Weber's theory of meaning, modernity and the value-spheres

This chapter describes how disenchanted modernity is understood by Weber as a series of separate competing value-spheres: the economic, political, intellectual/scientific, erotic and aesthetic. This theory of modernity is set within Weber's vast sociology of religion and can be regarded as Weber's attempt to understand how the fundamental human need for meaning, that religion so obviously meets, is manifested within the overall meaninglessness of rationalised modern life. That is, the value-spheres not only create and uphold modern senselessness, particularly with regard to death and suffering, but each sphere also provides a limited, specific degree of meaning once it is entered.