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Jason Philip Coy, Edward Bever and Randall Styers, editors. Magic in the Modern World: Strategies of Repression and Legitimization., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1728–1730, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy242
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The relationship between magic and modernity has elicited scholarly debate for well over a century. Most of this scholarship was shaped by Max Weber’s “disenchantment” paradigm, the notion that the Reformation paved the way for modern scientific rationality, secular society, and capitalist activity by internalizing religious faith and sequestering the supernatural from everyday experience. Weber’s influential depiction of the incompatibility of magic and modernity was rejuvenated in 1971 with the appearance of Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic, which argued that the Reformation fostered disenchantment and helped usher in modernity by replacing the miraculous elements of Catholicism and the magical elements of folk culture alike. In recent decades, however, scholars have called the entire notion of disenchantment into question. The prevalence of the occult in post-Enlightenment European culture has prompted some to question the validity of the disenchantment paradigm altogether. Instead of asking why magical belief disappeared, and explaining away its continued presence as mere vestiges of traditional cosmologies, scholars increasingly question whether modernity and enchantment are truly incompatible. Investigation has turned how magic (and the rejection of magical belief) is fundamental to conceptions of modernity.
