JOAS-The Power of The Sacred. Disenchantment

The Power of
the Sacred
The Power of the Sacred
An Alternative to the Narrative
of Disenchantment
By
HA N S   J OA S
Translated by
A L E X SK I N N E R
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Joas, Hans, 1948– author. | Skinner, Alex, translator.
Title: The power of the sacred : an alternative to the narrative of
disenchantment / by Hans Joas ; translated by Alex Skinner.
Other titles: Macht des Heiligen. English
Description: New York, NY, United States of America :
Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020041241 (print) | LCCN 2020041242 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190933272 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190933296 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190933302
Subjects: LCSH: Religion—Philosophy. | Religion and sociology. |
Weber, Max, 1864–1920.
Classification: LCC BL51.J63513 2021 (print) |
LCC BL51 (ebook) | DDC 210—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041241
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020041242
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190933272.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Preface
It is a good tradition to use a book’s preface to provide some information

about the institutions and individuals that have helped make it happen, thus
reducing the accumulated debt of gratitude at least a little. This can easily be
combined with some insights into its genesis, which I hope help the reader
better understand the book.
This book has a clear point of departure in institutional terms. I am refer-
ring to the lectures I gave in the summer semester of 2012 at the University
of Regensburg under the title “Sacralization and Secularization.” The frame-
work for these lectures was provided by the visiting professorship funded by
the Joseph Ratzinger Pope Benedict XVI Foundation, which I was the first to
hold. My thanks go to the foundation and to the Faculty of Catholic Theology
at the University of Regensburg for the invitation, and to my colleagues
Bernhard Laux and Erwin Dirscherl, as well as Florian Schuller, director of
the Catholic Academy in Bavaria, for their hospitality and support during
my stay. I gave one of the talks immediately before the Regensburg lectures
at the invitation of Heinrich Meier, head of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens
Foundation in Munich. My sincere thanks to him and his co-organizer of the
lecture series on “Religion and Politics,” Friedrich Wilhelm Graf.
While still based at FRIAS, the Institute for Advanced Study at the
University of Freiburg, I was able to deliver a more developed version of the
lecture series in the autumn of 2013 within the framework of the teaching
program at the University of Basel’s Faculty of Theology. In addition to the
students, I would especially like to thank my host, Protestant theologian
Georg Pfleiderer. I presented certain parts publicly on a number of other
occasions, which are too numerous to go into detail about here. Hence I men-
tion just two other institutional contexts, within each of which I was able
to present and discuss a number of chapters in preliminary form. The first
opportunity came as William James Scholar at the University of Potsdam in
the winter of 2012, thanks to an invitation from Logi Gunnarsson and Hans-
Peter Krüger of the university’s Department of Philosophy. Finally, in March
2016 and March 2017, I took up an invitation from Radboud University
Nijmegen in the Netherlands to present the entire train of my thought within
viii Preface
the framework of seminars organized by the Thomas More Foundation.

I thank the director of the foundation, Joost van der Net, and, as representa-
tive of all other participants, Jean-Pierre Wils (Nijmegen).
I feel some hesitation about mentioning my visiting professorship in
Regensburg. I am of course aware that in the intellectual life of Germany,
and beyond, many people are highly skeptical about Christianity or all re-
ligion, about the discipline of theology, the institutional framework of the
churches—particularly the Catholic Church—and the thought and min-
istry of Pope Benedict XVI. My hesitation is based on the concern that some
readers might abandon their reading of the present book without getting be-
yond the preface or, at least, might be unable to read what follows without
prejudice. The information I have provided so far makes it easy, right from
the outset, to put this book—which subjects Max Weber’s conception of
disenchantment to highly critical examination and attempts to outline an
alternative—down to religious motives and thus to pigeonhole it. Partly
because of this, I have decided to take the bull by the horns and provide a
fundamental, detailed discussion of the relationship between the scholarly
engagement with religion and religious faith in the first few chapters.
The connection between this book and a number of my other publications
is close and plainly apparent. In my book Faith as an Option: Possible Futures
for Christianity (2014; first published in German in 2012), among other
things I presented a critique of so-called secularization theory and explored
the consequences of such a critique for our understanding of modernity
and modernization. My critique in no way denies the phenomenon of sec-
ularization, but it radically questions its historical necessity or inevitability.
Conversely, my book The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of
Human Rights (2013; first published in German in 2011) focused on a pro-
cess of sacralization that has been gaining strength since the late eighteenth
century—that of the “person,” as evident in the history of human rights. In
other studies, particularly on the so-called Axial Age, which have been in-
corporated into c hapter 5 of the present book, I have grappled with a funda-
mental historical transformation in the character of the sacred. With these
studies under my belt, I felt challenged but also equipped as I began to come
to grips with Max Weber’s extraordinarily influential notion that the history
of religion paved the way for secularization and modern rationalization.
As I pursued this project, I stood on the shoulders of the great thinkers of
American pragmatism; the founder of French sociology, Émile Durkheim;
and Weber’s long-standing friend and rival Ernst Troeltsch. Closer to the
Preface ix
present, I was also influenced by the work of three leading sociologists. All
of them drew deep inspiration from Max Weber, but in their accounts and
conclusions they often diverged greatly from him. They are Robert Bellah,
Shmuel Eisenstadt, and David Martin. I am greatly beholden and indebted to
them. My decades-long engagement with the writings of Charles Taylor can
also be felt once again in this book, though I diverge substantially from his
views when it comes to the conception of disenchantment.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to the friends and colleagues who made
valuable suggestions about the entire manuscript or parts of it. They include
the theologian (and former Protestant bishop) Wolfgang Huber (Berlin), the
philosopher Matthias Jung (Koblenz), and the sociologist Wolfgang Knöbl
(Hamburg). Weber expert Johannes Weiß (Kassel) read and made helpful
comments on the Weber-related parts of c hapters 4 and 6. Years ago, philos-
opher Dieter Thomä (St. Gallen) provided me with an impulse that became
important to chapter 6; he expressed the view that the theory I set out in my
book The Genesis of Values (2000; first published in German in 1997) was vir-
tually crying out to serve as the foil for a new interpretation of Max Weber’s
“Zwischenbetrachtung” or “Intermediate Reflection.” I am very grateful to
him for this inspiration and for his critical reading of the resulting effort. In
the final stages of my work on the present book, the South African Institute
for Advanced Study (STIAS) in Stellenbosch once again provided me with
excellent working conditions, just as it had done in 2011, for which I am tre-
mendously grateful. Since 2014 my work has been generously supported
by the Porticus Foundation and since January 1, 2016, by the Max Planck
Research Award, and I would like to gratefully acknowledge both here.
I thank my assistant Mechthild Bock for her always reliable and meticulous
approach to an ever-shifting array of tasks, Eva Gilmer of Suhrkamp Verlag
for her excellent editorial work, and Christian Scherer, not for the first time,
for his outstanding support in proofreading the text and compiling the index.
Finally, I thank my wife, Heidrun. To share my life with her in joy and
sorrow is the greatest gift of all.
Berlin, June 2020
Introduction
This book is an attempt to divest of its enduring enchantment one of the

concepts central to the way in which modernity understands itself, namely
that of disenchantment. As we will see, this concept is profoundly ambig-
uous, as are contrasting terms such as “enchantment” and “re-enchantment,”
which also began to circulate after it was coined. Such ambiguity may lead to
confusion and has, in fact, often done so in this case. Conveyed covertly along
with the term itself, this ambiguity may also serve to establish a false sense of
certainty. This undoubtedly applies to the narrative of a progressive process
of disenchantment extending across millennia. If my argument is correct,
we cannot simply project this narrative forward into the future. What we
need, then, is an alternative to it, or perhaps several such alternatives—new
narratives of religious history as it is intertwined with the history of power,
narratives that might supersede that of disenchantment.
More than with any other thinker or scholar, the concept of disenchant-
ment is closely associated with the name of Max Weber. In a strategically
crucial part of the present book, I seek to come to grips with his use of this
concept, and the problems his approach raises, through close and detailed
reading of his work. But if we wish to outline an alternative, we need to do
much more than just critique Weber. In addition to a wide range of empirical
findings, such a project requires us to draw on other intellectual endeavors of
the past pursued by other thinkers. Despite the dominance of the narratives
of secularization and disenchantment—which we cannot, of course, simply
equate, but which are not entirely independent of one another either—the
two perspectives were never entirely uncontested or unopposed. Those
seeking to develop a coherent alternative, therefore, must build on the legiti-
mate aspects of these other thinkers’ observations.
This is also necessary because, at least in my personal experience, a cri-
tique of Weber on this point is all too easily attributed to the critic’s assumed
religious motives. From this perspective, Weber comes across as the epitome
of a sober and illusion-free thinker, one contradicted only by those incapable
of the same degree of sobriety, of his heroic lack of illusion. Seen from this
2 The Power of the Sacred
angle, their forlorn or gushing efforts merely collapse in on themselves. But

are we really dealing here with an opposition between objective scholarship
and faith, realism and self-delusion, rationality and a readiness to sacrifice
one’s intellect? Or do specific religious or antireligious motives also play an
important role for Weber and other exponents of the narrative of disenchant-
ment? Can narratives of such magnitude simply be derived from the facts?
Can they be unambiguously confirmed or refuted by them? Would Max
Weber himself ever have put forward this kind of defense? Can there even
be a discipline of religious studies if we believe that religious or antireligious
motives must inevitably play a constitutive role in it?
In order to explore these questions, while also seeking to tap the poten-
tial of intellectual history to stimulate possible alternatives to the narrative
of disenchantment, the present book begins with fundamental matters. The
first three chapters deal with the problems entailed in the scholarly study
of religion itself against the background of three different disciplines. The
first chapter is concerned with the discipline of history, the second with
that of psychology, and the third with sociology. Eschewing encyclopedic
aspirations, all three chapters are essentially limited to one intellectual
constellation each, each of which seemed to me to provide particularly in-
structive insights into the history of scholarship. To be specific, I first con-
sider the earliest of these cases, namely the attempt by the great Scottish
philosopher and historian David Hume, in the mid-eighteenth century, to
construct an empirically grounded, universal history of religion, one that
set aside all theological presuppositions. I then turn to the undisputedly
classic foundational document of an empirical psychology of religion, a
rich phenomenology of individual religious experiences, which in many
respects remains inspiring to this day. I am referring to the book written by
American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James in the
first few years of the twentieth century. When it comes to the emergence
of the specifically sociological (and ethnological-anthropological) study of
religion, things are not quite as clear-cut as in the other two cases with re-
spect to the originary intellectual constellation. I have opted to focus on the
discourse that unfolded, chiefly in France, on the role of collective rituals.
This leads us from the historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges to his
student, the classical figure of French sociology, Émile Durkheim, and his
magnum opus of 1912—which was of such crucial importance to the soci-
ology of religion—on the religion of the Australian aborigines and North
American Indians.
Introduction 3
It goes without saying, then, that the roots of all three of the cases I deal
with lie in the foundational periods of the modern academic disciplines,
a time when these disciplines were not yet clearly demarcated from one an-
other. David Hume’s historiographical project, for example, is strongly based
on a (specific) psychological theory. In what follows I am not really concerned
with questions of disciplinary history, such as the development of an auton-
omous discipline called “religious studies” or “comparative religion.” Instead
my focus is on three exemplary cases that enable us to discuss, in very different
contexts, the fundamental question of the potential for objective statements
about religion, while at the same time allowing us to gather together elements
of a more comprehensive theory. To both these ends, it is necessary to go be-
yond the relevant author in each case, and his oeuvre, and to at least take a
look at his implicit or explicit opponents, predecessors, and successors; this is
why I referred to “constellations.” In the case of the discipline of history, there-
fore, I also delve into the reception of Hume in the work of Johann Gottfried
Herder, because as a Christian he built productively on and extended Hume’s
project, which had been motivated by a skepticism about religion, in a highly
instructive way. In the case of psychology, we need to look both backward and
forward from the work of William James. Backward, because theologians tend
to date James’s methodological innovation one hundred years earlier, ascribing
it to Friedrich Schleiermacher’s speeches on religion of 1799, addressed to “the
educated among its despisers.” Forward, because James’s psychology was al-
ready perceived by contemporaries as one-sided and deficient with respect to
the interpretation of highly intensive human experiences by the experiencing
subjects themselves. A colleague and friend of James at Harvard University, a
philosopher by the name of Josiah Royce (virtually unknown in Europe to this
day), attempted, in his late work, in a way that seems quite sensational in ret-
rospect, to overcome these deficiencies with the tools of a theory of signs—in
other words, semiotics. In the third case, that of sociology, my focus is in any
case on the gradual development of a methodological approach within a newly
emerging subject. I present this approach in a way that distances itself greatly
from the conventional interpretation of Durkheim; through comparison with
later efforts to elaborate a theory of ritual, it is an approach I also outline in light
of its ongoing significance to an anthropology of the formation of ideals.
These first three chapters are intended to show that we have to trace re-
ligion back to historically situated human experiences of something that is
perceived as sacred—experiences that we can only understand correctly if
we anchor them in a semiotically transformed psychology of the self, if we
think of them as embodied in practices and if we avoid constricting them

through an overly individualistic approach. This compressed description will
not be entirely understandable to the reader at this stage. But my anticipatory
remarks here indicate that alternatives to the intellectual framework typical
of the naturalistic critique of religion developed at an early stage, and that
there is a mutually constitutive relationship between the history of this cri-
tique and other ways of thinking that seek to do justice to both academic
scholarship and religion.
Not until the fourth chapter do I turn to Max Weber and the narrative of
disenchantment, but even there these are not my only concerns. The schol-
arly disciplines dealing with religion developed on a broad basis throughout
the nineteenth century through historical, psychological, and sociological-
ethnological research, and made available a great wealth of knowledge.
This generated a growing need to piece together this accumulated but frag-
mentary knowledge, and to do so in order to analyze both history and the
modern world. I believe that the two most powerful such attempts at syn-
thesis were undertaken by two scholars who maintained the closest of in-
tellectual relationships, indeed, who lived in the same house in Heidelberg
for a number of crucial years: Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. Both men
produced brilliant syntheses that embedded the dynamics of religious his-
tory in a more comprehensive, and itself highly nuanced, history of political,
economic, social, and military developments. In the present book I refer to
this more comprehensive history in shorthand form as a history of power,
borrowing from Michael Mann’s multivolume, sociologically informed uni-
versal history, which revolves around four key sources of social power.1
Today, many people place these two scholars (Weber and Troeltsch) in
very close proximity to one another in every respect. Yet from a history-of-
religion vantage point, and even more from the perspective of a religion-
focused analysis of the contemporary era and anticipatory observations
about the future, I see major differences between them. It would be apt to
speak in terms of two alternative syntheses. Hence, before going into Weber,
I develop a historical framework with the help of Troeltsch’s historical so-
ciology of Christianity. In light of the empirical fact of the emergence of
new ideals, this framework presents the history of Christianity as alter-
nating between processes of sacralization and desacralization, explaining
the character and object of these processes essentially in light of the history
of the state. This, together with the elements gathered together in the first
three chapters, provides us with a foil against which we can clearly discern
Introduction 5
the special features of Weber’s thinking and allows us to critically appraise

his ideas.
In both Max Weber’s sociology, which works with a universal history and
is well-informed theologically, and in Ernst Troeltsch’s historical theology,
which was increasingly concerned with psychological and sociological
foundations, at the beginning of the twentieth century religious-theological
and secular-scholarly modes of observation seemed to be entering into the
most productive of exchanges. But this was soon to change, and as a result
the impulses emanating from the work of Weber and Troeltsch did not make
the kind of impact they ought to have. Certainly, Max Weber rose to become
undisputedly the greatest classic figure of sociology; but as the subject in-
creasingly turned its back on history, a gap opened up between the tremen-
dous respect for Weber and the number of studies that actually pursued a
program similar to his. I develop an explanation for this state of affairs in
chapter 6. This gap has not been seriously bridged by the numerous studies
that draw closely on Weber’s research without taking sufficient account of
the changed state of research since his day, or those that simply canonize his
assertions. Things are even worse when it comes to Ernst Troeltsch. In reac-
tion to World War I, German Protestant theology underwent a far-reaching
process of reorientation (which intensified later), for which the term “anti-
historicist revolution”2 has come into circulation. This hampered further
work on Troeltsch’s program within his home discipline, while scholars in
other subjects failed to take up this program because the (only superficially
plausible) impression took hold that his work was merely an inconsequential
variant of Max Weber’s sharply contoured intellectual project.
I mention this here because the argumentational stance of the next (fifth)
chapter depends on an understanding of this complicated situation. As a re-
sult of the developments outlined above, some scholars began to put forward
an argument already embraced by many religious thinkers: that empirical
research of a historical, psychological, and sociological-ethnological kind is
certainly appropriate when it comes to “primitive” or “archaic” religions, but
has nothing to contribute to the understanding of true religion based on real
divine revelation, namely the Jewish or Christian variety. For many secular
thinkers, such a claim is self-evidently absurd. Often, they do not even draw
a sharp boundary between religions of revelation and other kinds, because
for them the notion of a divine revelation is not qualitatively different from
the “illusions” of other religions. This did not apply in the work of Troeltsch
or Weber (and a number of others); through a concept such as “religions of
salvation,” they attempted to do justice to the profound empirical difference

between these and other traditions. My contention is that in the twentieth
century, on the basis of very different religious or antireligious motives, a
discourse on this very question developed, the key term here being “Axial
Age.” This discourse deals with the question of when and where, within the
history of humanity, under what conditions and with what consequences, a
fundamental transformation occurred in the understanding of the sacred, as
a result of which, in connection with a fundamental increase in reflexivity,
a concept of transcendence arose in the sense of a profound breach with all
that is worldly. Crucial to this fundamental transformation are the political
and social consequences of the desacralization of the structures of political
power and social inequality. Chapter 5 presents the wide range of such in-
tellectual approaches, sums up the state of empirical knowledge in this field,
and develops out of it a concept of transcendence as sacredness-become-
reflexive. This analysis also provides another important component of an al-
ternative to the narrative of disenchantment.
Already inherent in this brief reference to the desacralizing effects of a re-
ligion that has become morally demanding is a break with all notions of a
linear historical trajectory. Taking their inspiration partly from Max Weber
and partly from Émile Durkheim, though sometimes quite unconcerned
with their actual trains of thought, many analyses of the contemporary era,
however, presuppose such a linear trajectory. Chapter 6 delves into the three
most influential of such “dangerous nouns of process”: the concept of ration-
alization, borrowed from Max Weber; the concept of progressive functional
differentiation, borrowed from Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, and Émile
Durkheim, and the now all-pervasive concept of modernization, which
emerged after World War II in the United States. Reflecting on the gener-
ally unnoticed consequences of the use of these concepts facilitates a rein-
terpretation of Weber’s famous “Intermediate Reflection,” one that liberates
this text from the traditional reading, which is rooted in theories of differen-
tiation. What we find is that Weber refers to a wide range of fundamentally
different fields of tension that cannot be reduced to the notions of “rational-
ization” and “differentiation.” This finally clears the way for an outline of an
alternative to the narrative of disenchantment.
This outline is delivered in c hapter 7. This chapter begins at an elementary
level, briefly summing up the main ideas of a theory of the sacred or of pro-
cesses of sacralization as I have presented them in other books, while adding
another idea: that of self-sacralization, as a risk bound up with every form
Introduction 7
of sacralization. If we consider the tension that exists between the demands

of transcendence as a form of sacredness-become-reflexive and tendencies
toward self-sacralization, it is possible to develop a picture of religious his-
tory that does justice both to the power-critical and power-supporting po-
tential of religions. The power of the sacred becomes evident in both the
legitimizing and questioning of political and social power, because people’s
ties to the sacred, as they experience it, are one of their strongest sources of
motivation. In such abstract generality, this assertion may sound trivial. It
must, of course, prove its ability to illuminate specific issues on a case-by-
case basis. Chapter 7 provides no more, but also no less, than the outline of
such a history.
The reader has now had a brief preview of the way my argument unfolds.
I briefly address two other aspects of the present book’s themes in this in-
troduction. The first concerns the reasons why a picture of religious history
that is not geared toward the motif of “disenchantment” seems important to
me, particularly today, and the second centers on the relationship between
the scholarly study of religion and a language of faith appropriate to the
contemporary world.
Discussions on religion today, as I argued in my book Faith as an Option,3
are characterized by the fact that two pseudo-certainties, which exercised
tremendous influence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have both
lost their plausibility. Individuals of faith can no longer warn that processes
of secularization lead to the loss of all morality, because the reality of highly
secularized societies has not borne out these fears. Nonbelievers can no
longer interpret their distance from all religion as an avant-garde step into a
future toward which human history is headed of its own accord. If my anal-
ysis is correct, this opens up new potential for dialogue between believers and
nonbelievers, but also brings up entirely new questions. First and foremost,
these include the question as to the causes of processes of secularization,
given that these can no longer be understood as the self-evident consequence
of processes of modernization, and can, therefore, no longer be viewed as al-
ways already explained. But the attempt to achieve a valid explanation inevi-
tably brings individuals and organizations into view as actors with objectives
and ideas—in other words, it confronts us with secularization as a project.4
In this project, scholarship has always played a central role, whether in the
sense of the scholarly refutation of specific religious teachings, or in the sense
of an objective explanation for the existence of the allegedly “mysterious”
phenomenon of religion itself.
Today we have reached a point at which the two long-dominant ideas must
themselves be historicized—that is, the anthropological thesis of an essential
relationship between religion and morality, and the self-confident ideas of
those who believe they can explain religion objectively and thus render it inef-
fectual and superfluous. Beyond this vital process of historicization there lies
the project, pursued in this book, of imagining a study of religion that eschews
the unproductive dichotomy between a supposedly presuppositionless
scholarly engagement with religion and a theological approach to religion
allegedly based on unproven and unprovable presuppositions. Here this
dichotomy is superseded by an awareness that all human commitments to
certain values and identity-constitutive convictions are rooted in histori-
cally situated experiences. This, of course, is not enough. Such an awareness
spares no one of the need to put forward coherent arguments justifying every
single evaluative statement they make. But this awareness changes our stance
within such argumentational discourses, our expectations of them, and our
willingness both to recognize the limits of argumentational justifiability and
to contemplate means of reasonable communication that do not adhere to
the strict demands of rational argumentation.
In this changed discursive situation, in which few now expect ever-
advancing secularization, it is still possible to assume that disenchantment
was the backdrop to the highly contingent history of the secularization of
certain European countries—but no longer can it be considered the prelude
to a reality that will come to hold sway worldwide. So the responses to disen-
chantment and secularization are bound to be highly variable within global
power constellations, and cannot be simply and exclusively imitative, or a
matter of “catching up.” My hope is that the attempt made here to look at the
history of the scholarly engagement with religion, as well as the history of
religion itself, in a way that is not from the outset pervaded by the narrative
of disenchantment, will be of interest even to those who ultimately cleave to
Weber and his narrative.5
Finally, and very briefly here, I would like to consider the question of a
fitting language of faith, one that is appropriate in light of the scholarly en-
gagement with religion. A newly emerging discipline such as sociology, like
psychology or the myth-destroying discipline of history, was often perceived
as a great threat to religion. The same year that William James published his
great work of nonreductionist psychology of religion, Leo Tolstoy wrote a
story titled “The Restoration of Hell.” Here a devil boasts that he has struck
upon an idea to keep people from gearing their lives toward the teachings of
Introduction 9
Jesus, namely to whisper to them that “all religious teaching, including the
teaching of Jesus, is an error and a superstition, and that they can ascertain
how they ought to live from the science I have devised for them called soci-
ology, which consists in studying how former people lived badly.”6 A “sci-
ence” that saw its task as overcoming faith and a faith that felt nothing but
threatened by this “science”—these were two sides of the same coin. Much
the same may be said of political theory, when secular thinkers presume to
adjudicate on the “permissibility” of religiously motivated or even religiously
grounded views in public debates and, conversely, when believers evade
the task of justifying their political opinions in such a way as to persuade
nonbelievers, and instead merely use instruments of power to achieve their
objectives. Despite all the risks that continue to be generated by the mutu-
ally distorted perception of believers of various religions, or of believers and
nonbelievers, in the changed intellectual landscape, I see a significant chance
that a sphere is opening up in which everyone can articulate their experiences
and assumptions and relate them to one another.7 This is not to naïvely un-
derestimate the conflicts and risks entailed in such efforts. Such a project
expects a lot of those religious believers—within the Christian traditions, for
example—who have hitherto understood their faith as a matter of compli-
ance with a doctrinal system. The understanding of religion developed here
expects them to articulate their faith in a new way, while maintaining conti-
nuity with traditional forms. The following ideas require the secular-minded
to part company with a conception of history that has in many cases, though
not all, entered deeply into their self-image—a conception of history that
assumes an inexorable and advancing process of disenchantment.
1
History of Religion as Critique of Religion?
David Hume and the Consequences
Today, it is usually taken for granted that religion can be the object of schol-
arly research and theory-building.1 Just as every other sphere of human life
may be the topic of historical, sociological, or psychological analyses, so
can religion. If relatively little attention was long paid to the scholarly en-
gagement with religion internationally, in the decades after World War II,
for example, this was certainly not due to any reservations about profaning
the sacred. On the contrary, it was owing to the widespread assessment that,
at least in the present world, religion has largely lost its significance. Why
should one put a lot of effort into grappling with something that is about to
be swept away by a comprehensive process of secularization?
When the scholarly study of religion emerged in Europe, the situation was
very different. In any case, until the eighteenth century no one referred to a
subject area called “religion” in the first place. Such a term was widely per-
ceived as improper, particularly if it was supposed to include Christianity,
simply because it inevitably leveled the differences between the true
(Christian) faith and Judaism or Islam, but particularly between Christianity
and what was traditionally encompassed by the collective terms of heath-
enism and idolatry. To speak of “religion” in such an all-encompassing sense
presupposes a distance, in one way or another, from one’s own faith, and
an insight into commonalities that link it with other forms. Particularly in
England, by the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, constant con-
fessional disputes increasingly appear to have spurred a tendency to ab-
stract from each Christian confession and, ultimately, to imagine something
that contrasted with all of them.2 This was preceded by a lengthy process
in which, through the “discovery” of a “New World,” people’s conscious-
ness of religious diversity had expanded, while the philological engagement
with the classical and oriental languages, which had gained traction since
the Renaissance, had deepened the understanding of religious history.3 The
aforementioned contrast to the various confessions increasingly emerged as
History of Religion as Critique of Religion? 11
a worldview of immanence, which meant doing without or rejecting tran-

scendence. Such a worldview is the intellectual precondition for a conscious
rejection of all religion, for a “secular option,”4 in contrast to which every-
thing else could become variants of the curious phenomenon of “religion.”
A general term of this kind could emerge only gradually and was long per-
ceived as problematic.
Hence, even in the late nineteenth century, Max Müller, a leading Oxford
Indologist and Sanskrit researcher of German origin, could still remark that
“the very title of the ‘Science of Religion’ will jar, I know, on the ears of many
persons.”5 For believers, this offensive potential was inherent in the fact that
here their faith was being dealt with as a mere human phenomenon. This
potential for offense increases substantially when scholarly research claims
to do more than establish mere facts about religious life, that is, as soon as
it seeks to reveal the “secret” that (supposedly) underlies all religion. This is
the case whenever religious phenomena are conceptualized as a consequence
of something else: as the “sigh of the oppressed creature” or the “opium of
the masses” (Marx), as “illusion” or “projection” (Freud), as a misunder-
standing of the effects of the ecstatic experiences sometimes undergone by
human collectives (Durkheim), or even as a mere manifestation of brain
processes (Dawkins). As early as 1902, American psychologist and philos-
opher William James coined the apt term “nothing but” explanations for
such views within the study of religion.6 According to these explanations,
religious phenomena have no substance in their own right; they are “nothing
but” consequences of nonreligious phenomena, of which they represent a
distorted manifestation.
Since its inception, the history of scholarly engagement with religion has
undeniably been closely associated with such attempts to critique religion
and promote secularism or with the rejection of such endeavors. This con-
tinues to echo down to our own time, when, for example, in education policy
debates on the position of theology at universities, it has been claimed that
religious believers are fundamentally ill-suited to carrying out an unbiased
scholarly analysis of religion. Their entire world of thought, it is asserted, is
so thoroughly saturated by their faith and its assumptions, for which there is
no scientific evidence, that they cannot be serious candidates for the study
of religion. Believers, of course, point out that, when it comes to religion,
secularists are by no means neutral or free of presuppositions either. Their
argument becomes even stronger when they add that there is no such thing
as secularism in the singular, but rather a wide variety of secularisms, each of
which is characterized by a specific opposition to specific forms of religion.

Furthermore, to cite another argument against those who advocate the sec-
ularist study of religion, it may be that (an at least imaginative) access to reli-
gious phenomena is a helpful if not necessary prerequisite for its study. Can
one really be “religiously unmusical” if one is working on religion? Could
one be literally unmusical if one had chosen to become a musicologist?
These remarks are not an attempt to engage with a polemical debate be-
tween believers and nonbelievers, but to probe the fundamental possibility
of a scholarly study of religion, particularly in the sense of a space in which
believers (of all kinds) and nonbelievers (of all kinds) can enter into a dia-
logue with one another in a productive way. The historiography of religion
might constitute such a place. Or is such a historiography necessarily part of
the critique of religion? That is the question I explore in the present chapter.
A Methodological Breakthrough
The epoch-making breakthrough to a universal history of religion, one

that maintains a consistent methodological distance from all theological
assumptions and is in this sense wholly profane, dates back to Scottish phi-
losopher and historian David Hume. He called his book, which first appeared
in 1757 and rapidly achieved international recognition, The Natural History
of Religion, presumably signaling by its very title that he intended to pro-
duce a history of religion as a purely human (“natural” rather than “super-
natural”) phenomenon and in no other sense.7 Yet it is not certain that this
supposition is correct, given that Hume does not define the concept of nat-
ural history at any point in his work, and, moreover, it appears nowhere in
the text at issue apart from the title. Prior to Hume, the term was initially
used in a narrow sense for studies dealing with natural phenomena, such as
minerals or fossils, from a historical angle.8 Subsequently, however, it was in-
creasingly deployed by the authors of analyses that sought to explain moral—
that is, cultural—phenomena, in light of natural conditions such as climate.
The term “natural history” was also used to describe attempts to collate facts
from a particular field of phenomena and, on this basis, to inductively iden-
tify lawlike regularities. Alternatively, from a quite different perspective,
“natural history” meant studies that contrasted the incalculable diversity of
phenomena with an idealized theoretical model of an allegedly “natural” de-
velopment. Some of these ways of using the term “natural history” fit better
and some less well with Hume’s actual approach. Perhaps Hume was really
just out to provoke, as some contemporaries suspected, and if so he was cer-
tainly successful. One of his greatest adversaries, Bishop Warburton, stated
that the project of a natural history of religion was as meaningful as that of
a “moral history of meteors.”9 Whatever the exact intention behind the title,
then, it stands to reason that a historiography that emancipates itself from
theological presuppositions will take a historicizing approach to the origins
of the long-dominant framework.
Hume’s book has rightly been called the “beginning of the modern social
scientific approach to the religious problem.”10 While Hume declares at the
start of his text that “the whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author,
and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a mo-
ment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion”
(p. 134), we now know, on the basis of his other writings and his letters,11 that
in reality he had a profoundly critical attitude toward every attempt to iden-
tify evidence for God in the nature of the world. However, justifiably worried
about the consequences he might have to face for an openly critical view of
religion, such as excommunication from the Church of Scotland, he presum-
ably believed it necessary to dissimulate and pay lip service to theism. The
extent to which Hume indirectly sought to subvert traditional religious ties
through his text is a matter of controversy even in the most recent literature
on him. It is of course even more hotly debated whether his account can or
must impact on readers’ personal faith (as he perhaps intended), given the
way he concealed his views. Much more important for us, however, than the
question of Hume’s personal religious beliefs, his publishing strategy, and his
exact intentions in writing his text is the new methodological approach char-
acteristic of this work, which was, as I believe, of epochal importance. For
him, scholarly texts could no longer cite a divine “revelation” as a causal ex-
planation or an independent source of knowledge; such a “revelation” could
itself only be the object of scholarly investigation.
Going beyond the traditional approach of viewing all religions from the
standpoint of Christianity, Hume underlined the tremendous variety and
differences between religions in the world, and he used this fact to argue
against all attempts to derive religions “from an original instinct or primary
impression of nature” (p. 134). This observation, however, is itself ambig-
uous. It might imply that religion as such is a universal, as it were anthro-
pological phenomenon, but that for this very reason its individual variants
cannot be straightforwardly derived from the nature shared by all human
beings. But it might also mean that religion is not a phenomenon found
without exception among all peoples. Given that Hume contends that “some
nations have been discovered, who entertained no sentiments of Religion,
if travellers and historians may be credited” (p. 134), it rapidly becomes ap-
parent that he is in fact seeking to dispute the universality of religion. With
respect to peoples without religion, what he chiefly had in mind were prob-
ably Brazilian Indians such as the Tupinamba, whom he mentions elsewhere
in his writings,12 but perhaps China as well, as the idea that it was unreli-
gious was widespread in the eighteenth century and made a substantial con-
tribution to the popularity of China among Enlightenment thinkers. Voltaire
is said to have had a picture of Confucius above his writing desk in Ferney.
While he recognized that this thinker was no thoroughgoing atheist, he saw
him as a de facto nonreligious teacher of justice within the state and as an
advocate of a wise approach to living one’s life. Hume’s reference to peoples
without religion, of course, was chiefly focused on the future. If such people
may have existed in the past, then the idea of a life without religion in the fu-
ture inevitably seemed more plausible.
In this sense, Hume’s project of a natural history of religion was part of
the rise of a “secular option.” I prefer this term to that of “secularization”
when one is referring to the strength or weakness of religious faith because
it makes it clearer that secularism is an option that has been taken up in dif-
ferent countries, regions, or milieus to very different degrees, and that “faith
as an option” continues to exist alongside it. On this view, the secular op-
tion is a new option that joins the option of faith, but that also transforms
faith into one option among several. How, though, might believers relate to
the project of a “natural history of religion”? Are the disciplines that inves-
tigate religion saturated by the conflict between belief and nonbelief, or is
there a possibility of a study of religion beyond these conflicts? This ques-
tion can only be answered on a concrete level, with respect to the statements
made by researchers of religion on the one hand and the de facto reactions
to Hume’s pioneering achievement on the other. It is to these two complexes
that I now turn.
Four Hypotheses in the History of Religion
Hume’s empirical assertions can be condensed into four hypotheses. First,

he asserts that unprejudiced investigation into the history of religion shows
clearly that monotheism, even if it makes more sense from the perspective
of rationality, has not held primacy historically. “We may as reasonably im-
agine, that men inhabited palaces before huts and cottages, or studied geom-
etry before agriculture; as assert that the Deity appeared to them a pure spirit,
omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, before he was apprehended to
be a powerful, though limited being, with human passions and appetites,
limbs and organs” (p. 136). While previously polytheism had often been
imagined as a corrupted form of an original monotheism—because human
beings were ascribed a kind of natural tendency to embrace the (rationally
authenticated) content of the Christian faith—Hume refutes this completely
in historical terms. For him, in almost every case, polytheism was clearly the
original and, for a lengthy period, almost solely existing form of religion.
With this historical hypothesis, he consciously seeks not just to deal a death
blow to the biblical notion of God’s self-revelation to the first people, but also
to Enlightenment notions of a “natural religion” of humanity. In this sense,
the “natural history of religion” provides no support for notions of a “natural
religion,” but is in fact opposed to them.
The second hypothesis seeks to explain what the foundation of this orig-
inal polytheism might be, if rational thought can be ruled out. For Hume, it
is clear that it must be human beings’ passions, their emotions, out of which
such polytheistic belief grows. In particular, it is the “concern with regard
to the events of life, and . . . the incessant hopes and fears, which actuate the
human mind” (p. 139). It is not “speculative curiosity” or “the pure love of
truth” (p. 140) that plays the key role in the inner life of “such barbarians,” but
“the ordinary affections of human life; the anxious concern for happiness, the
dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst of revenge, the appetite
for food and other necessaries” (p. 140). Hume imagines that, “agitated by
hopes and fears of this nature, especially the latter, men scrutinize, with a
trembling curiosity, the course of future causes, and examine the various and
contrary events of human life. And in this disordered scene, with eyes still
more disordered and astonished, they see the first obscure traces of divinity”
(p. 140). In today’s language, we would say that Hume believes he can discern
the psychological roots of religion in the experiences of contingency typical
of human existence. He thus ascribes to religion a role in coping with such
experiences of contingency: through prayers, sacrifices, and in other ways,
human beings attempt to curry favor with their gods or idols. This is particu-
larly pronounced, Hume believes, where happenstance is most dominant: on
the high seas, at war, or in games of chance.
The third hypothesis has to do with the dynamics of religious history. For
Hume it is simply empirically untenable to believe that the history of religion
is a purposeful process, leading from an original polytheism to monotheism.
The opposite notion, of course, is even less valid. Instead, as Hume sees it, in
religious history we can identify an alternation between the two extremes, an
oscillation between polytheism and monotheism, comparable to the chan-
ging of the tides (“Lex Hume”).13 Certainly, Hume believes, monotheism
mostly arises from rational thought, yet compared to the passions, reason is
generally weak and largely powerless, and this is especially true for the uned-
ucated lower classes. As a result, it is probable that they will constantly seek to
return to polytheism, even under conditions of official monotheism, because
their embrace of the latter is not grounded in reason but is merely due to their
yearning for the strongest possible god. Polytheism, then, may at the very
least survive, and may even be reinvigorated. It was above all Hume’s friend
Edward Gibbon, the great historian of the decline and fall of the Roman
Empire, who took up this idea, seeking to use it to explain the emergence of
the Christian cult of the saints in late antiquity.14 But Hume himself was al-
ready referring in this vein to the Marian cult of Latin Christianity and the
veneration of Saint Nicholas in Russian Orthodoxy. Islam and Protestantism,
then, can be interpreted as movements running counter to polytheistic
distortions.
Finally, the fourth hypothesis is especially explosive. It asserts that poly
theism is by nature more tolerant than monotheism, because it is easy to in-
tegrate new gods into a heterogeneous pantheon, while monotheisms, by
definition, strove to render the worship of any other god impermissible. In
view of monotheisms’ proclivity for the suppression or destruction of rival
religions and their inherent tendency toward schism, mission, and expan-
sion, Hume believed that tolerance was barely compatible with their prem-
ises. For Gibbon, therefore, it was entirely understandable that the Roman
state did everything it could to defend itself against its intolerant Christian
citizens.15 Once again, it must be emphasized just how much Hume and
Gibbon diverged from what we commonly think of as Enlightenment
thought on religion. During an era when even most sophisticated critics of
Christianity did not doubt its moral superiority to other religions, Hume
sensationally sought, from the vantage point of peace, not only to ascribe to
all religions a hazardous potential but to attribute a greater potential danger,
indeed a potential for violence, to the more rational religion. In general, for
Hume it was the more demanding religions that tended to suppress natural
moral impulses. In fact, for him the mere emphasis on strict ritual guidelines
in religions already represented a danger to compliance with natural moral
impulses.
At least some of the four hypotheses, through which I have summed up
Hume’s arguments here, may be familiar to present-day readers—even if they
have never engaged with his work itself. It is probably not going too far to
claim that, into the present day, Hume’s hypotheses are key components, in-
deed core tropes of the critique of religion. This applies, for example, to the
hypotheses that there is no natural disposition for monotheism and that re-
ligion emerges from the attempt to cope with experiences of contingency.
Today, hypotheses inaugurated by Hume are sometimes discussed with ref-
erence to other critics of religion from Feuerbach to Freud. Yet it is beyond
dispute that the ideas of anthropomorphism and projection are already pre-
sent in Hume’s work. Moreover, we can even discern the Nietzschean motif
of an anti-Christian valorization of the heroic vis-à-vis the sacred in Hume,
when he compares forms of religion with respect to courage and humilia-
tion, while bringing out the difference “between the maxims of a Greek hero
and a Catholic saint” (p. 164) when it comes to their approach to bugs and
the “lower” animals. Finally, and irritatingly, the hypothesis on monotheism’s
potential for violence is now known in Germany as the “Assmann hypo-
thesis,” despite the fact that it was already present in the work of Hume in a
very similar form two and a half centuries earlier. It is fascinating to see the
early formulations of all these ideas gathered together as if in a compendium.
Meanwhile, a rich empirical and theoretical literature has been produced on
all four hypotheses since Hume’s day. Taking a quick look at this literature, as
I am going to do now, can certainly not do full justice to the complexity of the
subject matter. But my intention here is not to deliver a definitive empirical
judgment, but rather to demonstrate the potential for the empirical study of
religion beyond the conflict between belief and nonbelief.
Within research on the history of religion, when it comes to the first hy-
pothesis the crucial step consisted in overcoming the simplistic alternative
of polytheism versus monotheism. Hume operated within the framework of
this alternative as if it exhausted the range of possibilities, and as if it offered a
self-evident schema for the classification of religions. This was because, even
for him, despite all the emphasis he placed on the passions and emotions,
religions were predominantly belief systems, as evident in his polemic against
the role of stories, “loose and precarious fictions” in “pagan religion” (p. 173).
In the nineteenth century, however, this changed on a number of fronts.
Of most importance to the issue of polytheism were the writings of French

historian Fustel de Coulanges on religion in Greco-Roman antiquity.16 He
demonstrates that we completely fail to understand this religion if we think
of it as a belief in a vast and unwieldy pantheon. Instead we need to radically
redirect the focus of our attention, away from beliefs and toward the practice
of ancient rituals. Central for him, for example, was the cult surrounding the
domestic hearth, as a cult of house and family, as well as rituals in which the
polis or the state or the empire could celebrate itself. Quite regardless of how
accurate these analyses were, the key point is that they were a tremendously
important stimulus to considering other religions as well in a quite new way
with respect to the constitutive role of ritual practices. This also made an
impact on the study of the history of the “Semitic” religions, as they were
called at the time,17 and later, outside the field of religious history, within
ethnology or anthropology. At the close of the nineteenth century, Robert
Ranulph Marett, for example, refers to “theoplasm” in connection with ritual
practices and the associated experiences,18 a kind of substance out of which
the most varied ideas of God come into being—as attempts by human beings
to interpret their experiences, initially in mythical narratives, and later per-
haps even in abstract belief systems. Around 1900, these studies flowed into
the broader discourse on the “sacred” in the disciplines concerned with re-
ligion, particularly in the school established by the French founder of soci-
ology, Émile Durkheim, who happened to have been a student of Fustel de
Coulanges. As the sacred became the definitional characteristic of religion,
the focus on one God or several gods lost its central position. It now became
possible to think in terms of apersonal, sacred forces, and to imagine a range
of ways for the sacred to be embodied in persons.19
With his second hypothesis, that religion has psychological roots, Hume
could build on the writings of predecessors from antiquity onward (such as
Lucretius) and thinkers such as Hobbes, Mandeville, and Spinoza. But we
can scarcely describe him as a source of inspiration for the developing em-
pirical psychology of religion, because the simple idea of a misguided de-
sire to comprehend unexpected or feared events proved far too narrow to
be of much use in this context. The emphasis on negative contingency (fear
and suffering) is itself one-sided; the later literature, to a far greater extent
than Hume’s writings, highlights positive experiences of contingency, such
as ecstatic enthusiasm or overflowing gratitude—for the beauty of creation
or the certainty of being loved—as just as important if not more important.
This occurred, for example, in the brilliant synthesis of early research in the
psychology of religion produced by William James (1902) in his book The

Varieties of Religious Experience,20 and in the work of Émile Durkheim, who
underlines that “in sum, joyful confidence, rather than terror or constraint,
is at the root of totemism.”21 The picture became far richer still as soon as
scholars began to take seriously the interplay between experience and in-
terpretation, of which Hume makes no mention—in other words, attempts
to give creative expression to experience and religions’ important role in
making experiences possible in the first place, or in preventing them.
As for the third hypothesis, and thus the alleged oscillation between
monotheism and polytheism, the studies by the great church historian and
biographer of Augustine, Peter Brown, on the emergence of the Christian
cult of the saints have blazed a particularly useful trail.22 Grappling directly
with Hume and Gibbon, he has sought to demonstrate that we should not
think of the growth of this cult as a regression to paganism. First, Hellenistic
Judaism already featured the veneration of martyrs and, as Christoph
Markschies emphasizes, the personalization of good (and evil) forces, as for
example in the doctrine of angels and archangels and the entire divine as-
sembly.23 Second, it is simply empirically wrong to state that it was chiefly the
uneducated who were behind the cult of the saints. The educated elite and
leading theologians played a major part as well. The hypothesis of regression,
meanwhile, would imply that the most recently Christianized are more sus-
ceptible to repaganization, but there is no evidence of this. Today, therefore,
the view has become established that the cult of the saints should be seen as
part of a newly constituted social order, in which expectations of patronage
and clientelism, of a kind common in late antique society, were transferred—
distanced from world and state—to martyrs or other holy figures.
The fourth hypothesis—tolerant polytheism and intolerant monotheism—
has been taken up by German philosophy, initially in a rather playful way,
over the last few decades.24 It came to prominence, as mentioned above,
through Egyptologist Jan Assmann, who wrote of the “mosaic distinction”
between truth and untruth in the field of religion.25 Assmann sets great store
by the claim that his hypothesis is not merely a recapitulation of Hume. He
refers to the latter’s thesis as an “age-old argument,” which he “had no inten-
tion of revisiting” in his original book on Moses.26 It is not monotheism, he
asserts, but the orientation toward truth that is decisive when it comes to
the issue of intolerance and violence. This shift of emphasis results in a more
plausible thesis. It would, after all, be absurd to ascribe to mythical cultures
an ethos of tolerance. The point is that mythic narratives can coexist without
suppressing one another.27 Taking our lead from Hume, however, we must
ask whether in that case philosophers (rather than just prophets) have also
contributed to the history of intolerance and violence.28 Yet Assmann is by
no means unambiguous; time and again he explicitly affirms the central im-
portance of monotheism to the emergence of a “novel, purely religious mo-
tivation for violence and intolerance.”29 Assmann’s emphasis on the issue of
truth then comes across, not as an alternative to Hume’s hypothesis, but as a
justification for it.
His thesis triggered a many-branched debate that is by no means over, but
I do not intend to recapitulate it here. Over the course of this debate, Jan
Assmann qualified his hypothesis ever more tightly and partially rowed back
on it; he also shifted it away from the issue of truth toward that of loyalty and
betrayal. Not all monotheism, he asserted, has an affinity for violence, only
exclusivist monotheism—though this risks leaving us with the tautological
attribution to an intolerant form of religion of a tendency toward this very
intolerance.
This entire debate has remained almost entirely limited to the Abrahamic
religions and their supposed or real potential for violence; it urgently needs
to open itself to research on the role of violence in conflicts inspired by non-
monotheistic religions. This is of great contemporary relevance if we think of
the lengthy civil war in Sri Lanka or the present-day conflict in Myanmar. An
example from the historical research can help bring this out. Perry Schmidt-
Leukel, an expert on Buddhism, has produced a fascinating study showing
how Hinduism produced an apocalyptic mythology of violence in light of
the threat emanating from Buddhism.30 Buddha’s ideas inevitably endan-
gered the Indian tradition, because they challenged the privileged access to
the Dharma teachings enjoyed by the caste of Brahmins, and opposed the
exclusion of the lowest caste from the circle of these teachings’ recipients.
The new mythology states that, in a future incarnation, the god Vishnu will
appear in the form of “Kalki,” who will completely annihilate all the forces of
evil, beginning with all Buddhists, whose blood will flow in such quantities
“that horses will appear as boats in it.” This may be interpreted as a fantasy of
undoing Buddhist universalism, a fantasy produced by a religious and po-
litical particularism whose structures of privilege faced a significant threat.
More fascinating still, therefore, is the fact that this myth of Kalki was taken
up by the Buddhists themselves in the tenth or eleventh century, but with a
quite different thrust. In this version of the myth, the Brahmins are won over
to Buddhism; with their help, a vast army is now to be raised to wipe out the
“race of barbarians.” The location of this apocalyptic battle is to be Mecca; the

barbarians are now the Muslims, who were perceived as the common enemy
of Hinduism and Buddhism following their invasions of India. This myth
was also handed down and developed within Tibetan Buddhism, and was in
turn received in an Islamicized, ethnically Tibetan region and reinterpreted
in line with Islam. What is envisaged now is a decisive battle in Jerusalem,
after which the entire world converts to Islam. This example is intended to
demonstrate that whatever the potential of Buddhism to incorporate existing
religious traditions, to adapt to them or to permit multireligious identities,
even Buddhism, like Hinduism, may be interpreted in such a way as to priv-
ilege violence. Of course, this tells us nothing about the exact role of such
interpretations in the emergence of violence.
If we focus more on the history of practices—the actual lives of people
who call themselves Buddhists—than on teachings and myths, and if we in-
clude consideration of the diverse range of existing “Buddhisms” and their
embedding in political and social orders, then the notion of a thoroughly
mystical-pacifist religion31 finally loses all plausibility. Certainly, Buddhist
teachings often foreground a prohibition on killing, one that even goes be-
yond human beings to include the inviolability of animal life, yet within the
Buddhist traditions (as in, for example, the Christian ones), there exists an
ample repertoire of justifications for violence. Whether rulers were per-
mitted to protect the public order through violence, whether monks could
use force to defend themselves from attack, whether non-Buddhists could
be killed in order to disseminate or protect Buddhism—such questions
were by no means self-evidently answered in the negative, but often in the
affirmative. As with the history of natural law in those cultures molded by
Christianity, levels of religious truth could be distinguished in such a way
that radical ideas coexisted with a comprehensive adaptation to the realities
of a state order. In cases where the state supported monasticism, the deploy-
ment of Buddhist monks in war was no rarity; the best-known case here is
the history of the Japanese warrior monks, which extends into World War II
and Japanese efforts at imperial expansion. It will come as no surprise, there-
fore, that even peasant rebellions aiming to overthrow the existing order
and featuring millenarian hopes of the coming of a new Buddha32 justified
their violence in religious terms. The crucial point, then, is that it is not just
monotheism that appears to have a potential for violence. By the same token,
monotheism provided significant impulses for a religiously grounded idea of
religious freedom and tolerance.
After this brief overview of research significant to any assessment of

Hume’s hypotheses, and thus to the evaluation of a number of key tropes in
the critique of Christianity and religion, I can by no means claim to have
provided comprehensive empirical refutation of the Scottish thinker’s ideas.
In fact, I believe that none of his four hypotheses are empirically tenable, but
we rarely find unanimous, definitive consensus on these hypotheses in the
relevant research, and my above observations have certainly not developed
a comprehensive basis for such a consensus. But my objective here is not to
empirically refute (or confirm) Hume in any definitive sense. Furthermore,
it is entirely clear that the state of his empirical knowledge, compared with
what we know today, was very limited. As a librarian he had access to a wide
range of traditional writings from Greek and Roman antiquity, on which
he regularly drew. He probably knew a fair amount about non-European
cultures from travel reports—though he did not mention the title of a single
text—but what he knew was, evidently, entirely inadequate to the project
of a universal history of religion. When he referred to the cultures of the
Indians and the Japanese as “very barbarous and ignorant nations” (p. 177),
then today, for good reason, we perceive this as blinkered and Eurocentric.
Yet it would be anachronistic to use such observations as a basis for harsh
criticism. Furthermore, it is hardly surprising that the initiator of a process
of methodological innovation was not himself in a position to immediately
produce a comprehensive and empirically grounded theory as well. What
matters is the precise character of this methodological innovation. While
there is broad consensus that Hume’s text is of epoch-making significance,
opinions diverge greatly on how, exactly, we should understand this signif-
icance. Some of the leading experts on Hume question whether we should
even describe his work as empirically based history. They claim that it is too
anecdotal and abstract for this,33 even by the standards of the eighteenth cen-
tury. Some suggest that because Hume did not proceed in a patiently descrip-
tive fashion, and did not even thoroughly evaluate the empirical literature
available at the time, there is no reason to categorize his Natural History of
Religion as part of the historiography of religion in the conventional sense.34
For adherents of this perspective, his work is instead a philosophical account
of the preconditions for an adequate historiography of religion.35
This perspective might explain why there are in fact important accounts of
the study of religion in the eighteenth century that ignore Hume entirely.36
Yet this way of looking at things seems to me far too defensive. It spares
Hume’s empirical or even methodological shortcomings from criticism by
radically scaling back his aspiration. It seems more appropriate to me to as-

cribe to Hume the development of a “methodology of empirical history,”37
but to note its deficiencies as well as its merits. What was epoch-making was
the attempt to open up the universal history of religion to unrestrained em-
pirical investigation. But the specific form that this attempted opening took
was molded by the specific features of Hume’s psychological assumptions.
These certainly made it possible to identify regularities in the appearance
of causal links between psychological elements, but an approach with such
underpinnings inevitably came to grief with respect to creative processes and
the autonomy of ideational content. Yet this is by no means an inevitable re-
sult of Hume’s innovation itself. At this juncture, therefore, my proposition
is not that Hume’s method is beyond criticism or that his specific hypoth-
eses have been empirically refuted—though this is presumably the case—but
that it is important to subject his findings to empirical assessment; further,
this is in fact possible, and his method has made it so. I invite the reader to
view my engagement with Hume as an initial indication that, rather than the
differing starting points of believers and nonbelievers simply having to make
it past the findings of comparative religion, it is in fact possible, beyond all
the antagonisms, for these two groups to come to objective agreement about
facts and explanations.
The Consequences
We find a second, far more compelling indication of this possibility if we

consider the reception of Hume’s text in various European countries in the
second half of the eighteenth century. French and German translations
appeared just two years after the English original. In prerevolutionary
France, Hume was so popular among critics of Christianity or religion that
during a stay in Paris, as he recounted in a letter home, “I eat nothing but am-
brosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread on
nothing but flowers.”38 His Natural History of Religion originally inspired the
interest as well as the criticism of Voltaire and Denis Diderot,39 but was then
increasingly viewed by radical critics of religion as a kind of empirical dem-
onstration that religions suffocate free thought and impede social progress—
in other words, that they must ultimately be discarded. What was forgotten
here was that the skeptic Hume, who was an agnostic rather than an atheist,40
feared a materialist dogmatism as much as the religious variety. To him, every
instance of “enthusiasm” or “rage” was a lapse into the realm of the animal;
what he extolled was a moderate way of life and a stoic retreat from public
battles into the “calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy” (p. 185). In
his memoirs, Hume’s friend Gibbon made clear his disdain for the French
materialist philosophers such as d’Holbach and Helvétius: “They laughed at
the scepticism of Hume, preached the tenets of Atheism with the bigotry of
dogmatists, and damned all believers with ridicule and contempt.”41 Poor
Hume, as one of his friends wrote to him from Paris, was criticized across the
English Channel for his lack of religion, while being considered too religious
in France.42
The British reception was closer to Hume’s views in this respect. In the
United Kingdom his book inspired a rich tradition of positivist and evo
lutionist historiography of religion43 in the work of Herbert Spencer and
others, a tradition whose adherents considered themselves agnostic with
respect to religion and that had much in common with a sociology of mo-
rality that sought to “derive” norms from societal needs and relations of
domination. From the perspective of the empirical research generated by
this tradition, Hume’s impulses deserved respect; ultimately, however, they
were perceived as insufficiently empirical. A characteristic example is the
look back at Hume’s work around one hundred years later in Henry Thomas
Buckle’s famous History of Civilization in England.44 He calls the Natural
History of Religion, in a backhanded compliment, “an admirable specimen of
the deductive method,” whose mistake was to view as certain the results that
“on such a subject, that method could attain.” Hume stands accused of taking
highly selective account of facts and giving them a merely illustrative role in
an ultimately speculative line of argument.
But the most intriguing case is that of Germany. All that is widely known
is that Kant identified Hume as the thinker whose epistemological skepti-
cism awoke him from the dogmatic slumber of an all-embracing faith in ra-
tionality, setting him on the path toward his critical philosophy. Hence, in
view of Kant’s outstanding position, in German philosophy Hume’s role has
often been reduced to that of predecessor or even stooge. As an alternative
to Kant, let alone as a more radical version of a critique of rationality, and as
inspiration for post-Kantian philosophical innovations such as pragmatism,
Hume’s work is ignored or discounted.45
Yet at the time it was not primarily skeptics, critics of religion, or materialists
in Germany who were enthused by Hume’s philosophy as a whole and his
Natural History of Religion, but rather passionate exponents and defenders of
Christianity such as Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, and

Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Hamann translated a number of Hume’s writings
and made him accessible to Kant, Herder produced a detailed excerpt of his
book, and Jacobi wrote an extensive analysis of Hume.46
How could this be? Are we dealing with a complete misunderstanding,
an outlandish and reactionary misinterpretation, a conscious “coun-
terrevolution against philosophy,”47 or perhaps an unconscious conse-
quence of a poor knowledge of English in Germany? Such impressions
have taken hold in the English-speaking world as a result of an influential
essay by Isaiah Berlin.48 But I believe these interpretations to be wrong.
Hamann, for example, had spent a good deal of time in London, in 1758
as it happens, when Hume’s book had just been published, and was clearly
and demonstrably aware of the differences between Hume’s intentions and
his own. Yet this awareness failed to diminish either his or his German
colleagues’ enthusiasm for Hume. Why? Three main reasons suggest them-
selves here. The first lies in the field of epistemology. As mentioned above,
in his Natural History, as well as in other writings, Hume had brought out
the fact that “belief is more properly an act of the sensitive, than of the
cogitative part of our natures,”49 and that, in all our cognitions, we rely
on fundamental certainties—such as the reality of the external world—for
which we ourselves have no logical evidence. For Hume, such a cognitive
(rather than religious) belief (belief rather than faith) underlies all prac-
tical action, but also underpins scholarly research. It is here that Hamann,
for example, discerned a new opportunity with respect to religious faith.
“Our own being and the existence of all things outside of us must be
believed and cannot be discerned in any other way,” as he wrote in a letter
to Jacobi on April 27, 1787.50 What he is doing here is not confusing levels
of argumentation but beating a path from the role of “subjective self-evi-
dence” within the process of knowing to “subjective self-evidence” within
religious faith, which must essentially be conceived as an intuitive form
of certainty rather than the rational acceptance of doctrines. The second
source of agreement lay in Hume’s distance from every simplistic no-
tion of historical progress—in other words, his anti-teleological under-
standing of history, which truly opened up space for historical ups and
downs; for rise, decline, and fall; for surprising new beginnings, rupture,
and collapse. Religious history, if we take its empirical diversity seriously
and eschew an apologetic view of Christianity’s rise as the straightfor-
ward victory of truth, compels us to adopt such a new perspective, one
that paves the way for historicism. No wonder, then, that Ernst Cassirer
and Friedrich Meinecke later ascribed to Hume a key role in the “rise of
historicism.”51
But the third motive underpinning the enthusiasm for Hume is the most
important of all. It lay in the fact that these German thinkers were prompted
by Hume’s psychological assumptions about the origin of religion to rethink
the literary status of religious texts, especially the Bible. Herder in particular
departed from his theological colleagues’ widespread rejection of Hume and
accepted, without qualification, that it was vital to abandon the orthodox
idea of direct divine inspiration for every word in the Bible.
Hamann had already transformed Hume’s rejection of the “miracle”
into a sense of the wonderfulness of the fact of creation itself and of each
individual existence. In a similar way, Herder sought to produce an alter-
native to Hume’s picture of the primal history of religion, without lapsing
into the notion of any supranatural inspiration for sacred texts. This he
attempted to do in particular with reference to the Book of Genesis be-
cause, along with many of his contemporaries, he assumed that this text
was in fact the “oldest document of the human race”—to quote the title
of Herder’s lengthy text.52 As we now know, this is of course empirically
untenable, but it by no means a priori devalues Herder’s achievement, his
methodological innovation beyond Hume. Herder’s idea was to intro-
duce the term “poetry” into the primal scene of religious history and to
charge Hume with a lack of understanding of poetry. Hamann, taking up
Hume’s critique of rationality while concurrently rejecting his skepticism
about religion, had referred to “poetry as the mother tongue of the human
race,”53 suggesting that this becomes palpable for us in the biblical revela-
tion, particularly the Books of Moses. Herder himself had, from an early
point in his intellectual development, paid attention to the expressive
character of human language and the specific features of poetic discourse.
What “poetry” means here is that human beings cannot avoid articulating
intensive existential experiences in symbolic form. Such “poetry” is not an
immature precursor of objective knowledge, and the creation story is not
an empirically deficient paleontological theory. Today, we probably hear
more strongly than in Herder’s time the semantic element of mere fiction-
ality in the term “poetry,” but we have to bear in mind that Herder did not
yet have straightforwardly available to him the later, more common terms
“myth” and “mythology,” in their value-free sense, for what he had in
mind. These terms do crop up in his work but with fluctuating meanings.54
Thus, the world-experiencing person is conceived as a sensing being that

experiences the sensory world itself as the creation of a “primal poet”
(Hamann) and that seeks to express itself in the awareness that its expres-
sion, even the most poetically felicitous of hymns, for example, can never
come close to the greatness and power of the Creator. The human being,
then, must use imagery to try to convey the power she experiences, im-
agery of no less value than a conceptual language. While Hamann draws
on the theological trope of “kenosis”—that is, he thinks of creation as
the externalization and voluntary self-limitation of God—Herder places
more emphasis on the anthropological consequences arising from human
beings’ status as created in God’s image.55 This makes it possible to con-
sistently reinterpret Christian teachings in an anthropological vein and to
suggest that the symbolic expression of human experiences of self-tran-
scendence is similarly important in other religions. This signified an en-
tirely new impulse, initially for the exegesis of the Old Testament, but later
for the study of religion in general.
Even for contemporaries, however, it was not easy to completely grasp
the fundamentally new element in Herder’s text. This was no doubt due in
significant part to the fact that Herder himself was not talking conceptually
about the possibilities of poetic and religious language. Instead he presented
his ideas in an enthusiastic rhetoric that prompted his friend Goethe to refer
to “half-conscious, summer-lightning-lit, sometimes morning-friendly-
smiling, Orphic song.”56 Herder, then, could build on the “splendid Hume”57
as he sought to understand all religion from the starting point of the human
being, while at the same time sharply rejecting Hume’s critique of religion,58
because for him it was based on an inadequate understanding of language
and expression, tradition and history. In Herder’s work, Hume’s natural his-
tory of religion became the program of a historical hermeneutics of all re-
ligion, one that Ernst Troeltsch could still refer to in 1903, more than one
hundred years later, as “the most modern program of a theology anchored in
the history of religion.”59 Rather than seeking to undo Hume’s epoch-making
new approach, then, Herder took it a step further.
Without misunderstanding or distorting Hume, therefore, these German
thinkers found in him an ally in their opposition to the rationalism of the
Enlightenment and its overhasty identification of Christianity with a time-
less rational-universal morality. In the project of an empirical, universal
history of religion, they saw an opportunity to purify or “rejuvenate” the
Christian faith,60 because this project was a means of overcoming the
self-misunderstanding of dogmatic theology and developing a symbol-

focused conception of the human realm. Because it is not possible to talk
about God in the manner of a thing in the world, this reflexive rupture is
necessary—that is, reflection upon those who are speaking and the poten-
tial of their speech. “Revelation” and the historicity of biblical religion thus
gained a new meaning. Hume and some of his followers overreached when
they sought to use the project of a “natural history” of religion to undergird a
fundamentally antireligious new metaphysics of naturalism. That is, the em-
pirical study of religion must not be sacrificed to specific religious or secu-
larist assumptions. Nor can it be rid of these, however. It must, instead, be the
arena of fruitful exchange about them.
Engagement with David Hume and the manifold consequences of his
methodological innovation, particularly in the work of Herder, is impor-
tant not just for this reason, but also because it overcomes in several ways
at once the simplistic idea of an antagonism between Enlightenment and
religion. Not all religious individuals advocated a supranaturalist and apol-
ogetic positivism of revelation, not all Enlightenment thinkers were antire-
ligious, and not all antireligious Enlightenment figures endorsed the idea
of a natural religion. As a result, surprising alliances and argumentational
connections were possible, giving rise to an empirically oriented study
of religion that inevitably put pressure on theology. Of course, what had
newly emerged only fully developed later, namely in the nineteenth cen-
tury—that is, comprehensive investigation of the diversity of individual
and collective religious experience and interpretation, a genuine effort to
take account of the various religious traditions, and serious sociological-
historical research into the history of Christianity both within and outside
of theology. But as this methodologically self-conscious, universal history
of religion got off the ground, some fundamental problems were thrown
into particularly sharp relief. Herder’s approach could leave one with the
impression that he had gone from the extreme of a dogmatic conception
of revelation and of Christianity as the only true religion to the other ex-
treme, namely that of a purely aesthetic appreciation of forms of religious
expression, while relativistically neglecting issues of validity and truth. But
this is by no means the case. This impression can only arise if one ignores
what I have already described as the empirically untenable assumption that
the creation stories in the Book of Genesis really do constitute the oldest
document of human history. In Herder’s work, the assumption that the
Book of Genesis contains a genuine trace of humanity’s memory of God’s
act of creation served to demonstrate the origin of all religion in an indis-

putable divine revelation. While it is certainly possible to detach this as-
sumption from the program of a historical hermeneutics of all religion, this
once again throws up the unresolved character of the problem of validity,
contrary to Herder’s argumentational intention. His wide-ranging effort to
demonstrate the historical primacy of the Jewish religion over its Egyptian
counterpart,61 therefore, was no mere idiosyncrasy. In fact, it was a part of
what prompted Herder himself to refer to “historical-genetic evidence.”62
This brings us to a problem in Herder that also characterizes the appraisal
of Hume’s text. It seems plainly apparent that Hume intended his book to
help loosen his readers’ ties to the Christian faith or to all religion. But it is
far less clear just how he envisaged this effect. Hume, with his completely
antirationalistic view of human beings and negligible faith in the power of
rational arguments to make an impact, is very unlikely to have thought that
his text would exercise an irresistible logical pressure, prompting people to
finally abandon the irrationalities of faith. Yet he would scarcely have gone
to all the trouble of developing audacious hypotheses on the universal his-
tory of religion if he had expected them to make no impact at all on believers’
self-understanding.63 It is surely more likely that he sought to affect readers’
emotions, turning them away from religion by demonstrating its absurdities
and deleterious consequences, and, through an account of the emergence of
religion, opening their eyes to what had entranced them. In Hume, then, we
might discern a predecessor of the destructive genealogies of Nietzsche and
Foucault, with their tendency to unsettle all commitments. Conversely, in
Herder’s “historical-genetic evidence,” we might make out a progenitor of the
constructive or affirmative counterpart to Hume, one that has the potential
to strengthen commitments.64 But it would be wrong to state that either had
reached the heart of the issues emerging in this context.
Hence, the historiography of religion as an empirical discipline, as we
might provisionally sum up these observations, emerges as possible. It also
necessarily stands within a field of tension between the critique of reli-
gion and apologetics, though the first exponents of this history of religion
were unable to provide secure guidance for their successors even in this
respect. In light of this, the only thing for it is, first, to produce a psycho-
logical analysis, one that improves on Hume, of those human experiences
on which religious faith rests. Second, we need to dissect, in a way that
goes beyond Herder, the media of expression involved in the articulation
of such experiences; that is, we must unpack the symbolic nature of this
process of articulation. In the next chapter I take up these tasks while also
turning to another discipline in the study of religion, namely, psychology.
In addition, the next chapter too scrutinizes the relationship between em-
pirical research and the validity claim of religious discourse. After all, this
validity claim cannot be simply dispensed with, nor can this problem be
solved simply by parenthesizing it.65
2
Religious Experience and the
Theory of Signs
Rather than the history of religion across all eras and cultures, it is the in-
tensive experiences possible in every historical period and culture—ones
that overwhelm or seize hold of people and that may be referred to as “reli-
gious” experiences—that constitute the starting point for another attempt
to approach the realm of the religious and subject it to scholarly analysis.
I am referring to the psychology of religion. Both theology and the critique
of religion, of course, always already entail psychological presuppositions.
Religions are repositories of a multifaceted stock of knowledge about such
experiences and their role in the genesis and transmission, strengthening
and weakening of religious faith, if they distinguish an individualized
faith from ritual practice and tradition in the first place. Meanwhile, the
so-called mystical currents and varieties of religion—and, for example,
Pietism and Methodism—play experience-centered forms of religious
life off against the rigidity of institutions or orthodox doctrinal systems.
There is a tremendously fraught relationship between the understanding
of experience developed in this context and the premises of the domi-
nant strands of modern epistemology. This is because it is impossible to
articulate the special traits of mystical experience if one conceptualizes
experience solely in the sense of an internal, knowledge-generating pro-
cessing of sensory stimuli flowing in from outside. Hence, a psychology
of religion that truly seeks to do justice to the unique features of religious
experiences, and that refuses to simply subsume them under a precon-
ceived notion of possible experiences, cannot help but begin by reflecting
on just what these experiences are. Beyond this, such a psychology of re-
ligion has to determine what its starting point ought to be, and here it
faces the same problem that characterized the beginnings of the empiri-
cally grounded historiography of religion. The aim must be to design this
psychology of religion in such a way that it neither simply adopts certain

theological interpretations of religious experiences in the manner of an
apologia, nor, like the critique of religion, traces religious experiences
back to something that can best be interpreted without reference to any
religion. In our context, the question is whether such a level of analysis of
religious experience is possible in the first place, and if it is, what it might
allow us to state about such experiences and their interpretation.
The most important text to address these questions in classical fashion
is William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience of 1902. James
was a brilliant writer. More than one hundred years after its publica-
tion, his book has lost none of its original freshness and, at least in the
English-speaking world, has become a true classic for a broad readership.
It would be overly narrow to think of it merely as a contribution to the
psychology of religion. In fact, it inaugurates a methodological revolu-
tion in the study of religion in a far broader sense, because it declares the
empirical investigation of religious experience the truly fruitful point of
departure for an understanding of religion. After briefly elucidating the
nature of this revolution, in a lengthy excursus I examine a thinker who,
for good reason, is regarded as one of the greatest theologians of all time
and who some claim had already taken the step that I attribute here to
William James: Friedrich Schleiermacher. The key question in this respect
is whether Schleiermacher and James were really so similar and whether
James perhaps merely assimilated Schleiermacher’s ideas. In the main,
however, this chapter has a different focus: namely to discuss a crucial
step beyond the work of James within the philosophical school that he
himself embodied—that is, American pragmatism. Religious experiences
must always be interpreted. The psychology of religious experience must
therefore be linked with a theory of the articulation or interpretation of
experiences, something which, in the American context—in other words,
in James’s work itself—is absent. It is only this linkage of the psychology
of religion with semiotics, the theory of signs, that furnishes us—I would
argue—with an adequate intellectual approach. As we will see, this ap-
proach also places the question of the validity of statements generated by
religious experience on a new basis. This conceptual frame is thus fun-
damental both to an empirically adequate understanding of issues in the
psychology of religion and to a philosophically apt conception of the truth
claims of religious discourse.
Religious Experience and the Theory of Signs 33
The Turn to Experience in the Study of Religion
What was special about William James’s approach?1 It would not be going
too far to state that James established the notion of “religious experience”
as an object of scholarly inquiry. Prior to James, the phrase “religious ex-
perience” had often appeared in religious autobiographies, chiefly those of
American Protestants. But it was not until the work of James that the term
was detached from every specific religious tradition or theological con-
text and conceptualized as the object of psychological analysis beyond all
such distinctions.2 James did not invent the subdiscipline of “psychology
of religion,” but plainly drew on the materials and theories of a number of
predecessors. If we consider writings from the same era that sought to de-
fend the “independence of religion”3 against all secularist reductionism or
speculative attempts to make lived religion disappear, it becomes apparent
what a broad range of endeavors scholars could already draw on at the
end of the nineteenth century. It thus comes as no surprise that, immedi-
ately after it was published, James’s book met with a broad and extremely
lively response—not just in the United States but in Europe as well. Max
Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, Émile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, Rudolf
Otto and Paul Tillich, Max Scheler and Ludwig Wittgenstein—to mention
just the most important—were deeply influenced by James. In theology,
we find a plethora of partly enthusiastic, partly critical reactions and
arguments about the relationship between such an empirical psychology
of religion and theological dogmatics.4
The best way to identify the reasons for the appeal of James’s book and its
irritant effects is to consider what his approach sought not to do. His “turn to
experience” differs radically from two other, long-dominant approaches in
the scholarly study of religion: the analysis of religions chiefly as doctrinal
systems on the one hand, and mainly as social institutions on the other. It
would be to misunderstand James to assume that he rejected lock, stock, and
barrel these types of engagement with religion. He merely took the view that
we can correctly understand and analyze religious doctrines and religious
institutions only if we study them from the vantage point of human expe-
rience. This enables us to discern religious teachings as efforts to articulate
religious experience, and to perceive churches and religious communities
of all kinds as organizational attempts to transmit religious experiences and
place them on a permanent footing. Against the widespread efforts in his
day—as today—to comprehend the realm of the religious as a mere displaced

expression of other human needs that are truly at play, James created a space
in which one might acknowledge the variety of religious phenomena in ge-
neral and carefully describe each of them, rather than dismissing them as the
delusions of insufficiently enlightened individuals.
For his study, James chiefly considered material of two kinds. First, he
based his work on the writings, testimony, and self-portrayals of saints, sect
founders, and other religious virtuosi, and second, on autobiographical ac-
counts of the conversion experiences of American contemporaries. For him,
a sharp conceptual distinction between religion and morality is a key step
in approaching religious experiences. According to James, while morality
is restrictive in character—that is, it prohibits certain objectives or ways of
acting—the religious person is driven by a passion that propels his scope for
action beyond the realm of the quotidian. Hence, James was interested in
exceptional states within human life that throw the state of being seized by
something that transcends the human being into particularly sharp relief.
But he is also concerned with an enduring change in the religious person’s
relationship with the world. The term for this is the “faith state,”5 which
entails certain affective and cognitive characteristics—for example, feelings
of inner peace and a “willingness to be”—but also assumptions about an in-
visible order of the world and the presence of forces in the world that give the
human being a sense of security and safety.
In a detailed analysis of mystical experiences, James describes the expe-
rience of sudden illumination, insights, and revelations, which are often
very difficult to transpose into conceptual language, but nonetheless radiate
tremendous authority and that propel and guide individuals’ attempts at
articulation. James contrasts every account of religious faith not with sec-
ular worldviews—it is, after all, experiences that are at issue here rather
than theories—but with states of melancholy and depression, of a loss of
existential meaning. If it is more than an entreaty or the ritual repetition of
hallowed formulae, James regards the prayer as an active attempt to estab-
lish a connection with the very forces that generate individuals’ vital force.
What James chiefly sees at work in religion—in contrast to the discipline of
the moral person—is the capacity for total commitment or “self-surrender.”
He interprets conversions, which he analyzes in particular depth, as transfor
mations of the self, as the overcoming of a state of inner strife. In the shape of
James’s gripping and deeply moving descriptions of religious experience, the
psychology of religion—and, well beyond psychology, the scholarly study of
religion in general—received an impulse whose intense effects continue to be

felt today.
Excursus: Schleiermacher as Source?
Particularly in Germany, and above all among its Protestant theologians,

however, the epochal breakthrough to a new understanding of the Christian
faith, and of religion in general, is believed to have been made by another,
significantly older author.6 I am referring to Friedrich Schleiermacher and
his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers of 1799. For Jamesians in
the United States and outside of theology, Schleiermacher was at most a fore-
runner. For the “Schleiermacherians,” meanwhile, James’s work was nothing
but an elaboration of what Schleiermacher had, in principle, already dis-
covered. In perusing the literature, in fact, we often find the assertion that
James had taken his inspiration more or less directly from Schleiermacher.7
But this is the key question. The precise relationship between Schleiermacher
and James clearly requires clarification—which is what the present excursus
seeks to provide. Readers may wish to skip over it if they are not interested in
the history of scholarship or the relationship between the psychology of reli-
gion and theology, and are exclusively concerned with the systematic tasks of
the theory of religion.8
I will proceed in two stages: (1) I investigate what evidence we have re-
garding a possible influence of Schleiermacher on James and the other
American pragmatists. Then (2) I briefly discuss the relationship between
pragmatism and hermeneutics in a rather more general sense, scruti-
nizing the similarities and differences between Schleiermacher and the tra-
dition of the study of religion inspired by pragmatism. I call this tradition
“experientialist,” and I mean this as an alternative both to a “naturalistic” and
“culturalist” conception of religion.
(1) If we survey the direct references to Schleiermacher in the writings
of the pragmatists, we are immediately struck by how few of these there
are. In the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism,
there are only a few references to Schleiermacher, none of them in con-
nection with religion and never meant as a serious discussion of any as-
pect of Schleiermacher’s work.9 Even more striking is the almost complete
absence of references to Schleiermacher in William James’s work itself. In
his early (1881) piece on “Reflex Action and Theism” he briefly mentions
Schleiermacher, but only in a flippant and rather self-ironic way. Here he

tells his readers (originally his audience at a Unitarian ministers’ confer-
ence in Princeton) that he is well aware of the current trend to take nat-
ural scientists much more seriously than romantic poets or thinkers: “one
runs a better chance of being listened to today if one can quote Darwin
and Helmholtz than if one can only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge.”10
This lack of references could indicate, of course, that James was simply un-
willing to admit his indebtedness to Schleiermacher. But such an interpre-
tation is rather implausible if we consider what seems to be the only other
reference to Schleiermacher in James’s writings, in a letter from Berlin
to his sister Alice of October 17, 1867.11 Curiously enough, in this letter
he reports having met a German professor who is writing a biography of
Schleiermacher, clearly Wilhelm Dilthey, but that he was unable to catch
his name. The author of the most important biography of James interprets
this statement, no doubt correctly, as a symptom of James’s complete lack of
interest in Schleiermacher, at least during this period of his life; otherwise,
he could easily have found out the name of the latter’s great interpreter.12
However, it is also true that certain passages in James’s book on religion may
leave us with the impression that he is alluding to Schleiermacher—partic-
ularly in those instances, in chapters 2 and 3, in which James discusses the
idea of the individual having a feeling of “dependence” on the mercy of
the divine.13 But it is far from certain that this is the case, and at any rate
Schleiermacher’s name is not mentioned.
At this point in our investigation, the idea of James’s thought being sig-
nificantly shaped by Schleiermacher seems groundless. Before coming to
this conclusion, however, we ought to examine the other classic pragma-
tist thinkers from this perspective, namely Josiah Royce, George Herbert
Mead, and John Dewey. When it comes to Royce the outcome is truly sur-
prising. Though Royce was the great expert on classic German philosophy
among these thinkers, and indeed in North America in general, even his
work includes only brief remarks on Schleiermacher. His (unpublished)
notebooks from his student days document that he “at least planned to read
500 pages of Friedrich Schleiermacher’s work while in Germany,” where he
was about to attend university, but we have no evidence that he achieved this
ambitious goal.14 Schleiermacher’s name appears in several of his books, but
none of them discusses his work in depth.15
A different picture emerges when we turn to George Herbert Mead. In one
of his first publications, Mead refers to Schleiermacher in almost glowing
terms, and given that Mead was a student of Dilthey, it would be surprising
if he had completely ignored Schleiermacher. The text at issue is a review of
a book by Gustav Class, who happened to be one of Ernst Troeltsch’s most
important teachers.16 Mead addresses Class’s statement that he seeks to com-
bine Schleiermacher’s concept of “personal individuality” and Hegel’s notion
of the “objective spirit.” Schleiermacher’s conception, according to Mead, is
“determined by the problems of personal obligations,” and the solution to
these problems lies in “the marvelous spiritual insight of this religious hero,
whose instincts were in advance of his time.” Hegel, meanwhile, is described
by Mead as someone who “moves within speculative conceptions which
could be clearly defined and deduced in detail, without going beyond the
mental horizon of his own period” (my emphasis). Schleiermacher’s position
in the Soliloquies, that “every man shall present (darstellen) humanity in his
own particular manner” (my emphasis), was in Mead’s view far more inno-
vative and can clearly be viewed as an inspiration for Mead’s theory of the
formation of the self.
Finally, John Dewey’s work also contains just a few references to
Schleiermacher, most of them made in passing. The most important appears
in the concluding chapter of his great study of contingency, The Quest for
Certainty.17 There he states that the human being experiences nature and so-
ciety not only in their facticity, but also with respect to the “ideal possibilities”
they entail. Even if we do not worship nature as divine, it might “evoke heart-
felt piety as the source of ideals, of possibilities, of aspiration in their behalf,
and as the eventual abode of all attained goods and excellencies.” Though he
was unwilling to enter into the field of the psychology of religion—in other
words, “the personal attitudes involved in religious experience”—according
to Dewey “no one can deny that the sense of dependence, insisted upon,
for example, by Schleiermacher, comes close to the heart of the matter.” Of
course, Dewey’s objective was to retain the “noble humilities” inherent in the
feeling of dependence and the “unquenchable ardors” of the authentic com-
mitment to an ideal, but to transform them into a “sense of common partici-
pation in the inevitable uncertainties of existence”18 encompassing the whole
of humanity, “a sense of common effort and shared destiny,” and thus to over-
come the religious form of this sense. I pursue this topic no further here.19 In
our context, all that matters is that Mead and Dewey had a certain knowledge
of Schleiermacher, but this appears not to have involved On Religion. Mead
seems to have read the Soliloquies, while Dewey was influenced by the iso-
lated definition of faith as a total feeling of dependence in Schleiermacher’s
Glaubenslehre. Dewey’s teacher G. Stanley Hall had read Schleiermacher,20

and the latter’s work had been received within New England transcenden-
talism, but few scholars had a thorough knowledge of his work or were much
influenced by him.
James’s pioneering work, to sum up, did not take its key idea of a “turn to
experience” from Schleiermacher. Instead James appears to have gleaned this
idea from American religious traditions, American theology, and philosophy.
Jonathan Edwards’s A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections of 1746 stands
out in this regard, and James’s work does in fact contain numerous references
to it.21 Nonetheless, the immediate reference point lies in American tran-
scendentalism. Here, however, we find a link with Schleiermacher, given that
“the central religious impulse of transcendentalism most nearly resembles
the early religious position of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and many of the
defining moments and documents of transcendentalism clearly exhibit
his direct influence.”22 When, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson was
attacked due to the unorthodox character of his “Divinity School Address”
of 1838, his defenders and critics both referred to parallels between him and
Schleiermacher. His most important backer (George Ripley) went so far as
to declare that he considered Schleiermacher “the greatest thinker who ever
undertook to fathom the philosophy of religion.”23 There is also evidence that
Schleiermacher exercised a considerable influence on several other tran-
scendentalist religious thinkers, such as Orestes Brownson, Henry David
Thoreau, and Horace Bushnell. Although Schleiermacher’s On Religion had
not been translated into English in its entirety, lengthy translated fragments
were circulating in North America. It is also worth noting that the recep-
tion of Schleiermacher in nineteenth-century Germany differed significantly
from that in the United States. In the former, On Religion was not unambigu-
ously Schleiermacher’s most influential work.24 This only changed following
the publication of the new centenary edition by Rudolf Otto in 1899. In the
United States, conversely, it was the early Schleiermacher who “confirmed
Emerson, Brownson, Parker, and Ripley in locating religion in personal re-
ligious feeling, in individual religious experience.”25 But “confirmed” is of
course not the same as “caused.” Prior to James, in other words, the United
States already had its own authentic “experientialist” tradition of thought on
religion—and James is its mature outgrowth rather than a mere epigone of
the German theologian Schleiermacher.
A final observation reinforces my conclusion here. When James’s book on
religion was published in 1902, it would have been easy for German thinkers
to highlight possible connections between James and Schleiermacher and to

insist upon the latter’s primacy. Yet this did not occur, either in the case of
Dilthey or Troeltsch, to mention just these two. In an interesting fragment—
“Das Problem der Religion” of 191126—Dilthey places James in the tradi-
tion of reflection on what he calls “religious experience” (Erlebnis), and as
predecessors he mentions Pascal, Arnauld, Fénelon, Lavater, Hamann, and
Herder—but not Schleiermacher. Furthermore, he describes James’s book as
the most important of all of them. Meanwhile, in a 1904 speech in St. Louis,
Missouri, Troeltsch called James’s book a masterpiece, and complained that
German theologians relied too much on Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and
Fries, in whose writings the psychology of religion was too heavily burdened
with epistemological and metaphysical questions—in contrast to American
psychologists in general and James in particular. In fact, in the German edi-
tion of his speech, Troeltsch even felt the need to emphasize27 that his ad-
miration for James was genuine and that his statements were not a matter
of being polite to an American audience. Despite Dilthey’s and Troeltsch’s
affinities with Schleiermacher and the widespread arrogance at the time in
Germany vis-à-vis every product of American intellectual life, particularly
with respect to pragmatism,28 both of them, and many others, were full of
admiration for James’s book. This would surely not have been the case had
they perceived it as a mere copy of Schleiermacher’s work or as a minimal
extension of it.
Finally, in 1907, when James’s book first appeared in a highly abbreviated
and modified German translation, the translator Georg Wobbermin, him-
self a leading systematic theologian, justified his publication of a German-
language version in light of the fact that James’s book “has something to
offer a German readership that is not present in this form in German liter-
ature”29 and contended that it could be regarded as the standard work in a
scholarly development taking place chiefly in the English-speaking world.
What Schleiermacher had achieved had “initially been almost entirely elim-
inated” from “post- Schleiermacherian theology.”30 Wobbermin’s funda-
mental objective was to achieve a “combination and reciprocal correction of
the views of Schleiermacher and James.”31 With a great sense of proportion,
he commended Schleiermacher for the historical accomplishment of exam-
ining the Christian religion as a whole through the lens of the psychology of
religion. But he was also aware that Schleiermacher’s work does not dem-
onstrate a “methodological education”32 either in psychological or historical
research.
(2) By examining Herder and Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Troeltsch

on the one hand, and James and the other classic figures of pragmatism on
the other, I have referred to thinkers who differ in key respects from classic
German philosophy from Kant to Hegel. Some scholars, therefore, perceive
them as closer to the intellectual problems with which we grapple today,
while others feel they embody a regrettable drop below a level of reflection
that had already been attained. I am unable to delve more deeply here into the
commonalities of and differences between pragmatist and hermeneutic phi-
losophy.33 In any case, the relationship between James and Schleiermacher
touches on more than what may appear to be an esoteric issue in the history
of European-American intellectual transfer. It is significant well beyond this
context if, in a particular factual field—religion in this case—we seek to de-
termine the importance of the shared pragmatist-historicist shift away from
empiricism, rationalism, and Kantian philosophy. Schleiermacher, however,
embodies this shift only partially, as we will now see through a detailed com-
parison with James.
Of course, Schleiermacher and James share important similarities.
If this were not the case, the notion that James’s ideas are derived from
Schleiermacher would never have come up. Both emphasize that the analysis
of religion should not begin at the level of religious doctrines or institutions.
Both make a clear distinction between religion, on the one hand, and morality
and metaphysics on the other. For both, the alternative to the approaches
they reject consists in studying religious virtuosi or—in the case of James—
particularly intensive moments of religious experience as such. Both under-
line the “passive” dimension of these experiences, the fact that we cannot
intentionally induce them, and highlight how they shatter the fortifications
we constantly erect around the self. In all these respects, Schleiermacher and
James certainly have similar things in mind.
But the differences are even more instructive, and I would now like to take
a closer look at three of them.
A. First, I discern a key difference with respect to whether there is such a
thing as a unique, specifically religious “sentiment” or feeling in the first place.
James is very clear that there is not. His key term is not even “feeling,” but “ex-
perience.” At the start of his great book, he consciously keeps his other im-
portant terms relatively vague, because he fears that more precise definitions
tend to prevent us from observing phenomena in all their richness and im-
pede our sensitivity. He explicitly posits no essence underlying all religion,
and argues against the idea that a specifically religious need, feeling, or organ
is the ultimate source of religious experience. Instead, for him, “religion” is

an umbrella term, describing a phenomenon of human life that cannot be
easily delimited. In James’s view, if we were to accept this we would also rec-
ognize that all religious emotions are nothing other than our natural feelings
directed toward religious objects. Perhaps, James states, there is no common
essence shared by all religious objects and acts, but this does not mean that
there is no religious experience per se, only that we cannot isolate it from
the totality of our experience. Hence, for James, the study of religious expe-
rience is not the study of a peripheral field of experience accessible only to
the chosen few, but rather the study of human experience in one of its most
intensive and universally occurring forms. In principle, these experiences are
accessible to every human being, even if we study them through their most
talented exemplars, the religious virtuosi. James thus cites material both from
sect founders, saints, and so on, as well as ordinary people—in the shape of
the autobiographical material accumulated by psychologists of religion.
Exceptional states are important to his characterization of religious
experiences, but also significant are attitudes that have become enduring
and that typify the person’s entire relationship with the world. In this vein,
as mentioned earlier, James refers to the “faith-state,” calling its affective
side the “state of assurance”—“the loss of all worry, the sense that all is ul-
timately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the willingness to be, even
though the outer conditions should remain the same. . . . A passion of will-
ingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state
of mind.”34 It is also evident here that while experience is his starting point,
this does not prevent him from elaborating on the emotional dimensions
of this experience, its depth, its seriousness, and its solemnity.35 Viewed
in this light, James is empirically far more open-minded and, in a deep
sense, more egalitarian or democratic than Schleiermacher, as he ascribes
to literally every human being the capacity to have religious experiences
(in differing ways). Since the overcoming of Cartesian dualisms was one
of the pragmatists’ main objectives, it is unsurprising that James’s work is
free of condescending or polemical remarks about mythological narratives
or ritualistic practices. On the contrary, he is highly sensitive to the corpo-
real dimension of religious experience and the fact that we not only have
the feeling of subjective self-evidence when undergoing the religious ex-
perience itself but also when we articulate it or encounter mythological
narratives. In this sense, James was more “catholic”—in other words, more
inclusive—than Schleiermacher.
B. The second major difference concerns the understanding of action. For

Schleiermacher, the core of religion is contemplation, particularly reflection
upon the infinite, and he makes a sharp distinction between this and action.
He not only contrasts contemplation with work but also with play, and he
paints a picture of bourgeois life in which work and play are both instru-
mental and utility-oriented. This is comprehensible in the sense that, particu-
larly in the modern world, there are strenuous “leisure” activities that prevent
people from engaging in contemplation. In Schleiermacher’s work, how-
ever, this has less to do with analyzing the world of today than with his con-
ceptual framework. For him, all action comes under the rubric of morality.
“All actual action should be moral, and it can be too.”36 But, Schleiermacher
contends, because religion is something different from morality, it must also
lie beyond the world of action. For this thinker, contemplation is not some-
thing that arises from action or that has consequences for it: “Your inner-
most feeling must also assent to morality’s view that all of these sentiments
are not intended to produce action; as functions of your innermost and
highest life they are self-contained in their own coming and going.”37 As he
sees it, while all action and activity are something specific and have their
own inherent standards of excellence, they make an actor “cold, one-sided,
and hard.”38 It is not through a different mode of acting, but if “without def-
inite activity, he would allow himself to be affected by the infinite”39—that
is, if he goes beyond the taking of action, if there is “an expansive hovering
in indeterminability and inexhaustibility alongside the contracting striving
for something determinate and complete”40—this is when the human being
turns to religion. Strictly speaking, then, as Schleiermacher sees it, there is no
such thing as religious action. Certainly, he explains, religious feelings may
accompany human activity in the manner of “holy music.”41 Yet for him ac-
tion grounded in religious enthusiasm is always wrong: “To have the soul full
of religion while performing a calm action that must proceed from its own
source, that is the goal of the pious.”42 When enthusiasm becomes epidemic,
he contends, it is the road to ruin.
Here, in comparison with pragmatism, everything appears conceptually
distorted. In James’s work, there is no specifically religious emotion, and
therefore religious experience cannot be cordoned off from action in a realm
of contemplation. Experiences of self-transcendence—that is, of going be-
yond one’s self, which is what concerns James—arise in diverse contexts of ac-
tion, but not through a turning away from action. For him, the fundamental
distinction between morality and religion is not, as in Schleiermacher’s
work, that between action and contemplation, but between the restrictive
and the attractive. Action, he explains, is motivated by the attractive, by our
desires on the one hand, and our values or ideals on the other. In our actions,
we cannot bracket off the enthusiasm inspired by our ideals. We cannot in-
tentionally switch to a purely contemplative mode—except with the aid of
ritualized practices. In this field, then, there is clear disagreement between
Schleiermacher and James. Schleiermacher is, quite simply, still influenced
by the tradition of the philosophy of consciousness, which the pragmatists
(and others) sought to overcome. In making this remark, I have no wish to put
forward an anachronistic critique of Schleiermacher, but I do want to sound
a warning about any attempt to revitalize his thought without modification.43
C. While Schleiermacher is regarded, for good reason, as one of the classic
figures of hermeneutics, that is, the art of interpreting texts, it seems fair to
say that his On Religion is astoundingly unhermeneutic. What I mean is that
he does not really direct our attention toward the interplay between expe-
rience and interpretation, or toward what I call the mediation of situation,
prereflective experience, articulation, and cultural patterns.44 He is fully
aware of the enthusiastic articulation of religious feelings, but he does not
analyze how this articulation, indeed how feelings themselves, are culturally
patterned. This has consequences for the role of history in his understanding
of religion. With respect to the hermeneutic dimension of the study of reli-
gion, James has similar shortcomings. He too draws his examples very care-
lessly from the widest range of historical eras, without paying much attention
to the truly historical dimension.
But the fact that James’s phenomenology of religion is so much richer than
that of Schleiermacher, and so much more compatible with a theory of ac-
tion, also renders it better suited to historical analyses. In an early, hugely sig-
nificant article titled “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion” (“The Independence
of Religion”), Ernst Troeltsch already made the point that Schleiermacher’s
enthusiasm for history was abstract in character, devoid of true histor-
ical sensitivity: “His developmental theory was, essentially, only a theory
of the inexhaustible individualization of one and the same religious pro-
cess, whose various types sit next to one another without connection.”45 In
Schleiermacher’s work, we find no attempt to consider the historical nexus
of religious experiences, in other words, to inquire into how a tradition
preforms experiences or how experiences may even presuppose traditions
if they are to be possible in the first place. This also has an important theo-
logical dimension. The question, after all, is whether we see the object of our
religious experience as immutable, fixed ground on which we always depend,

and merely reflected in different ways in subjective states of consciousness—
or as a living God who reveals himself in historic acts.
If we compare Schleiermacher and James, we are comparing across the
chasm that divides pragmatism and historical hermeneutics from the phi-
losophy of consciousness. In this respect, the two thinkers are divided by an
epochal turning point. But if we think of a different opposition, namely that
between the defenders of the irreducibility of the religious and those who
seek to explain religion in light of the psychological or sociological functions
it fulfills, then James and Schleiermacher are on the same side.46 On this
premise, both represent brilliant attempts, intellectually and rhetorically, to
bring about a turn to experience in our understanding of religion.
The Interpretation of Religious Experience: Josiah Royce
While William James’s book was the most important root of a pragmatist
theory of religion, it was certainly not the only one.47 In any case, within its
rich phenomenology of religious experience it was not obvious where the
pragmatism was. Meanwhile, the second root is far less well known as such.
I am referring to the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce. Of importance to
the philosophy of religion, on the one hand, are those of his writings directly
devoted to this topic, and, on the other, his semiotics, which pervades his
entire, tremendously wide-ranging oeuvre. Peirce’s writings were often no
more than fragments and are notoriously difficult to understand. Like James,
Peirce is concerned with the possibility of being religious in an intellectually
responsible way under the conditions of modern science, that is, Darwinism,
experimental psychology, and critical historiography. In contrast to James,
however, his writings do not move in the direction of an empirical science
of religion, but are focused on issues of logic, metaphysics, and cosmology.
Peirce even makes a novel attempt to prove the existence of God.48 In the pre-
sent context there is no need to engage with the detail of these texts.
In any case, one of the main problems in the history of the pragmatist
theory of religion is that these two roots often remained separate. To be
more specific, scholars often failed to relate the impulses nourished by the
two different sources to one another, let alone combine them or create a
framework in which they could reinforce one another. In James’s thought,
although he dedicated his collection of essays The Will to Believe to his old
friend Peirce, the latter’s semiotics played no major role, apart from brief
passages in James’s Psychology on the role of signs in the thinking process.
Conversely, Peirce, as mentioned above, focused on metaphysical and log-
ical questions, and certainly not on the methodological issues facing the
humanities in general and the empirical study of religion in particular.
For my purposes, therefore, James’s work is significantly more impor-
tant than Peirce’s philosophy of religion, although only if some of its in-
ternal weaknesses can be overcome. The key problem here is that in James’s
writings, people’s interpretations of an intensive or ecstatic experience
simply seem to emerge out of the experience itself. Durkheim was already
perspicacious enough to remark that James failed to distinguish prop-
erly between the unquestionable reality of individual experience and the
individual’s eminently questionable interpretation of this experience.49 Yet
in Durkheim’s own analysis, the collective interpretation of an experience
of collective ecstasy also seems to emanate from the latter, while no account
is taken of the fact that, as a rule, the individuals who have participated in
a collective experience produce differing interpretations of it.50 At a crucial
point, then, both thinkers appear to neglect the role played by the articu-
lation and interpretation of experiences. In James’s great book on religion
it is not really apparent that individuals continue to depend, even when
interpreting their most intense personal experiences, on a shared language
and a collective repertoire of cultural interpretive patterns.
This critique had already been put forward in the 1910s by Josiah Royce,
one of James’s former students, who later became his colleague at Harvard
as well as a close personal friend. Two of the books that Royce published
after his friend’s death must be seen as responses to James’s The Varieties
of Religious Experience, above all in the sense that they attempted to add
a theory of interpretation to James’s approach. For the purposes of such a
theory of interpretation Royce drew, in a quite sensational way,51 on Peirce’s
semiotics. What we have in Royce’s writings from the last phase of his life (he
died in 1916) is, therefore, the first attempt to connect the two separate roots
of the pragmatist theory of religion. He thus sought to overcome possible
hermeneutic deficiencies in James’s phenomenology of religious experience,
something neither Peirce nor James had ever seriously attempted. In one fell
swoop, this perspective makes Royce’s late work seem dramatically relevant.
As I mentioned above, two books are particularly significant here, which are
almost unknown outside the United States and the circles of specialists in
the history of American philosophy:52 The Sources of Religious Insight and
The Problem of Christianity.53 If Royce succeeded, he has to be considered an

absolutely crucial figure in the history of the theory of religion—but did he?
To answer this question, I proceed in three steps. First, I describe Royce’s
proposals and discuss their import. I then briefly consider James’s work be-
yond his famous book on religion, to investigate whether the alleged her-
meneutic deficiencies of his theory are to be found in his other writings as
well. Finally, I try to show that Royce paid a price for his own achievements,
inviting us to formulate an imaginary Jamesian countercritique, particularly
when it comes to an appropriate understanding of history. This last step then
points beyond the dialogue between Royce and James and toward a position
capable of transcending their conflict.
So how does Royce criticize James’s ideas on religion and what does he
himself propose? In a memorial address one year after James’s death, Royce
called James the representative philosopher of contemporary America in
the same way that Jonathan Edwards and Ralph Waldo Emerson were rep-
resentative in and of earlier periods.54 Despite the tradition of saying only
positive things about the deceased in this rhetorical genre—de mortuis nil
nisi bene—Royce calls James’s philosophy of religion not only inadequate
but “chaotic.”55 Nonetheless, he does not reject it in toto, but instead seeks to
amend it by “taking it up into a larger view,” by which he most likely means
sublating it in the Hegelian sense. One of the terms in the title of his book The
Sources of Religious Insight signals the direction of his argument. I am refer-
ring to the word “insight.” Royce introduced this term because he wanted
to maintain an equal distance from a purely cognitivist understanding of
religious faith (for example, faith as “knowledge” of church doctrines) and
James’s experientialism. For Royce, “insight” retains what he calls the “close-
ness of personal touch” in James’s work, but it is also close to “knowledge”
because of the role played in it by “breadth of range, coherence, and unity
of view.”56 Experience, as he sees it, is necessary for insight but not suffi-
cient. In this sense, Royce sides with James by polemically dissociating him-
self from what Ernst Troeltsch and others called the positivism of revelation
(Offenbarungspositivismus)—the idea that faith in revelation is strictly op-
posed to the emphasis on subjective experience, as if the embrace of a rev-
elation has nothing to do with the living conditions and epistemological
frameworks of the experiencing individuals. Royce devotes a whole chapter
of his book to individual religious experience, which he calls “the most ele-
mentary and intimate” but also “the crudest and most capricious source of
religious insight.”57 What seems to be the only source of faith in James—an
extremely unstable one—is for Royce only one of at least seven sources. This
prompts him to immediately supplement the chapter on individual ex-
perience with another on “social experience” as a means of correcting the
experiences we have “in our solitude”:
A man corrects his own narrowness by trying to share his fellow’s point of
view. Our social responsibilities tend to set limits to our fickleness. Social
discipline removes some of our inner conflicts by teaching us not to in-
dulge caprices. Human companionship may calm, may steady our vision,
may bring us into intercourse with what is in general much better than a
man’s subliminal self, namely, his public, his humane, his greater social self,
wherein he finds his soul and its interests writ large.58
Unjustly, Royce even reproaches James for neglecting friendship and love as
possible ways of experiencing the divine, though in fact James adduces ex-
actly the feeling of being loved, even when the loved partner is physically
absent, to elucidate the believer’s feeling for life.59 Royce calls the third source
of religious insight Reason (with a capital R). Again, he tries to do justice
to James’s dislike of inconsequential abstractions and analysis for its own
sake. But he attempts to steer a middle course by emphasizing that “one may
use one’s process of abstraction as a sort of preparation for certain articulate
and noble intuitions that cannot be approached, by our human sort of con-
sciousness, through any other way.”60 Royce’s paean to “Reason” as a poten-
tial means of enriching our experience is combined with a highly polemical
protest against an “exclusive devotion to the inarticulate sources of religious
insight,” a position he goes so far as to call “occultism” and whose exponents
he describes as relying on witches and mystics who are unable to say what
they mean.61
But again, Royce does not want to be regarded as an old-fashioned ration-
alist. He claims to be closer to James and the pragmatists, because like them
he insists on the inherent relation between reason and action. He repeatedly
makes it clear that “for him this relation had become clear long before the
modern pragmatistic controversy began”:62 “Every opinion expresses an at-
titude of the will, a preparedness for action, a determination to guide a plan
of action in accordance with an idea.”63 This prompts him to add the “will”
as item four to his list of sources of religious insight, and in this context he
continues his long-standing debate with James on the character of truth—a
debate I have to leave aside here, though it is an apt means of shedding light
on Royce’s specifically action-oriented or “voluntarist” idealism and its rela-

tion to pragmatism.64
The three remaining sources must also be briefly mentioned. Royce
designates “loyalty” as the fifth source, the devotion to a cause that the in-
dividual has not simply chosen but that has been revealed to and captivates
her. Royce introduces this source by means of a wide-ranging discussion
of the relation between religion and morality. “Sorrow” is the sixth source,
the “tragic aspect of human life,”65 which often seems to be nothing but a
“hindrance to religious insight of any stable sort,” but that may also be-
come a source of such insight. And finally Royce mentions what he calls
“the crowning source of religious insight,”66 namely the church with “its
traditions, the lives of its servants, its services, its teachings.”67 What he
means by “the church” is, however, not a particular visible or mundane in-
stitution but the “community of all who have sought for salvation through
loyalty to the Invisible Church,”68 that is, a kind of universal brotherhood
of human beings that is, as such, not tied to any specific denomination or
religion.
All these individual “sources” could, of course, be compared with James’s
views. I do not do so in detail here. But what would no doubt emerge is
that the emphasis on the church is far removed from anything James ever
espoused, whereas the role of morality and the tragic are subjects in James’s
thinking as well and not alien to it as Royce purports. Of course, such a list
is more balanced than James’s (at least methodologically) exclusive focus on
individual experience. But a list is also merely a list. Furthermore, it seems
that Royce did not regard it as complete, since in his late lectures he added
more sources like “beauty” and the “cult of the dead.”69 In addition, such a
list is always somewhat disappointing because one would like to know how
its various items relate to one another. Royce recognized this difficulty70 and
tried to synthesize all the individual sources of religious insight in his philo-
sophical conception of loyalty.
But more important in the present context than a discussion of all these
individual aspects is the additional step Royce took in the book he published
one year later, in 1913, a text that is increasingly regarded as his master-
piece: The Problem of Christianity. In my remarks so far I have made very little
mention of Peirce’s great influence on Royce. The reason is that, in the Sources
of Religious Insight, Peirce is mentioned just once, when Royce argues, against
James, that not just experience but also Reason itself can be productive. Here
he based himself on Peirce’s understanding of mathematical innovation.71 In
the new book of 1913, however, Peirce’s work really takes center stage. Royce
had once again thoroughly studied his ideas72 and for the first time seems to
have fully grasped the revolutionary implications of Peirce’s semiotics for the
study of religion.
Peirce, as is well known, had the ambition to develop a general theory of
signs. In an unpublished manuscript of 1904, he listed various phenomena
that the term “sign” designates:
every picture, diagram, natural cry, pointing finger, wink, knot in one’s
handkerchief, memory, dream, fancy, concept, indication, token, symptom,
letter, numeral, word, sentence, chapter, book, library, and in short what-
ever, be it in the physical universe, be it in the world of thought, that
whether embodying an idea of any kind . . . or being connected with some
existing object, or referring to future events through a general rule, causes
something else, its interpreting sign (or interpretant) to be determined to a
corresponding relation to the same idea, existing thing, or law.73
His project was to develop a comprehensive typology of signs and the inner
dynamics of semiotic processes. Particularly important here is his distinc-
tion between iconic, indexical, and symbolic signs—for example, images
(“iconic”), fingerprints that serve as evidence (“indexical”), and designations
whose validity is based on convention (“symbolic”).74 These typologies
and analyses were meant to provide a basis for rethinking all philosophical
questions in a quite new way. Royce had returned to Peirce’s papers from the
late 1860s and recognized their importance so well that Peirce even called
Royce “America’s greatest pragmatist”75 and explicitly endorsed Royce’s in-
terpretation of his thinking.76
Royce recognized, even more clearly than Peirce himself, that this em-
phasis on the role of signs in human beings’ relation to the world fundamen-
tally transforms our understanding of “self ” and “community.” Regarding the
“self,” this means we have to give up the idea that there is such a thing as ac-
cess to ourselves that is not mediated by signs, an intuition of our selves that
might form the basis for an analogical understanding of others. With respect
to “communities,” it means we have to see them as the outcome of processes
of communication that are constitutive of the formation of individual and
collective identities—and not as mere aggregations of self-contained individ-
uals. Neither an adequate concept of “self ” nor an apt conception of “commu-
nity” is possible if we remain within the dualistic framework of “perception”
and “conception.” Both demand—as Royce states, building on Peirce’s theory

of signs—a triadic structure: someone interprets someone (or something)
to someone else. This even applies to processes of self-reflection in which,
according to Royce, “a man may be said to interpret himself to himself.”77
“Interpretation” thus becomes a crucial category for the self-understanding
of the humanities and social sciences and for a philosophy that maintains
contact with them. Such an interpretation, not only in these disciplines but
also as a ubiquitous feature of everyday life, is never a solitary enterprise but
always a contribution to an ongoing conversation. The most important fea-
ture of the “interpreted object” is not its material quality but the fact that it
has the nature of a mental expression. And every new interpretation imme-
diately becomes a new sign in the world, and may itself become the object
of other acts of interpretation. This process of interpretation never ends.78
In the extremely important chapters 11 to 14 of The Problem of Christianity,
Royce draws a great number of additional conclusions in light of Peirce’s
semiotic paradigm shift. Temporality, for example, appears “in a new light
with reference to the process of interpretation. . . . The present potentially
interprets the past to the future, and continues to do so ad infinitum.”79 The
role of memory and the reconstruction of the past on the one hand and the
role of hope and the anticipation of the future on the other hand—both for
the self and the community—become crucial from this perspective. Like
comparison, the establishment of a new connection between two signs
requires a tertium comparationis, a mediating “third.” On a high level of gen-
eralization, we could say that any serious confrontation between one cultural
tradition and another may produce innovative new cultural articulations.80
Even if one seeks to attain insights of timeless significance, this endeavor, like
every act, remains a temporal event.81
While The Sources of Religious Insight was a book of dialogue with James’s
theory of religion, The Problem of Christianity could be called a book of di-
alogue with both Peirce and James.82 Royce mentions explicitly that James
never paid enough attention to Peirce’s ideas about interpretation. He does
not really use his list of sources of religious insight, which he himself per-
ceived as unsatisfactory, to advance his argument in this new text. Instead
he bases himself almost exclusively on the “crowning source,” the invisible
church, the universal community of interpretation. He sees James as putting
too much emphasis on the quasimystical experience of interpersonal fusion
and contrasts this extraordinary experience with the processes of communi-
cation in everyday life: “For our functions as the mind interpreted, the mind
to whom the other is interpreted, and the interpreter, would remain as dis-
tinct as now they are. There would be no melting together, no blending, no
mystic blur, and no lapse into mere intuition.”83
And Royce even draws a major quasitheological conclusion from his ex-
tensive defense and elaboration of Peirce’s ideas about interpretation. For
him the church is the crucial idea of Christianity—and not the idea of an
individual relationship to the Savior Jesus Christ; for him, it is the commu-
nity of the first Christians and in this sense the “church” that first gave rise
to the ideas of Christianity. “Paul himself was certainly not the founder of
Christianity. But the Pauline communities first were conscious of the essence
of Christianity.”84 Further, he even proposes that we conceive of the divine
“in the form of the Community of Interpretation, and above all in the form
of the Interpreter, who interprets all to all, and each individual to the world,
and the world of spirits to each individual.”85 Hence it is in the “will to in-
terpret”—the title of a chapter that may be alluding either to Schopenhauer
or Nietzsche—that the “divine and the human seem to be in closest touch
with each other.”86 One might refer here to a sacralization of the process of
communication and interpretation, the formation of a universal community,
which recalls Karl Jaspers on the one hand and Jürgen Habermas and Karl-
Otto Apel on the other. This sacralization, however, is deeply ambiguous in
one respect. Is Royce thinking here of a personal God (a triune one in the
Christian sense) as the only one capable of such universal interpretation—or
does he regard the process of interpretation as a secularized substitute for the
idea of a personal God? Does the “church” in his work still refer in any way to
a specific institution—or does it only abstractly represent the idea of a uni-
versal community?87
I have no clear answer to these questions, and I am not even sure Royce
himself did. The first question is further complicated by a certain ambiguity
in Royce’s use of the terms “interpretation” and “interpreter.” The term “in-
terpretation” can refer to the act of looking for something that, when it is
found, is also called “interpretation.” This ambiguity—the lack of distinction
between the process of discovering and the result of the discovery—had al-
ready been flagged by one of the contemporary reviewers of Royce’s book.88
And as John E. Smith has observed,89 even the term “interpreter” is ambig-
uous: “Royce sometimes means the one who makes the interpretation and
sometimes the idea of signs through which the interpretation is made.” Both
ambiguities are highly relevant to whether Christianity can be defended as
an “interpretation” in the sense of a specific theological doctrine or whether
it only gives rise to a much more general and never-ending process of human
communication.
How might William James have responded to Royce’s critique and to the
development of Royce’s thinking in the last few years of his life, had he had
the chance? The two thinkers had a long tradition of friendly mutual cri-
tique, and I cannot resist the temptation to give two examples of James’s in-
imitably charming and humorous style, even with respect to controversial
topics. In a letter of September 1900, written when James was preparing the
Gifford Lectures, out of which The Varieties of Religious Experience emerged,
he wrote to Royce, “When I write, ’tis with one eye on the page, and one on
you. When I compose my Gifford lectures mentally, ’tis with the design ex-
clusively of overthrowing your system, and ruining your peace.”90 And when
Royce mentioned in the preface to his 1908 book The Philosophy of Loyalty
how much he owed to James,91 but that he nevertheless disagreed with him
concerning the concept of truth, James wrote to him that the only thing they
seemed to “see differently is the absolute, and surely such a trifle as that is not
a thing for two gentlemen to be parted by.”92
James could have made six points in an imaginary (posthumous) response:
1. He could have emphasized that his highly individualistic definition
of religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience was not meant to be ex-
haustive of the subject. Most readers tend to overlook the fact that he had re-
stricted himself to a very specific purpose in his book, even asking his readers
explicitly to accept his definition for this one occasion and not in principle.
2. He could have said that it is unfair to ignore his other writings, par-
ticularly those that demonstrate a greater sensitivity to the problems of ar-
ticulation and interpretation than The Varieties of Religious Experience. In
James’s last book, Some Problems of Philosophy, for example, we find a nice
analysis of the process of writing a letter as a fluid process of articulation,93
and Christoph Seibert has very fruitfully interpreted James’s work as a whole
in terms of a hermeneutics of concrete “having of the world” (Welthabe).94
3. James could have made it clear that he did not only acknowledge
institutions as social experience; he also mentions in passing the role that
suggestion and imitation play in “excited assemblies.”95
4. Against Royce, James could have highlighted the fact that in his anal-
ysis of mystical experiences he underlines not only their “ineffability” but
also their “noetic quality.”96 It is especially characteristic of mystical states
that those who partake of them experience them as “states of knowledge,” of
enriched insight. “They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed
by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of signifi-

