The Disenchantment of the Intellectuals
Many contemporary artists and intellectuals tell us that we are miserable. We have seen Rousseau’s view of our psychic distress, caused by endlessly seeking to be something or someone else, imagining the grass to be greener on the other side of the fence, always wanting. Nietzsche added tremendous bite to such themes by lending a biological base to a moral critique. The influence of both can be seen in Sartre’s insistence that there is a generalized problem of being. Equally, Heidegger claimed that we face a “void,” particularly given our enslavement to high technology. We have more recently been told that we live in a world of risk in which “the life-world” is “colonized,” and our humanity placed at a discount by the “malaise” of “modernity.”1 And such views are decidedly present in modern art, these days deeply influenced by social theory—prone indeed to quote such authors as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. One significant book about modern art notes the concentration on depression, seen as the pervasive mentality of “modernity.”2
The most evocative label capturing such discontent is disenchantment, and its subtlest exponent Max Weber. His work centers around the “rationalization of the world,” but only a single lecture, “Science as a Vocation,” directly considers the consequences of this process for the way in which we feel, or, more precisely, for our social identity. Science does not, Weber argued, make modern man better informed than the Hottentot; instead it means
the knowledge or belief that if one but wished one could learn at any time. Hence, it means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.3
Weber is describing the opportunity/cost of modernity: science brings plenty, but it destroys warm and comfortable identities. This claim haunts much of modern social theory. Weber himself was ambivalent, scornful of cheap “re-enchanting” creeds but not above hoping that charisma might provide us with passionate attachment to some new cause. Weber’s agenda can be clearly seen more recently in the title of the lecture that the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas gave when receiving the Hegel Prize in 1974. “Can modern societies build a rational identity?” he asked, before replying firmly in the positive.
A Pandora’s box of claims and implications, descriptive and normative, must be opened to cast light on these issues. Should we believe this strand of modern culture? Given what has been said, the answer will be negative. Is it then the case that our cherished belief in art, as illuminating our condition, should be abandoned? It is useful here to recall immediately a Durkheimian principle: every sign has a social referent and this, when interpreted, will tell us something about reality. The argument will add to what has been said to this point by showing that the set of ideas in question tells us more about the social position of some intellectuals than about our general social condition. When such figures seek to remold others so as to manage their own needs, they are likely to become enemies of civility. But it is very important here to make distinctions, both about art in general and about the scope of conditions under which intellectuals can be dangerous. We can advance understanding by considering the sociologies of culture of Daniel Bell and Pierre Bourdieu, interestingly and amusingly at odds with each other. As there are complexities to the argument, it may be good to clarify one point in advance: it is not the case that all intellectuals are enemies of civility, though some certainly are, with the impact of intellectuals depending less on ideas than on structural conditions.
But let us begin with the general claim about our putative misery. There is everything to be said for skepticism. Poverty, disease, and early mortality—that is, the standard condition of preindustrial life—were scarcely enchanting. There is, of course, little direct evidence about the feelings of the vast majority of humankind until relatively recently in the historical record. But we have some—such as the account of life in the Pyrenees in the early fourteenth century—and it brings home the suffering inherent to this condition.4 Perhaps the modern world is bereft of meaning, but the affluence provided by modern science means that for the vast majority of people, the world has probably never been so enchanted. The romantic nostalgia so characteristic of modernist ideas is unlikely to have any general appeal once industrial conditions have been established. Curiously, there is very little empirical investigation into the purported misery of modern men and women, and certainly few findings to back up the view that disenchantment dominates most of social life. In contrast, there is a massive amount of evidence supporting Adam Smith’s view of people being distracted from questions of meaning by the demands of status competition. And we should not forget the positive side of such competition, the benefits of fashion, of trying on new selves, of self-expression.
