Page 70 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

GERMAN SOCIOLOGY

modernity and of modernization: capitalism is above all a system of
rational economic calculation; bureaucracy is the distinctly modern
form of rational organization; Protestantism is a system of religious
belief peculiarly conducive to a radical rationalization of individual
ethical conduct; and even occidental music and its system of notation
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is distinctively and characteristically rationalized. In some respects
this notion runs parallel to Marx’s theory of alienation, and especially
so in its negative moment, as in the characterization of modernity as
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an iron cage of reason. It is sometimes suggested that Weber’s
rationalization thesis implies a much more benign vision of capitalism
than that in Marx. I doubt that this is so, for Weber feared the negative
moment in rationalization, just as Marx had acknowledged the positive
in capitalism.
Paradoxically, the fundamental difference between Marx and Weber
is, as Giddens recognizes, over whether history itself has a rationality:
Marx, following Hegel, though that it had; Weber, following Kant,
that it had not. Thus Weber’s position might very well be described,
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in Gouldner’s phrase, as a “nightmare Marxism”, a Marxism with
pessimism substituted for optimism. Hence Weber’s suspicion that
socialism, far from providing a solution to the problems of
bureaucratization, might only exacerbate them. This understanding
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of the modern world as an iron cage of disenchantment, we should
note, is yet another instance of the culturalist antithesis between culture
and civilization, or, to use Weber’s own terms, between Wertrationalität
and Zweckrationalität. 47
Weber’s theory of legitimation is only one especially important
particular instance of his general stress on the social effectivity of
belief. Despite the recognition, in The German Ideology, of the
significance of ruling ideas, both Marx himself and most immediately
subsequent Marxists had tended to explain social order, insofar as it
could be said to exist at all, as a consequence either of the mode of
production or of the state. Weber, by contrast, stressed legitimate
authority, that is, a type of imperative control based on the acceptance
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by subordinates of the right of superordinates to give orders. Weber
sketches out an ideal typology of three main kinds of legitimation,
but by far the most significant for modernity is the rational/legal
type, which rests “on a belief in the ‘legality’ of patterns of normative
rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to
issue commands”. In effect, this is little more than a restatement of
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