Sociology, both as a mode of thinking and as an academic discipline, came into existence as an attempt to understand the dramatic transformations that Western Europe experienced between the mid-point of the eighteenth century and the mid-point of the twentieth. I will mention some of the most obvious of these, but we have to remember that these descriptions themselves and the categories they use are themselves products of this attempt to understand them: the concepts we use to understand modernity are themselves modernist ones.
* There is a dramatic economic shift, whose most visible effects include the transformation of agriculture into a profit-oriented and increasingly technological activity, with the marginalisation of farm labourers and tenant farmers and their flight to the growing urban centres of population; the development of large-scale industrial manufacturing processes, the corresponding decline of artisanal and home production and the rise of trade unions; and the increasingly global dimensions of trade, as more and more of the world is drawn into the global economy and the non-European world is increasingly turned into colonial possessions designed to supply cheap or free labour, basic commodities and protected markets for the imperial centre.
* There is a dramatic shift in the terms of politics. Democratic movements make monarchic and aristocratic power increasingly untenable, and even authoritarian government increasingly requires the active participation of its citizens to sustain itself. At the same time, the state's capacity of intervention is transformed by its growing power of administration and surveillance, the development of large-scale standing armies based on mass conscription, and its increasing significance as an economic actor. This emerging power bloc is challenged by the growing workers' movement. Democratic and socialist revolutions and rebellions become a central part of European political development, but meet increasing opposition from a modernising and authoritarian right.
* Culture is transformed: most visibly with the spread of literacy via the developing mass education systems, but also via the increasing significance of print media, individuals participate in what is increasingly a national cultural formation; at the same time, dominant languages increasingly marginalise other languages and dialects. The system of social control represented by the official churches breaks down, particularly in urban areas; where it does retain some significance, it is as a power resource either for ruling groups in search of legitimation or as a rallying-point for marginalised groups.
In one sense, sociology can be said to come into being with the realisation that these phenomena - industrialisation and urbanisation, the rise of the democratic nation-state, and the death of God - must be interrelated; in other words, that a single explanation is needed for these transformations, and that it cannot logically be found within any of these fields as they are practised at the time - theories of political economy, normative philosophies of the state, an abstracted and often religious philosophy - but that a wider term is needed: the historical or, increasingly, the social. At the same time, the observation of the breakdown of local particularisms, and more particularly the observation of the increasingly international character of these transformations - the industrial revolution, the revolutions of 1848, the growth in communications - encourages general explanations which are not limited to developments within a single national history. Lastly, the word "revolution", applied at the time to what we now describe as the French and American revolutions, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and so on, indicates the dramatic effect these changes had on contemporary observers: they were felt to be wholesale transformations from a previously static era, and thus to point towards a concept of historical change, of changes from one type of society to another. Already in 1789 the "old regime" is described as feudal; increasingly, the new type of society is described as modern.
Karl Marx, and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, are among the earliest and most perceptive of those observers who did not adopt either an affirmative modernist or a straightforwardly reactionary position; in other words, who saw modernity as inevitable, yet in many senses deeply undesirable, and who therefore sought to identify how modernity could itself be transformed into an ideal future, rather than simply returning to an idealised past. This latter option is rejected, among other reasons, simply because modernity is seen as itself a product of the past: a past society which is therefore not stable, but inherently likely to generate modern formations.
A word of methodological caution before we start: Marx, and to a lesser extent Weber, is a classic example of the difficulties involved in saying "what so-and-so thought". Marx, like Weber, was immensely prolific; some of his most important writings remained unpublished for decades after his death (the same is true for Weber as far as translations into English go); and his immense intellectual and political status meant that many of his followers legitimated their own ideas by presenting them as supported by his authority. In other words, a "Marxist" theory or a presentation of "Weber's ideas" may be quite far removed from what the authors themselves wrote or thought - insofar as we can find that out. A good example of this is what is often presented as "Marxist political theory", a theory which derives in large part from Lenin rather than Marx, or "Marxist cultural theory", which often rests heavily on Gramsci. "Orthodox Marxism", in the sense of the theories approved by the parties of the 5th International, is something different again. More generally, we need to remain aware of the possibility that, just as mediaeval writers sought to give their ideas greater authority by ascribing them to some earlier author, contemporary writers often make substantive and independent contributions to social theory in the form of what are apparently interpretations and commentaries on earlier authors. The theories discussed in the next two lectures, structuralism and Western Marxism, were often presented by their authors as simple interpretations of "what Marx really meant"; but they are better thought of as independent theories.
