Narratives of Disenchantment and Secularization

Critiquing Max Weber's Idea of Modernity

Robert A. Yelle, Lorenz Trein

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350145665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What does it really mean to be modern? The contributors to this collection offer critical attempts both to re-read Max Weber's historical idea of disenchantment and to develop further his understanding of what the contested relationship between modernity and religion represents. The approach is distinctive because it focuses on disenchantment as key to understanding those aspects of modern society and culture that Weber diagnosed. This is in opposition to approaches that focus on secularization, narrowly construed as the rise of secularism or the divide between religion and politics, and that then conflate this with modernization as a whole. Other novel contributions are discussions of temporality - meaning the sense of time or of historical change that posits a separation between an ostensibly secular modernity and its religious past - and of the manner in which such a sense of time is constructed and disseminated through narratives that themselves may resemble religious myths. It reflects the idea that disenchantment is a narrative with either Enlightenment, Romantic, or Christian roots, thereby developing a conversation between critical studies in the field of secularism (such as those of Talal Asad and Gil Anidjar) and conceptual history approaches to secularization and modernity (such as those of Karl Löwith and Reinhart Koselleck), and in the process creates something that is more than merely the sum of its parts.

1

Dialectics of Disenchantment

The Devaluation of the Objective World and the Revaluation of Subjective Religiosity

Hans G. Kippenberg

Introduction: Disenchantment Does not Mean the Disappearance of Religion

Max Weber was interested in the fate of religion precisely in the modern period, but he did not apply the concept of secularization for this. Richard Swedberg did not include “secularization” in the lexicon of Weber’s key words, but he did include “disenchantment.”¹ For Weber, “secularizing” and “secularization” are concepts from the history of law that had been employed since classical antiquity to denote the transfer of land, institutions, and persons from ecclesiastical to secular law. When we inquire into Weber’s understanding of religious history in the modern period, it is “disenchantment” that occupies the central position.² As the debate about whether the legal concept of “secularization” is an appropriate key to grasp the decisive transformation of religions in the modern period has intensified in recent decades, an increasing number of studies on the theme of disenchantment, in connection with intellectualization and rationalization, have appeared. The list is impressive.³ Highly pithy remarks by Weber have favored this thematic concentration. For example, in his celebrated lecture “Science as a Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf) in 1917 in Munich, he observed:

The increasing intellectualization and rationalization do not indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. That is all that intellectualization means.⁴

The advantage of this way of looking at things is that there is an interaction between social processes, particularly progress in scientific knowledge, and the history of religions, driven by disenchantment. Not every scholar admits this. Hans Joas, in his book Die Macht des Heiligen: Eine Alternative zur Geschichte der Entzauberung,⁵ argues that Weber’s concept of “disenchantment” is so ambiguous that it needs to be translated by three notions indicating three different historical processes at different times: Entmagisierung, Entsakralisierung, Enttranszendentalisierung (demagicalization, desacralization, detranscendentalization). For Joas the notion of disenchantment is unable to cover contemporary religious renewal. It indicates the rise of an immanent frame, crucial for modern science and denying any transcendence; the world is transformed into a causal mechanism, devoid of any meaning.⁶ Instead he proposes to conceive of sacralization in modern societies in Émile Durkheim’s terms, as a process of articulating experiences. Since Joas excludes a renewal of religions in the modern world due to their disenchantment, typically modern religious phenomena such as fundamentalism, evangelicalism, New Age movements, and esotericism are mentioned only in passing.⁷ However, as I will show, the concept of disenchantment indicates a liberation of religion from the shackles of magic and establishes, in the long run, a religion independent from natural constraints.⁸ Disenchantment generates a specific form of religion and does not cancel religion altogether. In his chapter “Religious Communities,” Weber maps an independent history of religion, which is shaped by various forces: by persons gifted with extraordinary powers (called “charisma”) such as magicians, priests, prophets, mystagogues, and intellectuals who teach a cult, an ethics, mysticism, or asceticism as different means of salvation, in a variety of forms, in agreement with different social classes and political situations. Disenchantment is part of this history.

