What Does It Mean to Hear the Call of Science? Listening to Max Weber Now

ABSTRACT

This article performs a depth hermeneutic of the two senses of ‘vocation’ that were available to Max Weber when he delivered his complementary lectures to graduate students one hundred years ago: ‘Science as a Vocation’ and ‘Politics as a Vocation’. Both senses derive from the Protestant Reformation, but the relationship implied between the divine sender and human receiver of the ‘call’ are radically divergent. On the one hand, the Lutheran sense of ‘vocation’ involves hearing the call from God, recognising it for what it is, and then justifying one’s life in terms of it. In contrast, the Calvinist sense of ‘vocation’ involves neither the certainty nor the submission of the Lutheran call. Instead the call amounts an invitation to wager one’s life by venturing into a world of potentially – but by no means necessarily – transcendent significance. Weber associates the academic vocation – as he had previously the ‘capitalist ethic’ – with the Calvinist sense of calling. The stated and implied critique of conventional academic practice, which Weber saw as tending in a more ‘Lutheran’ direction, remains of contemporary relevance. Among the topics covered are the relationship between the pursuit of free inquiry and state policy, the status of academic works, and the sense of ‘purpose’ with which academic inquiry should be pursued.

KEYWORDS:

• Calvin
• Luther
• vocation
• Weber

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the Russian Science Foundation under grant No. [18-18-00238], ‘Non-Humboldt trading zones: an idea and project of the new infrastructure of science’, located at the Lobachevsky State University of Nizhnij Novgorod.

Notes on contributors

Steve Fuller

Steve Fuller is Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK. The founding editor of Social Epistemology, he is the author of over twenty books. His most recent work has been concerned with the future of humanity (or ‘Humanity 2.0ʹ) and the future of academic knowledge and the university as an institution. His latest books are Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game (Anthem, 2018) and Nietzschean Meditations: Untimely Thoughts at the Dawn of the Transhuman Era (Schwabe Verlag, 2019).