CLIVE E.HILL WEBER, MAX (1864–1920)

CLIVE E.HILL WEBER, MAX (1864–1920)

Traditionally, Weber’s writings have been divided into two: his sociological writings and his political writings. The former are supposedly concerned with the purely formal procedure of constructing broad typologies of legitimacy, administration and authority, while the latter ostensibly deal more expressly with coercion, conflict, power and violence in particular societies, and in concrete, historical situations. In fact, the two themes are inseparable and run through all of Weber’s disparate and remarkably wide- ranging works. From the famous essay on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to the writings on the world’s religions, to the lectures on Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation to the attempts in his magnum opus, Economy and

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Society (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft) to identify different types of authority, Weber’s works are the working-through of one fundamental problem: how to deal with the problem of violence and legitimate domination in a modern world where traditional forms of authority have lost their way.

In this massive project of historically understanding the systematic rationalization and regulation of modern life, Weber took his lead from Karl Marx (see MARX AND MARXISM) and FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, among Others (SØREN KIERKEGAARD, for example). As Weber’s wife Marianne famously reported her husband as saying, one can judge ‘the honesty of a contemporary scholar’ by his intellectual ‘posture towards Nietzsche and Marx’. Weber’s project, in other words, took up Nietzsche’s claim that God was dead and Marx’s claim that economic laws conditioned the structures of power. Where Weber was long regarded, by those coming from the Parsonian school of sociology (the basically optimistic functionalist school of social theory that developed in the USA in the 1950s under the lead of Talcott Parsons), as a theorist of legitimacy and stability, or as a theorist of the origins of capitalism, he is now more likely to be seen as the sociological counterpart to Nietzsche. Indeed, his writings are characterized far more by melancholy than a belief in progress, and it is hard to escape the conclusion that Weber’s theories of legitimacy and stability rest ultimately on nothing more than the threat of violence. Naked power, in other words, is the basis of ‘legitimacy’ in secular modernity. When combined with Weber’s famous notion of the ‘iron cage’ (Gehäuse der Hörigkeit), his definition of the state as ‘a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’, and his claim that modernity meant the ‘disenchantment of the world’ (Entzauberung der Welt) this is a bleak picture indeed. Nevertheless, Weber set out to analyse the possibilities of ethical life under these conditions of rationalization.

How did Weber arrive at such a bleak pass? The answer lies in the fact that his methodology was by no means the synchronic one often associated with mid-twentieth- century sociology, but was strictly diachronic, or historical. And because of his integration (a rather ambivalent one, to be sure) of thought-processes and economic and social structures he neatly sidestepped the Idealismmaterialism debate that so dominated much of German philosophy, and produced a broad theory that nevertheless provided for explanation on a human scale.

This kind of explanation is most clearly set out in The Protestant Ethic. That essay has most often been regarded as a rather simplistic explanation for the rise of capitalism in the West, which sees it as a direct outcome of the call of the Protestant sects to create wealth. Yet a careful reading reveals something quite different. Weber, to be sure, cites Calvin and other spiritual leaders among the Baptists and Quakers to the effect that one should make oneself rich; yet he also notes the paradox that these sects are characterized primarily by their ‘inner-worldly asceticism’. Far from being an Idealist argument—one that claims that the ideas promoted by Protestantism resulted in the development of economic realities—or a materialist argument—one that claims that economic reality dictates the dominant ideas of an age, including religious ones—Weber instead puts forward the notion of ‘elective affinities’ (Wahlverwandtschaften). That means that, far from there being a direct line between Protestantism and capitalism (an argument that hardly helps to explain the rise of Japanese capitalism, for example), there existed rather certain strands within that religious outlook that, unintentionally, sowed the seeds of a

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way of life that allowed primitive forms of marketoriented activity (such as also existed in China or India) to develop into the fully fledged capitalism that characterized the modern West. It is the claim that such an outcome was unintended that is really key here. Weber was by no means so thoughtless as to put forward monocausal, least of all determinist, arguments. Although some commentators have seen this caution as a weakness, as a reflection of Weber’s reluctance to put his cards on the table, it is better regarded as a sign of his deep insight into the complexity of causation and historical change.

Given the role of unintended consequences in history, and given Weber’s diagnosis of the threat of violence that underpinned modern society with its loss of cosmic certainties, Weber turned to the notion of scientific research as a way of finding meaning. Hence, in his two famous lectures delivered in 1918 shortly before his death, Weber set out the notion of value-freedom (Wertfreiheit). Weber knew that meaning in society is created intersubjectively, and that therefore the study of ‘pure facts’ was a chimera. Nevertheless,

he argued that, in contrast to political activity (which he knew something about, being an active supporter of the National Liberals, and speaking in the period of the demise of the German empire and the chaos of the early years of the Weimar Republic), in which it was necessary to make judgements and to promote them, in science (by which is meant all forms of academic study) one should not have to make practical value judgements. The context of this claim was Weber’s diagnosis of modernity’s disenchantment, its absence of ‘eternal’ guides to behaviour. Hence, rather than being a naïve call to objectivity, Weber’s idea of value-freedom was designed to make science not only possible under disenchanted conditions, but also to make it desirable as a way of creating meaning. The lecture hall was conceived as a place where market forces and the clash of values that characterized modern politics should and could be resisted. The teaching of an ‘ethic of responsibility’ too would help overcome the overbearing rule of technocracy. This too was part of his response to Nietzsche’s godless world.

His attempt in Economy and Society to build a typology of authority also needs to be seen in this light, rather than as a formal exercise in a historical description. Early societies were founded on a kind of legitimate domination derived from a belief in the innate right of the monarch or other traditional leader. Modern societies had no such legitimacy, being characterized more by the Marxist notion of ‘alienation’, and Weber’s typology was a way of trying to find one. It is worth noting that even when discussing the earlier types of rule—traditional or charismatic—Weber still sees their legitimacy as resting on an ‘authoritarian power of command’. But that does not make the task for the modern, rational type of authority, existing in an age without natural rights, any easier to solve. Since, however, it is unlikely that any modern, rational authority can exist purely on the basis of an inner conviction of ‘validity’ held by its subjects, Weber has to conclude that such authority ultimately rests on coercion. It remains only to find a way of bringing together the different classes and interest groups; but coercion underpins that cohesion. The state is lawful if it can enforce its commands. Hence in his 1895 Freiburg address, Weber advocated an emotional commitment to the nation channelled through the political institutions of plebiscitary leadership. Although in normal times these affective ties to the nation go unrecognized, at times of crisis they are made manifest, and Weber believed that encouraging these kind of ‘deep and elemental psychological foundations’ would not only resist the domination of the bureaucracy (Beamtenherrschaft) but would

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also prevent such crises from breaking out. It is only fair to point out that this charismatic use of the plebiscite, though it sounds superficially like the kind of irrational aestheticization of politics on which fascism relied, was conceived of by Weber as a way of steering a technocratic, managed society in a democratic direction by encouraging mass participation. Yet, since in a capitalist society, such emotional ties depend on the vagaries of the business-cycle, the risks are clearly great. But Weber believed there was no alternative, since it was not possible to reinstate some kind of traditional rule based on substantive justice, legal legitimacy or supernatural values.

It was therefore Weber’s fundamental agreement with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the modern world that led him to advocate value-neutral science, even though he knew full well that such a thing was impossible. In other words, rather than resort to fantastical solutions such as Nietzsche’s Superman, Weber sought to find a way of reconciling mankind to the melancholy condition in which it found itself in rationalized, bourgeois capitalism, though without abandoning its aspirations for an ethical life. And it was largely as a result of the inspiration he received from Nietzsche that Weber’s view of history was such a tragic one. As the Protestant Ethic reveals, Weber saw largescale historical change as resulting from the unintended consequences of human thought and actions. Thus, for all the leanings towards economic sociology and structural analysis, Weber’s view of history rested on a notion of contingency that was fundamentally different from the speculative philosophies of history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (such as that of Hegel (see HEGEL AND HEGELIANISM)), and in particular from Marx’s belief in the relationship between the classes and the means of production as the motor of history.

