Abstract
Sometime in the eighteenth century a fundamental shift took place in the European political imagination. Hitherto dreams of emancipation, freedom, and utopia were cast in religious terms, provoking bitter internecine conflict and wars of religion. The emergence of a new social rationalism during the Enlightenment emphasized individual conscience and the profound valorization of independent knowledge. The formal religious element was removed from the public eschatology of progress and development. Henceforth a secularizing dynamic was built into most variants of modernization, to the point that religion was expected to disappear as a significant factor in social life. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 combined rationalistic eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals of humanistic progress with nineteenth-century materialist conceptions of social emancipation, giving rise to the intense and violent espousal of a secular progressivism based not only on the destruction of organized religion, but also on the advancement of new forms of secularized political spirituality.
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Notes
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© 2014 Luca Mavelli and Fabio Petito
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Sakwa, R. (2014). The Clash of Postsecular Orders in Contemporary Russia. In: Mavelli, L., Petito, F. (eds) Towards a Postsecular International Politics. Culture and Religion in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341785_7
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