Understanding Weber
Understanding Weber
Understanding Weber
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<strong>Understanding</strong> <strong>Weber</strong><br />
<strong>Understanding</strong> <strong>Weber</strong> provides an accessible and comprehensive explanation<br />
of the central issues of <strong>Weber</strong>’s work. Using the most recent scholarship and<br />
editions of <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings, Sam Whimster explores the full range, depth<br />
and development of Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s approach to the social and cultural sciences.<br />
This path-breaking book:<br />
• locates the central issues in <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings and relates them to the<br />
golden era of social and cultural sciences at the beginning of the twentieth<br />
century;<br />
• argues that <strong>Weber</strong> remains the major exponent of the classical tradition<br />
still relevant today;<br />
• offers a new interpretation of the dynamic of <strong>Weber</strong>’s career as historian,<br />
social economist, methodologist and sociologist.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology stands as a successful and still valid underwriting of<br />
the substantive fields of power, law, rulership, culture, religion, civilizational<br />
configurations and economic sociology. At a time of turning away from grand<br />
theory to empirical policy studies, this book asserts the authority of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
conception and calls for a critical engagement with his legacy in order to<br />
understand the dynamics of a globalizing modernity.<br />
<strong>Understanding</strong> <strong>Weber</strong> is an indispensable guide to <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings and<br />
will be an invaluable companion to The Essential <strong>Weber</strong> (2004). The book<br />
closely tracks the development of <strong>Weber</strong>’s thinking, an exploration that will<br />
make it an obligatory purchase for undergraduate and postgraduate students<br />
as well as researchers in the fields of sociological theory, economic sociology<br />
and cultural studies.<br />
Sam Whimster is Reader in Sociology at London Metropolitan University.<br />
He is also editor of the international journal, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, and has<br />
published extensively on Max <strong>Weber</strong>. Publications include Max <strong>Weber</strong> and<br />
the Culture of Anarchy (1999) and The Essential <strong>Weber</strong>, Routledge (2004).
<strong>Understanding</strong> <strong>Weber</strong><br />
Sam Whimster
First published 2007<br />
by Routledge<br />
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© 2007 Sam Whimster<br />
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[T]he rational world can be considered as a great, immortal individual which<br />
ceaselessly produces that which is necessary and thereby comes to control<br />
the accidental.<br />
Goethe (letter from Dornburg, July 1828)<br />
Isn’t that splendid, such a historical chain of arguments in which each part<br />
is remorselessly pieced together without any gaps, where, as in this case,<br />
‘the writer’ makes himself totally invisible but nevertheless everything that is<br />
there is involuntarily animated by the heartbeat of a grand personality.<br />
Mina Tobler on reading The Protestant Ethic<br />
(letter to her mother, October 1912)
Contents<br />
List of figures viii<br />
Acknowledgements ix<br />
Abbreviations x<br />
Introduction 1<br />
1 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 11<br />
2 Capitalism in contemporary debates: Sombart, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
and Simmel 29<br />
3 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 48<br />
4 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 73<br />
5 The reluctant sociologist: from the Protestant ethic<br />
to the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik 116<br />
6 The Sociology of Religion 156<br />
7 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 193<br />
8 Power, legitimacy and democracy 220<br />
9 Sociological categories and the types of economic<br />
activity: a final account 247<br />
Notes 271<br />
Index 291
Figures<br />
6.1 Publication plans 157<br />
6.2 Determination of economic ethics 186<br />
7.1 Classification of cultural religions 218<br />
8.1 Mann’s four sources and organization of power 231<br />
8.2 Simulation of the final version of Economy and Society 232<br />
9.1 Types of economic regulation 256<br />
9.2 Economic sociology of money 257
Acknowledgements<br />
As in the Essential <strong>Weber</strong>, much of the scholarship and debate in this book<br />
draws on the lively state of the international network of <strong>Weber</strong> studies.<br />
Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 6 have appeared, respectively, in Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>s ‘Grundbegriffe’, edited by Klaus Lichtblau, and Das Faszinosum Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, edited by Karl-Ludwig Ay and Knut Borchardt; my thanks to the editors<br />
of these collections for inviting me to their conferences – in Bielefeld<br />
and Munich – and for permission to use the chapters in this book. A number<br />
of people have been especially helpful in reading and discussing parts of<br />
the manuscript, suggesting approaches, offering information and guiding me<br />
away from error. The failings that remain are, of course, of my own making.<br />
My thanks are due to Robert Bellah, John Breuilly, Hinnerk Bruhns, Hans<br />
Henrik Bruun, Brian Hall, Edith Hanke, Austin Harrington, Scott Lash, Raymond<br />
Lee, Hartmut Lehmann, Mohammad Nafissi, Kari Palonen, Guenther<br />
Roth, Yolanda Ruano, Keith Tribe and Stephen Turner. I must thank Gerhard<br />
Boomgaarden and his team at Routledge for their understanding and nudging<br />
me, and the book, towards successful completion.
Abbreviations<br />
Archiv Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.<br />
AS Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilisations, edited and translated<br />
by R.I. Franks, London, New Left Books, 1976.<br />
Cat ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’, translated by<br />
E. Graber, The Sociological Quarterly, 22, pp. 151–80, 1981.<br />
EEWR Economic Ethics of the World Religions.<br />
EOPS Economy and the Orders and Powers of Society. This was the<br />
title in the Outline Plan of 1914 for the first draft of what eventually<br />
was published as Part Two of Economy and Society.<br />
ES Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology,<br />
edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich, New York, Bedminster Press,<br />
1968.<br />
EW Essential <strong>Weber</strong>, edited by Sam Whimster, London, Routledge,<br />
2004.<br />
FMW From Max <strong>Weber</strong>, edited and translated by H.H. Gerth and<br />
C.W. Mills, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1947.<br />
GARS Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 3 vols, Tübingen,<br />
J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1920–1.<br />
GAWL Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 4th edn, edited by<br />
J. Winckelmann, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1973.<br />
MWG Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe, edited by H. Baier, M.R. Lepsius,<br />
W.J. Mommsen and J. Winckelmann, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr<br />
(Paul Siebeck), 1984–.<br />
PE Debate The Protestant Ethic Debate, edited by D. Chalcraft and A.<br />
Harrington, translated by A. Harrington and M. Shields, Liverpool,<br />
Liverpool University Press, 2001.<br />
PESC The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by<br />
T. Parsons, London, Allen & Unwin, 1930.<br />
SocRel The Sociology of Religion, translated by E. Fischoff, London,<br />
Methuen, 1965.
Introduction<br />
In an article published in 1974, the scholar Benjamin Nelson asked some<br />
very direct and simple questions of Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s work. He called for an<br />
adequate appreciation of <strong>Weber</strong>’s central intentions and horizons over the<br />
years of his life. He noted that, as yet, there was no critical edition of the<br />
Protestant ethic essays that would allow us ‘to see how the horizons of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
thinking shifted with the shifts of contexts demanded of him by his<br />
various sorts of critics’. There was no hope, he said, of a convincing and<br />
comprehensive interpretation of his life’s work ‘without a synoptical and<br />
synchronic reading of his Economy and Society, his Collected Essays in the<br />
Sociology of Religion and the stratum of discussions illustrated in the “Author’s<br />
Introduction” ’. Nelson correctly perceived that the last named article<br />
was a dense sedimentation of a lifetime’s knowledge and could provide ‘a<br />
master clue’ to <strong>Weber</strong>’s aims. 1<br />
What excited Nelson in such an inquiry was the uncovering of the full<br />
measure of what he called a ‘differential historical sociology of sociocultural<br />
process’ that would clarify civilizational configurations. Nelson observed<br />
that complex societies in the world were undergoing extraordinary change<br />
in respect of their central institutions, schemes of orientation and technologies<br />
and that <strong>Weber</strong>’s lead had to be followed.<br />
He called attention to ‘the different variable mixes of “religions” and<br />
“worlds”, organizational and regulative juridical structures, communal as<br />
well as associational living patterns, collective as well as individual identifications<br />
and identities’. This was the agenda of a future sociology and one that<br />
would ‘contribute to the necessary progress towards our common goals’. 2<br />
He speculated that there ‘is strong reason to believe that if <strong>Weber</strong> had<br />
lived beyond 1920, he would very probably have gone forward to recast<br />
the argument and emphasis of The Protestant Ethic’. He would have given<br />
greater prominence ‘to the distinctive origins and features of the modern<br />
“rational” Occidental science and technology’. There could be no understanding<br />
of ‘the most fateful force of our Western modern life, capitalism,<br />
without seeing it against the background of the historical rationalizations of<br />
science and sensibility in all the spheres of thought and action’.
2 Introduction<br />
Culture, religion, capitalism and power are the grand themes of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
writings. Nelson flags their importance yet registers the need for a more<br />
exact location of these themes within the overall body of his work. Writing<br />
in 2006 and commenting on the renewed interest in <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology in<br />
France, Catherine Colliot-Thélène notes ‘the gap left in the theoretical field<br />
by the retreat of Marxism and evaporation (“essoufflement”) of the structuralist<br />
paradigm’ and, accompanying this, a turn to policy expertise in place of<br />
critical reflection. This vacuum has occurred, she writes, at a time when the<br />
social and political effects of religion are meeting a renewed interest. 3 This<br />
reinforces Benjamin Nelson’s earlier demand for a sociology that can analyse<br />
the civilizational dynamics of modernity in their interrelated complexity.<br />
This book argues that the confidence in <strong>Weber</strong> is well placed but can only<br />
be justified by a far closer engagement in the full dimensionality of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
disciplinary range and how his ideas and interests developed over time. Nelson<br />
was correct in his speculation that the ‘Author’s Introduction’ of 1920<br />
placed a different emphasis – on science and technology in the west – as a<br />
wider basis for explaining the emergence of modern capitalism, compared<br />
with the more restricted arguments put forward in The Protestant Ethic and<br />
the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (PESC). The stark importance of this issue can<br />
easily be demonstrated. The ‘Author’s Introduction’ highlighted the pervasive<br />
importance of rationalism throughout occidental history. The Protestant<br />
ethic studies of 1904–5 laid great stress on a form of rationalism (ascetic life<br />
conduct) that was part of and followed on from the European Reformation<br />
of western Christianity. How do we weigh the larger narrative in relation<br />
to the ‘case study’ of Puritanism? A great deal turns on the kinds of answer<br />
that are given to the question. Puritanism is fairly restricted in its scope as a<br />
form of rationalism, for it is built on a blinkered view of the world in search<br />
of divine assurance. Western rationalism, and especially the emphasis Nelson<br />
placed on science, can with greater justification claim wider validity.<br />
There is not much evidence that <strong>Weber</strong> would have recast his argument in<br />
relation to the Protestant ethic study, although equally there is considerable<br />
scholarly evidence that the original thesis had drifted far from its original<br />
moorings – even if <strong>Weber</strong> was not prepared to admit this. This indicates that<br />
a close engagement with <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings will have to be a critical one: one<br />
that does not accept his own estimates and defences, and one prepared to<br />
advance the issues beyond where he left them.<br />
Looking at modern scholarship, do we have the synoptic and synchronic<br />
account of <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings that Nelson called for? Not quite. The Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe have published two-thirds of <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings in a<br />
critical historical edition. Under its rules, the dating, origins and contextual<br />
background of each of the texts has to be made known. But some important<br />
texts have no clear origination or dating. For example, the so-called ‘older<br />
part’ of Economy and Society consists of texts found in unmarked brown<br />
envelopes after <strong>Weber</strong> died. He probably had no intention of publishing<br />
them in the state they were left. Do we have a synoptic, that is an overall,
Introduction 3<br />
view of the texts? My own view is that we do not, and this relates only in<br />
part to the difficulty in dating the texts. Commentators on Max <strong>Weber</strong> have<br />
usually tried to come up with an overall interpretation of <strong>Weber</strong>’s many<br />
and varied writings; rationalization has often been chosen as the integrating<br />
theme. Wolfgang Schluchter has done more than anyone to show how <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
ideas developed, how they reoccur in more than one project and how<br />
they form a more or less systematic unity. 4 In The Essential <strong>Weber</strong>, I argued<br />
that my selection had a degree of coherence, not least because <strong>Weber</strong> can<br />
be seen to cross-reference the various departments of his work. Economy<br />
and Society and the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ (which forms<br />
the major part of the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion) pursue<br />
different but complementary paths.<br />
But a selection of the most important academic texts is not the same as<br />
a synoptic and synchronic account, of Nelson’s bidding. PESC had always<br />
struck me as a work of eruptive genius, difficult entirely to coordinate within<br />
the rest of <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings. In The Essential <strong>Weber</strong>, I selected only part of its<br />
final chapter, and I preferred to rely in my commentary on a later formulation<br />
(from 1915) in which <strong>Weber</strong> integrates the Protestant ethic thesis into<br />
a comparison with Confucianism. My selection also avoided the problem<br />
of what Lawrence Scaff has termed ‘<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology’, by<br />
which he meant the writings of the 1890s prior to PESC. 5 <strong>Weber</strong> wrote a<br />
small mountain of studies in the 1890s, and mainstream social science has<br />
more or less ignored it. This situation has been partly rectified by recent<br />
scholarship, not least the publication of most of his works from the 1890s<br />
by the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe. But in many ways, the output of the<br />
1890s, mostly in national-economy, raises the question of why he switched<br />
to studying Protestantism. Contrary to some commentators, <strong>Weber</strong> did not<br />
move into this field in order to develop the sociology of religion. He disliked<br />
sociology in its then current form, and he only developed his own version<br />
of it around 1910 to handle issues in comparative studies of religion and<br />
economy. Nor is it wholly convincing to argue that PESC was a response<br />
to the Marxist, materialist philosophy of history. The situation in nationaleconomy,<br />
a broad-ranging discipline at the time, was more complex than<br />
this.<br />
We now know far more about Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s life. A number of scholars<br />
have gained access to the archives and read large chunks of his correspondence,<br />
and the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe have published his letters for the<br />
period 1906–14. 6 The picture that is emerging is of a very complex and<br />
contradictory personality. He had some sort of affectual disorder in which<br />
periods of high productivity were followed by actual depression or exhaustion.<br />
He tried to compensate for these affectual disorders through medication,<br />
using quite large amounts of opiate-based drugs to calm his excitability.<br />
He developed a pattern of working hard through the autumn and winter<br />
and then convalescing at Easter and during the summer months. He was<br />
a strongly reactive person, easily provoked by a keen sense of competition
4 Introduction<br />
as to what fellow academics were producing. He was part of a golden era<br />
in the social, cultural and historical sciences, feeding off and closely connected<br />
with major figures such as Werner Sombart, Ernst Troeltsch, Georg<br />
Simmel, Alfred <strong>Weber</strong>, Ferdinand Tönnies, the Austrian economists, as well<br />
as the leading historians in ancient, medieval and modern history. He had a<br />
large and sensitive ego, and this impacted upon his work in ways that have<br />
proved quite tricky for subsequent interpreters of his work. Although he was<br />
hugely original, he tended not to indicate how his work related to previous<br />
work in the field, and it is only by paying close attention to his footnotes<br />
and sources that a picture of the ongoing debates can be reached. He never<br />
admitted to weaknesses in what were, after all, very bold hypotheses and<br />
theory construction, and he would often accuse his critics, somewhat pettily,<br />
of misunderstanding what he had written. How works originated in his<br />
mind, and what he thought might be their potential weak points, can only<br />
be surmised.<br />
We know from the memoirs of contemporaries that <strong>Weber</strong> had a terrifying<br />
ability to talk ex tempore on seemingly any subject with great authority<br />
and knowledge. 7 He was not a superman. He did take notes, and he was<br />
dependent, like any student, on libraries and interlibrary loan. But the first<br />
drafts of Economy and Society were written straight out at high speed, so<br />
fired was <strong>Weber</strong> at the time by his new ideas and project. It is not unreasonable<br />
to see him as a virtuoso who could devise an original theme and then<br />
play with it at will. PESC appeared in journal form in 1904–5. It reappeared<br />
threaded into his comparative sociology of religion sometime around 1912.<br />
Also at that time, it was merged into a more conventional account of religious<br />
and political history in a large chapter on political and hierocratic rule.<br />
It resurfaced again in an almost symmetrical comparison (of differences)<br />
with Confucianism in 1915. And, as Nelson notes, it was overlaid in the<br />
‘Author’s Introduction’ of 1920 by the larger theme of rationalism.<br />
We have to consider the possibility that the sort of careful synoptic and<br />
synchronic picture that Nelson was calling for is ruled out by the nature of<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s intellectual personality. Ernst Troeltsch, who knew <strong>Weber</strong> as well as<br />
anybody, was asked in October 1917 to provide a report on <strong>Weber</strong> for the<br />
University of Bonn – with a view to a possible appointment there. He said<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> was presently concentrating on sociology but could with great ease<br />
pick up again as a professor in national-economy. He also said that <strong>Weber</strong><br />
had two minds: one absolutist that always stood up for justice and fairness<br />
on an almost instinctual basis; the other was relativist, able to reduce any<br />
action, thought or decision to its sociological reality and underlying interest.<br />
The latter aspect was highly sharp and cynical. ‘To me, by the way,’ Troeltsch<br />
wrote, ‘he is in many ways deeply problematic and hard to fathom. I don’t<br />
know what his ultimate intellectual motives are.’ 8 Hence, <strong>Weber</strong> cannot be<br />
pinned down with complete precision. He could pursue two projects at the<br />
same time, and he was not beyond telling his publisher that his latest interest<br />
would not be a distraction from some other previously agreed contract
Introduction 5<br />
and deadline. At the least, we need a certain wariness in forming our view<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong>’s output and should not impose on it a too schoolmasterly order.<br />
He was a virtuoso with his materials and ideas: he could state a theme, invert<br />
it, introduce another tune alongside it and perhaps even become bored<br />
with it. Rainer Lepsius has noted that, in the last months of his life (before<br />
he was struck down by pneumonia), <strong>Weber</strong> was going to write on culture,<br />
Tolstoy and music – a switch of mind and of focus – after he had completed<br />
Economy and Society and the studies of the economic ethics of the world<br />
religions. 9<br />
I have taken some care in this book to register the particular characteristics<br />
of the format in which <strong>Weber</strong> wrote. He used a variety of formats<br />
– the essay, the research survey and research report, encyclopaedia entries,<br />
scholarly dissertation, the journal article and the academic public lecture.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> rarely used the book form – only his doctoral and habilitation theses<br />
and one agrarian survey appeared as books. He preferred the long essay to<br />
the book form, and it needs to be noted that many of <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘books’ are<br />
in fact collections of his essays. Some of the essays were intended by <strong>Weber</strong><br />
to form a collective entity, for example ‘The Economic Ethics of the World<br />
Religions’; other collections of his writings were put together after his death<br />
by Marianne <strong>Weber</strong>. Just to emphasize this point: only one English translation<br />
of a <strong>Weber</strong> text can be taken to be the equivalent of a book published<br />
by <strong>Weber</strong> in his lifetime – his doctoral thesis. 10 The Protestant Ethic and<br />
the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism is an essay; Economy and Society is a collection of<br />
manuscripts and corrected proofs brought together after his death.<br />
Unities, complementarities and sequencing can be drawn, but I have not<br />
tried to force these upon his writings. To take the largest of his questions:<br />
what were the causal origins of modern occidental capitalism? His career can<br />
be seen as continuously developing the question and creating new methodologies<br />
and new studies to answer it. We may have to accept that the question<br />
is unanswerable in a way that would meet agreed academic criteria of causal<br />
proof. At this point, the question becomes how does modernity develop in<br />
the west and how have similar religious-based trajectories of life conduct<br />
developed in other civilizations. The ‘how’ question is just as significant and<br />
valid as the exact specification of causal origins. My sense of <strong>Weber</strong>’s career<br />
is that he started out with a unique explanation (in Puritan asceticism) for the<br />
origins of modern capitalism, but this modulated into how occidental modernity<br />
was distinctive from other civilizations. <strong>Weber</strong> found this as intensely<br />
interesting and absorbing as his original starting point. This sense provides<br />
a trajectory to this book, but one that is not adhered to strictly. It is not assumed<br />
that <strong>Weber</strong> planned his scholarly career according to such a trajectory<br />
– quite the contrary. It is always a puzzle to figure out how <strong>Weber</strong> proceeded<br />
from one project to another. But now that there is sufficient information<br />
available about the dating and origins of these projects, it is possible to chart<br />
his movements along, around and across the line of this trajectory.<br />
Chapter 1 examines <strong>Weber</strong>’s career in national-economy in the 1890s.
6 Introduction<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> cannot be termed a sociologist in this period, but he was undertaking<br />
social survey research on contemporary agrarian conditions, which had a<br />
sociological dimension. There is a debate as to whether in this period <strong>Weber</strong><br />
was more structuralist in his account of the determination of market forces<br />
and political power over the lives of individuals and social groups. <strong>Weber</strong> is<br />
shown to express quite forcibly the role of ideas and psychological motivation<br />
in the behaviour of people in the face of determining forces of social<br />
and economic structure. Even though <strong>Weber</strong> has yet to develop an explicit<br />
sociology, the distinctive <strong>Weber</strong>ian approach to structure and action is already<br />
evident. <strong>Weber</strong>’s lecture course in theoretical national-economy from<br />
1898 is outlined. It can be established that he had both a good grasp of the<br />
historical development of capitalism as well as a theoretical understanding<br />
of capitalist exchange economies in terms of marginal utility. Also evident<br />
is a predilection to insert a cultural interface into the analysis of economic<br />
activity.<br />
Chapter 2 locates some of the major debates over capitalism that were being<br />
conducted in national-economy. Particular attention is given to Werner<br />
Sombart’s and Georg Simmel’s analysis of the origins of modern capitalism<br />
as the antecedents to <strong>Weber</strong>’s own Protestant ethic studies. <strong>Weber</strong> provided<br />
a culturally specific explanation of one section of the historical argument<br />
on the origins of modern capitalism. The wider argument was laid out in<br />
Sombart’s very large book Der moderne Kapitalismus. This in its turn was,<br />
in part, a response to Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, which treated the<br />
question of origins in a philosophical mode. First Sombart and then <strong>Weber</strong><br />
supplied causal explanations for a phenomenon that remained speculative in<br />
Simmel’s treatment. <strong>Weber</strong>’s Protestant ethic ‘essay’ was a limited intervention<br />
in a wider debate but, ever since its publication, it has been regarded as<br />
constitutive of the debate on the origins of modern capitalism. PESC provided<br />
an inspired interpretation of psychological motivation of an economically<br />
significant religious group. How economically significant that group<br />
was is not exactly specified by <strong>Weber</strong>, but the success of the essay made it a<br />
continuous topic of debate, for both <strong>Weber</strong> and his critics. Simmel’s contributions<br />
to a psychological theory of action are discussed, as is Sombart’s use<br />
of something very similar in his theorization of economic activity. <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
PESC remains within the same psychological framework. It would be some<br />
years before a version of social action was put forward by <strong>Weber</strong> (in 1913)<br />
– and then as a solution to issues raised by his comparative studies in religion<br />
and economic action.<br />
Chapter 3 offers a commentary on PESC, which concentrates on what<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> was actually doing in that study rather than what <strong>Weber</strong> says he was<br />
doing. Although it was a study that is formulated with regard to debates in<br />
national-economy over the origins of modern capitalism, it is written in a<br />
literary mode. It is not only a work of original scholarship and genius, but<br />
it also has imaginative and literary properties that lift it entirely out of the<br />
mode of social science. <strong>Weber</strong> employed not only historical and philological
Introduction 7<br />
scholarship; he used literary techniques, rhetoric and – above all – hermeneutics<br />
to make the essay such a success. It is against these last standards that<br />
it needs to be assessed.<br />
Chapter 4 notes what is effectively his retreat to methodology in the<br />
face of his own creativity. The scholasticism of Rickert’s methodology is<br />
favoured over the expansiveness of Dilthey’s project for the human sciences.<br />
I argue that PESC is more compatible with Dilthey’s ambitions than with<br />
Rickert’s prescriptive methodology. Nevertheless, <strong>Weber</strong> fashions his own<br />
methodological solutions for the cultural and human sciences in his 1904 essay<br />
on ‘Objectivity’. This essay served as a way forward in the methodological<br />
battles of the day for the relaunched Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und<br />
Sozialpolitik. It also acted as a methodological supplement to PESC, but in a<br />
number of respects that work had outstripped all methodological protocols.<br />
It attracted criticism from the outset, as it has done throughout the twentieth<br />
century. In his replies to his critics, the issue of multiple causation proved<br />
especially difficult, with <strong>Weber</strong> being heavily reliant on the ‘elective affinity’<br />
between ideal and material causes.<br />
Chapters 5 and 6 examine the huge expansion of <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings into<br />
comparative and systematic work on the economy in relation to the special<br />
sociologies of religion, law, power, the formation of communal groups and<br />
the formation of associative groups. <strong>Weber</strong> took on the editorial responsibility<br />
for the encyclopaedic and multivolume Outline of Social Economics<br />
(Grundriss der Sozialökonomik). And in the same period, broadly dated<br />
1910 to August 1914, <strong>Weber</strong> completed the first drafts of economic ethics<br />
influenced by Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Judaism. To<br />
date, nine separate volumes of the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe cover this<br />
period and, in addition, the letter volumes (Briefe) chart <strong>Weber</strong>’s voluminous<br />
and intricate correspondence with his publisher and fellow academics.<br />
The painstaking and detailed scholarship of the Gesamtausgabe editors has<br />
revealed the precise contours of <strong>Weber</strong>’s manifold studies. Chapters 5 and<br />
6 undertake a mapping of those contours and suggest that more than one<br />
map is required. Multiple causation in relation to developmental history is a<br />
continuous concern, addressed by more than one strategy. <strong>Weber</strong>’s own interpretative<br />
sociology makes its first appearance in this period, and its terminology<br />
feeds into the substantive studies and provides <strong>Weber</strong> with a reliable<br />
method when working with such a broad range of materials. The move into<br />
sociology was not wholly successful, and its role is a topic of a significant<br />
scholarly dispute. <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology of religion stands at the centre of this<br />
period. Hans Kippenberg’s scholarship and editing of the relevant MWG<br />
volume (Religiöse Gemeinschaften) demonstrates just how immersed <strong>Weber</strong><br />
was in the scientific study of religion, including the latest ethnographic field<br />
studies. I express the view that <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology of religion is both brilliant<br />
and hesitant. Even now, the problems <strong>Weber</strong> was addressing remain<br />
unresolved.<br />
Chapter 7 goes outside <strong>Weber</strong> in order to revisit the issues of multiple
8 Introduction<br />
causation that are inherent in any account that seeks to explain developmental<br />
sequences at the level of society and civilization. I reformulate the<br />
Protestant ethic thesis in terms of Harold Innis’ work on the modalities of<br />
communication and their impact on rulership and control. I also consider<br />
recent work by S.N. Eisenstadt and others on multiple modernities. I contrast<br />
this with <strong>Weber</strong>’s work as construed as an argument of the singularity<br />
of modernity. The sobering conclusion to be drawn from this is that, even<br />
though <strong>Weber</strong> had widened the terms of his argument on the origins of<br />
western (or as he called it, occidental) modernity, the research framework<br />
can be further enlarged. The hopes for a complete multifactorial analysis of<br />
the rise of the west appear unlikely to succeed.<br />
Chapter 8 takes up <strong>Weber</strong>’s special sociology of power and rulership.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s general theory of power is three-dimensional (economic, political<br />
and social status), and I compare this with recent treatments by Gianfranco<br />
Poggi and Michael Mann. Using the informative scholarship provided by Edith<br />
Hanke in the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe volume (Herrschaftssoziologie),<br />
I track the changes from the first draft of <strong>Weber</strong>’s political sociology to its<br />
final formulation in Economy and Society. This allows the emergent pattern<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology to be followed, and his choking back of developmental<br />
history in favour of classificatory types. In the final section, I ask whether<br />
political scientists should be taking more note of <strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis of leadership<br />
democracy (‘Führer-Demokratie’) in a contemporary world where<br />
presidents and prime ministers use the skills of rhetoric and demagoguery,<br />
aided by press offices and the media, to extend their power over the thick<br />
structures of democratic culture. <strong>Weber</strong> had already noted this tendency, and<br />
he took power and its control to be a constant in all rulerships, including<br />
constitutional democracies.<br />
Chapter 9 examines <strong>Weber</strong>’s long second chapter of Economy and Society,<br />
‘The Basic Sociological Types of Economising’. This represents the turning<br />
of the full circle of <strong>Weber</strong>’s ambitions, first as a national-economist in<br />
the 1890s and, finally, as a sociologist driving forwards the project of social<br />
economics. Significantly, in 1920, his contract at the University in Munich<br />
made mention of him as a sociologist as well as a national-economist. 11 The<br />
function of sociology, whose operation is laid out in great clarity in Chapter<br />
1 of Economy and Society, is to underwrite all the special fields of interest<br />
that had occupied his intellectual career: the economy, culture and religion,<br />
power and rulership, law, the orders of society, the formation of communal<br />
groups and associative groups and, alongside these, the developmental dynamics<br />
of societies and civilizations.<br />
A coda to Chapter 9 asks whether there is a <strong>Weber</strong> paradigm. As a sociologist,<br />
probably not, because <strong>Weber</strong>’s overall approach sought a multidisciplinarity<br />
in trying to formulate the grand themes of historical development.<br />
In terms of his approach to academic knowledge in the social sciences, there<br />
is something very distinctive to <strong>Weber</strong>. He insisted, with the suitable humility<br />
of a genius, on the transience of social scientific knowledge, where fifty
Introduction 9<br />
years counts as a long time. There was, for <strong>Weber</strong>, no march of history, only<br />
the endless flux and flow of social reality that could never be comprehended<br />
in its entirety. Time and viewpoints move on; knowledge immediately starts<br />
to date and its relevance fades. <strong>Weber</strong>, as Leo Strauss observed, 12 thought<br />
harder and deeper about modernity than anyone ever had before. Nobody in<br />
the future is likely to achieve such stature, for modernity is now practically<br />
taken for granted despite its manifest conflicts and problems. The <strong>Weber</strong><br />
paradigm obligates us to intervene in the flux of social reality. By making a<br />
value connection of relevance, social scientists may effect that flux of which<br />
they are a part, even though they should work under the pitiless demands<br />
of ‘objectivity’.<br />
Is <strong>Weber</strong> still relevant, then, after a hundred years, as we pass the centenary<br />
of the publication of PESC? Are his concerns still our concerns? Modernity,<br />
sometimes referred to as progress, is on the way to becoming a global<br />
destiny. Its grand themes of rationalization, disenchantment, fragmentation<br />
of value spheres, life conduct, bureaucracy, power and legitimacy, stratification,<br />
charisma and the interplay of value and instrumental rationality still remain<br />
central stage – and in ways <strong>Weber</strong> would probably not have imagined.<br />
Benjamin Nelson was prescient in calling for a <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology capable<br />
of analysing the different mixes of ‘worlds’ and ‘religion’, changing forms of<br />
power and organisation, and new patterns of living and identity formation.<br />
My approach in this book is not so much to pursue the grand themes,<br />
which have been well handled by other distinguished and eloquent interpretators<br />
– Karl Löwith, Reinhard Bendix, Guenther Roth, Julien Freund, Wolfgang<br />
Schluchter, Wilhelm Hennis, and Wolfgang J. Mommsen – as rather a<br />
close examination of the texts and their interrelation. In this, I sometimes<br />
fail to provide the synoptic, or characterizing, account, and I also resist the<br />
temptation to finish or round off <strong>Weber</strong>’s theories for him. Imposing a systematic<br />
account on <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings misses I think the very real difficulties<br />
he faced, difficulties inherent in his understanding of the project of social<br />
science. Likewise it can be a mistake to assume that <strong>Weber</strong> solved all the<br />
theoretical and methodological issues he posed in the pursuit of his grand,<br />
as well as his smaller scale, research problems. <strong>Weber</strong> was very proficient<br />
in analysing the claims of warring schools – of historicism, marginalism,<br />
materialism, monism, psychologism, the place of free will – and this is where<br />
we take our cues from him as a classic thinker. But he rarely saw the need<br />
to spell out his treatments of complex problems as a set of explicit methods.<br />
This applies both to his survey work and his ‘Verstehende’ work. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
drew no great distinction between those two modes of doing social research,<br />
and he certainly would not have designated one as quantitative and the other<br />
as qualitative – each with their own battery of methods and issues.<br />
Hence I am prepared to accept that <strong>Weber</strong> came up with brilliant solutions<br />
to research problems but without any fanfare of methodological reflection;<br />
likewise that there were difficulties he did not solve, or which he moved<br />
around trying different solutions. Also a close examination underlines the
10 Introduction<br />
sheer diversity and range of social science problems and issues he engaged<br />
with. Interpretators quite rightly gloss the grand <strong>Weber</strong>ian themes that are<br />
common to his various research issues, but <strong>Weber</strong>’s involvement in the specifics<br />
of evidence, sources, theories, presentation of findings, and their implications<br />
should also be accorded its very large due. The world is complex and<br />
we aspire to conceptual order – these are two sides of the <strong>Weber</strong>ian coin.
1 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian<br />
sociology, revisited<br />
Lawrence Scaff, in a path-breaking article some twenty years ago, asked how<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s works prior to the Protestant ethic studies of 1904–5 were to be<br />
classified. 1 The Protestant ethic studies belonged to an interpretative sociological<br />
approach; the works before that, from the 1890s, had the character<br />
of a marxisant political economy, dealing as they did with issues of class,<br />
power, and societal and economic change. I revisit this argument, bringing<br />
in more information about the decade of the 1890s, about which we now<br />
know far more. I shall also alter the terms of the argument. <strong>Weber</strong> was a<br />
national-economist in the 1890s, and this has to be investigated in some<br />
detail to find out what was distinctively <strong>Weber</strong>ian in his approach, which<br />
was not a form of Marxist sociology by another name. I do not follow the<br />
usual consensus of opinion that the Protestant ethic studies belonged to sociology.<br />
The best description of them is descriptive psychology being applied<br />
to national-economy. And, finally, <strong>Weber</strong> did not become a sociologist until<br />
around 1910. Prior to that, he regarded sociology as suspect, whose overall<br />
approach was either positivist or organicist – both completely untenable positions<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong>. He fashioned a sociology to his own needs in pursuit of his<br />
universal historical comparative studies. Across all these phases of activity,<br />
there is a constant concern with the meanings, values and culture, an area<br />
that is one of the hardest parts of the social, historical and cultural sciences<br />
to handle proficiently.<br />
At the start of the article, Scaff broaches a subject that goes to the heart of<br />
sociological theory, especially today. There appear to be two sociologies in<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s work. One is structuralist and determinist and is often referred to as<br />
belonging to <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘substantive’ work: ‘one in which status groups, social<br />
classes, patterns of domination, and material interests define the analytic<br />
core’. 2 Bryan Turner has portrayed this side of <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology as Marxist:<br />
. . . that <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology anticipates much that has been central to<br />
the empirical and theoretical focus of modern Marxism. The analysis<br />
of the state, legal fetishism, the separation of ownership and control,
12 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
bureaucratic management, de-skilling, ethnic identity, professions and<br />
secularisations as crucial concerns of neo-Marxism are all pre-figured in<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis of rational capitalism. 3<br />
One initial comment on this is that these were straightforwardly <strong>Weber</strong>ian<br />
themes rather than neo-Marxist ones. But Turner also makes for him<br />
the central point that <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology is deterministic in the sense that the<br />
individual’s fate or destiny is decided irrespective of his or her intentions<br />
and ambitions. ‘The social contexts which <strong>Weber</strong> studies have a logic or fate<br />
undermining the meaningful actions of individuals.’ 4<br />
The ‘other’ sociology in <strong>Weber</strong> is the methodology of ‘Verstehen’, that<br />
sociologists have to understand the motivations and values and the context<br />
of meaning in which the individual is placed. Bryan Turner was writing at<br />
a time when a younger generation of sociologists interpreted social action<br />
theory as the theoretical underpinning of the emancipatory attempt to gain<br />
control of the world and one’s own destiny. The cue to this was Alan Dawe’s<br />
essay ‘The Two Sociologies’, which argued that the theme of control in sociology<br />
should not be seen as a thing external to the individual, belonging to an<br />
ideology of order and pertaining to the structures of economic and political<br />
power. Instead, control should belong to the autonomous, acting individual<br />
who was the real ‘unit’ around which sociology should be framed. 5 The high<br />
point of this movement was that part of Anthony Giddens’ sociology which<br />
framed the semi-autonomous individual within the social world as a reflexive<br />
subject capable of understanding the world and contributing to the social<br />
world and, accordingly, being empowered. 6 Neo-Marxism registered the<br />
solidity of structures of power and saw Giddens’ insistence on the plasticity<br />
of the social world as naïve. In respect of <strong>Weber</strong>, Turner objected to what he<br />
took to be the contradiction of a ‘verstehende’ sociology that privileged the<br />
social actor as autonomous and the doom-laden stress <strong>Weber</strong> also placed on<br />
the giganticism of modern, high capitalism (which was reaching its zenith<br />
in <strong>Weber</strong>’s day). In France, as Catherine Colliot-Thélène notes, Raymond<br />
Aron and Julien Freund advanced <strong>Weber</strong> as a theorist of social action in<br />
opposition to the Marxist sociology of structures. 7 This was, and still is, a<br />
classic debate. Something of the same tensions, we will shortly see, entered<br />
into the young <strong>Weber</strong>, who belonged to an academic generation who pushed<br />
hard against the authoritarian political and social order imposed by an older<br />
generation of nation builders.<br />
Turner’s objections can also be framed in purely <strong>Weber</strong>ian terminology<br />
without drawing on the language of neo-Marxism. In his book, Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
and the Sociology of Culture, Ralph Schroeder places the analysis of culture<br />
at the centre of <strong>Weber</strong>’s concerns. Culture belongs to a macro level of analysis,<br />
and the individual faces culture as ‘an inescapable fate’, as the expression<br />
of ideas in religious beliefs or in western rationalism. <strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis of<br />
culture is built around the concept of worldviews that have an inner logic<br />
and consistency of their own. Belief systems have a logic of change through<br />
differentiation, from the relative simplicity of magic to the complexity of
<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 13<br />
religion. At the religious stage, the individual is subdivided into autonomous<br />
life orders (politics, religion, economy, art), and this differentiation into orders<br />
and value spheres continues into modernity where science, knowledge<br />
and technology form another autonomous realm. Each of these life orders,<br />
having their own system of values, contributes to the fragmentary nature<br />
of modernity. Ideas can change the course of history, but only as a force as<br />
a collective entity. Human beings may be cultural beings, but culture exists<br />
as a force beyond and outside the individual. Hence, what is required in its<br />
analysis is not <strong>Weber</strong>’s methodological advice on interpretative sociology,<br />
but the use of his substantive high-level concepts such as worldviews, life<br />
spheres, ideas as switchmen, routinization, rationalization. Schroeder writes,<br />
‘although is has been suggested that <strong>Weber</strong> should be seen as a theorist of<br />
social action (Kalberg, 1985a: 895), <strong>Weber</strong> rarely uses these concepts or an<br />
action-oriented approach in his substantive writings’. 8<br />
There is an obvious problem here. It is not sociologists who might have<br />
‘suggested’ the theory of social action, it was <strong>Weber</strong> who insisted upon it. He<br />
developed it as a methodology as he moved away from case study historically<br />
specific subjects into universal history. I see the chronology of the development<br />
of sociology by <strong>Weber</strong> somewhat differently from Scaff, but agree with<br />
his statement affirming the integral role of sociology with the ‘substantive’<br />
studies. ‘Far from establishing the “autonomy” of sociology, <strong>Weber</strong>’s approach<br />
seems to be self-consciously embedded within a set of assumptions<br />
about the nature of history, society, and human understanding.’ 9 Turning to<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s writings in the 1890s, we encounter a national-economist dealing<br />
with issues of economic transformation (the industrialization of German society,<br />
the flight from the land into the cities and the decline of artisanal craft<br />
enterprises in favour of the large factory and mass production), of a changing<br />
distribution of power and social stratification, and Germany’s claim to be<br />
a great power within the international order. These were real and pressing<br />
issues, and they could be treated through a ‘realist’ analysis of power and<br />
interests. <strong>Weber</strong> did not shy away from these issues; indeed, he had a rather<br />
uncontrolled tendency to spell out the issues, vociferously and uncompromisingly,<br />
to his readers and audiences. But at the same time, he stressed the<br />
role of values and ideas in the mighty processes under way, and it is in the<br />
writings of the 1890s that we see him grappling with causation as capable of<br />
handling both material and ideal causes. I provide methodological detail of<br />
these studies, because <strong>Weber</strong>’s views on causation are still very much open to<br />
debate, as indeed is the issue itself. His activities as an academic researcher<br />
and as engaged social policy activist form an important strand in the prehistory<br />
of the Protestant ethic studies of 1904–5.<br />
The agrarian question<br />
The agrarian question was a massive social policy and political issue in Germany<br />
in the 1890s. German unification had been achieved in 1871, and<br />
it kick-started a process of rapid industrialization and urbanization – at a
14 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
rate of change not dissimilar to that being experienced by China today. The<br />
young <strong>Weber</strong> (he was 28 at the time) was commissioned to conduct a study<br />
of a facet of this enormous transformation. In many provinces of the German<br />
Reich, 10 farm labourers were deserting the farms and their villages either<br />
to look for work in the new factories and towns or to emigrate to North<br />
America. The profitability of domestic farming had declined with the rise<br />
of Germany as an industrial, trading nation able to afford the import of<br />
cheaper foreign food, in particular wheat and cereals. Production of those<br />
staples had become far more economic in North America and Russia, and<br />
grain could be bought more cheaply on world markets than domestically.<br />
With the sharp drop in the price of grain (in Prussia, a ton of wheat priced at<br />
232 marks and had fallen to 174 marks in 1890), farmers experienced a loss<br />
of profitability, and farmworkers saw a reduction in their living standards<br />
and wages. 11<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> was approached by Germany’s leading social policy organization,<br />
the Verein für Sozialpolitik, to conduct a study of farming in the regions east<br />
of the Elbe (which have now become the territory of Poland and Russia).<br />
The Verein für Sozialpolitik was set up by Gustav Schmoller in the 1870s<br />
in order to monitor and investigate the social consequences of rapid industrialization<br />
and urbanization. German business, as well as the political<br />
class, was pretty much indifferent to the forces of dislocation unleashed by<br />
Germany’s economic transformation. But early in the 1880s, the political<br />
class signalled their concerns, not least in face of the growth of a radical<br />
working-class political party, the Social Democrats. Schmoller was a leading<br />
national-economist and economic historian at the University of Berlin, and<br />
he was successful in forming links between policy scientists and economists<br />
and government on questions of social and economic policy. His policy association<br />
– he was its founder and leader – stood out against classical British<br />
political economy and its belief in the free market. The Verein was very much<br />
a ‘third way’ organization. It was against unregulated competition in the<br />
domestic and world economy, and it was against working-class movements<br />
that sought a socialist transformation in the conditions of their existence.<br />
Government in the German Reich was strong, conservative and not unafraid<br />
of regulating many aspects of society and its development from above. 12<br />
Schmoller positioned the Verein as a source of evidence-based policy advice<br />
but with a bias towards paternalism. A conservative state would legislate for<br />
small improvements in living, social and legal conditions for the mass of the<br />
population.<br />
The Verein itself was something of a top-down organization. In September<br />
1890, its working committee under Schmoller had decided that three issues<br />
would be investigated: the condition of the agricultural worker in the<br />
German Empire; the question of migration from the countryside; and trade<br />
policy. <strong>Weber</strong> was allocated the provinces east of the Elbe for study – East<br />
and West Prussia, Pomerania, Posnia, Silesia, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg<br />
and the duchy of Lauenburg. A subcommittee of the Verein had designed
<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 15<br />
two questionnaires. The aims of the survey (‘Enquete’) were to gather exact<br />
data on the forms of payment relationships and the developments in the<br />
social and cultural conditions of the agricultural worker. Over and beyond<br />
these goals there was a concern about the consequences of the loss of profitability<br />
of farming, debt and the shortage of farmworkers. The first questionnaire,<br />
which gathered quantitative data on prices, wages, crop areas, etc.,<br />
was sent out in December 1891 to 3,180 landowners/farmers. The second,<br />
which asked for more descriptive reports, was sent out in February 1892 to<br />
562 ‘key informants’ (‘Generalberichterstatter’). <strong>Weber</strong> started work on the<br />
analysis of the questionnaires in the middle of February 1892, and he was<br />
given six months to complete his report, ready in time for a debate at the<br />
general meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik that was to take place that<br />
same autumn. 13<br />
This was a massive empirical undertaking on <strong>Weber</strong>’s part, and it resulted<br />
in an 800-page report. <strong>Weber</strong> received back 650 completed questionnaires<br />
from the farmowners in his regions. From these, he tabulated the data for<br />
each area within each region. More specifically, to give an idea just how<br />
detailed the research was, he carried out the following cross-tabulations:<br />
length of the working day for each season for male workers, their wives,<br />
the children and servants tabulated against each county (‘Kreis’) in a region;<br />
wages and payment in kind for each type of farm work (and the extent of<br />
each sort of farm work, e.g. wheat, root crops, cows, etc.) tabulated against<br />
county; income and yield for each sort of farm work against county; the<br />
proportionality of wages to payment in kind for each type of farmworker;<br />
annualized wages for farmworkers and their wives against county. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
then had to collect data on seasonal migratory labour. Here, he tabulated<br />
the duration of seasonal work, its purpose on the farm, place of origin of the<br />
seasonal workers, their wages and costs, the daily wages of domestic workers<br />
and their destination as migrants off the land – all this tabulated against<br />
county. Finally, he provided a table of the annual costs of the independent<br />
farmworker (the ‘Instmann’) – cost of seed, housing, fuel, rent, consumption,<br />
payments to farmworkers, fodder for livestock, wages for domestic maids.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> repeated the same tabulations for each of the eight provinces and<br />
their dozen or so counties, providing descriptive material for each category<br />
of data. Summaries were given for each province, and an overall summary<br />
was provided in the final chapter.<br />
The Verein für Sozialpolitik would collect the reports from the other German<br />
provinces. The reports would be debated at the Verein’s annual meeting,<br />
and a series of conclusions and recommendations would be made and<br />
publicized, not least to the government. 14 From the standpoint of nationaleconomy<br />
as a policy science, the Verein tended towards an inductive empiricism<br />
whereby the data would speak for itself. 15 Wages, prices, migration and<br />
emigration, types of agricultural production – all of this would tell its own<br />
story. But as any competent methods student will point out, data have to be<br />
interpreted, and it is through the process of interpretation that the policy
16 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
recommendations are arrived at. What was happening to Prussia farming<br />
was the same fraught transformation that affects so much of agriculture in<br />
the developing world today. And it becomes a highly political question: what<br />
to do about the ‘facts’ when they become known. Should governments put<br />
in place measures to support the small farmer in order to keep him, his<br />
family and village community on the land, should governments place import<br />
duties on cheap food imported from the world market, should governments<br />
allow the ‘natural and inevitable’ forces of global markets to work their way<br />
through their society? These are not either/or choices, for different social<br />
groups will take opposed positions on the question.<br />
Germany was an industrializing country, and cheap imported food materials<br />
were clearly to the benefit of the industrial sector. Industry also benefited<br />
greatly from the flow of migrants into the towns from the land as a source<br />
of cheap labour. 16 The landowners agitated successfully for import duties on<br />
foreign grain and cereal, in order to prop up the failing profitability of their<br />
farms (that agriculturally were no match for the grain from the prairies of<br />
North America and the Ukraine). In <strong>Weber</strong>’s areas, the landowners (the socalled<br />
‘Junkers’) formed the bedrock of the Prussian kingdom and, because<br />
of peculiarities in the German imperial constitution (of 1871), they were the<br />
predominant elite in the political system. The German Chancellor at that<br />
time, Caprivi, maintained import duties, although he did reduce them somewhat<br />
from the level at which his more conservative predecessor, Bismarck,<br />
had fixed them.<br />
Leaving aside the linkage between the local and the national, which greatly<br />
interested him, <strong>Weber</strong>’s interpretation and description of his data shows<br />
him to be an intuitive sociologist. There are a number of oppositions he<br />
draws in making the data ‘come alive’, sociologically speaking. Conditions<br />
and behaviour, objective and subjective factors, the situation of individuals<br />
and groups and their psychology together form two axes of what could be<br />
termed his ‘immanent’ sociology. These axes may be labelled ‘exterior’ and<br />
‘interior’ factors or causes.<br />
In his opening remarks to the report (‘The position of the farm worker in<br />
Germany East of the Elbe’), <strong>Weber</strong> states that nothing less than a revolution<br />
in social structure is involved in transformations which have been going on<br />
for decades and that his report will shed light on the ‘stage of development’<br />
reached so far. What has to be grasped, says <strong>Weber</strong>, is the direction these<br />
changes are moving towards. 17 The old traditional ways of farming and the<br />
organization of labour are being replaced by a new ‘employment regime’<br />
based on capitalistic wage labour. While the material, or objective, circumstances<br />
of the farmworker can be represented by the survey data, <strong>Weber</strong> also<br />
argues that it is crucial to include the subjective factors at work – how the<br />
various categories of farmworkers view their prospects. Data on fluctuations<br />
in the price of corn or cattle are insufficient to explain the interests of the<br />
workforce.
