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becoming) the institutional reality for all of us at the end of the twentieth
century. The separation of morality from religion is not new, rather it is
just more common; more clearly established as a fixture of public culture.
Today too people prefer to see gestures to hearing reasons.
Religion persists at the end of the twentieth century but its authority
has been fundamentally transformed. It persists but is hollowed out. The
significance of the Evangelical case, once so robust and optimistic about
the future, is that one might still imagine it to be, by virtue of its doctri–
nal orthodoxy, a community of resistance to the creeping nihilism of our
public culture. And yet the separation of religious authority from public
morali ty has occurred here as well. Despi te its intent to reinsert religion
into public life, the creedal authority it invokes has been fragmented and
subjectivized. The irony is that even among those who claim to be defend–
ing "Christian civilization" there is evidence that they are contributing to
exactly the opposi te-the insti tutionalization of nihilism in our public cul–
ture.
Such are the ironies of history.
Elliot Pruzan:
Thank you Professor Hunter. I was trying to take notes on
your many brilliant insights. The fact of privatization of religious author–
ity is something that bears scrutiny, and I think it is a perfect lead-in to our
next speaker's presentation. His topic is "Max Weber: The Iron Cage."
Stephen Kalberg is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University,
and the author of
Max Webers Comparative-Historical Sociology.
He is able to
speak with some authority of Weber's view on the role of religion in the
contemporary world, and on whether or not the kind of
de facto
privatiza–
tion of religious authority Professor Hunter spoke to is inevitable and
impervious to any form of transcendence.
Stephen Kalberg:
I will look at the last fin de siecle and this one in terms
of Max Weber's sociology. Weber is well-known in the U.S. for his depic–
tion of the modern world as an "iron cage"
(stahlhartes Gehause).
Along
with most of his German colleagues at the fin de siecle, he viewed the
coming of modern capi talism wi th trepidation and foreboding. How does
Weber define the iron cage and does this metaphor accurately capture his
view of modernity? More generally, do Weber's distinguished sociological
writings assist Americans today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, in
understanding their own society and, in particular, its "political culture?"
In his most fatuous book,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
if
Capitalism,
Weber argued that the "inner-worldly" asceticism of Reform
Calvinism had given birth to the notion of a "vocational calling." This
methodical orientation toward work, as it spread in the American
Colonies, lost its religious foundations after several generations.
