A Nobel Prize for Reenchanting The World?
October 11th, 2009 by SocProf and tagged Culture, Social Theory, Sociology
[Updated below]
This is interesting:
This captures one of the aspects that has always bothered me about Obama as candidate, speaker and now President: reliance on faith. The American society is already awash in childish religiosity and public figures, especially of the progressive or liberal persuasion should steer clear of that. But then, we already know that Obama is neither.
Also, ironically (or maybe not so ironically), a more contemporary Weberian sociologist, George Ritzer, has also written about reenchanting the world:
George Ritzer via kwout
The point of Ritzer’s book (note the religious reference to “cathedrals” here again), as noted, is to constrain (through rationalization) while enchanting (through consumption), hence the disconnect (for anyone paying attention) between Obama’s words (elevating, inspiring, and therefore “enchanting”, except for nasty old secular lefties like me who don’t like to be preached to) and actions (persistence of oppressive state apparatus and dominance by the financial and corporate sectors).
Update: over at Larvatus Prodeo, Mark Bahnisch takes this argument one step further:
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