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This paper explores the growing divide between Scotland and England, a schism that was beginning to take form with Scottish devolution and which has grown exponentially since the Independence Referendum of 2014. The central argument presented in the paper is that renewed impetus for national distinction and self-determination in Scotland is best understood as one facet of a much wider popular disenchantment and growing restiveness with the trajectory of contemporary UK politics, culture and society that has found an outlet via a resurgent nationalist discourse and institutional framework. Analysis here is approached via the application of an original biosocial theory with the aim of presenting further insights into the underlying processes driving contemporary political instability. Moreover, it is argued that this scenario can be understood, and may shed light upon, the wider rise in nationalist and populist sentiment that is contributing to increasing political turbulence across Europe and beyond.

In Zambia, dreams about snakes are connected to the devil. In Pentecostal ministries, testimonies about such experiences have a clear role: they function as proof that the battle between God and Satan is very real. An alternative approach is to see the dream snake as a symbol that can become meaningful in multiple ways. This article argues that both approaches are related to a process of disenchantment. Pentecostal ministries feel the need to give proof of the enchanted, spiritual world; while in the alternative approach former religious entities have become disenchanted as individual symbols.

The purpose of this chapter is to lay the methodological and theoretical foundations for the case studies in this book. Important to the empirical interrogation of the coast here are Weber’s methods and theories. The chapter begins initially by arguing that we need to resist presentism and ensure that we are historically aware when we conduct sociology. It then uses Weber’s work in rationalisation and disenchantment to suggest that throughout modernity different life-spheres rationalise in their own unique ways. Coasts, the chapter argues, have done and continue to follow this trajectory. Finally the chapter concludes by introducing concept formation through the ideal-type, with which the different types of coasts we see today can be aligned.

This chapter identifies historical disorientation as an aspect of liberal political thought in the decades following the Second World War. Using Isaiah Berlin’s intellectual biography as a basis, Gusejnova examines his disenchantment with the ideas of Immanuel Kant alongside his alienation from the more recent historical experience of the Eastern European Jews. Berlin argued that modern liberalism needed a ‘negative’ conceptualisation, which he compared to a citadel into which the subject could retreat. Pointing to a more geographically specific knowledge of citadels in Eastern Europe, Gusejnova suggests dating the emergence of this way of thinking to the Peace of Brest-Litovsk and the citadel of Brest. While continental intellectual historians like Hans Saner and Reinhart Koselleck had addressed the subject of unjust peace treaties, it was Berlin’s and later John Rawls’s estranged attitude towards recent history that prevailed as the more dominant view in Cold War political thought.

This chapter illustrates The Hobbit’s evolving significance for different kinds of fans, casual viewers and critics, and presents a comprehensive understanding of the factors that led to continued engagement versus progressive disenchantment and disaffection among different groups of viewers. Drawing on the project’s unique longitudinal dataset, it shows that an increasingly widely shared sentiment was disappointment at a failed adaptation and at the missed opportunity to replicate the heady success of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Disappointment primarily centred on issues pertaining to the quality of the adaptation and crystallised around the chief controversy surrounding the second and third Hobbit films: the introduction of a non-canon female character and a controversial love triangle. This issue is explored in depth here.

These five scientists and one social scientist were still doctoral students or had just graduated when our study ended. All had initially imagined future research-teaching positions—though not directly after their degrees. The stories are grouped: first, the two individuals who maintained their intentions despite challenges and second, the four who shifted their intentions away from research-teaching posts. Many challenges were shared by all, however, the four whose intentions shifted away from academia also developed a growing dislike of academic life and began to see a research-teaching position as unobtainable. You may value reading the second set of stories if you have any doubts about remaining in the academy. Our interpretations are offered at the end, so you can compare our ideas with what struck you.

One of the notable features of twenty-first-century British drama is its preoccupation with the manifestations, existential implications and ethical possibilities of belief across varied religious and secular contexts. Drawing on the philosopher and sociologist Max Weber’s landmark lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1918), which identifies ‘disenchantment’ as the presiding condition of modernity, and Simon During’s writings on ‘secular magic’, Megson shows how the encounter with belief in contemporary theatre raises vital questions about its capacity to enchant, delude or transform social reality at the present juncture. The chapter includes detailed analysis of Rob Drummond’s Bullet Catch (Arches, 2009), Lucy Prebble’s Enron (Royal Court, 2009) and Mike Bartlett’s 13 (National Theatre, 2011).

