By Nicholas Gane
"This booklet explores thematic parallels among Max Weber's sociology of tradition and the serious theories of modernity constructed by way of Lyotard, Foucault and Baudrillard. it is recommended that those 3 theorists, linked to post-structuralism and postmodernism, reply to Weber's account of the increase, nature and trajectory of recent tradition by way of pursuing transgressive concepts of confirmation and re-enchantment. �Read more...
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Additional info for Max Weber and postmodern theory : rationalization versus re-enchantment
Sample text
Turner, 1992, 88–91). This is indeed the case, but there are more fundamental reasons for Weber’s approach. On a basic level, Weber addresses the conflict between life-orders from the perspective of the religious sphere because this analysis is itself an ‘intermediate reflection’ (Zwischenbetrachtung) on the Religionssoziologie project. In addition, the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ privileges the religious sphere for it was written, at least in part, as a response to Georg Lukács and Ernest Bloch (key figures in the Weber circle), who espoused ‘eschatological hopes’ for ‘“salvation from the world” through creation of a new “socialist society founded upon an ethic of brotherliness”’ (Scaff, 1991, 93; see also Marianne Weber, 1975, 466).
There is no (rational or empirical) scientific procedure of any kind whatsoever which can provide us with a decision here. (Weber, 1949, 18–19) The irony of this is that scientific knowledge is unable consequently to resolve the very crisis it inaugurated. It set into play the modern conflict between different value-spheres through the progressive devaluation of religious ‘truths’, but is itself unable to resolve this conflict through the founding of a new value-standard. This is because science, in Weber’s view, should be concerned strictly with what ‘is’ and not what ‘ought’ to be, and may clarify but not answer questions of ultimate meaning or value.
And not only theoretical thought, disenchanting the world, led to this course, but also the very attempt of religious ethics practically and ethically to rationalize the world. (p. 357) This passage suggests that with the rationalization of the world, worldly values break free of all religious constraints and begin to follow their own relatively autonomous logics (see Chapter 3). The result of this is that culture itself becomes ‘ever more senseless’, for the religious, ‘organically prescribed’ cycle of life is at this point broken, and cultural values proliferate within their own secular cosmos and ‘progress indefinitely’ (see Weber, 1970, 356).
