One issue I want to raise, though, is the specter of American exceptionalism that haunts the book. Haunts, actually, may be too mild a word, since Kahn enthusiastically embraces the exceptional nature of American politics and law, and does so in absolutist terms (perhaps this is just the unfortunate sign of the legal mind at work, as is also the case in Schmitt). Of course, much of the book is devoted to pointing out how “extra-legal” America’s use of violence for political ends is, as opposed to that of Europe, while the typical right-wing elaboration of American exceptionalism tends to avoid this issue in favor of a reliance on the USA’s special, God-given dispensation to address the evils of the world wherever they occur. Even those who do not directly invoke the divinity or the duty of foreign adventurism in expressing their high regard for the country nevertheless often slip into a discourse in which the Sonderweg of the United States is dearly held. Kahn’s is a more sobering account of that Sonderweg, though it still weirdly (as Monod points out) ends up discovering a notion of freedom in Schmitt that could be appropriately applied to America’s exceptional (and exceptionally permanent, for Kahn) “state of exception” where extra-legal violence is concerned.

But it seems to me that all versions of political exceptionalism, whatever the ends to which they are put, are fundamentally wrong-headed. That is, no one would deny that each nation, even each Western liberal democracy, is somehow unique—France’s religious and courtly heritage is obviously quite different from Britain’s national (if we can call it that) Bildung. But if we are going to be historically circumspect and careful, then it does us little good to make such differences absolute. No matter how large the gap when it comes to legal or constitutional formations and predispositions (Napoleonic and codified in France, common-law to a large extent in the UK), we also need to acknowledge how far nation-state structures and geo-political exigencies create remarkable similarities (for example, France and Britain, despite chauvinist claims on both sides, ran empires with similar goals, similar legal chicanery, similar brutality, and similar denouements; both countries today attack the Islamic veiling of women in ways that would be unthinkable in the US; both are highly secular, and so on).

And yet Kahn has no difficulty speaking in absolutes about the US. “The juridification of politics is the leading idea of the Western European political order today. To the question of whether there can be sovereign action beyond the rule of law, European institutions have answered with a resounding no. All political violence is limited to law enforcement: no exceptions.” By contrast, Americans “live comfortably with their long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars,” so that popular history is the history of “violent force against enemies,” which is then “endlessly reinforced” when “Americans take their families to Valley Forge and Gettysburg, and even Omaha Beach.” (For the record, I have been to none of these places.)

I have read these passages numerous times, and I still do not get the supposed appropriateness of the contrast on page 16, the “on the one hand, on the other hand” structure that Kahn presumes is obvious to his reader. Yes, I agree, Americans do wave flags more than Europeans, and yes, as Kahn suggests, they do not see their history through the prism of the concentration camp or bombed out cities. But how the notion of “sacrifice” in war—and “sacrifice” is a crucial term in Kahn’s argument—came to be a uniquely American characteristic, one clearly absent on the Continent, remains a historical puzzle in Kahn’s book. It is as if this sense of “sacrifice” derived solely from the constitution (and I mean this in both the conceptual and legal sense) of the US, whereas its absence in Europe is also fundamentally constitutional. But this makes a hash of twentieth-century political history.

First, as should be obvious, the idea of “sacrifice” for the nation (or the city-state) goes back at least to Pericles. Second, modern European history is in many ways nothing but what Kahn (referring only to the US) calls “the long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars.” The scale on which French and German “citizens” (and they were that) sacrificed themselves during WWI alone dwarfs by orders of magnitude all American “sacrifices” in the last hundred years. We will not even begin to talk about Soviet or German “sacrifices” in WWII, or the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific or in kamikaze squads. Only one American war even comes close—the Civil War—and this of course was the one war not fought against foreign “enemies.” Given the level of the carnage, it is little wonder that Europeans have less of a taste for foreign adventurism than Americans do today. But even this reluctance did not happen overnight (even the Europeans, that is, learn slowly). French soldiers continued to sacrifice themselves in large numbers in Vietnam and—with a fairly enthusiastic use of extra-legal torture against their “enemies”—in Algeria in the 1950s. Of course, outside Europe, Korea and Vietnam made the sacrifice of citizens against foreign enemies something of a sacred cause. The Vietnamese were far more enthusiastic about sacrificing themselves for their nation than the disaffected Americans were between 1965 and 1973—the results prove it, I think. It would be hard to show that the Americans were more willing than the French to sacrifice themselves in Vietnam, and both were less willing than the Russians were (for a time, at least) in Afghanistan. The enthusiasm among British citizens for war in the Falklands was palpable and was far greater than Americans’ willingness to sacrifice themselves, in a comparably ridiculous war, in Granada. Had I the time or space, even a cursory discussion of Israel, where the willingness of citizens (again, in a Western European sense) to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation remains unabated to this day—just try throwing stones over the border—and far outstrips, say, US citizens’ willingness to sacrifice themselves in defending the border with Mexico. (Ok, in Arizona, I agree, there are some folks who may feel this way, but even big-chested Rick Perry in Texas has more or less admitted, to the dismay of the Tea Party, that he will not lay down his life to defend El Paso from Mexicans.)

