ABSTRACT
Religion and Politics have been inextricably interrelated since the dawn of human culture and civilization. Yet the scholarly tradition has tended to reify the dichotomous analytic distinctions made to distinguish between these two dimensions of human activity. The study of non-Westem, so called traditional, societies forced scholars to begin to come to terms with the complexity of these interrelationships, and this in turn may lead to a reconsideration of what has been the accepted view of the development of Western civilization. As Horowitz perceptively points out in his essay in this volume, the dualistic approach to the study of religion and politics has been called into question, and is no longer considered to be a cosmic certainty. He argues that the introduction of the focus on culture provides an important new paradigm, a more synthetic approach to understanding the relationship between religion and politics.
