More on Tradition

My book The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity was the subject of a lengthy symposium in Telos 94. Though some of the commentary was positive, much was critical. In what follows, I will neither restate my position nor respond directly to all my critics. Rather I will attempt both to articulate a broader view of traditions and to present a more useful way to approach them. In 1905, in an address to the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Weber said: “[W]e are in any case caught up in this development (i.e., the rule of bureaucratic life ideals), and the central question is not how we further and accelerate it but what we have to set against this machinery, in order to preserve a remnant of humanity from this parcelling-out of the soul.”

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