Ph.D. dissertation 2004/1
ISBN 87-7393-530-1
ISSN 1600-7557
ANDERS BERG-SØRENSEN
Paradiso-Diaspora
Reframing the Question of Religion in Politics
This dissertation interferes in the debates on secularism and its limitation s in contemporary political philosophy. It is guided by three theses regarding the relationship between religion and politics; first, that the relationship between religion and politics is a constitutive difference of secularism; second, that this constitutive difference between religion and politics assumes the form of a paradox in the articulations of the relationship between religion and politics; and, third, that the constitutive difference of secularism and the paradox of the question of religion in politics is rooted in a tension between immanence and transcendence of ontological character. On this basis, the aim is to reframe the question of religion in politics as an ontological question forwarding a radical republican perspective as alternative to the dominant liberal tradition and its conception of the question of religion in politics. This implies a play of differences at a spatial axis, e.g. between faith and knowledge, divine and human, public and private, and at a temporal axis in both cases exem plified in terms of readings of political thought from the formation of secularism in early modern political philosophy, in casu Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke, and from the transformation of secularism in contemporary political philosophy, in casu Rawls, Derrida, Deleuze and Taylor.
Anders Berg-Sørensen is assistant professor at Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University. He is doing research on democracy, political culture, public values, questions of identity, religion and politics within the fields of political theory and history of political ideas.

københavns universitet

Paradiso-Diaspora
Reframing the Question of Religion in Politics
ANDERS BERG-SØRENSEN