. Thus, protection was no longer sought on the ‘mundane’ plane, from king or patrons, but on the divine plane, from a deity. In prayers we often read sentences of this kind: 13 14

Sandman (1938: 86.15–16). Breasted (1972: 344–370).

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I have not sought for myself a protector among men, God N is my defender.15

In the time of Ramses II, a man called Kiki, a follower of the goddess Mut who donated all his property to her temple wrote in his tomb autobiography: He bethought himself That he should find a patron: And he found Mut at the head of the gods, Fate and fortune in her hand, Lifetime and breath of life are hers to command. [. . .] I have not chosen a protector among men, I have not sought myself a patron among the great. [. . .] My heart is filled with my mistress. I have no fear of anyone. I spend the night in quiet sleep, because I have a protector.16

The triggering factor for this process of transaction seems obvious: it is the traumatic disappointment on the political level that the Amarna revolution must have meant to the majority of Egyptians, the spectacle of kingship turning sinful and criminal towards the gods in the most radical and terrible way. The breakdown of a politics stressing the religious monopoly of the state led to the loss of this monopoly and to the rise of personal forms of religiosity. It is precisely in this line of historical trauma and semantic relocations that the rise of Biblical monotheism and covenant theology has to be interpreted. It means the transference of the political institutions of alliance, treaty and vassaldom from the mundane sphere of politics to the transcendental sphere of religion. In this respect, covenant theology may be compared to personal piety in Egypt which, as we have seen, was a relocation of the semiology of loyalism from the political to the religious sphere. In Israel, we are dealing with the ‘semiological divinization’ or ‘theologization’ of Egyptian, Hittite, Babylonian and especially Assyrian foreign politics (vassal treaties). What is most obvious, however, in the case of Israel is the connection with historical trauma. Covenant theology, and with it pure monotheism, developed after the fall of Jerusalem during and

15 16

See e.g. Assmann (1975: 5 pp., 42 pp., 62 pp., 102 pp., 177). Qader-Mohammad (1960: 48 pp.); Wilson (1970) and Assmann (1975 Nr. 173).

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after the Babylonian exile, after the complete failure and breakdown of the kingdom and after the loss of state and temple—in short, after the most traumatic series of experiences that could possibly befall a society in those times. The ensuing innovation corresponded in importance and consequence to the gravity of the historical traumatization, surpassing by far everything that ever occurred in Egyptian history. Using the model of a political alliance as a new form of the relationship between god and man meant the creation of a completely new form of religion, which proved able to withstand the pressures of political oppression. The biblical texts, especially in Deuteronomy, use the language of Assyrian loyalty oaths17 and vassal treaties.18 The political theology of Assyria was adopted by ways of ‘subversive inversion’ and transformed into the political theology of Israel.19 Whereas the former emphasizes the inseparable unity of the divine and the political, the latter accentuates the categorical separation of these two spheres. It seems obvious to me that there is a connection between this distinction and separation between politics and religion. On the one hand we have the Ausdifferenzierung or separation of religion from the overall system of culture, politics, morality, and law, and, on the other, that much more general distinction between true and false in religion, which I have called the ‘Mosaic distinction.” In this distinction I see the proper hallmark of monotheism.20 My thesis is that this, rather than the widespread idea of the unity of the divine, was the great innovation that transformed the ancient world in the way of an Axial breakthrough. The distinction between true and false was alien to ‘primary religion,’21 which was based on distinctions such as ‘pure’ and ‘impure,’ ‘sacred’ and ‘profane.’ Its introduction meant a revolutionary step, creating a new type of religion which, for the first time and quite unlike primary religion, set itself off; not only from other religions and its own religious tradition, but also from other spheres of culture such as politics, law and economy as a cultural sphere; not only as an autonomous sphere in its own right, but endowed with superior authority and normativity, forcing the other spheres under its spell. 17 18 19 20 21

Otto (1999); Steymans (1995). Baltzer (1964). Otto (2000: 59–76). See Assmann (1997). See Sundermeier (1987: 411 pp., 1999).

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Thus, the ‘Mosaic distinction’ between true and false meant, above all, the distinction between religion and politics or ‘state’ and ‘church.’ Akhenaten, it is true, had already drawn the same distinction with regard to the traditional religion of ancient Egypt, which he abolished as false. This step, however, did not lead to a separation between the political and the religious spheres. Kingship kept its position as a mediator between god and man even after the Amarna period, in the “age of Personal Piety”; only its monopoly was broken. But the state in Egypt continued to act simultaneously as a kind of church, it being the sole institutionalization of religion. The separation of politics and religion, “Herrschaft ” and “Heil ”,22 the mundane and the transcendental, was therefore the exclusive achievement of Israel. This achievement is connected in the biblical account with the name of Moses and with the legend of the exodus of the children of Israel out of Egypt.23 The political meaning of the Mosaic Distinction becomes evident in the Exodus tradition. In this context, Egypt appears not so much as the representative of ‘false religion,’ that is, paganism and idolatry, but above all as the representative of ‘false politics,’ the ‘house of serfdom.’ The exodus from Egypt means leaving the house of oppression and entering the realm of freedom. ‘Freedom,’ to be sure, is not a biblical word and does not occur in this context, but the alliance or ‘covenant’ with God as formed at Mount Sinai is obviously presented as liberation from serfdom under human rulership. Entering the alliance and the Law did not initially mean to found a state, but to get rid of the oriental principle of statehood and to found a kind of counter-society, in which the principle of statehood or kingship is allowed only minimal place.24 It is this anti-governmental impulse which is presented as a resistance against pharaonic oppression. Egypt appears as the paradigmatic ‘state,’ representing both political and divine power and order. By leaving Egypt, Israel separates itself from a political system denounced as false, oppressive,

22

See Assmann (2000). As has been shown by Rodney Needham and Louis Dumont, a similar distinction underlies the Indian system of “Dual Sovereignty,” that is, of religious (Brahmin) and political (Kshatriya) leadership. The duality of religious and military leadership seems, in fact, rather widespread even among tribal societies and has little to do with what I describe as the political implications and consequences of the “Mosaic Distinction.” 24 See Malamat (1990: 65–77); Handel (1981); Lohfink (1987); Clastres (1974). 23

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and humiliating. Seen from the view-point of the biblical texts and narratively enacted as an exodus from Egypt, monotheism appears as a political movement of liberation from pharaonic oppression and as the foundation of an alternative way of life, where humans are not ruled by a state, but freely consent to enter an alliance with God and adopt the stipulations of divine law.25 Just as the people are liberated from political oppression, God emancipates Himself from political representation. Religious salvation now becomes the exclusive competence of God, who now for the first time takes the initiative of historical action and withdraws once and for all the principle of salvation (“Heil”) from political representation and ‘mundane’ power. The new form of religion meant first and foremost a new way of life, based on the divine laws of justice and purity rather than a new belief system. The story takes place 26 in Egypt and at a time strangely close to Akhenaten and his monotheistic revolution, in the fourteenth or thirteenth centuries BCE, but it was told at a much later time, in the seventh through fifth centuries, in Judah and Babylonia during the time of Babylonian exile and Persian supremacy. In historical reality, therefore, the separation of state and church was achieved only in the sixth and fifth centuries, when the political functions of the ‘state’ were taken care of by the Babylonian and Persian Empires, when Israel founded its identity as the people of God, a kingdom of priests based on Torah and Temple rather than on king and palace. From then on, politics and religion, or ‘state’ and ‘church,’ were different spheres whose relationship had to be laboriously negotiated and whose re-unification could only be achieved by force. Political theology turns into a critical discourse, which in biblical tradition is critical of government and, in Greek tradition, critical of religion. The distinction between and the separation of religion and politics or state and church has to be regarded as one of the most important features of axiality. This also means that the subsequent attempts at reuniting and streamlining27 these two spheres, as in the French tradition of the ‘rois thaumaturges,’ in totalitarian forms of civil religion28 25

See Assmann (2000: 46–52). I do not mean this, of course, in the historical sense of “what really happened”, but in the narratological sense of narrated time. The biblical narrative is located in Egypt somewhere in the 15th through 13th centuries. 27 A helpless attempt at translating the Nazi-German term “Gleichschaltung.” 28 See Voegelin (1993). 26

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and also in religious movements insisting on the direct political realization of religious truth, may be regarded as shifts towards deaxialization. The anti-Egyptian or, more generally, the anti-state character of biblical monotheism and its political theology finds clearest expression in the prohibition of images. Idolatry means, in the first place, legitimizing the state in terms of divine representation. The state presents itself, in its images, symbols and ceremonies, as representative of the Divine; in biblical view, this is idolatry. From the view-point of Egypt, however, this is precisely what the state was made for.29 The Egyptians believed the gods were remote and hidden, withdrawn from earth and invisible. In lieu of their real presence, they installed the state on earth to represent them in the form of kings, images and sacred animals. The state’s most important task is to ensure divine presence under the condition of divine absence, and thereby to maintain a symbiotic relationship between man, society and cosmos. The king acts as representative of the creator: Re has installed the king on the earth of the living for ever and ever, administering justice to humans, satisfying the gods, creating true order and banishing disorder. The king gives divine offerings to the gods and mortuary offerings to the transfigured dead.30

The king depends on god whom he imitates and represents, and the god depends on the king for maintaining the order of creation on earth. God created the king, so to speak, ‘in his image,’ and in fact ‘image of god’ is one of the most-used royal epithets. Biblical political theology is the exact inverse. From this perspective, it is precisely the category of representation which shows the falseness of pharaonic politics respectively religion in its most obvious and abhorrent form: the sphere of kings, images and sacred animals. The prohibition of images means, in the first place, that god must not be represented.31 Images contradict the real presence of the divine which is implied in the idea of the covenant. Covenant 29

See Assmann (1989: 55–88). See Assmann (1995: 19 pp.). 31 See Dohmen (BBB 62, 2.ed. 1987); Mettinger (1995); Uehlinger (1998); Berlejung (1998); Dick (1999); Keel (2001). 30

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means a form of god’s turning towards the world which is both political and ‘living.’ The ‘living god’ (Elohim hayim) must not be represented. Images are a means of ‘magically’ representing the absent divine. Images, therefore, imply or presuppose the idea of divine absence. The ‘living’ god hides and reveals himself as he chooses and forbids any attempts at magical ‘presentification.’ This is the political meaning of the prohibition of images. The Golden Calf was meant to replace Moses, the only form in which God allowed Himself to be represented. The Israelites who believed Moses to be dead wanted to replace the representative of God by His representation. The function of the Golden Calf was clearly political. It was to serve not as a cult image but as a political symbol of leadership in the same way Moses did in his leading the people out of Egypt. The destruction of the Golden Calf put an end to these attempts of political representation. Images are artificial gods, and the relationship with ‘other gods’ (elohim aherim) is forbidden. An alliance is formed with one overlord only. The political meaning of monotheism in its early stage does not deny the existence of other gods. On the contrary, without the existence of other gods the request to stay faithful to the lord would be pointless. These ‘other gods’ were not non-existent, as were the gods whose worship Akhenaten abolished, but they were forbidden. With the radical destruction of representation, the divine or ‘transcendental’ sphere became independent of political institutions. It was thus able to survive the Babylonian exile and the loss of sovereign statehood under the Persians, when the former kingdom of Judah became integrated into the Persian empire as a province within the satrapy of Transeuphratene. Religion became an autonomous sphere, constituting and consolidating a vantage point from which all other spheres of culture, including the political sphere, could be transformed. Max Weber, in his ‘Zwischenbetrachtung,’ identified the tension between religion and other cultural spheres such as economy, politics, aesthetics, the erotic and the intellectual sphere, as characteristic of “Erlösungsreligionen” (religions of salvation or redemption).32 Tension presupposes distinction and differentiation, and the process of differentiation, especially concerning the religious and the political spheres, so I believe, lies at the core of axiality.

32

Weber (1920: 536–573).

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Voegelin reconstructed the process leading from the “cosmological societies” of the Ancient Near East to the rise of new, meta-cosmic or “transcendental” world-views in Israel and Greece as a shift from “compactness” to differentiation. Compactness is the hallmark of myth and the totalizing tendency of mythical thinking.33 Differentiation, on the other hand, may be identified as a hallmark of axiality. Axiality, however, is not to be equated neither with antiquity (a certain time-period around 500 BCE) nor with modernity per se.34 Weber and all those following his lead, including Voegelin and Habermas, regarded differentiation as a purely mental process and a form of rationalization. What I wanted to show in my contribution, with regard to Ancient Egypt, is the close relationship between historical and intellectual processes. Distinctions and differentiations in the intellectual sphere were brought about and forced upon the human mind by catastrophic and traumatizing experiences on the plane of history. Certainly, the rise of monotheism in the Ancient World had historical consequences.35 But the rise of monotheism may itself be seen as a consequence of historical changes. In this sense, I take the rise of intellectual and religious concepts in Ancient Egypt, such as the ‘judgment of the dead’ and ‘personal piety’ to be consequences of, or at least in some way or other related to, historical trauma such as the breakdown of the Old Kingdom and the Amarna experience. References Assmann, Jan (1975). Ägyptische Hymnen und Gebete. Zurich: Artemis. ——. (1979). “Weisheit, Loyalismus und Frömmigkeit.“ In: Hornung, von Erik and Othmar Keel (eds.). Studien zu alltägyptischen Lebenslehren (Orbis Biblicus et Orient. 28). Fribourg: Universitätsverlag.

33

See especially the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss. An overview can be obtained from Godelier (1973) and Habermas (1981). 34 Weber, Habermas, and others have depicted the differentiation of autonomous spheres the most characteristic property of ‘modernity.’ I would like to thank Johan Arnason who drew my attention to the problem of reconciling my concept of “distinction and differentiation” with Max Weber’s theory of the separation of cultural spheres which is closely related to Weber’s concepts of occidental rationalization and modernization. I think it is important to distinguish between “axiality” and “modernity,” especially if we take axiality as a non-evolutionary concept (the “axial paradigm”, not the “axial age”). 35 See Stark (2001).

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——. (1983). Sonnenhymnen in Thebanischen Gräbern. Mainz: von Zabern. ——. (1989). “State and Religion in the New Kingdom.” In: Simpson, William K. (ed.). Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, Yale Egyptological Studies 2. New Haven: Yale University Press. ——. (1990) Ma’at. Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im Alten Ägypten. Munich: Beck. ——. (1995). Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom. Re, Amun, and the Crisis of Polytheism. London: Kegan Paul International. ——. (1996). Ägypten: eine Sinngeschichte. Munich: Hanser. ——. (1997). Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——. (2000). Herrschaft und Heil. Politische Theologie in Altägypten, Israel und Europa. Munich: Hanser. ——. (2002). The Mind of Egypt. History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books. Baltzer, Klaus (1964). Das Bundesformular. Neukirchen: Neukirchener Verlag. Berlejung, Angelika (1998). Die Theologie der Bilder: Herstellung und Einweihung von Bildern in Mesopotamien und die alttestamentliche Bilderpolemik OBO 162 Freiburg, Schweiz: Universitätsverlag. Breasted, James Henry (1972). The Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Clastres, Pierre (1974). La société contre l’Etat. Recherches d’ anthropologie politique. Paris: Éditions de Munit. Dick, Michael B. (1999). “Prophetic Parodies of Making the Cult Image.” In: Dick, Michael B. (ed.). The Making of the Cult Image in the Ancient Near East. Winona Lake, ID: Eisenbrauns. 1–54. Dohmen, Christoph (1987). Das Bilderverbot. Frankfurt: Athenäum. Griffiths, John Gwyn (1991). The Divine Verdict. A Study of Divine Judgement in the Ancient Religions. Leiden: Brill. Godelier, Claude Maurice (1973). “Mythos und Geschichte. Überlegungen über die Grundlagen des wilden Denkens.” In: Eder, Klaus (ed.). Seminar: Die Entstehung von Klassengesellschaften. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. 309–329. Goedicke, Hans (1962). “A Neglected Wisdom Text.” In: Journal of Egyptian Archeology 48: 25–35. Habermas, Jürgen (1981). Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Handel, I. Michael (1981). Weak States in the International System. London: Cass. Hornung, Erik (2000). Akhenaten. The Religion of Light. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Keel, Othmar (2001). “Warum im Jerusalemer Tempel kein anthropomorphes Kultbild gestanden haben dürfte.” In: Pictor, Homo. Colloquium Rauricum 7. Leipzig: Saur. 244–281. Lohfink, Norbert (1987). “Der Begriff des Gottesreiches vom Alten Testament her gesehen.“ In: Schreiner, Josef (ed.). Unterwegs zur Kirche. Alttestamentliche Konzeptionen, OD 110. Freiburg: Herder. 33–86. Malamat, Avraham (1990). “The Kingdom of Judah between Egypt and Babylon. A Small State within a Great Power Confrontation.” In: Studia Theologica 44. 65–77. Mettinger, Tryggve N.D. (1995). No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in Its Near Eastern Context. Coniectanea Biblica, OT Series 42. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Metzler, Dieter (1991). “A.H. Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) und das Konzept der Achsenzeit.“ In: Achaemenid History VII. Leiden: Brill. 123–133. Montserrat, Dominic (2000). Akhenaten. History, Fantasy and ancient Egypt. London: Routledge.

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Otto, Eckart (2000). “Political Theology in Judah and Assyria. The Beginning of the Hebrew Bible as Literature.” In: Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok 65 (Festschrift Tryggve N.D. Mettinger). 59–76. ——. (1999). Das Deuteronimium. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Posener, Georges (1975). “La piété personelle avant l’age amarnien.” In: Revue d’Egyptologie 27. 195–210. Qader-Mohammad, Abd el (1966). “The Two Tombs Kyhy and Bak-en-Amin.” In: Annales du Service des Antiquités Egyptiennes 59. 157–184. Reeves, Nicholas (2001). Akhenaten. Egypt’s False Prophet. London: Thames & Hudson. Sandman, Maj (1938). Texts from the Time of Akhenaten. Brüssel: Fondation Egyptologique Reine Elisabeth. Schenkel, Wolfgang (1964). “Eine neue Weisheitslehre.“ In: Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 50. 6–12. Stark, Rodney (2001). One True God. Historical Consequences of Monotheism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Steymans, Hans Ulrich (1995). Deuteronimium 28 und die adê zur Theronfolgeregelung Assahaddons. Segen und Fluch im Alten Orient und in Israel. OBO 145, Freiburg, Schweiz: Universitätsverlag. Sundermeier, Theo (1987) “Religion, Religionen.” In: Müller, Karl and Theo Sundermeier (eds.). Lexikon missionstheologischer Grundbegriffe. Berlin: Reimer. ——. (1999). Was ist Religion? Religionswissenschaft im theologischen Kontext. Gütersloh: Kaiser. Uehlinger, Christoph (1998). “Du culte des images à son interdit.“ In: Le monde de la bible 110: 52–63. Voegelin, Eric (1993) Die politischen Religionen. Vienna: Fink. Weber, Max (1920). Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie I. Tübingen: Mohr. Wilson, John Alabert (1970). “The Theban Tomb.” In: Journal of Near Eastern Studies 29: 187–216.

POLITICS AND RELIGION FROM AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW: AN INTERVIEW WITH MARY DOUGLAS* I Biography Q: Starting off with some biographical questions, could you tell us how and why you became an anthropologist? M.D.: When I first went up to Oxford it never occurred to me to become an anthropologist, I had never even heard of the subject. I wanted to learn about social policy or something similar. So I went for the degree called Modern Greats, which was meant to be a modern equivalent of Classics, a balanced combination of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, PPE. It was the beginning of the 1940’s, not a happy time for anyone, and the conditions for study were difficult. And furthermore I was very unprepared for university work. I had been at a Catholic convent school where I had been happy, where we had learnt a lot, but not enough for Academia. For one thing, I did not have enough maths for PPE. When I graduated in 1942, I was mobilized for war service like every one else. I was sent to work as an ‘Assistant Principal’ in the Colonial Office until 1946. There I had the good fortune to meet some anthropologists who encouraged me to read their books. This transformed my idea of what I wanted to do with my life, I wanted to become an anthropologist. So as soon as the war was over I was determined to go back to university and to learn this new subject. Q: Was there any special reason for choosing Oxford? M.D.: There weren’t many places to study anthropology in England at that time, only Cambridge and London. Oxford had recently * The interview was conducted on the occasion of Mary Douglas’ visit to Konstanz in September 2003 to chair the graduate conference ‘Konstanzer Meisterklasse’ on ‘Politics and Religion.’ It was guided by Daniel ”uber and Marco Kaiser. A revisit in December 2003 gave the opportunity to fill gaps and dwell on details. We want to thank Professor Douglas for her indulgence and kindness. D.”. and M.K.

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founded a new graduate degree in Social Anthropology. As I belonged to Oxford already, it seemed ideal. Q: Can you tell us something about the Anthropology Department at the time that you began your studies? Who were the major influences? M.D.: I had picked by chance the perfect moment to do anthropology in Oxford. I chose it largely because the famous EvansPritchard was just taking up the Chair in Social Anthropology that had been occupied by Radcliffe-Brown. The star-studded international cast on the faculty included Meyer Fortes, a great West-Africanist, Louis Dumont, the French anthropologist specializing on India, and John Peristiany, a Greek specializing on Kenya. They were all major influences. It was one of those privileged periods which make an unforgettable impact. I was specially affected by what I learnt from Evans-Pritchard, the dominating influence for us all, also from Meyer Fortes, and the fellow students who were an extraordinarily distinguished group. They included the Jewish scholar, Franz Steiner, who was technically a graduate student but probably more learned than any member of faculty; and an Indian, Srinivas, who was another, very learned scholar. We also had an Egyptian, Essai, and from Ghana, Busia, who later became an important statesman, a New Zealander and an Englishman. You asked about Evans-Pritchard himself. From reading his books I expected him to be an old man, but he was only in his forties, very approachable and full of humor. He was reputed to be arrogant, and it is true that he did give that impression, but it was superficial. I have known many more arrogant anthropologists. When I was preparing for fieldwork in Central Africa I enquired about learning the Bantu language. He warned me that it was best to learn the language directly from the people who spoke it. The months in which the anthropologist is helplessly dependent on them puts the later fieldwork on the right footing. It forces humility—an irreplaceable experience. This is an insight into the complex character that he was.

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Q: How did you come to decide to pick the Lele as the subject of your research? M.D.: In spite of its international coverage, the Department of Anthropology in Oxford was pre-eminently Africanist. But I didn’t particularly want to do my fieldwork in Africa. I was very conscious of my ignorance of my own European culture and its history and looked for a chance to remedy that lack by doing fieldwork in Italy or Greece. I could not find a supervisor for European fieldwork, nor the funding. I could get a grant from the International African Institute, and chose Central Africa because I was interested in systems of matrilineal descent. I met a Belgian colonial official who recommended the Lele, inhabiting the Belgian Congo. It was a wonderful choice, an extremely interesting people, subtle, clever, handsome, skilled in wood carving and raffia weaving. I first went there between 1949 and 1950, returned in 1953, and did not see them again until a short visit in 1987. Q: In what sense did the study of the Lele preface your major works, Purity and Danger 1 and Natural Symbols? 2 M.D.: I do believe that the Congolese studies stimulated everything that I have written. I was interested in their family and village organization, their attitudes to power and authority, their beliefs concerning God and the spirits. They advanced my thinking about cosmology. What struck me most about their social life was the way they realized egalitarian principles. Authority was barely perceptible (this to their loss at times when an authoritarian voice might have been useful to them). I came to see how they used taboos and boundary separations as means for dissipating power, as functional equivalents for hierarchy. To whatever subject I attended in the following years, I found myself focusing on the structuring and negation of power. This was the origin of the grid-group method of analysis, on which I am still always working.

1 2

Douglas (1966). Douglas (1970).

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Q: Did your Catholic beliefs have any influence on your career of anthropologist? M.D.: The Department of Anthropology in Oxford became known for the relatively high proportion of Catholics on the staff. Add to this that many of the students and staff had strong religious beliefs, whether Hindu, Jewish, or other. So any one who had a religious commitment was not unusual. This was not the case for the rest of the profession. I have often been taunted or teased for imagining that a convinced Catholic could be a good anthropologist, or the other way round. Catholicism and Anthropology were thought to be incompatible. This was a level of naïveté that I could never understand. Q: Would you see another link between your education and your academic field of interest? M.D.: In retrospect, yes, indeed. My early life was spent in hierarchical institutions. Hierarchy always played a crucial part in my personal experience. My childhood and schooldays were passed in very structured social environments. I was raised by my grandparents in Devon. Their life was set in daily routines and established rules and rituals. Hierarchy tends to use gender as a principle of organization, and our household was gendered correspondingly. My grandmother was supreme in domestic affairs while my grandfather, who was a local magistrate, was chief for all external relations. Everyone in the house had defined roles and domains, marked by special times and spaces. No one went into the grandparents’ bedroom, for example, except when invited. Of course the maid went in when it was the time for making beds and cleaning. Equally strictly, no one could enter the maids’ bedroom, except the maids themselves. The same for the nanny’s bedroom. The same for the bathrooms, one was uniquely for the grandparents and house guests, the other in a kind of attic was for the children and the maids. As to food, the variations in the menu for the main meal was strictly prescribed for the week, the other minor meals were invariant, breakfast, tea and supper. All meals had their proper times. So everything was clearly laid out and we never had occasion to overstep the rules. I believe that this way of life was very comforting for children who were separated from their parents, as my sister and I were. But such an orderly upbringing leaves them unprepared for social life in twentieth century England. When my mother died, my father retired from Burma

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and set up house for us in Marlow. We went to the Sacred Heart Convent School in London, following the expressed wish of my mother. School life turned out to be just as highly structured as life with the grandparents. The main difference was that the rules were explicit. There were various school uniforms to be worn on stipulated occasions. Spatial boundaries were respected. The nuns lived in a separate area of the house called ‘Community’ to which the pupils had no access. The nuns had their holy rule, which including never eating except in community. We used to try to tempt them with sweets. In spite of the formalities, the whole atmosphere was warm and friendly. I was happy there. Individual competitiveness was controlled, we spontaneously condemned trying to attract attention, ‘showing off.’ These experiences of hierarchy in childhood have provided me with a profoundly interesting theme underlying my thinking on society and culture. II

Theoretical Approach

Q: Regarding the development of your thought, we are struck by a certain correspondence between your philosophical interests and those of a group of early twentieth century German philosophers, like W. Dilthey, M. Heidegger, as well as the sociologist, K. Mannheim, They were working towards the foundation of a holistic concept of social science. You used the concept of the ‘whole person’ that you used in a volume co-authored with Steven Ney a few years ago.3 The sub-title of that book, ‘A Critique of the Social Sciences,’ suggests a project that would correspond to their programs to the letter. Is this parallel a coincidence? Were you in any sense familiar with these traditions? M.D.: The answers are, No, it was not a coincidence since the idea of holism has had currency in social anthropology since the beginning. And again, No, I was never familiar with these traditions. It is not so surprising. Because of the alliances in two World Wars, the schooling in England paid more attention to French philosophy and literature than to German. It was Franz Steiner4 who kept telling us 3

Douglas and Ney (1998). Franz Baerman Steiner was a Czech Jew who emigrated to Great-Britain. See Adler and Fardon (1999). 4

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that what we were trying to do in a new Social Anthropology department in Oxford was anticipated in German philosophy. That was also the period in which Phenomenology was first gaining support in England and France. We were deeply influenced by Durkheim and Mauss. It took the anthropology students of my generation a long time even to glimpse the larger philosophical contexts in which the word ‘holism’ had begun. The one philosopher who made an indelible impact on all departments of Oxford Humanities was Wittgenstein, after all he had actually taught in Cambridge. His influence went in quite the other direction, teaching us to beware of the tricks that words can play, to avoid ambiguity, ineffability, mysticism, and to develop very positivist methods of research. In this perspective the best way for us to strive for a holistic view of society was to make sense of it in terms of total systems of exchange, and to avoid importing the unrecognized values of our own culture into our account of others. I am glad that you mentioned Missing Persons. The book was written in memory of a great American political scientist, Aaron Wildavsky5 (he used to describe himself as a ‘policy analyst’). Steven Ney and I offered it as a late response to the questions he used to ask. It is nice to hear you proposing that the aims and methods of research that it describes might be of interest to German sociologists under the rubric of ‘holism.’ As I see it, this is probably true. The project is to trace how body and mind, and society and individual, collaborate systematically. It is essentially a holistic view. ‘Missing Persons’ is directed against Anglo-Saxon methodological individualism. We tried to show that many of the social sciences, such as economics, psychology, political science and sociology, work with a very fragmented understanding of the rational human being. The person is depicted as a pre-social creature dominated by its individual wants and needs. Our goal was to show how culture can be included in the theoretical modeling of the self. It requires effort to work out how rational thinking is done by a socialized person. This question has to be prominent in the program to develop a holistic approach to human society. Particularly we criticized the impoverished social theory that excludes on principle the influence of other persons on the rational individual. In my introduction to a collection of essays, 5 Aaron Wildavsky and Mary Douglas collaborated on ‘Risk and Culture’ (1982). Wildavsky died in 1993.

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Risk and Blame,6 I predicted that the quest for a holistic approach to the social sciences will soon top the agendas of scientific discourse,7 but that day has not yet come. We need to make the measures of grid and group better known and more applicable to contemporary interests. Perhaps it could be achieved with the help of your generation of German scholars trained in holistic thinking. Q: Could you tell us a bit more about the origins of the concept of ‘missing persons’ itself ? M.D.: Anthropologists are happiest dealing with persons negotiating their way though real practical situations. Strong professional constraints prevent us from indulging in conceptual abstractions. Our role has been to check grand hypotheses with counterfactual experience. In the 1960s modernization theory developed on the supposition that ideals of freedom and prosperity had grown with technological progress. Anthropologists presume that to be false, democratic ideals have nothing to do with science and technology and thrive in very rudimentary economic conditions. Even today there is a lot of work to be done to overcome the ideas about individuality, basic needs, wants, etc. which prevail in contemporary discourse on policy. My arguments are generally based on empirical studies by anthropologists, such as Turnbull’s study of the Congo pygmies,8 McArthur and McCarthy on hunting societies,9 and of course on Marshall Sahlins’ important works on economics and culture.10 So you see, I am more oriented towards anthropology rather than to any general philosophical program. Q: What shone through your statement was a hope that better concepts can change public perception of social problems. Would you subscribe to that view? M.D.: Yes, most definitely. I believe that a different conception of so-called ‘individual needs,’ ‘individual’ wants and preferences, that

6 7 8 9 10

Douglas (1992). Douglas (1992; ix pp.). Turnbull (1962). McCarthy and McArthur (1960). Sahlins (1958, 1972).

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is to say, a socialized conception, can help us to perceive solutions to problems that up to this point we can hardly put into words. We are now undergoing the break-up of what can be called ‘the Western consensus.’ It is something similar to Thomas Kuhn’s depiction of scientific revolution. It is a re-shaping and renewal of our scientific conceptual apparatus. Many analyses refer to a process of ‘globalization.’ Whatever you name it, this world-wide development is bound to affect more than our political relations. It puts us in the throes of a thought revolution, inevitable because our traditional concepts simply fail to grasp what we observe to be happening. The social sciences are using an antiquated machinery of thought, narrowly focused on ourselves and our traditions. As soon as we try to appreciate a wider gamut of social forms the shortcomings of our concept of the rational being are evident. Q: How does this relate to you approach to culture in general? M.D.: From an anthropological view there is no sense in using the word culture for vague abstractions. Our task is to make sense of social rules and ways of organizing in terms of the meaning they have for specific collectivities—be it distant, small scale, societies, or our own globalizing one. Comparativism is the framework. The next step in the method is to stop talking about culture in general, but to focus on cultural bias. That concept is a bridge between our own preconceived values and other people’s. Cultural bias is a set of attitudes that are generated by specific forms of organization. For example, growing up in a hierarchical environment makes a person nervous about competition, and critical of pushy, competitive individuals determined to excel. That is one kind of bias with many ramifications. Growing up in an individualist environment has the opposite effect, it encourages a person to strive to excel. That is another cultural bias. Each has implications for the concepts of political science, justice, punishment, fairness and so on. The challenge is to make tools for tracing how the multiple other forms of social life deal with power, how they constrain or disperse it, or deal with tyranny. My own preferred way of working is to focus on a particular slice of behavior, like food, religion, risk, art. Within this deliberately restricted context I like to trace how the dominant cultural bias colors thought and perception. In this long-term project we are very much indebted to Durkheim and Mauss.

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Q: Could you give us a short illustration of this project? M.D.: Medicine would be a good example, although I have never worked extensively in that field. The anthropology of medicine has to take individual choices and experiences as the initial data, and to move from there to the larger holistic context. Let me speculate on medicine in two different communities, organized differently, one competitive, the other hierarchical. We would find two different theories of the body and of health, two different expectations about health and sickness. The hierarchical system rests on tried traditions; it depends on mutual respect between accredited practitioners, strong loyalties prevail among members of a particular school, they will defend each other if accused of malpractice. They have a firm idea of the ‘sick role’ to which the patient must conform in order to be cured, and great faith in the efficacy of their traditional treatments. In the competitive system the practitioners are rivals, they must vaunt their own superior prowess and the superiority of their medicines. They are readier to experiment with new drugs. Between patient and physician there is quite a different relation, strong bonding and no formally defined sick role. Much of the success of the treatment is attributed to the patient’s personality and will to recover. This is mostly imagined speculation, for the sake of a brief illustration of a holistic view that includes all the relationships in its purview. Let me hint you at an edited book entitled The Healing Bond.11 Q: Since you adopted your cultural matrix to explain many different phenomena, and because it is so central to your approach in general, could we ask you to sketch out its basic principles? M.D.: My most fundamental idea is that of distinctive thought styles which exclude and stand in conflict with each other. You may ask what this talk about thought styles has to do with human behavior? When people choose certain ways of living together, be it certain medical or aesthetic preferences, food or dress habits, they are actually engaged in manifesting a cultural pattern. The symbols they create play a crucial role in their social relations. When group ties are very strong, and social life is based on prescribed positions (that is

11

Douglas (1994).

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the hierarchical system), the anti-type is the individualist culture, based on individual competition. They are inherently incompatible. An individual who has built up one of these kinds of commitment is generally hostile to the behavior of individuals who have been reared in the other kind. This is half of the story. There are two other kinds of community generated by the two dimensions we use to identify with hierarchy and competitive individualism. The two dimensions are regulation ( grid ), and group solidarity ( group). When strong and complex regulation combines with group solidarity, we have to do with a hierarchical system. When there is no group solidarity and little regulation, we have an individualist culture where everyone is wheeling and dealing on their own account. Another possibility is weak regulation combined with strong group solidarity, the kind of sectarian group we call enclave. Lastly there is the possibility of no group organization and very strong regulation preventing individuals from freely negotiating with each other: I call that the culture of isolation. Though the names we have given to these spots on the grid group diagram in over 30 years of discussion have never been very satisfactory, often misleading, but the analysis can be very sophisticated. Each of these cultural types is described by the form of organization which generates the characteristic feelings and judgments. This typology does not presuppose that the cultural attitudes impose themselves on the human actors, but rather that the individuals themselves display their preferences by making manifest a cultural pattern, their actions display the culture. Q: Since you have worked on this model for more than three decades, what did you perceive as its major challenge? M.D.: Once I had worked out the model and started to test it, I soon found out that it was incapable of explaining cultural change. This blind spot was critical. I tried to account for changes by referring to factors external to the model. For example I would have to explain the decline of hierarchy and the rise of individualism by economic expansion, or the increase of social solidarity by the dangers of war. Then some enthusiastic colleagues started to work on the model together.12 They showed that the relations between the four 12

Thompson, Ellis and Wildavsky (1990).

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cultural patterns were inherently adversarial. Each cultural type was actively defending its cultural territory against all comers. This addition transformed it into something dynamic and more powerful for research. Gerald Mars and I recently applied it to terrorism.13 Q: This brings us close to the subject of our conference, ‘Politics and Religion.’ Can you say something about it? M.D.: From my theoretical position terrorism is likely to be an active principle in the ‘enclavist’ culture. Most enclaves (strong group, weak grid) raise the loyalty of their members by painting the outside world as evil. Some dissident groups collapse while others become violent and successful, and develop terrorist activities. Gerald Mars and I were trying to account for the different political strategies by considering the differences in social organization. The answer depends on the sources of funding, the difficulty of retaining the young members, the response of the outside society to the first aggressions. The more the group seems to be threatened, the more likely to resort to desperate measures. We hope to have opened up a new approach to the politics of terrorist groups. Q: At this point your cultural scheme seems to meet your later approach to institutions in ‘How Institutions Think.’ 14 M.D.: Indeed. This book was another shot in my locker against the implicit solipsism of utilitarianism. If we force the opponents to admit common culture that shapes individual thinking, we then have to invoke institutions as the common and powerful constraint on individual freedom to think. Institutions supply the basic categories and classifications on which every day social action relies. Classification is a prime example of collective action. Sharing a common interest in the survival of their institutions, individual members develop shared classifications of the world, and a shared moral concern. There they are, arguing with each other about what to do for the best, looking around for telling arguments to back a case, they try to justify their preferences by analogies with nature. If an institution survives, its functioning bears witness to its having achieved a consensus. It would 13 14

Douglas and Mars (2003). Douglas (1987).

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fade and disappear if its members did not endow it with some moral value. By building institutions together individuals create the terms in which they see their world. Institutions save intellectual energy. By making the classifications they reduce the range of possibilities among which individuals can choose. Thus an institution channels information and biases decisions. In effect its members leave much of their decision-making to the institutions they support instead of reasoning from scratch over each problem that confronts them. Q: You are purporting a very strong notion of institutions. You have been attacked for a particular bias that underlies your own approach, i.e. a certain bias towards non-dynamic and ‘conservative’ categories such as stability, classification, hierarchy. What would you respond to that? M.D.: Well, yes, I can’t completely deny it. I have explained why I am interested in defending these principles under attack from liberal forces. I don’t want to deny this tendency, and I would level the parallel charge against opponents. By emphasizing only the role of an autonomous individual in rational thought, they are biased the other way. Moreover, they are being carried by the stream that I am trying to swim against. Their intellectual bias demonstrates the truth of my theory about cultural influence on thought. Q: Continuing your argument would lead to a certain variety of relativism . . . M.D.: What’s wrong with that? Cultural relativism is unavoidable. Anthropologists who make relativist arguments against the idea of unacculturated intellectual life are not themselves subscribing to ethical or philosophical relativism. We are trying to understand how strong bias arises. I don’t think I am more relativistic than Durkheim, Fleck, Mannheim or Kuhn, or other sociologists of knowledge. Are you going to deny that cultures are really different? III

Religion

Q: Now we come back to the subject of religion. You have said it was your idea to demonstrate to the rationalists that having a religion and being an anthropologist are not incompatible. Could you say more about this conviction?

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M.D.: I find it hard to separate my anthropological thinking from my religious commitment. I would rather say that there has been a continuous dialogue between them, even though religion does not seem always to be the topic in hand, writing about economics for instance. Q: Still, there seems to be a particular discrepancy at work, since your anthropological approach seems to be heavily inspired by Durkheim’s religious sociology of his later period. In that works he depicted religion as a mere projection of society. Is that acceptable to a Catholic? What role did he actually play in forming your own approach anyway? M.D.: You are right in pointing out an apparent inconsistency. To many (and I suspect to Durkheim himself ) his theory of religion seems to be at odds with Catholicism. But the block is partly due to different ideas about society. Had anyone else before him developed the argumentative view of the formation of the social bond? That it is not maintained by force and authority but by agreement on the categories in which the world is apprehended? Following his example the English anthropologists have been trying to grasp the processes in which categories are formed. Durkheim has a sense of the fragility of the social bond. Anthropologists find that the members of society themselves are very well aware of the danger of strife and moral collapse; in response they reinforce their arguments by appeal to the highest possible authority they can think of, God. Durkheim must be right here: each society as it builds itself is building a distinctive idea of God. Does any one want to deny that there are many different ideas of God? Durkheim strikes a heavy blow against methodological individualism and in favor of collectivism and pragmatism. He manages to relate religion to the material conditions of existence, and to focus on its material manifestations, ritual performance, dance, song, rules about food and sex. This is very much more in sympathy with Catholicism than with religions which make a spurious cleavage between practical social life and its spiritual, ideological aspect. Durkheim showed that religion is not a secondary, derivative feature of social life, but an essential part of it.


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Q: What can anthropology bring to the Western academic effort to understand religion? M.D.: Many previous sociological accounts of religious formations have been flawed by a misconceived idea of modernity. It can be traced back to Weber and his contemporaries. They presented modern society as unique, incapable of comparison with any previous state of social evolution. Perhaps you don’t know that almost every tribe has a strong perception of its own uniqueness. Moreover, anthropologists are not half as sure as the mainstream sociologists that modernization necessarily produces secularization. These assumptions have obscured persistent expressions of religiosity in contemporary society. We can also qualify a popular assumption among the learned that religion is a unifying force, whereas experience suggests the opposite. Religion is divisive if the society is divided. Q: This is quite a strong criticism of modernization theory as well as sociology. M.D.: Yes, but sociologists have been taken by surprise by the rise of new religions and the rise of fundamentalism in recent decades. We do need to remake our conceptual apparatus, and go back to explore how small-scale societies work. Q: So, would you oppose the hypothesis of a general ‘crisis of religion’? M.D.: Absolutely. The idea rests on normative assumptions about religion: that religion is always something good, and that societies should be integrated by religion. For this there is only weak historical evidence. There is a crisis of organized religion, accompanied by a resurgence of private religions and subjective religious experience. Q: You presumably agree that modernity has liberated us from traditional bonds, and has led to an individualization of religious experience, as, among many others, Charles Taylor 15 has recently demonstrated. M.D.: We are back to my hierarchical prejudice. It is a story that many liberals love to tell, that thanks to modernization we are free.

15

Taylor (2002).

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But beware. We also must admit that under modernity only a very small and privileged group of people have much free choice. Somewhere I remember writing that the ancient Vikings had more free choice than we do: at least they could decide whether to go to Greenland, participate in wars, or stay in Scandinavia. Whereas for us, wherever we go, it is the same. We complain about the dullness and uniformity that we see on TV, in our shopping malls and holiday resorts. We are still very much under the control of our culture. Q: In recent years you have committed yourself to a close reading of parts of the Old Testament, and have described it as the most exciting research you have ever done. What was it that triggered this enterprise? M.D.: When I wrote Purity and Danger I included a whole chapter on the Mosaic dietary laws based on ‘Leviticus.’ At the time that I wrote it I had read very little of the Bible (a regrettable Catholic tradition). When I was in Princeton in the Department of Religion (in the early 1980’s) a colleague from the Presbyterian Seminary invited me to give a lecture on sacrificial rites in the ‘Book of Numbers,’ and to focus especially on the enigmatic rite of the sacrifice of the red heifer. Any other anthropologist would have been better qualified than I was for his task, since the Lele don’t make sacrifice. I only knew about sacrifice from books, I had never witnessed one, had no first hand experience. As I feared, when I met the students I found there was nothing that I could teach them that wasn’t obvious or that they didn’t know already. After that meeting I actually started to read ‘Numbers,’ and became enthralled by it. In the following years I deepened my understanding of dirt and defilement by studying that book, and wrote ‘In the Wilderness.’16 Q: The move to take the Bible for an ethnographic source appears likewise fascinating and very intricate. I must admit that I lack enough knowledge to grasp what the whole story is about. That is also why we would be very interested in delving deeper into these thoughts. In what manner do you consider a rereading of the Old Testament to contribute to your theory building?

16

Douglas (1993).

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M.D.: Actually, it was the other way around. Originally I had used the Bible as a source for suitable examples for my theoretical statements. While I went along, it turned out that the search for sources came to inform theory building. I started to study the history of the redaction of the different parts of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and the historical background of the different and rival groups in the Jewish community. Eventually, the process of learning the Bible taught me how to develop my theoretical interests. Q: Was there a special finding or problem in this process that convinced you to pursue a recasting of the story of the Bible? M.D.: In particular it was clear that the matter of ritual purity was very opaque. It was a help to be able to compare biblical ideas of purity with those reported by anthropologists (including myself ) from fieldwork. I have learnt not to focus on the negative side of the purity rules, but to relate them to the positive classification of the world, whatever it is. It is always difficult for Biblical scholarship to connect the editing of the priestly books to a particular historical and political situation. Dating is a perennial problem for which Bible scholars have been obliged for lack of other information to rely on philological criteria. It is very helpful to be told authoritatively that the two priestly books, Leviticus and the Book of Numbers, were given their final redaction during and after the Babylonian exile, that is, sixth and fifth centuries BCE. In focusing on those two books and that period I have tried to work out how contemporary political interests could have biased both the editing and also the subsequent reading. Q: Could you tell us more about the particular political context you are referring to? M.D.: We cannot assume that the records in the Pentateuch related to actual events that occurred around the twelvth century BC. Even at the time they were written, approximately 500 years later, particular groups had rival interpretations. At the generally agreed time of editing the final version, during and after the Babylonian exile, the situation of the Jews was very hard. They could draw a paral-

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lel between their own journey home from Babylon and their forefathers’ escape from slavery in Egypt. They had been allowed by the Persian king who had defeated the Babylonians, to return home from exile and rebuild the temple at Jerusalem. The priestly editors of Leviticus and Numbers had their own political agenda. They were concerned with the survival of the priestly school and with a future community that would include the descendants of all the sons of Jacob, not exclusively with the sons of Judah. This assimilationist viewpoint would have put them into conflict with the government of Judah which was promoting a very exclusionary policy. The returned exiles wanted a policy of ethnic exclusion, their leader, Ezra, ordered them not to marry foreign women and to send home any foreign wives they had taken. This would have driven a wedge between the priestly school and the government, particularly in regard to the war against Samaria. Q: With concern to the interpretation of the sources themselves, what could anthropology teach the Biblical scholars besides the import of the historical setting? M.D.: The anthropologist is also interested in the rhetorical structure of the written material and the literary principles which would have guided the editing process. There were of course many biblical scholars interested in the same questions. I owe much of my own reading to Jacob Milgrom’s interpretation of the Book of Numbers. He identified parallelism as the dominant poetic form in Numbers. Paying attention to the literary forms of the text opened new perspectives on the interpretation. Q: In your own reappraisal you have hinted a the so-called ‘ring-construction’ of the Biblical texts. What is it about? M.D.: Yes. In ring composition the themes are arranged so that the thoughts that opened the text would reappear at the end. This joining up made it into a kind of ring. The beginning and end do not contain the essential message of the text, they frame it. It is the midturn which is crucial to the ring construction and which carries the meaning. So we have the text divided into two halves, cut by the line from the start to the mid-point. The story is started in the opening section, the middle part expands the themes, after the mid-point

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the narration turns round and goes back to the beginning by either positive or negative analogies. The main message is in the middle, framed on both sides. It is quite a complicated construction. I consider that the book of Numbers only makes sense under the premise of its being a ring composition. By reading it the modern way, which imposes a linear structure throughout, you only get an impression of confusion and disorder. Q: Can you tell us more about the intellectual origins of the ring structure? Why has it been a secret to Biblical scholarship for so long? M.D.: That’s a good question. Parallelism has been known to Bible scholars for a very long time, and well-known in Europe since the eighteenth century, mainly for short poems. What is not well-known is its use as a frame for the macro-composition. As a rhetorical technique it is found in various cultural regions of the globe, such as North America, Northern Europe, China, India, Burma. It was used in antiquity to construct long pieces. It’s almost everywhere. Q: From where did the editors of the Pentateuch adopt this technique? This question must be crucial to your account. M.D.: Yes, indeed. But I must admit that it is hard to bring any further evidence about it. The method of organizing important literature in ring form goes back into pre-history. I doubt that it had a single origin. The editors of the Pentateuch were certainly a highly educated elite, some of them among the wealthy and noble families that were carried off by the Babylonian conquerors. Their knowledge of maths and astronomy was at a high level. In exile, they encountered different cultures and would have taken the opportunity to improve their skills in different arts and sciences. This might account for the sophistication and polish they brought to their writing, but it doesn’t imply that their learned teachers had not been writing in ring form long before that time. Q: Could you finally sum up the impact of your occupation with the Bible on your general cultural approach? M.D.: Actually the connections are very close. The new subject helped me to work out my ideas about culture. I developed the

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matrix of four kinds of culture with four types of religious practices. I came to the conclusion that the Priestly editors of Numbers would best fit into a hierarchical environment undergoing drastic change. I suspected that they have been misinterpreted, owing to prejudiced prior assumptions about modernity, priesthood, and ritual. I have gone on to write two more books on the Priestly work, using anthropology to make a fresh reading of Leviticus and Numbers. (One is still in press, due out in August). The fourth is a literary analysis of biblical styles, particularly of a form of composition in a ring, where the ending is made to join up with the beginning. Although the move has all the advantages of a complete change of field, it has not taken me out of my rut, I am still always working on culture, anthropology, Durkheim, and all the things we have been talking about. Q: We seem to have arrived finally at a reconciliation of religion and anthropology. We have come round full circle to the beginning. Many thanks for your patience with our questions. References Adler, Jeremy and Richard Fardon (1999). “Introduction.” In: Steiner, Franz. Selected Writings. 2 vols. Oxford: Berghahn, Studies in Methodology and History in Anthropology. Douglas, Mary (1966). Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. ——. (1970). Natural Symbols. Explorations in Cosmology. London: Barrie and Rockliff/ Cresset Press. Douglas, Mary and Aaron Wildavsky (1982). Risk and Culture. An Essay on the Selection of Technical and Environmental Dangers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Douglas, Mary (1987). How Institutions Think. London: Routledge. ——. (1992). Risk and Blame. London: Routledge. ——. (1993). In the Wilderness. The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. ——. (1994). “The Construction of the Physician. A Cultural Approach to Medical Healings.” In: Budd, Susan and Ursula Sharma (eds.). The Healing Bond. The PatientPractitioner Relationship and Therapeutic Responsibility. London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary and Steven Ney (1998). Missing Persons. A Critique of the Social Sciences. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Douglas, Mary and Gerald Mars (2003). “Terrorism. A positive feedback game.” In: Human Relations 56, 7: 763–786. McCarthy, Frederick and Margaret McArthur (1960). “The Food Quest and the Time Factor in Aboriginal Economic Life.” In: Mountford, Charles P. (ed.). Records of the Australian-American Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 145–94.

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Sahlins, Marshall D. (1958). Social stratification in Polynesia. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. ——. (1972). Stone age economics. Chicago, IL: Aldine-Atherton. Taylor, Charles (2002). Varieties of religion today. William James revisited. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Michael, Richard Ellis and Aaron Wildavski (1990). Cultural Theory. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Turnbull, Colin M. (1962). The lonely African. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

RELIGION AND MORALITY IN MODERN EUROPE COMPARED TO THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA* Thomas Luckmann I The French founders of sociology reaffirmed the basic principles of the Enlightenment philosophy of religion. They were not convinced by the critique of Enlightenment rationalism offered in the early nineteenth century by the French traditionalist philosophers. For them religion, at least religion as it was then represented by Christianity and other world religions, was a passing stage in the formation of collective consciousness. It was to be replaced by a positive philosophy and, eventually a ‘positive religion’ entirely unlike anything earlier known as religion. The functional differentiation of society would also lead to the transformation of traditional morality into an organic form of social solidarity. Once established, it would counteract the anomic potential of such differentiation. In essence, the theories of secularization of the past century accepted the ComteDurkheimian view. The statistics documenting the decline of church attendance throughout Europe since the eighteenth century seemed to lend plausibility to the assumption that religion and modern society were not compatible. * In the past forty years I have often written about religion in the modern world. Some elements of my view have changed. I tried to combine an anthropological functionalism—with which I began—with a phenomenology of transcendence, (in my postscript to the German translation by Hubert Knoblauch of ‘The Invisible Religion’ (1991)). However, in many respects my position remained the same. Over the years I published several articles which show both the continuities and the changes. I may mention the last one, from which the arguments and formulations in the lecture, given in the Konstanz University sociology “Meisterklasse,” were taken with several minor changes: “Superficial or radical transformations of religion and morality in the modern world,” Lecture at the Anno Santo Conference at the Urbaniana, September 2000, published (2001). I added the section comparing the religious situation in Europe and the United States of America. It is obvious that my thinking is so profoundly indebted to Max Weber, Alfred Schutz, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen, Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim that no amount of annotation would do justice to that debt. I therefore refer only to literature that is directly relevant to some particular argument.

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I did not share this view, for reasons that antedated the relatively recent quite extraordinary expansion of some varieties of Protestantism in Latin America, as well as the spread of Catholic and Protestant Christianity in Africa and the world-wide resurgence of Islam.1 It was argued that these societies do not contradict traditional secularization theories because they are not modern. But the obvious fact of the vitality of Christianity in the United States of America cannot be explained away in a similar fashion. It was observed by de Tocqueville, long before the recent triumphs of the evangelical successors over the older mainstream denominations continued to astound contemporary sociologists. America was then as it is now in several respects the most modern society in the world, even if some features associated with its religion did allow ‘special case’ explanations. In any case, my own early refusal to accept the prevailing theories of secularization had theoretical reasons. I did not accept the assumptions made about the nature of religion by rationalist philosophical and sociological theories. I was convinced that religion is not a passing phase in the evolution of mankind but a constituent element of human existence, appearing under different socio-structural conditions in various historical forms. In whatever form it became a social reality, it bonded individual human beings to a collective tradition, a shared view of the meaning of life. The bond was forged again and again in those elementary communicative processes by which an organism is transformed into a historical being with a personal identity of its own. To be sure, an anthropological assumption, well-founded as it appeared to me, is not a theory of religion. The universally human aspects of religion are one thing, the historical varieties of religious experience in distinct forms of social organization are another. A link between the two must be shown to exist. But first a brief observation about morality. I view morality as a reasonably coherent set of notions of what is right and what is wrong, articulating a view of the ‘good life’ that guides human action beyond the immediate gratification of desires and the momentary demands of a situation. These notions, held by individuals, are constructed in communicative interaction, and they are selected, maintained and transmitted in social processes in which

1

Berger (1999).

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some conceptions of what is right and what is wrong are canonized and others censored. Thus distinct historical traditions of a view of the good life are articulated which then serve as a norm in the collective organization of life. To every individual born into a historical society, a particular world view presents a conception of the nature of life and death; it defines the relation of everyday reality to an extraordinary, transcendent reality, and it articulates a given view of what is good and what is evil. A world view maps the way which an organism of our species must take to become human, to become part of a meaningful social and natural cosmos. The historical nature of human existence is a result of a complex evolutionary process. Once history evolved, it imposed itself as a second nature upon the biological determination of the species. A world view, a historical tradition which makes sense of the world, originates in subjective experiences of ordinary and extraordinary realities. These experiences are partly solitary, partly shared; they build up a world view in long chains of communicative interactions. World views—with their core components of a conception of the good life in relation to some transcendent reality—are transmitted in communicative processes to successive generations of individuated organisms of an animal species, thus transforming them into actors in a concrete, historical social world. As they learn that they are accountable to others, individuals become morally responsible (or irresponsible) human beings. The elementary function of a world view is both religious and moral. World views are constructed as meaningful wholes integrating the sense of diverse levels of human experience. Some subjective experiences are of everyday reality, others are of extraordinary realities. Collective, socially objectivated representations of all these realities are integrated into a hierarchical structure of meaning. Life and death, heaven and earth, order and chaos, the trivial and the sublime, are linked in some particular fashion. The basic religious function of the world view as a whole is consolidated in a special part of a world view. It is the part which originated in subjective experiences of transcendence. Such experiences became socially objectivated into what one may call specifically religious collective representations. These articulate the world view in intelligible terms as a model for the conduct of individual and collective life. The model defines the relations of ordinary everyday

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reality to transcendent realities. It names the elements of these realities, provides words and iconic representations for them, and defines the proper ways of addressing them (in sacrifice, prayer, dance etc.). The bridge between these two different reality domains is built with the help of metaphors, symbols and rituals. A phenomenological description of the subjective experiences of transcendence reveals three different levels. In everyday experience two levels of transcendence are encountered: the continuous minor transcendences set by the boundaries of time and space, and the intermediate transcendence defined by the inaccessibility, the essential otherness of fellow beings. In dreams, ecstasies, meditation, extreme pain and in the sight of death one experiences the great transcendences by confronting the boundaries of everyday life itself. Coping with the minor transcendences tends to be considered the domain of magic. A concern with the social transcendences belongs to the domain of political religion.2 Collective representations trying to overcome the great transcendences were the only ones that were conventionally viewed as being properly religious. It is difficult enough to separate these levels of experience even in phenomenological description. Empirically, world views in general and their religious core in particular contain all three levels, although the proportions may differ. This holds even for religions such Christianity and the Islam—whose theological experts battled fervently—generally in vain—against magic. In some societies the religious part of the world view was sharply set apart from the rest of collective representations, in other societies the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ was not radically separated. The tendency to segregate the sacred domain from the profane world became more pronounced with the emergence of the ancient civilizations. This was primarily the work of experts in religious knowledge. Ordinary members of society had no longer direct access to important parts of their religion. The basic religious function of world views is relatively independent of their specific contents. Animism and shamanism of tribal societies, peasant Taoism and Confucianism of the high tradition in China; the many public and secret cults in the Roman Empire; the ‘monotheism’ which came to be articulated in the Hebrew world view; the 2

As they were called by Voegelin (1938).


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various historical Hindu and Buddhist cultures of South, East and North Asia; the succession of Arab and non-Arab, Sunnite and Shiite Islamic cultures in Asia, Africa and Europe; the Puritan communities of New England, the Catholicism of Ignatius of Loyola; the various brands of Communism—all had the same elementary religious and moral function. Neither the subjective experiences from which, nor the communicative social interactions in which historical world views are constructed, are isolated from their social context. They are firmly embedded in different social structures. The religious and moral center of worlds views is influenced in various direct and indirect ways by the conditions of life which, in turn, are determined by different forms of social organization, by the division of labor, the technology of production and distribution, and by the system of power and the associated structure of social classes. The nature of the links between the social structure and the world view is not immutable. The religious and moral core of a world view may be diffused through the entire social order with all its institutions; it may be at home in a particular set of closely related institutions; and it may be segregated in one specialized institutional domain. The way in which the religious core of a world view is embedded in the social structure, I propose to call a social form of religion and, correspondingly, I shall call the place which morality occupies in the social structure its social form. II Throughout most of human history three social forms defined the place of religion in society. In archaic societies the maintenance and transmission of the ‘sacred universe’ was based on the social structure in its entirety. Religion was diffused throughout the various institutions of society, with a low degree of what one may call a specialization of religious functions. However, even in societies with a simple division of labor, some specialization of the religious function occurred at certain points in the kinship system (ancestors, totems) and among the early experts in transcendent experience (shamans). Religious knowledge helped shape the norms of kinship, the dominant dimension of social organization in these societies; it legitimated the simple patterns of the division of labor, and of the exercise of power.

