ABSTRACT
Issues that appear to originate in sociology have earlier lives, for example in politics or history. Owen Chadwick's history of secularisation in the nineteenth century lives in a very different part of the academic world from that occupied by sociology but sociologists would gain a great deal by taking its arguments on board, for example the early religiosity of the French revolution prior to 1793. Cultural anthropology is a special case when it comes to the loss of control over disciplinary borders. Two crucial disciplines that abut the issue of secularisation are philosophy and history. As regards philosophy, or perhaps one might say the history of ideas, the main contributors are Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas. The contributions of the historians Simon Green and Keith Robbins have been particularly valuable in tracing the course of secularisation in modern Britain as the world's first industrial society and therefore of particular theoretical interest.
