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Sekularizace, odkouzlení světa a „pluralizace náboženskosti“

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Havelka M.
Sociologický časopis. Czech Sociological Review
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2013
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vol. 49
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issue 2
221-241
EN
This article applies the perspective of historical-sociological semantics to examine the changing meanings of secularisation and pluralisation in relation to changing realities. This approach here makes it possible to analyse and distinguish several other concepts of the sociology of religion that can be used to take a more differentiated look to the often all-encompassing application of the concept of secularisation, which both embraces and diminishes Weber’s multidimensional concept of ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung). Drawing on Niklas Luhmann’s concepts of ‘segmentary differentiation’ and the ‘surplus effect’, the author attempts to formulate a radically different sociological concept of religion based not on a substantive definition of its sacred content but on the historical sociology of action, whereby religion can be interpreted through its specific focus on ‘meaning’ as a particular type of social relationship and its corresponding ‘chance’ (Weber) of understanding. Other cultural (and political) phenomena of modern society (confessionalism, political theology) whose applicability and effect are not explained away or exhausted/voided by the secularisation theory can also be analysed as ‘religious’. To provide these phenomena with a context the author uses the term ‘religious culture’ to aggregate of everything people of a particular period know and think about their religion, how they evaluate it, and to what degree they identify with it. The pluralisation of religion can then be demonstrated not just on a surface level (for instance, in term of the rise of new sects, client cults, and cult movements, participation in various spiritual and esoteric activities), but more generally as the potential or real presence of specifically religious phenomena in the public space and as a particular type of social relationship: both between actors reciprocally, and between actors on the one hand and institutions on the other, and finally also between institutions.
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Revizionismus jako osud hnutí? Nad knihou Michala Kopečka

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Havelka M.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
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2010
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issue 1-2
173-188
EN
In this review-essay the author looks at Michal Kopeček’s Hledání ztraceného smyslu revoluce: Zrod a počátky marxistického revizionismu ve střední Evropě 1953–1960 (Prague: Argo, 2009), whose title translates as ‘In Search of the Lost Meaning of the Revolution: The Birth and Beginnings of Marxist Revisionism in Central Europe’. The questions the reviewer raises and his development of the impulses contained in those questions help him to formulate broader refl ections on the genesis, nature, and contexts of Marxist revisionism. In passing, he makes some mildly critical comments about the book. He also offers four different ways or lenses for reading Kopeček’s work. First he shows the possibility of perceiving it through the prism of the historical analysis of discourse, in which the main concern is the overall development of a certain type of thinking (here, Marxist), as is done in the history of ideas. From this perspective, the reviewer considers the relationship between Marxism and Nationalism in the twentieth century, not only in the sense of its legitimizing potential in pushing through Communist ideology and régimes in central Europe (as analyzed by Kopeček in this book), but also in the sense of the changes in Communist doctrine and the emancipating potential of nationalism at a distance from the ‘obligatory’ model of socialism and in the democratizing process of the 1960s. In connection with the development of Western Marxism, which is critical of ideological doctrine, the reviewer wonders whether each and every attempt to make doctrine a reality is not necessarily also its revision. And he asks to what extent the revisionist arguments of the 1950s were original or were, on the contrary, adopted from earlier revisionism. At the level of the analysis of hegemonic and critical discourse, that is, of Stalinism and revisionism, it is a matter of ideological differences and counter-positions in power-politics between the two camps. The author-reviewer here points to the different conceptions of ideology (stabilizing for orthodoxy, but mobilizing or, depending on the point of view, retarding for revisionism), and he points to the role of formal and informal institutions of power, and asks what it was that formed the common ideological ‘matrix’ of Stalinism and revisionism. The prism of analysis of the utopian discourse, according to the author of this article, constitutes a third possible way of reading Kopeček’s book, in the intentions of its title, ‘in search of the lost meaning of the revolution’. The book considers the relationship between the movement and its roots, the legitimizing charge of these returns, and hope in the cultivation of an unsatisfying present by reviving its utopian and emancipating dimensions. The author proposes that revision has, from the perspective of this utopian dimension, necessarily accompanied Marxism throughout its existence, and has, with time, even become its driving force. In the end he points to the level of comparative analysis, concentrating on a comparison of the development, forms, and role of revisionism in all the states examined here – Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. In his conclusion, the author praises Kopeček’s book highly as an original and important attempt to change the approach to research into the former régime, and remarks that Kopeček excels in his profound knowledge of the material, the intensity of his historical empathy for the topic, and the freshness of his manner of interpretation.
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„ODKOUZLENÍ“ VERSUS SEKULARIZACE?!

