Reitter & Wellmon on Max Weber

Paul Reitter & Chad Wellmon write in the 'Chronicle Review'.

In 1908, Weber had taken on the powerful minister in charge of higher education in Prussia, Friedrich Althoff.

Althoff has been described as the Bismark of the German University of System. But he wasn't a Minister, merely a Civil Servant with a lot of connections in the right places who found ways of making himself indispensable to the concerned Ministers. In general, he is considered to have favored merit and originality in making appointments- much to the ire of entrenched cliques. However, because he had greatly advanced German Science and Mathematics, his position was unassailable. Still, anti-Semites and anti-Catholics felt Althoff was too liberal while Social Democrats hated him for preventing one of their own gaining an official appointment.
Althoff died in 1908. Weber made it clear a couple of years later- i.e. once it was safe to do so- that though Althoff had done much for German Higher Education, the means he employed were Dictatorial.

The case in question concerned the appointment of the economist Ludwig Bernhard to a full professorship at the University of Berlin.

This was done by the Kultusminister, Ludwig Holle. There followed a 'Battle of the Professors' with the 'Historical School'- Wagner, Schmoller & Weber opposing this upstart 'Business Economist' whose focus was on the present- not the misty past or the utopian future. Bernhard was friendly to free Enterprise but  ended up close to Hugenberg thus helping open the door to Hitler.

The Ministry of Culture and Education had long exercised final authority over all faculty hires, but it typically consulted closely with faculty members before making an official offer. In this case, however, Althoff had, as Weber saw it, simply installed his preferred candidate for reasons that had nothing to do with quality and everything to do with the fact that Bernhard’s research agenda advanced the state’s interests. 

Is this really true? Bernhard's father was of Jewish heritage, he himself was sympathetic to Polish Nationalism- indeed, unlike Weber, he spoke Polish- and. furthermore, was a new type of 'business economist'.  Thus, Weber was bound to oppose him. But, to be clear, no German Professor was not pretending to 'advance the State's interests' because, in the main, they were Civil Servants.
Weber would later move closer to Schmoller's Verein für Socialpolitik which sought a middle way between laissez faire and Socialism. However, Weber and his comrades were still on the side of 'positive'- i.e value judgment free- Social Science, as was Bernhard.

Whether out of conviction or opportunism, many academics supported Althoff’s appointment.

But many opposed Bernhard because he seemed a bit Jewy and, what's worse, hoped to make Economics more useful to Businesses.

But Weber insisted that allowing scholarship to be so closely aligned with the state’s agenda meant, as he wrote a year later, cultivating “political obedience among university students,” and this was sure to prove catastrophic for German universities.

Weber came to this view rather late in the day and only once Althoff was safely dead. Indeed, the discontented 'Humanists' in the German Universities- who felt they had lost out to the STEM subjects and their Commercial applications- were re-discovering around this time Wilhelm von Humboldt as the visionary father of the German University which the Althoff System had displaced from the hypokeimenon of the alterity of its own imaginative incubus under conditions of agglutinative saltation within the boundaries of some Teutonic shite or the other.

This led these stupid krauts to say ridiculous things- as if they all weren't a bunch of lemmings who had to be told which cliff edge to jump off.

The plain fact of the matter is that Germans of any type who failed to display 'political obedience' got short shrift. Why? Coz they were living in Germany. Those guys don't want freedom. They want beer and sausages and a Fuehrer who will make them feel good about themselves.

Weber, who couldn't consummate his marriage, speaks of castration when nothing but a limp dick obtained.

It would lead to the “castration” of academic freedom and stunt the “development of a genuine” scholarly character.

Shite which is of a genuinely scholarly character is still limp dicked shite.

Universities, he suggested sardonically, may have been better off under the church’s influence; at least then they pursued something other than money and power. 

What was that? Who knows? Who cares? Those guys weren't finding the cure for cancer- that's for sure.

Returning to Reitter & Welmon's article, which asks why a bunch of stupid students in Munich would invite Weber to talk to them in 1917- the answer being that he was out of a job and was writing a bunch of articles for the newspapers which appeared 'Liberal' and 'anti-annexationist' and thus offered the hope of a negotiated peace- we find this

 it was understandable why the students in Munich were drawn to Weber. They belonged to the Free Student Alliance, an organization devoted to championing the lofty ideals of the German research university — the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, Bildung or moral education, academic freedom, and the democratization of all these goods — at a time when those ideals appeared to be imperiled by disciplinary specialization, state intervention, the influence of industrial capitalism, and the war.