When Kahn writes about the exceptional and unique nature of Americans’ willingness to sacrifice themselves, even in extra-legal circumstances, for the nation, and then traces this willingness back to the unique nature of the US’ political constitution, I cannot avoid thinking of the great Viennese scholar Otto Brunner, perhaps the most important follower of Schmitt, völkisch thinker, and Nazi-identified historian of the Third Reich. Brunner’s summa is (in English) called Land and Lordship: Fundamental Questions on the Territorial Constitutional History of Southeast Germany in the Middle Ages. Like Kahn, Brunner accepted Schmitt’s definition of the political as the opposition of friend and foe; like Kahn, he accepted the irreducibility of political theology in the liberal state, that is, the state defined by the opposition of state and society. Like Kahn, he believed that the unique political constitution (both conceptual and legal) of a particular people (in this case, the Germans) was completely unsuited to the dominant liberal nation-state juridical and political order of Europe, an order based (just as Kahn himself puts it) on the idea that the rule of law and the state’s consequent monopoly on violence (only the state’s violence is permitted, and it is only permitted when it is lawful—no exceptions) is the essence of justice. And like Kahn, Brunner argued that one people, and only one people—the Germans—were constitutionally incapable of following the rule of such a European order of nation-states, and hence needed to reclaim a sense of freedom in the extra-legal use of violence, such as could be found in feuds and clan retribution, in the sense of the sacred that binds them organically to the soil and to one another, and most of all, in the sacrificial loyalties of the medieval Austrian Reich. When Kahn writes, late in his book, that “political authenticity, as it emerges in a study of political theology, is that experience of the unity of being and meaning that marks the presence of the sacred,” Brunner would have agreed wholeheartedly. And Brunner would also have agreed with Kahn that, alas, such an “experience” could not be found among the liberal nation-states of Europe, though he certainly hoped, in 1939, that Germany would soon show Europe how it might be achieved.

Kahn surely shares little of Brunner’s rabid, expansionist, and anti-Semitic nationalism. But his critique of the modern liberal nation-state from the vantage point of political theology is of a piece with much that has appeared recently, a fair amount of it deriving from both Schmitt and Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” which rejects both the earlier natural law tradition and the positive law of the nation-state. From the work of Giorgio Agamben, for whom the inevitable denouement of the nation-state is totalitarian Nazism, to the “Red Tory” revanchist theology of John Milbank, and the delirious Christian Stalinism of Salvoj Zizek, a certain strain of academic theory has emphasized that the nation-state after Hobbes rests on an absolutist basis—a monopoly on violence—that its own constitutional presumptions must constantly disavow under the guise of “lawfulness.”  Ironically, Brunner’s own deeply conservative, National Socialist thinking is in complete agreement with such indictments. Yet what Brunner demonstrates at the same time, albeit unintentionally, is that the attempt to find a final solution to the aporia of the liberal state’s political theology—its seemingly endless and irresolvable process of secularization—may be far worse than the aporia itself.

