Lecture 3: Max Weber (1864-1920) Rationalisation

1. With the thought of Max Weber we enter 20th century reflection on the problem of modernity. Despite his own thoughts about the rapid obsolescence of scientific work, his diagnosis of modernity has endured. His vision is compelling: it marks both a heightened awareness of the difficulties and tensions of modern complexity and, nevertheless, a determination to further advance this project and confront its challenges. Weber takes over insights from Nietzsche and Marx while, simultaneously, radically repudiating their diagnoses. He felt that Marx's revolutionary scenario failed to come terms with the problems of politics and administration in complex mass societies, while Nietzsche's hopes for the restoration of aristocratic culture and the Ubermensch was a pipe dream of radical subjectivism. Weber was born into a political family; his father was a well-known National Liberal politician. Despite his own strictures on the modern necessity for vocational specialisation, Weber was himself always torn between science and politics. He had career options in law and politics, but decided on academia and as a relatively young man gained the chair of political economy at Freiburg. However, right from in inaugural lecture his theoretical interventions had national political significance and his occasional writings were to constantly complain of a vacuum of political leadership in pre-war Germany. Towards the end of the First World War he even reconsidered a political career but circumstances and personality worked against it. In the mid-nineties he married his second cousin Marianne and in 1896 was called to a full professorship at Heidelberg but soon after suffered a severe psychological collapse. He retired from academic life in 1903 and travelled to America. From this time he began to recover but did not return to lecturing until after the war. However, he remained the “ghost of Heidelberg”: his home was the centre of one of the most dazzling intellectual milieus especially during the War. He was an advisor to the Germans at the time of the Armistice and his political thinking played a key role in framing Article 48 of the Weimar constitution. He died soon after the First World War. Weber is best known as a founding father of academic sociology. His work has remained a classical paradigm contemporaneous right up to the present. Although in philosophy he explicitly remained within the dominant Neo-Kantian paradigm of the time, his social theory was to preoccupy successive generations of scholars who followed. Horkheimer& Adorno, Foucault and Habermas all recognized his significance and found it necessary to respond to his diagnosis.

2. Weber saw at close range the rapid industrialization and modernization of Germany, the political unification of the Reich and the consolidation of a prosperous bourgeois society and finally the growing political crisis that led to the First World War and the German collapse. Like many intellectuals of his generation, he was not content with bourgeois prosperity. While facing the inevitability of modernizing processes and recognizing its emancipatory dimensions, he was aware of the ambiguity of this "progress", conscious of its increasing constraints, tensions and limitations. This was why he took Nietzsche's critique of modern democratic, secular, rational civilization so seriously. Unread at the time of his first writings in the 1870s, he only became popular after his mental collapse and death around the turn of the century. But unlike Nietzsche, Weber’s scepticism in regard to the claims of bourgeois academic and  political values did not become a frontal assault on them. He is aware of ambiguity, costs, the inevitability of value clashes in modern culture but he always remained committed to the value of science. While he agreed that science could not solve the fundamental problems of life, he upheld its significance as a passionate calling for its devotees and an indispensable means of clarification of the meaning of action. He joins Nietzsche in formulating doubts about the organisational mechanisms of mass society. However, he remains proudly bourgeois and liberal: he can see no prospects of a radically alternative future. The processes that brought modernity into existence were not inevitable but they are now practically irreversible. Weber’s authenticity and contempt for beautiful illusions combined with a voracious intellectual curiosity produce, I think, a very attractive, if tortured, personality. His diagnosis of modernity is couched in ascetic terms: it is our practical (moral) and intellectual duty to meet the "demands of the day". This requires courage: to face the modern predicament with rigorous intellectual honesty and to accept real emancipatory possibilities with all their constraints and limitations.

3. The central theme of the Weberian diagnosis of modernity was the problem of "rationalisation". Much of Weber's work represents an attempt to understand and explain the sort of rationalism unique to modern western civilization. For Weber, the principle underlying all the processes of rationalisation is: that it is possible to master all things by calculation and comprehensively understand all aspects of life. Given the time and inclination, everything in our world is amenable to rational understanding. However, unlike the Hegelian “spirit”, "rationalisation" is not a single historical process. The term denotes a number of historically distinct and contingent processes that have only become inextricably interlocked in Western civilization. This rationality has become universally significant but it is not necessary in any logical or evolutionary sense. Weber rejects all teleological accounts of history which one way or another perceive history as the bearer of an immanent meaning. Again siding with Nietzsche, Weber views history as a terrain of existential chaos and, at least in modernity, of value conflict. In all likelihood the course of historical development will not clarify the meaning of culture and it would be naive to believe that human happiness will emerge from the expansion of the world's limitless possibilities. As we will see, he believes the opposite more likely.