This is mad. The year is 1917. These kids would get drafted and shot or else might slowly starve. They didn't give a flying fart about Bildung. They just didn't want to starve or get shot.

Writing over the years as a kind of insider-outsider, Weber had distinguished himself as an extraordinarily erudite and forceful defender of an ideal university.

Actually it was the 'liberal' theologian Von Harnack & Eduard Spranger & other such fools who had created the cult of the Humboldtian University which excited German students because it would mean Germany could fuck over foreigners not by killing them- which involved the risk of getting killed- but through purely Academic means.

Like so many German intellectuals, Weber celebrated the outbreak of hostilities.

Why? He thought Germany would win. France would pay a lot of reparations like it did in 1870- which is what permitted Germany to go on the Gold Standard- and so there'd be plenty of beer and sausages and Professorships for everybody.

Yet by the summer of 1917, he had concluded that the war was essentially lost.

It was lost in 1914 at the First Battle of Marne. Weber was as stupid as shit.

What proved to be Germany’s undoing was the failure of Germans to think for themselves.

No. It was the fact that the French and the Brits kept shooting them. The Russians however put up a poor show. Germany's undoing arose out of the ability of Germans to think for themselves because stupid people thinking for themselves fuck up big time.

Neither the credentialed experts of the sprawling state bureaucracy nor the literary aesthetes of its cultural elite had shown any capacity to grapple intelligently and creatively with the problems of the day, and German universities had helped to cause the situation.

Fuck off! The problem was that the General Staff was as thick as shit. Boring bureaucrats and silly 'aesthetes' don't matter. It wasn't the Universities but the War College which had screwed up though, no doubt, other bureaucrats made stupid decisions.

Academics, intellectuals, and bureaucrats — those formed by Germany’s internationally esteemed universities — had all been guilty of an unreflective compliance to the state and its institutions and had directly contributed to the disasters that now faced the country.

Nonsense! They had shown 'reflective compliance' coz they thought Germany
would win big like it did in 1870. The thing was possible. But the British Expeditionary Force turned out to be surprisingly good. Britain won the war because it was prepared to throw millions of young men into the meat grinder of the Marne. Luddendorf's big mistake, in 1918, was to attack the Brits rather than the French. The Brits did fall back- but this tends to increase British fighting spirit- so the Somme chewed up Germany's future and spat it out coz that future was shite.

All this must have been very much in the forefront of Weber’s mind when, on November 7, 1917,

Coincidentally, this was the day of the Bolshevik Revolution- another German own goal.

he stepped to the podium to address an audience comprised mostly of students in a small theater connected to the bookshop in Munich where the Free Student Alliance met. Facing an uncertain future, the students, too, must have been thinking about the war. Germany was in the midst of a severe food shortage, and though defeat was by no means a foregone conclusion, a truce was the best that could be hoped for. In the meantime, millions of young men had died.

Why were these guys listening to a windbag? The answer is that the Social Democrats had split and windbags like Weber might (as in fact did happen) be useful enough idiots to create a new Party which would whimperingly make peace with the Allies before these precious young people got shot or starved to death.

How, in this context, was one to think of the vocation of the scholar?

As a useful idiot, who'd secure peace at any price or else act as the Kerensky for a Lenin.

Walter Benjamin, one of the leaders of an affiliated student group at the University of Berlin, had recently claimed that the vocation of university students was to be “authors of a transformation” of knowledge, the university, and, ultimately, “humanity.”

Vocation? Surely he meant vacation? Spring break can be really transformative.

A radical call, but one that evoked, that was indeed rooted in, the grand sense of purpose that the architect of the modern German educational system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, had assigned to it some hundred years earlier, when he described the university as the “pinnacle” of the nation’s “moral culture.”

But the 'pinnacle' of Germany's 'moral culture' remained somewhat lower than the pinnacle of any other nation's cowpat.

Yet Weber, to his audience’s dismay, began his lecture not by articulating an ideal but rather by delving into the practical challenges and liabilities of academic lives and careers. The university was riddled with structural problems: terrible teaching, workplace discrimination, the exploitation of the labor force, an arbitrary hiring process, and an ever more specialized, businesslike, and consequently uninspiring understanding of the scholar’s vocation.

