Leadership: The Power of Authority

Max Weber believed that the proper direction for social scientists is to probe the causes of unintended events, whether they are morally objectionable or not. The rationale for this is that if an event occurs as the result of someone’s planned action, then that person knows what causes it. Therefore the knowledge is already available and there is no need to resort to scientific enquiry to discover it. If the event is not intended by anyone, however, it is a fair assumption that its causes are not known and it is appropriate to mount a scientific enquiry to uncover them. Such a discovery will increase our power to control events, and that is what science is really aimed at. The advantage of Weber’s approach is that it relieves investigators of the necessity to become judges of what is morally good or bad. Consequently, they can regard the discovery of the causes of an unintended event as a useful scientific feat regardless of any debate about whether the event is good or bad. This makes scientific sense, for the discovery of the causes of any unintended event brings it within our power to judge whether that particular event will occur in the future. When we have that power, and then only, can we be effective as moralists, promoting those events judged to be good and preventing those judged to be bad. For Weber, then, science is directed at extending the power we have through knowledge, just as the forms of economic organisation we have developed are directed at extending the powers we have through control over the material conditions of our lives. The kinship between economic organisation and science therefore becomes transparent through the concept of power.