Here you meet eleven individuals who changed their career intentions away from research-teaching positions during or after their PhDs, prompted by personal or structural reasons or a combination of the two. Personal reasons included academic partners’ career goals, parenting, nearness to family, and illness. Structural reasons often related to disenchantment with academic life, the years required before possibly getting a research-teaching position, and/or a sense that they were not competitive enough to obtain such positions. The stories are clustered: first, the five social scientists who have already made the shift to new careers and then, the four scientists who are still in the process. You may value reading these stories if you have any doubts about remaining in the academy.

The protest movements that emerged in Spain in 1980–81 may have been different in several respects to those in other Northern and Western European countries. While many cities in those countries witnessed the rise of an autonomist and squatter movement, noted for their direct action repertoires and countercultural values, the Spanish context was still strongly shaped by the transition from the Franco dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy. In order to understand the movements of 1980–81 in Spain, it is thus necessary to position them within the general political context of the transition era, which began after Franco’s death in 1975 and ended with the rise to government of the Socialist Party in 1982. In the Spanish context, the transition era has a stronger explanatory value for the socio-political changes that took place in the early 1980s than the specific years 1980–81. However, in this chapter we argue that the years 1980–81 did play an important role in this process. These were the years in which the hopes of a generation of political activists for revolutionary change awakened, after four decades of dictatorship, and gave way to the disenchantment (desencanto) of the 1980s. What arose out of desencanto was a movement far more similar to the radical movements in the rest of Europe.

This book is unapologetic about its claim that development is increasingly being associated with the ‘local’ primarily because of unevenness in the results of the myriad models and strategies that have characterized post-WW11 development efforts, and out of which is borne disenchantment with the idea of development. In consequence of these two variables, considerable adjustment in development thinking and practice is taking place. It is within this framework that we seek to initiate a conversation around the role of local government in development through critical exposition of the praxis of developmental local government and governance in different countries, as outlined in the Introduction. The fundamental question that underpins each perspective in this book pertains to the manner in which the relationship between local government and development is being structured. The analyses offer important insights into the types of institutional arrangements that might be necessary to give effect to developmental local government and governance. But there is a more fundamental purpose for putting together this collection of varied experiences of governments’ attempts to decentre development: It is to aid successful policy transfer. Therefore, an important question that arises as a result of the findings of each case study in this text is: What are the lessons for policy?

In this chapter, an overview of the political developments of 1956 (the “Polish October”) precedes a relation of a very short blooming period. The international opening of previously isolated Polish sociology after the end of Stalinism is claimed to bring fresh methodological and theoretical impulses, mostly from the USA. A relative normalization and stabilization, whose symbol might be the revival of the Polish Sociological Association in 1957, is also claimed to be swiftly counteracted by political pressures, culminating in the anti-revisionist witch-hunts and the anti-Semitic propaganda of the late 1960s and the students’ revolts in March 1968. The author lists the real and symbolic damages done by 1968, arguing that the intelligentsia’s disenchantment with political action and public engagement opened a period of spiritual stagnation and organizational opportunism.

At the age of twenty John Stuart Mill was enveloped by a ‘cloud’ that would not ‘pass away of itself. Calling this period ‘a crisis in my mental history’, Mill blamed it on a realisation that his ambition to promote social reform was no longer a guarantor of happiness. The Benthamite utilitarianism that had given his life purpose, acquired in part through the unyielding educational experiment endured at the hands of his father James Mill, suddenly seemed insufficient. Mill’s tonic would be poetry, notably that of William Wordsworth, but in his Autobiography (1873), he framed this disenchantment with the strenuous logicism of Benthamism in an interesting way: If I am asked what system of political philosophy I substitute for that which … I had abandoned, I answer, no system: only a conviction, that the true system was something much more complex and many sided than I had previously had any idea of.1

In recent years, memory studies have begun focussing on embodied memories rather than on places and sites of memory. This has occurred at the same time as an ‘affective turn’ in cultural theory, in which the body is understood, not in terms of constructionism, but in terms of ‘intensities’ that represent non-cognitive disruptions and discontinuities in conscious experience.1 Memory’s bodies, especially in contexts such as those of ‘the disappeared’, are frequently objects rather than subjects: initially the objects of torture and suffering, they become, through remembrance, the objects of others’ gazes (and at times others’ politicized manipulations) at the same time as they elicit affective and emotional responses from those who view them. They are also frequently the objects of transnational gazes, as memory’s images now circulate globally, evoking both national- and cultural-specific traumas as well as becoming instrumentally linked to other, parallel or comparable, but not identical, traumas. The global valency of the term, ‘the disappeared’, which originated with Southern Cone Latin American dictatorships, illustrates the point. The phrase now generally evokes notions of illegal detention and forced disappearance, as well as the emotive situation of relatives and family members left dealing with the aftermath of irrecuperable and possibly legally unproveable loss, which is frequently crystalized in mug shots or identity photos of those missing.

