https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X221080770
Journal of Classical Sociology
2023, Vol. 23(1) 97 –136
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Max Weber and Charles 
Taylor: On normative aspects 
of a theory of human action
Sebastian Raza
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
This paper seeks to make two distinctive sets of contributions through a supplementary 
reinterpretation of Max Weber in the light of Charles Taylor’s expressivist-hermeneutical theory 
of human agency. First, it offers a reinterpretation of Weber’s work. Focussing on the concept 
of stance, the paper highlights that Weber’s theorising on values and their relation to cognition, 
action and identity is less underpinned by subjectivism, representationalism, emotivism and 
decisionism than is typically thought. Instead, Weber sets values within a non-naturalist dimension 
where agents find their bearings and are constituted as such. In this dimension, orientation to 
meaning takes place; identity, action and thought are constituted; and normative experiences 
(such as freedom, or responsibility) are made possible. Weber recognised that this non-naturalist 
dimension has variegated modes, but seemingly studied them in their purest and most logical 
form (the ‘ideal type’), hence his focus on explicit belief systems and world-images. Second, there 
is a prospective supplementation of Weber’s theory through Taylor’s notion of expression. For 
Taylor, we take a stance and orient ourselves expressively through the domain of strongly valued 
meanings. The notions of strong evaluation and articulation prove central to understanding 
embodied, symbolic and representational meaning-orientation in the non-naturalist dimensions of 
values. This supplementary reading places Weber as a central figure in current American, British 
and French debates about, respectively, the normative nature of human agency; the question of 
culture, meaning and their different forms and modes of operation; and the question of how to 
examine identity-formation.
Keywords
Agency, expression, meaning, normativity, stance, Taylor, Weber
Introduction
Recent developments in sociological theory intersect in the relationship between culture, 
meaning and action. American sociology has increasingly focussed on the relation of 
Corresponding author:
Sebastian Raza, University of Cambridge, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK. 
Email: slr75@cam.ac.uk
1080770 JCS0010.1177/1468795X221080770Journal of Classical SociologyRaza
research-article2022
Article
98 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
culture to action with an emphasis on culture’s ‘autonomy’ or ‘independent effects’ prior 
to or outside any strategic considerations (see Alexander and Smith, 2003; Swidler, 
1986). A central theme in the discussion concerns the modes of operation of culture. 
Meanings operate practically, habitually, through implicit understandings, schemas and 
skills that orient agents through a world of meanings (Lizardo, 2004, 2021; Strand and 
Lizardo, 2015). Meanings also operate at the level of explicit beliefs and representations 
of the world that allow for more ‘reflexive’, problem-solving forms of agency (Swidler, 
2001: 181–213). Finally, meanings operate aesthetically through codes, scripts, rituals 
and performances (Alexander, 2011: 1–81). These modes of operation entail different 
modes of cognition (DiMaggio, 1997; Lizardo and Strand, 2010). Implicit, practical 
understandings allow for more flexible, less ‘logical’ forms of cognition, while explicit 
beliefs require a logic that is not always possible in social settings with high levels of 
contingency. Aesthetic modes of operation stand somewhere in the middle, allowing for 
ritualistic sense-making by performatively convincing audiences. The sociological ques-
tion concerns meaning and its forms.
British sociology, for its part, has seen a longstanding debate over habits and routines, 
against reflexivity and evaluation as the constitutive feature of human agency (Archer, 
2010, 2012: 47–86; Elder-Vass, 2007; Piiroinen, 2014; Sayer, 2010). The question of 
how we orient ourselves in the world is tied to questions of identity-formation under dif-
ferent contextual conditions or situational logics (see, e.g. Baert et al., 2022, for an ‘exis-
tentialist’ version; Giddens, 1991, for the ‘practice-based’ option; Archer, 2012, for the 
‘critical realist’ option based on reflexivity and internal conversations). Meanings that 
orient actions, either habitually or reflexively, are strongly valued and move the agent 
both situationally and biographically. Orientation to meaning is intertwined with motiva-
tion and (ethical and normative) aspirations. The anthropological question concerns the 
relation between modes of meaning-orientation and identity-formation (Archer, 2000: 
19–52; 2003: 14; see also Chernilo, 2017: 181–205).
Spawning from the French MAUSS (Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences 
sociales), Vandenberghe (2017, 2018; see also Caillé and Vandenberghe, 2016) has 
advocated for a ‘normative sociology of action that consciously continues the venera-
ble traditions of practical and moral philosophy’. This sociological quarter explicitly 
prioritises the ‘normative’ over the ‘empirical’ (and even the ‘political’). Interestingly, 
their project draws on a theory of agency that centres on non-strategic, non-utilitarian 
modes of action. The question of orientation to strongly valued meanings, goods and 
norms is vital for this project. This theoretical concern ties with Chernilo’s (2017) 
project of better understanding the ‘normative’ by way of the anthropological (and 
agential) traits of human beings (for an account of the ‘normative turn’ in contempo-
rary social theory, see Raza, 2020). The key point of both Chernilo and Vandenberghe 
is that agential properties (habits, reflexivity, self-transcendence, adaptation, intention-
ality, etc.) configure the different modes of orienting towards the world and are the 
source of a normative fundus that is distinctly human, which sociology attempts to 
describe. The normative question is about the distinctive orientation to strongly valued 
meanings displayed in human agency.
My argument is that a supplementary reinterpretation of Weber’s work in the light of 
Charles Taylor’s expressive-hermeneutical theory of agency situates him as an important 
Raza 99
conversational partner for these three projects. Weber declared not only that the central 
problem of sociology is action and that the kernel of action is an orientation towards 
meaning on the part of the actor, but also that meaning-orientation is constitutive of cog-
nition and crucial for identity-formation. My interpretation reveals that, for Weber, 
value-orientation is an anthropological fact determining the normative fundus of action, 
that culture orients action and cognition in different ways, and that identity-formation is 
a process through which agents modulate values.
The relation of the three aforementioned sociological factions to Weber is somewhat 
ambivalent. The American faction finds in Weber an ally for the explanatory purposes of 
a science of action. However, it sets him as the source of ‘representationalist’, ‘intellec-
tualist’ models of action that the turn to habit and practice aims at surpassing on explana-
tory grounds (see Lizardo, 2021; Strand and Lizardo, 2015). Furthermore, Weber’s 
pivotal quote on material and ideal interests has been the subject of many controversies 
and re-appropriations (see Lizardo and Stoltz, 2018; Swidler, 1986). The MAUSS-
inspired faction, represented by Vandenberghe (2017; see also Vandenberghe, 2018: 
78–79), and the critical realist tradition in British sociology (Sayer, 2017), find in Weber’s 
axiological neutrality thesis the source of wrongheaded anormative tendencies.
Moreover, Weber’s alleged value decisionism and representationalism are seen as 
stumbling blocks to construing other modes of action (emotional, traditional or habitual) 
as unfolding in a normative-laden field of practical reason. Chernilo (2014, 2017: 2–7), 
on his part, finds in Löwith’s reading of Weber the inspiration for his normative-oriented 
‘philosophical sociology’. This reading of Weber relativises the more absolutist readings 
of the thesis of axiological neutrality, which have been correctly criticised by S Turner 
(2020: 588–590). Also, it dovetails with Hennis’s (1988: esp. 59) interpretation, endorsed 
as well by Turner (1992: 5–42), according to which Weber’s central concern was to 
straddle – based on an anthropology of cultural beings – a theory of normative life orders 
(i.e. value spheres) and a theory of personality, with the intent of evaluating as much as 
describing social orders.
This paper suspends the debate about axiological neutrality to dig into another aspect 
of Weberian sociology that has been hitherto occluded. Focussing on what Weber can 
teach us about the normative role of the scientific observer of the social world has 
occluded the question of the role of normativity in the life of the participant qua active, 
self-oriented being. Hence, this paper considers what Weber can teach us about the nor-
mative in the social world, and how his theory of action can provide blueprints for a 
contemporary normative theory of agency that takes meaning-orientation qua value-
orientation as the critical aspect of identity-formation and world-engagement, and that 
recognises the different forms of intending meaning in non-reductive terms.
That said, I acknowledge that Weber alone cannot provide a sufficient basis for a 
contemporary normative theory of action. To that end, I propose supplementing and rein-
terpreting his theory of action with the insights of Charles Taylor’s theory of meaning 
and agency. In other words, my paper aims at tailoring Weber’s value and action theories 
to the contemporary scene as described above. The focus on Taylor is not arbitrary. The 
two thinkers share many substantive interests, such as Protestantism, secularism and the 
disenchantment of the modern world, and a general diagnosis of modernity (see 
McKenzie, 2017: 69–103; Reckling, 2001; see also Taylor, 2011: 287–303), as well as an 
100 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
interest in the logic of the social sciences and the normative nature of human agency. 
There are also other implicit resonances, points of tension and dialogue that I aim to 
exploit productively. My aim is twofold: first, to show the importance of re-embedding 
Weber in his cultural, literary and philosophical context to better interpret his theory of 
values and action, cognition and identity-formation; and second, to showcase the pros-
pects of a Taylor-ed Weber for the contemporary sociological debates mentioned above.
The first section examines the concept of ‘stance’ in Weber’s work and argues that it can 
serve to reconnect his theory of action and value with a broader post-Kantian theme. What 
distinguishes the actions and judgements of cultural beings from the responses of other crea-
tures is that we are in some distinctive sense responsible for them. They express some sort of 
commitment of ours, which we can grasp, and to which we recognise some form of authority. 
The correlate of this view is that the human agent does not inhabit a physical space, an ‘envi-
ronment’, but a ‘world’, a space of meanings that cannot be equated to the naturalist space of 
causes, which Weber conceptualises in terms of ‘culture’. Against some of the more subjec-
tivist and mentalistic interpretations, these insights allow me to argue that, for Weber, norms, 
meanings and values operate in a non-naturalist dimension. Consequently, the concept of 
‘stance’ signals that the essence of human action resides in its responsiveness to norms and 
strongly valued meanings, and that there are many modalities of this responsiveness.
The second section presents Taylor’s notion of stance based on his philosophical 
anthropology of linguistic beings and shows the point of contact with Weber’s philo-
sophical anthropology of cultural beings. I argue that Taylor’s idea of strong evaluations 
and articulation supplements Weber’s thinking by offering answers to the question of 
human responsibility outside of decisionism and subjectivism. Taylor specifically 
focuses on responsiveness and articulations rather than decisions as the constitutive fac-
tor of our value commitments and the source of responsibility. I show that his view is 
closer to Weber than we might initially think. Through his notions of articulation and 
expression, Taylor also offers a more complex view of what it means to be responsive to 
and responsible for normative commitments.
The third section analyses what it means ‘to take a stance’, that is, to enter the non-natu-
ralist realm of values and meaning. Writing parallel to Husserl and before any sort of phe-
nomenological, hermeneutical or linguistic turn, it is easy to dismiss Weber’s theory of 
meaning and values as ensnared in representationalism and intellectualism. These views 
reduce beliefs, cognition and meaning-orientation to explicit propositional forms and mental 
representations of the actors imputed by the researcher. I argue that while there is enough 
textual evidence to ground such a reading, which parallels his typology of action, one can also 
find passages suggesting that Weber considers symbols and bodily enactment as crucial ele-
ments that bring the actor to operate in the realm of values and meaning, that lift the human 
agent from its physical environment to the world of ‘culture’. At this juncture, Taylor’s 
expressivist hermeneutics prove crucial to supplement Weber’s theory of meaning in direc-
tions that are non-reductive and fruitful for the contemporary sociological landscape.
The ‘stance’: Weber’s philosophical anthropology of 
cultural beings
Sociological discourse has overlooked Weber’s concept of ‘stance’. The reconstruction 
of his view on action, culture and values has canonised him as the founder of a scientific 
Raza 101
conversation about human action instead of continuing a broader conversation about the 
nature of the human agent.1 Weber employs the notion of ‘stance’ in his treatment of the 
relationship among beliefs, values, meaning, cognition and action in the social world in 
both his methodological texts and more substantive texts on religion. As I will demon-
strate, it is the keystone of his anthropological account of cultural beings. Along with its 
conceptual content, I want to argue that the notion of ‘stance’ is a master image to re-
embed Weber in his cultural and literary context. The notion of ‘stance’ points towards a 
fundamental issue of the German post-Kantian philosophical discourse, namely that 
human beings do not operate in the space of causes, but that of meaning, where funda-
mental human experiences like thought, rationality and identity-formation, alongside 
normative experiences of freedom and responsibility, are constituted.
The standard sociological interpretation of Weber’s account of the relation between 
meaning and action starts from one of the oft-cited passages of his ‘The Social Psychology 
of the World Religions’:
redemption attained a specific significance only where it expressed a systematic and rationalized 
‘image of the world’ and represented a stand [Stellungnahme] in the face of the world. For the 
meaning as well as intended and actual psychological quality of redemption has depended upon 
such a world image and such a stand. Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern 
men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, 
like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of 
interest. (Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 280, my emphasis)
Interpretative disputes focus on the ‘switchmen’ metaphor and hold that culture estab-
lishes the ends of action (cf. Swidler, 1986, 2001: 77–84), as well as on the issue of 
culturally and symbolically constituted interests (cf. Lizardo and Stoltz, 2018). Values 
are thus conceived as quasi-gravitational or symbolic forces that direct cultural beings 
towards some ends. These reinterpretations aim at taking issue with Parsons (1937: 697–
726; 1951: 11–12), for whom values and norms are a set of shared standards of prefer-
ences performing pattern-maintenance and integrative functions. These interpretations 
miss and distort the critical point that emerges when we focus on the notion of 
Stellungnahme, and how it contrasts with the idea of a (rationalised) image of the world. 
In the following page, Weber reiterates the crucial point that behind ‘the many more 
varieties of belief’ ‘always lies a stand [Stellungnahme]’ (Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 281).
