Science, Politics, Enchantment
(Originally published in John A. Hall & Ian C. Jarvie [Eds], Transition to Modernity, 1992, see abstract 93c01707.) Max Weber's essays Science as a Vocation (1917) & Politics as a Vocation (1919) raised themes that Ernest Gellner later addresses with a more sanguine attitude. Weber seeks a morality specific to the pursuit of science & politics in the distinction he draws between vocation & profession. Weber's conception of the multiplicity of values leads him to vacillate between ethical pluralism & nihilism. This moral indeterminacy leads Weber to embrace nationalism & its symptomatic conflicts such as WWI. Gellner finds a moral meaning in science & scientific rationality that mediates the value pluralism of modernity. Gellner has a more thorough understanding of religion & nationalism in the modern world & accommodates them in his multilateral vision of the world without embracing them as means to salvation. 10 References. H. von Rautenfeld