In the social sciences, this sort of issue has mostly been treated under the heading of relativism. As I have described it elsewhere, “our ability to be comfortable with relativism oddly depends on, or slides inexorably toward, a thin but broad universalism. But this universalism, this sense that through a less judgmental and more dispassionate gaze one has grasped the most truly general characteristics of human being, human civilization, even ‘human rights,’ as the Abbé Sieyès and others obviously thought they had [. . .] can be explained away [. . .] as a fiction embedded in certain kind of Judeo-Christian culture, that is, the kind that believes in the secularizing narrative that entails a latitudinarian tolerance based on individual rights rather than communal duties, on a putatively dispassionate separation of private and public beliefs,” and so forth. In the humanities, the dilemma of the ”frame” or structure that always somehow needs a larger one that it can never do more then gesture to “off the stage,” so to speak, was captured for many by Jacques Derrida’s very influential essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourses of the Human Sciences,” which he delivered as a lecture at The Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and which was basically an account of the failure of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s attempt at a universal method. (Niklas Luhmann refined the argument under the heading of “systems theory,” and I think mathematics discovered the problem rather early in the twentieth century.) The problem David Buckley is confronting, along with the skeptical gazes of those he interviews, is thus in many ways a problem that defines so much humanist reflection on method after 1945.

And yet, the fact that the problem is real—and I believe it is—should not be allowed to reduce intellectual work to an unending reiteration of the problem, as happened to “deconstruction” in the literary fields, or to the unending performance of the contradiction into which mise-en-abîme the Frankfurt School fell. It does seem to me, moreover, that the question of “religion” in a “post-secular” age raises this issue in a most intense way, since for modernity the most common way to deal with the comparison of religious systems is by methodologically stepping back (whatever one’s own beliefs may be) into a space that, in many cases, is hard to distinguish from the secular reason that dominates the Western academy (as Dipesh Chakrabarty has quite elegantly noted). In this sense, I think Buckley’s instincts are correct: to pursue the comparison on the widest possible historical grounds, though (I would add) with as much awareness of the “frame” dilemma I outlined above as possible. To do less would be to stop thinking altogether. But to ignore the dilemma would reduce thinking to the imposition of Procrustean beds, and we have enough of those already.

*  *  *

I think Jonathan Sheehan points to something quite useful in his last post: the need for a discourse that does not immediately slide into the “ideological” conflict of religious versus secular teleology.  I think many in the religious studies and sociology of religion fields have tried to find such a discourse for decades now.  It is just that their disciplinary efforts have become far more visible to the rest of us recently.  Still, Justin Reynolds raises a point that is indeed important in the entirety of the “post-secularization” discussion, as it is now being called.  However we contextualize this discussion—I tend to see it as accelerating rapidly after the end of the cold war—it is clear that much of it has circled around the question of teleology.  For a variety of reasons, two of the foundational questions of religion and philosophy, and certainly not only in the West, have reemerged to trouble the standard thesis among Western intellectuals that predicted inevitable and irreversible secularization and modernization: What is the aim, the end, the purpose of human life?  and, Can different societies reasonably embrace quite different answers to this question?

Actually, if I am right about the coincidence of post-secularization’s rise and the cold war’s end, there is perhaps a fairly superficial but still interesting answer to be had.  Socialism, or at least some fairly perfected version of social democracy, had long been regarded as the likely end or goal of human history by a fair number of Western and “Third-World” intellectuals, many of whom cut their critical teeth by working through the contradictions of capitalism and its purely instrumental version of reason—that is, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations minus Adam Smith’s Theory of the Moral Sentiments­.  When Francis Fukuyama turned this conviction on its head in the summer of 1989 (actually, before the Berlin Wall fell later that autumn, though this chronology is now routinely reversed) with “The End of History?” in The National Interest, the problem (as even he came later to admit) was that Western capitalism did not provide a very satisfying sense of fulfillment, even acknowledging that some bugs remained to be worked out.  In Blumenberg’s terms, Fukuyama put capitalism into the answer position formerly held by socialism (and before that by Hegel’s constitutional monarchy), but it fit far less well, especially if we accept, as I think we must during this season of terrible economic upheaval, Joseph Schumpeter’s insight that capitalism is always a process of “creative destruction.”  Now, really, what kind of telos is that?

