Science as an Ethical Mode of Life: On the Centenary of Max Weber’s Wissenschaft als Beruf

ABSTRACT

Max Weber’s reputation as one of the founding fathers of the modern social sciences relies in large measure on his methodological contributions such as value objectivity or freedom (Wertfreiheit) and ideal type (Idealtypus). This essay revisits Weber’s famous lecture on the Science as a Vocation (Wissenschaft als Beruf) to elucidate the meaning of these methodological doctrines that have come to constitute the core identity of the social sciences even into our time. By putting them in the larger context of his Kantian and Nietzschean background as well as the rationalization thesis he is also famous for, it argues that Weber’s methodological contributions read better not so much as an effort to establish a distinct field of research to be known as the social sciences than to prescribe a certain set of virtues to be possessed by the practitioners of this emerging genre of science. In its goal and contents, in short, Weber’s methodology is as ethical as it is epistemological.

KEYWORDS:

• Value Freedom
• Ideal Type
• Modernity
• Science
• Vocation

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Notes on contributors

Sung Ho Kim

Sung Ho Kim is Chair and Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at Yonsei University (Seoul). He has taught at the Universities of California (Riverside), Chicago, Keio (Tokyo), and Harvard (Cambridge). He is the author of Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society and Making We the People (with Chaihark Hahm), both published by Cambridge University Press. For his work on Weber, he received the Leo Strauss Award of the American Political Science Association.