4. The various manifestations of rationalisation share common features. These are:

1/ Human control over both natural and social processes is extended.
2/ Depersonalisation of social relations (contracts replace personal ties and obligations.
3/ Life chances determined by function, achievement and examination rather than birth.
4/ Discipline (the increasing importance of predictability and control in human action. Emphasis on legality and discipline and restriction placed on spontaneous, charismatic actions).
5/ Refinement of the techniques of calculation (book-keeping, bureaucratic files and records, science).
6/ Specialization (extended division of labour and the increasingly vocational character of modern life).
7/ The intellectualisation of all realms of culture. Elaboration and analysis of the meaning and consequences of all realms of culture. Art rejects nature as a model and takes on a much more conceptual and autonomous self-understanding in which its meaning is no longer immediate but intellectualised, science liberates itself from the demands of religion and an anthropocentric view of the world).

5. The manifestations of rationalization appear in all spheres of life (economy, religious life, science, politics), they have different historical sources (Monotheism, Greek enlightenment, Renaissance) and distinctive rates of development.

6. The ongoing historical extension of the principle of rationalization to all aspects of western culture results in what Weber called Entzaüberung "disenchantment". The world cannot retain its magical and religious significance. In traditional pre-modern societies, magic and religion are meaningful and prescriptive: the individual inhabited not an the objectified, scientific world of quantities but a mysterious, communicative one peopled with Gods that stipulated the sanctified rules and ends of all action. These early forms of world interpretation rendered meaningful such inexplicable problems as death, suffering and unfairness. These events are meaningful within a fixed cosmology and a narrative of divine order. Magic even allowed the individual to intervene and influence this order and sequence of events through ritual practices and ceremonies.  But rationalization strips the world of this ultimate religious or magical meaning, of a fixed moral order. Tradition is unable to endure rational dissection and criticism. For modern natural science, the world of nature just exists, natural events just "happen" but no longer signify anything. Science constructs a de-anthropomorphic view of the world with humanity is displaced from a central position. Science offers explanations but no meaningful order, or cosmological truths that might orientate individual action. Rationalization eliminates the meaningfulness and the harmonious order of experience in the universal ultimate sense furnished by the great world religions. The thirst for such orientation remains but science is unable to quench it. The de-magification of the world implies a degree of historical disorientation and a cultural demand for a new human answer to this problem.

7. Weber's attitude to the ongoing consequences of "rationalization" and "disenchantment" is ambiguous. For those sufficiently resolute to take up the challenge, he offers the heroic prospect of being able to create the meaning of his/her own life within the limits circumscribed by the modern objective order:

'The fruit of the tree of knowledge, which is distasteful to the complacent but which is, nonetheless, inescapable, consists in the insight that every single important activity and ultimately life as a whole, if it is not to be permitted to run on as an event in nature but is instead to be consciously guided, is a series of ultimate decisions through which the soul chooses its own fate, i.e., the meaning of its activity and existence'. (Essays on the Methodology of the Social Sciences P18)

Weber formulation of this theme of emancipation is tinged with limitation. Individual choice is always heavily constrained. The other side of increased individual autonomy and choice is the increasing domination of objective social processes and institutions (economy, bureaucracy, technology). These objective processes are rational and efficient but they also constitute a soulless and impersonal world that imposes its own severe disciplines. In a famous passage from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (P181), Weber continues:

'The Puritan wanted to work in a calling: we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of the monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of a "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed the cloak should become an iron cage'.

 In Weber’s famous reading, the Puritan is the archetypical modern individual. Their psychology of inner-worldly asceticism is decisive for the creation of the modern world. The spirit of capitalism emerges not from economic activity itself but from reformation Protestantism. The deep religiousity of the Protestant sects like the Lutherans, who believed in predestination, paradoxically gave rise to a disciplined and regimented inner-worldly activity that was especially conducive to modern economic life. The paradox is that a religious doctrine of predestination that might have disempowered the worldly aims of the individual, in the context of the religious sects of the Reformation, generated an unprecedented active participation in the world and empowerment of individual agency. This was a result of the fact that in this case a religious end now was assessed in terms of inner-wordly success. Here intense religiousity fostered deeper enmeshment in the world. This was why Weber could say that Luther had turned the whole world into a monastery. The Puritan found meaning in their calling and the discipline they imposed upon their lives. This meaning founded in absolute beliefs and convictions was ultimately transformed into an economic ethos. Thus we have the modern economic universe with its own ethos and logic. The religion foundations have disappeared, eroded by the ongoing scientific critique of religion. We, who have inherited the world the Puritans created, find ourselves compelled by emphatic economic and technological imperatives to asceticism and discipline without divine sanction or subjective conviction of its ultimate meaningfulness.