Why did Weber talk in this manner? The answer is he was a German pedant. Being boring and stupid was what came naturally to him. It wasn't like he had any new ideas or solutions to old problems.

All of which his audience was no doubt well aware. Yet Weber didn’t offer any suggestions about how to reform working conditions, or much hope that the university as an institution could be transformed. As to specialization, he presented it as a basic feature of scholarly life. Not only was specialization here to stay, but Weber appeared actually to affirm its value at the expense of more traditional moral education. He went so far as to say that specialization was less of a threat to German scholarship than were those who used the idealism of the past to call the present order in question.

What he didn't say was 'German Universities need to get rid of worthless academic availability cascades. We need STEM subject research so as to grow more food and produce better munitions. We don't need fucking sociologists or political philosophers or Marxian economists.

If before the war he had worried about conservatives aligning scholarship too closely with the state, now,

Once there is a war everybody is closely aligned with the State. Weber thought it was 'wunderbar'. Genuine conservatives would have been going- 'fuck getting rich through conquest. Let's all play nice so European culture don't turn to shit.' 

as Germany’s political and social order teetered, Weber was just as concerned about professors posing as prophets, trying to shape students’ souls in the classroom.

Was he though? Which fucking professor was getting away with any such thing? When there's a war on, young men get excited by guys with lots of medals on their chest. Pedants and Clergymen aint who they turn to.  

Professors who sought to fill a void of meaning from the lectern had found an eager audience in Germany’s zealous youth.

By 1916, enrollment was fifth of what it had been with kids under 18 and women making up the numbers. Zealous youth were dying on the front. They weren't eagerly giving ear to professors.  

They denounced disciplinary boundaries and intellectual fragmentation in the name of some lost, or future, harmony and wholeness. In doing so, they were undermining their own authority and the legitimacy of the university itself. They were overreaching. What they sought was simply no longer to be had, and had likely never existed. Expert knowledge had dramatically expanded over the course of the previous half century. There were too many disciplinary perspectives and too many competing moral ideals, too much pluralism in too many areas, for any responsible scholar to hold out a hope of integrating them all.

In other words, German university students could no longer think of themselves as a Nationalist vanguard as in 1813 or 1870. The age of Mass Man had arrived. The elites had no vantage point from which to see things clearly and as a whole.  

Weber was effectively declaring that the mission of the Humboldtian university — to lead people to a higher level of moral consciousness — was no longer viable. So, what was to be done?

STEM subject research working closely with State Governments and Business Enterprises such that technological innovations could raise the standard of living and make the Nation more secure.

In “The Scholar’s Work,” typically known as “Science as Vocation” (first published in 1919), Weber argues that to responsibly lead a life of the mind in the academy, a person had to recognize that universities shouldn’t provide more than a limited moral instruction.

Nor should they provide anything at all save laboratories and some seminar rooms for Math mavens. The life of the mind can't be lived in a place filled with gormless undergraduates and apple polishing grad students. Teacher Training Colleges and specialist Institutes may be useful. But, Universities aren't useful.

Nor should they impart ready-made worldviews. The purpose of universities is to advance scholarship and to educate students by pursuing knowledge in an open-ended way.

Institutes can 'advance scholarship' by offering prizes and getting wealthy amateurs to subsidize a few full-time researchers doing the donkey work.  An Althoff, or a 'publish or perish' competitive culture might have the same effect. But in most countries, most of the time, scholarship has languished in the Universities.

Institutions of higher learning would be “going beyond the boundaries of scholarship if they were to provide not only knowledge and understanding but also beliefs and ‘ideals.’

Is an example of a value judgement albeit of a meaningless sort.

 Scholars had to exercise self-restraint. Acting otherwise would violate professional ethics and undermine the legitimacy of academic freedom, and also close off precisely the space students needed to develop the highest intellectual and moral capacities and commitments.

Everybody has to exercise self-restraint. No particular 'space' is required for 'students' to develop because they are not fetuses.

Paradoxically, a form of moral asceticism was needed to protect the particular moral education that could sustain the scholar’s calling within the modern university.

Bullshit! Genuine scholarship occurs where there is the motive and ability to achieve the thing. You can have as much 'moral asceticism', or as little, as you like, but there's no guarantee that the thing will be produced or not produced.

One of Weber’s names for this asceticism was Wertfreiheit, or “value freedom.”

