EURO ST 10 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: French Revolution, Lightdark, Dialectic
Document Summary
Simple view: religion increasingly irrelevant in public life, indeed in modern societies in. This may be true but does this mean that religious structures, institutions, rituals, and symbols don"t play another role. In the more complex view of secularization, religious rituals, institutions, ideas, symbols, wander into other non religious spheres. Is that what the brotherhood of priests shows in the opera. Even the enlightenment with its focus on reason and science needs some kind of symbolic glue to bring people together. Dialectic of enlightenment - general move of a dialectic - in holding on to one exclusive position in opposition to another. Karl marx argued that precisely the success of capitalism would produce an ever larger working class that would lead a revolution against capitalism. Contemporary example - a white police force that defines the black criminal element as totally other can in fact itself become criminal by shooting innocent black men.
