Social Action:

Weber, it is often said, conceived of sociology as a comprehensive science of social action. His initial theoretical focus is on the subjective meaning that humans attach to their actions in their interactions with one another within specific social contexts. In this connection, Weber distinguishes between four major types of social action:

Zweckrational can be roughly translated as "technocratic thinking." It can be defined as action in which the means to attain a particular goal are rationally chosen. It is exemplified by an engineer who builds a bridge as the most efficient way to cross a river. Wertrational, or value-oriented rationality, is characterized by striving for a goal, which in itself may not be rational, but which is pursued through rational means within an ethical, religious, or even holistic context. An example would be an individual seeking salvation through following the teachings of a prophet. Affective action is anchored in the emotional state of the person rather than in the rational weighing of means and ends. Traditional action is guided by customary habits of thought, by reliance on what Weber called "the eternal yesterday." This classification of types of action provides a basis for his investigation of the course of western historical development, as well as his theory of human societies continued evolution.

Weber was primarily concerned with modern western society, in which, as he saw it, behavior had come to be increasingly dominated by goal-oriented rationality. He believed more and more of our behavior was being guided by zweckrational, less and less by tradition, values, or emotions. His whole work attempts to identify the social factors that have brought about this "rationalization" of the West.

While his sociology begins with the individual motivators of social action, Weber does not stay exclusively focused on the micro level. In modern society the efficient application of means to ends has come to dominate and replace other springs of social behavior. He proposed that the basic distinguishing feature of modern society was best viewed in terms of this characteristic shift in motivation. But he believed that shift was based on structural and historical forces.

Irrationality of Zweckrational:

Since it is clear that modern societies are so pervasively dominated by bureaucracy it is crucial to understand why this enormous power is often used for ends that are counter to the interests and needs of people. Again, the rationalization process is the increasing dominance of zweckrational action over rational action based on values, or actions motivated by traditions and emotions. Zweckrational can best be understood as "technocratic thinking," in which the goal is simply to find the most efficient means to whatever ends are defined as important by those in power.

An extreme case of rationalization was the extermination camps of Nazi Germany. The goal was to kill as many people as possible in the most efficient manner, and the result was the ultimate of dehumanization--the murder of millions of men, women and children. The men and women who ran the extermination camps were, in large part, ordinary human beings. They were not particularly evil people. Most went to church on Sundays; most had children, loved animals and life. The cyanide used in the gas chambers was supplied by an old established German firm through competitive bid. Their product could do the most effective job for the least possible cost, so they got the contract. In sum, the extermination camps were models of bureaucratic efficiency using the most efficient means available at that time to accomplish the goals of the Nazi government.

Technocratic thinking (zweckrational) can be contrasted with wertrational, which involves the assessment of means in terms of ultimate human values such as social justice, peace, and human happiness. Even though a bureaucracy is highly rational in the formal sense of technical efficiency, it does not follow that it is also rational in the sense of the moral acceptability of its goals or the means used to achieve them. The fact that individual officials have specialized and limited responsibility and authority within the organization means that they are unlikely to raise basic questions regarding the moral implications of the overall operation of the organization. In an advanced industrial- bureaucratic society everything becomes a component of the expanding machine, including human beings.

Under the rule of specialization, society becomes more and more intricate and interdependent, but with less common purpose. The community disintegrates because it loses its common bond. The emphasis in bureaucracies is on getting the job done in the most efficient manner possible. Consideration of what impact organizational behavior might have on society as a whole, on the environment, or on the consumer simply does not enter into the calculation.

The problem is further compounded by the decline of many traditional institutions such as the family, community, and religion, which served to bind pre-industrial man to the interests of the group. Rationalization causes the weakening of traditional and religious moral authority (secularization); the values of efficiency and calculability predominate.

