The Future in Disguise

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B Adam ESRC PF Weber 010205

The Future in Max Webers Methodological Writings

Barbara Adam

Abstract

This paper explores Max Webers approach to the future. Weber is a key theorist for the futures project as he argued that science delimits what can and cannot be studied and commented on in the socio-cultural sphere. Since social action is irreducibly future oriented this poses a dilemma for the social sciences which needs our most careful attention. The paper takes us through Webers methodological writings and explores the implications of his position for a social science approach that seeks to take the future seriously. It argues that human futurity constitutes the central dilemma in Webers methodological writings and suggests that the future is addressed in those writings through the key concepts of rationality, progress, ethics, values, of reason(s), purposes and motives, options and choices, calculation and the means-end schema, responsibility and vocation. By explicating the implicit futures in Webers work, the paper surfaces this dilemma for exploration. In a critical appraisal, finally, the paper considers to what extent Webers approach might serve as basis for a contemporary sociology of the future, which takes seriously not only the future as guide to action in the present but also the contemporary future-producing condition.

Introduction

Human futurity constitutes the central dilemma in Webers methodological writings. Despite the fact that the future per se is never mentioned, never features in any of his indexes or that of his commentators, it is implicated in most of the key concepts that are addressed in his work. In his writing on rationality and progress, on ethics and morality, values and reason(s), purposes and motives, on options and choices, calculation and the means-end schema, on responsibility, commitment and vocation, the future is the social domain of action. Through these concepts Weber acknowledged that humans are fundamentally future oriented and that the different ways the future is lived and approached is the proper subject matter for the social sciences. He accepted further that, as social beings, social scientists cannot escape their human futurity in the dual sense of being oriented towards the future and guided by the future for choices and actions and concluded that they therefore have to come to terms with the dilemmas posed for them by the logic of science. This logic makes it exceedingly difficult to engage with the multiplex human futurity in a meaningful way, given that science is grounded in a mode of enquiry that was established for objects in motion, for which futurity is irrelevant. In this paper I want to surface this dilemma for exploration before I consider to what extent Webers approach might serve as basis for a contemporary sociology of the future.

I begin the investigation with an outline of the diversity of implicit future orientations that are addressed in Webers work and render them explicit: first, in the subject matter of the social sciences, second, in the social sciences as a science and, third, in social scientists work as a vocation. Following this, I consider the suitability for the contemporary condition, of Webers extensive use of dualisms to identify and explain the distinctions he is attempting to foreground for discussion. Arising from my critique will be first points of departure that need to be briefly followed up before I conclude the essay with a view forward where I indicate Webers potential for a theoretical social science approach to the contemporary future-producing condition.

Futures Reign Supreme in the Subject Matter of the Social Sciences

When Weber writes about the subject matter of the social sciences, he may not use the terms future and futurity very much, but he nevertheless leaves us in no doubt that to be human is to be future oriented, that futurity characterises individual and social action. Whether we choose between options, allow values and beliefs to guide our actions, decide on the most appropriate means to achieve a given end, act rationally and/or responsibly, with commitment and/or dedication, the future features in all we do at any given present moment. The future is both reason and cause for what we do, how we act, and what decisions we take on a daily basis. Weber could not be clearer on this overarching point, even though he does not use these precise words to present his argument. The futurity of social life, as I have indicated in the introduction, emerges in Webers work not through explicit writing on the future or futurity but rather through his key concepts. A very brief focus on three of his key terms progress, rationality and the pursuit of profit will serve to illustrate the wider point.

When Weber writes about the modern (western, post-Enlightenment) world, his acceptance of the future as key social domain is uncompromising. He describes a world driven by the relentless pursuit of progress, that is, by an incessant, almost compulsive striving for change, advancement, improvement and innovation. Regarding the intensely future-oriented endeavours of science, for example, Weber (1958/1919: 137) explains how science is chained the course of progress, which means its purpose is to continuously raise new question, to be surpassed and outdated, never to fix its findings or establish their meanings for eternity. In principle, Weber (1958/1919: 138) proposes, this progress goes on ad infinitum.

