Entre revendication de sécularisme et « théorème de sécularisation » Le statut de la modernité philosophique

If the term of secularism is often used to mean something like an “outcome of religion”, the term “secularisation” is more ambiguous, and, in its modern usage, describes a breaking out from the religious into the secular as well as the inhibited permanency of the religious in our allegedly secular societies. I will here relate some of the most important stages of the “quarrel” (Jean-Claude Monod) of secularisation, from Carl Schmitt to Hans Blumenberg, by way of Erik Peterson and Karl Löwith in particular. The issue that I wish to examine, through this historical development, is that of an assumed perennity ? (which does not accordingly represent an auto-mystification) of the religious in our contemporary secular societies.