Abstract
The etymology of the word ‘hierarchy’ leaves little doubt about its theological derivation: the Greek word hieros, which means ‘sacred’, forms a single term with arkhia, which stands both for ‘rule’ and ‘origin’. A plausible first documented appearance of ‘hierarchy’ seems to be in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s mystical neoplatonic writings in the sixth century AD as, about a millennium later, Antoine Furetière wrote in his Dictionnaire Universel, published posthumously in 1690. While until the fourteenth century ‘hierarchy’ meant ‘subordination between the different choruses of angels divided into three hierarchies’, as Furutièere documented, the term later came to designate an ecclesiastic structure of subordination ‘that exists between the Prelates and the other ecclesiastics, the Pope, the Archbishops, the Bishops, the Curates and the Priests [who] constitute the hierarchy of the Church’ (Verdier 2006: 13). In canonical law, secularization referred to the expropriation of ecclesiastical properties and rights; its semantic field was extended from this restricted meaning to include a wide historical process of transferring sense, power and legitimacy from religious to non-religious authorities (Davis 2008). The term ‘secularization’ was used in 1646 by Longueville during the negotiations that led to the Peace of Westphalia regarding the laicization of ecclesiastic territories in France (Dobbeleare 2002: 22). With this meaning it was deployed by Napoleon to dispossess ecclesiastic properties in 1803; it then came to designate a polemical device during the Kulturkampf in the second half of the nineteenth century (Lübbe 1965). By the formation of the German nation-state, the notion of secularization was suddenly extended to politics, ethics and sociology. During the first decades of the German Sociological Association’s existence, both Tönnies and Weber, notwithstanding deep theoretical and political disagreements, agreed that secularization was a process that could define the whole specificity of the modern Western historical trajectory (Nijk 1968).
This chapter has been previously published as Ascione, Gennaro (2015) ‘Dissonant Notes on the Post-Secular: Unthinking Secularization in Global Historical Sociology’ Journal of Historical Sociology November 15, doi: 10.1111/johs.12116.
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Notes
- 1.
On Habermas’ cosmopolitanism see Fine and Smith (2003). For a wider critical assessment on the theme, see Rovisco and Nowicka (2014).
- 2.
In an interview given to Edoardo Mendieta (2010), Habermas maintains that ‘The secularization of state power is the hard core of the process of secularization. I see this as a liberal achievement that should not get lost in the dispute among world religions. But I never counted on progress in the complex dimension of the “good life”’.
- 3.
The attempt to traduce the theoretical assumption of secularization in quantitative indicators for empirical studies of non-Western societies is a leitmotif in American social science of the post-WWII period. See Eisenstadt (1966, 1970), Hoogvelt (1978), Hoselitz (1960) and Inkeles and Smith (1974).
- 4.
For a recent re-appraisal of Merton’s sociologies, see Calhoun (2010).
- 5.
William Rehg has provided an articulated argument to assert cogency of scientific arguments according to Habermas’ theory of communicative action. It is relevant to note how this attempt consistently attains to the existence of a possible ontological foundation for scientific arguments (Rehg 2009).
- 6.
On world-systems analysis charges of Eurocentrism, see Dussel (2002) and Hobson (2012).
- 7.
As introductory reading to the challenge to scientific method from theoretical physics, see Dawid (2013), Gale and Pinnick (1997), Keiser (2002, 2005), Mertz and Knorr-Cetina (1997), Schroer and Sigaud (2008), Susskind (2008), and Susskind and Lindesay (2005). For molecular biology and genetics, see Dupré (2008), Parry and Dupré (2010), Meaney (2001), Meloni (2014), and Nordmann (2014).
- 8.
See Habermas’ conversation with Cardinal Ratzinger in Habermas (2006).
- 9.
The exemplar theoretical dispute over the universals can be evinced from the diatribe between Scotus and Ockham (see Tweedale 1999).
- 10.
On the idea of a global modernity emerging in the Eurasian space, see Dirlik (2007).
- 11.
For a challenging assessment of the relation between science as hegemonic discourse and race as hierarchical system of subordination, see Roberts (2011).
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Ascione, G. (2016). Secularization as Ideology. In: Science and the Decolonization of Social Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51686-2_4
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