And yet, the exaggerated brevity of “Man dies again” does encapsulate what I take to be one of the central—and powerful—claims of this book, namely, that the “Man” who has been called into question by antihumanism is not always the same Man, but rather a historically shifting intellectual and political construct. Precisely because these philosophies do not always have the same target at the same moment, Man’s imminent effacement is invoked repeatedly, rather than once and for all. What might be understood as a negative anthropology in one context—for example, Kojève’s 1930s account of man’s negation with the end of history—is radically revised and reinterpreted as a Marxist anthropology in the postwar era.

Because the “Man” at stake in these debates is not always the same, “nonhumanist atheism” cannot be viewed as a singular phenomenon, event, or even theory. Its history rather spans several decades of mid-century French thought, from the interwar period to the immediate postwar—and, implicitly, beyond. The “movement” that Geroulanos traces is thus neither unified, nor unidirectional. Indeed, it is not always clear that it makes sense to call it a “movement” at all. As he writes at one moment in the Introduction: “I do not mean to argue here that antihumanism was the driving force or the secret heart of intellectual movements and philosophies, nor do I claim that it was a single movement, concept, idea or trend; rather, it is what emerged from, shaped, and configured a major matrix of concerns.” The book poses a significant methodological challenge: how can one write the history of something so mercurial?

The concepts and thinkers involved in this story are indeed extremely dynamic, as critiques of humanism are propelled forward by internal tensions and shifting contexts of articulation: confrontations between Catholicism and Communism; intellectual non-conformism in the 1930s; the events of World War II and the politics of the French resistance; growing acknowledgement of the realities of Soviet violence. While they kept critiques of humanism in motion, however, these internalist and externalist contexts do not determine—or endow—“antihumanism” with an ultimate end or definitive form. The “ends of man,” to cite the essay by Jacques Derrida that informs, but by no means overdetermines, the arc of this story, are indeed multiple—in part because the humanisms called into question by mid-twentieth-century French thought are themselves contingent and shifting. And for that very reason, neither Derrida’s famous 1968 essay—nor Foucault’s equally famous statement in the Order of Things—can be understood as the high-point or culmination of antihumanism as it is presented here. For Geroulanos, they represent, a “radicalization,” but by no means a definitive form or end.

The recounting of such a history presents a narrative challenge precisely because it refuses an ultimate telos and rejects easily discernable heroes. In other words, the book does not privilege—or seek to redeem—the antihumanist vision of one figure as truer than that of others. By contrast—and perhaps befitting a work concerned more with negation than affirmation—several anti-heroes can be found, such as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, whose “fuzzy, overdetermined, and often pejorative” use of antihumanism served to present its “purported philosophical partisans” as “disrespectful to the humanist tradition.” By demonstrating the complexity and contingency of the antihumanisms that emerged in France between the 1920s and the 1950s, Geroulanos responds to accounts such as Ferry and Renaut’s, not by simply inverting their normative philosophical and political claims, but by appealing to historical analysis as, in itself, a powerful modality of critique.

This at once historical and historiographical intervention is, in my view, one of the most compelling and important aspects of the book. Combining archival research with close textual analyses, Geroulanos significantly revises not only the most polemical and problematic accounts of antihumanism’s emergence, but also many of the standard narratives of the successive stages of twentieth-century French philosophy, from Kojève’s purportedly Marxist and anthropological readings of Hegel in the 1930s to Heidegger’s 1946 “Letter on Humanism,” understood as a manifesto of antihumanism. In Geroulanos’s account, the story is far more complicated and much less linear. Beyond recasting the work of the best known thinkers of the mid-century, Geroulanos also highlights the significance of lesser-known figures, from the philosophy of science to theology. In incorporating these voices, he is able to show that atheist antihumanism, far from being opposed to currents of either scientific or religious thinking, was, in fact, deeply indebted to them.

I will not seek to reconstruct the considerable intricacies of the argument here. Rather, what I want to highlight is how this book integrates the powerful philosophical and political lessons of antihumanist critiques precisely by writing a history of them. For example, many of its protagonists interrogated “the possibility of politics in a world that can no longer depend on the certitude of progress or human harmony.” Geroulanos implicitly asks a similar question about the possibility of historical writing. In doing so, he avoids the biggest pitfalls not only of humanist philosophies and politics, but also of humanist histories: progressivist teleologies, the celebration and/or vilification of their principal actors, and redemptive or moralizing conclusions.

