I've been sitting with and getting a lot out of "fascism as a politics of despair of alternatives", and one thing striking me in the moment is how processes of proceduralization and bureaucratization that attempt to establish widespread belief in "one right way to get X" will be unusually fragile to fascist tendencies as a failure mode anytime anything occurs to disrupt the "one way". Definitely speaks to my experience of the millennial life trajectory.
It raises for me the question of what modes of political and social organization more easily support a multiplicity of "paths to goal" or simply hope and faith in general -- which isn't exactly a new thought but feels on the way to a new technical problem statement....
Thank you, and yes, I imagine these could be fruitful lines to follow. On "proceduralization and bureaucratization," I recently had some fun reading Ben Kafka's The Demon of Writing, which has a lot of colorful anecdotes about the birth of bureaucracy in Enlightenment France, about its role in the Revolution, about its lack in the early US (horrifying Tocqueville). A lot of black comedy there, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781942130352/the-demon-of-writing
Well, I think the concept of role rationality is definitely there in Weber. It's certainly there in the concept of Beruf but is also used to introduce the concept of value rationality with the example of duty to an office. The problem is the career of the term instrumental rationality in Western Marxism. People read Adorno and Horkheimer or Habermas and retcon their understanding of Weber—who was mostly supplying some clarifying concepts in Economy and Society. It's not something tied to capitalism or industrialization or bureaucracy. It's just all goal-oriented social action but it gets conflated with the concept of proceduralism or rationalization or routinization or bureaucratization etc. Zweckrationalität even has "end" right there in the name. It's not about means alone. It's usually accused of the opposite, being about ends whatever the means. I think people take it to mean adequation of ends to means, when it is just as much about the adequation of means to ends. Alternately, value rationality is not about ends but about rules and duties, even in the face of tensions with means-ends reasoning, at best it can be about attributed to something like following some "ultimate ends." I think instrumental rationality might also be conflated with Weber's political ethics of responsibility, with ethics of conviction being attributed value rationality. But this distinction is just about what concern one is to have for consequences of one's actions. For Weber all politics is instrumental, goal-oriented social action. Anyway, I know this is a tangent from the book and the issues. I am just trying to get a handle on the approach.
Very good points, and yes: when I talk about a "Weberian phyletic tradition" what I say is not necessarily meant to be representative of Weber himself, because Weber is the focal exemplar of the tradition but the tradition is constituted by lesser followers and by opponents as well (as discussed here, it won't hurt to link once more: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/differentiating-traditions ). I don't personally know enough to assign what credit for which simplifications to retcons from 'Adorno and Horkheimer or Habermas' vs retcons from Parsons or others, but that history would interest me and I hope I'll learn it.
These are useful clarifications, and it's a welcome tangent. My favorite comments sections are often the ones that go a little off topic into technical roots.
Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to let Parsons (or as I like to call him the American Horkheimer) off the hook, though he was better on the reception of Weber than he was on Durkheim. It's just that most leftists outside of sociology encounter Weber through the Frankfurt School. On traditions: I clicked to the link to your piece on different kinds of traditions but I haven't read it yet. I am not familiar with this. Is it an alternative to meme theory, drawing on Geertz? I was a fan of Dan Sperber's epidemiology of representations as an alternative Dawkins, but I see it might be too general-level for use in historicizing intellectual traditions.
"American Horkheimer" I had not heard! It's evocative.
The language that I'm using for tradition here is original, drawing more directly on my background in biology (bioengineering in undergrad, further biochem and biophysics in grad school) than a prior sociological tradition. It is an alternative to meme theory. Implicitly, it's also drawing on MacIntyre, Laudan, Bourdieu, Marvin Harris, the "Bielefeld Collective" in history and philosophy of science, and category theory ontologies from math and programming. I hadn't heard of Dan Sperber but will check that out, thanks!
Just riffing on the isomorphic similarities between Horkheimer's project of uniting the social sciences at the Institute of Social Research and Parsons's Soc-Rel Department.
Funnily, Sperber has just come up again via a parallel thread, in the final chapters of Boyer's Minds Make Societies! (I noted I was planning to read that here, https://substack.com/@encaustum/note/c-124403181? )
Given that the signal for Sperber's apparently not sparse here on Substack, I'll definitely be making time for it soon.
Sperber's an interesting guy. He started out as a Levi-Straussian anthropologist doing fieldwork in Ethiopia and participating in the rationality and relativism debates on the side of rationality with his essay, "Apparently Irrational Beliefs": https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-Relativism-Press-Martin-Hollis/dp/0262580616
He remade himself as a cognitive scientist and analytic philosopher of mind and language in the tradition of Grice, Chomsky and Fodor. The philosophers are always surprised that he was an anthropologist first; anthropologists that he became a cognitive scientist. I was a fan of his book Explaining Culture when I was studying sociology of knowledge because all the sociologists of culture are Geertzian pragmatists.
