along with angels, heavenly bodies, and our fellow earthly creatures. This hierarchical
order in the universe was reXected in the hierarchies of human society.... Butatthe
same time as they restricted us, these orders gave meaning to the world and to
the activities of social life.... The discrediting of these orders has been called the
‘‘disenchantment’’ of the world. With it, things lost some of their magic. (Taylor
1991 , 3 )
Weber identiWed modern science as the ‘‘motive force’’ behind these disen-
chanting and discomforting eVects: in deWning nature as a mechanism of
material parts, in deWning materiality as deterministic and devoid of spirit,
and in allowing spirit to retain its premodern deWnition as the exclusive locus
of ‘‘meaning,’’ science empties the lived, natural world of moral signiWcance.
What is more, the very logic of scientiWcprogressalso demoralizes. Because
every piece of scientiWc knowledge must be understood merely as a tempor-
ary and soon-to-be-superseded truth, modern selves are denied the psycho-
logical satisfaction of closure, the pleasure of a fully accomplished goal:
civilized man, placed in the midst of the continuous enrichment of culture by ideas,
knowledge and problems,... catches only the most minute part of what... life...
brings forth ever anew, and what he seizes is always something provisional and not
deWnitive, and therefore death for him is a meaningless occurrence. And because
death is meaningless, civilized life as such is meaningless: by its very ‘‘progressive-
ness’’ it gives death the imprint of meaninglessness. (Weber 1981 , 140 )
How, then, does Weber illuminate the link between modernity and self-
critique? How does modernity necessarily engender radical repudiations of
it? In subjecting norms to a demystiWcation that weakens their eYcacy without
providing any critique-proof alternatives, in reducing nature to a calculable
but heartless mechanism, and in celebrating a scientiWc progress that precludes
the pleasure of completion, modernityalienates. One response, perhaps the
most common one, is the demand for a return to a social whole exempt from
relentless analysis and to a natural world restored to its cosmic purpose. Weber
did not quite foresee the rise of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish fundamental-
isms that would characterize the last years of the twentieth and beginning of the
twenty-Wrst centuries. But he did insist that rationalization inevitably gener-
ates a black hole of meaninglessness and a set of profoundly disaVected critics.
To sum up the story that Weber recounts: modernity is now-time, posi-
tioned against a lost age of wholeness; moderns are swept up in accelerated
processes of disenchantment, scientization, secularization, mathematization,
bureaucratization, and alienation; as such, they bear the burden of a world
without intrinsic meaning, although they also beneWt from an unprecedented
216 jane bennett