Twentieth-Century German Philosophy: Central Themes
Twentieth-Century German Philosophy: Central Themes
Chapter 1
Weber: Rationalization, Disenchantment and Charisma[1]
Max Weber (1864 - 1920) is known as a sociologist rather than a philosopher, as, indeed, one of the founders of sociology as an academic discipline. He was, nonetheless, deeply engaged with nineteenth-century German philosophy, above all with Nietzsche. And he represents an appropriate starting point for this book in virtue of having, at the beginning of the century, articulated, with memorable force, the problems that would come to be the central concern of each of the philosophers to be discussed in the chapters that follow. The principle (but not the only) text in which he does this is a lecture delivered to students at Munich University in November 7, 1917 entitled 'Wissenschaft als Beruf' ('Science as a Vocation', or 'Science as a Calling') .
Although it was not yet clear that Germany would lose the First World War, the fact that it had deployed the fruits of modern science to kill and maim human beings on an unprecedented scale (thirty-eight million in total) clearly affects the content of the lecture.[2] ('No one born after 1914', Bertrand Russell once remarked, 'is capable of happiness'.) On the students' minds, as Weber presents their concerns, is scepticism about the validity of the life of 'science' (FMW 138-39), the validity, that is, of the life for which they are preparing themselves. It is important to bear in mind that the German Wissenschaft embraces every intellectual discipline - frequently, indeed, Weber simply identifies 'science' with 'reason' as such (FMW 140-41) - so that whatever the students were studying they were preparing for entry into the project of 'science'. That Weber seeks to address these concerns gives the lecture something of the character of a commencement address.
Rationalization
Weber's lecture in an exercise in cultural criticism, in criticism of modernity. The focus of his criticism is what he calls 'rationalization' (sometime 'intellectualization') and which he defines as the exercise of 'control (or 'mastery' - beherrschen) through calculation' (FMW 139). Rationalization, says Weber, is an historical process unique to the West that has been developing for thousands of years (FMW 138). What is distinctive of modernity, however, is that the rationalization of life has become so effective and so all-embracing that it has generate two pathological consequences. These are - here I follow Habermas' Weber-taxonomy (Theory of Communicative Action I 244) - 'loss of freedom' and 'loss of meaning'. Before discussing the nature of these consequences and their connection to rationalization, I shall attempt to clarify 'rationalization' itself, the meaning of the phrase 'control through calculation'.
A way of approaching this concept would be to begin with examples of 'control' that is not the product of 'calculation': Lionel Messi's control of the ball, Jascha Heifitz's control of the bow, Donald Trump's control of the audience of angry old men, perhaps. This is the kind of control that Plato - the father of rationalization - refers to in a number of dialogues as a 'knack (empeiria)' and scorns as unreliable, as generating at best only a partial, hit-or-miss kind of control. To become reliable empeiria must, he says, be transformed into techne. 'Know-how' must be replaced by knowledge-that. In the Phaedrus, for instance, he argues, that for rhetoric to become really effective, the unreliable practice of the Sophists must be replaced by an exhaustive categorization of all personality types, followed by the empirical correlation of each type with the form of rhetoric likely to be most effective with respect to it. ('Extroverts love flattery', 'Flattery makes introverts suspicious', perhaps.)
At the most general level, then, the rationalization of some phenomenon is the exercise of control over it through knowledge-that, through the use of some body of explicitly formulated and systematically organized set of propositions. So, for example, the application of a system of formal logic would constitute the rationalization of inferential thought, the application of a system of geometry the rationalization of spatial measurement. Weber's lecture, however, has a specific species of rationalization as its topic. The 'intellectualist rationalization' that concerns him is 'created by science and science-based technology' (FMW 139).
Science, Weber observes, 'contributes to the technology of controlling life by calculating external objects as well as man's activities' (FMW 150). Science, in other words, divides into the natural and the social sciences. As a sociologist, of course, Weber's interest is in the latter, in the rationalization of human behaviour. Such rationalization, he holds, is created by the extension of the 'scientific point of view' (PE 36) from nature to humanity, consists in the social sciences mimicking the 'point of view' of their older, and more successful, cousins. What however does he take to constitute 'the scientific point of view'?
The progress of science is, he writes, is the 'transformation of [the world] into a causal mechanism' (FMW 350). He thus conceives of natural science in terms of the standard 'covering law' model. The 'calculation' that is involved in rationalization consists in the discovery of causal laws. If one is then able to develop a technology for controlling the antecedent event of the law in question one will have achieved control over the consequent, target phenomenon. So, for example, the rationalization of agriculture will consist (in part) in discovering the law that plants die when deprived of water and the consequent development of a technology, a mechanism of irrigation, which ensures that they are not deprived of water.
