Callinicos, ch.

7: “Weber”

7.1. Prussian Agriculture and the German State: 146: Weber understands capitalism’s historical
significance and the inherently conflictual character of social reality as well as Hegel or Marx,
but combines it with an attempt to understand irreducible, antagonistic values governing human
conduct.
● 148: Methodenstreit: Weber is in some ways closer to the marginalists, but with the
historical school wants to explore the social context of economic processes and relate
them to moral/political objectives.
● 150-52: nationalist, power-struggle dimension to economics. As explanatory, economics
is value-neutral, but it’s always applied politically in light of particular values: “It is a
servant of … the enduring power-political interests of the nation,” viz., Germany.

7.2. Science and the Warring Gods: In the 1890s, Weber seemed like a historical economist
influenced by Social Darwinism. But from 1903 on, his writings make it clear that he didn’t want
to assimilate physical and social processes: he was a part of the neo-Kantian anti-naturalism,
which tried to separate the Geisteswissenschaften into the noumenal, and so give rise to
separate human/cultural sciences, governed (Dilthey) by interpretive methods and the search
for understanding. Importance of Nietzsche: sees social life as governed by power, but sees
power-struggles as conflicts of values that are merely perspectival and can’t be objectively
adjudicated. Science always presupposes an evaluative perspective to enable it to select
phenomena of interest, but what it looks for among the phenomena are value-neutral causal
relationships, even in the Geisteswissenchaften. While our goals in doing science are always
value-driven, then, our methods should be value-neutral.

The social sciences can’t proceed by the covering law model: there’s no way to derive world-
historical events from general laws. Instead, we can construct “ideal types” that portray typical
social relationships in heightened form, uniting various concrete individuals into an analytical
construct. Most famous example: rational-legal domination, traditional domination, and
charismatic domination. Another example: the ideal underlying rational choice theory/economic
theory. “Weber in effect makes the procedures of marginalist economics the paradigm case of
social explanation”: 159. Methodological individualism: interpretive method a matter of
identifying the meaning of an action for an individual, the individual’s beliefs and desires from
which it arose. “Action in the sense of subjectively understandable orientation of behaviour
exists only as the behaviour of one or more individual human beings”: quoted at 159. Another
quote: any reference to a social group is “only [to] a certain kind of development of actual or
possible actions of individual persons,” pace Durkheim.)

7.3. History and Rationalization: For Weber, the history of Western civilization is one of
rationalistic development. Two kinds of rationality: instrumental rationality and value-rationality,
rational because (believed to be) valuable for its own sake. Rational choice theory underlies
Weber’s concept of instrumental rationality. And it’s that that he thinks prevails in the various
culture-spheres of the modern West: capitalism is “the rationalistic organization of (formally) free
 1

labour” (quoted at 160), and bureaucracy is the most efficient means of exercising authority over
people: indeed, modern forms of organization just are bureaucratically administered ones.

The Protestant Ethic is Weber’s first study of this process. The spirit of capitalism is “acquisition
as the ultimate purpose of life” (quoted at 161). But while Marx explains it by competitive
pressures, Weber sees it as an ethic of “inner-worldly asceticism.” He sees it as the behavioral
product of the Calvinist need for assurance of one’s elect status. And this fuels capitalism:
acquisitiveness + limited consumption = accumulation of capital through manic saving. Our
interest is in the relation of this theory to his social theory. He says it’s not the idealistic
counterpart of Marx’s one-sided materialism. He does advocate economic interpretation of
history, if not a materialist conception of it: rather than seeing its essence as univocally given by
the latter, he sees it on neo-Kantian lines as infinite, cognizable only through the deployment of
concepts as driven by particular values. So the social sciences must track interactions between
autonomous aspects of social life, not single out one as dominant: it can analyze the “elective
affinity,” or mutual reinforcement, between spheres at a given time (for instance, that between
the Protestant ethic and capitalist spirit, since both are inner-worldly asceticism, or that between
capitalism and bureacratization, which are both instrumentally rational forms of social
organization). This involves functional compatibility between social forms, but doesn’t make one
causally primary. “Weber thus regards social explanation as inherently pluralistic: while one
form of social power may provide the focus of study in a particular case and relative to certain
value[-]interests, in general none can claim explanatory priority over the others” (163). We see
this in his distinction of class and status, economic situation from social esteem, relationship to
production from typical consumption. These are irreducible sources of social division; we can’t
explain them all by any one factor.

