Re: Weber and rationality

-----Original Message-----
From: Ricardo Duchesne <RDUCHESN@unbsj.ca>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Date: Friday, January 22, 1999 4:18 PM
Subject: Re: Weber and rationality


>Ricardo:
>I would add that this emphasis on innovation as conduct is true of
>the whole Austrian school of economics; it was, in fact, Mises's key
>point against socialist planning.

Interesting - but unfortunately, an understanding of innovation as "action"
has largely disappeared from recent long waves discussions (for which, of
course, innovation is, at least in the Schumpeterian traditions, the central
force in an expansionary phase).

>One should not however reduce
>Weber's concept of rational action to economic action per se.

Which I don't do or suggest - but I am also unsure about the exact
relationship between "rational action" (by rational action, I mean action
that carefully considers ends, means and unintended consequences before
proceeding and then proceeds on the basis of these consideration) or the
result of rational action, namely, rationalization, and capitalism.

To phrase it in a "chicken and egg" format - What came "first" -
rationalization or capitalism. Does rationalization proceed capitalism so
that capitalism, for Weber is merely another example of rational action,
namely, the rational pursuit of profit or is the rationalization (and
"demagification") of the world a consequence (an emanation) of capitalism?

Logically, (at least), the latter makes more sense to me - namely that the
rationalization of economic conduct in turn influenced the rationalization
of other parts of the world - in E&S Weber basically states this is the case
of technology - modern technology (as we know it) is inseperable from the
context of modern capitalism (BTW, this is also a fairly standard position
in the study of technology - ex. David Noble and also underly the recently
fashionable discussions of "embeddedness" in sociology).  BTW, I also think
that this position is consistent with Weber's Protestant Ethic.  In other
words, Weber explains the origins of rational economic conduct in concerns
about salvation. From this singular point rationalization, as Weber suggest
at the end of the PE, spreads outward to (contaminates?) other spheres of
social life like the ripples from a stone thrown in a pond -

The other postion, rationalization has, so to speak, historical priority,
raises the question of why should rationalization suddenly appear, ex
nihilo, on the stage of history.

We have already debated AGF's "Re-Orient" and the issue of "euro-centrism"
on WSN about a year ago so I won't repeat my observations other than to say
that claiming that something historically different happended in Europe (as
a qualitative break or disconinuity) and, this in turn, transformed the
world - European, capitalist inspired/induced/ social strucures appear to be
emerging all over the world - is not a  euro-centric observation.  It is
merely the recognition that there are discontinuities in history.  These may
be macro, the emergence of new "world-systems", meso, the emergence of new
hegemonic powers or, micro, the emergence of new types of social relations.


>Dassbach, are you saying that for W  the "otherwordly"  motives
>guiding economic action are "irrational".

Here, I am guility of conflating the word rational (something I suspect that
I picked up from Marcuse's observation that capitalism uses rational means
to irrational ends).  Rational, at least as far as I can tell, is used in
two senses.  One sense, generally the most common sense is that something is
inherently "logical" or "reasonable" - eg Hegel phenomenology or Leibniz
monadology as rational philsophies. Maybe, it could be said that rational is
used in the sense of "ends" or "wert" rational. (or course, we have to ask
what is meant by inherently and this brings us back to the issue of
embeddness).  The other sense, but this far less common, is rational as
being "means" or "zweck" rational.  In German, one would use this term in
the sense of speaking about a "rationalization" of production. Americans
however generally don't use rational in this sense - if anything they
collapse the two sense and assume that things that are "means" rational -
for example, mass production - are also "ends" rational (why and how rthis
should occur is an interesting topic which can not be discussed here but
again, it has to do with context and embeddness).


What I should have said is that the original otherworldy motives that
provided the basis for innerworldly "rational" action are "unreasonable" in
sofar as they can not be (and can be as Kant shows us) logically proven or
disproven..  They are matters of faith.

>One should be careful not to reduce W's extremely rich, if
>convoluted, argument on the rise of the West to the Protestant
>thesis, as both Landes and Gunder Frank in their own ways tend to.


No, you can't reduce it to Protestantism but you can not, at least in terms
of Weber's thinking, ignore the role of Protestant if you ask Weber's
question - what is the origin of/source for the all prevailing
rationalization of western life.