TWO DISENCHANTMENTS

To any present-day sociologist, the word ‘disenchantment’ at once brings to mind Weber's ‘Entzauberung der Welt’ – the displacement, in a ‘demagified’ world, of the supernatural, the numinous, and the occult by direct observation, controlled experiment, and logical argument. It was not – or not to the extent that he supposed – an evolution unique to the West. Nor was it either as irreversible or as pervasive as he and many of his contemporaries and successors have been disposed to assume. But in the aftermath of the so-called ‘Enlightenment’, the collective European mind of the so-called ‘Middle Ages’ could be viewed with the complacency of hindsight as a culture of mysticism, bigotry, and superstition in which angels and demons fought for possession of human souls, the workings of nature were apprehended through signs, portents, and miracles, and Heaven was, so to speak, as close above our heads as Hell beneath our feet. By the time that T. H. Huxley had debated with Bishop Wilberforce, and Marx had published Volume I of Capital, theology had lost the hold it once had over the study of the workings of the world. It had not been comprehensively replaced by ‘natural’ or ‘mechanical’ philosophy. But it had been forced to surrender its erstwhile authority in the steadily widening area which Wissenschaft now claimed as its own.

There was, however, a different disenchantment still to come. What eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectuals preserved is as notable as what they rejected.