A disenchanted world: Max Weber on magic and modernity

Abstract

Despite its great popularity in both the scientific and non-scientific fields, Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment” remains mostly obscure and in recent years it has become the center of an interdisciplinary debate on modernity involving both Weberian specialists and non-specialists. The aim of the article is to return to Weber’s text and analyze Weber’s use of the term and the meaning of what he calls the “disenchantment of the world.” To do so I follow Taylor’s and Schluchter’s insight and investigate how Weber would picture an initial condition of enchantment. However, while these interpreters did not explore the Weberian perspective on magic, I instead show that not only Weber had a precise and original conception of magic as the primitive attitude toward the world, but also that this conception may clarify the meaning and dynamics of the process of disenchantment in both the spheres of religion and of science.

Introduction

Among all the terms introduced in the scientific lexicon and popularized by Max Weber, like “rationalization” or “charisma,” “disenchantment” holds a special place not only because it is probably the one Weber used most sporadically but also for the incredible impact it had on the fields of religious studies and sociology. As Joas (2021: 111–112) points out, not only the term itself is at the core of many interpretations of Weber’s oeuvre but it rose to prominence even more as Weber became one of the focal points of “the international discourse on modernity over the last few decades.” The emergence of this discourse has quite changed the discussion on disenchantment as it has brought together both Weberian specialists and non-specialists who may be more focused on their own theory of modernity.

Unfortunately, the incredible popularity of “disenchantment” (see Lehmann, 2009: 7) seems to be inversely proportional to the clarity of its meaning, so much so that the term is often used almost “as a poetical synonym for secularization” (Josephson-Storm, 2021: 31) or adjusted to fit the theory of an interpreter, as is the case for Taylor (2007). Even important endeavors like that undertaken by the contributors to the volume edited by Yelle and Trein (2021) do not provide a shared understanding of the term. Some authors just accept its intrinsic ambiguity, as does Joas (2021: 113) when he argues that “disenchantment” may indicate three different processes: “demagification” (Entmagisierung), “desacralization” (Entsakralisierung), and “detranscendentalization” (Enttranszendentalisierung).

Joas’ position is particularly interesting because he seems to see most of the meanings commonly attributed to “disenchantment” as legitimate and to ascribe all the confusion it has generated to Weber himself. However, this could be seen as too uncharitable an interpretation of Weber’s text and one may suggest that, were it possible to reach a univocal understanding of Weber’s use of “disenchantment,” this would be far more satisfactory from a hermeneutical point of view.

This article sets out to reach such an understanding of disenchantment. To do so, I will first explore the origin and meaning of the term “Entzauberung” and analyze its use in Weber’s work (2); then I will present Taylor’s (3) and Schluchter’s (4) theories of disenchantment and point out their assumptions concerning the concept of magic; to clarify Weber’s conception of magic I will explore the influence of pre-animistic theories on his work (5) and show Weber’s revision of those theories toward a new theory of magic (6); I will argue that this theory of magic led Weber to theorize the existence of an initial religious and cultural stage that he called “naturalism” (7); I will then show that a revaluation of Weber’s conception of magic can change our understanding of “disenchantment” (8) and, more specifically, that it can finally lead us to a univocal interpretation of the term (9).

“Entzauberung”

The meaning of the German word “Entzauberung” has often been the object of debate in the English-speaking literature on Weber. Most recently, Josephson-Storm (2021: 31) maintained that “disenchantment” does not render the more technical meaning of the German word, which would be more properly rendered as “de-magic-ing,” and so have Swedberg and Agevall (2016: 86), who suggested that “demagification” would be a more literal translation.

Entzauberung was not first translated into English as “disenchantment”: in Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethics, it is often translated as “elimination of magic” and sometimes as “rationalization” (Schluchter, 1981: 139 n.1 and Scaff, 2011: 227). However, Parsons is an exception as in French (désenchantement), Italian (disincantamento), Spanish (desencantamiento) and Portuguese (desencantamento) the translators chose the same Latin root as the English “disenchantment” and so did Gerth, a German mother-tongue speaker, in his own English translation.

Anter (2014: 14) has provided proof that Entzauberung was used in German as early as the first decades of the 19th century, which excludes the possibility that Weber coined it as an exclusively scientific term. Instead, it is safe to say that Weber knowingly used a somewhat common term and even a term that, like the English “disenchantment,” conveyed a sense of disillusionment: his contemporary Emil Ludwig (see Schluchter, 2009: 1–3) and even the famous poet and writer Wieland (1805) had used it with this meaning. However, this does not imply that in Weber’s work Entzauberung did not mean something more specific. To reach a better understanding of the meaning of the term, it seems more fruitful to look not at its origin but at the context in which it is used in Weber’s writings and at its role in the author’s theories.

