In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, within a variety of spheres, individual personalities referred to as ‘masters’ were venerated in quasi-religious terms. As a result, treatises relevant to the theme of the ‘master’ were written which had a major impact on subsequent scholarship, particularly in the sociology of knowledge and religion. Inspired by the poet Stefan George and taking his circle as a model, Max Weber, Max Scheler, and Joachim Wach published important works that enlisted religious and cultural historical approaches as well as social theory on topics like community building, the transference of knowledge, religious specialism, and charisma. These studies attest to a pronounced fascination with the phenomenon of the ‘master,’ which the present article investigates with reference to selected publications by the aforementioned scholars.
In many cultures and religions around the world, past and present, a relationship with a socalled "master" has been a model for the transfer of, and initiation into, particular forms of knowledge. Even among scholars, explorations of this theme have not infrequently been marked by an idealising use of the noun "master" and derivatives, most strikingly in Joachim Wach's pioneering study "Master and Disciple", but also in more recent works in other scholarly disciplines. This tendency greatly hampers work with the terminology as a metalinguistic apparatus for analysing what is meant and described by it. Accordingly, the present article explores the relational character of the "master" terminology, and introduces a number of stages in the history of its employment. Examples of its idealisation in scholarship show why it has so far proved untenable as a general heuristic category in the academic field of the study of religions.
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