Theories of Modernity Essay Questions

Theories of Modernity 2 2007

Essay Due: Tues 23rd Oct

All essays are due 23rd Oct. Late essays will be accepted up to 5th without excuse, but marks will be deducted. Essays will only be accepted after 5th Nov if a satisfactory excuse is submitted. The only satisfactory excuses are illness or misadventure. Pressure of other work, or computer equipment failure, does not normally count as misadventure. For further information contact the course-giver. Work must be submitted to the Sophi office, in person, with the proper cover sheet attached. The office is open from 9.30 am until 5.00 pm Mon to Fri.

Reading
There is a huge literature to these topics and you may find other useful studies. Secondary reading is not intended to be a substitute for reading the primary texts. Evidence of primary reading is essential. A good answer also presupposes an attempt at critical engagement either with the author or his interpreters or both.

Questions: Chose one question (2, 500 words)

1. Weber speaks of modernity as a new polytheistic age of warring gods. What does he mean and what is his attitude to this predicament? How does this “new polytheism” differ from that of the past? Does he offer us a solution and is it viable?

Readings
Weber, M. 'Politics as a Vocation' and 'Science as a Vocation' From Max Weber Routledge &Kegan Paul, London, 1948
Kalberg, S. Max Weber: Reading and Commentary on Modernity Blackwell, 2005

Scaff, L A. Fleeing The Iron Cage University of California Press, 1989, Ch 3
Habermas, J. Theory of Communicative Action Vol 1 Heinemann, London, 1984 Ch 2
Brubaker, R. The Limits of Rationality Allen & Unwin, London, Chapters1, 3, 4
Turner, C. Modernity and Politics in the Work of Max Weber Routledge, 1992
Bendix, R.&Roth, G. Scholarship and Partisanship University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971, Part A Ch 5
Schluchter,W. The Paradoxes of Modernity Stanford University Press, 1996 Section 1 Truth, Power and Ethics
Eden, R. Political Leadership and Nihilism University Press Florida, 1983 Ch 2, 5, 6
Goldmann, H. Max Weber and Thomas Mann University of California Press, 1988 part 2 Ch 4
Goldmann, H. Politics, Death and the Devil University of California Press, 1992, Ch 2, 3, 6
Kontos, A. ‘The World Disenchanted, and the Return of Gods and Demons’ in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment (Ed) Horowitz, A. & Maley, T, University of Toronto Press, 1994, pp 223/247

2. Explain what Horkheimer and Adorno mean by ‘dialectic of enlightenment’? What is the relationship between this idea and that of the ‘totally administered society’ and what are the consequences for the idea of a critical theory of society today? (Students doing PHIL 2644 Critical Theory cannot do this question and Question 7 on the Critical Theory Essay list)

Reading
Adorno, T W. & Horkheimer, M. 'The Concept of Enlightenment' and Excursus 1&11 from Dialectic of Enlightenment Stanford University Press, 2002

Jay, M. The Dialectical Imagination Heinemann, London, 1973, Ch 8
Held. D. Introduction to Critical Theory Hutchinson, London, 1980, Ch 5
Honneth, A, The Critique of Power M I T Press, 1991, Ch 2
Dubiel, H. Theory and Politics M I T Press, 1985, pp 69-113
Wiggerhaus, R. The Frankfurt School M I T Press, 1994 pp 326-350
Rabinbach, A. In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, Part 1, Ch 1, Part 2, Ch 5
Bronner, S E. Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists Blackwell, 1994, Ch 5, 9
Bronner, S.E. Reclaiming the Enlightenment Columbia University Press, 2004. Ch 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 9
Habermas, J. Theory of Communicative Action Vol 1 Heinemann, London, 1984, Ch 4 Part 2 pp 366-403

3. Elaborate Foucault's image of the "carceral society"? What is the critical burden of this image? Is his standpoint the same as Adorno and Horkheimer’s? Did Foucault intend this as a diagnosis of the present?

Reading
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punish,Allen Lane, London, 1977
Foucault, M. “Society Must be Defended” Lectures at the College De France 1975-1976 Picador, New York, 2003
Klitzman, L D. (Ed) Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture; Interviews and Other Writings 1977/1984 Routledge, 1988

Arato, A.& Cohen, J L. Civil Society and Political Theory M I T Press, 1992
Bernauer, J. Michel Foucault' s Force of Flight Humanities Press, New Jersey, Ch 5
Han, B. Foucault’s Critical Project Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2002, Part 1 Ch 1, Part 2
Oksala, J Foucault on Freedom Cambridge University Press, 2005, Part 2
Dumm, T. Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom Sage, 1996, Ch 3, 4
Merquior J G Foucault California University Press, 1985, Ch 7-10
Racevskis, K. Michel Foucault and the Subversion of the Intellect Cornell 1983, Cha 6-10
Honneth, A. Critique of Power MIT Press, 1991, Ch 5,6
Morris, M & Patton, P. (eds) Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy Feral Publications, Sydney, Part 2, pp109-145
Rajchman, J. Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy Columbia University Press, 1985

4. Habermas speaks of modernity as an "incomplete project". What is distinctive about this understanding and does it meet the sort of objections often raised against modernity?

Reading
Habermas. J. ‘Modernity versus Postmodernity’ New German Critique No 22 (included in Reader)
Habermas, J. ‘The Normative Content of Modernity’ from The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Polity, 1987, pp336-367
Habermas, J. ‘Conceptions of Modernity’ in The Postnational Constellation Polity, 2001 Ch 6.

Rengger, N J. Political Theory, Modernity and Postmodernity Blackwell, 1995, Part 1
Chambers, S. Reasonable Democracy Cornell Uni Press, 1996, Chapter 9
Holub, R C. Jürgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere Routledge, 1991, Ch 6
Best, S. The Politics of Historical Vision Guildford Press, New York, 1995, Ch 3
Giddens, A. ‘ Modernism and Postmodernism’ New German Critique No 22, pp15/18
Arato, A. & Cohen, J. Civil Society and Political Theory MIT, 1992, pp210/254
White, S. The Recent Work of Jürgen Habermas Cambridge, 1988, Ch 5&6
White, S. (Ed) Cambridge Companion to Habermas Cambridge, 1996 Part V
Honneth, A. Critique of Power MIT1991, Ch 9
Passerin d'Entreves, M. & Benhabib, S. (ed) Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity MIT, 1997, Ch 2, 5, 9


5. Critically analyze Weber's account of democracy and its potential. Do you think it has much to offer us today?

Readings
Weber M, ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (in Reader)
Weber, M. Economy and Society University of California Press, 1978, Vol 1 Ch 3 and pp 1339-1368, Vol 2 Appendix 2 pp 1381- 1461

