Administration, Ethics and Democracy

Øjvind Larsen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138716353
• eBook ISBN: 9781351768856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This title was first published in 2000: Administration, Ethics and Democracy is concerned with the disciplines of philosophy, political science and sociology. Øjvind Larsen's book provides a deeper analysis of the relations between administration, ethics and democracy. In modern society, it is no longer sufficient to be the obedient administrator Max Weber speaks about. The time is ripe to re-evaluate the overriding responsibilities of the administration. Today, responsible administration demands an independent position to be taken. Øjvind Larsen views the administration from the continuous complex demands it is required to meet and proposes that the professional role is not exempt from personal responsibility or position. Therefore it is crucial that the administrator has freedom of expression and the opportunity to discuss his problems with others. Ethics are a common concern and also a political problem in democratic society. This is why there is a close connection between administration, ethics and democracy.

1 Modern Society

Existence and Institution

Ethical dilemmas are not something one chooses to have. Ethical dilemmas are something one suddenly is cast into and something from which one cannot escape. Ethical dilemmas are always fundamentally of an existential character. This is also true for the administrator. An ethical dilemma can suddenly arise in the course of handling routine matters, casting the administrator into a predicament he cannot avoid. As exemplified in the introduction to this book, Frederik Schydt, the Director of the Danish Immigration Service was suddenly confronted with an acute ethical dilemma when the Minister of Justice, Erik Ninn Hansen gave him an order which was unlawful. Schydt was forced to decide whether he should obey the law, or obey the orders of his superior.

The acute existential dimension of the administrator’s ethical situation makes it appropriate to apply what could be called an existential phenomenological perspective to the situation. This perspective, however, is not sufficient to understand the ethical situation of the administrator. The administrator’s ethical dilemma is not just something that suddenly appears in a certain situation. It is, at the same time a summary expression of the social, institutionally conveyed complexity of a particular situation. It is this latter relationship I want to analyze.

As noted in the introduction, no general advice can be given for how an individual administrator should act in a particular situation. On the other hand, it is possible to say something about the general ethical situation of the administrator in which he alone must decide how he will act. But in order to do this, it is necessary to look at how the administrator’s ethical situation takes a rather particular form in modern society. With reference to Hegel’s philosophy of law, one could say that every social phenomenon must be presented in its immediate form, while at the same time being presented as a mediated institutional relation.⁸

This is the reason why I begin by giving a general description of the principles of modern society, and then in the following chapter look at the extent to which these principles institutionally apply or impact upon politics and administration. It is only upon this institutionally mediated background that I can, in Chapter 3, begin to present the administrator’s ethical situation as a direct, existential relationship into which he is cast.

Modernity in Change

That which most characterizes modern society is that it is in a permanent process of change. ‘All that is solid melts into air’ is the title of Marshall Berman’s book in which he describes how modernity proceeds.⁹ Permanent change is what distinguishes modern society. All other social formations in history have been characterized by stability. This is why they are also called traditional societies. What is meant by this is that these societies were reproduced by the repetition of set patterns in production, socialization, norm formation, etc. Every violent change was a threat to these societies’ existence. What characterizes modern society is that it cannot exist as a stable society. Modern society can only exist if new conflicts are created for which attempts are made at resolution, creating new situations and conflicts. This situation, which we soon will examine more closely holds for all realms of life; politics, administration, production, the family, socialization, the formation of norms, art, etc.

Breaking with Tradition, Religion and Metaphysics

Continuous change has decisive importance for the way people orient themselves. In traditional society, one orients oneself after tradition, religion or metaphysics, depending on what society one finds oneself in. Tradition prescribed how the individual should act, and there was no great uncertainty about what was expected of the individual over the course of his life. In religion, the higher meaning of existence was formulated, and it was not possible to question its meaning. This would have lead to the individual falling out of society, which was the equivalent of being eradicated. In western culture, religion was supplemented by metaphysical considerations about the place of humans in the great God-given or natural order.

Characteristic of the modern advance is that these three reference points – religion, metaphysics and tradition lose their importance. The individual in modern society is no longer bound to a particular rooted tradition from cradle to grave. Religion can no longer provide the answer to life’s definite meaning, and there is no longer a metaphysic which can take the place of religion. There are, in other words, no longer any preordained, directly valid references from which the modern individual can orient his life.

The Rational Character of Modern Society

It would be wrong here to conclude that the modern person stands totally alone with regard to orienting himself. On the contrary, the modern advance has a very definite character in western society which offers new possibilities for orientation. This was first and foremost described by Max Weber.

In the preface to the collection of his writings on the sociology of religion, Weber puts forward the universal historical idea that in the West, and only in the West, cultural phenomena that arose comprised part of a line of development of universal importance and validity.¹⁰ To Weber, it was not yet totally clear whether there was an internal connection or just a contingent connection between the modern rupture and that which he calls western rationalism, by which he meant the unique western rationalization of religion, science, art, economics, and state bureaucracy.¹¹ To understand the modern rupture, one must understand the special characteristics of western rationalism and explain its origin.