Many communities and nations across the Arab World face compounding social and environmental challenges. The rising levels of unemployment, illiteracy, poverty, corruption, and inequality coupled with increasing resource dependency, high rates of pollution, water shortages, and ensuing conflicts have sown many seeds of disenchantment across the region. More importantly, those trying to usher in positive change on any single one of these challenges appear to be faced with superhuman barriers; the underlying complexities and structural considerations make direct action with scalable results a near impossibility.

The post-1985 “bubble economy” intruded into the world of politics with the expansion of special warishin bearer bonds. Diabetes and prostate cancer hobbled Kanemaru’s political activities. The LDP leadership proposed a consumption tax, but Kanemaru suddenly broke ranks and disavowed it, throwing the LDP elite into a tizzy. Kanemaru engineered Nakasone’s departure and Takeshita’s ascension in the hard-fought 1987 LDP Presidential sweepstakes. Kanemaru became “the guardian” of the Diet’s largest political group, the Keiseikai or the Takeshita faction (October, 1987). Kanemaru and Takeshita fought over the consumption tax. The Recruit “scandal”: Takeshita’s power web was publically revealed in the media, forcing Takeshita to resign. Mudslinging and broken promises brought public disenchantment and anger. Takeshita selected Uno Sosuke as Prime Minister (Summer, 1989), cutting Kanemaru out of the loop.

As the educated children of occidental modernity, we often hear that our age is ruled by the twin processes of scientific disenchantment and technological rationalization. The social meanings and cultural values that prevail today are said to be sustained by a globalizing spirit of capitalist democracy and its bureaucratic disciplines, while the modern work ethic and new ways of conducting oneself are extended into a variety of individualizing and communal forms of expression and taste. A secular worldview appears to saturate all cultural spheres, from the everyday worlds of work and leisure to the institutional domains of the sciences, arts, and politics. And yet, as the intensification of industry and the expansion of commerce in the capitalist world system are reproduced by bureaucratic power structures at the highest levels, religious and traditional worldviews also become fragmented into fundamentalist revivals, often re-enchanting life at the depths of ordinary experience. Out of these competing and complementary forces, the unique path that ‘the West’ has forged to modernity is both entrenched and undermined, so that this civilization’s claim to ‘universal’ value and validity is perpetually revised and reasserted, but also continuously challenged and called into question.

In Maps of Englishness Simon Gikandi recounts his time at Edinburgh University in the early 1980s, thinking about empire, writing and identity ‘before the advent of postcolonial theory and cultural studies’.1 In the late 1970s and early 1980s I was a PhD student, also from a former colony, seeking intellectual capital abroad at the University of British Columbia. I also was working on the relations between the end of empire and the ‘crisis’ in English identity in a thesis on the fiction of Patrick White and Malcolm Lowry. But my ability to grasp those relations was thwarted not so much by the state of postcolonial or cultural theory as by the peculiar force of the late-settler nationalism I carried with me. As a ‘Pakeha’ (European-descended) New Zealander professionalising myself at a university in another settler nation I had yet fully to confront the awkward cultural politics of decolonisation. The country I had left behind was entering its own identity crisis both as the loyal offspring of a Britain with more pressing concerns than its former colonies and as a settler society beginning to feel its own internal discontents: in particular, an increasingly assertive sovereignty movement among Maori people. Nevertheless, the growing disenchantment among the Pakeha middle class with Prime Minister Rob Muldoon’s revivalist settler state had not yet shocked the underlying structure of settler consciousness into acknowledging its colonial history or the limits of its complacently monocultural nationalism.

‘Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology’ proclaims the introduction to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (xvii). This chiastic statement lies at the core of this work’s account of a fundamental incompatibility between enlightenment’s goals of ‘liberating human beings from fear’ (the freedom that Adorno and Horkheimer believe is inseparable from enlightenment thinking) and the simultaneous state of ‘the wholly enlightened earth’ as ‘radiant with triumphant calamity’ (DoE, 1). The key to grasping this interrelation of enlightenment and myth lies in the depiction of nature, to which one subsection will here be dedicated. Nature, for the longest period, was deemed to hold a degree of enchantment; it was intrinsically meaningful. The abstracted tales that correlate to such a foundationalist stance are myths. Conversely, at the dawn of the Age of Reason there began a progressive disenchantment of nature: ‘[f]rom now on, matter was to be controlled without the illusion of immanent powers or hidden properties’ (DoE, 3). The world and all aspects therein were available to be used and understood; there was no longer any intrinsic meaning: ‘[o]n their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning’ (3). This disenchantment of nature is termed enlightenment.

