Religion and the Political Imagination

by Edited by Ira Katznelson , Gareth Stedman Jones

• ISBN13: 9780521766548
• ISBN10: 0521766540
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-11-22
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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

Author Biography

IraKatznelson is Ruggles Professor of Political science and History at Columbia University and Research Associate at the Centre for History and Economics King's college, Cambridge. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society Professor katznelson has published widely on the history of the western liberal tradition. Gareth Stedman Jones is Professor of Political Thought in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. A Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, he is also Director of the centre for History and Economics. Professor Stedman Jones has written widely on the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European political thought.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. vii
Acknowledgements	p. ix
Introduction: multiple secularities	p. 1
Secularisation: religion and the roots of innovation in the political sphere	p. 23
Regarding toleration and liberalism: considerations from the Anglo-Jewish experience	p. 46
The Enlightenment, the late eighteenth-century revolutions and their aftermath: the 'secularising' implications of Protestantism?	p. 70
In the lands of the Ottomans: religion and politics	p. 90
The Russian Orthodox Church and secularisation	p. 112
The American experience of secularisation	p. 132
French Catholic political thought from the deconfessionalisation of the state to the recognition of religious freedom	p. 150
Religion and the origins of socialism	p. 171
From 1848 to Christian Democracy	p. 190
The disciplining of the religious conscience in nineteenth-century British politics	p. 214
Colonial secularism and Islamism in North India: a relationship of creativity	p. 235
The 1960s	p. 254
Gendering secularisation: locating women in the transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s	p. 275
Does constitutionalisation lead to secularisation?	p. 295
Europe's uneasy marriage of secularism and Christianity since 1945 and the challenge of contemporary religious pluralism	p. 314
On thick and thin religion: some critical reflections on secularisation theory	p. 336
Index	p. 356
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