In one passage Weber seems to assign priority to ideologies, saying that the “world images”
created by ideas determine “like switchmen” the tracks along which action will move. He says
that in the context of a discussion of religion, seeing religions as different “theodicies” that
rationalize social distribution (Hindu karma/reincarnation, Zoroastrian dualism, Christian free
will/predestination). These ideas are autonomous switchmen for human history -- or, at least,
semi-autonomous, since they are influenced by -- or in mutual influence with -- external interests
and social stratification. Weber’s an organizational materialist: the semi-autonomy of ideas
doesn’t come for free, but from the insulation of the organization that propounds them, which
has its own administration and own interests.

Contrasting with this bureaucratic instrumental domination is charismatic authority: it breaks

continuity that underlies rational and traditional domination, responding to needs that transcend
ordinary economic routine or customs. Thus: “In this purely empirical and value-free sense
charisma is indeed the specifically creative revolutionary force in history” (167). History is the
oscillation between transformative but unjustifiable ideas and rule-bound routine, since charisma
is itself gradually “routinized.” Charisma wanes largely through rational discipline, which takes
over more and more spheres as “the satisfaction of political and economic needs is increasingly
rationalized” (quoted at 168). When this turns itself back on religion, disenchantment reaches its
climax: religion becomes an irrational compensation for the rationalization of the world by
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science, bureaucracy and capitalism. This is implicit in Weber’s theory of rationality:

instrumental rationality is justifiable, but value-rationality is not, and so we moderns are “torn
between the warring gods” (169). (If, like Habermas, one thinks values can objectively be
justified, one will be critical of this theory of history, or at least rationality.) Anyway,
rationalization doesn’t need its religious basis anymore: we’re forced to work acquisitively and
ascetically under capitalism, regardless of Calvinist dogma. We’re in the “iron cage” (quoted at
170).

7.4. Liberal Imperialism and Democratic Politics: We can see Weber as an “agonistic liberal,”
one who sees modernity as constituted by the irresoluble conflict between rival values. He sees
capitalism as undermining rather than reinforcing ethical and cultural values of modernity:
economic indicators show us our increasing unfreedom, capitalism has no elective affinity with
democracy or liberalism. Here he and Marx are on the same page, seeing capitalism as a
system of domination in which the worker is formally free but actually compelled by starvation
(quotation at 171). But he sees bureaucratization as central to unfreedom, not separation from
the means of production. And he sees it as inevitable: it’s the source of indispensable technical
knowledge. (And he sees private entrepreneurs as a last safe haven from it, which militates
against centralizing the means of production.) If we aren’t anarchists or neo-agrarians, we’ll
have to affirm technology, and then ideas of socialism, democracy, and the end of hierarchy are
just utopian fictions. (Amazing quote at 173, akin to Bultmann’s “toasters? Then no miracles.”)
The only alternative is forsaking means-end reasoning altogether and renouncing the world;
otherwise, we must take responsibility for foreseeable consequences of our actions and rely on
instrumental rationality.

His advocacy for limited constitutional reforms stemmed not from pro-democratic leanings, but
from imperialist nationalist aims: only a nation of masters can engage in world politics (quoted at
175). He’s an elitist who sees the modern state as necessarily built on domination and coercion,
with a small leading group controlling everyone else. Though at least elected politicians can
counterbalance the executive, unelected bureaucracy. Democracy is indeed a rationalized form
of charismatic domination, but this means it’s built on demagogy: it’s “a variant of charismatic
authority, which hides behind a legitimacy that is formally derived from the will of the governed”
(177). It’s thus quasi-imperial, centered on a “Caesarist politician” (a Nietzschean Ubermensch)
who once elected is unaccountable, and while he would have opposed Nazism given his true
liberal values, this dimension of his thought was attractive to the anti-parliamentary right. This
tension between the rational bureaucracy and the charismatic president is just one of the many
antinomies that capture the tensions of modernity, but threaten to come apart. And it explains
why he was so inspiring both for a staunch anti-capitalist like Lukacs and a conservative
functionalist like Parsons.
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Weber - Protestant Ethic (selections)