Some old Marxists faced with socialism’s recent rough patch—think Terry Eagleton—turned hard to religion as a result.  But many more recognized that the purely economic (that is, Marxian) narrative of social evolution was no longer going to hold.  Suddenly bereft of the extraordinarily bad model of Soviet socialism; increasingly confronted with the evidence that even the good (if for my taste often narrow-minded, ethnically monotone, and boring) social democracies of Scandinavia might not be as sustainable as once thought (change the ratio of workers to retirees and the math turns funky, and don’t even think about assimilating Muslim immigrant populations); terribly unimpressed with Fukuyama’s solution (end of history, indeed!); and, perhaps above all, realizing that the most potent political forces in the “Third World” were on longer socialist parties (no USSR to support them anymore) but religiously based ones (think Hamas and Hezbollah today, or, earlier in the twentieth-century, M. K. Gandhi), intellectuals have witnessed the problem of moral-social teleology raising its ungainly head all over again.

And so, we find ourselves in forums such as this wondering about “what ends we mean” and talking about teleology, as in the old (pre-Adam Smith, pre-Marx) days, because the “material” (that is, purely economic) answers satisfy us less and less.  I will conclude with two observations.  First, by insisting that I do not regard a “fully secularized world” as a telos worth pursuing, I am hardly throwing out the baby of teleology with the bathwater of secularism.  I believe, as I think Kant did, that our brains are hard-wired to think in terms of purposes, goals, ends, and (even on occasion) final ends—though, as I have observed elsewhere, Kracauer’s late notion of “the last things before the last” is for me a preferable formulation.  Asking about the nature of the “good life” is not necessarily misguided, but “modernity” itself means that a wild variety of quite reasonable answers will be given that would not accord to classical ideals with all their caste and class presumptions.  I thus find it hard to credit Alasdair MacIntyre’s attempt to resurrect Aristotelian teleology in its Catholic (Thomist) form—a resurrection that would probably require a true second coming to find enough agreement on what it now means—or Charles Taylor’s numerous meditations on “wholeness,” a term that is likely to stir up far more profound disagreement than Taylor’s ecumenical (more liberal Anglican than not) Catholicism seems to allow for.  Freud was likely right that the only form of thought that can actually claim to provide an answer to the question “What is the meaning of life?” is religion, but (with Freud) I get no satisfaction in my late fifties from asking the question.  Still, my claim that complete secularism should not be regarded as a teleological project is not meant to rule out teleological thinking altogether, any more than it is designed to say that secularization is not a necessary (though very partial) part of human history.

But the second point I want to make is that, pace Reynolds and his Straussian-Lillaesque line of reasoning, I wonder about the consequences of concluding that any human telos must come from outside the human being and human history, as some of his scholarly subjects once claimed.  (I also feel bad, by the way, for the poor liberal Protestant theologians, who somehow in this narrative always get blamed for Hitler—but that’s fodder for another post altogether.)  That is, while I enjoy borrowing from Heidegger in my own way, I can’t embrace the basically Heideggerian atheism that resurrects the problem of Being on non-human grounds (whether via the four-fold (Geviert) of a Black Forest farmhouse or via language itself), a topic recently opened up yet again by Stefanos Geroulanos.  No Ereignis, no arrival from without, not even some weak Benjaminian messianism that magically reverses a world run to ruin seems, contra Judith Butler, like anything worth putting our faith in.  And yet I am now quite convinced that the option to which we should pledge our allegiance is not “secularism fulfilled”—indeed, I doubt our perennial dissatisfactions with civilization (and here Freud is indeed handy) would allow such a thing.  Most of all, and perhaps on this score I do feel some kinship with the subjects of Reynolds’s research, I worry that “secularism fulfilled” would simply mean “hubris fulfilled”—the old dialectic of enlightenment still retains some force for me.  But that too is the subject for a later post.

