Max Weber, 1918. Photo by Ernst Gottmann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Book Review

Weber, Max. *Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures". Edited by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon. New York Review of Books: 2020.

The Vocation of Science

The very day Vladimir Lenin acquired dominance over the Russian Revolution's leadership, Max Weber delivered a lecture to university students in Munich, dedicated to the idea of "Science as a Vocation". Not science or vocation as we consider them in their denuded forms in contemporary English. Science as Wissenschaften the comprehensive, accumulating, and definitive body of human knowledge encompassing the realms of both natural and human sciences. Vocation as Beruf a term steeped in the rich vestiges of Luther's notion of theological duty, the Romantic notion of destiny and calling, and that tidy German sense of efficient professionalism and studious excellence.

While theory may tend to draw analysis from the purported ends or historical origins of their subject origins, Weber takes the tack of the economist. To understand its subject matter from how it functions materially in the current moment. What is it like to be a scholar? Weber compares the tracks of the German and American systems respectively.

In the German system of Weber's day, scholars received no funding from the university but only compensation from the dispensations of students attending their lectures. There is a high degree of risk if one seeks to enter the German academic system without prior independent means. However, once successfully entered upon this track, the German scholar is essentially "in". They have full leeway to follow their inclinations without any external pressures to publish or perform in order to retain their post at the university, insofar as they can continue tod so.

The inverse of this plutocratic arrangement is the American bureaucratic system. The scholarly entrant is in this case fully dependent upon the procedures of the university system. They possess the safety net of the stipend to care for their financial compensation, but it comes with the strings attached of certain performantive and results-driven stipulations for the academic bureaucrat to continue on the long, winding track of university life.

Between these, Weber notes, the German system continues to become Americanized as bureaucratic capitalistic values incrasingly become the substratum defining the fabric of the university system across the West.

What used to be the "animating principle" of the university system is now purely incidental to its functional mechanisms. Scholarship has through this conversion become primarily a careerist foray and perhaps not even secondarily the enterprise of learning.

For one to succeed in this system, one must first and foremost be lucky. Invention and discovery find us on their own time no matter how desperately and ardently we may seek them out across long afternoons and evenings. And this luck is not constrained to discovery or research itself but to the politics of scholarship. The decisions and proclivities of advisors, of committees, of universities guided by ideological tribalism, these are the engines that launch the scholar to the heights or depths of their career.

In the worst cases, this popularity contest does not come from above or from one's peers, but from the students who flock to lectures. For Weber, this turns scholarship into its lowest forms, a science warped by the untuned opinions of the malleable student masses. The academy as democracy rather than aristocracy.

This is not say that one should completely disregard the receptivity of the student listeners but rather to engage them educationally in the true sense, that you are leading them out from where they are to elevate them as the art of pedagogy demands.

Such are the external aspects of scholarship, but what of its personal nature?

For Weber, the primary psychological frame enrapturing those who seek a life of scholarship is a desire to proceed where no one has gone before, to extend the frontier of specialization to new bounds. Thus, the fate of one's own soul as a scholar depends on one's output, one's work. Will you as a scholar truly contribute to the limits and progress of scientfic knowledge, or will this foray ultimately be a miscarriage forgotten before one's career has even ended. It is this uniquely pivotal insecurity that links scholarship to inspiration. Inspiration breeds sacrifice and resolve. Equally in science as in artist, a certain degree of manic intoxication is required. To be devoted wholesale to one's craft.

Unlike art though, science is tethered to progress. One cannot say that art is a progression in the same way that the sciences unfurl through history.

And this is tied to the meaning behind the scientific enterprise. What is the point behind this? "Why would he [the scholar] yoke himself to this hyperspecialized, never-ending enterprise in the first place?" (17)

Scientific development is primarily driven by intellectualization. Intellectual rationalization is not a process by which we come to understand the conditions under which we live, in a general sense. The modern understands the workings of the motorcar far less than the tribesman would understand their tools. Intellectualization refers instead to the potentiality. That if we wanted to, we could calculate the inner workings of phenomena. The mechanics of the motorcar, the weather, the forces beyond our world. This disenchantment is a hallmark of the modern perspective. This domain of rationalization expands to more and more domains as new sciences are founded and enfolded within the broader apparatus of scholarship.

