In 1917 and 1919, at the invitation of University of Munich students, Max Weber delivered two public lectures, “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation.” Why read these lectures today? What do they offer for navigating our own contemporary predicaments in knowledge and politics?
Weber was a dark thinker. This was not only a matter of his temperament or times. As important was his unrivaled appreciation of certain logics of modernity: its signature rationalities and forms of power; its generation of “human machineries” with unprecedented capacities for domination; its simultaneous proliferation and depreciation of value and values (its reduction of morality to matters of taste); the incapacity of democracy to resist or transform these developments; and the great challenge of cultivating responsible teaching and political leadership amid them. In a world he viewed as choked by powers destructive of human spirit and freedom, as well as forthrightly dangerous, he sought to craft practices by which both scholars and political actors might hold back the dark with their work.
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In 1917 and 1919, at the invitation of University of Munich students, Max Weber delivered two public lectures, “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation.” Why read these lectures today? What do they offer for navigating our own contemporary predicaments in knowledge and politics?
Weber was a dark thinker. This was not only a matter of his temperament or times. As important was his unrivaled appreciation of certain logics of modernity: its signature rationalities and forms of power; its generation of “human machineries” with unprecedented capacities for domination; its simultaneous proliferation and depreciation of value and values (its reduction of morality to matters of taste); the incapacity of democracy to resist or transform these developments; and the great challenge of cultivating responsible teaching and political leadership amid them. In a world he viewed as choked by powers destructive of human spirit and freedom, as well as forthrightly dangerous, he sought to craft practices by which both scholars and political actors might hold back the dark with their work.
This is one reason for turning to him now. We need sober thinkers who refuse to submit to the lures of fatalism or apocalypticism, pipe dreams of total revolution or redemption by the progress of reason — yet aim to be more than Bartlebys or foot soldiers amid current orders of knowledge and politics.
A second reason for thinking with Weber pertains to his deep confrontation with nihilism. If he is better known for his formalizations of methods and ideal types, folding hermeneutics into objective studies of social action, and his unique reformulation of materialist history to feature the centrality of values, this list occludes his effort to combat nihilistic effects in both knowledge and politics. This feature of his thought is overtly signaled by his frequent allusions to Tolstoy’s conclusion that in modernity, death, and hence life, is meaningless, and to Dostoyevsky’s portrait of the ethical irrationality of the world. It appears in his concerns with the effects of disenchantment, rationalization, boundary breakdowns, and the ubiquity of vanity or narcissism in intellectual, political, and cultural life. Hardly nihilism’s most complex theorist — Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Rorty, Rosen, and Pippin offer richer philosophical accounts — Weber may be among its most political.
By nihilism, I do not mean, nor did Weber, that all value has disappeared from the world, or that life is without purpose or meaning. Understood as a historical condition rather than a contingent attitude, one born from the displacement of religious authority by science broadly understood, nihilism both emerges from modernity and generates distinct predicaments for meaning within it. Science explains how things work but not what they mean — it cannot generate or rank values, or as Tolstoy puts it, science “has no answer to the only questions that matter to us, ‘What shall we do?’ How shall we live?’” Thus, on the one hand, there are no routes to securing meaning and value that do not resurrect discredited sources for that securing — religion, tradition, or pure reason — a discrediting that makes such appeals inevitably reactionary and shrill. On the other hand, faith in progress is revealed as a secularized version of the Christian millennium and as empirically confounded by modernity’s failure to deliver generalized peace, prosperity, happiness, or freedom. When appeals to origins and telos thus falter, programs for change themselves lose their compass, as if, in Nietzsche’s words, “we unchained the earth from its sun.” Now we are spinning without tether or illumination, without coordinates for knowing what to affirm and negate, without temporality or directionality for a motion of history. Under these conditions, both purpose and judgment alike are stripped naked, unbearably so.
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Put another way, for Weber, in modernity, on the one hand, all meaning is revealed as made rather than discovered, and values are at once consummately important yet ultimately undecidable. On the other hand, established meanings and the value of values are relentlessly unmade by forces of disenchantment and rationalization, respectively the usurpation of myth and mystery by science and the cannibalization of ends by means in a world governed by instrumental rationality. The deleterious effects of this condition are many, but among the most important for Weber is the simultaneous proliferation and deflation of value.
How, then, to recover the value of values in a nihilistic world? And how to think and teach in nihilistic times?