The concept of Stellungnahme shows that values and meanings are not projections of 
a subject’s representations. A ‘stance’ can be rationalised in a world image, but even if 
not, it remains operative. Behind a belief, there is a stance. Explicit beliefs are articula-
tions or rationalisations of our stance towards the world. A stance is an acquired sensitiv-
ity that opens us to a meaningful cosmos (cf. Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 281). We are 
responsive to these meanings in a way that differs from how non-cultural beings respond 
to their environments. Values do not provide mere standards for the orientation of action 
in discrete situations, nor are they constitutive of symbolic goods that set in motion the 
dynamic of interests. More importantly, they are constitutive of a non-gravitational bent 
for the whole conduct of life. This orienting character of strongly valued meanings is 
constitutive of thought and cognition, action and practices and selfhood and identity.
Surprisingly, the concept of Stellungnahme has been systematically overlooked. It 
appears not once but three times in the passage that has been so central in interpreting 
102 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
Weber’s thinking on action, value and culture. One reason for this neglect might be that 
it has been unsystematically translated across his texts: ‘stand’, ‘attitude’, ‘position’ or 
simply ‘viewpoint’. For the sake of simplicity, I will employ the notion of ‘stance’. 
Further, this notion allows Weber to intertwine culture with ‘thought’ and ‘cognition’, 
not just with action and ends. He develops this argument about values and cognition in a 
sub-argument of the ‘Objectivity’ essay (Weber, 2012 [1904]: 108–135; see also Weber, 
2012 [1906]: 174), and argues that strongly valued meanings and normatively loaded 
presuppositions guide the perception and cognitive interests of social actors, and these 
often operate as unexamined and perhaps unexaminable presuppositions. In his ‘Roscher 
and Knies’ essay, Weber proffers a definition of value that makes explicit its main 
elements:
we describe something as a ‘value’ precisely if, and only if, it is capable of becoming the 
content of a stand [Stellungnahme] – that is to say: an articulate and conscious positive or 
negative ‘judgement’, something that approaches us ‘demanding validity’, and whose ‘validity’ 
as a ‘value’ ‘for’ us must accordingly be accepted, rejected or, in the most various combinations, 
be subjected to a value judgement ‘by’ us. [. . .] It is the determinacy of the substance [of the 
judgement] which lifts the object of the value judgement out of the sphere of what is merely 
‘felt’. (Weber, 2012 [1903–06]: 79, my underlining)
This passage confirms two crucial elements that contradict most interpretations of Weber’s 
thinking on value. First, values approach us, exist outside us, solicit our responses, and are 
not the product of our choices (decisionism) or our subjective representational projections 
(subjectivism). Second, a value is something we must accept, reject or modulate in judge-
ments, and not just an emotional response (emotivism). Values incline without compelling 
us. At the same time, they configure the content of judgements, the aboutness of our inten-
tional representational acts, and their determinacy (or determinability) in judgements is 
what ‘lifts’ them from what is merely ‘felt’ into the realm of ‘thought’.
That values can be elevated to ‘thought’ does not mean that they need to be, or that 
rational scientific thought will settle questions of value. Value constitutes thought, not 
the other way around. In ‘Science as Vocation’, Weber (2012 [1919]: 352) argues that 
value commitments involve an element of ‘faith’: ‘presuppositions themselves lie beyond 
what is “scientific” [. . .] They do not constitute “knowledge” in the usual sense; they are 
something one “has” [ein Haben]’. In fact, ‘this belief is found in manifold nuances in 
the mind of each individual, partly intellectually well thought, partly vaguely felt, [and] 
partly passively accepted’ (Weber, 2012 [1904]: 130). There is no self-possession or self-
transparency when it comes to value commitments. It is a stance we can modulate with-
out ever fully controlling, orienting us towards what we consider significant for action 
and thought. The idea of something one has that opens us to a world of significance and 
meanings, that calls to be modulated and interpreted but which itself can never be fully 
known, that moves us in one (ethical) direction, has clear resonances with the Goethean 
idea of the daimon (see Wetters, 2014), a reference that Weber himself espouses (and to 
which I will return later in this section).
By foregrounding the concept of stance, it becomes clearer that, for Weber, meanings 
and values are not mentalistic projections. A stance is a posture one has, a sensitivity, 
Raza 103
responsiveness to issues that matter to us. They can remain at the level of tacit under-
standings or reach forms of articulacy. However, this applies to social scientists and 
cultural beings alike, to allegedly neutral observers as much as to active participants. 
Culture, and our relation to values, allows us to focus, gather attention and gain a specific 
mode of awareness, grasp and knowledge of the world (see Weber, 2012 [1904]: 114, 
119).2 Thus:
the transcendental precondition of every cultural science is [. . .] that we are cultural beings, 
endowed with the capacity and the will to adopt a deliberate position with respect to the world 
[zur Welt Stellung zu nehmen], and to bestow meaning upon it. Whatever this meaning may be, 
it will become the basis on which we are, in our life, led to judge certain phenomena of human 
existence in common and to adopt a (positive or negative) position [Stellungnahme] with 
respect to them because we regard them as significant. No matter what this position 
[Stellungnahme] may be, these phenomena possess cultural significance for us, and it is upon 
this significance alone that their scientific interest rests. (Weber, 2012 [1904]: 119]
In the ‘Roscher and Knies’ essay, Weber (2012 [1903–06]: 46–59) discusses the work of 
German Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, from whom he borrows the concept 
of Stellungnahme. Although he criticises Münsterberg, Weber retains the idea of the 
‘subject taking a stance’ [stellungnehmendes Subjekt] to suggest that cultural beings 
move in these sui generis dimensions opened by values, which are irreducible to exter-
nal, material, considerations. In a letter to Friedrich Gottl, Weber (2012 [1906]: 388) 
confides that ‘under all circumstances, “valuation” takes us into another world (that of 
the “subject taking a stand”, as Münsterberg terms it)’, and thus one must ‘not accept that 
“value” stands on the same level as “interest” or “importance’’’.
This last sentence contradicts readings of Weber that take values to be gravitational 
forces that symbolically constitute interests, ends or goods, the action-dynamic and 
motivational aspects of which could be studied in terms of strategies and economies, 
of wants and needs (cf. Weber, 2012 [1908]: 242–251; 2012 [1904]: 124). The concept 
of stance is key to understanding that orientation to strongly valued meanings does not 
move us in materialistic or physical terms. ‘Rationality, in the sense of logical or tele-
ological “consistency” [of means and ends]’ – Weber (1946 [1915]: 324; see also 323–
362) argues – entails ‘the “power” or command [Gewalt]’ that an ‘intellectual-theoretical 
or practical-ethical attitude [Stellungnahme]’ has over cultural agents, ‘however lim-
ited and unstable this power is and always has been in the face of other forces of his-
torical life’.
Orientation to strongly valued meanings, even rational orientation towards them, 
which can be construed in terms of means and ends, is not a gravitational force pulling 
and pushing agents in some direction but involves consenting to authority. Hence, it 
makes the agent distinctively responsible for it. It is a normative directionality rather 
than a causal directionality. Even in the face of the most pressing or immediate interests 
or needs, the cultural being takes a stance, commits herself to specific values that she 
recognises as qualitatively higher. This means inhabiting ‘another world’, where inter-
ests or needs are lifted to an irreducible dimension of actions and judgements that are 
strategically efficient only after being normatively valid (cf. Weber, 1978: 1402).3
104 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
A stance is not only constitutive of action and thought, but also of identity. The 
uniquely human self-relation is at stake in this non-naturalist realm. Developing a self-
relation implies a stable inner relationship with values and their translation in a conduct 
of life, in practices that are at once expressive of values and ourselves. Our actions and 
judgements are the result of commitments that (1) are expressive of who we are, (2) to 
which we recognise some form of authority and (3) that we experience as free the more 
conscious we are of our assent to them. In Weber’s (2012 [1903–06]: 85; see also Weber, 
2012 [1904]: 103; 2012 [1917]: 307, 315) words:
The more ‘freely’ [. . .] the person ‘acts’ – that is to say: the less the action has the character of 
a ‘natural occurrence’, the greater the effect will be [. . .] of a concept of ‘personality’ whose 
‘essence’ is to be found in a constant inner relationship to certain ultimate ‘values’ and 
‘meanings’ of life – ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ that in the actions of the ‘personality’ are translated 
into goals, and are thereby converted into teleological-rational action.
Weber speaks rhetorically about this relation between values and identity-formation. As 
is known, his preferred imagery is, on the one hand, that of an agent who chooses her 
values, who decides to devote her soul to one set of values. On the other hand, he uses 
the imagery of a battle of gods demanding obedience, of daimons holding the threads of 
her life, guiding her through value realms they have opened her to. I would like to briefly 
comment on this ambivalent rhetoric. If the interpreter takes the first imagery, she casts 
Weber into the Nietzschean shadows of value subjectivism, emotivism and decisionism. 
According to this interpretation, values are projections created by human decisions that 
fail to meet any rational standard (see MacIntyre, 1981: 26–27, 109–120). This interpre-
tation is at the basis of Strauss’ (1974: 35–80) critique, according to which Weber’s 
thinking paradoxically presupposes at the same time the rationality of knowledge and the 
irrationality of values. In the light of this dominant and widespread interpretation, it is 
easy to dismiss Weber as a contributor for a normative theory of agency. According to 
this view, Weber’s ‘well known pathetic statements’ connect his ‘heroic, manly and 
lonely stand on values to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and his flippant appeal to the 
Overman in Zarathustra’. This renders any appeal to ‘practical reason, moral justifica-
tion and normative foundation [. . .] suspicious’ and ends up in the ‘expulsion of values 
from reason’ (Vandenberghe, 2017: 418–419).
While I acknowledge the textual and contextual evidence, I want to propose a more 
productive interpretation to reclaim Weber for a normative theory of agency. It consists 
of taking the first imagery as purely rhetorical. I counterintuitively want to claim that 
these Nietzschean aphorisms serve Weber to underscore a Kantian idea. Cultural, as 
opposed to natural, beings are in a distinctive sense responsible for their judgements, 
identity and actions. Culture does not operate like gravity directing actors blindly to 
some range of meanings, but actors have the responsibility to grasp that to which they are 
responsive. Granting the notion of responsibility a central role in Weberian thought on 
value, action and identity-formation can help us make sense of other parts of his work 
that remain unintelligible within the Nietzschean interpretation.
First, it allows for an understanding of the sources of Weber’s methodological writings 
on the possibility of causal accounts of human action, which, as Stephen Turner (2020: 
Raza 105
584–589; see also Turner and Factor, 1981) points out, build upon Von Kries’s jurispru-
dential models centred on responsibility rather than guilt to develop the notions of causal-
ity adequate to meaning and ‘objective possibility’. His concept of unintended 
consequences of action must be understood in this context and not as the key to invoking 
an ‘economy’ with emergent or aggregate effects of mutually referred actions. Second, the 
emphasis on responsibility allows us to bridge Weber’s thinking on values, cognition, 
action and identity-formation, with his remarks on political personality at the end of 
‘Politics as Vocation’, which are rarely taken to have sociological significance (for a bril-
liant exception which has influenced my own reading, see Turner, 1992: 105–121). 
Modernity, for Weber, is characterised by a mosaic of irreconcilable normative fields of 
action, and having an identity via a ‘constant inner relationship’ to values and meanings 
that are translated into a mode of conducting life. The freer the agent, the more this rela-
tion is rationally articulated. However, Weber wants to recognise the conflict of values, 
the tragical aspects of value-orientation, and the dangers of totalising normative stances. 
For these reasons, the conditions of value-orientation in a modern society demand pas-
sion, responsibility and a sense of proportion. As Charles Turner (1992: 116–119) points 
out, what underlies this threefold characteristic is the idea that the human agent cultivates 
not only the capacity to listen and attend to the demands of the day, but also that of dis-
tancing herself from her beliefs, from her daimon. A rational inner relation to values 
demands at once to be possessed by one’s daimon and to maintain some degree of self-
possession. Such is the challenge of cultural beings in modernity. Her integrity as an agent 
lies in the fragile balance between taking her (finite) perspective and normative commit-
ments to be the centre of her world and in the ability to decentre herself, to be open to the 
world, to take the normative perspective of others upon herself and the world, etc.
Furthermore, Weber perceives the most dangerous totalising tendency in the Appeal 
to Reason, and here he departs from, or rather radicalises, Kant. Central to Kant’s view 
was the notion that we can ground our normative allegiances and commitments on reason 
alone, that agents do not need anything non-human to truly open themselves to norma-
tive realms. Weber’s rejection of this crucial idea emerges if we focus on the second set 
of imagery. In the last instance, our normative commitments are predicated on gods (in 
secular and immanent, and sacred and transcendent forms), opening us to their normative 
realms, guiding us in our practical reasoning. Here we no longer have the image of a 
lonely, isolated subject opening worlds of value on her decisions alone, a world in prin-
ciple transparent to herself, but rather one of an actor able to listen to a call (Beruf) and 
attend the normative demands of a realm of action.
The reference to the ‘daimon’ clarifies this point (Weber, 2012 [1919]: 353; 2012 
[1917]: 306). One does not ‘choose’ a daimon. Instead, one finds it; one is called upon to 
the demands of the day by it. As González García (1995) brilliantly observes, the refer-
ence to this Goethean notion entails that the agent is possessed somehow by normative 
commitments that are expressive of herself. Yet, she is somehow aware of and responsi-
ble for letting herself be possessed. The reference to daimons implies that there are cru-
cial elements of our normative commitments that the lumen naturale cannot reveal and 
that revealed meanings do not appear in complete clarity. The opacity of meanings is the 
source of unintended consequences of action, of the tragic features of culture, since 
agents cannot, even at their most rational levels, eliminate the many-forged directions 
106 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
our action might take us.4 Instrumental, strategic orientation might minimise unexcepted 
outcomes or organise means in more efficient ways, but can never eliminate the whole 
gamut of uncertainties, tragedies, and unintended directions or consequences of action. 
At this point, the sense of proportion, matter-of-factness and responsibility play a signifi-
cant role. This idea suggests that each responsible actor needs to modulate, translate, or 
articulate the call of the daimon that holds the fibres of her life. The human agent must 
make sense practically and theoretically of the demonic revelations.
