Simmel ended his essay with the usual disclaimer: "It is not our task either to accuse or pardon, but only to understand." Here again, the pretense of objectivity could not quite conceal emotional ambivalence and moral indecision. Still, ambivalence was a more appropriate response to progress than unyielding opposition or wholehearted approval. Indeed it was the only appropriate response, when progress was identified so closely with fate; and there is a certain heroism in the classical sociologists' determination to face unflinchingly facts that could not be altered, in their view, and to "bear the fate of the times like a man," as Weber put it. Weber's conception of the scientific vocation may have conceded too much to the view that science demands a rigorous abstention from moral judgment, but his warning against "academic prophecy" remains indispensable. "In the lecture rooms of the university," Weber insisted, "no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity." It is impossible not to acknowledge the force of this, even for those who have seen Weber's ideal of heroic detachment degenerate into the familiar academic accommodation with political power that sides with the status quo, in effect, while disclaiming any intention of taking sides. "Science as a Vocation" and its companion, "Politics as a Vocation," have been put to purposes Weber himself would have disavowed, serving to excuse moral and political complacency, to rid scholarship of "value judgments," to reinforce the notion that ethical judgments are completely subjective and arbitrary, and finally to banish them even from politics itself, leaving politics to the managers and technocrats. Far from encouraging "intellectual integrity" or protecting the university from political interference, a misconceived ideal of scientific objectivity has brought about a rapprochement between the university and the state, in which academic expertise serves to lubricate the machinery of power; and it is important to remind ourselves that Weber, often invoked by those who wish to limit both scholarship and politics to purely technical matters, never endorsed such a trivial conception of either.

In politics, he condemned the pursuit of ethical absolutes, not the pursuit of ethical ends as such. Ethical absolutes had no place in politics,

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