Dissonant Notes on the Post‐Secular: Unthinking Secularization in Global Historical Sociology
Journal of Historical Sociology
Published online on December 08, 2015
Abstract
The article criticizes the assumption that modernity is a rupture in time and space conceivable in terms of the coming of a secular age. It tackles Habermas concept of ‘post‐secular’ and denotes it as an attempt to provide new foundations to modernization narratives, in postmodern terms; it discusses Blumenberg's idea of secularization and questions the historical ontogenesis of what Blumenberg thinks of in terms of the transition to the modern age; it further elaborates on Wang Hui analysis of the relation between Western science and the role of China in global modernity. Secularization and the post‐secular, it is argued, re‐frame narratives of the disenchantment within a western geocultural ideology of western superiority.