Under the Spell of Freedom: Theory of Religion after Hegel and Nietzsche pursues a single, steadily ramifying question: how the history of religion and the history of political freedom condition one another once the confidence in a unitary, internally necessary story of Western modernity has become questionable. Hans Joas treats Hegel’s synthesis of Christianity and freedom as an enduring orientation that continues to structure expectations even where it is explicitly rejected, and he treats Nietzsche as the decisive intensifier of questions of value-genesis, contingency, and the fragility of moral self-understanding. The book’s distinctive value as an object of study lies in its method: an architecturally integrated sequence of conceptual portraits meant to reconstruct, from within, an alternative twentieth-century tradition in theorizing religion that sustains normative seriousness about freedom while refusing teleological reassurance.
From the outset, the book’s framing elements behave as interpretive operators rather than ancillary metadata. The title-page’s explicit marking of translation and the work’s academic publishing apparatus establish that the reader encounters a philosophical sociology in a linguistically mediated form whose conceptual economy depends on fine distinctions in wording, pacing, and inferential transition. That fact matters, because Joas repeatedly assigns philosophical weight to the difference between experience and articulation, between genesis and justification, between historical reconstruction and conceptual subsumption. A translated work can preserve such differences, yet it also inevitably reorganizes their micro-topography. The volume’s paratext thus tacitly trains the reader for a discipline of attention: the argument will often turn on how a term’s function shifts across contexts, how a contrast is stabilized in one place and strained in another, how a methodological remark reappears later as a constraint on what counts as evidence.
The epigraph from Tocqueville—stating a doubt about the co-possibility of “complete religious independence” and “entire public freedom,” and proposing an internal linkage between belief and freedom—does not serve as a thesis to be adopted. It serves as a compressed staging of the book’s problem-field: religion and freedom are presented as mutually implicating, yet the terms of implication are already contested. Joas’s work proceeds by neither accepting Tocqueville’s coupling as a settled anthropological claim nor dissolving it into a mere historical curiosity. Instead, the epigraph functions like a tuning fork: it resonates with a persistent modern habit of narrating freedom as requiring a religious ground, even where that ground is reconceived as cultural inheritance, moral capital, or civilizational background. The book’s inner movement can be read as an attempt to describe how this habit takes theoretical form, how it becomes plausible, and how it can be subjected to conceptual pressure without relinquishing the normative seriousness of freedom.
The Preface articulates the governing question in an apparently simple form—how the history of religion and the history of political freedom relate—then immediately renders the simplicity unstable by insisting that the available answers across philosophy, social science, and public discourse are both vast and resistant to any easy summation. This refusal of easy summation is already a methodological declaration. Joas identifies two orienting poles that continue to structure the field’s imagination. Hegel’s “grandiose philosophy-of-history synthesis,” presented as a teleological development culminating in Christianity and, through Christianity, in political freedom, remains “a vital source of orientation” for many, including those who revise details and including those who build on Hegel in Marxian ways while retaining key components. Nietzsche’s “strident critique of Christianity” and rejection of the modern liberal-democratic order functions as the other pole for many, again often combined with reservations. Joas’s central methodological decision follows from this diagnosis: he seeks an alternative that neither inherits Hegel’s teleological assurance nor treats Nietzsche’s genealogical radicality as a license for voluntarist reductions of ideals to fabrications.
The Preface also supplies the book’s self-description of form, and this formal self-description becomes inseparable from the philosophical aims. Joas explicitly characterizes the work as positioned between a monograph and a collection of articles, and he invokes the analogy of a novella cycle in order to name a unity that arises through recurrence, variation, and cross-illumination rather than through a single continuous deduction. This is a decisive compositional cue. It announces that the work’s unity will not consist in one privileged definition of religion or freedom introduced at the start and applied thereafter. Unity will consist in articulated relations: motifs that return with altered valence; distinctions introduced as clarifications that later become sites of tension; terms whose inferential burden migrates from one conceptual cluster to another. The Preface is candid about costs. The overall alternative historical narrative will resist neat summarization, including in the conclusion; and the book will not attempt exhaustive reconstructions of Hegel and Nietzsche “in all their own complexity.” These costs function as constraints on the reader’s expectations: the work seeks internal intelligibility without promising the satisfactions of encyclopedic completeness or the closure of a single master-narrative.
