Weber\'s Science as a Vocation and Politics as a Vocation

Weber's Analysis Of Vocation In The Modern, Secular Protestant World

In both his essays on "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a Vocation," the father of sociology Max Weber advances the idea that the development of a Protestant religious ideology created modern, secular notions of what constituted a vocation. At the time of his writing, Weber stated, it had become increasingly accepted that there was an equal validity of the vocations of science and politics, as opposed to the sole existence of a vocation of faith in service of God. Before Protestantism, religious dogma and religious bureaucratic institutions alone determined scientific truth. Religious internal politics also influenced national politics and political affairs. Now, Protestantism allowed for the creation of a private, religious sphere of the sacred that was intrinsically separate from a public, secular sphere of academic or political thought.

This rendering science and politics as potentially respectable vocations and also severed much of the religious meddling of past eras in science and politics. Protestantism made God a personal matter, rather than a matter filtered between a believer, Church, and only finally conveyed to God. Yet Weber also saw an advancing danger -- much as he approved that religious persecutions of the past, of scientists and leaders, by the clergy had ended, he feared a new bureaucracy was being created within secular institutions that was equally stifling to good science and good government as the church had been in ages past.

According to Weber, academic bureaucracy and orthodoxy in science and ethical machinations for personal means in politics, even if deployed for secular means rather than sacred means. Bureaucracies within secular institutions were just as bad as the Church bureaucratic wrangling about dogma and appointments of specific cardinals. Likewise, although politics in the form of secular and civil administration became a legitimate vocation with the end of the "hero worship" style of leadership of the Renaissance, as Weber terms the worship of Popes and Machiavellian Princes, when poor administers rose merely because they knew 'the right people,' this was just as damaging, if not more so, than the rise of unethical cardinals in the Church.

Weber allows that unlike past systems of patronage, the modern state's creation of secular vocations was not measured in godliness but in the meeting of bureaucratic standards. But in "Science as a Vocation," Weber notes that a meritocracy in a bureaucracy is not enough to ensure excellence. Weber praises the modern academic system of the United States, "where the bureaucratic system exists, and the young academic man is paid from the very beginning. To be sure, his salary is modest; usually it is hardly as much as the wages of a semi-skilled laborer. Yet he begins with a seemingly secure position, for he draws a fixed salary." This salary confers intellectual and economic freedom to the academic apart from obedience to a bureaucracy.

Weber felt that most bureaucracies, particularly controlling bureaucracies such as that of the German academy, but also, to some extend in America as well, stifle the imagination rather than enable it. In this sense, quite often, secular vocations also have their similarities to the former criticized Church. Often, Weber notes, the most meritorious academic does not win out, rather, much like "papal elections," the "cardinal who is said to be the 'favorite' only rarely has a chance to win out. The rule is rather that the Number Two cardinal or the Number Three wins out." But what must be fostered is excellence of Number One, not merely the most acceptable individual -- excellence and inspiration. "Inspiration in the field of science by no means plays any greater role, as academic conceit fancies, than it does in the field of mastering problems of practical life by a modern entrepreneur. On the other hand, and this also is often misconstrued, inspiration plays no less a role in science than it does in the realm of art." If academic bureaucracies become just as calcified as the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church, the original merit-based aims of scientific academia will be thwarted -- the young minds of new thinkers must have the space and scope to question, and not merely serve the old and respected, in hopes of an appointment and a secure salary.

Bureaucracy in scientific academia is dangerous to the advancement of knowledge. Yet bureaucracies in politics may be even worse. In his essay, "Politics as a Vocation," Max Weber fuses the development of Protestant bureaucracies with the development of a violent, authoritarian state. "Protestantism, especially, legitimated the authoritarian state," by taking it out of the larger context of the Holy Roman Empire. Nationalism became key as "Luther relieved the individual of the ethical responsibility for war and transferred it to the [state] authorities" of the nation rather than the fathers of the Church. Now the nationalist, secular state must define its own bureaucracy and its own ethics.