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

When scientific progress destabilized religious authority and the lack of meaning found in a pure rational worldview revealed science’s limitations, movements like Theosophy offered a kind of third way, a path toward understanding the world between science and religion. Theosophy was in conversation with both realms, using tools like magical practi

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One reason that the full force of Weber’s ideas has not been recognized is that they ultimately implicate the limits of rationality—the very foundations of Western thought. Science ignores those limits, and it is at those limits that the supernatural erupts. But it is not only the supernatural that is of interest, the problem of meaning, the idea o

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Academe today is both a product of and an agent for the disenchantment of the world. It has steadily become more bureaucratic and hierarchical. Davis noted that “Weber believed that the very progress of civilization inevitably led to the permanent anesthetizing of the human spirit.”24 Anti-structure, pure charisma, and supernatural phenomena are ne

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