The Introduction deepens the methodological orientation by clarifying the logic of selection. Joas explicitly rejects any antecedent yardstick that would allow a quasi-judicial ranking of importance. The choice of thinkers is guided by an exploratory survey of intellectual history and scholarship, and Joas remarks that the term “selection” sounds “too voluntaristic” for the picture that emerges. This remark is more than rhetorical modesty. It discloses a principle of explanation: the tradition Joas aims to render visible is not a canon instituted by explicit manifesto; it is a pattern of conceptual work distributed across disciplines and historical situations, connected through influence, translation, institutional migration, and shared problematics. In this sense, the book treats tradition as an emergent structure whose intelligibility arises from relational evidence rather than from an imposed schema.
Here a constitutive tension is explicitly introduced and retained as a limit-condition. Joas states that he does not strive for balance between confessions, nor between believers and secular worldviews, and he acknowledges the absence of representatives of religions other than Christianity. Since overcoming Eurocentric perspectives is presented as one of the strongest motives of the book, this absence is identified by Joas himself as a significant limitation. The tension is structurally important: the book will argue for global history and for the inadequacy of Eurocentric narratives, yet it will do so through a series of portraits largely confined to Christian and Western intellectual formations. Rather than being a mere inconsistency, this tension becomes part of the book’s methodological self-restraint. Joas treats his own procedure as working within a historically given archive of twentieth-century theory of religion, while also insisting that the archive’s limitations must remain visible as limitations, even when the argument depends on the archive for its evidential basis.
The Introduction’s title already indicates how Joas positions Hegel: Hegel’s philosophy of freedom persists as an influence, while present-day Hegelianism exhibits a “blind spot.” Joas does not begin by offering an external refutation of Hegel. He begins by analyzing why Hegel’s synthesis remains attractive: it offers a picture of history in which religion and freedom appear internally aligned, and in which Christianity—especially in its Protestant form—appears as the privileged medium through which freedom becomes historically real. The “blind spot” emerges where this alignment encourages a characteristic explanatory gesture: religious phenomena are treated as requiring conceptual sublation, as though their intelligibility and legitimacy depended on their successful absorption into a rational-philosophical account of freedom’s development. Joas’s alternative begins from the hypothesis that such sublation distorts both sides. It distorts religion by treating it as derivative of philosophical morality or political rationality, and it distorts freedom by binding it to a teleological narrative whose plausibility depends on selective historical hierarchies.
The architecture of the work, organized into four parts with introductory remarks, makes explicit that Joas pursues his alternative through a sequence of re-specifications of what “religion” and “freedom” can mean as theoretical objects. The introductory remarks to Part I state that, already in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new understanding of religion began to form beyond the paradigms associated with Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Feuerbach, reaching decisive force in the early twentieth century. Joas identifies the “key terms” of this turn as “religious experience,” the “interpretation” or “articulation” of such experience, and “sacredness” understood as a power pre-reflectively ascribed to objects, persons, and ideational contents through experience. This triad—experience, articulation, sacredness—functions as a conceptual seed that will recur across the entire book, repeatedly transformed as it is tested against secularization narratives, political crises, and global-historical perspectives.
The chapter on Troeltsch, explicitly thematized as “The Independence of Religion,” provides the first decisive stabilization of Joas’s alternative to reductionism. Joas frames his inquiry through three questions: what Troeltsch’s thesis is directed against, what risks it entails, and how those risks can be handled. He places the thesis between antagonistic fronts, and he defines its polemical target with precision: the “independence of religion” serves as a means of resisting “every form of reductionism” in the study of religion, meaning approaches that acknowledge religious phenomena yet ultimately treat them as mere expressions of something else. This definition supplies a methodological constraint that continues to operate later when Joas analyzes secular sacredness, democratic sacralization, and self-sacralization of political domination. The independence of religion does not assert an occult causal autonomy of ideas. It asserts that certain experiential and ideal formations possess their own structures of meaning and motivation that cannot be exhaustively translated into external functions without remainder.
Yet Joas also insists that the thesis carries risks, and the risks reveal an internal pressure on his own project. An insistence on independence can drift toward immunization: religion could be treated as insulated from explanatory critique, as though irreducibility were equivalent to invulnerability. Joas’s way of countering this drift is already visible in how he links independence to experience and to articulation. The independence at issue concerns the genesis and self-evidence of certain orientations, while articulation concerns the work of rendering those orientations intersubjectively credible. This pairing prevents independence from collapsing into subjectivism. Independence names irreducibility of meaning; articulation names the public labor through which meaning seeks validity. The pairing also prevents articulation from collapsing into Hegelian subsumption. Articulation can render experiences communicable while still leaving their genesis resistant to full conceptual capture.
