The Role of Sacrifice in the Secular Age

The focus of this Special Issue is the analysis of the role played by sacrifice in complex secular and modern societies in which the concept of emotional self-restriction (Freud 201; Elias 2009) as a keystone of civilization has collapsed. Today the old idea of sacrifice is superseded by the idea of useless sacrifice (Duvignaud 1997) not because the logic of excess carried by sacrifice is opposite to the capitalistic idea of efficacy but mainly because the contemporary actor is far away from any ideas of containment restraint or control. At the base of current civilizations instinctive sacrifice is not yet the rule. We could be closer to a new version of the intellectual sacrifice (Weber 2004). The weakening of the forces of transcendence (Reckwitz 2012) in the secular age sets up spaces of symbolic exchange (Baudrillard 1980) which play the articulator role in our hyperfragmented society. In this context the idea of compensatory loss remains present in current wars and migratory conflicts in the economic life of unregulated capitalism in the new imperative of corporal beauty in global sports competitions and so on. All of these are contexts current contexts where sacrifice plays a substantive role for understanding our age.In Merlin Donalds terms of evolutive evolution (1991) and with the force that drives the dynamics of change through all societies we understand that sacrifice performs a role in current societies but a role in which its meaning as well as its function have already changed. The aim of this Special Issue is to analyze and explain what this role is studying some of the different social faces that it presents. Our hypothesis is radically sociological because we understand that different dynamics of change have exerted a transformative influence over sacrifice.