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Max Weber's reply to Werner Sombart's lecture on technology and culture, presented at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society held in Frankfurt in 1910, is discussed in terms of its conventional and improvised character as a distinctive mode of `sociological' speech. Emphasis is placed on the specific rhetorical circumstances that gave rise to these remarks, especially with regard to Weber's status as an authorized speaker at the meeting, and their formulation as a response to Marxist theories accepted or criticized by members of the audience. In characterizing the relationship between technology and culture specifically as a topic of sociological discourse, Weber's comments therefore constitute a speechact in their own right. They both conform to the protocols of `value-free' academic debate upheld by the Society and experiment with this new genre and forum of intellectual discussion. Weber's innovative aspirations are ultimately in tension with his efforts to routinize or even rationalize the scholarly vocation (Beruf) of sociology as both an inward calling and an institutionalized profession that can speak critically to the most pressing and relevant issues of the day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how to give technology the dignity equal to that of morality so that a relation would be established between humans and technology. By redefining the technical, which the author considers to be an adjective and not a substantive. It is pointless to want to define some entities and some situations as technical in opposition to others called scientific or moral, political or economic. Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being. As the author sees it, the relation of technology to morality is somewhat modified in connection to its mode of existence.