But this does not answer how one can measure progress. It merely sounds like the evolution of techniques to achieve practical ends. Incremental gains for non-final purposes. Answers that are themselves provisional as new answers are supplanted by futures one in the endless chain of "progress". This is an important question that moves away from the purpose of scholarship to its value.

Many often turn to Plato's Allegory of the Cave in answering such a question, pointing to discovering the truth beyond the shadows. But the irony is that in the university far more than any other venue is one accosted by the endless controversions of disputants piling abstraction upon abstraction to create sophisticated, air-tight, but ultimately vacuous theories to explain the shadows on the wall. A scientific empiricism built on palimpsests of peer view rather than the observation of the real, organic world.

And this is due to the nature of modern scientific method. Experiment built on isolation, subtraction from the lived world of experience. A shift from the passionate thirst for cohensive truth to the cold, inured method of science, one utterly devoid of the notion of science as art as the Renaissance humanists practiced.

It is this frame of thought that gives rise to the countermovement of Pietism and Romanticism. A revolt from rationalization, seeking salvation from intellectualism. The idea that there must needs be non-calculable forces at play. And yet ironically it is this obsessive fixation with the irrationalism which causes it to be brought under the scrupulous lens of the microscope. And so these mysterious, sublime forces are themselves reduced to scientific explanation by those same adherents who sought to elevate them beyond the stultification of rationality.

It is Nietzsche's last men who believe that the mastery of nature is the path to happiness, an outlook held only by the most deluded occupants of the ivory tower.

Yet this does not answer what a scientist's work means, and frankly Tolstoy may have answered this question when he said, "Science is meaningless, because it provides no answer for the only question that matters: 'What should we do? How should we live?'" It may not perhaps answer these questions, but yet there remains a rooted assumption that the domain of this or that particular science is in fact worth knowing, though it cannot self-justify this worth. At best, a science may gesture toward its own results as a ground for its justification but ultimately this must come from something other than itself.

Aesthetics considers the methods and nature of art but never asks if there should be works of art. Jurisprudence compares and contrasts the sets of laws and decisions but does not resolve whether or not there should be laws at all, and so on. This is perhaps most important in the realm of politics where the academic's role is to determine the role and functions of democracy, etc. but never to implant political opinions such as whether there should be democracy or not. One is certainly entitled to these perspectives as a political actor but never as an academic one.

Some may say this level of detachment is impossible, but for Weber the inner structures and workings of these phenomena belong to a completely different investigation than the question of their values and worth. It is in this sense that science is value-neutral.

It is the role of the professor to present students with "uncomfortable facts", that is ideas and opinions that conflict with the students' and even the professors' outlook.

Beyond this, scientific partisanism is dangerous because at the end of the day, there is no resolution or eventual concordance to the viewpoints of the world. Citing J.S. Mill, if we start with experience, we end up with polytheism. The amalgam of the human race will self-select themselves to their deities who will remain in interminable conflict with one another. Private individuals are more than welcome, and in fact ought to pick a side in this factionalism, but the scientist must operate as a supratribal agent who refuses to serve this or that god, and only describe "what" this or that god does. It is Fate, not science, that determines the outcome of these battles.

The academic should never be a guide or a leader. This undermines their primary role to server as a teacher from behind the podium. The lecturn is the worst place to exercise leadership. That is what the public marketplace is for.

In our personal lives, scholarship should serve three purposes:

1. Academic knowledge gives us techniques for calculation, and thus mastering life.
2. It gives us methods of thinking
3. It gives us clarity on how positions and values align with one another, and it provides the individual with the tools "to reckon with the ultimate meaning of his own actions" (36)

Life itself will always be based in conflict, one that can never be decided in this life. Thus we must all make our own choice on which side we should take. Science should not attempt to justify why we should take this or that side, or what it may mean, but it should be able to clarify how these different sides relate, their histories, and their potential consequences as well.

On a final note, one may object that the science of theologically would seem heavily value-laden, so to speak. Weber would contest that theology and doctrine remain distinct, and in fact theology itself is agnostic to any single religion. At its root, "All theology is an intellectual rationalization of religion's sacred domain." (38) It cannot prove its worth to someone who rejects its foundations. Yet, theology does add on additional assumptions so that it may do its work and justify its existence. These assumptions are general arational "revelations" that remain outside the realm of knowledge.

The believer is required to sacrifice the intellect in order to reach faith. Theology simply does not extend to the realm of full religious salvation, though it may protest that it does so. There is a gap between reason and faith. The disenchantment of the world has concomitantly produced a retreat of this kind of thinking from public life as it pulls back into private life. One who cannot accept the destiny of secularization, so to speak, should retreat quietly into the church. For this is a far nobler response than to weaponize the scholarly podium as a tool for a dogmatism that will only fade from public life.

We should not work in vain to try to produce a final answer or destiny but rather work to meet the "demands of the day", both professionally and personally.

Thoughts

There is something deeply appealing about Weber's outlook on the scholarly enterprise and the admonition to belie partisanism, a message equally poignant in the early days of Weimar Germany as it is today when the American academic system seems to have devolved in large swathes into mere sycophantry and embarrassing ideologism.

But we cannot forget the course of events that led us here. Weber's advocacy for value-neutral scholarship is in some ways a callback to Enlightenment positivistic thinking. Though he does so with far more nuance, clarity, and thought than previous generations, and it is level of care which does lend some credence to his position.

For the question that was posed, and many deemed answered, after Weber's day is the supposition that this polytheism he describes between different ideas and factions does indeed leak down into the very foundations of the sciences themselves. The seeds of what some could consider postmodern thought through Einstein's relativity and the modernisms that framed the arts in the 1920s and onward, only a few short years after this lecture. There is no unity at the bottom of the sciences either.

Even if one is not attempting to create a comprehensive body of knowledge across the sciences but is only adjudicating between individual sciences, the problem remains. Even if science is geared toward describing the origins, inner working, and consequences of each god "in the world", how does one choose one's god of science. We have merely created a second-order polytheism, one whose conflicts and turmoils do not seem categorically different from the pantheon of demagoguery that Weber warns against.

It is a difficulty that Weber does not set himself up to answer in this lecture, and one further exacerbated by his closing remarks on theology which I believe seem to do more to draw attention to the weaknesses of his position than to solidify them. As he notes, theology as a science introduces additional arguments and justifications for its value in order to do its work, as he puts it. This does not seem to be an exclusive practice to theology but something common, though perhaps not universally so, to the sciences in general.

Aesthetics, jurisprudence, and political science may not blatantly state that ther subject matter has value, yet it is certainly presupposed at every single point of the investigation. One would not begin to ask the foundational questions associated with a science if they did not have prior reason to do so. This requires some sort of presumption on the part of all involved as to why they are engaged in this operation as a scientific activity. Is this merely to be kept some sort of unspoken secret across researchers, professors, and students?

Such a question may not be entirely fair to Weber, but it does highlight the idiosyncracies value neutrality introduces. Even considering the implications or consequences of art or law for example already indicates some sort of value or worth assessment. One cannot imagine a modern classroom today attempting to describe the inner workings of the god of democracy and the god of fascism respectively without introducing some form of value judgment by which to frame the consequences of becoming an advocate for each. Even if one were to abstract each system of all historical content, there remains consistently and universally value injection when one even begins to identify what would happen if one served such and such a god.

The worship of the god of neutrality is an invitation to a whole host of sins, some of which are far graver than the sins of mere advocacy for one particular side or another.

Yet this does not make Weber's ideal laughable in the same way as one would consider Comte or Bentham's notion of objectivity.

There must needs be something more than polytheistic scuffling between academic departments, and those operating as tendrils of political or parapolitical subterfuge. For this is how we have arrived at the American system as we have it today.

Few are content with reducing the role of pure knowledge to mechanical calculation, or as Weber puts it helping the grocer package vegetables more effectively. Nor should they be.

This would fall into the delusion that has enraptured so many today that there is nothing more to life outside incrementing the conveniences or extravagances of middle class life. The fruits of the admixture of those vague terms: rationalization, capitalism, modernity, bureaucratization.

