Autor: Lawrence, G. Frederick

Buch: Communication and Lonergan

Titel: The Human Good and Christian Conversation

Stichwort: (b) Weber: Between Kant and Nietzsche; scial science (Sozialwissenschaft);

Kurzinhalt: realm of nature investigated by science -> the value-free domain of fact; Weber's "iron cage";

Textausschnitt: The realm of nature investigated by science and exploited by technology becomes the value-free domain of fact; whereas both the realm of freedom and responsibility and that of art and religion become the domain of value. As a result of this fateful distinction, the normative moment of culture intended by Lonergan's notion of terminal value gets sunk into the quagmire of the arbitrariness and caprice of values as the creation of the Nietzschean will-to-power. (258; Fs) (notabene)
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... Social science is confined to facts: It describes, and its descriptions are expected to yield information on the basis of which social policy can predict and control. Any normative judgment - either as classical intelligibility or as true judgments of fact and value - gets systematically excluded. The individual, group, or general bias of those in power leads them to repudiate true terminal values (beyond the desires and needs of organistic spontaneity) and to reject any intelligibility yielded by science that does not afford means of prediction and control. The point is to increase managerial efficiency even at the cost of human liberty or social, cultural, personal, or religious values. (258; Fs) (notabene)
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32 The ongoing mutual impenetrability of second and third levels becomes all the more disastrous when it comes to Weber's reconstruction of the reasons why people historically have obeyed authority. On the one hand, his construct of the charismatic form of legitimation is one of the few 19th century instances of evaluating religiously based existence positively, since for Weber charismatic authority is the privileged force or agency for social change. On the other hand, his hypothesis about modernity as a process of rationalization, combined with his analysis of bureaucratic control, spells out in a way that is verifiable the meaning of Nietzsche's critique of liberal democracy and socialism on the level of the good of order. Because, for all the preoccupation of liberal and socialist democracy with being emancipated from religious, feudal, monarchical, or aristocratic control; for all their preoccupation with the use of scientific prediction and manipulation "for the relief of man's estate," and of either consent and bargaining (liberal reformism) or violence (socialist revolution) to bring about an order of freedom in equality - it all seems only to have paved the way for bureaucracy and centralization: Weber's "iron cage." (259; Fs)