Introduction: The evolutions and convolutions of political religion

Abstract

Johann Goethe once claimed that ‘great events throw their shadow before them’. Perhaps it is the instinct of scholars in the human sciences to work where the light is strongest that explains why some of the major, formative processes of modern history have been added so belatedly and hurriedly to the repertoire of legitimate research topics. It was only towards the end of the nineteenth century that the pioneers of sociology engaged intelligently with the impact of industrialisation and what has come to be known as ‘modernity’, long after countless writers and artists had started investigating its ominous spiritual fallout with visionary clarity. Subsequently, such epoch-forming phenomena as the rise of socialism and ‘the masses’, nationalism, Bolshevism, fascism, anti-colonialism, the counter-culture of the 1960s, and ecologism have entered the West’s historical consciousness by stealth rather than in the full glare of academic analysis.