Breiner, P. Max Weber and Democratic Politics Cornell University Press, Ch 4, 5, 6.
Mommsen W J Max Weber and German Politics 1890-1920 University of Chicago Press, 1984, Chapters 9,10
Mommsen,W. The Age of Bureaucracy Blackwell, Oxford,1974, Ch4
Wrong D (Ed) Max Weber Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1970, Ch 11
Eden R, Political Leadership and Nihilism University Press, Florida, 1983 Ch 2, 5, 6
Horowitz A & Maley T. (EdThe Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment University of Toronto, 1994 Part 1 Ch 3, 4 Part 2 Ch 5, 6
Beetham D, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics Allen &Unwin, London, 1974, Ch 4, 8
Struve W, Elites Against Democracy: Leadership Ideals in Bourgeois Political Thought in Germany 1890-1933 Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1973, Ch 4

6. Compare and contrast the use made by Nietzsche and Weber of the critique of asceticism? (This question is really only suitable for those who did Nietzsche is Semester 1)

Readings
Nietzsche, F. The Genealogy of Morals, Anchor, New York, 1956
Weber, M. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Unwin, London, 1974
Owen, D. Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche: Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason Routledge, 1994, Chapters 3,6, 8
Eden R, Political Leadership and Nihilism Uni of Florida Press, 1983 Ch 2, 3, 4, 5,
Turner, C. Modernity and Politics in the Work of Max Weber Routledge, 1992
Goldmann, H. Max Weber and Thomas Mann University of California Press 1988 Part 2 Chapter 4
Goldman, H. Politics, Death and the Devil University of California Press 1992, Chapters 2, 3, 6
Horowitz, A. & Maley, T. (Ed) The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment University of Toronto Press, 1994 Part 1 Ch 4, Part 3, Ch 9
Hollingdale, R. J Nietzsche Routledge &Kegan Paul, London, Ch 6
Danto, A C. Nietzsche as Philosopher MacMillan, London, Ch 5
Schacht, R. Nietzsche Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Ch 2, 4, 5, 6
Ackermann, R J. Nietzsche: A Frenzied Look University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1990, Ch 6
Mahon M, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy State University of New York Press, 1992, Ch 6
Baker, R. The Limits of Rationality Allen & Unwin, London, 1984 pp22-29
Wrong, D. (Ed), Max Weber Prentice-Hall, New Jersey, 1970 Part 3
Marshall, G. In Search of the Spirit of Capitalism Huchinson, London, 1982
Goldmann, H. Max Weber and Thomas Mann University of California Press, 1988, Ch 1, 4

Lecture 6: Horkheimer &Adorno (cont)

The Cultural Industry(cont) and the Critique of Instrumental Reason

1. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the term "culture industry" does not simply signify that cultural production has become industrial. They accept the reproduction of individual works of art on a mass scale inevitably requires industry. The important point encapsulated in the idea of the culture industry is that contemporary culture is increasingly "standardised" and repetitive with only "pseudo-individualisation" (marginal differentiation) of cultural objects: "something for all so no one escapes" (DEW123). This is wholly integrated with the commercialisation of promotion and distribution techniques. Despite the ideology of individualism that motivates much consumption in advertising and popular culture, the basic tendency not only of the institutions of late capitalism but also its culture is to eliminate all vestiges of individuality in favor of a predictable and calculable standardisation and uniformity. Horkheimer makes the same point when he says that the rhetoric of individualism impose collective patterns of behavior which disavow the very principle invoked(R&D of I, P158/159). For Horkheimer and Adorno, the leading characteristic of classical autonomous art was its utopian “promise of happiness” with its inherent critical function and enlightening potential. This potential now disappears with the "culture industry” and its homogenization of all culture as mere pleasure or entertainment as respite from drudgery of work. The crisis of the function of culture was symptomatic of the general tendency in the totally administered society to move increasingly towards the institutionalisation of "wants" and "needs" with the object of exercising tighter control. In this context, it is only the genuinely authentic “autonomous works of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Klee, Kandinsky and Schonberg that sustain the artistic vocation by resolutely resisting commodification and disclosing the truth about the world in their radical negation of it. In doing so they render aesthetically manifest the total alienation of the world. But the artistic price of this is high. They must abandon the classical unity of expression and meaning in favour of expressing this alienation and embrace audience incomprehension and refusal to communicate. To be genuine works of art, they must realize the deconstruction of art (Entkunstung).

2. Mass culture not only undermines the validity of autonomous art; it also destroys authentic popular folk culture. The former is achieved not merely by the increasing subordination of art to the status of a mere commodity. What follows from this is a widening of the distance between classical aesthetics and those of the culture industry. The audience for authentic autonomous art diminishes and this results in its cultural marginalisation. As suggested, increasingly a mass public questions the intelligibility of autonomous art. As regards popular culture, the culture industry triumphs through disembowelment. Certain elements, details and motifs are detached from their original organic whole with no thought to the inner consistency and the teleologically directed inner development of the work: instead they are reconstructed in commercial packages that simply feed the craving for new fashions. This inevitably results in the decontextualisation of the original meaning. The pride and resistance to the forces of cultural domination are virtually liquidated in the process of transformation into commodities. The outcome is simply a variation on the old standard product, the “ever new return of the same” rather than a genuinely new cultural work.

3. To fulfill its accommodating function mass culture has to tread a fine line. It must be familiar but also attractive enough to gain the attention. At the same time, it must induce in its receptors a compliant, passive and uncritical attitude. Thus the products of the culture industry must be carefully constructed and packaged. But this does not mean artistic forming or immanent coherent meaning but a packaging for effect and emotional satisfaction. Typically, this means products that neither challenge nor are divorced from existing social conventions and reality. The aim is to reinforce existing emotional expectations and affirm the reigning interpretations of late bourgeois society. The plots and heroes of film and radio rarely suggest other than identification with existing social roles and values. Popular works follow standardised structures and formulae merely imitating previous commercial successes. The contents of programs, songs, film plots are ceaselessly repeated with only minor variations and interchangeable details. Yet, for the sake of marketing, these products must have the appearance of novelty and originality. The impression has to be maintained that this industry is all about the satisfaction of customer choice and an open market. But as indicated, Adorno, maintains this is a more appearance. In fact, Adorno believes that even the very function of advertising has changed: it no longer fosters competition but serves as a blocking device. With its excessive costs it retards competition and binds consumers to the big brands. In any case, the ultimate result is for Adorno the triumph of predictability. The outcome of a film can be guessed from its opening scenes and characterisation is governed by tried and monotonous conventions. Not only are products increasingly repetitive and standardised: Adorno draws attention to the then novel built in cues for response, Canned laughter and continuous commentary elicit the “correct” responses from the audience. Furthermore, the products of the culture industry also take advantage of modern insight into the multi-dimensionality of the psyche. They address us on various levels playing to our unconscious needs and identifications with the aim of ensnaring the consumer as completely as possible.

