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.
