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In this article, I engage with three overlapping expressions of the increasingly postsecular cast of social and cultural theory. These currents -guided, respectively, by genealogical critique, neo-vitalist social philosophy and postcolonial anti-historicism -seek to problematize the frame of previous radical theorizing by exposing definite connections between the epistemological and political levels of secular understanding, and by assuming that the nature of those linkages counts heavily against secularism. As well as offering an interpretive overview of these contributions, I suggest that they are traversed by a number of conceptual flaws and inconsistencies. The tensions, I argue, stem from the fact that in spite of appearing to be driven by a strong anti-secular thrust, these positionings remain thoroughly intra-secular in character. This needs to be more emphatically acknowledged if the 'postsecular turn' is to be productive.

This article identifies four articulations of the growing `postsecular' condition of social and political thought, and places the idea of sociology in relation to them. I identify and critically engage with those aspects of poststructuralist vitalism, transcendental realism, multiculturalist thinking, and the recent `dialogical' sentiments of Habermas that might undermine sociology's definitive (but broadly conceived) secularism/naturalism. This implies that if we are concerned about advancing the role of `public sociology' then we should be actively engaged in countering anti-secular and anti-naturalistic elements of the postsecular climate.Yet we must avoid anthropomorphizing sociology as a public player, and accept too that the postsecular reconsideration of `faith versus reason' stretches beyond the confines of epistemological and explanatory considerations per se.

Engaging with recent keynote reflections on 'sociology at the end of the millennium', this article critically examines ways in which the current discourse of complexity can be related to characterizations of the intellectual style of sociology.After taking issue with the familiar characterization of sociology as quintessentially modernist, where modernist equates to 'reductionist' and 'simplistic', three more specific interventions are construed as contributions to the complexity debate. One is the growing preference for inter-and post-disciplinarity over traditional (sociological) disciplinarity.The second is John Urry's proposal for new rules of sociological method along the lines of chaos and complexity theory. The third is the assumption that in the 'network society' analysis of authors like Manuel Castells we have a substantive account which conforms directly to that fluid philosophical mind-set, rather than to conventional sociological framings. Since I do not seek to devalue complexity discourse as such, and since I advance support for the idea of trans-disciplinarity, the aims of this article are not merely conservative. However, each of the three lines of thought considered is defective, and the complexity of sociological discourse itself merits greater recognition. KEY WORDScomplexity theory / millennialism / network society / post-disciplinarity / sociology

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