Introduction 7

particular, affords man the opportunity to achieve the specialkind of moral dignity that Weber associates with the ethic ofresponsibility. At the heart of Weber’s moral reflections, inshort, is a deeply ambivalent attitude toward the processes ofrationalization that have shaped and that continue to shape themodern social world.Weber’s ideas about rationality are central to his sociological

work, and they are central to his moral perspective. But theseideas are neither easily accessible nor easily understandable, inpart because Weber never systematized them, in part because hiswork is usually encountered piecemeal and seldom studied in itsentirety. It is my aim to reconstruct Weber’s rich but fragmenteddiscussion of rationality, rationalism and rationalization in asystematic fashion, so as to clarify the intimate and ambiguousinterplay between his sociological work and his moral outlook.

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

1 Interesting attempts to sort out and systematize the various meanings of‘rationality’ in Weber’s work have been made by Eisen (1978), Kalberg(1980) and Levine (1'98la, 1982).

2 In his excellent article ‘Rationality and freedom: Weber and beyond’ (198la),Donald Levine includes a short discussion of the conceptions of rationalityheld by Kant, Hegel, Tonnies and Simmel.

1The Specific and PeculiarRationalism of ModernWestern Civilization

A few months before his death in June 1920, Max Weber wrote ashort introduction for his Collected Essays in the Sociology ofReligion. 1 This ‘preliminary remark’, as he entitled it with decep-tive modesty, contains what Benjamin Nelson (1974) has calledthe ‘master clue’ to Weber’s lifelong scholarly intentions. Forhere Weber makes explicit the underlying universal-historicalperspective that endows his vast, fragmented and apparentlyheterogeneous corpus of empirical studiesz with thematiccoherence. Basic to this perspective are two ideas: first, thatmodern Western civilization differs from all others in its ‘specificand peculiar rationalism’; and second, that the central task ofuniversal history is to characterize and explain this uniquerationalism (Al, p. 26).3Weber is quick to point out that ‘rational’, ‘rationalism’ and

‘rationalization’ are by no means unambiguous terms:

There is, for example, rationalization of mystical contem-plation . . . just as much as there are rationalizations of eco-nomic life, of technique, of scientific research, of militarytraining, of law and administration. Furthermore, each one ofthese fields may be rationalized from many different ultimatepoints of view and toward many different ultimate ends, andwhat is rational from one point of view may well be irrationalfrom another. Hence rationalizations of the most variedcharacter-have existed in various departments of life in allcivilizations. (GAR, pp. 11-12; AI, p. 26)

The systematic ambiguity surrounding the notions of rationalismand rationalization makes it necessary to specify ‘which spheres