cance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they
carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.”97 It is the hall-
mark of James’s greatness that he seeks to do justice to both characteristics of
mystical experiences: their ineffability and their noetic quality.
5. James could have said that his focus on individual experience was not
meant as a thesis about an ahistorical essence of all religion, but as an attempt
to analyze important religious tendencies of his time, namely the intensifica-
tion of religious individualization.98
6. He could have rejected Royce’s list of sources of religious insight by crit-
icizing his colleague for conflating two different problems. One can assail an
exclusive focus on individual experience either because it omits to take ac-
count of other dimensions or because it fails even to grasp what individual
experience is. The enumeration of sources of religious insight serves the first
purpose; the semiotic, Peircean critique of James the second. But this second
critique seems far more profound than the first. The list loses relevance when
one recognizes that all sources ultimately have something to do with indi-
vidual experience. The semiotic critique, meanwhile, could accept James’s
methodological restriction to individual experience and perhaps even con-
cede all the other points in his imaginary reply, but still insist that James’s
theory is not as fully “intersubjective” as it should have been.
James’s imaginary reply to Royce shows his conception in a somewhat
different light, and yet in a sense James remains on the defensive with re-
spect to each of the six points identified above. He is constantly measured
against a standard that he himself did not set and that he is never com-
pletely able to reach. But there is another respect in which James could in-
stead have gone on the offensive. He could have asked Royce whether it
really makes sense to combine, as Royce did, his sensitivity to the idea of
interpretation with a new defense of a teleological philosophy of history.
For in The Problem of Christianity, immediately after his exposition of the
theory of signs, Royce discusses the relation between the historical and
what he calls “the essential” and proclaims, as his metaphysical conclusion,
that the world is indeed the process of the spirit in the sense of an “evolution
wherein to every problem corresponds, in the course of the endless ages, its
solution, to every antithesis its resolution, to every estrangement its recon-
ciliation, to every tragedy the atoning triumph which interprets its evil.”99
In the concluding chapter, he repeats this message in similar words: “That
for every wrong there will somewhere appear the corresponding remedy;
and that for every tragedy and distraction of individual existence the uni-
versal community will find the way—how and when we know not—to
provide the corresponding unity, the appropriate triumph. We are saved
in and through the community.”100 This is his most profound philosoph-
ical message, a message he asserts to be “in agreement with what is vital in
Christianity.”101
Such statements would have sounded very odd, even scandalous, to James.
In a famous passage in his last lecture on pragmatism, which is concerned
with religion, James expresses his opposition to all teleological philosophy of
history, perhaps even to his friend Royce personally. James wrote, “I find my-
self willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous. . . .
I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no preser-
vation of all that is. I can believe in the ideal as an ultimate, not as an origin,
and as an extract, not the whole.”102 In The Varieties of Religious Experience
there are also forceful passages of this kind on the irremediable precarious-
ness of our existence,103 on “illness, danger, and disaster” as constant “possi-
bilities, on a mood of melancholy arising unsuspectedly from the bottom of
every fountain of pleasure.” A leading James scholar has appropriately used
“eclipse of certainty” as the subtitle of his book on James104—in other words,
the breakthrough to full awareness of the contingency of our individual ex-
istence and of history.
Royce claimed to have left Hegelianism behind him105 in an attempt to
shed his image as an obsolete nineteenth-century figure. And it is true
that his conception of teleology was not quietistic, but instead encouraged
human beings to take up “lost causes” of the past, to pursue creative atone-
ment in the sense of a “transformation of the meaning of that very past which
it cannot undo.”106 He also distanced himself from a belief in divine miracles,
a Schopenhauerian cosmic will or Bergsonian vital impulse, as untenable
forms of teleology.107 Nonetheless, his main emphasis is still on the certainty
of a future—mundane—“reconciling spiritual event.”108 John E. Smith has
aptly defined the difference between James and Royce with regard to reli-
gious faith and contingency as follows: “For James, to believe in God is the
ultimate risk, whereas for Royce it is the acknowledgment of a reality which
cannot not be.”109
If James’s imaginary response to Royce, with its defensive and offensive
aspects, is justified, we must conclude that neither of them offers a fully satis-
factory solution. It was only in the work of the next generation of pragmatists,
namely in George Herbert Mead’s The Philosophy of the Present, and to some
extent in John Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty and above all his Logic, that
we find the key achievement of an integration of the semiotic theory of self
and community with a nonteleological understanding of history.110 But in
Mead and to some extent in Dewey, there was no longer any connection with
the problem of religion, and so it remains for us to connect all three threads.
This would be an important step toward the synthesis of American pragma-
tism and German historicism with respect to the theory of religion, a syn-
thesis for which, from the opposite perspective, the ground was clearly laid
by Ernst Troeltsch in his late writings, prior to his death in 1923, when he
gave historicism an existential turn. This synthesis is not primarily a problem
for historians of ideas but rather a crucial methodological task for the histor-
ical and comparative study of religion today.111
A phenomenology of religious experiences augmented by semiotics—in
other words, the combination of a rich account of such experiences and an
equally rich typology of signs—provides the psychology of religion with
a route out of an old dilemma. It is not plausible to suggest that when it
comes to their experiential possibilities people are so completely reliant on
the offerings of specific religious traditions that they are well nigh confined
within them. Nor is it persuasive to argue that, beyond all religion and cul-
ture, people have available to them completely sign-free experiential mate-
rial. In the absence of holistic corporeal experiences, there would be no point
of departure for symbolic processes. Yet without the production of shared
meanings in situations, every human being would remain enclosed in her
subjective experiential world. Without situation-independent symbols, and
the abstractions they facilitate, there would be no critical assessment of the
legitimacy of validity claims. By taking consistent account of the semiotic
dimension, and embracing the turn to experience within the psychology of
religion, we can also build a bridge to religious traditions and institutions
and thus to history in general—in line with Herder’s intuitions in his debate
with Hume.
In both theology and the scholarship on religion, these impulses were
assimilated in a wide range of ways—frequently, but not necessarily, by
building directly on the work of William James, and more rarely by contin-
uing the endeavors of Peirce and Royce. Within theology, the “symbolic re-
alism” of Paul Tillich holds a key position in this regard. Influenced by him
but also drawing on later approaches within the theory of signs and symbols,
anthropologist of religion Roy Rappaport and sociologist Robert Bellah112 de-
veloped their pioneering studies. A range of writings within theology and the
philosophy of religion that draw on the thought of Ernst Cassirer, particularly

his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, point in the same direction.113 Hence,
here too it is conspicuous that theology and the scholarship on religion by no
means represent two separately developing discourses. In fact, we find a broad
range of interactions between them. Similarly, in the psychology of religion
and in the historiography of religion what we can discern are not dogmatic
and presuppositionless ways of thinking forming two hostile fronts. Instead,
the questions informing empirical scholarship and those concerning the legit-
imacy of the validity claims inherent in religious discourse are mutually imbri-
cated in a range of ways. Once again, the solution cannot be to simply tease
apart these entanglements. And once again, we find that it is possible to reach
agreement on empirical facts and that, while the debate on validity cannot be
settled by empirical research, it can be greatly enriched by it.
William James by no means believed that his psychology of religion was
empirical only in the sense that, ultimately, theological and philosophical
debates on validity remain untouched by this body of knowledge. Though
many scholars have repeatedly misunderstood him in this respect, or it
suited them to do so, in his book on the psychology of religion the rudiments
of a philosophy of religion are unmistakable. Among other things, the final
sentence of his great book points in this direction: he expresses the hope of
returning to all these issues in another book.114 We even have his outlines
for this planned work and can extrapolate from them the path he may well
have gone down had he been granted the time.115 It would be quite wrong
to suggest that James and most of the other participants in this discourse
were ignorant about the question of God and believed it had been super-
seded by empirical scholarship. In the early 1920s, by grappling with James’s
psychology of religion (or similar projects such as that of Rudolf Otto),116
a number of thinkers recognized the epoch-making shift of intellectual
problem that had occurred. If the question of God can only be posed indi-
rectly, that is, as the question of the faith of human beings, it must be posed
by scrutinizing religion and the scholarly study of it.117 This reflexive turn
becomes necessary due to the rise of the secular option. In a world of faith, as
the young Leo Strauss wrote so evocatively, theology had to “achieve recogni-
tion for the legitimacy of the rational. Today, in a spiritual reality dominated
by ratio, it is the office of theology to bring to life for our era ‘the irrational
in the idea of the Divine’ through the medium of the theoretical conscious-
ness. While earlier theology speculated in a religiously closed vault, the new
theology lives under the open sky, and must itself contribute, according to its
ability, to the construction of the vault. Then, the primary fact was God; now,
it is world, man, religious experience.”118
3
Ritual and the Sacred
On the Anthropology of Ideal Formation
The first two breakthroughs dealt with here that initiated the scholarly study
of religion, then, happened in the fields of history and psychology. To be
more precise, this took the form of the project of a universal history of reli-
gion, and a psychology of religious experiences. In both cases, the individual
was the center of attention. When it came to the causes of the emergence
of religion, David Hume consistently wrote as if individual human beings,
one by one, develop their ideas, which are subsequently laid down as reli-
gion;1 no other perspective appeared in his work even as a possibility. In the
case of William James, meanwhile, the turn to experience is from the outset
conceived as a turn to the isolated experiences of individuals—“in their sol-
itude”—though he was well aware of the specific nature of this definitional
postulate. In both cases, the (conscious or unconscious) one-sided individu-
alism in the analysis of religion stimulated intellectual approaches that went
further, emphasizing supra-individual phenomena characteristic of the re-
ligious sphere: “poetry” and “mythology” in the work of Herder, and signs
and symbols, along with the diverse sources of religious “insight,” in the work
of Royce. In the course of the nineteenth century, however, there now arose
another scholarly discipline—one that, right from the start, pursued a pro-
gram that goes beyond any ontological or methodological individualism.
I am referring to sociology. Of course, we can only ascribe to this discipline
a fundamentally different, independent perspective if it is concerned with
more than just the societal distribution of individual religious attitudes, or
the effects of such attitudes and their distribution on individuals’ action.2 It
must entail a way of thinking that views social institutions as a phenomenon
that, while certainly emerging from human action, is more than just the ag-
gregate of individual actions, and that is in fact constitutive of the develop-
ment of individuality.
This chapter is concerned with this discipline and its relationship to reli-
gion. The most ambitious attempt to give this new science an autonomous
Ritual and the Sacred 59
intellectual and institutional form was undertaken at the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth centuries in France by Émile Durkheim; the
topic of religion is crucial to his efforts. Both with respect to the uncovering
of the secret supposedly underpinning the existence of religious phenomena,
and with respect to demonstrating the new discipline of sociology’s alleged
productivity and potential, Durkheim’s aspirations were far-reaching. His
two aspirations, moreover, are internally linked. In an early study, Durkheim
had chosen suicide as his topic—and thus an act that inevitably seems unsur-
passably individual in its existential character—in order to demonstrate the
insights gained through analysis of social statistics. In much the same way, he
now sought to help the new discipline achieve greater recognition by making
an outstanding contribution to the study of religion. By the same token, soci-
ology was supposed to place on entirely new foundations the bitter dispute in
France at the time over laicism and the radical separation of state and church.
This chapter explores whether these aspirations were a matter of gross over-
reach. Even if this should prove to be the case, and Durkheim’s work there-
fore requires profound empirical and theoretical correction, I argue that it
is nonetheless of epochal significance. This significance, I assert, lies first in
Durkheim’s focus on collective bodily practices, and second in his ability to
demonstrate that these practices inspire people to identify an experiential
quality that differs from all quotidian experience. For the collective bodily
practices, Durkheim uses the term “ritual,” and for the experiential quality
beyond the everyday that of the “sacred.” Both terms are frequently misun-
derstood. Ritual is reduced to pressures to repeat a given action, stripping it
of meaning, while the “sacred” is seen as referring to the specific beliefs of
particular religions. The first thing we have to do here, then, is to recall the
tremendous power of the phenomenon of ritual as envisaged by Durkheim,
and, with him, to recognize that “sacredness” in his sense also exists, outside
of institutionalized religions, in a wide variety of forms, and underlies the de-
velopment of all “ideals,” including secular ones.
At first glance, it might appear that there could scarcely be a greater dis-
tance between the individualism of James and such a ritual-centered anal-
ysis of religion. Upon closer inspection, however, it emerges that from the
perspective of interest to us here, in many respects these are parallels rather
than alternatives. That is, the turn to the experience of the individual in his
solitary communication with God, and the turn to ritual, have in common
that they do not view religions chiefly as doctrinal systems. In both cases, the
relating of religion to the experience of individuals or collectives remains in
place, something that is lost in any conception of a religion that is hived off
from such experience. Certainly, the turn to individual experience arouses
suspicions of a Protestant or modernist bias; in much the same way, there are
suspicions that the turn to collective ritual embodies a Catholic or “primi-
tivist” tendency. But if we consider both, we can discern their inherent po-
tential, taken together, to illuminate the wealth of religious phenomena in
the history of humanity.
After first introducing and critically discussing the core idea of early so-
ciology of religion, namely ritual, and its significance to the emergence of
notions of sacredness, I then delve back into the prehistory of Durkheim’s
theory. There is a simple reason for this: Durkheim linked his 1912 book, The
Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, very directly to a particular empirical
complex, namely so-called totemism. Accordingly, the book’s subtitle is Le
système totémique en Australie (The totemic system in Australia). In order
to distinguish and emancipate the theoretical achievement of his book from
the empirical shortcomings of his analysis of totemism, it is helpful to ex-
amine two other analyses that exercised a major influence on Durkheim and
whose empirical foci were quite different. I am referring to the work of Numa
Denis Fustel de Coulanges, who examined the religion of the ancient Greeks
and Romans, and W. Robertson Smith, who investigated the religion of the
Semites. Having scrutinized the backstory to this third “breakthrough” in the
scholarly engagement with religion, I then examine its subsequent history
and reception. These too include an array of refinements of the basic theo-
retical idea. Above all, though, I am interested in whether, within religion or
culture as a whole, ritual represents something “primitive,” something that
is increasingly overcome or ought to be overcome over the course of history.
On the assumption that Durkheim’s hypothesis regarding the development
of ideals through ritual is correct, what might replace ritual? Or are there
good reasons for assuming the persistence of ritual in history?
The Turn to Ritual
According to Durkheim, one religious ritual among indigenous Australians,

as practiced around 1900, went roughly as follows. Over a period of several
days, the Warramunga tribe celebrates the festival of the snake Wollunqua.
The tribe’s two subunits, referred to as “phratries” in light of structures found
in Greek antiquity, play very different roles here. Only one half is permitted
to celebrate the rites involved on a particular occasion, while the members

of the other half only “decorate the participants, prepare the site and the
instruments, and serve as the audience. In this capacity, they are respon-
sible for mounding damp sand ahead of time, on which they use red down
to make a drawing that represents the snake Wollunqua.”3 The ceremony it-
self begins only when night falls. The members of the two phratries ascend
the mound in separate groups and begin to sing. Due to the preceding days
of religious celebration, and as a result of the exciting preparations for this
high point, they are already in a state of overstimulation. At a specific point
during this process of ever-heightening excitation, the men of the phratry
celebrating the rite fetch their women, handing them over to the men of the
other phratry, from which these women originally come, so that the former
can have sexual intercourse with the latter. Something occurs, therefore,
that would be strictly forbidden outside of the festival. After some time, re-
cently initiated adolescents are brought in and introduced to the secrets of
the ritual, which is described to them in every detail. After hours of more
singing, one of the phratries begins to circle the mound in a kind of jumping
procession in the light of the fires that have been lit all around. Its members
kneel down rhythmically, stand up again, turn their bodies to the right and
left, and emit a howl, to which the members of the other phratry respond by
making a sound with their boomerangs. Finally, as dawn breaks, the cele-
brating phratry, cheered on by the other one, storm the mound and attack
it with spears, sticks, and boomerangs; destroy it; and put out the fires. The
whole thing ends with a great silence.
Few will be left unaffected by the power of this account. Even members of
secularized cultures largely devoid of ritual have imaginative access, how-
ever watered down, to the experience described here, as a result of parties
in childhood and youth, carnivals, rock concerts, football stadiums, or mass
demonstrations. It is an experience of radical change of oneself, of sudden
transformation into a different being. This transformation is further expe-
dited by costumes, masks, or the coloring of one’s face or entire body.
Moreover, because this transformation is not restricted to the individual
but encompasses the others present as well, it is not just oneself that appears
transformed but the entire group, indeed the entire world. It is a new world, a
world full of unknown and intensive forces that bring about the experienced
transformation of the self. This different and newly experienced world seems
to exist independently, beyond one’s encounter with it, to be a permanent,
preexisting feature of specific places, to open up to us at particular times,
to come into effect through particular animals, plants, or, for example, the
bones of ancestors. “Two heterogeneous and incommensurable worlds” ap-
pear to exist. To quote Durkheim speaking about the experience of the in-
dividual: “In one world he languidly carries on his daily life; the other is one
that he cannot enter without abruptly entering into relations with extraor-
dinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy. The first is the profane
world and the second, the world of sacred things.”4
The ritual, in other words, is the source of sacredness. While many rituals,
of course, take place in already sanctified locations and merely recall a sacred
event by celebrating it, from this perspective it would be wrong to simply
presuppose the existence of the sacred, let alone to limit the concept of the
sacred to religious contexts in a narrow sense, that is, in contradistinction
to the secular. This is plainly apparent in light of Durkheim’s definition of
religion.
At an early point in his great study, Durkheim sums up his introduc-
tory remarks in a definition of religion that brings out very well the specific
features of his thought. The definition reads, “A religion is a unified system of
beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart
and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral
community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”5 As with many
definitions, almost every component of this formula requires more precise
characterization. But my focus here is solely on the three special features that
are decisive to Durkheim’s approach. Through the emphasis on “practices,”
which Durkheim mentions in such a way as to place them on an equal
footing with beliefs, he first distances himself from the idea that what matters
most are beliefs, while ritual practices are merely their expression; for him,
all cognitive classifications of the world are rooted in practices.6 Second, it
is significant that Durkheim does not define religion by referring to the “su-
pernatural” or a belief in God or gods, but rather by bringing in the “sacred,”
which must at this point, without further definition, initially appear like a
mere shifting of the definitional burden. While it was previously unclear
what religion is, now it is surely vital to clarify how we should understand
the sacred. And third, in his definition Durkheim unambiguously commits
himself to the social character of religion. In the sentence following his def-
inition in the book, he explicitly underlines once again that his emphasis on
the “church” was intended to highlight the fact that “religion must be an em-
inently collective thing.”7 Earlier, with respect to rites, he had already stated
that they are “ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled
groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or re-create certain mental

states of those groups.”8 For Durkheim, all individual relationships to the sa-
cred are necessarily derived from the collective, because as he sees it this sa-
cred sphere can only take shape through collective practices. Hence, for him
magic is not more primordial than religion, but instead dependent on it in
parasitic fashion; it represents an attempt to make the collectively constituted
sacred serve individual ends.
What looks, on this conceptual level, like a barely penetrable web of def-
initional postulates—one Durkheim weaves in his book by engaging with
mostly long-forgotten scholars and theories—becomes most plausible to
us today in his suggestive attempts to analyze various phenomena. But be-
cause he generates many of these analyses, as in the example above, by
reinterpreting ethnographic accounts of Australian aborigines (and occa-
sionally North American Indians), the exoticism of the examples diminishes
their immediate controllability. Hence, Durkheim’s attempts to link his ideas
with contemporary experiences from the modern world are often more ac-
cessible; this applies, for example, when he reminds us of the familiar fact
that a gathering of people, if it endures for a substantial period of time, tends
to reduce participants’ self-control and has powerful stimulating effects on
them. If the usual self-discipline of participants is negligible, as in the case of
children, this effect is all the more intensive. Durkheim also adduces the “the
demon of oratorical inspiration”9 that envelops speakers when they sense
that the communication with their listeners is going well. The tone of their
voice rises, but even the thoughts speakers utter change on the basis of their
sense of being animated by forces that do not simply come from them alone
but that transcend them.
The enhancement of the self through an ecstatic collective experience
may at a certain point even turn into a momentary loss of the self. In these
experiences of self-enhancement and self-loss, a force is perceived that carries
the individual along with it, and about whose existence there can be no doubt
when it is encountered. The question, however, is how to interpret this force.
For Durkheim, it is a central insight of sociology to see in this force nothing
but the effect of the momentary uniting of individuals into a jointly acting
collective. But those involved, according to Durkheim, do not interpret the
tremendous experience of a force that transcends every aspect of everyday
life with the cool reason of the sociologist. Instead, participants in such an
ecstatic group process put their experience down to powers that preexist
them, powers with which they came into convulsive contact at the place and
time of the gathering. For those involved, then, affective certainty that higher
powers are at work, a certainty that inevitably results from the experiences
of self-enhancement and self-loss, turns into an emotionally intensive con-
nection to attributes of the situation in which they had this experience. For
Durkheim, this act of attribution is the wellspring of “sacredness”—of a clas-
sification of the world into two spheres, depending on whether an object, a
being, an act, or the content of an idea is linked internally with this experi-
ence or not. That which does not feature such linkage is profane; that which
corresponds with this experience is sacred.
When it comes to the search for ecstatic group processes, Durkheim by
no means focuses solely on times and places deliberately cordoned off from
everyday life. Deeply influenced by the history of the French Revolution and
the revolutionary events over the course of the nineteenth century, he is in-
terested in revolutionary phases in general, in which the interplay between
individuals becomes intensified and they develop a readiness to take heroic
actions, or may be seduced into taking barbaric actions, that they would
never have considered in their everyday lives. Just as Durkheim imagines
that the Australian aborigines find in their rituals the life force that enables
them to live an everyday life scattered across large spaces, he emphasizes that
under modern conditions too the individual remains constantly dependent
on the “kinds of acts that express the understanding, esteem, and affection of
his neighbor.”10 We need recognition from our fellow human beings if we are
not to lose motivation when carrying out our everyday duties.
That there is a connection between the emergence of “sacredness” and
the formation of “ideals” out of the experience of ritual on the one hand and
individuals’ motivation in their everyday life on the other is plainly some-
thing Durkheim considers an anthropological fact, a given of human nature,
and thus not subject to historical change. For him, all that is changeable is the
nature of these ideals, the exact character of collective practices, the structure
of collectives, and individuals’ place within them. Hence, despite the self-
assurance with which Durkheim declares the Jewish and Christian religions
as such outmoded and to some extent actively opposes them, it is not pos-
sible to interpret him as the exponent of a straightforward thesis of seculari-
zation. “Even in this era of unbelief,” as he states explicitly in a debate on his
book that took place in Paris in 1913, we might still see “gods born in the
bosom of crowds”;11 elsewhere, he calls the ideas of progress and democracy
“sacred” for those who believe in them.12 Hence, it would only be correct to
call him a theorist of secularization if we took that term to include the emer-
gence of new forms of sacredness, that is, new (secular) ideals.
I shall leave aside how Durkheim, in light of the basic ideas set out above,
goes on to try to explain the emergence of ideas of the soul, spirits, and gods,
and how he classifies various kinds of rites, paying particular attention to
rituals of sacrifice. The crucial point in the present context is that Durkheim
himself, at the end of his book and in later retrospectives, emphasizes above
all that he wished to produce a scientific elucidation of the genesis of ideals.
He was not simply concerned, as has sometimes been assumed, with the
emergence of solidarity among the members of a collective, let alone with the
functionalization of rituals or ideals to establish or preserve social cohesion.
As Durkheim describes them, the processes involved in the emergence of
ideals cannot be straightforwardly wielded by any worldly power. The co-
hesion with which he was concerned comes about via the shared adherence
to ideals—not, that is, simply through ties to a collective, as it is or as a given
power defines it. Durkheim passionately rejected any historical materialist
interpretation of his ideas. Certainly, like Marxists, he views religion as a
social phenomenon, but he does not seek to understand either religions or
ideals in general as the mere translation of material interests into illusionary
forms. Instead, social life creates ideals, which cannot be reduced either to
individual notions nor to “ideal-free” material relations. The genesis of ideals
is not “a sort of luxury which man can do without.”13 Instead it is a prerequi-
site for the existence of societies.
A society can neither create nor re-create itself without creating some kind
of ideal by the same stroke. This creation is not a sort of optional extra step
by which society, being already made, merely adds finishing touches; it is
the act by which society makes itself, and remakes itself, periodically. . . .
The ideal society is not outside the real one but is part of it. Far from our
being divided between them as though between two poles that repel one
another, we cannot hold to the one without holding to the other.14
That is, one of the core features of a society is the idea it has of itself, an idea to
which it does not necessarily correspond. The emergence of ideals is linked
with the genesis of a collective’s self-image. This means the collective has the
opportunity to change itself, to bring itself into line with its ideals. But there is
also a risk that ideals will be used for the self-sacralization of the collective.15
From Totemism to Secular Religion?
For more than a century, scholars have grappled with Durkheim’s theory
of religion in a vast range of ways.16 I shall take up just three crucial points
arising from this engagement because they are important to the issues con-
sidered here—namely whether the scholarly study of religion is fundamen-
tally possible, and what the enduring benefits of the emergence of a specific
disciplinary perspective might be. The three key issues are the empirical per-
suasiveness of Durkheim’s analysis of totemism, the relationship of this soci-
ology of religion to the critique of religion, and the possible shortcomings of
Durkheim’s sociological program:
1. When Durkheim opted to declare the (supposed) totemism of the
Australian aborigines the most elementary form of religious life still discover-
able, and to make it the starting point for an evolutionary theory of religion,
he made a very risky decision. Empirically, this meant tying himself to a body
of knowledge not drawn from his own research; he made himself entirely de-
pendent on the accounts produced by colonial officials, missionaries, and a
scattered array of ethnological explorers. These accounts were subject to future
expansion and revision in ways only those who had themselves come into con-
tact with the relevant culture could hope to competently evaluate. Theoretically,
meanwhile, Durkheim put his faith in the claims of a contemporary discourse
on totemism as the original religion—a discourse that had already passed its
peak when Durkheim’s book appeared and was heading for oblivion.17 Even be-
fore it was published, among anthropologists carrying out empirical research
the understanding began to take hold that while Durkheim and others were
right to seek to consider three phenomena simultaneously—namely “an orga-
nization into clans, the attribution of animals and plants to the clans as names or
emblems, and the belief in a relation between clan and animal”18—the connec-
tion between the three phenomena was by no means as close as Durkheim and
other theorists of totemism had asserted. “Thus the Thompson River Indians
have totems but no clans; the Iroquois have clans called after animals which are
not totems; and the Yukhagir, who are divided into clans, have religious beliefs
in which animals play a large part, but through the mediation of shamans, not
social groups.”19 What Durkheim had believed to be a highly integrated “unified
system of beliefs and practices” was nothing of the kind, but rather a relatively
contingent assemblage of elements that are not necessarily dependent on one
another. Durkheim had constructed his arguments on a far too narrow empir-
ical basis. Even within Australia, obstacles emerged to any attempt to generalize
from the cases he cited. The obstacles were even greater whenever Durkheim
went beyond Australia to include the North American Indians.
Also problematic was the fact that Durkheim described the cases he
studied as lacking in complexity. Due to his evolutionist background beliefs,
he succumbed to the temptation of viewing supposedly “elementary” forms
as more simple than all later forms; he explicitly contended that for a sci-
entific discipline still in its early stages, such as the sociology of his day, it
was too soon to analyze “more highly developed” forms of religion, but that
through the knowledge of simpler forms, which supposedly stood at the start
of developments, the discipline could elaborate the foundations that would
later facilitate understanding of complex forms as well.20 Little wonder, then,
that as a result of these decisions Durkheim’s book was rejected and even
fell into disrepute among anthropologists and historians of religion. Some
of them, however, understood that objections to the empirical correctness
of Durkheim’s interpretation of the religious life of aborigines did not auto-
matically mean his entire theory was wrong. They thus partially excepted his
theory of ritual from their critique, particularly the basic idea of the social
origin of religion, which is after all relatively independent of the question of
whether Durkheim’s account of the social organization of the aborigines was
accurate or not.21 The crucial imperative, however, is to avoid simplifying
this basic idea such that we equate the religious and social spheres. It was
in fact Durkheim’s intention, in drawing such a sharp distinction between
the sacred and the profane, and thus between two forms of collective life—
the quotidian and extraquotidian-ecstatic—to avoid this simplistic equa-
tion. “That diversity,” as he contended, “allows one to understand how the
religious can be social without everything social being religious.”22 In other
words, it is not the theory of totemism that is decisive, but rather the turn to
ritual, not in the sense of a turn to collective practices as such, but to contexts
of action in which experiences of self-transcendence may occur. Even if it
were to emerge that the collective ecstasies that Durkheim has in mind are
not the only setting in which people may have such experiences, Durkheim’s
theory does not necessarily collapse. All that is then required is to develop
a richer phenomenology of such experiences of self-transcendence, rather
than abandoning the idea of there being a connection between the dynamics
of such experiences, the genesis of ideals, and their role in motivating action.
In a defense of his book, Durkheim himself identified, as one of his two
core hypotheses—alongside that of a dualism of the ideal and the real within
the human being—that of the “vertu dynamogénique” of all religion,23 its
“dynamogenic quality.” French psychologists of the 1880s used this term

to refer to the invigorating effects of particular sensory stimuli on motor
responses. Yet it was none other than William James who adopted it from
the “slang of the psychologists,” as he himself put it. This he did, in his anal-
ysis of experiences of conversion and divided selves, in order to portray the
biographical situation in which a human being orients himself toward higher
goals only in an abstract sense, but these do not truly take effect in the way he
lives his life.24 It seems beyond dispute that Durkheim borrowed this term,
with which he conveys the core idea of his theory of religion and of his an-
thropology of ideal formation, from James, developing it in the direction of
his conception of ritual.25
Hence, acquiring the foundations for a theory of the evolution of religion
clearly proved far less straightforward than Durkheim had imagined. In fact,
it was not just this initial step that was questionable, but also the assumption
of a fundamental continuity in the development of religion, and the resulting
analysis of the religious situation of the present era. Durkheim is certainly
open to the changes that religion undergoes as a result of changing organi-
zational forms of society over the course of history; it is a theory of just this
kind that he wishes to formulate and believes to have provided with a basis.
But it is not evident that he would have seen a possible breaking of the con-
nection between sacralization and self-sacralization, between ideal forma-
tion and solidarity formation in a particular collective, as a radical turning
point in the religious history of humanity.26 He did not recognize that, in the
case of the religious phenomena he analyzed, the ideals may, as it were, have
been less “ideal” than in the case of the subsequently emerging religions—
that is, that their distance from social reality was less, as was, therefore, their
power to relativize and change this reality.27 In the absence of such recogni-
tion of the fundamental discontinuity in the history of religion, the religion
of the future would inevitably feature a fundamentally similar link between
ideal formation and solidarity formation as in the case of totemism as the “el-
ementary” form of religion.
2. This sheds light on the relationship between the sociology of religion
and the critique of religion. Within the debates of his day, Durkheim was
undoubtedly a militant laicist, but as a scholar he was determined not to be
simply lumped together with the Enlightenment-rationalist or Marxist critics
of religion. He developed his sociology of religion at a time when a leading
Jewish intellectual, a staunch Voltairean, could begin his widely read book
on the history of religion with the definition of religion as “a sum of scruples
which impede the free exercise of our faculties.”28 Durkheim made it quite
clear that it must in no circumstances be sociology’s task to serve as “a means
of making war against religion.”29 It is also inadequate to think of Durkheim
as a passionate opponent of the existing religious communities, one who was
fascinated by religions of all kinds merely for biographical reasons—as the
scion of a “dynasty” of rabbis—and who had opted to study religion chiefly
because he wanted to put his sociology to a difficult test. The crucial point,
so it seems to me, is that Durkheim saw his laicism as possessing religious
qualities. What he envisaged was a new religion in which the belief in human
rights plays a central role—in other words, in which the sacredness of every
person is respected, embodied in practices, and ritually revitalized.30 For
him, this new religion is consonant with the modern conditions of advanced
functional differentiation, just as every earlier religion fit the conditions out
of which it emerged and in which it could remain vigorous. This enabled
Durkheim to concede a wide range of historical merits to, for example,
Judaism and Christianity, yet at the same time to declare them historically
outmoded. He goes so far as to assert that his method is not only capable of
explaining every rite practiced in the history of humanity, but that it in fact
justifies it; under their particular conditions, all rituals were necessary and
apposite. According to Durkheim, this applied to the “wild practices” of the
Australians no less than to the most idealist of religions.31 He thus evades his
believing readers’ and listeners’ urgent questions as to whether the explana-
tory aspirations of his sociology could, even in principle, leave faith intact, by
pointing to a new faith, one that is consonant with the new conditions and
that discards from the religious traditions all that is merely a remnant of an
extinct social order.32
No believing Jew, Christian, or Muslim will find this solution satisfac-
tory; it is far from apparent what, according to Durkheim, would be left of
the beliefs of the religious traditions other than a universalist morality. It
is at this point, however, that the concept of religion begins to oscillate be-
tween a narrow and broad meaning. In the narrow sense of existing religious
traditions, Durkheim essentially expects religion to disappear, whereas in
the broad sense of universalist ideals and unceasing processes of sacraliza-
tion, for him no period of history is imaginable without religion. Yet he him-
self did not discuss the difference between the narrow and broad concept,
despite its crucial role in the self-understanding of so many people. Most of
those who sympathized with Durkheim’s ideas will not have described them-
selves as religious, but emphasized their distance from the religions. From a
critical perspective, the crucial point is that Durkheim does not “reincorpo-
rate the absence of the self-attribution of ‘religion’ into his reconstruction, or
even indicate that it is a problem.”33 Hence, while Durkheim’s sociology of
religion is not out to critique religion, it is deeply bound up with the idea of a
new “secular religion.”34
3. A theory such as Durkheim’s that gives pride of place to collective
practices and the social character of religion, and thus goes so far as to seek to
demonstrate the need for a sociological perspective, can get nowhere without
a theory of signs. This is the only way to prevent collectives from simply
appearing like supra-individual entities or to avoid concepts such as that of
the “collective consciousness” that appear to be mysterious parallels to the
individual consciousness. A true theory of signs, however, is not to be found
in Durkheim’s oeuvre; yet he cannot be accused of having lacked all feeling
for the role of signs in collective action. In fact he emphasizes that “in all its
aspects and at every moment of its history, social life is only possible thanks
to a vast symbolism.”35 In contrast to the theory of signs found in American
pragmatism,36 however, he writes as if individual consciousnesses are ini-
tially “closed to one another” and then communicate with the consciousness
of others via symbols, which “express” the individual’s “inner states.”37
This is how things look if one assumes that the consciousness exists prior
to communication by means of signs. Because Durkheim is interested
chiefly in the emergence of a “sentiment commun,” a feeling of common-
ality, he concerns himself exclusively with the types of signs that are gen-
erated by the ritual itself and that give permanency to intensive feelings of
togetherness. This includes, first, the movements within the ritual action
that individuals perform simultaneously; in the wake of the experiences
they trigger, these are habitualized into repeatable movements and may,
therefore, themselves symbolize the ideas generated. Second and above
all, however, Durkheim is concerned with the linkage of these movements
with objects that are incorporated into rituals and, for participants, con-
tinue to exude the intensive, ecstatic experiences even when the gathering
itself is over. “These things keep bringing the feelings to individual minds
and keep them perpetually aroused, just as would happen if the cause that
first called them forth was still acting. Thus, while emblematizing is neces-
sary if society is to become conscious of itself, so is it no less indispensable
in perpetuating that consciousness.”38 For Durkheim, the most important
elements in the analysis of totemism are the symbolizing of the common-
ality of the collective in the “totem,” and the material presentation of this
totem through signs. The totem may be a shared name; its material pre-
sentation takes the form of an “emblem,”39 which is found, for example,
on flags or as a tattoo on the skin of the collective’s members. Yet it would
be wrong to consider the name to be the sign itself and to view material
forms of presentation as secondary. Durkheim is concerned with the affec-
tive charging of objects that were incorporated into the experience of self-
transcendence. These symbols themselves possess the maximum degree of
sacredness.40 Hence, Durkheim assumes that the animals and plants, even
the smallest and least significant, best suited to serving as totems are those
characteristic of the site of the gathering where a collective experiences its
commonality most strongly.
However, Durkheim links with this narrow but undoubtedly fruitful
theory of signs a goal that goes far beyond his immediate object of concern.
He goes on to ask just what—if the totem is a symbol—it symbolizes. Within
believers’ self-understanding, it is after all the totemic principle or totemic
God that takes on tangible form in the material totem. Yet it is unambigu-
ously “also the symbol of a particular society that is called the clan. It is the
flag of the clan, the sign by which each clan is distinguished from the others,
the visible mark of its distinctiveness, and a mark that is borne by everything
that in any way belongs to the clan: men, animals, and things.”41 And for
Durkheim, this doubling, such that something simultaneously symbolizes
God and society, demands resolution; for him, it allows the conclusion that
God and society must in fact be one. The clan deifies itself through the totem.
The inescapable conclusion, he contends, is, “Thus [that] the god of the clan,
the totemic principle, can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan
transfigured and imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal that
serves as totem.”42
The self-assurance with which Durkheim puts forward this conclusion as
inescapable highlights a grave shortcoming in his theory of signs. He simply
assumes that a symbol can only have one referent, and therefore, if it has two,
these must be identical, or one of them must be merely a false substitute for
the real referent.43 This presupposition, however, rests on the assumption
that symbols necessarily have a discursive character, that is, that they are sup-
posed to refer to a fact. However, they may also have a “presentative” char-
acter,44 in other words, they may refer holistically to something that finds
expression in them. For example, for the believing Christian, the love of a
human being may point to divine love, the beauty of creation to the goodness
of the Creator, without the question raised by Durkheim, as to whether one
or the other of these meanings applies, arising or even being a meaningful

question in the first place. Durkheim’s rudimentary theory of signs does not
do justice to religious symbols.45
William James, in his psychology of religion, sought to reach a meth-
odological level at which believers and nonbelievers might agree on the
description of religious phenomena. Durkheim, meanwhile, despite oc-
casional avowals to the contrary, ultimately burdens his sociology of reli-
gion, which in many respects parallels James’s work and was influenced by
it, with an argument that renders the religious consciousness illusionary.
While this never amounts to pure illusion, the supposed uncovering of the
true reality behind religious ideas devalues them completely. The sociology
of religion thus becomes an alternative to the religious consciousness.
Durkheim could have categorized collective practices, their causes and
consequences, as a specific object of sociology.46 But he not only wished to
establish sociology as a new and additional discipline and perspective, but as
a synthetic one that would incorporate the other subjects in the humanities
and social sciences as subdisciplines and thus also succeed philosophy. This
overambitious aspiration was to be his downfall. His sociology of religion
neither definitively uncovered the secret of all religion nor does the fruitful-
ness of the sociological perspective depend on doing so.
The Prehistory of Émile Durkheim’s Theory of Ritual
Durkheim’s theory has a historical backstory that is closely interwoven

with the discourse on religion at the fraught intersection of secular-
ization and the re-foundation of faith. As a rule, Durkheim does put
beliefs and ritual practices alongside one another as equally significant,
but ultimately he leaves us in no doubt that for him, at least genetically,
ritual practices take primacy. In the fourth volume of his history of the
problem of knowledge,47 Ernst Cassirer described this thesis— that
“ritual precedes dogma and that an understanding of the latter can only
be gained from an understanding of the former”—as having become the
“cardinal truth” of anthropology. This “truth” presupposes the abandon-
ment of the Enlightenment notion that religious faith must be cleansed of
all mythical elements or, because it necessarily remains mythical, must be
condemned as irrational. If, however, the myth is regarded as an interpre-
tation of the experiences gained in the rite, and the rite is viewed as the
source of unprecedented, “extraquotidian” experiences, then the picture

changes. Yet as Cassirer knew, the real pioneer of such an analysis was not
Durkheim, but one of his academic teachers, namely Numa Denis Fustel
de Coulanges, whose early text, La cité antique (1864), generated a huge
buzz when it appeared. His idea was to eschew investigating Greek and
Roman religion in light of their pantheon, their notions of gods, or the
myths in which the actions of these gods are narrated, let alone exclu-
sively against the background of politics and economics. Instead he set
out to study this religion in light of the rules of everyday living, but above
all to foreground cultic practices.
We shall be taking a closer look at his thinking in a moment. First,
though, it is important to note that there is another candidate for the role
of inaugurator of a sociological perspective within the study of religion.
The figure I have in mind is Scottish Old Testament scholar and Arabist
W. Robertson Smith, who had turned his attention to the ritual practices
of the ancient Jews and pre-Islamic Arabs, particularly in his book Religion
of the Semites of 1889.48 Since Durkheim was heavily influenced by both
Fustel and Smith, a look at these two scholars helps us discern more pre-
cisely the contours of his theory and to overcome the dependency of the
Durkheimian sociology of religion on outmoded research on totemism
and the aborigines. Whatever one’s assessment from a history of ideas
perspective—whether one considers these two scholars mere predecessors
of Durkheim or the true founders of the sociology of religion—it is beyond
dispute that key studies in the history of religion, produced in the nine-
teenth century, were moving in the direction of sociological analysis—for
their own reasons and quite separate from plans to establish a new scientific
discipline. Ernst Cassirer masterfully elaborated the internal logic of this
development.49 As stated above, the crucial step was the departure from an
Enlightenment understanding of myths and mythology, a shift that began
in the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. As long as myths were seen as
mere delusions and flights of fancy, they could not be considered sources
for the understanding of history. The myth must then inevitably appear as a
“barrier to historical knowledge.” The new approach involved taking myths
seriously in a new way and rethinking them as “instruments of know-
ledge.”50 Thus, in contrast to historical materialism, Fustel shed light on the
entire institutional edifice of the ancient Greeks and Romans (as well as the
“Aryan” Indians) by probing their religious beliefs, while Smith illuminated
the institutions of the “Semites” on the basis of their religious convictions.
But they illuminated these beliefs in turn on the basis of everyday practices.
At issue here, then, was not a return from the new materialist to old idealist
explanations in the sense of a determinism of ideas. Instead the intellectual
focus shifted to life as actually lived in a culture thoroughly pervaded by
religion. The beliefs of one’s own time and culture should not be projected
back into this life, let alone ideas of a completely irreligious individualist
or collectivist utilitarianism, according to which our best bet is to com-
prehend individuals or social classes primarily as pursuing material utility.
Hence, what matters in the work of Fustel and Smith is not their empir-
ical hypotheses themselves—though the intuitive power of these books
represents an enduring empirical challenge. Once again, the crucial thing
is the methodological shift. Fustel has rightly been compared with a miner
who “bores a new tunnel and happens upon a goldmine.”51
Fustel was so important to Durkheim as an academic teacher that in 1892
he dedicated his dissertation on Montesquieu and the latter’s contribution to
the founding of sociology to the memory of the great historian.52 One inter-
preter of Durkheim’s development has proposed portraying it in light of his
stance on the work of his venerated academic teacher; his book on totemism
can then be seen, in the role of “cité primitive,” as the counterpart to Fustel’s
work on the “cité antique,” as well as to the “cité moderne,” whose basic out-
line Durkheim set out in his analysis of the modern division of labor.53 This
does not necessarily mean that Fustel’s influence was continuous. Durkheim’s
growing interest in the scientific analysis of religion may have led him back
later to the origins of his mature thought.54 What seems beyond dispute is
that the first comprehensive attempt to analyze forms of social organiza-
tion, and institutional change, by drawing on an analytical concept of the sa-
cred, was made by Fustel rather than Durkheim himself.55 Although, at first
sight, Fustel’s work looks like a history of the developmental stages of ancient
Greek and Roman society, it does not focus on legal and political-economic
relations themselves. What the author actually has in mind are the attempts
made, for example by French revolutionaries, to orient themselves toward
ancient politics and its institutions. He firmly rejects such efforts, under-
lining the profound otherness of antiquity, which dooms to failure every
attempt to revive it. This otherness arises from the fact that we cannot com-
prehend the institutions of the ancients if we do not understand the beliefs
that underpinned them. His project, then, is to comprehensively reconstruct
these beliefs, taking his lead from the knowledge of ritual practices and asso-
ciated ritual precepts contained in the sources.
For Fustel, the starting point of all religious history among the peoples
he examined, though by no means only them, was the human being’s con-
frontation with death. What he has in mind here is not chiefly the anticipa-
tion of one’s own inevitable death, but the unavoidable confrontation with
the death of others, the transformation of close and familiar human others
into rigid, unresponsive, fear-inducing beings: “Before men had any notion
of Indra or of Zeus, they adored the dead; they feared them, and addressed
them prayers. It seems that the religious sentiment commenced in this way.
It was perhaps while looking upon the dead that man first conceived the idea
of the supernatural, and began to have a hope beyond what he saw. Death
was the first mystery, and it placed man on the track of other mysteries.”56
Fustel links this supposed primordial mystery with reproduction, with the
production of offspring,57 rendering the death of the progenitor a dual chal-
lenge. In light of this basic assumption, Fustel concludes that the veneration
of one’s father, one’s family, and one’s ancestors is a significant source of pious
feelings, which can be found, as he explicitly asserts, not just among the peo-
ples and cultures he considers, but also among the Chinese, in Africa, and
in the “New World.”58 In line with this, his developmental reconstruction
begins with family life, centered on the hearth and the ancestral grave. He
vividly describes the cult of the hearth, the funeral practices, and the vener-
ation of one’s ancestors among Greeks and Romans as a “primitive religion,”
of a “purely domestic” character.59 For him, then, religion seems to be a “con-
stituent principle,” at least with respect to the family: “The members of the
ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affec-
tion, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire, and of dead
ancestors.”60
The history Fustel is truly narrating leads from this supposedly primary
family and its religion to ever larger social formations. The amalgamation
of a number of families results in a “gens,” then a curia and a tribe, followed
by the emergence of the city-state and the establishment of an empire. For
each of these developmental stages, Fustel identifies driving forces and nec-
essary adaptations in the field of religion. Again and again, he emphasizes
the deeply particularist character of religion and morality in all these social
formations:
Religion did not say to a man, showing him another man, That is thy
brother. It said to him, That is a stranger; he cannot participate in the re-
ligious acts of thy hearth; he cannot approach the tomb of thy family; he
has other gods than thine, and cannot unite with thee in a common prayer;
thy gods reject his adoration, and regard him as their enemy; he is thy foe
also.61
Despite all the upheavals in antiquity, and despite all the universalist impulses
in philosophy and religion, according to Fustel the profound particularism
of the antique order was only fundamentally unsettled by Christianity, a reli-
gion that allowed every human being to pray to one universal God:
For this god there were no longer strangers. The stranger no longer pro-
faned the temple, no longer tainted the sacrifice by his presence. The temple
was open to all who believed in God. The priesthood ceased to be hered-
itary, because religion was no longer a patrimony. The worship was no
longer kept secret; the rites, the prayers, the dogmas were no longer con-
cealed. On the contrary, there was thenceforth religious instruction, which
was not only given, but which was offered, which was carried to those who
were the farthest away, and which sought out the most indifferent.62
This new religion brought a new principle into world history, one that placed
a question mark over every institution, and one that forced people to con-
template the cohesion of a particular polity in a new way. The reason, Fustel
tells us, is that in order to create a “social tie,” it takes something “stronger
than material force, more respectable than interest, surer than a philosoph-
ical theory, more unchangeable than a convention; something that should
dwell equally in all hearts, and should be all-powerful there.”63 It was, how-
ever, necessary to go beyond the topics considered in Fustel’s book in order
to investigate how a universalist religion can ensure the cohesion of partic-
ular polities.
As much as he venerated his academic teacher, Durkheim distanced him-
self, for good reason, from many of the particulars of his historical analysis.
On the methodological level, despite Fustel’s tremendous historical erudi-
tion, Durkheim contended that he had made too little effort to test his ideas
against ethnographic material and had therefore misinterpreted certain phe-
nomena.64 Specifically, Durkheim rejected the narrowing of the domestic
cult to the cult of the dead and instead asserted that the familial religion was
“far more complex,” comprising all those things that played a role in the life
of the family.65 He also vigorously disputed the assumption of an original fa-
milial patriarchy, and Fustel’s resulting conclusion that the archaic political
systems were “only families on a greater scale.”66 With these objections, some
of which had already been raised by other contemporaries,67 Durkheim is
very much in agreement with present-day attempts to relativize Fustel’s bril-
liant effort.68
All these questions, as important as they are to assessing the role of the sa-
cred in the history of power, have to take a backseat here to those concerning
the significance of Fustel’s conception to the development of a sociological
analysis of religion and, in particular, the significance of ritual in the genesis
of institutions. But what emerges here is an inconsistent picture. On the one
hand, it is quite correct that it was Fustel rather than Durkheim who first
placed ritual at the center of the analysis of religious life and all social life.
Fustel sharply criticizes Montesquieu—the thinker whom Durkheim, in the
dissertation he dedicated to Fustel, treated as a key pioneer of the new sci-
ence of sociology—because he believed “ancient religion was an imposture,”
nothing but a means “to restrain the people.” “A religion never had such an
origin; and every religion that has come to sustain itself only from motives
of public utility, has not stood long.”69 Religion, as Fustel emphasizes time
and again, was simply something other than “a body of dogmas, a doctrine
concerning God, a symbol of faith concerning what is in and around us. This
same word, among the ancients, signified rites, ceremonies, acts of exterior
worship.”70 It was not beliefs that were obligatory, but customs, to such an
extent that the entire day was pervaded by ritual prescriptions, every path
inevitably led to sacred objects, and time was structured in accordance with
a vast array of ritual obligations.71 These accounts almost exclusively concern
ritual.
On the other hand, however, we find in Fustel’s work a wealth of
statements that leave us with the impression that for him rituals were
only the expression of the truly decisive beliefs.72 Furthermore, in addi-
tion to cultic practices, he explicitly assumes that there is a second source
of religious ideas, namely—recalling David Hume—a kind of speculative
thinking about the experience of natural forces and an attempt to come to
terms with them through the “free operation of each mind.”73 The hypo-
thesis of the dual origin of religious ideas is not inconsistent in itself, and
might be commensurate with the facts. Fustel’s statements about the rite as
mere expression of preexisting beliefs, however, might indicate an inade-
quate understanding of the dynamics of semiotic processes. Conceptually,
the route out of this confusion must be to initially refrain from thinking
of religious faith as a theoretical statement about God and the world, and
instead to view it as a way of explicating obligatory practices. Fustel, after

all, in no way attempted to identify beliefs as such, separate from rituals. He
merely extrapolated from obligatory practices those ideas that make these
practices seem meaningful to participants. There can be no doubt that, if we
think for example of the emergence of Christianity, it was necessary to go
beyond such a thoroughly atheoretical understanding of religion. But this
certainly does not mean that it would be fundamentally wrong to shift away
from a later theorylike understanding of religion and return to the consti-
tutive dimension of instituted practices, which is the older phenomenon
within the history of religion.74 On the contrary, as we will see, this dimen-
sion is crucial to all religion.
The other candidate for the role of key source of inspiration for Durkheim,
and thus the role of inaugurator of the sociological analysis of religion, is
Scottish Bible scholar and orientalist W. Robertson Smith.75 Durkheim was
emphatic in acknowledging his influence. In 1907, Durkheim was accused
in a Catholic journal of having falsely passed off as his own certain ideas in
fact originating from the great psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and thus from
German scholarship. Durkheim put pen to paper twice in one month to de-
fend himself against this charge. This was not just a matter of his scholarly
honor or a claim to precedence. In a Europe fired up by nationalism and
less than a decade away from World War I, for a French Jew with a German-
sounding name, a supposed dependency on German influences represented
a tremendous risk. In the second of his letters, Durkheim wrote that while he
had certainly studied Wundt’s writings as early as 1887, it was not until years
later, in 1895 to be precise, that the central role of religion in social life had
become entirely clear to him:
It was in that year that, for the first time, I found the means of tackling the
study of religion sociologically. This was a revelation to me. That course of
1895 marked a dividing line in the development of my thought, to such an
extent that all my previous researches had to be taken up afresh in order
to be made to harmonize with these new insights. Wundt’s Ethics, which
I had read eight years earlier, plays no role in my change of direction. It
was entirely due to the studies of religious history which I had just under-
taken, and notably to the reading of the works of Robertson Smith and his
school.76
But what exactly was it that helped Durkheim achieve this sudden insight,
which he has no qualms about calling a “revelation”? Durkheim leaves us
guessing, and the dispute among experts on this point has led to no sat-
isfactory, universally accepted answer.77 A wide range of very different
answers have been proposed, extending from specific conceptions of to-
temism and sacrifice to ideas (of particular interest here) about the role of
ritual in the understanding of religion. Questions regarding the development
of Durkheim’s ideas in this respect are further complicated by the issue of
whether Robertson Smith was himself influenced by Fustel.78
Important passages in Smith’s work do in fact look astonishingly similar to
some of Fustel’s, particularly when it comes to the meaning of ritual. Smith
too contends that the study of an ancient religion ought not to take its lead
from Christianity and its focus on belief, but should begin with rites, and
should accept that strictly prescribed customs may be linked with a wide va-
riety of ideas that are by no means written in stone: “The rite, in short, was
connected not with a dogma but with a myth.”79 Furthermore, his focus with
respect to these practices is not on individuals but on collectives, though
we should not imagine these collectives as consisting exclusively of human
beings.
The circle into which a man was born was not simply a group of kinsfolk
and fellow-citizens, but embraced also certain divine beings, the gods of the
family and of the state, which to the ancient mind were as much a part of
the particular community with which they stood connected as the human
members of the social circle.80
Smith rejected the idea—advocated, for example, by Hume—that religion

emerged from feelings of fear, and he expressed opposition to the notion of
an original polytheism,81 but also to that of a primordial magic. “Religion”—
as he defined it—“is not an arbitrary relation of the individual man to a su-
pernatural power, it is a relation of all the members of a community to a
power that has the good of the community at heart, and protects its law and
moral order.”82 On the basis of his study at least of “primitive” and ancient re-
ligion in terms of collective practices, he developed his analyses—resembling
those of Fustel—of the religion of the Semites. While Fustel was not free of
the tendency to posit a fundamental contrast between the “Aryans” he was
studying and the “Semites,” Smith explicitly warns against overstating the
differences and against the assumption that discernible differences are “an
affair of race and innate tendency.” Instead he puts them down to the “oper-
ation of special local and historical causes.”83 Hence, his analyses of an orig-
inal totemism, and of the central importance of rituals of sacrifice among the
Semites, as well as his examination of ritual’s power to trigger the idealization
of one’s own social formation, were not limited to the ancient Semites but
were of a broader anthropological quality. No wonder that Durkheim could
knit together the newly emerging ethnography of Australia with the religious
history of the Semites in the work of Smith, and that of Greek and Roman
antiquity in the work of Fustel, deriving from this his aspiration to produce a
sociological analysis of religion.
In any case, examination of the differences between Smith and Durkheim
is highly instructive when it comes to our key question here as to whether the
scholarly study of religion is possible. Smith was a theologian and a devout
Protestant Christian. As already recognized by the great anthropologist Mary
Douglas, he perceived the historical significance of ritual through the lens of
Protestant skepticism about ritual.84 From this perspective, a ritual-centered
religion is primitive; as a result, Catholic Christianity is regarded as a lapse
into primitivity.85 In “modernity,” meanwhile, as modeled by Protestantism,
ritual must take a backseat to beliefs. In this sense, Durkheim radicalizes
Smith’s quasi-sociological approach when he extends it to modern societies,
the religion within them, and in particular, even to the cult of the individual.
An approach that a priori excepts Christianity as a whole, or merely
Protestant Christianity, or solely the latter’s modern variants from socio-
logical analysis will certainly be less hurtful to the religious feelings of the
advantaged parties, but is inadequate as scholarship. Yet Durkheim’s radical-
ization goes too far when he permits no other experiential basis for religion
into his theoretical constructions than ecstatic ritual practices, and when,
having demonstrated the presence of such experiences, he declares human
beings’ own religious interpretations definitively outmoded.86
Examination of the prehistory of Durkheim’s ritual theory in the work of
Fustel de Coulanges and Smith, then, points to more flexible ways of taking
up its ideas. But it also facilitates a better understanding of how the sociolog-
ical analysis of religion emerged from the discourses of theology and other
disciplines concerned with religion. The reception history of exemplary
texts and major scholarly achievements is, after all, not limited to a single
discipline.
Research on the history of religion and on the psychology of religion,
between which there is also an interplay, were always elements in the
development of the sociology of religion, and there can be no question of a

sharp dividing line between theology and these disciplines either. Here we
have a field of studies in the history of scholarship that is far from having been
adequately studied. Even more importantly, however, these historical studies
change one’s perspective on systematic issues. The roots of Durkheim’s an-
thropology of ideal formation seem to lie both in the psychology of religion
developed by William James and in the historiography of religion originating
with Fustel de Coulanges and Robertson Smith. But Smith himself was al-
ready deeply influenced by Albrecht Ritschl and the Göttingen School of re-
ligious history,87 which had developed through a critical engagement with
Ritschl. Here in turn, strong impulses from Schleiermacher were at work,
a scholar to whom James showed a remarkable affinity. What we see emer-
ging here is a complex “genealogy”—in the old sense of an ancestral line—of
Durkheim’s theory, a genealogy that is of great importance in assessing the
endeavors of Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, which I discuss in the next
chapter. That which is often considered inexplicable—similarities between
Durkheim on the one hand and Weber or Troeltsch on the other—becomes
far less mysterious if we examine the specifics of their writings’ long intellec-
tual backstory.88
If we place Durkheim in the context of the historians and anthropologists
of religion who influenced him, it becomes clear just how one-sided his
theory of ideal formation is, and what the reason for this one-sidedness is.
From the outset, Durkheim narrowed the spectrum of experiences of self-
transcendence to the single case of collective ecstasy (or collective efferves-
cence, as he himself put it), because of his eagerness to trace this experience
back to the mobilization of collective forces. His idea of explaining religion
as the result of the erroneous attribution of sacredness by those involved
functions only if, from the outset, we comprehend all more individual forms
of the experience of self-transcendence, and thus forms of the attribution
of sacredness, as merely derived from the experience of collective forces.
But this fails to do justice to the individual religious experiences of, for ex-
ample, prayer, or the individual experiences of love, of fusion with nature,
of sexuality, or of shattering compassion. Even in the case of the Australian
aborigines, Durkheim narrowed people’s extraquotidian experiences to those
involved in totemic ritual. Quite generally, in fact, he ascribed to totemism
a systematic closedness that does not even exist in “world religions” whose
systems have been thoroughly rationalized by doctrine. Ethnological re-
search after Durkheim on the Australian aborigines,89 but also Malinowski’s
work on the Trobrianders of the Western Pacific, have shown that, in this
society too,
the heightening of the emotions and the lifting of the individual out of
himself are by no means restricted to gatherings and to crowd phenomena.
The lover near his sweetheart, the daring adventurer conquering his
fears in the face of real danger, the hunter at grips with a wild animal, the
craftsman achieving a masterpiece, whether he be savage or civilized, will
under such conditions feel altered, uplifted, endowed with higher forces.
And there can be no doubt that from many of these solitary experiences
where man feels the forebodings of death, the pangs of anxiety, the exalta-
tion of bliss, there flows a great deal of religious inspiration. Though most
ceremonies are carried out in public, much of religious revelation takes
place in solitude.90
Here too, then, much that is sacred is individual and much that is collective
is profane.
To some extent, though by no means completely, these deficiencies have
been noted and eliminated over the course of the complex reception his-
tory of Durkheim’s conception of ritual. In sociology, however, initially this
conception was narrowed further in the sense that—in the work of Talcott
Parsons—the main emphasis was on the effects of ritual on social integra-
tion, but not on the fluid processes of ritual action itself. This was partially
corrected by Parsons’s students and their students, when, for example,
they investigated present-day liturgical rules and procedures (in the case
of Robert Bellah) or interpreted social crises and scandals (Watergate, the
outbreak of war) as forms of contemporary collective effervescence (Jeffrey
Alexander). Anthropology (in the sense of ethnology), meanwhile, made
much more of the transformative power of ritual (from Victor Turner to
Roy Rappaport).91
In France, the interwar era saw some very odd attempts to subject
Durkheim to a Nietzschean reading, and to apply his ritual theory to
the experience of war and violence (Collège de Sociologie). In the late
1930s, Roger Caillois undertook one of the most important attempts to
develop a theory of the sacred in order to come to grips with modern
phenomena—from festivals through holidays to war. He set great store in
comprehending the multifarious infringements of rules and crossings of
boundaries that occur during such events, or are caused by them, as more
than just the discharge of forces suppressed in everyday life and thus as
epiphenomena. Instead he viewed them as a return to a primal creative
state of chaos, and thus as the actualization of the mythical period of cre-
ation. This process, he contended, is of vital importance to the vitality of
collectives; without it, they will go the way of all flesh, that is, they will age
and their powers will fade, as familiar to individuals from their everyday
experience.92
Jürgen Habermas identified Durkheim and his theory of ritual as the
second classical source fueling his notion of a paradigm shift “from pur-
posive activity to communicative action.” Randall Collins, building on
Erving Goffman, interpreted even everyday interactional rituals, such as
greetings, in quasiphysical terms of the production and transfer of emo-
tional energy. I myself have attempted to explain the emergence of our value
commitments out of experiences of self-transcendence, but to undergird this
explanation with a far richer phenomenology of experiences and, far more
than Durkheim himself, to take account of the articulation of experiences as
well. This is partly intended to eliminate the secularist excesses in Durkheim’s
explanations of value change, as for example in the case of the emergence
and dissemination of human rights. The relationship between individual
and collective experience, and between experience and interpretation, is
far more complicated than it seems in Durkheim’s work, though his theory
undoubtedly remains an important building block for every theory of ideal
formation.93
The Persistence of Ritual
Even radical exponents of the theory of secularization, who consider religion

a thing of the past and rule out the possibility that present-day, newly emer-
ging religions might have a future, cannot declare the fact of ideal formation
obsolete. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries generated much that was
new in this field: from the undeniably creative synthesis of nationalism and
socialism in fascism, through Leninism, to the surprising mass spread of the
value of self-realization, above all in the wake of the cultural upheavals of
the 1960s. This is only to mention secular phenomena, while leaving to one
side for now religious ones, such as the emergence and tremendous expan-
sion of Pentecostalism and of political Islam in all its forms. But if ideal for-
mation never ceases to occur, we can do more than just take this fact as an
anthropological given. We can also take it as a point of departure when it

comes to identifying the key desiderata of philosophical anthropology, an
anthropology equal to the problems of the present-day humanities and so-
cial sciences. What then comes into view are the consequences of an (often
quite unconscious) skepticism about ritual, or of the assumption of a histor-
ical tendency toward progressive deritualization.
We can see this, first of all, in the place of ritual and of Durkheimian ritual
theory in Jürgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. In his 1981
magnum opus, as is widely known, Habermas identified two thinkers as the
initiators of the paradigm shift “from purposive activity to communicative
action,” a shift he himself then did so much to expedite: George Herbert
Mead and Émile Durkheim. When it comes to Mead, this perspective makes
perfect sense. He was the scholar who, probably more consistently than any
one else at the time, brought out the constitutive role of corporeal social in-
teraction in the formation of the child’s self and even in the development of
her cognitive abilities. He thus foreshadowed, to a quite astonishing degree,
the findings of present-day research, such as that of Michael Tomasello.94 Yet
the identification of Durkheim at this central point in his book is surprising
and certainly not immediately plausible. In a negative sense, this classifica-
tion of Durkheim does make sense: the theory of ritual cannot be formulated
on the basis of a theory of action typified, on the utilitarian model, by indi-
vidual actors and their utility calculations or strategic objectives. Nor does
the theory of ritual fit snugly with a theory of normatively oriented action,
as it is focused not on an orientation toward existing norms (or values), but
on the emergence of new values, from which norms may then be derived.
Habermas thus sensed correctly that ritual theory requires more than these
theories of action, which he too criticized, were capable of doing.
It is also true that the collective states of excitement in ritual in Durkheim’s
sense represent a highly intensive form of human communication. But when
Habermas refers to communicative action, he does not, of course, mean all
human communication in equal measure. Instead what he has in mind is
rational-argumentational discourse as what he believes to be the highest
form of communicative action. As a result, other forms of communication
are degraded to mere preliminary stages of true communicative action. It is
thus only consistent if Habermas integrates Durkheim’s ritual theory into his
framework by, as it were, immobilizing it in accordance with secularization
theory. “The linguistification of the sacred” is Habermas’s famous phrase. He
does not, in the first instance, mean the problems involved in the linguistic
articulation of the meanings of experiences of sacredness, but rather the pro-

gressive transition, for example, in the functions of social integration from
ritual to language, the “intersubjective recognition of validity claims raised in
speech acts.”95 It is not really clear here whether we are dealing only with the
opening up of a space to problematize institutions—institutions, however,
that are certainly still grounded in sacredness—or literally with the replace-
ment of ritual and sacredness by discussion and rational argumentation.
Durkheim would have been comfortable with the emphasis on discussion
and rational argumentation as characteristics of a modern system of values,
but he regarded their valorization as dogmas and the associated practices as
rituals of the new sacralization of every person and her or his autonomy.
However, anyone assuming that Habermas’s change of mind, which
made such a public splash, regarding the legitimacy of religiously grounded
arguments in public discourse, and his partial shift away from secularization
theory, are bound to have made an impact on his thinking that extends to
the anthropological grounding of his theory of action, will be disappointed.
Certainly, his interest in religious history has increased. But even in his most
recent work he ascribes to the sacred and to ritual—what he now calls the “sa-
cral complex”—a merely secondary role.96 For him, in the history of human
development, the switch to symbols as the medium of sociality generates a
fragility of social relations, a fragility that must then be managed through
ritual. Hence, the switch to symbols seems primary, while the management
of the problems of a symbolically mediated form of social integration seems
secondary. Hence, we are left with the notion of the supplanting of rituals and
the ousting of a “sacral complex” that he continues to describe as “archaic.”
In reflecting upon his action theory’s fit with the theory of ritual, then,
Habermas posited premises rooted in secularization theory. Had he not
done so, it would already have become clear by this point that Durkheim’s
theory of ritual cannot be classed as a forerunner of the theory of commu-
nicative action, but in fact requires a far more radical revision of our ideas
about human action. Like play and all creativity, ritual requires a theory of
action that does not revolve around setting goals, mastery of the body, and
individual autonomy, but instead the opening of the boundaries of the self,
the release of bodily control, and a readiness to imagine new and attractive
realities.97 Empirically, too, the notion that ritual is something archaic is ex-
plicable only if one disregards key aspects of reality in the most astonishing
way. Perhaps a future without religion is conceivable, but is one without
music and dance and theater, to mention other nonrational forms of human
communication? Not to put too fine a point on it, but do we envisage a future
without sexual interaction? Do we wish to regard all of these too merely as
preliminary stages in an evolutionary process culminating in discourse?
Randall Collins has developed out of Durkheim’s theory of ritual an orig-
inal theory of sexual interaction as a “ritual of love,” with highly persuasive
results.98 Akin to the religious ritual as described by Durkheim, in sexual
interaction shared physical presence is required, intensive concentration
on one’s own and the other’s body, and a sharp boundary with those not in-
volved. As in all rituals, we find ritualized ways of increasing tension and
synchronization of rhythmic movements. This shared, extraquotidian ex-
perience gives rise to an emotional attachment to one’s partner, even if love
was not the starting point of the sexual interaction. This intensive experi-
ence then radiates out to encompass “sacred” objects, through which the re-
lationship is symbolized—above all, of course, every part of one’s partner’s
body. There is nothing archaic about any of this. In fact, we might say that the
ritual quality of sexual interaction has increased as civilizing processes have
advanced.
Hence, if it makes sense to assume the persistence of ritual and of the sa-
credness to which it gives rise, rather than the linguistification of the sacred,99
then we might even consider the role of ritual in the emergence of language.
Anthropologically speaking, it is by no means obvious that we ought to as-
cribe to ritual merely compensatory functions for a sociality that operates via
linguistic communication. To the contrary, we can in fact attribute to ritual
itself a crucial role in the emergence of language. This is just what Robert
Bellah tried to do in his 2011 magnum opus Religion in Human Evolution.100
Here he draws on the ideas of cognitive scientist Terrence Deacon, though he
combines them with other research in such a way that ritual becomes under-
standable as an “external support system for language.”101 But he also draws
on studies by evolutionary musicologists and bases his remarks on the con-
cept of a “musilanguage” (Steven Brown). What this means is that we ought
not to imagine the emergence of language and of music as two separate pro-
cesses. Rhythmic speech and singing, ritual repetition and the resulting re-
dundancy generate symbols that are fixed in the memory. What eyewitnesses
to the aborigines’ ritual—our example at the start of this chapter—dismissed
as howling and noise was surely far more than that; Bellah refers to “speech
before language.”102
These brief remarks might do more than clarify the anthropologically
problematic consequences of a perspective determined by contemporary
ritual-skeptic intellectual positions. They might also indicate that a “view of

the human being” liberated from conventional constrictions can lead to pro-
ductive points of departure. The empirical fact of ceaseless ideal formation
seems to me one of these. Here the imperative is to reflect upon ritual and
other forms of acting and experiencing—of which this particular point of
departure makes us aware—in light of their anthropological conditions of
possibility. The key idea of this chapter, to conclude, is that ritual creates a
controlled environment that temporarily suspends the mechanisms of everyday
life. Ideal states can thus be rendered experienceable, in such a way that indi-
viduals remember them as intensive experiences when they have returned to
the realm of the quotidian.103
4
Multiple Forms of Ideal Formation or
Process of Disenchantment?
Attempts at Synthesis by Ernst Troeltsch
and Max Weber
Our run through the basic constellations of the scholarly engagement with
religion in the three disciplines of history, psychology, and sociology was
intended to demonstrate that the empirically controlled and theoretically
consistent, and thus “scientific,” investigation of religion is in fact possible.
Certainly, their authors’ specific religious or antireligious motives are unmis-
takably at play in every contribution in this field. In most cases, however,
their confrontation with empirical and theoretical issues points beyond their
initial assumptions. This expanded perspective may not be embraced by the
author of a particular contribution, but generally characterizes its reception.
Our discussion so far has also sought to lay the groundwork for an appro-
priate understanding of religion, in such a way that we grasp why this de-
veloping understanding is superior to certain “common-sense” ideas. Here
religion is understood through a focus on experience, though by no means
restricted to the experiences of individuals “in their solitude.” These solitary
experiences have emerged as always already historically situated, communi-
cated through symbols and embodied in practices.
Of course, our account so far cannot provide the basis for a comprehensive
history of the scholarship on religion.1 Such a history could not restrict itself
to initial constellations in the various disciplines, but would have to describe
the rich body of knowledge generated and accumulated by researchers over
the course of time. This applies above all to the historiography of religion,
which not only massively increased the corpus of knowledge concerning
the diverse array of religions but also confronted Christianity itself with its
own internal diversity and temporal dependency. A comprehensive account
would also have to show that, in the discipline of psychology for example,
paradigms gained ascendancy that make a productive engagement with
Multiple Forms of Ideal Formation 89
religion virtually impossible. One such case was behaviorism, which dom-
inated academic psychology in the mid-twentieth century and had so little
time for the “mental” dimension that matters “spiritual” were pushed entirely
beyond the pale. Beyond the academy, psychology was generally dominated
by psychoanalysis, whose founder Sigmund Freud had conceived of it as a
radically secularist project. Despite all the talk of “illusion,” however, psy-
chology always featured countervailing currents and attempts to find ways
of relating the discipline’s theoretical arsenal more productively to religious
experience. If we include in the sociological study of religion the efforts of
anthropologists, here too we find a tremendous accumulation of knowledge.
Ultimately, a comprehensive account would also have to incorporate the dis-
cipline of theology (in its various confessional or religious manifestations),
particularly in those cases in which theology explicitly sees itself as an ac-
ademic discipline among others, within a university setting, and effectively
finds itself in a process of continuous exchange with developments in the
other disciplines that take an interest in religion.2
Around 1900, the scholarly engagement with religion must have seemed
highly dynamic, profoundly exciting, but also fragmentary and unpro-
ductive when it came to attempts to analyze the contemporary world. The
conclusions scholars drew from this research as they sought to assess the
present-day religious situation and envisage future trends were often pal-
pably idiosyncratic— more an expression of their antecedent personal
attitudes than the result of an evaluation of the existing body of research.
This was a situation crying out for new attempts at synthesis. The present
chapter is concerned with the two most important and most ambitious such
attempts, undertaken in the early twentieth century by Protestant theologian
and historian of Christianity Ernst Troeltsch, and lawyer and political econ-
omist Max Weber, a man destined to become one of the classic figures of so-
ciology. Neither of these scholars can be easily pigeonholed into a particular
discipline. Both were so driven, indeed obsessed, by substantive issues that
their work transcends disciplinary boundaries. Ernst Troeltsch himself went
so far as to assert that he had established a “new discipline” with his work on
the history of Christianity.3 Talk of the amalgamation of disciplines in this
context may sound too much like the self-promoting academic jargon typical
of the present day. For Troeltsch and Weber, “interdisciplinarity” was not an
ideal to which they aspired independently of their object of investigation or a
mere assertion. It was the inevitable consequence of the problems with which
they were concerned.
These two major attempts at synthesis by no means developed independ-

ently of one another. At least between 1897 and 1915, when they were both
living in Heidelberg, Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber engaged in an inten-
sive intellectual exchange, which exercised a tremendous influence on the
thinking of both.4 In fact, at the time, but especially later, some observers
completely failed to recognize the profound differences in their attempts at
synthesis. These differences are central to the arguments put forward in the
present book. For the most part, therefore, I present the fundamentals of their
proposed syntheses separately, with a focus, in the case of Troeltsch, on one
of his major works, and, in that of Weber, on his diagnosis of advancing “dis-
enchantment,” which is scattered across many different texts. Other writings
by Troeltsch and other aspects of the work of Weber, therefore, concern us
here only when they help us relativize or expand on their interpretations.5
I repeatedly draw on the understanding of religion that has emerged from
this book so far to help evaluate whether a particular attempt at synthesis is
credible or not.
A Historical Sociology of Christianity
Ernst Troeltsch’s Social Teachings and the Effects

of Religious Innovations
If we consider Ernst Troeltsch’s prodigious oeuvre, two voluminous books

stand out. It is here that Troeltsch, whose thought showed a repeated ten-
dency toward fragmentation, came closest to realizing the project that was
inherent in his work and that best corresponded with his own standards.
In his late magnum opus Historicism and Its Problems,6 Troeltsch—at least
this is my contention—blazed a trail out of the relativistic dangers of histori-
cism. In making this claim, of course, I contradict all those who declare that
Troeltsch failed in his endeavors or who even propagate the myth that he
himself acknowledged his failure and resigned himself to the impossibility of
the task itself. The core of my interpretation, as set out in detail in my book on
the history of human rights,7 is the thesis that, in his observations on history
and values, Troeltsch’s point of departure is the “fact of ideal formation,” in
other words, the empirical fact that ideals necessarily emerge in historico-
social life. These ideals differ fundamentally from mere assertions of fact, but
also from norms. In methodological terms, this point of departure—that is,
the fact of ideal formation—requires study of the dynamic processes through

which such ideals emerge, as well as reflexive recourse to these processes of
emergence, if we are even to grasp what such an ideal (or “value”) entails in
the first place.
In his great book on historicism, Troeltsch was chiefly concerned with
fundamental issues in the philosophy of history and not—yet—with pro-
viding a concrete analysis of the conflict of ideals in which contemporary
Europe, that is, Europe after World War I, found itself. The material inter-
pretation of history Troeltsch had in mind for a second volume, the “cultural
synthesis” he proposed to produce, was never to see the light of day due to his
early and sudden death. I believe, however, that Troeltsch’s essays on intellec-
tual history and the sociology of religion, published by Hans Baron in 1925,8
provide us with a roadmap for the next step that Troeltsch would have taken
in his work.
But the fact that we lack Troeltsch’s mature material analysis of history,
and that there are therefore no texts available that transparently inter-
weave his methodological and substantive ideas, has both advantages and
disadvantages. The advantage is that the methodological reflections in his
book on historicism are set out in such a way that they apply to all ideals, and
by no means just to religious ones, let alone solely to Christian ones. After
all, there would have been, and would be, no need for a “cultural synthesis”
if Europe had not found itself—and did not find itself still—in a field of
tensions spanning heterogeneous traditions and tendencies. The disadvan-
tage, however, is that we are unable to trace in detail how Troeltsch, in light
of his fundamental methodological ideas, would have approached, or would
have liked others to approach, the analysis of a specific (religious) tradition.
When it comes to Troeltsch’s other great book, the almost one-thousand-
page-long The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches,9 the advantages and
disadvantages are reversed. Certainly, the empirical object here is enormous,
but it is clearly demarcated and unambiguously identifiable. Troeltsch aims
to provide a sociological history or a historical sociology of Christianity. In
this book, however, there is no explicit discussion of his method, excepting
a number of lengthy footnotes here and there. This method becomes a little
clearer in a number of other texts but remains highly obscure even there;
even for the author himself, during this period his method was perhaps intu-
itively plausible rather than something of which he was fully aware.
In what follows, I seek to bring out this implicit methodology in Troeltsch’s
historical sociology of Christianity. I do so because it entails a pioneering
achievement that present-day scholars could and should build on as they

explore topics beyond the history of Christianity, such as the sociological
analysis of other religions and secular value traditions. In making this claim,
I seek to restore Troeltsch’s status as a classical figure of the social sciences.
I say “restore” because early retrospectives on German sociology, for ex-
ample in the work of Karl Mannheim and Otto Hintze in the 1920s,10 identi-
fied Troeltsch self-evidently as one of the classical figures of the discipline, in
the same breath as Max Weber. A familiarity with Troeltsch’s Social Teachings
was still constantly evident in the work of Talcott Parsons, the leading soci-
ological theorist in the mid-twentieth century. In Parsons’s late work, when
he himself sought to write a sociology of Christianity, Troeltsch’s strong in-
fluence is unmissable.11 Yet in the work of Parsons’s students—even the most
outstanding among them, such as Robert Bellah and Shmuel Eisenstadt, and
in the writings of successors such as Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann,
Weber is omnipresent while there is very little trace of Troeltsch or none
at all.
The crudest expression of the erroneous assessment that eventually took
hold is found in the work of influential American historian of ideas H. Stuart
Hughes, in his book on the development of European social theory between
1890 and 1930, Consciousness and Society. Here he described Troeltsch’s
monumental book on Christianity as “a cruder, more incoherent, and infi-
nitely longer version of the same kind of study of the interplay of economic
and religious forces on which Weber was simultaneously working.” Despite
its author’s erudition, Hughes contended, the book was essentially unclear;
Troeltsch, allegedly, mostly got his categories from Max Weber, but deployed
them in a merely mechanical fashion, as if he had not entirely understood
them. In Troeltsch’s work, Hughes asserted, Weber’s meticulous analyses
of the autonomy of religion and social structure and the linkages between
them became the mere assertion of a back-and-forth process, while Weber’s
typology of the organizational forms of Christianity appeared forced and
contrived in Troeltsch’s hands. Furthermore, Hughes averred, in contrast to
Weber, as a Christian Troeltsch had been unable to examine Christianity with
the same detachment as he did religion in China; his work thus alternated,
in the most unedifying way, between a lofty ethical tone and tormented
insecurity.12
It is hard to imagine an interpretation more saturated by error, a worse
display of misunderstanding and ignorance.13 It is a fact, however, that this
idea of Troeltsch as the biased theologian, clearly inferior to Weber, the
radically reality-oriented sociologist, has become established in such a way

as to distort the reception of Troeltsch’s work. This can only be rectified if
we shed more light on the fundamentals of Troeltsch’s methodological ap-
proach and its great relevance, even as a sociological alternative to Weber.
Of course, we must bear in mind here that Troeltsch’s book on Christianity
cannot be straightforwardly placed alongside his book on historicism, as if
the former entailed the fully adequate application of a method that is merely
explicated in the latter. To adopt such a perspective would be to disregard the
fact that in the ten years between the two books Troeltsch may have devel-
oped his thinking. Yet this is exactly what happened. First,14 he progressively
de-essentialized his ideas about Christianity, and second, he moved beyond
the remnants of neo-idealism in his conception of history and action. These
developments are clearly inherent in his early work, but as we shall see, they
had not yet always been consistently thought through or formulated with
conceptual clarity.
The specific features of Troeltsch’s approach in the Social Teachings are set
out here in seven steps. First (1) I elucidate the background to Troeltsch’s
sociologization of the history of dogma, before (2) bringing out the crucial
role of the “fact of ideal formation” to his methodological approach. Next (3),
working on the assumption that ideals are not fundamentally cognitive in na-
ture, I set out the possible ways in which we might grasp the specific features
of a religion and (4) seek to unpack the complexity of the relationship be-
tween ideal and reality in the history of religions. This furnishes us with a
new perspective on the typology of the organizational forms of Christianity
(5), the analysis of the effects of religious innovations (6), and the influence
of forms of political and social organization on the formation of religious
communities (7). Taken together, these analytical steps should illuminate the
character of Troeltsch’s impressive attempt at synthesis.
The first step must be to clarify why Troeltsch pursued what was, in impor-
tant respects, a sociological project in the first place. We must explain why, as
a theologian, he declined to “stick to his trade,” namely the history of dogma,
in his examination of the “social teachings” of the Christian churches and
groups. The title of his book is unhelpful here, and the same goes for that of
his great book on historicism. Historicism and Its Problems sounds like an ex-
amination of the problems characteristic of a specific school within the disci-
pline of history. The “social teachings of the Christian churches and groups,”
to directly translate the original German title of the former book, might
suggest a concern solely with a specific part of the history of dogma, one,
furthermore, that many theologians would be likely to classify as fairly mar-

ginal. And it is entirely misleading when the English translation replaces the
plural “social teachings” with the singular “social teaching” and wholly omits
to mention the Christian “groups” in the title,15 as if there were one uniform
social teaching of Christianity that has merely unfolded across time—when
in fact it is the internal diversity of Christianity that Troeltsch brings out,
enjoining us to recognize the “relative historical legitimacy” of every “var-
iant” of Christianity, rather than condemning it as a deviation from the cor-
rect path.16
We can discern three reasons for Troeltsch’s sociologization of the history
of dogma. Two of them, while not trivial, are presumably uncontroversial
today. It is the third that entails the most radical potential for innovation.
The idea that the history of dogma is simply impossible to understand un-
less it is embedded in social history is probably uncontested in the present
day. In the absence of such embedding, theological controversies of the past
can easily be ridiculed as pointless hair-splitting and may be taken to exem-
plify how doing away with religion is bound to liberate human reason. In an
early review of the second volume of Reinhold Seeberg’s Protestant Lehrbuch
der Dogmengeschichte, a textbook on the history of dogma, and as yet devoid
of any reference to sociology, Troeltsch already points out that the conven-
tional history of dogma—whatever its confessional manifestation—will in-
evitably be eliminated by the “new historical method.” The reason for this, he
explains, is that the radical awareness of the historicity of everything human
expressed in this method could no longer recognize the church as an “un-
changing, unitary, supernatural subject” and in fact, Troeltsch states, as a
rule those possessed of this awareness no longer recognized it as such, or
only with a great deal of coyness. This new historical awareness “has ren-
dered everything fluid, supple and relative, and thus placed emphasis on the
major cultural and institutional realities that underpin the consistency of the
particular body of religious ideas dominating within a specific area.”17 When
Troeltsch engaged constructively with the history of Christianity, this his-
torical insight was bound to push him toward cultural and above all social
history.
Troeltsch himself clearly identifies his second motive in the introduction
to the Social Teachings. His historical examination was partly impelled by the
fact that he considered the attempts made during his era to put forward a
Christian social teaching for the present to be woefully inadequate. In the
absence of an in-depth analysis of contemporary social problems, this was
never going to change. Troeltsch did not pursue this task with the aid of a
generalizing concept such as “modernity” or any other monothematic short-
hand formula, as often occurs at present,18 but instead identified a field of
tensions spanning capitalist, bureaucratic, militaristic, and other tendencies
as he sought to characterize the problems of the present. Along with his theo-
logical colleagues’ ignorance of sociology, Troeltsch also excoriated them for
failing to truly recognize the otherness of past forms of Christianity or this
religion’s broad array of pasts. For him, the prerequisite for recognizing this
otherness was reflection upon the social-historical constellations in which
Christians and their communities had existed in different epochs.
A century after the rise of the social sciences, and given the widespread
sociologization of the general consciousness, these two motives no longer
seem very spectacular. But this does not apply to the third impulse. In
Troeltsch’s own words, this consists of the recognition that there is an “inner
connection of each formulated dogma to a fellowship group more or less af-
fected by it.”19 Just what this means can only be explained later. But it is already
clear at this point that what Troeltsch has in mind is a complex relationship
between dogmas and social forms, one that defies all base-superstructure
schemas or factor models according to which, for example, religious and so-
cial factors impinge on one another in the manner of an external effect.
Troeltsch’s book on the history of Christianity thus distances itself from
both the conventional theological history of dogma and from materialist
explanations, with Troeltsch generally identifying Karl Kautsky, the leading
social democratic–Marxist theorist of the time, as representative of the latter.
He not only reproaches Kautsky for making various empirical blunders, but
also vehemently rejects every account of religious history in which religion
is interpreted merely as ideological camouflage for the economic, social, and
political forces that are truly at work. Such a notion of the epiphenomenal
character of religion is profoundly secularist, and Troeltsch already refuted it
in detail in his great 1896 essay “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion.”20
At this point, we may get the impression that Troeltsch is contradicting
himself as he engages in a battle on two fronts. He never ceases to point out
to materialists the “dialectics” of religious ideas, while always highlighting
to historians of ideas that ideas do not give rise to and develop out of them-
selves. Vis-à-vis the materialists, he disputes that religious movements
can be straightforwardly interpreted in terms of class struggle. Yet he calls
on historians of dogma not to ignore the affinities between specific class
positions, forms of social organization, and religious dogmas.
The key to exiting this unproductive opposition between idealist and ma-
terialist explanations is to embrace an understanding of all social processes
in terms of human action, a way forward identified by Max Weber and a
number of his contemporaries in France and the United States. In the late
1930s, Talcott Parsons thus justified the canonization of these thinkers as the
true founders of the modern social sciences.21 I believe that in this respect
Troeltsch was moving in the same direction as Weber, but that if we look
more closely, his understanding of human action differs significantly from
that of Weber. Crucial to Weber’s work is his orientation toward the under-
standing of economic action referred to today as “rational action” and toward
neo-Kantian philosophies, which causes him difficulties when he seeks to
accommodate—and grasp conceptually—within his own typology of action
certain forms of action of crucial importance to his sociology of religion and
domination, such as charismatic action.22 In the work of Troeltsch, mean-
while, what dominates is his orientation to that which is now known (in the
work of Isaiah Berlin and Charles Taylor) as the “expressivist” conception of
action, whose roots lie not in economics or in Kant, but in the work of Herder,
Hamann, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey. Within this frame of ref-
erence, an idea such as charismatic innovations is not only straightforward to
formulate but makes perfect sense.
In the present context I am unable to enlarge upon all the things that
follow, theoretically and empirically, from the expressivist model of ac-
tion or to elucidate how aptly it furnishes us with a consistent picture of
Troeltsch’s thought. As the second step in the presentation of my argument,
I thus limit myself to emphasizing that this is the seedbed for the idea, men-
tioned at the beginning of this chapter, of the fact of ideal formation. What
Troeltsch sees at work in religious history are creative ruptures, and figures
whose thought and feeling cannot possibly be regarded “as the product of
class struggles and of economic factors.”23 Three such ruptures dominate his
history of Christianity: that ushered in by Jesus himself; then Paul, whom
Troeltsch identifies as the true founder of the church; and—hardly surprising
for a Protestant theologian—Martin Luther. But in Troeltsch’s own list, the
status of authentic force for religious innovation is also granted to “Origen,
Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, Bonaventura, Luther,
Calvin”24 and, this at least is my impression, also Pope Gregory VII and John
Wycliffe. In attempting to shed light on Troeltsch’s method, it is of course not
particularly important which figures he himself examines in empirical de-
tail or emphasizes. When Troeltsch was criticized for beginning his account
with Jesus but disregarding the latter’s Jewish background, this seems to me
unfair in that every account has to begin somewhere, and in other texts, on
the Hebrew prophets for example,25 he showed considerable interest in this
background. It is other issues that are methodologically crucial, above all the
relationship between the thesis of creative ruptures in religious history and
the supranatural claims inherent in religious innovations, along with the cor-
rect approach to identifying and describing such innovative leaps.
When it comes to the first issue, for Troeltsch the supranatural claims of
religious innovators or existing institutions can only ever play a role in the
work of historians, psychologists, and sociologists of religion as empirical
facts—in the sense that it is human beings or institutions that make such
claims and other human beings who recognize them. For him, this is the
fundamental characteristic of the modern scholarly study of religion: this
scholarship itself can never couch its arguments in terms of “miracles”
or “revelations.” But Troeltsch does not mean this in a secularist sense, as
if scholarship, by describing human experiences of “miracles” and “reve-
lation,” shows that these are nothing but human experiences. Nor does he
mean this in a defensive sense, as if theology, in a process of gradual retreat
in the face of modern science, must concede that certain aspects of the his-
tory of Christianity, contrary to its traditional self-understanding, are merely
human, while a final supranatural core must be defended and can be saved.
On the contrary, in his approach and that of all those of like mind, such as
William James and Wilhelm Dilthey, he sees a method “without prejudice for
or against”26 religion, a step beyond the alternatives of apologetics and sec-
ularism, one capable, under the transformed conditions of the time, of cre-
ating a new consciousness of the meaning of religious beliefs and symbols.
Here the possibility of the scholarly study of religion implies a fair degree
of emancipation from confessional dogmatics within Christianity. Troeltsch
describes differences between Catholicism and Protestantism in a bal-
anced way and ends his discussion in the Social Teachings at the point where
assessments of a specific feature of a confession interpret it as a “limitation”
or “eternal truth.”27
Just as Dilthey had declared the “combination of psychological and
comparative-historical insights” the royal road for every branch of the “sci-
ences of human-societal conditions,”28 Troeltsch advocates the same ap-
proach for scholarship on religion, though this is not intended to neutralize
religious questions but to open up new ways of answering them individu-
ally. The psychology of religion, most brilliantly elaborated in Troeltsch’s
view in the work of William James, makes it possible to forge connections

with present-day religious experiences—while the historiography of reli-
gion facilitates a new understanding of the ancient symbols of the religious
traditions. In contrast to James and Dilthey, however, psychology and history
are not enough for Troeltsch. He believes it necessary to bring sociology into
play as well, and not because it was becoming fashionable at the time.
The reason he draws on sociology when analyzing the history of dogma
in fact lies far deeper. In a footnote to the Social Teachings in which Troeltsch
distances his approach from that of Adolf von Harnack in his “brilliant
History of Dogma,” this becomes very clear. Certainly, Troeltsch tells us,
Harnack himself had overcome the notion of the mere “dialectic develop-
ment” of ideas of their own accord and embraced psychological explanations
of idea formation; but it is crucial to go further still and incorporate socio-
logical research and questions, and for a substantive reason: only they re-
flect the significance of law and ritual to the development of dogma. “Law”
and “ritual” must not, Troeltsch underlines, be hived off from the history of
dogma and relinquished to church law or the history of religious worship, be-
cause it is in these phenomena that the “chief roots of dogma” are to be found.
The worship of Christ and the Christian Sacrament of Holy Communion

preceded the doctrine of Christ in the Early Church, and to a great extent
conditioned it. The same holds good of the law of the Church. A purely in-
tellectual conception of the Faith is much less important than people think.
When the churches are studied sociologically, however, it is then precisely
that it becomes plain that the cultus provides the real means of unity, and
the system of law the form of unity; it is only natural that these fundamental
sociological elements should be reflected above all in dogma, and that
the purely logical theoretical speculative elements rather accompany the
whole system as the special concern and interest of the theological experts.
A purely intellectual religion in which worship and Church order are of
merely incidental significance only came in with the rise of Protestantism.29
This quotation brings out not just Troeltsch’s reasons for engaging with so-
ciology, but also his determination not to project Protestantism, as an “in-
tellectual religion,” back into the history of Christianity or of religion as a
whole. Even for Protestantism itself, in many of its lived forms, this would
in fact be inappropriate. As is well known, when it comes to the crucial
idea that the sole specifically Christian “primal dogma,” the “dogma of the
Divinity of Christ,”30 “arose out of the worship of Christ, and this again de-
veloped out of the fact that the new spiritual community felt the necessity for
meeting together,” Troeltsch bases himself on Adolf Deißmann;31 this idea
is also elaborated by Wilhelm Bousset.32 This notion is consonant with the
core impulse of the early sociology of religion, which leads—as described in
chapter 3—from Fustel de Coulanges’s work on Greco-Roman polytheism,
through Robertson Smith’s analysis of the “religion of the Semites,” to Émile
Durkheim’s classic analysis of the “elementary forms of religious life” in the
totemism of the Australian aborigines and the North American Indians.
This is the hypothesis of the primacy of ritual over dogma in the history of
religion.
Troeltsch’s aside that only “theological experts” were interested in the in-
tellectual systematization of a religion already hinted at an understanding
of religion inherent in this hypothesis. From this perspective, the basic reli-
gious ideas are not conscious, and often remain implicit; the shared cultural
ideas, meanwhile, Troeltsch believes, are the crucial and primary elements.
Methodologically, however, this signifies that a scholarly approach to re-
ligious phenomena entails observing them at their point of emergence or,
if they have long existed, to imagine them in their status nascendi in the
manner of a thought experiment.
My contention is that in his historical sociology of Christianity, Troeltsch
did in fact attempt to proceed in this way. His approach is thus very close to
that of Émile Durkheim, rather than that of Max Weber. Troeltsch’s account
of the emergence of the “church” as a social form of Christianity is so stimu-
lating precisely because, rather than taking the existence of the institution of
the “church” for granted, he “defamiliarizes” it, thus making us aware of the
improbability of its existence and its distinctiveness from a comparative reli-
gious perspective.33 But Troeltsch proceeds in exactly the same way when it
comes to other religious innovations. Hence, following lengthy expositions
setting out his argument that the idea of an internally coherent Christian
culture with a clear form was alien to antiquity, he asks how, in the Middle
Ages, “this ideal [was] evolved during the Middle Ages, out of the tradition
of the Primitive Church, out of the new situation, and out of the new intellec-
tual movements.”34 In line with this, Troeltsch treats the teachings of Thomas
Aquinas not as a quasi-timeless systematization of the fundamental Christian
ideas that had finally been achieved and was henceforth unsurpassable,
but as a “complicated historical product” with numerous prerequisites.35
Likewise, he presents the Reformation not as a cleansing of Christianity of
excrescences and a return to origins, but as an “inward change, and a fur-

ther development within Christian thought itself [toward] new ideals in the
Christian doctrine of Society.”36 The same goes for his account of the emer-
gence and Christian reception of natural law, the emergence of an “affirm-
ation of ordinary life” (Charles Taylor)37 in the late Middle Ages and early
modern period, and the emergence of ideals of asceticism. In each case, what
we are dealing with is the appearance of new ideals and not, as materialist-
sociological explanations contend, with shifts in an existing “material social
ideal” in the direction of the transcendent. This is “an entire transformation
of values; there is no idea of calling in Divine power to establish an organiza-
tion which men are unable to effect in their own strength.”38
The assumption of actual processes of ideal formation and the method-
ological return of existing ideals to their nascent state allow Troeltsch to
build a bridge to the typically sociological question as to the significance of
social strata or classes within religion. Ideals do not, of course, emerge in a
vacuum devoid of classes or class interests. But thinking in terms of base and
superstructure or factors is a woefully inadequate means of investigating the
political-economic framework of ideal formation, the new ideal’s affinities
with social realities, the reshaping of the ideal as it is received within different
social milieus, and the differing community-forming potential of different
ideals. This amounts to an entire program of research in its own right. Hence,
Troeltsch explains the “appeal to the lower classes” in early Christianity and
its attitude to them not “as the alleged product of a social process, but simply
as one which has arisen out of the nature of a new religious movement.”39
Troeltsch believes that only the educated classes responded to critique and
speculation, while “it is the lower classes which do the really creative work,
forming communities on a genuine religious basis.”40 From the second cen-
tury on, Christianity had undoubtedly penetrated the educated classes and
come into contact with their culture of reflection. What is remarkable, how-
ever, is that rather than leading to the demise of Christianity, this process de-
veloped it further. Here the process of ideal formation is not romanticized in
idealist fashion, but is subject to sober sociological analysis.
This brings me to the third step in the elaboration of my argument. If de-
veloping ideals are not fundamentally cognitive in nature and always to some
extent elude critical-speculative explication, how are we to define the spe-
cific features of a particular religion, such as Christianity, in the first place?
Troeltsch certainly attempts such a reflexive definition, and in fact no theo
logian or believing Christian can entirely avoid defining their faith in this
way. But Troeltsch is an “expressivist” and knows that every attempted artic-
ulation is inadequate and always tentative compared to the beating inspira-
tional heart of religion. He often uses expressions that we would be unlikely
to deploy today to convey this problem of articulation. He refers to “instinc-
tively formed” ideals,41 to the situating of fundamental religious ideas in
the “unconscious,”42 but it is clear what he means. He is seeking to express
that dogmas in a religion are “fixed elements induced by general conditions
and changes, elements that arise and pass away and, above all, that are cor-
rectly understood only if one also takes account of what they do not state and
presuppose as self-evident or what lives alongside them as practiced pop-
ular religion.”43 Troeltsch is so self-reflective that he even recognizes in this
way of thinking, which he also calls “critical symbolism,”44 an affinity with
spiritualist traditions; for him, this mode of thought is a turning point in the
history of the self-understanding of Christianity. As a result, he moves ever
further away from the search for an “essence” of Christianity. This is what
I meant when I referred earlier to the advancing “de-essentialization” of his
conception of Christianity. At the very least, this essence must be conceived
as something other than a pure form, given at the point of origin, or a fixed
telos of Christianity.
With all these caveats, Troeltsch provides two definitions in order to gain
initial purchase on the character of Christianity: universalism and individ-
ualism. Universalism signifies “the emergence of a new ideal of humanity,
arising out of the destruction of the militaristic and polytheistic nationalist
and conquering states” (of antiquity), one geared toward humanity in its en-
tirety.45 What Troeltsch means by “individualism” is an “ideal of a humanity
based on spiritual freedom and fellowship, in which tyranny, law, war, and
force are unknown, . . . due to the development of a purified and deepened
faith in God, which arose over against the polytheistic cults which sanc-
tioned the existing social order with its basis of force.”46 Troeltsch is aware
that this dual definition is still insufficient. First of all, these two character-
istics certainly do not apply solely to Christianity. He himself also attributes
them to the Stoics and “the other religious phenomena of late antiquity of a
similar nature (which research must yet illuminate further for us).”47 In light
of research carried out over the last few decades on the so-called Axial Age or
“axial civilizations,” universalism at least must also be ascribed to Buddhism
and Confucianism.48 Forms of religious individualism too are present
in these religious traditions, and even the ancient polytheisms cannot be
reduced entirely to cults of family and state. Here Troeltsch’s knowledge is
restricted to Christianity to a far greater extent than in the case of Weber,

though he constantly relates Christianity to the effective history of the Stoics
in the history of natural law. It is here that his interest in a history of “uni-
versalism,” which is more than a history of Christianity, finds its clearest
expression. Second, when it comes to the characterization of Christianity,
“universalism” and “individualism” must be joined by the most difficult-to-
grasp element, namely the ideal, originating in the Jewish tradition, of the
love of God and love of one’s neighbor, “the elevation of the souls of men and
their fusion in the Love of God.”49 For Troeltsch, it is in being seized by this
ideal that the deepest inspirational and motivational core of Christianity lies.
This ideal is far from adequately articulated in such arid terms and requires
narratives, symbols, and real presence in forms of worship if it is to shape
people’s lives. In all its hues, it is an ideal whose relationship to social reality
is a difficult one. As an ideal it may become an “abiding possession,” but it is
also “always in permanent conflict with the realistic demands of the natural
instincts, with the needs of material existence, and with political and legal
authority.”50 Pointing out that Europe has not abandoned this ideal into the
twenty-first century, then, does not mean that it has realized it.51
The question is what the realization of this ideal within a particular social
reality would have looked like in the first place, and whether Christians have
even attempted to realize it. This question must, of course, be posed with re-
spect to all other “universalisms” of a religious or secular nature as well. It is
central to Troeltsch’s conception of Christianity—and this is the fourth step
in the development of my argument—that he by no means treats the history
of Christianity simply as a history of the clash between ideal and reality. This
would be too simple, for several reasons. The most important of these is that
we cannot necessarily think of ideals in “activist” terms, as an entreaty to
shape reality in line with the ideal and to benefit from the altered world in the
foreseeable future. The ideal may lie in the distant future, its realization inde-
pendent of human will. All that then remains to human beings is to prepare
for the coming change; they cannot bring it about: “Jesus began His public
ministry, it is true, by proclaiming the Kingdom of God as the great hope of
Redemption, and this Hope was cherished by the Early Christian Church as
a whole.” Troeltsch interprets this hope as the vision of an “ideal ethical and
religious situation, of a world entirely controlled by God, in which all the
values of pure spirituality would be recognized and appreciated at their true
worth.”52 This is in contrast to interpretations of the Gospel that envisage a
God-induced “perfect social order” or the consolation of the hereafter for
the destitute. Neither hopes of the hereafter nor temporal social conditions,
then, but rather the “Kingdom of God,” that is, redemption as “purely inward,
ethical and spiritual. . . . This is the foundation fact from which we have to
start.”53
This basic fact is more closely aligned with the possibility of rejecting and
devalorizing the world than with the active shaping of reality. Nor does this
change when the expectation that divinely wrought change will occur in
the near future is disappointed. Even in the case of Paul we merely find “the
duty of the recognition and use of social phenomena as organizations and
institutions—which did not come into existence without God’s permission
and which contain an element of good—mingled with a spirit of inner de-
tachment and independence, since, after all, these things belong to a per-
ishing world and are everywhere steeped in paganism.”54 Troeltsch certainly
sees both a radical “communism of love” as inherent in early Christianity,
along with a socially conservative limitation of activities to the formation of
Christian communities, but he does not find there the third possibility, so
easy for us today to imagine, namely the formation of social orders in accord-
ance with religious-ethical goals. Historically, in the first instance there is no
sign of an actual social ideal that acknowledges the importance of social or-
ders while not simply accepting them.
As with every Axial Age breakthrough, this changed over the course of
time. Robert Bellah contends that all these religious innovations entailed
a “utopian” potential, which makes its impact through the creation of new
institutions. These institutions are intended to transmit the innovation over
time and protect its adherents; they are “relaxed fields within the ‘gentle vio-
lence’ of established social orders and sometimes the not so gentle violence
in times of political turmoil.”55 As examples, he mentions the hereditary caste
of Brahmins in India, the Buddhist invention of monasticism, and the Greek
and Chinese “schools” of philosophy. This is the context in which we must
place what Troeltsch says about the church—and about other social forms
produced by Christianity.
Hence, it is not until the fifth step that we come to Troeltsch’s famous
typology of the social forms of Christianity. Like all universalist ideal
formations, Christianity cannot be fully incorporated into existing social or-
ganizations, but requires its ideal to be placed on a permanent organizational
basis. So it would be to profoundly underestimate the status of Troeltsch’s
church-sect-mysticism typology if we were to understand it merely as an at-
tempt to classify the organizational forms of Christianity. This is not just a
matter of bringing conceptual order to a large quantity of data, and somehow

providing an overview of the existing “Christian churches and groups,” as
the original book title calls them. Troeltsch has a far more ambitious goal in
mind. I have already mentioned that, as with ideals, he also imaginatively
returns institutions to their nascent state. The crucial point now is that,
with the help of this method, he thinks through the internal connection be-
tween the genesis of ideals and institutions, but not simply in the sense of
what Parsons called idealist “emanationism,” as if ideals (in and of them-
selves) generated institutions. Like Weber and Durkheim, Troeltsch thinks
in action-theoretical terms, though it must be conceded that his language in
the Social Teachings again and again sounds idealist-emanationist. It is not
ideals as such that produce institutions. Instead, in light of the difficulties
involved in realizing ideals, human beings create institutions geared toward
them, which themselves influence the transmission of the ideals and the po-
tential for their realization.
It is not necessary to present Troeltsch’s typology in all its detail here.
Others have already done so, and have also provided brilliant accounts of the
development of the typology in the work of Weber and Troeltsch.56 I can thus
limit myself to two characteristics that are of outstanding methodological
significance. The first lies in the fact that Troeltsch assumes a pluralism here
in the first place. In summing up his findings, the first point he makes is that
“it has become clear how little the Gospel and the Primitive Church shaped
the religious community itself from a uniform point of view.”57 This pluralism
of organizational forms is presented without judgment. Sects and the forma-
tion of spiritualist communities are not denounced as deviations from the
only true saving church, yet neither is the church (are the churches) as such
condemned from the standpoint of sects or mysticism as corrupt, decadent,
authoritarian, or whatever it might be. Every organizational form features a
certain “sociological logic” of its own. This nips in the bud every historical
teleology implying the exclusive validity of just one of these organizational
forms. From this vantage point, there are always bound to be tensions be-
tween the different organizational forms of Christianity. The historical de-
velopment of Christianity inevitably unfolds through antagonisms: if, out of
the original community of worship, a priestly-sacramental church emerges,
which merely removes “within its own circle . . . those results of the conditions
which were not compatible with the new ethical ideal, so far as that was pos-
sible,” but adopts vis-à-vis the external world “a passive but conservative at-
titude toward existing conditions and organizations,”58 it makes sense that
“the Gospel” will defend itself “against this materializing and relative ten-
dency.”59 Religious individualism and “the radicalism of the ethical law of the
Gospel [were] put into practice, and the concessions to relative Natural Law
and fallen human nature were rejected” once again. They thus create their
own organizational form based on “personal piety and . . . ethical service.”
A number of antecedents already point like a “foreshadowing of coming
developments” to the ever more important type of a “religious individualism
which has no external organization,”60 which differs from church or sect, but
whose adherents, in their individual biographies, may well find their way
to a church or sect. Of course, these three types are not only abstractions
from the diversity of real existing organizations. Troeltsch also explicitly calls
them “main types,” which must surely mean that there are other types. In
his writings, Troeltsch did in fact show that he did not regard his typology
as exhaustive. For example, in his review of the book by Peter A. Clasen on
the Salvation Army,61 a dissertation supervised by Alfred Weber, Troeltsch
explores why a religious movement “makes use of ” the worldly analogy of
the armed forces in its organization and terminology. His answer is that the
conjunction of the unity reminiscent of a religious order and inner-worldly
asceticism had made this the obvious solution. Furthermore, building on
Troeltsch, new or modified types were introduced in an attempt to capture
particular social realities, as in the case of the “denomination” in the work of
H. Richard Niebuhr with reference to the large number of firmly entrenched
free churches in the United States.62 Within sociology, Troeltsch’s typology
was initially canonized to such an extent that it was bound to attract growing
criticism. Troeltsch’s flexible approach and the fact that he intended his ty-
pology only as a guide were easily forgotten.
The second characteristic that must be mentioned here, at least briefly,
consists in the fact that Troeltsch treats the organizational types not simply
as neutral conveyor belts of the Christian ideal, but instead attributes to them
their own efficacy in the transmission of Christianity and the assertion of
ideals. As soon as Christians no longer expected the “eschatological fulfill-
ment of [Christianity’s] universal ideal”63 solely through God’s action and
in the near future, they had to take charge of it themselves—through mis-
sion and organization. But this also meant refraining from setting the bar for
belonging to Christianity too high, and instead making the Christianness of
Christianity “independent of the subjective character and service of believers;
henceforth [Christianity] sought to concentrate all its emphasis upon the ob-
jective possession of religious truth and religious power.”64 For a mass church
of this kind, a variety of compromises with state and economy were possible
but also inescapable. Additional measures, concerned with “guiding the
souls” of church members (through the sacrament of penance, for example)
and the clear systematization and rendering obligatory of teachings, proved
sociologically functional, ensuring the survival of Christianity despite these
compromises. Penance, attempts to combat heresy, and the surveillance of
faith, however, then had tremendous consequences that are certainly not in-
herent in the Christian ideal as such. The sects, meanwhile, often heightened
the intensity of religious life, but were also less effective organizations, which
predisposed them more to eschatological expectations and to a greater em-
phasis on the divine law. As a result, however, they also more easily gener-
ated a dynamic of schism. Of course, each of these features requires empirical
verification, which is not my objective at this point. Here I merely wish to
emphasize this idea of the efficacy specific to a given organizational form vis-
à-vis the “world” and the understanding of the Christian ideal.
This already brings us to the sixth step—namely the question of how,
methodologically, we might get at the effects of religious innovations. Social
Teachings contains a plethora of hypotheses on the effects of Christianity on
social developments, relating for example to the family, state, culture, law,
economy, and the understanding of Europe and of the individual. Each of
these could be subject to empirical examination in light of present-day re-
search. It is striking how sharply Troeltsch distances himself from Christian
apologetics. With respect to the attitude of Christianity toward slavery in the
Middle Ages, for example, we read, “All the statements of theologians who
claim that Christianity in the medieval period at least did away with slavery
are based either upon crass ignorance or mendacious apologetics. Almost
the very opposite is the truth.”65 The way in which Troeltsch approaches these
effects shows that they as such are not his main concern. It has also been
observed66 that he is not equally interested in all factual effects, but chiefly in
those that are, directly or indirectly, linked with the fundamental religious in-
spiration of Christianity. And he comes nowhere near tracing back the spirit
of modern capitalism to one of the religious movements of the Reformation.
Anyone adhering to a simplistic reading of the so-called Weber thesis will be
surprised if not shocked upon reading the words of Troeltsch, who suppos-
edly shared Weber’s views: “At the present day we must take it for granted that
the great economic and social upheavals of the sixteenth century arose inde-
pendently of the religious movement, and that in them Lutheranism at first
adopted an essentially reactionary attitude, whereas the casuistical ethic of
Catholicism was in a position to make compromises with them.”67 Troeltsch

also makes a clear distinction between intended and unintended effects and
essentially views the strengthening of the mercantilist-absolutist territorial
states as among the unintended effects of the Reformation.
Yet none of this seems to me to be the true point of his approach. Certainly,
it is more empirically straightforward to deal with effects than to reverse per-
spective and seek to identify the origin of a social phenomenon. Isolating the
relative importance of a religious factor certainly appears possible in statis-
tical analyses. But once one has overcome factor models and embraced an
action-theoretical understanding, such attempts at isolation lose their plau-
sibility. I have asserted that this is so consistently in the present context with
reference to Troeltsch. With his “expressivist” conception of human action
and his notion of community formation, Troeltsch moved beyond factor
models in explaining social change. His historicism, which is bound up with
this approach, immunizes him against regarding “whole periods and groups
solely as preparatory phases for an Absolute which can never be found in
history.”68 He calls such a view of history “a bad habit” and, contra such a
perspective, invokes “that pregnant phrase of Ranke,” namely “that each
epoch—not in its crude actuality, but with the aims and ideals which it has
instinctively formed—exists directly for God.”69 This takes on concrete form,
for example, when he states that in political and economic history terms, “the
period of town civilization, which begins with the twelfth century” appears
“as a preparation and foundation for the modern world.”70
However, I would contend that, for Troeltsch, this aspect—namely the
reconstruction of the genesis of “modernity”—is not the only or most im-
portant one. A “history of ethics and of religious life,” that is, adopts other
perspectives, and within this history, “this period which is characterized by
its great cathedrals and their intensive Church life; its religiously consecrated
guilds and corporations; its social and political efforts for the spiritual and
material welfare of its citizens; its Christian parochial schools and its chari-
table institutions; its peace and its public spirit” appears chiefly as the “high-
water mark of the development of the medieval spirit.”71 It is vital that we
take Troeltsch seriously when he invokes Ranke and states that the absolute
can never be found in history. He thus refuses—in an anti-Hegelian manner,
as it were—to treat the history of Christianity in any way as the history of the
gradual realization of its ideals. To contemplate the effects of Christianity,
beyond empirically verifiable factual effects, is to consider the counterfactual
question as to the extent to which social orders justified and underpinned
in Christian terms can in fact be justified on a Christian basis. But this also
means that historical instances of the partial, genuine social realizations of
Christianity never cease to be contingent, and must be subject to a cease-
less process of evaluation in light of their own claims. It also means that the
ideals continue to exist in every era, while their inherent aspirations, which
are never entirely realized, will potentially continue to make a historical im-
pact. The Christian ideal “requires a new world if it is to be fully realized,”72
but concurrently renders all social utopias superfluous. Troeltsch’s proposi-
tion that the “life beyond this world is, in very deed, the inspiration of the
life that now is,” means, precisely, the motivating force of an ideal, which is
not watered down or led astray through the “experience that teaches that the
ideal cannot be fully grasped and realized.”73
This statement already anticipates the religious dimension of Troeltsch’s
approach, which I will conclude by examining. But his research program
entails a final—seventh—step that must be briefly mentioned first. A histor-
ical sociology of Christianity (or other religions) must include consideration
of how forms of existing political and social organization impact on the for-
mation of religious communities, or how different forms of religious com-
munity influence one another. Troeltsch’s work, therefore, repeatedly throws
up the question of the extent to which the social form of the “church” itself
was already influenced by the model of the Roman Empire; how the early
episcopal sacramental and traditional church developed its own legal subjec-
tivity, seeking to assert itself alongside the state, acquiring property and slaves
and developing a hierarchical order of its own; how, in the early medieval
territorial church, through the devolution of its missionary assignment, the
church became a major landowner, though it was subject to the king as the
supreme feudal lord; how the roots of the Investiture Controversy lay in the
church’s virtually theocratic claim to authority over state and empire; how
great an impact the early modern formation of the state had on the devel-
opment of post-Reformation forms of Christianity, or in North America,
under conditions of weak statehood, how the idea of congregationalism was
increasingly fused with a Calvinism of an originally theocratic-ecclesiastical
character.74
We might add the question, which lies outside of the time period examined
by Troeltsch, of what the loss of the Papal States and, earlier, the seculariza-
tion of territories formerly ruled by prince-bishops and under other forms of
ecclesiastical rule, meant for the self-understanding of the (Catholic) church.
In a brilliant essay that builds on the work of Troeltsch but is in fact superior
to it as it more deeply historicizes Catholicism, Franz-Xaver Kaufmann

traces back the intensification of the church’s aspiration to statelike authority
in the nineteenth century to its de facto political weakening.75 Troeltsch is
interested in all such repercussions, but takes great care to ensure that they
do not obscure the reconstruction of that which is generated by Christianity’s
own “sociological logic.” The core of his argument is that religious ideals of
a universalist type do emerge, but can only ever be inadequately realized—
both in their own organizational forms and within their encompassing polit-
ical and social orders.
Troeltsch’s historical sociology of Christianity and thus his attempt at
synthesis— which combines historical analysis, psychology, sociology,
and theology—can, as I have tried to show here, serve as the methodolog-
ical model for further research—and by no means solely on Christianity.
But his approach also has tremendous significance for the process of reli-
gious self-understanding. It refutes secularization theory but also the narra-
tive of disenchantment composed by his friend and rival Max Weber. In the
footnotes to Social Teachings, Troeltsch frequently highlights differences be-
tween Weber’s concerns and his own. These differences have frequently been
overlooked, to the detriment of Troeltsch. For him there was no doubt that
Christianity’s time was not over. He believed that “Christian hostility to the
world” “breaks forth anew from the fundamental ideas of religion and out of
the self-destruction of every kind of purely secular optimism.”76 This he says
in awareness of the fact that in his time this basic orientation of Christianity
“has been sensibly weakened by the tendencies of modern life: with its
Utilitarianism and its optimism, with its ideas of Immanence, its Naturalism,
and its aesthetic glorification of Nature, often to the extent of being unable to
interpret its own meaning.”77 The criticism that has been made of Troeltsch,
that he failed to adopt a purely external perspective on Christianity, can be
countered by pointing out that his objective was to interweave internal and
external perspectives and that he was more successful in this than Weber.
“Mysticism” as a type, which is so important in Troeltsch’s work to the under-
standing of religious individualization, is not introduced by him superflu-
ously or simply overlooked by Weber. Instead, inherent in it is an element of
that which Troeltsch considers to be a livable form of Christianity in keeping
with the times. Hence, one might also refer to Troeltsch’s historical sociology
of Christianity as an affirmative genealogy of a modern, vital Christianity.
This, of course, includes the interlinkage of the three main historical types
of Christian community formation: a global church that also opens up space
for autonomous self-organization on the model of the sects and that is expe-
rienced by individuals as a force facilitating rather than impeding individual
spirituality. Given Christianity’s confessional pluralism, this also means that
the confessions must learn from one another in organizational, practical, and
dogmatic terms.78
Max Weber and the Narrative of Disenchantment
Max Weber too writes against the background, and in awareness of, the rich
research conducted in the nineteenth century in the history, psychology, and
sociology of religion—like his long-standing colleague, housemate, and rival
Ernst Troeltsch and through vigorous intellectual exchange with him.79 But
it would be wrong to suggest that Weber sought to synthesize this knowledge
in the way Troeltsch expressly declared himself determined to do, as in his
speech in St. Louis at the Congress of Arts and Science in September 1904,
to which he had travelled with Weber.80 Instead, Weber’s own (almost man-
ically pursued) interest in understanding modern capitalism, its emergence
and its cultural effects, as well as the religious dimensions of these processes,
drove him ever deeper into problems he could tackle only by familiarizing
himself with the relevant research in a number of disciplines. If it may be
stated that Troeltsch and some other exponents of research on religion—
such as William James and Émile Durkheim—attempted to clarify the dy-
namics of the emergence of values or the formation of new ideals, and thus
constructed a picture of history featuring ever new processes of sacraliza-
tion and desacralization, then once again this description cannot simply be
applied to Max Weber. He certainly did not share Troeltsch’s core religious
impulse, namely the desire to understand the prerequisites for a vital con-
temporary Christianity and to explore what intellectual and institutional
form this might take.
As with Troeltsch, I am unable to review Weber’s entire oeuvre to con-
struct my interpretation. But the process of reducing it down to a manage-
able quantity will have to proceed differently than in the case of Troeltsch. In
the preceding section I asserted that in his great work The Social Teachings
of the Christian Churches, Troeltsch, despite all the factual limitations, did in
fact largely carry out his methodological program with respect to the sub-
ject with which he was most concerned, namely the history and present of
Christianity. When it comes to systematic analysis, meanwhile, the relevant
text by Max Weber exists only as a fragment; I am referring to Religiöse

Gemeinschaften, which made its impact above all as a chapter, focused on
the sociology of religion, in Weber’s supposed magnum opus Economy and
Society.81 And yet, even the comparative studies on the economic ethics of the
world religions submitted for publication by Weber himself, which appeared
posthumously as the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, are incom-
plete in the sense that Weber wished to add further studies. What is more, the
way in which they are written shows that circumstances and psychological
factors often prevented the author from setting out his arguments in a fully
developed and reader-friendly way. Weber’s eruptive and excessively con-
densed writing style has been remarked upon again and again and is in part
responsible for the existence today of an enormous literature discussing what
Weber was in fact asserting in these texts. Weber’s tremendous reputation
stands in peculiar contrast to the controversial question of just what his the-
ories were. This applies to many parts of his work—his sociology of law, for
example—but especially to his writings on religion.
If we are looking for a guiding thread amid all this complexity, one concept
coined by Max Weber in these writings suggests itself: “disenchantment.”
In a way that Weber could never have foreseen, this concept was taken up
by other important thinkers and developed further, until it became one of
the key terms in the self-understanding of Western societies, one of the es-
sential characteristics of “modernity” in the discourse on that topic—and
not just in the German-speaking world. “Disenchantment” is in fact just
one possible translation of the German term Entzauberung.82 In this form
the term has, according to Hartmut Lehmann,83 become so common since
the late 1950s that barely a year has gone by since without at least one book
being published containing the term in its title. New terms were also de-
rived from Weber’s translated concept, which are not found in his work at
all, such as “re-enchantment” and “enchantment,”84 and these are now be-
coming common in the German language as well. Jörg Lauster, for example,
called his important cultural history of Christianity Die Verzauberung der
Welt (The Enchantment of the World), evidently in an attempt to put forward
an alternative to Max Weber’s history of disenchantment.85 And in Diarmaid
MacCulloch’s comprehensive history of Christianity, the chapter on the nine-
teenth century is titled “Europe Re-Enchanted or Disenchanted?”86
To settle on the term “disenchantment” to guide one through Weber’s
writings on religion is to tread a well-worn path. The crucial role of the in-
terpretation of history represented by this term to understanding Weber is
widely acknowledged. In a collection on the key problems explored by major

philosophers, Johannes Weiß, one of the leading experts on Weber, headed
his account of Weber’s entire life’s work “Die Entzauberung der Welt” (The
Disenchantment of the World).87 Karl Löwith used a similar form of words
in the title of his evaluation of Weber on the occasion of the 100th anniver-
sary of the latter’s birth.88 The same goes for the special issue of the journal
of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences marking the 150th anniversary of Max
Weber’s birth in 2015.89 One leading American Weber scholar, Lawrence
Scaff, sees the diagnosis of disenchantment as the sum of all Weber had to
say on the topic of modernity.90 And Wolfgang Schluchter, globally leading
expert and systematizer of Weber’s work, identifies as Weber’s “second break-
through”—after he had worked out his position on the logic inherent in
the historical and theoretical study of culture—the thesis that “not just the
economy, but modern Occidental culture in its entirety, is pervaded by a spe-
cific rationalism.”91 It is only consistent that elsewhere Schluchter sums up
Max Weber’s “perspective on modernity” entirely under the rubric of the dis-
enchantment of the world, using this phrase as the title of one of his books
on Weber.92 From this perspective, after all, the history of disenchantment
is the prerequisite for, and flip side of, the history of an ever more pervasive
rationalism.
In all of these texts and many others, of course, Weber’s conception is
handled in an overwhelmingly affirmative way, indeed, often in the manner
of an apologia. These efforts to reconstruct Weber’s intellectual develop-
ment seem worthwhile because we appear to be dealing here with the his-
tory of a fundamental discovery. There are those who attribute to Weber’s
work a similar importance to that of Einstein,93 as a result of which the
movements of his thought are forced into the schema of scientific progress.
Debates over the correct interpretation of Weber thus become tremen-
dously charged. In the German philosophy of the nineteenth century, to
quote Hans Vaihinger, the question of how to interpret Kant became the
“arena where every battle is fought out,”94 and the same goes for the inter-
pretation of Weber and the international discourse on modernity over the
last few decades. Hence, the advantage that the concept of disenchantment
provides a guiding thread through Weber’s labyrinth contrasts with the dis-
advantage that one must also traverse a minefield. If the correct interpre-
tation of Weber triggers passionate polemics even among leading experts
and his greatest admirers, how much more likely is this if Weber’s work is
not treated self-evidently as the expression of superior insight, but instead
as the product of a highly influential but also profoundly problematic nar-

rative—namely that of disenchantment?
Hence, in an attempt to factor in both these opportunities and risks—after
a few brief remarks on the origin of the concept of disenchantment—the fol-
lowing account refrains from immediately putting forward sophisticated
hypotheses on history and modernity. Instead it starts with a cautious in-
terpretation of those passages in Weber’s writings in which he uses the term
“disenchantment.” What I hope to do, by paying attention to the detail and
context of the term’s use, is to tease out the multifacetedness of Weber’s con-
ception, without simply assuming that this conception is consistent and justi-
fied. It will in fact become clear that Weber’s use of this concept is ambiguous
in key respects. Only by taking account of Weber’s writings on religion as a
whole—with respect to how this ambiguity comes about and how it might be
resolved—can my central claim be developed. This is that we require three
different terms for the historical processes referred to as “disenchantment”
by Weber: demagification, desacralization, and detranscendentalization. Of
course, my concern here is not with these rather unlovely neologisms, but
with the conceptual distinction between the matters to which they refer. That
is, I do not simply claim that Weber was unclear on this point but rather, far
more radically, that the entire highly influential narrative of disenchantment
rests upon this conceptual ambiguity.
In an unprecedentedly suggestive fashion, Weber’s narrative of disen-
chantment linked together events ranging from the prophets of the Old
Testament through the Reformation and the Enlightenment to Europe’s
profound crisis of meaning in the so-called Fin de Siècle and on the eve of
World War I. If, however, we expose its conceptual ambiguity, this narrative
falls apart and loses its suggestive power. This opens up alternative ways of
interpreting the relationships between these events—in particular, other
ways of understanding the history of religion, the future possibilities of
Christianity or other religions, and the potential historical potency of uni-
versalist morality in general. Given the multifacetedness of Weber’s oeuvre, it
will come as no surprise that it also features statements that can be adduced
to oppose the narrative of disenchantment, or that at the very least fit un-
easily into its framework. This applies in particular to Weber’s conception of
charismatic innovations, whose parallels with Durkheim’s theory of sacrali-
zation have frequently been remarked upon.95 Hence, I repeatedly highlight
here internal tensions in Weber’s work and its incomplete character. An as-
sessment of the narrative of disenchantment, then, is not the final word on
all aspects of Weber’s oeuvre. Nor are references to other parts of his work
enough in themselves to disprove my critique of fundamental aspects of the
narrative of disenchantment.
It was not Max Weber who introduced the word Entzauberung into the
German language. The word family Zauber/zaubern/Zauberer is already to
be found in Old and Middle High German, and the words bezaubern and
verzaubern are also attested since the Middle Ages.96 As the opposite of
bezaubern (in the sense of exercising great appeal) and verzaubern (in the
sense of a transformation or capture), the word entzaubern already appears
in the late eighteenth century. It crops up on several occasions in the literary
work of Christoph Martin Wieland, where it means the release or freeing of
a human being or thing “from a spell, rapture, or mania.” In none of these
cases, however, does the term mean a long-term historical process, an ep-
ochal weakening of magical forces, for example, or of the overall belief in
them. This is presumably the reason why, in the literature, a different source
is repeatedly identified for Weber, namely Friedrich Schiller and his poem
“The Gods of Greece.”97 This poem does in fact articulate the sense of an irre-
trievable loss. Schiller contrasts a time when the “beauteous beings from the
fable-land” of Greek mythology still ruled the world and “the magic veil of
poesy still round truth entwined its loving chain,” with his present, in which
“godless nature” seems only to obey the laws of physics. The contrast between
“magic veil” and “godless nature” certainly conveys the idea of a historical
process of disenchantment. But this word does not appear in Schiller’s work,
nor did Weber ever explicitly make reference to this poem.98 The writings
of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and August Wilhelm Schlegel, meanwhile, do
contain passages more clearly anticipatory of Weber. Jacobi sees modern as-
tronomy as a celestial mechanics. Human reason, he states in this connection,
is capable of “putting an end to wonder through science, stripping heaven of
its gods, and disenchanting the universe.”99 Remarkably little attention has
been paid to the fact that the term already appeared in the work of Georg
Simmel as early as 1902–1903, and in his case unquestionably in connection
with religion. In fact, he even used it to characterize the contrast between the
prophets and “pre-prophetic Judaism.” Simmel designates the “higher form”
of the understanding of salvation, which consists in expecting no reward for
obedience to God’s law, as Erlösung, and calls this a “disenchantment of value,
which has certainly always been present in the soul, but mixed with the alien,
the impure, and the incidental”—which tallies very well with the meaning
of disenchantment as demagification, as the “extension and enhancement of
the empirical person through the inner ideal of its self,” as Simmel would
have it.100
Given the term’s unclear origin, other possible sources or parallels have
been cited, such as Alfred de Musset’s book Confession d’un enfant du siècle
of 1836, in which a post-Enlightenment and postrevolutionary atmosphere
is in fact conveyed by the term “désenchantement.” The first German transla-
tion of 1915, moreover, rendered this term as Entzauberung.101 Once again,
however, there is absolutely no evidence that Weber was familiar with this
book or that his terminological usage was influenced by its translation.102 So
it must remain an open question how Weber came to deploy this term in his
writings.
What is certain is that others soon emulated him when it came to the use
of this term. Two thinkers profoundly influenced by Weber use it in their
writings before he himself ever did so in a publication: György Lukács and
Emil Lask. In the work of Lukács, in his (pre-Marxist) theory of the novel,
however, it is essentially the older, nonhistorical sense of the term “disen-
chantment” that is meant. He highlights the “abstract idealism” that, “dazzled
by the demon,” regards the lack of correspondence between reality and ideal
as its enchantment “by evil demons,” and believes that “the spell can be broken
[in the German original: “entzaubert”] and reality can be redeemed either by
finding a magic password or by courageously fighting the evil forces.”103 It is,
therefore, not entirely certain whether this is really an instance of building on
Weber’s terminological usage. If it is, the impact must have been made in oral
form—for example, through Weber’s readings of unpublished manuscripts
in his home. A different situation pertains when it comes to Lask.104 In a
manuscript forming part of his literary estate and published after this philos-
opher was killed in action in 1915, he brings together “Entzauberung” with
the “Entdeutung der Natur,” that is, the “de-signification of nature,” the “elab-
oration” of that element of nature that is “alien to meaning,” nature being just
what he regards as the “entity that is alien to meaning.”
In the writings of such important thinkers as Franz Rosenzweig, Martin
Buber, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, Weber’s influence then
seems very obvious, though once again his name is not mentioned. In The
Star of Redemption of 1921,105 Rosenzweig uses the term Entzauberung to
characterize the worldview that he believed to have superseded the ancient
worldview under the influence of the sciences since the seventeenth century,
and in I and Thou of 1923, Martin Buber refers to the Entzauberung of the I,
as opposed to its salvation.106 Horkheimer and Adorno begin their Dialectic
of Enlightenment of 1944 by designating the Enlightenment a program whose

goal is the “Entzauberung of the world”: “It wanted to dispel myths, to over-
throw fantasy with knowledge.” Shortly afterward, Entzauberung is defined
as the “extirpation of animism.”107 Their train of thought then moves on to
the ambivalent consequences of such enlightenment, including the new my-
thology generated by it, a process they refer to as a “dialectic.” Their signif-
icant influence, and thus Weber’s indirect impact, has undoubtedly made a
key contribution to the central position of the concept of disenchantment
within the discourse on modernity.
Catholic philosopher Peter Wust, in his analysis “Die Krisis des
abendländischen Menschentums” of 1927, also makes approving reference
to Weber’s diagnosis of disenchantment, highlighting “just how much the
world of today is ‘disenchanted,’ to speak in the idiom of Max Weber and
thus of the modern spirit itself, or just how much present-day culture is
desecrated, de-deified, and de-Christianized, to express it in the terms of
believing Catholics.”108 Wust mentions Weber by name and takes him to be
a spokesman for the “modern spirit,” but immediately muddies the waters
by equating Weber’s “disenchantment” with desecration, de-deification, and
de-Christianization.
In any case, the approach I have set out, of collating the individual passages
in which Weber refers to “disenchantment,”109 and placing each of them in-
dividually under the microscope, seems to make sense because there is no
single passage in which Weber clearly defines what he meant. The term, fur-
thermore, appears relatively late in the development of Weber’s work. Its first
appearance is in a passage of a text published in 1913 in the journal Logos,
“Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology.” Given that here Weber informs
us110 that part of the text is a “fragment from an exposition written some time
ago,” but we do not know exactly which fragment this is,111 it cannot be stated
with certainty when Weber—perhaps prior to 1913—came up with the idea
of using this term. The passage at issue states,
Action oriented toward conceptions of magic, for example, is often subjec-

tively of a far more instrumentally rational character than any non-magical
“religious” behavior, for precisely in a world increasingly divested of magic
[German original: “mit zunehmender Entzauberung der Welt”], religiosity
must take on increasingly (subjectively) irrational meaning relationships
(ethical or mystical, for instance).112
This passage is obviously not an attempt to define what “disenchantment”

means. It contains a reference to a historical process, but this process remains
in the background. This is entirely legitimate in the context of an essay con-
cerned with the fundamental categories of a Verstehen-based sociology—in
other words, a sociology that declines to rush headlong into an embrace of
natural scientific methodological ideals, but instead retains a sense of the
specific features of a “science” of human action. In the narrower context of an
attempt to differentiate between Verstehen-based sociology and psychology,
Weber asserts that “action subjectively, rigorously, and rationally oriented to-
ward means” is “the most understandable kind of meaning structure of an
action.”113 “The more unambiguously an action is appropriately oriented to-
ward the type of correct rationality (‘Richtigkeitsrationalität’), the less the
meaningful intelligibility of its course is enhanced by any psychological con-
siderations whatever.”114
As an example of “irrational” occurrences that can be legitimately
explained in psychological terms, he mentions panic on the stock market.
I believe that Weber’s thinking here shows very clearly just how much his
ideas about action were influenced by modern economic theory and the
model of human action inherent in it. But this is not our concern here.115
The salient point is that Weber distinguishes with all the clarity one could
wish for between a subjective instrumentally rational orientation and action
that is “ ‘correctly’ oriented toward objectively valid goals,”116 which Weber
calls “correctly rational (richtigkeitsrational).” Hence, in assessing whether an
actor has undertaken to act in instrumentally rational fashion, it plays no
role whether the researcher would act in the same way in this situation ac-
cording to the state of his knowledge. The assumptions an actor proceeds in
light of may be false, indeed bizarre; this will certainly have consequences for
the possible success of her action, but it does nothing to detract from her sub-
jective instrumental orientation.
These fundamental matters of action theory come into play here because
Weber set great store in ascribing to action geared toward magical ideas a
subjectively instrumentally rational character. As we will see even more
clearly as my argument unfolds, what Weber sees at work in magic, as a basic
stratum of the development of religion, is in fact chiefly subjective instru-
mental rationality. Because magical notions seem unfounded or inexpedient
in the light of modern sciences, this is often not immediately clear to the ob-
server. It is thus one of the tasks of scholarly analyses, as Weber saw it, to
uncover the subjective meaning of magical action. This is the first key point
to be gleaned from this passage.
The second insight it offers us, however, is more important still. Weber
refers to the fact that, with the increasing disenchantment of the world, forms
of religiosity develop for which a subjective instrumental orientation, as
found in magic, is less prominent. Crucially, then, at least in this passage, dis-
enchantment cannot mean secularization in the sense of the weakening or
disappearance of religion. The issue here, after all, is how religion changes
or must change under the conditions of the “increasing disenchantment of
the world” (English translation above: “in a world increasingly divested of
magic”). As an example of such potential changes, Weber mentions first a
more “conscientious” (German original: gesinnungshafte, translated as “eth-
ical”) orientation. This means an orientation that recognizes something as
good, and renders it a maxim of action, even if it contradicts subjective con-
siderations of utility. Second, he refers to a mystical form of religiosity in
which, once again, it is not the subject and its goals that guide action; instead,
an explicit attempt is made to move away from one’s ego and its preconceived
ends, or even to abandon both the ego and its ends. Precisely what disen-
chantment is supposed to be, then, cannot be gleaned from this passage.
For now, all that is certain is that it cannot be equated with secularization,
and that it has something to do with the weakening or overcoming of the
magical dimension, which is, as a rule, an arena of subjectively instrumental
rationality.
Presumably also in 1913, Max Weber penned his great outline of a sys-
tematic sociology of religion. This contains many other statements that en-
able us to achieve a more detailed picture of Weber’s understanding of magic
and of the most important upheavals in the religious history of humanity.
We return to this point later. But if our investigation is centered on Weber’s
use of the term “disenchantment,” we need only look at one passage in this
text; it appears nowhere else in the entire enormous tome. Remarkably,
the index of the first German edition of Economy and Society also fails to
list the term. Only in the part of the book in which Weber deals with the
role of classes and status groups in the history of religion does the word “dis-
enchantment” occur, and indeed in a section concerned with the specific
features of intellectuals’ religiosity. Of course, in this context the term intel-
lectual, which only really started to be commonly used in Weber’s time, is
anachronistic. But Weber often likes to use anachronistic terms to make a
point in his accounts of historical realities. I would conjecture that Weber
needed a word to counter all those terms relating to the lives of nonprivileged
strata, or of those privileged individuals whose lives are devoid of leisure. He
wishes to refer to those people not mainly grappling with “external hardship,”
but whose religious life is dominated by “inner hardship.” It is they, as I take
Weber to mean, who pose questions of meaning more fundamentally and
systematically than can those whose lives give them no opportunity to do
so. Weber also sees the flipside of this liberation that facilitates fundamental
and systematic reflection, namely the risk of alienation from everyday life
inherent in a person’s attempts to “endow . . . life with a pervasive meaning,
and thus” to achieve “unity with himself, with his fellow men, and with the
cosmos.”117 It is the intellectual, in this view, “who conceives of the ‘world’ as
a problem of meaning.”118 Here the topic of disenchantment comes into play.
We read that as “intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s pro-
cesses become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth
simply ‘are’ and ‘happen’ but no longer signify anything. As a consequence,
there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be sub-
ject to an order that is significant and meaningful.”119
In one respect, this passage confirms what we could construe from Weber’s
comments in his essay on categories: in both cases, disenchantment has to
do with the suppression of the belief in magic. Here, however, for the first
time a force is mentioned that is responsible for this suppression. In con-
trast to Weber’s welcome tendency to identify real actors rather than talking
about abstract entities when it comes to action, however, here he refers not to
“intellectuals” but to “intellectualism” as the relevant driving force. But this
does not seem to me to entail any fundamental problem. Two other aspects
are problematic, however. It is not immediately obvious why intellectualism
ought to entail a desire to suppress the belief in magic, let alone achieve such
an outcome, nor is it clear in what way the suppression of magic ought to lead
to an experience of the world in which nothing “means” anything in and of
itself.
These issues require brief discussion, though we certainly cannot expect
Weber’s statements in this passage alone to provide further illumination.
The first question is whether the freeing up of the human mind to engage
in intellectual systematization, under conditions of magic, would not simply
lead to the systematization of magical knowledge, rather than to its suppres-
sion. In his analyses of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as in his studies on
Confucianism and Daoism, Weber is well aware of this possibility. At one
point, when comparing Confucianism and Puritanism, he himself makes an
explicit distinction between the degree to which a religion “has ridden it-
self of magic” and the “degree of systematic unity that a religion has brought
about in the relation of God and the world, and so a religion’s particular eth-
ical relationship to the world.” But he sees in this distinction two “measures
[that are] internally connected to each other in various ways” and that relate
to one and the same phenomenon, namely that of the rationalization of re-
ligion.120 Weber is familiar from the research literature with the wealth, for
example, of forms of Chinese intellectual refinement and systematization of
magic in the thinking of “chronomancers, geomancers, water diviners, and
weather diviners”121 and would, therefore, ideally have provided more de-
tail on the specific conditions under which “intellectualism” does in fact
seek to suppress magic. Furthermore, a process of suppression on the part
of intellectuals will by no means necessarily lead to a weakening of the belief
in magic among non-intellectuals struggling with “external hardship.” There
is certainly no reason to assume any automatic diffusion of intellectualism.
Equally likely is the emergence of an antagonism between intellectual elite
and “non-privileged strata”; indeed, this antagonism may itself play a role in
the distancing of intellectuals from the traditional “magical” religion, or in
the insistence of other strata upon it.
As long as Weber merely refers to intellectuals as such, this question as to
the broad effect of intellectualism can be left in parentheses. But the analysis
of the religiosity of intellectuals entails another profound problem that has
already been mentioned: whether it is really the case that the suppression
of magic disenchants events in the world in such a way that they no longer
“mean” anything within everyday experience but now merely “are” and
“happen.” I believe that a problem is becoming apparent here that pervades
Weber’s theory of religion and is bound up with fundamentally question-
able elements of his entire sociology. The first question we must ask of him
is whether the loss of magical meaning can truly be equated with the loss
of all encountered—rather than self-produced—meaning. If we distinguish
more clearly than Weber did between worldviews and the dynamics of eve-
ryday or ordinary experience, what we find is that the devalorization of a
magical worldview usually has no direct implications for the experience of
an action’s intrinsic meaning or of the qualities of the world that are intui-
tively experienced as valuable.122 A comparative look at an alternative way
of thinking is useful at this point. For the pragmatist John Dewey, all sci-
ence remains dependent on a grounding in ordinary experience, and scien-
tific and everyday knowledge are not simply opposed in antagonistic fashion.
Building on Dewey, Matthias Jung illustrates this alternative way of thinking

through the oft-cited example of our perception of a sunrise. The contem-
porary individual knows as a matter of course that “the phenomenal reality
of the sunrise in its physical form must be understood as the effect of the
rotation of the Earth. . . . This precludes a return to prescientific naivety. Yet
this new definition in no way detracts from the experiential qualities them-
selves.”123 Even intellectuals—whoever might be included in this category—
live their lives in this dimension of ordinary experience; they do not generate
meaning and purpose out of nothing, but on the basis of the meaning they
experience in connection with their actions and those qualities of the world
that attract or repel them.
Again, I am unable to pursue here the full ramifications of this idea for an
adequate understanding of religion and merely make a provisional note of
it. The key point, however, is that disenchantment, if it is supposed to mean
a decline in the credibility of magic, can by no means simply be equated with
a process in which a loss of meaning occurs on the level of ordinary experi-
ence. Hence, a different term must be found to convey that phenomenon.
When Max Weber decided to publish his collected studies in the sociology
of religion in 1919–1920, he began to revise them, including his most famous
text—namely, that on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. It was
only during this process of revision that he inserted the term “disenchant-
ment” into his old essay. He also used it at pivotal points of this collection that
were presumably composed at the time. In his 1975 essay, which is brilliant if
not tenable in every respect, Friedrich Tenbruck124 drew attention to the fact
that the term “disenchantment” must have been so important to Weber that
he inserted it at key points, but he underlined that this is also an indication
that the idea it expressed was not especially present when Weber first con-
sidered this topic. The first of these insertions occurs at a strategically crucial
point, namely when Weber characterizes ascetic Protestantism. “Absolutely
decisive” to this, Weber tells us, was the “complete elimination of salvation
through the Church and the sacraments (which was in Lutheranism by no
means developed to its final conclusions)”—in contrast to its central posi-
tion in Catholicism. But Weber does not portray this rupture simply as a spe-
cifically radical approach within the incipient division of the Latin Church
into competing confessions. Instead, in an extraordinarily audacious thesis,
he declares it the culmination of a long-term world-historical process: “That
great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of
magic from the world [Entzauberung] which had begun with the old Hebrew
prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repu-

diated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin, came here
to its logical conclusion.”125 Weber appended a footnote to this sentence
that refers the reader to his other essays for an explanation of the thesis of
disenchantment—above all, evidently, that on Jewish religion and “the old
Hebrew ethic,” which, he asserts, “after the time of the prophets,” rested “en-
tirely on this fundamental fact, the rejection of sacramental magic as a road
to salvation.”126
What is being asserted here goes very far beyond what Weber has previ-
ously stated but also beyond anything contained in the original version of the
Protestant Ethic. Tenbruck articulated this fact in dramatic fashion: “There
can be no doubt: the passage is an outright foreign body in the Protestant
Ethic. It was not only absent from the original, but would have been utterly
out of place there, because it goes well beyond its scope and stakes out en-
tirely new dimensions.”127 What Weber is referring to here is not just a case-
by-case suppression of the belief in magic, but a major world-historical
process, one that is worthy of the name “disenchantment” and is furnished
with a beginning and end. This is not a matter just of specific attempts at
demagification, by intellectuals for example, or of the lack of success of a par-
ticular form of action geared toward magical ideas, which might be followed
by another equally magical form of action, but of a transformation in reli-
gious history that began with the prophets of the Old Testament and culmi-
nated in Puritanism.
Let us leave to one side for the moment whether Weber’s wide-ranging
remarks on the Old Testament prophets and on the Reformation provide con-
vincing empirical evidence for this sweeping hypothesis and let us continue
to cleave closely to his statements. It seems to me that these obviously require
clarification in three respects. The first question we must ask is how we ought
to envisage the connection between the prophets and the Reformation. Even
if we provisionally assume that both prophets and ascetic Protestants can in
fact be characterized by their hostility toward magic, the obvious thing to
do is view both merely as two cases in the history of religion of religiously
motivated, radical efforts toward demagification. This perspective applies
even if, in the later case, the Reformation, key protagonists drew explicitly
and consciously on the earlier case, namely the prophets, to legitimize their
own objectives. Why, though, should we discern the beginning and end of
a process in these two cases? After all, this presupposes that an early im-
pulse triggered continuous effects that cannot, however, have been strong
enough to have persisted, as otherwise there would have been no need for
a new “reformatory” impulse. What, then, truly constitutes the single “great
historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic
from the world [Entzauberung]” of which Weber speaks? Furthermore, what
is the justification for discerning the conclusion of this process in ascetic
Protestantism? If the non-ascetic Protestants and Catholics, let alone most
non-Christians, have not advanced to the point of implementing this radical
demagification, there can be no question of this process of disenchantment
having reached its conclusion for the great majority of humanity—or only
in the sense that this specific hostility to magic has reached its high point
and cannot be further intensified. But if this is the case, could the ascetic
Protestants themselves not regress from this radical demagification? How
will things look when it comes to their descendants, if the original religious
intensity of ascetic Protestantism wanes?
The second issue arises from Weber’s insertion asserting that the great
process of disenchantment, although it began with ancient Jewish prophecy,
gained a significant additional boost from “Hellenistic scientific thought.”
The relevant passage provides us with no further details on this, even when
considered in its broader context. It may be assumed that what Weber had
in mind was the Hellenization of Jewish thought in antiquity and, even
more, the effects of the attempt by Christian thinkers in late antiquity to jus-
tify their beliefs intellectually with the tools of Greek philosophy. Evidence
of this may be found in unambiguous passages in other writings of Weber,
whose significance to the conception of disenchantment I address later. For
now, though, we must ask whether this reference too suggests that Weber
is going too far in assuming continuity, and whether it even makes sense to
envisage a possible interplay between religiously motivated and purely in-
tellectual demagification. The Christian theology of late antiquity, it is true,
shows the significance of Hellenistic thought to the history of Christianity,
but cannot simply be taken for granted as a stage in a process of religious
disenchantment.
The third issue, finally, relates to Weber’s approach to the sacraments as
understood within Catholicism. We have already seen him refer to “sac-
ramental magic.” Particularly with Catholic Christianity in mind, Weber
frequently uses the hyphenated term “magic-sacramental.” I have already
highlighted elsewhere128 that Weber’s characterizations thus stand in di-
rect continuity with confessional polemics since the Reformation. Other
insertions into the text of his old essay on Protestantism, in which the term
“disenchantment” crops up, reinforce the impression that Weber’s picture

of Catholic Christianity itself is by no means unprejudiced and value-
neutral but instead tinted with a Calvinist hue. Hence, in describing the
Catholic sacrament of penance, he explicitly calls the priest a “magician,”
and once again states that in Catholic piety the “disenchantment” of the
world, “the elimination of magic as a means to salvation,”129 was not carried
out with the same consequences as in the case of “the Puritans (and before
them the Jews).” Once again, a footnote emphasizes the “absolutely fun-
damental importance of this factor,” without indicating exactly what this
is. Clearly, however, when he classifies the sacraments as a form of magic,
what Weber means by disenchantment includes the waning of belief in the
sacraments.130
Hence, three questions are inescapable at this point. We may provisionally
sum them up as follows. How did Weber construct a single great process of
disenchantment within the history of religion? What is the significance of
nonreligious, for example, purely intellectual and scientific impulses in such
a process? Finally, does Weber’s view of the Reformation and its effects reveal
a confessional bias?
Three other occurrences of “disenchantment” in the Gesammelte Aufsätze
zur Religionssoziologie help shed light on why Weber ascribes such out-
standing world-historical significance to demagification. It is above all in his
description of the Quakers that Weber underlines which consequence of the
disenchantment of the world he considers the crucial one: “The radical elimi-
nation of magic [Entzauberung] from the world allowed no other psycholog-
ical course than the practice of worldly asceticism.”131 His original concern
in this study had not been with the consequences of disenchantment—to
which he did not initially refer at all—but with the origins of worldly asceti-
cism and thus, for him, the spirit of capitalism. Again, in the “Introduction”
to Weber’s comparative studies of the economic ethics of the world religions,
which follows upon his writings on Protestantism in the collection of his
essays, we read, “When religious virtuosos have combined into an active
asceticist sect, two aims are completely attained: the disenchantment of the
world and the blockage of the path to salvation by a flight from the world. The
path to salvation is turned away from a contemplative ‘flight from the world’
and towards an active ascetic ‘work in the world.’ If one disregards the small
rationalist sects, such as are found all over the world, this has been attained
only in the great church and sect organizations of Occidental and asceticist
Protestantism.”132 Here, then, disenchantment comes into play because it
allegedly entailed the devalorization of all routes to salvation and redemp-

tion other than a ceaseless striving within the occupational sphere. The ques-
tion of the religious roots of such a mentality is undoubtedly of the greatest
social-historical interest, as is that of its effects on economy, society, and cul-
ture. Yet it is by no means immediately plausible to comprehend the genesis
of this mentality as an essential prerequisite for the emergence of modern
capitalism.
Since the first publication of Weber’s essay on Protestantism in 1904, there
has been a multifaceted and seemingly endless controversy over these issues.
To look more closely into this debate and its key questions would merely
detract from the core concerns of this book. Responding to the pressure of
contemporary criticism of the original version of his hypothesis, rather than
retreating, Weber constantly extended the object of his investigations. He
thus expanded on the claims made in his original thesis. Hence, the question
of the precise role played by this work-related and economic mentality in the
emergence of modern capitalism, within the diverse contingencies of eco-
nomic history, turned into a dual and expanded question: namely as to the
character of the long-term prerequisites for the emergence of this mentality
and what the long-term consequences were if this mentality did not arise or,
at least in part for religious reasons, could not develop. It is only within this
expanded investigative framework that the next passage in Weber’s work that
I wish to discuss becomes meaningful.
In the Gesammelte Aufsätze, the study of Protestantism is followed
first by Weber’s analysis of “Confucianism and Daoism” and, under this
rubric, a final section titled “Conclusions” that undertakes to compare
Confucianism and Puritanism. As we have already seen, here Weber
brings the two together as forms of rationalism.133 Unsatisfactorily, he
fails to clarify the precise relationship between the two yardsticks of
“demagification” and “degree of systematic unity.” With almost exactly the
same wording as in certain passages of his study of Protestantism, Weber
then cites the Puritans’ hostility to magic, though here he refers to the
sacraments as a “sublimated form”134 of magic. As earlier, he then states,
“Nowhere has the complete disenchantment of the world been carried
through with greater consistency.”135 However, mentioning the witch trials
in Puritan New England, with greater nuance than before, Weber states
that we should not conceive of demagification simply as the disappearance
of all magic, as the “freedom from what we nowadays customarily regard
as ‘superstition.’ ” Within Puritanism, however, Weber explains, everything
magical became devilish—in other words, as it were, a negative remnant

that had to be combated. Confucianism, in contrast, according to Weber,
had “left untouched the significance of magic for redemption,” and this
applied a fortiori to the heterodox teachings of Daoism. Deploying a met-
aphor that also crops up in his study of India, Weber refers to the “magic
garden” of this doctrine and declares that, given the absence of a process of
demagification, “a rational economy and technology of modern occidental
character was simply out of the question.” This was plainly one of his key
argumentational goals in his study of China, which he now believed he had
achieved. Just as demagification through ascetic Protestantism had created
the precondition for a rational economy and rational technology, the ab-
sence of demagification, “the preservation of this magic garden,” inevitably
prevented this development.
A particularly unambiguous formulation of this thesis is found in the text
created out of one of Weber’s final university lectures and published posthu-
mously under the title “Wirtschaftsgeschichte” (English: General Economic
History): “Prophecies have released the world from magic [Entzauberung
der Welt] and in doing so have created the basis for our modern science
and technology, and for capitalism.”136 Here too, in the very next sentence,
Weber asserts by way of contrast that China produced no prophets of its
own—a statement that seems strange in the sense that it could also be said
of Europe. The crucial point is that Weber discerns in radical demagification
not just a radical form of religion and not just the apogee of religious his-
tory, but a necessary condition for the emergence of the spirit of capitalism
and, beyond this, the development of modern science and technology.
Though he does not spell it out, Weber presumably assumes here that only a
demagified world can be subject to methodical, scientific investigation and
comprehensive technological mastery. Hence, Weber readily points to re-
sistance, anchored in magical notions, to the construction of railroads in
China. The precise details of such phenomena, however, surely require ad-
ditional clarification.
Following his studies of China and prior to those of India, Weber inter-
polated into the Gesammelte Aufsätze his perhaps most enigmatic text, the
exceedingly famous “Intermediate Reflection.” Within the history of soci-
ology, this has often been read as positing the progressive differentiation of
cultural spheres of value. Whether this interpretation is justified I discuss in
detail later in this book.137 Here, guided by the concept of “disenchantment,”
I merely consider the fact that at two points in the “Intermediate Reflection”
Weber goes into more detail about the role of science in the process of dis-
enchantment. However, in these passages we learn nothing more about the
conditionality of scientific development in light of an antecedent or concur-
rent process of religiously induced demagification. Now Weber is more con-
cerned with the effects of science on religious-metaphysical worldviews and
the resulting tensions. As Weber puts it, “But where rational empirical know-
ledge has consistently carried through the disenchantment of the world and
its transformation into a causal mechanism, there emerges a tension with the
claims of ethical postulates—that the world, for religion, is ultimately willed
and ordained by God and is therefore, in whatever way oriented, an ethically
meaningful cosmos.”138 This effect of “rational empirical knowledge,” how-
ever, is by no means solely that of the suppression of the belief in magic, as
stated in Weber’s categories essay, but of the transformation of the world into
a causal mechanism. This must mean a transformation of worldview, rather
than of the world itself.
Once again, as in the passage discussed earlier in the Religiöse
Gemeinschaften, Weber does not make a distinction between the emer-
gence of a new worldview and the transformation of the conditions of
everyday and ordinary experience. It is indisputable that in the early
modern period and undoubtedly under the influence of science, a world-
view emerged that privileged a “causal mechanism.” In such a worldview,
people’s experience of themselves as freely acting, as well as moral catego-
ries, come to seem groundless and incomprehensible. Within the history of
philosophical thought, however, this tension also became the point of de-
parture for attempts to think dualistically (like Kant) or in an expressivist
and pragmatist way, that is—in light of human beings’ experience of moral
freedom—to counter the causally determined universe with a return to the
epistemological conditions of the knowing subject (as in the work of Kant
and its consequences) or (as in the writings of Herder or William James
and their consequences) to undertake a fundamental revision of the idea
of the human being and all organisms. Weber himself might have reflected
at this point on the extent to which the concept of action, which is so cen-
tral for him, defies the schema of the “causal mechanism.” He fails to do
so and at other points in his work goes so far as to explicitly assert that the
knowledge generated by the culture-focused disciplines is “entirely causal
knowledge exactly in the same sense as the knowledge of significant con-
crete natural events which have a qualitative character” (emphasis in orig-
inal).139 But this means that he squanders the opportunity, in light of the
fact of intentional and normatively oriented action, to find a way out of the
dualism of “causal mechanism” and “ethically meaningful cosmos.” This is
inconsistent in and of itself.
If we were to think of the world as a “causal mechanism” through and
through and the distinction between natural causality and actional causality
could be ignored, then the search for the place of ethical action as a whole
would be no more than an illusion, because acting human beings themselves
would merely be cogs within this mechanism. Hence, in Weber’s case we
might refer to a process of semi-disenchantment, since his conception of the
disenchantment of the world seems not to include the disenchantment of the
subject, as in the case of a consistent materialism or reductionist naturalism.
Yet these phenomena of subjectivity—that is, human emotion, imagination,
thinking, and morality—compel naturalists to develop nonreductionist
versions of naturalism and even fill materialists with awe.140 Weber was nei-
ther a materialist nor a reductionist naturalist. He cannot, therefore, have
shared the worldview of the “causal mechanism.” In this passage at least,
however, he appears not to distinguish sufficiently between the description
of a particular phase in the history of ideas, in which a worldview emerged
that was never without opponents and alternatives, and a necessary and in-
escapable consequence—on the level of ordinary experience—of the pro-
cesses that triggered the transformation of the worldview.
Yet the real point of the passage at issue here is a different one. Weber
asserts that the emergence of this worldview of the “causal mechanism” now
threw into sharp relief the tension between the knowledge of its laws and
the idea of an ethically meaningful cosmos. Here disenchantment clearly no
longer applies solely to magic, but to a religious-metaphysical worldview that
was, essentially, none other than the result of philosophical-intellectual and
prophetic-religious demagification.141 The difference between magic and
(philosophical) metaphysics is smoothed out through the concept of disen-
chantment. As a world-historical process, disenchantment as demagification,
which supposedly reached its conclusion in ascetic Protestantism, now
appears to extend into the transformation of worldview in the early modern
period and Enlightenment, and to encompass the conflict between “science”
and “religion” in these eras. It should be noted that Weber is of course quite
right to pay attention to this conflict and—for example, at the only other point
in the “Intermediate Reflection” where he refers to disenchantment142—to
ask what the consequences must have been for the self-understanding of
religion of “not perhaps only theoretical thinking which led to the disen-
chantment of the world, but also the direct attempt of the religious ethic to
carry through practically an ethical rationalization of the world.” But it is by
no means a self-evident move to use the same term for the devalorization of
magical practices by the prophets, the overcoming of myth by the ancient
philosophers, and the immanentization and ethical neutralization of nature
in, to put it in shorthand form, the Enlightenment, or to declare them phases
in one single, great, advancing, world-historical process of “disenchantment.”
For our run through Weber’s writings in light of the concept of disenchant-
ment, there is just one more text to consider, namely the lecture “Science as
a Vocation,” originally held in 1917 and published in substantially expanded
form in 1919. In this text, which was of “monumental importance to the re-
ception of Weber,”143 the term “disenchantment” crops up no fewer than six
times.144 First, it appears twice145 when Weber reflects upon the fact that all
scientific endeavor is “harnessed” to “the course of progress.”146 Science and
scientific progress appear here as “an integral part and a driving force” of a
more comprehensive process of increasing intellectualization and rationali-
zation. Weber refers here once again to a “process of disenchantment that has
been at work in Western culture for thousands of years.”147 He places partic-
ular emphasis on the worldview-like character of the ideas to which science
gave rise:
Thus the growing process of intellectualization and rationalization does

not imply a growing understanding of the conditions under which we live.
It means something quite different. It is the knowledge or the conviction
that if only we wished to understand them we could do so at any time. It
means that in principle, then, we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredict-
able forces, but that, on the contrary, we can in principle control every-
thing by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment of
the world.148
And Weber once again proceeds to contrast such a worldview, of what we

might call optimistic faith in science, with the magical worldview: “Unlike
the savage for whom such forces existed, we need no longer have recourse to
magic in order to control the spirits or pray to them. Instead, technology and
calculation achieve our ends. This is the primary meaning of the process of
intellectualization.”149
At first sight this contrast seems clear-cut, but a second look reveals it to be
quite ambiguous. If this is not a matter of actual superior knowledge and mas-
tery of one’s living conditions, but merely of a belief in their knowability and
masterability, then beyond the distinction between the magical and scientific-
technological worldviews, the people concerned are really quite similar. In
their subjective instrumental rationality, they turn to the means they con-
sider apt; to decide which means these are, they fall back on socially estab-
lished knowledge, putting their trust in experts, whether wielders of magic or
scientists and technicians. At first sight, then, they differ only in the nature of
the knowledge involved, and in the character of the experts in whom they put
their trust. But as we read at the end of the categories essay, the knowledge
of the “civilized” rests upon the assumption that the conditions of everyday
life fundamentally entail “human artifacts accessible to rational knowledge,
creation, and control,”150 whose behavior is not arbitrary but calculable. The
emphasis on belief in science also opens up the possibility of contemplating
cyclical ups and downs in this belief itself. The belief in the controllability of
the world may well take the form of a misguided trust in large-scale tech-
nologies, whose risks may turn out to be uncontrollable. In light of this idea,
since the 1980s sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Charles Perrow have
struck a chord with a public increasingly skeptical about science.151 The be-
lief described by Weber unquestionably includes illusory elements that have
at times resulted in the wide acceptance of the most outlandish notions—of
a racist kind, for example—as long as they were presented in scientific terms
(“racial biology”). From a sociological perspective, the prevalence of such
a faith in science cannot simply be taken for granted as an unproblematic
given. This faith in science itself has its social bearers. Its dissemination is
shaped by specific interests, and its potency fluctuates.
By this point, Weber’s retrospectively oriented thesis of a world-historical
process of disenchantment has become an element in an analysis of the
modern world and the present, and this tendency is reinforced as the
“Science as a Vocation” lecture proceeds. One key motif in this lecture is a
warning of the dangers of “professorial prophecy,”152 in the sense of “im-
posing one’s personal opinions on others,”153 the moment the professor goes
beyond assertions with a solid scientific basis. Even more significant is the
profound insight that there can be no scientific answer to questions con-
cerning values. Here Weber is expressing a striking view that remains contro-
versial to this day, one I do not discuss further here. I will only mention that,
for him, a scientific response to questions of values is not possible “because
the different value systems of the world are caught up in an insoluble struggle
with one another.”154 He makes an analogy between this conflict of values
and the rivalry between the gods in ancient polytheism. Once again, the dif-
ference, as we read on several occasions and with three uses of the term “dis-
enchantment” within the same paragraph, lies solely in disenchantment. So
we might refer to a “disenchanted polytheism” as emblematic of the present
era: “The numerous gods of yore, divested of their magic [entzaubert] and
hence assuming the shape of impersonal forces, arise from their graves, strive
for power over our lives, and resume their eternal struggle among them-
selves.”155 With great pathos, Weber calls on his contemporaries, and partic-
ularly his young student listeners, not to dodge this issue, “for weakness . . . is
to be unable to look the fate of the age full in the face.”156
It is an open question whether the idea of an “eternal struggle” truly
captures the relationship between the gods within the polytheistic pan-
theon, or whether the relationship between values can be described in these
terms. In archaic Greece at least, the latent tragedy of life under polythe-
istic conditions, namely that “action always led to violation of the values
demanded by the god responsible for a particular field,”157 could remain
concealed from people. This predicament probably first came to light in
the tragedies and then became the object of philosophical reflection. Even
then, however, the struggle between the gods in polytheism is something dif-
ferent from a struggle between monotheisms.158 In our context, namely the
discussion of Weber’s conception of disenchantment, another aspect is cru-
cial. It is not just ancient polytheism that Weber interprets here as a victim
of disenchantment, but also the religion that had once “dethroned this poly
theism.”159 Christianity too, without further justification, appears here as
part of the past or, at least, not as a force that might offer a serious alternative
to disenchanted polytheism. Nor is there any sign here of any other religious
or secular force that might be expected to do so. Weber does not welcome
this, as a militant secularist or an avowed opponent of any attempt to create
a harmonious system of values would presumably have done. He merely ve-
hemently denies that there is any intellectually or morally tenable religious
route out of this situation, declaring that contemporary forms of religious
faith are possible only at the cost of the “sacrificium intellectus,” that is, by
forgoing the demands of reason.
The last section of the lecture also begins with a reference to the process
of disenchantment and declares impossible any public role for religion in
the contemporary world: “Our age is characterized by rationalization and
intellectualization, and above all, by the disenchantment of the world. Its

resulting fate is that precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have
withdrawn from public life. They have retreated either into the abstract
realm of mystical life or into the fraternal feelings of personal relations be-
tween individuals.”160 As Weber sees it, mysticism in the private life of indi-
viduals, a highly intensive life in very small communities, and perhaps even
“unconditional religious commitment” (though at the unavoidable cost of
sacrificing one’s intellect) are still possible. “New prophets and saviors,”161
however, longed for by so many, are not on the horizon. Rather than merely
longing and hoping for such figures, Weber tells us, every human being today
must find and obey his own “daemon.”
I believe Weber’s biographer Dirk Kaesler is wise to advise us “not to make
a philosophical text out of this context-bound, ad hoc lecture.”162 A diag-
nosis formulated at the end of World War I should not be elevated to the
status of enduring or sole intellectually honest perspective on the potential
of contemporary religion or morally driven social movements. It is also no-
table that Weber himself by no means fundamentally excludes the possibility
that “at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will
arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.”163 As yet, though,
he does not see such a development even appearing on any kind of horizon,
and wants to look in the eye, “like a man,” the possibility that no such re-
newal will occur, and that what will instead emerge is “mechanized petri-
fication, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.”164 Hence,
that which some of his leading intellectual contemporaries, such as William
James, Émile Durkheim, and Ernst Troeltsch—as mentioned several times
in the present book—emphasized so strongly, namely the dynamics of ever
new processes of ideal formation, is by no means fundamentally ruled out by
Weber’s theory. But he considers such a process to be empirically improbable
in his era. For him, the reason for this lies in the world-historical process of
disenchantment.
This brings us to the end of our run through Weber’s observations on this
process of disenchantment. The approach I have taken, by cleaving closely to
Weber’s texts, was intended to avoid the risk of merely perpetuating existing
master interpretations of Weber’s work. At the same time, my methodical ap-
proach to interpreting Weber does not presuppose that we are dealing here
with the genesis of a discovery and need only iron out minor inconsistencies
in a fundamentally consistent conception. Now, however, it is vital to address,
order, and weave together the many threads left hanging in my interpretation
of the various passages. What we find is that we must go beyond Weber’s own
conception if we wish to integrate his various assertions into a whole.
An Attempt at Systematization
In order to systematize Weber’s aforementioned ideas and my doubts about

them, it makes sense to distinguish between four topics, two of which are of
an essentially anthropological character and two of a historical nature. The
first topic (1) concerns the identification of the most elementary layer of re-
ligion. I have already touched on this when discussing the earliest passage in
which Weber refers to “disenchantment,” where he ascribes to magic a sub-
jective instrumental rationality. But the topic also appears on many occasions
when Weber refers to the position of magic within the history of religion and
to its questioning, relativization, or sublimation (in the sacraments). In the
second, quasi-anthropological topic, (2) I include all those passages in which
Weber refers directly or indirectly to the constitution of the meaning of the
world or of life. This includes Weber’s ideas about the specific role of intel-
lectualism, or of ordinary experience, and the question of whether his con-
ception of the disenchantment of the world does not in fact, in a peculiarly
halfhearted way, come to a halt before tackling the idea of the disenchant-
ment of the subject. Crucial in the present context are, next, the two historical
topics relating to the entire construction of what Weber calls a process of dis-
enchantment “at work in Western culture for thousands of years.”165 Taking
up a suggestion made by Wolfgang Schluchter, we can divide the questions
arising here into those concerning the processes of religious and cognitive
disenchantment.166 The topic of religious disenchantment (3) then includes
all the doubts we might have about Weber’s hypotheses of demagification,
up to and including, of course, his assertions about the consequences of a
lack of demagification. Furthermore, here we cannot avoid examining the
supposed end of this process, and clarifying whether this should be seen in
the disempowerment of all religion. The fourth topic (“cognitive disenchant-
ment”) (4) encompasses all those arguments and criticisms relating to the
intellectual drivers of the (supposed) process of disenchantment prior to the
Reformation, and to the preconditions for, and effects of, the development of
science since the early modern period.
(1) There can be no doubt that, according to Weber, the claimed process
of disenchantment has a historical starting point, which he, as mentioned,
sees in Judaism, above all in the prophets of the Old Testament. Likewise,
he conceives of the Reformation, in the shape of the emergence of ascetic
Protestantism, as the apogee of this process, in fact as the conclusion of re-
ligious disenchantment (though he is far from clear about just what this
entails). Yet as Friedrich Tenbruck rightly puts it in his pioneering essay, “The
intervening stages [remain] rather obscure.”167 Beyond the aforementioned
references to the intellectual culture of Hellenism, Weber, with special refer-
ence to Western Europe, also emphasizes the development of “Roman law and
of the Roman Catholic church resting on the Roman concept of office.”168 In
an attempt to remedy the obvious shortcomings of Weber’s fragmentary his-
tory, other scholars have made heroic attempts to bring together everything
in his writings that would have to be included in a history of disenchantment,
which Weber of course did not provide us. In his effort, Schluchter identifies
six key components of such a history and—to a greater extent than has been
possible in this book so far—highlights the attention Weber paid to the liber-
ation of the Jesus movement “from ethical and social constraints as a result of
Paul’s mission” and the “specific mediation between hierocratic and political
power through the resolution of the Investiture Controversy”; but he is aware
that his interpretation rests “on a partially shaky foundation.”169
Even if it were to prove possible to proceed in this way and construct out of
Weber’s writings, or even independently of them, a persuasive and coherent
picture of the actual historical process in this respect, fundamental questions
remain as far as the process as a whole is concerned. Scholars seeking to
counter the critique of the idea of a linear, progressive process of disenchant-
ment have regularly highlighted the intermeshing of the disenchantment of
the world with its “constant re-enchantment”170—yet the same interpreters
simultaneously claim that the process of disenchantment is irreversible.171
This can only mean that, on the one hand, disenchantment awakens counter-
vailing forces, but that on the other these can never become strong enough
to halt the process. But how would we generate knowledge of this fact? Is
this idea historically verifiable, and plausible with respect to the future? Or
do we perhaps need to question the entire construct of a single process of
disenchantment?
Whether the human being is naturally primed for religion or not has long
been a topic of controversial debate between critics of and apologists for re-
ligion. If the answer is no, a future without religion is quite imaginable; if
the answer is yes, even the most secularized era appears as a mere interlude,
inevitably to be followed by the revitalization of religion. Max Weber would
not have answered this question with a simple yes or no. For him, the basic
substrate of all religion is magic. In the “primitive image of the world,” he
writes, “everything was concrete magic.”172 His point of departure is “the as-
sumption of a primevally pragmatic, this-worldly form of action that counts
on success in one’s dealings with the surrounding world.”173 Since the success
of this action, however, is by no means assured, experiences of failure are
unavoidable. These may take the form of the total frustration of one’s needs
or a sense of relative disadvantage vis-à-vis one’s fellow human beings, who
are more successful in their endeavors. The suffering to which this gives rise
must be addressed. This is bound to create a need to obtain more effective
means than those currently available. “The original response to this is the
search for charisma . . . in other words, for mastery, based on magical means,
of the uncertainties of a world full of suffering. The experience of everyday
human life, in both the natural and social orders, yields too little, so right
from the outset human beings seek out extraordinary experiences, in which
they obtain magical power over the environment and thus become bearers of
charisma.”174
The above account focuses on the beginnings of human history and the
historical emergence of what we call magic or religion. But Weber does not
share with the optimists about progress the belief that science and tech-
nology can bring about a world in which the contingencies of instrumen-
tally rational action or of social life become manageable once and for all. As
a result, suffering will remain part of human life, as will the need to over-
come, forget, or explain it. Right at the start of his systematic outline titled
Religiöse Gemeinschaften, Weber emphasizes that “religious or magical beha-
vior or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive
conduct, particularly since even the ends of the religious and magical action
are predominantly economic.”175 For Weber, the key trait of actors deploying
magic is not their lesser degree of instrumentality but rather their attempt
to tap “extraordinary powers.”176 Weber obviously knew from the anthropo-
logical literature of the day177 that many languages contain their own terms
for these extraordinary or extraquotidian forces, and he mentions the most
common of these terms (the Melanesian “mana”), but also “orenda” (from the
language of the Iroquois) and the Old Iranian “maga,” from which our word
“magic” is derived. But he decided against using any of these words and opts
“henceforth”178 for the Christian term “charisma,” from the Greek, which
highlights not just, as in the other terms, the element of the extraquotidian
force, but above all the latter’s character as gift.
In order to bring out the special features as well as the problematic na-
ture of Weber’s ideas, a comparative look at other (contemporary) ways of
thinking is helpful. Most important here is the difference between Weber’s
thinking and the theory of religion—outlined in chapter 3 of the present
book—expounded by Émile Durkheim. For Durkheim, in the ecstatic expe-
rience of the collective, people experience extraquotidian forces that, upon
their reintegration into everyday life, are ascribed to certain attributes of
the experiential situation as sacred qualities. There is no need to repeat his
complex reasoning here. The crucial point is that in this conception there
is no room for the idea that magic is the basic layer of the religious sphere,
or that instrumentally oriented action is the original context for sacredness.
In Durkheim’s work, in fact, magic is parasitical upon religion. Without the
forces of the sacred constituted through collective ecstasy, individuals, par-
ticularly wielders of magic—as quasi-experts in the instrumentally oriented
deployment of these forces—have nothing at all to work with in the context
of everyday action. Durkheim went so far as to refuse to see in extraquotidian
forces anything other than the collective’s own uncomprehended powers. My
concern is not with the validity of this profoundly “secularist assumption,”
but with the fundamental contrast here with Weber’s presuppositions. If
magic, as in Weber’s work, represents the basic layer of religion, then subse-
quent developments can only consist either in its strengthening and systema-
tization or, alternatively, in its weakening and suppression. Things look quite
different in Durkheim’s work. His framework is centered on the ever-new
dynamics of sacralization and the ever-new forms of appropriation of the sa-
cred in instrumentally rational actions. Weber’s logic is to infer from the lack
of a prohibition on magic that the magical realm is dominant within a tradi-
tion. From Durkheim’s perspective, this inference is not inevitable, because
the constitution of sacredness occurs outside of instrumentally rational
contexts, and the existence of a belief in sacred forces by no means inevitably
signifies that an instrumentally rational approach to them will dominate.179
It is not the case that Weber did not discern the fundamental difference
between an instrumentally rational and a different type of approach to the sa-
cred. As mentioned above, the passage on disenchantment in the categories
essay explicitly referred to such alternatives—the “conscientious” and the
“mystical.” In the text Religiöse Gemeinschaften, Weber introduces the key
conceptual distinction between “worship of the god” and “coercion of the
god”; he means, respectively, the attempt to compel God to act in line with
one’s desires and a willingness to have one’s will shaped by the divine will.
Weber, however, in sharp contrast to Durkheim, believes that “the orgiastic

and mimetic components of the religious cult—especially of song, dance,
drama, and the typical fixed formulae of prayer”180 can be traced back to
the objective of compelling God. In his analyses of post-prophetic Judaism,
Weber makes use of the distinction between “magic” and “miracle”—again,
in an attempt to convey a fundamental change. According to Weber, in post-
prophetic Judaism the “idea that one may coerce the deity through magic
is radically eliminated. . . . The prophetic conception of God, once for all,
precluded this. Therefore, magic in this primitive sense was indeed held by
the Talmud as abominable and blasphemous.”181 Weber is also aware of the
exceptions—in exorcism and the healing of the sick, though for him this
involves the attempt to compel demons rather than God, and highlights the
demands made of Jesus, as depicted in the Gospels, to prove his status as
God’s emissary through signs. For the Jews, however, Weber tells us, this was
absolutely not a matter of the divinity of Jesus but only of legitimizing the
notion that he had been sent by God. The opposition between magic and re-
ligion, then, is also present in the work of Weber, but in the sense of religion
flowing from magic over the course of time. Of course, here “flowing from”
does not imply a straightforward sequence of events, because for Weber the
“overcoming” of magic was “improbable in an evolutionary sense,”182 and
even after it had been “overcome,” magic continued to survive among peas-
ants or resurged as an aspect of decadence.183
One distinction that Weber made within the supposed magical substrate of
the religious sphere can help shed more light on the specific and problematic
aspects of his thinking. Like the discourse on “mana” and the sacred around
1900 as a whole, he assumes that an experience of extraquotidian forces is the
wellspring of the development of religion, but also that the initial frame of
reference for this experience is that of a presymbolic naturalism. It takes an
additional developmental step for magic to turn “from a direct manipulation
of forces into a symbolic activity.”184 Using a form of words similar to those
with which he characterizes disenchantment as a result of modern science
or the worldview based on it, Weber states, “Before, only the things or events
that actually exist or take place played a role in life; now certain experiences,
of a different order in that they only signify something, also play a role.”185
This makes it sound as if a modern scientistic naturalism reestablishes a
primal relationship between human being and world. For Weber, the emer-
gence of ideas about “souls, demons, and gods” creates a realm whose “beings
cannot be grasped or perceived in any concrete sense but possess a kind of
transcendental existence which is normally accessible only through the me-

diation of symbols and meanings”; in stark terms, he even states that at a cer-
tain point, in significant part as a result of the magic wielders’ power interests,
“a tidal wave of symbolic action . . . engulfs the primal naturalism.”186 This,
however, is to interpret religious meaning as a superfluous secondary layer of
the experience of the world—once again in profound contrast to Durkheim
and all those thinkers (from Mircea Eliade to Robert Bellah), for whom there
is no relationship of human being to world that is not symbolically consti-
tuted.187 This is not the place to seek to determine definitively the validity of
Weber’s way of thinking. What matters here is that the starting point, in reli-
gious history, of Weber’s narrative of disenchantment contains a problematic
assumption, namely that of the precedence of magic in the development of
religion.
(2) A generous interpretation of Weber—and this brings us to the second
topic—might argue that in magical or religious symbolism Weber discerned
a kind of secondary symbolism supervening on the primary gestural and
linguistic communicative symbol; this means it could indeed cease to exist
at some point. Hence, he states that in Egypt the “devaluation of the tradi-
tional religion by the monotheistic campaign of Amenhotep IV (Ikhnaton)
immediately stimulated naturalism.”188 But the question is whether we ought
to envisage the emergence of language in this way; in my critical examina-
tion of Jürgen Habermas’s conception of ritual in c hapter 3 I identified the
reasons I think this idea is wrong.189 Even if certain religious symbols pre-
suppose language, this does not mean that those experiences we may refer
to as constitutive of religion were not already central to the emergence of
linguistic symbols. The relationship between human being and world is al-
ready semiotically mediated in its physical dimension rather than originally
“naturalistic.”
It was William James who came up with the most vivid way to point up
just how much the human being’s experience of the world is fundamentally
pervaded by values that create meaning. In his lectures on the psychology of
religion, he invited his listeners to partake of a thought experiment:
Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with

which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely
by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive
comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of
negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have
importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and
series of events would be without significance, character, expression, or
perspective.190
What James is getting at is that we could not live in a pure world of facts be-
cause such a world would be dead for us. This would not be the relationship
to the world of the illusion-free realist, but of the depressive. Through reflec-
tion, we can certainly conclude that it is our needs that give the world interest
and meaning for us. Yet we do not experience such prereflective construction
of meaning as an addition to the world but as the world. Those who love,
James tells us, see the loved being but also themselves and the entire world in
a different light. Yet it would be quite misleading to interpret such love as a
mere projection, as if the world were naturally free of meaning. What James
underlines here applies to the experience of the world in general, but even
more so in those cases in which we experience something as “ideal.” In this
sense, “love” and “faith” are heightenings of the natural human experience of
the world, not projective additions to an originally meaning-free perception
of the world.191
One of the pitfalls of Weber’s metaphor of disenchantment, as even its
staunchest defenders acknowledge, is that it points to an antecedent “en-
chantment of the world”: “For something to be disenchanted, it must first
be enchanted.”192 Yet the notion of enchantment in the sense of a theory of
projection is a wholly inadequate means of describing the emergence of that
vital, basic attitude of the human being in which the world is experienced
as of value. When human beings perform an activity they enjoy for its own
sake, as in the case of play or work they relish,193 they are not projecting any-
thing, they are not succumbing to illusions and are not the victims of a spell
from which they ought to emancipate themselves. Weber himself, no doubt
influenced by his reading of James’s classical text in the psychology of religion,
refers time and again to the intuitive certainty of the religious experience or
the ineffability of the mystical, but he talks about them as if human beings’
overriding obligation is not to abandon themselves to these experiences.
Now, the alternative to this is certainly not to willingly open oneself to every
instance of wishful thinking or self-deception, let alone to create a desired
faith oneself in voluntaristic fashion. Yet Weber, in “Science as a Vocation,”
for example, portrays the believing individual as one who has decided to turn
his back on reason—that is, due to a yearning for faith and contrary to his
own rational insight, has accepted teachings that he himself cannot justify. In
a turn of phrase that he erroneously appears to link with Augustine of Hippo,

he refers to the “sacrifice of the intellect,” which the Catholic Christian in par-
ticular is allegedly obliged to make.194 This phrase, originating in monastic
contexts, was chiefly an element in the Enlightenment critique of religion
and, in Weber’s time, of Protestant confessional polemics; but with the excep-
tion of integralist versions, it was by no means an aspect of Catholic teachings
themselves.195 Both in his understanding of the relationship between quo-
tidian and extraquotidian experience, and in his ideas about reason and
faith, Weber turns distinctions that can be meaningfully identified along a
continuum into dichotomies. This gives rise to artificial alternatives, such as
that between purely pre-given values and those individuals posit entirely on
their own—alternatives that lead us into the dead-end of value decisionism.
If instead we think in terms of a continuum of prereflective experience and
reflection, we become aware of the diverse range of paths along which human
beings integrate pre-reflectively experienced meaning, which they them-
selves have not created, into their explicit worldviews.196 Once again, we will
not be pursuing here all the implications of Weber’s flawed and dichotomous
approach. What counts is that the everyday experience of a value-laden
world ought not to be described as enchantment, and thus its loss should not
be conceptualized as disenchantment.
(3) As far as the two historical topics are concerned, I provisionally omit
the strictly empirical questions as to the aptness of Weber’s ideas about the
prophets or the Reformation. In both cases, that of “religious” and “cognitive”
disenchantment, my initial concern is solely with the foundations of the con-
struct as a whole. With respect to “religious disenchantment,” in order to aid
understanding of my key objection, I require the distinction between three
conceptual pairs, which flow into one another in the associated debates time
and again.197 I am referring to the following distinctions: sacred/profane,
transcendent/immanent (or mundane), and religious/secular. The terms “sa-
cred,” “transcendent,” and “religious” are not synonyms. The concept of the
“sacred” is an attempt to convey a universal anthropological phenomenon,
one arising from human experiences of self-transcendence. The concept of
the “transcendent” refers to ideas of a separation between the realm of the di-
vine and that of the mundane, and concurrently to the localization of the true
in the realm of the divine; these ideas are by no means a universal anthro-
pological phenomenon and came into existence historically in identifiable
places and at particular points in time. Finally, the concept of the “religious”
is only meaningful when contrasted with an alternative; this has been fully
possible only since the rise of the “secular option” (Charles Taylor) in the
Europe of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.198
If this distinction between three contrasting pairs, introduced only very
briefly here,199 makes sense, then it follows that there must be three different
processes of changeover from one to the other and in both directions. On
this premise there are processes of sacralization and profanization (or desa-
cralization), processes of transcendentalization and immanentization (or
detranscendentalization), and processes of religious revitalization and secular-
ization. By no means must we assume that one of these processes invariably
follows the other. A single example can serve to illustrate this.
Weber’s account makes much of Calvin’s activities, as the “completion” or
high point of a process of religious disenchantment engendered by a rad-
ical hostility to magic. Certainly, Weber exaggerates in the passage on disen-
chantment in the subchapter of his Gesammelte Aufsätze titled “Resultat,”200
when, without providing evidence, he writes that “the strict Puritan had the
corpses of his loved ones dug under without any formality in order to as-
sure the complete elimination of superstition,” as Calvin certainly approved
of funeral rites.201 But it is fundamentally correct that Calvin insisted
upon the “negation of any grounds for a mundane separation between sa-
cred and profane—in other words of any basis for distinguishing certain
places, times, numbers, objects, actions, and so on, as holy and endowed
with sacred dignity.”202 And yet the point of the struggle against all “idol-
atry of created things” (Kreaturvergötterung), is not total desacralization,
let alone secularization, but the intensified, indeed exclusive sacralization of
God—in other words, his radical transcendentalization.203 This example is
intended to demonstrate that we require the tripartite distinction between
the above-mentioned conceptual pairs and, in addition, the relativization of
magic’s supposed starting point in religious history, if we are to avoid the
pitfalls of the disenchantment narrative. In the case of ascetic Protestantism,
demagification must be understood as transcendentalization.
Much the same applies in the case of what Weber calls the “prophetic
age.”204 We can at least tentatively tease apart what Weber elides in the concept
of disenchantment. This will surely prompt us to ask whether demagification,
desacralization, detranscendentalization, and secularization are not in fact
quite different processes. On this premise it no longer makes sense to de-
clare that one of these processes lays the ground or sets the pace for any of
the others. Instead, what we find is a plethora of different challenges that reli-
gious traditions must cope with and that may be their downfall.
(4) In the case of the second historical topic, so-called cognitive disen-
chantment, we find confirmation of the need for a more nuanced concept
than that of disenchantment. The question of the importance of nonreli-
gious impulses in the history of disenchantment prior to the Reformation is
a quite different one from that concerning religious or antireligious motives
and effects within the modern history of science. In the first case, if Weber’s
writings are our point of departure, what is mainly at issue are the character-
istics of ancient Greek thought—what Yehuda Elkana calls “second-order”
thinking, that is, one that seeks to assure itself reflectively of the correctness
of its own reasoning or measuring through recourse, for example, to logic
and geometry.205 Robert Bellah declared the emergence of “theory” as a hall-
mark of the Greek Axial Age, as a dimension of the critical-reflexive break
with myth.206 Weber was very aware of the tremendous significance of the
reception of Greek thought within Christianity, particularly for the develop-
ment of a systematized doctrine. “Only among the Christians did there de-
velop a comprehensive, binding, and systematically rationalized dogmatics
of a theoretical type concerning cosmological matters, the soteriological
mythos (Christology), and priestly authority (the sacraments).”207 Weber the
sociologist does not simply provide us with an explanation centered on intel-
lectual history. Instead it foregrounds the “distinctive character of the intelli-
gentsia which was a product of Greek education” and the importance of the
justification of faith vis-à-vis the educated stratum that at first remained out-
side the Christian community. But his explanation concurrently underlines
the fact that “socially, Christianity was a congregational religion comprising
primarily petty-bourgeois laymen, who looked with considerable suspicion
upon pure intellectualism.”208
If we move beyond Weber’s writings, the topic of “cognitive disenchant-
ment” clearly encompasses the role of science and intellectualism within
Asian and particularly Chinese history. Today it is beyond dispute that
Weber’s knowledge of the Chinese history of science, like that of his Western
contemporaries in general, was wholly inadequate, leading him to make false
assertions about the special characteristics of the Occident.209 These issues,
then, relate to the interplay of religious and cognitive impulses within var-
ious cultures and the legitimacy of applying the term “disenchantment” as an
overarching term to the resulting developments in the first place.
Things look quite different, however, in the second case, that is, when we
turn to the emergence of modern science and, above all, the development of a
worldview that does without transcendence or militantly refutes it, for which
Charles Taylor coined the term “immanent frame,”210 that is, a framework
that consciously remains wholly immanent. No one today will seriously por-
tray all the key figures in the early modern history of science as motivated by
a desire for secularization; it is now widely acknowledged that it was often
religious motives that prompted the great natural scientists to study na-
ture, viewing it, for example, as the book of God.211 Because of this, it is not
enough to trace back the emergence of the “immanent frame,” a worldview of
immanence, to the empirical progress of science. Here we have at least three
tasks if we wish to achieve an adequate picture of these realities. First, in ad-
dition to the causal-mechanistic worldview, we must take account of all those
new intellectual approaches that emerged in reaction to it and that restrain
or overcome it. Hence, the philosophy of Kant, centered on the conditions
of possibility of human knowledge and moral freedom; the expressivist and
hermeneutic tradition of Herder, Humboldt, and Schleiermacher, with its
emphasis on human expression; the complex attempts to synthesize these
new philosophies in the work of Hegel; and their creative development in
pragmatism—none of these tallies with the notion of the “victory” of the
causal-mechanistic worldview. Second, we must ask how the ideas about
transcendence within religious traditions, such as the Christian, change if
the spatial metaphor for localizing transcendence (in “Heaven”) is no longer
available. The simplistic idea that the astronomy of the early modern period
straightforwardly did away with the Axial Age notions of transcendence
by no means captures the history of the Christian discourse on cosmology.
Third, in the case of the newly emerging worldview of immanence, we must
distinguish between those versions concerned with retaining the moral uni-
versalism of the transcendence-focused religions, perhaps in secularized
form, and those for which science and the pathos of immanence are a means
of disposing of this moral universalism.
The terms “disenchantment” and “enchantment” certainly do not allow us
to perform all these tasks. If the meaning of the term “disenchantment” is to be
narrowed down to that of “demagification,” then the empirical question that
must be asked is how the battle against magic or a belief in miracles played it-
self out in the modern era and what the role of religious or other motives
was in this.212 We might also investigate the role played by references to sci-
ence in the various processes of demagification, detranscendentalization,
desacralization and secularization; in none of the relevant cases should we
work on the assumption of an automatic, one-sided effect. The forms of ex-
pression of religious faith are often shaped by the associated disputes, but the
outcome is always open and not determined by the sciences. The brief review
of these issues here chiefly serves to lend greater plausibility to my proposed
conceptual distinction. The history of demagification since the Reformation
differs from that of detranscendentalization, and neither should be equated
with desacralization in the sense of the loss of a motivating relationship with
the world. In order to trace the possible effects of one process on the other,
and to assess what role all of them play in connection with secularization (in
the sense of the weakening of all religion), we must overcome the concept of
disenchantment.
It must also be overcome because it is the lack of differentiation be-
tween these very different processes that makes the suggestive narrative of
a millennia-old process possible in the first place. This narrative has two
other characteristics that I have as yet barely addressed. These relate to its
potential to analyze the present age and its culturally specific dimension. To a
large extent, the narrative of disenchantment gains its existential significance
from the fact that it appears to provide us with the empirical basis for the
feeling that we are facing a crisis of meaning or loss of meaning. Here Weber
comes across as the illusion-free and sober analyst who makes it clear to
his contemporaries, with a downright prophetic air, that they are living in a
prophetless age, distant from God. He chiefly invokes Tolstoy to lend weight
to the idea that there is no possibility of answering existential questions by
scientific means. This diagnosis itself was certainly in the air. It reflects the
generationally typical “experience of nihilism that Nietzsche had dramatized
so impressively,” writes Jürgen Habermas,213 adding that it is not the diag-
nosis itself but its substantiation in light of the religious-historical process of
disenchantment that is the truly original thing about Weber. Weber’s conclu-
sion, on the basis of this diagnosis, was that “general views of life and the uni-
verse can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that
the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only
in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours
are to us.”214 Thus, the crisis of meaning does not rule out the possibility of
orienting oneself toward ideals, and it is notable that Weber even applies the
term “sacred” to these ideals. But the route to ideal formation seems radically
individual, activist, and separated by a great chasm from the investigation of
history. This is the flip side of his historical narrative, which allows the ever-
new processes of sacralization and ideal formation to be subsumed into a
story of advancing disenchantment.
But in addition to its melancholy analysis of the present age, according to

which disenchantment has led to a shattering crisis of meaning, the narra-
tive of disenchantment also entails, quite centrally, the idea of the culturally
determined superiority of the West, which has supposedly developed over a
long period of time. Certainly, disenchantment leads to a crisis of meaning,
but it is also claimed to be the precondition for, and part of, a process of ra-
tionalization. In the shape of modern capitalism and the modern bureau-
cratic Machtstaat or “power-state,” Weber tells us, this rationalization has
given rise to a dynamic order, which other religious or cultural traditions are
unable to counter with anything comparably powerful. Yet rationalization,
which is Weber’s other key term in addition to that of disenchantment, is at
least as ambiguous, and runs a similar risk of failing to examine very different
processes in light of their differences, failing to investigate them to determine
their causal effects on one another, and instead subsuming them under a fic-
titious meta-process.215 In his essays on the economic ethics of the world
religions, time and again these ethics are interpreted from the perspective
of their specific deficiencies in comparison with “occidental rationalism.”
Hence, Weber underestimates their internal variability and their potential
for modernization and universalization.216
The key issue guiding Weber’s research—originally, the issue of the emer-
gence of the “spirit” of capitalism, then the preconditions for, and causes of,
the alleged victory of “occidental rationalism”—certainly provided him with
a framework for his intensive study of Confucianism and Daoism, Hinduism
and Buddhism, ancient Judaism, and on a rudimentary level, the history of
Christianity and Islam. But his obvious fascination with the “world religions,”
which appears to contradict his self-characterization as “religiously unmu-
sical” in a letter to Ferdinand Tönnies,217 ultimately remained sterile in re-
ligious terms. In this sense, then, his self-image does seem fitting. Weber
certainly showed no willingness to find existential inspiration in the here
and now in other religious traditions—in contrast to Max Scheler’s opening
his mind to East Asia in the 1920s, Karl Jaspers’s work after World War II,
and above all, the literary output of Alfred Döblin.218 Weber did not see—
despite the repeated claims of Weberians—total secularization in the sense
of a disappearance of all religion as the future result of the process of disen-
chantment; he even warned, combatively, of the danger that in the future, in
addition to bureaucratism within the state, “the virtuoso machinery of the
Catholic Church . . . [has] the best prospect of prevailing over everything
else”—and this in a letter to a women’s rights campaigner who had converted

to Catholicism!219 But he ruled out the possibility of a modern religion that
would be intellectually justifiable and institutionally efficacious under the
structural conditions of contemporary and future society. Private religiosity
perhaps, the survival of religious institutions, and the legitimation of polit-
ical orders in religious terms, yes—but no more than this.
The insights arising from the conceptual dismantling of “disenchant-
ment” that I have undertaken here are now crying out to be applied to the
history of religion and thus prove their value. So far, I have put forward a
single example of their potential productiveness, when I asserted that the
Reformation entailed a heightening of the sacredness of God—his intensified
transcendentalization—rather than just the demagification of the world. In
passing, I also mentioned the various possibilities of a new interpretation of
religious faith following the rise of the worldview of immanence, which has
the potential to facilitate an adequate perspective on the Enlightenment and
its consequences. Furthermore, my emphasis on the fact that a cultural loss of
meaning does not arise, at least primarily, from worldviews, but rather from
changes in everyday experience, means we must identify other causes for the
crisis of meaning in Europe on the eve of World War I than the supposed
victory of the causal-mechanistic worldview. And this applies even more to
cultural crises of meaning at other times and in different places. Likewise,
Weber’s notion of the Asian “magic gardens,” which for him admitted of no
path toward a rational, this-worldly conduct of life, will have to be substan-
tially revised. When it comes to the assessment of Asian cultures, it is vital to
take far greater account than Weber did of the mastery of natural causality
within the context of everyday action, which relativizes the idea that people
are cocooned in a “highly anti-rational world of universal magic”220 that sup-
posedly pervaded everyday economic life. And because for Weber what has
been said here applies to all cultures in thrall to “magic,” this relativization
also applies to the earlier stages of cultural development outside of Asia, such
as medieval Europe.
The greatest challenge, of course, consists in examining those of Weber’s
accounts that were most thorough and seemed to jibe best with the idea of
a world-historical process of disenchantment. Here I am thinking of his
analysis of the Old Testament prophets and the Reformation. In this respect
too, I would contend, the modified conceptual framework I am proposing is
better able to integrate our present state of empirical knowledge. I cannot, of
course, do this comprehensively here. A few sentences will have to suffice.
Weber’s account of the ancient Israelite prophets is highly vivid, and here
his prose itself takes on a prophetic brio.221 He paints a picture of ecstatic
individuals who, at the greatest personal risk (up to and including execu-
tion) threaten the king and the people with the displeasure and punishment
of God if they fail to change their ways. Weber underlines the original orality
of prophecy, its deeply emotional character, and the power of the spoken ex-
pression of the meaning gained from the experience of ecstasy. “In the partly
fragmentary tradition, the great power of rhythm is yet surpassed by the
glow of visionary images which are always concrete, telling, striking, concise,
exhaustive, often of unheard of majesty and fecundity; in this regard they be-
long to the most grandiose productions of world poetry.”222 Crucially, how-
ever, we are told, the prophet does not speak like “ordinary pathologically
ecstatic men” about his extraquotidian experiences, but instead transforms
the raw material of his experience into comprehensible words, because only
these can be received as the message of God: “The tremendous pathos of pro-
phetic speech in many cases was, as it were, a post-ecstatic excitement of in
turn semi-ecstatic nature.”223
Weber’s account of the prophets, therefore, centers on the ecstatic ex-
perience and its interpretation by the ecstatic himself. Weber’s compar-
ative perspective enables him to bring out more clearly specific features
of Old Testament prophecy, both with respect to the causation of ecstatic
experiences and to the content of the message authenticated by these
experiences. According to Weber, ecstasy is not intentionally brought about
through intoxicants or ascetic exercises. Further, we are told, ecstasy only
grips the individual; it does not take hold of an entire community (with the
individual as mere mouthpiece). “Hence, the prophet abstained from gath-
ering a community about him which might have engaged in mass ecstasy
or mass-conditioned ecstasy or ecstatic revivals as a path to salvation.”224
And the objective of the prophecy arising from experiences of ecstasy, Weber
contends, is not otherworldly salvation for a small number of recipients of
the message, but rather the upholding of everyday morality, which, however,
was raised to a special ethical duty of a people chosen by its God, the might-
iest of all, and exhorted by utopian promises and punishments. The special
promise of salvation held out to Israel made morally correct action and the
abidance by everyday ethic all important. However banal and self-evident
this may seem, here alone it was made the basis of religious prophecy.
Highly special conditions led to this result.225
With respect to these special conditions too, Weber’s comparative vantage

point is illuminating. He discerns the domestic and international political
constellations in which prophetic speech of this kind developed and be-
came entrenched. He places particular emphasis on the international polit-
ical dimension: “The question for the national state was to live or be crushed
between the Assyrian world power on the one hand, the Egyptian on the
other.”226 Such public prophecy would have been impossible on the territory
of these world powers themselves.227 In the context of domestic politics, the
prophets argued “passionately for the social-ethical charity-commandments
of the Levite exhortation for the benefit of the little people and hurled their
wrathful curses preferably against the great and the rich.”228 Yet despite all
the attention he pays to the politically “demagogic” character of the prophets,
Weber disputes the dominance of political motives in their action. Quite the
reverse. His analyses are pervaded by assertions that purely religious motives
were decisive.
In the background here is the motif that pervades his entire series of compar-
ative studies of the economic ethics of the world religions, namely eschewing
the reduction of either ideas or ideals to their contexts of emergence and, by
the same token, rejecting the idea that they had no causal efficacy. Here a role
was no doubt also played by Weber’s consistent objective of underlining the
importance of the religious causes of world-historical developments—as in
the case of the relationship between ascetic Protestantism and the capitalist
spirit. In the case at hand, after all, the broader context consists in answering
the question of why what Weber controversially referred to as Jewish “pariah
capitalism”229 did not lead to modern capitalism and why the universalism of
the prophets was so fractured that it developed into a ritually self-segregating
confessional formation. As Weber sees it, the crucial factor here is the frac-
turing, indeed “suffocation” of prophetic charisma by the priesthood under
the conditions “of [a]‌people integrated in the (relatively) pacified world, first
of the Persian kingdom, then of the Hellenic.”230 The intensification of uni-
versalism as found in Deutero-Isaiah—in the conception of God, who not
only guides the history of Israel but universal history, and of the innocently
Suffering Servant of God—is interpreted by Weber as “the glorification of
the situation of the pariah people and its tarrying endurance,”231 partly as
an important forerunner of the later conception of Christ, it is true, but
above all as an interpretation of the world-historical mission of the “pariah
people.” Questions as to the emergence of moral universalism, therefore, are
repeatedly forced back into the framework of a different question, namely

that concerning the causes of the non-emergence of a rational economic
spirit.
Weber’s accounts—and how could it be otherwise?—are deeply dependent
on the state of research in his day.232 In the present context, this means above
all scholarship on the prophets within Protestant theology, but also works
by ancient historians that did much to shape the discipline of theology. In
one respect in particular, the scholarship after Weber’s time has changed our
ideas to such an extent that we have to ask what this means for our present-
day relationship to Weber’s observations. The idea that we might identify by
name “brilliant individuals” in the prophetic books, and perhaps eliminate
all later alterations from the surviving texts in such a way that we can fully ac-
cess the original version,233 has gradually been abandoned. It has become in-
creasingly clear that the prophetic books are the product of a complex literary
history. “The exegetical engagement with those passages in the prophetic
books traditionally regarded as apocryphal made it clear that they amounted
to more than just glosses and textual errors. Often, in fact mostly, we should
read them as meaningful later interpretations of preexisting textual material.
In the wake of such discoveries, the writers of amendments rose in status
from bungling glossators to scribal editors, and are even viewed as prophets
themselves in recent research.”234 This, however, turns prophecy back into a
collective phenomenon once again. The impact of individual charismatic fig-
ures may have been incorporated into it, but this is by no means always cer-
tain. Hence, the prophetic figures, whom Weber interpreted psychologically
and sociologically, are to a significant extent at least textual fictions. But their
fictionality, the legendary character of their authors, does not divest the texts
of their innovative character.
Two key components of Weber’s arguments, however, thus lose a great
deal of their plausibility. The emphasis on a “purely religious” motiva-
tion may seem persuasive in the case of the personal resistance of indi-
viduals to political and economic realities. But if we think of a process
of textual composition extending over many centuries, it becomes diffi-
cult to believe that we might isolate a specific type of motivation.235 In
such a long-lasting process, the most varied range of motives are bound to
have become inextricably interwoven.236 Likewise, the notion of a one-off
phase of prophetic demagification emerges as untenable. In any case, it is
not inevitable that statements by individual prophets expressing hostility
to magic were successful in the sense that they led to the wide-ranging
suppression of magic.237 The prophetic books, as the product of a long
intrabiblical history, thus clearly indicate that statements critical of magic
had not lost their object. Weber was very well aware of this. This is evi-
dent when he states that “magic . . . in Israel . . . never vanished completely
from popular practice,”238 and when he refers to the masses’ resistance to
the prophets’ and Torah teachers’ hostility to magic.239 Hence, the most
important point is that the condemnation of magic, for which Weber also
identifies other reasons, prevented the priests from systematizing it “for
the sake of taming the masses.”240 It is not a definitive break with magic,
but instead the ceaseless assertion of a more sophisticated conception of
the sacredness of God that then emerges as the objective of the prophetic
books. This difference should not be obscured by the thesis of a one-off
radical act within the process of disenchantment.
But the need for revision is even greater when it comes to Weber’s ideas
about the Reformation and Protestantism. The relevant texts are so well
known—the best-known sociological texts that the twentieth century pro-
duced, in fact—that there is no need for a summary here. A summary, more-
over, would have no choice but to comment on the seemingly endless dispute
over the correct understanding of these texts. Even their explanandum, what
they are truly seeking to explain, is unclear. If this is the emergence of modern
capitalism in northwestern Europe in the sixteenth century, then we would
have to consider the relative significance of religious and other “factors”—
such as the causes of the shift in trade flows away from the Mediterranean
and toward the North Atlantic. The questionable assumption of Europe’s su-
periority over China since this period would also come to the fore in this
context.241 Weber ensured himself against such crude objections by referring
not simply to capitalism but to its “spirit.” But what exactly is this “spirit,” and
how does it relate to other dimensions that must be taken into account if we
truly seek to understand the history of capitalism?242 Conversely, though, if
the goal, rather than explaining the genesis of capitalism, is to provide a com-
prehensive analysis of the social consequences of the Reformation, then the
focus on capitalism is bound to prove restrictive; the net of questions must
be cast far wider, and we would have to consider the fact that the impulses
driving the Reformation were many and varied, that only a few of them
had an impact on the power struggles of the day, and that new generations
could—and still can—always find new ways of building on these impulses.243
In the context of my examination of Weber’s narrative of disenchantment,
I leave all these considerations aside and seek to more fully answer just one
question: to what extent did the Reformation—as Weber wrote—amount to
the final victory of demagification?
The first crucial point here is that Weber inevitably overestimated the ex-
tent of the reformatory rupture simply because he was insufficiently aware of
the prereformatory developments that already pointed in the same direction,
and he was especially unconscious of the postreformatory reforms within
Catholicism.244 Today, the once-and-for-all view of the Reformation has
largely been superseded by that of a long-drawn-out and multifaceted devel-
opment. But even more important than this correction are the consequences
arising from scholarship on the Reformation at the level of lived religion.245
The first step here is to attain a correct understanding of the relationship
between magic and religion in the Middle Ages. If this is misinterpreted as the
straightforward regression of Christianity into magic, the medieval church’s
struggle against the tendency toward remagification becomes incomprehen-
sible. Protestant polemics against the supposedly magical Catholic under-
standing of the sacrament, which influenced Max Weber, not only failed to
understand the Catholic doctrine of the sacraments, but also entail a flawed
view of what, in fact, had a magical character. The church constantly strug-
gled against surviving pre-Christian forms of, for example, magical love
and healing spells. It attempted to respond to the need for these partly by
integrating pre-Christian forms, and there can be no doubt that nonmagical
forms were instrumentalized within a magical framework.246 Hence, there is
continuity between the anti-magic statements of Reformers on the one hand
and the medieval church on the other; such statements by no means repre-
sent an era-defining, renewed embrace of a motif that had been abandoned
since the time of the Old Testament prophets.
But we cannot directly determine the effects of Reformers’ attempts to
eliminate magic by reading their texts, any more than we could in the case
of the prophetic books of the Old Testament. If we investigate lived religion
rather than doctrinal statements and focus not just on the first, but also on
later generations, we soon find that in many respects things were not as ex-
treme as they seemed. The original efforts to consistently forgo the sacral-
ization of specific times, places, and persons and to deritualize the forms
of religious practice failed to comprehensively achieve their goals. New,
Protestant forms of the “consecration” of church buildings, organs, altars,
cemeteries, and church bells arose, which also had to be protected, time
and again, against attempts to instrumentalize them in a magical vein.247
In cases where the Catholic eucharistic procession, performed to ensure a

good harvest, was frowned upon, the same objective could be pursued in
a Protestant way by means of the “hail ceremony” (Hagelfeier), that is, “a
procession around the fields with hymns and prayers” and later the “hail
sermon” (Hagelpredigt), with its “own distinctive apotropaic features.”248 In
general, it would in fact be quite wrong to imagine that the original reforma-
tory teachings were inflexible vis-à-vis the needs of the faithful.
This is also why later generations of Calvinists were quite unable to
specify what role the belief in predestination played for them.249 Economic
activity was by no means the only way of dealing with fears regarding sal-
vation or eternal damnation. But even in the most undiluted of texts, the
reformatory struggle against magic spells was not targeted against an il-
lusion and thus disenchanting, but rather against satanic and demonic
forces whose existence was not in dispute. Even Weber conceded this.250
Luther’s belief in the devil is proverbial, yet even Calvin’s view of the world
and of history entails a cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, a
struggle that certainly includes other forces—namely angels and demons,
which are, of course, attested in the Bible. Amid the turmoil of the post-
reformatory wars and civil wars, the belief in this worldview, which had
not been “disenchanted,” even intensified. Robert Scribner concludes
that the hypothesis of the disenchantment of the world as a historically
fitting description of this era cannot endure,251 and Alexandra Walsham
contends that future generations of scholars will regard the vast debate on
the topic as an interpretative dead-end and as a “historiographical red her-
ring.”252 Some historians even describe the period from 1500 to 1650 as a
time of “super-enchantment.”253 I would like to add that the subsequent
history of Protestantism also compels us to abandon this narrative of dis-
enchantment. Whatever the exact nature of the relationship between the
Reformation and the Enlightenment may be, the eighteenth century is not
just that of the Enlightenment, but also of Pietism, Methodism, and the
American “Great Awakening.”254 These developments, and later the great
global Pentecostalist revivalist movements, also call for a modified theoret-
ical framework.255
I return to this alternative framework in the final chapter of this book.
Here I would like to remind the reader that the key question informing the
first chapter was whether there can be a “science” of religion—a science in
the sense that the statements of a given author are not simply predictable on
the basis of his religious or antireligious presuppositions, but are instead the
result of empirical research and the theoretical penetration of empirical ma-

terial. This key question must also be applied to the two most comprehensive
efforts made in the early twentieth century to lay the ground for a synthesis
of the empirical knowledge on religion and a universal-historical narrative.
What this question means in this case is that we must consider the funda-
mental difference between the research of Troeltsch and Weber in an attempt
to determine whether it is simply due to how differently the two scholars
assessed the prospects of religion in their day. There is an undeniable connec-
tion between Ernst Troeltsch’s interest in a vital contemporary Christianity
and his theory of ceaseless processes of ideal formation. The same goes for
the connection between Max Weber’s perception that what he regarded as
the only consistent forms of religion, namely ascetic Protestantism and the
acosmist Indian ethic of brotherhood, were both worn out and no longer po-
tent historical forces, and his construct of a world-historical process of disen-
chantment. But in both cases it would be unjust to evade the challenge posed
by their arguments by tracing them back to underlying motives. Questions
of faith cannot be resolved by any theory or by any critique of such a theory.
Yet it is also paradoxical to imagine that a body of scholarship that takes the
alleged process of disenchantment as its own foundation, and sees itself in
large part as a reflection of this process, is free of “claims to totality.”256 What
is becoming clear is that the potential of the scholarly study of religion is in-
evitably bound up with what such study means in terms of challenges and
opportunities for believers and nonbelievers.
5
Transcendence as Reflexive Sacredness
The “Axial Age” as a Turning Point in Religious History
In my account of the emergence of the historiography, psychology, and so-

ciology of religion—which took up the first three chapters of this book—I
repeatedly referred to the tension that entered into the discourse on faith as
a result of the claim to scientificity. This claim to scientificity might express
skepticism about religion or even radical criticism of it, by refuting specific
religious beliefs, or revealing the “secret” underlying the existence of reli-
gion as such, and thus supposedly explaining it. But I also showed how the
arguments put forward by skeptics such as David Hume, or critics of religion
such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Émile Durkheim, could also be developed
or taken up independently by other thinkers of the same caliber—such as
Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, W. Robertson Smith,
and William James—but in a quite different way, namely to formulate a new,
positive understanding of faith.
The two attempts at synthesis—described in chapter 4 of the present
book—also differ in this respect. Ernst Troeltsch’s entire oeuvre was guided
by his interest in sounding out the potential for a vital Christianity under the
radically changed circumstances of European culture. His writings are sus-
tained by a faith that Europe does not simply face the prospect of a nonreli-
gious future or the “incipient dissolution of European culture as such, which
will be unable to form a new religious element of life yet cannot do without
one.”1 Contra such scenarios, Troeltsch insists at least on the possibility of
meeting the new intellectual challenges confronting Christianity, and, by
radically reforming the social organization of Christians, achieving a new
concentration of religious forces.2 It is also remarkable that in an era when
the advance and irreversible nature of secularization were widely taken for
granted, and seemingly required no further explanation, Troeltsch appears
to have considered the atheism of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer, Marx and
Nietzsche a temporary historical phenomenon. He defends their intellectual
accomplishments, which he explicitly acknowledges as feats that will retain
Transcendence as Reflexive Sacredness 155
their significance even “if the atheism that initially gave rise to them will one
day be a thing of the past.”3
This assessment does not apply to Max Weber. Certainly, in a range of ways
he was close to liberal Protestant circles within the German empire and even
participated occasionally in their reformist and anti-Catholic activities.4 But
the contrast with Troeltsch’s self-confident and forward-looking Christianity
is unmistakable. This, however, does not make Weber in any sense an engaged
critic of Christianity or of all religion. To answer the “very difficult question
as to Weber’s personal religious value orientations,” Friedrich Wilhelm Graf
has coined the term “heroic agnosticism.”5 If we draw on Weber’s most fa-
mous personal testimonial in this respect, it confirms this diagnosis. In a
letter to the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, probably of February 19, 1909,
Weber wrote that he could not “honestly” take part in atheist campaigns such
as those of Ernst Haeckel:
It is true that I am absolutely unmusical in matters religious and that I have
neither the need nor the ability to erect any religious edifices within me—
that is simply impossible for me, and I reject it. But after examining myself
carefully I must say that I am neither antireligious nor irreligious. In this re-
gard too I consider myself a cripple, a stunted man whose fate it is to admit
honestly that he must put up with this state of affairs (so as not to fall for
some romantic swindle). I am like a tree stump from which new shoots can
sometimes grow, but I must not pretend to be a grown tree.6
Often, only the phrase “absolutely unmusical in matters religious” is quoted

from this self-description. Torn from its context, this sounds like a person
who is cheerfully unburdened by things religious, or as if the author of
lengthy studies on the economic ethics of the world religions is playing up
his lack of personal interest in the true core of religion. Yet when taken as
a whole, in this passage Weber is clearly keen to distance himself from all
irreligiosity and all militant hostility to religion. It actually expresses a tragic
sense of being excluded from something, which, nonetheless, the author’s
searching, investigative mind cannot help but explore as a fascinating di-
mension of human life.
But the narrative of a world-historical process of disenchantment, which
I described in detail and called into question in the preceding chapter, raises
this tragic personal feeling to the status of an assertion in the philosophy of
history. Graf has drawn attention to the fact that the phrase “unmusical in
matters religious” already occurs in the original version of Weber’s essay on

the Protestant churches and sects in North America of 1906, but here it is
“generalized significantly”:7 “We modern, religiously ‘unattuned’ people
are hard pressed to conceptualize or even simply to believe what a powerful
role these religious factors had in those periods when the characters of the
modern national cultures were being stamped.”8 Here, the status of religious
“cripple” that Weber ascribes to himself appears not as a matter of solitary
deviation from the majority of healthy people, but simply as the fate of the
“modern” human being, whoever or whatever this may be. Hence, although
the narrative of disenchantment does not appear aggressively critical of reli-
gion, paradoxically it is more difficult to build on it if one intends to achieve
religious renewal. Max Weber’s line of argument seems open to attempts at
religious revitalization, but only recognizes as intellectually acceptable those
efforts that he simultaneously seeks to show have no prospect of success
under “modern” conditions.
In addition to Zoroastrian dualism (which Weber actually considers
neglectable due to its small number of adherents and takes into account
only because of its influence on what he still referred to as “late Judaism”),
he only treats the (Calvinist) belief in predestination and the Indian religi-
osity of intellectuals as intrinsically consistent types of theodicy. For Weber,
the belief in predestination is one possible solution to the problem of how a
good God can permit suffering and injustice, because “Man’s acknowledged
incapacity to scrutinize the ways of God means that he renounces in a love-
less clarity man’s accessibility to any meaning of the world. This renunciation
brought all problems of this sort to an end.”9
Weber’s studies of Protestantism had elaborated the psychological
consequences for human action of such a solution to the problem of the-
odicy. His idea was that these consequences include the emergence of the
spirit of capitalism, a spirit that then undermines its own underlying reli-
gious convictions. Furthermore, Weber was aware of the fact that such a
consistent “solution” or, we might say, elimination of the issue of theodicy
could not, “outside of the circle of eminent virtuosos . . . [be] permanently
endured.” This is why, over the course of time, the strict belief in predestina-
tion, even within the religious tradition of the Calvinists, was to dwindle to
the point of incomprehensibility.10
Weber saw the other intrinsically consistent form at work in India. He
characterizes it as the uniting of “virtuoso-like self-redemption by man’s own
effort with universal accessibility of salvation, the strictest rejection of the
world with organic social ethics, and contemplation as the paramount path
to salvation with an inner-worldly vocational ethic,” all of which he regarded
as an “extraordinary metaphysical achievement.”11 For Weber, however,
it is certainly not compatible with the conditions of modern social life. No
wonder, then, that Weber’s writings in the sociology of religion generally,
and his narrative of disenchantment in particular, could be understood as
lending support to the critique of Christianity.
This is one way to sum up the key issues within the scholarship on religion
in the early twentieth century, as manifest in the most ambitious attempts at
synthesis. However, in the attempted syntheses by Troeltsch and Weber (and
earlier, here and there), another aspect requires special emphasis. It matters
because it forms the point of departure for an important further development
of the discourse on the power of the sacred over the course of the twentieth
century. I am referring to the assertion of a fundamental turning point in
the religious history of humanity—of such significance that it problematizes
generalizing statements about religion, should they ignore this turning point
and thus throw heterogeneous elements into one pot. David Hume makes no
mention of such a turning point in his Natural History of Religion, and Émile
Durkheim’s sociological investigation of the (supposedly) “elementary forms
of religious life” in totemism also leads to conclusions about the role of the
sacred in “modernity” that are unrestrained by any notion of such a shift.12
The work of William James, meanwhile, hints at the idea of such a histor-
ical turning point; within his arguments in the psychology of religion, this
takes the form of a typological distinction between religious mentalities,
something easily missed by scholars whose gaze is focused on history. James
distinguishes between the “once-born” and the “twice-born.”13 While the re-
ligious aspirations of the once-born are simply focused on good fortune and
salvation in this world, the “twice-born” do not consider the world to be the
place in which one might ultimately find salvation. They aspire to salvation
in another world. Hence, their concept of “redemption” is necessarily ori-
ented toward a fundamental transformation of themselves and of the world
as a whole. This does not simply mean a world beyond physical life, but a dif-
ferent reality beyond the mundane, which is perceived as the true reality. The
orientation toward this reality, then, represents a second birth within the in-
dividual life, after which, ultimately, the mere worldly pursuit of happiness al-
ways seems unsatisfactory. “Primitive” religions, Greco-Roman polytheism,
and even recent American movements such as transcendentalism appear
as religions for the once-born—in contrast to what “Brahmans, Buddhists,
Christians, Mohammedans, twice- born people whose religion is non-

naturalistic get from their several creeds of mysticism and renunciation.”14
Hence, an idea is discernible in the work of James that spread within the
scholarship on religion in a variety of forms toward the end of the nineteenth
century, namely that of religions developing toward a higher level known as
a “religion of salvation.” Josiah Royce, who developed James’s psychology
of religion in an important direction, as set out in chapter 2, self-evidently
refers to “higher” religions, namely Buddhism and Christianity.15 Yet the
various authors who used the term “religion of salvation” after it was coined
by theologian Otto Pfleiderer in 1878 certainly did not give it a clear-cut def-
inition.16 The degree to which salvation was conceived as salvation from the
world rather than in the world varies—both in the religions scholars con-
sidered and in their views about them. I will not be going into detail about
this here. What matters is that the idea of a fundamental historical turning
point leading to the emergence of “religions of salvation” appears in the work
of both Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber—that is, in both major attempts at
synthesis.
It comes as no surprise that the idea of such a turning point plays a role
for Troeltsch as a Christian. No believing Christian can place the Christian
faith close to religions that lack a fundamental focus on transcendence.
Troeltsch considered this issue in connection with his investigation of how,
exactly—were the historical mode of thought to be consistently applied—
one might still refer to the absolute nature of Christianity as the true religion,
or as the highest and insuperable stage in the development of religion. In line
with this, we find his definition of “religion of salvation” at the point where,
having concluded that the historical mode of thought does not exclude the
possibility of recognizing Christianity, he turns to the question of whether
“the historical way of thinking” includes “the positive acknowledgement of
Christianity as the highest realm of religious life and thought that has validity
for us.”17 This question leads him to a comparison of Christianity not with
all religions but with the “universal religions”—that is, with those religions
that have freed “themselves from the natural confinement of religion to state,
blood, and soil, and from the entanglement of divinity in the powers and phe-
nomena of nature” and that have generated the idea of a “clearly suprasensual
world of absolutely transcendent values, which enters into the world of the
senses.”18 Troeltsch thus regards Judaism and Islam as having only partially
overcome “natural or particularlistic restraints” and as “religions of law” that
expect individuals to ascend to the higher world through their own efforts to
conduct themselves in conformity with the law.
The religions of redemption are the ones that consummate this distinction
between the two worlds. They sever men inwardly from the whole of ex-
istent reality, even from the nature of their own souls, in order to confront
reality with divinely empowered men. Thus they provide the whole of ex-
istent reality not only with an example of those values that overcome the
world and constitute its only worth but also with the sure hope of victory
and of living for a higher world.19
Hence, for Troeltsch, these religions of salvation by no means include just

