ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an apparent contradiction that is confronted and partly explained through an engagement with the ancient Greek references that are laced through Weber's arguments, especially as they are found in the final stages of 'Science as a Vocation'. Max Weber discusses the vocational life of the elected politician and the scientist/intellectual. 'Cultivating plain brotherliness in personal relations' means trying to maintain this traditional Christian ethic outside religion; and pursuing this value in human relations that have not been consumed into the necessary but unethical realms of impersonal modernity; or are not dominated by other, 'private' values or loves. A significant contrast can therefore be found between the fate of vocation in the economic value-sphere as described at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and the fate of the calling in the Vocation lectures, especially as it is told at the end of 'Science as a Vocation'.