Weber further characterises the modern world in all its major spheres science, economics, education, medicine, law, politics, even religion - as being suffused by the principle of rationality. In Economy and Society Weber suggests that this rationality is marked by two distinct forms of orientation, by purposive utility (Zweckrationalitt) on the one hand and values on the other. The first form relates to rational calculation and goal-orientation as well as choices and decisions made on the basis of utility. The second, which he calls value rationality (Wertratioalitt), is guided by ethics and morals, beliefs and ideals, vocational considerations and responsibility. Although informed by different clusters of motives, both types of rationality share an equally focused future orientation that guides our actions in a systematic, calculating manner. Weber understands rationalisation as a central and generalised feature of industrialisation, bureaucratisation, specialisation, secularisation and capitalist development. Rationalisation means, Weber (1958/1919: 139) explains, that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather, that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. On the basis of his extensive studies of this all-pervasive process Weber (1958/1919: 155) identifies also a darker side to rationalisation. As the fate of our times, he suggests, rationalisation is implicated not just in the successes of the west but also its failures, derailments, and disappointments. Accordingly, Weber sees rationality culminating in an iron cage from which there appears to be no escape and which in turn engenders new yearnings for (non-rational) charismatic leaders, spiritual fulfilment, religious devotion, ultimate sublime values and, in the most general sense, all that escapes its iron grip on the social world.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber shows how a (Judeo-Christian) religious pursuit the quest to save ones soul has guided actions in such a pervasive way that an entire new form of socio-economic existence was born. He explains how the pursuit of profit had existed throughout the ages when he suggests,

The impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. (Weber 1989/1904-5: 17)

It is the rational pursuit of capitalistic acquisition, Weber (1989/1904-5: 18) argues, where the corresponding action is adjusted to calculations in terms of capital, that marks modern from traditional forms of economic impulses. Both are future-oriented but only the modern capitalist form is fundamentally guided by rationality. This rationality, in turn, is reconnected in The Protestant Ethic to monastic orders of the Middle Ages where Benedictine, Cistercian and Jesuit monks, among others, had developed systematic methods of rational asceticism in order to overcome the temptations of the flesh. This active self-control, Weber (1989/1904-5: 119) proposes, was also the most important practical ideal of Puritanism, where it served the same purpose and was seen as the primary means to the salvation of the soul. When over time the religious fervour had faded, rationalism remained, pervading every aspect of todays social life. On this point it is worth quoting Weber at length.

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forded to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilised coal is burnt. In Baxters view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment but fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage. (Weber 1989/1904-5: 181)

As an unintended consequence of the Protestant ethic, Weber goes on to argue, material goods have gained an unprecedented power over our lives. Rather than the salvation of the soul, their acquisition and the pursuit of wealth more generally are todays motive force and inexorable guiding vision.

When Weber focuses attention on the subject matter of social sciences, we are left in no doubt that what makes social action meaningful, interesting and significant, and what makes social life worth living are our visions and dreams, our beliefs and motives, our guiding principles and values. At the same time, however, he was more acutely aware than any other social scientist before him and since that this implicit futurity at the core of our subject matter is simultaneously the social sciences greatest challenge.

The Future as Challenge for Social Science as a Science

As a science, Weber argued, the social sciences are bound by the logic of the scientific form of inquiry, which deals with empirical (present-based) sense data, gives guidance about technical (present-based) means to pre-given ends and provides (past-based) causal analysis. As a cultural enterprise the social sciences have to square the circle of also dealing with the (future-based) realm of ideas, visions and values, of taking a stance on the normative dimension of social life, and making that life intelligible that is, achieve adequacy in both meaning and causality at the level of social science explanations. It is not sufficient, therefore, for the social sciences to explain the how of achieving the right means to pre-given ends; they also need to encompass what constitutes the expressly human part of the world they study, which includes, as I have identified above, our multiplex futurity. In his methodological writings Weber shows that this is anything but an easy task.

In his Science as a Vocation Weber (1958/1919: 147-52) suggests that, within the confines of the logic of science, social scientists are able to establish available means to existing ends, show the advantage of some means over others, calculate the various costs involved and assess the internal consistency between ends. As such, their work can aid social control. Moreover, (on the basis of past knowledge) social scientists can historically establish causal chains and calculate probable outcomes of present actions. As social scientists they can clarify methods of thinking and provide training and tools for thought. They can identify the nature of ideas and assumptions but not comment on their being right or wrong, good or bad. Answers to questions about how the world ought to be and what norms or values should be adopted, Weber maintains, are not in the gift of an empirical science. Despite this tightly delimited logic, Weber suggests, the scientific method, appropriately applied, can bring about not just self-clarification but also a sense of responsibility. Finally, when the logic is embraced, it confronts social scientists with the uncomfortable truth that all beliefs and ultimate values are irreconcilable, that therefore choices between them are inevitable, but that those choices fall outside the remit of science.

