Introduction

Summary

In November, 1917, the German sociologist Max Weber delivered a now-famous lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” before an assembly of students and faculty at the University of Munich. “The fate of our times,” he declared, “is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’” Weber intended this remark as a global characterization of a modern society in which the natural sciences and bureaucratic rationality had conspired to undermine confidence in religious values and traditional sources of meaning. But we may also take his words as a more general verdict on the condition of modern European thought at the dawn of the twentieth century, when intellectuals from across the continent looked upon the wreckage of the First World War as a turning point in civilization, as a violent end to the nineteenth century and a grim foretaste of the world to come. Weber himself remained in a posture of ambivalence: He feared that the higher ideals of the Enlightenment were “irretrievably lost” and that only the imperative of “economic compulsion” would prevail.