<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 17<br />
It is impermissible to leave out of consideration the subjective dimension<br />
and this is very much the case when one attempts to investigate the<br />
consequences which follow or are produced by the visible transformation<br />
of the social class structure, the reciprocal relationship between the<br />
landowner and workforce and for the position of the latter in the social<br />
body of the nation. It does not so much concern the actual level of the<br />
worker’s income as whether it is possible to pursue an ordered economic<br />
way of life (‘geordnete Wirtschaftsführung’), whether the worker<br />
and employer subjectively regard each other – justifiably or not – in a<br />
favourable light or not, and so which tendencies inhere in the subjective<br />
wishes or interests of both parties, since it is on these that the further<br />
line of development in the future depends. 18<br />
In the next section of his report, <strong>Weber</strong> demonstrates how subjective factors<br />
are implicated in the structural conditions of what he terms the employment<br />
regime (‘Arbeitsverfassung’). 19 Farm labour in the Prussian regions had<br />
yet to move over to unregulated ‘free’ wage labour, where the price of labour<br />
was dictated by market conditions. Peasant serfdom had only been abolished<br />
as late as 1807 in Germany, and there were still semi-servile survivals,<br />
especially in Prussia. The main categories of farmworkers were in fact, as<br />
well as in law, employed as servants. <strong>Weber</strong>’s report starts by describing the<br />
somewhat peculiar arrangements that landowners were using, even in the<br />
1890s. Unmarried workers, male as well as female, were placed on a fixed<br />
wage contract for the year and, in addition, they were given fixed shares in<br />
the cultivation of agricultural produce. Above them was another class of<br />
servants who were married, employed their family on the farms and hired<br />
casual labourers. They were also on a yearly contract, but both the money<br />
component and their right to share in the produce were variable not fixed.<br />
These servants were termed ‘Instleute’. They were given housing, land, livestock,<br />
grazing rights in addition to a share in the main crop (usually corn).<br />
Seen from the economic point of view, they were part of a cooperative venture,<br />
but one in which the landowner had the largest share. A good harvest,<br />
good weather, high prices for agricultural produce were in the joint interest<br />
of owner and ‘Instleute’. Effectively, the landowners had subcontracted a<br />
large part of the farming to the ‘Instleute’ on a cooperative basis. But on the<br />
legal, social and status level, the ‘Instleute’ were very much inferior to the<br />
Junker landowner.<br />
In his report, and in subsequent follow-up studies, <strong>Weber</strong> defended this<br />
paternalist set-up. Whether he should have defended the situation, as a good<br />
bourgeois, is another matter. But he goes out of his way, one might say<br />
sociologically, to underline what gave stability to an employment regime that<br />
was beginning to dissolve. ‘The estate owner (‘Gutsherr’) was not a normal<br />
employer, but a political autocrat who ruled over the worker.’ 20 The strong<br />
patriarchal leadership is tolerated because it corresponds to the economic
18 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
basis of relationships. 21 The old patriarchalism provided a form of security<br />
and limited independence for the settled farm tenant. ‘. . . the continuity of<br />
the patriarchal organisation and the greater flexibility of the opposed relations<br />
between employer and employee preserve quite effectively the living<br />
standards of the worker and the community of interest’. 22<br />
In order to explain his position, <strong>Weber</strong> reaches deep into the psychological<br />
underpinnings of what he sees as a shared community, where he gives<br />
an explanatory role to the motivation of the farmworker. Under the old<br />
patriarchal estate system, the estate owner could claim a conservative legitimacy<br />
by being seen ‘as a born representative of the interests of his people’. 23<br />
Paternalism worked as a managerial ideology and as a form of cooperative<br />
enterprise. The breakdown of this system came with the move to a fully<br />
capitalistic employment regime. The basic problem with year-long contractual<br />
labour was the unevenness of the need for labour power (‘Arbeitskraft’).<br />
The seasonal high points of demand were planting and harvesting but, prior<br />
to the introduction of steam threshing machines, the corn was threshed by<br />
hand over the long winter months. In addition, sugar beet and root crops<br />
were introduced on the best, most fertile land as a new cash crop, i.e. they<br />
were grown so that it could all be sold on the market by the landowning<br />
farmer alone. Root crops required intensive labour but only at two points in<br />
the year (planting and harvesting). 24 A capitalistic employment regime that<br />
used wages alone was far more favourable to the economic interests of the<br />
Junkers. If they ended their servant labour contracts with the ‘Instleute’, the<br />
Junker landowners could then concentrate on the more profitable root crops<br />
and employ seasonal casual labour at low prices. The casual workers came<br />
across the border from Poland and the Ukraine.<br />
But with the move to a fully waged system of labour, the tenants lost their<br />
security and the community of interest was broken. <strong>Weber</strong> comments that<br />
‘the patriarchal system is completely hopeless in terms of popular psychology’.<br />
There was no incentive, psychologically or economically, to remain<br />
on the old estates. Motivation also operated as a pull factor, drawing the<br />
farmworkers into the towns. <strong>Weber</strong>, in the conclusion of his study, observed<br />
that it was not the issue of wage levels alone that drove the farmworker off<br />
the land (although this was a factor as seasonal labour had undercut the<br />
previous standard of living of the German farmworker). In the town, the<br />
farm ‘servant’ would be free from the everyday paternal authority of the<br />
estate owner, he and she would have their own independence as a free wage<br />
labourer. <strong>Weber</strong> is quite expressive about this. He calls it ‘the pure psychological<br />
magic of “freedom” ’. 25<br />
Summarizing this section, then, <strong>Weber</strong> is receptive to different levels of<br />
explanation. As a national-economist, he analyses the movement in food<br />
prices and its effects on the income of farm labourers. His depiction of the<br />
situation of the labourer involves the sociological analysis of cooperative<br />
interest and patriarchal authority, and the dissolution of those social and<br />
economic bonds by new labour market practices. And, if prices and mar-
<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 19<br />
kets represent objective factors, for <strong>Weber</strong>, the subjective, motivational or<br />
psychological factors have to be given equal attention if one is to assess the<br />
future direction of developments.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s report was immediately recognized as authoritative and insightful<br />
as well as breaking new ground in research on the agrarian question.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> used his empirical study and analysis to great effect in the political<br />
and policy debates which followed on the publication of the report at the<br />
end of 1892. <strong>Weber</strong>’s own political position, which has been expounded in<br />
detail elsewhere, 26 argued for maintaining a German agricultural workforce<br />
on the grounds that the eastern borders would only be secure with a settled<br />
German workforce and not a Polish migratory one. Given that the psychological<br />
and motivational grounds for the joint community of ‘Instleute’ and<br />
Junker were no longer viable, farmland should be made available by the<br />
government for small German farmers. For a bourgeois academic, <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
political position was somewhat eccentric and hardly progressive. In terms<br />
of agrarian development, sounder arguments could have been made to allow<br />
the inevitable migration to the west – both of German farmers to the towns<br />
and of farmworkers from central Europe to Prussia. This would have optimized<br />
the development of central Europe, which was then very backward,<br />
and have been in the interests of both landowners and dissatisfied German<br />
farmworkers.<br />
The national-economist<br />
It is still not generally understood just how immersed <strong>Weber</strong> was in national-economy.<br />
Overall, there has been a tendency to regard the <strong>Weber</strong> of<br />
the 1890s as an emergent sociologist who was informed about economics<br />
rather than an economist in his own right who later developed sociological<br />
interests. His professorial post was in national-economy, first at Freiburg and<br />
then at Heidelberg, and that is what he principally lectured on. His work on<br />
the agrarian conditions in the east of Germany was done as an economist,<br />
even though we can see the signs of social researcher in those studies. In<br />
addition, he became an expert on the stock exchanges, or bourses as they<br />
were called. An impression has been formed that, because <strong>Weber</strong> trained as a<br />
legal historian, his ‘switch’ into national-economy, when he took up a chair<br />
in that subject at Freiburg in 1894 at the age of 30, was artificial. Also, his<br />
immense reputation as a sociologist has provided the lazy assumption that he<br />
was never properly an economist.<br />
But even in his postdoctoral work at Berlin, prior to his appointment at<br />
Freiburg, law, economy and capitalism in the ancient world had become<br />
the focus of his interests. His habilitation thesis, published in 1891, was<br />
entitled ‘Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private<br />
Law’. 27 Wolfgang Mommsen comments that, while the thesis was intended<br />
as an analysis of the Roman legal system and its impact upon the agrarian<br />
economy, it soon escaped this narrow framework. What <strong>Weber</strong> discovered
20 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
in his research was that ‘aided by the legal system there had emerged a fullfledged<br />
system of agrarian capitalism’. Mommsen describes <strong>Weber</strong>’s turn<br />
towards the analysis of capitalism as follows:<br />
Against the backcloth of a traditional economy, <strong>Weber</strong> described the<br />
emergence, the dominance and, eventually, the decline of what he described<br />
as a fully developed agrarian capitalism. The progressive spread<br />
of the principle of unconditional ‘freedom of disposal of land ownership<br />
and its total economic mobilisation’ 28 was, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s view, the key<br />
factor that more than anything had made possible the rise of a largescale<br />
agrarian capitalism. Indeed, by abolishing all restrictions on the<br />
acquisition and the marketing of land, there occurred, as <strong>Weber</strong> put<br />
it, ‘the most unlimited capitalism in land property that the world ever<br />
has seen’. 29 The gradual implementation of the principle of unrestricted<br />
ownership of land during the Roman Republic was the backbone of a<br />
market economy which had made possible the rise of Rome to a huge<br />
political and commercial empire. According to <strong>Weber</strong>, the traditional<br />
communal structures as well as the relatively independent position of the<br />
smaller farmers were totally destroyed in favour of an agrarian economy<br />
dominated by large-scale estates. 30<br />
It would be wrong to extend the concept of the market economy beyond<br />
the market for land. That market arose from the specific circumstances of a<br />
militarized empire, expanding its borders through conquest. With conquest<br />
came a large supply of slaves whose labour was used by the estate owners.<br />
This slave labour displaced the small independent farmer who had previously<br />
been the key social stratum in the rise of Rome as a Mediterranean great<br />
power. Changes in law not only permitted the rise of agrarian capitalism,<br />
they also dispossessed an economic class of farmers. This transformation<br />
was followed by slow decline as the supply of slaves ceased, as the empire<br />
reached the limits of its military capability.<br />
the system of agrarian capitalism gradually withered away and eventually<br />
the free market economy was supplanted by the ‘Kolonat’. This<br />
was a system of huge landed estates that became self-sufficient economic<br />
units and no longer produced for the market. This eventually led to the<br />
destruction of the essential preconditions for dynamic economic growth<br />
and free market exchange. In the end agrarian capitalism gave way to<br />
a stagnant economic order that foreshadowed the economic conditions<br />
during the early Middle Ages. 31<br />
While it is reasonable to see <strong>Weber</strong>’s expertise as lying in the field of legal<br />
history, it was an approach sensitive to the forms of capitalism. He asked the<br />
question, notes Mommsen: ‘what consequences do legal regulations have<br />
on the economy? In the background of this work we discover the contours
<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 21<br />
of a specific concept of world history, namely the recurrent rise and fall of<br />
world civilisations respectively caused by specific economic and/or cultural<br />
conditions.’<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s move to Freiburg as a professor of national-economy should<br />
therefore be seen as justified by his expertise in agrarian economics, first<br />
those of the ancient world and, second, the contemporary crisis in agriculture<br />
east of the Elbe. It should also be added that <strong>Weber</strong> had expertise in<br />
the medieval economy, again approaching the subject from the discipline of<br />
legal history. His doctoral dissertation and research was published in 1891<br />
and entitled ‘The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages’.<br />
Its subject matter was the development of medieval trading partnerships in<br />
northern Italy. <strong>Weber</strong>’s research problem was to explain how investment<br />
for overseas trading expeditions could be mustered and how the risks and<br />
returns of these expeditions were to be shared. Modern company law, which<br />
was created in the nineteenth century, solved this problem through the legal<br />
device of the limited liability company. This separated the risk of bankruptcy<br />
from the individual investors who were no longer made personally liable,<br />
to the complete extent of their wealth, for the debts of a failed company. It<br />
then became more attractive for investors to risk their money by investing<br />
in such legally constituted companies. What <strong>Weber</strong> was seeking to explain<br />
was how, in the context of the medieval economy, investment funds could<br />
be assembled in the first place for an overseas venture when there were few<br />
laws to regulate such transactions. Using the records of trading partnerships<br />
and analysing the laws and regulations available and specially developed,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> explained the rules according to which such partnerships operated.<br />
Lutz Kaelber, who has recently translated <strong>Weber</strong>’s dissertation publication<br />
into English, argues that this research fed into PESC, Economy and Society<br />
and the General Economic History. 32<br />
As a national-economist, <strong>Weber</strong> developed specialist expertise on the<br />
stock exchanges during the mid-1890s. He lectured publicly on the subject,<br />
he wrote pamphlets, he served on a government commission on the workings<br />
of the stock exchange, and he wrote several long academic treatises<br />
on the subject. It was a very technical and very controversial area. Public<br />
concern centred on the speculative opportunities of the exchanges. Knut<br />
Borchardt writes, ‘Particularly intensive was discussion relating to the casino-like<br />
qualities of the bourse (Börsenspiel). This was principally related<br />
to the question of whether obligations arising from trades which did not<br />
conclude with the delivery of and payment for securities or commodities,<br />
but simply balanced the difference between an agreed future price and the<br />
price actually prevailing in the exchange on the delivery date . . .’. This was<br />
seen as gambling on the difference in prices. Borchardt makes the point<br />
that <strong>Weber</strong> was relatively well equipped to write on the subject because of<br />
his legal training. The stock exchange had not yet become a topic within<br />
economics. Instead, it was lawyers who contributed to the growing literature<br />
‘concerning inadequate regulation of brokers (Makler), the numerous abuses
22 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
of business on account (Kommissionsgeschäft), and the problems relating to<br />
those investing in securities’. 33<br />
Reactionary agrarian interests objected to the development of futures in<br />
grains being traded on the stock exchanges. They thought this contributed<br />
to the lowering of cereal prices through opening the market to international<br />
trade. Their views were successful when the German parliament (‘Reichstag’)<br />
passed a new Bourse Law in June 1896 forbidding the trading in futures. The<br />
new law undermined the work of the Bourse Commission on which <strong>Weber</strong><br />
was sitting. <strong>Weber</strong> was bitter about this result, for he had consistently argued<br />
that Germany could not afford to turn its back on world markets in favour<br />
of agricultural protectionism. ‘The representatives of the agrarian interest<br />
needed the decision for their masses of thickheaded votes, “ut aliquid factum<br />
videatur” (“in order to show something was being done”). A few of them<br />
even believed in the particularly detrimental character of futures trading<br />
itself . . .’. 34<br />
Borchardt queries whether <strong>Weber</strong> should be seen in this period exclusively<br />
as an economist, which is a viewpoint he attributes to Wilhelm Hennis,<br />
Keith Tribe and Heino Nau. He observes that, while <strong>Weber</strong>’s appointment<br />
in Freiburg was Professor of Economics and Public Finance, he also offered<br />
classes in commercial law and lectures in the history of German law. Borchardt’s<br />
point is well made and needs to be retained. Today, we would say<br />
that <strong>Weber</strong> was interdisciplinary, but this is only because of the differentiation<br />
of the specialist academic knowledge into the separate disciplines of<br />
law, economics, philosophy, sociology, politics and so on. <strong>Weber</strong>’s appointment<br />
in Freiburg was in the Faculty of Philosophy, as was his appointment<br />
in Heidelberg in 1898. But it would not have seemed too strange – perhaps<br />
maybe energetic – to offer a course in the Faculty of Law. In the historical approach<br />
to both law and economics, which was then dominant, the interface<br />
of law and economy received considerable attention, not least by <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
own teacher in Berlin, Levin Goldschmidt. The ability to trade is dependent<br />
on laws and conventions. Who then decides on those laws and regulations?<br />
In The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages, <strong>Weber</strong> said,<br />
in respect of the trading societies, it was not clear ‘how in each case the law<br />
had been formed – whether it involved entirely new legal thinking springing<br />
from the burgeoning needs of the day, finding general acceptance through<br />
transformation onto mercantile usage, and from thence into mercantile customary<br />
law’. 35 Whether laws are created by merchants for their own use, or<br />
law and regulation are created autonomously of economic interest groups<br />
remains a central issue, both historically and today. The economic historian<br />
Hinnerk Bruhns has recently argued that this forms the basis of a theory of<br />
regulation in <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings and is to be found in Economy and Society. 36<br />
In addition, <strong>Weber</strong> gave a lecture course on national-economy from 1894<br />
to 1898, and his reading list and exposition of one section of the course have<br />
been published. The full course is to be published shortly by the Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
Gesamtausgabe, so what we can say about the bits published so far should
<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 23<br />
probably be placed in the provisional category awaiting fuller confirmation.<br />
37 <strong>Weber</strong> provided his students with a structured reading list. Removing<br />
the references from this produces the following syllabus outline.<br />
Title: Outline of lectures on general (‘theoretical’) economics<br />
Introduction<br />
§ 1. Problems and methods of theoretical national-economy.<br />
Book 1. The conceptual foundations of economic theory<br />
(‘Volkswirtschaftslehre’)<br />
§ 2. The economy (‘Wirtschaft’) and its elementary forms<br />
(‘Erscheinungen’).<br />
§ 3. The national-economy (‘Volkswirtschaft’) and its elementary forms.<br />
Book 2. The natural foundations of the economy<br />
§ 4. The natural determinants of the economy.<br />
§ 5. Population (‘Bevölkerung’).<br />
§ 6. The biological and anthropological foundations of society.<br />
§ 7. The economy in its relation to other cultural forms in particular law<br />
and state.<br />
Book 3. The historical foundations of the national-economy<br />
§ 8. The typical prestages of the national-economy.<br />
§ 9. The economic development of the coastal civilization of antiquity.<br />
§ 10. The agrarian foundations of the medieval inland civilization.<br />
§ 11. The urban economy and the origin of modern forms of enterprise.<br />
§ 12. The origination of the national-economy (‘Volkswirtschaft’)<br />
Book 4. The stages of development of economic theory<br />
§ 13. Economic science until the creation of liberal economic theory.<br />
§ 14. The economic theory of the so-called classical national-economy<br />
(‘Nationalökonomie’).<br />
§ 15. The theoretical bases of scientific socialism.<br />
Book 5. The theoretical analysis of the modern exchange economy<br />
§ 16. Production and its theoretical problems.<br />
§ 17. Exchange and its theoretical problems.<br />
§ 18. Distribution and consumption and their theoretical problems.
24 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
§ 19. The regulating principles and forms of organization of want satisfaction<br />
(‘Bedarfsdeckung’) in terms of trade and enterprise and their functions<br />
and developmental tendencies.<br />
Book 6. The development and analysis of economic and social<br />
ideals<br />
§ 20. (No rubric provided, only three references.)<br />
Going through <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘Books’, we can allocate them – but only approximately<br />
– to today’s subject areas. Book 1 is about economic theory. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
outlines the main tenets of Austrian marginalism and gives a detailed account<br />
of the rationale behind opposed economic actors conducting a market<br />
exchange. Each party will buy and sell a commodity only when its marginal<br />
utility is positive. <strong>Weber</strong> extends his treatment of marginalism into price<br />
theory and money. He also shows that the use of labour and capital by owners<br />
follows marginalist principles. <strong>Weber</strong> had read and understood the three<br />
leading Austrian economists – Carl Menger, Bohm-Bäwerk and von Wieser.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> was practically the only German economist to accept and teach the<br />
new Austrian marginalist economics, which, it should be pointed out, underpins<br />
the whole of modern neo-classical theory. But, as we shall see, he does<br />
insert at the start his own distinctive set of definitions of economic action.<br />
Book 2 is a combination of economic geography, population studies and<br />
the ethnographic foundations of the economy. §7 outlined the relation of<br />
the economy to other cultural forms, including law and the state. Book 3 is<br />
economic history and presents a clear periodization of economic eras: the<br />
early or primitive stages, the coastal civilization of antiquity, the agrarian<br />
foundations of the Middle Ages, the city economy and the origins of modern<br />
entrepreneurship, and the arrival of the modern national-economy.<br />
Book 4 treats the development of economics as a science, and competing<br />
versions of economics as a science, and could stand as a miniature version<br />
of Schumpeter’s later book Economic Doctrine and Method. An Historical<br />
Sketch. 38 Book 5 concerns the operation and formation of markets and<br />
trade, money, credit and finance, the firm, industry and the rural economy,<br />
production and consumption and the distribution of income sources, and<br />
the regulation of the economy – all these in the modern era, i.e. it is a complete<br />
applied economics. Book 6 is concerned with policy and with reform<br />
and social ideals.<br />
I have given a somewhat schematic summary, whereas the great range and<br />
number of topics listed indicate that <strong>Weber</strong> was not following any programmatic<br />
syllabus (as in a modern economics textbook today) but felt free to follow<br />
his own intellectual interests. The lecture course does not allow <strong>Weber</strong><br />
to be placed firmly within any one school or tradition. For this reason, it is<br />
quite hard to translate what he lectured in, which was then called ‘Nationalökonomie’.<br />
His exposition of marginalism in Section Three (see more on
<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 25<br />
this in my footnote) shows he had read Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics,<br />
which was published in 1871, and then elaborated by von Wieser and<br />
Bohm-Bäwerk. 39 All these three economists were Viennese, hence the name<br />
‘the Austrian School’. To the extent that <strong>Weber</strong> had embraced marginalism,<br />
he could be called simply an economist. His pronounced interest in history,<br />
politics and culture make him more than an economic historian. His concern<br />
with the interaction of economic interests and politics and issues of income<br />
distribution (rent, interest and wages) point to the English tradition of classical<br />
political economy. Against this, though, he knew that Bohm-Bäwerk had<br />
destroyed the economic theoretical grounds for attributing the distribution<br />
of income to the three main classes of modern society (landowners, capitalists<br />
and wage labourers). 40 In the modern era, <strong>Weber</strong>’s point of reference is<br />
the economy of a country or nation (‘Volkswirtschaft’). These considerations<br />
give no firm guidance, so it is probably best to keep with the term then current:<br />
a national-economist. This is a ‘satisficing’ solution and by no means<br />
perfect. It contains an important ambiguity. <strong>Weber</strong>, in his personal political<br />
views, was highly national in his economic policy recommendations, yet the<br />
study of national-economy was rather the study of the economy as it had<br />
developed within the boundaries of the modern nation state, i.e. the national-economy<br />
could be studied in a value-free way. 41<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> prepared and printed lecture notes of §2 and §3 of his lectures,<br />
and I will outline the first four subsections of §2 to show the basis of how<br />
he thought about the economy in relation to history, society and culture.<br />
(These passages are not yet translated and my own translation here is slightly<br />
paraphrased.)<br />
§2 The conceptual foundations of modern economic<br />
doctrine (‘Volkswirtschaftslehre’)<br />
1 Concept of the ‘Wirtschaft’. This is a specific form of striving for an<br />
external goal, that is consciously planned behaviour in relation to nature<br />
and to man (‘Mensch’) that is occasioned through those needs that require<br />
external means for their satisfaction, whether they are of a ‘material’<br />
or ‘ideal’ nature, and includes provision for the future. ‘Wirtschaft’ is<br />
the complex of measures that is occasioned by the economic activity<br />
of the individual (‘Wirtschaften eines Individuums’) or of the human<br />
community.<br />
2 Presuppositions of the abstract theory of the economy. Economic activity<br />
(‘Das Wirtschaften’) is instilled into man through a thousand-year process<br />
of adaptation. The bulk of the planned economic activity in the modern<br />
sense was and is very differently developed (and then not completely)<br />
according to race and (within the modern occidental culture) according<br />
to occupation (‘Beruf ’), education, intellect and character of individuals;<br />
correspondingly, the scope that is given for purely economic motives<br />
within the determining drives of the action of individuals is historically
26 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
and individually extremely changeable. Abstract theory originates<br />
in the modern occidental type of person and his economic activity. It<br />
seeks first of all to investigate the most elementary living phenomena<br />
(‘Lebensphänomene’) of the fully educated (‘erzogenen’) human being.<br />
To this end, economics establishes a constructed ‘economic subject’ in<br />
relation to the contrasting state of empirical human beings.<br />
a All not specifically economic motives, which do exert pressure on<br />
empirical persons, are ignored.<br />
b It defines (i) perfect insight into the actual situation – economic<br />
omniscience, (ii) full commitment of most appropriate means to<br />
the actual goal without exception – absolute ‘Wirtschaftlichkeit’,<br />
(iii) complete application of own forces in the service of economic<br />
meeting of needs – ‘weightless acquisitive drive’ (‘trägheitslosen<br />
Erwerbstrieb’).<br />
Therefore, economics uses in its argument an unrealistic human being<br />
analogous to a mathematical ideal figure.<br />
3 Economic needs. The only needs that come into consideration are<br />
economic needs. Insofar as they are satisfied, this necessitates disposal<br />
over the forces of nature and human beings.<br />
3.1 Decisive for the theory are the facts of the actual subjective perception<br />
by the economic subject. Economic theory is ethically indifferent<br />
to the subjective feelings and perceptions (‘Empfundenwerden’) of<br />
the economic subject. These subjective states of what counts as an<br />
economic need are highly variable over history. The whole economic<br />
history of the west is the history of the qualitative expansion of the<br />
state of need.<br />
3.2 The perception of need will vary with how pressing the need<br />
remains in relation to its fulfilment/satiation and the fulfilment of<br />
other economic needs. The reduction in the urgency of one need<br />
is accompanied by an increase in the sense of urgency of other<br />
needs. Future needs are perceived as less pressing than present ones;<br />
their urgency increases with the satiation of present needs and with<br />
a rising level of awareness of economic need, i.e. raised cultural<br />
expectations.<br />
4 Goods (‘Güter’)<br />
4.1 ‘Goods’ in the sense of theory are the utility satisfactions<br />
(‘Nutzleistungen’) performed by human beings and material objects,<br />
as follows:<br />
a the usable output (‘Leistung’) of mental and physical labour<br />
power (‘Arbeitskraft’) for human purposes;<br />
b the usable power of nature (living or dead) for human purposes,<br />
either as found in nature as ‘natural goods’ or as fabricated by<br />
man as ‘products’.<br />
4.2 What is decisive for the quality of goods is their usefulness<br />
(‘Brauchbarkeit’). This is not objective but simply means the actual
<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited 27<br />
or intended means of satisfaction of perceived human needs. These<br />
therefore are subjective and vary and (i) the need has to be perceived,<br />
and (ii) the usefulness has to be recognized and believed in.<br />
What is decisive is the standpoint of human beings. ‘Nationaleconomy<br />
is a science not of nature and its properties but of human<br />
beings (‘Menschen’) and their needs’.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s opening definition reflects the emphasis placed on subjective<br />
utility by the science of economics at the time. Economics is an activity<br />
of purposeful activity directed to the satisfaction of subjectively perceived<br />
needs. But <strong>Weber</strong> immediately flags up that those needs can be material,<br />
as in commodities, or they can be ideal. In his own lecture notes, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
indicates just what can count as ideal needs. The building of pyramids is a<br />
spectacular example of an economy organized around the politico-religious<br />
significance of the preservation of corpses. ‘The organisation of the satisfaction<br />
of human needs is influenced by the totality of cultural phenomena and<br />
conditions, by climate, race, law, other material needs, religious needs, too:<br />
pyramids. Here religious creeds are more important than anything else it<br />
breeds entirely different human beings, money economy, capitalism, slave<br />
labour.’ 42 In his commentary on this, Wolfgang Mommsen notes: ‘This passage<br />
indicates that <strong>Weber</strong> saw economics as part of a cultural science, or, as<br />
he puts it occasionally, a science about the living-together of human beings<br />
– social science (eine “W[issenschaft] vom Zusammenleben der Menschen<br />
– Sozialwissenschaft”) . . .’. 43<br />
The subjectively perceived needs are bracketed by the type of society in<br />
which an individual or community lives. People make economic choices and<br />
plans, and estimate their own advantage, but they do this within a framework<br />
of cultural values, which to a large extent are pregiven – individuals are<br />
born into a particular society and culture. While economic activity is mostly<br />
concerned with the meeting of present and future material needs, these<br />
needs turn out to be qualitatively limitless, depending on what a culture can<br />
conceive of consuming. Economics, says <strong>Weber</strong>, is not a science of nature<br />
but of the needs of human beings, although as a science it has as its object a<br />
constructed ‘ideal figure’ – an entity not to be confused with actual human<br />
beings (‘Menschen’) with culturally determined material needs.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s thinking as a national-economist, therefore, can be seen as forming<br />
a framework for a religion-based explanation of the rise of modern capitalism,<br />
of most of whose aspects – in theory and in history – he already had<br />
a sophisticated knowledge. As §2 shows, he was also already thinking about<br />
the role of modern occidental culture in the determination of economic<br />
needs. In addition, as the layout of §2 demonstrates, <strong>Weber</strong> was quite able<br />
to deal with the subject of economics (not yet a discipline) in a systematic<br />
manner. His lecture notes are set out like a legal treatise with main headings,<br />
main sections and with three or more descending subsections.<br />
This is the basis for asserting a continuity between <strong>Weber</strong>’s work as a
28 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
national-economist in the 1890s and the Protestant ethic studies of 1904–5.<br />
The latter did not come out of thin air, even though its highly original arguments<br />
and format might suggest that. In particular, it would be wrong to suggest,<br />
as many commentators do, that, because <strong>Weber</strong> had a nervous collapse<br />
and gave up his chair in national-economy at Heidelberg (in 1903), he had<br />
in some way turned his back on his former studies and knowledge. <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
prodigious output during the 1890s may well have contributed to his collapse<br />
in 1899, but I would propose that his work on national-economy forms<br />
the platform for his later work in what he was to call social economics; also<br />
that his lecture programme of 1898 reveals his academic footprint that provided<br />
the conceptual breadth and depth for his later studies in comparative<br />
historical sociology. For these reasons, I will in later chapters refer back to<br />
the lecture outline presented in this chapter.<br />
My conclusion on sociology is that national-economy could accommodate<br />
without much difficulty the sociological themes that <strong>Weber</strong> raised, especially<br />
in his empirical and policy studies on agriculture in eastern Germany.<br />
He was able and prepared to think in terms of economic classes, interest<br />
groups and social strata, and to counterpose to this a descriptive psychology<br />
of attitudes. At the same time, there is no evidence that <strong>Weber</strong> identified<br />
himself with sociology, or a sociological theory that provided a framework<br />
of integrating structure and action. Section 7 of his lecture outline (‘The<br />
economy in its relation to other cultural forms in particular law and state’)<br />
did contain a list of sociologists, but mostly of the ‘wrong’ sort. If one takes<br />
out the evolutionary theorists, the positivists and the organicists, who most<br />
probably would have been critiqued in his lectures, practically only Simmel<br />
(Über soziale Differenzierung, 1890) and Tönnies (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft,<br />
1887) remain.
2 Capitalism in contemporary<br />
debates<br />
Sombart, <strong>Weber</strong> and Simmel<br />
This chapter argues that capitalism was an object of wide-ranging debate in<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s generation of national-economists, and that The Protestant Ethic<br />
and the Spirit of Capitalism was an intervention in those debates. It was<br />
an intervention at once highly specific – the cultural aetiology and cultural<br />
significance of modern capitalism – but also a more general contribution to<br />
the wider debates in national-economy. PESC’s part in the general debates<br />
on national-economy remain virtually unseen when the essay is read today.<br />
The chapter starts by outlining some of the main contours of the debate<br />
over capitalism. It expounds the major stances towards it taken by Werner<br />
Sombart and Georg Simmel, into which <strong>Weber</strong>’s own PESC fits. The chapter<br />
highlights the role given to the psychology of motives, by <strong>Weber</strong> in particular.<br />
Hartmut Lehmann has recently published an exchange of letters between<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> with Lujo Brentano. 1 Lehmann argues that <strong>Weber</strong> was keen to<br />
commission an intelligent and judicious review of Sombart’s newly published<br />
book, Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902) and, for this, he turned to one of<br />
the foremost economic historians of the day, Lujo Brentano, professor at the<br />
Karl Maximilian University in Munich. <strong>Weber</strong> wrote to Brentano in October<br />
1903, ‘. . . I consider it absolutely essential that one of the leading scholars<br />
in our field should write this review’. 2 <strong>Weber</strong> added that he himself would<br />
address the methodological issues in the book. Brentano only partly committed<br />
to the commission, and <strong>Weber</strong> in reply sent him some references on<br />
English Puritanism, which Brentano might well have asked for, or <strong>Weber</strong><br />
thought relevant. 3 <strong>Weber</strong>, in his second letter, says that he would himself<br />
look again at the source material on English Puritanism because, as Lehmann<br />
paraphrases, he intended ‘to write an essay on the matter for the Archiv’. 4<br />
Lehmann concludes, ‘What we have in front of us, therefore, looks like a<br />
division of labour: While Brentano was supposed to look at the relevance<br />
of Calvinism and Puritanism for the genesis of modern capitalism, it was,<br />
supposedly, <strong>Weber</strong>’s task to discuss the methodological implications.’ 5 ‘Concludes’<br />
probably puts it too strongly, but it is a very interesting inference:<br />
PESC started life as a book review, which grew into a freestanding essay. In a
30 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
third letter to Brentano (9 March 1904), <strong>Weber</strong> again pressed Brentano for a<br />
proper scholarly review, which, unlike some other ‘limited minds’, Brentano<br />
could deliver. Brentano wrote back to say he ‘most certainly’ 6 would try to<br />
point out the positive aspects in Sombart’s book. No review was written by<br />
Brentano, but <strong>Weber</strong>, like a good journal editor, kept on pushing. In May,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> wrote to Brentano that he hoped he would address the ‘considerable<br />
issue of the genesis of the modern economic spirit’. By this time, <strong>Weber</strong> had<br />
already started writing PESC, and it seems reasonable to suppose that one<br />
early stimulus for this was the appearance of Sombart’s moderne Kapitalismus.<br />
It is quite clear from the above exchanges that <strong>Weber</strong> was well disposed<br />
to Sombart’s enterprise. <strong>Weber</strong>’s goodwill extended beyond the book itself,<br />
as Sombart was a fellow editor (along with Edgar Jaffé) of the Archiv für<br />
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and <strong>Weber</strong> and Sombart were leading<br />
figures in Germany’s premier policy research association, the Verein für<br />
Sozialpolitik. <strong>Weber</strong>’s relationship with Sombart could not be described as<br />
one of close personal friendship – actually more of sibling rivalry – but, in<br />
many ways, Sombart had an academic and political profile closely resembling<br />
that of <strong>Weber</strong>’s. They were born within a year of each other, both brought<br />
up in Prussia, both studied at the University of Berlin and were connected to<br />
Gustav Schmoller who was the senior and controlling academic influence in<br />
their field of study. And in Germany, <strong>Weber</strong> and Sombart were marked out<br />
as the rising stars within national-economy.<br />
Their joint editorship of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik<br />
(hereafter abbreviated to Archiv) points to their substantive academic<br />
links and association. Edgar Jaffé, the third editor, who received his doctorate<br />
at Heidelberg in 1902, was previously a banker and financial expert. It<br />
was his money that founded and helped to run the Archiv. Jaffé bought the<br />
Archiv für soziale Gestezgebung und Statistik from its previous editor Heinrich<br />
Braun, and it was relaunched under its new title in 1904. The old title<br />
concerned social legislation and statistics and was a very fact-based journal<br />
reporting on new social legislation and collecting evidence on the social and<br />
health conditions of working people in the new industrial capitalism. The<br />
old journal followed a revisionist social agenda, i.e. non-Marxist, and Sombart<br />
was one of its leading writers and supporters – providing financial help.<br />
The relaunched new journal undertook to maintain the reform agenda, as<br />
the ‘Sozialpolitik’ in its title indicates, but it moved its emphasis away from<br />
factual reporting and descriptive statistics to a more theoretically oriented<br />
investigation of social and policy issues.<br />
Under the new editors, the labour question was to be widened and deepened<br />
to consider the origins and consequences of the revolutionary process<br />
of capitalism on economic life and to consider this in the interaction of the<br />
social with the economic. The journal would be international and non-partisan,<br />
and value judgements about social reform would be derived not from<br />
personal opinion and political affiliation but would be informed by insights
Capitalism in contemporary debates 31<br />
into the historical and sociopolitical situation. The editors accept that capitalism<br />
was now irreversible – there can be no anti-modernity movement,<br />
which many in Germany did espouse. The existence of a proletariat was a<br />
fact of political life, and the working classes had a consciousness of their own<br />
history and condition. A reform agenda should be adopted, backed by social<br />
scientific knowledge, and the politics of social reform had to be treated in a<br />
realistic way, i.e. neither revolutionary Marxism nor authoritarian and patriarchal<br />
government. The editors wrote as economists (‘Nationalökonomen’)<br />
but, in the pursuit of the study of the ‘general cultural significance of capitalist<br />
development’, the journal would include work from political science<br />
(‘Staatslehre’), legal philosophy, social ethics, social psychology and what<br />
went under the name of sociology. 7<br />
Capitalism was a new word and, for Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong>, is a carefully<br />
formulated concept. Other academics and commentators simply did not have<br />
the word in their vocabulary, and they thought about the transformational<br />
process in Germany (and Europe) from an agricultural and artisanal society<br />
to factory production and urbanization in more descriptive terms. This<br />
was in part a generational divide and can be seen in the highly influential<br />
reform group, the Verein für Sozialpolitik. This was founded in 1872 by the<br />
national-economists Gustav Schmoller, Lujo Brentano and Adolf Wagner.<br />
Gustav Schmoller remained the leading force in the association for the next<br />
three decades. He and his co-founders belonged to the ‘founder generation’<br />
of the German Empire. This generation was active in the political, legislative,<br />
educational and cultural construction of a new united Germany (1871).<br />
Germany’s economic development would be a continuation of a previous<br />
north German free trade area and would be liberal in character: removal<br />
of restrictions on trade and a move away from state mercantilist policies<br />
of steering the economy according to the interests of the government. By<br />
the late 1870s, Schmoller had become alarmed at the unrestricted growth<br />
of industries and their social consequences and the alarming cyclical turns<br />
from boom to depression in the economy. In his mind, what was needed<br />
was some return to state intervention in the economy to protect it from its<br />
worse excesses and to place the interests of society as a whole as the goal of<br />
state policy. For him, the founding of the Reich was always a political and<br />
constitutional exercise, and the more dynamic features of the new society<br />
had to be guided by judicious state policies.<br />
The sons of the founding generation, who came to maturity in the 1890s,<br />
men such as Werner Sombart, Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Alfred <strong>Weber</strong>, Schulze-Gaevernitz<br />
and Ferdinand Tönnies, argued for a more radical programme of reforms<br />
based on a more radical analysis of social and economic problems. They<br />
argued that a new type of society had come into being. This was modern<br />
capitalism. It was simply inadequate for Schmoller and his colleagues, such<br />
as Adolf Wagner, to argue that the contemporary conditions were a continuation<br />
of the old. Above all, the new generation was acquainted with the<br />
writings of Marx and Engels, which held that capitalism was a revolutionary
32 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
development in the course of world history. Schmoller dismissed Marx’s<br />
economics as ‘speculative conclusions drawn from the writings of Ricardo<br />
and previous socialists, and modified by German philosophy and the ideas of<br />
political radicalism of the 1830s and 40s’. 8<br />
The younger generation paid attention to the Marxist analysis and realized<br />
its disruptive if not revolutionary potential. The younger generation<br />
belonged to the academic middle class (‘Bildungsbürgertum’) and were committed<br />
to social and political reform – what today would be called the establishment<br />
of a viable civil society in the face of Prussian authoritarianism. The<br />
context of their reading and understanding of Marxism was edgily informed<br />
by the possibility of a mass revolutionary uprising led by the German Social<br />
Democratic Party (SPD). In 1891, the SPD had committed to Marx’s analysis<br />
of the need for revolution as the only way to improve the position of the<br />
working class. In this analysis, propagated by the SPD leader Karl Kautsky,<br />
the economics of capitalism pointed to the growing immiseration of the<br />
working class, as wages were driven down by capitalist competition and capitalist<br />
exploitation. This would lead to a crisis of profitability as consumption<br />
was depressed in the name of profit. The only way out of this pathological<br />
dynamic was for the organized working class to seize control of the means<br />
of production and institute social production for the needs of the people.<br />
The SPD also adhered to the tenets of world revolution (rather than local or<br />
national class struggle), as laid down by Marx himself in 1864 at the First<br />
International of Working Men’s Associations. Kautsky’s line became the orthodox<br />
position of the SPD in <strong>Weber</strong>’s lifetime, although Eduard Bernstein<br />
led a revisionist position within the party that argued that wages were in fact<br />
rising and that crisis was by no means inevitable. Bernstein recommended<br />
a political route for the democratization of politics and the amelioration<br />
of the position of the working class through radical reform. Both options<br />
were very much on the table during this period. The early 1890s had seen<br />
an economic depression with 30% either unemployed or earning less than<br />
subsistence, and price deflation. In Berlin, there were 400,000 homeless.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s bride, Marianne, was amazed to see so many people sleeping rough<br />
in the ‘Tiergarten’ when she first came to Berlin in 1892.<br />
For the younger generation of national-economists, the dynamics of capitalism<br />
had to be understood as a series of causal relationships. These would<br />
define the possibilities of profit, growth, economic strength and ‘national<br />
destiny’ (to use Friedrich Naumann’s phrase); they would also define politics,<br />
either in the direction of revolution or in a reform direction. Naumann<br />
was himself a leading politician in the camp of those who wanted to see<br />
far-ranging social reform. He wrote an article in 1911 saying that, while the<br />
big question in France was the great revolution, in Germany, national destiny<br />
was concerned with ‘what is capitalism?’. 9 He looked back to the analysis<br />
of capitalism by the younger generation, naming in particular the work of<br />
Sombart, Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Troeltsch, Schulze-Gaevernitz, Tönnies and Simmel<br />
among others (and he pointedly excluded the work of the older generation
Capitalism in contemporary debates 33<br />
– Schmoller, Adolf Wagner and Lujo Brentano). The overall thrust of this<br />
generation ‘was to reveal the nature of that huge general change which<br />
has emerged from the middle ages up to the present day’. He continued<br />
that the work of Sombart and Max <strong>Weber</strong> had taken up anew the Marxist<br />
problematic (‘Fragestellung’) ‘with new means on the basis of a new half<br />
century’. Marxism provided the ‘explanatory principle of the present’, as<br />
Dieter Lindenlaub comments. 10<br />
Hence, the historical question of how the capitalist process had started<br />
and what were the exact dynamics of its development was not a mere academic<br />
question – it went to the heart of contemporary debates and fears. It<br />
was Karl Marx who had dated the start of modern capitalism at the transition<br />
point of the late Middle Ages, as the towns developed independently<br />
and unfettered by the old feudal lordship. Marx periodized this transition as<br />
the dialectical move from a class society based on peasant serfs and feudal<br />
rulers to one based on the rising bourgeoisie who were constituting the new<br />
capitalist society and were becoming the new ruling class, exploiting the<br />
landless peasant as wage labourers.<br />
The younger generation accepted Marx’s terminology but rejected his<br />
dialectical account of historical change. They accepted there were classes;<br />
there were those who owned property and those who owned nothing but<br />
the ability to sell their labour; also the accumulation process, the means<br />
of production and social and political structures of inequality; above all,<br />
the idea that there were causal linkages between these various terms. While<br />
they did not adopt the crude determination of a material base controlling<br />
political, economic and cultural actions, they did accept that capitalism was<br />
an entity with interlinked parts and that it had its own historical dynamic<br />
of development. So facts, trends and developments had in some way to be<br />
causally modelled and thought about; they had to be fitted into some sort of<br />
pattern – but not into a schematic pattern as Marx and Engels had argued.<br />
Werner Sombart and the origins of modern capitalism<br />
Of the younger generation, Sombart had by far the closest engagement with<br />
