Modernity and Enchantment: A Historiographic Review

SPECTERS ARE ONCE AGAIN HAUNTING EUROPE AND AMERICA—as are magicians, mermaids, mesmerists, and a melange of marvels once thought to have been exorcised by the rational and secular processes of modernity. In recent years, historians from disparate fields have independently challenged the long-standing sociological view that modernity is characterized by “disenchantment.” This view, in its broadest terms, maintains that wonders and marvels have been demystified by science, spirituality has been supplanted by secularism, spontaneity has been replaced by bureaucratization, and the imagination has been subordinated to instrumental reason. In the past decade, however, a new historiographic position, if not consensus, has emerged that presents Western modernity as “enchanted.” The ongoing redefinition of such an established view is of consequence for a variety of reasons, not the least of which has to do with the master narratives underlying the stories that historians choose to tell. As Dipesh Chakrabarty usefully reminds us, “The moment we think of the world as disenchanted . . . we set limits to the ways the past can be narrated.”1 The emergent view that modernity is as enchanted as it is disenchanted may conjure alternative vistas to the historical imagination, and at the very least offers the possibility of pulling new rabbits out of old hats. Narrating a historiography of “modernity and enchantment” has limitations of its own, however. Those historians who challenge the equation of modernity with disenchantment often present their views within the context of topical debates in their respective fields. It will therefore be useful to tease out some of the common concerns and findings that have appeared in otherwise distinct areas of study, such as the histories of science, religion, and mass culture. The works examined here are necessarily eclectic, drawn primarily from European and American histories of these subfields, but they are nevertheless representative of how the topic is currently being handled across historical specialties. A second challenge has to do with defining such inherently vague and complex terms as “modernity” and “enchantment.” Taken separately, each term has manifold meanings. When the two terms are paired under a particular interpretation of the relationship between “modernity and enchantment,” however, each assumes greater