We have learned from José Casanova and Jürgen Habermas that the removal of religion from the official public sphere that we commonly identify with secularization does not entail a disappearance of religion in public altogether.⁹ When religious believers experience a world governed by autonomous laws that are inimical to their religious values, these values can be articulated as an oppositional force in the public realm of their society. In this process the view of the world changes as the meaning of religion does. Likewise, the notion of a disenchantment of the world generates a different view of the world and has an impact on religions as well.¹⁰ This dialectic of disenchantment was crucial for Max Weber when he turned to comparative religious studies. Hence my chapter addresses:

1. the inherent connection between the section on religion in Max Weber’s Economy and Society (titled “Religious Communities” or “Sociology of Religion”) and his studies of The Economic Ethic of the World Religions;

2. Weber’s concept of the consequences of disenchantment and its ensuing processes in his “Religious Communities” and other contemporary texts;

3. dialectics of disenchantment of religion in recent approaches to history, nature, and society.

The Link between the Section on Religion in Max Weber’s Economy and Society and His Studies of The Economic Ethic of the World Religions

Economy and Society has a prehistory that surfaced with the critical edition of Max Weber’s works.¹¹ In her preface to the second part of the work, published in 1921–22, Marianne Weber pointed out that, with the exception of some later additions, the manuscripts originated in the years 1911–13.¹² The reconstruction of the composition of Economy and Society confirms that date for the section on religion. The studies cited by Weber in this text include no publications after 1913.¹³

A closer look at the genesis of the section reveals that Weber’s first outline of the Handbook in 1910—the work that was finally published posthumously as Economy and Society after Weber’s death in 1920—lacked a separate treatment of religion; at this point, Weber merely planned a section “Economy and Culture (Critique of Historical Materialism).”¹⁴ This was to change in the years to come. A clear indication of this appears in a letter dated July 3, 1913, in which Weber thanks his longtime friend Heinrich Rickert for an off-print and adds that he would soon return the favor by sending him the manuscript of “my systematic of religion.” In late November of the same year, Weber repeated this, telling Rickert that he would like to send his “(empirical) casuistry of contemplation and active religion,” but adding that the manuscript was only three-quarters typed. Then, on December 30, 1913, Weber informed his publisher Paul Siebeck that he had finished an exposition relating all major forms of community to economy: the family, the domestic community, the commercial enterprise, the clan, the ethnic community, and religion. In brackets, Weber explained what could be expected from the segment on religion: “comprising all great religions of the earth: a sociology of the doctrines of salvation and of the various religious ethics—similar to Troeltsch, however now for all religions, only much more concise.” In an outline of the content of the entire series that appeared in 1914,¹⁵ Weber projected as a contribution of his own the part “The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers,” consisting of sections on communities. After “Household, Oikos, Enterprise” came “Neighbourhood, Kinship Group, Local Community,” then “Ethnic Communities,” and finally “Religious Communities.” Weber clarified the last item with the further title “The Class Basis of the Religions; Cultural Religions and Economic Orientation.”¹⁶ Weber’s topics and sequence in this announcement correspond roughly to the manuscript he described to Siebeck in December 1913 and to the text published in 1921–22.

The changes, evident in Weber’s 1914 outline when compared with that of 1910, reflected his growing interest in the history of world religions. According to Weber, his thesis about the Puritan origins of a methodical pattern of life conduct, enabling the development of Western capitalism, had withstood all objections in the heated scholarly debate that followed the publication of The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1904–05).¹⁷ Now he wanted “to correct the isolation of this study and to place it in relation to the whole of cultural development,” he explained in the second edition of his essay in 1920/21.¹⁸ In her biography, Marianne Weber gives some valuable particulars about this shift in her husband’s thought and work.

