Dick Houtman’s research while affiliated with KU Leuven and other places

In a long-forgotten essay, Alvin Gouldner defended the distinctive contributions of Romantic social science. Today, half a century later, very few would risk making a similar plea. Owing to its deconstruction, the discourse of Romanticism has increasingly fallen out of favor in the social sciences, meaning social scientists have progressively come to see Romanticism as less a resource for critique than a bourgeois ideology warranting critical scrutiny. Yet the truth is quite a bit more complicated. For despite its disapproval at the level of social science's explicit culture, Romanticism continues to serve, at the level of implicit culture, as a potent resource for social analysis. We start with a clarification of what we mean by Romanticism. While Romanticism may be an amorphous and multifaceted structure of thought and feeling, like Gouldner, we do not think it lacks coherence. Thus, we outline what we take to be the core dimensions of the ‘Romantic syndrome’, and then survey some of its key figures in Western social thought. Next, we move to a discussion of three select studies about the infiltration of Romanticism into the capitalist heartland—the sphere of work. We demonstrate how, consistent with our argument that Romanticism has become increasingly symbolically polluted within social science, each of these studies critiques the Romantic turn at work, while nevertheless anchoring their critiques in Romanticism, albeit in increasingly implicit fashion. We conclude by offering some reflections on why Romanticism continues to haunt contemporary social science—and why this matters.

The expansion of New Age spirituality in the West is largely due to women's decision to become involved, not men’s. Apparently, this type of spirituality appeals more to women than to men, but why should this be the case? Attempting to solve this ‘New Age gender puzzle’, Heelas and Woodhead (2005) introduced contrasting and allegedly gendered notions of autonomous selfhood, viz., individuated- and relational subjectivism. Both types aim to improve the quality of subjective-life, but the former is externally oriented and seeks indirect solutions to ‘problems’ by reaching outside into the world, whereas the latter is internally oriented and focused on exploring the complexities of the inner life through meaningful relationships with others. They argue that men more typically endorse individuated subjectivism that fails to spur spiritual longings whereas women more naturally embrace relational subjectivism that does do so. Because their theory has not been tested systematically yet, we do so in this paper by examining nationally representative survey data from the Netherlands collected in 2008 (n=1,836). The findings of a mediation analysis show that women have indeed more affinity with New Age spirituality than men because they generally embrace relational subjectivism to a greater extent, thereby supporting their theory.

This article studies resemblances between academic postmodernism and today's popular contestations of the authority of science by means of a qualitative content analysis of 657 critical online comments on a Belgian newspaper article about the COVID-19 crisis that features a prominent Belgian virologist. The comments portray scientists as (1) prophets who pretend their knowledge to be superior to competing understandings of the world; (2) puppets who figure in hidden schemes that cannot stand the light of day; and (3) pinheads who lack the intellectual competence to give solid scientifically informed advice. While the first two critiques do at first sight resemble academic postmodernism, they are in fact informed by the markedly modern understanding that objective and neutral scientific knowledge is as feasible as it is desirable. What we find, then, are not contestations of the authority of science per se, but indeed of practices deemed deviant aberrations of science.

This article tests two contrasting hypotheses about changes in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism-progressiveness, which pertains to attitudes toward matters of procreation, sexuality, and family and gender roles. While the ‘cultural turn’ literature expects the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism to increase over time alongside that of all other cultural issues, studies inspired by secularization theory rather predict a decrease in its relevance – due to religious decline. Analyzing the data from the European Values Study (1981-2017) for twenty West European countries, we find empirical evidence for a decrease and no indication of an increase in the electoral relevance of moral traditionalism. Religious decline weakened the effect of moral traditionalism on religious and conservative voting over time due to the most traditionalist voters shifting away from these parties. Our findings, therefore, highlight the need to differentiate between different types of cultural motives behind voting choice in Western Europe.

The commentary on ‘workplace spirituality’ is deeply polarized. Among advocates, the integration of spirituality and work is hailed as the ultimate cure-all for the problems facing the modern work organization. Conversely, critics see it as yet another form of capitalist appropriation. This article advances a neo-Durkheimian cultural sociological analysis of these polarized responses. Proponents espouse a schema of purification, which holds that once the moral pollutions of bureaucracy and rationalization are excised from the workplace, the spheres of spirituality and work will be integrated, which will lead to the sacralization of the latter by the former. This is assumed to end the compartmentalization of workers’ professional lives and to imbue their workplaces with ethicality and existential meaning. By contrast, critics espouse a schema of pollution, which holds that any attempt to integrate spirituality and work is doomed to failure under capitalist conditions, for it will result in workers’ spiritual lives suffering from alienation, instrumentalization, and commodification, and their work being oppressive, manipulative, and inhuman. We conclude with a reflection on the implications our analysis holds for future research on ‘workplace spirituality’.

There is little question that organized religion as embodied in the Christian churches has not fared well in recent decades. Yet, precisely the period when the decline of organized religion hit its stride – the 1960s and 1970s – also witnessed the rise of what Ernst Troeltsch referred to as ‘mystic religion’, only now it goes by ‘spirituality’. Indeed, recent empirical studies suggest that, in addition to secularization, we are also witnessing a veritable spiritual turn. How do we explain this? We pursue this puzzle in a somewhat peculiar fashion: by turning the sociological gaze toward the lives and oeuvres of the two sociologists who have arguably played the largest roles in the development of classical secularization theory: Max Weber and Peter Berger. Addressing their theoretical contributions in tandem with their personal stances vis-à-vis religion, we argue that the standard account of secularization rests on an extremely one-sided interpretation of their legacy: it leaves out their steadfast romanticism, their deep commitments to the value of individual freedom, and, most importantly, the particular religious paths they charted. Furthermore, we contend that each of them exemplifies a way of reconciling a rationalist commitment to disenchanting science with a romantic longing for ultimate meaning, which sheds significant light on why mystical religion (or ‘spirituality’) has come to flourish in late modernity.

This paper examines nationally representative survey data from the Netherlands collected in 2015 (N=2,197) to study whether the 'spiritual but not religious' embrace New Age spirituality and reject traditional Christian religion, whereas the 'both religious and spiritual' adhere to traditional Christian religion and understand spirituality in a non-New Age fashion (i.e. spirituality in a Christian sense). Yet, we find just as much affinity with New Age spirituality among the 'both religious and spiritual' as among the 'spiritual but not religious'. This is because the more liberal and progressive Christians in the former category embrace New Age spirituality, too, while their more conservative and traditional Christian counterparts in this 'both religious and spiritual' category rather dismiss it. Both within Christian religion and beyond it, then, self-identifications of 'being spiritual' have become quite reliable shortcuts to identify sympathy with what used to be called 'New Age' in the past.