The breadth of his work also goes some way to telling us why his ideas are still so hotly debated and why he is regarded (along with Durkheim and Marx) as a ‘father of sociology’. His various studies, for example on the agrarian conditions of ancient societies, of Chinese or Indian religions, or on the sociology of law, were not randomly acquired interests; rather they formed a historical study of such proportions that very few scholars have had the ability to question his conclusions with a comparable knowledge- base. Just one illustration of these debates is also the most famous: the Protestant Ethic debates. Following numerous attacks from contemporaries, especially the historian Felix Rachfahl, Weber set out his thesis in fine in his ‘Anticritical Last Word on The Spirit of Capitalism ’ in 1910. Like many later critics, Rachfahl argued that the distinction between traditional and capitalistic economies was dubious; that the notion of inner-worldly asceticism was just as characteristic of Catholicism as of the Protestant sects; that there were no clear factual links between the sects and the rise of capitalism; that capitalism was carried by a few great entrepreneurs rather than by the petit bourgeois; and that the Reformation’s contribution to the rise of capitalism lay not in the idea of a ‘calling’ but in

a general tolerance of different modes of living. In other words, the identification of religious causes at the expense of all others was Rachfahl’s main complaint. It was left to Weber only to point out that this was not in fact his thesis, though this has not prevented scholars ever since from continuing to read too much into his essay. Yet the study of the Protestant sects and the religion-inspired ‘style of life’ that unintentionally became the ‘spiritually adequate’ basis for the development of modern capitalism represents just one corner of one aspect of Weber’s field of study.

Entries A-Z 701 There have of course been many challenges to Weber’s world-view. In particular, it is

possible to point to ‘paradoxes of modernity’ that mitigate Weber’s bleak vision. Some commentators feel that, as a vision of modernity, Weber’s description of the social is no longer appropriate to a post-industrial, globalized, electronic age. But violence, domination and surveillance proceed apace, even in the age of post-modernism when blueprints for organizing the world have (supposedly) been abandoned.

Finally, it is tempting to argue that Weber has the last laugh anyway. He was far from blind to the fact that the rationalized structures of modernity can themselves become the focus of the affective life (a love of rationality for its own sake), as the studies of the Frankfurt School prove. These, most famously Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1944), merged Weberian definitions of modernity with Marxist notions of coercion and discipline in order to arrive at a stark vision of the total domination over nature leading to totalitarianism, in a searing critique of the rational, Enlightenment project.

But beyond this, one may find in Weber a definition of the modern that actually goes against what is generally held to be ‘Weberian’ in social theory. Weber himself was not so naïve as to hold to the rigid vision of rationalization, bureau-cratisation and secularization with which his name is associated, as one small example reveals. In the standard translation of Science as a Vocation in the selection of Weber’s essay edited by Gerth and Mills, the following passage appears:

Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another.

In the original German, the first sentence reads ‘Heute ist es religiöser Alltag’, which might better be translated as ‘today the everyday is religious’. Despite the best efforts of Gerth and Mills to present Weber as a theorist of secular, rational modernity, Weber himself saw that there was no disappearance of the affective or emotional life, that these human forces and energies must be directed somewhere, and that they may even be channelled into apparently rational social structures. There is, in other words, no such thing as a post-religious secular modernity; rather, the danger to society lies in the failure to acknowledge the need for these energies to be given an outlet. Such a society might be the modern world, and thus when Weber (at the chilling end of Politics as a Vocation) said that ‘Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph eternally now’, it is hard to resist the temptation to believe that he foresaw the triumph of fascism.