Just to set the record straight — and who doesn’t want to hike deep into the tall weeds of literary origin? — the sociologist Max Weber didn’t coin the term “elective affinities.” He borrowed it from the title of Goethe’s 1809 novel about the tragic consequences of an almost chemical pull into illicit sexual attraction. Which makes sense, because Goethe himself borrowed the phrase from the early days of chemistry, where “elective affinity” was used to name certain catalytic chemical reactions that were not yet well understood.

So, just to make everything clear, a pre-scientific description of chemistry stands behind a novelistic description of tawdry sexual desire, which stands behind a description of sociological effects. In his classic 1905 study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber used “elective affinity” to explain how otherwise apparently unrelated intellectual and sociological trends could somehow push in the same direction, combining, like Protestantism and capitalism, to create a new age. Elective affinity gave us the birth of the modern.