No scholar in the contemporary field of social sciencesor cross-cultural studies would question Peter L.Berger's observation that ‘today's world isfuriously religious’ (Berger 1999: 9). The oncewell-accepted ‘modernization theory’ of the 1960sand 1970s, which assumed that the introduction ofmarket economies in Asia would not only institutestate-directed democracy and neoliberal reforms butalso trigger processes of secularization that wouldpush religion out of the public arena and into theprivate sphere, has turned out to be wrong. Criticalreason, a concept shaped by the ‘philosophicalenlightenment’ of Kant and others, obviously did notprevail on a grand scale. Instead, ‘theInternationale of Unreason’ (‘die Internationale der Unvernunft’;Meyer 1989) and persistent outbreaks of religiouslymotivated violence nourish scepticism regarding suchEurocentric mindsets. This becomes even clearer whenseen from a post-colonial perspective, such as thatof Dipesh Chakrabarty in his ambitious project‘Provincializing Europe’ (1992, 2000). Chakrabartyargues against scientific narratives that implicitlytake Europe as a benchmark for all of history:‘“Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical subjectof all histories, including the ones we call“Indian,” “Chinese,” “Kenyan,” and so on’(Chakrabarty 2000: 27). Western thinkers like MaxWeber and Karl Marx saw ‘Europe’ simply as theframework for all historical discovery: ‘Thedominance of “Europe” as the subject of allhistories is a part of a much more profoundtheoretical condition under which historicalknowledge is produced in the third world’(Chakrabarty 2000: 29). The actual paradox ofthird-world social science, according toChakrabarty, ‘is that we [i.e. intellectuals in third-worldcountries] find these theories, in spite of theirinherent ignorance of “us,” eminently useful inunderstanding our societies’ (2000: 29).