Given these philosophies’ multiple and repeated critiques of Man, how can one adequately write their history? And, perhaps more radically, how can one write histories tout court? In taking up this challenge, Geroulanos provides one powerful example of a history that does not presume humanist atheism as either a normative ground or telos. But nor does it take the reiterated “ends of man” as injunctions to stop writing history. On the contrary.  This book instead asks questions about the writing of history anew. In the process, it posits new horizons for thinking about the interrelationship between secularity and religion at a moment when these are highly charged questions in French history and politics—as well as beyond them. Not least, it would be interesting to pursue how the book helps us to understand why so much recent discussion of secularism and human rights has focused on the question of Woman.

Having now read the book, I’m inclined to think that, in this case, form follows substance: contrary to much sociological writing on religion stemming from Weber, A Secular Age focuses on the nature and background of contemporary religious experience – on the kind of experience of the transcendent one can have in our world (that is, the world of Latin Christendom). Leaving practically no area of humanistic scholarship or human experience untouched, Taylor argues that we have arrived, during the last 500 years or so, at an unprecedented juncture in human affairs. We have exchanged a world in which the transcendent was a taken-for-granted aspect of experience, and unbelief a problematic option, for a world in which belief and unbelief are at least equally plausible, and the option of a purely immanent, “exclusive humanism” entirely possible – even, perhaps, preferable for most people. Spiritually speaking, the very water in which we swim has changed profoundly and ineluctably.

In demonstrating that this is the case, Taylor has transformed the contemporary debate – now much warmed as compared to, say, the period before 1989 – over the meaning of “secularization.” He has shifted the focus of our attention from questions about the supposedly waning “public role” of religion and the possible decline of religious belief to a question concerning our experience of the world. For my money, he deftly captures the sense that, for wide segments of the Western world, it is perfectly acceptable to hold an outlook that seeks no further, in spiritual terms, than the enhancement of human flourishing. Indeed, the destination Taylor describes seems a good deal like the world that Durkheim adumbrated when he wrote, in the context of the Dreyfus affair, that “man has become a god for man and… he can no longer create other gods without lying to himself.”

Despite all the nuance and detail in Taylor’s presentation of his case, however, I wonder whether A Secular Age won’t have one baneful unintended consequence. Its characterization of a world “of” and a world “after” the transcendent suspiciously recalls similar developmental dichotomies in the history of social thought – from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from traditional to modern, from mechanical to organic (solidarity), etc. Taylor’s invocation of a world that is without any necessary commitment to the transcendent is fair enough. But I fear that it is likely to entrench those who encounter its argument (and at 776 pages of text, I suspect A Secular Age is going to be a book most people have heard about rather than read themselves) in the view that the old days were straightforwardly god-fearing and the “modern” world godless – for better or worse.

This would be an unfortunate outcome, since the present reconsideration of the concept of secularization offers potentially enormous prospects for new research. One can perhaps predict two general directions this new research will take. First, and already very much underway, is the question of the extent to which the contemporary period is, in fact, marked by a decline among Westerners in attachment to worldviews that transcend this world. Here the contrast between “spirituality” and “faith” takes center stage. While we may be talking about a re-orientation of the transcendent, the drift toward “believing without belonging” offers striking parallels to the weakened attachment to established social institutions more generally. The other tack that researchers are likely to take is to explore more fully the period before, say, 1500 in order to discern the extent to which unbelief really was a novel development.

In short, the historical trajectory of religious belief will come in for intensified scrutiny in order to assess the degree to which we’ve really moved from a world “of” to a world “after” the transcendent. Sociologists will not be well-equipped to undertake the historicization of (un)belief, yet it will be essential for them to assimilate the fruits of this research if they are not to persist in untenable generalizations about social change. Accordingly, we should all be looking forward to the results of Robert Bellah’s explorations of religious evolution. Even if they ultimately support Taylor’s perspective, they will form a crucial counterpoint that will help us make sense of secularization – a notion which, despite much need for qualification, ain’t dead yet.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

This passage comes quite early in Charles Taylor’s new book, while he is still assembling the pieces of the “story” that he will tell over its almost-900 pages. The passage is perhaps most easily read (allegorically, as it were) as a defense of the sheer length of the book. Stories, at least good stories, are full of details that demand time and space in a narrative. They are worth it, though, because they make narratives more like real life: good stories are thick and messy rather than thin and sterile. They take surprising twists and turns, double back on themselves, try things out from another angle.

