Rationalization and Modernity

Weber used rationalization to examine the spread of calculation, predictability, specialized knowledge, impersonality, and control across law, administration, science, and economic life. He treated these developments as powerful but morally ambivalent.

Rational institutions can expand technical capacity and individual room for action, yet they can also constrain people within systems whose rules and purposes they do not control. This tension is central to Weber's account of modernity.