This chapter explores the dystopian cultural construction of science and technology across the discourses of social science, science fiction and popular film. This powerful language of disenchantment borrows heavily from Romantic critiques of modern society, and articulates wider cultural sensibilities about the dissolution of social order and stability in the modern world, alongside fears about the effects of technology as a force for dehumanisation and domination.

No one who teaches in senior secondary schools can be ignorant of the disenchanted young adults among whom they work (Hascher and Hagenauer, 2010; Young et al., 1997b). Following Weber (2009) the concept of disenchantment means that schooling provides for young adults’ increasing intellectualisation and rationality, but does not increase their knowledge of the conditions under which they live. Schooling does not help young adults deal with their disaffection, alienation and insecurity with respect to twenty-first-century capital accumulation. Among these young adults, some have at sundry times plotted mischief against the project of classroom-centric schooling (Sheets, 1996).

The resilience of the political speech remains a marvel. In the age of Twitter, where attention spans are short and political disenchantment great, politicians with something important to say invariably still turn to the oldest method we know — the speech. Aristotle and Plato — or senators at the Roman Forum — were they magically transported into the twenty-first century to listen to a prime minister addressing the parliament, would immediately recognise the activity taking place. It is an act of persuasion using nothing more elaborate than the tools of ethos, logos and pathos that Aristotle divined more than two millennia ago. So how can this be? The sophistication of the human race has produced newspapers and computers, printing presses and soap-boxes, media management experts and representative parliamentary democracy. Yet, why have we not managed to perfect a better or more useful art for marking out what is important in politics than the political speech?

It is no surprise that belief in the world of spirits and messiahs, belief conditioned essentially by social disenchantment, should cause socially disenfranchised groups to attempt to unite that belief with political and economic arguments derived from utopian socialists. For a time in the nineteenth century there was certainly debate and bridge-building between both spiritualists and socialists, and utopian socialists were also in the spiritualist movement. This was especially so in Britain, where many of the founders of the Labour Party were themselves spiritualists. Spiritualism’s egalitarian nature also allowed women to take centre stage in proceedings and created ground for debate on temperance and suffrage. Frustrated revolutionary emigres escaping from the failed insurrections of the period from 1830 to 1848, arriving from France, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia and Germany also took to spiritualism (or spiritism as it was then called) as a compensation for their impotence in their own national affairs; a symptom of psychic displacement, frustration, fanaticism and despair. The spiritualist movement was not only egalitarian, it was also democratic in the basic sense, not communist but communalist, open to the influence of the Church and scientific reasoning.

In 1960 at the University College of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, Arthur Lewis, as Principal, addressed students on their Matriculation. In his Address, Lewis described himself, like most of his audience, as a ‘new’ student, but in his case one who had been away from the West Indies for 27 years. The theme of his Address was the question of West Indian ‘identity’: ‘What is a West Indian?’ he asked the students in his Address. ‘What are we trying to be? These are the speculations of a West Indian who has been away from these islands since before you were born, and who has only just returned. It is not I who will make the image of the new West Indian, but you.’1

The relationship between modernity, modernism and occultism has become a growing field of scholarship in recent years. In contrast to Max Weber’s thesis of disenchantment, we have become familiar with the ways that scientific incursions into the domain of belief produced new forms of re-enchantment in the form of spiritualism,1 telepathy,2 or magical thinking associated with new technologies.3 Wouter Hanegraaff has argued that occultism persisted into modernity through processes of psychologisation: ‘magic has been interpreted increasingly as a series of psychological techniques for exalting individual consciousness; the original focus on learning how to use the hidden forces of the natural world has become dependent on learning how to use the hidden forces of the psyche’.4 Hanegraaff’s view has been challenged by Egil Asprem, who has argued that psychologisation can be equated with psychological escapism, while occultists such as Aleister Crowley were seen to ‘embrace natural scientific inquiry and tirelessly pursue such critical assessment of magical techniques, practices and results, reclaiming the subjective experiences for intersubjective scrutiny’.5 In both cases the authors are interested in the ways in which occultists are able to legitimate their beliefs and practices within the intellectual (and more specifically scientific) contexts of modernity.

The massive growth of evangelical churches across much of the planet in recent times is especially ironic from an African perspective. It is not merely that these movements underline what has become a truism: the enduring, even intensifying salience of the sacred in our ever more rationalised world — something that defies the telos of disenchantment, presumed by the great evolutionary theorists of modernity. It is also that the forms of religious life that have proved most adaptive to conditions on the continent in the twenty first century challenge many of the tenets of Protestant modernism promulgated by the likes of Max Weber, or by those who hoped to usher Africans into the ‘civilized’ world by way of conversion. What is more, the movements that have proved to be most popular in current times have been self-propagating in a manner that eluded earlier, laborious efforts to seed Christianity on African soil — like the effort by the European missions to cultivate self-possessed African converts, to tame their passions and to instil a message of salvation through patient toil.

