Not “the present.” A specific historical wager: that reason, bureaucracy, and markets could organize a shared life better than inherited tradition and communal trust could.
Max Weber’s account of modernity centers on rationalization and disenchantment: the progressive replacement of tradition, magic, and communal meaning with calculation, bureaucracy, and instrumental reason as the basis for organizing social and economic life. Later historians have complicated the “disenchantment” half of this story considerably — modern societies never purged themselves of enchantment as thoroughly as the classic account claims — but the rationalization half, the shift toward impersonal, calculable, contract-based coordination over relationship-based trust, remains the more durable and better-evidenced part of the thesis.
A financial system built on named relationships and communal trust is, in this framing, a specific and legible rejection of the modern settlement: it reintroduces exactly the tradition-bound, relationship-dependent coordination modernity was defined by displacing.
Source: Jenkins, R., “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium,” Max Weber Studies, 2000; Josephson-Storm, J.Ā., The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, University of Chicago Press, 2017.