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Rationalisation

Rationalisation and the question of individual freedom in an increasingly rational society, was a central theme in Weber's scholarship. This theme was situated in the larger context of the relationship between psychological motivations, cultural values, cultural beliefs, and the structure of the society. Weber understood rationalisation as having resulted in increasing knowledge, growing impersonality, and the enhanced control of social and material life. He was ambivalent towards rationalisation. Weber admitted that it was responsible for many advances, particularly freeing humans from traditional, restrictive, and illogical social guidelines. However, he also criticised it for dehumanising individuals as "cogs in the machine" and curtailing their freedom, trapping them in the iron cage of rationality and bureaucracy. His studies of the subject began with The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In it, he argued that Protestantism 's – particularly Calvinism 's – redefinition of the connection between work and piety caused a shift towards rational efforts that were aimed at achieving economic gain. In Protestantism, piety towards God was expressed through one's secular vocation. The religious principles that influenced the creation of capitalism became unnecessary and it became able to propagate itself without them.

What Weber depicted was not only the secularisation of Western culture, but also and especially the development of modern societies from the viewpoint of rationalisation. The new structures of society were marked by the differentiation of the two functionally intermeshing systems that had taken shape around the organisational cores of the capitalist enterprise and the bureaucratic state apparatus. Weber understood this process as the institutionalisation of purposive-rational economic and administrative action. To the degree that everyday life was affected by this cultural and societal rationalisation, traditional forms of life – which in the early modern period were differentiated primarily according to one's trade – were dissolved.

— Jürgen Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, 1990.

Weber continued his investigation into this matter in later works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on the classification of legitimate authority into three ideal types – rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic – of which rational-legal was the dominant one in the modern world. In these works, Weber described what he saw as society's movement towards rationalisation. Bureaucratic states justified themselves through their own rationality and were supported by expert knowledge which made them rational. Rationalisation could also be seen in the economy, with the development of a highly rational and calculating capitalism. Capitalism's rationality related to its basis in calculation, which separated it from alternative forms of economic organization. State bureaucracy and capitalism served as the twin pillars of the developing rational society. These changes eliminated the preexisting traditions that relied on the trades. Weber also saw rationalisation as one of the main factors that set the West apart from the rest of the world. He also applied rationalisation to music in his The Rational and Social Foundations of Music. In writing it, he was influenced by his affair with the pianist Mina Tobler and a sense that Western music was the only type that had become harmonic, while other cultures' music was more intense and focused on hearing. Weber argued that music was becoming increasingly rational. In his view, that resulted from new developments in musical instrument construction and simultaneous socio-economic shifts of the different instruments' players.