This is one good reason for paying more attention to the ideas than the extent of their scriptural authority: whether an idea is good or bad, right or wrong, has nothing to do with whether it can be found in the pages of Marx or Weber or not. If we are interested in what they themselves wrote - for example, if we are interested in how their different ideas interact, and form a coherent perspective, we need to be aware of this difficulty, and not always take commentators at face value. In particular, most negative evaluations of Marx and Weber that I have come across are based on caricatures of their ideas, which are far more complex and well-founded than people who only know them at second hand tend to assume.
Marx's view on modernity is deeply shaped by his own involvement in the Europe of his day. He was an unemployed philosophy graduate who became a radical journalist and, as a consequence of this, a political refugee. He was also a political activist, involved with radical and socialist organisations in Britain and France as well as in the first socialist International. Most importantly, though, was his intense intellectual involvement with his own society. The collected works of Marx and Engels run to over 40 volumes of social philosophy, economic analysis and political comment, which taken together represent a phenomenal amount of empirical research.
In particular, Marx's idea of modernity was shaped by three developments: the French revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and the French theorists of revolution; the industrial and agricultural revolutions in Britain and the British economists who theorised them; and the collapse of the official church's intellectual credibility, as reflected in German philosophy. His empirical starting-point for thinking about the new society is largely a projection of each of these developments into the future. When he died, in 1883, most of Europe was still agricultural and artisanal; most European states were still dominated by monarchical power; and most Europeans still went to church. In other words, when we describe "the Europe of Marx' day" as being, for example, a Europe of mass industrial labour, we are falling into the worst kind of anachronism. It has been said that Marx's analysis of industrial capitalism is based on the experience of the textile industry in Manchester alone; that is perhaps an exaggeration, but it is worth bearing in mind that the high point of industrial employment in France, for example, is only reached after the Second World War. Taken in these terms, as a projection of an emergent future, we can understand his thinking more clearly.
It's a common enough observation that, for Marx, modern society is above all capitalist society. Modernity, or "the capitalist mode of production", is contrasted with an earlier society which is described as "feudal", as well as even earlier stages which we don't need to get into. What does this description, of modern society as capitalist, in fact mean?
Marx described his social theory as "the materialist conception of history". This "historical materialism" has two primary starting-points. The first is the assumption that humanity is primarily social: that its "species-being" is one based around interaction, rather than around isolated individuals. He polemicises against the "Robinson Crusoe" approach of economists such as Adam Smith who see individuals as somehow being born, brought up, and working in initial isolation from one another, until they start to exchange goods. Instead, Marx observes, human beings are always found in social contexts; their characteristic activities, what sets them apart from other species, are all social ones. The defining characteristic of humanity, however, is productive labour: in other words, the transformation of nature into material to meet human needs. This labour, for Marx, involves both mental and physical components: unlike insects, humans plan their labour. Equally importantly, this labour is a social activity, in that it is usually carried out with techniques (what Marx described as the "forces of production") and within relations of ownership (or "relations of production") which represent interaction rather than isolation, although Marx accepts that there are limiting cases, such as the smallholders after the French Revolution whose ownership of the land they worked and subsistence farming restricted their interaction to a very great extent. The best statement of this "materialist conception of history" is found in the first volume of the German Ideology.
In any given society, Marx argues, a particular combination of these forces and relations of production - what he describes as a mode of production - will dominate all others. Thus, in the society that he saw emerging, an industrial technology dependent on large-scale investment was driving out artisanal production; more generally, relations of production based on small-scale production for one's own use, of relations of serfdom, of an aristocratic lifestyle based on conspicuous expenditure were being replaced by a polarisation: those who had no access to the means of production and who therefore had to sell their labour-power to those who controlled the means of production via ownership of capital.
Thus social relations in capitalist society are reshaped by this emerging situation, which replaces the domination and exploitation of feudal peasants by the aristocracy with a new kind of exploitation and a new kind of domination. These, for Marx, are the primary relations within capitalist society. In capitalist as in other societies, the state, the arts, philosophy and so on are determined by this primary reality. Marx formulates this as the determination of social consciousness by social being. At one level, what this means is clear enough: consciousness is a social product, and (as Marx argued in 1845) the practical form of consciousness is its social embodiment in language. At another level, however, the determination of social consciousness by social being is translated into an unfortunate metaphor which opposes different forms of social activity - an economic "base" and an ideological "superstructure". This is confusing, because clearly economic activities involve consciousness, just as much as political and cultural activities also form economic realities.
