Gallowglass

Weber and Academia

Timothy Burke has started off a fascinating debate (although Matt Yglesias isn't as enthused) on the circumstances under which academics can or can't have serious intellectual conversations; Kieran Healy, Invisible Adjunct and Chris Bertram all weigh in. Kieran channels Max Weber (and specifically, Weber's wonderful essay,"Science as a Vocation") as an alternative to Burke's Nietzche. As Weber says, there's an inevitable impulse towards specialization in modern science, and it's by no means necessarily a bad thing. But there's another relevant argument in "Science as a Vocation" that Kieran doesn't mention, which leans heavily on Nietzche, and thus supports Burke's view of academic life. Weber makes it clear that there simply isn't much scope for scholarly discussion between individuals espousing different world views. The most that science can do, in Weber's account, is to ensure that world views are "responsible;" that is, that each view is rationally articulated, so that its consequences and implications are fully understood. Except within these very narrow limits, science has no business telling anyone which world views they should or should not adopt; that's the business of prophets. Each world view, in the end, rests on a set of priors that are not themselves open to scientific explication or analysis. In Weber's understanding, individuals must choose a view of the world and act upon it, but they also must remain aware that their choice is radically contingent; there is no underlying basis for determining whether they are "right" or "wrong" in their choice, and no way to determine whether their choice is better than that of someone else who has made a completely different, and radically incompatible one. As Weber describes it;

"So long as life is immanent and is interpreted in its own terms, it knows only of an unceasing struggle of these gods with each other. Or speaking directly, the ultimate possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion. Thus it is necessary to make a decisive choice."

In other words, Weber thinks that serious debate among different viewpoints is highly unlikely to result in agreement; one simply can't convince someone else that their world view is flawed on rational grounds; a theme that he develops further in "Politics as a Vocation." In PaV, Weber contends that cannot define an ultimate "goal" of politics, or even weigh the respective merits of different policies or political outcomes. There are as many versions of the politically good as there are world views, and there is no ultimate benchmark against which the validity of these world views can be tested. His view is a tragic and individualistic one; politics, in its richest sense is not about reaching consensus so much as it is about the heroic individual taking a stand, and following it through, even though she knows that there isn't any fundamentally grounded justification for the stand that she has taken. "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders" and so forth. If Weber is right, then the lack of real debate among academics that Burke deplores may be unavoidable. Academic debate (or other kinds of debate) may simply not be much good at resolving the vital issues of life that people disagree on. Of course, I think that Weber is much too pessimistic in his account of science and politics, but his argument is rich, nuanced, and important.