The Myth of Disenchantment

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

Hardback (30 Jun 2017)

Not available for sale

Includes delivery to the United States

Out of stock

This service is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Publisher's Synopsis

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.

Book information

ISBN: 9780226403229
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Imprint: The University of Chicago Press
Pub date:
DEWEY: 001.0903
DEWEY edition: 23
Language: English
Number of pages: 400
Weight: 710g
Height: 235mm
Width: 160mm
Spine width: 30mm