Across his oeuvre, ¹ Weber uses Entzauberung only 10 times and exclusively in the context of the expression “Entzauberung der Welt” (“disenchantment of the world”): once in his article On Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology (MWG: I/12, 397), twice in the conference on Science as a Vocation (MWG: I/17, 87, 109), four times in the second edition of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (MWG: I/18 280, 320, 398, 403), once in the Introduction to WEWR ² (MWG: I/19, 114), once in the work on Confucianism and Taoism (MWG: I/19, 450) and once in the Intermediate Considerations (MWG: I/19, 512). In the Intermediate Considerations (MWG: I/19, 520) he also once speaks of theoretical thought as something “that disenchanted the world” (welches die Welt entzauberte), while in Science as a Vocation he speaks once (MWG: I/17, 87) of a “process of disenchantment” (Entzauberungsprozeß), once (MWG: I/17, 100) of a “world not yet disenchanted with their [the Greeks”] gods and demons’ (noch nicht von ihren Göttern und Dämonen entzauberten Welt) and also uses (MWG: I/17, 100–101) the adjective “disenchanted” (entzaubert) twice. Finally, even though “Entzauberung” is famously never used throughout Economy and Society, the section dedicated to Religious Communities (MWG: I/22/2, 273) deals with how “the events of the world were disenchanted” (die Vorgänge der Welt „entzaubert“ werden).

In the overwhelming majority of these occurrences, the object of disenchantment is the world, ³ the only notable exceptions being the two times Weber uses the adjective “disenchanted”: in the first occurrence (MWG: I/17, 100), he characterizes the modern behavior toward ultimate values as an equivalent to the Greeks’ relationship with their gods, only “disenchanted” and divested of every mythical aspect, while in the second (MWG: I/17, 101) the gods themselves are referred to as “disenchanted.” Of course, a satisfactory interpretation of the concept of disenchantment must address these exceptions. The starting hypothesis of this article is that understanding disenchantment means understanding the way Weber conceives the world as subjected to a process of disenchantment. This brings up the question of what is the origin of this process and so, as Taylor (2007: 25–43) and Schluchter (2009: 3–7) both suggest, the question of how we should envision an “enchanted world” (verzaubert Welt).

Taylor: Disenchantment as immanentization

When comparing Taylor’s and Weber’s accounts of disenchantment, it is important to stress that they take into consideration different timespans (see Schluchter, 2017: 26–29). In fact, while Weber traces back the roots of disenchantment to the ancient Jewish prophets, Taylor (2007: 25–26) mainly uses this concept when trying to explain the change in the worldview that occurred between 1500 and 2000. Taylor does not intend to follow Weber to the letter, yet his account of the “enchanted” world is still relevant to this study, most importantly because it does not treat the contributions of science and religion to the “disenchantment of the world” as two different processes.

In Taylor’s view, disenchantment represents “a fundamental shift” in “the way we naïvely take things to be” (Taylor, 2007: 30). The focus on “naïve understanding” is integral to Taylor’s conception of secularization as a more general “move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood to be one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace” (Taylor, 2007: 3). In his terminology, the “enchanted world” is “the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces which our ancestors lived in” (Taylor, 2007: 26), an outlook that he holds in contrast to the modern everyday understanding of the world in which “the only locus of thoughts, feelings, spiritual élan is what we call minds; the only minds in the cosmos are those of humans [. . .]; and minds are bounded, so that these thoughts, feelings, etc., are situated ‘within’ them” (Taylor, 2007: 30).

In other words, according to Taylor disenchantment marks the passage from a “pre-modern world,” in which “meanings are not only in minds, but can reside in things, or in various kinds of extra-human but intra-cosmic subjects” (Taylor, 2007: 33) to the modern understanding that unreflexively accepts that meanings “are ‘in the mind’, in the sense that things only have the meaning they do in that they awaken a certain response in us” (Taylor, 2007: 31).

Most importantly, Taylor (2007: 13–16) describes this passage from the “religious”/pre-modern to the secular/modern understanding of the world as a transition from a worldview informed by transcendence to a purely immanent one, so much so that the transcendency/immanency dichotomy ends up being symmetrical to the religious/secular dichotomy.

The main limitation of Taylor’s argument is that in his account disenchantment corresponds to a process of elimination of “the supernatural” (Josephson-Storm, 2017: 4), a reading of modernity that has been challenged by authors such as Luhmann (2000: 273) and Josephson-Storm (2017, 2021). Regarding disenchantment, Barbalet (2018: 472–475) even criticized Weber for not considering the importance of fear and persecution of magic in Puritan communities. This critique falls short when one considers that Weber took into account the Puritan obsession with witchcraft, as his reference to the persistence of witch trials clearly shows (MWG: I/19, 450). Barbalet’s remarks could however easily apply to Taylor.

Above all, while Taylor and Weber are both concerned with the uniqueness of Western modernity, Taylor’s account ends up being far more Western-centric ⁴ than Weber’s comparative approach. His emphasis on the uniqueness of Western development also leads him to formulate more clear-cut oppositions between the modern condition and any other human condition, an aspect that Schluchter tries to mitigate in his own account of disenchantment.

The enchanted world as “Hinterwelt”

Transcendency and immanency also play a pivotal albeit different role in Schluchter’s reinterpretation of Weber’s theory of disenchantment and this is especially true for his later reassessment (Schluchter, 2017) in which he directly compares Weber’s and Taylor’s accounts of disenchantment. ⁵ According to Schluchter, the “enchanted world” does not represent humanity’s primordial worldview, but rather the result of a process of “enchantment” (Schluchter, 2009: 3) that turned the “original naturalism” into a new worldview in which “the world as a whole was more or less under the sway of magic” (Schluchter, 2017: 31).