What is the spirit of capitalism? To try to define it raises difficulties in the nature of social-
scientific investigation. It’s a historical individual, a complex associated in historical reality that
we unite into a conceptual whole in terms of their cultural significance. But we can’t define this
from the top-down, but must instead put it together out of the individual historical parts, and so
do so at the end of the investigation. Even once we’ve done so, moreover, it could be done
differently from a different point of view, yielding different characteristics as essential. That’s
inevitable for historical investigation, which can’t begin with abstracta but from unique, concrete
individuals. And so we can’t begin with an abstract definition, but only with a provisional
description. We see this in Ben Franklin. (Long quote: basically, don’t ever waste your time;
that’s throwing away money; don’t ever spend money that could be making more money.)
Kurnberger calls this America’s faith: “They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men.”

The ideal is that of the individual’s duty to increase capital as an end in itself. This isn’t just
useful advice but an ethic: to forego it is to violate a duty. Weber uses spirit of capitalism to
allude specifically to this ethical character of capitalist maxims. (Sometimes Franklin looks to be
praising these characteristics just for utilitarian reasons, but in his autobiography he frames
them as divine revelations for the path of righteousness.) There’s no eudaimonistic/hedonistic
component to this ethic: earning more is seen as an end in itself, one that seems totally
irrational from the standpoint of individual well-being. It’s an inversion of the human being and
money-making; looks crazy from any other lens, but it’s a leading principle of capitalism. And yet
it’s a feeling linked to religious ideas, since (legal) money-making in a capitalist order is being
seen as a calling, and this is really the key idea of Franklin’s ethic. And this idea of one’s duty in
a calling is both most characteristic of, and the fundamental basis of, the social ethic of capitalist
culture. The individual is supposed to feel it to his professional activity, whatever it consists in.
(Not that all individuals under capitalism recognize this explicitly: capitalism confronts individuals
as just how things are done. And if they don’t do things that way, they will fail to get a job or stay
in business.)

The spirit of modern capitalism (and so culture) is “rational conduct on the basis of the idea of
the calling” (122), and this was born from Christian asceticism: it’s just Puritan worldly
asceticism, but without the religious basis. (The ascetic character of modern labor: restriction to
specialized work, renouncing universality, and the ascetic character of middle-class life.) The
religious basis is now gone: our work in a calling is not a spiritual passion, but forced,
determined irresistibly by the technical and economic conditions of industrial capitalism. Care for
external goods is now no longer Baxter’s light cloak but an “iron cage” (123), and maybe it will
be till the lights go out for the last time. External goods have an inexorable power over our lives:
“the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs”
(124). We can’t justify it spiritually, and we don’t need it materially, so we do it without
justification, like a kind of sport. Will things always be this way; will old ideas/ideals resurface;
will entirely new prophets arise? Who knows …
 4

“But this brings us to the world of judgments of value and of faith, with which this purely
historical discussion need not be burdened” (124). Further steps the analysis could take:
broadening out to track ascetic Protestantism’s quantitative cultural significance compared to
other elements of modern culture. In particular, we’d want to see how it was influenced by
economic conditions, just as we’ve seen here how it influenced them: “it is, of course, not my
aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal
interpretation of culture and of history” (125). Each is the premise that sets up the other, neither
should be our dogmatic stopping point.
 5

Weber - “Bureaucracy” (in Lemert, Social Theory, 5th ed., as “The Bureaucratic
Machine”)

Characteristics of Bureaucracy: Modern officialdom involves bureaucratic authority (or in the

private sphere bureaucratic management), which is built on three elements: fixed jurisdictional
areas, with authority distributed stably by rules (laws or administrative regulations) of coercion,
for officials with generally regulated qualifications. It’s distinctively modern; premodern authority
was distributed through particular persons with malleable, situation-dependent roles (advisers).
This arrangement inevitably involves principles of hierarchy/levels of authority: “a firmly ordered
system of super- and subordination” (83). (It also involves a sphere of documents, scribes, etc.,
which with the authorities make up a bureau or office.)