4. The functionality which entertainment and distraction of the culture industry serves is the need to reconcile the masses to the drudgery and meaningless of everyday life in the totally administered society. As such it is an index of the truth that people feel oppressed by the lack of control they have over their own lives. The great economic crisis of the 20 's and 30 's created the objective conditions for dependency, which rob individuals of their independence and expose them to manipulation. The great uncertainties of this epoch and its structural tendencies to undermine the economic and social conditions of autonomous individuality have engendered a widespread fear and anxiety about security and employment, which generates ego weakness and neurosis. In these conditions, which systematically undermine real individuality and make it difficult to cope, people take flight in entertainment. It offers respite, relaxation, and relief from the pressures of work with its effort and alienating demands. In this relaxed state, the irrational susceptibilities of the audience are open to manipulation. Here the cultural industry brings its full arsenal to bear to convince contemporary individuals that its dream factory is delivering popular goods and satisfaction when, in reality, everything has been preprogrammed and individuals are merely been assigned their predetermined “needs” and slotted into their pre-assigned places. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that the illusion of escaping the everyday world of prosaic life and its demands is, in any case, contradictory. New or reflective experience cannot be derived from these standardized packages and managed leisure. This is the basis of Adorno’s critique of pleasure:

To be pleased means being in agreement: not having to think about it, to forget suffering, even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is really flight, only not-- as it asserts—flight from wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance. The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and negation. ( D of E, p)

Mass culture merely reinforces the psychological attitudes that give rise to dependence whereas only real critical reception and intellectual effort (like that of genuine autonomous art) can lead beyond passive dependency and attitudes of resignation. Instead, the culture industry counsels the individual to adjust to the existing social arrangement. In other words, despite its celebration of the individual, it implicitly discourages real difference or resistance and instead counsels reconciliation with existing reality. At the same time, its fake respite from the everyday merely functions to recharge the individual's capacity for continued labor in the totally administered society. Thus, the culture industry not only exploits the passivity arising from the workers objective circumstances but advances this incapacity by creating the particular frame of mind that cultivates the passivity of the mass individual.

5. As mentioned at the outset, Horkheimer and Adorno locate this very critical and negative assessment of modernity as the totally administered society within an even more encompassing critique of historical progress and civilisatory rationality they call the critique of instrumental reason. The central thesis of this cultural critique is a repudiation of the idea of objective progress through a Nietzschian inspired analysis and demasking of the bourgeois concept of reason. The classical Marxist view that assumed man's relation to nature in history unfolded in an emancipatory dynamic creating and liberating human powers and possibilities is inverted in favour of a theory of domination. This finds its roots in the identity logic of instrumental reason--that of subsuming the particular to the general--rationality synonymous with humanity's increasing domination of nature. This once emancipatorally conceived domination is now conceived repressively as the original model of domination from which all later forms are merely derivative. Instead of registering the progressive self-humanisation of the species, social labour signifies the increasing civilisatory need for instinctual sublimation and repression. Man has gained a mastery of nature but this has not been accompanied by a decline in social domination; on the contrary, the latter is only a species of the former. The more complete and rationalised is the contemporary domination of nature, the harder to recognise and the more sophisticated is social domination. Social mastery and repression need not be brutal and can be enticingly subtle as revealed by the culture industry's careful co-option and seduction of the mass individual. In the most provocative terms Horkheimer and Adorno construct a definite nexus between the development of civilisatory rationality and the barbaric domination both of self, others and nature. Whereas Marx wanted to find a specific historical explanation of domination through a structural analysis of the dynamics of bourgeois society, Adorno and Horkheimer view commodity exchange itself as a mere social medium. This extends throughout society a deeper mode of rationality already dominant in the original human project to master nature. Thus in the perspective presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment, class conflict is merely a subordinate mode of human domination of nature. In this perspective, the process of humanity's separation from nature and its conquest of nature as a mere object of domination signifies two things: firstly a distortion of human cognitive interests and secondly a repression of the natural in man. The human species only overcomes the threatening natural environment by abandoning the limits of a merely passive resistance to natural dangers and transforming mimetic reactions into instrumental acts of control. However, in this historical transformation born by the agency of social labour, the natural environment is increasingly objectified and deprived of its sensory richness by an increasingly exclusive cognitive and instrumental appropriation. At the same time, humans must forcibly constrict their sensory experience and discipline their original organic instinctual potential. This is the paradox of the civilisatory process. In order to free ourselves from the domination of nature, we enchain ourselves to a process of increasingly sophisticated social domination. In this process, the subject and the ultimate fruit of the process--humanity -- is deformed, restricted and subordinated into a means. Ultimately it is dominated, repressed, contorted and even destroyed by the very instrument--reason--that was supposed to be its means of its liberation.

Lecture 5: The Frankfurt school

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
Theodor W Adorno (1903-1969)

1. Weber lived to see the collapse of Imperial Germany and defeat in the First World War. This disaster never shattered his faith in bourgeois society. His political testament emphasized the need to nurture charismatic elements in modernity and protect the space for individual initiative resisting the universalizing tendencies of modern bureaucratisation. He felt this could be achieved in Germany by the establishment of a plebiscitary democracy along the lines I outlined last time. In philosophical terms Weber follows the late Nietzsche in placing the real emancipatory emphasis in modernity on the individual. At the same time, he resisted Nietzsche radical utopian expectation of future cultural renewal beyond enlightenment. Weber remained a bourgeois thinker and a scientist. However, the experience of the war caused many European intellectuals to adopt a more radical response to bourgeois society, the capitalist system and its dominant rationalist traditions. Many were horrified by the destruction and senseless slaughter of the War and were driven to pacifism and Marxism especially after the apparent success of the first Communist Revolution by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917. The leading members of the so-called Frankfurt School (our next subjects) were well-to-do middle class Jewish intellectuals who became heavily influenced by Marxism and its revolutionary critique of capitalism.

2. The Marxist orientated Institute for Social Research was established at Frankfurt University in 1923 funded by a wealthy merchant whose son Felix Weil was sympathetic to revolutionary politics. From 1930 this Institute was headed by Max Horkheimer who gathered around himself a very talented team of philosophers, cultural critics, economists, a psychologist, social and political theorists in an interdisciplinary program aimed at a practically motivated critique of contemporary capitalist society from the standpoint of socialism. Not all members of the Frankfurt School group shared identical views although they managed to work within a common framework. I shall consider only the diagnosis of modernity associated with the two leading figures (Horkheimer and Adorno) of the Institute that emerged towards the end of the 1930’s and during the Second World War. After the National Socialist takeover in Germany in 1933, the Institute moved its headquarters to Paris and then finally to the United States where its members lived as émigrés and observed the social and cultural developments which appeared to prefigure the post war world.