When around 1911 he resumed his studies on the sociology of religion, he was attracted to the Orient—to China, Japan, and India, then to Judaism and Islam. He now wanted to investigate the relationship of the five great world religions to economic ethics. His study was to come full circle with an analysis of early Christianity.¹⁹

The segment “Religious Communities” was an outcome of this scholarly work. When composing it in 1913, Weber drew (as his direct and indirect quotations reveal) on a profound study of comparative religion, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, tribal, ancient, and Hellenic religions.²⁰

Although Weber published his studies of The Economic Ethic of the World Religions separately in 1915 and 1916, he did not see them as standing alone; he conceived of them, rather, as “preliminary studies and annotations to the systematic sociology of religions.”²¹ When the first of these studies appeared in 1915 (The Religion of China), Weber pointed out in a footnote to his introduction to both articles that he had written them and read them aloud to friends two years earlier, that is, in 1913.²² And he added in the same footnote that “they were designed to be published simultaneously with” his treatise “Economy and Society,” his contribution to the manual Outline of Social Economics (Grundriss der Sozialökonomik), and were intended to “interpret and complement the section on the sociology of religion (and, however, to be interpreted by it in many points).”²³

Likewise, in 1919, when Weber reviewed the text of The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism for inclusion, along with the studies that constituted The Economic Ethic of the World Religions, in his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Papers on the Sociology of Religions), he added that he hoped to treat ethnographic material when systematically revising “the sociology of religion.”²⁴ Even at this late date, Weber viewed this section (now in its projected revised form) as a bridge between The Protestant Ethic and his subsequent historical studies of the ethics of the world religions, emphasizing again that systematic issues were crucial for its function.

The concepts and sources Weber relied on were derived from German scholars of religious history. Weber adopted a German Orientalist perspective that differed from the “Orientalism” famously described by Edward Said.²⁵ It was not tied to politics of colonialism but grappled with religious meanings and their subjective appropriation.²⁶ An early public forum for the German Orientalists was a series edited by Paul Hinneberg under the title Die Kultur der Gegenwart (Contemporary Culture). In 1906, two important volumes were issued, one on so-called Oriental religions, another on Christianity as well as Israel and Judaism. Some of the most eminent scholars who established the historical-critical method in their fields contributed to these volumes and became key sources for Weber’s “Religious Communities”: Julius Wellhausen on Israel and Judaism, Ignaz Goldziher on Islam, and Hermann Oldenberg on Hinduism and Buddhism.

According to Hermann Oldenberg (1854–1920) and his Indian Religion (1906),²⁷ the gods in early India were personified powers of nature. This primordial view ceased, however, when the necessities of social life required gods who would protect law and morals. Moreover, these gods were approachable not only by sacrifice and prayer but also by magic—a force that was expected to intervene directly in the course of events. From cosmological speculation about the efficacy of both sacrifice and magic there then arose the notion of Brahman, understood as the unchanging essence of the universe, an essence that is also present in the individual (as Atman). Combined with the belief that the transmigration of the soul is dependent upon its karma, these notions formed the matrix on which Jainism and Buddhism emerged as religions of world rejection. Oldenberg’s contribution to Hinneberg’s manual retrieved from the Indian sources worldviews and ethics that were constitutive of human subjects and their social practices.

Similar considerations informed philosophers. Hermann Siebeck, in a textbook published in 1893, divided historical religions into three categories: natural religions, which considered gods as rescuers from external evil; moral religions, which viewed gods as guarantors of social norms and upheld a positive attitude toward the world; and salvation religions, which postulated a contradiction between the existence of God and the reality of evil in the world, and fostered an attitude of rejecting the world.²⁸ Siebeck’s entire concept depended on an understanding of religion in terms of “world-denial” (Weltverneinung).

Another important document for the German branch of comparative religious studies was an encyclopedia edited by the Protestant theologians Friedrich Michael Schiele and Leopold Zscharnack: R...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Dialectics of Disenchantment: The Devaluation of the Objective World and the Revaluation of Subjective Religiosity
• 2 Max Weber and the Rationalization of Magic
• 3 Science as a Commodity: Disenchantment and Conspicuous Consumption
• 4 Multiple Times of Disenchantment and Secularization
• 5 The Disenchanted Enchantments of the Modern Imagination and “Fictionalism”
• 6 Narratives of Disenchantment, Narratives of Secularization: Radical Enlightenment and the Rise of the Illiberal Secular
• 7 “An Age of Miracles”: Disenchantment as a Secularized Theological Narrative
• 8 Counter-Narratives to Secularization: Merits and Limits of Genealogy Critique
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint