Modernity and enchantment: A historiographic review

American Historical Review

Volumn 111, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 692-716

  Saler, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33750000288     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.111.3.692     Document Type: Review

References (177)

1. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J., 2000), 89.
2. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), 82;
3. Rémi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago, 2003), 194;
4. Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, N.J., 2001), 4.
5. David Hollinger, "The Knower and the Artificer, with Postscript 1993," in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Social Sciences (Baltimore, Md., 1994), 26.
6. An adequate survey of the concept of modernity would require an essay in its own right. Among the many works devoted to it are Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Harmondsworth, 1988);
7. Anthony J. Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge, 1992);
8. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, N.C., 1987);
9. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass., 1995);
10. David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass., 1986);
11. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif., 1990);
12. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, "A History of the Concept 'Modern,'" in Gumbrecht, Making Sense in Life and Literature, trans. Glen Burns (Minneapolis, Minn., 1992);
13. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass., 1987);
14. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, eds., Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (Oxford, 1996);
15. John Jervis, Exploring the Modern (Oxford, 1998);
16. Leszek Kolakowski, "Modernity on Endless Trial," in Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago, 1990);
17. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, eds., Modernity and Identity (Oxford, 1992);
18. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York, 1990);
19. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989);
20. and Bryan Turner, Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (London, 1990).
21. For a spirited interrogation of the concept, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass., 1993).
22. See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass., 1983);
23. Brague, The Wisdom of the World; Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton, N.J., 1997);
24. James T. Kloppenberg, "Democracy and Disenchantment: From Weber to Dewey to Habermas and Rorty," in Ross, Modernist Impulses in the Social Sciences, 69-90;
25. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (New York, 2004).
26. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation," in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1946), 129-156.
27. See also Ronald M. Glassman and Vatro Muvar, eds., Max Weber's Political Sociology: A Pessimistic Vision of a Rationalized World (Westport, Conn., 1984);
28. Stephen Kalberg, "Max Weber's Types of Rationality," American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 5 (1980): 1145-1179;
29. Edward Shils, "Max Weber and the World since 1920," in Wolfgang Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel, eds., Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London, 1987), 547-580;
30. Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley, Calif., 1989).
31. Weber may have drawn his phrase from Schiller, whose poem "Die Götter Greichenlands" referred to "die entgöttertur Natur." In the late nineteenth century, "disenchantment" was often used synonymously with "pessimism," the latter term given currency by the vogue for the "pessimistic" philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer; see Edgar Evertson Saltus, The Philosophy of Disenchantment (New York, 1885).
32. The phrase "cultural pessimist" has been applied to a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers who criticized aspects of the modern West, among them Friedrich Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, Oswald Spengler, T. S. Eliot, Arnold Toynbee, and Martin Heidegger. See Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York, 1997);
33. see Oliver Bennett, Cultural Pessimism: Narratives of Decline in the Postmodern World (Edinburgh, 2001).
34. Weber, "Science as a Vocation," 139.
35. In the Oxford English Dictionary, for example, the definitions of "enchant" include "to hold spell-bound; in bad sense, to delude, befool" as well as to "delight, enrapture."
36. The literature on "folk," "popular," and "mass" cultures is extensive. For overviews of selected facets, see Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (Cambridge, 1998);
37. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978);
38. Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York, 1975);
39. Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1999);
40. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1988);
41. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1994);
42. Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (New York, 1995).
43. This view was reiterated in 1976 by Bruno Bettelheim. Arguing for the pedagogical importance of fairy tales for children, he maintained that children's thought is animistic, like that of "all preliterate people": "A child trusts what the fairy story tells, because its world view accords with his own." Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York, 1976), 45.
44. Johann P. Arnason, "Reason, Imagination, Interpretation," in Gillian Robinson and John Rundell, eds., Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity (London, 1994), 156-169;
45. Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1998);
46. John Tinnon Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 (New York, 1943).
47. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes the dramatic shift in attitudes toward fantasy and the imagination during the course of the past two centuries: "Until recently... a case could be made that fantasy and imagination were residual practices, confined to special moments or places ... [but] this weight has imperceptibly shifted. More persons throughout the world see their lives through the prisms of possible lives offered by the mass media in all their forms. That is, fantasy is now a social practice; it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives for many people in many societies." Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, Minn., 1997), 53-54.
48. Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1991), 35.
49. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (1965; repr., New York, 2004).
50. For other explorations of "modernity and nostalgia," see Sylviane Agacinski, Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia (New York, 2004);
51. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2002);
52. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, Mass., 2004);
53. Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars (New Haven, Conn., 1995).