I've been sitting with and getting a lot out of "fascism as a politics of despair of alternatives", and one thing striking me in the moment is how processes of proceduralization and bureaucratization that attempt to establish widespread belief in "one right way to get X" will be unusually fragile to fascist tendencies as a failure mode anytime anything occurs to disrupt the "one way". Definitely speaks to my experience of the millennial life trajectory.
It raises for me the question of what modes of political and social organization more easily support a multiplicity of "paths to goal" or simply hope and faith in general -- which isn't exactly a new thought but feels on the way to a new technical problem statement....
Thank you, and yes, I imagine these could be fruitful lines to follow. On "proceduralization and bureaucratization," I recently had some fun reading Ben Kafka's The Demon of Writing, which has a lot of colorful anecdotes about the birth of bureaucracy in Enlightenment France, about its role in the Revolution, about its lack in the early US (horrifying Tocqueville). A lot of black comedy there, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9781942130352/the-demon-of-writing
Well, I think the concept of role rationality is definitely there in Weber. It's certainly there in the concept of Beruf but is also used to introduce the concept of value rationality with the example of duty to an office. The problem is the career of the term instrumental rationality in Western Marxism. People read Adorno and Horkheimer or Habermas and retcon their understanding of Weber—who was mostly supplying some clarifying concepts in Economy and Society. It's not something tied to capitalism or industrialization or bureaucracy. It's just all goal-oriented social action but it gets conflated with the concept of proceduralism or rationalization or routinization or bureaucratization etc. Zweckrationalität even has "end" right there in the name. It's not about means alone. It's usually accused of the opposite, being about ends whatever the means. I think people take it to mean adequation of ends to means, when it is just as much about the adequation of means to ends. Alternately, value rationality is not about ends but about rules and duties, even in the face of tensions with means-ends reasoning, at best it can be about attributed to something like following some "ultimate ends." I think instrumental rationality might also be conflated with Weber's political ethics of responsibility, with ethics of conviction being attributed value rationality. But this distinction is just about what concern one is to have for consequences of one's actions. For Weber all politics is instrumental, goal-oriented social action. Anyway, I know this is a tangent from the book and the issues. I am just trying to get a handle on the approach.
Very good points, and yes: when I talk about a "Weberian phyletic tradition" what I say is not necessarily meant to be representative of Weber himself, because Weber is the focal exemplar of the tradition but the tradition is constituted by lesser followers and by opponents as well (as discussed here, it won't hurt to link once more: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/differentiating-traditions ). I don't personally know enough to assign what credit for which simplifications to retcons from 'Adorno and Horkheimer or Habermas' vs retcons from Parsons or others, but that history would interest me and I hope I'll learn it.
These are useful clarifications, and it's a welcome tangent. My favorite comments sections are often the ones that go a little off topic into technical roots.
Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to let Parsons (or as I like to call him the American Horkheimer) off the hook, though he was better on the reception of Weber than he was on Durkheim. It's just that most leftists outside of sociology encounter Weber through the Frankfurt School. On traditions: I clicked to the link to your piece on different kinds of traditions but I haven't read it yet. I am not familiar with this. Is it an alternative to meme theory, drawing on Geertz? I was a fan of Dan Sperber's epidemiology of representations as an alternative Dawkins, but I see it might be too general-level for use in historicizing intellectual traditions.
"American Horkheimer" I had not heard! It's evocative.
The language that I'm using for tradition here is original, drawing more directly on my background in biology (bioengineering in undergrad, further biochem and biophysics in grad school) than a prior sociological tradition. It is an alternative to meme theory. Implicitly, it's also drawing on MacIntyre, Laudan, Bourdieu, Marvin Harris, the "Bielefeld Collective" in history and philosophy of science, and category theory ontologies from math and programming. I hadn't heard of Dan Sperber but will check that out, thanks!
Just riffing on the isomorphic similarities between Horkheimer's project of uniting the social sciences at the Institute of Social Research and Parsons's Soc-Rel Department.
Yes, it seems fitting – the sort of short joke that suggests a lot of gristle to chew on.
Funnily, Sperber has just come up again via a parallel thread, in the final chapters of Boyer's Minds Make Societies! (I noted I was planning to read that here, https://substack.com/@encaustum/note/c-124403181? )
Given that the signal for Sperber's apparently not sparse here on Substack, I'll definitely be making time for it soon.
Sperber's an interesting guy. He started out as a Levi-Straussian anthropologist doing fieldwork in Ethiopia and participating in the rationality and relativism debates on the side of rationality with his essay, "Apparently Irrational Beliefs": https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-Relativism-Press-Martin-Hollis/dp/0262580616
He remade himself as a cognitive scientist and analytic philosopher of mind and language in the tradition of Grice, Chomsky and Fodor. The philosophers are always surprised that he was an anthropologist first; anthropologists that he became a cognitive scientist. I was a fan of his book Explaining Culture when I was studying sociology of knowledge because all the sociologists of culture are Geertzian pragmatists.
The book Explaining Culture arrived today and it reads very smoothly! Thank you again for the rec.