Any attempt to make such an explanation must, according to Weber, take into account the economic conditions of the origin of western rationalism due to the fundamental importance of the economy.¹² This is the explanatory model we find in the work of Karl Marx.¹³ But this perspective, in which forces of production lead to a change in relations of production, according to Weber, should not lead to leaving the reverse causality out of the analysis. Just as the origin of economic rationalism is dependent on rational technology and rational law, it is also, according to Weber, dependent on people’s ability and disposition towards particular forms of practical, rational ways of living. Where this is intertwined with restraints of a religious nature, according to Weber, the development of an economically rational way of life meets strong internal resistance.¹⁴

The Importance of Protestantism

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber shows how Protestantism not only contributed to triumphing over the restraints on an economically rational way of life, but also how the powers of the soul were invested in it. Weber presents a very refined sociology of religious analysis, of how spiritual powers, which in the Catholic form of Middle Age Christianity were bound to religious salvation, were liberated from this connection, which from an economic rationality perspective can be seen as a constraint, and were invested in economic activity.

Calvinism is especially significant in this regard. Calvinism had a strong theological understanding of predestination, the belief that God has already decided who is saved and who is not, regardless of human action. This theological conception is turned, in the bourgeois economic interpretation, entirely around in the sense that of course Christians cannot know about God’s preordained plans; but on the other hand, God in his goodness and power would not want the saved to live in misery on earth. This reasoning was turned around once again to give an understanding that when things go well for an individual, it must be a sign that God has selected that person for salvation.

With this perversion of the doctrine of predestination, the way is paved for the previously religiously bound energies to be applied rationally to obtain economic wealth in order to acquire the sign or trait of predestined salvation. The goal of this economically rational way of life is predetermined by God. The problem is to find adequate means to rationally reach this goal. In this way, according to Weber, goal-rational action is introduced as the fundamental form of rational action in western culture. This form of rationality is fundamental to the capitalist economic form, which aims precisely for the increased accumulation of capital. Protestantism, and especially Calvinism, from a sociology of religion perspective, becomes the driving force of the cultural revolution pushing the centre of spiritual energies out of the religious sphere and into the temporal, where spiritual characteristics are then detected in economically rational behavior.

Weber shows by extension how, as capitalism consolidates, economically rational action is wrested from its original religious constraints and becomes a goal in itself. The accumulation of wealth then becomes a goal in itself.

Weber then, in analyzing English Puritanism and Methodism, shows how economically rational action consolidates itself in the form of a bourgeois ethics of calling.¹⁵ Weber writes that standing in God’s full mercy and to be clearly blessed by Him not only enabled the bourgeois capitalist – when he kept to the formally correct parameters, had an externally apparent moral disposition and did not use his wealth for opulence – to pursue his business interests, it obliged him to do so.¹⁶ According to Weber, the power of religious asceticism also brought to the capitalist sober, conscientious and eager workers who saw their work as a God given goal in their life. Furthermore, according to Weber, consciousness of God’s grace gave the bourgeois capitalist the calming security that the unequal distribution of goods on Earth was part of God’s plan, in that by way of these differences, as well as individually distributed salvation, God proceeded with his secret, inscrutable ends. Understanding work as a ‘calling’, according to Weber, also became a characteristic of the modern worker, just as the equivalent understanding of income was for the employer. Through this ethic of calling, it was possible to approach rationally both work and income or profit. In both cases it was a matter of doing God’s will, which gave meaning to the goal rational activity.

It is Weber’s point that the bourgeois ethic of calling liberated itself from its religious origin as capitalism consolidated. Income became a goal in itself, work became a goal in itself, neither being pursued any longer for the glory of God. At this point we arrive at what Weber calls the spirit of capitalism.¹⁷ Weber then puts forward his description of modern society as an ‘iron cage’:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced 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 the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day 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 fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should 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.

Since asceticism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as no previous period in history. To-day the spirit of religious asceticism – whether finally, who knows? – has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’¹⁸

In this diagnosis, goal-oriented rationality has completely triumphed as the social and cultural form of rationality. What is worse though, is that this triumph implies a loss of both freedom and meaning. Goal-oriented rationality becomes a compulsion, which ultimately is meaningless, because the religious dimension that previously partly gave both freedom and meaning to this form of rationality has disappeared. The calling has become a meaningless relic of the past, and activity attached to a calling is only enforced through compulsion.

Habermas’s Critique of Weber’s Analysis of Modernity

Weber’s empirical investigation in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism concentrated solely on the origin of capitalism and how goal-oriented rationality became institutionalized as the dominant form of rationality. This has to do with social rationalization, which means the establishment of one or more forms of rationality in a society. In Weber’s investigation, social rationalization is identified only with the form of rationality which came to be dominant in modern capitalist society. At the same time, Weber offers a very pessimistic diagnosis. It is here that Habermas begins his critique which we will look at below.

The problem is that Weber identifies rationalizing with the historically specific form of rationality which has evolved in western culture. In this way Weber, according to Habermas, has not seized the opportunity to differentiate between the cultural rationalization of forms of understanding and the historical rationalization of forms of action. Such a differentiation would have given Weber the opportunity to erect a critical standard by which to evaluate actual historical rationalization, in which goal-oriented rationality became dominant.¹⁹ According to Habermas, what is missing is a standard for evaluating the pessimistic diagnosis of contemporary society which Weber puts forward in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In the following discussion, I will look at how Habermas tries to solve this problem.

Habermas introduces a differentiation between, on the on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Modern Society
• 2 Modern Politics and Administration
• 3 The Modern Administrator
• 4 Ethics and Administration
• 5 Freedom of Expression, the Public Space and Democracy
• 6 The Obedient Administrator
• Notes
• Bibliography