A social theory that vindicates
the centrality of religion in
understanding the transformations of
modernity
http://dx.doi.org/10.22529/sp.2025.65.002
STUDIA POLITICÆ Número 65 otoño 2025 pág. 10–15
Publicada por la Facultad de Ciencia Política y Relaciones Internacionales
de la Universidad Católica de Córdoba, Córdoba, República Argentina.
Central aspects of the work of Hans Joas
T
his special issue of Studia Politicae presents a set of papers by re-
gional and international researchers with an analytical and critical
approach regarding central subjects of the work of German sociolo-
gist and philosopher Hans Joas. Taking into account the value and originality
of his contributions for a novel understanding of contemporary social reality,
this dossier proposes an inquiry into his ideas, as a key insight for specialized
social and political theory.
If we compare the inuence that those thinkers with whom Joas himself
has established fundamental debates – such as Habermas, Taylor, Honneth
and Bellah – have, it becomes clear that the dissemination of Joas’ works in
our regional context and in the Spanish-speaking world is still insufcient.
A brief overview of his elds of interest provides us with a guideline to
some of his contributions and facilitates a better acquaintance with his main
DIEGO FONTI, JUAN SAHARREA Y CLAUDIO VIALE 11
ideas. Among the issues addressed by Joas’ work, we nd some fundamental
topics for discussion in the current public domain – such as violence, war,
Human Rights and democracy, the origin of values and religious experiences
of self-transcendence –, with a perspective based on a fruitful approach that
links American pragmatism and German historicism.
Joas’s numerous publications over four decades of intellectual development
have allowed not only updating the analysis of these elds. They also ques
-
tion some inuential ideas that were long time undisputed, for instance about
the origin of Human Rights, the relationship between secularism and free-
dom, the questioning of the role of moral universalism or sacralization in
modernity, among others. It is worthwhile to enumerate and briey describe
some of his central contributions as a framework for the issues addressed by
the contributions in this volume.
1. Renewal of social theory: From his early works, Joas reassess social theory
by appealing to the pragmatist theory of action. He pursues this strategy by
focusing on creativity to account for social change, vindicating the concep
-
tion of action in terms of “practical intersubjectivity”, following Mead and
Dewey; but also making room for the contingency and fallibility of the his-
torical creations of values, as well as the attempts at their universalization,
elements that he particularly takes from Troeltsch’s work. A key element to
understand Joas’ work is his methodological contributions to social theory,
which allows a series of results that have repercussions on the social sciences,
especially his rejection of the sociological dichotomy between functionalist
theories and normativist theories, proposing the creativity of action as a third
way of social analysis. As a part of his project for a renewed understanding
of modern society, he offers an alternative to a widespread understanding of
modernity that goes from Weber to Habermas, according to which the with-
drawal of religion from the public sphere and the understanding of human
life itself is the condition of possibility for the consolidation of values which
are central to liberal democracy.
2. His understanding of secularization and values: Joas rejects an inuential
version of modern secularization, insofar as he nds that there are persisting
forms of sacralization. These refute the traditional version - derived from the
Hegelian left and from a “liberal” interpretation of Luther - of a supposedly
progressively growing connection between modernity and the fall of reli
-
gion, and that this connection is a condition for autonomy and freedom. On
this point, we see his critique of the narrative that the historicist and fallibilist
experience of values necessarily entails a denial of moral universalism.
12 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025
Joas provides a historical reconstruction of notions such as Human Rights,
whose origin he nds not in philosophical arguments but in a sensibility born
out of the experience of witnessing the suffering of others (particularly sla-
very, torture, and the death penalty); or as those overwhelming experiences
of self-transcendence that relate to and include other persons, or that notion
of freedom that is concretely located and conscious of not being its own
origin. These are all elements that lead him to rethink central aspects of de-
mocracy and the role of values - including religious experiences - in them. In
this regard, he echoes a sensibility that is at the very origin of modern socio-
logical studies, which sees the role of values and sacralization in societies not
as a particular chapter of sociological research but as a central element for an
integral analysis and understanding.
3. The appraisal of religion as an indispensable source of social theory: In
recent years, Joas has focused more strongly on religion and its role for un
-
derstanding social practices. He is interested in the empirical basis of the
religious phenomenon and its normative implications for thinking about po-
litical philosophy and defending universalistic ethics. Hence, his project of
a “historical sociology of religion” highlights and reassesses previous and
contemporary studies, such as the works of R. Niebuhr, Koselleck, Taylor
and Bellah, among others. His original articulation between action theory
and social theory, on the one hand, and between social theory and philosophy
of religion, on the other, are precisely the two axes with which he critically
reviews the canonical interpretations of modernity and the process of secu-
larization.
In our present context, in which political science and social practices are
shaken by the often perverse reappearance of the religious in public life, and
in the face of secularist options that voluntarily seek to annul this presence or
reduce it to a type of discourse without commitments, the study of Joas’ work
provides a pragmatic alternative to these dead ends and an viable experience
for analyzing contemporary social reality.
The contributions to this issue
This special issue opens with Alejandro Pelni’s text, “Hans Joas as a global
thinker.” Written from a sociological perspective, this paper analyzes the
role of universalism and the global as an object of inquiry for social theory.
Pelni’s analysis of world religions, as in the case of Catholicism, the genea
-
DIEGO FONTI, JUAN SAHARREA Y CLAUDIO VIALE 13
logy of Human Rights and their present situation in an unequal world, allows
him to return to Joas’ approach of the global, but from a perspective usually
absent in his work: Latin American reality.
