The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism

Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2005, is a widely cited work of religious studies scholarship arguing that the standard modern list of world religions, the category itself, is a nineteenth century European intellectual construction rather than a neutral inventory, and that the categories still carry the assumptions of the comparative religion scholarship that produced them. Masuzawa is a historian of religion whose argument draws on close reading of comparative religion's founding texts. Its strength is the influence the book has had in reshaping how religious studies as a field examines its own categories. Its limit is that it is itself one contested position within that field, not a description every historian of religion accepts, so a claim built on it should be attributed to Masuzawa's specific argument.