At this point Joas introduces, within the Troeltsch discussion and later as an explicit retrospective statement, a broad family resemblance among James, Dilthey, and Troeltsch: religious and secular beliefs alike are attempts, by means of articulation, to give the certainties and subjective self-evidence arising from experience an intersubjectively credible form. This statement performs several functions at once. It extends the independence thesis beyond religion in a narrow sense toward “ideal formation” more generally; it grants secular orientations an analogous structure rather than treating them as pure rational transparency; and it establishes a continuity between the analysis of religion and the analysis of freedom, since freedom too will be treated as an orientation whose normative force depends on historical and experiential conditions and whose stability depends on articulation and public forms.
The Otto chapter, “Secular Sacredness,” intensifies the work’s engagement with the sacred as a conceptual operator that refuses easy domestication. Joas situates Otto’s Idea of the Holy historically, emphasizing its appearance during World War I and its reception as a work of “liberation” and “breakthrough.” The conceptual core is Otto’s attempt to analyze the holy through the “numinous” as a dimension that resists reduction to the rational. Joas’s treatment is conceptually diagnostic: he tracks how Otto seeks to name a non-rational element in the experience of the holy and how he nevertheless uses resources from classical German philosophy, including Kant, when attempting to clarify the relation between rational and non-rational moments. The chapter’s internal headings—“Rationalization in the Numinous,” “Subjectivity and Objectivity of the Sacred,” “Rudolf Otto’s Topicality”—already display the tensions Joas aims to keep active. Sacredness threatens to become a purely subjective feeling, losing objectivity; it also threatens to be treated as an objective property, losing its experiential genesis. Otto’s own procedure, as Joas presents it, oscillates between these dangers, seeking a language that can “hint at” what exceeds discursive determination while still allowing comparative and historical work across religions.
Joas’s interest in Otto is not antiquarian. Otto becomes a crucial bridge toward later analyses of “secular sacredness” in political and cultural forms. Once sacredness is conceived as a power pre-reflectively ascribed through experience, the concept becomes available for diagnosing sacralizations that occur outside explicitly religious institutions. Here the book’s internal movement begins to display its characteristic method of recurrence with altered valence: sacredness, introduced as a term for the irreducible core of religious experience, becomes a diagnostic tool for understanding modern formations where the sacred attaches itself to democracy, nation, violence, and collective identity.
The Scheler chapter, framed through the contrast between “self-evidence” and “sense of self-evidence,” further specifies how experience can ground normativity without becoming voluntarist invention. Joas notes Scheler’s distinctive position in relation to secularization narratives and turns to the phenomenology of religious acts. A decisive scene in Joas’s reconstruction concerns moral transformation and conscience. Scheler’s description of remorse does not remain on the level of regretting an external deed; it penetrates to an appalled recognition of having been the kind of person capable of the deed. From this experience, Joas derives Scheler’s notion of expelling the deed and its motive from the “living center of the Self,” opening the possibility of acting as a changed person. Here “sense of self-evidence” acquires its specific meaning: it connects to the experience of being able, in principle, to enact morally better acts and to live up to one’s ideals. Joas then shows how this phenomenology is used by Scheler to lend plausibility to the claim that conscience’s admonition can be experienced as the voice of a “divine Judge.” The conceptual tension is sharp and retained. The experience yields a sense of normative demand that exceeds mere preference, yet the interpretation of that demand as divine remains an interpretive articulation that can be questioned. Joas’s treatment thereby enacts his triad: experiential self-evidence, interpretive articulation, and the sacred as a force that presses upon the self.
At the level of the work’s overall architecture, Part I therefore establishes a foundation that is neither purely theological nor purely sociological. Religion emerges as a domain of experiential self-evidence and sacredness that generates ideals and values, while also requiring articulation in language, concepts, and practices that seek intersubjective credibility. The reductionisms resisted are multiple: naturalistic debunking, sociological functionalism that dissolves meaning into external causes, and philosophical sublation that absorbs religion into a teleological narrative of reason. Yet the resistance produces its own pressures: how to distinguish irreducibility from immunity; how to preserve objectivity of the sacred without treating it as a metaphysical substance; how to treat self-evidence as more than mere feeling without turning it into a covert rationalism.
Part II begins by relocating the analysis within political history, thereby testing whether the experiential and sacred categories developed in Part I can remain theoretically productive under conditions where religion’s public functions are violently contested. Joas opens with the claim that the history of religion and the history of political power are closely linked in multiple ways: religion can justify domination; religion can inspire resistance and contribute to the transformation of systems of rule. He remarks that Marx’s generalization of religion as “opium” fails as a universal claim, and he juxtaposes it with Werner Stark’s counter-formula that religion can produce “adrenaline.” This juxtaposition is not a mere rhetorical flourish; it introduces a guiding tension that will recur: religion can pacify and intoxicate, religion can energize and mobilize, and any theory of secularization attentive to political critique and power struggles must be capable of accounting for both. Secularization, insofar as it involves criticism of religion and more than a mere decline in interest, becomes unintelligible without political history; political history becomes unintelligible without tracing how sacredness attaches itself to political forms.