Importantly, what is beyond the logic of (natural) science are precisely the prospective features of socio-cultural life, that is, the actions and decisions based on beliefs, ethics and moral responsibility, for example, which differentiate us from past-determined things: unlike cultural beings, things age and rust without orienting their processes to the future. Equally, the apple falls from the tree without considering whether or not it is the right thing to do. The futurity of the socio-cultural subject matter, therefore, requires a subject-specific mode of enquiry, no less stringent and systematic, but fundamentally different from the study of (physical) objects in motion. Cultural modes of inquiry, Weber insists, need to take account of individually pursued purposes, values and belief as well as socially constituted values, rules and moral codes. A science focused on culture needs to understand purposes, make socio-cultural action intelligible, which means, in my terms, never losing sight of the futures that guide actions in the present. Such understanding (verstehen) can be achieved variously by knowing the social rules, through (socially constituted) empathy, that is, having shared such an experience, on the basis of logic and on the general principle of rationality. Moreover, Weber is adamant that such future-oriented actions of individuals (or groups of individuals), rather than any form of social wholes, are the empirical data of the social sciences. Webers approach is one of methodological individualism when he argues that wholes dont act. Only people act, as part of and on behalf of institutions, groups or nations, embedded in their historical context and focused on where they are going and where they want or dread to be. Webers acknowledgement of historical, contextual contingency, finally, led him to point out that the conceptualisations of the social sciences can never be permanent but rather require regular renewal, as the need arises, in light of changing conditions.

Weber insists further that social science modes of enquiry and explanation need to be adequate not only at the level of material cause rooted in past-based experience but also at the level of meaning, that is, tied to past, present and expected futures (Weber, 1978/1913 Vol. I: 11, 19, 22). Given that the future is not a sense datum, that is, not observable, Weber proposed the construction of ideal types, that is, stereotypes of the phenomena to be explained, against which actual social events and purposive, prospective activities could be plotted and compared. In the light of this extensive effort to devise a systematic mode of enquiry that is adequate to the cultural world, Weber went further than most of his colleagues, before him and since, to encompass teleological causal explanation in his method. That is, he conceived of reasons as causes for action and it is this philosophical move, which brought with it the raft of specifically cultural methods for which Weber is famed.

Despite Webers extensive methodological considerations and innovations, however, the contradictions and dilemmas remained. It is in his engagement with those dilemmas that we find some of his most interesting, hotly debated and often misunderstood writing. It is here that we discover valuable insights for a contemporary social science of the future on the one hand and where we need to establish points of departure on the other. It is therefore the future in the work of social scientists as cultural, projective and purposive beings, dedicated to their work and bound by the logic of their inquiry, that we turn to next.

The Future in Disguise: Science as a Vocation

As scientists, social investigators are bound to the logic of science and chained to the requirement of innovation and progress. Here we have the first dilemma: scientific progress and socio-cultural meaning are incompatible. Quoting Leo Tolstoi, Weber (1958/1919: 143) points out that science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our questions, the only question important for us: What shall we do and how shall we live?. As cultural beings, investigators are meaning seeking, future creating and future guided beings for who this question is crucial. Good and evil, right and wrong, beliefs and commitments are central to what it means to be human and to lead a social life. Even if we were to execute our job in a technically immaculate way, that is, conduct a perfect study of means to pre-given ends, as human beings studying a cultural world we would fail our humanity, since, as cultural scientists we are bound to analyse social phenomena in terms of their cultural significance and this significance, in turn, presupposes a value-orientation. (Weber 1969/1904: 76). How then are we to conduct our work in a dedicated manner that encompasses the important questions of socio-cultural existence about how we should live our lives whilst avoiding the trap of acting as mere technicians on the one hand and biased advocates of personal and political opinion on the other?

Weber is very clear that personal politics and science dont mix. Thus, he insists in his essay on The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics,

It is poor taste to mix personal questions with specialised factual analyses. We deprive the word "vocation" of the only meaning which still retains ethical significance if we fail to carry out that specific kind of self-restraint which it requires. (Weber 1969/1917: 5-6)

It is the duty of social investigators, Weber insists, to make unambiguously clear where science ends and personal presuppositions and opinions enter. Let us be clear at this point: it is not Webers intention for social scientists to move values and morals aside as unimportant, on the contrary. Weber (1969/1904: 60) is adamant that an attitude of moral indifference has no connection with scientific objectivity. He is asking investigators to make clear at which point the evaluating and acting person begins to speak.

