Max Weber was the kind of genius we don’t seem to encounter anymore. Trained in law, he taught economics and helped invent sociology while dabbling in philosophy, history, and the study of art, as well as churning out commentary for newspapers and magazines. The project to bring out Weber’s collected papers will run to 47 volumes. Remarkably, Weber generated all this material before his death at 56, a victim of the flu that ravaged Europe after World War I.
Yet the technical character of Weber’s work has limited his influence. Unlike his contemporary Sigmund Freud, Weber did not display the literary gifts that might have made his ideas accessible to a general audience. Beyond specialist circles, his reputation rests on addresses about the purposes of scholarship and politics delivered in 1917 and 1919. Known as the “vocation lectures,” they sketch a society in which historical sources of guidance have lost their authority.
Originally presented to a student association in Munich, the lectures remain staples of general education courses. Charisma and Disenchantment seems aimed at this market. In addition to an introduction that situates the lectures in the uncertain politics of a defeated and polarized nation, the volume includes a new and surprisingly colloquial translation of Weber’s stately German.
The intention to bring Weber into the 21st century is evident in the rendering of the lectures’ titles. The key term in German is “Beruf” — typically translated as “vocation,” from the Latin “vocare,” for “to call.” (Beruf has similar connotations in German — its root, “rufen,” also means “to call.”) Associations with New Testament accounts of God’s invitation (or calling) to salvation are not accidental. When Weber describes “scholarship as a vocation” and “politics as a vocation,” he is suggesting these activities retain the structure of religious obligation even as they are emptied of theological content.
While they acknowledge these connections, the editors emphasize the mundane use of Beruf to refer to virtually any job. They translate it with the trendy, vaguely Marxist “work,” rather than with terms that evoke Weber’s arguments about secularization. The result sounds less like a disillusioned prophet than like an organizer for a graduate student union.
The effect is particularly disconcerting in the first of the lectures, “The Scholar’s Work.” Here, Weber gives a sobering account of conditions in early 20th-century German universities. Pay was low and prospects for permanent appointment slim. Promotion could depend on political connections, while anti-Semitism limited the prospects of Jews. Scholarship itself was becoming increasingly narrow. Because of these forbidding circumstances, Weber argued, the would-be academic needed the fervor of a believer.
Anyone who has spent time around today’s colleges can recognize parallels between the circumstances Weber described and our own. But Weber’s point is not about the reform of training or hiring. Rather, he is making a more sweeping observation about a paradox at the heart of the modern university — and modern life.
Modern scholarship, particularly in the natural sciences but also in the social sciences, is based on a distinction between facts and values. Facts are thought to be objective and verifiable; values are regarded as opinions that stand outside rational scrutiny. To pursue the facts, the scholar should hold his values in suspension. If he fails to do so, the results might be contaminated by bias or prejudice.
It is not clear, however, that inquiry can be “value neutral” in this way. To justify the sacrifices involved in a scholarly career, one has to believe the facts are worth knowing. That belief is not an empirical hypothesis that can be confirmed by evidence, however. It is a judgment about what matters.
Premodern universities were religious institutions that endorsed the pursuit of knowledge as an obligation to God. Scholarship was a calling insofar as it was a specialized form of worship. Modern universities abstract from religious faith as a dangerous source of prejudice. As a result, they struggle to explain why they should exist.
The most plausible answer is that academic institutions provide ancillary benefits, such as technological innovation or job training. In other words, they can be shown to “work” for certain secondary purposes. Weber’s point, however, is that this pragmatic justification is not only a degradation of the older conception of scholarship but also insufficient to explain why anyone would suffer the indignities of an academic career. Scholarship must be a vocation, or it is nothing at all.
Embracing religion would seem the easiest way to recover a scholastic vocation. But if the authentic believer must be called by God, that is not a choice anyone can make for himself. The modern dilemma, as Weber sees it, is that we must substitute internal sources of meaning for external, objective ones, even though we know that the substitution is not a fair exchange. In the face of this dilemma, he counsels a special kind of virtue: “simple intellectual integrity.”
This disciplined refusal to pronounce on the ultimate purposes of life is not what Weber’s audience wanted to hear. In 1917, as today, many students were eager to be told how to conduct themselves in uncertain times. But practical direction, Weber insisted, is not the job of scholars. Instead, it is the calling of politicians.
Weber elaborated this argument in the second lecture, here translated as “The Politician’s Work,” delivered two years later with Bavaria under the temporary rule of a socialist government. Best known for its survey of the sources of authority, in which Weber explained his concept of political charisma, the core of the lecture is Weber’s distinction between two approaches to politics.
Under one approach, the “ethics of responsibility,” politics are primarily about choosing the means most likely to produce given ends. Under the second, the “ethics of personal conviction,” the ends or purposes of action come into question. An ethics of responsibility may be sufficient when there is consensus about the goods to be secured by political action. An ethics of conviction becomes necessary when we have to choose among them.
The predicament outlined in the scholarship lecture, though, is that this choice is inescapably subjective. There is no “scientific” way to prove my beliefs about how society should be organized are more true or binding than yours. The ethics of conviction, then, impose one individual’s or group’s values on others. For that reason, this approach contains tyrannical potential.
Weber confessed that he did not know how to reconcile these unsatisfactory alternatives. Decades later, the critical theorist Max Horkheimer recalled that “the frustration and disappointment were almost palpable … everything was so precise, so rigorously scholarly, so value-free that we all went dolefully home.” As Horkheimer and his colleagues on the revolutionary left saw it, Weber diagnosed all the problems of liberal modernity but could not see his way to the solution.
Weber knew better. Rather than seeing politics as the triumphant expressions of personal conviction, he insisted that they are unglamorous and tedious, “a slow and difficult drilling of holes into hard boards.” It is a lesson that students, and not only students, are inclined to forget. Like scholarship, the only reward for political activity is the satisfaction of a job well done. To be able to enjoy that satisfaction without public recognition is difficult at the best of times, and even more challenging when indifference is replaced with hostility. That is why we still need vocations in a disenchanted age.
Samuel Goldman is an associate professor of political science at George Washington University and the literary editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.
