Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures

“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

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 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Damion Searls is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch and a writer in English. His own books include What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, The Inkblots, and The Philosophy of Translation. He received the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2019 for Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries.

Paul Reitter teaches in the German department at the Ohio State University. He is the co-editor, along with Chad Wellmon, of Anti-Education- On the Future of Our Educational Institutions by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Chad Wellmon is the author of Becoming Human- Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom, Organizing Enlightenment- Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University, and the forthcoming Permanent Crisis- The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. He is on the faculty of the University of Virginia.

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