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The meaning of ordinary action was linked to transcendent realities. Social organization was based almost exclusively on face-to-face social relations and socialization procedures were homogeneous. This first and oldest social form of religion prevailed for the longest part of the history of our species. The second arrangement dates back about five thousand years. Its development is best documented in Pharaonic Egypt and in the old ‘hydraulic’ societies of the Near East.3 It may be said that in these societies the entire social structure kept supporting a ‘sacred universe,’ and that transcendent realities continued to legitimate the entire social structure. However, the specifically religious part of the world view did have highly visible ties to the institutions of power— as in divine kingship. The increasing complexity in the division of labor, the production of a surplus over the subsistence minimum, central control over its storage and distribution, growth of supracommunal and supra-tribal political organization, emergence of distinct occupational roles and the formation of social classes made for progressive functional differentiation of social institutions. In these societies, religion began to achieve a distinct institutional location in the social order. Yet the ‘sacred logic’ of the world view continued to provide cognitive and affective support for the individual’s conduct of life. It should be noted that in these societies the majority of the rural population continued to live in ‘archaic’ folk communities still characterized by vestiges of the original social form of religion. Two social forms of religion thus came to co-exist and to interpenetrate. The third of these basic arrangements of religion in society is characterized by the fact that one particular set of institutions came to maintain and transmit the collective representations of transcendent reality. The sacred part of reality was sharply segregated from the profane, and religion acquired a visibly separate location in a special set of social institutions. The differentiation of the social structure into functionally specialized institutional domains was not the result of a general evolutionary process. It emerged in one particular line of human history, in the post-Constantinean (post-Theodosian) areas of the Roman Empire. Within the general process of social differentiation of some

3

As Wittfogel (1962) called them.


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societies, the institutional specialization of religion in the form of the Christian churches represents a historical development that was originally also limited to that area. The new social form of religion was superimposed upon the already existing mixture of the archaic and traditional forms. The new situation contained elements of the social universality of religion which was characteristic of the diffused archaic social form; the ‘caesaropapist’ linkage of an established church to the state contained elements of the traditional social form. Nonetheless, the new social form of religion was characterized by a genuinely new arrangement of the relation between religious collective representations and the social structure. Institutional specialization of religious functions, and monopolization of these functions in one distinctly religious institutional domain, resulted in a church which—during the Middle Ages—was capable of contesting the state or entering into mutually profitable alliances with it. The restricted location of institutional religion in the social structure, with a correspondingly restricted jurisdiction over thought and action, was a seemingly unstable arrangement for religion in society, but it survived as a dominant social form of religion for something like a millennium and a half. However, from the beginnings of the modern era, and at an accelerated pace since the social transformations of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, the consequences of the general functional specialization of institutions helped to undermine its preponderance. This process which was, in my view, erroneously interpreted as the spread of secularization, should be recognized as the emergence of a fourth, the privatized, social form of religion. The fate of morality in many ways resembled that of religion. With some simplification one many say that in archaic societies religion, morality and law had a common basis in the social structure. The institutions that involved different functions in social life were, if not entirely “fused,”4 very closely coordinated. At the heart of the moral order of every society there was a clearly articulated conception of the good life. The overall significance of the moral order was legitimated by systematic reference to a transcendent sacred universe even when morality and religion were no longer seen as being identical. 4

To use a metaphor suggested Redfield (1953).

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In the course of Near Eastern and Western history, moral, religious and legal functions of collective life increasingly tended toward organization in separate institutions. The codification of rules of conduct in the form of law represented a first step in the differentiation of religion and morality, although divine sanctions continued to be invoked. But morality remained attached to religious institutions during the earlier phases of the process of institutional differentiation and even law retained a sacred quality almost to the present day. As the pace of functional differentiation of political, economic and legal functions of social life which marked Western societies since the late Middle Ages speeded up, the process spared neither religion nor the moral order. For a prolonged period, religious institutions continued to serve as the social-structural basis of morality but religious institutions themselves were eventually restricted to what was considered their proper function by the modern state. In consequence, the socially and morally disciplining force of religious institutions began to weaken. Both, religion and morals, were increasingly individualized and, first in the case of religion and subsequently in the case of morals, privatized. Religion became faith, morality conscience—in other words, they became subjective realities, socially defined, to be sure, but enforced only within social milieus rather than by the institutional apparatus of the entire social order. III After something like two centuries during which this change was prepared by transformations in the economy, in the relations between church and state, in the family structure, by urbanization processes etc., the ‘privatized’ social form of religion, and analogously of morals, came to prevail in the past decades over the form that was dominant over many centuries. It did not simply replace the institutionally specialized social form; it redefined the general social-structural and cultural framework within which the churches were to coexist with other, in the main highly individualized objectivations of religious experience. This fourth social form of religion emerged in the vast overall process of modernization and is most directly associated with two of its basic components. One is the functional specialization of the major public domains. The economy shed functions not directly connected with the orga-


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nization and production of goods and services, and the state concentrated upon the organization of power. Both emancipated themselves from religious norms. The other is the modern variety of pluralism. Different world views do not merely coexist in segregated social and ethnic groups within an empire, as in Hellenistic and Roman times, when the contacts between the groups were sharply limited by religious and secular law, social norms and custom. Now, different world views became available to everyone, at least in principle. The belief in the uniqueness and superiority of one’s own view of transcendent realities was challenged and their dominance of in the conduct of ordinary life undermined.5 Essential characteristics of the ‘modern’ privatized social form of religion are institutional de-specialization of religion, de-monopolization of the production and distribution of world views, and immediate mass-medial accessibility of a supply of collective representations that refer to various levels of transcendence. (Religious) collective representations are produced by a variety of sources and distributed in a relatively open market. Canonization of one world view for an entire society and general censorship become unlikely if not impossible.6 The churches and sects remain important; they offer a product that is clearly labeled as religious. They compete with other contemporary constructions of a sacred cosmos which attempt to cope with the subjective experiences of the ‘great’ transcendences. They are doing so either by adaptations to what is taken to be ‘modern consciousness,’ or by selective conservatism, or by outright ‘fundamentalism.’ It should be remembered that the overwhelming majority of the population in the European countries had nominal membership in the established Protestant, Catholic and, in the Southeast and East, Eastern Orthodox churches well into the twentieth century, with the exception of Soviet Russia and the small European strip of Turkey. Active participation had shrunk consistently but only relatively small numbers actively dissociated themselves from the churches. Today, only a small part of the nominally Christian population (I now disregard, for the moment, the immigrant minority religions, such as,

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See Berger and Luckmann (1995). Totalitarian regimes in a modern state, as in National Socialist Germany, may establish them with limited success and for a limited duration. 6

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most prominently, Islam) forms an inner core of the faithful. The level of participation in church religion is generally low throughout Europe. Significant differences remain, however, despite a ‘leveling’ process in which areas, which until one, two or three generations ago still had high levels of participation, tend to ‘catch up’ with areas, which had relatively low levels even in the nineteenth century. Depending on what indices one uses, the figures range between far less than 10 per cent, in England, for example, to an estimate of an exceptional 30 per cent for Poland. This inner core is surrounded by a layers of different degrees of attachment, all the way to total indifference. There is little outright hostility to the church and, considering that only few belong to the inner core, nominal membership remains relatively high. Davie’s notion of ‘vicarious memory’7 aptly describes the situation for these outer layers in a simplified formula. A major part of the population accepts and supports the Christian tradition as representative of its historical identity. Acceptance is extended not only to the tradition as such but, by most, to the Christian churches as the caretakers of that tradition even if one is critical of the church for any number of reasons. To repeat: this part of the population is not homogeneous. It consists of occasional and very occasional, more or less skeptical practitioners as well as of non-practitioners. However, at least part is religious in a general non-institutional way, and highly syncretistic, taking bits and pieces from selected elements of the Christian tradition, from a vaguely pantheistic nature worship, from ‘New Age’ notions, Buddhism etc. Among them, too, and not merely among the active members of the churches, there is some potential for mobilization. The potential is exemplified in collective charity work, in various peace movements, and in the ecological movement. It is difficult to say how the situation will evolve. It is quite unlikely that the Christian churches will turn into strong ‘denominations’ on the American model, and even less likely that—apart from some sects, and remaining skeptical about the success of the restorationist trend in the Vatican—they will turn fundamentalist. However, there is no strong evidence for predicting their withering away entirely either. Together with the ‘vicarious memory’ sector of the population, a small inner core will probably keep Europe ‘Christian,’ albeit 7 See Davie (2000). For the concept of religion as memory see Hervieu-Léger (1993).


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in a diluted way. It is difficult to say to what extent recent immigrant religion, Islam in particular, will change the religious face of Europe in the coming generations. The churches are of course only one, although the oldest, provider of transcendent orientations on the ‘meaning’ market. For one, the residual carriers of nineteenth century political religions that focused on the intermediate social transcendences of class, race and nation, continue to operate in the highly competitive market. They have little success in the core regions and population strata of modern European society. An expanding position in the market is occupied by relatively new suppliers. They conquered a large share of the market in recent decades. Here, the situation is quite diffuse. Among the new suppliers are, both, the ‘new’ religious communities and the large-scale commercialized enterprises in the all-embracing fold of the ‘New Age.’ Finally, there are the mass media which select and transmit collective representations produced elsewhere. The ‘contents’ of the privatized social form of religion are, of course, quite heterogeneous. The contemporary mass media cater primarily to a large part of the population, possibly a majority, which espouses minimally transcendent views of the good life: from ‘selfrealization’ to ‘wellness,’ representing a variant of privatized religion hardly any traditional religionists and few sociologists of religion would consider ‘religious’.8 Hedonistic attitudes, a constitutive part of a modern mentality, is rooted in the cultivation of emotions and immediate sensations. When articulating topics appealing to this mentality in myths, symbols, and dogmas it is not easy to meet even low standards of consistency. However, a variety of social organization that is located between the ‘great’ institutions, the state and the economy on the one hand, and the individual on the other, is doing its best to overcome this difficulty. Whereas television caters to various audiences, different smaller groups may selectively pick up topics generated by the subjective experiences of life in contemporary society, reformulate and recombine them in digestible portions under various brand names, and distribute them on a local, regional and, 8 It is not impossible that modern apocalyptic and ascetic movements such as the ecological movement will eat into the broad hedonistic section of the population, possibly in a new coalition with Christianity. But that will depend on what the ecological and economic situation will be during the twenty-first century.

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meanwhile, also on a world-wide scale. Groupings of this kind often arise in sub-institutional movements started by religious charismatics and moral entrepreneurs. In addition, there are small-scale revival attempts of nineteenth century occult, spiritualist, etc. movements, most of which claim an older lineage. Television is not the only mass medium active in the propagation of the new social form of religion. There is also a vast ‘devotional’ literature. The treatises on ‘life-reform’ at the beginning of the last century were the forerunners of the best-sellers on positive thinking, on expansion of consciousness etc. that started in the fifties and sixties. They are as nothing compared to today’s flood of volumes on popular psychology, Eastern ‘mystical’ and meditational practices, astrological advice, bioenergetics, etc. An earlier scattering of smallscale enterprises has now turned into a major industry. The products provided are religious representations of the most diverse kinds. Various sets of these representations can be combined individually. They can be also taken up by groups—typically on the periphery of modern society—and converted into a sectarian model. Their chances of stable institutionalization tend to be rather small, however, and any particular syncretism tends to be ephemeral. Most of the enterprises in the fold of the ‘New Age’ do not even attempt formal institutionalization. Few attempts are made to transform the small enterprises into big corporations. Instead, ‘net-works’ are created or, at least, a ‘network’ mystique is cultivated, and commercially exploitable ‘cultic milieus’ are thus formed. The general structural conditions favoring the spread of the highly subjectivist ‘New Age’ in search of a new ‘wholeness’ were the functional specialization of institutional domains, the pluralism of massculture, and the development of a market of world views. These conditions also gave rise to another ‘holistic’ option. ‘Fundamentalism’ is the opposite of individual syncretism and subjective ‘bricolage.’ Despite some obvious likenesses, one must distinguish this kind of ‘fundamentalism’ from the violent response to the cognitive and emotional strains which, in addition to the very serious material problems, somewhat similar conditions produce in many traditional societies in transition. The challenge to traditional religious legitimations of a particular form of life, especially in Muslim countries, was much more sudden and more radical than in the original core areas of the Western processes of modernization and provoked radical responses that seem to have swamped ‘liberal’ Muslim traditions.


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Even the less pervasively disorienting challenges, under the substantially more favorable material conditions of life in modern Western societies, gave rise to Protestant and Catholic versions of fundamentalism. These have chosen traditional models of ‘wholeness’ in reaction to ‘modernity’ which is seen as fracturing human existence and alienating the individual from society, creating disorientation and anomie, fostering ‘immorality’ in economic and political life, destroying obligatory controls for public and private life by the propagation through the mass media of a wide variety of models for ‘immoral,’ especially sexual behavior. The fundamentalist attempts to re-universalize what may have once been universal—but had now become the religious and moral dogma of a cognitive minority—do not seem to have much chance of success in Europe.9 The members of cognitive minorities seem to be unaware of this; in the case of the Vatican, for example, just as unaware today as in the times of Pius IX—unless the strategists there are discounting Europe and North America and counting on the expansion of traditionalist (i.e., nineteenth century anti-modernist) Catholicism in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In short: the modern privatized social form of religion is characterized, for better or for worse, by the absence of plausible and generally obligatory social models for the persisting, universal human experiences of transcendence and the search for a meaningful life. This situation appears to represent a radical decline of religion which could be only explained by a theory of secularization. I hope to have shown that a better explanation is available. In the Western European societies, religion underwent an epoch-making change of the social form of religion (and morality). One should assume that the structural conditions that were responsible for this change also transformed the social form of religion in other modern societies. The situation in Japan is different for obvious reasons. However, Europe and the United States of America share a common religious history and, throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they are comparable grosso modo in most aspects of the social structure: industrial capitalism, some sort of approximation to parliamentary democracy within national republics and 9

In Europe, Protestant fundamentalism is weak and generally limited to sects. Catholic fundamentalism, on the contrary reemerged as a powerful force in the Church in a reaction to the Second Vatican Council.

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constitutional monarchies, and a reasonably effective rule of law. A comparison between the United States and Europe is therefore more illuminating with regard to the different ways by which institutional specialization was replaced by a privatized social form of religion. IV In the United States of America this process occurred under quite different circumstances and had different consequences. ‘History’ shapes the conditions of life and conditions of life shape collective mentalities (and collective mentalities shape collective action that makes ‘history’). In a comparison of Western Europe and the United States of America it was the history of the relation between religion and the state that may have decisively influenced the social context for the emergence of the new social form of religion in these structurally most modern societies. In the United States of America, the social form of religion is even more difficult to treat in an account separate from the political domain than in Europe. In Europe, ‘social’ disestablishment preceded legal disestablishment. In the United States, however, the separation of church and state prevailed from the very beginning. On one, the purely constitutional level, the situation appears rather simple. Whatever the original differences in the colonies and early states were with respect to church establishment, federally, strict separation of church and state prevailed from the beginning despite strong political forces, which propagated establishment. The situation was peculiar in the eyes of European visitors. There was no legally established church, no state church, yet at the time of Tocqueville’s visit, both the everyday and the political importance of religion could hardly be overestimated. One is tempted to say that legal non-establishment was the necessary condition for an unofficial federation of the major non-conformist Protestant denominations, the Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians (Congregationalists), as well as the Americanized Anglicans, to become socially established in the early nineteenth century.10 In the United States, the churches were never churches in the traditional sense of the word, they were denominations in a plural system of legal disestablishment in which the early ‘social establish10

For a recent, excellent and compact analysis see Casanova (1994).


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ment’ was followed by ‘disestablishments,’ revivals, ‘re-establishments’ and a perhaps not quite definitive ‘disestablishment.’ After the failure of evangelical, ‘fundamentalist’ regeneration in the early decades of the twentieth century, mainstream Protestantism became the central pillar of the Protestant/Catholic/Jewish ‘civil religion’11 of the fifties and sixties. In the following decades, the modern anti-modernist Protestantism, which with its fundamentalist core had retreated to the rural areas and the South, reemerged as a noticeable political force; it became a public religion12 as it profited from the organizational capabilities of the ‘New Right’ and the charismatic appeal of Falwell. At the same time, the older denominations, which were accommodated to pluralism and secular, religiously neutral conditions of life, shrank. American Protestantism has bifurcated, at least temporarily, into a smaller section consisting of the somewhat ‘liberalized’ traditional denominations, that are fully accommodated to pluralism and modern conditions of life, and another section,13 a modern anti-modernist one, which contains a fundamentalist core, and which had become active as a public religion. All that appears to have happened without a substantial decrease in participation in Christian denominations; during the last decades the inner secularization of some of the older, ‘respectable’ denominations was compensated by the rise of evangelicalism. In general, the denominations were much better fitted to function as organizational forms of some vitality within the new privatized social form of religion. American Catholicism, after its earlier fate as a minority religion and then as one of the pillars of the post WWII ‘civil religion,’ seems to be in a transitional phase. Catholic religious social ethics is now at the opposite side of right-wing Protestant ‘fundamentalism;’ its official sexual ethics, however, although increasingly disregarded even by the faithful, as in Europe, even before the ‘sexual scandals’ broke in the church (e.g., in the Boston diocese), and its rigorous position on abortion brought it into an uneasy alliance with the evangelical Protestants. 11

See Herberg (1955). In Casanova’s terminology. See Casanova (1994). In Europe, “public religions” were limited to a few rather special cases, such as Franco/post-Franco Spain and communist/post-Communist Poland. The overall situation is quite varied in national detail yet shares some common features which differentiate it from the situation in the United States of America. 13 Whether this section is really expanding as much as some—usually worried— commentators will have it, is difficult to assess. 12

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Next to the clearly visible vitality of the new Protestant denominations and of Catholicism in its new, somewhat shrunk shape, hedonistic individual syncretism and loosely organized esoteric circles or, as in the case of ‘New Age’ groups, ‘networks’ dot the religious landscape without, as a rule, considering themselves religious. For much of the late modern era, participation in some ritual activities, such as baptism, church marriage, church funeral was lower, but not much lower in Europe than in the United States. However, with some simplification of internal differences, one may say that service attendance and participation in congregational or parish activities kept dropping in Europe from a slightly lower level to a much lower level at least since the middle of the nineteenth century for the Protestant countries, and the middle of the twentieth century for the Catholic countries. In a traditional view of what constitutes religion, America gives the impression of religious vitality, Europe of religious decline. With regard to religion the similarities between Europe and the United States are nonetheless still greater than the differences, and in their similarities they differ strongly from modernizing Latin American countries and from the Islamic part of the world. However, the differences remain and they cannot be understood in terms of the secularization paradigm. The secularization theorists considered Europe to be in the vanguard of secularization, the United States merely lagging behind for reasons, which they were hard put to explain. In my view, Europe is not secularized but in the vanguard of a privatized form of religion, with the churches surviving within the new frame on a modest level, new, highly syncretistic, possibly evanescent forms spreading outside the traditional organizational forms of religion. In the United States of America, Christianity in the form of denominations not only survives but even thrives in an American variant of the privatized social form of religion, this being attributable in major part to ‘history,’ more specifically to the different history of the relations between church and state.14 14 It would seem that the difference between the United States and Canada bears out this point. The religious situation in Canada resembles that in Europe more closely than that in its neighbor country. On a very rough estimate, participation in traditional forms of church activity, although somewhat higher than in Europe, is perhaps no more than half that in the United States. The outreach of the oldline Protestant denominations has shrunk as in the United States but was not compensated by a fundamentalist evangelical resurgence. The close connection between


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The changes in morality were in some ways analogous to those in religion. Morality is a constitutive dimension of face-to-face social interaction, both in archaic societies in which it had no institutional basis of its own, as well as in traditional societies in which this was the case, and in societies with a high degree of functional differentiation. Concrete interactional morality in small groups was a necessary part of all human societies. In ancient civilizations, morally significant notions and ideas were built into complex systems of morality. These had their canons and catechisms and were infused into the institutional norms of the social structure. Eventually, they developed a structural basis of their own in religious-moral institutions. However, the emergence of a cultural superstructure and an organizational basis did not make practical morality disappear from everyday life. It did, of course, make a difference by influencing practical morality or, at the very least, its rhetoric in traditional and early modern societies. In late modern societies, unitary moral orders no longer exist. Certainly, modern societies still contain groups with an insider morality—but the morality is unenforceable outside the group. Notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ continue to be relevant to the conduct of life. Although a dogmatic hierarchy of conceptions of the good life is no longer uniformly transmitted and enforced by a dominant institutional apparatus, notions of right and wrong are still passed on by various channels, especially by the family and by (other) intermediary institutions, peer groups, local branches of larger societal groups, associations and institutions such as civic organizations, clubs, religious congregations, and schools. Intermediary institutions are also the main source of at least partial enforcement of such moralities in the interaction order. Neither the new social form of religion nor the new form of morality are confined to the solitary individual. Privatized religion tends to find scattered social bases in intermediary groups and institutions; and privatized morality is still a matter of interactional praxis. The ‘contents’ of religion do include traditional orthodoxies of ecclesiastic and political-ideological origin, although they are now bereft of the institutional power of old-style orthodoxies. But these are ‘islands church and society exemplified in Quebec Catholicism for centuries, well beyond World War II, has been severed. Traditional religious adherence remains high only for the recent Muslim and Hindu immigrants.

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surrounded by a sea’ of a religion that leaves little to be venerated but the self-indulgent quasi-autonomous ‘self.’ Analogously, practical morality consists of islands of traditional Christian, Jewish and Islamic morality, as well as traditional humanist, socialist and other secular moralities. In Western Europe, at least, these islands that are almost submerged in a self-enclosed familistic morality, at best, and the nearly solipsistic morality of self-fulfillment. To sum up: structurally a new, privatized social form of religion and morality was superimposed on a mixture of older ones. The contents of religion and morality have changed significantly, too. In their dominant versions they are characterized by a shift of the transcendences to which they are addressed from the great to the intermediate and, especially, the minor ones. However, the rationalist view which saw religion as a passing historical phenomenon is wrong. Neither religion nor morality have disappeared. In one form or another they are alive. References Berger, Peter L. (ed.) (1999). The desecularization of the world: Resurgent religion and world politics. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Berger, Peter L. and Thomas Luckmann (1995). Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Foundation Publisher. Casanova, José (1994). Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Davie, Grace (2000). Religion in Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herberg, Will (1995). Protestant-Catholic-Jew. An Essay in American Religious Sociology. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle (1993). La religion pour Mémoire. Paris: Cerf. Luckmann, Thomas (1991). Die unsichtbare Religion. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ——. (2001). “Superficial or radical transformations of religion and morality in the modern world.” In: Euntes docete 54, 2: 35–46. Redfield, Robert (1953). The Primitive World and its Transformations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Voegelin, Eric (1938). Die politischen Religionen. Vienna: Bermann-Fischer. Wittfogel, Karl A. (1957). Oriental Despotism. A Comparative Study in Total Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

TALES OF TRANSCENDENCE: IMAGINING THE SACRED IN POLITICS Bernhard Giesen I Introduction The master narrative of modernity insists on a neat institutional separation between religion and politics. Politics is viewed as a rationalized and autopoetic business of generating power—purely mundane and devoid of any religious roots. In this clinically pure vision of modernity functional differentiation is in the saddle and assigns a logic of its own to each domain: science is governed by nothing but the devotion to timeless truth, capitalist economy is driven by the utterly mundane pursuit of individual economic interests. Like politics, science and economics, too, are thoroughly rationalized and largely public domains. Religion, by contrast, is shifted to the private realm and related to the individual quest for consoling answers to questions of human existence. This radical separation of religion and politics, however, is a fairly recent historical achievement of Western civilization. We don’t have to focus on Muslim fundamentalism to discover that it is only feebly and superficially supported by non-Western societies. Even in the most secularized Muslim societies, like Turkey, a clear majority of the population does not accept secularization. And this Western ‘exceptionalism’ is not backed by a long historical continuity; in most ancient societies religious and political leadership were merged in the sacral authority of kings. Political authority claimed a religious foundation and religious cults were public practices that tried to cope with extraordinary challenges and to mediate between humans and gods by sacrifice and prayer. Frequently this sacrificial mediation was performed by the ruler himself. Thus politics had a direct religious foundation and theology had immediate political implications.1

1 Assmann (2003) mentions Varro as the first who coined the term ‘political theology.’

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The history of the Western split between religion and politics is well known: The collapse of the west Roman Empire in the fifth century, and the conflict between the universal reach of the church and the limited range of political authority since the eleventh century, generated a particular tension between church and state in Latin Christianity.2 From this period onwards the distinction between spiritual and temporal powers, between ‘sword’ and ‘book,’ between the ‘heavenly city of god’ and the ‘earthly city’ has been at the core of Western political philosophy. But even the medieval conflict between pope and emperor was not about a political intervention into the ecclesiastical domain, but about competing spiritual claims to represent Christianity on earth. Both, emperor and pope, claimed to be representatives of Christianity and heirs of the Roman Empire. Centuries later, the confessional wars were still driven by religious motives and even today many focal conflicts of global politics are fuelled by religious zeal and confessional divide. After the Treaty of Westphalia, however, the relationship between politics and religion was reversed in Europe. Religion as the prime mover of war and politics was increasingly replaced by an autonomous politics of the princely state. The sovereign prince could decide about the confession of his subjects and his politics was to be based on purely secular foundations. The Enlightenment attacked this alliance of ‘throne’ and ‘altar’ as well as the heteronomy of what was considered to be the most personal commitment: religious confession. Political power should give up its religious disguise and religion should abstain from intervening in politics. Even if in modern societies politics can occasionally still dress as religious movement, this relapse into a pre-modern fusion of religion and politics is easily discarded as pathological deviation. How was this fundamental translation from the unity of sacral authority, via competing claims on spiritual leadership, into a coexistence of separate domains achieved? The classical paradigm for answering this question was provided by Max Weber’s famous essay about ‘Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism’:3 Capitalism was generated by religious motives but persisted even if its religious roots were fading away. In a similar way politics—although once merged 2

This split repeated the separation between religious community and political rule that Israel had to stand under the Babylonian rule. 3 Weber (1979).

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with religious practice—can, in a modern context, dispense with any religious foundation.4 In contrast to assuming a mere generative or historical function of religion, scholars like Eisenstadt and Voegelin, Schmitt and Kantorowicz, Assmann and Luckmann have doubted whether even modern politics can dispense with religious foundations though in a secularized translation. Schmitt’s thundering statement is well known: “All central notions of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”5 Religion—however disguised and translated—is constitutive for every kind of politics. Following this “transcendentalist” line we should—instead of discovering political power behind religious surfaces—rather reveal the hidden religious core of politics. Some conceptual clarification may be helpful. Transcendental reference is not identical with religion. Even if we concede that no politics can dispense with a reference to a transcendental pre-political basis, we do not have to accept that every political practice presupposes a religious core in the strict sense of the term. We may consider religion to be one of several different cultural notions of the sacred or of transcendence. In this case the attention turns to those other modes of relating to transcendence which are implied in politics. In the following remarks we will address this issue from two different points of view. First, we will try to outline a typology of analytical figures of transcendence implied in social theory, and raise the question whether these figures of transcendence differ in their ‘elective affinity’ (Weber) to either politics or religion. The second and larger part of this essay reverses the perspective and investigates—again in an ideal-typical manner—different imaginations of the sacred as generated by social carriers, their life-world, and their mode of communication. Here, we will argue that a distinction between traditional religion and politics on the one side and modern secularized politics on the other is too crude and simplistic. Instead we will present four ideal-typical scenarios in which the differentiation between religion and politics unfolds and the sacred, as the source of politics, is imagined and presupposed in different ways. Each of these ideal-typical

4

Hans Blumenberg (1966) and others have provided some illuminating insights into this modern turn to constructing the world on purely this-worldly ground. 5 Schmitt (1922: 37).

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scenarios or “tales of transcendence” is grounded in a particular figure of transcendence as presented in the following chapter. II

Figures of Transcendence

The thesis that all politics relies upon a hidden transcendental reference can point to well-known philosophical arguments, ranging from German Idealism to more recent varieties of social philosophy: perception of reality presupposes a categorical frame (Kant); the order of objects is constituted by a transcendental subject (Hegel); the exception is constitutive for the rule (Wittgenstein); the profane exists only in distinction to its opposite, the sacred (Durkheim); social order has to be contrasted to some liminal reference (Turner); action cannot be conceived of without reference to an autonomous source of agency (Parsons); constitutions are set by a sovereign (Schmitt); and so forth. All these arguments converge in supporting the idea that social reality is constituted by referring to something that transcends the sheer positivism of the ordinary world of everyday life. Social theory—while not ignoring this reference to transcendence completely—has, however, a very restricted and selective perspective on it. Transcendence is commonly referred to as the contingency or autonomy of action—phrased either as the problem of deviance or as the problem of sovereignty in a state of nature. This perspective focuses the classical Hobbesian problem of social order as normative control. It disregards, however, largely the mode the transcendence that is implied by the basic structure of symbolic meaning. In the following outline we will include the dimension of symbolic meaning. Our typology consists of four different paradigms of transcendence with respect to social order: ‘deviance,’ ‘sovereignty,’ ‘epiphany,’ and the ‘void’ of meaning. 1. Deviance The reality of social laws, rules, and norms differs fundamentally from the reality as described by natural laws. Natural laws, if true, relate to cases only as confirming examples and allow for no exception. Social rules and social order, by contrast, are constituted by this very reference to the exceptions or to the cases that contradicts them. A social norm is not invalidated by actions that deviate from it; rather, it is the very possibility of deviance that requires norma-


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tive order. If actions were not essentially driven by autonomous decisions, but determined by external causes, there would be no need for norms and rules. Thus normative order and voluntary action presuppose each other. The deviant act—in its turn—becomes deviant only by reference to a norm—an action becomes a crime only through presupposing a law. Laws are not ‘broken’ by criminal acts, but they are instituted and enforced only because there are possible acts that would violate them—the crime is the reason for the law. Furthermore, the law itself is invisible; its existence is noticed only when contrasted to the visible act of deviance. The perpetrator embodies and represents this act of deviance. In his most elementary form the perpetrator is a stranger who violates the rules without knowing them.6 His action inflicts impurity and stain to a social community. Rituals of purification and separation that work even without the awareness and consent of the stranger can restore the original purity of the social order. More complex is the case of the perpetrator who was a regular and competent member of the community. He knew the norms, but decided voluntarily to violate them. Healing this violation by intentional decision requires rituals of jurisdiction and punishment. These rituals presuppose, however, that the accused person knows about the accusation and that he can defend himself against the charges. Even more complex is the case of the repenting perpetrator who not only knew about the rules before, but who, later on, confesses his guilt and promises not to act against the norms any more. By accusing himself the repenting perpetrator has contributed significantly to repair the crisis of the normative order, and the punishing authority can therefore reduce the degree of punishment. The very idea of deviance seems to have an obvious elective affinity to the realm of political action—to power, law and punishment. Deviance is the logical transcendence of the law as disobedience is the transcendence of authority. Both represent, however, negative forms of transcendence that—from the point of view of political order—are related to the demonic mode of the sacred. The distinction between demonic and redeeming modes of the sacred or of transcendence comes to the fore when political institutions supersede and integrate family ties and kinship units.7 6 7

The classical paradigm for this is the case of Oedipus. See next chapter.

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The question remains however, whether law and authority can be effective through threat of sanctions, i.e. of power alone, or whether law and authority have to be rooted in a ground that transcends the sheer positivism of power and its contingent distribution. 2. Sovereignty Searching for this transcendental ground of politics, we can imagine an absolute authority that is independent from the approval or consensus within the political process: the sovereign. The sovereign is the source of the constitution, i.e. of the basic normative order of a domain. This normative order differs from a natural order in being created and instituted by an agency, i.e. an autonomous source of action, which existed prior to this action and has to be conceived of as independent from this action. The sovereign is sovereign because he is able to suspend the constitution and to declare the state of exception.8 By constitution he is exempted from its rules. The sovereign acts out of a state of nature but he transcends this state of nature, its violence and brutishness, where bare life is at stake by establishing a political authority and a social contract. Although existing independently from the constitution the sovereign is analytically related to it. He can claim sovereignty only by referring to the normative order that he has instituted. Thus the sovereign is included in the constitution and at the same time exempted from it. The transcendence of the sovereign is imagined in the figure of the ‘charismatic hero.’ The hero is exceptional, autonomous and unique, he is endowed with superhuman powers, he commands a divine violence, he defies common reason and the risk of death, and he crushes the existing order and sets a new one.9 The figure of the hero reflects not only the relationship between sovereign and constitution, but inspires also the modernist notion of the autonomous individual, who creates the social order and acts out of a state of nature. Modern individualism is a transformation of the narrative of heroism, and the paradigm of action theory in social science continues this tradition. Again, there seems to exist an obvious elective affinity between this mode of transcendence and the political order: questions of sov8 9

Schmitt (1996). See Campbell (1971); Giesen (1998); Rank (1910).


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ereignty are at the core of political theory and philosophy. But one problem remains: the sovereign who sets the temporal and political order and controls its changes has to be exempted from its tidings and, in particular, from the risk of death. The imagination of the sovereign as immortal and sacral is, therefore, the Achilles’ Heel of political philosophy. As positive imaginations of transcendence, sovereignty and charismatic authority are thus challenged by the risk of misfortune and the dwindling belief of the followers in the immortality of the sovereign. As the normative order is related to deviance as its negative transcendence, sovereignty as positive transcendence is challenged by its ‘profanization’ through failure: the hero is discovered as a mortal human being who has lost the grace of gods. 3. Epiphany Not only norms, but also symbols cannot escape this basic reference to the opposite or to the exception; however, the relationship is slightly different. The normative order consists of a set of rules or expectations that are valid if they are sanctioned. By contrast, the symbolic structure of social reality consists of relations of meaning that allow understanding and orientation. In distinction to natural signs produced by natural events, the meaning of symbolic items or moments does not mirror natural objects. Symbolic meaning transcends the sheer factuality of natural events and the habituality of mundane procedures, and hints at a source of meaning behind it: ‘God,’ the ‘Sacred,’ ‘Identity,’ ‘Reason,’ and ‘History.’ Here—as the constitutive power is exempted from the constitution—the source of meaning is exempted from mundane, everyday reasoning and the ordinary expectations. If we directly encounter this source of meaning, we experience this moment as ‘epiphany,’ as ‘miracle,’ as ‘grace,’ as ‘awakening,’ or as ‘revelation.’ Of a sudden the hidden meaning is disclosed, the scattered stories merge to exhibit the true meaning of history; the ordinary pattern are discovered as superficial and illusionary, behind the visible everyday world appears an invisible eternal order. The fullness of meaning experienced in the epiphanic moment radiates into everyday life and commands radical changes. Usually this extraordinary source of meaning can be experienced only through its symbolic traces and representations in the visible everyday world. It requires mediation. The figure of the ‘prophet’ embodies this epiphanic transcendence; he reveals the hidden meaning

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behind the surface of mundane everyday life, and mediates between the sacred and the profane. The prophet does not act on behalf of his own, like the perpetrator or the hero, but, instead, speaks in the name of a higher truth, mediates between different realms; he has— like a ‘trickster’—no firm and fixed position in this world. In contrast to deviance and sovereignty, the epiphanic disclosure of meaning does not show an obvious elective affinity to politics. Prophets challenge the existing order of power and are notoriously hostile to compromises. Like sovereignty, the epiphany of the truth represents a positive transcendence to the regular social order, and like sovereignty, epiphany has to face the risk of doubts and disbelief—what the prophet claims to be ‘parusiah’ is mocked by his audience as preposterous eccentricity. Thus every figure of transcendence is defined also by its special counterpart that renders the representation and imagination of the sacred fragile and volatile. 4. Void The opposite of meaning is not a different meaning but the lack of meaning, the ‘void,’ the ‘absurdity.’ Here, the opposite to the mundane order is not constituted by a special act that becomes visible in contrast to a general rule, as in the case of norms and deviance or rules and exceptions. Instead, the unspecified state of void, ‘emptiness,’ and ‘nothingness’ cannot be experienced but by contrasting it to the web of meaning that patterns normal life, to the expectation of rule guided activities, to the benevolent presupposition of understanding each other. Like a hole that cannot be perceived but as a space surrounded by matter, the void of the ‘outlands’ cannot be defined and experienced but as collapse of meaning, as absolute absence of the sacred or—as the traditional theological discourse would have phrased it—as being ‘abandoned by God.’ Obviously, the void of meaning is related to the meaningful life by an oppositional or even destructive relationship.10 10 Social theory has paid much attention to themes like the constitution of normative order, and the Hobbesian perspective on social order has focused explicitly on a negative reference: the war of all against all in the state of nature. In contrast, the perspective on symbolic order has centered mostly on the positive construction of meaning: everyday action in a life-world or the function of religion for social order. The challenge from ‘nothingness,’ the void of meaning, the absurdity that lurks behind the surface of everyday activity have, however, rarely been addressed as a core reference for the constitution of symbolic order. There is no Hobbesian


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Like other modes of transcendence, the void, too, has to be represented and embodied in order to be visible in the social world. Among other embodiments of the void and the collapse of meaning the figure of the victim stands out. ‘Victims’ are depersonalized human beings. They are treated as ‘objects,’ as ‘cases of a kind,’ as ‘beings without a face, a name, a place’ within the community. In the outlands of camps they can claim no rights, they can be used and killed like cattle, they are just bodies, whoever kills them commits no crime.11 After longer maltreatment they are reduced to walking corpses without emotions, to the status of ‘living dead,’ to a borderline existence between human and nonhuman. Their remainders are dispersed and blown to dust, nothing should remind of their existence. But also, any link to a sacred core is denied for them; even their death cannot serve as a sacrifice, they are treated as utterly profane objects, their suffering has no meaning, they face the void, the nothingness, the absurdity of death without hope or consolation. In this radical sense the victim is indeed a modern phenomenon. Only in a world that has been abandoned by all Gods, the victim has to encounter this total absurdity without hope for redemption, for rebirth, for a better life after death. The outlands of camps stand for this radical externalization of the void, which lurks behind the surface of any symbolic order. But even the figure of the victim is not exempted from questions that may subvert the belief in this embodiment of negative transcendence. Like other representations of transcendence in politics, this one, too, is not exempted from profane doubts and disillusion, from fraud and fake. III

Four Tales of Transcendence

In the preceding introduction we have assumed that every social order presupposes a reference to transcendence, to the extraordinary, to the exceptional, to the sacred. The historical imaginations and representations of this transcendence, however, vary vastly and this diversity is rooted, in turn, in social situations and institutional patterns. It is imprinted by the life-world of its social carriers, by their perspective on the symbolic order of society and the philosophies of Heidegger and Kierkegaard have not yet been translated into a paradigm for the construction of social reality. 11 This description is inspired by Agamben’s concept of the ‘homo sacer’ (2000).

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forms of association and their media of communication. In the following we will relate the four figures of transcendence outlined above to four social and historical scenarios. These scenarios are: (1) ‘charismatic political authority’ embodying the figure of sovereignty, (2) the ‘principled rule of the law’ and its counterpart—the construction of deviance, (3) the ‘epiphany of reason’ in the public discourse of the Enlightenment, and (4) the ‘void of meaning’ as embodied in the victim as negative transcendence. Before we present these scenarios, in which the differentiation between religion and politics unfolds, we have to outline the mythical starting point: the paradise in which the original unity of society and family and the harmony between gods and humans still existed. 1. The Tale of Sovereignty: Charismatic Authority Many mythical stories about the origin of history imagine an original paradise in which men and animals lived in harmony with superhuman forces. From the eighteenth century onwards this paradise of affluence and innocence was translated into the concept of ‘the state of nature’ in political theory or into the notion of ‘primitive society’ in evolutionary accounts of society. These modern imaginations of the beginning of history focus less on the absence of suffering or guilt (which were at the core of traditional religious accounts) but on the structural simplicity of society: the institutions of kinship and family were seen as the backbone of society. Here the basic code consisted of the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ Viewed from the modern perspective, polity and family were assumed to be coextensive in pre-historical as well as in so called primitive society. Special political institutions or religious belief systems were rare or nonexistent. The sacred was seen as overwhelming power as embodied in natural forces like sun, wind or mountain. Like power, sacrality, too, was a matter of degree and it was not yet divided into good and evil. Everything could partake in this sacredness as everything could be endowed with power. The sacred forces were still part of the mundane world, the deities walked on earth and communication with them was not a great problem. Because the differentiation between the more sacred and less sacred were still inner-worldly distinctions, the original society was seen as a paradise without tension, alienation or suffering.


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This paradise was lost as soon as the sacred forces were divided into the redeeming and purifying forces on the one side and the destructive and demonic forces on the other. Evil and stigma were separated from charisma and the divine, the world was split into an opposition that did not allow for reconciliation. In order to prevent a merging of the opposites, the sacred forces had to withdraw from the profane world, the gods became invisible and communication with them became difficult.12 The sacred was still embodied in this world, but now humans—situated in-between the Gods and the demons—had to understand the mystery behind the surface of things. The world got a double meaning: behind the surface, the obvious and immediate appearance of things, a hidden and sacred power had to be discovered. In addition to this mystification of reality, a new structural situation demanded symbolic representations and institutional solutions: the unity of the community could no longer be seen as an extensive family and the boundaries of kinship did not confine the range of social integration. Instead, the social community consisted of a variety of families, the relations of which had to be institutionally regulated and symbolically represented. Commonly this problem of conflict resolution beyond the range of direct reciprocity is associated with the rise of political authority.13 In its original form political authority was still fused with sacredness. Political authority and the administering of religious cult not only originated from the same exigencies of integration, but were even performed by the same person. The ruler had not only to take care of internal conflicts between different families but also to cope with gods and demons. His task was to overcome an extraordinary crisis and to keep the world going in a regular and predictable way. And the ritual modes of coping with the extraordinary did not fundamentally differ between challenges from profane and from sacred powers. In both cases the law of diffuse reciprocity applies. A similar logic drives the gift-giving to non-related humans and the sacrificial offering to gods and demons.14 Whoever receives an offering that is set free from immediate profane benefits for the giver is obliged to

12 13 14

Assman (2003). See also his contributions to this volume. Service (1975). See Mauss (1990) and Godelier (1996).

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diffuse benevolence. Thus the sacrificial offering and offering of gifts have a common origin: the attempt to overcome the challenge of the extraordinary. Politics and religion are still indistinguishable. The merging of functions that, later on, were split and separated corresponded to an imagination of a world that—despite the separation of good and evil—still had an original unity. Although the sacred was hidden behind the surface of things it was not yet imagined as a distinct and disembodied sphere, but, instead, it still existed in this world, embodied in particular objects and places.15 It could still be conceived in spatial terms: there were objects fused with sacrality and objects without it, there were places that were haunted and doomed and places that were not, things that were pure and things that were polluted. Different gods and demons had their place in this world and could coexist because of spatial separation. Relating to transcendence also had a spatial dimension: being close to sacred objects allowed to participate in their redeeming aura and proximity to doomed or demonic objects polluted or bewitched a person. The fundamental law of contagion and separation applied. In this world where sacrality was unevenly distributed in space, where gods and demons could still talk with humans and walk among them, where the sacred powers were still embodied and represented by objects and images in this world, where the visible world mirrored the invisible world of gods and demons, humans could embody the sacredness of the Gods. The most radical mode of sacralizing a living person is the ‘divinization’ of the ruler. In ancient Egypt and in the state of the Inca, the ruler was not only a representative of the Gods but divine himself.16 In the West African kingdoms,17 in the Cuban monarchy or the Cameroon principalities, the Swazi kingdoms,18 and in many other archaic kingdoms the person of the ruler had a clearly sacred character; he was not a simple mediator, but a being detached from ordinary men and similar to the gods. The king was not allowed to eat ordinary food in public, he should not touch the ordinary ground with his feet, he was even exempted from the incest taboo in order to indicate his extraordinary and superhuman nature. Also well-known are the cases of deification of the 15 16 17 18

Voegelin refers to this unity as “compactness” and “the cosmological order.” Assmann (1999 a). Most prominently in the figures of the Ashante Hene or the Ibo Onitsha. See Girard (1977: 111) and Beidelmann (1966).


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emperor in China and Japan, and, of course, in the Roman Empire. Sometimes the deification of the ruler was founded in imagined kinship relations with the deities—thus referring to a mythical area in which gods and humans could even marry each other. The Chinese Ming emperor, for example, claimed not only to be under the mandate of heaven, but also to be the son of heaven himself; the Pharaoh was the visible representation of the gods; and the Inca could not marry outside his own family, because his divinity set him apart from ordinary human beings. In the person of the deified ruler, religion and political authority were merged and fused. Political authority had an immediate religious meaning and the religious cult related the people to the ruler as well as to the gods. Even more important for the sacralization of politics than the official deification of the ruler is the figure of the ‘charismatic hero.’19 Like the saint or the prophet, the charismatic hero mediates between the world of humans and the world of gods. As a human person he partakes in divine superiority. The charismatic hero is exempted from the regular social order, he defies death and common reasoning, and he commands a divine violence and crushes the existing order in order to construct a new one. He is the autonomous sovereign if there is any at all. Charisma is extraordinary and diffuse, it fuses political authority with sacredness and it overwhelms the community of followers in an effortless way—nobody may apply for it or argue in favor of it. Therefore it provides the most precious foundation of political authority. The construction of monarchic authority in ancient societies referred strongly to charismatic foundations. The king was imagined as the founder of the kingdom, as the triumphant conqueror of the land and as the victorious defender of his people. He represented, as a person, the original unity of society that once resulted from the bond of kinship. This charismatic core of monarchic authority is, however, elusive and volatile. Charisma is bound to the dialectic of failure and reconstruction.20 The personal embodiment of the sacred in the prince can hardly stand the test of time and routine, in which the hero is created—any attempt to turn this extraordinary moment into an ordinary and stable routine will finally result in the decay of genuine charisma. No hero can continuously work miracles. Failure and 19 20

See Weber (1925); Rank (1910) and Campbell (1968). See Giesen (2004).

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misfortune will result in a dwindling belief of his followers; may be raised and questions asked, the extraordinary hero is finally revealed as a mortal and ordinary human being. In the real world the hero can hardly avoid the decay of his charisma.21 The most common attempt to prevent this decay of charisma consists of the spatial separation between the charismatic hero and the mundane world of ordinary beings. It relates back to the assumption that the sacred is unevenly distributed in space and that spatial distance represents and reinforces social separation. Because no mortal person is able to present himself constantly in a charismatic way, the preservation of charisma requires that the hero can escape and retreat to the ‘arcanum,’ where only his confidants, his personal servants and his close family members notice his human weaknesses, respond to his need for advice and communicate with him on an equal footing. Both poles, the ‘arcanum’ and the ‘publicum,’ are necessarily connected, and the charisma of the king presupposes a delicate balance between them. If the king’s rule remains permanently in the arcanum, rumors about his death can spread and his charisma will fade away— a risk depicted in the classical drama of El Cid or Kurosawa’s movie ‘Kagemusha, The Shadow Warrior.’ If, on the other hand, the king never retreats backstage, he risks appearing as just another ordinary human being—mortal and weak, dependent and commonplace. This mortality and weakness have to be concealed from the public eye; those who witness it—his servants and advisors—are obliged to be mute with respect to outsiders. In the prince’s rare appearances in public, his charisma is staged by an elaborate liturgy, assisted by servants and minstrels, patterned by solemn rituals of procession, adorned with the signs of sacredness. The staging of his charisma aims at the awe that results from being close to what usually is distant and beyond a boundary. The close physical proximity between the prince and the people has to be counteracted by ritual restrictions of communication. Courtiers 21 Recognizing this inescapability of a tragic ending, some living heroes, in a dramatic turn, may even prefer to choose the moment of death by themselves and, thus, keep their sovereignty even in the defeat (Morris 1975). And some of them may even try to convince their followers to join them into the abyss-leaving behind them a devastated world that resisted their thrust for the new order. Cultures of martyrdom centre on this ultimate sovereignty of the voluntary death: let reality perish, but never give up the sacred cause.


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and guards maintain a distance between the king and the people; the king is silent or restricts his speech to ritual benedictions and blessings; he sits on an elevated throne or rides a special animal; his dress and insignia indicate his sacredness, so that he is separated from the mortal beings in many ways. Staging the charisma of the prince is to construct alterity and visibility, distance and proximity at the same time. As beneficial as the king’s presence might be, it is also frightening, overwhelming or even terrifying. When the charismatic hero appears in public, the people are captivated by his presence; they allow the sacred to permeate them and to dissolve their mortal individualities. The triumphant moment of charisma is the moment of effervescence on the part of the community of followers. Whoever wants to prevent the charismatic ‘osmosis’ between the prince and the people has to establish strong barriers of communication between the prince and his followers. Thus the English Puritans had to forbid any attempt of Charles I to address his people directly before his execution; the execution was public, but performed behind a screen that prevented the bloody act from being watched by the people. The Puritans were well aware of the diffuse, permeating and expansive nature of charisma, the crossing of boundaries and the sacred radiation of the crown. The sacralization of political rulership was, of course, also a mark of the European medieval monarchy. The king continued the line of the Roman emperors, his person marked the center of the universe and he could claim “ubi imperatore ibi Roma” (where the emperor is, Rome is). His presence infused and infected his entourage with sacredness—well known is the case of the “rois thaumaturges”22 in late medieval France, who were reported to heal scrofula (a skin disease) by simply touching people affected with the disease. But the ruler was neither divine by descent, nature nor by person. Instead, he was solemnly crowned by the representative of the church—the pope for the Carolingian emperors and the bishops of Sens or Reims for the Capetian kings of France. No matter how powerful the ruler might have been, he could not claim the crown unless the Holy Church agreed and invested him according to a prescribed liturgy. The coronation ritual links the sacred, timeless and invisible realm of the crown on the one hand, and the mundane, mortal and visible

22

Bloch (1998).

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realm of the ruler on the other.23 The king in the European tradition had “two bodies,” as Kantorowicz has shown in his masterful account of medieval political theology: his mortal, visible and private body is distinguished from his sacred body and the sacred office, which never dies but is passed from one ruler to another.24 The distinction between ‘immortal office’ and the ‘mortal person’ reflects the double nature of Christ as God and human being, as a mediator between the sacred transcendental realm and the profane affairs of this world. Saint Augustine, in late classical antiquity, and the Calabresian monk Joachim of Fiore, in late medieval times, elaborated the theological frame for this conception of the two realms or ‘two swords.’ Consequently, the early medieval image of the link between the king’s two bodies was based on ‘christomimesis,’ on the liturgical imitation of Christ by the king.25 Here, the immortality of the sovereign and the eternity of the sacred is achieved by separating the office from the person holding it. This separation opened up the road to a new scenario that eroded the sacred nature of personal charismatic authority. The charismatic hero still embodies the transcendence of sovereignty in an undiluted way. It center the figure of the autonomous agency that links the exception to the rule, the extraordinary to the ordinary, the sacred to the profane, the divine to the human. The sacred can still be positively embodied, imagined and represented in this world. It has a face and a place, a voice and a name in this world. In the next scenario this embodiment of the sacred will be challenged, its imagination will be questioned and its personification will be demonized. In the end, the figure of the hero is replaced by the figure of the ‘perpetrator.’ 2. The Tale of Deviance: The Rule of the Law When the Staufian emperor Frederic II26 extended his rule over Italy in the twelvth century, he staged his charisma not only by referring to the sacredness of the imperial crown and his succession to the Roman emperors, but also by presenting himself as “pater iustitiae,” as the source of justice in his realm.27 Originally, the sacrality of the 23 24 25 26 27

Eisenstadt (1982). Kantorowicz (1957). Feichtinger (1999). See Kantorowicz (1957: 87 pp.). Stürner (1996).


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written law reflected the charisma of the king who established it. It allowed decoupling political authority not only from family ties, but also from the presence of the ruler and even from symbolic representations of his person. Ideally it extended the range of political control considerably but it also transformed the representation of political authority profoundly. The pattern of radiation generated by the presence of the ruler was turned into an omnipresence of authority on a marked territory. This transformation generated a new transcendental foundation of politics. The sacred as represented by the law was now disembodied and exempted from the confines of space. Prepared by the distinction between person and office in the king’s two bodies, the actual politics of the prince had to be separated from the impersonal rule of the law. Political ruler ship, deprived of its sacral nature, was turned into a domain of contingent and strategic action, contrasted to the sacralized principles of law. As a final point, the personal rule of the prince was even demonized: the sovereign hero was turned into a demonic perpetrator whose mere existence constituted a crime. What had been the positive transcendence before, now appeared as a negative one: the charismatic embodiment of sovereignty was turned into deviance. Thus politics and religion could finally part company, the Axial age tension between the transcendental principles and this-worldly history could open up.28 While politics was increasingly turned into a profane art of handling power (Machiavelli), the impersonal justice could not dispense with a transcendental foundation and a religious backing. It is no surprise that the beginning of the split between politics and law was patterned by a close affinity between religious practices and the administration of justice. Both were based on writing and canonized scriptures. Writing transcends the boundaries of locality and presence, reaches out to future generations and distant readers, stabilizes meaning, and facilitates comment and criticism. It replaced the presence of the charismatic ruler and his spoken word with his written law, and removed the political center from visibility. Correspondingly, the shift from the charismatic presence of prophets and their oral preaching to the canonization of sacred writings, from the ritual sacrifice to please the gods to the reading of sacred scriptures and its interpretation by intellectuals profoundly changed the religious

28

See Eisenstadt (1982).

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imagination of transcendence. The sacred was no longer embodied in space, in objects’ places and persons, but disembodied—invisible, principled, timeless and merciless.29 In the religious domain, it called for the distinction between “true” and “false” religion,30 between righteous and sinful life, and denounced the old religious practices as pagan idolatry, as demonic witchcraft and ridiculous superstition. The image of a bond between humans and gods via kinship or sacrifice was either rejected or restrained to an original salvation encapsulated in some mythical beginning. In the legal domain it called for logical consistency and principled reasoning that transcended every finite number of special cases: on the basis of a principle we can always imagine further instantiations of the principle. Any limitations of this ‘categorical transcendence’ of principles have to be considered as arbitrary and mistaken. The structural similarities between the new legalist foundation of political rule and the “secondary religions” (Sundermeier) based on canonized scriptures go beyond the common reliance on written communication. Both aimed at disempowerment of the previous imagination of the sacred (charismatic personal rule, the gods whose grace responded to prayer and sacrifice), both opposed the polycentric embodiment of the sacred (diversity of local customs, feudalism, polytheism), both underlined the principle and disregarded the exception (the personal privilege, the miracle), both trusted extending control by missionary conversion, and, finally, both were carried by a special group of trained intellectual experts in distinction to ordinary people. Frequently these intellectual experts had training in theology as well as in law; they were authorized to interpret the law as well as the sacred scriptures, and their practice of administering the law strongly resembled religious liturgy. Frederic II, for instance, appointed a large number of clerics as counselors and missi dominici, who were to administer justice and justify the emperor’s decisions. These clerics were experts in Roman law as codified under Justinian in the sixth century, trained at the centers of medieval scholarship, and deeply involved in a new rational discourse about legal principles. They exalted rationality and justice and considered themselves to be “sacerdotes iustitiae” (priests of justice).31 Their jurisdiction and legal 29 30 31

Eisenstadt (1982). Assman (2003). “It fell in with the intellectual climate of the century of legalism in general,


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discourse were performed in a liturgical manner that strongly resembled the religious rituals of the Church—the adopted solemn postures, special robes set over their ordinary dress, readings of sacred texts and lectures on their interpretation, clearly defined roles, and the moment of epiphany when the judgment is solemnly declared. Even if the king was absent and invisible, his sacred rule was reenacted in a liturgical celebration of justice. Individuals and their substantial interests did not matter in these highly ritualized forms of communication. As in the religious ceremonies of the church, ordinary people were, of course, largely excluded from participation in the rituals. They were considered to be just the objects of administration or the audience, whose approval was irrelevant for the service of justice and rationality. Since the central middle Ages, there was an increasing separation between the lay community and the inner circle of the religious virtuosi who celebrated the Eucharist. Inside the church, a decorated wall protected the holy ceremony from the view of commoners, who, rather than participating in the communion by eating the ‘body of Christ,’ could only look at the holy wafer for a short moment when the priest presented the result of the sacrament to them. God became increasingly invisible and inaccessible to commoners. The liturgy of jurisdiction reflects this growing independence and autonomy of the ritual. The process of justification and arriving at a decision was shielded from the eye of a particular public— it was only the result of the jurisdiction that was proclaimed to them. The approval of the particular audience could be disregarded, because it could be erroneous in its very particularity. Instead, the service of justice aimed at a more general and disembodied public, whose impartiality and rationality it tried to represent. Thus the rule of the law as distinct from contingent political decisions kept a strong affinity to religious practices. Both were part of the same divide that ran and in particular with that of Frederick’s Magna Curia where the judges and lawyers were expected to administer justice like priests; the High Court sessions, staged with a punctilio comparable to Church ceremonial, were called a most holy ministry (mystery) of Justice (Iustitiae sacratissimum ministerium [mysterium]); the jurists and courtiers interpreted the ‘Cult of Justice’ in terms of a religio iuris or of an ecclesia imperialis representing both a complement to and an antitype of the ecclesiastical order; the robe of the law clerk was set over against the robe of the ordained cleric; the emperor himself, whom the Great Artificer’s hand created man, was spoken of as Sol Iustitiae, the ‘Sun of Justice,’ which was the prophetic title of Christ.” (Kantorowicz 1957: 101, 1931: 88) For more details about the magna curia, see Cuozzo (1996).

