ABSTRACT
With his metaphor of the disenchantment of the world Max Weber expressed one of the central myths by which fabrication is understood and intellectually spurred on to ever greater feats of construction. Indeed, perhaps Weber’s image (which, it ought to be said, owes far more to a literary than to a specifically sociological imagination), has proved to be so popular and compelling precisely because it resonates so well with the practical belief that the human condition necessarily involves the social and cultural fabrication of homes fit for men and women to live in for all time. Take away the sense of melancholy which pervades what Weber says about disenchantment and what remains is, essentially, a myth of fabrication which tells a story of ever greater objectivity and ever greater humanity and humanization. (Although for Weber of course that humanization is a rather poisoned chalice; without the get-out clause of the charismatic leader it implies nothing other than the opening up of the iron cage of bureaucracy. As such, Weber tells a normative tale which fits in with the narrative structure of rise, decline and fall; from enchantment to disenchantment to rationality.)
At the heart of Weber’s metaphor is the contention that disenchantment may be understood as a process which is set in train by empirical knowledge: ‘empirical knowledge has consistently worked through to the disenchantment of the world and its transformation into a causal mechanism’ (Weber 1948:350). In other words, disenchantment is about the identification of an objective world out there which stands in mute opposition to the subjective world in here. That out there is commonly called nature and it is understood to obey processual laws which are taken to exist like mechanisms and can only be known from the point of
view of socially and culturally generated empirical knowledge. The out there has no subjective animating principle of its own since subjectivity is a purely social and cultural possession and condition. In its own terms, disenchantment demonstrates that the universe has no non-mechanistic definite meaning except for the kind of meaning which is predicated upon a leap of faith and which is, therefore, pushed beyond self-awareness and the possibility of empirical knowing (in other words, empirical knowledge allows for a ghost in the machine only to the extent that the ghost can never get in the way of empirically based activity. The ghost is allowed to exist only so long as it does not actually make too much of a difference to anything other than the quest of individuals to make life make sense).
