By Nicholas Gane (auth.)
This publication explores the modern nature of Max Weber's paintings through having a look intimately at his key thoughts of explanation and disenchantment. Thematic parallels are drawn among Weber's explanation thesis and the reviews of latest tradition constructed through Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard. it is recommended that those 3 'postmoden' thinkers strengthen and reply to Weber's research of modernity through pursuing radical innovations of confirmation and re-enchantment. reading the paintings of those 3 key thinkers during this method casts new mild either on postmodern idea and on Weber's sociology of rationalization.
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Additional info for Max Weber and Postmodern Theory: Rationalization versus Re-enchantment
Sample text
And this, for Strauss, effectively devalues both science and ultimate values, for it implies that the former cannot be employed to confer human ‘right’, and that the latter, as irrational forms, are equivalent to all other values before the tribunal of reason. Against this position, Strauss insists that the faculty of human reason may be used, if only by a select few, to discover the principles of justice upon which social and political forms are to be based. This is what Strauss terms ‘natural right’: the right of the wise (the philosopher) to use the highest form of human knowledge (philosophy/science) to discover the natural and superior form of right or good for ‘man’.
Salvation religion, in turn, can respond only by devaluing this-worldly rationalism and by becoming at the same time increasingly other-worldly in its orientation. In a key passage, Weber (1970) writes: The advancement of cultural values appears the more meaningless the more it is made a holy task, a ‘calling’. Culture becomes ever more senseless as a locus of imperfection, of injustice, of suffering, of sin, of futility. For it is necessarily burdened with guilt, and its deployment and differentiation thus necessarily become ever more meaningless.
Conclusion Weber’s account of the transition to modernity may be read, in the light of the above two chapters, as a theory of the descent rather than progress of Western culture. The promises of Western rationalism – universal freedom, personal autonomy – have, in capitalist modernity, turned into their opposites, and been supplanted by new forms of ‘rational’ discipline and formal domination, and by an infinitely ‘polytheistic’ culture characterized, paradoxically, by structural sameness. In view of this, one is left with the following question: how is it possible to work against the instrumentalism of modern culture, and with this resist the further rationalization and disenchantment of the world?