But asceticism is not a value freedom. It is either self-deception or  bullshit.

Often translated as “value neutrality,” the term has elicited much criticism. Since Weber’s day, it has invited the charge that he was an epistemologically naïve positivist. Yet on more than one occasion, Weber himself ridiculed the notion that a scholar could ever simply “let the facts speak for themselves” or muster complete disinterest. Scholarship required certain ideals, values, and virtues.

Which the cretin thought he possessed. He wrote a book called 'The Religion of India' without knowing shit about India or its Religions or its Society. That isn't scholarship. It is stupidity.

In fact, the values that Weber identified as essential for scholarship turn out to resemble the ones that today’s advocates of moral education tend to foreground as a counterpoise to research training: inclusiveness, intellectual integrity, courage, and a principled commitment to intellectual and value pluralism, among others.

Sadly, one can have all these qualities while still being as stupid as shit.  Conversely, a racist bastard can make great discoveries. Enlightened self-interest suffices to stop people faking their results and also encourages them to move out of areas where peer review sucks.

For Weber, research training should include imparting those values, which are at once scholarly and moral.

Like not writing 'scholarly' books called 'The Religions of India' if you have never been to India and know nothing of its Religions.

Weber considered universities uniquely well-equipped to form students into mature, independent, self-reflective subjects with “the capacity to think clearly and ‘know what one wants.’”

He was completely wrong. Universities are and were wholly unequipped for any such thing. They are a place to prolong neoteny, by excluding economic imperatives, for a Credentialist purpose. They are the opposite of the real world. Any 'morality' inculcated in such places is a hot house affair which will soon wither and die once a living has to be earned.

Universities shouldn’t shy away from values; rather, they should induce students to reflect conscientiously on the values they presumed to be their own; they should teach students to understand how their own moral claims and values will conflict with those of others, and that acting in accord with their values will have specific social consequences.

This shite is stuff we all understand by the age of 4. Why not say 'Universities should not shy away from potty training?'

 For this teaching to happen in a scholarly way, students and university teachers alike need “value freedom,” a concept oftentimes mistaken for value neutrality.

No they don't. The thing is meaningless bullshit. The big problem is cognitive biases and poor training in Bayesian and other methods.

As Weber understood it, however, value freedom functioned like an imperative to take responsibility for one’s freedom and, thus, one’s own ultimate commitments and values.

Any economic process involves taking responsibility for one's choices. The more one is involved in economic choices, the less you need some stupid Professor saying 'you chose the chocolate pudding. You may now want the cheesecake but that's not the choice you made. Stop crying. Everybody thinks you are a great big baby. Take responsibility for your own actions you worthless pile of shite! You are 45 years old! Get a fucking job already. Getting another PhD in finger painting isn't gonna help you any.'

Neither specialized scholarship nor the modern, disciplinary university could ground and sustain one’s highest ideals and loves. The “ideals” a student “should serve,” “the gods he should bow before” are, to Weber, ultimately a matter that students must figure out for themselves and should come down to where their passion lies.

Coz, like Weber, their wives had inherited wealth. Indeed, Weber probably thought of himself as the sort of 'aristocrat' who had a special 'calling' to politics coz wifey could support him financially and thus he was 'independent' of the State. This was a very silly view. The State was what guaranteed that inherited wealth wouldn't suddenly disappear.

Even — indeed, especially — the choice to follow the scholarly calling and adopt its ideals and values can’t be justified through scholarly deliberation alone. A measure of faith is necessary. 

And a larger measure of stupidity and indifference to the suffering and sacrifices of others.

Weber’s embrace of asceticism, empirically grounded scholarship, and value pluralism in “The Scholar’s Work” invited immediate criticism.

The world was crashing down around their ears and yet they thought it worthwhile to criticize a cretin.

But a more prominent target in recent years has been Weber’s account of disenchantment, which puts “de-magicking,” or Entzauberung, at the center of a master narrative of the West.

De-magicking occurs when people beat and kill witches, magicians and so forth because they aren't making gold and diamonds on demand. If the guy claiming the supernatural power first robs and kills anyone who fucks with him, and then gets everybody to kiss his ass, we don't say he is a warlock. We say he is God's anointed.