This leads to the central point: artists and intellectuals have their own particular worries, and so may not give an accurate report on modern social conditions. In premodern, status-dominated societies, the prestige of intellectuals was often huge, not least given that literacy was not widespread but rather their preserve. The decline in standing has been very great. Nineteenth-century Russian thinkers wrote more eloquently than any others about this situation, in large part because of the schizophrenia induced by knowledge of the developed West while living in a backward society. Mikhail Petrashevsky exemplified this world of “superfluous men” when he decided to devote himself to the service of mankind after realizing that he had no particular links to or admiration for the men and women of his own social circle. He became a follower of the French socialist Charles Fourier, and so established a commune on his estate: the peasants hated it and burned it down. Petrashevsky was close to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose great novel The Devils famously captured the tensions within this world. Of course, patronage at times replaced the status that came with the monopoly of literacy, but patrons can be and indeed were often fickle. So intellectuals and artists had to exist in the interstices of the market. Naturally enough, they sometimes felt badly done by, with their works accurately reflecting this experience, as Henry David Thoreau noted:
I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.5
This baseline condition could be exacerbated by the overproduction and so underemployment of the educated. Thomas Hobbes felt that this contributed to the English civil war, and there seems evidence that this was so—certainly thereafter attempts were made by the elite to limit the production of the educated.6 Joseph Schumpeter particularly stressed in this regard that capitalism tended to overproduce intellectuals:
All those who are unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed or unemployable drift into the vocations in which standards are least definite or in which aptitudes and acquirements of a different order count. They swell the host of intellectuals in the strict sense of the term whose numbers hence increase disproportionately. They enter it in a thoroughly discontented frame of mind. Discontent breeds resentment. And it often rationalizes itself into that social criticism which as we have seen before is in any case the intellectual spectator’s typical attitude toward men, classes and institutions especially in a rationalist and utilitarian civilization. Well, here we have numbers; a well-defined group situation of proletarian hue; and a group interest shaping a group attitude that will much more realistically account for hostility to the capitalist order than could the theory—itself a rationalization in the psychological sense—according to which the intellectual’s righteous indignation about the wrongs of capitalism simply represents the logical inference from outrageous facts and which is no better than the theory of lovers that their feelings represent nothing but the logical inference from the virtues of the beloved.7
Schumpeter, however, did not believe that the intellectuals could themselves overturn capitalism. Rather, he suggested that they would highlight and accentuate resentments that other groups already had against capitalism. “Labour never craved intellectual leadership,” he noted, “but intellectuals invaded labour politics.”8 An interesting variation on this theme is Tocqueville’s view that intellectuals will differ: the great dreamers of authoritarian schemes are those who lack social engagement, whereas those who have access to power—Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes jump immediately to the forefront of attention—will feel less isolated, and so produce theories in which their own needs are not hegemonic. And it is impossible not to quote Samuel Johnson, who was aware that intellectuals can suffer from the dangers of imagination at all times:
To indulge the power of fiction, and send imagination out upon the wing, is often the sport of those who delight too much in silent speculation. When we are alone we are not always busy; the labour of excogitation is too violent to last long; the ardour of enquiry will sometimes give way to idleness or satiety. He who has nothing external that can divert him, must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is? He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire, amuses his desires with impossible enjoyments, and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion. The mind dances from scene to scene, unites all pleasures in all combinations, and riots in delights which nature and fortune, with all their bounty, cannot bestow.9
This is the moment to begin to make distinctions, and we can do so in the spirit of Tocqueville’s awareness of differences in the behavior of intellectuals. Let us begin by considering the claim that art is by inherent necessity and logic humanist and liberal, with those who endorse horrible practices thereby being seen as mere ideologists lacking all aesthetic virtue. This cannot be wholly true. Whatever one may think of Heidegger, it is hard to deny that Louis-Ferdinand Céline is a great writer, and D. W. Griffith a superb director—and both made illiberal sentiments comprehensible, even attractive. There have been intellectual justifications for racism, murder, and every sort of foulness, often embraced with enthusiasm. Still, there is something to the claim. An awareness of the absurdity of life, its lack of meaning, is surely in a fundamental way totally correct. No one understood this more and wrote about it better than Samuel Beckett. The absurdity he portrayed was, of course, so deep that all one could do was to live with it, no escape being possible. Interestingly, his work is full of humor and irony, his life marked by considerable courage. The trouble comes with those who cannot stand emptiness, and who believe that it is possible and necessary to escape it. It was not a long step for Joseph Goebbels to move from his early expressionist novel to the embrace of a new creed. This again is the world of belonging and authenticity. One is reminded at this point of the comment made by Raymond Aron to his teacher Léon Brunschvicg when he returned from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s—namely, that the Nuremburg Rallies were pure Durkheim, “society worshipping itself.” To turn complex society into a singular, moral community in modern times has always required force. It is better to live with less.