*  *  *

I wondered how long it would take DPDF participants to undo what I thought I had carefully assembled in my opening post on “Secularism, secularization, and why the difference matters.”  Not very long at all, it seems.  And so, I will try a response here to Justin Reynolds and Alex Hernandez, both of whom have questioned what I actually mean by saying that “secularization” is a conceptual improvement over “secularism.”  Hernandez is suspicious about my invocation of Blumenberg, who seems to him to have in the end a very thin concept of “secularization,” one that relegates the tradition that comes out of Carl Schmitt (or Carl Löwith) to a sort of category error (the religious and secular answer positions may look the same, but the answers are really very different).  But his best insight is to see the desire for the fulfillment of the standard “secularization thesis” as a kind of eschatology in its own right. (He suggests this is perhaps not a form of teleology, though I will avoid worrying the distinction for the moment.)  I agree with Hernandez completely on these points, and have argued as much elsewhere: Blumenberg’s approach does not finally allow him to respond adequately to people like Schmitt and Löwith; and the standard “secularization thesis” did indeed harbor a telos within it, as my example of Habermas’s lament over the “unfinished project of modernity” indicates.  This is why so many today are reexamining the assumptions behind the standard thesis, and why I was suggesting a notion of “secularization” at odds with that thesis.

Reynolds’s complaint is a bit trickier.  On the one hand, he wonders whether my own use of the term “secularization” remains necessarily eschatological, despite my protests to the contrary, and suggests that I have simply adopted the “delay of the day of salvation” idea from the theologians—salvation here being a fully secular world, rather than the Kingdom of God.  On the other hand, he suggests that I fall into such a form of reasoning because, in fact, there is no getting around the idea of transcendence (as Voegelin, Jaspers, Niebuhr, and Tillich might claim).  That is, even scientific thought relies on notions of “truth” that are, if not divine, at least sufficiently universal and unchanging to suggest something beyond the mere singularities of disordered perception (or poetry).  Plato argued, to great effect, that this was indeed the case; and Nietzsche, to equally great effect, argued that Plato’s argument—along with its Jewish and Christian re-statements—was the error that more or less ruined Western civilization.

I will save for a subsequent post a more elaborate account of what I am trying to say with the term “secularization.”  But I do fully agree with Reynolds that religious thought is often capable of openness and contingency—I just think religions need to be reminded every so often that certain defined ends do not always justify the means—and historically, the secularizing tendencies within religion have served that purpose.  Reynolds is also right that I do not buy Asad’s argument (derived in part from Foucault) that equates secularism at the level of the state with the pursuit of “governmentality.”  I don’t buy it because it seems obvious to me that all religions that have achieved some measure of political power—whether in classical Rome, Islamic Spain, Christian Spain, the Ottoman Empire, the Puritan states of colonial America, or Saudi Arabia, to name just a few—have been equally interested in issues of governmentality; of what use would conversion be otherwise?  Some nominally secular, capitalist regimes, as Foucault (like Max Weber before him) argued, have achieved hegemony on the basis of modes of self-regulation that, it is true, would have made earlier religious tyrants and monarchs green with envy.  But many have not, and it would seem to me that Turkey today might turn out to be an interesting test case: Turkey’s greater openness toward Islam may well mean less recourse to brute force (as under the old secular military regimes) and a more modern approach to “governmentality.”  But this would be achieved—contra Asad—with the re-assertion of religion’s public role, not its eradication or greater compartmentalization.

However, in response to Reynolds’s claims that my use of the term “secularization” must be secretly eschatological and that I cannot escape from transcendence in any case, I must disagree on both points.  On the first point, I simply don’t see how a fully secular world is necessarily better—that it is something to be aimed at, or to be treated as any sort of fulfillment.  Actually, I don’t even know what the phrase “fully secular world” means.  For example, if it means leading one’s life rigorously according to scientific principles—at least the ones we know today—then I would say that the fully secular life is actually impossible to imagine: one would be in the predicament of a character in one of Samuel Beckett’s novels (which is certainly not to say that such predicaments never occur in real life—they do).  Another way to say this is: I am not a believer in any religious faith, but I recognize full well that I live my life in a world saturated with vestiges of religious faith and ritual from the past, and routine re-assertions of such faith and ritual in the present (as Sarah Shortall’s recent post also observed).  I cannot imagine that my life, even as an unbeliever, would necessarily be emotionally richer or happier if all of this, including all the historical and cultural consequences of it, were suddenly wiped away.  (In fact, I can’t even understand what that would mean, though I do recognize that it has been tried, generally with unhappy results.)  It is not necessarily that I think we must have religion to survive—we may not need it at all.  It is simply that I see no redemptive achievement—no telos worth pursuing—in its eradication.  There are people who have thought in such terms—both Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens claimed at different times that religion is the source of all evil in the world.  But I just don’t find enough evidence for such claims.