Joas’s chapter on Dewey, explicitly titled “The Sacralization of Democracy,” becomes the first major laboratory for this problem. Joas foregrounds Dewey’s A Common Faith as a concise yet rich contribution within the theory of religion, and he links Dewey’s move to the pragmatist separation—introduced at the beginning of Dewey’s lecture “Religion versus the Religious”—between institutional religion and the quality of the religious as such. Joas’s reconstruction treats this separation as both enabling and perilous. It enables a theory that can locate religious experience and ideal formation beyond confessional boundaries, aligning with the Part I emphasis on experience and articulation. It becomes perilous when the “religious” is recruited to sacralize democracy itself, as though democratic commitment required a quasi-religious aura to acquire motivational force. Here sacredness returns with altered valence: the question shifts from the sacred as the core of religious experience to the sacred as a force that can be attached to political ideals. The same conceptual operator becomes diagnostically ambivalent. Democratic sacralization can stabilize commitment to equal freedom, yet it can also create conditions for exclusion, moral simplification, and the transformation of political opponents into enemies against whom sacralized violence becomes thinkable.
This ambivalence becomes more explicit in the Döblin chapter, “Post-totalitarian Christianity,” which Joas frames through the problem of dialogue between believers and nonbelievers. Joas begins with the surface plausibility of dialogue and immediately complicates it by arguing that, after the rise of the “secular option” in eighteenth-century Europe, such conversation became encumbered by suppositions that deform mutual understanding. One supposition involves critics viewing believers as living in the past and undeserving of a future; another involves believers treating critics as blind to decisive truth. Joas reads Döblin’s “religious dialogues” as shaped by the historical experience of Nazism and war, producing a Christianity that has passed through totalitarian catastrophe and can no longer rely on inherited cultural authority. The chapter’s internal headings—“The Immortal Human Being,” “The Struggle with the Angel,” “A New Language for Christianity?”—signal that Joas treats Döblin as experimenting with modes of articulation under conditions where older vocabularies have become compromised or incomprehensible. Here articulation becomes more than a generic term for expressing experience; it becomes a practical necessity under historical rupture. The “post-totalitarian” qualifier indicates that Christianity’s self-understanding is forced to reckon with political forms of sacralization that have perverted religious symbols, making a renewed articulation simultaneously necessary and suspect.
The Koselleck chapter, “The Contingency of Secularization,” drives the analysis into the structure of historical time and into the semantics of secularization itself. Joas begins by acknowledging the limits of empirical social science in dealing with contemporary secularization trends, especially when examining links between religious history and political freedom. The limits arise from two questions that empirical approaches struggle to address: the difficulty of making empirically “unmolded” statements about religion without underlying presuppositions, and the deeper problem of interpreting historical change in ways that avoid hidden teleologies. Koselleck becomes central because his theory of history provides tools for thinking temporal strata, expectation, experience, and acceleration without presupposing a necessary direction. Joas engages Koselleck’s reflections on secularization’s semantic shifts, including attention to the “Saddle Period” (Sattelzeit) and to how a term once tied to expropriation of church property becomes a key category of cultural analysis. He also engages Koselleck’s analysis of acceleration, drawing a provocative parallel between early Christian ideas of time speeding toward apocalypse and modern notions of technological progress as acceleration of social life. This parallel reconfigures sacredness again: apocalyptic temporal experience and secular progress experience share a structural form. The sacred and the secular, far from being separated by a clean boundary, appear as historically intertwined modalities of time-consciousness.
Within this framework, contingency becomes more than a claim about empirical variability. It becomes a methodological demand: histories of religion and freedom must be narrated in a way that can register fragility and reversal. Joas draws on Koselleck’s critique of moral simplification and utopian arrogance, in which opponents become criminals and self-righteousness turns into a fusion of party and judge. In this critique, sacralization becomes a political danger: moral certainty can become a pseudo-sacred authority that legitimates violence. Yet Joas also indicates limits and asymmetries in Koselleck’s own sensitivity. He later remarks, in the Conclusion, that Koselleck displayed an “odd” lack of receptiveness to the contingency of European secularization itself, a remark that reveals Joas’s own criterion: contingency must apply reflexively, including to the conceptual frameworks through which Europe narrates itself as late, advanced, or exemplary.