An uncharitable reading would suggest that, for Weber, ‘the battle of Gods cannot be 
moderated by Man’ (Vandenberghe, 2017: 419). However, this displaces any notion of 
responsibility, which is central to Weber’s thought. In his ‘Roscher and Knies’ essay, 
Weber (2012 [1903–06]: 85) further dispels any form of emotivism or irrationalism with 
Romantic roots. Conceiving identity-formation as a matter of conducting life by one’s 
‘own “deliberations”’ and less as a ‘natural occurrence’ driven by ‘“external” concerns 
or irresistible “affects”’ implies
a fading away of the romantic naturalistic version of the idea of ‘personality’, which seeks the 
real inner sanctum of the personal in the opposite direction: in the vague, indistinct, vegetative 
‘underground’ of personal life, that is to say: in an ‘irrationality’ based on a tangled infinity of 
psychophysical conditions for the development of temperaments and moods – an ‘irrationality’ 
that the ‘person’ in actual fact completely shares with the animal.
At the core of our value commitments are not immediate desires or brute emotional reac-
tions, but rather mediations that are within our ken. We do not inhabit the space of mean-
ings like ‘animals’, but as cultural beings. This space does not resemble a physical 
environment where we succumb to causes, sensations and the chasing of experiences 
[Erlebnis] (cf. Weber, 2012 [1919]: 340), but a non-naturalist world of meanings where 
our orientation is co-constituted by our more absorbed and also more detached engage-
ments in the demands of the day.
Yet, the question remains: What are we to make of Weber’s claim of the irrationality of 
values, an irrationality that the ‘person’ does not share with the ‘animal’? One cannot 
appeal to Reason alone for grounding value commitments, let alone to a form of Reason 
that grounds everything on Knowledge of Reality. Weber’s invocation of the ‘irrationality’ 
of values must be seen more as an ‘anti-foundationalist’ argument than the ‘expulsion of 
values from reason’. Let me quote at length a vital passage of the ‘Objectivity’ essay:
the innermost elements of our ‘personality’ – the highest and most fundamental value 
judgements that determine our action[s] and endow our life with meaning and significance – 
are experienced by us as something ‘objectively’ valuable: we can only espouse them if we 
regard them as valid, as stemming from the highest values that guide our life, and if they are 
further developed in the struggle against the difficulties of daily life [. . .] Nevertheless: to 
judge the validity of such values is a matter of belief, possibly also a task for speculative 
observations and interpretations of the meaning of life and of the world, but certainly not the 
object of the [. . .] science of empirical experience. (Weber, 2012 [1904]: 103)
Weber does not reject reason tout court. He rejects the idea that value controversies can 
be ultimately resolved in (Empirical and Instrumental) Reason, that Reason alone can 
Raza 107
open and mediate the normative realms in which the human operates. His worries are the 
delegation of responsibility and the possible normative totalisation that emerges from the 
appeal to empirical reality as the ultimate grounds for our value commitments. At the 
same time, he argues that we can’t derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ and that nonetheless we expe-
rience values as something ‘objectively’ valid. Weber is hence also reluctant to claim that 
values are confined to the ‘underground’ faculties of human life, to our emotional life 
and faith alone, to the lower faculties over which agents have no ‘deliberative’ hold. 
Rather, value commitments are ‘a matter of belief’ and ‘possibly also a task for specula-
tive observations and interpretations of the meaning of life and of the world’.
I take Weber to be pointing to a non-reductive, anti-foundationalist view of practical 
reason, which encompasses the non-closure of meaning and values, and the tragic aspects 
of culture. This is the source of ‘irrationality’. For it does not attempt to obtain presup-
positionless or empirical certainty and accepts the need for further and novel articula-
tions of normative meanings in the light of contingent historical development (see Weber, 
2012 [1904]: 121, 137–138). ‘Man’ has a role in moderating ‘the battle of Gods’; he has 
responsibility in how value domains are opened and how he moves within these domains, 
but this role and responsibility cannot be reduced to the faculty of Reason. Turner (2020: 
287–288) has recently advanced a similar anti-foundationalist reading of Weber, accord-
ing to which our value articulations are ultimately ‘ungroundable’. This groundlessness 
does not entail that ‘reasoning about values and clarifying both them and the conse-
quences of pursuing them was impossible’. Sometimes, such a clarification process can 
find ‘middle courses’ or a temporary consistency between value commitments. So con-
strued, Weber’s thinking of values is no longer trapped in the contradiction between a 
subjectivist account of value realms regarding the relationship between identity forma-
tion, action and value, and a non-subjectivist account of the relation between value 
judgements and cognition.5
The ‘expressive’ stance: Taylor’s philosophical 
anthropology of linguistic beings and its supplements to 
Weber’s ‘stance’
Many familiar with Charles Taylor might have noticed that I started Taylor-ing Weber 
silently from within his writings. I have tried to find traces that point to a supplementary 
reinterpretation through Taylor’s expressivist-hermeneutical theory of human agency. I 
have claimed that the concept of stance constitutes the critical node through which we 
can interpret Weber’s thinking on values. In this reading, the Weberian value realms are 
not underpinned by mentalism, representationalism, subjectivism or decisionism. Behind 
a rationalised image of the world and any form of explicit belief always lies a ‘stance’, 
that is responsiveness to a certain range of normative questions. Once we dispel emotiv-
ism and the other -isms typically attributed to Weber, we end up with the question of how 
to attribute responsibility for something that depends more on agents being receptive to 
norms than creators of value commitments entirely of their own (rational) making.
The notion of ‘stance’ unveils a pressing concern that Weber shared with many embed-
ded in German thought’s long cultural and scientific conversation. From philosophical 
108 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
anthropology to Neo-Kantianism, (post-)Heideggerianism, and beyond, this conversation 
takes with utmost seriousness the idea that human agents inhabit not only a physical envi-
ronment of causes but a normative world of meaning.6 This world cannot be a subjectivist 
projection, nor can it be construed in naturalist terms. In this world, our humanity is at 
stake: thought, action and identity are therein constituted. The way we move around this 
world exhibits aspects irreducible to naturalistic accounts: expression, recognition, moral-
ity, symbolism, language, consent, responsibility, freedom. Meaning orients us not as 
‘objects among objects’ through quasi-gravitational forces and dynamics. Part and parcel 
of this theme is the extent to which human agents need the world to be opened (or dis-
closed) to them and the extent to which they can produce openings in it: the extent to 
which to belong to this world we must be receptive to it and the extent to which we can 
shape it in the light of our expressions.7
My account of Weberian thought centred on the notion of ‘stance’ aims at foreground-
ing his engagement with this larger conversation but also acknowledges that he never 
provided a conceptually developed position. I propose to reinterpret his account with 
insights drawn from Taylor’s expressive-hermeneutical theory of human agency. 
Choosing Taylor for this supplementary reinterpretation is not arbitrary. He has delved 
into the German tradition as an outsider and elaborated a refined view that balances the 
focus on both expressive and receptive aspects of human agency, which I take to be 
encapsulated in his notions of strong evaluation, self-interpretation and articulation. For 
Taylor, it is language that makes us both responsive to issues of intrinsic rightness and 
capable of expressive activities. Weber’s ambivalent reference both to the need of gods 
and daimons, and to human responsibility, seems to put his solution somehow in the mid-
dle, in a view on agency that balances receptivity and expression.
Towards the end of The Language Animal, Taylor (2016: 335–339) turns to the 
anthropological consequences of his investigations into language.8 He employs the term 
‘flexibility’ to characterise the beings that deal linguistically with the world. This flexi-
bility allows for some sort of distance that is constitutive of questions of worth. In gain-
ing flexibility, human agents become responsive, in another dimension, to goods and 
questions of strong value. This normative dimension in which things gain meaning is 
constitutive of ends and purposes that display ‘intrinsic rightness’ (Taylor, 2016: 3–4, 
25–28; see also Taylor, 1995: 84). In his words,
new meanings arise in the new space of questions which language opens. Human ecological 
action has to deal with a whole range of new questions, on top of those we share with other 
animals. The step to language involves far more than providing effective means to the perennial 
ends of survival, prosperity, effective combination, avoidance of mutual destruction. But these 
new ends and new meanings are hard to grasp in the no-non-sense terminology of instrumental 
efficacy [. . .]. They seem strange and mysterious, hard to get a handle on, and threaten to 
involve us in moral and aesthetic issues. (Taylor, 2016: 117)
For Taylor, since the human agent inhabits the world linguistically, she is responsive on 
a new axis to normative questions, distinguishing her actions and judgements from those 
of other non-linguistic creatures. Language is the source of a ‘sensitivity’ to issues of 
strong value (Taylor, 2016: 7). Taylor refers to Plessner’s concept of ‘eccentric position-
ality’ to formulate these insights:
Raza 109
The mode common to all animals, and to humans a good deal of the time, is that in which the 
agent is the centre of its environment, and things show up in their meaning or relevance to the 
action which the situation calls for. But in addition to this stance, humans are also capable of an 
‘eccentric’ one; they are capable [of] making this ordinary stance the object of a more reflexive 
one, to see it from outside, from another point of view, or in the eyes of another. This is what 
Plessner calls our ‘eccentric positionality’, something only humans share. (Taylor, 2016: 
341–342)
In a symposium on his book, Taylor (2017: 732) argues that to understand our different 
ways of entering the space of meaning, ‘we need a concept of stance, a way of “inhabit-
ing” expressively the physical world’. Expression is the crucial anthropological feature 
that makes us sensitive to strong rightness and allows us to distance ourselves from the 
world. Taylor’s expressivist notion of stance offers us supplementary elements to 
Weber’s. It encapsulates conceptually the possibility of being both absorbed in our world 
of strong values and the possibility of taking distance from it. In his theory of human 
agency, this sensitivity to issues of intrinsic rightness is conceived in terms of ‘strong 
evaluations’.9
In his Hegel, Taylor (1975: 564) anticipates the contours of the concept of strong 
evaluations. He argues that any concept of human agency that takes the possibility of 
human freedom into account must include
the notion of a bent in our situation which we can either endorse or reject, reinterpret or distort. 
This not only must be distinguished from what we ordinarily call desire. But it is hard to see 
how a bent of this kind could be accounted for in mechanistic terms, not to speak of its relation 
to our desires.
The anthropological feature of meaning-orientation makes human beings distinc-
tively responsible for their actions and judgements and opens them up to the possibil-
ity of freedom. For Taylor, our ‘strong evaluations’ not only orient our actions but 
also define our identity.10 Finding orientation in the moral space is to answer the 
question of who we are (see Taylor, 1989: 25–49). Responsibility, identity, freedom 
and action are the human experiences that the concept of strong evaluation is set to 
grasp. Taylor (1985a) opens ‘What is Human Agency?’ with the question of the dis-
tinctive type of responsibility we can attribute to human agents; and ends in a similar 
position to the one I attributed to Weber: it is our value commitments, expressed in 
judgements and existential modulations that make us responsible. Writing after phe-
nomenology, Taylor has conceptually clarified something that Weber could only inti-
mate through images. Many of our evaluations are not even formulated as beliefs. 
They show up in the way we do things and carry on with the demands of the day. 
These provide a precondition for acting and thinking. We feel, think and act in this 
context of significance that was not of our choosing. And yet, we somehow are dis-
tinctively responsible for our moves in the context, albeit not entirely (cf. Taylor, 
2007: 387). I will restrict myself to three observations on Taylor’s key concept to 
supplement Weber’s theory of action.
First, strong evaluations necessarily refer to a non-subjectivist dimension insofar as 
distinctions of worth that orient us ‘are not rendered valid by our desires, inclinations, or 
110 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be 
judged’ (Taylor, 1989: 4). But then the question emerges as to what responsibility can be 
attributed to a human agent who finds herself moved by standards that are not of her own 
(rational) making. More importantly, some of these standards might not even find intel-
lectual formulation or foundations. They might remain as something one simply has. We 
are first and foremost moved and the recipients of moral claims demanding validity, but 
they do not compel us to accept them. Instead, we reply to them expressively through 
‘articulations’ that attempt to get the moral claims right.
In this sense, Taylor provides a philosophically sound solution to the question of 
responsibility outside any vocabulary of ‘radical choice’ or moral subjectivism. Taylor 
(1985a: 28–30) argues that values are not the product of subjective projections. At this 
juncture, Taylor takes issue with understanding our responsibility in terms of Sartrean 
choices, something some interpreters might be keen to project into Weber. But I have 
argued that Weber employs this choice imagery rhetorically to emphasise the agent’s 
responsibility, without any intent to decisionism. In this sense, Taylor’s criticism serves 
more as a supplement to than a displacement of Weber’s theory of values.
Taylor argues that the vocabulary of choice ultimately contradicts the idea of human 
agents as oriented by strongly valued meanings: ‘a radical choice between strong evalu-
ations is quite conceivable, but not a radical choice of such evaluations’ (Taylor, 1985a: 
29). Alternatively, in Weberian terms: a choice between daimons is quite conceivable, 
but not a choice of such daimons. Daimons are discovered rather than made out of whole 
cloth. Before choosing between values, the actor must be sensitive to their different 
validity claims. We are responsible for endorsing a value, and we do so expressively.
We experience normative bents in terms of claims laid upon us, in terms of calls and 
solicitations, and not forces pulling and pushing us around. Weber often employs the 
language of obedience to emphasise that we endorse specific normative commitments, 
but this obscures the fact that the endorsement or assent to one value commitment con-
sists in both existential modulations and judgements. In endorsing a value, we modulate 
a conduct of life [Lebensführung] (to use one of Weber’s terms); we do not just passively 
surrender to them. Taylor’s preferred term for these value modulations and judgements 
is ‘articulation’. Articulations are expressive interpretations that partly shape our moral 
orientation and understanding. Through articulations, we gain some clarity as to the nor-
mative claims orienting us. We are responsible for our articulations (see Taylor, 1985a: 
35–42). Agents are responsible not only for their expressive interpretations of the world, 
but also for their (in)capacity to maintain openness to different experiences and norma-
tive claims, and to take a distance from their self-descriptions, for having, in Weberian 
terms, distance, a sense of proportion and matter-of-factness. This capacity to maintain 
or regain openness is rooted in the anthropological feature of strong evaluations, in our 
being able to attend to the world in terms we are solicited to, to have a sense of wonder, 
awe and humility towards the world (cf. Taylor, 2011: 297–298). We can take (and not 
only accept) a ‘stance’ upon the world through articulations. We expressively take a 
stance upon the world. This is Taylor’s non-trivial supplementation to the Weberian con-
cept of stance.
