From allgemeine Religionswissenschaft to realpolitik: potential contributions of Eliade’s humanism to Huntington’s civilizing vision

Abstract

The political situation in the Middle East, the reemergence of the fundamentalist terrorism and the ethnic and cultural tensions in the changing European demographic map seems to confirm Samuel Huntington’s vision of the clash of civilizations and his political realist perspective of international relations. To what appears to be an unavoidable and discouraging scene, this paper pretends to demonstrate that the seemingly lack of solutions, answers to a western scope focused in geopolitics and the struggle for the control of natural resources, disesteeming the humanistic studies that, for more than a century, have tried to find clashing and converging points between the western worldview and those with which it has disputed civilization spaces. Authors like Mircea Eliade, perhaps the most relevant historian of religions of the twentieth century, have generated a prodigious amount of supplies that, from an interdisciplinary and humanistic perspective, could give new answers to the contemporary debate about the clash and dialogue among civilizations.