How worried should we be about this tendency in modern culture? A helpful way to approach these issues is by looking at the two sociologists who offer interesting ideas about the effect of art on society, beginning with Daniel Bell, who suggested nothing less than that capitalism is facing its demise as a result of a cultural contradiction.10 His argument is that capitalism was able to work as a political, economic, and cultural system only as a result of the presence of religion. He does not clearly spell out the benefits of religion (although he waxes eloquent on the evil consequences of their loss) but some of his hints in the matter are worth noting. Puritanism is important in that its values serve to bind together all three realms mentioned. The puritan ethic is of obvious economic value. Bell hints that it is also of political value in encouraging people to make their own fates independently of the state; for many years this underwrote the pluralism of American politics that was responsible for diffusing social conflict. But most important in Bell’s eyes is that puritanism offers some answers in the cultural realm. Bell’s conception of culture stresses that it is a response to the basic questions of the human predicament, most notably that of death. The answers provided by religion gave meaning to life, and the presence of such meaning gave a guarantee of social stability.
This unity has now collapsed so that the polity, economy, and culture run on different “axial principles.” The economy is concerned with ever-increasing economic growth but is disrupted by excessive wage demands that cause inflation. The polity is concerned with establishing legitimacy but is troubled by insistent demands for political participation. Bell is not, in the last analysis, worried by these problems for which he sees relatively easy solutions, but he is terrified by modern culture, which he feels is now based on a remorseless demand for the fulfillment of rampant individualism. Bell’s fears can only be understood when one realizes that his Jewish background placed the Holocaust at the center of his social theory. Bell believes that human beings, bereft of the restraint imposed by a religious order, are likely to seek salvation through domination. The demonic is released when there is no longer assurance that life has meaning:
Religion … was a way for people to cope with the problem of death…. When it was possible to believe, really believe, in heaven and hell, then some of the fear of death could be tempered or controlled….
It may well be that the decline in religious faith in the last century and more, this fear of death as total annihilation, unconsciously expressed, has probably increased. One may hypothesise, in fact, that here is a cause of the breakthrough of the irrational, which is such a marked feature of the changed moral temper of our time. Fanaticism, violence, and cruelty are not, of course, unique in human history. But there was a time when such frenzies and mass emotions could be displaced, symbolised, drained away, and dispersed through religious devotion and practice. Now there is only this life, and the assertion of self becomes possible—for some even necessary—in the domination over others.11
Bell’s fears, then, are not just for the breakdown of social structure but rather for the reemergence of the demonic. Art was placed under restraint in religious cultures, but it has now, in Bell’s eyes, achieved autonomy; in other words, the investigation into the meaning of life has recently been undertaken by art. The autonomy of art is seen in and is responsible for modernism, that cultural mode that Bell feels reached its peak in the years 1890–1920. Modernism represents one of the greatest moments of human creativity in his eyes, and allows the aesthetic imagination to lay bare the impulses of the human mind. He considers modernism’s central figures to be Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, both of whom glorified those roots of impulse concerned with sexuality and will to power.
