The Disenchantment of the World: Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures (In-Person)

In November, 1917, as the dreams of Imperial Germany devolved into nightmare, Max Weber delivered a lecture, at a small theater in Munich, describing a different, more profound kind of disenchanment—the “un-magic” (Entzauberung) perpetrated by scholarship, science, and industry in the age of capitalist modernity. In 1919, amidst the ashes of the German revolution, Weber returned to the very same Munich theater to deliver a second, companionate lecture, in which he asked: In a disenchanted world, devoid of overarching meaning, what are the purpose, limits, and possibilities of politics? Contrasting the freewheeling politician of the proverbially democratic United States with their more impotent German counterpart, Weber devised a theory of modern politics by which charisma (a word Weber borrowed consciously from theology) serves a primary role in binding mass publics to politicians and channeling diffuse political energy into constructive political activity. Yet, in both lectures, Weber remains acutely conscious of the nihilistic temptation that pervades the modern world, manifesting in those, whether scholars or politicians, who, in cynical fashion, live off of their work, rather than for it. But, in an age of disenchantment, in which knowledge is all too comprehensive, how do we believe in anything at all? Can reason and knowledge be anything other than instrumental? Can politics be anything more than the cynical pursuit of fortune and power?

In this course, we will undertake an intensive study of Weber’s so-called Vocation Lectures (which provide an ideal introduction to Weber’s thought more generally), querying the impetus, structure, promises, and shortcomings of his diagnosis of modernity and prescriptions for knowledge production and politics. How can we understand Weber’s concept of disenchantment? And how, for Weber, has the process of disenchantment simultaneously eroded moral purpose and authority while also causing a proliferation of irreducible viewpoints, values—and conflict? What is political charisma, and how is it the distinguishing attribute of the modern politician? And how can we think about Weber’s political philosophy more broadly? Is Weber, as some critics maintain, merely an apologist for value-free liberal proceduralism? Or are there more radical possibilities to be excavated from Weber’s thought? Alongside Weber, we will read Wendy Brown’s Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber, which takes up Weber’s work to think about the concurrent contemporary crises in the academy and U.S. and global politics. Can the concepts of disenchantment and charisma help us understand the rise and dominance of Donald Trump and the ultra-Right?

Course Schedule

Monday, 6:30-9:30pm ET
October 13 — November 03, 2025
4 weeks

$335.00

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