No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
From 1848 to Christian Democracy
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the relationship between the processes of secularisation and Catholic religious revival that have shaped Europe's transition to modernity. The chapter falls into two parts. The first explores the deepening tension between an anti-clerical European liberalism at the height of its powers and confidence and a revitalised Catholic Church determined to mobilise the masses of the faithful in support of its objectives. The second part of the chapter explores the dialectical relationship between secular (liberal, republican) and clerical forms of mobilisation. Secularising movements and initiatives, it argues, triggered waves of confessional mobilisation and vice versa. In this process of challenge and response the two processes evolved in tandem. The chapter closes with a reflection on the significance of this paradoxical intertwining of opposed phenomena for the shaping of modern Europe. Even the most cursory overview of the history of Catholicism in nineteenth-century continental Europe reveals an apparently contradictory state of affairs. On the one hand, church properties were seized and sold off; ecclesiastical privileges (fiscal, political, juridical) were removed or curtailed; clerical authorities came under pressure to retreat from their commanding positions in education and charitable provision; liberal, national, radical and socialist political discourses were marked by an uncompromisingly anti-clerical rhetoric and Masonic and free-thinking associational networks sprang up to combat the influence of church institutions and doctrine over human affairs.
... 75 Many Europeans were devoted to their religions on a spiritual level, however in the upper echelons of society in Europe, religion was also an avenue for societal advancement despite the fact that the continent was moving towards political secularization in the nineteenth century. 76 On the African continent, religion played a much different role. Generally, religion across Sub-Saharan Africa permeated every aspect of one's life. ...
Far from being limited to denunciations of modernity, nineteenth-century Catholic thought had a programmatic and visionary side. This article deals with the models of community put forward by Lamennais in L'Avenir , Antonio Rosmini, Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, and Wilhelm Ketteler. These writers reimagined the foundations of public life against the claims of self-interested individualism and state omnipotence. Three theses in particular capture their vision of the future polity: 1) societies, which were not “mechanisms,” needed Catholicism as animating spirit; 2) political representation should be “organic”; and 3) whereas the liberal elites imposed their vested interests on the common people, the Catholic polity reflected their needs and beliefs. The four writers envisaged a community of the gentle and caring, which, like the family, was hierarchical, self-governed, local, and supportive. In contrast, it was argued that the people had no voice under liberalism because the elite's values were not the people's and because the political system was a mere arena for the clash of special interests. This was a communitarian and populist Catholicism, prizing self-government, denouncing parliamentary politics, and siding with “the people.”
This chapter provides a detailed analysis of Kemalist narratives, contextualized by a fresh look at some of Turkey’s major political processes. It covers the main contours of republican history as an interplay among major domestic political events, global history, and key ideological patterns produced from the 1920s to the 1990s. The transformation and redefinition of classical political ideologies during Turkey’s twentieth-century history is depicted as a mechanism. It is within this mechanism that the call of liberal individualists for personal freedom and dignity, a communitarian quest for meaningful belonging, boundary-making, and expectations of solidarity constitute the repertoire through which Turkish foreign-policy narratives respond to challenges emerging from global power structures. The analysis shows the extent to which Kemalism shared the basic assumptions of what could be called the Liberal Philosophy of History, a conglomeration of ideas that have shaped liberalism and, ultimately, the liberal international order. Light is also shed on the main changes that have affected Turkey in the post-Cold War era, and on the extent to which politicians and intellectuals have been proactive in their initiatives, coincident with the neoliberal restructuring of Turkey’s economy and society since the 1980s.
This book relates some of the major trends within religion and politics to offer a historical framework with which to assess their interactions and a point of departure for studies to come. The study of the interrelationship between contemporary religious practice and modern politics is divided between several scholarly disciplines, all embracing different terminologies as well as multiple theoretical and philosophical premises. Such diversity of perspectives is to be welcomed, but it can inhibit the ability of academics to form a cohesive and coherent dialogue around the subject. While critically assessing the historic, sociological, political, theological and anthropological aspects of religion and politics, the book demonstrates the crucial importance of recognising the capitalist economy as the framework for understanding their dynamic relationship. Moreover, it claims that humanism is the proper lens through which to critically engage with religion in society and must be the favoured point of departure for any study within the field. This book offers a unique overarching viewpoint for of all these divergent scholarly trends and traditions. As such, it will be of significant use to academics in religious studies, political science, sociology and anthropology.