In his treatise on the ‘frailty of human bonds ’, Zygmunt Bauman claims that for modern societies love is eclipsed by power, and desire is eclipsed by spontaneous urges: ‘As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’ (Bauman, 2003: 8). For Bauman and numerous other sociologists of contemporary sexuality, the vision of the end emerges in a condition of crisis: love and desire become the ‘fear and trembling’ of the advanced world’s emotional, reproductive and sexual insecurity.1 More than anything else, the sexual and erotic desires that were associated with ‘lust ’, as the counterforce of love, have been reconditioned by a society that has grown increasingly intolerant of the deferral of gratification. In a context of cultural and economic urgency, love has become subsumed by a more exigent volition to pleasure. As outlined in previous chapters, this volition and the fantasy of infinite pleasure compounds love and desire in the densely mediated conditions of consumerism and the pursuit of pleasure through the pursuit of purchase. In Bauman’s terms, desire has become trammelled up into the needs of perpetual acceleration and the imperatives of spontaneous, consumer urges.

After years of prevarication, non-negotiation and bluster, televised election debates came to the United Kingdom in 2010. For many, this was seen as the worst of times to try such an experiment: in the aftermath of the MPs’ expenses scandal, politicians’ reputations were at a low ebb; in a period of economic crisis and austerity political leaders were accused of not being straight about their policy intentions. Could the televised prime ministerial debates lead to something like a fresh start — perhaps even serving to reduce or alleviate public disenchantment? Or might the debates fall down the sceptical drain, as it were — be dismissed as just ‘more of the same’? With their peak audiences of 10.3 million viewers,1 the televised debates made possible direct appeals from candidates for the premiership to the immediacy of the domestic audience. While we should not overstate the significance of these events (both the most-viewed first debate on ITV and the second most-viewed debate on BBC attracted smaller audiences than Britain’s Got Talent, EastEnders and Dr Who, all shown in the same weeks), there can be little doubt that they reached more voters than any other episode of televised election coverage — and stimulated a considerable amount of reflective commentary and debate both on television and in the wider media.

The characteristics of a social movement defy easy categorization, and the Freewoman periodical offers a case study which adds to our understanding of how social movements operate, yet also pushes at the definitions of what a social movement is, and how its media might function. Movement media have typically been viewed as secondary to the formation of the ‘core’ movement; it is often assumed that social movements formulate grievances and collective identities at a face-to-face level or through everyday ‘submerged networks,’ and then during a more publicist or insurgent phase, attempt to convey or communicate them (Melucci 1985; Mueller 1994: 236). Early twentieth-century feminist movement media, however, challenge this model, and place communications at the heart of collective identity formation. The publication of the Freewoman was not a tactic adopted by a pre-existing movement, but itself tentatively brought some new collective identities into being. Though the Freewoman did not follow conventional social movement formulae of attempting to mobilize large numbers or influence the state, it offered a space to think about movement dynamics, and envisage new avenues of activism. It also offered a site of disenchantment and disaffiliation amongst suffragists; its letters pages and archived correspondences offer unique insights into the trajectories of commitment and motivation at the individual level.

Chapter 3 has addressed Morgenthau’s endorsement of the ‘death of God’ diagnosis, his awareness of the relativism and perspectivism embedded in moral and epistemological arguments, and his concern with the status of truth and meaning in modernity. Chapter 4 has analysed the translation of Morgenthau’s metaphysics into a political theory with disenchantment and power as meaning imposition at its core, and has discussed the elements which make up Morgenthau’s vision of political leadership. The present chapter represents the resolution which brings together the various strands of the argument so far, and focuses on Morgenthau’s commitment to the creative restoration of tradition, and on his attempt to close the openness announced and discussed by Nietzsche and Weber. The creative restoration of the ‘old’ constitutes Morgenthau’s solution to the nihilistic crisis, and the unit by which he argues that the strength of political leadership is measured. Morgenthau’s strategy for avoiding absolute relativism encompasses the use of a particular conception of man in order to stabilise meaning, and involves a constant move between universality and particularity, obvious in his conceptualisation of the statesman. The argument in this chapter demonstrates that Morgenthau finds the idea of tradition in politics very appealing, and he perceives it as a viable foundation likely to offer guidance in the production of theory, and in the interpretation of current political developments.