Second, like Weber, Taylor has been criticised for allegedly overintellectualising the 
human agent. For critics, orientation to strongly valued meaning seems to imply that the 
Raza 111
agent is constantly involved in active evaluation.11 According to them, focussing on this 
dimension displaces dispositions, emotions, or habits, favouring more ‘reflective’ and 
detached features of human agency. Their argument implies that once we focus on these 
other ‘underground’ levels, orientation towards strongly valued meanings is no longer 
the essential feature of human agency. However, these criticisms have completely mis-
taken Taylor’s point. He does not argue that agents can orient their actions normatively 
because they are capable of reflective distance. Rather the opposite: ‘strong evaluation is 
a condition of articulacy [. . .] to be a strong evaluator is thus to be capable of a reflection 
which is more articulate. But it is also in an important sense deeper’ and ‘without it an 
agent would lack a kind of depth we consider essential to humanity, without which we 
should find communication impossible’ (Taylor, 1985a: 24–25, 28). Because we are 
moved by something that is not a physical force, and we have a sense of what this move-
ment is about, we strive to express it and put it into words or symbols.
In my understanding, the concept of strong evaluation serves to underscore the fact 
that a central feature of any aspect of human agency is its sensitivity to external norma-
tive claims, its openness to being affected by the world, rather than its free-floating, 
detached nature (cf. Taylor, 1989, 2; see also Smith, 2001). In simple terms, it under-
scores that human agency is more world-oriented than self-possessed. A sensitivity to 
dimensions of irreducible rightness is constitutive of it. Strong evaluations point to the 
fact that, whether conscious or not, explicit or not, articulate or not, a sense that some 
desires, motivations and modes of life are qualitatively higher than others is central to 
every aspect of human agency.12
An implicit assumption lies behind this family of challenges and misunderstandings 
that associate strong evaluation with ‘reflexivity’. According to it, the lower-end ele-
ments of agency (habits, dispositions, emotions, etc.) cannot display any sort of norma-
tive orientation of which the agent has some sort of grasp. They allegedly function 
according to another set of considerations found in the ‘objective dynamics’ of the situ-
ation or field. Habits or emotions orient us in ways that are more primordial, mechanis-
tic, or perhaps even unrelated to values and more to interests. They put us not in the 
non-naturalist realm of human meanings, but somewhere else. The lower-end dimen-
sions supposedly situate the agent in a complex and dynamic space of causes, by positing 
the body as a (dynamic) object among objects that can be explained naturalistically in a 
field over which agents have no control. There is a distinctive directedness orienting 
human agency in this version, but it operates in the register of forces and tensions rather 
than of interpretations and norms we modulate through our existence. They cannot be 
rejected, accepted or distorted by an agent’s understanding of them. The orienting bent 
in this sense is derivatively normative and primarily functional as a dynamic tendency of 
the system of which actions are contingent events. We are entering the Bourdieusian ter-
ritory that cognitivist cultural sociologists are now reclaiming in the American scene 
(Lizardo, 2004, 2007, 2021; see also Lizardo et al., 2020; Strand and Lizardo, 2015).
For Taylor, the turn to habit and practices does not entail the naturalisation of the direct-
edness of human agency. In ‘To Follow a Rule’, Taylor (1995) argues explicitly against the 
representational, intellectualist view of rule-sensitive behaviour. However, he does not want 
to jump to the conclusion that practices are oriented anormatively and blindly. For Taylor, 
the body is not merely ‘the executant of the goals we frame, nor just the locus of causal 
112 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
factors’. On the contrary, it ‘can encode components of our understanding of self and world’ 
and display ‘patterns of appropriate action, which conform to a sense of what is fitting and 
right’; and thus ‘actions are responsive throughout to this sense of rightness, but the “norms” 
may be quite unformulated, or only in fragmentary fashion’ (Taylor, 1995: 170–171). Taylor 
convincingly argues that the retrieval of the body, and habits, in a theory of human agency 
need not amount to its denormativisation. The same is true for emotions (see Taylor, 1985a: 
45–76). Emotions are affective modes of awareness of the strongly valued meanings that 
orient us in the space of meanings. They contain an understanding, however inchoate or 
partial, of self and world, that we are called to further articulate, and this is what makes us 
self-interpreting animals (see Taylor, 1985: 65).
All aspects of human agency open us to a world of meaning that demands further 
interpretation that is carried out through different expressive activities. Embodied prac-
tices, habits and emotions project (in Heidegger’s technical sense) the agent to a world 
of meaning and significance. Because strongly valued meanings are not the result of 
subjective projections, they never appear in total clarity to the agent. This is where emo-
tivism and decisionism finally succumb. If the values that orient our action were the 
product of our conscious choices, they would appear to the agent transparently so that 
she can act in a mode of complete self-possession and self-consciousness. Were they 
irrational projections of our emotional responses, there would be no space for us to make 
sense of them, no possibility of getting them right.
Taylor’s point is subtle yet powerful and can help us to retrieve a crucial aspect of 
Weber’s theory of action. As Turner (1981, 2019) has argued, it is possible to find a 
‘sociology of fate’ embedded in Weber’s theory of action. By this he means that Weber 
posits the principle that agents are not fully aware of the consequences, entailments or 
the meanings orienting their actions. Turner argues that this principle must be studied in 
the light of an economic theory of action in which instrumental orientation is incapable 
of reducing ‘uncertainty’ and ‘risk’, and that a fully fleshed out Weberian theory of 
action must extend this principle somehow to habituation (but – it must be added – also 
to other modes of meaningfully oriented action). However, it is difficult to see how an 
‘economic’ sociology of fate can incorporate emotions and habits in a coherent way. An 
expressivist-hermeneutical sociology of fate provides a better solution. The fateful 
aspect of any action, that is, its unintended consequences, is rooted in an ineliminable 
opacity of the meanings orienting action. Meanings can be emotionally, habitually, 
symbolically or rationally intended, and nonetheless have an excess of meaning that 
gives rise to novel interpretations, articulations or re-expressions. We never fully know 
where our daimon leads us, but we are in the constant process of making sense of the 
path, its traces and its multi-sided tracks. Because our emotions or embodied practices 
open us to a world of meanings with normative purchase, the space of meanings never 
appears transparently to us. Instead, we have a sense of what is important for us, of the 
goods and values orienting our bearings in the world. Moreover, because this sense is 
always partial, and inchoate, poorly formulated, or confused, we are invited to re-
express it, figure it out through symbols, modulate it differently in our conduct of life, 
or reformulate it conceptually.
Re-expression entails opening our world differently. These re-expressive articulations 
are non-trivial. This kind of formulation ‘does not leave its object unchanged’. For, ‘to 
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give a certain articulation is to shape our sense of what we desire or what we hold impor-
tant in a certain way’, so that ‘in the fact of shaping, it makes it accessible and/or inac-
cessible in new ways’ (Taylor, 1985a: 36, 38). Through various expressive capacities, 
human agents can spin, modify, reinforce, misdirect, or give a different thrust to the 
normative bent orienting their actions. This is the crucial theoretical insight of Taylor’s 
concept of strong evaluation as a central feature of human agency: its responsiveness and 
sensitivity to something external that nonetheless is not ‘intransitive’. By intransitive 
(for lack of a better word), I mean that the orienting power of this ‘bent’ is not immune, 
as gravity is, to how agents interpret or re-express it.
Emotions, rituals, embodied practices, explicit beliefs constitute the different medi-
ums in which culture comes to expression. In each of them, the agent gains awareness of, 
and sensitivity to, the meanings orienting her actions and life. In gaining a symbolic, 
embodied or conceptual sense of them, agents are invited to further articulate them: to 
existentially modulate explicit beliefs in their practices, to reformulate conceptually 
what they understand bodily or symbolically, or to figure out symbolically what is mov-
ing them bodily. This is the second supplementation, to which I will return, that Taylor’s 
expressive-hermeneutical view provides to Weber’s thinking. We find orientation to 
meaning in different mediums that correspond roughly with different types of action and 
different modes of awareness (or modes of intentionality, to use a more technical term). 
For now, Taylor, writing after the phenomenological and hermeneutical movement, can 
provide an account of agency where normative orientation goes all the way down and is 
the fundamental anthropological feature that enables more distant, reflective or symbolic 
ways of cognition of meanings.
This leads me to the third contribution of this supplementary reading. I argued that 
Weber did not aim at the expulsion of values from the realm of reason. Weber aimed to 
deny that Reason oriented to empirical knowledge of Reality can settle value conflicts; 
that the validity of value judgements is intrinsically different from the validity of scien-
tific judgements. But Weber struggled to formulate what is really at stake in taking a 
stance, in making a value judgement. It is a matter of belief and something (perhaps a 
daimon) one has more un-self-reflectively. He also claims that it can perhaps involve 
speculative observations and interpretations of the meanings of world and self. Taylor’s 
notion of strong evaluations, from which articulations and self-interpretations emerge, 
provides an answer that fits with Weber’s anti-foundationalist statements. For Taylor, 
‘reason in this domain [of human meanings] must take a largely hermeneutical turn; and 
this brings with it a certain endlessness, a resistance to completion, the impossibility of 
resting in some supposedly “final” and unimprovable conclusion’ (Taylor, 2016: 338).
Much of Taylor’s (2016: 177–265) The Language Animal is devoted to showing how 
this hermeneutical reason operates through bodily enactments, symbolic figurations, and 
conceptual descriptions of different ranges of meanings. He claims that this type of rea-
son cannot appeal to ultimate grounds for its validity, and that there is always some opac-
ity and excess of meaning that can give rise to further enactments, symbolisation or 
descriptive accounts of the meanings we live by.13 Taylor certainly holds a less tragic 
view of culture and values than Weber expresses in his most tragic statements, yet they 
are not incompatible. Sometimes Weber exaggerates that there is no space for relativisa-
tion or compromise, but rather a sort of death struggle between values.14 I take these to 
114 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
be rhetorical elements as they appear primarily in the 1917 paper where he is concerned 
with the danger of ‘single-purpose’ organisations and totalising normative stances and 
urges his contemporaries to not fall into them (see Weber, 2012 [1917]: 314–320, 333–
334). In his earlier methodological writings, it is possible to distill yet another view that 
is perhaps less tragic. It still acknowledges the inevitability of value conflict. However, 
it affirms that concrete value relations and historical boundaries amongst normative 
domains are fluid and contingent, assuming new colourings and forms, and that conflict 
is everchanging in the light of historical experience (see Weber, 2012 [1904]: 121, 137–
138). Taylor (1989: 89) is also wary of ‘single-term’ moralities that unify the moral 
domain around a ‘basic reason’ and occlude value conflicts, but he argues that our articu-
lations can give a partial, contingent, local solution to some value conflicts.15 Our exis-
tential modulations, symbolic figurations or conceptual reformulations can open us to a 
mode of life in which some of these demands could be contingently reconciled. This does 
not preclude further and novel value conflicts, or the possibility of the return of a previ-
ous conflict that our articulations had managed to resolve but in a way that is no longer 
valid. Part of our nature as expressive beings is to open ourselves to new normative ways 
of exploring the world and seeing things differently. This presupposes both value conflict 
and the possibility of partial compromises or relativisations.
The mode of reasoning about human values is expressive and hermeneutical and can 
never find an ultimate ground, be it in Reality or Reason. Our articulations of human 
meaning, our value judgements, follow an expressive-constitutive ‘semantic logic’, as 
opposed to the ‘descriptive semantic logic’ of independent domains of objects (for a 
fuller account of these two ‘logics’, see Taylor, 2016: 187–260). Hence, the conditions of 
validity and verification are indeed different. The former involves speculative observa-
tion, enactment, symbolisation and conceptual reformulation that
strive to be faithful to something. But what they strive to be faithful to is not an independent 
object with a fixed degree and manner of evidence, but rather a largely inarticulate sense of 
what is of decisive importance. An articulation of this ‘object’ tends to make it something 
different from what it was before. And by the same token a new articulation does not leave its 
‘object’ evident or obscure to us in the same manner or degree as before (Taylor, 1985a: 38).
The concept of ‘expressive stance’ encapsulates the twofold features of articulation and 
strong evaluation: human agents are oriented to issues of strongly valued meanings with 
which they can take issue. Taking issue with it does not entail rejecting or strategising, 
but rather involves a range of moral, cultural and linguistic capacities ranging from criti-
cism to justification. Interestingly, both Weber’s idea of an ‘inner stable relationship to 
value’ and Taylor’s idea of articulate strong evaluation means that we can only cast our 
actions or plans in the language of ‘choice’, ‘means’, or ‘ends’, only after a more expres-
sive relation to values is achieved.16 Prior to any strategy of action, there must be a rec-
ognition and modulation of the range of goods that motivate and constitute one’s action, 
life-project and identity. Identity-formation and biographical disruptions relate to these 
crucial articulations of what matters to us.17
The lessons of the supplementary reading are the following. We are responsible for 
our articulations of the meanings that call upon us. We expressively take a stance. A 
Raza 115
stance can find expression in embodied practices, habits, emotions and beliefs that we 
are invited to re-express. This act of re-expression aims at getting our normative calls 
right, but the conditions of validity are different from those of describing an independent 
object, for the act of re-expression involves enactments, interpretations, speculative 
observations and symbolisation. Our reasoning in the domain of meanings is thus herme-
neutical and anti-foundationalist.
To expressively take a stance: Meaning and its forms
In this section, I want to address the question of what it means to take a stance, once we 
supplement Weber’s account of meaning through Taylor’s notion of expression. This 
refers to the different mediums in which culture finds expression: the modes in which 
strongly valued meanings orient action and constitute modes of cognition. However, 
Weber’s theory of meaning is somewhat outdated and needs to be supplemented, given 
that he was writing before the peak of the phenomenological movement and its herme-
neutical ramifications. This does not entail that Weber was unaware of expressivist 
themes that go back to Herder, Schlegel, Humboldt, Hamman, Schleiermacher and 
Hegel, such as the debates around the (un)translatability of the poem and the symbol, the 
(ir)reducibility of non-linguistic (e.g. pictorial art, symbols, gestures, etc.) to linguistic 
expressions, and how language (or culture) bounds and constitutes thought (see Forster, 
2010, 2011). Therefore, it is legitimate to ask what Weber’s implicit position regarding 
these topics is. I want to argue that Weber holds at most an unrefined and narrow expres-
sivism, which suffers compared to Taylor’s broad expressivism that includes, in a non-
reductive manner, the whole range of symbolic forms.