As to Reynolds’s second point about the unavoidability of transcendence—well, this is finally a semantic issue.  If, as I said above, this means we can’t avoid thinking in terms of universals and unchanging properties that have a more or less fuzzy relationship to actual things—my words “sex” and “wife” might conjure up an act and person that are quite different from the ones conjured in Reynolds’s head (at least, I hope so)—then I agree, but really, all that “transcendence” means here is what Durkheim meant by “collective consciousness”—that is, language itself, with all its formal coherence and sloppy substance.  But if transcendence means I can’t think, even scientifically or analytically, without invoking another world, so to speak, where all the ideas expressed in my words have an existence quite distinct from the one I inhabit, then I would say we avoid such transcendence well enough every time we use the word mind.  For me, a Kantian or Blumenbergian regulatory principle need be no more transcendent than a surgeon’s check-list.  And I hope we can all agree that, whatever they may think, surgeons have no special link to the divine.

*  *  *

Several decades ago, well before there had been any concerted effort among historians and sociologists of religion to trash the standard model of the “secularization thesis,” Jürgen Habermas famously pronounced modernity an “unfinished project,” and then proceeded to outline both the conditions needed to complete the project and the barriers that the twentieth century had thrown up in its way. This is obviously not the place to rehearse Habermas’s ideas, especially since so many others have done it well. (I am especially fond, still, of Anthony Giddens’s quick and reductive, yet incisive, overview of Habermas in Social Theory and Modern Sociology.) But, for the present purposes, I think we can usefully boil the conditions down to two. First, there is the completion of the process of the differentiation—or rationalization—of social spheres that had been emphasized (though not entirely happily) by Max Weber: the distinction of “state” from “society,” or the public from the private, that has become the hallmark of the liberal capitalist nation-state, and with it, the concomitant distinctions between the economic, the legal, and the political, along with the separation of science, morality, and aesthetics that is the legacy of the Enlightenment. Second, in order to prevent the undeniable effectiveness of “steering mechanisms”—essentially, the purposive, means-ends rationality that has proven so successful in the areas of science and economics, and even, to a large extent, in utilitarian reformations of the law—from becoming “reified,” and thus overpowering all other potential social aims, the “life-world,” that is, the everyday world of lived traditions and customs, including the “semantic potentials” of religious beliefs and their ethical systems, would need to be preserved through a process of “communicative action” that based such beliefs on rational argumentation alone.

Nevertheless, Habermas posited that the major barrier to this happy (and still devoutly Weberian) synthesis, or balancing, of disenchanted managerial technocracy and charismatic life-world was the same one that had bedeviled the Enlightenment: myth. Again, this is not the place for detail, but it would be fair to say that Habermas is very much in the mainstream of Western thought in making a sharp distinction between religion (which is, in this view, rational in its own way) and myth (which is not), and then in assuming that the sorts of “semantic potentials” that could usefully be provided by religious tradition in the life-world of modernity were those that were already largely “rationalized” (that is, reformed), Protestant (or Judaic, in Hermann Cohen’s sense), private, individual, and directed toward ethical action in this world, rather than salvation in another—essentially, Judaic “justice” and Pauline “love.” In this sense, myth, from the dogmas and totalitarianism of the Right and the Left to what Habermas has called “idle postmodern talk,” is the primary enemy of the unfinished project of modernity.

