The road from “vocation”: Weber and Veblen on the purposelessness of scholarship

Abstract

“Science as a Vocation” describes an ideal of scholarship for a vanished world. Images of the past university still color our idea of the university. Weber dispelled illusions about the university of his own time, and pointed to its cruelty and irrationality. Veblen did something similar for the American university of his time, defended a similar ideal, and foresaw the effects of disciplinarization and the quantification of academic life. They both provide insights into the ways in which the autonomy of academic inquiry has been transformed, and the price that has been paid for the present forms of autonomy. But a consideration of these changes also reveals the reasons for the change in academic values over the last century and what has been lost.