ABSTRACT
Max Weber, as Marx before him, vested his hope of objective understanding of history with the historical developments taking place in the western world. Not, however, with the change ‘round the corner’, with the imminent demise of the capitalist structure of domination, responsible-in Marx’s view-for producing a meaningless ‘social reality’ out of meaningful, intentional human acts. Max Weber saw the chance of objective understanding in the very changes already brought about by the advent of capitalism: in the crucial role capitalism assigns, to an ever-growing degree, to rational-instrumental action. In its capitalist stage, western civilization has shed its particularistic commitments to arbitrarily chosen consummatory values, which elude rational discourse, and replaced them with an instrumental reason able to neutralize the impact of constraints arising from time and place. Rational-instrumental behaviour can be grasped objectively, as it is rule-governed and selfconscious, and above all, because of its structural affinity to rational science, to ‘objective reason’ itself. Modern rational science, which self-consciously limits itself to the pursuit of instrumental sequences of action and forgoes the discussion of end-values, finds in the modern bases of human behaviour an object cut to the measure of its ends and means.
