Kant and Weber's Concept of Freedom

6 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY
Kant also distinguishes three kinds of free- dom: freedom of choice, or free will; freedom as self-regulation, or autonomy; and freedom as civil liberty. Freedom of choice is a natural property of all human beings, and refers to the fact that human conduct is not wholly determined by animal impulses. Autonomy is the capacity of a subject to legislate and abide by ethical impera- tives of his own making. Civil liberty refers to a condition in which men are protected by the rule of law against constraints on their actions emanating from the arbitrary wills of other actors. To the first kind of freedom reason relates only indirectly, only in the sense that by virtue of being an animal with the potential for reason, man possesses an innate capacity to determine for himself what he shall do. This capacity itself is not rational, however; free choice stems from the elective will, Willkiir, which is a faculty of desire, not of cognition. Freedom of choice simply represents a factor of organismic indeterm- inacy in the constitution of man; as such, Kant considers it neither morally valuable nor depend- ent on the actual exercise of rational powers.
The two other kinds of freedom, by contrast, do constitute ideal conditions for Kant, and both are closely tied to the use of reason. First and foremost, reason gives man freedom by enabling him to legislate ethical imperatives for himself, to experience autonomy through the exercise of a purely rational will ( Wille, as contrasted with
Willkiir). Moreover, practical reason dictates the propriety of joining with others in a civil society and, through that collaboration of rational wills, establishing a juridical condition that guarantees to each independence from the constraint of another’s will insofar as is compatible with the freedom of everyone else in accord with a uni- versal law. Kant’s summary position, then, would be that rationality in the form of practical reason (a kind of subjective rationality) promotes both human autonomy (a kind of subjective free- dom) and civil liberty (a kind of external or objective freedom).
Although these and other formulations of Kant were absorbed in various ways into the complex of intellectual resources from which Weber was to draw heavily, there is one particularly impor- tant respect in which Kant anticipates and orients the thinking of 19th-century writers whom Weber confronted. This is his turn from treating reason and freedom exclusively in the framework of a static metaphysic of morals and its related view of human nature to their examination in a histori- cal perspective as well. In his later reflections,
Kant maintained that a purpose could be dis- cerned in the natural unfolding of the history of humanity-and this purpose was in fact to perfect the use of human reason and to establish societies which guarantee freedom under external laws (Kant, [1784] 1963; Galston, 1975).
It is this historicizing afterthought of Kant which Hegel seized to make the entire ground of his conception. Although freedom and reason
(Vernunft, which following Kant is contrasted with Verstand, mere scientific understanding) con- tinue to signify preeminent ideals for Hegel, he sees them not as states attainable by every person simply by virtue of being human, but as species objectives to be attained through a long and arduous evolutionary struggle. It is this very struggle which constitutes history as Hegel prefers to define it.
Hegel defines history, however, in two distinct senses: in a subjective sense, as the human nar- ration of events, and an objective sense, as the events themselves. The development of ration- ality and freedom, accordingly, follows two dis- tinct paths. On the one hand, history is the actual sequence of struggles by which political com- munities successively emerge to negate and tran- scend the cultural values of their predecessors; objective reason is the progressive embodiment of that struggle in the form of increasingly perfected systems of morality represented by the state and its laws; and objective freedom is maximally obtained when the constituent units of society all submit their wills to the laws and regulations of the state. On the other hand, history is the reconstruction of that progressive record of events by human subjects; subjective reason is the active self-consciousness of the subjectivity of oneself and others and the growth of Mind in articulating that self-consciousness through the creative work of art, religion, and philosophy; and subjective freedom is the transcendence of passions and impulses by the achievement of ultimate self- knowledge through philosophical speculation.
Sub-
jective reason and freedom are possible only because what history comprises are the manifesta- tions of universal ideas of reason and freedom in concrete communities; objective rationality and freedom are possible only because the subjects it considers are rational subjects in pursuit of free- dom. Both types of freedom entail the subor- dination of impulse to the constraints of reason, and both represent freedom in the sense of self- perfection. Hegel’s conception of rationality and freedom thus differs radically from that of Kant. Not a guaranteed sphere within which actors can do what they wish without interference from others, but a regime of duties stipulated by and enforced by political institutions, constitutes the domain of objective freedom; not moral laws of the autonomous individual’s own making, but recog- nition of the rationality of the state’s demands, is the locus of subjective freedom. For Hegel “it is not the particular members of the society that constitute an individual, free, self-integrated, and self-conscious entity; it is the society as the
The two dimensions are closely related. Sociological Inquiry
51 (1): 5-25
Rationality and Freedom : Weber and Beyond *
Donald N. LEVIN-E
The University of Chicago and Center for Advanced Study, Stanford
In the tradition of German social thought from Kant and Hegel through Toennies and
Simmel. the development of rationality in modern Europe is associated with an increase of human freedom. Weber’s work departs from that tradition by providing an incomparably diflerentiated framework for the analysis of rationality and by associating modern European rationalization with a curtailment of freedom. More careful examination of Weber’s oeuvre, however, indicates that he, too, connected rationalization with the growth of freedom in many respects. His amended argument remains valuable today, although ways in which it stands to be improved by incorporating subsequent analyses are suggested.
Max Weber did not utter the first words on the problem of rationality and freedom in modern life, nor has he had the last word, but he did recast the entire discussion of the subject-in terms which have by no means lost pertinence for analyzing a world increasingly shaped by scien- tists, industrialists, and bureaucrats.
Prior to reaching the mind of Weber, this prob- lem was presented grandly by a number of 18th- century writers who subscribed to a general formulation which subsequently underwent a series of critical transformations. The philoso- phers of the Enlightenment, writes Ernst Cassirer, were suffused by the sense that a new force was at work in their time, a formative power that manifested itself in a great variety of energies and shapes. The name given to this essentially homo- geneous formative power was ‘reason.’ “ ‘Rea- son,’ ” he observes, “becomes the unifying and central point of this century, expressing all that it longs and strives for, and all that it achieves”
(1951: 5).
Not the least appreciated attribute of this force of reason was its assumed capacity to promote human freedom. For Voltaire, reason served to liberate men from superstition, bigotry, and intolerance. For Montesquieu, reason applied to the study of political forms could enable men to
*Paper presented at the Max Weber Symposium,
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, May 5, 1977.
This substantially revised version has had the benefit of comments from Jeffrey Alexander, Joseph Ben-
David, Charles Bidwell, Lewis Coser, Morris Jano- witz, Harry Johnson, Stephen Kalberg, Victor Lidz,
John MacAloon, Guy Oakes, Karl Pletsch, Guenther
Roth, Wolfgang Schluchter, Michael Schudson. Terry
Sullivan, Gerald Suttles, Richard Taub, and Stephen
Warner.
The final revisions on this paper were made at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral
Sciences. I am grateful for financial support pro- vided by the Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, and National Science Foundation BNS 76 22943. devise a constitution which realizes the greatest possible freedom. For Diderot, to follow the laws of reason was to shake off the yoke of authority and tradition.
This conjoint celebration of reason and free- dom by 18th-century thinkers had some well- known repercussions in modern history. It ani- mated the framers of the American Declaration of Independence. It was used and abused by the makers of the French Revolution. It initiated a great tradition of German social thought; as
Hegel wrote to Schelling in 1793, despite the excesses of the French Revolution “reason and freedom remain our principles” (Marcuse, 1941 :
11).
PRE-WEBERIAN FORMULATIONS: KANT
AND HEGEL
It was Immanuel Kant who first transformed the philosophes’ rather diffuse laudation of reason and freedom into a differentiated schema of pre- cise philosophical argument. If rationality and freedom remain preeminent linked ideals for
Kant, it is not the case that all forms of rationality promote freedom nor that all kinds of freedom represent ideal states. Rather, Kant takes pains to distinguish and assess different forms both of rationality and freedom.
For Kant, rationality is a property of human subjects that appears when their mental powers are developed to the point of achieving cognition according to principles. Kant identifies three such higher faculties of cognition: understanding
(Verstand), judgment (Urteil), and reason (Ver- nunft). Understanding serves to ascertain the deterministic laws of natural phenomena, and judgment serves to produce aesthetic and teleo- logical assessments; neither of these cognitive ac- tivities, however, is directly constitutive of human freedom. Only Vernunft, the faculty responsible for producing morality, is related to the attain- ment of freedom. RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 7 resolution of the partial freedom and self-con- sciousness of the members” (O’Brien 1975: 161).
PRE-WEBERIAN FORMULATIONS
TOENNIES AND SIMMEL
This shift toward the representation of in- creased rationality and freedom at the level of large-scale societal processes was perhaps the aspect of Hegel’s treatment of the problem which had the most lasting repercussions in German social thought.’ In the next major reformulation of the problem, Ferdinand Toennies would hail
Hegel’s achievement in demonstrating the histori- cal necessity of the rational modern social struc- tures--civil society and the state-thereby deflat- ing the movement by romantic writers, legal historians, and reactionary thinkers to reject them as theoretical errors. At the same time Toennies faulted Hegel for presenting a vague and ob- fuscating view of social life and for propounding the idea of a unilineal development toward per- fection. In seeking to correct these shortcomings,
Toennies attempted to bring persons back into the picture, to uncover “the real relationship between individual will and social groups” which
Hegel had “blotted out” ([1912] 1971: 27), and to replace the notion of Vernunft as a transcend- ent teleological ideal with a variety of relatively neutral analytic concepts. In so doing, he laid the groundwork for the modern sociological treat- ment of rationality and freedom.’
‘This is true well beyond the period reviewed in the present paper. See Mannheim’s call for a return to Hegel as point of departure in developing a mod- ern sociology of mental life: “What makes Hegel’s original point of view still worth remembering is his collectivistic, and potentially sociological, under- standing of ideas” (1956: 59). It should be noted, in passing, that contemporary with Hegel a compa- rable shift toward conceptualizing the growth of rationality and freedom as evolutionary societal proc- esses was taking place in France in the work of
Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Comte, albeit on the basis of radically different philosophical principles.
’Some mention should be made of the man who has justly been referred to, if unjustly neglected, as the first German sociologist-Lorenz von Stein.
Toennies acknowledges von Stein as a key transitional figure between Hegel and himself. Stein attempted to bring Hegel’s conception of reason and freedom into closer contact with contemporary realities. Deny- ing that freedom could be secured solely through a constitution that embodies the pure idea of the state, on grounds that what the state does must reflect the differential distribution of resources in society, Stein sees the true history of freedom as the history of the growth and distribution of societal products among the disadvantaged classes. Insofar as people lack possessions they live in a state of social “dependence.” They are unfree as individuals, and their state, which is supposed to serve the whole
It was a constant feature of Toennies’s socio- logical vision, in his own later words, to “see in the entire historical development since the Middle
Ages the gradual setting free of rationalism and its increasing dominance as inherently necessary processes, and especially as processes of human mind as will” ([1932] 1971: 6). To conceptualize this vision he constructed a pair of ideal types to represent fundamentally contrasting kinds of human volition, Wesenswille and Kiirwille.s
Both Wesenswille and Kurville involve rational activity, and both manifest freedom since, as
Toennies defines it, freedom denotes the psychic energy that comprises both kinds of human volition ([I8871 1977: 136). Moreover, the dis- tinctive types of social formations which they generate, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft respec- tively, both manifest freedom. This is so, fist, because both kinds of formation involve volitional affirmation, and second, because both have some kinds of laws which guarantee certain kinds of freedom ([ 19261 1974: 174). Accordingly, the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft is not a movement from nonrationality and unfree- dom to rationality and freedom; but from one mode of volition and social organization in which rationality and freedom are defined and circum- scribed by the immersion of selves in an organic community bound by shared sentiments and mu- tual understandings, to another in which ration- ality and freedom are exhibited in the deliberative processes by which persons associate on the basis of instrumental considerations and contractual arrangements. Why, then, does Toennies repeatedly maintain that the development of Gesellschaft entails the development of rationalism? The point is this: community but is constrained to serve the interests of the privileged, is similarly unfree. The movement for freedom begins with the appropriation of intel- lectual goods, with education. “The spread of edu- cation necessarily constitutes a beginning of the spread of human freedom” ([1850] 1964: 71). The cultivation of human reason through education pro- motes freedom by making people conscious of their needs and interests and by equipping them to strive more adequately for material possessions. terms are scarcely translatable, but Loomis’s translation of Kiirwille as “rational will” is especially unsatisfactory, for two reasons. “Rational will” is often identified with Kant’s Wille, which for
Kant was identical with pure practical reason. The term Toennies used in the first two editions of
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft was Willkiir, precisely
Kant’s term for the elective will as opposed to rational will. Toennies’s Willkiir or Kiirwille, then, is more accurately rendered as elective will, or ar- bitrary will, as Kahnman and Heberle have done.
(Wesenswille might best be translated as primordial will.) A second reason for objecting to Kiirwille as rational will is the implication that Wesenswille is devoid of rationality, which as the text indicates was not the way Toennies conceived it. 8 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY in Wesenswille, thought is subordinated to voli- tion. That is, rational activity occurs in order to realize desires derived from genetic inheritance, habit, group sentiments, custom, and religion. In
Kurwille, by contrast, volition is subordinate to thought. In Kurwille, rational activity attains a kind of independence such that it can conceive novel ends, project alternative futures, and cal- culate a variety of means. It is this autonomous status of rational activity that Toennies has in mind when ascribing an expanded role to ration- ality in Gesellschaft.
Viewed as a critical extension of Hegel, this formulation of Toennies not only purports to be a secular empirical analysis, but further modifies
Hegel’s treatment of reason in history by stressing the distinction between two levels of historical phenomena: an objective, social level and a sub- jective, individual level. Hegel had, as Toennies put it, defined the objective mind as the system of social life, and for Hegel “the state was to emerge as social rationality in all its purity”
([1894] 1974: 66). Toennies insisted on supple- menting this level of analysis with one focused on variations in the quality of individual intention- ality, on different modes of rational volition.
Thus, for Toennies to treat the development of rationalism as a social phenomenon means to identify “a development in both individual and social reason (Entwicklung der individuellen und der sozialen Vernunft)” (1926: 98; 1974: 174; emphasis mine); in his own analytic terms, a development both of the capacity for Kiirwille and of the enactments of Gesellschaft.
Enhanced freedom is a major consequence of this development in individual and social reason.
Gradually, Toennies states, the activity of persons oriented by Kiirwille and the institutions of
Gesellschaft dissolve the unifying social bonds based on time-honored custom and belief, bonds which restrict the individual’s freedom of move- ment and conception. They produce persons who are free, self-determining agents, free to subjugate one another or free to conclude agreements, free to establish contracts, and free to adapt their attitudes to the findings of science ([1887] 1957:
224, 234).
Kindred themes are broached in the work with which, as Toennies put it, 19th-century sociology
“reached an impressive finale” ([ 19261 1974: 182),
Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes. In his first sociological monograph (1890), Simmel had out- lined a number of developmental patterns that together portrayed modern society as a highly differentiated social world wherein individuals are liberated from a variety of jural and customary constraints in ways that enormously expand their freedom of action. In his long treatise on money published years later, Simmel developed a more original and profound set of interpretations. In the latter work, Simmel depicted a new mode of rational activity manifest in the pervasive utili- zation of money as a generalized medium of exchange. Money, Simmel writes, favors the ascendance of intellectuality over emotional re- sponses. Being a quantitative measure, the re- peated use of money required the development of calculative skills and habits. Being a strictly instrumental possession-money is the absolute tool, the means flexible enough to serve any end whatsoever-its habitual use requires that consid- erable energy be devoted to the rational analysis of costs and benefits, means and ends.
In pursuing this analysis, Simmel does not consistently adhere to the kind of distinction urged by Toennies, between subjective and objec- tive rationality. Although Simmel does make, and use to very good effect indeed, a distinction between what he calls subjective and objective culture, when treating the rationalism of modern social relations based on the circulation of money he tends to confuse the objective significance of money as a social phenomenon and the subjective orientations of those who use it (a confusion for which he would later be criticized by Weber‘).
On the other hand, he goes well beyond Toennies and other writers of the time in making and using clear distinctions among different kinds of freedom. Of the many kinds of freedom which Simmel mentions at different points in his work, three are of recurring and central importance. We may gloss these in terms of the already mentioned distinction between subjective and objective free- dom. Simmel distinguishes two kinds of objec- tive freedom, kinds of freedom that refer to an actor’s position in a nexus of relations with objects: a ‘‘negative’’ freedom of liberation from external constraints and obligations, and a “posi- tive’’ freedom to obtain satisfactions through the control of resources. In addition, Simmel de- velops a notion of subjective freedom in the sense of individuality, freedom as the development of one’s personality according to the dispositions of one’s own nature.
What Simmel goes on to argue in Philosophie des Geldes is that all three kinds of freedom are promoted by the use of money and its related rational mental habits. Money promotes free- dom in the sense of liberation from external constraints: by enabling values to be assigned precisely and impersonally, money makes it possi- ble for individuals to be connected to other per- sons only insofar as they need or wish to be so connected, and to be freed from the ancillary constraints and obligations which encumber rela- tions to patrons, suppliers, clients, and customers
~~
4‘‘(Subjectively) intended and objectively valid
‘meanings’ are two different things which Sirnmel not only fails to distinguish but often mixes up with one another” ([1921 (1976)] 1968: 4 [l]; translation altered). RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 9 in societies which lack monetized media of ex- change. Money promotes freedom in the sense of ability to realize one’s goals in a number of respects. Of all objects, money offers the least resistance to an agent. It is the most possessable of all things, hence completely submissive to the will of an ego. It can be acquired in countless ways. There are no limits to the amount of it that one can possess. As the absolutely general instrumentality, money maximizes the options available to anyone having a finite amount of resources. Finally, money promotes freedom in the sense of individualized self-development, by providing an effective means of differentiating between the subjective center and the objective achievements of a person. Individuals’ performances may be paid for with money while their persons remain outside the transaction. Conversely, individual persons can be supported as such by monetary contributions from anonymous others, while their specific performances remain free from financial considerations. Further in this vein Simmel argues that the separation of workers from their means of production (for which “a money econ- omy paved the way”), while viewed by some as the focal point of social misery, may rather be viewed “as a salvation” insofar as it provides conditions for the liberation of the worker as a human subject from the objectified technical ap- paratus of productivity ([1907] 1978: 337).’
ENTER WEBER
The formulations of Kant, Hegel, Toennies, and
Simmel provided some of the ideas from which
Weber drew selectively in developing his own sociology of rationalism. Although Weber’s work was arguably stimulated by their formula- tions in certain ways,6 what is perhaps more
‘Simmel’s complex argument on this subject also includes lines of thought which treat the negative consequences both of excessive freedom and of ra- tionalization as a source of alienation. For a more extended exposition, see Levine (1981).
8For example, Kant’s formulation of the categor- ical imperative was for Weber an archetypical ex- ample of what he came to call value-rationality;
Hegel’s treatment of the course of rationalization in world history set up the project which Weber strove to recast (on Weber’s silent homage to and acute consciousness of Hegel as his major intellectual an- tagonist, see Bruun, 1972: 39); Toennies’s treatment of Gerneinschaft and Gesellschaft as social forms based on differing degrees of rational volition became the paradigm for Weber’s first sketch of a Ver- stehende sociology in his 1913 Logos essay; and
Simmel’s last chapter of Philosophie des Geldes was cited as a “brilliant portrayal” (“glanzenden Bilder”) of the spirit of capitalism in the Protestant Ethic essay ([1920] 1930: 193 [33]). notable is that Weber’s treatment of the topic of rationality differs dramatically from all of his predecessors in three respects.
First, the conceptual apparatus Weber devel- oped to represent the forms and processes of rationalization is much more differentiated than that employed in any of the earlier analyses.
Second, through his comparative studies of efforts to rationalize culture in classical antiquity, the
Near East, China, and India, Weber decisively transcended the Europocentric notion that the development of rationalism is a uniquely Western phenomenon. Indeed, he can be viewed as credit- ing the Orient for having developed heights of rationality in some respects superior to those reached in the Occident.’
Regarding developments in Western Europe, fi- nally, Weber’s position concerning the effects of rationality on freedom challenges the formula with which all the previously mentioned thinkers, in spite of their numerous substantive differences, were in agreement. Far from viewing the advance of rationality as a prime source of free- dom in the modern West, Weher frequently decried it as a serious threat to freedom. Pre- vailing interpretations of Weber typically focus on this aspect of his position: thus, “when it came to [analyzing] the trends toward rationaliza- tion.. . of modern society, Weber tended.. . to assert that the chances were very great indeed that mankind would in the future be imprisoned in an iron cage of its own making” (Coser, 1977:
233); for Weber after 1903, “the Leitmotiv of
Western history has changed from progress through self-liberation to enslavement through rationalization” (Mitzman, 1970: 168); “Weber’s sympathy, or rather his grim anxiety, is on the side of personality against rationality” (Cahnman,
1978: 19 I ; emphasis mine).’
To advance beyond Weber in the understanding of these issues, I argue in the remainder of this paper, requires two efforts. The first is to recover what Weber actually said concerning the forms and processes of rationalization. Weber’s pene- tration of these issues was not only unprecedented, it remains unsurpassed. No subsequent dis- cussion of rationalization with which I am famil-
‘See, for example, Weber’s assertion that ”in the area of thought concerning the ‘significance’ of the world and of life there is nothing whatsoever which was not already been conceived in Asia in some form” ([1923] 1958b: 331 [365]; emphasis in original: translation altered).
‘This is not, of course, to say that Weber was the first to sound the alarms about certain negative tendencies in modern society. Apart from the varied anti-modernist currents in 19th-century culture, nota- ble critical diagnoses were made by Marx, Nietzsche, and Simmel, all of whom had serious impact on
Weber. Still, it was Weber who first thematized the intimate association between historical processes of rationalization and the curtailment of freedom. 10 SOCIOLOGICAL lNQUIRY iar has mastered the levels of complexity and insight that Weber reached. To do this we must bring more order to Weber’s formulations than he himself had time to produce.
Second, we must subject the formula that modern rationalization produces unfreedom to a searching critique. I shall argue that any global assertion that rationalization curtails freedom must be fundamentally flawed, in good part because of its failure to take into account the full scope of Weber’s argument on the problem and beyond that its failure to apply the gamut of
Weber’s rich array of distinctions regarding ra- tionality to the question of freedom in the modern world. THE WEBERIAN CONCEPTION OF
RATIONALITY
Few sources indeed are informed by a sustained appreciation of the fact that for Weber the con- cept of rationality was multiply ambiguous.g
This is no less than astonishing in view of Weber’s own declaration, in a footnote to his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism: “If this essay makes any contribution at all, may it be to bring out the complexity
(Vielseitigkeit) of the only superficially simple concept of the ‘rational”’ ([1920] 1930: 194 [35]).
Within the text itself, moreover, Weber makes the point that “one may rationalize life from fundamentally different points of view and in very different directions. ‘Rationalism’ is a historical concept that contains a world of contradictions in itself”--a point given added emphasis in the revised edition of 1920, where Weber observed,
“This simple proposition, which is often forgotten, should be placed at the beginning of every study which essays to deal with rationalism” ([ 19201
The problem of securing an adequate grasp of the Vielseitigkeit of Weber’s conceptualization of rationality is complicated by the fact that Weber himself did not use the relevant distinctions in a
1930: 77-78 [62]).l”
YThe few significant exceptions include Bendix
(1965). Schluchter ([I9761 1979b), and Kalberg (1980).
‘““Rationality” and “rationalism” are used inter- changeably by Weber to denote a property of action or symbolic products. “Rationalization” refers to a historical process of making action or symbolic products more rational.
The attempt by Swidler (1973) to make these terms bear the semantic freight of distinguishing the several substantive meanings used by Weber seems to me misguided. Although one must agree with her point that “confusion over terminology blunts the real theoretical impact of Weber’s study of rationality,” an effort to remedy the situation by attaching major substantive meanings to those three terms can scarcely be justified either by reference to the Weberian texts or by claims that it clarifies Weber’s argument. clearcut and consistent manner, nor did he ever produce the conceptual exposition of the “many possible meanings of the concept of ‘rationaliza- tion’” which he promised in introducing the later part of Economy and Society ([I921 (1976)l 1968:
30 [IS]). Even for those who are aware of the serious need for such conceptual clarification, then, the matter remains vexed.
As a contribution toward sorting out some of this complexity, I propose as a preliminary step to make use of the distinction between subjective and objective manifestations of rationality which surfaced in our review of the earlier authors.
This is a commonplace distinction and each term refers to a wide variety of phenomena. The locus of subjective rationality is the mental proc- esses of actors. Such notions as Kant’s practical reason, Hegel’s self-consciousness, Toennies‘s ra- tional volition, and Simmel’s calculating habits of mind refer to various aspects of kinds of subjective rationality. Other contemporary no- tions include Pareto’s concept of subjective logi- cality and, more generally, the economists’ notion of utility-maximizing orientations.
The locus of objective rationality is courses of action and symbolic products assessed in terms of institutionalized norms. Hegel’s notion of reason embodied in laws and political institutions,
Toennies’s notion of the constitution and judicial agencies of Gesellschaft as embodying “naked social reason,” Simmel’s conception of social rela- tions based on precise, impersonal calculation, and Pareto’s concept of objective logicality are illustrative. Although Weber did not consistently make use of the distinction when analyzing the phenomena of rationality and rationalization, I believe that without clearly distinguishing subjective and ob- jective rationality it is impossible to do justice to his complex of observations on this subject.
There are several warrants for this claim. For one thing, there are passages in his methodological writing where Weber does articulate a distinction between subjective and objective rationality.
Both “On Some Categories of Interpretive Soci- ology” (1913) and “The Meaning of ‘Ethical
Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics” (1 917) include discussions of the importance of distin- guishing these two dimensions of social action.
Subjective rationality is taken to refer to action that is conscious and deliberate (contrasted with action undertaken for motives that are uncon- scious or disavowed) and/or action that is oriented to means that are regarded as correct for a given end. Objectively rational action, by contrast, is taken to refer to action that uses technically correct means in accord with scientific knowledge and/or has been subjected to some process of external systematization (1922: 408-11 ; [1922]
1949: 34 [488]). Weber goes on to insist that a progressive subjective rationalization (“fort- schreitende subjektive Rationalisierung”) of con- RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 11 duct is not necessarily the same as an advance in the direction of objectively rational conduct; and that what appear as objectively rational human adaptations have been brought into being in numerous historical instances through completely irrational motives.
Beyond this, there are other passages where this distinction is clearly implicit in Weber’s dis- cussion. Most notable, perhaps, is the contrast, in sections 6 and 7 of Chapter 1 of Economy and Society, between the various ways in which actors can be oriented to uphold the norms of a social order, and the grounds on which legitimacy can be ascribed to a social order. Viewed togeth- er with Weber’s other discussions of legitimacy, the latter must be viewed as a typology of insti- tutionalized forms, involving beliefs and related sanctions to which the representatives of an order have recourse in the exercise of their legitimate authority. The former typology is one of the subjective intentions of actors as they comply with or deviate from that order. Thus, an order which rests on objectively rational grounds (e.g., on the basis of a consensually validated legal constitution) may be adhered to because of the nonrational dispositions of the subjects (e.g., their emotional need to comply with authority figures).
Finally, I would argue that although Weber signaled his intention, in the prefatory note to
Economy and Society, to distinguish subjectively intended meanings from objectively valid mean- ings as sharply as possible (“tunlichste Scheidunp der gemeinten von dem objektiv gultigen ‘Sinn’ ”), his general failure to articulate the distinction between subjective and objective rationality more forcefully and consistently appears plausible if two considerations are kept in mind: Weber’s tendency to avoid using the category of “objective validity” because of its connection with normative approaches in social studies, such as jurisprudence, from which he was aggressively trying to dis- sociate his empirical sociology; and his lack of a viable theory of institutionalization, such that he did not have at his disposal a ready and precise way of distinguishing the term ‘objective’ in the sense of valid from ‘objective’ in the Durk- heimian sense of supra-individual or institution- alized. To avoid this ambiguity and remain mindful of Weber’s sensitivity on this point, I propose hereafter to use in the latter sense the term ‘objectified’ in place of ‘objective.’
Since it appears, then, that there are ample justifications for doing so, let us proceed to organ- ize Weber’s manifold references to rationality in the terms just suggested.
SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIFIED FORMS
OF RATIONALITY
Weber discusses rationality as a quality of sub- jective mental processes in two contexts. These correspond, very broadly, to Kant’s distinction between Verstand and Vernunft, the capacity for rational understanding of phenomena, and the capacity to use reason as a source of directives for willed action. Weber has little to say about the operation of mind in its understanding of natural phenomena, but focuses his attention on mental operations involved in understanding human conduct. He presents, with little elab- oration, a straightforward dichotomy, between
(1) rational understanding, itself further divisible into mathematical and logical understanding, and (2) empathic understanding. Rational under- standing entails an intellectual grasp of the coherence of the elements of action in the actor’s situation. In empathic understanding, the observ- er draws on his personal fund of emotional self- knowledge to experience imaginatively the emo- tional context of that situation (1968: 5). It is empathic understanding if, attending to a student’s rapid breathing and staccato talk, I intuit that he has come early to an appointment because he is anxious; it is rational understanding if I have knowledge of his schedule and calculate that he has an important class soon after for which he does not want to be late.
Weber’s other discussion of subjective ration- ality appears in his classification of the types of social action (1968: 24-26). Social action can be conceptualized in terms of four ideal types, two of which are rational, two nonrational. A person’s action is rationally oriented, for example, if he greets another person because of a con- sciously held belief that it is a moral duty to show respect for all human beings (value-rational
[wertrational] action); or because he has rea- soned that the costs of appearing rude or in- different outweigh the advantages of remaining self-absorbed (means/end-rational [zweckrational] action). A person is nonrationally oriented when greeting someone because of long-established custom (traditional action) or a momentary burst of good feelings about that person (affectual action). This typology is well known and requires no elucidation at this point beyond some comment on the category of Zweckrationalitat. Many writers have understood this to refer to action in which consideration is given only to questions of technical expediency. Admittedly there are pas- sages in Weber’s writings which permit a narrow construction of this sort. However, in his chief discursive exposition of the category, Weber presents a broader definition: action is zweck- rational, he writes, “when the end, the means, and the secondary results are all rationally taken into account and weighed. This involves rational consideration of alternative means to an end, of the relations of the end to the secondary con- sequences, and finally of the relative importance of different possible ends” (1968: 26). I shall adhere to Weber’s explicit statement on the matter 12 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY and regard meanslend-rational action in this more inclusive sense.”. ’’
Weber’s explicit discussion of these forms of subjective rationality is succinct and late. It appears only in the introductory chapter of his last major writing, Part I of Economy and
Society. By contrast, in the greatest part of his substantive work from 1904 on he was preoccu- pied with the different kinds of objectified ration- ality in world history.
There are two principal places in his oeuvre where Weber sets forth considerations that enable us to discriminate the variety of manifestations of objectified rationality. When discussing the point that “there have been rationalizations of the most varied sort within various spheres of life in all civilizations” (1930: 26; translation altered “),
Weber asserts that to characterize these different rationalizations one must determine (1) what spheres of life are being rationalized, and (2) with respect to what ultimate points of view and in what directions (“letzten Gesichtspunkten und
Zielrichtungen”) they are rationalized. Further- more, in another passage (to be discussed below),
Weber sets forth still another set of distinctions concerning (3) the different forms which ration- alization may take.
By “spheres of life” Weber meant what sociol- ogists today often refer to as institutional orders.
Weber himself treated, at varying length, the phenomena of rationalization in at least a dozen distinct institutional spheres: economic organi- zation; political order; military organization; legal systems; social stratification; education; religion; ethics; science; music; art; and erotic life. By “ultimate points of view” Weber was refer- ring to the particular ends on behalf of which the rationalization of some sphere of life has been carried out. Thus, the law could be rationalized in order to solidify caste or class distinctions, or in order to ensure equality of treatment for all members of the community. Science could be
’IFailure to do so has produced some puzzling formulations, such as that of Kaplan’s effort (1976), in the guise of refuting Weber’s position, to argue against the narrower conception of instrumental ra- tionality on behalf of a position which is precisely that which Weber represents in the passage here cited.
‘1 am adopting Matthews’ translation of Zweck- rationalitiit as means/end-rationality (Runciman,
1978), partly in order to save “instrumental rational- ity” to designate one of the forms of objectified rationality discussed below, and partly to emphasize that this type of rational orientation involves not only the assessment of the costs and consequences of alternative means to a given end, but also the “ra- tional consideration. . . of the relative importance of different possible ends.”
‘”‘Rarionalisierungen hat es daher auf den ver- schiedenen Lebensgebieten in hochst verschiedener
Art in allen Kultirrkreisen gegeben” (1920: 12). rationalized in order to understand better the working of divine providence and to glorify the
Creator, or to provide knowledge that may be used to improve living conditions. Religious be- liefs and practices could be rationalized in accord with ascetic or mystical ideals. In other Webe- rian language, modes of rationalization differ according to the “irrational presuppositions” which ground and direct the various ways of leading a rationalized style of life.
What I am glossing as the diverse “forms” of rationalization represents the dimension of varia- tion which Weber delineated briefly in his intro- duction to The Economic Ethics of the World
Religions, when he enumerated some of the “very different things” that “rationalism” may mean.
(The full text is provided in the Appendix.) Al- though Weber does not intend here to present an exhaustive or systematically developed typology, he does clearly differentiate four emphatically distinct conceptions of what it might mean to describe a cultural phenomenon as rational.
One meaning of rationality, in Weber’s words, is “the methodical attainment of a particular given practical end through the increasingly precise cal- culation of adequate means.” Although exhibited in its most developed form by such strata as peas- ants, merchants, and artisans, this type of rational action is to some extent universal. It is informed by a general human tendency to attain worldly goals by adapting to the exigencies of everyday life. Weber notes that the most elementary forms of magical and religious behavior exhibit a degree of rationality of this sort (1968: 400), a point akin to Malinowski’s (otherwise somewhat different) observations from Trobriand culture in refuting the notion that the thought of primitive peoples is fundamentally prelogical. I shall refer to this as “instrumental rationality.”
A second meaning of rationality, Weber writes, is “increasing theoretical mastery of reality by means of increasingly precise and abstract con- cepts.’’ Rationalization of this kind is designed to produce a coherent, meaningful picture of the world, and is preeminently the achievement of religious or secular intellectuals. It involves the basic cognitive processes of generalization and logical systematization. It may be referred to as
“conceptual rationality.”
The next meaning of rational mentioned by
Weber is one that relates to evaluative standards.
This kind of rationalization is conceived as a process of establishing valid canons against which that which is empirically given can be assessed, canons not derived from traditional or mystical sources. Weber’s example of this type of ration- ality in the passage is the aesthetic canons of
Renaissance humanism. Primarily, however, in the comparative studies he treats this form of ra- tionality in the context of considering ethical ideals which have a transformative effect on every- day life, ideals such as justice, equality, piety, RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 13 or nirvana. Religious and secular prophetic fig- ures are viewed as the typical sources of such ideals. More generally, this form of rationality can be identified with what Weber refers to in the economic and legal spheres as “substantive (mate- rielle) rationality,” a rationality which accords predominance to ethical imperatives, utilitarian rules, or political maxims (1 968: 85, 657).
Finally, rationality may take the form of what
Weber calls Planmiissigkeit, a methodical ordering of activities through the establishment of fixed rules and routines. This kind of rationalization is designed to maximize the predictability of activi- ties and norms in a particular sphere of action and to minimize the influence of uersanal ties and social sentiments. Weber tended tn refer to this as “methodical rationality” in the snhere of re- ligion (1930: 197), and as “formal rationality” in spheres of law and economic action (1968: 85.
657). I shall use the latter term here.’*
Some effort is required to keep these distinc- tions clearly in mind, especially since Weber’s own usage is at times confusing. Conceptual rationality is a predicate of symbolic systems, not of social action; its relation to action is significant, but indirect, as Kalberg has pointed out. Conceptual rationality is manifest to the extent that symbolic representations are governed by norms of precision, inclusiveness, and coher- ence; conceptual rationalization is a response to the human desire for meaning and itnderstanding of the world.
The three other forms of objectified rationality have reference to socially sanctioned courses of action. Instrumental rationality is manifest to the extent that the operative norms are those of technical efficiency; it reflects the wish to use maximally adequate means in attaining given ends.
Substantive rationality is manifest to the extent that the operative norms are subordinated to some overarching value; it reflects the desire to achieve motivational integrity. Formal rationality is manifest to the extent that the operative norms channel action according to clearly stipulated procedures; it reflects the wish to act within a calcitlable order of activities and relationships.
For three of the institutional spheres which
Weber treated most extensively, these forms of objectified rationality may be illustrated as fol- lows: FORM OF INSTITUTIONAL SPHERES
OBJECTIFIED
RATIONALITY Religion Economy Law
Conceptucrl
Instrumental
Substantive
Formal
Systematic theodicy
Use of prayers sucessful in exorcising noxious spirits Pursuit of nirvana as ultimate soteriological ideal Monastic devotional routines Science of economics
Use of efficient production or marketing techniques Allocation of resources according to a standard of fairness
Capital accounting
Clear and consistent codification of legal propositions Use of skilled diviner to establish a defendant’s guilt or innocence
Subordination of legal decisions to an articulated ideal of justice
Reliance on abstract procedural rules
14This typology quite parallels the fourfold classi- fication of Weber’s forms of rationalization inde- pendently developed by Kalberg (1980). For two of the four categories, other terminology seems to me preferable. I have used “instrumental” rather than “practical,” inasmuch as the latter term generally has reference to praxis or action, and “substantive” and “formal” types of rationalization refer to prac- tical rationality in this commonplace sense no less than does instrumental. I have used “conceptual” rather than “theoretical,” inasmuch as this mode of rationalization applies to spheres like law and music where the interest is other than what is commonly considered theoretical. “Methodical” is perhaps a more descriptive term than “formal,” but I have decided to follow Kalberg’s usage in this case in order to minimize the appearance of differences be- tween what are essentially identical interpretations of Weber’s schema.
Although many other observations made by Kal- berg in this paper seem persuasive, I do take issue with some features of his application of the schema.
It seems to me (a) a contradiction in terms to say that formal rationality cannot be associated with a methodical way of life (1169); (b) confusing to say that bureaucracy calculates “the most precise and efficient means for the resolution of problems by ordering them under universal and abstract regula- tions” (1 I%), since this blurs the distinction between the principles of instrumental and formal rationality;
(c) important to stress the independent variability of subjective and objectified forms of rationality;
(d) puzzling to read that for Weber the origin of substantive ethical rationalities was “largely a result of economic factors” (1171); and (e) misleading to suggest that only value-rational action possesses the potential to rupture traditional ways of life (1171), for
Weber argues that “ratio” can also be a revolutionary force by working from “without” in ways that trans- form men’s living conditions and “finally,” in conse- quence, men’s attitudes ([1921 (19761 1968: 245 [142])
-as the introduction of technological change into so many “traditional societies” in the last half-century dramatically indicates. 14 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY
Speculating for a moment beyond Weber, I wish to make two further comments on this typology.
One is to suggest that there are probably signifi- cantly different affinities between the several insti- tutional spheres and the various forms of ration- ality. Thus science, as the sphere primarily concerned with understanding the world, would have a special affinity for conceptual rationality, and law, as the sphere most concerned with regulating relations among actors, would have a special affinity for formal rationality.
The other is to suggest that the four forms of objectified rationality have approximate counter- parts in the forms of subjective rationality. For three of these, the previously mentioned Weberian terms are indicative: rational understanding is the subjective counterpart to conceptual rationality; the means/end-rational orientation corresponds to instrumental rationality; the value-rational orien- tation to substantive rationality. Although Weber did not provide a term to designate the subjective orientation which parallels formal rationality, he frequently described a psychic tendency for actors to secure order by enacting regulative norms, a tendency he glosses as “one of the factors motivat- ing social action” (1968: 333). It should be re- membered, however, that the empirical connection between subjectively rational orientation and objectively rational action is variable: actors may observe the norms of objectified rationality of a given sort for a variety of rational or nonration- a1 reasons.
The full set of distinctions outlined above is presented schematically in Table 1. Only with a schema of this order of complexity can we begin to appropriate all that Weber has to say on the subject of rationality. The schema alerts us to one of the hallmarks of Weber’s interpretive genius: his revelation that there are historically consequential affinities and conflicts among inde- pendently varying manifestations of rationaliza- tion. A few references may remind us of some of the complex relationships among different forms of rationality which Weber illuminated. Between forms of subjective rationality, there is an inher- ent tension between value-rational and rneans/end- rational orientations: the latter regards the former as irrational and always increase at the expense of the former (1968: 26, 30). In the relation br- tween subjective and objectified rationality, there are moments of affinity between value-rational orientations and substantive rationality, since the prophets or lawgivers who establish substantively rational codes would have to be oriented in a value-rational way; however, that subjective and
TABLE 1
OUTLINE OF THE VARIOUS MEANINGS OF RATIONALITY IN WEBER’S WORK
I. FORMS OF SUBJECTIVE RATIONALITY AND NONRATIONALITY
MENTAL QUALITY ORIENTATIONAL SPHERES
Cognitive Processes Conutive Processes
(rationales Verstehen) (Zweckra tionalitiit)
1. mathematical 2. Value-rational orientation
2. logical ( Wertrationalitiit)
Rutionill Rational understanding 1. Meamlend-rational orientation
Nonrationul: Empathic understanding 3. Affectual orientation emotional (einfirhlend nachrrlehenes Verstehen) habitual 4. Traditional orientation
11. FORMS OF OBJECTIFIED RATIONALITY
INSTITUTIONAL SPHERES
Economy Polity Law Military Religion Ethics Science Art etc.
FORMS OF
RATIONALIZATION
Conccptiial
Instrumental
Su bstaniive
Formal
Within each of the institutional spheres-but to different degrees according to presumptive differentials in elective affinity between type of sphere and form of rationality-the different forms of rationality have beenlcan be pursued in different directions on the basis of orientations to diverse ends or “nonrational presuppositions.” 111. CORRESPONDENCES BETWEEN SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIFIED FORMS
OF RATIONALITY
Objective Forms Subjective Counterpart
Conceptual rationality Rational understanding
Instrumental rationality Means/end-rational orientation
Substantive rationality Value-rational orientation
Formal rationality Disposition toward calculable regulation RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 15 objectified forms of rationality often vary in- versely has been shown in the passages referred to above (p. 10). The relations among different forms of objectified rationality within the same institutional sphere admit of many possibilities: the formal rationalization of religious practice has favored the conceptual rationalization of religious beliefs (1968: 41 7); conceptual rationalization of religious knowledge as in Brahmanic contempla- tion stands in contrast with the formal type of rationalization of religious technique as in classical yoga ([I9231 1958b; 165); and the formal ration- alization of law exists in chronic tension with substantive rationality in the legal sphere (1968:
81 1-1 3). Regarding the relations among different courses of rationalization within different institu- tional spheres, Weber writes, for example, that the conceptual rationalization of religious doctrine has occurred at the expense of instrumental ra- tionality in the economic sphere (1968: 424) and has inhibited the formal rationalization of law
(1968: 577), but also that substantive rationality in a this-worldly ascetic direction was a key factor in promoting the formal rationalization of economic action in early modern capitalism. Fi- nally, it should be noted that even when Weber was concerned to show affinities among different types of rationalization in different institutional spheres in Western history, he stressed repeatedly that those different rationalization processes took place at different times and in different places
(1930: 77; 1968: 1400).
To my mind, the foregoing considerations es- tablish beyond doubt that it is untenable to attrib- ute to Weber the belief that rationalization refers to a univocal unilineal historical process.
RATIONALIZATION AND SITUATIONAL
FREEDOM
Enough has been said, now, to equip us for confronting the difficult problem to which this paper is finally addressed: what is Weber’s argu- ment regarding the relationship between ration- ality and freedom, and how adequate is this argument? In contrast to the discussions of rationality which permeate Weber’s oeuvre, his comments on freedom are few and far between. Albeit conspicuously devoted to the ideal of freedom, and indeed hailed as “the last great liberal of modern times” even by an outspoken critic of the authoritarian implications of some of his polit- ical ideas (Mommsen, in Stammer 1971: 183),
Weber rarely made the subject of freedom the- matic in his scholarly studies nor, despite his expressed awareness of the multivocality of the concept, did he at any point articulate a typology of different kinds of freedom. An especially circumspect interpretive effort is thus mandated by the fact that Weber’s best-known statements appear only as rhetorical footnotes to his schol- arly analyses.
As has already been suggested, the position most commonly associated with Weber is one which contradicts the Enlightenment equation of rationality and freedom and the 19th-century sociological consensus regarding the close link between the growth of rationalism and the rise of individualism. Although Weber carries for- ward certain lines of interpretation pursued by
Toennies, Simmel, Sombart, and others so as to describe modem capitalist society (and, he prog- nosticates, modern socialist society a fortiori) as pervaded by a thoroughgoing rationalization of worldview and life conduct, he is generally thought to associate that condition with a radical and perhaps fatal curtailment of human freedom.
Such an interpretation, I shall argue, is simplified to the point of distortion. To reach a more adequate understanding of Weber on this complex question I propose, first, to look at the specific formulations wherein Weber connects rationaliza- tion with repressiveness; second, to examine other portions of his work which express a contrary argument; and third, to present some consid- erations which bear on a general assessment of
Weber’s position.
The passages where Weber actually conveys the observation that rationalization curtails freedom appear in two contexts-where he is commenting on conditions within the two institutional spheres of economic production and political authority.
Regarding the economic system of modern in- dustrial capitalism Weber observes that “the technical and economic conditions of machine production.. . today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism.. . with irresistible force” (1930: 181). The exigen- cies of mechanization and the need for discipline in factories and modem commercial establish- ments repress the natural rhythms of the indi- vidual human organism and promote relentless authoritarian coercion (1968: 1156, 731). The capitalistic interest in standardizing the produc- tion of commodities promotes a powerful tend- ency toward the uniformity of life-styles (1920:
187).” For such reasons, Weber concludes that
“all economic weathervanes point in the direction of increasing ‘unfreedom.’ It is most ridiculous to think that present-day advanced capitalism, as it is currently being imported into Russia and now exists in America-this ‘unavoidability’ of lSThe existing English translation of the passage in question (1930: 169) is inaccurate. A more faithful rendering would be: “That powerful tendency to make lifestyles uniform, which today is so immensely aided by the capitalistic interest in the ‘standardiza- tion’ of production.. .” (Jene machtige Tendenz zur
Uniformierung des Lebensstils. welcher heute das kapitalistische lnteresse and der ‘standardization’ der
Proditktion zur Seite steht . . .). 16 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY our economic development-has some elective affinity with ‘democracy’ or even with ‘freedom’
(in any sense of the word)” ([1906] 1958a; 60-61; emphasis in the original).
Whereas Weber speaks of the curtailment of freedom under the factory system of production as a kind of bondage to inanimate machines, he describes the repression due to bureaucracy as bondage to an “animated machine.” In contrast to earlier, irrational forms of bureaucracy, mod- ern rational bureaucracy because of its specialized personnel and codified routines is “escape-proof.’’
It is fabricating a cage which men will perhaps be forced to inhabit someday in a condition as powerless as that of the fellahs of ancient Egypt
Summarizing this double threat to freedom,
Weber writes, in his chapter on “Discipline”:
“This whole process of rationalization, in the factory and especially in the bureaucratic state machine, [is a] universal phenomenon [which] more and more restricts the importance of.. . individually differentiated conduct” (1968: 1 156).
And commenting on the prognosis in his discourse on “Parliament and Government in Germany,”
Weber asks plaintively, “Given the basic fact of the irresistible advance of bureaucratization, the question about the future forms of political organ- ization can only be asked in the following way:
How can one possibly save any remnants of
‘individualistic’ freedom in any sense?” ([ 19181
1968: 1403).
These are strong statements. Their force may be somewhat attenuated, however, by three con- siderations. First, although Weber does stress the pervasive character both of economic activity and of bureaucratic authority in modern society- noting that capitalism is “the most fateful force in our modern life” (1930: 17) and that bureau- cratic organization has been tending to permeate many kinds of private association as well as public administration-the fact remains that these are but two of the spheres in which modern life has been rationalized, and that Weber may be shown to argue that rationalization within other spheres enhances freedom.
Second, Weber’s statements about the repressive effects of rationalization within those two spheres have reference almost exclusively to the method- ical or formal type of rationality, whereas his treatment of other kinds of rationality (and rela- tions among different forms of rationality) within those spheres may be shown to indicate ways in which rationalization enhances freedom.
Third, the curtailment of freedom described in those statements has reference only to certain kinds of freedom, whereas Weber’s treatment of freedom in other contexts may be shown to make freedom in a different sense of the term dependent on increased rationality.
This last point indicates a need to clarify the semantics of ‘freedom’ as we proceed. Although
(1968: 1401-02).
Weber himself failed to distinguish different senses of the term, he does use the concept of freedom in varying senses at different points in his work.
The major shift in his usage is between an objective notion of situational freedom, referring to the scope of external constraints on the move- ments of actors, and freedom in the subjective sense of autonomy, the condition in which indi- vidual actors choose their own ends of action.”
In the passages just cited, Weber’s reference is clearly to situational unfreedom: the curtail- ment of opportunities for alternative courses of action on the part of individuals employed within capitalist industrial enterprises and subjected to bureaucratic regulation. His best-known position can thus be formulated more precisely as follows: the establishment of formal rationalities in the spheres of capitalist economic activity and bu- reaucratic domination restricts freedom in the sense of imposing more situational constraints on action. Indeed, it is never rationality in general, but only the formal or methodical type of objectified rationalization which Weber has in mind when he permits himself those rhetorical flourishes for which he is so renowned. There is simply no place in his writings where either subjective ration- ality or objectified rationality in its conceptual, instrumental, or substantive forms is associated with a threat to freedom. Insofar as Weber indicts the rationalization process, it is only when it takes the form of the impersonal regulation of human activities according to fixed rules and routines. Yet the critique of this type of ration- alization in modern life is limited to the spheres of economic and political action. In a different sphere, that of law, formal rationalization was seen by Weber to be a major world historical source of situational freedom.
A system of formally rational law exists when what are acknowledged as legally relevant facts are so identified on the basis of abstract generic characteristics. In its most fully rationalized form, such characteristics are disclosed through the logical analysis of meaning and are juridically interpreted through the application of determinate legal concepts which derive from highly abstract rules. In Weber’s view the operation of a for- mally rational juridical system enhances the possibilities of situational freedom. It does this by stipulating certain privileges (Freiheitsrechte). have abandoned the idea of applying a more refined typology of kinds of freedom, based on sources to be mentioned below, because of the danger that such fine-grained semantic analysis would intro- duce distinctions of which Weber was not mindful.
However, 1 do not see how it is possible to represent
Weber’s statements on freedom without having re- course to this minimal distinction, which is formally parallel to Kant’s distinction between the internal and the external exercise of will. RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 17
One set of these privileges consists of guarantees that a person may engage or fail to engage in certain kinds of conduct without interference from third parties, especially state officials. In- stances of this include “freedom of movement, freedom of conscience, and freedom of disposition over property.” Another type of privilege is that which grants to an individual the right to regulate his relations with others through his own transactions. This constitutes the “freedom of contract” (1968: 667-9).
Weber was too realistic not to note that author- itative powers have at times had resort to “tech- nical devices” to circumvent the protection of individual rights by the judiciary, and he laid stress on the possibility of repressive outcomes of a formally rational legal system in situations where powerful property-holders operate in a for- mally free market to exert considerable de fact0 coercion upon the poor (1968: 876, 731). Such coercion, however, was shown to follow from inequalities of wealth and power, not from the rationalization of law as such. Regarding the latter, he stressed its effect in curbing the powers of hierarchical despots and democratic dema- gogues alike. If, as Weber says, juridical for- malism enables the legal system to operate like a “technically rational machine,” it thereby
“guarantees,” he immediately adds, “to individuals and groups within the system a relative maximum of freedom” (“das relative Maximum an Spiel- raum fur seine Bewegungsfreiheit”) ([I9211 (1976)
1968: 811 [469]).
Even within the spheres of bureaucratic author- ity and capitalist economy, moreover, Weber can be shown to have indicated a number of respects in which rationalization promotes situational freedom. In addition to their constraining features, the formally rational aspects of capitalism and bureaucracy guarantee significant kinds of sitiia- tional freedom. A defining feature of the capi- talist system is the existence of an open labor market where workers are formally free to sell or withhold their services. Use of the monetary contract, in particular, frees the contracting par- ties from the all-inclusive obligations which en- cumbered them in contracts based on status; it thus “represents the archetype of the purposive contract” (1968: 674).“ Similarly, the formally rational regulations of bureaucracy provide for recruitment to office on the basis of free con- tractual arrangements, and once in office staff
I.
“Appreciation of this Weberian point was for a long time obscured by the translation of this phrase as “coercive contract” rather than “purposive con- tract,’’ an error based on a misreading of the German text as Zwangskontrakt instead of Zweckkontrakt, as
Guenther Roth has pointed out (Weber 1968: 734,
n. 23). The misreading was not corrected until the
5th, revised German edition, first published in 1972. members “are personally free and subject to authority only with respect to their impersonal official obligations” (1968: 220).
The ambiguities inherent in institutionalized rationalization in any sphere enhance situational freedom by opening up options in any situation of action. Weber’s considered position on the matter was that univocal determinations of what is objectively rational within any sphere of action cannot be realized, since “compromise or selection among several bases of rationalization is possible or unavoidable (1922: 414).”
Conflicts of value and related alternative choices which represent different axes of rationalization permeate bureaucratic organizations. Weber has often been criticized for failing to appreciate this fact of life; Peter Blau, for example, maintains that Weber’s model of bureaucracy sets up “an implicit functional scheme that addresses itself to the problem of how a given element of the organ- ization contributes to its strength and effective functioning and thus fails to examine the conflicts that arise between the elements comprising the system” (1968: 60). On the contrary, I would argue that some of Weber’s most revealing insights deal precisely with conflicts among differ- ent elements comprising bureaucratic organiza- tions. (a) One primary area of conflict within bureau- cracies is between the obligation to act in accord with the rules in the organization’s handbook and the wish to act in accord with the organization’s given objectives. Weber could not be more explicit in noting this tension: he depicts the spirit of rational bureaucracy in terms of two general characteristics: formalism, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, a tendency of officials to act
“from what is substantively a utilitarian point of view in the interest of the welfare of those under their authority.. . a tendency which is apparently, and in part genuinely, in contradiction to the above [formal rationality]” (1968: 228).
(b) To this tension between formal rationality and substantive rationality is added a tension between both of them and instrumental ration- ality, when Weber points out that the rationally debatable reasons that stand behind every act of bureaucratic administration concern “either subsumption under norms or a weighing of ends and means” (1968: 979; emphasis mine). The salience of instrumental rationality in Weber’s typification of bureaucracy is underscored in passages where Weber speaks of “the feature of bureaucratic administration which makes it specifically rational” as being the possession of
“technical knowledge” by officeholders (1968:
225). The formal rationality of orderly and pre- dictable career lines conflicts with the instru-
”“Kompromiss oder Wahl zwischen mehreren solchen Crundlagen des Rationalisierrtng moglich ist oder unvermeidlich wird.”
2. 18 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY mentally rational norm of staffing offices with the technically most qualified candidates (1968:
962).
(c) Different aspects of bureaucratic rationality are congruent with contradictory political value- orientations. The formal rationalities of bureau- cratic procedure support the values of egalitarian mass democracy, inasmuch as they are responsive to demands for equality before the law and due process and the popular horror of “privilege.”
Indeed, the modern bureaucratic state has been transformed into an institution for the protection of rights (1968: 983, 908). On the other hand, the requirements of technically qualified official- dom and access to confidential knowledge pro- mote oligarchic tendencies within bureaucratic elites, tendencies which are recurrently opposed by the efforts of democratically oriented constit- uencies to institute checks and controls-not to mention the controls built in through the limita- tion of power and the separation of powers which characterize the modem state (1968: 985, 962,
652).
(d) Even along a single axis of rationalization courses of action are by no means always uni- vocally determined. The norm of instrumental rationality, for example, leaves the door open for a variety of technically suitable courses of action, even when a particular end is specified;
“as every expert knows, the various technically rational principles come into conflict with one another” ([ 19221 1949: 35 [489]; translation alter- ed). Due to ambiguities of this sort, Weber indicates that all bureaucratic officials, although never at liberty to act out arbitrary personal whims, do possess a sphere of “ ‘freely’ creative administration,” and notes that “even in the field of law-finding there are areas in which the bureau- cratic judge is directly held to ‘individualizing’ procedures by the legislator” (1968: 979).
The constraints imposed by formal ration- alization within any one sphere are to some extent oflset by the competition among groups within and among diflerent institutional spheres.
Just as the diverse axes of rationalization in any sphere of action possess distinctive inner dynam- ics, so do the diverse institutional spheres possess distinctive interests and values which compete with one another, Although Weber’s language at times sounds as though he viewed modern society as wholly dominated by bureaucratic offi- cialdom, with its ethos of orderliness, punctuality, reliability, and adherence to rules, he also makes clear that each of the other major spheres of modern life has its own protagonists who hearken to different demons and ethics. The political sphere has acquired “a peculiarly rational mys- tique of its own” (1968: 601), wherein the struggle for power and the promulgation of policy orients action in a manner quite opposed to the bureau- cratic orientation (1968: 1393-1405). A very different alternative is represented by commercial
3.
and industrial entrepreneurs, with their ration- alized pursuit of monetary profit in the market; at one point Weber singles out the capitalist entre- preneur as the type preeminently “able to main- tain at least relative immunity from subjection to the control of rational bureaucratic knowledge”
(1968: 225), just as he repeatedly stresses that the bureaucratic organizations of private capitalism set up a countervailing force against domination by the bureaucracy of the state (1968: 1402).
The development of rational science offers a vocational sphere with its own unique orientation, and still other alternatives appear in the religious domain where the arms of the churches remain open to embrace those who find modern science or politics uncongenial.
A complete Weberian depiction of modern society must therefore be one which views the power of any sector, including the bureaucratic state, as balanced by the power and claims of various other sectors, and reveals a condition of situational freedom in which actors can follow alternative norms and values by selecting from a plurality of sectors. Still, it might be argued that such a conception sees the situational freedom of actors enormously limited once they have com- mitted themselves to participation in a particular sector. That is, I believe, how Weber regarded the matter, but there are two considerations which relax the austerity of this view somewhat. Weber knew, but did not articulate sociologically (as did
Simmel), two phenomena whose expansion in modern society greatly enhances the situational freedom of actors: multiple role playing, and voluntary associations. If, as Weber argued forcefully, the modern scientist in his properly institutionalized role is constrained not to advance political interests and ideals, outside the labora- tory and the lecture hall he is, as citizen, free to take an active part in party politics. Moreover, in his later years Weber was increasingly sensitive to the opportunities afforded by voluntary asso- ciations in opening up new possibilities for action. Is
RATIONALIZATION AND SUBJECTIVE
FREEDOM
Weber’s pessimistic utterances regarding the effects of rationalization on freedom had reference
‘Owe have reason to believe that part of Weber’s motivation in delivering a number of speeches, in- cluding “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a
Vocation,” to the Freistudentische Bund during the last few years of his life was his desire to advance the role of voluntary associations in the reconstruc- tion of postwar Germany (Schluchter 1979a: 116).
His interest in this social form was initially kindled by his observations of sects and clubs during his visit to the United States in 1904, and first reported in his
1906 essay, “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of
Capitalism” (1948: 302-22). RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 19 specifically to the possibilities for “individually differentiated conduct” under conditions of exten- sive formally rational regulation of conduct. It is an open question how much of this pessimism represented the idiosyncrasies of his own temper- ament and personal experience; how much a response to the deeply authoritarian cast of public life in Wilhelmine Germany and of Prussian culture more generally; how much a rhetorical stance designed to prod others to exert them- selves in struggle for freedom; and how much a considered analysis of secular tendencies of bu- reaucratized and industrialized societies. In any case, we have seen that Weber’s famous pro- nouncements regarding the modern threats to freedom have to be qualified by attention to the numerous respects in which his analyses reveal an increased scope for situational freedom due to a variety of rationalizing processes in Western society. There is, however, another area in which
Weber appears quite unambivalent in assessing the effects of rationality on freedom. This is when he considers freedom, not in the sense of the absence of situational constraints on action, but in the sense of an actor’s subjective disposition to make decisions for himself.
Weber expressed himself on this issue in his two 1905 essays on the logic of the cultural scien- ces. In those essays Weber sharply criticized the view, associated with Karl Knies and Eduard
Meyer, that freedom of the will is a function of the irrational aspects of action. Weber, by con- trast, defined an actor’s decision as “free” when it is “based on his deliberations, without the intrusion of external compulsions or irresistible affects” ([1922] 1975: 191 [132]). Rejecting the notion that incalculability is the hallmark of subjective freedom, Weber argued: “We associate the highest measure of an empirical ‘feeling of freedom’ with those actions which we are con- scious of performing rationally-i.e., in the absence of physical and psychic ‘compulsions,’ vehement ‘affects,’ and ‘accidental’ disturbances of the clarity of judgment, in which we pursue a clearly conceived ‘end’ through ‘means’ which are the most adequate according to our empirically grounded knowledge” ([I9221 1949: 124-5 226; translation altered).
In thus linking the subjective freedom of auton- omous decision-making to the rational capacities of actors, Weber directs our attention to a dimen- sion of rationality different from that which we have considered up to this point, namely, to the dimension of subjective rationality. We must accordingly recall Weber’s analysis of the four ways in which social action can be subjectively oriented. It is evident from that analysis that
Weber conceives the four categories of tradition- ality, affectivity, value-rationality, and meanslend- rationality as constituting a kind of hierarchy, a hierarchy based on increasing deliberateness of choice. Rationalization, Weber writes, can pro- ceed by abandoning ingrained habituation for more deliberate kinds of adaptation; by abandon- ing emotional values for a deliberate formulation of ultimate value standards; and by abandoning belief in absolute values for a more skeptical kind of rational orientation (1968: 30).
With increasing subjective rationality, in other words, Weber associates an increase in the actor’s subjective freedom of choice. One has little free- dom of choice so long as one’s actions are deter- mined by custom or ingrained habituation; some- what more if one is free to follow the swings of one’s emotional moods; still more if one cal- culates intentions in order to bring them in line with a consciously held supreme value; and most of all if one is free to deliberate about alternative values, means, and their respective costs and benefits-to take all one’s ends as given subjective wants and arrange them in a scale of consciously assessed relative urgency. In other words, as actors become more conscious of and deliberate about the means and ends of their actions-as they become increasingly zweckrational in their subjective orientations-so accordingly do they experience a greater subjective sense of freedom.
So stated, this is a purely analytic, ahistorical argument, similar in form (if notably different in substance) to Kant’s equating the use of practical reason with the ideal freedom of human agents.
Is it plausible, now, to link this Weberian for- mulation regarding subjective rationality and free- dom to his analyses of the historical processes of modern Western rationalization, referred to above as objectified rationalities in the various institu- tional spheres? The question at once directs us to Weber’s ideas on the rationalization of religion and science.
Although instrumental, substantive, and formal types of rationalization can be identified in the areas of religious and scientific practice, the rationalization of beliefs involves the type referred to above as conceptual rationalization. This in turn, as Weber was well aware, is a complex development involving a number of elements which do not always occur together. The prin- cipal elements of conceptual rationalization that
Weber refers to include logic, the norms of clarity and consistency; abstraction, the norms of comparison and generalization; verifiability, the norm of empirically grounding beliefs; and re- flectivity, the norm of continuous critical exami- nation of beliefs. When the general human desire to possess a meaningful picture of the world was coupled with powerful interests in intellectual systematization and the elimination of magical ideas, a conjunction which took place initially in ancient Judaism and again with renewed force following the Protestant Reformation, the result was a historically unprecedented development of conceptually rationalized beliefs about the world. 20 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY
Although the movement toward conceptual rationalization of worldviews was initially pro- pelled by the salvation religions, paradoxically the success of those efforts weakened the position of their original religious sponsors. Modern science has not only completed the age-old
Judaeo-Christian project of eliminating empiri- cally ungrounded beliefs in magical entities,”’ but also, by providing more reliable knowledge about the world and demonstrating the inexorable reality of value pluralism, has undermined the possibility of deriving an intellectually compelling view of the world from traditional transcendental religious sources.” The ascendance of rationalized science means that the modern person who abides by the kind of belief systems now institutionalized as legiti- mate may no longer embrace without question notions validated by tradition or prophetic author- ity. Older cognitive orientations have been un- dermined at the same time that newer cognitive resources have been provided: increased knowl- edge about the world which raises awareness of the costs and benefits of utilizing alternative means to pursue diverse goals, and increased clar- ity about the implications and coherence of di- verse values and normative criteria.
It is difficult to separate Weber’s descriptive account of this situation from his valuational response to it. Both judgments come together in his formulations on the ethic of responsibility, an orientation in which actors balance considera- tions of technical adequacy based on the findings of empirical science with considerations of moral appropriateness based on the critical examination of values. I think it must be said that Weber regarded the ethic of responsibility both as an orientation advanced by the achievements of modern science and as the most desirable kind of orientation for what he regarded as the authentic modern personality.”
The ethic of responsibility entails the highest degree of subjective rationality, that is, the broader conception of means/end-rationality de- scribed above. This is a disposition to be constant in employing correctives against un- thinking habit, unconscious ideation, emotional biases, fuzzy thinking, and rigid beliefs. By the
20This is the true meaning of Weber’s concept of
Enrtauhcrung. which is often misleadingly translated as “disenchantment.” The more accurate, if less euphonious, translation is “demagicalization.”
21For a stimulating exposition of Weber’s account of this paradoxical development, see Schluchter
(1979b). It is rarely appreciated that Weber’s ac- count is in many ways parallel to Comte’s interpreta- tion of the role of theological philosophy as a transitional development between animism and posi- tive science.
‘2This interpretation of Weber’s ethic of responsi- bility runs parallel to, and has been reinforced by,
.that advanced by Schluchter (3979b: 53-59). same token, the ethic of responsibility maximizes the freedom of actors to make their own decisions.
Even if one overlooks the many respects in which rationalization enhances situational freedom (as described in the preceding section), it is clear that Weber regarded the rationalization of belief systems as a dynamic process which promotes subjective freedom. As Karl Loewith observed in an exceptional earlier interpretation, “The motive force of Weber’s whole attitude was.. . recognition of a rationalized world and of the countertendency to achieve the freedom of self- responsibility” ([I9321 1970: 120; emphasis mine).
WEBER AND BEYOND
The pluralistic perspective that Weber taught us to substitute for monistic accounts of world historical development is no less applicable to diagnostic analyses of the modern world.
Beyond the more adequate comprehension of
Weber’s stated views on rationality and freedom to be gained through the sort of critical exegesis I have attempted above, the full appropriation and application of his argument at present requires modifications of three major kinds.
1. Additional analysis of the concepts of ra- tionality and freedom. As descriptive concepts,
Weber’s distinctions among types of rationality possess enduring value. There is now the need to exercise them more systematically as well as relate them to discussions of the concept of ra- tionality by other social scientists and philoso- phers. By contrast, Weber’s treatment of the idea of freedom is analytically superficial. Work in the last generation on the types or dimensions of freedom by scholars such as McKeon (1 952; n.d.),
Adler (1958-61), and Oppenheim (1961) has great- ly enriched the conceptual resources for bringing to the empirical analysis of freedom the same kind of sophistication that Weber introduced to the empirical study of rationalization processes.
In Weber’s work, the normative treatment of rationality and freedom is not always distin- guished clearly from their empirical examination nor is it articulated adequately in its own right.
He simply takes as given the modern person’s desire for situational freedom: “It is a gross self- deception to believe that without the achieve- ments of the age of the Rights of Man any one of us, including the most conservative, can go on living his life” (1968: 1403). He neither mar- shalls arguments to justify the value of situational freedom nor, in spite of his awareness for the need for authority in organizing human relations, does he provide arguments that justify the erection of limits on situational freedom (as can be found in the thought of sociologists like Simmel, Durk- heim, and even Engels) or, apart from a brief discussion of the historical roots of the right to RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 21 freedom of conscience (1968: 1208-09), that ana- lyze the circumstances under which situational freedom becomes positively valued (see Oppen- heim, 1961: 211-27). Regarding the value of autonomy, Weber simply asserts as an ultimate value the ideal of maximizing subjective freedom, in flourishes of disdain for “the shallowness of our routinized daily existence” which permits life to run on “as an event in nature” rather than be guided by “a series of ultimate decisions through which the soul-as in Platwhooses its own fate” (1949: 18), again without elaborating argu- ments to justify the value of autonomy or, despite his keen awareness of the high costs of living in a condition of anxiety produced by the dissolution of accustomed beliefs, without considering other values which might be competitive with the ideal of maximizing the subject’s freedom of choice.
Toward the value of rationality Weber had mixed sentiments. He expresses himself as a great advocate of ratio when he speaks of it as the indispensable means for enabling actors to become more responsible in making decisions and as the requirement for leading a nontrivial productive life in modern times. On the other hand, as we have seen, he tends to regard the extension of rationalized routines as suffocating.
He failed to incorporate his distinctions regarding rationality into an explicit discussion of the positive and negative values of rationality and of the ways in which rationality may be related to other desired goals.
Further qualification of Weber’s conception of bureaucratic rationalizution. Although Weber was clairvoyant in perceiving the centrality of bureaucratic formations in modern society and the inexorability of their continued expansion, his stark image of bureaucracy as an escape-proof shell of bondage must be modified by qualifica- tions implicit in his writings and by considerations of subsequent developments both in modern so- ciety and in sociological knowledge. That there are determinate limits to the extent of rationalized regulation of human activities in any sphere of life follows both from his methodological point that human reality is so complicated that it can never be wholly subsumed under any particular axis of rationalized treatment and from his aware- ness of the inexorable conflict between formal rationality and rationality of other types.‘:’ Sub- sequent work on the sociology of bureaucratic organizations, by Peter Blau and others, has illu-
2.