The best way to make sense of this is by replacing it in the intellectual context of Marx's own time. Philosophies of history such as Hegel's argued that human history was a working-out of Ideas with a capital I, ideas which are largely of a philosophical or theological nature. In other words, explanations of historical development in terms, for example, of the development of the idea of God or of changing forms of government are what Marx is arguing against: a purely "top-down" history, as we would say today, which treats the self-understanding of a literary, philosophical or political élite as the "real history". As against this, Marx (I think) is arguing that we need to look at what is actually going on in the everyday lives of the majority of people, and explain changes in the way élites think about themselves in these terms. Put in this way, the "primacy of social being" is by now a more or less taken for granted assumption of virtually all serious history and sociology - we no longer think that the "age of the novel", for example, is an adequate description of eighteenth-century England. What this fairly straightforward opposition lacks is a term for the social and the cultural in a broader sense: social interaction other than the immediately economic, cultural activity other than the production of "high culture". It is in this area that the serious arguments are located: but it is an area which could not be opened up until the arguments that history could be seen purely in terms of kings, philosophers and novelists had been got out of the way.
One of the key problems in this area relates, in fact, to the opposition that Marx identifies between those who depend on selling their labour-power - the working class - and those who own the means of production - capitalists. For Marx, because the history of the human species is the history of its social labour, the development of new modes of production is itself a human history. More than that: it is the history of a class. The development of the capitalist mode of production not only generates a new class of capitalists; it is at the same time a result of their creative activity: and the first section of the Communist Manifesto is a poetic description, and very often an admiring one, of the human creativity and the immense forces unleashed by this new class. This class shapes society in its own image, at the same time as it is itself shaped by the mode of production it is developing. This is not simply economic; Marx treats the 1688 coup in Britain and the French Revolution as moves towards the state of the new society, and analyses much of the intellectual culture of his day as a further contribution to this kind of society.
In capitalist societies, the working class occupies the same place that the capitalist class occupies in feudal society: for Marx, it will eventually overthrow the capitalist class and create a new society, a socialist one in which the means of production will be socially rather than individually owned, and which will tend towards the establishment of a communist society which will be entirely free of domination and exploitation. How is this supposed to happen? Marx makes a conceptual distinction between the economic position occupied by the working class - what he describes as "class in itself" - and its political and cultural activity - what he describes as "class for itself". The argument is essentially this: The situation of exploitation and domination into which the capitalist mode of production places the working class is not the end of the story. Working-class people will become aware of this exploitation and domination; they will organise together; and they will oppose it. This awareness, organisation and opposition is initially local and spontaneous; but it becomes more and more organised, more powerful and more radical. Class-for-itself, then, involves a "class consciousness" which is ultimately directed towards the transformation of society. The conflict that this entails - class struggle - is described by Marx in a famous formulation as "the history of all previously existing societies". Social movements, then, in the form of class movements, are instrumental both in forming the major events within particular social forms and in transforming one social form into another.
So it is reasonable to say that Marx's holism is based on the argument that the history of humanity is a history of social labour: this in effect turns humanity into a self-creating subject. However, the development of this social labour leads to the formation of social subjects at the more immediate level of class movements, creating, transforming or defending a particular organisation of social labour.
Humanity, however, is not simply a self-creating subject; it is also, to a greater or lesser extent, a self-knowing subject.
We have already seen that Marx describes social consciousness as determined by social being. One way of thinking about this is as follows: our thinking and communication with one another is closely linked to our practical interaction with each other. We therefore develop, at an everyday level, ways of thinking which can be shown to be structured by the forms of this interaction, in other words by the kind of social labour processes we are involved in. At a second, more abstracted level, the theories that intellectuals articulate about the nature of society are shaped by this everyday experience, whether it is their own or - as it often is - someone else's. So, for example, Marx argues that the constitutional lawyers and economic theorists, whose ideas formed so great a part of early democratic theories in Britain, France and America, are in effect working on the everyday experience of the small producers and traders who formed the basis of those movements. Their perception of individuals as originally isolated and coming together to trade is elaborated into an ideology of individual rights, including absolute rights of property, and of a state whose role is to represent their interests and guarantee the legal context within which this production and trade can take place. There is thus a movement from the everyday experience of a class to an ideology which articulates, elaborates and formalises this and which forms the basis of a revolt against an earlier order - in this case the "feudal" order, as the French Revolution describes the ancien régime - and the official ideology of a new social order.