Weber is equally clear in his essay on Objectivity in Social Science and Policy that

It can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms and ideals from which directives for immediate practical activity can be derived. (Weber 1969/1904: 52)

An empirical science cannot tell anyone what he should do but rather what he can do and under certain circumstances what he wishes to do. (Weber 1969/1904: 54)

As scientists, social investigators cannot provide solutions to the important questions and the most pressing issues of social life. Despite this major restriction on their activities, however, what the social sciences have to offer is substantial and significant. They can identify and disclose problems in argument and practice. They can also help to arrive at an understanding of hotly contested, incompatible socio-cultural goals and ideals over which battles are fought between groups and in the corridors of power. For such tasks to be executed with compassion within the confines of the logic of science, Weber admits, is never an easy task and requires our most delicate and dedicated application. It is worth quoting him at length here.

In the empirical social sciences the possibility of meaningful knowledge of what is essential for us in the infinite richness of events is bound up with the unremitting application of viewpoints of a specifically particularised character, which, in the last analysis, are oriented on the basis of evaluative ideas. These evaluative ideas are for their part empirically discoverable and analysable as elements of meaningful human conduct, but their validity can not be deduced from empirical data as such. The "objectivity" of the social sciences depends rather on the fact that the empirical data are always related to those evaluative ideas which alone make them worth knowing and the significance of the empirical data is derived from these evaluative ideas. But these data can never become the foundation for the empirically impossible proof of the validity of the evaluative ideas. The belief which we all have in some form or other, in the meta-empirical validity of ultimate and final values, in which the meaning of our existence is rooted, is not incompatible with the incessant changefulness of the concrete view-points, from which empirical reality gets is significance. Both these views are, on the contrary, in harmony with each other. (Weber 1969/1904: 111)

The empirical sciences, in other words, are inescapably entangled with the world of values through the bounding of knowledge and the creation of meaning, which cannot be separated from social scientists cultural location and interests. Insofar as the value sphere is their subject matter, it is a domain social scientists can study but not judge and evaluate. The activity of selection and the bounding of what we can see in terms of knowledge context and theoretical framing, is clarified even further in the following quote.

For none of those systems of ideas, which are absolutely indispensable in the understanding of those segments of reality which are meaningful at a particular moment, can exhaust its infinite richness. They are all attempts, on the basis of the present state of our knowledge and the available conceptual patterns, to bring order into the chaos of those facts which we have drawn into the field circumscribed by our interest. The intellectual apparatus which the past has developed through the analysis, or more truthfully, the analytical rearrangement of the immediately given reality, and through the latter's integration by concepts which correspond to the state of its knowledge and the focus of its interest, is in constant tension with the new knowledge which we can and desire to wrest from reality. The progress of cultural science occurs through this conflict. (Weber 1969/1904: 105)

Weber does not leave it here. He recognises that the object of our study is defined (and circumscribed) through the questions we ask and the methods we employ. In addition Weber asks social scientists to be cognisant of the constitutive nature of their knowledge, that is, that their knowledge has an effect on the world they investigate and he points out to them that this, in turn, makes them responsible for the impacts of their knowledge.

Let me try and draw out from this complex perspective on the role of social scientists the implicit messages regarding the future and begin to reflect on the implications of this approach for a contemporary social science of the future. I begin with those elements of social investigation that an acknowledgement of the logic of science disallows. On the basis of science, social scientists cannot make statements about what we should do and how we should live our lives. Equally, they cannot set the goals and aims for society or establish social norms. Science provides them with no base from which to espouse political views and personal beliefs and values. This logical delimitation, however, does not excuse social scientists from making moral choices, selecting phenomena on the basis of their socio-cultural significance or taking a stand on matters of great socio-political importance. Given that all cultural phenomena are infinite on the one hand and stand in a conflictual value relation on the other, social scientists cannot evade making selections, decisions and choices. These in turn are guided by their values and morals. As dedicated scientists they are bound therefore to clarify their position.

If we now consider what social scientists can achieve within those logical limits of the cultural sciences as set out by Weber, we find that we are nevertheless left with a surprisingly powerful tool for socio-cultural analysis. In addition to the aspects I have already outlined in earlier parts of the paper, social scientists are empowered to elucidate morals and values and investigate how the various value spheres (as well as morals and belief systems) stand in relation to each other and how they are politically and socially employed to which ends. They are able to show problems, specify flaws in logic and identify contradictions in aims and goals across the entire socio-cultural domain (economic, scientific, political, educational, religious etc.). On the basis of rigorous comparative analysis they are able to offer critiques of existing practices. Importantly, they may surface taken-for-granted assumption for scrutiny and analyse them with reference to practices, be they dominant or at the periphery of the socio-political limelight. Finally, social scientists are not just empowered but have the duty to adapt their conceptual tools to the contemporary condition, that is to say, as new phenomena and conditions arise the social sciences conceptual apparatuses and tools need to be scrutinised for their contemporary appropriateness. Unlike scientific laws, the social sciences concepts are contingent, tied to their historical context. This presents social scientists with an ongoing, never-ending challenge on the one hand and an opportunity on the other.