Marxism. He had written critical expositions of Marxism, he himself belonged<br />
to the SPD, and he was a political activist in Breslau where he was assistant<br />
professor. (He remained stuck at assistant professor level, despite his<br />
outstanding academic reputation, because no ministry of education would<br />
accept a member of the SPD as a full professor.)<br />
My argument in this section is that Sombart’s moderne Kapitalismus represents<br />
a theoretical reorientation around the issue of capitalism within the<br />
field of German national-economy and, in this sense, Sombart became the<br />
leading intellectual influence among the younger generation of the Verein.<br />
Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902) offered, in its opening chapters, a methodological<br />
way of integrating the motives of people and groups in pursuit of<br />
economic goals with resultant economic organization and institutions created
34 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
for those purposes. 11 In this respect, it went further than the very suggestive<br />
ideas in <strong>Weber</strong>’s own lecture outline in national-economy. Sombart provided<br />
some key concepts for the analysis of the emergence of modern capitalism:<br />
economic rationalism, acquisitive behaviour and the profit motive, and ‘high<br />
capitalism’ – a very far-reaching concept whose subsequent influence can<br />
be seen, for example, in Habermas’ theory of the colonization of the life<br />
world. He also demanded that history had to be investigated through the<br />
aid of clearly defined concepts and theories, and he stood out against the assumption<br />
that the historical facts alone would provide their own explanation<br />
of events. In my view, Sombart’s subsequent publications, which were extremely<br />
numerous and not least a much enlarged second edition of moderne<br />
Kapitalismus (1916 onwards), detract from and disguise the originality and<br />
sheer achievement of the first edition of the book. (I make this point because<br />
Sombart is often portrayed retrospectively through his later publications,<br />
many of which command little or negative credibility today. 12 )<br />
If we confine our attention just to titles for a moment, we can see the<br />
sequencing of ideas and their standpoints as so many stepping stones. Marx<br />
wrote Das Kapital, Sombart Der moderne Kapitalismus and <strong>Weber</strong> Die protestantische<br />
Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus. The semantic shift from<br />
‘Das Kapital’ to ‘der Kapitalismus’ is enormous. Marx’s capital is neuter in<br />
gender – impersonal, brutish – and it outlines the laws of accumulation of<br />
an object whose dynamics demand the crude servitude of all social classes<br />
caught in its embrace. Sombart made the accumulation of capital the result<br />
of individuals behaving according to an array of economic motives. While<br />
these motives, psychological in origin, could be crudely acquisitive, Sombart<br />
had humanized capital accumulation to the extent that he made it the<br />
outcome of individuals and groups and their self-organization, and not the<br />
impenetrable dialectic of impersonal forces. Capitalism was a matter of the<br />
motives of individuals and social and economic relationships. For Sombart,<br />
the outcomes of high capitalism were unacceptable and unwanted, and he<br />
still remained the socialist critic of certain forms of capitalism. But he argued<br />
that there were individual and institutional factors in play that produced a<br />
particular outcome and, equally, the socialization of the means of production<br />
was still possible in terms of the logic of capitalistic development and<br />
the reinsertion of cooperative ideas and institutions. <strong>Weber</strong>’s title signals his<br />
acceptance of the shift to capitalism as the object of study, and ‘Geist’ – as<br />
is probably not realized by most Anglophone readers – was Sombart’s term.<br />
To see this, Der moderne Kapitalismus (hereafter mK) has to be looked at in<br />
closer detail and, in particular, <strong>Weber</strong>’s somewhat devious way of relating<br />
to Sombart’s mK.<br />
In the second and revised edition of PESC, <strong>Weber</strong> dropped the quotation<br />
marks around ‘spirit’ (‘Geist’) in the title. No doubt he felt he had made the<br />
term his own, not least through a sixteen-year intellectual tussle played out<br />
by both men, Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong>. 13 But in 1904, ‘Geist’ appeared in quotation<br />
marks, partly as an acknowledgement of Sombart’s prior use of the term
Capitalism in contemporary debates 35<br />
and that he, <strong>Weber</strong>, was going to use it in another way. (And both men had to<br />
be definitionally careful in using ‘Geist’ because, for most readers, it would<br />
have signalled Hegel’s big idea of Reason as the progressive supra-individual<br />
force within the dialectic of history. ‘Geist’ in German and, to a lesser extent,<br />
‘spirit’ in English also have plainer and far more everyday meanings. There<br />
is also a suggestion by both men that they chose, or at least did not dislike,<br />
the term because it was a play on the word ‘Geist’ at Hegel’s expense. Both<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> and Sombart were resolutely against Hegel, and Sombart saw part of<br />
his role as taking Hegel out of Marx – and this meant removing a dialectical<br />
philosophy of history.)<br />
There is a series of corrective passages and footnotes in <strong>Weber</strong>’s PESC to<br />
Sombart’s mK. They refer to Sombart’s dismissal of religion as a factor in<br />
western economic development and to <strong>Weber</strong>’s highlighting of the role of<br />
religious ethics in economic behaviour. <strong>Weber</strong>’s references to Sombart, while<br />
aiming to be corrective are also slightly belittling, and they give the effect<br />
that Sombart’s thesis can be disregarded. The relationship of book to essay<br />
surfaces here. <strong>Weber</strong>’s PESC could adopt an essayistic form as a critique<br />
of what was a very large and quite systematic book. mK appeared in two<br />
volumes, it had an elaborate set of divisions into books, sections and chapters,<br />
and totalled 28 chapters and 656 pages. mK is now virtually unread,<br />
whereas in its day, it was a considerable academic publishing sensation. It<br />
needs, therefore, to be seen as a situating reference point in the debate on<br />
capitalism. <strong>Weber</strong>’s PESC is of course freestanding in its own right; indeed,<br />
its self-containedness is one of its remarkable features. But some part of its<br />
ability to assume the form of an essay was the opportunity to offer a critical<br />
perspective on one aspect of a larger thesis and enterprise.<br />
mK outlined a whole programme for national-economy that offered a<br />
way of integrating economic history with economic and sociological theory.<br />
It opens with several methodological chapters that assert the need to distinguish<br />
between phenomenal facts presented by historians and the mediation<br />
of those facts by the concepts of national-economy. Historians tend to miss<br />
the economic significance of facts because they lack a theory of economic<br />
activity. The major distinction Sombart wanted to introduce was between<br />
an enterprise (‘Betrieb’) and the wider economy (‘Wirtschaft’). Sombart<br />
argued that one could find similar enterprises, such as the industrial workshop,<br />
throughout history. The point, however, was to situate the enterprise<br />
within the dominant principles of an economy. The industrial workshop<br />
could be found in ancient Greece, in the medieval guilds and in modern<br />
capitalism. The economic principles of the ancient economy excluded any<br />
predominantly competitive and market economy; likewise, the guilds were<br />
committed to a restrictive economy and, in the capitalist era, one could find<br />
workshop enterprises operating on cooperative lines.<br />
Sombart, therefore, looked for the economic principles at work in an<br />
economy rather than their particular organizational forms such as the enterprise,<br />
the household, the manor or the factory. His major idea was that
36 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
two principles need to be distinguished in explaining the rise of western<br />
capitalism. One was the principle of the satisfaction of need (‘Bedarfsbefriedigung’),<br />
the other was the acquisition of wealth as an end in itself (‘Erwerbswirtschaft’).<br />
Each of these principles came to define their respective<br />
economies. ‘The purpose of a capitalist factory producing boots is not the<br />
making of boots but rather the raising of profit; the purpose of a peasant’s<br />
own economy is equally not to produce boots but to protect the feet from<br />
the wet and the cold.’ 14 This is the difference between a traditional economy<br />
and a modern capitalist economy. The traditional economy, in its various<br />
forms, is based on the motivation of fulfilling immediate needs, and it is<br />
characterized by a limited division of labour. The modern capitalist economy<br />
is psychologically driven by a desire for profit as an end in itself, irrespective<br />
of what good or service is provided.<br />
Sombart’s main question is what causes the changeover from the principle<br />
of the satisfaction of need to that of the acquisitive principle, which,<br />
as Parsons pointed out in an early paper, is the Kapitalismus problematic. 15<br />
The crossover was triggered in the late Middle Ages by a heightened sense of<br />
consumption and wealth, after Europe had made contact with the Near East<br />
and the depredations of the Crusades and the later expeditions to find new<br />
sources of wealth in the colonies. In place of an economy regulated by tradition,<br />
there arose, says Sombart, a new lust for wealth – ‘auri sacra fames’. 16<br />
The motivation of greed, followed by a new ‘economic rationalism’ centred<br />
on double-entry book-keeping (introduced by Luca Paciola in 1494), opens<br />
the door to the calculation of profit. Modern capitalism therefore originated<br />
in the Italian towns that had grown rich on trade, had adopted the technicalities<br />
of profit calculation and were freed from traditional restraints in<br />
their search for wealth.<br />
‘Geist’ plays a major conceptual role in Sombart’s explanation, especially<br />
with regard to the move from one economic principle to another. Part Three<br />
of his exposition is entitled ‘Die Genesis des kapitalistischen Geistes’. It comprises<br />
two chapters: one on the awakening of ‘Erwerbstriebes’, the other on<br />
the formation of economic rationalism. Sombart frames the problem of the<br />
emergence of modern capitalism in terms of psychological motives, economic<br />
principles and the resultant organization of economic forms in terms of<br />
norms and regimes. (Indeed, it is not a little Parsonian in method.) Sombart<br />
uses the phrase ‘psychogenesis’ to conceive the sea-change in psychological<br />
motivation that was taking place by the end of the Middle Ages. 17<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> disputed a particular aetiology in Sombart’s account. As we have<br />
seen, Sombart’s aetiology turned on the new ‘auri sacra fames’ – the accursed<br />
lust for gold. Chapter 14 of mK raises alternative possible causes and<br />
dismisses them. Sombart dismisses religion as a possible cause.<br />
It also seems insufficient to me to locate the nature of modern capitalism<br />
through the belonging to specific religious communities. That Protestantism,<br />
particularly in its variants of Calvinism and Quakerism, has<br />
significantly supported the development of capitalism is a well-known
Capitalism in contemporary debates 37<br />
fact but one that also needs to be further established . . . the Protestant<br />
system of religion is the consequence rather than the cause of the modern-capitalist<br />
spirit.<br />
Sombart, like <strong>Weber</strong>, quotes (in a footnote) Eberhard Gothein’s contribution<br />
to the debate.<br />
Whoever will trace the origins of capitalist development, in whatever<br />
country of Europe that may be, is always impressed by the same fact:<br />
the Calvinist diaspora is at the same time the breeding ground (‘Pflanzschule’)<br />
of the capitalist economy. The Spanish expressed this with bitter<br />
resignation: heresy supports the spirit of trade (‘Handelsgeist’). 18<br />
What, however, is required to avoid such an error, says Sombart, is a<br />
closer examination of the actual historical constellation in order to draw a<br />
satisfactory answer for the rise of modern capitalism.<br />
The scientific significance of what Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong> were attempting<br />
turns on getting the causation correct. An unbridled acquisitive urge<br />
(Sombart) or inner-worldly asceticism (<strong>Weber</strong>) was the decisive motivational<br />
principle that moved the economic development of western Europe into a<br />
new phase and new dynamic. The new capitalist spirit (however described)<br />
is part of the cultural genealogy of modernity. Both Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong> were<br />
conducting a historical exercise to isolate this cultural ‘gene’ in the make-up<br />
of modern capitalism. 19 If, as they argued, it were decisive and distinctive,<br />
then it would also shape the behavioural patterns of contemporary economic<br />
behaviour.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s dialogue with Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus<br />
A close reading of <strong>Weber</strong>’s Chapter Two, ‘The “Spirit” of Capitalism’, in<br />
relation to Sombart’s mK reveals it to be a critical dialogue with Sombart’s<br />
position on the motive forces of economic behaviour. <strong>Weber</strong>’s chapter heading<br />
deliberately echoes Sombart’s own title for Part 3 of mK, ‘The Genesis of<br />
the Capitalist Spirit’. <strong>Weber</strong> apologizes for the pretentiousness of the term<br />
‘spirit’ but curiously fails to acknowledge that Sombart had already coined<br />
the term two years previously. 20 <strong>Weber</strong> uses the case study of Benjamin Franklin<br />
to illustrate what he means by the new spirit of capitalism. It is a systematic<br />
work ethic driven by an ethical attitude to the world.<br />
the summum bonum of this ethic, the earning of more and more money,<br />
combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life,<br />
is above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic, not to say hedonistic,<br />
admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from<br />
the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to, the single individual,<br />
it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational.<br />
(PESC, p. 53)
38 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> disputes the significance of one of Sombart’s prime examples of the<br />
new acquisitive spirit. Sombart placed on the frontispiece to Book 2 (‘The<br />
Genesis of Modern Capitalism’) a quote from the memoirs of Anton Fugger:<br />
‘but Herr Jacob Fugger had always given him the same answer: . . . that he<br />
was of a different mind, that he wished to turn a profit as long as he lived’. 21<br />
The questioner was a business colleague who had already retired and had<br />
asked Jacob Fugger why he did not do likewise as he had already made a tremendous<br />
fortune. (Jacob Fugger [1459–1525] belonged to one of Europe’s<br />
greatest business dynasties, making money as merchants, bankers, tax farmers<br />
and money lenders to kings and emperors.) The high-profile argument<br />
between Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong> concerned the motivation of Jacob Fugger. For<br />
Sombart, it was a spectacular example of the new acquisitive spirit and the<br />
new business mentality spreading north to Catholic Bavaria from the Italian<br />
cities. Jacob Fugger’s comment could serve as a motto for the capitalist<br />
entrepreneur, notes Sombart, where calculation, speculation and business<br />
become a way of life in itself. 22 For <strong>Weber</strong>, while Fugger embodied mercantile<br />
daring and risk-taking, 23 he lacked the sober and systematic attitude to<br />
business exemplified by Benjamin Franklin. The latter embodied the modern<br />
attitude, while the Fuggers stood for premodern merchant aristocracy.<br />
On the matter of work ‘as an end in itself ’, <strong>Weber</strong> is saying the same<br />
thing as Sombart. But of course, what <strong>Weber</strong> has to establish is that this is<br />
religiously driven and not a lust for profit in its own right. <strong>Weber</strong> demands<br />
the specific historical origins of this religiously derived spirit be confirmed,<br />
because the later development of capitalism through its inevitable secularization<br />
of religious discipline into capitalist discipline obscures the specific<br />
historical origin. This leads to the mistake, made by ‘naïve historical materialism’,<br />
of reversing the causal relation, i.e. a type of religion produced the<br />
capitalist spirit, and not capitalism a religious attitude. What <strong>Weber</strong> spells<br />
out as a mistake was the very position articulated by Sombart, who, as we<br />
have seen, dismisses the influence of Protestantism and Calvinism as a causal<br />
factor.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> next takes up Sombart’s key description of the emergence of the<br />
lust for gold, which distinctively stands out in both men’s text as a Latin tag:<br />
‘auri sacra fames’. Sombart locates this in the late Middle Ages, whereas <strong>Weber</strong><br />
notes that ‘it is as old as the history of man’ (PESC, p. 57). This means,<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong>, that there is nothing new about it, so it has to be discounted as<br />
a new factor. Sombart’s acquisitive spirit can be found all over the world<br />
– in an Italian as well as a Chinese cab-driver, craftsmen in southern Europe<br />
and Asia, etc. ‘At all periods of history, wherever it was possible, there had<br />
been ruthless acquisition, bound to no ethical norms’ (PESC, p. 57). <strong>Weber</strong><br />
then takes on Sombart’s argument that an adventurer capitalism developed<br />
from the European experience of the Crusades. Against this, <strong>Weber</strong> asserts,<br />
‘Capitalist[ic] acquisition as an adventure has been at home in all types of<br />
economic society which have known trade with the use of money . . .’ (PESC,<br />
p. 58). ‘Absolute and conscious ruthlessness in acquisition has often stood
Capitalism in contemporary debates 39<br />
in the closest connection with the strictest conformity to tradition’ (PESC,<br />
p. 58). Sombart sought to contrast traditionalism with the new acquisitive<br />
spirit. For <strong>Weber</strong>. the traditionalism of unscrupulous adventurer capitalism<br />
has to be combated with a new ethical style of life. So what Sombart takes<br />
to be novel (acquisitiveness). <strong>Weber</strong> takes to be age-old; also he insists that<br />
what was age-old – a traditional attitude to acquisition – had to be converted<br />
by the emergence of a new ethical style of life. At this point, Sombart has<br />
made no formal appearance in the main text, although Sombart is clearly the<br />
critical object of <strong>Weber</strong>’s own exposition.<br />
A few pages further on, <strong>Weber</strong> formally disputes Sombart’s division of<br />
economic motivation into satisfaction of need and the ‘new’ acquisitive<br />
spirit. Sombart, as we have seen, had put considerable effort into a dual<br />
articulation of enterprise, both within the framework of craft mentality (production<br />
for need) and within the capitalist spirit (the struggle for profit freed<br />
from needs). <strong>Weber</strong> appears to bend towards Sombart’s position, equating<br />
production for need with what he (<strong>Weber</strong>) terms economic traditionalism.<br />
This, for Sombart, is the precapitalist world that is to be transformed. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
likewise is focused on the transformation, but he brings in the concept of<br />
traditional capitalism. This introduces a new axis of articulation: capitalism<br />
can exist in traditional form either side of the historical line (or watershed)<br />
of the transformation into modernity. One can adduce historical examples of<br />
capitalism in the medieval and ancient world that are traditional in orientation.<br />
‘Enterprises, namely, which are carried on by private entrepreneurs<br />
by utilizing capital (money or goods with a money value) to make a profit,<br />
purchasing the means of production and selling the product, i.e. undoubted<br />
capitalistic enterprises, may at the same time have a traditionalistic character.’<br />
24 Sombart is right to note what <strong>Weber</strong> terms an ‘adequate relationship’<br />
between capitalist spirit and the capitalist enterprise – they do go together<br />
in the modern era. But this is not a ‘necessary relationship’, says <strong>Weber</strong>.<br />
One can have a capitalist workshop in the ancient world run on traditional<br />
grounds. Conversely, within the period of modern European history, it is<br />
common to find capitalist enterprises run on traditional principles.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> uses the example of the textile industry in the nineteenth century,<br />
in order to ram home the argument that capitalist businesses are frequently<br />
traditional and lack the dynamic impulse to ever-expanding growth. The<br />
linen business was a cottage industry and used middle men to process the<br />
raw material. ‘The form of organization was in every respect capitalistic; the<br />
entrepreneur’s activity was of a purely business character; the use of capital<br />
turned over in the business was indispensable; and finally, the objective<br />
aspect of the economic process, the book-keeping, was rational’ (PESC, p.<br />
67). Book-keeping was a central feature of Sombart’s account of economic<br />
rationalism. But, despite these features, the linen business remained locked<br />
into a traditionalist phase. <strong>Weber</strong> continues to labour the point over the next<br />
few pages and is, in effect, trying to bury Sombart’s distinctions.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> next takes a point already established by Sombart: that it is not
40 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
the availability of money that is the vital prerequisite for the development of<br />
modern capitalism, but rather the attitude towards business. ‘The question<br />
of the motive forces in the expansion of modern capitalism is not in the<br />
first instance a question of the origin of the capital sums which were available<br />
for capitalistic uses, but, above all, of the development of the spirit of<br />
capitalism.’ This is exactly Sombart’s argument but, of course, <strong>Weber</strong> wishes<br />
to denote a different spirit. <strong>Weber</strong> seeks to establish that it is the ethical<br />
qualities informing the spirit that are crucial (PESC, p. 69). The capitalist<br />
system ‘needs devotion to the calling of making money’ (PESC, p. 72) that<br />
the previous era with its ‘auri sacra fames’ would have found ‘perverse’.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, again without mentioning Sombart, turns to the Church’s attitude<br />
to money-making in relation to the Italian cities in the late Middle Ages. For<br />
Sombart, as we have noted, the Italian cities were the location of the new<br />
capitalist spirit. <strong>Weber</strong> asserts, on the contrary, that the Church’s influence<br />
was decisive in making the unrestrained search for profit an object of deep<br />
shame and unworthiness. 25<br />
Chapter 2 finally ends with another reference to Sombart. ‘The attempt<br />
has been made, particularly by Sombart, in what are often judicious and<br />
effective observations, to depict economic rationalism as the salient feature<br />
of economic life as a whole’ (PESC, p. 75). <strong>Weber</strong> admits economic rationalism<br />
to be a central component of ‘modern bourgeois society’ (PESC, p. 75).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> even offers that it might seem that ‘the development of the spirit of<br />
capitalism is best understood as part of the development of rationalism as a<br />
whole, and could be deduced from the fundamental position of rationalism<br />
on the basic problems of life. In the process Protestantism would only have<br />
to be considered in so far as it has formed a stage prior to the development<br />
of a purely rationalistic philosophy’ (PESC, p. 76). As can now be expected,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> dismisses this train of thought on the grounds that rationalism is not<br />
a uniform movement in European history. Roman law attained a high degree<br />
of rationalism but, in the modern era, it had little impact on capitalist<br />
development.<br />
At almost every stage of <strong>Weber</strong>’s exposition in Chapter 2, Sombart is<br />
the mostly hidden object of his argument, and so the structure of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
argumentation derives from Sombart. <strong>Weber</strong> alters, quite crucially, the terms<br />
of the argument: from adventurer capitalism to ethical lifestyle, and from<br />
modern acquisitiveness to universal acquisitiveness. <strong>Weber</strong> redistinguishes<br />
Sombart’s conceptual categories, and he is also more incisive in his definition<br />
of capitalism (but not in his definition of ‘Geist’). But we should not lose<br />
sight of the fact that motive (‘Geist’) is established as a new way of thinking<br />
in national-economy by Sombart. <strong>Weber</strong> may differ in terms of the contents<br />
of the argument, but the (hidden) underlying structure of thinking about<br />
the relation of economy to economic subjects in comparative perspective is<br />
Sombart’s.
Simmel’s Philosophy of Money<br />
Capitalism in contemporary debates 41<br />
We have seen that Sombart’s moderne Kapitalismus sought to establish ‘spirit’<br />
as the decisive force in releasing the dynamic of modern capitalism, and<br />
we have seen that <strong>Weber</strong> directly confronted Sombart’s attribution of greed<br />
as the driver of the acquisitive economic principle (‘Erwerbsleben’). In both<br />
Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong>, there was an acceptance that psychological motives<br />
were the key to any understanding of the rise of modern economic life and,<br />
in both men, there was an acceptance that the ends of economic behaviour<br />
– in the fulfilment of needs – had been decisively altered by an economic<br />
system that placed the emphasis on penultimate ends, the search for profit<br />
regardless of economic use and need. Greed linked to economic rationalism,<br />
for Sombart, drove the search for profit and, for <strong>Weber</strong>, Puritan asceticism<br />
led to the concentration on work as an end in itself. Final purposes such as<br />
consumption, want satisfaction, expenditure to demonstrate status distinction<br />
or waging wars became displaced by the economic mechanism itself.<br />
Sombart’s merchant and <strong>Weber</strong>’s Puritan had, through their disregard of<br />
the ends of economic activity, entered a wholly new disposition in western<br />
civilization.<br />
Both authors, especially Sombart, acknowledged their indebtedness to<br />
Georg Simmel for the insight that final ends could be thought of as being<br />
displaced by mechanisms that take possession of the mind and behaviour<br />
of economic actors. 26 The work to which they referred was Simmel’s Philosophy<br />
of Money, a 550-page treatise that was first published as a book in<br />
1900. This project had first surfaced in 1889 as an essay, ‘Zur Psychologie<br />
des Geldes’, published in a journal edited by Schmoller. 27 During the 1890s,<br />
Simmel had developed many of the themes of the book as separately published<br />
essays, and it is reasonable to infer that both Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong> were<br />
aware of Simmel’s project during the 1890s. 28 Indeed, we know that <strong>Weber</strong><br />
read the book on its appearance in 1900, for Marianne <strong>Weber</strong> tells us that,<br />
during his convalescence in Rome in 1902, it was one of the first books he<br />
read at the start of his recovery. 29 Further, if we pair Simmel’s book with the<br />
‘English texts’ also being read by <strong>Weber</strong> in Rome, one begins to sense the<br />
immense straddling operation that he was putting into place. One very large<br />
foothold is the German debate over capitalism, the other not yet significant<br />
foothold is the revolutionary (and inwardly heroic) potential of the Puritan<br />
achievement that made modern capitalism a possibility. Both Sombart and<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> acknowledge Die Philosophie des Geldes. 30<br />
Simply stated, the argument that Simmel delivered was to show how<br />
money developed into a powerful mechanism enabling a huge range of<br />
economic transactions and that, as an instrument for economic process, it<br />
inserted itself as a determinative force into the quality and structure of the<br />
social relationships of people. If greed was a prime psychological driver for<br />
Sombart, then money was its object, and it was Simmel who pointed out how<br />
intimate this link was. And if the Puritan in his economic behaviour could
42 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
change the texture of economic activity from the mundane to the inner consolation<br />
of salvation anxiety, then it was Simmel who had shown how such<br />
psychological displacements were possible. Through his analysis of money,<br />
Simmel is the first social theorist to place the stress on the centrality of mediating<br />
mechanisms, that the medium becomes determinative of the ends of action<br />
and that a means under certain circumstances becomes an end in itself.<br />
It was also Simmel who established the usage of the word ‘Geist’ as a set of<br />
psychological attributes that had to be analysed in relation to the nature of<br />
money. 31 There is more than a hint of the magical and Faustian in the choice<br />
of the term ‘Geist’. Money is a type of alchemy that transforms the normal<br />
social and economic relationships between people into something slightly<br />
beyond their own control; in enabling so much, it enables too much.<br />
Chapter 3 of the Philosophy of Money, ‘Money in the sequence of purposes’<br />
(‘Das Geld in den Zweckreihen’), is a crucial reference point for both<br />
Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong>. It provided the pretext for thinking about modern capitalism<br />
as the pursuit of money as an end in itself. It also provided a theory<br />
of social action, as it is now termed. Sombart had already built some of its<br />
features into his own schematic account of economic principles, motivation<br />
and organizational norms. <strong>Weber</strong>, in favouring a psychologistic account of<br />
inner-worldly asceticism, had not built a theory of social action into PESC,<br />
although, as the comparative sociology of religion project got under way, his<br />
own theory of social action appeared in his 1913 essay for Logos. <strong>Weber</strong> is<br />
generally regarded as the initiator of the theory of social action, but Simmel<br />
produced the first clear outline in his Philosophy of Money. <strong>Weber</strong> acknowledged<br />
Simmel’s importance at the start of his Logos essay. 32<br />
The language of ‘causality’ with regard to human action is highly varied in<br />
the philosophy of social science and, to make comparisons across philosophical<br />
positions, we need to be alert as much to underlying models of action as<br />
to terminology. Simmel realizes this at the outset. ‘The great antinomy in the<br />
history of thought – whether the contents of reality are to be conceived and<br />
interpreted in terms of their causes or their consequences (‘Folgen’) (i.e. the<br />
opposition between a causal and a teleological approach) – finds its original<br />
expression in a distinction within our practical motivations’ (p. 204). Do we,<br />
asks Simmel, adopt an approach that sees human action ‘caused’ by factors<br />
outside our control, or are we conscious beings, intentional and in control<br />
through the pursuit of our own aims? 33<br />
Simmel distinguishes instinctual from planned or intentional action. For<br />
example, eating wild strawberries is an instinctual response to hunger. Planting<br />
strawberries in spring is a purposive activity.<br />
In both these cases (instinctual and intentional actions), Simmel stipulates<br />
that energy is expended. Instincts cause the release of pent-up energy, and<br />
intentions that are realized also involve the expenditure of energy. An intent<br />
could remain an ‘ideal representation of action and events’ – ‘it . . . can<br />
become real only to the extent that it is endowed with real energy, in the
Capitalism in contemporary debates 43<br />
same way as justice and morality, as ideas, have no historical influence until<br />
they are adopted as determinants of action by real powers’. The results of<br />
action, says Simmel, here exist in a psychologically effective form before<br />
they acquire an objective existence. In both cases, the real status of action<br />
is confirmed by the expenditure of energy. All human action, therefore, will<br />
leave an energy trace, and it is up to the social scientist to attribute that<br />
energy to motive in pursuit of an objective or as instinctually caused. In this<br />
way, the expenditure of energy as common to both action complexes, the<br />
debate between causality and teleology, is reconciled, asserts Simmel. 34 The<br />
energy component of action needs to be linked up to Simmel’s discussion of<br />
desire as value realized against resistance. Desire implies that work (the expenditure<br />
of energy) needs to be accomplished before satisfaction is reached;<br />
so seduction, cuisine, cultivation are all forms of energy expenditure in the<br />
pursuit of objects in the world, whose instant gratification – as sex, fast food,<br />
prettiness – would devalue desire.<br />
This is an extraordinarily neat and compact theory of action. It is not<br />
particularly sociological. It asserts some psychological cause (intentional or<br />
instinctual), which is worked out in the world, producing specific results.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> omitted the energy component when he developed a similar theory<br />
of action (in 1913). In the PESC, it was sufficient for his thesis to treat psychological<br />
motivations and compulsions as causally effective.<br />
Simmel becomes sociological in his argument when he acknowledges that<br />
realizing an aim or purpose in the world involves the mediation of the subject<br />
who makes that aim happen in the world. ‘Our actions are the bridge that<br />
makes it possible for the content of the purpose to pass from its psychological<br />
form to a real form. Purpose is necessarily bound up with its means’ (p.<br />
206). We have to engage with the objective world to attain our aims, and this<br />
involves complex means–end complexes. In order to achieve D, ‘a chain of<br />
mechanical processes A, B, C has to be produced so that B is caused by A, C<br />
by B and D only by C . . .’. In other words, if I wanted to go to the Football<br />
Cup Final, I have to actualize my desire by ringing the box office, buying a<br />
ticket and then getting across London to Wembley. In doing this. I will use<br />
tools or instruments – the telephone, a credit card and a transport system.<br />
A tool for Simmel is an intensified form of means, and money for Simmel<br />
is the purest example of a tool. ‘Here, finally, we reach the point at which<br />
money finds its place in the interweaving of purposes’. Money ‘is an institution<br />
through which the individual concentrates his activity and possessions<br />
in order to attain goals that he could not attain directly’ (p. 210).<br />
The nature of money as a tool for the attainment of aims leads Simmel into<br />
an interesting digression on the congruence of strangers and money – with<br />
Puritans as a particular example. ‘The importance of money as a means,<br />
independent of all specific ends, results in the fact that money becomes the<br />
centre of interest and the proper domain of individuals and classes who,<br />
because of their social position, are excluded from many kinds of personal
44 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
and specific goals’ (p. 221). There are, then, social groups who are excluded<br />
from full rights and benefits of citizenship. The Quakers in England are an<br />
interesting case because they voluntarily renounced political participation.<br />
After the Quakers had already attained full political equality, they themselves<br />
rejected the interests of others: they did not take an oath and<br />
therefore could not accept a public office; they refused everything that<br />
was associated with the adornment of life, even sport; they even had to<br />
give up their farming because they did not want to pay tithe. Thus, in<br />
order to retain an external interest, they were directed towards money<br />
as the sole interest in life to which they had access.<br />
(p. 222)<br />
Simmel makes the same point with regard to the German Pietists and<br />
Herrenhuter, whose ‘naked acquisitiveness’ stands out as their only practical<br />
impulse when these communities denied themselves an ‘interest in the sciences,<br />
the arts and cheerful sociability’.<br />
Simmel, then, provides more than hints (about Puritans) for the Protestant<br />
ethic thesis; he provides a philosophy of social action. This is rooted in<br />
a theory of desire, resistance, realization and value and, overall, it can be said<br />
to be psychological. Perhaps it is in this connection that <strong>Weber</strong> raises his objection<br />
in 1913 that Simmel does not differentiate sufficiently the subjective<br />
from the objective (see note 25). But in 1904–5, <strong>Weber</strong> himself is operating<br />
with psychological motivations in the absence of his own theory and model<br />
of social action.<br />
Some interim conclusions<br />
Two main points can be drawn from the above analysis and exposition. First,<br />
Simmel, Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong> all use the concept ‘Geist’ as a form of explanation,<br />
and all three have in common its use in a predominantly psychological<br />
manner. Simmel stands out through his intensive discussion of the psychology<br />
of motivation and how it may be developed as a philosophy of social<br />
action. This has methodological consequences for <strong>Weber</strong> that will be discussed<br />
in the next chapter. At this point, however, it is premature to speak<br />
of a sociological theory of action in either Simmel or <strong>Weber</strong> (although if one<br />
chooses to read more of Sombart, a credible basis for an economic sociology<br />
will be found at the start of mK).<br />
Second, Simmel’s discussion of the role, function and philosophy of<br />
money enters into a diffuse account of historical development. There is an<br />
implicit assumption in The Philosophy of Money that barter and the absence<br />
of money characterize prehistory and simpler societies and that fully developed<br />
money characterizes modern society. But Simmel himself provides no<br />
clear periodization in the way proffered by authors such as Marx, Rodbertus,<br />
Bücher, Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong>. 35 My argument throughout this chapter
Capitalism in contemporary debates 45<br />
has been that, although we have a precise grasp of the nature of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
explanation, the same specification does not apply to what is to be explained.<br />
I have outlined the contours of the capitalism problematic (‘Fragestellung’) in<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s lectures as a national-economist, as the central topic in the younger<br />
generation of the Verein and as the advertised object of study in the Archiv.<br />
PESC is an essay that contributes to the much wider capitalism debate, and<br />
this becomes particularly clear when its relation to Sombart’s mK is fully<br />
articulated – something <strong>Weber</strong> was less than forward about. There is therefore<br />
a lack of symmetry in the PESC between <strong>Weber</strong>’s care in expounding<br />
his explanation and the assumed and imprecisely indicated nature of what<br />
exactly was being explained – and, as noted by Nipperdey, <strong>Weber</strong> used a<br />
postgraduate dissertation on late nineteenth-century occupational divides by<br />
way of an explanandum. 36 As we will see, <strong>Weber</strong> had to rectify this asymmetry<br />
outside the original text of PESC. He took up the methodological<br />
problems in his ‘Objectivity’ essay of 1904, which, following the suggestion<br />
by Lehmann, can be seen as the followthrough of a suggested division of<br />
labour with Brentano. He attempted to answer his critics in a series of anticritiques,<br />
after which he redefined his research orientation in terms of a<br />
comparative sociology.<br />
A final point remains to be considered. <strong>Weber</strong> and Sombart were reliant<br />
on Simmel’s exposition of means and ends and how money is able to<br />
reconfigure the actions of individuals and groups. But The Philosophy of<br />
Money did not conform to the capitalism debate in the way I have surveyed<br />
it above. Simmel was quite explicit about this at the outset and, in an often<br />
quoted section of his Preface, he wrote, ‘The attempt is made methodologically<br />
to construct a new storey beneath historical materialism such that<br />
the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life into the causes<br />
of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic forms themselves<br />
are recognized as the result of more profound valuations and currents of<br />
psychological or even metaphysical pre-conditions.’ 37 Historical materialism<br />
or Marxism famously developed the divide between a material base (the<br />
economic relations of class society) and the superstructure (state, politics,<br />
culture, religion), and either directly or indirectly the base determined the<br />
superstructure. For example, for Marx, the state was nothing but the executive<br />
committee of the ruling class. What Simmel proposes is to insert a new<br />
level of analysis beneath the base and its superstructure. It is a statement of<br />
some verve in taking on the central tenets of Marxism, and it is somewhat<br />
cheeky as this is about the only direct reference to historical materialism in<br />
his book. 38 Moreover, he also states in the Preface that, ‘Not a single line of<br />
these investigations is meant to be a statement about economics.’ 39 So we<br />
have an engagement with Marxism, but of what sort? Overtly, it is not that<br />
of a national-economist.<br />
Simmel’s reply is to refer to ‘psychological or even metaphysical pre-conditions’.<br />
40 While we have examined the psychological preconditions, what<br />
are those metaphysical preconditions? It is here that ‘Geist’ comes to be
46 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
more than psychology. Money, by being the measure of all things, combining<br />
form, function and substance (latterly symbolic), becomes a universal means.<br />
It combines in itself the extension of mind as abstraction, as ‘Geist’, and the<br />
value standard of things. There is in Simmel’s exposition a dualism (derivable<br />
from Spinoza): the world of mind and the world of things can never be<br />
reconciled because of their radically different ontologies. But money is an<br />
instrument that can equilibrate between the valuations placed on objects and<br />
things when they are exchanged by people. Money has no substantive value<br />
itself but acts as a universal measure of value where value is only objectified<br />
through the process of exchange, so realizing the subjective values of the<br />
desires and preferences of individuals. Money, here, can be thought of as a<br />
new plane of existence – the point at which the plane of mind has conjoined<br />
with the plane of things. Although Simmel did not go in for reflections about<br />
the distinctiveness of the west, the development of money by modern man<br />
would count as a singular event in comparative perspective. This, I think,<br />
is the attractiveness of Simmel’s analysis for Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong>. Where<br />
they could not follow Simmel was into the area of philosophy and his assertions<br />
of ontological planes – of mind and things – for these are metaphysical<br />
speculations off-limits to national-economy.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> and Sombart instead tried to provide a historical aetiology for the<br />
rise of the means–end mentality. They moved national-economy towards<br />
thinking about what sociological and historical conditions would satisfy the<br />
problematic of modern capitalism. The explanandum that required an explanation<br />
was the emergence of an extended division of labour, production<br />
for profit and means–end calculations in which both people and things are<br />
treated as means to a further end. Both Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong> drive their analysis<br />
(of greed and of asceticism) to fit the Simmelian means–end schema. But,<br />
in being drawn to Simmel’s philosophy, <strong>Weber</strong> and Sombart were attempting<br />
to confront a question of origins that, as one reads Simmel more intensively,<br />
lay beyond historical representation. For money could be conceived as a new<br />
‘media res’, a new plane of existence, determining but not itself historically<br />
determinable.<br />
A recent essay by the sociologist and theologian Martin Riesebrodt succinctly<br />
states the position developed in this chapter. ‘. . . Simmel, Sombart,<br />
and <strong>Weber</strong> all understood themselves as further developing Marx from a<br />
critical perspective, not as refuting him’. ‘<strong>Weber</strong>’s generation of scholars<br />
identified the weakness of the Marxian approach most in need of further<br />
development to be historical materialism understood as a doctrine, . . . instead<br />
of as a method of inquiry.’ 41 <strong>Weber</strong>, Riesebrodt continues, sought to<br />
widen the materialist perspective through the consideration of ideal factors<br />
(i.e. inner-worldly asceticism). In this, he followed Simmel, who argued that,<br />
in history, ‘material and ideal factors engage in a dialectical relationship in<br />
which neither one is first or last’.<br />
However, Riesebrodt goes on to conclude of Simmel, ‘The difference<br />
between materialism and idealism is not an ontological one, but a meth-
Capitalism in contemporary debates 47<br />
odological one.’ 42 This is true of <strong>Weber</strong> and Sombart, but not of Simmel.<br />
His book was titled The Philosophy of Money precisely because he wanted<br />
to go beyond the layer of positivist economic science into a consideration<br />
of ontology. Moreover, there is not a methodological solution to the issues<br />
raised by Simmel, only philosophical ones. <strong>Weber</strong>’s methodology, as it developed<br />
from 1904 onwards, wanted to treat ideal factors as causes, not as<br />
philosophical inquiry.
3 The Protestant Ethic and the<br />
‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> published The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism in<br />
two instalments in November 1904 and June 1905. He called it an essay.<br />
Most readers assume that it is a book they are reading. It has the structure<br />
of a research thesis. Its opening chapter outlines what is to be explained:<br />
the much-noted link between economic progress and populations that are<br />
Protestant in orientation. Chapter 2 exemplifies but does not define what<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> means by the spirit of capitalism. Chapter 3 develops the argument<br />
that the idea of occupation is religious in origin, as indicated by the concept<br />
of vocation or calling (‘Beruf ’). Chapter 4 deepens the argument through an<br />
exploration of Christian calling as practised by four different Puritan sects,<br />
and this practice is defined by <strong>Weber</strong> as inner worldly asceticism. Chapter 5<br />
concludes the study by arguing that a religiously derived asceticism constitutes<br />
the mentality of modern capitalism. The study is supported throughout<br />
by highly detailed and scholarly footnotes, which sometimes reduces the<br />
main text to a few lines in the original German edition. So, is it a book or<br />
an essay?<br />
This is a slightly unfair question, because what <strong>Weber</strong> meant by an essay<br />
was not the relatively brief exposition of ideas that we take an essay to be.<br />
He meant an exploratory investigation rather than a systematic treatise, and<br />
the investigation would not be limited in length or in penetrative depth.<br />
Most commentators agree that it is unrivalled as a penetrating study of the<br />
roots and significance of the western capitalistic work ethic and, indeed, as a<br />
study of just what it is that characterizes the uniqueness of modern western<br />
civilization or ‘Kultur’ as <strong>Weber</strong> termed it. 1 In these senses, it is taken to be<br />
‘a classic’, i.e. widely acknowledged to be outstanding in value and to possess<br />
additional qualities of proportioned and harmonious structure befitting<br />
one of the foundational texts of sociology and, more widely, the social and<br />
cultural sciences.<br />
The critical reaction to the study, both positive and negative, bears out<br />
the proposition of its classic status. Within six years of its first appearance,<br />
it had attracted a body of critical literature to which <strong>Weber</strong> replied in a<br />
series of anti-critiques. Some of the major figures in economic history (Lujo
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 49<br />
Brentano and Werner Sombart) as well as some of the more minor figures<br />
(Karl Fischer and Felix Rachfahl) ignited a debate that made <strong>Weber</strong>’s study<br />
one of the more controversial issues of the day in the German-speaking academic<br />
world. A later German editor of Protestant ethic studies, Johannes<br />
Winckelmann, gathered some of these critiques and the anti-critiques together<br />
2 as a supplementary volume, and it came out longer in length than the<br />
original studies. 3 Throughout the twentieth century, there have been waves<br />
of international debate – some of these collected together in a reader by<br />
Green 4 – and in the centenary years (2004–5) of the first appearance of the<br />
essay, there have been at least three publications devoted to it. 5 As recently<br />
as 1992, Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth published a major scholarly<br />
reconsideration of the Protestant ethic. Interest in the subject is likely to be<br />
rekindled by the imminent publication of Die protestantische Ethik und der<br />
‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus in the German complete works of Max <strong>Weber</strong> (Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe), complete with introduction and scholarly apparatus.<br />
And a fourth English translation of the work is soon to appear. 6<br />
In the academic world, most debates move on, through scientific resolution,<br />
through paradigm change or through exhaustion of the subject. The<br />
Protestant ethic debate is one of those few that refuse to lie down and die. I<br />
will argue in this chapter that this is in part related to the question already<br />
posed: is it an essay or a more systematic academic book? In particular, I<br />
will examine the claims that <strong>Weber</strong> makes for his study, which are somewhat<br />
contradictory, and I will argue that these contradictions derive from the origins<br />
and construction of the study. And in these respects, while it is a work<br />
of outstanding value, its structure is less than classical, and what is taken by<br />
sociology to be one of its founding texts in fact has a number of pronounced<br />
oddities.<br />
In my original draft for this chapter, I attempted to survey the methods<br />
employed by <strong>Weber</strong> in PESC as a way of teasing out these oddities. It proved<br />
to be an almost impossible task. In contemplating my failure, I came to fathom<br />
just why <strong>Weber</strong>’s PESC has a perennial ability to weather criticisms. My<br />
plan was to reread PESC, and extract and list what seemed to be the principal<br />
methods used by <strong>Weber</strong>. Then, I would compare these methods with what he<br />
had to say about them in his methodological writings. I wanted to create a<br />
situation similar to Durkheim’s where there is a systematic linkage between<br />
methodological rules and substantive work. With Durkheim, he wrote his<br />
Rules of Sociological Method and, then two years later, he produced Suicide,<br />
which was a near perfect exemplification and vindication of his new scientific<br />
method. I knew I would never obtain as perfect a match between method<br />
and substantive study in the case of <strong>Weber</strong>, but assumed this was because<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> did not, or could not, operate in the same planned and integrated way<br />
as Durkheim did. Nevertheless, I reckoned that there would be enough of a<br />
match to reveal how PESC exemplified <strong>Weber</strong>’s own innovative thinking in<br />
methodology. Like any teacher of social research methods, I was aiming to<br />
make transparent the combination of methods and practice.