Christianity. He explicitly mentions the Indian religions of salvation,
approximations of them in the Neoplatonism and Gnosticism of late antiq-
uity, as well as rudimentary forms in the “religions of law”—Troeltsch’s way,
as mentioned above, of classifying Judaism and Islam. He regards prophetism
as playing an important role in the emergence of the religion of salvation.
Christianity, however, he believes, transcends prophetism to a significant de-
gree. This is presumably the reason why Troeltsch begins his historical soci-
ology of Christianity with Jesus, and only later turns to the preliminary steps
taken toward a belief in the messiah within the prophetic tradition.20
Max Weber’s work too includes the idea of a fundamental turning point in
the religious history of humanity. He does not, however, consistently use the
term “religion of salvation” for this. What was central for him was the role
of the “prophets”; reference to a “prophetic age” in the work of Protestant
theologian Wilhelm Bousset probably influenced him here.21 By no means
limited to the Hebrew prophets, this age marked the turning point between
millennia of magical religion and the new era of post-magical religions of
salvation. Weber in particular emphasizes parallels with (and differences
from) Greece, India, and China.22 But the meaning of the term ‘religion of
salvation’ seems gradually to have shifted in Weber’s writings. “Whereas in §§
10 and 11 of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft the ‘religion of salvation’ continues
to be linked with the ‘ethic of conviction’ in the Protestant-Kantian sense,
in the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ it approaches the ethic of fraternity, which
unambiguously falls within the category of the world-rejecting ethic of con-
viction.”23 Rather than Puritanism, it is Buddhism that for Weber seems to
become the prototype of the religion of salvation.
However, there is no need here to trace the terminological developments

in Weber (or, perhaps, his inconsistencies) in a philological way. My only
concern at this point is to demonstrate that Weber too was impelled to con-
sider what the ethical charging of the idea of salvation means for the history
of the power of the sacred. However differently the goals of and routes to
salvation may be conceptualized in different religions, common to a small
number of them is the notion of a “good” that transcends mundane human
flourishing.
I place so much emphasis on this notion here because it points to a new
configuration of the discourse on science and religion. If the mere schol-
arly or scientific study of religions was perceived as a threat to faith, then
one means of achieving peaceful coexistence was to limit the competence of
such scholarship to the “lower” religions. After all, there was no reason not
to study religions from a historical, psychological, and sociological perspec-
tive if no modern contemporary espoused their truth. Likewise, it seemed
unproblematic to investigate human experiences that can also be had out-
side of a religious faith that claims the status of truth. But the discourse on
religions of salvation approaches, as it were, the core sphere of the “higher”
religions. Could a religion that understands itself as the product of a divine
revelation submit to investigation with the tools of the various disciplines—
and not just the scrutiny of its external forms but even of that which it claims
to be the divine revelation itself? Was it even appropriate, as a true religion, to
be discussed in the same breath as many other phenomena, which cannot be
traced back to the self-revelation of God, under the umbrella term “religion”?
Did this conceptual framework itself not entail a reduction of the divine to
the human, which—however innocent it might appear—was bound to have
destructive consequences for faith?
My contention is that in Europe and North America, as soon as it
encompassed Christianity and Judaism, the scholarly engagement with re-
ligion was in fact promptly viewed as a provocation in this way. This applied
not just to an old, science-rejecting orthodoxy, which had always existed, but
also to a new orthodoxy, which was staking out its opposition to the most ad-
vanced attempts at synthesis in particular—within theology, above all in op-
position to Ernst Troeltsch—and, after World War I, expected to enjoy new
opportunities to gain the ear of the public. But if it was to be refuted, this new
orthodoxy necessitated further deepening of the historical–social scientific
discourse on the development of religion. Over the past few decades, I would
contend, that which we find preformed in the (far from clear) discussions of
the “religion of salvation” has come to a head under the rubric of the “Axial
Age” and has in fact been developed further in key ways. This opens up new
argumentational fronts in this field.
Here I will take the young Leo Strauss as representative of many other
instances of such neo-orthodox critique of science in the early 1920s.
Prompted by the publication of a “sourcebook” on the philosophy of religion
in 1924, in a review with the rather overambitious title “On the Argument
with European Science,”24 he put forward a radical critique of the entire pro-
ject of the scientific study of religion—all religion. The editor of the reviewed
volume was Georg Wobbermin, the first German translator of William
James’s magnum opus in the psychology of religion and successor to Ernst
Troeltsch in his chair at the University of Heidelberg, after Troeltsch had
switched to Berlin. In this text Strauss does not mention Troeltsch by name,
but his polemic is meant to apply to him as well, at least when he identifies a
category that was for a time characteristic of Troeltsch, that of the “religious
a priori.”25 The names he does mention are those of Rudolf Otto and Ernst
Cassirer. The target of his critique is all those who, building on Kant and/
or Schleiermacher, rejected the Enlightenment critique of religion. This has
certainly saved religion, Strauss avers, but only at great cost—namely that of
its “idealist, romantic reinterpretation”:
However, the more the science of religion (now no longer in need of criti-
cizing religion) devoted itself to the concrete actuality of religion, the clearer
it became that the claim to transcendence, which, if not relinquished, was
still endangered by romanticism and which is the ultimate root of the
specific claim to truth of religion, is also the vital principle of religion.
Accordingly, while an idealistically reinterpreted religion may perhaps
be the most amusing thing in the world, it can in any case no longer be
religion.26
Strauss sees the overcoming of the polarization of science and a belief in rev-
elation, in “brutally factual revelation,”27 not as progress, but as the loss of
the dogmatic claim of religion. As Strauss sees it, the European critique of
Christianity, eo ipso, always criticized Judaism too; in fact, this is “the de-
cisive cause of what is known as assimilation.”28 In Strauss’s thinking, there
seems to be no possibility of regaining a conception of transcendence and
divine self-revelation on the basis of the scholarly or scientific study of re-
ligion. In this respect, here we can detect an elective intellectual affinity, on
the part of the staunchly Jewish thinker Leo Strauss, with the radical shift
in the Protestant theology of the day, perhaps even a dependency upon it.29
The polemics of a new generation took aim at both the psychology and his-
tory of religion. Friedrich Gogarten, one of the leading critics here,30 saw
in these disciplines not a means of dealing with a religious crisis, but a risk
of deepening and exacerbating it. As he saw it, everything divine was now
being humanized, and thus the human realm was being deified.31 For such
thinkers, the best way to counter the danger of relativism emanating from
historicism was not to embrace Troeltsch’s subtle approach of reflecting upon
the scholarly engagement with historical claims to absoluteness; instead, the
only alternative seemed to be the restoration of an ahistorical conception of
revelation. On this view, the intellectual movements that had sought to rec-
oncile secular scholarship and religious faith had all failed, as had the entire
project of a historical theology.
A number of motives converge in this rebellion by a young generation, and
in their struggle against the scholarly traditions dating from before World
War I. The experience of the front separated the World War generation from
those older than them, who attempted to endow the war with meaning in
the absence of any actual experience of it. A closeness to death at a young
age, or at least its imaginative construction, reinforced the gravity of exis-
tential issues. Many characteristics of prewar culture, even those that seem
hard to link causally with the war, were caught up in the denigration of tra-
ditional culture.32 The tone here was often profoundly aggressive. As articu-
lated in what seem like excessively dire terms, in contrast to an “ecumenical
coalition of the soft, femininely weak, tired and sentimental theologians of
resignation, impressionists devoid of resolute will to act or offensive crea-
tive power, trapped in passivist waffle about experience,” young men felt
“committed only to their own, inescapably subjective experience. The im-
agery and terms used by the religious thinkers among the ‘frontline genera-
tion’ for these older religious scholars such as Harnack and Troeltsch, Cohen
and Buber, are marked by a rhetoric of medical pathologization: sick, rotting,
mouldy and dying off, they already stink, representing death in the midst of
life. On 10 June 1920, in the programmatic manifesto ‘Zwischen den Zeiten’
[Between the Ages], Friedrich Gogarten declared that living among corpses
has no appeal.”33
Personally, I have no desire to declare this rebellion incomprehensible or
to suggest that it would have been desirable for the liberal Protestantism of
the prewar era to have continued to develop in linear fashion, or, against the
pathologization described above, to seek to pathologize the rebels. And it is

not surprising that some of the motives that led to the rebellion gained even
more credibility later as a result of the crimes of Nazism and World War II.
Yet it was not inevitable for concerns about the loss of a radical conception
of divine transcendence to take the form of hostility to the scholarship on
religion or, above all, to the theology that based itself upon it. This is plainly
evident in the discourse on the “Axial Age,” a discourse that existed long be-
fore philosopher Karl Jaspers articulated it after World War II. Hence, its
consequences are very different from those of cultural Protestantism.
I would now like to take a closer look at this discourse, whose recent forms
we might also view as a creative extension of Max Weber’s analysis of the
world religions. I begin my account not chronologically but, due to his out-
standing importance, with Karl Jaspers. He too, of course, was impelled by
highly specific motives in his studies. These motives were not Christian or
Jewish in his case. He also encumbered this discourse with a number of un-
necessary excesses, which were to be greatly modified in the subsequent
historical–social scientific research. What appears in his work as the in-
explicable concurrence of religious and political phenomena in different
civilizations loses its mysterious character when linked with the history of
the archaic state. I am unable here to provide a comprehensive empirical
overview of a rich body of research that is also in a state of flux. But certain
fundamental information is necessary if the hypothesis to which the ideas in
this chapter are building up is to make sense. That is, in identifiable places and
at identifiable times, and through comprehensible social processes, the reli-
gious history of humanity has generated an idea that we might understand
as transcendence. The nub of this idea of transcendence is the reflexivization
of the sacred; here, transcendence means sacredness-become-reflexive. As
a result, the power of the sacred reached a historically unprecedented level.
Karl Jaspers: Communication about Transcendence
One of the most important fields of present-day research within the his-
torical social sciences is the so-called Axial Age.34 Since the appearance of
a book by Karl Jaspers in 1949, titled The Origin and Goal of History, the
term “Axial Age” has designated a period around the middle of the last pre-
Christian millennium, a period in which—according to Jaspers—all the
major world religions and, in addition, ancient Greek philosophy originated.
The corresponding intellectual processes in the major civilizations of hu-

manity, Jaspers tells us, largely took place independently of one another—
so they cannot be put down to one civilization influencing another. In all of
them, Jaspers contends, a mythical age comes to an end, and is superseded by
an age of systematic reflection on the basic conditions of human existence.
While in the first three decades after the publication of Jaspers’s book, this
idea, characterized here very briefly for now, was taken up only sporadically
and was little discussed, since the 1970s a rich body of research seeking to
verify Jaspers’s hypothesis has developed. Consonant with its social-scientific
character, this research is focused on the question of the social consequences
of this new kind of religion (and philosophy). Previously, in the mythical age,
the divine was in the world and part of the world; in other words, there was
no real separation between the divine and the mundane. The spirits—of the
ancestors, for example—and gods could be directly influenced and manip-
ulated, precisely because they were part of the world, or because the realm
of the gods merely represented a parallel world that functioned in much the
same way as the earthly world. But with the new religions of salvation and
philosophies of the Axial Age, a substantial gap opened up between these two
spheres. During this age the divine—to cite the key idea here—became the
real, the true, the wholly other, in contrast to which the mundane can only
be deficient.
But this idea ushered in not only a metaphysical distinction. What we find
is an unprecedented tension between the “mundane” (worldly) and the tran-
scendent, a tension with considerable political and social consequences. For
example, no kind of divine kingship is compatible with this idea. The ruler
can no longer be godlike if the gods are located elsewhere. Moreover, there
is henceforth a tendency to compel the ruler to justify himself in light of the
divine postulates. That is, the ruler is of this world—and must justify himself
before the true, otherworldly realm. We can thus refer to the desacralization
of political power. This facilitates the emergence of a new form of critique
(of power), bringing a completely new dynamic to the historical process, be-
cause now it is possible to point out that the ruler is failing to comply with
the divine precepts. At the same time, it also becomes possible, in a far more
radical and dogged way, to argue about the right god or the correct interpre-
tation of the divine precepts, which will sooner or later lead to conflicts, and
to the differentiation of ethnic and religious collectives. Intellectuals avant
la lettre—priests, prophets, and so on—now play a significantly more im-
portant role than they did before the Axial Age, because among other things
they have the difficult task of interpreting the (in reality inaccessible) will of
God or the gods, a will that can no longer be understood so simply through
mundane categories. The idea of transcendence effectively opens up history,
and entirely new fields of conflict become conceivable. To put it in rather
more abstract terms: the idea of transcendence prompts the idea of a need
to fundamentally restructure the worldly order. Henceforth, it is possible to
comprehend the social order as demanding changes in accordance with the
divine precepts. This also facilitates the desacralization of the structures of
social inequality. For the first time, it becomes possible to envisage deliberate
transformations. The efficacy and potency of ideas rooted in the Axial Age,
then, gave rise to a new social dynamism.
In the philosophical literature on Karl Jaspers, his Axial Age thesis plays
a surprisingly negligible role. Philosophers, it seems, tend to leave the task
of assessing the empirical validity of this thesis to historians, sociologists, or
others. The nonphilosophers, on the other hand, generally extract this thesis
from Jaspers’s work without considering its ramifications within it.35 The few
attempts at contextualization that have been made fail to do more than point
out that the book The Origin and Goal of History was written shortly after
World War II. And there can in fact be no doubt that it was a reaction to the
devastating experiences of Nazism and that war. But it would be grossly sim-
plistic to allocate it to the literary genre, which flourished after 1945, on the
special traits of the “West.” Jaspers’s book did not have the self-adulating style
that typified most of this literature.
In his earlier writings, such as his famous study Die geistige Situation der
Zeit of 1932, Jaspers was to an extent captive to that style. At the time, he had
still understood “Bildung” (education) very much in line with the European-
humanistic tradition, including both its great aspirations and its limits.36 He
was still in thrall to Weberian ideas about the development of “Occidental
rationalism.” Now, however, he not only went beyond this by taking greater
account of philosophy (in addition to religions), but also by attempting to
see the non-European traditions as genuinely equal interlocutors, in other
words, seeking to study Europe too in a non-Eurocentric way.
In contrast to the later academic radicalism, however, this critique of
Eurocentrism was not motivated by a kind of Western self-hatred, but was
an attempt to place universalism on a new basis and defend it in a new way.
Jaspers positioned himself in opposition to the ideologies of the day—which
means contra the Communist tyranny and its imposed secularization; the
Nazis’ efforts to return to a Germanic, pre-Christian, pre–Axial Age religion;
all other political and philosophical attempts at detranscendentalization; the

ideology of scientism; the mere unbroken continuation of the European re-
ligious traditions; all teleological philosophies of history; and the complete
separation of philosophy from religious issues—with a plea for the recogni-
tion of the multiplicity of existing universalisms and the development of a
philosophical conception facilitating their mutual understanding.37
Jaspers himself had a Protestant background, but in his writings and in
interviews he made it perfectly clear that he himself was not a believer. As he
explained, he could not only not believe the statement “God revealed him-
self to the world through Jesus Christ,” but, quite apart from belief, he simply
did not understand what it means to state that Christ is the Son of God, God
made flesh. Yet he had the greatest respect for the post–Axial Age religions.
With his hypothesis of the Axial Age, the temporal coincidence of crucial
religious innovations, he sought to establish empirically “a tremendously ex-
citing factuality,” on “which all people and modes of faith could agree, be-
cause here the subject matter is not a belief, but a documented fact.”38 His way
out of a scenario that seemed intractable—namely multiple universalisms, all
of them under threat—lay not in philosophy’s aspiration to reformulate the
rational core of religious belief, but in the idea of philosophy as intermediary
in the communication between believers. Hence, I see his work not just as
an important source of inspiration for a historical-comparative sociology of
religion, but also for a theory of the specific characteristics of our communi-
cation about fundamental values and about experiences of transcendence.
According to Jaspers, such communication presupposes that we are capable
of comprehending other forms of faith than our own as attempts to articulate
a never fully articulable experience of the divine. This must influence our re-
lationship to our own religious tradition, because then we will understand it
too not as a rigid dogma but as an attempt at articulation that is never final or
definitive. Jaspers was concerned about a power-focused approach to tran-
scendence that, as he warned, causes the process of transcending to stall and
rigidify.39 But this also means that his philosophy does not call on us to break
with the religious traditions and experiences that have been formative for us,
but to renew our efforts at articulation. Interreligious dialogue, but also the
dialogue between philosophy and the religions, thus helps all those involved
to understand themselves better.40 In Jaspers’s work itself, however, it remains
unclear whether he was chiefly concerned to achieve the “binding, golden
thread of religious reconciliation” or advocated a mere “Don Juanism” within
the sphere of the religious.41
When Jürgen Habermas was awarded the Karl Jaspers Prize in 1995, in
his acceptance speech he highlighted the fact that Jaspers’s entire philosophy
must be interpreted as an attempt to find a third way between a relativistic
historicism and an abstract universalism.42 There is undoubtedly a compli-
cated continuity between this project and the writings of Max Weber (and
Ernst Troeltsch). With his hypothesis of the Axial Age, Jaspers not only built
on Weber’s analysis of the world religions, but also sought to exit the intel-
lectual dead-end in which he believed Weber had maneuvered himself.43
Weber’s great emphasis on ultimate value commitments and the inevitability
of the either-or—that is, of existential decisions between competing values—
seemed problematic to him. For Jaspers, this perspective runs the risk of
lapsing into decisionism, as if the choice of ultimate values is arbitrary, and as
if the holders of differing values are entirely unable to communicate sensibly
with one another. For a long time, Max Weber had seemed so admirable to
him precisely because of his emphasis on existential responsibility in the ab-
sence of any foundation in the philosophy of history. But a letter from Jaspers
to Max Weber’s brother Alfred of March 26, 1945,44 reveals that, against Max
Weber and distancing himself from him here, he believed a form of commu-
nication to be possible that blurs the edges even of “ultimate standpoints.”
For Jaspers this was a key task, if not in fact the main task, of philosophy: to
make such unbounded communication possible.
We do in fact require at least a theory of communication about values and
about the experiences that give rise to our commitment to them that goes
beyond a mere theory of discursive-rational argumentation. This commu-
nication about values cannot consist solely in empathy, nor is it a matter of
rational-argumentative discourse. Jaspers’s reconstruction of the funda-
mental innovation of the Axial Age is intended to serve as the foundation for
a dialogue between philosophy and the post–Axial Age religions, as well as
between these religions. In this sense, Jaspers’s writings on the Axial Age, in
contrast to the contributions of certain other authors, do not have an explic-
itly or implicitly religious dimension, but instead seek to provide the basis
for a contemporary discourse—one that is open to all religious articulations
of transcendence and to nonreligious forms of moral universalism. Jaspers’s
thinking is thus consonant with a broad range of attempts to get beyond
historicist relativism. These seek to honor the insight that even universalist
validity claims are not founded in “reason” as such, but arise from a contin-
gent history,45 which is nonetheless not irrelevant to their validity. Hence,
Jaspers’s work may be counted among similar efforts, by Georg Jellinek and
Ernst Troeltsch, to transform historicism.46 However, as we will see, from a

historical-sociological perspective this amounts to little more than an initial
impulse.
Axial Age: Word, Idea, Meaning
Why does Jaspers call the period of history he has in mind the Axial Age?
For those familiar with the work of Georg Simmel, it makes sense to look for
the inspiration for this name in his oeuvre. Particularly in his late work The
View of Life, which exercised such a great influence on Heidegger, he refers
to the “axial turning” as the crucial process in the genesis of ideals. Love, for
example, according to Simmel, may be triggered by physical attraction, but
if the original desire leads to an intensive personal relationship, this rela-
tionship itself takes on an autonomous quality that makes it the source of
norms and values. Here, then, “axial turning” means the emergence of cul-
tural objectifications that arise from the flow of life but then make their own
impact upon it.47 For Simmel, it is in religion that the “rotation around forms
that life produces in itself ” has occurred “more completely than anywhere
else.”48 Yet I see evidence against this interpretation of the origin of Jaspers’s
choice of term—as espoused by America’s leading Simmel expert Donald
Levine.49 With his axis, Jaspers did not seek to capture the relative autonomy
of cultural objectifications. Instead he aimed to convey the idea of a single
“axis” around which the whole of world history pivots—that point in history,
in other words, that allows us to make a dichotomous distinction between
everything that came before and everything that came after.
At the crucial point in his writings, furthermore, Jaspers does not refer to
Simmel, but to Hegel. He saw Hegel as the last great exponent of the Western
form of historical thought for which, since Augustine of Hippo, it had been
beyond doubt that God’s revelatory actions are the crucial turning points in
world history. For example, as Jaspers underlined, Hegel had stated, “All his-
tory goes toward and comes from Christ. The appearance of the Son of God
is the axis of world history.”50 For Jaspers, writing after World War II, how-
ever, such a Christocentric or Christianity-centric conception was no longer
acceptable. His theory of the Axial Age was in fact the result of an attempt
to come up with an empirically tenable and universally acceptable alterna-
tive to this notion. However, the problem with Jaspers’s reference to Hegel is
that he fails to state the location of the passage to which he alludes, and it has
proved impossible to identify it to this day. The closest thing is a passage in

Hegel’s The Philosophy of History, in which he refers to the idea of the Trinity
as crucial: “God is thus recognized as Spirit, only when known as the Triune.
This new principle is the axis [German: Angel] on which the History of the
World turns. This is the goal and the starting point of History.”51 For Hegel,
this meant that with the emergence of the Christian religion and its estab-
lishment throughout the Roman Empire, “self-consciousness had reached the
phases of development, whose resultant constitutes the Idea of Spirit, and
had come to feel the necessity of comprehending those phases absolutely.”52
But this means that in his construction of history, informed by the principle
of the freedom of the spirit, a stage had been reached beyond which nothing
can go within the sphere of religion. Hence, the dating system normally used
in Europe emerged not as a random convention but held validity for hu-
manity as a whole.
It thus seems as though Jaspers simply mixed up the terms “Angel”
(English: hinge or pivot) and “axis” and that this confusion brought us the
term “Axial Age.” Yet a new finding directs our attention to a different source
for Jaspers’s terminological usage. Prior to Jaspers’s work, a Catholic theolog-
ical textbook (Lehrbuch der Dogmatik), in wide use for decades, utilized the
term “axis” to refer to the Christ event. God’s incarnation, to quote Joseph
Pohle, “constitutes the summit and culmination of God’s self-revelation to
humanity. In truth, then, Christ is the axis of the world and of world history,
the living proof of theism.”53 It may be, then, that in Jaspers’s recollection
gleanings from Hegel and Catholic theology had become entangled.
Of course, far more important than the philological question as to the or-
igin of the term “Axial Age” is the problem of the intellectual origins of the
idea to which it refers. Here Jaspers was undoubtedly strongly influenced by
the writings of Max Weber, his brother Alfred Weber and, through both of
them, by Ernst Troeltsch and his friend Wilhelm Bousset. In their writings,
all of them had already discussed similarities between the Hebrew prophets
and comparable phenomena in other cultures, and had introduced terms
such as “prophetic age” or “synchronistic age” in order to convey the idea
that these similarities were features common to a historical period. In this
respect, they in turn had been influenced by leading nineteenth-century
scholars of religion (such as Hermann Siebeck) and Indologists (like Thomas
William Rhys Davids); there are even commentators referring to a debate
on the Axial Age around 1900.54 But even these authors were not the first to
think in these terms. Jaspers himself mentioned two forerunners: Sinologist
Victor von Strauss and classical philologist and philosopher Ernst von
Lasaulx. In his commentary on Laozi of 1870, von Strauss devoted just
a few lines to this topic. Lasaulx, meanwhile, did in fact develop the idea,
later taken up by Jaspers, in considerable depth in a notable book of 1856.
Yet even he mentions forerunners.55 Going by current views on the history
of this idea, it appears as though the earliest formulation of the hypothesis of
the Axial Age came from the great Orientalist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-
Duperron, the founder of Iranology, who was also one of the initiators of the
comparative study of religion. A deeply religious and royalist French scholar,
he asserted in 1769 that the ideas he believed to have been articulated by
Zoroaster in the sixth century before Christ were part of a broader “revolu-
tion” taking place in many parts of the world.56 I view it as an empirical ques-
tion as to whether even earlier formulations may be found, and do not assert
that the flow of findings amount to a single chain of influences.
Moreover, it seems that, long before Jaspers gave it a catchy name, this ob-
servation had appeared in the work of many authors in both the German-
and English-speaking worlds. A few examples, some of them chance finds,
may suffice.
In the work of an almost entirely forgotten figure of early British soci-
ology, John Stuart Stuart-Glennie, we find the outline for a new philosophy
of history that borrows almost word for word from Ernst von Lasaulx, as
well as reference to a “moral revolution” around the sixth century before
Christ. It is unclear how dependent this diagnosis was, in the detail, on
forerunners, especially Lasaulx.57 In a textbook of religious history, early
American scholarship on religion also produced, right down to the details,
descriptions consonant with the hypothesis of the Axial Age.58 Protestant
theologian Rudolf Otto’s 1917 book The Idea of the Holy was probably the
greatest theological publishing success in Germany in the twentieth cen-
tury. His expertise increasingly extended beyond Christianity, making him
an expert in the religious history of India as well. In 1932, he examined the
“Parallels and Convergences in the History of Religions,” which made him
aware of the relevant phenomena.59 Max Weber’s brother Alfred, little read
today, also sought to capture the same phenomenon in his magnum opus
of 1935 through the term “synchronistic age.”60 A final example. When the
great German writer Alfred Döblin, who took an interest in the diversity of
religions like few others, agreed during his American exile to write the in-
troduction to an English-language selection of the writings of Confucius, he
seems to have viewed the parallels with the prophets Ezekiel and David, with
Solon and Pythagoras in Greece, and with Buddha in India, as familiar and
taken-for-granted facts.61
I began by elucidating the meaning of the hypothesis of the Axial Age
through the distinction between the transcendent and the mundane. Here
I am preceded by American Sinologist Benjamin Schwartz, who charac-
terized the Axial Age as the “age of transcendence” in 1975.62 It seems even
more precise to me to refer to the Axial Age as the era in which an idea of
transcendence first emerged. Italian ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano
proposed to refer instead to the “age of criticism,” and leading Israeli sociol-
ogist Shmuel Eisenstadt, who has done more than anyone else to revitalize
research on the Axial Age, subscribes to this emphasis on the normative rel-
ativization of all that is mundane.63 I discern no contradiction between these
characterizations, merely a difference in emphasis. In one case the accent lies
on the religious historical upheaval itself, in the other on its social and po-
litical consequences. There are, however, those—such as Swedish social sci-
entist Björn Wittrock—who regard merely increased reflexivity, rather than
the idea of transcendence, as characteristic of all the upheavals of the Axial
Age.64 Above all the Chinese case is subject to controversy here,65 but this is
not the place for details on that issue.66
When it comes to the emphasis on reflexivity as the key hallmark of
the Axial Age shift, a significant role was played by the aforementioned
observations of Israeli historian of science Yehuda Elkana on “second-order
thinking” and its emergence in ancient Greece. This is a type of thinking
that refers to thinking and knowledge itself, as evident in ideas about proof
in mathematics, but also about how to solve ethical and political problems
within philosophy.67 While such thinking certainly strives to go beyond the
particularities of specific situations and in this sense points toward the po-
tential for universal validity, the accent does not lie on moral universalism.
As later authors built on the idea of the Axial Age, they declared this moral
universalism the key hallmark of the corresponding shift. This is particularly
evident in the work of Karl-Otto Apel. For him, a psychologically based “de-
velopmental logic of morality” can be deployed so straightforwardly within a
historical reconstruction that, particularly in the “Greek Enlightenment” of
the Sophists and Socrates in the fifth century before Christ, the shift may be
described as one from a conventional to a postconventional morality. He goes
so far as to describe the Axial Age as “humanity’s crisis of adolescence.” The
transition he has in mind here seems to him possible only on the basis of a
philosophical ethics of reason.68 Another version is found in Ernst Cassirer’s
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in which the transition from “myth” to

“religion” is characterized by the understanding of the symbolicity of symbols.
“Religion,” writes Cassirer, “takes the decisive step that is essentially alien to
myth: in its use of sensuous images and signs it recognizes them as such—
a means of expression, which, though they reveal a determinate meaning,
must necessarily remain inadequate to it, which just ‘point’ to this meaning
but never wholly exhaust it.”69 Hence, that which other thinkers view as a
rupture between pre–and post–Axial Age religion, Cassirer characterizes as
the transition from myth to religion.
Transcendence, criticism, reflexivity, moral universalism, and insight into
the symbolicity of symbols—for the moment we have five different answers
to the question of what the core hallmark of the Axial Age is. As I have al-
ready remarked with respect to “transcendence” and “criticism,” these do not
necessarily contradict one another. But nor are these definitions identical,
though we can intuitively discern connections between the issues they seek
to convey. I do not intend to impose clarity through an act of definitional
violence, which would merely reduce the richness of this discourse, nor will
I discuss whether any one of these definitions, or a different one, might be ca-
pable of subsuming the others into it.70
As mentioned above, this is not my objective at this stage of my argu-
ment. Instead what I seek to do is increase sensitivity to the fact that all the
contributions to this debate are imbued by assumptions about, and attitudes
toward, religion. It is far from easy to find any kind of language for these
phenomena that avoids the uncontrolled incorporation of a specific religious
faith or secularist premises. When I referred to the emergence of the idea of
transcendence, I did so in order to avoid terms such as “discovery” or “inven-
tion”—because “discovery” qualifies the Axial Age breakthrough as progress
within the history of religion, while “invention” can only be plausible from
a secularist perspective. What is more, if we do not regard transcendence as
the definitional hallmark of the Axial Age, this changes our perspective on
the possible consequences of a loss of transcendence. They then seem less
dramatic, less of a threat to moral universalism, than in the classical per-
spective. Today, calls for us to recall the original impulses of the Axial Age
may be regarded as powerful, themselves prophetic attempts to liberate us
from later, watered-down forms—or as a dangerous regression into obso-
lete fanaticisms. The various versions of Axial Age changes may be played
off against one another—Athens or Jerusalem? There may also be nostalgia
about pre–Axial Age myths and cosmologies or a radical modernism that

regards the legacy of the Axial Age as merely paving the way for a modernity
that is fundamentally independent of this inheritance. Like Jürgen Habermas
as early as the 1970s,71 we might regard our relationship to the Axial Age as
a matter of overcoming and replacing or, like Robert Bellah, as one of addi-
tion and integration. In any event, the debate on the Axial Age is well suited
to two key tasks. On the one hand, it helps uncover more or less hidden re-
ligious or antireligious presuppositions within important theories of his-
tory and of social change. On the other, it is an apt means of “grounding”
the often heated contemporary debates on religion by bringing in a historical
sociology perspective. Before turning to recent research in this field and its
findings, I would like to embark on a brief excursus examining the contribu-
tion of a once important but today largely forgotten thinker.
Excursus: Lasaulx’s Revival of Christian

Universal Historiography
The name and oeuvre of Ernst von Lasaulx are so forgotten today that it
seems appropriate to begin with some biographical information about him.72
Lasaulx, born in 1805, was the scion of a noble Luxembourgeois family. He
was closely associated with the leading figures of conservative Catholicism
in the Bavaria of the nineteenth century: both as a student of Joseph Görres,
to whom he was also related, and as the son-in-law of Franz von Baader.
Without the traces of his work in the writings of famous historians such
as Lord Acton and Jacob Burckhardt, one would scarcely come across his
name today.
When a Bavarian prince became the first king of Greece in 1832 following
its independence from the Ottoman Empire, Lasaulx was a member of his
entourage. His sojourn in Greece and the Holy Land left behind deep traces
in his thinking. He referred to Greek thought as a second, apocryphal Old
Testament; for him, then, Christianity seemed like the successful synthesis of
Judaism and Hellenism. After his return, he became a professor in Munich,
where Lord Acton was one of his students. He was also highly active politi-
cally, among other things as a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly
of 1848; he was temporarily suspended from his professorship for protesting
against the ennoblement of Lola Montez, a dancer and the lover of King
Ludwig I of Bavaria.
The objective of his scholarly endeavors was the revival of a Christian

universal historiography at a time of growing nationalization in the disci-
pline of history. Until the seventeenth century, a Christian perspective had
self-evidently dominated historiography in Europe, but afterwards this was
gradually superseded by a strict separation between empirically based histo-
riography and a theological discourse on the history of salvation. Lasaulx and
other Romantic thinkers now imagined they could reestablish the old unity
of theology and history with the help of an organicist mode of thought—not,
however, by returning to dogmatic or biblically grounded assertions about
history, but in an empirically sound way.
The title of Lasaulx’s main work is Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die
Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegründeten Philosophie der Geschichte (A New
Attempt at an Old Philosophy of History Based on the Truth of Facts). I take
this title to imply a new endeavor in an abandoned field, but now on an em-
pirical basis. Lasaulx differed from other conservative Catholic thinkers of
his time through his “inclusivist” understanding of religion. For him, the
teachings of the Catholic Church did not stand, as revealed truths, in stark
contrast to all other forms of the Christian religion and all other religions;
instead, he saw all religions as part of one and the same process of the re-
ligious development of humanity.73 Such an inclusivist conception of reli-
gion was of course the logical prerequisite for the application of organicist
metaphors or theorems to the history of religion. For Lasaulx, there is a
strict parallelism between the development of the individual and that of en-
tire peoples. Religious faith, he contended, is always the point of departure.
Youthful doubts, therefore, are a necessary but temporary phase that ends
either in despair or in a reconciliation with faith. He extends this analogy so
far that for him diminishing vigor within the aging process applies to peo-
ples just as much as individuals. As a result, some have misleadingly declared
Lasaulx a forerunner of Oswald Spengler. As Lasaulx sees it, secularization is
an indication of an organism’s decline. Hence, religious indifference, a lack of
respect for religious traditions, attraction to other forms of belief, the emer-
gence of sects, skepticism, or the total loss of faith all appear as symptoms
of degeneration; according to Lasaulx, they occur in particular among the
higher social classes and the “semi-informed.”74 The immortality of souls and
the existence of divine beings, Lasaulx contends, become the object of intel-
lectual speculation only when the original vitality, which rendered doubts
about them absurd, is lost.
But this analogy of organismic and religious development has clear limits
in the work of Lasaulx.75 In his conception, religion as such does not de-
velop in accordance with the laws of organic development. For him, reli-
gious institutions do not age or decay. On the contrary, while the Catholic
Church witnessed the rise of the European dynasties, it will, he speculates,
also experience and survive their demise. Here the main difference from
older versions of theological historical thought appears to lie in the fact that
Lasaulx seems to rule out the religious revitalization of an aging people.
Other peoples take over as the proponent of a religion and breathe new life
into it. Given the present-day globalization of Christianity, and the low fer-
tility rates in secularized countries,76 these speculations seem far from en-
tirely implausible—but they clearly rest on shaky foundations. Lasaulx’s
inclusivist understanding of the development of religion and of the relation-
ship between religion and philosophy prompt him to go beyond a merely
culturalist conception of the emergence of Greek philosophy. At the point
where he refers to the parallels between the adolescence of individuals and
that of peoples, we find perhaps the clearest articulation of the Axial Age hy-
pothesis prior to Jaspers:
For it cannot possibly be a coincidence that at about the same time,

600 years before Christ, Zoroaster in Persia, Gautama Buddha in India,
Confucius in China, the prophets among the Jews, King Numa in Rome and
the first philosophers in Hellas, Ionians, Dorians and Eleatians appeared
as reformers of the folk religion; the reason for this peculiar convergence
can only lie in the inner, substantive unity of human life and of the life of
peoples, only in a shared vibration of the life of humanity as a whole that
affects all peoples, rather than in the particular effervescence of a national
character.77
This sounds almost word for word like Jaspers.

For Lasaulx, Jesus Christ is the great hero of human history. From his per-
spective Moses, as a figure in the history of revelation and salvation, is joined
by Socrates, Buddha, Zoroaster, and others. Imperceptibly, Lasaulx passes
from the observation of parallels between the Judeo-Christian event of salva-
tion and other religious breakthroughs to a merely hero-oriented perspective
on history. In his book he lists those who, for him, are worthy of hero status,
and this list extends into his era, comprising names such as Hamann, Kant,
Goethe, Gluck, Mozart, and—unsurprisingly—Joseph Görres, his academic

teacher. This intellectual tendency came to the attention of the Catholic
Church; a few years after its publication, the pope placed Lasaulx’s text on the
Index librorum prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books). Lasaulx had died
in 1861, so we cannot know how he would have responded to this condemna-
tion. In any case, the papal verdict was lethal to his text, as it became taboo in
Catholic circles, while among liberal philosophers and historians it remained
notorious for its excessively Catholic and reactionary character.78 Even lib-
eral Catholics, such as the great church historian Ignaz von Döllinger, dis-
tanced themselves from Lasaulx’s downplaying of Christ’s role in the event of
salvation. Characteristically, the resurrection and return of Christ played no
role in Lasaulx’s philosophy of history.
Lasaulx deserves credit for attempting to bring the history of religion and
the discourse on religion back into dialogue with one another—just as Ernst
Troeltsch, for example, tried to do later. The parallels between the world
religions remain a challenge for all believers—but also for secular minds. The
question of “revelation” cannot so easily be ignored. Lasaulx touched on the
question of whether there can only be one revelation or whether there might
be several, and he contemplated philosophy’s stance on claims of revelation.
This is the thread picked up almost a century later by Karl Jaspers, a thinker
of a quite different background who was pursuing a quite different philo-
sophical project.
Axial Age and Archaic State
Jaspers’s initiative has been taken up by the empirical cultural and social sci-
ences in a range of ways over the last few decades.79 Apart from a short text by
Hans Freyer,80 the first major example of this is Eric Voegelin’s multivolume
work, which appeared under the title Order and History from 1956 onward.81
Voegelin had studied for a semester under Jaspers and Alfred Weber in
Heidelberg in 1929,82 but Order and History, in all its impressive individu-
ality, can by no means be reduced to the influences of these thinkers. Due
to the enormous size of this work, I am unable to discuss it in an empirically
adequate way here. But because Voegelin began to partly distance himself,
during the process of writing it, from the Axial Age idea that had originally
informed his thinking, a brief discussion of this text is valuable in the present
context.
Empirically, Voegelin goes far beyond Jaspers in the sense that at the
start of his book he provides a detailed examination of the “pre–Axial Age”
civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and ancient Israel, which Jaspers dealt
with only fleetingly and as the background to the emergence of the “Axial
Age” innovations. Voegelin too goes no further back than this. To charac-
terize the religions of the archaic states of the so-called ancient Orient, he
develops a theory of the “cosmological myth,” in which the establishment
of the political and existential order are contemplated in a unified way. In
Voegelin’s early work, The Political Religions, a key chapter was dedicated to
Akhenaten; by 1938 Voegelin already took the view that the Egyptians’ sun
worship was “the oldest political religion of a highly civilized people” and
its development “illustrates the contours of the problem almost more clearly
than the later or better known cases of the Mediterranean and European cul-
ture groups.”83 It is no surprise that specialists on these empires have often
discussed Voegelin’s conclusions.84 In contrast to Jaspers’s opening to China
and India, however, which had already occurred by this point, Voegelin’s
understanding of these cultures essentially failed to advance. He examines
them quite briefly,85 and where he touches on these cases—particularly that
of China—the overwhelming tone is one of identifying deficiencies vis-à-vis
“Western” history; admittedly, he explicitly distinguishes his hypothesis of
China’s “incomplete breakthrough” from Weber’s thinking in this respect,
which is even more deficiency-oriented. What proved highly productive,
however, is that Voegelin, far outstripping Jaspers in this regard, tried to
identify the precise preconditions for Axial Age innovations in the problems
of state and empire formation. This initiative was to have a tremendous im-
pact on the research of later scholars.
Going far beyond his predecessors in theoretical and methodological
terms, Voegelin introduced an experience-centered approach to the schol-
arship on the Axial Age. Though he had long specialized in the history of
political ideas, and initially sought to realize his new ideas within this frame-
work, influenced by his early engagement with William James86 he increas-
ingly found inadequate a focus on conceptually articulated ideas. In Order
and History he thus sought to investigate the symbols through which histor-
ical experiences are articulated pre-conceptually. Yet he failed to execute this
crucial methodological shift in a truly consistent way. Time and again, when
tracing key lines from past to present, Voegelin lapses into assertions that
sound like the mere history of ideas, and that fail to meet his own methodo-
logical postulates.
In religious terms, Voegelin distances himself from Jaspers chiefly through

his greater emphasis on the uniqueness of Christianity. Jaspers had, of
course, undoubtedly focused on the Jewish and Greek innovations that pre-
ceded Christianity. Voegelin sees this as a failure on the part of Jaspers given
the radical significance of the shift, which had (supposedly) only occurred in
Christianity, toward an unrestrained universalism, which was, as Voegelin
contended, simultaneously a personalism.87
This claim is certainly of tremendous importance. In the form Voegelin
gives it, however, it is apparent that it is not being espoused by a believing
Christian on the basis of palpably religious convictions. Instead it is political
reasons that motivate Voegelin to defend the political role of Christianity. In
the work of this secularized Protestant, his unreserved admiration for the
“Christian” Middle Ages, and his criticism of secularization as a process of
the loss of transcendence, sound like something an anti-modern Catholic
would say. He deals with the distinction between transcendence and im-
manence as if only a transcendence-focused religious faith could guarantee
the indisposability that imposes fundamental limits on the state. Hence, for
him, the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century are a late consequence of
a rebellion against transcendence that had already begun in the heretical
movements of antiquity and the Middle Ages; for him, they are highly dan-
gerous attempts to immanentize the “eschaton.” Voegelin assails these efforts
as forms of “gnosis”; however, his notion of a connection between totalitar-
ianism and gnosis is, at best, of interest within an abstract, history-of-ideas
framework, and suffers from a dearth of concrete historical evidence to back
it up.88
It is not surprising that this framework, within which Voegelin’s historical
research is embedded, has attracted vehement criticism. From a Christian
perspective, commentators have lamented the fact that within his politics-
centered historiography the Gospel appears only in highly diluted form,
and that his polemic, targeting every aspect of Gnosticism, goes too far in
denying that the Gospel has any affinity with it at all.89 Jan Assmann, mean-
while, has rightly assailed the tendency to write the history of the last few
centuries solely in the spirit of loss and decay: “In Auschwitz it was not the
Christian West but Judaism that was annihilated, and with the tacit tolera-
tion of the institutions of the spirit that Voegelin presents as the victims of
the murderous assault.”90 The goal, then, must be to retain the productive
perspectives of a history focused on the emergence of ideas of transcendence,
their secularization in philosophical forms of moral universalism, and their
loss in (religious and secular) forms of anti-universalism, without forcing

them into Voegelin’s framework.91
As impressive as Voegelin’s work is in the breadth of the material it deals
with, its idiosyncrasies marginalized it within the social sciences. In the
English-speaking world, meanwhile, Jaspers’s “Axial Age” idea was initially
taken up in three key ways. Cultural critic Lewis Mumford’s attempt to build
on this concept also remained rather marginal; Mumford, as it happens,
asserted that he had come up with the term “axial” independently of Jaspers.92
Here he associates this English translation of Jaspers’s concept with the word
for value theory from the Greek, as in the term “axiological.”93 This connec-
tion is not obvious in the German language and is not one that Jaspers made,
but it enables Mumford to interpret the great historical shift of the Axial Age
as a fundamental shift in values.
Significantly more consequential are the two other attempts to flesh out
the idea of the “Axial Age” within historical sociology. The first is to be found
in the work of the leading sociological theorist in the United States in the
first few decades after World War II, Talcott Parsons. In the 1950s he devel-
oped a sociological systems theory that attracted great attention, but also
the criticism that his theory was ultimately static, allowing us to view all the
drivers of social change solely from the perspective of threats to the stability
of social systems, in other words with a view to their restabilization. Parsons
responded to this critique, and to internal problems of modernization theory,
by elaborating a sophisticated theory of social change.94 At times this took on
a highly abstract form, in that Parsons was seeking to identify processes of
change that supposedly arise from his schema of functions that every social
system allegedly has to fulfill. In addition, however, on this basis he also tried
to construct a concrete historical schema of the evolution of human soci-
eties. Here a cultural innovation that supposedly advanced human society
beyond the archaic state formation in Egypt and Mesopotamia emerged as
crucial to his project. He identified this cultural innovation as the “attain-
ment of higher levels of generalization in the constitutive symbolic systems
of their cultures.”95 More specifically, he describes this transformation as “a
differentiation between the order of representations of ultimate reality and
the order of representation of the human condition. Any human being’s pre-
tension to divine status became out of the question, so that the institution of
divine kingship was terminated with the archaic period.”96
This definition is none other than what Jaspers called “transcendence.”
Like the philosopher Jaspers, however, the sociologist Parsons does not seek
to uncover the causes of the process at issue here or to assess the relative im-
portance of the different cultural and social factors involved. He does not
mention Jaspers—though he knew him from his studies in Heidelberg and
even devoted a late lexicon article to him, in which he again says nothing
about Jaspers’s relevant writings in the philosophy of history.97 Voegelin’s
name is also absent, though the close intellectual exchange between the two
has been well documented.98 The most important effect of Parsons’s incipient
integration of the “Axial Age” idea into his theoretical edifice was probably
that his two outstanding students at Harvard, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Robert
Bellah, geared their own research toward the unresolved problems of this in-
tellectual project through a continuous critical engagement with Parsons.99
In addition to Harvard, however, there was another place where, during
this period, an attempt was made to build on Jaspers’s work through a major
theoretical construct in the historical social sciences. I am referring to the
University of Chicago, where the great historian of Islam Marshall Hodgson,
sometime chairman of the interdisciplinary Committee on Social Thought—
making explicit mention of Jaspers—presented a grand blueprint for a non-
Eurocentric global historiography.100 In his case, the religious motives and
preconditions for an important project, which in many respects remained a
fragment due to his early death, are plainly apparent. He was a Quaker and as
such a radical pacifist; for him, the conventional image of Islam as a warrior
religion was wholly inadequate. His work emphasizes quite different traits of
Islamic cultures. He viewed Islam with respect and with palpable sympathy
for its features of Puritan moralism, the great importance of the individual
relationship to God, and the distance inherent in the Sharia from the mere
law of the state. He was particularly interested in the history of the Persian
civilization, keen as he was to overcome the one-sided focus on the Arabs. He
also examined the external influences on Islamic civilizations—for example,
the tremendously destructive effects of the Mongol invasions—in order to
get past the notion of a historical trajectory arising from a kind of cultural
and religious essence. In addition, he foregrounded the religious diversity
within Islamic cultures, the internal pluralism of Islam, and thus also the key
religious virtuosi.
He produced an in-depth reconstruction of the conditions under which
Islam emerged and managed to spread so rapidly, prompting him to study
the relationships between civilizations, rather than just comparing them. He
vehemently rejected Weber’s program of reconstructing Occidental ration-
alism, believing it was based on an inadequate knowledge of non-Western
cultures. He sometimes considered publishing his blueprint for a global

history, which remained incomplete when he died in 1968, under the title
“There Is No Orient.”101 In methodological terms, what he had in mind was
analyzing civilizations in such a way that one never loses sight of the diver-
sity of possible relationships they may have with their formative ideals. On
the substantive level, he contested the tendency to locate the key shift toward
“modernity” in the Reformation era and, like many contemporary authors,
made the case for the eighteenth century instead. He located the crucial
turning point in premodern history in the middle of that era dominated by a
civilization essentially based on agriculture but also characterized by cities—
in other words, the period around 3000 BC until AD 1800. This periodiza-
tion coincides with Jaspers’s “Axial Age,” but in the work of Hodgson it is
given a substantially deeper grounding in social history.102
Shmuel Eisenstadt and Robert Bellah, in addition to their sociological ed-
ucation prominently featuring Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and as men-
tioned above, Talcott Parsons—were also unmistakably inspired by theology
and the philosophy of religion. Elsewhere I have described Eisenstadt as the
synthesis of Max Weber and Martin Buber, and Bellah as the synthesis of
Parsons and Paul Tillich.103 Of course, these are shorthand descriptions in-
tended to make highly complex intellectual edifices easily comprehensible.
Eisenstadt deserves credit, above all, for investigating how, exactly, the revo-
lutionary ideas of the Axial Age could themselves take on institutional form.
The unprecedented tension that existed between these ideas and all polit-
ical, social, and economic realities did not, after all, simply continue to exist.
This tension was resolved through doctrines and institutions that partly
embodied compromises with existing realities. His interest thus shifted away
from an Axial Age to a type of social order imbued by “axiality,” and away
from the primary breakthroughs of the Axial Age to secondary ones such
as Christianity and Islam. He was also particularly interested in the ways in
which universalisms could regress into particularist and exclusivist ideolo-
gies that justified violence: from Jacobinism to religious fundamentalism.104
But we will fail to do justice to the religious dimensions of Eisenstadt’s
work if we merely look for traces of his highly secularized Judaism in his
thought. Internal tensions within the state of Israel and the tremendous di-
versity of ways in which post-Holocaust Jewish culture and religion were
carried forward were undoubtedly constitutive of his thought in many
respects. But even more crucial, it seems to me, is the way in which Eisenstadt
seeks to interpret modernity in religious terms. For him, modernity is chiefly
characterized by the combination of an orientation toward a universalist

order that surpasses all existing conditions and is in this sense transcendent,
and persistent doubts about its claim to validity. He embraces Claude Lefort’s
claim105 that today we have lost all certainty about the validity of such a tran-
scendent order. In such a situation, he contends, our only option is to be
highly tolerant of ambiguity, continually searching for certainty in the mel-
ancholy awareness that we will never be able to find it. Lefort and Eisenstadt,
however, it seems to me, blur two things that we ought to clearly distin-
guish: first, the idea that under modern conditions religious faith has become
fundamentally impossible, and, second, the idea that under these conditions
it has become an option, that is, it has necessarily become a religious faith in
the presence of non-belief, in the awareness of the possibility of non-belief.
I hold to the latter rather than the former interpretation. The decline in in-
stitutionalized worldviews that lend to a particular religion general and un-
questioned validity does not simply annul the subjective sense of certainty
characteristic of religious experience.106
The most important French contribution to the Axial Age debate is based
even more unambiguously on the perspective of Claude Lefort.107 Marcel
Gauchet, one of the most influential contemporary French intellectuals, al-
ready presented his great project of a “political history of religion” in 1985,
whose title, The Disenchantment of the World, was inspired by Max Weber.108
For him, under modern conditions, religion, in the sense of a collective force,
has definitively become obsolete and only remnants of religious traditions
can still play a role in orienting individuals’ beliefs. So consistently does he
espouse this hypothesis that for him it is only during its earliest stages, when
it was “primitive,” as he puts it, that religion could truly be described as such.
Crucial to his thinking is the conceptual pair autonomy/heteronomy. As he
sees it, religion is total heteronomy, the self-denial of human beings’ crea-
tive powers, in that human beings attribute to a creator god, a multiplicity
of gods, or a cosmic order that which is in fact their own unique capacity
for “institutionalization.”109 Hence, every attempt to assert human autonomy
seems to him essentially a-religious or antireligious. It is the question of the
role of religion in producing a world without religion that brings him to the
topic of the Axial Age. For him, it is the religions that arose in the Axial Age,
but especially, on this basis, Christianity, that represent the forces that led to
the reappropriation of creative powers in human beings’ self-understanding.
Unmistakable here is the Nietzschean motif, which was also at work in
the writings of Max Weber and Karl Jaspers, of identifying a dialectic within
the Christian faith that drives this religion beyond itself. Within his concep-
tion of modernity, Gauchet permits the diversity of the Axial Age religions
to a lesser degree than Jaspers did. In this sense he falls back on Max Weber,
though the tragedy expressed in the work of the latter is lost in his historical
reconstruction. He writes a Hegelian narrative of progress with the means
of Max Weber’s narrative of disenchantment. His book has therefore rightly
been described as a “post-Weberian Hegelianism.”110
The one-sidedness and theological ineptness of Gauchet’s conception are
obvious. Nowhere does he consider the numerous attempts to think human
beings’ relationship with God in light of the “indebtedness” (Verdanktheit)
of human autonomy and thus to overcome the simple opposition between
religious heteronomy and secular autonomy.111 But this does not mean that
his brilliant outline of a political history of religion is empirically unpro-
ductive. On the contrary. Far more than Jaspers and also more clearly than
Voegelin,112 Gauchet links the “Axial Age” idea with the history of the state.
He calls the emergence of the state “the first religious revolution in history.”113
This is no doubt overstating things, as Gauchet thus trivializes the religious
dimensions of sedentarization and the rise of agriculture. For him, the fact
that people interpreted these earlier processes as a gift to them is enough
reason to deny them an epoch-making character. According to him, how-
ever, through the state the externalized religious sphere reenters the human
sphere; now, the structures of political order are no longer conceptualized as
traditional and constituted in a mythical past but as dependent on human
decision-making. The emergence of the state, Gauchet contends, is thus the
axis of world history: “This event severs history in two and brings human
societies in an entirely new age—brings them decisively into history.”114 But
this does not mean that political and religious change simply blur into one
another in Gauchet’s work. The Axial Age innovations, we are told, are the
result of a creative response to the emergence of the state, and in particular
to its inherent expansive tendency. Within the community that constitutes
it, but especially outside of it, the state threatens every traditional order and
engenders the vision of a universal empire. However limited this may remain
in concrete terms, Gauchet explains, it furnishes key actors with the vision of
a universal realm. This they may also turn against the state from a religious
perspective. Gauchet goes so far as to describe wars of expansion as “one
of the greatest spiritual and intellectual forces to ever have operated in his-
tory.”115 He thus interprets Judeo-Christian monotheism as a desperate at-
tempt to gain emancipation from imperialism.116 Despite all the inaccuracies
in the historical detail and the rhetorical paradoxes that beset this ambitious
project, Gauchet has identified a crucial point here. The consistent linkage
of Axial Age innovations with the history of the state “demystifies” Jaspers’s
always mysterious-sounding claim of these innovations’ simultaneity. In the
work of Voegelin, Eisenstadt, and Gauchet, a political interpretation gains the
upper hand, yet it does not functionalize religion as the servant of the polit-
ical sphere. But what is astonishing about Gauchet is how little he appears to
believe that the phenomenon he has analyzed from a historical point of view
extends into the present.117 With the emergence of the modern state, which
he also explores in his book, the religious realm appears to have vanished as a
countervailing force to that of the state.118
The close interlinkage of the history of religion and the history of the state
appears in all the recent research on the Axial Age within the historically ori-
ented social sciences. The tension between Jaspers, whose goal was the “dis-
pelling of the magic charm of the history of the states,”119 and Gauchet, who
might be criticized, conversely, for seeking to reenchant this history, is pre-
sent in the background of all this research. Outstanding among it is one of the
most ambitious models of a universal history of our time, which integrates
the idea of the “Axial Age” into a sweeping construction. With a consistency
previously seen perhaps only in the work of Hodgson (within the framework
of this debate), Ian Morris liberates himself from the narrative of the devel-
opment of Occidental rationalism. Here he is aided by a determined effort
to take account of the internal diversity of “Western,” “Eastern,” and South
Asian thought. “Eastern thought can be just as rational, liberal, realist, and
cynical as Western; Western thought can be just as mystical, authoritarian,
relativist, and obscure as Eastern.”120 He sets great store in interpreting Axial
Age thought as a response to the fully developed state—“with huge rev-
enue flows, a professional army, and a bureaucracy”121—rather than, for ex-
ample, tracing this state back to the changed thinking of the Axial Age. This
new thinking, Morris contends, impacted only negligibly on politics, with
breakthroughs in the political hinterland having especially little influence on
the societal development of the major powers.122 This influence is only dis-
cernible at all at a far later stage, and mostly came at the cost of blunting the
Axial Age impulse itself.123
American sociologist Robert Bellah, meanwhile, elevated the Axial Age
debate to an entirely new level. Perhaps the leading sociologist of religion
of the past few decades, he had already produced an outline of a universal
history of religion from a sociological perspective by 1964, in the context of

a close working relationship with his academic teacher Parsons.124 As a re-
tirement project, for more than fifteen years he sought to elaborate and re-
vise, on a broad basis, the ideas outlined there. His book Religion in Human
Evolution, published in 2011, represents just half of the originally planned
account. The next installment is no more than a fragment due to the author’s
death in 2013. The existing volume in itself, however, constitutes a tremen-
dous empirical and theoretical achievement.
In empirical terms, far more than any of his predecessors, Bellah took
comprehensive account of the cases of China and India, in line with the
present-day state of research. He also clarified the differences between tribal,
archaic, and Axial Age religion. In theoretical terms, more than any of his
predecessors, he integrated into his interpretation social inequality in addi-
tion to political power. I am unable to provide a comprehensive evaluation
of this here.125 Of religious significance—and this is of much interest in the
present context—is the leitmotif of his work: “Nothing is ever lost.” The spe-
cifically new aspect of the Axial Age, however we comprehend it—as moral
universalism, a reference to transcendence, a capacity for critique, increased
reflexivity, insight into the symbolicity of symbols, or, Bellah’s own sugges-
tion, as systematic and critical theory formation that goes beyond the realm
of mythical narrative—joins the old without entirely ousting or replacing
it. That which characterized pre–Axial Age religions lives on, or may live
on, in post–Axial Age ones, namely ritual and myth. Bellah, every bit the
American Protestant Christian, seeks to build on the prophetic. But he is also
aware that the prophetic must run dry if it does not bear upon a substance
that he, like Tillich, regards as more pronounced in the sphere of the sac-
ramental, in Catholic Christianity. For him, no civilization consists wholly
of Axial Age elements. Every civilization represents a synthesis of archaic
and Axial components. When Bellah’s book was described by one reviewer
as “the greatest work of liberal Protestant theology ever,”126 he vehemently
rejected this accolade, not only because he did not wish his work of historical
sociology to be referred to as theological but, above all, because he did not
straightforwardly consider himself a “liberal Protestant.”127 His emphasis on
the indispensable role of the “sacramental” does not, after all, sound much
like liberal Protestantism. It is thus no more than consistent that Bellah him-
self found his way to the Episcopalians, the American branch of the Anglican
Communion.
Reflexivity and Sacredness
This walk through the history of research and debate on the “Axial Age” has
changed nothing about the diversity of ways—evident from the outset—in
which scholars have sought to capture the “essence” of this portentous era.
But our review may well have helped provide a grounding in historical soci-
ology for attempts to identify the causes of the multiple changes to which the
term “Axial Age” refers. The competing definitions have emerged as partly de-
termined by their authors’ specific religious or antireligious preconceptions
and intentions. Considering the history of the scholarly engagement with
religion, this was bound to be the case. The empirical-historical findings,
meanwhile, were more independent of the starting point of a given piece of
research. This makes it easier to confirm undeniable progress in our know-
ledge. Of course, this progress can only be perceived if the writings of Karl
Jaspers are not always taken as representative of the present-day state of de-
bate. It makes little sense to repeatedly criticize the scholarship on the Axial
Age for shortcomings that contemporary scholars have long since sought to
remedy.128
I have already alluded to the fact that, for all his merits, Jaspers encum-
bered the Axial Age debate with three unnecessary assumptions: that of the
strict simultaneity of Axial Age breakthroughs in various civilizations, the
complete lack of mutual influences between them, and the inability to ex-
plain the Axial Age phenomenon within the framework of historical soci-
ology. Jaspers presumably ruled out possible influences because he sought to
radically overcome a Eurocentric or Christocentric version of world history.
It was no doubt important to him to direct attention toward the independent
character of the cultural innovations in China and India rather than leaving
them, in one way or another, in the shadow of European or Judeo-Christian
developments. But even if strong cultural interactions did occur—for ex-
ample, via the Silk Road or maritime links across the Indian Ocean129—no
one today would be prompted to conclude that influences from other cultures
were decisive to the emergence of Jewish prophetism, Greek philosophy, the
thought of Confucius, or the message of Buddha. Should relevant evidence
emerge, we could drop this assumption of the lack of all influence without
detriment to the Axial Age hypothesis.
Much the same may be said about the assumption that key phases of inno-
vation occurred at the same time. Once again, it may be that Jaspers was partly
motivated by his desire to underline the independence of these changes from
one another. Effects, after all, come after their causes. Eisenstadt attempted
to shift the debate by seeking to replace the notion of an Axial Age—which
seemed bound to the assumption of simultaneity—with that of “axiality,” an
attribute, in other words, that may appear in different cultures at different
times. This move, however, has its own disadvantages. We might then apply
the term “axiality” to changes clearly triggered by the influence of earlier
cultural innovations—for example, through the reception of Buddhism in
Japan. It seems more prudent to me to pluralize the term “Axial Age” and, for
example, to refer to an Axial Age in Greece, Israel, India, and China. It is not
essential for the relevant phenomena to have occurred everywhere at exactly
the same time; what is at issue is always the emergence of the fundamental
innovations and their preconditions.
The only meaningful sense in which we can still believe it impossible to ex-
plain such cultural innovation actually applies to all serious creativity. When
we look back at major creative accomplishments, we are left with the impres-
sion that the new departure has surprisingly transcended its circumstances.
Every examination of these circumstances, which were similar to those in
many other places in which the new departure did not occur, inevitably
seems like an unreasonable attempt to belittle the innovation. Crucial to the
religious and philosophical upheavals of the Axial Age—this is the consensus
among present-day scholars, and is consonant with the work of Eric Voegelin
and Marcel Gauchet—is these upheavals’ connection with the archaic state.
Without the history of the state, these changes must remain incomprehen-
sible. But the religious-philosophical innovations are not the inevitable result
of changes at the level of political power. If they were, they would correlate
with them directly, and then we would be dealing with mere epiphenomena
of the history of bureaucratic-military apparatuses. On this premise, the ab-
sence of Axial Age cultural impulses in particular cases of archaic state devel-
opment can then be perceived as evidence against the “Axial Age” hypothesis
itself.130
Instead we must understand the Axial Age innovations as contingent, crea-
tive responses to the challenges of imperial statehood. These responses are con-
tingent, that is, they might be weakly present or fail to occur at all. They by no
means always occurred in the centers of the archaic state itself, but often out-
side of it, though on the condition that the actors driving these innovations
were affected by these centers and were aware of their power.131 The pow-
erful archaic states represented a major threat to their neighbors. Every
Bible reader knows this of the Assyrians and Babylonians. The (Persian)
Achaemenid Empire, according to Robert Bellah,132 represented a back-

ground challenge to no fewer than three Axial Age processes of innovation—
in Greece, Israel, and India. In the case of China, in addition to nomadic
incursions, the decisive factor appears to have been the dissolution of an
order that had already been established when the Zhou dynasty collapsed.133
The nature of the challenge helped shape the character of the contingent, cre-
ative response. Defeat at the hands of a superior neighboring state could be
interpreted, for example, by the prophets of the Old Testament as the result of
offenses against the divine will and as divine punishment; but it could also (in
the case of Confucius) trigger the idealization and spiritualization of threat-
ened or extinct structures of authority. Furthermore, in their confrontation
with other old or new forms of religion, religious traditions frequently re-
spond by understanding themselves differently. For example, the emergence
of Buddhism within the religious world of India represented a challenge that
triggered a new articulation of the Vedic traditions.134 Here, of course, all
these assertions sound superficial and schematic. I urge the reader to bear in
mind that my goal here is not to adequately describe the complex religious-
political constellations involved but only to counter the prejudice that the
Axial Age debate mystifies the emergence of the new. On the contrary, that
which, for Jaspers, still seemed an unsolvable puzzle has been transformed
into a program of empirical research.135 It is true, however, that there is still
plenty of research to do on this topic.
Another criticism often made of Jaspers’s original idea is that he system-
atically overstated the character of the Axial Age innovations as rupture or
breakthrough. He supposedly did this both with respect to the beginning of
these changes and their consequences. With respect to the beginning, it is
asserted, we ought to assume a far greater continuity with the religious forms
in archaic states or highly developed tribal societies, while the consequences
were often far less dramatic than implied by the notion of an abrupt world-
historical leap to a higher level of human culture. Once again, however, I do
not regard this as a reason to abstractly negate the Axial Age thesis.
First of all, it is plainly apparent that all new Axial Age ideas must always
have been articulated with the means of pre–Axial Age traditions. Hence,
pre–Axial Age notions of a hereafter, in the sense of a realm of the dead, may
correspond with newly arising ideas about transcendence,136 just as pre–
Axial Age ideas of the perfection of heaven may tally with Axial Age tenden-
cies to ethicize the idea of salvation. In the Chinese case, it is surely beyond
dispute that Confucian ethics did not invent a new ethos but generalized
an existing one. In general, the new ideals coexisted with the old ones and
could only gain the upper hand through a prolonged process, which even
now has by no means concluded.137 The innovations, therefore, are certainly
never creations out of a void, but are instead the result of critical reflection
on traditional elements, of a “standing back and looking beyond,” to quote
Benjamin Schwartz in one of the most cited passages in the literature on the
Axial Age: “Whether one deals with the Upanishads, Buddhism, or Jainism
in India, with the rise of biblical Judaism, with the emergence of Greek phi-
losophy or with the emergence of Confucianism, Taoism, and Mohism in
China—one finds a kind of standing back and looking beyond; of questioning
and reflectivity as well as the emergence of new positive perspectives and
visions.”138
This way of thinking greatly diminishes the persuasiveness of criticisms
that point to religious changes of a thoroughly “axial” character prior to the
Axial Age as conceived by Jaspers or that emphasize that much of what ret-
rospectively appears as an Axial Age change is in fact due to later styliza-
tion.139 The great Egyptologist Jan Assmann has repeatedly underlined both
these points, and his views are well worth considering.140 For him, first of
all, the short-lived attempt to institutionalize monotheism in Egypt under
the Pharaoh Akhenaten was a step toward axiality. Second, it is particularly
important to this scholar of cultural memory to distinguish between the can-
onization of mythical figures such as Homer and Isaiah and their real lives.
His solution to both these problems is essentially to follow the path already
beaten by Shmuel Eisenstadt, namely to switch from the hypothesis of an
Axial Age to investigating the presence of axiality.141 Hence, I would raise the
same objection as I did to Eisenstadt, namely that giving up the assumption
of simultaneity should not prompt us to abandon our attempts to understand
the emergence of innovations. When it comes to the consequences of Axial
Age innovations, even Jaspers did not claim that religious or philosophical
upheavals triggered a total revolution in all political or economic power re-
lations. Certainly, the potential for a critique of power is unmistakably in-
herent in the Axial Age changes. It is not surprising, then, that the exponents
of the new religions and philosophies often suffered persecution.142
It was never easy being a prophet. Buddha’s teachings were regarded as
an attack on the Indian caste system and were largely driven from the sub-
continent in which they arose. If Confucianists became too vociferous in
their criticisms of the powerful within the Chinese state they risked being
buried alive. The empire of Ashoka in India, meanwhile, is mentioned as one
of the rare cases of a harmonious relationship between empire and Axial Age
ethic.143 Often, however, the original radicalism was soon moderated on the
level of doctrines and institutions, and adapted to existing political, social,
and economic conditions. Axial Age impulses, therefore, could turn into a
legitimizing ideology; their universalism easily lent itself to the justification
of expansionist tendencies. Empires could draw strength from the notion
that they were seeking to expand not due to simple power interests but in
pursuit of a good cause of the highest ethical quality. The notion of a thor-
oughly power-critical religion is just as false as that of an exclusively power-
dependent and power-legitimizing religion. The constellations of political
and religious power subsequent to the Axial Age changes are complex; I re-
turn to them under the heading of “Collective Self-Sacralization and Ways of
Overcoming It” in c hapter 7 of the present book.144
My summaries of the results of research on the Axial Age within the
historical social sciences have been directed at the fundamental criticisms
of the concepts underlying this scholarship. I have as yet said nothing
about the considerable theoretical advance it has made on the basis
of empirical research, an advance in comparison with the work of Max
Weber and—in this case—the typology he initiated of possible routes to
salvation, this-worldly or other-worldly, ascetic or mystical. Weber had
assumed that each route to salvation had been largely preformed by the
central assumptions of the relevant world religion. But the interplay be-
tween religious impulses and mundane realities is far more complex than
this perspective makes out. Eisenstadt, meanwhile, increasingly focused
on the ways in which the tension inherent in the Axial Age religions was
understood and resolved in specific civilizations.145 Religions are inter-
nally diverse, and cultures cannot simply be derived from religions; social
structures and political struggles play a role in the development of their
institutions, as do the self-interest of actors and newly formed doctrines.
Like Weber, Eisenstadt pays attention to the social bearers of religious
innovations, while conceptualizing the institutionalization of ideals as a
power-based and power-saturated process. Some interpreters of sacred
teachings had official approval, while others were expelled, persecuted,
and oppressed. Power holders might even claim jurisdiction over the for-
mation of religious doctrine—like the Roman emperor Constantine and
his successors. This inserts between ideas of salvation and routes to salva-
tion an intermediate level of power-backed institutions, which may face
resistance for religious and other reasons—which seems to me an impor-

tant theoretical achievement of Axial Age scholarship.
Another achievement lies in overcoming the focus, which informed
Weber’s work, on the emergence and spread of an “Occidental rationalism.”
Jeffrey Alexander minced no words in celebrating this accomplishment.146
Despite their extraordinary erudition, Weber’s comparative historical
studies were “blinkered by the myopia of Orientalism.” And the same goes,
Alexander contends, for Talcott Parsons as well;147 it is only in Eisenstadt’s
program of “multiple modernities” and in Bellah’s historical sociology of reli-
gion that this has been overcome.
I agree with this, though with an important qualification. As clearly as
it emerges from Eisenstadt’s work that we must distinguish between three
levels—that of ideals as such, the social institutionalization of ideals, and
their factual realization—it is also clear that Eisenstadt pays a price for over-
coming the essentialization of religions, namely the essentialization of en-
tire civilizations. A number of commentators have noted that colonialism
and imperialism are almost entirely absent from Eisenstadt’s conception of
multiple modernities and their genesis.148 But like religions, cultures and
civilizations are not hermetically sealed universes predominantly nourished
by endogenous impulses. They are entities that are interrelated in a number
of ways, and they inevitably point beyond themselves in terms of their mean-
ingful content. Here Eisenstadt remains in thrall to Weber’s typologizing ap-
proach.149 It seems to me that Bellah’s work does a better job than Eisenstadt’s
of linking the sociology of religion and the sociology of power, and thus
better captures the history of the power of the sacred and the role of the sa-
cred in the history of power.
I hope the reader agrees, having read my account, that this field of research
has advanced our understanding in important ways and can be expected to
do so in the future. But it would be dishonest to assert that empirical research
has produced or will produce an uncontroversial answer to the question of
what, exactly, the essence of the Axial Age is. The five key attributes I have
identified—transcendence, critique, reflexivity, moral universalism, and in-
sight into the symbolicity of symbols—all remain significant; in fact, chiefly
in the work of David Martin,150 they have been joined by a sixth, already
hinted at in the work of others as a secondary motif: the ethos of nonvio-
lence and the shift away from the heroic ethos. Only sheer ignorance could
lead anyone to comprehend this array of definitions as the expression of
theoretical confusion or malicious, myth- building intent.151 Certainly,

there is a need to further clarify the internal connections between these
definitions, all of which have a basis in reality. What is at issue here, plainly,
are fundamental questions relating to the understanding of the human ca-
pacity for action, human sociality, the temporality of social processes, and
the embedding of the human being in the cosmos of organic and inorganic
developments and regularities.
When it comes to the individual Axial Age civilizations, the various
definitions emerge as plausible to varying degrees. Here the concept of the
“family resemblance” from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein is an ef-
fective way to impose a degree of order. Just as, within a family, not all features
are pronounced in every member, yet there is enough overlap of attributes to
recognize membership of the family, no single Axial Age case is character-
ized by all changes to the same degree. But due to the underlying logic that
binds these characteristics together, their affinity is unmistakable. Induction
from empirical cases, however, cannot provide us with an unambiguous def-
inition. As Ernst Troeltsch showed in exemplary fashion with respect to the
essence of Christianity,152 this requires a future-oriented intention and a de-
cision. Any other notion would be inconsistent with what we have seen so far
of the role of religious (or antireligious) motives in the debate on the Axial
Age or on the history of religion in general. In the present book as elsewhere,
there is no way of occupying an Archimedean point.
It is in this spirit, in the context of my investigation of the power of the
sacred, that I put forward the briefest possible characterization of the Axial
Age, namely the reflexivization of the sacred. In contrast to those who wish
to replace the attribute of “transcendence” with that of “reflexivity,” my objec-
tive is to reveal transcendence as the reflexivization of the sacred. Reflexivity,
just as it relates to the conditions for successful thinking and acting in prac-
tical contexts and to the foundations of correct moral and ritual action, is also
concerned with the basic question as to the origin of the sacred. Notions of
transcendence153 are thus the product of consistent reflection on this origin
of sacredness. Ideas about transcendence radicalize the experience of the un-
availability of the sacred. Demagification is thus a necessary correlate of ideas
of transcendence because magic represents the attempt to command the sa-
cred. Ideas of transcendence embody the ethicization of the abandonment of
attempts to command the sacred. God, the transcendent God, can thus—in a
Christian context154—be addressed as the “source of all sacredness.”
The “source of all sacredness”—this phrasing, however, surely means that

sacredness flows out of the transcendent realm into the mundane world,
rather than remaining within the former. This phrasing, then, is by no means
one that would be approved by all religions that date back directly or indi-
rectly to the Axial Age. It would be even less acceptable to the secular value
systems and philosophies that regard their moral universalism as anchored
in the overcoming of religious and metaphysical ideas about transcendence,
or in their limitation to a transcending of given conditions that fundamen-
tally remains immanent. For Christians, the idea of God-become-flesh, of
the Incarnation, represents a novel form of mediation between Axial Age
transcendence and immanence. Jews and Muslims, however, may perceive
this mediation as a regression vis-à-vis an already achieved understanding
of transcendence, indeed, as the renunciation of monotheism. Even within
Christianity itself, an increased emphasis on the transcendence of God, as
in the case of Calvin and the Calvinists, may lead to a reduced orientation
toward the God-made-flesh, the Son of God. By the same token, Christians
may project onto Judaism and Islam the idea of a distance from God. Here,
then, we are touching on profound questions concerning the difference be-
tween fundamental religious intentions. The empirically based disciplines
cannot furnish us with a definitive answer to such questions.
What is certain, however, is that ideas of transcendence, in the sophisti-
cated sense found in Axial Age metaphysics, are the product of a culture of
reflection. No individual human being could advance to this point on their
own. But where this idea has emerged, it may even find expression in the
form of ritual. How precisely transcendence, as sacredness-become-reflexive,
relates or ought to relate to pre-reflectively experienced sacredness, is a
matter that we can only clarify by distinguishing between a number of levels
of symbolicity. Pictorial symbols, for example, or situation-related signs do
not lose all their functions once situation-independent symbolization has
occurred.155 The less reflective forms are not simply replaced or ousted by the
more reflective ones; but they change their character when they are incorpo-
rated into the latter—for example, through an idea of transcendence. If we
call demagification “disenchantment,” we must be aware of its flip side in the
history of religion, namely the emergence of ideas of transcendence. On this
premise, the devalorization of these ideas of transcendence, even if appro-
priate in a concrete instance, does not represent the logical continuation of a
process of demagification, but is in many respects its inversion. After all, this
devalorization eliminates a counterweight to the perpetual tendency toward

magical, instrumentalist conduct toward the sacred. For the development of
a worldview of immanence, however, another concept is required than in the
case of the overcoming of magic, if we are not to succumb to the misconcep-
tion that the movement leading to the emergence of ideas of transcendence
in the Axial Age already entailed their modern devalorization.
6
Fields of Tension
A New Interpretation of Max Weber’s
“Intermediate Reflection”
In the history of the social and cultural sciences after Max Weber, the con-
cept of “disenchantment,” whose meaning, range, and problematic aspects
were the focus of the last two chapters, is embedded in a whole network of
other concepts. Taken together, their inherent claims amount to far more
than just a proposition about a fundamental dynamic of religious history. In
Weber’s work itself, the concept of disenchantment already serves as a means
of understanding the prehistory of and buildup to modern “rationalization.”
In sociology after World War II, this idea was linked (far from clearly, for
the most part) with the concept of differentiation. As a result, functional dif-
ferentiation appeared as a hallmark of “modern” societies, as did the notion
(borrowed from Weber) of the differentiation of cultural spheres of value.
This fusion then gave rise to ideas about processes of “modernization”—in
the sense of the prehistory of modernity, the catch-up development of other
societies, and the further development of societies that had already entered
“modernity.” “Disenchantment” is, so to speak, the religion-focused noun
of process whose entanglement with the processual terms (often used to di-
agnose modernity) of differentiation, rationalization, and modernization
I examine here.
The objective of this chapter is clear-cut.1 It is to sound the alert about dan-
gerous nouns of process, nouns that lead sociologists astray whenever they
try to use them to place their analyses of the contemporary world on a histor-
ical foundation. These nouns of process also exercise a detrimental effect be-
yond the boundaries of sociology when other scholars, such as historians, see
them as a source of theoretical guidance that has already proved itself in the
social sciences. To avoid misunderstandings, I underline that my warning
about these three “dangerous” nouns of process applies exclusively to them,
and not generally to terms that seek to capture social processes—quite the
opposite.2 That is, my warning relates to those nouns of process that impede
rather than facilitate the comprehension of social processes because, from

the outset, they presuppose long-term historical tendencies or homogenize
and disambiguate heterogeneous and contradictory changes. To explain
the sharp tone of my warning, I must begin with a brief look at the relation-
ship between sociology and history during the period when the former was
getting off the ground, paying special attention to the role of the topic of re-
ligion in this process. I then discuss the three “dangerous” nouns of process
individually. This throws up the question of what the consequences might be
if we were all more aware of the dangerous nature of these nouns of process.
In particular, I seek to explore the consequences for our understanding of
religion. I also provide an in-depth interpretation of how our understanding
of Max Weber’s famous “Intermediate Reflection” (Zwischenbetrachtung)
changes if we reread it in light of these issues.
Sociology, as is widely recognized, has a number of roots as an inde-
pendent academic discipline. It has absorbed philosophical ideas, sometimes
with anthropological underpinnings, about the nature of human social re-
lations; inquiries into social problems of social reformist intent (on poverty,
alcoholism, and criminality, for example); attempts to analyze the modern
world and describe modern society as such; and models for systematizing the
mass of historical and ethnological knowledge generated by the nineteenth
century. When all goes well, the fusion of these disparate strands produces
brilliant writings of broad interdisciplinary resonance. When things go
awry, the discipline often threatens to disintegrate into its constituent ele
ments, into disciplinary subcultures that have little to say to one another and
that feel greater rapport with neighboring subjects than with their originary
discipline.
If we go by university curricula, however, we do at least find a fair degree of
internal cognitive stability within the discipline of sociology, in two respects.
A specific canon of empirical methods of data collection and data analysis
enjoys an undisputed status. For many people, then, the discipline’s profes-
sional identity consists chiefly in these methods, mainly the quantitative, but
also the qualitative. But there is also consensus about what we ought to re-
gard as classic sociological theory. Throughout the world, there is virtually
unanimous agreement among sociologists that sociology’s core canon is cen-
tered on the work of two authors, namely Max Weber and Émile Durkheim,
and a good knowledge of both is an absolute prerequisite for membership in
the disciplinary community.
Fields of Tension 197
This fact can, however, easily blind us to the improbability of this theo-
retical canon. At the international level, these canonical authors were men-
tioned only peripherally during the discipline’s first few decades. During his
lifetime, in Germany Max Weber was by no means regarded as the key figure
of the new discipline, head and shoulders above all others, while the interna-
tional reception of his work had barely begun. Émile Durkheim was certainly
the most influential figure in France when it comes to the institutionalization
of the discipline of sociology, but once again, during his lifetime his work was
not received in any substantial way in Germany or the United States, for ex-
ample. It has often been noted that Weber and Durkheim appear to have been
unaware of each other. Not only that, but much of Weber’s writings consisted
of scattered fragments or failed to enter the canon at all, and there is an end-
lessly complex relationship between these two “gospels,” which by no means
tell the same story.3 All efforts to expand the canon and make Adam Smith,
Karl Marx, George Herbert Mead, or Georg Simmel canonical in the same
way remain controversial. And while modern sociological theory certainly
features a set of shared themes, it is by no means a fixed paradigm.
I mention all this because it is vital to clarify a point without which, I be-
lieve, we have no hope of evaluating the nouns of process that dominate
contemporary sociology. What I have in mind is the fact that the writings
of both Weber and Durkheim exhibit two characteristics that do not apply
to present-day sociology as a discipline. Both authors were concerned with
social phenomena throughout human history, and the topic of religion was
central for both of them. In other words, two scholars who espoused a uni-
versal historical approach, and for whom the history of religion was a cen-
tral part of this universal history, became the classic figures of a discipline to
which these two characteristics do not apply. Sociology narrowed its focus to
the point where it became the “study of the present,” a process lamented by
later disciples of the classic figures, such as Norbert Elias,4 while being given
programmatic status by others. Inevitably, this primary focus on the present
fosters speculation that can easily run out of control. Meanwhile, sociology
as a whole increasingly pushed its subdiscipline, the sociology of religion, to
the margins. To the extent that scholars still pursued it at all, it had very little
prospect of shaping the overall discipline.
The state of affairs described above sounds paradoxical. Is this a case of
a discipline betraying its founders? And if so, why does it continue to value
them at all, going so far as to retrospectively declare—in an increasingly
strident way—Weber and Durkheim its founders? The key to this paradox is,
I think, obvious. Sociology is losing its historical perspective and marginal-
izing religion, while at the same time canonizing authors and texts to which
these two characteristics do not apply, because the classic figures’ theories
themselves foster this development. They do so in two respects. First, their
theories contain assumptions about progressive secularization, which means
nothing other than that religion is becoming increasingly less important.
Second, they entail assumptions about the uniqueness of modernity as an
entirely novel historical formation to which, supposedly, much of that which
has always applied throughout history no longer applies. The latter charac-
teristic can lead to a simplistic dichotomous perspective (Gemeinschaft or
community versus Gesellschaft or society; mechanical versus organic soli-
darity; traditional versus modern society). It may also be extended to include
three phases (Chicago School: “reconstruction”) or divided up in a sophis-
ticated way (Parsons’s “pattern variables”).5 But the common ground is the
assumption of a fundamental break with all previous history as a new age
dawns, an age for which the term “modernity” has increasingly taken hold.
This modernity without religion thus becomes the object of sociology. In es-
sence, this means that now sociology only needs to show an interest in reli-
gion as a condition for the emergence of this modernity. This explains the
key role played by Weber’s essay on the Protestant ethic, and also Durkheim’s
theory of the transformation of the division of labor and of law.
I risk being misunderstood here. I am well aware that the writings of the
two classic figures contain elements that defy this description. Weber’s the-
orem of “disenchantment,” as I have shown in some detail, is really more an
analysis of demagification and other processes, but is certainly not iden-
tical with any simple thesis of secularization. Durkheim’s mature theory
of religion can also be seen as an important approach to analyzing sacral-
ization of all kinds, even the sacralization of secular content such as the
nation or human rights. I return to this topic later. For now I merely want
to highlight the fact that simple recourse to the classic figures must remain
unsatisfactory as long as we fail to eliminate those of their assumptions
that prompted the development of sociology as the study of a religion-free
modernity.
The loss of credibility and crisis of secularization theory has now
endowed this issue with profound contemporary relevance. Even those
who—like Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Steven Bruce, and Detlef
Pollack—continue to adhere to the notion of a causal relationship between
modernization and secularization will concede that they are now in the mi-
nority, that within the social sciences more scholars now reject than em-
brace the thesis of secularization. Of course, this does not mean that we can
now simply reverse the thesis of secularization. To critique the assumption
that modernization necessarily leads to secularization is not to dispute that
secularization has occurred in many European and a small number of non-
European societies. It means finally making a serious attempt to explain this
fact. In the same way, skepticism about the explanatory power of the theory
of functional differentiation in no way entails a naive call for societal de-
differentiation. But it does imply that, in light of the historical developments
of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we should ask whether
those canonized theories derived from the classic figures are truly ca-
pable of explaining these developments. This cannot be a matter merely of
applying differentiation theory historically and seeing what happens, or of
determining how contemporary historical research fits into this framework.
Instead we must reflect historically upon the phenomenon of differentiation
theory itself and make it compete with alternatives.
Such a critique of the theory of functional differentiation is not, of course,
in its infancy—quite the opposite. As early as 1984, in his spirited book Big
Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons,6 American sociologist and
historian Charles Tilly referred to the notion of advancing functional differ-
entiation as a “pernicious postulate.” He readily conceded that in the nine-
teenth century a whole range of processes of social change made it seem
plausible to apply the concept of differentiation sociologically, a concept
that had been gleaned from biological models of evolution. The specializa-
tion of labor, the construction of state bureaucracies, the spread of commod-
ities markets, and the proliferation of societies and associations all seemed
to point in the same direction. These processes appeared to confirm a gen
eral law of social change—a law, moreover, that implied that this change
was progressive in some way. The theory that emerged in the late nineteenth
century—though not without triggering a number of skeptical and ironic
reactions—almost died out again between the world wars. It then resurfaced
around 1960 with great intensity when Talcott Parsons began to build his
search for a theory of social change around this idea, which he had previ-
ously tended to reject. In his outstanding history of modernization theory,
Wolfgang Knöbl has shown just how much this maneuver was in fact a kind
of preemptive defense of the postwar theory of modernization when it came
to face its first crisis.7
Tilly, then, did not dispute that processes of functional differentiation

occur. But he emphasized that there is also a wealth of concurrent pro-
cesses that would be better described as processes of de-differentiation. His
examples are processes of linguistic standardization in connection with
nation-state formation, the development of a mass market in consumer
goods, and the agglomeration of small territories to form nation-states.
Neither term— differentiation or de- differentiation— is an appropriate
means of describing other key processes of social change, such as progressive
capital concentration or the diffusion of world religions (of the kind we ob-
serve today in the tremendous global expansion of Christianity and Islam).
What is more, processes of differentiation in one location—Tilly’s example
is the European shoe industry in the nineteenth century—often lead to pro-
cesses of de-differentiation in another place, in this case the shoe-importing
countries.
But if this is correct, then there is clearly a pressing need to clarify the log-
ical status of the theory of functional differentiation. Does it aspire to de-
scribe individual processes of social change or one great global process of
social change as a whole? Does it seek to go beyond description and pro-
vide explanations; in other words, does calling a phenomenon a “differen-
tiation process” explain its causes and progress over time? To what extent is
the theory of functional differentiation normative; in other words, does it not
only describe or perhaps even explain a developmental trend but identify it
as desirable as well? In fact, there is no doubt that the theory often entails sig-
nificant normative content, and because of this its exponents frequently per-
ceive the critique of its explanatory power as a quasitotalitarian call to reverse
existing forms of differentiation. Is the term “differentiation” chiefly meant
to indicate a state of affairs, or an increasing degree of distinction between
functional systems? Has modern society attained a state of functional dif-
ferentiation, or should we anticipate an advancing process of differentiation
extending into the future?
As mentioned earlier, there have been intensive debates on all these
questions among the theory’s supporters and critics for decades. In a 1992
book8 I myself tried to systematically collate the unresolved questions as-
sociated with this topic, concerning processes of differentiation and their
causes, effects, agents, impediments, tempo, contingencies, and normative
evaluation. Parsons’s students, and their students in turn, have given crea-
tive answers to all these questions. It is impossible to provide an exhaustive
account of this here, so I content myself with the observation that the theory
has undergone gradual “liberalization” in the United States as scholars (from

Shmuel Eisenstadt and Robert Bellah to Jeffrey Alexander) increasingly
opened it up to action-theoretical explanations. This initially led to the aban-
donment of the theory’s explanatory aspirations and then even of the label
“(neo-)functionalist,” while in Germany, as a result of the tremendous in-
fluence of Niklas Luhmann’s radicalization of functionalism, a theory rose
to prominence that can view every social phenomenon as contingent except
one, namely the very process of progressive functional differentiation. While
in the first case there is a risk of shapelessness, in the second case we find a
dangerous noun of process of the most extreme kind.
Durkheim and Simmel are the classic reference authors for this theory of
differentiation. Max Weber, meanwhile, injected another dangerous noun of
process into the sociological canon, namely that of progressive “rationaliza-
tion.” It is surely beyond dispute today that we cannot reconstruct Weber’s
work, at least in terms of its development over time, in light of this concept.
Weber biographer Dirk Kaesler, for example, makes it abundantly clear that
Weber did not start out with an intuitive sense of a “universal historical pro-
cess involving the rationalization of all spheres of life in all cultures and at all
times,” but instead subsequently hit on the idea of using this concept to unite
his disparate studies on bureaucratization, industrialization, intellectualiza-
tion, the development of rational “enterprise capitalism,” specialization, ob-
jectification, methodization, disciplining, disenchantment, secularization,
and dehumanization.9 But there is a huge question mark over the plausibility
of this retrospective self-systematization, over whether it can be correctly
understood as the “unintended product of his many individual pieces of re-
search” (as Kaesler puts it), or even as a “discovery” (as Schluchter suggests),10
or whether we might not make better use of Weber’s work by eschewing the
notion that these discrete processes are subprocesses of an overarching ra-
tionalization. Here I mention just two reasons for my skepticism about the
all-embracing processual notion of “rationalization.”
First, there are clearly radical differences between rationalization in the
sense of an increasing orientation toward profit-making principles and, for
example, rationalization in the sense of theologians’ intellectual systema-
tization of religious content. It is inappropriate, in my opinion, to use the
same term for both processes—unless one assumes some kind of causal
relationship between them. But this—and here we come to my second
reason—makes sense only if we assume the existence of a specific pro-
cess of rationalization within a particular culture over very long periods of
time—in other words, the development of “Occidental rationalism.” I shall

illustrate what disturbs me so much about this with reference to a single
statement by Weber. In his study of Hinduism, in connection with a discus-
sion of the caste system and the limits to commensality associated with it,
Weber mentions the famous dispute between Peter and Paul in Antioch and
writes, “The elimination of all ritual barriers of birth for the community of
the eucharist, as realized in Antioch, was, in connection with the religious
pre-conditions, the hour of conception for the occidental ‘citizenry.’ This is
the case even though its birth occurred more than a thousand years later in
the revolutionary conjurationes of the medieval cities.”11 In a narrowly logical
sense, Weber is of course correct: no medieval urban bourgeoisie without a
shared Communion.12 But it is far from obvious that we should look for the
origin of this prerequisite in an event in religious history that occurred one
thousand years earlier. This ascribes to very long-term religious traditions
a role that might also be played by contemporary social configurations. It is
true that Weber attributes no determinative power to these traditions. But
he treats them as facilitators or impediments to such an extent that it would
be fair to say that he underestimates religions’ adaptability. The issue of the
development of “Occidental rationalism” rests upon specific assumptions
about the West’s enduring uniqueness and about features common to all
“rationalization”—assumptions that, in my opinion, are becoming increas-
ingly implausible today in light of the tremendous economic rise of East
and South Asia. Questions concerning the connection between religion and
the rise of an acquisitive bourgeoisie in Europe are surely too narrow for a
historical-comparative sociology of religion, and may in fact be fundamen-
tally misconceived.
Even more than in the work of Weber himself, which features many
productive internal inconsistencies, this lurking danger becomes clearly
apparent when his work is rendered consistent, when it is thoroughly sys-
tematized. Wolfgang Schluchter has probably done more than anyone else
in this vein, and in his work on Occidental Christianity—whose epigraph
happens to be the above-quoted statement from Weber13—he interprets
what Weber analyzed as medieval “community religiosity,” in its sectarian or
sectlike form, as helping lay the groundwork for ethical rationality and thus
the spirit of the Reformation and the development of modern capitalism. As
impressive as this systematization is, it is also highly one-sided. It would have
been possible to adopt a quite different perspective, one that portrayed this
form of Christianity as an entity in its own right, one that could be picked up
on later in a wide variety of ways and that already showed affinities with var-
ious contemporary phenomena.
“Rationalization,” as one of Weber’s dangerous nouns of process, has
exercised a tremendous influence on the self-understanding of the contem-
porary world, an influence even greater than the notion of functional dif-
ferentiation, which has remained a largely academic concept. Weber’s own
tragic perspective, the Communist-utopian eclipsing of Weber in György
Lukács’s conception of reification and its elimination through a Leninist-led
revolution, the return of tragic resignation in the “dialectic of Enlightenment”
envisaged by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the more optimistic
attempts to open up these ideas in Jürgen Habermas’s concept of commu-
nicative rationality, and Alain Touraine’s notion of subjectivization—all of
this has done much to gear the intellectual self-understanding of the last few
decades to this dangerous noun of process. With the exception of Touraine’s
work, there was very little space left for religion in this understanding of mo-
dernity, because here religion was robbed of its vigor by the thesis of pro-
gressive “disenchantment,” visions of its utopian eclipse, or the rationalist
conception of an intensifying “linguistification of the sacred.”
The third dangerous noun of process I would like to flag up here is that of
modernization. Sometimes it is actually quite harmless—if we merely mean
economic growth and the productivity-increasing effects of scientific re-
search. From this point of view modernization has always existed, and its
scale and tempo are simply empirical questions. We can then refer, for ex-
ample, to the modernization of agrarian technology in the high Middle Ages,
without associating this with any great theoretical claims. But the term is
used far more often in the sense of a transition to a specific era called “mo-
dernity.” This, however, infects the term with all the problems associated
with the concept of modernity. The term “modernity,” of course, suffers from
a notorious lack of definition with respect to when it began (from 1492 to
1968) and, much like the term “functional differentiation,” from a blurring of
empirical and normative claims. Even more significant, so-called moderni-
zation theory too conceives of processes such as bureaucratization, democ-
ratization, and secularization as subprocesses that are closely linked with one
another, rather than relatively independent processes that, while certainly
featuring a wide range of mutual dependencies, essentially generate a field of
tension rather than a holistic process.
I shall say no more at this point about the dangers of this third noun of pro-
cess.14 The more pressing issue is what the outcome would be if my warning
were heeded. For some people, the theory of functional differentiation, for
example, is so constitutive of the identity of sociology (or: a specific variant
of rationalization theory is so constitutive of the identity of critical theory)
that they fear that forgoing these theorems would mean annulling all theo-
retical claims, leaving us with nothing but historiography itself, the study
of history in all its contingency. So it makes sense here to at least outline
the basic ideas of a theoretical alternative that does without the dangerous
nouns of process, and to derive from this alternative theory a number of
tentative statements concerning the history of the relationship between reli-
gion and power, before going into greater depth about this in the concluding
chapter. I begin by briefly indicating what it looks like to draw on the classic
sociological figures of Weber and Durkheim if one keeps in mind the risks
involved in these nouns of process and maintains a distance from the idea—
resting upon these nouns—of a religion-free modernity. In both cases, I re-
strict myself to two comments about each of these thinkers, one concerned
with their understanding of religion, and the other with their conception of
modernity.
If we try to at least tentatively bracket off Durkheim’s theoretical
assumptions about differentiation, we recognize him as a pioneer of a theory
of dynamic processes of sacralization or ideal formation. This was my key
contention in c hapter 3. This theory, and certainly not the reduction of reli-
gion to the function of social integration, is the true achievement of his classic
work on the elementary forms of religious life. And in this theory we find
the reason that his essay of 1898 became the starting point for a sociology of
human rights as the modern sacralization of the person. But it is impossible
to draw on this classic text in any straightforward way. However magnifi-
cent his theory of sacralization may be, it suffers from serious shortcomings
that are clearly linked with Durkheim’s laicist political intentions. In contrast
to Weber, who recognized the fundamental turning point of the emergence
of ethicized religions of salvation in the “prophetic age,” Durkheim failed to
grasp this and thus presented modern, even secular sacredness as similar to
the religious structures of tribal societies.15
In Durkheim’s work, far more than in that of Weber, the image of mo-
dernity is pervaded by a notion of functional differentiation. Durkheim
interprets problems of his era as difficulties in switching over to this new
mode, as temporary anomie. His theory, much like later modernization
theory, thus lacks the tools to comprehend the totalitarianisms of the twen-
tieth century as anything but deviations from the path of modernization.
There is thus no “totalitarian modernity” in this construction, exposing the

latent normativity of the idea of modernity.
This point is bound up with the understanding of religion in that, in
Durkheim’s one-dimensional conception of sacralization, processes of sa-
cralization within the framework of totalitarianisms—the nation, race, class,
party, leader, or revolution—cannot be distinguished from sacralization with
a focus on transcendence. He thus links universalism with secularism, rather
than recognizing the risk of a secularist anti-universalism and the potential
of a religious universalism.
At the time of his early death, meanwhile, Weber’s thinking was still in a
state of flux, and we might speculate as to whether he himself would have
continued to adhere to all of those ideas that were later canonized. This spec-
ulation is nourished by newly available material such as Weber’s 1920 lecture
on the sociology of the state, held just a few weeks before his death, and by a
newspaper article on a lecture given by Weber in Vienna in 1917.16 Here as
elsewhere, Weber underlines the supposed uniqueness of the Occidental city
and concludes his description of the modern forms of political domination
by highlighting the city and the “kind of politics and economic policy that
were first developed by it” as the “third indispensable historical component
of the modern forms of political domination” alongside the “rational bu-
reaucratization of the monarchical military states and of rational capitalism.”
Here the military state, capitalism, and urban self-government are all qual-
ified as “rational.” Yet Weber can scarcely have been thinking of a coherent
principle. After all, the inherent logic of state action in the modern nation-
state or in a postnational constellation, the inherent logic of economic action
in various institutional forms of capitalist economy and the inherent logic
of more or less democratic self-government are not identical. What he has
in mind must instead be a configuration characterized by profound internal
tensions. The term “rationality,” so it seems to me, tends to conceal this ten-
sion rather than elucidate it. At a certain point, Weber’s action-theoretical
analytical aspirations and the assumption of a universal historical process of
rationalization are bound to come into conflict.
My second comment relates to Weber’s understanding of religion, which
I examined in Chapter 4 through a critical discussion of his concept of disen-
chantment. What we discovered was that this concept has a cognitivist or in-
tellectualist slant whenever Weber has magic preceding religion historically
or regards the issue of theodicy as fundamental to all religion. As I see it, the
dynamics of the experience of the sacred and of its interpretation are more
fundamental than issues of meaning and justice, and these dynamics gen-
erate the framework within which the latter issues can be explored in the first
place. Yet as Weber’s thinking developed and he deepened his understanding
of the topic of ecstasy, and above all in his brilliant so-called “Intermediate
Reflection,” he developed a schema for the competition between experiences
of ecstasy (or self-transcendence) that is crucial to any analysis of the
“tensions between world and religion.” In his hands, however, this schema
is linked with the thesis of competition between the internal tendencies of
value spheres, a thesis on which readings beholden to differentiation theory
could later build. As the process of Weber’s reception continued, this made
the theories of rationalization and differentiation seem quite compatible, vir-
tually crying out to be linked together. But it would also be possible to remain
on the level of action and experience, without making any such assertions
about the internal logic of cultural spheres, and to distinguish between fields
of tension of different kinds. From this angle, the conflicts between different
approaches to experiences of self-transcendence (through religion, art, erot-
icism, violence, intoxication, and so on) appear as problems of individuals
and collectivities and as balancing acts performed by institutions—without
any transhistorical trajectory toward disenchantment or advancing differ-
entiation. I now explore this alternative conceptual approach, which I have
only hinted at here, in greater depth, as it is of crucial strategic importance to
working out an alternative to the narrative of disenchantment.
Weber’s “Intermediate Reflection”—A New Interpretation
Through the concept of “modernization” and a “modernization theory” that

places it front and center, the connection between the dangerous nouns of
process “differentiation” and “rationalization” seems firmly established. Yet
it is far from self-evident. They are not simply different terms for the same
thing. As I have shown in this chapter, their roots lie in quite different the-
oretical contexts, though each enjoys the great prestige of being central to
the work of one of the two uncontested classic figures of sociology. However,
Durkheim, the classic author of differentiation theory, never refers to
rationalization—while Weber, the originator of the theory of rationalization,
though he uses the term “differentiation” fairly often, only ever does so “inci-
dentally.”17 Nonetheless, since the rise of modernization theory after World
War II, a kind of consensus has taken hold that Weber’s theory of rationaliza-
tion contributed to the theory of differentiation.
Here, as representative of many other instances, I mention the account
in a textbook on differentiation theory.18 According to this book, the
Durkheimian variant of the theory in particular brings out “the variety of
micro-differentiations between the various roles,” while Weber allegedly
focused on the “macro-differentiations, taking shape in parallel to these
[micro- differentiations] within modern society, between different soci-
etal segments.” This sounds like an amicable division of labor. The author of
the textbook, Uwe Schimank, adds that Durkheim was chiefly interested in
“the abstract logic of differentiation and integration in modern societies,”19
and had sweepingly contrasted them with pre-modern societies, whereas
Weber had been concerned with the “concrete historical development of
the West’s leading cultural ideas”20 in a process that was by no means inev-
itable. Schimank thus shows clearly that he is fully aware of the substantial
theoretical differences between the two classic figures. Nonetheless, his in-
terpretation of Max Weber is guided by the idea that one can infer, from a
cultural peculiarity of the West, parallel increases in the rationality of action,
theory-building, bureaucratic administration, and values. For Schimank, the
societal rationalization of the dimension of values means that human action
is “geared toward a limited plurality of criteria of value, all of which possess
a specific ‘immanent law.’ ”21 The textbook interprets politics, the economy,
law, art, and eroticism as rationalizable “value spheres” of this kind, between
which there are unavoidable tensions that inevitably put the cohesion of soci-
eties at risk. There must, therefore, we are informed, be other sources of this
cohesion, and these lie, for example, at the level of bureaucratic organization.
This is a widely canonized view of things, and no one will deny that it
engenders an impressive picture of universal history and modernity, at least
in outline form. The divergence between a more strongly action-theoretical
and systems-theoretical sociology leads to different emphases, but these are
not so pronounced as to challenge a fundamental commonality. Authors that
draw largely on theories of action, placing them closer to Max Weber’s self-
understanding, rightly emphasize that he did not assume that the increasing
complexity of societies itself triggers processes of functional differentiation.
They thus inquire into the values, goals, and strategies through which spe-
cific actors generate differentiated orders.22 Conversely, the staunchest pro-
ponent of a systems-theoretical reading of Weber, Niklas Luhmann, attested
to Weber, rather patronizingly, “descriptions characterized by an impres-

sionistic pithiness” but at the same time, because these permitted no fur-
ther theoretical development, Luhmann switched “to a conception more
compatible with systems theory,” with which he sought to preserve Weber’s
key insight: “The insight very much worth preserving is that rationalization
differentiates, and it does so in a dual sense: its rejection frees up energies for
the construction of one’s own rationality, while the rationalization of other
spheres of life concurrently clarifies that with which one may not identify.”23
When it comes to these thinkers’ divergent attempts to appropriate Weber
for their own theoretical constructions, there is no controversy over which
of his texts serves as the crucial foundation. Rather than discussing in detail
the various efforts to build on Weber, which in this case extend from Jürgen
Habermas to Niklas Luhmann in Germany, and from Jeffrey Alexander to
Rogers Brubaker in the United States,24 once again, as with my analysis of
Weber’s concept of disenchantment in c hapter 4 of this book, I attempt, at
least experimentally, to depart from an entrenched interpretive tradition and
turn to the text itself. I am referring to Max Weber’s famous “Intermediate
Reflection,” which I will not be reading in light of differentiation theory.
Max Weber himself could hardly have been clearer about the objec-
tive of his “Intermediate Reflection.” In his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
Religionssoziologie, this text comes after his comprehensive analysis of
Confucianism and Daoism and their sociological foundations in China,
while preceding his equally in-depth examination of Indian religiosity.
Weber contrasts China and India in extreme fashion, almost reminiscent of
cultural clichés, which he only manages to avoid due to his awareness of the
risks of excessive typologization. While he attributes to Confucianism only
the absolute minimum of religious devalorization of the world and its prac-
tical renunciation,25 according to him Indian religiosity “in strongest con-
trast to the case of China . . . is the cradle of those religious ethics which have
abnegated the world, theoretically, practically, and to the greatest extent.”26
The goal of the “Intermediate Reflection” is thus explicitly to achieve an un-
derstanding of how such religious renunciation of the world could ever have
come about, to clarify “the motives from which religious ethics of world ab-
negation have originated, and the directions they have taken.”27
To pursue this clearly stated objective, Weber constructs a theoreti-
cally derived—that is, not inductively obtained—schema. He is also very
clear about the methodological status of this schema. First, he makes
the—negative—point that the schema itself is not supposed to represent a
philosophy, not even one positing that value conflicts cannot be sublated into
a superordinate synthesis. In the first instance, as he emphasizes, he is merely
concerned—positively—to establish a means of orientation within an “oth-
erwise immensely multifarious” context;28 in this sense, his construction is
“merely a technical aid which facilitates a more lucid arrangement and ter-
minology.”29 This all sounds quite above suspicion and pragmatic, and is far
from any assertion of historical tendencies. This also applies when Weber
adds that he will be presenting the individual value spheres analyzed within
the schema—which we take a closer look at later on—with the kind of ra-
tional cohesion “which is rarely found in reality. But they can appear thus in
reality and in historically important ways, and they have.”30 The relationship
between such a typology and reality is free of all assumptions of causality. It
serves merely to facilitate the conceptual comprehension of reality, in order
to establish its factual divergence from theoretically constructed types. Given
this methodological limiting of his aspirations, there can be no question of
any kind of theory of the differentiation of value spheres.
Nonetheless, Weber himself certainly takes a step beyond this humble
aspiration, though he expresses himself very cautiously. “Under certain
conditions,” he writes, his typology “might” be something rather more
than this.31 That is, he explains, what the theorist constructs rationally by
extracting the most consistent forms of ideas or behaviors is by no means
something entirely alien to human beings themselves, with whom historical-
sociological analysis is concerned. Every human being, Weber contends,
features a capacity (admittedly often a weak capacity) for rational consist-
ency. “Religious interpretations of the world and ethics of religions cre-
ated by intellectuals and meant to be rational have been strongly exposed
to the imperative of consistency.”32 In contrast to a typology entirely free
of assumptions of causality, then, Weber puts forward a claim of causality,
though a very weak one. A demand for rational consistency is at work in
the world; those who specialize in intellectual work perceive this more than
others. But Weber is fully aware just how “limited and unstable this power
[the demand for rational consistency] is and always has been in the face of
other forces of historical life,”33 that even intellectuals meet the demand for
consistency only to empirically varying degrees, and that, as a rule, ethical
postulates go beyond what is rationally derivable.
Weber goes one additional step further, however, when he tasks his schema
with “contributing to the typology and sociology of rationalism.”34 The most
rational forms then allow one to determine empirically whether or not the
theoretically conceivable rational conclusions have in fact been drawn in re-

ality. What is problematic about this most far-reaching methodological as-
piration of Weber’s is the concept of “rationalism.” After all, this seems to
point to more than the rational consistency of intellectual work in all cultural
contexts. It appears to suggest a quality that is present to differing degrees in
different cultures. Weber’s first step, after scrupulously explaining the meth-
odological status of his construction, confirms this impression.
Weber begins his substantive remarks with an initial conceptual distinc-
tion that he has already deployed in the introduction to his three volumes
and in the studies on Protestantism and on China, namely the distinction
between asceticism and mysticism. Both appear here as ways of expressing
the rejection of the world: “Active asceticism that is a God-willed action
of the devout who are God’s tools, and, on the other hand, the contempla-
tive possession of the holy, as found in mysticism. Mysticism intends a state
of ‘possession,’ not action, and the individual is not a tool but a ‘vessel’ of
the divine. Action in the world must thus appear as endangering the abso-
lutely irrational and other-worldly religious state.”35 Weber complicates this
simple opposition between two religious forms of rejection of the world by
introducing another distinction— namely, that between this- worldliness
and withdrawal from the world. What we are dealing with here, then, is a
typology consisting of four types: an asceticism involving withdrawal from
the world on the one hand and a this-worldly focus on the other, and a mysti-
cism entailing either withdrawal from or a focus on the world.36 The greatest
contrast is thus between mysticism involving withdrawal from the world and
asceticism with a this-worldly focus, in which “rationally active asceticism,
in mastering the world, seeks to tame what is creatural and wicked through
work in a worldly ‘vocation’ ”;37 here, of course, Weber is thinking of the
Puritans, whose world-historical role he traced with unflagging fascination.
Asceticism involving withdrawal from the world and mysticism entailing a
this-worldly focus may appear in combination with one another or, in their
practice, be almost indistinguishable.
There is no need for us to trace the origins, within the history of schol-
arship, of Weber’s conceptual distinctions.38 What should be noted, how-
ever, is that before Weber introduces his conceptual schema itself, he devotes
two paragraphs to possible connections between the different types of reli-
gious ethics and differing conceptions of the divine. Building, as he himself
acknowledges, on the work of Ernst Troeltsch, Weber sees a close connection
between the conception of a transcendent creator God and an actively ascetic
stance toward the world on the one hand, and between a “depersonalization
and immanence of the divine power”39 and a contemplative-mystical stance
on the other. Weber is too educated in the history of religion to declare such
a close connection an absolute. In particular, he recognizes that the (Axial
Age) conception of a supramundane God alone cannot have determined
the “direction of Occidental asceticism.”40 After all, had this been the case,
Judaism and Islam too would have produced powerful forms of this-worldly
asceticism. Furthermore, as he sees it, Christianity, with its doctrine of the
Trinity and cult of the saints,41 represents a weakening of the supramundane
conception of God as found in Judaism. This renders implausible an expla-
nation of Puritanism’s this-worldly asceticism solely in light of the Christian
conception of God.
So there must at least have been additional factors involved. And Weber
articulates what kind of factors he has in mind here, namely “the nature of
religious promises and the paths of salvation which they determined.”42 This
conjecture, however, makes sense only if we look for the cause of the devel-
opment of a religious tradition’s specific potential chiefly in this tradition’s
own components. Otherwise, it would make more sense to attribute at least
to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam a similar potential, but one that has been
actualized in line with factors that cannot be described as religious. Here
Weber shows that he would like to discern the roots of this-worldly ascet-
icism in the conception of God, notions of salvation and envisaged routes
to salvation. This is why his announcement that the schema of his typology
would contribute to the sociology of rationalism was quite problematic. That
is, it is based on the assumption of profound connections between religion
and rationalization, which Weber has yet to properly justify. I return to this
point later.
True to his task of clarifying the motives for religious rejection of the
world, Weber’s next step is to turn to the antecedents of asceticism and mys-
ticism within the history of religion. Here his account is informed by the
scarcely tenable supposition that magic is the starting point of religious his-
tory.43 Asceticism, meanwhile, features forms of abstinence practiced “for
the sake of awakening charismatic qualities or for the sake of preventing evil
charms.”44 Weber, then, already discerns the phenomenon of turning away
from the world in order to master it in the asceticism of the sorcerer. But the
crucial point for him is whether this amounts merely to momentary eleva-
tion into the extraquotidian or whether actors succeed in reaching a “a holy
state, and thereby a habitude that assures salvation” rather than “an acute and
extraordinary, and thus a holy, state which is transitorily attained by means

of orgies, asceticism, or contemplation.”45 In other words, the unexpected ex-
perience of self-transcendence, but also the occasional instances when it is
triggered by practices of asceticism or mysticism, take people out of their
everyday existence but then allow them to be reabsorbed into it. The orienta-
tion toward prophets or a savior, by way of contrast, leads people to gear their
entire conduct of life to the pursuit of a salvation good (Heilsgut), a once-
and-for-all redemption, or as Weber puts it, “at least relatively, to systema-
tize and rationalize the way of life.”46 This, however, turns the acute tension
vis-à-vis the profane, associated with all experience of sacredness, into an
enduring tension between a religious community and the world and its or-
ders,47 with both sides potentially heightening it. Within the religious camp,
this applies if convictions become increasingly important, while participa-
tion in rituals and obtaining the salvific good of redemption are understood
in an increasingly inward sense. When it comes to the world and its orders,
the tension grows if the rationalization of worldly goods intensifies.
At this point, it is still far from clear what exactly these worldly goods
are, and especially what their rationalization means. What is clear, how-
ever, is that here, for the first time in the “Intermediate Reflection,” we have
reached a point on which the interpretation that I have criticized, rooted in
the theory of differentiation, could (supposedly) meaningfully build. Here,
that is, Weber states that this “rationalization and . . . conscious sublimation
of man’s relations to the various spheres of values, external and internal, as
well as religious and secular, have then pressed towards making conscious
the internal and lawful autonomy of the individual spheres; thereby letting
them drift into those tensions which remain hidden to the originally naïve
relation with the external world.”48 The religiously motivated systematization
of one’s conduct of life, as Weber presumably means here, entails a poten-
tial that also has consequences for the rational organization of the individual
worldly spheres. As a result, these spheres develop more strongly in accord-
ance with their own lawlike regularities and come into more intense conflict
with one another. Weber adds, “This results quite generally from the devel-
opment of inner-and other-worldly values towards rationality, towards con-
scious endeavor, and towards sublimation by knowledge. This consequence
is very important for the history of religion.”49 Here Weber has abandoned
his methodological caution. He is no longer concerned merely with intro-
ducing a typology of religious rejections of the world, and has also shifted
away from his weak claim of causality with respect to the effects of rational,
consistency-focused motives. Now, on the contrary, he is explicitly asserting

that religious history in its entirety features a movement toward the rational,
and that the rationalization within religion has impacted on the rationaliza-
tion of societal spheres, as well as on possible conflicts between them.
My examination of the rest of Weber’s argument will have to show whether
it can bear the heavy burden this imposes on it. The key question will be
whether, when it comes to the tensions between religion and world, Weber
once again—in much the same way as with his conception of disenchant-
ment and his use of the terms “rationality” and “rationalization”—lumps
together problems that are quite different conceptually, ascribing to them a
deceptive commonality. On this premise, all we can do is unpack this com-
monality on the conceptual level. This is our only route to a new perspective
on the factual realities.
At this stage of his argument, Weber does not turn immediately to the
array of worldly goods in light of which he seeks to present his hypothesis.
Instead he inserts another intermediate step, centered on what we might
call the development of the idea of moral universalism through the salva-
tionist prophecy of the Axial Age. With sublime brevity, Weber portrays how
prophecy devalorized, at least to a degree, the “natural sib,” that is, the kin
group, as the central, value-laden social form in human history up to that
point, and how the “magical ties and exclusiveness of the sibs [were] shat-
tered,”50 creating a new social community. In this community, which is
independent of kinship ties and constituted through a shared orientation to-
ward the teachings, or role model, of a prophet, a specific form of ethics now
develops. This draws on existing forms of ethical conduct but extends them
in a number of ways. Weber identifies two key features of ethics prior to the
prophetic age. According to him, this ethics features reciprocity and a strict
distinction between in-group and out-group morality. When it comes to the
members of one’s own community—whether this is the village, clan, army on
the march, or the like—the “obligation to give brotherly support in distress”
is the order of the day, and it finds economic expression in the fact that one
was “obliged to loan, free of charge, goods for the use of the propertyless,
to give credit free of interest, and to extend liberal hospitality and support.
Men were obliged to render services upon the request of their neighbors, and
likewise, on the lord’s estate, without compensation other than mere suste-
nance.”51 These obligations do not apply to outsiders. When it comes, for ex-
ample, to exchange with or loans to them, it is quite acceptable to prioritize
one’s own interest.
This ancient economic ethic of neighborliness is now applied to rela-

tions within the religious community and beyond (though it is remarkable
in itself that the religious community does not adhere to traditional bound-
aries of clan or people). On the basis of the experiential foundation of close
relationships, this ethics is intensified both externally and internally, if the
idea of salvation is sublimated: “Externally, such commands rose to a com-
munism of loving brethren; internally, they rose to the attitude of caritas, love
for the sufferer per se, for one’s neighbor, for man, and finally for the enemy.”52
In such an intensified ethos of love, Weber discerns “the peculiar euphoria
of all types of sublimated religious ecstasy.”53 But the characteristic feature
here is not this euphoria, but the development “of a universalist brotherhood,
which goes beyond all barriers of societal associations, often including that
of one’s own faith.”54 Hence, in the connection between “prophetism” and
“universalist brotherhood,” Weber sees precisely what I have portrayed here
as the emergence of moral universalism in the Axial Age.55 And without il-
lusion he sees that this universalism was inevitably going to clash “with the
orders and values of this world”56—the more consistently it was understood
and the more these orders and values of the world “have been rationalized
and sublimated in terms of their own laws.”57
Weber himself by no means expresses his ideas on the emergence of moral
universalism—to come to an interim conclusion—in the language of differ-
entiation theory, nor in a way that tallies with it. Nor would this have been
plausible. The social form taken by a religious ethos of moral universalism
is neither a matter of functional differentiation, nor can this ethos be con-
ceptualized as a new “sphere of values.” If the difference between internal
and external, in-group and out-group morality is annulled, as it is in the case
of the emergence of a religious ethic of fraternity, it would make far more
sense to refer to de-differentiation. Certainly, a new social form comes into
being—the “church,” for example—but not for its own sake, but due to the
difficulty of realizing a universalist ideal. If it is to be prevented from disap-
pearing as an ideal, it must at least be preserved, passed on to new genera-
tions, lived more intensely within a given community, and held up as an ideal
to the outside world.58 The notion of a value sphere would be inappropriate.
While moral universalism certainly can and must be attuned pragmatically
to the difficulties of its realization, it would lose its universalist character if
it were programmatically reduced to the realizable, and limited entirely to
the relationship between believers. Christians, for example, never felt called
only to aid other Christians; their universalist readiness to help seems to have
contributed substantially to the spread of Christianity in the late Roman

