Pozemské mocnosti - Politická náboženství od Velké francouzské revoluce do 1. světové války – Burleigh Michael (2016)

In a grand panoramic view of that long European century from the French Revolution (1789) to the Prussian massacre of civilians in Flanders (1914), a significant English historian describes the political struggle of Christian churches against the emancipatory, liberal nation-state against the backdrop of humanist cults – Robespierre's Jacobin deism, Comte's Great Being of Humanity, Saint-Simon's and Marx's classless paradise of the future – with their still somewhat comical, pre-totalitarian civic liturgy and rituals derived from Christianity. Political religions paradoxically originated in the rationalism of the Enlightenment, that is, in the Enlightenment cult of man, enlightenment, and reason, from which practically the entire historiography of the 20th century emerges, viewing religion as mere decoration of socioeconomic development, without recognizing that only Europe has secularized. The key to understanding European development is precisely the rationalist utopian faith in a perfect social order, which has condemned Christian transcendence and posthumous salvation and becomes a murderous plan for the total reconstruction of this world – already foreshadowed by the Jacobin genocide in the Vendée. Burleigh vividly illustrates how in the cauldron of earthly ideologies...