Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, and the Problem of Social Rationality in Thorstein Veblen

摘要

Given the complexities of meaning and usage of the term "social rationality," the reader may be willing to substitute the term "social intelligence" for it, in which case little would be lost. In any case, there were undertones of pessimism in the work of our three key figures regarding the future of social rationality in industrial society. Nevertheless, they did not abandon hope that the industrial order might come to encapsulate both science and means-ends congruence as well as authentically humanistic values. Veblen recognized that the development of his own social value principle was part of an evolutionary process whose incompleteness would always be part of human existence. However strongly he articulated and defended what he took to be the generic ends of life, he knew, staunch Darwinian that he was, that the impermanency of life condemned to obsolescence claims of institutional immutability. If idle curiosity, altruism, and the sense of workmanship were of transcultural significance and transhistorical relevance, it was primarily because of their role in helping humanity avoid extinction; in short, they had adaptive and selective value greater than their opposites, Veblen's bete noire, force and fraud.