Bell’s fears for the social stability of modern capitalism depend on his going beyond this thesis on modernism to stress the danger of “modernism in the streets.” The great classics had at least obeyed the restraints of artistic form. Bell’s hatred of many contemporary cultural phenomena follows from his belief that all restraints have vanished. The facile and meretricious popularizations of modernism scare him:
When there is the democratization of Dionysius in the acting out of one’s impulses, then the demonic spills over all bounds, and suffers a double fate. At one extreme, violence becomes the aesthetic of politics (no longer of art), as in the calls to a cleansing of the polluted selves by a Sorel, a Marinetti, a Sartre, or a Fanon; at the other, the demonic becomes trivialised in the masochistic exorcisms of the cultural mass.12
By the latter point, Bell seems to mean that, to use his expression, “pornotopia” sets the tone for popular culture; and this—despite his comment about “trivialisation”—is a source of worry in that Bell feels that something once thought can later serve as the basis for action.
One central ambiguity in Bell’s account should be highlighted. He wishes to scare and to reassure, and this makes for a most contradictory analysis. The social reformer holds out the hope that
despite the shambles of modern culture, some religious answer surely will be forthcoming, for religion is not (or no longer) a “property” of society in the Durkheimian sense. It is a constitutive part of man’s consciousness: the cognitive search for the pattern of the “general order” of existence; the affective need to establish rituals and to make such conceptions sacred; the primordial need for relatedness to some others, or to a set of meanings which will establish a transcendent response of the self; and the existential need to confront the finalities of suffering and death.13
This is vague, and open to the classic objection that understanding the function of religion is not the same as understanding the religious impulse itself. People do not believe because it is good for them but because there is a theology that helps them make sense of the world. Further, there is something unbalanced about Bell’s account of the unreleased human demon and his hope for a new religion. If what modernism has released is demonic, then surely its very power as psychic dynamite prevents it being easily curtailed. Bell himself seems to consider this a possibility:
But the postmodern mood, touching deeper springs of human consciousness, and deeper, more restless longings than the overt political search for community, is only the first act of a drama that is still to be played out.14
Bell oscillates between his hopes and the conclusions to which his analysis seems to be forcing him.
One of the amusing characteristics of social studies—making one reluctant to talk too easily of social science—is the fame and attention given to wholly opposing theories. The second analysis of the effects of modern art is derived from Western Marxism. Thinkers in this school are naturally much exercised by the failure of Marx’s prediction that revolution would usher in a new order. Not surprisingly, many have suggested that various factors in the “superstructure” are restraining the natural outcome of objective factors. This line of investigation has spiritual ancestors in the work of Lukács, Gramsci, and the Frankfurt School, perhaps especially in that of Herbert Marcuse. However, attention is worth giving to those writers of the French Left who have given added sophistication to this approach by concentrating on art. And by art they are concerned not with the popular trash of “the culture industry” but with supposedly high and meritorious art. Their general theory is simple. The bourgeoisie is deemed to pose as the protectors of culture, and this is held to be sociologically crucial in justifying their class advantage. Thus schematized, the position sounds most implausible; this makes it all the more to the credit of Pierre Bourdieu (marxisant rather than Marxist) and Renée Balibar that they are able to give it some plausibility as the result of empirical work. The general theory as to the function and political consequences of art may be described best by looking at Bourdieu’s work; the question of quality becomes more clearly focused when turning to Balibar.
Bourdieu’s work on the sociology of art is part of a much larger project concerned with arguing that bourgeois society exerts “symbolic violence” in establishing a “cultural arbitrary” that is not justified by philosophic reasoning. However, all that we need to realize here is that he considers that art is a key means by which the bourgeoisie makes its own rule seem natural. Bourdieu feels that this can clearly be seen in the process of art perception itself. He notes that it is in fact difficult to “read” the pictures of previous civilizations: one needs, for example, considerable knowledge of the iconography of the Renaissance to understand Florentine fifteenth-century painting. Bourdieu then suggests that:
Since the work of art only exists to the extent that it is perceived, or in other words deciphered, it goes without saying that the satisfactions attached to this perception … are only accessible to those who are disposed to appropriate them because they attribute a value to them, it being understood that they can do this only if they have the means to appropriate them.15
The training and educational standards necessary to decipher works of art would lead one to expect that the difficulty of understanding would be generally acknowledged. Bourdieu feels that the opposite is the case; this horrifies him. He considers that the most connoisseured are keenest to stress that art is the product of inexplicable genius, and that it is capable of moving anyone with sensitivity. He acidly comments that
silence concerning the social prerequisites for the appropriation of culture or, to be more exact, for the acquisition of art competence in the sense of mastery of all the means for the specific appropriation of works of art is a self-seeking silence because it is what makes it possible to legitimatize a social privilege by pretending that it is a gift of nature.16
The bourgeoisie thus poses as the agent of civilization and justifies its position on this ground, while making it difficult for the mass of the population to understand the mysteries of culture that it apparently guards. Bourdieu feels that he has found evidence for this argument in an empirical study of the image of museums in various European countries. He is able to show without much difficulty that museums are used by the highly educated, who may be described as possessors of an “extended code” of culture; in contrast, the mass of the population, possessors of a more “restricted code” of culture, are afraid of museums and tend to associate them with churches.17 And Bourdieu is once again keen to argue that this fear is not surprising given that so little attempt is made to help ignorant viewers once they are actually inside a museum.
