invention of) the realm of private ‘‘values’’ and aesthetic, sexual, or mystical
‘‘experiences.’’
Weber acknowledges that the ‘‘modern’’ processes of rationalization pre-
date modern times: attempts to displace magic were made, for example, by
the ancient Hebrew prophets ‘‘in conjunction with Hellenistic scientiWc
thought’’ (Weber 1958 , 105 ; Jameson 1988 , 26 ). But Weber describes the urge
to demystify, pursued inWts and starts throughout history, as reaching its
‘‘logical conclusion’’ in seventeenth-century Puritanism. The ascetic ethic of
Puritanism and its idea of a ‘‘calling’’ eventually became the entrepreneurship
and acquisitiveness of modern capitalism (Weber 1958 ).
Whether directly or indirectly touched by Puritanism, any culture of
modernity will encourage a distinctivelyanalyticalstyle of thinking. More
speciWcally, to be modern is to be able to discern what things are ‘‘in
principle’’ and not only what they are in current practice: one learns to relate
to phenomena by seizing upon thelogicof their structure, upon theprinciple
of their organization, and this enables an even more careful and precise
categorization of things. In a passage that also exempliWes how modernity
is deWned by way of contrast to an imagined primitivism, Weber describes
this ‘‘in principle’’ logic:
Does... everyone sitting in this hall... have a greater knowledge of the conditions
of life under which we exist than has an American Indian or a Hottentot? Hardly.
Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car
happened to get into motion.... The increasing intellectualization and rationaliza-
tion donot, therefore, indicate an increased and general knowledge of the conditions
under which one lives. It means something else, namely, the knowledge or belief that
if one but wished onecouldlearn it at any time. Hence, it means that principally there
are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in
principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.
(Weber 1981 , 139 )
Modernity produces a self skilled in the art of discerning the hidden logic of
things. Key to Weber’s story is the claim that while this skill is a laudable
achievement, its cost is very high: a rationalized world stripped of all ‘‘mys-
terious incalculable forces’’ is ameaninglessworld. ‘‘The unity of the primitive
image of the world, in which everything was concrete magic,’’ gives way to
‘‘the mechanism of a world robbed of gods’’ (Weber 1981 , 281 ). Or, as Charles
Taylor puts the point:
People used to see themselves as part of a larger order. In some cases, this was a
cosmic order, a ‘‘great chain of Being,’’ in which humansWgured in their proper place
modernity and its critics 215