Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
7 - Secularism, Sociology and Security
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Crisis of Multiculturalism, New Assimilationism and Secularism
- 2 Assimilation in the French Sociology of Incorporation from a Multicultural Perspective
- 3 The Liberal Sociology of Assimilation and Citizenship and its Transnationalist Alternatives
- Transit I Proust as a Witness of Assimilation in 19th-century France
- 4 Alfred Bloch's Personal Integration Test at the Threshold of his Friend's Home
- 5 Stuck in a Revolving Door: Cultural Memory, Assimilation and Secularisation
- Transit II Laïcité and Assimilation in the Third Republic and Today
- 6 Elements of a Critique of the Laïcité-religion Framework
- 7 Secularism, Sociology and Security
- 8 The Highly Precarious Structure of Assimilation: Modernist Philosophical Schemes, Memory and the Proustian Narrative
- 9 Concluding Remarks
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Other IMISCOE Research Titles
Summary
At the same time, however, precisely because of the ways in which the end of colonialism came about, postcolonialism denotes a situation in which the ‘metaborder’ between metropolis and colonies [between citizens and not-yet-full-citizens, YJ] no longer organizes any stable world cartography but the possibility is given that it reproduces itself, in a rather fragmented way, within the territory of the former metropolises themselves (Mezzadra 2006: 35).
Not only popes and ayatollahs have to learn that they cannot be king and that, if there is to be a sovereign at all, it has to be the vox populi; also Western secular elites should learn that ‘error has the same rights as truth’ (Bader 2007: 90).
The sociology of secularisation, normative laïcité and multiculturalism
This chapter first examines the Stasi report (2003), which imparted to the French government the crucial recommendation to issue a law prohibiting the wearing of conspicuous religious signs in public schools. The report provides a lengthy analysis of the actuality of laïcité. The final recommendation about the conspicuous religious signs forms only a small part of this document, which redefines laïcité in several regards. I relate my reading of the report to the views of multiculturalists who have concentrated on secularism such as Brahm Levey and Bader, focusing especially on the report's reiteration of the modernist dichotomies discussed in the previous chapters. I then concentrate on where public order comes in, and try to make plausible how it relates to the culture of laicism laid out in Chapter 6. This enables me to explore some further motives in the recent French sociological debates about secularisation and religion in the ‘age of identities’ and securitisation, by analysing the relation between religion, culture, security and politics in the works of Gilles Kepel, Alain Touraine, Marcel Gauchet and Olivier Roy. These authors share an unreflected modernist legacy with regard to modernity and religion, independently of their standpoint about the headscarves or about laïcism.
I pay ample attention to the modernist presuppositions of Roy, a French sociologist of religion who criticises both multiculturalism and laïcité (especially in Roy 2005). By analysing Roy's understanding of the relation between culture and religion in a globalised Islam, I demonstrate that the pattern of cultural laicism returns in Roy's analysis and that we require a deeper critique, one that addresses the modernist heritage in his thinking about secularisation.
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- Information
- Secularism, Assimilation and the Crisis of MulticulturalismFrench Modernist Legacies, pp. 225 - 252Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2013