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The Future in Max Weber’s Methodological Writings
Barbara Adam
Abstract
This paper explores Max Weber’s approach to the future. Weber is a key theorist for
the futures project as he argued that science delimits what can and cannot be studied
and commented on in the socio-cultural sphere. Since social action is irreducibly
future oriented this poses a dilemma for the social sciences which needs our most
careful attention. The paper takes us through Weber’s methodological writings and
explores the implications of his position for a social science approach that seeks to
take the future seriously. It argues that human futurity constitutes the central dilemma
in Weber’s methodological writings and suggests that the future is addressed in those
writings through the key concepts of rationality, progress, ethics, values, of reason(s),
purposes and motives, options and choices, calculation and the means-end schema,
responsibility and vocation. By explicating the implicit futures in Weber’s work, the
paper surfaces this dilemma for exploration. In a critical appraisal, finally, the paper
considers to what extent Weber’s approach might serve as basis for a contemporary
sociology of the future, which takes seriously not only the future as guide to action in
the present but also the contemporary future-producing condition.
Introduction
Human futurity constitutes the central dilemma in Weber’s methodological writings.
Despite the fact that the future per se is never mentioned, never features in any of his
indexes or that of his commentatorsi, it is implicated in most of the key concepts that
are addressed in his work. In his writing on rationality and progress, on ethics and
morality, values and reason(s), purposes and motives, on options and choices,
calculation and the means-end schema, on responsibility, commitment and vocation,
the future is the social domain of action. Through these concepts Weber
acknowledged that humans are fundamentally future oriented and that the different
ways the future is lived and approached is the proper subject matter for the social
sciences. He accepted further that, as social beings, social scientists cannot escape
their human futurity – in the dual sense of being oriented towards the future and
guided by the future for choices and actions – and concluded that they therefore have
to come to terms with the dilemmas posed for them by the logic of science. This logic
makes it exceedingly difficult to engage with the multiplex human futurity in a
meaningful way, given that science is grounded in a mode of enquiry that was
established for objects in motion, for which futurity is irrelevant. In this paper I want
to surface this dilemma for exploration before I consider to what extent Weber’s
approach might serve as basis for a contemporary sociology of the future.
I begin the investigation with an outline of the diversity of implicit future orientations
that are addressed in Weber’s work and render them explicit: first, in the subject
matter of the social sciences, second, in the social sciences as a science and, third, in
social scientists’ work as a vocation. Following this, I consider the suitability for the
contemporary condition, of Weber’s extensive use of dualisms to identify and explain
the distinctions he is attempting to foreground for discussion. Arising from my
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critique will be first points of departure that need to be briefly followed up before I
conclude the essay with a view forward where I indicate Weber’s potential for a
theoretical social science approach to the contemporary future-producing condition.
Futures Reign Supreme in the Subject Matter of the Social Sciences
When Weber writes about the subject matter of the social sciences, he may not use the
terms ‘future’ and ‘futurity’ very much, but he nevertheless leaves us in no doubt that
to be human is to be future oriented, that futurity characterises individual and social
action. Whether we choose between options, allow values and beliefs to guide our
actions, decide on the most appropriate means to achieve a given end, act rationally
and/or responsibly, with commitment and/or dedication, the future features in all we
do at any given present moment. The future is both reason and cause for what we do,
how we act, and what decisions we take on a daily basis. Weber could not be clearer
on this overarching point, even though he does not use these precise words to present
his argument. The futurity of social life, as I have indicated in the introduction,
emerges in Weber’s work not through explicit writing on ‘the future’ or ‘futurity’ but
rather through his key concepts. A very brief focus on three of his key terms –
‘progress’, ‘rationality’ and the ‘pursuit of profit’ – will serve to illustrate the wider
point.
When Weber writes about the modern (western, post-Enlightenment) world, his
acceptance of the future as key social domain is uncompromising. He describes a
world driven by the relentless pursuit of progress, that is, by an incessant, almost
compulsive striving for change, advancement, improvement and innovation.
Regarding the intensely future-oriented endeavours of science, for example, Weber
(1958/1919: 137) explains how ‘science is chained the course of progress’, which
means its purpose is to continuously raise ‘new “question”, …to be ‘”surpassed” and
outdated’, never to fix its findings or establish their meanings for eternity. ‘In
principle’, Weber (1958/1919: 138) proposes, ‘this progress goes on ad infinitum.’
Weber further characterises the modern world in all its major spheres – science,
economics, education, medicine, law, politics, even religion - as being suffused by the
principle of rationality. In ‘Economy and Society’ Weber suggests that this rationality
is marked by two distinct forms of orientation, by purposive utility
(Zweckrationalität) on the one hand and values on the other. The first form relates to
rational calculation and goal-orientation as well as choices and decisions made on the
basis of utility. The second, which he calls ‘value rationality’ (Wertratioalität), is
guided by ethics and morals, beliefs and ideals, vocational considerations and
responsibility. Although informed by different clusters of motives, both types of
rationality share an equally focused future orientation that guides our actions in a
systematic, calculating manner. Weber understands rationalisation as a central and
generalised feature of industrialisation, bureaucratisation, specialisation,
secularisation and capitalist development. Rationalisation means, Weber (1958/1919:
139) explains, ‘that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come
into play, but rather, that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’. On
the basis of his extensive studies of this all-pervasive process Weber (1958/1919: 155)
identifies also a darker side to rationalisation. As ‘the fate of our times’, he suggests,
rationalisation is implicated not just in the successes of the west but also its failures,
derailments, and disappointments. Accordingly, Weber sees rationality culminating in
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an ‘iron cage’ from which there appears to be no escape and which in turn engenders
new yearnings for (non-rational) charismatic leaders, spiritual fulfilment, religious
devotion, ultimate ‘sublime values’ and, in the most general sense, all that escapes its
iron grip on the social world.
In ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ Weber shows how a (JudeoChristian) religious pursuit – the quest to save one’s soul – has guided actions in such
a pervasive way that an entire new form of socio-economic existence was born. He
explains how the pursuit of profit had existed throughout the ages when he suggests,
The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible
amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse
exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists,
prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and
beggars. (Weber 1989/1904-5: 17)
It is the rational pursuit of ‘capitalistic acquisition’, Weber (1989/1904-5: 18) argues,
where the ‘corresponding action is adjusted to calculations in terms of capital’, that
marks modern from traditional forms of economic impulses. Both are future-oriented
but only the modern capitalist form is fundamentally guided by rationality. This
rationality, in turn, is reconnected in ‘The Protestant Ethic’ to monastic orders of the
Middle Ages where Benedictine, Cistercian and Jesuit monks, among others, had
developed systematic methods of rational asceticism in order to overcome the
temptations of the flesh. ‘This active self-control’, Weber (1989/1904-5: 119)
proposes, ‘was also the most important practical ideal of Puritanism’, where it served
the same purpose and was seen as the primary means to the salvation of the soul.
When over time the religious fervour had faded, rationalism remained, pervading
every aspect of today’s social life. On this point it is worth quoting Weber at length.
‘The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forded to do so. For when
asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to
dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos
of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to technical and
economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives
of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly
concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so
determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view
the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a
light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment” but fate decreed that
the cloak should become an iron cage’. (Weber 1989/1904-5: 181)
As an unintended consequence of the Protestant ethic, Weber goes on to argue,
material goods have gained an unprecedented power over our lives. Rather than the
salvation of the soul, their acquisition and the pursuit of wealth more generally are
today’s motive force and inexorable guiding vision.
When Weber focuses attention on the subject matter of social sciences, we are left in
no doubt that what makes social action meaningful, interesting and significant, and
what makes social life worth living are our visions and dreams, our beliefs and
motives, our guiding principles and values. At the same time, however, he was more
acutely aware than any other social scientist before him and since that this implicit
futurity at the core of our subject matter is simultaneously the social sciences’ greatest
challenge.
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The Future as Challenge for Social Science as a Science
As a science, Weber argued, the social sciences are bound by the logic of the
scientific form of inquiry, which deals with empirical (present-based) sense data,
gives guidance about technical (present-based) means to pre-given ends and provides
(past-based) causal analysis. As a cultural enterprise the social sciences have to
square the circle of also dealing with the (future-based) realm of ideas, visions and
values, of taking a stance on the normative dimension of social life, and making that
life intelligible that is, achieve adequacy in both meaning and causality at the level of
social science explanations. It is not sufficient, therefore, for the social sciences to
explain the ‘how’ of achieving the right means to pre-given ends; they also need to
encompass what constitutes the expressly human part of the world they study, which
includes, as I have identified above, our multiplex futurity. In his methodological
writings Weber shows that this is anything but an easy task.
In his ‘Science as a Vocation’ Weber (1958/1919: 147-52) suggests that, within the
confines of the logic of science, social scientists are able to establish available means
to existing ends, show the advantage of some means over others, calculate the various
costs involved and assess the internal consistency between ends. As such, their work
can aid social control. Moreover, (on the basis of past knowledge) social scientists can
historically establish causal chains and calculate probable outcomes of present
actions. As social scientists they can clarify methods of thinking and provide training
and tools for thought. They can identify the nature of ideas and assumptions but not
comment on their being right or wrong, good or bad. Answers to questions about how
the world ought to be and what norms or values should be adopted, Weber maintains,
are not in the gift of an empirical science. Despite this tightly delimited logic, Weber
suggests, the scientific method, appropriately applied, can bring about not just selfclarification but also a sense of responsibility. Finally, when the logic is embraced, it
confronts social scientists with the uncomfortable truth that all beliefs and ultimate
values are irreconcilable, that therefore choices between them are inevitable, but that
those choices fall outside the remit of science.
Importantly, what is beyond the logic of (natural) science are precisely the
prospective features of socio-cultural life, that is, the actions and decisions based on
beliefs, ethics and moral responsibility, for example, which differentiate us from pastdetermined things: unlike cultural beings, things age and rust without orienting their
processes to the future. Equally, the apple falls from the tree without considering
whether or not it is the right thing to do. The futurity of the socio-cultural subject
matter, therefore, requires a subject-specific mode of enquiry, no less stringent and
systematic, but fundamentally different from the study of (physical) objects in motion.
Cultural modes of inquiry, Weber insists, need to take account of individually pursued
purposes, values and belief as well as socially constituted values, rules and moral
codes. A science focused on culture needs to understand purposes, make sociocultural action intelligible, which means, in my terms, never losing sight of the futures
that guide actions in the present. Such understanding (verstehen) can be achieved
variously by knowing the social rules, through (socially constituted) empathy, that is,
having shared such an experience, on the basis of logic and on the general principle of
rationality. Moreover, Weber is adamant that such future-oriented actions of
individuals (or groups of individuals), rather than any form of social wholes, are the
empirical data of the social sciences. Weber’s approach is one of methodological
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individualism when he argues that wholes don’t act. Only people act, as part of and on
behalf of institutions, groups or nations, embedded in their historical context and
focused on where they are going and where they want or dread to be. Weber’s
acknowledgement of historical, contextual contingency, finally, led him to point out
that the conceptualisations of the social sciences can never be permanent but rather
require regular renewal, as the need arises, in light of changing conditions.
Weber insists further that social science modes of enquiry and explanation need to be
adequate not only at the level of material cause rooted in past-based experience but
also at the level of meaning, that is, tied to past, present and expected futures (Weber,
1978/1913 Vol. I: 11, 19, 22). Given that the future is not a sense datum, that is, not
observable, Weber proposed the construction of ‘ideal types’, that is, stereotypes of
the phenomena to be explained, against which actual social events and purposive,
prospective activities could be plotted and compared. In the light of this extensive
effort to devise a systematic mode of enquiry that is adequate to the cultural world,
Weber went further than most of his colleagues, before him and since, to encompass
teleological causal explanation in his method. That is, he conceived of reasons as
causes for action and it is this philosophical move, which brought with it the raft of
specifically cultural methods for which Weber is famed.
Despite Weber’s extensive methodological considerations and innovations, however,
the contradictions and dilemmas remained. It is in his engagement with those
dilemmas that we find some of his most interesting, hotly debated and often
misunderstood writing. It is here that we discover valuable insights for a
contemporary social science of the future on the one hand and where we need to
establish points of departure on the other. It is therefore the future in the work of
social scientists as cultural, projective and purposive beings, dedicated to their work
and bound by the logic of their inquiry, that we turn to next.
The Future in Disguise: Science as a Vocation
As scientists, social investigators are bound to the logic of science and chained to the
requirement of innovation and progress. Here we have the first dilemma: scientific
progress and socio-cultural meaning are incompatible. Quoting Leo Tolstoi, Weber
(1958/1919: 143) points out that ‘science is meaningless because it gives no answer
to our questions, the only question important for us: “What shall we do and how shall
we live?”’. As cultural beings, investigators are meaning seeking, future creating and
future guided beings for who this question is crucial. Good and evil, right and wrong,
beliefs and commitments are central to what it means to be human and to lead a social
life. Even if we were to execute our job in a technically immaculate way, that is,
conduct a perfect study of means to pre-given ends, as human beings studying a
cultural world we would fail our humanity, since, as cultural scientists we are bound
to analyse social phenomena in terms of their ‘cultural significance’ and this
significance, in turn, presupposes a ‘value-orientation’. (Weber 1969/1904: 76). How
then are we to conduct our work in a dedicated manner that encompasses the
important questions of socio-cultural existence about how we should live our lives
whilst avoiding the trap of acting as mere technicians on the one hand and biased
advocates of personal and political opinion on the other?
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Weber is very clear that personal politics and science don’t mix. Thus, he insists in his
essay on ‘The Meaning of “Ethical Neutrality” in Sociology and Economics’,
It is poor taste to mix personal questions with specialised factual analyses. We
deprive the word "vocation" of the only meaning which still retains ethical
significance if we fail to carry out that specific kind of self-restraint which it
requires. (Weber 1969/1917: 5-6)
It is the duty of social investigators, Weber insists, to make unambiguously clear
where science ends and personal presuppositions and opinions enter. Let us be clear at
this point: it is not Weber’s intention for social scientists to move values and morals
aside as unimportant, on the contrary. Weber (1969/1904: 60) is adamant that ‘an
attitude of moral indifference has no connection with scientific “objectivity”. He is
asking investigators to make clear at which point the ‘evaluating and acting person
begins to speak.’
Weber is equally clear in his essay on ‘“Objectivity” in Social Science and Policy’
that
‘It can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms and
ideals from which directives for immediate practical activity can be derived’.
(Weber 1969/1904: 52)
An empirical science cannot tell anyone what he should do – but rather what
he can do – and under certain circumstances – what he wishes to do. (Weber
1969/1904: 54)
As scientists, social investigators cannot provide solutions to the important questions
and the most pressing issues of social life. Despite this major restriction on their
activities, however, what the social sciences have to offer is substantial and
significant. They can identify and disclose problems in argument and practice. They
can also help to arrive at an understanding of hotly contested, incompatible sociocultural goals and ideals over which battles are fought between groups and in the
corridors of power. For such tasks to be executed with compassion within the confines
of the logic of science, Weber admits, is never an easy task and requires our most
delicate and dedicated application. It is worth quoting him at length here.
In the empirical social sciences… the possibility of meaningful knowledge of
what is essential for us in the infinite richness of events is bound up with the
unremitting application of viewpoints of a specifically particularised character,
which, in the last analysis, are oriented on the basis of evaluative ideas. These
evaluative ideas are for their part empirically discoverable and analysable as
elements of meaningful human conduct, but their validity can not be deduced
from empirical data as such. The "objectivity" of the social sciences depends
rather on the fact that the empirical data are always related to those evaluative
ideas which alone make them worth knowing and the significance of the
empirical data is derived from these evaluative ideas. But these data can never
become the foundation for the empirically impossible proof of the validity of
the evaluative ideas. The belief which we all have in some form or other, in
the meta-empirical validity of ultimate and final values, in which the meaning
of our existence is rooted, is not incompatible with the incessant changefulness
of the concrete view-points, from which empirical reality gets is significance.
Both these views are, on the contrary, in harmony with each other. (Weber
1969/1904: 111)
The empirical sciences, in other words, are inescapably entangled with the world of
values through the bounding of knowledge and the creation of meaning, which cannot
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be separated from social scientists’ cultural location and interests. Insofar as the value
sphere is their subject matter, it is a domain social scientists can study but not judge
and evaluate. The activity of selection and the bounding of what we can see in terms
of knowledge context and theoretical framing, is clarified even further in the
following quote.
For none of those systems of ideas, which are absolutely indispensable in the
understanding of those segments of reality which are meaningful at a
particular moment, can exhaust its infinite richness. They are all attempts, on
the basis of the present state of our knowledge and the available conceptual
patterns, to bring order into the chaos of those facts which we have drawn into
the field circumscribed by our interest. The intellectual apparatus which the
past has developed through the analysis, or more truthfully, the analytical
rearrangement of the immediately given reality, and through the latter's
integration by concepts which correspond to the state of its knowledge and the
focus of its interest, is in constant tension with the new knowledge which we
can and desire to wrest from reality. The progress of cultural science occurs
through this conflict. (Weber 1969/1904: 105)
Weber does not leave it here. He recognises that the object of our study is defined
(and circumscribed) through the questions we ask and the methods we employ. In
addition Weber asks social scientists to be cognisant of the constitutive nature of their
knowledge, that is, that their knowledge has an effect on the world they investigate
and he points out to them that this, in turn, makes them responsible for the impacts of
their knowledge.
Let me try and draw out from this complex perspective on the role of social scientists
the implicit messages regarding the future and begin to reflect on the implications of
this approach for a contemporary social science of the future. I begin with those
elements of social investigation that an acknowledgement of the logic of science
disallows. On the basis of science, social scientists cannot make statements about
what we should do and how we should live our lives. Equally, they cannot set the
goals and aims for society or establish social norms. Science provides them with no
base from which to espouse political views and personal beliefs and values. This
logical delimitation, however, does not excuse social scientists from making moral
choices, selecting phenomena on the basis of their socio-cultural significance or
taking a stand on matters of great socio-political importance. Given that all cultural
phenomena are infinite on the one hand and stand in a conflictual value relation on the
other, social scientists cannot evade making selections, decisions and choices. These
in turn are guided by their values and morals. As dedicated scientists they are bound
therefore to clarify their position.
If we now consider what social scientists can achieve within those logical limits of the
cultural sciences as set out by Weber, we find that we are nevertheless left with a
surprisingly powerful tool for socio-cultural analysis. In addition to the aspects I have
already outlined in earlier parts of the paper, social scientists are empowered to
elucidate morals and values and investigate how the various value spheres (as well as
morals and belief systems) stand in relation to each other and how they are politically
and socially employed to which ends. They are able to show problems, specify flaws
in logic and identify contradictions in aims and goals across the entire socio-cultural
domain (economic, scientific, political, educational, religious etc.). On the basis of
rigorous comparative analysis they are able to offer critiques of existing practices.
