Superstition, religion and the political / Supersti o, religi o e o político

/presentationAlthough a respected researcher of religion in both the European and North American intellectual scene, Michel Despland is to date still little known in Brazilian religion studies circles. Among his several publications, we name but a few: Kant on history and religion: with a translation of Kant's On the failure of all attempted philosophical theodicies (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973); The education of desire, Plato and the philosophy of religion (University of Toronto Press, 1985); Les hierarchies sont ebranlees, politiques et theologies au XIXe siècle, (Fides, 1998); Comparatisme et Christianisme: questions d'histoire et de methode (L'Harmattan, 2002). In the paper before us, which was presented during the 12th Symposium of the Brazilian Association for the History of Religions (2011, UFJF), Professor Despland starts from the anthropological premise that religion is “something people do”. Drawing on Spinoza’s work, Despland elects the category of “superstition” as the most adequate tool for the analysis of the religious realm, rather than, for instance, “the sacred”. The author’s immediate goal is first to understand Spinoza’s own construal of the religious and political realms in their interrelatedness – both in conceptual continuity and rupture with the Western/Christian traditions of political theology. He then proceeds to probe historically into the moral and social dimensions of religion as embedded both in its own institutions and in the ever growing third realm of civil society vis-à-vis the state. This discussion, enriched by the contribution of other important writers such as J.-J. Rousseau, A. de Tocqueville, B. Constant and C. Lefort, should serve as a test for his theoretical choices. Despland hopes to have shown, at the end, that a consideration of religion as inevitably rooted in human nature, together with the analysis of the particular historical configuration of the political and religious realms in modern Western civilization, provides us with “a good context for the confrontation with some of the fundamental problems of justice that remain before us today”. Religion as he sees it, therefore, is finally to be understood as psychologically and historically contingent human action. All the same, it takes place over against the irrational-rational background of some philosophically resilient categories: superstition and morality. Resumo/apresenta oCientista da religi o reconhecido e respeitado em ambientes intelectuais da América do Norte e da Europa, Michel Despland é ainda pouco conhecido pela academia brasileira.