Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics

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The relationship between cosmopolitanism and secularism is explored in Étienne Balibar's book, where he argues for a secularization of secularism to advance a democratic and emancipatory cosmopolitanism. He questions the assumptions of popular ideas of secularism and religion and highlights the importance of considering cultural hybridization, migration, and mobility in conflicts between religious and secular discourses. The book offers a profound rethinking of identity and difference and seeks to make room for a renewed political imagination.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 288 pages
\n Publication date: 29 December 2020
\n Publisher: Columbia University Press
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While cosmopolitan politics may appear inherently secular, existing forms of secularism risk undermining the universality of cosmopolitanism because they privilege the European tradition over all others and transform particular historical norms into enunciations of truth, valid for all cultures and all epochs. In this book, the noted philosopher Étienne Balibar explores the tensions lurking at this troubled nexus in order to advance a truly democratic and emancipatory cosmopolitanism, which requires a secularization of secularism itself.

Balibar argues for the idea of the universal against its particular dominant institutions. He questions the assumptions that underlie popular ideas of secularism and religion and outlines the importance of a new critique for the contemporary world. Balibar holds that conflicts between religious and secular discourses need to be reframed from a point of view that takes into account the cultural hybridization, migration, and mobility, and transformation of borders that have reshaped the postcolonial age. Among the topics discussed are the uses and misuses of the category of religion and the religious, the paradoxical genealogy of monotheism, the French laïcité's identitarian turn, and the implications of the responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks for an extended definition of free speech.

Going beyond circumscribed notions of religion and the public sphere, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism is a profound rethinking of identity and difference that seeks to make room for a renewed political imagination.

\n Weight: 324g\n
Dimension: 130 x 209 x 18 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780231168618\n \n