This narrative has become a popular foil in scholarly discussions of the tenacious persistence of myth, magic of all kinds, the occult, and religion in Western culture. That is, in identifying the continued existence of people who pray or claim to commune with spirits, scholars often claim to be unsettling a reigning comprehensive narrative largely attributed to Weber and “The Scholar’s Work.”

Shitheads aren't scholars. Narratives are just silly stories. They don't reign over shit and can't get 'unsettled'. 

But Weber didn’t suggest that disenchantment was simply another name for secularization. Intensely pious 16th-century Calvinists, he argued in The Protestant Ethic, had helped disenchant the world by denying the Catholic sacraments their “magic.” 

Yes, but those shitheads were big on burning witches. James I had a Calvinist for a tutor.

Similarly, humanistic scholarship, such as philology, along with the natural and physical scien­ces, acted as agents of disenchantment by stripping literature and nature of certain mysteries and eroding the belief that the world has in itself, independent of any human activity, “any such thing as a ‘meaning’!”

Only 'humanistic scholars', or other such shitheads, talk about stuff like whether the world has meaning even if no human beings exist. Why not simply ask whether Nature would feature in David Attenborough Documentaries even if Life had never evolved on earth. ?

Often overlooked is that in the very lecture in which Weber developed his most extensive account of disenchantment, he also discusses the longing for re-enchantment, transcendence, and utopia — both inside and outside the university.

Physics had genuinely become utterly enchanting.  

As Weber understood it, the very agents of disenchantment, such as disciplinary, university-based scholarship, had created a desire for re-enchantment, leading to a cult of “authentic experience,” especially among cultured elites and intellectuals, those most likely to be fully enmeshed in, if not enthralled with, the modernizing systems of rationality.

But drugs gotta feature otherwise the thing gets real lame, real fast- unless you are studying a STEM subject.

Nowhere was the desire for re-enchantment more evident than among those devoted to the modern humanities.

i.e. tossers.

German intellectuals and scholars had relatively recently begun to invoke “the humanities” as moral compensation for a world experienced as lacking meaning and value.

Yup. Having the shit beaten out of you does tend to make you whine about 'humanity'.

Reflecting in 1930 on the debate Weber’s lecture had provoked over the past decade, the philosopher Erik Wolk described Weber as “the model for the crisis of the modern humanities.”

So, a mentally ill cretin who couldn't even fuck his wife was the 'model' for other tossers. BTW, Erik Wolk was one of the few Professors (apparently he's made a contribution to Church Law) to get sacked after Hitler came to power for being too Nazi! Wolk participated in the 'Aktion Ritterbusch'- a War time project to use the Humanities to help Nazify Europe. Later he got honorary Doctorates in plenty coz he was such a swell guy- not a Nazi at all- but an Evangelical Christian Jurist with an abiding commitment to some shite or the other.

Wolk did not mean that Weber had offered an exemplary analysis of the contradictions that characterized the study of art, history, literature, and philosophy in universities; rather, he meant that Weber himself was “the model;” he was the crisis personified.

But what was that 'crisis'? It was simply the fact that Germany couldn't get richer through warfare- as it had done in 1870. It could only fuck up big time. That's it. That's the whole story.

By performing what the modern disciplinary humanities could offer, Weber embodied their “tragically tense ethos.”

This is unfair. Weber was much stupider than average. The guy was supposed to be an economist- but was too crap in that subject even for Germany. Then he went mad and wrote stupid shite of a madly eclectic kind. Then he died and his wife spent some money on making out he was smart and then some stupid Professors jumped on the bandwagon because Weber had died before he could come out as a Heidegger or Schmitt type Nazi.

He had turned disciplined, specialized, and ascetic thinking into a distinctly moral example of how one might choose to live and to commit oneself to intellectual work today.

This could be said, with greater truth, of a paranoid hobbyist. The problem with 'intellectual work' is that it needs to be both utile as well as unmercenary to qualify as such. Otherwise it is merely the expertise needed to thrive in a trade or else some private type of lunacy.

He embodied the contradictions of the crisis of the humanities — that they could be justified both as method and moral formation, as both knowledge and ethos.

Weber embodied being a stupid windbag. There was no 'crisis of the humanities' in countries which had

1) always regarded 'the Humanities' as a merely ornamental part of elite paideia. It functioned like a handicap in horse racing, to compensate for the different weights of jockeys. Having a brain full of useless shite was the penalty for being born posh. It leveled the playing field in one sense. In another, it meant that people like Boris Johnson would be intellectually and morally contemptible enough for the hoi polloi to elect.

