STATECRAFT AND SOULCRAFT IN MAX WEBER

In our allegedly postmodern world, we see the ever-growing recognition of Max Weber as one of the first political and social thinkers whose main question centered on what is now called modernity. Weber's recent reputation seems to rest on two potent images by which he captured our (post)modern predicaments – the imminent iron cage of bureaucratic petrification and the Hellenistic polytheism of warring deities. This seemingly contradictory imagery of modernity in fact reflects different faces of the same coin. Whether the problem of modernity is accounted for in terms of a permeation of objective, instrumental rationality or of a purposeless agitation of subjective values, Weber viewed these two images as constituting a single problem insofar as they contributed to the inertia of modern individuals, who fail to take principled moral action. According to Weber, in other words, a modern individual tends to act only in accordance with his or her aesthetic impulse to express arbitrary convictions; the majority of those who cannot even act on their convictions lead the life of a “cog in a machine.” This problem of modern individuals and the disempowerment of their agency have provided the central theme that runs through my reinterpretation of Weber's vast opus.

Once things were different, Weber claimed. An unflinching sense of conviction that relied on nothing but one's innermost personality once issued in a highly methodical and disciplined conduct of everyday life – or, simply, life as a duty.