So theoretical ideas are not arbitrary - because related to practice - but they are partial - because they represent the ideas of a class, or (we might say) of a social movement. How can Marx justify his own theory in this context? The first thing to say is that he is quite explicit that it is an ideology, in this sense of an elaboration of the practical and everyday experience of a particular social group. However, Marx argues at various places that the working class is unique in history because it is a "universal" class, in the sense that the final end of its class struggle will not be another form of class domination and division of labour, but will be an end to both with the formation of a society consisting only of workers; and in the sense that its domination and exploitation in present-day society is total, leading to a freedom from illusion which no previous class has shared. The implication is that theories based on the everyday experience of workers and the practical strategies of the workers' movement can be said to operate from the viewpoint of the future, universalist society. In other words, when ideology is related to a group whose experience and aims can be said to be universal, it can transcend the limitations of being the theoretical expression of a partial perspective on society. The practical conclusion that Marx draws from this is that he devotes himself to understanding the ways in which the working class is exploited, and to involvement in its struggle against this exploitation.
So reflexivity, for Marx, is primarily a matter of this awareness that theory is ideological and of searching for a position from which these partial perspectives on society can coincide with the universal. He formulates this, in the Communist Manifesto, by speaking of a "portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole" going over to the side of the working class.
What about rationality? The term itself is not massively used in Marx, but the concept appears often enough, in a number of contexts. The first is in the figure of thought that "the rational is the real", in other words that a rational understanding is an understanding of reality which is valid because it starts from valid premises. In this sense Marx treats his replacement of accounts of human history in terms of the development of philosophy, art, religion, and so on by accounts in terms of the development of social production as a move towards rational understanding; and there is a suggestion that by choosing to theorise from the position of the "universal" working class he is guaranteeing a correspondence between the ideological and the rational,.between socially-determined thinking and a valid understanding of reality.
A second form is in terms of what we might call "capitalist rationality": the argument that a particular mode of production involves the imposition of a particular logic - for example, a logic of the exchange of commodities - on all social interaction: everything becomes a commodity, to be bought and sold on the market. Another feature of this "capitalist rationality" is the accumulation of capital - in other words, of economic power - in ever-fewer hands. Lastly, there is a suggestion that history has a rational potential, in other words that the actual interaction of human beings in social production can be understood, brought to serve their own needs, and transformed into a situation of mutual communication and interactive self-realisation. This involves suggesting both a movement towards a form of production which does not involve domination and exploitation of one human being by another and a movement to a form of ideological thinking which is universal and therefore represents a valid understanding of reality.
This idea of rationality, in other words, is a complex one which can refer either to modes of understanding or to an assumption that the way the world works or can work is related to the way we think or can think. This last assumption can be defended in terms of the statement that the social world is a human creation: the link between the way we act and the way we think means that the real is ultimately the rational.
Marx is not a sociologist in the disciplinary sense for the simple reason that he is not an academic. Max Weber is, or rather becomes, a sociologist, because he is living and working as an academic at the point where sociology is developing as a separate discipline; and indeed he moves from the study of law, political economy and history to a stronger identity as a sociologist. This has important consequences: whereas Marx, the activist thinker, is working towards a global theory which renders the older disciplinary division of labour obsolete by showing the interrelation between the different spheres of human life, Weber sets out to define sociology as different from the other humanities, and restricts its scope - in theory, at least - more perhaps than any comparable sociological theorist, to the point where, if we are to hold ourselves to his explicit statements, it would be impossible to describe him as a holist.
There are a number of steps in this narrowing of the jurisdiction of sociology. Firstly, Weber takes what is known as a "methodologically individualist" position: in other words, he assumes that all statements about the human world can in principle be reduced to statements about individuals and aggregates of individuals. This means treating individuals, rather than relationships between individuals, as primary. A consequence of this is that these relationships depend on active construction, that they do not necessarily apply globally, and that even where they do apply they can best be described in terms of the probability that the relationship or process in question will apply in a particular case. Secondly, he restricts the scope of sociology as a discipline to the study of meaningful social action: in other words, to the action of these individuals insofar as their action is oriented towards each other and insofar as they attach meaning to it. This involves an exclusion of biology, of the unconscious, potentially of some economic relationships, and so on. This position is stated in detail in the opening section of Basic concepts in sociology.
