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Short abstract:

This paper argues against the conventional interpretation of Max Weber’s “disenchantment” as the erasure of feeling in modernity through the advance of science. I argue that Weber actually understands the intellectual transformations prompted by Wissenschaft as determined by scientific affects.

Long abstract:

The common sense of disenchantment holds that as scientific knowledge advances, the world is steadily drained of feeling. Max Weber’s article “Science as a Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf) is taken as a prototype of this narrative of decline, an early iteration of a defining twentieth-century myth. This interpretation has profoundly shaped conventional wisdom—both academic and popular—about the sweeping transformations triggered by modernity.

A closer reading of Weber’s “Science as a Vocation,” however, shows that Weber actually intended to demonstrate the opposite conclusion: science is infused with feeling. Weber proposes that the best way to understand science is as a “passion,” and an “intoxication,” more akin to “artistic mania” than to a dry, feelingless act. What Weber means by “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) is literally “demagification”—transforming the world into a place that can be explained, rather than a cosmos governed by inscrutable gods and spirits. This reframing of the world as explainable is the condition of possibility for the flourishing of scientific affects.

By science, Weber means Wissenschaft—the broader field of knowledge-making projects across the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. What Weber diagrams, then, is a new picture of the role of academic knowledge production broadly speaking. Rather than an erasure of the quality of feeling from the world, Weber understands the rise of scientific explanation as the emergence of a new configuration of intellectual affects, one in which the emotional power of study, research, and teaching have important roles to play.