How do agents inhabit the space of meanings? What makes our movements in this 
space operate on the plane of values? The first obstacle in Weber’s writings is his coarse 
typology of action. Tradition, emotions, conviction (value-rationality) and purposive 
rationality constitute the four modes in which an action can be oriented towards meaning, 
but Weber suggests that the former two are on the border with behaviour ‘unrelated’ to 
meaning-orientation (Weber, 2019: 79). After phenomenology and hermeneutics, a soci-
ological theory that builds its explanatory system upon such premises looks unaccepta-
ble. Emotions and habits are nowadays at the centre of theories of agency, making 
Weber’s typology seem obsolete. However, to Weber’s credit, he acknowledged that 
emotions and tradition are modes of oriented action, albeit perhaps deficient ones. 
However, in his substantive writings, Weber went well beyond his coarse distinction of 
Economy and Society to take on board sociologically habitual and bodily dispositions 
[Einstellungen] to strongly valued meanings (cf. Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 277–278; see 
also Camic, 1986: 1057–1066; Hennis, 1988: 30–39, 70; Schluchter, 1979: 98).
Furthermore, not just habits and beliefs but symbols too are crucial for the particular 
meaning-oriented character of human agency. ‘Symbolic activity’, Weber (1978: 404–
406) argues, displaces the ‘direct manipulation of forces’ and allows us the flexibility to 
take a stance and be responsive and sensitive to novel elements, since ‘a realm of souls, 
demons, and gods’ is such that ‘cannot be grasped or perceived in any concrete sense but 
possess[es] a kind of transcendental existence which is normally accessible only through 
the mediation of symbols and meaning [. . .] by instrumentalities that “mean” 
116 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
something, i.e. symbols’.18 Moreover, Weber claims, ‘all areas of human activities were 
drawn into this circle of magical symbolism’, thus having ‘incalculable importance for 
the substantive evolution of culture’.
My point is that there is an ambivalence in Weber’s writings regarding the role of 
symbols, habits and explicit beliefs. Turner (1992: 56) goes so far as to claim that, for 
Weber, through the ‘symbolic forms’ opening us to a range of meanings, ‘life is lifted out 
of the immediacy of drives’. I agree, but it is difficult to discern a theory of symbolic 
forms from Weber’s writings. Methodologically, Weber poses another problem that 
points in a similar direction. He suggests that values operate mainly in terms of explicit 
beliefs and their semantic core (in terms of reference and predication, significance and 
meaning, etc.), and that a sociological description must treat them accordingly even if 
they do not appear in this form. Rationally oriented action constitutes the preferred object 
of sociological description because it fits its abstraction, generalisation and causal impu-
tation methods. The ‘ideal type’ analytically approaches the multimedia space of mean-
ings (the conduct of life and lifeworld of early Protestantism) in the model of a space of 
concepts (Calvin’s doctrine of predestination) in which beliefs and actions follow rela-
tions of logical inference (see Weber, 2012 [1904]: 124–126, 129, 132; 2019: 99–108). 
The ideal-typical reduction analytically presents these spaces of meanings in their purest 
form: a logical space of inferences, propositions and entailments, distorting its quality as 
a space of expressions.
Nevertheless, Weber remains ambivalent on this score. Meaning-orientedness is con-
figured by a stance and a world image, practical and theoretical modes of referring to 
meanings. As Schluchter (1987: 98; cf. Weber, 1946 [1922–23]: 277–278, 286–287, 293) 
has noted, this is critical to understanding how Weber speaks of rationalisation. This 
should be understood as a process by which different sets of meanings find rational exis-
tential modulations and theoretical clarifications, which are in principle different.
Culture is constitutive of thought and action. This is an expressivist thesis that we find 
in Weber. Culture operates in the form of ‘explicit beliefs’ and ‘means-ends’ practical 
schemas, but also in the form of embodied practices, traditions and symbols, which for 
him can be reduced (at least analytically) to the former. We can study all symbolic forms 
according to the ideal-typical model that organises them in a pure, rational manner of 
logical relations of practical or theoretical inferences of explicit beliefs. This is somehow 
a narrow expressivist thesis that would reduce the meaning of non-linguistic artworks (or 
symbols and gestures) to linguistic articulations, of habits to explicit beliefs. Implicitly, 
Weber argues that to study the space of meanings sociologically, we ought to model it in 
ideal-typical terms, as a logical space of concepts, explicit beliefs and means-ends practi-
cal schemas. Acknowledging differences and yet reductively explaining all forms of 
meaning in terms of a supposedly pure model of ideal types is unrefined narrow 
expressivism.19
Taylor’s broad expressivism offers a way to differentiate between forms of meaning 
and study them in non-reductive ways.20 This consists of construing the space of mean-
ings as a multimedia space of expressions and accepting that non-standard linguistic uses 
and non-linguistic expressions cannot be reduced to standard linguistic expressions. 
Each mode of expression allows for different forms of intending or referring to meaning, 
Raza 117
and we must account for the intentional structure and type of cognition relative to each. 
This supplements Weber’s theory with Taylor’s philosophy of meaning and language.
In Taylor’s view, bodily attitudes enact meaning without signifying relation, giving 
rise to modes of non-representational, non-predicative, non-propositional intentionality; 
symbols portray meaning; and concepts describe meanings (Taylor, 2016: 177–319, 
332–334, 337–338). Explicit rule-following, rituals, myths, practices, habits – all are 
different and mixed ways in which a cultural being takes a stance towards the world. 
Taylor’s broad expressivist argument is twofold. On the one hand, expression ‘reveals a 
new way of inhabiting the world, and the new significances which this way responds to’ 
(Taylor, 2016: 29–30). On the other hand, expressions involve distinctive cognitive ele-
ments. Each medium of expression gives rise to a particular mode of cognition. Thought, 
the mode of cognition that allows for representation and more deliberative, focussed and 
detached modes of orientation, is constituted by literal speech and its as-structure 
(Taylor, 2016: 16; see also 1995: 88). In this sense, linguistic beings ‘are conscious of the 
things they experience in a fuller way’, they are ‘more reflectively aware’ (Taylor, 1985b: 
228). In this strong sense, ‘expression makes possible its content; [. . .] language opens 
us out to the domain of meaning it encodes’ (Taylor, 2016: 90).
Nevertheless, language, or better said our linguisticality, contains a whole ‘family of 
modes of intrinsic rightness, which cannot simply be modelled on descriptive rightness 
[the as-structure] as their paradigm’. Descriptive adequacy can only emerge ‘against a 
rich background of other modes of rightness’ (Taylor, 2016: 47, see also 98–102). We are 
capable of the sort of reflective distance of speech, because we are embedded in the pre-
figured world of practical, embodied, understanding and in the figurative world of sym-
bolic representations. Taylor calls this his ‘maximal claim’, which entails recognising that 
non-standard linguistic (and non-linguistic) expressions have ‘validity conditions’, and 
that these could be misleadingly construed in the light of the as-structure of conceptual, 
representational intentionality. More radically, he argues ‘that the standard depictions 
wouldn’t be possible for a being who didn’t have the nonstandard uses in its repertoire’. 
The notion that culture and meanings can be expressed in different mediums, which allow 
for different modes of consciousness and orientation, is a Cassirean theme (see Matherne, 
2021: 115–150, 229–236) that Taylor silently and implicitly appropriates. This advances 
a holism of expressive mediums, or, as Taylor sometimes puts it, the ‘whole range of 
‘symbolic forms’’ (see inter alia Taylor, 1985b: 216; Taylor, 2005: 440–441; and espe-
cially Taylor, 2016: 99, 260–263).
This maximal claim allows to grant greater degrees of clarity and reflectiveness to the 
mode of cognition enabled by speech and at the same time to deny that it renders the space 
of meanings transparent to the agent. Agents cannot traffic in a self-possessed manner. 
There is no ‘resistanceless medium’ in which Thought is in its element and self-conscious-
ness comes to presence in language.21 For, even our modes of descriptive speech are 
embedded in our practical understanding, to being-in-the-world and contingent symbolism 
(Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 83). Hence, Taylor is effectively inverting what Forster (2011) 
conceives of as refined narrow expressivism, that is, the view that non-standard expres-
sions are parasitic, translatable and derivative of standard linguistic expressions. For Taylor, 
there is neither parasitism, translatability, nor derivativeness amongst expressions: their 
relationship is one of articulation, interpretative re-expression and expressive 
118 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
interpretations. The relation between beliefs, representations and practices (and their modes 
of cognition) is not logical but hermeneutical, and our analytical models need to account 
for this.
The focus on expression, which Taylor shares with Cassirer and Merleau-Ponty, con-
stitutes the cornerstone of his whole theoretical edifice that allows him to hold together 
more ‘practical’ and more ‘aesthetic’ philosophical anthropologies, more receptive and 
more expressive views of agency.22 For ‘expressions manifest things, and hence essen-
tially refer us to subjects for whom these things can be made manifest [. . .] If we make 
expression fundamental, it seems impossible to explain it in terms of something else’ 
(Taylor, 1985b: 221, my emphasis). If we take speech and symbols as expressions, they 
cannot be explained in terms of the fore-structure of practical understanding. The embod-
ied world of meanings, in turn, neither can be explained in terms of explicit webs of 
beliefs, vocabularies, or symbolic representations.
The symbol, the body and the concept are mutually irreducible; each allows for dif-
ferent forms of cognition and agent-integration in the space of meanings. Motor inten-
tionality cannot be reduced to (or fully explain) representational intentionality or the 
double intentionality of the symbol, and all these mediums are present in our grasp of 
spheres of meaning.23 The grasp of the social space of meanings (or culture) could be 
better defined as ‘multimedia’. Not only ready-to-handness, or world images and vocab-
ularies, or symbols and metaphors, but a ‘multimedia understanding’ that would include 
the whole range of expressive forms (see Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 46, 116–126).
I want to briefly examine the mode of cognition (or ‘consciousness’) and agent-inte-
gration of the three mediums of expression that Taylor (2016) studies: enaction, portrayal 
and description. Enaction is the level of embodied practices. In sociological theory, 
Bourdieu reigns in this realm. Taylor (2016: 42–43, 76, 224–227, 273–274; Dreyfus and 
Taylor, 2015: 116–117) approvingly turns to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. This reference 
could be misleading. Bourdieu’s habitus is the crucial premise that allows him to model 
the space of bodily expression as a space of dynamic and contingent causes. For him, 
practical understanding embeds the agent in a field of dynamic forces, in an economy of 
practices.24 For Taylor, the notion of the habitus advances the view of a normatively 
oriented human agent that operates not with a (conceptual) representation, but rather 
with a practical sense of rightness. Practical understanding does not render representa-
tions superfluous, nor is it the disguised underside of symbolic realities or economies. 
Quite the opposite: ‘the habitus demands symbols and formulations in declarative speech’ 
(Taylor, 2001: 76).
Self-interpretation alters our understanding of the world. In Taylor’s words, agents 
‘learn to embody the point [of their practices]; or to enact it bodily. But this doesn’t mean 
that articulating this point makes no difference. On the contrary, to bring the value, or 
good or norm, to speech makes it exist for us in a new way. It comes into focus for us. It 
acquires clarity for us’ (Taylor, 2016: 43–44). Linguistic articulation allows practices to 
self-correct normatively and the agent to access the space of meanings in different ways 
(Taylor, 1995: 175–178). More radically, theoretical descriptions can bring new objects 
to bear on our practices and understanding. To explain this process, Taylor employs a 
crucial Kantian notion that puts him at odds with the Heideggerian ontologisation of the 
pre-reflective practical ‘fore-structure’ of understanding: ‘theory is schematized in the 
Raza 119
dense sphere of common practice’ (Taylor, 2007: 176, my emphasis). Theory is not 
another derivative mode of interpretation that can be reduced to the ‘fore-structure’ of 
embodied understanding, but rather an irreducible expressive medium through which 
agents access and orient themselves differently in the space of meaning.
A posture, a gesture, a bodily style constitutes the genetically primordial medium of 
integration and cognition. For Taylor (2016: 76), bodily enactments do not refer to some-
thing else; they enact what they intend. This lack of representational intent means that 
the body is ‘at grips’ with an unthematised world replete with significances orienting the 
agent. The correlative mode of cognition is called ‘motor intentionality’: ‘the first word 
conveys that the know-how lies in our ability to make our way around; the second 
emphasises that this constitutes a way of grasping the world surrounding us. This is not 
explicit knowledge of an independent object, but it is nevertheless “about” something; it 
is an understanding of the world’ (Taylor, 2016: 149). The intended world in enaction is 
not made up of objects or facts to be described or characterised, but significances that 
solicit the right responses. Enactment involves being rightly ‘attuned’ or ‘geared’ to sig-
nificances, rather than describing objects (cf. Taylor, 2016: 61). Yet, we are in a domain 
of rightness, not of causal relations (see Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 50–55). Agents can 
‘get a better grip’ of the situation and its points of relevance, but this is not akin to an 
instrumental-pragmatic reorganisation of its parts in terms of means and ends. Instead, it 
implies finding a sort of ‘balance’ or ‘equilibrium’ within the normative requirements of 
the situation that are bodily lived through (Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 48–50).
Taylor’s non-reductivist, broad expressivism allows him to accept the enactivist and 
phenomenological corrections without their reductive intents that deflate symbolic and 
reflective ‘consciousness’ to embodied understanding. At the end of this path, we encoun-
ter the crux of the contemporary junction between the sociology of culture and the cogni-
tive sciences (see, for instance, Lizardo, 2004, 2007, 2021; Lizardo et al., 2020; Strand 
and Lizardo, 2015), which the Taylorian view intelligently avoids – I will return to this 
in the conclusion. For now, it suffices to say that Taylor does not take the embodiment 
thesis as an argument for a materialist reduction, but for an expressivist hermeneutical 
expansion of the world of meanings.
