Bibliographic record
Abstract
Originally published as a special issue of the journal Intellectual History Review, this collection of essays edited by Peter Harrison is intended to bring analytical clarity to the thorny question of secularization. The book is best described as a scholarly road map designed to introduce newcomers to the many and varied contours of the debate surrounding why, how, and when western civilization turned from an “age of religion” towards an equally encompassing “age of secularity.” Interdisciplinary in remit and eclectic in methodology, this volume is meant to help scholars navigate the minefield of competing narratives of secularization. In the introduction Peter Harrison teases out the various interpretative strands within the debate, or as he puts it the “major genres in the history of secularization” (p. 1). These boil down to descriptive accounts, explanatory interpretations, and ideologically derived normative pronouncements. The introduction functions as a short history of these various approaches and it helpfully locates within this overview contributions that have revitalized the debate in recent years, including Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation (2012), Thomas Pfau’s Minding the Modern (2013), Larry Seidentop’s Inventing the Individual (2014), Stephen Gaukroger’s Science and the Shaping of Modernity (2007), and Peter Harrison’s own book, The Territories of Science and Religion (2015). Harrison establishes clusters of interpretation based on the religious and political commitments that shape in competing ways the marshalling of facts, the form of argumentation, and the explanations given by various theorists within a range of disciplinary fields. He then maps each of the contributions to the volume into the various narrative traditions and approaches, and provides a useful typology of secularization accounts. Each of the chapters that follow fill in the picture, reflecting from disciplinary vantage points as diverse as early modern religious and political history, to international relations and the history of philosophy, on the manifold ways in which the story of secularization has been told. In the space of eight chapters the reader is given ample illustration, not only of multiple variations of the story of secularization, but also of the many ways in which the term itself is deployed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".