December 2018
Intermediate to advanced
315 pages
11h 8m
English
Christoph Markschies
Philosopher Carl Friedrich Gethmann, a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, has described rationalization as the “targeted, structured and reproducible operation of optimization.”1 Gethmann’s broad definition covers rationalization across a range of very different areas – in the economy, in society, even in the mind of the individual. In our own field of religious studies, the first scholar who comes to mind in this context is the philosopher and sociologist Max Weber, who introduced the term “rationalization” to the field.2 Maintaining that religious rationalization preceded social rationalization, Weber identified rationalization structures within the Judeo-Christian tradition ...
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