Empire.59 Nor would it be appropriate to conceive of the emergence of moral
universalism as the differentiation of religion. Many religions, after all, in-
volve no ethos of moral universalism, and not every moral universalism is
religious.
In his argument so far, then, Max Weber has not referred to a process of
differentiation and could not have plausibly done so. Instead he refers to a
rationalization of religion. If this is supposed to mean a move toward moral
universalism, his line of thought is clear. But what still requires clarifica-
tion is why this development should have triggered the rationalization of
various societal spheres in line with their immanent laws, as Weber put it.
Why should the rationalization of religion in the sense of the rise of moral
universalism, while not itself representing a process of differentiation, bring
about differentiation? Does Weber provide good reasons for this? Or does he
extend the term “rationalization” in such a way that it encompasses signifi-
cantly more than the emergence of a religious ethos of moral universalism?
This brings us to the point in the “Intermediate Reflection” where Weber
truly begins to analyze individual societal spheres from the perspective
of their immanent laws and that of their (increasing) discrepancy with
the demands of religious fraternity. The spheres Weber addresses are the
economy, politics, art, eroticism, and science. But Weber neither explains,
in any way, whether these are the only spheres there are, or for what theoret-
ical reasons he limits his arguments to them—one might also look at law or
sports—nor do we learn whether the concept of the (value) sphere has a spe-
cific theoretical status, or whether it makes any sense to describe eroticism as
a sphere of this kind. I return to this problem later. For now, we can discern
Weber’s principle of conceptual organization: he analyzes the economic and
political spheres in light of the immanent laws of instrumentally rational ac-
tion, while ascribing the aesthetic and erotic spheres to those “ ‘this-worldly’
life-forces” whose “character is essentially non-rational or basically anti-
rational.”60 The tension between religiosity and each of these “spheres” must
therefore differ in form and intensity. For Weber, this tension seems to be
different again vis-à-vis “the sphere of intellectual knowledge.”61 It remains
to be seen whether the difference in these relations or fields of tension even
allows us to discern in them that commonality implied by Weber’s notion of
rationality and rationalization.
Weber begins his detailed examination with the economic sphere, because
it seems to him that it is here, in circumstances of increasing rationalization,
that the discrepancy with the demands of the ethic of brotherliness is

most apparent. Just as, in his systematic sociology of religion,62 Weber had
declared the this-worldly orientation to be typical of all religion prior to the
emergence of religions of salvation, here too he mentions that at this stage
of religious development the increasing of one’s own prosperity was among
the self-evidently accepted objectives of religious action. The religions of
salvation, however, trigger a rupture in this respect. Weber does not actu-
ally set out what this rupture consists of. But his assertion is entirely plau-
sible if we think of the more intensive moralization of action with respect
to the convictions underpinning it, and of the moral universalism that
problematizes the enjoyment of one’s own prosperity if this is at the expense
of others or is not shared by them. Weber puts less emphasis on this funda-
mental tension between an ethic of fraternity and individual growth in afflu-
ence, and more on the increase in this tension as a result of the progressive
rationalization of the economy. Businesslike economic action geared toward
prices and with a view to market success, Weber contends, becomes funda-
mentally detached from personal relationships and their ethical regulability.
“The more the world of the modern capitalist economy follows its own im-
manent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a
religious ethic of brotherliness.”63 This proposition no longer sounds like a
mere typology, free of assumptions of causality. In fact it entails an interpre-
tation of the history of capitalism as the unfolding of the internal lawlike reg-
ularities of rational economic action. The idea of an increasing discrepancy
with the fraternal ethic is bound up with this assumption of the increasingly
impersonal nature of economic relations. For Weber, the attempt to influence
these impersonal relations can only lead to the “stifling [of] formal ration-
ality,”64 to a conflict between formal and material rationality. This, of course,
opens up a whole range of questions. It can by no means be taken as read
that untrammeled formal rationality is the royal road to the development of
the economic sphere. The introduction of aspects of material rationality—in
the welfare state, for example—may even foster the long-term development
of the economy. Likewise, we should certainly not overstate the impersonal
character of real existing capitalist economies.
But the issues involved in an adequate theory of capitalism must remain
peripheral here. It is surely correct that the “religions of salvation”—to quote
Weber—regarded the development of “economic forces” that are “opposed to
brotherliness” with “profound suspicion” and took “warnings against attach-
ment to money and goods” to the point of “tabooing” them.65 But because the
religious communities and their members themselves could not avoid eco
nomic necessities, they found themselves compelled to enter into all kinds
of compromises, with Weber pointing here to the history of the prohibition
on interest and usury.66 It was only ever religious “virtuosi” who consistently
upheld the religious precepts, such as monks through the vow of poverty,
which meant forgoing individual property; and their “needs [were] . . . re-
stricted to what was absolutely indispensable.”67 This asceticism entails a par-
adox in the sense that for monks as a collective—the individual monastery or
the entire order—it often led to substantial prosperity. At the very least, the
collective had to uphold the fundamentals of rational economic activity.
In his consciously hyperbolizing typological approach, Weber declares just
two ways of resolving the tension between a universalist ethic of fraternity
and a rational economy to be consistent: the “mystic’s acosmism of love”68
on the one hand and the Puritan vocational ethic on the other. With the dif-
ficult concept of “acosmism of love,”69 what Weber has in mind is an ethic
of love that is not only universalized to encompass all people, even distant
strangers and those of hostile intent, but that takes the “form of an objectless
devotion to anybody, not for man’s sake but purely for devotion’s sake.”70 The
Puritan vocational ethic, meanwhile, rested on the radical desacralization
of the world,71 the declaration that its objectification is divinely ordained.
Weber correctly states that the radical version of this ethos involves adopting
a “standpoint of unbrotherliness,”72 one that foregrounds the difference be-
tween individuals regarding their state of grace, abandons the Christian uni-
versalism of love, and can no longer be meaningfully described as a religion
of salvation.
Weber’s construction thus presents two and only two ways of resolving
this tension as consistent, but neither of them resolves the tension construc-
tively. Both merely deactivate one of the two poles of tension. The radical
Puritan ethic is no longer a universalism of love. The acosmism of love,
meanwhile, also fails to pull individuals toward concrete others; instead
they remain immersed in the self-indulgent pleasure of selfless devotion, for
which Weber uses Baudelaire’s phrase, the “soul’s sacred prostitution.”73 In
my view, what this means is that every authentic orientation toward a univer-
salist morality—and this applies even more to a universalist ethos of love—
must guard against any tendency to try to escape this tension once and for all,
in one of the ways described above. The Puritan—overstylized by Weber—
forgoes universalism. But the mystic characterized by the acosmism of love
refuses to balance universalism with his specific obligations, which continue
to exist—obligations to one’s nearest and dearest, which do not melt into thin
air or self-evidently retreat behind obligations to distant strangers.74
Weber’s next step is to consider the tensions between the universalist
fraternal ethic and political orders. For religions prior to the historical
emergence of universalism, there was no problem here. The gods were as par-
ticularist as the communities in which they were worshiped. “The problem
only arose when these barriers . . . were shattered by universalist religions,
by a religion with a unified God of the entire world. And the problem arose
in full strength only when this God was a God of ‘love.’ . . . For redemption
religions [tensions with the political sphere emerged from] the basic demand
for brotherliness.”75 In light of the studies of the Axial Age I described in the
previous chapter, it is evident that Weber’s conclusion here is overly rash. It is
true that a tension with the political orders of the world arose only with the
emergence of moral universalism, but it is problematic to see universalism at
work exclusively in monotheism—rather than in the idea of transcendence.
It is also dubious to present the Christian ethos of love as the only form of
universalism in which the tension between it and particular orders breaks
through “in full strength.”
As with the economic sphere, Weber’s main interest in political orders is
not the history of the religious position itself—in other words, the political
ethic of the world religions—but rather the rationalization of these orders.
This is because he assumes that, as a result of this rationalization, a funda-
mental tension with the world, inherent in the religions of salvation, becomes
increasingly pronounced. But what can the rationalization of political orders
mean? Weber refers first to bureaucracy and the administration of justice,
because for him these have “depersonalization”76 in common with rational
capitalism. But we could object here that the administration of the state and
the administration of justice are not matters of politics, and that the rational-
ization of politics more narrowly understood is barely conceivable.
Here everything depends on what we mean by politics. In the context of
never-ending struggles for power, rationality means something different than
with respect to political participation or the ceaseless communication about
the best way to organize the polity.77 Weber leaves us in no doubt that for him
the state’s administration of justice and the administration of the state are “in
the final analysis . . . repeatedly and unavoidably regulated by the objective
pragmatism of ‘reasons of state.’ The state’s absolute end is to safeguard (or to
change) the external and internal distribution of power; ultimately, this end
must seem meaningless to any universalist religion of salvation.”78 Weber
formulates a “realist” conception of the state that is defined domestically by

a monopoly on the legitimate use of force and an outward orientation to-
ward self-preservation and power enhancement.79 But the threat of the use
of force and at least occasional use of violent measures are then unavoidable.
Weber is also a realist in the sense that he knows that such threats and use of
violence can and do trigger counterviolence. From the standpoint of a uni-
versalist fraternal ethic, the recourse to violence can only be considered le-
gitimate if it is possible to identify a universalist justification for state action
itself. But Weber leaves entirely unexamined the attempts to do this, which
were of such central importance, for example, to the French and American
history of political ideas.80
The only alternatives he sees are the blasphemous recourse to God for
one’s own side in a power struggle or “the complete elimination of ethics
from political reasoning” as the “cleaner and only honest way.”81 Weber adds
that, when it proceeds on the basis of impersonal calculation and in a dispas-
sionate way, politics is bound to appear particularly alien to fraternity for the
religions of salvation. This is another disturbing reminder of the ambiguity
of his conception of rationality. For a universalist ethos of love, why should a
fanatical, highly emotional particularism be any less repugnant than a coldly
calculating one? Weber tends to contrast abstract impersonalism within state
action on the one hand and rational religion in the sense of a moral univer-
salism on the other as particularly alien to one another, despite the fact that
in the first instance the key opponent of universalism, for him too, is mere
moral particularism.
Just how far from self-evident Weber’s assumptions here are becomes dra-
matically evident in the next step of his argument, in which he turns to the
topic of war. When the threat of violence that is constitutive of the state is
realized beyond its borders, something happens that Weber appears to in-
terpret as a further increase in the rationalization of the political sphere.
This is the only way to make sense of his contention that the discrepancy
between the fraternal ethic and sphere-specific rationalization is particu-
larly pronounced in war. He assumes—inevitably influenced by World War
I—that in two respects, modern, industrialized war, featuring a high degree
of strategic rationalization, not only contrasts with the religious ethic in the
manner of the economic sphere, as its radical other, but also encroaches on
this ethic’s own terrain as it comes into “direct competition” with it.82 First,
that is, Weber believes that “among modern polities, war creates a pathos and
a sentiment of community.” It gives rise to “an unconditionally devoted and
sacrificial community among the combatants and releases an active mass

compassion and love for those who are in need. And, as a mass phenom-
enon, these feelings break down all the naturally given barriers of associa-
tion. In general, religions can show comparable achievements only in heroic
communities professing an ethic of brotherliness.”83 Here one would have
to insert the caveat that compassion in war by no means tends to extend to
those fighting on the other side, as demanded by the universalist ethic of
fraternity.
Second, Weber contends, war can endow death in action with an expe-
rienced meaning, as a result of which there are “no presuppositions for
the emergence of the problem” of “the ‘meaning’ of death” in “its universal
significance, which is the form in which religions of salvation are impelled
to be concerned with” it.84 It is, of course, an empirical question as to how
close this conception of the heroic death is to the lived reality of the or-
dinary soldier. We should be highly skeptical about idealized notions of
death experienced as meaningful. Also important is the fact that here, be-
fore reflecting on responses to questions of meaning, Weber clearly has
the pre-reflective experience of meaning in mind, which is not always the
case in his theory of religion.85 It is particularly the connection with death,
and the deep existential dimension of meaning entailed in death in war,
that make war an important source of legitimation for states and political
associations.
At this point, Weber switches from his initial contrasting of sphere-
specific rationality and the ethic of fraternity to a different contrast, namely
that between a “religion of brotherliness” and a different form of (newly
emerging) sacredness. If the universalist ethos of the religion of salvation is
taken seriously, the “brotherliness of a group of men bound together in war
must appear devalued in such brotherly religions. It must be seen as a mere
reflection of the technically sophisticated brutality of the struggle. And the
inner-worldly consecration of death in war must appear as a glorification of
fratricide.”86 This, however, gives rise to a quite different competitive rela-
tionship than in the case of rational action within the economic and political
spheres. In the latter cases it was the competition between the universalist
ethos, whose roots lie in extraquotidian experiences, and everyday rational
action. In this case it is the competition between two stances grounded in
extraquotidian experience: “The very extraordinary quality of brotherliness
of war, and of death in war, is shared with sacred charisma and the experience
of the communion with God, and this fact raises the competition between
the brotherliness of religion and of the warrior community to its extreme

height.”87 But Weber appears not to recognize with sufficient clarity that this
is a quite different kind of competition than that with which he was initially
concerned in the economic and political spheres. Otherwise he would be un-
able to refer to the extreme increase in the same form of competition. There
is also an inconsistency between his assertion, made shortly before, that it is
above all the dispassionate hard-headedness entailed in the pursuit of power
that is experienced as alien to the idea of fraternity, and his hypothesis here
that passionate fraternity in war has taken this opposition to its ultimate
extreme.
As in the sections on the economic sphere, Weber inquires into the pos-
sibilities of consistently resolving the tension between universalism and the
“pragma of violence.”88 Once again he finds this, on the one hand, among
the Puritans, when they consider violence justified to realize divine precepts,
and, on the other, in the “mystic’s radical anti-political attitude, his quest for
redemption with its acosmic benevolence and brotherliness”89—that is, the
willingness to turn the other cheek as the greatest possible contrast to the
ethos of heroism. In his treatment of the economic sphere, Weber showed
no interest in different forms of potential compromise—compromise that is,
after all, unavoidable, if the two supposedly consistent forms are unlivable
or if they merely evade the relationship of tension. By contrast, he considers
these compromises worth addressing in the political field. In this context he
mentions the deployment of violence against heretics out of a sense of re-
sponsibility for the salvation of their souls, or violence to advance the cause
of religion in a “holy war,” as well as believers’ resistance—which may include
the use of violence—against the state repression of their faith. Weber makes a
sharp distinction between these forms—characteristic of the ancient church,
Calvinism, and Islam on the one hand, and Lutheranism on the other—with
the latter permitting only passive resistance and, furthermore, accepting
“obedience to secular authority as unobjectionable, even when this authority
has given the order for war, because the responsibility for war is on the sec-
ular authority and not on the individual and because the ethical autonomy of
the secular authority, in contrast to the inwardly universalist (Catholic) insti-
tution of grace, was recognized.”90
Weber knows that in reality what he has described as the only consistent
forms were of fairly marginal importance and that almost all empirically
attestable positions of religions on political action represented compromises.
He regards what he refers to as “organic social ethics” as in “practice, the most
important type,” which was at the same time “the most important contrast to
the idea of ‘calling,’ as found in inner-worldly asceticism.”91
The starting point for this “organic social ethics” is the unequal distribu-
tion of religious charisma among human beings, but also the refusal to infer
from this unequal distribution that salvation and redemption are not for
everyone. Its “social ethics” therefore “attempts to synthesize this inequality
of charismatic qualifications with secular stratification by status, into a
cosmos of God-ordained services which are specialized in function. Certain
tasks are given to every individual and every group according to their per-
sonal charisma and their social and economic position as determined by
fate.”92 It seems obvious to me that with this description Weber is building
on Ernst Troeltsch’s analysis of medieval social philosophy, particularly that
of Thomas Aquinas.93 But he also alludes to the fact that in India, through
the doctrine of karma, quite different conclusions were drawn from a com-
parable organic social teaching with respect to the individual pursuit of
salvation than in the case of medieval Latin Christianity. He thus builds a
bridge to one of the key points in his study of Hinduism, which follows the
“Intermediate Reflection.” But Weber immediately shows how the different
variants he distinguishes—this-worldly asceticism, the acosmism of love,
and the organic social ethic—perceive one another. From the standpoint of
the organic social ethic, the “redemptory aristocracy” of this-worldly ascet-
icism is “the hardest form of lovelessness and lack of brotherliness,” and the
mysticism of the acosmism of love is a “mere selfish means in the search for
the mystic’s own salvation.”94 Conversely, for the Puritans, the organic so-
cial ethic seems like the forgoing of a methodical conduct of life, and for the
radical mystics of fraternity this social ethic seems like an adaptation “to the
interests of the privileged strata of this world.”95 The organic social ethic, as
Weber contends with no sign of value-neutrality, cannot tolerate the idea of
the absolute meaninglessness or even incomprehensibility of the world and
thus envisages it as a relatively rational cosmos. With his descriptions here,
Weber is surely thinking beyond medieval Christianity and also reflecting
upon the Catholic worldview as a whole.
Weber concludes his analysis, which began with the immanent laws of the
political sphere, with a short reflection on the possible revolutionary poten-
tial of the different variants. Before doing so he correlates the question of
whether the ethical value of an action should be judged more in light of its
underlying conviction or more on the basis of its consequences, with the fact
that there is a tension between the ethic of fraternity and any sort of rational
action. The connection between this assertion and the notion of value spheres
is unclear. The assertion, after all, implies that the tension exists beyond the
distinction between the spheres. When it comes to the possible revolutionary
versions of the religiosity of fraternity, Weber sees the same two possibili-
ties: the Puritan religious war on the one hand, and a radical chiliastic nega-
tion of regulation, as in the Anabaptist revolution, on the other. Meanwhile,
the organic social ethic is “everywhere an eminently conservative power and
hostile to revolution.”96
That which was already intimated in Weber’s treatment of war—namely
that the religious ethic of fraternity finds itself in a particularly competitive
relationship with other a-rational “life-forces,”97 and that these tensions re-
quire their own resolution—becomes clear, according to Weber, when we
consider two other “spheres,” the aesthetic and erotic.
Weber’s remarks on the aesthetic sphere are very brief and extremely com-
pressed. They are underpinned by the same schema positing contrasting sce-
narios before and after the emergence of moral universalism, as familiar to
us from his discussion of the other spheres; it is burdened by the assumption
that the pre-universalist phase of religious history should be characterized as
magical. However, Weber adds remarks on collective ecstasy as an important
form of pre–Axial Age religious life. Accordingly, he mentions the tremen-
dous significance of music and dance to the early development of religion
and that of “idols” and “icons” or buildings to rituals. Here the aspect of style-
formation through the stereotyping of forms is especially important to him.
With the emergence of a universalist ethic of fraternity, all these forms, as
bearers of magical effects, are “not only devalued but even suspect.”98 Once
again, Weber not only refers to an ensuing fundamental tension—now be-
tween the religion of salvation and “art”—but to an increasing relationship of
tension that is not only due to the intensification in the understanding of sal-
vation but also to “the evolution of the inherent logic of art.”99 “Art becomes
a cosmos of more and more consciously grasped independent values which
exist in their own right. Art takes over the function of a this-worldly salva-
tion, no matter how this may be interpreted. It provides a salvation from the
routines of everyday life, and especially from the increasing pressures of the-
oretical and practical rationalism.”100
As with the topic of enthusiasm for war in his analysis of the political
sphere, Weber underlines that the sphere of art competes with the religion
of salvation. Within such a competitive relationship, radical mutual rejec-
tion may ensue, as may attempts at incorporation through the forging of an
alliance. No transcendence-focused religion can straightforwardly approve

of any aspiration to purely this-worldly salvation through artistic production
and aesthetic experience. The aesthetic sphere entails an unavoidable tension
not just with transcendence, but to the entire realm of the ethical. Precisely
because aesthetic and religious experience are related to one another, from
a religious standpoint the aesthetic may appear as a diabolical distraction
and “irresponsible Ersatz for primary religious experience,” while art in ge-
neral may be a “deceptive bedazzlement; and the images and the allegory of
religious subjects appear as blasphemy.”101 According to Weber, however,
universalist mass religions in particular tended to replace the competitive
relationship with alliances—in other words, appropriated art as a means of
propaganda.
In methodological terms, the section on the aesthetic sphere oscillates
strikingly between the two conceptual frames distinguished at the beginning
of my interpretation. The first is an outline typology providing us with an
overview of the forms of the relationship between art and religion, without
asserting any kind of historical tendency toward growing competition or a
closer alliance. The second is a theory of rationalization, according to which
the tension between art and religion mounts because both increasingly ad-
here to their immanent laws. “L’art pour l’art,” art for art’s sake, might be
taken to confirm the hypothesis of growing adherence to an immanent law.
Yet this impression rapidly fades when we become aware that this was just
the slogan of one camp within the contest between artistic schools, and that
there is no reason to see this as foreshadowing the development of art as a
whole. It may very well be the artist’s burning ambition to question and over-
come the rigid separation of cultural spheres. The relative autonomy of art
may prompt efforts to de-differentiate the cultural spheres.
In the ensuing discussion of the erotic sphere, this problem reappears.
Once again, it makes perfect sense for Weber to emphasize the funda-
mental transformation of ethics through the emergence of the idea of uni-
versal brotherhood. Prior to the appearance of this idea, sexual intercourse
was frequently part of rituals that lead to collective ecstasy. Certainly, in
the cultic purity of priests we already seem to find an intimation of the de-
monic, marriage-and order-threatening power of sexuality. “Furthermore,
it was no accident that subsequently the prophetic religions, as well as the
priest-controlled life orders, have, almost without significant exception, reg-
ulated sexual intercourse in favor of marriage. The contrast of all rational
regulation of life with magical orgiasticism and all sorts of irrational frenzies
is expressed in this fact.”102 Hence, once again we are dealing with the fun-
damental field of tension between the religious ethic of fraternity, as found
in the religions of salvation, and a vital force that facilitates and holds out
the prospect of ecstasy and redemption outside of religion. Once again, how-
ever, our author is not content to establish the presence of a fundamental ten-
sion or expound a typology of forms of competition and alliance. As with art,
Weber might have considered religious hostility to the body or the sacrali-
zation of the erotic—the erotic as a religious experience. Instead he returns
anew to his hypothesis of increasing tension, once again, as he sees it, caused
by developments on both sides. In the case of sexuality, Weber works on the
assumption of the original “sober naturalism”103 of the peasant. It takes the
sublimation of this naturalism into a consciously cultivated eroticism to jus-
tify the notion of a “non-routinized sphere”104 in the first place. He goes so
far as to assert that in this case the extraquotidian dimension first arises from
the “gradual turning away from the naïve naturalism of sex.”105 This may be
due to Weber underestimating the power of all sexual experience and its
order-threatening potential, and may also contradict the hypothesis he put
forward shortly before on the causes of priestly chastity.
Yet the hypothesis of an extraquotidian quality triggered only by the “ra-
tionalization and intellectualization of culture”106 seems so important to
Weber that he examines the stages of this development in greater detail than
in the case of all other “spheres” in this text. Limiting himself to the Occident,
certainly, but otherwise tracing in broad strokes the position of eroticism in
ancient Greece, the Christian Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Weber’s
focus is on what he calls “the last accentuation of the erotical sphere.”107 What
he means by this is the point at which the rejection of the carnal, through a
transcendence-focused ethic, switches over to the idea that it is precisely this
sphere that might entail an “inner-worldly salvation from rationalization.”108
Yet this switch, as Weber sees it, is prompted by the increase in the rational. In
particular, we are told, the ethos of love in the religion of salvation increases
this tension because under “these conditions, the erotic relation seems to
offer the unsurpassable peak of the fulfillment of the request for love in the
direct fusion of the souls of one to the other.”109 Here Weber soars to almost
hymnic heights in his remarks on the process of becoming one with another
person, which he identifies as such an overwhelming experience that it must
be interpreted “symbolically,” indeed “as a sacrament.”110 It is the language of
mysticism on which Weber draws to articulate the experiences of lovers, the
sense of certainty that nonetheless remains impossible to communicate,111
as one is “freed from the cold skeleton hands of rational orders, just as com-
pletely as from the banality of everyday routine.”112 It is only after this run
through the history of the sublimation of the sexual into an erotic value
sphere that Weber can once again provide an outline typology of the rela-
tions between the religious fraternal ethic and this sphere. Once again, this
extends from radical rejection to quasi-alliance. Eroticism is rejected not on
the basis of the ascetic desire for mastery over all that is natural, but due to
the relationship of competition between what we might call two forms of
mysticism: “union with God” (Gottinnigkeit)113 and the event of becoming
one with one’s lover. But psychologically, Weber contends, the erotic thrill is
also akin to religious ecstasy, repeatedly resulting in a “relation of surrogate-
ship or fusion”114 between the two.
Weber also considers another sphere, after the economic, political, aes-
thetic, and erotic spheres, though without referring to it as a sphere. Instead
he refers to the “realm” (Reich) of “intellectual knowledge.”115 For Weber,
it is between this sphere and religiosity that the tension is the greatest and
most fundamental, but once again only after the emergence of the univer-
salist religions. Prior to this developmental stage, Weber contends, there
was complete “unity,”116 as in the case of the intellectual systematization of
a consistent magical worldview in China. Subsequently, we are told, there
was a wealth of forms of mutual recognition between religion and intellec-
tual work—for example, in the form of metaphysical speculation. If religions
sought to develop a doctrine, Weber explains, they were in fact dependent
on such rational apologetics. The priesthood’s interests in passing on their
teachings made an impact to this effect, as did the “inward compulsion of the
rational character of religious ethics and the specifically intellectualist quest
for salvation.”117 In this case, Weber describes neither the typologically pos-
sible forms of approach to the tension between faith and knowledge, nor the
stages of a development leading to contemporary realities. He claims, how-
ever, that rational empirical knowledge—in other words, modern science—
has brought about the “disenchantment” of the world, that is, transformed it
into a causal mechanism, which represents a break with the idea of a cosmos
ordered in an ethically meaningful way.118 As I argued in c hapter 4 of the pre-
sent book,119 however, this conceptual framework fails to describe the world-
view of science, let alone that of those individuals who lead their lives in a
world shaped by science. I do not repeat here my critique of Weber’s notion
of disenchantment. But it is only through Weber’s associated background
assumptions that we can understand why, in the “Intermediate Reflection”
(and in the lecture “Science as a Vocation”), he claims once again that every
religion must at some point demand the “sacrifice of the intellect.”120
Consonant with the tasks he has in mind for the “Intermediate Reflection,”
by no means does Weber now synthesize his observations on the fields of ten-
sion between the “world” and the demands of a universalist religious ethic of
brotherhood into a theory of the progressive differentiation of value spheres,
despite his many references to an increasing orientation toward immanent
laws and growing relations of tension. In any case, Weber’s objective here is
a different one. Delving even deeper than before, he considers how the ques-
tion could arise in the first place as to whether the course of the world as a
whole is “somehow meaningful.”121 Thus Weber does not regard the theodicy
problem as constitutive of all religion, but as constitutive at the stage of re-
ligious development at which the well-being of all people and of the entire
world comes into play. For him, the rational treatment of this question tends
toward a progressive “devaluation of the world,”122 precisely because a solu-
tion to this problem seems hopeless if one is limited to this world, without
transcendence. The possible solutions, such as the doctrine of the sinful-
ness of the world as the cause of suffering, were bound to further devalue the
earthly goods, and the idea of timelessly valid values in particular was bound
to further intensify “the ethical rejection of the empirical world.”123
For Weber, this tendency is further intensified if the highest cul-
tural goods are indicted, because they in particular emerged from social
conditions that could not be justified from the strict perspective of the ethic
of fraternity: states with their acts of violence, an economy characterized by
a lack of charitableness, an egotistical hedonism merely disguised as love,
a science that destroys meaning and develops along elite lines. Ultimately,
Weber underlines, from the perspective of the death that the religions of
salvation hold up in contrast to all this-worldly striving for salvation, no
pursuit of cultural goods can lead to a point that would meaningfully con-
clude life. This, however, makes the world into a “locus of imperfection,
of injustice, of suffering, of sin, of futility. For it is necessarily burdened
with guilt, and its deployment and differentiation thus necessarily become
ever more meaningless.”124 To this devalorization of the world through
the advancing rationality of ethics, thought, organization, and reflection
upon experience—a process featuring the “construction of the specific na-
ture of each special sphere existing in the world”—religion responds by
becoming ever more “other-worldly, more alienated from all structured
forms of life.”125 Weber’s line of thought thus leads to an unambiguous
hypothesis with respect to religion. We might call this the hypothesis of the
placelessness of religion in the differentiated culture pervaded by rational-
ization. Weber’s work lacks any pathos induced by the final overcoming of
religion, but it also fails to provide any indication of the preconditions for
its authentic vitality in the present era.
The “Intermediate Reflection” does not end with this hypothesis but with a
typology of possible solutions to the theodicy problem. What Weber regards
as consistent is the radical dualism of Zoroaster, which does without the om-
nipotence of God; Calvin’s belief in predestination, which does without the
goodness of God; and the Indian religiosity of intellectuals. Here Weber has
finally built a bridge between his studies of ascetic Protestantism and those
on Hinduism and Buddhism.
But what have we learned from this attempt to read Weber’s text while ten-
tatively bracketing off its tremendous effective history? This attempt had to
disregard two key facts. The first is that a theory of the connection between
rationalization and functional differentiation has been part of the Western
social sciences’ core inventory since the emergence of modernization theory
after World War II. The second is that this theory endowed the classic figure
of Weber with his canonical status in the first place.
My reading has shown that this text, which is tremendously brief and
brimming over with hypotheses, uses many terms, including crucial ones, in
a very unclear and poorly explained way. Even Weber’s leading interpreters
do not dispute this. What exactly does Weber mean when he refers to a “value
sphere”? How does this term relate to that of “life order,” which also crops up
in this text? What does “immanent laws” (“Eigengesetzlichkeit”) mean in this
context, and above all, what kind of causal claim is associated with the notion
of the value spheres’ immanent laws? Is the list of value spheres that Weber
deals with underpinned by a latent scheme of classification? Is it plausible in
the first place to call the economic sphere a value sphere? Is it acceptable to
omit law as a value sphere? The research literature contains astute answers to
all these questions, typically taking the form of constructive corrections.126
Wolfgang Schluchter, for example, provides the definition of value spheres
missing in Weber’s work when he refers to “supra-individual contexts of
meaning,” which are “institutionalized as life orders and internalized as ac-
tion orientations,”127 and also tries to produce a systematization of the value
spheres. Thomas Schwinn has also made a comprehensive attempt at system-
atization and removal of inconsistencies. As mentioned earlier, for Niklas
Luhmann the only productive approach is to translate the ideas present in
the “Intermediate Reflection” into the language of systems theory. Even in

his work, the declared goal is to fundamentally retain Weber’s ideas, but the
form taken by his “translation” is in reality far distant from anything Weber
asserted.128 In the work of theologian Günter Thomas, Max Weber’s text
serves to identify “implicit religion,” that is, functional equivalents of reli-
gion in modern, functionally differentiated societies—for example, in art or
eroticism. Once again, as I pointed out earlier with respect to the narrative
of disenchantment, what is astonishing about all these studies is the fairly
apologetic stance of their authors. If something is missing in Weber’s text,
they try to find it in other parts of his extensive but often fragmentary oeuvre.
Many of Weber’s assertions are taken as undisputed facts. There is a pre-
vailing identification with Weber’s intentions, though the understanding of
these intentions has sparked heated controversies.
I believe the most systematically independent and most sophisticated at-
tempt to build on Weber and his “Intermediate Reflection” is to be found
in the work of Jürgen Habermas.129 He shares with Weber the idea of ana-
lyzing world history with the help of a theory of rationalization. But he
diverges radically from Weber because his understanding of rationalization
is underpinned by a different understanding of rationality—in the form of
a theory of communicative rationality.130 As a result, what appears on the
basis of Weber’s understanding of rationality as the paradoxical character
of societal rationalization is described by Habermas as its partial character.
For Habermas, Weber’s idea—which was to make such a major impact on
left-wing cultural criticism in the twentieth century—that “the seeds of de-
struction of the rationalization of the world [lie] in the very differentiation
of independent cultural value spheres that released that potential and made
that rationalization possible,” retains its plausibility “only so long as Weber
does not take into account, with respect to the moral-practical complex of ra-
tionality, a form of the religious ethic of brotherliness secularized at the same
level as modern science and autonomous art, a communicative ethic de-
tached from its foundation in salvation religion; that is, so long as he remains
generally fixated instead on the relations of tension between religion and the
world.”131 Here Habermas makes no bones about the fact that he believes the
moral universalism of the religions of salvation is completely secularizable.
Nor does he conceal the fact that the theory of communicative rationality
claims nothing less than to be this secular philosophy of moral universalism.
On this basis, Habermas contends, a theory of comprehensive rationaliza-
tion can build on Weber but also supersede him.
I do not pursue any of the routes briefly characterized above. I believe my

reflections on the “Intermediate Reflection” have shown that it is problematic
to build on Weber’s understanding of “rationalization” in an orthodox way,
or by transforming it into systems theory, or revising it in light of communi-
cation theory. I aim to demonstrate this here exclusively with reference to the
“Intermediate Reflection.”
If we look back on Weber’s text, it seems clear that Weber regards the emer-
gence of a universalist religious ethic of fraternity as the key turning point in the
religious history of humanity. As I showed in chapter 5, there are many reasons
to accept Weber’s supposition, and I see no reason to contradict him in this re-
spect in light of our present-day state of knowledge. For Weber, this turning
point was brought about by a “rationalization” of religion, which, for him, is
characterized by demagification, ethicization, and internal systematization.132
With these descriptions, he is seeking to highlight the same realities identified
in the debates on the “Axial Age” as a syndrome entailing moral universalism,
reflexivity, and the experience of transcendence. I already highlighted in the
preceding chapter an initial distinction between Weber and the findings of the
scholarship on the Axial Age. This scholarship has emancipated itself from a
narrow focus on the emergence of an “Occidental” rationalism. The relevant
scholars’ perspective on China and India is not informed by the question of why
something called “Occidental rationalism” did not occur there. Instead they
seek to determine what other forms of moral universalism, reflexivity, or rela-
tionship with transcendence arose there. In considering Weber’s “Intermediate
Reflection,” however, the crucial point is not this, but rather what ensues from
this changed perspective when it comes to the idea of a tension between the
value spheres induced by rationalization. Our microscopic reading of Weber’s
text has revealed that what Weber is addressing here is not a single type of ten-
sion but rather, so it would appear, four entirely different types.
1. The first field of tension is rooted in the tension that was always present
between the sacred and profane, the extraquotidian and the quotidian, but
that increased tremendously when the (ethically indifferent) sacred turned
into the (ethically positive and propositionally definable) “ideal.” It is the
tension between ideal and reality or, if the ideals are localized in the tran-
scendent realm as a result of the reflexivization of the sacred, between the
transcendent and the mundane.
2. The second field of tension is that between moral universalism and
moral particularism, between an orientation toward that which is good, not
just for the members of one’s own clan, people, state, or religious community,
but for all human beings, even those in the future.133
3. The third field of tension exists between an orientation toward the values
of moral universalism and a mere instrumental rationality, of the kind that
may underpin rational action in the narrow sense of increasing one’s own (or
someone else’s) utility within the economic and political spheres.134
4. The fourth field of tension exists between competing sources of the ex-
perience of self-transcendence, for example, between aesthetic and religious
experience, between erotic and religious experience, between the ecstasy of
acts of violence and religious ecstasy, and between the processes of sacraliza-
tion triggered by experiences of self-transcendence. By no means must these
assume the character of stabilized value spheres.135 This field of tensions
gives rise to attempts by institutionalized religions either to integrate aes-
thetics, eroticism, violence, and intoxicants into religious life or, conversely,
to banish them and condemn them as demonic—in other words negatively
sacred.
The terms “rationality” and “rationalization,” it seems to me, even if we
think of them as specific to value spheres, do a poor job of capturing these
different types of tensions, all of which play a role in Weber’s “Intermediate
Reflection.” “Rationality” and “rationalization” take on an extreme, con-
fusing, unmanageable ambiguity. The same goes for the contrasting terms
to which they give rise: “a- rational,” “nonrational,” “anti-
rational.” The
reflexivization of the sacred, the universalization of the moral, the intensifi-
cation of the instrumental, the refinement of the aesthetic, or the sublimation
of the erotic are different processes. The most varied range of relationships of
competition and alliance may exist between them.
In constructing a typology of such fields of tension, Weber himself seems
to have had something like this in mind. But with his references to rationality
and rationalization he immediately squandered the possible gains of a typo-
logical approach. At the very least, he constantly burdened his statements
about rivalries and alliances with assertions about the mounting tensions
resulting from increasing value sphere–specific rationalization. Yet in many
cases Weber failed to provide evidence of the tendencies he claimed to dis-
cern, which were in fact unprovable anyway. It is high time for us to liberate
ourselves from the conceptual constraints of the dangerous noun of process
that is “rationalization,” and from its linkage with the conceptual straitjacket
of differentiation theory.
Consequences
Hence, we can sum up the consequences of these reflections, and the theoret-
ical alternative that I have only touched on so far, in two ways. First, skepti-
cism about the dangerous nouns of process should prompt us to begin at one
level of abstraction lower than do the theories of functional differentiation,
rationalization, and modernization. Like Charles Tilly and other major rep-
resentatives of historical sociology, my focus is on the level of historically
specific processes of the organization of economy and politics. But I proceed
on a far broader action-theoretical foundation than applies in the writings
of those who work chiefly with models of rational action. Analyses of the
constellations that exist between institutionally embedded processes, how-
ever, will remain captive to the idea of a religion-free modernity136 if they fail
to incorporate the dynamics of ever new processes of sacralization, the “fact
of ideal formation,” as I call it.137 The idea of linear processes of secularization
or disenchantment must be superseded by analysis of the interplay between
sacralization and desacralization, of the migration of the sacred; the notions
of “functional differentiation” and “rationalization” must be superseded by
analysis of processes of interplay between institutionalized logics of action,
processes with no fixed outcome. At the same time, the dynamic of sacraliza-
tion repeatedly ensures that radical shifts occur and new institutions emerge.
I began this chapter with a brief look back at the relationship between soci-
ology and history as the discipline of sociology was taking shape. Against this
background, I tried to draw up a list of requirements for a present-day soci-
ology that might enjoy a relationship to research in universal history sim-
ilar to the one we find in the work of Weber and Durkheim. There are five
items on this list. Such a sociology must be free of the fetishization of a ho-
mogenous modernity, of the premises of secularization theory, and of what
I would call an Occident-centric worldview. It must be sensitive to historical
contingency and must ultimately derive its view of normative issues from the
“fact of ideal formation.” In order to fulfill these requirements, it must eman-
cipate itself from certain borrowings from the natural sciences, including the
idea of advancing functional differentiation as one of the master trends of
history. All these desiderata, outlined only briefly here, are crucial to formu-
lating an alternative to the narrative of disenchantment.
This is the main thrust of my observations as they apply to the discipline
of sociology or the social sciences as a whole. But they also entail a religious
aspiration. The idea of religion as a value sphere of society, of equal rank to
all others, or as a functional system in analogy to all others is itself secularist.

Religion has specific characteristics, but these do not lie in a cultural special-
ization in things religious. Its relationship to the culture as a whole is not that
of one cultural sphere to another. Believers and their social organizations as-
pire to shape all cultural spheres and functional systems if they take their faith
seriously. This is not a call for religious fundamentalism or integralism. It is
beyond doubt that religions have had to learn to respect other value systems
and forms of belief, and to understand the specific functional logics of soci-
etal “subsystems” or cultural “value spheres.” But the emotive force of univer-
salist religion, and universalist secular thought for that matter, does not fit
into the worldview of an advancing process of functional differentiation. The
scope, degree, and direction of this process must themselves be measured
against ideals relating to how to live and how to organize the world—ideals
both religious and secular.138
7
The Sacred and Power
Collective Self-Sacralization and
Ways of Overcoming It
This book began with a critical examination of David Hume’s classic outline
of a natural history of religion, one of the most influential attempts to deal
with religions—however much they may understand themselves as “super-
natural”—at least methodologically as human phenomena, as an expres-
sion of human nature and its forms of historical realization. Since the time
of this pioneering achievement from the mid-eighteenth century, just what
the term “religion” means and encompasses has been highly contested, as has
the question of what constitutes human nature and how, exactly, the human
being, as a natural creature, differs from other living beings. Consonant with
the hermeneutic approach taken in the present book, some scholars have
sought to answer these questions by doing more than just putting forward
their own definitional postulates. The opportunity entailed in this approach,
of course, is that it can enable us to perceive with great sensitivity the diver-
sity and richness of past intellectual explorations and to seriously open our-
selves to the diverse array of reasons for different accounts. This approach
also makes it unmistakably clear that the various definitions of “religion” and
“human nature” in the work of specific thinkers are not independent of one
another. Religious (or antireligious) ideas flow into accounts about human
nature, while anthropological assumptions enter into writings on religion
and its historical fate.
A consistent conception of religion as a human phenomenon may form
part of a naturalistic critique of religion, but this is not inevitable. As the first
few chapters of this book revealed, younger contemporaries of Hume—such
as Johann Gottfried Herder—were already willing to take the same meth-
odological step as Hume had done but without pursuing the same religion-
skeptical or religion-critical project as the great Scottish thinker. What we
observed in the first efforts to construct an empirically grounded, universal
history of religion also applies to the history of the psychology and sociology
The Sacred and Power 235
of religion. Between the extremes of a dogmatic critique of religion, with

little concern for the empirical facts, and an analogous religious apologetics,
there is a rich history of scholarship, driven forward by intensive interactions
between thinkers whose motives, in religious terms, are often contrary. There
are no neatly distinguishable camps of a “critical” or “apologetic” scholarship
of religion. This is true of the disciplines dealt with here, but also of the rela-
tionship between theology and the discipline of comparative religion. There
is nothing to be gained from such pigeonholing. Instead the goal must be to
produce factual assertions that can be backed up with solid evidence.
If those who espouse the fundamental legitimacy of religious faith in an
age dominated by the natural sciences want to take on the challenge inherent
in a “naturalistic” conception of religion, it is not enough to counter biologi-
cally based statements about human beings with religious doctrines—for ex-
ample, that human beings are created in the image of God—or to proceed
as if one might simply build on the “first floor” of nature by adding a second
floor that allows one to refer to “spirit” and “soul.”1 Similarly unsatisfactory
as such a defense of faith is a critique of religion whose view of human beings
leaves no room for facts that seem indisputable. On the anthropological level,
one such fact in particular was central to my argument. I called this the “fact
of ideal formation”—the fact that in their shared lives, human beings are to a
significant extent guided by ideals, by ideas about the thoroughly good and
the thoroughly evil. Even those who see ideals as mere delusions, or those
who consider ideals to be something revealed to human beings rather than
produced by them, cannot get around this fact of the existence and histor-
ical change of ideals. In several chapters of the present book I have discussed
the emergence of intensive affectively charged commitments to such ideals
through extraquotidian individual experiences or ecstatic-collective phys-
ical practices. This fact, it seems to me, furnishes us with an uncontroversial
foundation for an appropriate understanding of religion.
But what does the existence of ideals mean for our understanding of his-
torical changes in such ideals, and for our conception of the history of reli
gion and the history of secular values? In an attempt to answer this question,
my argument so far has yielded—in terms of what I am trying to achieve
here—two positive results and one negative result. On the positive ledger,
building chiefly on Ernst Troeltsch’s history of Christianity, is the insight into
the tremendous historical diversity of ideal formation, even within a single
religious tradition, and the understanding of the complex interplay between
religious innovations and efforts to give them institutional form. Second, as
the scholarship on the so-called Axial Age has demonstrated, in the history
of humanity, at particular points in time, there was a fundamental increase
in the reflexivity of those processes through which something is under-
stood as “sacred.” Strictly speaking, it is only this increase that takes human
beings beyond the level of pre-reflective or largely nonreflective sacraliza-
tion to “ideals” that are elevated above all worldly reality and that become
the yardstick for its normative evaluation. Hence, the fact of the tremendous
historical variability of ideal formation is joined by the fact that, under cer-
tain circumstances, human beings advance to an idea of “transcendence”
that points beyond all this-worldly “sacredness.” At least when it comes to
the existence of ideas about transcendence, we can indisputably refer to a
fact here. The negative result is that probably the most influential narrative
of religious history of our time, namely Max Weber’s narrative of “disen-
chantment,” emerged as profoundly ambiguous and thus problematic. I do
not deny the existence of any of the historical phenomena that Weber had in
mind with his term, none of which are irrelevant. But once we have grasped
the ambiguity of Weber’s conceptual framework, the connection between
these phenomena loses its plausibility. A misleading and thus dangerous
noun of process like disenchantment must then be superseded by analyses
of configurations—analyses actually inherent in Weber’s work—that take ac-
count of the openness of history, not least that of religious history.
This concluding chapter thus has three tasks. First, I try to briefly system-
atize my ideas on a theory of sacralization and an anthropology of ideal for-
mation that are scattered across my observations in the preceding chapters.
I then outline my alternative to the narrative of disenchantment. It goes
without saying that this cannot take the form of a comprehensive account of
the history of religion. Hence, I have decided to foreground a single phenom-
enon that seems to me the most important to the history of both religion and
of power—and to the history of the fusions of religion and power. I am refer-
ring to the ceaseless tendency toward collective self-sacralization. I have al-
ready touched on this when addressing Émile Durkheim’s theory of religion
in chapter 2 and in my observations on ideas of transcendence and moral
universalism in chapter 5. I aim to bring out the potential fruitfulness of an
alternative to the narrative of disenchantment by outlining the role of col-
lective self-sacralization before and after the emergence of the state and then
after the development of ideas of transcendence, which appear to preclude
such self-sacralization. My remarks so far, and particularly my interpreta-
tion of collective self-sacralization as dangerous and something that must be
overcome, signal a normative judgment. My third step is thus to explicate the

normative dimension of the argument put forward in this book, whose focus
is largely empirical.
Sacralization as an Anthropological Phenomenon
Statements about the universal nature of the human being self-evidently re-
quire confirmation by biological research. Yet fundamental attempts to de-
fine this human nature can certainly not simply be left to biologists. A look
back over the history of science would quickly reveal just how much histor-
ically relative ideas about human beings have impacted even on biologists’
most “scientific” statements. Even if the physical nature of the human being
is the foundation for human history, this does not mean that the life sci-
ences are the undisputed foundation for statements about human beings. In
analogy to the notion of the sources’ right of veto vis-à-vis historical schol-
arship,2 we might refer to biology’s right of veto vis-à-vis anthropological
statements. If this is correct, then, anthropology is not a fundamental sci-
ence (Grundlagenwissenschaft) but rather a dimension of the “self-reflection
of the social and cultural sciences on their biological foundations and on
the normative content of their bodies of knowledge, considered in relation
to determinate historical and political problems.”3 All expectations that bi-
ology will finally unveil the secret behind all religion are misconceived for
this methodological reason alone. Every attempt to derive judgments of the
validity of religious discourse from propositions about the physiological pro-
cesses accompanying religious experiences or the evolutionary functionality
(or dysfunctionality) of religious beliefs and actions exceeds the potential of
biology.
It thus makes sense to take the inverse approach. Of course, its point of de-
parture cannot be the content of religious discourse itself, because the expec-
tation of an anthropological proof of God would be just as misconceived as a
biological critique of religion. Even if it could be shown that the human being
is anthropologically primed for religion, this would not justify abandoning
oneself to a “natural” tendency if there were strong reasons not to. Hence, my
starting point here is not a particular religion and not even religion as such,
but only, as I have mentioned already, the fact of sacralization or ideal forma-
tion. The key question is: what are the anthropological conditions of possi-
bility of this fact? This mode of inquiry—into the conditions of possibility of
an empirical phenomenon—is common both to the approaches of transcen-

dental philosophy and the approach I have chosen here, inspired by pragma-
tism and historicism.
As far as this anthropological phenomenon is concerned, the observations
presented in the current volume are underpinned by a five-stage line of
reasoning. I have set out all five stages elsewhere on a broad basis, so here
I merely aim to call them to mind in the briefest of forms, chiefly in order
to ensure that my arguments are not misunderstood.4 Only when they are
considered together do these five steps yield the outline of a theory of sacral-
ization, which can in turn be used to undergird my historical propositions.
The first step involves a specific conception of human action as such, and
of the experience that is both inherent in and results from this action. This
conception does not focus on individual actions nor does it contrast action
with states of rest or contemplation. Instead it seeks to grasp the relationship
of the human being, as organism, to its environment as deeply molded by
the activities of this organism. Such a conception was developed not exclu-
sively but predominantly by the American pragmatists, in response to one
of the greatest scientific upheavals of all time, namely the Darwinian revo-
lution. Many scholars understood the basic hypotheses of Darwin’s biolog-
ical theory of evolution as the completion of a worldview anchored in causal
determinism, and thus as a death blow to Christian notions of human per-
sonhood and divine action in the world. By way of contrast, the founders of
American pragmatism (Charles Sanders Peirce and William James) saw that
through Darwin the understanding of the contingency of natural processes
had erupted at the heart of the natural sciences. This opened up entirely new
ways of understanding the human being and, in particular, human action.
I have proposed the phrase “creativity of action”5 as the briefest possible way
to describe the intellectual breakthrough represented by pragmatism. This
does not refer to a single type of action called “creative action” but to a quality
found in all human action.
It is vital to define this conception of creativity in more detail vis-à-vis
alternative forms, and this I have tried to do through the concept of “situ-
ated creativity.”6 The fundamental idea here is that, in her relationship to
the environment, the human being as organism experiences problematic
tensions that must be dealt with and that this forms the point of departure
for new variants of action that are then incorporated into a routinized reper-
toire of action. This fundamental idea of situated creativity changes the self-
understanding of scholarly and scientific action.
First within the discipline of psychology and then across the whole
range of the humanities and social sciences,7 the notion of situated crea-
tivity opens up a program that seeks to comprehend all specifically human
accomplishments in light of their functionality for the active mastery of the
environment by the human organism. This idea liberated older intellectual
approaches to human creativity formulated prior to Darwin—such as the ex-
pressive model formulated by Johann Gottfried Herder and the “production
paradigm” of Karl Marx8—of their one-sided aspects, placing them on an
improved biological foundation. This new model of action also leads to rad-
ical changes in ideas about the intentionality of action.9 Intentions, motives
and values no longer appear as components of an interior world, one that can
only impact on the external world through a separate act of decision-making.
Instead, perception and knowledge are themselves viewed as phases of ac-
tion, through which action is guided and redirected within its situational
contexts. Typically, the setting of goals does not occur through intellectual
acts outside of action situations. Instead it is the result of situated reflection
on the pre-reflective strivings and tendencies that are always already at work
in our action. Our perceptions are always already structured by our capaci-
ties for and experiences of action. The world is never simply present for us as
an entity external to our internal world, but always exists as a field of possible
actions.
Dropping the idea that the means-ends schema is the best way to under-
stand human action also sensitizes us to particular forms of action that, due
to the intellectual constraints of this schema or of the schema of rationality
itself, occupy a merely marginal position or seem deficient: play and ritual.
For the pragmatists, in contradistinction to a powerful intellectual tradition,
play occupied a central position within their understanding of action. For
them, the creative solving of problems presupposes the capacity to leave, at
least imaginatively, entrenched channels of action and, playfully or exper-
imentally, to build new bridges between one’s own actional tendencies and
the objective realities of the world. The pedagogical writings of John Dewey
and George Herbert Mead presented play as the epitome of a form of ac-
tion experienced as thoroughly meaningful and satisfying in itself. The basic
outlines of a theory of artistic action and of aesthetic experience were also de-
rived from this.10 In the work of American pragmatists, whose thinking was
influenced by Protestant skepticism about ritual, however, ritual tended to
remain at the margins. But due to its inherent affinity with play—as “sacred
play”11—it virtually cries out to be examined with the tools of this model of
action. It is here, rather than in communicative action, that we find the po-
tential to link pragmatism and Durkheim’s later theory of religion.12
Within American social psychology toward the end of the nineteenth
century, the model of action formulated by pragmatists, described so briefly
here, gave rise—and this is the second step in my chain of reasoning—to a
theory of the constitution of the “self ” out of the processes of social inter-
action. Certainly, the issues of self-perception and self-reflection had been
thematized in a range of ways earlier. But only with the work of Charles
Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead do we find the emergence of an
anthropological theory of the specific characteristics of human communica-
tion and sociality and, building on this, a genetic analysis of the development
of the “self ” in the child.13 According to this theory, the “self ” does not refer
to the biological individuality of the child nor to her gradually developing
structure of personality, but rather to the structure of a person’s relationship
to herself to the extent that she manages to synthesize relations with various
others in given situations and throughout her life in such a way as to create
a coherent framework. This theory emerged from the model of action found
in pragmatism, the moment it was used explicitly to analyze not just how
an actor deals with his material environment, but how he deals with other
actors. The focus thus shifted to problems of understanding and commu-
nication between actors. It was also extended to the role of increased self-
perception and self-reflexivity in ensuring successful interaction, and even in
enabling a sensitive approach to objects.
Closely intertwined with the concepts of “role,” “generalized other” (when
participating in organized group activities such as team sports, for example),
self-control, and social control, this gave rise to a productive social scien-
tific research program. After World War II, efforts began to link this pro-
gram with psychoanalytic components, most influentially in the work of Erik
Erikson.14 The theory of the development of the “self ” or of “ego identity”
became a contemporary reformulation, free of elitist undertones, of the ideal
of the “formation” of the personality.15 Certainly, within a “postmodern”
framework, many commentators critiqued the unquestioned normative
presupposition inherent in the conception of the “self.” Their writings not
only highlighted the increasingly problematic process of identity formation,
but, by the same token, underlined the coercive element in the demand, in-
cluding the demands people make of themselves, for the consistency and
continuity of the person.16 The rapidly increasing importance of communi-
cation technologies, the psychologization of the understanding of the self,
and the burgeoning web of social relations in which many contemporaries

are embedded prompted claims that the person was communicatively
oversaturated and that the coherent self was dissolving into a fragmented
identity. Yet questioning the ideal of consistency is only to seriously chal-
lenge the normative background assumptions of this theory of the self, not
its empirical core.
Rather more controversial than the first two steps in my line of reasoning
is the third. If the self of the human being is not simply given and does not
develop automatically through processes of maturation, but is instead
the product of the active management of conflicts between others’ expec-
tations and one’s own self-perception, then it cannot be assumed that this
process of self-formation comes to a once-and-for-all conclusion at a par-
ticular point in an individual’s biography. It may be true that, after the crisis
of adolescence and in early adulthood, the self achieves a degree of fairly
enduring stability for many human beings. But later challenges during the
life course, as a result—for example, of the aging process or unexpected life
events—may destroy this stability and necessitate the restructuring of one’s
self-understanding. This too is essentially uncontroversial. A different pic-
ture pertains if we take radically seriously the shattering of the symbolic
boundaries that make up the self. For these shattering events—of both the
positive and negative kind—I use the term “self-transcendence.”17 This term
foregrounds more than just the challenge to a self to cope actively with a new
situation. Also crucial here are experiences that feature a fundamentally
passive dimension—experiences not of grasping opportunities to act but of
being seized, for example, by individuals or ideals. That is, sociality is not just
the genetic prerequisite for the emergence of an ability to act and for indi-
vidual autonomy. These must also be periodically reinvigorated by the tem-
porary suspension of actors’ symbolic boundaries vis-à-vis their fellows and
their environment. Experiences that call the boundaries of the self into ques-
tion range from libidinous fusion to traumatizing formlessness. Particularly
influential from an intellectual history point of view, when it comes to under-
standing these phenomena, are the romantic speculations on the rediscovery
of Dionysus as the god of intoxication and delirious rapture, particularly
as articulated in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche.18 Here, art becomes the
modern means of reacquiring the Dionysian, while the Dionysian provides
a route out of the aporias of modernity—making a tremendous impact on
right-and left-wing cultural criticism.
Émile Durkheim’s theory of ritual, examined in detail in chapter 3,

explores the same terrain. It too deals with the renewal of social bonds,
the emergence of institutions, and the revitalization of individuals and
collectives through the dissolving of the boundaries of the self. But
Durkheim does not subordinate his analyses to the Nietzschean ideal of cre-
ative self-enhancement. Instead he looks for the connection between these
insights into forms of human experience and the normative requirements
of a universalist morality. This may be the reason why his theory had less
influence on culturally critical currents than Nietzsche’s thought outside of
France. As promising as his theory of sacralization and later attempts to build
on it are, Durkheim himself is unmistakably one-sided when it comes to the
various phenomena of self-transcendence. He describes only the totemic
ritual of Australian aborigines in great detail and thus an extreme form of
collective ecstasy in a culture characterized by a low degree of individualiza-
tion. Certainly, he analogizes this case repeatedly with examples of collective
ecstasy in the France of the many revolutions; but he does not analyze how
the preconditions for such experiences change and what other possibilities
of the experience of self-transcendence there might be under such changed
conditions. Hence, Durkheim’s analysis of ritual must be incorporated into
a rich phenomenology of experiences of self-transcendence. Alongside the
experience of collective ecstasy, this must include, for example, experiences
of falling in love and of love, of the opening of the self through successful di-
alogue or through shattering empathy, as well as euphoric experiences of the
dissolution of boundaries in response to nature.
There is also room here for religious experiences that are not simply a reli-
gious interpretation of generally accessible experiences but that presuppose
faith—I call these “sacramental experiences.”19 But such a phenomenology
must not be restricted to experiences of self-transcendence that are accom-
panied by enthusiastic feelings. It must also include experiences of anxiety
through which a human being becomes aware of his profound vulnerability
and finitude as a result of his own illness and fear of death or through the
suffering of loved individuals and their loss; experiences in which the world
ceases to stimulate us to take action and we become depressed about the
meaninglessness of our existence; experiences, finally, in which a sense of
guilt due to things we have done or failed to do robs us of our self-image as
moral beings.20 In addition to enthusiastic experiences of self-transcendence
constitutive of our commitments to persons or values, and the experiences
of anxiety in which we are not carried beyond the boundaries of our self and
instead become all too aware of them, there are also the destructive and self-
destructive forms of crossing the boundaries of the self. Not every opening
of these boundaries, after all, occurs voluntarily. We may be the victim of
acts of violence, of a violation not just of our body but of our self. We cannot
detach ourselves from this experience as life goes on, any more than we can
from the experiences that have led to our identity-forming ties to persons
and values.21 The new closing of the boundaries of our self following an ec-
static experience, even if we deliberately brought this about, and following
experiences of anxiety and violence, may go awry, prompting us to recall
these experiences as a loss rather than a transformation into something new.
The fourth step follows necessarily from the third. The passive dimen-
sion of being seized in experiences of self-transcendence is necessarily the
experience of stirring forces. Something must be at work if individuals or
collectives are wrenched beyond the previously stable boundaries of the self.
The unprecedented experiences of a temporary loss of self and an enthusiasm
that goes beyond anything familiar from everyday life, for example, lead to an
emotional charging of the situation in which this experience was undergone.
The experience of the dissolving of the boundaries of the self or of going be-
yond the self entails an affective certainty; this fills elements of the situation
with a pre-reflective binding force, with a strength that surpasses anything in
everyday experience. This is what Durkheim means when he refers to the “sa-
cred.” Experiences of self-transcendence necessarily lead to the attribution of
the quality of the “sacred”22—though of course the actors involved may not
necessarily use this particular term. This “sacred” is a quality assigned to the
stirring forces; it is, at least in the first instance, by no means identical with
the good or with other positive evaluations such as the true or the beautiful.
The demonic and the diabolic also fall within this category. Hence, with re-
spect to the process of ideal formation, I have certainly drawn on knowledge
about the dynamics of sacralization processes, but I have taken care not to
declare every process of sacralization one of ideal formation. We are only
dealing with ideal formation if a sacred object is ethicized, and if the ideal
content can be abstracted, in an articulate way, from the pre-reflective expe-
riential quality.
This brings us to the fifth step in my line of reasoning. One weakness of
Durkheim’s theory of processes of sacralization is that in his account it seems
as though the subjective articulations of experiences of self-transcendence
simply arise from these experiences. Yet even in the case of the most inten-
sive experiences of fusion within a collective, this shared experience will
unavoidably demand individual interpretation at some point. There is, how-

ever, no single, obvious interpretation just waiting to be shared by all. It goes
without saying that the same distinction between experience and individual
interpretation of experience also applies to those experiences undergone by
individuals separately. Once again, it would be odd to ascribe the same kind
of self-evidence to the interpretation of the experience as to the emotional
qualities of the experience. As a result of intensive new experiences, people
may be motivated to “convert” to a new system of values and interpretation;
but even without new experiences, newly encountered interpretations of
their earlier experiences may make so much more sense to them that this
prompts them to convert. Despite some rudimentary efforts here and there
in their work to do justice to this fact, one cannot help but acknowledge that
both William James’s psychology of religion and Émile Durkheim’s sociology
of religion are deficient in this respect—a deficiency that we might describe
as “hermeneutic” or “semiotic.” Josiah Royce does no more than open up the
potential for such analyses, and in the work of Ernst Troeltsch, with its roots
in the hermeneutic tradition, the focus is on the interpretive processes of
scholarship rather than the interpretations produced by human actors.
Under the influence of Charles Taylor, the term “articulation” has be-
come established to refer to the phenomenon at issue here. Yet Taylor is by
no means the first to use the term in this way, which goes far beyond its pho-
nological meaning. We can already find a keen sense for this phenomenon
and the use of the term “articulation” for it in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey.23
In his analyses of processes of articulation, Taylor distinguishes between
four levels, which I refer to as the levels of the experienced situation, the pre-
reflective experience, the individual interpretation of experiences, and the
cultural inventory of interpretive patterns.24 The process of articulation does
not proceed in a clearly definable direction but rather in the form of a her-
meneutic circle. We constantly move back and forth between the realities of
the situation that exist independently of us, our holistic experience of this
situation, our own current interpretation of our experience, and publicly es-
tablished interpretations. There is always the possibility of friction between
these levels. Subsequent experiences may contradict our previous perception
of the situation; suddenly, our previous articulation of experience seems in-
adequate. The publicly available interpretations may lose whatever plausi-
bility they previously had. Taylor himself illustrates the complexity of these
processes with an example drawn from the experience of an ethnic minority
that is subject to discrimination.25 The cultural ascription of inferiority may
lead to feelings of inferiority on the part of those affected if they make them
their own. But it may also lead to resistance to a culturally established world-
view as interpretations from other traditions or cultures are mobilized. The
process of articulation involved here may very well generate something new.
Our experiences do not remain unchanged if we lend them a particular form
by articulating them.26
Of course, often this entire process of articulation does not take place
in isolation, but through direct interaction with others, who foster or im-
pede our attempts to express ourselves.27 Furthermore, many prevailing and
taken-for-granted cultural elements are chiefly embodied in practices that
are carried out without every individual consciously accounting for and jus-
tifying them. Furthermore, in addition to more or less articulated values and
the practices of everyday life, there are institutional rules confronting actors
as binding expectations. Hence, we need to work on the assumption of a field
of tension with three poles: institutions, values, and practices. Changes may
originate at any of these poles.28
Admittedly, Taylor’s conception of articulation is language- focused.
Without underestimating the indispensable achievements of language,
pragmatism’s theory of signs is less one-sided in this respect. Sign systems
other than language, such as visual depictions or theatrical embodiments,
may serve us better as we seek to articulate experiences. Even within lan-
guage, a narrative or poetic mode may be a means of articulation superior to a
discursive-rational one.29 That which applies to everyday experiences applies
even more to extraquotidian ones, the experiences of self-transcendence.
These experiences require articulation through complex symbolization
though they always also elude symbolic expression to some extent. If we
fail to comprehend this symbolization as an attempt at articulation of such
experiences, we are misunderstanding it from the outset. In reflecting upon
such phenomena, we must be mindful of the difference between experiences,
their symbolization, and that which is symbolized in symbols.30
The goal, then, must be not just to focus on the phenomena conventionally
classified as “religion” or to which people apply the term “religion” in their
own accounts. Such a term, used for classification and self-description, ob-
viously has its own history; it will always be contested because it is deployed
in substantive arguments. The conceptual difficulties become very clear in
efforts to honor the intuition that the totalitarianisms of the twentieth cen-
tury somehow recall the historical religions: “surrogate” or “ersatz” religion,
“political religion” or “secular religion,” “pseudo-religion,” “crypto-religion,”
“disguised” or “new” religion, “loss of transcendence,” or “practical tran-

scendence” are just some of the suggestions that have been made here. My
objective is not to achieve seeming independence from these conceptual
struggles through a definition of religion but rather to gain an overview
of the whole range of phenomena that emerge when we contemplate the
experiences that human beings undergo and that prompt the attribution of
sacred qualities.
The term “sacredness” is also the object of conceptual tussles, as we
would expect.31 I use this term too not in the sense of self-description but
in the attempt to designate a complex of affective qualities that arises from
experiences of self-transcendence. This complex may also be present in cases
in which people vehemently reject the term “sacredness” due to its echoes
of traditional and institutionalized religions. There is no final, definitive
route out of such conceptual struggles. All we can do, again and again, is re-
mind ourselves of the phenomena that we seek to understand. In this vein,
the present book does not assert the anthropological universality of religion;
this would obviously be untenable after the critiques of religion and antire-
ligious movements in Europe since the eighteenth century and the processes
of secularization that have led to the imposed or voluntary abandonment
of religious traditions without the emergence of new religions. What I do
assert, however, is the anthropological universality of experiences of “self-
transcendence” and the ensuing attributions of “sacredness.” This assertion
becomes fully meaningful only in light of the entire conception of action and
experience, of the constitution and transformation of the self, of articulation
and symbolization, which I have briefly summarized here.
The notion of the “power of the sacred,” then, seems justified. The
experiences that I seek to identify and the ties generated by these experiences
feature deep sources of vital force and nourish our readiness to master and
suppress desires and immediate bodily needs. Sacrificing at least our comfort
and perhaps even major interests, or our entire existence, may seem thor-
oughly meaningful to us. As small as our place in the universe may be, we can
perceive ourselves as a meaningful part of the whole, unique in our individ-
uality and called to engage in the world, as justified in our trust in the order
that sustains us, despite the constant threats we may face. In this description,
what I have in mind are not solely comprehensive religious or philosophy-of-
history worldviews but pre-reflective, given features of our world as experi-
enced on an everyday basis.32
Hence, I do not refer to the “power” of the sacred merely in a metaphorical
sense. But it would be wrong to regard the power of the sacred as the only
kind of power. Already at the level of individual motivation, the appeal of
the sacred or of ideals does not preclude other sources of motivation; in fact,
within us, a better self that embodies our ideals constantly struggles with
other inclinations and routines, of which we ourselves may disapprove. At
the level of acting collectives, the guiding ideals in any case become partially
detached from those of individuals, and it is even more true of the aggre-
gate forms of individual and collective actions that they cannot be explained
in light of shared ideals. Furthermore, no process of sacralization occurs in
a power-free space. Experiences are had in power-saturated contexts. Every
attempt to authentically articulate an experience comes up against existing
symbolizations and traditional patterns that others may be interested in
maintaining. This interest may simply arise from a genuine commitment to
these symbols and forms of articulation. But other interests may also lead to
the defense of the status quo or to the monopolization of claims to interpret
meaning. One of the great strengths of Max Weber’s sociology of religion is
that he always takes account of the role of power in the history of religion
and of the role of religion in the history of power. He is always interested in
the social bearers of religious doctrines, the affinities between certain social
ranks or classes and particular forms of religious life, and the forms of the
social organization of religion.33 We might say much the same about Ernst
Troeltsch’s historical sociology of Christianity, which, in particular, brings
out the repercussions of these forms of social organization on the devel-
opment of religious doctrines.34 The work of both is thus indispensable if
we seek to link knowledge about the dynamics of processes of sacralization
comprehensively with a theory of power.
Such a theory of power, for its part, must comprehend power as a phe-
nomenon of action. In other words, every conception will be inadequate if
it merely understands power in terms of power resources of a material kind,
and pays attention solely to the unequal distribution of such resources. Such
a conception is inadequate because the most varied range of human capa-
bilities and the broadest array of social realities may be mobilized and com-
bined in such a way that they become power resources. As a result, there is
never a fixed distribution of these power resources. Just as the idea of a fixed
entity called religion must be superseded by study of the dynamics of pro-
cesses of sacralization, the notion of an entity of state power, or any other
kind of power, must be replaced by study of the dynamics of processes of

power formation.
Over the last few decades, sociological theorizing on processes of power
formation has overcome the older, unproductive contrast between mate-
rialist and culturalist perspectives. “Power” is not just the availability of
certain material resources such as the means of production or weapons.
Values and social trust also have power effects that are more than just epi-
phenomena of material structures. In many situations of conflict, however,
these convictions and binding forces cannot compensate for the advantages
arising from access to material resources, and however questionable the le-
gitimacy of a power system may be, recourse to pure force can by no means
be ruled out. In this vein, through critical self-revision on both sides of the
materialist-culturalist divide, we might refer to a convergence toward such a
theory of the dynamics of processes of power formation.35 Independently of
these theoretical schools, and as yet scarcely noticed within the international
debate, German sociologist Heinrich Popitz has produced one of the most
sensitive analyses of the constitution of power through processes of action.36
With a background in phenomenology, he is interested in the diverse array
of forms of power, their interplay, and their convertibility. For him, every
culture, whether of a religious character or not, represents a “modeling” of
specific fears and hopes, but as such it concurrently “arranges for particular
opportunities to employ threats and promises as power instruments, and
every cultural change modifies those opportunities. This does not entail re-
ducing all system and all change to power-political intentions. But all cultural
change produces new bases for the exercise of instrumental power and does
away with old ones. Each cultural transformation shows how being subjected
to threat lends itself to conscious shaping.”37
What, following Popitz, I have stated here about cultural change in ge-
neral applies to processes of sacralization and ideal formation in particular.
Whether anyone meant it to or not, every new such process has all kinds
of repercussions for the existing distribution of power. New processes of
sacralization may cast doubt on old legitimacies, while giving rise to new
opportunities for the legitimation of old and new claims to power. A whole
range of individuals and collectives, objects and ideas, may be sacralized: the
ruler and the country, the people and the nation, the race or class, science
or art, the church or the commodity and the market. Sacredness, which in
any case has the tendency—as Durkheim was aware—to “contaminate” other
objects, persons, and content,38 may, through acts of “consecration” within

institutions, be consciously applied, or migrate through transfer39 from one
institution to another, or migrate in an entirely unplanned way.40 What we
call “secularization,” that notoriously ambiguous term, may be a whole range
of things from the perspective of processes of sacralization. The affective in-
tensity of the tie to a sacred entity may be transferred from one idea or one in-
stitution to others; this was often the case, for example, where people’s ties to
Christianity and the church were superseded by a commitment to socialism
and the party. But it is also possible for the intensity of ties to dwindle without
migrating to new content or other institutions; in other words, there may be a
loss of motivation that is not replaced by anything else.
Our guide as we develop an alternative to the narrative of disenchantment,
therefore, must be the interplay between a plurality of processes of sacrali-
zation on the one hand and a diverse range of processes of power formation
on the other, rather than, for example, the history of science or the history of
humankind’s advancing knowledge in general.41 This interplay is contingent.
As a result, in view of the potential for ever-new processes of sacralization
and ideal formation, we cannot infer a transhistorical process of the deval-
orization of all sacralities and ideals; nor can we assume that all new ideals
will be nipped in the bud. The term “sacralization,” that is, does not refer to
a homogeneous world-historical process, but rather to a complex and un-
predictable plethora of such processes. Hence, the alternative to the narra-
tive of disenchantment cannot consist of a simple inversion, as insinuated
by references to the “enchantment” or “re-enchantment” of the world. Nor
would a tidal model of the ceaseless back and forth of sacralization and desa-
cralization constitute a convincing approach.
Finally, even the conceptual schema that interprets every tendency that
defies it as a mere reaction to the single, dominant process of rationalization
remains captive to the narrative of disenchantment: every mystical impulse,
every critique of rationalism, every attempt to change existing structures of
differentiation is thus devalued and pushed to the margins of history. Instead
what we need to show is how, out of human social history, ever-new pro-
cesses of sacralization or of the revitalization of old sacralizations emerge,
what their effects are on processes of power formation, how the emergence
of ideas of transcendence placed a fundamental question mark over tenden-
cies toward collective self-sacralization without being able to prevent these
ideas from themselves becoming means of collective self-sacralization. The
relationship between sacredness and power, religion and politics thus re-
mains a relationship of tension that generates ever-new, concrete processes
of resolution, but will never actually disappear.
A Historical Sketch
The sacralization of kings or other rulers seems like the obvious starting point
for a historical sketch of the relationship between power and sacredness. That
is, the global spread of this phenomenon is beyond dispute. While there were,
no doubt, outside influences shaping the specific form of this phenomenon
in different societies, the emergence of the sacredness of rulers itself does not
appear to have been a straightforward cultural borrowing. Perhaps the most
ambitious attempt at a universal historical sociology of religion in the gener-
ation after Max Weber and Émile Durkheim—though admittedly restricted
to Christianity—thus begins with this phenomenon, declaring this fact, that
the king was to be regarded “simultaneously as the highest of men and the
lowest of the gods” and represented a “connecting link between the sphere of
the mortal and the sphere of the immortal” to be the inevitable point of de-
parture for such an endeavor.42
Yet this approach leaves open how we are to conceive of the relationship
between sacredness and power prior to the emergence of kingship. How,
exactly, are we supposed to imagine this relationship in non-state societies
featuring a relatively small disparity in power among its members? And
what influence did the “Axial Age” ideas of transcendence—described in
chapter 5 of the present book—have on the sacralization of rulers? In the
Axial Age of the last pre-Christian millennium, as evident even from a cur-
sory glance, there was no definitive break with the sacralization of rulers,
even in those cultures influenced by the new religious and philosophical
ideas. This prompts the question of what compromises were found between
the new conceptions and the traditional forms of power, or whether, in fact,
key actors gleaned new opportunities to legitimize power and authority from
the transcendence-oriented religions. We must consider two further forms
of sacralization, as they at least have the potential to become an alternative
to the sacralization of the ruler: the sacralization of the people and the sa-
cralization of the person, in the sense of the valorization of universal human
dignity—in other words, a quality inherent in every human individual. As we
shall see, prior to the emergence of the sacredness of the ruler, sacralization
can best be characterized as collective self-sacralization. In what follows,

my examination of the other forms—the sacredness of the ruler before and
after the Axial Age, the sacralization of the people and the sacralization of
the person—inquires into the extent to which these forms of the relationship
between power and sacredness inherently entail the overcoming of collective
self-sacralization, or at least a force running counter to it.
We should be very cautious when making statements about societies
prior to the emergence of state structures. Because writing appears to have
emerged in connection with the rise of state structures (such as the tax and
tribute registry), it can come as no surprise that non-state societies left be-
hind no written accounts. The insights gained from anthropological research
on contemporary nonliterate and stateless societies cannot, of course, simply
be projected back into history, as if they revealed to us the past of state-
organized societies in other places. Furthermore, contemporary societies are
always already enveloped by a world in which the state structures of others
exercise a profound effect on them. Even the positive descriptive term “tribal
societies” is so bound up with the history of colonialism and imperialism, as
well as civilizationally denigrating notions such as “savage” and “primitive,”
that many scholars suggest that we should stop using it.
However uncertain our knowledge of the details may be, though, in prin-
ciple there can be no doubt about the significance of ritual to such pre-or
non-state societies. Durkheim’s classic analysis,43 in addition to many empir-
ical shortcomings, can rightly be criticized from a theoretical perspective for
its exclusive emphasis on collective experiences and an inadequate sensitivity
to the articulation of such experiences. Nonetheless, it must be recognized
that its one-sided aspects are a pleasing counterbalance to the tendency to
project the individualism of modern cultures back into history. It would in
fact be wholly anachronistic to consider the individual experiences of the
tension between ideals or between ideal and reality to be significant in these
societies. Because ideals are an abstraction from experiences of sacredness,
the degree of this abstraction may vary. If the abstraction is negligible, this
means that the experience of sacredness has strongly retained its situational
tie. In line with this, the gap between ideal and reality will be negligible or
scarcely present. If the experience constitutive of sacredness is a collective
one, then it is possible that the ascription of sacred qualities to particular
individuals will be entirely absent.
This theoretical analysis of the character of sacredness under conditions
of limited individualization appears to find confirmation in research on
the Australian aborigines undertaken after Durkheim, and at a critical dis-

tance from him, and in studies of other non-state societies.44 As an example,
drawing on the account provided by William Stanner, let us imagine groups
of nomadic hunters and gatherers who cultivate no crops and build no per-
manent structures, remaining nowhere for any great length of time; their
changes of location, however, do follow a specific pattern, and are based on
precise knowledge of the seasonal availability of foodstuffs and water. These
nomadic or seminomadic groups, of between ten and sixty individuals, who
carry only a few belongings with them, feel closely linked by language and
custom with certain other similar groups. They come together with them,
however, only on very special occasions. These may be major festivals, rit-
uals of initiation, attempts at conflict resolution, or demanding hunting
expeditions requiring a large number of participants. The rituals that take
place in this context, whether organized or spontaneously arising, facili-
tate intensive experiences that do in fact differ markedly from everyday life
in small groups. The structured life of everyday reality is interrupted. If we
wish to highlight this interruption in our analyses, the term “anti-structure”
suggests itself.45 If we wish to emphasize that these rituals entail not just the
dissolution of structures but also the experience of a controlled environment
in which ideal states are rendered experienceable, states that remain in the
memory when individuals return to their everyday lives,46 then a term such
as “alternative structure”47 seems more appropriate. Because these rituals
take place at established sites, these places become charged with a particu-
larly intense binding power.
Within the mode of life of the members of such social orders, the sacral-
ization of places seems to be central. As a result of their sacredness, how-
ever, these places should not be thought of as mere neutral sites for a sacred
event. Instead, place and event form a virtually indissoluble imagined whole.
Under these circumstances, what emerges as what we might call the smallest
unit of the interpretive system is something referred to in the scholarship as
“rhythmed events” or “abiding events.” These are events, but not in the sense
of one-off elements in an irreversible temporal chain, but constitutive, pe-
riodically recurring events at a sacred site with enduring effects.48 Much of
that which—in the literature on the Australian aborigines since the research
of Spencer and Gillen, who were the most important source for Durkheim—
has been referred to as the “dreamtime,” a notion that causes a great deal of
confusion, thus becomes comprehensible. What we have here is the inter-
penetration of a mythical origin narrative with the idea that the origin of the
world lies not in an unrepeatable past but occurs again and again and entails
a principle of order that pervades all aspects of reality.49 This ordering prin-
ciple, however, makes no or very little distinction between the real and the
possible. This prompts Stanner to refer to life under these conditions as a
“one-possibility thing,”50 as the only thing possible, as devoid of alternatives.
The ideal has not yet become separate from the real, or is only very slightly
elevated above it. The intensity of the sacralization of places and events
structures a worldview without presenting the world as changeable in light
of an ideal state.
In this case, we can refer to a power gap among the members of such a
society only in two respects: people have power over those younger than
them, and men have power over women. Older men have the best prospects
of influencing collective decisions. Of course, superior abilities, strengths, or
ingenuity often engender respect and a willingness to follow. But there are no
formal offices that people might vie to occupy.51 Knowledge of the collective
rituals themselves plays a major role in structures of authority. This is an im-
portant reason for the respect for older people or for “experts” in the prepa-
ration, execution, and interpretation of the ritual event. They can treat their
knowledge of such things as “secret knowledge” and pass it on only partially
to others. Hence, respect may be paid to people whom others experience as
superior and exemplary, without these people being in a position to derive
binding claims to fealty, let alone material privileges, from their exemplary
status.
It is quite right, contra a Hobbesian conception of pre-state societies as a
struggle of all against all, to highlight the beauty and dignity and even the
creative and Epicurean characteristics of life under these conditions.52 But it
would be wrong to romanticize it or present it as an idyll, for two reasons. The
first is that the absence of a pronounced power gap cannot be equated with
the absence of power. In Stanner’s studies, this point becomes apparent only
when he states that the largely egalitarian social system of the aborigines he
studied protects and renews itself: “The real point of it all is that the checks
and balances seem nearly perfect, and no one really seems to want the kind
of satisfaction that might come from a position of domination.”53 Although
this is not articulated here, it seems clear that the lack of desire for power and
dominance over others is not attributable to innate goodness or internalized
morality. Had these been present, after all, there would be no need for any
“checks and balances” and it would be wrong to refer to a “self-protective
system.” We need to think instead in terms of social mechanisms through
which individual attempts to increase power are prevented by collective

power. That is, the lack of a power gap between individuals does not neces-
sarily indicate an absence of power, but may be a sign of the strength of col-
lective power vis-à-vis individuals.
We see this today in every social order geared toward norms of equality.
This emphasis on the active prevention of individual increases in power
through the exercise of collective power becomes even more plausible when
we consider the social life of primates, which preceded human beings in
evolutionary terms. It was clearly not equality that predominated here, but
rather pronounced hierarchies of dominance in which, for example, one or
a small number of alpha animals largely monopolized sexual reproduction.
But this seems to have been prevented within the earliest forms of human
sociality. Some have even referred to a U-curve in the development of
equality, given that we find the egalitarian structures of pre-state societies
between the highly hierarchized primate bands and profoundly hierarchical
state-organized societies. Among the instruments of power that prevent the
emergence of a power gap in pre-state societies are a whole array of forms
of social sanctioning, from mockery of the self-confident person to their
ostracization. One of these means of power is also the power of the sacred
in its collective form: rituals may intensify the sense of commonality to such
an extent that individuals voluntarily forgo aspirations to enforce their will;
rituals may also temporarily suspend any existing power gaps in “carnival-
esque” fashion, thus depriving them of their taken-for-granted status in
everyday life.54
The other reason it would be inappropriate to conceive of the ritually
backed and relatively egalitarian social structure of the society described
here as desirable lies in the restriction of sacredness to the members of the
collective who participate in the ritual. In the absence of the abstraction of
an ideal, as described above, all that emerges is the idealization of a specific,
particularly successful state of the collective itself. Sacralization is, originally,
always the self-sacralization of the collective as well. The shared experience
at particular places and points in time, which marks out part of the world
as “sacred,” directly envelops all those who share this experience—but as a
result makes others who are not involved appear less sacred or not sacred, as
“shadow creatures.”55 It is of course an empirical question as to the extent to
which the nonsacralization of outsiders plays a role in conflicts and permits
behaviors not permitted toward members of one’s in-group. We certainly
should not regard the mere fact of a restricting of sacralization to a particular
collective as a sufficient basis for untrammeled hostility. But the collective

self-sacralization56 embedded in the constitution of sacredness brings out a
problem that seems to me to be central to understanding the subsequent his-
tory of power. Every step of power formation beyond the elementary level
described above is experienced within the horizon of this self-sacralization of
the collective. To be more specific, de facto power accrues to older people or
ritual experts, just as, conversely, proven hunters or warriors may be ascribed
a greater repleteness with sacred forces. But this means that it is not just states
of the collective in which the collective as a whole feels elevated that we must
regard as social forms of sacredness. There is also the power-backed sacred-
ness of individuals and their power, which is experienced as sacred.
Of course, in historical reality there is no leap from the relative egalitari-
anism depicted here, and the associated collective self-sacralization, to the
despotism of archaic statehood. We can identify a wealth of institutional
forms in societies without a state before, and especially after, sedentarization
and the development of forms of agricultural production, institutions in
which we find substantial internal power gaps as well as fusions of sacredness
and power. One indication of such fusions is to be found in cases in which
ritual, as constitutive of sacredness, splits into forms to which not everyone
has access and those that continue to take place as quasi-egalitarian collec-
tive events. It seems better to me to refer to such a process of division or bi-
furcation57 than to a unilinear development toward hierarchical forms of
ritual. We should not ignore possible forces running counter to the concen-
tration of power that may be generated by egalitarian forms of ritual that con-
tinue to exist. By the same token, paying attention to countervailing forces
and tendencies should not prompt us to minimize the tremendous power
differentials within collectives that we can identify as societies become states.
We can find a good illustration of this in the small island of Tikopia, per-
haps researched more thoroughly by anthropologists than any other tradi-
tional Polynesian society. According to available accounts, Tikopia lacked a
state in the first half of the twentieth century but was not characterized by
primordial egalitarianism. While kinship remained a significant structuring
principle, there was nonetheless a marked status gap within and between kin
groups. There were chiefs of individual clans and procedures for appointing
them that we might call elections, though “dynastic” elements—being the
son of the previous chief, for example—played powerfully into these pro-
cesses. There was no chief of all clans but there was the idea that the chief of
the clan with the greatest prestige could be regarded as a representative of
everyone—but not as a ruler. In terms of the relationship between sacredness

and power, the most important point is that, following their election, chiefs
were “tabooed” in a fixed ritual, that is, they were consecrated or sacralized.
Through this ritual, which was explicitly said to entail the conferral of sacred-
ness by the collective, the previously profane person was transformed into
an object who was now to be treated in the same manner as sacred objects.
Unsolicited touching was prohibited henceforth. The physical posture of
those interacting with him was one of veneration, as expressed through
bowing and kneeling. The chief himself visited no one, but gave audiences
and did not eat in the presence of others because this would have lent a pro-
fane element to the impression he made. While the power of this type of chief
was very limited, his important priestly role is plainly apparent. But this role
was not insignificant to the physical well-being of those for whom he was
responsible, as if this well-being were ensured within a secular economic,
political, or military sphere. Quite the opposite. This well-being depended
in significant part on the benevolence of superhuman forces and beings, and
interacting with them was now the noblest task of the chief and high priest.
Only he sacrificed food and drink to the powerful beings, unless he tasked
others with the performance of similar duties. Others had to keep their dis-
tance when the sacred act of sacrifice between him and the powerful super-
natural beings took place; they did not know the ritual formulas that were
spoken and were not permitted to hear them. However, when the ritual was
over they could celebrate with song, dance, and convivial feasting, as was typ-
ical of the old collective rituals.58
As with the fairly egalitarian non-state systems devoid of fixed structures
of chieftainship, we should not present this scenario as idyllic either. The
form of religious and political order depicted here entails at least three po-
tential sources of conflict that may give rise to struggles over power but that
may also prompt individuals to try to increase their power. First, of course,
we must unavoidably ask what exactly happens if the goodwill of the super-
natural beings, as solicited through sacrifice, fails to materialize, as in the
case of severe weather or a bad harvest. The chief and high priest may then
attempt to wrest their good favor from them by offering greater sacrifices,
but those who appointed him to his office and sacralized him may also re-
gard him as a failure and depose or even kill him. This potential source of
conflict was the point of departure for one of the most influential anthropo-
logical texts ever written, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.59 Frazer’s oeuvre
was present in the background of many studies in the universal history of
religion that I have referred to in the present book: from Durkheim’s con-

ception of totemism to Max Weber’s specific distinction between magic and
religion. In the Golden Bough, Frazer, a classical scholar, basing himself on
ancient sources, had narrated the history of the priests serving a temple to
Diana in the Alban Hills near Rome. The priests’ vital force was considered
responsible for the lushness of the vegetation. This, however, meant that the
dwindling of the priest’s energies posed a threat to everybody that could only
be remedied through his death and replacement by a vigorous successor. He
too might one day face the same fate. Frazer tried to collate examples of this
mechanism from every era and culture and claimed that this made sense of
the idea of a god who loses his life but is then resurrected, in light of the
logic of vegetation cycles (Easter in spring). What interests me here, however,
is not so much these supposed consequences of a real event on later myth-
building, but rather the idea of a tendency toward violence—on the one hand
through the possible killing of the failing priest and chief, and on the other in
the expansion of sacrifice, up to and including human sacrifice.
The second source of conflict lies in the redistributive effect of rituals,
whose execution is monopolized by the chief-and-priest. For rituals of sac-
rifice, gifts are required, particularly for the subsequent collective festivi-
ties. These gifts must be collected and stored, and often specially produced.
Although the chief-and-priest is not necessarily more powerful or well off
than others, his role in the coordination of ritual-related activities at least
gives him a better chance of acquiring goods for himself and his kin. It seems
that there have always been fluid transitions between such mere coordina-
tion on the one hand and economic betterment and power on the other.60
This, however, lends a self-stabilizing dynamic to the initially ad hoc linkage
of sacredness and power. People begin to develop an interest in maintaining
an unequal distribution of resources and in acquiring the means to enforce it.
The third source of conflict is bound up with this. If the chief-and-priest
predominantly or exclusively communicates with the powerful beings, then
in the first instance he takes on the characteristics of these beings only situ-
ationally; his tabooing in itself turns this into something enduring, though
not unforfeitable. But this enduring sacredness, like everything sacred, may
“contaminate” other people and other things, such as the kin of the chief-
and-priest, or all members of the relevant clan. This burgeoning sacred-
ness may be perceived or conceptualized as unconditional, as given in the
manner of physical realities. Then a particular lineage is regarded as fun-
damentally superior to another. In the shape of the pride in ancestry and
marriage behavior characteristic of aristocracies, and in the notion of their

noble blood, such ideas have survived down to the present day. Because the
sacralization of whole clans occurs within a field of power and interests, ge-
nealogical knowledge may be prescribed or prohibited, while genealogies
may be manipulated—with considerable consequences for claims to landed
property and land use.61
In my brief attempt to illustrate the nature of social orders that lack a state
but are no longer strictly egalitarian, I have so far avoided two terms: king
and god. Rather than kings, I spoke of chiefs who are simultaneously high
priests, and rather than gods I referred to powerful beings and forces. The
reason I avoided both terms is that they are not entirely appropriate prior to
the development of the state. This is not the right place to clarify just what
constitutes a state or the extent to which a conceptual framework abstracted
from European phenomena since the early modern period can be applied
to older periods of European history and to archaic non-European forms of
power in the first place. Here it is sufficient to state that, in particular places
and at particular points in time, a form of power concentration and power
differentiation emerged whose dominant organizational principle was no
longer kinship or descent. A different, new organizational principle became
superimposed upon this older one—which does not disappear. This consists
essentially of an organizational and coercive apparatus that operates through
a division of labor. A small group thus gained the opportunity to consume
surpluses from agricultural production, to organize collective works (such
as the construction and maintenance of an irrigation system) on the basis of
a division of labor, to settle disputes authoritatively, to subdue internal and
external enemies by force and live in demonstrative luxury. I do not asso-
ciate any claim of the inevitability of development toward the state with this
description;62 there are many examples of the discontinuation or reversal
of such developmental tendencies. Things change, however, when the state
emerges. Its superior organizational potential may result in successful efforts
at expansion and thus trigger defensive developments of a similar kind in
response among neighbors. The best-known relevant descriptions here are
those found in the Old Testament,63 particularly in the First Book of Samuel,
regarding Israel’s desire to have a king just like the neighboring peoples and
God’s reluctant fulfillment of this wish.
Not inevitably, then, but frequently, societies trod this path of state forma-
tion, partly emulating neighboring and threatening states, but also, at times,
entirely in the absence of any influence from role models, creating something
new but extremely similar. No one would try to attribute state formation
in China to that in the ancient Near East or vice versa, and state formation
among the Maya and the Inca is clearly not linked with that in the other
settings. Yet across the world we find the emergence of sacred kingship. This
is a phenomenon that occurs from early agricultural societies into the pre-
sent day, with the specific economic conditions and religious ideas diverging
greatly. If we wish to understand the links between sacredness and power,
or the forms taken by collective self-sacralization, this presents us with an
object of monumental significance. The clear contours of this phenomenon
despite the variability of its preconditions suggest that we should reject the
tendency to see it as the mere result of particular economic conditions and,
in line with this, to see ideas of God as the mere projection of the idea of a
king onto supernatural forces. What appears to have happened is that both
ideational complexes developed jointly, or in fact, one ideational complex
with two aspects emerged.64 This is something that must be borne in mind
when we seek to reconstruct the process of power formation that transforms
the collective self-sacralization of pre-state orders into the tremendous sa-
cralization of the single, all-dominating king, who is the representative of the
collective vis-à-vis the supernatural forces.
But the global spread of the phenomenon of sacred kingship and its histor-
ical continuity should not prevent us from recognizing its internal variation.
Werner Stark already proposed a sociological typology, distinguishing three
main forms,65 though he presumably drew on the work of predecessors. First,
the king may be imagined as a god himself or, at least, as of divine descent,
or as becoming a god upon his death. Often, the institution of kingship itself
is conceptualized as a divine gift, making the king the representative of God
or the gods among human beings. Second, while not being viewed as divine
himself, the king may be understood as sent, chosen, elevated, or anointed by
gods. Here he remains human, but enjoys a special proximity to the divine.
Third, in continuity with the connection between the offices of chief and high
priest in pre-state societies, the king may be conceptualized predominantly
or exclusively as the highest or even the only priest. In extreme cases he may
merely play this role alongside the real military power-holder, as occurred
for example in the Frankish Empire and Japan. Here there is no doubt that he
is a member of the human race, though his closeness to the divine allows him
to partake of its aura.
Of course, in reality the three types do not necessarily occur in a clear and
distinct form. In one and the same culture, the conception of kingship may
change in this respect. It may not be uniform and it may be subject to contes-
tation. Hence, in Mesopotamia from the time of Hammurabi (around 1800
BC), the notion of the ruler’s divine begetting appears to have been aban-
doned, without all the associated ideas disappearing entirely as a result.66
Generally, there may be discrepancies between the official self-presentation
of kingship and the beliefs of the general population as actually lived—on
both sides. On the one hand, sacred kingship may face a crisis of legiti-
macy, its claims falling on deaf ears. On the other, spontaneous sacralization
by the people may be received by the object of this sacralization cynically,
as a means of boosting his power, or ironically, as foolish superstition. The
Roman emperor Vespasian is said to have reacted to a serious illness by
exclaiming, “Oh dear, I think I’m becoming a God.”67 This response becomes
more understandable when we consider the fact that the divinification of the
Roman emperors emanated not so much from Rome itself, with its repub-
lican history, as from the traditions of rule typical of conquered eastern prov-
inces. Even in republican Rome, however, reminiscences of archaic sacred
kingship remained alive, providing indigenous points of departure for its im-
perial rebirth.
It seems to me that the sacralization of the ruler is something we can easily
relate to in light of the cults of Hitler and Stalin, but not the divinification, if
we take this to mean the elevation of a ruler or priest to the state of divinity
itself. This has to do with the fact that even the most secular contemporaries
tacitly assume a more sophisticated concept of God than appears to have
pertained under the conditions of archaic statehood. The idea of the begetting
of a ruler or of the progenitor of a ruling dynasty by a god, or of the transition
of a ruler into a god at the moment of his death, presupposes a permeability
between the earthly-human and the divine—the absence of a metaphys-
ical chasm, such that there could be not just an analogy, but genuine unity,
between the order of the cosmos and that of the state. Under conditions of
statehood, the organizational resources mobilized for the broadest range of
state tasks could also flow into actions and projects such as the construction
of temples and rulers’ burial sites (the pyramids), which impress future gen-
erations even if they perceive them as an incomprehensible use of resources.
But they are only incomprehensible if we fail to grasp the intensity of the
self-sacralization of a social order in the shape of the sacred ruler. Unless this
is factored in, it is chiefly the violent aspects of these civilizations that people
remember. To this day, our imagination is pervaded by imagery dating
back to this propensity for violence: the human sacrifices of the Aztecs, the
wastage of human labor in the construction of the pharaohs’ pyramids, the

atrocities of Nebuchadnezzar—though it is an open question to what extent
these images tally with historical reality or are the outcome of enemy propa-
ganda. We should surely be careful not to overestimate the actual capacity of
despotic rulers to permeate the societies they ruled and to “implement logis-
tically” the decisions they made.68
At least on the imaginative level, the close link, if not fusion, between sa-
credness and highly concentrated power in the archaic state has remained
a nightmare vision of enduring potency. But it is not the end of the story.
We can discern tendencies to reverse the concentration of power, which I ad-
dress later when considering the sacralization of the people contra the ruler’s
sacredness. But quite apart from this, there were reactions to fusions of sa-
credness and power that sought to make them impossible, to put a stop to
them forever, by radicalizing and ethicizing the sacred. What I have in mind
here is the emergence of an idea of transcendence that establishes a boundary
between everything earthly and the divine, one that no ruler can cross. Jesus’s
statement to Pontius Pilate that “My kingdom is not of this world” (John
18:36) is probably the most striking formulation of such a radical distinction.
It was not introduced by Jesus, but was already presupposed by him.
The emergence of the idea of transcendence in history is the focus of re-
search and debate on a “prophetic age” or the “Axial Age.” I addressed this
scholarship in depth in this volume69 when I explored the issue of a funda-
mental turning point in the religious history of humanity, and the poten-
tial for a historical and social-scientific explanation of this turning point.
My reflections had a dual outcome, and only this, rather than its rationale,
should be called to mind here. What emerged is that this turning point in re-
ligious history can only be explained as a response to the development of the
archaic state. In this sense it is intimately bound up with changes in the struc-
ture of power and political rule. But it is crucial to grasp that this turning
point was in fact a response to these changes, not an automatic consequence
of them. In other words, societies responded creatively (and thus contin-
gently) to new challenges. These responses differed greatly, but what has be-
come clear is that all of them featured a syndrome consisting of increased
reflexivity together with the emergence of ideas of moral universalism and
transcendence. Hence, I proposed that the core of this religious upheaval was
the conception of transcendence as reflexive sacredness.
The tremendous concentration of power and its fusion with sacredness
in the archaic state thus sparked a novel vision in which the sacredness of
earthly power was fundamentally questioned, the central role of the means of
violence was radically rejected, and every form of collective self-sacralization
of a limited human collective was countered by the aspiration to serve the
good of all people. Just as the expansion of archaic states had opened up the
prospect of universal world domination and relative independence from
kinship and ethnicity, these new forms of the understanding of sacredness
could extend to all human beings regardless of their affiliation with existing
social forms. This opened up a gap within the self-sacralization of the collec-
tive. A division formed between the ethnic and religious collective, while an
idea of humanity could now emerge, with the notion of the radical renun-
ciation of violence or even of conciliatory self-sacrifice coming to the fore.
Against this background, we can read the history of Jesus Christ as that of a
break both with the self-sacralization of the Jewish people and with that of
the Roman Empire.
As revolutionary as this turning point in religious history appears, it
would be quite wrong to infer from it that there was a similarly revolutionary
upheaval in the history of power. By no means did the desacralization of po-
litical power, nonviolence, and an orientation toward the well-being of all
human beings become a stable cultural possession, at least in the civilizations
molded by the Axial Age. Because the desacralizing religious forces were
often appropriated, quite rapidly, as sources of new religious legitimation
of political power, the supposed world-historical turning point may, in ret-
rospect, appear almost as a politically inconsequential episode. Exclusively
with reference to Christianity, I briefly illustrate this here, though this claim
certainly applies to more than just the monotheistic religious traditions.70
The history of Christianity, the moment it came anywhere near political
power, is pervaded, indeed dominated, by attempts to justify the sacredness
of rulers within the framework of Christian ideas. This history begins before
the point when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire
in 391 under Emperor Theodosius the Great, namely with the so-called
Constantinian shift of 311—in other words the recognition of Christianity
as a legitimate religion and Emperor Constantine’s personal embrace of the
Christian faith.71 During his time in office, “the Christian idea of the ruler
developed in such a way that, directly or indirectly, it served as a model that
influenced all subsequent rulers in the Christian West (and beyond). No
Christian emperor, however, was venerated as effusively, indeed, excessively,
and exalted as intensely as Constantine, who relieved the Christians of a tre-
mendous pressure, appearing to them as savior, benefactor, and patron, and
thus ultimately as the instrument of heaven, a means of furthering the divine

plan of salvation.”72 Particularly famous is the form taken by the Christian
veneration of this emperor in the work of Eusebius of Caesarea, an early
church historian and biographer of Constantine, who presented the em-
peror as chosen by God, the instrument and representative of God, the image
and emissary of Christ, priest, bishop, and battler against the enemies of the
faith. Psychologically, this response is no doubt understandable, although
the theological boundlessness is astonishing. Sociologically, it surely played
a significant role that “apart from the episcopal parishes, no overall hierar-
chical organization had as yet developed within the church.”73 For the history
of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, the fusion of the cult of the em-
peror and of Christ, which has fittingly been referred to as “hybridization,”74
proved particularly influential. Here imperial dignity was traced back to God
himself, rather than being acquired only through coronation by the church.75
Yet it would be wrong to conclude in light of the mere fact of the develop-
ment of the papacy in the Latin West—and thus in light of the coexistence
of two poles, one more intensely sacred and one more power-focused—
that this entailed a fundamental distance from the sacralization of the king
or emperor. In fact, under Charlemagne at the latest, what emerged was a
new and autonomous form of theocentric power legitimation. This was sub-
sequently, and repeatedly, subject to change in form, for example toward
Christocentrism, but this can certainly not be described as desacralization.76
The broadest range of traditions were mobilized in the Christian sacraliza-
tion of the ruler, with scholars disagreeing over the importance of each: an-
cient Roman and Oriental traditions, Celtic and Germanic ones among the
Christianized peoples, and biblical tropes, drawn above all from the Old
Testament. In his classic work on the origins of the belief in the miracu-
lous healing power of Christian kings, Marc Bloch demonstrated that this
not only involved elements of arguments over legitimacy, nor was it solely
a matter of symbols, but was “the model for a very concrete institution,”77
namely the anointing of kings with consecrated oil. In disputes over the kind
of oil that ought to be used to anoint kings—that used to consecrate bishops
or the one commonly used for the laity—the battle over the exact sacred defi-
nition of the office of king played itself out. At least until the eleventh century,
it cannot be claimed that Europe’s Latin west showed any less predisposition
for the Christian legitimation of the ruler’s sacredness than in the east.
Two facts appear to run counter to this assertion. First, there were repeated
attempts to assert the spiritual primacy of the church over the emperor,
particularly if the latter did not comply with the church’s teachings or had
clearly committed a serious sin.78 Further, fifth-century popes also made
fundamental statements whose exact scope is unclear; in any case, their
successors did not feel truly bound by them.79 Yet these scattered voices and
efforts should not be assumed to amount to a steadily growing tradition and
contrasted with a supposedly monolithic east, as if there, for example, impe-
rial rule always self-evidently prevailed in the face of monastic resistance.80
Second, it is true that the eleventh century saw the great and later vir-
tually mythicized clash between papacy and imperial rule, known as the
“Investiture Controversy,” a dispute over who had the right to appoint clergy,
particularly bishops, to office. This conflict and its resolution appear to evince
an early division of sacredness and power in western Europe.81 Yet there are
at least three reasons to reject such an interpretation. First, it is by no means
the case that the short-term desacralization of Emperor and King Henry IV
in Canossa led to a long-term and comprehensive decline in the sacredness
of kingship.82 This is true within the empire, where in fact imperial rule sub-
sequently tended to consolidate, but especially outside of it. Beyond the em-
pire, this conflict seems to have gone largely unnoticed.83 Second, outside
the empire new processes of the sacralization of kingship began. I have al-
ready referred to the wonder-working kings—in England and France—when
I mentioned Marc Bloch’s seminal study. In addition, here it is important
to underline that the idea that kings could perform miracles not just on the
basis of their personal piety, as “saints” like all other saints, but due to their
office, was not a relic of pre-Christian times. In fact this idea developed only
after the Investiture Controversy. It is also notable that, overall, people saw
nothing strange in “applying the ideas of the sacred developed with a view
to Roman imperial dignity, which originally related to a universal figure, to
the orthodox kings of imperatively coordinated groups of a non-universal
character.”84 Third, we must not overlook the fact that as a result of the rela-
tive strengthening of the papacy vis-à-vis the emperor, the papacy itself took
on characteristics of sacred monarchy; popes also orchestrated themselves
as successors to the Roman emperor Constantine—as Thomas Hobbes put it
polemically in Leviathan, when he referred to the papacy as “the ghost of the
deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”85
In light of these facts, it seems better not to refer to an accumulation, of
any kind, of tendencies toward the desacralization of power, nor to a “vector”
that runs through the history of Latin Christianity in Europe, as Charles
Taylor did,86 but rather to take truly seriously the “mutability of the idea of
the sacred ruler, the ebb and flow of its intensity and its ceaseless reconfig-
uration.”87 This enables us to see the very different articulations appearing
in different historical constellations—the era of absolutism, for example,
produced the “Sun King” Louis XIV in France and King James I of England
(VI of Scotland). In 1610, the latter began a speech before both Houses of
Parliament with the truly radical words: “The state of monarchy is the
supremest thing upon earth: for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon
earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called
gods.”88
The sacralization of the ruler as our ruler, if it was grounded in the mindset
of the general population, always entailed a concealed collective self-
sacralization. As powerless as ordinary people may have been vis-à-vis the
ruler, they had the subjects’ pride in his power, which was imagined as sur-
passing that of other rulers. Yet this pride in the ruler as the embodiment
of the collective always features an oppositional potential as well. This may
take on a life of its own if the sacralization of the people is turned against the
sacralization of the ruler. In any case, we can only correctly understand rad-
ical manifestations of the ruler’s claim of sacredness, as we find it particu-
larly in the case of James I of England, if we recognize what it was directed
against: not just papal claims that were undergoing revitalization, but above
all against then-current Catholic and Calvinist conceptions of a right to re-
sist tyrants or heretics on the throne, or even the idea of a political authority
derived from a consensus or mandate of the ruled.89 These ideas had cer-
tainly taken on a new form, but their roots lie in a constant undercurrent and
counter-current that we can trace across the entire history of sacred ruler-
ship. The sources on such counter-currents are naturally often scarce because
the ruling powers largely set the tone for the documentary record.
But it is enough to point to the carnivalistic reversal of hierarchies, pro-
phetic critique of rulers, monastic refusal to be integrated into worldly or-
ders, popular forms of disrespect, or uprisings among the oppressed, such
as slaves and poor peasants, in order to demonstrate that domination always
represents the containment of countervailing forces. These counterforces
may result in the desacralization of the ruler. But they may also lead to the
alternative sacralization of their own leaders or of the countervailing forces
themselves, that is, to the sacralization of the “people.” Yet the social scope
of that which is considered to be the people and, accordingly, just what is
sacralized (as for example in the notion that the voice of the people is the
voice of God, “Vox populi, vox Dei”), is highly variable. It may be urban
citizens or the urban underclasses, the rural poor or even aristocrats opposed
to absolutist rule.90
Against the background of the assumptions about the dynamics of collec-
tive self-sacralization elucidated above, it can come as no surprise if the sa-
cralization of the people takes the form of collective ethnic self-sacralization.
Sociology has had a sensitivity to this from the outset—since William
Graham Sumner introduced the famous distinction between “in-group” and
“out-group,” deriving from this his theory of ethnocentrism.91 For him, hos-
tility toward non-members of a collective was merely the flipside of the sense
of belonging felt within one’s group. From this perspective, ethnocentrism is
a necessary consequence of the internal bonds that keep in check conflicts
and diverging interests within a collective, thus endowing a particular col-
lective with internal unity in the eternal competitive struggle between soci-
eties. Max Weber too was aware of these realities, linking them with class
differences or status-based gradations within a supposedly homogeneous
“people”: “The conviction of the excellence of one’s own customs and the in-
feriority of alien ones, a conviction which sustains the sense of ethnic honor,
is actually quite analogous to the sense of honor of distinctive status groups.
The sense of ethnic honor is a specific honor of the masses, for it is acces-
sible to anybody who belongs to the subjectively believed community of
descent.”92 Poor whites in the southern United States, according to Weber,
were therefore the social bearers of racial antipathy to a greater degree than
the plantation owners because their “social honor . . . was dependent on the
social déclassement of the Negroes.”93 Every external feature can become a
symbol of ethnic belonging or rejection.
These realities are crucial to understanding the history of nationalism. It
is not to deny the multifarious economic, political, and military causes of
the formation of nation-states if we impute to nationalist movements more
than just instrumentally rational motives, attributing to them and their in-
dividual members the sacralization of the nation as well.94 Just as collective
self-sacralization in relatively egalitarian tribal societies was more than just
the sacralization of the human members of the collective, with the sacraliza-
tion of places, times, and objects radiating out to envelop the collective, the
collective self-sacralization of the nation is not limited to human beings. It al-
ways goes beyond this to include a particular territory with its specific land-
scape and points of historical remembrance, a past with victories and defeats,
heroes and martyrs, as well as customs, values, and conceptions of law. The
sacralization of the nation may be directed toward an existing state territory
or aspire to expand it because other territories are perceived, or claimed to

be, a natural part of it. The focus may be on the reassertion of “authentic”
customs and institutions that have been lost due to profaning, “polluting” ex-
ternal influences, or due to internal carelessness. Where states are weak, the
sacralization of the nation may be directed toward the people without a state,
while independence from existing state claims or the establishment of a sep-
arate state may become objectives.95
In political terms, the sacralization of the people or nation may take very
different forms—from the sacralization of a political leader, who rules dic-
tatorially as the incarnation of a mythicized, unified, popular will, to the es-
tablishment of democratic procedures as the institutional translation of the
sovereignty of the people. Likewise, there are good reasons to comprehend
the re-emergence of a republican tradition in the Italian cities of the late
Middle Ages not as a desacralizing tendency, but on the contrary as the revi-
talization of the sacredness of politics and as the “rediscovery of the fusion of
the sacred and power, as characteristic of Graeco-Roman antiquity.” To quote
an adviser to the Republic of Florence in the fifteenth century: “Deus est res-
publica, et qui gubernat rempublicam gubernat Deum. Deus est iustitia, et
qui facit iustitiam facit Deum.”96 Paolo Prodi, who quotes this, concludes,
“The holiness of the monarch is superseded by a collective sacredness as an
expression of the new collective identity”97—as evident in cases ranging from
Savonarola’s Florence to the emergence of the United States. Meanwhile, the
relationship between this specific fusion of sacredness and power on the one
hand, which was a novelty in Christian Europe that drew on the model of
antiquity, and religious traditions on the other, is highly variable: “It extends
from the assimilation of the cult and models of sacredness in the form of a
virtually frictionless symbiosis, to stances of total opposition that sometimes
resulted in schism.”98
The great turning point in the history of religion that was the emergence of
“Axial Age” religions, of ideas about transcendence and moral universalism,
also influenced the forms taken by the sacralization of the people, but did
not itself impede the tendency toward collective self-sacralization.99 Just as,
under conditions of sacred rulership, Christian forms of legitimation evoked
the ruler’s mission to defend and disseminate the faith, the sacralization of
the people or nation was often charged with the notion of a specific histor-
ical mission. The naive egocentricity that leads people to believe they are the
ward of their own god became, under conditions of moral universalism, the
conviction that one’s people is chosen above all others. This consciousness
of being chosen may, but does not necessarily, take on a missionary form;100
in any case, it represents an ingenious linkage of universalism and partic-
ularism. I in no way seek to negatively mythologize such belief in a chosen
status. Quite the opposite—it is perfectly understandable if the sense of an
unprecedentedly superior religious insight, one that has been granted to a
particular people, is articulated in terms of a special “endowment” with this
“revelation.” But what is crucial from the perspective of moral universalism is
whether the idea of a people’s collective chosenness appears as an irredeem-
able and unconditional privilege or as a conditional, forfeitable quality that
may also be bestowed upon others.101 A famous passage in the Book of Amos
explicitly disputes any special rights for the people of Israel.102
Consonant with this, the belief in chosenness can have a morally
disciplining effect internally, but may also legitimize and motivate expan-
sion outwardly. The history of the self-image of the United States is pervaded
in exemplary fashion by these tensions.103 Over the centuries, even before
the establishment of the state, and into the present day, we find statements
that elevate Americans’—often particularist—objectives to a universal status
and assign to the American people a mission to civilize the world. This is
often expressed through motifs from the Old Testament. But it would be a
mistake to see in these tendencies toward collective self-sacralization under
conditions of moral universalism simply the effects of a concealed continuity
of motivation. Certain venerable interpretive patterns are quite simply well
suited to articulating novel situations, which require expression in one form
or another. The United States, moreover, is by no means the only case. In
the history of British and French colonial policy, for example, supposed civi-
lizing missions play a central role.104 The Soviet Union claimed to be guided
by the mission of spreading socialism in the interests of the worldwide prole-
tariat, and in the history of German nationalism, Germans’ national mission
was justified as a form of resistance to a false, rationalist, “Western” univer-
salism. “Every modern nation developed its own messianism, a version of a
global drama in which it played the lead role.”105
The sacralization of the people or the nation by no means always takes a
religious form. The distinction between the terms “sacred” and “religious,”
as well as the assumption of instances of secular sacredness—an assumption
that informs the present book106—allow us to keep our distance from empiri-
cally questionable theories about republicanism and nationalism as products
of secularization. The missionarism of universalist religions continues under
conditions of secularization. I have already referred to the Soviet Union, but
the highly secular interventionism of the French revolutionary troops is a

relevant earlier example.107 There are undoubtedly remarkable continuities
in French history between the Christian belief in chosenness—the French
nation as eldest daughter of the church—and the secular-revolutionary no-
tion of the Republic as a nation of human rights.108
The same finding applies to that other form of sacralization that we are
going to explore here due to its world-historical significance, namely the sa-
cralization of the person. Inspired by a phrase of Émile Durkheim’s, this is the
concept I have used to convey the process that led to the institutionalization
of human rights and the value of universal human dignity.109 I perceive in
this process the second great historical advance of the radical desacralization
of political power—following the Axial Age breakthrough, which saw the
emergence of the foundations of the world religions and philosophy. From
the standpoint of the relationship between sacredness and power, the insti-
tutionalization of human rights outstrips the importance of the Investiture
Controversy and the Reformation within European history.
This assertion no doubt only makes sense if we close off two sources of
misunderstanding. The history of human rights is not merely a history of
ideas nor is it a history of secularization. The breakthrough to the sacrali-
zation of the person may arise out of an internal history of learning charac-
teristic of a universalist religion. This was the case when the discovery, by
the religiously persecuted, that they themselves might be seduced into perse-
cuting believers of other faiths led to attempts at self-constraint through the
institutionalization of religious freedom.110 Of course, what I mean here is
only a rationale for religious freedom that is not granted on purely pragmatic
grounds or out of indifference to all religion. It must also be a freedom of re-
ligion that incorporates the freedom of nonbelievers. Self-evidently, a similar
learning process may prompt other people to reject all existing forms of re-
ligion as a personal option. For such individuals, the question then arises as
to whether their rejection prompts them to support the suppression of reli-
gion or to advocate religious freedom of the kind outlined above. The crucial
point is the sacralization—religious or nonreligious—of each person, every
human being, regardless of their merits or transgressions.
This sacralization of the person necessarily requires the relative desacrali-
zation of state, ruler, nation, or community. It does not, as is often assumed,111
require secularization in the sense of abandoning the idea of God as the
source of all sacredness. As we have seen, this idea may in fact act as a coun-
terweight to the sacralization of earthly political power.
Hence, an adequate understanding of the history of human rights must

certainly include the emergence and development of ideas about the equal
dignity of all human beings, but must focus on the ways in which these ideas
have been turned into positive law. The idea that everything human has a
special quality was probably never entirely absent; Durkheim tried to show
this in light of the elementary respect for human blood.112 But in the full
sense—that is, an empirical idea of humanity that can then be normatively
charged as moral universalism—this idea emerges only in the Axial Age. In
my remarks, I have attached great importance to relating this innovation
in the history of ideas to the history of power—as a creative response to the
expansive archaic state. Beyond the availability of this idea, however, the
history of human rights must, above all, scrutinize their institutionalization.
What I have in mind here is both their institutionalization within spe-
cific states and their transnational codification. The former began with
the declarations of human rights generated in the American and French
Revolutions in the second half of the eighteenth century, the latter with
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. All of them, of course,
have their own prehistories and effective histories.113 I believe that these
developments too cannot be explained in light of the maturation of the
idea itself or a slow accumulation of strong arguments for their validity, but
only in light of configurations of processes of both sacralization and power-
building. The background to the human rights declarations of the eighteenth
century was the history of the absolutist state and its sacred rulership, while
the declaration of 1948 occurred against the background of the totalitarian
fascist and Nazi states. The further development of human rights occurred
chiefly through conflict with the colonial state and communist totalitar-
ianism. Yet even human rights, like the idea of universal human dignity,
never become an entirely secure cultural possession. Once again, there is no
vector of increasing sacralization of the person.114 Like all forms of sacrali-
zation, human rights may degenerate into the mere legitimation of power-
political strategies, or even, because they impede state action, be explicitly
relativized. This has occurred in recent years as the prohibition on torture
has been weakened as part of efforts to combat terrorism. If this occurs on a
broad front, once again a bulwark against the self-sacralization of powerful
collectives will have proven too weak.
In addressing four forms of the relationship between sacredness and
power—the collective self-sacralization of egalitarian tribal societies, the
sacredness of rulership, the sacralization of the people or nation, and the

sacredness of the person—I neither claim that there are no other forms of
linkage between sacredness and power, nor do I assume a historical develop-
mental tendency necessarily leading from one form to another. On the con-
trary, it seems to me virtually impossible to gain a complete overview of the
diverse array of real existing fusions of sacredness and power, and I am aware
that clear-cut types can do no more than provide a useful means of conceptu-
alizing the real-world diversity.
Around 1900, no one predicted that the twentieth century would produce
a linkage of the movements of nationalism and socialism in the form of Italian
fascism and German national socialism, and in the absence of the contingent
event of World War I, this may not have happened. In any case, what emerged
were entirely new forms of the sacralization of politics that were reminiscent
of the archaic state but vastly more powerful as a result of the technological
means now available. Much the same goes for the Stalinist Soviet Union and
the regimes it installed in other countries.115 Who predicted, far in advance,
the rise of a terrorist Islamist fundamentalism extending to the attempt to
form a caliphate? Who would have thought that a state founded on the basis
of Marxism-Leninism and its theory of imperialism could generate a ruling
dynasty with magical aspirations, as in North Korea? Who would have ex-
pected none other than the Shi’ite branch of Islam, in opposition to a secu-
larizing developmental dictatorship, to give rise to new forms of a theocratic
constitution, as in Iran? The social sciences often risk abstracting their the-
ories from a small number of “leading” countries and of predicting that the
rest of the world will pursue a form of catch-up development in the same
direction, or recommending that it do so. A theory that instead highlights
the diversity of configurations of power and sacredness anticipates a diverse
range of forms, because the power of one actor mobilizes the countervailing
forces of others, and these often flow in quite unexpected directions. Hence,
every Axial Age tradition may give rise to forms of religious fundamentalism
or nationalism, but also to forms of resistance to them. These religions may
both impede and propel collective self-sacralization. This does not mean that
every form of power is possible at all times, but it does mean that every re-
ligious and secular tradition entails a considerable degree of flexibility with
respect to its adaptation to power relations. What we must do is avoid the
“Hegelian temptation” of a teleological interpretation of history,116 without
forgetting that humanity has a single history.117
A Normative Conclusion
The present book has not focused on normative issues. Even when resisting
teleological historical constructions, my main aim has been to shed light on
the empirical diversity of phenomena and to maintain awareness of the tasks
of historically sensitive social scientific explanation. But it would be dis-
honest to act as if my ideas are in no way guided by values and devoid of nor-
mative consequences.
In any case—for what it’s worth—my own impression is that the present
book entails two key normative elements. First, the very hypothesis of a fun-
damental turning point in religious history is very obviously guided by the
assumption that moral universalism is fundamentally superior to moral
particularism. I understand very well the motives of all those who reject the
distinction between “higher” religions and others. Yet I believe that their
very motives, their preference for tolerance over intolerance, entails a non-
relativist judgment. Hence, to write the history of tolerance, I believe, must
mean writing it in an affirmative way, despite the fact that this history is not a
teleological one, but can only be reconstructed, in all its contingency, “gene-
alogically.”118 However, this argument is restricted to the question of a higher
morality. It can only be applied to higher religion if we assume different affin-
ities with universalist morality among religions. In fact, every Axial Age re-
ligion fundamentally features this affinity, however much it may repeatedly
drive it out through processes of reparticularization. The pre–Axial Age
religions are only devalorized if, as in the work of James Frazer and Max
Weber, they are disqualified as merely magical. I have repeatedly opposed
this idea in the present book. If this devalorization does not occur, we can
grasp the spiritual venerability of these religions too, recognizing them as a
source of inspiration of many kinds. They are not, however, spared reflection
on their relationship with moral universalism.119 The magical then emerges
as a perpetual possibility, rather than part of a cultural stage that humanity
has left behind it.
Second, the notion of “collective self-sacralization,” which informed my
historical outline of the relationship between sacredness and power, and thus
my attempt to set out a possible alternative to the narrative of disenchant-
ment, is by no means value-free, not least in light of the critical distancing
it entails from all forms of moral particularism. I asked quite overtly how it
might be possible to transcend all given social forms, in such a way that one
pays heed not only to all people living today, but also those in the future, and
not just to the well-being of all human beings, but of the world as a whole.
By emphasizing the sacredness of the person, I have problematized forms of
universalism that do not respect the dignity of every individual. This applies,
for example, to theocratic authoritarianisms as well as to laicist dictatorships.
Within my frame of reference, both appear normatively problematic due
to the failure to guarantee religious freedom. It remains an ever new task to
strike the correct balance between morally justifiable sacralizations on both
the institutional and individual levels.
At the level of individuals too, a commitment to moral universalism does
not relieve us of the need to strike the correct balance between our particular
obligations, for example to our nearest and dearest, and the aspirations we
derive from our moral universalism.120 As individuals too we are enmeshed
in a whole range of relations of tension, which I discussed earlier, building
on Max Weber’s “Intermediate Reflection.”121 There is no route leading out
of these fields of tension once and for all. Max Weber, whose narrative of dis-
enchantment I have criticized in the present book, would surely not dissent
from this normative conclusion.
Notes
Introduction
1. Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 4 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press (vol. 1: 1986; vol. 2: 1993; vol. 3: 2012; vol. 4: 2013).
2. This term goes back to Hermann Heimpel and is chiefly used in accounts of the his-
tory of theology. See Kurt Nowak, “Die ‘antihistoristische Revolution.’ Symptome und
Folgen der Krise historischer Weltorientierung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Horst
Renz and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (eds.), Umstrittene Moderne. Die Zukunft der Neuzeit
im Urteil der Epoche Ernst Troeltschs (= Troeltsch-Studien, vol. 4), Gütersloh: Mohn,
1987, 133–171; Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Die antihistoristische Revolution in der
protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahre,” in Jan Rohls and Gunther Wenz
(eds.), Vernunft des Glaubens. Wissenschaftliche Theologie und kirchliche Lehre.
Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Wolfhart Pannenberg, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht, 1988, 377–405 (now also in Graf, Der heilige Zeitgeist, Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2011, 111–138). Heimpel himself, however, referred to an “at once antilib-
eral and antihistorical revolution in Protestant theology, through which Karl Barth,
in opposition to Harnack, overcame the triumph of David Friedrich Strauß and des-
titution of Ernst Troeltsch.” See Heimpel, “Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft.
Bericht über die 23. Versammlung deutscher Historiker in Ulm,” in Vierteljahrshefte
für Zeitgeschichte 5 (1957), 1–17, here 2.
3. Hans Joas, Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2014.
4. This perspective is advocated with notable energy by American sociologist of re-
ligion Christian Smith. See his introduction to Christian Smith (ed.), The Secular
Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, 1–96.
5. It is striking just how much one of the most significant and influential works to have
helped overcome the so-called thesis of secularization, namely that of Charles Taylor,
itself remains captive to the narrative of disenchantment; see Taylor, A Secular Age,
Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007.
6. Leo Tolstoy, “The Restoration of Hell” (1903), in On Life and Essays on Religion,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934, 309–330, here 326.
7. See my observations on the dialogue between believers and nonbelievers in Hans Joas,
“Nachwort,” in Alfred Döblin, Der unsterbliche Mensch /Der Kampf mit dem Engel,
Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2016, 613–636.
276 Notes
Chapter 1
1. A first version of the ideas presented in this chapter appeared in Albrecht Beutel and
Martha Nooke (eds.), Religion und Aufklärung, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016, 3–17.
2. Peter Harrison, “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, Cam
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. James Turner sees deism as the most impor-
tant element in the development of the modern concept of religion and contends that
“Every religion department should erect a little altar in the department chair’s office
to venerate its household gods,” namely, the leading exponents of deism in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries. See James Turner, Religion Enters the Academy: The
Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America, Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2011, here 14.
3. Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010; for a summarizing account by the
same author, see Stroumsa, “The Scholarly Discovery of Religion in Early Modern
Times,” in Jerry Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (eds.),
The Cambridge World History, vol. VI, Part 2: The Construction of a Global World
1400–1800 CE, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 313–333.
4. The term “secular option” comes from Charles Taylor, who has made the most com-
prehensive attempt to describe the rise of a worldview of immanence in Europe (see
his book A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007). For a work that builds on
this, see Hans Joas, Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity, Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2014.
5. Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the
Royal Institution (1870), London: Longman, Green, 1882, 8.
6. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), New York: Penguin,
1982, 12.
7. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (1757), in David Hume, Principal
Writings on Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 134–193. In what follows,
page numbers for quotations from this work are provided in brackets in the main text
rather than in the footnotes. For all questions regarding the constitution of the text
and Hume’s sources, see the excellent critical edition: Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), A
Dissertation on the Passions /The Natural History of Religion, Oxford: Clarendon, 2007.
8. The best text on the topic is Michel Malherbe, “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion,’ ”
in Hume Studies 21 (1995), 255–274. But see also Tom L. Beauchamp, “The Intellectual
Background,” in Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), A Dissertation, here 215f.
9. Quoted in ibid., 219.
10. M. Andreas Weber, David Hume und Edward Gibbon: Religionssoziologie in der
Aufklärung, Frankfurt/M: Hain, 1990, 20f. For a similar take, see Robert A. Segal,
“Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion’ and the Beginning of the Social Scientific Study
of Religion,” in Religion 24 (1994), 225–234. For him, however, in contrast to me,
there is an opposition between the social sciences and the discipline of history.
Notes 277
11. Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, Oxford: Clarendon, 1980, 601.
In what follows I limit myself to Hume’s text on the natural history of religion and
do not trace its relationship with the clearly religion-critical writings in his oeuvre
or with his philosophy as a whole. This also spares me the need to examine possible
contradictions between different parts of his work, or the role of this particular text in
a strategically complex attack on religion.
12. See Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), A Dissertation, 113.
13. After Anton Thomsen, “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion,’ ” in The Monist 19
(1909), 264–288, here 284.
14. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–
1788), 3 vols., ed. David Womersley, New York: Penguin, 1994, vol. 2, 90–97.
15. Ibid., vol. 1, 515.
16. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and
Institutions of Greece and Rome (1864), Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.
17. William Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (1889), Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.
On Smith and Fustel, see ch. 3 of the present book.
18. Robert Ranulph Marett, A Jerseyman at Oxford, London: Oxford University Press,
1941, 161.
19. On these matters, see Hans Joas, “Säkulare Heiligkeit. Wie aktuell ist Rudolf Otto?,” in
Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige, new edition, Munich: Beck, 2014, 255–281, and ch. 3 of the
present book.
20. See n. 6. For a detailed account, see ch. 2 of this book.
21. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), New York: The Free
Press, 1995, 225.
22. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, esp. 1–50, which includes a nuanced ac-
count of the views of Augustine and Jerome.
23. Christoph Markschies, Das antike Christentum. Frömmigkeit, Lebensformen, Institu
tionen, Munich: Beck, 2006, 111f., which includes reference to Basil of Caesarea and
his emphasis on the fact that the veneration of saints was not a phenomenon of uned-
ucated popular religiosity (p. 115).
24. Odo Marquard, “In Praise of Polytheism (On Monomythical and Polymythical
Thinking),” in Odo Marquard, Farewell to Matters of Principle (1981), Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989, 87–110.
25. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2009, and many other publications by this author—most recently Jan Assmann,
The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. In parallel to Assmann, a similar line of ar-
gument has been developed in the United States: Regina M. Schwartz, The Curse of
Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
26. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, 14.
278 Notes
27. A point also made, with reference to Assmann, by Robert N. Bellah, Religion in
Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap,
2011, 276.
28. This is the thrust of the arguments put forward by John G. A. Pocock, “Superstition
and Enthusiasm in Gibbon’s History of Religion,” in Eighteenth-Century Life 18
(1982), 83–94, esp. 85.
29. For example, in a reply to Peter Schäfer’s critique: Jan Assmann, “Alle Götter sind
eins!,” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 15, 2004, 14.
30. Perry Schmidt-Leukel, “Drei Kalkins und die Frage nach den Wurzeln religiöser
Gewalt,” in Zeitschrift für Missions-und Religionswissenschaft 97 (2013), 91–101.
31. See Michael K. Jerryson in the introduction to Michael K. Jerryson and Mark
Juergensmeyer (eds.), Buddhist Warfare, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010,
3–16, here 9. This volume contains excellent studies on historical instances of the
Buddhist justification of violence.
32. Bernard Faure, “Afterthoughts,” in ibid., 211–225, here 221.
33. Michel Malherbe, “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion,’ ” 263.
34. According to Tom L. Beauchamp, “The Intellectual Background,” 226.
35. Michel Malherbe, “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion,’ ” 267.
36. For example Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science.
37. To quote Ernst Troeltsch in a perceptive review of Julius Goldstein, Die empiristische
Geschichtsauffassung David Humes mit Berücksichtigung moderner methodologischer
und erkenntnistheoretischer Probleme. Eine philosophische Studie, Leipzig 1903, origi-
nally in Historische Zeitschrift new series 56 (1904), 477–482, now in Ernst Troeltsch,
Rezensionen und Kritiken (1901–1914), ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collabora-
tion with Gabriele von Bassermann-Jordan, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004 (= Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4), 330–336, here 334.
38. J. Y. T. Greig (ed.), The Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011, 416.
39. For more detail see Tom L. Beauchamp (ed.), A Dissertation, cxvii (on Diderot) and
cxxix (on Voltaire).
40. Hume’s conception of “true religion” is now being received in a new way by André
C. Willis, Toward a Humean True Religion: Genuine Theism, Moderate Hope, and
Practical Morality, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.
41. Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges A. Bonnard, London: Thomas
Nelson, 1966, 127.
42. Sir James Macdonald, letter of June 6, 1764, quoted in André C. Willis, Toward a
Humean True Religion, 1.
43. See the account in Ernst Troeltsch, “Der Deismus,” in Ernst Troeltsch, Aufsätze
zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie. Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Tübin
gen: Mohr Siebeck, 1925, 429–487.
44. Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England, vol. 2 (1861),
London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864, 468–473, here 469.
Notes 279
45. In the introduction to one of his essay collections, Arnold Gehlen, defending his
“empirical philosophy,” wrote pointedly: “For German philosophy, Socrates was
devoured by Plato, while Hobbes and Hume, W. James and Dewey lived in vain”
(Arnold Gehlen, Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie, Neuwied: Luchterhand,
1963, 9).
46. On this topic, see the excellent dissertation by Thomas Brose, Johann Georg Hamann
und David Hume. Metaphysikkritik und Glaube im Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung,
2 vols., Frankfurt/M: Lang, 2006. Herder’s excerpt appears in his Sämtliche Werke,
ed. Bernhard Suphan, vol. 32, Berlin: Weidmann, 1899, 193–197. I will say no more
about Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. While he engaged with Hume’s work, including his
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he did not write about his Natural History
(my thanks here to Walter Jaeschke). Hegel too was familiar with the Natural History
and based himself on it: Norbert Waszek, “Hume, Hegel, and History,” in Clio 14
(1985), 379–392, esp. 383–385. For a comprehensive account, though one not geared
toward the questions pursued in the present book, see Günter Gawlick and Lothar
Kreimendahl, Hume in der deutschen Aufklärung. Umrisse einer Rezeptionsgeschichte,
Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog,  1987.
47. To quote Frank Manuel, The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1959, 285.
48. Isaiah Berlin, “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism,” in Isaiah Berlin,
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1979, 162–187.
49. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40), Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1978, 188.
50. Johann Georg Hamann, Hauptschriften, vol. 7, Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1956,
167–169.
51. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, New York: Herder
and Herder, 1972, ch. 5. The idea itself had earlier been mentioned by Ernst Cassirer,
The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009, 226–227.
52. In Johann Gottfried Herder, Schriften zum Alten Testament (= Werke, vol. 5), Frankfurt/
M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993, 179–660. This volume contains not just this text
(originally published in 1774) but also an earlier version rediscovered only in 1980, and
the text “Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie,” as well as very important comments by the
editor Rudolf Smend. I base my interpretation in particular on the excellent book by
Christoph Bultmann, Die biblische Urgeschichte in der Aufklärung. Johann Gottfried
Herders Interpretation der Genesis als Antwort auf die Religionskritik David Humes,
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999 (see 120f. for information on the theological critique
of Hume in Herder’s time). See also Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study
in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1974, 183–201 (“Herder on the Bible: The Realistic Spirit in History”).
53. In his “Aesthetica in nuce,” quoted in Thomas Brose, Johann Georg Hamann und
David Hume, 41.
280 Notes
54. See the article “Mythos, Mythologie,” by Axel Horstmann, in Joachim Ritter
and Karlfried Gründer (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 6,
Basel: Schwabe, 1984, col. 281–318, here col. 288f.
55. This sparked a dispute between Hamann and Herder. For a reconstruction, see
Thomas Brose, Johann Georg Hamann und David Hume, 486–501.
56. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, letter to Schönborn of June 8, 1774, as translated by
Humphry Trevelyan, Goethe and the Greeks, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1981, 62. Goethe himself was also influenced by Hume and by Herder’s engage-
ment with the latter’s work. This at least is the argument put forward in the following
interpretation of Goethe’s poem “Prometheus”: David Wellbery, “The Imagination of
Freedom: Goethe and Hegel as Contemporaries,” in Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the
Persistence of Literature, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013, 217–238. I would like
to note here that this essay by my Chicago colleague provided significant impulses for
the present chapter.
57. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Älteste Urkunde,” 254, fn. 9.
58. Ibid.,  287f.
59. Ernst Troeltsch, “Religionswissenschaft und Theologie des 18. Jahrhunderts,” first
in Preußische Jahrbücher 114 (1903), 30–56, now in Ernst Troeltsch, Schriften zur
Religionswissenschaft und Ethik (1903–1912), ed. Trutz Rendtorff in collaboration
with Katja Thörner (= Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6.1), Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014,
69–95, here 95.
60. Hermann August Korff, Geist der Goethezeit, Leipzig: Köhler and Amelang, 21966,
vol. 1, 108.
61. See Christoph Bultmann, Die biblische Urgeschichte, 165–169.
62. Johann Gottfried Herder, “Älteste Urkunde,” 289.
63. I thus contradict both Yandell, who believes there may have been no consequences,
and O’Connor, who—entirely unconcerned about the empirical validity of Hume’s
hypotheses, as it happens—thinks it vital that the reasonableness of religious belief is
indeed being challenged by Hume: Keith Yandell, Hume’s “Inexplicable Mystery”: His
Views on Religion, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990, 340; David O’Connor,
“Psychological Explanations of Religious Belief,” in Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien
(eds.), The Continuum Companion to Hume, London: Continuum, 2012, 265–278.
For a vigorously argued account claiming that this destabilization was what Hume
intended, see P. J. E. Kail, “Understanding Hume’s Natural History of Religion,” in
Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2007), 190–211. Yandell has developed his thinking fur-
ther in Yandell, “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion,’ ” in Paul Russell (ed.), The
Oxford Handbook of Hume, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 646–659.
64. See Hans Joas, “Neither Kant nor Nietzsche: What Is Affirmative Genealogy?,” in Hans
Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, 97–139.
65. For an astute argument on the indispensability of this validity claim in a now
classic essay, see Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Understanding Religion Compatible with
Believing?” (1964), in Faith and the Philosophers, ed. John Hick, London: Macmillan,
1964, 115–133.
Notes 281
Chapter 2
1. I provide a more detailed account of this in Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 43–53; here I draw to a limited degree
on my remarks in that book, which also includes plenty of information on the sec-
ondary literature. Of the texts that have appeared since its publication, I would
highlight: David C. Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; Christoph Seibert, Religion im Denken
von William James, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009; Felicitas Krämer, Erfahrungsvielfalt
und Wirklichkeit. Zu William James’ Realitätsverständnis, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht, 2006, esp. 81–142; Michael Hampe (with Felicitas Krämer), “Befreiende
Erfahrungen. Religion bei William James,” in Michael Hampe, Erkenntnis und Praxis.
Zur Philosophie des Pragmatismus, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2006, 254–291. But the
argument put forward in the latter text (288) that James “espouses an immanentist
rather than transcendental conception of the divine” seems to me wholly implausible.
See ch. 5 of the present book, n. 13. As I see it, James was concerned with the im-
manent consequences of transcendence-focused action. See also the excellent and
comprehensive biography: Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of
American Modernism, Boston: Mariner, 2006.
2. According to Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and
Explaining Experience from Wesley to James, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1999, 351.
3. Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und
Kirche 5 (1895), 361–436, and 6 (1896), 71–110, as well as 167–218, now in Ernst
Troeltsch, Schriften zur Theologie und Religionsphilosophie (1888–1902) (= Kritische
Gesamtausgabe [KGA], vol. 1), ed. by Christian Albrecht in collaboration with Björn
Biester, Lars Emersleben, and Dirk Schmid, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009, 364–535; on this
topic, see Hans Joas, “The Independence of Religious Phenomena: The Work of Ernst
Troeltsch as a Template for the Study of Religion,” in Christopher Adair-Toteff (ed.),
The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch, London: Anthem Press, 2018, 25–35.
4. A useful typological overview can be found in Christian Henning, “Die Funktion
der Religionspsychologie in der Protestantischen Theologie um 1900,” in Christian
Henning and Erich Nestler (eds.), Religion und Religiosität zwischen Theologie und
Psychologie, Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1998, 27–78.
5. James borrows this term from James Leuba, one of the early psychologists of religion.
See James Leuba, “Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena,” in American
Journal of Psychology 7 (1896), 345–347, here 345; cf. William James, The Varieties of
Religious Experience (1902), New York: Penguin, 1982, 505.
6. I have published a preliminary though in parts more detailed version of my
observations here: Hans Joas, “Schleiermacher and the Turn to Experience in the
Study of Religion,” in Dietrich Korsch and Amber L. Griffioen (eds.), Interpreting
Religion: The Significance of Friedrich Schleichermacher’s “Reden über die Religion” for
Religious Studies and Theology, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011, 147–161.
282 Notes
7. To take a recent example, Birgit Weyel writes, without offering any evidence,
that Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as “feeling” was adopted by James: “It
was taken up just under a century later by William James, who interpreted it
from a psychology- of-
religion point of view.” See Birgit Weyel, “Religion und
Gefühl. Religionspsychologische Aspekte im Anschluß an William James,” in
Arcadia: International Journal for Literary Studies 44 (2009), 64–72, here 67. Sidney
Ahlstrom calls James’s work “a twentieth-century version” of Schleiermacher’s On
Religion, in Ahlstrom (ed.), Theology in America: The Major Protestant Voices from
Puritanism to Neo-Orthodoxy, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003, 496.
8. Comprehensive information can be found in a multivolume work on the history
of the American reception of Schleiermacher: Jeffrey A. Wilcox, Terrence N. Tice,
and Catherine L. Kelsey (eds.), Schleiermacher’s Influences on American Thought and
Religious Life (1835–1920), 3 vols., Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2014. On the relationship
between pragmatism, esp. that of John Dewey, and Schleiermacher, see esp. vol. 2,
113–124 and 198–264.
9. For example, Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, Cambridge, MA: Belknap,
1931, vol. 1, 575, and vol. 6, 590.
10. William James, “Reflex Action and Theism,” in William James, The Works, vol. 19,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, 90–113, here 91. On p. 265 of this
edition, the editors point out that Widener Library at Harvard holds James’s copy of
Schleiermacher’s Der christliche Glaube, but that it shows no sign of James having
read it (thanks to Paul Croce, one of the top experts on all James’s materials).
11. William James, letter to Alice James, October 17, 1867, in The Correspondence of
William James, vol. 4, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995, 212–217,
here 213.
12. Robert D. Richardson, William James, 85.
13. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 27 and 51.
14. Josiah Royce Papers, Box B, “Student in Germany,” Harvard Archives, quoted in Frank
M. Oppenheim, S.J., Reverence for the Relations of Life, Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2005, 473, fn. 2.
15. Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co.,
1892, 172; Josiah Royce, Fugitive Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1920, 267 and 314. The first of these passages appears in an essay on George Eliot
that includes an outline of the history of German ideas on religion from Lessing to
Feuerbach and David Friedrich Strauß.
16. George Herbert Mead, “Review of Gustav Class, Untersuchungen zur Phänomeno
logie und Ontologie des menschlichen Geistes. Leipzig 1896,” in American Journal of
Theology 1 (1897), 789–792, esp. 789.
17. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929), New York: Paragon, 1980, 306f. Other
references appear in John Dewey, Early Works 4, Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1972, 149; 5, 137; Middle Works 8, Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1978, 145 and 177.
18. Ibid.,  308.
Notes 283
19. For my critique of Dewey’s “sacralization of democracy,” see Hans Joas, The Genesis of
Values, 121–123.
20. Steven Rockefeller, John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, 89.
21. Wayne Proudfoot, “From Theology to a Science of Religion: Jonathan Edwards and
William James on Religious Affection,” in Harvard Theological Review 82 (1989),
149–168; a comprehensive embedding of James’s psychology of religion in American
religious history and history of science is provided by Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and
Visions.
22. Robert D. Richardson, “Schleiermacher and the Transcendentalists,” in Charles
Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (eds.), Transient and Permanent: The
Transcendentalist Movement and Its Context, Boston: Northeastern University Press,
1999, 121–147, here 121.
23. In a letter from George Ripley to Theodore Parker of 1852, printed in Octavius
Brooks Frothingham, Ripley, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1882, 229, quoted
in Robert D. Richardson, “Schleiermacher and the Transcendentalists,” 122.
24. According to Ulrich Barth, “Friedrich Schleiermacher,” in Friedrich Wilhelm Graf
(ed.), Klassiker der Theologie, vol. 2, Munich: Beck, 2005, 58–88, here 68f.
25. Robert D. Richardson, “Schleiermacher and the Transcendentalists,” 141.
26. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Das Problem der Religion” (1911), in Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 6, Leipzig: Teubner, 1924, 288–305, here 293.
27. Ernst Troeltsch, Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie in der Religionswissenschaft,
Tübingen: Mohr, 1905, 11 and 14, now in Ernst Troeltsch, Schriften zur Religions
wissenschaft und Ethik (1903–1912) (= KGA, vol. 6.1), ed. by Trutz Rendtorff in
collaboration with Katja Thörner, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014, 215–256, here 220
and 223f.
28. Hans Joas, “American Pragmatism and German Thought: A History of Mis
understandings,” in Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993, 94–121.
29. See Georg Wobbermin, “Vorwort des Übersetzers,” in William James, Die religiöse
Erfahrung in ihrer Mannigfaltigkeit, Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1907, iii–xviii, here iv.
30. Ibid.,  vii.
31. According to Wobbermin in the preface to the second edition, Leipzig 1914, xiii–
xxxi, here xvi.
32. Georg Wobbermin, “Vorwort des Übersetzers,” xi.
33. For a detailed account, see Hans Joas, “Pragmatism and Historicism: Mead’s
Philosophy of Temporality and the Logic of Historiography,” in Hans Joas and Daniel
R. Huebner (eds.), The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2016, 62–81.
34. William James, Varieties, 248.
35. Ibid.,  48.
36. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799),
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 30. On play, see 60.
37. Ibid.,  46.
284 Notes
38. Ibid.,  47.

39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.,  48.
41. Ibid.,  30.
42. Ibid.,  30–31.
43. These remarks relate to Schleiermacher’s On Religion. In his Sittenlehre, he
introduces the famous distinction between “effective” (wirksam) and “representative”
(darstellend) action, which points beyond the philosophy of consciousness and has
had a fruitful effective history into the present era. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Die
christliche Sitte nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange
dargestellt, Berlin: Reimer, 1843 (reprinted Waltrop: Verlag Hartmut Spenner, 1999,
ed. by Ludwig Jonas); Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christliche Sittenlehre (lecture in
the winter semester of 1826–1827) (ed. by Hermann Peiter), Berlin: Lit, 2011 (with
thanks to Wolfgang Huber and Michael Moxter for their valuable suggestions).
44. Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, 134–136.
45. Ernst Troeltsch, “Selbständigkeit,” 493. On the charge of a lack of historicity, see
also Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on
a Universal Theme, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 100. This book
provides an outstanding history of ideas on the topic of “experience”; especially rele-
vant here is ch. 3, “The Appeal of Religious Experience: Schleiermacher, James, Otto,
and Buber” (78–130).
46. Remarkably, Ludwig Feuerbach—a key figure in the critique of religion through
his attempt to transform theology into anthropology—came to the defense of
Schleiermacher in opposition to Hegel’s polemical critique. Hegel, of course, per-
ceived a risk of atheism in Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the “feeling.” In our context
one might suspect a lapse into Hume’s critique of religion, which derives notions of
God from feelings of fear. Feuerbach, however, disagrees: “I reproach Schleiermacher
not, like Hegel, for making religion a matter of feelings, but only because, due to his
theological bias, he did not and could not recognize the inevitable implications of his
standpoint, and because he did not have the courage to understand and admit that,
objectively, God is nothing other than the essence of the feeling, if, subjectively, the
feeling is the principal element of religion. I am so little opposed to Schleiermacher,
in fact, that he effectively helps confirm my thesis as deduced from the nature
of the feeling” (Ludwig Feuerbach, “Zur Beurteilung der Schrift ‘Das Wesen des
Christentums’ ” [1842], in Ludwig Feuerbach, Werke, ed. by Erich Thies, Frankfurt/
M: Suhrkamp, 1975, vol. 3, 210–222, here 211). As the intellectual debates on reli-
gion continued, Feuerbach’s defense of Schleiermacher could be taken as evidence
that Schleiermacher’s “turn to feeling” did in fact foster the loss of the transcendence
of God and bolster the critique of religion. But this is to assume that Feuerbach un-
derstood Schleiermacher correctly, which is by no means the case. In fact, Feuerbach
adopted Hegel’s assumption that Schleiermacher had a subjectivist conception of
feeling, but this fails to do justice to the complexity of Schleiermacher’s ideas. Such
an argument would be even less valid if applied to James’s “turn to experience.”
Interestingly, in his history of the concept of “experience,” Martin Jay too perpetuates
Notes 285
this misunderstanding: Martin Jay, Songs of Experience, 101f.; for an instructive cor-

rective, see Maciej Potepa, “Feuerbach und Schleiermacher,” in Hans-Jürg Braun,
Hans-Martin Sass, Werner Schuffenhauer, and Francesco Tomasoni (eds.), Ludwig
Feuerbach und die Philosophie der Zukunft, Berlin: Akademie, 1990, 165–177.
47. For the original version of this section, see Hans Joas, “Religious Experience and Its
Interpretation: Reflections on James and Royce,” in Hermann Deuser, Hans Joas,
Matthias Jung, and Magnus Schlette (eds.), The Varieties of Transcendence: Pragmatism
and the Theory of Religion, New York: Fordham University Press, 2016, 219–235.
For an overview of primary texts and the associated debate, see the following two
anthologies: Stuart Rosenbaum (ed.), Pragmatism and Religion, Urbana: University of
Illinois, 2003; Deuser et al. (eds.), The Varieties of Transcendence.
48. See Charles Sanders Peirce, “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908), in
The Essential Peirce (ed. by Peirce Edition Project), Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1998, vol. 2, 434–450. In fact, no one in Germany has made a greater contri-
bution than Hermann Deuser to the reception of Peirce’s philosophy of religion. In
the writings of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, so central to Peirce’s recep-
tion in Germany, this field was of marginal importance only. See Hermann Deuser,
Gottesinstinkt. Semiotische Religionstheorie und Pragmatismus, Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2004; Deuser, Was ist Wahrheit anderes als ein Leben für eine Idee?
Kierkegaards Existenzdenken und die Inspiration des Pragmatismus, Berlin: de Gruyter,
2011, 291–663; Deuser, Religionsphilosophie, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009.
49. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), New York: Free Press
1995, 420.
50. Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, 67f.
51. I opt for such strong language because I was aware of James’s weakness but not Royce’s
proposed remedy when I wrote The Genesis of Values.
52. So far just one book on Royce has been published in German: Karl-Theo Humbach, Das
Verhältnis von Einzelperson und Gemeinschaft nach Josiah Royce. Eine Untersuchung
zum Zentralproblem der Sozialphilosophie, Heidelberg: Winter, 1962. But see also
the comprehensive studies by Eilert Herms, “Metaphysik und Christentumstheorie.
Beobachtungen und Erwägungen zu Josiah Royces ‘religiöser Philosophie’ und
Fundamentaltheologie,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 71 (1974), 410–455;
Eilert Herms, “Josiah Royces Beitrag zur Theorie des Christentums: Beobachtungen
und Erwägungen zu seinen Hibbert Lectures über ‘The Problem of Christianity,’ ” in
Theologische Zeitschrift 36 (1980), 5, 286–310, and 6, 355–373. The latter, second part
of this essay includes a perceptive critique of Royce’s conception of Christianity (see
below, n. 87). Over the last few years, Austrian philosopher Ludwig Nagl has produced
a number of important articles on Royce (and James). See his essay collection: Ludwig
Nagl, Das verhüllte Absolute. Essays zur zeitgenössischen Religionsphilosophie,
Frankfurt/M: Lang, 2010, 221–329. The most important book in this field in France
comes from the great “Christian existentialist” philosopher Gabriel Marcel: Royce’s
Metaphysics (1945), Chicago: Regnery, 1956.
53. Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, New York: Scribner, 1912; Josiah Royce,
The Problem of Christianity (1913), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
286 Notes
Press, 2001 (this edition includes a preface by Frank Oppenheim and an introduction
by John E. Smith of much value to understanding Royce).
54. Josiah Royce, William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life, New York:
Macmillan, 1911, 6f.
55. Ibid.,  25.
56. Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, 6.
57. Ibid.,  27.
58. Ibid., 55. In line with this, the compatibility of Royce’s late philosophy with sociology
was recognized at an early stage: George P. Adams, “The Interpretation of Religion in
Royce and Durkheim,” in The Philosophical Review 25 (1916), 297–304.
59. William James, Varieties, 72.
60. Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, 89f.
61. Ibid.,  128.
62. Ibid.,  145.
63. Ibid.
64. For a comprehensive study of the relationship between Royce and James in every field
of philosophy of relevance to both of them, see Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J., Reverence
for the Relations of Life: Re-Imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce’s Interactions
with Peirce, James, and Dewey, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,
2005, 61–280. With a special focus on their theories of religion: John E. Smith,
“William James and Josiah Royce,” in Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Steven Katz,
and Patrick Sherry (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West, 2 vols.,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, vol. 2, 315–349. On the debate con-
cerning the question of truth, which I leave aside here, see James Conant, “The James/
Royce Dispute and the Development of James’s Solution,” in Ruth Anna Putnam (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to William James, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997, 186–213.
66. Ibid.,  276.
67. Ibid.,  277.
68. Ibid.,  280.
69. Frank M. Oppenheim, Reverence for the Relations of Life, 464, fn. 15.
71. Ibid.,  98f.
72. It seems clear that Royce is not referring to his earlier study of Peirce when he writes
in the preface to The Problem of Christianity (39), “I now owe much more to our
great and unduly neglected American logician, Mr. Charles Peirce, than I do to the
common tradition of recent idealism, and certainly very much more than I have ever
owed, at any point of my own philosophical development, to the doctrines which,
with technical accuracy, can be justly attributed to Hegel.” A passage in his 1914 book
on war is more explicit still: “The present Address differs from any of my former
efforts to define the nature of loyalty through its very explicit use of the ideas of
Charles Peirce” (Josiah Royce, War and Insurance: An Address, New York: Macmillan,
1914, 85). On the basis of material not easily available to John E. Smith in the late
Notes 287
1940s, Randall Auxier has brought out very clearly the long-standing and reciprocal
intellectual relationship between Peirce and Royce. This makes it unmistakably clear
that Royce was in fact familiar with Peirce’s conception of “signs” at an early stage. For
Auxier, the new insight, to which Royce himself referred, was no major turning point
in his intellectual development, but only “an insight about how to use Peirce’s theory
of signs (which Royce had known for years) as a tool for the application of his own
(long-held) theory of community to historical and present and future communities”
(Randall Auxier, Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah
Royce, Chicago: Open Court, 2013, 17). In my context, however, this insight does in
fact deserve to be described as a major turning point.
73. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Ideas, Stray or Stolen, about Scientific Writing. No. 1,” in The
Essential Peirce, vol. 2, 325–330, here 326.
74. Peirce introduced this distinction in his early work and continued to use and refine
it. A particularly clear and concise definition can be found in his letter to British phi-
losopher Victoria Lady Welby of October 12, 1904, in Charles Sanders Peirce, Values
in a Universe of Chance (Selected Writings), ed. by Philip P. Wiener, New York: Dover,
1958, 381–393, here 391f. For a good introductory account of Peirce’s semiotics, see
Ludwig Nagl, Charles Sanders Peirce, Frankfurt/M: Campus, 1992, 21–61.
75. Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1993, 293.
76. Ibid.,  317.
77. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 387.
78. All these ideas are reminiscent of the tradition of hermeneutics, which Royce’s work
independently converged upon. He was never to use the term. See Kenneth W.
Stikkers, “Royce and Gadamer on Interpretation as the Constitution of Community,”
in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15 (2001), 14–19.
80. Here there is clearly a similarity with Talcott Parsons’s concept of “value generali-
zation” and the use I made of it in my book on the history of human rights: Hans
Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, 173–193; Talcott Parsons, “Comparative
Studies and Evolutionary Change,” in Talcott Parsons, Social Systems and the
Evolution of Action Theory, New York: Free Press, 1977, 279–320, esp. 307ff.
81. Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 357. Here there are striking parallels with
the work of Ernst Troeltsch. See Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme
(1922), 2 vols. (= KGA, vols. 16.1 and 16.2), ed. by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collabo-
ration with Matthias Schloßberger, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008, 379.
82. In addition to Frank M. Oppenheim, Reverence, see John E. Smith, Royce’s Social
Infinite: The Community of Interpretation, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1950;
Michael L. Raposa, “In the Presence of the Universe: Peirce, Royce, and Theology as
Theosemiotic,” in Harvard Theological Review 103 (2010), 237–247.
84. Ibid., 43. We encounter this idea again in my discussion of Ernst Troeltsch’s histor-
ical sociology of Christianity (see ch. 4). Royce was familiar with Troeltsch’s Social
288 Notes
Teaching and makes reference to it. We are still waiting for a comprehensive discus-
sion of Royce’s position on the “liberal” German theology of his day. Mathews takes a
step in this direction but in fact only discusses Harnack: Matthew T. Mathews, “The
Theological Framework of Josiah Royce’s ‘The Problem of Christianity,’ ” in American
Journal of Theology and Philosophy 19 (1998), 275–291.
86. Ibid.,  319.
87. Eilert Herms points out that, for Royce, “the concept of the absolute and of God [is
coextensive] with the concept of all possible worldly being” and criticizes the fact that
“the key point when it comes to the Christian idea of God, namely the idea of God as
an authority that is superior to every possible worldly being in the sense that it enables
worldly being to truly be and persist in the first place, is absent from Royce’s work.
While Royce may use the term transcendent to describe the system of all reality as a
system of all possible worldly being vis-à-vis every realized state of the world . . . , the
transcendence and proximity of God in relation to his creation, as found in biblical
faith, is not present in Royce’s work” (Eilert Herms, “Josiah Royces Beitrag,” 367; on
his understanding of the church, see ibid., 369).
88. L. P. Jacks, review of Royce, The Problem of Christianity, in Hibbert Journal 12 (1913),
215–220, here 219f., and John E. Smith, Royce’s Social Infinite,  96–98.
89. See his introduction in The Problem of Christianity, 30, fn. 26. On the lack of distinc-
tion between the relationship between signs and between interpretations in Royce,
see also Eilert Herms, “Josiah Royces Beitrag,” 360f.
90. William James, letter to Josiah Royce, Nauheim, September 26, 1900, quoted in Ralph
Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols., Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 1935, here vol. 1, 817.
91. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, New York: Macmillan, 1908, x.
92. Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, 822.
Additional information on the personal relationship between James and Royce can be
found in John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 1999.
93. William James, Some Problems of Philosophy, New York: Longmans, Green and Co.,
1911, 210f. An interpretation of James’s philosophy from this perspective is pro-
vided by William Joseph Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague,
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. On the problem of articulation, see
Hans Joas, “On the Articulation of Experience,” in Hans Joas, Do We Need Religion?
On the Experience of Self-Transcendence, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008, 37–48.
94. Christoph Seibert, Religion im Denken von William James. However, in my opinion
Seibert goes too far when he infers from the fact that James based himself on texts that
he had a hermeneutic orientation.
95. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 229.
96. Ibid.,  380.
97. Ibid.,  380f.
Notes 289
98. This is the main reason why Charles Taylor contributed to the contemporary debate
on James. See Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
100. Ibid., 388.
101. Ibid.
102. William James, Pragmatism (1907), New York: Dover, 1995, 114.
103. See, for example, William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 136.
104. Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: The Eclipse of
Certainty, 1820–1880, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
106. Ibid., 180f.
107. Ibid., 400.
108. Ibid., 388.
109. John E. Smith, William James and Josiah Royce, 344.
110. George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1932;
John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and
Action (1929), New York: Paragon, 1980; John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry,
New York: H. Holt and Company, 1938.
111. On the relevant issues in intellectual history, see Hans Joas, “Pragmatism and
Historicism.”
112. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith (1957), New York: Harper, 2009; Roy A. Rappaport,
Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999. On the methodological issues bound up with the semiotic foundations
of Robert Bellah’s work (Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the
Axial Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011), see the chapters by me, Merlin Donald,
and Matthias Jung in Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its
Consequences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012 (9–29, 47–76, and
77–101, respectively).
113. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929), 3 vols, New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
115. David C. Lamberth, William James and the Metaphysics of Experience, 106–110, for
details on the relevant materials.
116. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the
Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (1917), Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1958. For a critical examination of his work and a comparison with James,
see my afterword, “Säkulare Heiligkeit. Wie aktuell ist Rudolf Otto?,” in Das Heilige.
Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen
(1917), Munich: Beck, 2014, 255–281.
117. According to Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man (1920), London: Routledge,
2009, 130.
118. Leo Strauss, “The Holy” (1923), in The Early Writings, 1921–1932, ed. by Michael
Zank, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, 75–79, here 76–77.
290 Notes
Chapter 3
1. Following Robert A. Segal, “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion’ and the Beginning
of the Social Scientific Study of Religion,” in Religion 24 (1994), 225–234, here 228.
2. Hans Joas, “Die soziologische Perspektive,” in Hans Joas (ed.), Lehrbuch der Soziologie,
Frankfurt/M: Campus, 32007,  11–38.
3. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), New York: The Free
Press, 1995, 219. Durkheim bases himself here on Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen,
The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, London: Macmillan, 1904, 226–256, here
237. This book includes illustrations of the ritual.
4. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 220.
5. Ibid., 44. In what follows I base my remarks on my more detailed account in Hans
Joas, The Genesis of Values, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, 56–61.
6. For more detail, see Hans Joas, “Durkheim and Pragmatism: The Psychology of
Consciousness and the Social Constitution of Categories,” in Hans Joas, Pragmatism
and Social Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 55–78.
8. Ibid., 9.
9. Ibid., 212.
10. Ibid.,  213.
11. See the transcript of the debate “The Problem of Religion and the Duality of Human
Nature,” in Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long (eds.), Knowledge and Society: Studies
in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present, Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1983, 1–44, here
30. I was made aware of this passage by Jean Torrier’s valuable essay “ ‘Auch in unserer
Zeit werden Götter in den Massen geboren’. Émile Durkheims Erklärungsansätze
zur Entstehung gesellschaftlicher Ideale in der Moderne,” in Berliner Journal für
Soziologie 22 (2013), 497–516. The above-mentioned debate transcript seems to
me one of the most important sources for understanding Durkheim’s intentions in
writing his book on religion, and for clearing up the many misunderstandings of it.
For an early and detailed examination of this transcript, see Robert Alun Jones and W.
Paul Vogt, “Durkheim’s Defense of ‘Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse,’ ” in
Knowledge and Society 5 (1984), 45–62.
12. “Débat sur la possibilité d’une science religieuse,” in Durkheim, Textes, vol. 2,
Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1975, 142–144, here 143.
14. Ibid.,  425.
15. Merely adumbrated here, this idea plays a key role in ch. 7 of the present book, where
it is elucidated in more detail.
16. I point the reader here to the secondary literature mentioned in my book The Genesis
of Values, 197, fn. 8, which I do not repeat here. In the interim, the study of the emer-
gence of Durkheim’s theory and the examination of its early reception, as well as the
associated interpretive endeavors, have progressed significantly. Particularly worth
mentioning and important to my critical discussion are Marcel Fournier, Émile
Durkheim: A Biography, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013 (the most comprehensive
Notes 291
Durkheim biography yet produced); Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005; William Watts Miller, A Durkheimian Quest: Solidarity and the Sacred,
New York: Berghahn, 2012 (which includes an account of the genesis of Durkheim’s
book, 233–256); Sondra L. Hausner (ed.), Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary
Celebration of “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” New York: Berghahn, 2013;
Edward A. Tiryakian, For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology,
Farnham: Ashgate, 2009; Günter Thomas, Implizite Religion. Theoriegeschichtliche und
theoretische Untersuchungen zum Problem ihrer Identifikation, Würzburg: Ergon, 2001,
125–198; Matthias Sellmann, Religion und soziale Ordnung. Gesellschaftstheoretische
Analysen, Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2007, 203–330; Tanja Bogusz and Heike Delitz
(eds.), Émile Durkheim. Soziologie–Ethnologie–Philosophie, Frankfurt/M: Campus,
2013; Bruno Karsenti, “Sociology Face to Face with Pragmatism: Action, Concept,
and Person,” in Journal of Classical Sociology 12 (2012), 398–427; Thomas Idinopulos
and Brian C. Wilson (eds.), Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of
Religion Today, Leiden: Brill, 2002; N. J. Allen, W. S. F. Pickering, and William Watts
Miller (eds.), On Durkheim’s “Elementary Forms of Religious Life,” London: Routledge,
1998. On the relationship between Durkheim’s and James’s theory of religion, see Sue
Stedman Jones, “From ‘Varieties’ to ‘Elementary Forms’: William James and Émile
Durkheim on Religious Life,” in Journal of Classical Sociology 3 (2003), 2, 99–121.
17. The German edition of the critical assessment of the totemism discourse produced by
Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1962 under the title “Le totémisme aujourd’hui” is aptly entitled
Das Ende des Totemismus (“The End of Totemism”; Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1965).
The English edition is Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, Boston, MA: Beacon, 1971.
18. Ibid.,  5.
19. Ibid. Lévi-Strauss essentially subscribes here to the arguments put forward by
Alexander Goldenweiser. The latter also published a highly nuanced critical dis-
cussion of Durkheim’s book (in American Anthropologist, new series 17 [1915],
719–735).
20. For example, in the introduction to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life and quite
explicitly in comments during a 1914 debate: “Remarques sur l’évolution religieuse
et son étude,” in Durkheim, Textes, vol. 2, 146–148, here 147. (“C’est qu’une science
qui débute doit se poser les problèmes sous leurs formes les plus simples, sauf à les
compliquer ensuite progressivement.”)
21. Very interesting in this respect are the views expressed in a letter of August 6, 1912,
by the great British anthropologist and scholar of Australia Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
to Durkheim’s nephew and colleague Marcel Mauss: “Lettres de Radcliffe-Brown a
Mauss,” in Études durkheimiennes 4 (1979), 2–7. For an overview of the ethnological
reception of Durkheim, see also Hans Peter Hahn, “Durkheim und die Ethnologie.
Schlaglichter auf ein schwieriges Verhältnis,” in Paideuma 58 (2012), 261–282.
22. Émile Durkheim, “The Problem of Religion,” 18.
23. Ibid., 4. In the history of the interpretation of Durkheim, the first to draw attention to
this crucial point, as far as I know, was Edward Tiryakian, “Durkheim’s ‘Elementary
Forms’ as ‘Revelation,’ ” in Buford Rhea (ed.), The Future of the Sociological Classics,
292 Notes
Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1981, 114–135, esp. 121f. Tiryakian, admittedly, refers (ex-
clusively) to the only other passage in which Durkheim uses this expression: Émile
Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, “Note critique sur Frazer, ‘Totemism and Exogamy’
et sur Durkheim, ‘Formes élémentaires’ 1913,” now in Émile Durkheim, Journal
sociologique, Paris, 1969, 700–707, here 706: “Bien qu’elle [la religion] ait un rôle
spéculatif à jouer, sa fonction principale est dynamogénique. Elle donne à l’individu
des forces qui lui permettent de se dépasser lui-même, de s’élever au-dessus de sa na-
ture et de la dominer.”
24. A passage in the Confessions of St. Augustine seems to James the perfect descrip-
tion of this state. See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902),
New York: Penguin, 1985, 171.
25. Here I draw on the remarks of Robert Alun Jones, “Practices and Presuppositions: Some
Questions about Durkheim and ‘Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse,’ ” in
Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (eds.), Cambridge Companion, 80–100, esp. 92f.
26. See ch. 5 of the present book. This criticism of Durkheim was first put forward in the
great critical examination penned by Catholic modernist Alfred Loisy, “Sociologie et
religion,” in Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 4 (1913), 45–76.
27. This is what Talcott Parsons had in mind when he wrote shortly before the end of his
life, while looking back over the tremendously influential interpretation of Durkheim
in his early work: “We may very broadly say that the closeness of this identification of
ritual symbolism with societal content is, at least in part, an index of the primitive-
ness of the religious system Durkheim is analyzing.” See Talcott Parsons, “Durkheim
on Religion Revisited. Another Look at the Elementary Forms of the Religious Life,”
in Charles Y. Glock and Philip E. Hammond (eds.), Beyond the Classics? Essays in the
Scientific Study of Religion, New York: Harper and Row, 1973, 156–180, here 169.
28. Salomon Reinach, Orpheus: A General History of Religions, London: Heinemann,
1909, 3, quoted (with reference to the French original: Salomon Reinach, Orpheus.
Histoire générale des religions [1909], Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002, 4), in Guillaume
Cuchet, “La réception catholique des ‘Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse’ (1912)
d’Émile Durkheim,” in Archives de sciences sociales des religions 159 (2012), 29–48,
here 33. This excellent essay is limited to the Catholic reception. The Protestant re-
ception is included in W. S. F. Pickering, “The Response of Catholic and Protestant
Thinkers to the Work of Émile Durkheim: With Special Reference to ‘Les formes
élémentaires,’ ” in Durkheimian Studies 14 (2008), 59–93.
29. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms, 2.
30. See my critical examination of his program in Hans Joas, “Human Dignity: The
Religion of Modernity?,” in Hans Joas, Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of
Self-Transcendence, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007, 133–147. I should also men-
tion here that—taking up one of Émile Durkheim’s ideas—I have written my own
account of the history of human rights and their relationship with the religious
traditions: Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human
Rights, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. The debate on this book
has shown my interpretation of Durkheim to be a controversial one. This is especially
evident in the anthology Hermann-Josef Große Kracht (ed.), Der moderne Glaube
Notes 293
an die Menschenwürde. Philosophie, Soziologie und Theologie im Gespräch mit Hans

Joas (see especially the contributions by Matthias Koenig, Bijan Fateh-Moghadam,
and the editor along with my reply, esp. 244–249). See also the review of the English-
language edition of the book by Edward Tiryakian in Contemporary Sociology 43
(2014), 187–190.
31. Durkheim, “Débat sur la possibilité,” 146.
32. For a nuanced attempt to come to grips with these issues, see Steven Lukes, “Is
Durkheim’s Understanding of Religion Compatible with Believing?,” in Religion 42
(2012),  41–52.
33. To quote Günter Thomas in his perceptive interpretation of Durkheim: Implizite
Religion, 174.
34. A helpful account here is W. Watts Miller, “Secularization and the Sacred: Is There
Really Something Called ‘Secular Religion’?,” in Thomas Idinopulos and Brian C.
Wilson (eds.), Reappraising Durkheim,  27–44.
36. See ch. 2 of the present book.
38. Ibid.,  232f.
39. Durkheim refers to “emblème” and “emblématisme.”
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Here I follow the excellent argument put forward by Günter Thomas (Implizite
Religion, 142–150), see 145, fn. 193 for further literature.
44. Here I use the terminology of Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in
the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1965, esp. ch. 4.
45. The most ambitious attempt to integrate a pragmatism-inspired conception of
symbols into Durkheim’s ritual theory is Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in
the Making of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Another
problem with Durkheim’s ideas about symbols, which I am unable to delve into in
the present book, is that Durkheim treats the semantic content of new symbols gen-
erated through ritual like a “creatio ex nihilo.” An excellent treatment of this problem
can be found in Andreas Pettenkofer, Radikaler Protest. Zur soziologischen Theorie
politischer Bewegungen, Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2010, 220–230.
46. See, for example, Thomas, Implizite Religion, 146.
47. Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren
Zeit, vol. 4: Von Hegels Tod bis zur Gegenwart (1950), Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1973, 324.
48. In what follows I quote from W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites (1889),
New York: Routledge, 2002.
49. Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem, 298–328. Here he also emphasizes the role of
the sensational books of David Friedrich Strauß and Ernest Renan, which were crit-
ical of Christianity, in this development.
294 Notes
50. To quote Cassirer, ibid., 312.

51. Ibid.,  323.
52. See Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology, Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960. Fustel de Coulanges had died in 1889.
53. Jean-Claude Chamboredon, “Émile Durkheim: Le social, objet du science. Du moral
au politique?,” in Critique 445/446 (1984), 460–531, here 512.
54. The idea that this influence was in fact continuous is espoused by Christopher
Prendergast, “The Impact of Fustel de Coulanges’ ‘La Cité antique’ on Durkheim’s
Theories of Social Morphology and Social Solidarity,” in Humboldt Journal of Social
Relations 11 (1983/84), 53–73. The opposite view can be found in the most thorough
study of the subject: Robert Alun Jones, “Durkheim and ‘La Cité antique’: An Essay
on the Origins of Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion,” in Stephen Turner (ed.), Émile
Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist, London: Routledge, 1993, 25–51, here 35.
55. According to Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition, New York: Basic, 1966, 238.
56. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and
Institutions of Greece and Rome, Chelmsford, MA: Courier, 2012, 24–25.
57. Ibid.,  36.
58. Ibid.,  37.
59. Ibid.,  34.
60. Ibid., 40 and 42.
61. Ibid.,  95.
62. Ibid.,  392.
63. Ibid.,  132.
64. Particularly the emergence of the “gens” out of superordinate families. See Émile
Durkheim, “Préface” to the first issue of the journal L’Année sociologique (1896/97),
quoting Émile Durkheim, Journal sociologique, Paris, 1969, 31–36, here 32; in his
study of the “division of labor” of 1893 he was still criticizing Fustel’s emphasis on reli-
gion from a quasi-materialist perspective. See Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor
in Society, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984, 141.
65. See Émile Durkheim, Professional Ethics and Civic Morals, London: Routledge, 1992,
154–158.
66. Ibid.,  154.
67. I would particularly like to highlight the critique penned by Eduard Meyer, who—I
believe correctly—rejects the idea of the family as the most primal social form and,
in line with this, repudiates the notion that larger social formations necessarily came
about through the amalgamation of smaller ones. See Eduard Meyer, Geschichte
des Altertums (1884), vol. 1, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1953,
5f.; see also Camilla Warnke, “Antike Religion und antike Gesellschaft. Wissen
schaftshistorische Bemerkungen zu Fustel de Coulanges’ ‘La cité antique,’ ” in Klio
68 (1986), 287–304. At this point it is also worth noting that both Ernst Troeltsch and
Max Weber were familiar with Fustel’s work. Troeltsch briefly acknowledges it in his
great book on historicism: “At the boundary between prehistory and history we have
Fustel de Coulanges. In his highly instructive Cité Antique he demonstrates the close
connection between the religious idea and social institutions and between the latter
Notes 295
and the former, while also granting the religious idea its qualitative-autonomous con-
tent and comprehending Christianity, in contrast to Comte, not essentially as an or-
ganization but as the individualist breaking of the religious-sociological spell of the
ancient city” (Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme [1922], 2 vols.,
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008 [= Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGA)], vol. 16.1 and 16.2, here
16.1, 648f.). Max Weber also seems to have read Fustel, as the high degree of similarity
between passages in his sociology of religion and some of Fustel’s statements suggest.
See François Héran, “L’institution démotivée. De Fustel de Coulanges à Durkheim
et au-delà,” in Revue française de sociologie 28 (1987), 67–97, esp. 92ff. Since Weber
fails to mention Fustel, the author of this important study goes so far as to refer to
“plagiarism” (96). Bear in mind, however, that Weber himself did not publish his text.
Had he done so he would probably have furnished the relevant references prior to
publication.
68. The critical literature on Fustel is extensive and, with respect to certain issues, such as
the cult of the dead, highly contentious (my thanks to Ralf von den Hoff, Freiburg, for
important pointers in this regard). Holloway, for example, responds to Humphreys’s
trenchant critique with his own countercritique. See S. C. Humphreys, The Family,
Women, and Death: Comparative Studies, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1983, 135–147; R. Ross Holloway, “ ‘La cité antique’ of Fustel de Coulanges and Its
Modern Critics,” in Revue des archéologues et historiens d’art de Louvain 32 (1999), 1–
5. Other important texts include Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Ancient City of Fustel de
Coulanges,” in Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography,
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977, 325–344; Karl Christ, “Fustel de
Coulanges und die antike Gesellschaft,” in Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Der
antike Staat. Kult, Recht und Institutionen Griechenlands und Roms, Munich: Klett-
Cotta, 1988, 9–20; M. I. Finley, “The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max
Weber and Beyond,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977), 305–
327; Georges Dumézil, “Réflexions sur ‘La Cité Antique,’ ” in the following edition of
Fustel’s book: Paris: Albatros/Valmonde, 1982, 7–30; François Hartog, “Préface,” in
the following edition: Paris: Flammarion, 1984, v–xxiv.
69. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, 166. It was “very late,” according
to ibid., 213, that governments declared religion useful—“but then religion was al-
ready dead in their minds.”
70. Ibid.,  167.
71. Ibid.,  211.
72. For example ibid., 13, 396.
73. Ibid.,  123.
74. On the underlying conception of religion here, see Hans Joas (ed.), Was sind
religiöse Überzeugungen?, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003 (my introduction and the
contributors’ arguments, developed chiefly through a critical engagement with
Ludwig Wittgenstein). For a corresponding understanding of Fustel, see François
Héran, “L’institution démotivée,” and Bruno Karsenti, “De l’historiographie ancienne
à la science sociale. Une nouvelle lecture de ‘La Cité antique’ de Fustel de Coulanges,”
296 Notes
in Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), 3–29,

esp. 15–19.
75. In recent years, a third influence has been identified in the field of the study of re-
ligion, namely the work of Indologist Sylvain Lévi. See Ivan Strenski, The New
Durkheim, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006, esp. 134–157 (“The
Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony of Myth: Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians, and Max
Müller”). Similar arguments in this respect have been put forward by Alexander
Tristan Riley, Godless Intellectuals? The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented,
New York: Berghahn, 2010, 63–65 and 128–132; Marcel Fournier, “ ‘Les Formes
élémentaires’ comme œuvre collective. Les contributions d’Henri Hubert et de
Marcel Mauss à la sociologie de la religion tardive d’Émile Durkheim,” in Canadian
Journal of Sociology 39 (2014), 523–546, here 528. I am unable to do justice here to the
complex web of influences within the Durkheim school.
76. The letters of October 20 and November 8, 1907, to the chief editor of the journal
Revue néo-scolastique are reprinted in Émile Durkheim, Textes, vol. 1, 401–405. The
quote is on 404. The partial English translation is taken from Steven Lukes, Emile
Durkheim: His Life and Work—A Historical and Critical Study, London: Penguin,
1973, 237.
77. One of the best studies on the topic thus states ironically, “The tantalizingly elu-
sive statement of indebtedness to Smith is the equivalent in Durkheimian scholar-
ship of Fermat’s Last Theorem” (see Robert A. Segal, “Robertson Smith’s Influence
on Durkheim’s Theory of Myth and Ritual,” in Thomas Idinopulos and Brian
C. Wilson [eds.], Reappraising Durkheim, 59–72, here 63). In addition to the biog-
raphies by Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work, and Marcel Fournier,
Émile Durkheim, see also the studies by Robert Alun Jones, esp. “Robertson Smith,
Durkheim, and Sacrifice: An Historical Context for ‘The Elementary Forms of
the Religious Life,’ ” in Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 17 (1981),
184–205; Jones, “Durkheim, Frazer, and Smith and the Sociology of Religion,” in
American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986), 596–627; and (featuring a certain amount
of self-correction) Jones, “Pragmatism and Protestantism in the Development of
Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion,” in Thomas Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (eds.),
Reappraising Durkheim, 45–58. Jones now places greater emphasis on the influence
of William James on Durkheim and his insights into the attractiveness of ideals,
which burgeoned after 1895. See also W. S. F. Pickering, “The Response,” 62–70, and
Alexandra Maryanski, “The Birth of the Gods: Robertson Smith and Durkheim’s
Turn to Religion as the Basis of Social Integration,” in Sociological Theory 32 (2014),
352–376.
78. We have no evidence of this. Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim, 238 and 450, fn. 1, has
claimed that there was an indirect influence via J. F. McLennan, but there appears
to be no evidence of this either. See T. O. Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith and the
Sociological Study of Religion, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974, 142,
fn. 142.
79. W. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 17.
80. Ibid.,  29.
Notes 297
81. Ibid., 55 and 39.

82. Ibid.,  55.
83. Ibid.,  32.
84. See Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, 8–35,
esp. 29f.; Douglas, In the Active Voice, London: Routledge, 1982, 34–37; Douglas,
Natural Symbols, London: Routledge, 2003, 9–11. See also Robert A. Segal, “William
Robertson Smith vis-à-vis Émile Durkheim as Sociologist of Religion,” in Journal of
Scottish Thought 1 (2008), 1–12.
85. Robert A. Segal, “William Robertson Smith,” 9.
86. In contrast to Robert A. Segal, “William Robertson Smith,” 11, and many others, I do
not think that Durkheim generally declared the collective itself the object of reli-
gious veneration. At the very least one would have to incorporate Durkheim’s thesis
of the increasing sacralization of the person into his conception of modern collec-
tiveness; above all, though, this understanding fails to recognize the basic idea of a
theory of ideal formation, which is simply something quite different than a theory of
projection.
87. Robert Alun Jones, “Pragmatism and Protestantism,” 56– 58; Bernhard Maier,
William Robertson Smith, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009.
88. See n. 67 of this chapter on Troeltsch’s and Weber’s knowledge of Fustel. Both were
also familiar with the work of Smith. See Ernst Troeltsch, “Religionsphilosophie”
(1907), in Ernst Troeltsch, Schriften zur Religionswissenschaft und Ethik (1903–1912)
(= KGA, vol. 6.1), 543–613, here 587. Here Smith is mentioned, along with Julius
Wellhausen, as one of the most useful sources when it comes to the task of explaining
the emergence of “higher” religions out of “lower” ones. It seems unclear to me
whether Troeltsch is referring here to Smith’s book on the religion of the Semites, as
the editors (ibid., fn. 39) assume, or in fact to his book The Prophets of Israel, which
was published in Edinburgh in 1882. Max Weber’s study of Judaism is directly or
indirectly influenced by Robertson Smith. He is mentioned in Max Weber, Ancient
Judaism, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967, 427.
89. W. E. H. Stanner, “Religion, Totemism and Symbolism,” in Ronald M. Berndt and
Catherine H. Berndt (eds.), Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus
Professor A. P. Elkin, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965, 207–237; on this entire
complex of issues, see also Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the
Paleolithic to the Axial Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011, here 117–174.
90. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion (1925), Garden City, NY:
Doubleday Anchor 1954, 57f.
91. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937;
Robert N. Bellah, “Liturgy and Experience,” in James D. Shaugnessy (ed.), The Roots
of Ritual, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973, 217–234; Jeffrey Alexander, “Culture and
Political Crisis. ‘Watergate’ and Durkheimian Sociology,” in Jeffrey Alexander (ed.),
Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988, 187–244; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969),
London: Routledge, 2017; Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion.
298 Notes
92. Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology, 1937–1939, Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1988; on the same topic, see Stephan Moebius, Die Zauberlehrlinge.
Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie (1937–1939), Konstanz: UVK Verlagsge
sellschaft, 2006; Alexander Tristan Riley, Godless Intellectuals; Andreas Pettenkofer,
“Sakralisierung und Abweichung. Das Collège de Sociologie, Marcel Mauss und die
Aktualität der Durkheim-Schule,” in Mittelweg 36, 23 (2014), 95–110; Roger Caillois,
Man and the Sacred (1939), Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.
93. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Boston: Beacon, 1985, 1–
111; Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004; Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values,  54–68.
94. For example Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, and many other texts by the
same author. For further comparative analysis of Tomasello and Mead, see Frithjof
Nungesser, “Mead Meets Tomasello: Pragmatism, the Cognitive Sciences, and
the Origins of Human Communication and Sociality,” in Hans Joas and Daniel
R. Huebner (eds.), The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2016, 252–275.
95. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, 89.
96. Especially apparent in Jürgen Habermas, “A Hypothesis concerning the
Evolutionary Meaning of Rites,” in Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II,
Chichester: Polity, 2017, 43–56. For a critical examination of Habermas’s concep-
tion of ritual, see Massimo Rosati, “The Archaic and Us: Ritual, Myth, the Sacred
and Modernity,” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 40 (2014), 363–368.
97. These are the fundamental ideas in Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
98. Randall Collins, “A Theory of Sexual Interaction,” in Randall Collins, Interaction
Ritual Chains, 223–257.
99. In the introduction to his most recent relevant collection of essays, Jürgen Habermas
self-critically backs away from the radical thesis of a “linguistification of the sa-
cred,” as found in his theory of communicative action. This changes the meaning
of the expression “linguistification of the sacred” or restricts it to the “transfer of
meaning from sources of sacred communication to everyday language” (see Jürgen
Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II, xiv). This is not the place for a more de-
tailed discussion of the remaining or newly arising problems with this conception.
100. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution , esp. 120–138.
101. Ibid., 132, with reference to Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-
Evolution of Language and the Brain, New York: Norton, 1997.
102. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 128; Steven Brown, “The
‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution,” in Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, and
Steven Brown (eds.), The Origins of Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000,
271–301.
103. This definition is influenced by that in Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of
Ritual,” in Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 53–65, here 63.
Notes 299
Chapter 4
1. See Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History, Chicago: Open Court, 21986; Hans
Gerhard Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. In my opinion, both books suffer from a ten-
dency to excessively restrict the relevant intellectual trends to the development of a
specific discipline of “religious studies.” My interpretations and assessments fre-
quently diverge from both.
2. For a representative example of the most important theology in this respect, namely
Protestant theology in nineteenth- century Germany, see Johannes Zachhuber,
Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. On the complex relationship between Catholic
theology and modern historical thought, see Gregor Klapczynski, Katholischer
Historismus? Zum historischen Denken in der deutschsprachigen Kirchengeschichte um
1900, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013.
3. Letter from Ernst Troeltsch to his publisher Oskar Siebeck of September 18, 1910, in
Ernst Troeltsch, Briefe III (1905–1915) (= Kritische Gesamtausgabe [KGA], vol. 20),
ed. by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with Harald Haury, Berlin: de Gruyter,
2016, 396–398, here 398.
4. The studies produced by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf provide a groundbreaking, detailed
investigation of this interaction, as well as clearly bringing out the differences be-
tween Troeltsch and Weber. They appear in collected form in Friedrich Wilhelm Graf,
Fachmenschenfreundschaft. Studien zu Troeltsch und Weber, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014.
5. In numerous publications over the last few years I have tried to demonstrate Troeltsch’s
great importance to the sociology of religion in the broadest sense. See, for example,
Hans Joas, “Selbsttranszendenz und Wertbindung. Ernst Troeltsch als Ausgangspunkt
einer modernen Religionssoziologie,” in Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Friedemann
Voigt (eds.), Religion(en) deuten. Transformationen der Religionsforschung, Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2010, 51–64; Hans Joas, “Society, State and Religion: Their Relationship
from the Perspective of the World Religions—An Introduction,” in Hans Joas and
Klaus Wiegandt (eds.), Secularization and the World Religions, Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2009, 1–22. The first intimations of my critique of Max Weber ap-
pear in Hans Joas, “Max Weber and the Origin of Human Rights: A Study of Cultural
Innovation,” in Charles Camic, Philip S. Gorski, and David M. Trubek (eds.), Max
Weber’s “Economy and Society”: A Critical Companion, Stanford, CA: Stanford
6. Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922), 2 vols. (= KGA, vols. 16.1
and 16.2), ed. by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with Matthias Schloßberger,
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008.
7. Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights,
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, 97–139.
8. Ernst Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie, ed. by Hans
Baron, Tübingen: Mohr, 1925.
300 Notes
9. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), London: Allen
and Unwin, 1931. Since the translation of the title of this book is misleading, it is
quoted here as Social Teachings; see p. 94, including n. 15. For crucial studies of
this book, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Trutz Rendtorff (eds.), Ernst Troeltschs
Soziallehren. Studien zu ihrer Interpretation, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus,
1993 (= Troeltsch-Studien, vol. 6).
10. Karl Mannheim, “Problems of Sociology in Germany” (1929), in Kurt H. Wolff and
Volker Meja (eds.), From Karl Mannheim, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1993,
438–456, here 438; Otto Hintze, “Kalvinismus und Staatsräson in Brandenburg zu
Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Historische Zeitschrift 144 (1931), 229–286, here
229f. Here Hintze refers to the “Heidelberg School of sociologists,” meaning Weber,
Troeltsch, and Jellinek.
11. Most of the relevant studies by Parsons are collected in Talcott Parsons, Action
Theory and the Human Condition, New York: Free Press, 1978. For my interpretation,
see Hans Joas, “The Gift of Life: Parsons’ Late Sociology of Religion,” in Journal of
Classical Sociology 1 (2001), 127–141.
12. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social
Thought, 1890–1930, New York: Knopf, 1958, 235f.
13. Not so hard, perhaps. See the similarly prejudiced remarks by René König in his
autobiographically imbued retrospective: René König, “Soziologie in Berlin um
1930,” in René König, Soziologie in Deutschland. Begründer, Verfechter, Verächter,
Munich: Hanser, 1987, 258–297, esp. 270–274. He accuses Troeltsch of having failed
to liberate himself “from his Christian background” (272), and contends that his
book on the “social teachings” “in fact [represents] no more than a (dogmatic) so-
cial teaching of the Christian churches rather than a sociological analysis of religious
phenomena” (272). It is hard to believe that this assessment is based on a reading of
the book.
14. As persuasively set out in Lori Pearson, Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian
and Theorist of Christianity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
15. See Brian A. Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious
Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 228.
16. Ernst Troeltsch, “Rezension Reinhold Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte,
2. Hälfte” (Erlangen, Leipzig, 1898), originally in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen
163 (1901), 15–30, quoted here from the reprint in Ernst Troeltsch, Rezensionen und
Kritiken (1901–1914) (= KGA, vol. 4), ed. by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration
with Gabriele von Bassermann-Jordan, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004, 89–111, here 92.
17. Ibid., 91f. Troeltsch himself later regarded this review as an outline of the program he
undertook in the Social Teachings. See Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 809, n. 510.
18. For a critique, see Hans Joas, Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014, 63–77.
19. Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 20.
20. Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion” (1895/96), in Ernst Troeltsch,
Schriften zur Theologie und Religionsphilosophie (1888–1902) (= KGA, vol. 1), ed. by
Christian Albrecht in collaboration with Björn Biester, Lars Emersleben, and Dirk
Notes 301
Schmid, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009, 364–535. For an interpretation, see Hans Joas, “The
Independence of Religious Phenomena: The Work of Ernst Troeltsch as a Template
for the Study of Religion,” in Christopher Adair-Toteff (ed.), The Anthem Companion
to Ernst Troeltsch, London: Anthem Press, 2018, 25–35
21. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937.
22. I tried to bring this out in Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996, 44–49.
24. Ibid.
25. Ernst Troeltsch, “Glaube und Ethos der hebräischen Propheten” (1916), in Ernst
Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie,  34–65.
26. Ernst Troeltsch, “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie in der Religionswissenschaft”
(1905), in Ernst Troeltsch, Schriften zur Religionswissenschaft und Ethik (1903–
1912) (= KGA, vol. 6.1), ed. by Trutz Rendtorff in collaboration with Katja Thörner,
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014, 215–256. Here Troeltsch writes that it “remains the task of a
purely empirical approach, of a true psychology of religion, to study the religious ex-
perience without prejudice for or against it” (220).
27. Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 828, n. 210.
28. Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, Leipzig: Teubner, 1907, 159.
29. Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 387, n. 98.
30. Ibid.,  994.
31. Ibid., 69, n. 33.
32. Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1913.
See also Karsten Lehmkühler, “Die Bedeutung des Kultus für das Christentum der
Moderne. Eine Diskussion zwischen Wilhelm Bousset und Ernst Troeltsch,” in Gerd
Lüdemann (ed.), Die “religionsgeschichtliche Schule.” Facetten eines theologischen
Umbruchs, Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1996, 207–224.
33. This also points up the problematic character of the term “church” in the work of
Fustel de Coulanges and Durkheim. Both use it to refer to every religious community,
even if this is not differentiated from the political community.
35. Ibid.,  283.
36. Ibid.,  483f.
37. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
38. Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 48f.
39. Ibid.,  44.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid.,  1004.
42. Ibid.,  996.
43. Ernst Troeltsch, “Rezension Reinhold Seeberg,” 91.
44. Ernst Troeltsch, “Auguste Sabatier: Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion d’après
la psychologie et l’histoire” (1897), originally in Deutsche Litteraturzeitung 19 (1898),
737–742, here in Ernst Troeltsch, Rezensionen und Kritiken (1894–1900) (= KGA,
302 Notes
vol. 2), ed. by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with Dina Brandt, 328–333.
The term “critical symbolism” appears on 329 and 332.
45. Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 68. Here Troeltsch is in fact heavily influenced by
Max Weber’s studies on antiquity and the decline of ancient culture. See also 168,
n. 14, and Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte,
Tübingen: Mohr, 1924, 1–311.
47. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. See Hans Joas, Sind die Menschenrechte westlich?, Munich: Kösel, 2015.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.,  83.
55. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age,
Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011, 596. For a detailed discussion of the so-called Axial
Age, see ch. 5 of the present book.
56. Arie L. Molendijk, Zwischen Theologie und Soziologie. Ernst Troeltschs Typen der
christlichen Gemeinschaftsbildung: Kirche, Sekte, Mystik, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Ver
lagshaus, 1996.
58. Ibid.,  379.
59. Ibid.,  380.
60. All quotations ibid.
61. Ernst Troeltsch, “Peter A. Clasen: Der Salutismus” (1915), originally in Historische
Zeitschrift 115 (1915), 327–330, here in Ernst Troeltsch, Rezensionen und Kritiken
(1915–1923) (= KGA, vol. 13), ed. by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with
Diana Feßl, Harald Haury, and Alexander Seelos, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010, 84–87.
62. H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism, New York: Holt, 1929.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 430f., fn. 160. On this topic, see Hans Joas, Sind die Menschenrechte westlich?
66. Arie L. Molendijk, Zwischen Theologie und Soziologie, 188.
67. Ernst Troeltsch, Social Teachings, 554, fn. 264. Of course, this statement does not pro-
vide a complete account of the difference between Weber and Troeltsch in this regard.
Particularly important to assessing these matters is Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism
and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World,
London: Wipf and Stock, 1999. See also my further remarks in this chapter on the
topic of the Reformation.
69. Ibid. (translation modified), see also ibid., 206f.
70. Ibid.,  255.
71. Ibid.
Notes 303
72. Ibid.,  999.

73. Ibid., 1006 (translation modified). On this topic, see Hans Joas, “Was dürfen wir
hoffen?,” in Rudolf Walter (ed.), Inspiration für das Leben. Im Dialog mit der Bibel,
Freiburg: Herder, 2015, 205–218.
74. For an account that is highly attentive to these issues and provides useful insights
into the hidden sociologization of church history even before Troeltsch, see Manfred
Wichelhaus, Kirchengeschichtsschreibung und Soziologie im neunzehnten Jahrhundert
und bei Ernst Troeltsch, Heidelberg: Winter, 1965.
75. Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, “Wissenssoziologische Überlegungen zu Renaissance und
Niedergang des katholischen Naturrechtsdenkens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert”
(1973), in Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, Soziologie und Sozialethik. Gesammelte Aufsätze
zur Moralsoziologie, ed. by Stephan Goertz, Freiburg (Switzerland): Herder, 2013,
321–354. See 350, fn. 91: “Our analysis here largely tallies with that of Troeltsch,
though from an inverse perspective. The reception of Stoic ideas on natural law func-
tioned to integrate ‘church’ and ‘society,’ while the attempts made by the popes since
Pius IX to propagate such ideas resulted in the segregation of ‘church’ and ‘society’ ”
(emphasis in original).
77. Ibid.
78. On these issues, see also Hans Joas, Kirche als Moralagentur?, Munich: Kösel, 2016.
79. On the personal and professional relationship between Weber and Troeltsch and a
number of potentially valuable arguments as to why Troeltsch should not, either po-
litically or theologically, simply be described as a liberal, see Heinz Eduard Tödt, “Max
Weber und Ernst Troeltsch in Heidelberg,” in Wilhelm Doerr (ed.), Semper Apertus.
Sechshundert Jahre Ruprecht- Karls-
Universität Heidelberg 1386– 1986. Fest
schrift
in sechs Bänden, vol. 3, Berlin: Springer, 1985, 215–258; but see above all Friedrich
Wilhelm Graf, Fachmenschenfreundschaft (with a lengthy introduction: 1–79). Astute
thoughts on the differences between Weber and Troeltsch can also be found in Kristian
Fechtner, Volkskirche im neuzeitlichen Christentum. Die Bedeutung Ernst Troeltschs
für eine künftige praktisch-theologische Theorie der Kirche, Gütersloh: Gütersloher
Verlagshaus, 1995, esp. 51–78.
80. Ernst Troeltsch, “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie in der Religionswissenschaft.”
81. Max Weber, Religiöse Gemeinschaften, ed. by Hans Gerhard Kippenberg (= Max-
Weber-Gesamtausgabe, section I, vol. 22.2), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001, or Max
Weber, “Religious Groups (The Sociology of Religion),” in Max Weber, Economy and
Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1922, 399–634. In what follows I quote from this text as it appears in Economy and
Society.
82. Talcott Parsons chose a different rendering in English: “elimination of magic from the
world.” This is clearer, but also narrower. It fails to do justice to the various meanings
of the term in Weber’s work and was never to take off. Other translators, however,
opted for further variants, making it difficult to gain any kind of overview of Weber’s
use of the term in the English translations of his work.
304 Notes
83. Hartmut Lehmann, Die Entzauberung der Welt. Studien zu Themen von Max Weber,
Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009, 7.
84. This term is older, already appearing in the work of William James, The Varieties of
Religious Experience (1902), New York: Penguin, 1982, 47 (twice).
85. Jörg Lauster, Die Verzauberung der Welt. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Christentums,
Munich: Beck, 2014.
86. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, New York:
Viking, 2009, 817.
87. Johannes Weiß, “Max Weber: Die Entzauberung der Welt,” in Josef Speck (ed.),
Grundprobleme der großen Philosophen, vol. 4, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und
Ruprecht, 1981, 21991,  9–47.
88. Karl Löwith, “Die Entzauberung der Welt durch Wissenschaft. Zu Max Webers 100.
Geburtstag,” in Merkur 18 (1964), 501–519.
89. Akademie Aktuell. Zeitschrift der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1
(2014), Schwerpunkt: Die Entzauberung der Welt. 150 Jahre Max Weber.
90. Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought
of Max Weber, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
91. Wolfgang Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, 2 vols., Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1988, here vol. 1, 102f.
92. Wolfgang Schluchter, Die Entzauberung der Welt. Sechs Studien zu Max Weber,
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009, esp. 1–17.
93. See, for example, Charles Lemert, “1905: Weber in the Year of Miracles,” in William
H. Swatos Jr. and Lutz Kaelber (eds.), The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the
Centenary of the Weber Thesis, London: Paradigm, 2005, ix–xii, here ix.
94. Hans Vaihinger, “Zur Einführung,” in Kant-Studien 1 (1896), 1–8, here 5. Vaihinger
sought to use this phrase to describe the new journal’s mission.
95. The most influential example being Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action.
96. See Walter M. Sprondel, “Entzauberung,” in Joachim Ritter (ed.), Historisches
Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1972, col. 564/565, which includes examples of these terms’ use.
97. Friedrich Schiller, “The Gods of Greece,” in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (ed.),
Poems of Places: An Anthology in 31 Volumes, Greece and Turkey in Europe, vol. 19,
Boston: Osgood, 1876–79, 5–8 (“godless nature” inserted by the translator of the
present work).
98. In the “Introduction” to his collected essays in the sociology of religion, Weber uses
the term “entgottet” (translated here as “robbed of gods”): “The unity of the primi-
tive image of the world, in which everything was concrete magic, has tended to split
into rational cognition and mastery of nature, on the one hand, and into ‘mystic’
experiences, on the other. The inexpressible contents of such experiences remain
the only possible ‘beyond,’ added to the mechanism of a world robbed of gods. In
fact, the beyond remains an incorporeal and metaphysical realm in which individ-
uals intimately possess the holy” (my emphasis); in Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze,
vol. 1, 254 (English translation as “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,”
in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills [eds.], From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,
Notes 305
New York: Routledge, 2009, 267–301, here 282). For a persuasive critique of the

claim that Weber had drawn on Schiller, as in the work of Morris Berman (The
Reenchantment of the World, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981, 69), see
Hartmut Lehmann, Die Entzauberung der Welt, 13, fn. 15.
99. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, “Einleitung in des Verfassers sämtliche philosophische
Schriften” (1815), in Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Schriften zum transzendentalen
Idealismus, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2004, 373–433, here 399. August Wilhelm
Schlegel uses the term “entzaubern” in a critique of Enlightenment ideas on me-
thodical language instruction. See August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Allgemeine Übersicht
des gegenwärtigen Zustandes der deutschen Literatur” (1802/ 03), in August
Wilhelm Schlegel, Geschichte der klassischen Literatur, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1964 (= Kritische Schriften und Briefe, ed. by Edgar Lohner, vol. 3), 22–85, here 66.
I learned of this in Christian Begemann, Furcht und Angst im Prozeß der Aufklärung,
Frankfurt/M: Athenäum, 1987, 79.
100. For the quotations, see Georg Simmel, “Vom Heil der Seele,” here quoted from
the edition by Horst Jürgen Helle (ed.), Georg Simmel, Gesammelte Schriften
zur Religionssoziologie, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989, 61– 66, here 64.
I gleaned this information from Volkhard Krech, Wissenschaft und Religion,
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002, 234, fn. 1. Simmel’s observations on this topic
were already highlighted in 1930 in Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum communio: A
Theological Study of the Sociology of the Church, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009,
204, fn. 76. Krech asserts (following Werner Gephart, Strafe und Verbrechen,
Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1990, 83), that Émile Durkheim uses the term in his
book on suicide: Le suicide (1897), Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1973, 229
(English: Suicide: A Study in Sociology, London: Routledge, 2005, 214; the word
used in the translation is “disillusionment”). “Ainsi, se forment des courants de
dépression et de désenchantement.” I also found the word “désenchantement” in the
context of suicide statistics in Durkheim, L’ éducation morale (1934), Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1963, 52 (“Nous voyons la société saisie d’une tristesse, d’un
désenchantement qui se traduisent dans la courbe des suicides”). The translations
do not use the term “Entzauberung”: in German “Enttäuschung” or “disappoint-
ment” is used (118), and in English “pessimism” (52). Durkheim’s use of this word
cannot, in fact, be considered close to the Weberian version, let alone its forerunner.
101. Alfred de Musset, La confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836), Paris: Bookking
International, 1995, 26: “Ce fut comme une dénégation de toutes choses du ciel et
de la terre, qu’on peut nommer désenchantement, ou si l’on veut, désespérance.” In
the first German translation this is rendered as follows: “Es war, als versagte man
jeglichem Ding auf Erden und im Himmel den Glauben, und man konnte von einer
Entzauberung oder, wenn man will, von einer völligen Verzweiflung sprechen.” See
Alfred de Musset, Bekenntnisse eines Kindes seiner Zeit, Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek
in Berlin, n.d. (1915), 16. The new translation (Zürich: Manesse, 1999, 21) does
without the word “Entzauberung” and refers to “Enttäuschung” [disappointment].
102. The claim that the term “désenchantement” and thus Weber’s term “Entzauberung”
first appears in the work of Musset comes from Rémi Brague, The Wisdom
306 Notes
of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003, 194, n. 54. Given the evidence of the
earlier occurrence of this term in German, I have to contradict Brague on this point.
But even in French there are earlier occurrences, for example in the work of Balzac
in 1831 (see Honoré de Balzac, “Lettres sur Paris, 9.1.1831,” in Honoré de Balzac,
Œuvres diverses, Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1925, vol. 2, 114f.). Wolfgang Schluchter
speculates that Weber may have been inspired by Emil Ludwig (Wagner oder die
Entzauberten, Berlin: Felix Lehmann, 1913), though without providing any evi-
dence (see Schluchter, Entzauberung, 1f.); this is an implausible claim. Hartmut
Lehmann, meanwhile (Die Entzauberung der Welt, 13), believes it possible that
Weber was influenced by a text by Dutch theologian Balthasar Bekker from the
late seventeenth century, bearing the title “bezauberte Welt” [Enchanted world]
in German translation. This idea was already mentioned by Christian Begemann,
Furcht und Angst, 78.
103. György Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1916), London: Merlin Press, 2006, 97.
104. Emil Lask, “Zum System der Wissenschaften,” in Emil Lask, Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. III, Tübingen: Mohr, 1924, 239–293, here 258.
105. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (1921), Frankfurt/ M: Suhrkamp,
1988, 246f.
106. Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923), Edinburgh: Clark, 1937, here 69.
107. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944),
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002, 1 and 2.
108. Peter Wust, “Die Krisis des abendländischen Menschentums” (1927), in Peter Wust,
Weisheit und Heiligkeit. Vorträge und Aufsätze (= Gesammelte Werke, vol. VI),
Münster: Regensberg, 1966, 254–312, here 305.
109. I managed to identify a total of seventeen places in Weber’s writings in which ref-
erence is made to disenchantment/ disenchanted [Entzauberung/ entzaubert]
and so on. The first is in the essay “Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden
Soziologie” [“Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology”]; in the tome Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft [Economy and Society] the term appears just once in the chapter
on the sociology of religion. There are four occurrences in the new edition of the
Protestant Ethic, and four more in other passages of the Gesammelte Aufsätze
zur Religionssoziologie, two of them in the “Intermediate Reflection.” “Science
as a Vocation” contains six instances. The Wirtschaftsgeschichte also includes
one example of its use. To ensure that I did not miss any occurrences—in corre-
spondence, for example—I sought the help of Edith Hanke, general editor of the
Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, who carried
out additional research. No other instances were identified (my thanks to Edith
Hanke for her support). The literature on Weber’s narrative of disenchantment
is so enormous that I make no attempt to provide a list, merely mentioning the
titles I myself have used. For a recent overview of the state of the debate, I men-
tion just Hans Kippenberg, “Dialektik der Entzauberung. Säkularisierung aus der
Perspektive von Webers Religionssystematik,” in Thomas Schwinn and Gert Albert
Notes 307
(eds.), Alte Begriffe – Neue Probleme. Max Webers Soziologie im Lichte aktueller
Problemstellungen, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016, 81–116.
110. Max Weber, “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology,” in The Sociological
Quarterly 22 (2), 151–180.
111. It is unclear whether Weber’s reference to “the second part of the essay” means
Part II or the second half of the text, which is made up of seven parts. Differing
views on this can be found in Wolfgang Schluchter, Entzauberung, and Johannes
Winckelmann, “Die Herkunft von Max Webers ‘Entzauberungs’- Konzeption.
Zugleich ein Beitrag zu der Frage, wie gut wir das Werk Max Webers kennen
können,” in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 32 (1980), 12–49.
112. Max Weber, “Categories,” 155. Translation slightly modified.
113. Ibid., 154.
114. Ibid.
115. For a fundamental critique and possible alternative, see Hans Joas, The Creativity of
Action.
116. Max Weber, “Categories,” 155.
117. Max Weber, Economy and Society, 506.
118. Ibid.
119. Ibid.
120. Max Weber, The Essential Weber: A Reader, London: Routledge, 2004, 35.
121. Ibid.
122. Here Charles Taylor seems to me to cleave too closely to Weber. He too writes that
the “disenchanted” world appears to be one without meaning, but then rightly
rejects the tendency to engage in backward historical projection to the effect that
the question of meaning was decisive to the emergence and development of religion
(Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007, 680).
123. Matthias Jung, Gewöhnliche Erfahrung, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014, 118f.
Relevant works of John Dewey are John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry,
New York, 1938, 60–80; Dewey, Experience and Nature (1925), New York: Dover,
1958,  40–77.
124. Friedrich H. Tenbruck, “Das Werk Max Webers,” in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie
und Sozialpsychologie 27 (1975), 663–702.
125. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London: Routledge,
2001, 61f.
126. Ibid., 178, fn. 19.
127. Friedrich H. Tenbruck, “Das Werk Max Webers,” 667.
128. Hans Joas, Was ist die Achsenzeit? Eine wissenschaftliche Debatte als Diskurs über
Transzendenz, Basel: Schwabe, 2014, 31.
129. Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, 71.
130. Very much in line with this is ibid., 95: “The Baptist denominations along with the
predestinationists, especially the strict Calvinists, carried out the most radical de-
valuation of all sacraments as means to salvation, and thus accomplished the reli-
gious rationalization [Entzauberung] of the world in its most extreme form.”
131. Ibid., 97.
308 Notes
132. Max Weber, “Social Psychology of the World Religions,” 226.

