主讲人简历：
Elmar Rieger，University of Bremen Download！
时间地点：
9月15日下午3：30-5：30；历史系二院108
简要介绍:
Short Abstract： The global expansion of a capitalist market economy provides new evidence about factors driving both religiosity and the social functions of states. It seems that secularization depends in a critical way on the ability of states to provide a sense of existential security. Since secularization has been an important means to achieve domestic, and, by extension, international peace between conflicting faiths, it is important to have a new look at the relations between religion and social policy.
详细介绍:
Long Abstract: The rise of fundamentalist religions and the declining efficiency of public policy in sustaining social security indicate that the renaissance of religion and modernization (or globalization, when we give it a more contemporary label) are not contradictory phenomenon but two sides of one and the same social transformation. The history of religiosity in European and other countries developing strong welfare states shows that the need for religious reassurance of social existence has become less pressing under conditions of greater security provided by the secular institutions of public policy. In other parts of the world, however, where state power remained weak, the social institutions of religions, for example Islamic charities in Arabic countries, Hinduist castes in India and familial networks in East and South-East Asia remained the main provider of social security. In fact, as C. A. Bayly in his "The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914" (2004) has shown, the institutional formation, intellectual consolidation, and social mobilization of world religions is best understood as a result of the capitalist transformation of the World in the 19th century. The (relative) success of welfare statism (and, for a time, socialism) in the West owed more to its ability to supplant the Judeo-Christian forms of salvation religions than to an autonomous and irreversible logic of societal modernization. For this reason, and pointing to some functional equivalence between certain types of religiosity and secular forms of social policy, the surprising renaissance of evangelical Protestantism is strongly correlated to eroding structures of state provided welfare and existential guarantees. Taking religion more seriously in the historical and comparative study of the welfare state may provide us with more adequate answers to a number of questions. First of all, why have the Western forms of social policy a quite limited appeal in other forms of the world? Is there a peculiarity to Western welfare states that hinders their transposition to non-Western countries? And what does this peculiarity owe to the religious origins of Western types of social structures and social orders? Why do some religions, in particular Islam and Hinduism, show remarkable powers of resistance as parts of peculiar social orders, sometimes despite a liberal-democratic constitution, as in India? What explains the extraordinary success of evangelical Protestantism in China and Latin America – but not, for example, in Japan or South Korea?