Bourdieu’s position is one that is best seen as moderate in that it seems to suggest that great art should be made available to more than the few. This stance naturally leads to calls for reform and may be contrasted with more radical versions of the social control theory of art. These extreme versions argue for the abolition of bourgeois art on the basis of the sociological premise: the discovery that art is the preserve of the few quickly leads to the assertion that it cannot be of high quality. These extreme versions often have as a starting point the observation that turning art into a barrier of social distinction militates against artistic appreciation. In particular, it is claimed that art can only serve as a barrier to the understanding of normal people if taste is made to change quickly. The increased speed with which taste changes in modern society is neatly captured by a wholly different figure, Quentin Bell:
Novelty, audacity, and above all exclusiveness, the bright badge of social enterprise brings a fashion in, and when a hat or shoe has lost its social appeal, when everybody is wearing it, it dies of popularity. Such seems to be the fate of elitist art in our society, the social impulse that made it fashionable with the few ends by making it vulgar with the many whereupon the elite must look for something else.18
Such sentiments serve as a starting point for Balibar’s recent work in the sociology of literature. She argues that the French educational system manages to buttress the position of the bourgeoisie in many ways. The very national language that was established in the revolutionary period was based on the grammars of the Old Regime that centered on the need to translate French into Latin; this allowed different “levels” of French to develop thereafter.19 Literature plays a central role in developing these levels of language in three ways. First, authors themselves were deeply affected by the new emphasis on style. George Sand, for example, spent much of her time in the early l840s collecting examples of local speech, but none of this was included in the fictional treatment she gave of the same rural workers in La Mare au Diable.20 Much the same is true of Flaubert. Balibar spends a great deal of time analyzing the styles of speech of the characters in A Simple Heart and interestingly notes that all, and especially the servant Félicité, speak perfect French. Balibar is not one to shirk sweeping conclusions and concludes in this instance that the bourgeoisie was attempting to make the lower orders mute. Second, she considers that examination of the manner in which literature came to be taught in French schools justifies speaking of different levels of cultural comprehension; in the primary school, literary passages are used for dictation and comprehension only, whereas in the secondary school the pupil is introduced to the author’s work as a whole and trained in an appreciation of the value of literary creativity. This latter emphasis is deemed particularly unfortunate in that it results in a “sacralizing” of the text that removes it from the comprehension that can only be gained by placing it in its social context. This forms the basis of her third point, made as the result of empirical work on the schoolbooks of French children. She argues that books that do have radical intent (Zola’s novels dealing with alcoholism is an example cited) tend to be “misread” when they are used as school texts; the emphasis on style apparently obscures the obvious political message.21
Balibar’s claim is that bourgeois mentality is hostile to real culture. John Berger’s celebrated claim that many classic genres of bourgeois art—portrait, landscape, and nude—are meretricious, the glorification of position and property, is similar. Art too closely reflects its social origin; and in this case art suffers from the original sin of being the child of the bourgeoisie. Berger carries on his argument by suggesting that the abolition of the art of the few will help raise artistic standards. He sees “no reason to lament the passing of the portrait—the talent once involved in portrait painting can be used in some other way to serve a more urgent, modern function.”22 It is not surprising to find this position argued by a Marxist, although it does go against Marx’s insistence that the new society would accommodate the cultural achievements of the bourgeoisie.
