In 1917, lecturing to students in Munich on Science as a Vocation, Max Weber named the condition that modern thought had placed them in: die Entzauberung der Welt, the disenchantment of the world. He did not mean that modern people had stopped believing in magic, though they mostly had. He meant that the modern educated person lives on the assumption that "there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation." The world has ceased to be a cosmos — an ordered whole with meaning built in — and become instead a field of neutral fact, to be known by the sciences and put to use by the technologies they spawn. The older languages of sacredness, vocation, and cosmic significance have not been refuted; they have become unavailable, except as private consolation.
Weber was describing a cultural achievement and a cultural loss at once. The achievement was the intellectual discipline of modern science, and the political discipline of a liberal order that did not pretend to rest on metaphysical guarantees. The loss was that the same disciplines could not supply the meanings on which ordinary human lives had always depended — meanings about what a person is for, what a life is worth, what suffering signifies, what the natural world asks of us. The question that has run through the century since is whether the loss can be compensated, and if so, how: by a recovery of religious tradition, by a sophisticated philosophical naturalism, by a new attention to art and the sacramental, by a political transformation, or by some combination that does not yet have a name. The literature below collects the diagnosis and the major responses.
"Re-enchantment" is the label that has emerged — in Jane Bennett, Akeel Bilgrami, and the late work of Charles Taylor — for the constructive half of the problem. It is not a call to return to a pre-scientific cosmology; nobody serious is asking for that. It is an attempt to describe what can still be said, after Darwin and Freud and Auschwitz and the neurosciences, about the kind of world we actually inhabit: a world in which mind, meaning, moral obligation, and aesthetic experience are not illusions, even if they cannot be reduced to the terms of physics. The dispute between scientific materialism and its critics is, in the end, a dispute about what counts as real.
Annotated bibliography
The diagnosis
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation (1917) and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) — the founding text. Science as a Vocation is short, bleak, and still the most honest statement of the disenchantment thesis. The Protestant Ethic traces the path by which Calvinist asceticism produced the mentality that, once detached from its theological frame, survives as the rationalized, calculating self of modern capitalism.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882) — the "death of God" passage in §125 is the moment at which the problem becomes explicit in European thought. Nietzsche understood, as few of his contemporaries did, that the collapse of Christian metaphysics would not leave European morality intact; the madman's cry is a diagnosis, not a celebration.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007) — the major philosophical expansion of Weber. Taylor's central distinction is between the "porous self" of pre-modern Christendom, permeable to spiritual forces, and the "buffered self" of modernity, sealed within its own consciousness. He charts the five-hundred-year process by which belief in God moved from nearly impossible to disbelieve to one option among many — and argues that the transition was not simply subtraction (enlightenment clearing away superstition) but the construction of a new moral anthropology, with its own commitments and its own costs.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1981) — the parallel diagnosis in ethics. MacIntyre argued that modern moral discourse consists of fragments of older traditions, torn from the teleological frameworks that once made them intelligible. The resulting "emotivism" — the conviction that moral judgments are expressions of preference rather than claims about the world — is the ethical counterpart of disenchantment.
The materialist case
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) — not itself a work of scientific materialism, but the intellectual event after which the older theological biology could not be recovered intact. Darwin himself was cautious about metaphysical conclusions; the materialist reading is a later interpretive overlay.
Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995) — the most philosophically serious defense of the reductionist program. Dennett argues that natural selection is a "universal acid" that dissolves every pre-Darwinian conception of mind, meaning, and value, and that this is good news if one is prepared to follow the argument. He is worth reading whether one agrees or not.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976), The God Delusion (2006) — The Selfish Gene is the scientifically serious book, though the "selfishness" metaphor imported exactly the kind of pre-scientific framing Dawkins elsewhere denies (see Midgley below). The God Delusion is the polemic; it tends to treat theology as if it were a particularly incompetent branch of natural science, which is why it misses most of its targets.