3. The failure of socialist revolution in Western Europe has often been viewed as the key to understanding the Frankfurt School diagnosis of modernity. The very first sentence in Adorno's latter main work Negative Dialectics (1966) reads "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed" (p3). Socialist revolution, which would have overcome the irrationality of the existing bourgeois world and established a rational world, failed to materialise. Thus philosophy remains necessary as a vehicle of radical critique of the existing world. Horkheimer and Adorno were witnesses to the complete victory of fascism in Europe. Already in the early thirties, empirical studies under Fromm had discovered the pervasive presence of the authority personality amongst the German working class. The Bolshevik revolution in Russia had stagnated into a totalitarian form of state oppression. Rosa Luxemburg's fears about the bureaucratisation of the party seemed to be realised. The possibility of a socialist future seemed to be closed for the foreseeable future. These disappointments were compounded by the apparently successful reorganisation and stabilisation of monopoly capitalism under the New Deal in America. The success of the New Deal policies meant that increasingly consumerist American culture was never problematised but now hailed as a truly democratic expression of the popular will. The multiple crisis of the inter-war period in Europe and the world-wide Depression appeared to have been overcome but only at the cost of increased intervention of the state into the economy and the adoption of a greater planning and regulative role.

4. In the face of this historical situation, Horkheimer felt compelled to abandon the Marxian vision of history as an emancipatory process of humanity's increasing domination of nature that had underpinned the School's early interdisciplinary work. From the late 30's these thinkers overturned the Marxist emancipatory vision of history in favor of one that views history as a process of the self-destruction of reason. I shall return to this idea later. For the moment, I want to concentrate on their diagnosis of the contemporary historical constellation that was formulated in their idea of the totally administered society. This view was built on the conviction that all contemporary economic systems--liberal democratic, fascist and socialist--seemed to be manifesting a frightening convergence in their basic logic and structure, becoming characterised by an omniscient planning and manipulation of all spheres of life. Marxists had previously maintained that the liberal, competitive bourgeois economy was rent by inescapable contradictions. Massive inequalities of wealth and economic dynamism lead to disequilbriums between production and capital valorisation, to unsold commodities and unemployment. At the same time, the self-consciousness of the proletariat was always increasing. According to this classical scenario, the combination of systemic disequilibriums and the increasing political maturity of the workers would finally lead to a revolutionary challenge to the fundamental structure of capitalist society. Frederick Pollock, an economist, provided the economic dimension of the Frankfurt school’s diagnosis. He argued that in the most recent decades bourgeois society had undergone a fundamental structural change. A radically new form of monopoly capitalism had superseded the classical competitive capitalism of the 19th century on which Marx had based his critique. The crux of this argument was that capitalism had entered a new phase in which competition had given way to government intervention and corporate planning. Pollock maintained that this transformation could contain economic contradictions for the indefinite future and therefore he could see no purely economic collapse of the bourgeois system. Pollock based his work on studies of the Soviet experience and on recent developments in Germany. He stressed the contemporary decline of the market as the primary agent of social mediation and the subordination of the profit motive to direct political and social considerations. On the basis of this work, Horkheimer and Adorno felt justified casting aside classical revolutionary optimism and viewing authoritarian state capitalism as the paradigmatic form of modernity. Fascism and other forms of authoritarian and totalitarian state appear as the political form corresponding to the new phase of monopoly capitalism. The liberal age of bourgeois society with its competitive economic relations, democratic political institutions and contractual legal arrangements had masked the domination implicit in the capitalist system. But these liberal forms of freedom were now historical memories. They were increasingly replaced by an overtly authoritarian system. With the advent of the modern totalitarian regimes, the typical liberal dualisms of individual and society, private and public, law and morals, the economy and politics are blurred and even liquidated in the service of direct control and command.

5. The traditional capitalist entrepreneur who controlled the enterprise and lived off the profits no longer controlled the economy. They were now reduced to mere rentiers and removed from a direct management function. However, even this life was insecure with economic fluctuations and the liquidation of the gold standard. Government intervened to control prices and wages, to encourage technological innovation, to enforce full employment and avoid over accumulation through the expansion of military and defence requirements. This control exercised by the state in league with the large monopolists forestalled the worse excesses of period downturns in the economic cycle. Coupled with direction of the new mass media, it opened up the possibility of a new omniscience, control and manipulation of the system. Political cliques which controlled the state apparatus but still in the interests of the economically most powerful groups (rackets) could now exercise naked power backed by all the forces of modern administration and bureaucracy aided by the subtle yet insidious pressures of the mass media. The authoritarian state becomes the vehicle of a new mode of capitalist organisation. No longer relying on competition and the market, steering functions are now transferred to the centralised administrative activity of the apparatus of domination--governmental agencies, police, army, and media. The result is a new synthesis of monopoly capitalism and totalitarian state which brings together the calculated interests of the major corporations and the planning capacity of the state organs in a technical rationality which dominates all aspects of society and quashes all opposition either by terror or consumerist incorporation. Developments in Europe, the Soviet Union and the United States all seemed to reveal the same tendencies. On this view, modernity comes to represent a new system of total domination characterised by new manifestations of alienation, administrative manipulation, by a uniform subordination and depersonalisation. With its new power (increasing bureaucratic reach) and technological means (radio, TV), the state is able to expand its influence entering and administering every facet of life. Everything that cannot be subordinated to the demands and logic of the new system will be processed, reeducated, dispensed with. Uniformity inevitably replaces individuality. The notion of the "totally administered society" has as its complement "the end of the individual". With such total control and manipulation of all domains of society the previous major forces of social resistance to capitalist domination and totalitarian tendencies are largely defused and seduced into acquiescence.

