Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures

Description

A new translation of two celebrated lectures on politics, academia, and the disenchantment of the world. In 1919, just months before he died unexpectedly of pneumonia, the sociologist Max Weber published two lectures that he had recently delivered at the invitation of a group of students. The question the students asked Weber to address in these lectures was simple and haunting. In a modern world characterized by the division of labor, constant economic expansion, and unrelenting change, was vocation, in intellectual work or politics, still possible? Responding to the students' sense of urgency, Weber offered his clearest account of "the disenchantment of the world," as well as a seminal discussion of the place of values in the university classroom and academic research. Similarly, in his politics lecture he gave students what is undoubtedly his pithiest version of his account of the nature of political authority. Weber's attempts to rethink vocation remain as relevant and as stirring as ever.

Max Weber (1864-1920) was a sociologist, philosopher, jurist, and political economist. Considered one of the founders of modern sociology, he is best known for his essay "Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" and for his writings on bureaucracy. Paul Reitter is a professor of Germanic languages and literatures and the director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State. His work has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Bookforum, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Times Literary Supplement as well as in various scholarly journals. He is the author of three books, and recently collaborated with Jonathan Franzen and Daniel Kehlmann on The Kraus Project. Chad Wellmon is the author of Becoming Human- Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom and Organizing Enlightenment- Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. He is on faculty at the University of Virginia. Damion Searls has translated books by Rilke, Proust, Hermann Hesse, Christa Wolf, and others. For NYRB he has edited Henry David Thoreau's The Journal- 1837-1861 and translated Nescio, Robert Walser, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Patrick Modiano.

"I found Weber's lectures-the first of which was delivered during the Bolshevik Revolution-a bracing, relevant read. I also appreciated Damion Searls's approach to translating from the German, 'skewed towards everyday vocabulary whenever possible' to reflect the ethos of a popular lecture series." -Nadia Kalman, Words Without Borders "The incoherence of modern life could be said to have been Weber's great subject. Weber used the term Entz -auberung-'dis-enchantment'-to describe the way in which science and technology had inevitably displaced magical thinking. . . . His writings anticipate both the rise and fall of the Soviet Union . . . and also the steady, soulless spread of global capitalism." -Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker