For the German sociologist Max Weber, modernity is marked by the ‘disenchantment of the world [Entzauberung der Welt]’. What segregates the modern from the ancient world is a process of ‘de-magification’, whereby Western society exorcises itself of its fear of demons, ghosts and goblins. Modern humanity no longer submits itself to the spell of superstition and the sacred rituals of power, but has demystified its existence through the calculations of science and the bureaucratic apparatus of state. What was supernatural has been rationalised as merely the natural; the ‘fear of things invisible’, as Thomas Hobbes puts it, has been dispelled by the clarity of reason; the authority of religion has been replaced by the politics of state. The modernisation of society is therefore its secularisation; humanity, by disenchanting the world, needs believe in no other god than itself.

But for Weber secularisation is a fateful process. He sees the seed of this catastrophe in the fruit of knowledge that enticed humanity with the promise of enlightenment. Weber's sociology replays the narrative of Eden in secular terms: ‘The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge’, he writes, ‘is that it must know that [it] cannot learn the meaning of the world from the result of its analysis.’