Progress, or Weber

Max Weber, one of the founders of sociology, is known for his ban on evaluation from the social sciences. I argue that despite or even because of his ban, Weber finds a way for sociology to evaluate the development of civilizations. He does so by investigating technical progress, which must be purely descriptive, and by using the fact that technical progress can be “entangled” with progress in a normative sense, or with increased value, to state that there is progress in a normative sense. As I understand Weber, although he doesn’t say so himself, technical progress entangles increase of value if it is pursued by actions loved for their own sake. For Weber assumes, as I think most people do, that if we do something for its own sake or autotelically, then there is value in the action. Thus, Weber provides an acceptance condition for claims on the meaning of the world: that it requires technical progress in value spheres that must be produced by autotelic actions. Yet it seems he must use two criteria to evaluate societies: how many value spheres there are in a society, and how much autonomy a value sphere has in pursuing its values.