Under the Spell of Freedom Theory of Religion after Hegel and Nietzsche

How do the history of religion and the history of political freedom relate to each other? The variety of views on this subject in philosophy, the humanities and social sciences, and the public is broad and confusing. But the grandiose synthesis in which Hegel brought together Christianity and political freedom is still an enormous source of orientation for many-despite or even because of the influential provocations of Friedrich Nietzsche. As Hans Joas shows in Under the Spell of Freedom, a different view has developed in the religious thinking of the twentieth century based on a conception of history that is more open to the future and on a concept of freedom that is richer than that of Hegel. Using sixteen selected thinkers, Joas deconstructs the grand Hegelian narrative of human history as the self-realization of the idea of freedom, setting as a counterpart the sketches of a theory of the emergence of moral universalism. Further, taking the classical views of Hegel and his emphasis on the role of Protestant Christianity and the extremely negative views about Christianity in the work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Joas elaborates on this new understanding of religion and freedom, which avoids both Eurocentrism and an intellectualist view of religious faith and practice. The result is a forceful plea for a global history of moral universalism. Under the Spell of Freedom is an important step in this direction.

Hans Joas is Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin. For more than twenty years, he was a Visiting Professor of Sociology and in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Among his numerous prizes are the Max Planck Research Award in 2015; the Prix Paul Ricoeur in 2017; and the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award of the German Sociological Association in 2022. Some of his books in English include The Power of the Sacred (Oxford, 2021); G.H. Mead, A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought, Pragmatism and Social Theory; The Creativity of Action, The Genesis of Values, War and Modernity, The Sacredness of the Person: A New Genealogy of Human Rights, and Faith as an Option: Possible Futures for Christianity. He has also published two books with Wolfgang Knoebl: Social Theory: Twenty Introductory Lectures and War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present and has edited several volumes, including The Axial Age and Its Consequences (with Robert Bellah).