The “Vocation Lectures” are built around two related sets of distinctions, between scholarship and politics, and between facts and values. Weber is infamous for drawing these distinctions not as mere differences but as opposites that inhabit separate spheres, and entail radically different personal commitments, ethics, and responsibilities. He is also known for reprimanding both those who mix facts with values and those who openly advance values in scholarly research or teaching.
However, in “Science as a Vocation,” far from excising values from scholarly consideration, Weber argues for closely analyzing them as ethical and political constellations with entailments for action, power, and violence. So important is this practice for him that when discussing ethical pedagogy, Weber turns not to the question of how to teach facts but of how to handle values in the classroom. Precisely because values are so important, and so imperiled, the task of the teacher is to withdraw them from the moral or theological castles in which they are often locked not to discover whether they are “true” — which they cannot be — but to submit them to rigorous analysis of their premises, “internal structure,” and entailments.
Such an approach differs radically from contemporary bids for teachers to “balance” political views with opposing ones, or to let them “compete” with one another for attractiveness, or to crown some political value systems as moral or correct while denouncing others as evil or wrong. These approaches leave values unexamined, implicitly rendering them as beyond the ken of the classroom, either because they are sacred and hence untouchable, or because they are mere opinion and hence unimportant, or because they are subjective and hence unscientific. Each turns values into objects of deference or derision rather than unflinching analysis.
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For Weber, values emerge from worldviews without rational origins or ultimate foundations, yet are no less analyzable for that. Moreover, submitting them to scholarly scrutiny is all important in a nihilistic age that both threatens value and confuses us about its status. The paradox of the “irrational” origin of values alongside the commitment to rationally analyze it is a vital dimension of what makes Weber’s perspective useful today. Weber implores scholars, especially but not only in their teaching capacity, to approach contemporary value concatenation “scientifically” even though the origins of values and the ultimate domain for their contestation lie in nonscientific domains — feeling or attachment for the former and politics for the latter.
Weber’s wager is that academic commitment to cool and impartial deconstruction of values can be a scene of sober mediation between the subjective and political realms, but only if subjectivity and politics are both barred from the academy. This paradox comprises the very scene of knowledge and the classroom that Weber aims to theorize, circumscribe, and protect. He is adamant that philosophers, theologians, or social scientists cannot and should not solve value disputes. Rather, the task and ethical requirement of the scholar and teacher is to treat values as objects of analysis and critique — that is, to examine them through historical and comparative analysis or through consideration of their logics and entailments, not as matters of truth.
In short, Weber believes that teachers can illuminate the stakes, implications, and possible trajectories of values in practice; we can help students clarify the meaning and entailments of the positions they hold. We can stress the importance of values in crafting a meaningful life, and crafting worlds according to intention rather than enormous yet faceless powers. But we cannot settle which values are right. That said, securing a dispassionate and thoughtful domain for analyzing value clashes may render their clashes — in an age of value proliferation and instrumentalization — both more substantive and less strident. Such scholarly and pedagogical practice might thus indirectly enrich the public sphere, and at the same time burnish the reputation of the academy. At a time when both domains are in peril and disrepute, this would be no minor accomplishment.
If Weber’s thought provokes an important conversation about ethical pedagogy in a nihilistic age, his methodological and political conservatism, along with the distance between his time and our own, requires that we augment and, in some cases, challenge his distinctions, admonitions, and prohibitions if we are to make his thinking useful to ours.
Certainly Weber is right about the obligation of faculty to teach students facts, including what he calls “inconvenient facts” — those that challenge received narratives or deep convictions. But we must also teach students about facticity, how facts come to be and to acquire legitimacy. We must introduce them to the complexities and competing theories of how facts are constituted and interpreted, their historical, social, discursive, and hermeneutic dimensions, their nonisolability from one another, and their lack of intrinsic meaning. In an age of so much confusion and duplicity about facts, science, and truth, what could be more important than helping students reflect on how each is made, rhetorically secured, destabilized, or contested?
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Weber is also right to insist that faculty are obliged to help students understand that no value system is ever “true,” but that, far from bringing analysis and judgment to an end or casting us adrift in relativism, this condition heightens the importance, indeed the urgency, of examining values — and deciding what to affirm, what to oppose, and what to seek to bring about in the world. At the same time, it heightens the importance of understanding the complex sources of value constitution and attachment — sources Weber leaves mostly to subjective inclinations — and understanding value depletion and the nihilism it breeds. This in turn might help students understand why value concatenation is at once so intense and so shrill in our time.
