I have always been struck by a repeated assertion of one of my heroes, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, about those people he called self-actualized. In an essay called “Self-Actualizing and Beyond,” he says: Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside of themselves. They are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them—some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense. They are working at something which fate has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love, so that the work-joy dichotomy in them disappears. (42)
It may be a feature of Marxist thinking to characterize what they do as a "vocation." We have Max Weber's two wooden Vocation Lectures, the brutally honest Canadian C.B. Macpherson, and Sheldin Wolin's "political theory as a vocation" chorus. But there are traces of the same bastardized aspirations in liberals like John Maynard Keynes and the water carrying Canadian, John Kenneth Galbraith, among many others. To me, vocation should be reserved for calling as the root suggests, whereas theoretical activists are better described as professionals, which is the more everyday business meaning of a Beruf. A Beruf—despite its similar literal meaning as vocatio—is expressed in urbane rhetoric more or less free from anxiety, whereas a calling indicates an obeisance to a voice of spiritual authority. And eloquence is a nice distinction to reserve for this discourse over against rhetoric. Curiously, almost the only appearances of eloquence at the moment come in plain clothes without collars.
It may be a feature of Marxist thinking to characterize what they do as a "vocation." We have Max Weber's two wooden Vocation Lectures, the brutally honest Canadian C.B. Macpherson, and Sheldin Wolin's "political theory as a vocation" chorus. But there are traces of the same bastardized aspirations in liberals like John Maynard Keynes and the water carrying Canadian, John Kenneth Galbraith, among many others. To me, vocation should be reserved for calling as the root suggests, whereas theoretical activists are better described as professionals, which is the more everyday business meaning of a Beruf. A Beruf—despite its similar literal meaning as vocatio—is expressed in urbane rhetoric more or less free from anxiety, whereas a calling indicates an obeisance to a voice of spiritual authority. And eloquence is a nice distinction to reserve for this discourse over against rhetoric. Curiously, almost the only appearances of eloquence at the moment come in plain clothes without collars.