Re: commentary is a minstral show

There is one thing to come to grips of this problem. His idea about
bureaucracies grew out of his experience of the bureaucracies in Prussian
government. In the later year of his life he saw the principles of Taylor
and the practice of Henry Ford coming.
Do we today experience bureaucracies that are filled with more of
""specialists" being groupish, unassertive, and demotivated ", than those
forms of bureaucracies that Weber experienced. I think that could be true.
The mechanisms creating the bureaucracies Weber studied have, however, lost
their influence. These are not neede any longer to keep the impersonalism
living in bureaucracies.
"In Baxter's
view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders
of the 'saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any
moment.' But fate decreed that the cloak became an iron cage."
(Weber, _The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_,
p. 181, New York, Scribner, 1958.)
The willingness of individuals to spend their time in work, is not any
longer governed by a sense of moral and particularly not religious duty.
Weber once wrote something like: "The Puritan wanted to be a specialist,
we have to be it." Something like this development has in fact been going
on after the death of Weber in 1920.


At 16:23 1999-01-12 -0800, you wrote:
>According to this interp of Weber, individuation would not be preferred;
>I
>would like to suggest that Weber would have preferred individuation as
>compared to the groupish,
>unassertive, and demotivated "specialists" found in bureaucracies today.
>
>----
>In the Protestant Ethic, Weber castigates modern society, it is true,
>because individuals feel compelled to work and seek material comforts
>without the spiritual checks inherent to the early Protestant
>experience. They are mere pleasure-seekers, whose function is socially
>reactionary; Kings have always protected them because their activity
>counters the moralism on which the opposition (he mentions the labor
>union) depends. Your concept of individuation, as you have used it in
>conjunction with what asserts to be an empirical fact, will, when
>pressed to its outermost boundaries, collapse. Is it individuation to
>be the slave of a patriarchal God (or a Kaiser, as Weber was to find out
>after WWI)? Any more than one's own lusts? Your stereotype of the
>contemporary bureaucracy bears much in common with Weber's
>"traditionalist," or Catholic in Protestant Ethic, less with the facts
>of the present day (your language suggests to me that you'd rather have
>the Prussian army delivering your mail or policing your streets) or the
>constitutional structure of the United States and its divergence from
>the monarchic system. Recall, of course, that Weber postwar strove to
>give rhetorical reasons why one should, in spite of modernist
>disillusionment, see science and politics as spiritually valid; the
>appeals are subjective, while corresponding to a perceived objective
>need in Weimar (peaceful professions vs. war machine). It is a banality
>in sociology departments that Weber was an individualist, disregarding
>the checks he saw as necessary; as it stands your definition stinks of
>Ayn Rand.
>
>Yours,
>Matt
>
>
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>>In a message dated 1/11/99 3:34:22 PM Eastern Standard Time,
>>mthrond@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
>>
>>> Society was
>>> fluid and tolerant, but bereft of affective bonds and deep emotional
>>> comforts (Specialists without spirit, said Weber).
>>
>>According to this interp of Weber, individuation would not be
>preferred; I
>>would like to suggest that Weber would have preferred individuation as
>>compared to the groupish,
>>unassertive, and demotivated "specialists" found in bureaucracies
>today.
>>
>>Vunch
>>
>
>
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-------------------
"Måske er det blevet for meget med hovmod og den konsekvente fornæktelse af
det åndelige. For det er som
om kulden og fugten er vendt tilbake. Små tegn på trædhet er begyndt at
vise sig i de ellers så solide og
moderne bygninger."

Peter Norberg
http://hem.passagen.se/fosforos/RIGET.htm
ceepn@xxxxxx
fil. mag. idé- och lärdomshistoria
M. Sc., civ. ek. DHS

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