Weber is right, too, to demand in the classroom our self-consciousness, care, and restraint with regard to our own political views even if this cannot be fulfilled in the way he demanded because, from Kant to evolution, climate change to genocide, racial histories to constitutions, there are never facts or texts apart from interpretations of them. Weber is also right to worry about personality in the classroom substituting for teaching students how to research and think; yet not only is personality impossible to suppress, it is relevant to inciting students to ponder difficult ideas, and the sometimes long and arduous work of building them, in the age of Twitter and TikTok. Socrates might provide a useful supplement here. Rather than banishing the personal charisma of the teacher, or what Socrates depicted as the transferential erotics cultivating desire for wisdom in a student, Socrates offered an ethic of restraint and responsibility, the very ethic Weber sought for political action. Once again, Weber’s hard lines between the two spheres melt.
In short, while Weber exaggerated the opposition and distance between universities and politics, facts and values, he helps us see how the promise of each is threatened in an age of nihilistic boundary breakdown, and he reminds us of the many reasons for protecting an interval between the political (and political economic) and academic spheres. Intellectual analysis, discovery, critique, and reflection are fundamentally different from political action, legislation, and dicta. They mobilize different subjects and subjectivities; they draw on different languages, temporalities, aims, and ethoi; they have different requirements for realizing their potential. For this reason, demands that a curriculum comport with any political program — right or left, secular or religious — ought to be rebuffed. Such conflation corrupts both spheres.
By nihilism, I do not mean, nor did Weber, that all value has disappeared from the world, or that life is without purpose or meaning.
In addition to keeping political agendas and didacticism away from curriculums, scholarship today requires protection from being bought by the powerful, valued only for its commercial applications or job training, and from devaluation by anti-democrats aiming to keep the masses stupid and manipulable. (It is worth recalling former President Donald Trump’s spontaneous cri de coeur at a 2016 campaign rally: “I love the poorly educated!”)
Preserving the scholarly realm for the relative autonomy and integrity of thought, indeed for thinking itself, means resisting both the hyperpoliticization of knowledge and its structuration by relations of dependence — state, economic, or philanthropic. Even with the world in an emergency state, then, where we may want every scholarly hand on deck, a moat between academic and political life is essential. This moat is vital to protecting reflection, imagination, and accountability in knowledge production and dissemination. It is also vital to protecting an understanding and practice of facticity against the indifference to it generated by nihilism while remaining faithful to the complexity of knowledge formation. It distinguishes the place where values are struggled for from the place where they can be queried and analyzed, doubted, taken apart, reconsidered.
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Of course it is the case that scholarly work, including that of theory and critique, can inform particular political struggles and develop their potential or illuminate their weaknesses. The complexities of consent, autonomy, and choice; the slippery semiotics of corporations and personhood; the ambiguous workings of human rights; the failures and aporias of constitutional democracy; the instability and historicity of race and gender; the novel and wily powers of finance capital: Consideration of these may help build effective political projects and refine political positions. But that does not mean these complexities can be aired in the midst of political campaigns, nor should they be confused with them. Just as nothing is more corrosive to serious intellectual work than being governed by a political program (whether that of states, corporations, foundations, or a revolutionary movement), nothing is more inappropriate to a political campaign than the unending reflexivity, critique, and self-correction required of scholarly inquiry. It is not a matter of being “too deep in the weeds” but of the profound differences between the sphere where knowledge is achieved by opening up meaning and complexity, and the sphere where a political aim is realized through fixing meaning and reducing complexity. Scholars and students must allow and be open to the productive disruption of their assumptions and axioms, and be willing to be uncertain and even bewildered at times. Political actors, on the other hand, must be steadfast, strategic, and focused. Neither kind of activity should be scolded for its inapplicability to the other or submitted to the spirit and requirements of the other.
This is not a brief for arcane knowledge or ivory-tower thinkers wholly unaccountable or indifferent to the world we live in. Rather, I am suggesting that Weber’s distinction between the pursuit of value as a political cause and the submission of value to relentless intellectual scrutiny is ultimately far more important than his fact/value distinction in differentiating academic from political life. Indeed, the first distinction may help undo the second insofar as Weber’s own hard codification of scholarly value neutrality must, by his own account, be available to contestation, and hence to the surfacing of values in knowledge production.
