From The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation (Max Weber, 1917)
Thus academic life is an utter gamble. When young students come to me to seek advice about qualifying as a lecturer, the responsibility of giving it is scarcely to be borne. Of course, if the student is a Jew, you can only say: lasciate ogni speranza.9 But others, too, must be asked to examine their conscience: Do you believe that you can bear to see one mediocrity after another being promoted over your head year after year, without your becoming embittered and warped? Needless to say, you always receive the same answer: of course, I live only for my “vocation” — but I, at least, have found only a handful of people who have survived this process without injury to their personality.
So much for the external conditions of a scholarly vocation.
But I believe that you really want to hear about something else, about an inner vocation for science. At the present time, that inner vocation, in contrast to the external organization of science as a profession, is determined in the first instance by the fact that science has entered a stage of specialization that has no precedent and that will continue for all time. Not just outwardly, but above all inwardly, the position is that only through rigorous specialization can the individual experience the certain satisfaction that he has achieved something perfect in the realm of learning. With every piece of work that strays into neighboring territory, work of the kind that we occasionally undertake and that sociologists, for example, must necessarily produce, we must resign ourselves to the realization that the best we can hope for is to provide the expert with useful questions of the sort that he may not easily discover for himself from his own vantage point inside his discipline. Our own work, however, will inevitably remain highly imperfect. Only rigorous specialization can give the scholar the feeling for what may be the one and only time in his entire life, that here he has achieved something that will last.
9 Lasciate ogni speranza [voi ch’entrate]! (Abandon all hope, [ye who enter here]!), Dante, Inferno, canto 3, line 9. This is the inscription on the lintel above the gate of Hell.
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