THE
SOCIOLOGY OF EXISTENTIALISM
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tive, necessarily specialized knowledge and its practical application.
He is the bearer and product of that great process of rationalization,
which, in co-operation with natural science, technology, economic
competition and political rivalry, has produced modern industrial so–
ciety. This development not only burst asunder the structure of the
feudal and later bourgeois society of Old Europe, but also shaped
the great colonial and half-colonial areas which are now overtaking
and threatening the mother continent. True, this new situation affects
experts too in Europe, yet in general everywhere in the world the
significance of objective knowledge and skill is doubtless on the in–
crease. But above all the principle of expert knowledge independent
of the cultured group is not in the least touched by the exclusion of
Europe from its leading position.
Things are quite different for the bearers of culture, whose posi–
tion rests, not on the possession of universally valid knowledge and
technical information, but on the social recognition of certain valu–
able forms of life. At first in the nobility of early antiquity and the
Middle Ages musical-literary culture occurs alongside skill in fighting
as a stylization of life.
It
has received its specifically modern form
only since the Renaissance: the quality of culture competes with the
vocational grace of the priest as a personal grace that can be earned.
Thus, usurping despots strive, as cultural Maecenases, for a legitima–
tion which religion and tradition cannot give them. Yet the humanistic
class of scholars and literati is still much too weak to be able to hazard
serious conflict with the existing authorities. Only with the progress
of secularization and the bourgeois union of property and culture
against the union of throne and altar, does culture acquire a quasi–
religious character. The bourgeoisie develops a belief in freedom and
humanity as its temples-theaters, museums, cultural institutions–
are supported by endowments and administered by a secular cultural
priesthood.
Through the social convulsions after the rise of an industrial
laboring class, this bourgeois aristocracy of the spirit gradually loses
its social prestige and its influence on the attitude of the people as
a whole. Today the social presuppositions for the recognition of cul–
tural values have to a large extent disappeared. Neither for the well–
organized institutions which have taken the ideological lead in large
parts of Europe nor for the ideology of the mass-welfare state does