Moreover, relations between the academic and political realms are as important as the corridor of their separation. This is especially true in a democracy, which cannot survive an uneducated citizenry. We know now that curtailed access to and eroded quality of public higher education, as well as denigration of the value of college apart from job training, were key strategies of the neoliberal and right-wing assault on democracy of the past four decades. In a downward spiral, the anti-intellectualism that discredits education in turn depletes capacities for democratic citizenship and makes citizens manipulable. In addition, academic specialization and professionalization, replacement of public with private research support, and neoliberal pressures on universities for immediate market deliverables — in research outcomes and the production of human capital — have together diverted research and teaching from public, worldly purposes precisely when the crises of our time demand the opposite.
Given these recent histories, it may be that we teachers have lately been too absorbed by issues of academic freedom while paying too little attention to matters of academic responsibility. The former is not trivial, especially given powerful right-wing campaigns to regulate curriculums and pedagogy. But might the latter also address in a profound and worldly way our imperiled collective future? Possibly the most important question before the professoriate today is not “what have we the right to say and do in or outside the classroom,” but “what curriculums and pedagogies contribute to educating and enabling citizenries in these times?” How do we cultivate knowledgeable and thoughtful citizens in the short, fraught space of a college education, especially with so many other claims on students today? Ought we to reconsider the wide latitude offered to most university students in what they can study … and avoid studying? What pedagogical strategies, texts, topics, and discussions might help redirect the reactive personal politics in which today’s students are steeped? How can we encourage deliberation about the large-scale economic, political, social, and ecological trajectories of the present and near future?
And how do we break the siloization, professionalization, and instrumentalization of knowledge that makes too much academic knowledge unworldly? How do we help students, faculty, and administrators alike shed the absorption with enhancing personal and institutional capital that keeps them loyal to this siloization, professionalization, and instrumentalization?
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Essential to this work is turning hard toward, rather than away from, values in the classroom. By this I do not mean promulgating values. Classrooms are where values may be studied as more than opinions, ideologies, party or religious loyalties — but also as more than distractions from the empirical, technical, instrumental, or practical. It is where they can be deepened as worldviews or recognized as falling short of that possibility, analyzed historically and theoretically, considered in the contexts of the specific powers that mobilize and transmogrify them, and scrutinized for the interests they serve. It is where they can be examined genealogically, culturally, economically, and psychically — for example, as complex reaction formations or theological remainders. It is also where they can be discovered in powers — algorithms, markets, law courts — that disavow them through feigned neutrality or objectivity. Above all, it is where they can be framed by responsible teachers as both foundationless yet all-important in grasping and responding to the many crises of our time.
Approaching values in these ways would constitute a vital counter to a nihilistic age in which values are trivialized and instrumentalized; a political age in which they are widely perceived as monopolized by religionists on the right and secular righteousness on the left; a capitalist age of ubiquitous branding in which they are mobilized to expand market share; a technocratic age in which they are buried in platforms and apps; and a secular liberal age in which they are personalized and individualized. Re-centering the study of values in higher education would also counter the steady pressure on universities, especially public ones, to elevate professional and STEM education above all else, an elevation that gravely threatens the most important remaining venue for deep and informed reflection on the world, a threat could not come at a worse time in history.
But substantive treatment of values does not only move against the grain of external forces; it also encounters the crushing effects of an unprecedentedly riven consciousness borne by contemporary university students. On the one hand, most have internalized the neoliberal mandate to calculate and titrate their every educational, social, civic, and personal investment, relentlessly tending their human capital to build their individual prospects. On the other hand, most are alert to the looming global ecological, political, and economic catastrophes that make the world in which they are tending this value likely to soon crash out of the universe. No generation has ever stared so directly into its own lack of collective future while managing such intense, complex requirements for building its personal and immediate one.
This predicament is too much for many young spirits, essentially enjoined to put one entrepreneurial foot in front of the other as if they were not walking toward catastrophe. Build your résumé, cultivate your networks, find your mate … save and plan for an unaffordable home, unlikely retirement, the end of democracy, and an uninhabitable planet. Most young people are in a mode of preapocalyptic survivalism, as are we all to some extent.
One way we might address this predicament is to acknowledge it and break it open with deliberately postnihilist questions for our students:
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“What world do you want to live in?”
