Social Science Research Council
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is assistant professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She studies the philosophical and theological underpinnings of international relations, with a focus on relations between Europe, the United States, and the Middle East and North Africa. Her new book, The Politics of Secularism in International Relations (Princeton, 2008) argues that secularist divisions between religion and politics are not fixed, as commonly assumed, but socially and historically constructed. Examining the philosophical and historical legacy of the secularist traditions that shape European and American approaches to global politics, she shows why this matters for contemporary international relations, and in particular for the United States and Iran, and the European Union and Turkey. Recent articles include “Political Islam and foreign policy in Europe and the United States,” Foreign Policy Analysis (2007), “Theorizing religious resurgence,” International Politics (2007); and “Negotiating Europe: The politics of religion and the prospects for Turkish accession to the EU,” Review of International Studies (2006). She is a member of the SSRC working group on religion, secularism, and international affairs.
A survey of leading contemporary international relations (IR) journals published between 1980 and 1996 revealed that 6 out of 1,600 articles featured religion as an important influence. But things have changed this past decade. It is now impossible to maintain the notion that religion is irrelevant to international politics, for at least three reasons. [...]
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For Lilla, Westerners are the exception because we live on what he calls “the other shore.” Civilizations on the “opposite bank” puzzle us because we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. They are, moreover, unlikely to follow our path because to successfully navigate the hazardous shoals of political theology as we have done would require a difficult excavation of theological resources….contra Lilla, could it be that we are all on the same shore, struggling with questions of transcendence and immanence in different languages and traditions?
One of the most important books of our time, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age explains how many Europeans and their cultural heirs have come to experience moral fullness and identify their highest moral capacities and inspirations purely within the range of human power and without reference to God. It presents an alternative to “subtraction stories” of modernity in which superstition and belief are understood to have withered away, leaving room for modern science and humanism to flourish uninhibited by metaphysical constraints. [...]
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