Abstract
Weber claims that Calvinism ‘liquidated’ magic while Confucianism, he says, is magic-tolerant. The chapter explores Weber’s discussion of the importance of magic in the evolution of religion and considers his treatment of magic in both Calvinism and Confucianism. The chapter demonstrates that Weber’s claims regarding Calvinist demagicalization are made without reference to Reformation Calvinist obsessions with satanic witchcraft, in which the reality of magic is accepted and expressed in the witch hunts that lasted more than a century. Through a careful analysis of Calvin’s own writings it is shown that although Calvinism opposed magic, it did not eliminate it, but accepted it as an element of the religious force-field. The chapter makes an original contribution, providing a major challenge to Weber’s Protestant Ethic thesis.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Aldenhoff, Rita. 2010. ‘Max Weber and the Evangelical-Social Congress’. Pp. 193–202 in Max Weber and his Contemporaries, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel. London: Routledge.
Angus, Ian H. 1983. ‘Disenchantment and Modernity’. Human Studies. 6(2): 141–66.
Ashiwa, Yoshiko and Wank, David L. 2009. ‘Making Religion, Making the State in Modern China’. pp. 1–21 in Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China, edited by Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Baker, Hugh D.R. 1979. Chinese Family and Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.
Berghahn, Volker. 2005. Imperial Germany 1871–1918: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics. New York: Berghahn Books.
Calvin, John. 2002. Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by Henry Beveridge. Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
Clark, Anthony E. (ed). 2014. A Voluntary Exile: Chinese Christianity and Cultural Confluence since 1552. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press.
Clark, Christopher. 2008. ‘Religion and Confessional Conflict’. Pp. 83–105 in Imperial Germany 1871–1918, edited by James Retallack. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Coe, Rodney M. 1997. ‘The Magic of Science and the Science of Magic: An Essay on the Process of Healing’. Journal of Health and Social Behavior. 38(1): 1–8.
Daston, Lorraine. 1991. ‘Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe’. Critical Inquiry. 18(1): 93–124.
David-Neel, Alexandra. 1907. Socialisme Chinois: Le Philosophe Meh-Ti et l’Idée de Solidarité. London: Luzac and Co.
de Groot, Jan Jakob Marie. 1910. The Religion of the Chinese. New York: Macmillan.
Faber, Ernst. 1877. Die Grundgedanken des alten chinesischen Socialismus oder die Lehre des Philosophen Micius. Elberfeld: Friderichs.
Faure, David. 2006. China and Capitalism: A History of Business Enterprise in Modern China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Figala, Karin. 2004. ‘Newton’s Alchemy’. Pp. 370–86 in The Cambridge Companion to Newton, edited by I. Bernard Cohen and George Edwin Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freedman, Maurice. 1979. ‘Geomancy’. Pp. 313–33 in his The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman, edited by G. William Skinner. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Girardot, Norman J. 2002. The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Glete, Jan. 2002. War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660. London: Routledge.
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1995. ‘The German Theological Sources and Protestant Church Politics’. Pp. 34–41 in Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts, edited by Lehmann Karl and Guenther Roth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Graham, A.C. 1990. The Book of Lieh-tzŭ: A Classic of Tao. New York: Columbia University Press.
Greene, Thomas M. 2005. ‘Language, Signs and Magic’. Pp. 29–42 in his Poetry, Signs and Magic. Newark: University of Delaware Press.
Haley, Peter. 1980. ‘Rudolph Sohm on Charisma’. The Journal of Religion. 60(2): 185–97.
Honigsheim, Paul. 1950. ‘Max Weber: His Religious and Ethical Background and Development’. Church History. 19(4): 219–39.
Huenemann, Ralph William. 1984. The Dragon and the Iron Horse: The Economics of Railroads in China, 1876–1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
James, William. 2002. The Varieties of Religious Experience, Centenary Edition. London: Routledge.
Johnston, Ian (translator). 2010. The Mozi: A Complete Translation. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press.
Johnstone, Nathan. 2004. ‘The Protestant Devil: The Experience of Temptation in Early Modern England’. Journal of British Studies. 43(2): 173–205.
Kent, Percy Horace. 1907. Railway Enterprise in China: An Account of its Origin and Development. London: Edward Arnold.
Knoblock, John (translator). 1999a. Xunzi. Volume 1 (Library of Chinese Classics: Chinese-English). Hunan: Human People’s Publishing House.
Knoblock, John (translator). 1999b. Xunzi. Volume 2. (Library of Chinese Classics: Chinese-English). Hunan: Human People’s Publishing House.
