Product details
- ISBN 9781032457376
- Weight: 360g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jul 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book offers a political anthropological perspective on the problematic character of science, combining insights from historical sociology, political theory, and cultural anthropology. Its central idea, departing from the works of Frances Yates and the Gnosticism thesis of Eric Voegelin, is that far from being the radical opposite of magic, modern science effectively grew out of magic, and its varieties, like alchemy, Hermetic philosophy, the occult, Gnosticism, and Neoplatonism. Showing that the desire to use science to solve various – real or presumed – problems of human existence has created a permanent liminal crisis, it contends that the ‘will to science’ is parasitic, existing as it does in sheer relationality, outside of and in between concrete places and communities. A study of the mutual relationship between magic and science in different historical eras, ranging from the Early Neolithic to recent disease prevention ideas, Magic and the Will to Science will appeal to scholars and students of social and anthropological theory, and the philosophy and sociology of science.
Agnes Horvath is a political anthropologist and sociologist. Founding editor of the Journal International Political Anthropology, and president of the International Political Anthropology Association, she was an affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University from 2011 to 2014. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma and Political Alchemy: Technology Unbounded, the co‑author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary, Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil: Tricksterology; and co‑editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality: A Political Anthropology of Transformations, Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of Subversion, Modern Leaders: In Between Charisma and Trickery, and Liminal Politics in the New Age of Disease: Technocratic Mimetism.