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Importantly, they may surface taken-for-granted assumption for scrutiny and analyse
them with reference to practices, be they dominant or at the periphery of the sociopolitical limelight. Finally, social scientists are not just empowered but have the duty
to adapt their conceptual tools to the contemporary condition, that is to say, as new
phenomena and conditions arise the social sciences’ conceptual apparatuses and tools
need to be scrutinised for their contemporary appropriateness. Unlike scientific laws,
the social sciences’ concepts are contingent, tied to their historical context. This
presents social scientists with an ongoing, never-ending challenge on the one hand
and an opportunity on the other.
Having thus far covered the elements of Weber’s work that I could embrace with
unrestrained enthusiasm, I now need briefly to turn to aspect that give me some cause
for concern. In particular it is the rationalistic and dualistic nature of Weber’s
conceptualisation of the social sciences’ methodology that becomes troubling when
related to our contemporary, globalised world of networked communication and
unbounded environmental problems. Of course, we need to bear in mind that some of
these contemporary conditions did not yet exist some one hundred years ago.
Troubling Choices in Dualistic Schemas and Overarching Themes
Weber was acutely aware of the infinitive complexity of the social world and at pains
to work through the methodological implications of it. He was equally a cognisant of
the interdependency of much that he organised along dualistic lines: facts and values,
means and ends, science and policy. Clearly, his dualisms served as a heuristic only,
as an aid to conceptual clarity. And yet, it is the dualisms by which Weber is primarily
remembered and which feature so prominently in textbooks that first introduce
students to his body of work. As tools for thought the dualisms espoused in his
writings have become constitutive: we began to see the world in terms of those
dualisms and the world in turn became dualistic. Moreover, Weber’s dualisms match
perfectly the common-sense understanding of the world: a world that is made up of
nature and culture, facts and ideas, an external reality that can be observed and
discovered by science in an objective way in the present, with past and future the
‘places’ we visit in our minds. By retaining the fact-value, is-ought, science-policy
dualisms on logical grounds, Weber also held on to the assumptions that underpin the
separations: that facts are empirically accessible sense data; that there are absolute
distinctions not just between observer and observed but also present and future; that
there is an external reality to be discovered and known. The dualisms, as constitutive
knowledge, therefore, merged in perfect harmony with the western, taken for granted,
naturalised view of reality. This, I want to propose, is a grave problem for
understanding today’s world and for doing the kind of social science that Weber
encouraged us to practice. Let me explain.
When these distinctions are revisited and subjected to a time-sensitive analysis, we
begin to realise that facts can be facts only after they have been de-temporalised, that
is, abstracted from the ongoing temporality of being-becoming. Facts, we appreciate,
are tied to a specific way of knowing that is, to object thinking and an emphasis on the
spatial and material. Object thinking brackets and thus conceals the temporal and
invisible, the immaterial and unbounded in the subject matter. Since temporal
becoming and ongoing transformation in the context of an interactive relationship
with others and openness to the environment are the mark of both life and social
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activity, an approach that negates these key characteristics of life can only deal with
(real and conceptual) dead things. Moreover, object thinking allows ‘observers’ to see
only time slices, that is, facts as freeze-frames, moments frozen in time and space.
This means, facts are not isolated in and of themselves: we make them so in order to
render the temporality of reality accessible and manageable, that is, to infuse the
infinite, transient and contingent complexity of life with clarity and simplicity. As
such, this a-temporal stance on temporality facilitates not only counting, measurement
and classification but also the illusion of control on the one hand and ‘objectivity’ and
‘ethical neutrality’ on the other.
In a similar vein we must recognise that the futurity of human purposiveness and
intent is not a sense datum, is not accessible to empirical observation. Rather, it has to
be inferred from phenomena and processes and, as Weber recognised, requires
conceptual rather than empirical observational tools for its investigation and analysis.
At the same time, however, Weber would insist that human futurity – in form of
values, morals, ideals, motives, reasons, purposes – is a ‘fact’ of human cultural
existence. This means, the non-empirical is accepted as ‘fact’ and with that move, the
every-day assumption that facts belong to the empirical realm of matter whilst values,
morals and other aspects of human futurity belong to the sphere of ideas is unsettled.
With the object thinking that underpins the language of ‘facts’ as distinct from
‘values’, therefore, Weber undermines his own complex perspective on the matter,
which allows for the world of material outcomes of cultural activity, the world of
‘facts’, to be inescapably permeated and constituted by the cultural realm of ideas,
norms and values. This is so, as I showed earlier, because the future is the source for
action in the present: it underpins wars and demonstrations, supports our choice of
religion, politics and voluntary activities.