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998) — the late-twentieth-century manifesto for a reductive unification of the sciences with the humanities under a naturalistic umbrella. Ambitious, sometimes naive about what the humanities are, and for that reason a useful clarifier of what the materialist program actually claims.
Critical rationalism and the limits of scientism
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), Conjectures and Refutations (1963), and (with John Eccles) The Self and Its Brain (1977) — Popper belongs here because he is the great counter-example to the equation of science-loving with materialism. Falsificationism is itself a limit on what science can claim: a theory is scientific insofar as it forbids some possible observation, and therefore scientific claims are always provisional, never the final word on reality. His late work with the neurophysiologist Eccles developed the "three worlds" ontology — physical states (World 1), mental states (World 2), and the objective contents of thought, including theories and works of art (World 3) — which is an explicit rejection of the reductionist identification of mind with brain. Popper is a case study in how one can be unreservedly pro-science without being a scientific materialist.
Mary Midgley, Science as Salvation (1992), The Myths We Live By (2003), Science and Poetry (2001) — the most patient and devastating critique of scientism in twentieth-century English philosophy. Midgley's point is not that science is wrong but that scientism — the use of scientific prestige to smuggle in a metaphysics of reduction — is bad philosophy and bad science at once. Her decades-long exchange with Dawkins, beginning with "Gene-Juggling" in Philosophy (1979), is the reference quarrel.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), The Tacit Dimension (1966) — Polanyi, a physical chemist turned philosopher, argued that all knowledge — including scientific knowledge — depends on a tacit, personal commitment of the knower that cannot itself be made fully explicit. His critique of "objectivism" undercut the positivist self-image of science from within.
C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (1959) — the famous lecture naming the split between literary and scientific intellectuals. Included here not because Snow resolved the problem — he did not — but because the lecture remains the shortest route into the cultural shape of the disenchantment debate.
The irreducibility of mind
Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind (2010) — the Terry Lectures; a sustained attack on what Robinson calls "parascientific" writing — popular works by Dennett, Dawkins, Pinker, and others that claim scientific authority for metaphysical conclusions. Robinson's defense of the "mind" (and of the tradition — Calvinist, humanist, Emersonian — that took the mind seriously) is the most eloquent American statement of the case.
Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (1986), Mind and Cosmos (2012) — Nagel is an atheist and a philosophical naturalist who nonetheless argues that the reductive materialist account of consciousness and value is almost certainly false. Mind and Cosmos was attacked from both sides on publication, which is a good sign. His 1974 paper "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is the starting point for the contemporary consciousness debate.
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), Process and Reality (1929) — Whitehead's "process philosophy" is the most systematic early-twentieth-century alternative to the mechanistic cosmology of Newton and its positivist heirs. Difficult; rewarding. Science and the Modern World is the accessible point of entry.
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (1970) — Murdoch's short book argues that moral life consists largely in attention — the just and loving gaze directed at the particular — and that this is unintelligible within a picture of the self as a utility-maximizing chooser. A Platonist intervention against the behaviorist and emotivist accounts that dominated mid-century ethics.
Theological responses
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947), Waiting for God (1951) — Weil's writing on attention, affliction, and the absence of God is, among other things, a response to disenchantment from within the religious tradition: not a retreat to pre-modern certainty but an attempt to think God in the light of modern suffering, modern science, and the moral demands of solidarity. Listed also under Faith and the Modern World.
Howard Thurman, The Creative Encounter (1954), The Inward Journey (1961), Disciplines of the Spirit (1963) — Thurman's mystical-ethical writings argue for a direct experiential religion compatible with rigorous honesty about the conditions of modern life. His method — interior attention cultivated in silence, then deployed in the world — is a practical answer to the question of what contemplation can mean in a disenchanted age.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (1955), Man Is Not Alone (1951), The Prophets (1962) — Heschel's concept of "radical amazement" is an explicit counter-move to the flattening effect of habitual, rationalized perception. His theology begins not from proofs of God's existence but from the experience of the ineffable in ordinary life.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966) — Merton's contemplative tradition, read as a response to disenchantment rather than a retreat from it. The late Merton's engagement with Zen, with civil rights, and with the atomic age was an argument that contemplative attention is not incompatible with modern knowledge but necessary to it.