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through Axial age civilizations and that established a new transcendental reference beyond personal embodiment and sacrificial practice. Although, in principle, addressing a public audience that extended far beyond the confines of family and locality, the new mode of scholarly communication in fact established a professional monopoly of politics and administration, decoupled from the approval of ordinary people and impenetrable to common sense. This institutional monopoly not only was based on the exigencies of training and teaching, on the elaboration of a special language and a special liturgy, but furthermore and above all, it was reinforced by the institution of office.32 Originally derived from and dependent on the king’s authority, the office of administering justice gradually became an autonomous source of power. The rise of a special group of administrators and magistrates, who got their positions by intellectual training, education and princely appointment, represents a breakthrough of political institutions that moved the rule of the king toward the contours of a state—even if territorial demarcations were still vague and shifting.33 The novelty of legalist rule is based on an institutionalized, and sometimes even embodied, disregard of family ties.34 If an official has a family to care for, this care will usually prevail over the exigencies of his mandate. Hence conflicts between the obligations of filial piety on the one hand and the duty to follow the king’s orders on the other became a core issue of classical literature in ancient Rome as well as in early modern France and classical China. In particular, if the person of the ruler is absent and tight controls are lacking, the institutionalized disregard of family ties takes on crucial importance for the rule of the king. In contrast to vassals, the clerical administrators could not pass their power to their offspring. Thus it is not by coincidence that the main carriers of medieval legalism were monks.35 32 See chapter 5. 1 in Weber (1978 b) for the concept of “Amtscharisma”, i.e., charisma of office. 33 Thus Ranke could describe the reign of Philippe LeBel as showing “den kalten Lufthauch der modernen Geschichte” (“the chilly breeze of modern history”). 34 Max Weber was probably the first to have pointed to this institutional logic of modern administration, see especially chapter 9 in Weber (1978 b). 35 The German emperor Otto I used clerics for his imperial administration in the 10th century—for example, his brother Brun, who was the archbishop of Cologne and even became the archduke of Lothringen (Fichtenau 1973), and the late medieval French kings-in particular Philip Augustus, Philippe LeBel, and Louis IX—followed


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The great monastic reform movements of Citeaux and Cluny renewed the requirement of asceticism and chastity for the religious virtuosi. In contrast to the unregulated religious charisma of radical prophets and hermits, they focused on liturgical celebration and devoted most of their time to the scholarly study of scriptures. The crusading orders of the German Knights, the Hospital of Saint John (the Maltese knights), and the Templars merged the monastic ideal of chastity and the feudal institution of military fraternity in the pursuit of honor and virtue. This combination of military power and monastic ideals became, however, a dangerous institutional alternative to the emerging princely rule. Later, the newly founded orders of the Dominicans and the Jesuits perfected the methodical conduct of monastic asceticism as well as rational organization based on written law and the techniques of interrogation in courts, both secular and religious. Even the Inquisition was a methodically conducted and rationally controlled procedure to find proof of heresy—and it was mostly performed by traveling monks specially appointed to the office, who had no personal ties to the accused individual or the community that raised the accusation of heretical activities. The path to the modern legalist state was prepared not only by the monastic deification of justice and rationality, but also by the strict decoupling of justice from the private realm of the family. Legalist administrators, institutionally relieved of family ties, were, of course, not an exclusively Western invention. The most impressive case is certainly that of the Chinese mandarins.36 Since the Song dynasty at the latest, they replaced the old hereditary aristocracy as the core carrier group of the Chinese Empire.37 The mandarins were scholar-officials, who reached their positions in the imperial bureaucracy and in civil service only by passing a highly competitive examination following a long and arduous study of the classical scriptures, in particular the writings of Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi, but also those of so-called legalists like Li Si and Han Fei. Family support and recommendation were helpful38—most of the Chinese bureaucracy Frederick of Sicily in replacing or superseding feudal authority by the institution of bailiffs and senechaux, who were directly responsible to the king. 36 See Marsh (1961) and Loewe (1966). 37 Anderson (1990: 182). 38 In contrast to its common image, the Inquisition was not a frantic scapegoat driven by personal hatred, but a highly formal interrogation that led to far fewer

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was of gentry origin—but could never replace the examination itself as the central institution of recruitment.39 Occasionally the cutting of family ties and interests was reinforced by using marginalized ethnic groups like the Janissaries, i.e. Christian slaves in the Ottoman Empire, as military elites, or foreigners as modernizing elites like the Jesuits in early modern Japan and China. Vast parts of the bureaucracy in the ancient empires were, however, controlled by social classes that did have family ties closely associated with social corporations and their particular interests. In these cases, the administration of justice was less likely to take a turn toward universalism than in Western history.40 The extension of legalist scholarship and bureaucratic administration was driven by the monarchic efforts to disempower unruly vassals and to fight rivals.41 However, the rise of monasticism and legal scholarship was an ambivalent transformation of the king’s authority. What had started as an effort to extend the authority of the ruler ended in a challenge to this authority. On the one hand, it extended princely rule by superseding feudal ties, on the other it could challenge the personal rule of the king and question the embodiment of the sacred law in the special person. Viewed from the legalists’ perspective, the king was considered king not because of his own personal sacredness, but because he incorporated the law and granted justice. If the construction of charisma was to link the king’s two bodies, the sacralization of the law took the opposite direction: shifting the sacred to an impersonal and abstract level took away the king’s sacred dress and revealed him merely as a human person

executions than commonly assumed. Marsh uses a lot of historical data to investigate the effects of family position and other factors on elite mobility in China during the Qing dynasty. See especially Marsh (1961: 80 pp.). 39 See Ch’ü (1957); Franke (1972); Chang (1974). 40 Even if the rule of law was impersonal and its administration divorced from personal interests, it could also change sides and be used by aristocratic opponents of the king or give rise to the establishment of an autonomous political authority. The Christian orders of the Hospitalers and the Templars established their own political rule, which rivalled the traditional princely authority, because of their highly rationalized organization, their supralocal networks and their detachment from family ties. Monastic orders like the Templars were targeted as heretics (Barber 1978, Demurger 1991), banned, and persecuted by Philippe LeBel (Strayer 1980), the French king. Two centuries later, Henry VIII of England banned the monastic orders entirely from the English territory. 41 See Reuter (1982) and Fleckenstein (1966).


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driven by passions and ambitions.42 As soon as he, as a mortal person, violated the law and pursued private interests, he challenged the sacred rule of law. In this case, the professional legalists could, by their very office, turn the law, that is, the invisible and eternal rule of the king, against the mortal body of the king, against his erroneous opinions and private interests. In order to cope with this situation, Frederick II of Sicily adopted the formula ‘pater et filius iusticiae,’ (‘father and son of justice’) for his rule. But this precarious balance between the king’s two bodies could stand the legalists’ challenge only as long as the king was indeed in full control over his realm. If he was devoid of reason and unable to rule rationally, the charismatic link between the king’s two bodies was broken. The king, who was a sovereign hero before, was now turned into a potentially demonic perpetrator. Gone were the times in which the king could still claim to be ‘legibus assolutus’ (‘independent of the laws’). The mortal prince could be put on trial. Killing the king became a definite possibility.43 Instead of being ‘lèse majesté,’ the ultimate crime, regicide, could also be considered a restoration of the ‘maiestas legis’ (‘majesty of the law’)—an act that gives way to a new embodiment of the law. In the debates about regicide at the end of the fifteenth century, the Monarchomaques took this direction. The antimonarchic turn was broadened by the parliaments in England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.44 Supported by the tides of aristocratic resistance, the king himself became the target of legalist opposition. This opposition was based not on military power or popular movements, but on the rule of the law, on the command of legal procedures, on the complicated divisions of courts. Removing the monarch was staged as a legal trial in court, using the independence and complexity of the law, turning documents of previous royal decisions against the king’s actual politics and requiring 42

This revelation of mundane human nature, in distinction to the abstract divinity of ratio (reason), is also indicated in the depiction of Christ in late medieval art. Whereas Romanesque art presents Christ as the giant ruler of the world uniting heaven and earth, Gothic art shows God as a suffering human being-crucified, tortured and mortal. 43 The doctrine of tyrannicide has a long history in Europe. It grew out of the medieval notion of a “contract” between the ruler and subject and the idea of a system of pre-existing legal rights. However, it was John of Salisbury who articulated a doctrine of tyrannicide: The ruler who broke the law could no longer claim to be a legitimate sovereign, and thus could be deposed and executed (Gough 1961). 44 For the “Glorious Revolution” and the parliament see Gralher (1973).

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consistency, rationality, and respect for the law.45 But in the French Revolution, the king was beheaded not primarily because he could be accused of illegal activities (which were, of course, the indispensable pretext). His very existence as the former incarnation of personal rule was a scandal to the sacred core of revolutionary republicanism. His ‘two bodies,’ the immortal representation of the sacred center and the mortal body of the individual, were reduced to one. The French Republic triumphantly took over the sacred core, dissipated it to the individual citizens and centered it in the committee du salut publique headed by Robbespierre, the ‘incorruptible.’ Left was the mortal body of the king, who, however, still had the signs of his previous sacredness, and who hence, in order to demonstrate his mortality, had to be killed in public. Even in China, the mandarins could occasionally turn against the emperor. Eunuchs led military revolts, installed new emperors, and even assassinated emperors such as Xianzong (805–820) and Jingzong (824–826). In contrast to the legalism of medieval monks, however, the Chinese law had no strong transcendental foundation that could be turned against the ruler. Instead, it was based on human virtue and utilitarian principles. The axial tension between political and religious power was weaker than in Europe.46 In distinction to the monastic orders of the West, the power of the mandarins was dependent on the imperial office and the eunuchs had no organizational basis outside of the palace itself. But the classical scriptures contained sufficient legitimization to turn against bad rulers. The emperor could be suspected of being the embodiment of selfish ‘shi,’ or he could be controlled by an insurmountable amount of paperwork and restricted by a complex system of security rules that kept some documents from the emperor’s own eyes. Failure to fulfill the emperor’s duties and evident incompetence could even raise the question of replacement. The mandate of heaven was debatable and the mandarins had the power of interpreting it.

45 The trial and execution of Charles Stuart in 1649 stands out in Western history. Charles I was the first European monarch to be put on trial for his life in public by his own subjects (Mayfield 1988). But Charles’s execution has not left the same traces in the English national memory as the execution of Louis XVI in the French collective memory. The English saw themselves as getting rid of one wicked prince. For the French, monarchy itself was “an eternal crime” (Dunn 1994). 46 Eisenstadt (1982).


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In demonizing the personal embodiment of the sacred, the new principled rule of the law strikingly resembled the zeal of post-Axial age religions in persecuting idolatry and pagan practices of adoration and sacrifice. Both, pagan practices and personal embodiments of the sacred, were part of a different tale of transcendence that had to be outruled and banned. What had been a positive embodiment of transcendence before, was now converted into a negative one. But—as we will see in the following—the new rule of disembodied principles, on its part, was not entirely immune against the risks of profanization. 3. The Tale of Epiphany: The Public Sphere and the Discursive Construction of the ‘General Will’ In his well known account of civil society, Habermas47 presents a new transformation of the ‘tale of epiphany.’ Instead of the prophet who tells a new sacred truth that runs counter to common wisdom and orthodox scholarship, it is the institutional arena of public discourse that is considered as the source of superior reason and morality, opposing the existing structure of political power and legal rights. Transcendence to the mundane world of politics is no longer based on the procedural rationality of the legal system. Instead it results from the natural endowment of all humans with reason and morality and from the universal obligation to the commandments of reason and morality.48 Habermas’ model of the public sphere continues an intellectual movement that is commonly seen as rooted in the European Enlightenment,49 in the ideas of Kant and Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau, Ferguson and Condorcet. Its conception of public discourse by guided reason establishes a new transcendental reference, from which the legal order and the state could be viewed not only as profane and erroneous, but as vile and repressive. The new tale of epiphany converted, again, what had been the positive transcendence before into its opposite. This epiphany of reason and moral judgment is carried by a social community defined not by its formal authority and social privilege, as in the case of the legalists, but by its self-appointed task as an

47 48 49

Habermas (1962). Habermas phrased it as the universal validity of certain rules of discourse. Calhoun (1992).

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audience monitoring the profane world of power and money: civil society. Civil society emerges if neither the personal charisma of the king nor the impersonal sphere of the law is considered to incorporate the sacred in a convincing way. The sacred character of the law and its embodiment in the state are dried out by historical variations of the law, by its bureaucratic administration and mundane omnipresence, by feudal privileges and procedural absurdities. Disenchantment with the bureaucratic state and repression by its laws engenders the search for a new source of sacredness and collective identity. The king’s two bodies are now translated into the collective identity of society and the individual identities of citizens, into the volonté générale and the volonté de tous,50 into universal morality and contingent interests. The sacralized arena linking both poles is the public sphere. Here, individual interests and private passions can be articulated only if they are couched in terms of a possible general will. An universal morality has to be accepted by the individual citizens; the political decisions of the government have to be legitimized by the political community of citizens. According to the Hegelian ideal, the field of civil society should give way to a harmonious merging of ‘the individual’ and ‘the general,’ the interests of the citizens and ethics of the state, without repressing either side of the opposition.51 Although its social forms are by no means limited to Europe, the associational life and the public communication of eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe are commonly treated as the historical paradigm for this public sphere. Its general structural and institutional preconditions—cities and relatively large literate classes that did not treat literacy as a professional monopoly—can also be found in non-European civilizations like China, Japan, or the Muslim empires. There, too, voluntary associations provided a public space for educated citizens to debate matters of common interest. They crystallized around professional interests or local politics, matters of general concern, and leisure activities. Access was limited to respected 50

Rousseau (1966). This conception of merging the individual and the general can also be found in the British idea of a balance between the king’s government and the people’s representation by the parliament. The German, English and French versions of this tension between the private and the public may differ, but they converge in a common focus on civil society as the main arena where the common good is mediated and constructed (Giesen 1998 b). 51


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adult members of the community, occasionally even depending on ceremonies of introduction, recommendation and adoption. In the ancient empires of China, Japan, India, and the Muslim world, as well as in the European case, civil society and its manifold clubs and associations, public houses and secret societies, emerged as an interface between the formal authority of the king and his bureaucracy on the one hand, and the family, the locality, and private economic interests as organized in corporations on the other. Because of its position outside of work and family, communication in this public sphere has a leisurely character, and because of its position outside of the political organization of the state, participation in it is voluntary. Nevertheless, it presupposes education and non-utilitarian knowledge from its participants. In Ming China, the Confucian literati formed cultural movements organized around academies, like the Donglin in the seventeenth century or intellectual networks like the Fushe, the restoration movement, which were clearly opposed to the imperial bureaucracy and sometimes even persecuted by the imperial secret police. It gave way to a new conception of the public sphere, the gong, in distinction to the guan, the public office.52 The increase of bureaucratic and centralized control during the long reign of Qianlong in the eighteenth century, however, repressed these beginnings of a Chinese civil society. It was not until the nineteenth century that a public sphere carried by networks of Chinese literati—like the Xuannan Poetry club, the movement of Qingyi (‘pure thought’), or early parts of the powerful reform movement—could be restored again. Structural predecessors of civil society’s discourse can even be found in archaic societies: the ‘palaver’ of men in the longhouses of New Guinea, the ‘jamboree’ of the warriors in African herding societies, or the meeting of the wise men in American Indian tribes. All these basic forms of ‘public discourse,’ however, differ from the European Enlightenment in one important aspect: their participants rarely claimed to speak as advocates or representatives of humankind in general. Their turn toward universalism was, if not entirely missing, less pronounced. And it is this abstention from an universalism that also prevented the sacralization of the public discourse in premodern societies outside Europe.

52

Wakeman (1997).

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This sacralization is the mark of the European Enlightenment. The general will as generated by public discourse takes the position of an insurmountable transcendental reference of politics, thus replacing the voice of God. But in the public construction of general will, transcendence has entirely lost its face, its place and its name. Like the law, it is an invisible, omnipresent and impersonal reference, but unlike the law it is no longer linked to a fixed text or to a set of fixed themes. Instead its thematic orientation is volatile and fluid; transcendence consists of an empty sphere and a formal space for a never-ending, inclusive and open discourse. This space is generated by a particular mode of organized communication. Newspapers and associations, British clubs, French ‘salons’ and German ‘Vereine’53—to name just a few organizational patterns—established a space of communication where citizens could debate, deliberate and comment on political matters. The rituals of discourse in this public sphere were based on the individual variation of a common thematic issue, whether controversial, in the form of a debate, or supportive, in the form of successive appeals to morality, virtue and reason. Again, the communication was based on the knowledge of written texts. In distinction to the scholarly texts of the professional legalists, however, these texts were not hermetically closed to outsiders, but addressed to a general public of educated readers.54 Everyone present in a public arena was entitled to participate on an equal footing, but the private interests of the speakers ought not to be mentioned. Only if the private realm of the citizen is respected by other citizens and protected from the intervention of the state can individual subjectivity unfold and become the moving force of discourse. The public nature of this discourse is not ensured by institutions that disconnect the individual from his or her family—as in the case of monasticism—but by presenting the communication in a way that could be accepted by any reasonable person regardless of family background. Disagreement and dissent were by no means excluded, but they had to be articulated by referring to a common horizon of morality, reason and virtue. Critical

53 Although the Enlightenment was a discourse all over Europe, there were differences in the social position of the supporters and their communication. See Darnton (1982), Wuthnow (1989) and Albrecht (1995). 54 Giesen (1998 a).


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detachment from conventions and contingencies, privileges and powers was fostered and favored, but it had to be phrased in terms of universal reason and morality. Kant’s famous ‘categorical imperative’ catches this core conception of public discourse superbly. This reference to the universalistic conceptions of a general will, of human reason and natural morality sets the public sphere in opposition to the private sphere as the realm of particular group interests. ‘Private’ refers here less to family ties or to the arcanum of politics than to the corporate order of society.55 This traditional order of corporations, of status groups and religious confessions, of local clans and ethnic communities, of guilds and professional monopolies, provided the structural backbone not only of late medieval and early modern society, but also of most ancient empires. The new tale of epiphany turned the sacralized diversity of corporate groups into its opposite: they were redefined as private, as barriers to reason, and contrasted with the triumph of a new inclusive public discourse that transcended locality and class, religion and privilege. Instead of depending on membership in particular corporations, participation in this new public discourse was to be based on individual choice and decision. This voluntariness of participation, as well as the principled openness to everyone, is at the core of modern public discourse. The public discourse of the Enlightenment was, in fact, not open to everyone. Although not restricted by descent or by local origin, access was granted only to those who possessed education, manners and morality, and who thus were open to the epiphany of reason. La vile populace, das einfache Volk, hoi polloi, common people, were excluded—they lacked morals, manners, and means.56 This exclusion, however, was achieved more discreetly than demonstratively, less formally proclaimed than tacitly assumed. It is not by coincidence that the public institutions of civil society were only partially open; the clubs, salons, and associational halls were shielded against external disturbances, notwithstanding whether they resulted from princely intervention, from legal supervision, or from popular intrusion.57 No one could insist on access to the arenas of civil society.

55 56 57

See Gay (1995); Koselleck (2000). Eder and Giesen (2001). Darnton (1982).

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Salons were based on invitations,58 clubs and Vereine required personal recommendations for would-be members. But again, this exclusive character of civil society’s discourse is not a particularly occidental phenomenon. The Chinese literati, with their bibliomania and their discourse about public matters, were similarly based on the exclusivity not of descent, but of education. In China, as well as in Enlightenment Europe, education was considered to be the insurmountable barrier and defense against intruders from above and below.59 But in spite of its factual exclusivity, the community of reason and morality could, and can, claim to represent the encompassing society and also to speak for those who had no voice. The discourse of the Enlightenment abounds with sometimes condescending, but mostly compassionate references to the poor people who were enclosed in their misery, but treated with disgust if they came too close. This seemingly paradoxical merging of compassion and contempt was the civil society’s way of separating the king’s two bodies—the categorical presupposition of humankind and the actual limitation of voicing it by an educated audience and its particular rituals of discourse. The categorical presupposition of an universal moral reference, transcending the limitations of space and time as well as of class and race, gave way to the conception of humankind as an inclusive moral community. Moral discourse presupposes the tension between the moral, the universal, and the public on the one side and the strate-

58

See Giesen (1999 a). Occasionally, however, the attempt to shield the discourse of civil society from external influence turned the principle of public reasoning into its very opposite: the associations of Freemasonry or the radical order of the Illuminati were certainly strongholds of the Enlightenment discourse, but at the same time they were secret societies. In fact, on the institutional level, the civil society of the eighteenth century was very exclusive, and it had to be that way in order to protect the fragile rule of reason. Even in today’s civil discourse, this exclusivity can still be foundalthough in a much attenuated form. Access to the forums of ambitious media discourse presupposes not only education (which is fairly widespread), but also some intellectual reputation. The new social movements that have replaced the associational life of the eighteenth century as the organizational form of civil society expect their members to display a certain way of behaving and talking, and even have certain dress codes. They repel outsiders with silent moral contempt. This boundary between participants in civil discourse and outsiders is no longer seen as the demarcation of an elite, but as the difference between a moral avant-garde and the unenlightened masses. 59


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gic, the particular, and the private on the other.60 Constructing and re-linking these oppositions in moral communities is imprinted with temporal metaphors. Public sphere and morality are associated with the future, progress, and the avant-garde, whereas the private, the particular, and the periphery are considered to be backward, limited, and linked to the past. Thus, the spatial differentiation of the sacred as found in archaic societies is replaced by a temporal one: the future will overcome the split between the sacred order of reason and moral and the profane world of politics. History was imagined as a progression of education and learning—the more advanced had to advocate the interests of the backward groups, even if the latter seemed to oppose it. Those, however, who refuse to accept the benefits of education or who by descent are unable to support the progress towards the public rule of reason had to be outlawed and banned. Moral discourse engenders an increased suspicion of individual immorality in the political center. Because the moral discourse of civil society is decoupled from the private realm, it is particularly vulnerable to hypocrisy. The intrusion of private motives into the public sphere is considered a transgression, and this transgression turns into abuse if the private interests appear in moral disguise. Because there are no safeguards against a hypocritical pretence of moral commitment, suspicion is the inevitable companion of morality. The prime ritual of disclosing the hidden immorality of political power is the ‘scandal.’ Like gossip, scandals, too, refer to significant members of a community. But this time it is not just the prince who is disclosed as a criminal perpetrator, but also ordinary members of civil society who are under suspicion of secretly counteracting the rule of reason. Scandal can thus result in scapegoating and accusing entire groups. Driven by public campaigns, their members had to be sorted out, separated from the reasonable and morally pure citizens, imprisoned or removed into camps, and sometimes even killed in the name of reason and moral. The immortality of public reason required the mortality of human individuals, the revolutionary attempt to create the perfect society resulted in the killing of those who—by descent or by conviction—did not fit into the grid 60

For the increasing differentiation between the public and the private, see Giesen (1998 b: 228) and Brewer et al. (1996).

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of the perfect society. The rule of public reason produced victims. Since the regime of the Sansculottes in the French Revolution at the latest, these victims were killed neither out of personal hatred and dark passion nor because they had violated the existing laws, but for principles of public safety and sanity—they were thought to impede the progress of history towards a perfect society in which reason and reality coincided. But the revolutionary epiphany of reason and moral not only demonized particular groups as collective barriers to progress on the way to the perfect society. It also reached out to attack the existing laws and property rights as unjust privileges of a particular corporate group. In the name of equality it abolished feudal rights, expropriated land and leveled economic differences between citizens. The rationality of the existing legal order is here contrasted to the atemporal reason and uncompromising moral. Thus, what had been the source of transcendence before, is turned into a most profane object of change and reform, and sometimes even became the evil and repressive counterpart of public reason. As in other cases of competing imaginations of transcendence, the demonization of ‘previous’ forms of the sacred becomes one of the major driving forces of politics. 4. The Tale of the Void: Victims as Negative Transcendence We have discovered the transcendence of sovereignty behind the charismatic core of monarchic rule, the transcendence of deviance behind the impersonal and written law, and transcendence of epiphany behind the construction of general will by public discourse. Less obvious are the transcendental dimensions of politics that relate to the void of meaning. The void of meaning results from the sudden collapse of symbolic orientation, from a traumatic experience that, at first, can hardly be narrated and represented, from the rupture in the web of meaning, from the demonic decay of order, from the abandonment by God. In a certain manner, the void is the opposite of religion. Politics that openly confirms the void of meaning amounts to nihilism. It displays brutal power in naked and unabashed form. Ancient religions have, however, explicitly mentioned the experience of the void and treated it as a test of the truly faithful. The Book of Hiob addresses the suffering of the just and righteous and the complaint of the innocent who is struck by misfortune and dis-


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ease: why could Almighty God allow his people to suffer? The problem of theodicee continued this question on a philosophical level. The existence of innocent suffering is one of the core issues of Judeo— Christian theology—the sacrifice of Isaac and the self-sacrifice of Christ are paradigms of innocent suffering, which inspired martyrdom and around which the story of salvation unfolds. The voluntary decision of Christ to endure suffering and death, not to give in to the authorities and to abstain from violent retaliation, underlines his sacredness: his reign is not of this world, he is immortal in his death.61 Thus, the self-sacrifice of Christ is imprinted with the tale of divine sovereignty and heroism. In contrast, the involuntary suffering of the innocent is embodied in the figure of the victim. Victims are persons at the fringe of moral communities—in a twilight zone where the boundary between object and subject is blurred. The modern notion of ‘victim’ contrasts strongly to the meaning of the term in ancient societies. Originally the ‘victima’ were human beings or animals who were destined to be sacrificed to the deity in order to construct a strong bond between the community and the Gods. These human victima were considered to be precious objects offered to the deity; but they were also seen as partaking in the sacred core of the community. Questions of guilt or innocence were not asked—the logic of sacrifice differs strongly from the logic of sin and guilt. Traditionally, victims were mostly found at the periphery of society, among persons who did not fit easily into the classificatory grid of society—strangers, vagabonds, handicapped or insane persons. Killing them did not engender bloody revenge or retaliation.62 Sometimes the victim was even presented as evil, as pollution, as ‘scandalon.’ Occasionally the victima were also victi, shown in the triumph of the victorious hero before they were sacrificed in the temple. It was not before the stoic philosophy focused on the suffering of the world that the defeated victus conveyed a tragic feeling about the volatility of fame and fate. Post-Axial Age cultures and their inclusive construction of boundaries reverse the meaning of victims. They untie the victim from the logic of sacrifice and relate them to questions of guilt and sin.63 The

61 62 63

See Girard (1983). See Girard (1977). See Ricoeur (1967).

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innocence of victims is discovered and the sacrifice of humans is turned from a religious ritual into its opposite—the ultimate scandalon that results in God’s punishment for those who committed it. Sacrificial practices are increasingly regarded as pagan, inner-worldly magic based on ridiculous superstition. A new solidarity transcends the bonds of kinship and includes all believers. In an attenuated form this solidarity of co-humans engenders the obligation to support the needy and suffering. The Buddhist dana or the Christian agape, but also its translations into the compassion of the Enlightenment assume a communal bond to those other believers or co-nationals who, by bad fate, are in a miserable situation. Compassion with the poor, however, does not aim at eroding the boundary between rich and poor. In distinction to the sacrifice of co-humans, the misery of others is not yet a scandal by itself—on the contrary: it provides an opportunity for performing misericordia. Giving to the needy brothers and sisters is not an issue of general politics, but a matter of individual charity. It represents an exception to the regular social order, and is closer to mercy and grace than to a principled legal entitlement. It is generated by a personal encounter with misery and suffering, by the incidental close proximity between persons that were socially distant from each other. At the fringe of the traditional moral community, the rule of the law did not exclude what today is regarded as victimization. Until the Enlightenment the torture of the suspect was considered as a regular method of criminal investigation, the slavery of millions of Africans extended until the nineteenth century, the distant famine and the genocide abroad were not a moral concern. In modern societies this situation changed profoundly: every human person, however far away, was endowed with inalienable rights with respect to her body, torture was outlawed, only the evidently guilty criminal was to be imprisoned. Today every innocent suffering by victims—not just the sacrificial killing—is seen as a crisis of the social community, and it is politics’ challenge to overcome it. The void of evil that lurks behind the suffering of victims is increasingly turned into a major mode of relating to transcendence in modern politics. Faced with genocide and ethnic cleansing, the regular political game has to step back—questions of contingent costs and strategic gains are not to be asked if bare life and human rights are at stake. Today political rituals and national monuments in Western societies avoid celebrations of triumphant victories over nations that have been enemies before, but are neighbors now. Instead, they rather center the


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suffering of victims and the guilt of perpetrators. War memorials that in the nineteenth century focused on the heroism of generals and soldiers today imagine the soldiers killed in action as victims. Holocaust museums spread rapidly in Western societies and the new nations in Africa consider the colonial yoke to be at the core of their national identity. Even generations later the descendents of the victims require compensations and excuses on the part of the community of perpetrators, and frequently their requests are respected. Today massacres and impending genocides trigger immediate worldwide protests and even military interventions to prevent further atrocities. This unconditional thrust to soothe the suffering of victims or—if it is too late— to remember their suffering by monuments and mourning is a remarkable feature of modern politics. It hints at a new mode of transcendence carried by a global community: solidarity extends not only to kin, friends, neighbors and co-believers, but to unknown and anonymous victims. This solidarity is not, however, seen as a personal and individual obligation as in the case of Christian charity but as a central function of politics. What are the conditions fostering this rise of the void of innocent suffering to a focal reference of modern politics? Several core features of modern secularized cultures are conducive to this focus on victims. The modern recognition of victimhood relates to the construction of inclusive collective identities that had been prepared by the public discourse of the Enlightenment. Solidarity extends beyond class and ethnicity and aims at a global community of humankind. This drift towards universalism and inclusion results from the turn from the center to the periphery that is at the core of modern societies. In ancient myth the hero frequently originated from the margins of society—he was raised by fishers or herdsmen. In modern culture this shift to the periphery is, however, turned from the extraordinary and personal into the regular and collective mode. Since Rousseau at the latest it is the people at the periphery of society that are viewed as the source of authenticity, natural innocence and identity. The extraordinary has lost its name and its face. Personal heroism, in its turn, has lost its innocence: in a global public sphere heroes are discovered as perpetrators. In contrast, victims are invested with a constitutive innocence and we can relate to this innocence by compassion and mourning. Their suffering represents an ultimate certainty beyond volatile claims and questionable representations. It

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commands an unconditional respect and anybody withholding this respect positions himself outside of the community of humankind. Therefore the victim who was seen as the embodiment of evil in ancient cultures increasingly takes the position of a sacred figure that had been the domain of heroes before. It is turned into an icon of heightened subjectivity, which inspires the fantasy of contemporaries who are searching for a mode to present themselves as extraordinary and unique. Well-known is the case of Bruno Doesseker who pretended to have escaped the concentration camp of Majdanek as a child, but who in fact was neither Jewish, nor a surviving victim. His autobiography was celebrated as one of the most touching and authentic reports of Holocaust survivors, translated into thirteen languages.64 Another one is the report of a French woman who accused young Muslim immigrants of having attacked her in a subway train for anti-Semitic reasons. It triggered a major public campaign against anti-Semitism, the French president apologized publicly, the Israeli foreign minister presented the serious concerns of his government, etc.; after several days, the entire story was discovered to be fake. The modern shift to victims as figure of transcendence is supported by the impersonal order that had been established by the rule of the principled law. Heroes as well as perpetrators have faces and voices; they are personal embodiments of good and evil, of the sacred and the demonic, of triumph and trauma. As outlined above these personal embodiments of transcendence are turned into deviance by the impersonal order of modern society. Markets and bureaucracies, sciences and legal systems cannot dispense with agency but these agencies are conceived as objects, that can be compared, evaluated, counted and measured.65 In a strange way the systems of modern society show an elective affinity to the faceless de-individualized victim, who is treated as an object but could claim to be a subject again. But neither the impersonal order nor the turn towards the periphery are achievements of the last century. An explanation of the recent turn to victims has, therefore, to consider additional cultural patterns. One of them is the very absence of religious imagination of a life after death in secularized cultures. Most traditional religions

64 65

See Wilkomirski (1995) and Mächler (2000). Blumenberg (1966).


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imagine some form of otherworldly life after death that responds to the sinful or virtuous life before death. Suffering can thus be compensated and death can appear as a transition to salvation in the otherworldly realm. In thoroughly secularized cultures, however, this conversion of death and suffering into an imagined entrance to eternal salvation is no longer available. There is no life after death in another world that could provide consolation. Premature death and innocent suffering appear as the ultimate and unmasked void of meaning. Nothing can justify it and disguise it as just punishment or precondition for a better life. This existential absurdity of death is the negative transcendence of secularized cultures. If the world is reduced to a reality of profane objects, transcendence can only be viewed in a negative form—as the void of meaning. Secularized cultures that deny the existence of salvation in an otherworldly realm are not only confronted with this void in an unmasked and radical way, but they are also urged to cope with the existential scandal of death and of innocent suffering by this-worldly means. Salvation has to be achieved in this world. The great utopias of early modern society opened up a perspective in which inner-worldly salvation seemed to be possible. Accelerating history into the future was seen as the royal road to inner-worldly salvation that could still be imagined in positive, however impersonal terms. This was the aim of ‘history’ as imagined by the Enlightenment rule of reason.66 In the 2 first century, after the collapse of the great utopias, the promise of a better life in a perfect society to come has lost its attraction. Most historical attempts to create an ideal society ended in totalitarianism, in camps and barbarism. They produced victims. Postmodern politics and historical action in Western societies are thus reluctant to pursue an utopian vision of a perfect society. Instead, they are increasingly moved by the urge to prevent catastrophes and to save victims. The positive transcendence of an ideal society as envisioned by the Enlightenments’ public discourse is replaced by the negative transcendence of victims, and the efforts to forget the past and to think about the future are replaced by the politics of memory. Those who suffered and lost their lives as victims take the position that has been the domain of heroes before. Their immortality is based on public

66 Voegelin’s discovery of the Gnostic roots of modern political religions and Eisenstadt’s analysis of Jacobinism arrive at the same result from different perspectives.

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mourning and memorials; their salvation consists of public recognition of their innocence. By recognizing the innocence of victims, by recalling their names and by bringing them back into the center of the community, modern society does not just compensate for their suffering in a symbolic way, but it copes with the challenge of an existential void that relates to everyone. In addition to this construction of negative transcendence the perspective on ‘the evil’ has changed in modern societies. Traditionally, evil was seen as a matter of deviance and crime. Sometimes, however, evil cannot be traced back to a clearly identifiable perpetrator who can be held responsible for it.67 In modern societies misery and evil is frequently attributed to complex concatenations or side-effects of human agency, involving a multitude of actors, acting under uncertainty and risk, shifting possible side-effects to the periphery of their attention, some of them known, most of them unknown, none of them entirely innocent, but most of them responsible only to a limited degree. As our knowledge about the complex ramifications of action effects increases, the verdict about guilt or innocence, crucial to the discourse of justice, amounts sometimes to an arbitrary abstraction from the complexity of entanglement, to a reduction of a field of greyish nuances to a clear-cut line between black and white. Even if the misery of the victim can be clearly related to a perpetrator, these perpetrators sometimes cannot be held accountable for their deeds, because they may be unable to compensate for the immense harm he or she caused, or because they may be dead or simply out of reach.68 Even if the question of guilt is difficult to answer we can, however, arrive at a consensus about the innocence of the victims, because no participant in the debate is targeted as the one who has to face the risk of punishment. Suffering requires compensation and healing. If individual persons cannot be held responsible, because they are dead or unknown or

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Shklar (1990). Sometimes in the aftermath of a bloody civil war the punishment of the perpetrators would risk to sever the fragile bonds between the two parties and refuel the hatred and hostility between them. If the perpetrators include large parts of the population and cannot be limited to a small group—as in the case of the genocides of Rwanda or Cambodia—jurisdiction fails to restore the moral order of society. Here muteness and the taboo of talking about personal involvement in atrocities ensures a fragile and endangered peace. For case studies on this matter see Henke (1991) and Avishai (1997). 68


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because, as in most cases, the harm and suffering of the victims outweighs by far the perpetrators’ means to compensate for it, then the community has to take over the task of healing.69 Thus the discourse about victims changes its core focus: it is no longer about individuals and their responsibilities, about crime and punishment, but rather political responsibility and public solidarity, about risks of life and collective support. The state not only defines the imperfection of the social order, but takes responsibility also for its repair; it not only assesses the harm inflicted on the victims, but also carries the burden for its healing. It is the politics of the modern state that it has to banish the void of despair to the outlands in which no citizen wants to get lost. As the replacement for god the state has to restore the just order. The victims themselves have no voices and no faces.70 They are dead, muted in their misery, numb in their trauma. They cannot advance their claim directly, individually and personally. They need representation.71 Like the figures of the hero and of the perpetrator, the figure of the victim, too, is not a natural fact, but a transcendental reference that is socially mediated and constructed. Some victims remain in the shadow of public attention. There has always been, there is, and there will always be suffering without representation and recognition, misery that fails to receive public attention; there will always be the silence of unnoticed ‘victims.’72 Others are promoted by those who claim a special mandate as their advocates, their representatives, their heirs. These representatives present their story as a case of innocent suffering; they appeal to solidarity and refer to common moral principles. However, the victims who are represented in the public discourse are not invariably and unanimously granted political support.73 Their advocates compete to

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Kaufmann (1992). Certainly, after some time, the voices of the very few survivors who are able to talk about their trauma move a wide audience, and their testimonies and memories are globally read and broadcast. Survivors like Primo Levi or Eli Wiesel are regarded as embodiments of authenticity, as paradigms of the restitutions of damaged subjectivity. 71 The public arenas of the government, the court, and the discourse of civil society are super-local institutions—they do not notice local events without mediating mechanisms; instead the claim to be recognized as victims has to be represented to them in forms to which they can respond. 72 Lyotard (1988). 73 On victim language, official victims and interest groups see Amato (1990). 70

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represent the group that had suffered most and deserves support first. On the level of welfare budgets, incomparable suffering has to be compared and assessed. In this public recognition of victimhood it is neither the obvious difference in moral gravity nor the sheer amount of suffering that makes some claims be successful and others be dropped. Defining innocence and guilt, demarcating the boundaries of the social order and declaring its imperfections, labeling actions as deviant and situations as miserable are not self-evident deductive operations; they rather result from debates and conflicts, routines and traditions, professional interests and political power. The selective recognition of innocent suffering mirrors the long-term changes of the moral order, of sensitivities and empathy. What we today unanimously regard as brutal violence against children and women, was seen a century ago as appropriate education and adequate display of manly authority. The face of suffering changes in the course of history.74 Some historical traumas are forgotten, others are very much alive, appealed to and reconstructed in public fights. The representation of victims by mediating third parties is, of course, not an invention of the last century. As we have outlined above, the civil society of the Enlightenment claimed a general mandate to represent humankind and, in particular, to speak on behalf of those who could not raise their voices in public discourse. This advocacy for the poor was carried by educated lay-people. In contrast, the new representation of victims is promoted by professional specialists like lawyers, social workers, medical doctors, and even journalists, who claim to be impartial experts and thus to represent the public interest; but they also claim to represent the justified interests of the victims and to bring them to the fore of public attention. They act as mediators between the victims and the public sphere. Professional advocacy softens the struggle for recognition: efficiency is increased; conflicts become less passionate, compromises more likely. But in this mediation they also construct the distance that is constitutive of victimhood. Without this distance from the center the

74 Recently a group of Herero chiefs has presented an official quest asking half a billion German marks in compensation of the genocide of the Hereros during the German colonial rule a century ago. The German president, when visiting Namibia, expressed his concern, but declined the claim.


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victim would be considered either as a challenge to immediate personal compassion or as a citizen struggling for his share. Of course, the advocacy of professional experts is not without risks. Like other representations of transcendence, this one, too, can be perverted and challenged by profanization. Experts not only offer their services to an eagerly demanding clientele of suffering victims, but they can also convince a possible clientele of their victimization, and thus create the demand their professional services are ready to satisfy.75 People who have no connection to each other and live their lives in quite diverse ways might be declared victims and represented by professional advocates without a mandate. A market for the representation of victims can emerge, identity entrepreneurs compete in the public sphere, and misery is staged in the media; ultimately, those who considered themselves to be happy citizens before come to see themselves as humiliated victims. Thus professional representation not only may leave authentic suffering unnoticed, but also may construct victims where there is no suffering.76 This professional advocacy is framed by a new field of public politics: legal institutions define the rights and entitlements of victims, norms of political correctness demarcate the range of prudence in public expression and the occasions for publicly recognized offences. In this politics of victimhood the suffering of the victims is turned into a most profane cause. The transcendence of the void, too, cannot escape the volatility which is the mark of any form of transcendence. IV

Concluding Remarks

Secularization has gradually dissolved the original unity of politics and religion. The extraordinary presence of the sacred as embodied in particular persons and objects has been turned into an impersonal principled and invisible order that regards any private and personal 75 In this respect professional advocacy for victims does not, however, differ from other professional services. See Illich (1977) for a polemical treatment of this issue. For a less polemical account—taking Illich’s accusations seriously—see Collins (1979) and Abbott (1988). Professional groups aim at a monopoly of defining the need, providing the therapy and supervising its success by themselves. Society and victims cannot completely avoid the risk of being misused by these quasimonopolies— even when therapists and advocates are tempered by the obligation to serve the common good. See Becker (1973); Giesen (1983). 76 Rutschky (1992).

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authority as deviance. Once sacred, the rule of the law was, in its turn, discovered to be a mundane and regular domain that had to be subjugated to the judgment of public discourse as the collective epiphany of reason. Progress to perfect societies that the collective epiphany of reason envisioned required, however, victims. Therefore, the positive, though this-worldly, utopias are today increasingly replaced by the negative transcendence of the void as embodied in the figure of the victim. Modern politics is largely set free from close ties to traditional religious practice, whether based on sacrificial cult or on sacred scriptures. But it cannot dispense with transcendence. The seemingly profane business of power needs foundations that are exempted from the varying tides of fortune. We can conceive of ‘modernity’s iron cage of serfdom’ (Weber) only if we imagine a world outside of the cage. And this transcendence may well be phrased as the sacred core of politics. In the course of secularization this reference to the sacred is transformed in fundamental ways: it is increasingly separated from the profane space of visible objects and conceived of as an ineffable and unlimited sphere. As the gap between the sacred and the profane widens the need for representation and mediation grows. But any attempt at representing the sacred in an institutionalized form inevitably results in its exodus to new spheres. In the end the sacred dissolves into negative transcendence—the void of meaning. The tales of transcendence outlined above might foster an evolutionist or teleological account of secularization—the path to a secularized notion of politics is inevitable, there is no way back. The contrary is true. All these ‘earlier’ and ‘outdated’ forms of transcendence can still be found in contemporary politics: there is charismatic leadership and the sacralization of the constitution, there is religious fundamentalism and missionary zeal, public discourse and belief in progress, there is even sacrificial cult and the worshipping of ancestors in contemporary politics. Sometimes these seemingly incompatible forms are blended into an effortless coexistence, but frequently they clash together and engender serious conflicts in which the legitimacy of the opponents’ position is fundamentally questioned. Viewed from the perspective of an enlightened public discourse, the fundamentalist zeal of Islamism is not only difficult to understand but wrong, dangerous and evil, the sacrificial practices of primary religions are regarded by the principled order of legalism as pagan magic and ridiculous superstition, and the utopian attempt to cre-


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ate a perfect society is rejected by postmodernist skeptics as the road to barbarism. What is at stake here is not scarce resources or political power, but different conceptions of transcendence presupposed by political camps. These conceptions limit the horizon and demarcate the boundary behind which barbarism reigns. As before, the sacred is the ultimate source of meaning. But—and this might be the secret of secularization—this reference to the sacred is kept latent in everyday politics. It is covered by layers and hidden behind translations that allow to ignore and even to deny it in routinized procedures. Like the forbidden and repressed core of social relations, the constitutive transcendence has to be excluded from regular communication. Only in situations of extraordinary crisis, when the fundamentals of social order are challenged and rational procedures decay, when routines fail and disorientation spreads, we turn to these hidden transcendental sources that—however latently—have always been there. References Abbott, Andrew Delano (1988). The System of Professions. An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, Giorgo (2000). Homo sacer. Die souveräne Macht und das nackte Leben. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Albrecht, Clemens (1995). Zivilisation und Gesellschaft. Bürgerliche Kultur in Frankreich. Munich: Fink. Amato, Joseph A. (1990). Victims and Values. A History and a Theory of Suffering. New York: Praeger. Alexander, Jeffrey C. et al. (2004). Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ——. (2003). The meanings of social life. A cultural sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. Assmann, Jan (1998). Moses der Ägypter. Munich: Hanser. ——. (1999). Ägypten. Eine Sinngeschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-TaschenbuchVerlag. ——. (2003). Die mosaische Unterscheidung. Munich: Hanser. Avishai, Margali and Gary Smith (eds.) (1997). Amnestie oder die Politik der Erinnerung in der Demokratie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Barber, Malcolm (1978). The Trial of the Templars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Becker, Howard (1973). Outsiders. Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York, NY: Free Press. Beidelmann, Thomas O. (1966). “Swazi Royal Ritual.” In: Africa XXXVI: 373–405. Bloch, Marc (1998). Les Rois Thaumaturges. Étude sur le Caractère Surnaturel Attribué a la Puissance Royale Particulièrement en France et en Angleterre. Paris: Gallimard. Blumenberg, Hans (1966). Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brewer, John D. et al. (eds.) (1996). The Police, Public Order and the State. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

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PART B

RELIGIOUS ORIGINS OF MODERNITY

MONOTHEISM AND ITS POLITICAL CONSEQUENCES Jan Assmann I The ‘Mosaic Distinction’ and the Problem of Violence Monotheism introduced a new distinction into the realm of religion, bringing about a totally new form of religion whose hallmark was less the exclusive worship of one god, but the distinction as such. This distinction implies a whole scale of concretizations between the poles of a more ontological and cognitive meaning with regard to true and false, and of a more ethical and ‘deontic’ meaning with regard to ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ or ‘just’ and ‘unjust,’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘slavery.’ Drawing the distinction entails making a decision, and this decision of necessity implies rejecting the discarded option. This new form of religion is based on a decision, which in its turn is based on a deep conviction, implying strong notions of what is deemed incompatible. All convictions aspiring to any depth and power require those strong concepts of the excluded other. The monotheistic, or ‘Mosaic’ distinction, which in its last consequence means the distinction between ‘God’ and ‘the world,’ is hard to draw, and the Bible is very explicit about these many difficulties and drawbacks.1 Monotheism required a firm decision and correspondingly strong concepts about ‘the other,’ for which a whole new vocabulary was created: the ‘heathens,’ ‘pagans,’ ‘gentiles,’ ‘unbelievers,’ ‘idolaters,’ ‘heretics’ etc. The strength of the decision and the firmness of the conviction imply an element of violence. This element of violence becomes obvious as soon as the distinction between true and false or good and evil is turned into the distinction between ‘friend’ and ‘foe.’ I do not hold that this new form of religion brought violence into the world; the world, of course, was already full of violence before the advent of monotheism. One could even argue that monotheism, by abolishing ethnic and national distinctions and creating overarching identities and solidarities, tends to make the world more peaceful. But it is impossible to deny that—at least potentially—this 1

Assmann (1996, 1997, 2003).

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kind of religion implies a new type of violence, religiously motivated and directed against those who, in the light of that new distinction, appear to be the enemies of god. ‘Enemies of God,’ however, sounds familiar not only in the context of monotheism, but also in the context of ‘pagan’ religion. It is a normal device in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources to represent the political enemy as an enemy of God. In order to get a clearer view of the problematic alliance between religion and violence, we must distinguish between ‘interpretation’ and ‘motivation.’ The religious interpretation or legitimation of violence is as old as warfare in general. Examples stretch from the Ancient Near East to the most recent military activities in East and West. What is new, is the religious motivation of violence—the idea of killing a person or starting a war for the sake of God, to fulfill his will and orders, acting as God’s executioners. This new type of religion is based on a truth—or a ‘law’—that requires the resolution either to kill or to die for it, a new form of ‘religious heroism,’ which implies either active or passive intolerance. On what could be called the ‘mythical’ plane, the plane of the founding stories and grand narratives modeling the lives of peoples and individuals, active intolerance is exercised, e.g., by Moses after the episode of the Golden Calf, when 3000 men “brothers, friends, neighbors” were killed; by Pinhas, who killed his kinsman Zimri together with a Midianite girl in the act of love-making;2 by Joshua and the whole complex of the “conquest”; by Elijah killing the priests of Ba’al after winning the contest,3 etc. The list is much longer, and though these events belong to myth and not to history, it seems to me highly significant that the new religion attaches so much importance to violence in its narrative self-presentation. Violence belongs to what could be called the ‘core-semantics’ of monotheism. I do not state that monotheism is violent; merely that it dwells on scenes of violence in narrating its path to general realization. On the plane of history, active intolerance was shown by Josiah destroying the “high places” (bamot) and killing the priests;4 by Ezra divorcing the mixed marriages;5 and above all by Judas Maccabaeus, 2 3 4 5

Num 25:7. 1 Kg 18:40. 2 Kg 23. Ezra 9: 1–4.

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who applied the fictitious and archaic Deuteronomist regulations concerning the Canaanite towns, which “must not be spared”6 to the Jewish towns and communities that abandoned the way of the Law and succumbed to Hellenism. To those towns, “the ban was executed” and every living being was killed.7 In I Maccabees, the story is told with pride, not with horror. The biblical term for active intolerance is qana, “zeal.” God is a “zealous god” (El qana), persecuting the idolatry of the fathers down to the third and fourth generations, and those who love him are expected to be equally zealous in fighting for the Law. Monotheism requires a zealous attitude; it is a virtue to be zealous, i.e. to engage totally in the cause of God. The Arabic equivalent, of course, is djihad. The Maccabaean wars seem to be the first religiously motivated wars in history. They were wars of resistance, to be sure, led in defense against an aggressor and his project of forced assimilation. Judging from numerous discussions, modern theologians—Jews and Christians, Catholics and Protestants—hate to be reminded of these biblical stories and react violently to this line of reasoning, which they decry as “anti-Semitic.” They point to the unhistorical, purely fictional character of these texts, as if this would solve the problem. It is precisely the fictional or rather mythical character of most of these stories which makes them potentially dangerous. I am not talking about ‘history,’ but about cultural semantics conditioning and motivating the actions and attitudes of peoples living in the horizon of these semantics. I consider it dangerous to close one’s eyes vis-à-vis the potentially negative or malignant implications of one’s convictions. In a global world we cannot afford such an apologetic attitude. Stark denial is not helpful; reflection is required. I do not want just to criticize or reproach monotheism’s violent implications, but to encourage a process of reflection and, if possible, what in Freudian terms is called “sublimation.” I do not advocate abolishing the Mosaic distinction, but rather call for more reflective, considerate and historically informed ways of dealing with it. Active intolerance, however, is only one side of what I have called ‘religious heroism.’ The other side is passive intolerance, i.e. martyrdom, in Hebrew qiddush ha-shem. On the plane of myth, this form

6 7

Dtn 7:2: lo tekhanem, cf. 13:16f. and especially 20: 16–18. 1 Macc 5.

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of qana—“zeal for the Lord”—appears in the Book of Daniel,8 which was written in the time of the Maccabaean Wars; on the plane of history, it appears during these same wars in the form of heroic resistance to Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ project to turn his kingdom into the first ‘nation-state’ in human history, a state where there should be only one people, one religion and (what was regarded to be the same) one law.9 Many Jews resisted this forced assimilation and preferred to die rather than bow to an idol or eat sacrificial meat, becoming by this form of zealous engagement for the Law the first martyrs in history. Also in this context, it has to be stressed that there are many examples of heroism and of ‘dying for’ outside the horizon of monotheism. Roman history especially is full of examples of heroic Romans who preferred death to ignominy, slavery or other privations they considered incompatible with their convictions about ‘Romanhood,’ honor, patriotism, and bravery. Martyrdom, however, i.e. to die for God, was something new, and it was based on this same distinction between true and false or good and evil, which is the hallmark of the new religion. Drawing the distinction, forming the decision, rejecting the excluded option to the point of dying rather than giving in and compromising: this is the line that leads from a new form of religious conviction to its personal, social and political consequences. Both, active and passive intolerance, are interpreted and justified in the Bible as a kind of ‘fulfillment’: the fulfillment of scripture. This idea of ‘scripture’ is equally novel and innovative. Two kinds of written texts may be identified, which I propose to term ‘informative’ and ‘performative.’ Informative texts require our attention; performative texts, our obedience—i.e. fulfillment, execution, or translation into action and behavior. Informative texts tell us something important or amusing about the world; performative texts order and prohibit, and in doing so make claims of our life. Holy writ is a performative text: it requires that it be performed or fulfilled in our way of living. This hold true for, at least, the Jewish or, to be more precise, the ‘halakhic’ concept of scripture, which, however, is also present in various forms in the other monotheistic religions. All monotheistic religions, even Buddhism (which, though not monotheistic, is still a religion based on a variant of the Mosaic distinction), 8 9

Ch. 3, ch. 14. I Macc 1:41–64.


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imply performative scripture in the form of canons of holy writ, determining the forms of personal, social and political action and behavior in the way a film script determines the actions and speeches of the actors. Martyrdom is the form of acting out a performative text in which this relation between scripture and fulfillment becomes most clear. The Jewish martyrs typically die with a verse of scripture on their lips. Death is the most radical and the most decisive way of fulfilling, acting out, or living out scripture; not in the temple, the sanctuary or some other sacred place, but in everyday life and in the most profane and unholy situations and places.10 Again we must realize that the world was already full of scripts, performative texts prescribing human action and claiming strict obedience and fulfillment, well before the emergence of monotheism. These texts, however, never claimed to regulate the whole of human life, but only certain spheres of action, as may be regulated either by law codes and royal edicts or by rituals and ceremonial prescriptions. The Torah, it is true, contains many similar laws and prescriptions, and there are many singular parallels in other ancient civilizations, but there is no parallel for the claim the Torah holds on the totality of human existence, nor for the divine origin and timeless, absolute validity of such an all-encompassing regulation. Without this form of performative scripture, the underlying distinction, decision and conviction cannot be maintained and reproduced through the sequence of generations and radical changes of context and circumstances history brings about in the course of centuries. The Mosaic distinction requires and brings about a thorough restructuring of cultural memory. This form of living in the horizon of a canon is not exclusively Jewish; in various permutations, it applies to many minoritarian communities in antiquity. They left the mainstream ways of life in favor of alternative, purer paths, typically based and gathered around a core-library of normative and ‘performative’ scripture: the Pythagoraeans, the Orphics, the Platonists and other philosophical schools, the ‘sectarian movements’ in early Judaism, the various branches of Gnosticism and Hermeticism, the Christians, the Buddhists, the Manichaeans, the Mandeans and others. In all these movements, we meet with the desire for the sanctification of life, for living a life in fulfillment of a sacred or sanctioned script, a life in truth and goodness. 10

See Agus (1988).

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Drawing the distinction and making the decision requires a firm mind and heart. Monotheism implies not only a new idea of god but also, and above all, a new concept of man, laying much stress especially on ‘inner man’ (ho endos anthropos in the words of St. Paul, interior homo in those of Augustine). Israel is required not only to recognize god’s unity (aechad ), but love the Lord “with all thy soul, all thy heart, all thy power”.11 The development of new forms of inner life, of subjectivity, reflectivity and inner conflicts, is among the most important personal consequences of monotheism. Conversion and repentance are perhaps the most prominent and the most innovative of these new forms of inner life. Also in this respect, I would dare the thesis that conversion and repentance are unthinkable concepts in the context of traditional ‘pagan’ religions. These religions could not be separated from culture and society. You could assimilate to Egyptian or Mesopotamian culture, but never ‘convert’ to the respective religions. Conversion implies a decision based on the Mosaic distinction between true (or good, or just) and false (or bad, or unjust) religion. Conversion means making a decision about the true forms of life and belief. Repentance—teschuvah in Hebrew, metanoia in Greek—means a total transformation or reformation of one’s ways of living. It is closely connected to a concept of sin which is equally revolutionary. Making mistakes and repenting of them afterwards is, of course, a universal phenomenon. I am thinking of an existential turn, caused by an awareness of the general sinfulness of one’s former life. I am not speaking of specific misdeeds, but of the fundamental and existential sinfulness of the ‘natural state,’ i.e. a life outside the Law, unheeding the will of God, as it is expressed, e.g. in Ps 51 v. 7: for I am born in guilt, in sin my mother has conceived me.

and in verse 19: Das Opfer, das Gott gefällt, ist ein zerknirschter Geist, ein zerbrochenes und zerschlagenes Herz wirst Du, Gott, nicht verschmähen.

The god of monotheism has no divine partners, his partner is man; both in the shape of the chosen people, Israel, and that of the indi11

See the ‘schema prayer’, Dtn 6.5.


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vidual Israelite, who assumed, in this new kind of religion, a totally new dignity. The individual now found himself or herself confronted with god, even exposed and surrendered to god’s omniscience and critical attention. Monotheism is a drama between god and man, acted out on the arena of, both, everyday life and of the inner life of the psyche. The ‘I’ of the psalms stands firstly for a singular suffering or jubilating, imploring or thanksgiving individual, secondly for everybody confronting his god in similar situations, and thirdly for the community of Israel. It is an ‘I’ ‘larger-than-life,’ accommodating all three meanings in its exposed position before God. Monotheism means an extension of the traditional world in the direction of transcendence and subjectivity, or outer and inner transcendence. This new form of intensified subjectivity finds its clearest expressions in the sentiment of repentance and the step of conversion, to leave one’s former life which one has come to recognize as wrong, sinful or evil, and to enter the life of truth, the way of the Law or the imitation of Christ. All this is totally alien to ‘pagan’ religions. Repentance and conversions are dramatic plays acted out on the inner stage of the human heart, which co-evolved with the monotheistic turn in ancient Israel. II The Political Consequences of Monotheism The ‘monotheistic turn’ means both a revolution and an evolution, stretching over many centuries and including many drawbacks and movements in the opposite direction. The law of evolution reads “Natura non facit saltus,” and it applies also to cultural history. But culture does make leaps, not perhaps in actual history, but in history as it is perceived, remembered and represented. The monotheistic turn is represented in the Bible as a revolutionary ‘leap’ of the highest possible degree. The prolonged sojourn of Israel in Egypt for more than four centuries effaces every memory of the patriarchal past in Canaan, and the exodus from Egypt cuts the links to the host culture and helps to prepare a ‘tabula rasa’ for God on which to write His revelation. Moses means a new beginning and the installation of a new religion, turning an amorphous mass of nameless emigrants into the ‘Chosen People,’ the people of God. The revelation of the Law at Mt. Sinai constitutes the ‘primal scene’ of monotheism.

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This primal scene is politically determined in such a way as to suggest that monotheism is originally a political religion, in the sense of a sacralized political movement. I am envisaging, to be sure, the event at Mt. Sinai in its broader context, including the exodus from Egypt, the wanderings through the wilderness and the conquest of the Promised Land, and I am interpreting this narrative complex not in the sense of real history, but of mnemo-history. This means that I am asking for the form in which monotheism remembers and tells the story of its origins. The primarily political character of this story is obvious. The story is about liberation from Egyptian serfdom, a purely political action, in clear opposition to a kind of political order and organization, for which Egypt stands as its symbolical exponent. This political action leads to the constitution of the Hebrews as the people of God and a “kingdom of priests and a holy people” (mamlekhet kohanim we-goj qadosh),12 an alternative political organization and the political antithesis to the oriental empires, based on the principle of sacral kingship or ‘representative theocracy.’ The form of this constitution is a treaty, a political alliance between the people and God. Monotheism is the basic principle and the first commandment of this new political order: “I am YHWH thy God that has liberated thee from Egypt. Thou shalt not have other gods beside me.” This does not mean that there are no other gods, but that Israel should not have other gods. This makes a big difference. Israel is committed to political loyalty, to staying loyal to the alliance and not breaking away to other overlords. Loyalty is a meaningful concept only if there are other gods. Exclusivism, the hallmark of monotheism, is therefore originally a political concept, meaning the exclusivity of allegiance to one particular god, not the exclusive existence of one god only. It concerns the alliance between the people of god and the god of liberation. To the loyalty of Israel corresponds the ‘jealousy’ of God: both are political properties. Both, loyalty and jealousy, are political concepts. Only with the transformation of a sacralized political movement into a new form of full-fledged religion, the exclusivity of God turns from a question of commitment into a question of existence. The Schema prayer, it is true, being a central part of the Sinai revelation, states that YHWH is ‘ONE,’ aechad. This may be inter12

Ex 19:6.