By 1964, Hans Morgenthau regarded the opportunities offered by the social and political order more optimistically. When asked about the disillusions expressed earlier, he replied: ‘I’m through with being disillusioned, as it were. I try now to come to terms with the positive values which human nature and human life, social and political life, contain and more particularly potentialities which human life and the social and the political order contain’ (‘The Sum and Substance’ interview, Morgenthau Papers, Box 172, p. 5). At that time, Morgenthau was trying to raise his contemporaries’ awareness of the ‘death of God’, and the perils of meaninglessness and technological advancement. At the same time however, his earlier criticism of the perceived disenchantment of the world, including here the disenchantment of the political world, was tempered by the belief that mankind could use ‘the new potentialities’ provided by modern technology to its advantage, instead of its destruction (see Fifth Lecture at the Oriental Institute, 7 April 1950, Morgenthau Papers, Box 169, p. 23). The present interpretation maintains that despite the aforementioned coming-to-terms with life’s positive values, the foundational assumptions embedded in Morgenthau’s theory — the ‘death of God’, the subsequent advent of nihilism and disenchantment, and the fight over power interpreted as meaning imposition — will endure in his account until the very end.

This chapter rounds off the arguments developed throughout the book, highlighting the key points arrived at in previous chapters, and indicating their originality vis-a-vis other evaluations of Morgenthau’s theory. It also points to certain issues in Morgenthau’s account which have attracted criticism, and spells out the position taken in the present interpretation. The chapter ends with an assessment of the importance of Morgenthau’s thought for the modernity/postmodernity dichotomy as manifested in IR, indicating its relevance to debates related to the death of universal values and the legitimacy of a singular meaning and truth.

If the 2009 MPs expenses scandal was the acme of how remote Parliament seemed from the people, it also revealed more enduring popular frustrations with formal politics — that far from confined to Britain, were common to many liberal democracies. Musing on ‘the contemporary condition… of political disaffection and disenchantment’ in 2007 Colin Hay argued, ‘“Politics” has increasingly become a dirty word’.1 And, as Lawrence’s timely history of electoral conduct contends, both politicians and the modern media have effectively marginalized the public from political debate. Representative politics has been challenged not just by falling party membership and participation, but has been a victim of a secular decline in a range of other forms of associational activism. Given diminishing trust and interest in party, part of the alleged falling stock of social capital and health of the public sphere, and studies like Why We Hate Politics, a political version of Callum Brown’s The Death of Christian Britain thesis might recommend itself to cultural historians aiming to capture the essence of politics’ history since the 1950s.2

In ‘the outset of life’, William Hazlitt muses, tellingly more than half way through ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, ‘our imagination has a body to it’ (ix. 104).1 Hazlitt’s imagination vividly embodies his ‘first acquaintance’ with Coleridge and Wordsworth in the essay, bathing it in an unsentimental glow of affection and rapture, even as his later disillusion finds expression. The result is a remarkable account of an affective and intellectual trajectory central to the Romantic period: bliss at the ‘outset’, subsequent disenchantment. In the essay Hazlitt writes with the subdued passion of the principled dissenter, who has not sold his political soul for a mess of Tory pottage, but he also writes with real and brilliant empathy: ‘the sense of a new style and a new spirit in poetry came over me’ (ix. 104), a ‘new style and a new spirit’ imprinted on the lineaments of the countryside round Alfoxden.

In 1976, Hans Morgenthau was asked by a journal to make a list of the ten books that were the most important to him, for an article called ‘Books that Shape Lives’ (see Frei, 2001, p. 113). In an impressive list of authors and titles, among Carr, Arendt and Plato, along with Aristotle’s Politics and Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man, we find The Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche and The Political Writings of Max Weber (Frei, 2001, p. 113). This list constitutes one of the very few public acknowledgements of the authors whom Morgenthau considered of utmost importance to him, authors whose insights he deemed relevant to his theory, and employed for his own purposes. The present chapter intends to focus on the Nietzschean—Weberian section of Morgenthau’s list, and to emphasise these thinkers’ special role in the articulation of Morgenthau’s scholarly perspective, and of his concern with meaning and disenchantment in particular.

This chapter investigates the claim that modernity is synonymous with secularism. The idea has long been an orthodoxy among historians of western Europe and North America. Indeed, many historians of the West have embraced an appealingly simple notion of modern progressive development that runs something like this: As societies modernize, with scientific rationality emerging hand in hand with capitalist economic development and liberal political democracy, they experience what German sociologist Max Weber labeled the progressive ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Weber 155). In this scenario, the emergence of modern life is identified with a set of historical conditions that include the industrial revolution, the transition to urban culture, the rise of the nation-state, and the emerging power of the bourgeoisie, all of which were shaped by and also shaped specific political, intellectual, and cultural discourses around rationality and secularism. In short, the conventional historical narrative of western modernity is predicated on the inevitability of religious decline.

