Weber's Science As a Vocation and Politics As a Vocation Term Paper

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Weber's Analysis Of Vocation In The Modern, Secular Protestant World

In both his essays on "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a Vocation," the father of sociology Max Weber advances the idea that the development of a Protestant religious ideology created modern, secular notions of what constituted a vocation. At the time of his writing, Weber stated, it had become increasingly accepted that there was an equal validity of the vocations of science and politics, as opposed to the sole existence of a vocation of faith in service of God. Before Protestantism, religious dogma and religious bureaucratic institutions alone determined scientific truth. Religious internal politics also influenced national politics and political affairs. Now, Protestantism allowed for the creation of a private, religious sphere of the sacred that was intrinsically separate from a public, secular sphere of academic or political thought.

This rendering science and politics as potentially respectable vocations and also severed much of the religious meddling of past eras in science and politics. Protestantism made God a personal matter, rather than a matter filtered between a believer, Church, and only finally conveyed to God. Yet Weber also saw an advancing danger -- much as he approved that religious persecutions of the past, of scientists and leaders, by the clergy had ended, he feared a new bureaucracy was being created within secular institutions that was equally stifling to good science and good government as the church had been in ages past.

According to Weber, academic bureaucracy and orthodoxy in science and ethical machinations for personal means in politics, even if deployed for secular means rather than sacred means.

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Bureaucracies within secular institutions were just as bad as the Church bureaucratic wrangling about dogma and appointments of specific cardinals. Likewise, although politics in the form of secular and civil administration became a legitimate vocation with the end of the "hero worship" style of leadership of the Renaissance, as Weber terms the worship of Popes and Machiavellian Princes, when poor administers rose merely because they knew 'the right people,' this was just as damaging, if not more so, than the rise of unethical cardinals in the Church.

Weber allows that unlike past systems of patronage, the modern state's creation of secular vocations was not measured in godliness but in the meeting of bureaucratic standards. But in "Science as a Vocation," Weber notes that a meritocracy in a bureaucracy is not enough to ensure excellence. Weber praises the modern academic system of the United States, "where the bureaucratic system exists, and the young academic man is paid from the very beginning. To be sure, his salary is modest; usually it is hardly as much as the wages of a semi-skilled laborer. Yet he begins with a seemingly secure position, for he draws a fixed salary." This salary confers intellectual and economic freedom to the academic apart from obedience to a bureaucracy.

Weber felt that most bureaucracies, particularly controlling bureaucracies such as that of the German academy, but also, to some extend in America as well, stifle the imagination rather than enable it. In this sense, quite often, secular vocations also have their similarities to….....

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