ABSTRACT
Patriarchy, the law of the father, was the big loser of the twentieth century. Probably no other social institution has been forced to retreat as much. Institutionalized religion has also lost much ground: secularization was already well under way by 1900, among Latin European liberals and among the industrial working class all over Europe. However, the late twentieth century saw a worldwide, though minoritarian, re-assertion of religion, in Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalism, in Hindu and Buddhist nationalism, and in post-Communist re-affirmations of religion, from Polish Catholicism to Chinese Falun Gong.