The extension of rationalization to human behaviour will similarly consist in the discovery of laws of human behaviour on the basis of which we then construct mechanisms of control. Human beings are, of course, less predictable than natural objects, so that the laws in question will likely be statistical rather than exceptionless, and the technologies of control less reliable than technologies for the control of natural objects. Nonetheless, the principle in both cases the same: in a slogan, rationalization is mechanization.
Bureaucratization
Weber's term for the rationalization of human behaviour is 'bureaucratization'. Bureaucratization is the use of causal knowledge about human behaviour in order to construct mechanisms of control, social 'machines' designed to produce a given outcome as efficiently and reliably as possible. Hence bureaucracies mimic the design of machines: they are characterized by a division of labour into specific tasks within a hierarchy of command and control where the tasks to be performed at each level - the functions to be fulfilled by each 'machine part', as it were - are defined by rigid and clearly defined rules and procedures (FMW 196). Bureaucracies have, of course, existed for millennia. Only in modernity, however, has bureaucratization come to embrace the totality of social life. Where the bureaucracy in question is that of the state Weber calls it 'bureaucratic authority' (ibid.).
Familiarity (and, in younger generations, lack of experience of a not-totally-bureaucratized way of life) dulls our awareness of the extent to which our lives are controlled and disciplined by the modern bureaucratic state.[3] (As David Graeber points out, a graph of the number of times the word 'bureaucracy' appears in books written in English, peaks during the 1970s, and massively declines thereafter.)[4] But whether it is a question of the height of one's house, what and where one can drink and smoke, how much of one's income one can keep, what foreign countries one can visit and how long one can stay there (passports as we know them, did not exist before the 20th century), and, crucially, what length and content of the education one must have, the modern state regiments our lives into, as Richard Wagner observed, already in 1849, a 'red-tape uniformity' undreamt of in pre-modern times.[5] Max Horkheimer tries to raise our consciousness of this regimentation by contrasting the multiplicity of rules and regulations governing the driving of a car on the highway with the freedom of riding a horse over the eighteenth-century countryside (p. *** below).
There are, of course, many bureaucracies (a great deal of 'paperwork') that we need to deal with other than those of the state. Opening a bank account, the online booking of an airline ticket, satisfying the requirements for the accreditation of one's university, gaining entry to a graduate school, applying for a research grant, the publication of an article in a learned journal, the refereeing of such an article, all require the usually tedious, exhausting, and obscurely offensive submission to inflexible bureaucratic procedures. Apart from the state, however, what Weber focuses on, and with a gesture toward Marx (whom he generally opposes) regards as fundamental, is the bureaucratization of the workplace.
* * *
Where bureaucratic rationalization concerns the workplace rather than the state it constitutes, says Weber, not 'authority' but rather 'management' (FMW 196). 'Management', he says, is the science of the 'rational organization of (formally) free labour' (PE xxxiv). It aims at the 'calculability of the productivity of labour' (ES I 150), aims, that is, to use scientific 'calculation' to increase productivity. In discussing management, Weber sometimes defers to the work of his contemporary American, Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) (ES I 150), whose The Principles of Management Science (1911) was the first textbook of management science.
Taylor saw that, through the introduction of an industrialised version of the division of labour, productivity could be greatly increased. Accordingly, 'Taylorism' analyses the manufacture of a product, a car, for instance, into a set of micro-tasks that are as small as possible, and then uses the 'time and motion study' to reduce those tasks to the smallest possible number of bodily movements. Taylorism is the theoretical basis of 'Fordism', Henry Ford's assembly-line method of manufacturing cars, but also the mode of production that increased productivity to a degree that eventually provided the U.S. with its overwhelming advantage in weaponry in the Second World War.
It is important not to identify the industrial division of labour with the division of labour as such, with specialization. (Weber, who refers to the assembly-line worker as a 'specialist' (p. 6 below) seems not to be sensitive to this distinction.) The medieval sculptor carved the statues, and the painter the paintings, each of these specialized tasks being necessary to the completion of the medieval cathedral. As Hannah Arendt observes, however (pp. *** below), while each of these tasks produces a satisfying 'end in itself', Fordism reduces work to the mechanical, meaningless drudgery memorably satirized in Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). The pre-industrial division of labour allows for the possibility of, in Marx's language, 'un-alienated' labour, the industrialized division of labour produces only 'alienated' labour. (This latter point was already understood in 1776 by Adam Smith. While regarding industrialization as essential to productivity, The Wealth of Nations nonetheless observes that, in the pin factory, the individual worker, who could formerly make a whole pin, can now complete only a small part of the process, a meaninglessness of activity that infects all aspects of his life with a 'torpor of mind', making him 'as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become'.[6] Since the industrial division of labour reduced the worker to low-paid, dazed, 'stupidity', Taylorism predicts and requires the burgeoning of hierarchical levels of corporate management where 'stupidity' decreases and synoptic understanding increases as one ascends the hierarchy.)