Joas’s engagement with Charles Taylor in the chapter on “The Secular Option” further sharpens the internal frictions. Joas acknowledges the ambiguity of “secularization” and refers to his own earlier distinctions among meanings of the term, then turns to Taylor’s influential account of the rise of a secular condition in which belief becomes one option among others. Joas’s difficulties begin, as he explicitly states, with Taylor’s initial definition of “religion” via a transcendent–immanent distinction. Joas treats this distinction as lacking self-evidence and suggests that it imports contested assumptions into the analysis. The friction here is methodological and substantive. Taylor’s narrative offers a powerful articulation of modern conditions of belief, yet the very conceptual boundary used to define religion risks excluding forms of sacredness that do not map neatly onto transcendence, including forms of secular sacredness that play decisive roles in modern political life. Taylor becomes, within Joas’s architecture, a figure through whom the question of secularization becomes inseparable from the question of conceptual framing: what categories allow one to see modern transformations, and what categories impose distortive simplifications?
Part II, taken as an integrated movement, therefore pushes the Part I triad into a domain where it must withstand political and historical violence. Religious experience and sacredness do not disappear under modern freedom; they migrate, reattach, and sometimes deform into political sacralizations. Articulation becomes both the means of making experiences communicable and the site where distortions can be introduced, because the language of freedom can itself become spellbinding, capable of rendering particular narratives of modernity inevitable and thereby concealing contingency.
Part III begins with an explicit conceptual reset that exposes why the title’s “spell” is more than a metaphor. Joas remarks that agreement on freedom as a key value, perhaps even as the highest value within a tradition or as an aspiration across cultures, leaves the question of what freedom is radically underdetermined. He describes the apparent clarity of a negative conception: freedom as unrestricted power of disposal over oneself, one’s actions, property, even one’s body and life; and limitation occurring where other persons’ self-determination is affected. He then notes how debates shift toward the relation between freedom and equality, implying that the negative conception fails to provide a stable basis for the equal freedom of all. The internal necessity of this shift is crucial: it marks the point where freedom’s concept demands a richer determination, and where the theory of religion enters as a resource for understanding the enabling conditions of freedom’s stability.
The chapter on a “German idea of freedom,” organized around Cassirer and Troeltsch between Germany and the West, serves as a historical-philosophical hinge. The question mark in the title signals that Joas treats the “German idea” as a contested construction rather than a fixed essence. By situating Cassirer and Troeltsch within the tension between German intellectual traditions and Western political forms, Joas reopens the relation between freedom as concept and freedom as institutional reality. Freedom becomes visible as a historically mediated ideal whose articulation can take divergent forms, including forms capable of being recruited into nationalist sacralizations. This chapter’s position within the overall architecture indicates its function: it mediates between the political history of secularization and the search for an alternative concept of freedom that can resist both teleological Hegelianism and sacrificial national sacralizations.
Tillich then becomes the explicit site where Joas names the alternative determination of freedom as “indebted freedom.” The chapter begins with an anecdote linking Bellah’s intellectual approach to a synthesis of Parsons and Tillich, already demonstrating Joas’s method of cross-linking motifs across parts. Tillich’s freedom is “indebted” in the sense that it depends on conditions and relations that enable it, rather than being a self-originating possession of an isolated subject. Joas’s discussion of Tillich’s semiotics—his distinction and relation between sign and symbol—and his attention to the interplay of religious traditions indicates that Tillich supplies conceptual tools for understanding how freedom’s normative force is mediated through symbolic forms that cannot be reduced to mere instruments. Here the Part I emphasis on sacredness and articulation returns with altered function: symbols become carriers of depth and self-evidence, enabling forms of freedom that include responsibility and relationality. Indebtedness becomes the conceptual means of expressing that freedom’s reality depends on what precedes and sustains it, including traditions, institutions, and communicative forms.
Ricœur intensifies this line through the “sieve of norms,” holy scripture, theonomy, and freedom. Joas begins with Toulmin’s anecdote about a Jesuit colleague who long denied the existence of genuine conflicts among values for Christians, then revised his opinion. This staging is decisive: it introduces value pluralism as a constraint on any concept of freedom that seeks harmony through doctrinal closure. The “sieve of norms” suggests a procedure of filtering and judgment rather than a simple derivation of norms from scripture or tradition. Joas’s internal headings—“The Sieve of Norms,” “Religious Experience and Religious Language”—indicate that Ricœur is presented as linking hermeneutics to freedom: freedom requires a discipline of interpretation that can negotiate conflicts without collapsing into relativism. Theonomy, within this frame, does not operate as heteronomous command imposed upon freedom. It functions as a mode of grounding that still requires interpretive labor, thereby aligning with Joas’s overarching insistence that ideals arise through experience and demand articulation in forms subject to critique and revision.