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Havelka M.
Sociológia (Sociology)
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2012
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vol. 44
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issue 5
564 – 578
EN
In the context of the constitutive antinomy of German intellectual life at the end of 19th century and the bifurcation of subject and object, this essay attempts to reconstruct the original intentions of Weber’s concept of Entzauberung (elimination of magical powers) of life and the world. It shows the weaknesses of a one-dimensional identification of the term Entzauberung with secularisation. It argues that it was not Weber’s aim to capture the cultural and social processes of the de-religionalization of both the public and private sphere, or the process of the expulsion of belief from everyday life. On the contrary, he strove to critically interpret the social and cultural consequences of the development of science and an increasing rationalization of life. There were two consequences, according to Weber. First, religiosity and belief changed in relation to the privatization and subjectification of traditional values (such as good, beauty, hope, etc.) which brought an increased danger in that these values can be externally manipulated. Second, various forms of “religious” ideologies were produced and resurrected. From this perspective, Entzauberung is a phenomenon parallel to secularisation, and not one of its forms.
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Srovnávání nesrovnatelného aneb Existovala v nejnovějších českých dějinách epocha totalitarismu?

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Havelka M.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
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2009
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issue 4
607-624
EN
This article seeks to illustrate some particular problems that arise whenever the concept of totalitarianism is applied to Czech history. The article aims in particular to broaden the scope of the discussion, by introducing sociological and demographic aspects into a perspective usually limited strictly to political factors. Taking issue with the common application of the term ‘totalitarian’ to the period from 1938 to 1989, the author emphasizes the scope of change that Czech society experienced up to 1956, and he looks for an internal commonality extending over the whole period. He argues that the number of changes that altered the ethnic, demographic, social, and political stratifi cation of Czech society between 1938 and 1956, in contrast to what is implied by the ‘democratic tradition’ so frequently being claimed for the First Republic, led to a ‘totalitarian mindset’ that worked in favour of the dictatorships of the times. The principal prerequisite, he argues, is the exploitation of mass dynamics (as described by Hannah Arendt), which was achieved by those in power consciously manipulating social structures from 1938 to 1956.
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Václav Havel v živlu absurdity, antinomií a nesmyslu

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Havelka M.
Soudobé dějiny (Contemporary History)
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2014
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issue 3
422-425
EN
The author focuses on the archetypal plan of ‘comedy’ which Jiří Suk has borrowed from the literary theorist Northrop Frye as the interpretational framework for his book about Václav Havel. Moreover, the author questions the extent to which it can properly be used to understand Havel’s dramatizations of absurdity and the absurd nature of politics. In the author’s judgement, these would have been better classified under the genre of the grotesque, which consists in the tension between irreconcilable opposites and paradoxes. It is their existence and operation in Havel’s life and work in the period covered by the book, which Suk has so vividly demonstrated. From this book, one can reasonably conclude that Havel did not believe in a historical happy ending; indeed, history for him comprised open-ended and unplanned events. This way of intellectually relating to the world remained, according to the author, true of Havel also in his role as President after the Changes beginning in November 1989. It helped him to maintain his distance from reality at that time, and also to maintain ironic distance from himself; it is thematized, for example, in the antinomies of morals and politics or civil society and the multi-party system. Among the strong points of Suk’s work is how he has structured the wide range of primary sources according to their meaning and for his own purposes, by using his own meta-historical terms and also adopting metaphors such as the ‘restoration of order’ or the ‘grey zone’. Suk persuasively shows Havel as the central figure of Charter 77 and the Changes. His interpretations are well informed, and constitute the deepest probe into the topic so far.
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