A01=Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
adorno
aleister crowley
anthropology
Author_Jason Ananda Josephson Storm
britain
Category=QRAB
death of god
disenchantment
enchantment
england
enlightenment
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
folklore
france
francis bacon
germany
golden bough
hauntings
hegel
history
horkheimer
logical positivism
magic
Max Weber
mesmerism
metaphysics
mighty
modernity
new age
nihilism
nonfiction
occult
paganism
paranormal
philosophers
philosophy
psychoanalysis
religion
religious studies
revolution
schiller
science
sociology
spirits
spiritualism
spirituality
supernatural
suppression
walter benjamin
Product details
- ISBN 9780226403366
- Weight: 652g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 16 May 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A great many theorists have argued that the defining feature of modernity is that people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic. Jason A. Josephson-Storm argues that as broad cultural history goes, this narrative is wrong, as attempts to suppress magic have failed more often than they have succeeded. 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. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain, France, and Germany were in the midst of occult and spiritualist revivals. Indeed, Josephson-Storm argues, these disciplines' founding figures were not only aware of, but profoundly enmeshed in, the occult milieu; and it was specifically in response to this burgeoning culture of spirits and magic 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.
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.
