Culture in a Rationalizing World

Abstract

Whereas Karl Marx decried without hesitation or reticence what he saw as the ‘dominance of things over men’ in capitalist society, the German social theorist Max Weber (1864–1920), born 46 years after Marx, deployed the more ‘neutral’ notion of rationalization to describe a process that both opened up the way to purposive rational action and led us into an ‘iron cage’ (Lowith, 1993[1960]).¹ In the following two chapters, the argument is made thatMax Weber’s work on rationalization has much to tell us about the fate of cultural values in the late modern world that we inhabit. Weber perceived a world in which cultural values were in retreat and impersonal forces had come to dominate (Gronow, 1988). if the rationalization of thought and action had yielded material wealth and, to some extent, a greater scope for freedom and responsibility of action, Weber was also acutely aware that accompanying such developments were, as Alan Sica (2000, p. 42) comments, ‘seedbeds of pathology that affected individuals as much as the societies in which they struggled, vainly ... to maintain their individuality and freedom’. Distinctive cultural values and ways of being, w^Tbether creative or morally purposeful, whether aesthetic or ethical in orientation, whether serving the ‘demons’ of an artistic or a moral value sphere, were threatened by the very same purposeful rationality that enabled them to find an emboldened form in the first place.