The Workshop and the World: What Ten Thinkers Can Teach Us About Science and Authority by Robert P. Crease

Author:Robert P. Crease
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton Company
Published: 2019-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

The more complicated and specialized modern culture becomes, the more its external supporting apparatus demands the personally detached and strictly “objective” expert, in lieu of the lord of older social structures, who was moved by personal sympathy and favor, by grace and gratitude. Bureaucracy offers the attitudes demanded by the external apparatus of modern culture in the most favorable combination.16

But bureaucracy also makes rationalization incarnate, becoming its worldly arms and legs. “The more the bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.”17 Bureaucracy also replaces old-style rulers who are motivated by concern, sympathy, grace, and personal judgment, with emotionally detached, professional experts. Rationalization also corrodes the value neutrality of the scientific workshop, by making it easier for scientists to leave their humanity outside the lab, acting not as scientists but as agents of funding agencies or political ideologies.

Some of bureaucracy’s acts of dehumanization can be blunted by what Weber called “ideological halos” that religion, politics, or some other activity occasionally give to certain cultural values. Yet some stronger countermeasure is needed to keep bureaucracy from stifling the modern state. Weber could not find it.

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