Schluchter (2009: 3–4; 2017: 30–31) identifies the “enchantment” of the world as the product of the “human ability to symbolize,” which leads to the formation of a world of meaning juxtaposed to the real, naturalistically conceived world. This means that transcendence was first established through the enchantment of the world, which makes it a trademark of the enchanted world. However, when comparing Weber’s and Taylor’s accounts of disenchantment, Schluchter discards the idea of disenchantment as a linear movement from transcendence to immanence in favor of a modern antithesis between a religious worldview informed by transcendence and a scientific worldview that presupposes an “immanent frame” (Schluchter, 2017: 42). The evolution of religion should not be seen as a movement toward a more immanent, but rather toward an even more transcendentalized worldview since the magic worldview does not clearly separate the immanent and the transcendent, resulting in an incomplete dualism not as logically defined as that later realized by the systematization of religious beliefs (Schluchter, 2017: 29–41).

Schluchter’s account stands on two main assumptions regarding Weber’s conception of magic (Schluchter, 1988: II, 24–29; 2009: 3–4; 2017: 30–31). The first one is that, according to Weber, the state of “enchantment” or, as Schluchter (2017: 32) calls it, the “magical worldview” should not be considered the original form of human orientation toward the world. The second is that the initial shift in the worldview, from naturalistic to magical, should be attributed to the formation of a “Hinterwelt,” a world-behind-the-world or an extramundane reality, a concept that, according to Schluchter, shows the influence of Nietzsche (2006: 20–22) on Weber’s conceptualization of disenchantment.

Today there is little doubt that Nietzsche influenced Weber; and yet it is important to proceed carefully in exploring what became of this influence, as Weber can often be fairly critical of Nietzsche, especially when it comes to verifying the validity of Nietzschean historical hypotheses such as that concerning the role of “resentment” (Ressentiment) in the formation of religious ethics (MWG: I/18 257-264).

With regard to “Hinterwelt,” while the term is undeniably a Nietzschean coinage, Weber seldom uses it (and mostly in its adjective form, “hinterweltlich”) and, even when he does, the term hardly corresponds to the meaning given by Schluchter. For the most part, Weber uses the adjective “hinterweltlich” when talking of an “extramundane realm” (hinterweltlich Reich), as he does twice in Science as a Vocation (MWG: I/17 89, 109), once in the Introduction to WEWR (MWG: I/19. 107), twice in the Intermediate Considerations (MWG: I/19, 499, 507) and twice in The Religion of India (MWG: I/20, 529-530, 538). Religion of India also mentions “extramundane fields” (hinterweltliche Gefilde) (MWG: I/20, 542) and presents the only occurrence of the noun “Hinterwelt” (MWG: I/20, 208) in the entirety of Weber’s religious studies. In all these cases, Weber is not talking about magic or the enchanted world: in WEWR he is always discussing mysticism and in the same applies to one occurrence in Science as a Vocation (MWG: I/17, 109), while in the other he is addressing young people’s criticism of the abstract nature of scientific concepts, which they feel are too detached from the real world (MWG: I/17, 89). Since the last passage is polemic in nature and does not necessarily reflect Weber’s thoughts on the subject but rather mocks a naïve discontent with science, it is correct to affirm that he used “Hinterwelt” almost exclusively to describe the religious experience of mysticism and most often Indian forms of mysticism.

This link to Indian culture is particularly relevant, as Nietzsche himself possibly found his inspiration for the coinage of “Hinterwelt” in a book on Indian religion, that is in Oldenberg’s work on the Buddha, in which Oldenberg (1881: 19) identifies the root of all Indian religious speculation in “the faith in the blessed, unchanging All-One, which rests behind the world of suffering and transience” (den Glauben an das selige, unwandelbare All-Eine, das hinter der Welt des Leidens und der Vergänglichkeit ruht). Whether or not Nietzsche really took inspiration from Oldenberg, an author he was provenly familiar with (Brobjer, 2004: 13–17), it is easy to suppose that Weber, who also made plenty of references to Oldenberg’s works, was influenced by him in his own use of the term.

Going back to Weber’s texts, the only notable exception to this use is represented by a passage that has not yet been mentioned, the only one that could support Schluchter’s interpretation. It is the section of Economy and Society dedicated to the Religious Communities (MWG: I/22/2 128), in which Weber speaks once of the emergence of a world of spirits and demons, a world that is characterized by an “extramundane existence” (hinterweltlich Dasein). This may seem to correspond to the development described by Schluchter. However, there is an important distinction to be made. Immediately after, Weber points out the effects that a similar process had “on the meaning of the magical art” (auf den Sinn der magischen Kunst), thus implying a pre-existing magical worldview. The process of formation of a “Hinterwelt” populated by demons and spirits should then not be seen as the premise of the formation of a magical worldview, but rather as a mutation that occurred within it.

The preanimism-animism debate

Even though the concept of “magic” is used throughout WEWR and plays an important role in all its parts (see Breuer, 2001: 119–122), the text does not offer a clear definition of the term. All studies collected in WEWR presuppose the more fundamental reflection on the nature of magic and religion that can be found in the section on Religious Communities.

The difficulty in approaching this text, published posthumously by Weber’s wife, mainly stems from the fact that Weber makes almost no reference to the contemporary debate on the subject of magic and religion. As Whimster (2007: 164) highlights, this should not trick the interpreter into thinking that Weber was not informed of the scientific progress in the field of religious studies. After all, the presence of concepts such as “mana,” “orenda” and “preanimism” is a clear sign that, at least to some degree, Weber was aware of the then ongoing debate on animism and preanimism.