Bodily schemes open agents to proto-interpretations, to a space of prefigured meanings 
and significances that can be symbolically or conceptually interpreted. Bodily intended 
meanings are prefigured in Gestalt forms, which is the source of their opacity, excess of 
meaning, and need for further interpretation (Taylor and Ayer, 1959: 95; see also Kullman 
and Taylor, 1958: 115–116). They present a ‘penumbra’ of meanings and fuzzy referents 
prefigured in interconnected but ever-extending wholes (Taylor, 2016: 148; see also 70–71; 
see also Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 69, 74, 77). Verbal articulations can never fully exhaust 
or redeem the non-conceptual background, its opacity zones and its excesses of meaning 
(cf. Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 34, Kullman and Taylor, 1958: 119). This medium provides 
a mode of access to an irreducible reality that brings its structure and form, which coexists 
with other modes of understanding. Only in this sense it is legitimate to talk about an enac-
tive mode of awareness and access to meanings in non-reductive terms (cf. Dreyfus and 
Taylor, 2015: 18).
Portrayals involve the realms of metaphor, artwork and figurative speech. If the body 
is the primary ‘vehicle’ in enaction, symbols are the key aspects of portrayals. Symbols 
120 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
‘point’ to their referent through something else that they embody or present. They display 
a paradoxical kind of ‘reference’ that vouchsafes, or portrays, the meaning it is oriented 
to. As expressions, they figure what is prefigured in our practical sense. In this sense, the 
intentional relation carries a figuring element that is the source of the symbol’s ‘poly-
semy’, which is constituted by ‘the uncertainty of the reference’ (Taylor, 2016: 72–74, 
see also 129–176). If Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are the references for the enactive 
and prefigurative aspects of the body and its motor intentionality, Taylor refers here to 
Ricoeur’s account of the symbol’s double intentionality and Lakoff’s work on meta-
phors, but it can also extend to Blumenberg’s work on non-conceptuality.
The symbol has an intrinsic ‘double intentionality’ (Ricoeur, 2007: 289–290): ‘the 
first, literal, patent meaning analogically [i.e. metaphorically] intends a second mean-
ing which is not given otherwise than in the first’. In this sense, symbols do not aim to 
describe a space of meanings but to present it in terms of something else (see Taylor, 
2016: 79, 169, 235–236). Symbolic consciousness bears the mark of this double inten-
tionality. It refers to two domains of meaning at once. It emerges in the tension of a 
transfer of meanings and ‘thoughts’ from one domain to another, and this carries a 
surplus of meaning, polysemy and opacity (Ricoeur, 2007: 237). They make prefig-
ured, unfamiliar, enigmatic domains of meaning appear, in a broader horizon, through 
another, more familiar domain. The meanings that come to light are constituted in the 
tension of getting access to A (target domain) through B (source domain) (see Taylor, 
2016: 229–231).
Symbols transport a set of properties or understandings of a domain to another. This 
foreign reference unpredictably contributes to a qualitative leap of significances and 
objects of intuition in the intended, target domain. The symbol possesses thus a centrifu-
gal force that expands the horizons of non-modalised givenness of our primary embodied 
understanding (cf. Blumenberg, 2020 [1979]: 243; 2020 [1975]: 292). Given this sort of 
‘reference’, signifier and signified cannot be fully separated, nor their relation be ‘arbi-
trary’ or ‘unmotivated’ (see Taylor, 2016: 129–176; see also Ricoeur, 2007: 319). Hence, 
symbolic understanding is always open to conflicts of interpretations that are incapable 
of resolving the many zones of uncertainty, non-representational excess and sources of 
opacity. We can focus on what symbols conceal, and bring to thought the possible disan-
alogies between source and target domain, and denounce symbols as blinding or disguis-
ing. But the reverse is also true: we can bring the metaphor to thought and theorise the 
domain from within. Hence, Ricoeur’s (2007: 296–310) maxim, which Taylor (2016: 
168) adopts, ‘the symbol gives rise to thought’.
We are neither in the phenomenological world of embodied significances nor in the 
conceptual world of representation (see Blumenberg, 2020 [1979]: 241, 254). Like con-
cepts, symbols allow for a type of detachment from what is at hand. In intending a 
domain-at-hand, symbols refer to distant domains of meaning to introduce more than 
what is already contained in what is ready-to-hand. Hence, through symbols, we are not 
in an attitude of absorbed engaged coping, but something akin to the action at a distance 
that is enabled by conceptual speech but which lacks the clarity needed for proper delib-
eration (cf. Blumenberg, 2020 [1975]: 263–270). Symbols attempt to figure rather than 
describe what they intend. This is a different distance or attitude than what in sociology 
is associated with ‘reflexivity’, and is however central to social life. The figurative 
Raza 121
distance is an ‘aesthetic’ attitude or operation for knowing, seeing and telling things that 
ultimately resists our knowledge, vision or words. It intends meanings that in no way 
permit direct access or rational or instrumental control. It relates to what perhaps remains 
deeply unsaid and implicit, but also crucial, in our social life, as is the case of evil and the 
sacred, just to mention two of Ricoeur’s predilect themes.25
Unlike concepts, the symbolic distance is not ‘reflective’ or ‘instrumental’, perhaps 
not even ‘performative’, because what is intended somehow escapes control or ‘objec-
tivisation’. Language, however, makes possible another mode of awareness: ‘reflection’. 
Agents are not trapped in symbols but can engage in a new form of discourse in which 
they describe or make assertions about their symbols and practices. However, the ‘objects 
of reflection’ do not result from immediate, transparent intuitions. Reflection is a process 
by which understanding moves from trafficking with symbols and gestures to trafficking 
with thoughts starting from symbols and gestures.
Only at this level of description do we reach what is often regarded as the universal 
character of all mediums of expression, that is the arbitrary sign structure. This is the 
realm of the ‘instituted’ sign concatenated to ideas, properties or referents; of codes and 
speech acts that can be performed in different pragmatic contexts. The world surround-
ing us is taken as an independent object (signified) available for descriptions (signifier), 
and to be known in terms of (causal) explanation, (historical) understanding, etc. This 
is the realm of representational intentionality, of explicit beliefs and world images, 
which allow for more reflective, detached, meta-pragmatic modes of agent-integration 
into the field of meanings.
Speech indeed allows a more clarifying distance from the world, but it relies on a 
background of vocabularies, practices and symbols, from which it cannot break free 
(Taylor, 1985b: 231; see also Taylor, 2016: 256). The signature of Taylor’s broad expres-
sivism is to embrace these various expressive mediums in a non-reductive manner. In 
each medium, ‘consciousness’ has a different relationship with its objects. In other 
words, in each medium, agents are oriented to meaning and normativity in different 
modes. ‘Understanding’ is ‘carried in a plurality of media’. Any frontier among them is 
‘porous’ and ‘fuzzy’, since ‘any particular understanding of our situation blends explicit 
knowledge and unarticulated [non-conceptual] know-how’ (Dreyfus and Taylor, 2015: 
45–46). Thus, the world of culture is ‘multimedia’, and ‘understandings are multimedia 
events’. The relation amongst our different expressive capacities is interpretative, but 
these expressive mediums operate on different planes and axes. The human world results 
from the various expressive activities that open and integrate us to the space of mean-
ings. Taylor seems to suggest that the hermeneutical circle is more of a sphere where 
different expressive mediums rotate around a subject matter in non-reductive ways.26
Taylor (2016: 224–257) construes the relation among the three expressive mediums in 
terms of rungs on a ladder of articulacy, where enactment is at the bottom and description 
at the top. The imagery of a ladder can be nonetheless misleading. We are tempted to 
think that they stand in parallel; or, worse, that once we reach the higher viewpoint of 
description, the other media are inoperative or superfluous. Nevertheless, Taylor’s point 
is precisely the opposite: ‘our ordinary grasp of meaning draws on all three rungs’. The 
ladder image should only be taken to show that the relation between rungs is ‘of the 
nature of an interpretation’, or ‘hermeneutical, that is, the higher rungs interpret and 
122 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
clarify the lower’. Thus, ‘the relation of the higher level to the lower is one of expression, 
trying to render something in a clearer medium’: ‘each successive articulation allows us 
to take a freer stance to, and hence get a clearer articulation of, the meanings involved. 
What we live unreflectingly on the level of enactment can be set out before us as some-
thing we can enjoy and contemplate in a work of art, and then made an object of descrip-
tion and possible analysis in prose’. However, ‘this ranking can also be reversed. It is 
possible to hold that certain meanings cannot be adequately captured at a freer, more 
analytical level’ (Taylor, 2016: 225, 251–252; emphasis added).
Taking a stance, articulating a world image, mastering beliefs theoretically, modulat-
ing conducts of life: all must be seen as part and parcel of the process by which agents 
are differently oriented to strongly valued meanings through different expressive medi-
ums. Thus, ‘rational’, ‘detached’ agency brings along an excess and opacity of meaning 
which translates into the impossibility of agents having a complete understanding of the 
entailments of their actions and commitments. Put differently, it implies that, even at its 
most ‘rational’ levels, human action inevitably an element of fate, because it is oriented 
by meanings that agents never transparently understand, and with consequences that can 
spill over their purview, life, context of action and, ultimately, intended normative 
domain (or value sphere). This understanding and incorporation of ‘fate’ into Weber’s 
theory of action in hermeneutical and expressive, instead of economic (cf. Turner, 1981, 
2019), grounds comes to view only through the supplementary re-interpretation of his 
theory in the light of Taylor’s expressive-hermeneutical view of the human agent.
Recently, Malczewski (2019) has interpreted Weberian sociology as offering an ‘analytic 
of thought’ that points in a similar direction as my interpretation, since both of us argue that, 
for Weber, values and meaning are constitutive of thought as much as action. However, the 
broad expressivist view cannot agree with his distinction between ‘value stand’, ‘presup-
positions of thought’ and ‘structuring logics’. This seems to assume that ‘thought’ exists 
independently from culture. Also, Terpe’s (2020) recent interpretation of Weber could be 
seen as compatible with mine. At first sight, prioritising the concept of ‘stance’ chimes with 
her ‘actor-centred’ approach to value spheres. Her reference to Joasian notion of articulation 
resonates with Taylor’s work. Nevertheless, I do not think my focus on stances and expres-
sion sustains an ‘actor-centred’ approach. Value spheres do not exist in people’s minds, as 
her premise goes, but in expressive mediums. Articulation is not of a static world-image but 
of the necessary excess of meaning and zones of opacity in each expressive medium. My 
interpretation points in a radically different direction from that of Terpe and allows to hold 
more elements of Weberian thought together, such as his emphasis on responsibility and fate 
as inevitable aspects of human action. Moreover, while her interpretation takes Weber hap-
pily down the representationalist view, my focus on stance and its supplement with Taylor’s 
notions of expression and articulation, aims at giving a theoretically sound way of under-
standing the different modes in which meaning can orient action, as well as the different 
modes of cognition and belief that are possible for cultural beings.
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper was to offer a supplementary reading of Weber through the 
expressivist hermeneutics of Charles Taylor. This supplementary reinterpretation allowed 
Raza 123
me to posit two very different sets of contributions to sociological scholarship. The first 
is to Weberian scholarship. No major interpretation of Weber has focussed on the notion 
of ‘stance’, despite it featuring in methodological, substantive and theoretical writings. 
The concept of stance highlights that Weber’s account of values is less mentalistic or 
subjectivist than hitherto supposed. Our relation to values involves a posture, a mode of 
comporting oneself, alongside a world image. Since the concept of stance features in 
arguments that relate values to action, as well as to cognition and identity, I have argued 
that it is not possible to sustain a subjectivist, emotivist and decisionist theory of values 
when it comes to action and identity, and one that posits them in a non-naturalist, inter-
subjective dimension when it comes to cognition. My interpretation has shown that 
Weber’s choice of vocabulary and imagery, as well as his constant emphasis on the sub-
jective relation to values, is grounded on the Kantian theme that the actions and judge-
ments of cultural beings, unlike those of other non-discursive, non-cultural creatures, 
involve a particular type of responsibility since they are related to some commitments 
that are expressive of who we are and in which we recognise some form of authority.
Against Kant, however, Weber thinks that grounding our normative commitments on 
Reason alone, constitutes another way for humans avoid to taking responsibility. More 
so in a context in which Reason was identified with empirical knowledge of the world. 
In this sense, I have argued, Weber does not expel values from the realm of reason to cast 
them to the underground dimensions of the human soul. Quite the opposite, I have shown 
that he rejects what he calls ‘romantic-naturalism’ and the chasing after experiences and 
sensations as elements configuring our relation to values. His point is that belief, and 
possibly speculative observation and the interpretation of the meanings of life and world, 
are at stake in articulations of value commitments.
Nevertheless, humans do not create values by themselves or by their own choices. 
Values approach us in a non-naturalist dimension. Gods and daimons inhabit the space of 
meaning in their secularised or sacred forms and call us to modulate and articulate their 
demands. Our status as human agents is constituted in our responses to the normative 
solicitations of the world. Taylor’s supplementation provides a solid account of how to 
understand the nature of human agency better if we take meaning-orientation to entail 
some sort of responsibility. The fact that Weber mentions gods and daimons fighting for 
our obedience shows that he did not want to argue that our choices create the values 
orienting us; instead, we are solicited by the world to act in a certain way or another; 
nonetheless, we are responsible in some way for them (see also Davison-Vecchione, 
2021: 121). Finally, my supplementary reading has brought the concept of stance and the 
notion of taking a stance to discussions of the different ways in which culture and mean-
ing find expression in the social world. While I argue that Weber already recognised 
different modes of being oriented to meaning (symbols, habits and beliefs), I have tried 
to supplement this with Taylor’s broad expressivism to provide a sounder cultural and 
normative theory of action that allows for a notion of practical reason along hermeneuti-
cal lines.
My second set of contributions have a more prospective element. The question is 
not what we can learn about Max Weber that we did not know, but how this version of 
Weber renders him a better conversational partner in current sociological debates about 
human agency, identity-formation and culture and its relation to action and cognition. 
