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the natural scientific concepts of observation and experiment were intended to enlarge the distance between seems and is. The lenses of the telescope and the microscope are given priority over the lenses of the eye; in the measurement of temperature the effect of heat on spirits of alcohol or mercury is given priority over the effect of heat on sunburnt skin or parched throats. Natural science teaches us to attend to some experiences rather than to others and only to those when they have been cast into the proper form for scientific attention. It redraws the lines between seems and is; it
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Theory is required to support observation, just as much as observation theory. There is indeed therefore something extraordinary in the coexistence of empiricism and natural science in the same culture, for they represent radically different and incompatible ways of approaching the world.
Tristram Shandy.
The Enlightenment is consequently the period par excellence in which most intellectuals lack self-knowledge.
movement towards or away from various goods are to be explained with reference to the virtues and vices
as much treatises concerned with how human action is to be explained and understood as with what acts are to be done.
the notion of mechanical explanation is a conception of invariances specified by law-like generalizations. To cite a cause is to cite a necessary condition or a sufficient condition or a necessary and sufficient condition as the antecedent of whatever behavior is to be explained.
What Marx understood was that such an agent is forced to regard his own actions quite differently from the behavior of those whom he is manipulating.
the question remains open whether in the case of the agent who claims to be applying the science of human behavior we are genuinely observing the application of a real technology or rather instead the deceptive and self-deceptive histrionic mimicry of such a technology.
The civil servant has as his nineteenth-century counterpart and opposite the social reformer: Saint Simonians, Comtians, utilitarians, English ameliorists such as Charles Booth, the early Fabian socialists. Their characteristic lament is: if only government could learn to be scientific! And the long-term response of government is to claim that it has indeed become scientific in just the sense that the reformers required. Government insists more and more that its civil servants themselves have the kind of education that will qualify them as experts. It more and more recruits those who claim to
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in his insistence that the rationality of adjusting means to ends in the most economical and efficient way is the central task of the bureaucrat
modern theories of bureaucracy or of administration which differ widely from Weber’s at many other points tend on this issue of managerial justification to agree with him
So we can now see in bare skeletal outline a progress first from the Enlightenment’s ideal for a social science to the aspirations of social reformers, next from the aspirations of social reformers to the ideals of practice and justification of civil servants and managers, then from the practices of management to the theoretical codification of these practices and of the norms governing them by sociologists and organization theorists and finally from the employment of the textbooks written by those theorists in schools of management and business schools to the theoretically informed managerial
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what is certainly not the case—that the social sciences are almost or perhaps completely devoid of achievement. For the salient fact about those sciences is the absence of the discovery of any law-like generalizations whatsoever.
To explain is on their view to invoke a law-like generalization retrospectively; to predict is to invoke a similar generalization prospectively. For this tradition the diminution of predictive failure is the mark of progress in science; and
King Charles II’s dead fish.
I make the point of saying ‘radically new’ or ‘radically innovative’ clear and that I also make it clear that what was alleged to be a counter-example is not in fact one.
concerned not with mere foretelling but with rationally grounded prediction, and it is the systematic limitations on such prediction with which I am concerned.
if the game metaphor may be stretched further, the problem about real life is that moving one’s knight to QB3 may always be replied to with a lob across the net.
this affects the predictive power of many computer simulations which seek to transfer analyses of past determinate situations to the prediction of future indeterminate ones.
There is at the outset no determinate, enumerable set of factors, the totality of which comprise the situation. To suppose otherwise is to confuse a retrospective standpoint with a prospective one. To say this is not at all the same as saying that all computer simulation is valueless; but what simulation cannot evade are the systematic sources of unpredictability.
Wittgenstein who, I take it, was saying to us something like this: on the best account of language that I can give and the best account of inner mental states that I can give, I can make nothing of the notion of a private language, I cannot render it adequately intelligible.
given the type of consideration which I have been able to adduce, I can make nothing of the proposal. I cannot render it adequately intelligible either to assent to it or dissent from it.
It is at once clear that many of the central features of human life derive from the particular and peculiar ways in which predictability and unpredictability interlock. It is the degree of predictability which our social structures possess which enables us to plan and engage in long-term projects; and the ability to plan and to engage in long-term projects is a necessary condition of being able to find life meaningful.
We are thus involved in a world in which we are simultaneously trying to render the rest of society predictable and ourselves unpredictable, to devise generalizations which will capture the behavior of others and to cast our own behavior into forms which will elude the generalizations which others frame. If these are general features of social life, what will be the characteristics of the best possible available stock of generalizations about social life?
We should not be surprised or disappointed that the generalizations and maxims of the best social science share certain characteristics of their predecessors—the proverbs of folk societies, the generalizations of jurists, the maxims of Machiavelli.
