As a project, sociology belonged at the heart of a movement that self-consciously and intentionally displaced western Christianity’s integrative and directive role in society. It was a key partner in modernity’s world-historical efforts to create a secular, rational, scientific social order. In this sense, sociology as a discipline operated functionally in direct structural parallel to the Roman Catholic Vatican’s Curia and European Protestantism’s early modern theology faculty—all being assigned the task of conducting the systematic intellectual work undergirding attempts to exert
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