Religion and the Political Imagination

Religion and the Political Imagination offers new ways of thinking about the urgency of religious issues in the contemporary world.

Ira Katznelson (Edited by), Gareth Stedman Jones (Edited by)

9780521766548, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 7 October 2010

394 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.73 kg

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

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.

Introduction - multiple secularities Ira Katznelson and Gareth Stedman Jones
1. Secularisation: religion and the roots of innovation in the political sphere Ingrid Creppell
2. Regarding toleration and liberalism: considerations from the Anglo-Jewish experience Ira Katznelson
3. The Enlightenment, the late eighteenth-century revolutions and their aftermath: the 'secularising' implications of Protestantism? David M. Thompson
4. In the lands of the Ottomans: religion and politics Karen Barkey
5. The Russian Orthodox Church and secularisation Geoffrey Hosking
6. The American experience of secularisation Michael O'Brien
7. French Catholic political thought from the deconfessionalisation of the state to the recognition of religious freedom Emile Perreau-Saussine
8. Religion and the origins of socialism Gareth Stedman Jones
9. From 1848 to Christian democracy Christopher Clark
10. The disciplining of the religious conscience in nineteenth-century British politics Jonathan Parry
11. Colonial secularisation and Islamism in North India: a relationship of creativity Humeira Iqtidar
12. The 1960s Hugh McLeod
13. Gendering secularisation: locating women in the transformation of British Christianity in the 1960s Callum G. Brown
14. Does constitutionalisation lead to secularisation? Anat Scolnicov
15. Europe's uneasy marriage of secularisation and Christianity since the 1960s and the challenge of contemporary religious pluralism Jytte Klausen
16. On thick and thin religion: some critical reflections on secularisation theory Sudipta Kaviraj.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL]