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Modern societies, and the modern knowledge that was seen to be both an emblem and a precipitating cause of their modernity, have long been seen as marking a great historical advance. Modernity, we have been assured, by the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, is not only different from premodernity and contemporary nonmodern societies, these differences are also signs of intellectual, moral and material progress. In recent times, however, there have been a chorus of criticisms of the core presumptions that undergird modern knowledge. Such criticisms are sufficiently widespread and intellectually serious that the superiority and universality of modern western Reason, which could previously be taken for granted, now have to be argued for. Such defences of the universality of modern knowledge invariably draw on Kant and/or Hegel, as in the case of the two contemporary defenders of modern western knowledge, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas, whose arguments this article will outline and evaluate. It argues that neither convincingly shows that there are transhistorical and transcultural standards by which we can uphold the superiority and universality of modern knowledge, and concludes that there are no grounds to cleave to the idea of ‘progress’.

This article argues that the very idea of religion, as the genus of which the various ‘world religions’ are the species, is a modern invention, and thus comparisons between religions – including those pertaining to their capacity to recognize and adapt to the necessary distinction between matters of religion and matters properly belonging to secular society and the state – rest upon a deep conceptual error. Religion is made or produced, it goes on to show, in part by the interventions of the state; the claim that secularism is the process by which politics and religion come to be ‘separated out’ is therefore untenable. It concludes by asking how we might understand religion and secularism in the light of this, if it is no longer possible to understand them in the conventional way; and also what the implications of such alternative understandings might be for the narrative of modernity of which the secularization thesis is a part.