Let us accept Weber's account of modernity as reasonable.
Modernity, for Weber, is the culmination of a rationalization process that is driven forward by modern capitalism, and which results in the hegemony of the abstract quantitative thinking, instrumental reason and the domination of nature by the natural-technical sciences.
It is reasonable because we are living through a new form of the process of rationalization at the moment. The neo-liberal process of globalization, which is being driven and shaped by global corporations, is a continautiono f the process of rationalisation.
My time in Canberra in the last two weeks was spend dealing with the abstract quantitative thinking of the number crunchers who dealt with costs generated by computer that modelled the behaviour of a nation. It was was all about numbers--ever changing numbers; numbers that never stood still.
My response to this? Concrete particularity. This person in this particular place engaged in these particular tasks in this particular practice.
Webers' idea of the responsible, ethical individual standing firm with his hand on the wheel of history and then acting resolutelyin reaction to the process of rationalization looks very shaky. It is not plausible as a critical-historical standpoint, since it implies that such an individual stands outside the process of rationalization. Something more convincing is required, than this kind of Nietzschean romanticism about the sovereign individual. Weber's romanticism can be caricatured as 'life verses the machines'. It opens the door to, and can lead to, irrationality.
Schmitt responds to this Weberian romanticism by scorning and repudiating aesthetic romanticism as irrational. He picks up on Hegel's working through the duality of duality of the abstract positivist thinking of the mechanistic world view (Descartes, Hobbes and Kant) and concrete being. Hegel's working this duality is based on the insight that individual subjectivity is a part of the objective order.
Schmitt re-deploys this in terms of a Catholicism that is sensitive to local particularity, and this provides the basis for a conservative critique of economic-technical rationality.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at March 15, 2004 09:12 PM | TrackBack