Kippenberg (1997: 188, 232; 2001: 44–48) identifies Marett as the most probable influence on this subject and suggests that Weber’s conceptualization of the history of religion was in line with Marett’s, while Breuer (2001: 126–128) maintains that Weber did not take a definitive stance on preanimism and that he probably even lacked first-hand knowledge of its major theorists.

Kippenberg’s judgment is influenced by the prominence he assigns to Marett in the debate between preanimism and animism. There is no denying that Marett was in fact the first to speak of a “preanimistic religion” (Kippenberg, 1997: 179–181; Marett, 1914: vii–viii) even though he stresses that he did not coin the noun “preanimism” (Marett, 1914: xxi). However, by focusing on Marett, Kippenberg does not consider the longer conceptual history surrounding the term “mana” and the way this term ended up being the thorn in the side of Tylor’s theory of animism.

According to Meylan’s reconstruction, the Melanesian term “mana” was used against Tylor as early as 1878, when Müller (1878: 55–57) first introduced the term into the field of religious studies. As Meylan (2017: 35–39) shows, Müller had multiple reasons to be dissatisfied with Tylor’s theory, but one of the main ones was Tylor’s “minimum definition of Religion” as “the belief in Spiritual Beings” (Tylor, 1871: I, 383), which led him to coin “animism” as an umbrella term to include all the most primitive doctrines of faith (Tylor, 1871: I, 384–385).

Both Müller and, later, the theorists of preanimism found in “mana” and in Hewitt’s (1902) “orenda” examples of a more rudimental, elementary and, most importantly, impersonal experience of faith. Marett (1914: xxii) sought to encourage further research on this primeval forms of faith and coined the concept of “preanimistic Religion” as a place-holder for any religious experience that predated the belief in spirits. To put it in the words of the encyclopedia Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, a fundamental text for religious studies in Germany in Weber’s time (see Kippenberg, 2021: 14), the theory of preanimism came to see “mana” and “orenda” as names for a “magical force” that was the cornerstone of the “magical faith” that “predated all religions” (Schiele and Zscharnack, 1913: 126). Here the concept of “religion” is coherent with Tylor’s theory, while “magic” is used to identify the primordial form of faith, something that is of the greatest importance when it comes to understanding Weber’s use of both terms. From this it also follows that, in the context of Weber’s work, the emergence of a world of spirits and demons cannot be considered the origin of the magical worldview (as Schluchter does). Instead, it marks the passage from a magical to a religious form of faith.

As for Weber’s awareness of this development in the religious studies, it is first important to point out that Schiele and Zscharnack (1913: 126) named Marett, Hewitt, Preuß, Hubert and Mauss as the principal theorists of preanimism and that in Germany “preanimism” had even been used by Wundt in reference to Marett (see Marett, 1914: viii and Kippenberg, 1997: 180–181). Therefore, at the time, there was enough of a consensus concerning “preanimism” that Weber probably did not deem it necessary to take a clear stance in the debate, as Breuer (2001: 127) expects of him. In the eyes of his contemporaries, to criticize Tylor would have been quite simply to beat a dead horse.

As Kippenberg (1997: 188) highlights, even Durkheim made preanimism the foundation of his theory of religion. Yet Breuer (2001: 127–128) is not entirely wrong when he points out that Weber does not fully accept the preanimistic theory. To prove his point, Breuer provides two quotes from Religious Communities: in one, Weber clearly states (MWG: I/22/2, 127) that the passage from a condition in which things and events “play a role in life” by virtue of their existence to a condition in which they play a role “because they ‘mean’ something” is more important than the passage from an impersonal conception of divinity to a personal one; in the other (MWG: I/22/2, 124) he says that the belief in mana presupposes a “faith in spirits.” Though these two propositions are in open contradiction with the foundations of the preanimist theory, they do not necessarily show ignorance on Weber’s part, but they could rather point to the originality of his theory of magic and religion.

Mana as charisma, charisma as mana

When Breuer (2001: 127) points out that “in few sentences” Weber passes “from mana, the alpha and omega of the preanimistic doctrine, to the faith in spirits,” he fails to realize that Weber’s account of mana is already incompatible with preanimism. In fact, Weber famously associates “mana” and “orenda” with two terms that are far outside the scope of the preanimistic perspective: “maga” and “charisma.”

The Weberian connection between mana and charisma is one of the aspects that clearly show the limits of a specialized approach to Weber’s oeuvre. Well documented studies on Weber’s theological sources on charisma, such as Graf (1987) and more recently Yelle (2019: Ch. 2), provided detailed accounts of Weber’s reception of Sohm, Kuenen and Wellhausen among others and Yelle (2021) even reconstructed a bigger picture of the long-term theological tradition that definitely influenced Weber’s view of religion; yet none of these works explain why Weber would have been compelled to associate the theologically charged term “charisma” with the magical/preanimistic “mana.” On the opposite side, scholars mostly preoccupied with Weber’s interest in ethnology, anthropology, and the study of primitive religions in general barely talk of charisma, as is the case for both Kippenberg (1997) and Breuer (2001), and never provide nor look for an explanation of the connection between mana and charisma.

As interesting as it would be to explore what it means to reinterpret the theological concept of “charisma” as a synonym of “mana,” it lies far beyond the scope of the present paper. However, explaining how the primeval “mana” could be associated with the notion of “charisma” is indispensable in order to understand Weber’s unique stance on the subject of magic and religion.

