ABSTRACT
Although the thematic unity of the works of Max Weber has been much disputed (Tenbruck 1980) there is at least some agreement that the process of rationalization is central to an understanding of Weber’s project (Löwith 1982). The nature of rationalization arises as a crucial issue in Weber’s sociology of modern societies at every point of his sociological investigation. While there is broad agreement as to the centrality of rationality and rationalization in the thought of Weber, it is curious that this feature of his work has not received extensive and systematic scrutiny (Schluchter 1981; Brubaker 1984). Existing studies of Weber’s treatment of rationality typically draw attention to the paradoxical nature of rationalization in human societies, especially in capitalism. There are a number of dimensions to this paradoxical quality of rationality. The process of western rationality has to some extent a major origin in the irrationality of the Protestant quest for salvation. There is furthermore a contradictory relationship between formal and substantive rationality where substantive questions of value are subordinated to formal questions of logic. There is the further paradox that the outcome of rationalization is a world that is essentially meaningless, lacking in moral direction and dominated by a bureaucratic structure. These contradictions were summarized in Weber’s metaphor of the iron cage, and the contradictory relationship between formal reason and substantive
irrationality was well captured in Herbert Marcuse’s famous essay ‘Industrialisation and Capitalism in Max Weber’ (Marcuse 1968).