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (1952), Dynamics of Faith (1957) — Tillich's reframing of faith as "ultimate concern" and God as "the ground of being" was designed precisely for people who could no longer accept a supernatural theism but would not settle for reductive materialism either. Middle-ground theology in the Weberian sense.
The sacramental and the agrarian
Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America (1977), Life Is a Miracle (2000), The Art of the Commonplace (2002) — Berry's agrarian Christianity is the most sustained contemporary American argument that the natural world is a gift rather than a resource and that a mechanistic view of it is not merely false but corrosive of the practices (farming, marriage, neighborliness) on which actual human flourishing depends. Life Is a Miracle is his direct response to E. O. Wilson's Consilience; one of the better short polemics of its period.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems (posthumous, 1918) — Hopkins is the poet of sacramental vision in modern English. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God"; "inscape" and "instress" as names for the particular, charged suchness of things. Not an argument against disenchantment but a demonstration that the charged world can still be seen.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (2004), Home (2008), Lila (2014) — the Gilead trilogy as the major contemporary fictional demonstration that a sacramental sense of ordinary life is still imaginatively available. The Iowa Congregationalist minister John Ames is a character who sees the world with exactly the kind of attention the tradition asks for; Robinson's achievement is to make the seeing credible.
Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (1949) — Weil's short, unfinished book, written for the Free French in London in the last year of her life, on what a post-war France would need in order to be habitable as a civilization. The argument is political and sacramental at once: rootedness, vocation, beauty, and physical labor as the conditions of a human life. Listed here because it is the clearest bridge between the sacramental and the political.
Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy — both Southern Catholic novelists whose work is a sustained demonstration of what a sacramental imagination can still see in the twentieth-century American South. O'Connor: grace as violent intrusion. Percy: spiritual malaise diagnosed with clinical precision. Both listed more fully in Faith and the Modern World.
Re-enchantment as project
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), Vibrant Matter (2010) — Bennett argues, against both the secularization thesis and the sacramental tradition, that modernity has its own sources of enchantment — the strangeness of matter, the agency of things — and that attending to them is a political and ecological discipline. Her position is sometimes called "new materialism," which is a deliberate repurposing of the vocabulary.
Akeel Bilgrami, Enchantment of the World (2008 essays, collected in Secularism, Identity, and Enchantment, 2014) — Bilgrami, a philosopher at Columbia working in the tradition of William James, argues that the seventeenth-century scientific revolution contained a hidden choice — between a "disenchanted" nature and a nature in which value was intrinsic — and that the path not taken is still available. The argument is more radical than it looks.
Charles Taylor, The Language Animal (2016) and Cosmic Connections (2024) — the late Taylor, turning from the genealogy of disenchantment to the resources for re-enchantment, primarily through a sustained reading of the Romantic tradition as a response to the modern predicament. Difficult late books, but they close a philosophical arc that began with Sources of the Self.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) — the founding modern attempt to take religious experience seriously as data without either explaining it away or surrendering critical reason. Still the starting point for any contemporary philosophy that wants to keep science and religious experience on the same table.
Secondary sources and overviews
George Levine, Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World (2006) — a Victorianist's argument that Darwinism itself, read sympathetically, can be a source of modern enchantment rather than its solvent.
Joshua Landy and Michael Saler, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (2009) — the useful interdisciplinary collection; essays on literature, film, stage magic, and consumer culture as modern sites of enchantment.
Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon (2019) — the argument that capitalism is not disenchanting but re-enchanting in a perverse register: money, commodities, and the corporation as the modern sacred. A dense, sometimes hectic book, but its central thesis is important.
Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (2007) — listed above as a primary source, but it is also the best single secondary work on the whole terrain; the bibliography alone is a research program.