Selected Publications
- The Power of the Sacred. An Alternative to the Narrative of Disenchantment (Oxford University Press 2021)
- War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present (Princeton University Press 2013 , with Wolfgang Knöbl)
- The Sacredness of the Person. A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington, D.C.: Goegetwown University Press 2013)
- Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures (Cambridge University Press 2009, with Wolfgang Knöbl)
- Im Bannkreis der Freiheit. Religionstheorie nach Hegel und Nietzsche (Berlin: Suhrkamp 2020, English translation forthcoming with Oxford UP 2023)
FRIAS Projects
A Global Genealogy of Moral Universalism (2021-2023)
In this book project I elaborate an alternative to both Max Weber’s narrative of a world historical process of disenchantment and the Hegelian and Marxist teleological philosophies of history; the reasons for the need of such an alternative have been developed in “The Power of The Sacred” and “Im Bannkreis der Freiheit / Under the Spell of Freedom”. The alternative lies in a study of the global history of moral universalism. The crucial theoretical point in this connection is a focus on the interplay of the formation of empires – what I call “political universalism” – and the religious and philosophical forms of an ethos that emphasizes the wellbeing of all human beings and not only of the members of a particular collectivity. Methodologically, I follow the “affirmative genealogy” approach introduced in my book “The Sacredness of the Person” and based on the work of Ernst Troeltsch. Individual chapters deal with the genesis of moral universalism not only in the traditions that influenced Europe, but also in China and India; with the appropriation of moral universalism by empires; the development of an “organic social ethics” in medieval Europe; the connections between absolutism, colonialism, or totalitarianism and the history of human rights; and with three specific constellations of the twentieth century that are particularly instructive for my purposes. The book ends with reflections on controversial political implications of moral universalism.
“Sacralization and Secularization” (2013-2014)
After completing in 2011 a book on the history of human rights as the sacralisation of the “person”, I have since then concentrated my efforts on developing an alternative to the conventional understanding of secularization and disenchantment as the necessary corollaries of processes of modernisation. The first steps in this project were: a, a book “Faith as an Option”, published in German in 2012 and forthcoming in English in 2014, that treats the emergence of the “secular option” not as a cause of inevitable religious decline, but as a new challenge for believers who have to define their faith now as one option among many. b, an edited volume on the Axial Age as the historic breakthrough to conceptions of transcendence and moral universalism (published in 2012). An extended version of my own chapter in this volume will be published as a small book in German in 2014.
I am now mostly working on a book manuscript – tentatively titled “Sacralisation or Disenchantment” – in which I will present the basic features of a theory of the dynamics of sacralisation processes and their interchange with processes of the formation of power. This book also situates this theory in the context of the history of the historical-comparative study of religion.