ABSTRACT
Max Weber’s major writing on art appears within his sociology of religion, and predominantly in the much vaunted and, inevitably, much scrutinised Zwischenbetrachtung. Perhaps the strongest sense of what is at stake for Weber in terms of this overarching concern with meaning can be appreciated through consideration of the concept of disenchantment. The road to Protestant disenchantment begins, for Weber, with ancient Judaism, and when its logical extreme is reached some severe implications can be witnessed. That great historic process in the development of religions, the elimination of magic from the world which had begun with the old Hebrew prophets and, in conjunction with Hellenistic scientific thought, had repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin, came to its logical conclusion. In varying degrees, magic is stripped from the world in all intellectualised urban cultures, usually in combination with increasingly rationalised theologies.