54. H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York, 1961).
55. In addition to identifying thinkers who tended to express a binary view of modernity, Hughes does acknowledge the attempts by certain thinkers, such as Sigmund Freud and Max Weber, to hold opposing forces - especially reason and the irrational - in the tense harmony represented by the antinomial paradigm. A body of thought known as "Traditionalism" also developed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was avowedly "antimodernist" and in its more trenchant forms does fit this oppositional, "binary" model: see Mark J. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York, 2004).
56. Thus, in an influential work, Morris Berman captured an outlook shared by many progressive movements in Europe and America during the 1960s and 1970s, when he recounted the by now familiar argument: "The view of nature which predominated in the West down to the eve of the Scientific Revolution was that of an enchanted world. Rocks, trees, rivers, and clouds were all seen as wondrous, alive, and human beings felt at home in this environment... The story of the modern epoch, at least on the level of the mind, is one of progressive disenchantment. From the sixteenth century on, mind has been progressively expunged from the phenomenal world." Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (1981; repr., New York, 1988), 2.
57. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), ix.
58. Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968; repr., New York, 1970), 10.
59. Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968; 1970), Ibid., 12.
60. As recently as 1998, Jay Winter described the growth of spiritualism in interwar Europe: "The Great War, the most 'modern' of wars, triggered an avalanche of the 'unmodern.' One salient aspect of this apparent contradiction is the wartime growth in spiritualism." Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1998), 54.
61. For two works in the Sonderweg tradition, see George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964),
62. and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley, Calif., 1974);
63. for a critique, see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford, 1984).
64. The "irrationalist" title is that of Robert George Leeson Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York, 1977).
65. Derrida discusses Marx's recourse to ghost imagery in Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York, 1994).
66. Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy" and "The Genealogy of Morals," trans. Francis Golffing (New York, 1956), 299.
67. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (1930; repr., New York, 1961), 104.
68. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, Calif., 2002), 19.
69. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, Ibid., 20.
70. Among an expanding literature, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe;
71. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, eds., Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Postcolonial Africa (Chicago, 1993);
72. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago, 1997);
73. Saurabh Dube, ed., Enduring Enchantments, special issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (October 2002);
74. Dube, "Introduction: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities," Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 2 (2002): 197-219;
75. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life in the Zambian Copperbelt (Berkeley, Calif., 1999);
76. Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa, trans. Janet Roitman (Charlottesville, Va., 1997);
77. Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New York, 2001);
78. Henrietta L. Moore and Todd Sanders, eds., Magical Interpretations, Material Realities: Modernity, Witchcraft, and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa (London, 2001);
79. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, N.J., 1999);
80. Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories (Berkeley, Calif., 2004);
81. Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York, 1997).
82. As Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park observed, "the last twenty years have seen a deep questioning of ideals of order, rationality, and good taste - 'traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential' - that had seemed self-evident to intellectuals since the origins of the modern Republic of Letters in the late seventeenth century." Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York, 1998), 10.
83. Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
84. For a defense of the concept of "multiple modernities," see Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, N.C., 2004).
85. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (2000; repr., New Haven, Conn., 2005), 8;
86. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 243.
87. James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
88. Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago, 2004), 6.
89. T. J. Jackson Lears was one early exception to this rule, and his own views on the topic have continued to develop since 1981, when he published No Place of Grace: Antimodemism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981).
90. The subtitle suggests that Lears accepted the binary distinction between the rationalizing and secularizing processes of modernity, and the corresponding reactions by intellectuals and artists who sought to restore enchantment to fin-de-siède America through more traditional means. This binary thread does run through the book, as does the related dialectical approach. For example, Lears argues that fundamental aspects of the antimodern reaction, such as the quest for "authentic" experience, actually eased America's transition to modernity: "The shift from a Protestant to a therapeutic world view, which antimodern sentiment reinforced, marked a key transformation in the cultural hegemony of the dominant classes in America ... [promoting] new modes of accommodation to routinized work and bureaucratic 'rationality' " (xviii). So far, so standard. But Lears also acknowledges that the antimodern tradition he charts was complex and unstable, containing progressive elements that resisted incorporation into the new status quo (xiv, 6). If this was not a full-fledged embrace of the antinomial understanding, his next two works, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1994)
91. and Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York, 2003), moved more decisively in this direction. In them, Lears offers a more complex understanding of the Protestant ethic than that advanced by Max Weber, who identified Protestantism as an important factor in the emergence of modern instrumental rationality. In Fables of Abundance, Lears highlights the antinomial aspects of Protestantism that have helped shape Western modernity. In addition to its stress on rational calculation, which Weber considered central to the disenchantment of the world, Lears points to a countervailing aspect of Protestantism, stemming from its Pietist branch: an emphasis on subjectivity, which is capable of imbuing the material world with significance. Fables of Abundance argues against a notion of modern disenchantment, for animistic tendencies continue to exist in the modern world-not only in certain works of elite culture, but also in some manifestations of mass culture, including modern advertising. Modernity thus consists of both the "rational, managerial ethos" and an animistic countertendency: "Throughout the twentieth century, people have imagined alternatives to the disembodied corporate vision of abundance; many fastened on the detritus of commodity civilization itself as they seek another way of being in the world. Bricolage, verbal or artifactual, has been a strategy for reanimating matter" (10, 133). And in his history of the concept of "luck" in American culture, Lears demonstrates a similar tension in modern American culture between the antinomies of a Protestant "culture of control" and the more pagan (as well as pietistic and scientific) celebrations of the "culture of chance." Lears's work has been implicitly concerned with exploring the different forms of specifically modern enchantments, anticipating the spate of recent works that address the topic directly.
