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Soc (2013) 50:301310DOI 10.1007/s12115-013-9664-y
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Max Weber, Religion, and the Disenchantment of the World
Steven Grosby
Published online: 13 April 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract This article offers a re-evaluation of Max Webers analyses of both the disenchantment of the world and the origins of capitalism.
Keywords Weber . Academic ethic-Religion . Disenchantment . Capitalism . Property rights . Firm . Charisma .
The Disenchantment of the Academic Calling
I have been asked to speak to you today about Max Webers characterization of our times as the disenchantment of the world. However, before doing so, because you are graduate students seeking to pursue a career in the academy, a few introductory remarks about the academic profession are in order. They are also increasingly difficult to avoid, because repeated challenges to the academic calling have led to the expectation that I am under an obligation to clarify my point of departure in a discussion of Max Webers work and, in particular, his formulation of the Entzauberung der Welt, the disenchantment of the world.
By challenges to the academic calling I do not refer to the fact that more than 70 % of the instruction at educational institutions beyond high school is done by an exhausted, irregular teaching staff who are compensated not with a salary but at the rate of piece worka staff so exhausted from usually teaching five or more courses a semester to support themselves financially that their students cannot receive the attention appropriate to learning what they should learn. I also do not refer to that rationalization of instruction, based on a criterion of efficiency, of what is called on-line education, where hundreds of students, evennote wellin humanities
courses, sit isolated in front of a computer. Obviously, in these circumstances, college professors at the undergraduate level cannot know their students; and they cannot carry out their otherwise obligatory duty to act in loco parentis. These developments can rightly be understood as one expression of the rationalization and bureaucratization of the academy, as the Entzauberung of the teaching profession.
Literally, Entzauberung is the elimination from our conceptual world of those powers aroused or manipulated by magical techniques. In this sense, the English disenchantment is an appropriate translation of Entzauberung....