Secularization and the Working Class: The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the 19th Century

By Pickwick Publications

Secularization and the Working Class brings together contributions from thirteen Central European historians who have taken a long-term interest in the issue of the secularization of modern society and social issues affecting the working class. By using contemporary historical methods they have researched the theoretical aspects of secularization theories as well as individual cases which illustrate Czech developments within the framework of the Austrian monarchy. These cases touch upon working conditions, working-class organizations and political parties, cultural life and means of communication. Among other things they present the conflicts that led to rifts within society. This representative collection of texts is will appeal to historians of modern history interested in the fascinating issues of European development, all those who are interested in the living conditions of the working class in the 19th and 20th centuries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781630875893

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Secularization and the Working Class

The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

Edited by

Lukáš Fasora, Jiří Hanuš, and Jiří Malíř

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SECULARIZATION AND THE WORKING CLASS

The Czech Lands and Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

Copyright © 2011 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-61097-014-3

eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-589-3

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Secularization and the working class : the Czech lands and Central Europe in the nineteenth century / edited by Lukáš Fasora, Jiří Hanuš, Jiří Malíř.

xiv + 242 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-014-3

1. Working class—Europe—Religious life. 2. Europe—Religion—19th century. 3. Secularization Europe. I. Title. II. Fasora, Lukáš, III. Hanuš, Jiří. IV. Malíř, Jiří.

hc59.15 s25 2011

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Published within GAČR project entitled Social Interaction between Aristocracy, Bourgeoisie and Working Class: The Case of Moravia in 1873–1918, no 409/08/0591, and within Centre for Studies in Central European History: Sources, Countries, Culture—no MU MSM 0021622426.

Translators: Graeme Dibble, Michaela Kapušová, and John McKenna

Reviewers: Ivana Noble (Prague) and Pavel Kladiwa (Ostrava)

Contributors

Lukáš Fasora, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Brno

[e-mail]

Jiří Hanuš, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Brno

[e-mail]

Miloš Havelka, Fakulta humanitních studií Univerzity Karlovy, Praha [e-mail]

Roman Holec, Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Komenského v Bratislavě, Bratislava

[e-mail]

Martin Jemelka, Katedra historie FF Ostravské univerzity v Ostravě, Ostrava

[e-mail]

Kristina Kaiserová, Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Jana Evangelisty Purkyně, Ústí nad Labem

[e-mail]

Jiří Kořalka, Praha

[e-mail]

Marie Macková, Ústav historických věd Filozofické fakulty Univerzity Pardubice, Pardubice

[e-mail]

Jiří Malíř, Filozofická fakulta Masarykovy univerzity, Brno

[e-mail]

Pavel Marek, Katedra historie Filozofické fakulty Univerzity Palackého, Olomouc [e-mail]

Jiří Matějček, CLEO, pracoviště historické sociologie, Kutná Hora

Juergen Schmidt, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin

[e-mail]

Josef Šebesta, Praha

[e-mail]

Preface

"At first sight it would appear that the issue of religion has lost its former importance and is more of a secondary concern in the workers’ movement. If religion and faith in God are discussed, everyone contemptuously dismisses them, and the smile and disdain are natural signs of intelligence. But beneath the surface of this contempt, beneath this apparent calm, there is widespread ignorance as to the causes of both the great religious struggles of the old world and manifestations of religion in modern life."¹

These deliberations by the editor of the leading socialist paper Hlas lidu from 1908 sum up very precisely the issues which the organizers put forward at the symposium Secularization of the working class in the 19th Century, which was held by the history department of Masaryk University in Brno in 2009 and which forms the basis of this publication.

When contemplating the notion of secularization we are aware of the ambivalence of this cultural and social phenomenon which manifests itself primarily through a decline in the importance of the Church and religion in both individual and public life, while at the same time there is a search for new identities and moral codes, which might be, for example, the nation, class, or even a new relationship towards religion, redefined according to the criteria that are most suited to the modern age. In this respect the so-called religion of humanity plays a significant role.

There emerge three aspects to the historical analysis of secularization: firstly an analysis of the revolutionary events of the modern age, particularly where there is an impact on the relationship between the state and the Church—this research looks at the French Revolution and its influence on Central Europe, the revolutions from 1848–1849, as well as revolution from above, which applies in particular to the Kulturkampf during the Bismarck era. The second crucial trend in the basic research involves the development of science in the modern age and the relationship between science, progress and politics.² Here historians were interested in the expansion of science in various social groups and its application in schools and other educational institutions. The third trend which also influenced our research concerned modernization and an analysis of socio-cultural realities—European development was described as a transition from an agricultural, hierarchical society to an urbanized, democratic society, a society which was both industrialized and secularized. The work of the British historian Hugh McLeod shows in a (West) European comparison the difference in the speed and course of secularization that can be seen in a relatively small area in the modern era, how the variety of conditions linking socio-economic and cultural matters are almost unlimited from the viewpoint of various social levels and formations, from the viewpoint of gender, generations, etc.³ To express this variety in a Central European context would seem to be an exceptionally difficult task. Nevertheless, the formulation of research questions must be based on these realities.

The aim of this publication is certainly not to be, nor can it be, a comprehensive picture of religion and faith within the lower levels of society and the working class in particular, but rather a collection of several interesting features and connections within a Czech and Central European context which up until now have escaped the attention of historians who have concentrated mainly on Western European and American events. The Czech lands present an interesting area for research into secularization for at least two main reasons—firstly due to the manner in which, until recently, the subject had been addressed by Marxist historiography, and secondly, the specific character of the social formation called the working class.

Whether historians only paid lip service to Marxist approaches or whether they were actually ideologically attached to them, the ideological pressure from the Communist regime led them to interpret religion and faith as obstacles to workers forming a class consciousness. The inexorable progress of history and the realization of the historical role of this social class was to gradually lead the workers towards a repudiation of the religious concept of the world, and the task for historians was to support this journey through an interpretation of past events. During the era of the Communist regime this highly ideological concept proved extremely restrictive for the more capable historians and only a few of them were able to look at the theme from a different perspective—which did not, of course, prevent them from protecting themselves in their texts with quotations from the acknowledged classics and leading lights of Marxist ideology. Within a Marxist-Leninist ideological framework in the Czech lands and the countries of the socialist bloc there was room for creative study of the cultural changes affecting the working class when this was placed within the context of the national-emancipation process, which—even though it was mainly carried out by members of the bourgeoisie—also affected the working class. Anti-clericalism as an important element of the Czech national revival presented a significant platform for co-operation between the bourgeois parties and working-class organisations, and this theme could not be ignored even by Marxist historiography in the search for progressive national traditions. Opportunities also arose for the application of non-dogmatic approaches to the theme in microhistorical research and ethnographic studies, which—often very carefully and only by implication—demonstrated in their results the incompatability of the ideological clichés with reality. The microhistorical research mentioned often provides valuable material for the second issue—the socio-economic and cultural restrictions on the concept of the working class, an issue which goes hand in hand with the question of the profiles of the so-called bourgeoisie, petite bourgeoisie, middle class, etc. Although British and German historians started to examine this problem in the 1960s, it was not until the 1980s that Austrian historians published works in this area, with Czechs following approximately ten years after that. A major reason was the significant variety in the living conditions of the lower and middle levels of society in Central European countries and the existence of several transitory social forms, resulting in a lack of methodological clarity. The industrialization of the Czech lands and the Habsburg Empire not only occurred much more slowly than in Western Europe, but was also somewhat half-hearted. Those industrial centres with large numbers of workers consisted geographically and socially of sparse islands surrounded by agricultural areas; in Moravia they were concentrated around Brno and Ostrava, while in Bohemia they were situated around Prague, Pilsen, and smaller industrial areas in the foothills to the north and east of the country. In comparison with Western Europe the important industrial centers in the Czech lands had numerous links to agriculture, whether it was the widespread use of the working class for domestic labor, the phenomenon of subsistence farmers dividing their living and identity between the countryside and the city, or the typical form of Czech industrialization where a factory was built right in the middle of the countryside and orientated towards the use of unqualified but very cheap labor from the ranks of the lower classes of rural society.

The Czech worker in the second half of the nineteenth century had much stronger links to rural life than his British or German counterpart and was less affected by modern trends in science and education, and therefore more integrated into traditional society with its authorities and religious dogmas and ideas. Nevertheless, during the second half of the nineteenth century even the Czech working class underwent significant changes which had earlier affected the German-speaking population and later also the Czech-speaking population. Around 1900 the technological and general economic changes also manifested themselves in the character profile of the typical worker. He gradually moved away from his former life due to the possibility of education and professional development, which contributed to a solid financial basis and even raised the living standards of the working class. From the 1890s the acquisition of basic necessities and social security for a greater number of workers, though of course with large differences across trades, regions and gender, paved the way for an intellectual transformation of the workers. A generation now firmly connected to the city had an education, even at the most basic level, which provided a scientific interpretation of the world, so that by around 1900 religion and faith were being pushed further out of people’s minds, though only a very small minority would consider faith internally or externally to be a fallacy. This was also connected to the rise in political Catholicism, which by the end of the 19th century had led to the establishment of several institutions in the form of associations transforming into modern political parties⁴ and which provided effective competition to the Social Democrats and leftist thinking. Whilst in the industrial regions of Western Europe the most serious contenders for the new religion were the socialist movements with their supposedly scientific view of the world as the most coherent substitute for the religious view, in the Czech lands the expansion of Marxist socialism was obstructed by weighty ideological opponents.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the Czech lands were the setting for a fierce national struggle which by the end of the nineteenth century had directly affected the working class. During the period in the 1880s when the workers’ movement was being suppressed by the conservative Austrian government of Viscount Eduard Taaffe, the differences between the individual nationalities of the working class within the Austrian Small International had still not clearly emerged. However, even in the 1870s it was obvious that having German speakers as the leading figures of the Social Democratic movement in Vienna was going to be an issue for the Czech working class. The leaders of the Social Democratic party tried to address this problem by granting some autonomy to the Czech branch of the political party, though at the same time they played down the serious problems which arose from the complicated situation of having workers of differing nationalities. The more qualified German workforce watched with resentment and unease as a tide of unqualified workers from the Czech countryside swept into the hitherto purely German towns and regions, and within the workers’ movement national identity became a far more important homogenizing factor than the Marxist identification with class. The end of state repression of the workers’ movement after 1890 and the concurrent rise of more liberal and more radically nationalist political forces in the Czech and German camps brought social issues more into the sphere of national rivalry and also brought some of the workers’ concerns closer to the radical nationalists. In place of a religious view of the world was a so-called progressive interpretation, though of course without the underpinning of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but with the central idea being the national interest. With a view to the national interest, forces from both the German and Czech camps attempted, with great success, to address the working class. They portrayed religion and the Catholic Church as being anathema to the interests of the nation and the workers, and attacked the stereotyped Austrian alliance of throne and altar. In the Czech lands this was seen in the fierce anti-clericalism of the Young Czech party and the so-called national workers, and in a German context there was the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei with its pan-German view of the world, though with a more realistic social policy, and its hostility towards Catholic ultramontanism.

Competition from nationalist forces, but also from the modernized Christian-Social movement, weakened the influence of Social Democracy on wide sections of the working class. Even so, the Social Democrats maintained a clear predominance among the urban working class; apart from red strongholds such as Brno, Pilsen or Liberec, this also involved many small towns where Social Democracy found itself on the defensive, coming under pressure from nationalist political forces. The core of Social Democratic sympathizers was undoubtedly made up of factory workers, mainly qualified workers—the influence of the socialists sharply declined among men in sectors with a higher representation of unqualified and especially female workers (the textile, clothing and tobacco industries).

Women, present mainly in sectors with low qualification requirements, represented a thorny problem for the socialists because of their persistent adherence to traditional values (and thus also to certain traditional forms of religion). Although the party based its campaigning on the principles of August Bebel’s famous book Women and Socialism and formally declared its support for the idea of full emancipation of women, the Social Democrats still had to approach this matter very circumspectly in the predominantly Catholic environment of the Habsburg monarchy. The majority of the party’s male backers frowned upon the fact that the female workforce had become a significant part of the labor market in the late nineteenth century and posed more of a threat to the econo-mic position of qualified workers than disputes with employers. However, this was surely about more than just a conflict of economic interests. Because of their lack of education, women were more attached to traditional values and represented an imaginary cultural bridge to the rural world, where the first two generations of workers continued to maintain extensive family ties which would provide assistance in case of unemployment or industrial action. We find only a few exceptional cases of politically active women, mainly in the very core of the Social Democratic movement, i.e. in political associations, while in other satellite organizations the proportion of women was low. Women in the numerous socialist satellite organizations, especially consumer cooperatives and educational societies, also preferred to move anti-religious propaganda into the background and concentrate on other issues. It was not even unheard of for Social Democratic organizations to publish calendars with religious themes and lists of saints’ days for commercial reasons. Not even in the case of the socialist movement can one speak of the disruption of the traditional image of the family, firmly linked with religion, in which the woman’s main responsibility was looking after the household and the children.

The situation was very different within small-scale industry as here the socialists were only marginally influential. The problem for the Social Democratic movement was that when confronted by their opponents they were unable to carry out revolutions of the mind. The workers’ attachment to the rural way of life, traditional society, religion and faith was, for the time being, stronger than the power of the Social Democrats. The workers’ education gave way to primitive propaganda which overlapped with tradition rather than uprooting it. The Social Democrats made little headway in achieving the movement’s important goal, whereby from the fire of new ideas, thought through to their conclusion, the workers will throw out the old ideas and cast off the remnants of bourgeois culture which enshroud the core of their proletarian being.⁵ In 1902, Viktor Adler, the leader of the Austrian Social Democrats, also expressed his doubts about the true Marxist content of the workers’ education: The task of workers’ education is not to learn how to write properly, to speak properly, to eat properly or to behave properly. We do not demand from you any kind of correct (i.e., bourgeois) behaviour, we demand self-consciousness.⁶ However, the relationship of a large majority of the working class and party functionaries towards Marxism remained extremely limited, restricted to propaganda slogans: it was certainly not strongly rooted in a Marxist world view and therefore a repudiation of a religious understanding of the world.

Our knowledge of the cultural profile of Czech workers at the start of the modern era therefore gives rise to a series of questions. The wide variety and ambivalence of many economic, social and cultural processes and influences, together with the state of research after the Communist era, mean that further questioning using a more modern methodological approach is required.

L. Fasora, J. Hanuš, and J. Malíř

1. Dělnictvo a náboženství, Hlas lidu, September 30, 1908.

2. See Loewenstein, Víra v pokrok. Dějiny jedné evropské ideje.

3. McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe 1848–1914.

4. Malíř, Od spolků k moderním politickým stranám.

5. Vzdělávejme se! Hlas lidu June 3, 1908.

6. Pepper, Die frühe österreichische Sozialdemokratie, 98.

part one

Methods and International Inspiration

1

Two Trends in the Process of Secularization in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

¹

Miloš Havelka

They plow’d in tears, the trumpets sounded before the golden plow, and the voices of the living creatures were heard in the clouds of heaven . . .

—William Blake

However, Austrian Catholicism was never completely authentic. After the collapse of the Reformation, especially in the Czech Lands, it never had a challenger and became the comfortable official religion

—Tomáš G. Masaryk

It is impossible to ignore the extent to which in the last two decades of the twentieth century an interest in religion once more came to the forefront of the humanities, in particular history, sociology and culturology. At the turn of the millennium this interest was deepened by political developments, not least because of the connection with global terrorism. The French scholar of Arabic studies and religion Gilles Kepel described this situation as God ’s revenge to express his belief that an often simplified or fundamentalist form of religion had returned to the public and political life of nations in the case of all three of the Abrahamic religions—Christianity, Judaism and Islam. ² According to Kepel, God’s revenge symbolically began in the second half of the 1970s with three important religious events—the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran, the election of Karol Wojtyla as Pope and the political support of Menachem Begin by the previously restrained Israeli fundamentalist parties, which enabled his ascent to power. Over time these events began to exert wide-ranging influences on religious attitudes in other aspects of social life. For example, the German systematic theologian Friedrich Wilhelm Graf warned in his book Die Wiederkehr der Gotter: Religion in moderner Kultur [The Return of the Gods: Religion in Modern Culture] ³ of the hitherto neglected or underestimated effect of religion in several central areas of modernity and points out, for example, the thematization of religious pluralism in market models (religious economics) and in a denominationally based comparison of development (shared history).