Bureaucracy separates official activity from private life. This is part of a historical development.
(And entrepreneurs, too, are heads of the business like rulers are heads of state. It’s a
European idea that the two should function differently, totally foreign to America.) Specialized
office management, which is itself distinctively modern, presupposes expert training. This
management follows stable general rules, and learning them is a special technical knowledge
(jurisprudence, administrative/business management). “The reduction of modern office
management to rules is deeply embedded in its very nature” (84). By contrast, premodern
management is nepotistic and particularistic.

The Leveling of Social Differences: Bureaucracy stems from a leveling of economic/social

differences, and from mass democracy, since its basic principle is equality before the law, and
so regularity in the execution of authority. (It ends exploitative administration.) This happens not
only within the state but also within political parties in mass democracies. Still, this
democratization involved in bureaucratization isn’t actually necessarily authority of the people: it
just changes who has authority over it. The bureaucracy can function autocratically; the point is
just that the governed are leveled with respect to it (this is a passive democratization, manifest
wherever a privileged class is replaced with a bureaucratic team). But in pushing for regular
elections and eliminating expert qualifications, deep democracy actually opposes
bureaucratization. (Economic conditions typically play a role in this passive democratization, but
sometimes it’s a purely political matter. It’s hard to give a general account of its causes.) Its
advance really rests on its technical superiority. (And so it advances slowest in places where
premodern administration was most technically developed.)

The Permanent Character of the Bureaucratic Machine: “Once it is fully established,

bureaucracy is among those social structures which are the hardest to destroy. … [A] form of
power relation is established that is practically unshatterable” (86). An individual bureaucrat has
no autonomy, but is checked by and has his behavior prescribed by the whole system, all of
which has an interest in the self-perpetuation of its authority. And the ruled can’t dispense with it
either, since it rests on expert training and functional specialization: without it, chaos results,
and solutions are difficult to improvise. “More and more the material fate of the masses depends
upon the steady and correct functioning of the increasingly bureaucratic organizations of private
capitalism. The idea of eliminating these organizations becomes more and more utopian” (86).
 6

(Bakunin thought we could end private property by just burning the deeds/public records -- but
we have been so formed that we look to the records to settle our disputes.)

That bureaucracy is both indispensable and impersonal makes it ripe for take-over by “the
enemy,” once in power. Just change the top official and the system keeps on trucking. That it
can do this makes revolution -- “the forceful creation of entirely new formulations of authority” --
“technically more and more impossible” (87). The French illustrate this: they claim to produce
“transformations” when really they can only produce coups.
 7

Weber - “Class, Status, Party”

Economically Determined Power and the Social Order: There are types of power other than
economic power; they may cause it rather than vice-versa; economic power may be valued
because it is power and not for economic enrichment. Or it may be valued because it yields
social honor -- but merely economic power does this least of all, and conversely, social
honor/prestige can be the basis of political/economic power and often has been. We can think of
the social order as the distribution of honor among social groups; it is not identical with the
economic order. Its status groups are phenomena of distribution of power alongside classes and
parties.

Determination of Class-Situation by Market-Situation: A class is not a community, but a possible

basis for communal action. A class is a group of people with the same typical chance of
obtaining goods/living conditions based on the power or lack of it to dispose of goods/skills for
income. A general Marxist account of exploitation and of property as the basis of class. But then
some nuances, both among the owners and among the workers, which I won’t bother to record
scrupulously.

Communal Action flowing from Class Interest: Nor is class-interest unambiguous, except when
read off of statistical averages. Workers may be well- or poorly-qualified, and that will affect their
prospects considerably. And they may have strong or little communal association, which will
affect the prospects of fighting back as they see them. Often times pushback is individual,
sporadic, and only tacitly shared. For it to become rationally organized, there must not only be
the fact of different life chances for the different classes, but the fact of this being due to cultural
conditions/classes must become distinctly recognized, so that this can be seen not only as
given fact but a matter of prevailing distributions of property/economic relations.

Types of Class Struggle: So it’s not necessary that a class engage in class action. Classes
aren’t communities in themselves. We can note that people in the same class situation regularly
take mass actions to economic situations in the direction of the interests of their average
member as a simple, important fact for understanding historical events without reifying the class
or assuming some inevitable law of its developments or knowledge of its interests. (Moreover,
classes emerge only in the context of capitalist relations that are made possible by a libertarian
legal order.)