The most obvious weakness that springs to mind as we begin to evaluate these views is the implicit assumption that the values of modernist “high art” have come to dominate the tone of the general culture. Evidence in the sociology of literature on this matter goes in the opposite direction. Romantic novels and popular drama remain remarkably conservative in their moral emphasis.23 Bell’s analysis is here amusingly at odds with that of the Frankfurt School, which accurately noted the conservative character of much popular art, and condemned it precisely for this “ascetic” character. Bell has little sense of where his allies lie; he would perhaps do better to join with those who use the “common sense” of popular art as a tool with which to berate the pretensions of high culture. And this finding does nearly as much to undermine the view that access to culture serves as a mechanism enabling the privileged to pass on their advantages. As a Marxist theory this is, of course, weird: it seems as if brute material forces are constrained by the upper reaches of the superstructure! This is idealism with a vengeance, and it conjures up amusing thoughts of the leaders of the revolution marching under banners calling for the death of “bourgeois high culture.” Perhaps there is something to the view insofar as it is part of the competitive emulation described by Adam Smith, especially as it applies to higher levels of the class structure. But there is no real evidence that the disadvantaged are somehow mystified by the presence of cultural matters that they do not understand. British experience certainly suggests that this is mistaken.24
It is also important to note that Bell’s account of modernism is exaggerated. Samuel Beckett does not fit within his account, nor do Ulysses and À la recherche du temps perdu. Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the former is popularly and justly known as nothing less than one of the great affirmations of “life itself.” In the latter Marcel, after much strain and anguish at the “intermittences of the heart,” establishes an identity for himself: the last volume of the book, Time Regained, is a paean of praise for the value of his newly found artistic vocation. Then Proust’s awareness of human instability leads him to argue forcefully for the preservation of moral standards—and he insists time and again that his moments of involuntary memory are useless to him without the disciplined determination to investigate their meaning fully.25 And in this Proust is in fact representative of modernism in general, which is best seen not as an attack on reason but as an attempt to understand the full workings of the human heart. Freud’s work is based on the discovery that seemingly irrational behavior is in fact perfectly rational.
But let us put those considerations aside, as we must, given that there is without any question a major strand of modern culture that does make much of our disenchanted status, very often proposing in consequence to find ways in which to re-enchant us. Many have noticed and analyzed the enormous ideological pool of re-enchantment so often formed from fusions of Marx and Freud, but not every analyst has thereby judged capitalism to be under threat.
A really advanced industrial society does not any longer require cold rationality from its consumers; at most, it may demand it of its producers. But as it gets more advanced, the ratio both of personnel and of their time is tilted progressively more and more in favour of consumption, as against production. More consumers, fewer producers: less time at work, more at leisure. And in consumption, all tends towards ease and facility of manipulation rather than rigour and coldness. A modern piece of machinery may be a marvel of sustained, abstract, rigorous engineering thought; but its operating controls must be such that they can easily and rapidly be internalised by the average user, without arduousness or strain. So the user lives in a world in which most things have an air of easy, “natural,” “spontaneous” manipulability. And why should not the world itself be conceived in this manner?26
Interestingly, Bell makes essentially the same point:
Today one finds asceticism primarily in revolutionary movements and revolutionary regimes. Puritanism, in the psychological and sociological sense, is to be found in Communist China and in the regimes which fuse revolutionary sentiment with Koranic purposes, as in Algeria and Libya.27
Revolutions are indeed made or led by intolerant elites; it is hard to see the antinomian, sex-ridden, and self-indulgent popularizers of modernism as being capable of destroying anything. Settled conditions in the industrial era place intellectuals at a discount; their demands for re-enchantment amount to mere cultural entertainment. At present this is the world of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, who are amazingly blind to the past, mere apologists for horror. But it behooves us to remain aware of the fact that times are not always settled. Great social transitions and the disruptions caused by defeat in war can create social conditions in which intellectuals gain great influence. So we should remain wary of the gifts offered by intellectuals.
