Sociology as a Vocation

What does it mean to live for sociology, today? In attempting to answer this question I return to Max Weber’s famous lectures delivered toward the end of his life—one on science as a vocation and the other on politics as a vocation. He presented ‘‘Science as a Vocation’’ in November 1917 toward the end of World War I and the more pessimistic ‘‘Politics as a Vocation’’ in January 1919 after Germany’s defeat. The essays themselves exemplify Weber’s methodology— interpreting social action within the external conditions that shape it. Weber not only explicates the meaning of ‘‘vocation’’— what it means to ‘‘live for’’ as well to ‘‘live off’’ science and politics—but situates their pursuit within historical and national contexts. He explores the possibilities of an ‘‘inner devotion’’ to science or politics in Germany as compared to the United States and Britain. Yet neither here nor elsewhere does Weber turn his sociology of vocation back on to sociology itself. He does not advance from sociology of vocation to sociology as a vocation, which is the endeavor of this essay, an endeavor that draws on but leads us beyond Weber. Consonant with Weber’s own life, I shall argue that sociology sits uncomfortably between science and politics. Twisting between science and politics—since he could not marry the two—he presented them as two spheres that must be kept apart. Weber failed to grasp sociology’s place between science and politics for two reasons: first, sociology as a discipline was still embryonic and pre-professional. It needed to be safeguarded from politics. Second, he had not developed a coherent view of civil society populated by institutions that could ground a standpoint between science and politics. Yet, and here is the paradox, his conception of sociology as an interpretive understanding of value-oriented social action calls for its own value standpoint since sociology cannot be its own exception. As a form of social action it too must be impelled by value commitments. Weber fully understood this. Indeed, he was so insistent on the ethos of science precisely because he feared that sociology might be overrun by arbitrary value commitments, commitments that are nevertheless essential to its pursuit. The tension between science and politics was, therefore, complicated by a second tension, that between fact and value, or more broadly between instrumental rationality and its underpinnings in value rationality. But without a conception of civil society, he had no way of collectively mooring those values, and so they are instead reduced to an individual existential choice. The completion of Weber’s program and the sustainability of sociology depend on its connection to civil society.