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chap 2 22/3/04 12:12 pm Page 50 2 The most perfect state: French clerical reformers and episcopal status As a general council of the church, Trent offered a framework within which a resurgent catholicism could take shape. To a man, its delegates took it for granted that the clergy would lead the laity, and that bishops would supervise and govern all the faithful. While the conciliar decrees were designed to respond, therefore, to the specific abuses and inadequacies of contemporary religion, they drew equally on what were assumed to be eternally applicable
From British rule the independent Irish state inherited an effectively denominational system of university education and a complementary set of science and arts institutions. Under independent rule denominational influence increased and resource starvation prevailed until the end of the 1950s. Then, as the formation of human capital, education began to be treated as an input into economic growth and American initiatives stimulated new research activity. These changes played a vital role in the rebalancing of power between the Catholic Church and the state. Social science, where the Catholic Church had been a monopoly provider, supplies a dramatic case study of the interlinking of this power shift with the process of knowledge generation.
173 6 Social research and state planning Introduction The First Programme for Economic Expansion was launched in 1958. By the early 1960s the scope of programming was widening as the stagnation prevailing for most of the 1950s gave way to a period of continuous economic growth. Initial crisis conditions had enabled increased social spending to be left off the programmers’ agenda. The changed politics of increasing prosperity, as well as their own expanding ambitions, meant that this could no longer be sustained. This chapter begins by sketching Ireland’s social
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 08/13/2013, SPi 1 Secularisation, religion and the state This chapter introduces a discussion of a fundamental paradox concerning contemporary society and government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) – that while there is strong evidence of continuing trends towards a more secular and less religious society and pattern of social behaviour, at the same time, religious doctrines, rituals and institutions are central to the legitimacy, stability and continuity of key elements of the constitutional and
4 The nation-state’s wobbly hyphen: the backlash against multiculturalism We are sleep-walking our way into segregation. (Trevor Phillips, Chairman, Commission for Racial Equality, 2005) The assertion, re-imagining and negotiation of difference is central to group formation and evolution and thus to multiculturalism. (Modood, 2007) The nation-state holds within it a deep schizophrenia. Tensions between the private space of the national, which is deeply ideological, and the public space of the state, which is impartial, can result in tensions that are hard to
or suppress subversive elements. The ‘criminal justice model’, on the other hand, places the onus on the police forces while confining its actions to state criminal legislation, 3 as further elaborated by Crelinsten: In a criminal justice model, the rule of law is paramount, while in the war model, it is the rules of war that prevail. In the criminal justice model, it is the police who exercise the state’s monopoly on the use of violence. The rules of engagement, so to speak, involve the use of minimal force, which requires an exercise of
privileges or protected them from competition. Others noted the historical experience of Byzantium, Ottoman rule, and state dominance in Russia and the USSR which rendered the Church defensive, concerned above all with survival rather than theological and social thought. In addition, in those countries where Orthodoxy has been the dominant tradition, there has been limited experience of democratic governance until very recently. In his book on the ‘third wave’, Samuel Huntington had very little to say about Orthodoxy, beyond the vague suggestion
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 08/03/2013, SPi 7 UK state Anglican multifaithism and the Protestant monarchy While considered by many to be a ‘broad church’, the Anglicanism that provides the basis of the UK state religion is a narrow formulation within the context of the total span of Christianity and the global diversity of religious and related belief. UK monarchs have constantly been aware, at least in the last century or more, as has been shown, of the tension between the narrow and exclusive religious doctrines and rituals which legitimate their reign and
6 The Bishop of Down and Connor and the established Church and state in Ireland, 1721–39 Despite a recent flurry of interest in the Church of Ireland clergy,1 as T. C. Barnard has pointed out, ‘the characteristics and functions of this profession can only be guessed until the origins, education, careers and wealth of its members have been clarified through prosopographical studies of particular cohorts of graduates and ordinands, and of individual dioceses’.2 The latter study would be particularly welcome in the case of the diocese of Down and Connor, upon
MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 08/05/2013, SPi 5 Parliamentary devolution, church establishment and new state religion in the UK In 1936, the historian A.L. Rowse perceived that there was a ‘slow march’ to the disestablishment of the Church of England. Yet, despite the evident and considerable social changes since then, the growth of both secularism and religious pluralism and the experiences of the newer devolved Parliament and assemblies, the Church of England remains, in the twenty-first century, as the established church of the UK and its Parliament, while the