As previously stated, for both Müller and the theorists of preanimism, “mana” (and later “orenda”) represented the most primitive form of religious experience imaginable. Sure, Marett (1914: xxiv–xxvi) lamented the inaccessibility of any “purely preanimistic” culture or “island” and consequently did not consider Melanesian culture as an example of the first conceivable stage of human culture. Nevertheless, both mana and orenda were still seen as the closest thing to a surviving form of preanimism, and as such they were assigned almost no role in the further development of religion.

On the contrary, by associating “mana” and “orenda” with the Zoroastrian “maga” and the Christian “charisma,” Weber suggests that the presence of a magical force did not in fact fade away in time, but changed and evolved together with different forms of belief. It would be fair to say that the persistence of charisma-mana represents the continuity of magical practices throughout the development of multiple (if not all) civilizations. Most importantly, this means that whereas the theorists of preanimism thought that the faith in mana had slowly evolved into the faith in spirits and demons, Weber thought that charisma-mana had remained at the core of the faith in spirits and, later, in the Israelite and Christian God.

Another indication that Weber did not fully embrace the preanimistic theories is the fact that he almost never uses the term “preanimism”: the noun never appears in WEWR or in Economy and Society and the adjective “preanimistic” is employed only three times in Religious Communities (MWG: 1/22/2 123, 131, 161). The fact that he only used it as an adjective could already suggest that Weber was aware of Marett’s reservations concerning such a concept, but an attentive reading of the three passages can offer even more insight into his take on the subject.

The last occurrence of the term (MWG: 1/22/2, 161) links the primordial form of faith, described as “the preanimistic fetichism” (der präanimistische Fetisch), to “the charisma of the magically gifted” (das Charisma des magisch Begabten), which underscores the equivalence between charisma and mana as magical preanimistic forces. However, the other two occurrences are far more interesting. The second occurrence (MWG: 1/22/2, 131) talks of “the transitions from preanimistic naturalism to symbolism” (die Übergänge vom präanimistischen Naturalismus bis zum Symbolismus), while the first one (MWG: 1/22/2, 123) explicitly equates naturalism and preanimism as it discusses a “strictly naturalistic (recently labeled as preanimistic) conception” (streng naturalistische (neuerdings sog. präanimistische) Vorstellung). From these passages it appears that Weber intended to propose an alternative theory to preanimism and that he even chose a new term to indicate the preanimistic state, a term that even provided a positive definition of how this state should be conceived: such a term is, of course, “naturalism” (Naturalismus).

Naturalism and the origin of mana

The literature on the Weberian concept of “naturalism” is basically non-existent. The two main studies dedicated to the subject of nature in Weber’s work (Anter, 2011; Radkau, 2009) offer no discussion of this aspect: Anter (2011) is more preoccupied with the political significance of Weber’s conception of nature, while Radkau (2009: 398, 418, 440) quotes some passages on naturalism from Weber’s religious studies but does not explain its meaning and significance. According to Radkau (2009: 252), in Weber’s time “naturalism” could indicate either (1) a form of social Darwinism, (2) a tendency to reduce human science to natural science, or (3) “the epistemological postulate of a unity of man and nature, mind and body, internal and external world” or, as he presents it, a form of naïve realism. The third definition is the only one that could apply to religious naturalism.

Schluchter, who does not provide any explicit definition of naturalism, often comes back to some of the passages that feature the term and in fact, as previously shown, he bases his own reading of “enchantment” as the formation of a “hinterweltlich” worldview on the pages where Weber describes the shift from naturalism to symbolism (MWG: I/22/2, 129–131). From his comments on this passage, it seems evident that Schluchter also assumes that “naturalism” corresponds to a form of naïve realism, as he states that the shift to symbolism marks the moment when “the world of men ‘doubles’, when men, things and events do not just mean what they are, but they become symptoms and symbols of another reality” (Schluchter, 1988: II, 24–25). The peculiarity of Schluchter’s interpretation is that he assumes that this form of realism goes hand in hand with the absence of any magical element, an aspect that is not only contradicted by some references to magic in the naturalistic state but, most importantly, by the description that Weber provides of the naturalistic condition.

Weber, once again, does not give an explicit definition of “naturalism,” yet there should be little doubt concerning what the term indicates: the stage that predates “symbolism” and even the “faith in mana’ ⁶ What Schluchter fails to see is that Weber does provide a precise description of this even more primitive disposition toward the world. ⁷

Weber (MWG: I/22/2, 121–122) begins his exploration of the topic of magic and religion by talking of the most elementary and primitive “religiously or magically oriented action” and he points out that such a form of action is initially “directed to the world” (diesseitig ausgerichtet) or, more literally, “directed to this side,” which means that this action is not guided by any transcendent concept or belief. Such an action cannot be clearly separated from regular every-day action as it is equally oriented toward the realization of an end and, more importantly, in such initial disposition all means are equally “magic”: “the spark produced by the fire drill is just as much a ‘magical’ product as the rain evoked through the manipulations of the rainmaker” (der Funken, den der Feuerquirl erzeugt, ist genau ebenso ein „magisches" Produkt wie der durch die Manipulationen des Regenmachers erzeugte Regen).