Huber, approached through “communicative freedom” and theology of liberation, introduces the public sphere as a decisive arena where indebted freedom must be stabilized. Joas presents Huber as a prominent public intellectual within German Protestantism, combining ecclesial office with sustained engagement in public moral and political debates, and developing a theology in which “freedom” becomes the central concept. Joas’s internal headings indicate two key tensions: Huber’s relation to Theunissen on communicative freedom, and the conflict between value monism and value pluralism. Communicative freedom, as Joas reconstructs it, suggests that freedom’s reality depends on communicative conditions that enable mutual recognition and public accountability. The reference to theology of liberation signals that communicative freedom must also be tested under conditions of oppression and structural injustice, where communication itself is distorted. Here the book’s method again displays recurrence with intensified pressure: sacredness, once analyzed as a power of experience, becomes implicated in political struggles over liberation; articulation becomes a public practice subject to asymmetries of power; freedom becomes a relational achievement requiring institutions and norms capable of sustaining equal standing.
Part III, as an integrated movement, therefore converts freedom from a spellbinding master-word into a concept whose internal demands become visible through its dependencies. The concept acquires constraints: relational conditions, interpretive procedures, communicative structures, and historical inheritances. These constraints do not weaken freedom; they specify what freedom requires in order to be more than a private possession. Yet they also generate new tensions. Indebtedness can appear as a threat to autonomy; theonomy can appear as a threat to self-legislation; communicative conditions can appear as fragile achievements vulnerable to sacralized exclusions. Joas’s portraits keep these tensions active, treating them as internal pressures generated by freedom’s own normative demands.
Part IV opens by placing Joas’s project within the longer emergence of the sociology of religion after Hegel’s Berlin lectures. Joas emphasizes the epoch around 1912, with Durkheim’s Elementary Forms and Troeltsch’s Social Teachings appearing as foundational works for sociology and historical sociology of Christianity, alongside Weber’s vast comparative project. This historical anchoring serves two functions. It clarifies that Joas’s alternative to Hegelian philosophy of history is not a retreat into purely philosophical abstraction; it is a reorientation toward historical sociology as a discipline capable of integrating religion and freedom without teleological necessity. It also signals that the theory of religion has always been interdisciplinary in its decisive advances, emerging at intersections where conceptual, historical, and empirical analyses mutually constrain one another.
Niebuhr’s chapter, titled “Religion Is More Than Culture,” makes explicit the conceptual stakes of this sociological turn. Joas structures the discussion through headings that articulate the core tensions: moving beyond Troeltsch within historical sociology; balancing a universalist validity claim with historical particularity in Niebuhr’s conception of revelation; and linking selfhood to responsibility. The phrase “more than culture” functions as a refusal of reductionism analogous to Troeltsch’s “independence” thesis, yet it also relocates the refusal within debates about cultural interpretation. If religion becomes assimilated to culture, then its capacity to generate normative claims with universal reach becomes unintelligible. Yet if religion is asserted as sheer transcendence, its historical particularity and its susceptibility to political sacralization becomes unintelligible. Niebuhr becomes, in Joas’s architecture, a figure through whom the tension between universality and particularity is reframed: revelation and responsibility indicate a mode of normativity that claims more than local cultural meaning while remaining historically mediated and thus exposed to contingency.
Werner Stark then becomes the decisive case for analyzing political dangers that arise when sacredness attaches itself to domination. Joas’s internal headings—“A Forgotten Catholic Classic?,” “Routinization of Charisma? Stark’s Critique of Max Weber,” “The Sacralization of Political Domination,” “Social Conflicts and Sectarianism,” “The Universal Church”—indicate that Stark functions as a bridge between sociological theory and normative diagnosis. Stark’s critique of Weber on routinization suggests a methodological dispute about how charisma, institution, and power interact. The sacralization of political domination names a phenomenon that echoes Dewey’s democratic sacralization while revealing a darker valence: sacredness can legitimate domination and intensify conflict. The universal church motif indicates that Christianity’s universalist claims can function as a resource against national self-sacralization, yet the same universalism can also be recruited into imperial or exclusionary projects. Joas’s treatment thereby keeps universalism itself under tension: universalist claims can serve moral universalism, and they can serve sacralized power.