6. The increasing power and control of the authoritarian society over the individual was facilitated by the diminishing importance of the family in socialising individuals. Horkheimer had already argued in the thirties that the decline of the liberal era of capitalist competition and the replacement of independent bourgeois operators by monopoly concerns and increased government interference impacted on the family as the principal means of capitalist socialisation and character formation. The large institutions of mass society--media, state, parties and schools--began to takeover the socialising role formerly the province of the family. Horkheimer argued that for all its repressive and authoritarian aspects, the old bourgeois family had engendered a private realm of love and security. [Using a Freudian developmental psychology mediated by Erich Fromm, Horkheimer argued that, at least the male children, having overcome the fear induced by the Oedipus complex, gained autonomy, a sense of independence and rationality]. As a result of the faltering position of the bourgeois father, the process of identification was impaired and individuals were compelled to seek beyond the family for the fulfillment of their unconscious identificatory needs--they looked to leaders and broader peer and social groups. They remained passive and susceptible to unconscious fear. Such fearfulness and passivity made them malleable to the repressive demands of the new more integrated and controlled system of domination associated with the totally administered society. The loss of paternal authority following the erosion of economic independence left the child open to a direct socialisation through administrative agencies and powers. Although we do not have time to go into the Frankfurt School deployment of Freud, I will at least mention the main line of subsequent critical commentary on this thesis of the decline of the socialising role of the bourgeois family. The most important point is that it is very reductive. It links together the Freudian psychological account of socialisation with the economic theory of monopoly capitalism. As a result of monopolization and the loss of the economic autonomy of the entrepreneurial subject the control of individual behavior passes from individual conscience to the authoritarian planning agencies and the political demagogues of total administration. Yet, this account clearly reduces the whole communicative context of society to the family. It leaves out the whole dimensions of social action beyond the family. Even if the Freudian account of the nuclear family is correct, (and there is much in it to be skeptical about) it completely neglects other dimensions of social interaction. The bourgeois public sphere, co-operative enterprises and various forms of sub-culture all play a significance role in socialisation and delay and resist the logic of total administration. This neglect of the other mediating institutions of socialisation is one of the greatest weaknesses in the Horkheimer/Adorno thesis of the totally administered society.

7. One of Horkheimer and Adorno's newest insights was that this integrated system of domination also infiltrated and relied upon the domain of consumption. Previously Marxist theorists had paid little attention to consumption because the workers were largely excluded from anything more than subsistence consumption. However, in the newly emerging total system consumption begins to play a vital pacifying role in keeping the masses "satisfied". Horkheimer and Adorno speak of the "culture industry". Entertainment, distraction, conspicuous consumption all plays their part in promoting a popular perception of contentment. Individuals enjoy leisure, felt needs are satisfied and the system appears to be generally supported by those it rules over. However, the central contention is that this satisfaction is a surface phenomena that obscures the deeper truth that this “satisfaction” is itself product of the system which functions not just to satisfy “needs” but to produce them. Thus comes the radical thesis that today the poverty of the workers no longer consists in their exclusion from culture but from the fact that they can no longer escape from it. The expression "culture industry" was deliberately chosen to eliminate any positive overtones arising from alternative expressions like "mass culture" or "popular culture". They want to refute any idea that contemporary mass culture-- film, radio, records, popular literature-- was in any way a spontaneous, popular creation of the masses. It is not an organic product of a vibrant low culture reflecting the forms and activity of the masses, of their own cultural creativity. Contemporary mass culture was in no way spontaneous and had little to do with the genuine demands of the masses. Mass culture was a commodity, deliberately produced for profit. It responded to demands that had been systematically evoked and manipulated to ensure compliance to the existing state of affairs even at the level of individual motivation. The modern culture industry was also a creature of big business, molded to its requirements and the necessity of quick return on investments.