Weber is then quick to point out that whereas modern man would be inclined to measure the effectiveness of similar actions in terms of correctness, “the magic actor” (der magisch Handelnde), that is, the primitive man, would instead judge the means “only according to the greater or lesser ordinary occurrence of the phenomena” (nur nach der größeren oder geringeren Alltäglichkeit der Erscheinungen): this was the first criterion by which primitive people could judge the magical properties of objects and men. Unlike Schluchter, one should take this condition of the world to be the most enchanted as every form of efficacy is here considered magical. ⁸

It is only after sketching this portrait of the most primitive condition of humanity that Weber introduces the concept of charisma-mana. What he aims to trace is a sort of prehistory of the emergence of mana, for charisma-mana is here characterized as an intellectual abstraction of a vaguely defined concept of “efficacy.” In the 1917 article On the Meaning of “Value Neutrality” (MWG: I/12 492) Weber declares that “magic has been ‘rationalized’ as systematically as physics” (man hat [. . .] die Magie ebenso systematisch „rationalisiert“ wie die Physik). Following the interpretation suggested in this paper, the process of abstraction that led to the formation of the charisma-mana concept could then be seen as the first step in this process of rationalization as well as the first step toward transcendentalization. Consequently, transcendence should not be seen as a defining feature of enchantment, as it is, in fact, historically posterior to the primordial enchantment; if anything, it should be identified as the first step of the weakening of the magical disposition toward the world.

Rationalization of salvation and disenchantment

Any attempt at understanding the “disenchantment of the world” should take into account Weber’s reconstruction of the original form of magical action, not only because it helps define the starting point of the whole process, but also because it is at the center of the sentence where the author first used the expression in a published work.

In On Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology, an article that first appeared in 1913, Weber makes a first attempt at a foundation for a subjectively rational evaluation of action. When trying to mark the distinction between subjective and objective rationality, he points out (MWG: I/22/2, 397) that a magically oriented action “is often far more purposively rational in character than any non-magical ‘religious’ behavior” (ist subjektiv oft weit zweckrationaleren Charakters als irgend ein nicht magisches „religiöses“ Sichverhalten), since the progressive “disenchantment of the world” compels religion to adopt “relations of meaning” (Sinnbezogenheiten) that are more and more “purposively irrational” (zweckirrationalere) from a subjective point of view. This “irrationality” will remain a common theme in Weber’s discussion of religion, especially in the Intermediate Considerations, and this first contraposition of rationality of magic and irrationality of religion can only be properly understood by studying the entirety of Weber’s writings on religion.

In the Intermediate Considerations (MWG: I/19, 487–488) Weber explicitly states that the original magical practices could be directed to the attainment of mundane as well as soteriological goals: magic was the only means possible for the realization of any end. On the contrary, modern religions are more and more preoccupied with specific aspects of life and specific ultimate ends that are inevitably in contrast with the rational pursue of mundane goals that other forms of rationality, such as economic rationality, prescribe.

This does not mean that religion should be considered altogether less rational than magic. In a famous addition to the Protestant Ethic (MWG: I/18, 159 n.32), Weber says that “a thing is never ‘irrational’ in itself, but only from a certain ‘rational’ point of view” („irrational“ ist etwas stets nicht an sich, sondern von einem bestimmten „rationalen“ Gesichtspunkte aus). This is what creates an increasing tension between religion and other aspects or “spheres” of everyday life in a way that is completely unknown to the original “magical” condition.

For this reason, as long as the rationalization of religion is seen as oriented toward the specific religious value of salvation, it is easy to draw a parallel between the rationalization of religion and the “disenchantment of the world.” The Protestant Ethic (MWG: I/18 320) famously equates the process of “disenchantment of the world” to “the elimination of magic as a means of salvation” (die Ausschaltung der Magie als Heilsmittel). However, this should not be interpreted as a definition of “disenchantment” as it is clearly insufficient to describe the entire process and, even more importantly, it does not even encompass all possible forms of rationalization of religion.

In the opening pages of the last chapter of Confucianism and Taoism, dedicated to Confucianism and Puritanism, Weber (MWG: I/19, 450) distinguishes two forms of measurement of the rationalization of religion: one measures the degree to which it has abandoned magic while the other measures the level of systematization of the relationship between the world and religious precepts, that is, the level to which the religious ethic is systematized. This distinction is important because, according to Weber, Confucianism has not abandoned magical practices, yet it is quite rationalized in the second sense.

It is hard to overestimate the theorical significance of Confucianism and Puritanism, as it is where Weber discusses the differences between the religion that has brought the “disenchantment of the world to the extreme” (Puritanism) and a religion that Weber sees as still deeply influenced by magic (Confucianism). Whether his judgment on Chinese religions reflected the Western bias of the sources he relied on (see Barbalet, 2017: Ch. 2) or not, here Weber provides the clearest description of what he sees as a persisting magical worldview.

According to him, Confucianism thinks of the world as a “magical garden” (Zaubergarten) and it knows no tension between the world and a higher transcendental reality, a tension that is instead a prominent feature of Puritanism and Western culture in general (MWG: I/19, 451–452). This leads Confucianism to establish an ethic that promotes an attitude of “acceptation of the world and adaptation to the world” (Weltbejahung und Weltanpassung) (MWG: I/19, 453) as opposed to the Protestant and Western attitude of “mastery of the world” (Weltbearbeitung) (MWG: I/19: 114). Notwithstanding the fact that Albrow and Xiaoying (2014) showed that Weber’s position later evolves beyond this opposition between Chinese and Western culture as proponents of adaptation and mastery respectively, what matters to the present argument is that, when describing Confucianism, Weber presents a connection between an enchanted worldview (the world as a “magical garden”), an ethic of adaptation to the world and the absence of any transcendent principle to which the world should be subjected.