Status groups “hinder the strict carrying through of the sheer market principle” (101): that’s what
the next section is about. First, though, note that we can’t say much in general terms about
class antagonism, except perhaps that the focus of class struggle has gradually shifted from
consumption credit (i.e. debt) to struggles in the commodity market and then price wars on the
labor market. Further, class antagonisms were most bitter between the actual opponents in the
price wars, so that sometimes landlords or bankers could ally with the proletariat against the
bourgeoisie!
 8

Status Honor: Status groups are typically communities, if amorphous ones; they’re defined by
shared situation involving life outcomes as determined by social estimations of honor. This can
be linked to class situation, but it need not be, and often the two stand in opposition: propertied
and propertyless people can belong to the same status group, with tangible consequences.
American society is built on this, with bosses mingling with underlings after hours. (Though this
equality of social esteem may be precarious in the long run.)

Parties: Parties are not in the economic or social order but the “house of ‘power’”: they seek to
acquire social power, to influence communal action in whatever direction. They could exist in a
state or a social club, the structure is the same. They involve societalization, since they strive for
a particular conscious goal and plan how to achieve it. It may be a cause, or just personal
benefits, or likely both at once. So they presuppose rational order and a staff of persons to
enforce it. They may represent class or status interests and may be ordered by either criterion.
They also may incorporate modern or premodern forms of authority, in virtue of which it’s hard
to say anything more about their structure without discussing those in more detail.
 9

Weber - “Politics as a Vocation” (snippet)

We’ll ignore all questions about the policies we should pursue: that has nothing to do with
politics as a vocation. What is politics? Well, we could say any type of independent leadership
activity, but we’ll say just the one in a state. What’s a state? Well, it’s defined not by any
particular task -- none are exclusive to it, but it’s done most at given points -- but by its peculiar
means: the state has a monopoly on the means of violence within its boundaries. It is the sole
source of the right to violence: others have it just so far as the state grants it. (So an anarchistic
society would be one in which there was no normal violence as a means, or at least none that
was legitimate…)

But since this violence must be seen as legitimate, we might ask what grounds legitimate it. In
principle there are three ideal types of rule (if hardly ever occurring in pure form in reality),
based on their justification: traditional rule, justified by custom (the eternal past); charismatic
rule, justified by personal charisma or leadership; and rule by legality, justified by statutes taken
to the valid and rules taken to be rational. The second is the root of the idea of politics as a
vocation.
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Weber - “Science as a Vocation” (starting p. 11 in the Hackett ed.)

In science, we know our work will be obsolete shortly: that’s its very meaning. It invites new
questions, begging to be surpassed and rendered obsolete. We hope for infinite progress
beyond ourselves. But how can this enterprise be meaningful and rational: what’s the point of
pursuing an ever-receding goal? It’s technically useful, sure -- but how can the scientist himself
justify it? He thinks it should be pursued for its own sake. Why? “Scientific progress is a fraction,
and indeed the most important fraction, of the process of intellectualization to which we have
been subjected for thousands of years” (12). This doesn’t mean that each of us understands the
conditions under which we live better than premoderns. But it does mean we could, so that “in
principle … we are not ruled by mysterious, unpredictable focus, but … on the contrary, we can
in principle control everything by means of calculation. That in turn means the disenchantment
of the world” (12-13). That we achieve our ends through technology and calculation rather than
spiritualism is “the primary meaning of the process of intellectualization” that’s been at work in
Western culture for millennia (13).

This is progress. Does it mean anything beyond its practical/technical implications? Tolstoy
argued that death has no meaning for “a civilized person”: since she’s caught up in progress to
infinity, her life can’t have an intrinsically meaningful end, unlike the premodern peasant who
died fulfilled by life, for whom life had given all it had to offer. But we can know so little of what
there is to know, and even that is only provisional. And so death is meaningless, and so in turn
is “civilized life.” What do we say to that? Can we attach any intrinsic meaning to progress so
that devotion to it can become a meaningful vocation? What is the vocation of science in the
place of human life -- what’s its value?

