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The media became the most important research subject at the First German Sociological Conference in 1910 when Max Weber presented a detailed description of a 'Survey of the Press'. This rather sophisticated study, which fitted his research program of a 'disenchantment of the world', was supposed to prove the sociologists' expertise in the area of empirical research. But it was never realized and after its failure the topic even disappeared from the discipline's agenda for many years. In Germany, this only changed more than a decade after the Second World War when communication studies were looking for a new identity as a social science. But there was no systematic research on the question whether and how Weber's suggestions had become relevant. This article seeks to demonstrate that Weber's concerns remain relevant in the area of journalism research. Based on bibliometrics and a keyword-oriented content analysis, it investigates whether Weber's traces can be found in studies aimed to answer the research questions he initially posed and also whether the categories and key terms contained in his oeuvre have been used. The results suggest that Weber's ideas were a valuable contribution to the 'measurement of the media world' that took place only decades later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This 'note' constitutes a study of thematic affinities in the work of the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and Max Weber (1864-1920). With an emphasis on Weber's reference to Heine in the footnotes of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, we seek to respond to and explore Gregory Höhn's (2002) observation that in the philosophy of history expressed in Heine's poetry and prose, Heine anticipates Weber's understanding of the process of disenchantment and its existential consequences. This discussion is the site for a consideration of the Enlightenment-mythology relation. A particular emphasis is placed on devaluing reversal as a motif of the disenchantment-rationalization narrative in Heine and Weber, and how this motif relates to a condition of alienation. We explore the way in which devaluing reversal as an inner motif of the development of modern capitalist society finds an apposite expression in the religious image of the demonic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between Weber's concepts of bureaucracy and disenchantment are related to poetic concepts of disenchantment and re-enchantment in Goethe and Rilke. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Weber's ideas of value pluralism and disenchantment haunt modern political thought often without explicit acknowledgement. The problem of value pluralism in the work of Isaiah Berlin and John Rawls is explored. Is there an uncritical, even if implicit, acceptance of the idea of a connection between 'the fact of pluralism' as Rawls calls it and the idea of disenchantment? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weber's sociology and the novels of Thomas Pynchon share many themes. In this essay I will focus on Pynchon's two recent novels, Vineland, about contemporary America, and Mason&Dixon, about its origins. Vineland is about the 'counterculture' of the 1960s and poses questions about how this episode of "re-enchantment' in American history should be remembered. Mason&Dixon deals in large part with the conquest by the two surveyors of the American landmass, with its overtones of scientific mastery overreaching itself. These themes can be compared with Weber's view of America; how he regarded some aspects of American social life as illustrating the furthest extensions of the rationalization process, and at the same time thought that American invidualism, shaped by the religious sects, was potentially robust enough to withstand this process. The comparison between Weber's and Pynchon's views of America will lead to a discussion of the 'social construction' of the exceptional concern with American culture and its travails at the turn of the millenium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without wishing to deny the historical reality of processes of disenchantment, this paper challenges the classic Weberian account of disenchantment as a uni-directional and universalizing tendency of modernity. This argument has a number of stages. (1) Reason and rationalization are distinguished from each other. (2) The historical relationships between modernity, Reason and rationalization are problematized. (3) The scale and scope of rationalization are questioned (it is partial and unsuccessful, almost by definition). (4) Secularization and the 'decline of magic' are distinguished from each other. (5) Enchantment and re-enchantment are placed at the heart of modernity. Enchantment and re-enchantment are both distinctively modern and a response to modernity. While disenchantment has been a stimulus to (re)enchantment, enchantment may generate its own disenchantments. The two are opposite sides of one coin. This argument is exemplified by a brief look at the contradictions, alarms and damp squibs of the recent Millennium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]