The key step to an actual solution is illustrated in Weber's opening remarks on this subject. A bureaucratic academic system will tend most strongly toward promotioneering, careerism, and the war of polytheism (if even in closeted forms). The American academic system is founded upon a brute, capitalistic utilitarianism that precludes the animus of inspiration, of passion.

Whatever its flaws as a plutocratic system, the German university historical was less subject to these pitfalls. It seems to me the only recourse to substantively course correct the dotage of American academia is to detach it from capitalistic and bureaucratic incentive systems. A simplistic, reactionary copy and paste from late nineteenth century Germany would likely not be useful in itself, but a reinstitution of the scientific enterprise as an aristocratic venture, detached from political machinations, may at the very least offer us a way forward. Even if the solutions it may provide to the problems above are not fully articulated here. To reclaim the ideal that sparks human ingenuity, not fully clouded by the miasma of ochlocracy.

The Vocation of Politics

A year after this first lecture, Weber was invited once again to deliver a lecture, this time on politics.

Once again, Weber is not concerned with the answer to political questions themselves (i.e. the content of questions) but rather wants to focus on the meaning of political activity in general.

What does politics (Politik) mean? For the purposes of this lecture, politics should be taken as the "leading, or attempt to influence the leadership of, a political grouping, which today means: a modern state".

Defining a modern, political state is rather tricky, but Weber opts to define it as an organization which has exclusive, legitimized recourse to violence. It has a monopoly on legitimate violence. The state is the only political entity within a single jurisdiction that can sanction violence.

Thus some have the authority to rule over others by force. This is generally legitimized in three ways: (1) the custom of traditional rule, (2) an exceptional charismatic leader with the "gift of grace" procures this power through demagoguery, and (3) by rule of law, that is a general belief in legal statutes and rational rules that the people submit to.

In the second case, we can say there is a calling to politics. Regardless of other traits, his followers are devoted to him. Prophets and warlords are one kind of this charismatic leader. The other kind are modern, political leaders.

A continuous rule is dependent upon two things: (1) a general submission to the ruler and (2) the rulers possess the force to oversee the populace as necessary. The administration of government may be carried out either by officials who themselves hold instruments of power and resources (e.g. nobility) or officials who do not hold the instruments of power themselves but are lent them by the ruling leadership (e.g. bureaucracy).

The modern state begins to develop when the ruler transfers power from private, decentralized authorities to public, centralized ones. This transition gives rise to the "professional politician" who either seeks to gain access to the levers of power themselves or simply to operate as civil servants within the general administration.

These civil servants or leaders may be independently wealthy, and in this case plutocrats. Or they may not be independently wealthy and thus require an income from political activities. This income may come fees or bribes, brokering their influence to the highest bidder, or they may also come from a fixed-income.

In addition, the increasing rationalization of political administration also brings about specialization which requires a highly-educated and credentialed class who can be expected to operate in specialized political positions. This is dependent in many ways on "professional honor" to keep these bureaucratic agents in check and accountable to the larger system.

The technocratic, political class emerges from a number of sources across the world: the clergy, the educated literati, the court nobility, the gentry (in the English case), and university-trained lawyers. Legal rationalism is critical to the emergence of a rational, modern state and lawyers have grown increasingly powerful in conjunction with the powers of the bureaucratic state.

There are other types of political professionals.

Demagoguery is built often on the backs of journalists. Strong, journalistic writing is difficult, particularly as it faces strong temptations and pressures to print irresponsibly for personal gain. The journalist is not unlike the young scholar in the risks and temptations involved.

Another kind of person is the party official who have a unique capacity to reconcile, organized, and coordinate disparate and often high-friction special interests to work together in political coalitions. They are heavily active in building party machinery widely distributed across local jurisdictions to recruit and create the political logistical apparatus for improving their party's position. This kind of political machine can be referred to as "plebiscitary democracy".

We see this develop in America by the election of 1840 where a party spoils system built on party machinery assumed control of politics and Congressional leaders Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun retired from political life as their influence was usurped from them.

The American system is uniquely prone to the spoils system because the presidential election grants a large swathe of political offices in the executive branch that can be awarded at the discretion of the newly-elected president only requiring review by the Senate, but otherwise are largely unaccountable.