Legge, James. 1895. ‘That the Nature is Evil by the philosopher Hsün’. Pp. 79–88 in his The Chinese Classics: Volume II, The Works of Mencius. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
Legge, James. 1962a. ‘The Tâo te King’. Pp. 45–124 in The Texts of Taoism, Volume 1. New York: Dover.
Legge, James. 1962b. ‘The Writings of Chuang Tzŭ: Part 1’. Pp. 127–309 in The Texts of Taoism, Volume 1. New York: Dover.
Lyons, Sara N. 2014. ‘The Disenchantment/Re-enchantment of the World: Aesthetics, Secularisation, and the Gods of Greece from Friedrich Schiller to Walter Pater’. Modern Language Review. 109(4): 873–95.
Maxwell-Stuart, Peter. 2004. ‘Witchcraft and Magic in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’. Pp. 81–99 in Beyond the Witch Trials: Witchcraft and Magic in Enlightenment Europe, edited by Owen Davies and Willem de Blécourt. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Moerman, Daniel E. 2002. Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1989. The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Monter, E. William. 1971. ‘Witchcraft in Geneva, 1537–1662’. Journal of Modern History. 43(2): 179–204.
Needham, Joseph. 1956. Science and Civilization in China. Volume 2, History of Scientific Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pollard, David E. (translator). 2014. Real Life in China at the Height of Empire: Revealed by the Ghosts of Ji Xiaolan. Hong Hong: The Chinese University Press.
Qi, Xiaoying. 2014. Globalized Knowledge Flows and Chinese Social Theory. New York: Routledge.
Schluchter, Wolfgang. 1985. The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Weber’s Developmental History, translated, with an introduction, by Guenther Roth. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scribner, R.W. 2001. ‘The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’. Pp. 346–65 in his Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800). Leiden: Brill.
Sivin, Nathan. 1976. ‘Chinese Alchemy and the Manipulation of Time’. Isis. 67(4): 513–26.
Sivin, Nathan. 1985. ‘Max Weber, Joseph Needham, Benjamin Nelson: The Question of Chinese Science’. Pp. 37–49 in Civilizations East and West: A Memorial Volume for Benjamin Nelson, edited by E.V. Walter, Vytautas Kavolis, Edmund Leites and Marie Coleman Nelson. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press.
Smith, David Norman. 1998. ‘Faith, Reason, and Charisma: Rudolph Sohm, Max Weber and the Theology of Grace’. Sociological Inquiry. 68(1): 32–60.
Stark, Werner. 1968. ‘The Place of Catholicism in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion’. Sociological Analysis. 29(4): 202–10.
Styers, Randall. 2004. Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sun, Anna Xiao Dong. 2005. ‘The Fate of Confucianism as Religion in Socialist China: Controversies and Paradoxes’. Pp. 229–53 in State, Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies, edited by Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney. Leiden: Brill.
Swatos, William H. and Kivisto, Peter. 1991. ‘Max Weber as “Christian Sociologist”’. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. 30(4): 347–62.
Tambiah, Stanley J. 1990. Magic, Science and Religion and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tanakh. 1985. Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society.
Thomas, Keith. 1997. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thorndike, Lynn. 1923. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. Volume 1. New York: Columbia University Press.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh. 1978. The European Witch-craze of the 16th and 17th Centuries. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Weber, Max. 1963. The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff. Boston: Beacon Press.
Weber, Max. 1964. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth, with an Introduction by C.K. Yang. New York: The Free Press.
Weber, Max. 1967. Ancient Judaism, translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. New York: The Free Press.
Weber, Max. 1970a. ‘Science as a Vocation’. Pp. 129–56 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge.
Weber, Max. 1970b. ‘The Social Psychology of World Religions’. Pp. 267–301 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weber, Max. 1981. General Economic History, translated by Frank Knight. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.
Weber, Max. 1991. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons. London: Harper Collins.
Weber, Max. 2002. ‘The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1905)’. Pp. 1–202 in Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings, edited and translated by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. London: Penguin.
Weber, Max. 2014. ‘The Meaning of “Value Freedom” in the Sociological Economic Sciences’. Pp. 304–34 in Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, edited by Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster. London: Routledge.
Whimster, Sam. 2007. Understanding Weber. London: Routledge.
White, Michael. 1999. Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer. Reading: Helix Books.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barbalet, J. (2017). Magic. In: Confucianism and the Chinese Self. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6289-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6289-6_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-6288-9
Online ISBN: 978-981-10-6289-6
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)