133. Max Weber, The Religion of China, New York: Free Press, 1951, 226.
134. Ibid.
135. Ibid., 226f.
136. Max Weber, General Economic History, Chelmsford, MA: Courier, 2012, 362.
138. Max Weber, The Essential Weber, 238.
139. Max Weber, “ ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy” (1904), in The
Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. by Edward A. Shils and Harry A. Finch,
Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949, 50–112, here 82.
140. Charles Taylor, “Disenchantment–Reenchantment,” in Charles Taylor, Dilemmas
and Connections: Selected Essays, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011, 287–302.
141. On the transformation of myth into logos, see the literature on the “Axial Age” and
ch. 5 of the present book.
142. Max Weber, The Essential Weber, 244.
143. Dirk Kaesler, Max Weber. Preuße, Denker, Muttersohn. Eine Biographie, Munich:
Beck, 2014, 752.
144. It seems certain that Weber had already used the term in a lecture, as it appears
in a newspaper report on the latter. This text in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten
of November 9, 1917 (morning edition), is reprinted in Wolfgang Mommsen, Max
Weber und die deutsche Politik, Tübingen: Mohr, 21974, 290, fn. 292.
145. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (eds.), The
Vocation Lectures, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004, 1–31, here 13.
146. Ibid., 11.
147. Ibid., 13.
148. Ibid.,  12–13.
149. Ibid., 13.
150. Max Weber, “Categories,” 179.
151. Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 2013; Charles
Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (1984), Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
152. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 31.
153. Ibid., 22.
154. Ibid.
155. Ibid., 24. Here Weber refers not to David Hume and his theory as examined in the
first chapter of the present book, but to John Stuart Mill.
156. Ibid.
158. See Hartmann Tyrell, “Max Weber: Wertkollision und christliche Werte,” in
Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik 37 (1993), 121–138.
160. Ibid., 30.
161. Ibid., 31.
Notes 309
162. Dirk Kaesler, Max Weber, 759. This is in contrast to Wolfgang Schluchter, for whom
this talk and that on “Politics as a Vocation” are philosophical texts. See his com-
prehensive and informative introduction to the new edition of the two talks in Max
Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf / Politik als Beruf (= Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, sec-
tion I, vol. 17), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992, 1–46, here 1.
163. Max Weber, Protestant Ethic, 124.
164. Ibid.
166. Wolfgang Schluchter, Entzauberung.
168. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, 5.
169. Wolfgang Schluchter, Entzauberung, 8 and 7.
170. Ibid.
171. Wolfgang Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, vol. 2, 518.
172. Max Weber, “Social Psychology of the World Religions,” 282.
174. Ibid.
175. Max Weber, Economy and Society, An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (ed. by
Guenther Toth and Claus Wittich), Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978, 400.
176. Ibid.
177. Stefan Breuer questions, for good reasons, Weber’s familiarity with this literature;
he believes Weber had probably only consulted the associated reference works. See
Stefan Breuer, “Magie, Zauber, Entzauberung,” in Hans G. Kippenberg and Martin
Riesebrodt (eds.), Max Webers “Religionssystematik,” Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2001, 119–130, here 126.
179. Here Charles Taylor puts forward arguments similar to those of Durkheim: “Even
in the pre-Axial period, ritual was not simply an attempt at manipulation of higher
powers, as we would understand this today, because it was accompanied by a sense
of awe at these higher powers, and often a sense of wrongness in going against them,
captured by a term like ‘hubris’ for instance, as well as feelings of devotion and grat-
itude for favours conferred” (A Secular Age, 439).
182. According to Hartmann Tyrell, “Potenz und Depotenzierung der Religion. Religion
und Rationalisierung bei Max Weber,” in Saeculum 44 (1993), 300–347, here 305.
183. Hartmann Tyrell, “ ‘Das Religiöse’ in Max Webers Religionssoziologie,” in Saeculum
43 (1992), 172–230, here 192.
185. Ibid., 404.
186. Ibid., 405.
187. It should be added—as Hans Gerhard Kippenberg and Joachim Radkau, for ex-
ample, have pointed out— that Weber also increasingly opened his mind to
310 Notes
the topic of ecstasy, not, of course, under the influence of Durkheim, but that of
Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde; yet he did not consistently conceive of this ecstasy as
constitutive of sacredness. See Joachim Radkau, Max Weber. Die Leidenschaft des
Denkens, Munich: Carl Hanser, 2005, 599 (the English translation is abridged);
Hans Gerhard Kippenberg, “Religionsanalyse im Zusammenhang mit einer
pragmatistischen Handlungstheorie,” in Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer (ed.), Hans Joas
in der Diskussion. Kreativität–Selbsttranszendenz–Gewalt, Frankfurt/M: Campus,
2012, 59–78, esp. 73; in that volume, see also my “Antwort auf Kippenberg” (79–85);
Erwin Rohde, Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks
(1898), London: Routledge, 2014; on Rohde’s influence on Weber, see Stefan Breuer,
“Max Weber, das Charisma und Erwin Rohde,” in Zeitschrift für Religions-und
Geistesgeschichte 67 (2015), 1–16.
189. I related these reasons to Habermas as one of the thinkers who has most consist-
ently set out his ideas within a theory of language framework. Weber, meanwhile,
wrote before the “linguistic turn” as such and was unfamiliar with the semiotics of
American pragmatism; as a comparison with Dilthey or Troeltsch reveals, his work
also features major shortcomings from a hermeneutic perspective.
1982, 150. For an interpretation, see Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000, 50f. Among philosophers, when it comes to
the prereflective constitution of meaning, American pragmatism is, often, not the
main point of reference. Instead they refer to the thought of Martin Heidegger and
Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
191. It should be emphasized that James did not give deep consideration to the symboli-
cally mediated nature of human perception; see ch. 2 of the present book. The way in
which Wolfgang Hellmich treats Max Weber as a quasipragmatist seems to me mis-
leading. See Wolfgang Hellmich, Aufklärende Rationalisierung. Ein Versuch, Max
Weber neu zu interpretieren, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2013, esp. 187–223.
Pakistani sociologist Basit Bilal Koshul also seems to me to overstate the similarities
between Weber and pragmatism (Basit Bilal Koshul, The Postmodern Significance
of Max Weber’s Legacy. Disenchanting Disenchantment, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005). He attempts to substantiate the thesis that Weber himself made a
substantial contribution to stripping disenchanted rationalism of its enchantment.
His objective thus differs from mine, when I refer to stripping the narrative of disen-
chantment of its enchantment.
192. Wolfgang Schluchter, Entzauberung, 3.
193. See Joachim Radkau, Max Weber: A Biography, Cambridge: Polity, 2009, 200, on
Weber’s lack of understanding of libidinously charged work.
195. This is not to deny that these versions, particularly in Weber’s day in the wake
of the debates on the First Vatican Council, exercised a major influence that ex-
tended into the magisterium. On the history of this term, see Matthias Laarmann,
“Sacrificium intellectus,” in Joachim Ritter et al. (eds.), Historisches Wörterbuch
Notes 311
der Philosophie, vol. 8, col. 1113–1116; Andreas Speer, “Sacrificium intellectus,” in

Archivio di filosofia 76 (2008), 57–70. For the defense of a positive meaning, see
Max Scheler, On the Eternal in Man (1921), London: Routledge, 2009, 345–347. In
a well-regarded speech in November 1999, Joseph Ratzinger too put forward his
views on these issues, making it clear that recognizing the limits of scientific know-
ledge is not a matter of enjoining people to engage in acts of obedience. See Joseph
Ratzinger, “Christianity— the True Religion?,” in Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and
Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004, 162–
183. Specifically on the sacrificium intellectus of the priest, who is not supposed to
propound his private philosophy of life when preaching the Word of God but must
nonetheless be more than a “telegram messenger,” that is, who must place himself
at the disposal of the “Word,” see Joseph Ratzinger, “Bereitung zum priesterlichen
Dienst,” in Joseph Ratzinger, Künder des Wortes und Diener eurer Freude (=
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12), Freiburg: Herder, 2010, 423–450, here 442f. (my thanks to
Christian Schaller).
196. See the pertinent remarks by Charles Taylor, “Recovering the Sacred,” in Inquiry 54
(2011), 113–125.
197. I can claim to have espoused this distinction for years (see Hans Joas, The Sacredness
of the Person, 56f., on the secular/religious distinction versus profane/sacred; on
transcendent/immanent, see my studies on the Axial Age). It is expressed with par-
ticular clarity in José Casanova, “Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity
in Bellah’s Theory of Religious Evolution,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas
(eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012, 191–221. And it is now the basis for the theory of religion in Reinhard
Schulze, Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam, Basel: Schwabe, 2015, 109ff.
198. On the emergence of the term “religion” in the sense of an opposition to the sphere
of the “secular,” see the remarks in ch. 1 of this book; on the emergence of notions of
transcendence, see ch. 5.
199. For more detail on the concept of the sacred, see ch. 2 of the present book; Hans Joas,
The Sacredness of the Person, 51f.; Joas, “Säkulare Heiligkeit. Wie aktuell ist Rudolf
Otto?,” in Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen
und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1917), Munich: Beck, 2014, 255–281.
200. Max Weber, The Religion of China, 226.
201. See Hartmann Tyrell, “Potenz und Depotenzierung,” 306, fn. 20.
202. Ibid., 323.
203. Ibid., 311.
204. See Hans Joas, Was ist die Achsenzeit?,  26–35.
205. Yehuda Elkana, “Second- Order Thinking in Classical Greece,” in Shmuel N.
Eisenstadt (ed.), Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, vol. 1, Albany: State
University of New York Press: 1986, 40–64.
206. Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution. On the complex of themes known as
the “Axial Age,” see the detailed account in ch. 5 of the present book.
208. Ibid.
312 Notes
209. Nathan Sivin, “Chinesische Wissenschaft. Ein Vergleich der Ansätze von Max
Weber und Joseph Needham,” in Wolfgang Schluchter (ed.), Max Webers Studie über
Konfuzianismus und Taoismus. Interpretation und Kritik, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1983, 342–362. More positive about Weber in the context of the same comparison
is Benjamin Nelson, “Sciences and Civilizations, ‘East’ and ‘West’: Joseph Needham
and Max Weber,” in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 11 (1974), 445–493.
210. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age.
211. Of the vast and of course also controversial literature, here I mention just an ex-
cellent overview: Rivka Feldhay, “Religion,” in The Cambridge History of Science,
vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 727–755. It distinguishes three
main narratives on the relationship between religion and science as it has devel-
oped over the course of history (eternal conflict; peaceful coexistence; affinities and
interactions), affirms the relative validity of each narrative, and above all emphasizes
how the religious upheavals of the early modern period and the development of
modern science led to changes whose complexity is not well conveyed by any of the
three narratives.
212. The standard text by Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic,
New York: Scribner, 1971, is highly compatible with Weber’s narrative of disenchant-
ment. For the debate on this book, see the introduction by the editors in Jonathan
Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996,
1–45. On the history of the “miracle,” see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park,
Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750, New York: Zone, 2001. For a critique,
see Michael Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review,” in
American Historical Review 111 (2006), 692–716, esp. 703–705. Saler writes, “In this
respect, enchantment waxed rather than waned by the time of the Enlightenment,
countering more linear narratives of progressive disenchantment” (703).
213. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 247.
214. Max Weber, “ ‘Objectivity,’
” 57. Some scholars have used statements like
this as the basis for an interpretation of Weber as the defender of unintellec-
tual value commitments: Joachim Vahland, “Entzauberung. Max Weber und
seine Interpreten,” in Kant-Studien 90 (1999), 410– 433; for more detail, see
Joachim Vahland, Max Webers entzauberte Welt, Würzburg: Königshausen und
Neumann, 2001.
215. For more detail on this, see ch. 6 of the present book.
216. Again, the relevant literature is enormous. As an example of an alternative to
this weakness of Weberian analyses, here I mention just Peter van der Veer, The
Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India, Princeton,
217. Letter from Max Weber to Ferdinand Tönnies, February 19, 1909, in Max-Weber-
Gesamtausgabe, section II, vol. 6, Tübingen: Mohr, 1994, 64f. For more on this letter,
see ch. 5 of the present book.
218. See Hans Joas, “Nachwort,” in Alfred Döblin, Der unsterbliche Mensch /Der Kampf
mit dem Engel, Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2016, 613–636.
Notes 313
219. Letter from Max Weber to Elisabeth Gnauck-Kühne of July 15, 1909, in Max-Weber-
Gesamtausgabe, section II, vol. 6, 176.
220. Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism,
New York: Free Press, 1967, 336f.
221. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, esp. 270–296. As absorbing as Weber’s writings on
this topic and on the other world religions are, time and again they leave me with
an uneasy feeling. They are obviously based in large part on lengthy excerpts from
secondary sources, but he presents them as if they were primary research findings.
He almost never tries to weigh the pros and cons of conflicting views. Instead Weber
decides with an authoritative air what is right and wrong.
222. Ibid., 290.
223. Ibid., 291.
224. Ibid., 294.
225. Ibid., 296.
226. Ibid., 273.
227. Ibid., 268.
228. Ibid., 277.
229. This term and this topic have long dominated the critical engagement with this text,
but I have to leave aside their problematic character here. One of the earliest critics of
Weber on this front is still worth reading: Julius Guttmann, “Max Webers Soziologie
des antiken Judentums” (1925), in Wolfgang Schluchter (ed.), Max Webers Studie
über das antike Judentum. Interpretation und Kritik, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1981,
326; the same goes for Arnaldo Momigliano, “A Note on Max Weber’s Definition of
Judaism as a Pariah Religion,” in History and Theory 19 (1980), 313–318; for a sum-
mary, see Wolfgang Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, vol. 2, 182–192.
231. See ibid., esp. 369–378, here 375. “Deutero-Isaiah” (= Second Isaiah) is the term ap-
plied to the (fictional?) author of c hapters 40–55 of the Book of Isaiah.
232. For a comprehensive reconstruction, see Eckart Otto, Max Webers Studien des Antiken
Judentums, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002. For a shorter account that focuses on
comparisons with Weber’s contemporaries, see Eckart Otto, “Die hebräische Prophetie
bei Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch und Hermann Cohen. Ein Diskurs im Weltkrieg zur
christlich-jüdischen Kultursynthese,” in Wolfgang Schluchter and Friedrich Wilhelm
Graf (eds.), Asketischer Protestantismus und der “Geist” des modernen Kapitalismus.
Max Weber und Ernst Troeltsch, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005, 201–255. Also useful
is Bernhard Lang, “Prophet, Priester, Virtuose,” in Hans G. Kippenberg and Martin
Riesebrodt (eds.), Max Webers “Religionssystematik,” 167–191. On the significance of a
latent engagement with Nietzsche, see Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values,  27–31.
233. See the excellent essay by Konrad Schmid, “Klassische und nachklassische Deutungen
der alttestamentlichen Prophetie,” in Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 3
(1996), 225–250.
234. Ibid., 247.
235. It is, of course, a great irony, then, when Tony Fahey praises Weber’s text as nothing
short of a methodological model for the analysis of individuals: Tony Fahey, “Max
Weber’s Ancient Judaism,” in American Journal of Sociology 88 (1982), 62–87.
314 Notes
236. In this light, one might also rethink the comparison between Weber’s perspective
and Ernst Troeltsch’s interpretation of the prophets, which he produced in connec-
tion with a different issue. See Ernst Troeltsch, “Glaube und Ethos der hebräischen
Propheten,” 34–65. In his comparative analysis, “Die hebräische Prophetie,” Eckart
Otto aligns himself with Weber’s concerns to an astonishing degree. A more
apt means of grasping Troeltsch’s perspective is provided by Johann Hinrich
Claussen, Die Jesus-Deutung von Ernst Troeltsch im Kontext der liberalen Theologie,
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997, 72–78. For more on the topic of the prophets, see ch.
5 of the present book.
237. Correct in this respect is Stefan Breuer, Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie,
Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1991, 66f.
239. Ibid., 223.
240. Ibid., 222.
241. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the
Modern World Economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
242. A summary that magnifies all the various criticisms can be found in Heinz Steinert,
Max Webers unwiderlegbare Fehlkonstruktionen. Die protestantische Ethik und der
Geist des Kapitalismus, Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2010. See also the review of this book
by Johannes Weiß, “Was steckt dahinter?,” in Archives européennes de sociologie 52
(2011), 580–587.
243. From this perspective, Troeltsch’s writings seem to me far superior. In addition to
my observations in the first part of this chapter, see esp. Ernst Troeltsch, Schriften
zur Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die moderne Welt (1906–1913) (= KGA, vol.
8), Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001. Of the recent literature, the following provocative book
in particular highlights the distorted nature of our conception of the Reformation
as a result of the focus on its “surviving” variants: Brad Gregory, The Unintended
Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012.
244. I find the scholarship of Wolfgang Reinhard most impressive in this respect. See,
for example, his classic essay “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena
zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters” (1977), now in Wolfgang Reinhard,
Ausgewählte Abhandlungen, Berlin: Dunkler und Humblot, 1997, 77–102, and the
rich literature building on his work.
245. Pioneering here is Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the
‘Disenchantment of the World,’ ” in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993),
475–494. Salient to my arguments, in addition to Scribner’s publications, which
are now available in collected form (Robert W. Scribner, Religion and Culture in
Germany 1400–1800, ed. by Lyndal Roper, Leiden: Brill, 2001), are the studies of
Alexandra Walsham. See Walsham, “Reformation Legacies,” in Peter Marshall
(ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reformation, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015, 227–268; Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the
World’ Reassessed,” in The Historical Journal 51 (2008), 497–528; and coming to
profounder conclusions: Walsham, “Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious
Notes 315
Change in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 44 (2014), 241–280. There are, however, certainly grounds for the
claim that Weber himself was already focusing on the level of lived faith by consid-
ering popular devotional literature. But it is surely beyond dispute that his sources
here were far from adequate.
246. For an excellent account of this, see Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation,”
476–480.
247. Ibid., 483. A fascinating study of the spontaneous sacralization of spaces under the
conditions of a strict theological antisacramentalism is provided by Brian C. Wilson,
“Altars and Chalkstones: The Anomalous Case of Puritan Sacred Space in Light of
Durkheim’s Theory of Ritual,” in Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (eds.),
Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today, Leiden: Brill,
2002, 163–182.
248. Robert W. Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany, 1400–1800, 327; on historical
change in this respect, see Heinz-Dieter Kittsteiner, “Das Gewissen im Gewitter,” in
Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 10 (1987), 7–26.
249. See ch. 5 of the present book, 316, n. 10.
250. See above, 125f.
251. Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation,” 493.
252. Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation,” 528. British historian Owen Chadwick
warned of the dangers of the concept of disenchantment as early as 1975 in his
important book on secularization. See Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of
the European Mind in the 19th Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975, 258.
253. I was made aware of this by Alexandra Walsham, “Migrations of the Holy,” 247, with
reference to Ulinka Rublack and Robin Briggs. To gain a more complete picture, one
would also have to pay more attention to the research on the witch hunts and witch
mania of the early modern period.
254. Alexandra Walsham, “Reformation Legacies,” 267.
255. Through a critical engagement with Max Weber, Hartmut Lehmann has repeat-
edly called for this with reference to the history of pietism: Hartmut Lehmann, Die
Entzauberung der Welt. Studien zu Themen von Max Weber, Göttingen: Wallstein,
2009; Lehmann, Religiöse Erweckung in gottferner Zeit. Studien zur Pietismusfor
schung, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010. Also salient, with a focus on global Penteco
stalism in the twentieth century, is the oeuvre of British sociologist of religion
David Martin. See, for example, his essay “The Relevance of the European Model
of Secularization in Latin America and Africa,” in Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt
(eds.), Secularization and the World Religions, Liverpool, 2010, 278–295. On Martin,
see my recent contribution: Hans Joas, “Introduction: More Weberian Than Weber?
David Martin’s Political Sociology of Religion,” in Joas (ed.), David Martin and the
Sociology of Religion, Oxford: Routledge, 2018, 1–15.
256. According to Johannes Weiß, “Entzauberung,” 26.
316 Notes
Chapter 5
1. Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Zukunftsmöglichkeiten des Christentums,” in Logos 1 (1910/

11), 165–185, here 168.
2. On the intellectual challenges arising from the work of Troeltsch, see Hans Joas, Faith
as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2014, esp. 126–137; on the organizational ones, see Joas, Kirche als Moralagentur?,
Munich: Kösel, 2016.
3. Ernst Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922), 2 vols., Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2008 (= Kritische Gesamtausgabe [KGA], vols. 16.1 and 16.2), here 763.
4. See Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Die ‘kompetentesten’ Gesprächspartner? Implizite
theologische Werturteile in Max Webers ‘Protestantischer Ethik,’ ” in Friedrich
Wilhelm Graf, Fachmenschenfreundschaft. Studien zu Troeltsch und Weber, Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2014 (= Troeltsch-Studien, new series, vol. 3), 111–149.
5. Ibid., 114.
6. The letter is reprinted in Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, section II, vol. 6, Tübingen:
Mohr, 1994, 64ff.; this English translation comes from Guenther Roth and Wolfgang
Schluchter (eds.), Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984, 82.
7. Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, section II, vol. 6, 113, fn. 12.
8. Max Weber, “ ‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America: An Ecclesiastical Socio-
Political Sketch,” Sociological Theory 3 (1985), 7–13, here 11. In the version included
in Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsätze, this passage has been cut. This translation uses “reli-
giously unattuned” for “religiös unmusikalisch.”
9. Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World,” in From Max Weber: Essays in
Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, ed. by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills,
1946, 323–359, here 358.
10. Alan Wolfe, The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our
Faith, New York: Free Press, 2003. Wolfe provides a particularly vivid account of this
state of affairs in an interview (www.homileticsonline.com). Asked about the meager
knowledge of theological teachings among (American) believers, he explains his as-
tonishment that most Presbyterians know little about the doctrine of predestination,
“about which I would have thought people would have some familiarity, since it is as-
sociated with the historical origins of their church. Most people don’t, and don’t care,
and you start to explain it to them and their eyes glaze over.”
11. Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World,” 359.
12. This assertion requires mild qualification if we take account of Durkheim’s book
on the history of the university in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. See Émile
Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and
Development of Secondary Education (1938), London: Routledge, 1977.
1982, 78–188. Here James follows a conceptual distinction formulated by British
theologian Francis W. Newman, younger brother of Cardinal Newman, in Francis
W. Newman, The Soul: Its Sorrows and Its Aspirations, London: Chapman, 31852,
89–91 (cf. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, 80f.). Felicitas Krämer clearly
Notes 317
discerns the connection between the formation of psychological types and assertions
about religious history: Krämer, Erfahrungsvielfalt und Wirklichkeit. Zu William
James’ Realitätsverständnis, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006, 86–88.
I disagree with her classification of Hinduism, however.
15. See, for example, Josiah Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, New York: Scribner,
1912, 8.
16. A good overview can be found in Edith Hanke, “Erlösungsreligionen,” in Hans
G. Kippenberg and Martin Riesebrodt (eds.), Max Webers “Religionssystematik,”
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001, 209–226. See the reference there (211) to the first
use of the term in Otto Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage,
Berlin: Reimer, 1878, 725.
17. Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religion (1902/
1912), London: SCM, 1972, 107f.
18. Ibid.,  109.
19. Ibid. On this topic in his later writings, see also Ernst Troeltsch, “Erlösung: II.
Dogmatisch,” in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
1910, vol. 2, col. 481–488, and Troeltsch, Glaubenslehre, Munich: Duncker und
Humblot, 1925, 326–364.
20. Ernst Troeltsch, “Glaube und Ethos der hebräischen Propheten” (1916), in
Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie, ed. by Hans Baron,
Tübingen: Mohr, 1925, 34–65; Troeltsch, “Erlösung: II. Dogmatisch,” col. 481–488.
21. Wilhelm Bousset, “Propheten und Prophetische Religionen,” in Bousset, Das Wesen
der Religion, dargestellt an ihrer Geschichte, Halle: Gebauer-Schwetschke, 1906,
82–103.
22. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. by
Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978,
443f., and Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism,
Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958, 153 and 354f., n. 25.
23. Edith Hanke, “Erlösungsreligionen,” 224 (following Wolfgang Schluchter).
24. Leo Strauss, “On the Argument with European Science” (1924), in: Leo Strauss,
The Early Writings (1921–1932), Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002,
107–117. For an excellent interpretation and contextualization, see Stephan Steiner,
Weimar in Amerika: Leo Strauss’ Politische Philosophie, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2013, 54f. Strauss’s text refers to Georg Wobbermin (ed.), Religionsphilosophie, Berlin:
Heise, 1924.
25. Leo Strauss, “On the Argument,” 109.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 108. For key contextual information, see Thomas Meyer, Vom Ende der
Emanzipation. Jüdische Philosophie und Theologie nach 1933, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
und Ruprecht, 2008.
29. In the preface, written in 1964, to the first publication of the German original of his
book on Hobbes, Strauss refers to the “revival of theology, a process that for me is asso-
ciated with the names of Karl Barth and Franz Rosenzweig.” See Leo Strauss, Hobbes’
318 Notes
politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften. Briefe (= Gesammelte Schriften,

vol. 3), Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008, 7–10, here 7. See the reference to this in Friedrich
Wilhelm Graf, Der heilige Zeitgeist. Studien zur Ideengeschichte der protestantischen
Theologie in der Weimarer Republik, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011, 49f.
30. Friedrich Gogarten, “Die Krisis unserer Kultur” (1920), in Friedrich Gogarten, Die
religiöse Entscheidung, Jena: Diederichs, 1921, 32–53.
31. See Christian Henning, “Die Funktion der Religionspsychologie in der Protestanti
schen Theologie um 1900,” in Christian Henning and Erich Nestler (eds.), Religion
und Religiosität zwischen Theologie und Psychologie, Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1998, 27–78,
here 73f.
32. A fascinating study of these phenomena in another field of culture is provided by
Albrecht Koschorke, “Moderne als Wunsch. Krieg und Städtebau im 20. Jahrhundert,”
in Leviathan 27 (1999), 23–42.
33. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Der heilige Zeitgeist, 50f., with reference to Friedrich
Gogarten, “Zwischen den Zeiten” (1920), in Jürgen Moltmann (ed.), Anfänge der
dialektischen Theologie, vol. II, Munich: Kaiser, 1963, 95–102, here 97. The same
volume by Graf includes a detailed analysis of Gogarten (265–328) and Troeltsch’s
responses to the relevant intellectual movements (139– 160). Troeltsch him-
self responded to Gogarten in 1921: Ernst Troeltsch, “Ein Apfel vom Baume
Kierkegaards,” in Christliche Welt 35 (1921), 11, col. 186–189, now also in Jürgen
Moltmann (ed.), Anfänge, 134–140. A good analysis of the attempt not to view the
Christian faith as part of general religious and cultural history, and the paradox-
ical consequences of this attempt, is provided by Gerhold Becker, Neuzeitliche
Subjektivität und Religiosität. Die religionsphilosophische Bedeutung von Heraufkunft
und Wesen der Neuzeit im Denken von Ernst Troeltsch, Regensburg: Pustet, 1982,
esp. 9–40. Gertrud von Le Fort’s novel Der Kranz der Engel (the second part of her
work Das Schweißtuch der Veronika) includes a devastating scene that may to some
extent be understood as a clash between Troeltsch and Gogarten in the older man’s
house (Munich: Ehrenwirth, 1956, 539ff.). See Eugen Biser, Glaubensprognose.
Orientierung in post-säkularistischer Zeit, Graz: Styria, 1991, 57–63.
34. In what follows I draw on lengthy passages from my book on the topic. See Hans Joas,
Was ist die Achsenzeit? Eine wissenschaftliche Debatte als Diskurs über Transzendenz,
Basel: Schwabe, 2014. Here I augment and revise these passages in a number of ways.
See also Joas, “The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse,” in Robert N. Bellah
and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012, 9–29.
35. Among the few exceptions are two articles by Aleida Assmann: “Jaspers’ Achsenzeit,
oder Schwierigkeiten mit der Zentralperspektive in der Geschichte,” in Dietrich
Harth (ed.), Karl Jaspers. Denken zwischen Wissenschaft, Politik und Philosophie,
Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989, 187–205, and “Einheit und Vielfalt in der Geschichte. Jaspers’
Begriff der Achsenzeit neu betrachtet,” in Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (ed.), Kulturen der
Achsenzeit, vol. 2, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1992, 330–340. See also Norbert J. Rigali,
“A New Axis: Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy of History,” in International Philosophical
Quarterly 10 (1970), 441– 457; Georges Goedert, “Die universalgeschichtliche
Notes 319
Einheitsidee bei Karl Jaspers,” in Jahrbuch der Österreichischen Karl- Jaspers-

Gesellschaft 11 (1998), 9–27; Richard Dietrich, “Karl Jaspers als Geschichtsdenker,”
in Richard Dietrich (ed.), Historische Theorie und Geschichtsforschung der Gegenwart,
Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964, 75–98; Suzanne Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers: A Biography, New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004, esp. 199–207. See also the remarks in Austin
Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices
from Weimar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, 361, fn. 45.
36. Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1932, for example
100–102.
37. Karl Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, New York: Harper and Row, 1967.
38. For an example, see “Philosophie und Offenbarungsglaube. Ein Gespräch mit Heinz
Zahrnt,” in Hans Saner (ed.), Karl Jaspers: Provokationen. Gespräche und Interviews,
Munich: Piper, 1969, 63–92, here 89 and 85.
39. Paul Ricoeur, “The Relation of Jaspers’ Philosophy to Religion,” in Paul Arthur
Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, New York: Tudor, 1957, 611–642, here
623f.; Heinrich Barth, “Karl Jaspers über Glaube und Geschichte” (1950), in Hans
Saner (ed.), Karl Jaspers in der Diskussion, Munich: Piper, 1973, 274–296, here 286ff.
40. On Jaspers’s significance in this respect, see Jörg Dittmer, “Jaspers’ ‘Achsenzeit’ und
das interkulturelle Gespräch,” in Dieter Becker (ed.), Globaler Kampf der Kulturen?
Analysen und Orientierungen, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1999, 191–214.
41. To quote Ricoeur, “The Relation of Jaspers’ Philosophy to Religion,” 639; similar
remarks in Heinrich Barth, “Karl Jaspers,” 292. In a significant analysis of Jaspers,
Leszek Kolakowski too has highlighted the fact that his concept of the “cipher” may
be misunderstood in that it implies the possibility of “deciphering” at least an original
text—but Jaspers did not work on this assumption. At the same time, Jaspers’s ciphers
are not a means of coming into contact with the divine. See Leszek Kolakowski,
“Philosophical Faith in the Face of Revelation,” in Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity
on Endless Trial, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, 108–119, here 113.
For an interesting attempt, on the basis of Karl Rahner’s religious inclusivism, to
criticize Jaspers’s conception of Jesus Christ and his religious pluralism, see James
A. Montmarquet, “Jaspers, the Axial Age, and Christianity,” in American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2009), 239–254.
42. Jürgen Habermas, “Vom Kampf der Glaubensmächte. Karl Jaspers zum Konflikt
der Kulturen,” in Jürgen Habermas, Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen
Ausdruck, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1997, 41–58.
43. On the importance of Weber to Jaspers, see Dieter Henrich, “Karl Jaspers: Denken im
Blick auf Max Weber,” in Wolfgang Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwentker (eds.), Max
Weber und seine Zeitgenossen, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988, 722–
739; and Joshua Derman, “Philosophy beyond the Bounds of Reason: The Influence
of Max Weber on the Development of Karl Jaspers’s Existenzphilosophie, 1909–1932,”
in David Chalcraft et al. (eds.), Max Weber Matters: Interweaving Past and Present,
Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008, 55–71. Neither Henrich nor Derman go into the topic
of the Axial Age at all.
44. Alfred Weber, Ausgewählter Briefwechsel, Marburg: Metropolis, 2003, 129f.
320 Notes
45. Hans Joas, “Max Weber and the Origin of Human Rights: A Study of Cultural
Innovation,” in Charles Camic, Philip S. Gorski, and David M. Trubek (eds.), Max
Weber’s “Economy and Society”: A Critical Companion, Stanford, CA: Stanford
46. Hans Joas, “Eine deutsche Idee von der Freiheit? Cassirer und Troeltsch zwischen
Deutschland und dem Westen,” in Rainer Forst, Martin Hartmann, and Rahel Jaeggi
(eds.), Sozialphilosophie und Kritik, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2009, 288–316. In
this sense it is notable that one of the first reviews of Jaspers’s book was titled “Die
Überwindung des Historismus” [Overcoming historicism]; see Rudolf Schottländer,
in Der Monat 2 (1949), 12, 96–98.
47. Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms,
Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2010. On the concept of the “axial turning” in
Simmel’s work, see Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000, 79–81. On the influence of Simmel’s book on the early Heidegger and
his understanding of death, see Michael Großheim, Von Georg Simmel zu Martin
Heidegger. Philosophie zwischen Leben und Existenz, Bonn: Bouvier, 1991; John E.
Jalbert, “Time, Death, and History in Simmel and Heidegger,” in Human Studies 26
(2003), 259–283, and the instructive introduction by Donald N. Levine and Daniel
Silver to the English-language edition of Simmel’s book: The View of Life, ix–xxxii.
48. Georg Simmel, The View of Life, 54.
49. Donald N. Levine, “Note on the Concept of an Axial Turning in Human History,”
in Said Amir Arjomand and Edward A. Tiryakian (eds.), Rethinking Civilizational
Analysis, London: Sage, 2004, 67–70. One might argue, however, that in his essay on
Michelangelo, Simmel does in fact interpret the turn to the worldly in Renaissance
art as an “axial turning” vis-à-vis the transcendence-orientation of the Gothic style,
and that in this sense he applies his conceptual scheme to the rise and decline of
“transcendence.” But he does not refer to this change as a turning point in world
history: Georg Simmel, Philosophische Kultur, Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1923, 168.
An older attempt, not so much to claim that Simmel influenced Jaspers as to apply
Simmel’s idea of the “axial turning” to Jaspers’s Axial Age—that is, to suggest that the
beginning of the “axial turning” lies in the “Axial Age”—is provided by Leo Franke,
“Die Achsenzeit als Wendung zur Idee: K. Jaspers und G. Simmel,” in Zeitschrift für
philosophische Forschung 26 (1972), 83–102.
50. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, London: Routledge, 2010, 1 (emphasis
added).
51. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, Kitchener, ON: Batoche,
2001, 338f. Curiously, here the English-language edition translates the German word
“Angel” as “axis.” My thanks to Austin Harrington (Leeds) for pointing this out.
52. Ibid. For the classical interpretation of this passage, see Karl Löwith, From Hegel to
Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought (1941), London: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1954, 31–36, esp. 34f.
53. Joseph Pohle, Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, vol. 1, Paderborn: Schöningh, 1914, 20 (em-
phasis added). My thanks to Roland Kany (Munich) for making me aware of this pas-
sage. I do not, however, have any evidence that Jaspers was familiar with this text. The
Notes 321
first use of the terms “axis” and “Axial Age” in Jaspers’s work is to be found in a talk he
delivered in Geneva in 1946: Karl Jaspers, The European Spirit, London: SCM, 1947.
54. Martin Riesebrodt, “Ethische und exemplarische Prophetie,” in Hans G. Kippenberg
and Martin Riesebrodt (eds.), Max Webers “Religionssystematik,” 193–208.
55. Ernst von Lasaulx, Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen
gegründeten Philosophie der Geschichte (1856), Munich: Oldenbourg, 1952 (for more
detail on Lasaulx, see the excursus later in this chapter). Lasaulx mentions August
Friedrich Gfrörer, Urgeschichte des menschlichen Geschlechts, Schaffhausen: Hurter,
1855, see 206f., and Eduard Röth, Die ägyptische und die zoroastrische Glaubenslehre
als die ältesten Quellen unserer spekulativen Ideen, Mannheim: Bassermann, 1846.
The latter refers (348) to Anquetil-Duperron as his source.
56. Dietrich Metzler, “A. H. Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) und das Konzept der
Achsenzeit,” in Achaemenid History 7 (1991), 123–133. He refers to Anquetil-
Duperron’s translation and publication of the ancient Persian Zend-Avesta (Paris,
1771). For an account of Anquetil-Duperron’s achievement, see Jürgen Osterhammel,
Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2019, 363–367. He calls Anquetil-Duperron’s translation “the first
scholarly work on an Asiatic text standing completely outside the biblical and clas-
sical Mediterranean traditions and, as such, it deserves to be seen as a founding docu-
ment of a truly polyphonous global history” (363). A comprehensive biography of the
scholar is available in French: Jean-Luc Kieffer, Anquetil-Duperron. L’Inde en France
au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1983.
57. John Stuart Stuart-Glennie, In the Morningland: Or, The Law of the Origin and
Transformation of Christianity, vol. I: The New Philosophy of History, London:
Longman, Greens and Company, 1873. The first to draw attention to this author in
connection with the Axial Age debate was Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of
Man, London: Allen and Unwin, 1957, 57. A detailed account is now available: Eugene
Halton, From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers,
and a New Understanding of the Idea, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
58. George Foot Moore, History of Religion, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1914, vol. 1, viii/
ix. I found the reference to this in James Turner, Religion Enters the Academy: The
Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion in America, Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2011, 65.
59. Rudolf Otto, “Parallels and Convergences in the History of Religions,” in Rudolf
Otto, Religious Essays: A Supplement to “The Idea of the Holy,” Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1931, 95–109. As it happens, his book is dedicated to Wilhelm
Bousset, who had already introduced the phrase “prophetic age” in 1906. See p. 317,
n. 21 in this chapter.
60. Alfred Weber, Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie, Leiden: Sijthoff, 1935, 7.
61. Alfred Döblin (ed.), The Living Thoughts of Confucius, New York: Longmans, Green
and Co., 1940, for example, 17.
62. Benjamin Schwartz, “The Age of Transcendence,” in Daedalus 104 (1975), 1–7.
Arnold Gehlen also demonstrates a sense for this when he refuses to apply “our” un-
derstanding of the “supernatural” to “primitive cultures.” In that context, he contends,
322 Notes
it is in fact “a dimension, a quality of everyday life that may come into play at any
time, because one transcends into the this-worldly realm, but this does not entail
a difference between the beyond and this world of the kind we inevitably associate
with the concept of the supernatural” (Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur.
Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen [1956], Frankfurt/M: Athenäum, 21964, 99).
63. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975, 8f. Of the extremely numerous writings of Shmuel
Eisenstadt, here I mention just “The Axial Age in World History,” in Hans Joas and
Klaus Wiegandt (eds.), The Cultural Values of Europe, Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2008, 22–42.
64. Björn Wittrock, “Cultural Crystallization and Civilization Change: Axiality
and Modernity,” in Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg (eds.), Comparing
Modernities: Pluralism versus Homogeneity: Essays in Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt,
Leiden: Brill, 2005, 83–123, here 112.
65. Both Benjamin Schwartz and Robert Bellah set great store in interpreting
Confucianism as a religion with “post-axial” traits and identifying in several Chinese
traditions concepts whose meaning corresponds with that of transcendence. I am
unable to discuss this nonetheless controversial issue further here. In addition to
Schwartz’s article “The Age of Transcendence,” see his book The World of Thought in
Ancient China, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1985. See also Heiner Roetz, Die chinesische
Ethik der Achsenzeit. Eine Rekonstruktion unter dem Aspekt des Durchbruchs zu
postkonventionellem Denken, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1992; Roetz, “The Axial Age
Theory: A Challenge to Historism or an Explanatory Device of Civilization Analysis?
With a Look at the Normative Discourse in Axial Age China,” in Robert N. Bellah
and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012, 248–273; Michael Puett, To Become a God: Cosmology,
Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Asia Center, 2002, esp. 1–29; Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the
Paleolithic to the Axial Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011, 399–480.
66. Johann Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, “General Introduction,”
in Johann Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock (eds.), Axial
Civilizations and World History, Leiden: Brill, 2005, 1–12, here 7. This volume also
includes an essay by Arnason on the history of the Axial Age hypothesis: “The Axial
Age and Its Interpreters: Reopening a Debate,” 19–49. This essay, however, is a pro-
grammatic text rather than a study in the history of science. A recent work that moves
things forward in the latter sense is John D. Boy and John Torpey, “Inventing the Axial
Age: The Origins and Uses of a Historical Concept,” in Theory and Society 42 (2013),
241–259.
67. Yehuda Elkana, “Second- Order Thinking in Classical Greece,” in Shmuel N.
Eisenstadt (ed.), Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, vol. 1, Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1986, 40–64. An independent effort in the same di-
rection has been produced by Michael Horace Barnes, Stages of Thought: The Co-
Evolution of Religious Thought and Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000,
esp. 93–111.
Notes 323
68. Karl-Otto Apel, Diskurs und Verantwortung. Das Problem des Übergangs zur
postkonventionellen Moral, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1990, passim, for example,
429f. The phrases cited here come from the Apel-led project “Funkkolleg Praktische
Philosophie/Ethik,” Studienbegleitbrief 2, Weinheim 1980, 51 and 81.
69. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought (1923),
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955, 255. Of the literature on the Axial Age,
Matthias Jung in particular builds on the work of Cassirer. See, for example, his
“Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency: Anthropological Features of the
Axial Age,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age, 77–101.
70. On the basis of evolutionary psychology, Robert Bellah has sought to find a synthe-
sizing term in the shape of “theoretic culture.” See p. 185. of the present book.
71. It is noteworthy that in his attempt to reformulate historical materialism, Jürgen
Habermas made reference to Jaspers’s Axial Age hypothesis. See Jürgen Habermas,
“Geschichte und Evolution,” in Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen
Materialismus, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1976, 200–259, here 241f. But it is equally
noteworthy that for him the novel elements emerging from the Axial Age “replace”
older aspects—as he states explicitly (242) with reference to narrative or argumen-
tative explanations. Here we find a significant difference between the (then) views of
Jürgen Habermas and those of Robert Bellah (see below).
72. My main sources for the biographical information are Axel Schwaiger, Christliche
Geschichtsdeutung in der Moderne: Eine Untersuchung zum Geschichtsdenken von
Juan Donoso Cortés, Ernst von Lasaulx und Vladimir Solov’ev in der Zusammenschau
christlicher Historiographieentwicklung, Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2001, 236ff.,
and the introduction by Eugen Thurnher to the republished version of Lasaulx’s book
Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegründeten Philosophie
der Geschichte, 7–60. See also Friedrich Engel-Janosi, “The Historical Thought of
Ernst von Lasaulx,” in Theological Studies 14 (1953), 377–401. Also inspired by
Engel-Janosi is Herta-Ursula Docekal, Ernst von Lasaulx. Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des
organischen Geschichtsbegriffs, Münster: Aschendorff, 1970. For an unsurpassed de-
scription of the intellectual milieu to which Lasaulx belonged, see the chapter “Die
Auseinandersetzung mit dem Zeitgeist” in Franz Schnabel’s history of the nineteenth
century: Franz Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol.
4: Die religiösen Kräfte, Freiburg: Herder, 1937, 164–202. Schnabel, however, erro-
neously describes Lasaulx as a nephew of Görres (168). In fact Görres was married
to Catherine von Lasaulx, a cousin of Ernst von Lasaulx. Detailed information on
the reasons for Jacob Burckhardt’s strong interest in Lasaulx and his critical engage-
ment with him can be found in Werner Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt. Eine Biographie,
vol. XI, Basel: Schwabe, 1977, esp. 90–96; see also Alfons Koeter, “Ernst von Lasaulx’
Geschichtsphilosophie und ihr Einfluß auf Jacob Burckhardts ‘Weltgeschichtliche
Betrachtungen,’ ” Dissertation, Universität Münster, 1937, esp. 90–127.
73. See Axel Schwaiger, Christliche Geschichtsdeutung, 267.
74. Ernst von Lasaulx, Neuer Versuch, 159.
75. Here my interpretation differs from that of Axel Schwaiger, Christliche Geschichts
deutung, 267.
324 Notes
76. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics
Worldwide, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. See also the brilliant cri-
tique of this influential book by Daniel Silver, “Religion without Instrumentalization,”
in Archives européennes de sociologie 47 (2006), 421–434.
77. Ernst von Lasaulx, Neuer Versuch, 137.
78. Axel Schwaiger, Christliche Geschichtsdeutung, 244.
79. In addition to the texts I have mentioned already, articles providing an over-
view are Stefan Breuer, “Kulturen der Achsenzeit. Leistung und Grenzen eines
geschichtsphilosophischen Konzepts,” in Saeculum 45 (1994), 1–33 (no longer fully
up to date, of course); Antony Black, “The ‘Axial Period’: What Was It and What Does
It Signify?,” in Review of Politics 70 (2008), 23–39 (full of misunderstandings in my
opinion); Björn Thomassen, “Anthropology, Multiple Modernities and the Axial Age
Debate,” in Anthropological Theory 10 (2010), 321–342. A comprehensive bibliog-
raphy is provided in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age, 469–537.
80. Hans Freyer, “Der Einbruch der Transzendenz in die Geschichte,” in Freyer, Schwelle
der Zeiten. Beiträge zur Soziologie der Kultur, Stuttgart: DVA, 1965, 121–156.
81. Eric Voegelin, Order and History, 5 vols., Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2001.
82. For biographical information, see the excellent introduction by Michael Henkel, Eric
Voegelin zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius, 1998, here 16.
83. Eric Voegelin, “The Political Religions” (1938), in Eric Voegelin, Modernity without
Restraint, ed. by Manfred Henningsen, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000,
19–74, here 34.
84. See in vol. 1 of Eric Voegelin, Ordnung und Geschichte, introduction and afterword
by Jan Assmann (17–23 and 213–224) and Peter Machinist, “Mesopotamien in Eric
Voegelins ‘Ordnung und Geschichte,’ ” 177–212.
85. See Eric Voegelin, Order and History, vol. 4 (“The Chinese Ecumene”), 340–370.
My thanks to Micha Knuth (Berlin) for helpful remarks and objections to my
interpretation.
86. Michael Henkel, Eric Voegelin, 20. On the epoch-making importance of James in this
respect, see Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, 35–53, and ch. 2 of the present book.
87. A new comparison between Jaspers and Voegelin in this respect is provided by Peter
Brickey LeQuire, “The Axial Age Debate as Political Discourse: Karl Jaspers and Eric
Voegelin,” in Clio 43 (2014), 295–316.
88. An extensive literature exists on these issues. See, for example, Udo Kessler, Die
Wiederentdeckung der Transzendenz. Ordnung von Mensch und Gesellschaft im
Denken Eric Voegelins, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1995; Claus Heimes,
Politik und Transzendenz. Ordnungsdenken bei Carl Schmitt und Eric Voegelin,
Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2009.
89. Bruce Douglass, “A Diminished Gospel: A Critique of Voegelin’s Interpretation of
Christianity,” in Stephen A. McKnight (ed.), Eric Voegelin’s Search for Order in History,
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978, 139–154.
90. Jan Assmann, “Der Sonderweg des christlichen Abendlandes. Eric Voegelin stiftet
Feindschaft zwischen Geist und Ordnung und bestreitet der Neuzeit ihre Legitimität,”
in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 3, 1994, 10.
Notes 325
91. I have pursued this project in a number of my works. See Hans Joas, The Sacredness
of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, 2013; Joas, “Sacralization and Desacralization: Political
Domination and Religious Interpretation,” in Journal of the Society of Christian
Ethics 36 (2016), 2, 25–42.
92. Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man, 57, for his assertion that he made his
word choice independently.
93. Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951,
221: “Deliberately, I use the word ‘axial’ in a double sense, meaning first of all that
there must be a change in values, and further a change so central that all the other
activities that rotate around this axis will be affected by it.” This, however, does not
appear to capture the meaning of Jaspers’s concept of an axis. For the reference to
“axiology,” see Lewis Mumford, The Transformations of Man, 57.
94. On the background to this theoretical turn, see Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl,
Social Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, 85–90.
95. Talcott Parsons, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966, 70.
96. Ibid.
97. Talcott Parsons, “Karl Jaspers,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,
vol. 18, New York: Free Press, 1979, 341–345.
98. Peter Brickey LeQuire and Daniel Silver, “Critical Naïveté? Religion, Science, and
Action in the Parsons-Voegelin Correspondence,” in European Journal of Sociology
54 (2013), 265–293.
99. The assertion in Björn Thomassen, “Anthropology,” 327, that only thinkers who
were “somewhat peripheral to mainstream functionalism” took up the idea of the
Axial Age thus requires correction.
100. See Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a
World Civilization, vol. 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958; Marshall
Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (on Jaspers, 21).
101. See Edmund Burke III, “Introduction: Marshall G. S. Hodgson and World History,”
in Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History, ix–xxi, here xi, fn. 5.
102. See William A. Green, “Periodization in European and World History,” in Journal of
World History 3 (1992), 13–53, on Jaspers and Hodgson, 42–46.
103. Hans Joas, “Robert N. Bellah. Religiöse Evolution und symbolischer Realismus,”
in Stephan Moebius and Dirk Quadflieg (eds.), Kultur. Theorien der Gegenwart,
Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 22011, 83–91, here 90.
104. See the excellent account of the development of Eisenstadt’s oeuvre in Wolfgang
Knöbl, Spielräume der Modernisierung, Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001, 221– 261,
which also provides a great deal of bibliographical information on Eisenstadt’s
writings. From the perspective of interest here, see also Ilana F. Silber, “Deciphering
Transcendence and the Open Code of Modernity: S. N. Eisenstadt’s Comparative
Hermeneutics of Civilizations,” in Journal of Classical Sociology 11 (2011), 269–280.
105. “An Interview with S. N. Eisenstadt: ‘Pluralism and the Multiple Forms of
Modernity,’ ” in European Journal of Social Theory 7 (2004), 319–404, here 395.
326 Notes
106. For more detail on this, see Hans Joas, Faith as an Option.
107. His most important text is Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-
Political?,” in Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, Cambridge: Polity, 1988,
213–255.
108. Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde. Une histoire politique de la religion,
Paris: Gallimard, 1985. In what follows I quote from the English translation: Marcel
Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton,
109. On this key idea of the creative formation of institutions in the work of Lefort’s
long-standing intellectual partner Cornelius Castoriadis, see Hans Joas,
“Institutionalization as a Creative Process: The Sociological Importance of
Cornelius Castoriadis’s Political Philosophy,” in Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social
Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 154–171.
110. To quote Jean Greisch in a volume devoted to Gauchet’s book: Pierre Colin and
Olivier Mongin (eds.), Un monde désenchanté?, Paris: Cerf, 1988, 22.
111. As an alternative I mention just Paul Ricoeur, “Theonomy and/or Autonomy,”
in Miroslav Volf, Carmen Krieg, and Thomas Kucharz, (eds.), The Future of
Theology: Essays in Honor of Jürgen Moltmann, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996,
284–298. On this issue, see also Jean-Paul Willaime, “À propos du ‘désenchantement
du monde’ de Marcel Gauchet,” in Autres Temps. Les cahiers du christianisme social 9
(1986),  68–75.
112. Oddly, Gauchet does not mention Voegelin despite the evident parallels between
their work. A number of reviewers have pointed this out: Adam Seligman in
American Political Science Review 92 (1998), 960f.; Martin Riesebrodt in American
Journal of Sociology 104 (1999), 1525f.
113. Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment, 13.
114. Ibid., 34.
115. Ibid., 36.
116. Ibid., 107.
117. This is also apparent in his astonishing conclusion that the risk of totalitarianism is
behind us. See his remarks in Pierre Colin and Olivier Mongin (eds.), Un monde, 88f.
118. Theorist of modernity Peter Wagner’s contribution to the Axial Age debate is ob-
viously influenced by Lefort’s analysis as well. He considers the consolidation of
religious doctrines after the Axial Age a relative loss of the sense for “reflexivity,
historicity and agentiality” or at least as their compression into narrower channels.
See Peter Wagner, “Palomar’s Question: The Axial Age Hypothesis, European
Modernity, and Historical Contingency,” in Johann Arnason et al. (eds.), Axial
Civilizations, 87–106, here 103.
119. Karl Jaspers, The European Spirit, London: SCM, 1947, 57. (The German original
has “Entzauberung der Staatengeschichte.”)
120. Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They
Reveal about the Future, London: Profile, 2011, esp. 245–274, here 261f.
121. Ibid., 248.
122. Ibid., 262.
Notes 327
123. I point the reader to two other contributions that I cannot look at in detail here.
A comprehensive popular account is provided by Karen Armstrong, The Great
Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions, New York: Anchor, 2006.
David Graeber makes a stab at a materialist explanation in a book much read due
to the author’s influence on the Occupy movement: David Graeber, Debt: The First
5000 Years, Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014, ch. 9. What makes his analysis in-
teresting is the attention he pays to the role of money and coinage. In the detail,
however, his statements are quite unreliable. In particular, while Gauchet or Morris
try to comprehend the Axial Age innovations with a view to defending the victims
of archaic imperial expansion, Graeber seems to me to attribute these innovations
to this expansion itself or to view them as forms of mere “escapism,” as the mere inti-
mation of alternatives that await earthly realization.
124. Robert N. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” in American Sociological Review 29 (1964),
358–374.
125. Of the many discussion of Bellah’s work I mention just Marcel Hénaff, “Three Crucial
Aspects of Religion in Human Evolution: Shamanism, Sacrifice, and Exogamic
Alliance,” in European Journal of Sociology 53 (2012), 327–335. A list of analyses
can be found in Michael Stausberg, “Bellah’s ‘Religion in Human Evolution’: A Post-
Review,” in Numen 61 (2014), 281–299, here 295–299. For a provisional attempt
to develop Bellah’s project further, see Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The
Axial Age.
126. Thomas Joseph White, “Sociology as Theology,” in First Things 234 (2013), 34–39,
here 34.
127. Robert N. Bellah, “A Reply to My Critics,” in First Things 234 (2013), 49–55, here 50.
128. A crude example of a polemical critique that considers just a small portion of this
research and is chiefly based on popularizing renderings is Iain Provan, Convenient
Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That Never Was, Waco,
TX: Baylor University Press, 2013.
129. Elmar Holenstein refers briefly to existing trading contacts. See Elmar Holenstein,
Philosophie-Atlas. Orte und Wege des Denkens, Zürich: Ammann, 2004, 40.
130. On the risk of reducing everything to the history of the state, see my above remarks
on Gauchet. The otherwise excellent contribution by Sheldon Pollock on the topic
also seems to me to suffer from a tendency to view the Axial Age innovations as
a necessary consequence rather than a response to developments in the impe-
rial state: Sheldon Pollock, “Axialism and Empire,” in Johann Arnason, Shmuel
Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock (eds.), Axial Civilizations and World History, 397–
450. This volume also includes an important chapter on the Mesopotamian states
(which tend to serve merely as a contrast to the Axial Age breakthroughs), their
own tendencies toward axiality, and the associated heterodox and often short-
lived religious innovations: Piotr Michalowski, “Mesopotamian Vistas on Axial
Transformations” (157–182).
131. Following the masterful overview by Björn Wittrock, “The Axial Age in World
History,” in Craig Benjamin (ed.), The Cambridge World History, vol. IV: A World
328 Notes
with States, Empires, and Networks, 1200 BCE–900 CE, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015, 101–119, here 109.
132. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 271.
133. Ibid., 399–480; see also Björn Wittrock, “The Axial Age,” 109.
134. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 481–566; Björn Wittrock, “The
Axial Age,” 115.
135. Particularly instructive as a list of unresolved research problems is Johann P.
Arnason, “Rehistoricizing the Axial Age,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.),
The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 337–365.
136. Bernhard Lang, “Die zweigeteilte Welt. ‘Jenseits’ und ‘Diesseits’ in der katholischen
Theologie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Lucian Hölscher (ed.), Das Jenseits.
Facetten eines religiösen Begriffs in der Neuzeit, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007, 203–232,
here 208f.
137. For a very clear example, see the remarkable theological reception of recent Axial
Age research: Robert Cummings Neville, Religion: Philosophical Theology, vol. 3,
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015, 47–63, here 53f. The most im-
portant example of the theological reception of earlier research is John Hick, An
Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1989, 21–35. For an informed and agenda-advancing contribution from
contemporary German theology, see Bernd Elmar Koziel, Achsenzeit, Apokalyptik,
Gnade. Zur Hermeneutik des christlichen Glaubens, Würzburg: Echter, 2015, 43–75.
138. Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 1985, 3.
139. I addressed this point with respect to the change in the idea of the prophet at the end
of ch. 4.
140. Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, 76–89; Assmann, “Cultural Memory
and the Myths of the Axial Age,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial
Age and Its Consequences, 366–407.
141. Jan Assmann, “Cultural Memory and the Myths of the Axial Age,” 400.
142. Here I draw on a passage in Hans Joas, Sind die Menschenrechte westlich?,
Munich: Kösel, 2015, 33f.
143. Björn Wittrock, “The Axial Age,” 108.
144. The rapid onset of fusions between “axial” religion and political power is emphasized
by William Herbrechtsmeier, “The Burden of the Axial Age: Transcendentalism in
Religion as a Function of Empire,” in Arthur L. Greil and David G. Bromley (eds.),
Defining Religion: Investigating the Boundaries between the Sacred and Secular,
Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2003, 109–126.
145. An example is Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Weber’s Analysis of Islam and the Specific
Pattern of Islamic Civilization,” in Wolfgang Schluchter (ed.), Max Weber and Islam,
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999, 281–294.
146. Jeffrey Alexander, “The Promise and Contradictions of Axiality,” in Sociologica 1
(2013), 1–7, here 3.
Notes 329
147. For a defense of Weber against the critique emanating from Axial Age scholarship,
see John Torpey, “The ‘Axial Age’ vs. Weber’s Comparative Sociology of the World
Religions,” in Roland Robertson and John Simpson (eds.), The Art and Science of
Sociology: Essays in Honor of Edward A. Tiryakian, London: Anthem, 2016, 189–
203. His arguments, however, are based on the misunderstanding that the Axial Age
literature overstates the similarities between different religions.
148. Wolfgang Knöbl, Spielräume der Modernisierung, 221–261.
149. Jeremy C. A. Smith, “Grounds for Engagement. Dissonances and Overlaps at the
Intersection of Contemporary Civilizations Analysis and Postcolonial Sociology,” in
Current Sociology 63 (2015), 566–585.
150. David Martin, “Axial Religion and the Problem of Violence,” in Robert N. Bellah
and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences, 294–316 (which refers to
the author’s earlier important and comprehensive studies on the topic). This motif
also plays a key role in the account of Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation.
151. As in the case of Iain Provan, Convenient Myths.
152. Ernst Troeltsch, “What Does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” (1903), in Ernst
Troeltsch, Writings on Theology and Religion, ed. by Robert Morgan and Michael
Pye, Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977, 124–179.
153. For an overview of the term’s meanings, see Ingolf Dalferth, “The Idea of
Transcendence,” in Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its
Consequences, 146–188. Highly informative on the conceptual history and the ques-
tion of how well the conceptual dyad transcendent/immanent captures the history
of religion is the essay by Johannes Zachhuber, “Transzendenz und Immanenz als
Interpretationskategorien antiken Denkens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Izaak de
Hulster and Nathan MacDonald (eds.), Divine Presence and Absence in Exilic and
Post-Exilic Judaism, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013, 23–54.
154. As, for example, in the so-called Second Eucharistic Prayer of the Catholic Mass.
Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper went so far as to reject the attribution of the
term “sacred” to the nature of God, limiting it to “a quality pertaining to this our
world”: “Although God, of course, and God alone, is in the ultimate and deepest
sense ‘holy,’ we never apply to him the terms sacer, sacré, sacred, ‘sakral’—which
fact already clarifies a further point: whatever is not sacred cannot be conceived as
‘Godless’ by definition, much less as opposed to God” (Josef Pieper, In Search of the
Sacred: Contributions to an Answer, San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991, 22).
155. See ch. 2 of the present book and throughout. I return to the levels of symbolicity in
ch. 7. At this point it should also become clear why the pioneers of a conception of
religion that builds on a semiotic anthropology—namely Friedrich Schleiermacher
on the one hand, and Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce on the other—had to
be dealt with in depth in ch. 2. For a text that draws inspiration from both traditions
and creatively develops them further as few others have done, see Hermann
Deuser, Religionsphilosophie, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009, here esp. Part III, “Das
Unbedingte: Ausarbeitung von Kreativität” (259–339).
330 Notes
Chapter 6
1. In the first part of what follows I base my argument on Hans Joas, “Dangerous Nouns
of Process: Differentiation, Rationalization, Modernization,” in Roland Robertson
and John Simpson (eds.), The Art and Science of Sociology: Essays in Honor of Edward
A. Tiryakian, London: Anthem, 2016, 149–162. That text does not include my critical
examination of Weber’s “Intermediate Reflection,” which takes up most of the present
chapter.
2. Hence, Andrew Abbott’s attempt to develop a “processual sociology” is not the
target of my critique. See Andrew Abbott, Processual Sociology, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2016. I borrow the phrase “dangerous nouns of process” from the
writings of British sociologist of religion David Martin. See, for example, David
Martin, The Future of Christianity, Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011.
3. On the question of whether there was a convergence between the writings of the two
classic figures, see Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, Social Theory: Twenty Introductory
Lectures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 20–42.
4. See Norbert Elias, “The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present,” in Theory, Culture
and Society 4 (1987), 223–247. In 1912, American historian William Sloane cap-
tured the attitude of the social sciences toward the discipline of history when he re-
ferred to “the amusing independence . . . of children living on a handsome allowance
from their parents.” See William Sloane, “The Substance and Vision of History,” in
American Historical Review 17 (1912), 235–251, here 237; quoted in Peter Novick,
That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 91.
5. On these alternatives, see Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993, 14–51, and Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, Social
Theory, 68ff.
6. Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, New York: Russell
Sage Foundation, 1984, esp. 43–53.
7. Wolfgang Knöbl, Spielräume der Modernisierung, Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001.
8. Later published in English as Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1997, 223ff. Of course, since then the debate has moved on, and
quite vigorously, especially in Germany. Particularly important are the writings of
Uwe Schimank (Theorien gesellschaftlicher Differenzierung, Opladen: Leske und
Budrich, 32007) and Thomas Schwinn (Differenzierung ohne Gesellschaft. Umstellung
eines soziologischen Konzepts, Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001). Both seek to develop
differentiation theory, by supplementing it with (Schimank) or grounding it in
(Schwinn) theories of action.
9. Dirk Kaesler, “Max Weber,” in Dirk Kaesler (ed.), Klassiker der Soziologie, vol. 1,
Munich: Beck, 52006, 191–214, here 199f.
10. Wolfgang Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, vol. 1, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1991, 102. With this choice of words, Schluchter echoes the heroizing account of Weber’s
widow: Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, London: Taylor and Francis, 2017.
Notes 331
11. Max Weber, The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism,
New York: Free Press, 1958, 37f. (translation slightly modified).
12. Here the caveat must be added that Weber is too quick to equate the sacramental
meal and real meal. Ulrich Berner raises a serious objection: “If [in the cultic meal]
there is no connection with the real meal or no conscious thematization of the table
fellowship—and this surely applies to the medieval situation to which Weber refers—
then the Eucharist should not be referred to as commensality.” See Ulrich Berner,
“Kommensalität,” in Hubert Cancik, Burkhard Gladigow, and Matthias Laubscher
(eds.), Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1993, vol. 3, 390–392, here 391.
13. Wolfgang Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, vol. 2, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1991, 382f.
14. For more on this, see the chapter “The Age of Contingency” in Hans Joas, Faith
as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2014, 63–77. In addition to my statements in the book, I would point
out that today we are increasingly dealing with a concept that is problematic in
much the same way as the dangerous nouns of process dealt with here, namely
“globalization.” On this topic, see Olaf Bach, Die Erfindung der Globalisierung.
Entstehung und Wandel eines zeitgeschichtlichen Grundbegriffs, Frankfurt/M:
Campus, 2013.
15. See chs. 3 and 5 of the present book.
16. Max Weber, Allgemeine Staatslehre und Politik (Staatssoziologie), ed. Gangolf
Hübinger, Tübingen: Mohr, 2009 (= Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, section III, vol. 7);
Weber, “Probleme der Staatssoziologie. Bericht der Neuen Freien Presse (Wien) vom
26.10.1917,” in Max Weber, Herrschaft, ed. Edith Hanke, Tübingen: Mohr, 2005 (=
Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, section I, vol. 22.4), 745–756, here 755.
17. See, for example, Uwe Schimank, Theorien, 49. There are two references to “dif-
ferentiation” or to cultural goods that are differentiating in the “Intermediate
Reflection”: Max Weber, “Intermediate Reflection,” reproduced as “Religious
Rejections of the World and Their Directions” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press,
1996, 323–359, here 357 and 356. A digital search identified two hundred instances in
Weber’s writings.
18. Uwe Schimank, Theorien, 49.
19. Ibid.,  50.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., 55 (emphasis in original).
22. See Thomas Schwinn, Differenzierung, 153. See also Wolfgang Schluchter, Grundle
gungen der Soziologie. Eine Theoriegeschichte in systematischer Absicht, Tübingen:
Mohr, 22015, 273–321; Schluchter, Religion und Lebensführung, vol. 2, 62–108.
23. Niklas Luhmann, “Die Ausdifferenzierung der Religion,” in Niklas Luhmann,
Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen
Gesellschaft, vol. 3, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1989, 259–357.
332 Notes
24. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Boston: Beacon, 1985, vol. 1,
143–272; Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Classical Attempt at Theoretical Synthesis: Max
Weber, London: Routledge, 1983; Rogers Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality: An
Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber, London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1984.
25. Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, New York: Free Press,
1951, 227f. My interpretation is based on the latest version of Weber’s text. On its
composition in 1920 and its relationship to the earlier versions—in addition to the
information provided in the Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, section I, vol. 19—see the
very useful account by Wolfgang Schluchter, Rationalismus der Weltbeherrschung.
Studien zu Max Weber, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1982, 208–214. I also agree with
his interpretation that the “Intermediate Reflection” should be seen as a “connecting
link” between Weber’s material research and his famous lectures on science and poli-
tics as a vocation.
26. “Religious Rejections,” 323.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.,  324.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 323–324.
31. Ibid.,  324.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.,  325.
36. Weber, however, refers to contemplation entailing withdrawal from the world rather
than mysticism of this kind.
37. Max Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 325.
38. See the helpful articles by Stefan Breuer on “renunciation of the world,” Volker
Krech on “mysticism” and Hubert Treiber on “asceticism” in Hans G. Kippenberg
and Martin Riesebrodt (eds.), Max Webers “Religionssystematik,” Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2001, 227–240, 241–262, and 263–278. Interesting doubts about the value-
neutral character of Weber’s distinction between asceticism and mysticism, particu-
larly with respect to the Jesuit tradition (“in actione contemplativus”) are raised by
Anthony J. Carroll, Protestant Modernity: Weber, Secularisation, and Protestantism,
Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2007, 152f., fn. 117.
40. Ibid.
41. For a critique of Weber’s ideas here, see Hans Joas, Was ist die Achsenzeit? Eine
wissenschaftliche Debatte als Diskurs über Transzendenz, Basel: Schwabe, 2014, 26–35.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
Notes 333
47. Particularly in the so-called salvationist religions. On Weber’s understanding, see ch.
5 of the present book, esp. p. 158, including n. 16.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.,  329
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.,  330.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. See my observations, building on the work of Ernst Troeltsch, in ch. 4 of the present
book, and Hans Joas, Kirche als Moralagentur?, Munich: Kösel, 2016.
59. This is the argument of Walter G. Runciman, “The Diffusion of Christianity in the
Third Century AD as a Case Study in the Theory of Cultural Selection,” in Archives
européennes de sociologie 45 (2004), 3–21.
61. Ibid.,  350.
62. Max Weber, “Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology” (1922),
ed. by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, Berkeley: University of California Press,
1978, 399.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid., 331–332.
66. For an in-depth examination of this issue that builds on Max Weber and is in fact
dedicated to his memory, see Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury: From Tribal
Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood (1949), Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969 (expanded edition).
68. Ibid.,  333.
69. Robert Bellah devoted an important essay to this term: Robert N. Bellah, “Max Weber
and World-Denying Love,” in Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67 (1999),
277–304.
71. For more detail on this, see ch. 4 of the present book.
73. Ibid. The expression is in Charles Baudelaire, “Le Spleen de Paris” (1869), in Charles
Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Pléiade, 1975, 273–374, here 291. As it happens
it is highly questionable whether Weber captures the intentions of Baudelaire, whose
target was the poet.
74. For more detail on this with reference to the churches and their stance on immigra-
tion policies, see Hans Joas, Kirche als Moralagentur?,  71–79.
334 Notes
76. Ibid., 334.
77. As we might summarize the difference between a Weberian and republican concep-
tion of politics.
79. The literature on Weber’s conception of state and politics is enormous, and I do not
attempt to list it here. Of my own work, I would highlight my critical examination
of Weber’s positions on imperialism and war in Hans Joas, War and Modernity,
Oxford: Polity, 2003, esp. 61–65; Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, War in Social
Thought: Hobbes to the Present, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012, esp.
116–133.
80. See the remarks on Durkheim and the United States in the two books mentioned in
the previous footnote.
82. Ibid., 335.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. See ch. 4 of the present book, p. 120 and 138ff.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid., 337.
91. Ibid., 338.
92. Ibid.
93. Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), London: Allen
and Unwin, 1931, 280–328, esp. 284–286.
94. All quotations from Max Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 338–339.
95. Ibid., 338.
96. Ibid., 340.
97. Ibid., 341.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid., 342.
101. Ibid., 342–343.
102. Ibid., 344.
103. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid., 346.
108. Ibid.
109. Ibid., 347.
110. Ibid.
Notes 335
111. To paraphrase William James’s famous description of mystical experience. See ch. 2
of the present book, p. 34 and 52f.
113. Ibid., 348.
114. Ibid., 349. Ernst Troeltsch too has a feeling for this specific relationship of tension,
as evident, for example, in his discussion of the rise of the “ideal of chastity” in early
Christianity. Here he refers to “the natural desire of strong religious feeling to thrust
out of its way the rival interest of eroticism, whether through severe discipline of
the sex instinct or through the fusion of erotic and religious excitement” (Ernst
Troeltsch, Social Teaching, 106).
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid., 352.
118. See ibid., 350.
119. See ch. 4 of the present book, p. 126ff.
120. Ibid., p. 139f., including n. 194.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid., 354.
124. Ibid., 357.
125. Ibid.
126. In addition to the studies already mentioned here by Schluchter, Schwinn, and
Brubaker, leading examples include Hartmann Tyrell, “Max Weber: Wertkollision
und christliche Werte,” in Zeitschrift für Evangelische Ethik 37 (1993), 121–
138; Günter Thomas, Implizite Religion. Theoriegeschichtliche und theoretische
Untersuchungen zum Problem ihrer Identifikation, Würzburg: Ergon, 2001, 84–98.
An original argument about the influences on Weber’s “Intermediate Reflection”
is provided by Elisabeth Flitner, “Vom Kampf der Professoren zum ‘Kampf der
Götter’. Max Weber und Eduard Spranger,” in Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 44 (1998), 6,
889–906.
127. Wolfgang Schluchter, Grundlegungen der Soziologie, 308.
128. I agree entirely with Schluchter and Schwinn in this respect.
129. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 143–272, esp. 233–242.
130. For my critical examination of this, see Hans Joas, “The Unhappy Marriage
of Hermeneutics and Functionalism,” in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (eds.),
Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s “The Theory of Communicative
Action,” Oxford: Polity, 1991, 97–118; Joas, The Genesis of Values, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000, 175–186.
131. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, 241–242.
132. On the evidence and its interpretation, see ch. 4 of the present book, esp. p. 119f. and
125ff.
133. I leave aside here possible implications of this ethos for the remembrance of victims
of the past and the needs of nonhuman living beings.
336 Notes
134. This lends great relevance to the question of whether Weber’s “economic value
sphere” is a “value sphere” at all. See Rogers Brubaker, Limits, 86; Hartmann Tyrell,
“Max Weber,” 124; Thomas Schwinn, Differenzierung, 185–198.
135. Karl Mannheim already put forward a very interesting objection to the notion of
“value spheres,” writing that “the existence of certain realms of values and their
specific structure” are “intelligible only with reference to the concrete situations
to which they have relevance and in which they are valid.” See Karl Mannheim,
Ideology and Utopia (1929), Eastford, CT: Martino Fine, 2015, 82.
136. For a critique of the suppression of religion in historical sociology, see Philip Gorski,
“The Return of the Repressed: Religion and the Political Unconscious of Historical
Sociology,” in Julia Adams, Elizabeth Clemens, and Ann Orloff (eds.), Remaking
Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005, 161–189.
137. Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights,
Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, 102f., and chs. 3 and 4 of the
present book.
138. A similar argument is presented by Charles Taylor: “The fact that activity in a given
sphere follows its own inherent rationality and doesn’t permit of the older kind of
faith-based norming doesn’t mean that it cannot still be very much shaped by faith”
(see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018,
425 and 535).
Chapter 7
1. I have Matthias Jung to thank for the metaphor of the “second floor.” See Matthias
Jung, “Verkörperte Intentionalität—zur Anthropologie des Handelns,” in Bettina
Hollstein, Matthias Jung, and Wolfgang Knöbl (eds.), Handlung und Erfahrung.
Das Erbe von Historismus und Pragmatismus und die Zukunft der Sozialtheorie,
Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2011, 25–50, here 25f. (“Anthropological layer models
that place the truly human, as a second floor, on top of a general-biological first
floor . . .”).
2. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 151.
3. To cite the form of words used in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas, Social Action and
Human Nature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 9.
4. Here I draw on various passages from my earlier writings.
5. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
6. Ibid., 133.
7. Ibid., 126–144; Hans Joas, “Pragmatism in American Sociology,” in Hans Joas,
Pragmatism and Social Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 14–51.
8. Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, 75–85 and 85–105.
9. Ibid., 148–167, esp. 158f.
10. Ibid., 138–144.
Notes 337
11. For more on the common features of ritual and play within the context of the de-
bate on the Axial Age, see Adam B. Seligman, “Reflexivity, Play, Ritual, and the Axial
Age,” in Sociologica 1 (2013), 1–15. For a classic work that draws on the studies by
Durkheim’s student Marcel Granet on dance and music in ancient China, see Johan
Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938), Kettering,
OH: Angelico Press, 2016, 14 (“The participants in the rite are convinced that the
action actualizes and effects a definite beatification, brings about an order of things
higher than that in which they customarily live. All the same this ‘actualization by rep-
resentation’ still retains the formal characteristics of play in every respect. It is played
or performed within a play-ground that is literally ‘staked out,’ and played moreover
as a feast, i.e. in mirth and freedom. A sacred space, a temporarily real world of its
own, has been expressly hedged off for it. But with the end of the play its effect is not
lost; rather it continues to shed its radiance on the ordinary world outside, a whole-
some influence working security, order and prosperity for the whole community until
the sacred play-season comes round again”).
12. See ch. 3 of the present book, esp. p. 85.
13. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (1934), ed. by Daniel R. Huebner and
Hans Joas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. For a detailed account, see
Hans Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-Examination of His Thought, Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985 (21987, with new preface). On Cooley, see Hans-Joachim
Schubert, Demokratische Identität. Der soziologische Pragmatismus von Charles
Horton Cooley, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1995.
14. Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, New York: Norton 1994.
15. An influential synthesis of the research at the time can be found in Lothar
Krappmann, Soziologische Dimensionen der Identität. Strukturelle Bedingungen für
die Teilnahme an Interaktionsprozessen, Stuttgart: Klett, 1971. Krappmann drew on
the work of Jürgen Habermas. For an example of the latter’s contributions in this field,
see “Moralentwicklung und Ich-Identität,” in Jürgen Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion
des Historischen Materialismus, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1976, 63–91.
16. For example, Kenneth Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in
Contemporary Life, New York: Basic Books, 1991. See also Hans Joas, “The Concept of
Self and Its Postmodern Challenge,” in Joas, The Genesis of Values, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2000, 145–160, esp. 152f.
17. For more detail, see Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values.
18. This is already evident in his early work. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
and Other Writings, ed. by Raymond Geuss, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999, 1–116. An excellent reconstruction of these developments is provided
by Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures,
New York: Wiley, 2015. See also Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, 190–195.
19. Hans Joas, Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence, Boulder,
CO: Paradigm, 2008, here 13f.
20. These distinctions build on the work of Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952), New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014, 32–63.
338 Notes
21. These experiences of violence, particularly those of the perpetrators, are a key motif
in my studies of war and its consequences. See, for example, Hans Joas, War and
Modernity, Oxford: Polity, 2003, 20f. and 111–121.
22. For more detail, see Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of
Human Rights, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013, esp. 54–58, and
ch. 3 of the present book.
23. For the first time, to my knowledge, in Wilhelm Dilthey, “Ideen über eine
beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” (1894), in Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung
in die Philosophie des Lebens /Abhandlungen zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissen
schaften (= Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5), Leipzig: Teubner, 1924, 139–240, here 217.
For an earlier example (c. 1892–1893), though one published posthumously, see
Wilhelm Dilthey, “Leben und Erkennen. Ein Entwurf zur erkenntnistheoretischen
Logik und Kategorienlehre,” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Grundlegung der Wissenschaften
vom Menschen und der Geschichte. Ausarbeitungen und Entwürfe zum zweiten
Band der Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (= Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19),
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1982, 333–388, here 345.
24. Building on the work of Taylor, see Hans Joas, The Genesis of Values, 134f.
25. Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers,
vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 45–76, here 69. For an excel-
lent analysis of Taylor, see Hartmut Rosa, Identität und kulturelle Praxis. Politische
Philosophie nach Charles Taylor, Frankfurt/M: Campus, 1998, 84f. Also instructive
is Taylor’s contentious debate with Kenneth Gergen: “Charles Taylor, Wittgenstein,
Empiricism, and the Question of the ‘Inner,’ ” in Stanley Messer, Louis Sass, and
Robert Woolfolk (eds.), Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory, New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988, 52–58.
26. For an argument that does not build on Taylor but instead takes up motifs found in
the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, see Hans Joas, “On the Articulation of Experience,”
in Joas, Do We Need Religion?,  37–48.
27. “Articulated” in unmatched fashion by Heinrich von Kleist, “Über die allmähliche
Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden,” in Heinrich von Kleist, Werke,
Munich: Hanser, 1966, 810–814.
28. For more detail on this, see my account of the antislavery movement as a model of
moral mobilization: Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person,  85–96.
29. The most impressive contemporary attempt to produce a comprehensive theory of
articulation is Matthias Jung, Der bewußte Ausdruck. Anthropologie der Artikulation,
Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. Through critical examination of the contemporary cognitive
sciences, Jung, author of books on Dilthey and on a synthesis of hermeneutics and
pragmatism in the philosophy of religion, brings out Dilthey’s tremendous contem-
porary importance. See also Matthias Jung, Dilthey zur Einführung, Hamburg: Junius,
1996; Matthias Jung, Erfahrung und Religion. Grundzüge einer hermeneutisch-
pragmatischen Religionsphilosophie, Freiburg: Alber, 1999, esp. 261–403.
30. See ch. 2 (conclusion) and ch. 5 of the present book with reference to Ernst Cassirer.
31. I experienced a very clear example of this in the debates on my book The Sacredness
of the Person, when the distinction, initiated by Durkheim, between the religious and
Notes 339
the sacred was constantly ignored, and I was alleged to be proposing a “religious”
origin of human rights. For an attempt to clarify things, see Hans Joas, “Replik,” in
Hermann-Josef Große Kracht (ed.), Der moderne Glaube an die Menschenwürde.
Philosophie, Soziologie und Theologie im Gespräch mit Hans Joas, Bielefeld: Transcript,
2014, 243–264.
32. On this distinction, see ch. 4 of the present book, p. 120f. and 138ff.
33. Max Weber, “Religious Groups (The Sociology of Religion),” in Max Weber, Economy
and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978, 468–500.
35. I cannot go into detail about this here. Therefore I merely point out that the rela-
tionship between culture and power was considered to have been unsatisfactorily
clarified by both sides—the Parsons school and the sociology of conflict—toward
the end of the 1960s, which helped stimulate new attempts at theory-building
(see Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 197f.). The most important studies
produced by the conflict theory camp are those of Michael Mann and Randall
Collins, while those of Robert Bellah and Shmuel Eisenstadt stand out in the Parsons
school. In Mann’s work, the only echo of his old Marxian sources of inspiration is in
his choice of words (“ideological power”); in the work of Bellah and Eisenstadt there
is no sign of Parsonian cultural determinism. For a useful and influential overview
of the debates on power theory over the last few decades, see Steven Lukes, Power: A
Radical View, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
36. Heinrich Popitz, Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. See also the important contribu-
tion, influenced by the work of Popitz, by Gianfranco Poggi, Forms of Power,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, in the present context esp. 58–96.
37. Heinrich Popitz, Phenomena of Power, 70.
38. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), New York: Free
Press, 1995, 328.
39. The phrase “transfert de sacralité” was probably first used by French historian Mona
Ozouf in her study of festivals during the French Revolution, in which traditional
forms of sacredness were transferred to the revolutionary nation. In its substance, of
course, this idea, like the institutional possibility of “consecration,” and “anointing,”
is older. See Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire 1789–1799, Paris: Gallimard, 1976,
317–340 (see also Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, “Sakraltransfer,” in Religion in Geschichte
und Gegenwart, vol. 7, Tübingen: Mohr, 42004, col. 748–749).
40. The earliest evidence of the term “migrations of the holy,” to my knowledge, is in John
Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985,
153; now see also William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the
Political Meaning of the Church, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.
41. On the reasons for my skepticism about the idea of “cognitive disenchantment,” see
ch. 4 of the present book, 255–260. In an analogous argument as to why seculari-
zation cannot simply be attributed to advancing knowledge, see Hans Joas, Faith as
340 Notes
an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

2014, esp. ch. 3 (37–49).
42. I am referring to Werner Stark. See Werner Stark, Grundriß der Religionssoziologie,
Freiburg: Rombach, 1974, 11. This one-volume German text is an abbreviated version,
composed by the author, of his five-volume English-language historical sociology
of religion: Werner Stark, The Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom, 5 vols.,
New York: Fordham University Press, 1966–1974. (There are no direct equivalents of
the passages from the German version in the original English publication.)
43. For a critical discussion, see ch. 3 of the present book and the literature
mentioned there.
44. Key studies of Australia were produced by William E. H. Stanner. See William E. H.
Stanner, “Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism,” in Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine
H. Berndt (eds.), Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor
A. P. Elkin, Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965, 207–237; William E. H. Stanner,
“The Dreaming” (1956), in Thomas G. Harding and Ben J. Wallace (eds.), Cultures of
the Pacific: Selected Readings, New York: Free Press, 1970, 304–315. On subsequent
research, see esp. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic
to the Axial Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011, 117–174.
45. According to Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969),
London: Routledge, 2017.
46. See the definition of ritual at the end of ch. 3 of the present book.
47. See, for example, building on the research of Ellen Basso on the Brazilian Kalapalo,
Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 141. Cf. Ellen Basso, A Musical View
of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1985, esp. 253, where the creative and healing effects of rituals are
emphasized.
48. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 147, with reference to Tony
Swain, A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being,
49. William E. H. Stanner, “The Dreaming,” 305.
50. Ibid., 307, 312.
51. Ibid.,  314.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid.
54. This paragraph is based on Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution
of Egalitarian Behavior, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Cf. Robert
N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 175–182.
55. Werner Stark, Grundriß der Religionssoziologie, 19.
56. In essence, the idea of “collective self-sacralization” is present in Émile Durkheim’s
theory of religion; but I am not aware of any passage in which he actually uses this
term. In my book on the history of human rights (Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the
Person, 159) I myself distinguished between the universalist sacralization of the
person and the “self-sacralization of the private individual,” but without using the
term “collective self-sacralization.” A number of authors refer to the “self-sacralization
Notes 341
of the nation” or “self-sacralization of imperial power.” The term “collective self-

sacralization” also appears, but with no reference to an original source. On the nation,
see Jörn Leonhard, Bellizismus und Nation. Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung
in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten, 1750–1914, Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008, 625;
on empires, see Herfried Münkler, Imperien. Die Logik der Weltherrschaft vom Alten
Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten, Berlin: Rowohlt, 2005, 135; on the use of the term,
see Mischa Meier, “Krisen und Krisenwahrnehmung im 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr.,” in
Helga Scholten (ed.), Die Wahrnehmung von Krisenphänomenen. Fallbeispiele von der
Antike bis in die Neuzeit, Weimar: Böhlau, 2007, 111–125, here 123.
57. In the work of Robert Bellah I found the term “ritual bifurcation,” which I think
captures this idea well (Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 570).
58. My account here, whose empirical validity in the case of Tikopia I cannot guar-
antee, is essentially based on the research of Raymond Firth and its theoretical treat-
ment in the work of Bellah (Raymond Firth, Rank and Religion in Tikopia: A Study
in Polynesian Paganism and Conversion to Christianity, London: Allen and Unwin,
1970; Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 182–191 and 570).
59. I base my remarks on the one-volume edition, James George Frazer, The Golden
Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, New York: Macmillan, 1923. The original ver-
sion is from 1890; but there are numerous, ever-multiplying editions. For an overview
of his life and work, see Hans Wißmann, “James George Frazer (1854–1941),” in Axel
Michaels (ed.), Klassiker der Religionswissenschaft. Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis
Mircea Eliade, Munich: Beck, 1997, 77–89.
60. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 194, drawing on Marshall Sahlins,
Stone Age Economics, Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972, 140.
61. For examples from precolonial Hawaii, see Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human
Evolution, 197–209.
62. For an account that argues, with good reason, against such a supposition, see Michael
Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012,  65–70.
63. See 1 Samuel 8–12.
64. Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution, 212. In addition to Bellah’s ac-
count (210–264), the main studies of importance to my remarks in what follows
are Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006;
Franz-Reiner Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter. Von den Anfängen bis zum
Investiturstreit, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006 (34–88 on developments extending
from the ancient Near East to late Roman antiquity); Franz-Reiner Erkens (ed.), Die
Sakralität von Herrschaft. Herrschaftslegitimierung im Wechsel der Zeiten und Räume,
Berlin: Akademie, 2002; Franz-Reiner Erkens, “Herrschersakralität. Ein Essai,” in
Andrea Beck and Andreas Berndt (eds.), Sakralität und Sakralisierung. Perspektiven
des Heiligen, Stuttgart: Steiner, 2013, 15–32; for sociological studies, apart from
Bellah, see Werner Stark, Sociology of Religion, vol. 1, 7–68. I have no wish to get into
a separate debate here with the various texts geared chiefly toward Weber’s concep-
tual toolkit, such as that by Stefan Breuer, Der charismatische Staat. Ursprünge und
Frühformen staatlicher Herrschaft, Darmstadt: WBG, 2014.
342 Notes
65. Werner Stark, Sociology of Religion, vol. 1, 24–35. The typology in Franz-Reiner
Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter, 29, resembles that of Stark. In this excellent
book, Erkens makes a terminological proposal that I find confusing and therefore do
not take up. He suggests using “sakrales Königtum” as an umbrella term for all three
types, of which “Sakralkönigtum” would be just one (31). Both may be rendered as
“sacred” or “sacral kingship” in English.
66. Ibid.,  35.
67. According to an account by Roman historian Suetonius: “Vae, puto deus fio.”
68. I draw here on Michael Mann’s important distinction between “despotic” and “in-
frastructural” power, which he introduced in the context of a discussion of the com-
parative study of archaic empires (see Michael Mann, Sources of Social Power, vol. 1,
170f.).
70. See my remarks on Buddhism and violence in ch. 1 of the present book.
71. In addition to Franz- Reiner Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter, 60–
80, and Francis Oakley, Kingship, 68– 76, see the helpful account by Hartmut
Leppin, “Kaisertum und Christentum in der Spätantike. Überlegungen zu einer
unwahrscheinlichen Synthese,” in Andreas Fahrmeir and Annette Imhausen (eds.),
Die Vielfalt normativer Ordnungen. Konflikte und Dynamik in historischer und
ethnologischer Perspektive, Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2013, 197–223.
72. Franz-Reiner Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter, 62.
73. Ibid.,  64.
76. A pioneering text on this topic is Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A
Study in Medieval Political Theology (1957), new edition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016. For a brief overview of the debate, in addition to the introduc-
tion by Conrad Leyser (ix–xxiii), see Bernhard Jussen, “The King’s Two Bodies Today,”
in Representations 106 (2009), 102–117.
77. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England (1924),
Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, 36. The entire chapter “The Origins of the Royal Healing
Power: The Sacred Aspect of Royalty in the Early Centuries of the Middle Ages”
(28–48) is of great significance to the question of sacred rulership under Christian
conditions. In the context of the present book I would like to point out that the influ-
ence of Émile Durkheim, his students, and his teacher Fustel de Coulanges is crucially
important to Bloch’s most important work. See R. Colbert Rhodes, “Émile Durkheim
and the Historical Thought of Marc Bloch,” in Theory and Society 5 (1978), 45–73.
78. Franz-Reiner Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter, 64–68, provides a nuanced
discussion of the sources and the uncertain status of a number of reported incidents.
79. Francis Oakley, Kingship,  76–79.
80. Ibid.,  80.
81. The literature on this topic is immense. Here I mention just the account in Franz-
Reiner Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter, 190–214 (with many bibliograph-
ical references) and, due to their significance to the discussion of the historical
Notes 343
scope of the sociological theory of functional differentiation, the contributions by

Hartmann Tyrell, Gerd Althoff, Wilfried Hartmann, and Sita Steckel, along with the
commentary by Otto Gerhard Oexle in Karl Gabriel, Christel Gärtner, and Detlef
Pollack (eds.), Umstrittene Säkularisierung. Soziologische und historische Analysen zur
Differenzierung von Religion und Politik, Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2012, 39–
187. In the same volume (620f.) I myself pointed out that in this case the fact that the
church pursued separation from the state did not mean—to quote Ernst Troeltsch—
“the separation of the state from the church” and that this fact is very difficult to de-
scribe in terms of differentiation theory. See Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of
the Christian Churches (1912), London: Allen and Unwin, 1931, 234.
83. Rudolf Schieffer, “Worms, Rom und Canossa in zeitgenössischer Wahrnehmung,” in
Historische Zeitschrift 292 (2011), 593–612.
85. See Francis Oakley, Kingship, 116f.; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), pt. 4, ch. 47,
ed. by Michael Oakeshott, Oxford: Blackwell, 1946, 457 (emphasis in original). On
this topic, see also Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 87–192.
86. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007. For a critique, see Hans
Joas, “Die säkulare Option und ihre Folgen,” in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57
(2009), 293–300.
87. Franz-Reiner Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter, 216. In our context it should
be noted that elsewhere Erkens explicitly takes issue with Max Weber’s narrative of
disenchantment: “Overall, however, the term ‘disenchantment of the world,’ coined
to convey an increasingly rational understanding and interpretation of the world
by another, particularly important, source of inspiration for the modern discipline
of history, namely Max Weber, does not apply to kingship” (Franz-Reiner Erkens,
“Herrschersakralität,” in Andrea Beck and Andreas Berndt [eds.], Sakralität und
Sakralisierung. Perspektiven des Heiligen, 28). When it comes to my other key source
on the topic of sacred rulership, Francis Oakley, the subtitle of his book and a chapter
heading refer to “enchantment” and the “disenchanted world.” It is striking, however
(Kingship, 137), that he locates the beginning of the process of disenchantment in the
eighteenth century, whereas Weber identified the Reformation as the high point of
this process.
88. Franz-Reiner Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter, 129. For the English
text, see Johann P. Sommerville (ed.), King James VI and I: Political Writings,
89. Franz-Reiner Erkens, Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter, 127f. Wolfgang Reinhard
has shown that ideas about the right of resistance, popular sovereignty, and democ-
racy cannot be clearly assigned to particular confessions, and that they could in fact
be mobilized by all of them in line with a given situation of oppression or in light
of the lot of minorities. See Wolfgang Reinhard, “Historiker, ‘Modernisierung’ und
Modernisierung. Erfahrungen mit dem Konzept ‘Modernisierung’ in der neueren
Geschichte,” in Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (eds.), Innovation und
Originalität, Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993, 53–69, esp. 68.
344 Notes
90. On the use of this formula by the “Frondeurs” in Bordeaux in 1652–1653, see Francis
Oakley, Kingship, 138.
91. William Graham Sumner, “War” (1903), in William Graham Sumner, War and Other
Essays (ed. by Albert Galloway Keller), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919,
3–40. For an account and discussion of his theory, see Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl,
War in Social Thought, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017, 110–115.
92. Max Weber, “Ethnic Groups,” in Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline
of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, 385–398,
here 391.
93. Ibid.
94. In this respect, I agree in particular with the studies of Anthony D. Smith. See
Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003; Smith,
“Ethnic Election and National Destiny: Some Religious Origins of Nationalist Ideals,”
in Nations and Nationalism 5 (1999), 3, 331–355. Smith has been heavily influenced
by the work of George L. Mosse, chiefly on German history. See George L. Mosse, The
Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany
from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich, New York: Howard Fertig,
1975. Rich material on the relationship between nation and religion in Germany
and Europe can be found in the following two anthologies: Heinz-Gerhard Haupt
and Dieter Langewiesche (eds.), Nation und Religion in der deutschen Geschichte,
Frankfurt/ M: Campus, 2001; Heinz- Gerhard Haupt and Dieter Langewiesche
(eds.), Nation und Religion in Europa. Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und
20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2004. See also Dieter Langewiesche, Reich,
Nation, Föderation. Deutschland und Europa, Munich: Beck, 2008, 68–92. A very
good research overview that seeks to integrate research on religion and nationalism is
provided in Philip S. Gorski and Gülay Türkmen-Dervisoglu, “Religion, Nationalism,
and Violence: An Integrated Approach,” in Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013), 193–
210. See also Werner Stark, The Sociology of Religion, vol. 1, 69–135. Jörn Leonhard’s
book Bellizismus und Nation is a veritable compendium of the interactions between
the sacralization of the nation and the nationalization of the sacred in Europe and the
United States.
95. Rich material on, for example, the Boers in South Africa and the Zionist movement
appears in Donald Harman Akenson, God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South
Africa, Israel, and Ulster, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992.
96. Quotations from Paolo Prodi, “Konfessionalisierungsforschung im internationalen
Kontext,” in Hans Joas (ed.), Die Anthropologie von Macht und Glauben. Das Werk
Wolfgang Reinhards in der Diskussion, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008, 63–82, here 67f.
(“God is the republic, and he who commands the republic, commands God. Likewise,
God is justice, and he who dispenses justice thus creates God”).
97. Ibid.,  68.
98. Ibid.
99. For a highly nuanced account of the history of the sacralization of the state and its
dangers (including critical engagement with my hypothesis of the sacredness of the
Notes 345
person), see Ludwig Siep, Der Staat als irdischer Gott. Genese und Relevanz einer
Hegelschen Idee, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015.
100. Max Weber was greatly interested in the reasons why missionarism developed only
weakly in the history of ancient Judaism. See ch. 4 of the present book. Anthony
D. Smith seeks to express this difference through the terms “covenanted” and “mis-
sionary peoples.” See Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples, 95.
101. Conor Cruise O’Brien expresses this nicely by referring to chosenness with or
without “tenure”: O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, 42.
102. Amos 9:7.
103. See Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role
(1968), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; Cavanaugh, Migrations of the
Holy, 88–108. Specifically on the history of American foreign policy is the account
by Knud Krakau, Missionsbewußtsein und Völkerrechtsdoktrin in den Vereinigten
Staaten, Frankfurt/M: Metzner, 1967.
104. For an excellent account, see Jürgen Osterhammel, “ ‘The Great Work of Uplifting
Mankind,’ Zivilisierungsmission und Moderne,” in Boris Barth and Jürgen
Osterhammel (eds.), Zivilisierungsmissionen. Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit
dem 18. Jahrhundert, Konstanz: UVK, 2005, 363–425; on France, see Daniel
Bogner, Das Recht des Politischen. Ein neuer Begriff der Menschenrechte, Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2014.
106. See esp. ch. 3 of this book and the first half of the present chapter.
107. On justifying comments by the young Friedrich Schlegel and by Joseph Görres, see
Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl, War in Social Thought, 59.
108. See Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples, 106–115.
109. Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person; Hans Joas, Sind die Menschenrechte westlich?,
Munich: Kösel, 2015.
110. Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person,  9–36.
111. Franz-Reiner Erkens, “Herrschersakralität,” 29.
112. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), 136f.
113. For more on this, see the books listed in n. 109 and the literature they mention.
114. Hans Joas, “Ist die Menschenwürde noch unser oberster Wert?,” in Die Zeit, June 7,
2013 (philosophy supplement), 10f., now also in Die Zeit (ed.), Wie soll ich leben?
Philosophen der Gegenwart geben Antwort, Munich: Pattloch, 2014, 43–49.
115. For a comprehensive account, see Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash
of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the French Revolution to the Great War,
London: HarperCollins, 2005 and Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the
European Dictators to Al Qaeda, London: HarperPress, 2006; Hans Maier (ed.),
Wege in die Gewalt. Die modernen politischen Religionen, Frankfurt/M: Fischer,
2000. On the controversy over the term “political religion” and the efficacy and limits
of Burleigh’s approach, see, for example, Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The
Relevance of a Concept,” in History and Memory 9 (1997), 321–349; David D.
346 Notes
Roberts, “ ‘Political Religion’ and the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical

Concept,” in Contemporary European History 18 (2009), 381–414.
116. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2010, 193–206. See also ch. 4 of the present book, which includes a passage on the
anti-Hegelian impulse in the work of Troeltsch.
117. When I first publicly presented these ideas (see preface), I linked them to remarks
on the “sacralization of Europe” (a better phrase would be the “self-sacralization of
Europe”) and drew attention to current tendencies to idealize Europe, its culture,
and its past. These tendencies, it should be noted, are also evident in the output of
opponents of European unification, whether of an Islamophobic bent or “defenders
of the West,” as well as among the champions of European unity. The media response
to my talk almost exclusively highlighted this warning about the sacralization of
Europe. See Hans Joas, “Sacralization and Desacralization. Political Domination
and Religious Interpretation,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 36 (2016),
25–42, here 38f.
118. On “affirmative genealogy,” see Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person, 97–139.
119. A striking example of the hurtful nature of the denigration of non-Christian
African religion as mere magic can be found in the autobiography of important
Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. He describes how one of his first stories, which
he submitted under the title “My Childhood,” was retitled by a periodical as “I Try
Witchcraft” and how his reflections on his previous beliefs were twisted into a pro-
colonial condemnation of the faith of an entire community. See Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o,
In the House of the Interpreter, New York: Anchor, 2015, 166.
120. On the complex nature of this balance, see Hans Joas, Kirche als Moralagentur?,  69–79.
Bibliography
Abbott, Andrew. Processual Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Adams, George P. “The Interpretation of Religion in Royce and Durkheim.” Philosophical
Review 25 (1916): 297–304.
Ahlstrom, Sydney (ed.). Theology in America: The Major Protestant Voices from Puritanism
to Neo-Orthodoxy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003).
Akenson, Donald Harman. God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and
Ulster (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Alexander, Jeffrey. The Classical Attempt at Theoretical Synthesis: Max Weber
(London: Routledge, 1983).
Alexander, Jeffrey. “Culture and Political Crisis: ‘Watergate’ and Durkheimian
Sociology.” In Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, edited by Jeffrey Alexander
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988): 187–244.
Alexander, Jeffrey. “The Promise and Contradictions of Axiality.” Sociologica 1 (2013): 1–7.
Alexander, Jeffrey, and Philip Smith (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Allen, N. J., W. S. F. Pickering, and William Watts Miller (eds.). On Durkheim’s “Elementary
Forms of Religious Life” (London: Routledge, 1998).
Apel, Karl-Otto. Diskurs und Verantwortung. Das Problem des Übergangs zur post
konventionellen Moral (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1990).
Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
(New York: Anchor, 2006).
Arnason, Johann P. “Rehistoricizing the Axial Age.” In The Axial Age and Its Consequences,
edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2012): 337–365.
Arnason, Johann P., Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock. “General Introduction.”
In Axial Civilizations and World History, edited by Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N.
Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005): 1–12.
Assmann, Aleida. “Jaspers’ Achsenzeit, oder Schwierigkeiten mit der Zentralperspektive
in der Geschichte.” In Karl Jaspers. Denken zwischen Wissenschaft, Politik und
Philosophie, edited by Dietrich Harth (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989): 187–205.
Assmann, Aleida. “Einheit und Vielfalt in der Geschichte. Jaspers’ Begriff der Achsenzeit
neu betrachtet.” In Kulturen der Achsenzeit, vol. 2, edited by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1992): 330–340.
Assmann, Jan. “Der Sonderweg des christlichen Abendlandes. Eric Voegelin stiftet
Feindschaft zwischen Geist und Ordnung und bestreitet der Neuzeit ihre Legitimität.”
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 3, 1994, 10.
Assmann, Jan. “Alle Götter sind eins!” Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 15, 2004, 14.
Assmann, Jan. Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008).
Assmann, Jan. The Price of Monotheism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
348 Bibliography
Assmann, Jan. “Cultural Memory and the Myths of the Axial Age.” In The Axial Age and
Its Consequences, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012): 366–407.
Assmann, Jan. The Invention of Religion: Faith and Covenant in the Book of Exodus
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Auxier, Randall. Time, Will, and Purpose: Living Ideas from the Philosophy of Josiah Royce
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2009).
Bach, Olaf. Die Erfindung der Globalisierung. Entstehung und Wandel eines zeitgeschichtli
chen Grundbegriffs (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2013).
Balzac, Honoré de. “Lettres sur Paris, 9.1.1831.” In Honoré de Balzac, Oeuvres diverses,
vol. 2 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1925): 114f.
Barnes, Michael Horace. Stages of Thought: The Co-Evolution of Religious Thought and
Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Barry, Jonathan, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (eds.). Witchcraft in Early Modern
Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Barth, Heinrich. “Karl Jaspers über Glaube und Geschichte” (1950). In Karl Jaspers in der
Diskussion, edited by Hans Saner (Munich: Piper, 1973): 274–296.
Barth, Ulrich. “Friedrich Schleiermacher.” In Klassiker der Theologie, vol. 2, edited by
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Munich: Beck, 2005): 58–88.
Basso, Ellen. A Musical View of the Universe: Kalapalo Myth and Ritual Performances
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985).
Baudelaire, Charles. “Le Spleen de Paris” (1869). In Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes
(Paris: Pléiade, 1975): 113–307.
Beauchamp, Tom L. (ed.). David Hume. A Dissertation on the Passions /The Natural
History of Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007).
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 2013).
Becker, Gerhold. Neuzeitliche Subjektivität und Religiosität. Die religionsphilosophische
Bedeutung von Heraufkunft und Wesen der Neuzeit im Denken von Ernst Troeltsch
(Regensburg: Pustet, 1982).
Begemann, Christian. Furcht und Angst im Prozeß der Aufklärung (Frankfurt/M:
Athenäum, 1987).
Beidelman, T. O. W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).
Bellah, Robert N. “Religious Evolution.” American Sociological Review 29 (1964): 358–374.
Bellah, Robert N. “Liturgy and Experience.” In The Roots of Ritual, edited by James D.
Shaugnessy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1973): 217–234.
Bellah, Robert N. “Max Weber and World-Denying Love.” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 67, no. 2 (1999): 277–304.
Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011).
Bellah, Robert N. “A Reply to My Critics.” First Things 234 (2013): 49–55.
Bellah, Robert N., and Hans Joas (eds.). The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Belliger, Andréa, and David J. Krieger (eds.). Ritualtheorien. Ein einführendes Handbuch
(Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2006).
Berlin, Isaiah. “Hume and the Sources of German Anti-Rationalism.” In Isaiah Berlin,
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1979): 162–187.
Bibliography 349
Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1981).
Berner, Ulrich. “Kommensalität.” In Handbuch religionswissenschaftlicher Grundbegriffe,
vol. 3, edited by Hubert Cancik, Burkhard Gladigow, and Matthias Laubscher
(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993): 390–392.
Biser, Eugen. Glaubensprognose. Orientierung in post- säkularistischer Zeit (Graz:
Styria, 1991).
Black, Antony. “The ‘Axial Period’: What Was It and What Does It Signify?” Review of
Politics 70 (2008): 23–39.
Bloch, Marc. The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England (1924)
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2015).
Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
Bogner, Daniel. Das Recht des Politischen. Ein neuer Begriff der Menschenrechte (Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2014).
Bogusz, Tanja, and Heike Delitz (eds.). Émile Durkheim. Soziologie– Ethnologie–
Philosophie (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2013).
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Sanctorum communio: A Theological Study of the Sociology of the
Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009).
Bossy, John. Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Bousset, Wilhelm. “Propheten und Prophetische Religionen.” In Wilhelm Bousset, Das
Wesen der Religion, dargestellt an ihrer Geschichte (Halle: Gebauer-Schwetschke,
1906): 82–103.
Bousset, Wilhelm. Kyrios Christos (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1913).
Boy, John D., and John Torpey. “Inventing the Axial Age: The Origins and Uses of a
Historical Concept.” Theory and Society 42 (2013): 241–259.
Brague, Rémi. The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western
Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
Brent, Joseph. C. S. Peirce: A Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).
Breuer, Stefan. Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1991).
Breuer, Stefan. “Kulturen der Achsenzeit. Leistung und Grenzen eines geschichtsphiloso
phischen Konzepts.” Saeculum 45 (1994): 1–33.
Breuer, Stefan. “Magie, Zauber, Entzauberung.” In Max Webers “Religionssystematik,” ed-
ited by Hans Gerhard Kippenberg and Martin Riesebrodt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2001): 119–130.
Breuer, Stefan. Der charismatische Staat. Ursprünge und Frühformen staatlicher Herrschaft
(Darmstadt: WBG, 2014).
Breuer, Stefan. “Max Weber, das Charisma und Erwin Rohde.” Zeitschrift für Religions-
und Geistesgeschichte 67, no. 1 (2015): 1–16.
Brose, Thomas. Johann Georg Hamann und David Hume. Metaphysikkritik und Glaube im
Spannungsfeld der Aufklärung, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/M: Lang, 2006).
Brown, Peter. The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity
Brown, Steven. “The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution.” In The Origins of Music,
edited by Nils L. Wallin, Björn Merker, and Steven Brown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000): 271–301.
Brubaker, Rogers. The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of
Max Weber (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1984).
350 Bibliography
Buber, Martin. I and Thou (1923) (London: A and C Black, 2004).

Buckle, Henry Thomas. History of Civilization in England (1861), vol. 2 (London: Longman,
Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1864).
Bultmann, Christoph. Die biblische Urgeschichte in der Aufklärung. Johann Gottfried
Herders Interpretation der Genesis als Antwort auf die Religionskritik David Humes
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999).
Burke, Edmund, III. “Introduction: Marshall G. S. Hodgson and World History.” In
Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993): ix–xxi.
Burleigh, Michael. Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe, from the
French Revolution to the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2005).
Burleigh, Michael. Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al
Qaeda (London: HarperPress, 2006).
Burrin, Philippe. “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept.” History and Memory 9
(1997): 321–349.
Caillois, Roger. Man and the Sacred (1939) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
Carroll, Anthony J. Protestant Modernity: Weber, Secularization, and Protestantism
(Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2007).
Casanova, José. “Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity in Bellah’s Theory of
Religious Evolution.” In The Axial Age and Its Consequences, edited by Robert N. Bellah
and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 191–221.
Cassirer, Ernst. Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren
Zeit. Vol. 4: Von Hegels Tod bis zur Gegenwart (1950) (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1973).
Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–1929), 4 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2009).
Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Cavanaugh, William T. Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the
Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century
Chamboredon, Jean-Claude. “Émile Durkheim: Le social, objet du science. Du moral au
politique?” Critique 445/446 (1984): 460–531.
Christ, Karl. “Fustel de Coulanges und die antike Gesellschaft.” In Fustel de Coulanges, Der
antike Staat (Munich: Klett-Cotta, 1988): 9–20.
Class, Gustav. “Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Ontologie des menschlichen
Geistes, Leipzig 1896.” American Journal of Theology 1 (1897): 789–792.
Claussen, Johann Hinrich. Die Jesus-Deutung von Ernst Troeltsch im Kontext der liberalen
Theologie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997).
Clendenning, John. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce (Nashville: Vanderbilt University
Press, 1999).
Colin, Pierre, and Olivier Mongin (eds.). Un monde désenchanté? (Paris: Cerf, 1988).
Collins, Randall. Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, NJ: Princeton: Princeton
Conant, James. “The James/Royce Dispute and the Development of James’s Solution.”
In The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by Ruth Anna Putnam
Bibliography 351
Croce, Paul Jerome. Science and Religion in the Era of William James: The Eclipse of
Certainty, 1820–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Cuchet, Guillaume. “La réception catholique des ‘Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse’
(1912) d’Émile Durkheim.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 159 (2012): 29–48.
Dalferth, Ingolf. “The Idea of Transcendence.” In The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed-
ited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2012): 146–188.
Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750
(New York: Zone, 2001).
Deacon, Terrence. The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain
(New York: Norton, 1997).
Derman, Joshua. “Philosophy beyond the Bounds of Reason: The Influence of Max Weber
on the Development of Karl Jaspers’s Existenzphilosophie, 1909–1932.” In Max Weber
Matters: Interweaving Past and Present, edited by David Chalcraft, Fanon Howell,
Marisol Lopez Menendez, and Hector Vera (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008): 55–71.
Deuser, Hermann. Gottesinstinkt. Semiotische Religionstheorie und Pragmatismus (Tübin
gen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004).
Deuser, Hermann. Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009).
Deuser, Hermann. Was ist Wahrheit anderes als ein Leben für eine Idee? Kierkegaards
Existenzdenken und die Inspiration des Pragmatismus (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011).
Deuser, Hermann, Hans Joas, Matthias Jung, and Magnus Schlette (eds.). The Varieties of
Transcendence: Pragmatism and the Theory of Religion (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2016).
Dewey, John. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1938).
Dewey, John. Experience and Nature (1925) (New York: Dover, 1958).
Dewey, John. The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action
(1929) (New York: Paragon, 1980).
Dietrich, Richard. “Karl Jaspers als Geschichtsdenker.” In Historische Theorie und
Geschichtsforschung der Gegenwart, edited by Richard Dietrich (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1964): 75–98.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Leipzig: Teubner, 1907).
Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Das Problem der Religion” (1911). In Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. VI (Leipzig: Teubner, 1924): 288–305.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie”
(1894). In Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Philosophie des Lebens /Abhandlungen
zur Grundlegung der Geisteswissenschaften (= Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5) (Leipzig and
Berlin: Teubner, 1924): 139–240.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Leben und Erkennen. Ein Entwurf zur erkenntnistheoretischen
Logik und Kategorienlehre.” In Wilhelm Dilthey, Grundlegung der Wissenschaften
vom Menschen und der Geschichte. Ausarbeitungen und Entwürfe zum zweiten
Band der Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (= Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19)
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1982): 333–388.
Dittmer, Jörg. “Jaspers’ ‘Achsenzeit’ und das interkulturelle Gespräch.” In Globaler
Kampf der Kulturen? Analysen und Orientierungen, edited by Dieter Becker
Döblin, Alfred (ed.). The Living Thoughts of Confucius (New York: Longmans, Green and
Co., 1940).
352 Bibliography
Docekal, Herta-Ursula. Ernst von Lasaulx. Ein Beitrag zur Kritik des organischen
Geschichtsbegriffs (Münster: Aschendorff, 1970).
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966).
Douglas, Mary. In the Active Voice (London: Routledge, 1982).
Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols (London: Routledge, 2003).
Douglass, Bruce. “A Diminished Gospel: A Critique of Voegelin’s Interpretation of
Christianity.” In Eric Voegelin’s Search for Order in History, edited by Stephen A.
McKnight (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978): 139–154.
Drescher, Hans Georg. Ernst Troeltsch. Leben und Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und
Ruprecht, 1991).
Dumézil, Georges. “Réflexions sur ‘La Cité Antique.’ ” In Fustel de Coulanges, La cité an-
tique (Paris: Albatros/Valmonde, 1982): 7–30.
Durkheim, Émile. Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1960).
Durkheim, Émile. Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Application of the Sociology
of Education (New York: Free Press, 1961).
Durkheim, Émile. L’ éducation morale (1934) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1963).
Durkheim, Émile. “Préface,” vol. 1. of the journal L’ Année sociologique (1896/1897).
In Émile Durkheim, Journal sociologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1969):  31–36.
Durkheim, Émile. Le suicide (1897) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973).
Durkheim, Émile. Textes, vol. 2 (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1975).
Durkheim, Émile. The Evolution of Educational Thought: Lectures on the Formation and
Development of Secondary Education (1938) (London: Routledge, 1977).
Durkheim, Émile. “The Problem of Religion and the Duality of Human Nature.” In
Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture, Past and Present, edited by
Henrika Kuklick and Elizabeth Long (Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1983): 1–41.
Durkheim, Émile. The Division of Labor in Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 
1984).
Durkheim, Émile. Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (London: Routledge, 1992).
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) (New York: Free
Press, 1995).
Durkheim, Émile. Suicide: A Study in Sociology (London: Routledge, 2005).
Durkheim, Émile, and Marcel Mauss. “Selbstrezension der ‘Formes élémentaires’ 1913.”
In Émile Durkheim, Journal sociologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1969): 700–707.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. “Weber’s Analysis of Islam and the Specific Pattern of Islamic
Civilization.” In Max Weber and Islam, edited by Wolfgang Schluchter (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction, 1999): 281–294.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. “Interview: Pluralism and the Multiple Forms of Modernity.”
European Journal of Social Theory 7 (2004): 319–404.
Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. “The Axial Age in World History.” In The Cultural Values of Europe,
edited by Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2008): 22–42.
Elias, Norbert. “The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present.” Theory, Culture and Society
4 (1987): 223–247.
Bibliography 353
Elkana, Yehuda. “Second-Order Thinking in Classical Greece.” In Origins and Diversity of

Axial Age Civilizations, edited by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, vol. 1 (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1986): 40–64.
Engel-Janosi, Friedrich. “The Historical Thought of Ernst von Lasaulx.” Theological
Studies 14 (1953): 377–401.
Erikson, Erik H. Identity and the Life Cycle (New York: Norton 1994).
Erkens, Franz-Reiner. Herrschersakralität im Mittelalter. Von den Anfängen bis zum
Investiturstreit (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2006).
Erkens, Franz-Reiner. “Herrschersakralität. Ein Essai.” In Sakralität und Sakralisierung.
Perspektiven des Heiligen, edited by Andrea Beck and Andreas Berndt (Stuttgart:
Steiner, 2013).
Erkens, Franz-Reiner (ed.). Die Sakralität von Herrschaft. Herrschaftslegitimierung im
Wechsel der Zeiten und Räume (Berlin: Akademie, 2002).
Fahey, Tony. “Max Weber’s Ancient Judaism.” American Journal of Sociology 88
(1982): 62–87.
Fechtner, Kristian. Volkskirche im neuzeitlichen Christentum. Die Bedeutung Ernst
Troeltschs für eine künftige praktisch- theologische Theorie der Kirche (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995).
Feldhay, Rivka. “Religion.” In The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern
Science, edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge
Feuerbach, Ludwig. “Zur Beurteilung der Schrift ‘Das Wesen des Christentums’ ” (1842).
In Ludwig Feuerbach, Werke, edited by Erich Thies, vol. 3 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1975): 210–222.
Finley, Moses I. “The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond.”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (1977): 305–327.
Firth, Raymond. Rank and Religion in Tikopia: A Study in Polynesian Paganism and
Conversion to Christianity (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970).
Flitner, Elisabeth. “Vom Kampf der Professoren zum ‘Kampf der Götter.’ Max Weber und
Eduard Spranger.” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 44 (1998): 889–906.
Fournier, Marcel. Émile Durkheim: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
Fournier, Marcel. “ ‘Les Formes élémentaires’ comme oeuvre collective. Les contributions
d’Henri Hubert et de Marcel Mauss à la sociologie de la religion tardive d’Émile
Durkheim.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 39 (2014): 523–546.
Franke, Leo. “Die Achsenzeit als Wendung zur Idee: K. Jaspers und G. Simmel.” Zeitschrift
für philosophische Forschung 26 (1972): 83–102.
Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (New York:
Macmillan, 1923).
Frei, Hans. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century
Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).
Freyer, Hans. “Der Einbruch der Transzendenz in die Geschichte.” In Hans Freyer,
Schwelle der Zeiten. Beiträge zur Soziologie der Kultur (Stuttgart: DVA, 1965): 121–156.
Frothingham, Octavius Brooks. Ripley (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1882).
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis. La cité antique (1864) (Paris: Flammarion, 1982
and 1984).
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis. Der antike Staat. Kult, Recht und Institutionen
Griechenlands und Roms (Munich: Klett-Cotta, 1988).
354 Bibliography
Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis. The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and
Institutions of Greece and Rome (Chelmsford, MA: Courier, 2012).
Gabriel, Karl, Christel Gärtner, and Detlef Pollack (eds.). Umstrittene Säkularisierung.
Soziologische und historische Analysen zur Differenzierung von Religion und Politik
(Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2012).
Gauchet, Marcel. Le désenchantement du monde. Une histoire politique de la religion
(Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion
Gavin, William Joseph. William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1992).
Gawlick, Günter, and Lothar Kreimendahl. Hume in der deutschen Aufklärung. Umrisse
einer Rezeptionsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1987).
Gehlen, Arnold. Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963).
Gehlen, Arnold. Urmensch und Spätkultur. Philosophische Ergebnisse und Aussagen (1956)
(Frankfurt/M: Athenäum, 21964).
Gephart, Werner. Strafe und Verbrechen (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1990).
Gergen, Kenneth. “Charles Taylor, Wittgenstein, Empiricism, and the Question of the
‘Inner.’ ” In Hermeneutics and Psychological Theory, edited by Stanley Messer, Louis Sass,
and Robert Woolfolk (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988): 52–58.
Gergen, Kenneth. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life
(New York: Basic Books, 1991).
Gerrish, Brian A. Continuing the Reformation: Essays on Modern Religious Thought
Gfrörer, August Friedrich. Urgeschichte des menschlichen Geschlechts (Schaffhausen:
Hurter, 1855).
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), 3
vols., edited by David Womersley (New York: Penguin, 1994).
Goedert, Georges. “Die universalgeschichtliche Einheitsidee bei Karl Jaspers.” Jahrbuch
der Österreichischen Karl-Jaspers-Gesellschaft 11 (1998): 9–27.
Gogarten, Friedrich. “Die Krisis unserer Kultur” (1920). In Friedrich Gogarten, Die
religiöse Entscheidung (Jena: Diederichs, 1921): 32–53.
Gogarten, Friedrich. “Zwischen den Zeiten” (1920). In Anfänge der dialektischen
Theologie, vol. II, edited by Jürgen Moltmann (Munich: Kaiser, 1963): 95–102.
Gorski, Philip. “The Return of the Repressed: Religion and the Political Unconscious of
Historical Sociology.” In Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, edited
by Julia Adams, Elizabeth Clemens, and Ann Orloff (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2005): 161–189.
Gorski, Philip, and Gülay Türkmen-Dervisoglu. “Religion, Nationalism, and Violence: An
Integrated Approach.” Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 193–210.
Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014).
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. “Die antihistoristische Revolution in der protestantischen
Theologie der zwanziger Jahre.” In Vernunft des Glaubens. Wissenschaftliche Theologie
und kirchliche Lehre. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Wolfhart Pannenberg, edited by
Jan Rohls and Gunther Wenz (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988): 377–405.
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. “Sakraltransfer.” In Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 7
(Tübingen: Mohr, 42004): col. 748f.
Bibliography 355
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. Der heilige Zeitgeist. Studien zur Ideengeschichte der protestan
tischen Theologie in der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011).
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. Fachmenschenfreundschaft. Studien zu Troeltsch und Weber
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014).
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. “Die ‘kompetentesten’ Gesprächspartner? Implizite theologi
sche Werturteile in Max Webers ‘Protestantischer Ethik.’ ” In Friedrich Wilhelm
Graf, Fachmenschenfreundschaft. Studien zu Troeltsch und Weber (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2014): 111–149.
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Trutz Rendtorff (eds.). Ernst Troeltschs Soziallehren.
Studien zu ihrer Interpretation (= Troeltsch-Studien, vol. 6) (Gütersloh: Gütersloher
Verlagshaus, 1993).
Green, William A. “Periodization in European and World History.” Journal of World
History 3 (1992): 13–53.
Gregory, Brad. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized
Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
Große Kracht, Hermann- Josef (ed.) Der moderne Glaube an die Menschenwürde.
Philosophie, Soziologie und Theologie im Gespräch mit Hans Joas (Bielefeld:
Transcript, 2014).
Großheim, Michael. Von Georg Simmel zu Martin Heidegger. Philosophie zwischen Leben
und Existenz (Bonn: Bouvier, 1991).
Guttmann, Julius. “Max Webers Soziologie des antiken Judentums” (1925). In Max
Webers Studie über das antike Judentum. Interpretation und Kritik, edited by Wolfgang
Schluchter (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1981): 289–326.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Geschichte und Evolution.” In Jürgen Habermas, Zur Rekonstruktion
des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1976): 200–259.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Moralentwicklung und Ich-Identität.” In Jürgen Habermas, Zur
Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1976): 63–91.
Habermas, Jürgen. Theory of Communicative Action. 2 vols. (Boston: Beacon, 1985).
Habermas, Jürgen. “Vom Kampf der Glaubensmächte. Karl Jaspers zum Konflikt der
Kulturen.” In Jürgen Habermas, Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen Ausdruck
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1997):  41–58.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (New York:
Wiley, 2015).
Habermas, Jürgen. “A Hypothesis Concerning the Evolutionary Meaning of Rites.” In
Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking II (Chichester: Polity, 2017): 43–56.
Hahn, Hans Peter. “Durkheim und die Ethnologie. Schlaglichter auf ein schwieriges
Verhältnis.” Paideuma 58 (2012): 261–282.
Halton, Eugene. From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl
Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Hamann, Johann Georg. Hauptschriften, vol. VII (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1956).
Hampe, Michael, and Felicitas Krämer. “Befreiende Erfahrungen. Religion bei William
James.” In Michael Hampe, Erkenntnis und Praxis. Zur Philosophie des Pragmatismus
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2006): 254–291.
Hanke, Edith. “Erlösungsreligionen.” In Max Webers “Religionssystematik,” edited by Hans
Gerhard Kippenberg and Martin Riesebrodt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001): 209–226.
Harrington, Austin. German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices
from Weimar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
356 Bibliography
Harrison, Peter. “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Hartog, François. “Préface.” In Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique (Paris: Flammarion,
1984): v–xxiv.
Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Dieter Langewiesche (eds.). Nation und Religion in der
deutschen Geschichte (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2001).
Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard, and Dieter Langewiesche (eds.). Nation und Religion in Europa.
Mehrkonfessionelle Gesellschaften im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/M: Campus,
2004).
Hausner, Sondra L. (ed.). Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of “The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life” (New York: Berghahn, 2013).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History (Kitchener, ON: Batoche, 2001).
Heimes, Claus. Politik und Transzendenz. Ordnungsdenken bei Carl Schmitt und Eric
Voegelin (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2009).
Heimpel, Hermann. “Geschichte und Geschichtswissenschaft. Bericht über die 23.
Versammlung deutscher Historiker in Ulm.” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 5
(1957): 1–17.
Hellmich, Wolfgang. Aufklärende Rationalisierung. Ein Versuch, Max Weber neu zu
interpretieren (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2013).
Hénaff, Marcel. “Three Crucial Aspects of Religion in Human Evolution: Shamanism,
Sacrifice and Exogamic Alliance.” European Journal of Sociology 53 (2012): 327–335.
Henkel, Michael. Eric Voegelin zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 1998).
Henning, Christian. “Die Funktion der Religionspsychologie in der Protestantischen
Theologie um 1900.” In Religion und Religiosität zwischen Theologie und Psychologie,
edited by Christian Henning and Erich Nestler (Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1998): 27–78.
Henrich, Dieter. “Karl Jaspers: Denken im Blick auf Max Weber.” In Max Weber und seine
Zeitgenossen, edited by Wolfgang Mommsen and Wolfgang Schwentker (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1988): 722–739.
Héran, François. “L’institution démotivée. De Fustel de Coulanges à Durkheim et au-
delà.” Revue française de sociologie 28 (1987): 67–97.
Herbrechtsmeier, William. “The Burden of the Axial Age: Transcendentalism in Religion
as a Function of Empire.” In Defining Religion: Investigating the Boundaries between the
Sacred and Secular, edited by Arthur L. Greil and David G. Bromley (Oxford: Elsevier
Science, 2003): 109–126.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Exzerpt Hume: natürliche Geschichte der Religion.” In
Johann Gottfried Herder, Sämtliche Werke, edited by Bernhard Suphan, vol. 32 (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1899): 193–197.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Schriften zum Alten Testament (= Werke, vol. 5) (Frankfurt/
M: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993).
Herms, Eilert. “Metaphysik und Christentumstheorie. Beobachtungen und Erwägungen
zu Josiah Royces ‘religiöser Philosophie’ und Fundamentaltheologie.” Zeitschrift für
Theologie und Kirche 71 (1974): 410–455.
Herms, Eilert. “Josiah Royces Beitrag zur Theorie des Christentums: Beobachtungen
und Erwägungen zu seinen Hibbert Lectures über ‘The Problem of Christianity.’ ”
Theologische Zeitschrift 36 (1980): no. 5: 286–310 and no. 6: 355–373.
Hick, John. An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989): 21–35.
Bibliography 357
Hintze, Otto. “Kalvinismus und Staatsräson in Brandenburg zu Beginn des 17.

