Introductory Remarks: Sociological Allegory in the Age of Weber

Abstract

As the educated children of occidental modernity, we often hear that our age is ruled by the twin processes of scientific disenchantment and technological rationalization. The social meanings and cultural values that prevail today are said to be sustained by a globalizing spirit of capitalist democracy and its bureaucratic disciplines, while the modern work ethic and new ways of conducting oneself are extended into a variety of individualizing and communal forms of expression and taste. A secular worldview appears to saturate all cultural spheres, from the everyday worlds of work and leisure to the institutional domains of the sciences, arts, and politics. And yet, as the intensification of industry and the expansion of commerce in the capitalist world system are reproduced by bureaucratic power structures at the highest levels, religious and traditional worldviews also become fragmented into fundamentalist revivals, often re-enchanting life at the depths of ordinary experience. Out of these competing and complementary forces, the unique path that ‘the West’ has forged to modernity is both entrenched and undermined, so that this civilization’s claim to ‘universal’ value and validity is perpetually revised and reasserted, but also continuously challenged and called into question.

One day when Weber was asked what his scholarship meant to him, he replied: ‘I want to see how much I can stand.’ What did he mean by that? Perhaps that he regarded it as his task to endure the antinomies of existence and, further, to exert to the utmost his freedom from illusions, and yet to keep his ideals inviolate and to preserve his ability to devote himself to them.

(Marianne Weber, 1988:678; Jaspers, 1989:188–9)