50 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
But <strong>Weber</strong>’s PESC resists any such treatment. Methods cannot be separated<br />
out from the substantive arguments because <strong>Weber</strong> had fused them<br />
together, and this fusion was a condition of the work’s own creation. My<br />
argument now is that <strong>Weber</strong> went beyond methods and created something<br />
much more than cultural science – his own designation of what he was doing.<br />
To an extent, he had created a work of art, and it is to those methods<br />
and skills we have to turn if we are to understand what sort of work of art<br />
it was – and still is.<br />
‘Theory and method’ in PESC<br />
My survey of PESC produced the following list:<br />
1 causal links and causal mechanism;<br />
2 the historical individual and genetic ideal types;<br />
3 hermeneutics;<br />
4 ‘Verstehen’.<br />
This was drawn up from the following brief audit of <strong>Weber</strong>’s methods.<br />
Chapter 1 of PESC, ‘Religious Affiliation and Social Stratification’, uses<br />
survey data on occupational statistics to establish the argument that<br />
Protestant populations are more strongly associated with economic development<br />
than Catholic ones. Survey data and the establishment of<br />
non-random variability between factors or variables is the dominant<br />
style of today’s social research. <strong>Weber</strong>, however, wants to go beyond<br />
the results of survey data. He asks: ‘why were the districts of highest<br />
economic development at the same time particularly favourable to a<br />
revolution in the Church? The answer is by no means so simple as<br />
one might think’. <strong>Weber</strong> raises an issue that still bedevils much survey-based<br />
research. How do we know what is cause and what is effect?<br />
Statistical data can be tabulated and reformatted in all sorts of<br />
ways in order to reveal a non-random relationship between variables.<br />
Statistically significant correlations between variables, such as religion<br />
and occupation, can be found. But the question still remains as to the<br />
nature of the relationship and causal priority. <strong>Weber</strong> will argue that, in<br />
initial outline, the causal linkage goes from reformed church to higher<br />
economic development in comparison with the unreformed church<br />
and the economic character of its population(s). But he immediately<br />
acknowledges the counterhypothesis: that higher economic development<br />
could attract Protestant populations as more adapted than their
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 51<br />
Catholic counterparts. The causal sequence then becomes: the causes<br />
of economic development lie outside factors of religion, i.e. they could<br />
be endogamous to the economic sphere concerned with trade routes,<br />
financial innovation, technological progress, etc. And once economic<br />
development is under way in its recognizably modern capitalistic form,<br />
then the outlook and habits of Protestants are drawn to the new centres<br />
of commerce.<br />
Actually, in a reworked version, this argument is far more potent<br />
than <strong>Weber</strong> allows. But the point is that <strong>Weber</strong> has flagged up the crucial<br />
importance of some kind of underlying model that provides an explanation<br />
of how the causal linkages operate – the links or mediations<br />
in the argument as well as the directionality of causality. Swedberg and<br />
Hedstrom have recently given a very cogent summary of why causal<br />
models are required to make sense of statistical data. 7 They call for the<br />
explication of the causal mechanism. This is what <strong>Weber</strong> proposes to<br />
do in PESC. He intends to spell out the causal mechanism. This will<br />
establish the direction of cause and effect, not beyond scientific doubt,<br />
but beyond any uncertainty in his own argument. And he will articulate<br />
a chain of causes and effects – a recognition that the causal mechanism<br />
will be complex and subtle.<br />
Right at the start of Chapter 2, ‘The Spirit of Capitalism’, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
presents the reader with a fairly tricky proposition. The ‘spirit’ of capitalism<br />
– ‘a somewhat pretentious phrase’, says <strong>Weber</strong> – can only be<br />
understood as ‘an historical individual’. It is the novelty of this suggestion<br />
that trips the reader up, because not a person, nor a thing, but a<br />
‘spirit’ is to be thought of as a ‘historical individual’. Obviously, then,<br />
this is not individual as in a person – such as Fred Smith – but more in<br />
line with an individual event. But it is a complex of events that, taken<br />
together, would seem to be historically unique or ‘individual’. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
could have referred the reader to his colleague Heinrich Rickert, who<br />
originated the concept. But he doesn’t and instead provides his own<br />
parenthetical definition: ‘i.e. a complex of elements associated in historical<br />
reality which we unite into a conceptual whole from the standpoint<br />
of their cultural significance’. The point about these ‘historical<br />
concepts’, says <strong>Weber</strong>, is from the methodological point of view ‘not<br />
to grasp historical reality in abstract general formulae, but in concrete<br />
genetic sets of relations which are inevitably of a specifically unique<br />
and individual character’ (p. 48; all page references are to the Parsons’<br />
translation of PESC unless otherwise footnoted). <strong>Weber</strong> could have<br />
saved himself and his book much misunderstanding by going on to
52 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
explain this more fully, for it entails a central tenet of neo-Kantianism,<br />
which was the theory of knowledge that in part underwrote <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
new approach to the historical and cultural sciences. At the very least,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> should have referred the reader across to his ‘Objectivity’ essay,<br />
which handled some of these novel methodological issues, including<br />
what he meant by ‘genetic’. 8 At this juncture, I only list ‘historical individual’,<br />
‘genetic’ and ‘cultural significance’ as requiring further explanation.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> then immediately launches into his famous exposition and<br />
analysis of Benjamin Franklin. We have already seen why Franklin is<br />
central to his argument, for he represents the new spirit of commerce<br />
over the old ethos of capitalist traditionalism (and obviously I do need<br />
want to repeat <strong>Weber</strong>’s argumentation in this chapter). The methods<br />
deployed at this point by <strong>Weber</strong> concern the interpretation of historical<br />
texts. <strong>Weber</strong> wants to draw out the inference, which for him is crucial,<br />
of what Franklin wrote or what was said and reported about the<br />
merchant aristocrats, the Fuggers. On p. 71, <strong>Weber</strong> makes a glancing<br />
reference to Franklin, in embodying the new entrepreneurial spirit, as<br />
an ‘ideal type’. This is not explained, as surely it needed to be. The interpretation<br />
of meaning, and in textual expression, is normally known<br />
as hermeneutics. Chapter 3, ‘Luther’s Conception of Calling’, is a further,<br />
and brilliant, example of hermeneutics, and is a reminder that the<br />
technique called hermeneutics was developed within theology and the<br />
reading of sacred texts.<br />
Chapter 4, ‘The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism’, contains<br />
the central part of his argument, specifically the sequencing of<br />
causes in their roots in Puritan theology to their realization in the conduct<br />
of everyday economic life, which as <strong>Weber</strong> notes is a move from<br />
dogmatic origins to non-dogmatic practice. <strong>Weber</strong> announces at the<br />
start of the chapter that: ‘In history there have been four principal<br />
forms of ascetic Protestantism . . .’ (p. 95), and these were Calvinism,<br />
Pietism, Methodism and, lastly, the sects growing out of the Baptist<br />
movement. <strong>Weber</strong>, briefly, warns the reader that he ‘can of course only<br />
proceed by presenting these religious ideas in the artificial simplicity<br />
of ideal types, as they could at best be seldom found in history’ (p.<br />
98). So, we should briefly follow through and see how <strong>Weber</strong> handles<br />
Calvinism.<br />
Its ‘most characteristic’ dogma is that of predestination. In the sixteenth<br />
and seventeenth centuries in the most highly developed countries<br />
of the day – the Netherlands, England and France, this doctrine
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 53<br />
was subject to ‘great political and cultural struggles’. For example:<br />
‘The schism in the English Church became irrevocable under James<br />
I after the Crown and the Puritans came to differ dogmatically over<br />
just this doctrine’ (p. 99). <strong>Weber</strong> shields the reader at this point from<br />
the extraordinary political, theological and social complexity of the<br />
historical record. Today, as in <strong>Weber</strong>’s days, professional historians can<br />
devote a lifetime’s scholarship to this period, probably concentrating<br />
on just one country. <strong>Weber</strong> extracts what he takes to be predestination<br />
in about three pages, citing, or rather excerpting, the Westminster<br />
Confession of 1647 as his main source. 9 He then elaborates or interprets<br />
what this means for the religious person and, over the next dozen<br />
pages, he elaborates in some very fine writing the deeper significance<br />
of this for the persons concerned. This is the place where Bunyan’s dilemmas<br />
and terrors are outlined. The method being used here, broadly<br />
speaking, is an interpretative one, but it subdivides into hermeneutics<br />
and the ability to place oneself in the position of someone like Bunyan<br />
– the method otherwise known as ‘Verstehen’. Then, at the start<br />
of Chapter 5, ‘Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism’, <strong>Weber</strong> has to<br />
complete the transition from dogmatic to everyday ethics, and it is here<br />
that he expands on manuals of practical instruction, such as Bayley’s<br />
Praxis Pietatis and Baxter’s Christian Directory. In a sociological sense,<br />
he also has to ensure through some empirical verification that working<br />
men did, in large numbers, read and follow these instruction manuals.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> places his own methodological emphasis, such as it is, on items<br />
1 and 2 – causality and genetic ideal types – and very little about items 3<br />
and 4. Some years later, in connection with his move towards sociology<br />
around about 1912, he would have more to say about ‘Verstehen’. And right<br />
across his oeuvre, he makes hardly any mention of hermeneutics. Not to be<br />
systematic and integrated ‘as in Durkheim’ is allowable, but for <strong>Weber</strong> to say<br />
practically nothing about his principal methods is very strange. What makes<br />
it stranger is that his whole intellectual formation came out of a golden age<br />
of hermeneutics and ‘Verstehen’. Marianne <strong>Weber</strong>, in her biography, tells us<br />
that ‘when <strong>Weber</strong> returned to academic writing around 1900’, he started<br />
with some methodological writings, 10 and that the leading figures and basis<br />
for discussion lay with Dilthey, Windelband, Simmel and Heinrich Rickert. 11<br />
Windelband and Rickert were philosophers who had developed the theory<br />
of knowledge, working out the rules and limits of science in the area of history<br />
and the cultural sciences. Simmel, as we have already encountered him<br />
in the company of Sombart, was a deeply gifted analyst of human behaviour<br />
and human motivation and the consequences of action. Wilhelm Dilthey
54 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
– and this is where the real surprise lies – not only formulated the grounds<br />
on which ‘Verstehen’ could claim to provide a scientific basis for what he<br />
called the human sciences, but was also the leading commentator and theoretician<br />
of hermeneutics. Yet, apart from some passing references in an early<br />
methodological essay, <strong>Weber</strong> never refers to him. I shall return to Dilthey in<br />
the next chapter but, in the field in which <strong>Weber</strong> was working, it is reasonable<br />
to argue that Dilthey was a massive presence.<br />
So why do items 3 and 4 not receive any explicit attention from <strong>Weber</strong>?<br />
My answer is that <strong>Weber</strong> had not only absorbed the ‘methodological’ lessons<br />
from Dilthey, but went beyond them as a practitioner of hermeneutics. One<br />
of the biographical challenges of Max <strong>Weber</strong> is to realize something akin to<br />
what Dilthey achieved with Schleiermacher. Dilthey had established hermeneutics<br />
as part of a long tradition in European thought, originally stemming<br />
from the interpretation of a sacred text – the Bible – where the explication<br />
and understanding of the meaning of a text had become an art of interpretation.<br />
This is the definition of hermeneutics: the art of interpretation. PESC is<br />
peopled with leading interpreters of texts – Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Wesley,<br />
Baxter; these are some of the leading religious figures of the Reformation<br />
which, just to point out an obvious and large fact, came about through and<br />
depended on the reading and interpretation of the Bible. <strong>Weber</strong> also engages<br />
critically with some of the leading academic theologians of the nineteenth<br />
century whose work concerned the historical interpretation of meaning.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is such an accomplished and powerful interpreter of meaning that he<br />
himself joins the ranks of the hermeneutical tradition. He himself becomes<br />
canonical in the interpretation of religious text and religious expression. He<br />
becomes the Luther of the secular age, in the John Lennon sense that more<br />
people read <strong>Weber</strong> today than they do Martin Luther. <strong>Weber</strong> determinedly<br />
held on to items 1 and 2 in the list, regarding himself as a proponent of a<br />
new causal method in the cultural sciences. He failed to recognize the sheer<br />
achievement of his own essay and just how much of his own heart and soul<br />
he had poured into the creative outburst that is PESC. <strong>Weber</strong>’s own insistence<br />
on the sober, objective and restrained habitus of the ‘Wissenschaftler’,<br />
his own favoured image, is continually belied by his eruptive genius that has<br />
left its mark on the European historical consciousness of modernity.<br />
‘Der geniale Hermeneutiker’<br />
In this section, I shall give some examples of <strong>Weber</strong>’s interpretative genius,<br />
and then I will outline the methodological tradition he was part of, yet went<br />
beyond as a practitioner of the art of interpretation.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s treatment of Benjamin Franklin seizes the reader at the start of<br />
Chapter 2. <strong>Weber</strong>, quite dramatically, presents a series of excerpts of Franklin’s<br />
sayings. Initially, <strong>Weber</strong> does not tell the reader who the author is<br />
or the source. The reader is presented with a series of statements that will
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 55<br />
produce various reactions in the reader, from strong recognition through to<br />
strong incredulity (depending on the reader’s exposure to Protestant work<br />
values). ‘Remember, that time is money.’ ‘Remember, that credit is money.’<br />
‘Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can<br />
beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on.’ ‘Remember this<br />
saying, The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse.’ <strong>Weber</strong> unleashes<br />
the full rhetorical and literary force of Franklin upon the reader. The starting<br />
injunction – ‘Remember’ – repeats like hammer blows. Franklin was also<br />
master of the aphorism and, of course, his sayings have entered popular<br />
language. What today’s readers may have heard their grandmother saying is<br />
re-presented by <strong>Weber</strong> in its pristine form. Franklin ties the getting of money<br />
to all other departments of life in a striking, even outrageous, way. The literal<br />
implication of Franklin’s injunctions is to reduce the waking consciousness<br />
of a person to one aim alone, thinking how to make more money.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does not modify his presentation in any way. ‘To understand the<br />
object of investigation [spirit of capitalism]’, he says, ‘we turn to a document<br />
of that spirit which contains what we are looking for in almost classical<br />
purity, and at the same time has the advantage of being free from all direct<br />
relationships to religion, being this, for our purposes, free of preconceptions’<br />
(p. 48). <strong>Weber</strong> is being insouciant here. There is some debate about just what<br />
Franklin’s attitude was. To call it ‘classical purity’ is to misdirect the reader<br />
from Franklin’s artfulness. Franklin knew his English was mimicking the<br />
religious/Christian form of the Bible ‘thou shall do this & thou shall not do<br />
that’. Franklin was not a believer, as <strong>Weber</strong> notes, but his employment of this<br />
homiletic form has an air of the not quite serious. <strong>Weber</strong> takes Franklin to be<br />
what we would today perceive as the style of an earnest and evangelical business<br />
guru. Franklin, however, was too much of a man of the world (so the<br />
debate argues) 12 to take himself this seriously. Rather, a serious point, about<br />
how to save in difficult circumstances, is being made in a semi-humorous but<br />
memorable way. It has more to do with mnemonics than ‘classical purity’.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> also does not situate Franklin in his historical setting – mid-eighteenth-century<br />
Boston – an economic environment of small traders, producers<br />
and shopkeepers. The linkage between Franklin’s spirit and any potential<br />
seeding of modern capitalism in North America is ignored. Instead, Franklin<br />
becomes the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism, period. The pattern of<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s argumentation, and one comes across this repeatedly in his oeuvre,<br />
is to contrast Franklin’s attitude with another person’s – first Ferdinand<br />
Kürnberger and then Jacob Fugger. Kürnberger gave a satirical account of<br />
America in his Picture of American Culture, which was published in 1855.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> introduces him as going too far in portraying the American culture as<br />
completely materialist. And Fugger, as we have seen, is introduced to show<br />
a non-modern business ethos. These two references, historically hundreds of<br />
years apart, serve to throw the distinctiveness of Franklin’s ethos into relief:<br />
‘the earning of money within the modern economic is . . . the result and
56 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling; and this virtue . . . is the real<br />
Alpha and Omega of Franklin’s ethic, as expressed in the passages we have<br />
quoted . . . ’ (pp. 53–4). Through a skilful use of figures who embody different<br />
ethoi – through Franklin, Kürnberger and Fugger – <strong>Weber</strong> establishes his<br />
central point with the reader: ‘. . . duty in one’s calling . . . is an idea which<br />
is characteristic of, and indeed in a certain sense of constitutive significance<br />
for, the “social ethic” of capitalistic culture’ (my translation, p. 54).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is keen to stress the historicity of vocational calling, which has<br />
been taken for granted in modern times. It is something he will trace back<br />
‘to a time previous to the advent of capitalism’. This (historical) exercise<br />
will show just how peculiar an idea vocational calling is. He draws out a<br />
powerful historical paradox. This constitutive and historical idea is now no<br />
longer required.<br />
Still less, naturally, do we maintain that a conscious acceptance of these<br />
ethical maxims on the part of the individuals, entrepreneurs or labourers,<br />
in modern capitalistic enterprise, is a condition of the further existence<br />
of present-day capitalism. The capitalistic economy of the present<br />
day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which<br />
presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order<br />
(Gehäuse) of things in which he must live (p. 54).<br />
This is the first appearance of the trope of the immutable shell/steel<br />
housing/iron cage of a giant capitalism dwarfing the individual. It is a trope<br />
of fear, of helplessness in the face of an impersonal order, of the loss of a<br />
personal ethic to an anethical machine. <strong>Weber</strong> legitimately wants to locate<br />
and exemplify what he takes to be the spirit of capitalism, but he does this<br />
by playing the reader backwards and forwards through time, pointing him<br />
squarely, through passing allusions, to the idea of duty in one’s occupational<br />
calling. This is not manipulation of the reader, but also it is not without<br />
art. <strong>Weber</strong>’s depiction in the rest of the chapter of medieval and Catholic<br />
attitudes and traditionalism of work is equally skilful in his use of illustrative<br />
examples.<br />
Chapter 3, ‘Luther’s Conception of Calling’, is almost exclusively concerned<br />
with hermeneutics. It is based purely on textual exegesis and interpretation.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s argument is that it was Luther who first introduced<br />
the idea of work as possessing a religious connotation. Luther, through his<br />
translation of certain passages of the sacred texts (ben Sirach and Paul’s letter<br />
to the Corinthians), elided the idea of God’s calling of man to salvation<br />
(‘Ruf ’) with that of vocation (‘Beruf ’). <strong>Weber</strong> establishes this point through<br />
a comparison of the original Greek and Latin versions of the relevant sacred<br />
texts (and, in the 1920 version of PESC, the Hebrew version) and translations<br />
prior to Luther’s. The sense in all these languages of a passage, selected<br />
by <strong>Weber</strong> from ben Sirach (Chap 11, verse 20), advises the believer to stay<br />
in his job/task/work. Whether ‘ergon’, ‘opus’ or ‘Pflicht’, the sense of these
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 57<br />
words had no religious connotation. Luther, however, translated this as<br />
meaning stay in your ‘calling’ (‘Beruf ’), whereby a job or work is now given<br />
a religious revaluation.<br />
There are many hermeneutical aspects to what <strong>Weber</strong> is undertaking.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> establishes the new meaning of ‘Beruf ’ through a comparison of previous<br />
texts both in German and in the first language versions of the sacred<br />
text (Greek and Latin). The meaning of a word – here one word – is established<br />
in relation to a sentence. The previous normal sense of the sentence<br />
is established through its various translations. Luther alters the word and,<br />
from that point onwards in Protestant Bibles, the new sense of ‘Beruf ’ is<br />
conveyed. Hermeneutics operates by discerning the meaning of a word by<br />
placing it in a sentence. It is placed in a known context. That text is also<br />
placed in the context of the author. <strong>Weber</strong> makes the crucial point, both for<br />
his own argument and for the operation of hermeneutics: ‘but the fact that<br />
the word [Beruf] in its present meaning derives from the translations of the<br />
Bible, in fact from the spirit (‘Geist’) of the translators, not from the spirit<br />
of the original’. 13 <strong>Weber</strong>, I think rather lazily, does not inform us of Luther’s<br />
new spirit – presumably a tendency to accentuate work and its sense of joint<br />
community. The context, though, is Luther’s intent, and this gives <strong>Weber</strong><br />
and other exegetical commentators the ability to note a semantic shift in an<br />
important Biblical word.<br />
Harry Liebersohn, coming to this passage in PESC by another route – a<br />
critique of meanings as derivable from ethnic primordialism – has this to<br />
say:<br />
The act of translation disrupts the continuum of culture and introduces<br />
a new concept. The search for origins does not lead to a primordial<br />
linguistic past but is arrested at a specific moment in Luther’s work.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s survey of linguistic evidence goes on the assumption of the instability<br />
of linguistic meaning over time; he delineates how social and<br />
political institutions provide the proper frame of reference for the interpretation<br />
of words, whose meaning depends not on linguistic essence or<br />
folk spirit, but on social convention. 14<br />
Hermeneutics, then, proceeds by teasing out meaning or a shift in meaning<br />
through relating a word to its surrounding words (a sentence) and outwards<br />
to the intent of the author, and still further to the context of the author.<br />
This interpretation of the meaning and significance of ‘Beruf ’ is an absolutely<br />
critical stage in <strong>Weber</strong>’s argument. Luther switched the meaning of a<br />
concept, and the world in its Protestant sphere was set on a different path.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> cements his argument by making a contrast between the medieval<br />
worldview of Dante and the new Puritan worldview expressed by John Milton.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> assumes his readers already know the last canto of Dante’s The<br />
Divine Comedy. <strong>Weber</strong> therefore refers back to the reader’s own knowledge<br />
and understanding, inserting an emphatic point of his own argument. This
58 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
barely works for today’s reader because a knowledge and appreciation of<br />
poetry has been marginalized in favour of a more utilitarian curriculum.<br />
The Divine Comedy is a cosmological epic in which the poet is guided first<br />
through the inferno, then purgatory and, finally, into paradise where, right<br />
at the end, the poet looks upwards into the heavens, describing the divinity<br />
of God and the state of his own being. <strong>Weber</strong> could have explained to<br />
the reader that the poet’s vision and ecstasy is other-worldly and involves<br />
a mystic union of poet with the divine, where, through divine benefaction,<br />
the poet’s will and desire become perfectly reconciled. It is a kind of cosmological<br />
nirvana, an inverse of what <strong>Weber</strong> was later to term, in relation to<br />
Buddhism, an acosmic love where pure contemplation replaces the Christian<br />
notion of pilgrimage, of a necessary arduous and long journey before sight<br />
of the divinity is obtained.<br />
Milton’s Paradise Lost has the same structure of an epic as Dante’s Divine<br />
Comedy, but the cosmological psychology is entirely different. The worlds<br />
of heaven and hell are not invested with liturgy, magic and an intense devotion<br />
towards sacred objects and people. In a sense, the medieval Christian<br />
outlook tended to assimilate the supernatural into the everyday. For<br />
the Puritan, this was not allowed. His or her problem was not so much to<br />
attain a psychological state through mysticism, ecstasy and their accompanying<br />
techniques of sensory deprivation and intensification, but rather to<br />
ensure salvation after death. <strong>Weber</strong> quotes the passage where Adam and Eve<br />
are expelled from paradise, a simply unutterable thought for Dante as the<br />
culmination of a religious life was to gain some inkling of paradise. Milton<br />
allots some measured sorrow to Adam and Eve as ‘They looking back all<br />
the eastern side beheld/Of paradise so late their happy seat,’; ‘Some natural<br />
tears they dropped, but wiped them soon:’. <strong>Weber</strong> places the next two lines<br />
in an emphasized font (which has been accidentally omitted in the Talcott<br />
Parsons’ translation). ‘The world was all before them, there to choose/Their<br />
place of rest, and Providence their guide.’ The archangel Michael gives them<br />
some advice, a list of virtues they will need to get on in the world outside,<br />
saying with these they will not be sorry to have left paradise, ‘but shall possess/A<br />
Paradise within thee, happier far.’ <strong>Weber</strong> also emphasizes these lines<br />
(p. 88).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s final comment reads, ‘One feels at once that this powerful expression<br />
of the Puritan’s serious attention to this world, his acceptance of his<br />
life in the world as a task, could not possibly have come from the pen of a<br />
mediæval writer.’ This is something of an understatement about a topic that<br />
could have been explored more extensively and more profoundly. Instead,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> invokes the reader’s own poetic imagination and memory to mark the<br />
transition point between the medieval and (for <strong>Weber</strong>) modern sensibility.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s interpretation of the meaning of these passages is dependent on the<br />
reader’s own knowledge and understanding. In the two paragraphs above,<br />
I have interposed my understanding of the gulf that stands between Dante’s
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 59<br />
climactic of paradise and Milton’s endorsement of work as an alternative for<br />
the loss of paradise. As we shall see, this constitutes a permanent feature of<br />
hermeneutics.<br />
Puritanism revisited<br />
One of his English texts for PESC was Edward Dowden’s Anglican and Puritan,<br />
which was published in 1900, and whose importance for <strong>Weber</strong> at<br />
a critical stage in his life has been noted by Peter Ghosh. 15 Its chapter on<br />
John Bunyan is well worth reading, for it recreates the imaginative world of<br />
seventeenth-century English Puritanism. The chapter also advances some of<br />
the ideas that <strong>Weber</strong> integrates into his conceptualization of Puritanism. For<br />
us (c. 2006) to enter into Dowden’s evocation of Bunyan will take a little<br />
imaginative effort of our own. In my education in a Christian school, I do<br />
not remember reading Bunyan. I suspect this was because he was regarded as<br />
a little too desperate in his religious enthusiasm and his literalism – he was<br />
not a suitable role model. My students today are Islamic or Jewish or Christian<br />
in faith, or have a multifaith education. This raises the question of how<br />
an empathetic connection can be made with a seventeenth-century Puritan?<br />
And, more generally, how do we understand another person’s faith, or the<br />
absence of faith?<br />
Dowden has a phrase to describe this problem – ‘the parallax of truth’.<br />
Bunyan was the most popular author of middle and late seventeenth-century<br />
England – ‘who will not say that in the religious passion of an Englishman of<br />
the mid-years of the seventeenth century that the parallax of truth was not<br />
considerable?’ 16 So, from where a Puritan stood in the seventeenth century,<br />
what Bunyan wrote had the absolute conviction of truth. Moving forwards<br />
in time to 1900 and Dowden registers a problem that the parallax of vision is<br />
no longer looking straight ahead, but is looking backwards or not in a straight<br />
line. The credibility of Bunyan as an author does not convince in the same<br />
way. ‘If the deep realities of Puritanism remains – its seriousness, its ardour,<br />
its plea for the loins girt and the lamp lit – yet its exact modes of thought and<br />
feeling, which did their work and have been replaced by others, can no more<br />
be revived than its exact forms of speech.’ 17 Dowden himself exemplifies the<br />
problem of which he speaks. ‘Loins girt and lamps lit’ is the language of the<br />
seventeenth century. Dowden is being ironic, and he knows his readers will<br />
know he has ‘patched’ into the idiom of early modern English. Of course, it<br />
does not really work for us in the twenty-first century (other than through<br />
Shakespeare who, as a world author, keeps this language alive).<br />
Dowden regarded Bunyan as having a particular genius. ‘Had he interpreted<br />
what was peculiar to a special period and a particular phase of religious<br />
thought and feeling, what he has written might still be valuable as<br />
a document for historical students, but it could not be a living power with<br />
successive generations of readers of every class and in almost every region of
60 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
the world.’ 18 <strong>Weber</strong>, as will be seen, called this a ‘transcendental presupposition’.<br />
This means that, although we are no longer contemporaneous with<br />
past events, we can still understand what animated Bunyan’s writings.<br />
Bunyan has an intense feeling of holiness. Religion for him was ‘a personal<br />
unique experience’. He did not receive his religion through the organized Anglican<br />
Church which, with ‘its appointed bounds . . . forms and ceremonies<br />
[as] an aid to spiritual life’, was a form of ‘cultivated community’. Bunyan<br />
stood for the rawness of direct belief in his God. He found the deepest community<br />
‘not in institutions, or corporations, or Churches, but in the secrets<br />
of a solitary heart’. This individualized belief gave ‘an incandescence of the<br />
inward life . . . which touches heights and depths beyond what can be safely<br />
approached in forms suited for the general and habitual uses of religion’.<br />
Bunyan constructed an inward literary drama of his belief, which featured<br />
himself, God and Satan. He, as a solitary soul without help of church rites<br />
and ceremonies, has to escape the City of Destruction and journey to the<br />
Celestial City. It is a journey from everyday temptation and sinfulness to a<br />
realm of purity and salvation. In describing this journey, Bunyan reveals his<br />
most private experiences. Bunyan shared his experiential journey by writing<br />
Pilgrim’s Progress, a best-seller in the seventeenth century. He also wrote<br />
an autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, that chronicles<br />
the psychological mood changes of his journey: a ‘history of a soul struggling<br />
from darkness to light, from confusion to clearness, from weakness to<br />
strength . . .’. He wrote in Bedford jail in 1666, locked up for the zealousness<br />
of his religious convictions and the intolerance of government (whose<br />
laws were ameliorated in 1687).<br />
In speaking of the ‘disillusioned and pessimistically inclined individualism’<br />
and the ‘deep spiritual isolation’ of the Calvinist, it is Bunyan whom<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> cites,<br />
To see the specific results of this peculiar atmosphere, it is only necessary<br />
to read Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, by far the most widely read book of<br />
the whole Puritan literature. In the description of [Mr] Christian’s attitude<br />
after he had realized that he was living in the City of Destruction<br />
and he had received the call to take up his pilgrimage to the Celestial<br />
City, wife and children cling to him, but stopping his ears with his fingers<br />
and crying, ‘life, eternal life’, he staggers forth across the fields. No<br />
refinement could surpass the naive feeling of the tinker who, writing in<br />
his prison cell, earned the applause of a believing world, in expressing<br />
the emotions of the faithful Puritan, thinking only of his own salvation.<br />
(PESC, p. 107)<br />
Grace Abounding shows that Bunyan was possessed by a literal and vivid<br />
understanding of heaven and hell, and his psychological states alternated<br />
between a visceral fear that he might die and descend to the tortures of hell,<br />
or the intensely felt joy that he might be saved and that his lonely earthly
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 61<br />
existence would be replaced by entering the communion of saints and God<br />
in heaven. The Bible was more than a book of scriptures, it was, says Dowden<br />
‘the authentic voice of God’. It was not something to be interpreted<br />
by priestly experts, but it was the ‘sayings of the divine word; they leaped<br />
out upon him, now like angels waving swords of flame, now like winged<br />
messengers of consolation’. 19 Bunyan was both a martyr to and the glorified<br />
child of Puritan scripturalism, notes Dowden. Bunyan describes what<br />
would now be called neurotic and obsessive thoughts. When playing cards<br />
in a public house, a voice came into his head and spoke to him – ‘Wilt thou<br />
leave thy sins and go to heaven or have thy sins and go to hell.’ He enjoyed<br />
bell-ringing but, on occasions, he could not put out of his mind the idea<br />
that the bells and steeple were about to collapse on him, and the fear of<br />
this forced him to run out of the building. As he walked along the country<br />
roads of Bedfordshire tormented by the psychological agony of whether he<br />
was a sinner or whether he could be saved, he would seek a miraculous<br />
signal that he was after all to be saved. He would say to the puddles ‘be<br />
dry’ and to the dry patches ‘be you the puddles’. Bunyan was what Dowden<br />
terms ‘otherworldly’. He was always preoccupied by his own goodness or<br />
badness and his possible fate when he died, which in his neurosis he always<br />
imagined to be at any moment. Yet Bunyan describes this spiritual journey<br />
in a completely practical way. It is an empirical world of roads, trees, birds,<br />
animals, houses, family, friends and types of person. He lives in this world<br />
but is always thinking of another world.<br />
What caused Bunyan a particular sort of ever present terror was the<br />
thought that God had already decided who had received His grace and would<br />
join ‘the elect’ in heaven, and that he Bunyan was not among them. He was<br />
already, whatever his struggles, doomed to die a sinner and go to hell. The<br />
theological term for this is predestination, and its rationale follows from the<br />
idea that, if God knew everything, that he was omniscient, he would already<br />
know who was destined for salvation and who for damnation. Among the<br />
Puritan sects, it was the Calvinists who made predestination a central feature<br />
of their faith, unlike the mainstream churches who allowed the idea that,<br />
through good works, prayer and confession, all sinners might be saved. This<br />
particularly vicious piece of theology had reduced Bunyan to a psychological<br />
wreck. And it is an interesting psychological dilemma: if you personally<br />
are responsible for your sins directly to God without any intervention of<br />
priest, liturgy or confessional, yet God has already decided your fate, just<br />
what do you do? Deliverance came, literally, through the Bible. He read<br />
‘Behold, thou art fair, my love . . . thou art my love.’ This was a message<br />
from God to him that he was saved. He was unable to save himself, which<br />
as Dowden notes is a form of spiritual egoism. To achieve this, Bunyan tells<br />
us, he abandoned his self to the righteousness of God. Bunyan tells us that<br />
in this state of grace he saw Jesus at God’s right hand, i.e. he had attained<br />
an extraordinary psychological state. The idea of deliverance, redemption<br />
and abandoning oneself to a higher force is well captured in the German
62 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
word ‘Erlösung’. When <strong>Weber</strong> refers to ‘Erlösung’, the straight translation is<br />
‘salvation’. But Bunyan exemplifies, almost in a psychopathological way, the<br />
psychological dimensions of falling into salvation.<br />
Dowden’s recreation of Bunyan’s faith as psychological drama and crisis<br />
would, I suggest, have had a significant impact on <strong>Weber</strong> in his psychologically<br />
prostrated state. This points not simply to <strong>Weber</strong>’s own receptiveness<br />
to the otherwise strange world of English Puritanism, but also to Dowden’s<br />
imaginative powers in retelling Bunyan’s story. Of course, today, we are far<br />
less receptive. Bunyan comes across as naïve, simple and somewhat unhinged.<br />
His language and images seem strange if not bizarre. While the contemporary<br />
urbanite may believe in good and evil, the literal visual presence of heaven<br />
and hell may well seem far-fetched. However, central to <strong>Weber</strong>’s method is<br />
the acceptance that we can imaginatively recreate the psychological attitude,<br />
values and outlook of another person, across time and even across cultures.<br />
Ten years later, <strong>Weber</strong> was recreating the mentality of the Confucian in ancient<br />
China, the Hindu mystic, the Islamic warrior and so on. The grounds<br />
and reasons for this capability raise some interesting questions.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> used the case of John Bunyan sparingly, mainly to illustrate the<br />
condition of spiritual isolation (as quoted above). In order for <strong>Weber</strong> to<br />
advance his study on the economic effects of religious belief, <strong>Weber</strong> required<br />
more practical attitudes. Bunyan was too extreme a case, bordering as we<br />
have seen on the psychopathological and certainly the neurotic. All the main<br />
ideas of Puritan behaviour are there in Dowden’s study. What we need to<br />
see next is how <strong>Weber</strong> reassembled them. <strong>Weber</strong> needed to demonstrate<br />
the psychological attitude of the mass of Puritans as a more normal phenomenon.<br />
When Bunyan was in jail, his wife brought him two books to<br />
read: Arthur Dent’s The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Bishop Bayley’s<br />
Practice of Piety. These texts were manuals of instruction and spelt out just<br />
exactly how one could and should behave in everyday situations. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
used Bayly’s Practice of Piety and another work that was extremely popular<br />
in the seventeenth century, Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory. This latter<br />
book, technically known as a casuistry, is in the format of frequently asked<br />
questions. If you lend someone money, should interest be charged upon it?<br />
Under what circumstances should beggars be aided? This sort of book is far<br />
less fervent and far more a practical guide to everyday conduct. The readers<br />
inhabited the same set of Puritan beliefs as Bunyan, but here behaviour is<br />
both normalized and disciplined.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> makes the point about Bayly (<strong>Weber</strong> uses the spelling ‘Bailey’) that,<br />
although doctrinal beliefs such as predestination were central to Calvinism,<br />
religious writers such as Bayly placed the emphasis not on doctrine but on<br />
how one practised one’s religion. ‘The emphasis was placed so strongly on<br />
the praxis pietatis that doctrinal orthodoxy was pushed into the background;<br />
at time, in fact, it seemed quite a matter of indifference.’ 20 And on Baxter, he<br />
‘stands out above many other writers on Puritan ethics, both because of his<br />
eminently practical and realistic attitude, and, at the same time, because of
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 63<br />
the universal recognition to his works, which have gone through many new<br />
editions and translations.’ ‘. . . like so many of the best spirits of his time,<br />
[he] gradually grew away from the dogmas of pure Calvinism.’ ‘He sought<br />
his field of labour most especially in the practical promotion of the moral life<br />
through the Church.’ ‘His Christian Directory is the most complete compendium<br />
of Puritan ethics, and is continually adjusted to the practical experiences<br />
of his own ministerial activity.’ Baxter would preach to the weavers<br />
and other trades of Kidderminster in the English Midlands, forcefully telling<br />
them how they should behave in all practical aspects of life.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, then, combines a keen sense of the psychology of the Puritan predicament<br />
with its practical resolution. The principal theme of this resolution<br />
was work which, as <strong>Weber</strong> notes, has in many other religious situations,<br />
especially monasticism, been used as a way of controlling the emotions. Puritanism<br />
as a doctrine turned away from emotional display, it had a horror<br />
of sensuous and sexual enjoyment, it regarded art as frivolous, and regarded<br />
idleness as one of the greatest sins. If we accept that man and woman are<br />
sensual beings in their make-up, Puritanism can be seen to go against the<br />
grain of human nature. ‘To put this is in our terms’, writes <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
the Puritan, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to enable a man<br />
to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which<br />
it taught him itself, against the emotions. In this formal psychological<br />
sense it tried to make him into a personality (Persönlichkeit). Contrary<br />
to many popular ideas, the end of this asceticism was to be able to lead<br />
an alert intelligent life: the most urgent task the destruction of spontaneous,<br />
impulsive enjoyment, the most important means was to bring order<br />
into the conduct of its adherents. 21<br />
<strong>Understanding</strong> Calvinism<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> also uses the same passage to indicate the gulf between the Lutheran<br />
and the Calvinist outlook. ‘But it [life in the world as a task] is just as uncongenial<br />
to Lutheranism, as expressed for instance in Luther’s and Paul<br />
Gerhard’s chorales.’ 22 The reader, again, has to supply his own meaning,<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong> has assumed his reader attends, or has as a child attended, church<br />
services where this music is sung. The reader is meant to infer that participation<br />
in Luther’s church music ‘was to be the liturgical counterpart to his<br />
theological doctrine of the communion of all believers’. 23 Calvinism, however,<br />
is absolutely severe and far more abstract in its notion of divinity. Strict<br />
Calvinist churches play no music (just as they have no altars, stained glass<br />
windows or any other sensual evocation of the sacred). Milton was a Calvinist,<br />
although in later life, he escaped its full rigour. With this literary flourish,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> turns the essay away from Luther (allowing, of course, his crucial admission<br />
of ‘Beruf ’ into German language usage) and comes to what he says<br />
is ‘the starting point in the investigation’ – ‘the relationship between the old
64 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
Protestant ethic [Lutheranism] and the spirit of capitalism in the works of<br />
Calvin, of Calvinism, and the other Puritan sects’ (p. 89).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> goes on to state the main methodological purpose of his investigation.<br />
‘The following studies could, then, perhaps play a modest part in illustrating<br />
the manner in which “ideas” become effective in history.’ <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
academic or ‘sociological’ treatment of religious ideas was something new<br />
c. 1900. He has to reassure his readers that he has no interest in religious<br />
ideas for their own sake and, against materialist interpretations of history,<br />
he wishes to make two things clear. First, he rejects ‘any notion that economic<br />
changes could have led to the Reformation as a “historically necessary<br />
development” ’. Second, he has no intention of defending ‘the foolishly<br />
doctrinaire thesis’ that the ‘ “capitalist spirit” (as always in the provisional<br />
sense of the word in which we are using it), let alone capitalism itself, could<br />
only arise as a result of certain influences of the Reformation’. 24 ‘For we<br />
are merely attempting to clarify the part which religious forces have played<br />
in forming the developing web of our specifically worldly modern culture,<br />
in the complex interaction of innumerable different historical factors’ (p.<br />
90). From <strong>Weber</strong>’s methodological standpoint, what mattered was not being<br />
taken for an idealist, nor for being anti-materialist. His novel suggestion was<br />
that ideas could be treated as effective in history, one factor in a constellation<br />
of others. <strong>Weber</strong> is pushing for a more complex grasp of causes and their<br />
outcomes. Yet the identification and isolation of the ideas themselves, how<br />
they are articulated and expressed in texts, and how taken up within the<br />
practical behaviour of people also remains a methodological challenge about<br />
which <strong>Weber</strong> has little to say.<br />
Chapter 4, ‘The Religious Foundations of Wordly Asceticism’, presents<br />
two major challenges for the interpretation of meaning. <strong>Weber</strong> requires that<br />
his analysis of Calvinist theological texts pronouncedly displays the idea<br />
of predestination, and then he needs to show how the acute psychological<br />
problems presented by predestination are dealt with in everyday conduct. In<br />
respect of the first issue, I will discuss his interpretation of the Westminster<br />
Confessions and, for the second issue, I return to Richard Baxter.<br />
In <strong>Weber</strong>’s argumentation, Luther had no interest whatsoever in economic<br />
development. In economists’ terms, he was a traditionalist. However,<br />
within the realm of Calvinist doctrine and practice, a fundamental change<br />
in attitude towards business and work occurred. <strong>Weber</strong> quotes directly six<br />
statements from the Westminster Confessions of Faith of 1647 as evidence of<br />
the Calvinist dogma of predestination, and mentions in support the international<br />
synod held at Dordrecht in 1618 that formulated the principle tenets<br />
of Calvinist dogma. Actually, in the light of <strong>Weber</strong>’s eloquent discussion of<br />
the effects of Calvinist belief, the Dordrecht synod supplies the full tenor of<br />
predestination – more so than the Westminster Confessions. Diarmaid Mac-<br />
Culloch, a historian of the Reformation, writes of it, ‘The Synod formulated<br />
conclusions under five headings which would remain the reference points<br />
of developed Calvinism: the unconditional decree by God of election, the
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 65<br />
limiting of Christ’s atoning death for humanity to those elect to salvation,<br />
the total corruption of humankind, the irresistibility of God’s grace, and the<br />
unchallengeable perseverance in saving grace of God’s elect.’ 25 As, today,<br />
only some few isolated communities live under the terror of this doctrine, it<br />
is probably necessary to probe some of the irrationalities of predestination.<br />
Following the writings of St Augustine of Hippo (fourth century ce), church<br />
doctrine has held that humankind had fallen into sin, ‘into death’ as the Bible<br />
quaintly puts it. Adam and Eve were the perpetrators of original sin and,<br />
hence, their mythical and poetical status in Christian belief. The Christian<br />
Church, however, offered forgiveness of sin through the performance of<br />
good works – charity, behaving in a Christian manner – and confession. Sins<br />
could be absolved in a person’s lifetime, even up until death. The Church<br />
in countless ways was the beneficiary of this contract. Calvinists considered<br />
the Church, under its papal leadership, an abominable interference in the<br />
word of God as revealed in the Bible. The Bible teaches that the Christian<br />
God is all powerful and all knowing; therefore, in a display of devilish consistency,<br />
the Calvinists argued God had already determined everything that<br />
could happen, and it was already chosen who were the damned and who<br />
would be saved, irrespective of people’s actual behaviour. Doctrinal points<br />
that the Calvinists and other sects frequently visited were whether a person<br />
chosen for election to heaven could, through their wickedness, alter that<br />
judgement (was it irresistible?); when God had first decided on the elect – at<br />
their birth, at their baptism, at some existential point when they received<br />
God’s grace (i.e. have been chosen), or even whether God’s soteriological<br />
lottery had been implemented prior to the appearance of Adam and Eve.<br />
The Calvinists were a new sect (under way by 1560), marginalized in Europe<br />
and frequently persecuted. So, by word of explanation, the social psychology<br />
of this belief system excluded any intellectual doubt about salvation and<br />
demanded complete confidence of its members that they should act as if they<br />
were predestined for salvation.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s use of the Westminster Confessions can be criticized for its partiality.<br />
The full doctrinal extent of Calvinism could have been better presented,<br />
for instance through the Dordrecht synod. This would have better underpinned<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s wide-ranging subsequent discussion. Malcolm H. MacKinnon<br />
has criticized <strong>Weber</strong>’s partiality in another way. 26 In his excerpting of<br />
the Westminster Confessions, <strong>Weber</strong> mistook the main doctrinal thrust of<br />
the document. The statements that <strong>Weber</strong> quotes are a kind of preamble of<br />
what everyone already knew. They are of less significance than what follows.<br />
The real message of the Westminster Confessions was an amelioration of<br />
the doctrine of predestination in favour of God’s providential guidance of<br />
mankind. Providence still asserts the denial of free will to people in the face<br />
of God’s all powerful status, and it is God who will decide the fate of each<br />
individual irrespective of their attempts to influence his decision – a guilty<br />
thought or single bad deed can still lead to damnation. But God’s decision<br />
has not been predetermined. This offers a slightly more liveable contract, or
66 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
covenant as it was known, of Calvinists with their God. MacKinnon goes<br />
on to argue that this reduces Calvinists’ anxiety over their salvation, so the<br />
psychological tension that <strong>Weber</strong> argued for as crucial to disciplined conduct<br />
was historically inaccurate.<br />
There have been a number of assessments of just how damaging the<br />
MacKinnon critique is for the <strong>Weber</strong> thesis. 27 The technique of hermeneutics<br />
has the ability to resolve the MacKinnon/<strong>Weber</strong> dispute in terms of the interpretation<br />
of meaning. A principle of hermeneutics is to relate individual<br />
words, sentences and paragraphs within the whole text; also, the intentions<br />
of the authors of a text should be taken into account. If <strong>Weber</strong> were to<br />
provide an anti-critique to MacKinnon, he would have to follow such a<br />
procedure.<br />
MacKinnon also pursues <strong>Weber</strong> over his interpretation of Baxter and<br />
Bayly. It will be recalled that <strong>Weber</strong>’s final empirical proof for the effects of<br />
belief on conduct rested not on dogma but on how the lay population were<br />
guided in their practical behaviour. This is one reason for <strong>Weber</strong>’s justification<br />
of his reluctance to become too deeply involved in religious dogma. The<br />
doctrinal points that priests argued over, while of interest to theologians,<br />
have only indirect relevance for the economic historian. But MacKinnon<br />
argues that, if the true import of the Westminster Confessions allowed the<br />
idea of ‘effectual calling’, through correct spiritual exercise a person could<br />
influence their fate, then the task of Richard Baxter in his pastoral preaching<br />
was less daunting. 28 MacKinnon’s reading of Baxter is that a temporal calling<br />
is just another term or description for occupation with none of the religious<br />
overtones imputed by <strong>Weber</strong> to Luther. Also that Baxter and other Puritans<br />
distinguished between temporal calling and spiritual calling. It was the latter<br />
that was the object of Baxter’s ministry. Temporal calling was considered to<br />
be part of natural life and a matter of indifference in spiritual terms.<br />
MacKinnon’s critique has, in its turn, been subjected to a penetrating<br />
critique by David Zaret, who seeks to reinforce <strong>Weber</strong>’s view that Puritanism<br />
was ‘an anxiety-inducing creed’ and to restore <strong>Weber</strong>’s arguments on the<br />
‘spiritualization of secular employments’. 29 Once again, matters turn on the<br />
interpretation of documents, and Zaret notes that, within a proper selection<br />
of documents, there will be contradictory evidence, interpretations for both<br />
strict determinism and providential statements. Zaret puts his methodological<br />
requirements in the language of current qualitative social research. All<br />
researchers are faced with the problem of ‘exegetical selectivity’ – which<br />
texts and documents to present and which to leave to one side. This does<br />
not permit selectivity that eliminates the ambiguity of the original documents<br />
and discards any interpretation that goes against the researcher’s own<br />
favoured line of argument. The criterion of reliability stipulates thatnother<br />
researchers who come along and reassess the data would not expect to<br />
find marked biases of interpretation in the account of the first researcher.<br />
Obviously, there will be biases according to viewpoint, but science does<br />
not permit all evidence against a viewpoint to be dropped into the trash
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 67<br />
can, and all evidence for to be ruthlessly extracted from the overall text.<br />
Second, the process of inference of behaviour from belief systems requires<br />
‘triangulation’, that is ‘corroborating interpretations of formal writings by<br />
consulting other types of textual data such as autobiographies, biographies,<br />
letters, juridical records, contemporary accounts, and so on’. 30 Third, when<br />
a document is studied, it is necessary to take account of the context in which<br />
it was written. 31<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own presentation and the numerous subsequent debates demonstrate<br />
that one of the primary methodological fields in PESC concerns the<br />
interpretation of meaning. Before turning to <strong>Weber</strong>’s reluctance to make this<br />
an explicit topic in his methodology, I will finish this chapter with some observations<br />
on the rhetorical force with which <strong>Weber</strong> conveys his arguments.<br />
‘Der Rhetoriker’<br />
In the interpretation of the significance and meaning of Puritan texts and religious<br />
praxis, <strong>Weber</strong> appears to follow the obvious procedure of presenting<br />
a text and then moving on to critical commentary of it. But his commentary<br />
quite quickly becomes a strongly moulded set of arguments whose purpose<br />
and endpoint are to offer a ‘characterology’ of the ascetic Protestant. <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
own argumentation is eloquent and is not without rhetorical flourishes.<br />
His method of exposition is highly effective, and he leaves the reader very<br />
much in possession of a fully explicated ‘character’.<br />
His discussion of Benjamin Franklin falls into this mode of interpretative<br />
procedure. Probably the most impressive example is his analysis of Calvinism.<br />
The Westminster Confessions are excerpted, some textual analysis occurs<br />
and then, around page 103 in the Parsons’ translation (which best picks<br />
up <strong>Weber</strong>’s eloquent flow), <strong>Weber</strong> launches into an almost intimate portrait<br />
of the predicament of the Calvinist. ‘For the damned to complain of their lot<br />
would be much the same as for animals to bemoan the fact they were born as<br />
men.’ <strong>Weber</strong> is paraphrasing Calvin, but is it <strong>Weber</strong>’s voice or Calvin’s voice<br />
we are hearing? 32 <strong>Weber</strong> acknowledges the majesty of Calvinist doctrine,<br />
almost personally. ‘In its extreme inhumanity this doctrine must above all<br />
have had one consequence for the life of a generation which surrendered<br />
to its magnificent consistency. That was a feeling of unprecedented inner<br />
loneliness of the single individual’ (p. 104). Here, <strong>Weber</strong> references Edward<br />
Dowden’s depiction of the Calvinist as a ‘solitary soul’. Of that inhumanity<br />
for the lone individual, <strong>Weber</strong> enthuses:<br />
No one could help him. No priest, for the chosen one can understand the<br />
word of God only in his own heart. No sacraments, for though the sacraments<br />
had been ordained by God for the increase of His glory . . . they<br />
are not a means to the attainment of grace . . . No Church, for though<br />
it was held that outside the Church there is no salvation . . . , nevertheless<br />
the membership of the external Church included the doomed . . . .
