Introduction

Among the terms most often associated with Max Weber's sociology are the German word Entzauberung and the famous phrase “die Entzauberung der Welt.” Anglophone readers have generally come to know them as “disenchantment” and “the disenchantment of the world,” thanks to the popularity of Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills's anthology of translations, From Max Weber. There is good reason, however, to think twice about substituting “disenchantment” for Entzauberung. When we speak of disenchantment, we typically mean that someone has been freed of illusions and, correspondingly, disappointed with the outcome of a situation (Lehmann 2009, 11– 12). Such emotive connotations are not entirely irrelevant in the context of Weber's discussion of Entzauberung, but they do imply the kind of scholarly value judgment that he claimed to eschew. A more appropriate translation would be the literal one, “demagification,” which has the advantage of acknowledging the religious sources of his interest in the concept. Weber's investigations into the sociology of magic, and its role in the development of world religions, provided the context in which Entzauberung first appeared in his writings, namely, in his article “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology” (1913) and the concurrently written manuscript on “Status Groups, Classes and Religion” for Economy and Society (Winckelmann 1980, 15).

Weber understood magic to be a form of “relatively rational behavior” aimed at coercing the spirits of the natural world, primarily for this- worldly and specifically economic benefits (Weber [1922] 1978, 399– 403, 422). One of his major sociological interests concerned the ways in which certain religions, most notably ancient Judaism and ascetic Protestantism, had historically divested themselves of magical beliefs and superstitions. These religions posited the existence of an omnipotent God, incapable of being coerced whose creation of the world precluded the existence of immanent natural spirits. Moreover, they encouraged believers to shun magical practices in favor of rational life conduct in accordance with ethical commandments (Weber [1915] 1946b, 290; [1920] 2009, 107, 135, 137; [1920] 1951, 226– 30; [1921] 1952, 4, 219– 25, 262, 394, 400; [1922] 1978, 630). Demagification, in this sense, represented an eminently religious process, not a symptom of secularization, though its significance for economic life was considerable.