The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences

Jason A. Josephson-Storm

மே 2017 · University of Chicago Press

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This study of the early human sciences and their deep connections to spiritualism dispenses with the myth that separates magic and modernity.

Many theorists contend that the defining feature of modernity is our collective loss of faith in spirits, myths, and magic. But in The Myth of Disenchantment, Jason A. Josephson-Storm argues against this narrative, showing that attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than not. Even the human sciences have been more enchanted than is commonly supposed. But that raises the question: How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted?

Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. He demonstrates that the founding figures of these “mythless” disciplines were in fact profoundly enmeshed in the occult and spiritualist revivals of Britain, France, and Germany. It was in response to this milieu that they produced notions of a disenchanted world.

By providing a novel history of the human sciences and their connection to esotericism, The Myth of Disenchantment dispatches with most widely held accounts of modernity and its break from the premodern past.

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Jason A. Josephson-Storm is associate professor in and chair of the Department of Religion at Williams College. He is the author of The Invention of Religion in Japan, also published by the University of Chicago Press.