/lit/ - Literature

>>19361117
My understanding of Weber's rationalisation thesis is that it is essentially epistemological. Weber's sociological project was what he termed an interpretive sociology—one that saw the substance of social life as a product of the meaning that individuals gave to their social actions. Thus, much of Weber's world-historical interpretation of society is tied with trying to find how people's interpretation of social life manifests itself in social structures. The rationalisation hypothesis is, in this sense, the manifestation of a certain kind of epistemological legitimacy of one form social meaning over another. A Weltanschauung in it's most comprehensive sense.
A good way to understand this is his comparison between Traditional and Rational legitimacy. Under traditional relations, meaning and authority in social relations is governed by age and ceremony. The reason one would support,or adjudicate between, given social relations is on the basis of the posterity of that relation. For example, in early common law, property rights were legitimated if that property was held 'since time immemorial' by a given family. In contrast, under rational social relations, typically things are ordered instrumentally, with the privileging of any position governed by it's appropriateness to achieving some given end. Thus today property rights are decided by deliberate contract, often allocated for specific use.
As such, it can be very strange for us to look back on previous social structures and why people supported them. They can be perplexing because, according to Weber, they were essentially operating under a different logic than we do now. For example, we may marvel at the complicit submission of so vast a population such as India to the Varna system, and wonder why individuals would live under it, it would seem, completely voluntarily; why the Kshatria would submit to the Brahmin despite having the preponderance of arms and income. Looking back now, we tend to impute some kind of logic of utility: that in accordance to the Indian religion, they sought the utility in reincarnation over the this-worldly gain of rebelling against their Dharma. But what Weber wants us to think is rather that they weren't thinking in these terms at all; social truth was divined through tradition, not utility. Thus, it is as natural to us to consider the utility of something as demanding our allegiance as it was to them tradition and 'time immemorial'. The lower castes saw their position as natural due to it simply being 'as things have always been', and that alone established the truth and justification of this relation. I personally don't know enough about classical Indian society to mediate on this point, but it is a demonstration of what i think Weber meant by an interpretive sociology—all social structures and relations were governed by a prevailing epistemological authority of tradition-as-justification, which manifested itself in all social action.