Secularization, Social Order, and World History
Toward a Global Perspective
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:16th Dec '25
£39.99
This title is due to be published on 16th December, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Secularization, Social Order, and World History provides a new perspective on the nature of secularization. This book demonstrates that the concepts of ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ that are assumed in traditional accounts of secularization are not universal human categories, but specifically modern and Western ideas. What if we told the story of secularization not from the perspective that secularization itself produced, but from a standpoint outside the modern West?
This book draws on premodern traditions from China, India, the Islamic world, and beyond to develop an alternative conceptual framework of ‘sacred-social order’. Sacred-social orders aim to align all of human life—from marriage to government to the calendar—with superhuman purposes and authorities. From the perspective of sacred-social order, the secularization of Western societies was not simply ‘the decline of religion’, but a revolutionary break with sacred order across all social domains and the attempt to construct a new secular order on purely human foundations. As the secular order has been exported around the world, it has provoked movements for the restoration of sacred-social order that are often misunderstood as mere religious revivals or a clash of civilizations.
Bridging sociology, history, religious studies, and philosophy, this work offers an innovative, global account of secularization and its discontents.
"In his new book, Kevin N. Flatt offers a refreshing, new take on secularization. He painstakingly exposes the weaknesses of the standard conceptual framing of secularization theory, convincingly establishing the importance of a broader appeal to anthropological and cross-cultural studies. The result is a profound challenge to common assumptions about the apparent waning of religion in the West and beyond. This excellent book is essential reading for students of secularization."
- Peter Harrison (University of Notre Dame, Australia)
"Secularization, Social Order, and World History is an engaging read that addresses some of the core criticisms of secularization theory with well-fleshed out conceptual tools that don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. This book breaks the reader out of the Western religious/secular dichotomized mold, and dives into world civilizations where sacred social orders have and do still reign, to contrast their key characteristics and dynamics with today’s Western secular social order. It adds important substance to a once empty understanding of secularity. A must read for those interested in religion, secularization, societies, global North-South power dynamics, and world history."
- Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme (University of Waterloo, Canada)
"The growing critique of the concept of “religion” has shown that the way that people today use this concept is a product of social changes that only began in Europe and North America about three hundred years ago. But how might we understand patterns in world history without the concept of “religion”? Kevin N. Flatt takes this critical project seriously and puts forward a constructive theoretical proposal, illustrating with multiple cases from around the world how we can think “after ‘religion.’” The result is a promising new framework for how we might grasp secularization across cultures.
- Kevin Schilbrack (Appalachian State University, United States)
ISBN: 9781041075325
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
318 pages