Marcos Breuer’s contribution: “Hans Joas’ Theory of Religion and the Foun
-
dations of the Modern State” reconstructs Joas’ theory of religion and its
fundamental anthropological features. The essay shows how this anthropo-
logical experience gives rise to both particularistic and universalistic social
congurations to criticize the thesis that the modern, secular state requires
for its sustenance a kind of experience of value comparable to that provided
by religious experience.
Germán Arroyo’s “Between ‘Democratic Ethicality’ and the ‘Sacredness of
Democracy’. John Dewey’s pragmatism in Axel Honneth’s theory of justice
and Hans Joas’ theory of religion”, proposes a revision and reinterpretation
of the debate between Honneth and Joas, based on the tension between two
uses of Dewey’s philosophy: On the one hand, the Hegelian notion of justice,
recreated by Honneth in his reading of Dewey, and on the other, the response
to the thesis of the “spell of freedom” proposed by Joas. According to this
article, making explicit these opposing readings allow us to better understand
the reason for various tensions among them, insofar as Joas’ contingent fra
-
mework is closer to Dewey’s pragmatist presuppositions and diverges from
the teleologism that persists in Honneth.
On his part, Jesus Conill’s article “Hermeneutical Genealogy of Seculariza
-
tion. Joas’ Critique of the Rationalizations of Weber and Habermas”, offers
an analysis of the traditional idea of secularization as a constitutive feature of
modernity. Starting from Joas’ critique and his interpretation of sacralization,
Conill researches its social role and its function in the formation of idealiza-
tions and values. At the same time, he identies a shortcoming: the empirical
identication of the formation of universalist ideals and the gestation of an
“afrmative genealogy” require also a hermeneutic task, as a model capable
of including and rooting these ideals in social congurations.
The article by Enrique Muñoz Pérez, “The Evidence of the Believer. Hans
Joas’ reading of Max Scheler” focuses on a relevant chapter of Joas’ recently
published book in Spanish, Im Bannkreis der Freiheit, in which the notion
of evidence in Max Scheler regarding belief takes on a signicant role. This
article provides a reconstruction of this notion, beginning with Husserl’s pre
-
vious epistemological approach to belief as a source of Scheler’s interpreta-
tion. In this way, the article establishes an interesting dialogue with Joas, as
14 STUDIA POLITICÆ Nº 65 otoño 2025
it reconstructs Scheler’s sources and positions on the feeling of evidence of
belief and its phenomenology.
Subsequently, two texts written by Professor Björn Wittrock are published
for the rst time in English in this volume. They were tribute contributions
for Joas on his 60th and 70th birthdays. The rst of these, “Human Action,
History and Social Change: Reconstructions of Social Theory in Three Con
-
texts”, presents a comparison and possible interaction between Joas and ano-
ther great reference of the new social theory of the middle of the last century:
Stuart Hughes. Hughes, like Joas, questions Talcott Parsons’ theory of action
as the central basis for articulating a new vision of sociality. However, until
this essay, the rapprochement between Hughes and Joas had not been syste
-
matically addressed. The article sets out as the beginning of this dialogue the
analysis of two accounts of human action, naturalistic and antinaturalistic,
and then shows the dilemmas that arise in this debate. The essay points out
how Joas renews these positions based on his analysis of action, whose ad
-
vantage, besides conceptual precision, is a solid historical reection.
Wittrock’s second text is “World Religions and Social Thought: From Ernst
Troeltsch and Max Weber to Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas”. This paper
highlights the contributions of Joas’s social philosophy to a dialogue with
the main positions of the scientic study of world religions. In addition to
analyzing their constitutive features and confronting them with other expres
-
sions considered as religious, Wittrock provides an analysis of the axial era
in which the interpretations of Joas and Habermas tend to converge. This
dialogue, reconstructed in this essay, is valuable to understand the tensions
and possibilities of both interpretations in light of the current manifestations
of secularization and religiosity.
Next, the dossier offers the reproduction of the essay “Creativity and action
theory. Hans Joas, Recovering John Dewey” by Professor Cristina di Gre
-
gori, originally published in 2010. Cristina was one of the rst recipients
of Joas’ work in the Spanish-speaking world, to the point that the editors
consider her a necessary contributor to this issue. Her death, while we were
preparing the call for papers, impeded us from inviting her to update this
text, which has not lost its relevance for the issue at stake. The essay sum-
marizes the main pragmatist theses in Joas, particularly in relation to action
and creativity. Then, it analyzes the Deweyan inheritance of the notions of
experience and action. Finally, it presents suggestions regarding the notion
of ‘transaction’ in Dewey, for a better articulation of the ideas of action and
creativity that are still productive in Joas’s work.
DIEGO FONTI, JUAN SAHARREA Y CLAUDIO VIALE 15
The dossier includes a review of the recent translation of Im Bannkreis der
Freiheit Martina Torres Criscuolo, which provides an accurate description
of the different parts of the text and details its main conceptual cores. The
review also emphasizes the concluding study by the translators, as a contri
-
bution to systematize the main elements of Joas’ work for Spanish-speaking
readers, whether specialists in these elds or those beginning in its study.
This special issue includes an incisive response from Joas to the texts that
compose it — a contribution that ttingly crowns this issue of Studia Poli
-
ticae. With his characteristic sharpness and meticulous style, Joas reviews
each article and its main arguments, reframing them within the broader con
-
text of his own work and programmatic aims. In doing so, he opens up a
number of particularly fertile lines for further discussion.
