ABSTRACT
Weber is the key intermediary who inherits, accepts and develops upon the preceding complex of Nietzschean ideas. Significantly, Weber also urged his students to recognise the limits of reason in helping find the “way to true being.” Weber is analysed through two of his key motifs: first, the iron cage of the modern economic order, and second, the countervailing trend towards charismatic authority, in its most irrational and demonic forms. Weber’s conclusion was that the modern world is characterised by a process of “disenchantment,” and agreed that a return to institutional religion is impossible for the intellectual. He is left with an ambivalent sense of vocation and intellectual integrity as guiding forces.
