Disenchantment, Rationality and the Modernity of Max Weber

2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-137
Author(s):  
Anthony J. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
The World

Following Aristotle's distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, Max Weber holds that beliefs about the world and actions within the world must follow procedures consistently and be appropriately formed if they are to count as rational. Here, I argue that Weber's account of theoretical and practical rationality, as disclosed through his conception of the disenchantment of the world, displays a confessional architecture consistently structured by a nineteenth century German Protestant outlook. I develop this thesis through a review of the concepts of rationality and disenchantment in Weber's major works and conclude that this conceptual framework depicts a Protestant account of modernity.

scholarly journals Save or Spend? Western and Eastern Economic Discourses in Russian Fiction of the 19th Century

2021 ◽  
pp. 13-45
Author(s):  
Hans Günther ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Economic Discourse ◽  
Special Position ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Century Literature

According to Max Weber, protestant ethics with its active secular asceticism had a decisive impact on the development of capitalist economics whereas the contemplative Orthodox tradition did not favor the idea of active domination of the world. The economic discourse of the Russian nineteenth century literature reflects the widely spread discussion about the future of Russia, which, compared to advanced Western capitalism, was in the position of periphery. On the one hand, authors are aware of the fact that the adoption of certain Western economic concepts is inevitable in Russia, yet on the otherhand they fear the loss of cultural identity. Gogol and Goncharov, the authors of such famous works as The Dead Souls or Oblomov, are inclined to approve certain elements of capitalist economy – they will be treated under the catchword «economize» –, whereas the idea of anti-economic «spending» of money is characteristic of Dostoevsky´s novels such as The Gambler or The Adolescent. A special position may be ascribed to Tolstoy’s economic «minimalism» which has its roots in peasant ideas of natural economy and Western authors like Proudhon or Rousseau.

Beyond the Binary

2020 ◽  
pp. 139-156
Author(s):  
Jillmarie Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Nature Writing ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Feminist Geography ◽  
Binary Opposition ◽  
The World ◽  
Rural Hours ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Isles Of Shoals

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory of binary opposition considers oppositional categories as a fundamental effect of human cognition. Humans, Lévi-Strauss argues, structure the world and their existence in it by way of symbolic oppositions that are represented and negotiated analogically. Nineteenth-century writing about nonhuman nature has been commonly regarded as a male-dominated field focusing on encounters with nature as a feminized other that resides in contraposition to man and manmade settings. This essay seeks to theorize the inconsistencies represented in feminized nature, to lay bare the ways in which scholarly interpretations of nature writing are traditionally structured around binary boundaries, and to reassess the conceptual framework of feminist geography, which has historically employed a dichotomous structure to expose traditional representations of gender. Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours and Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals each illustrate an awareness of the transcorporeality of human bodies and ecological spaces as enmeshed in a complex, shifting ontology. Both writers attempt to reconstruct an inclusive “non-gendered” ecology that transforms the binary landscapes of “village-woods” and “island-garden” into non-hierarchical vistas that de-enforce the subservience of nature, making these spaces compatible, harmonious, and synergistic.

‘Otherwise in London’ or, the ‘Essence of Things’: Modernity and Estrangement in the Nineteenth-Century Cityscape

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35
Author(s):  
Julian Wolfreys
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Thomas De Quincey ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Representation ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Writers of the early nineteenth century sought to find new ways of writing about the urban landscape when first confronted with the phenomena of London. The very nature of London's rapid growth, its unprecedented scale, and its mere difference from any other urban centre throughout the world marked it out as demanding a different register in prose and poetry. The condition of writing the city, of inventing a new writing for a new experience is explored by familiar texts of urban representation such as by Thomas De Quincey and William Wordsworth, as well as through less widely read authors such as Sarah Green, Pierce Egan, and Robert Southey, particularly his fictional Letters from England.

Mirrors, Masks, and Masculinity: The Homosocial Legacy from Dickens to Machen

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-275
Author(s):  
Molly C. O'Donnell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Novel ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
The World ◽  
Speech Genre

All the narrators and characters in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly are unreliable impostors. As the title suggests, this is also the case with Arthur Machen's The Three Impostors, which similarly presents a virtual matryoshka of unreliability through a series of impostors. Both texts effect this systematic insistence on social constructedness by using and undermining the specific context of the male homosocial world. What served as the cure-all in the world of Pickwick – the homosocial bond – has here been exported, exposed, and proven flawed. The gothic is out in the open now, and the feared ghost resides without and within the group. The inability of anyone to interpret its signs, communicate its meaning, and rely on one's friends to talk one through it is the horror that cannot be overcome. Part of a larger project on the nineteenth-century ‘tales novel’ that treats the more heterogeneric and less heteronormative Victorian novel, this article examines how In a Glass Darkly and The Three Impostors blur the clear-cut gender division articulated in prior masculine presentations like The Pickwick Papers and feminine reinterpretations such as Cranford. These later texts challenge binaries of sex, speech, genre, and mode in enacting the previously articulated masculine and feminine simultaneously.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

Engineering knowledge: philosophy and ponstructive meanig

2018 ◽  
pp. 10-16
Author(s):  
V. I. Onoprienko
Keyword(s):  
Information Technologies ◽  
Knowledge Engineering ◽  
Practical Rationality ◽  
Engineering Knowledge ◽  
World Today ◽  
The World ◽  
Technological Area

An expansion of information technologies in the world today is caused by progress of instrumental knowledge. It has been arisen a special technological area of knowledge engineering, which is related to practical rationality and experts’ knowledge for solving urgent problems of science and practice.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

The Whole World in a Book

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
White Men ◽  
Nation State ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Canadian French ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
Lower Status ◽  
Brazilian Sign Language

The nineteenth century saw a new wave of dictionaries, many of which remain household names. Those dictionaries didn’t just store words; they represented imperial ambitions, nationalist passions, religious fervour, and utopian imaginings. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. This volume investigates dictionaries in the nineteenth century covering languages as diverse as Canadian French, English, German, Frisian, Japanese, Libras (Brazilian sign language), Manchu, Persian, Quebecois, Russian, Scots, and Yiddish.

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