This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Citation Map Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Harrington, A. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                   What's this?

Ernst Troeltsch’s Concept of Europe

University of Leeds, UK, a.harrington{at}leeds.ac.uk

Recent writing in social theory has seen a renewed preoccupation with questions of religion, secularization and civilizational difference. This article reappraises the work of one early twentieth-century thinker in relation to these issues: the German historical theologian and close colleague of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923). The article concentrates particularly on Troeltsch’s late writings on Europe and ‘Europeanism’. The thesis is defended that Troeltsch offers an important gloss on Weber’s famous assertion of the ‘universal significance and validity’ of occidental rationalism. Troeltsch offers a thicker, more concretized reading of Weber’s statement that serves as a precursor to contemporary thinking about ‘multiple modernities’ and also as a fund of trenchant counter-responses to the claims of recent post-colonial critics about Eurocentrism in western social science. Troeltsch’s writings give us one example among many of a current of cosmopolitan reflexivity in European social thought between the wars that avoided both nationalism and chauvinism, on the one hand, and nihilism and obscurantism, on the other.

Key Words: Eurocentrism • Europeanism • historicism • occidentalism • secularization • Ernst Troeltsch • Max Weber

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. Harrington Introduction to Georg Simmel's Essay 'Europe and America in World History' European Journal of Social Theory, February 1, 2005; 8(1): 63 - 72. [Abstract] [PDF]