A propos Brian Leiter's important mission to get philosophers to pay attention to Max Weber, "One of the most extraordinary things to anyone of my age is the re-sacrilizing of the world. If you were brought up on Weberian—to say nothing of Marxist—social philosophy, then the secularization image of modernity was absolutely central to our self-image. And that has gone into reverse in a way that completely mystifies me."--Quentin Skinner. These remarks reveal [sic!] that Weber's deepest insights have been almost lost because even among the most philosophical of historians he had been assimilated to a kind of (soft-Materialist, Enlightenment) progressive narrative. But, of course, (i) for Weber secularism was not inevitable (disenchantment is characteristic of a particular epoch). In fact, (ii) Weber was too good a student of Nietzsche to fail to realize that "many old gods" always resurface even in secular ages, but in different guises. (iii) The religiosity we experience today is not wholly a reversal (although there may be some of that); today's religiosity is the (bastard?) off-spring of disenchantment (not to mention the disorder that comes from our hybrid financial-military-scientific-pharmaceutical states), in particular, the obsession with authenticity or sincerity.
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