ABSTRACT
Max Weber's now classic coinage "disenchantment" has stressful mood-connections with fin de siecle and the holocaust of World War I. This chapter illustrates how, albeit without Procrustean uniformity, disenchantment has affected both politics and religion in contemporary life. In America, disenchantment has been very much conditioned by the way in which secularization was received. While America's enchantment was in many ways neither enchanting nor profound, a fact rarely missed by foreign observers, this very inhibition to flights of the intellect helped to make disenchantment a highly un-American enterprise, appropriate to solitude or exile. Disenchantment is porous: its social connectedness or social location is extremely hard to pin down because of its unmediated play of oppositions. Culture, on the other hand, which not only includes religion but is defined as the sacred, has been subject to "disenchantment" or "profanation". Nostalgia includes both privileged and anxious reactions to change within the movement of disenchantment.