?:‘Harold Orlans has recently described a case in point: the accelerated effort to apply “rational” methods to the affairs of government early in the administration of President Johnson. An approach to full-throttle rationalization developed at Rand- the planning, programming, and budgeting system, or
PPBS-was in August 1965 introduced into all govern- ment agencies. A few years later, the architects of this program agreed in dismay that the problems met minated further structural tensions which open up degrees of situational freedom in any bureau- cratic setting, even under totalitarian ~egimes.’~
Moreover, Weber’s notion that formally ration- alized organization of the bureaucratic sort is the preeminent and all-pervasive mode of organiza- tion in modern societies must be corrected by the analyses of Parsons (1968) and others, which indicate the equally crucial role in modern so- cieties played by more self-regulative types of organization-collegial groups, democratic vol- untary associations, and markets-not to mention the relatively autonomous character of profes- sional groups and statuses inside of bureaucratic structures. Distinctions must also be made be- tween the restriction of the bureaucrat’s freedom and the implications of this for clients, which is as likely to be as much a guarantee of rights as it is a restriction of freedom.
Finally, it may be suggested that Weber’s view of the oppressiveness of bureaucratic regulation was empirically more descriptive of the situation in the Germany of his time (and, apparently, of the situation in Germany today) than it ever has been in the United States. Weber‘s generalized conception of bureaucracy has been viewed as biased to some extent by the particular case which he was closest to, such that he was led to view a sheer increase in formal rationality and domina- tion as historically indispensable on the basis of observations of a particular historic situation in which he was enmeshed (Philo and Walton, 1973).
Even given the organizational imperatives of bureaucratic hierarchy and regulation, such de- vices as independent administrative courts and ombudsman offices have been widely instituted to exert control over the excesses of bureaucratic domination, and recent social research indicates the plausibility of instituting parallel structures which afford greater situational freedom to salaried employees (see Stein, Kanter, et al., 1979).
Attention to the social psychological reyui- sites and consequences of subjective rationality.
One of Weber’s main oversights was his failure to consider the implications of the diffusion of an increasingly zweckrational orientation among the inhabitants of modern societies or, to put it in somewhat different terms, the difficulty of secur- ing the balance between the self-interested and
3.
in implementing this approach had been unexpected- ly enormous; PPBS “died unmourned in 1969’’ (1977:
34).
a41ndeed, as Richard Behrendt has concluded, the
“hard experience of our times” has indicated the need for a good deal of “decentralization and democratiza- tion of methods discussion, decision-taking and exe- cution” for the sake of instrumental rationality within bureaucratic organizations (see Stammer, 197 I : 180).
On the limits to the extent of plausible bureaucratic regulation even within Communist societies, see Gold- farb (1978, 1980). 22 SOCIOLOGICAL INQUIRY moral components that represented his ideal con- ception of the means/ends-rational orientation.
Although the phenomenon can be encompassed easily within his conceptual framework, Weber was inattentive to certain processes in advanced capitalist societies that enhance the freedom of self-determination by promoting means/ends-ra- tional orientations, processes which were identified and analyzed by Toennies and Simmel, and which represented a focal concern of 19thcentury
French social thought from de Maistre and
Saint-Simon to Durkheim (see Lukes 1971: 195-
199).
At the present time, of course, it is difficult for a sociologist living in the United States not to be made aware of the cumulative effects of those long-term secular trends. The institutional spheres where they are most manifest are those pertaining to socialization, the areas Weber gener- ally ignored-the spheres of family, education and, now, psychotherapy. In these areas there has been a marked trend in some Western so- cieties during the last century toward an emphasis on the cultivation of rational decision-making and autonomy. Parental objectives in middle- class American families have shifted from teach- ing children the “right way to live” to encourag- ing them to make up their minds for themselves.
In educational institutions, beginning at the col- lege level but extending now to some secondary and even primary schools, there has been a growing emphasis on teaching students how to solve problems and make independent judg- ment~.’~ The enormous spread of psychotherapy in recent decades may be seen as additional institu- tionalized support for the liberation of persons from habitual, emotional, and authoritarian com- pulsions and the enhancement of their capacities as autonomous rational actors. The attainment of maximum self-responsibility is a primary ther- apeutic objective for approaches otherwise as disparate as psychoanalytic therapy and est. This is true a fortiori for such popular therapeutic modalities as rational therapy, assertion training, and decision therapy.
The general cultural attitudes that legitimate these developments have become apparent in the area where Weber first identified a pattern of enslavement due to rationalization, the economic sphere. Even in Weber’s own terms, one might have predicted that, once whatever impetus to methodical rationalization in industry and com- merce deriving from the substantive rationalities of ascetic Protestantism had waned, it might not be long before continued rationalization in other spheres and directions would motivate a more balanced pursuit of goals within the economy, creating demands for more humane working con- ditions in factories and offices, markets for more diversified consumer goods, and a more calculat- ing and critical kind of consumer mentality. To some extent, a central theme of some of the seminal diagnoses of American society of the last generation, from Riesman (1950) to Bell (1977), can be phrased as the antinomy between the objectified formal rationalities of production and the subjective means/end-rationalities of con- sumption. A number of diagnostic comments on the contemporary United States suggest that its dom- inant “pathology” is not the hypertrophy of ra- tionalized regulation, as was the case in Weber’s
Germany (and may be in today’s Germany as well), but-more along Durkheimian lines-what appear to be expressions of a relatively unreg- ulated hedonic orientation. These comments refer variously to such phenomena as the weak- ened position of families as a locus of moral socialization; widespread cheating and vandalism in schools; lowered academic standards; per- missive attitudes toward the use of chemical substances and sexual experiences of all kinds; the calculated use of incivility and violence in social relations; the expansion of a “consumer- ist” mentality; the rise of single-interest groups and the decline of responsibility for public con- cerns; and a greater fickleness regarding personal commitments and cultural styles. However one might evaluate such phenomena, they cannot be said to reflect a condition of repression due to the unchecked processes of formal rationalization, but rather an enormous amount of situational freedom and autonomous decision-making pro- moted by the eroding effects of conceptual and instrumental rationalities on moral authority and the bases of moral community.*‘
In the light of these last considerations, the complete Weberian argument seems most wanting in its inattention to the social psychological con- text of autonomous decision-making. For all his awareness of the nonrational dimensions of action,
Weber remained in some deep sense a child of the Enlightenment by holding to an ideal of the human universe as one constituted by heroically
’”American colleges in the 1960s experienced a quantum jump in the use of pedagogical approaches geared to enhancing student participation in problem- finding and problem-solving, through problem-orient- ed texts, teaching by discussion, student research projects, and even curricular structures (and non- structures) enabling students to construct highly per- sonalized four-year degree programs (see Grant and
Riesman, 1978).
’6The numerous efforts to stake out some of the social psychological dynamics of this aspect of our current condition include Gutmann ( 1974). Janowitz
(1978), and Lasch (1979). RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM: WEBER AND BEYOND 23 rational, free, autonomous monad^.^ ' The most rationally grounded habits of character instilled profound correction of his vision may perhaps lie well before humans are fully capable of mature in the incorporation of those hypotheses which deliberative choice, and that continuing social thinkers like Aristotle and Durkheim considered support is of the greatest relevance to the capacity bedrock: that the human capacity for autono- for subjective rationality and freedom. mous moral judgment must be based on non-
APPENDIX
Weber’s Summary Formulation Regarding the Forms of Rationality
At this point it should be noted once again: “rationalism” can mean very different things. It means one thing if we think of the kind of rationalization the systematic thinker performs on the image of the world: an increasing theoretical mastery of reality by means of increasingly precise abstract concepts.
Rationalism means another thing if we think of the methodical attainment of a particular given practical end by means of an increasingly precise calculation of udeqrrate means.
These types of rationalism are very different, in spite of the fact that ultimately they belong inseparably together. Further distinctions can be made within the intellectual comprehension of reality: for instance, the differences between English physics and
Continental physics have been traced back to distinctions of this sort.
That rationalization of the conduct of life which concerns us here can assume unusally varied forms. In the sense of the absence of all metaphysics and almost all residues of religious anchorage, Confucianism is rationalist to such a far-going extent that it stands at the extreme boundary of what one might possibly call a “religious” ethic. At the same time, Confucianism is more rationalist and sober, in the sense of the absence and the rejection of all non-utilitarian yardsticks, than any other ethical system, with the possible exception of J. Bentham’s. Yet Confucianism remains extraordinarily different from Bentham’s as well as from all other Occidental types of practical rationalism in spite of its innumerable actual and apparent analogies with them.
“Rational” in the sense of belief in a valid “canon” was the supreme artistic ideal of the Renaissance. The Renaissance view of life was also rational in the sense of rejecting traditionalistic bonds and of having faith in the power of naturalis ratio, despite its strains of Platonizing mysticism.
In yet another wholly different sense of the term, “rational” means “ordered according to plan” (Planmassigkeit). The following are rational in this sense: methods of mortificatory or magical asceticism, or methods of contemplation in their most consistent forms, as in yoga or in the manipulations of prayer machines in later
Buddhism.
In general, all kinds of practical ethics that were systematically and unambiguously oriented to fixed goals of salvation were “rational” both in this latter sense of being formally methodical and in the former sense of distinguishing between the normatively
“valid” and the empirically given.
(1) conceptual rationality (2) instrumental rationality (conceptual)
(instrumental)
(3) substantive rationality (conceptual)
(4) formal rationality (formal)
(substantive)
Source: Weber 1920: 265-6; 1948; 293-4.
Translation modified and emphases and marginal glosses added by the author.
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WANTEDXitations of research on CRIMINAL VIOLENCE: If you have done, are now doing, or soon expect to be doing research on CRIMINAL VIOLENCE in any of the medical, behavioral or social sciences, please contact Drs Marvin E. Wolfgang and Neil A. Weiner, University of Pennsylvania, Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law. 3718 Locust Walk/CR, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104. This project, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, involves compiling a com- prehensive list of research on criminal violence which will be made available to researchers as part of an information clearinghouse. Any related research is requested, regardless of size, design or purpose. Please send your name, address and descriptwe materials or reprints.

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