The Enchantments of Mammon

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Eugene McCarraher cites these words from the English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins in an epigraph for The Enchantments of Mammon and then invokes them again a dozen times over the course of nearly seven hundred pages. For McCarraher, illuminating this forgotten grandeur requires more ardor than subtlety. Popular reviews have described the scope of his opus as “capacious,” “monumental,” “majestic,” “immense”—but above all else it is instilled with an extraordinary energy emanating from his conviction regarding the inherent sacral needs and capacities of humankind. McCarraher's focus on the persistence of the sacral leads him to frame the book as a grand argument with Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). The transition to capitalism, McCarraher argues, should not be seen as a process of secularization: capitalism is itself a regime of enchantment, and in its workings we can find endless manifestations of “a longing for divinity” (p. 4). The book then unfolds as an extended reading of the sacral aspects of capitalist modernity, wherein management theory provides dogma, engineers act as priests, brands become icons, advertisements inscribe commandments, material goods serve as sacraments, slogans function as chants, and skyscrapers rise like cathedrals

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Capital (architecture · Capitalism · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Secularization · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory