Max Weber’s Disenchantment

Abstract

Weber’s disenchantment is that Kant’s reason fails to deliver on the promise. Kant’s promise is that reason in history will produce ‘progress’, produce ever greater quantities of reason culminating in a ‘rational kingdom of ends’. Weber’s Puritan studies put this claim to the test. They do so through Kant and Channing, who see the providential ‘determinism’ of predestination as an insult to reason and ‘freedom’. Calvinists respond to predestination’s insult with the ‘free force’ of ‘ideas’ - with reason, and with ‘good works in vocation’ for God’s glory. Yet this response fails to produce the rational-ascetic utopia that Kant predicts, and leads instead to the material sensuality of capitalism. Reason is thus irrational because it creates the capitalist conditions of its own negation, because, in short, freedom creates determinism.