ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a series of historiographical reflections on the ways in which the study of political culture produced a disenchanted mode of intellectual history characterized by a loss of faith in Marxian and other deterministic paradigms, including the comparative analysis of revolution in France, Russia, and China undertaken by Theda Skocpol. It explores how political culture, while distancing itself from conventional preoccupations with social classes and states, has at the same time brought together fields once kept distinct in mainline historical research: theology and the economy. Such an unlikely convergence reveals the extent to which the methodological debates among historians of political culture have coalesced in tandem with those of historical sociologists informed by critical realism. The chapter ends on a more speculative note with an account of the forms the articulation of the theological and the economic has taken and might take in the future.