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preted both ways: in the sense of an exclusivity of commitment, which befits the following injunction to love YHWH “with all thy heart, all thy soul and all thy might,” but also in the sense of absolute oneness or unity. In this context, the other gods that Israel is requested not to ‘have’ are not only forbidden, but nonexistent, false, fictive gods. Monolatry turns into Monotheism. YHWH is the only true god. The tension between monolatry and monotheism, loyalty to the one in full recognition of the existence of other gods on the one hand, and the recognition of only one god denying the existence of other gods as mere idols on the other hand, this tension marks biblical religion from the beginning. The borderline between the one god YHWH and the other gods is originally a political boundary, separating the Chosen People from the rest of the nations, but it tends right from the start to take on the cognitive or ‘existential’ meaning between true and false gods. This border, the distinction between true and false or good and evil with regard to religion is the proper innovation of monotheism. This distinction simply did not exist previously in the realm of religion. There were foreign religions with foreign, unknown gods, but nobody would have declared these gods false and fictitious or wrong and evil. Not the oneness of god, but the concept of ‘idols’ is the real monotheistic innovation. There were no idols and heathen in the realm of tribal religion and polytheism. The construction of paganism is the single achievement of monotheism, based on the distinction between true and false. Monotheism, therefore, is a religion that blurs boundaries, the boundaries that are expressed or represented by the divinities of polytheism: between cities and countries, tribes and nations, day and night, land and sea, love and war, good and evil—but that also erects a boundary: between true and false, religion and idolatry. Monotheism is, at the same time, exclusive and universalistic. Both tendencies, the exclusive and the universalistic, have political consequences. The political problem of universalism consists in its lack of legitimizing function. The chief gods of polytheistic religions are state gods and represent political unity. Ashur stands for Assyria, Marduk for Babylonia, Amun-Re for Egypt, Athena for Athens etc. In this way, YHWH originally stood for Israel but the biblical god soon outgrew this political role. Pure monotheism does not recognize national gods. This problem is solved by the monotheistic religions in different ways. The Jewish solution consists in ‘sub-sovereignty.’

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Israel develops the pure form of monotheism only under minority conditions, in the Babylonian exile and under Persian rule. Under these conditions, YHWH may renounce his political function as a state god and become truly universal. The Christian and Islamic solution of this problem is the empire. So little monotheism suits the needs of a national religion, so well it functions as an imperial religion. It does not support a nation-state, but an empire. Christianity is linked to the Roman Empire, Islam forms empires of its own, from the Abassid, Omayyad, Fatimid etc. up to the Ottoman empires. Nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism, therefore, represented a mortal danger to the alliance between religion and politics, in the Muslim East as well as the Christian West. The typical nationstate is a secular state. This holds for post-revolutionary France, as well as for Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Egypt and even early Zionism. Nationalism is also a political religion that does not tolerate other religions beside itself. Religious nation-states such as Pakistan and Iran are exceptional and problematic constructions. The same would apply to a not yet existing ‘Serbia’ (at least not under this designation), with its national branch of Greek orthodox faith. The political forms that are congenial to monotheistic universalism are either minority conditions or imperial multinationalism. But there is also the political problem of the ‘Mosaic distinction’ with its construction and exclusion of paganism. The political consequences of this distinction turn dangerous only if it is interpreted in terms of friend and foe. Then, the idolaters turn into enemies of God and the political leaders turn into God’s willing executioners. This interpretation seems typical of the political world view of the two extreme spearheads, of radical Islamism and the Bush administration. One side speaks of Allah’s enemies, the other of the axis of evil. Each side perceives the other as the providential foe, the “personification of its own question” (“ihre eigene Frage als Gestalt”): Der Feind ist unsre Frage als Gestalt, und er wird uns, wir ihn zum selben Ende hetzen. The foe personifies our own question and he will hunt us, we him, down to the same end.

Whereas Carl Schmitt saw in these verses by Theodor Däubler the epitome of the political, I would understand them as expressing a pathology of politics, a malign clinch calling for therapy. The polarization of the political world into friend and foe seems in itself patho-


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logical, but it becomes mortally dangerous if the foe is demonized far beyond his real possibilities and intentions for destruction. In those cases the point is reached where politics merges with myth and religion. III

Monotheism, Violence and the Modern Situation

Twenty years ago, the global situation was still determined by the Cold War, i.e. the confrontation between two powers, one of which, the communist block, considered itself as atheistic, and the other, the capitalist block, as Christian. It appears that religion was only involved on the one side of this confrontation, the capitalist side. The opposite, in fact, is true. The communist totalitarianism of the Soviet empire presented the paradigmatic case of a political religion, i.e. politics with a religious, even messianic perspective aiming at establishing a paradise on earth in form of class-free society and eternal peace. Communism was not connected to a religion, but was in itself a religion. Using Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s important distinction, we may say that it is deeply rooted in, but not caused by, Christian and Jewish millennialism. There is certainly no evolutionary trend leading from Christian or Jewish religion, or even Gnosticism, to Marxism; still, these religions laid the foundation for a new religion, or anti-religion, to arise. Being an universal or ‘world-religion’ in itself, it did not tolerate another religion beside itself. Soviet Communism was a religion and even what I call a “secondary or counter-religion,”13 including a church and an orthodoxy, because it was based on the distinction between true and false and had codified this distinction in a canon of holy writ, including the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. It demanded belief and propagated the polarization of believers and pagans, capitalism thereby playing the role of paganism.14 Capitalism, on the other hand, is not a religion, in the same way as paganism is not a religion, but just a polemical and external classification. As a religion, communism had no real counterpart in the West. The exact counterpart was only represented by Islam. If

13 14

Assmann (1997). Gellner (1994: 170–181).

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communism may be termed a political religion in the sense of a political movement with a religious orientation, Islam may be termed a political religion in the sense of a religion with a political orientation. Islam is a religion which aims at political realization, communism is a political movement aspiring at being believed, ‘loved,’ and passionately adhered to as a religion (a goal which it never achieved in actual history). Common to both religions is the element of totalitarianism, the de-differentiation of autonomous cultural spheres. Both force the entire public and private life under the yoke of their respective salvatory doctrines. This confrontation remained invisible, however, because of the relative invisibility of Islam. The situation changed only in 1979 with the revolution in Iran, when Islam reasserted itself as a political power, and with the ensuing politics of the USA, which supported Islamist combatants such as the Mudjaheddin and the Taliban against the Soviet empire. In the war between Iran and Iraq, however, the USA sided with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a non-religious regime under Soviet influence. Today, after the disintegration of the Soviet empire, Islam and the West confront each other as the two remaining global powers. Islam advanced from being a third power to the role of the “providential foe” in the sense of Carl Schmitt. Again, the West is confronted by a political religion, this time, however, not by politics in religious disguise but by a politically active religion. The question is how the West will react to this new confrontation; the concern is that it will turn religious itself, harnessing its central values such as democracy, freedom, individualism, division of power, market economy, human rights, cultural diversity etc., in the shape of an orthodoxy, demanding blind belief and allegiance, and propagating its religion globally in the form of a crusade. What I dread is “the sacralization of politics,” which, according to Emilio Gentile’s definition, takes place when a political movement confers a sacred status to an earthly entity, and renders it an absolute principle of collective existence, considering it the main source of values for individual and mass behaviours, and exalting it as the supreme ethical precept of public life. It thus becomes an object of veneration and dedication, even to the point of self-sacrifice.15 15

Gentile (2000).


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To be sure, we are not, or perhaps not yet, dealing with a ‘political movement,’ simply with a trend toward a situation where we would then have to deal with the confrontation of two political religions: one a politicized religion aiming at political power, and the other a sacralized politics aiming at religious adherence, including fanatic engagement and ‘love’—because religion is above all a matter of emotional engagement. Both blocks draw their dynamism (or dynamite) from the construction of ‘the other.’ Islam draws its political dynamics from its political construction of paganism: the pagan is the enemy, to be either converted or annihilated (except the ahl al-kitab, ‘People of the Book’ who are tolerated and assessed for tax as a minority). The politics of the USA, on the other hand, draws its religious dynamics from the demonization of the enemy. One could perhaps also think of a conflict between two monotheisms, Islam and Christianity. This construction, however, does not correspond to the Islamic perception of the conflict. The enemy of Islam is not Christianity, but rather Western secularism. Islam does not feel threatened with forced conversion to Christianity, but with losing all religious orientation.16 Western secularism is in fact so heavily rooted in, and has adopted so many features from Christianity, that it may even be seen as the continuation of Christianity in a different shape. Again, it should be stressed that, according to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Western secularism is rooted in, but not caused by, Christian traditions. Yet one is tempted to ask whether there is a tendency towards secularization inherent in monotheism, at least towards the phenomenon Max Weber had called the “disenchantment of the world.” This, however, does not seem to apply to Islam. In any event, among the many things which Western secularism adopted from Christian traditions, above all there is the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion. In contrast to Judaism, which leaves the pagans alone, Christianity is a missionary religion that seeks to render its message accessible to all the nations on earth. This opening to the heathens, however, implies the exclusion of all those who reject the message. Unlike Judaism, Christianity is not indifferent to the external world, but divides it in terms of friend and foe. ‘Friends’ are those who accept the message, ‘foes’ those who reject it. Thus, by virtue of its opening

16

I am basing my interpretation on Meddeb (2002).

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towards the heathen, Christianity is a globalizing and polarizing, i.e. politicizing, religion. Yet even Judaism implies a globalizing tendency. It is not missionary, but lives among the peoples. What mission is to Christianity, diaspora is to Judaism. Judaism, originally a religion of self-exclusion from the orbit of other peoples, destined to live as a ‘Chosen People’ in the ‘Promised Land,’ had to live dispersed among the peoples in a form of passive globalization. If Christianity is a globalizing religion intending to spread over the whole earth, it is nonetheless about a reign which is not of ‘this world.’ The Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man is constitutive of Christian thought and practice, although it had often been deliberately blurred. Mission does not necessarily mean subjugation, though in history both quite often went together. Islam, however, does not know of such restrictions. The pagans are neither excluded nor violently ‘missionized,’ but subjugated and converted. Here, the distinction reads Dar el Islam and Dar el Harb: “house of Islam” and “house of war”. This means exactly: ‘where there is no Islam, there is war.’ And since war is not a desirable state, the rule is: ‘where there is war, shall be Islam.’ For this reason, Islam is the most pronouncedly globalizing religion among the three Abrahamitic monotheisms. The globalizing element of monotheism is present only in a passive form in Judaism, in the form of diaspora; it becomes active in Christianity, but tempered by a that-worldly orientation; and finds its intemperate political expression only in Islam. The globalizing dynamics of monotheism is based from in its underlying universalism. If there is only one god, He is responsible for all countries and peoples. Polytheism expresses the diversity and plurality of the world, monotheism knows of only one god, one world and one humanity. For this reason, the Bible interprets the diversity of languages as a punishment and a ‘depravation of creation.’ The plurality of peoples, goyim in Hebrew, acquires the negative meaning of ‘pagans,’ and in the Arab expression dar el-harb, this negative meaning becomes most manifest. The three monotheisms handle their universalistic perspective, however, in very different manner. Judaism postpones it to a ‘messianic age.’ History is determined by the plurality of the nations and religions. Only at the end of time, in the post-histoire of messianic time, will the peoples convert to the One God and go to Zion for worship.


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For Christianity, the Messiah has already come, bringing, however, not the end of history; the end will come only when the gospel has been told to all the peoples. Until then, the kingdom of God is in a certain mysterious way present, it is ‘true,’ but not of this world. At least the shi’ite Islam knows of this messianic-eschatological postponement, but not of the Christian dichotomy of the two kingdoms. Islam insists on realization, that is, on transformation of religion into politics here and now; it leaves no doubt that its kingdom is of this world. Of the three Abrahamitic religions, it is the one that is most resolute in the realization of the political implications of monotheistic universalism. This most unequivocally and politically globalizing religion sees itself now confronted with a similarly globalizing movement, not in Christianity, but in the shape of post-Christian secularism, which shares with Christianity its universalistic impulse but not its spiritual perspective and which, for the same reason, globalizes the world in such a successful and even irresistible way that it can only be perceived by Islam as a mortal threat. With Western secularism on the one side and Islam on the other, we have two religions which operate on the political plane with the claim to universal power, and which demonize each other as mortal enemies. In this extreme status, however, this analysis holds true only for the two extreme spearheads of these two powers, Islamism and fundamentalism on the one hand and the Bush administration as the exponent of Western values or value-fundamentalism (democracy, individualism, market economy etc.) on the other. This offers to the more moderate zones within and between the two blocks, to liberal Islam and to pluralistic Europe with its partly Islamic history, the chance of playing the role of the third and of breaking up the dangerous dualism. Is it possible or even probable that the radical polarization of the world is connected with the Mosaic distinction between true and false religion? I would think so, but its destructive potential is only realized in a modern, post-monotheistic world. In this situation, the only cure seems to consist in a resolute de-demonization of the other. The West should beware of demonizing Islam by confounding it with Islamism (and then depicting it as the ‘personification of its own question’). Islam is a complex and pluralistic phenomenon. The West should support the liberal, reformist trends as opposed to the fundamentalists and puritans (the Wahhabites) with their radical fanaticism. Of crucial import is also the disentanglement of politics and

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religion. Western secularism must not see and advertise itself as the only true and universal form of political order. Islam or Islamism, in turn, should no longer insist on the immediate political realization of its religious norms and notions. Monotheistic religion must remember its original critical impulse. It was originally intended as a means of breaking up the inseparable unity of ‘rule’ and ‘salvation,’ ‘Herrschaft ’ und ‘Heil,’ typical of the representative theocracies of the Eastern empires, Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, Persia and Hellenism ruled by gods and the sons of Gods. The idea of the ‘covenant’ burst the compact unity of rule and salvation and withdrew salvation from the hand of the rulers. Monotheism originally meant political criticism. Biblical monotheism opposed the pharaonic oppression with its utopia of a decent society, where nobody was enslaved or humiliated. Monotheism meant the definition of an Archimedean point, from which to unhinge the political orders of the ancient world. This issue may be defined as the separation of religion and politics. This separation is given up where religion foregoes its critical potential and establishes a new form of totalitarian unity, forcing politics, jurisprudence, art and other cultural fields under its vision. The political theology of the Pentateuch and the prophets has a double direction. It is not only about founding and legitimating a new form of political order, but it is also and primarily about criticizing and delegitimizing the traditional prevailing order; and this, not the foundational function, is the most important aspect of biblical political theology. Biblical monotheism as it appears in the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy is a weapon directed against the political structures of the Ancient Near East. However, if we continue reading in the Hebrew Bible beyond the Pentateuch, from the Books of Judges and Samuel to the Books of Kings and further through the Books of the Prophets, it becomes crystal clear that biblical political theology is not so much directed against Egypt and Babylonia, but it rather addresses Israel’s own society. Egypt and Babylonia are just symbols for what is considered to be wrong in terms of political order. Moses standing before Pharaoh is just a model for the later prophets to confront their respective kings in Jerusalem, Samaria and Babylon. Biblical Monotheism constructs a new platform from which to criticize and delegitimize political order. This platform simply did not exist in the pre-Israelite world. Religion was part of the system.


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Now, it became a system of its own, separated from culture including politics, economics, arts and sciences. Yet, the function of biblical political theology is, both, critical and foundational; it delegitimizes the previous political order and legitimizes a new one. It separates religion from the rest of culture, but it tends to transform the whole of culture in the light of truth. It differentiates and it de-differentiates. As a means of differentiation, it represents an immense achievement in the history of mankind, in terms of freedom and human rights against the claims of politics; as a power of de-differentiation, however, of totalitarian ‘Gleichschaltung’ (ideological standardization and synchronisation) of culture under the dictate of religion, it is a danger to human freedom. For a close, I would like to summarize my interpretation of monotheism as being (originally) a political movement of resistance and liberation in five points, which correspond to five leitmotifs in the Biblical narrative: (1) The motif of liberation. The liberation from Egyptian serfdom is the first and foremost foundation of the new religion; it is thus purely political, meant to found human society on a new basis which forever precludes oppression, exploitation and humiliation. (2) The motif of God’s oneness, uniqueness or solitude. As we have seen, this has also, at least originally, a political meaning. Political alliances are exclusive: you must serve two overlords. A small state such as Israel was constantly confronted with the decision of whether to side either with Egypt or Assyria, but never with both. The only way to escape these constraints was to form an equally exclusive alliance with God that excluded other gods and other lords. The resolution to recognize only one God is, by its origin, a purely political intention. (3) The motif of God as legislator. A legislating god was unknown to the world of polytheism. God as judge, to be sure, was a central concept in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but legislation was the task of the king. The idea of justice was divine, but the formulation and promulgation of concrete laws to be derived from the idea of justice was the task of the king, because the laws were deemed to be dependent on historically changing situations. The legislating god replaces the king in his most important function. (4) The motif of the wrath of God. The jealousy and the wrath of God are political affects, distinguishing the sovereign ruler. The

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biblical god develops these qualities only after the formation of the covenant at Mt. Sinai. Unlike the gods of Egypt and Mesopotamia, YHWH does not rule over other gods, but over human people, and assumes the necessary political emotions in relation to his people. (5) The prohibition of images. Many things arouse the anger of God, but he reacts most furiously to images. The primal scene of the wrath of God is the story of the Golden Calf, which God resents as defection to other gods. What is wrong with images? Images are the medium through which the gods of ancient polytheisms exerted their rulership on earth. The ancient oriental state may be classified as a ‘representative theocracy.’ The states were ruled by state-gods, Assur in Assyria, Marduk in Babylonia, Amun-Re in Egypt, yet they ruled not directly but indirectly, through representatives such as the king, the sacred animals and the innumerable images in the temples. Mundane government is just a replica and representation of divine rulership, and draws its legitimacy from this ‘theo-mimesis.’ This sphere of representation is destroyed by the prohibition of images. The god of Israel rules directly, not indirectly. Every image would destroy the immediacy of His presence. The covenant is based on direct theocracy. In this context, I would also like to refer to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s remark on Augustine’s rejection of any representation of the city of God on earth. According to Eisenstadt’s understanding of Augustine’s position, people could not ‘represent’ the City of God without conceiving themselves as divine. In this rejection of representation, Eisenstadt detected what he called an “Axial theme,” a feature of “axiality.” Axial Age civilizations develop a strong aversion to representing the divine, because it implies the danger of self-deification. There is first a Jewish, then a protestant reserve against political institutions representing the divine on earth, such as les rois thaumaturges in France and also some elements of sacral kingship in pre-reformation England. This is the political meaning of idolatry; and, in my view, it belongs to the original semantic core of monotheism. References Agus, Aharon (1988). The Binding of Isaac and Messiah. Albany, NY: University of New York Press. Assmann, Jan (1996). “The Mosaic Distinction: Israel, Egypt, and the Invention of Paganism.” In: Representations 56: 48–67.


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——. (1997). Moses the Egyptian. The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ——. (2003). Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus. Munich: Hanser. Gellner, Ernest (1994). Encounters with Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Gentile, Emilio (2000). “The Sacralization of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism.” In: Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 1, 1: 34–55. Meddeb, Abdelwahab (2002). La maladie de l’Islam. Paris. Seuil.

THE RELIGIOUS ORIGINS OF MODERN RADICAL MOVEMENTS* Shmuel N. Eisenstadt I Modernity, modern civilization, the cultural and political programs of modernity, have been often seen as epitomizing a break from religion; as heralding the rise of the secular age in which religion and the sacred have been relegated to the private sphere, or to the margins of society. While needless to say there is a very strong kernel of truth in such approach, it presents at most only one side of the picture. Not only does it confuse or conflate religion as defined in Western discourse with the sacral; beyond such conflation it does not do full justice to the fact that many central and continual dimensions and tensions of the cultural and political program of modernity and of modern political dynamics are deeply rooted in the religious components of the civilization which they developed, and that these dimensions and tensions constitute in many ways the transformation, even if in secular terms, of some of the basic religious orientations and the tensions that have been constitutive of these civilizations. This is especially true of the Jacobin component of the cultural and political program of modernity—a component which is at the root of what is probably the most continual dramatic confrontation in the modern political discourse and dynamics—namely, the confrontation between pluralistic and totalistic and totalitarian ideologies, movements and regimes.1 It is the major argument of this essay that the roots of modern Jacobinism in their different manifestations are to be found in the transformation of the visions with strong Gnostic components and which sought to bring the ‘Kingdom of God’ to earth and which

* The research on which this article is based has been helped by a grant from the Thyssen Foundation. 1 Blumenberg (1987); McKnight (1983).

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were often promulgated in medieval and early modern European Christianity by different heterodox sects. The transformation of these visions as it took place above all in the Great Revolutions, in the English Civil War and especially the American and French Revolutions and their aftermaths, entailed their transposition from relatively marginal sectors of society to the central political arena. From then on these visions, especially in their various collectivistic, especially Jacobin guises, became a continual component of the modern political discourse and dynamics, in continual confrontation with more open pluralistic visions. Or, in somewhat greater detail, the roots of the continual confrontation between on the one hand an encompassing, totalistic, potentially totalitarian vision with strong Jacobin tendencies, and on the other hand a commitment to pluralistic premises and orientations which constituted a basic component of the modern political discourse and dynamics, are to be found in modern transformations of the tensions inherent in all Axial civilizations in the very premises of these civilizations and in the process of their institutionalization.2 The most important of these tensions were, first, a tension related to the awareness of a great range of possibilities of transcendental visions and of their implementation; second was the tension between reason and revelation or faith or their equivalents in the non-monotheistic Axial civilizations; and third was the tension focused on the desirability of attempts promulgated above all by various heterodox sects to implement such visions in their pristine utopian form, to bring the ‘Kingdom of God’ to the ‘Kingdom of Man.’3 It was above all this last problematique that constituted the roots of the development of the modern totalistic, especially Jacobin ideologies and movements. The roots of this problematique were to be found in the very process of institutionalization of the transcendental visions promulgated in these civilizations. Any such institutionalization naturally entailed some compromise of the pristine transcendental vision with mundane, social and political reality; the close interweaving of such visions with the existing political order, with the interests of the powers-that-be, and the concomitant emphasis on the importance of the maintenance of this order for the maintenance of even the possible

2 3

Eisenstadt (1982, 1986). Eisenstadt (1999).

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partial implementation of the transcendental vision; and the ensuing acceptance of the difficulty, even impossibility, of a total bridging of the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane order.4 Moreover, any such institutionalization entailed the growing awareness of a great range of possibilities of transcendental visions, of the very definition of the tensions between the transcendental and the mundane order and of the quest to overcome it, i.e. of the implementation of such visions constituted an inherent part of their institutionalization in the Axial civilizations. Historically such process of institutionalization of transcendental visions was never a simple, peaceful one. It was usually connected with a continuous struggle and competition between many groups and between their respective visions. Because of this multiplicity of visions, no single one could be taken as given or complete. Once the conception of a basic tension between the transcendental and the mundane order was institutionalized in a society, or at least within its center, it became in itself very problematic. Thus the very process of such institutionalization generated the possibility of different emphases, directions and interpretations of the transcendental visions.5 Such processes of institutionalization have also sharpened the awareness of yet another basic tension inherent in these civilizations, namely that between on the one hand ‘reason’ and on the other ‘revelation’ and faith in the monotheistic tradition and some transcendental principle in the Confucian, Hinduistic and Buddhist ones. The premises of these civilizations—and their institutionalization—entailed a high level of reflexivity, including a second order reflexivity about these very premises. Such reflexivity has been, of course, reinforced by the awareness of alternative visions. It necessarily entailed the exercise of reason not only as a pragmatic tool but also as at least one arbiter or guide of such reflexivity—and often gave rise to the construction of reason as a distinct category in the discourse of that developed in these civilizations. Hence, it may have easily endowed reason with a metaphysical or transcendental dimension and autonomy which did not exist in pre-Axial civilizations—and could generate confrontations between the autonomous exercise of reason and revelation or its equivalents in the non-monotheistic civilizations. Such

4 5

Eisenstadt (1999). Eisenstadt (1982 b, 1986, 1988).

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confrontation was historically very central in the monotheistic civilizations as they confronted the only Axial civilization—the Greek one—which did indeed define reason, “logos” as the ultimate transcendental value.6 Parallel confrontations—even if, needless to say, couched in other terms and in less confrontational ways—developed also in other Axial civilizations. II All these processes and problems attendant on the institutionalization of such visions have sharpened the awareness and problematization of the possibility or desirability of a full implementation of the transcendental visions constitutive of these civilizations. As against the seemingly natural quest for the implementation of such visions there developed also in these civilizations the recognition not only of the impossibility but also of the undesirability of such implementation. There also developed within the reflexive traditions of these civilizations doubts, given the imperfectability of man, about the possibility—and even feasibility—of such full implementation of these visions. Such view was not inherently exogenous to the basic conceptions and premises of these civilizations—it was indeed a basic even if controversial component of their premises. The very emphasis on the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane order entailed also the conception of the inherent imperfectability of man. Given such imperfectability, it was often emphasized in the discourse that developed in these civilizations that attempts to a complete overcoming of the chasm between the transcendental and the mundane orders, could be very dangerous, that they would lead to attempts by the fragile and imperfect to abrogate for themselves divine power. Accordingly, there developed within these civilizations strong emphases on the necessity to regulate mundane affairs without attempts of an extreme, totalistic implementation of pristine transcendental vision. The proper limits of such implementation, the scope of the arenas and aspects of social life which should be regulated according to such vision, as against those in which the more mundane concerns, economic or power ones, should be accepted—but also regulated by

6

Vernant (1979); Gordon and Buxton (1981).


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mundane means, constituted one of the major concerns of the reflexive discourse in all these civilizations. Augustine’s famous distinction between the City of God and the City of Man is one of the best-known illustrations of this concern— as well as of the resolution of this problem in the direction of the separation of the two cities. Similar discourses can, however, also be found in other Axial civilizations. These concerns were closely related to the problem which was central in the discourse of all these civilizations, namely that of the evaluation of hedonistic and anarchic impulses and of mundane interest of people. In the discourses that developed in all these civilizations, there developed a strong preoccupation with the relations between on the one hand these impulses and interests; between the egoistical, hedonistic, and anarchic impulses of individuals and groups within the society and, on the other hand, the upholding of the proper social order. In close relation to these considerations, there developed in many of these civilizations some kernels of the idea of social contract, of the idea that the actual mundane, especially political order is constituted through some implicit contract between different members of a society or between them and the ruler. Different variations of such idea of social contract could be found in some of the great writings on political and social matters of the Asian civilizations, as for instance of Artashartra of Katulya,7 in the work of Ibn Khaldoun,8 or in the work of some of the Chinese thinkers—like Motzu or Hsunt-su.9 Most of these discussions emphasized that such contract with the rulers was based on some utilitarian considerations, as well as those of fear. Such considerations were usually seen as being a natural part of the mundane order, rooted in the anarchic potentials of human nature, which had to be regulated by the laws or customs which hemmed in these anarchic potentials and/or by the power of the rulers. The recognition of this necessity was often connected with legitimation of political order based on considerations of power. The contract based on such considerations could be seen as legitimate—but certainly not as entailing the full implementation

7 8 9

Heesterman (1985). Khaldoun (1988); Lawrence (1984); Gellner (1981). Metzger (1977); DeBary (1975: 1 p.).

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of the pristine transcendental vision; but its legitimacy could be also connected with the fear of attempts to implement totalistically the pristine transcendental vision. At the same time, however, the possibility was raised in this discourse that the regulation of such impulses could be best assured by the exercise of reason rather than by attempts to implement transcendental visions in a totalistic way. III It was all these problems attendant on the institutionalization of the transcendental visions which were constitutive of Axial Civilizations— i.e. the combination of the awareness of such multiplicity of competing views or of their interpretation together with compromises in which the institutionalization of such visions entailed that constituted the butt of the criticism of various religious cognoscenti and sectors, which promulgated alternative visions presented by their bearers as the pristine visions untainted by any compromise. A crucial component of many of such alternative visions was the emergence in the Axial civilizations of the utopian conception of an alternative cultural and social order which often also contained very strong Gnostic and eschatological components or vision.10 Such utopian conceptions often contained strong millenarian and revivalist elements that can be also found in pre-Axial Age or non-Axial civilizations such as Japan; but these utopian visions go beyond the millenarian ones by combining them with the search for an alternative better order beyond the given one, a new social and cultural order which will negate and transcend the given one, an order that will be constructed according to the pristine precepts of the higher transcendental order, and within which the transcendental visions will be fully implemented so that the bringing of the Kingdom of God to the Kingdom of Man would be eventually achieved. These visions with their very strong antinomian potentialities were usually articulated by social actors who presented themselves as the bearer of the pristine religious and/or civilizational visions of these civilizations. Illustrations of such carriers are the holy men of antiquity, the Indian or Buddhist ‘renouncers,’ Christian monks, and the 10 Voegelin (1961); Cohn (1961, 1977, 1993); Seligman (1989: 1–44), Eisenstadt (1982 b).


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like—in other words, religious virtuosi, who often stood in some ambivalent or dialectic relationships to the existing ways of institutionalizing the transcendental visions, often acting from within liminal situations, and who often coalesce into distinct groups—sectors, orders which could become heterodoxies. The promulgation of these visions was closely connected to the struggle between different elites—making all these elites—to follow Weber’s designation of the ancient Israeli prophets—into “political demagogues,”11 who could also develop distinct political programs of their own. These actors, these elites often attempted to implement such visions in cooperation or coalition with broader social movements. Accordingly such alternative visions became very often combined with the perennial themes of social protest, with attempts to overcome or supersede the predicaments and limitations of human existence in general and of death in particular, especially the tension between equality and hierarchy; between the complexity and fragmentation of human relations inherent in any institutional division of labor and the possibility of some total, unconditional, unmediated participation in social and cultural orders; and the tension between the quest for meaningful participation in central symbolic and institutional arenas by various groups in the society.12 Accordingly, such alternative visions, with their strong antinomian potentialities as they were borne by the various actors—especially by religious virtuosi, sects, or potential heterodoxies—, were not confined to the purely intellectual realm; they could also have broader institutional and political implications, and they could—under appropriate conditions—become very forceful challenges to the existing regimes, to the political and religious establishments alike. Such political potential of these sects and of the alternative visions promulgated by them was reinforced by the conceptions of the accountability of rulers to some higher order which constituted important components of the premises of these civilizations, conceptions according to which the rulers were seen as responsible for the implementation in their respective societies of the transcendental visions,13 and could also be held responsible, above all by sectarian utopian 11 12 13

Weber (1952). Eisenstadt (1985, 1995). Eisenstadt (1981: 155–181), (1982).

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movements, for the sheer failure of implementation of the transcendental visions and of the construction of a political order which would assure such full implementation, of bringing the Kingdom of God to the Kingdom of Man. IV Whatever the differences between these Axial civilizations, such various sectarian heterodox groups and visions constituted a continual component in the dynamics of these civilizations, but with some partial exceptions. Especially among some Islamic sects, they did not give rise to radical transformation of the political arena, its premises and symbols. In the realm of European-Christian civilizations, they constituted through their transformation in the Great Revolutions a central component in the crystallization of modern civilization, of modernity, in the crystallization of the political program of modernity with its tensions and contradictions.14 The crucial historical step in this process in Europe was the Reformation. The Reformation15 constituted the crucial point of transformation of Catholic sectarianism in a this-worldly direction: Luther’s famous saying of making the whole world into a monastery—while overtly oriented against the existing monastic orders—did denote a radical transformation of the hitherto prevalent hegemonic tendencies towards sectarian activities in Christianity. Such transformation was taken up even more forcibly both by the radical Reformation and by Calvinism—in which there developed very strong emphasis on the bringing together of the City of God and the City of Man. Lutheranism did not on the whole give rise to active autonomous political activities, and it was only in the Reformation and Calvinism that they were successful—and only for relatively short periods in relatively small communities—in Geneva, in some Dutch and Scottish sects and in some of the early American colonies. Contrary to some simplistic interpretations of Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic Thesis,’ these sectarian orientations did not give rise, as it were, to capitalism or 14 On the Great Revolutions and their background see Eisenstadt (1978, 1992); Lasky (1970, 1976). On the Revolutions and modernity, see for instance the special issue on “The French Revolution and the Birth of Modernity” in Social Research (Feher 1989); Wood (1992). 15 Oberman (1986, 1994), Eerdmans (1994).


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to modern civilization in general. Rather, under very specific and distinctive institutional and geopolitical conditions, they constituted a very important component in the crystallization of this civilization16—a component which entailed both a continuation and a radical transformation of the place of sectarianism and proto-fundamentalist movements in the dynamics of Great Civilizations. All these processes did provide a very crucial component of the background of the development of the Great Revolutions, and it was the Great Revolutions that in a way constituted the culmination of these processes. The Great Revolutions can be seen as the culmination of the sectarian heterodox potentialities which developed in the Axial civilizations—especially in those in which the political arena was seen as at least one of the arenas of implementation of their transcendental vision. These Revolutions can indeed be seen as the first or at least the most dramatic, and possibly the most successful attempt in the history of mankind to implement on a macro-societal scale the utopian vision with strong Gnostic components. Such transformation entailed the turning upside down—even if ultimately in secular terms—of the hegemony of the Augustinian vision, and the concomitant attempts to implement the heterodox Gnostic visions, and of the sectarian visions which wanted to bring the City of God to the City of Man. It was indeed Eric Voegelin’s great insight— even if he possibly presented it in a rather exaggerated way—to point out to those deep roots of the modern political program in the heterodox-Gnostic traditions of medieval Europe.17 It was in these revolutions that such sectarian activities were taken out from marginal or segregated sectors of society and became interwoven not only with rebellions, popular uprisings, movements of protest but also with the political struggle at the center and were transposed into the general political movements and the centers thereof, and themes and symbols of protest became a basic component of the central social and political symbolism. The transformation of the sectarian activities that took place in the Great Revolution was closely connected with the development of a new type of political activists and leadership. The most central component of such leadership, the most central component in these

16 17

Eisenstadt (1990). Voegelin (1975, 1952, 1996, 1994).

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revolutionary processes—and one which probably constitutes their most distinct characteristics—is the place of specific cultural, religious or secular groups of autonomous intellectuals and political activists, among which especially prominent were the bearers of the Gnostic vision of bringing the Kingdom of God, or some secularized vision thereof, to earth. The English and, to a different extent, the American Puritans; the members of the French clubs so brilliantly described by Albert Cochin and later on by François Furet,18 Mona Ozouf, and others and the various groups of Russian intelligentsia,19 are the best and best-known illustrations of this new type of social activists. It was usually these groups that provided the distinctive social element that transformed rebellions and/or sectarian activities into revolutions. The essence of this transformation was that as against the suppression or hemming in of the more radical sectarian and heterodox activities and orientations in special, highly controlled, spaces (such as monasteries, that was characteristic of the medieval scene), these activities and orientations were transposed, in the Revolutions and in the subsequent modern political process, into the central political arena. It was through such transposition of the heterodox utopian totalistic visions into the central political arenas, which took place above all in the Great Revolutions, that the totalistic Jacobin orientations became a continual component of the modern cultural and political program and discourse and in the institutional dynamics of modernity, in continual tensions within other, especially the more pluralistic, components of this program. V The Cultural and Political Programs of Modernity The cultural and political program of modernity developed and crystallized in Europe, and it was rooted in the distinctive premises of the European civilization and European historical experience—and bore these imprints—but at the same time it was presented and was perceived as being universal, of universal validity and bearing. This 18

Chocin (1924, 1979); Furet (1970, 1981, 1982). Ozouf (1982); Nahirny (1981); Riegel (1997); Pomper (1970); Venturi (1983); Sarkisyanz (1955). On the role of groups of heterodox intellectuals in some of the revolutions and in the antecedent periods, see Cochin (1924, 1979); Baechler (1979); Furet (1982). 19


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program entailed, as did any strong cultural or civilizational program—as for instance those that crystallized in the Axial Civilizations—, a distinct ontological-metaphysical vision or visions; distinct conceptions of social and political order; of the bases of legitimation: of authority and its accountability and of the constitution of collective identities, as well as of its civilizing aspects—i.e., of the promulgation of distinctive attributes of the proper man or woman— of the “civilized person.”20 In the background of this program loomed several very powerful, even if sometimes hidden, meta-narratives. The most important among them were—to follow Tiryakian’s felicitous expression—the Christian, in the sense of affirmation of this world in terms of a higher, not fully realizable vision, the agnostic which attempts to imbue the world with a deep hidden meaning, and the chthonic which emphasizes the full acceptance of the given word and of the vitality of its forces. These different meta-narratives were closely related to the different historical roots of the modern cultural program, of the cultural program of modernity especially—to the Reformation and counter-Reformation to the constitutional traditions in Europe and in the Enlightenment. The different components of this program were not obliterated by coming together in the cultural and political program of modernity, as it crystallized above all in the Renaissance, Enlightenment and the Great Revolutions. These components became highly transformed in this program and provided the starting points for the tensions and antinomies that developed within it—thus attesting to its roots in the different aspects of the European historical experience.21 The cultural program of modernity entailed a very distinct shift in the conception of human agency of its autonomy, and of its place in the flow of time. Thus, first of all this program entailed a very strong emphasis on the autonomous access of the major social sectors, indeed of all members of the society to these orders and their centers, and then on autonomous participation of members of society—in the constitution of the social and political order. Second, it entailed a very strong component of reflexivity about the basic ontological premises of the cosmic order as well as about the bases and

20 21

Elias (1983, 1978–1982); Foucault (1973, 1988, 1975, 1965). See Tiryakian (1996); Durand (1979); Eco (1992).

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legitimations of social and political order of authority prevalent in society—a reflexivity which was shared even by those most radical critics of this program, who in principle denied the legitimacy of such reflexivity. Closely related was development of a conception of future as open with various possibilities which can be realized by autonomous human agency, often in conjunction with the inexorable march of history. The radical innovation of this cultural program as it developed in Europe lay in several major, often conflicting, tendencies and premises which yet shared a strong common denominator: this was the change of the place of God in the construction of the cosmos and of man, and in their understanding.22 The most important components of this program as they crystallized in Europe were first the naturalization of man, society and nature; second the promulgation of the autonomy and potential supremacy of reason in the exploration and even shaping of the world; and, third, the emphasis on the autonomy of man, of his reason and/or will. Man and nature tended to become naturalized, tended to be increasingly perceived not as directly regulated by the will of God, as in the monotheistic civilizations, nor by some higher, transcendental metaphysical principles, as in Hinduism and Confucianism, or by the universal logos, as in the Greek tradition. Rather they were conceived as autonomous entities regulated by some internal laws which could be fully explored and grasped by human reason and inquiry. It was such naturalization of cosmos and of man that constituted the central turning point from the pre-modern to the modern cosmological and ontological visions and conceptions. The exploration of natural laws became one of the major foci of the new tradition. At the same time it was more and more assumed in this new cultural program that exploration of these laws would lead to the unraveling of the mysteries of the universes and of human destiny. Such exploration was not purely passive or contemplative. Rather, a very strong assumption of this modern cultural vision, or at least of large parts thereof, was that through such exploration not only the understanding, but even the mastery of the universe and of human destiny, and a concomitant continuous expansion of human environment, could be attained by the conscious effort of man. 22

Toulmin (1990); Blumenberg (1987).


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The exploration of nature and the search for potential mastery over it also tended, at least in some versions of this new tradition— especially among some thinkers of the Enlightenment—, to extend beyond technical and scientific spheres into the social one. Such a view led almost naturally to the conception, rooted in the belief of the relevance of information and knowledge to the management of the affairs of society and to the construction of the socio-political order that the exploration and investigation of human nature and of society could become connected with the attempts at application of knowledge acquired in such inquiries to the social sphere proper. Concomitantly, central to this cultural program was the emphasis on the growing autonomy of man; his or hers (in this program certainly ‘his’) emancipation from the fetters of traditional political and cultural authority and the continuous expansion of the realm of personal and institutional freedom and activity, and of human ones. Such autonomy entailed several dimensions—first, reflexivity and exploration; and, second, active construction, mastery of nature, possibly including human nature and of society. Out of the conjunctions of these different conceptions there developed within this modern cultural program the belief in the possibility of active formation by conscious human activity and possibly also critical reflections of central aspects of social, cultural and even natural orders. VI The program and civilization of modernity as it developed first in Western Europe and then in the Americas was from its very beginning—as was the case with any great cultural vision—beset by internal antinomies and contradictions, giving rise to continual critical discourse which focused on the relations, tensions and contradictions between its premises and between these premises and the institutional developments in modern societies. These tensions and antinomies constituted a transformation of those inherent in Axial civilizations which we analyzed above—namely, first, those focused around the awareness of a great range of possibilities of transcendental visions and of the range of ways of their possible implementation; second, around the tension between reason and revelation or faith (or their equivalents in the non-monotheistic

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Axial civilizations); and third, around the problematique of the desirability of attempts at full institutionalization of these visions in their pristine form. These antinomies become transformed in the cultural program of modernity into, first, that between different evaluations of major dimensions of human experience; second, that between on the one hand reflexivity and autonomy, and on the other active construction of nature and society; third, between control and autonomy, between discipline and freedom; and, fourth, that between totalizing and pluralistic conceptions of the major components of this program, especially of the very conception of reason and its place in human life and society, above all as they bear on the construction of nature and society. Of special importance in the context of the relative importance or primacy of different dimensions of human existence has been the evaluation of the predominance of reason as against the emotional and aesthetic dimension of human existence, often equated with various vital forces, as well as with so-called primordial components in the construction of collective identities. In the context of the tension between different conceptions of human autonomy and of its relation to the constitution of society and of nature—often in a technocratic engineering way—that was that between on the one hand reflexivity and critical exploration of man, society and nature and of human activity and society. The emphasis on active construction of society and mastery of nature could become closely connected with the tendency, inherent in cognitive instrumental conceptions, to emphasize the radical dichotomy between ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ and between man and nature—reinforcing that radical criticism of them which claimed the cultural program of modernity necessarily entailed an alienation of man from nature and from society. The central focus of the dichotomy between totalizing and pluralistic visions has been that between the view which accepted the distinctiveness of different values and rationalities as against the view which conflated the such different values and above all different rationalities in a totalistic way. This tension developed first of all with respect to the very conception of reason and its place in the constitution of human society. It was manifest for instance, as Stephen Toulmin has shown, even if in a rather overstated way, in the difference between the more pluralistic conceptions of Montaigne or Erasmus as against the totalizing vision of reason promulgated by


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Descartes. Such totalizing visions usually entailed the conflations of different rationalities has been that which attempted to subsume value-rationality (Wertrationalität) or substantive rationality under instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität). Such conflation of substantive and of instrumental rationality was often identified as the major message of the Enlightenment, as epitomizing the sovereignty of reason, of science. Such conscious totalistic effort could develop in two—sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting—directions. One has been the technocratic direction, based on the assumption that those in the know, those who mastered the secrets and arcanae of nature and of man, of human nature, could devise the appropriate institutional arrangements for the implementation of human good, of the good society. The second such direction promulgated attempts to reconstruct society usually in a very totalistic way according to a cognitive—usually scientific moral or religious—vision. These two directions, the technocratic, scientistic and the more economical, could become fused, as was the case, for instance, in the Communist ideology. Concomitant tension developed between totalizing visions as against more pluralistic tendencies with respect to the construction and possible absolutization of other dimensions of human experience—especially the emotional ones. Closely related were tensions between different conceptions of the bases of human morality, especially whether such morality can be based on or grounded in universal principles based, above all, on reason, on instrumental rationality or on multiple rationalities as well as in multiple concrete experiences of different human communities. The tension between totalizing and pluralistic conceptions of human existence and social life developed also with respect to the conception of the course of human history—of its being constructed, especially by some overarching totalizing visions guided by reason or by the ‘spirit’ of different collectivities against the emphasis on multiplicity of such paths. The utopian eschatological conceptions inherent in the belief in the possibility of bridging the gaps or chasms between the transcendental and the mundane orders entailed also some very specific ideas of time, especially as related to the course of human history. Among the most important of these conceptions, many of which have been rooted in Christian eschatology, but constituted also far-reaching transformations thereof, was, first, a vision of historical progress and of history as the process through which

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the cultural program of modernity, especially individual autonomy and emancipation, would be implemented. Such progress was defined above all in terms of universalistic values of instrumental rationality, as of reason, science, and technology. This conception was closely related to a very strong tendency to conflate science and technology with ultimate values, to conflate Wertrationalität and Zweckrationalität, human emancipation with instrumental, even technical rationality. It had as well a strong evangelistic and chiliastic trend, which, together with its ‘this-worldly’ orientations, gave it the very strong impetus to expansion.23 As against such totalizing visions of history there developed different visions—perhaps best represented by Vico, and later by Herder24— of the existence of multiple paths of histories of different societies. This major opposite (romantic) tendency emphasized the autonomy of emotions and of the distinctiveness of primordial collectivities, but it shared with the new major program many of the strong utopian, semi-eschatological conceptions, even if certainly not the idea of progress.25 VII Cutting across these tensions or contradictions in the basic premises of the cultural program of modernity, there developed within it the continual—even if continually changing in their concrete manifestations—contradictions between the basic premises of the cultural and political programs of modernity and the major institutional developments in modern societies. Among these contradictions of special importance have been those so strongly emphasized by Weber, namely those between the creative dimension inherent in the visions which led to the crystallization of modernity, the visions of the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment and the Revolutions and the flattening of these visions, the ‘disenchantment’ of the world inherent in the growing routiniza-

23 Toulmin (1990); Outram (1995); Salomon (1963, 1955); Hulme and Jordanova (1990). 24 Lilla (1993, 1966); Berlin (1975: 118–172), (1976), (1980), (1991); Vico (1961); Herder (1969). 25 Toulmin (1990); Habermas (1987); Blumenberg (1987); Eisenstadt (1972); Taylor (1989 a, b).


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tion of these visions and above all in the growing bureaucratization of the modern world; and between an overreaching vision through which the modern world becomes meaningful and the fragmentation of such meaning generated by the growing autonomous development of the different institutional arenas—the economic, the political and the cultural. Closely related has been that between on the one hand the emphasis on human autonomy, the autonomy of man, of the human person and on the other hand the strong restrictive control dimensions, such as were analyzed—even if in an exaggerated manner—from different but complementary points of view by Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault,26 which were rooted in the institutionalization of this program according to the technocratic and/or moral visionary conceptions—or in other words, to follow Peter Wagner’s formulation between “freedom” and “control.”27 VIII Within the framework of this cultural program, there crystallized, above all in the Great Revolutions, the political program of modernity with its specific tensions and antinomies within it. This program entailed a radical transformation of the parameters and premises of the political order, of its legitimation, and of the conceptions of accountability of rulers; the basic orientations to tradition and to authority; as well as the basic characteristics of centers and of centerperiphery relations. This political program of modernity combined orientations of rebellion, protest, and intellectual anti-nomianism, together with strong orientations to center-formation and institution building. The central foci of the transformations of the conceptions of political order that crystallized in the political program of modernity were the construction of the political arena and center as a distinct autonomous ontological entity; the emphasis on the construction of this arena by human agency; the breakdown of traditional legitimization of the social and political role and the opening up of different possibilities of legitimation. 26 27

See note 20. Wagner (1994).

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The construction of the political arena by human agency was characterized by two complementary but also potentially contradictory tendencies. The first such tendency, as it crystallized above all in the Great Revolutions, gave rise, perhaps for the first time in the history of humanity, to the belief in the possibility of bridging the gap between the transcendental and mundane orders, or realizing in the mundane orders, in social life, some of the utopian, eschatological visions—through conscious human actions. The second such tendency—also novel, in its extreme formulation, in human history, rooted in the Renaissance and certain groups of the Enlightenment28— was in the growing recognition of legitimacy of autonomous individuals’ goals and the legitimacy of private and multiple individual interests and multiple interpretations of the common good. The recognition of such legitimacy of multiple interest constituted a far-reaching transformation of that view of such interests in new Axial civilizations in which they were conceived as related to or rooted in the lower, base human impulses. In the modern cultural and political discourse these impulses tended to become fully legitimized as rooted in the basic human rights and as dimensions of human emancipation. This transformation was also connected with a parallel one in the conception of social contract. Rather of such contract being seen as rooted in or necessitated by these lower aspects of human nature in the modern discourse, it was conceived as possibly the very basis of society, as constitutive of society, of the social order.29 IX Out of these conceptions of political order that crystallized in the political program of modernity—i.e. out of the combination of the construction of the political arena and center as a distinct autonomous ontological entity; the emphasis on the construction of this arena by human agency; the breakdown of traditional legitimization of the social and political role—there took place far-reaching transformations in the symbolism and structure of modern political centers as compared with their predecessors in Europe or with the centers of

28

Toulmin (1990). Shklar (1987); Skinner (1981, 1991); Pocock (1957, 1975, 1985); Fontana (1994); Dunn (1984, 1978). 29


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other civilizations. The crux of this transformation was, first, the development of a strong tendency to charismatization of the center and the major collectivities as the bearers of the transcendental vision promulgated by the cultural program of modernity. Second was the development of continual tendencies to permeation of the peripheries by the centers and of the impingement of the peripheries on the centers, of the concomitant blurring of the distinctions between center and periphery; and third was the combination of such charismatization with the incorporation of themes and symbols of protest which were central components of the transcendental vision, which had promulgated the autonomy of man and of reason, as basic and legitimate components of the premises of these centers. Themes and symbols of protest became central components of the modern project of human emancipation—a project which sought to combine equality and freedom, justice and autonomy, solidarity and identity of modern political discourse and practice. It was indeed the incorporation of such themes of protest within the center which heralded the radical transformation of various sectarian utopian visions into central components of the political and cultural program. X The transformation of the basic premises and legitimation of the social and political order became interwoven with a parallel transformation and institutionalization of the ideology of sovereignty, of citizenship and of representative institutions, and of accountability of rulers. The radical transformation of the basic concepts of sovereignty which took place above all in the Great Revolutions, was the transfer of the locus of sovereignty to ‘the people,’ giving rise to the concepts of popular sovereignty. Concomitantly, ‘citizenship’ was formed from an acclamatory or ratifying act into a participatory one and a concomitant transformation of representation from a virtual into an actual one.30 All these changes constituted a far-reaching transformation of the perception of the definition of the accountability of rulers to the

30

Koenigsberger (1979); Walzer (1974); Rosanvallon (1992); Wood (1992, 1966).

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community, to the citizens—the crux of which was the full institutionalization of such accountability in specific mundane ‘routine’ especially the representative and juridical political institutions rather than, as in the pre-modern Axial civilizations in ad hoc outbursts in charismatic individuals or in extra-political institutions, such as the Church— all of which claimed to be the authentic carrier of the Higher Law. Later on, this conception became transformed into the basic constitutional democratic premise according to which rulers are continuously elected, and in this way presumably continuously responsible to the people, or at least to the electorate. Out of the combination of the transformation of the conceptions and practice of accountability of rulers, of the incorporation of symbols and demands of protest into the central symbolic repertoire of society, and of the recognition of the legitimacy of multiple interests, the continuous restructuring of center-periphery relations has become the central focus of political process and dynamics in modern societies. The tendency to such continuous reconstruction of centerperiphery relations was most fully manifest in the continual developments of social movements, movements of protest which were activated above all by various political activists and intellectuals. The continual processes of structural change and dislocation which continually took place in modern societies as a result of economic changes, urbanization, changes in the process of communication, of the development of capitalism and of the new political formations have led in modern societies not only to the pursuit by different groups of various concrete grievances and demands, but also to a growing quest for participation in the broader social and political order and in the central arenas thereof. This quest of the periphery or peripheries for participation in the social, political, and cultural orders, for the incorporation of various themes of protest into the center, and for the concomitant possible transformation of the center, was guided both by the various utopian visions referred to above and promulgated above all by the major social movements that developed as an inherent component of the modern political process, as well as by the continuous claims to the legitimacy of individual and group interests, and interpretation of the common good, of the general will, of the volonté générale.


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XI This program entailed also a very distinctive mode of the construction of the boundaries of collectivities and collective identities. The most important dimensions of such construction was, first, the crystallization of secular definitions, in highly ideological terms, of the major components of collective identity—the civil, primordial and universalistic and transcendental sacred ones, and of the strong tendency to their absolutization in ideological terms; second, the growing importance of the civil components thereof; third, the development of a continual tension between such different components; fourth, the promulgation of a very strong emphasis on territorial boundaries as the main loci of the institutionalization of collective identity; and, fifth, the promulgation of a very strong connection between the construction of political boundaries and those of the cultural collectivities, and a continual tension between the territorial and/or particularistic collectivities and broader, potentially universalistic frameworks.31 XII

Jacobin Components in the Political Discourse and Dynamics of Modernity

Within the framework of these basic premises of the modern political program, there developed some distinct tension focused around the interpretation of the self-constitution of society and of the political order and in a consciously reflexive way which were closely related to the more general tensions inherent in the cultural program of modernity. The first such tension was that between a constructivist approach which views politics as the process of active reconstruction of society and especially of democratic politics, to follow Claude Lefort or Johann Arnason’s formulations, as active self-construction of society as opposed to a view that emphasizes the continual construction of society in its concrete composition. The second such tension, closely related to the first one and also rooted in the overall cultural programs of modernity and in the modern transformation of the basic antinomies inherent in the Axial

31

Eisenstadt (1998); Eisenstadt and Giesen (1995); Shils (1975).

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civilizations, was that between on the one hand an overall totalizing, usually utopian and/or communal visions, and on the other hand principled pluralistic views. The totalistic views usually entailed a strong constructivist approach, frequently rooted in a strong belief in the possibility of bridging the gap between the transcendental and mundane orders. As in the broader cultural program of modernity such totalistic vision could be technocratic, ‘engineering’ or of a moral ‘cognitive’ or religious ones. This orientation was in constant tension with the recognition of the legitimacy of multiple interests and of multiple conceptions of common good. Such recognition did not necessarily negate a constructivist approach to politics, but entailed the acceptance of multiple patterns of life, of interest, of traditions, and conceptions of good social order that would develop within it; the recognition and acceptance of society in its continually changing composition in the mundane orders and in social life.32 XIII The central focus of these tensions in the realm of political discourse of modernity was that between on the one hand the acceptance of the legitimacy of plurality of discrete individual and group interests, and of different conceptions of the common will, of the freedom to pursue such interests and conceptions, and, on the other hand, of totalizing orientations which denied the legitimacy of private interests and of different conceptions of the common good and which emphasized the totalistic reconstruction of society through political actions. The mirror image of these pluralistic visions, of the different conceptions of the legitimacy of multiple private individual or group interests, and of different conceptions of the common good, were various collectivistic orientations or ideologies which espoused the primacy of collectivity and/or of collectivistic visions. Two broad types of collectivistic orientations or ideologies were rooted in the revolutionary ideologies central in the continual cultural and especially political discourse of modernity. 32 Lefort (1988); Arnason (1990); Dryzek (1996); Dunn (1996); Hobsbawm (1994); Lübbe (1991); For a general view see Hobsbawm (1964).


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One was some form of ideology emphasizing the primacy of a collectivity based on common primordial and/or spiritual attributes of—above all, but not only—national collectivity. The bearers of such totalistic views tended to emphasize strongly the human-individual and/or collective will as against the emphasis on reason and on the legitimacy of utilitarian goals; and the primacy of the aesthetic, emotional dimension of human existence, very often promulgated in primordial tendencies. The other form of such modern collectivistic orientation, rooted in the revolutionary ideology, was the Jacobin one. The essence of such Jacobin orientations was the belief in the possibility of transforming society through totalistic political action. It was these orientations, the historical roots of which go back to medieval eschatological sources, developed fully in conjunction with the political program of modernity that epitomized the modern transformation of the sectarian attitudes to the antinomies of the Axial civilizations. It was this orientation that had its roots in the heterodox-religious orientations as they became transformed in the Great Revolutions. The Jacobin components of the modern political program have been manifest in a very strong emphasis on social and cultural activism, on the ability of man to reconstruct society according to some transcendental visions, with the closely connected very strong tendency to the absolutization of the major dimensions of human experience as well as of the major constituents or components of social order and with the concomitant ideologization of politics. Such Jacobin orientations tended to emphasize the belief in the primacy of politics and in the ability of politics to reconstitute society. The pristine Jacobin orientations and movements have been characterized by a strong predisposition to develop not only a totalistic world view, but also overarching all-encompassing ideologies with strong totalitarian orientations, which emphasize a total reconstitution of the social and political order, and which espouse a strong— even if not always universalistic—missionary zeal. These orientations have become visible above all in the attempts to reconstruct the centers of their respective societies; in the almost total conflation of center and periphery, negating the existence of intermediary institutions and association—of what can sometimes be called civil society, conflating civil society with the overall community. The homogenizing tendencies promulgated by most modern nation-states, especially those

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which crystallized after the Revolutions, were strongly imbued by such Jacobin orientations. The Jacobin component did also appear in different concrete guises and in different combinations with other political ideological components. The Jacobin orientations in their pristine modern form or versions developed in the various ‘leftist’ revolutionary movements which often conflated the primacy of politics with the implementation of progress and reason. Thus indeed, as Norberto Bobbio has very often emphasized in his works,33 the Jacobin component has been present in socialist, nationalistic, and fascist movements; these orientations could become closely interwoven, as it was in many fascist and National-Socialist movements, with the emphasis on the primacy of primordial communities. The Jacobin components constitute also very strong components of many populist movements.34 It could also become closely interwoven, as in the fundamentalist movements, with the upholding of the primacy of religious authority. This component could also become manifest in more diffuse ways, as for instance in the intellectual pilgrimage to other societies, in attempts to find there the full flowering of the utopian revolutionary ideal,35 and in many totalistic attitudes which flourish in different social movements and in popular culture. XIV The tension between the totalistic and pluralistic conception of the political was also manifest in the construction of collective identities— in the tensions between emphasis on the relative importance of the basic components thereof—the primordial, civil and universalistic ones; and above all between the tendencies to absolutization of such dimensions as against a more open or multifaceted approach to such construction between the closely related tendencies to homogenization of social and cultural spaces and construction of more multiple spaces allowing for heterogeneous identities.36 33

Bobbio (1984, 1990a); Matteucci (1983). On the Jacobin elements in modern polities see Cochin (1924, 1979); Baechler (1979); Furet (1982); Talmon (1960). See also Salvadori and Tranfaglia (1984); Fränkel (1990: 68–137). A very strong statement against the emphasis on “common will” in the name of “emancipation” can be found in Lübbe (1994). 35 Eisenstadt (1988). 36 Eisenstadt (1998); Eisenstadt and Giesen (1995). 34


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XV It is these different conceptions of the relation between the individual and the social order, of the different modes of legitimation of modern political regimes, that generated some of the basic tensions in modern political discourse and its dynamics. It was within the basic framework of the political discourse of modernity that the concrete tensions in the political programs of modernity developed— namely those between liberty and equality, between emphasis on a vision of the good social order and the narrow interests of different sectors of the society, between the conception of the individual as an autonomous sovereign and emphasis on the community, between the utopian and the ‘rational’ or ‘procedural’ components of this program; and the closely related tensions between ‘revolutionary’ and ‘normal’ politics, and between different bases of legitimation of these regimes. In the political program of modernity, these tensions and antinomies coalesced above all in the form, to follow Lübbe’s terminology, between “freedom” and “emancipation” which to some extent coincides also with Berlin’s distinction between “negative” and “positive freedom.”37 These various tensions in the political program of modernity were closely related to those between the different modes of legitimation of modern regimes, especially but not only of constitutional and democratic polities—namely between, on the one hand, procedural legitimation in terms of civil adherence to rules of the game and on the other hand in different substantive terms; and on the other hand a very strong tendency to promulgate other modes or bases of legitimation—above all, to follow Shils’ terminology, various “primordial,” “sacred”—religious or secular—ideological components.38 XVI It was the tension between the totalizing, especially the Jacobin, and the pluralistic orientations that constituted the most radical transformation of the antinomies inherent in the Axial Civilizations as they became most fully articulated in the Great Revolutions. 37 38

Berlin (1975); Lübbe (1991). Shils (1975).

