Dissonant Notes on the Post-Secular. Unthinking Secularization in Global Historical Sociology

This article questions the axiomatic nature of the assumption according to which modernity represents a rupture in spacetime conceivable as the coming of a secular age and confute the theoretical adequacy of the concept of ‘post-secular’. It proposes a global historical sociological perspective to unthink secularization both as a narrative of social change and as a hermeneutic of historical time, in order to contest its nature of elite discourse. My target is organized around three main focuses: I criticize Habermas’s conception of post-secular as an attempt to provide new foundations to modernization narratives; I discuss Blumenberg’s idea of secularization and question Eurocentrism intrinsic to what he thinks of in terms of transition to modern era; I elaborate on Wang Hui’s analysis of the relation between Western science and China within global modernity. I conclude recasting the problem of secularization in terms of modernity as discourse contingently and strategically establishing elite control over systems of thought at the global scale and within the nation-state, which articulates hierarchies between social groups through the underlying possibility to reframe the dualism between civilization and its otherness.