Colin Jager. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-0812239799. Price: $59.95

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the disciplinary and institutional landscape of the humanities and social sciences has been enduringly concerned with notions of the secular and secularization. Indeed, some disciplines (e.g., sociology, higher biblical criticism) or subfields (the post-Wittgensteinian critique of modern moral philosophy) largely acquired their object and overall purpose through a sustained reflection on modernity’s self-legitimation as a teleological movement towards the state as a liberal, secular, and rational “enterprise-association” (Oakeshott). Wherever one may choose to locate the “beginnings” of that process—say, in early 14^th century Nominalism, the Reformation, or in the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century—it appears to be at the end of the eighteenth century that quintessentially modern critiques of religion and metaphysics of a Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke are being scrutinized for hidden and troubling presuppositions of their own. As the quintessentially modern, Cartesian stance of methodical doubt becomes itself the target of a reflexive critique (Hegel’s “self-perfecting skepticism”), secularization ceases to operate as putatively self-evident and incontestable project. Rather, by 1800 it begins to disclose the as yet unexamined grounds of modern Wissenschaft and, hence, the potential causes for a crisis of legitimacy that threatens the “logical optimism” (Nietzsche’s phrase) so defining of the liberal nation-state’s economic, institutional, and geo-political pursuits. As Hegel insists, no society will be properly secular or enlightened unless it has achieved an adequate self-description. The result is a major change in the conception and production of knowledge itself—associated above all with Romanticism and Idealism—such that modern, institutionally embedded, academic inquiry (hermeneutics, sociology, philosophy of history, utilitarian philosophy, art history) are now enjoined to produce both, positive knowledge and a sustained reflection on their own conceptual and methodological limits. This shift can be observed in Hegel, Saint-Simon, and Comte, yet also in Marx’s retention of Idealism’s stadial philosophy of history—an eschatological matrix that endures well into the twentieth century (e.g., in the work of Karl Löwith). Comte offers a particularly striking example of how a particular secularization narrative begets a distinctively modern discipline; for it is in the Positive Philosophy that we find the sources of Durkheim’s and Weber’s finely grained empirical (and scrupulously detached) sociological accounts of religious culture and its alleged transposition into the secular, industrial and bureaucratic spheres of the Western-European nation state. On the other hand, wary of the mutual reinforcement of secularization and the genesis of modern “expert languages” (A. Giddens), G. E. Anscombe, C. Taylor, and A. MacIntyre in the second half of the twentieth century revived an incisive critique—first launched by Coleridge, the Oxford Movement, and by writers such as G. M. Hopkins and G. K. Chesterton in England, or Eichendorff and Droste-Hülshoff in Germany—of the intellectual complacency and fallaciousness said to characterize notions moral and religious life in a liberal nation state that has peremptorily quarantined religion as a merely subjective “feeling,” and as irrational, incommunicable “belief.” Thus for Gadamer, MacIntyre, Nicholas Lash (to name but a few), the task at hand was to rehabilitate the Aristotelian or Thomistic idea of “tradition” as an alternative to the hectoring, strictly self-certifying atheism from which Nietzsche, L. Stephen, Zola, Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Bloomsbury group had launched their critique of late Wilhelminian, Victorian, and Edwardian religious and moral culture. More recent projects—such as those by Talal Asad, Hans Blumenberg, David Martin, Peter Berger, Michael Buckley, Louis Dupré, and Charles Taylor—have variously stressed the continued, robust hold that questions of secularization have on advanced inquiry in the humanities and social sciences while also proving alert to the ambivalence of a secularism all but axiomatic within the modern, specialized and institutionally …