Why Max Weber matters
DUNCAN KELLY
Peter Ghosh
MAX WEBER AND “THE PROTESTANT ETHIC”
Twin histories
424pp. Oxford University Press. £30 (US $49.95).
978 0 19 870252 8
"Weber’s well-known refrains about the dangers of a politics of national vanity (Eitelkeit), made most famously in his lecture on the vocation of politics, were in fact extant in his writings from the start. For example, in a perspicacious essay realistically assaying the prospects of Germany against the European world powers during the war, he once more stated his belief that “objective politics” was not a “politics of vanity”, but one whose actions necessarily took place in the shadows. In the darkness personality could really count, rather than in public, when it was too often just for show. Whether inThe Protestant Ethic or in his later essays and lectures on politics, Weber worried about the fate of personality and responsibility in what has infamously (if incorrectly) come to be known as the “iron cage” of a rationalized and bureaucratized modern world. In The Protestant Ethic, he wrote that perhaps the mechanization of life would continue unchallenged until the last ounces of fossil fuel had been used up, and the danger was that we might simply fail to notice. In later work, such environmental imagery had turned into a worry about the future as a polar night of icy darkness. In order to guard against these dangers, inner personality had to be focused, hardened and retooled, made able to resist superficiality in its own engagement with the impersonal force of fate. In our own age, where borderlands between environmental crisis, near-pathological boredom and disaffection with mainstream politics, and tensions driven by religion have if anything become more rigidly crippling than ever, Max Weber looks a more profound guide than we might care to think."
No comments:
Post a Comment