Dancing to the Music of Time: Modernity, Secularization, and Incarnation

Abstract

In his response to Steve Bruce’s latest defence of secularization (Bruce, 2011), William McKelvy cleverly deflects a charge lev-elled against his book, The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880 (2007), and aims it squarely at the sociologist. McKelvy la-ments the fact that his own work has been seen, not as having ploughed uncharted waters, but as having instead remained shore bound – rather like the narrator of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” listening to the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of an already changed and prevail-ing historiographical tide (Arnold, 1867, l.25). Turning the tables, McKelvy cheekily asserts that Bruce is neither breaking new ground nor restating an authentic 1960s mantra in his book. Instead Bruce is rehears-ing teleologies formulated and articulated by his Victorian forebears. That Bruce should – apparently – be unaware of this happy coincidence, McKelvy argues, is because he is an intellectual inheritor of imported Weberian sociology rather than the follower of home-grown social the-ory articulated in the nineteenth century by both secularists and religion-ists.