ABSTRACT
When Weber talked about the problem of the role of knowledge in society, he used a vocabulary in which the terms “experts” (Experten) and “specialists” (Spezialisten) are more or less interchangeable. His normative ideas on this subject were central to “Science as a Vocation,” where he argues that:
only by strict specialization can the scientific worker become fully conscious, for once and perhaps never again in his lifetime, that he has achieved something that will endure. A really definitive and good accomplishment is today always a specialized accomplishment. And whoever lacks the capacity to put on blinders, so to speak, and to come up to the idea that the fate of his soul depends upon whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage of the manuscript may as well stay away from science.
([1919] 1946: 135)