The function of religion and its position within the structure of modern society also began to occupy authors whose works had previously been concerned with the more widespread influence of the Enlightenment, such as Niklas Luhman, Jürgen Habermas, and Ulrich Beck.⁴ A longer-term interest in religiosity is also encountered in the phenomenologically oriented sociology of Thomas Luckmann and Peter L. Berger.⁵ The work of Raymond Aron on the specific aims of secularized religions has been developed by the Munich-based Hans Maier and the Rome-based Emilio Gentile.⁶

In the Czech Republic there has been a bias towards the translation of French political works over German studies: alongside the previously cited Gilles Kepel, one can also mention Marcel Gauchet⁷ as well as René Rémond’s historical overview Náboženství a společnost v Evropě [Religion and Society in Europe], which places a somewhat one-dimensional emphasis on the interpretation of the development of political power in the relationship between the state and religion.8

These and other attempts to analyze the position and function of religion in contemporary society are complemented by the compensation-oriented renewed interest in the older theme of secularization. In individual works this concept can often be significantly over-worked and obfuscatory in its content, as well as frequently being oversimplified.⁹

Therefore, within the more general perspective of historical semantics¹⁰ and the history of thought, this paper aims to focus attention on certain specific connections in the approaches of historical sociology to the issue of secularization.

The setting¹¹ of this contribution is a thesis on the ambiguous and multidimensional process of secularization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which corresponds to the plurality of its research specification. This has arguably manifested itself in the de-churching of the public realm as well as the transfer of religious convictions into the private realm, or even the de-spiritualization of subjectivity, which means freeing views on life, experience and knowledge from their religious moorings, something which Max Weber analysed with his concept of the disenchantment of the world (Entzauberung der Welt).¹²

From the viewpoint of historical semantics it is also necessary to stress that the concept of secularization changed its content significantly approximately halfway through the nineteenth century.

As is shown in theological compendia,¹³ the use of this concept was originally connected with the transference of church property into secular hands and it is most often encountered in legal and economic religious history. Secularization was characterized therein as a one-sided appropriation of church property against the will of the church, in particular church ownership of land and its use for non-religious purposes. (Even today we come across similar attempts at laicizing property that originally belonged to the church, and the property-rights view should not, of course, disguise any wider anti-church, anti-religious, or even general cultural consequences such as have been seen with the wrangling over St. Vitus’ Cathedral.) Viewed in this way, which specifically thematizes the duality of the spiritual and the worldly (economic) dimensions of religious life, the concept of secularization supposedly appeared for the first time in the arguments of the French ambassador during the preliminary negotiations of the Peace of Westphalia (April 8, 1646).¹⁴

This is therefore a historical phenomenon which has not only been present throughout various periods of time—as can be seen in ancient Rome with the confiscation of property from various Christian communities at the time of the persecution of the first Christians, thus removing the basis for their existence. The secularization of property should not be considered to be solely concerned with power-grabbing or anti-religious tendencies. We also encounter similar phenomena in Christian countries in different periods and in different areas—Austria, Prussia, Würtenberg, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America¹⁵—while after the French Revolution, which here almost serves as a paradigm, the confiscation of property was significantly linked to anti-church and anti-religious ideological arguments.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the concept of secularization was used almost exclusively to describe the waning influence of religion on man’s way of thinking, on the organization of society and on the policies of the state. What links, in the broadest sense, both the above-mentioned meanings of this long-term, non-linear and multi-dimensional historical process is the laicization of religious assets (in a material or spiritual sense) and their surrender to temporal objectives. The application of this concept could thus denote more than just changes in religiosity and the worldly position of the church. In this way, the historico-sociological view of the process of secularization began to take in a rapid expansion (complementary to secularization) of world views, supported in various ways by an intense if secular faith in their own universal validity, as in the case of the growing rationalization and modernization of European society and accompanying changes in specific areas in the development of the legal, economic and social life of European society, in which it is not easy to say what was the cause and what was the effect. The change in the accepted notion of secularization naturally led to a historical search for its new components and also to a new interpretation of certain issues.

