Secularisation: The Birth of a Modern Combat Concept

Prof Ian Hunter (University of Queensland)

Prior to the 1820s the term secularisation had two main meanings. One was a specialised canon law usage referring to the transfer of cloistered clergy to ‘worldly’ parochial duties, and the other was a public law usage referring to the civil conversion of ecclesiastical property and jurisdiction. The central modern meaning of the term, referring to the epochal transformation of a society grounded in religious belief into one grounded in autonomous human reason, seems to have been unknown prior to the early nineteenth century. Focusing on Germany, I would like to reorient discussion of secularisation by addressing two main questions. First, what is the significance of the fact that the modern concept of secularisation did not exist in early modernity — that is, at the very time when the process that it names was supposed to be taking place? Second, what cultural and political factors shaped the formation and the roles of the modern concept during the early nineteenth century? In discussing these questions I will focus on secularisation as a modern combat concept; that is, as a term whose use to advance competing religious and political programs means that it has no clear historical referent or settled theoretical meaning.

Ian Hunter is an emeritus professor in the Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of Queensland. He is the author of several studies on early modern religious, philosophical, and political thought, and several more on the history of ‘theory’ in the modern humanities.