This book seeks to provide analytical traction for historians by revisiting Max Weber's multiple notions of rationality. While Weber identified four components of all social action, including traditional and affective action, D'Avray focuses on the other two ideal types: “instrumental rationality” (Zweckrationalität) and “value rationality” (Wertrationalität, here “conviction rationality”). The book corrects common misreadings of Weber's rationalities, rendering his model again vividly complex. For example, D'Avray's close reading of the manuscripts that comprise Economy and Society (including many sections not yet translated into English) shows how Weber applied Zweckrationalität to places and times distant from the modern West, indeed anywhere that a religion or other movement was able to attract adherents, solidify a position, and endure over time. If instrumental rationality turns out to be a human universal (p. 135), though, and not a specifically occidental force associated with modernity, it is only in certain kinds of institutions—say, the medieval Christian Church, or the modern factory—that means-ends efficiency itself can become a value (pp. 63, 187). In such instances, instrumental bleeds into value rationality. The two ideal types also converge because all values must to some degree be instrumentalized if they are to generate traditions and institutions that allow them to endure.

D'Avray devotes more pages to showing the reverse process, namely how questions of values inflect and transform even apparently instrumental rational processes. He demonstrates how, in various legal systems, values and convictions determine when, how, and why exceptions are made to general legal rules; how they create “the rules for suspending the rules” (163). This emphasis on the power of exceptions seems especially important in the current moment when Rational Choice Theory, so-called “RCT,” has become prevalent. Value rationality radically complicates RCT's idea that social actors universally seek to “maximize interests.” A particular group might emphasize poverty and bodily suffering and develop complex systems for producing the experience of those states. One might call this a maximizing of interests, but only by severely distorting those words in the liberal economic canon from which RCT is descended.

At the same time, D'Avray does aim to defend an idea of universals in human social life, against one strain of recent cultural anthropology. The universals he proposes are not related to specific cultural content, nor does D'Avray locate them strictly in cognitive processes, nor a universal idea of mind; rather he finds them precisely in a revived and revised version of Weber's notion of instrumental rationality, namely the way values are woven together into instituted systems. In Weber's ideal type of value rationality, ends do not justify means; rather, the means are themselves the end. For example, a movement that seeks justice may engage in careful means-ends planning, but it primarily realizes its values through the daily work of acting “justly.” Nevertheless, this value must be instrumentalized: standards and techniques for deciding upon the justice to be achieved, and how to achieve it, must be settled upon. Similarly, religions develop instrumental rationalities through which to solidify, amplify, and internalize their values, their aspired-to futures, their notions of salvation and healing. D'Avray argues that it is this structuring of the instrumentalization of values that is relatively universal. Even very different ideologies must render values concrete by embedding them in clusters of ideas, practices, and things. This creates intersecting and mutually reinforcing supports, and helps produce relatively self-contained meaning-worlds, or “general systems” (76, 92) that endure because of how well-defended they are against rival meaning-clusters. Beliefs (in reincarnation or human rights) are comparable, similarly buttressed against collapse through intersecting supports (185).

Even such solid general systems change, and this is the historians' problem. D'Avray argues that to see how and why value systems arise and retreat (93, 185), historians should attend to the particular architecture of the “‘symbiosis’ of values and instrumental rationality” (186). Change occurs when the framework of intersecting ideas, practices, and materials begins to loosen or decay, often spurred by a charismatic leader's vivid enunciation of new values. In this work, though, D'Avray is most interested in theorizing how value-systems resist change. In that sense this is a Durkheimian engagement of Weber, explicitly so (10), and wonderfully provocative, since those two founding fathers never directly engaged each other's work. D'Avray's main empirical example in the text is the Congregation of the Council, an organ within the Catholic Church, and how the Council's decisions on legitimate annulments of marriage in the late seventeenth century gave legal form to, and in that sense instrumentalized, values presented in the Council of Trent. Importantly, in this example D'Avray emphasizes the exceptions to the rule.