If instead we kept careful records of error, and made of error itself a topic for research, my guess is that we should discover that predictive error is not randomly distributed.
conceptual innovation, or the unforeseen consequences of unmade decisions, or the game-theoretic character of human life or pure contingency
four sources of social unpredictability
organizational success and organizational predictability exclude one another,
true of living organisms as well as society
There is then nothing paradoxical in offering a prediction, vulnerable in the way that all social predictions are, about the permanent unpredictability of human life.
The concept of managerial effectiveness is after all one more contemporary moral fiction and perhaps the most important of them all. The dominance of the manipulative mode in our culture is not and cannot be accompanied by very much actual success in manipulation. I do not of course mean that the activities of purported experts do not have effects and that we do not suffer from those effects and suffer gravely. But the notion of social control embodied in the notion of expertise is indeed a masquerade. Our social order is in a very literal sense out of our, and indeed anyone’s, control. No one
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the social world of everyday hard-headed practical pragmatic no-nonsense realism which is the environment of management is one which depends for its sustained existence on the systematic perpetuation of misunderstanding and of belief in fictions. The fetishism of commodities has been supplemented by another just as important fetishism, that of bureaucratic skills.
in the social world of corporations and governments private preferences are advanced under the cover of identifying the presence or absence of the findings of experts.
The effects of eighteenth-century prophecy have been to produce not scientifically managed social control, but a skillful dramatic imitation of such control. It is histrionic success which gives power and authority in our culture. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor.
in our culture we know of no organized movement towards power which is not bureaucratic and managerial in mode and we know of no justifications for authority which are not Weberian in form.
this Weberian vision of the world cannot be rationally sustained; it disguises and conceals rather than illuminates and it depends for its power on its success at disguise and concealment.
Marx’s particular examples were generalized into a theory—either by Marx himself or by others—quite different types of issue were raised. For the generality of the theory derived precisely from its attempted embodiment of the theory in a set of law-like generalizations which link the material conditions and class structures of societies as kinds of cause to ideologically informed beliefs as kinds of effect.
it was Nietzsche’s historic achievement to understand more clearly than any other philosopher—certainly more clearly than his counterparts in Anglo-Saxon emotivism and continental existentialism—not only that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will, but also the nature of the problems that this posed for moral philosophy.
The rational and rationally justified autonomous moral subject of the eighteenth century is a fiction, an illusion; so, Nietzsche resolves, let will replace reason and let us make ourselves into autonomous moral subjects by some gigantic and heroic act of the will,
The problem then is how to construct in an entirely original way, how to invent a new table of what is good and a law, a problem which arises for each individual. This problem would constitute the core of a Nietzschean moral philosophy. For it is in his relentlessly serious pursuit of the problem, not in his frivolous solutions that Nietzsche’s greatness lies, the greatness that makes him the moral philosopher if the only alternatives to Nietzsche’s moral philosophy turn out to be those formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their successors.
Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism—irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unsolved and his solutions defy reason—remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture.
Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the Left as well as of the Right.
the precise counterpart of the thought of Weber and Nietzsche, the sociology of interaction elaborated by Erving Goffman. The central contrast embodied in Goffman’s sociology is precisely the same as that embodied in emotivism. It is the contrast between the purported meaning and point of our utterances and the use to which they are actually being put, between the surface presentations of behavior and the strategies used to achieve those presentations.
It is important to notice that the concept of honor in the society for which Aristotle was the spokesman—and in many subsequent societies as different as that of the Icelandic sagas and of the Bedouin of the Western desert—just because honor and worth were connected in the way which Aristotle remarks, was—in spite of the resemblance—a very different concept from anything that we find in Goffman’s pages and from almost anything that we find in modern societies.
it was because a moral tradition of which Aristotle’s thought was the intellectual core was repudiated during the transitions of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries that the Enlightenment project of discovering new rational secular foundations for morality had to be undertaken.
no doctrine vindicated itself in so wide a variety of contexts as did Aristotelianism: Greek, Islamic, Jewish and Christian;
Aristotelianism is philosophically the most powerful of pre-modern modes of moral thought. If a pre-modern view of morals and politics is to be vindicated against modernity, it will be in something like Aristotelian terms or not at all.
What is alien to our conception of virtue is the intimate connection in heroic society between the concept of courage and its allied virtues on the one hand and the concepts of friendship, fate and death on the other. Courage is important, not simply as a quality of individuals, but as the quality necessary to sustain a household and a community.
For in heroic societies life is the standard of value. If someone kills you, my friend or brother, I owe you their death and when I have paid my debt to you their friend or brother owes them my death. The more extended my system of kinsmen and friends, the more liabilities I shall incur of a kind that may end in my death.
‘What is character but the determination of incident?’ wrote Henry James. ‘What is incident but the illustration of character?’