2) not let the Army General Staff fuck up the country by provoking wars it was bound to lose. This meant pedagogues could continue to ignore reality they way they are paid to.

But for many of his contemporaries, Weber’s insistence on a narrow, highly constrained conception of the ends of scholarship was precisely the problem, woefully inadequate to the demands of crisis.

The only adequate response to the 'demands of crisis' is to shit yourself and run around screaming hysterically.

Unlike many of his German contemporaries, Weber did not believe that the world, however disenchanted or rationalized, lacked meaning.

Then why talk shite about magic and enchantment?

The real problem was not a lack of meaning, but rather a surfeit of it, what he termed the “polytheism of values,” the proliferation and increasing proximity of distinct values and value orders.

Did this cretin not get that there was actual polytheism in days of yore?

As Freud would in Civilization and Its Discontents, Weber enjoined readers to come to terms with the difficulty of modern life and avoid sham solutions that would make things vastly worse: professors affecting prophetic airs, political and otherwise, in the classroom, and thereby enfeebling the university.

The problem here is that some aspects of classical paideia do require an understanding of prophetic texts. Why not have a couple of Professors who are charmingly off their rocker but capable of shedding light on archaic modes of thought?  

In effect, Weber went after the push for re-enchantment that many humanists took to be their vocation, suggesting such humanists lacked intellectual maturity and “manliness,” and more than a few struck back.
To read Weber today is to be reminded of the moral urgency of sober, unglamorous thinking in times of crisis.

Sober, unglamorous thinking is needed all the time though, no doubt, it may be relatively useless once the crisis is upon us.

But Weber also offered a vision of scholarship as a meaningful and deeply moral way of life.

As opposed to a meaningless and immoral way of passing the time.

He sought to combine idealism and realism to preserve the ethical integrity and moral legitimacy of the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

But failed to add in pragmatism and a dash of oregano to preserve something which has no need of any such ingredient. Only utility matters in the pursuit of knowledge and truth.

Weber repeatedly tells his readers that without a visceral passion for scholarship that scholarship itself cannot entirely account for, it makes little sense for young people to subject themselves to the vagaries — indeed, the horrors — of the conditions of labor in the university.

Right! Coz working at a Uni is so much worse than turning tricks at a truck stop.

Given the poor pay and arbitrary hiring process, scholarship and intellectual work have to generate “passion” as only a not-entirely-rationalizable belief in an ultimate ideal can in order to make any sense as a profession.

Which is why trading blowjobs for the price of a Happy Meal has to generate 'passion' as only a not-entirely-rationalizable belief in an ultimate ideal can explain why very poor people with substance abuse issues persist in that profession.

Scholarship may be an agent of disenchantment,

Historically, the opposite was the case. Dr. Faustus or Dr. Dee or Paracelsus were typical of the Academy whereas Lawyers, like Bacon, and Merchant Mariners and Engineers and Architects and inventors and so forth, showed superior rationality because it was useful for them to do so. But such has it always been.

and re-enchantment may threaten scholarship, but scholarship also requires enchantment, a passion that can’t be fully accounted for.

This is only true if the thing is a hobby with no reputational benefit.

Weber addresses the need for ­ideals as well as an empirically based assessment of the world — of an internal passion and a frank account of reality — by adapting a term of religious derivation to modern times, the word that appears in the titles of “The Scholar’s Work,” as well as in the second lecture Weber delivered in the Munich series, “The Politician’s Work”: Beruf, or what we translate variously as “calling,” “vocation,” or “work.”

Sadly, a 'vocation' which is well paid or which has reputational advantages is going to attract people whose 'calling' is a 'Kavka toxin' type strategic belief.

In order to articulate the paradoxical notion of a true calling in a time when the gods who might issue it have absconded or been drowned out by modernity’s rational structures, Weber draws on the analysis of Calvinism that he had presented more than a decade earlier in The Protestant Ethic but had continued to return to as part of his wide-ranging studies of world religions in the final decade of his life. 

So, the silly man kept repeating a lesson he was incapable of learning. Calvinism is still Christianity. Christ calls to sinful, suffering, human beings. A vocation is a hearkening to the call to be of service to the good shepherd.

For Weber, “vocation” had two meanings: a traditionally religious one, as in a calling from God,

to God

and a professional one, as in one’s job or employment.

which yet is Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam.