It is obvious, from the vantage point of the present, that Habermas’s quite influential theory is in many ways a theory of secularization, and in the classical sense of that term. Those social spheres already emancipated by purposive rationality—by self-interest, that is—were the leading edge of a secular modern world. But they needed to be countered by residues of ethical tradition—in particular, it turns out, the belief set that came to be defined in the twentieth century as the “Judeo-Christian tradition”—until such time as such vestiges could be translated into the language of secular philosophy. In Habermas’s words, “As long as religious language bears within itself inspiring, indeed, unrelinquishable semantic contents which elude (for the moment?) the expressive power of a philosophical language and still await translation into a discourse that gives reasons for its positions, philosophy, even in its postmetaphysical form, will neither be able to replace nor to repress religion.” Bracketing off the circularity of this statement—for example, are the contents of religion “inspiring” because they are “unrelinquishable” (that is, perhaps, innate), or “unrelinquishable” merely because they are “inspiring,” if obviously contingent?—Habermas’s Hegelian faith in the power of philosophical reason eventually to “translate” religious ethical contents into language with a firm (materialist and scientific?) basis is clear. That would, presumably, finish the project of modernity once and for all. Not incidentally, it would mean the end of all processes of “secularization,” and the full instauration of “secularism” as a lived, quotidian experience.

There is no way, I think, that Habermas, in his earlier work, could have predicted the return of religion in its more public forms in recent decades, any more than he could have foreseen the re-opening of the question of secularization within social theory since 1990. But these are empirical questions, and there has been a fair amount of debate about the factual reality of the oft-cited resurgence of religion, or “desecularization,” and about how to measure it. I am more interested here in the theoretical questions that Habermas’s work raises: What would a fully secularized world mean? What would the “project of modernity” look like if it were, finally, finished? What philosophy could achieve the thorough extirpation of all religious, or mythical, or irrational elements, and how would we respond to it?

Such questions remind me of a smart comment made by Barbara Johnson years ago—I now forget where—in reference to the voluminous amount of criticism leveled at the way the realist novel encoded and sustained gender inequities. Could the novel as a genre even exist, she asked, without the inequities? Johnson’s question is a properly deconstructive one, and I have no desire to re-open here the question of the utility of Derrida’s work. But even on historical grounds, she is right: the ongoing conversation that we call the novel in fact depends on certain kinds of irrationality, and gender is one of them (there are many others). But the same could be said about “philosophy”—indeed, I think that is, finally, what Habermas is getting at once you subtract the Hegelian teleology (itself attenuated by a question mark) from his work—or about “ethics” or “justice” or any of the other big ideas that are inevitably raised by social theory. Considerations of this sort have traditionally led people back to a kind of neo-Kantianism, that is, a sense that what matters most is the method by which we approach such questions, not whether we are able to posit a fixed endpoint to the discussion. Hans Blumenberg, for my money, has it about right when he insists, in a neo-Kantian vein, that the idea of progress—ethical, legal, and political, and not just scientific or technological—can be treated as an infinite project without positing any sort of “finish”: “If there were an immanent final goal of history, then those who believe they know it and claim to promote its attainment would be legitimized in using all the others who do not know it and cannot promote it as mere means. Infinite progress does make each present relative to its future, but at the same time it renders every absolute claim untenable. This idea of progress corresponds more than anything else to the only regulative principle that can make history humanly bearable, which is that all dealings must be so constituted that through them people do not become mere means.”

I hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth already: Blumenberg leaves us with a Kantian “regulative principle” and nothing more. Worse, he hardly sets the bar very high. A history that is merely “humanly bearable” is a long way, in my book, from the one that would hold out the promesse du bonheur that Stendhal attributed to art, and that legions of Marxist thinkers in later decades demanded from society. (Indeed, even the reference to the “pursuit of Happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence would be, for most people, a substantial improvement over Blumenberg, I think.) Still, regulative principles can be extraordinarily useful—think of them as procedural “checklists” of the sort that Atul Gawande has recently promoted in medicine. In effect, Blumenberg’s regulative principle has two consequences. It not only demands that we eschew the willingness to tailor all means to predetermined ends promoted by dogmatism, from the religious to the scientific to the professional—a refusal of dogma that is the essence of what Edward Said once meant by “secular criticism,” and that is in many ways an echo of what Matthew Arnold meant by “Hellenism.” It also insists that the pathway to the ideal of “secular criticism” (or “Hellenism”)—that is, the pathway to secularism, in the terms I have set out in this post—is itself without end. No one, as far as I can tell, has yet been able to describe what a fully achieved secularism would mean. Were lives today to be lived only according to the latest scientific evidence, devoid of allegiances to that hodgepodge of ideas we call custom, tradition, religion, and (even) myth, we would need a new Jonathan Swift to capture the likely result; the eighteenth century was already fertile ground for his satire. And those “projectors” who subsequently tried to implement such a world—from Fourier with his phalanstery to J. B. Watson with his scientific child rearing—hardly inspire any more confidence. (Swift’s religion was, at its core, a stinging rebuke of mortal hubris.) My point here is not to resurrect Habermas’s “semantic potentials” under another guise, for these emotive elements of the life-world are “potentials” precisely in the sense that they would eventually be “translated” by rational actors who could then provide good reasons, based on sound evidence, for what they believe and do. Rather, I want to insist that “secularization,” in all its polymorphous perversity, is all that we have ever had, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and that this is, strictly speaking, an unending process, even if it is one that, for many reasons (such as the “regulative principle” against dogma), is worth pursuing. In this sense, as I have argued elsewhere, contra Habermas, the only modernity that any rational person should want is one that will remain both historically unnecessary and never complete. Finishing the project of modernity is precisely the oxymoron we want to avoid.

