The starting point of this research proposal is that many of the most significant challenges of contemporary society find a common denominator in the problem of the secularisation. While the term itself may attract only sporadic attention in public debates, we contend that its overall significance lies beyond interrogating the rise or decline of religious beliefs and practices; instead, it is connected to sociological and philosophical questions about the autonomy of modern social orders. Indeed, the challenge of populism to political representation, of global inequality to wealth distribution, of climate change to the planet’s sustainability and of artificial intelligence to the transformations of human nature, all refer to the ways in which in modern societies autonomously organize their practices and institutions, on the one hand, and seek to rationally justify the values on which these practices are based, on the other.

The main aim of this project is to critically assess the most salient debates on secularisation over the past 100 years insofar as they illuminate questions about modern claims to autonomy. As they partly intersect but also talk past one another, each of these areas of research focuses on a particular set of questions. We identify four of them: (1) normative questions on the rise and decline of secular values; (2) temporal questions on the self-positing of modernity as an historical epoch; (3) political questions on the desacralisation of modern sovereignty, and; (4) practical question on the non-technological dimensions of technology.

The proposal is built on two main hypotheses. The first, sociological, hypothesis is that these debates on secularisation are inextricably linked to the question of whether modern societies are able to organise their own practices and institutions in a rational manner. The self-organisation of modern societies is a central feature of most key modern institutions from democracy and education to the economy and family life itself. The second, philosophical, hypothesis is that these four areas of research also point in the direction of whether and how it is possible to justify the normative autonomy of modernity. The legitimacy or otherwise of modernity refers to its ability to articulate the reasons on which it bases such key normative ideas as freedom, equality and self-determination.

The originality of the research project is threefold. First, the international literature offers no comparable account to the one we seek to carry out here. While each of these four debates comprises a huge body of literature, no attempt has been made to look together at these different fields. This proposal is unique insofar as it seeks to offer a combined interpretation of the main theses and arguments of different bodies of scholarship. Secondly, the project puts to use the idea of philosophical sociology that the principal investigator has been developing over the past several years (Chernilo 2013, 2014, 2017a, 2017b). By bringing together insights from both philosophy and sociology, this project raises sociological questions regarding the constitution of the legitimacy of modern societies, on the one hand, and philosophical questions about autonomy and self-legislation as key normative principles of modernity, on the other. Thirdly, we contend that through this dual sociological and philosophical approach we are be able to shed a new light onto the key question that underpins the problem of secularisation: whether, how and indeed why the autonomy of modern values and institutions remains such an intractable problem.