Such a connection is not fortuitous, nor is it peculiar of Confucianism, but it is deeply rooted in the way Weber conceives magical culture: if transcendence marks the first form of weakening of the magical disposition toward the world, then the lack of transcendence in the Chinese worldview is definitely coherent with the surviving of enchantment. But those two conditions are also connected to the ethic of adaptation, as (at least in Confucianism and Taoism) Weber sees a connection between a worldview characterized by a defined and articulated form of transcendence and the tension toward the world ⁹ that is the cornerstone of any ethical imperative of “mastery of the world.”

Weber (MWG: I/19, 454) clearly states that Confucianism has never known any form of “tension toward the ‘world’” (Spannung gegen der „Welt“) because it never had any “ethical prophecy of a supramundane God making ethical demands” (eine ethische Prophetie eines überweltlichen, ethische Forderungen stellenden Gottes) and he thus traces back the Western uniqueness to the Jewish prophets as he will later do in the Protestant Ethic (MWG: I/18, 280). However, it should be noted that in Confucianism and Taoism the reference to ancient Judaism is more likely dictated by the subject of the chapter (the comparison between Confucianism and Puritanism), since the tension toward the world is not a characteristic unique to Western culture: as Albrow and Xiaoying (2014: 186) demonstrate, the dichotomy between adaptation and tension later becomes central to Weber’s classification and comparison of religions and both Buddhism and Jainism are later opposed to Confucianism on the same basis (MWG: I/22/2, 270). On the contrary, the concept of “disenchantment of the world” is always and only applied to the specific development of the West.

Disenchantment as a cognitive process

At this point it should be clear that the “disenchantment of the world” should not be directly identified with the emergence of an ethical inclination toward the mastery of the world. After all, any interpretation defining disenchantment as a practical religious attitude toward the world would leave the door open to the problem of its meaning in the context of science: that is what Gauchet (1985: 10) does when he accepts the association between disenchantment and “the elimination of magic as a means of salvation” (MWG: I/18 320) as if it were a definition of disenchantment itself.

Any reading that focuses on the opposition between science and religion in Weber will not be able to provide a univocal explanation of disenchantment. Instead, a reassessment of disenchantment should start from the element that hints at a possible conciliation between the scientific and the religious worldview: the role of intellectualism in the development of both. In Science as a Vocation (MWG: I/17, 109) Weber famously characterizes disenchantment as a product of “intellectualization” (Intellektualisierung), while in Religious Communities (MWG: I/22/2, 273) he identifies “intellectualism” (Intellektualismus) as the agent of change in the religious perspective on the world. In both fields, intellectualism advances a worldview where the world is seen as devoid of magic. The question is whether the two worldviews have even more in common.

Throughout his studies, Schluchter (1979, 2009, 2017) has always insisted on the opposition between the two and, most recently, he has framed this opposition as one between immanence and transcendence (Schluchter, 2017). However, this interpretation rests on the assumption that, according to Weber, science leads to an immanent worldview, something that does not entirely fit the Weberian conception of science. Sure, Weber fought any form of emanationism (MWG: I/7, 62–101) and has often been seen as a nominalist, but this does not mean that he saw science as confined to an immanent perspective on the world. If anything, the Weberian methodological stance entails a certain form of transcendence, more specifically the transcendence of values.

The question of the ontological status of values has almost no space in the rich literature on Weberian methodology, and Weber never explicitly addressed such a problem in his writings, but this should not be seen as indicative of a lack of interest, as his letters show that he was in fact heavily invested in the debate between Lask and Rickert, a debate that had the ontology of values as one of its focal points. As Beiser (2011: 414–418 and 452–455) expertly shows, the main preoccupation of both authors was to define values as other than a material or psychological reality, while avoiding the risk of falling into a form of Platonism.

Rickert (1921: Ch. 5) devoted an entire chapter of his System der Philosophie to the definition of what he calls a “third world,” besides the objective-material and the subjective-psychological dimension. According to Rickert (1921: 114), the experience of the world is divided “into two sharply separated spheres” (in zwei scharf gesonderte Sphären) that Beiser (2011: 417–418) designates with the Humean terms of “is” (which in this case encompasses both material and psychological existence) and “ought.” Both components are part of reality in a certain sense, both are intrinsic components of the human experience, but the latter escapes the constraints of “what merely exists” (was bloß existiert) (Rickert, 1921: 114), be it material or psychological.

In Rickert’s terminology values are transcendental in the Kantian sense (Rickert, 1921: 160) and the implications of this transcendental status was at the core of the debate between him and Lask (see Beiser, 2011: 453–455). Whether Weber agreed with one or the other, what matters to the present argument is that he could not make values an integral part of his philosophy of science without granting them some sort of separate reality. This because his philosophy of science presupposes the existence of “dogmatic sciences,” (“jurisprudence, logic, ethics and esthetics”), which want “to investigate the ‘correct’, ‘valid.’ meaning of their objects.” “Therein lies the difference” between these sciences and the “empirical sciences of action, sociology and history” (darin liegt der Unterschied der empirischen Wissenschaften vom Handeln: der Soziologie und der Geschichte, gegenüber allen dogmatischen: Jurisprudenz, Logik, Ethik, Ästhetik, welche an ihren Objekten den „richtigen“, „gültigen“, Sinn erforschen wollen) (MWG: I/23, 149). ¹⁰

The legitimacy of the “dogmatic sciences” is necessarily linked to the (transcendental) existence of values, as the aim of such sciences is to better define the nature of “justice,” “beauty” or “truth” and to progressively differentiate between what “is” and what “ought to be” (i.e. a transcendental value).

