ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche has the honour of being the first to have understood the dialectic of enlightenment. Nietzsche does not explicitly use the word disenchantment, which later gained prominence through Max Weber's use of the term, to designate the process of rationalization, but he often uses the word in this sense, and enchantment as its antonym. In this perspective, Nietzsche makes the elements of historical foundations of religion, which in relationship to the myth are more rational, ultimately responsible for the fact that religion also succumbs to the onslaught of the same millennial processes of growing rationalization and disenchantment. In addition to Nietzsche, one can suggest a potential influence from the early work of Freud on Weber's rationalization thesis. The path of thought traced through the work of Weber, Troeltsch and Bultmann, following the guiding impetus of Nietzsche, entails that concept formation, determined by the demands of disenchantment, involves the attempt, beyond Weber, to rearticulate relationship between religion and the juridico-political.
