Religious Organizations and Political Process in Centralized Empires

Abstract

The problem of the relations between religious and political organizations and systems has been of long standing in the broad field of comparative historical studies and in the sociology of religion. The work of Max Weber, although more explicitly focused on the relations between economics and religion has, of course, contained many general and concrete analyses on the interrelations between religion and politics in general and between specific types of religious and political systems in particular. Some of the recent works dealing with this area have been devoted to the more general problem of “The State and Religion.” These discussions have emphasized the problem of their interdependence and mutual influence, especially in the more “developed” forms of both religious and political institutions, but have not always specified the exact types of religious and political structures whose interaction formed the object of the analysis.