Introduction

Abstract

In his critical analysis of the development of capitalism in Western societies and torn between the values of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, Max Weber (1948) reflected upon the essential opposition that exists between science and what he called ‘substantive human values’. As several of his writings demonstrate, Weber saw the rise of science and bureaucracy to stand in direct conflict with the possibility of creating a meaningful life: the notion of disenchantment, but more strikingly his image of the ‘iron cage’, fully captures the way Weber evaluated the so-called ‘modernization process’ as experienced in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the “disenchantment of the world”. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life’ (Weber, 1948, p. 155). According to Weber, Western capitalism and its particular interventionist rationality expressed the paradoxical relation between ‘formal rationality’ (which referred to the application of principles of science and the law) and ‘substantive rationality’ (which referred to values such as justice, ethical and aesthetic standards), to the extent that the former directly opposed the latter.