Looking beyond "imaginary' analytics and hermeneutics in comparative politics

Multiple modernities has emerged as the post-Huntingtonian paradigm in the study of secularism and religion, and the concepts imaginary' or verstehen' are the most common candidates guiding research aiming to articulate this multiplicity. This article revisits Shmuel Eisenstadt's original Multiple Modernities' thesis, Charles Taylor's concept imaginary' and Max Weber's verstehen', and offers concise examples on how they are put into practice in the current literature on secularism and religion. I argue that the original Eisenstadt thesis is built upon interactions of modernities, and the imaginary' and verstehen' analytics eliminate from sight non-isomorphic relations between ideas and actions, despite the ample presence of both interactions and non-isomorphic relations in the politics of secularism and modernity. Turning multiple modernities into an exercise in typologies of non-interacting modernities articulated in isomorphic relations between ideas and actions produces new kinds of post-Huntingtonian culturalism. I finally sketch a comparative politics of new meanings as the counter-hypothesis to which imaginary', verstehen' and non-interacting typology analytics of modernities have to respond.