So Weber is not a straightforward holist: he undermines both the possibility of general explanations and the scope of sociology and the social itself to a very great extent. However, this theoretical refusal of holism is undermined by a number of features of his thinking.
The first and most obvious of these is this: there is a tension between the statement that we start from individuals rather than relationships and the statement that what we are interested in is the way those individuals orient their action to each other, in other words, their interaction. The effect of this becomes clear when we consider the second element of Weber's definition of sociology: that it is not just about social action, but about meaningful social action. He proceeds to develop a categorisation of the types of meaning which can be attached to social action: a categorisation which appears in some senses as a general statement of the kinds of ways in which people can relate to one another, or in other words precisely the kind of general statement about social relationships that methodological individualism finds suspect. These types of social action reappear in a number of forms, for example as the different ways in which a given power structure can find legitimation (Weber 1984: 44, 62). Traditional meanings of action are related simply to habit and custom, and are described by Weber as coming close to having no meaning, because unreflective. Affective action relates to the emotions, and is equally seen as often meaningless in these terms. The major distinction of clearly meaningful action, then is between the last two categories: the value-rational and the goal-rational. Value-rational action treats action as having a value in itself, which is independent from its effect, and derives, for example, from moral, aesthetic or religious criteria. Goal-rational, or instrumental, action, is oriented purely towards desired results.
This last category is particularly associated with Weber's account of modernity, which he sees as a progressive extension of this principle of instrumental rationality, which sees action as deriving its sole meaning and interest from its results, to dominate all contemporary society. For Weber, the history of modernity is the history of the progressive orientation of all social action, in all contexts, to instrumental rationality. This rationalisation of social life involves an ever-greater development of technical means and a progressive relegation of the ends towards which these means are supposed to lead. An example may make this clearer. Weber argues, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that Calvinist and Dissenting religion represented a rationalisation of human behaviour, which focussed people's constant attention on the relationship between their everyday activity and their hope of salvation. All behaviour was scrutinised to see whether or not it represented a waste of time, and thus possibly an indication that one was not destined for salvation. This obsession with making the most of each minute, with the rationalisation of everyday life, particularly economic life, gradually came to take complete precedence over the intended goal, of demonstrating to oneself that one was likely to be destined for salvation. Weber's analysis of the development of bureaucracy is similar. Bureaucracy, for Weber, is simply the most technically efficient means of organising the action of a state. Thus, bureaucratic means of organisation come to predominate in modern societies irrespective of the actual goals which they are supposed to serve. This means that increasingly bureaucracy takes on a life and a logic of its own, which renders its ultimate goals irrelevant.
In Weber's terminology, formal rationality, the (instrumental) rationality of a particular form, leads to substantive irrationality, a content which is in fact derived from the form and not from the goal which the formal rationality is supposed to serve. Capitalism is itself a very important instance of this general rationalisation of behaviour which characterises modern society: Weber defines it in terms of the rationalisation of the pursuit of profit, a rationalisation which ultimately means that the individuals to whom this profit is accruing are not in a position to enjoy its possession, but must rationalise their own lives, replacing an aristocratic lifestyle based on waste and conspicuous consumption with a bourgeois lifestyle based effectively on the service of profit rather than its enjoyment. Once again the means becomes the end. Weber's account of modernity as the progressive extension of rationalisation, and his scepticism about the possibility of reversing this trend, make his view of modernity, at least, effectively a holistic one.
Weber's view of social movements, however, is less holistic; and here he serves as a prototype for that approach which sees structures - of rationality, for example - as ultimately more deeply-founded than collective action; even though both are of course in his own terminology simply forms of meaningful social action. This can be illustrated in relation to his approach to social class.