124 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
First, concerning the project of a normative theory of agency, I have argued that a sup-
plementary reading of Weber through Taylor allows for a twofold contribution. As I 
argued in the first part, Weber is less of an emotivist, subjectivist and decisionist; and 
perhaps the first sociologically relevant anti-foundationalist providing the blueprint 
for a sociological theory of agency. This also does not mean that ‘Man’ has no role in 
moderating the ‘Battle of Gods’. Instead, it implies that the distinctive human respon-
sibility for how values orient our lives cannot be grounded on Reason alone, let alone 
a construal of reason that centres on empirical knowledge. Reason in this domain must 
be otherwise, possibly including speculative observation and interpretation (in Weber’s 
terms) or hermeneutical (in Taylor’s). A normative theory of agency needs to offer an 
account of reason along these lines, and to propose concepts to study them empirically, 
which I have found in the notions of ‘stance’, ‘strong evaluation’, ‘expression’, 
‘expressive medium’ and ‘articulations’.
Once we accept this, it is possible to realise that value-orientation should be seen as 
the central anthropological feature in Weber’s account of human action. This anthropo-
logical feature is constitutive of the normative fundus of social life. Valuation takes 
agents to the dimensions in which human freedom and responsibility are possible. These 
dimensions constitute the objects of sociology, and sociology must take this normative 
fundus into account when describing them. This by no means breaks the thesis of axio-
logical neutrality. We do not aim to infer value judgements from scientific inquiry but to 
evaluate the humanness of different life orders, life trajectories or experiences. Some of 
them can be more liberating or imprisoning; more guided by ‘impersonal’ norms that do 
not provide sources of meaning to agents, or some can allow agents to live less alienat-
ing, more authentic lives.
Concerning the debate around culture and its forms and themes in American cul-
tural sociology, my supplementary interpretation offers an expressivist alternative to 
the problem and study of the different forms of meaning. To take meaning beyond the 
belief-as-representation model entails the retrieval of the body, emotions and habits. In 
the American scene, the move beyond representationalist models of culture embeds the 
agent in the space of causes (cf. Lizardo, 2021; Strand and Lizardo, 2015). The body 
supposedly places the human as an ‘object among objects’ involved in multilevel pro-
cesses (economy, culture, reproduction, etc.) that appear in their field of experience in 
terms of somewhat flexible lines of forces to which they are endowed to respond to 
because of some acquired tacit scheme. In this account, the habit model provides solid 
observational grounds for sociology to generate better causal explanations of action 
and interact with the neurosciences (cf. Lizardo, 2007, 2021; Lizardo et al., 2020). 
Habit and embodied practices supposedly provide an ‘empirically plausible way of 
making understanding synonymous with explanation’ (Strand and Lizardo, 2015: 65). 
In other words, the turn to habit is meant to explain the space of meanings naturalisti-
cally in terms of forces and dynamics that do not refer to any ‘subject’. Meaning and 
culture are thus set on a naturalist plane that can be studied through science’s objecti-
vising (yet not deterministic) methods. The habit-cognitivist model is hence opposed 
to representationalist models based on, for instance, performances (e.g. Alexander, 
2011); or treated as complementary to it according to different situational logics (see, 
e.g. Vaisey, 2009).
Raza 125
My supplementary interpretation provides an alternative to this retrieval of the body 
framed on explanatory grounds and leading to the naturalisation of culture and meanings. 
My claim is that the thesis of embodiment, which American cultural cognitivists yield 
against representationalism and intellectualism, must take the notion of expression seri-
ously, and doing so goes against any naturalistic tendency. It also challenges their ‘expla-
nation alone’ purpose because an expression always entails self-referring properties, and 
hence understanding is unavoidable. Taylor’s retrieval of the body aims at placing it in 
the human realm of expressions (where freedom, responsibility and justification are pos-
sible) rather than as an object among objects in dynamic fields of forces and tensions. In 
this he follows Merleau-Ponty closer than cogntivist or Bourdieusian sociologists. For, 
Merleau-Ponty (2012: 152), who coined the term motor intentionality and ‘discovered’ 
the unselfconscious and un-self-referring mode of intending meanings argues that ‘the 
body cannot be compared to the physical object, but rather to the work of art’. The body 
does not operate in a field of quasi-gravitational forces but expressively through ‘existen-
tial modulations’ akin to poems. Taylor allows us to break free of the illusion, spurred by 
explanatory delusions, that the retrieval of the body and habits inevitably puts us on track 
to dispel interpretative aspects of human agency and focus solely on explanation. The 
thesis of embodied cognition, beliefs and values should not be taken to entail that mean-
ing and sense-making are dynamic processes embedded in a space of (multilevel and 
dynamic) causes.
The project of seeing culture in expessivist terms provides indeed a more complex 
view than the explanatory models in American sociology. Each expressive medium 
(enactment, portrayal and description) allows for different types of modulations of mean-
ing and different ways of sense-making and agent-integration. Sociological studies must 
not conflate (or reduce) the figurative aspects of the symbol, nor the reflective aspects of 
explicit beliefs, nor the enactive aspects of gestures. Taylor signals to us to an expressiv-
ist turn in the way that we study culture that here I have retrospectively connected with 
Weber via the notion of taking a stance. This expressivist turn retrieves the body and 
habits and connects them hermeneutically and expressively to more representational, 
detached modes of agency and belief, without any naturalistic explanatory intention. 
Representation and embodiment do not constitute an explanatory either/or; neither two 
modes corresponding to problematic and unproblematic pragmatic situations or social 
conditions. They are two crucial modes of expression of culture. The third one is the 
symbolic. The question is not about the social conditions of one or another form of inten-
tionality but about how a set of values or norms finds figuration, representation or enact-
ment in different realms of the social world.
When it comes to identity-formation and biographical research, my interpretation of 
Weber highlights a crucial aspect. Biographies are not constituted by strategical 
choices we take in ‘fateful moment’. A truly ‘fateful moment’ would be constituted by 
a novel articulation that retrospectively makes sense of a life differently, allowing us 
to ‘see the light’. Life is not constituted by ‘existential milestones’ that we somehow 
organise, given our differential life-chances, into ‘existential ladders’ that can be dis-
mantled or from which we can fall down because of objective events. Our relationship 
to norms is not that of adherence or non-adherence, nor that of having the resources or 
privileges to attain a more or less ambitious version of them, but instead of expressive 
126 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
modulations that are constantly challenged in the light of new experiences. Any strate-
gic orientation relies on this expressive modulation and its development throughout 
one’s life’s course.
Social change and biographical transitions result from such articulations of mean-
ing. A human life is about the stances we take, how we articulate values and goods 
differently in the light of new events, and how we articulate our transitions between 
articulations of meaning. In short, it is about how we narrate our life. In this way, we 
make sense of how we got from stance A to stance B when Event 1 showed us that we 
were wrong. These transitions are not like transitions between paradigms, because 
they do not refer to an independent domain of objects that are known to us. They 
necessarily involve a reference to how we see reality. In this sense, stance B contains 
an account of how we got from A to B, of how this move has been clarifying, liberat-
ing, etc. Seen from B, A appears blinding or distorting, or incapable of accounting or 
seeing things. Stances A and B are not incommensurable, but they make sense of each 
other from within. An existential gain occurs in moving from A to B (see Taylor, 
1995: 34–60; 2016: 292–319). Life is a narration of happenings integrated into a story 
of articulations, existential modulations and value commitments. To focus on ‘exis-
tential milestones’ or ‘fateful moments’ is to remain trapped in models of agency that 
conceive it as a matter of more or less instrumental, pragmatic, strategic orientation 
without expressive, self-interpretative, hermeneutical elements. What my interpreta-
tion offers is a move from a resource-based to a normative-hermeneutical view of 
biographical research.
Similarly, the critical realist notion ‘modes of reflexivity’, despite offering a model 
that is more compatible with mine (see, e.g. Archer, 2000: 83, 195, 231–242; 2007: 25, 
133–155; 2012: 22–3; Sayer, 2011), focuses the inquire mainly on the conditions of pos-
sibility of different modes of orientation and their possibility of success in different ‘situ-
ational logics’ without inquiring into the expressive-hermeneutical dimensions of 
identity-formation. For critical realists, identity-formation can be accounted for in terms 
of the autonomous, communicative, meta-reflexive, fractured modes of navigating dif-
ferent ‘situational logics’ that emerge from different structural and cultural conditions. 
There is no insight into the importance of the expressive, articulative elements, of how 
we modulate, reject, distort, reinterpret our commitments and where those commitments 
come from. What is missing in this account is that ‘fracture reflexives’, the kind of agents 
that are impeded to develop ultimate concerns and keep the internal conversation going, 
are perhaps the result of a society where sources of meaning have effectively been 
depleted, where there are no longer possibilities of resonance, of finding a world (or 
daimon) that talks back to us in a meaningful way.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers at the JCS. Their incisive comments and criticisms 
helped me to clarify and polish my arguments. Filipe Carreira da Silva and Patrick Baert read and 
commented earlier versions of this paper. Their insights were helpful and encouraging. I would 
like to thank also Charles Turner, whose teachings and informal conversations at Warwick heavily 
influenced my take on Max Weber.
Raza 127
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: This work was supported by Secretaría de Educación Superior, 
Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación of the Republic of Ecuador.
ORCID iD
Sebastian Raza  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1045-313X
Notes
 1. An important exception is González García (1989, 1992) who attempts to re-embed Weber 
in his literary and cultural context by noting the influence of important references to and 
resonances with Goethe and Kafka. Piedras Monroy (2005) has suggested that one must 
re-embed Weber’s interest in India, comparative religion, and disenchantment of the world 
within the larger context of Romantic poets and thinkers initiated by Herder. More specific 
studies (Kent, 1983; Mitzman, 1984) show the literary references shaping Weber’s sociologi-
cal concept of ‘iron cage’. Finally, the works of Goldman (1992) connecting Weber’s concern 
with the literature of Thomas Mann also show how his views, diagnoses and concepts were 
embedded in a larger cultural tradition.
 2. These positions taken by Weber echo important themes in German Romanticism. Here, in 
particular, Herder’s philosophy of language and his concept of Besonnenheit as the awareness 
introduced by language enabling to ‘gather attention’ amidst an otherwise chaotic ocean of 
sensation linking perception with culture (see Taylor, 1995: 79–99).
 3. Dorschel (2021) has recently provided an interesting account that could be interpreted in 
terms of hyper-recursivity of fields of action, or value spheres. He rightly identifies the field 
of action of data scientists as constituted by the need to discover needs as a qualitatively 
higher end. The world of data scientists is one in which the perception of possible needs 
and the manufacturing of solutions reigns normatively. The social constitution of needs can 
become a value, thus opening a whole social sphere which is normatively oriented towards 
the discovery of needs.
 4. The daimon reveals to us ‘fates that are hidden from us’ (Weber, 2012 [1917]: 340). For 
Goethe (quoted in González García, 1995: 399), ‘darkness and light make up the fate of man. 
We need the daimon to always take us by the hand and indicate in each case what we have to 
do. Then this good spirit abandons us and we grope in the shadows’.
 5. On the latter, values provide the basis for the ‘objective’ validity and intersubjective intelligi-
bility of knowledge claims and conceptual development, and hence there is no space for value 
subjectivism or irrationalism (if the latter is equated exclusively with emotivism or decision-
ism) (see Weber, 2012 [1904]: 117–119, 121, 137–138). When it comes to cognition and 
judgements, Weber clearly defines the realm of value in non-naturalist and non-subjectivist 
terms, and my argument is that this is so also when it comes to action and identity-formation, 
but he employs rhetorical elements to stress that we are responsible in a distinct way.
 6. Gehlen’s (1988: 3–78) deficiency thesis, Blumenberg’s (1987: 438–440; 2020 [1975]) focus 
on myths, rhetoric, nonconceptuality and metaphors, Cassirer’s (1944: 41–61; 1957: 43–104) 
128 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
focus on the expressive function and the world of expression as the root of the symbolic 
forms, and Heidegger’s (2010 [1926], 1993) notion of eksistence, clearing [Lichtung] and the 
resoluteness or openness of being [Entschlossenheit] are all conceptual variations that give 
different accounts of the same theme of the world-openness of the human agent.
 7. Those focussing on the expressive functions of language and symbols (such as Cassirer and 
Blumenberg) tend to emphasise the aesthetic human capacities to open worlds through indi-
rect manipulation and actio per distans, whilst the Heideggerian emphasis on ready-to-hand-
ness, attunement [Befindlichkeit], listening and belonging emphasises the need of the world 
to be opened (see particularly Heidegger, 2010 [1927]: 129; 1993: 229–234). This is a secular 
variation of the mediaeval question of the aspects of the human world that need to be revealed 
by non-human entities (Gods, angels and demons) and aspects that can be revealed by the 
lumen naturale, that is human faculties alone. It is telling that Heidegger (1993: 256–259) 
and Weber recourse to the Goethean notion of ‘daimon’ to describe how everyday life (‘the 
demands of the day’) is opened to the human agent full of ethical and normative meanings to 
which they have to attend. For Heidegger, as opposed to Weber, it is only Being, and not the 
human being, that is capable of illuminating aspects of the world.
 8. This turn should not be surprising given that, since his early writings, Taylor sees himself as 
involved in some sort of philosophical anthropology (see Taylor, 1985: 1).
 9. Interestingly, this concept first features in his 1976 paper ‘Responsibility for Self’, revised 
and reprinted as ‘What is Human Agency?’ in his Philosophical Papers (Taylor, 1985a), 
and is further developed in Sources of the Self (Taylor, 1989), and then retaken in his more 
recent debates about reenchantment (Taylor, 2011). I will not deal with the issue of strong 
evaluation vis-à-vis the disenchantment-reenchantment debate, which would offer another 
sort of comparison with Weber’s work, but will focus on the issue of responsibility and 
identity-formation.
10. I will not reconstruct in detail Taylor’s notion of ‘strong evaluation’. This has been discussed 
largely in secondary philosophical literature (Abbey, 2000: 17–31; Laitinen, 2008; Meijer, 
2018; Smith, 2001: 89–97) and more recently in sociology (Chernilo, 2017: 159–180).