Those early twentieth-century thinkers who believed that modernity was ‘disenchanted’ were unlikely to perceive the uncanny as a source of genuine knowledge, but rather as an immature affect that needed to be explained away. It is possible to discern this sentiment in Max Weber, for example. Weber did not discuss the uncanny specifically, but he alluded to something comparable in a revealing aside in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Deriding the ‘fashionable’ idea that specialists ought to be ‘degraded to a position subordinate to that of a seer’, he sneers in response, ‘He who yearns for seeing should go to the cinema.’1 For Weber, rationalized science yields not only scientific specialists, but also the disenchantment of the world; both ‘seers’ and the cinema belong to the marginal and irrational sphere of mass culture. Thus the ‘uncanny’, associated with the mysterious powers of the seer, is implicitly dismissed as a relic of the premodern, enchanted world.

In Part III of this book, we have tried to show that the alienation that characterizes much human distress consists partly in disenchantment with the world. The forms of scepticism we have begun to chart are perhaps less the cause than the symptom of this. We stand in need of redemption of a kind, and each of our three themes — therapy, education, philosophy — has its stakes in this; yet we are wary of redemption stories, burdened as they can become with a drama of eschatology, perhaps the promise of salvation, just as we are wary of the sentimental idealization of the ordinary. How then shall we proceed? What we intend in this final chapter is to retrace some of the threads that we have woven into this text as a whole, a weaving that has profited from some unravelling too. The questions that are opened as these themes intertwine might marry easily with a number of ready-made responses, which present themselves with the insistence of confident suitors. Our investment in these questions has caused us, chapter by chapter, to extend our refusal of such solutions, in continuing expectation of a better return.

Like Meillassoux, Alain Badiou not only declares his fealty to the legacy of Cartesian rationalism; he openly endorses the Enlightenment project of disenchantment.1 For Badiou, the denigration of mathematical rationality in much post-Kantian European philosophy is symptomatic of the sway which Romanticism continues to exert over philosophical sensibility. Where a belated philosophical Romanticism continues to bewail the ‘nihilistic’ consequences incurred by science’s disenchantment of the world and capital’s desecration of the earth, Badiou proposes that philosophy take up the challenge posed to it by the annihilating vectors of science and capital the better to accede to a register of universality capable not only of matching but of surpassing the abstractions of number and the value-form.

The violence that preoccupies as I write this covers so wide a span of the global arena that it is difficult to imagine peaceful spaces, though these exist and define, in some incalculable sense, the vast array of human interactions. Nevertheless violent conflict preoccupies precisely because of its seeming persistence irrespective of the very modern idea that we have the capacity to eradicate it. The defining certainties of modernity — the state, citizenship, democratic space, scientific and technological advancement, rationality over tradition — have, in the late modern era come face to face with uncertainty, unpredictability and the reemergence of the parochial and the particular. There is both a disenchantment, a loss of faith, in rationality’s capacity to “legislate for peace” as well as a resilience borne of the project of modernity itself, a resilience that has temporal and spatial expression, universalising in its remit to contain the unpredictable and the particular.

It has often been argued that the conceptual beginning of modernity lies in the notion of man’s self-determination and what Charles Taylor famously called ‘the disenchantment of the world’.1 It will be one of the tasks of this introductory chapter to suggest that the idea of modern humanism should be understood in relation to the loss of the traditional ontological order of the world. This will enable us to provide a contextual background for our discussion of two alternative approaches to the political, approaches attempting to go beyond modern humanism. Thus I shall argue that the modern conception of humanism, the idea of self-determining reason, the Enlightenment attempts to formulate rationally justified autonomous morality which,as it was believed, would serve as the cornerstone for universal civilisation, together with instrumental reason giving the impetus for the establishment of modern science – all of these have to be understood together and in relation to the decline of the traditional ontological world-view. Such a conception of modern humanism contrasts with Martin Heidegger’s and more recently John Gray’s understanding, since this notion of humanism will be exclusively linked to modernity. It will be claimed that only in modernity and due to modernity has humanism become the all pervasive ideology and Weltanschauung of the contemporary world.

