ABSTRACT
Perhaps the greatest flaw in MaxWeber’s thinking was that he sincerely believed he was right. Weber was the twentieth century’s preeminent theorist of bureaucracy, and his description of a paradoxical modern world has guided science and technology studies (STS) scholars since the field’s founding.The frameworkWeber created was immediately influential, as apparent in social theorist Robert Merton’s decision in 1936 to write his Ph.D. dissertation on the rise of modern science as a companion toWeber’s book on the rise of modern capitalism, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2008; Merton 1938). Since then,Weber’s framework has remained influential in STS. Steven Shapin’s The Scientific Life (2010), for example, is best read as a twentyfirst-century homage toWeber’s “Science as aVocation” (Weber 2004). Weber (1864-1920) both theorized and experienced a world permeated by large-scale
administrative organizations – both public agencies and private firms – which he thought grew out of the peculiar variety of capitalism that cropped up in Europe around the time of the Protestant Reformation. For Weber, the defining feature of modern capitalism was not free exchange, but the odd fact that people saved, in the financial sense, as evidence that they were saved, in the religious sense. En masse, Europeans cultivated the self-discipline, restraint, and asceticism that allowed them to accumulate wealth that they poured back into family businesses, eventually shifting financial exchange outside of the household,where it had originated (Weber 2008). InWeber’s vision of history, businesses grew in scale and in number along with people’s wealth. Governments expanded apace, bringing taxation and the rule of law to give a democratic anchor to the global capitalist economy. Private associations emerged to protect financial interests of the well-educated professional classes that already enjoyed political advantage.The upshot forWeber was that in an effort to manage their size and scale, these growing businesses, associations, and governments set up large apparatuses staffed by permanent employees simply to administrate the organization – apparatuses he called bureaucracies. In both private firms and public agencies, this historically and geographically unique vari-
ant of capitalism prompted a world that was – and remained – highly rule-bound, or inWeber’s terms, “rational.” For him, “rational” did not mean logical, but indicated, in the context of
organizations, that their bureaucracies were governed by agreed-upon, seemingly impersonal, rules. Weber was puzzled and impressed by the suasion of rationality. Even when moderns disagree with the actions prescribed by impersonal rules,Weber observed, they typically follow the rules nonetheless, without being compelled by brute force.Weber had a name for this power to prompt others to obey without physical violence: “legitimate domination” (Weber 1978, see especially volume 1, chapter 3). ByWeber’s description, there were a variety of forms of domination – both legitimate and illegitimate – but the rational authority of seemingly impersonal, shared rules was the moral force that drove modernity. The ascetic sensibility,which sixteenth-century Calvinists cultivated to assure themselves they
had a secure place in the kingdom of heaven, had been transposed, according toWeber, into a secular, capitalist world that was itself the product of self-restrained Calvinists. Science was indispensable to the impersonal administration of states and private enterprises in this environment:
A rational, systematic, and specialized pursuit of science, with trained and specialized personnel, has only existed in theWest in a sense at all approaching its present dominant place in our culture. Above all is this true of the trained official, the pillar of both the modern State and of the economic life of theWest.