What is the other option? According to Taylor, the opposite of a history is bare conceptual analysis: “But why tell a story? Why not just extract the analytic contrast, state what things were like then, and how they are now, and let the linking narrative go? Who needs all this detail, this history?” (28). The implication is that a shorter, more strictly analytical book would have missed the heart of the matter. Why is this? Because “this detail, this history” is not just an optional extra, not just a set of examples or illustrations. Rather, details are where the action is. This is a normative anthropological claim: details are where we live, because details are where history lives, and we are historical creatures.

The question that remains, then, is how best to capture this sense of history. Now one answer to this question, which began gathering steam during the period of which Taylor writes, is literature. Literature is frequently praised for bringing abstraction down to earth, fleshing it out, making it live and move. An oft-quoted example of this claim comes from Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “[T]he poet’s pen,” he writes in Act V, “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”

By far the most sophisticated attempt in this direction, however, belongs to a group of German thinkers briefly gathered at Jena in the late 1790s and known to posterity as the Romantics. This group—principally Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and Schleiermacher—came of age in a Germany intellectually dominated by Kant and Fichte. Against what was rapidly hardening into a battle of systematic philosophies, Friedrich Schlegel in particular argued for an anti-systematic approach that he linked to the literary genre of the fragment. Philosophy had run stuck in the wake of Kant, Schlegel argued, because it mistakenly assumed that thinking must begin from a first or unconditioned principle, a still point in a turning world. Schlegel thought this was exactly backwards: philosophy should begin in medias res, with the place where we find ourselves, conditioned creatures that we are. The fragment is the only form capable of answering this requirement, Schlegel proposed, because it reflected the state of incompletion and partiality from which we inevitably begin our reasoning. And part of that incompletion, of course, stems from the historicity of our situation. Thus, writes Schlegel in the famous Athenaum Fragment 116, “Other genres are fixed and capable of being classified in their entirety. The romantic genre is, however, still in the process of becoming. Indeed, that is its essence: to be eternally in the process of becoming and never completed.”

Taylor’s book is hardly a romantic fragment, of course. In its sprawling ambitiousness it is more like a nineteenth century novel by Tolstoy or Eliot. Still, Taylor’s defense of his method is a romantic one precisely insofar as it is literary—precisely insofar, that is, as its emphasis falls on the story that it has to tell.

One characteristic of romantic theories is that aesthetic productions cannot be paraphrased, because to paraphrase them inevitably distorts or misses everything worthwhile about them. (This idea was elevated into a theory of literature as such by the American New Critics, who for the most part hated romanticism but adopted this fundamental tenet into their thinking; see for example Cleanth Brooks’s famous essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase”.) That is the point of the romantic fragment—if you ask what a particular fragment “means” you are asking that it be translated into philosophy’s conceptual language, which is precisely what Schlegel and company were trying to avoid. There is a story about the composer Robert Schumann: after he was finished playing a new piano piece, someone in the audience asked him what it meant. For answer, Schumann simply played the piece again.

In a roughly analogous way, Taylor’s book is unparaphrasable: the level of detail and richness—the story—is so great that any attempt to extract a single thread from it inevitably mars its fabric. It would be better, given world enough and time, to simply read the book again.

Yet this is how Charles Taylor has invited us to think about secularism—not as beliefs, principles, or a mode of organizing state and society, though it certainly comprises these things (or, more accurately, these become some of secularism’s effects), but as a matter of human experience. Taylor wants us to appreciate modern Western secularism as a peculiar way of being, knowing, inhabiting the world; indeed, as a condition of being, knowing, and inhabiting the world in a particular way. By framing secularism thus, he moves quickly past quagmired politicized debates about secularism. Are we really secular? Should we aspire to secularism, and at what cost? To paraphrase Samuel Huntington, is the West still the West if it gives up its Judeo-Christian moorings and frame? Or to paraphrase Thomas Friedman, is the problem with Islam the fact that it is as yet unwashed by secularism? Not only can Taylor’s approach reveal the shallowness and indeed wrongheadedness of all such questions, it prevents our getting lost in the question of how intense religiosity and secularism can coexist in the same polity or even the same person. Taylor refounds secularism as a way of being, feeling, thinking and knowing that is as nonoptional in the contemporary West as a polytheist world view was for the ancient Greeks. He gives us, in short, the first erudite phenomenology of secularism through a story of the historical construction of secular subjectivity.

