The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm S. M. Mendel Bindell KEY WORDS Mendell S. M. Bindel, Mendell Bindell, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, Jason Josephson-Storm, Magic, modern magic, philosophy and magic, modernity, Disenchantment jason ā. josephson-storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. xvi + 412. In his pioneering work, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, exposes the multivalent, deeply fascinating narrative of disenchantment—a variable and changing narrative that can nonetheless be widely conceived as an interpretation of history that sees the “modern” world as having lost a sense of wonder, enchantment, and magic—as a pervasive myth that has come to structure historical and contemporary conceptions of modernity and European culture. Josephson-Storm argues the myth of disenchantment has played a central role in shaping various historical, philosophical, and sociological accounts of modernity, the Enlightenment, religion, science, and the death of God. Complicating this narrative, however, Josephson-Storm illustrates how the myth of disenchantment is entwined with various revivals of magic, occultism, and mysticism. Although he begins his work on a conceptual level, critiquing the rigid binary understanding of disenchantment and modernity as polar opposites of enchantment, myth, magic, and the occult, the thrust of Josephson-Storm’s argument unfolds in his meticulous intellectual and cultural history of the genealogy of disenchantment, or “the myth of mythless modernity” as he frames it. In articulating this genealogy, Josephson-Storm invokes the bimodal nature of attempted disenchantments and disenchantment narratives, as they ultimately slip into that which they either oppose or argue is in decline: the world of enchantment and myth. In demystifying the myth of disenchantment and the logics of “occult disavowal” (the disavowal or repression of enchantment, magic, and the occult for various reasons), Josephson-Storm uncovers how which certain narrators of disenchantment were themselves engaged in an array of enchanted and occult milieus to varying degrees (19). His work thus highlights the stakes and significance of the narrative myth of disenchantment in a wide array of ostensibly disconnected intellectual, aesthetic, cultural, and religious movements. Josephson-Storm demonstrates the ways that the myth of disenchantment—and its reversion into its antitheses—fundamentally [End Page 120] shaped theoretical and philosophical accounts of modernity and enlightenment. Insofar as this work serves to demythologize the myth of disenchantment, therefore, it also functions as an immanent critique of theories of modernity and enlightenment that pivot on the myth of disenchantment by positioning disenchantment as the defining other through which these categories are conceived. Displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of European intellectual and cultural history, in his work, Josephson-Storm pushes the reader to question not only the grand narratives of disenchantment, modernity, enlightenment, and the “Death of God,” but also to radically challenge these very categories. This sort of paradigm-shifting intervention in historical and theoretical discourses on disenchantment, modernity, and enlightenment grows out of the author’s dialectical genealogy of the birth and proliferation of “the myth of mythless modernity.” In their disenchanting drive to either demythologize and disenchant the world, or to narrate its already disenchanted state, Josephson-Storm argues, theorists and narrators of disenchantment in effect revert to the very logic they argue is progressively disappearing from the “modern” world. Paradoxically, Josephson-Storm eruditely illustrates how the narratives of disenchantment, of “mythless modernity,” are self-defeating myths (i.e. insofar as they ultimately constitute the perpetuation of myth), that often emerge bimodally, as narratives of enchantment and reenchantment. In this way, Josephson-Storm proffers a critical genealogy of the myth of disenchantment as it was conceived and developed by a wide range of thinkers and movements from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present. Before he begins this genealogy, Josephson-Storm reveals the narrative of disenchantment as myth by evaluating an array of sociological sources providing evidence of the extent to which the ostensive “heartland of disenchantment”—Europe and the United States—is rife with people who still believe in enchanted, occult, magical, paranormal, or supernatural phenomena (304). After demonstrating the enchanted backdrop of the...