| In 1917 Max Weber wrote: "It is the fate of our age, with its characteristic rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, its 'disenchantment of the world', that precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from the public sphere." I argue, to the contrary, that these values mediate social relations under modern capitalism.;In chapter one, I follow Weber's "ultimate and sublime values" into the sublime bourgeois interior via the prophetic spirit to which Weber believed it corresponded. In chapter two, I explore this spirit's archetypal antagonist, traditional religion. I show how, for Weber, ordinary traditional religion was to extraordinary charismatic religion as the iron cage of capitalism was to the interior of the bourgeois subject. By theoretically and methodologically excluding this subject from the public sphere, Weber also removed modern religion as an object of sociological inquiry.;In chapter three, I examine the modern social subject more closely by examining Weber's interpretations of the prophet and religious warrior. In chapter four, I show how Weber's interpretation of ancient China's, India's, and Judea's intellectuals was shaped by Weber's location within modern social theory. This location was structured by and expressed within his neo-Kantian approach. In chapter five, I explore the role that religious hysteria played in Weber's defense of neo-Kantian interpretive categories. Our exploration unavoidably leads me to Foucault's critique of Weber's explanation for the rise of capitalism. After reviewing Weber's treatment of religious hysteria and Foucault's somatic explanation for capitalism, I conclude that both theorists structured their theories around a Kantian ontology that prevented both from grasping the sublime character of capitalism.;In chapter six, I confront Weber's neo-Kantianism directly, looking first at Kant's theory of the sublime and then reviewing the critique of neo-Kantian social theory advanced by Weber's student, the marxian theorist Georg Lukacs. In view of Lukacs' critique I return, in chapter seven, to Weber's interpretation of warrior religion and examine how Weber's sociology has been misused in interpretations of Germany's peculiar path to capitalism and democracy---Germany's Sonderweg. In my concluding chapter I set forth a coherent basis for exploring modern religious subjectivity. |
