Leaving for Germany: Literature, Theory, and Religion

Abstract

I begin by reducing William McKelvy’s very interesting and in-formative essay to its governing opposition: that between the sec-ularization theory of the 1960s, dominated by Weber and professional sociology, and the secularization theory of the 1860s, dominated by Vic-torian literary intellectuals. Though both models are in a sense theoretical, one of them – the German, sociological, one – is closer to what we usual-ly mean by “theory”; the other, based in various ways on the personal narratives of its practitioners, is closer to “literature.”