Weber argued that religion is the original agent of rationalization, but also that rationalization eventually pushes religion out of the public sphere. Many summaries of Weber’s argument stop there, at the disenchantment of the world. But Weber also suggested that rationalization produces a new form of enchantment, a kind of “polytheism” of impersonal gods, which include the state and the market.

Let’s begin with the first part of his argument. Weber regards magic as a primitive form of religion. Early cultures practiced magic to try to control nature and mitigate its various dangers; if we perform a certain dance, it will bring rain on our crops. Magic was this-worldly—not ethical, but transactional. It tried to coerce or bribe the spirits that lived in material things. There is a sort of rationality in this quid pro quo. When the great salvation religions erupted in the Axial Age, however, they introduced a new kind of rationalization. The gods were now personal and otherworldly, transcending the material world, and so interactions with them took on an ethical tone. Such gods were universal rather than local, and this gave rise to the notion of stable and universal laws that govern nature and society. A rational social order was complemented by an intellectual order that answered the human need for coherent meaning. People needed a way to deal with senseless suffering. So salvation religions developed the myth of a savior and an ethical system in which the gods could punish the unjust and reward the righteous. Since the righteous often suffer in this life, while the unjust often prosper, explanations were sought outside of the present world. Present suffering was explained by the sins of a former life or by one’s ancestors, or an afterlife was posited to ensure that the guilty were punished and the righteous rewarded after death.

For Weber, this puts salvation religions in a state of permanent tension with the world, which leads to the second part of his argument: the more religion becomes rationalized, the more it becomes otherworldly, while the worldly spheres of politics, economics, family, sex, etc. take on increasing autonomy. Worldly activities like business and war cannot meet the high ethical standards of the great salvation religions, so the religious person either flees from the world into mysticism or becomes a worldly ascetic, like the Puritan. According to Weber, the Puritan accepts the ultimate meaninglessness of this world but tries to work out his salvation in inner dialogue with God while following his worldly vocation as a businessman. This is how Protestantism led to capitalism. For the Puritan, the Catholic sacraments were mere magic, an attempt to manipulate God. The Reformation swept the world clean of such idols, so that God would be all in all. But removing God from the material world to protect God’s holiness would eventually lead to the disenchantment of all worldly pursuits. Science, for example, deals only in facts; it cannot produce meaning. Capitalism responds to whatever the market dictates; values are irrelevant to it. The bureaucracy of the state seeks efficiency; it does not respond to the will of God.

For a lot of people, what they know of Weber ends there, in disenchantment. But Weber himself took a third step, writing not only of the godlessness of the modern world, but also of its “polytheism.” Weber was convinced that human beings have an elemental need for meaning. For Weber, the split between fact on the one hand and meaning or value on the other is both a reality and a serious problem, because we still urgently want to know what the meaning of our lives is. According to Weber, “Science is meaningless, because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’” Weber rejects the idea that we can return to religion; he regards that route as suitable only for the person too weak to face “the fundamental fact that he is destined to live in a godless and prophetless time.” But Weber translates the question “What shall we do and how shall we live?” into the question “Which of the warring gods should we serve? Or should we serve perhaps an entirely different god, and who is he?” Polytheism is a direct consequence of rationalization. The divorce between fact and value means that “the various value spheres of the world stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other,” with no factual basis for adjudicating their rival claims. There is no rational way to resolve such conflicts. We must take the irrational leap of simply choosing some values rather than others. Weber writes:

We live as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted of its gods and demons, only we live in a different sense. As Hellenic man at times sacrificed to Aphrodite and at other times to Apollo, and, above all, as everybody sacrificed to the gods of his city, so do we still nowadays, only the bearing of man has been disenchanted and denuded of its mystical but inwardly genuine plasticity.

Here it is important to note that Weber seems to see no difference between the observable behavior of people in the ancient world and that of people in the modern world. Weber continues, “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another.”

In Weber’s view, Apollo has been replaced by impersonal forces like capitalism, but “gods” is not a casual metaphor. As Weber says, “they strive to gain power over our lives.” Weber believed the individual has the freedom to choose among the various gods on offer, but this choice is made in the context of unchosen constraints. The new gods we can choose must struggle not only against each other, but against the gods we do not choose. Weber writes of how Puritan asceticism

did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.

Weber concludes that “material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.”

In the nineteenth century, figures like Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche thought that doing away with God or the gods would lead to liberation for human beings. Humanity would finally take the reins of its own destiny. Weber was much more pessimistic. He emphasized the fragmented nature of human meaning in the modern world and the power and inertia of large social institutions. Together, these make complete liberation impossible. Weber seems to agree with Marx and Nietzsche that there is no pre-given order, that we humans are making it all up as we go. For Weber, however, human technical prowess produces wonders that end up dominating us. As the monster says to Dr. Frankenstein, “You are my creator, but I am your master; obey!”

So the gods eliminated by rationalization return in a different form to rule over us. In the political sphere, Weber describes how nation-states employ rationalized violence to protect borders, pushing religious scruples—like the pacifism of the Sermon on the Mount—into the private sphere of values. But war then out-religions religion, creating a new form of devotion to the nation-state. War, Weber writes, “makes for an unconditionally devoted and sacrificial community among the combatants and releases an active mass compassion and love for those who are in need…. In general, religions can show comparable achievements only in heroic communities professing an ethic of brotherliness.” Weber goes on to argue that the state does a better job than religion at giving meaning to death. In the economic sphere, Weber describes capitalism as the height of rationalization, precisely in its ­depersonalization of transactions. Money is “the most abstract and ‘impersonal’ element that exists in human life.” Weber adds, “For this reason one speaks of the rule of ‘capital’ and not that of capitalists.” Making money is no longer just a means to serve the life of people: “Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life.” In short, we continue to serve gods every bit as transcendent and irrational as the gods of old. The holy has not disappeared but migrated from the church to the state and the market.