Max Weber’s Ghosts
Recovering the Spirit of Secularisation
Keywords:
Weber, disenchantment, enchantment, modernity, secularisation, spiritAbstract
This article re-evaluates sociologist Max Weber’s contributions to ongoing debates about secularisation. Weber is uniformly considered to be one of the founding authors of the secularisation thesis. However, a careful analysis of his use of the tropes of haunting, prophecy and the concept of ‘the gift’, in two of his most widely read texts—‘Science as Vocation’ and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—shows us that instead of affirming the decline of religion in modernity, Weber’s work actually attests to curious dependence between the spiritual and the material, the religious and the secular and the enchanted and disenchanted. This revelation is used to highlight some oversights in more recent scholarship on postmodern ‘re-enchantment’ and the ‘religious revitalisation’ of the postindustrial Western world. It argues that it is not only in postmodernity that evidence of the alliance between the enchanted and disenchanted can be found, but also in the ostensibly secular culture of modernity described by ‘founding fathers’ like Weber.
References
Bauman, Zygmunt 1993 Postmodern Ethics. Blackwell, Oxford.
Bendle, Mervyn F. 2005 Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1905): A Centennial Essay. Australian Religious Studies Review 18(2): 235-50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1558/arsr.2005.18.2.235.
Berger, Peter L. 1999 The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Ethics and Public Policy Centre, Washington, DC.
Bruce, Steve 2002 God Is Dead. Blackwell, Oxford/Malden, MA/Carlton, VIC.
Bruce, Steve, and Roy Wallis 1992 Secularization: An Orthodox View. In Religion and Modernization edited by Steve Bruce, 8-29. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Caputo, John D. 2001 On Religion. Routledge, New York.
Caputo, John D., and Michael Scanlon 1999 God, the Gift and Postmodernism. Indiana University Press, Bloomington.
Casanova, José 1994 Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Cohen, Ira 2005 General Editor’s Foreword. In Max Weber: Readings and Commentaries on Modernity, edited by Stephen Kalberg, xi-xiv. Blackwell, Oxford.
Davie, Grace 2001 Patterns of Religion in Western Europe: An Exceptional Case. In The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion, edited by Richard K. Fenn, 265-78. Blackwell, Malden, MA.
Derrida, Jacques 1994 Specters of Marx. Routledge, New York.
Fenn, Richard K. 1969 Max Weber on the Secular: A Typology. Review of Religious Research 10(3): 159-69. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3510743.
Fishcoff, Ephraim 1968 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The History of a Controversy. In Protestant Ethic and Modernization, edited by Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, 67-86. Basic Books, London and New York.
Gane, Nicholas 2002 Max Weber and Postmodern Theory. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230502512.
Gerth, Hans H., and Charles Wright Mills (eds.) 1948 From Max Weber. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
Habermas, Jurgen 1984 Theory of Communicative Action. Beacon Press, Boston.
Harrington, Anne 1996 Reenchanted Science. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Heclo, Hugh 2003 An Introduction to Religion and Public Policy. In Religion Returns to the Public Square, edited by Hugh Heclo and Wilfred M. McClay, 3-30. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.
Heelas, Paul, and Linda Woodhead 2005 The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality. Blackwell, Malden, MA and Oxford.
Hume, Linda, and Kathleen McPhillips (eds.) 2006 Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment. Ashgate, Aldershot.
Jenkins, Richard 2000 Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium. Max Weber Studies 1(1): 11-32.
Kalberg, Stephen (ed.) 2005 Max Weber: Readings and Commentary on Modernity. Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA and Oxford.
Kierkegaard, Soren 1962 Philosophical Fragments. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Lechner, Frank 1991 The Case Against Secularization: A Rebuttal. Social Forces 69(4): 1103-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2579304.
McPhillips, Kathleen 2002 Refiguring the Sacred: Re-enchantment and the Postmodern World. In Challenging Subjects, edited by Valerie Walkerdine, 177-90. Palgrave, Basingstoke and New York.
Merleu-Ponty, Maurice 1968 The Visible and the Invisible. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL.
Pierucci, Antonio Flavio 2000 Secularization in Max Weber: On Current Usefulness of Re-Accessing that Old Meaning. Revista Brasileira de Ciencia Socias Special Issue 1: 1-35.
Sayer, Derek 1991 Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber. Routledge, London and New York.
Siontu, Eeva, and Linda Woodhead 2008 Spirituality, Gender and Expressive Selfhood. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 47(2): 259-76.
Swatos, William H. Jr, and Peter Kivisto 1991 Max Weber as ‘Christian Sociologist’. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 30(4): 347-62.
Taylor, Mark C. 2007 After God. Chicago University Press, Chicago.
Weber, Marianne 1975 Max Weber: A Biography. John Wiley & Sons, London and New York.
Weber, Max 1948a The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism. In Gerth and Mills 1948: 302-22.
b Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions. In Gerth and Mills 1948: 323-59.
c Science as Vocation. In Gerth and Mills 1948: 129-46.
d Politics as Vocation. In Gerth and Mills 1948: 77-28.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Unwin Paperbacks, London (originally published 1930).
Wilson, Bryan 1979 The Return of the Sacred. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 18(3): 268-80.
