This seminar is primarily concerned with the origins, theoretical contents, and historical implications of liberal pluralism in the social thought of Max Weber and Isaiah Berlin. In the post-Nietzschean age in which traditional Western cosmology is broken, construction of and belief in utopia a realistic impossibility (despite many ideological attempts, such as Nazism, Fascism on the Right and Communism on the Left, which proved to be great catastrophes at tremendous human costs and sufferings), the reflections of Weber and Berlin as sustained responses to the challenge of modernity are among the most powerful and significant. The seminar, while not exclusively confined in their writings, is mainly devoted to analyses of those writings of theirs, which deal with the historical backgrounds of rise of secular modernity, a spiritual origin of modern Western Capitalism and its dehumanizing consequences, and the validity and meaning as well as the limitations of liberal pluralism in the modern age.

More specifically, Weber’s treatments of the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, that has resulted dialectically in the emergence and dominance of “instrumental rationality” (as opposed to “value-rationality”) which in turn led to the “disenchantment of the world” and the “battle of gods,” Berlin’s ideas of the demise of utopia, of the conflicts of good ends, Weber’s notion of the alienation or crisis of modernity to which his articulations of “politics as a vocation” and “science as a vocation” as conscientious responses, and Berlin’s emphasis on negative liberty and its critiques by others will carefully be studied.