David Martin’s chapter, framed through the provocative question of being “more Weberian than Weber,” continues the sociological interrogation of secularization. Joas structures the discussion around the possibility of a general theory of secularization, the Pentecostal movement and its global expansion, and the relation between religion and violence. Martin becomes central for Joas because Martin’s work enables an account of secularization that resists unilinear European declension narratives and remains capable of registering global religious dynamics. The emphasis on Pentecostal expansion functions as an empirical and conceptual counter-pressure against Eurocentric expectations: modernization does not entail the same religious outcomes across contexts. The attention to violence aligns with the book’s earlier concerns about sacralization, showing that religion’s relation to violence is neither reducible to pacifying “opium” nor to energizing “adrenaline.” Instead, religion participates in complex moral and political formations where sacredness, identity, and power can intensify conflict or constrain it.
Bellah’s chapter, “Religious Evolution and Symbolic Realism,” is positioned as a culminating conceptual resource for the global turn. Joas emphasizes Bellah’s historical orientation and links him, through the earlier Tillich anecdote, to a synthesis of sociological system-building and theological depth. The chapter’s headings—“Community and Democracy,” “Global History of Religion”—signal that Bellah functions as a thinker for whom religion must be treated within a universal history attentive to symbolic forms and evolutionary transformations. “Symbolic realism” suggests a stance toward symbols that refuses both reductive instrumentalism and naïve literalism: symbols disclose realities that shape experience and motivation, and they do so through historically evolving forms. In Joas’s overall architecture, Bellah provides a way of thinking global history that can answer Ricœur’s demand—explicitly invoked in the Conclusion—to resist teleological totalization while still affirming that humanity has a single, common history.
Casanova’s chapter on “Religion and Globalization” brings the global turn into direct contact with modernization and democratization debates and with the globalization of Christianity. Joas treats Casanova as a theorist who, like Bellah, undermines the assumption that secularization follows a single necessary trajectory. Globalization becomes the field in which religion’s independence, secularization’s contingency, freedom’s indebtedness, and the inadequacy of Eurocentric narratives converge. Here the book’s method of recurrence reaches a high degree of integration: earlier motifs are no longer merely repeated with variation; they become mutually determining constraints. Religion’s irreducibility matters because globalization multiplies forms of religious articulation; contingency matters because modernization produces divergent outcomes; indebted freedom matters because democratic freedoms require enabling conditions across global interdependencies; global history matters because any narrative that treats Europe as normative center becomes practically and conceptually distorting.
The Conclusion, explicitly titled “Global History of Religion and Moral Universalism,” provides the most condensed statement of Joas’s guiding intention while also preserving the novella-cycle refusal of a single master-summary. Joas looks back and states that he has presented and critically discussed sixteen important theorists of religion from the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The aim is described as a fundamental questioning of a notion of history that found systematic expression in Hegel and repeatedly asserts itself even without direct influence: the view that Christianity stands above other religions as the “absolute religion,” and that Protestant Christianity functions as a crucial driving force in modern political freedom. Joas adds a crucial complication: this view is held by Christians as apologia and by secularists who find it convenient, since they can interpret departure from Christianity as overcoming the highest religion. This symmetrical diagnosis is a core contribution to the book’s internal argument. It shows that the same historical image can underwrite opposed evaluative positions, thereby indicating that the image’s persuasive force cannot be explained by doctrinal motives alone. The image functions as a narrative technology for organizing modern self-understanding.
Joas then articulates four desiderata that condense the work’s recurring operations. First, the theory of religion should take account of the independence of religion and of “genuine ideal formation,” a motif Joas associates with Troeltsch. He connects this to the claim that both religious and secular beliefs seek, through articulation, to render experientially grounded self-evidences intersubjectively credible, and he explicitly names James, Dilthey, and Troeltsch as representatives of this idea. Second, the theory requires a radical understanding of historical contingency, applying to secularization and to political freedom itself, since neither religious decline nor freedom’s stability are historically guaranteed. Joas identifies figures who embody this awareness and emphasizes Ricœur’s call to resist the “Hegelian temptation” of teleological history while still acknowledging a common human history. Third, Joas introduces “indebted freedom” as a necessity for sustaining equal freedom, associating its elaboration especially with Huber and also with Tillich, while indicating that freedom requires more than a purely negative conception and demands a clearer understanding of public sphere and communication. Fourth, Joas calls for a turn toward global history, recovering simultaneity and analogy where Hegelian narratives introduced hierarchical belatedness, and emphasizing Christianity’s non-European character and the absence of any inner logic toward global Protestantization.
