Abstract

This dissertation reexamines the process of secularization that went on in the European Enlightenment, specifically as it relates to political theory. The philosophers of the Enlightenment united the secularizing trends occurring in all areas of knowledge—science, sociology, history, the study of religions, etc.—into a “secular contract” for modern politics. I argue that this was a normatively valuable enterprise whose purposes, arguments, and history we need to recover today as liberals in the West nervously face two distinct forms of theocratic revanchisme: fundamentalist Christianity in the United States and radical Islam in Western Europe. At its core the “secular contract” involves not only the separation of the political-temporal sphere from spiritual matters, but the application to politics of a new, evolutionary form of knowledge birthed from the scientific revolution, a form of knowledge that of necessity diverges from both divine-scriptural authority and the hierarchical-dogmatic authority of a priestly caste. Social contract theories generally tell stories about how humans entered into political society from some sort of pre-political state, and in doing so justify or at least explain a preferred social order. What is usually missing from such theories is any comprehensive way to deal with the evolution of human societies over time—and this during a period when the West began a process of material progress and social change unequaled in any human society since the advent of agriculture. I anatomize and defend the “secular contract” as a remedy for this lacuna.