Lecture 4: Critique of Weber

1. Do we need to accept Weber's interpretation of the dilemma facing modern subjectivity and its task of making modern individal life meaningful after the collapse of tradition and other inter-subjectively binding worldviews like religion? Confronting the modern division of labor and the increasing rationalisation of culture with its increasingly sphere immanent norms and rules, Weber opts for the notion of an individual existential choice. The subject must form his or her own life meaningfully within a chosen value sphere around a single value i.e. art, science, politics, etc. Weber resists the temptation to make this choice romantic: he speaks of its rigors in a stoic voice. Such commitment is entirely without glamour. It involves the asceticism that comes with prosaic and Sisyphean specialisation. For example, in the domain of science it involves the total commitment of a large slice of life in training and research in pursuit of an elusive goal that may never be attained. Without an inner drive such a choice can turn into a destructive nightmare of self-waste. Achievement in such a life does not generate ultimate satisfaction. Scientific achievement is transitory with inbuilt obsolescence. Rapidly changing horizons of modern knowledge cannot answer the fundamental question about the meaning of life. This question forever remains beyond the sphere of science.
2. However, despite Weber's efforts to describe such a choice as unglamorous: in the light of its complexities, its prosaic aspects, its ultimate existential dissatisfaction, there remains a compelling romantic element. The very idea of the calling as a sort of redemption (the elevation of the individual to meaning), the scale of the sacrifice and the asceticism of the challenge ensures that only the exceptional and the driven will bear it. Remember Weber's choice of the term “Beruf” (calling) is quite deliberate. He takes over the charismatic connotations of religious vocation into the wider mundane world of science and politics and represents it in absolutist terms: the passion of this total commitment elevates the choice into something that is really meaningful. Here the exception becomes the rule. Total commitment has its own grandeur. This is a wager of life involving a sort of self-abandonment and self-transcendence that brings this value choice into conflict with other important values, creating meaning.
3. Is Weber's vision convincing? While the vision of heroic commitment is, perhaps seductive, I want to argue that it is precisely these romantic elements and the residual quasi-religious absolutism of his notion of vocation that narrows options and result in distortion. Let's start with the exclusivity of the choice. Weber interprets the task facing the modern subject as an exclusive choice of a value sphere (science, politics, art, religion, and eroticism). Weber does not consider everyday life as a sphere because we do not choose the everyday but rather inhabit it by necessity: we cannot help but dwell in it. Furthermore, for Weber, the everyday is not an exemplary way of life that creates meaning. Weber prohibits mixing or crossing spheres because of the conflicting character of the norms they presuppose and also because real achievement demands utter dedication in a specialised area. However, for many, the idea that their life be a singular project devoted to the service of a single value sphere seems at odds with a satisfaction and a meaning derived from close intersubjective bonds and acts of friendship, love and care. These also bestow upon an individual feelings of value, esteem, respect and singularity. There can be little question that Weber valued these bonds. However, he seems to build a wall between them and vocation that could only be humanly crippling for many of us. This seems to be a consequence of his emphasis on the demands of specialisation. In the era of rationalisation, Weber wants to rigorously uphold the notion of specialisation and this proscribes the idea of mixing callings or of mixing the calling with everyday life. As a result, Weber's modern subject become unnecessarily a mono-centred individual who chooses one way of life for good and also denies themselves the possibility of participating in other spheres by a sort of self-imposed rigid specialism and a resulting ethical constraint. Clearly Weber is right that in the modern age of specialisation it is almost impossible for any individual to serve "two deities" with the same devotion. Nevertheless, this is a practical inhibition. There is no good theoretical reason why all individuals should become mono-centred. Clearly it is possible and may well be desirable for many modern individuals to change vocations, to be active in two or more spheres obeying their inner spheric rules and norms depending on interests and talent without chasing for perfection in any single one. Such a solution must be especially attractive to women who typically bear the greater weight of hard choices between specialisation/career and child bearing/rearing. This is clearly an obvious practical and life enriching solution to the problem of choosing between different specialist cultural spheres in a way that is not so absolutely focused on the exemplary personality and the highest level of vocational achievement.
4. Secondly, we could question the consequences Weber draws from the pluralism of values in the modern world. In his view, this leads to the “war of the Gods” because reason lacks the capacity to hierarchies these values and all that is left is the chaotic struggle between them and only the existential choice of the individual to impose a self-chosen hierarchy. However, it could be argued that Weber moves too quickly from the pluralism of modern value standpoints to the impossibility of hierarchising them. Even if many philosophers today are sceptical about the possibility of the absolute basis for rational discrimination between values, most would nevertheless still argue that it is possible to discriminate rationally on the basis of degree of universality. In other words, the relative merits of certain values can be debated on the basis of a consensus that is open-ended and ultimately includes all humanity. Thus while a political value like “American freedom” is likely to gain many adherents this is not as universalisable as certain moral values like “do not kill”
5. Thirdly we must focus on what I shall call Weber's redemptive subjectivism. After the collapse of traditional worldviews, Weber shifts the task of creating meaning on to the exemplary individual. This is a very heavy load indeed and almost beyond the power of the single individual. Weber overcomes this problem by the notion of "calling": the individual must choose a value-sphere and it is the passionate devotion to that sphere which both elevates the subject beyond mere subjectivity and infuses life with meaning. After the decline of religion, cultural spheres are the closest the individual can come to supra-individual meaning. The residual religiousity of this view is clear. It is marked by what Nietzsche called ascetic ideals. Weber asks the individual to bear an unrealistic weight. On the one hand, Weber's uncalled subject is too much like the weak creature of the Christian tradition. On the other, Weber underplays the role of intersubjective relations in the creation of a meaningful life and, as we have suggested, the way in which a range of social bonds and commitments also richly add to the meaningfulness both of an individual life and to social life more generally.
6. To the extent that Weber takes up the problem of meaning on a societal level this finds expression in his political thought on leadership. Modern society is characterized by galloping rationalization and bureaucratisation. Weber’s response is the call to sustain and nurture charisma. Weber recognises the efficiency of bureaucracy in getting things done smoothly, consistently and expertly in mass complex societies. He notes the way in which the politics of the machine and the specialists of the state in war, finance and law proved their superiority over the regimes of notables and dilettantes time and time again. However, he also believes that the bureaucrats for all their devotion to public service and the chain of command have their own interests, logic and a dulling resistance to creative initiative beyond the system, rules and conventionality. Their discipline depends upon individual creativity and autonomy. As already said, for Weber, charisma is the only available antidote to bureaucratic ossification. Weber believed that with the threat of universal bureaucratisation it was crucial to preserve the maximum amount of social dynamism by maintaining social and political competition wherever possible. This general diagnosis was located in his specific critique of recent German political history.
7. With rapid economic modernization the aristocratic Junkers were a decaying ruling class that no longer possessed the capacity to further Germany's real national interests. Yet they remained the dominant political force with great influence in the army and bureaucracy. Bismarck's victory represented a historic defeat of the German bourgeoisie and of German liberalism. He had stifled genuine parliamentary politics and this had left Germany without great political leaders. After Bismarck's demise the aristocratic bureaucrats had been able to manipulate a weak and vacillating Kaiser. The only way to make good this lack in Germany was to activate civil society and introduce aggressive parliamentary democracy that would cultivate real charismatic leaders with a calling for politics. This situation reached a crisis point during the war with the eventual revolutionary overthrow of the imperial regime in 1918. Throughout this whole period Weber was an advocate of the real democratisation of Germany. However increasingly he came to focus less on broad economic and political reforms and more on the creation of conditions that would produce leaders with a calling. For example, to counteract the encroachment of bureaucracy in the civil service and the party machine and its impact on the quality of political leadership, Weber advocated the idea of plebicitarian democracy. Thereby political leaders supported by the mass party machines would gain their authority and legitimacy directly from the consensus/acclamation of the people rather than being the complete servants of these party bureaucracies. This would provide leaders with real political ability with the leverage to really transform political reality, to change society's direction, to foster new values and avoid the twin dangers of progressive bureaucratisation and leaderless modern mass democracy.
8. For Weber, modernity had undercut the conditions that had sustained classical liberal democracy. The real meaning of his thesis of the "loss of freedom" was that the classical ideal of "individual self-determination" and the "popular will” was now virtually obsolete. They had lost much of their practical meaning because modern conditions were so much more complex, the weight of the combined objective logics of economic, technological and bureaucratic processes was so great and inescapable, and individuals were inevitably and necessarily interdependent. Weber acknowledges the Tocqueville point about the atomisation of the modern individual in mass democracy and the need to energise a healthy civil society. But, unlike Tocquevillean, he thinks it naive to believe the mass individual could have much influence on the corporate entities and complex processes of modern mass politics. In any case, Weber is a radical sceptic when it came to the concept of democratisation. His argument was that the demos itself in the sense of an inarticulate mass never actually governs: all that changes is the methods of the selection of executive leaders and the influence which various circles within the demos are able to exert. Democratisation does not therefore necessarily mean a greater active share of the governed in political authority. In this situation, Weber argued the only realistic alternative was the form of constitutional democracy in which people would be able to choose in a formerly free way the leaders who seemed best able to represent their interests and aspirations and robust civil debate would engender the leaders with real political calling. Rather than allow the faceless bureaucrat without a political calling and without real responsibility de facto political power, Weber preferred the presidential style direct election of political leaders. Those who possessed a real political calling, who were sufficiently charismatic to emotionally bind the masses and convince their supporters of their qualifications to rule, could proceed according to their own discretion as long as they maintained the trust of the masses. If they lost that trust, their political career would be finished.
9. In Weber's theorization of democracy we perceive almost the inversion of its classical meaning. In their classical sense the ideas of individual self-determination and popular will represented a process of legitimisation and policy formulation from the bottom up, from the electors to their candidates by a sort of delegation. Weber clearly believed that this model was no longer viable. While he retains the idea of the formerly free election of leaders and a dynamic civil society, he believes that modern politics is a complex arena for specialists-- for those with a calling for politics. If the great threat of universal rationalisation and bureaucratisation are to be met and held at bay, modern society requires leadership and charisma. Modern politics, itself subject to the inroads of bureaucratisation-- the increasing importance of the party machine and the public service, of specialists in various aspects of public business like finance, law, diplomacy--can sustain it own vitality only if openings are preserved and facilitated for charismatic leadership. Yet here again Weber asks the individual in the shape of charismatic leadership to achieve almost the impossible. If bureaucratisation is to effectively be resisted the struggle must be taken up on a wider front than mere leadership. In Germany at this time what was required was a range of institutional changes both economic and political to reduce the power of the Junker's and facilitate the birth of democratic forces and organisations. Ironically, for Weber, universal bureaucratisation becomes the great threat in modernity. He completely ignored what, with hindsight, has turned out to be an equally significant danger-- the totalitarian charismatic dictator -- the individual who takes over or usurps control of the vast bureaucratic machine of modernity using it for criminal sectional or irrational ends. Thus while Weber advocated a vigorous parliamentary democracy and rigorous civil debate, his pre-occupation with charisma and leadership in modern mass society distorts his commitment to, and understanding of, democracy.