To further complicate matters, the enacted, thus factual world of ideas, in turn, has
socio-physical consequences, some of which take on material form quite quickly,
others, such as hormone-disrupting chemicals or the effects from smoking, do not
materialise as symptoms for a very long time. Where the effects are time-space
distantiated, this acculturated physis, this ‘future in the making’ needs to be
recognised as both material reality and latent process-world of an encoded invisible
reality, a realm beyond the reach of the senses, beyond the world of linear causal
connections. To re-centre the temporal and to make futurity explicit, therefore, is to
emphasise not merely the world of social products but, equally, to stress the
importance of the immanent, the process world beyond empirical access that is
nevertheless real in its consequences. This requires a new sense of ‘factuality’ and
‘facticity’ that transcends conventional dualisms of facts and values, the world of
things and products that are empirically accessible in the present and the ideational
world of values and purpose that that elude such access due to their futurityii.
Weber’s means-end schema entails a similar conception of the present and future to
the one that underpins the fact-value distinction: the ‘end’ or ‘goal’ being clearly
located in the future beyond the reach of the senses, whilst the ‘means’, in contrast,
are being viewed as scientific/technical ways to help us achieve those pre-given ends,
goals and visions. ‘Means’ are the definable paths by which we reach into the future.
Knowing the goal, we can apply the counterfactual schema if this... then that.... Thus,
for example, if we want to get rid of weeds on the garden path, then science can
supply us with the ‘means’ available in the present to achieve the desired future state
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of no weeds on the path. Science, we need to remember, is not empowered to
comment on the merits or value of our goal - it can merely tell us in a factual, or
counter-factual, non-evaluative way what needs to be done if we want to get of the
weeds on the path. In addition it can provide a range of options and identify their
potential effects: weed by hand (hard work not very long lasting, environmentally
benign), torch the path (dependent on available tools, also not very long lasting,
environmentally benign), use one of a variety of weed killers (effective for longer
period, easy to do, environmental effects disputed), concrete over the path (permanent
solution, costly, environmental effects resource intensive).
This understanding becomes inappropriate once we acknowledge the interpenetration
of past, present and future in such situations. Let us assume that we have chosen to
use a particular weed killer as the means to our pre-defined goal. First, the
effectiveness of the weed killer is inescapably tied to past uses and the reflexivity
within the eco-system, which means, the past is ineradicably implicated in the means
to achieving a given end. Secondly, the application of our weed killer creates an openended, indeterminate future that affects the person applying the spray, the immediate
environment and the eco-sphere for an in(de)finite time. As such, the future features
in our present action not only as the desired end (the reason for our action) but also as
an encoded reality of potential impacts. Past, present and future interpenetrate in
purposes, goals, actions and outcomes: actual and potential, intended and unintended.
From a temporal perspective, therefore, the world of the ‘is’, the realm of the present,
is not neatly definable, not temporally bounded, not the exclusive province of the
senses (not that it ever was, of course). All aspects of that temporally constituted
process mutually implicate each other. Moreover, there is a need to appreciate that
such dualistic schema are static, that they fix and generalise into an a-temporal,
decontextualised form processes and relationships that are contingent, transient,
specific, embodied and embedded. Thus, boundaries and distinctions between ‘means’
and ‘end’ are perforated, the dualism once more unsettled at best, rendered useless at
worst.
When social scientists are asked to separate facts from values, the material world from
the world of ideas and the means from ends, that task is far more complex than even
Max Weber had allowed for. Not only do these conflicting aspects of our work shade
into each other and interpenetrate, as I have indicated above, they mutually constitute
each other in ways that go even beyond Weber’s conceptual complexity. To elaborate
this point, let us focus on the way Weber conceptualised cultural futurity. The future,
as we have seen earlier, is associated with the ideational world of purpose, motive,
and belief. It encompasses our entire world of reason as causes for actions: ideals,
values, morals, commitments, hopes, fears and desires. As such, the future acts on the
present; it guides our plans and choices, decisions and actions. Or to put it differently,
it is in the present that the future is enacted, and realised. Once materialised it
becomes a sense datum and as such accessible to empirical study. However, the
motive is not visible in the outcome but has to be inferred by means other than
empirical factual analysis. This is, as Weber pointed out, where meaning-adequacy
and understanding become important aspects of our work.
