The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (review)

After the fall of the Soviet Union, market capitalism replaced socialism in Eastern Europe. Supposedly, the new economic logic would allocate resources impartially, allowing the possibility of prosperity for those who worked hard. What happened instead is that citizens from Russia to Romania, Serbia to Albania poured billions of dollars into pyramid schemes advertising astronomical returns. These investment vehicles never explained how they would produce such wealth. In fact, the leaders commonly employed religious rhetoric to convince people to simply have faith and turn over their cash. When the schemes inevitably crashed, riots broke out.

Following Michael Taussig’s work with newly proletarianized workers in South America, anthropologists like Katherine Verdery and Jean and John Comaroff have documented how magic and the occult always accompany the cool calculus of modern life. A baker’s dozen of humanities scholars have now brought that insight to the fields of literature, history, and philosophy. They argue that for as much as scientific rationality has characterized the post-Enlightenment west, whenever God has been erased, a secular re-enchantment has emerged to fill the space.

The authors collected in The Re-Enchantment of the World take as a point of departure Max Weber’s 1917 pronouncement that religious authorities and mystical explanations no longer guide the industrial world. While they agree with the decreasing influence of the Church in public life, the contributors claim that Weber missed a simultaneous trend. New venues for contemplating the sacred and invoking awe have proliferated across society. They depict these strategies not as atavistic throwbacks or nihilistic critiques of science. Rather, the forces of disenchantment and re-enchantment depend on one another in a messy, contradictory tangle.

The examples of secular strategies of re-enchantment in the volume range from Thoreau’s encounter with nature to Wittgenstein’s embrace of detective stories. Though most of the chapters focus on an intellectual figure from Europe or the United States, there are also two short reflective essays on the wonder evoked by gardens and sporting events. The reader learns how stage magicians came to dress in formal wear and that one of William James’s colleagues in a society for the study of the paranormal was a future British prime minister. The diversity of the cases illustrates the argument about the inconsistency of modernity, but it is never clear if these examples are the best representations of the trend or just arbitrary data points.

Almost all the authors build their arguments on literary analysis and historical interpretation. Even the two essays about contemporary gardens and spectator sports quote Heidegger more than they give ethnographic description. The evidence for re-enchantment is thorough and convincing, though the standard for persuasion is low. Re-enchantment as the volume uses it seems to include anything more emotional than Spock in “Star Trek.” It is easy to make the case that a poem or novel inspires imagination or that a theorist rejects scientific determinism. What is not so clear is what those conclusions reveal about the book’s subtitle: “Secular Magic in a Rational Age.”

Since Malinowski, magic has possessed a specific meaning for anthropologists as a body of practical acts performed to achieve a desired outcome. It differs from science, yes, but it is also distinct from religion. The humanists in The Re-Enchantment of the World seem to conflate the withdrawal of ecclesiastical authority with a decline in magic. But the rise of scientific rationality that Weber noticed need not mean the disappearance of magic. To the contrary, research like the participant-observation Hugh Gusterson conducted with nuclear testers has shown that magic often coincides with the most sophisticated science.

Moreover, the authors uncritically accept the idea that modernity has left a “God-shaped void.” Their obituary for religion recalls the secularization thesis popular in the 1960s. While anthropologists and religious studies scholars have revised that idea in light of the extraordinary explosion...