Paul Alper writes:
Max Weber gave a speech at Munich University in 1917, or possibly 1918 – the date is in dispute – while his country was about to lose World War I and a pandemic was about to engulf the world. His speech was blandly entitled, Science as a Vocation, and the written version first appeared in 1919. Here is a link to an English translation of his lecture. Not bad for one talk during WW I and a pandemic. Weber died in 1922 at the young age of 56 so he did not live long enough to fully appreciate how prescient his views were in the decade/decades to follow.
This really is a great lecture. I’d heard of Max Weber and I guess read one or two things by him, but I’d never read this one all the way through. Like the best lectures, it’s densely packed with ideas, kind of like a story that keeps introducing new characters to the drama before you have time to get tired of the ones who are already there.
I’d quote from Weber’s lecture but really you just have to read the whole thing. So please do so. It relates to many of the discussions we’ve had over the years regarding scientific culture, political science, the role of assumptions and modeling, scientific practice and scientific discovery, academic life, and lots more.
The bit about “intellectual sacrifice” near the end was great. Lots of secular academics do some intellectual sacrifice too, in order to play by the rules and not offend anyone powerful, or even internally, to not disturb their preconceived notions.
Max Weber’s talk (pre Hitler, pre NFL and pre Trump) of over 100 years ago [!] in Munich is really an eyeopener especially if you ever have attempted forecasting of any kind. Here are several examples:
“Hence academic life is a mad hazard. If the young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation [obtaining tenure], the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne. If he is a Jew, of course one says, give up any hope.”
“The American’s conception of the teacher who faces him is: he sells me his knowledge and his methods for my father’s money, just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage. And that is all. To be sure if the teacher happens to be a football coach, then, in this field, he is a leader. But if he is not this (or something similar in a different field of sports), he is simply a teacher and nothing more. And no young American would think of having the teacher sell him a Weltanschauung or a code of conduct.”
“Fellow students! You come to our lectures and demand from us the qualities of leadership, and you fail to realize in advance that of a hundred professors at least ninety-nine do not and must not claim to be football masters in the vital problems of life, or even to be ‘leaders’ in matters of conduct.”
“In very important respects German university life is being Americanized, as is German life in general.
“A counterpart are the events at the papal elections, which can be traced over many centuries and which are the most important controllable examples of a selection of the same nature as the academic selection. The cardinal who is said to be the ‘favorite’ only rarely has a chance to win out. The rule is rather that the Number Two cardinal or the Number Three wins out. The same holds for the President of the United States. Only exceptionally does the first-rate and most prominent person get the nomination of the convention. Mostly the Number Two and often the Number Three persons are nominated and later run for election. ”
Max Weber strongly believed that sociology was a discipline that belonged within the sciences. Tom Lehrer, thought otherwise and here is one Lehrer’s lesser known contributions to society:
https://tomlehrersongs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/sociology.pdf
Here is the third verse:
Joes
Who wrote pros
Now write algebra. Who knows?
It may be Sociology.
They’re
Everywhere
Full of sigma and chi-square
And full of — Sociology .
They consult
Sounding occult
Talking like a mathematics Ph.D.
They can snow all their clients
By calling it ” science”
Although it’s only Sociology.
The other verses are equally vicious.
Finally found the somewhat obscure video of Tom Lehrer singing all four verses about Sociology
https://sociologiac.net/2009/03/03/sociology-song-by-tom-lehrer/
I’m not sure I see the contradiction between Weber and Lehrer, at least from what you’ve posted. The fact sociology “belongs within the sciences” doesn’t imply that its practitioners will employ sound scientific practice – and we’ve seen time and time again that they frequently don’t employ sound scientific practice, despite being lodged at least nominally within the sciences.
BTW, I selected an entirely different set of quotes from Weber as being important.
His take on US presidential elections (and elections in general) is mistaken. He states:
“Only exceptionally does the first-rate and most prominent person get the nomination”
His mistake here is to claim that the “most prominent” candidate is “first-rate”. IMO “first-rate” candidates in US politics are virtually non-existent at any level in any party. What makes the US system work is that it is competitive – the quacks from one party are balanced out, or approximately so, at least over time, by the quacks from the other party. Hence Warren might get elected, but Cruz also gets elected.
Also, academic hiring isn’t comparable to American elections. Nominally, yes, candidates compete against one another for each job. But those candidates have already been culled to the “mainstream” by graduate program selection, and by the funding and publishing systems. That “mainstream” in any given discipline is determined by an very small number of people compared to the larger population, which allows it to become strongly biased. (And by that measure, Pope election is an order of magnitude worse than academic hiring).
Qualifying my statement on academic hiring:
I’ll suggest: the degree to which bureaucracy contributes to academic hiring is inversely proportional to the quantitative success of the discipline. IOW, Physics, the most quantitatively successful discipline, should have the lowest proportion of bureaucratic hiring, since the “quality” of work is borne out by its quantitative success, rather than personal judgements about its value.