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The Great Revolutions constituted the culmination of the sectarian, heterodox, potentialities which developed in the Axial civilizations—especially in those in which the political arena was seen as, at least, one of the arenas of implementation of their transcendental vision. Such transformation entailed the turning upside down— even if ultimately in secular terms—of the hegemony of Augustinian vision, which promulgated the separation of the City of God from the City of Man and the concomitant attempt to implement the heterodox visions, and of the sectarian visions often imbued with strong Gnostic elements which wanted to bring the City of God to the City of Man. Thus, as indicated above, the Great Revolutions can indeed be seen as the first or at least the most dramatic, and possibly the most successful, attempt in the history of mankind to implement on a macro-societal scale utopian visions with strong Gnostic components. As can be concluded, Eric Voegelin’s ideas about the Gnostic roots of Western modernity39 hinted at a crucial point. Since, the search for the ways in which the concrete social order could become the embodiment of an ideal order became a central component of the modern political discourse and tradition, and it was closely connected with the charismatization of the center as the area in which such visions can and should be implemented, a process which fully crystallized in the Great Revolutions. But at the same time there developed in all these revolutions also the strong emphasis of rights of individual, of citizens which potentially at least entailed the acceptance of the possibility of multiple views about matters political and social, and of the legitimation of multiple patterns of life and interests.40 It was indeed already in the Great Revolutions and later in the various modern post-revolutionary constitutional, alter democratic, regimes that the contradiction between on the one side the emphasis on an encompassing revolutionary or technocratic vision and, on the other side, the acceptance of the possibility of multiple view about matters political and social, and of the legitimation of multiple patterns of life and interests, became fully visible in the Great Revolutions. In the English Civil War (possibly already earlier in the Revolt of the Netherlands) the revolutionary vision was couched in religious eschatological terms which were very closely interwoven with legal 39 40

Voegelin (1952, 1975, 1994, 1996); LeGoff (1968); Heer (1968). Bobbio (1984, 1990 a, b).


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and constitutional dimensions. In the American Revolution the constitutional component itself became predominant, but it was deeply rooted in religious orientations.41 It was above all in the French Revolution that the fully secular transformation of the sectarian antinomian orientation with strong Gnostic components took place.42 This transformation was epitomized in the Jacobin orientations which became a central component of the modern political program—to reappear yet again forcefully, as Raymond Aron has shown in an incisive article, in Lenin and in the Russian Revolution, and later in the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions.43 In the former societies, in post-revolutionary regimes that crystallized after the Great Revolutions in Europe and in the U.S., it was the constitutional republican option and the recognition of the legitimacy of multiple interests developed—as against the monolithic totalistic and exclusive visions inherent in the revolutionary origins—that won the day. But in all these societies the Jacobin component, with its sectarianutopian roots, constituted a continual component of modernity of modern political dynamics. Whatever the concrete manifestations of the various collectivist, especially Jacobin visions and ideologies, they constituted a continual component of the modern discourse, of the discourse of modernity. It is indeed the continual confrontation between this component and orientation and the more pluralistic orientations, as well as between different Jacobin ideologies that constitute one of the central core of the discourse of modernity. The challenge of the contradiction between an encompassing, totalistic, potentially totalitarian vision, primordial collectivity, and/or a commitment to the pluralistic premises constituted an inherent element of these constitutional regimes and a basic component of the political dynamics of the modern era. None of the modern constitutional and/or liberal democracies has entirely done away—or can even possibly do away—with either Jacobin component, especially with its utopian dimension, the orientation to some primordial components of collective identity, or with the claims for the centrality of religion in the construction of collective identities or in the legitimization of 41 42 43

Hill (1997); Goldstone (1983, 1991); Feher (1989); Wood (1992). Furet (1970, 1981). Aron (1993).

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the political order. All of these components were inherent in the “Axial” religious roots of the cultural and political program of modernity in which they became transformed. XVII The preceding analysis indicates that the cultural and political program of modernity as it crystallized in Europe can be seen as a sectarian heterodox breakthrough in the Christian Axial civilization as it crystallized in Europe. All these processes attesting to the strong religious sectarian roots of modernity and especially of the tensions between totalistic Jacobin and pluralistic orientations developed initially in Europe, but, once they crystallized and became institutionalized in the political program of modernity, they could, with the expansion of Europe and of modernity, find very strong resonance in the utopian sectarian traditions of the Axial civilizations. In all these civilizations these processes gave rise to different multiple programs of modernity—in all of which the tensions between pluralistic and totalistic tendencies constituted a continual component. It is also the religious roots of the modern political program that explains the specific modern characteristics of what may be seen as the most anti-modern contemporary movements—namely the various fundamentalist movements which, contrary to the view which defines them as traditional, are really modern Jacobin movements which construct tradition as a modern, totalistic ideology. References Arnason, Johann P. (1990). “The Theory of Modernity and the Problematic of Democracy.” In: Thesis Eleven 26: 20–46. Aron, Raymond (1993). “Remarques sur la gnose leniniste.” In: Aron, Raymond. Machiavel et les tyrannies modernes. Paris: Éditions de Fallois. 405–420. Baechler, Jean (1979). “Preface.” In: Cochin, Auguste. L’esprit du Jacobinisme. Paris: Universitaires de France. 7–33. Berlin, Isaiah (1975). “Two Concepts of Liberty.” In: Berlin, Isaiah. Four Essays on Liberty. London: Oxford University Press. 118–172. ——. (1976). Vico and Herder. New York, NY: Hogarth Press. ——. (1980). Against the Current. New York, NY: Hogarth Press. ——. (1991). The Crooked Timber of Humanity. New York, NY: J. Murray. Bobbio, Norberto (1984). Il Futuro della Democrazia. Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore.


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POLITICAL THEOLOGY: RELIGION AS LEGITIMIZING FICTION IN ANTIQUE AND EARLY MODERN CRITIQUE Jan Assmann In Greek texts of the fifth and fourth centuries we encounter the idea that religion, the belief in gods and their worship, is a human invention in the service of political power and social control. The earliest and most radical text, known under the designation of “the fragment of Critias” is an excerpt from a satirical play believed to be by Critias but now more convincingly attributed to Euripides.1 It is a speech put into the blasphemous mouth of Sisyphos, saying that the fear of the gods is nothing but the invention of a shrewd, intelligent and thoughtful man, meant to intimidate the wicked and keep them from committing evil in thought, word or deed. The problem is ‘the evil’ which is undiscovered and undiscoverable, committed in concealment and seclusion beyond the reach of public control. Starting from this calculation, he introduced the belief in gods. The idea of omniscient deities should persuade humans to keep the laws, even where no witnesses were present. This can be read, both, as a critique of and an apology for religion. Religion is a fiction, but a legitimate fiction, because without religion there would be no law and social order; the weak would not be sheltered from the greed of the strong and crime would multiply without proportion. Any form of civil society requires the belief in god(s). A similar argument is used by Polybios in a fully positive sense. This author ascribes the success of Rome to the absolutely dominant position which the Romans gave religion within the structure of their state. “The greatest advantage of the Roman republic”, he writes, “seems to me to lie in the belief in gods ( peri theon dialepsei ).”2 The Romans, he continues, granted this position to religion “for the sake of the masses” (dia plethous charin), a statement which seems to anticipate Marx’s famous diction “Opium of the people.” 1 2

Dihle (1977). The following quotations are taken from Siculus (1969: 56.6–12).

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For this reason, Polybios continues, “the ancients seem to me to have deliberately inspired the masses with the ideas about the gods ( peri theon ennoias) and the belief in the netherworld.” Moreover, they had created tragedy as a medium to arouse visions of horror and anxiety in the masses in order to discipline them: “The masses are careless and full of illegal desires. The only means to restrain them is by vague fears (adelois phobois) and by such a spectacle (tragodia).” Polybios recognizes religion as a fiction, it is true, but as a great civilizing achievement and the foundation of social order, peace and harmony: thus, a “legitimate fiction.” According to Polybios, it would be extremely unreasonable to cure the masses of these imaginations. Still, Polybios, unlike Critias or Euripides, distinguishes between ‘religion’ and ‘popular beliefs.’ He does not say that the gods are fictitious, but that mass religion rests on fictitious concepts and imaginations. Mass religion is fictitious because it fulfils a political function. The political function of religion both legitimizes and criticizes. It legitimizes religion because it argues that the belief in gods is indispensable for political order and social harmony, and it criticizes it by exposing its fictitious character. Cicero, in De Natura Deorum, stresses the critical character of this argument, postulating that by representing the belief in gods in its totality as an invention of smart politicians, religion altogether is destroyed.3 In Roman history, Numa Pompilius was held to be a model of such a smart politician. He appears in Roman tradition almost as a clone of Moses. Numa was said to have referred to the nymph Egeria as the source of his legislation just as Moses referred to Jahveh. Like Moses, Numa codified these laws in a book. Unlike Moses, however, he took this book along in his tomb instead of leaving it to posterity, thereby protecting it from later manipulation. In Roman tradition, Numa appears as a wise ruler and not as a religious impostor. He acquired this negative attribute only in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The notorious pamphlet De Tribus Impostoribus exposing Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed as the prototypes of religious invention for political purposes quotes Numa as the most important pagan parallel, dedicating a whole chapter to him.4 3 “Quid i, qui dixerunt totam de dis immortalibus opinionam fictam esse ab hominibus sapientibus rei publicae causa, ut, quos ratio non posset, eos religio ad officium duceret, nonne omnem religionem funditus sustulerunt?” (Cicero 1995: 106). 4 Schröder (1992: 72).

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An equally ambivalent statement is provided by Diodorus Siculus in a passage concerning the six great legislators of humanity. Diodorus intends for his account to be a demonstration of wise statesmanship without any critical, let alone denunciating, tendencies. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, however, this passage became the most influential argument for exposing religion’s fictitious character and political function. Moreover, it is the only quotation within the pagan critique of religion that explicitly mentions Moses. The first of these legislators, whom Diodorus calls Mnevis or Menas or Menes, is said to have stated that Hermes gave him these laws. In the same manner, Minos among the Cretes referred to Zeus, Lycurgus among the Spartans to Apollon, Zoroaster among the ‘Arians’ (arianoi = Persians) to Agathos Daimon (= Ahura Mazda), Zalmoxis among the Getans to Hestia and Moses among the Jews to Iao (= Yahveh).5 Again, Diodorus or his informant, perhaps Hecataeus of Abdera, does not aim at a critique of religion, but he rather describes this strategy, the framing of legislation by political theology, as a highly successful and fully legitimate device for the foundation of states and larger communities. In the fifteenth century, this passage provided the model for Marsilio Ficino’s concept of ‘theologia prisca.’ Ficino interpreted the notions of legislation and the founding of states in the sense of theology and the founding of religions and replaced the great legislators with his concept of the ancient “sages:” Hermes Trismegist, Zoroaster, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras etc., who conveyed to humanity both religion and the rules of social order and civilized life. Even in the first half of the seventeenth century, Gabriel Naudé (1600–1652) in his famous Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État could still quote and even enlarge Diodorus’ argument in a totally neutral, uncritical sense: Tous les anciens Législateurs voulant autoriser, affermir & bien fonder les Loix qu’ils donnoient à leurs peuples, n’ont point eû de meilleur moïen de le faire, qu’en publiant & faisant croire [. . .] qu’ils les avoient reçûës de quelque Divinité: Zoroastre, d’Oromasis, Trismegiste de Mercure, Zalmoxis de Vesta, Charondas de Saturne, Minos de Jupiter, Lycurgue d’Apollon, Drago & Solon de Minerve, Numa de la nymphe Egerie, Mahomet de l’Ange Gabriel; & Moise, qui a été le plus sage

5

Siculus (1956–1957: 94.1–2).

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It was only in the latter part of the seventeenth century that some ‘free thinkers’ discovered the critical potential in this tradition. Political theology came to be seen not only as the instrumentalization, but also as the invention of religion for political purposes. Arguing that religion served a function in the civilization of mankind and the build-up of political communities inevitably implied the critique that it is nothing but a function of politics, a fraudulent invention. The seventeenth chapter of the French Traité des Trois Imposteurs starts with this quote from Naudé and turns it into a devastating critique of religion, or, to be more precise, of ‘revealed religion’—that is, of monotheism.7 The French pamphlet bears the name of Spinoza in its subtitle: Traité des Trois Imposteurs ou l’lesprit de Monsieur de Spinosa. It is obvious that the publication of Spinoza’s Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus (1670) marks the turning point in the reception of Diodorus and the tradition about the six legislators. It is thus not inadequate to subsume the whole debate on the political instrumentalization or invention of religion under the term ‘Political theology.’ From Spinoza to Bakunin, political theology is a polemical term, denouncing theology or religion as the handmaid of politics. Among the most interesting contributions to the debate about political theology are John Toland’s Adeisidaemon, dealing with Numa Pompilius and with Cicero’s summary of the Greek critique of religion,8 and Origines Judaicae, published together in 1709, dealing with Moses and taking Diodorus’ passage on the six lawgivers as its starting point. In this booklet, Toland opposes the Biblical Moses, who followed the general principle in “inventing” ( finxisse) a deity as the author of his legislation, with Moses of Strabon (Moses Strabonicus), who, conversely, rejected the principle or strategy of political theology in radical fashion.9 According to Strabo, an Egyptian priest named Moses, who felt dissatisfied with Egyptian religion, decided to found a new religion, and emigrated with his followers to Palestine. He rejected the Egyptian tradition of representing the gods in zoomorphic images. His reli6 7 8 9

Naudé (1988: 118 pp.). Berti (1994: 198); Schröder (1992). Toland (1709). See Assmann (1998: 134 pp.).

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gion consisted of the recognition of only ‘One Divine Being’ whom no image could represent: “which encompasses us all, including earth and sea, that which we call the heavens, the world and the essence of things—this one thing only is God.” The only way to approach this god is to live by natural law, in virtue and in justice. Later on, the Hebrews deviated from the purity of this doctrine and developed superstitious habits, such as dietary prohibitions, circumcision and various other laws. Toland constructs the opposition between Egyptian traditional religion, with which Moses is said to have been dissatisfied, and the new religion instituted by Moses, in terms of political versus natural religion. He supplies the reasons for Moses’ dissatisfaction by drawing on another passage in Diodorus, saying that each nome or province had its own deity ever since a certain, very sagely, prince (“sapientissimus quidam princeps”) came to stabilize the concord of the kingdom by introducing a pluralistic and polytheistic religion (“variam & miscellam induxit religionem”), and thereby to prevent a conspiracy among the Egyptians. Polytheism, according to Diodorus and Toland, has a political purpose. It stresses the political divisions and sub-identities by instituting tutelary deities, thus preventing unification and the formation of one political will, which this over-sage ruler seems to have feared as potentially rebellious. Strabon’s Moses, in turn, was a deist and an iconoclast. He held God to be “Nature, or matter, mechanically arranged and acting without conscience and intelligence” (“Naturam, vel mundi materiam mechanice dispositam et absque ullam consia intelligentiam agentem”) and was a fierce enemy of idolatry. Even the Bible shows that he did not make any mention of the immortality of the soul nor of a future state of reward or punishment. The name by which he called his god means just “necessariam solummodo existentiam,” necessary existence or “what exists by himself ” (“quod per se existit”), in the same sense that the Greek “to on” denotes the incorruptible, eternal, and interminable world. Toland obviously thinks of Ex. 3:14 where God presented himself to Moses: “I am that I am,” or, in the version of the LXX: “ego eimi ho on” = “I am the Being one” or simply “I am Being.” Moses was not an atheist, but a pantheist, or, to speak in conformity with more recent usage, a Spinozist. Toland explains what Strabon describes as a later depravation of Moses’ religion, with its innumerable commandments and prohibitions, by quoting a passage from Ezekiel: “But I shall give them

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statutes that are not good and laws by which they cannot live,” (“Ego etiam dederam ipsis statuta non bona et Jura per quae non vivere possent”).10 In this way, religion turned into ‘superstition.’ The same distinction between religion and superstition occurs also in Toland’s other pamphlet, Adeisidaemon. Here, ‘religion of reason’ is viewed as the only valid religion. Superstition is denounced a pseudoreligion, unable to withstand the criteria of reason, and invented by humans only for the purpose of supporting the political order in the sense of political theology. Political theology is a phenomenon of degeneration and the hallmark of ‘false religion.’ Even more orthodox authors such as Alexander Ross availed themselves of this same argument. For them, political theology is the hallmark of pagan religion. In his book Pansebeia Ross writes: “All false Religions are grounded upon Policy,” that is, “humane Policy to keep people in obedience and awe of their superiours”.11 Similarly, the most important and influential treatment of questions concerning revelation and political theology, Bishop Warburton’s The Divine Legation of Moses, has to be seen within this tradition.12 Warburton, however, is more of a classical scholar than a theologian. He agrees with Ross that polytheism or paganism is political theology and a human fiction, but he follows the antique tradition in taking these inventions as indispensable and therefore legitimate fictions without which all political and social order would collapse. Warburton gives two explanations for the political function of polytheism, one based on Critias and the other on Strabo. Polytheism, as political theology, fulfils two functions: first, the function of founding public morals and obedience to the laws, and, secondly, the function of mirroring and expressing on the divine plane the various distinctions and identities that make up the political and social world—the distinctions between nations, provinces and cities, and between classes, tribes and professional groups. Both functions cooperate to keep the subjects under control. Therefore, every society aiming at social order and political power must of necessity form a pantheon of tutelary deities,

10 Ez. 20, 25. Toland deploys several other passages from the prophets rejecting cult on behalf of “nature” (on behalf of justice, to be precise, but this distinction seems to be immaterial in Toland’s context). 11 The quotations are taken from the second edition, which was published in 1653 (Schröder 1998: 228). 12 Warburton (1778); Assmann (1998: 138–170).

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by elevating important legislators, heroes and kings to the ranks of gods, and ascribing to them supervisory functions of the laws and personifications of political and social identities. But Warburton also takes the pagan gods to be a necessary, indispensable, and legitimate fiction, without which civil society could not last. Both, polytheism and idolatry, originate from and correspond to a political necessity, and form the political theology of paganism.13 So far, we have encountered four different positions concerning the political function of religion. All four agree in declaring political theology or political religion as false or fictitious. They differ in what they conceive of as truth in opposition to political theology. The most radical position, which is also the earliest attested one, is the position of Sisyphos in Critias’ or Euripides’ play Sisyphos. He declares religion as such and in toto to be a political fiction, implying the truth to be atheism. Less radical is Polybios’ position, who speaks only of popular religion as a political fiction, implying that there is also a true or elite religion which is inaccessible to the masses. The position presented by the treatise De Tribus Impostoribus and also by the Spinozist Traité des trois imposteurs implies the opposition between revealed religion as false, because of its political function, and natural religion as true. The fourth position, for which we quoted Alexander Ross in the seventeenth and William Warburton in the eighteenth centuries, declares pagan religions to be false because they only serve political functions, and biblical religion to be true because it is based not on fiction but on revelation. Warburton, however, being a classical scholar, combines the position of Polybios with that of Alexander Ross. He reconstructs pagan religions as “double religions” displaying an exoteric and an esoteric side. The political function and the fictitious character concerns only the exoteric side of pagan religion. The esoteric side, the ‘mysteries,’ are free of any political instrumentalization. This is also the reason for their concealment. The mysteries do not legitimize or support the state at all, because they are about nature or natural theology and nature, accordingly, would not know of moral obligations and

13 It is important to realize that neither the atheist nor the deist critics of political theology and even those orthodox theologians who interpret political theology as the hallmark of paganism never put into doubt the necessity of theological fictions. Even the atheists, except extremists such as Knutzen and Meslier, do not plead for anarchy. See Schröder (1998: 228 pp.).

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political or social identities. But Warburton’s theory is even more complex because, besides being a classical scholar, friend of Alexander Pope and editor of Shakespeare’s works, he was also a bishop for the Anglican church; as such, he was constrained to reserve the highest place for revealed religion. This forced him to distinguish not only between false, i.e. political, and true, i.e. natural religion, but also between pagan and Christian religion. Pagan religion is not false but “double,” comprising an exoteric political and an esoteric natural religion, as opposed to biblical religion which, because it is based on revelation, is simple. Warburton’s monumental work, nine books in three volumes, met with a very widespread and vivid reception; though not for its orthodox superstructure, but rather because of its theory of double or ‘mysterious’ religion. It was read as demonstrating that every religion, including biblical monotheism, had the structure of a double religion: a state-supportive, legitimizing façade and an esoteric inside, the mysteries of nature. It thus became a basic text for freemasonry. In 1786 and 1787, Carl Leonhard Reinhold, a Jesuit, student of philosophy, freemason and illuminate, wrote a book on the “Hebrew Mysteries or the Oldest Religious Freemasonry”14 that was based on Warburton. This became a basic text not only for Masonic, but much wider circles of Deism, Enlightenment and philosophy, especially by mediation of Schiller, who condensed Reinhold’s arguments and demonstrations into a widely read essay Die Sendung Moses.15 Reinhold equates the concept of ‘nature’ as the supreme deity of natural religion with Isis, the goddess of the Egyptian mysteries, who, in the inscription on her “veiled image at Sais” presents herself with the words “I am all that is, was and will be. No mortal unlifted my veil.” This, according to Reinhold, is the deity in whose mysteries Moses was initiated when he was educated as a prince at the Pharaonic court. When Moses later returned to his native people, he wanted to acquaint his people with the deity of the mysteries, whose presentation he translated for them not as “I am all that is,” but as “I am Being.” This is how Reinhold interprets Ex 3:14, “eheyeh asher eheyeh” (“I am that I am”). However, because Moses wanted to include the whole people into the mysteries of nature, and because

14 15

A quote from Karl Leonhard Reinhold [1788]. See Assmann (2001). Schiller (1968: 737–757); Assmann (1998: 186–205); Hartwich (1997: 21–47).

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he could not possibly “initiate” them (an educational process taking many years and requiring only the strongest and most intelligent minds), he had to turn the mysteries of Isis into a public and political religion, based on blind belief and obedience, and to turn Isis, the sublime deity of the mysteries, into Yahveh, a national god. Thus biblical monotheism, because of its political function in supporting the Jewish nation and commonwealth, has to be classified among the false religions—its only element of truth, which Moses was able to rescue from the Egyptian mysteries, being the unity or oneness of God. Yet according to Schiller, Moses was not an impostor, but just an “accommodator.” According to Schiller “His enlightened mind and his sincere and noble heart” had revolted against the idea of giving his people a false and fabulous god. But the truth, the religion of reason and nature, was equally impossible to reveal. Eventually, the only solution was to proclaim the truth in a fabulous way and to endow the true god with some fictitious properties and qualities that the people would be able to grasp and to believe in.16 Thus, Moses couched his vision of truth in the illusionistic form of a national god and a national cult, including the whole ‘hieroglyphic’ symbolism of lustrations, sacrifices, processions, oracles, and so forth. With Schiller we approach the point where religion is defined as “Opium of the people” (Marx) and as an “illusion” (Freud). Through this transformation process, the topic of political theology finally reached Mikhail Aleksandrovitch Bakunin (1814–1876), the exponent of romanticist anarchy, who no longer concedes religion’s legitimacy and indispensability as political fiction. His motto is the inversion of Voltaire’s verse “Si dieu n’existait pas il faudrait l’inventer,” which proclaimed: “Si dieu existait il faudrait l’abolir” (“If God existed he should be abolished”). Up to Bakunin, almost all critics of religion, including Sisyphos in Euripides’ play, agreed that, without the fiction of god or gods, all moral, legal and political order would vanish. Bakunin, on the other hand, holds that religion 16 “Should he proclaim to them a false and fabulous god, against whom his reason revolts, whom he learned in the mysteries to detest? For this, his mind is too enlightened, his heart too noble and sincere. . . . How may these contradictions may reconciled? He cannot proclaim the true god to the Hebrews, because their mind is unable to grasp him; he does not want to give them a false god because he despises this adverse role. Nothing is left to him but to proclaim to them his true god in a fabulous way” (Assmann 2001: 756 pp., my translation).

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must be abolished because of its political theology. Political theology has now become an unequivocally polemical term, denouncing religion as a tool of oppression in the hands of the ruling classes. Religion can and must be disposed of, because humankind has the reason and the power of their own to establish institutions of decent society. It is in Bakunin’s writings that Carl Schmitt detected the term ‘political theology’ and redefined it in a positive sense. Schmitt does not share Bakunin’s positive anthropology. Instead, he falls back to the pessimistic anthropology of Christianity in general with its doctrine of original sin, and to the seventeenth century in particular and Hobbes’ ideas of the natural state as bellum omnium contra omnes. In the light of such a pessimistic view of man, not religion, but political order, the state, becomes indispensable. Again, the notion of indispensability acquires a religious aura. Political power is good, because it is indispensable, and this goodness or sacredness of power is expressed by St. Paul in the words that it is “of God.” Not “false religion is political,” but “true politics is theological;” summarizes Schmitt’s version of the debate on the relation between religion and politics. True politics is theological because it knows that its power comes from God. All the salient political concepts—this is Schmitt’s thesis—are secularized theological concepts. With Schmitt, political theology is still a polemic, but with the direction of the polemic radically changed—even inverted. It no longer implies a critique of religion, but a critique of politics. False politics is denounced by political theology as neglectful of its divine fundaments and origins. False politics bases itself on a positive anthropology, imagining that it could do without God. False politics—still according to Carl Schmitt—is the politics of secularism, individualism, democracy, and free-market economy, the politics of sovereign, autonomous, this-worldly man, believing himself able to negotiate the principles of truth, order and justice on a totally secular and rational basis. In a particular fashion, Schmitt is right to use the term “political theology” as a critique of politics; this corresponds to the original meaning of biblical monotheism. In the Books Exodus through Deuteronomy, monotheism is represented as a liberation movement, directed against pharaonic totalitarianism. In the confrontation between Egypt and Israel, Egypt stands for oppression, humiliation, and dehumanization, while Israel stands for the principles of decent society. The original meaning of biblical monotheism is deeply political and its theology is, above all, political theology, i.e. covenant theology.

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This is, however, not what Carl Schmitt had in mind. The sovereign state which Schmitt advocated corresponds more to ancient Egypt than to ancient Israel. References Assmann, Jan (1998). Moses der Ägypter. Entzifferung einer Gedächtnisspur. Munich: Hanser. ——. (ed.) (2001). Carl Leonhard Reinhold. Die Hebräischen Mysterien oder die älteste religiöse Freymaurerey. Neckargemünd: Mnemosyne. Berti, Silvia (1994). Trattato dei tre impostori. La vita e lo spirito del Signor Benedetto di Spinoza. Turin: Einaudi. Cicero, Marcus Tullius (1995). De natura deorum. Über das Wesen der Götter. Stuttgart: Reclam. Dihle, Albrecht (1977). “Das Satyrspiel ‚Sisyphos‘.” In: Hermes 105: 28–42. Hartwich, Wolf-Daniel (1997). Die Sendung Moses. Von der Aufklärung bis Thomas Mann. Munich: Fink. Naudé, Gabriel (1988). Considérations politiques sur les coups d’État. Paris: Les Éditions de Paris. Schiller, Friedrich (1968). “Die Sendung Moses.” In: Koopmann, Helmut (ed.). Sämtliche Werke IV: Historische Schriften. Munich: Winkler-Verlag. 737–757. Schröder, Winfried (1992). Traité des Trois imposteurs. Hamburg: Meiner. ——. (1998). Ursprünge des Atheismus. Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik—und Religionskritik des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Frommann-Holzboog. Siculus, Diodorus (1956–57). Bibliotheca Historica I. London: Oxford University Press. ——. (1969). Bibliotheca Historica VI. Lipsiae: Teubner. Toland, John (1709). Adeisidaemon, sive Titus Livius a superstitione vindicatus. Annexae sunt ejusdem Origines judaicae [sive, Strabonis, de Moyse et religione judaica historia, breviter illustrata]. The Hague: Thomam Johnson. Warburton, William [1738–1741] (1778). The divine legation of Moses demonstrated on the principles of a religious deist, from the omission of the doctrine of a future state of reward and punishment in the Jewish dispensation. 4 vols. London.

PART C

ASPECTS OF MODERN SECULARIZATION

TEMPORAL FORESHORTENING AND ACCELERATION: A STUDY ON SECULARIZATION* Reinhart Koselleck “Et minuentur anni sicut menses et menses sicut septimana et septimana sicut dies et dies sicut horae.”1 These lines come from the fourth century; they belong to the visions of the Tiburtinian Sibyl.2 What we have here is an apocalyptic text. Temporal foreshortening introduces the uprising of the fearsome peoples who will destroy the Roman Empire. It is a work of the Antichrist, who brings the last great misery over the Earth, but also of the returning Christ; for “the elect’s sake, whom He hath chosen, He hath shortened the days,”3 so that their suffering will not last too long before the Savior defeats the Antichrist. Whether it is brought about by the Antichrist or by Christ, temporal foreshortening is a sign of the end of the world. Let us compare these lines with a statement by the German electrical engineer and entrepreneur Werner von Siemens. From the

* Transl. from German. The work was originally published in 2000 under the title “Zeitverkürzung und Beschleunigung. Eine Studie zur Säkularisation” in: R. Koselleck. Zeitschichten. Studien zu Historik. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. pp. 177–202). We are indebted to the Suhrkamp-Verlag for permission for translation. 1 “And years were shortened into months, and months into weeks, and weeks into days, and days into hours.” 2 Kurfess (1951: 276). According to A. Kurfess (1951: 346) and E. Sackur (1898: 162), the text dates back to around 360. The corresponding passage from Lactantius, whose text, according to Hans Lietzmann, was known by Constantine, reads as follows: “tunc et annus et mensis et dies breviabitur: et hanc esse mundi senectutem ac defectionem Trismegistus elocutus est; quae cum evenerint, adesse tempus sciendum est, quo deus ad commutandum saeculum revertatur” (Kurfess 1951: 246). On the apocalyptic prophecies which were theologically contested in the Greek East earlier than in the Latin West, see the research of Harnack and Lietzmann. The apocalyptic expectation and with them also the relatively rare topoi of acceleration and temporal foreshortening, remained in popular belief and could and can be appealed to at any time. The small range of variation of the underlying sources is emphasized by Arthur Hübscher (1952). Ernst Benz (1977) offers much historical evidence but without conceptual historical analysis. Daniel Halévy’s Essai sur l’acceleration de l’histoire (1961) is vague concerning the theory of time, but stimulating as cultural history. 3 Thus states the Tiburtinian Sibyl (Kurfess 1951: 278), following Mark. 13, 20.

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series of earlier inventions, in 1886 Siemens extrapolated an underlying law: This clearly discernable law is that of the constant acceleration of our present cultural development. Developmental periods that in earlier times took centuries, and at the beginning of our period still took decades, are now completed within years and often come into being fully formed. On the one hand, this is a natural manifestation of our cultural progress itself . . .; on the other hand, it is the effect of selfrejuvenating scientific-technical progress.4

Formally, the two determinations of time seems to be astonishingly similar. In both cases, foreshortened spans of time are conjured up or identified, even if their context and content are different. The text of the Tiburtinian Sybil refers to a temporal foreshortening before the end of the world. The text of the electrical engineer refers to an acceleration within the horizon of progress. Closely examined, however, we have clearly distinguishable positions. In the one case, time itself is accelerated by the pressing together of temporal phases taken from nature—at least years, months, and days. It is a matter of a divinely willed transformation of natural time, whose even rhythms are foreshortened before the coming of the Last Judgment. In the other case, for scientific reasons alone, the idea that natural time itself could change does not arise. As with Newton, it always remains constant. But within the chronology based on nature, progress in science and culture, as well as its diffusion, occurs ever more rapidly. Natural time itself remains the same, but the manmade content of time is realized at an accelerated rate. Despite the semantic similarity, then, we have here two different, indeed contradictory findings: in the Sybil’s text time itself is foreshortened; in the engineer’s text the sequence of innovations and improvements within equal periods of time accelerates. Temporal foreshortening and acceleration are similarly defined, but refer to different ideas as well as states of affairs. With this we find ourselves at the center of our question: is the one connected to the other? Does the verbal similarity of the formulations and the determinations of time indicate a connection? Is it even a secularization of Christian apocalyptic expectations of the ‘endtimes’ that has led to the acceleration thesis? Is it a matter of 4 Von Siemens [1886] (1985: 120). Van der Pot (1985) delivers irreplaceable sources of evidence for conceptual history.

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a Christian legacy that has here been transposed into modernity? Or, put differently, are temporal foreshortening, acceleration, and secularization connected at all? In order to answer these questions, I will proceed in three steps: First, I will try to clarify terminologically the concept of secularization. Second, I will try to explore the category of temporal foreshortening from the New Testament to the modern era. Third, I will try to distinguish this from the modern concept of acceleration in order to contrast the latter with the concept of secularization and temporal foreshortening. I Secularization—Historical and as Metaphor Today, secularization has become a far-reaching and diffuse catchword; there is little agreement as to its use. It can just as well serve Christian and anti-Christian cultural criticism as be used as an interpretive model in the philosophy of history. Its use reflects different standpoints.5 If we follow the history of the concept, it emerges (1) that secularization possesses an institutionally unambiguous core whose meaning is not in doubt. The word, which only arose toward the end of the sixteenth century in French, meant first of all the transfer of a member of an order to worldly status. A ‘regular’ cleric then became a ‘saecularis,’ a worldly cleric. The expression has retained this strict canonical-juridical sense up to the present.6 (2) A first extension of this legal institution occurred with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. In the protracted peace negotiations at Münster

5 Lübbe (1965). For basic information on ‘secularisation’ and its equivalents in foreign languages see G. Marramao (1992). On its history see Crusius (1996) and Heckel (1996). The connection of the concepts ‘secularisation’ and ‘saeculum’ has, to my knowledge, not yet been sufficiently explored. The semantic charge that ‘saeculum’ gets from ‘secus’ and ‘sexus’ still need historical-anthropological interpretation. Linguistically it refers to the connection between sex, generation, age, period in office, lifetime, and the maximum time of about 100 years that, on the one hand, is religiously elevated (as in the Imperium Romanum) and, on the other hand, in a Christian context, could be interpreted in ‘worldly’ terms. The transposition of the concept ‘saeculum’ into the simplified and innocuous category of ‘century’ had a pre-Christian origin, but only occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. On its Etruscan-Roman forerunners, see Lietzmann (1909) and, on the sources, Lietzmann (1979: 1492–1494). 6 On the following, see Conze, Strätz and Zabel (1984: 789–829).

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and Osnabrück, the French envoy introduced a new concept with the old word secularization. It was meant to refer to a political act that had existed since the early medieval Church without this designation. For the French envoy, secularization meant the transfer of church property to worldly dominion. In the concrete situation of the Thirty Years War, this designation of course had an anti-Protestant inflection. The Protestant territorial rulers were to be prevented from what they themselves called ‘Reformation,’ namely the further seizure of Catholic Church property. By and large, the Peace of Westphalia brought about a stalemate in the lands of the German Empire, fixing the shares of Church and worldly holdings. But it would not remain at this. In the course of the Enlightenment, culminating in the French Revolution, there came a wave of further secularization in the sense of the expropriation of Church holdings, trusts, and properties. Now it was primarily Catholic territorial rulers themselves who were involved in the process. The German bishops reserved the right, not only for the sake of religion but also for the common good, to transform trust property into “another form that is more appropriate to the main aim and real needs.”7 Josef II put numerous church holdings to new purposes; all Church property was finally seized during the French Revolution and, by way of the new currency stabilized by the expropriations, transferred to the bourgeoisie, whose power lay in capital. The dissolution of all German Church dominions can be seen as the final blow of this wave of secularization, laying the old imperial constitution to rest. Secularization thus has a core in church law whose meaning still holds today. In addition, secularization means a politically-based legal act that diminishes or expropriates the Church’s share of worldly dominion and possession in order to put the profits to new purposes. These purposes could be educational, mercantile, or economic, even worldly-religious, as with the Protestants; they could also be used as rewards for political good behavior—in any case, they pushed the Church out of the field of worldly rule, over which the modern state claimed a monopoly.8 In both cases, in the canonical as in the political-legal sense, the concept of secularization took its concrete meaning from the spirit7

See ‘Punctation of Ems by the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, Cologne, Salzburg, 25. August 1786’ in Mirbt (1934: 415). 8 On this whole institutional and legal complex, see Heckel (1981).


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ual/worldly opposition. The historical background can only be understood with reference to Augustine’s theory of the two kingdoms, which, as Gilson has shown, has structured Western history through numerous transformations and metamorphoses.9 To the extent that political-legal secularization advanced, attempts were also made to limit Church rule to the spiritual realm. What was secularized, which prerogatives and holdings were distributed, can clearly be empirically verified and historically tested. While its evaluation may vary according to one’s standpoint, the finding itself remains unambiguous. (3) It is entirely different with the metaphorical extension of the concept of secularization since the French Revolution. Since then the canonical-legal and political-legal concept has become an interpretive category in the philosophy of history, which, like ‘emancipation’ or ‘progress,’ claims to interpret the whole of modern world history. The concept of secularization has been subject to numerous different interpretations. At one extreme we find the position of Marx, who “made it the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world.”10 The other extreme might be indicated by Overbeck and negative theology: for Overbeck theology was already “nothing other than a piece of the secularization of Christianity.”11 Secularization, the entanglement in inner-worldly tasks with all the burdens that arise from them, began with the establishment of the Church. For negative theology, the sense of the Christian teaching of redemption lay precisely in this worldly entanglement. However meaningless the course of history, the Christian message, once accepted for human existence, promises salvation. The liberal position can be inscribed between these two extremes, the Marxist and the existentialist position of negative theology. At a certain level of abstraction, Kant, Hegel, Dilthey, and Troeltsch can be ranged along a single line of development. For all of them, Christian expectations of redemption are no longer located in the beyond; a task that runs throughout the modern era is rather to morally and ethically realize the Christian religion in this world. The path leads from eschatology, which once taught the end of world

9 10 11

Gilson (1952). Marx [1844] (1956: 379). Overbeck [1873] (1963: 34).

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history, to progress, which is to realize Christian postulates in this world until the coming of freedom from domination. All the historical-philosophical options briefly sketched here can be located politically since the French Revolution. They can be aligned with specific party-political camps on the spectrum from conservatism to communism, and can thus be read according to a critique of ideology. However, these theories of secularization have a common signature: all dispense with a rigorous separation between the beyond and the here, between eternity and the world, between the spiritual and the worldly. Rather, all historical-philosophical interpretive schemes stand under the dictate that all tasks and challenges are to be solved within historical time, with and through historical time itself. ‘Time’ does not stand in opposition to ‘eternity:’ time absorbs eternity. All dualistic oppositions of Christian origin dissolve under the presupposition, taken to be universally valid, that the world-time of history not only calls forth problems, it also leads to their solutions. In other words, the opposition of past and future takes the central place once occupied by the opposition of ‘here’ and ‘beyond’. This process can be described as secularization, but the designation ‘temporalization’ would be more correct. With this we would have a first point of entry into our question concerning the relation of acceleration and secularization. For if there is an experience of time that is immanent to the world and historical, that differs from temporal rhythms tied to nature, it is undoubtedly the experience of acceleration, through which historical time qualifies as specifically man-made time. Only through consciousness of acceleration—or of the slowing-down that corresponds to it—can the experience of time that is always naturally given be specified as specifically historical. Let us take stock of our first preliminary results. Until around 1800, beyond its meaning in church law, secularization is a politicallegal process that underlined a shift in the balance of power from the Church to the secular state. From 1800 on secularization acquires a historical-philosophical dimension. The theory of two worlds as the final legitimating instance for political action and social conduct is superseded by history and historical time, which are now conjured up and mobilized as the last justification for political planning and social organization. With this we come to the second part of our reflections.


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II The Transformation of Apocalyptic Temporal Foreshortening Is modern acceleration connected to the Christian legacy, without which our modern period cannot be understood? Or, more precisely, is the incontestable experience of modern acceleration only explicable if it is thought together with the Christian lineage? Or, even more precisely, is modern acceleration the product of a secularization that cannot be thought without the opposing concepts of heaven and eternity? In purely formal terms, there can be two answers. First, secularization can designate the negation of the Christian lineage, the supersession of the theory of the two kingdoms, its fundamental renunciation. Second, secularization can mean that Christian questions and hopes— more concretely, the substance of Christian belief—remain an implicit presupposition of being able to think and experience secularization in the first place. This analytical alternative, which empirically speaking allows of many intermediate forms, will guide our further reflections. We may therefore recall our initial distinction, namely that between temporal foreshortening, represented by the Tiburtinian Sybil, and acceleration, for which our electrical engineer was the chief witness. (1) The idea that time itself can be shortened stems from the apocalyptical texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Here we have a concept of religious experience that takes its sense from the expectation of redemption. In Christian expectation, God mercifully shortens time because He wants to shorten the suffering of His people before the end of the world.12 It is a matter, then, of the drawing near of the end of the world, which is itself certain. The measure of this foreshortening is the predestined overcoming of time itself. Before the Last Judgment brings the existing world and its times to an end, even the naturally given time of the cycle of the sun and the stars

12 See Mark 13:20; Matt. 24:22. The Greek expressions for ‘shortening,’ ‘breviare,’ are much more vivid: ‘ekolobosen’ refers to ‘mutilate’ and ‘swallow’ (Mark 13:20), as do ‘ekolobothesan’ and ‘kolobothesontai’ (Matt 24:22). One of the often invoked passages of expectation (1 Cor 7:29), ‘tempus brevis est’—in Luther’s words, the time is short—is more clearly formulated in the Greek: ‘ho kairos synestalmenos estin,’ the time presses; this refers at once to that which is pressing together, that which is pressed, and that which presses.

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will be rapidly accelerated in a whirl of misery and suffering. To speak with Lactantius: The sun is enclouded in eternal paleness, the moon is colored in blood and cannot make up for the lost light; all the stars fall from the sky; the times lose their regularity, winter and summer mingle. Then years and months and days are shortened [tunc et annus et mensis et dies breviabitur]; and this is the old age and the exhaustion of the world predicted by Trismegistus. Then the time comes when God will return to transform the world [saeculum].”13

The foreshortening of time is then a sign of salvation from this world. Subjectively, what stands behind this idea is the believers’ expectation that Christ will return, condensed into the question: When at last? The basis for such an expectation was the hope, the believers’ robust wish, to see time foreshortened in order to participate in eternal redemption as soon as possible. Theologically speaking, this wish presupposed a God who, as ruler and creator of time, was also capable of shortening it. He was powerful enough to accelerate even the cycle of the stars in order to bring about the preordained end of the world earlier than foreseen. In the economy of Christian interpretation, temporal foreshortening before the end of the world by no means played a permanent central role. Rather, as soon as it was applied to concrete political and historical events, the apocalyptic interpretation quickly ended up in heresy. Nevertheless, the foreshortening of time, once predicted, remained a theological interpretive option that could always be called upon according to the situation. And since the predictions and prophecies inspired by God exceeded human knowledge, they participated in a supertemporal truth that no chronologically visible event could refute.14 Of course, there remains a lasting problem that no dogma can resolve: the announced temporal foreshortening before the end of the world refers to unique historical processes that should nevertheless be structurally capable of repeating themselves again and again. The conflict with the institutional Church was inevitable. 13

See Kurfess (1951: 246). Irenaios, Adversus haereses IV 33,9,10,15; Hyppolyt, Refutatio omnium haeresium X 33. The unimaginable speed (‘inestimabilis velocitas’ or ‘celeritas’), with which God carries out the Last Judgment, since His judgments are already completely clear to Him in advance (Otto von Freising, Chron. VIII 19, based on Augustine, De Civ. Dei XX 2), should not be mistaken for the thesis about temporal foreshortening based on historical diachronics. 14


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Especially in the late Middle Ages, apocalyptic visions that escaped the control of the Catholic Church proliferated and took on a life of their own.15 Even Luther is a good witness for this. In contrast to his theological writings, Luther returned again and again to apocalyptical expectations in his table-talk: both by begging for a deferral of the end of the world and by already seeing the Last Days as imminent and longing for them. Thus, he once reported Melanchthon’s idea that there were only 400 years left until the end of the world. “Sed Deus abbreviabit dies propter electos; then the world hurries away, quia per hoc decennium vere novem saculum fuit.”16 In the decade between the Diet of Worms in 1521, where Luther protested against anathematization and ostracization, and the second Diet of Speyer, when the Protestant party came into its own as the Turks besieged Vienna, so many things crowded upon one another that for Luther the conditions for the new saeculum almost seemed to be satisfied. The end of the world seemed to him to be setting in with foreshortened temporal rhythms. Luther, who had large reservations concerning St. John’s apocalypse, nevertheless succumbed to the suggestion of New Testament passages on temporal foreshortening. The maelstrom of very concrete political events provoked the application of biblical passages which made it seem as if, with the expected end of the world, the spans of time leading to the Last Judgment would be ever shorter. To the same extent that Luther renounced the conjuring up of apocalyptic figures—whether intended literally or metaphorically—appealing instead to empirically visible conflicts and constellations, the passages on temporal foreshortening almost unnoticed became arguments for historical acceleration. But for him it was fundamentally a matter of the extra- and suprahistorical determination of time that lent itself to being situationally applied to history. A durable criterion of apocalyptic predictions is that they can always be repeated. An unfulfilled prophecy or apocalyptic expectation can always be repeated—indeed, the likelihood of what is prophesied and expected increases with disappointed expectations. Precisely the error concerning the point in time provides evidence for the even surer future fulfillment of the prediction. The formula of foreshortening, the overcoming of the ordo temporum, thus remains theologically or metahistorically given in 15 16

See, among others, Kamlah (1935) and Cohn (1962). Luther (1981: 678, 2756 b).

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advance and always applicable. Even more, the empirical data confirming the fact that the times are growing short can always be replaced. The argument’s plausibility holds as long as the duration of the world is compared to the human lifespan. The closer a person comes to death, the shorter are the time-spans still available to him. Again and again in the Middle Ages, the biological metaphor faded into theological temporal foreshortening. The lasting premise of this interpretive figure, which endured over 1000 years, was that time was established and limited by God, over whose end He sovereignly reigned. Temporal foreshortening was always applicable to history, but itself was an extra—and suprahistorical given over which human beings had no say. That changed in the early-modern period. (2) Since the sixteenth century evidence has accumulated that novelties occur in this world in ever shorter periods of time. Formally, temporal foreshortening remains an argument for future redemption, but the reference to the apocalypse retreats. It loses political relevance even if it continues to be used within Christian sects, among millennarians or pietists and theologians of the covenant, in order to interpret historical events in the light of the Last Judgment. What comes to the fore beginning in the sixteenth century is something fundamentally new. The discoveries and inventions of the rising natural sciences condensed into an experiential core from which one increasingly proceeded. That more had been discovered in the last century than in those that came before was, for example, already noted in the mid-sixteenth century by Ramus.17 Bacon still formulated this as the hope that inventions would be accelerated through rational planning: “itaque longe plura et meliora, atque per minora intervalla, a ratione et industria et directione et intentione hominum speranda sunt.”18 But that it was so was regularly confirmed in the seventeenth century: thus Leibniz, for example, thought that ever greater progress in the art of invention was being made in ever less time. With this, hope becomes an empirical thesis. Now, what distinguishes these formally very similar argumentative figures? What distinguishes the temporal foreshortening in the eschatological horizon of the Last Judgment from acceleration in the horizon of progress? For one thing, it is no longer God who is the master

17 18

Cited in Bury (1955: 35). Bacon (1858: 108, 1963: 207).


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of action, but man who provokes progress. Here we have a creeping change of the subject. For another thing, it is no longer time itself that is robbed of its natural regularity and thereby shortened; rather, man helps himself to natural time, which always remains the same, in order to chronologically measure the progress he has unleashed. The hoped-for or already confirmed acceleration of progress is measured within a time that remains the same—as opposed to the temporal foreshortening reigned over by God. This fundamentally changes the economy of argumentation. Temporal foreshortening, which had previously set an early end to history from outside, now becomes an acceleration that is registered within history itself and over which human beings have control. What is new here is the idea that it is no longer the end that is coming more quickly, but progress, compared to that of past centuries. The two positions retain a point of commonality. For in both cases the arguments are sustained by the determination of a goal, a teleology, a telos, that is to be achieved ever more quickly. The goal of accelerated progress was the mastery of nature, and increasingly the selforganization of political society as well. One no longer looked for redemption at the end of history, but in the process of history. These were the goals of the Enlightenment. With them it is a matter of something more and other than mere secularization. As much as the expectations of redemption may have entered into the new concept of acceleration in the guise of millennarian hopes, the experiential core to which the new expectations referred was no longer deducible from the apocalypse and no longer determined by the Last Judgment. Rather, in Schiller’s words, world history itself becomes the world’s judgment.19 Nevertheless, we may assume that the modern concept of progress, which could be verified by the acceleration of discoveries and inventions, also remained colored by earlier Christian expectations. Schiller’s endlessly repeated line about world history as the world’s judgment directly testifies to the temporalization that brings the judicium maximum into the process of history. Even if the eschatologically or apocalyptically limited future was reinterpreted as an open future, there always remained a surplus of Christian expectations in scientifically packaged hopes. The voices that drew the opposite conclusion from

19

Schiller (1992: 171, 420).

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the sobering warning of the Old Testament wisdom that for God a thousand years are as a day,20 making it a metaphor for progress, proliferated: developments that earlier took a thousand years are now realized in one.21 To this extent, it is partially justified to speak of an authentic secularization of Christian teleologies. This can be clarified with a range of evidence. Lessing already noted in a psychologizing way that mystical and millennarian traditions were also at work in the Enlightenment. The enlightened enthusiast, as he puts it, “often casts true glances into the future”; however, “he wishes this future accelerated, and to be accelerated by him.”22 Here the reliance of the postulate of acceleration on autonomous agents, on human beings, becomes clear— as does the transformation of the apocalyptic expectation into a hope for the accelerated future: What takes a thousand years in nature is to ripen in the moment of his [the enthusiast’s] existence. For what good would it do him if what he takes to be the better does not become the better during his lifetime?

Like the anti-apocalyptic church fathers, who rejected every calculation of the future as heresy, Lessing kept his distance from such enthusiasts of progress. Nevertheless, Lessing’s description of the progress-minded accelerator testifies to a creeping but unambiguous transformation: it is no longer a matter of a divine dictate, but the religious underpinnings shine through everywhere. Thus a German author wrote in 1788, shortly after Lessing’s critical remarks: “We must hurry to accelerate the revolution in human spirit where possible . . . Let us act while it is day.”23 Long before the Industrial Revolution, the pathos of acceleration spread in the glow of the Enlightenment. Always at stake in this were the determination of goals within the newly discovered history, to be reached in a finite or finally infinite progression. Let me call upon further witnesses to this. Kant ironically observed that theologians again and again claimed that the world was now sliding ever more quickly to the worse: but this ‘now’ (and we know that this is the ‘now’ of temporal foreshortening) is as old as history itself.24 Nevertheless, Kant too posi20 21 22 23 24

Psalms 90:4, 2; Peter 3:8. See van der Pot (1985 a: 120 pp.). Lessing [1780] (1858: 423). Wekhrlin [1788] (1987: 200). Kant [1793] (1907: 19 pp.).


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tively referred to chiliastic tropes in justifying a well-ordered constitution and a world federation as the long-term worldly goal of political action. Undeterred by—indeed, contrary to—all previous historical experience, Kant tried to uncover a motivation for historical acceleration in his reflections on the categorical imperative: as soon as morality actively influences practice, the long-term goal it demands can be realized that much more quickly: “it appears that we might be by our own rational projects accelerate the coming of this period which will be so welcome by our descendants.”25 For him, this was true for the domestic constitution as well as for the world federation, for the coming world peace organization in the supranational domain: “since the times during which equal progress takes place will, we hope, become always shorter.”26 The previously otherworldly goal of future salvation was taken into history as worldly hope; it was temporalized and acceleration, through its connection to morality, provided directives for autonomous human beings. Being able to participate in the Last Judgment over their persecutors, previously a privilege of the chosen—“Spiritualis autem judicat omnia: et ipse a nemine judicatur”27—now congeals into the moral self-empowerment of practical reason. This position corresponds to the naturally much more activist position articulated by Robespierre at the Fête de la Constitution in 1793. Happiness and freedom, the destiny of humanity, are now to be realized in the Revolution: “the progress of human reason has prepared this great revolution, and the duty to accelerate it has been imposed especially on you.”28 Or, as Wieland commented on the events from the other side of the Rhine shortly thereafter: for the planners of the French Revolution, it was a matter of “nothing less than, step by step, from people to people, democratizing the entire Earth in the shortest possible time.”29

25

Kant [1784] (1991: 50). Kant [1795] (1996: 351). 27 I Cor 15; on this, see Irenaios, Adversus haereses IV 33. “einer machthabenden praktischen Vernunft, die, so wie sie ohne weitere Gründe im Gesetzgeben schlechthin gebietend ist, als die unmittelbare Erklärung und Stimme Gottes angesehen werden kann, durch die er dem Buchstaben seiner Schöpfung einen Sinn ergibt. Eine solche authentische Interpretation finde ich nun in einem alten heiligen Buche allegorisch ausgedrückt. Hiob . . .” (Kant 1964: 116). 28 Robespierre [1793] (1956: 10). 29 Wieland [1798] (1857: 100). 26

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Let us pause and ask what changed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In the Enlightenment, the earlier, apocalyptically expected, hoped-for, or feared teleology of an end of the world that breaks through in foreshortened periods of time, becomes a purely inner-worldly expectation. To be sure, the future was also colored by a quasi-religious promise in the Enlightenment. It was to bring happiness and freedom from domination, and their realization was to be accelerated by human action. But the foundation of all these determinations of acceleration was purely inner-worldly. Here, then, we have the model of that secularization which, according to our analytical criteria, broke away from Christianity, though no doubt the Christian legacy remained present within it—if, with the secularization of the telos, it even makes sense to speak of the historically immanent coming Jerusalem.30 (3) Even in the nineteenth century, as technological progress increasingly confirmed the thesis of acceleration, religiously colored and, to this extent, secularized Christian teloi, remained. Thus, in an essay in the 1838 essay in the Brockhaus encyclopedia on the railroad, this steaming vehicle is imbued with a redemptive meaning. The world peace organization of a self-determining humanity is first of all defined, entirely in Kant’s sense, as a morally necessary postulate. Then the author continues: “Although history has always directed its course toward this truly divine goal, on the forward-rushing wheels of the railroad it will be reached centuries earlier.”31 Even in 1871 a book appeared in Germany on the sacred significance of the transcontinental railway in the United States for the coming kingdom of God. For the theologian, acceleration and the knitting together 30 This transformation of extra-historical into inner-historical teleology remains, in spite of Hans Blumenberg’s critique (1991), indisputable, as Karl Löwith (1953) has shown. 31 Brockhaus (1838: 1126). The article on ‘Eisenbahnen’ (railway) ends with the following passage: “On the iron rails our century rolls towards a shining, majestic goal. We will fly along the spiritual path we leave behind even faster than physical space! As the roaring steam colossi shatter every external resistance that provocatively or foolishly gets in its way, so we hope each spiritual resistance that timidity and disfavor try to oppose to them will be smashed by their gigantic power. The triumphal steamcar is still at the beginning of its race and thus rolls only slowly! This alone awakes the confused hope that it could be stopped; but as it proceeds its wings pick up speed and overpower those who try attack the spokes of its fateful wheels!” (Brockhaus 1838: 1136) How apocalyptic temporal foreshortening becomes historically immanent acceleration without losing the pathos of the message of redemption is shown in passages like this one.


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of the global transportation network served as a tokens for the realization of the kingdom of God on Earth.32 When we compare the evidence from the nineteenth century, which could be indefinitely expanded, with the earlier testimonies it becomes clear that the burden of proof for acceleration has shifted. The primary experience is no longer the religiously colored expectation of redemption, but the technical success that brought together communications networks and raised productivity in ever-shorter periods of time. Earlier Christian expectations of redemption could then crystallize around technological progress, themselves becoming a secondary phenomenon. At most, one could say that the inner-worldly expectations of redemption were formally connected to the old apocalyptic temporal rhythms—but no more than that. For the new experience on which they were based remained a technical instrument, which soon turned out not to be up to this redemptive demand. Later editions of the Brockhaus included only technical information on the railway. Those who wanted to hold onto inner-worldly redemption had to look for other accelerators. Friedrich Nietzsche paraphrased the inversion of the chiliastic burden of proof from the Christian legacy to the world-historical future: “The press, the machine, the railway, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has yet dared to draw.”33 The earlier millennarian hope contained in the apocalyptic expectation of a double return of Christ had now become the burden that results from technical innovations that transform all of life on Earth in an unknown but millennial way. Let us summarize the results of our second step. In the course of the early-modern period, extrahistorically determined temporal foreshortening becomes the innerhistorical axiom of acceleration. Here the subject changes from God to man, who is to bring about this 32

Plath (1871). (I owe this note to Walter Magaß). The transcontinental railway unites the Atlantic and the Pacific. “The Russians, the Greek Catholics come from the West, the Protestant Germans from the East, and the one vein through which the people who belong to the kingdom of God stream from ocean to ocean, as the Christian blood streams through the breast of the German-Protestant land, is the Atlantic-Pacific railway. So humanity goes on its way. It roams across the earth, its rails becoming ever smoother and straighter, its pace becoming faster and faster, time flies faster with each new century.” (p. 134) Despite the clearly increasing acceleration, the author admits that he does not know when humanity “will have reached its goal according to God’s will.” 33 Nietzsche [1886] (1988: 674).

