Max Weber: Science as a Vocation

Excerpts from Weber, Max (1918) Originally a speech at Munich University. Published in 1919 by Duncker & Humblodt, Munich. Eng. Trans. Science as a Vocation (Eds. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press 1946.

Science as a Vocation

What is the meaning of science as a vocation ... Tolstoj has given the simplest answer, with the words: “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to the only question important for us: what shall we do and how shall we live?”... Politics is out of place in the lecture-room. It does not belong there on the part of the students ... Neither does politics, however, belong in the lecture-room on the part of the docents ... 

The true teacher will beware of imposing from the platform any political position upon the student, whether it is expressed or suggested. “To let the facts speak for themselves” is the most unfair way of putting over a political position to the student... One can only demand of the teacher that he have the intellectual integrity to see that it is one thing to state facts, to determine mathematical or logical relations or the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture and its individual contents and the question of how one should act in the cultural community and in political associations... If he asks further why he should not deal with both types of problems in the lecture-room, the answer is: because the prophet and the demagogue do not belong on the academic platform...

To the prophet and the demagogue, it is said: “Go your ways out into the streets and speak openly to the world”, that is, speak where criticism is possible. In the lecture-room we stand opposite our audience, and it has to remain silent. I deem it irresponsible to exploit the circumstance that for the sake of their career the students have to attend a teacher’s course while there is nobody present to oppose him with criticism... 

The task of the teacher is to serve the students with his knowledge and scientific experience and not to imprint upon them his personal political views. It is certainly possible that the individual teacher will not entirely succeed in eliminating his personal sympathies. He is then exposed to the sharpest criticism in the forum of his own conscience... I ask only: How should a devout Catholic, on the one hand, and a Freemason, on the other, in a course on the forms of church and state or on religious history ever be brought to evaluate these subjects alike? This is out of the question. And yet the academic teacher must desire and must demand of himself to serve the one as well as the other by his knowledge and methods... The primary task of a useful teacher is to teach his students to recognize “inconvenient” facts — I mean facts that are inconvenient for their party opinions. And for every party opinion there are facts that are extremely inconvenient, for my own opinion no less than for others. I believe the teacher accomplishes more than a mere intellectual task if he compels his audience to accustom itself to the existence of such facts... 

In practice, you can take this or that position when concerned with a problem of value... If you take such and such a stand, then, according to scientific experience, you have to use such and such a means in order to carry out your conviction practically. Now, these means are perhaps such that you believe you must reject them. Then you simply must choose between the end and the inevitable means... Does the end justify the means? Or does it not? The teacher can confront you with the necessity of this choice. He cannot do more, so long as he wishes to remain a teacher and not to become a demagogue... 

The error [of youth] is that they seek in the professor something different from what stands before them. They crave a leader and not a teacher. But we are placed upon the platform solely as teachers. And these are two different things... The qualities that make a person an excellent scholar and academic teacher are not the qualities that make him a leader to give directions in practical life or, more specifically, in politics ... The professor who feels called upon to act as a counsellor of youth and enjoys their trust may prove himself a person in personal human relations with them. 

And if he feels called upon to intervene in the struggles of worldviews and party opinions, he may do so outside, in the market place, in the press, in meetings, in associations, wherever he wishes...