Influencers | The Snigger

INSPIRATIONS AND INFLUENCERS (True Influencers, not the social media talentless attention seekers)

Max Weber

This month’s influencer is for the fourth consecutive month a German, namely the sociologist Max Weber who explains the rise of modern, industrial, and bureaucratic societies.

The main themes of Weber’s writings were how Capitalism emerged from Protestant religious theology, and how the rationalisation in Western culture led to the “Entzauberung der Welt” or in English the "disenchantment of the world", an idea he introduced in his 1917 lecture "Science as a Vocation" and which he defined as the removal of magic and mystery from the world, replaced by intellectualization and calculation.

Maximilian Carl Emil “Max” Weber (21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was born in the Prussian city of Erfurt and was brought up in a prosperous, cosmopolitan, and cultivated family milieu, his father came from a Westphalian family of merchants and industrialists in the textile business and he went on to become a lawyer and National Liberal parliamentarian. Weber lived during the industrial revolution which saw German and other European cities expand and large trading companies formed, and it also saw the old Aristocracy being replaced as the leaders of society by a new managerialist class of businessmen. It was these changes that Weber spent his life studying.

The work for which Weber is most well known is 'Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus' (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism) which was published in 1905, and argued that Protestantism, particularly Calvinism, introduced the concept of engaging in worldly, secular work as a moral duty. This combined asceticism (a rejection of worldly pleasures and luxury) and working hard, but also not spending their money on indulgences, and reinvesting it to generate greater wealth and fostering capitalist accumulation.

The doctrine of Calvinism believed in predestination, a theological concept where God has already chosen who is saved and who is not with no options for salvation based on good actions or redemption, it was all decided before you were even born.

Before the Reformation when Europe was still Catholic, sins could be confessed to a Priest who had authority to absolve them, but Protestants rejected this concept and replaced it with the belief that only God could forgive your sins, and He wasn’t going to let you know pre Judgement Day. This created immense anxiety, leading the believers to look for signs of their status in daily life, interpreting financial success through hard work as a sign of God's favor. This is the Protestant Work Ethic where hard work is considered to be virtuous in and of itself.

By purging Christianity of its Roman Catholic doctrines and rituals, and advocating for a stricter Calvinist theology, piety, and simpler worship, religion became less mystical and more rational leading to the development of science and rationality to explain the world and moving away from supernatural explanations.

Weber argued that “rationalisation” is a process through which more and more aspects of human life become subject to calculation, measurement and control. This happens in every field of life, not just in science itself, human societies gradually base themselves around calculation, measurement and control. This can be seen in any large corporation or government bureaucracy. It has led to greater efficiency, accuracy, and levels of productivity and asserted control over many varied aspects of human life, and it has given net positives such as elimination of diseases, improved nutrition, lifespans and more comfortable lifestyles, although there are negatives such as environmental pollution.

The consequence of this process of rationalisation was what Weber called the "disenchantment of the world" where scientific understanding, rationalization, and bureaucracy replace magical, mystical, and religious interpretations of life. The world transformed from an "enchanted garden" of spirits and demons and hidden meanings into a predictable, mechanical system. Through science, all things can be understood and mastered by calculation rather than by prayer or magic.

The problem is that humans are not purely rational creatures, and Weber believed that disenchantment led to a loss of meaning and that rationality could not adequately fill the vacuum left by the diminishment of religion. Weber suggested that the process had left modern life without the highest values, and reduced them to merely personal, subjective preferences. Modernity provides knowledge, but not inherent meaning or intrinsic values. Weber noted that modern rationality is often limited to "instrumental reason", asking how to efficiently achieve ends, rather than evaluating the meaning or morality of those ends.

Science may be able to clarify questions of values and morals, but it is ultimately incapable of answering them in the way religion could or for some people, still can, however, a return to old-style religion is also an inferior solution, for that would represent a withdrawal into the obsolete and unfounded beliefs of the past. The inadequacy of both science and religion produces a fundamental impasse in the modern world that continues in the West to this day.