The result is a seeming paradox -- bureaucracies, the epitome of rationalization, acting in very irrational ways. Thus we have economic bureaucracies in pursuit of profit that deplete and pollute the environment upon which they are based; political bureaucracies, set up to protect our civil liberties, violate them with impunity; Agricultural bureaucracies (educational, government, and business) set up to help the farmer that end up putting millions of these same farmers out of business; Service bureaucracies designed to care for and protect the elderly that routinely deny service and actually engage in abuts. The irrationality of bureaucratic institutions is a major factor in understanding contemporary society. Weber called this formal rationalization as opposed to substantive rationality (the ability to anchor actions in the consideration of the whole). It can also be called the irrationality of rationalization, or more specifically, the irrationality of zweckrational.

Weber and Marx:

Weber's views about the inescapable rationalization and bureaucratization of the world have some obvious similarities to Marx's notion of alienation. Both men agree that modern methods of organization have tremendously increased the effectiveness and efficiency of production. Both agree that this has allowed an unprecedented domination of man over the world of nature. Both also agree that the new world of rationalized efficiency threatens to turn into a monster and dehumanize its creators.

But Weber disagrees with Marx's claim that alienation is only a transitional stage on the road to man's true emancipation. Weber does not believe in the "inevitability" of socialism. However, if it came to pass he thought that socialism would be even more bureaucratic and rationalized than capitalism--and thus even more alienating to man. Weber believed that the alienation documented by Marx had little to do with the ownership of the mode of production, but was a consequence of bureaucracy.

Marx asserted that capitalism has led to the "expropriation" of the worker from the mode of production. How the modern worker is not in control of his fate, is forced to sell his labor (and thus his self) to private capitalists. Weber countered that loss of control at work was an inescapable result of any system of rationally co-ordinated production. Weber argued that men could no longer engage in socially significant action unless they joined a large-scale organization. In joining organizations they would have to sacrifice their personal desires and goals to the impersonal goals and procedures of the organization itself. By doing so, they would be cut off from a part of themselves, they would become alienated.

Socialism and capitalism are both economic systems based on industrialization --the rational application of science, observation, and reason to the production of goods and services. Both capitalism and socialism are forms of a rational organization of social life to control and co-ordinate this production. Socialism is predicated on government ownership of the economy to provide co-ordination to meet the needs of people within society. If anything, Weber maintained, socialism would be even more rationalized, even more bureaucratic than capitalism. And thus, more alienating to human beings as well.

Weber and Class:

To Max Weber, writing in the early 1900s, Marx's view was too simple - he agreed that different classes exist, but he thought that "Status" or "Social Prestige" was the key factor in deciding which group each one of us belongs to. So, where we live, our manner of speech, our schooling, our leisure habits, these, and many other factors, decide our social class - he called these different aspects of the way we behave our "Life-Style". Particularly important, he thought, was the way each person thinks about his/her "Life-Chances" - if we feel that we can become a respected and highly valued member of wider society, then this is likely to put us in a higher social class than some others e.g. a child who goes to a Private School, live in a large house, has parents who are "professional" people, and has a "standard" BBC accent is likely (but not certain) to feel that he/she has a greater chance of becoming generally respected than a child who is educated in an inner city, crowded school, and who lives in a Council Estate, and who speaks with a regional accent.

"Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view, is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under a capitalist influence" (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1904)

Protestant Ethic:

Weber's concern with the meaning that people give to their actions allowed him to understand the drift of historical change. He believed that rational action within a system of rational-legal authority is at the heart of modern society. His sociology was first and foremost an attempt to explore and explain this shift from traditional to rational action.

Weber believed that the rationalization of action can only be realized when traditional ways of life are abandoned. Modern people often have a difficult time realizing the hold of tradition on pre-industrial peoples. Tradition was overpowering in pre-modern societies. Weber's task was to uncover the forces in the West that caused people to abandon their traditional religious value orientation and encouraged them to develop a desire for acquiring goods and wealth.

After careful study, Weber came to the belief that the Protestant ethic broke the hold of tradition while it encouraged men to apply themselves rationally to their work. Calvinism, he found, had developed a set of beliefs around the concept of predestination. It was believed by followers of Calvin that one could not do good works or perform acts of faith to assure your place in heaven. You were either among the "elect" (in which case you were in) or you were not. However, wealth was taken as a sign (by you and your neighbors) that you were one of the God's elect, thereby providing encouragement for people to acquire wealth. The Protestant ethic therefore provided religious sanctions that fostered a spirit of rigorous discipline, encouraging men to apply themselves rationally to acquire wealth.