11. The family of interpretations of Taylor’s strong evaluations against which I want to argue are 
condensed in both Flanagan’s (1990), and Rorty and Wong’s (1990) appraisals. These criti-
cisms have been scrutinised and rejected by sympathetic interpreters of Taylor (cf. Abbey, 
2000: 19–26; Meijer, 2018: 33–45; Smith, 2002; 89–97). Although I agree with and follow 
their defence of Taylor’s key concept, I aim to do so on grounds that are fertile for a socio-
logically operative theory of human agency, whereas their defence occurs exclusively on the 
grounds of moral philosophy.
12. Nevertheless, Taylor is not blameless here, for his writings lend themselves to this major 
confusion of associating strong evaluation with reflection, articulacy and awareness. Taylor 
(1994: 249) himself acknowledges that the term ‘evaluation’ was perhaps misleading given 
‘its overtones of reflection and deliberate opting for one alternative rather than another’, 
whilst in fact it is not ‘a condition of acting out of strong evaluation that one has articulated 
and critically reflected on one’s framework’, but merely that ‘one is operating with a sense 
that some desires, goals, aspirations are qualitatively higher than others’.
13. In technical terms, he calls this the ‘non-unicity’ of points of reference of reasoning and 
articulation, which entails that reasoning in this domain requires being open to unsettling 
experiences and, more importantly, seeing how our descriptions demand novel ways of exis-
tential modulations which will further call for new articulations in symbols or concepts (see 
Taylor, 2016: 254).
14. This is what his concept of ultimate value means: an espousal of a value that, taken to its 
ultimate end, shows us that neither world nor self could be different, and so we take them to 
Raza 129
be major principles according to which all other values should be organised. The problem is 
that in modernity there are many ultimate values (in this sense they are akin to Taylor’s (1989: 
63–68) ‘hyper-goods’).
15. Taylor (1994: 214) clings to this possibility in the teeth of Isaiah Berlin, someone who resem-
bles Weber in his most tragic view of value conflict. But Taylor is also conscious of the 
dangers as he saw them in the aftermath of Leninism (something that Weber had somehow 
foresaw; see Weber, 2012 [1917]: 333–334) and does not see an incompatibility between 
a tragic view that still holds for the possibility of everchanging value conflicts and value 
articulations.
16. Taylor (2016: 45) argues that any action is ‘only right task-strategically through being right 
expressively, that is, it belongs to the range of expression which helps constitute this mean-
ingful human stance’. Before the rational teleological organisation of action, there is a non-
trivial ethical element through which the agent takes a stance towards the world.
17. I will return to this in the conclusion when addressing the contributions of a Taylor-ed Weber 
to the debates on identity-formation and biographical transitions in British sociology.
18. These statements clearly echo important notions that flow from German Romanticism, in par-
ticular Schlegel’s notion of the ‘symbol’. For Schlegel, the only mode in which the ‘infinite’ 
can come to manifestation or appearance [Erscheinung] is through symbols and images (see 
Taylor, 2016: 167–168).
19. Unrefined narrow expressivism can be contrasted with refined narrow expressivism. This is 
a form of expressivism that Forster (2010, 2011) finds in Herder’s thinking. His refined nar-
row expressivism entails that non-linguistic symbolic forms (like gestures and artworks) are 
possible because of linguistic capacities. This involves a complex argument in the philosophy 
of meaning and language that is completely absent in Weber. The latter tries to dissolve the 
question methodologically, through the idea that the ideal type (modelling a space of mean-
ings in its purest forms to end up in logical relations) offers a tool to study multimedia spaces 
of meaning, whilst acknowledging that the latter cannot be grasped totally via the former. 
Holding that there are differences between forms of meaning and thinking that these differ-
ences can be solved methodologically is unrefined narrow expressivism.
20. Englander (2013 has argued against Taylor’s broad expressivism and advocated for narrower 
forms. These discussions build upon Forster’s (2010, 2011: 178–219) key distinction between 
forms of narrow and broad expressivism in German philosophy of language and meaning.
21. I draw the idea of a ‘resistanceless medium’ from Rosen’s (1982: 128) discussion of Taylor’s 
(1975) interpretation of Hegel. Although I do not fully agree with Rosen’s criticism, the 
notion of a ‘resistanceless medium of expression’ captures well the Hegelian proposition that 
the Idea struggles to find its adequate expression that would bring its meaning to full clarity 
and self-consciousness.
22. I do not have the space to convincingly develop this complicated argument. Tersely put, 
against interpretations that charge Taylor of excessive Heideggerianism (see Gordon, 2008; 
MacIntyre, 1997), which allegedly does not allow him to argue for how the human agent 
can open itself to different ways of experiencing the world or to any notion of rational self-
correcting practices, I want to argue that he departs from Heidegger on critical junctures to 
take a more expressivist route. ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’, perhaps his most Heideggerian 
text (see Blakely, 2013), already bears witness to this departure. Read in parallel with 
Chapter 5 of Division 1 of Being and Time, the break becomes obvious. Both start with emo-
tions (or moods) to demonstrate that human agents always already find themselves attuned 
[Befindlichkeit] to some world with normative commitments and practical urgencies. This 
attunement provides the agent with a pre-reflective understanding of the world that forms 
the basis upon which any effort to make sense rests and also the basis to which these efforts 
130 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
return. Attunement and understanding are the two structural elements of Dasein’s embedded-
ness with which Taylor clearly agrees. But Heidegger moves on to a third element, which 
he calls entanglement [Verfallen], traces of which are absent in Taylor. In his words, ‘every 
understanding has its mood. Every attunement understands. Attuned understanding has the 
characteristic of entanglement. Entangled, attuned understanding articulates itself with regard 
to its intelligibility in discourse’ (Heidegger, 2010 [1927]: 321). For Taylor, entanglement 
is not a structural moment of the embeddedness of human action. Rather, as he makes clear 
in his A Secular Age Taylor (2007: see particularly chapter 10), closed world structures, or 
closed interpretations of a world picture, are a contingent characteristic of historical world 
openings. More importantly, for Taylor, our self-interpretations are partly constitutive of our 
understanding. Taylor’s departure from Heidegger at this juncture finds its root in his expres-
sive-constitutive theory of meaning. For Heidegger (2010 [1927]: 144, 151), ‘in interpretation 
understanding appropriates what it has understood understandingly [. . .] understanding does 
not become something different, but rather itself’. Furthermore, the ‘as-structure’ is only a 
derivative mode of interpretation incapable of disclosing new objects. In contrast, for Taylor 
(1985a: 71), ‘language articulates our feelings, makes them clearer and more defined; and in 
this way transforms our sense of the imports involved; and hence transforms the feelings’. In 
short, for Taylor, articulation in speech changes the shape of its objects and meanings, and 
allows them to be brought (through the as-structure) to the ‘semantic dimension’ where they 
can become an object of thought, that is of more distant reflection where more rational forms 
of approaching it are possible (see Taylor, 1985a: 232–233; 1995: 88; 2016: 16). Explicitly, 
Taylor (2016: 37) argues that ‘bringing things to speech can’t just mean making externally 
available what is already there’. And yet, ‘making externally available what is already there’ 
is precisely what Heidegger (2010 [1927]: 149–161; see also Dreyfus, 1991: 186–212, 215–
224) argues that the statement and the apophantic as consist of. What articulation changes, 
for Taylor, is understanding itself, but this view is only possible if one accepts that bringing 
things to speech or any other medium of expression makes a difference both in the way that 
we entertain meanings and in the shape of meanings themselves. This key expressivist prem-
ise is completely absent (and indeed rejected in the discussion of the as-structure) in Being 
and Time (a fact of which Taylor (2005): 453–454n6) seems to be completely aware as he 
suggests reading the sections of Being and Time Chp.5, on the apophantic as ‘in the light 
of some doctrine of semantic dimension’, that is in the light of the key expressivist prem-
ise the early Heidegger opposes). For, as Taylor (1985a: 221; see also Taylor, 1975: 14–16) 
argues, ‘expressions manifest things, and hence essentially refer us to subjects for whom these 
things can be made manifest [. . .] If we make expression fundamental, it seems impossible to 
explain it in terms of something else’, including Heidegger’s fore-structure of understanding, 
in terms of which he explains the as-structure, that is statements qua descriptive expressions. 
Speech and the as-structure must be taken as expression, as that which ‘makes possible its 
contents’ and ‘opens us to the domain of meaning it encodes’. This change of interpretation 
of Heidegger, which Taylor seems to suggest, has tectonic consequences since it displaces 
entanglement as a structural moment of embeddedness, and would entail elevating self-inter-
pretation to a structural moment of embeddedness itself, and not only as a derivative ele-
ment of understanding. And since self-interpretation, understood in expressivist terms, brings 
changes to our understanding, the possibility of opening oneself and opening objects is part 
and parcel of embeddedness. But this takes us miles away from Heidegger’s dictum of ‘letting 
things be’ and ‘truth as disclosure’, without falling into any sort of subjectivism. The human 
agent is not only a being who needs her world to be disclosed to her (as Heidegger argues); 
she is also a ‘world discloser’, as Dreyfus and Taylor (2015) would put it.
Raza 131
23. This strong expressivist thesis sustains Taylor’s (2007: 159–211) concept of ‘social imagi-
nary’, arguably his most ‘sociological’ concept and which allows a direct connection to 
Weberian ‘value spheres’. A social imaginary constitutes a background understanding of 
social life that enables the world (and self) to show up in a manner that sustains specific prac-
tices and institutions. His point is that a social imaginary should not be equated to ‘theories’ 
(descriptive speech), but encompass the whole range of symbolic forms (stories, myths, etc.) 
that make these new dimensions accessible and manifest for social beings, that is, the whole 
range of expressive mediums that comprise the space of meanings. If one understands value 
spheres in this light, it would be necessary to reject Habermas’s account of value differentia-
tion, as it relies on an arbitrary separation of ‘types of symbolism’ correlative to ‘types of 
rationality’ (see Habermas, 1984; Oakes, 2003; Schluchter, 1979: 143–272; for a criticism, 
see Turner, 1992: 73; Hennis, 1988). An alternative account of how values differentiate can 
be found in the concepts of ‘play’ and ‘articulation’. I do not have space here to develop this 
rather complicated argument, but it suffices to note that my interpretation on stance and the 
supplementation with the notion of expression brings about productive new lines of interpre-
tation of Weberian thought.
24. In another piece, Taylor (1994: 241–244) acknowledges that he admires ‘one aspect of 
Bourdieu’s work’: the turn to practical sense. When it comes to his theory of capitals and 
fields, it becomes ‘preposterous, and lands him in a form of ethnocentrism even worse than 
the one he has so painstakingly escaped with his theory of practice’. I do not think it is pos-
sible to keep Bourdieu’s notions of practical sense and habitus without his theory of fields and 
capitals; and I take Taylor’s approval of it to be the consequence of a mistaken, but generous, 
reading that aims at this otherwise artificial separation.
25. The ‘sacred’ has been approached by sociologists, at least since Durkheim, in terms of rituals 
that evoke a collective awareness, as a script or set of codes that can be performed. According 
to this view, agents can in principle take a reflective, pragmatic attitude towards its mean-
ings, codes and symbols (see, for instance, Alexander, 2011). This model has been creatively 
transposed, via Douglas’s work on purity, danger and pollution, to the study of the meanings 
of the modern civil sphere (see Alexander, 2006). Ricoeur (1995) argues, in contrast, that 
symbolisms of ‘the sacred’ (or ‘evil’ and hence ‘pollution’) operate as figurations rather than 
as performances (for the latter approach, see Giesen, 2006). More recently, Williams (2014) 
has argued persuasively that talk about the sacred breaks the bounds of our absorbed, practi-
cal and engaged coping with environing conditions, and has more of a metaphorical, figura-
tive, disclosive aspect than a performative one. In a similar vein, Blumenberg (2020 [1979]: 
275–289) argues, building upon Kant, that the meanings of freedom come into our lifeworld, 
into our horizons of meaning, only through metaphors, through symbols, that figure them, 
that gives them a practical shape and a thinkable form. We could argue along the same lines 
regarding crucial meanings of our modern world, such as equality, autonomy, etc. A com-
pletely novel line of research is thus opened in which the symbols of freedom, the sacred, 
equality, etc., are studied in terms of figurations rather than performances. This shift entails 
moving from the model of speech acts, that misconstrues symbols as concepts – and symbolic 
systems as codes – operating according to the dynamics of conceptuality, the sign structure, 
and locutionary forces. In attending to the figuring dimension, several insights need to be 
revisited. For example, it is not enough to argue that the symbols of civic democracy operate 
through a binary system of purity and pollution, and that successful ritual operations consist 
of the successful performance of this code to the benefit of one party. The ‘evils’ or ‘dangers’ 
of democracy can be figured differently, thus opening different orientations for action: our 
democracy could be symbolised as being held captive in the hands of a minority, or stained 
132 Journal of Classical Sociology 23(1)
by the actions of a group of people, or polluted by the presence of someone. The experience 
of the retrieval of our democratic meanings depends on how we figure its dangers, more than 
on the performance of a binary code. Another example that ought to be rejected is the theorem 
of ‘stable signifiers, shifting signifieds’, since – properly understood – in figurations, and 
in symbolisms in general, as I have already mentioned, the arbitrary relation of signifiers-
signified does not hold.
26. Enactment, portrayal and description operate in tandem to allow agents access to a field of 
meanings. ‘These meanings’ – Taylor (2016: 257) claims – ‘cannot escape the circles [of 
expressive mediums] which help determine their significance; and these circles are always 
changing’. A crucial aspect of the relation between these mediums is that it is impossible to 
align them fully, to cancel the non-conceptuality of embodied understanding or the double 
intentionality of symbols in the supposedly transparent battery of concepts. It is impossible 
to traffic with conceptual, disengaged reason alone, to purge the space of reasons from the 
figurative revelations of symbols or the prefigurative intimations of enactments, and to see it 
as an ever-adapting web of explicit beliefs, tools, concepts, explanatory inferences and theory, 
or as a fore-structure of practical understanding to which everything can be reduced.
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Author biography
Sebastian Raza is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. 
He is also co-editor of Theorein. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, published by Pontificia Universidad 
Católica del Ecuador.