It is not difficult to find reasons to praise Taylor’s work. It is so rich, learned, careful, detailed, complex, attentive to a variety of forces at work in producing the secularism Westerners inhabit today, the secularism enshrined in the Establishment Clause and the First Amendment of the American Constitution or embodied in French laïcité, as well as the secularism many believe would neuter radical Islamicism, defuse battles among Shiites and Sunnis, relieve tensions between Hindus and Muslims, or ease the constraints on Israeli policy imposed by a minority orthodox population, especially those in the Settlements. In short, Taylor’s work attends to the secularism largely believed to yield legal protection of individual belief, civil tolerance of religious and cultural difference, and political resolution of bloody wars of faith.

Yet there are two aspects of Taylor’s massive historical account that I find deeply disturbing. First, absent from Taylor’s account is every stripe of outsider to Latin Christendom, from Jews and Muslims in Europe to colonized natives and other outsiders, as well as dissident voices, reversals and disruptions to what he calls his “story.” The missing elements make it more provincially European, monolithic, colonial, than it needs to be. Above all, they make the emergence of EuroAtlantic secularism a product of tensions within Christendom rather than, in part, a feature of Christendom’s encounter with others and especially with its constitutive outside. More than a problem of historiography or comprehensiveness, this omission has consequential politics; today, Western secularism is so relentlessly defined through its imagined opposite in Islamic theocracy that to render secularism as generated exclusively through Western Christian European history is to literally eschew the production of ourselves as secular through and against our imagined opposite. It is to be locked into Thomas Friedman’s conceit about “our” secular modernity and “their” need for it.

A second disturbing dimension of Taylor’s account pertains to its express and deliberate antimaterialism. Taylor’s “story” and the historiography structuring it aim not only to displace liberal shibboleths about secularism that equate it with value pluralism, church-state separation, and state protection of conscience, but also to challenge both Marx’s and Weber’s accounts of the process of secularization in the West. Taylor’s objection to these stories is both explicit and methodologically complex. His rejection of them is also consequential, not only for the way he tells his own story, but again, for how this story occludes the imperial face of Western secularism today. Even as Taylor is bent on explaining how secularism becomes a reigning worldview in the Euroatlantic, secularism is propelled, in his account, by epistemological conditions of belief. In contrast, I would argue that modernity features other knife-edged forces cutting through the waters of religious cosmology, including those identified by Weber as rationalization and by Marx as profanation. Today, these forces meld in neoliberalism, combining capital’s profanation of the sacred with the extension of market rationality and rationalization to all domains of existence. And neoliberalism, I would argue, is one of the key imperial forces of our time, probably more important in the long run than American military bellicosity or designs of regime change.

Let me underscore that Taylor and I share a move to diffuse and complicate the classical idealist/materialist opposition—both Taylor’s Hegelianism and my Marxism are extensively reconstructed by Foucault, and before Foucault, other post-Hegelian, post-Marxist formulations of the problem. Moreover, Taylor at times comes so close to materialism in thinking secularism—not only by posing secularism as a condition of belief rather than belief itself but also by tracking the multiple conditions of its production as a condition—that his reductionist and rejectionist approach to materialism and general eschewal of capitalism in the drama of secularization are all the more striking. What remains unquestionably idealist and antimaterialist in Taylor’s account is his commitment to tracing the production of secular consciousness within religious understanding as opposed to tracing secularization processes resulting from extrareligious forces that erode, transform, or instrumentalize a religious cosmology. The former treats consciousness as making itself through interaction with dominant ideas; the latter treats the production of conditions for religiosity and erosion or transformation of these conditions as the medium in which consciousness and dominant ideas are produced. Taylor’s approach is tricky because he speaks of conditions of belief but the conditions to which he refers are the framework and contents of intellectual and religious landscapes, and thus more closely approximate what Foucault called epistemes than what we encounter in Weber and Marx or even in the later Foucault’s appreciation of discourses and eventually, rationalities.

Moreover, Taylor’s driving question and mine are different. He wants to think about who a secularist is and what secularism achieves and sacrifices in relation to belief, and I want to think about the subtle violences of the forces that we might call secularizing. It is in this respect that I can’t quite stay with what Taylor calls “secularity 3”—this is secularity not in the sense of the state as constituted “above religion” (“secularity 1”) or in the sense of the decline of religious belief (“secularity 2”) but focused only on the making of the secular subject as one who can have religious faith without expecting others to share it. Ultimately, I think, Taylor wants to a) explain himself as “a believer” who is also a secularist; b) explain how, paradoxically, religious belief can be secured from and even by secularism; and c) explain the costs and losses attendant upon a fully secular age and consciousness. By contrast, I am interested in secularism as an instrument of empire. To be clear, in no way am I suggesting that this is all that secularism is; rather, it simply constitutes my own interest in secularism today.