Politics and the Sacred

Harald Wydra is a Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He has previously taught political science at the University of Regensburg, held visiting fellowships at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris) and the National University of Australia (Canberra), and was Visiting Professor at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense. He is the founding Editor of the journal International Political Anthropology and his books include Continuities in Poland's Permanent Transition (2001), Communism and the Emergence of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Democracy and Myth in Russia and Eastern Europe (2008, co-edited with Alexander Wöll) and Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (2015, co-edited with Agnes Horvath and Bjørn Thomassen).

• Introduction: the sacred and the political; 1. The extraordinary and the political imagination; 2. The politics of transcendence; 3. Secular sources of political theologies; 4. Democracy and the sacred; 5. The power of symbols: Communism and beyond; 6. Generations of European imaginations; 7. The spell of humanity; 8. Victim and new wars; Epilogue: rationalities of the sacred.

'This book is a first-class contribution to the reflection on the anthropological foundations of politics. By laying stress on meanings, and through judicious use of a wide-ranging number of illustrations, Harald Wydra's work offers a well-grounded reformulation of the key question of the sacred. It is essential reading not only for political anthropologists, but also for comparativists and specialists of international relations.' Jean-Pascal Daloz, CNRS Research Professor, University of Strasbourg (SAGE), France