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acceleration through a transformation of nature and society. What is secularized, what carries over from the Christian legacy, is, first, the goal that attaches itself to the progressive hopes of realizing a kingdom of happiness and freedom from domination in the future, and, second, the idea that history itself has a goal in the first place. In this restricted sense, we can speak of a secularization of Christian legacies. But a look at the early-modern period has already taught us that the hard kernel of the modern experience of acceleration, the technological and industrial restructuring of society, can no longer be deduced from theological premises. With this we come to the final part of our investigation. III

Acceleration as Post-Christian Temporal-Historical Category

To this point we have seen that Christian expectations of redemption, with their shortening spans of time, are springs of historical determinations of acceleration. Here it emerged how a secularized theological goal slowly became accidental, referring primarily to historical experiences. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the idea of an experience of acceleration took on a life of its own. It could exist independent of any Christian derivation. I now want to summarize this under three points. First, with the French Revolution the idea of acceleration acquired a historical-theoretical dimension that can be empirically verified without referring to a divine timetable. While the German Reformation as well as the English Revolution, though with decreasing intensity, were still geared to apocalyptic expectations, this changed fundamentally with the experience of rapid constitutional change during the French Revolution. It has been repeatedly noted that the course of the French Revolution hurried through all possibilities of political and social organization—from monarchy via constitutional monarchy to republican constitutionalism and its despotic-terrorist outgrowth, back to an elite-bourgeois constitution and finally to Napoleon’s dictatorship—within ten years. Wieland, Oelsner, Görres, Rebmann, and Kornmann, among others, observed that, measured against Polybius’s ancient cyclical model, this was an accelerated transformation that nevertheless did not produce anything fundamentally new: “Our contemporary history is a repetition of the deeds and


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events of several millennia—in the shortest possible period of time.”34 While substantively history could only repeat itself, the real innovation of the experience of the French Revolution lay in the fact that everything occurred faster than ever before. The idea of acceleration was thereby stripped of its apocalyptic legacy and shorn of its progressive expectations, but it was still able to persist as a historical thesis for the experience of ‘modernity.’ As Niebuhr once noted looking back at the French Revolution, since the last third of the eighteenth century the whole of European history went faster.35 This subjective perception referred not only to political events, but also to the fading echoes of the pre-industrial age. Already in the period of pre-mechanical trade, i.e., in the run-up to industrialization, we find a range of extra-political experiences of social acceleration that herald the coming Industrial Revolution. Horse-drawn carriages were able to almost double their speed thanks to better roads; riverboats were able to significantly increase their loads for the same number of shipments and periods of time thanks to new canals. Communications accelerated enormously thanks to mail, newspapers, and optical telegraphy in the eighteenth century, and, beyond this, sailboat technology improved to the extent that the fastest sailboats of the nineteenth century were faster than the first steamboats. Thus, beyond the experience of political acceleration, 34 Kornmann (1814: 4). Kornmann, himself a victim of (Bavarian) secularization as abbot of Prüfening, brings out simply in his pregnant title the change of argumentative topoi. The renunciation of apocalyptic expectations—without giving up Christian belief—and the recourse to structures that have been repeating since ancient history, enriched by revolutionary, specifically modern experiences of acceleration, lead Kornmann to insights, as exciting as they are learned and witty, that avoid any borrowing from the philosophy of history: “It was the privilege of a single generation to see things for which once the lives of many generations were not sufficient.” See on this my article “Revolution” (Koselleck 1984: 739–740). 35 Niebuhr (1845: 54): “Many things contributed to accelerating everything; even the distance from one place to another was reduced by building roads, establishing the regular circulation of public officials, etc.; everything was increasingly at the command of the individual. A great confidence spread for undertakings of all kinds, such as never had been known before. Previously those who lacked fortune, position or birth had a very difficult way; now it is easy for anyone to achieve his own independent existence. The poorest among us has it much better than the son of well-off but not rich parents 100 years ago. The prosperity of the middle class grew and now the number of the well-off is no doubt 50 times greater than 100 years ago. One also began to live faster and more intensively than earlier; this was still coming into being at the time of the revolution and only since then has really developed.” (Lecture, Bonn University, summer 1829).

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in the eighteenth century we already see a speeding up in the field of bourgeois economic society. Second, with the introduction of machine technology and its industrial-capitalist organization, the idea of acceleration acquires general confirmation in everyone’s everyday experience. Allow me to mention a few examples. The division of labor made it possible to increase not only production, but productivity itself. Any time won in production resulted in an increase in the number of products. This unleashed a general, cross-class increase in needs, such that the satisfaction of old needs gave rise to new ones, and allowed them too to be satisfied. The construction of the railway, and in a second wave the car and airplane, soon made possible the transport of ever more people and goods in ever shorter periods of time. As our encyclopedia already observed in 1840, the railway overcomes spatial divisions by bringing things closer in time . . . For all spaces are only distances for us because of the time we need to traverse them; if we accelerate this, space itself, in its impact on life and transportation, is reduced.36

From a purely technical perspective, this statement could be further confirmed. The same holds to an even greater extent for communications. With the introduction of the rapid press at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the invention of telegraphy, lithography, and photography, events could be converted into information in ever shorter periods of time, and could reach people ever more quickly. The invention of the telephone, radio, and television made it possible for actions and events to coincide with reports of them. With this the whole political and social decision-making structure, as well as the capacity for political and social organization, changes. Thanks to information technology, deeds, actions, and their coverage increasingly converge. Thanks to acceleration, action and reflection draw closer: human beings cannot help taking the future into account and planning as more experiential data becomes available to them. Finally, global population growth also corresponds to this finding of acceleration, compelling a turn to the open future. The increase of the world population from around half a billion people in the 36

Brockhaus (1838: 1117). See generally Zorn (1977).


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seventeenth century to around six billion in the year 2000 can be interpreted as facet of acceleration: this is an exponential time-curve in which humanity doubles in ever shorter periods of time. The synergy of increasing output in science, technology, and industry is at the same time the condition for the life of a world population that is growing geometrically. Thanks to acceleration, our globe itself has become a closed spaceship. If we again pose our question about secularization, we may rightly say that these factors of acceleration refer to world-immanent processes, but that these are no longer derivable from Christian expectations of redemption. This leads me to my third point. Today it is emerging that certain acceleration processes in our differentiated societies are reaching their saturation point. No doubt the world population will reach an absolute limit, wherever and whenever it may be. Equally, there are natural minimal conditions that cannot be transgressed or stretched, for example in order to further accelerate transportation. Car and air traffic increasingly get in their own way. Information technology can continue to bring together data and coordinate the data of the past and the future every more quickly thanks to the computer, but its productive analysis will probably continue to depend on the natural receptive capacities of human beings. The hitherto valid empirical thesis that our welfare can only be maintained through further increases in productivity, too, may well, according to the Club of Rome, reach a limit that can no longer be exceeded by raising rates of acceleration. This raises the question of whether the general experience of acceleration can continue unhindered into the future. First of all, it cannot be ruled out that the earlier apocalyptic visions of decline will be empirically far outdone by the human capacity for self-destruction. While apocalyptic temporal foreshortening always represented a gate, a passageway to eternal salvation, what emerges in the domain of historical-temporal acceleration is the possibility that humanity itself destroys the inherited, culturally and industrially enriched conditions of its existence. Here we encounter the question of whether it is possible to infer long-term prognoses from previous historical experiences of acceleration. With Luhmann, I take this possibility to be rather limited.37

37

Luhmann (1976).

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Even if acceleration has become a durable experience and to this extent relatively stable, we can by no means infer what will in fact occur in the future at an accelerated rate. For once acceleration as a specific historical-temporal category has become an experiential model, in hindsight all of history turns into a progression of increasing acceleration. This can be shown with three overlapping exponential time-curves that retrospectively unlock the whole of human history. For one thing, the biological differentiation of the human being takes place in shortened periods of time. Measured against the five billion years of the Earth’s crust, and the one billion years of organic life, the roughly ten million years of ape-like human beings is a short span of time. And the two million years for which we for which we have evidence of the existence of man-made tools appears against this as even more negligible.38 Next, compared to the two million years of demonstrable human history, the products of an independent and differentiated art in the last 30,000 years have, in retrospect, occurred in a comparatively short time. From the perspective of cultural history, the time spans keep getting shorter: the introduction of agriculture and husbandry 12,000 years ago, and finally the unfolding of high culture roughly 6000 years ago, again measured against prehistory, refer to ever shorter periods of time in which the new appears at an accelerated rate. Even if this appearance of the new in the world of culture has by now become a durable precondition of our own life, measured against the whole of human cultural history it is a matter of progressively shorter spans of time in which arise ever greater aggregations of organizational accomplishments. Finally, we can see another exponential time-curve if we focus on the roughly 6000 years of high culture. What we have come to know as post-Christian, technological-industrial, specifically historical-temporal acceleration has only taken place for about the last 200 years. Since then our life-world has been technologically and industrially restructured so that the question of further acceleration has become the question of our future as such. However, the idea of the acceleration or foreshortening of the duration of our experience per definitionem prevents further forecasts.

38

See on this Narr (1974, 1978) and Hambloch (1986).


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It is precisely these previously overlapping and self-reinforcing exponential time-curves that therefore cannot be projected into the future in a linear manner. So it may well be that in the future we will be forced to concentrate our energies more on stabilizers and the natural preconditions of our worldly existence. Then it could turn out that previous acceleration was only a transitional phase, after which the shares of duration and survival versus change and transformation have to be reordered. Politically speaking, the important thing is to know who accelerates or decelerates whom or what, when, and where. Translated by Robin Celikates and James Ingram References Bacon, Francis (1858). “Novum Organon” I. In: Works. London: Longman. ——. (1962). Novum Organon. Vol. 1. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Benz, Ernst (1977). Akzeleration der Zeit als geschichtliches und heilsgeschichtliches Problem. Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und Natur. Blumenberg, Hans (1966). Legitimität der Neuzeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bury, John B. (1955). The Idea of Progress. New York: Dover. Cohn, Norman (1993). The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Pimlico. Brockhaus, Friedrich A. (ed.) (1838). Conversations-Lexikon der Gegenwart. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Brockhaus. Conze, Werner, Hans-Wolfgang Strätz and Hermann Zabel (1984). “Säkularisation, Säkularisierung.” In: Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.). Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Vol. 5. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. 789–829. Crusius, Irene (1996). Zur Säkularisation geistlicher Institutionen im 16. und im 18./19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gilson, Étienne (1952). Les métamorphoses de la cité de dieu. Louvain: Louvain University Press. Halévy, Daniel (1961). Essai sur l’acceleration de l’histoire. Paris: Fayard. Hambloch, Hermann (1986). Der Mensch als Störfaktor im Geosystem. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Heckel, Martin (1981). Korollarien zur Säkularisierung. Heidelberg: Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. ——. (1996). “Das Problem der ‘Säkularisation’ in der Reformation.” In: Crusius, Irene (ed.). Zur Säkularisation geistlicher Institutionen im 16. und im 18./19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hübscher, Arthur (1952): Die große Weissagung. Texte, Geschichte und Deutung der Prophezeiungen von den biblischen Propheten bis auf unsere Zeit. Munich: Heimeran. Kamlah, Wilhelm (1935). Apokalypse und Geschichtstheologie. Berlin: Ebering. Kant, Immanuel (1907). “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft.” In: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 6. Berlin: Reimer Verlag. ——. (1964). “Über das Mißlingen aller philosophischen Versuche in der Theodizee.” In: Weischedel, Wilhelm (ed.). Werke. Vol. 6. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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——. (1991). “Idea for a universal history with a cosmopolitan purpose.” In: Reiss, Hans (ed.). Kant. Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 41–53. ——. (1996). “Toward Perpetual Peace.” In: Gregor, Mary J. (ed.). Immanuel Kant. Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 311–351. Kornmann, Rupert (1814). Die Sibylle der Zeit aus der Vorzeit oder Politische Grundsätze durch die Geschichte bewähret. Vol. 1. Regensburg: Rotermundt. Koselleck, Reinhart (1984). “Revolution.” In: Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.). Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politischsozialen Sprache in Deutschland. Vol. 5. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Kurfess, Alfons (ed.) (1951). Sibyllinische Weissagungen. Urtext und Übersetzung. Munich: Heimeran. Lessing, Gotthold E. (1858). “Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts.” In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 9. Leipzig: Göschen. Lietzmann, Hans (1909). Der Weltheiland. Bonn: Marcus und Weber. ——. (1979). “Saeculum.” In: Der kleine Pauly. Vol. 4. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Löwith, Karl (1953). Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Lübbe, Hermann (1965). Säkularisierung. Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs. Freiburg: Alber. Luhmann, Niklas (1976). “The Future Cannot Begin. Temporal Structures in Modern Society.” In: Social Research 43: 130–152. Luther, Martin (1981). Tischreden. Stuttgart: Reclam. Marramao, Giacoma (1992). “Säkularisierung.” In: Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. 8. Basel: Schwabe. 1133–1161. Marx, Karl (1956). “Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung.” In: MEW. Vol. 1. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. Mirbt, Carl (1934). Quellen zur Geschichte des Papsttums und des römischen Katholizismus. Tübingen: Mohr. Narr, Karl J. (1974). ‘Vom Wesen des Frühmenschen: Halbtier oder Mensch?.’ In: Saeculum 25, 4. 293–324. ——. (1978). Zeitmaße in der Urgeschichte. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Niebuhr, Barthold G. (1845). Geschichte des Zeitalters der Revolution. Vol. 1. Hamburg: Agentur des Rauhen Hauses. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1988). “Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.” In: Colli, Giorgio and Mazzino Montinari (eds.). Kritische Studienausgabe. Vol. 2. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. Overbeck, Franz (1963). Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Plath, Carl Heinrich Christian (1871). Die Bedeutung der Atlantik-Pacifik-Eisenbahn für das Reich Gottes. Berlin: W. Schultze. van der Pot, Johan Hendrik Jacob (ed.) (1985 a). Die Bewertung des technischen Fortschritts. Eine systematische Übersicht der Theorien. Vol. 1. Maastricht: Van Gorcum. ——. (ed.) (1985 b). Die Bewertung des technischen Fortschritts. Eine systematische Übersicht der Theorien. Vol. 2. Maastricht: Van Gorcum. de Robespierre, Maximilien (1956). “Discours sur la constitution.” In: Poberen, Jean (ed.). Textes choisis. Vol. 1. Paris: Éditions Sociales. Sackur, Ernst. (ed.) (1898). Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen. Halle: Niemeyer. Schiller, Friedrich (1992). “Resignation.” In: Werke und Briefe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. von Siemens, Werner (1985). “Das naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter.” In: van der Pot, Johan Hendrik Jacob (ed.). Die Bewertung des technischen Fortschritts. Eine systematische Übersicht der Theorien. Vol. 1. Maastricht: Van Gorcum. Wekhrlin, Wilhelm Ludwig (1987). “Hyperboreische Briefe.” In: Vierhaus, Rudolf (ed.). Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.


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Wieland, Christian M. (1857). “Gespräche unter vier Augen.” In: Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 32. Leipzig: Göschen. Zorn, Wolfgang (1977). “Verdichtung und Beschleunigung des Verkehrs als Beitrag zur Entwicklung der ‘Modernen Welt.’” In: Koselleck, Reinhart (ed.). Studien zum Beginn der modernen Welt. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. 115–134.

SECULARIZATION: GERMAN CATHOLICISM ON THE EVE OF MODERNITY* Rudolf Schlögl Ever since Max Weber’s depiction of religion as the prime mover of the Western rationalization process, the theme of secularization has belonged to historical and social sciences’ stock knowledge. However, the appearance of the ‘cultural turn’ since the 1960s has given rise to a firm criticism of the modernization paradigm in general and the secularization thesis in particular. Especially, the USA served as an example displaying the persistence and vitality of religious traditions and their effects on social institutions and politics. The image of a ‘civil religion’ as the prerequisite of modern, civil society has thus been espoused in explorations of post-modern societies as well. Accordingly, they could neither dispense with religious underpinnings—in whatever ideological dress they appeared. Functionalist as well as phenomenological approaches consent with respect to this issue.1 It cannot be decided whether the criticism really shatters the secularization paradigm before exploring the respective presupposed views of ‘religion’ which the critics emphasize. This holds already true for the case of Weber who unintentionally supported a Protestant notion of religion which was meticulously separated from magical practices. The following contribution rests on different presuppositions. It will be upheld that religion gains social force when it is expressed * This is a revised article, which first was published in different form before (2002, 2003). References here have therefore been kept to a minimum. 1 Even contemporary religious sociology is struggling with the formulation of a concept of secularization which would be applicable to varied historical constellations. See in general Christiano et al. (2002: 59 pp.). Typically, the religious impregnation of modern societies is interpreted as a counter-argument against the secularisation thesis. While functionalists focus on the religious rootings of identities (HervieuLéger 2000: 123 pp.; Eder 2002: 332 pp.), phenomenologists who purport an anthropological notion of religion (Luckmann 2002) argue for a privatization and pluralization of religious practices. For a general view see Wohlrab-Sahr (2000: 44 pp.). Applications of the privatization argument are delivered by Knoblauch (2002) and Pollack (1990). An account from the perspective of communication theory was fostered by Thomas (2001: 23 pp.).

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in visible and accountable social forms. These forms are thereby connected to various other social forms, and thus cannot vary independently with respect to the latter. The thesis under discussion assumes that the concept of secularization is indispensable for describing tensions and transformations between the social institution of religion on the one hand and coexisting societal institutions on the other. The fact that, since early modernity, religious discourse itself drew on the secularization paradigm in order to come to terms with the relationship between religion and a transforming social setting seems to confirm this argument. Anyone examining the religious journalism, theological reflection, and pastoral-theological reassurances of the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century can appreciate the depth of uncertainty among those who had power in the Church and among the clerical virtuosi of religion. The large gap separating the educated and moneyed classes from the church and religion was clear, but even among the lower classes, indifference towards the church, ignorance in matters of faith, and, at best, a superficial, purely habitual piety were apparent. The collapse of the legal and economic institutional structure of the imperial Catholic Church, which took place between 1803 and 1814, thus seemed to presage Catholicism’s imminent end; and from the Lutheran perspective it seemed doubtful whether Protestantism would be able to assume the mantle. Since Woellner’s religious edict of 1788, Lutheranism, too, had witnessed a stream of complaints about the decay of religiosity and church discipline, and the destruction of traditional religious beliefs among Lutheran Christians.2 This discourse was the first reaction of theologians, virtuosi of religion, and lay people of all Christian confessions to the secularization projects of secular rulers. Even in ecclesiastical electoral states, it was considered, both, rational and pious from the 1770s on to dissolve monasteries in order to provide a better basis for an university. Beyond this, however, these writings articulated the observation that the world was entering a new relationship with the church and religion. This produced changes in religious institutions as well as in the pious practices of believers, which amounted to a fundamental change in the shape of religion. Thus from the perspective

2

See Görres (1998: 89); Graf (1997: 37 pp.).

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of religion itself, notions such as secularization or de-Christianization summed up the fact that the world’s relationship to religion was clearly changing. To speak of secularization, therefore, is initially to take a religious perspective on the world in order to find out what religion might look like from the other side—from the world.3 That is why this discourse did not remain purely a lamentation. Friedrich Schleiermacher, who paradoxically adopted precisely this internal perspective by imitating an external perspective in his Über die Religion, did not consider that the state of religion in 1799 religion was such as to cause anxiety. “I do not join with most people in claiming the decline of religion,” he wrote, “for I do not know of any other period that would have accepted it better than the present.”4 Novalis, too, concluded from the anarchy of contemporary upheavals a “time of revival” for the religion of a united Christendom when, in the same year of 1799, he wrote Die Christenheit oder Europa.5 And a third text dating from 1799 springs to mind: the ‘Letter to Dorothea’ written by Friedrich Schlegel who converted to Catholicism only a few years later. In it he explained to his beloved that religion was the best way for women to shape an undivided personality for themselves which, in Schlegel’s words, “lives and writes in a divine way.”6 In other words, he saw religion as a form of education that would allow people to find one’s individual bearings within the profanity of a splintered bourgeois society, and an agency that would reveal to them their proper divinity. These texts express confidence in the future importance of a religion that had proved itself as a medium in which citizens (Bürger) could develop their individuality, and as a remedy for the suffering of an existence which bourgeois society had split up into different spheres of value and areas of activity. Conversely, however, these texts also express the insight that this was the path of the fault lines that were opening up between the modern world and a churchbased piety which aspired to be crucial and all-shaping. In his Athanasius (1837), Joseph Görres expressed fear that the Rhinelanders, otherwise so pious, “would forget the higher things in the face of all the economic and political activity.”7 3 4 5 6 7

Luhmann (2000: 278–85). Schleiermacher (1999: 55 pp.). Novalis (1978: 743). Schlegel (1988: 175). von Görres (1998: 132).

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Much of the present-day scholarly energy devoted to researching the concept of ‘secularization’ concentrates on demonstrating that it is inappropriate, because every de-Christianization has been followed by a religious revitalization, as illustrated in particular by the Catholic revival of the nineteenth century.8 But it seems to me that this simply fails to reveal the essential historiographical and analytical yield of this concept. I would rather opt for an approach that would enter upon the perspectives of contemporary observers. In this way, we could see this term refers to a profound upheaval that assigned religion a new place in the social structure as well as in individual patterns of action, and which therefore also redefined the church and religiosity as necessary.9 During the French Revolution, a new form of constitutional, national statehood was translated into reality, and the long-running transformation of a society based on status groups or estates into a bourgeois society organized according to egalitarian principles was legally ratified. With this it became clear to what extent religion in general, and Catholic religiosity in particular, were intertwined with the disintegrating order of Old Europe. The associated transformation process affected the Catholic Church in a number of ways: first, its relationship to political order, and thus its form as a political legal corporation, was called into question; secondly, its internal constitution was affected; thirdly, it was obliged to adapt ecclesiastical social integration to the changes in the social order—that is, how in the course of their lives people were known as Catholics or became members of the Church; and fourthly, it was affected as a community of believers, as it became apparent that traditional forms of piety could be changed fundamentally or disappear completely. This article focuses on these four levels, looking at the period from 1750 to 1850 in each case.

8 An example of this view is Lehmann (1997). See also the contributions by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Martin Greschat, and Margaret Lavinia Anderson in the same volume. 9 Hahn (1997); Mc Leod (2000).


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I From the Church as an Estate of the Empire to the Church as a Privileged Religious Association As we know, the Catholic Church’s political-legal constitution in the Holy Roman Empire made it one of the state-like units overarched by the empire; it, in turn, supported this arch. This is not the place to demonstrate how the imperial church’s state-like nature had placed the Holy Roman Empire’s political structure under considerable strain since 1648, while encouraging the church to place itself outside the imperial constitution in that it continued to regard Protestants as heretics. The Church itself saw this attitude merely as a response to the secularization proviso which had been in place since 1648, and which kept the imaginations of imperial politicians working. Febronian attempts to renew the National Church, which reached from the early 1760s to the archiepiscopal reform congresses in Koblenz (1769) and Ems (1786), were therefore initially motivated by the desire to make ecclesiastical law conform to imperial law, and thereby to erect a firewall against secularization.10 However, it became increasingly obvious that the Febronian enthusiasm for reform was neither beneficial to the imperial structure nor in the interests of Rome. The Empire’s confessional structure, and especially its Estate-based statehood, did not offer the least support for a national church bringing the confessions together. For Rome, on the other hand, a German Gallicanism plus an episcopacy based on its church’s statehood seemed so threatening that, on the issue of the enunciator, Pius VI decided for a territorial state church. Thus, when the secular territories in the League of Princes (Fürstenbund ) finally turned against the Empire, it was clear that the imperial church had no future, either. After the implosion of the ancien regime, there was no way back to a state-like church. The concordats negotiated between Rome and the constitutional states of the German Confederation from the Congress of Vienna to 1830 guaranteed the churches a legal form of privileged corporation. In return, the churches had to endure smothering state supervision, and could make only limited use of confessional privilege. Napoleon’s Organic Articles and the Bavarian

10

Lottes (1997); Aretin (1997).

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Edict on Religion of 1817 further developed the paradigm of this institutional transformation of religion.11 The new legal and political order, of course, looked forwards and backwards at the same time. These non-simultaneities produced the constitutional confessional state, as the altar’s support for the throne was trusted more than legitimation of power through participation. As a corporation, conversely, the church had lost all state-like qualities. In its privileged position, the principle of a social hierarchy derived from an Estate-based state, and legally securing power and influence continued to be effective—although they now had to be harmonized with the idea of a free and equal society of Bürger. The Catholic Church was therefore set free as one confession among others. Differences in belief thus acquired a new legal and social quality, and for the first time a standardized legal area, spanning the confessions, was assigned to ‘religion’.12 However, from the church’s perspective, the question now arose as to how the ‘rest’ of society was to be reached. The tension between the corporate hedging-in of the confession and its liberation as a religion reveals that, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the legal and institutional order of society could not adequately deal with the increasingly significant differentiation in how people lived their lives. In an industrializing, market-based society it was difficult (and quickly became unreasonable) to link earning one’s living with saving one’s soul. Conversely, the many social relationships into which their lives had to fit not only required combining these roles, but also binding them together into a biographical identity. For the institutional shape of religion this meant that the state-like (and thus privileged) corporation was not ultimately appropriate; even if, as was the case in the Bavarian Edict on Religion, it was already combined with the freedom of choice of confession. To be sure, however, organizing religion according to individual conscience was no longer completely unthinkable. Paragraph 16 of the Vienna Federal Act had suspended the territorial jus reformandi, guaranteed freedom of religion, and stated explicitly that choice of confession could not justify “differences in civil and political rights.”13 11

Hömig (1969: 30 pp., 64 pp.); Huber (1957: 416–441); Ammerich (2000). Huber (1957: 398). 13 On provisions relating to the church in the Reichsdeputationshauptschluß see Strätz (1978: 48). 12


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Confessional constitutionalism and the corporate privileges of the church together initially prevented this principle’s observation. Yet the legislators had not considered the confessionally mixed landscapes and confessional diasporas that had resulted from Napoleon’s cleanup operation, and which now became potentially explosive in the relationship between church and state. The eruption of the Cologne Troubles was a disquietingly dramatic demonstration of this. In 1837, in his Athanasius, Joseph Görres still spoke with complete abhorrence of the Belgian constitution, which had freed the church and completely separated it from the state. Lamennais and his ideas were still excluded.14 Not until the Paulskirche Constitution of 1848 was religion socially organized on the principle of individual conscience and protected by fundamental rights. The idea of a privileged corporation was abandoned, and the notion of ‘religious communities’ smoothed the differences between churches and sects. Henceforth, religion was to organize itself in ‘associations,’ which meant that piety finally lost any claim to priority among the many individual, personal motives and interests. After all, there was a rich associational life in which these manifold interests could publicly be articulated.15 II Internal Constitution: From the Aristocratic Church to a Bureaucratic Organization The development which changed the external institutional aspect of religion from the church as a state into a religious community with associational status also influenced the church’s internal organization. Above, I referred to this as its internal constitution and the relation of the religious to the social order. As the fundamental lines of development have now been made clear, both points can be discussed more generally. It is well known that the imperial church survived the Reformation only as part of noble society, and that it therefore remained an aristocratic church until secularization. This term therefore stands for a combination of power and property, reaching far down into the smallest branches of the church constitution, which, until the end of 14 15

von Görres (1998); Maier (1988: 157–188). Huber (1957: 779).

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the ancien regime, meant that political power too was seen primarily as domination. Therefore the separation of a lower, non-aristocratic secondary clergy from a higher, aristocratic, primary clergy repeated the worldly hierarchy of rule within the church. For this reason, spiritual offices in the church, right down to the village priest and his vicar, were benefices. This had far-reaching consequences for the internal shaping of the church, as the adoption of the function-orientated principles characteristic of bureaucratic organizations was often blocked. The defects in the constitution of the ecclesiastical states, which Josef Edler von Sartori had discovered in an oft-quoted treatise,16 applied equally to the church organization. The top positions in the church hierarchy were reserved for the high and middling Catholic aristocracy of the Empire. The same applied to the majority of positions in cathedral chapters, prelacies, and other canonries, which meant that the high and middling church offices were firmly integrated into the network underpinning aristocratic status and rule. This not only distorted and undermined the hierarchy of the church by the accumulation of offices—for example, the Wittelsbach Sekundogenituren in the NorthWest of the imperial church—but also frequently overlaid the canonical hierarchy with dynastic solidarities, as for example in the Schönborns’ patronage policy. The interests and objectives of officeholders were also shaped by these connections. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the bishops of the imperial church were, by education and in their own view, aristocratic cavaliers. In the dioceses this clerical feudalism meant that the cathedral chapters were largely not available to support the church administration, but rather developed their own aristocratic, Estate-based counterweight which even on spiritual matters worked against the spiritual leaders.17 In general, the direction and content of ministry was often blocked by the archdeaconates held by the canons, which broke the jurisdiction of the vicar-generals, and in general by the system of patronage among the lower clergy, which prevented a thorough-going overhaul of training for the ministry and significantly weakened the Episcopal powers of supervision and direction. Whereas as we have seen state legislation for the church revealed some continuity beyond the end of the ancien regime, secularization 16 17

von Sartori (1787). On this see, most recently, Andermann (2000).


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created space and pressure for a fundamental restructuring of the church as an institution. The fact that the previous state-like status of the church had evaporated in two directions affected the institutional position of the church within the German Confederation as a whole. The structures of the secular state had absorbed most of the church’s former state-like substance and transformed it into state supervision of the church. The other, much smaller part, had been taken by Rome. This happened at the moment when the Roman Curia (and not the bishops) appeared on the concordats as the contractual partner of the states of the German Confederation, and it was emphasized when the states initiated diplomatic relations of various sorts with the Holy See. In this situation Rome almost as a foregone conclusion assumed the role of guaranteeing the unity of the church. Thus the Catholic clergy’s Ultramontanism was also based on the episcopate’s inability to integrate independently of the state structures or in opposition to them. Only in the mood of national upheaval generated by the events of 1848 did the bishops of the German Confederation meet for the first time in a German Bishops’ Conference. But they did without claiming the rights of a national council and put themselves completely under the Pope’s authority on this point.18 This external hierarchization of the church was reflected in its internal re-organization. Since the collapse of the ancien regime, state power had definitively been transformed into politics by the separation of power and property; similarly, in the church, secularization separated office, at least in the upper ranks of the hierarchy, from benefice and property. This liberated the dynamic core of functional creative power in the church hierarchy, and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had already made considerable successes in the bureaucratization and professionalization of the spiritual institution possible. While the church was still treated as a corporation in legal terms, internally it gradually transformed itself into an efficient, bishop-centered organization. This began with the Offizialate, the bishops’ judicial authorities, which were restructured and whose jurisdictional competence was in future separated from that of the church administrative authorities. Cathedral chapters were de-feudalized. After a

18

Freisen (1916: vii pp., 5 pp.).

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brief period of transition during which—when the state church nominated bishops—the cathedral chapters lost a clearly defined field of duties, the canons took over offices subject to direction by the Episcopal administration. The efficiency and scope of Episcopal power improved markedly once the archdeacons had lost theirs and the deans’ administrations had been cut back. The Cologne Edict of 1827 mentioned that the newly installed deans would preserve the individual members of the diocesan clergy “from fatigue, and maintain them all in God-fearing and lively activity.” Priests were no longer able to appoint their own assistants; this power was given directly to the bishops.19 Directly after the secularization, the church lacked clergy prepared to engage in ministry. Nonetheless, by the third decade of the nineteenth century, the supply of priests had attained new standards of quality and depth. This was to a small extent because the orders were slowly gaining ground again, but it was mainly the result of setting up seminaries and reforming training for the ministry, which now, for the first time systematically, combined theological studies and preparation for pastoral work. From the 1830s, many priests were young, committed men who spoke confidently about their theological studies. They were all the more puzzled, therefore, why “of all social groups, priests have the lowest standing” among the general population, as a clergyman from Cologne put it in 1831 at a Conference of Deans.20 But this alienation had been underway for some time, and its origins lay in clerical professionalization itself. Priest’s libraries reveal that the intellectual horizons of the clergy and educated laymen had been moving further and further apart since the last third of the eighteenth century. An investigation of the paintings owned by priests would additionally show that the clergy was also being marginalized in aesthetic terms.21 III

Social Order and Religious Socialization

This observation again shows us that the whole process of the church’s institutional re-organization was only superficially to do with strength-

19 20 21

Eberts (1993: 71). Schlögl (1995: 144). Schlögl (2001 a: 139–44).


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ening it by adopting the principles of bureaucratic organization. At its heart lay the problem of the overlap between non-church forms of socialization and church membership. The complaints quoted at the beginning about the state of religion show that baptism alone was hardly enough to turn citizens into Catholics in a way which gave the church ‘reality’ and weight as a community of believers. So long as the church was an aristocratic church, at the supraregional level the church’s sovereignty itself, or that of the ruler equipped with the jus reformandi, took care of membership. At the local level, the rural community and the parish were identical as a living community. Thus the practice of faith and social regulation were so closely intertwined as to be indistinguishable.22 In the towns, this form of religious inclusion via social institutions had always been much more difficult because the legal, political, and social order had never, at any time, coincided with the parish. On the whole, therefore, for the urban communities the identity of social and religious integration could only be created symbolically, through processions or pilgrimages. The parish community was absorbed by the urban community. Parish schools, catechists, and the sacramental as well as social aspects of birth, marriage, and death linked social life and religious observance together, at least for the middle and upper classes. The various forms of voluntary religious socialization, such as confraternities and Marian congregations, had always been more significant in towns. Especially in the larger towns, it had been well-known since the beginning of the nineteenth century that increasing horizontal and vertical mobility threatened the parish association, and that stable inclusion in the church could no longer be achieved via the parish community alone.23 It is obvious that, with the loss of church sovereignty, the integration of people via upbringing and education, as well as baptism, acquired unprecedented significance. The issue of mixed marriages and the debate about confessional schools drew their dramatic and explosive quality from here. The family as the core of Catholic Christianity also belongs to this context.24 Against this background, however, the new forms of observance and ministry that increasingly characterized Catholicism since the 22 23 24

Holzem (2000: 55–155). Schlögl (1995: 178). Maier ( 2000).

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1830s also gained social and religious meaning. Lay missions, pilgrimages, and confraternities replaced the ties of parish and of a socialization that had already become fragile in the cities, but now those in many rural areas suffered the same fate. These forms of visible mass religiosity had the character of events, and therefore no longer presupposed a permanent identity of social and religious socialization in order to make the individual Christian a member of the church community of faith. The pilgrimage to the Holy Coat of Trier in 1844 was the provisional climax of this ecclesiastical success; it became synonymous with an expressive, ecstatic piety now possible in all classes, and made the church as a mass organization widely visible.25 Believers, however, were able to experience how fundamentally the times and the (social) forms of religiosity had changed in the fact that confraternities and pilgrimages were now firmly in the organizing and disciplining hands of the parish clergy—whereas just two generations earlier laymen had dominated in initiating and carrying out these activities. Intellectual Catholicism, finally, created friendship circles in Koblenz, Mainz, Landshut, and Munich. With publications such as Katholiken, which was first published in 1821 in Mainz, Eos, which was edited by Ringseis and Görres starting in 1828, and Historisch-politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland, which Görres was also involved in after 1838, they created media for milieu integration which made it possible for Catholicism to politicize itself without direct ties to churchbased piety.26 A Catholic association movement, which grew hesitantly in the 1840s before taking off rapidly with the Pius Associations of 1848, also built bridges between milieu-related social integration and the church—bridges which were able to differentiate themselves from a parish-bound church piety, and thus to overarch it. Nothing reveals the new position religion had found in the functionally differentiated spheres of bourgeois society since the second third of the nineteenth century more clearly than the fact that, although it could now be combined with political options, it was no longer possible to infer religion from politics, nor to predict the political from the religious position. Clemens Brentano had already accused Joseph Görres of scratching himself theologically when he had a political itch.27 25 26 27

Schieder (1974); Sperber (1984). Lill (1978). Brentano (1991: 254).

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Religious Conviction and Individuality

This brings us to the question of how the church’s social reorientation, and the associated institutional reorganization of religion, relate to the religious behavior of Catholic Christians. Scholarship finds it hard discover reliable answers. The few studies on the Habsburg area, the various regions and towns of France, and my own on towns in the Rhineland-Westphalia area (Cologne, Aachen, and Münster), however, supplement and support each other.28 The sources consulted were primarily inventories of books, wills, and Totenzettel (death announcements), but also the layman directed theological discourse in the form of prayer books and devotional books, because, naturally, individual motives and personal religious experience give rise to religion as a social phenomenon only when these individual convictions are communicated in social contexts. Discussion here will be limited to three aspects: first, the obvious change in the form of piety; second, the associated shifts in the economy of salvation; and finally, the place believers assigned Christianity in their own self-image. As already mentioned, since the last third of the eighteenth century the Catholic clergy in the process of professionalizing had shown less and less interest in ‘worldly knowledge.’ They began to ignore large areas of contemporary literature, art, and philosophy. Among lay people, the inventories of books document an almost contrary development. From 1780 to 1830, the proportion of religious titles in the possession of the urban bourgeoisie of the Rhine area fell from 30 to 10 per cent. In the lay intellectual world interests were obviously changing, and this increased the distance between them and their priests. In any case it was becoming increasingly questionable whether traditional religious forms were still appropriate. Wills show clearly that from the 1740s bequests ad pias causas, and especially those for saying masses for the soul of the departed, declined permanently and unavoidably, both in quantity and frequency. In 1820, fewer than 10 per cent of those leaving wills felt compelled to leave such bequests, whereas one century earlier the figure had been over 50 per cent; the number of masses donated also fell distinctly. Thus, as the image

28

Schlögl (1995); Pammer (1994). On France see McManners (1998).

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of God was reshaped, so the emphases in the economy of salvation changed. From the 1740s on, the urban bourgeoisie had increasingly dispensed, in their wills, with expressions in which salvation was bound directly to Christ’s redemptive death. The desire for saintly intercession for the soul, and especially by Mary, endured longer; but by the second decade of the nineteenth century bourgeois imaginations had developed a theology with room neither for punishment by a vengeful God nor for divine mercy—and certainly not for the intercession of the saints. It obviously suited the autonomous bourgeois subject better to expect salvation from the caring love of the divine, and from his or her own efforts. The theology of devotional and prayer books reacted to this retrograde development in the significance of church sacraments and treasury of merit for the salvation of believers by differently accenting the doctrine of salvation. Instead of continuing to stress renunciation of the world, much devotional literature from the second decade of the nineteenth century on reflects the bourgeois desire to contribute to their own salvation, by emphasizing that fulfilling the duties of their station in life and being successful in their professional lives was a means thereto. To be sure, this was done in the awareness that silent dedication of daily work, and not mingling religious norms with the rationalities of the other spheres, would make the difference. The Christian could very well attend to his duties as a citizen and a Christian on one and the same day, wrote Andreas Frey, a canonist from Bamberg. He argued that the church and the state did not need to take account of each other when declaring their respective holidays.29 Such expressions signaled acceptance that being a Christian did not encompass the totality of life, but that it had been reduced to a defined, special part of everyday life and one’s biography; and one whose relationship with the other aspects of personal identity was not without problems. The Totenzettel and the descriptions they give of the deceased’s life demonstrate how powerfully personal identity and Christian existence had been moving apart since the 1820s and in all social classes. These memorial devices contained prayers for and biographical information about the deceased. They spread since the end of the eighteenth century. On the occasion of a funeral they could be printed rapidly and handed out to the community, in this

29

Plassmann (1968: 107 pp.).


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way even disseminating a person’s life to the lower social classes. Although the Totenzettel could, in principal, be designed according to the preferences of the family members and were only exceptionally ‘advised’ from the side of clerics, particular conventions about the form and content were quickly established. Historically considered, they are most relevant since they entail not just the testaments, but also quite extensively document the spiritual beliefs of all layers of society. Whereas in the Totenzettel of the end of the eighteenth century it was customary to see the deceased’s identity as summed up in his soul, and to ask believers to pray for it, around 1840 the bourgeois concept of the subject in a functionally differentiated society had also reached this sphere. The name (and not the soul) now stood for the person, and mourners were exhorted to remember him or her. The full significance of this semantic change is revealed by the fact that it applied only to the middle classes and the artisan class, while the aristocracy continued to use the language of hierarchical, Old European society. Finally, the form in which the person was presented also changed markedly. More and more frequently, the different roles in the life of the deceased as described in the Totenzettel fell into separate compartments, as the husband was placed next to the father and the successful merchant, artisan, or conscientious official. And only then— but by no means in every case—was the reader reminded that the deceased had lived as a Christian. In the Totenzettel of the end of the eighteenth century, by contrast, the brief formula ‘lived as a Christian’ could still be used to describe the integral wholeness of a successful life. In conclusion, a dramatic process of transforming social structures culminated in secularization as a historical event, which then increased the pace of further change. I have described how, in the course of this structural shift, which permanently replaced the Old European hierarchical social order with a functionally differentiated bourgeois society, religion took a new place in the social structure.30 This necessarily involved a change in the form of religion; the Catholic

30

One issue to discuss is what contribution the religion of pre-modern times made to the rise of modernity itself. See Schlögl (2001 b: 34 pp.) and von Greyerz (2000: 325–41).

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Church’s legal position vis-à-vis state and society changed, as it transformed itself from a sovereign association to one religious community among many—though certainly a privileged one. In its internal structure, it merged hierarchical order and bureaucratic principles of organization after the abolition of the system of benefices, while the plurality of life orders in nineteenth-century society made new forms of integrating social contexts and membership of a confession possible and necessary. In them, however, piety and church membership sometimes moved so far apart that other differences, such as that between religion and politics, were blurred again. Finally, there are references by Catholics to how difficult it became to integrate being a Christian with the differentiated roles of bourgeois life. These processes did not always run completely parallel in temporal terms; but each one individually and all of them in their entirety can be ‘understood’ if they are brought into connection with the transformation of social structural patterns to which I have alluded. One substantive and one methodological conclusion can be drawn from this. The substantive conclusion is that the Romantic hope for a new social unity and individual subjectivity in religion was not realized, and where it was attempted the result came close to integralistic fundamentalism. In the modern world religion was (and remained) one social sphere among many. The methodological conclusion is that it makes sense to observe the world from the perspective of religion, and then to speak of secularization. This can also imply an irreversible alienation from the church. From its origins, secularization concerns the place religion occupies in the social structure of the world, and consequently the form in which religion possible and necessary in these structures. Thus, to cite re-Christianization or a ‘Catholic revival’ as arguments against secularization is only to a limited extent helpful; and therefore, in this case, historians are well advised to accept the judgment of theologians. Translated by Angela Davies References Andermann, Kurt (2000). “Die geistlichen Staaten am Ende des Alten Reiches.” In: Historische Zeitschrift 271: 593–619. Ammerich, Hans (ed.). 2000. Das bayerische Konkordat 1817. Weißenhorn: Konrad.


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Aretin, Karl Otmar Freiherr von (1997). Das alte Reich 1648–1806, Vol. 3. Das Reich und der österreichisch-preußische Dualismus (1745–1806). Stuttgart: Klett & Cotta. Brentano, Clemens (1991). Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Christiano, Kevin J., William H. Swatos, Jr. and Peter Kivisto (eds.) (2002). Sociology of religion. Contemporary developments. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press. Eberts, Michael N. (1993). “’Ein Haus voll Glorie schauet . . .’ Modernisierungsprozesse der römisch-katholischen Kirche im 19. Jahrhundert.” In: Schieder, Wolfgang (ed.). Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Klett Cotta. 62–85. Eder, Klaus (2002). “Europäische Säkularisierung. Ein Sonderweg in die postsäkulare Gesellschaft? Eine theoretische Anmerkung.” In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 12: 331–343. Freisen, Joseph (1916). Verfassungsgeschichte der katholischen Kirche Deutschlands in der Neuzeit. Aufgrund des katholischen Kirchen—und Staatskirchenrechts dargestellt. Leipzig: Teubner. von Görres, Joseph (1998). “Athanasius.” In: Hürten, Heinz (ed.). Gesammelte Schriften. Vol 17. Paderborn: Schoeningh. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm (1997). “Dechristianisierung: Zur Problemgeschichte eines kulturpolitischen Topos.” In: Lehmann, Hartmut (ed.). Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven in der Forschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 32–66. von Greyerz, Kaspar (2000). Religion und Kultur: Europa 1500 –1800. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hahn, Alois (1997). “Religion, Säkularisierung und Kultur.” In: Lehmann, Hartmut (ed.). Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven in der Forschung, Rechristianisierung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 17–32. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle (2000). Religion as a chain of memory. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press. Holzem, Andreas (2000). Religion und Lebensformen: Katholische Konfessionalisierung im Sendgericht des Fürstbistums Münster 1570–1800. Paderborn: Schoeningh. Hömig, Dieter and Klaus Dieter (1969). Der Reichsdeputationshauptschluß vom 25. Februar 1803 und seine Bedeutung für Staat und Kirche. Tübingen: Mohr. Huber, Ernst Rudolf (1957). Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Knoblauch, Hubert (2002). “Ganzheitliche Bewegungen, Transzendenzerfahrungen und die Entdifferenzierung von Kultur und Religion in Europa.” In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 3: 295–307. Lehmann, Hartmut (ed.) (1997). Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven in der Forschung, Rechristianisierung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lill, Rudolf (1978). “Die Anfänge der katholischen Bewegung in Deutschland.” In: Jedin, Hubert (ed.). Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte. Vol. 6. Freiburg: Herder. Lottes, Günther (1997). “Die Geistlichen Staaten und die Herrschaftskonkurrenz im Reich.” In: Weinzierl, Michael (ed.). Individualisierung, Rationalisierung, Säkularisierung: Neue Wege der Religionsgeschichte. Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik. 96–111. Luckmann, Thomas (2002). “Veränderungen von Religion und Moral im modernen Europa.” In: Berliner Journal für Soziologie 12: 285–293. Luhmann, Niklas (2000). Die Religion der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Maier, Hans (1988). Revolution und Kirche. Zur Frühgeschichte der christlichen Demokratie. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder. Maier, Joachim (2000). “Kirche und Schule. Auseinandersetzungen um Schulform und geistliche Schulaufsicht im konfessionell gemischten Staaten.” In: Ammerich, Hans and Johannes Gut (eds.). Zwischen ‘Staatsanstalt’ und Selbstbestimmung: Kirche und Staat in Südwestdeutschland vom Ausgang des Alten Reiches bis 1870. Stuttgart: Thorbecke. 269–293.

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McLeod, Hugh (2000). Secularization in Western Europe 1848–1914. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McManners, John (1998). Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France. Vol. 2: Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Novalis. Werke (1978). Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, vol. ii. Hans Joachim Mähl and Richard Samuel (eds.). Munich: Beck. Pammer, Michael (1994). Glaubensabfall und wahre Andacht: Barockreligiösität, Reformkatholizismus und Laizismus in Oberösterreich 1700–1820. Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik. Plassmann, Engelbert (1968). Staatskirchenrechtliche Grundgedanken der deutschen Kanonisten an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert. Freiburg: Herder. Pollack, Detlef (1990). “Vom Tischrücken zur Psychodynamik. Formen außerkirchlicher Religiosität in Deutschland.” In: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Soziologie 16: 107–134. Sartori, Joseph von (1787). “Statistische Abhandlung über die Mängel in der Regierungsverfassung der geistlichen Wahlstaaten und von den Mitteln, solchen abzuhelfen.” In: Journal von und für Deutschland 4: 121–163. Schieder, Wolfgang (1974). “Kirche und Revolution: Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte der Trierer Wallfahrt von 1844.” In: Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 14: 419–454. Schlegel, Friedrich (1988). Kritische Schriften und Fragmente (1798–1801). Vol. 2. Paderborn: Schoeningh. Schleiermacher, Friedrich (1799). Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. Berlin: de Gruyter. Schlögl, Rudolf (1995). Glaube und Religion in der Säkularisierung. Die katholische Stadt: Köln, Aachen, Münster. 1700–1840. Munich: Oldenbourg. ——. (2001 a). “Geschmack und Interesse: Privater Bildbesitz in rheinisch-westfälischen Städten vom 18. bis zum beginnenden 19. Jahrhundert.” In: Thamer, Hans-Ulrich (ed.). Bürgertum und Kunst in der Neuzeit. Cologne: Böhlau. 123–147. ——. (2001 b). “Historiker, Max Weber und Niklas Luhmann: Zum schwierigen (aber möglicherweise produktiven) Verhältnis von Geschichtswissenschaft und Systemtheorie.” In: Soziale Systeme 7: 23–45. ——. (2002). “Der Glaube Alteuropas und die moderne Welt. Zum Verhältnis von Säkularisation und Säkularisierung.” In: Rödel, Walter G. and Regina E. Schwerdtfeger (eds.). Zerfall und Wiederbeginn. Vom Erzbistum zum Bistum Mainz (1792/97–1830). Ein Vergleich. Festschrift für Friedhelm Jürgensmeier. Würzburg: Echter. 63–82. ——. (2003). “Secularization. German Catholicism on the Eve of Modernity.” In: Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London 25, 1: 5–21. Sperber, Jonathan (1984). Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Strätz, Hans-Wolfgang (1978). “Die Säkularisation und ihre nächsten staatskirchenrechtlichen Folgen.” In: Langner, Albrecht (ed.). Säkularisation und Säkularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert. Munich: Schoeningh. 31–62. Thomas, Günther (2001). Implizite Religion. Theoriegeschichtliche und theoretische Untersuchungen zum Problem ihrer Identifikation. Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag. Wohlrab-Sahr, Monika (2000). “‘Luckmann 1960’ und die Folgen. Neuere Entwicklungen in der deutschsprachigen Religionssoziologie.” In: Soziologie 3: 36–60.

RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE: THE RISE OF MODERN SOCIAL SCIENCE FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF CONCEPTUAL HISTORY Daniel ”uber Il faut répudier les vestiges de moralisme, religieux ou politique, qui inspirent souterrainement nombre d’interrogations d’apparence épistémologique.1

I Introduction The following contribution deals with intellectual developments that occurred in the field of academic knowledge since modern times. Historians of ideas have often hinted at the close affinity between religion, philosophy and modern science.2 Generally, the emergence of modern science since the sixteenth century is interpreted as altering the cultural bedrocks of the ancient world for all time, and also as bringing down the traditional barriers between religion, politics and science. Starting from this assumption, this study traces eminent transitional momentums in the process of secularization of knowledge. This term refers to a particular form of secularization which could be specified as reflexive secularization. Reflexive secularization shall stand for a typical conceptual strategy practiced by scientists, which points in the direction of undermining inherited theological-transcendental connotations of knowledge. The presented story begins in the scene where the spheres of religion, philosophy, and political thought had not yet been separated. The first part of this contribution follows the intellectual formations and social settings of conceptual strategies which contributed to the

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Bourdieu (1997: 11). With systematic intentions, Hegel’s Phenomenology and Comte’s Law of the Three Stages, among many others, embraced particular interpretations of this relationship. The late Durkheim gave a vague but original account indicating the religious roots of modern science. For the European context, authors like Löwith, Voegelin, Blumenberg, and Gogarten, in the wake of Schmitt, have opposed the secularization thesis from a cultural historical viewpoint. 2

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overthrow of established notions to the emergence of the social sciences in second half of the nineteenth century. The pride of place will be devoted to their treatment by the founding fathers of modern sociology. The German scholar Friedrich H. Tenbruck has argued that modern social science conveyed particular cultural visions about man’s position in the world, which had been neglected by the majority of twentieth century sociologists. They had thus fuelled current misunderstandings about the status of sociology.3 Comte, Marx, Spencer, and others linked up in the idea that a rational and secularized world view must be instituted, replacing the traditional forms of community (Gemeinschaft ). This had taken up the responsibilities formerly mediated by religion.4 The crisis of contemporary social science, Tenbruck concluded, could only be resolved by means of a reassessment of its cultural-historical roots. We want to pursue this line of thought by examining how Weber, Simmel, and Mannheim embarked on prevalent philosophical concepts, while at the same time incorporated them into a genuine ‘theory of knowledge’ and added a distinct meaning to them. Still today, the epistemological efforts of sociological classics are denied their philosophical ingenuity. In the final part of this contribution this common sense shall be challenged against the background of the developments presented in the first part of this study. II ‘The Old Studies’:5 the Unity of Religion, Politics and Philosophy In 1902 the German neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband wrote that philosophy no longer intended “to derive a religion from science, as the neo-Platonists or the deists of Enlightenment had attempted.”6 He thus made the distinction between modern philosophical knowledge on the one hand and a peculiar constellation where the modern separation of religion, politics and philosophy did not qualify on the other. The following may hint at some historical watersheds in 3

Tenbruck (1984). See also Wahl (2000) who starts from similar starting points. Tenbruck (1984: 63, 76). 5 I borrow that term from Hall (1983: 210) where it refers to the pre-modern form of academia. 6 Windelband (1915c: 295). 4

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the development of the pre-modern notion of knowledge to modernity. The history of Western science since the early Middle Ages was substantially shaped by the respective form of connection between theological and philosophical knowledge. Medieval science modeled theology at the center and, at the same time, at the top of all intellectual ambition. It was Aquinas who posited a division between philosophy and theology which carried with it a particular conceptual tension.7 Accordingly, philosophy as the highest form of human reasoning could not grasp the transcendence of God. It was only God Himself who could bestow knowledge of transcendental matters. Aquinas continued to assert that, in principle, philosophical investigation would also have to be devoted to knowledge of the world’s principles. Intentionally or not, he thus supplied the seed which would later breed the overcoming of theology in the name of (philosophical) reason. This process took the form of ardent attempts, encouraged by men of science, to reveal the Godly plan within their respective academic fields. The achievements of natural scientists like Kepler and Galilei supported the emancipation of reason and nature from theological pretensions. However, their personal fates remonstrated the close interconnectedness between theological, philosophical and political motives in Central European medieval society. Finally, the sixteenth century bore the phenomenon that outstanding academics “flourished in the service of a prince.”8 This is personified by Leibniz, who rejected many invitations to academic positions and deliberately opted for political services. He acted out of the impression that a political career would serve better in his ambition to reunify Christian civilization. A closer look at the writings of such alleged leading figures of early Enlightenment, like Locke, Hobbes, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and others reveals the prevalence of conventional theological topics. Hence, the idea of an abrupt revolutionary dismissal of religious matters, which was occasionally spread, must not be upheld. The German scholar Rainer Specht has argued profoundly (notably with regard to empiricism and rationalism) that modern philosophy widely accepted the main kernel of medieval natural theology.9 Typically, each of the cited authors provided a genuine theory of Creation. In general, 7 8 9

See among others Pannenberg (1996: 26 pp.). Hall (1983: 210). Specht (2000: 24).

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they agreed upon the idea, which had already been at the core of medieval science, that nature was imbued with reason and structured according to a Godly plan. For apostles of Leibniz and Descartes, the profound efficiency of nature discovered in natural laws eventually postulated the existence of God.10 For this reason, Descartes’ physics was not grounded on a mechanical notion of force, but rested upon God as the prime mover. Rationalist philosophers up to Kant presupposed that man’s faculties of knowing were bestowed by God. In the following account, the ideological departure from theologicaltranscendental notions will be interpreted as a move towards secularization of knowledge. III

Secularization in the Name of PHILOSOPHY : from GOD to GEIST

Historians of ideas have ascribed the beginning of sociology to varied philosophical pedigree movements, such as the French Enlightenment (Rousseau, Montesquieu), the Scottish Moralists, or Marxism.11 From the point of view of intellectual history, the field of a genuine scientific discipline elaborating ‘society’ had only been sown by Hegel. He had instituted the domain of Gesellschaft as an autonomous social sphere at the side of ‘state’ and ‘family.’12 This innovation becomes pivotal with regard to the history of social science. Hegel conceived of these spheres as being governed by one and the same driving force, namely the ‘Spirit’ (Geist ). So defined, a distinction between the human and social sciences was not yet discernible.13 Hegel’s account brought forth another intellectual innovation: it added a particular, novel historical-philosophical impetus to the notion of secularization.14 It presaged the initial concepts of a social science, even though figures like Comte, Marx, Droysen, and Spencer fiercely rejected Hegel’s interpretation on the centripetal forces of history.