However, as I have already begun to indicate, there is an entire dimension missing
from this schema, since past and future feature in yet another, much more material
way in that relation. Each action binds pasts and futures to set free new futures. Some
B Adam – ESRC PF Weber 010205
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of these new futures may materialise quickly – the weeds on the path may wilt within
a week or so – in which case we can access them empirically at that point and
retrospectively establish cause and effect relations. Others maybe time-space
distantiated, that is, materialise in some unspecified open future some time,
somewhere, in which case causal relations cannot be identified and the ‘reality’ of the
‘future in process’ is placed in question. This poses severe problems for the
materialist perspective, which underpins the scientific method. The impact of the
weed killer on soil bacteria and earthworms, on the purity of groundwater and on the
other plants nearby, on insects and birds and, at the level of cells, on the persons
applying the chemical and their unborn offspring, is a future, which is from this
perspective immaterial in the double sense of the word, because it is immanent and
latent and because as such it is not empirically real, not a fact and therefore of no
material consequence.
To associate the future and futurity with the ideational sphere relegates this central
domain of social life to the realm of the immaterial unreal. Moreover, to restrict
human futurity to the domain of human purpose means that we loose sight of the other
side of cultural futures: that we create futures that are as difficult to access for the
social sciences as the futures that guide our actions. In their latency and immanence
these ‘futures in the making’, these deeds under way, are denied reality status until
they materialise as symptoms. In the case of our weed killer example, we need to
encompass this cultural future not just in terms of means to our end, not just as the
realm of the predictable knowledge based on past experience (ours and that of
science), not just in terms of known goals and values (a weed-free path) but, equally,
in terms of futures that we thereby create, both expected and unexpected, intended
and unintended, material and immanent, latent and potential, unknown and
unknowable. The schema of dualistic distinctions is clearly inappropriate to that task.
In our globalised world of unbounded networked processes this is a challenge for the
social sciences of even greater magnitude than the earlier one addressed by Weber
when he sought to take account of values, motives and purposes within an empirical
mode of enquiry. It is this challenge, which I want to open up for discussion in the last
part of this paper.
Futurity as Process and Product: Towards a Future-oriented Social Science
‘A new “science” emerges where new problems are pursued by new methods
and truths are thereby discovered which open up significant new points of
view’. (Weber 1969/1904: 68)
Weber was acutely aware of the contingent nature of the socio-cultural sciences and
the need, as I have indicated above, to adapt and change them in the light of new
cultural conditions. He was at pains to point out that we create meaning and that this
meaning in turn is constitutive, that we are therefore responsible for the meanings we
produce. And he insisted that conventional science was not the only and certainly not
always the appropriate means to understanding. Thus he argued,
The more “general” the problem involved, i.e., in this case, the broader its
cultural significance, the less subject it is to a single unambiguous answer on
the basis of data of empirical sciences and the greater the role played by valueideas (Wertideen) and the ultimate and highest axioms of belief. (Weber
1969/1904: 56-7)
B Adam – ESRC PF Weber 010205
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With these three premises Weber provide us with an excellent base from which to
depart from his own dualistic schema and seek more appropriate means to understand
and theorise contemporary social actions, assumptions and processes together with
their impacts and paradoxes. What then is to be left behind, what to be re-thought and
revised in light of the contemporary condition?
Where Weber conceived of the cultural world in terms of facts and values, that is, the
realms of matter and ideas, we need to supplement this understanding by refocusing
attention on the socio-environmental world of processes and products. We need to
appreciate that the (natural) scientific mode of understanding the world is not only
incapable of encompassing human futurity in terms of the world of ideas but also in
terms of the world of invisible, latent, immanent processes. Products, not processes,
natura naturata not natura naturans, Merkwelt not Wirkwelt, the present not the
future, past-based evidence not future-based uncertainty, boundedness not time-space
distantiation, material outcomes not the potential, virtual, unknown and the
unknowable are the empirical sciences’ spheres of competence. Yet, I barely need to
point out that many of the most intractable problems of contemporary existence are
precisely of the processual, futurig, time-space distantiated kind that fall outside the
present-based domain of empirical science. The safe decommissioning of nuclear
waste, the regulation of bio-technology and genetic modification of food, the creation
of stem-cell and nano-technology products, the international efforts to deal with
global warming, ozone depletion, hormone-disrupting chemicals and the cultural
extinction of species, are just some of the time-space distantiated process phenomena
that are currently recognised as both potential and actual problems. Going by past
records of the last century, moreover, there are likely to be many more that have yet to
materialise as symptoms, that is, as scientifically accessible productsiii. In all of these
examples, furthermore, the apparent scientific and technological control tends to stand
in an inverse relation to the created indeterminacies and the loss of control over timespace distantiated impacts.
If we now return to the issue of human futurity and conceive of that futurity not just in
the restricted sense of an ideational sphere of purposes and values that guide choices,
decisions and actions in the present, but take the next step as well where those
choices, decisions and actions create futures, many for open-ended periods and with
uncertain and even unknowable results, then these created futures of our making need
our urgent social science attention. How are they to be conceptualised? What tools
can we draw on if neither materialist science nor idealist humanism can provide
viable answers? Is it a case of constructing appropriate ‘ideal types’? Is it sufficient to
create new ‘understanding’? Is there an additional need to re-conceptualise the sphere
of responsibility?