Vocation referred to both an individual form of specialization and a social category or form of organization.

As a matter of politeness, we speak of Medicine or Teaching as a vocation though, of course, they are professions like any other. But this is merely a manner of speaking.

Ultimately, vocation became an end in itself.

Only if the underlying activity was wholly inutile even in the eyes of those who shared the same Credo.

One worked not only to earn money but also to be part of something greater than oneself.

But, speaking generally, there was more than one way to earn money and more than one bigger thing one could be part of.

The division and specialization of labor were not problems to be solved; they were moral solutions for a new reality.

No, they were economic, not moral, solutions to the same old reality- viz. the existence of scarcity.

To lead a meaningful life in the modern West was to commit to a vocation and be transformed by it.

Nonsense. A 'gentleman' did not have to commit to a vocation. The point of going into business was to make your pile so that you could stop being a businessman and live like a gentleman. To have been 'transformed' by your trade was to be rendered permanently declasse.

Weber considered scholarship and politics two such vocations.

Because they are so similar, right? Why not add being  a trapeze artist or gaining employment as a Cost and Management Accountant?

The scholar and politician lived, as he put it, not only “from” their vocation, earning a living from it, but also “for” it.

But both had to pretend they weren't in it for the money.

They lived from it psychologically, deriving meaning and value from the role they served in a social world. 

This is the opposite of the truth. The true scholar knows he serves no role in the social world. Rather, he is a link in a chain stretching back and forward across the abyss of Time. Similarly, the true politician prefers to pull the strings behind the scenes. Even if she holds a high position, her popular persona may be diametrically opposed to her true views and agenda.

For most of Germany’s cultured elite, Weber’s vision of politics and scholarship amounted to a bleak, existential liberalism, a hopeless capitulation to modernity made up as a heroic realism.

In other words, an Enlightenment without a Frederick the Great.

Weber had poked a hornet’s nest that had formed over decades, unleashing a swarm of ideas about rebirth, renewal, and the recovery not just of scholarship and politics but about which ways of living and working in the modern world might be meaningful. 

Weber gained political importance as a member of the German Democratic Party- which he initially opposed because it was Republican whereas he was a Monarchist.  In his view, Germany should not have surrendered. He thought Ludendorff had panicked. His backing for full Democracy was an over-reaction. Interestingly, Weber was enthused by Rathenau's call for a levee en masse to continue the fight and only desisted when it became obvious to him that Bavaria would then separate from the Reich. In any case, once Revolutionaries grabbed power, it became obvious that the State would need all its strength to defeat the internal enemy and thus it was futile to continue the War.

At times, he took a gloomy view of the future of his class-

Weber saw a conflict between the scholarly life- where only principles matter- and that of the politician- where compromise is essential. He withdrew from the Democratic Party, after losing an election, and quit active politics.
This is his own, somewhat garbled, but very German, letter explaining his decision.

Reitter & Wellmon take a 'glass half full' view of Weber. However, it is anybody's guess what direction he would have taken had he lived longer. My guess is he would have supported Hindenberg's rule by decree though, like his brother, the Nazis would have silenced him once they took power.

One of the questions raised in Germany in the 1920s that continues to be debated, and in our view misunderstood, is what Weber meant by value-free or value-freedom. American sociologists, led by Talcott Parsons, embraced the concept and celebrated Weber as its founding figure, as they sought to develop a scientific and methodologically rigorous social science that could serve the modern liberal state.
Max Horkheimer, the German philosopher and leading member of the Frankfurt School, remembered Weber this way too. Weber’s refusal to use his scholarly acumen to help construct a better society, Horkheimer said in 1962, decades after hearing the politics lecture as a student, was a result of his commitment to value-freedom. This inhibited his thinking and trapped him in the values of a liberal “bourgeois society.”

A more reasonable view is that Weber's values were that of a bygone age. He wanted a limited Monarchy of the late Victorian type. He considered Socialism to be a swindle. But the world had changed and he could not change with it because, after all, his calling was to the past.

An influential critique from the left, that of the German émigré Hans Gerth and the young Columbia sociologist C. Wright Mills, by contrast, took Weber to be a nostalgist. In their introduction to From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, which included the first widely available English translations of Weber’s two vocation lectures, they suggested that Weber had been a reluctant advocate of technical rationality. He was ultimately an “old-fashioned liberal” for whom “the decline of the humanist and the ascendency of the expert” were further signs of the “diminished chances for freedom” in Western modernity.

