Questions of legitimacy of global governance can only be addressed, if there is a vision beyond the nation state or the community of states. Cosmopolitan is not strong enough to solve this problem alone. The paper pleas for a post-secular supplementation. Like the Hobbesian Leviathan, a metaphor taken from the Bible to foster a visual imagination of “the state” in early modernity, religious semantics can help to imagine visions of “one world”. The erosion of the Westphalian System was the precondition of rising paradigm of global governance. Few would deny that sovereignty, as a cornerstone of the Westphalian, is under siege. The other cornerstone, secularity, however, is still seen as part of the game. This paper challenges this view. Thinkers such diverse as William Connolly, Charles Taylor and Jürgen Habermas argue for a new perspective on secularism and democracy. Habermas argues that even secular citizen can learn from religious notions because they might contain a truth which is not yet translated in a secular language. He requests a restart of the translation project. In this perspective the paper will debate the effects of restarting the translation of “heaven” into “utopia” for questions of legitimacy concerning global community and agency.