It is traditional to represent Weber's views on class as representing a rejection of Marx's; there is some truth in this, but it is only partial. For example, Weber agrees with Marx that the worker's movement is an extremely significant and powerful movement, and even sees a successful installation of a socialist régime as a possibility. However, he argues, like Robert Michels, that it will be forced to adopt bureaucratic means in order to reach this goal - and hence that the socialist régime would represent an intensification of instrumental rationalisation at the expense of any possibility of achieving the substantive rationalities that were aimed at. Equally, Weber accepts not only that economic class is a fundamental basis for social action - in a formula reminiscent of Marx's distinction between class in itself and class for itself - and even that status differences are increasingly eroded by economic class in modern society.
There are, I think, two primary differences between Weber and Marx on class. The first is in their conception of the economic class structure that underlies class movements. For Marx, we have seen, this can ultimately be reduced to a primary opposition between the exploited and the exploiters, those who labour and those who live off their labour. For Weber, however, economic situation is not so much a relationship as a given, which individuals bring to a market. Schematically, we can say that individuals bring their labour-power, or their skills, or their ownership of the means of production to a market; and it is this market situation, for Weber, that generates the "life-chances" of each individual. In other words, Weber's economic classes are more heterogenous and less interactive than Marx's; this conception, at least, cannot be said to be holistic.
The other major difference which Weber brings to his analysis of social movements is the concept of social closure. This he treats as a process whereby groups aim at restricting access to particularly desirable things - occupations, goods, status or whatever - to themselves. Much of his writing deals with the extent to which successful collective action results in this kind of social closure for the sake of exercising a monopoly on something; in recent years neo-Weberians such as Frank Parkin have argued that access to political power is itself such a good, and that a major aim of collective action is to move from an "outsider" status of exclusion to an "insider" status where the group enjoys a monopoly of influence on political power on the issues that are important to it.
So Weber's theory, in particular his analysis of modernity as rationalisation, starts from an individualist point of view but tends towards a holistic one, which is, as I argued in the previous week, to a certain extent inherent in the idea of "the social". His concept of social movements emphasises their partial character, but he is always concerned to emphasise that collective action is also a feature of dominant groups, not just of subordinate ones; and he offers us a picture of dominant groups controlling the state and monopolising access to desirable goods thanks to the success of their organisation which can be said to offer the potential of a general account of the dominant social order, if not of the totality of the social order (because there are also outsider and subordinate groups challenging this order). What about reflexivity?
Weber, like Marx, is well aware that the sociologist is also a social actor. Basing himself, like Marx, on the principle emphasises by Vico that the real is the created, that the social world is a human creation, he argues that our own status as social actors makes it possible for us to understand the action of others, and in particular the meaning they attach to it. This is the starting-point of what is generally described, in English, as Weber's concept of Verstehen, in other words of understanding, or as we say of interpretation: we interpret the action of others, based on our shared human situation and participation in the creation of the social world. Remembering in particular that one of Weber's caveats about traditional and emotional reasons for action is that they are highly unreflective - that they are not thought about - it is reasonable to say that it is reflexivity, for Weber, that guarantees the possibility of interpretation; and this is another reason why Weber treats traditional and emotional action as falling on the borders of the social.
A major element in the method of Verstehen is what Weber describes as "ideal types". These are models which describe "rules of the way things happen" in a way that makes sense to us. Thus we might construct an ideal-typical description of the way in which religions founded by a charismatic prophet become, over time, highly structured organisations. The relationship of this model to the way things actually happen is then variable: in general, Weber says, it helps to develop these models at as abstracted a level as possible, so that the concepts become as unambiguous as possible and their interrelation is as clear as possible. These ideal types are then yardsticks against which we can measure what actually happened.
In other words, the ideal type is a description of a particular logic of process, or of a rational sequence of events in the sense of one where their sequence has a meaning. Clearly they will be far easier to establish in the case of value-rational or goal-rational sequences, since an assumption of continued custom tells us very little about the content of the custom, and assumptions that emotions follow particular sequences are very risky. In other words, it is rationality itself - whether goal-rationality or value-rationality, that makes interpretation possible, on the basis of a shared and reflexive participation in the social world. Beyond the specific case of rationalisation as a general process in modernity, then, rationality for Weber is a concept which bridges the gap between sociology and its objects: rationality, in either form, is present as a tendency within society, which may be approximated to a greater or lesser extent. The sociologist can use this tendential rationality to make more sense of the actual process of events.
Clearly, then, the more rationalised society becomes - the deeper into modernity we go - the easier the sociologist's task should become and the closer their interpretations should correspond with what actually happens. As we shall see in subsequent lectures, this expectation has only been partially realised, if at all.
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