The Imprensa Evangelica, published between 1864 and 1892 in Brazil by Presbyterian missionaries, furnished Brazilian Evangelical minorities with a means of crafting new religious identities and of asserting their presence in the public arena. Its editors defended the political rights of non-Catholics in the country, took part in religious controversies with Catholic publications in Brazil and Portugal, and intervened in on-going public debates on the separation of Church and State and the abolition of slavery. This article also examines how the periodical's circulation generated new reading practices in Brazil.
Neither self-styled radical ‘realists’ who reject the sort of liberalism inspired by John Rawls, nor liberal ‘realists’ who reject other forms of apparently utopian politics, properly take the measure of how far their accounts of realism recall the historical political theory of nineteenth-century European Realpolitik. This article sketches the evolution of that style of political theory in the thought of its conceptual pioneer, August Ludwig von Rochau, and outlines the bases of his understanding of state power. Reconstructing his argument not only suggests an alternative genealogy for modern realism in political theory, but it also offers a challenge. For behind Rochau’s Realpolitik lies a strong judgment about how ideas are politically consequential only when aligned with state power under modernity, and that such alignments are both historically conditioned and difficult to judge. Rochau’s challenge for realism in contemporary liberal political theory implies that its general antipathy towards writing about the historical evolution of the state and its structural power threatens to leave it as unmoored from practical politics as the so-called ideal-theorists that realists so often profess to criticize.
Today's dominant academic use of the term ‘secularisation’ refers to an epochal process that transformed a society based on Christian faith to one grounded in human reason. This paper argues that ‘secularisation’ had not been used in this sense prior to the 1830s, and that no such process has been shown to have taken place in early modernity. This new use of the term was in fact internal to rival secularising and sacralising programs. The notion of an epochal rationalisation of society was thus invoked by secularists seeking to turn a factional campaign into an historical process. Their sacralising opponents employed the same strategy when they claimed that this process contained a desecularising counter-current, or that secularisation was secretly grounded in an alienated religion whose de-alienation held the promise of a post-secular age. This suggests that until they can adduce evidence of an epochal rationalisation of society in early modernity, histories of secularisation should be regarded as disguised program-statements for rival cultural-political factions in the present.
This essay argues that today's dominant understanding of secularization—as an epochal transition from a society based on religious belief to one based on autonomous human reason—first appeared in philosophical histories at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was then anachronistically applied to early modern Europe. Apart from the earlier and persisting canon-law use of the term to refer to a species of exclaustration, prior to 1800 the standard lexicographical meaning of “secularization” was determined by its use in public law and diplomacy to name the civil conversion of ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction. Prior to the same point the most important use of the adjective “secular” was in political jurisprudence as a synonym for temporal, civil, and political, to name a religious-political settlement from which rival theologies had been excluded as the condition of its negotiation. But this usage was domain-specific, was quite compatible with religious devotion, and had nothing to do with the putatively secular character of the spheres of philosophy or the natural sciences, thence “society”. Far from seeing a shift from religious belief to autonomous rationality, early modernity in fact witnessed a significant intensification of religious belief and practice under the impact of rival confessional movements. It also emerges that the nineteenth century was characterized not by the supersession of confessional religions—or their conversion into rational religion or moral philosophy—but by their remarkable persistence and adaptation to new circumstances. In light of this, the essay argues that the variant philosophical-historical conceptions of secularization—as the epochal supersession of religious belief by human rationality—should not be understood as theories of a putative process but as “combat concepts”. These were internal to an array of rival cultural-political factions that first emerged in early nineteenth-century Protestant Germany and that continue to do battle today.
Introduction: ‘Clericalism? That's the enemy!’ Gambetta's battle cry, hurled in a celebrated speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 4 May 1877, has rightly come to be seen as the declaration of war which heralded the onset of the French Kulturkampf, a struggle between the Third Republic and the Catholic church which lasted between 1879 and 1905 and was characterised by the enactment of two major programmes of anticlerical legislation, one between 1879 and the mid-1880s, the other at the turn of the century, the culmination of which was the complete separation of church and state in 1905. The legislative culture war has been studied many times, and will not be re-examined in this chapter. The focus here, rather, is on the culture war on the ground, in order to demonstrate that the culture war was fought not just between a bourgeois intelligentsia (republican and Catholic) in the forum of parliament and the national press but also involved ordinary people, both villagers and priests, in obscure corners of provincial France. The chapter seeks to show further that the late nineteenth-century conflict was only a particular phase – albeit the most decisive one – in a much longer-running guerre des deux Frances, or ‘war of the two Frances’. The French culture war was in many respects a kind of ‘cold'war which periodically irrupted into ‘hot’ war, as in the Breton guerre scolaire (‘battle of the schools’), which provides our case study. © Cambridge University Press 2003 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.