18 - Church and state: the problem of authority

Summary

The history of thinking about the structures of human association in Western Europe during the nineteenth century was marked by a remarkable resurgence of interest in questions pertaining to the conflicting and mediating relations between the spiritual and temporal, the transcendent and immanent, the sacred and secular dimensions of human experience, as well as to the institutional, ‘objective’ articulation of such ‘subjectively’ defined relations in the renegotiations, transformations, reforms and reconstructions of the relations between state and church. Between the defeat of Napoleon and the massive social and political transformations of the last quarter of the century, it was virtually impossible to formulate questions concerning the associative life of human beings outside the framework of the field of tension and reciprocity produced by religious and political agendas for transforming emancipated strangers into members of a community of consciousness, will and sentiment. It is difficult to find a significant political or social thinker before 1870 whose discourse was not framed in large parts by this polarity.