The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” Ever since, we’ve tended to think of ourselves as living in a disenchanted world, from which all magic has been stripped. Bennett asks us to entertain the possibility ... See more

Philosophically, modernity is often referred to as “The Age of Man.” In ascension since the Renaissance, it crystallized toward the end of the 18th century into a configuration of knowledge that French philosopher Michel Foucault characterized as an episteme in which the figure of Man as the foundation of all possible knowledge. Jamaican philosophe

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I constructed a world-view in which the forces I experienced fit within the natural order of science, as what Jung called "archetypes of the collective unconscious". I rejected supernatural explanations, but learned to believe in magic -- the magic of the human mind and hand and heart.