Having thus far covered the elements of Webers work that I could embrace with unrestrained enthusiasm, I now need briefly to turn to aspect that give me some cause for concern. In particular it is the rationalistic and dualistic nature of Webers conceptualisation of the social sciences methodology that becomes troubling when related to our contemporary, globalised world of networked communication and unbounded environmental problems. Of course, we need to bear in mind that some of these contemporary conditions did not yet exist some one hundred years ago.

Troubling Choices in Dualistic Schemas and Overarching Themes

Weber was acutely aware of the infinitive complexity of the social world and at pains to work through the methodological implications of it. He was equally a cognisant of the interdependency of much that he organised along dualistic lines: facts and values, means and ends, science and policy. Clearly, his dualisms served as a heuristic only, as an aid to conceptual clarity. And yet, it is the dualisms by which Weber is primarily remembered and which feature so prominently in textbooks that first introduce students to his body of work. As tools for thought the dualisms espoused in his writings have become constitutive: we began to see the world in terms of those dualisms and the world in turn became dualistic. Moreover, Webers dualisms match perfectly the common-sense understanding of the world: a world that is made up of nature and culture, facts and ideas, an external reality that can be observed and discovered by science in an objective way in the present, with past and future the places we visit in our minds. By retaining the fact-value, is-ought, science-policy dualisms on logical grounds, Weber also held on to the assumptions that underpin the separations: that facts are empirically accessible sense data; that there are absolute distinctions not just between observer and observed but also present and future; that there is an external reality to be discovered and known. The dualisms, as constitutive knowledge, therefore, merged in perfect harmony with the western, taken for granted, naturalised view of reality. This, I want to propose, is a grave problem for understanding todays world and for doing the kind of social science that Weber encouraged us to practice. Let me explain.

When these distinctions are revisited and subjected to a time-sensitive analysis, we begin to realise that facts can be facts only after they have been de-temporalised, that is, abstracted from the ongoing temporality of being-becoming. Facts, we appreciate, are tied to a specific way of knowing that is, to object thinking and an emphasis on the spatial and material. Object thinking brackets and thus conceals the temporal and invisible, the immaterial and unbounded in the subject matter. Since temporal becoming and ongoing transformation in the context of an interactive relationship with others and openness to the environment are the mark of both life and social activity, an approach that negates these key characteristics of life can only deal with (real and conceptual) dead things. Moreover, object thinking allows observers to see only time slices, that is, facts as freeze-frames, moments frozen in time and space. This means, facts are not isolated in and of themselves: we make them so in order to render the temporality of reality accessible and manageable, that is, to infuse the infinite, transient and contingent complexity of life with clarity and simplicity. As such, this a-temporal stance on temporality facilitates not only counting, measurement and classification but also the illusion of control on the one hand and objectivity and ethical neutrality on the other.

In a similar vein we must recognise that the futurity of human purposiveness and intent is not a sense datum, is not accessible to empirical observation. Rather, it has to be inferred from phenomena and processes and, as Weber recognised, requires conceptual rather than empirical observational tools for its investigation and analysis. At the same time, however, Weber would insist that human futurity in form of values, morals, ideals, motives, reasons, purposes is a fact of human cultural existence. This means, the non-empirical is accepted as fact and with that move, the every-day assumption that facts belong to the empirical realm of matter whilst values, morals and other aspects of human futurity belong to the sphere of ideas is unsettled. With the object thinking that underpins the language of facts as distinct from values, therefore, Weber undermines his own complex perspective on the matter, which allows for the world of material outcomes of cultural activity, the world of facts, to be inescapably permeated and constituted by the cultural realm of ideas, norms and values. This is so, as I showed earlier, because the future is the source for action in the present: it underpins wars and demonstrations, supports our choice of religion, politics and voluntary activities.

