ABSTRACTThis historiographical review offers a critical reconsideration of a central component of modernization theory: the model of secularization devised within the sociology of religion, and especially the version sustained by sociologists in the UK. It compares that model with the results of historical research in a range of themes and periods, and suggests that those results are now often radically inconsistent with this sociological orthodoxy. It concludes that an older historical scenario which located in the early modern period the beginnings of a ‘process’ of secularization that achieved its natural completion in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries is finally untenable, and it proposes a broader, more historical conception of ‘religion’ able to accommodate both persistent religiosity and undoubted changes in religious behaviour.
. National identity, nationalism, patriotism, state formation, and their present-day policy implications now constitute one of the most vital areas of scholarship on British history. In no other period is the debate currently as focused as it is in the long eighteenth century, that crucially contested territory in which older assumptions about a fundamental transition between pre-modernity and modernity have now been called in doubt. This article offers an overview of recent work. It argues that much writing on these years has framed misleading models both of state formation and of national identity. It adds that this period is nevertheless a key one in revealing that the processes at work in sustaining collective identities in the British Isles did not originate with ' nationalism ' in its historically correct meaning, and need not follow its trajectory.
Early in 2002, the earth experienced a near-miss: an asteroid passed within a whisker (in astronomical terms) of the planet. Had it struck, it would have done so with a force six hundred times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. No observer saw it coming, and it was tracked only after it had passed; yet this event produced little surprise. We already knew that the secure foundations of modernism had moved beneath our feet: the idea of continental drift; then pollution; then global climate change; then epidemic disease, AIDS; now the realization that life on this planet is regularly challenged, and at longer periods catastrophically transformed, by the impact of extraterrestrial objects. Asteroids are rational in the sense that they obey mechanical laws well understood since Newton; yet their intrusion into our world says nothing of human or divine reason, and seems to re-assert the old doctrine: chance rules all.
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