Max Weber: Science, Technology and Vocation

Abstract

Weber considered that instrumental rationality is a product of modern science and constitutes a distinctive sign of Western society, with the complexity of technological progress as its most developed expression. He considered that the expansion of instrumental rationality would lead to the divorce of the worker from the means of production, generating a bureaucratization of society as a whole (iron cage). The last few decades have witnessed an increasing separation of the dynamics of science and technology, which calls into question the traditional theory of knowledge and the motivation of scientific staff. This autonomous dynamic of technology has allowed the proliferation of explanations according to which technological transformations unilaterally determine the evolution of economic and social forms. Weber had already suggested an interdependence between the logic of technological rationality, the instrumental mastery of reality and the social forms that the economy takes. In this sense, Weber’s thought represents an opportunity to identify the objective conditions that determine those economic forms, as well as to establish the extent to which individual action gives meaning to the logic that makes these forms present themselves as they do, or the degree in which the subject is guided by a sense of purpose (vocation) or by an objectivity created by the action itself, which is imposed on the consciousness. Answering these Weberian questions will help us obtain a more accurate picture of the current role of technology, of the relationship between science and values, and of the epistemological and ethical problems associated with these transformations.