Transcription
Max Weber now presents his own classification of the four ideal types of social action. The first one is called zweckrational, which can be translated as goal-rational or means-rational. This is social action that is motivated by the desire to reach, in the most efficient way, an end result that can also be defended with rational arguments. In a calculating, systematic way, the means are selected that will lead to that goal. However much you would like to achieve that goal, you shoot at all times to keep your emotions under control, because they may lead you away from where you want to go. Always keep a cool head—that could be the motto of the engineer who designs a bridge or the general at the eve of a battle, studying his maps.
The second ideal-typical category consists of social action that seems to be irrational because it is directed at a value that cannot be motivated in rational terms. And this is what Weber calls the wertrational or value-rational social action. In order to achieve that value, the individual may be just as rational as the person displaying goal-rational social action. Most people are not saints or military heroes, and for them it may be hard to understand, but if you sincerely strive for personal salvation, then you might choose the aesthetic lifestyle of the hermit. Or if you really want to defend your military honor, you may rationally choose a social action that inescapably will result in you losing your life. Those actions can be understood in rational terms, but only if you accept, without a rational argument, the value that they are oriented at.
Number three is called affective social action, and it is motivated by the emotional state of the actor. When somebody is overcome with anger, he may react in a certain way that maybe he regrets afterwards, but that was the only possibility at that very moment. Weber mentions a furious parent that beats a child purely out of anger. Maybe a better example that you will most find in Weber is a soccer player biting a member of the opposite team. He knows very well that he will be severely punished, that his team will receive bad publicity plus a financial penalty, that his social action may dramatically influence their position in the competition, and still he cannot stop himself from sinking his teeth in the neck of his fellow soccer player. That is affective social action, driven by emotion.
And then there is traditional social action. When you ask somebody why they do things the way they do them, the answer will be, "You know, that's the way we do this in our community. We always did it this way. Our ancestors always did it this way. We have been raised to do it this way." Again, an example that you will not find in Weber, but that I think helps you to understand what it means, is eating with a fork and knife. There may be hygienic advantages and rational reasons, but you can experience the weight of tradition if you just try to do it—to eat your evening dinner, just for once as an experiment—with your bare hands.
Those are the four ideal types of rational action. And one more time, those categories are ideal types, so you will never encounter them in the real world out there in their pure state. What you will find is a mixture, or at least a slightly contaminated case. The four types, in their pure form, only exist in the world of ideas, but we can observe all kinds of phenomena that more or less approach that, more or less come close to the types that Weber has constructed.
Now Max Weber is convinced that the first type, goal rationality, is gaining territory in modernity. More and more social action in modern Western societies can be characterized as goal-rational, and we also witnessed a gradual marginalization of value-rational, affective, and traditional social action. Those types can still be found, but you have to search for them in the periphery; they are pushed into the margin.
Now the kernel of Weber's sociological theory of modernity boils down to this: In modern Western societies, the realm of goal-rational social action is constantly increasing at the expense of the realms of the other three types of social action. All the other aspects of modernity that we will discuss from here are nothing but the consequences of this central development.