“How should or could humans order common arrangements, with each other and other life forms, at this juncture in world history?”
“What table of values ought to organize our existence? Sustainability? (What does that mean or entail?) Freedom? (What kind?) Mutual tolerance or recognition of differences? Equality? (What kind?) Families or alternative kinship? (What kind?) Meaningful work or the abolition of work? Religion protected or diminished? Worldwide institutions or local ones?”
Demands that a curriculum comport with any political program — right or left, secular or religious — ought to be rebuffed.
“How have the powers and technologies invented and unleashed but not controlled or governed by humans produced specific ways of being human and of inhabiting the planet? Are there ways to confront the fears and despair related to this conjuncture without being wrecked by them? What do we need to know and think about, hence to study, in order to address these and related questions in a deep and thoughtful way?”
Empirical analyses (how things are ordered and work now) along with historical and material analyses (the forces that brought us to this pass and the powers organizing it) are all critical in framing such questions. Psychology, sociology, and political economy are important in developing and complicating them. Literary, theoretical, philosophical, artistic, and other modes of rendering and interpreting the world are indispensable to tackling them, as is basic literacy in science, technology, and philosophy of science. Indeed, there is almost no part of the university curriculum that cannot be brought to bear on these questions, although the professional schools and preprofessional tracks may need the most help and encouragement in bending toward them.
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Students should not be expected to answer these questions but incited to ask them and assisted in exploring them. Our pedagogy should be aimed at illuminating and deepening them. In this way, we would not only be attending to student anxiety rather than shipping it off to the ever-growing college counseling and pharmaceutical industry but initiating students into basic practices of curious and thoughtful citizenship.
In addition to offering students the concrete knowledge required to understand their world, we would be teaching them what is entailed in arriving at deep and considered value positions that are essential to meaningfully crafting their own lives. Equally important, orienting some of our curriculum and teaching in this way could help dismantle the shrill and relatively anti-intellectual character of the politicized academy today, offering in its place more productive, and more intellectual, ways of relating academic and political life.
Such work comports with Weber’s argument for our pedagogical duty to “foster clarity and a sense of responsibility” in students, but it accomplishes two things his program does not. First, it aims to make students more worldly and to incite their engagement with the world, both as they find it and as they may imagine it otherwise. Second, it treats values as ineradicable elements of learning about the world as it is, that is, as embedded in what Weber treated as the factual world. In both respects, it would be a steady disrupter of both positivism and fatalism.
It should be clear that this is not an argument to place the question, “What is to be done?” at the heart of college curriculums. Nor is it a brief for “tolerating all viewpoints” in the classroom, a conceit that diminishes rather than builds the stature of values insofar as it treats “viewpoints” as personal possessions, like property, rather than as worldviews with power entailments. Developing Weber’s encomium to replace such tolerance with fearless scrutiny and hence a certain depersonalization of values would today include helping students see why highly personalized justice claims and values imagined as nearly written on the body are at once effects of neoliberalism and markers of a nihilistic loss of world and crisis of desire. These things require thoughtful and compassionate exposure if we are to pique student curiosity about understanding the sources and implications of their political claims, and incite their interest in other modes of political thought, identity, and purpose.
Fearless, critical analysis of values, consideration of the knowledges necessary to form them intelligently, and identification of their importance to individual and collective freedom and futurity — these are hardly the principles by which most university curriculums are designed today. Apart from pressure from every quarter to turn all but elite institutions in vocational directions, putatively norm-free methods in mainstream social science, where values are treated as illegal aliens, actively discourage such concerns. And in most approaches to studying social and political behavior, as well as in mainstream philosophy, values tend to be reduced to norms, norms to opinions, and opinions to surveyable attitudes. Students themselves have come to expect teachers to deliver “information” (increasingly in bullet points) and have learned to be made nervous by large, unanswerable questions in classroom settings. And instructor “bias” tends to be narrowly casted as overt political statements, a narrowing that excludes modes of interpreting facts, the politics of methods, the treatment of theory, and much more. In all of these respects, the mission reorientation I am suggesting for liberal-arts curriculums, pushing as it does against current forces shaping higher education, is revolutionary. And yet it was old, conservative Weber who inspired it.
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This essay is excerpted and adapted from Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber (Harvard University Press).
Wendy Brown is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of California at Berkeley and a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study.