Jahrhunderts.” Historische Zeitschrift 144 (1931): 229–286.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan (1651), edited by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Blackwell,
1946).
Hodgson, Marshall. The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization,
vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Hodgson, Marshall. Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History
Holenstein, Elmar. Philosophie-Atlas. Orte und Wege des Denkens (Zürich: Ammann,
2004).
Hollier, Denis (ed.). The College of Sociology, 1937–1939 (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1988).
Holloway, R. Ross. “ ‘La cité antique’ of Fustel de Coulanges and Its Modern Critics.” Revue
des archéologues et historiens d’art de Louvain 32 (1999): 1–5.
Honneth, Axel, and Hans Joas. Social Action and Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
Horstmann, Axel. “Mythos, Mythologie.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol.
6, edited by Joachim Ritter et al. (Basel: Schwabe, 1984): col. 281–318.
Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social
Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Knopf, 1958).
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1938) (Kettering,
OH: Angelico Press, 2016).
Humbach, Karl-Theo. Das Verhältnis von Einzelperson und Gemeinschaft nach Josiah
Royce. Eine Untersuchung zum Zentralproblem der Sozialphilosophie (Heidelberg:
Winter, 1962).
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739/ 40) (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1978).
Hume, David. The Natural History of Religion (1757). In David Hume, Principal Writings
on Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): 134–193.
Humphreys, S. C. The Family, Women, and Death: Comparative Studies (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983).
Idinopulos, Thomas, and Brian C. Wilson (eds.). Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and
Teaching of Religion Today (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. “Einleitung in des Verfassers sämtliche philosophische
Schriften” (1815). In Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Schriften zum transzendentalen
Idealismus (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2004): 373–433.
Jalbert, John E. “Time, Death, and History in Simmel and Heidegger.” Human Studies 26
(2003): 259–283.
James, William. Some Problems of Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green and
Co., 1911).
James, William. “Reflex Action and Theism.” In William James, The Works, vol. 19
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979): 90–113.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) (New York: Penguin, 1982).
James, William. “Letter to Alice James, October 17, 1867.” In The Correspondence of
William James, vol. 4 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995): 212–217.
James, William. Pragmatism (1907) (New York: Dover, 1995).
358 Bibliography
Jaspers, Karl. Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Berlin and Leipzig: de Gruyter, 1932).
Jaspers, Karl. The European Spirit (London: SCM, 1947).
Jaspers, Karl. Philosophical Faith and Revelation (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
Jaspers, Karl. The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge, 2010).
Jay, Martin. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a
Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
Jerryson, Michael K., and Mark Juergensmeyer (eds.). Buddhist Warfare (Oxford: Oxford
Joas, Hans. G. H. Mead. A Contemporary Re-Examination of His Thought (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985) (21987, with new preface).
Joas, Hans. “The Unhappy Marriage of Hermeneutics and Functionalism,” in Axel
Honneth and Hans Joas (eds.), Communicative Action: Essays on Jürgen Habermas’s
“The Theory of Communicative Action” (Oxford: Polity, 1991): 97–118.
Joas, Hans. “Durkheim and Pragmatism: The Psychology of Consciousness and the Social
Constitution of Categories,” in Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 1993): 55–78.
Joas, Hans. “Institutionalization as a Creative Process: The Sociological Importance of
Cornelius Castoriadis’s Political Philosophy,” in Hans Joas, Pragmatism and Social
Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 154–171.
Joas, Hans. Pragmatism and Social Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
Joas, Hans. The Creativity of Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Joas, Hans. The Genesis of Values (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
Joas, Hans. “The Gift of Life: Parsons’ Late Sociology of Religion,” in Journal of Classical
Sociology 1 (2001): 127–141.
Joas, Hans. War and Modernity (Oxford: Polity, 2003).
Joas, Hans. “Max Weber and the Origin of Human Rights: A Study of Cultural Innovation.”
In Max Weber’s “Economy and Society”: A Critical Companion, edited by Charles Camic,
Philip S. Gorski, and David M. Trubek (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005):
366–382.
Joas, Hans. “Die soziologische Perspektive.” In Lehrbuch der Soziologie, edited by Hans
Joas (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 32007): 11–38.
Joas, Hans. Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence (Boulder,
CO: Paradigm, 2008).
Joas, Hans. “Die säkulare Option und ihre Folgen.” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 57
(2009): 293–300.
Joas, Hans. “Eine deutsche Idee von der Freiheit? Cassirer und Troeltsch zwischen
Deutschland und dem Westen.” In Sozialphilosophie und Kritik, edited by Rainer Forst,
Martin Hartmann, and Rahel Jaeggi (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2009): 288–316.
Joas, Hans. “Society, State, and Religion: Their Relationship from the Perspective of the
World Religions. An Introduction.” In Secularization and the World Religions, edited
by Hans Joas and Klaus Wiegandt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009): 9–43.
Joas, Hans. “Selbsttranszendenz und Wertbindung. Ernst Troeltsch als Ausgangspunkt
einer modernen Religionssoziologie.” In Religion(en) deuten. Transformationen der
Religionsforschung, edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Friedemann Voigt (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2010): 51–64.
Joas, Hans. “Robert N. Bellah. Religiöse Evolution und symbolischer Realismus.” In
Kultur. Theorien der Gegenwart, edited by Stephan Moebius and Dirk Quadflieg
(Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 22011): 83–91.
Bibliography 359
Joas, Hans. “Schleiermacher and the Turn to Experience in the Study of Religion.” In
Interpreting Religion: The Significance of Friedrich Schleichermacher’s “Reden über die
Religion” for Religious Studies and Theology, edited by Dietrich Korsch and Amber L.
Griffioen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011): 147–161.
Joas, Hans. “The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse.” In The Axial Age and Its
Consequences, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Joas, Hans. “Ist die Menschenwürde noch unser oberster Wert?” Die Zeit, June 7, 2013
(Beilage Philosophie): 10f., now also in Wie soll ich leben? Philosophen der Gegenwart
geben Antwort, edited by Die Zeit (Munich: Pattloch, 2014): 43–49.
Joas, Hans. The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013).
Joas, Hans. Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity (Stanford, CA: Stanford
Joas, Hans. “Replik.” In Der moderne Glaube an die Menschenwürde, edited by Klaus
Große Kracht (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014): 243–264.
Joas, Hans. “Säkulare Heiligkeit. Wie aktuell ist Rudolf Otto?” In Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige.
Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen
(1917) (Munich: Beck, 2014): 255–281.
Joas, Hans. Was ist die Achsenzeit? Eine wissenschaftliche Debatte als Diskurs über
Transzendenz (Basel: Schwabe, 2014).
Joas, Hans. Sind die Menschenrechte westlich? (Munich: Kösel, 2015).
Joas, Hans. “Was dürfen wir hoffen?” In Inspiration für das Leben. Im Dialog mit der Bibel,
edited by Rudolf Walter (Freiburg: Herder, 2015): 205–218.
Joas, Hans. “Dangerous Nouns of Process: Differentiation, Rationalization, Modern
ization.” In The Art and Science of Sociology: Essays in Honor of Edward A. Tiryakian,
edited by Roland Robertson and John Simpson (London: Anthem, 2016): 149–162.
Joas, Hans. Kirche als Moralagentur? (Munich: Kösel, 2016).
Joas, Hans. “Nachwort.” In Alfred Döblin, Der unsterbliche Mensch /Der Kampf mit dem
Engel (Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 2016): 613–636.
Joas, Hans. “Naturgeschichte der Religion als Religionskritik? David Hume und die
Folgen.” In Religion und Aufklärung, edited by Albrecht Beutel and Martha Nooke
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016): 3–17.
Joas, Hans. “Pragmatism and Historicism: Mead’s Philosophy of Temporality and the
Logic of Historiography.” In The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead, edited by Hans
Joas and Daniel R. Huebner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016): 62–81.
Joas, Hans. “Religious Experience and Its Interpretation: Reflections on James and
Royce.” In The Varieties of Transcendence, edited by Hermann Deuser, Hans Joas,
Matthias Jung, and Magnus Schlette (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016):
219–235.
Joas, Hans. “Sacralization and Desacralization: Political Domination and Religious
Interpretation.” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 36 (2016): 2, 25–42.
Joas, Hans. “More Weberian Than Weber? David Martin’s Political Sociology of Religion.”
In David Martin and the Sociology of Religion, edited by Hans Joas (Oxford: Routledge,
2018): 1–15.
Joas, Hans. “The Independence of Religious Phenomena: The Work of Ernst Troeltsch as
a Template for the Study of Religion,” in Christopher Adair-Toteff (ed.), The Anthem
Companion to Ernst Troeltsch (London: Anthem Press, 2018): 25–35.
360 Bibliography
Joas, Hans (ed.). Was sind religiöse Überzeugungen? (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003).

Joas, Hans, and Wolfgang Knöbl. Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures (Cambridge:
Joas, Hans, and Wolfgang Knöbl. War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
Jones, Robert Alun. “Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and Sacrifice: An Historical Context
for ‘The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life.’ ” Journal of the History of the Behavioral
Sciences 17 (1981): 184–205.
Jones, Robert Alun. “Durkheim, Frazer, and Smith and the Sociology of Religion.”
American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986): 596–627.
Jones, Robert Alun. “Durkheim and ‘La Cité antique’: An Essay on the Origins of
Durkheim’s Sociology of Religion.” In Émile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist, edited
by Stephen Turner (London: Routledge, 1993): 25–51.
Jones, Robert Alun. “Pragmatism and Protestantism in the Development of Durkheim’s
Sociology of Religion.” In Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of
Religion Today, edited by Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (Leiden: Brill,
2001): 45–58.
Jones, Robert Alun. “Practices and Presuppositions: Some Questions about Durkheim
and ‘Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse.’ ” In The Cambridge Companion to
Durkheim, edited by Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge
Jones, Robert Alun, and W. Paul Vogt. “Durkheim’s Defense of ‘Les formes élémentaires
de la vie religieuse.’ ” Knowledge and Society 5 (1984): 45–62.
Jung, Matthias. Dilthey zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 1996).
Jung, Matthias. Erfahrung und Religion. Grundzüge einer hermeneutisch-pragmatischen
Religionsphilosophie (Freiburg: Alber, 1999).
Jung, Matthias. Der bewußte Ausdruck. Anthropologie der Artikulation (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2009).
Jung, Matthias. “Verkörperte Intentionalität— zur Anthropologie des Handelns.” In
Handlung und Erfahrung. Das Erbe von Historismus und Pragmatismus und die Zukunft
der Sozialtheorie, edited by Bettina Hollstein, Matthias Jung, and Wolfgang Knöbl
(Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2011): 25–50.
Jung, Matthias. “Embodiment, Transcendence, and Contingency: Anthropological
Features of the Axial Age.” In The Axial Age and Its Consequences, edited by Robert N.
Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 77–101.
Jung, Matthias. Gewöhnliche Erfahrung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).
Jussen, Bernhard. “The King’s Two Bodies Today.” Representations 106 (2009): 102–117.
Kaegi, Werner. Jacob Burckhardt. Eine Biographie, vol. XI (Basel: Schwabe, 1977).
Kaesler, Dirk. “Max Weber.” Klassiker der Soziologie, vol. 1, edited by Dirk Kaesler
(Munich: Beck, 52006): 191–214.
Kaesler, Dirk. Max Weber. Preuße, Denker, Muttersohn. Eine Biographie (Munich:
Beck, 2014).
Kail, P. J. E. “Understanding Hume’s Natural History of Religion.” The Philosophical
Quarterly 57, no. 227 (2007): 190–211.
Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
(1957) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Bibliography 361
Karsenti, Bruno. “De l’historiographie ancienne à la science sociale. Une nouvelle lecture
de ‘La cité antique’ de Fustel de Coulanges.” In Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique
(Paris: Flammarion, 2009): 3–29.
Karsenti, Bruno. “Sociology Face to Face with Pragmatism: Action, Concept, and Person.”
Journal of Classical Sociology 12 (2012): 398–427.
Kaufmann, Franz- Xaver. “Wissenssoziologische Überlegungen zu Renaissance und
Niedergang des katholischen Naturrechtsdenkens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert”
(1973). In Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, Soziologie und Sozialethik. Gesammelte Aufsätze
zur Moralsoziologie, edited by Stephan Goertz (Freiburg [Switzerland]: Herder,
2013): 321–354.
Kessler, Udo. Die Wiederentdeckung der Transzendenz. Ordnung von Mensch und
Gesellschaft im Denken Eric Voegelins (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann,
 1995).
Kieffer, Jean-Luc, Anquetil-Duperron. L’Inde en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Société
d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1983).
Kippenberg, Hans Gerhard. Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton,
Kippenberg, Hans Gerhard. “Religionsanalyse im Zusammenhang mit einer pragma
tistischen Handlungstheorie.” In Hans Joas in der Diskussion. Kreativität–Selbsttranszendenz–
Gewalt, edited by Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2012): 59–78.
Kippenberg, Hans Gerhard. “Dialektik der Entzauberung. Säkularisierung aus der
Perspektive von Max Webers Religionssystematik.” In Alte Begriffe –Neue Probleme.
Max Webers Soziologie im Lichte aktueller Problemstellungen, edited by Thomas
Schwinn and Gert Albert (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016): 81–116.
Kippenberg, Hans Gerhard, and Martin Riesebrodt (eds.). Max Webers “Religions
systematik” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).
Kirkbright, Suzanne. Karl Jaspers: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2004).
Kittsteiner, Heinz- Dieter. “Das Gewissen im Gewitter.” Jahrbuch für Volkskunde
(1987): 7–26.
Klapczynski, Gregor. Katholischer Historismus? Zum historischen Denken in der
deutschsprachigen Kirchengeschichte um 1900 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013).
Kleist, Heinrich von. “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden.” In
Heinrich von Kleist, Werke (Munich: Hanser, 1966): 810–814.
Klimkeit, Hans- Joachim. “Friedrich Max Müller (1823– 1900).” In Klassiker der
Religionswissenschaft. Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade, edited by Axel
Michaels (Munich: Beck, 1997): 29–40.
Knöbl, Wolfgang. Spielräume der Modernisierung. Das Ende der Eindeutigkeit (Weilers
wist: Velbrück, 2001).
Koeter, Alfons. Ernst von Lasaulx’ Geschichtsphilosophie und ihr Einfluß auf Jacob
Burckhardts “Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen” (Dissertation, University of Münster,
1937).
Kolakowski, Leszek. “Philosophical Faith in the Face of Revelation.” In Leszek Kolakowski,
Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990): 108–119.
König, René. “Soziologie in Berlin um 1930.” In René König, Soziologie in Deutschland.
Begründer, Verfechter, Verächter (Munich: Hanser, 1987): 258–297.
Korff, Hermann August. Geist der Goethezeit (Leipzig: Kohler und Amelang, 21966).
362 Bibliography
Koschorke, Albrecht. “Moderne als Wunsch. Krieg und Städtebau im 20. Jahrhundert.”
Leviathan 27 (1999): 23–42.
Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005).
Koshul, Basit Bilal. The Postmodern Significance of Max Weber’s Legacy: Disenchanting
Disenchantment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Koziel, Bernd Elmar. Achsenzeit, Apokalyptik, Gnade. Zur Hermeneutik des christlichen
Glaubens (Würzburg: Echter, 2015).
Krakau, Knud. Missionsbewußtsein und Völkerrechtsdoktrin in den Vereinigten Staaten
(Frankfurt/M: Metzner, 1967).
Krämer, Felicitas. Erfahrungsvielfalt und Wirklichkeit. Zu William James’ Realitätsverständ
nis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006).
Krappmann, Lothar. Soziologische Dimensionen der Identität. Strukturelle Bedingungen
für die Teilnahme an Interaktionsprozessen (Stuttgart: Klett, 1971).
Krech, Volkhard. Wissenschaft und Religion (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002).
Laarmann, Matthias. “Sacrificium intellectus.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie,
vol. 8, edited by Joachim Ritter et al. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1972): col. 1113–1116.
Lamberth, David C. William James and the Metaphysics of Experience (Cambridge:
Lang, Bernhard. “Prophet, Priester, Virtuose.” In Max Webers “Religionssystematik,” ed-
ited by Hans Gerhard Kippenberg and Martin Riesebrodt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2001): 167–191.
Lang, Bernhard. “Die zweigeteilte Welt. ‘Jenseits’ und ‘Diesseits’ in der katholischen
Theologie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts.” In Das Jenseits. Facetten eines religiösen Begriffs
in der Neuzeit, edited by Lucian Hölscher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007): 203–232.
Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and
Art (1942) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965).
Langewiesche, Dieter. Reich, Nation, Föderation. Deutschland und Europa (Munich:
Beck, 2008).
Lasaulx, Ernst von. Neuer Versuch einer alten, auf die Wahrheit der Tatsachen gegründeten
Philosophie der Geschichte (1856) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1952).
Lask, Emil. “Zum System der Wissenschaften.” In Emil Lask, Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
III (Tübingen: Mohr, 1924): 239–293.
Lauster, Jörg. Die Verzauberung der Welt. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Christentums
(Munich: Beck, 2014).
Lefort, Claude. “The Permanence of the Theologico- Political?” In Claude Lefort,
Democracy and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1988): 213–255.
Le Fort, Gertrud von. Der Kranz der Engel (Munich: Ehrenwirth, 1956).
Lehmann, Hartmut. Die Entzauberung der Welt. Studien zu Themen von Max Weber
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2009).
Lehmann, Hartmut. Religiöse Erweckung in gottferner Zeit. Studien zur Pietismusforschung
(Göttingen: Wallstein, 2010).
Lehmkühler, Karsten. “Die Bedeutung des Kultus für das Christentum der Moderne.
Eine Diskussion zwischen Wilhelm Bousset und Ernst Troeltsch.” In Die “religions
geschichtliche Schule.” Facetten eines theologischen Umbruchs, edited by Gerd Lüdemann
(Frankfurt/M: Lang, 1996): 207–224.
Bibliography 363
Lemert, Charles. “1905: Weber in the Year of Miracles.” In The Protestant Ethic Turns 100.
Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis, edited by William H. Swatos Jr. and Lutz
Kaelber (London: Paradigm, 2005): ix–xii.
Leonhard, Jörn. Bellizismus und Nation. Kriegsdeutung und Nationsbestimmung in Europa
und den Vereinigten Staaten 1750–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2008).
Leppin, Hartmut. “Kaisertum und Christentum in der Spätantike. Überlegungen zu einer
unwahrscheinlichen Synthese.” In Die Vielfalt normativer Ordnungen. Konflikte und
Dynamik in historischer und ethnologischer Perspektive, edited by Andreas Fahrmeir
and Annette Imhausen (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2013): 197–223.
LeQuire, Peter Brickey. “The Axial Age Debate as Political Discourse: Karl Jaspers and
Eric Voegelin.” Clio 43 (2014): 295–316.
LeQuire, Peter Brickey, and Daniel Silver, “Critical Naïveté? Religion, Science, and
Action in the Parsons-Voegelin Correspondence.” European Journal of Sociology 54
(2013): 265–293.
Leuba, James. “Studies in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena.” American Journal of
Psychology 7 (1896): 345–347.
Levine, Donald N. “Note on the Concept of an Axial Turning in Human History.” In
Rethinking Civilizational Analysis, edited by Said Amir Arjomand and Edward A.
Tiryakian (London: Sage, 2004): 67–70.
Levine, Donald N., and Daniel Silver. “Introduction.” In Georg Simmel, The View of Life
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010): ix–xxxii.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Das Ende des Totemismus (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1965).
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism (Boston: Beacon, 1971).
Loisy, Alfred. “Sociologie et religion.” Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 4
(1913): 45–76.
Löwith, Karl. “Die Entzauberung der Welt durch Wissenschaft. Zu Max Webers 100.
Geburtstag.” Merkur 18 (1964): 501–519.
Löwith, Karl. From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought
(1941) (London: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954).
Ludwig, Emil. Wagner oder die Entzauberten (Berlin: Felix Lehmann, 1913).
Luhmann, Niklas. “Die Ausdifferenzierung der Religion.” In Niklas Luhmann, Gesell
schaftsstruktur und Semantik. Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft,
vol. 3 (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1989): 259–357.
Lukács, György. The Theory of the Novel (1916) (London: Merlin Press, 2006).
Lukes, Steven. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work—A Historical and Critical Study
(London: Penguin, 1973).
Lukes, Steven. Power: A Radical View (1974) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
Lukes, Steven. “Is Durkheim’s Understanding of Religion Compatible with Believing?”
Religion 42 (2012): 41–52.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Christianity. The First Three Thousand Years (New York:
Viking, 2009).
MacIntyre, Alasdair. “Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?” In Faith
and the Philosophers, edited by John Hick (London: Macmillan, 1964): 115–133.
Maier, Bernhard. William Robertson Smith (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).
Maier, Hans (ed.). Wege in die Gewalt. Die modernen politischen Religionen (Frankfurt/
M: Fischer, 2000).
Malherbe, Michel. “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion.’ ” Hume Studies 21, no. 2
(1995): 255–274.
364 Bibliography
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Magic, Science, and Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954).

Mann, Michael. The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
4 vols. Vol. 1: 1986; vol. 2: 1993; vol. 3: 2012; vol. 4: 2013).
Mannheim, Karl. “Problems of Sociology in Germany” (1929). In From Karl Mannheim,
edited by Kurt H. Wolff and Volker Meja (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
1993): 438–456.
Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia (1929) (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine, 2015).
Manuel, Frank. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Marcel, Gabriel. Royce’s Metaphysics (Chicago: Regnery, 1956).
Marett, Robert Ranulph. A Jerseyman at Oxford (London: Oxford University Press, 1941).
Markschies, Christoph. Das antike Christentum. Frömmigkeit, Lebensformen, Institutionen
(Munich: Beck, 2006).
Marquard, Odo. “In Praise of Polytheism (On Monomythical and Polymythical
Thinking).” In Odo Marquard, Farewell to Matters of Principle (1981) (Oxford: Oxford
Martin, David. “The Relevance of the European Model of Secularization in Latin America
and Africa.” In Secularization and the World Religions, edited by Hans Joas and Klaus
Wiegandt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010): 278–295.
Martin, David. The Future of Christianity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
Martin, David. “Axial Religion and the Problem of Violence.” In The Axial Age and Its
Consequences, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Maryanski, Alexandra. “The Birth of the Gods: Robertson Smith and Durkheim’s Turn
to Religion as the Basis of Social Integration.” Sociological Theory 32 (2014): 352–376.
Mathews, Matthew T. “The Theological Framework of Josiah Royce’s ‘The Problem of
Christianity.’ ” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 19 (1998): 275–291.
Mead, George Herbert. “Review of Gustav Class, Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie
und Ontologie des menschlichen Geistes. Leipzig 1896.” American Journal of Theology
1 (1897): 789–792.
Mead, George Herbert. The Philosophy of the Present (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1932).
Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society (1934), edited by Daniel R. Huebner and
Hans Joas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Meier, Mischa. “Krisen und Krisenwahrnehmung im 6. Jahrhundert v. Chr.” In Die
Wahrnehmung von Krisenphänomenen. Fallbeispiele von der Antike bis in die Neuzeit,
edited by Helga Scholten (Weimar: Böhlau, 2007): 111–125.
Meinecke, Friedrich. Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1972).
Metzler, Dietrich, “A. H. Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) und das Konzept der Achsen
zeit.” Achaemenid History 7 (1991): 123–133.
Meyer, Eduard. Geschichte des Altertums (1884). Vol. 1 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1953).
Meyer, Thomas. Vom Ende der Emanzipation. Jüdische Philosophie und Theologie nach
1933 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2008).
Michalowski, Piotr. “Mesopotamian Vistas on Axial Transformations.” In Axial
Civilizations and World History, edited by Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt,
and Björn Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005): 157–182.
Bibliography 365
Moebius, Stephan. Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie

(1937–1939) (Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2006).
Molendijk, Arie L. Zwischen Theologie und Soziologie. Ernst Troeltschs Typen der
christlichen Gemeinschaftsbildung: Kirche, Sekte, Mystik (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Ver
lagshaus, 1996).
Momigliano, Arnaldo. Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “The Ancient City of Fustel de Coulanges.” In Arnaldo Momigliano,
Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1977): 325–344.
Momigliano, Arnaldo. “A Note on Max Weber’s Definition of Judaism as a Pariah
Religion.” History and Theory 19 (1980): 313–318.
Mommsen, Wolfgang. Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (Tübingen: Mohr, 21974).
Montmarquet, James A. “Jaspers, the Axial Age, and Christianity.” American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2009): 239–254.
Moore, George Foot. History of Religions (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1914).
Morris, Ian. Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal
about the Future (London: Profile, 2011).
Mosse, George L. The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass
Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York:
Howard Fertig, 1975).
Mossner, E. C. The Life of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).
Mumford, Lewis. The Conduct of Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1951).
Mumford, Lewis. The Transformations of Man (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957).
Münkler, Herfried. Imperien. Die Logik der Weltherrschaft vom Alten Rom bis zu den
Vereinigten Staaten (Berlin: Rowohlt, 2005).
Musset, Alfred de. La confession d’un enfant du siècle (1915) (Paris: Bookking
International, 1995).
Musset, Alfred de. Bekenntnisse eines Kindes seiner Zeit (Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek in
Berlin, n.d.).
Musset, Alfred de. Bekenntnisse eines jungen Zeitgenossen (Zürich: Manesse, 1999).
Nagl, Ludwig. Charles Sanders Peirce (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 1992).
Nagl, Ludwig. Das verhüllte Absolute. Essays zur zeitgenössischen Religionsphilosophie
(Frankfurt/M: Lang,  2010).
Nelson, Benjamin. The Idea of Usury: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood
(1949) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).
Nelson, Benjamin. “Sciences and Civilizations, ‘East’ and ‘West’—Joseph Needham and
Max Weber.” Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 11 (1974): 445–493.
Neville, Robert Cummings. Religion: Philosophical Theology. Vol. 3 (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2015).
Newman, Francis W. The Soul: Its Sorrows and Its Aspirations (London: Chapman, 31852).
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In the House of the Interpreter (New York: Anchor, 2015).
Niebuhr, H. Richard. The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Holt, 1929).
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss
Nisbet, Robert A. The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic, 1966).
Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide
366 Bibliography
Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical
Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Nowak, Kurt. “Die ‘antihistoristische Revolution.’ Symptome und Folgen der Krise
historischer Weltorientierung nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg.” In Umstrittene Moderne.
Die Zukunft der Neuzeit im Urteil der Epoche Ernst Troeltschs, edited by Horst Renz and
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (= Troeltsch-Studien, vol. 4) (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1987): 133–171.
Nungesser, Frithjof. “Mead Meets Tomasello: Pragmatism, the Cognitive Sciences, and
the Origins of Human Communication and Sociality.” In The Timeliness of George
Herbert Mead, edited by Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2016): 252–275.
Oakley, Francis. Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
O’Brien, Conor Cruise. God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge,
O’Connor, David. “Psychological Explanations of Religious Belief.” In The Continuum
Companion to Hume, edited by Alan Bailey and Dan O’Brien (London: Continuum,
2012): 265–278.
Oppenheim, Frank M. Reverence for the Relations of Life: Reimagining Pragmatism via
Josiah Royce’s Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 2005).
Osterhammel, Jürgen. “ ‘The Great Work of Uplifting Mankind,’ Zivilisierungsmission und
Moderne.” In Zivilisierungsmissionen. Imperiale Weltverbesserung seit dem 18. Jahrhundert,
edited by Boris Barth and Jürgen Osterhammel (Konstanz: UVK, 2005): 363–425.
Osterhammel, Jürgen. Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia
Otto, Eckart. Max Webers Studien des Antiken Judentums (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002).
Otto, Eckart. “Die hebräische Prophetie bei Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch und Hermann
Cohen. Ein Diskurs im Weltkrieg zur christlich- jüdischen Kultursynthese.” In
Asketischer Protestantismus und der “Geist” des modernen Kapitalismus. Max Weber
und Ernst Troeltsch, edited by Wolfgang Schluchter and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of
the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational (London: Oxford University Press, 1923).
Otto, Rudolf. “Parallels and Convergences in the History of Religions,” in Rudolf Otto,
Religious Essays: A Supplement to “The Idea of the Holy” (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1931): 95–109.
Otto, Rudolf. Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis
zum Rationalen (1917) (Munich: Beck, 2014).
Ozouf, Mona. La fête révolutionnaire 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
Parsons, Talcott. The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937).
Parsons, Talcott. Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall,  1966).
Parsons, Talcott. “Durkheim on Religion Revisited: Another Look at the Elementary
Forms of the Religious Life.” In Beyond the Classics? Essays in the Scientific Study of
Religion, edited by Charles Y. Glock and Philip E. Hammond (New York: Harper and
Row, 1973): 156–180.
Parsons, Talcott. “Comparative Studies and Evolutionary Change.” In Talcott Parsons,
Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory (New York: Free Press, 1977): 279–320.
Parsons, Talcott. Action Theory and the Human Condition (New York: Free Press, 1978).
Bibliography 367
Parsons, Talcott. “Karl Jaspers.” In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 18
(New York: Free Press, 1979): 341–345.
Pearson, Lori. Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1931).
Peirce, Charles Sanders. Values in a Universe of Chance (Selected Writings). Edited by
Philip P. Wiener (New York: Dover, 1958).
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God” (1908). In
The Essential Peirce. Edited by Peirce Edition Project, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Ideas, Stray or Stolen, about Scientific Writing. No. 1.” In
The Essential Peirce. Edited by Peirce Edition Project, vol. 2 (Bloomington: Indiana
Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies (1984) (Princeton,
Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little,
Brown and Co., 1935).
Pettenkofer, Andreas. Radikaler Protest. Zur soziologischen Theorie politischer Bewegungen
(Frankfurt/M: Campus,  2010).
Pettenkofer, Andreas. “Sakralisierung und Abweichung. Das Collège de Sociologie,
Marcel Mauss und die Aktualität der Durkheim- Schule.” Mittelweg 36, no. 23
(2014): 95–110.
Pfleiderer, Otto. Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage (Berlin: Reimer, 1878).
Pickering, W. S. F. “The Response of Catholic and Protestant Thinkers to the Work of
Émile Durkheim: With Special Reference to ‘Les formes élémentaires.’ ” Durkheimian
Studies 14 (2008): 59–93.
Pieper, Josef. In Search of the Sacred: Contributions to an Answer (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1991).
Pocock, John G. A. “Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon’s History of Religion.”
Eighteenth-Century Life 18 (1982): 83–94.
Poggi, Gianfranco. Forms of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Pohle, Joseph. Lehrbuch der Dogmatik, vol. 1 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1914).
Pollock, Sheldon. “Axialism and Empire.” In Axial Civilizations and World History, ed-
ited by Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock (Leiden: Brill,
2005): 397–450.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern
World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
Popitz, Heinrich. Phenomena of Power: Authority, Domination, and Violence (New York:
Potepa, Maciej. “Feuerbach und Schleiermacher.” In Ludwig Feuerbach und die Philosophie
der Zukunft, edited by Hans-Jürg Braun, Hans-Martin Sass, Werner Schuffenhauer,
and Francesco Tomasoni (Berlin: Akademie, 1990): 165–177.
Prendergast, Christopher. “The Impact of Fustel de Coulanges’ ‘La Cité antique’ on
Durkheim’s Theories of Social Morphology and Social Solidarity.” Humboldt Journal of
Social Relations 11 (1983/1984): 53–73.
Prodi, Paolo. “Konfessionalisierungsforschung im internationalen Kontext.” In Die
Anthropologie von Macht und Glauben. Das Werk Wolfgang Reinhards in der Diskussion,
edited by Hans Joas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2008): 63–82.
368 Bibliography
Proudfoot, Wayne. “From Theology to a Science of Religion: Jonathan Edwards and

William James on Religious Affection.” Harvard Theological Review 82 (1989): 149–168.
Provan, Iain. Convenient Myths: The Axial Age, Dark Green Religion, and the World That
Never Was (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2013).
Puett, Michael. To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early
China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2002).
Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred. “Lettres de Radcliffe-Brown a Mauss.” Études durkheimiennes 4
(December 1979): 2–7.
Radkau, Joachim. Max Weber. Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2005).
Radkau, Joachim. Max Weber: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).
Raposa, Michael L. “In the Presence of the Universe: Peirce, Royce, and Theology as
Theosemiotic.” Harvard Theological Review 103 (2010): 237–247.
Rappaport, Roy A. Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge
Ratzinger, Joseph. “Christianity—The True Religion?,” in Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and
Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004): 162–183.
Ratzinger, Joseph. “Bereitung zum priesterlichen Dienst.” In Joseph Ratzinger, Künder
des Wortes und Diener eurer Freude (= Gesamtausgabe, vol. 12) (Freiburg: Herder,
2010): 423–450.
Reinach, Salomon. Orpheus: A General History of Religions (1909) (London: Heinemann,
1909).
Reinach, Salomon. Orpheus. Histoire générale des religions (1909) (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2002).
Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Historiker, ‘Modernisierung’ und Modernisierung. Erfahrungen
mit dem Konzept ‘Modernisierung’ in der neueren Geschichte.” In Innovation und
Originalität, edited by Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1993): 53–69.
Reinhard, Wolfgang. “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer
Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters” (1977). In Wolfgang Reinhard, Ausgewählte
Abhandlungen (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1997): 77–102.
Rhodes, Robert Colbert. “Émile Durkheim and the Historical Thought of Marc Bloch.”
Theory and Society 5 (1978): 45–73.
Richardson, Robert D. “Schleiermacher and the Transcendentalists.” In Transient and
Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Context, edited by Charles Capper
and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999): 121–147.
Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
(Boston: Mariner, 2006).
Ricoeur, Paul. “The Relation of Jaspers’ Philosophy to Religion.” In Paul Arthur Schilpp
(ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (New York: Tudor, 1957): 611–642.
Ricoeur, Paul. “Theonomy and/or Autonomy.” In The Future of Theology: Essays in Honor
of Jürgen Moltmann, edited by Miroslav Volf, Carmen Krieg, and Thomas Kucharz
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996): 284–298.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Riesebrodt, Martin. “Review: Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World.”
American Journal of Sociology 104 (1999): 1525f.
Riesebrodt, Martin. “Ethische und exemplarische Prophetie.” In Max Webers “Religi
onssystematik,” edited by Hans Gerhard Kippenberg and Martin Riesebrodt
Bibliography 369
Rigali, Norbert J. “A New Axis: Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy of History.” International

Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1970): 441–457.
Riley, Alexander Tristan. Godless Intellectuals? The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred
Reinvented (New York: Berghahn, 2010).
Roberts, David D. “ ‘Political Religion’ and the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical
Concept.” Contemporary European History 18 (2009): 381–414.
Rockefeller, Steven. John Dewey: Religious Faith and Democratic Humanism (New York:
Roetz, Heiner. “The Axial Age Theory: A Challenge to Historism or an Explanatory
Device of Civilization Analysis? With a Look at the Normative Discourse in Axial Age
China.” In The Axial Age and Its Consequences, edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans
Joas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): 248–273.
Roetz, Heiner. Die chinesische Ethik der Achsenzeit. Eine Rekonstruktion unter dem Aspekt
des Durchbruchs zu postkonventionellem Denken (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1992).
Rohde, Erwin. Psyche: The Cult of Souls and Belief in Immortality among the Greeks (1898)
(London: Routledge, 2014).
Rosa, Hartmut. Identität und kulturelle Praxis. Politische Philosophie nach Charles Taylor
Rosati, Massimo. “The Archaic and Us: Ritual, Myth, the Sacred and Modernity.”
Philosophy and Social Criticism 40 (2014): 363–368.
Rosenbaum, Stuart (ed.). Pragmatism and Religion (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2003).
Rosenzweig, Franz. Der Stern der Erlösung (1921) (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1988).
Röth, Eduard. Die ägyptische und die zoroastrische Glaubenslehre als die ältesten Quellen
unserer spekulativen Ideen (Mannheim: Bassermann, 1846).
Royce, Josiah. The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1892).
Royce, Josiah. The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908).
Royce, Josiah. William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life (New York:
Macmillan, 1911).
Royce, Josiah. The Sources of Religious Insight (New York: Scribner, 1912).
Royce, Josiah. War and Insurance: An Address (New York: Macmillan, 1914).
Royce, Josiah. Fugitive Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920).
Royce, Josiah. The Problem of Christianity (1913) (Washington, DC: Catholic University
of America Press, 2001).
Runciman, Walter G. “The Diffusion of Christianity in the Third Century AD as a Case
Study in the Theory of Cultural Selection.” Archives européennes de sociologie 45
(2004): 3–21.
Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972).
Saler, Michael. “Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review.” American
Historical Review 111 (2006): 692–716.
Saner, Hans (ed.). Karl Jaspers. Provokationen. Gespräche und Interviews (Munich:
Piper, 1969).
Scaff, Lawrence. Fleeing the Iron Cage. Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of
Max Weber (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Scheler, Max. On the Eternal in Man (1921) (London: Routledge, 2009).
Schieffer, Rudolf. “Worms, Rom und Canossa in zeitgenössischer Wahrnehmung.”
Historische Zeitschrift 292 (2011): 593–612.
370 Bibliography
Schiller, Friedrich. “The Gods of Greece.” In Poems of Places. An Anthology in 31 Volumes,

Greece and Turkey in Europe, vol. XIX, edited by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(Boston: Osgood, 1876–1879): 5–8.
Schimank, Uwe. Theorien gesellschaftlicher Differenzierung (Opladen: Leske und Budrich,
32007).
Schlegel, August Wilhelm. “Allgemeine Übersicht des gegenwärtigen Zustandes der

deutschen Literatur (1802/03).” In August Wilhelm Schlegel, Geschichte der klassi
schen Literatur (= Kritische Schriften und Briefe, vol. 3), edited by Edgar Lohner
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799)
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Die christliche Sitte nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen
Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt (Berlin: Reimer, 1843) (reprinted Waltrop:
Spenner, 1999, edited by Ludwig Jonas).
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Christliche Sittenlehre (Vorlesung im Wintersemester 1826/27),
edited by Hermann Peiter (Berlin: Lit, 2011).
Schluchter, Wolfgang. Rationalismus der Weltbeherrschung. Studien zu Max Weber
(Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,  1982).
Schluchter, Wolfgang. Religion und Lebensführung, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,  1988).
Schluchter, Wolfgang. “Einleitung.” In Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf /Politik als
Beruf (= Max-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, section I, vol. 17) (Tübingen: Mohr, 1992): 146.
Schluchter, Wolfgang. Die Entzauberung der Welt. Sechs Studien zu Max Weber
Schluchter, Wolfgang. Grundlegungen der Soziologie. Eine Theoriegeschichte in systemati
scher Absicht (Tübingen: Mohr, 22015).
Schmid, Konrad. “Klassische und nachklassische Deutungen der alttestamentlichen
Prophetie.” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 3 (1996): 225–250.
Schmidt-Leukel, Perry. “Drei Kalkins und die Frage nach den Wurzeln religiöser Gewalt.”
Zeitschrift für Missions-und Religionswissenschaft 97 (2013): 91–101.
Schnabel, Franz. Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 4: Die religiösen
Kräfte (Freiburg: Herder, 1937).
Schottländer, Rudolf. “Die Überwindung des Historismus.” Der Monat 2 (1949): 96–98.
Schubert, Hans-Joachim. Demokratische Identität. Der soziologische Pragmatismus von
Charles Horton Cooley (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1995).
Schulze, Reinhard. Der Koran und die Genealogie des Islam (Basel: Schwabe, 2015).
Schwaiger, Axel. Christliche Geschichtsdeutung in der Moderne. Eine Untersuchung zum
Geschichtsdenken von Juan Donoso Cortés, Ernst von Lasaulx und Vladimir Solov’ev
in der Zusammenschau christlicher Historiographieentwicklung (Berlin: Duncker und
Humblot, 2001).
Schwartz, Benjamin. “The Age of Transcendence.” Daedalus 104 (1975): 1–7.
Schwartz, Benjamin. The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap, 1985).
Schwartz, Regina M. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Schwinn, Thomas. Differenzierung ohne Gesellschaft. Umstellung eines soziologischen
Konzepts (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2001).
Scribner, Robert W. “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the
World.’ ” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23 (1993): 475–494.
Bibliography 371
Scribner, Robert W. Religion and Culture in Germany, 1400–1800, edited by Lyndal Roper
(Leiden: Brill, 2001).
Segal, Robert A. “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion’ and the Beginning of the Social
Scientific Study of Religion.” Religion 24 (1994): 225–234.
Segal, Robert A. “Robertson Smith’s Influence on Durkheim’s Theory of Myth and Ritual.”
In Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today, edited by
Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 2002): 59–72.
Segal, Robert A. “William Robertson Smith vis-à-vis Émile Durkheim as Sociologist of
Religion.” Journal of Scottish Thought 1, no. 2 (2008): 1–12.
Seibert, Christoph. Religion im Denken von William James (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2009).
Seligman, Adam. “Review: Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World.” American
Political Science Review 92 (1998): 960–961.
Seligman, Adam. “Reflexivity, Play, Ritual, and the Axial Age.” Sociologica 1 (2013): 1–15.
Sellmann, Matthias. Religion und soziale Ordnung. Gesellschaftstheoretische Analysen
Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion: A History (Chicago: Open Court, 21986).
Siep, Ludwig. Der Staat als irdischer Gott. Genese und Relevanz einer Hegelschen Idee
Silber, Ilana F. “Deciphering Transcendence and the Open Code of Modernity: S.
N. Eisenstadt’s Comparative Hermeneutics of Civilizations.” Journal of Classical
Sociology 11 (2011): 269–280.
Silver, Daniel. “Religion without Instrumentalization.” Archives européennes de sociologie
47 (2006): 421–434.
Simmel, Georg. Philosophische Kultur (Potsdam: Kiepenheuer, 1923).
Simmel, Georg. Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie, edited by Horst Jürgen Helle
(Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989).
Simmel, Georg. The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms
Sivin, Nathan. “Chinesische Wissenschaft. Ein Vergleich der Ansätze von Max Weber
und Joseph Needham.” In Max Webers Studie über Konfuzianismus und Taoismus.
Interpretation und Kritik, edited by Wolfgang Schluchter (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp,
1983): 342–362.
Sloane, William. “The Substance and Vision of History.” American Historical Review 17
(1912): 235–251.
Smith, Anthony D. “Ethnic Election and National Destiny: Some Religious Origins of
Nationalist Ideals.” Nations and Nationalism 5 (1999): 331–355.
Smith, Anthony D. Chosen Peoples (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Smith, Christian (ed.). The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the
Secularization of American Public Life (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2003): 1–96.
Smith, Jeremy C. A. “Grounds for Engagement: Dissonances and Overlaps at the
Intersection of Contemporary Civilizations Analysis and Postcolonial Sociology.”
Current Sociology 63 (2015): 566–585.
Smith, John E. Royce’s Social Infinite: The Community of Interpretation (New York: Liberal
Arts Press, 1950).
372 Bibliography
Smith, John E. “William James and Josiah Royce.” In Nineteenth-Century Religious

Thought in the West, vol. 2, edited by Ninian Smart, John Clayton, Steven Katz, and
Patrick Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985): 315–349.
Smith, Jonathan Z. “The Bare Facts of Ritual.” In Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining
Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1982): 53–65.
Smith, William Robertson. Religion of the Semites (1889) (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Speer, Andreas. “Sacrificium intellectus.” Archivio di filosofia 76 (2008): 57–70.
Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J. Gillen. The Northern Tribes of Central Australia
(London: Macmillan, 1904).
Sprondel, Walter M. “Entzauberung.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol.
2, edited by Joachim Ritter et al. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1972): col. 564f.
Stanner, W. E. H. “The Dreaming” (1956). In Cultures of the Pacific: Selected Readings, ed-
ited by Thomas G. Harding and Ben J. Wallace (New York: Free Press, 1970): 304–315.
Stanner, W. E. H. “Religion, Totemism, and Symbolism.” In Aboriginal Man in Australia:
Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A. P. Elkin, edited by Ronald M. Berndt and
Catherine H. Berndt (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965): 207–237.
Stark, Werner. Grundriß der Religionssoziologie (Freiburg: Rombach, 1974).
Stark, Werner. The Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom, 5 vols. (New York:
Fordham University Press, 1966–1974).
Stausberg, Michael. “Bellah’s ‘Religion in Human Evolution’: A Post-Review.” Numen 61
(2014): 281–299.
Stedman Jones, Sue. “From ‘Varieties’ to ‘Elementary Forms.’ William James and Émile
Durkheim on Religious Life.” Journal of Classical Sociology 3, no. 2 (2003): 99–121.
Steiner, Stephan. Weimar in Amerika. Leo Strauss’ Politische Philosophie (Tübingen: Mohr
Siebeck, 2013).
Steinert, Heinz. Max Webers unwiderlegbare Fehlkonstruktionen. Die protestantische Ethik
und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 2010).
Stikkers, Kenneth W. “Royce and Gadamer on Interpretation as the Constitution of
Community.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 15 (2001): 14–19.
Strauss, Leo. “On the Argument with European Science” (1924). In Leo Strauss, The
Early Writings, edited by Michael Zank (Albany: State University of New York Press,
2002): 107–117.
Strauss, Leo. “The Holy” (1923). In Leo Strauss, The Early Writings, edited by Michael
Zank (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002): 75–79.
Strauss, Leo. The Early Writings, 1921–1932, edited by Michael Zank (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002).
Strauss, Leo. Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft und zugehörige Schriften. Briefe (=
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2008).
Streminger, Gerhard. David Hume. Der Philosoph und sein Zeitalter (Munich: Beck, 2011).
Strenski, Ivan. The New Durkheim (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006).
Stroumsa, Guy G. A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason
Stroumsa, Guy G. “The Scholarly Discovery of Religion in Early Modern Times.” In The
Cambridge World History, vol. VI, part 2: The Construction of a Global World 1400–
1800 CE, edited by Jerry Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Bibliography 373
Stuart-Glennie, John Stuart. In the Morningland: Or, The Law of the Origin and
Transformation of Christianity, vol. I: The New Philosophy of History (London: Longman,
Greens and Company, 1873).
Sumner, William Graham. “War” (1903), in William Graham Sumner, War and Other
Essays, edited by Albert Galloway Keller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1919): 3–40.
Swain, Tony. A Place for Strangers: Towards a History of Australian Aboriginal Being
Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience
from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
Taylor, Charles. “Self-Interpreting Animals.” In Charles Taylor, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Taylor, Charles. Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge,
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007).
Taylor, Charles. “Disenchantment–Reenchantment.” In Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and
Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2011): 287–302.
Taylor, Charles. “Recovering the Sacred.” Inquiry 54 (2011): 113–125.
Tenbruck, Friedrich H. “Das Werk Max Webers.” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und
Sozialpsychologie 27 (1975): 663–702.
Terrier, Jean. “ ‘Auch in unserer Zeit werden Götter in den Massen geboren’. Émile
Durkheims Erklärungsansätze zur Entstehung gesellschaftlicher Ideale in der Moderne.”
Berliner Journal für Soziologie 22 (2013): 497–516.
Thomas, Günter. Implizite Religion. Theoriegeschichtliche und theoretische Untersuchungen
zum Problem ihrer Identifikation (Würzburg: Ergon, 2001).
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971).
Thomassen, Björn. “Anthropology, Multiple Modernities and the Axial Age Debate.”
Anthropological Theory 10 (2010): 321–342.
Thomsen, Anton. “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion.’ ” The Monist 19 (1909): 264–288.
Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith (1957) (New York: Harper, 2009).
Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be (1952) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014).
Tilly, Charles. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage
Foundation, 1984).
Tiryakian, Edward A. “Durkheim’s ‘Elementary Forms’ as ‘Revelation.’ ” In The Future
of the Sociological Classics, edited by Buford Rhea (Boston: Allen and Unwin,
1981): 114–135.
Tiryakian, Edward A. For Durkheim: Essays in Historical and Cultural Sociology (Farnham,
UK: Ashgate, 2009).
Tiryakian, Edward A. “Book Review: Hans Joas, ‘The Sacredness of the Person.’ ”
Contemporary Sociology 43 (2014): 187–190.
Tödt, Heinz Eduard. “Max Weber und Ernst Troeltsch in Heidelberg.” In Semper Apertus.
Sechshundert Jahre Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg 1386–1986. Festschrift in
sechs Bänden, vol. 3, edited by Wilhelm Doerr (Berlin: Springer, 1985): 215–258.
Tolstoy, Leo. “The Restoration of Hell” (1903). In On Life and Essays on Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934): 309–330.
374 Bibliography
Tomasello, Michael. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Torpey, John. “The ‘Axial Age’ vs. Weber’s Comparative Sociology of the World Religions.”
In The Art and Science of Sociology: Essays in Honor of Edward A. Tiryakian, edited by
Roland Robertson and John Simpson (London: Anthem, 2016): 189–203.
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Rezension: Julius Goldstein, Die empiristische Geschichtsauffassung David
Humes mit Berücksichtigung moderner methodologischer und erkenntnistheoretischer
Probleme. Eine philosophische Studie, Leipzig 1903.” Historische Zeitschrift N.F. 56
(1904): 477–482, now in Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGA), vol. 4, ed-
ited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with Gabriele von Bassermann-Jordan
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004): 331–336.
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie in der Religionswissenschaft”
(1905). In Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGA), vol. 6.1, edited by Trutz
Rendtorff in collaboration with Katja Thörner (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014.): 215–256.
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Religionsphilosophie” (1907). In Ernst Troeltsch, Kritische Gesamtaus
gabe (KGA), vol. 6.1 , edited by Trutz Rendtorff in collaboration with Katja Thörner
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Erlösung: II. Dogmatisch.” In Ernst Troeltsch, Die Religion in Geschichte
und Gegenwart (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1910), vol. 2, col. 481–488.
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Die Zukunftsmöglichkeiten des Christentums.” Logos 1 (1910/
1911): 165–185.
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Ein Apfel vom Baume Kierkegaards.” Christliche Welt 35 (1921): col.
186–189.
Troeltsch, Ernst. Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie. Edited by Hans
Baron (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925).
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Der Deismus.” In Ernst Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und
Religionssoziologie (= Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4) (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925): 429–487.
Troeltsch, Ernst. Glaubenslehre (Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1925): 326–364.
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Glaube und Ethos der hebräischen Propheten” (1916). In Ernst
Troeltsch, Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte und Religionssoziologie (= Gesammelte
Schriften, vol. 4) (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925): 34–65.
Troeltsch, Ernst. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912) (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1931).
Troeltsch, Ernst. The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religion (1902/1912)
(London: SCM, 1972).
Troeltsch, Ernst. “What Does ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” (1903). In Ernst Troeltsch,
Writings on Theology and Religion, edited by Robert Morgan and Michael Pye
(Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1977): 124–179.
Troeltsch, Ernst. Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of
Protestantism to the Modern World (London: Wipf and Stock, 1999).
Troeltsch, Ernst. Schriften zur Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die moderne Welt (1906–
1913) (= KGA, vol. 8), edited by Trutz Rendtorff in collaboration with Stefan Pautler
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Rezension: Reinhold Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte.
2. Hälfte (Erlangen/Leipzig 1898).” Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 163 (1901): 15–30,
now in Ernst Troeltsch, Rezensionen und Kritiken (1901–1914) (= KGA, vol. 4), ed-
ited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with Gabriele von Bassermann-Jordan
Bibliography 375
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Auguste Sabatier: Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion d’après

la psychologie et l’histoire” (1897). Deutsche Litteraturzeitung 19 (1898): 737–742,
now in Ernst Troeltsch, Rezensionen und Kritiken (1894–1900) (= KGA, vol. 2), ed-
ited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with Dina Brandt (Berlin: de Gruyter,
2007): 328–333.
Troeltsch, Ernst. Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922), 2 vols. (= KGA, vols. 16.1 and
16.2), edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with Matthias Schloßberger
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Die Selbständigkeit der Religion.” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche
5 (1895): 361–436, and 6 (1896): 71–110 and 167–218, now in Ernst Troeltsch,
Schriften zur Theologie und Religionsphilosophie (1888–1902) (= KGA, vol. 1), edited
by Christian Albrecht in collaboration with Björn Biester, Lars Emersleben, and Dirk
Schmid (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009): 364–535.
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Rezension: Peter A. Clasen, Der Salutismus (1915).” Historische
Zeitschrift 115 (1915): 327–330, now in Ernst Troeltsch, Rezensionen und Kritiken
(1915–1923) (= KGA, vol. 13), edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf in collaboration with
Diana Feßl, Harald Haury, and Alexander Seelos (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010): 84–87.
Troeltsch, Ernst. “Religionswissenschaft und Theologie des 18. Jahrhunderts” (1903). In
Ernst Troeltsch, Schriften zur Religionswissenschaft und Ethik (1903–1912) (= KGA,
vol. 6.1), edited by Trutz Rendtorff in collaboration with Katja Thörner (Berlin: de
Gruyter, 2014): 69–95.
Turner, James. Religion Enters the Academy: The Origins of the Scholarly Study of Religion
in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti- Structure (1969) (London:
Routledge, 2017).
Tuveson, Ernest Lee. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (1968)
Tyrell, Hartmann. “ ‘Das Religiöse’ in Max Webers Religionssoziologie.” Saeculum 43
(1992): 172–230.
Tyrell, Hartmann. “Max Weber: Wertkollision und christliche Werte.” Zeitschrift für
Evangelische Ethik 37 (1993): 121–138.
Tyrell, Hartmann. “Potenz und Depotenzierung der Religion—Religion und Rationali
sierung bei Max Weber.” Saeculum 44 (1993): 300–347.
Vahland, Joachim. “Entzauberung. Max Weber und seine Interpreten.” Kant-Studien 90
(1999): 410–433.
Vahland, Joachim. Max Webers entzauberte Welt (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neu
mann, 2001).
Vaihinger, Hans. “Zur Einführung.” Kant-Studien 1 (1896): 1–8.
van der Veer, Peter. The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and
India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Voegelin, Eric. “The Political Religions” (1938). In Eric Voegelin, Modernity without
Restraint, edited by Manfred Henningsen (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
2000): 19–74.
Voegelin, Eric. Order and History. 5 vols. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001).
Voegelin, Eric. Ordnung und Geschichte (1956–1987). 10 vols. (Munich: Fink, 2001–2005).
Wagner, Peter. “Palomar’s Question: The Axial Age Hypothesis, European Modernity and
Historical Contingency.” In Axial Civilizations and World History, edited by Johann P.
Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005): 87–106.
376 Bibliography
Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’

Reassessed.” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 497–528.
Walsham, Alexandra. “Migrations of the Holy: Explaining Religious Change in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 44
(2014): 241–280.
Walsham, Alexandra. “Reformation Legacies.” In The Oxford Illustrated History
of the Reformation, edited by Peter Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015): 227–268.
Warnke, Camilla. “Antike Religion und antike Gesellschaft. Wissenschaftshistorische
Bemerkungen zu Fustel de Coulanges’ ‘La cité antique.’ ” Klio 68 (1986): 287–304.
Waszek, Norbert. “Hume, Hegel, and History.” Clio 14 (1985): 379–392.
Watts Miller, William. “Secularization and the Sacred: Is There Really Something
Called ‘Secular Religion’?” In Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of
Religion Today, edited by Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (Leiden: Brill,
2002): 27–44.
Watts Miller, William. A Durkheimian Quest: Solidarity and the Sacred (New York:
Berghahn, 2012).
Weber, Alfred. Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1935).
Weber, Alfred. Ausgewählter Briefwechsel (Marburg: Metropolis, 2003).
Weber, M. Andreas. David Hume und Edward Gibbon. Religionssoziologie in der Auf
klärung (Frankfurt/M: Hain, 1990).
Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography (London: Taylor and Francis, 2017).
Weber, Max. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr,
1921).
Weber, Max. “ ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy” (1904). In The Methodology
of the Social Sciences, edited by Edward A. Shils and Harry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: Free
Press, 1949): 50–112.
Weber, Max. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (New York: Free Press,
1951; translation of “Konfuzianismus und Taoismus,” published in vol. 1 of Gesammelte
Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie).
Weber, Max. Ancient Judaism (New York: Simon and Schuster: 1967; translation of vol. 3
of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie).
Weber, Max. The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (New York:
Free Press, 1967; translation of vol. 2 of Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie).
Weber, Max. “Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie.” In Max Weber,
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973): 427–474.
Weber, Max. “Wissenschaft als Beruf.” In Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
Wissenschaftslehre (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973): 582–613.
Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by
Guenther Toth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
Weber, Max. “Ethnic Groups.” In Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of
Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Toth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1978): 385–398.
Weber, Max. “Religious Groups (The Sociology of Religion).” In Max Weber, Economy
and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Toth and Claus
Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978): 468–500.
Weber, Max. “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology.” The Sociological Quarterly 22,
no. 2 (1981): 151–180.
Bibliography 377
Weber, Max. Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Abriß der universalen Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte

(1923) (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1981).
Weber, Max. “ ‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America: An Ecclesiastical Socio-Political
Sketch.” Sociological Theory 3 (1985): 7–13.
Weber, Max. Briefe 1909–1910, MWGA, section II, vol. 6, edited by M. Rainer Lepsius and
Wolfgang J. Mommsen (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994).
Weber, Max. “Intermediate Reflection,” reproduced as “Religious Rejections of the World
and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): 323–359.
Weber, Max. Religiöse Gemeinschaften, MWGA, section I, vol. 22.2, edited by Hans
Gerhard Kippenberg (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).
Weber, Max. The Essential Weber: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2004).
Weber, Max. “Science as a Vocation.” In The Vocation Lectures, edited by David Owen and
Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004): 1–31.
Weber, Max. “Probleme der Staatssoziologie. Bericht der Neuen Freien Presse (Wien)
vom 26.10.1917.” In Max Weber, Herrschaft, MWGA, section I, vol. 22.4, edited by
Edith Hanke (Tübingen: Mohr, 2005): 745–756.
Weber, Max. Allgemeine Staatslehre und Politik (Staatssoziologie), MWGA, section III, vol.
7, edited by Gangolf Hübinger (Tübingen: Mohr, 2009).
Weber, Max. “The Social Psychology of the World Religions.” In From Max Weber: Essays
in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Routledge,
2009): 267–301.
Weber, Max. General Economic History (Chelmsford, MA: Courier, 2012).
Weiß, Johannes. “Max Weber: Die Entzauberung der Welt.” In Grundprobleme der großen
Philosophen, vol. 4, edited by Josef Speck (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
1981, 21991): 9–47.
Weiß, Johannes. “Was steckt dahinter? (Rezension zu: Heinz Steinert, Max Webers
unwiderlegbare Fehlkonstruktionen).” Archives européennes de sociologie 52 (2011):
580–587.
Wellbery, David. “The Imagination of Freedom: Goethe and Hegel as Contemporaries.”
In Goethe’s Ghosts: Reading and the Persistence of Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden
House, 2013): 217–238.
Weyel, Birgit. “Religion und Gefühl. Religionspsychologische Aspekte im Anschluß an
William James.” Arcadia. International Journal for Literary Studies 44 (2009): 64–72.
White, Thomas Joseph. “Sociology as Theology” (review of Robert N. Bellah, Religion in
Human Evolution). First Things 234 (2013): 34–39.
Wichelhaus, Manfred. Kirchengeschichtsschreibung und Soziologie im neunzehnten Jahr
hundert und bei Ernst Troeltsch (Heidelberg: Winter, 1965).
Wilcox, Jeffrey A., Terrence N. Tice, and Catherine L. Kelsey (eds.). Schleiermacher’s
Influences on American Thought and Religious Life (1835–1920), 3 vols. (Eugene,
OR: Pickwick, 2014).
Willaime, Jean-Paul. “À propos du ‘désenchantement du monde’ de Marcel Gauchet.”
Autres Temps. Les cahiers du christianisme social 9 (1986): 68–75.
Willis, André C. Toward a Humean True Religion: Genuine Theism, Moderate Hope, and
Practical Morality (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).
Wilson, Brian C. “Altars and Chalkstones: The Anomalous Case of Puritan Sacred Space
in Light of Durkheim’s Theory of Ritual.” In Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and
378 Bibliography
Teaching of Religion Today, edited by Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson

(Leiden: Brill, 2002): 163–182.
Winckelmann, Johannes. “Die Herkunft von Max Webers ‘Entzauberungs’-Konzeption.
Zugleich ein Beitrag zu der Frage, wie gut wir das Werk Max Webers kennen können.”
Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 32 (1980): 12–49.
Wißmann, Hans. “James George Frazer (1854–1941).” In Klassiker der Religionswis
senschaft. Von Friedrich Schleiermacher bis Mircea Eliade, edited by Axel Michaels
(Munich: Beck, 1997): 77–89.
Wittrock, Björn. “Cultural Crystallization and Civilization Change: Axiality and
Modernity.” In Comparing Modernities: Pluralism versus Homogenity— Essays in
Homage to Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg
(Leiden: Brill, 2005): 83–123.
Wittrock, Björn. “The Axial Age in World History.” In The Cambridge World History, vol.
IV: A World with States, Empires, and Networks, 1200 BCE–900 CE, edited by Craig
Benjamin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 101–119.
Wobbermin, Georg. “Vorwort des Übersetzers.” In William James, Die religiöse Erfahrung
in ihrer Mannigfaltigkeit (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1907): iii–xviii.
Wobbermin, Georg (ed.). Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: Heise, 1924).
Wolfe, Alan. The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith
(New York: Free Press, 2003).
Wust, Peter. “Die Krisis des abendländischen Menschentums.” In Peter Wust, Weisheit und
Heiligkeit. Vorträge und Aufsätze (= Gesammelte Werke, vol. VI) (Münster: Regensberg,
1966): 254–312.
Yandell, Keith. Hume’s “Inexplicable Mystery”: His Views on Religion (Philadelphia: Temple
Yandell, Keith. “Hume’s ‘Natural History of Religion.’ ” In The Oxford Handbook of Hume,
edited by Paul Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 646–659.
Zachhuber, Johannes. “Transzendenz und Immanenz als Interpretationskategorien
antiken Denkens im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.” In Divine Presence and Absence in
Exilic and Post-Exilic Judaism, edited by Izaak de Hulster and Nathan MacDonald
Zachhuber, Johannes. Theology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F. C.
Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford Universitsy Press, 2013).
Name Index
Abbott, Andrew, 330n.3 Bonaventura, 96

Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, 173 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 305n.100
Adorno, Theodor W., 115–116, 203 Bossy, John, 339n.40
Ahlstrom, Sidney, 282n.7 Bousset, Wilhelm, 99, 159, 169, 321n.59
Akhenaten, 138, 177, 189 Brague, Rémi, 305n.102
Alexander, Jeffrey C., 82, 191, 201, 208 Breuer, Stefan, 309n.177, 314n.237,
Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham 341n.64
Hyacinthe, 170 Brown, Peter, 19
Apel, Karl-Otto, 51, 171, 285n.48 Brown, Steven, 86
Armstrong, Karen, 327n.123 Brownson, Orestes, 38
Arnason, Johann, 328n.135 Brubaker, Rogers, 208
Arnauld, Antoine, 39 Bruce, Steven, 198
Ashoka, 189 Buber, Martin, 115, 162, 181
Assmann, Jan, 17, 19–20, 178, 189 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 24
Augustine of Hippo, 19, 96, 140, 168, Buddha, 20–21, 171, 175, 186, 189
292n.24 Bultmann, Christoph, 279n.52
Auxier, Randall, 286n.72 Burckhardt, Jacob, 173
Bushnell, Horace, 38
Baader, Franz von, 173
Balzac, Honoré de, 305n.102 Caillois, Roger, 82–83
Barnes, Michael Horace, 322n.67 Calvin, John, 96, 141, 152, 193, 228
Baron, Hans, 91 Carroll, Anthony J., 332n.38
Barth, Karl, 275n.2, 317n.29 Cassirer, Ernst, 26, 56, 72–74, 161,
Basil of Caesarea, 277n.23 171–172
Baudelaire, Charles, 217 Chadwick, Owen, 315n.252
Beauchamp, Tom L., 22 Chamboredon, Jean-Claude, 74
Beck, Ulrich, 130 Charlemagne (Emperor), 263
Begemann, Christian, 305n.99–102 Clasen, Peter A., 105
Bekker, Balthasar, 305n.102 Class, Gustav, 37
Bellah, Robert N., 55, 82, 86, 92, 103, 138, Claussen, Johann Hinrich, 314n.236
142, 173, 180–181, 184–185, 188, 191, Cohen, Hermann, 162
201, 252, 278n.27, 322n.65, 323n.70, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 36
333n.69, 339n.35, 341n.57–58, Collins, Randall, 83, 86, 339n.35
341n.64 Comte, Auguste, 294n.67
Bergson, Henri, 33, 54 Confucius, 14, 170, 175, 186, 188–189
Berlin, Isaiah, 25, 96 Constantine (Roman Emperor), 190,
Berner, Ulrich, 331n.12 262–264
Bloch, Marc, 263–264 Cooley, Charles Horton, 240
Boehm, Christopher, 340n.54 Croce, Paul Jerome, 54
380 Name Index
Darwin, Charles, 36, 238–239 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 17, 89

David (King of Israel), 170 Freyer, Hans, 176
Dawkins, Richard, 11 Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 39
Deacon, Terrence, 86 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 2, 18,
Deißmann, Adolf, 99 60, 73–81, 99, 301n.33, 342n.77
Descartes, René, 41
Deuser, Hermann, 285n.48, 329n.155 Gauchet, Marcel, 182–184, 187
Dewey, John, 36–38, 55, 120–121, 239, Gehlen, Arnold, 279n.45, 321n.62
279n.45 Gfrörer, August Friedrich, 321n.55
Diderot, Denis, 23 Gibbon, Edward, 16, 19, 24
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 36–37, 39–40, 96–98, Gillen, F.J., 252, 290n.3
244, 310n.189, 338n.29 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 176
Döblin, Alfred, 145, 170–171 Gnauck-Kühne, Elisabeth, 146
Döllinger, Ignaz von, 176 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 27, 176
Douglas, Mary, 80 Goffman, Erving, 83
Durkheim, Émile, 2–3, 6, 11, 18–19, 33, Gogarten, Friedrich, 162
45, 59–74, 76–86, 99, 104, 110, 113, Görres, Joseph, 173, 176, 345n.107
132, 136–138, 154, 157, 181, 196–198, Graeber, David, 327n.123
201, 204–207, 232, 236, 240, 242–244, Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm, 155–156,
248–252, 257, 269–270, 305n.100, 162, 299n.4
338n.31, 340n.56, 342n.77 Granet, Marcel, 337n.11
Gregory VII (Pope), 96
Edwards, Jonathan, 38, 46 Gregory, Brad, 314n.243
Einstein, Albert, 112 Greisch, Jean, 183
Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 92, 171, 180–182, 184, Guttmann, Julius, 313n.229
187, 189–191, 201, 339n.35
Eliade, Mircea, 138 Habermas, Jürgen, 51, 83–85, 92, 138,
Elias, Norbert, 197 144, 167, 173, 203, 208, 229, 285n.48,
Eliot, George, 282n.15 337n.15–18
Elkana, Yehuda, 142, 171 Haeckel, Ernst, 155
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 38, 46 Hall, G. Stanley, 38
Erikson, Erik H., 240 Hamann, Johann Georg, 25–27, 39,
Erkens, Franz-Reiner, 262–265, 269, 96, 175
341n.64, 342n.65 Hammurabi, 260
Eusebius of Caesarea, 263 Hanke, Edith, 159, 306n.109
Ezekiel (Prophet), 170 Harnack, Adolf von, 98, 162, 275n.2
Harrington, Austin, 320n.51
Fahey, Tony, 313n.235 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 37,
Feldhay, Rivka, 312n.211 39–40, 46, 54, 107, 143, 168–169,
Fénelon, François, 39 183, 271, 279n.46, 284n.46,
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 17, 154, 282n.15, 286n.72
284n.46 Heidegger, Martin, 168, 310n.190
Firth, Raymond, 341n.58 Heimpel, Hermann, 5
Flitner, Elisabeth, 335n.126 Hellmich, Wolfgang, 310n.191
Foucault, Michel, 29 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 36
Francis of Assisi, 96 Helvétius, Claude Adrien, 24
Franke, Leo, 320n.49 Henry IV (Emperor), 264
Frazer, James George, 256–257, 272 Herbrechtsmeier, William, 328n.144
Name Index 381
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 3, 25–29, Kaesler, Dirk, 129, 132, 201

39–40, 55, 58, 96, 127, 143, 154, Kail, P.J.E., 280n.63
234, 239 Kant, Immanuel, 24–25, 39–40, 96, 112,
Herms, Eilert, 288n.87 127, 143, 159, 161, 175
Hintze, Otto, 92 Kany, Roland, 320n.53
Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 253, 264, 279n.45, Kaufmann, Franz-Xaver, 109
317n.29 Kautsky, Karl, 95
Hodgson, Marshall, 180–181, 184 Kippenberg, Hans G., 309n.187
Hoff, Ralf von den, 295n.68 Kleist, Heinrich von, 338n.27
d’Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, 24 Knöbl, Wolfgang, 191, 199
Holenstein, Elmar, 327n.129 Knuth, Micha, 324n.85
Homer, 189 Kolakowski, Leszek, 319n.41
Horkheimer, Max, 115–116, 203 König, René, 300n.13
Huber, Wolfgang, 284n.43 Korff, Hermann August, 27
Hughes, H. Stuart, 92 Koselleck, Reinhart, 237
Huizinga, Johan, 337n.11 Koshul, Basit Bilal, 310n.191
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 96, 143 Krämer, Felicitas, 316n.13
Hume, David, 2–3, 12–20, 22–29, 55, Krappmann, Lothar, 337n.15
58, 77, 79, 154, 157, 234, 279n.45, Krech, Volkhard, 305n.100
284n.46, 308n.155
Langer, Susanne K., 293n.44
Inglehart, Ronald, 198 Laozi, 170
Isaiah (Prophet), 148, 189 Lasaulx, Catherine von, 323n.72
Lasaulx, Ernst von, 170, 173–176
Jacks, L.P., 51 Lask, Emil, 115
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 25, 114 Lauster, Jörg, 111
Jaeschke, Walter, 279n.46 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 39
James I (King of England), 265 Le Fort, Gertrud von, 318n.33
James, Alice, 36 Lefort, Claude, 182, 326n.118
James, William, 2–3, 8, 11, 19, 32–36, Lehmann, Hartmut, 111, 305n.102,
38–48, 50, 52–56, 58–59, 68, 72, 315n.255
81, 97–98, 110, 127, 132, 138–139, Lemert, Charles, 112
154, 157–158, 161, 177, 238, 244, Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 282n.15
279n.45, 296n.77, 304n.84, Leuba, James, 281n.5
335n.111 Lévi, Sylvain, 296n.75
Jaspers, Karl, 51, 145, 163–170, 175–184, Levine, Donald N., 168
186–189 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 66
Jay, Martin, 284n.45–46 Loisy, Alfred, 292n.26
Jellinek, Georg, 167, 300n.10 Louis XIV (King of France), 265
Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Löwith, Karl, 112
Hieronymus), 277n.22 Lucretius, 18
Jesus of Nazareth /Jesus Christ, 9, 51, Ludwig I (King of Bavaria), 173
96–99, 102, 134, 137, 148, 159, 166, Ludwig, Emil, 305n.102
168–170, 175–176, 261–263 Luhmann, Niklas, 92, 201, 207–208,
Jones, Robert Alun, 292n.25, 294n.54, 228–229
296n.77 Lukács, György, 115, 203
Jung, Matthias, 121, 235, 323n.69, 336n.1, Lukes, Steven, 296n.78
338n.29 Luther, Martin, 96, 152
382 Name Index
MacCulloch, Diarmaid, 111 Oakley, Francis, 341n.64, 343n.87

Macdonald, James, 24 Origen, 96
Malherbe, Michel, 22 Osterhammel, Jürgen, 321n.56
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 81–82 Otto, Eckart, 314n.236
Mandeville, Bernard, 18 Otto, Rudolf, 33, 38, 56, 161, 170
Mann, Michael, 4, 339n.35, 342n.68 Ozouf, Mona, 339n.39
Mannheim, Karl, 92, 336n.135
Manuel, Frank E., 25 Parker, Theodore, 38
Marett, Robert Ranulph, 18 Parsons, Talcott, 82, 92, 96, 104, 179–181,
Markschies, Christoph, 19 185, 191, 198–200, 287n.80, 292n.27,
Marquard, Odo, 19 303n.82, 339n.35
Martin, David, 191, 315n.255, 330n.2 Pascal, Blaise, 39
Marx, Karl, 11, 154, 197, 239 Paul of Tarsus, 51, 96, 103, 134, 202
McLennan, J.F., 296n.78 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 35, 44–45, 48–51,
Mead, George Herbert, 36–37, 54–55, 84, 53, 55, 238, 329n.155
197, 239–240 Perrow, Charles, 130
Meinecke, Friedrich, 26 Peter the Apostle, 202
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 310n.190 Pfleiderer, Otto, 158
Metzler, Dietrich, 321n.56 Pieper, Josef, 329n.154
Meyer, Eduard, 77 Pius IX (Pope), 303n.75
Mill, John Stuart, 308n.155 Plato, 279n.45
Molendijk, Arie L., 104, 106 Pocock, John G.A., 278n.28
Momigliano, Arnaldo, 171 Pohle, Joseph, 169
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron Pollack, Detlef, 198
de, 74, 77 Pollock, Sheldon, 327n.130
Montez, Lola (Elizabeth Rosanna Popitz, Heinrich, 248
Gilbert), 173 Prendergast, Christopher, 294n.54
Montmarquet, James A., 319n.41 Prodi, Paolo, 267
Moore, George Foot, 170 Provan, Iain, 327n.128, 329n.151
Morris, Ian, 184 Pythagoras, 171
Moses, 19, 26, 175
Moxter, Michael, 284n.43 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred, 291n.21
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 176 Radkau, Joachim, 309n.187
Müller, Friedrich Max, 11 Rahner, Karl, 319n.41
Mumford, Lewis, 179, 321n.57 Ranke, Leopold von, 107
Musset, Alfred de, 115 Rappaport, Roy A., 55, 82
Ratzinger, Joseph, 310n.195
Nebuchadnezzar II, 261 Reinach, Salomon, 68–69
Newman, Francis W., 316n.13 Reinhard, Wolfgang, 314n.244, 343n.89
Newman, John Henry, 316n.13 Renan, Ernest, 293n.49
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 346n.119 Rhys Davids, Thomas William, 169
Niebuhr, H. Richard, 105 Richardson, Robert D., 36, 38
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17, 29, 51, 82, 144, Ricoeur, Paul, 166, 271, 326n.111
154, 182, 241–242, 309n.187 Riesebrodt, Martin, 169
Norris, Pippa, 198 Ripley, George, 38
Ritschl, Albrecht, 81
O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 345n.101 Rohde, Erwin, 309n.187
O’Connor, David, 280n.63 Rosenzweig, Franz, 115, 317n.29
Name Index 383
Röth, Eduard, 321n.55 Spengler, Oswald, 174

Royce, Josiah, 3, 36, 45–55, 58, 158, 244, Spinoza, Baruch de, 18
329n.155 Stanner, William E.H., 81, 252–253
Stark, Werner, 250, 254, 259, 263, 268
Saler, Michael, 312n.212 Strauß, David Friedrich, 275n.2, 282n.15,
Savonarola, Girolamo, 267 293n.49
Scaff, Lawrence, 112 Strauss, Leo, 56–57, 161–162
Schäfer, Peter, 278n.29 Strauss, Victor von, 170
Schaller, Christian, 310n.195 Stuart-Glennie, John Stuart, 170
Scheler, Max, 33, 145 Suetonius, 342n.67
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 73 Sumner, William Graham, 266
Schiller, Friedrich, 114
Schimank, Uwe, 206–207, 330n.8 Taylor, Charles, 11, 96, 100, 141, 143, 244–
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 114 245, 264, 275n.5, 289n.98, 307n.122,
Schlegel, Friedrich, 345n.107 309n.179, 336n.138
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 3, 32, 35–44, Tenbruck, Friedrich H., 121–122, 134–135
81, 96, 143, 154, 161, 329n.155 Theodosius the Great (Roman Emperor), 262
Schluchter, Wolfgang, 112, 133–134, Thomas Aquinas, 96, 99, 222
139, 201–202, 207, 228, 305n.102, Thomas, Günter, 70, 229, 293n.43
309n.162, 332n.25 Thomas, Keith, 312n.212
Schmid, Konrad, 149 Thomassen, Björn, 325n.99
Schmidt-Leukel, Perry, 20 Thomsen, Anton, 16
Schnabel, Franz, 323n.72 Thoreau, Henry David, 38
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 51, 54, 154 Thurnher, Eugen, 323n.72
Schottländer, Rudolf, 320n.46 Tillich, Paul, 33, 55, 181, 185, 337n.20
Schwaiger, Axel, 323n.72–75 Tilly, Charles, 199–200, 232
Schwartz, Benjamin, 171, 189 Tiryakian, Edward, 291n.23
Schwartz, Regina M., 277n.25 Tolstoy, Leo, 8–9, 144
Schwinn, Thomas, 207, 228, 330n.8 Tomasello, Michael, 84
Scribner, Robert W., 152, 314n.245 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 145, 155
Seeberg, Reinhold, 94 Torpey, John, 329n.147
Segal, Robert A., 276n.10, 296n.77, Torrier, Jean, 290n.11
297n.86 Touraine, Alain, 203
Seibert, Christoph, 52 Troeltsch, Ernst, 4–6, 23, 27, 33, 37, 39–40,
Siebeck, Hermann, 169 43, 46, 55, 81, 89–110, 132, 153, 154–
Simmel, Georg, 6, 114–115, 168, 197, 201 155, 157–162, 167–169, 176, 192, 210,
Sloane, William, 330n.4 222, 235, 244, 247, 275n.2, 287n.81–84,
Smith, Adam, 197 294n.67, 310n.189, 314n.236–243,
Smith, Anthony D., 344n.94, 345n.100 335n.114, 342n.81
Smith, Christian, 275n.4 Turner, James, 276n.2, 321n.58
Smith, John, E. 51, 54, 286n.72 Turner, Victor, 82, 252
Smith, Jonathan Z., 298n.103 Tyrell, Hartmann, 137, 141
Smith, William Robertson, 18, 60, 73–74,
78–81, 99, 154 Vaihinger, Hans, 112
Socrates, 171, 175, 279n.45 Vespasian (Roman Emperor), 260
Solon, 171 Voegelin, Eric, 176–180, 183–184, 187
Spencer, Baldwin, 252, 290n.3 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet),
Spencer, Herbert, 6, 24 14, 23, 68
384 Name Index
Wagner, Peter, 326n.118 Wellhausen, Julius, 297n.88

Walsham, Alexandra, 152, 314n.245 Weyel, Birgit, 282n.7
Warburton, William, 13 White, Thomas Joseph, 185
Weber, Alfred, 105, 167, 169–170, 176 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 114
Weber, M. Andreas, 13 Willis, André C., 278n.40
Weber, Marianne, 330n.10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 33, 192
Weber, Max, 1–2, 4–6, 8, 33, 81, 89–90, Wittrock, Björn, 171
92–93, 96, 99, 102, 104, 106, Wobbermin, Georg, 39, 161
109–142, 144–153, 155–160, Wolfe, Alan, 316n.10
163, 165, 167, 169–170, 177, Wundt, Wilhelm, 78
180–183, 190–191, 195–198, Wust, Peter, 116
201–232, 236, 247, 250, 257, Wycliffe, John, 96
266, 272–273, 294n.67, 343n.87,
345n.100 Yandell, Keith, 280n.63
Weiß, Johannes, 112, 153
Wellbery, David, 280n.56 Zoroaster, 170, 175, 228
Subject Index
action, 25, 34, 42–43, 47–48, 58–59, 64, 67, Calvinism, 108, 124, 141, 152, 156, 193,
70, 73, 82–85, 93, 96, 107, 116–122, 221, 228, 265, 307n.130, 316n.10
127–128, 131, 135–136, 138, 141, capitalism, 95, 106, 110, 121, 124–126,
146–148, 156, 192, 205–207, 210, 145, 148, 150, 156, 201–202, 205,
215–216, 220–223, 228, 231–232, 216, 218
237–242, 246–248, 284n.43 charisma, 96, 113, 135, 148–149, 211,
theory of, 42–43, 84–85, 96, 104, 107, 220, 222
117, 201, 205, 207, 232, 238–240, 246 Christianity, 3–5, 9–10, 13, 15–17, 19–23,
anthropology, 2–3, 8, 13, 18, 27, 55, 64, 25, 27–29, 35, 39, 51, 54, 64, 69,
66–68, 72, 80–82, 84–87, 89, 133– 71, 76, 78–80, 88–89, 91–111, 113,
135, 140, 196, 234–238, 240, 246, 116, 123, 131, 134–135, 137, 142–
251, 255–256, 284n.46 143, 145, 151, 153–155, 157–161,
articulation /expression, 9, 19, 26–34, 163, 165, 168–170, 173–175, 178,
41, 43, 45, 47, 50, 52–53, 62, 64, 181–183, 186, 192–193, 200, 202,
70–71, 77, 83, 85, 96, 101, 107, 127, 211, 214–215, 217–218, 222, 225,
139, 143, 147, 166–167, 172, 177, 235, 238, 247, 249–250, 261–264,
188, 193, 225, 234, 239, 243–247, 267, 269, 294n.67
251, 268 Catholic, 17, 60, 78, 80, 97, 107–109,
asceticism, 100, 105, 121–124, 126, 128, 116, 121, 123–124, 134, 140, 145–146,
134, 141, 147–148, 153, 190, 210– 151–152, 155, 169, 173–176, 178, 185,
212, 217, 222, 226, 228 221–222,  265
atheism, 14, 23–24, 154–155, 284n.46 Latin, 16, 121, 202, 222, 263–264
Axial Age, 6, 101, 103, 141–143, 157–159, Orthodox, 16, 263–264
161, 163–173, 175–177, 179–194, Protestant, 5, 16, 33, 35, 60, 80, 89, 94,
204, 211, 213–214, 218, 223, 230, 96–98, 121–126, 128, 134, 140–141,
236, 250–251, 261–262, 267, 269– 148–153, 155–156, 159, 162–163,
272, 323n.71, 325n.93, 326n.118, 166, 170, 178, 185, 198, 210, 228, 239
327n.123 see also individual entries
Confucianism, 14, 101, 119, 125–126,
belief /(religious) faith, 2, 7–15, 17–18, 145, 170, 175, 186, 188–189, 208,
23–25, 27, 29, 31, 34–35, 37, 41, 322n.65
46, 54, 56, 59, 62, 64, 66, 69, 71–74, contemplation, 42–43, 124, 157,
77–80, 97, 100–101, 106, 114, 119– 210–212,  238
120, 122–124, 127, 129–131, 136, contingency, experience of, 15, 17–18, 37, 54
139–140, 142–143, 146, 152–154,
156, 158–162, 166, 172, 174, 176, 178, Daoism, 119, 125–126, 145, 189, 208
182–183, 214, 221, 226, 233, 235, 237, desacralization (profanization), 4, 6,
242, 260, 262–263, 267–269 10, 76, 110, 113, 141, 143–144,
Buddhism, 20–21, 101, 103, 119, 145, 157– 164–165, 217, 232, 249, 262–265,
159, 171, 175, 186–189, 228 267, 269
386 Subject Index
detranscendentalization (immanentization), Free Churches, 105, 108

113, 129, 141, 143–144, 162, 166, 178 functionalism, 65, 106, 179, 184, 201, 229,
differentiation, functional, 6, 69, 126, 179, 233, 237, 239
195, 199–201, 203–204, 206–209,
212–215, 224, 227–229, 231–233, Gnosticism, 159, 178
249, 258
disenchantment, 1–2, 4, 6–9, 90, 109, heathenism, 10, 17, 19, 103
111–134, 136–146, 150, 152–153, hermeneutics, 27, 29, 35, 40, 43–46, 52,
155–157, 183, 193, 195, 198, 143, 234, 244, 287n.78, 310n.189
201, 203, 205–206, 208, 213, 226, Hinduism, 20–21, 103, 119, 145, 156–157,
229, 232, 236, 249, 272–273, 159, 202, 208, 222, 228
275n.5, 305n.100–102, 306n.109, historicism, 5, 26, 40, 55, 90–91, 93–94,
307n.122, 315n.252, 343n.87 107, 162, 167–168, 238
doctrine, religious, 7–9, 17–19, 21, 25, 28, historiography (of religion), 2–5, 8, 10, 12–
31, 33, 40, 46, 48, 51, 56, 59, 72, 77, 16, 18–20, 22, 24, 28–29, 31, 39, 44,
81, 85, 93–95, 98–99, 101, 106, 110, 55–56, 58, 67–68, 73–76, 78, 80–81,
142, 151, 161, 166, 174, 181, 190, 88–89, 92–95, 97–98, 109–110,
226, 235, 247, 264 133–134, 144, 149, 152, 154, 158,
160, 162–163, 165, 168, 171, 173–
ecstasy, 11, 18, 45, 63–64, 67, 70, 80–81, 175, 178, 180–181, 183–184, 195–
136, 147, 206, 214, 223–226, 231, 235, 196, 199, 204, 232, 237, 261, 263
242, 243, 309n.187 human rights/dignity, 21, 69, 83, 90, 146,
enchantment, 1, 111, 115, 139–140, 143, 198, 204, 250, 269–270, 273
152, 249
Enlightenment, 14–16, 27–28, 34, 68, 72– ideal /ideal formation, 3–4, 37, 43, 54, 59–
73, 113, 115–116, 128–129, 140, 60, 64–65, 67–69, 80–81, 83–84, 87,
146, 152, 161, 171, 203 90–91, 93, 96, 100–110, 115, 132, 139,
epistemology, 24–25, 31, 39, 46, 127 144, 148, 153, 168, 181, 188–191, 204,
ethic of brotherhood/fraternity, 132, 153, 214, 230, 232–233, 235–237, 240–
159, 213–227, 229–230 241, 243, 247–249, 251–254, 297n.86
ethicization, 160, 188, 192, 202, 204, 230, idealism, 48, 54, 74, 93, 96, 100, 104, 115,
243, 261 161, 183, 271, 286n.72
ethnology, 2, 4–5, 18, 63, 66, 76, 80–82, 196 immanence, 6, 11, 105, 109, 129, 135, 140–
experience /religious experience, 2–3, 141, 143, 146, 157, 160, 164–165,
7–9, 11, 15, 17–19, 26–29, 31–35, 171, 178, 190, 193–194, 210–212,
37–48, 50, 52–53, 55, 57–64, 215–216, 220, 222–225, 227, 230,
67–68, 70–73, 77, 80–83, 85–86, 236, 276n.4
87–89, 97–98, 108, 110, 119–121, individualism /individualization, 4, 31,
127–128, 133, 135–140, 144, 43, 52–53, 58–60, 74, 80, 101–102,
146–147, 160, 162, 165–167, 177, 105, 109, 242, 246, 251
182, 192–193, 205–206, 212, 214, institution /institutionalization, 31, 33,
220–221, 224–225, 227, 230–231, 40, 48, 51–52, 55, 58–59, 73–74,
235, 237–239, 241–247, 251–255, 76–78, 85, 93–95, 97, 99–100,
284n.46 103–110, 124, 145–146, 154, 175,
178–179, 181–182, 189–191, 197,
feeling /religious feeling, 15–18, 25, 38, 205–206, 214, 221, 228, 231–232,
40–43, 70–71, 75, 79, 82, 128, 138, 235, 242, 245–247, 249, 255, 259,
246, 284n.46 263, 267, 269–270, 273, 294n.67
Subject Index 387
intellectuals /intellectualism, 98–99, 118– monotheism, 15–17, 19–21, 131, 138, 183,
124, 128–129, 132–134, 142–143, 189, 193, 218, 262
156, 164, 182, 201, 205, 209–210, morality, 6–8, 12–13, 16–17, 24, 34, 40,
215, 225–226, 228 42, 48, 69, 75, 113, 127–128,
interpretation, 3, 19, 28, 32, 43, 45, 50–53, 131–132, 143, 147, 170–171,
63, 83, 205, 244–245, 247, 252–253 192, 213, 216–217, 229, 231,
Islam, 10, 16, 20–21, 69, 73, 83, 145, 242, 253, 272
158–159, 180–181, 193, 200, 211, mysticism, 21, 31, 34, 47, 50–53, 103–104,
221, 271 109, 116, 118, 132, 136, 139, 158,
184, 190, 210–212, 217, 221–222,
Jainism, 189 225–226, 249, 304n.98
Judaism, 5, 10, 19–20, 29, 64, 68–69, 73, myth, 8, 18–21, 26, 41, 58, 72–73, 79, 83,
78, 97, 102, 113–114, 121–124, 114, 116, 129, 142, 164, 172–173,
134, 137, 145–151, 156, 158–163, 177, 183, 185, 189–190, 252, 257,
169–170, 173, 175, 178, 181, 264, 267–268
183, 186–189, 193, 211, 258,
262–263,  268 naturalism, 4, 12–15, 27–28, 35, 109, 128,
137–139, 158, 225, 234–235, 237,
Lutheranism, 106, 121, 221 277n.11
magic, 63, 79, 114–131, 133, 135–138, 141, particularism, 20, 75–76, 181, 218–219,
143, 146, 150–152, 159, 184, 192, 194, 230, 268, 272
205, 211, 213, 223–224, 226, 257, Pentecostalism, 83, 152
271–272, 304n.98 philosophy (of religion), 2–3, 11–12,
magification /demagification, 113–115, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 32, 36, 38, 40,
122–128, 133, 141, 143–144, 146, 44–46, 48–50, 53–54, 56, 72–73,
149, 151, 192–194, 198, 230 76, 84, 91, 96, 103, 112, 115–116,
Marxism, 65, 68, 95, 115, 271 123, 127–129, 131–132, 143, 155,
materialism, 23–24, 65, 73–74, 95–96, 100, 161, 163–167, 170–171, 174–176,
128, 248 178–181, 186–187, 189, 192–193,
meaning, 34, 55, 59, 78, 85, 97, 109, 115, 196, 209, 222, 229, 238, 246, 250,
117, 119–121, 127–128, 133, 138– 269, 277n.11
140, 144–147, 156, 172, 206, 220, philosophy of consciousness, 43–44,
222, 226–228, 239, 242, 246–247, 284n.43
307n.122 Pietism, 31, 152
metaphysics, 28, 39–40, 44–45, 53, 127– poetry /religious narrative, 18–20, 26–28,
128, 157, 164, 193, 226, 260 41, 58, 102, 114, 147, 245
Methodism, 31, 152 polytheism, 15–19, 79, 99, 101, 131, 157
modernity /modern, 1, 3–4, 13, 27, 31, 42, positivism, 24, 28, 46
44, 47, 60, 63–64, 69, 74, 80, 82, power /power formation, 1, 4, 6–9, 77,
85, 95–97, 100, 106–114, 116–117, 105, 134, 138, 145, 150, 157, 160,
125–128, 130, 133, 137, 142–143, 163–164, 166, 185, 187, 189–192,
145–146, 148, 150, 156–157, 160, 204–205, 218–219, 221, 236,
173, 178, 181–184, 191, 194–200, 246–251, 253–265, 267, 269–272,
202–205, 207, 216, 219, 226, 229, 339n.35, 342n.68
232, 240–241, 251, 258, 268 pragmatism, 2, 24, 32, 35–36, 39–45,
modernization, 6–7, 145, 179, 195, 199, 47–49, 54–55, 70, 120, 127, 143,
203–204, 206, 228, 232 238–240, 245, 286n.72
388 Subject Index
predestination, 152, 156, 228, 307n.130, religion

316n.10 critique of, 2–4, 6, 11–13, 17, 22–24,
profaneness, 10, 12, 34, 59, 62–64, 67, 76, 26–29, 31–32, 34, 66, 68–70, 80, 84,
82–83, 87, 120, 135, 140–141, 212, 88, 97, 140, 142, 152, 154–157, 161,
223, 230, 256 173, 182, 186, 192, 234–235, 237, 246,
prophet /prophecy, 20, 97, 113–114, 277n.11, 284n.46
122–123, 126, 128–130, 132, 134, history of, 1–2, 4, 7–8, 10, 12–18,
137, 140–141, 144, 146–151, 159, 22–23, 25–29, 31, 58, 60, 67–69,
164, 169–170, 172, 175, 185–186, 73–76, 78, 80–81, 85, 89, 91–99,
188–189, 204, 212–214, 224, 101–102, 104, 107–111, 113,
261, 265 117–118, 121–124, 126, 133–135,
Protestantism, ascetic, 121–124, 126, 128, 138, 141, 144–146, 148, 157–160,
134, 141, 148, 153, 228 163, 170–172, 174, 176, 182–185,
psychology (of religion), 2–5, 8, 10–11, 15, 192–193, 195, 197, 202, 204–205,
18–19, 23, 26, 29–35, 37, 39, 41, 211–213, 216, 218, 223, 227, 230,
44, 55–56, 58, 68, 72, 78, 80–81, 234–236, 247, 256–257, 261–262,
88–89, 97–98, 109–111, 117, 124, 267, 272, 277n.11
138–139, 149, 154, 156–158, 160– study of, 2–4, 7–8, 10–14, 17–18, 22–28,
162, 171, 226, 234–235, 239–240, 30–35, 38–41, 43–46, 49–50, 55–56,
244, 263 58–60, 65–69, 73–74, 77–82, 88–89,
Puritanism, 119, 122, 124–126, 141, 159, 91, 97, 99, 110–111, 120–121, 136,
180, 210–211, 217, 221–223 152–153, 157–158, 160–161, 163,
169–170, 177, 186, 197–198, 201,
Quakerism, 124, 180 203–205, 220, 236–237, 240
religion
rationalism, 27, 29, 40, 47, 56, 68, 112, ancient, 16, 18–19, 74–75, 77, 79–80,
124–125, 145, 165, 180, 184, 191, 98–99, 101, 123, 131, 145, 147, 159,
202–203, 209–211, 223, 230, 177, 221, 260–261
249, 268 Egyptian, 29, 138, 177, 189, 261
rationality, 2, 8, 13, 15–16, 24–27, 29, 56, Greek /Roman, 18–19, 60, 73–76, 80,
72, 84–85, 96, 116–118, 126–127, 99, 131, 157
130, 135–136, 139–140, 142, 146, “higher,” 67, 114, 158, 160, 272
149, 166–167, 184, 201–202, 205, “primitive” /“archaic,” 2, 5, 15, 60–61,
207–210, 212–213, 215–220, 222– 63–64, 66–69, 73–76, 79–82, 85–86,
227, 229, 231–232, 239, 245, 266 99, 129, 135, 137, 157, 182, 185, 242,
rationalization, 6, 81, 120, 129, 131, 142, 252–253, 255–257, 292n.27
145, 195, 201–208, 211–216, “Semitic,” 18, 60, 73, 79–80, 99
218–219, 224–225, 228–232, 249, revelation, 5, 13, 15, 26, 28–29, 34, 44,
307n.130 46, 48, 53, 82, 97, 160–162, 166,
re-enchantment, 1, 111, 134, 184, 249 168–169, 174–176, 235, 268
reflection /reflexivity, 6–7, 28, 42–43, 50, revitalization, religious, 69, 134, 141, 156,
56, 100, 119, 139–140, 142, 163– 175, 242, 249, 265, 267
164, 171–172, 185, 189, 191–193, ritual /religious practice, 2–4, 15, 17–19,
220, 227, 230–231, 236, 239–240, 21, 31, 34, 41, 43, 59–70, 72–88,
243–244, 246, 261 98–99, 101–102, 137–138, 150–
Reformation, 99–100, 106–108, 113, 122– 152, 185, 192–193, 202, 211–212,
124, 133–134, 140, 142, 144, 146, 223–224, 235, 239, 242, 251–257,
150–152, 181, 202, 269, 343n.87 263, 292n.27, 293n.45, 309n.179
Subject Index 389
sacralization, 4, 6–7, 51, 68–69, 110, 113, 212, 221–222, 229, 233, 235, 245,
136, 141, 144, 151, 198, 204–205, 256, 260, 268–269, 271, 276n.4
225, 231–232, 236–238, 242–243, secularization, 1, 7–8, 10, 14, 51, 61, 64–
247–250, 252–254, 256, 258, 266, 65, 69, 72, 83–85, 108–109, 116,
269–271,  273 118, 134, 141, 143–145, 154, 165,
of the people /the nation, 198, 248, 174–175, 178, 181, 198–199, 201,
250–251, 261, 265–269, 271 203–204, 228–229, 232, 246, 249,
of the person, 85, 151, 198, 204, 250– 268–269, 271, 275n.5
251, 269–271, 273, 297n.86 self, 3, 37, 40, 49–50, 55, 61, 68, 115,
of the ruler, 248, 250–251, 259–265, 240–243
267, 269–271 self-control, 63, 240
sacrament, 98, 104, 106, 108, 121–125, self-enhancement, 63–64, 114–115,
133, 142, 151–152, 185, 202, 225, 242, 247
242, 307n.130 self-formation, 37, 49, 84, 240–241, 243
sacred, the, 6–7, 10, 17–18, 59, 62–63, 67, self-loss, 63–64,  243
74, 77, 82, 84–86, 136–137, 140, self-sacralization, (collective), 6–7, 65,
157, 160, 163, 191–192, 194, 203, 68, 190, 236, 249, 251, 254–255,
205, 230–232, 243, 246–247, 254, 258–260, 262, 265–268, 270–272,
261, 264, 267, 298n.99 340n.56
sacredness, 3, 6–7, 18, 59–60, 62–65, 69, self-transcendence, 27, 34, 42, 61, 63, 67,
71, 73, 75, 77, 81–82, 85–86, 135– 71, 73, 81–83, 86, 135–137, 140,
137, 140–141, 144, 146–147, 150, 147, 206, 211–212, 220, 225, 230–
190, 192–193, 204, 211–212, 217, 231, 235, 241–243, 245–246
220, 231, 236, 239, 243, 246, 248– self-transformation, 34, 61, 157, 246
252, 254–257, 259–265, 267–273, semiotics /(theory of) signs, 3, 32, 44–45,
309n.187 49–51, 53, 55, 58, 70–72, 77, 137–
sacrificium intellectus, 2, 131–132, 138, 172, 193, 244–245, 286n.72,
140, 227 310n.189
salvation, (religion of), 5–6, 48, 114–115, social sciences, 13, 50, 72, 84, 92, 95–96,
121–122, 124–125, 147, 152, 156– 160, 163–164, 171, 176, 179–180,
161, 164, 166–167, 172, 174–176, 184, 190, 195, 199, 228, 232, 237,
188, 190, 204, 211–214, 216–227, 239–240, 261, 271–272
229, 263, 267, 272, 307n.130 sociology (of religion), 2–5, 8–10, 18, 24,
science /scientificity /scholarship, 2, 28, 44, 55, 58–60, 63, 66–70, 72–74,
4–5, 7–13, 17, 22–24, 27–36, 39, 77–78, 80–82, 88–89, 91–100, 104–
44–45, 55–56, 58, 60, 65–68, 74, 106, 108–111, 117–118, 120–121,
78, 80–81, 88–89, 97, 99, 112, 114– 126, 130, 142, 149–150, 154–155,
118, 120–124, 126–130, 133, 135, 157, 159–160, 165–166, 168, 170–
137, 142–144, 152–154, 156–158, 171, 173, 179, 181, 184–186, 191,
160–164, 166, 170, 174, 177, 186, 195–199, 201–202, 204–209, 211,
191, 193, 195, 199, 203, 210, 226, 216, 232, 234–235, 244, 247–248,
229–230, 232, 234–238, 244, 249, 250, 259, 263, 266
251, 312n.211 state /state formation, 4, 14, 16, 18–19,
secularism, 11–12, 14, 28, 33, 83, 89, 95, 21, 59, 75, 79, 101, 106–109, 145,
97, 131, 136, 172, 205, 233 148, 158, 163, 177–181, 183–184,
secularity, 5, 9, 11, 14, 34, 56, 59, 61–62, 65, 187–190, 199–200, 205, 216, 218–
70, 83, 92, 102, 109, 131, 140–141, 221, 227, 231, 236, 247, 250–256,
162, 176, 179, 183, 193, 198, 204, 258–262, 264, 266–271
390 Subject Index
Stoicism, 101–102 117, 158, 160–161, 167, 171, 174,

symbol /symbolization, 26–29, 49, 55, 58, 182, 237, 243
70–72, 77, 85–86, 88, 97–98, 101–
102, 137–138, 172, 177, 179, 185, universalism, (moral), 2, 4–5, 12–14, 20,
191, 193, 225, 241, 245–247, 263, 22–23, 27–29, 48, 50–51, 54, 58, 69,
266, 292n.27, 293n.45 76, 101–103, 105, 109, 113, 140, 143,
145–146, 148–149, 153, 156, 158,
teleology, 6–7, 9, 25, 53–55, 101, 104, 134, 165–167, 171–172, 174, 178–179,
166, 271–272 181–185, 190–191, 193, 197, 201,
theology, 2–3, 5, 8, 11–13, 19, 26–28, 205, 207, 213–221, 223–224,
31–33, 35, 38–39, 43, 51, 55–57, 226–227, 229–234, 236–237, 242,
80–81, 89, 92–100, 106, 109, 123, 246, 250, 256, 261–262, 264,
149, 158–160, 162–163, 169–170, 267–270, 272–273
174–175, 181, 183, 185, 201, 229,
235, 263, 284n.46 value sphere, 126, 131, 195, 201, 206–209,
tolerance, 16, 19–21, 23, 182, 272 212–216, 218–233, 336n.135
totemism, 19, 60, 66–68, 70–71, 73–74, values, 8, 43, 83–85, 90–92, 100, 102,
79–81, 99, 157, 242, 257 110, 114, 130–132, 138–140, 155,
transcendence, 6–7, 11, 100, 108, 138, 140, 158–159, 166–168, 179, 193, 207,
142–143, 147, 157–161, 163–167, 209, 212–214, 222–223, 227, 231,
171–172, 178–179, 182, 185, 188, 233, 235, 239, 242–245, 248, 266,
190–194, 205, 210–212, 218, 224– 269, 272
225, 227, 230, 236, 246, 249–250, violence /war, 15–17, 19–21, 82, 101,
261, 267, 284n.46, 288n.87 103, 162, 181, 191, 206, 219–221,
transcendentalism, 38, 157 223, 227, 231, 243, 248, 257–258,
transcendentalization, 141, 146 260, 262
truth /validity, 15, 19–21, 25, 28–30, 32,
47, 49, 52, 55–56, 85, 97, 104–105, Zoroastrianism, 156, 170, 175, 228

JOAS-The Power of The Sacred. Disenchantment

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

JOAS-The Power of The Sacred. Disenchantment

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Power of

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

It is a good tradition to use a book’s preface to provide some information

the framework of seminars organized by the Thomas More Foundation.

This book is an attempt to divest of its enduring enchantment one of the

angle, their forlorn or gushing efforts merely collapse in on themselves. But

think of them as embodied in practices and if we avoid constricting them

the special features of Weber’s thinking and allows us to critically appraise

salvation,” they attempted to do justice to the profound empirical difference

of sacralization. If we consider the tension that exists between the demands

a worldview of immanence, which meant doing without or rejecting tran-

which is characterized by a specific opposition to specific forms of religion.

The epoch-​making breakthrough to a universal history of religion, one

Four Hypotheses in the History of Religion

Hume’s empirical assertions can be condensed into four hypotheses. First,

Of most importance to the issue of polytheism were the writings of French

psychology of religion produced by William James (1902) in his book The

“race of barbarians.” The location of this apocalyptic battle is to be Mecca; the

After this brief overview of research significant to any assessment of

radically scaling back his aspiration. It seems more appropriate to me to as-

We find a second, far more compelling indication of this possibility if we

Christianity such as Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, and

Thus, the world-​experiencing person is conceived as a sensing being that

self-​misunderstanding of dogmatic theology and developing a symbol-​

act of creation served to demonstrate the origin of all religion in an indis-

psychology of religion in such a way that it neither simply adopts certain

The Turn to Experience in the Study of Religion

day—​as today—​to comprehend the realm of the religious as a mere displaced

religion in general—​received an impulse whose intense effects continue to be

Particularly in Germany, and above all among its Protestant theologians,

Schleiermacher, but only in a flippant and rather self-​ironic way. Here he

Glaubenslehre. Dewey’s teacher G. Stanley Hall had read Schleiermacher,20

to highlight possible connections between James and Schleiermacher and to

(2) By examining Herder and Schleiermacher, Dilthey and Troeltsch

is the ultimate source of religious experience. Instead, for him, “religion” is

B. The second major difference concerns the understanding of action. For

religious experience as immutable, fixed ground on which we always depend,

The Interpretation of Religious Experience: Josiah Royce

The Problem of Christianity.53 If Royce succeeded, he has to be considered an

on Royce’s specifically action-​oriented or “voluntarist” idealism and its rela-

and “conception.” Both demand—​as Royce states, building on Peirce’s theory

by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of signifi-

philosophy of religion that draw on the thought of Ernst Cassirer, particularly

The Turn to Ritual

According to Durkheim, one religious ritual among indigenous Australians,

to celebrate the rites involved on a particular occasion, while the members

groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or re-​create certain mental

From Totemism to Secular Religion?

“dynamogenic quality.” French psychologists of the 1880s used this term

or the other of these meanings applies, arising or even being a meaningful

The Prehistory of Émile Durkheim’s Theory of Ritual

Durkheim’s theory has a historical backstory that is closely interwoven

source of unprecedented, “extraquotidian” experiences, then the picture

instead to view it as a way of explicating obligatory practices. Fustel, after

Smith rejected the idea—​advocated, for example, by Hume—​that religion

development of the sociology of religion, and there can be no question of a

The Persistence of Ritual

Even radical exponents of the theory of secularization, who consider religion

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

The epoch-making breakthrough to a universal history of religion, one

Thus, the world-experiencing person is conceived as a sensing being that

self-misunderstanding of dogmatic theology and developing a symbol-

day—as today—to comprehend the realm of the religious as a mere displaced

religion in general—received an impulse whose intense effects continue to be

Schleiermacher, but only in a flippant and rather self-ironic way. Here he

on Royce’s specifically action-oriented or “voluntarist” idealism and its rela-

and “conception.” Both demand—as Royce states, building on Peirce’s theory

groups and whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or re-create certain mental

Smith rejected the idea—advocated, for example, by Hume—that religion

ritual-skeptic intellectual positions. They might also indicate that a “view of

the fact of ideal formation—requires study of the dynamic processes through

achievement that present-day scholars could and should build on as they

radically reality-oriented sociologist, has become established in such a way

magical became devilish—in other words, as it were, a negative remnant

else”—and this in a letter to a women’s rights campaigner who had converted

Christians, Mohammedans, twice- born people whose religion is non-

about pre–Axial Age myths and cosmologies or a radical modernism that

Goethe, Gluck, Mozart, and—unsurprisingly—Joseph Görres, his academic

loss in (religious and secular) forms of anti-universalism, without forcing