Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley:
Skillfully employing the tools of 'conceptual history,' María Pía Lara maps the convoluted discourse of secularization in Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg, Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and the father of Begriffsgeschichte himself, Reinhart Koselleck. The result is not only a masterful vindication of a method but also a challenge to the glib assumption that we have reached a postsecular era in which politica powerful case for a democratic politics of immanence only disclosed in a modern age facing problems that no restoration of a presecular past can solve.s can be traced back to its allegedly theological roots. Instead, Lara makes