"Fragmentation of the Sacred or Disenchantment of the World? An Alternative Narrative of Western Modernity"

Phil Gorski, Yale University

Most narratives of secularization are built on Weber's narrative of "disenchantment" and his kindred concepts of "differentiation" and "rationalization." This narrative has grown increasingly implausible over the last century. Modern culture fairly bursts with myths and magic, heroes and gods. "Value spheres" overlap and interact and are surrounded with bits and pieces of culture of all shapes and sizes. Nor has rationality triumphed, even amongst its putative "carriers", the modern, global, educational meritocracy. This paper critiques the dominant, neo-Weberian narrative and sketches a neo-Durkheimian alternative: the fragmentation of the sacred. On this account, the Axial Age breakthrough from immanent to transcendent religions set the stage for the monopolization of legitimate forms of the sacred, which reached its height in the West in Medieval Catholicism. Monopolization was followed by iterative and cumulative processes of fragmentation unleashed, inter alia, by Reformation, Revolution, and Globalization. The narrative of fragmentation leads to a radically different diagnosis of the modern cultural condition: not a deficit of meaning, but a surfeit; not the retreat of the sacred, but its re-immanentization. It is against this background that some of today's existential dilemmas and political conflicts must be understood.

See paper

 Presented in Session 29. Modernity, Secularization, and Cultural Politics