The rationalization and disenchantment of the world, as outlined in the previous two chapters, is accompanied by the rise of new instrumentally rational forms of this-worldly legitimation (for example, monocratic bureaucracy), and by the differentiation and de-differentiation of modern culture, manifested in the emergence and rationalization of autonomous and conflicting life-orders. The outcome of this movement, is a form of cultural nihilism, for with the rationalization of the world ultimate values are progressively disenchanted by the claims of ‘rational’ science, or even devalue and disenchant themselves through a process of self-rationalization that is spurred by the (unintended) cultivation of new forms of instrumental reason. In view of this, the present chapter analyses Weber’s position on science, and questions the value of this enterprise given, first, its role in disenchanting the world, and second, its apparent inability to fill the void left by the death of God. This chapter will focus on the lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber’s most explicit statement on science, and will pay particular attention to its allusions to the work of Tolstoy and Nietzsche. It will be argued that Weber, in forging a position against that of Tolstoy (the rejection of this world) and Nietzsche (the revaluation of all values), offers us a guide to how we may employ instrumental reason while remaining sensitive to the further rationalization and disenchantment of the world.

A crucial aspect of the rationalization and disenchantment of the world is the differentiation of modern culture. For Weber, this process accompanies the general movement of nihilism in the West (see Chapter 2), for with the ‘death’ of God worldly values proliferate, separate out and are drawn into endless conflict with one another. This process leads to the formation of a world torn by an infinite number of value-conflicts, for ‘rational’ (scientific) knowledge, which, for Weber, is limited to questions of fact rather than value, is unable to resolve the crisis of values that it itself inaugurated. Weber argues, however, that the differentiation of culture into irreconcilable value-positions is accompanied at the same time by the overarching de-differentiation of values within each modern life-order. This process takes the form of the rationalization of value-positions, and this in turn leads to the increasing homogenization of all cultural forms. The rationalization process is, therefore, deeply tragic in nature, for, while seeming to contain a heterogeneous or postmodern moment (Holton and Turner, 1989), it in fact intensifies the underlying sameness of culture, and with this contributes to the increasing sameness of modern life itself.

Some of the most ambitious and innovative public policy reforms adopted in Latin America in recent years have made stakeholder appeals to citizen participation, self-help and ownership.1 By involving and mobilizing potential beneficiaries during reform adoption and forwarding the long-term benefits of reform to the present, politicians have hoped to make contentious reforms self-sustaining. However, five years into reform implementation, questions of long-term institutional survival are more than ever on the minds of reformers. Poor institutional performance, public disenchantment and policy reversals have started to unravel some of the more political and volatile aspects of privatization, pension and decentralization reforms throughout the region. How to make complex and divisive policy reforms succeed? How to move from policy adoption to implementation, from short-term feasibility to long-term viability? Where do the so-called second generation reforms fit in the larger scheme of political and economic development?2

Max Weber’s sociology of religion contains an account of the emergence and development of modern Western culture. This account reads the history of the West in terms of two interconnected processes: the rise and spread of Occidental (instrumental) rationalism (the process of rationalization) and the accompanying dis-enchantment (Entzauberung) of religious superstition and myth.2 More precisely, it treats Western culture as the product of two key developmental transitions (Schroeder, 1987, 207; Owen, 1994, 101): the elimination of prehistoric forms of magical religiosity with the rise of universal religion, and the subsequent disenchantment of universal religion with the emergence of modern ‘rational’ science and the advanced capitalist order. The present chapter will examine the logic of these two transitions, and with this analyse Weber’s position on the rise, trajectory and logic of modern culture.3 It will be argued that, for Weber, the transition to modernity is driven by a process of cultural rationalization, one in which ultimate values rationalize and devalue themselves, and are replaced increasingly by the pursuit of materialistic, mundane ends. This process of devaluation or disenchantment, gives rise to a condition of cultural nihilism in which the intrinsic value or meaning of values or actions are subordinated increasingly to a ‘rational’ quest for efficiency and control.

The writings of Max Weber and Jean-Francois Lyotard appear at first glance to lie in radical opposition. The work of Weber, on the one hand, is of a typically modern nature, centring on the power politics of the nation-state, the meaning of social action and the affinity between religious ethics and the rationalization and disenchantment of the world. The work of Lyotard, on the other, became typically postmodern, and attacks modern forms of representation, authority, power and justice. In spite of this, however, there are important points of convergence between these two thinkers over the question of cultural rationalization. These points will be addressed in the present chapter through analysis of Weber’s and Lyotard’s respective positions on three key issues: first, the nature of modern and postmodern science; second, the form and consequences of cultural differentiation; and, finally, the aesthetic sphere as a possible site of resistance to, or even escape from, Western rationalism. Special reference will be made to the work of Charles Turner (1990) throughout the course this chapter, for it provides a useful starting point for reading between Weber and Lyotard, and for addressing the question of cultural differentiation in particular.