92. Another sign of the changing reception to the concept of modern enchantment can be found in works on the poet and occultist William Butler Yeats. Early biographies and literary studies tended to minimize Yeats's profound and lifelong interest in the occult, but the two-volume biography by historian Roy Foster unabashedly depicts occultism as central to his life and work - indeed, worthy of a subtitle: Roy Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1: The Apprentice Mage, 1865-1914 (New York, 1997),
93. vol. 2: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939 (New York, 2003).
94. Among the many recent works discussing the concept of modern enchantment, not restricted to history and not explicitly acknowledged elsewhere in this essay, are Arun Agrawal and C. C. Gibson, "Enchantment and Disenchantment: The Role of Community in Natural Resource Conservation," World Development 27, no. 4 (April 1999): 629-649;
95. Kelly Besecke, "Speaking of Meaning in Modernity: Reflexive Spirituality as a Cultural Resource," Sociology of Religion 62 (2001): 365-381;
96. Anthony Cascardi, "The Critique of Subjectivity and the Re-enchantment of the World," Revue Internationale de Philosophie 50, no. 196 (1996): 243-263;
97. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York, 1995);
98. Saurabh Dube, "Introduction: Enchantment and Modernity," South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 729-755;
99. Michael Gilsenan, "Signs of Truth: Enchantment, Modernity, and the Dreams of Peasant Women," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6, no. 4 (December 2000): 597-615;
100. Richard Jenkins, "Disenchantment, Enchantment, and Re-enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium," Max Weber Studies 1, no. 1 (November 2000): 11-32;
101. Michael Lowy, "Walter Benjamin and Surrealism: A Story of Revolutionary Enchantment," Europe-Revue Littéraire Mensuelle 74, no. 804 (April 1996): 79-90;
102. Walter Mignolo, "The Enduring Enchantment (Or the Epistemic Privilege of Modernity and Where to Go from Here)," South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 927-954;
103. David Morgan, "The Enchantment of Art: Abstraction and Empathy from German Romanticism to Expressionism," Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 2 (April 1996): 317-341;
104. Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets (Cambridge, Mass., 2002);
105. Christopher H. Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture (Edinburgh, 2005);
106. Paul A. Passavant, "Enchantment, Aesthetics, and the Superficial Powers of Modern Law," Law & Society Review 35, no. 3 (2001): 709-729;
107. Michael Saler, "Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes: Mass Culture and the Re-enchantment of Modernity, c.1890c.1940," The Historical Journal 46, no. 3 (2003): 599-622;
108. Mark Sussman, "Performing the Intelligent Machine: Deception and Enchantment in the Life of the Automaton Chess Player," The Drama Review - A Journal of Performance Studies 43, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 81-96;
109. Stanley J. Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge, Mass., 1990);
110. Edward A. Tiryakian, "Dialectics of Modernity: Reenchantment and Dedifferentiation as Counterprocesses," in Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, eds., Social Change and Modernity (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 78-83;
111. Yi Fu Tuan, Escapism (Baltimore, Md., 1998);
112. Joel Whitebook, "Slow Magic: Psychoanalysis and 'the Disenchantment of the World,' "Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 50, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 1197-1217;
113. Jennifer Wicke, "Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-enchantment: Joyce and the Cult of the Absolutely Fabulous," Novel - A Forum on Fiction 29, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 128-137;
114. Avihu Zakai, "Jonathan Edwards and the Language of Nature: The Re-enchantment of the World in the Age of Scientific Reasoning," Journal of Religious History 26, no. 1 (February, 2002): 15-41.
115. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 368.
116. Wonders and the Order of Nature, Ibid., 9.
117. Wonders and the Order of Nature, Ibid., 17.
118. Wonders and the Order of Nature, Ibid., 14-15.
119. Other histories of emotions include Hans Medick and David W. Sabean, eds., Interest and Emotion: Essays in the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge, 1984),
120. and Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998).
121. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 17. The issue of wonder as a cognitive passion is also addressed in Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences.
122. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 331.
123. Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Kracauer, Humphrey Jennings, and certain French surrealists were among the early-twentieth-century intellectuals in Europe who tried to reconcile the processes of modernity with the idea of enchantment, although until recently their project tended to be overshadowed by the greater attention given to the "cultural pessimists"; see Michael Saler, "Whigs and Surrealists: The 'Subtle Links' of Humphrey Jennings' Pandaemonium," in George Behlmer and Fred Leventhal, eds., Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture (Stanford, Calif., 2000), 123-142.
124. Other works that have addressed perceptions by contemporaries of the "wonders" of modernity include Christoph Asendorf, Batteries of Life: On the History of Things and Their Perception in Modernity, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley, Calif., 1993);
125. Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York, 1998);
126. Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York, 2003);
127. David Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of New Technology, 1880-1940 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992);
128. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1967);
129. Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, Calif., 1999);
130. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles, 2001);
131. and Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism: Insolent Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif., 2000).
132. Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago, 1998).
133. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Ibid., 125, 184.
134. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Ibid., 38.
135. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain, Ibid., 211.
136. Daniel Pick, Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture (New Haven, Conn., 2000).
137. Svengali's Web: The Alien Enchanter in Modern Culture, Ibid., 86.
138. He quotes with approval David Blackbourn's assertion that Marpingen "did not represent a clash between tradition and modernity, but fed off many conflicts of an uneven, uneasy world." Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (Oxford, 1995), 407;
139. Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in a Secular Age (New York, 1999).
140. See also Peter Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2001).
141. Pick, Svengali's Web, 20.
142. Pamela Thurschwell pursues the connections among new communications technologies, scientific thought, and the vogue for the occult and supernatural during the fin-de-siècle in Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, 2001).
143. Pick, Svengali's Web, 100.
144. Pick, Svengali's Web, Ibid. 100.
145. Alex Owen makes a similar argument for the occultist movement of fin-de-siècle Britain in The Place of Enchantment. I have already considered it in these pages; see AHR 110, no. 3 (June 2005): 871-872.
146. Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore, Md., 2004), 51.
147. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, Ibid., 24.
148. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, Ibid., 19.
149. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, Ibid., 245
150. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, Ibid.
151. She refers to this mixture of the traditional and the new as "the heterogeneous presence of scientific modernity." This aspect of German intellectual history is also addressed in Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, N.J., 1996).
152. Treitel,A Science for the Soul, 53-55.
153. A Science for the Soul, Ibid., 52.
154. For an incisive exploration of "psychological modernism," see Jan Goldstein, "The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France: An Alternate Narrative," in Ross, Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences, 190-209.
155. Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 75.
156. A Science for the Soul, Ibid., 212;
157. see also Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York, 1984);
158. Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J., 1999).
159. Patrick Brantlinger, Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993);
160. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York, 1989).
161. Cook, The Arts of Deception, 16.
162. The Arts of Deception, Ibid., 15, 169.
163. The Arts of Deception, Ibid., 68.
164. The Arts of Deception, Ibid., 17.
165. The Arts of Deception, Ibid., 28.
166. Ibid., 308 n. 11.
167. Cook acknowledges his debt to Neil Harris's concept of an "operational aesthetic," which Harris defined in his cultural history of P. T. Barnum as "an approach to experience that equated beauty with information and technique, accepting guile because it was more complicated than candor." Harris also observes that Barnum's exhibits and hoaxes "trained Americans to absorb knowledge. This was an aesthetic of the operational, a delight in observing process and examining for literal truth. In place of intensive spiritual absorption, Barnum's exhibitions concentrated on information and then problems of deception." Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston, 1973), 57, 79.
168. Simon During, Modem Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 65-66.
169. Modem Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Ibid., 102-103.
170. Modem Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Ibid., 49-50.
171. Modem Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Ibid., 66-71.
172. Modem Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Ibid., 50.
173. Modem Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic, Ibid.
174. Mark A. Schneider, Culture and Enchantment (Chicago, 1993), 4.
175. Culture and Enchantment, Ibid., 73-81, 4.
176. Culture and Enchantment, Ibid., ix.
177. Culture and Enchantment, Ibid., x