68 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
Finally, even no God. For even Christ had died only for the elect, for<br />
whose benefit God had decreed His martyrdom from eternity.<br />
(p. 104)<br />
The repetition of the negative followed by the explanatory clause is, of<br />
course, a cadence much used in the Bible itself, although <strong>Weber</strong> keeps his<br />
rhetoric within the bounds of ostensibly cultural science.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> then moves on to the sensuous side of the Calvinist character:<br />
‘the corruption of everything pertaining to the flesh, this inner isolation of<br />
the individual contains, . . . the reason for the entirely negative attitude of<br />
Puritanism to all the sensuous and emotional elements in cultural and in<br />
religion . . .’ ‘. . . it forms one of the roots of that disillusioned and pessimistically<br />
inclined individualism’ (p.105). In this vein, friendship is mistrusted,<br />
for a Calvinist should place his trust exclusively in his God. Confession was<br />
disallowed. ‘The means to a periodical discharge of the emotional sense of<br />
sin was done away with’ (p. 106). <strong>Weber</strong> relentlessly heightens the sense of<br />
being shut off from all normal physicality, contact and pleasure and, at this<br />
point, introduces the figure of Bunyan, a man so obsessed with salvation that<br />
wife and children have to be left behind for its immediate search. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
then enters into a number of literary comparisons on the matter of ultimate<br />
existential choices. The true Calvinist’s fear of death is like Döllinger’s description<br />
of Alfonso of Liguori. Bunyan is also like a character in one of<br />
Gottfried Keller’s novels, but he is quite unlike Machiavelli’s citizen who<br />
would place ‘love of their native city higher than the fear for the salvation<br />
of their souls’. And the Calvinist is even further away from the mock feudal<br />
fatalism of Wagner’s Siegmund ‘before his fatal combat’ (examples, p. 107).<br />
Some of these comparisons will not work for the current reader because he<br />
or she will have a different universe of historical and literary references. But<br />
what <strong>Weber</strong> is establishing with the reader is a sense of the position of the<br />
Calvinist as a character type in relation to other types.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> enters into a four-way comparison: the Calvinist, the Lutheran,<br />
the Catholic and the monk. The Calvinist is wrenched away from the close<br />
ties that would normally bind him to the world. As an elect, predestined to<br />
heaven, his only way to realize the glory of God, which was a commandment,<br />
was to labour in a calling. The Lutheran, who also has to bear the<br />
sense of sin, can simply trust in God’s grace rather than trying to ‘prove<br />
it’ through labour as does the Calvinist. Work for the Lutheran can be a<br />
straightforward sense of brotherliness. <strong>Weber</strong> is drawing what for him was<br />
to be an important contrast of types. The religious believer can ensure a<br />
state of grace ‘either in that he feels himself to be the vessel of the Holy<br />
Spirit or the tool of the divine will. In the former case his religious life<br />
tends to mysticism and emotionalism, in the latter to ascetic action. Luther<br />
stood close to the former type, Calvinism belonged definitely to the latter’<br />
(pp. 113–14). With these types is contrasted ‘the normal Catholic layman’<br />
who ‘lives ethically, so to speak, from hand to mouth’ (p. 116), that is in his<br />
secular and temporal work, ‘did not necessarily form a connected, or at least
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 69<br />
not a rationalized system of life . . .’. Against these, ‘the moral conduct of the<br />
average man [Calvinist] was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic<br />
character and subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole’ (p.<br />
117). In this respect, as a planned form of asceticism as a way of seeking to<br />
ensure grace, it comes close to western monasticism. Western monasticism<br />
‘developed a systematic method of rational conduct with the purpose of<br />
overcoming the status naturae . . .’. Active self-control, as developed in the<br />
monasteries, became ‘the most important practical ideal of Puritanism’. The<br />
respect for ‘quiet self-control . . . still distinguishes the best type of English<br />
or American gentleman to-day’ (p. 119).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s writing of these passages is masterful. He combines theological,<br />
ethical and practical precepts in developing a characterology or a series of<br />
character types: the average medieval layman, medieval monk, Puritan and<br />
Lutheran. <strong>Weber</strong> focuses the Puritan character in the reader’s mind through<br />
a series of well-handled comparisons. ‘The Puritan, like every rational type<br />
of asceticism, tried to enable a man to maintain and act upon his constant<br />
motives, especially those which it taught him itself, against the emotions. In<br />
this formal psychological sense of the term it tried to make him into a personality’<br />
(p. 119). Asceticism, a practice, is made into a living thing, breathing<br />
form into the Puritan. <strong>Weber</strong> makes his characters, as average types, come<br />
alive for the reader. Given the complexity of the materials and the history<br />
with which he is working, this is a formidable achievement. He lodges these<br />
characters in the reader’s mind, and they become fixed reference points for<br />
an understanding of Reformation history and its long-term effects.<br />
In his summation of his essay, where <strong>Weber</strong> seeks to further emphasize<br />
his argument, he chooses the theme of the imposition of Puritan asceticism<br />
turning ‘with all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of<br />
life’ (p. 166). <strong>Weber</strong> selects the episode in which King James I and Charles<br />
I of England tried to stop the Puritans’ banning of all popular pastimes on<br />
the sabbath. Enjoyment of life versus rational asceticism becomes a defining<br />
moment in the characterology of early modernity. <strong>Weber</strong> pursues this<br />
theme with considerable literary skill in the field of culture and arts. ‘Here<br />
asceticism descended like a frost on the life of “merrie Old England” ’. ‘The<br />
Puritan’s ferocious hatred of everything which smacked of superstition, of<br />
all survivals of magical or sacramental salvation, applied to the Christian festivities<br />
and the May Pole and all spontaneous religious art.’ ‘The theatre was<br />
obnoxious to the Puritans, and with the strict exclusion of the erotic and of<br />
nudity from the realm of toleration, a radical view of either literature or art<br />
could not exist.’ Warmth, sensuality, enjoyment on one side, and hoar frost<br />
on the other – the argument with its use of this imagery becomes irresistible<br />
in its rhetorical force. Asceticism was an attack against a universal character,<br />
the average sensuous living human being. ‘That powerful tendency toward<br />
uniformity of life, which today so immensely aids the capitalistic interest in<br />
the standardization of production, has its ideal foundations in the repudiation<br />
of all idolatry of the flesh’ (pp. 168–9).
70 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s essay ends in pages that are now so well known that they have become<br />
etched upon our own consciousness. He does this by bringing together<br />
his historical characters and some of his recurrent images. <strong>Weber</strong> has related<br />
a story of where capitalist spirit originated from, how it entered the lives of<br />
the Puritans and was transferred into methodical conduct of the utilitarian<br />
outlook of the nineteenth century, and then that spirit disappearing from the<br />
human being as an animating principle to become the spirit inherent within<br />
the capitalistic economic cosmos of industrial capitalism; becoming, as if it<br />
were, the ghost in the machine. <strong>Weber</strong>, almost arrogantly and certainly in a<br />
Nietzschean flourish, discards the notion of a meaningful, animating sense<br />
of vocation for the modern professional. They are ‘sensualists without heart,<br />
specialists without spirit’. <strong>Weber</strong> conducts his argument through a deft handling<br />
of his historical characters pulling them onto a fast-moving historical<br />
stage whose backdrop is images of the human form, clothing, confines and<br />
machinery.<br />
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For<br />
when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life,<br />
and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the<br />
tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now<br />
bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production<br />
which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born<br />
into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic<br />
acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them<br />
until the last ton of fossilized fuel is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for<br />
external goods would only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light<br />
cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment’. But fate decreed that<br />
the cloak should become a casing as hard as steel. 33<br />
In a recent contribution, Donald A. Nielson argues that <strong>Weber</strong>’s PESC is a<br />
‘grand narrative’. It cannot be considered a narrative in the normal sense as<br />
understood by historians, as it fails to adhere to any consistent time line. <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
examples shift backwards and forwards through time and place – Franklin<br />
in the eighteenth century, Baxter and Bunyan in the seventeenth century,<br />
the Wesleys in the nineteenth century and so on. But Nielsen suggests that, if<br />
the topics were joined up, then his thesis could become ‘the grand historical<br />
narrative of European civilization’s inner life’. 34 Nielsen rearranges <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
major topics and produces the following temporal series: monastic orders,<br />
Luther’s idea of calling, Calvinist teaching, Puritan ethics as an everyday<br />
accomplishment, Benjamin Franklin, Methodist workers, the iron cage of<br />
industrial capitalism. Nielsen’s perception is interesting, because it poses the<br />
question: just what would a narrative of a civilization’s inner life consist of?<br />
To make it ‘grand’ would surely lead such a historian into an idealist and<br />
essentializing methodology, as if there was a continuous mentalist thread to<br />
be grasped.
The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism 71<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does not do this. An alternative way of approaching this is through<br />
Wilhelm Hennis, who has argued, in a series of provocative and authoritative<br />
essays, that <strong>Weber</strong> is conducting throughout his oeuvre a form of philosophical<br />
anthropology. It is the human being who always stands at the centre<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong>’s interests. The materials Hennis brings together go far beyond the<br />
subject of this chapter, and he constructs a sociology of orders around the<br />
concept of the human being (‘Mensch’). His viewpoint, which he strongly<br />
attributes to <strong>Weber</strong> himself, is that the concept of the human being, or man,<br />
belongs to a long tradition of political thought from the Sophists, to Aristotle,<br />
to Machiavelli and to classical political economy, where the questions of<br />
politics – how should we live? – is always interlinked to a concept of man as<br />
a human being living together in society. This can be termed philosophical<br />
anthropology to the extent that the human being, as a living physical and<br />
cultural entity, is a constant reference point for study and for education;<br />
although Hennis would not accord a cardinal priority to anthropology separate<br />
from the political. The individual, as a human and cultural being, needs<br />
to be studied in relation to the social and political orders within which he<br />
and she is always to be found.<br />
On the basis on the PESC text alone, it goes too far to say that <strong>Weber</strong> was<br />
engaged in a philosophical anthropology. But Hennis has observantly noted<br />
that there is some sort of characterology at work here and that <strong>Weber</strong> is always<br />
concerned with living individuals and not an abstract entity like ‘homo<br />
sociologicus’ or ‘homo œconomicus’. 35 If a search is conducted using the<br />
prefix ‘Leben-’ (‘life’), the word is rife throughout PESC: ‘Lebensführung’,<br />
‘Lebensinhalt’, ‘Lebensbeziehung’, ‘Lebensfremdheit’, ‘Lebensreglementierung’,<br />
‘Lebenstechnik’, ‘Lebensbedürfnisse’, ‘Lebensstil’, ‘Lebenstempo’,<br />
‘Lebensgenuß’, ‘Lebensarbeit’, ‘Lebensideale’, ‘Lebensfreude’, ‘Lebenspraxis’,<br />
‘Lebensstellung’, ‘Lebensstimmung’, ‘Lebenszweck’, ‘Lebenshochmut’,<br />
‘Lebensweisheit’, ‘Lebensglück’, ‘Lebenslage’, ‘Lebensgestaltung’, ‘Lebenszeit’,<br />
‘Lebensanchauung’, ‘Lebensauffassung’. ‘Lebensführung’ occurs over<br />
65 times in the text. 36<br />
We should agree that the living individual in his and her inner and outer<br />
life is a central concept of PESC. To call it a grand narrative or a philosophical<br />
anthropology does not quite designate what <strong>Weber</strong> was doing in PESC.<br />
My conclusion from this chapter’s analysis is that <strong>Weber</strong> is presenting to<br />
the reader a set of characters who come to personify in their views, their<br />
behaviour and their outlook a series of historical types whose distinctive<br />
characteristics are revealed and thrown into relief through their comparison.<br />
In presenting these characters, <strong>Weber</strong> goes beyond the art of interpretation<br />
(hermeneutics) and offers the reader something closer to the art of the novelist.<br />
Imagery, rhetoric, eloquence and the play of character are all used to<br />
impress <strong>Weber</strong>’s cardinal aim: conveying to the reader the full significance<br />
and meaning of a crucial stage in the formation of modern rationalistic capitalism<br />
and culture. <strong>Weber</strong> gave a copy of PESC to Mina Tobler, who was a
72 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
close and amorous friend of his. Tobler wrote to her mother on 6 October<br />
1912:<br />
Isn’t that splendid, such an historical chain of arguments in which each<br />
part is remorselessly pieced together without any gaps, where, as in this<br />
case, ‘the writer’ makes himself totally invisible but nevertheless everything<br />
that is there is involuntarily animated by the heartbeat of a grand<br />
personality. He said I would find it boring, and I have read it as if it were<br />
a good novel. 37<br />
Professor Lepsius notes of Mina Tobler that she ‘could not provide <strong>Weber</strong><br />
with any intellectual resonance, or act as a critic; she reacted spontaneously<br />
and emotionally’. 38 The academic criticism, as we have seen, is relentless in<br />
pointing out the various shortcomings of the PESC. But Tobler identifies the<br />
sense that PESC has for the first-time reader. It does read like a novel with<br />
a thread of arguments drawn together by the writer’s artistry. In expressing<br />
her views Mina Tobler was re-living the spontaneity of <strong>Weber</strong>’s original<br />
creativity. That for <strong>Weber</strong> probably concerned a mix of intellectual emotions<br />
– dread, joy, admiration, aspiration – emotions not unconnected to his own<br />
predicament in 1900. These he used to re-live and re-create the experience<br />
of Puritan beliefs and practice. Tobler reminds us that the interpretation of<br />
meaning is always about re-animating the experiences of not a dead past, but<br />
a past brought to life. This is what Dowden did, and what <strong>Weber</strong> did in his<br />
turn. And whether these works still speak to us will depend on our imaginative<br />
resources and circumstances.
4 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
Tying PESC down to any specific method, or even set of methods, is a futile<br />
undertaking. As we have already noted, it is a fusion of methods and a highly<br />
imaginative intellectual project. <strong>Weber</strong> was offering a new solution to a wideranging<br />
debate on the origins and significance of modern capitalism. His<br />
originality lay in offering a new explanatory variable – ‘kapitalistische Geist’<br />
– placed within his own framework of investigation. He used every available<br />
intellectual means to investigate and convey his thesis: statistics, philology,<br />
historical scholarship, theology, hermeneutics and a highly figurative and, at<br />
times, rhetorical mode of delivery. His work fell into no recognizable school<br />
of thought or discipline, yet it revolutionized how historians, cultural scientists,<br />
economic historians and sociologists would think about their subject.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> had exceeded by far what had, up until then, been achieved in this<br />
subject area – and especially in the manner he had accomplished this.<br />
What I want to examine in this chapter is, broadly put, what <strong>Weber</strong><br />
thought he had achieved. On a personal level, he had come back from academic<br />
oblivion, having lost his university chair as a full member of the faculty<br />
through illness, and established his reputation for originality, scholarship<br />
and the sheer imaginative power of his work. But he had also put himself<br />
in a new intellectual territory. While he may have started out as a nationaleconomist,<br />
after the completion of his essay he was in a new but undefined<br />
territory. He was not a sociologist. Not for him Durkheim’s systematic steps<br />
of founding a discipline first through definition of rules and, second, by brilliant<br />
vindication and realization of those rules. <strong>Weber</strong> had started on some<br />
methodological reflections in 1900 – a series of three essays on the ‘old’<br />
‘Nationalökonomie’, which took him five years and then remained uncompleted.<br />
They were highly discursive, overly complex and still remain a topic<br />
of some scholarly despair among experts today – little Gallic illumination<br />
shines out. He also composed, in consultation with his fellow Archiv editors,<br />
a supposedly programmatic introduction on the occasion of assuming the<br />
editorship of the Archiv. From these writings, one can establish what he<br />
disliked and what were the new tasks, but they do not adequately explain
74 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
what he was doing in PESC. And from within PESC, the reader is given little<br />
practical guidance as to his own method of proceeding and, frequently, the<br />
reader is simply assumed to be informed about contemporary debates. An<br />
instance of this is the throwaway reference to the ‘historical individual’ – a<br />
less than intuitive concept formulated by the philosopher Heinrich Rickert.<br />
In this chapter, I give an exposition of some of the principal ideas of<br />
Wilhelm Dilthey, and I argue that they are the most relevant for what <strong>Weber</strong><br />
achieved in PESC, especially the manner in which he did this. I examine<br />
critically the accepted position that <strong>Weber</strong> adhered to Rickert’s philosophical<br />
position on the validity of knowledge in the historical and cultural sciences.<br />
For reasons that have yet to be completely explained, <strong>Weber</strong> followed<br />
Rickert’s critical distance to Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences,<br />
even though that work presented the fundamental issues of how a science of<br />
mental life was both possible and necessary. <strong>Weber</strong> devised his own methodology<br />
of meaning and causation and, in his essay on ‘Objectivity’, he showed<br />
how progress in social science was possible – and transitory.<br />
The word itself – methodology – is fairly horrendous. Marianne <strong>Weber</strong><br />
used the term ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ when referring to her husband’s ‘methodological’<br />
writings, and this was the title she gave to the collection of those<br />
writings. ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ was already a ‘heritage’ word when Marianne<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> chose it (in 1922). She took it from the title of one of Fichte’s lecture<br />
courses in Berlin c. 1800, i.e. at the start of the whole revolution in method<br />
and techniques that so distinguished German academic knowledge throughout<br />
the nineteenth century. 1 Marianne <strong>Weber</strong> was alluding to the agreeable<br />
idea that ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ denoted an idea of knowledge and a way of<br />
learning; something one would do throughout one’s life as a developing<br />
potential and that would contribute to knowledge and culture in its turn.<br />
Methodology can, of course, be technical but, when the term is used in relation<br />
to Max <strong>Weber</strong> and his contemporaries, it still retained some component<br />
of learning as part of life and culture. Its Fichtean legacy concerned ontology<br />
– statements about the nature of reality and being – and epistemology<br />
– theories on the status of knowledge. In addition, there was a concern with<br />
the validity as well as the relevance of knowledge, where validity concerned<br />
the philosophical justification of knowledge itself.<br />
Marianne <strong>Weber</strong>, in resorting to Fichte’s Berlin lecture course (‘Wissenschaftslehre’),<br />
also makes the link between learning and a new national<br />
awareness. Fichte established patriotism among the educated middle class at<br />
the time of the Napoleonic rule of Prussia. From these small beginnings began<br />
the ascent of the idea of Germany as a cultural nation and the role of the<br />
educated middle class in propagating those ideas through a distinctive idea<br />
of learning (‘Bildung’). Education and, by implication, ‘methodology’ had a<br />
decidedly emancipatory flavour. Some of this emancipatory fervour is still<br />
detectable in <strong>Weber</strong>’s methodological essay on ‘Objectivity’ when setting out<br />
the agenda of the relaunched Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.<br />
Hence, when the word ‘methodology’ is used in this chapter, it is quite capacious<br />
in its various senses.
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 75<br />
The study of methodology also has an unfortunate tendency to place<br />
people in schools and to create divides after the event. <strong>Weber</strong> himself, especially<br />
in the field of the philosophy of history, was a polemicist. But much of<br />
what <strong>Weber</strong> achieved came from his ability to synthesize different methods.<br />
Some care, therefore, has to be taken in inferring what positions, at the time,<br />
were complementary, what were compatible and what were truly opposed.<br />
I will outline the field of methodological forces at work; ‘in play’ would be<br />
a better phrase, because positions had not yet solidified. For example, when<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does cite Dilthey or Husserl or Vossler, it would be a mistake for us<br />
to conclude that somehow <strong>Weber</strong> should be considered to be sympathetic to<br />
vitalism, phenomenology or linguistics respectively. The period c. 1900 was<br />
awash with new ideas and new approaches, and it is only later rationalizations<br />
of academic knowledge that have retrospectively codified these fluid<br />
positions into opposed schools. 2 We also need to take on board recent work<br />
by Austin Harrington who argues that, in the subsequent codification of debates,<br />
false oppositions have been created – crucially, between hermeneutics<br />
and objectivity; equally, the work by Michael Friedman that points out that<br />
the split between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ philosophy occurs was not as<br />
clear cut in the period in which <strong>Weber</strong> was writing, and Stephen Turner,<br />
who argues the relevance of <strong>Weber</strong>’s philosophy of social science in connection<br />
with recent work on action, explanation and cause. In the formation<br />
of later positions, each side drew from a common store of philosophical<br />
presuppositions. 3<br />
I present the main elements in the methodological field of debate, in<br />
which it should be noted that <strong>Weber</strong> himself is an interacting and not yet<br />
stabilized element. The main figures include Wilhelm Dilthey, whose whole<br />
approach to academic knowledge insisted that we, as academic writers, are<br />
embedded in the flow of life and this affects how we revisit our subject material,<br />
for example history. Georg Simmel is an important referent, because he<br />
had already articulated the validity grounds of knowledge in cultural science<br />
and sociology in The Philosophy of Money (which we have already discussed<br />
in relation to the debate over modern capitalism). Both Dilthey and Simmel<br />
were drawn to certain ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche who, from a methodological<br />
point of view, can be regarded as something of a ‘wild card’. His<br />
thinking injected creativity and instability into the force field. Carl Menger,<br />
who we have already encountered, offered <strong>Weber</strong> the heuristic option of<br />
modelling the complexity of social reality. Lastly, the Baden epistemologists,<br />
Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, attempted to impose their own<br />
philosophical order on the field. They stood in the Kantian tradition that the<br />
flux of reality had to be tamed through the imposition of categories, classifications<br />
and judgements. This, to repeat, is schematic in presentation, and<br />
one has to remember that the German tradition was rooted in a very keen<br />
sense of the history of philosophy, including classical Greek philosophers<br />
and schools. <strong>Weber</strong> can at times be quite disconcerting, plucking ideas or<br />
concepts unreferenced (because he expected his readers to know the reference)<br />
from both the history of philosophy and his own contemporaries.
76 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
Wilhelm Dilthey<br />
Dilthey is the most intriguing influence. He is mentioned least by <strong>Weber</strong>, he<br />
is usually presented in opposition to <strong>Weber</strong>, yet PESC is the most ‘Diltheyan’<br />
of all <strong>Weber</strong>’s works. Anyone who doubts Dilthey’s pervasive influence<br />
need only consult a glossary of his terms in order to realize their take-up in<br />
writers such as Max <strong>Weber</strong>: ‘Bedeutsamkeit’, ‘Bedeutung’, ‘Erfahrung’, ‘Erklärung’,<br />
‘Erlebnis’, ‘Geist’, ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, ‘Gemeingefühl’, ‘Handlung’,<br />
‘Herrschaft’, ‘Kausalzusammenhang’, ‘Kulturwissenschaften’, ‘Leben’,<br />
‘Lebenseinheit’, ‘Lebensführung’, ‘Lebensgefühl’, ‘nachfühlen’, ‘psychophysische’,<br />
‘Sinn’, ‘Sittlichkeit’, ‘Stellung’, ‘Trieb’, ‘Urteil’, ‘Verhaltung’, ‘Verstand’,<br />
‘Verstehen’, ‘Weltbild’, ‘Wirklichkeit’, ‘Zusammenhang’, ‘Zweck’. 4<br />
Many of these words are simply common German words. ‘Verstehen’ is the<br />
verb ‘to understand’. But it is the use to which Dilthey puts them that marks<br />
them out as part of his conceptual vocabulary. They are all used, often in a<br />
reconceptualized form, by <strong>Weber</strong>. Translating the above list of terms, it will be<br />
seen that many of them are everyday terms: ‘Significance’, ‘meaning’, ‘experience’,<br />
explanation’, ‘lived experience’, ‘spirit’ or ‘mental life’, ‘the sciences<br />
of mental life’, ‘feelings held in common’, ‘action’, ‘power over somebody’,<br />
‘causal nexus’, ‘life’, ‘the individual as an entity’, ‘conduct of life’, ‘feeling<br />
of life’, ‘to re-experience feeling’, ‘psychophysical’, ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’,<br />
‘ethical life’, ‘attitude’, ‘drive’, ‘judgement’, ‘behaviour’, ‘comprehension’,<br />
‘understanding’, ‘worldview’, ‘reality’, in the sense of what (the social scientist)<br />
wishes to designate as real, ‘an interrelated context’, ‘purpose’. Most of<br />
these words belong to the language of life, and their usage by both Dilthey<br />
and <strong>Weber</strong> demonstrates that a social or cultural science will operate with<br />
words that are commonly used by people themselves. Unfortunately, it is not<br />
quite that simple, because their use within science involves treating them as<br />
concepts with fairly precise definitions, and procedures have to be followed<br />
within research in order to ensure accuracy and truthfulness. The language<br />
of life confers its own relevance on study, but the social and cultural science<br />
has its own ways of proceeding.<br />
Dilthey (1833–1911) belonged to the generation before Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s.<br />
In fact, he was a friend of <strong>Weber</strong>’s father in Berlin in the 1860s. The young<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> visited Dilthey as a sixteen-year-old during a walking tour in<br />
Bohemia. In his letters home from the walking tour, he treats Dilthey with<br />
some familiarity. 5 In the 1860s, Dilthey worked as a journalist before establishing<br />
himself in an academic position and, as a philosopher, he still<br />
continued writing articles for newspapers on a huge range of topics: culture,<br />
literature, science, politics, religion. He was a voracious reader and followed<br />
developments in both humanities and natural sciences. These last two terms<br />
are common to the Anglophone world. Dilthey argued for a cultural science<br />
alongside natural science. Both would be sciences, and the German<br />
word ‘Wissenschaft’ allows this latitude as well as indicating that science<br />
was also knowledge and learning. ‘Humanities’ in the Anglophone sense<br />
would remain for literary and cultural studies, but a science of culture or
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 77<br />
of human and mental life he termed ‘Geisteswissenschaft’. This, as befitting<br />
a science, would be as systematic, objective, reliable and truth establishing<br />
as the natural sciences; however, the cultural and natural sciences each had<br />
their own subject material and would therefore pursue their broadly similar<br />
goals through different routes and methods. The subject material of the<br />
natural sciences was matter, whereas in the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’, what<br />
was studied was the expression (in language, text, artefact and art) of human<br />
mental life. ‘These are only accessible to understanding and require<br />
interpretation.’ 6 Dilthey was the first person to establish a rigorous set of<br />
criteria for distinguishing between the natural and the cultural sciences and<br />
their respective approaches. Simmel, <strong>Weber</strong>, Windelband and Rickert all<br />
followed his lead in making this distinction, even though they introduced<br />
qualifications, amendments and objections of their own. When Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
speaks, successively, of a cultural science, a social science and a sociology, it<br />
was Dilthey who provided the gateway into a scientific approach that placed<br />
meaning and cultural significance at the heart of the enterprise.<br />
While understanding and interpretation may be thought of as normal<br />
words and everyday accomplishments, Dilthey specified their operation<br />
within the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’. Central to the cultural sciences is the<br />
interpretation of meaning. Human activity has the capability of communicating<br />
meaning. The method of comprehending these meanings is hermeneutics.<br />
Dilthey saw this as a rigorous and difficult accomplishment, as equal<br />
to corresponding activity in the natural sciences. Writing at the end of the<br />
nineteenth century, he keenly appreciated the advances that had been made<br />
in philology, law, history and theology from the start of that century. In<br />
theology, close textual analysis of the Bible in its various original languages<br />
(Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin) had identified the history of its compilation<br />
– that the first five books of the Old Testament were not the oldest<br />
parts as the Genesis story would imply, and that, from the literary styles of<br />
the New Testament gospels, much could be learnt about their authors and<br />
their intentions. While for the believer the Bible was the word of his or her<br />
God, for biblical scholars, the historicity of its origins could be established.<br />
In history and law, the study of historical documents, records and inscriptions<br />
allowed the actual history of, say, ancient Rome to be ascertained in<br />
place of literary treatments of a mythical past and romantic ruins. Likewise,<br />
the history of the German language could be traced from its earliest appearances,<br />
a scholarly exercise that was crucial to an emergent sense of a German<br />
cultural heritage. These achievements for Dilthey rivalled those in natural<br />
science which had emancipated itself from medieval theories of substances<br />
and essences, from alchemy and from religion.<br />
In his Introduction to the Human Sciences, Dilthey writes with as much<br />
confidence as a Comte or Durkheim.<br />
The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter<br />
are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations
78 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
to one another and to their foundation. Conditions within the positive<br />
sciences are working in this direction together with powerful forces<br />
stemming from the upheavals in society since the French revolution. A<br />
knowledge of the forces that rule society, of the causes that have reproduced<br />
its upheavals, and of society’s resources for promoting healthy<br />
progress has become of vital concern to our civilization. Consequently,<br />
relative to the natural sciences, the importance of the sciences dealing<br />
with society is increasing. On the large scale of modern life, a transformation<br />
of our scientific interests is taking place comparable to that<br />
which occurred in the small Greek city-states in the fifth and fourth<br />
centuries B.C . . . 7<br />
Like Comte and Durkheim, Dilthey insists that the study of history, society<br />
and culture will be a science. It will be ‘a complex of propositions 1) whose<br />
elements are concepts that are completely defined, i.e., permanently and<br />
universally valid within the overall logical system, 2) whose connections are<br />
well grounded, and 3) in which finally the parts are connected into a whole<br />
for the purpose of communication.’ In a further comment, Dilthey wrote:<br />
‘Thus, all philosophy of science is governed by the concept of scientific certainty<br />
in its various forms, such as the conviction of reality in perceptions,<br />
evidence in reasoning, and the consciousness of necessity in accordance with<br />
the principle of sufficient reason in knowledge.’ 8<br />
Unlike Comte or J.S. Mill, whose works Dilthey had studied closely, the<br />
sciences of society, culture and history – the human sciences (‘Geisteswissenschaften’)<br />
will not be based on ‘a definition of knowledge which arises from<br />
a predominant concern with the natural sciences . . .’. It is because of this<br />
mistaken identification of social with natural science – an ‘arbitrary concept<br />
of knowledge’ says Dilthey, ‘some have shortsightedly and presumptuously<br />
denied the status of science to the writing of history as it has been practiced<br />
by great masters . . .’. 9<br />
The human sciences are faced with difficulties of their own, but this<br />
should not be used to deny their scientific approach and ambitions. History,<br />
social science, sociology, the study of culture, the moral sciences – these all<br />
have in common a concern ‘with the facts of the human spirit’ (‘geistigen<br />
Lebens’). A science of this spirit (‘Geist’) has ‘the advantage of appropriately<br />
characterizing the central sphere of facts in terms of which the unity of these<br />
disciplines was actually perceived, their scope outlined, and their demarcation<br />
from the natural sciences established, no matter how imperfectly’. This<br />
unity resides in ‘human self-consciousness’.<br />
Dilthey’s programme will establish how ‘human self-consciousness’ may<br />
be scientifically studied, how this will be constitutionally different from the<br />
natural sciences, and how this study undergirds the unity of the human sciences.<br />
The quality of human self-consciousness Dilthey refers to as ‘geistlich’.<br />
This is the same word that Max <strong>Weber</strong> used in the title of PESC – Die protestantische<br />
Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus. <strong>Weber</strong> placed ‘Geist’ in
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 79<br />
inverted commas, and we have seen that this could have been a direct reference<br />
and distancing from Sombart’s use of the same phrase. Equally though,<br />
we come to the issue of how the facts of human self-consciousness can be<br />
studied, which is the challenge Dilthey sets out to answer. ‘Spirit’ as a translation<br />
misleads. What Dilthey is trying to grasp by scientific means can be<br />
termed, alongside human self-consciousness, a quality of mental life, or the<br />
psychological medium of cultural communication between individuals. We<br />
can intuitively understand what <strong>Weber</strong> is conveying in his term the ‘spirit of<br />
capitalism’. It is a specific type of human self-consciousness shared through<br />
the medium of religious practice by a large number of people. Dilthey’s task<br />
is to demonstrate how there can be a robust science of what is intuitively<br />
obvious to us as social and cultural beings – something <strong>Weber</strong> presumes (on<br />
the basis of Dilthey I will argue) rather than explains.<br />
Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences has the sense of a pioneering<br />
work. There have been advances in both the natural sciences and the<br />
humanities, and his chosen task is to place a science of mental life on firm<br />
foundations. Initially, he circles around his task, pointing out the difficulties<br />
that are peculiar to studying human and social life. The individual is able<br />
to reflect on his or her own experience, yet is also aware that the facticity<br />
of that existence is tied to a biological body with its own demands and<br />
constraints. Psychological reflection, what Dilthey terms the ‘psychic’, cannot<br />
be separate from the body: there is a ‘psychophysical unity of human<br />
nature’. 10 ‘Psychophysical’ was the term <strong>Weber</strong> also used, realizing that the<br />
study of meaning could always be overshadowed by the determination of the<br />
physiological. 11 Dilthey continues to the capability of the individual to have<br />
‘sovereignty of the will, a responsibility of actions’ that distinguishes him<br />
from the rest of nature. ‘He exists in nature as a realm within a realm . . .’.<br />
‘Thus from the realm of nature he distinguishes a realm of history, in which,<br />
amidst the objective necessity of nature, freedom is manifested at countless<br />
points. In contrast to the mechanical course of natural change which at the<br />
outset already contains everything that follows from it, acts of will exert<br />
force and involve sacrifices, whose meaning is evident to the individual in his<br />
experience and which actually produce something.’ 12 In <strong>Weber</strong>’s essay on the<br />
logic of the cultural sciences, he took up the same theme that the individual<br />
person is both an agent of his or her own destiny as well as being controlled<br />
by both natural and social processes. 13<br />
Dilthey raises the difficult issue that people are evaluating, opining and<br />
judging creatures. His solution here is to offer a threefold analytical differentiation.<br />
There can be a science of cultural life and history that is concerned<br />
at one level with facts, at another with theories and at a third level the<br />
judgments people make. ‘The human sciences consist of these three classes<br />
of statements: facts, theorems, value judgements and rules.’ 14 This is recognizably<br />
the same as <strong>Weber</strong>’s later distinction between the empirical, the<br />
ideal typical and value judgements in his essays on ‘objectivity’ and value<br />
freedom.
80 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
Dilthey’s concentration on ‘spirit’ and ‘Geist’ should not be confused<br />
with the ‘spirit of the people’ (‘Volksgeist’). This quite major part of German<br />
nineteenth-century thinking is quickly dispatched to the trash can. The<br />
events and outcomes of a people or nation can come to possess a common<br />
genealogy – Dilthey has no objection to that (and nor I think should we).<br />
There can be no commonality based on ‘somatic constancy’ (what we today<br />
would term gene pool); instead, ‘historical and spiritual physiognomy creates<br />
ever more refined differences in all the various spheres of the life of a<br />
people’. In our terms, the contingency of history and the agency of decision<br />
supervene over any primordial nation. Dilthey is harsh in his criticisms of<br />
those attempts to appropriate the concept of ‘Geist’ into a romantic, essential<br />
spirit. ‘The individual unity of life in a people that is manifested in<br />
the affinity of all its life expressions, such as its law, language, and religion,<br />
is mystically expressed in terms such as Volksseele, Nation, Volksgeist, and<br />
Organismus. But these concepts are no more usable in history than is the<br />
concept of life-force in physiology.’ 15<br />
Dilthey also eliminates approaches which for him cannot succeed with his<br />
chosen subject of study. In considering the psychic dimension of human life,<br />
a descriptive psychology is allowed, but an explanatory psychology based<br />
on the assumption that the individual is some mechanical unit about which<br />
assumptions are based and conclusions drawn about human nature is dismissed.<br />
16 This point needs registering in light of subsequent critical attacks<br />
on Dilthey for his ‘psychologism’. The ambitious scientific systems of Comte<br />
and J.S. Mill are rejected. ‘In the spirit of eighteenth-century French philosophy,<br />
Comte’s sociology subordinated the historical world to the system<br />
of the natural sciences. Mill retained and defended the idea that at least the<br />
method of studying the facts of the human world should be subordinated<br />
to the methods of the natural sciences.’ ‘In Comte’s view, the study of the<br />
human mind is dependent on the science of biology, and the uniformity that<br />
can be detected in a succession of mental states is the effect of uniformities<br />
of bodily states. Thus he denies that lawful relations between psychic<br />
states [Dilthey’s project] can be studied.’ 17 Dilthey dismisses Comte for the<br />
presumption that the whole of social reality was amenable to the science of<br />
sociology – a critique later expounded by Karl Popper under the pejorative<br />
term of ‘holism’. 18 Both Mill and Comte are taken to task for their misuse of<br />
natural scientific methods.<br />
Especially in Mill do we hear the monotonous and tedious clatter of the<br />
words ‘induction’ and ‘deduction’ which now resounds around us from<br />
all neighbouring countries. The entire history of the human sciences<br />
stands as a refutation of the idea of such an accommodation. These sciences<br />
have a wholly different foundation and structure than the natural<br />
sciences. Their subject matter is composed of unities that are given rather<br />
than inferred – units that are understandable from within. 19
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 81<br />
This is not the place to enlarge on Dilthey’s quite expansive critique of<br />
Comtean positivism. It was a line followed by <strong>Weber</strong> who, in referring to<br />
positivist sociology, would usually have Comte in mind, whose mistake, for<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, was on the basis of a deductive science to derive laws of society from<br />
which individual behaviour would be inferred. In his later comparative studies,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> did, however, absorb some of J.S. Mill’s methodology. Whatever<br />
their faults, it should be noted that both Comte and Mill offered the largest<br />
and most coherent account of a positivist scientific account of society, culture<br />
and history. In dismissing them, Dilthey signals his own ambitious plans<br />
for a unified science of cultural and human sciences, and Dilthey’s writings<br />
here far outstrip any of his contemporaries.<br />
So, how does a science proceed from an understanding ‘from within’? An<br />
object of study is created in the human sciences in one or other of two ways:<br />
‘either when a purpose grounded in some aspect of human nature – which<br />
for that reason is enduring – relates psychic acts in different individuals to<br />
join them into a purposive whole (“Zweckzusammenhang”)’. This, says<br />
Dilthey, creates a cultural pattern within society. Or ‘when enduring causes<br />
bind the wills of many into a single whole, whether these causes be rooted in<br />
the natural articulation of social life or in the purposes which drive human<br />
nature’. This latter option creates the ‘external organization’ of life ‘which<br />
man has created for himself. The latter consists of states, associations . . .’.<br />
Dilthey continues that, when the enduring volitional bonds between individuals<br />
are probed, this brings us to the various forms of association of society<br />
– the basic relations of power, dependence, property and community. 20<br />
This is fairly dense writing and it needs to be ‘unpacked’ somewhat. The<br />
two options, the either/or, both produce what Dilthey terms a ‘Zusammenhang’.<br />
Dilthey’s translator renders this as ‘system’, but this goes too far. Both<br />
options create an interconnected entity made up of the purposive activities<br />
of individuals. Dilthey says, at one level, this produces a cultural entity (or<br />
‘system’) and, at a level external to the individual, a state and the forms of<br />
society.<br />
Later in his exposition, Dilthey makes clear that the distinction between<br />
the external level of institutions such as the state, law or ethics as an external<br />
‘system’ enforcing, for example, conscience within the behaviour of individuals,<br />
and the more associational and immediate linkages between individuals,<br />
which he designates as cultural life, is not an absolute one. In the sphere of<br />
ethics, individuals act from their own ethical volition as well as reacting to<br />
the force of ethical injunctions. In one form, ethics ‘appears as a living force<br />
of motivation, in the other as the force that responds from without’, approving<br />
and disapproving of the behaviour of individuals. ‘In this twofold form,<br />
ethical consciousness permeates the overall life of society in an infinitely<br />
complex play of impulses and reactions.’ 21 Law is also characterized by the<br />
same twofold form. In customs, common law and feelings such as the sense<br />
of justice, it is a cultural form of the psychic–cultural life. When codified or
82 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
‘ “objectified and compressed in the smallest possible form, i.e., the shape<br />
of legal constructs” ’ (here, Dilthey is quoting the legal theorist Jhering), it<br />
is like the state and represents an organization external to the individual. 22<br />
And even that state itself has limits. ‘The volitional relation of power and<br />
dependence is limited by the sphere of external freedom’ just as ‘the relationship<br />
of community is limited by the sphere in which an individual exists<br />
for himself ’. 23<br />
Individuals, in interrelating their mental behaviour in a purposive way,<br />
create culture, society and state. This can be taken as a protosociology of<br />
social action – a forerunner of what <strong>Weber</strong> constructed more systematically.<br />
But Dilthey refuses to call his analysis sociology. That, for him, meant either<br />
organicist accounts such as Shäffle’s and von Mohl’s or positivist schemas<br />
such as Comte’s. Dilthey’s ambition is to construct the mentalist (‘geistlich’)<br />
basis for all the human sciences: anthropology, economics, psychology, law,<br />
ethics, politics, sociology, etc.<br />
Dilthey has more to say about purposive behaviour and its formation<br />
of interconnected entities (‘Zusammenhänge’). This can be represented<br />
as propositions, ‘but propositions of very diverse kinds. Depending on<br />
whether the psychic elements connected in the purposive system belong predominantly<br />
to thought, to feeling, or to will, we must differentiate between<br />
truths, expressions of feelings, and rules respectively.’ 24 Purposive behaviour,<br />
therefore, comprises thought or intentional action, feelings or some<br />
sort of emotional action, and will or what an individual wants. This remains<br />
some distance away from what <strong>Weber</strong> was to develop into a theory of social<br />
action, and it is probably wrong to force this connection at this juncture.<br />
The substratum, though, of Dilthey’s claim to create a human science is<br />
that (1) individuals are volitional and purposeful, (2) this covers a range of<br />
behaviour including the rational, affectual and evaluative, and (3) the ways<br />
in which the volitional behaviour of individuals combines in ‘systems’ or<br />
(sociological) entities gives us culture, the forms of society and the external<br />
organization of the state.<br />
Dilthey provides the reader with an interesting illustration of his approach.<br />
Theories can be generated from ‘systems’ or entities. Within a<br />
‘system’ or set of purposive psychical or pyschophysical elements, certain<br />
dependencies can be generated. Individuals can express religious feelings as<br />
purposeful activity, for example through the feelings generated by congregational<br />
worship, and these can exist in a dependency relation to religious<br />
dogma and their worldviews. Dilthey refers to the work of Schleiermacher at<br />
this point as an exemplar of such a theory. 25 Dilthey does not offer complete<br />
clarity as to what he is saying here, but it is not impossible to read in this a<br />
methodological justification of <strong>Weber</strong>’s PESC. A dependency relation exists<br />
between the religious (predestinarian) feelings of Puritans, on the one side,<br />
and the conduct of life, on the other. Dependency relationships, which for<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> become causal relationships, can be adduced from the interactions of<br />
individuals (socially groupable) at the psychic or psychological level.
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 83<br />
One would not single out Dilthey’s account of psychophysical life as the<br />
clearest statement of a theory of social action, which <strong>Weber</strong> was to achieve<br />
with a far tighter focus. But the two accounts of human action indicate that<br />
Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences was a not incompatible starting<br />
point for <strong>Weber</strong>’s own deliberations. Also Dilthey, in his Introduction,<br />
established the key principle that its ‘logic’ was to be built on the propositional<br />
statements of individuals in their lives. Social and cultural scientists<br />
should take statements such as ‘I want such and such’, ‘what I feel is such and<br />
such’, ‘I accept the prince’s authority as absolute’, ‘I judge this person in such<br />
a way’ as their datum. These are the statements that the social or cultural<br />
scientist will use in their relational interdependence to construct purposeful<br />
edifices of sociopsychic life. It is Dilthey who insists that a future science of<br />
mental life will work with the language of life.<br />
Hermeneutics<br />
In the last chapter, the question was raised about whether <strong>Weber</strong>’s interpretation<br />
of predestinarian doctrines and everyday practices could be accepted.<br />
Was he correct and how would we adjudicate this? Dilthey is the author who<br />
has most to offer on the subject. Dilthey’s starting point here is the interpretation<br />
of texts, and his inspiration was the advances made by historians,<br />
theologians and philologists in their interpretation of historical documents,<br />
sacred texts and ancient languages. In these situations, the meaning has to be<br />
deciphered and thought about, and it is in these non-transparent situations<br />
that Dilthey worked out the rules or methods of interpretation.<br />
It is important to grasp the thrust and impetus of this background that had<br />
developed spectacularly over the nineteenth century. Hermeneutics enabled<br />
classical historians such as Niehbuhr to assemble the first reliable account of<br />
the history of Rome. It enabled theologians and philologists to work on the<br />
historical stages of the composition of the different books of the Bible and<br />
to distinguish between apocryphal and traditional religious texts. In philosophy,<br />
the writings of Plato were placed within the context and traditions<br />
of Greeks schools of thought and the practice of learning and disquisition.<br />
In philology, the genealogical history of languages was being established.<br />
Documents, inscriptions, texts all provided the source material for gaining<br />
a scientifically reliable way of establishing ‘what really happened’, to use<br />
the historian Ranke’s famous phrase. And what really happened was pieced<br />
together by correctly extracting the information contained in the various<br />
forms of historical evidence. This procedure was taught and transmitted in<br />
the university seminar. The professor had mastered the sources of evidence<br />
in his field, and his students had to demonstrate their own competence (or<br />
incompetence) in their interpretation of historical (primary) sources. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
himself was a product of this system, which had come to define the university<br />
during the nineteenth century. He worked with historical law documents<br />
with Frensdorff and other legal scholars at the University of Göttingen. 26
84 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
To an extent, it was a tradition and procedure that <strong>Weber</strong> could well have<br />
taken for granted in his own writings. It was a technique and discipline that<br />
had to be mastered as part of an academic’s training, rather than standing<br />
for a methodological novelty (now designated as working with ‘primary<br />
sources’).<br />
Dilthey took what many practitioners would regard as a necessary skill<br />
and made it into a component of his philosophical approach to the human<br />
sciences. He makes the point that, just as the natural scientist has the experimental<br />
method as a way of establishing truth, so the human sciences have<br />
hermeneutics as the art of interpretation. If this statement is read through<br />
the lenses of Heidegger, Gadamer and Derrida, who have come to characterize<br />
the hermeneutical operation over the twentieth century, an opposition<br />
between science and art will be assumed. Science is concerned with exact<br />
certainty, whereas in the humanities, everything is subject to interpretation,<br />
and the meaning inferred will be highly dependent upon the interpreter’s<br />
own situation. Dilthey’s own writings can be pulled in the direction of the<br />
arbitrariness of viewer (as opposed to the object studied for its meaning),<br />
and this relates to one of the weaker flanks of Dilthey’s position (which we<br />
will consider shortly). But the opposition between science and art is not<br />
Dilthey’s point. Science and art are equivalents in the search for truth. The<br />
German word for art, ‘Kunst’, denotes not only art in the aesthetic sense<br />
but also art in the sense of skill, as in ‘artistry’. The art of interpretation has<br />
been developed to ‘crack open’ documents and all expressions of the human<br />
spirit that had remained indecipherable, misunderstood or have received<br />
mistaken readings. Such procedures do not eliminate all ambiguities, and<br />
major debates are sometimes required before contradictory interpretations<br />
are resolved. But the whole tenor and practice of hermeneutics was to establish<br />
certainty of meaning. It is a standard that most professional historians<br />
still adhere to. 27<br />
In a lecture to the Prussian Academy of Science in 1896, which was published<br />
in 1900, Dilthey noted that ‘philology and history rest on the assumption<br />
that the understanding of the unique can be made objective’. Disciplines<br />
in the human sciences, such as history, ‘depend for their certainty on the<br />
possibility of giving general validity to the understanding of the unique’. 28<br />
Data in the human sciences derive from the expressions and utterances of<br />
other human beings, and these do not face the investigator, as in the natural<br />
sciences as an insensate reality, but can be understood from within. The<br />
‘systematic understanding of recorded expressions we call exegesis or interpretation’.<br />
‘The art of understanding therefore centres on the interpretation<br />
of written records of human existence.’ 29<br />
The art of interpretation has developed just as slowly, gradually and in<br />
as orderly a way as, for example, the questioning of nature by experiment.<br />
It originated and survives in the personal, inspired virtuosity of
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 85<br />
philologists. Naturally it is mainly transmitted through personal contact<br />
with the great masters of interpretation of their work. But every skill<br />
also proceeds according to rules which teach us to overcome difficulties<br />
and embody what can be transmitted of a personal skill. So the<br />
art of interpretation gives rise to the formulation of rules. The conflict<br />
between such rules and the struggle between different schools about the<br />
interpretation of vital works produces a need to justify the rules and this<br />
gives rise hermeneutics, which is the methodology of the interpretation<br />
of written records. 30<br />
At a technical level, these rules involve what today is called triangulation<br />
(see above p. 67) – a number of methods are used in combination to<br />
pin down the exact place and meaning of, say, a text. Hermeneutics can be<br />
seen ‘as an edifice of rules – the parts of which – the individual rules – were<br />
held together by the aim to achieve a valid interpretation. It had separated<br />
the functions which combine in this process into grammatical, historical,<br />
aesthetic-rhetorical and factual exegesis. From the philological virtuosity of<br />
many centuries it had crystallized the rules according to which these must<br />
function.’ 31 By grammar, Dilthey means a given language – its syntax, vocabulary<br />
and range of meanings have to be learnt. The first recognizably<br />
modern theorist of hermeneutics, Schleiermacher, argued that this occurred<br />
through an iterative process of relating a part of a text to the whole – of a<br />
word within a sentence, an expression within a language. Only by going<br />
backwards and forwards between part and whole can a language and, therefore,<br />
the meaning of a word or text be established. The historical meant that<br />
the historical origins of a text have to be established. A book might come<br />
down to us as a seemingly unified entity, but historical analysis can reveal<br />
it to be a composite of texts from different periods and pens. Texts convey<br />
their meaning, as communication, through the use of imagery, tropes and<br />
rhetorical devices. Aristotle was the first analyst to provide an inventory of<br />
rhetorical devices. These have to be recognized and, to an extent, put on one<br />
side in order to study the factual or substantive level of the text.<br />
In the development of hermeneutics over centuries (from the second and<br />
third centuries bc), there is, says Dilthey, a history of wrong-headed interpretation,<br />
of what Dilthey refers to as ‘allegorical’ interpretation. Allegory is<br />
used as a way of avoiding the truth of what is stated or written down. Veracity<br />
is abandoned, often in the face of religious, political and other subversive<br />
pressures, in favour of interpretivist accounts. In Christianity, the New<br />
Testament is seen as following on from the Old Testament. In particular, the<br />
prophecies scattered over the Old Testament have to be made to conform<br />
–when clearly many of these do not – to Jesus Christ as the foretold messiah.<br />
Historical theological scholarship points to the lack of fit, when the text is<br />
read for what it actually says; the imperatives of revelatory belief mean that<br />
these inconsistencies have to be explained away through fanciful allegories.