For Plato, common sense is the cave of illusion, and “science” the truth of the sun that presents
true being. For us, scientific ideas seem like otherworldly abstractions, and common sense
seems like authentic reality. How did this reversal happen? With Socrates we see the rise of
concepts and logic, and so Plato hoped that the correct concept would mean grasping the true
nature of things, from which right action would follow logically. That’s why science was
worthwhile. But this was supplemented in the Renaissance with scientific experiment as a
means of reliably controlling experience, and indeed centering all research around this method.
For these artistic experimenters, science was the path to true art and true nature. But
nowadays, we want to get away from science to recover nature. Puritan Protestantism thought
of science as the way to God (with older a priori arguments failing, God’s nature can only be
known through his works), but now we know that science tells us nothing about the meaning of
the world, if there is any: indeed, it makes our belief in such a thing wither, along with our belief
in God. “Release from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental premise
of life in communion with the divine” (16). Young people are now in search of experience
(especially religious experience), but are now intellectually scrutinizing the irrational to get it:
thus romanticism undermines itself. Science is not the road to happiness; it just explains away
the force of things that would have made us happy. Given all that, what is the meaning of
science as a vocation? It has no answers to practical/ethical questions, which Tolstoy thinks the
 11

only ones that matter to us, and so, he thinks, it’s meaningless. But might it prove useful for
someone who asks the right question?

Can there be a presuppositionless science? Well, science always presupposes logical and
methodological rules. That’s fine. But we also assume that objects of scientific research should
be important, and that can’t be established scientifically, but only “interpreted with reference to
its ultimate meaning, which we must accept or reject in accordance with our own ultimate
attitude toward life” (18). We assume that it’s worth knowing the ultimate laws governing cosmic
processes, but we can’t scientifically prove that (let alone that the world should exist, is
meaningful, etc.). Similarly, medicine as a science tells us only how to use technology to control
life: all questions of whether and when we ought to do so are beyond its purview. Similarly
aesthetics, jurisprudence, and cultural history, the last of which tells us how cultural products
resulted from earlier conditions, but not whether they deserved or deserve to exist or whether
it’s worth our getting to know them (they just assume this, but couldn’t demonstrate it, and it’s
far from self-evident).

What about the social sciences and the philosophy of them? For Weber, “politics has no place
in the lecture room” (19). Students no-platforming for political reasons is wrong, but so is
lecturers injecting their political views, even if they’re political scientists. “For opinions on issues
of practical politics and the academic analysis of political institutions are two very different
things” (20). At the public meeting, use language to persuade to your political point of view. But
it’s outrageous to use it this way in the lecture room: the task there is analytic, causal-
explanatory/nomological, and comparative. “Our aim must be to enable the listener to discover
the vantage point from which he can judge the matter in the light of his own ultimate ideals” (20),
but not to offer such a judgment -- and especially not in the guise of merely “allowing the facts to
speak for themselves” (20). Weber recognizes that many disagree with this and grants that he
“cannot provide a university teacher with scientific proof of where his duty lies” (20). But we can
force him to see and admit that these are two separate problems: establishing factual
knowledge vs. asking value questions and questions about how we ought to act. Why not deal
with both? Because “the prophet and the demagogue have no place at the lectern” (20): they
should go speak in public where they can be criticized, not in the lecture hall where students
owe the lecturer deference (and, even if the right to it is compromised, they may feel like they
have to accord it anyway, for the sake of their careers). Indeed, Weber thinks, it could be
demonstrated (but would take us too far afield here) that introducing one’s own values
necessarily limits one’s understanding of the facts. Moreover, students with different values will
never see eye-to-eye, but the lecturer owes it to them to provide something they can both use:
the facts and his understanding of disciplinary method.

