Here is your essay on the State and Secularisation.
(1) The Concept of State:
According to Max Weber, state is ‘a human community which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. In this way the state is one of the important agencies of social control.
Its functions are carried out through the enforcement of laws which are invariably backed by the use of force. According to Comte and Herbert Spencer the emergence of state was due to the increasing size and complexity of societies.
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The study of simple societies made by Anthropologists and Sociologists has revealed that there was some correlation between the complexity, size of society and settled political authority. According to R.H. Lowie the early communities must have been tiny and egalitarian and were like a ‘kindred group’.
In this way, kinship exercised a great influence in maintaining unity. The society was more or less undifferentiated.
Hence, there was no great distinction between religious institutions and political institutions. The head of the community was both a religious as well as apolitical head. As the complexity of society increased, a need was felt to separate the religious and the non-religious domain, so as to democratize the domain of authority.
(2) Definition of Secularisation:
Secularisation is the decline in the political and social importance of any single Religion in society. Generally, secularization is associated with modern, technologically advanced societies. The word secularization is derived from the Latin word ‘seculum’ which means the ‘present age’.
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The word secularization, in its very general usage, came to convey a dominant social process, that is, a view of or understanding of the world “which is shift from a religious understanding of the world which is based on faith in what cannot be directly proved to a scientific understanding of the world which is based on knowledge about what can be directly proved”.
The political dimension of secularism’ essentially means the separation of the political authority from the religious authority. In this context a secular state is one which does not support or favor any single Religion. On the contrary, it aims at treating all citizens as equal irrespective of religious considerations.
(3) The Process of Secularisation:
The process of modernization was accompanied by many other developments. One such process was ‘Differentiating’. It meant that social institutions had exclusive functions. The different functions found their own institutions for effective performance. From this point of view a distinction is often made between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies.
In a traditional society, different functions are performed by the same institution. On the contrary to it, in a modern society different functions tend to be performed by institutions that are meant to perform specific functions.
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The above process resulted in a distinction between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ realms of social life.
The religious aspects are included in the ‘sacred’ Durkheim refers to the distinctive trait of religious thought that “the beliefs, myths, dogmas and legends are either representations or systems of representations which express the nature of the sacred things…” The activities in society other than Religion were included in ‘secular’. Politics and political processes were included in the secular process of the modern society.
The process of modernization covering the whole society also resulted in, ‘differentiation’. It in a way resulted in more ‘secularisation’ of the political process. It was accepted, that politics and Religion should keep away from influencing each other.