Weber studied non-Western cultures as well. He found that several of these pre-industrial societies had the technological infrastructure and other necessary preconditions to begin capitalism and economic expansion. The only force missing were the positive sanctions to abandon traditional ways. While Weber does not believe that the Protestant ethic was the only cause of the rise of capitalism, he believed it to be a powerful force in fostering its emergence.

It did NOT arise as the superstructure or reflection of economic situations. For example, the spirit of capitalism such as espoused by our buddy Ben Franklin was present before capitalistic order.

In order to arise, the spirit of capitalism had to struggle with its 'most important opponent,' traditionalism. For instance, workers will respond to an increase in piece rates by doing less work, collecting the usual amount of money, and going home early. Men do not ''by nature'' wish to earn more and more money, they simply wish to live as they are accustomed to and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.

Another way of attempting to increase productivity is to lower wages or piece rates, so that workers must work harder and longer to earn the same amount as before. This method has its limits. It (and capitalism) requires a surplus population which can be hired cheaply in the market. Also, too large a surplus population can encourage the development of labor intensive methods, rather than more efficient methods: low wages do not equal cheap labor. And, if you pay people too little, their efficiency and attentiveness decreases.

Thus, it would be better if labor were performed as if it were an absolute end in itself. This can only be the process of a long and arduous education (for example, being raised Pietist). Capitalism ''now in the saddle'' can fairly easily recruit the required workers, but this was not always the case.

Protestantism was not merely a stage prior to the development of a purely rationalistic philosophy, however. Rationalism shows a development which by no means follows parallel lines in the various departments of life. Since life may be rationalized from fundamentally different basic points of view and in very different directions, we must ask the origin of the irrational element which lies at the basis of this particular concrete form of rational thought: the conception of a calling.

The acquisition of wealth in the performance of a calling is morally permissible and enjoined.

-- Asceticism turned against the spontaneous enjoyment of life. So, sport, for instance, is acceptable only if it serves a rational purpose, say, increasing physical efficiency.

-- The powerful tendency toward uniformity of life, which today so immensely aids the capitalistic interest in the standardization of production, had its ideal foundation in the repudiation of all idolatry of the flesh (e.g., non-ascetic, flashy or attractive clothing).

The Puritan outlook on life 'stood at the cradle of modern economic man' (174). This religious epoch bequeathed to its utilitarian successors ''an amazingly good... conscience in the acquisition of money, so long as it took place legally'' (176). In addition, the power of religious asceticism provided owners with sober, conscientious and industrious workmen. And, it provided comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of goods in the world was ordained by God.

The religious basis had died away by Ben Franklin's time. Limitation to specialized work is now a condition of any valuable work in the modern

world. ''The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production and today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.''

Money is the most abstract and impersonal element that exists in human life. The more the world of the capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness. Ultimately no genuine religion of salvation has overcome the tension between their religiosity and a rational economy.

Economic Sphere:

The paradox of all rational asceticism is that rational asceticism has created the very wealth it rejected.

There have only been two consistent avenues for escaping the tension between religion and in the economic world in a principled and inward manner: 1) the Puritan ethic of the vocation. Puritanism, as a religion of virtuosos, renounced the universalism of love and rationally routinized all work in this world into serving God's will and testing ones state of grace. Puritanism accepted the routinization of the economic cosmos, which , along with the whole world, it devalued as creatural and depraved. It involved a renunciation of salvation in favor of the groundless and always only particularized grace. Actually, this standpoint of unbrotherliness was no longer a genuine religion of salvation. A genuine religion of salvation can exaggerate brotherliness to the height of the mystic's acosmism of love. 2) Mysticism. The mystic's benevolence does not inquire into the man to whom and for whom it sacrifices. Mysticism is not interested in his person. Mysticism is a unique escape form this world in the form of an objectless devotion to anybody, not for man's sake, but purely for devotion's sake.