The Reformation’s and later the Enlightenment’s anti-ecclesiastical purging of faith—not to mention Max Weber’s famous thesis on the relationship between Protestant ethics and capitalism, which can be interpreted not only conceptually in its significance for an understanding of the origin and uniqueness of Occidental capitalism, but also in a secularizing sense with regard to the subsequent process of divesting economic activity of its former religious character (with its resultant simplified patterns of success)—could be seen as being as formative a force as were the attempts to change the view of socio-historical events and their structural power. As an example, Jean Bodin’s Methodus ad facielem historiarum cognitionis, from 1560, aspires to replace the previous theology of history with its own philosophy. The orientation of the book towards secular causes, for example the motive of power or the various national characters, began to establish the basis for a new schematization of historical development, independent of a consecrated plan of providence. Similarly, the new anthropology¹⁶ of Thomas Hobbes did not explain man as part of a created, predetermined order of the world (as in Aristotle’s theory of natural places), but in terms of his instinctive structures, orientated towards self-preservation (conservatio sui); the basic social contract then became the framework for people’s political lives, which allowed a part of their self-preservation energies to be delegated to the state (to the army and police in particular). Therefore the future began to open up as a strange and uncertain sphere occupied only by individual interests, a sphere of self-affirmation and emancipation, independent to a considerable degree from the order of creation and the goal of redemption.

The general desire of modern philosophy and science for objectivity in their functioning, based on the search for a supposedly unshakeable foundation of knowledge and the essential principles of our thought, reached its peak in the Enlightenment and in its objectifying philosophy of reflection, where the cognizant individual is transformed into the subject and things become conceptions and objects, constructed by our understanding (though with the help of the universal principles of mathematical science or Kant’s transcendentally elucidating reflection) and manipulated by our will. In the name of reason and nature, the Enlightenment then became critical of all supposed preconceptions, incomplete experiences and unsatisfactory concepts, and finally helped to completely remove the original, religious-based, universalizing and wisdom-seeking connection of reason, truth, being and the world, an all-justifying basis that could naturally link the questions concerning the reason for a person’s existence, for the existence of individual things and events as a whole. In place of the older principles of hierarchy, uniformity, and order, which made it possible to enquire about the true nature of being and God, appeared equilibrium, equality, and an orientation towards the individual; the world became only a horizon whose appearance and distance were dependent on the position of the observer.

Therefore, in the basis of Enlightenment thought and in its entire orientation was hidden a tendency—as a rule disruptive—towards a rational arrangement of each whole into individual, equally accessible components, and also towards a complementary attempt to interpret a totality through the objective reconstruction of its supposedly relevant, independently controlled, though in reality simplifying (and depleting) elements. Here meaning stops being a complex category¹⁷ anchored in reality itself and necessarily changes into a merely subjective (mental) construct, whether it has a rational character or is something which we wish to believe.

The most characteristic premise of the Enlightenment’s rational reflection, and at the same time also its conclusion, is the general division of man and the world, of subjectivity and objectivity, reason and the inner life, the public and the private, which form the basis of the development of post-Kantian philosophy¹⁸ and which became the cultural principle of modern civilization, and in this sense a new dimension to the issue of secularization. On one side of the division we have to deal with an objective approach to the world, emerging from the conviction that, despite the chaos on the surface, everything is in fact rational and in principle accessible via a structure,¹⁹ and on the other side we find subjectivity and the inner life of individuals, in which is preserved everything which the experience-related reason of modern science has gradually displaced from its objectively material concept of reality and abandoned to individual existence: secondary qualities and values, faith and wisdom, goodness and beauty, desire and dreams, memory and hope, and also God and (originally generally binding) humanity.²⁰ However, the objectivity, transparency and repeatability of the cognition of subjects acquired in this way lost their ability to appeal to man and offer him solutions to questions concerning his place in the entirety of being, which then culminated in the idea of a completely dehumanized, positivist knowledge. Science paid for its objectivity through the loss of its original effort to be "the way to true being (as in antiquity), the way to true art (as in the Renaissance), the way to true nature (as in the ideas of the modern age), the way to true God (as in the Reformed religions) and the way to true happiness" (as in the socialist movement) as Max Weber emphasized in connection with his interpretation of the principles of the objectivity of modern science, continuing with a variation on Tolstoy’s assertion:

[S]cience is meaningless for it is unable to provide us with the answer to the only question which is important for us: What should we do and how should we live? The fact that science cannot answer this question is irrefutable. The question is then in what sense it cannot answer this question and whether it might not offer some help to the person who could phrase the question correctly.²¹

The search for answers to the meaning of history and the questioning of the character of the entire world, originally the realm of religion, were somewhat lost in the bias of the division and the different perspectives it established for the viewing of subject and object, and as those grew, so the critical potential of the Enlightenment dwindled even further into the pure manipulation of knowledge for ideological purposes, ensuring the inner integration of society in an alienated form.²² The critical faculties of Enlightenment reason ended up in the service of individual and group interests.