In other words, one's freedom to be a late Nineteenth Century bore had been reduced by the passage of time.

All of these readings fall short. They misunderstand the tension at the center of “The Scholar’s Work” and “The Politician’s Work.” This tension is the double bind that is both the burden and the possibility of living in a disenchanted world.

Everybody lives in a world without magic. Some people refuse to accept that this is so and get ripped off by charlatans. But this isn't a 'double bind'. It is stupidity.

In a world that abounds with competing values and moral claims, what Weber called “the polytheism of values,” intellectual work is of paramount importance.

Nonsense! Doing sensible things is of paramount importance. Writing nonsense may be described as 'intellectual work' but isn't really.

If anything binds humans across space and time, it is, according to Weber, their capacity to create meaning.

Sadly, one can 'create meaning' till the cows come home but no 'binding' occurs if the thing is useless.

The purpose of intellectual work is to help make possible meaningful forms of life for this world.

The purpose of all useful work is to make life possible. Where there is life there is meaning.

More than a hundred years later, the questions Weber faced are still with us.

Very true! But only if you are Sabrina, the teenage witch.

Our own liberal institutions have proven not to be as robust as many imagined, with ascendant far-right movements, intensifying inequality, endless war, and feckless cultural and political elites undermining confidence in the durability of democracy itself.

When has this not been the case? Institutions aren't 'liberal'- at least in the view of Libtards.

The invisible hand of history, the market, or Reason have failed to guide us to universal peace and prosperity.

History does not have an invisible hand. Markets are about Supply and Demand. There isn't a 'universal' demand for peace- some peeps like War. The Supply condition for universal prosperity does not exist for Malthusian reasons. Technology may change this- but that requires some genuine scholarly work- not yet more mindless bullshit.

To read Weber’s vocation lectures today is to be reminded of the moral urgency of sober, unglamorous, disciplined thinking in times of crisis.

No it isn't. It is to marvel at the stupidity of Sociology as an academic subject.

It is to be reminded, as Weber put it in “The Politician’s Work,” that ethics can be and often are “used in morally disastrous ways” in both the academic and political spheres, ways that preclude an honest and responsible reckoning with the world in which we find ourselves.

Who doesn't know that people who talk about 'ethics' are either stupider or more sociopathic than average?

On the campuses of today’s universities, especially in the United States, student activists are making moral demands and defending ideals, but mostly outside of the classroom and lecture halls and within a bureaucratic system of moral management.

But a lot of those students are getting swindled. The 'bureaucratic system of moral management' is the P.R aspect of a Ponzi scheme.  It is very expensive. At the end of the day the students are paying for their own further impoverishment. On the other hand, academics in useless departments can get better paid jobs as administrators.

While some scholars try to accommodate them, many more simply work to keep these higher-education factories running on their own adjunct labor. And most presidents at our leading universities muster ceremonial acknowledgments of the institutions’ past purposes but spend their days overseeing multibillion-dollar global enterprises. Who but a blessed, tenured few could continue to believe that scholarship is a vocation?

Useful scholarship can find a market outside the Academy. People will pay to read well written, well researched books. By contrast, credential seeking cretins are obliged to read crap.

To read “The Scholar’s Work,” then, is to be confronted with the possibility that our own universities are, for many, inhospitable places for pursuing intellectual work as a calling.

Quite true. We must get rid of young people stinking up the place with their pheromones.

Since our duty as scholars is to understand our current conditions and to take responsibility for our own future, these are questions we have to answer for ourselves.  

Everybody has a duty- failure to perform which may result in death- to 'understand' current conditions and to take responsibility for our future. On the other hand, once one has performed this duty adequately, one can while away the tedious hours in any manner one pleases.

The history of German Academia, from 1870 to 1945, proves only one thing. Scholars are wholly ineffective in opposing any type of political catastrophe. A call to scholarship is, more often than not, a call to cretinism. Equally, it must be said, very good intellectual work can be produced simply because, for those with a comparative advantage in it, it is well remunerated.

The same is true of politics. But then it is also true of plumbing. A guy who likes tinkering with pipes may flood your house. It is better to call in a qualified plumber who doesn't like his job, but does it because it is well paid and thus allows him to pay off his student loans.