Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures

A new translation of two celebrated lectures on politics, academia, and the disenchantment of the world.

In 1919, just months before he died unexpectedly of pneumonia, the
sociologist Max Weber published two lectures that he had recently
delivered at the invitation of a group of students. The question the
students asked Weber to address in these lectures was simple and
haunting. In a modern world characterized by the division of labor,
constant economic expansion, and unrelenting change, was vocation, in
intellectual work or politics, still possible? Responding to the
students’ sense of urgency, Weber offered his clearest account of the
disenchantment of the world, as well as a seminal discussion of the
place of values in the university classroom and academic research.
Similarly, in his politics lecture he gave students what is undoubtedly
his pithiest version of his account of the nature of political
authority. Weber’s attempts to rethink vocation remain as relevant and
as stirring as ever.