Description
The backdrop of Max Weber’s well-known lectures on science and politics is the process by which the world becomes “disenchanted,” literally de-magic-ified. Among other things, this means that the world loses whatever intrinsic moral meaning it may once have carried, leaving us with a clash of putatively universal value-claims that cannot be resolved in a globally compelling manner. The irony of this disenchanted condition is that we are left with universals that cannot actually function as universals — we cannot simply abandon them, but we cannot simply affirm them either. Weber’s solution is a pragmatic one, relying on the tension between these formally universal ethical imperatives and the practical necessities of acting in the world (particularly the practical requisites of governing) to prevent terrible harms from occurring. This in turn demands a novel grammar of political contestation, and a robust pluralism that stands in continual need of nurturing (even, and perhaps especially, by social scientists), in order that social relations may continue in the absence of any overarching normative consensus.