Loss of Freedom
Weber's question in his famous lecture - the question on the minds of his sceptical, student audience - is: is science really a vocation? Is it really a 'calling' that can give value and meaning to one's life? Has the project of science - which we now see to be responsible for the rationalization of the world - really made life better for us?
For this to be a genuine question there has to be something that raises the possibility of a negative answer, a dark side to 'scientific progress' and the rationalization of life it has brought with it. Weber's account of this dark side can be brought under the two headings already mentioned: loss of freedom and loss of meaning. I begin with the first.
Weber talks about the loss of freedom that results from the bureaucratization of the workplace in a memorable passage at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:
The Puritan wanted to be a man of vocation (Berufsmensch); we have to be one. … the modern economic order … is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production …[which] today determine with irresistible force the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In [the Puritan moralist, Richard] Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ''saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.'' But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage (stahlhartes Gehäuse). No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether, at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrifaction (mechanisierte Versteinerung), embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the [Nietzsche's] 'last man' (letzter Mensch) of this cultural development, it might well be truly said [in Goethe's words]: ''Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity never before achieved'' (PE 123-4 translation adjusted).
What concerns us in the passage[7] is the famous image of the 'iron cage', an image that repeats Richard Wagner's 1849 description of the modern bureaucratic order as confining the individual to an “iron harness”.[8] (A more accurate translation of stahlhartes Gehäuse would be 'steel shell', but since the image has become famous I shall retain the mistranslation.). The modern economic order (the combination of Taylorism and Fordism), Weber observes, turns one into a Berufsmensch. Applied to the industrial factory or office worker rather than the Puritan capitalist, the phrase 'man with a calling' takes on an ironic meaning, so that to capture its actual sense one needs to translate Berufsmensch by something like 'organization man', 'salary man', or Arendt's 'jobholder': something which suggests the reduction of the worker to a 'cog in the machine', in the computer age, to a node in the cybernetic network. Increasingly, says Weber, we are suffering from (a somewhat mixed metaphor) 'mechanised petrifaction', becoming, that is, the quasi-robots parodied in Chaplin's Modern Times yet unaware of our quasi-robotic status. The modern economic order, to which self-preservation compels us to belong, creates a world in which we have no more freedom than has a robot.
Consequences of the Iron Cage
The 'iron cage' passage ends with an apocalyptic vision of a dehumanised future, a future that will soon arrive unless there is a radical disruption of current trends. In this future, our confinement within the iron cage has reduced us to 'specialists without spirit [and] sensualists without heart', creatures whose 'self-importance', whose blindness to their own condition, is so complete that - laying aside their opium pipes for a moment - they say, with Zarathustra's 'last man', 'we have invented happiness'.[9]
The specialist without spirit is, of course, the auto worker or bank clerk or who performs his or her task 'without spirit' (in Adam Smith's phrase, in a dull 'torpor of mind') because, rather than producing a satisfying 'end in itself', the task is meaningless drudgery, 'alienated' labour. 'Sensualism without heart' means sensation without emotion: sex without love or danger without purpose (as in bungee jumping), for instance, the quest for 'experiences (Erlebnisse)' that Weber regards the students as being overly attracted by. Why should the Berufsmensch be condemned to such a life?
Speaking of the alienation of labour, Marx writes that, for the industrial worker, 'real life starts when work ceases - at table, in the bar, in bed'.[10] Weber's point, however (a point we will find developed in a significantly new direction by Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse) is that the iron cage of industrialism degrades the so-called leisure time of the worker to such a degree that there is no genuine 'real life' left at all. Focussing, in particular, on the cheapness of nineteenth-century musical theatre, on the fact that all the audience wants from opera are slushy arias for easy listening, Richard Wagner attributes the degradation of art to exhaustion. As he writes in 1849,
when a prince leaves a heavy dinner, the banker a fatiguing financial operation, the working man a weary day of toil and go to the theatre, what they ask for is rest, distraction, and amusement, and are in no mood for renewed effort and fresh expenditure of energy (Art and Revolution 42-4).
When one has put in a ten-hour day in the office or on the factory floor one lacks the energy for Shakespeare or Schönberg. All one is capable of is the effort-free consumption of one kind of drug or another, the passive consumption of pleasant sensations, sensations for which one has a genuine need in order to compensate for what Weber calls the enforced 'asceticism', the pleasure deficit, of the workplace. Heidegger sums up the effect that this has on art by saying that, in the age of industrialization, art becomes the art of 'pastry cooks' (Introduction to Metaphysics p. 131).