86 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
This, for Dilthey, would be an interpretation of meaning but not hermeneutics.<br />
Another and more relevant example concerns the Christian Reformation.<br />
In the face of Jean Calvin’s interpretation of the sacred texts, which<br />
also at points explained the rules of interpretation, the Catholic Church<br />
asserted that the scriptures were ‘obscure’ and had to be interpreted through<br />
Catholic traditional doctrine. The Lutheran theologian Flacius understood<br />
the need to demonstrate that the scriptures could be interpreted correctly<br />
and, in doing this, ‘he became conscious of [new] methods and rules which<br />
earlier hermeneutics had not elicited’. ‘It was Flacius who was also the first<br />
to grasp the significance of the psychological or technical principle of interpretation<br />
according to which an individual passage must be interpreted in<br />
terms of the aim and composition of the whole work. He was the first to<br />
use methodically the insights of rhetoric about the inner units of a literary<br />
product, its composition and effective elements for technical interpretation.’<br />
Flacius used the methodical aids of ‘context, aim, proportion and the<br />
consistency of individual parts or links in determining the definite meaning<br />
of passages’. 32 Dilthey follows the history of the development of biblical<br />
hermeneutics through to Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth<br />
century. Schleiermacher is a pivotal figure for Dilthey, and this is where his<br />
account stops, but Dilthey could have traced the continuation of Protestant<br />
historical theology in the figures of Harnack, Ritschl and Troeltsch. Hermeneutics<br />
had a mission within Protestant theology – of combating tradition<br />
with the presentation of the truth of the text. This was a trail that led directly<br />
to <strong>Weber</strong>’s academic front door. 33<br />
One section of Dilthey’s thinking can help with our treatment of Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> in the last chapter. In writing on methodology, there is a tendency towards<br />
the pedagogic exposition of rules – hence, the rules of hermeneutics.<br />
With Schleiermacher, Dilthey encountered someone who had not only absorbed<br />
these rules but, through his inspirational gifts, had gone far beyond<br />
them. We can refer to this as the virtuoso ‘problem’. When we read Erving<br />
Goffman, Richard Sennett or Harry Braverman, it is possible to specify their<br />
methodological procedures but not, however, to account for the extra brilliance<br />
that suffuses their writings and explanations. There may also be a<br />
difficulty, as with <strong>Weber</strong>, that what they say they are doing and what they are<br />
actually achieving can be (artfully) different.<br />
Dilthey is adamant that hermeneutics involves more than the specification<br />
of rules which ‘only produces blind windows through which no one<br />
can look. An effective hermeneutics could only emerge in a mind which<br />
combined virtuosity of philological interpretation with genuine philosophic<br />
capacity. A man with such a mind was Schleiermacher.’ ‘He recognized<br />
that the imaginative consideration of the creative process through which<br />
a vital work originates was the basis for appreciating the process by which<br />
we understand the whole of work from its written signs and from this the<br />
purpose and mentality of its author.’ Reading a text (or, more widely, reading<br />
a sociological situation) should at its best involve creativity. ‘Receptivity
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 87<br />
and creativity cannot be separated.’ 34 A literary text possesses the creativity<br />
of the author.<br />
Such a work meets with the insatiable desire of the reader to supplement<br />
his own individuality through contemplation of that of others. <strong>Understanding</strong><br />
and interpretation therefore are constantly alive and active in<br />
life itself, but they are perfected by the systematic interpretation of living<br />
works and the unity they were given in the author’s mind. This was the<br />
new conception in the special form it assumed in Schleiermacher. 35<br />
The last part of this statement says that the researcher has to penetrate the<br />
writer’s own mind and intentions, and to recreate the vision and outlook of<br />
the author if the full sense and meaning of the text is to be garnered. In terms<br />
of social research, an investigator has to give something creatively of his or<br />
herself in the process of interpretation. The realm of public, social and civic<br />
life that Sennett brings to life in his Fall of Public Man had to be creatively<br />
reconstituted. The documents and testimony drawn on by Sennett were not<br />
ready and waiting in the archives, requiring only presentational display. A<br />
breath of inspiration, the creativity of the investigator to imagine how it<br />
might have been, and was, in revolutionary Paris was required. On this basis,<br />
it is what the student brings creatively to interpretation – in conjunction with<br />
mastery of methodological rules – that always makes possible the next masterpiece.<br />
In <strong>Weber</strong>’s case, penetrating the mindset of the seventeenth-century<br />
Puritan and bringing it alive to the twentieth-century reader would fulfil the<br />
full creative potential of hermeneutics for Dilthey (although it should be<br />
added that we do not know what he thought of <strong>Weber</strong>’s masterpiece).<br />
There is a case for stopping the methodological exposition at this point.<br />
There are rules, and those who can go beyond them (without egregiously<br />
breaking them) fall into the master class. Methodology cannot legislate for<br />
this extra brilliance; all it has to do is allow it to happen. To an extent,<br />
Dilthey himself rests the argument at this point. For him, what is important<br />
is that a linkage is made between a past or objectivated expression of human<br />
consciousness and the self-awareness of the researcher in his or her world.<br />
<strong>Understanding</strong> is a living process, where one person creatively relives the<br />
outlook and expression of another era (‘nacherleben’) through a process of<br />
ascribing. Ascetic (English) Protestantism was not an academic construction<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong> in c. 1900, it was a significant part of his own self-conception,<br />
indeed, if not an ideal that he would have preferred more of his fellow<br />
countrymen to have experienced. 36 It is on this basis that <strong>Weber</strong> was able<br />
to bring his Puritan character to life on the academic stage. These creative<br />
academic works add to the canon of a society or civilization’s own heritage,<br />
self-awareness and educative potential. This is the completion of the hermeneutical<br />
task for Dilthey.<br />
But Dilthey does not allow this creative ‘loose end’ to remain unsecured.
88 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
He wants to tie it into a complete philosophy. His argumentation here displays<br />
vulnerabilities, which will be quickly sketched before moving on to<br />
some of Dilthey’s more academicist critics (with whom <strong>Weber</strong> is more usually<br />
aligned).<br />
Schleiermacher had expanded the rules of interpretation (more accurately<br />
‘explication’/‘Auslegung’) to include the psychological motivation of<br />
an author and his place in historical context; this involved a creative act of<br />
understanding. 37 This, for Dilthey, is an act of artistic fusion. ‘The concepts<br />
which guided him [Schleiermacher] in his brilliant works on Greek poetry,<br />
Goethe and Boccaccio were: the inner form of the work, the development of<br />
the author and the articulated whole of literature.’ Schleiermacher ‘rejected<br />
the division of the exegetic process into grammatical, historical aesthetic<br />
and factual interpretation’, for this has to be combined with psychological<br />
interpretation that penetrates the inner creative process. 38 In philosophical<br />
terms, Dilthey terms this, with critical intention, transcendental idealism:<br />
that the creative act itself gives one access to the mental expressions of any<br />
other human being and time. And underlying this assumption is the further<br />
opinion that human beings as natural beings have access to an understanding<br />
of nature, and that the world of spirit and that of matter are not necessarily<br />
apart. This philosophical doctrine owed more to poetic influences such as<br />
Goethe than it did to philosophy proper. Dilthey knew this and set about<br />
reworking the philosophical basis of what may be termed transcendental<br />
understanding. This becomes a validity question: how can we know that<br />
we have this ability to reach across from our own world to penetrate the<br />
outlook of another era or social world?<br />
This is a question that is more strictly formulated in the philosophy of<br />
Locke and Kant respectively. In the English tradition of Locke and Hume,<br />
what our minds know of external reality remains a philosophical mystery,<br />
simply because our minds are separate and different from reality ‘out there’.<br />
We obviously receive sensations from reality, but our thoughts and ideas can<br />
only be said to be fading reflections of sensations which, by their nature, are<br />
only momentary. I leave the seminar room to allow my students to discuss<br />
the topic, but how do I really know they are still in the seminar room when<br />
I have shut the door? All I have is the fading impression of what I, in the<br />
seminar room, immediately knew. This is philosophical scepticism. Dilthey<br />
is pretty scathing about this approach because it conceives reality ‘out there’<br />
in physicalist terms. Reality is also, for Dilthey, the life of the mind, so why<br />
reduce it to pale and wan impressions of sensate data? This is no way to<br />
think about ideas, culture and all the expressions of the mental capacity of<br />
human beings. Immanuel Kant attempted to secure the faculty of reason in<br />
the human mind in the face of the rather depressing implications of Humean<br />
scepticism. Reason gives us the ability to think rationally and to act morally,<br />
and the mind also has the capacity of aesthetic appreciation and ennoblement.<br />
Kant argued that, although we only apprehend the appearances of<br />
a reality ‘out there’, we – everyone – do have root mental capacities that
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 89<br />
allow us to order that reality in terms of fundamentals such as the passing<br />
of time, spatial awareness, causality. These properties of mind Kant termed<br />
transcendental categories. Overall, it needs to be noted that these problems<br />
are designated, both now and by <strong>Weber</strong> and his contemporaries, as dualism;<br />
there is the perceptual world of the human being and there is a world of<br />
external reality. <strong>Weber</strong>’s friend, the philosopher Emil Lask, referred to this<br />
as an unbridgeable gulf – a ‘hiatus irrationalis’, and <strong>Weber</strong> agreed with this<br />
stance.<br />
Dilthey is dismissive of philosophic dualism. In the Preface to his Introduction<br />
to the Human Sciences, he notes:<br />
Although I found myself frequently in agreement with the epistemological<br />
(‘erkenntnistheoretischen’) school of Locke, Hume, and Kant I<br />
nevertheless found it necessary to conceive differently the nexus of facts<br />
of consciousness . . . No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing<br />
subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant, but rather the diluted<br />
extract of reason as a mere activity of thought. A historical as well as<br />
psychological approach to whole human beings led me to explain even<br />
knowledge and its concepts (such as the external world, time, substance,<br />
and cause) in terms of the manifold powers of a being that will, feels,<br />
and thinks. 39<br />
Dilthey’s solution is to lay aside transcendental categories in favour of<br />
categories of life. Instead of making the Kantian assumption of transcendental<br />
categories, Dilthey holds that these categories are part of our existence<br />
as human beings. We all experience time, its passing and its duration and<br />
sense of present and future, we are all in our lives exercising our capacity to<br />
understand and make sense and meaning of the world in both its parts and<br />
whole, and we all make positive and negative valuations of the world around<br />
us. 40 This is ingenious and it added considerably to the methodological field,<br />
where other attempts – most notably phenomenology and pragmatism – were<br />
being undertaken not to solve the dualism problem but to go around it and<br />
render it irrelevant. In this light, Dilthey may be referred to as post-Kantian.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, in his explicit epistemological (‘erkenntnistheoretische’) writings,<br />
remained locked into the dualism problematic, although as I have suggested<br />
in the previous chapters, PESC should be regarded as his most hermeneutical<br />
work.<br />
Dilthey wanted to push philosophical thinking into the language and experience<br />
of life itself.<br />
I will relate every component of contemporary abstract scientific thought<br />
to the whole of human nature as it is revealed in experience, in the study<br />
of language, and in the study of history, and thus seek the connection of<br />
these components. The result is that the most important components of<br />
our picture and knowledge of reality – our own personality as a living
90 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
entity, the external world, other individuals, their temporal life and their<br />
interactions (‘Wechselwirkung’) – can be explained in terms of this totality<br />
of human nature. 41<br />
This was a prefatory statement, one of ambition rather than its realization,<br />
so we cannot adequately assess Dilthey’s success in this enterprise (which he<br />
never completed, leaving as he did many unfinished manuscripts). 42 Nevertheless,<br />
we can glimpse how the enterprise could founder: by collapsing the<br />
issue of the categories of knowing into an insufficiently distinctive conception<br />
of ‘life itself ’. Such a judgement cannot be made here, and it would be<br />
contingent on an assessment of how Dilthey handled the relation of the parts<br />
of the world to its whole.<br />
The neo-Kantians<br />
The neo-Kantians, Windelband and Rickert, colleagues of <strong>Weber</strong> at the universities<br />
of Freiburg and Heidelberg, are Kantian in the following respects.<br />
Scientific work has to proceed through the construction of concepts in order<br />
to perceive and make sense of reality, and a philosophy of knowledge has to<br />
be used to impose some sort of ordering of scientific work in the cultural and<br />
historical sciences. In Rickert’s hands, a highly detailed ‘logical’ account is<br />
given of how the investigator relates to the subject being researched and how<br />
the dualistic split between concept and reality is to be handled, so preserving<br />
the scientific validity of work in the human and cultural sciences. Rickert was<br />
critical of the efforts of Dilthey, regarding his underpinning of the validity of<br />
knowledge as ‘ontological’, i.e. the categories of life. Rickert advocated quite<br />
prescriptive procedures for ensuring the validity of scientific knowledge in<br />
the cultural and historical field. This is the sense in which Rickert is termed<br />
a neo-Kantian – the abiding concern is how to secure the grounds on which<br />
scientific claims for knowledge can be made, once the duality and scepticism<br />
of the observer–world split are admitted. Dilthey, as we have seen, was quite<br />
aware of this issue but chose to treat it as, in large part, solved by academic<br />
work using the methods of hermeneutics and as, ultimately, a condition of<br />
human existence, whereas Rickert turned to logical or formal solutions.<br />
Quite an amount of tension sprang up between the Rickert and Dilthey<br />
approaches, but it is important to recall that they had a common enemy<br />
in the positivistic conception of natural science. Scientific advances in evolutionary<br />
biology, embryology and cellular research, electromagnetism,<br />
entropy in physics, the bacterial origins of diseases, and the support given<br />
by the Prussian Ministry of Education to research institutes and professorial<br />
chairs in the natural sciences had placed the humanities on the back<br />
foot. The balance of influence and prestige was moving from the seminar<br />
to the laboratory and, unless a claim for the scientificness of historical and<br />
cultural disciplines could be advanced, their standing within the university<br />
system and as a cultural force within society would be diminished. Another
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 91<br />
Comtean moment had been reached. The genius of the young Comte in<br />
his Discourse on Positivist Philosophy (1822) had provided a conspectus of<br />
recent scientific advances and had perceived the shift from ‘Aristotelian’ substances<br />
and teleology to a proper understanding of causation in the physical<br />
world; for Comte, this was the move from the metaphysical to the positivist<br />
conception of knowledge, and the new science of society, sociology, would<br />
model itself on the same scientific principles.<br />
In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, the Comtean moment<br />
appeared in the guise of scientific monism. The dualistic notions that there<br />
exist scientific theories and hypotheses, on the one side, and the ultimately<br />
unknowable world of brute reality, on the other, were being swept aside by<br />
scientific discoveries and a rapid progress, which suggested to some that<br />
all that was needed was the laboratory, technology, experiments and the<br />
gathering and analysis of facts and the laws of the natural world would be<br />
revealed. Regularities of law-like certainty were a feature of physical reality.<br />
It was not brute, chaotic or unknowingly noumenal; properly addressed, it<br />
revealed its secrets. Furthermore, the psychophysical human being could best<br />
be explained through its natural properties. The human being was a product<br />
of biology, of cellular embryology, and consciousness through experimental<br />
methods would be shown to operate in terms of stimulus and response. A<br />
scientific psychology started by Fechner and Wundt would demonstrate how<br />
thinking and feeling were constituted and produced in the psychophysical<br />
organism. 43 The human being possessing the sovereign faculties of reason<br />
– Kant’s postulate – could be dispensed with. The autonomy of will – thinking,<br />
feeling, wanting, valuing – was to become subsidiary to causal determination.<br />
A monistic conception of science held that the human being was<br />
reducible to the rest of physical reality, which, when approached with the<br />
instruments of natural science, would reveal its laws and mechanisms. While<br />
Dilthey’s ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ is now translated (not wholly satisfactorily)<br />
as ‘human sciences’, there were major efforts around 1900 to create the<br />
human sciences through a reduction of the human organism to physicalist<br />
mechanisms.<br />
Much of <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ is taken up with very combative<br />
refutations of the claims and illusions of a unified science of ‘Natur’ and<br />
‘Mensch’ on monistic principles. (And, by implication, there is far less writing<br />
– than we might wish – devoted to practical methodological issues in the<br />
social, historical and cultural sciences.) <strong>Weber</strong> attacked the startlingly ambitious<br />
programme of the evolutionary biologist and chemist, Ernst Haeckel,<br />
who in his book The Riddle of the Universe saw monism rather in the way<br />
Comte came to inscribe positivism as a controlling ‘Weltanschauung’ with<br />
its own priesthood. Karl Lamprecht is vituperatively rubbished for his grandiose<br />
schema for outlining in his Deutsche Geschichte the laws of succession<br />
of culture and the determining mentalities of each epoch. Economists<br />
are attacked for believing that utility maximization will be secured through<br />
psychological laws of diminishing response to stimuli. The legal theorist
92 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
Stammler is demolished for asserting that legal norms are a reflection of<br />
the materialist laws of society – this was monism though the evolutionary<br />
Marxism of Engels and Kautsky. In the same vein, the older generation of<br />
national-economists, Roscher and Knies, are criticized for securing their<br />
theories to evolutionary entities seen in organic terms, where ‘Volksseele’<br />
and ‘Volksgeist’ become real and growing objects. And Ostwald’s championing<br />
of entropy as the key to a unified science is revealed as an extraordinary<br />
gambit.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s place in the force field of debates on the nature of science should<br />
be seen as the major antagonist in favour of a culturalist approach and<br />
against an encroaching monism. All the academic writers discussed so far<br />
– Schmoller, Sombart, Simmel, Dilthey, Windelband, Rickert – align with<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> against a positivizing approach to science. By comparison with this<br />
major division, the neo-Kantian direction is significant but represents a minor<br />
divide.<br />
In opening the neo-Kantian case in 1894, Windelband acknowledges a<br />
generic point. The cultural and historical sciences have to lay claim to their<br />
own legitimate place as science in the face of the natural sciences, which<br />
make that claim by a different route. Windelband makes his, by now famous,<br />
distinction between idiographic science that focuses down on the singularity<br />
of phenomena and nomothetic science whose goal is to explain by showing<br />
the operation of laws and their causal effects. The nature of the object being<br />
studied determines the particular method of investigation. History, for<br />
example, studies particular events, personalities and their motivation, and<br />
the contingency of processes. Explanation tends to reside in the in-depth<br />
knowledge of these topics. Unlike natural science, the materials studied do<br />
not offer up striking regularities that can then be formulated as laws. This<br />
opening has much in common with Dilthey’s own setting out of the issues<br />
(at roughly the same date – 1893).<br />
Having made the case for the difference between, but equivalence of, the<br />
two approaches to science, Windelband had little to contribute on just how<br />
the idiographic would secure its scientific validity. This was developed by<br />
Heinrich Rickert in The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science,<br />
published in 1902. <strong>Weber</strong> read it in Florence in 1902 while recuperating<br />
from his illness. He pronounced it as ‘very good’ in a letter to his wife,<br />
although his subsequent comments were less approving. 44 Hence, we know<br />
he had read Rickert, also that he took over some of Rickert’s terminology,<br />
but just how much of Rickert’s solution to the epistemological problems of<br />
the cultural and historical sciences <strong>Weber</strong> took over into his own work will<br />
require consideration below.<br />
Rickert framed the problem, ‘in what areas the formation of concepts<br />
of natural science makes sense, and in what areas the sense of that kind of<br />
concept formation is by necessity lost’. 45 Rickert treated the world of reality<br />
‘out there’ as being composed of objects that were innumerable. In physics<br />
today, especially particle physics, this is a reasonable proposition – the idea
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 93<br />
that reality can be broken down into ever smaller objects, until they are<br />
infinitesimally small. Rickert asserts this as a logical proposition that, in the<br />
dimensions of both time and space, the objects that could be perceived are<br />
infinite. In this respect, reality cannot be cognized in its complexity. We use<br />
words to reference objects in this infinitely complex reality, and scientists use<br />
concepts, which give precise definitions of objects. Again on formal or logical<br />
grounds, Rickert asserts that, in the natural sciences, concepts can group<br />
together objects that have common properties. These concepts in their turn<br />
can be fitted together to arrive at laws describing the regularities of objects.<br />
Concepts in the natural science, therefore, tend to an ever increasing abstraction<br />
of reality. In the study of social and historical life, ‘objects’ are<br />
individual, that is they do not present commonalities that allow them to be<br />
grouped together under abstract concepts. This presents two classes of concepts:<br />
those that travel away from reality in the direction of abstraction; and<br />
those (in the historical sciences) that attach themselves as closely as possible<br />
to the individuality of the past. Individuality – and this works slightly better<br />
in its Latin form – should be understood as the individuation, or the dividing<br />
up, of reality into specific objects.<br />
So informed, it is now feasible to return to <strong>Weber</strong>’s usage of the term in<br />
PESC. Introducing the phrase ‘the spirit of capitalism’, <strong>Weber</strong> says of it,<br />
If any object can be found to which this term can be applied with any<br />
understandable meaning, it can only be an historical individual, i.e. a<br />
complex of elements associated in historical reality which we unite into<br />
a conceptual whole from the standpoint of their cultural significance.<br />
Such an historical concept, however, since it refers in its content to a<br />
phenomenon significant for its unique individuality, cannot be defined<br />
according to the formula genus proximum, differentia specifica . . .<br />
(PESC, p. 47)<br />
The Latin phrase means that individual specifics can be grouped together<br />
to produce more general concepts, i.e. the method of increasing abstraction.<br />
This cannot be done with historical concepts, which have to attach as far<br />
as possible to the object’s unique reality. Rickert therefore introduces the<br />
term a ‘science of reality’ (‘Wirklichkeitswissenschaft’) to depict this movement<br />
towards objects. It is a term that <strong>Weber</strong> himself deploys in his essay<br />
on ‘Objectivity’ in the social sciences. Because reality (‘Wirklichkeit’) is not<br />
subsumable under general concepts and is infinite, in both time and space<br />
– what <strong>Weber</strong> refers to as ‘extensive and intensive infiniticy’ 46 – the historian<br />
is forced to be selective in approaching this infinite multiplicity.<br />
Selectivity is a fairly open-ended notion. Selection could mean selection<br />
to your point of view or opinions. This is not what Rickert, or <strong>Weber</strong>, meant.<br />
Many histories are written from an opinionated standpoint or with a blatant<br />
bias that leads to absurd situations. For example, a Catholic historian<br />
will write a history enumerating Catholic martyrs and their torture in the
94 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
Reformation, whereas a Protestant historian will do the same but for Protestant<br />
martyrs, and no doubt an atheistic historian would argue that religion<br />
is bad for your health.<br />
Rickert argues for something far more neutral, what he calls value orientation.<br />
Human beings are purposive, and they make evaluations of the<br />
world. Reality, argues Rickert, with regard to history only has meaning for<br />
the purposive and active human being in so far as it is unique. 47 This line of<br />
thought is not dissimilar to Dilthey’s recreation of the historical through the<br />
historian’s own values of life. But Rickert turns what sounds like a practical<br />
evaluation into what he terms a ‘value relation’ (‘Wertbeziehung’). This<br />
means it is worthy of interest, although what practical evaluations may be<br />
drawn is a different matter – one to do with what <strong>Weber</strong> termed value judgements.<br />
Both <strong>Weber</strong> and Rickert insisted on the distinction between value<br />
relation and value judgement and, without the insistence, the distinction<br />
easily falls back to a more encompassing ‘point of view’.<br />
Rickert also argues that what is of interest to the historian must be a reflection<br />
of what is of general interest to the community of historians and their<br />
public. This gives a value relation a general validity, and it is not hard to trace<br />
the Kantian influence here. Kant had argued that practical reason derives validity<br />
in the applicability of a (moral) rule as being true for all members of a<br />
community, indeed as universally valid. In a more restricted community – of<br />
historians – validity is conferred through some sort of consensus, as opposed<br />
to the possibly idiosyncratic view (value relation) of the lone historian. In<br />
passing, one cannot help but observe that this would seem to condemn value<br />
interest to the conformity of the generally accepted, and that innovation in<br />
historical science could not be generated from what initially might seem to be<br />
obscure and of no interest. 48 Also, it would seem to beg the question of what<br />
constitutes value in the first place. The obligation of the historian, writes<br />
Bruun about Rickert, is ‘always to let his value relations be guided by values<br />
which are generally (empirically) valid in the “Gemeinschaft” [community]<br />
for which his account is written . . .’. 49 Empirical validity here means the<br />
values actually held by a community. Furthermore, these values, insofar as<br />
they can claim validity, are general values. Each community for which a historian<br />
writes and, by this, Rickert means Church, state, law, science and arts,<br />
hold values that are ‘cultural values’. 50 History must therefore be oriented<br />
to culture. And, because these values are general to each community, they<br />
have normative force. It is this aspect of selection, a difficulty that applies<br />
to both natural and historical sciences, that confers empirical validity and so<br />
objectivity to history. The selection is empirically valid because it is a reflection<br />
of the relevant values of the normative community of historians. This, it<br />
should be noted, is not how methods in history would be thought of today.<br />
Actual methods of interpretation and verification would be emphasized – for<br />
example, is the document original and to be trusted, what are its origins,<br />
who or which persons wrote the document and for what purposes, and so<br />
on? Rickert turns the emphasis around, pinpointing an exercise – that of
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 95<br />
selection – that most historians ignore or remain unaware of. But in choosing<br />
a subject, and bringing certain value questions to bear on it, for Rickert, this<br />
is to confer an empirical validity on the topic selected.<br />
This, I think, takes Rickert down an overly prescriptive road incompatible<br />
with other scientific values of spontaneity, creativity and the ability to<br />
cause value positions to be changed within a public. Kantian imperatives<br />
might be considered as a viable system of ethics but, within the sphere of<br />
science, at the operational level, i.e. choosing what to study, this meeting of<br />
validity claims involves too much of a sacrifice of the historian’s own individuality.<br />
The anarchic spirit of Nietzsche – to ask the questions that nobody<br />
else permits themselves to ask – would be appalled. Rickert was concerned<br />
to exclude just that sort of arbitrariness in which question, judgement and<br />
evidence are reduced to an aphorism; however memorable the aphorism<br />
might be, it could be no substitute for scientific procedure. Rickert would<br />
also be able to point out that historians in their periodizations and dividing<br />
up of the historical past into topics, such as legal history, ecclesiastical<br />
history, economic history, etc., are proceeding in the way he suggests and<br />
prescribes. But, in following this procedure, it can be noted that Rickert<br />
clearly separates his procedure from that of Dilthey’s, for whom the movement<br />
between investigator and objects studied is far more fluid. It allows the<br />
researcher freedom and creativity to move back into any aspect of historical<br />
and cultural life, and to reanimate for himself and perhaps to create a new<br />
audience and field of interest. Rickert’s concern is to place the epistemology<br />
on a more specified basis.<br />
In relation to Dilthey’s work, it is worth noting where Rickert himself<br />
places the stress. He agrees that the division between the science of nature,<br />
concerning non-meaningful objects, and the science of mental life, which<br />
concerns meaningful behaviour, can be a common starting point for epistemologists.<br />
History ‘is primarily concerned with cultural realities that are<br />
meaningful and mental. For this reason, a representation of this object requires<br />
a value-relevant, individualizing concept formation. The domain of<br />
nonmeaningful “nature”, on the other hand – in other words, everything<br />
whose existence independent of value and meaning – intrinsically conforms<br />
to a system of general concepts.’ 51 On the basis of ‘the distinction between<br />
meaningful and nonmeaningful realities’ that forms ‘the real core of Dilthey’s<br />
theories of the human sciences . . . there can be no question of a fundamental<br />
opposition between Dilthey’s ideas and those set out here’. What Dilthey<br />
fails to provide, says Rickert, is a ‘clear conceptual analysis of the essential<br />
feature of his principle of demarcation’. 52<br />
Their differences, in Rickert’s hands, are quite subtle though important.<br />
(And they should not be depicted unsubtly, as many commentators do, 53 as<br />
an opposition between an expressive, relativistic ‘Lebensphilosophie’ and<br />
the tight conceptual formulation of Rickert.) Having made the meaningful–non-meaningful<br />
distinction, Rickert goes on to insist that meaning is<br />
a non-real and transcendent category. It is not an empirical and objective
96 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
category. Only when meaning is ascribed through value relation to a historical<br />
object does it take on the status of the empirical; otherwise, it is a freefloating<br />
supposition. The historical individual as a topic, period, personality,<br />
etc. contains value in itself, asserts Rickert, and the historian is informed by<br />
his or her own value community. The value relation that connects these two<br />
is an empirical one, opening the way to establishing questions of objectivity<br />
and of what is true and false. Values in themselves can claim to be valid (as<br />
truth, as aesthetic, as moral, etc.) but in themselves are not real.<br />
Values as such are never real. On the contrary, they hold validly. In other<br />
words, the values themselves cannot be real, but rather only the things<br />
(‘Güter’) in which they are ‘realized’ and in which we discover them. In<br />
the same way, the meaning reality acquires with reference to value does<br />
not itself fall within the domain of real existence. On the contrary, it<br />
obtains only in relation to a valid value. In this sense, the meaning itself<br />
is unreal. In consequence, by culture we understand, first, real historical<br />
life to which a meaning is attached that constitutes it as culture. In<br />
addition, we can also understand by culture the nonreal ‘content’ itself,<br />
conceived as the meaning of such a life that is detached from all real<br />
existence and is interpreted with reference to cultural values. 54<br />
Rickert adds that, although ‘meaning’ and ‘value’ interpenetrate our sense<br />
of life, in theoretical terms, they should be distinguished.<br />
Undoubtedly, there is a strangeness to Rickert’s argument and its Kantian<br />
style and the way in which he deploys the categories of value. 55 It is by these<br />
means that he hoped to place the cultural sciences on a more objective basis,<br />
even though it is quite hard to discern just how his conception of objectivity<br />
is made to work. In particular, Rickert addresses Dilthey’s lecture (1900),<br />
outlined above, accusing him of over-reliance on the re-experiencing of inner<br />
experience as the basis of understanding. He quotes Dilthey: ‘We call<br />
that process understanding in which we acquire knowledge of something<br />
that is inner on the basis of externally given signs.’ Of this, Rickert opines,<br />
‘We know how vacuous the concept of an inner process is.’ ‘The signs that<br />
are “externally” given must make it possible to acquire knowledge of more<br />
than a real “inner” process. Otherwise they will remain unintelligible.’ 56 The<br />
simple Diltheyan riposte to this is that the interpretation of inner experience<br />
attaches to its objects of expression – texts, pictures, gestures – and the<br />
interpretation of authorial intention has to be inferred from the historical<br />
situation. And if we revisit Dilthey’s sentence, in the official translation, it<br />
reads: ‘On the logical side of this process [the possibility of valid interpretation<br />
deduced from the nature of understanding] is one of coming to know<br />
a whole context from only partially defined signs by making use of existing<br />
grammatical, logical and historical knowledge.’ 57 Hermeneutics, for Rickert,<br />
would seem to include the art of paraphrase.<br />
This is not the place to argue out the dispute over the best scientific
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 97<br />
treatment of the meaningful in history, other than to note that it was a<br />
sophisticated debate and that neither side had abandoned objectivity and<br />
truthfulness. Reading much of interpretative sociology today, of which <strong>Weber</strong><br />
is said to be a founder, it would be a complete misreading to assume that<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is arguing that ‘subjective understanding’ equates with the subjectivity<br />
or relativism of truth. He is part of a tradition whose concern was to establish<br />
objectivity through a proper conceptualization of values.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s critical distance from Dilthey<br />
Pietro Rossi points out that <strong>Weber</strong> acknowledged Dilthey’s work, and that<br />
his knowledge of his works was quite comprehensive. It included Introduction<br />
to the Human Sciences, Ideas on Descriptive and Analytic Psychology<br />
and his lectures on ‘The Origins of Hermeneutics’ and ‘Studies towards the<br />
Foundation of the Human Sciences’. These references occur in the footnotes<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong>’s methodological essays on Roscher and Knies. They acknowledge<br />
Dilthey’s importance but are accompanied by references to Rickert. Dilthey<br />
was the first to establish the division of the sciences, but it was Windelband<br />
and Rickert who revealed the ‘logical distinctiveness of history’. <strong>Weber</strong>, following<br />
Rickert’s argument, noted that Dilthey’s distinction between ‘inner<br />
“experience” (“Erlebungen”)’ and ‘outer appearances’ was not just ‘logical’<br />
but ‘ontological’. <strong>Weber</strong> continued that he favoured Rickert’s logical and<br />
conceptual approach to the study of history. 58<br />
Hence, <strong>Weber</strong>’s comments on Dilthey are meagre, not fulsome, and critical<br />
of his ontology. It is a difficult judgement to make, but how much of that<br />
eruptive work of genius – The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism<br />
– was reliant on Dilthey’s expansive intellect and how much on Rickert’s<br />
logic? It was Dilthey who opened the door to the in-depth exploration of<br />
the inner life and meaning of historical lives and documents, and it was he<br />
who underlined the importance of hermeneutics and ‘Verstehen’ as a reliable<br />
method of study. Dilthey also supplied an embryonic sociology that was able<br />
to link the internal dimension of people’s actions with the external structures<br />
of society that surrounded them. Rickert supplied a way of using concepts<br />
that neutralized the observer’s engagement with history, and so offered the<br />
assurance of objectivity in place of a subjective engagement with the lives and<br />
artefacts of the past. Dilthey’s imaginative and energetic intellect celebrated<br />
our ability to make just such an engagement. The question, which I leave on<br />
the seminar table for discussion, is: what kind of exercise was <strong>Weber</strong> pursing<br />
in his imaginative and energetic engagement with Puritan history?<br />
The actual dynamics of this debate – its cross-currents, debates and conversations<br />
– have yet to be fully investigated from a history of ideas standpoint.<br />
Toby Huff ’s discussion of the <strong>Weber</strong>–Dilthey relationship points out<br />
the complexity of the debates and the large number of other actors, minor<br />
and major, who were also on stage. For Huff, the critical split, which he<br />
terms a ‘theoretical gulf ’, was over the issue of psychologism. When Dilthey
98 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
published his Ideas on Descriptive and Analytic Psychology in 1895, it was<br />
critically taken apart by Ebbinghaus. Dilthey immediately withdrew from<br />
any further work in that direction. I am not sure whether this provides<br />
enough evidence to locate the split in terms of psychologism. 59 Dilthey’s<br />
Introduction to the Human Sciences places the emphasis on descriptive psychology,<br />
simply in the sense that the historian needs to recreate the thoughts,<br />
ambitions and feelings of historical personages. No ‘scientific’ discipline of<br />
psychology is alluded to as providing an explanatory tool. Dilthey’s move<br />
into ‘analytic psychology’ did make that move – but then he withdrew from<br />
such a project.<br />
I would hypothesize that psychologism was a more general threat, seen<br />
by a large number of academics as the next big breakthrough in the human<br />
sciences. Dilthey might have given hope to those ambitions, and hence he<br />
was suspect. But, in his lecture on hermeneutics, I do not see how calling for<br />
the motivation behind a work of art also to be taken into account constitutes<br />
a cardinal sin. It is abundantly clear that <strong>Weber</strong> did not like psychologism,<br />
and he spent a considerable amount of methodological ink in condemning<br />
it. The principal object was that a science of psychology – and it would be<br />
based on natural scientific procedures – could provide a royal road into the<br />
human and cultural sciences; in the same way, today, evolutionary psychology<br />
offers that possibility. Very many economists persevered with the idea<br />
that a psychology of stimulus and response would explain the underlying<br />
mechanism of desire, utility and its satisfaction. 60 <strong>Weber</strong> disagreed with this<br />
on the grounds that social economics provided the basis for imputing desires<br />
and motives to economic actors; this was a sufficient explanation. In the<br />
area of ‘Verstehen’, so crucial to <strong>Weber</strong>’s cultural science, psychologism offered<br />
not so much a science as a loose account of how re-experiencing and<br />
empathy operated.<br />
Simmel was one of the worst offenders in this respect. In his 1892 publication<br />
of The Problems of the Philosophy of History, Simmel wrote:<br />
We must be able to recreate the mental act of the historical person. As<br />
this is sometimes expressed, we must be able to ‘occupy or inhabit the<br />
mind of the other person’. The understanding of an utterance entails<br />
that the mental processes of the speaker – processes which the words of<br />
the utterance express – are also reproduced in the listener by means of<br />
the utterance. 61<br />
For <strong>Weber</strong>, and hermeneutics in general, both the subjectivity of the<br />
speaker and the objectivity of the utterance are important. The mistake is to<br />
short cut from the subjectivity of the person, whose mind we in some wise<br />
inhabit, to the objective meaning of what is said – or expressed in writing or<br />
in artefact or in observed behaviour. Simmel was guilty of taking this short<br />
cut. Intuition, sympathy and feeling were the ways into the mind of another<br />
person and, in so understanding the mind of another person, their utterances<br />
could be understood. With <strong>Weber</strong>, motives have to be inferred, and what is
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 99<br />
said as an utterance, having an objective empirical existence separate from<br />
the intentions of the speaker, has to be interpreted; what <strong>Weber</strong> does not<br />
say is – interpreted according to hermeneutic rules. Simmel was capable of<br />
assuming a spirit world of the soul as a common property of humankind;<br />
hence, empathy was always possible and self-evident. For <strong>Weber</strong>, it can only<br />
be taken as an unprovable assumption that such understanding of motives<br />
and feelings is possible. This is the transcendental presupposition. What then<br />
matters is the procedure, which has to be critical not credulous.<br />
It was Simmel who used the example ‘one does not have to be Caesar in<br />
order to understand Caesar’, in The Problems of the Philosophy of History. 62<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> agreed with this as a possibility and uses the phrase himself. But as<br />
Huff points out, Simmel gave validity to this process by virtue of feeling<br />
alone. He quotes Simmel: ‘. . . the kind of general validity that is at stake<br />
here is a psychological property of mental activity itself. It is a feeling immediately<br />
given in mental activity’ (p. 65). <strong>Weber</strong>’s and Rickert’s methodology<br />
was designed to place this possibility of understanding on a sounder and<br />
more objective basis. Huff notes, ‘In short, Simmel substitutes “feeling” for<br />
objective and logical criteria of “validity” ’ (p. 66). I think Huff is correct<br />
in presuming that this not minor methodological difference is the basis for<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s very prominent disavowal of Simmel’s subjectivity. In <strong>Weber</strong>’s two<br />
sociological essays – ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’ and ‘Basic<br />
Sociological Concepts’ – Simmel is both acknowledged and reprimanded in<br />
the opening preamble. ‘I deviate from the method adopted by Simmel in his<br />
Sociology of Money in that I make as clear as possible a distinction between<br />
intended and objectively valid “meaning” (“Sinn”), a distinction which Simmel<br />
not only sometimes fails to make, but often deliberately runs together’<br />
(EW, p. 311). Simmel, it seems to me, redeems himself through his depiction<br />
of objectification as well as the central feature of his sociological and cultural<br />
analysis, the reciprocity of life and its forms.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s distrust of Dilthey, I suspect, stems from the issue of vitalism.<br />
Simmel’s psychologism and subjectivism are ways into what interests him<br />
most of all, the energy and creativity of life itself. <strong>Weber</strong> never reconciled<br />
himself to this feature of Simmel’s work. Yet the word ‘life’ (‘Leben’) and<br />
its compounds are central to <strong>Weber</strong>’s own work. It is perhaps here that<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s preference for Rickert over Dilthey should be sought. Dilthey, as<br />
noted in the preceding section, effectively collapsed his hermeneutic method<br />
into the ‘categories of life’. This was as much a move into vitalism as it was<br />
a psychologism. It was a move incompatible with the ambitions for a science<br />
of human and cultural life with any claims to validity in terms of critical<br />
distance and objectivity. It was just this distancing of the investigator from<br />
the embrace of vitalism that Rickert supplied to <strong>Weber</strong>.<br />
There is an important corollary to this debate, which was conducted as<br />
much covertly as textually explicitly. <strong>Weber</strong>, so to speak, sheltered behind<br />
Rickert rather than directly engaging in methodological debate with Dilthey.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> also seized hold of the method of causal attribution. Neither of these<br />
manoeuvres obviates the need for a critical discussion of hermeneutics. I flag
100 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
this up for future discussion, and I agree with Huff ’s recommendation that<br />
the work of recent language philosophy, particularly Donald Davidson, 63<br />
will show the way forward – in a way that accords with <strong>Weber</strong>’s ambitions<br />
for ‘objectivity’ in the human sciences.<br />
The ‘objectivity’ of knowledge<br />
We do not have to make <strong>Weber</strong> conform to either the Diltheyan or the Rickertian<br />
line. He does need, however, to be placed in the extraordinarily rich<br />
context of methodological work that was reflexively coming to terms with<br />
a century of academic progress in the historical and cultural disciplines and<br />
with the recent challenge of the all too successful natural sciences.<br />
Key to <strong>Weber</strong>’s views is his essay ‘The “Objectivity” of Knowledge in<br />
Social Science and Social Policy’. This is a massive essay in its length, topics<br />
and issues covered, and its innovative approach. In terms of pedagogic<br />
understanding, it is probably one of the more difficult pieces of his writing<br />
and one lecturers probably have the most difficulty teaching, even though it<br />
will always appear in a ‘theory and methods’ syllabus. It contains just about<br />
all the ideas and concepts of <strong>Weber</strong>’s thinking on methodology, although we<br />
need to make the proviso that he had not at this point developed a theory<br />
of social action. It has no subtitles, and it certainly should have them, because<br />
of its large array of topics. There is some evidence that it was written<br />
under pressure in order to front up the relaunch in 1904 of the Archiv für<br />
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik by its new editors, Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Werner<br />
Sombart and Edgar Jaffé.<br />
It was composed in order to raise and answer questions at a number of<br />
levels. It takes until the halfway point of the essay before the topic of ‘objectivity’<br />
and the issues related to PESC are discussed. It is preceded by an<br />
introduction signed by all the editors (‘Die Herausgeber’) that signals the<br />
change of direction in the journal. Under its old editor, Heinrich Braun, its<br />
major orientation was the labour question (‘Arbeiterfrage’), and the journal<br />
had had an explicit reform agenda, which it promoted through the publication<br />
of details of labour statistics and labour legislation. Under the new<br />
editors, the labour question is widened and deepened to consider the origins<br />
and consequences of the revolutionary process of capitalism on economic<br />
life and to consider this in the interaction of the social with the economic.<br />
The editors wrote as economists (‘Nationalökonomen’) but in the pursuit<br />
of the study of the ‘general cultural significance of capitalist development’.<br />
A theory of the social would establish the specific meaning of the social<br />
phenomena of culture (‘Kultur’). This, in its turn, demanded a consideration<br />
of the relation between conceptual constructs (‘Begriffsgebilde’) and reality<br />
(‘Wirklichkeit’). This was necessary if the journal was to meet scientific<br />
standards and, hence, the introduction would be followed by an essay by one<br />
of the editors (<strong>Weber</strong>) on ‘Erkenntniskritik’ (epistemology) and ‘Methodenlehre’<br />
(research methods). 64
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 101<br />
So <strong>Weber</strong>’s essay on ‘Objectivity’ emerges within the context of the<br />
capacious manifold of national-economy, a reform-oriented analysis of<br />
modern capitalism and a commitment to science. While it was written at the<br />
same time as PESC, the essay does not have a specifically cultural, religious<br />
or sociological focus. PESC can be placed within the new programme of the<br />
Archiv. It would be an example of the cultural determination of the economic<br />
development of capitalism. PESC might exemplify the new programme and<br />
its approaches, but it did not constitute a new disciplinary departure in the<br />
social sciences. While, as we have seen in the last chapter, PESC does indeed<br />
have major implications for social and cultural science, <strong>Weber</strong>’s overall<br />
methodological comments keep his cotemporaneous essay within the bounds<br />
of the scientific project of the new programme for national-economy.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s essay opens with an aggressive attack on the prevailing orthodoxy<br />
in national-economy and social science. This attributed too much faith<br />
to the explanatory power of science, assuming that, once the laws of societal<br />
development or the laws of the mind derived from biology, then all sociopolitical<br />
decisions and ethical choices could conform to scientific analysis.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> terms this historical relativism, and he applies this critique to historical<br />
materialism as well as Spencerian evolution.<br />
Value judgements<br />
His other associated main theme is value judgements. Science, <strong>Weber</strong> says,<br />
can establish what is, but it cannot prescribe what we should do in the light<br />
of scientific information. The ends of our actions, our goals and purposes,<br />
belong to a realm separate from that of science. Science can tell us how to<br />
pursue an end and the consequences flowing from the achievement of that<br />
end. Science can analyse means, but ends belong to the purposive activity<br />
of human beings. <strong>Weber</strong> had a huge fight on his hands in advocating this<br />
position. The general public (then, as now) was quite happy to accept the<br />
scientific logic of statements such as ‘scientific research has shown, for example,<br />
smoking damages your health’ and therefore we ought as a society to<br />
adopt the recommendations of scientists. For <strong>Weber</strong>, something like ‘smoking<br />
damages your health’ might be demonstrable and ‘self-evident’ through<br />
research, but what we choose to do about it as private citizens and public<br />
governments is another matter. Professors, whether in public health or social<br />
science, in his day saw no point in conducting research unless they could tell<br />
or prescribe what people and governments ought to do. The economists, of<br />
all persuasions, were especially inflexible. Forces of economic determination,<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong>, clearly could not be denied, but how citizens and governments<br />
reacted still remained a realm of freedom of choice within certain<br />
boundaries, i.e. capitalism could not be reversed, but it could be shaped, and<br />
the direction of its shaping was a matter of citizen/political debate. It was on<br />
this front that the Archiv wanted to open up the subdiscipline of social economics.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s remarks remain persuasive today. East coast US economists
102 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
in the early 1990s demanded, on the basis of free market economic theory,<br />
neo-liberal solutions for the ex-Soviet Union, and they did this in the certainty<br />
of scientific truth – which for <strong>Weber</strong> would have been a value judgement.<br />
In a <strong>Weber</strong>ian scientific world, neo-liberal recommendations would be<br />
analysed as one policy option with certain benefits and disadvantages and,<br />
crucially, they would be compared with alternative economic prescriptions<br />
(EW, p. 362), both open to public debate.<br />
In very broad terms, <strong>Weber</strong>’s position on value judgements is considered<br />
Kantian in that it follows in the footsteps of Kant’s threefold analysis of cognitive<br />
(pure) reason, moral (practical) reason and artistic judgements. 65 Each<br />
of these spheres has its own philosophical logic. In contrast, the dominant<br />
Anglophone philosophy of utilitarianism tends to collapse these categories:<br />
what a person finds rational tends to coincide with what he or she wants, and<br />
what gives pleasure is what he or she fancies, whether aesthetic or any other<br />
cultural good. In the sense of this gross contrast, <strong>Weber</strong> is Kantian. But, on<br />
the formation of value judgements, <strong>Weber</strong> is not strictly Kantian.<br />
The fate of a cultural epoch that has eaten from the tree of knowledge<br />
is that it must know that we cannot read the meaning of world events<br />
out of the results of any analysis, no matter how complete that might<br />
be; but that it has to be prepared to create such a meaning itself, that<br />
‘worldviews’ can never be the product of enhanced experiential knowledge,<br />
and that therefore the highest ideals that move us most strongly<br />
are forever formed in struggle with other ideals, ideals which are as dear<br />
to others as ours are to us.<br />
(EW, p. 364)<br />
We cannot decant our view of the world from scientific knowledge. But<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong>, our view of the world may well be in opposition to another one<br />
and, in this sense, we assert our meaning against other viewpoints. It is an<br />
agonistic or competitive vision. In the Kantian and more ordered world of<br />
Rickert, value judgements would emerge from values that were held in common<br />
by a community, and they would be prioritized according to areas of<br />
life. 66 Habermas, one of the most prominent critics of <strong>Weber</strong> in this respect,<br />
argues that moral values and norms should emerge from an open discussion<br />
within any one community and that their validity derives from a procedure<br />
that can produce a consensus within a community. Habermas criticized <strong>Weber</strong><br />
for his ‘decisionism’ – that ethical and political judgements are reduced to<br />
individual decision-making unreflective of wider group norms. And, in later<br />
work, Habermas specified the procedures whereby those norms could best<br />
be realized within groups. 67 With <strong>Weber</strong>, the formation of value judgements<br />
appears to rest on the desirability of commitment, that one set of values are<br />
supported while openly recognizing that others commit to opposing value<br />
judgements. Kant’s moral philosophy endorses the community consensus<br />
because it can secure a more universal basis, and so validity. <strong>Weber</strong> endorses
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 103<br />
the heterogeneity of values that may exist in perpetual conflict rather than<br />
being resolvable to any one consensus.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> insists that ‘a social scientific periodical as we understand it should,<br />
inasmuch as it is scientific, be a space where truth is sought, truth which can<br />
claim to be a valid conceptual ordering of empirical reality . . .’ (EW, p. 365).<br />
Truth is a scientific standard that is universally valid. <strong>Weber</strong> continues that<br />
two obligations follow from the inability of scholars to refrain from introducing<br />
value judgements into their work.<br />
First of all, both readers and editors should be at all times entirely aware<br />
which standards are here applied for the measurement of reality, and<br />
from which a value judgement is derived; contrasting with the all too<br />
frequent practice of an imprecise mingling of the most diverse values,<br />
confounding the conflict between ideals in an effort to ‘offer something<br />
to everyone’.<br />
(EW, p. 366)<br />
Secondly, value conflict should lead to a clear ‘confrontation’ of value<br />
standards.<br />
Any meaningful evaluation of alien aspirations can only be a critique<br />
formed from one’s own ‘worldview’, a struggle against alien ideals on<br />
the basis of one’s own ideals. If in individual cases the ultimate value-axiom<br />
underlying a practical aspiration is not only identified and subjected<br />
to scientific analysis, but its relationships with other value-axioms made<br />
clear, then ‘positive’ criticism of the latter through systematic exposition<br />
is unavoidable.<br />
(EW, p. 366)<br />
Education and science, then, will form the basis for a critical debate over<br />
policy issues. A strong commitment to wealth creation is not necessarily<br />
reconcilable with egalitarian viewpoints. In this ‘confrontation’, scientific<br />
analysis would remove empirical errors and lack of clarity in arguments; it<br />
would not remove the underlying convictions that may be deeply held, but<br />
it could place the debate on policy on a new footing.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is eloquent and insistent on this issue for many pages, very much<br />
aware of the opposition he would face. As the policy and social sciences were<br />
new and innovative, there was a belief that they would change the world for<br />
the better. This was an aspiration held in various policy forums such as the<br />
Verein für Sozialpolitik in Germany, the L’Anneé Sociologique in France and<br />
the Fabian Society in Britain. <strong>Weber</strong>’s scepticism on values was later to lead<br />
to a major crisis (1909–14) in his relationship with the German Sociological<br />
Society and the Verein für Sozialpolitik. At this point, however, his insistence<br />
on scientific standards will be pursued. Bruun pertinently notes that<br />
the separating of value judgements from scientific analysis has the corollary
104 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
that greater emphasis is placed on the objectivity of knowledge – the title of<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s essay. 68<br />
The challenge<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> was facing a major challenge. He insisted on scientific validity in the<br />
sense that the truth of empirical facts in the social and cultural world can<br />
be established and that truth will be universally valid. He is not able to fall<br />
back on a ‘correspondence’ account of empirical truth, that facts ‘speak for<br />
themselves’ – ‘naïve self deception’ (EW, p. 381). Rickert had put this issue<br />
beyond contention as, in the infinite nature of the world, there are a<br />
number of facts that can be presented, and the procedure becomes one of<br />
selection of facts and the aspectual character of what we know. There is no<br />
‘real’ underlying structure to the world whose nature is presented to the<br />
scientist through unambiguously true facts. <strong>Weber</strong> also follows Rickert on<br />
the conceptual dualism that an ontological gulf separates the mind of the<br />
observer from reality itself (‘Wirklichkeit’). If anything, <strong>Weber</strong> stresses this<br />
gulf even more than Rickert. <strong>Weber</strong> takes the reality ‘out there’ to be an irrational<br />
chaos, and holds that the role of the social and cultural scientist is<br />
to impose some kind of ordering. 69 <strong>Weber</strong> also assumes that people make<br />
evaluations and hold to deeply held beliefs and convictions. These, however,<br />
need not coexist in some kind of order, in the way in which Rickert sought<br />
to structure values. Heterogeneity of values is the assumption that <strong>Weber</strong><br />
makes, what he would later call the polytheism of beliefs. 70 <strong>Weber</strong> belongs to<br />
the philosophical tradition that the human, social being is a feeling, wishing<br />
and evaluating entity. 71 In his refusal of reductionism, and this is how he uses<br />
the term ‘relativism’, <strong>Weber</strong> continually insists that the acting human being<br />
– what Spinoza termed the ‘conative’ part of being – cannot be explained<br />
away as determined by forces of biology, evolution or materialism.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> cannot, therefore, follow the full Rickertian programme of securing<br />
