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In social science, disenchantment () is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion apparent in modern society. The term was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western world. In Western society, according to Weber, scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, in which "the world remains a great enchanted garden".
Jürgen Habermas has subsequently striven to find a positive foundation for modernity in the face of disenchantment, even while appreciating Weber's recognition of how far secularism was created from, and is still "haunted by the ghosts of dead religious beliefs."
Wang Huning has written that disenchantment constitutes a dialectical tension in the West which drives forward social and material progress at the expense of "authority, moderation, self-sufficiency, and self-confidence."
Some have seen the disenchantment of the world as a call for existentialism commitment and individual responsibility before a collective normative void.
The process of sacralization endows a profane offering with sacred properties – consecration – which provides a bridge of communication between the worlds of the sacred and profane. Once the sacrifice has been made, the ritual must be desacralized in order to return the worlds of the sacred and profane to their proper places.
Disenchantment operates on a macrosociology, rather than the microsociology of sacralization. It also destroys part of the process whereby the chaotic social elements that require sacralization in the first place continue with mere knowledge as their antidote. Therefore, disenchantment can be related to Émile Durkheim's concept of anomie: an unmooring of the individual from the ties that bind in society.
Carl Jung considered symbols to provide a means for the numinous to return from the unconscious to the desacralized world – a means for the recovery of myth, and the sense of wholeness it once provided, to a disenchanted modernity.
Ernest Gellner argued that, although disenchantment was the inevitable product of modernity, many people just could not stand a disenchanted world, and therefore opted for various "re-enchantment creeds", such as psychoanalysis, Marxism, Wittgensteinianism, phenomenology, and ethnomethodology. A noticeable feature of these re-enchantment creeds is that they all tried to make themselves compatible with naturalism: i.e., they did not refer to supernatural forces. Likewise, Charles Taylor identified certain aesthetic impulses—those found in Romanticism, magic realism, and "watching movies about the uncanny"—as failed attempts to recover an enchanted sense of self.
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