America was able to tolerate this "amateurish way of doing things" (87) because its vast resources and wealth provide greater leeway for the awarding of useless offices and other such rewards. A nation without such unlimited resources could not attempt this level of public corruption without far greater scrutiny.

This plebiscitary party machinery is run by the party boss. The party boss has no fixed political policies or principles, his positions are constructured purely for the maximal efficiency of electioneering and power gains.

In the German system of 1919, Weber notes how the "political guilds" have alienated broad swathes of the population and a new transformation may be underway.

University students now provide a lot of volunteered human capital for political parties, and are thus incentivized not by commercial gain but rather ideological devotion, so this may involve a sort of return to charismatic demagogue leadership.

What does happen if a demagogue assumes power is that their followers' "souls are 'hollowed out'". They are required to blindly submit themselves to the new machine they cast into office, and this often leads to alienation and disenchantment whereby these followers either sacrifice their idealism for the machinery (e.g. as in the case of Lincoln) or they withdraw altogether.

There is no way around this.

This is the choice: You either have a democracy with leaders and "machines", or a leaderless democracy, meaning the rule of "professional politicians" with no vocation--with none of the inner charismatic qualities that make someone a leader. (93)

The latter is the current situation in the Germany of 1919 and in Weber's view was likely to continue for some time, one that could only be solved by a charismatic leader elected to the office of president.

Politics as a business is not politics as a vocation. One is not inspired or possessed by a higher calling in the same way, even less so when one is financially dependent upon politics for income.

So for one such politician to grasp the wheel of power they must have passion, a sense of responsibility, and clarity of vision (Augenmass).

They are passionate insofar as they are wholly committed. They have a sense of responsibility in the sense that they deeply feel their obligation, and clarity of vision in the sense that they have a cool, rational detachment that allows them to decide judiciously within the hot fray of tactical and strategic moves.

Vanity is one such force which may distract the leader from their calling and intoxicate them with the celebrity of personality.

To avoid this misdirection through an ambiguous vision, we must face the ethics of politics as a cause.

In what sense can a universalized ethics be applied to politics? Weber would contend that there is no common, comprehensive ethical system between public and private individuals, precisely because the modern state has license to the use of force and violence while private individuals do not.

If one submits to the Sermon on the Mount and must give up everything and turn the other cheek, they must do so entirely with regard to every matter of life. They are "acosmist" in this sense as they do not belong to this world and are a saint.

To apply this at the level of a state however can only lead to the discrediting and eventual abolition of peace and love. As those with force will abuse those who do not. This also applies to matters of truth telling, where certain facts may be published but in a way as to cause catastrophic damage that undermines the state.

So we must distinguish in ethics between an "ethics of personal conviction" and an "ethics of responsibility". The former is concerned with one's personal activity as it relates to God and fellow man, taking responsibility first and foremost for one's convictions. Yet this system will always collapse in the public sphere whenever it is forced to rationalize an actions as an "ends justifying the means", an inevitability in the dirty life of political work.

Religious doctrine affirms this in the sense that the world is disorderly, sinful, and chaotic, so that the religious individual must set themselves against it in their absolute purity. Yet this can never properly address the problem of heroic leadership which is rooted at its foundation in the legitimate use of violence as well as the rewards their followers are granted for their service.

There is no solution to this problem, and it remains a tension in the individual as to what extent they will subscribe to an "ethics of responsibility" or an "ethics of personal conviction".

What Weber finds most convicting in all this is when a mature human being "takes real responsibility, with his whole soul, for the consequences of his actions and, following an ethics of responsibility, stops at some point and says: 'Here I stand. I can do no other.'" (113)

This is a position all of us may be placed in at some point, and it is very few who contest their whole soul on a single point with great opposition. It is in this kind of personality that the ethics of personal conviction and ethics of responsibility do not contradict but rather complement each other to form the personage truly capable of political leadership.

To achieve what is possible in the world, one must constantly reach for the impossible--this is absolutely true and confirmed by everything we know of history. But to do so, one must be a leader--not only that, a hero, in a very literal sense of the word [...] Only those who are certain they won't be shattered when the world turns out to be too ignorant or evil for what they are trying to give it--those who can say, even when faced with all that, 'And yet!'--only they are truly called to do the work of politics." (115)

Thoughts

Coming soon...