Rationalization:

The rationalization process is the practical application of knowledge to achieve a desired end. It leads to efficiency, coordination, and control over both the physical and the social environment. It is the guiding principle behind bureaucracy and the increasing division of labor. It has led to the unprecedented increase in both the production and distribution of goods and services. It is also associated with secularization, depersonalization, and oppressive routine. Increasingly, human behavior is guided by observation, experiment and reason (zweckrational) to master the natural and social environment to achieve a desired end.

Weber's general theory of rationalization (of which bureaucratization is but a particular case) refers to increasing human mastery over the natural and social environment. In turn, these changes in social structure have changed human character through changing values, philosophies, and beliefs. Such superstructural norms and values as individualism, efficiency, self-discipline, materialism, and calculability (all of which are subsumed under Weber's concept of zweckrational) have been encouraged by the bureaucratization process.

Bureaucracy and rationalization were rapidly replacing all other forms of organization and thought. They formed a stranglehold on all sectors of Western society:

It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving toward bigger ones--a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative systems, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy ...is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics. . . we were to deliberately to become men who need "order" and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.

The Political Sphere:

The consistent brotherly ethic of salvation religions has come into an equally sharp tension with the political orders of the world. Local (community, tribe, household, etc.) gods and magic were not a problem The problem arose when these barriers of locality, tribe and polity were shattered by universalistic religions. And the problem arose in full strength only when this god was a god of 'love.' The problem of tension with the political order emerged for redemption religions out of the basic demand for brotherliness. In politics as in economics, the more rational the political order became, the sharper the problems of these tensions became.

The brotherliness of a group of men bound together in war appears valueless in brotherly religions; it is seen as a mere reflection of the technically sophisticated brutality of the struggle. It's consecration appears as the glorification of fratricide.

The only two consistent solutions (first three guesses don't count...): puritanism and mysticism. Puritanism believes God's commands should be imposed on the world by the means of the world -- violence, so ''just war'' is not a problem for Puritanism (God is on their side). The mystics take a ''radical political attitude'' of ''turning the other cheek'' which makes them appear ''necessarily vulgar and lacking in dignity in the eyes of every self-assured worldly ethic of heroism.''

Organic social ethics (where religiously substructured) stands on the soil of brotherliness, but, in contrast to mystic and acosmic love, is dominated by a cosmic, rational demand for brotherliness. It point of departure is the experience of the inequality of religious charisma. The fact that the holy should be accessible to some and not all is unbearable to organic social ethics. It therefore attempts to synthesize this inequality of charismatic qualifications with secular stratification by status, into a cosmos of God-ordained services which are specialized in function. Certain tasks are given to every individual and every group according to their social and economic position as determined by fate. Without something like the Indian doctrine of Karma (which says there's a reason why you're bottom dog), every organic social ethic unavoidably represents an accommodation to the interests of the privileged strata of the world.

From the standpoint of inner-worldly asceticism, the organic ethic lacks the drive for an ethical and thorough rationalization of individual life. In such matters, it has no premium for the rational and methodical patterning of personal life in the interest of the individual's own salvation. The organic pragmatism of salvation must consider the redemptory aristocracy of inner-worldly asceticism, with its rational depersonalization of life orders, as the hardest form of lovelessness and lack of brotherliness. It must also consider the redemptory pragmatism of mysticism as a sublimated and unbrotherly indulgence of the mystic' s own charisma. Both inner-worldly asceticism and mysticism ultimately condemn the social world to absolute meaninglessness (or, at least they hold that God's aims concerning the world are utterly incomprehensible).

The rationalism of religious and organic doctrines of society cannot stand up under this idea; for it seeks to comprehend the world as an at least relatively rational cosmos in spite of all its wickedness: the world must hear at least traces of the divine plan of salvation.

The organic ethic of society is an eminently conservative power hostile to revolution. Virtuoso religion is a potentially revolutionary force. Its revolutionary turn may assume two forms: 1), (from inner-worldly asceticism, with an absolute divine law) it becomes a religious duty to realize this divine natural law. This corresponds to an obligation to crusade. 2), (from mysticism) The commands of the world do not hold for the man who is assured in his obsession with god.