Kalendarium

CCD international seminars: The French Revolution and religious change through the lens of social emergence theory

Manuel Stadler is a PhD candidate at the Institute of Religious Studies, Leipzig University (Germany). During his presentation, he will delve into the French Revolution through the lens of social emergence theory. The French Revolution is often interpreted as the founding event of the modern secular nation-state, built up upon the guiding principle of laïcité, a strict form of separation between the church and the state, which is generally misunderstood as a categoric split between religion and politics. The religious politics during the French Revolution had a significant impact on the perception of history as the unfolding of reason and rationality, leading to the construction of a perfect society based on natural laws. In this talk Stadler wants to challenge the classical narrative of the French Revolution as a process of secularization and instead use a Durkheimian emergence theory approach to interpret the empirical sources. Emergence theory presupposes that society is more than the sum of rational acting individuals but can be described through concepts of collective psychology. To operationalize emergence theory, he will focus on empirical sources stemming from the period of the French Revolution, uncovering changes in power relations and social structures. The aim of his presentation is to use religion as a heuristic concept to explain how the change of power relations is connected to the emergence of new forms of collective memory.

Discussant: Peter Karlsson

The seminar will be hybrid on Zoom: https://ju-se.zoom.us/j/61288774852