To further complicate matters, the enacted, thus factual world of ideas, in turn, has socio-physical consequences, some of which take on material form quite quickly, others, such as hormone-disrupting chemicals or the effects from smoking, do not materialise as symptoms for a very long time. Where the effects are time-space distantiated, this acculturated physis, this future in the making needs to be recognised as both material reality and latent process-world of an encoded invisible reality, a realm beyond the reach of the senses, beyond the world of linear causal connections. To re-centre the temporal and to make futurity explicit, therefore, is to emphasise not merely the world of social products but, equally, to stress the importance of the immanent, the process world beyond empirical access that is nevertheless real in its consequences. This requires a new sense of factuality and facticity that transcends conventional dualisms of facts and values, the world of things and products that are empirically accessible in the present and the ideational world of values and purpose that that elude such access due to their futurity.

Webers means-end schema entails a similar conception of the present and future to the one that underpins the fact-value distinction: the end or goal being clearly located in the future beyond the reach of the senses, whilst the means, in contrast, are being viewed as scientific/technical ways to help us achieve those pre-given ends, goals and visions. Means are the definable paths by which we reach into the future. Knowing the goal, we can apply the counterfactual schema if this... then that.... Thus, for example, if we want to get rid of weeds on the garden path, then science can supply us with the means available in the present to achieve the desired future state of no weeds on the path. Science, we need to remember, is not empowered to comment on the merits or value of our goal - it can merely tell us in a factual, or counter-factual, non-evaluative way what needs to be done if we want to get of the weeds on the path. In addition it can provide a range of options and identify their potential effects: weed by hand (hard work not very long lasting, environmentally benign), torch the path (dependent on available tools, also not very long lasting, environmentally benign), use one of a variety of weed killers (effective for longer period, easy to do, environmental effects disputed), concrete over the path (permanent solution, costly, environmental effects resource intensive).

This understanding becomes inappropriate once we acknowledge the interpenetration of past, present and future in such situations. Let us assume that we have chosen to use a particular weed killer as the means to our pre-defined goal. First, the effectiveness of the weed killer is inescapably tied to past uses and the reflexivity within the eco-system, which means, the past is ineradicably implicated in the means to achieving a given end. Secondly, the application of our weed killer creates an open-ended, indeterminate future that affects the person applying the spray, the immediate environment and the eco-sphere for an in(de)finite time. As such, the future features in our present action not only as the desired end (the reason for our action) but also as an encoded reality of potential impacts. Past, present and future interpenetrate in purposes, goals, actions and outcomes: actual and potential, intended and unintended. From a temporal perspective, therefore, the world of the is, the realm of the present, is not neatly definable, not temporally bounded, not the exclusive province of the senses (not that it ever was, of course). All aspects of that temporally constituted process mutually implicate each other. Moreover, there is a need to appreciate that such dualistic schema are static, that they fix and generalise into an a-temporal, decontextualised form processes and relationships that are contingent, transient, specific, embodied and embedded. Thus, boundaries and distinctions between means and end are perforated, the dualism once more unsettled at best, rendered useless at worst.

When social scientists are asked to separate facts from values, the material world from the world of ideas and the means from ends, that task is far more complex than even Max Weber had allowed for. Not only do these conflicting aspects of our work shade into each other and interpenetrate, as I have indicated above, they mutually constitute each other in ways that go even beyond Webers conceptual complexity. To elaborate this point, let us focus on the way Weber conceptualised cultural futurity. The future, as we have seen earlier, is associated with the ideational world of purpose, motive, and belief. It encompasses our entire world of reason as causes for actions: ideals, values, morals, commitments, hopes, fears and desires. As such, the future acts on the present; it guides our plans and choices, decisions and actions. Or to put it differently, it is in the present that the future is enacted, and realised. Once materialised it becomes a sense datum and as such accessible to empirical study. However, the motive is not visible in the outcome but has to be inferred by means other than empirical factual analysis. This is, as Weber pointed out, where meaning-adequacy and understanding become important aspects of our work.

However, as I have already begun to indicate, there is an entire dimension missing from this schema, since past and future feature in yet another, much more material way in that relation. Each action binds pasts and futures to set free new futures. Some of these new futures may materialise quickly the weeds on the path may wilt within a week or so in which case we can access them empirically at that point and retrospectively establish cause and effect relations. Others maybe time-space distantiated, that is, materialise in some unspecified open future some time, somewhere, in which case causal relations cannot be identified and the reality of the future in process is placed in question. This poses severe problems for the materialist perspective, which underpins the scientific method. The impact of the weed killer on soil bacteria and earthworms, on the purity of groundwater and on the other plants nearby, on insects and birds and, at the level of cells, on the persons applying the chemical and their unborn offspring, is a future, which is from this perspective immaterial in the double sense of the word, because it is immanent and latent and because as such it is not empirically real, not a fact and therefore of no material consequence.