The phenomenon of secularization should not be restricted solely to the long 19th century,²³ nor should it be viewed solely in its intellectual or power-politics component.

With regard to what has already been said, it is therefore important to distinguish between (a) de-churching (Entkirchlichung), i.e., the process of politically restricting, institutionally weakening, and socially isolating the church; the similarly oriented (b) secularization in the older sense of the word, discussed above, as the expropriation of church property; (c) secularization in its most commonly used sense, i.e. the secularization of spiritual and intellectual aspects; and finally (d) the de-religiousification of forms of public and private life.

A similar methodological separation of the various forms of secularization can lead us to Niklas Luhmann’s concept of system segmentation. He understood this segmentation as the process of differentiation of structurally similar units having a similar function. As a rule, these units are not very specialized, they do not co-operate or interact with each other, and so they are relatively autonomous. The stability of the overall framework is not threatened by the imperceptible functioning of segmentation, and the possible failure of one segmental unit does not lead to a general breakdown, merely to a reduction in the system.

(a) De-churching was linked with the disappearance of the church’s influence in religious and non-religious spheres. Of course, this was more a matter of secular and spiritual power rather than faith, or more precisely the institutional manipulation of church life, even if it manifested itself in the removal of ceremonial members of the church from specific church offices, or the growing non-participation of the population in various church activities (which, of course, does not necessarily mean a reduction in the requirements and functions of religion in the public sphere). De-churching is also frequently associated with laicism as an ideological movement which demanded the radical separation of church and state.

The question still remains to what extent de-churching can be seen as a reaction to attempts by the majority of religions to maintain a long-term influence over domestic and, in many cases, also world-power polity. In connection with this we can mention Masaryk’s Světová revoluce [World Revolution] from 1925, where in his interpretation of the First World War he emphasises the dissolution of the European absolutist theocracies of the nineteenth century as being one of its most important consequences.²⁴

(b) The cause of the secularization of property was, and still is, the requirements of the state (e.g., the Theresa-Josephine reforms with their closure of monasteries and submission of religion to state supervision) and the absolutist reach of the state into all areas; later there was also a weakening of the original functions of church property, sometimes as a result of the market organization of the economy (e.g., tourist access and music concerts in secularized church spaces).

(c) Secularization, as it is most commonly understood today, that is as an intellectual separation from religion as a result of scientific, secular and pragmatic arguments, as the description of an internal process whereby public life takes on a strictly secular character and becomes religiously neutral, began to be used as a concept (secularization) in England from the start of the second half of the nineteenth century,²⁵ undoubtedly also on the basis of intellectual reflection on the growing industrialization, urbanization and modernization of English society. A role was no doubt played by the expanding positivistic notions of man and society, the first practical successes of natural science and the growing potential for the technological management of the world.

The enduring setting for this concept of secularization was the assumption of a strong world order and an original (natural) unity and spiritual connection of all areas of the social and cultural world in religion, precisely that from which we are supposedly diverging in secularization, and at the same time also the idea that this separation is something negative, that through secularization something is happening which from the nature of things should not happen. In order to illustrate further, let us turn once more to T. G. Masaryk and his first major themes in sociology—alcoholism, prostitution and suicide—which he explained by the growth of atheism in modern man:

The collective phenomenon of suicide to which we are witness in today’s society is the result of the demise of the unified view of the world which Christianity consistently brought to people of all educated nations. The struggle between free thought and positive religion leads to the atheism of the masses; this atheism then means intellectual and moral anarchy—and death . . . ²⁶

The belief that religion was a force for social and cultural integration and that in its absence destruction prevailed was linked to Masaryk’s concept of the crisis of modern man. In his book on suicide Masaryk attempted to show that the ultimate reasons for this new social phenomenon of the modern age could not be attributed purely to external (natural and social) causes, but were mainly due to the influence of modern currents of thought, which replaced the firm world view uniting the moral order with belief in God, which caused the centuries-old, sacred and generally respected morality to disappear, and which, according to Masaryk, had not been replaced by anything. Suicide is therefore one manifestation of the crisis of modern man, which, together with the social and political crises, constitutes one of the main elements of the crisis of the