These desiderata also reveal how Joas positions Nietzsche within the system. Joas credits Nietzsche, especially through On the Genealogy of Morality, with pioneering a historical-psychological investigation of value-genesis and with intensifying awareness of the contingency of values. Joas indicates that genealogy becomes possible through a turn to subjectivity and through pluralization of “values,” and he underscores Nietzsche’s willingness to subject even cherished moral concepts to suspicion. Yet Joas identifies a decisive danger: an “activist or voluntarist misunderstanding” of ideal formation. He supports this diagnosis by pointing to Nietzsche’s metaphors of a “workshop” in which “ideals are fabricated,” and to Nietzsche’s insinuation that this workshop “stink[s] of lies.” Joas treats such metaphors as structurally distorting, since they construe ideals as products of fabrication in a manner that threatens to collapse the difference between genesis and validity. This is the point where Joas’s long-standing engagement with James becomes philosophically strategic: a pragmatist orientation allows one to affirm the contingency and historical genesis of values while refusing the reduction of ideals to deliberate inventions or to mere masks of power.
The Conclusion’s extended engagement with resentment further demonstrates the work’s tension-sensitive character. Joas acknowledges resentment as a pervasive human phenomenon, even among Christians, and he notes Scheler’s readiness to consider whether love itself can camouflage power claims. Joas then extends the analysis to a contemporary posture of secular moral universalism, suggesting that it too can function as a vehicle for resentment against the “provincial” or less educated. The issue thus becomes neither the existence of resentment nor the purity of any moral camp. The issue becomes the plausibility of Nietzsche’s specific explanatory derivation of an ethos of love from resentment, together with the broader methodological question of how to analyze the genesis of ideals without treating genesis as debunking. This discussion retroactively clarifies why the portraits repeatedly attend to sacralization and self-sacralization: moral universalism and freedom are vulnerable to deformation when they become self-righteous, when opponents are moralized into criminals, when public discourse adopts utopian arrogance. The book thereby treats moral universalism as a precarious achievement rather than a guaranteed culmination.
If the work is read as an integrated system, its unity consists in the way it repeatedly returns to a small number of conceptual operators—experience, articulation, sacredness, contingency, indebtedness, globality—each time adding determinations drawn from other contexts and thereby converting earlier premises into later results. Sacredness begins as a pre-reflective ascription in religious experience; it reappears as secular sacredness and as democratic sacralization; it reappears again as the sacralization of political domination and as the danger of national self-sacralization; it is finally reconfigured within global history as a diagnostic category for understanding how moral universalism is stabilized or distorted across civilizations. Articulation begins as the interpretation of religious experience; it becomes the labor of developing new language after totalitarian catastrophe; it becomes the hermeneutic filtering of norms and scripture under value conflict; it becomes communicative conditions of public freedom. Contingency begins as a challenge to secularization narratives; it becomes a theory of temporal strata and acceleration; it becomes a constraint on any narrative that would treat freedom as self-stabilizing; it becomes a requirement for global history that refuses hierarchical belatedness.
Throughout, the book’s method also generates pressures on its own categories. The insistence on religion’s independence risks under-describing strategic manipulation and domination; Joas counters this risk by tracing sacralizations of domination and by analyzing resentment, yet the tension remains as a demand for further work. The insistence on contingency risks dissolving unity of history into disconnected multiplicity; Joas counters this risk by invoking Ricœur and Bellah in support of a common human history without teleology, yet the tension remains as a methodological wager whose success depends on narrative discipline. The emphasis on indebted freedom risks being heard as moralizing limitation; Joas counters this risk by treating indebtedness as constitutive enabling condition, yet the tension persists because enabling conditions can become vehicles of coercion. The call for global history risks appearing as a corrective appended from outside; Joas counters this risk by showing how globality is required by the earlier desiderata themselves, yet the limitation of the archive—its confinement to Christian and Western theorists—remains visible as a constraint on the book’s own realization of its motive.
By the end, the work attains a form of philosophical unity best described as layered stratification under methodological restraint. Reconciliation in a Hegelian sense would require a teleological synthesis that Joas repeatedly warns against. Pure antinomy would leave the relation between religion and freedom as an irresolvable clash. Joas’s achieved unity instead consists in a controlled ordering of tensions: independence paired with articulation; sacredness paired with diagnostic suspicion of sacralization; contingency paired with the insistence on a common history; freedom paired with indebtedness and communicative conditions; global history paired with a genealogical inquiry into moral universalism that refuses both triumphalist Christianity-as-origin and secularist Christianity-as-highest-stage-to-be-overcome. The “spell” of freedom is neither broken through dismissal nor preserved through reverence. It is rendered visible as a historical and conceptual force that can organize narratives, motivate commitments, and distort perception. The book closes by leaving certain pressures deliberately unresolved, thereby preserving the very conditions under which a theory of religion after Hegel and Nietzsche can remain both normatively serious and historically honest.
Simon Gros 
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