Sacralidad, cohesión social y desencantamiento. Conversación con Hans Joas

Abstract

In light of an analytical review of the different stages of Hans Joas’ social theoretical work — whose stages range from his early studies of George Herbert Mead and American pragmatism to his most recent publication Die Macht des Heiligen (The Power of the Sacred) (2017)—, as well as the complex internal connections between them, a detailed critical evaluation is made of both the meaning of the Durkheimian notion of the value consensus and the relevance of this consensus to social cohesion in modern societies. In view of all this, urgent issues in current society are discussed —such as migration, the geopolitical order and internal and external security; all of them issues to which Joas has also devoted part of his work. To resume, such theoretical and empirical questions about social cohesion serve here as the guiding thread for an understanding of the power of Hans Joas’s social theory, in particular, his sociology of the sacred.

Keywords

• Thesaurus: social cohesion. Author: disenchantment of the world; pragmatism; the sacred; value consensus