Weber on Rationalisation (cont)

Lecture 3: Weber on Rationalisation

1. Weber thoughts on the prospects and the fate of modernity can be summarized into a double formulae "loss of meaning", "loss of freedom". (A) The "loss of meaning" refers to the idea of "disenchantment" just elaborated. The traditional Christian cosmology that provided a fixed, hierarchical and harmonized view of the world and gave the individual security by locating his/her place in the world by providing limits and certainty has now collapsed inducing a "crisis" of experience. The pre-modern individual knew their place in the world, knew the bounds of that world and what could be expected of themselves and others. Such an order made life meaningful. The modern individual must make sense of life and determine conduct without the security of traditionally endorsed values and life conduct, without the weight of a collectively affirmed set of rules and practices and amidst a welter of competing and clashing values and standpoints. Rationalisation has forever destroyed the harmony of the old cosmologies that subordinated all values to one overriding value (typically religious like salvation). Before I mentioned intellectualisation as a facet of rationalisation: the way in which various aspects of culture become autonomous. Motored by their own highest value and its institutions, the logic and possibilities of this sphere are explored. The pursuit of science or art as a value has its own necessity that further estranges these cultural activities from each other and problematises the possibility of their ultimate reconcilability. Weber believes that in modernity we have re-entered the age of polytheism (of multiple and warring Gods), of conflict between depersonalised value standpoints that cannot be reconciled in any rational way.

The grandiose rationalism of an ethical and methodical conduct of life which flows from every religious prophesy has dethroned this polytheism in favour of “ the one thing that is needful”. Faced with the realities of inner and outer life, Christianity has deemed it necessary to make those compromises and relative judgements, which we all know from its history. Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old Gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again resume their eternal struggle with one another (S asV, p149)

2. At the dawn of the modern age Machiavelli had argued that politics had to obey its own laws and grasp its own ethical schema. He drew our attention to the fact that ordinary ethics and the necessities of political life are incompatible. Kant first grasped this increasing differentiation of value spheres philosophically; he separates the theoretical-scientific, practical-moral and aesthetic- spheres. Weber gives a cultural reading of this insight in terms of the increasing autonomy and inter-conflict of value-spheres of life. One of his favourite examples is the birth of modern science out of religious wonder in the harmonious and lawful character of the natural cosmos. For many of the early modern scientists like Newton, their work was a demonstration of a theological design in nature. However, the ongoing evolution of science allows it to completely dispense with theological presuppositions about design. Moreover, in many cases science is compelled by is own logic and method to contest a religious view of the world. As he says, it becomes an irreligious power. Since the late 18th century it has been impossible to reconcile truth, morality and beauty. Kant argued that these are theoretically irreducible human faculties but practically reconcilable. But even this practical postulate of ultimate reconciliation is in doubt. The difficulty is expressed even more strongly in Nietzsche with his idea of the incompatibility and tension between art, science and morality. Weber maintains that intellectual honesty now forces us to choose between competing conflicting values-spheres. The dissolution of an objective cosmic order is now compounded by the fragmentation of the unity of subjective experience itself in the sense of coherent meaningfulness. The challenge is now the existential one of how the individual can establish a personal unity and meaningfulness out of these fragmentary and conflicting perspectives.
3. The idea of a "loss of freedom" refers to both the increasingly irresistible power of the modern industrial economic order and its more frequent incursions into, and annihilation of, individual space and the possibility of autonomy. Weber argued that in modern western society the material fate of vast populations depended upon the increasingly bureaucratised mechanisms of private capitalism. Here Weber does not mention the state. This is because he did not live to see the modern welfare state nor the Soviet style command economies of Eastern Europe. However, his comments on the Bolshevik Revolution and his analysis of socialist doctrine, demonstrate a remarkable prescience: he recognized both the increasing necessity of massive bureaucracies both in private capitalism and the state apparatus but also their dangers. For Weber, all hopes that these vast modern bureaucratic mechanisms could be eliminated were completely utopian. The necessity of large-scale economic organization requires, and even demands, the further refinement of specialisation, an increasing individual discipline and predictability and growth of bureaucracy. The imperatives of specialisation and discipline conscript individuals into a universal vocational culture. Here vocations are stripped of their former religious meaning and now typically entrap their bearers in an endless advance of "progress”, "career”, specialisation, fragmentation and "tension”. The increasingly all-encompassing universality of these system-demands foreshadows the rapidly encroaching "rational" discipline shaping all private and public relations. The emphasis is on behaviour that is calculable and predictable. These organizational imperatives enhance the role of the professional expert and further restrict the scope for individual charisma and idiosyncratic behaviour. This tendency towards organisational regimentation is prescribed by the principles of rationalisation, by the rational economy of doing things efficiently and predictably in a complex, mass society. The expert and the bureaucrat are servants of totally impersonal orders. One serves science and the other higher authority. Each is required to subordinate personality to impersonal, objective rules and functions. Increasingly all moderns find themselves imprisoned in or effected by similar "chains of command", mere cogs in the wheels of a vast machine over which they have little control. This physiognomy of modern society-- vast political and economic systems, regimentation, discipline, specialisation and uniformity--means that these systems threaten to become more and more autonomous, operating only according to their own purely functional and systemic requirements. They either subordinate or completely negate the needs/personalities of contemporary individuals. In general, Weber is wary of historical predictions. He refuses to allocate a definite outcome or meaning to his diagnosis of modernity. The threatening aspect of the diagnosis is more a negative utopia. On the positive side, Weber offers a guarded emancipatory potential.
4. For Weber, the modern individual is set before a task. Recognising that the loss of immediate unified experience of the past has problematised the very idea of a modern self, the challenge becomes to recreate meaning and centreness out of the passion and critical scepticism of modern subjectivity. For Weber, this task requires the abandonment of all illusions, a sober acknowledgement of all the facts --bad as well as good--and sense of responsibility to history.