Finally, I believe that the proposals submitted for this year’s Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship in the “After Secularization” field suggest approaches to secular modernity that are quite congruent with what I have outlined so far.

First, there is a very clear interest, shared by about half the group, in empirical questions—that is, questions that have to do less with theoretical issues of, say, the meaning of secularization, or religion, or what (if anything) one might imagine “after secularization,” than with how a specifiable collectivity of persons responds to such questions in practice, in everyday life, and in the kinds of moral or political decisions they make. In one sense, this is not surprising: much of the work in the first wave of revisionist scholarship on the secularization thesis, from 1990 to the present, was theoretical in nature. When empirical considerations were taken into account, this was done largely through superficial surveys of population samples in given societies that could then be used for comparative purposes. What was evident in many proposals was a desire to dig deeper, to work especially via interviews and ethnographic investigation toward a more thorough and complex understanding of how and why secularization in particular societies occurred, and to elaborate more fully the kinds of resistance, or the types of return to religion, that might accompany this process. In particular, it seems that many younger scholars are concerned to view the boundaries of the secular and the religious as being far more porous than surveys might suggest, even in those instances when there are measurable claims to either strong belief or strong skepticism.

Second, it is clear that the wide range of problems that have been discovered in the “secularization thesis” over the past two decades equally unsettle the term secularism. The difficulty of defining “religion” in any comprehensive way, or with any pretension to universality, is a long-standing one. Indeed, one might say that the entire history and sociology of religion in the modern period, since their emergence in the late eighteenth century, have been built in large part around this difficulty. But it is now impossible to avoid the conclusion that secularism itself is not simply a word that defines a negative condition—the absence of religious belief, whatever that might be taken to mean—but rather a term that occasions almost as much ambiguity and difficulty as “religion.” Whether we consider the work of figures like Ashis Nandy, for whom secularism represents a particular imposition of Western values in non-Western religious communities, or that of Talal Asad, for whom secularism is the agenda of a specific regime of what Michel Foucault called “governmentality,” we no longer have the luxury of seeing the secular in some neutral, non-historical, non-political, and purely rational light. Many proposals demonstrated a fairly sophisticated awareness that, whatever “secularism” might mean, it was not going to be easily reduced to the sheer invisibility of religion, and that this was true, not only for some putative era “after secularization,” but also for the entire history of secularization itself.

Third, there was a manifest interest in the ongoing, yet also quite newly inflected, interrogation of the underlying theories of religion and secularization. This is particularly salient in the degree to which the broader set of questions once posed on the peripheries of mainstream secularization scholarship by “political theology” has now become far more central, whether in the work of early figures such as Carl Schmitt or in that of contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben. But even here, there is a real desire to push the boundaries of, say, what “political theology”—a term with an essentially Christian frame of reference—might mean. Most significant is the widespread desire to re-situate theorizing about religion and the secular in global terms. No matter how limited by geography or confession individual projects may be, there appeared to be a fairly consistent sense that, even on theoretical grounds, new revisionist work on secularization and its history could not be done on Christian terms alone, no matter how one regards fairly entrenched claims—claims made with equal force from Max Weber to Peter Berger to Bernard Lewis to Talal Asad—about the overwhelmingly Christian origins of secularization in history.