To associate the future and futurity with the ideational sphere relegates this central domain of social life to the realm of the immaterial unreal. Moreover, to restrict human futurity to the domain of human purpose means that we loose sight of the other side of cultural futures: that we create futures that are as difficult to access for the social sciences as the futures that guide our actions. In their latency and immanence these futures in the making, these deeds under way, are denied reality status until they materialise as symptoms. In the case of our weed killer example, we need to encompass this cultural future not just in terms of means to our end, not just as the realm of the predictable knowledge based on past experience (ours and that of science), not just in terms of known goals and values (a weed-free path) but, equally, in terms of futures that we thereby create, both expected and unexpected, intended and unintended, material and immanent, latent and potential, unknown and unknowable. The schema of dualistic distinctions is clearly inappropriate to that task. In our globalised world of unbounded networked processes this is a challenge for the social sciences of even greater magnitude than the earlier one addressed by Weber when he sought to take account of values, motives and purposes within an empirical mode of enquiry. It is this challenge, which I want to open up for discussion in the last part of this paper.

Futurity as Process and Product: Towards a Future-oriented Social Science

A new science emerges where new problems are pursued by new methods and truths are thereby discovered which open up significant new points of view. (Weber 1969/1904: 68)

Weber was acutely aware of the contingent nature of the socio-cultural sciences and the need, as I have indicated above, to adapt and change them in the light of new cultural conditions. He was at pains to point out that we create meaning and that this meaning in turn is constitutive, that we are therefore responsible for the meanings we produce. And he insisted that conventional science was not the only and certainly not always the appropriate means to understanding. Thus he argued,

The more general the problem involved, i.e., in this case, the broader its cultural significance, the less subject it is to a single unambiguous answer on the basis of data of empirical sciences and the greater the role played by value-ideas (Wertideen) and the ultimate and highest axioms of belief. (Weber 1969/1904: 56-7)

With these three premises Weber provide us with an excellent base from which to depart from his own dualistic schema and seek more appropriate means to understand and theorise contemporary social actions, assumptions and processes together with their impacts and paradoxes. What then is to be left behind, what to be re-thought and revised in light of the contemporary condition?

Where Weber conceived of the cultural world in terms of facts and values, that is, the realms of matter and ideas, we need to supplement this understanding by refocusing attention on the socio-environmental world of processes and products. We need to appreciate that the (natural) scientific mode of understanding the world is not only incapable of encompassing human futurity in terms of the world of ideas but also in terms of the world of invisible, latent, immanent processes. Products, not processes, natura naturata not natura naturans, Merkwelt not Wirkwelt, the present not the future, past-based evidence not future-based uncertainty, boundedness not time-space distantiation, material outcomes not the potential, virtual, unknown and the unknowable are the empirical sciences spheres of competence. Yet, I barely need to point out that many of the most intractable problems of contemporary existence are precisely of the processual, futurig, time-space distantiated kind that fall outside the present-based domain of empirical science. The safe decommissioning of nuclear waste, the regulation of bio-technology and genetic modification of food, the creation of stem-cell and nano-technology products, the international efforts to deal with global warming, ozone depletion, hormone-disrupting chemicals and the cultural extinction of species, are just some of the time-space distantiated process phenomena that are currently recognised as both potential and actual problems. Going by past records of the last century, moreover, there are likely to be many more that have yet to materialise as symptoms, that is, as scientifically accessible products. In all of these examples, furthermore, the apparent scientific and technological control tends to stand in an inverse relation to the created indeterminacies and the loss of control over time-space distantiated impacts.

If we now return to the issue of human futurity and conceive of that futurity not just in the restricted sense of an ideational sphere of purposes and values that guide choices, decisions and actions in the present, but take the next step as well where those choices, decisions and actions create futures, many for open-ended periods and with uncertain and even unknowable results, then these created futures of our making need our urgent social science attention. How are they to be conceptualised? What tools can we draw on if neither materialist science nor idealist humanism can provide viable answers? Is it a case of constructing appropriate ideal types? Is it sufficient to create new understanding? Is there an additional need to re-conceptualise the sphere of responsibility?

