Dear Colleagues,

Sacrifice was one of the main features of agro-pastoral societies (Hénaff, 2010). In this type of society, sacrifice acts as a ‘total social fact’ (Mauss, 1979), like a primordial dimension of social life that, as such, reveals some of the main properties of this way of articulating reality and existence. In this context, the religious system was responsible for social order, and sacrifice acted as the method of communication between profane and sacred realms (Mauss, 1979). These realms, which were originally integrated into what we know as ‘animistic religion’ (Tylor, 1981) or ‘primitive religion’ (Bellah, 1969), were differentiated from each other at the same time that human beings started to develop ‘second order thinking’ (Elkana, 1986) or rational thinking. Here, we can clearly establish a link between the axial age (Jaspers, 1994; Eisenstadt, 1986) and ‘the age of sacrifice’ (Hénnaf, 2010). The role played by sacrifice has been studied by distinguished authors such as William Roberston Smith (1972), Émile Durkheim (1982), Marcel Mauss (1970; 1979), and, more recently, René Girard (1995; 2012), Marcel Hénaff (2010), and Guy Stroumsa (2012), amongst others.

We would be making a great mistake if we were to assume that sacrifice performs a similar function in current societies as in the past. As we know, societies change through time. This implies that a social fact will present several faces depending on the context in which we analyze it, and depending on the influence of the different hegemonic social forces in dispute. In its evolution, sacrifice has been necessarily affected by these dynamics of change. These have caused a transition from the imaginary focus on the religious sphere to another modern and secular one. In this transition, the role played by several “social engines” is of great importance; these include functional differentiation (Spencer, 1947; Durkheim, 1987; Luhmann, 1998, Parsons, 1977), individualization (Beck, Giddens, Lash, 1997; Bauman, 2002), secularization (Taylor, 2014; Martin, 1969; Casanova, 2012), the disenchantment of the world (Weber, 1979), acceleration (Koselleck, 2003, Rosa, 2016), and re-entchantment and re-fusion (Alexander, 2017).

We would be making another great mistake if we were to consider sacrifice as only being able to perform the role of a ‘total social fact’. That is to say, either it performs this role or nothing else will do it. According to Merlin Donald (1991), social facts (evolution in his own terms) do not appear and disappear as if by magic. We witness an endless reshaping of the role that they actually represent or can represent. This paper is concerned with the social mainstream and with the values around the hegemonic institutions and social movements which are constructed in each society. In the same way, in modernity (as well as in postmodernity), it is very difficult to find ‘total social facts’ due to (among other things) the fragmentation of individual and collective experiences, to multiple belongings, and to functional differentiation processes.

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 Donald’s 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.

In achieving this purpose, we build one structure divided into two parts: The first is named ‘contextures’, in which on the one hand, we analyze the role played by sacrifice in past societies or what Hénaff called ‘the age of sacrifice’; and on the other hand, we attempt to urbanize the conceptual field of current sacrifice, this is, the context where sacrifice can articulate itself today. The second part is named ‘textures’, in which we analyze the link between sacrifice and some of the basic elements of current social life, such as economy, the nation, religion, democracy, culture, creativity, terrorism, the body, and so on.

Dr. Javier Gil-Gimeno
Dr. Josetxo Beriain
Dr. Celso Sánchez Capdequí
Guest Editors

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• sacrifice
• secular age
• sacred sphere
• social life areas
• modernity