Politics and the Sacred

Argues that practices of the sacred have shaped the frames of modern secular politics.

Harald Wydra (Author)

9781107075375, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 April 2015

276 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.54 kg

'Two of the driving forces in contemporary life - politics and the sacred - are not necessarily separate, as this thoughtful book reveals. The striking analysis focuses on lived aspects of practice and performance rather than on images and concepts, and its arresting reconception of both politics and the sacred is brought to life in chapters that focus on communism, democracy, human rights and collective victimhood. These fertile ideas will change our ways of thinking about the way politics and religion interact and how they affect public life in the global era.' Mark Juergensmeyer, author of Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State

This path-breaking book argues that practices of the sacred are constitutive of modern secular politics. Following a tradition of enquiry in anthropology and political theory, it examines how limit situations shape the political imagination and collective identity. As an experiential and cultural fact, the sacred emerges within, and simultaneously transcends, transgressive dynamics such as revolutions, wars or globalisation. Rather than conceive the sacred as a religious doctrine or a metaphysical belief, Wydra examines its adaptive functions as origins, truths and order which are historically contingent across time and transformative of political aspirations. He suggests that the brokenness of political reality is a permanent condition of humanity, which will continue to produce quests for the sacred, and transcendental political frames. Working in the spirit of the genealogical mode of enquiry, this book examines the secular sources of political theologies, the democratic sacred, the communist imagination, European political identity, the sources of human rights and the relationship of victimhood to new wars.

Introduction: the sacred and the political
1. The extraordinary and the political imagination
2. The politics of transcendence
3. Secular sources of political theologies
4. Democracy and the sacred
5. The power of symbols: Communism and beyond
6. Generations of European imaginations
7. The spell of humanity
8. Victim and new wars
Epilogue: rationalities of the sacred.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], Social theory [JHBA], Social & political philosophy [HPS]