V--2nd, Chap 9, after Robin's post with a short lead-off digression (for Robin)

[Mark Kohut]

Yes!....Weber stole what I was tryin' to say........


----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tue, October 12, 2010 9:42:28 PM
Subject: Re: V--2nd, Chap 9, after Robin's post with a short lead-off digression 
(for Robin)

RATIONALIZATION OR ROUTINIZATION AND THE CHARISMATIC HERO

The world of modernity, Weber stressed over and over again,
has been deserted by the gods.

Man has chased them away and has rationalized and made calculable and
predictable what in an earlier age had seemed
governed by chance, but also by feeling, passion, and commitment, by
personal appeal and personal fealty, by grace and by the ethics of
charismatic heroes.

Weber attempted to document this development in a variety of
institutional areas.

His studies in the sociology of religion were meant
to trace the complicated and tortuous ways in which the gradual "rationalization
of religious life" had led to the displacement of magical procedure by the
rational systematization of man's relation to the divine.

He attempted to show how prophets with their charismatic appeals had
undermined priestly powers based on
tradition; how with the emergence of "book religion" the final
systematization and
rationalization of the religious sphere had set in, which found its
culmination in the Protestant
Ethic.