Are the achievements of science meaningless to one interested only in the practical point of
view, not in the facts as such? Well, maybe not: good teachers force their students to
acknowledge inconvenient truths (which exist for every evaluative point of view), and having to
do so is not just an individual but an ethical achievement.
 12

It’s not merely a practical mistake to impose one’s value-judgments on others, but a mistake in
principle: “scientific” advocacy of practical points of view (as opposed to advocacy of statements
of consequences of values taken as given) “is senseless in principle because the different value
systems of the world are caught up in an insoluble struggle with one another” (22). How could
you decide scientifically between the values of different cultures? (As Mill says, if you go simply
on experience -- on empiricist science -- you get polytheism: an irresolvable conflict between the
gods.) “We cannot go beyond understanding what the divine means for this or that system or
within this or that system. And this spells the end of any discussion by professors in lecture
rooms, although, of course, the great problem of life implicit here is far from being exhausted”
(23; Me: end of the Tractatus). How could we refute the pacifist morality of the Sermon on the
Mount? But our human code of honor opposes it: we must just pick between the two value
systems. The disenchanted gods still eternally struggle for power over our lives. But it is hard for
us “to meet the challenge of such an everyday life” (24), whence the Romantic flight to
experience: “For weakness it is to be unable to look the fate of the age full in the face” (24). Our
cultural destiny is to become aware of the situation again after Christianity blinded us to it for a
millennium. [Skipping a few bars…]

So, what can science achieve for our lives practically, then? That brings us back to the problem
of science’s “vocation.” First, it gives us knowledge of controlling life through calculation.
Further, though, it provides us methods of thought and the training to use them. Even more so,
though, science can offer us clarity: it can make it clear to us that in practice we adopt a certain
evaluative stance, and it can offer us the means of making those values real. Sometimes we’ll
reject the means, and so have to make the choice whether the end justifies them or not: the
teacher can’t decide, but can show the choice to be necessary. Finally, in showing this need for
choice, “we can compel a person, or at least help him, to render an account of the ultimate
meaning of his own actions” (26). A teacher who succeeds in this does act in the service of
ethical forces, following the duty to foster clarity and a sense of responsibility -- and will do this
better for avoiding imposing a political point of view.

The fundamental “fact” underlying Weber’s position: “life is about the incompatibility of ultimate
possible attitudes and hence the inability ever to resolve the conflicts between them. Hence the
necessity of deciding between them” (27). And so in the lecture room, as scientists, we can’t say
anything about whether we should be scientists, whether it’s a worthwhile vocation: “This is
because positively affirming the value of science is the precondition of all teaching” (27). If
Tolstoy rises up to ask who will settle the war between the gods if not science, “we must reply:
only a prophet or a savior” (28). And if none emerges, then we won’t force one to by instructing
professors to fill his role in the classroom! Instead, we’ll just rob the younger generation of the
chance to learn the all-important fact that “the prophet for whom so many of them yearn simply
does not exist. I believe that the inner needs of a human being with the ‘music’ of religion in his
veins will never be served if the fundamental fact that his fate is to live in an age alien to God
and bereft of prophets is hidden from him and others by surrogates in the shape of all these
professorial prophets” (28).
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(There is theology, which purports to be a religious science. But it not only assumes its own
value, like every science, but makes factual assumptions such as that the world has a meaning
and various particular dogmas of special revelation that we must believe in without evidence. It
then fits these together rationally, but they themselves lie outside the realm of science: we take
them on faith, and one who hasn’t already “sacrificed the intellect” and “embraced the absurd”
can’t be argued into doing so. It’s the prophet and the church who claim a sacrifice of the
intellect, and a new prophecy has never come into being by intellectuals reviving old religious
views, deceiving themselves into thinking they still believe or are under the charismatic spell.)

“Our age is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the
disenchantment of the world” (30). And so our values withdraw from public life into mysticism or
the interpersonal. Our art is now quiet and intimate, not sweeping and grand: forcing the
grandeur simply creates “wretched monstrosities.” And forcing religious movements without a
prophecy leads to something just as monstrous, and with worse consequences, for the psyche.
Academic prophecies produce fanaticism, but not real community. If you can’t take the
disenchantment of modernity like a man, then go join a church quietly: they’ll take you. You’ll
have to sacrifice your intellect, but maybe you can, and if it is in favor of an unconditional
religious commitment, well, fair enough. But it’s another thing to not be able to accept it as an
ultimate standpoint but equivocate to avoid the consequences. And it’s another other thing to
import morality into the lecture room. We must keep our intellectual integrity, and that involves
recognizing that people have been waiting for a new prophet for long enough, and that we
should instead carry on our work and meet the challenge of the day in our relationships and our
vocation. “But that moral is simple and straightforward if each person finds and obeys the
daemon that holds the threads of his life” (31).