While it is true that in the Kantian lexicon “transcendent” and “transcendental” are not synonyms, the members of the Baden Neo-Kantian School (Windelband, Rickert and, to a lesser extent, Lask), partially blur the distinction between the two when they try to define the nature of values. Rickert does not define values as “transcendent,” as this would have huge consequences from a Kantian point of view. He does however insist on a separate existence of values that seems quite akin to a form of transcendence.

Of course, Weber was not a blind follower of Rickert and what is true for the latter is not necessarily true for the former. In order to explore the peculiarity of Weber’s position it is now time to discuss the reason why he talks of the disenchantment in reference to gods (MWG: I/17, 100–101).

In his famous review of Science as a Vocation, Kahler (1920: 40–41) criticizes Weber’s “polytheism of values” for being quite dissimilar to Hellenic polytheism. According to him, the Greek gods were neither as abstract nor as opposed to one another as Weber’s values and Weber is merely trying to dignify his relativism by associating it with polytheism. Weber would have probably accepted most of Kahler’s criticisms, since he did not actually see values as the exact equivalent of Greek gods. . . but rather as their disenchanted version. Here disenchantment once coincides with a shift toward transcendence, as values are further removed from reality than Greek gods and, most importantly, their domains are more clearly defined, so that their contraposition is harsher and, at the same time, cannot be mitigated by magical means such as sacrifices.

Since science cannot give itself any meaning without referring to transcendent values (e.g., medicine is funded on the value of health and jurisprudence on the value of justice) (MWG: I/17, 106–108), then its worldview is necessarily anchored in transcendence. Whether science is conscious of it or not, such a dependence is undeniable. But the “symmetry of religion and science” (Albrow, 1990: 25–28) goes even deeper: just as religion shows a tendency toward systematization of belief, science can lead to a better understanding of single values through what Weber calls a “discussion on values” (Wertdiskussion) (MWG: I/12, 465), which ultimately leads to an even stronger subordination of the world to ultimate, transcendent values.

All things considered, values should not be seen just as a minimal form of transcendence but rather as the ultimate result of a process of progressive transcendentalization. If we invert Taylor’s (and to a certain extent also Schluchter’s) terms and we start from an immanent magical worldview and trace disenchantment as a development toward transcendence, then suddenly every piece of the puzzle falls into place.

In the field of religion, it is pretty straightforward that the more God is removed from the world and the more the religious ethic evolves toward an ethic of mastery of the world, the more the worldview is informed by transcendence. In a similar fashion, the more abstract and coherently defined value becomes, the more it can claim absolute validity ¹¹ and completely transcend the reality upon which it acts through human volition.

Thus, both the advancement of science and the systematization of religion participate in the same process of disenchantment. To better outline the result of such a process, it is useful to go back to Taylor’s interest in “naïvely understanding” and define the disenchanted condition as one where the world and the events of the world are no longer framed in a magical worldview but are instead naïvely understood as mere objects to be subsumed under transcendent criteria, whether those are understood as moral precepts of religion or as abstract values. The problem of meaning is then completely, or mostly, transformed into a debate on the transcendent and the world in itself ends up having no meaning to offer. This process can well be described as an “elimination of magic,” as long as we intend “magic” as the original disposition toward the world that is ultimately negated through disenchantment and not as practices that are, in a way or another, still influenced by magical concepts, such as turn of the century occultism.

Conclusions

In conclusion, much remains to be said on the topic of disenchantment and much more could be said once this new interpretation has been put forward. Themes such as the sociological meaning of disenchantment and its relationship to rationalization are far too vast to be addressed here and they would require the discussion of many more authors, starting from Tenbruck (1980) seminal work on the subject.

What remains here to be done is to summarize the results of the present study. The best way to do so is to go back to Joas (2021) tripartite definition of disenchantment as demagification, desacralization and detranscendentalization.

While the present study did not deal with the theme of sacrality in Weber’s work (in itself a topic worth exploring in depth), from what has been said it follows that, whatever the link between the two, disenchantment should not in any way be considered a process of “desacralization’ ¹²

Turning to demagification, I argued that “disenchantment” does mean the “elimination of magic” as long as “magic” is understood as an all-encompassing disposition toward the world and not as just a practice like modern occultism. In this sense, the limitations of Josephson-Storm’s (2017, 2021) take on the problem of magic appear to derive from his lack of attention to Weber’s use of the concept of “magic’ ¹³ This “elimination of magic” does not mean the disappearance of all magical practices or practices still influenced by once magical concepts, but simply that the naïve disposition toward the world, the common worldview, does not see the world as something imbued with magical properties.

As for detranscendentalization, it should be clear enough that the final thesis of this study is that disenchantment does not correspond to a process of detranscendentalization and that, if anything, it actually participates in a process of transcendentalization, from the immanent naturalistic disposition toward the world to the highly abstract and transcendent perspectives of science and modern (Western) religion. Of course, disenchantment does not completely identify with a process of transcendentalization either and it should not be seen as the only possible path toward transcendentalization, with Buddhism and Indian religions in general clearly representing another option. Once again, while disenchantment is a uniquely Western process, both rationalization and transcendentalization are not, and the complex interchange between the three should be in the object of further research, building on the premises of what has been established here.