In conclusion, let us return to Max Weber. In purely philosophical terms, some of his arguments are impossible to ignore. The cognitive power of science is immense, and it does put traditional belief at a discount. Our acceptance of empiricism, the base of real knowledge, means that facts stand over us, beyond our control. In that sense we are and must be disenchanted. But the tenor in which Weber writes about this is far too Germanic, far too close to the cultural pessimism so prevalent in the society in which he lived. The suggestion is that life is cold and without meaning because we have become homunculi, workers, so to speak, in factories whose production depends on the dull rigidities of assembly lines. But the point about assembly lines, to continue the metaphor, is that they produce endless technological marvels that anyone can use, and that increase choice and expand horizons. And there is a related point that needs to be made about Weber. His scorn for sloppy, facile, re-enchanting creeds is admirable. Habermas’s call for a rich, rational social identity can be seen in this regard as wholly question-begging. But Weber was not above seeking to warm up the world when insisting that charismatic renewal was needed to release us from the dull slough of mere materialism. In this matter, Weber seems to me to be not nearly disenchanted enough. Life really does not have a meaning, as Smith realized when speaking of “winter storms,” and as Beckett stresses all the time. To pretend otherwise is infantile. The warm and cozy worlds of the re-enchanters are deeply unconvincing, an extra reason—beyond its link to science—why openness is positively morally attractive. Anomie is better than bonhomie!
1 U. Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992); J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984, 1987); C. Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Toronto: Anansi, 1991).
2 C. Ross, The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
3 M. Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1919), in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills ([1948] New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 139.
4 E. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error (New York: G. Braziller, 1978).
5 H. D. Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods, ed. L. Ross ([1854] New York: Sterling, 2009), 98–99.
6 T. Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament ([1681] Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). The empirical evidence is that of M. Curtis, “The Alienated Intellectuals of Early Stuart England,” Past and Present, no. 23 (1962).
7 J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ([1942] London: Routledge, 1978), 153.
8 Ibid.
9 S. Johnson, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, in Rasselas, Poems and Selected Prose, ed. B. H. Bronson ([1759] New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 596.
10 A very similar claim, albeit in a different register, is made by Jürgen Habermas in Legitimation Crisis (London: Heinemann, 1976).
11 D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1962), 400–401.
12 D. Bell, “The Return of the Sacred? The Argument on the Future of Religion,” British Journal of Sociology 28 (1977): 431.
13 D. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (London: Heinemann, 1976), 169.
14 D. Bell, The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journeys (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 300.
15 P. Bourdieu, “Outlines of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception,” International Social Science Journal 20 (1968): 601. Cf. P. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Sociological Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
16 Bourdieu, “Outlines of a Sociological Theory,” 608.
17 P. Bourdieu and A. Darbel, L’Amour de L’Art (Paris: Minuet, 1969).
18 Q. Bell, A Demotic Art (Southampton: University of Southampton, 1976), 8.
19 R. Balibar and D. Laporte, Le Francais National (Paris: Hachette, 1974).
20 R. Balibar, Les Francais Fictifs (Paris: Hachette, 1976), 42.
21 Ibid., 45.
22 J. Berger, The Look of Things (London: Viking Press, 1972), 35.
23 J.S.R. Goodlad, A Sociology of Popular Drama (London: Heinemann, 1972); P. Mann, Books, Borrowers and Buyers (London: Andre Deutsch, 1969).
24 R. Bourne, “The Snakes and Ladders of the British Class System,” in New Society 47 (1979): 242. Much more evidence supporting this position can be found in A. H. Halsey, A. F. Heath, and J. M. Ridge, Origins and Destinations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
25 M. Hindus, The Proustian Vision, especially the chapter “Ethics.”
26 E. A. Gellner, “Ethnomethodology: The Re-enchantment Industry or The Californian Way of Subjectivity,” Philosophy of Social Sciences 5 (1975): 448.
27 Bell, The Cultural Contradictions, 82.