some kind of ordering among scientists and citizens, which then confers<br />
some kind of validity upon the process of selection. <strong>Weber</strong>’s position – and<br />
solution – is unique to him, and he carries a fairly minimal amount of baggage<br />
as measured in presuppositions or ‘a priori’ assumptions. The ‘Objectivity’<br />
essay marks the coming of age of twentieth-century social science<br />
and the removal of the comforts of positivism, naïve empiricism and the<br />
transcendentalism of ideas and values.<br />
The only existing English translation (until Keith Tribe’s translation in<br />
2004 72 ) rendered the title, ‘ “Objectivity” of Social Science and Social Policy’.<br />
Edward Shils, its co-editor and co-translator, was a forceful advocate not<br />
only for social science, in post-1945 North America and Great Britain, but<br />
for a <strong>Weber</strong>ian conception of it. In his Introduction, he speaks of a marriage<br />
of policy and science and, to a certain extent, he forces the linkage of these<br />
two – and this appears in the English title. The German runs, ‘Die “Objektivität”<br />
Sozialwissenschaftlicher und Sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis’: ‘The “Ob-
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 105<br />
jectivity” of Social Scientific and Social Political Knowledge’. <strong>Weber</strong>’s intent<br />
is to separate policy from science and to downplay the claims of science.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does not use the term ‘science’ (‘Wissenschaft’) in the title, he uses<br />
‘knowledge’ (‘Erkenntnis’) and, whether science or knowledge, the word is<br />
dropped entirely in the Shils and Finch edition. 73 ‘Erkenntnis’ has the sense<br />
of the getting of knowledge, and its English equivalents from a standard<br />
dictionary read: ‘realization’, ‘recognition’, knowledge’ and (in philosophy)<br />
‘cognition’. ‘Science’, in contrast, has a spurious finality.<br />
It is in the second part of the essay that <strong>Weber</strong> gives his solution. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
defines the object of study as ‘socioeconomic’ in character. In meeting their<br />
economic needs, people engage in ‘careful forethought, effort, a struggle with<br />
nature, and the need to work in association with people’. These phenomena<br />
have no inherent objectivity. Rather, study ‘is determined by the direction<br />
of our cognitive interest, arising out of the specific cultural meaning that<br />
we attribute to the individual process in question’. Where a specific event<br />
or process has such a meaning, a social scientific problem is found. This<br />
problem and its circumstances then becomes a task for a discipline that seeks<br />
to clarify the problem and its ‘underlying circumstances’ (EW, p. 368).<br />
Because the essay is directed towards how people meet their external<br />
physical needs, i.e. economics in its widest sense, <strong>Weber</strong> places stress on<br />
economic motives but also their interaction with cultural life more generally.<br />
In this more general field, a topic only becomes an object of study when it<br />
becomes ‘problematic’, and what the Archiv considers to be problematic is<br />
‘the constellation of interests and conflicts of interest arising out of the leading<br />
role played by capital in search of investment opportunities in modern<br />
developed economies (“moderne Kulturländer”), their present significance<br />
and their historical formation’. This leads to a subset of problems, such as<br />
the labour question or tariff question, that are ‘formed by the particular<br />
nature of the economic foundations of our culture, and hence specifically<br />
modern cultural problems’ (EW, p. 371).<br />
The creation of an object of study, therefore, is not the free play of academic<br />
discourse but something far more ‘hard-nosed’. <strong>Weber</strong> was slightly<br />
premature in his diagnosis of the carving up of the world into investment<br />
opportunities (although not in its colonial phase), whereas today this is<br />
happening with a frightening intensity and speed. Today’s satisfaction of<br />
material, and ideal, needs generates enormous problems and, for <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
inevitable conflicts – now, for example, the desire for motor cars and a<br />
clean environment, or the interests of the developed world and those of<br />
the developing world. The Archiv’s general problematic has become even<br />
more pressing and urgent. Socioeconomic life generates issues which then<br />
become objects of disciplined methods and study. ‘Scientific domains,’ says<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, ‘are constituted not by the “objective” (sachlich) relation of “things”,<br />
but by the relationship of problems in thought: a new “science” emerges<br />
wherever new methods are applied to a new problem and, in this way, truths<br />
discovered which disclose significant and new perspectives.’ So, for example,
106 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
climate warming ‘objectively’ had been occurring throughout the twentieth<br />
century. It was only when it was defined as a problem in the 1970s–80s that<br />
the swathe of environmental subdisciplines were created.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is scathing about the scientific priority that investigators allocate<br />
to their subject in the name of ‘objectivism’. He has in his sights the (Marxist)<br />
materialist interpretation of history where everything is reducible to the<br />
circumstances of economic motives and interests; likewise, theories of race<br />
rooted in the objectivism of biology. What is required in their place is ‘the<br />
enlargement of the possibility of certain imputation of individual concrete<br />
cultural events occurring in historical reality to concrete, historically given<br />
causes through the acquisition of exact observational material furnished by<br />
specific perspectives’ (EW, p. 372). Racial biology – ‘a product of the modern<br />
rage for founding new disciplines’ – fails as a science because it misplaces<br />
the role of science, which is exact method and not ‘objective realities’. The<br />
modern rage for sociobiology on genomic principles would equally have<br />
incurred <strong>Weber</strong>’s ire.<br />
There is no absolutely ‘objective’ scientific analysis of cultural life<br />
. . . there is no ‘objective’ analysis of ‘social phenomena’ independent of<br />
special and ‘one-sided’ perspectives, on the basis of which such phenomena<br />
can be . . . selected as an object of research, analysed and systematically<br />
represented. The reason for this arises from the specificity of the<br />
cognitive aim of social scientific work which seeks to move beyond a<br />
purely formal consideration of legal or conventional norms governing<br />
social association.<br />
(EW, p. 374)<br />
This passage points both towards Rickert’s principle of selection and<br />
against any formalism of pre-existing norms, of which the study of law, or<br />
of theology, would be examples. ‘The social science that we wish to pursue<br />
is a science of reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft). Our aim is an understanding<br />
of the uniqueness of the lived reality within which we are placed . . . to<br />
understand the context and cultural significance of individual phenomena<br />
in this lived reality – and, on the other hand, the reasons for their being<br />
historically so and not otherwise’ (EW, p. 374). <strong>Weber</strong> squarely places the<br />
enterprise as a science of lived experience, of life, but the epistemological<br />
route for apprehending reality follows Rickert.<br />
All cognitive knowledge of infinite reality by the finite human mind thus<br />
rests upon the implicit presupposition that at any one time only a finite<br />
part of this reality can be subjected to scientific scrutiny, that only this<br />
part is ‘material’ in the sense of ‘worth knowing’.<br />
(EW, p. 374)<br />
This is close to Rickert’s distinction between the real and the non-real. For
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 107<br />
Rickert, what is worth knowing is valid but not real, but through the process<br />
of selection of infinite reality, it attaches to a segment of material reality.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> draws the same sort of contrast as Windelband and others between<br />
a science framed in laws and a science that seeks out the individuality of<br />
phenomena. Astronomy conforms to the former and is quantitative, whereas<br />
social science is concerned with the qualitative. In dealing with mental processes<br />
(‘geistiger Vorgänge’), understanding (‘Verstehen’) is gained through<br />
re-experiencing (‘nacherlebend’) (EW, pp. 375 and 386). This is a sentence<br />
straight out of Dilthey, who put forward a method of empathy and re-experiencing<br />
as a way of connecting the investigator to the expressive human<br />
subject. In the social sciences, although there might be regularities falling<br />
short of laws, these would not constitute, or point to, a topic worth studying.<br />
Instead, it is the investigators’ own evaluation of what is of interest that<br />
confers cultural significance upon reality.<br />
The significance inherent in the formation of a cultural phenomenon<br />
and the bias for this significance cannot be taken, founded and rendered<br />
intelligible from a system of law-like concepts, no matter how complete,<br />
for the significance of cultural phenomena implies a relationship to evaluative<br />
ideas (Wertideen). The concept of culture is an evaluative concept.<br />
Empirical reality is for us ‘cultural’ in the sense, and to the extent that,<br />
it is related to evaluative ideas; it comprises those elements of reality<br />
rendered meaningful by this relationship, no more.<br />
(EW, p. 377)<br />
It takes a little concentration at this difficult juncture of the ‘Objectivity’<br />
essay to grasp that <strong>Weber</strong> is using terms very close to Rickert’s terminology,<br />
but is not following in his exact footsteps. Key to Rickert’s argument was<br />
the term ‘Kulturwerthe’ but, with <strong>Weber</strong>, this has become ‘Wertideen’. Rickert’s<br />
cultural values structure and impose validity on ‘Wirklichkeit’. <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
‘Wertideen’ cannot perform this task, because <strong>Weber</strong> has already admitted<br />
to the heterogeneity of values. Instead, they become for him the pretext for<br />
selection in terms of meaning from the complexity of ‘Wirklichkeit’.<br />
Of course, this is not made any easier to follow by the slightly contrived<br />
nature of Rickert’s own argumentation. The issue of concern here is the<br />
Hume/Kant one of epistemological dualism. Dilthey had one solution, Rickert<br />
another. What was <strong>Weber</strong>’s? This matters because on it hangs <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
methodological treatment of the meaningful. <strong>Weber</strong> got more from the<br />
analysis of the meaning and significance of culture than just about any other<br />
practitioner in the social, cultural and historical sciences. <strong>Weber</strong> produces<br />
colour where other social scientists manage tones of grey. If the social sciences<br />
were to deal with its subject matter, as defined through the process of<br />
selection as being of evaluative worth – and hence concerned with a meaningful<br />
segment or aspect of culture – what makes this ‘objective’, even within<br />
scare quotes?
108 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
Reading this section of his essay, a clear answer is not to be had – if one<br />
is looking for a philosophical answer to epistemological dualism. <strong>Weber</strong> appears<br />
to be saying that we throw or project our own ideas of value against a<br />
brute complex reality and so illuminate it, in some aspect, as meaningful. But<br />
the underpinning operation is left unresolved, neither Rickert’s validity of<br />
cultural values nor Dilthey’s categories of life. <strong>Weber</strong> presses on to provide<br />
other forms of assurance in the form of research techniques that are more<br />
clearly in line with how objectivity is secured in current research practice.<br />
One conclusion, however, is that <strong>Weber</strong> is giving himself covert Nietzschean<br />
licence. To make a value relation and confer value is tacitly to re-evaluate;<br />
not in Nietzsche’s own ‘über’ sense of the aesthetic or the will to power, that<br />
is of imposing oneself – as a higher being – on brute reality, but nonetheless<br />
having the freedom to decide oneself what is of cultural value and thereby<br />
becoming an object of study. This gives <strong>Weber</strong> room for his own undoubted<br />
creativity and also contributes to his own powers of attraction to his audience.<br />
Validity questions pertained to causation, not meaning and values. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
follows the Rickertian line that causal explanation occurs only when<br />
attached to the individual event or fact. Concepts of increasing generality, as<br />
in physical laws or, indeed, in the mass regularities of exchange behaviour,<br />
contain less explanatory power the further removed they are from concrete<br />
individual events. ‘The more general, that is the more abstract, that the<br />
laws are, the less work they do for the requirements of causal imputation<br />
of individual phenomena, and hence indirectly for the understanding of the<br />
significance of cultural processes’ (EW, p. 379).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> applies the argument that only historical causation is a real explanation.<br />
He uses the example of exchange behaviour. ‘The cultural significance<br />
such as exchange in a money economy lies in the fact that it appears<br />
in the form of a mass phenomenon, which is a fundamental component in<br />
modern cultural life. But if we are to understand the cultural significance of<br />
the historical fact that it plays in this role, then its historical emergence has<br />
to be causally explained’ (EW, pp. 377–8). The money economy, like modern<br />
capitalism, is a system that has specific causal/historical origins – the invention<br />
of money, or the rise of the Puritan middle class, for example. However,<br />
like the orbit of a comet in the natural sciences, price and exchange<br />
behaviour will take on regularities that can be explained by theories such<br />
as the quantity theory of money or market behaviour. But the actual position<br />
of a comet or the actual price of a commodity is the real that is caused<br />
by the antecedent events. In a diachronic analysis, history matters, because<br />
certain historic events have long-term repercussions. In synchronic analysis,<br />
the regularities occurring at a point in time provide the social scientist with<br />
powerful explanatory theories. <strong>Weber</strong>’s answer to these arguments would be<br />
that all reality is diachronic – every event and every fact has a history – and<br />
this is the only ‘real’ there can be, and hence is the site of causal explanation.<br />
If one wishes to choose to divide time and space up into the diachronic and
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 109<br />
synchronic, the social scientist can do this, but these divides would be purely<br />
concepts not descriptions of an indivisibly complex reality.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s radical insistence on the unknowability of the infinitely complex<br />
real forms the basis of his discussion of where he wishes to place the emphasis<br />
of ‘objectivity’ – on causal adequacy and ideal types. Before turning<br />
to this, it is worth reflecting on <strong>Weber</strong>’s style or way of arguing. He refers<br />
in passing to logical developments in the theory of knowledge. But he fails<br />
to provide bibliographic references, and this applies to both Rickert and<br />
Dilthey. His transposition of Rickert’s argument on values to causality and<br />
meaning is hard to discern. He has denied Dilthey in the name of Rickert,<br />
and he has replaced Rickert’s strict treatment of values by inserting in their<br />
place the Diltheyan emphasis on meanings. He hopes to secure his position<br />
with the empirical testing procedures of causation of concrete events.<br />
Reasons and causes of action<br />
In the continuous war of a positivistic versus an interpretivist version of social<br />
science, one of its front lines has been the dispute about whether human<br />
behaviour is ‘caused’ by factors external to the individual or whether a person<br />
is a participating and, in principle, freely deciding member of a culture<br />
and society. It is a debate that sets in, on one side, with scientific earnestness<br />
with Comte, and continues through Durkheim, behaviourism and current<br />
versions of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. And those positivistic<br />
claims are resisted by the humanities, by the ‘scientific’ humanities (Dilthey)<br />
and the long interpretivist tradition of the twentieth century that originates<br />
in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz. The methodology<br />
wars of the twentieth century have disputed every term in the lexicon<br />
of social research. Precise definition of terms, their operationalization, hypothesis<br />
forming, empirical proof, causal explanation belong to positivism.<br />
The understanding and elucidation of meanings, how they are shared and<br />
how they affect individuals and groups belong to the interpretivist account.<br />
It is one of the heavy burdens of postgraduate training in social research<br />
methods that some part of this conflict has to be imbibed (even though the<br />
slightly more farcical situation seems to have been reached where these debates<br />
now come down to a choice between ‘hard’ quantitative methods versus<br />
‘soft’ qualitative methods; a choice that makes risible any credible claim<br />
to research design).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> simply walks across this line, seemingly unaware of the sound of<br />
gunfire. As the champion of meaning, he moves straight to the assertion that<br />
individual actions are ‘caused’. Yet the language of causation belongs to the<br />
natural sciences and the nomological. If we follow Martin Hollis’ highly<br />
commended essay ‘Models of Man’, in which the two opposing schools are<br />
schematically represented as ‘autonomous man’ (the interpretivist account)<br />
and ‘plastic man’ (the positivistic account), some care is exercised by Hollis<br />
in his own use of terminology. In the former account, individuals have
110 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
‘reasons’ for acting; in the latter, they are have ‘causes’ for action. 74 This,<br />
incidentally, is not a debate about free will versus determinism. Durkheim<br />
and <strong>Weber</strong> both agreed that people are placed in sociological situations that<br />
are beyond their making, but within which they can exercise free will. 75 And<br />
Marx said a similar thing in his theses on Feuerbach. But each of these social<br />
theorists operates with different and opposed methodologies of causation.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is impervious to this methodological divide. For him, even if there<br />
were nomological regularities in social science, these would not explain the<br />
actions of individuals. This he asserts on the grounds of the non-real status<br />
of concepts. Causal forces, like Durkheim’s suicidogenic currents, have no<br />
ontological validity for <strong>Weber</strong>. It is, however, permissible to attribute to<br />
individuals the reasons/causes for their observed behaviour. In this way, a<br />
reason for acting becomes an imputed cause for <strong>Weber</strong>. Causality becomes a<br />
retrospective operation and can never be a predictive science. In his causative<br />
model, the situation offers various ‘objective possibilities’; sociologically,<br />
we do not live in a realm of freedom but of constrained choices. Causal<br />
explanation operates through imputing or attributing causes to actions. In<br />
an English coroner’s court, the ‘objective possibility’ facing an inquest is the<br />
person was murdered or died of natural causes or took their own life. In<br />
reaching a verdict, the coroner imputes a possible cause. The coroner may<br />
well turn out to be wrong in his or her attribution, but this highlights the<br />
nature of probability in sociological judgements. Hence, the judgement from<br />
a social scientific perspective, which would, optimally, operate to higher<br />
levels of evidence and investigation than an average coroner’s court, is that<br />
someone probably took their own life. <strong>Weber</strong> expects the social scientist to<br />
imagine the range of possible causes of an event on the basis of his or her<br />
experience of life and accumulated academic knowledge. These form the<br />
basis of objective possibility, a term not dissimilar to counterfactual possibility,<br />
i.e. the course of action could have been ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’ but, on the basis of<br />
the evidence, a cause is attributed to an outcome. 76 ‘Concepts of this sort are<br />
constructs in whose terms we formulate relationships through the employment<br />
of the category of objective possibility; and these constructs are judged<br />
with respect to their adequacy by an imagination oriented to, and guided by,<br />
reality’ (EW, p. 390). 77<br />
After some few pages in which <strong>Weber</strong> berates the claims of abstract theory<br />
as being able to deduce causal explanation of ‘real’ events and actions (and<br />
a reflection of the eruptive debates in German-speaking national-economy),<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> outlines the ideal type. <strong>Weber</strong> has, so to speak, prepared the epistemological<br />
ground for this and, conversely, it is not advisable for a student to<br />
look this term up in the index and expect to comprehend what is at stake!<br />
It is in the nature of social science that the researcher has to be content with<br />
choosing an aspect of reality as worthy of study and, in this sense, all theory<br />
is one-sided; this would apply to Marxism as much as to marginalism, for<br />
neither can validly claim to be a comprehensive account of reality. Marginalism<br />
as much as Marxism is a theoretical or accentuated account of reality.<br />
In this sense, both are conceptually utopian – they do not exist in reality
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 111<br />
and neither can they be produced out of history. We can, says <strong>Weber</strong>, have<br />
an ideal grasp of processes of markets, commodities, exchange, competition<br />
and rational action.<br />
This construction brings together certain relationships and events of historical<br />
life into an internally coherent conceptual cosmos. This construction<br />
has the substantive idea of a utopia arrived at by the conceptual<br />
accentuation of particular elements of reality. Its sole relation to the empirically<br />
given facts of life is where relationships there represented abstractly,<br />
i.e. events related to the ‘market’, can be identified or supposed<br />
as existing in reality; and we are therefore able to make the characteristic<br />
features of this relationship pragmatically lucid and understandable in<br />
terms of an ideal type. This procedure can be of value, even indispensable,<br />
heuristically as well as in exposition. The concept of the ideal type<br />
can direct judgement in matters of imputation; it is not a ‘hypothesis’,<br />
but seeks to guide the formation of hypotheses. It is not a representation<br />
of the real, but seeks to provide representation with unambiguous means<br />
of expression.<br />
(EW, p. 387)<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> himself notes the ambiguity of the term ‘ideal’ in ideal types. Ideal<br />
types can be constructed just as much from saintliness as from prostitution.<br />
Perhaps it would have been better for <strong>Weber</strong> to call them heuristic types, an<br />
adjective he uses on a number of occasions. Ideal types seek to accentuate<br />
meaning, but note that the word hermeneutic never crosses <strong>Weber</strong>’s lips. We<br />
can only guess that hermeneutics belongs to a sort of preliminary enterprise,<br />
and belongs to the researcher’s accumulated understanding, knowledge and<br />
experience of the world. An ideal type is a sharp conceptual instrument<br />
for the purpose of elucidation. Hermeneutics belongs to the exegesis and<br />
explication of the text and other cultural artefacts. Heuristics is a conceptual<br />
contrivance for shaping and dissecting cultural meanings, while hermeneutics<br />
has to attend to the facticity of the artefact. While I have drawn this<br />
distinction, so to speak on behalf of <strong>Weber</strong>, I would not myself like to defend<br />
the distinction as hard and fast, for both would seem to involve parallel, if<br />
not overlapping, conceptual operations. <strong>Weber</strong> has his gaze firmly set on<br />
causal explanation as the standard of objectivity and of science. But to do<br />
this, he has to interpose hypothesis construction between ideal types and<br />
causal explanation. Were the Herrnhuter a sect? In ideal–typical terms, this<br />
cannot be answered but, if we hypothesize certain characteristics, indicative<br />
of and drawn from the ideal type of sect, the empirical facts of Herrnhuter<br />
could be said to meet those characteristics. <strong>Weber</strong> says very little on the<br />
subject of hypothesis formation, although he does say that the overall aim<br />
is to compare (EW, p. 396) or even confront (EW, p. 402) empirical reality<br />
with ideal type. This is not terribly satisfactory, and modern methodology<br />
in social research has not fared terribly well either in working out the relation<br />
between concepts of meaning and the investigation of empirical reality
112 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
– as debates over ‘grounded theory’ and ‘sensitizing concepts’ have shown. 78<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is aware that problems remain to be elucidated on the relation of ideal<br />
types to other seemingly similar concepts such as ideals in life, like Christian<br />
ethics, collective concepts, normative concepts of value as in economic<br />
theory or normative concepts of the state. But, he says, ‘we must simply<br />
abandon any ambition of seriously examining in any greater depth practical<br />
methodological questions that are here only briefly exposed . . .’ (EW,<br />
p. 397). One is tempted to observe that methodological questions can only<br />
be practical and that <strong>Weber</strong> remains delinquent on how to investigate how<br />
values are empirically attached in the world.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does offer a very brief discussion of the role of ideas in history, a<br />
topic which unsurprisingly was going to occupy more of his attention in the<br />
light of the publication of PESC: ‘the causal relationship between a historically<br />
existing idea that rules men, and the components of historical reality<br />
from which its corresponding ideal type can be abstracted, can be formed in<br />
quite various ways’ (EW, p. 391). <strong>Weber</strong>, needless to say, stresses the procedure<br />
of abstracting the ideal type of ideas from their complex manifestations<br />
in history. ‘. . . the “ideas” that govern the people of a given epoch . . . can<br />
(where a degree of complexity of thought construct is involved) only be<br />
grasped with any kind of conceptual clarity in the form of an ideal type, since<br />
this idea empirically inhabits the heads of an indeterminate and constantly<br />
changing number of individuals . . .’ (EW, pp. 391–2). And, ‘the empiricohistorical<br />
process in the heads of human beings has to be understood as a<br />
psychological process . . .’. ‘Ideas are historically effective, and they live on<br />
in the minds of men long after the fundamental “idea” has . . . died out . . .’<br />
(EW, p. 392). This is unambiguous. Ideas are causally effective, existing as a<br />
psychological reality in the minds of men and causing them to act in certain<br />
ways.<br />
The progress of knowledge<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> has a number of scattered remarks about how knowledge advances.<br />
This has become one of the major themes of the philosophy of science, especially<br />
in the second half of the twentieth century. Here, as in much else,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> anticipates future developments. When his remarks are brought together,<br />
a motif can be discerned, which I think comes to be a characterizing<br />
feature of <strong>Weber</strong>’s own creation of social scientific knowledge.<br />
This can be envisaged, mentally rather than diagrammatically, as a background<br />
reality of continuously flowing space and time coordinates. The<br />
investigator occupies a ‘pod’ in this reality that is filled with his or her experience<br />
and knowledge. Around this is a larger pod of the scientific or<br />
disciplinary knowledge. The investigator shines a torch (powered by evaluative<br />
ideas) on to the otherwise impenetrable complexity of reality. This<br />
cognitively defines and fixes an aspect of reality. This is then subjected to<br />
the dual operation of ideal type and causal analysis. The result could be<br />
prosaic or highly creative. If the latter, then it feeds back with considerable
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 113<br />
impact into the scientific/disciplinary pod and as a cultural product to the<br />
researcher himself. The process could then repeat, for example as critique<br />
and anti-critique, as it did in the case of PESC itself. The epistemology of this<br />
has been outlined above. But the temporality of knowledge is worth noting.<br />
Knowledge is never secured to time and place and, in this sense, it cannot<br />
be ‘objectively’ banked. The researcher lives and works in the continuous<br />
flow of time, and this temporality characterizes both what counts as scientifically<br />
interesting and the results of scientific investigation in the cultural and<br />
historical fields.<br />
This would seem to be the ‘model’, although <strong>Weber</strong> puts it far more eloquently.<br />
For the normal researcher, evaluative ideals lead to selection and the<br />
attribution of meaning, so ‘the direction of his personal belief, the refraction<br />
of his values in the prism of his mind, gives direction to his work’. ‘And the<br />
values to which the scientific genius relates the object of his inquiry may determine,<br />
i.e. decide the “conception” of a whole epoch, not only concerning<br />
what is regarded as “valuable” but also concerning what is regarded as significant<br />
or insignificant, “important” or “unimportant” in the phenomena’<br />
(EW, p. 381). Essentially, this what I have argued in Chapter 3 with regard to<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own scientific genius and achievement with PESC.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> goes on to argue that a closed system of knowledge cannot be<br />
achieved. ‘The stream of infinite events flows constantly towards eternity.<br />
The cultural problems that sway humankind are constantly renewed and<br />
reformulated . . .’. ‘The points of departure for the cultural sciences remain<br />
mutable throughout an endless future, so long as a Chinese ossification of<br />
intellectual life does not render mankind incapable of posing new questions<br />
to eternal, inexhaustible life’ (EW, p. 383). Specialization can lead to the<br />
consolidation of knowledge. ‘And that is a good thing. But at some point<br />
the atmosphere alters: the significance of viewpoints used unreflectively<br />
becomes uncertain, the path becomes lost in twilight. The light cast by the<br />
great cultural problems has moved onward. Then even science prepares to<br />
shift its ground and change its conceptual apparatus so that it might regard<br />
the stream of events from the heights of reflective thought’ (EW, p. 403).<br />
The body of knowledge and procedures known collectively as ‘science’<br />
is itself a floating temporal object in the flow of time. Science, as <strong>Weber</strong><br />
was later vigorously to assert, only arose in the Occident and was particular<br />
in its maturing to a period and place. ‘For scientific truth is only valid for<br />
those who seek truth’ (EW, p. 383). The resurgence of anti-modernity at the<br />
beginning of the twenty-first century unfortunately gives this insight added<br />
weight. Science tout court is an evaluative idea that confers a particular sort<br />
of significance upon reality – it brings, to quote <strong>Weber</strong>, ‘order out of chaos’,<br />
and without the evaluative idea, no science.<br />
Conclusions<br />
A great many ideas and projects in the philosophy and methodology of the<br />
social sciences can be traced back, or at least imputed, to this transformative
114 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
essay that so confounds the claims of scienticism, empiricism, reductionism,<br />
idealism and evolutionism. The traceable ideas include Popper’s conjectures<br />
and refutations as the solution to Humean scepticism, Kuhn’s idea of paradigm<br />
shifts as an account of ‘progress’ in science and Rorty’s anti-foundationalism<br />
and the wider field of pragmatism, to name the most prominent.<br />
Equally, the essay offers little support to an interpretative project concerned<br />
with meanings per se and understanding (without causal explanation).<br />
The consolidation of this split between positivistic explanation and<br />
interpretative understanding postdates <strong>Weber</strong>, so was obviously no concern<br />
of his. The split, as it predated him, no doubt he reckoned to have handled<br />
authoritatively, indeed muscularly. But some confusion and difficulty<br />
remains and, reading the essay, it is a reasonable inference to say that <strong>Weber</strong><br />
was looking for various solutions in the course of writing the essay itself.<br />
In particular, how is meaning and its interpretation assessed prior to being<br />
incorporated into a cultural science?<br />
At the end of the essay, <strong>Weber</strong> provides a sort of summary, more in the<br />
way of looking back and assessing the long route he has taken.<br />
We have come to the end of this discussion, the only purpose of which<br />
has been to trace the fine line that separates science and belief, and<br />
makes clear the meaning of the search for socio-economic knowledge.<br />
The objective validity of experiential knowledge rests, solely rests, upon<br />
the fact that given reality is ordered by categories which are in a specific<br />
sense subjective: they represent the presupposition of our knowledge<br />
and are based on the presupposition of the value of those truths which<br />
experiential knowledge alone is able to give us.<br />
(EW, p. 402)<br />
This part is Diltheyan. Scientific questions originate in life, but they cannot<br />
be validated by the empirical material.<br />
The ‘objectivity’ of social scientific knowledge depends rather on the<br />
fact that the empirical given is always related to those evaluative ideas<br />
which alone give it cognitive value, and the significance of the empirically<br />
given is in turn derived from these evaluative ideas. But this empirical<br />
given can never become the pedestal upon which is based an empirically<br />
impossible proof of its validity.<br />
(EW, p. 403)<br />
Objectivity is constituted by something outside the empirical – this part<br />
is an adaptation of Rickert on empirical validity. Our highest and ultimate<br />
beliefs, in which, says <strong>Weber</strong>, we ‘anchor our being’, do not exclude the notion<br />
that we can always change our scientific viewpoint. The transitivity of<br />
viewpoints and the corresponding transitivity of reality is <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘base-line’
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ 115<br />
(or anti-foundationalist) position, and it underwrites and promotes progress<br />
– if one chooses to believe in science.<br />
life, in its irrational reality and its store of possible significances is inexhaustible,<br />
the concrete formation of value relations remains therefore<br />
fluid, subject to change in the distant future of human culture. The light<br />
given off by these highest evaluative ideas falls upon an ever-changing<br />
finite part of a monstrously chaotic stream of events that flow through<br />
time.<br />
(EW, p. 403)
5 The reluctant sociologist<br />
From the Protestant ethic to the<br />
Grundriss der Sozialökonomik<br />
This chapter, and the following, covers an extensive segment of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
intellectual life (1905–14), in which he made a number of intensive commitments<br />
to a variety of projects. The chapter will register the various phases of<br />
this period in terms of the goals and markers <strong>Weber</strong> had set down in PESC<br />
and the essay on ‘Objectivity’. The phase up until around 1909 is marked by<br />
unsuccessful attempts to answer his critics. <strong>Weber</strong>’s difficulties stem from the<br />
difficulty of solving the highly problematic issue of multiple causation. The<br />
second phase (1910–14) is a creative convulsion taking his work way beyond<br />
the Protestant ethic studies. There are a number of trajectories which, I shall<br />
argue, we should not try to arrange into a neat order. One strong dynamic<br />
of the second phase, however, is developmental history on a comparative<br />
basis bringing with it a further, but not final, elaboration of methodology. It<br />
is here that <strong>Weber</strong> has to construct a sociology of his own making and for<br />
his own needs.<br />
The Protestant ethic thesis is not an easy matter to grasp and the grounds<br />
for mistaking what kind of thesis it was are not minor. As has been argued,<br />
it offered an explanation as a contribution to a wider debate, which was not<br />
in itself visible from the text of PESC. It could be mistaken in the appearance<br />
of its arguments as a narrative history, which was not its intention. It<br />
presented itself as an ideal type of a historical individual, a self-presentation<br />
that has continually failed to secure widespread comprehension and acceptance.<br />
It was an exemplification of the ambitions laid out in the ‘Geleitwort’<br />
of the ‘Objectivity’ essay and explicated as a new methodological way of<br />
doing cultural science in that essay. But the connection – between PESC<br />
and ‘Objectivity’ – was not a programmatic formulation. Finally, through its<br />
rhetorical verve, PESC dazzled its critics, leading to them to praise or blame<br />
features that were not necessarily core to the thesis.<br />
PESC suffers an inconsistency between the boldness and ambitions of the<br />
thesis, on the one hand, and the caveats and qualifications that are introduced,<br />
on the other. In addition, <strong>Weber</strong> announces at the beginning that his main<br />
concept, the spirit of capitalism, cannot receive a final definition until the<br />
end of the essay (PESC, p. 47). But at the end, he says that systematic work
The reluctant sociologist 117<br />
in a worldly calling was the most powerful factor contributing to ‘that attitude<br />
toward life which we have here called the spirit of capitalism’ (PESC,<br />
p. 172). At this point, the spirit of capitalism still awaits its definition. And<br />
right at the end, he writes that ‘one of the fundamental elements’ of the spirit<br />
of capitalism was ‘rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling’ (PESC,<br />
p. 180). From these statements, one concludes either that, in the end, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
failed to provide a definition, or that what definition he did provide seems<br />
in part to include the causal factor (religious calling) that is meant to explain<br />
the spirit of capitalism. The latter option comes close to being an identity<br />
and not a causal relationship. This is a very large weakness to expose to your<br />
critics. The thesis can, however, be saved because it is not hard to assemble<br />
from <strong>Weber</strong>’s incisive argumentation the characteristics of the spirit of modern<br />
capitalism, i.e. systematic and rational attitude to life and work, unceasing<br />
labour, asceticism of conduct, the concentration on means and technique<br />
over ends. These are the ingrained attitudes of those who work and live<br />
in the modern capitalist economy and culture. <strong>Weber</strong> offers up Benjamin<br />
Franklin in his systematic and rational search for profit as an illustration of<br />
the spirit of capitalism (PESC, p. 64). But much ink and controversy would<br />
have been spared if a complete definition of this concept had been supplied<br />
– preferably at the outset where the reader would expect it.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> writes that his study ‘may thus perhaps in a modest way form a<br />
contribution to the understanding of the manner in which ideas become effective<br />
in history’. Hartmut Lehmann points out that <strong>Weber</strong> insistently refers<br />
to his ‘provisional remarks’, ‘provisional illustration’ of the spirit of capitalism<br />
and ‘provisional’ definition of traditionalism. 1 To this he adds another<br />
caveat that he did not subscribe to the ‘foolish and doctrinaire thesis’ that<br />
capitalism as an economic system is a creation of the Reformation (PESC,<br />
pp. 90–1). The second statement certainly qualifies the scope of the thesis.<br />
The thesis is not an idealist theory of history. What it seeks to do is ‘ascertain<br />
whether and to what extent religious forces have taken part in the qualitative<br />
and the quantitative expansion of that spirit over the world’. This reads like<br />
a caveat. Just like the ‘modest way’ the study would be a ‘contribution’, but<br />
equally they can be read in their own terms as very strong propositions. Was<br />
PESC just another bit adding its own causal factor in the edifice of European<br />
historiography, or was it boldly reformulating the hitherto hidden realm of<br />
effective ideas in history? If <strong>Weber</strong> is arguing for the interaction of material<br />
forces and effective ideas in history, as he undoubtedly is, can we formulate<br />
the (null) hypothesis boldly and sharply in these terms: no Puritanism, no<br />
ascetic practice, no spirit of capitalism, no modern capitalism as we know<br />
it? This formulation of the hypothesis is not without its own problems, but<br />
it does illustrate the ambiguities that come to the surface when critical questions<br />
are asked of the thesis. I will in due course return to the null hypothesis<br />
(no Puritanism . . . no modern capitalism) in a discussion of what I term the<br />
singularity argument. Against the bold hypothesis, and when read in the<br />
light of the essay on ‘Objectivity’, PESC is slight in its intentions. <strong>Weber</strong>
118 The reluctant sociologist<br />
found Puritanism to be a subject of value to be studied, whereas before it had<br />
been neglected; he isolated an aspect he found significant and offered it as a<br />
contribution to the development of modern capitalism. This combination of<br />
methodological slightness and boldness of hypothesis has created confusion<br />
and difficulties in the critical interpretation of the thesis.<br />
In his replies to his critics, <strong>Weber</strong> consistently, and sometimes angrily,<br />
insisted that they had misunderstood what he was saying. In the next section,<br />
I will focus on his inability to provide the ‘killer’ answer to his critics, and<br />
will suggest that this inability is inherent in PESC itself.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> replies<br />
A Dr Karl Fischer, about whom not much is known, posted the first review<br />
in 1907 and in the Archiv. He was the first of many to take the thesis as an<br />
idealist account in place of a materialist one. Because <strong>Weber</strong>, as we know,<br />
devoted some pages in PESC (pp. 90–2) specifically arguing for the combination<br />
and interaction of material and ideal forces, he could rebut this<br />
suggestion. But the amended position – ideas as ‘effective forces in history’<br />
– would still require a more robust methodology than the couple of references<br />
to ideal types.<br />
Fischer raised a valid point about <strong>Weber</strong>’s interpretation of Luther’s<br />
translation of work as ‘Beruf ’ (see pp. 56–7). ‘For how did Luther arrive<br />
at the idea of using Beruf for his translation of the passage in Jesus Sirach?<br />
Presumably, he could not have meant his Bible translation to create a religious<br />
system in which even work in a worldly calling was to have a place.<br />
Rather, he must have thought that by using this common expression, he was<br />
choosing the best, most easily understandable term for ordinary people.’ 2<br />
The point Fischer was making was that economic development had already<br />
preceded the Reformation, and that Luther’s use of terms was a reflection of<br />
existing use of meaning, i.e. ‘Beruf ’ had already taken on the connotations<br />
of calling prior to Luther, therefore he, or the movement of Protestantism<br />
more generally, did not amount to the effective force of an idea in history.<br />
Fischer also raised the question of the psychogenesis of modern capitalism,<br />
referring to Sombart’s moderne Kapitalismus on the origins of acquisitive behaviour<br />
in Europe. Fischer correctly identified the psychological explanation<br />
of motivation as central to the thesis. It is interesting to see that Fischer was<br />
unable to discern the Sombart–<strong>Weber</strong> linkage on psychogenesis, and <strong>Weber</strong><br />
is forced with some asperity to acknowledge his link ‘to my good friend<br />
Sombart’ (PE Debate, p. 32). Fischer drew on the English utilitarian tradition<br />
as formulated by J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer to suggest that, if the<br />
acquisition of money as an end in itself is the thing to be explained, then ‘we<br />
can understand it in terms of the pleasure of the individual in active exertion<br />
of his powers’ (quoted by <strong>Weber</strong>, PE Debate, p. 35). The pleasure of exerting<br />
oneself is a generality that hardly applies to the ‘reigned-in Puritans’. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
reckoned himself to have refuted such simplistic psychological explanation
The reluctant sociologist 119<br />
elsewhere (in his ‘Objectivity’ essay and his articles on Roscher and Knies).<br />
This, though, still leaves the door open to the more complex question of<br />
how historical situations come to determine the psychological outlook and<br />
thinking of social groups.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s response is to accuse Fischer of not providing any evidence for<br />
his argument. ‘Philological findings may obviously correct my conclusions<br />
at any time. However, as the evidence stands, this certainly cannot be done<br />
merely by asserting the opposite’ (PE Debate, p. 32). <strong>Weber</strong> certainly closes<br />
down this avenue of criticism, but it still remains an interesting conjecture<br />
worth exploring in its own right – despite Fischer’s failure to substantiate<br />
it. Meaning could well be given by ordinary (German) language use. David<br />
Chalcraft notes in his introduction to <strong>Weber</strong>’s replies that much of the debate<br />
turns on misunderstandings, and therefore on hermeneutics. <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
notes Chalcraft, finds debates on terminology sterile. ‘Yet, when discussing<br />
the meaning of a Franklin, or a Luther or a Sir William Petty, it is clear that<br />
what is said in particular places and contexts in their texts is at the heart<br />
of the matter.’ Chalcraft concludes that one searches in vain for a consistent<br />
hermeneutics’ in <strong>Weber</strong>’s replies (PE Debate, p. 14). What is consistent<br />
about the replies and PESC is that <strong>Weber</strong> does not enter into the field of<br />
Diltheyan hermeneutics, despite his dependence on such procedures.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s strategy is to focus debate on the role of causation in history, the<br />
groundwork for which he had laid down in the ‘Objectivity’ essay. Fischer<br />
remained unsatisfied with <strong>Weber</strong>’s reply and, in 1908 in the Archiv, he published<br />
a rejoinder, in which he accused <strong>Weber</strong> of being ‘temperamental’ – no<br />
doubt because <strong>Weber</strong>, fairly roughly, accused him of being ignorant of the<br />
historical facts and misunderstanding his approach. Fischer said there was<br />
no doubt that Puritanism strengthened the methodical conduct of life, but<br />
the issue still remained to be debated about ‘the genesis of the spirit of the<br />
methodical conduct of life in this period’ (PE Debate, p. 41). To settle the<br />
genesis question, Fischer said <strong>Weber</strong> would have to eliminate other possible<br />
causes in order to show that only religion remained as the prime determinant<br />
of life conduct. (To an extent, this is how Durkheim proceeds in Suicide,<br />
eliminating possible alternative explanations, leaving his own favoured one<br />
as the sole survivor.) <strong>Weber</strong> resiled, pointing out that the historian could<br />
scarcely be expected to take on ‘the negative burden of proof ’. ‘Normally he<br />
works the other way, investigating the effects of the other causal components<br />
positively [the economic, political components, etc.]. In this way, he will<br />
arrive at an ever more comprehensive (but never entirely self-sufficient) attribution<br />
of causes . . .’ (PE Debate, p. 46).<br />
The issue of causality arose again when Felix Rachfahl, a historian specializing<br />
in German and Dutch history, made a number of objections to the<br />
Protestant ethic thesis, of which he designated Troeltsch as well as <strong>Weber</strong> the<br />
authors. Rachfahl noted that economic development had occurred in France<br />
and the Low Countries prior to Protestantism, and that, in the case of England,<br />
the decisive move in economic development occurred in the eighteenth
120 The reluctant sociologist<br />
century under entirely different religious influences. And in North America,<br />
capitalism did not accelerate until the late eighteenth century and then under<br />
the influence of secular rationalism. Rachfahl contended that a methodical<br />
conduct of life was the result of the development of business as a vocation in<br />
the Renaissance period prior to Protestantism. He also objected to <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
use of an abstracting ideal type, when what was required was country-specific<br />
historical analyses in order to handle the complex factors at work.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s response here, as with Fischer, is to assert the ascendance of the<br />
causal change he had sketched out, i.e. religious vocation → conduct of life<br />
→ spirit of capitalism. He refers his critics back to a key passage, on multiple<br />
causality, in PESC.<br />
In view of the tremendous confusion of reciprocal influences emanating<br />
from the material base, the social and political forms of organization,<br />
and the spiritual content of the cultural epochs of the Reformation, the<br />
only possible way to proceed is to first investigate whether and in what<br />
points particular elective affinities between certain forms of religious<br />
belief and the ethic of the calling can be identified. At the same time, the<br />
manner and general direction in which, as a result of such elective affinities,<br />
the religious movement influenced the development of material<br />
culture will be clarified as far as possible. Only then can the attempt be<br />
made to estimate the degree to which the historical origins of elements<br />
of modern culture should be attributed to those religious motives and to<br />
what extent to others. 3<br />
Fischer’s method of elimination cannot operate because of the confusion<br />
of reciprocal influences. It remains methodologically impractical, even<br />
impossible, to isolate a cause, such as prior economic development, and its<br />
effect upon the conduct of life. <strong>Weber</strong>’s tactic is to assert his historical grasp<br />
of the linkages, and his opponents’ weaknesses in this department. The onus<br />
then rests upon the critics to come up with a better historical account. <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
no more than his critics, has not solved the conundrum of multiple<br />
causality. Having established the positive linkages, he does concede it would<br />
be necessary to go back and investigate a different train of linkages, for example<br />
the economic and material factor operating upon religious influences.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> never denies the converse: that material factors shape religion. It is<br />
just that he reckons he has established the superiority of his explanation over<br />
competing accounts.<br />
Methodologically, what <strong>Weber</strong> proposes is akin to principal components<br />
analysis (or multifactorial analysis). Suppose the thing to be explained is<br />
the incidence of heart disease in a population. In a research design, various<br />
factors are held to account in different measure for its incidence. So smoking<br />
may come top of the list, followed by diet, followed by exercise. Applied to<br />
the Protestant ethic thesis, religious influences take priority over economic,<br />
political and social factors. The technique is to demonstrate that one factor
The reluctant sociologist 121<br />
takes priority over another. The other factors cannot be eliminated; also<br />
because they may be co-relational and co-terminous, the principal factor<br />
cannot even be isolated – it is probable that smoking will co-relate with bad<br />
diet and the two remain inextricable.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, of course, did not have the luxury of thinking in terms of principal<br />
components analysis (which is, in addition, wholly dependent on statistical<br />
inference. Rachfahl did in fact suggest using statistics on economic growth,<br />
and <strong>Weber</strong> rightly points out that motivational influences in the past would<br />
not be susceptible to such analysis; PE Debate, p. 70.) <strong>Weber</strong> was in something<br />
of a quandary on the issue of competing causes, as no answer – then or<br />
now – can put the issue to rest. He makes two further responses. He places a<br />
greater emphasis on causal adequacy. Rachfahl had contested the linkage between<br />
capitalism as an economic system and the ‘spirit of capitalism’. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
replies that particular historical forms of capitalism have to be discussed in<br />
relation to different kinds of spirit, and he makes this point in contradistinction<br />
to talking of capitalism in general across history and place.<br />
A historically given form of ‘capitalism’ can be filled with very different<br />
types of ‘spirit’; this form can, however, and usually will, have different<br />
levels of ‘elective affinities’ to certain historical types of spirit: the ‘spirit’<br />
may be more or less ‘adequate’ to the ‘form’ (or not at all). There can be<br />
no doubt that the degree of this adequacy is not without influence on the<br />
course of historical development, that the ‘form’ and ‘spirit’ (as I said<br />
previously) tend to adapt to each other, and, finally, that where a system<br />
and a ‘spirit’ come up against each other, there ensues a development<br />
of (even inwardly) unbroken unity similar to that which I had began to<br />
analyze. 4<br />
An ‘elective affinity’ was a peculiarly nineteenth-century way of speaking<br />
about chemical bonding. Whereas today, we think in terms of two oxygen<br />
electrons binding together with a hydrogen nucleus (to form water), Goethe,<br />
reflecting his scientific knowledge, spoke of elective affinity (‘Wahlverwandtschaft’);<br />
it was also the title of one of his novels that catalogued friendship<br />
between two people – indeed, in Goethe’s hands, as a new literary genre.<br />
So, individuals are drawn to each other in the strong sense that chemical<br />
elements bond together. <strong>Weber</strong> asserts that this reciprocal bonding lies at the<br />
heart of his research: modern capitalism and the vocationally specific spirit<br />
of capitalism. <strong>Weber</strong> allows the complexity of factors in play that have to be<br />
sifted by the historian, but what he has discovered is an immensely strong<br />
linkage. <strong>Weber</strong>’s usage of ‘causal adequacy’ goes somewhat beyond imputation<br />
here. He is close to saying that this linkage is a real occurrence in history<br />
– a standard of objectivism he has already rejected.<br />
His other reaction is to signal a retreat from the Protestant ethic thesis.<br />
He had intended to expand the scope of his studies. At the end of PESC,<br />
he wrote that ‘it would be further necessary to investigate how Protestant
122 The reluctant sociologist<br />
asceticism was in turn influenced in its development and its character by the<br />
totality of social conditions, especially economic’ (PESC, p. 183). He also<br />
referred to the period prior to the Reformation when the interaction of economic<br />
development and religion would become ‘a further chapter’ (PESC,<br />
p. 284, n. 118). This same note also registers <strong>Weber</strong>’s distaste for writing big<br />
books ‘I have no great inclination . . . to write heavy tomes’. <strong>Weber</strong> intended<br />
in 1907 to make further clarifications of PESC for its publication as ‘a separate<br />
edition’ (PE Debate, p. 34). In 1908, he referred back to his previous<br />
statements in PESC ‘about future investigations for completing, interpreting,<br />
and testing it further’ (PE Debate, p. 45).<br />
During this period, <strong>Weber</strong>’s close colleague at Heidelberg, Ernst Troeltsch,<br />
was also working intensively on Protestantism. He gave a lecture entitled<br />
‘The Significance of Protestantism for the Origins of the Modern World’ at<br />
the Historians’ Conference in 1906. (This was translated into English in<br />
1912 as Protestantism and Progress. 5 ) Hans Kippenberg notes of this lecture<br />
that Troeltsch was elaborating <strong>Weber</strong>’s distinction between the capitalist<br />
system and the spirit of capitalism as it occurred in Holland, England and<br />
America, and that Troeltsch was indicating that, as the historical and theological<br />
expert, this was his field of specialism. Troeltsch was also publishing<br />
a series of articles in the Archiv, covering all aspects of Protestantism and<br />
western Christianity. (These later became the book The Social Teachings of<br />
the Christian Churches.) <strong>Weber</strong> had indicated in 1908 that there was an<br />
unnecessary duplication of work between himself and Troeltsch and, effectively,<br />
he was bowing out to the specialist theologians. 6<br />
But, if we read his second and last reply, in 1910, to Felix Rachfahl’s critique<br />
of PESC, <strong>Weber</strong>’s own stance to further research in this field remains<br />
unclear. He admits that further specialized research is required, and goes<br />
on: ‘However necessary (indeed substantially more necessary) it may be to<br />
compare the various characteristics of the individual countries influenced<br />
by ascetic Protestantism (which alone will help explain evident differences<br />
in development), the most pressing questions for me lay and lie elsewhere.’<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> then goes on to specify where further research needed to be done.<br />
‘First . . . I needed to differentiate the various effects of Calvinist, Baptist<br />
and Pietist ethics on lifestyle, much more deeply and in detail than had been<br />
done before. We must also investigate thoroughly the beginnings of similar<br />
developments in the Middle Ages and early Christianity, as far as Troeltsch’s<br />
works still leave scope for this – which will certainly require very intensive<br />
collaboration with theologians.’ (<strong>Weber</strong> inserts a footnote here on his relation<br />
to theologians.) He continues, ‘Then we need to consider how best to<br />
explain, from the economic standpoint, that ubiquitous elective affinity of<br />
the bourgeoisie to a definite kind of lifestyle . . .’. ‘Numerous things have<br />
been said from many different quarters about this more general problem,<br />
but much more remains to be said – including, I believe, all that is fundamental.’<br />
7<br />
In his footnote on his relationship to theologians, <strong>Weber</strong> says that – in
The reluctant sociologist 123<br />
contrast to the criticisms of the bungling, amateur and dilettante Rachfahl<br />
– his PESC had been well received. ‘However,’ he goes on, ‘such merely<br />
“sociological” work must also be carried out – as it has been done by some of<br />
the theologians themselves, pre-eminently by Troeltsch. It should surely be<br />
done best by the specialists, to whom we outsiders can just here and there offer<br />
possible perspectives on the problem . . .’. 8 There certainly is an element<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong> giving the problem back to sociologically attuned theologians, preeminently<br />
Troeltsch.<br />
But <strong>Weber</strong> also says fundamental work still remains to be done. I take<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> here to be referring to his own plans. The Protestant ethic studies<br />
can be interpreted as still remaining a focus for his research programme, but<br />
the specialist historical work on the Puritan sects would be accomplished by<br />
others. The Protestant ethic essay never did become a stand-alone book, as<br />
his publisher fervently hoped. 9 The enlargements, as promised, never did<br />
materialize. Peter Ghosh has observed that, by the time <strong>Weber</strong> had replied<br />
to his critics, he had exhausted the subject of capitalism and its relation<br />
to ascetic Protestantism. 10 This comment cannot, I think, be extended to<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s interest in capitalism as a socioeconomic phenomenon subject to<br />
cultural influences, because the period 1910 onwards represents just such a<br />
commitment but now on a universal–historical scale. It is difficult to reach<br />
a conclusion. Had <strong>Weber</strong> effectively retreated in the face of the demands of<br />
his critics, especially in respect of the highly problematic field of multiple<br />
causation? Or was he about to rework the problem of causation through<br />
comparative analysis? It is probably a mistake to search for continuity, and<br />
we need to register the author’s discretionary right to switch fields, not least<br />
as a new energizing source of enthusiasm. This does not, however, make the<br />
problem of multiple causation go away; rather, it moves it to a higher, and<br />
no less problematical, level.<br />
The agrarian regimes of ancient civilization<br />
Rachfahl’s criticisms had prompted from <strong>Weber</strong> a reflection on the analysis<br />
of European-specific capitalism and whether other historical, but ideal–typical,<br />
constructs of capitalism could offer a point of comparison. This, he says,<br />
‘is what I tried to do for the “capitalism” of the ancient world as an economic<br />
system, although certainly in a very incomplete way (see my ‘Agrarverhältnisse<br />
im Altertum’ in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaft, third<br />
edition, Vol. 1, 1909)’ (PE Debate, pp. 74–5). The comparison would operate<br />
by presenting features ‘not so present in other epochs’. Hence, both early<br />
modern European development and antiquity could be constructed as types<br />
of capitalism, but one (antiquity) would lack the ‘spirit of capitalism’. The<br />
implication – and this is all it is at this stage in <strong>Weber</strong>’s thinking – is that a<br />
missing cause will have missing effects, so throwing into relief their presence<br />
in Protestant Europe. This represents a new approach, as yet not clear in its<br />
logic, to the methodology of causation.
