Secularization as Ideology

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.