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See (2000: 28). See among others Aron (1968), Jonas (1980), Manicas (1987), Olson (1993), and Singer (2004). 12 Szacki (1979: 133 pp.), Koselleck (1996: 120 pp.), Wagner (2001: 129). 13 It, thus, had only been in the course of historical procession in the second half of the nineteenth century that they were perceived as constituting two different ‘cultures.’ For this process and its preconditions see Lepenies (1985). 14 Conze (1984: 791). 11


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Recently, his philosophy has been recounted as a “project of reconciliation.”15 While the question of the relationship of his system towards theology or even Christianity remains intricate today,16 it is understood that he aimed at reconciling the philosophical consciousness of his time with the prevalent political and social conditions.17 In consequence, secularization meant the integration of theological, or rather Christian, values on a higher level of philosophical reflection.18 The paradigm-shifting momentum of Hegel’s approach is embodied in the all-embracing category of the Spirit, since it gave rise to the possibility to account for large-scale and longue durée interactions.19 The hypothesis unfolded in the following chapters assumes that, both, the establishment of human and social sciences must be understood as a turning away from theological principles. Both meet in the effort to relocate the structuring intellectual ideas—God, reason, and Spirit—into an original theoretical framework, and adopt them to modern contexts. Depicting Hegel as the key figure that, at the threshold of the modern age, refurbished traditional theological and political concepts, imbuing them with new meanings, requires some information about the social-structural settings of Hegel’s period. Like many other scholars, the German conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck has hinted at the significance of Saint Augustine’s doctrine of the two kingdoms, the celestial and terrestrial realm, which had informed Western intellectual history throughout.20 Hence, at the heart of not only theological and metaphysical, but also philosophical thinking, there was

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See Hardimon (1994) and Lilla (2001). Lilla (2001: 862). 17 Before Hegel, Kant had already staged a “theological-political revolution“ (Lilla 1998). He had limited religion to inner morality and, thus, curtailed the weight of the churches. He declared development of morality to the ultimate aim of human activity to which religion necessarily had to contribute. However, according to Kant, religion could do so directly while politics, in turn, only indirectly. In summary, religion has been dignified by Kant as a human need whereas it was, simultaneously, rooted out of its dogmatic predicaments (Lilla 1998: 432). 18 See Zabel (1984: 812). 19 The Kantian thought style, in contrast to the Hegelian, appears to be relatively restricted and inflexible with regard to the capacity to account for complex relations of that kind. Instead, hardly anything could be stated about ‘real’ correlations from a strict Kantian perspective that would rely upon the hiatus between the noumena (things-in-themselves) and the phenomena (appearances). 20 See Koselleck (2003: 182) and his contribution in this volume. See also OeingHanhoff (1964: 78 pp., 89 pp.). 16

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a strict division between the spiritual and the worldly.21 In the wake of the Hegelian attempt to ‘sublate’ both realms by means of a reappraisal of history of thought, successors like Feuerbach, Marx, Comte, and Dilthey “all dispense with a rigorous separation between the beyond and the here.”22 With regard to the perception of a new age this was of crucial importance, since it brought with it a conception of time that had abandoned the Christian eschatological implications. Instead, the latter has been secularized in that it was taken for granted that “all tasks and challenges are to be solved within historical time, with and through historical time itself.”23 Thus secularization and temporalization make up two sides of the same coin. No longer did God appear as the master of historical progression, but man himself entered the stage of history. At this stage we encounter a critical conceptual shift that shall be elaborated in more detail. This intellectual innovation was induced and supported by everyday experience, however. Especially the repercussions of the French Revolution had demonstrated that political constitutions could alternate within a very short sequence of time. As had been affirmed pervasively, the modern notion of ‘revolution,’ which stands in a particular contrast to its original meaning, is rooted in this episode.24 The decoupling of human creation from transcendental forces was fostered by industrial and economic innovations like telegraphy, the steam engine, and the railway. The acceleration of transformations profoundly shattered the conventional metaphysical accounts and transcendental visions. The circulation of concepts which transported a temporal index were disseminated at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century;25 the most prominent ones, i.e. progress and development, very soon received (meta)philosophical ennoblement.26 Philosophers like Kant and Tennemann had already introduced a “philosophising history of philosophy, that was itself a strand of philosophy”27

21 Manicas (1987: 7) depicted Copernicus the figure that had initiated the dissolution of this cosmology and, at the same time, inaugurated the modern one. 22 Koselleck (2003: 183). 23 Koselleck (2003: 183). See also Giesen (1992). 24 For a broad account see Koselleck (1969). An overview can be obtained from Giesen and ”uber (forthcoming). 25 See Koselleck (2000: 339 pp.) and Bollenbeck (1996: 75 pp.). 26 See Plessner (1962: 100). 27 Oeing-Hanhoff (1964: 96).


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before Hegel supplied a philosophical system in the form of a fullscale history of thought. It comes as no surprise that this period also saw the emergence of the ‘historical consciousness’ in Germany, which had risen to a central cultural momentum in the course of the nineteenth century. What is probably most characteristic of the German development is the fact that political-institutional and philosophical-ideological transformations went hand in hand, thereby stimulating each other. Representative of the close connection between these spheres is the materialization of a peculiar “transcendental code”28 among the Romanticist intellectuals in Germany. Novalis even claimed that “poets and priests should again be one.”29 These indications alone suggest that philosophy was heir to timehonored, religious-theological pretensions.30 We will take a more cautious look at the dominating cultural movements in order to understand the origins of those philosophical roots which bred the idea of the social sciences. The indicated modification can again be discerned within the development of Hegel’s own thinking. He had changed his mind on the question of which historical agent was bestowed with the potential to bring about man’s reconciliation with the world. While the young Hegel assumed that the existential rift between thought (Denken) and being (Sein) could only have been overcome by “religion as a way of life,” the (more) mature Hegel of the ‘Phenomenology of the Spirit’ gave the task of ultimate reconciliation to philosophy.31 He wanted to push philosophical thinking to surmount its archetypal “fear of truth”32 that he had attributed to Kantian as well as Romantic thinkers. Rather, he called for philosophy to “follow the negative power of the false to realize truth.”33 The etymology of the concept ‘Geist’ displays that it was attributed those features which traditionally had been assigned to God.34 The Christian category, as Kant’s ethical and historical-philosophical writings testify, was potently

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Bernhard Giesen (1998: 80 pp.) gives a splendid image of this development. Giesen (1998: 82). 30 It was probably Plessner (1962: 93) who inaugurated the afterwards manifold reappraised allegation according to which philosophy meant an ersatz religion for the Germans in 18th century. 31 Lilla (2001: 869 pp., 890). 32 Hegel (1986: 70). 33 Lilla (2001: 872). 34 See Marquard (1974: 182, 187). 29

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lurking in the background. Yet Kant refused to incorporate the concept of the ‘Spirit’ systematically into his transcendental philosophy.35 Only in the work of Hegel did it acquire philosophical-systematic prominence.36 The idealist movement not only exerted a major influence on the cultural-political discourse in general, but also on the formation of the key institutions that emerged in Germany in the ensuing decades. However, its influence cannot be traced straightaway, since their principles amalgamated with other theoretical assessments carried forward by ideological as well as political societies. Authors like Ringer, Giesen, and Bollenbeck have elaborated on the minutiae necessary to contrive a coalition between academic, administrative, and governmental agents, which would not only lead to the realization of the particular ‘German’ idea of university in Berlin,37 but secure the major role that academics would play in public life until the Great War.38 Without going into detail, the singular career of the concepts of Bildung and Kultur, unparalleled in Western intellectual history, shall be outlined.39 Both concepts condensed some of the key ideas of idealist philosophy in a form that would make them applicable in praxis. Symbolically, a representative phrase by Fritz Ringer that indicates the prominent position of academics—who were expected to orientate about the major cultural-political issues—shall be quoted: The whole complex of institutional, social, and cultural pattern which insured the mandarin’s influence had its center at the universities. No one could speak with more authority for the elite as a whole than the men of learning, the ‘mandarin intellectuals.’40

Drawing on a close examination of primary sources, Ringer saw himself entitled to conclude that “Idealism was a creed as well as a philosophy from the very beginning.”41 Even for remnants of the 35

For a systematic philosophical evaluation of Kant’s failure to restore the idea of God into philosophy see Jaeschke (1986: 24–90). 36 In Schelling it was connected to aesthetical experience. See Marquard (1974: 183 pp.). 37 In fact, the preconditions of the establishment of the so-called HumboldtUniversity were so specific that one spoke of a “miracle” that it did, as a matter of fact, succeed. See Ellwein (1992: 111). 38 Ringer (1969), Bollenbeck (1996), and Giesen (1998). 39 See Bollenbeck (1996: 129 pp.). 40 Ringer (1969: 81). 41 Ringer (1969: 96).


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idealist movement in the beginning of the twentieth century, e.g. Wilhelm Windelband, it was still sacrosanct that “philosophy is the science of the principles of absolute judgment”42—and, thus, of moral and ethical import. Many academics welcomed the new task delegated to them; but, for certain reasons, philosophers resolutely refused to conflate science and politics. These circumstances hint at a particular historical constellation. It has only recently been taken into account that the development of German academic philosophy since the 1840s ran in an opposite direction than did, above all, the various strands of Historicism.43 According to Ringer and others, the ‘crisis’ of the traditional system had unfolded only since the 1890s.44 In contrast, Herbert Schnädelbach, the author of another eminent contribution to the history of nineteenth century German philosophy, deemed the coincidence that the influence of philosophy on public affaires began to vanish right at the moment when it peaked in the newly established system of university and “irony.”45 Correspondingly, the severe “crisis of identity”46 within academic philosophy had finally resulted in a “revolution of the very concept of science.”47 This meant, among other things, the abandonment of the “mandarin doctrine that the university must be dedicated to the search for a ‘total,’ philosophical verity.”48 We can assume that the move towards scientization49 taken by philosophy ran counter to the inherited theological program. In order to come to terms with the meta-theoretical stance of modern science it makes sense to focus on the labyrinthine paths which had unfurled between natural science and human sciences on one side and philosophy on the other. The borderlines, which had been established in the aftermath of the decay of idealist systematic philosophy 42

Windelband (1915 a: 46). The stupendous effort undertaken by Klaus Christian Köhnke (1991) to reissue the history of post-Hegelian German philosophy have brought to surface many exiting details and insights about that period which will be subject to further elaborations in the decades to come. 44 Ringer (1969: 253 pp.), Lichtblau (1996: 398), and Bambach (1995: 5). 45 Schnädelbach (1999: 88 pp.). 46 Schnädelbach (1999: 89, 119). 47 Schnädelbach (1999: 22). 48 Ringer (1969: 106). 49 The term ‘scientization’ refers to the “development of a closed of a closed, formal ‘self-referential’ discourse,” thereby using the definition introduced by Peter Wagner and Björn Wittrock (1991 b: 333, 337). 43

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since the 1840s, had been invigorated by ethical-scientific problematiques, which were current in the discourse about the possibilities of a scientific social science half a century later. To put our problem into a single question: ‘what happened to the ‘Spirit,’ which had compensated for the loss of the theoretical function of God as a fundamental principle?’ IV

Secularization in the Name of SCIENCE : the CRISIS of Knowledge

Before we turn to the social sciences, short notes about the new criteria of scientific knowledge brought about by the cited “revolution” are required. Köhnke has pointed to the political reverberations of the 1848 Revolution as a turning point in the history of modern philosophy. The subsequent years ushered in an institutional as well as public dwindling of its reputation, which can be immediately grasped by such factors as the massive closing of philosophical journals and the heavy decline of the number of students and docents.50 The reasons for this development are intricate. Philosophy was trapped between the Scylla of playing the role that idealism had bestowed on it on one side, i.e. providing political and cultural orientation, and the Charybdis of becoming deprived of its scientific status on the other. The pressure on philosophy to get rid of speculative presumptions was enforced by the rise of the special sciences and by the separation of the natural sciences from philosophy. Suddenly, the former leader in the system of sciences itself was in the position to justify its scientific character. Even greater pressure was put on philosophy by the political leaders in the aftermath of the failed 1848 Revolution. In reaction to the self-restriction of philosophers, who opted for a clear distinction between philosophy and religion, those functionaries launched an attack against so-called pantheist elements in philosophy, which was supported by radical conservative representatives of philosophy. In the preface to his ‘Philosophy of Right,’ Friedrich Julius Stahl, the rector of Berlin university between 1852–1853, wrote: . . . respect for philosophy is now lower than at any time in the history of civilized nations. . . . A well-deserved judgement has been passed 50

Köhnke (1991: 77 pp., 198 pp.; 1993: 311).


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on philosophy . . . the way of thinking to which all modern (rationalist-pantheist) philosophy belongs has at its centre a denial of the living God and that the disruption in church and state is only the ultimate practical fulfilment of the philosophical teaching admired for so long.51

Considering that at that time the process of separation of church and state had not yet been initiated in Germany,52 it becomes more understandable why any attempt to promote the autonomy of philosophical reflection was perceived as a dangerous step towards secularization. The consequences of that association were disastrous for philosophy. The prosecution of allegedly anti-religious doctrines went so far that even conservative philosophers like Erdmann and Braniß had to defend themselves. Carl von Prantl and Kuno Fischer had been dismissed from their teaching assignments. Most characteristic is the mere fact that such eminent philosophical figures like Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, and Marx were doomed to support their careers outside of the university. The loss of philosophy’s reputation is directly connected to its ideological function. In the political atmosphere of 1850s Germany, scientization was equated with secularization in its negative connotation. However, German philosophy resisted the call uttered by political and ideological leaders, but followed its way towards strict scientific values and criteria. The move towards scientization had many different faces. It was around the mid of the nineteenth century that philosophical sub-disciplines like history of philosophy, epistemology, theory of science (Wissenschaftstheorie), and psychology obtained their modern form. Moreover, the formation of such disciplines meant a turning towards the practices of the new special sciences and a shifting away from metaphysics and speculative philosophy that, by then, was predominantly symbolized by the Hegelian system. Which institution succeeded philosophy now that it had refused to fulfill any meta-scientific needs? Not coincidentally, reference has to be made to a broad theoretical movement that sprang from idealist philosophy itself, namely Historicism. The dispute between Hegel and Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the leading figure of the Historical

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Köhnke (1991: 90). Peter Wagner and Björn Wittrock (1991 a: 11) have indicated that even “in the early twentieth century a sociologist could still be denied a professorship on the grounds that it was both inappropriate and dangerous to establish a concept of society besides those well-understood and appreciated ones of church and state.” 52

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School of Jurisprudence, signifies the moment at which the separation of Historicism from idealist system philosophy became overt.53 Although it is not possible to associate the doctrine of Historicism with a certain author or philosophical school, its influence was so pertinent that the nineteenth century was even labeled the century of history.54 As a matter of fact, almost all domains of the later socalled Geisteswissenschaften were largely influenced by the Historicist concept of science.55 It was based on the conviction that dealing with ‘historical individuals,’ i.e. singular historical events or personalities, informed also the present with values and ethical orientation. For that reason, the introduction of definite historical methods spurred the process of scientization on the one hand, while it still claimed to promote central values by exemplifying singular events in detail on the other. The function of value systems that underlie historical descriptions was to imbue the historical process with a certain meaning and purpose (Zweck). Thus, Historicism still relied upon a certain notion of the ‘Spirit,’ historical ‘reason,’ and metaphysical force as the organizing principle. The Historicist conception, however, featured some significant differences to the former. Ranke wrote that each historical period was ‘immediate to God,’ which implied that the historical process could not be conceived as a fulfillment of one single Godly plan. Hegel’s phenomenology still perpetuated the idea of one single mover of history. The Historicist model thus introduced a polytheist notion of Geist. We find here the same paradox that had led philosophy to give up on the task of orientation entirely. By the end of the nineteenth century the historicist model of science was challenged by critics like Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, and others. Scholtz has hinted at the failure of historians to provide evidence for their normative assumptions as a major cause for the upcoming “crisis of historicism” (Troeltsch).56 Yet for another reason the Historicist doctrine of measuring historical epochs and events only in terms of criteria taken from the same objective structure lost its appeal. As Nietzsche already indicated, the sheer number of historical accounts produced over the last decades would devalue any single explanation. The 53 54 55 56

For details see Rothacker (1930: 40 pp.) and Schnädelbach (1999: 291 pp.). Tenbruck (1959: 595). See Iggers (1976: 4 pp.). Scholtz (1991: 47).


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problem implied in this constellation would later be coined the problem of relativism. This is important to mention, because the soon-toemerge discourse on social sciences centered around the quest for an ‘objective’ knowledge. At the next stage, Wilhelm Dilthey will be portrayed as the central figure. He not only strove to provide a theoretical foundation to the practice of historical work, but also should be considered the starting point of the theoretical discourse on the social sciences in general.57 His effort to constitute a theory of a different type of knowledge, apart and independent from the natural sciences, had strong influence on Simmel’s and Weber’s conceptions of sociology as well as Husserl’s and Heidegger’s versions of phenomenology. Before proceeding to work out the confines of his theoretical framework, we want to resituate the questions which Dilthey attempted to answer. It is crucial to notice that, for philosophers of Dilthey’s generation, the political and cultural climate in Germany had changed drastically in the wake of the so-called Kulturkampf of the late 1870s. It brought about a liberalization of societal domains from any immediate ideological involvement and, most importantly, an institutional division of church and state. Science policy became relatively unrestricted by ideological motifs. Consequently, the number of philosophical tenures at universities and philosophical journals increased markedly. Different theoretical schools could eventually concentrate on genuinely philosophical problems instead of adhering to those imposed on them from outside. The vast number of approaches were centered around the critical task to deliver a new foundation for empirical knowledge. Philosophy had to deal with the type of knowledge that was produced by the special sciences and, thereby, had to dispense with any metaphysical categories that had integrated the works in the human sciences so far. In this situation many philosophers fell back on Kant as a point of reference. However, to associate the rising movement of neo-Kantianism with a particular philosophical position would be misleading.58 They had little more in common

57 Dilthey’s significance for the establishment of sociology as an autonomous discipline has been acknowledged and elaborated by a small number of scholars such as Johach (1974), Acham (1985, 1992), Guillemin (1998), and Bakker (1999). 58 Köhnke (1991: 136 pp., 206 pp.).

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than Kant as a starting point. A handful of alternative founding disciplines and approaches were offered by the 1880s, such as psychology, logic, anthropology, epistemology, positivism, empiricism, and materialism. The extent of concern that the crisis of knowledge was met by contemporary scientists might best be grasped from a note that Dilthey set down in a letter in the early 1880s: The great crisis of science and European culture, which we face these days, affects my frame of mind so completely and deeply that it has extinguished any personal ambitions in me.59

In order to evaluate this expression in balanced terms, let me recall that the overthrow of the idealist system, which had borne the human sciences until the late nineteenth century, meant an “epoch-making turn.”60 Let me again quote from a manuscript of Dilthey’s: Idealist pathos has lost its effectiveness. . . . Our mood is, in this respect, nearer to that of Voltaire, Diderot, or Frederick the Great than to that of Goethe or Schiller.61

Philosophy was suddenly in the difficult position of maneuvering on a completely secular ground, and thus had to invent new methods and conceptual tools. The struggles of philosophers like Dilthey, who committed his whole life to the task of creating an adequate and general theory of knowledge, can only be understood in terms of that difficult constellation. They shared a common awareness of the complexity and intricacy of the venture ahead.62 Typically, Dilthey maintained that the crisis could only be resolved by means of philosophy itself. He thus defined the role philosophy had to perform as “to organize the work of the human sciences,” since Only when we succeed in developing anthropological reflection, inner experience, and the human sciences positively can the Spiritual life of Europe receive a new impetus.63

Dilthey’s theory of knowledge shall now be outlined, with special regard to its implications for philosophical reflection in general and the social sciences in particular. 59

Misch (1933: VII). Koselleck (1996: 133). 61 Dilthey (1976: 109 pp.; GS VIII: 191). 62 Just to give an idea of the continuity of that particular crisis consciousness and its backdrop, I want to point at Husserls ‘Krisis’ that was infused with virtually the same concerns according to Orth (1999: 179). 63 Dilthey (SW I: 437; GS XIX: 275). 60


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V Secularization in the Name of LIFE : Dilthey The scope of Dilthey’s philosophical endeavor is ubiquitous. He designed it to work towards a “generalization,” which would “be the expression of struggle of our whole culture to reach a stage higher than any previous one.”64 It resembled Hegel’s phenomenological account in that it took the shape of a reappraisal of the whole of the history of knowledge. Therefore, it might be helpful to enter Dilthey’s systematic framework by turning initially to its superior category. Although it may be disputed, the notion of ‘life’ shall figure as the central concept of Dilthey’s systematic philosophy in the presented interpretation. Yet Dilthey’s application of the term differed from such famous contemporaries as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Bergson, or Simmel. Although Dilthey put himself in accord with the broader life-philosophical movement,65 he was aware that he was, unlike them, urging to reconcile their general claims with the very idea of science. For the same reasons, Dilthey’s version of life-philosophy has been labeled a “scientific life-philosophy.”66 Life in Dilthey’s sense was not a metaphysical concept ( just as Hegel’s Spirit was not by definition), but a fundamental and empirical “structure.”67 A valid foundation of knowledge, according to Dilthey, would have to account for the various properties of the whole ‘nexus of life.’ Consistently, the project envisioned by Dilthey entailed a renovation of “epistemology, logic, methodology, theory of value, and ethics.”68 Leading scholars have illustrated that the systematic framework that underlies the whole of Dilthey’s compound work had already been set down as early as 1865.69 In order to indicate that it would go beyond a mere epistemological endeavor, Dilthey introduced the term “self-reflection” (Selbstbesinnung) as the main title for his foundational philosophy.70 At the same time, he was clear about

64

Dilthey (1976: 121; GS VIII: 204 pp.). See for instance Dilthey (GS V: 352, 370). 66 Glock (1935). 67 Dilthey (GS XIX: 355). See also Ermath (1978: 109). 68 Dilthey (GS VIII: 179). 69 Rodi (1985: 142, 155). 70 In concreto this programme said: “This analysis of the total content and nexus of the facts of consciousness, which makes possible a foundation for the system of the sciences, we call ‘self-reflection,’ in contrast to ‘theory of knowledge.’ (Dilthey: SW I: 268; GS XIX: 79). 65

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the point that philosophy would be unqualified to solve religiouseschatological questions.71 He summarized: What we seek to show is life itself; we are not doing this in order to disclose something transcendent. To show life as it is-that is what we strive for.72

Dilthey is chronically accused of having elicited irrationalist standpoints and even to be responsible for the “enslavement of the Spirit”73 and the “crisis in the German genius.”74 From the illustration presented so far, it can be concluded that such an interpretation would not comply with Dilthey’s self-image whatsoever. Let us now take a closer look at what the obscure concept of “life structure” was finally about. Dilthey constantly portrayed structure as a structural coherency. In his early works Dilthey distinguished between “willing,” “feeling” and “thinking” as major components of this nexus.75 They constitute the “three sides of the psychic process.”76 Later, he reinforced his study after he had designed his “descriptive psychology.”77 It would have to rely upon the essential that the structure of the whole be not dissected by means of analysis, but rather maintained in its original form. He was far from naïve to assume that any natural scientific approach could help to promote a theory of knowledge on that basis. Against such “explanatory” methods he held two arguments. The first asserted that “We are unable to reduce the facts of consciousness to a degree that they would constitute the grounds for a whole theory.” The second point, which is more essential, claimed “It is the nexus of life itself which brings about knowledge. We cannot go behind it.”78 This conclusion represents the most important philosophical theme of Dilthey’s systematic work. In the following we will refer to it as Dilthey’s life-philosophical key concept. With regard to the problem of the foundation of knowledge, this idea has bestowed Dilthey’s successors with a compelling, but 71

See especially Dilthey (SW I: 463 pp.; GS XIX: 306). Dilthey (SW I 491; GS XIX: 330). 73 Antoni (1962: 36). 74 Antoni (1962: 38). See also Scholtz (1997: 23). 75 Dilthey (SW I: 51; GS I: xviii). 76 Dilthey (GS XX: 172). 77 These results have posthumously been published in volumes 18 and 19 of the German edition of his Selected Works. The most essential works are added to the first volume of the English version of the work edition. 78 Both citations are from Dilthey (GS XX: 321). 72


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also weighty baggage. Conclusively, a theory of structure (Strukturlehre) in Dilthey’s sense would go far beyond any exclusively psychological, anthropological, or epistemological proposition. Due to Dilthey’s “axiom of phenomenality,”79 which he considered to be the starting point for any modern philosophy, the structure of life is to be traced in human consciousness (Bewußtsein). Correspondingly, his “descriptive psychology” was designed “to disengage the structural nexus of evolved psychic life.”80 Since the 1890s he abandoned the idea that life could be grasped by means of a psychological approach after all. Instead, he strove to acknowledge a particular “tragedy“ which “springs from the impossibility to fully separate life from the totality of reality.”81 His later approach in the Aufbau was, however, grounded on the same basic presumptions, but now depicted the process of “Verstehen” as the royal road to the nexus of life. By first look, it is hard to understand how such unlike methodological strategies could reasonably aim at one and the same goal. Only when compared to the basic attributes of the structure of life, according to which the “concepts: being, reality only stand for a certain mode of how particular contents are represented within my consciousness,”82 does it become clear that life could be approached from different angles. We could only afford to give a very rough sketch of Dilthey’s framework. The impetus of Dilthey’s life-philosophical scheme was not only to reduce the functions that Hegel had attributed to the category of the Spirit in his phenomenology, as had been suggested by Koselleck,83 but rather an extension and complication of the problem of knowledge. By introducing his life-philosophical key concept, he cemented the doctrine that the relations between world, perception, and knowledge were so intricate that one could not come to terms with the footing of the traditional fetters of philosophical thinking. More than his psychological and epistemological insights, the mere fact that he failed ever to consummate the second volume of his project of an ‘Introduction to the Human Sciences,’ even after 79 This principle presumes “the beginning of all today serious and consistent philosophy is represented by the insight: all objects [. . .] are only given to me as facts of my consciousness.” (Dilthey: SW I 245). See also Dilthey (GS V: 90). 80 Dilthey (1977: 58; GS V: 176). 81 Dilthey (GS XIX: 356). 82 Dilthey (GS XX: 170 pp.). See also van der Hoeven (1998: 95). 83 Koselleck (1996: 132 pp.).

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a devoted struggle of 30 years, had informed his contemporaries about the intricacies of a foundation of human knowledge. Even today, it is often stated that the project outlined by Dilthey is still unresolved and blatant.84 As Riedel has made it utterly clear, this endeavor was primarily directed against the prevalence of metaphysics within the domain of epistemology.85 In that respect, Dilthey had been substantially successful in his critique of the conventional assumptions of the representatives of the Historical Schools as well as his intellectual mentors Schleiermacher and Trendelenburg. Although he eventually had to contend that life was “the sole, dark, and frightening subject of all philosophy,”86 this did not lead him to resort to non-empirical, artificial solutions. He continued the tendency of postrevolutionary German philosophy to secularize their subject matter from any speculative categories and to restrict itself to purely scientific means. He had even put an end to this movement by taking in utmost seriousness the position that even such complexities as ‘Spirit’ or ‘life’ could be elucidated with reference to empirical realities. Ever since, knowledge could, in principle, be founded without any resort to cosmological fictions. VI Secularization of Philosophy in the Name of CULTURE : Badian neo-Kantianism In terms of the emergence of modern sociology, we have to account for the so-called Southwest or Badian School of neo-Kantianism, because eminent founders of German sociology such as Simmel and Weber referred to Windelband and Rickert as their main intellectual models relating to epistemology. Hence, it is commonly held by many social scientists that sociology rests upon neo-Kantian intellectual roots. Windelband’s concept of “Wirklichkeitswissenschaft” and Rickert’s “Kulturwissenschaft” represented an alternative and even rival project to Diltheyan life-philosophy.87 We will focus mainly on Rickert’s concept of science, since he, a disciple of Windelband, fleshed out the rough sketches inaugurated by his mentor.

84 85 86 87

See for instance (Otto 1988: 38). Riedel (1968/69; 1993). Dilthey (GS VIII: 140). Riedel (1978: 100).


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Rickert rejected the nomenclature introduced by Dilthey and replaced the term Geisteswissenschaft with Kulturwissenschaft. His foundational philosophy is built upon a particular understanding of culture. He introduced a theory of knowledge which is by definition concerned with transcendental logic, not with ontology or any empirical science which, still, it was designed to found.88 His strong division between science and life and, in accord with that, between the task of philosophy and the special sciences, must be viewed as problematic for reasons that will be explained.89 Rickert did not doubt that philosophy was concerned with the genuinely theoretical exploration of the “whole of the world” (Weltganzes). Like Cohen, Natorp, and other representatives of neo-Kantianism, he based his work upon the Kantian dualism of appearance and thingas-it-is. He reformulated Kant’s philosophical problem by pointing at the gap between concept and reality which had to be bridged by novel philosophical means. Although Rickert shared the idea according to which “Any thing being (Seiende) only exists as content of my consciousness”90 with Kant and Dilthey,91 he did not believe in the direct access to reality by means of human faculties. Alternatively, he defined the task of epistemological foundation of knowledge in terms of the problem of concept formation. The respective type of knowledge produced by scientists would depend on the interests of the scientific observer. Rickert distinguished two basic forms of concept formation, one so-called “generalizing” which is mainly applied by the natural sciences and directed at formulating general laws, and the “individualising” type which is dominant in the historical sciences that scrutinize single events. Thus, the criteria that would differentiate natural and historical sciences would neither be related to differing subject matters nor to inner-scientific aspects, but to subjective interests. So defined, this conception would for obvious reasons evoke a form of scientific relativism that would leave any methodological as well as substantial decisions completely in the hands of the scientist. Rickert, well aware of these problematical implications, developed a 88 Only lately have scholars accounted for a particular reorientation towards ontology in Rickert’s later philosophy. See Schulz (forthcoming), Breil (1996: 10; 29), and Orth (1998: 80 pp.). 89 Orth (1998: 85). 90 Rickert (1915: 29 pp.). 91 See Orth (1998: 95).

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theory of values that was meant to guarantee the objectivity of science. The most important concept with regard to this issue was named “value relevance” (Wertbeziehung). The theory of value relevance limited the realm of potential subject matters for each scientist to a few, because only those events and questions would be interesting to him which expressed a value that called to the observer in the first place. The crucial question would thus be how historical events could ultimately articulate any meaning at all. Only by considering that the whole notion of culture had undergone some fundamental transformations since the end of the nineteenth century,92 and that the rising neo-Kantianism contributed significantly to that change, does this shift, apparent in Rickert’s philosophy of value, make sense. Not only from the accumulation of the term in the titles of philosophical works, but even more so from the material explorations of historians and sociologists, it must be concluded that culture had risen to one of the main signatures of early twentieth century German science. While culture had originally been perceived as an organic form of community in the sense of Tönnies’ concept of “Gemeinschaft” until the first half of the nineteenth century, the radical experiences of industrialization and its social repercussions had effected a general awareness that culture followed its own dynamics which, therefore, had to be reckoned with. Culture had become an ubiquitous concept that could serve equivalent functions to the concepts of the Spirit in Hegel or life in Dilthey. With Rickert, culture was even granted epistemological glorification. He defined it as those “goods” (Güter) which were endowed with value by human beings.93 From this superficial definition we can already grasp the close interdependence between culture and value that allowed Weber to summarize: “The concept of culture is a value-concept” (Wertbegriff ).94 Still, values and cultural goods belonged to different ontological spheres. While values were ‘unreal’ but ‘valid,’ goods were ontologically ‘real’ in the program of Rickert.95 He eventually distinguished nature as the domain of things that have no meaning on the one hand from culture as the subject matter of the

92 For a closer description see Tenbruck (1994: 78 pp.), Orth (1998: 79), and Bollenbeck (1999: 18 pp.). 93 Rickert (1986: 35). 94 Weber (1949: 76). 95 Rickert (1986: 39).


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historical sciences on the other. From this perspective it becomes clearer why Rickert’s prima philosophia took the shape of a system of values: because culture is constituted by and through “relation to values” (Wertbeziehung). We have learned that Rickert’s version of philosophy would deal with the complexity of the world from a transcendental position. He himself announced right away that it was restricted to the exploration of “unreal carriers of meaning, which could be subsumed under a systematic theory of values.”96 In his last systematic account, “System of Philosophy”, Rickert added two more levels to the dualist structure of reality and value sphere, the “prophysical” and the “metaphysical.”97 These four “forms of being” (Seinsarten) would, in the eyes of Rickert, entail the entire philosophical knowledge of the world. Under these specific premises the problem of scientific truth would not be solved ontologically, by establishing a genuine link to the “real world,” but was reformulated as a problem of validity of values (Wertgeltung). He introduced the act of consenting to a value as constituting a third mediating sphere, which would link the value sphere to the real sphere.98 Maintaining that reality could only be grasped by reference to unreal values, the problem of objectivity appeared as resolved by the very act of acknowledging true values.99 Rickert went on to derive a complete system of values that would entail the whole territory between subjective and objective values. This enterprise led him to account for the abundance of cultural goods which carried values and, moreover, to consider their connection to the real sphere. Rickert’s concept of philosophy, hence, displayed the form of cultural philosophy and, at the same time, philosophy of history. World and culture appear as interchangeable, as Orth has inferred.100 Despite similar theoretical starting points and objectives, Rickert and Dilthey advanced contrasting theories of the foundation of knowledge and, in the end, also concepts of philosophy. Herbert Schnädelbach argued against Rickert that his system would presuppose a number of concrete, cultural philosophical assumptions which it could

96 97 98 99 100

Bast (1999: XVIII). Rickert (1982: 179 pp.). Rickert (1921: 260). Bast (1999: XXIII pp.). Orth (1998: 83).

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not account for within its theoretical spectrum. He furthermore claimed that the hermeneutic tradition had just delivered those conceptualizations which Rickert’s system lacked.101 That conclusion can lead to believe that both approaches could be merged into a single, more fruitful system.102 But their antithetical philosophical positions should not be neglected. While both of them strove for a universal theory that would not only comprise the whole of human knowledge, but, in addition, expose its scientific character in the modern meaning of the term, Rickert did not believe that an obscure notion of life could serve the purpose. Therefore, he perpetuated the dualist, Kantian scheme that draws a distinction between the concrete and abstract. Scientific knowledge must relate to a transcendental sphere of values, he affirmed. Like Hegel, Dilthey opted for a holistic starting point that would not allow for a difference between these two realms in the first place. We want to close the section on the philosophical background of the social scientific discourse by explaining why Rickert’s approach, considering the direction German philosophy had taken since the second half of the nineteenth century, must be regarded as a step backwards. Since then, philosophy was forced to learn that it was no longer in position to dominate the special sciences.103 Most philosophers had no difficulties in subscribing to the new agenda, portrayed above as scientization. We introduced Dilthey’s life-philosophical system as the beginning of modern philosophy by noting the reluctance to resort to metaphysical categories in principle. From his perspective, Rickert’s promulgation of a strong distinction between philosophy and special sciences becomes problematic, because it draws on an ontological distinction between reality and a transcendental sphere of validity. Although the Southwest neo-Kantians themselves continued to maintain that their system started from the acknowledgement of the “factum of the sciences” (Cohen), it must yet be noted that philosophy was assigned to approach these “facts” not as concrete phenomena like the special sciences, but as phenomena in the 101 Schnädelbach (1974: 158). A similar interpretation is provided by Signore (1994: 497). 102 Dilthey and Rickert kept on repeating the far distance between their works. The same must be said for Heidegger and Husserl who could be viewed as the main heirs of Dilthey and Rickert. 103 In 1859, the 46 years-old Dilthey mocked the “philosophical vanity which still dreamt of a supremacy over the special sciences” (Misch 1930: 81).


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modus of transcendence, i.e. as abstract carriers of meaning.104 Their dualist opposition of reality and validity has since been the main cause for critique and rejection.105 Additionally, the theoretical strategy of Rickert and Windelband of counting on a transcendental grounding of historical knowledge and, at the same time, denying the functions of subsuming categories like Spirit or life, ran counter to the general tendency to secularize the discipline. Probably the fact that Rickert’s account today is largely known through Weber’s adoption,106 who neglected, both, the systematic and value-theoretical ideas of Rickert entirely, mirrors the difficulty implied in Rickert’s value philosophy. Finally, we can turn to the question of how modern sociology fits in this picture. The examples so far have provided us with a map of meta-theoretical positions, which can help to contextualize the formative period of modern German sociology from a more general perspective. VII

The Foundation of Modern Sociology in Light of Secularization of Knowledge

Many scholars agree that sociology as an autonomous discipline emerged simultaneously with modern society and modernity in the more general sense. Very rarely, in turn, the contribution of the founders of social science to the problem of knowledge receives attention. It shall be argued, first, that the epistemological writings of Simmel, Weber, and Mannheim must be considered genuine and ground-breaking solutions to the crisis of knowledge, and, second, that they meant a radicalization of the secularization movement in several respects. Despite the announcement that “the turn to history and to practices has placed the social sciences at the center of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science,”107 this “sociological turn”108 has not yet generated a wide-spread consciousness about the systematic relation of sociological knowledge vis-à-vis its meta-theoretical status. Symptomatically, only the recent past has 104 105 106 107 108

See Krijnen (2002: 175). For an overview see Vollhardt (1986: 189 pp.). See Vollhardt (1986: 189) and Scholtz (1997: 25). Bohman (1991: viii). Brown (1984).

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witnessed the “coming of age of metatheorizing.”109 The situation of the founding fathers of sociology was, in some crucial respects at least, similar. Their occupation with epistemological problems was not only due to their ambition to establish sociology as an autonomous academic field, but has to be placed against the background of the crisis of knowledge. Typically, the convoluted body of Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre started off with an excuse for him as an empirical scientist being concerned with philosophical issues: Since I am not professionally competent to deal with the literature on logical problems [. . .] it is this circumstance alone which enables me to discuss these problems here. However, the specialist in a single discipline cannot afford to ignore these problems either. Although they are quite elementary, there is [. . .] only a very limited recognition of their bare existence.110

The “circumstances” that Weber was referring to were the unresolved “basic logical and methodological problems”111 of the historical sciences. Almost two decades later, Karl Mannheim would still feel the need to work towards “a novum organon in the humanistic sciences.”112 He complained about “the circumstance that the new disciplines of human scientific research have grown out of a philosophy different from that in which the still dominant methodological theory originated.”113 The negative judgment of contemporary philosophy is eye-catching in both instances. Obviously, neither Weber in 1903 nor Mannheim, almost twenty years later, deemed the common philosophical systems suitable to base a conception of sociology upon. The question of whether the distrust of the adepts of social science exhibited against philosophy rested upon random criteria or whether it was systematic becomes urgent. For an explication of this problem, we will take a closer look at the relationship between empirical science, philosophy and epistemology articulated in the conceptual works of sociological classics before we turn to their epistemological key concepts. As already indicated, Weber did not have any ambition to contribute to the actual philosophical discourse, but was led to method109

Ritzer (1992: 7). See also Ritzer (1991) and Fiske and Shweder (1986). Weber (1975: 209). 111 Weber (1975: 53). 112 Mannheim (1982: 150). 113 Mannheim (1982: 151). For Mannheim’s evaluation of Dilthey’s, Husserl’s and the neo-Kantian approach, see ”uber (forthcoming). 110


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ological meditations from concerns about his own discipline. It has long been disputed whether the canonization of Weber’s “occasional methodological exertions”114 to a Wissenschaftslehre was in accord with Weber’s proper intentions.115 Weber was principally concerned with the “logic of the cultural sciences.”116 He thus had a very restricted interest in philosophy. For this reason, Rickert didn’t view Weber as a philosopher.117 However, it was Karl Jaspers, another friend of Weber’s, who considered him “the true philosopher of his time,” despite the fact that he neither developed a philosophical system nor taught a particular form of philosophy.118 Jaspers’ estimation was based on the particular attitude that Weber displayed with respect to the philosophical problems of his time.119 My interpretation tends towards Jaspers’ verdict and offers a more concrete reasoning. It is impossible to evaluate Weber’s position towards the problem of the foundation of knowledge as long as the prejudgment of his dependency on Rickert is maintained. Furthermore, from a systematicphilosophical point of view, Weber’s epistemological convictions flew in the face of his alleged paragon. Weber’s reservations about exclusively philosophical reflections shines through in the following passage: Only by laying bare and solving substantive problems can sciences be established and their methods developed. On the other hand, purely epistemological and methodological reflections have never played the crucial role in such developments.120

This statement reveals that Weber’s position with regard to philosophy could not be more at variance with Rickert’s strong separation between empirical sciences and philosophy. Still, the question of what this dissimilarity entails for Weber’s adoption of Rickert’s 114

Tenbruck (1959). It has been Friedrich H. Tenbruck (1959) who attacked the post-war reception history of Weber’s epistemological contributions already in 1959. Ever since, on can dissect two opposing strands of position with regard to the question of the status of Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre. Besides Tenbruck, authors like Burger, Hempel, and Lazarsfeld disagreed with the traditional over-estimation of Weber’s epistemological works. On the other side, Parsons, Henrich, and Runciman interpreted it as a genuine answer to the philosophical problems of his time. For an overview, see Wagner and Zipprian (1985: 115 pp.). 116 Weber (1949: 113). 117 Rickert (1989: 85). 118 Jaspers (1988: 94). 119 For a closer examination see Bianco (1994: 306 pp.). Karl Löwith gave a similar reasoning as Jaspers. See Löwith (1989: 139). 120 Weber (1949: 116). 115

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dualist world view must be left open. It is certain that Weber took up Rickert’s definition of reality as “an extensively and intensively infinite multiplicity of phenomena”121 as well as the neo-Kantian concept of ‘culture’122 to the letter. In the formulation of his theoretical problems, Weber rests entirely on the conceptualizations and theoretical models provided by Rickert. It is not necessary to retell this story to the last detail, since it belongs to the stock knowledge of sociological theory; we will rather stress the points where Weber leaves the ground of neo-Kantian philosophy. This is the case with regard to the main question that he struggled with in his Wissenschaftslehre, namely “in what sense are there in general ‘objectively valid truths’ in those disciplines concerned with social and cultural phenomena?”123 The problem of objectivity sprang out of the concept of value relevance, as we have already noted in the case of Rickert. Whereas the latter conceived a complex theory of values as a proper means to secure objectivity for historical knowledge, Weber renounced meta-theoretical solutions. Instead, he theorized the actual practices of historical work and, moreover, reflected their consequences with regard to social and cultural sciences. He maintained that science per se cannot provide criteria to decide whether “that which is produced by scientific work should be important in the sense of ‘being worth of knowing‘.”124 In the end, it was the community of scientists who would have to define good and bad scientific results, since “scientific truth is precisely what is valid for all who seek the truth.”125 It is crucial to realize that these criteria were external to science per se in that they were still related to the subjective predispositions on the part of the observers. This also holds true for the “norms of thought,” i.e. the rules of logic and causal explanation, that he wanted each scientist to obey. Aware that he did not provide a solution to the problem of objectivity at all (or at least not in a form that would be acceptable to his colleagues), he nevertheless was convinced enough about the validity of his findings to put the term objectivity in quotation marks.126 In his summarizing speech, which has been pub121

Weber (1975: 55). See Weber (1949: 76). 123 Weber (1949: 51). 124 Weber (1989: 18). 125 Weber (1949: 84). The German philosopher Odo Marquard coined this principle the “cooptative self-definition of science” (1986: 107). 126 Tenbruck reported that Weber was, in fact, so stunned by the results of his 122


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lished under the title “Science as a vocation,” he generalized this idea: “No science is absolutely without assumptions.”127 In the eyes of Rickert, a “pessimistic outlook on cognition”128 was characteristic of Weber. In defense of Weber, it shall be argued that it was rather due to his deep understanding of and concern about the consequences of the process that he described as “intellectual rationalization through science and scientific technology,”129 which restrained him from believing in the feasibility of a rational foundation of knowledge through philosophical reflection. From this perspective, the proclamation of a transcendental sphere of ideal principles would not be sufficient and even dysfunctional for the purpose of building up a scientific discipline designed to account for the repercussions of intellectualization. Thus, the particular attitude to which Jaspers was referring should be appreciated as a product of Weber’s conviction that modernization had not led to a rationalization of life, but to many precarious impediments that must be discerned by a special science. We only get a full picture of Weber’s modern attitude if we include the individualistic ethics he developed most clearly in “Science as a vocation.” Its essence proclaimed that each individual was supposed to reflect upon his “demon which holds the threads of his life.”130 In other words, each individual held so-called “ultimate attitudes towards life”131 as reference points of thinking and acting. The point of Weber’s talk was finally to free traditional institutions such as religion and politics, but also science itself from the task of providing orientation for individual actions. Instead, he called for actors to resonate about the moral reasons and consequences of their deeds. The role of philosophy was reduced to “forc[ing] the individual, or at least help[ing] him, to give account of the ultimate meaning of his own actions.”132 This ethics has been termed a decisionist account, due to the affirmation that an individual decision to serve this or that God,

methodological meditations that he postponed the finishing of his essay on Knies for the sake to get the Objektivitätsaufsatz published right away. Even afterwards, he handed in the Knies-essay unfinished. See Tenbruck (1959: 619). 127 Weber (1989: 28). 128 Bianco (1994: 303). 129 Weber (1989: 13). 130 Weber (1989: 31). 131 Weber (1989: 18). 132 Weber (1989: 26).

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as Weber had put it, was inescapable. However, Tenbruck was right to distinguish the traditional version of decisionism, which betrayed an element of voluntarism and even arbitrariness at its roots, from Weber’s rather subjectivist ethics that appealed to the actor’s consciousness.133 Max Scheler criticized Weber’s underlying “assertion that the material values have only subjective significance.”134 The insistence that values would have no significance for objective phenomena led Scheler to the hypothesis that Weber pursued the “exclusion of philosophy.”135 It was, as a matter of fact, Weber’s strong and calculated distinction between theory and practice that provoked acute responses from steadfast philosophers of values like Rickert and Scheler, who were convinced that philosophy provided the proper means of mediation.136 Weber’s standpoint represented the exception to the rule, and he did not even play a crucial role for the sociology of the interwar period. In comparison to Weber, the case of Simmel betrays obstructions for opposite reasons. Whereas we had to reconstruct Weber’s theory of knowledge from different parts of his work, because he had left us without any systematic reflections on these questions, in Simmel we face difficulties due to the complexity of his opus. He was concerned with epistemological and philosophical questions from the very beginning of his career to the end of his life. What is more, he continually revised his positions without giving clear reasons for his reconsiderations. This character of his working style rendered the development of his oeuvre highly opaque. His philosophical thinking is foremost articulated in his explorations of the presuppositions of historical knowledge, which are noted in his diverse accounts on the “Problems of the Philosophy of History.” The first edition had already been published in 1892, hence two years before Windelband set down the principles of the Southwest neo-Kantian account in his famous rector’s speech.137 Twelve years later, Simmel revised the first version entirely and issued the second edition under the same title. Again, ten years later he began to work on another revision of the 133

Tenbruck (2002: 68). Scheler (1989: 93). 135 Scheler (1989: 92). Schelers original term „Ausschaltung“ seems to be much stronger than the English translation “exclusion.” 136 Scheler (1989: 94) denoted philosophy “that mediator between faith, religion and positive science.” 137 Simmel (1892), Windelband (1915 b: 136–160). 134


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book, which he did not finish. He left us with a few essays which hint at the direction the new edition would have taken. The following picture will reveal that Simmel’s theory of knowledge navigated the middle between the neo-Kantian and Dilthey’s systems, which have both overshadowed the ingenuity of his own epistemological effort.138 Still, Simmel’s theory of knowledge cannot be reduced to any of these accounts, but presents an original and specifically modern view on philosophy and science. Similar to Dilthey, Windelband and Rickert, Simmel developed the key categories of his theoretical thinking in dialogue with Kant’s metaphysical worldview. Thereby, he was especially drawn by Kant’s refutation of sensualism and empiricism. He took up the Kantian distinction between knowledge and experience and applied it to historical knowledge. From then on, as he summarized in an autobiographical sketch, he enhanced the distinction between form and content to an universal “metaphysical principle.”139 In the ‘Problems,’ he developed the idea according to which there is no relation between reality and the form of its knowledge, as opposed to “historical realism” which held the position that history could mirror the past “how it really was.” Simmel maintained that the description of historical events was rather dependent on an a priori that would determine what aspects of the material were significant. He criticized the stubbornness of the Kantian conception of a priori, and contended that there are manifold combinations between the material and the forms of knowledge.140 We note that Simmel’s evaluation of Kant went in a different direction than Dilthey’s, who had disputed that “The a priori of Kant is fixed and dead.”141 Simmel’s position presumed a dualism of reality and knowledge, calling Rickert’s version to mind.142 This picture would, however, tell only one side of the story. As shall be outlined, Simmel was moving on life-philosophical rather than on transcendental-philosophical grounds. Apart from Southwest neo-Kantianism and similar to Dilthey, he wanted to lay bare the empirical, psychological and anthropological, 138

Fellmann (1980: 164). Simmel (1958: 9). 140 Simmel (1892: 2). 141 Dilthey (GS XIX: 51). 142 Rickert commented to Simmel’s second edition of the ‘Problems’ that he was content with Simmel’s turn away from psychologism. See for a detailed account Fellmann (1980: 177 pp.). 139

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preconditions upon which any form of knowledge rested. Kant’s notion of experience was, Simmel asserted, too weak, and his distinction between the empirical and the a priori too strong, so that Kant was incapable of accounting for the “unconscious and unproven precondition”143 of concept formation. The clearest evidence for the suggestion that Simmel should not be called a neo-Kantian may be found in the prevalence of the problem of understanding throughout his methodological works.144 Simmel acknowledged that there must be a certain psychological prerequisite for any understanding.145 However, it has only been in the later phase of his life that Simmel arrived at a clearer description of the process and impact of understanding. In 1892 he confessed that he had not yet developed a “positive picture.”146 Still, in his second edition of the ‘Problems,’ Simmel distanced himself from the Diltheyean idea that psychological aspects were essential to historical concept formation. He ascribed this position to an “empiricist historicism,” which had to be overcome.147 During the last decade of his life, Simmel turned to ontological and life-philosophical occupations. The exact motifs which inclined Simmel to resituate historical knowledge in a broader philosophical context remain obscure.148 Simmel’s turn from the exploration of manifold intellectual forms towards the content in 1910 might be explained by the growing insight into a certain characteristic of life, which he summarized in the definition of ‘life’ in his last book ‘Lebensanschauung.’ Here, ‘life’ is introduced as the most fundamental concept in the sense that it is prior to forms.149 The forms appear as the means by which life is able to transcend itself. Thus, life becomes ‘more-life’ if those forms became autonomous from their original content. Also, through those forms, life can breed a “surplus or excess of the actual life process” to the extent that it can even become its own “antithesis.”150 Although Simmel never went on to objectify life as Dilthey tried, his attention

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Simmel (1892: 4 pp.). Max Weber referred to Simmel’s ‚Problems’ as the most significant source with regard to the concept of understanding (1980: 1; 1975: 152 pp.). 145 Simmel (1892: 18). 146 Simmel (1892: 15). 147 See for this aspect the study by Fellmann (1980: 171). 148 Some hints can be grasped from the description by Oakes (1980: 55 pp.). 149 See Simmel (1918: 24). 150 Simmel (Simmel 1967: 24). 144


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shifted to meta-theoretical preconditions of intellectual forms. At this point, the notion of life became important. Typically, his reappraisal of the question “how is historical knowledge possible?” went in a much more abstract and anthropological direction. Historical knowledge rested, according to Simmel, upon the intricate and complex process of understanding. Thereby, understanding is conceived as “an irreducible, primitive phenomenon in which a universal relationship between man and the world is expressed.”151 It is important to note that Simmel defined scientific understanding as “a variant of our contemporaneous, thoroughly quotidian understanding.”152 Because of this universality of the phenomenon, Simmel’s theory of interpretation, which was developed on the plane of history, was to the same degree valid for a theory of sociology.153 We will not repeat the complex story of the intricate interactions between the three different types of interpretation—psychological, immanent, and historical— that are relevant for historical knowledge. For a systematic reason we can allow for that negligence, since Simmel’s theory of understanding hardly deserves the label ‘theory.’ As Oakes concluded, “differences between interpretations are differences of nuance and stress, not differences of category.”154 To paraphrase this verdict, interpretation consists of an interplay between the givenness of life, which is the prerequisite of any interpretation on one side, and the respective interests which constitute the specific form of knowledge on the other. Simmel explains why: “this circle is inevitable . . . because life is the ultimate authority of the Spirit.”155 We recognize that Simmel reproduced the figure of the hermeneutic circle, prevalent in the nineteenth century hermeneutic tradition from Schleiermacher to Dilthey. This proximity can be substantiated by referring to the following conclusion, where Simmel, deliberately or not, quotes Dilthey’s lifephilosophical key concept: “Life can only be understood by life.”156 Simmel acknowledged the necessity of accounting for the interrelations between the forms of knowledge and its empirical foundations.

151 152 153 154 155 156

181).

Simmel (1980: 124). Simmel (1980: 102). See also Lichtblau (1993: 32 pp.) and Kim (2002: 455). Simmel (1980: 85). Simmel (1980: 124). Simmel (1980: 124). Dilthey’s expression was “Life grasps life” (Dilthey: 1976:

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This distinguishes him from Rickert, who attended exclusively to the “theoretical man.”157 It is overdue to account for the consequences of the presentation of Simmel’s ideas with regard to our topic of the foundation of knowledge. The case of Simmel discloses an interesting amalgamation of Kantian and life-philosophical conceptual schemes. He began by postulating a dualism of knowledge and experience, which led him to conclude that any form of knowledge, scientific or not, would be predicated on a particular a priori. In contrast to Windelband and Rickert, he did not draw distinctions between theory and practice or philosophy and empirical science. Simmel rejected the Kantian premise of the transcendental subject altogether and, under the auspices of Dilthey, replaced it with “empirical human beings.”158 In consequence, his separation of philosophy and special sciences was arbitrary in that it was not supported by an ontological criterion. It was due to one’s cognitive attitude, he inserted. Simmel, hence, became a purveyor of the ideas of perspectivism and methodological pluralism by insisting that each form of knowledge was autonomous and could not be reduced to any other. Under these premises, the plain idea of one universal theory of knowledge was discarded altogether. Simmel even radicalized this implication by adding that every intellectual perspective should work out its proper epistemology on the one hand and its wider cultural-historical significance by means of metaphysics on the other. From this wider perspective, it becomes clear why Simmel directed his attention to a stupendous range of intellectual fields, from history and sociology to acting, religion, and art. He deliberately put up with being accused of relativism,159 although he used to defend himself against such objections. For him, relativism, which was indeed the wrong term for his principle,160 denoted a “positive metaphysical principle”161 and eventually “the essential feature of truth.”162 It avoided falling into the same trap as absolutist standpoints, because it “[did] not claim exemption from its own

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Krijnen (2001: 582). Becher (1971: 19). 159 Simmel himself used the term for the characterization of his approach (1958: 9 pp.). 160 In accord with Köhnke (1996: 480) I would suggest that Simmel’s intention rather resembles a relationist position. 161 Simmel (1958: 117 pp.). 162 Simmel (1990: 116). 158


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principle; it [was] not destroyed by the fact that its validity [was] only relative.“163 The consequence of relativism, or rather relationism, must be situated within the context of his essential perspectivist view on science, according to which, and further incommensurable. Oakes belongs to the few who recognized that it was not Simmel’s intention to “eliminate philosophy as an inquiry,”164 but that his theoretical examination of the foundations of historical-cultural knowledge gave rise to his particular stance. With Karl Mannheim the last illustration of a critique of philosophical reason in the name of social science is presented. In the textbooks of the history of ideas, Mannheim is registered as one the founders of that sociology of knowledge which systematically accounts for the “social determination of knowledge.” In the broad discussion that his version of sociology of knowledge provoked,165 he was for the most part perceived as a Marxist. Only the publication of two unknown manuscripts on the logic of cultural-sociological knowledge in 1980 revealed a more detailed picture of the epistemological ideas on which Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge was grounded. We will restrict ourselves to the basic philosophical principles and their interconnectedness with the sociology of knowledge.166 Already his early drafts, which date back to the early 1920s, were aimed at scrutinizing the “fact of inner connection between thinking and existence.”167 From the very beginning of his systematic reflection on this issue, Mannheim seemed aware that he would need to found a comprehensive theory of knowledge on a particular philosophical basis. He ruled out any approach that would rest upon Kantian grounds because it would be oriented to natural scientific rationales.168 Mannheim was convinced that any “attempt to construct an epistemology without ontological presuppositions must today be regarded as having already failed.”169 They had failed to recognize that “there is a wide undercurrent of knowledge about whose methods we are not as yet able to give ourselves an accounting.”170

163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170

Simmel (1990: 117). Oakes (1980: 22). See Meja and Stehr (1990). For a more systematic exploration of the following ideas, see ”uber (forthcoming). Mannheim (1982: 163). Mannheim (1982: 160). Mannheim (1982: 283). Mannheim (1982: 159).

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In the works of Dilthey, Mannheim sensed “philosophical grounds more congenial to the humanistic sciences.”171 He sprang from a very different philosophical tradition, i.e. Historicism or Romanticism, which, according to Mannheim, was open to such preconditions which had been commonly neglected. He especially deemed Dilthey’s theory of world-views as the most eminent theory of history. Mannheim demarcated the particular type of knowledge affected by that undercurrent as the realm of “qualitative knowledge” and separated it from “quantitative knowledge.” Already from these efforts, the parallels to Dilthey’s endeavor of a ‘Critique of historical reason’ become overt. Mannheim labeled his attempt to explore the fundamentals of the qualitative sphere, indeed less dramatically than Dilthey, as a “theory of knowing the qualitative.”172 Similar to Dilthey, Mannheim could only think of abstract, figurative terms for what he named “total consciousness”173 and Dilthey had earlier conceived as the “unity of consciousness.”174 We can identify almost all of the basic notions which had already figured centrally in Dilthey’s theory of knowledge from Dilthey’s life-philosophical key concept, which Mannheim rephrased “knowledge is only one side of a more far-reaching existential relationship,”175 to his conclusion which quotes Dilthey’s famous image of the ‘whole person:’ “the subject of cultural-scientific knowledge is not the mere epistemological subject, but the ‘whole man.’”176 Other aspects of human existence in the sense of Mannheim were “‘loving,’ ‘acting,’ ‘wanting to change’.”177 He depicted the process of constitution of unity between subject and object as “contagion”178 which, as Mannheim concluded, was the basis any form of experience—of ‘things’ as well as feelings. The difference between inner and outer experience was only relative to secondary aspects as biographical and social context. He demonstrated the impact of the social setting for the prototypical constitution of knowledge on the case of dyadic relations. He drew the conclusion that it is impossible for outside observers who

171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178

Mannheim (1982: 162). Mannheim (1982: 160). Mannheim (1982: 187). Dilthey (SW I: 317 pp.). Mannheim (1982: 187). Mannheim (1982: 50). Mannheim (1982: 186). Mannheim (1982: 187).