We know of no scientifically demonstrable ideals. To be sure, our labours are now rendered more difficult, since we must create our ideals from within our own chests in the very age of subjectivist culture. But we must not and cannot promise a fool's paradise and an easy street, neither in the here and now nor in the beyond, neither in thought nor in action, and it is the stigma of our human dignity that the peace of our souls cannot be as great as the peace of one who dreams of such a paradise (Debate at the Associate for Sozialpolitik in Vienna 1909)(GASS, S420)

The liberating aspect of this task is the prospect of emancipation from the age-old straitjacket of tradition and "received" self-definition and world order. Its attraction lies in the possible realisation of a new ethical dignity forged in radical autonomy. The exemplary modern individual's life is a self-chosen one. The individual creates their own lives meaning by choosing a particular value sphere and living in its terms to the full, making their life harmonious and integral in terms of the chosen value. Paradoxically, for Weber the real personality is not the individual who seeks meaning in merely subjective experience but the one who can passionately commit themselves to the impersonal demands required by service to these higher values whether they be art, politics or science. This requires a stoic acceptance of limits imposed by the modern objective order, the determination to struggle for the realisation of chosen values against resistance and in full consciousness. Weber wages on the individual and his/her ethical autonomy and passionate commitment as the principal bulwark against both the increasing power and dominance of objective rationalised processes and institutions and the correlated subjective retreat into "mere experience". Weber recognises that this view of a calling and existential ethics radicalises the element of choice in social action. But he particularly also emphasizes the weight of these choices by driving home the need for individual responsibility for the foreseeable consequences of self-chosen actions. This understanding of self-creation is not without risks. Weber realises that a proposal for the radical subjectivisation of meaning and value is not for all. Not everyone can live without the security of a sense of absolute standards and bear the internal tensions of conflicting norms.

To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are open widely and compassionately to him. Afterall, they do not make it hard for him. One way or another he has to bring his ‘intellectual sacrifice—that is inevitable. If he can do it, we shall not rebuke him. For such an intellectual sacrifice in favour of an unconditional religious devotion is ethically quite a different matter than the evasion of the plain duty of intellectual integrity…(S as V, p155)

Those who have the intellectual courage to dispense with fixed signposts and beautiful illusions face heightened dangers. Such an individual commitment can become a "demonic possession". Commitment to one value can involve conflict with other cherished values and even their annihilation i.e. ethics and politics. As recent events have only too well demonstrated, the passion to “become what you are” does not allow for the discrimination between saint and assassin. In Weber's view such conflicts are irresolvable: there is no rational way of resolving questions of value. Science can only demonstrate the appropriate means to given ends and the consequences of adopting alternative means: it cannot hierarchise the ends themselves. This must be left to individual choice. In a famous passage Weber maintains:

The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that it cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; It must recognise that general views of life and the universe can never be products of increasing empirical knowledge, and that the highest ideals, which move us forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.(Essay on Objectivity).

Weber recognises the limits of science. This allows him to even question the value of rigorous intellectual activity itself while himself remaining committed to it. The quest for truth itself is a value choice that must be left to the individual. "Truth" is a value only for those who seek the truth. Unable, as it had in the past, to show men how to act rightly and how to be good citizens, rational analysis must remain silent before the ultimate questions of human meaning and direction. All that science can do is allow the individual to attain self-consciousness about the meaning of their action in terms of consequences. Beyond that Weber demands only that the modern individual be passionately devoted to their demon. For Weber, this ideal of individual self-creation through vocational calling and responsibility represents the realisation of true ethical autonomy in a world devoid of universal principles and traditionally sanctified hierarchies of value. The individual who takes up the challenge liberates their own life from being merely a natural event, they make it free and, in so doing, become a personality, an exemplary model that serves as a paradigm for others.

Lecture 2: intro (continued) & Max Weber

Lecture 2:

Intro to Modernity (continued)

1. Let me stress that this “inexhaustibility” is no failing of social philosophy. On the contrary, it is an expression of the fact that modern life is not a problem to which we will ever find a solution. My aim is not to come down for or against modernity. That would be non-sensical. We must deal with the cards we have been dealt. Heidegger speaks of modern individuals “Dasein” being thrown into a specific society and time that is contingent, that is, beyond their choosing. However, while we are contingent we cannot avoid our responsibility for the real choices we do make. Finally, some of you may even find the concept of modernity itself too abstract and homogenizing. While I sometimes harbor empiricist doubts about the usefulness of this concept, I also find it quite challenging to try and encapsulate a common experience of the modern that incorporates something approaching the full richness of all its permutations. The concept of modernity has always also been a value concept that evaluates societies on the basis of certain, primarily western indices. If the concept of modernity is to be of any use today it need to overcome the naïve prejudices associated with judging modernity crudely in terms of GNP and other like measures. What is required is a more encompassing understanding of modernity that while holding onto certain historical achievements also concedes a variety of ways of life as modern, that does not oppress but allows for the cultural richness as a legitimate element of contemporary modernity. In this way the concept would be no mere abstraction but reflect new realities and perspectives that have emerged as a result of the complex dynamics of modernity itself. Our task is to use the theoretical means at our disposal to read them, to give theoretical expression to these insights: their opportunities and their threats. In this way we stand some chance of beginning to grasp our own fate and present responsibilities.

Max Weber(1864-1920)

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, at the same time, a determination, nevertheless, to affirm 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 found it necessary to respond to Weber and/or to recognize his significance.
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, Weber 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 could take Nietzsche's critique of modern democratic, secular, rational civilization so seriously. Remember that Nietzsche was unread in his own time. He only became popular after his madness and death when Weber was establishing his mature standpoint. A fundamental difference is that Weber’s scepticism did not become a frontal assault on ascetic values. 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. He 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; it would be naive to believe that human happiness will emerge from the expansion of the world's limitless possibilities. As we will see, it 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, records, files, 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 world of science but a communicative one peopled with Gods and meaning that stipulated the sanctified rules, mores and ends of all action. These early forms of world interpretation were able to explain 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. 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. However, the thirst for such orientation remains and science is unable to quench it. The demagification of the world implies a degree of disorientation and increasingly urgent demand for a 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'.

The Puritan is the archetypical modern individual in Weber’s account. Their psychology of ìinnerworldly asceticism is decisive for the creation of the modern world. In Weber’s famous account, 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 innerworldly activity that was especially conducive to modern economic life. The paradox is that a religious doctrine of predestination that might have disempowered 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 brought about by the fact that a religious end now was measured by innerwordly means. Therefore intense religiousity led to 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 transmogrified 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.