I started reading this; it seems nice, and hopefully I’ll find time to finish it later. (Appropriately, one of the tasks of the day is reading faculty applications…) Wondering if there’s a more legible version, I found https://hscif.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Max-Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf , which has useful footnotes, and which also differs in its translation. For example, ” he takes up residence on the basis of a book and, usually, a rather formal examination before the faculty of the university.” vs, in this version, “he qualifies as a university lecturer on the basis of a book and an examination — something of a formality for the most part — in the presence of the faculty as a whole.”
“Er habilitiert sich nach Rücksprache und mit Zustimmung des betreffenden Fachvertreters, auf Grund eines Buches und eines meist mehr formellen Examens vor der Fakultät, an einer Universität.” (German 1922 published version https://www.textlog.de/2333.html near the top)
“sich habilitieren” means to get the “venia legendi”, i.e. to qualify as a university lecturer at a specific university, so I would say “take up residence” implies too much: he isn’t hired or paid yet, which is pretty much Weber’s point. OTOH the second translation seems to omit the fact that this qualification is only valid for a specific university (“an einer Universität”).
When I decided to submit something for publication about Weber’s remarkable prescience, I actually used this translation:
https://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/X/WeberScienceVocation.pdf
Just as with the translation used by Raghu Parthasarathy, females did not exist at German universities some hundred years ago. The default is always male when it comes to tenure and “the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage” with the assumption that females always do the shopping from the default male at the shop/store.
Emmy Noether was an interesting exception (about the comment that females didn’t exist in academia). However, the fact that I can only name one person bears out your point. She was barred from lecturing I believe, because she was a woman.
Today in Germany there is a prestigious research grant named after her.
As a FWIW aside here, Japanese academics, intellectuals, and public intellectuals have been fans of Max Weber since like, forever, and one can’t deal with Japanese intellectual life without tripping over the bloke ever other sentence, it sometimes seems. When I did a (quick and dirty one year) MA in East Asian Studies, they made us look up and read some Weber. The first translation I found was probably English but read more like German than English. A while later I found a more recent, and far more reasonable translation, and he was clearly making lots of sense.
Translation: Hey, thanks for reminding of something I need to read again and in more depth. Appreciated!
Thanks for reminding us of the insight of Weber. I had the benefit of studying under one of his last students, Hans Gerth, and he had many of the qualities I imagine Weber must have had: a wide-ranging but systematic mind, a very personal mixture of radicalism and conservatism, and an overflowing library of books, books, books. I can’t say exactly what I learned, but I think, whatever it was, it was important.
I’ve always liked this essay, but I don’t accept the stark distinction between normative and positive analysis he presents. We have to separate them, but then we have to see how they are interwoven. In this respect, I felt more at home with Dewey’s approach once I discovered it. Dewey approaches ethics inductively; I think he would have been intrigued by the experimentalism in this field we see today. Normative evaluation still rests on pre-analytical priors, but the scope for reasoning and evidence can be made much wider than it usually is. Perhaps this is also what Weber was getting at in his discussion of “clarity”.
My favorite passage from the essay is the one where he talks about inconvenient facts and the ethical achievement of teachers who can expand their students’ capacity for cognitive dissonance (not his term of course).
There’s this new translation of both of the “vocation lectures” that might be of interest: https://www.nyrb.com/products/charisma-and-disenchantment?variant=14728903786548
I read it recently, but I hadn’t read other translations previously.
I liked Peter Dorman’s sentence: ” I can’t say exactly what I learned, but I think, whatever it was, it was important.”
That is sort of how I felt when I read this lecture (over several days as it was so long).
Perhaps there was some context for this lecture that I am missing (no, for sure I am missing something), but it sounds like an incoherent mess. I would not call it a great lecture by today’s standards at least. My problem with this lecture is I have no idea where he is going. Maybe in its own time and space there was a subtext that was clear to the listener; it escaped me.
The German habilitation is slowly being phased out, by the way, and thank god for that. It was supposed to be replaced by the Juniorprofessorship (a sort of assistant prof. in the US), but it is hard to eradicate from every single department. I was one of the first few Juniorprofs installed in Potsdam back in 2004, and after three years there was an evaluation, and that was officially considered to be a habil equivalent (at least for job applications in some German states, not sure if it’s official). Unlike proper habils, one cannot use the title Privadozent (PD) when one gets a habil equivalent.
There is also a weird German law that requires postdocs to get a professorship within 12 years or get out (as in, they cannot be kept on even if one has the money to keep them). You can get extensions if you have children during your postdoc period. In my opinion, it’s a pretty dumb law, because many postdocs are thrown out of academia after having invested most of their adult life into science, and despite having performed really well but just being not lucky enough to get a professorship. I like the French system more where you have these Mittelbau (mid-level) positions which are paid not as well as professorships but at least give you a tenured job. I wish Germany would adopt at least a version of the French approach.