1 - The “disenchantment” of the world

Summary

Historical self-assertion

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life.

Max Weber, “Science as Vocation”

“The disenchantment of the world” is a phrase that I take from Max Weber, who spoke of the eclipse of magical and animistic beliefs about nature as part of the more general process of “rationalization” which he saw as the defining feature of modernity in the West. In the lecture entitled “Science as Vocation” (1917) and in the prefatory remarks to his studies on the sociology of religion written at the very end of his life (1920), Weber posed the following questions: How can we account for the fact that there developed in the West a series of interrelated practices and beliefs predicated on the a priori accessibility of nature to rational calculation and control? Why was the process of secularization also accompanied by an increase of purposive-rational (zweckrational) action in the West? What has been the impact on the modern system of values of a concept of perfection that was uprooted from its sacred context and became interpreted as a form of inner-worldly progress, at once technological in nature and potentially infinite in scope?

The list of phenomena that Weber subsumes under the heading of “rationalization” is remarkably diverse.