It seems clear that we need to find ways to understand, accept and think of the
potential, virtual world of processes as im/material real. It seems equally clear that we
need to conceive of the future as both guide to actions in the present and as activated
by us in the present. It seems additionally obvious that we shall have to take
responsibility for these directions of influence and their effects. This, however, takes
us into the realm of moral theory, where, as I have shown in recent work (Adam 2004,
Jonas 1984/1079) much equivalent conceptual revision is on the political and
environmental philosophical agenda. Weber holds social scientists responsible for the
impact of their constitutive knowledge and for their professional integrity, which
B Adam – ESRC PF Weber 010205
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demands that they keep their facts and values distinct. When he discusses ‘Politics as
a Vocation’ Weber (1958/1917: 121-2) constructs two ideal types of responsibility: an
ethics of responsibility that bears in mind (plausible) outcomes (Verantwortungsethik)
and an ethics of ultimate ends, which is guided solely by values and beliefs
(Gesinnungsethik). I am afraid neither of these ideal types is of help with the problem
I am addressing here. I would therefore like to take Weber’s points further and
suggest that social scientists have a professional responsibility to point out where the
competence of science ends and where social responsibility has to be activated: when
mastery fails we need to point out and carefully elucidate the sphere of morals.
Moreover, if the current moral tools are inadequate to encompass the potential socioenvironmental world of our making, then it behoves us to either team up with moral
philosophers or to extend our knowledge sphere to encompass that body of thought in
order that we might be able to connect assumptions, actions and potential effects. This
entails that we point out that ethics, which is traditionally focused on the social world
of human reciprocity, needs to be extended to encompass the sphere of our influence,
that is, future generations and fellow species, all of which are affected by our actions,
yet have no voice or representation to put their case. This extension of the social
science sphere of competence becomes essential not just on ethical grounds but on the
basis that today cultural being needs to be conceptualised not just as human but
natured and nature creating being, as implicating other species in body and action and
related to them through an infinite connectedness that reaches ultimately to the stars
and the beginning of time.
When the future in Weber’s work is surfaced and its role in the social sciences
brought into sharp focus we can see that body of work in a new light, discover points
of departure and see first openings for change. When the temporal silences begin to
get expressed and the invisible is given form, reality begins to resonate with the
immanent process-world beyond empirical accessibility. Veracity and the Real are no
longer exclusively associated the visual and material. Facts and values take on a
different hue. With the future no longer ‘in disguise’, the limitations of present-based
science and the rationalism that pervades our daily lives, become inescapably
obvious, thus encouraging us to re-fashion our conceptual tools to better suit the
contemporary condition. Could the explication of our futurity be the beginning of the
‘“new science” where new problems are pursued by new methods’, and which, as
Weber (1969/1904: 68) suggested, ‘opens up significant new points of view’?
References
Adam, B. (1998) ‘Values in the Cultural Timescapes of Science’, in Lash, S. Quick,
A. Roberts, R. eds. Special edition, ‘Time and Values’, Cultural Values 2(2 &
3): 385-402.
Adam, B. (2004) Minding Futures. www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/futures/
Albrow, M. (1990) Max Weber’s Construction of Social Theory. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Jonas, H. (1984/1979) The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the
Technological Age. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Weber, M. (1958/1919) ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright
(eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, pp. 77-128.
B Adam – ESRC PF Weber 010205
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Weber, M. (1958/1919) ‘Science as a Vocation’, in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright
(eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, pp. 129-58.
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New York: The Free Press, pp. 50-112.
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Sciences. Max Weber. New York: The Free Press, pp. 1-49.
Weber, M. (1978/1913) Economy and Society Vol. I. Roth, G. and Wittich, C. eds.,
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Acknowledgement
This research has been conducted during a three-year research project 'In Pursuit of
the Future', which is funded by the UK’s Economic and Science Research Council
(ESRC) under their Professorial Fellowship Scheme.
Biographical Details
Barbara Adam is Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. She is founding editor
of the journal Time & Society and has published extensively on the social relations of
time. Her most recent book Time (2004) is published under the Polity Press ‘Key
Concepts’ Series. She currently holds an ESRC Professorial Fellowship (2003-6) in
which she explores the social relationship to the future. E-mail:
adamtime@cardiff.ac.uk web sites: http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/whoswho/adam/
http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/futures/
i
For reliable secondary literature on Weber see Albrow 1990, Giddens 1971, Käsler 1988, Wrong
1970.
ii
For a more detailed account of these dualistic distinctions and their socio-environmental implications
for contemporary social science, see Adam 1998: 385-402.
iii
See Wynne 2005 who is arguing these points with reference of post-genomics knowledge.