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were not part of the same “experiential community” (Erfahrungsgemeinschaft) to make sense of either the language or the content of communication. This type of knowledge was obviously exclusively relevant and valid for direct participants. Mannheim took over the term “conjunctive knowledge” from Victor von Weizsäcker to denote it. We conclude that these observations marked the starting-point for a sociology of knowledge. It would exactly account for the interplay of ideas with their social context. Thus, it was systematic reasons which persuaded him of the necessity of a sociology of knowledge. Accounting for the life-philosophical, Mannheim might have rather preferred the term existential, key figures, he was more consequent than Dilthey in concluding that the type of knowledge to which human and cultural sciences were exposed was inherently conjunctive, and hence not objective in the traditional sense. Typically, it was one of his mainline efforts to lay bare the existential preconditions for the diverse philosophical standpoints in order to prove the right of his presuppositions.179 He warned one must nor forget that philosophy, life, and scientific knowledge never go along side by side in isolation. Philosophy, in its various tendencies, always arises, rather, out of a current of life.180

The sociology of knowledge has been widely perceived as an agent of relativism, due to its restriction of the possibility of objective knowledge. Even today, under allegedly ‘post-modern conditions,’ it is a common strategy to ignore the epistemological dimension of the subdiscipline.181 Parallel to Simmel, Mannheim refused to resort to any vague temporary solutions. Instead he promoted his concept of “dynamic relationism,”182 which signifies merely that all of the elements in a given situation have reference to one another and derive their significance from this reciprocal interrelationship in a given frame of thought.183

179

Mannheim (1968a: 149 pp.). Mannheim (1982: 151). 181 For an elaboration of this argument see also Meja and Stehr (1982: 903 pp.), Barnes and Bloor (1982), and Endress (2000: 329). 182 Mannheim (1968b: 88). 183 Mannheim (1968b: 76). 180

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Conclusion

It has been one of our main objectives to take a closer look at the formation and separation process of modern social science from the human sciences in order to learn about the social and cultural sciences’ meta-theoretical identity. For this reason we made a detour through the wider intellectual history of modern philosophy. In particular, the study followed the movement of human-scientific knowledge’s emancipation from its traditional association with ultimately religious-theological concerns. Against this backdrop, it is possible to evaluate the meta-theoretical significance of the protagonists of sociology and their contributions to secularizing knowledge from nonscientific impetus. The examination concludes that the promoters of modern German sociology, Simmel, Weber, and Mannheim, were dissatisfied with the form of philosophy offered by leading contemporary philosophers. Their struggles to transform the latters’ ideas into an appropriate notion of science that was fitting with the conditions of modern times decried any attempt to fall back on non-empirical, transcendental images. They produced particular relativizations of philosophy as the main agents for a foundation of knowledge. In concert, they rejected an abstract-philosophical system, as provided by the various strands of neo-Kantianism, as a sound philosophical base on which to ground their cultural-sociological inquiries. Instead they opted for accounts that went beyond the confines of academic philosophy and reckoned with the interconnectedness of knowledge and this-worldly conditions. Dilthey’s theory of knowledge provided some basic ideas that were especially important to Mannheim and Simmel. Starting from differing theoretical assumptions, they came to similar conclusions with regard to the problem of knowledge. Accordingly, the traditional ideal of objective knowledge rested on theoretical and ontological presumptions that were no longer bearable under present conditions. In consequence, the theories of sociology provided by Simmel, Weber, and Mannheim supported a notion of knowledge that only allowed for ‘objectivity,’ not for objectivity, to paraphrase Weber. A transparent sensitivity towards the perspectivity of knowledge lies on the basis of modern sociology, which led Weber to assert that he was neither willing nor capable of imposing his vision of social science on others (1980: 6). In Simmel and Mannheim this feature was more acute so that they were immediately exposed to denigra-


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POLITICS AND RELIGION IN EUROPEAN NATION-STATES: INSTITUTIONAL VARIETIES AND CONTEMPORARY TRANSFORMATIONS Matthias Koenig I Introduction The following contribution addresses the changing relation of politics and religion in Western European nation-states that has recently given rise to announcements of a coming “post-secular society.”1 Contrary to such announcements it is argued that contemporary changes in the relation between politics and religion do not constitute an exit from the secular condition of European modernity. Rather they have to be understood as part of larger institutional transformations of the modern nation-state. To the degree that the social sciences fell victim to what has been called a “methodological nationalism”,2 their conventional theories of secularization ignored the nation-state as the institutional framework of relations between politics and religion in modernity. They thereby neglected the charismatic constitution of the nation-state and, indeed, the sacralization of the secular that went along with it. While recent sociological theory has taken up the challenge of historicizing the sociological epistemologies and methodologies that assumed national “society” as a natural given, such a self-reflexive mode of theorizing still needs to be extended to a sociology of the secular.3 Such a problem-shift, that allows notions of “religion” and “secularization” to be contextualized and historicized, is necessary to understand the changing relationship

1 The notion of “post-secular society” has, to the astonishment of many, been coined by Jürgen Habermas who previously supported a rather strong secularization thesis. See Habermas (2001) as well as Eder (2002). 2 That conventional methodologies, theories and research questions in the social sciences were premised on the assumption of territorially bounded and culturally integrated national societies, has become increasingly clear with the rise of discourses of post-colonialism, post-modernity, and globalization. For a recent critique of “methodological nationalism” in the social sciences see Wimmer (2002: 5). 3 For preliminary attempts to elaborate a reflexive anthropology of the secular see Asad (2003: 16 pp.).

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between politics and religion. That religion is invested with new legitimacy as a category of collective identity and is thus becoming an important resource in struggles for recognition in secular public spheres, is in fact a result of the nation-state’s loss of charisma and, more precisely, of a structural decoupling of statehood, national identity, and individual rights. Taking as my point of departure recent controversies over the theory of secularization, I first highlight the embeddedness of relations between politics and religion within the institutional framework of the classical modern nation-state. Against this background, I then provide an ideal-typical sketch of institutional varieties of secularism as exemplified by the historical processes of state-formation and nation-building in Britain, France, and Germany. Finally, drawing on evidence from comparative studies on the incorporation of Muslim immigrants in Britain, France, and Germany, I show that in spite of considerable historical path-dependencies all three cases attest to institutional changes in the relations between politics and religion which result from the shift of charisma from the nation-state to universal human rights. II

Theoretical Background

The theory of secularization has become highly contested in the sociological discourse about politics and religion within modernity. Major social theorists such as Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, Niklas Luhmann, or Bryan Wilson, while emphasizing different aspects and dimensions of secularization, shared at least some basic assumptions that could be integrated in a multidimensional theory of secularization.4 The rise of modernity, so the argument went, generally entails a rationalization of previously religious world-views, a differentiation of religion and non-religious institutions, a pluralization and privatization of religious beliefs, and in the long run even a general decline of religion. However, these assumptions have been seriously challenged by recent empirical phenomena such as new religious movements, religious fundamentalism, and new religious nationalism that amount to what has been called a resurgence of religion. Whereas 4 For the theoretical integration of various theories of secularization within a single multidimensional paradigm see Dobbelaere (1981) and Tschannen (1992).

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proponents of the classical paradigm have tried to interpret this resurgence of religion as a reaction against, or regression from, modernity, critics have called into question the basic assumptions of the secularization paradigm and argued that there was a permanent and perhaps even legitimate place for religion within modern society. Thus, José Casanova has persuasively argued that empirical evidence, such as the public role of both conservative and progressive Roman Catholicism in Latin America, Poland, and the United States, invalidates the assumptions of a steady decline of religion and of its continuing privatization. Moreover, building on Habermas’ theory of communicative action, he claims that as part of a pluralistic civil society composed of multiple voluntary associations and as a moral voice within the rational discourse of an autonomous public sphere, public forms of religion, which have incorporated the basic premises of modernity, are not only empirically possible but also normatively legitimate.5 Danièle Hervieu-Léger has challenged the theory of secularization from a different perspective, by highlighting the deficiencies of their underlying concepts of religion, be they functionalist or substantialist. Taking up the Weberian problem of meaning in modernity and its elaboration in recent French philosophy and political theory,6 she wishes to account for the ways in which modernity does not only not entail a decline of religion but is actually productive of ever new social forms of religion that respond to the modern condition of uncertainty and contingency. She proceeds by elaborating an analytical definition of religion according to which the religious is a specific form of believing, one that situates its belief within a tradition, a “lignée croyante.”7 By moving from the sociology of religion to a sociology of the religious, she claims to better grasp the fluid and ephemeral character of de-institutionalized religiosity and, in particular, to identify religious elements in various other social domains, including politics.8 While these and other contributions9 are an important step towards a more self-reflexive sociology of the secular condition, they hardly 5

See Casanova (1994: 19–39, 232). See in this respect most notably Séguy (1986). 7 Hervieu-Léger (1993: 119, 135). 8 See Hervieu-Léger (1993: 158, 1993). 9 See most notably the supply-side interpretation of religion, that contrasts the impact of religious pluralism on religious vitality in the United States with the effects of monopolistic religious organizations in Europe on the decline of religion. See e.g. Stark and Bainbridge (1985) and for criticism Pollack (2003). 6

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problematize what is perhaps the core of the classical paradigm of secularization, namely the thesis of a differentiation between politics and religion. In his account of religious de-privatization, Casanova explicitly upholds a normative concept of functional differentiation, arguing that religion may not raise any claims to power within the political system proper.10 He thereby takes for granted an essentialist definition of religion, which reduces religious beliefs and practices to a specific form of moral argumentation within a separate domain of human life.11 Similarly, Hervieu-Léger’s definition of the religious has normative implications, when she associates it with heteronomy as opposed to the autonomy of the political.12 While this conceptual move allows her to discern, in a critical perspective, religious elements within both institutional religion and politics, the pragmatic function of the semantic distinction between “religion” and “politics” within the political discourse of European modernity remains opaque.13 A more thorough theoretical revision of the secularization paradigm therefore has to contextualize this semantic opposition between “religion” and “politics” within cultural construction of the “secular.” It has to treat the “secular” as well as “religion,” in other words, as discursive phenomena.14 The following remarks provide some preliminary elements of such a reflexive sociology of the secular, by focusing on the institutionalization of the nation-state and its semantic repercussions. The imagination and sacralization of the “secular” is a crucial aspect of the emergence of modernity as a cultural program and its institutionalization in the nation-state in which various patterns of differentiation between politics and religion developed. The emergence of modernity in Europe can be described, following Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s Weberian analysis of Axial Age civilizations and their internal transformations, as a result of heterodox movements within Christianity. These movements that crystallized in the Protestant

10

Casanova (1994: 5, 65, 211). See on this point Talal Asad’s perceptive analysis of Casanova’s argument (2003: 181–201). 12 See Hervieu-Léger (1993: 171; 1997: 374). 13 In his critical reply to Hervieu-Léger, Patrick Michel has therefore suggested pushing further the analysis towards a sociology of (religious and political) “belief.” See Michel (1994). 14 Such a problem-shift has been suggested, most notably, by Joachim Matthes (1995) and Friedrich H. Tenbruck (1993). 11


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Reformation both radicalized the Axial tension between the transcendent and the mundane order or, to use the Augustinian distinction, between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena, and attempted to resolve it by means of an inner-worldly reconstruction of society.15 Concomitant with the breakthrough to modernity, the political sphere gained institutional autonomy vis-à-vis the Church and became the major focus for such rational reconstructions of society. In other words, the charisma which in medieval Roman Christianity was invested in the “spiritual” authority of the Church (ecclesia) shifted to “secular” authorities (imperium), thus opening up the possibility of absolute politics.16 In that context, it was the sovereign State that was conceived as the organizational center for projects of rationalization and disciplinization, into which both former feudal or corporate units and individual actors were incorporated.17 Similarly, the State was seen as the focus for symbolic constructions of collective identity, most notably under the impact of the Great Revolutions through which political authority became accountable to the “People” or the “Nation.” The project of modernity was thus institutionalized in the form of the nation-state in which a specific type of political organization, the sovereign territorial state, was structurally coupled with a specific type of collective identity, the imagined community of the nation.18 This shift of charisma to “secular” authorities did not, however, imply that “spiritual” matters and the Christian tradition more generally became politically irrelevant. On the contrary, what was now called “religion” could be incorporated into the nation-state’s projects of rationalization and disciplinization. The state gained organizational control over practices and institutions which formerly were placed under “spiritual” authorities, such as private and civil law, education, science, etc.19 Furthermore, Christian symbols could be drawn upon to construct collective identities, most notably in the

15

See, for instance, Eisenstadt (1989) as well as his contributions in this volume. That this shift of charisma and absolute politics from “spiritual” to “secular” authorities, which has to be understood against the background of the Gregorian Revolution, cannot be equated with a differentiation of politics and religion has been shown by Alessandro Pizzorno (1987: 33, 44). 17 See also Thomas and Meyer (1984). 18 See Anderson (1991). 19 On this point see, with respect to the monopolisation of the legal system, Berman (1983, 2004) as well as Prodi (2003). 16

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confessional age when sovereign rulers assumed the right to determine the “religion” of their subject, but also later, in the nineteenth century, when national identities were constructed with reference to confessional traditions. The breakthrough to modernity and the institutionalization of the nation-state were accompanied by several semantic changes. A new stratum of intellectuals, who gained cultural authority against the theological elite, reformulated the medieval conceptual framework. The saeculum, previously conceived as interlude between Creation and eschaton, was re-conceptualized as unlimited time-space within which both “religion” and “politics” are situated. Thus, it was in postReformation political vocabulary that the concept of “religion” received its particular modern meaning.20 This modern concept has, first of all, a generic meaning signifying a presumably distinctive phenomenon (“religion”), distinct in essence from the newly emerging and equally essentialized domains of rational action, i.e. of economy, politics, law and science. Secondly, it also has a relativistic and historicist meaning (“a religion”/“religions”) and thus allows different actualizations of the essence of “religion” to be discerned by identifying historical systems of belief that are assumedly shared by a certain group of people, enacted in their common rituals and embodied in mutually exclusive membership organizations.21 Although the larger semantic field within which this concept was embedded cannot here be analyzed in its entirety, it should be noted that it contributed to the establishment of symbolic boundaries between “public” and “private” which were of constitutive value in the political discourse of modernity.22 During the formation of absolutist territorial states after the confessional wars and the Peace of Westphalia (1648), “religion” was located in a private sphere opposed to a State that was considered to transcend all “religious” particularities. In the eighteenth century, when a new conceptual opposition was formulated between the State and what was now understood as “civil society”

20 As Ernst Feil has shown in numerious studies in conceptual history. See Feil (1986, 1997). 21 Note that this occidental concept was later exported into non-occidental contexts and contributed to the reconstruction of various traditions as “religions.” See, with reference to the Korean case, Koenig (2000). 22 See in this respect Reinhart Koselleck’s analysis of post-Reformation political discourse in Koselleck (1973: 18, 29, 154).


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and the “public sphere” as loci of social transcendence, “religion” was further privatized conceptually. From the French Revolution onwards, the semantic dichotomy of “religion” and the “secular” was transposed on to a narrative structure commonly associated with the concept of “secularization.” Originally this term was used in a strictly legal sense, for instance in the Codex Juris Canonici where it meant a status transition of a monk (religiosus) from monastic to priestly office, and later in public law where it referred to the state’s appropriation of ecclesiastical property. Yet, since the nineteenth century a metaphorical usage became common in European historiography to account for the emergence of “modernity.” This metaphorization is characterized by a relatively flexible narrative structure that can be couched in either utopian or nostalgic idioms. Basically two variants of the meta-narrative associated with the metaphor of “secularization” can be distinguished. First, the narrative of a radical discontinuity between religion and (secular) modernity; and second the narrative of a continuity of religion and its secularized derivates within modernity. While the first variant was embraced by both anti-clerical political elites and, with an inverse evaluation, by representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, the second variant was more prominent within Protestant theological discourse and its philosophical counterparts.23 Both meta-narratives reflect the political-theological background of Christianity and result in specific semantic self-descriptions of modernity as a social condition set apart from any other, non-European experience, most notably from Islam.24 To conclude, the shift of charisma from “spiritual” to “secular” authorities resulted in new arrangements of political organization, collective identity and religion within the modern nation-state. These institutional arrangements, of which the relations between State and Church are but one among several components, are reflected in

23 The second variant of the secularization narrative is mainly associated with German philosophical controversies that date back to Hegel and Hegelian theologians such as Richard Rothe and extend, over the Kulturprotestantismus, to the debate betweeen Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, and Hans Blumenberg. A French perspective on this controversy is presented in Monod (2002). However, it should be stressed that a similar concept of secularization was already available at the time of the French Revolution. See Manent (1987). 24 On the function of the concept of religion within the orientalist discourse see Stauth (1993) and Salvatore (1997).

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semantic changes, most notably in the construction of the “secular.”25 The emerging knowledge culture—including the concept of “religion”, the larger semantic field structured by the “religious”/ “secular” dichotomy, and its articulation within meta-narratives of “secularization”—has left its imprint on the emerging sociological discourse of modernity. As John Milbank has argued in his provocative and fundamental criticism of sociology, the sociological discourse of modernity was premised on a historically contingent conception of the “secular” as a social space, within which both “politics” and “religion” are situated.26 It is in this sense that secularization is indeed concomitant with the emergence of modernity, all the while multiple forms of (de-) differentiation between “politics” and “religion” remain possible within the nation-state. III

Institutional Varieties of Secularism

Given the diverse historical trajectories of state-formation and nationbuilding in early modern Europe, it can be assumed that the cultural construction of a secular space and the institutional arrangements of politics and religion within it took different forms. These institutional varieties of secularism comprise different patterns of functional differentiation, including even patterns of de-differentiation.27 In the literature, such institutional varieties of relations between politics and religion are often reduced to legal arrangements between State and Church, so as to distinguish regimes of separation, co-operation, and of State or national Church.28 Against this conventional typology, I

25 To quote Peter van der Veer: “With the rise of the nation-state comes an enormous shift of what religion means. Religion produces the secular as much as the reverse, but this interaction can only be understood in the context of the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth century” (2001: 20). 26 See Milbank (1990). For a more balanced account of how the sociological discourse thematized religion see Tyrell (1995). On the “secularization” of modern knowledge more generally see Daniel ”uber’s contribution in this volume. 27 That de-differentiation of politics and religion was a major phenomenon in early modern Europe, most notably within Lutheran territories, has been stressed by Philip Gorski (2000: 150). Yet, while I concur with his criticism of the differentiation thesis as a paradigmatic core of the secularization theory, I would stress that the de-differentiation takes place within the modern condition and its conception of a “secular” social space. 28 See, for instance, with special reference to the government of religious diversity, Monsma and Soper (1997).


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propose to focus more systematically on varying characteristics of the nation-state as the institutional framework of political modernity. Drawing on a well-established typology in sociological neo-institutionalism, varieties of political modernity or polity models may be distinguished by cross-tabulating two institutional dimensions: (a) the degree to which the modern project of rationalization is carried by a centralized state; and (b) the degree to which the individual has substituted former feudal units as an autonomous actor. Four ideal types of modern polities can thus be distinguished: statist/republican, liberal, state corporatist, and social corporatist.29 In addition, these models display elective affinities to different constructions of national identity, which can be symbolized in more universalistic or more particularistic codes.30 Each polity model provides a distinctive institutional environment for public policies, modes of citizenship, patterns of formal organization, and social protest movements. Furthermore, each model contains specific implications for the relations between politics and religion; for instance, the stronger the degree of state centralization, the more pronounced are the potential cleavages between political and religious authorities. While space does not permit this typology to be developed in more detail,31 I wish to sketch its implications for institutional arrangements of politics and religion by focusing on the historical cases of Britain, France, and Germany. In liberal polities, no corporative units but only individuals are recognized as legitimate actors in the public sphere. However, the liberal polity refrains from incorporating individual actors into a centralized project of rationalization, and only provides the legal guarantees and political conditions for the individual’s rational pursuit of interest in civil society. This implies recognition of a pluralism of individual religious orientations in the public sphere, while privileging an associational and voluntary mode of religious organization. Due to the weak degree of “stateness,” conflicts between state and ecclesiastical authorities display only low profiles. Public religious policy is regarded less as a state affair, and more as a decentralized process of negotiations in civil society. In spite of the establishment 29 For the most recent and comprehensive formulation of this typology see Jepperson (2002). 30 See Eisenstadt and Giesen (1995). 31 For further elaboration see Chapter 2 in Koenig (forthcoming).

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of the Anglican Church since the 1534 Act of Supremacy under Henry VIII, institutional arrangements of religion and politics have been oriented at the liberal polity model in Britain. In a tradition of legal exemptions for individuals belonging to religious minorities, which starts with the Toleration Act (1689) and continues until the Religious Exemption Act (1976), exempting Sikhs from having to wear motorcycle crash helmets, Britain, like other Anglo-Saxon countries, has seen the development of relatively pluralistic modes of organizational incorporation. In the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the privileges granted to the Church of England were successively expanded to other religious communities (1829 to Catholics, 1858 to Jews) without ever being anchored constitutionally in individual rights to freedom of religion. As a corollary to the establishment of the Church of England, Anglicanism was an important symbolic element in the construction of collective identity and of nation-building in Britain. Yet, with the inclusion of other religious communities, this element was continuously transformed so as to extend the symbolic boundaries of the British nation and to integrate Christianity more generally.32 This is reflected in the dominance of the second variant of the secularization narrative; in metropolitan Britain, Christianity was propagated as the foundation of modern civilization. At the same time, the discourses of the British Government in the colonies drew upon the first variant of the secularization narrative by criticizing social practices (e.g. widow-burning) as “religious” and, hence, pre-modern.33 In comparison with the British case, the French development of institutional arrangements of political organization, collective identity and religion has taken a rather different course. The historical path of relations between religion and politics followed the institutional characteristics of a statist or republican polity model. Here, the cultural program of modernity is institutionalized in a central state, while individuals are incorporated into the collective project of rationalization without taking into account their respective position in civil society. The public sphere is regarded as homogeneous and as being composed of formally equal individuals, whereas the representation of particularistic identities, especially those that are categorized as “religious,” are excluded and restricted to the private 32 33

See Baubérot and Mathieu (2002). See van der Veer (2001: 41–52).


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sphere. Conflict characterizes the relations between the state and ecclesiastical authorities, and public religious policies are aimed at controlling the symbolic boundaries of the state and on projecting relatively homogeneous national identities in various social fields, notably in the education system. Thus, throughout the nineteenth century, the first variant of the secularization narrative dominated the political discourse in France, both on the part of the Catholic monarchists’ reaction and on the part of the Republican laïcists, the two parties of what has been described as the “guerre des deux Frances.”34 In both cases, modernity was understood as a fundamental break with the religious past as exemplified by the French Revolution, evaluated either as threat or as promise. The impact of the secularization narrative on the formation of political order and on the construction of collective identity was particularly strong at the end of the nineteenth century. At the level of dominant discourse we may think of writers such as Ernest Renan, Jules Ferry, Charles Renouvrier and, not least, Emile Durkheim, who exhibit a similar combination of nationalist and secularist elements, often couched in orientalist terms. At the level of political institutions, the adoption of state secularism in the Third Republic, with the foundation of non-confessional state schools in 1882 and the constitutional separation of State and Church in 1905, was clearly legitimated by the cultural scheme of the secularization narrative in its first variant. Until today, the political conflict between the Republic and the Roman Catholic Church in the nineteenth century has left its imprint on the political vocabulary and public institutions of the French Republic, most notably by establishing the concept of laïcité. In the state corporatist polity model, which is characteristic of the bi-confessional German-speaking region, individuals are incorporated into centralized projects of rationalization via corporative intermediate units. The situation of bi-confessionality was highly important both with respect to state-formation and the construction of collective identities. Religion(s) used to be regarded as a component of the public sphere, and religious organizations are even invested with public or state functions. It is in their capacity of being members of a corporative religious organization that individuals are perceived as religious actors. Hence, the state’s public policy of religion is mainly

34

See Poulat (1987).

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concerned with regulating the public functions of corporative religious communities, even after formal separation of State and Church. In the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, the second variant of the secularization narrative, which was already drawn upon by the carrier groups of the German Reich founded in 1871, i.e. by Protestant Prussian elites propagating a nationalized and secularized form of Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus) against both French secularism and, particularly in the Kulturkampf, against German Catholicism, was particularly formative.35 After the Second World War, that narrative was re-formulated so as to conceive of (Christian) religion in general as factor of social or national integration.36 The state-corporative model is reflected by institutional arrangements of close cooperation between the State and the two Churches as set forth in the Weimarer Reichsverfassung and adopted in the Grundgesetz of the Federal Republic. The legal dimension of this model is epitomized by the complex set of constitutional, legislative and contractual regulation that constitute the so-called Staatskirchenrecht within which rules of a selective co-operation between the religiously “neutral” State and the Churches are laid out and the conditions for granting religious communities the status of “corporations of public law” are specified. Its political dimension is the continuing strong influence of the two Christian Churches in the public sphere, notably in the fields of social welfare and education, but also with respect to public policies vis-à-vis religious minorities. Needless to say that this is but a brief sketch of institutional trajectories of state-formation and nation-building and their impact on institutional varieties of secularism. Also needless to stress that the three cases correspond to the above-mentioned ideal types only to a limited extent. Yet, the analysis suggests that, contrary to conventional theories of secularization, different varieties of secularism emerged within European modernity that are characterized by different patterns and degrees of differentiation between “politics” and “religion.” These patterns continue to affect struggles over the legitimate place of religion within the public sphere until today.

35

See for instance Smith (1995). The obligatory reference is, of course, to the the famous “secularization” thesis by the German jurist Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, according to which the “secular constitutional State lives on presuppositions that he cannot guarantee himself ” (1981: 71). 36

politics and religion in european nation-states IV

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Contemporary Transformations of Secularism

To exemplify the impact of these institutional arrangements of religion and politics, the following section deals, in greater detail, with the public incorporation of Muslim immigrants in Britain, France and Germany.37 Only recently has the religious dimension of international migration and integration been moved up the agenda of academic research and public policy. For a long time, and by following mainstream theories of secularization, researchers tended to assume that traditional and religious attitudes of immigrants would successively dissolve in the acculturation and assimilation to industrial societies. Similar assumptions were shared by theorists of multiculturalism who stressed that migration processes were accompanied by new claims for recognition of particularistic cultural or ethnic identities, but ignored the specifically religious dimensions of such identities. More recently, however, scholars have started to acknowledge that religious practices play a crucial role in the construction of immigrants’ identities, of immigrant communities or diasporas, and of transnational migrant networks. Borrowing their conceptual categories from post-colonial studies and the sociology of religion, they have highlighted the individuality, hybridity, and indeed the modernity of Islamic identifications in Europe as well as the emergence of new Islamic networks and organizations, particularly among the so-called second and third generation of immigrants.38 But in spite of its incontestable value, this line of research has left the deliberate policy initiatives, political opportunity structures, and institutional repertoires of European nation-states and their respective impact on the incorporation of Muslim migrants in Europe largely unexplored.39 Taking up this problem, I argue that divergences in public policy responses to Muslim claims for recognition can be explained by varying institutional arrangements of political organization, collective identity, and religion which result from the distinctive historical paths of state-formation and nation-building (a). Yet, to the degree that

37

The following passages draw heavily on my article in Koenig (2005 a). See, for instance, Césari (1997), Pace (1995), Saint-Blancat (1995), Tietze (2001), Vertovec and Peach (1997). 39 See on this point Rath et al. (2001: 259); Fetzer and Soper (2004). 38

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immigration challenges the nation-states and contributes to the development of post-national forms of citizenship, it also seems to induce isomorphic transformations of institutional arrangements of politics and religion, most notably the inclusion of “religion” as a legitimate category of identity in the public sphere (b). (a) As a starting point for a comparative macro-sociological analysis of the public incorporation of Muslim immigrants it is useful to analyze more systematically the claims for recognition articulated by this religious minority. Elaborating on the above-mentioned theoretical considerations concerning the classical model of the nationstate, I propose to distinguish different types of claim-making. Due to the centrality of the political arena in the cultural program of modernity, the content of claims for recognition can either be aimed at redefining the symbolic boundaries between the public and the private, the secular and the religious, or at gaining access to the political center. Furthermore, given the structural connection between political organization and collective identity within the classical model of the nation-state, claims for recognition can either address the organizational structure of the state or the prevalent symbols of national identity. A combination of these two analytical distinctions yields four different types of claim. First, Muslim immigrants can contest the legitimacy of politicized symbols of national identity and request liberties for the articulation of different identities. Claims for the toleration of religious dress codes in the public sphere, of ritual slaughter, of the muezzin call, etc., are examples of this type. Second, Muslim immigrants can call for their own autonomy in organizational spheres of society, for instance by asking for the establishment of subsidized private schools or the guarantee of religiously motivated exemptions from obligations within the state education system. More demanding are, third, claims for tolerance. These are claims of recognition which call for a recombination of the central symbols of national identity, e.g. by introducing new religious holidays in the national calendar or by extending the existing blasphemy laws. And, finally, Muslim immigrants can call for an equal participation in the organizational center of the state, which would influence the processes of societal construction, without religious identities being excluded a priori. Taking into account that the public responses to such claims of recognition can be either rejection or approval yields a highly differentiated conceptual framework for analyzing modes of public incorporation. It goes beyond


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classical distinctions of differential exclusion, assimilation, and multiculturalism by distinguishing more clearly between organizational and symbolic aspects of the incorporation process.40 Before utilizing this conceptual framework to analyze the incorporation of Muslim immigrants, it is necessary to point out that the extent to which claims of recognition have been articulated by this group is, at least to some degree, dependent on their formal citizenship status and typical patterns of migration flows. Thus, in Western Europe, claims for the recognition of Muslim religious identities have only appeared in the 1970s, when European industrial states adopted more restrictive policies of immigration, which were accompanied by programs of family reunification and integration policies, including naturalization. While the politics of Muslim recognition focused first on claims of toleration and autonomy, claims of tolerance and participation appeared considerably later. This sequence is not surprising, as it reflects the emergence of the so-called second and third generations who had started to acquire formal citizenship and electoral rights and thus constituted a new carrier group of more demanding claims. The timing evidently varies from country to country. In Britain, where even the first generation of Muslim immigrants had easy access to formal membership by virtue of their status as Commonwealth subjects, Muslim claims for recognition entered the public sphere about a decade earlier than in France, with Germany following only in the 1990s when jus sanguinis elements of nationality became increasingly supplemented by jus soli elements.41 In Britain, the incorporation of Muslim immigrants generally followed a pattern of continuous negotiations of rights between civil 40 It also captures some elements of Alexander’s recent useful attempt to systematize modes of incorporation by distinguishing between the inclusion of individuals and that of their attributes. What he describes as “multicultural” incorporation— the inclusion of outsiders not only as individuals, but also the recognition of their particularistic attributes or qualities—is a positive reaction, although after struggles and negotiations, to claims of recognition aimed at tolerance and participation (2001: 246). Yet, as we shall see, a more refined conceptual framework allows to differentiate more clearly between different aspects of “multi-religious” forms of civic incorporation. 41 Due to different citizenship regimes and policies of naturalization, the number of Muslim immigrants with formal citizenship status still varies today. In Britain, 80–90 per cent of the Muslim population, mostly from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, are British citizens. In France, about 50 per cent of the Muslim population, mostly of Maghrebian origin, hold a French passport. In Germany, only 10 per cent have become German citizens. For details on these demographic data see Koenig (forthcoming).

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society and the government. Due to decentralization and the high autonomy of local government, negotiations often took place at a local level. Claims for the toleration of religious symbols and for autonomous organizational spheres, including the building and registration of mosques, the establishment of Muslim cemeteries, the permission for ritual slaughter, the exemption of religious instruction and of school worship, were already granted in the 1980s. Even Muslims’ claims for political participation at the local level did not go unnoticed during this period; for instance, Muslims participated in the drafting of curricula of multi-religious instruction in state or public schools. Resistance was, however, encountered by claims for tolerance in the sense of a recognition of religious difference within the set of national symbols. To be sure, the government had already institutionalized the idea of a “multicultural society” in the anti-discrimination laws of the Race Relations Act (1976), but religious discrimination was explicitly excluded from these institutional rules. The Education Act (1988), contrary to local practice, even strengthened the Christian character of school worship and confirmed the privileged status of confessional private schools. The “Rushdie affair”, in which British Muslims demanded the extension of blasphemy laws that until then only protected the Anglican faith, highlighted the symbolic boundaries between Islam and the British nation and functioned as a catalyst for the organizational mobilization of Muslims in the national public sphere.42 Hence, in the 1990s, Muslim claims for recognition focused predominantly on the granting of equal public subsidies for Islamic private schools and on a law against religious discrimination. In the liberal polity model, pluralistic modes of incorporation therefore seem to have developed rather in a bottomup process without strong conflicts. Conflicts only arose to the extent that claims focused on the modification of symbols of British identity. Yet, even the Protestant or Christian elements in the set of British national symbols have a potential for pluralistic modes of incorporation; thus it is not by accident that many Muslims have expressed themselves in favor of the establishment of the Anglican Church, arguing that, unlike secularist multiculturalism, it recognizes a positive role of religion in the public sphere.43 42

For an analysis of the defense of the liberty of expression against the claims for Muslim recognition see Asad (1993: 239–268). 43 This point has been stressed by Tariq Modood (1994, 2000).


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In sharp contrast to the British experience, all four types of Muslim claims for recognition have encountered strong resistance in France. This is basically due to the high degree of state centralization of public functions, combined with the national symbol of laïcité. Religious claims for recognition are thus easily perceived as transgressing the symbolic boundary between the public and the private, or as polluting the sacred core of the nation. Particularistic, “religious” identities are relegated to the private sphere, while at the same time the public sphere is defined in expansive terms, as shown by the ongoing conflicts over the wearing of the veil by Muslim schoolchildren, conflicts which most recently have resulted in the legislative prohibition of religious symbols in state schools. Furthermore, perhaps paradoxically, the state intervenes rather strongly in the politics of Muslim recognition. Since the 1990s, the government has continuously attempted to create a central representative organization of French Muslims. After the failure of the Conseil de Réflexion sur l’Islam en France (CORIF) created by Pierre Joxe in 1990 and a similar initiative of Charles Pasqua, Pierre Chévènement initiated a “consultation” with Muslim associations who had to declare their compliance with core values of the French Republic, in order to participate. These attempts at controlled organizational incorporation, which have resulted in the creation of the Conseil Français du Culte Musulman (CFCM) in 2003, would be inconceivable in Britain. Hence, to the degree that pluralistic modes of incorporation developed at all, they were highly controlled by the state. In the state-corporatist polity, which is characteristic of the German case, incorporation has similarly been controlled by the organizational center of the state. However, it took a different form than in France in centering on legal questions of including Islamic organizations in the system of privileged relation between the state and the religious communities. Since the 1970s, Muslim groups have applied to be granted the status of a corporation of public law. For a long time these attempts were without success, as were similar claims to have Islamic religious instruction established in state schools. Although some obstacles began to be removed by policy-makers in the 1990s, notably in the field of education, such claims have met continuous resistance by the administration and the courts. The major obstacle to the development of more pluralistic modes of incorporation in Germany was the particularistic coding of national symbols, due to which Islam was perceived as ethnically or culturally alien.

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While these institutional arrangements of political organizations, national identity and religion, characteristic of each case and its underlying polity model, explain divergent patterns of organizational and symbolic incorporation of Muslim immigrants, we may go one step further and ask how they shape the forms of collective organization and identification among Muslims themselves. For instance, we may expect that corporatist polities induce the development of hierarchically structured religious organizations; recent attempts of Muslim organizations to form corporations of public law in Germany point precisely in that direction. Furthermore, we may hypothesize that Muslim collective identifications crystallize around the dominant national symbols of each polity, including even French laïcité. Preliminary evidence suggests that the institutional environment of incorporation indeed triggers internal change among Muslim migrants and thus affects the very claims for recognition articulated by this particular group.44 (b) The successive emergence of more pluralistic modes of incorporation has in all three cases been accompanied by considerable institutional changes. The increasing awareness of the religious dimension of integration policies has led to contestations and debates about the future of the Anglican establishment, of the French laïcité, and of the German Staatskirchenrecht. The possibility to conceive of a “laïcisation de la laïcité ” in the French discourse is perhaps most indicative of the underlying structural transformations.45 These debates, which are triggered by religious claims for recognition of immigrants, have been increasingly framed in the cognitive and normative categories of a human rights discourse, focusing on the individual’s right to religious freedom as well as on the collective rights of minorities. They attest to a far-reaching transformation of the nation-state as an institutional framework of political modernity. Following neo-institutionalist theories of citizenship, these convergences can be explained by changes in the institutional or cultural environment of modern nation-states.46 In fact, the classical model of the nation-state has been de-institutionalized in the post-war period by the development of what is called a “post-Westphalian” interna44

See, for instance, Rath et al. (2001). This notion has been coined by Jean-Paul Willaime (1991, 2004). For a related analysis see also Marcel Gauchet (1998). 46 See, most notably, Soysal (1994). 45


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tional system. Two transformations directly affect the institution of citizenship: the decoupling of state membership and individual rights, and the decoupling of state membership and national identity. First, the transnational diffusion of ideas of human rights in the post-war period and their institutionalization in international organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, has established a charismatic status of “universal personhood” to which rights are, at least in principle, attached independently of formal state membership or nationality. Even though a strong version of this thesis is controversial,47 at least a weaker version does hold, emphasizing that human rights discourses provide new repertoires of contestation and justification to both individuals and states and, thereby, change domestic political dynamics. Secondly, within the transnational human rights discourse there has been a proliferation of new rights that clearly go beyond the classical European political tradition. Of particular importance in this respect is the further specification of rights of equality and non-discrimination in articles on individual rights to cultural identity and minority rights, as they oblige states to adopt a proactive approach to promote the identity of ethnic or national, linguistic, and religious minorities on their territory.48 It has been since the 1990s, in particular, that the concept of a right to cultural identity has taken hold in transnational human rights discourses, as demonstrated by the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of all Migrant Workers and Members of their Families (1990), the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic Religious and Linguistic Minorities (1992), or a variety of activities of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Together, these two transformations amount to a de-charismatization of the nation-state, with charisma being invested in the redemptive vision of human rights.49 As a consequence of the emergence of new institutional bases of rights and the transnational diffusion of a “multicultural” citizenship model, we may expect institutional changes in a variety of policy fields including immigration, integration and, as I argue, the management of religious diversity. As statehood and national identity 47

For criticism see Joppke (1999). For an extended analysis of the emergence and global diffusion of a discourse of cultural diversity see Koenig (2005 b). 49 For an analysis of the secular, redemptive vision of human rights see Asad (2003: 155). 48

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have become increasingly decoupled, new categories of identity have been legitimated and sanctioned in the public sphere, including “religion.” Thus, in all three cases, the emergence of more pluralistic modes of organizational incorporation can be discerned which largely correspond to the globally diffused model of “multicultural” citizenship. In the wake of the selective adaptation of this citizenship model, European states have started to develop new routine relations with religious minorities. Without officially privileging a particular religious organization, governments increasingly co-operate with organized religious bodies in many institutional fields including education, welfare provisions, legislation and even jurisdiction. An important factor explaining this convergence is the above-mentioned decoupling of formal membership and national identity in transnational discourses of human rights, according to which states are obliged to recognize and even promote ethnic, cultural, and religious difference. The Council of Europe, for instance, increasingly monitors state policies vis-à-vis Muslim minorities in Europe and exercises normative pressure on governments to adopt religious anti-discrimination legislation. The European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), which has formulated a Policy Recommendation “Combating Intolerance and Discrimination against Muslims” (27 April 2000),50 has particularly criticized the French republican model of relegating religious diversity to the private sphere, as well as the ethnic definition of German nationhood and British blasphemy laws.51 States respond to these expectancy structures by legislative changes and administrative policies. For example, current debates about a potential legislation on religious discrimination in Great Britain—one of the recurrent Muslim demands in the nineties—explicitly refer to European legal standards of human rights. Even the more recent legal prohibition of visible religious signs in state schools, which re-affirmed a strict interpretation of French laïcité, was framed by references to global and European norms of religious liberty.52 As a result, the convergences of citizenship regimes analyzed elsewhere in neo-institutionalist literature are equally to be found in the field of religious policies. 50

See Council of Europe Doc. CRI (2000) 21. p. 5. See for instance Council of Europe Doc CRI (98)47 [15 June 1998], p. 5 (on France); Council of Europe Doc CRI (2001)36 (on Germany); and Council of Europe Doc CRI (99)5, p. 10. 52 The Report Laïcité et République, written by a Commission of political and intellectual leaders under Bernard Stasi to prepare new legislation, explicitly places the French tradition in a broader international perspective (2004: 47–50, 71–80). 51


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The analysis of the incorporation of Muslim immigrants in Western Europe shows that the way in which nation-states respond to new forms of religious diversity is, on the one hand, shaped by the institutional arrangements of political organization, collective identity and religion characteristic of the historical trajectories of modern nationstates and their specific polity model. On the other hand, in spite of such path-dependencies, it also points to convergent trends, which correspond to the development of cognitive and normative expectancy structures at the transnational level and amount to a decoupling of political organization and national identity. Hand in hand with the emergence of “multicultural” modes of incorporation, we witness new struggles for public recognition, which are characterized by the inclusion of “religion” as a legitimate category of identity in the public sphere and by successive symbolic boundary-shifts between the “religious” and the “secular.”53 V Conclusion The analysis presented in this contribution has gone some way towards a more reflexive sociology of the secular. I have emphasized the modernity of the very concept of “religion” and its pragmatic function within the semantic field of the modern political discourse, most notably the delineation of boundaries between the private and the public and, hence, the definition of legitimate politics. Furthermore, I have highlighted the nation-state as a major institutional framework of political modernity and its imaginations of a “secular” social space, within which various modes and degrees of differentiation between politics and religion—institutional varieties of secularism— are possible. And, finally, I have tried to shed some light on contemporary transformations of the nation-state that result in institutional rearrangements of politics and religion. Throughout the argument, I have mainly referred to “religion” in its more narrow, modern sense which has, of course, to be sharply distinguished entire transcendental visions in Axial Age civilizations that we retrospectively conceive as world religions.54

53

For a comparison of such symbolic boundary shifts with the controversy over national language in the United States see Zolberg and Woon (1999). 54 On this distinction see Eisenstadt (1993), who himself is primarily concerned with the civilizational dimension of religion and its impact on modern politics.

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In conclusion, I would like to return to the diagnosis of a coming “post-secular society.” This diagnosis which assumes, to recall Habermas’ main argument,55 a return of religious languages into the public sphere of rational discourse and, hence, a relativization of secular or secularist arguments, is misleading on several accounts.56 First of all, religion had never been entirely privatized within the framework of the classical nation-state. Multiple patterns of differentiation and even de-differentiation between politics and religion were possible within the nation-state. Moreover, the “secular” sphere was itself invested with charismatic or sacred qualities in the emergence of political modernity. Conventional theories of secularization have ignored these aspects to the degree that they did not problematize the cultural constitution of the nation-state as an institutional framework for processes of functional differentiation.57 Furthermore, contemporary transformations in the relation between politics and religion, epitomized by struggles over the recognition of religious identities, are far from constituting an exit from the secular and modern condition; rather, they indicate a shift of charisma from the nation-state to human rights, as a result of which new particularistic identities, including religious ones, are sanctioned as legitimate expressions of the universal. Far from challenging the major premises of political modernity, claims to the recognition of religious identities contribute, in other words and perhaps paradoxically, to a disenchantment with the classical instrument of disenchantment: the modern nation-state. References Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2001). “Theorizing ‘Modes of Incorporation’: Assimilation, Hyphenation, and Multiculturalism as Varieties of Civil Participation.” In: Sociological Theory 19: 238–249. Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Asad, Talal (1993). Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 55

See Habermas (2001: 22). For a related argument see Joas (2004: 122–128), who rightly emphasizes the internal transformation of religious languages. 57 To quote Talal Asad: “If the secularization thesis no longer carries the conviction it once did, this is because the categories of politics and religion turn out to implicate each other more profoundly than we thought, a discovery that has accompanied our growing understanding of the powers of the nation-state.” (1999: 195). 56


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INDEX acceleration 11, 208ff. Agamben, G. 101 Akhenaten 43, 47, 50 Alexander, J.C. 305 Amarna religion 44 Amarna Revolution 43, 45 Anglicanism 88, 300ff., 306, 308 animism 78 apocalypse 11 apocalyptic movements 85 apocalyptic prophecies 207f., 213ff. Aquinas, T. 25 Arnason, J. 181 Aron, R. 187 Artasharta 165 Assmann, J. 4, 7, 9–10 Assyria 45f., 149, 156ff. Aton 44 Augustine 6, 108, 146, 158, 165, 169, 186, 211, 214, 253, 295 Axial Age A.A. theory 6f., 39 A. civilizations 34, 112, 158, 162ff., 181f., 294, 311 Axiality 48, 50f., 158 A. religions 31 A. tension 109, 116, 147, 162f., 175, 178 de-axialization 49 post-Axial Age cultures 117, 125 pre-Axial civilizations 163, 166, 185f. Baptism 88, 90, 241 Babylonian exile 46, 48, 50, 70 Bacon, F. 216 Bakunin, M.A. 11, 196, 201f. Bellah, R.N. 2, 4 Berger, P.L. 1, 4, 292 Berlin, I. 185 Bildung (education) 256 Blumenberg, H. 95, 249, 297 Bobbio, N. 184, Böckenförde, E.-W. 302 Bollenbeck, G. 256 Book of Daniel 145 Book of Hiob 124 Book of Judges 156

Book of Numbers 69ff. Book of Prophets 156 Book of Psalms 43 Braniß, C.J. 259 Breasted, J.H. 44 Brentano, C. 242 Buddha 39 Buddhism 20, 23, 28, 31, 79, 84, 145, 163, 166 Bürger 235f. Burckhardt, J. 260 Calvinism 168 Casanova, J. 293f. Catholicism 2, 12, 79, 87, 89f., 231ff., 293, 302 C. and anthropology 58, 67f. Christianity 3, 23, 76, 78, 94, 150, 202, 253, 297 Christian orders 113ff., 168 C. vers. Islam 153, 297 chosen people 146f., 149, 154 church/state 8, 47f., 81f., 88ff., 94, 210ff., 235ff., 259, 261, 295ff. Cicero 194, 196 citizenship 10, 22f., 179, 309 City of God/City of Man 6, 94, 154, 158, 161f., 165f., 168ff., 186, 211, 220f., 295 civil religion 4–5, 48, 89, 231 civil society 22, 117ff., 131f., 183, 193, 293, 296, 299f., 305f. civilization clash of c. 3, 33 comparative c. 5 clubs 120ff. Cochin, A. 170 Cohen, H. 267, 270 collective identity 10, 17ff., 27f., 127, 171, 181, 184, 187, 292, 295, 297, 300, 303f., 311 Communism 10, 27, 89, 151, 175, 212 Comte, A. 2, 75, 249f., 252, 254 Condorcet, M. 117 Confucius 39, 113 Confucianism 78, 163 Copernicus 254

318

index

cosmopolitanism 28 covenant theology 45, 49f., 156, 202, 216 crisis c. of knowledge 12, 262 existential c. 4 c. of normative order 97, 103, 126, 135 c. philosophy 257 c. of science 250 Critias 10, 193f., 198 cultural bias 7, 62 Däubler, T. 150 decisionism 275f. Descartes, R. 251f. de-secularization 2f. Deuteronomy 46, 143, 156 development 208, 253f. deviance 8, 96ff., 130, 134 tale of d. 108 transcendence of d. 124 Diderot, D. 262 Dilthey, W. 12, 59, 211, 254, 261ff. disenchantment (Entzauberung) 18, 153, 176, 312 division of labor 79f., 224 djihad 143 Douglas, M. 1, 4, 7 Droysen, J.G. 252 Dumont, L. 56 DuPerron, A. 39 Durkheim, É. 1, 2, 60, 62, 66ff., 73, 75, 96, 249, 301 Edler von Sartori, J. 238 Eisenstadt, S.N. 1, 4, 6, 9–10, 95, 151, 153, 158, 294 Elias, N. 177 emancipation 211 end of history 10, 26, 33 Engels, F. 151 Enlightenment 1, 9, 30f., 75, 94, 117ff., 126f., 132, 171, 173ff., 210, 217ff., 250 epiphany 8, 96, 99f. e. of reason 117, 124, 134 tale of e. 117ff. transcendence of e. 124 Erasmus 174 Erdmann, B. 259 eschatology 155, 166, 175ff., 183, 186, 211, 216, 254, 264 Euripides 10, 193f., 201

evangelicalism 89 Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 56 evil 130, 193 evolution 6 exclusivism 149, 154 Exodus 40, 47f., 147f., 156, 202 Ferguson, A. 117 Ferry, J. 301 Feuerbach, L. 254, 259 Ficino, Marsilio 195 Fischer, K. 259 Fiore, J. 108 Fleck, L. 66 Foucault, M. 177 Freud, S. 11, 143, 201 functional differentiation 2, 75, 80, 82, 91, 93, 245, 294 fundamentalism fundamentalist movements 3, 6, 17, 20, 26f. 30, 33, 87, 93, 155, 184 religious f. 83, 134, 292 rise of f. 86 Furet, F. 170 Galilei, G. 251 Gehlen, A. 75 Gentile, E. 152 German Idealism 12, 96, 256ff. Giesen, B. 255f. Gilson, É. 211 Goethe, J.W. 262 globalization 24f., 27f., 33, 62, 291 Gnosis 6, 145, 151, 161, 166, 169f., 186f. Görres, J. 233, 237, 242 Golden Calf 50, 142, 158 grid-group 57, 61, 64 Habermas, J. 51, 117, 291, 293, 312 Han Fei 113 Hannerz, U. 25 Hegel, G.W.F. 12, 96, 211, 249, 252ff., 259, 263, 265, 270, 297 hegemony 30, 32f. Heidegger, M. 59, 101, 261 Herder, J.G. 176 Hermeticism 145 hero 8, 98ff., 105, 108f., 131 religious heroism 142f. Hervieu-Léger, D. 293f. hierarchy 58f., 63, 77 Hinduism 20, 28, 31, 78, 163

index Historicism 257, 259ff., 278, 282 Hobbes, T. 96, 100, 202, 251 holism 59ff., 270 homo sacer 101 Hsunt-su 165 Huntington 3 Husserl, E. 261f., 272 hydraulic societies 8, 80 Ibn Khaldoun 165 idolatry 47, 49, 158, 197, 199 individualism 3, 7, 30, 64, 98, 146, 172f., 185, 202, 233, 246 inner man 146 Inquisition 113f. instrumental rationality (Zweckrationalität) 25, 175f. invisible religion 4f. Islam 9, 23, 76, 78, 84f., 151ff., 303ff. Islamism 134, 150, 155f. Israeli Kingdom 7 Jacobinism 6, 10, 18, 26, 161f., 170, 181ff. Jaspers, K. 7, 39, 273 Jesus 194 Jingzong 116 Judaism 9, 145, 153ff. justice idea of j. 157 Kant, I. 96, 117, 121, 211, 218ff., 252ff., 261f., 267, 270, 277, 281 Kantorowicz, E. 95, 108ff. Katulya 165 Kepler, J. 251 Kierkegaard, S. 101 Köhnke, K.C. 258 Koselleck, R. 11f., 253, 265 Kuhn, T. 62, 66 Kultur (culture) 256, 266ff. Lactantius 214 Lamprecht, K. 260 Laotse 39 Lefort, C. 181 Leibniz, G.W. 216, 251f. Lenin, V.I. 151, 187 Lessing, G.E. 218 Levi, P. 131 Leviticus 69ff. life 263ff. Li Si 113

319

Locke, J. 117, 251 Löwith, K. 249, 273, 297 logos 164, 172 loyalism 43, 45 Loyola, I. 79 Luckmann, T. 1–2, 4, 7–8, 95, 292 Lübbe, H. 185 Luhmann, N. 225, 292 Luther, M. 168, 213, 215, 232 Machiavelli 109 magic 79, 134 Mandeans 145 Manicheans 145 Mannheim, K. 12, 59, 66, 250, 271f., 281ff. Mao, T. 151 Marquard, O. 274 martyrdom 145 Marx, K. 11, 75, 151, 193, 201, 211, 250, 252, 254, 259 Mauss, M. 60, 62 Melanchton, P. 215 Mencius 113 Methodism 88 Middle Kingdom 42f. Milbank, J. 298 Milgrom, J. 71 modernization process of m. 3–4, 9, 82, 86, 275 project of m. 10 m. theory 61 modernity 2, 10, 271, 291, 301 ambivalence of m. 5, 173ff., 185 dilemma of m. 29, 31, 69, 168 discourse of m. 6, 26ff., 185ff., 296, 298 monopoly of m. 31f. multiple modernities 29, 31ff., 188 program of m. 17, 20, 22, 24, 26, 29, 32f., 51, 93, 161, 170ff., 181, 294f. Mohammed 194 monastic asceticism 112f. monotheism 7, 9, 39, 45ff., 49, 78, 141, 156, 163, 201f. monotheistic revolution 48, 51, 147 Montaigne, M. 174 Montesquieu, C.L. 252 morality 76ff., 82, 91 Mosaic distinction 9, 46ff., 141ff. M.d. and violence 141ff. Moses 47, 50, 142, 147, 156, 194f., 197, 200f.

320

index

Moses of Strabon (Moses Strabonicus) 196ff. Motzu 165 multiculturalism 2, 18, 21, 303, 305f. nationalism 150, 184, 291, 301 Natorp, P. 267 natural law 172 natural theology 251 Naudé, G. 195f. negative theology 211 negative transcendence 97, 99, 101f., 109, 117, 124ff., 129f., 134, 137 neo-Kantianism 12, 261f., 266ff. New Age 84ff., 90 New Testament 209, 215 Newton, I. 208 Niebuhr, B.G. 223 Nietzsche, F. 211, 260, 263 Novalis 233, 255 Numa Pompilius 194, 196 Oakes, G. 281 Oedipus 97 Old Kingdom 7, 40ff., 51 Old Testament 7, 69ff., 218 Orpheus 195 Orphics 145 Osiris 41f. Overbeck, F. 211 Ozouf, M. 170 paganism 14, 47, 110, 117, 126, 134, 142, 146ff., 198f. Parsons, T. 96, 273 Pentateuch 70ff., 156 perpetrator 8, 97, 100, 108f., 115, 123, 126, 130f. personal piety 42ff., 51 philosophy of history (Geschichtsphilosophie) 209, 211, 255, 269, 276ff. pharaoh 42, 47, 49, 105, 156 phenomenology 60, 75, 261 f. of religion 78, 231 Platonism 145 Plessner, H. 75, 255 political theology 10–11, 40, 49, 193ff. biblical f.t. 156f. medieval f.t. 108 f.t. of Israel 46, 156 turn in f.t. 48 Polybios 10, 193f., 222

polytheism 9, 149, 157f., 197ff., 260 postmodernism 9, 18, 21, 291 postmodern movements 25, 28, 32 postmodern skepticism 135 Prantl, C. 259 Presbyterianism 88 privatization of religion 4, 8, 18, 81ff., 231, 292f. progress 6, 134, 208, 211, 216ff., 254 prophet 8, 99, 156, 167 Protestantism 2, 76, 89f., 232, 302 public sphere 10, 22, 118ff. f.s. vers. private s. 121ff., 296, 304, 307, 310f. Puritanism 107, 170 Pythagoras 195 Phytagoraeans 145 Quianlong

119

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 56 Ramesside Age 42 Ramses II 45 Ramus 216 Ranke, L. 260 reason 9, 30, 122f., 129, 163, 166, 172, 174f., 251 historical reason 260, 282 philosophical r. 281 practical r. 219 reason and revelation 162f., 173f. Reformation 168ff., 176, 222, 237, 295 regicide 115 Reinhold, C.L. 200 relativism 3, 66, 261, 267, 280f., 283f. religion political r. 152f. r. as fiction 193f. r. as illusion 201 r. vers. philosophy 258 Renaissance 171, 176, 178 Renan, E. 301 Renouvrier, C. 301 revolution concept of r. 223, 254 English R. 222 French R. 116, 124, 162, 187, 210ff., 219, 222ff., 229, 234, 254, 297, 301, 307, 310 Great r. 6, 31, 162, 168ff., 177ff., 183, 185f., 295 Gregorian R. 295

index Industrial R. 218, 223 revolutionary movements 18, 170 revolutionary state 10, 17, 20f. scientific r. 62, 256ff. Rickert, H. 12, 266ff. Ringer, F.K. 256 Robbespierre, M. 116, 219 rois thaumaturges 48, 107, 158 Romanticism 30, 176, 246, 255, 282 Ross, A. 10, 198ff. Rousseau, J.-J. 117, 127, 252 sacerdotes iustitiae (priests of justice) 110 sacred/profane 78, 80, 96, 100, 103, 123, 134, 145 salons 120ff. Savigny, F.C. 259 Scheler, M. 276 Schelling, F.W.J. 256 Schiller, F. 10, 201, 217, 262 Schleiermacher, F.D.E. 233, 267 Schlegel, F. 233 Schlögl, R. 11 Schmitt, C. 11, 95f., 150, 152, 202f., 249, 297 Schnädelbach, H. 257, 269 Scholtz, G. 260 Schopenhauer, A. 259, 263 Schutz, A. 75 scientism 25, 175, 257, 259ff., 270, 275 Scottish Moralists 252 secularization concepts of s. 12, 75, 87, 134, 209ff., 232, 291ff. critique of s. 7, 9, 11, 76, 81, 90, 93, 291ff. process of s. 4, 8–9, 81, 133f., 212 s. and science 259, 266 thesis of s. 2–3, 68, 231, 291 shamanism 78 Shia 79, 155 Shils, E. 185 Simmel, G. 12, 261, 266, 271 Siculus, Diodorus 195 Siemens, W. 207f. Simmel, G. 250, 276ff. skepticism 5, 135 solidarity 127, 131 Sombart, W. 1 sovereignty 8, 96 figure of the sovereign 98f., 108 ideology of s. 179

321

tale of s. 102ff. transcendence of s. 124 Specht, R. 251 Spencer, H. 250, 252 Spinoza, B. 10, 196, 251 Spirit (Geist) 12, 252ff., 265f., 271, 279 Stahl, F.J. 258 Stalin, J. 151 state modern s. 210 nation-s. 10, 12, 17, 20f., 29, 150, 183, 291ff. princely s. 94 revolutionary s. 21ff., s. as replacement for god 131 Sunna 79 taboo 57, 104, 130 Taoism 78 Taylor, C. 4, 68 temporal foreshortening 11, 207ff. terrorism 65 Tenbruck, F.H. 250, 273f., 276 theodicee 125 theo-mimesis 158 Tiburtinian Sibyl 207f., 213 Tiryakian, E.A. 171 de Tocqueville, A. 5, 76, 88 Toland, J. 196ff. Tolstoy, L. 263 Totenzettel (death announcements) 243ff. Toulmin, S. 174 transcendence figures of t. 95ff. great t. 78, 83 intermediate t. 78 minor t. 78 transcendental philosophy 256, 269ff. trauma 1, 7, 40, 45f., 124, 128, 131f. Trendelenburg, F.A. 267 Trismegist 195 Troeltsch, E. 1, 211, 260 Turner, V. 96 universalism 20, 23, 29, 119, 127, 149f., 154f., 170, 181, 292, 299 university 256 value-rationality (Wertrationalität) 175f. value-theory 268ff. Vereine 120ff.

25,

index

322

Vico, G. 176 victim 8, 101f., 124f., 134 victimhood 127, 132f. v. vers. hero 127ff. v. vers. sacrifice 125f. Voegelin, E. 4, 39, 51, 95, 104, 169, 186, 249 void 8, 96, 100, 134 tale of the v. 124ff. transcendence of the v. 133 volonté générale (general will) 118, 120f., 124, 180 Voltaire 117, 201, 262 Wagner, P. Warburton, Weber, A. Weber, M.

177, 259 W. 10, 198ff. 7, 39, 261 1–2, 4, 12, 50f., 68, 75,

94, 112, 134, 153, 167, 176, 231, 250, 266, 268, 271ff., 284, 293 Weizsäcker, V. 283 Wieland, C.M. 219 Wiesel, E. 131 Wilson, B. 292 Windelband, W. 250, 266, 271, 276, 280 Wittgenstein, L. 60, 96 Wittrock, B. 259 world view 77ff. Xianzong 116 Xuannang poetry Xunzi 113

119

Zoroaster 39, 195 Zoroastrianism 39

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