The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences
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Abstract
A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? This book traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, it argues, these disciplines’ founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic that they produced notions of a disenchanted world. By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.
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Front Matter
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Introduction
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
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One
Enchanted (Post) Modernity
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
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Part I God’s Shadow
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm -
Part II The Horrors of Metaphysics
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm-
Seven
The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
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Eight
Dialectic of Darkness: The Magical Foundations of Critical Theory
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
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Nine
The Ghosts of Metaphysics: Logical Positivism and Disenchantment
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
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Ten
The World of Enchantment; or, Max Weber at the End of History
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
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Conclusion
The Myth of Modernity
Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm
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Seven
The Black Tide: Mysticism, Rationality, and the German Occult Revival
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End Matter
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