It seems clear that we need to find ways to understand, accept and think of the potential, virtual world of processes as im/material real. It seems equally clear that we need to conceive of the future as both guide to actions in the present and as activated by us in the present. It seems additionally obvious that we shall have to take responsibility for these directions of influence and their effects. This, however, takes us into the realm of moral theory, where, as I have shown in recent work (Adam 2004, Jonas 1984/1079) much equivalent conceptual revision is on the political and environmental philosophical agenda. Weber holds social scientists responsible for the impact of their constitutive knowledge and for their professional integrity, which demands that they keep their facts and values distinct. When he discusses Politics as a Vocation Weber (1958/1917: 121-2) constructs two ideal types of responsibility: an ethics of responsibility that bears in mind (plausible) outcomes (Verantwortungsethik) and an ethics of ultimate ends, which is guided solely by values and beliefs (Gesinnungsethik). I am afraid neither of these ideal types is of help with the problem I am addressing here. I would therefore like to take Webers points further and suggest that social scientists have a professional responsibility to point out where the competence of science ends and where social responsibility has to be activated: when mastery fails we need to point out and carefully elucidate the sphere of morals. Moreover, if the current moral tools are inadequate to encompass the potential socio-environmental world of our making, then it behoves us to either team up with moral philosophers or to extend our knowledge sphere to encompass that body of thought in order that we might be able to connect assumptions, actions and potential effects. This entails that we point out that ethics, which is traditionally focused on the social world of human reciprocity, needs to be extended to encompass the sphere of our influence, that is, future generations and fellow species, all of which are affected by our actions, yet have no voice or representation to put their case. This extension of the social science sphere of competence becomes essential not just on ethical grounds but on the basis that today cultural being needs to be conceptualised not just as human but natured and nature creating being, as implicating other species in body and action and related to them through an infinite connectedness that reaches ultimately to the stars and the beginning of time.

When the future in Webers work is surfaced and its role in the social sciences brought into sharp focus we can see that body of work in a new light, discover points of departure and see first openings for change. When the temporal silences begin to get expressed and the invisible is given form, reality begins to resonate with the immanent process-world beyond empirical accessibility. Veracity and the Real are no longer exclusively associated the visual and material. Facts and values take on a different hue. With the future no longer in disguise, the limitations of present-based science and the rationalism that pervades our daily lives, become inescapably obvious, thus encouraging us to re-fashion our conceptual tools to better suit the contemporary condition. Could the explication of our futurity be the beginning of the new science where new problems are pursued by new methods, and which, as Weber (1969/1904: 68) suggested, opens up significant new points of view?

References

Adam, B. (1998) Values in the Cultural Timescapes of Science, in Lash, S. Quick, A. Roberts, R. eds. Special edition, Time and Values, Cultural Values 2(2 & 3): 385-402.

Adam, B. (2004) Minding Futures. www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/futures/

Albrow, M. (1990) Max Webers Construction of Social Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Jonas, H. (1984/1979) The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Weber, M. (1958/1919) Politics as a Vocation, in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 77-128.

Weber, M. (1958/1919) Science as a Vocation, in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 129-58.

Weber, M. (1969/1904) Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, in Shils, E.A. and Finch H.A eds. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Max Weber. New York: The Free Press, pp. 50-112.

Weber, M. (1969/1917) The Meaning of Ethical Neutrality in Sociology and Economics in Shils, E.A. and Finch H.A eds. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Max Weber. New York: The Free Press, pp. 1-49.

Weber, M. (1978/1913) Economy and Society Vol. I. Roth, G. and Wittich, C. eds., Berkeley: University of California Press.

Weber, M. (1989/1904-5) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Transl. T. Parsons. Intro. A. Giddens, London: Unwin Hyman.

Wynne, B. (2005) Reflexing Complexity: Post-Genomics Knowledge and Reductionist Returns in Public Science, Theory, Culture and Society

Acknowledgement

This research has been conducted during a three-year research project 'In Pursuit of the Future', which is funded by the UKs Economic and Science Research Council (ESRC) under their Professorial Fellowship Scheme.

Biographical Details

Barbara Adam is Professor of Sociology at Cardiff University. She is founding editor of the journal Time & Society and has published extensively on the social relations of time. Her most recent book Time (2004) is published under the Polity Press Key Concepts Series. She currently holds an ESRC Professorial Fellowship (2003-6) in which she explores the social relationship to the future. E-mail: adamtime@cardiff.ac.uk web sites: http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/whoswho/adam/ http://www.cf.ac.uk/socsi/futures/

For reliable secondary literature on Weber see Albrow 1990, Giddens 1971, Ksler 1988, Wrong 1970.

For a more detailed account of these dualistic distinctions and their socio-environmental implications for contemporary social science, see Adam 1998: 385-402.

See Wynne 2005 who is arguing these points with reference of post-genomics knowledge.