Information Technology and Society - Essay Example

I hope to explore these themes in a way that transcends the terms of the well-known debates over the normative and historical ramifications of the late Weber's theorizing of charisma and Fuhrerdemokratie. (Feldman, 2005, 60) However, what must be addressed in the course of this analysis is the fact that Lukacs and Schmitt themselves -- each in their way, to be sure -- endorsed twentieth-century political mythologies that most vigorously championed political will: left- and right-wing authoritarianism in the forms of, respectively, Soviet Communism and National Socialism.

In Weber the neutrality and technological innovation does not however prevent the emergence of a prejudiced disposition over historical specificity: that is, the melancholy of the conclusion of The Protestant Ethic and the "Science" lecture which fuels the call for responsible personal stands in the "Politics" and "Parliament and Government" lectures. Lukacs's early writings betray a similar lament over, and desire to actively transcend, the alienation brought on by rationalized modernity. In this regard, he frequently' exhibits an existential pathos derived often explicitly from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoyevsky.

(Portis, 1990, 759) In both works the phenomenon of rationalization is. As Schmitt observes its influence is nearly all-pervasive: "In almost every discussion one can recognize the extent to which the methodology of the natural-technical sciences dominates contemporary thinking". But again he now attributes the genesis of this rationality to a Marxian category and no longer a Weberian one: "The modern modes of thought already eroded by the reifying effects of the dominant commodity form" encourages purely "quantitative" analyses of society and not "qualitative" ones ((Feldman, 2005, 60)).

Its common ground is a concept of nature that has found its realization in a world transformed by technology and industry. Nature appears today as the polar antithesis of the mechanistic world of big cities whose stone, iron, and glass structures lie on the face of the earth like colossal Cubist creations. The antithesis of this empire of technology is nature untouched by civilization, wild and barbarian -- a reservation into which "man with his affliction does not set foot." (Feldman, 2005, 60) The old gods rise from their graves and fight their old battles once again, but now disenchanted and now, as should be added, with new means of struggle which are no longer mere weapons but terrifying means of annihilation and extermination -- dreadful products of value-free science and the industrialism and technology that it serves.

What is for one the devil is for the other the god. That the old gods have become disenchanted and become merely accepted values makes the conflict specter-like and the antagonists hopelessly polemical.