124 The reluctant sociologist<br />
But <strong>Weber</strong> himself admits in his 1910 reply to Rachfahl that his attempt<br />
was incomplete. ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ was not written with comparison<br />
in mind. It belonged to a series of initiatives and projects, like his<br />
intensive involvement in the literature coming out of Russian in 1905 on<br />
revolutionary activity and like his study of the industrial psychology of<br />
workers in 1907, that led him away from ever completing the promised<br />
additions to the Protestant ethic ‘sketch’.<br />
‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ was a commissioned entry for an encyclopaedia,<br />
and this meant that it had to conform to a format, title and style<br />
laid down by the editors of the Handwörterbuch. This placed constraints on<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s ability to pursue his favoured methodology of the ideal type. The<br />
encyclopaedia format was very popular in the German universities – as it<br />
is again today. The whole approach favours the reader who, essentially, is<br />
able to find information on an indexed or alphabetical system. The format<br />
tends to the presentation of reliable and accessible knowledge rather than<br />
the more usual academic habit of getting embroiled in controversial debate.<br />
The Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaft in its third edition was a<br />
well-established and respected encyclopaedia. <strong>Weber</strong> had provided short<br />
entries of eighteen pages for the supplementary volume of the first edition<br />
in 1897 and an amended version for the second edition of 1898. This probably<br />
explains <strong>Weber</strong>’s sense of obligation to contribute to the third edition<br />
of 1909, but not why his entry was so extensive. <strong>Weber</strong>’s entry ran to 136<br />
double-columned pages. By comparison, the entries by Karl Lamprecht on<br />
agrarian regimes in the Middle Ages ran to three pages and agrarian regimes<br />
of modernity by Freiherr von der Goltz ran to eighteen pages. The entry<br />
title was given to the author: ‘Agrarian regimes in the ancient world’. An<br />
introduction was required: ‘on the economic theories of states in the ancient<br />
world’. Part 2 provided a breakdown of the agrarian history of ancient<br />
civilization (‘alten Kultur’) – in Mesopotamia, Egypt, ancient Israel, Greece,<br />
Hellenism, Rome and the basis of development in the Roman Empire.<br />
So, it was a commission, for a dictionary/encyclopaedia, and had seemingly<br />
little connection to seventeenth-century Protestantism. Where, it might<br />
be asked, was <strong>Weber</strong> going with this academic enterprise? Initially, he considered<br />
it an obligation he could not refuse and that he would return to<br />
the Protestant ethic. On 26 December 1907, <strong>Weber</strong> wrote to Oskar Siebeck<br />
(his PESC publisher) that the article for the Handwörterbuch was a ‘terrible<br />
obligation’ that he could not decently refuse to do. He thought he would be<br />
finished in a few weeks, and then he would concentrate on a separate publication<br />
(‘Sonderausgabe’) of the ‘Geist des Kapitalismus’ for Siebeck. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
never delivered on that promise, and one implication is that his move into<br />
comparative historical sociology blocked his return to the Protestant ethic<br />
study. 11 ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ is a work that is held in some awe by<br />
classical historians. Alfred Heuss considered it ‘the most original, daring and<br />
persuasive analysis ever made of the economic and social development of<br />
Antiquity . . . the area in which <strong>Weber</strong>’s judgement, especially in the details,
The reluctant sociologist 125<br />
was most sovereign and surefooted . . .’. 12 And the foremost classical scholar<br />
of the twentieth century, Moses Finley, wrote, ‘When I read in Marianne<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s preface that Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Agrarverhältnisse was the result of four<br />
months’ intensive work, I react as to one of the miracles of the Bible. It<br />
takes me four months to study Demosthenes.’ 13 Marianne <strong>Weber</strong>, when she<br />
had the article reprinted, added a footnote at the start saying its contents<br />
far exceeded the prescribed title – it was ‘a social and economic history of<br />
antiquity’. 14<br />
This raises a large question about what is meant by the term ‘history’, especially<br />
at this juncture in <strong>Weber</strong>’s intellectual career. I think Guenther Roth<br />
is right to say that <strong>Weber</strong> was advancing ‘a limited developmental scheme’<br />
or, more simply, ‘developmental history’. 15 This is the direction of travel in<br />
another of <strong>Weber</strong>’s enterprises that he agreed to the year before, an encyclopaedia<br />
under his own editorial control, the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik<br />
(which is considered in the next section). Heuss refers to <strong>Weber</strong> as being<br />
‘sure-footed’ in the field of classical studies, but his last effort in this field<br />
was a lecture in 1896 and his 1897 entry to the Handwörterbuch. What has<br />
to be grasped here is that <strong>Weber</strong>’s footwork allowed him to change direction<br />
at will and to generate enormous impetus in a very short space of time – another<br />
of his ‘temperamental’ qualities. During the period 1909–14, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
generated a truly enormous output of material that can be broadly described<br />
as developmental history. Considered from the stance of 1904 and 1905,<br />
this was tangential, even perverse. The strategy then was not history per<br />
se in its narrative traction and multiple complexity, but by a point of view<br />
determined by the author’s value-signifying discernment and deployment of<br />
the thrown net of the ideal type. In ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
is not allowed to roll out his pet method of ideal types – just three mentions,<br />
and one of these in the bibliography.<br />
I have translated ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ as agrarian regimes. The difficult<br />
word here is ‘Verhältnisse’ whose literal translation is ‘relationships’ or, more<br />
loosely, ‘organization’. ‘Regime’ suggests itself because, while <strong>Weber</strong> does<br />
not ignore the agricultural dimension – the topography of garden culture,<br />
cereals, forests, rivers, irrigation, coastal settlements etc. – he is much more<br />
interested in the arrangements for the delivery of agricultural and economic<br />
goods. He is concerned with the relationship between landlord and serf,<br />
freeholder and renter, estate owner and slave, monarchs and taxation, land<br />
grants and their legal conditions. It is the power and status distinctions that<br />
structure the delivery of agrarian products that <strong>Weber</strong> works with. In this<br />
sense, he is concerned with the regimes of agrarian societies.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> would have been approached by the editors of the Handwörterbuch<br />
(Conrad and Lexis) as an agrarian expert. 16 His postdoctoral thesis<br />
(‘Habilitationsschrift’) on the changing legal forms and economic conditions<br />
of Roman agriculture was based on the analysis of primary documents (laws,<br />
legal documents, wills, inscriptions). And, as a national-economist in the<br />
1890s, <strong>Weber</strong>’s empirical inquiries on agrarian conditions had established
126 The reluctant sociologist<br />
him as an authoritative expert. It is this expertise that <strong>Weber</strong> delivers to the<br />
Handwörterbuch.<br />
Turning, at random, to the section on Mesopotamia, how does <strong>Weber</strong><br />
proceed? First, he indicates the state of the historical sources – the development<br />
of cuneiform scholarship. Throughout the section, he refers back to<br />
the sources available, for example the laws of Hammurabi. <strong>Weber</strong> was not<br />
equipped to read the primary sources but, as his bibliography shows, he<br />
was up to date with the German, French and American scholarship. 17 <strong>Weber</strong><br />
then fashions this source material to the ways in which he thinks about the<br />
agrarian economy. As might be expected, he starts with a (brief) description<br />
of agriculture – domestication of animals, horticulture, irrigation – but then<br />
he quickly turns to the political system of the monarchy and its economic<br />
base: how taxes and labour services were delivered by the different status<br />
groups (slaves, serfs, landowners and subjects). The economic resources of<br />
the temple are mentioned as are the military campaigns to acquire booty.<br />
The basis of the military system of obligation is outlined (mercenaries, vassals,<br />
community forces). The economy is discussed in terms of what could be<br />
inferred from documents: the forms of property – the ‘oikos’, the ownership<br />
of private land and the limitations placed on its sale (alienation). Subsections<br />
follow on the organization of the family and the status of women,<br />
slaves and wage labour, rental agreements on land, the existence of money<br />
and its restricted use as an indicator of value of bartering, loans and money<br />
transactions, trade in benefices as a form of interest-bearing bonds and the<br />
regulation of prices.<br />
This may well seem prosaic, but it is where <strong>Weber</strong>’s historical expertise<br />
lay. <strong>Weber</strong> makes some acute judgements. He notes the danger of basing<br />
arguments using analogies from modern states, yet inevitably he has to draw<br />
on the language of modern economic usage. A ‘money man’ in ancient Mesopotamia<br />
is someone who does not act as buyer and seller but is an estimator<br />
of value in a predominantly barter economy. And, under old Babylonian law,<br />
caravans were given commissions to ‘buy at the going price’. This was not<br />
evidence of a free market economy, but an instruction to buy at the ‘price<br />
set by the royal or temple storehouse’ (AS, p. 104). <strong>Weber</strong> was working with<br />
very few translated documents, yet he is able to discern and mark out the<br />
principal legal, social and economic forms and the undergirding structure of<br />
economic obligations between status groups. <strong>Weber</strong> processes the existing<br />
source material to a very high level of intelligibility and, if one consults, in<br />
contrast, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on Mesopotamia, it is a<br />
mass of undigested philology, dates and genealogies.<br />
The Handwörterbuch article reminds us that <strong>Weber</strong> was ever the nationaleconomist<br />
and agrarian expert. He had accumulated over the decades of the<br />
1880s and 1890s a fund of knowledge and expertise that he could draw on<br />
at will; or at least the ability to update his knowledge in a very short period.<br />
Having noted this, though, it is still permissible to ask in which direction this<br />
work was leading him. Recent work by Hinnerk Bruhns, Luigi Colognesi,
The reluctant sociologist 127<br />
Jürgen Deininger and Mohammad Nafissi alerts us to <strong>Weber</strong>’s continuing<br />
engagement with the ‘Kapitalismus’ problematic. 18<br />
In his few uses of the ideal type, <strong>Weber</strong> enters into a discussion of whether<br />
there is a generic ideal type of capitalism. From his 1898 Lecture Outline, it<br />
is clear that <strong>Weber</strong> was fully informed about Bücher’s division of economic<br />
history into three stages: the ‘oikos’ economy, the city economy and the<br />
national-economy. <strong>Weber</strong> was probably agreeable to this as a useful periodization,<br />
although he would have rejected a theory that held this to be a kind<br />
of evolutionary necessity. ‘Oikos’ is a ‘Wirtschaft’ or an ‘economy’ (indeed,<br />
it is the Greek root word for ‘economy’). An ‘oikos’, for Bücher, was an economically<br />
self-contained, rural-based estate headed up by a patriarch. The<br />
patriarch or head of the household would rule, organize and look after the<br />
needs of his family, personal retinue, serfs and slaves. While an ‘oikos’ might<br />
make a surplus, this was stored rather than traded or invested. Bücher held<br />
that the ‘oikos’ was the main economic institution of the ancient world of<br />
Greece and Rome, its use of slavery being particularly characteristic. It was<br />
preceded by a form of tribal and clan organization. The ‘oikos’ stage marked<br />
a decisive step forward from the ‘primitivism’ of the clan. An ‘oikos’ was embedded<br />
in a wider political community, which in Greece culminated in the<br />
‘polis’ (that, in Athens for a brief period, initiated and attained a democratic<br />
form). The city economy pertained to the Middle Ages, differentiating itself<br />
from feudal and manorial regimes. The national-economy started to become<br />
the predominant phase in the modern period, fostered by absolutist states<br />
from the sixteenth century onwards. 19<br />
The classical historian Eduard Meyer challenged Bücher’s construction<br />
of the ‘oikos’ as the dominant economic form of antiquity. He disputed the<br />
emphasis that Bücher placed on slavery, and his ignoring of the role of free<br />
labourers, markets and factory enterprises. Mohammad Nafissi refers to<br />
Meyer as a ‘modernist’. Meyer regarded it as acceptable to use modern economic<br />
terms to describe the ancient world. His argument was that the ancient<br />
world had attained a high level of economic development. ‘Meyer pointed<br />
to widespread commerce, developed accountancy systems, and transportation<br />
networks linking various centres of the pre-classical ancient Orient from<br />
the third millennium BC to the fall of the Persian Empire more than two<br />
thousand years later.’ ‘By displaying the breadth and depth of commercial<br />
activity in the ancient Near East, Meyer at the same time painted Greece and<br />
Rome as inheritors of a process of commercial and cultural development<br />
spanning over two millennia rather than as recent offspring of fairly primitive<br />
kinship formations.’ 20 As Nafissi shows, Bücher’s attempt to encapsulate<br />
the ‘oikos’ economy of Rome and Greece as an autonomous development<br />
from its preceding simple clan society fails. Meyer substitutes instead a preexisting<br />
economy stretching across the Near East and Mediterranean. Meyer<br />
made the dramatic claim that ‘the seventh and sixth century of Greek history<br />
corresponds to the development of modernity in the fourteenth and fifteenth<br />
century after Christ; the fifth to the sixteenth.’ And he went on later to claim
128 The reluctant sociologist<br />
that Athens ‘stands under the banner of capitalism just as much as England<br />
since the eighteenth century, Germany since the nineteenth.’ 21<br />
In ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, <strong>Weber</strong> was forced to reconsider his<br />
own position that, as set forth in 1896, was close to Bücher’s. <strong>Weber</strong> had<br />
emphasized the predominant place of the ‘oikos’ and an economy based<br />
on slavery. Indeed <strong>Weber</strong>’s account of the decline of the Roman Empire<br />
depended on the centrality of slavery. While the civilization based on Athens<br />
depended on trade between city and countryside as well as the existence of<br />
international trade along the Mediterranean coast, the later Roman Empire<br />
shifted the economic centre of gravity inland where transport was difficult<br />
and trade limited. The huge geographical expansion of Roman rule was motivated<br />
by conquest and the demand for slaves for the emerging large estates<br />
(‘oikoi’). ‘Wars served as slave hunts and were followed by confiscation of<br />
lands; the lands were formed into domains, and leased by exploitation to<br />
wealthy contractors’ (AS, p. 395). ‘Thus the slave owner became the dominant<br />
figure in the economy of Antiquity, and a slave-labour system became<br />
the indispensable foundation of Roman society’ (AS, p. 396). There were,<br />
however, limits to the expansion of empire and its military capability. This<br />
led to the drying up of the supply of slaves and, in turn, led the (late) Roman<br />
Emperor, Diocletian, to issue bureaucratic ordinances forcing people to<br />
remain in their place of origin, so severe became the shortage of labour. At<br />
this point, the empire was already set upon the path of decline and the rural<br />
stultification of the Dark Ages.<br />
Meyer’s argument also related to Sombart’s articulation of capitalist<br />
profit as the defining feature of modern capitalism, as opposed to industrial<br />
workshops that existed in the medieval period but did not operate according<br />
to the principle of profit maximization (see Chapter 1). The same issue arose<br />
in Antiquity. Industrial workshops had operated within the ‘oikos’ and in the<br />
cities. Did this make the ancient economy capitalistic, especially when the<br />
existence of markets, trade, transportation and banking are noted?<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> notes that the question of using concepts drawn from later economic<br />
periods had been debated ‘with vigour and sometimes with passion<br />
during the last century’. ‘The starting point of this controversy was<br />
the theory of Rodbertus, according to whom all Antiquity was dominated<br />
by what he called an “oikos” economy’, one in which production centred<br />
around the household and the household was extended to include unfree<br />
workers. He argued that division of labour in Antiquity was essentially only<br />
specialization within the great slave households, and that commerce was<br />
only an occasional and secondary phenomenon, serving merely to dispose of<br />
the excess production of the great households. Hence, Rodbertus argued for<br />
the ‘autarky of the “oikos”; he regarded the great households of Antiquity as<br />
in principle economically self-sufficient’ (AS, pp. 42–3).<br />
There is slightly more to say about Rodbertus than <strong>Weber</strong> provides. He<br />
was a country squire, a conservative and favoured a version of state socialism.<br />
He held to a historically undifferentiated version of the whole of An-
The reluctant sociologist 129<br />
tiquity in which, to quote him, ‘nowhere does buying and selling intervene,<br />
nowhere do goods change hands. Since the national dividend never changes<br />
hands, it nowhere splits up into various income categories as in modern<br />
times . . .’. 22 The intellectual significance of Rodbertus is not simply Bücher’s<br />
relationship to him, but Karl Marx’s adoption of some of Rodbertus’ principal<br />
ideas. In the ‘oikos’, the patriarch could decide who (slaves, retinue and<br />
family) got what. In the modern economy, surplus is distributed not through<br />
personal rule, but is divided up between rent, rent on property, interest<br />
(on capital) and profit, and a fixed constant, which went to wages. Despite<br />
improvements in technology and productivity, wages remain the same – at<br />
subsistence – while rents increase. Rodbertus argued for the (Prussian) state<br />
to intervene and reallocate a taxed portion of rent to the workers. Marx’s<br />
thinking about surplus value – how the capitalist class expropriates the value<br />
produced by the working class – is obviously proximate to Rodbertus’ thinking.<br />
This genealogy of ideas had implications for the ‘Kapitalismus’ debate<br />
at the end of the century. Bücher as well as Sombart were products of this<br />
genealogy, but as much through Rodbertus, who was no revolutionary, as<br />
through Marx. In other words, they participated in a labour theory of value<br />
and circulation without belonging to the Marxist camp.<br />
So, in acknowledging Rodbertus as a forerunner of Bücher in the ‘oikos’<br />
dispute, <strong>Weber</strong> would have taken these implications as commonly understood.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> continues his outline of the ‘oikos’ dispute:<br />
Karl Bücher accepted Rodbertus’ account of the oikos, but with a difference.<br />
His view may, I think, be interpreted – on the basis of his own<br />
statements – in this manner: he considered the oikos as an ‘ideal type’,<br />
denoting a kind of economic system which appeared in Antiquity with its<br />
basic features and characteristic consequences in a closer approximation<br />
to its ‘pure concept’ than anywhere else, without this oikos economy<br />
becoming universally dominant in Antiquity, either in time or space.<br />
One may add with confidence that even in those periods when the oikos<br />
was dominant this meant no more than a limitation on commerce and its<br />
role in meeting consumer needs. This limitation was, to be sure, strong<br />
and effective, and caused a corresponding economic and social degradation<br />
of those classes which would have otherwise carried on a more<br />
extensive trade.<br />
(AS, p. 43)<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> effectively saves Bücher’s generalization of the ‘oikos’ economy<br />
from Meyer’s criticisms through the device of the ideal type. And Meyer<br />
is criticized for suggesting that it was necessary to use the concepts of ‘factory’<br />
and ‘factory worker’ to analyse Periclean Athens. <strong>Weber</strong> agrees with<br />
Meyer that capitalism existed in the ancient world. There were workshops,<br />
free and semi-free workers as well as slaves; there were banks and credit,<br />
and there was extensive trade and merchants. But capitalism in its modern
130 The reluctant sociologist<br />
form did not exist. This leads <strong>Weber</strong> to conclude that capitalism did exist<br />
in the ancient world, ‘Where we find that property is an object of trade and<br />
is utilized by individuals for profit-making enterprise in a market economy,<br />
there we have capitalism.’ This is <strong>Weber</strong>’s generic definition of capitalism.<br />
But capitalism in the ancient world was entirely different from modern capitalism.<br />
‘We must avoid exaggeration. In particular it is necessary to show the<br />
specific peculiarities of the various types of capital goods, and the manner of<br />
their valorization, which determined the course of ancient economic history’<br />
(AS, p. 51).<br />
The merchant and the owners of capital, whether in the form of land,<br />
workshops or treasure, were never in a position for a great many reasons to<br />
invest profit with the expectation of expanding production and increasing<br />
profit. Over some sixteen pages (AS, pp. 42–68), <strong>Weber</strong> elaborates the principal<br />
differences between ancient and modern capitalism. Factories did not<br />
exist in the industrial sense of size, continuity of operation and a technology<br />
reliant on fixed capital, division of labour and its concentration in the factory<br />
workshop. Treasure was not advanced as capital, but stayed within the palaces<br />
and temples – it was thesaurized. Capital in the form of ownership of slaves<br />
was a highly unstable mechanism for advancing a business, and the vagaries<br />
of supply added to this. There was no reliable cost accounting. Guilds in<br />
Antiquity were a state organization for performing public tasks, and nothing<br />
like the medieval independence of guild masters appeared. The cities were<br />
centres of consumption not production and, where free labour existed, it<br />
nowhere amounted to a proletariat defined through its productive role.<br />
To sum up, the most important hindrance to the development of capitalism<br />
in Antiquity arose from the political and economic characteristics<br />
of ancient society. The latter, to recapitulate, included: (1) the limits on<br />
market production imposed by the narrow bounds within which land<br />
transport of goods was economically feasible; (2) the inherently unstable<br />
structure and formation of capital; (3) the technical limits to the exploitation<br />
of slave labour in large enterprises and (4) the limited degree to<br />
which cost accounting was possible, caused primarily by the possibility<br />
of strict calculation in the use of slave labour.<br />
(AS, pp. 63–4)<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s long list of differentiating factors that marked out the ancient<br />
economy as different can be read the other way round: their absence signals<br />
what defines the nature of modern capitalism. Through this simple method<br />
of difference, <strong>Weber</strong> was addressing the ‘Kapitalismus’ debate as a nationaleconomist.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> writes here very much as the national-economist, essentially reverting<br />
back to his teaching role in the 1890s. However, the point, of course,<br />
is that <strong>Weber</strong> had never left off being a national-economist. The academic
The reluctant sociologist 131<br />
footprint of the 1890s contained the periodization of the ancient economy,<br />
the medieval economy and the modern national-economy. Bücher had<br />
unwisely turned this periodization into a series of necessary stages – from<br />
the ‘oikos’ economy, to the city economy, to the national-economy. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
shared the periodization, as did most national-economists, but maintained<br />
that the dynamics and the characteristics of each period were far more complex.<br />
It was through the analysis of the differences between the ancient and<br />
the modern economy that the distinctiveness of modern capitalism was ascertained.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s outlining of these differences creates the reference point<br />
for what were the characteristic features of modern capitalism. This was the<br />
same ‘Kapitalismus’ debate that preceded the writing of PESC. Did capitalism<br />
emerge in the fifteenth century with the accumulation of treasure and a<br />
new acquisitive instinct, as argued by Sombart, or was it a later development<br />
subsequent and intrinsic to the Puritan reformation, as argued by <strong>Weber</strong>?<br />
Through these comparative analyses, the distinctiveness of modern capitalism<br />
was to be established.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> speaks of the ‘oikos’ economy of Bücher’s, as already noted, as an<br />
ideal type, and the ‘urban economy’ as it appeared ‘in a great many medieval<br />
cities’ as an ‘ideal type’ (AS, p. 48). By the standards of PESC and the<br />
‘Objectivity’ essay, this is misleading. There, the ideal type refers to cultural<br />
meanings – the spirit of capitalism and the vocational ethic. In ‘Agrarverhältnisse<br />
im Altertum’, capitalism as an entity or system is put forward as<br />
a theoretical model. In addition, what emerges from <strong>Weber</strong>’s discussion is<br />
the distinctiveness of a regime – the conditions of status inequality and the<br />
mechanisms through which economic needs are met. Within these regimes,<br />
the attitudes, reasons and motivations can be subjected to ideal typical treatment<br />
as a cultural heuristic. But <strong>Weber</strong> actually makes very few references<br />
to attitudinal dispositions of the vocational sort. The ‘moral qualities’ of<br />
slaves render them ‘amenable to exploitation’ but make them ‘most inefficient<br />
as workers in a large enterprise’ (AS, p. 55). ‘The ancient businessman<br />
remained no more than a “common tradesman” in his own eyes and in the<br />
eyes of his contemporaries.’ This contrasts with early modern times when<br />
the ‘rationalization and economization of life were furthered by the essentially<br />
religious ideas of “vocation” and the ethic derived from it, but nothing<br />
similar arose in Antiquity’ (AS, p. 67).<br />
It is an important switch of emphasis on <strong>Weber</strong>’s part to start referring to<br />
what are effectively definitions of different regimes as ideal types. ‘Agrarverhältnisse<br />
im Altertum’ undoubtedly represents a widening of scope as well as<br />
a more muscular way of handling the historical materials, but the ideal type<br />
was now being merged into history and its developmental sequences. But the<br />
ideal type, in its original formulation, distanced the investigator from the<br />
sheer facticity of history and privileged his or her own standpoint in terms of<br />
what was seen as worth studying and as conferring significance. Within the<br />
constrained framework of an encyclopaedia entry, it could perhaps be argued
132 The reluctant sociologist<br />
that <strong>Weber</strong> was simply using the concept of the ideal type as a convenient<br />
way of handling an extraordinarily complex set of materials. But, when we<br />
examine <strong>Weber</strong>’s growing preoccupation with developmental history on a<br />
comparative basis, the ideal type appears to operate more as a modelling<br />
device than as a cultural heuristic.<br />
Developmental sequences comprise the end of <strong>Weber</strong>’s introduction to<br />
the ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’. <strong>Weber</strong> reports that little is known of<br />
the prehistoric period of the agrarian societies of the ancient world. ‘But<br />
one thing is clear: there are certain stages of organization, and these appear<br />
to have been repeated by all the peoples in Antiquity from the Seine to the<br />
Euphrates among whom urban centres developed’ (AS, p. 69). In summary<br />
form, these stages were:<br />
1 Walled settlements providing defence for essentially kinship-orientated<br />
groups.<br />
2 The fortress with more urban characteristics and ruled by a king.<br />
3 The aristocratic city state of the ‘classical’ age. This was a feudal nobility<br />
emancipated from kingly rule, possessing slaves and serfs, and where rank<br />
was determined by military criteria: ‘these cities were not administered<br />
by bureaucracies, a fact of decisive importance’.<br />
4 The bureaucratic city kingdom. This represents an alternative<br />
developmental route from stage 2. ‘If the king gained sufficient economic<br />
resources to become master of his retinue and army to the extent that<br />
he could bind them to his own person, then he was able to take a step of<br />
fundamental importance: create a bureaucracy entirely subordinate to<br />
himself and organized on hierarchical principles. With the aid of such a<br />
bureaucracy the king could govern his subjects directly and the city then<br />
became no more than the royal capital where he and his court resided’<br />
(AS, p. 72).<br />
5 The authoritarian liturgical state. Here, the economic relationship of<br />
king to subjects underwent ‘rationalization’, becoming a tax and liturgy<br />
regime. Subjects were forced to pay taxes or to provide labour services<br />
directly to the court and state, the state ran monopolies for which<br />
subjects were forced to provide labour services, and there was a system<br />
of taxation backed by punishment. Outside these liturgical obligations,<br />
commerce was encouraged, because it offered another source of revenue.<br />
‘ “Enlightened despotism” of this sort generally developed in the ancient<br />
Near East directly out of the more primitive forms of the bureaucratic<br />
city kingdom, and indeed differed from the latter type only in its more<br />
rationalized organization’ (AS, p. 74).<br />
6 The hoplite ‘polis’ of the Mediterranean lands. Hoplites were independent<br />
farmers who owned their own land. They were soldier citizens, and they<br />
overthrew the aristocratic clans.<br />
7 The democratic citizen ‘polis’. Citizenship rights were no longer<br />
dependent on the ownership of land. ‘All citizens could become eligible
The reluctant sociologist 133<br />
for office without regard to property qualifications.’ Laws were passed<br />
to create a stable social order where creditors were no longer allowed to<br />
reduce peasants to debt slavery. <strong>Weber</strong> refers to this as the amelioration<br />
of class conflict in the ancient world, although it was a tendency that<br />
‘never wholly triumphed’; equally, that conflict could intensify with land<br />
ownership being held by a wealthy elite.<br />
At one level, as <strong>Weber</strong> insists, these seven stages are just types that ‘seldom<br />
existed in complete isolation. They are “pure types”, concepts to be used in<br />
classifying individual states. They simply allow us to ask whether a particular<br />
state at a particular time more or less approximated to one or other these<br />
pure types.’ This, says <strong>Weber</strong>, is only an approximating exercise, ‘for the actual<br />
state structures in the most important phases of history are too complex<br />
to be comprehended by so simple a classification as the one used here’. This<br />
statement should be taken at face value. The types, which <strong>Weber</strong> fails to designate<br />
explicitly as ‘ideal types’, are organizing ideas or concepts to provide<br />
some kind of framework to a very far-reaching dictionary entry.<br />
As a developmental series, there is a clear impulse to move from simple<br />
kinship (stage 1) to higher stages. <strong>Weber</strong>’s developmental stages cannot be<br />
used as an argument for linear developments. Stages 6 and 7 are historically<br />
contingent upon circumstances, and the history of the later Roman Empire<br />
shows the complete reversal of an independent arms-bearing peasantry. In<br />
addition, there is the much commented upon bifurcation at stages 4 and 6.<br />
One leads to the authoritarian liturgy states of the Near East – Mesopotamia<br />
and Egypt – the other to some kind of (feudal) democratization of rule on<br />
the basis of independent property and reaching its high point in the Athenian<br />
‘polis’. This bifurcation in developmental paths is highly consequential for<br />
the history of the Occident and the Near East.<br />
The split is complicated by ‘the manifest and latent struggle between<br />
theocratic and secular-political forces’. <strong>Weber</strong>, at this point, wants to factor<br />
in ‘developed theology and educated priesthood’ which, through functional<br />
specialization (or ‘differentiation’ in the later terminology of modernization<br />
theory), had attained some degree of independence. The priesthood could<br />
act as a competing centre because it possessed three sources of power: economic<br />
– from its ownership of temple lands and income; religious – through<br />
the ability to offer salvation in cases of sacrilege (i.e. ritualistic ‘sins’ not ethical<br />
sinning); and literacy, which was either a monopoly of learning belonging<br />
to the priesthood or one held in competition with secular officials.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does not systematically follow through the permutations, making<br />
instead particular developmental paths contingent upon conflict between the<br />
various sources of power.<br />
Hence certain conflicts are characteristic of early Antiquity: temple<br />
priesthood versus military nobility and royal authority in bureaucratic<br />
monarchies; commoners (‘nichtadligen Bürger’) versus the monopoly of
134 The reluctant sociologist<br />
legal knowledge enjoyed by noble priests in aristocratic states. All sorts<br />
of alliances occurred. These conflicts influenced social and economical<br />
developments, especially in periods of general secularization or restoration;<br />
the latter were usually due to usurpers striving for legitimacy.<br />
There were important differences in this respect between oriental and<br />
occidental civilizations, and these will be discussed below.<br />
(AS, p. 79)<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, then, was entering into one of the great fault lines in world historiographies<br />
– the bifurcation between east and west – using a ‘simple’ classification<br />
of types with the role of the priesthood as determinative, but in<br />
an unspecified way. Contemporary historical sociology operates very much<br />
in the manner of <strong>Weber</strong>’s realist analysis of competing sources of power<br />
and their outcomes. 23 But, for <strong>Weber</strong> himself, it has to be noted that he had<br />
rapidly moved away from the causative role of religion in the period of early<br />
modernity in Europe and its ideal type methodology.<br />
The ideal type method in 1904 and 1905 had produced cultural heuristics<br />
– the religious nature of vocation, the spirit of capitalism – against which<br />
empirical reality could be assessed. If there was a closeness of fit (which of<br />
course could never be a verified certainty), then it could be said that certain<br />
ideas worked out in people’s behaviour may well have given the capitalist<br />
system its distinctive character. While this in itself was a scientific achievement<br />
of a high order, <strong>Weber</strong> was not able to assess just how consequential<br />
the religious derived spirit of capitalism was for the development of the<br />
whole system. In his qualifications of the extent of the thesis, <strong>Weber</strong> had to<br />
forgo an assessment of the emergence of capitalism as an entity. As he put it<br />
in his first reply to Rachfahl in 1910:<br />
Now just a few more remarks about the relationship of the ‘spirit’ of<br />
capitalism to capitalism as an economic system.<br />
Werner Sombart has made a study of this subject (Archiv,<br />
XXIX:689ff), 24 which in its broad agreement on all significance points,<br />
especially methodological, relieves me of the obligation to go into detail.<br />
Both the concepts of ‘capitalism’, and even more so, ‘spirit of capitalism’,<br />
can be construed as ‘ideal-typical’ constructs of thought.<br />
(PE Debate, p. 74)<br />
This absolved <strong>Weber</strong> from entering into the analysis of capitalism as an<br />
economic system. What <strong>Weber</strong> had supplied was an important cultural determinant<br />
in its development. But, if it was important, the next question is<br />
how important?<br />
The move into comparative studies offered one way of supplying an answer.<br />
Early Rome and Periclean Athens had capitalism but lacked any ‘spirit<br />
of capitalism’. J.S. Mill, who was well understood by German nationaleconomists,<br />
had offered a ‘method of difference’ as a way forward. The
The reluctant sociologist 135<br />
historian might be in a position to operate a quasi-experimental method. If<br />
two historical situations were roughly similar, but differed in respect of one<br />
factor, then a causal linkage could be asserted if the crucial factor (spirit of<br />
capitalism) produced dynamic rational capitalism in one setting and, in the<br />
other setting, where it is absent, then no dynamic capitalism appears. By<br />
this experimental method, some sort of proof would be established. The<br />
closest <strong>Weber</strong> came to doing this was in his comparative study of Puritanism<br />
and Confucianism at the end of his study The Religion of China. 25 As an<br />
economic system, China was more advanced than Europe c. 1400, but Confucian<br />
mores and life conduct could not psychologically push the system into<br />
a higher gear. In Europe, there was sufficient economic development plus a<br />
spirit of capitalism that ‘kicked in’ in the seventeenth century. The causal<br />
inference, under Mill’s method of difference, is that the ‘spirit of capitalism’<br />
is an effective cause. There are a great many objections that can be mounted<br />
against this way of proceeding, and the comparative historiography of China<br />
and Europe can hardly be said to endorse <strong>Weber</strong>’s argument in the conclusion<br />
of The Religion of China. All this being noted, it is possible to see how<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> would be drawn to a stronger comparative programme, even though<br />
it exceeds the ambitions of 1904–5. It would provide a further justification<br />
– or what would now be termed triangulation – of the Protestant ethic thesis.<br />
In PESC, <strong>Weber</strong> demonstrated a positive factor and, in China, that factor<br />
being missing, further support was offered to the thesis.<br />
As far as I know, J.S. Mill’s programme has never been successfully realized<br />
in the field of comparative historical sociology, and it is easy to understand<br />
why. Finding two historical situations that are alike, but in one respect<br />
or factor, is almost impossible. The similarity will only be proximate and,<br />
without complete knowledge of all the factors at work, the researcher can<br />
never know for sure whether just one factor has been isolated. For example,<br />
a very well-known argument for China’s slowness to emerge as a dynamic<br />
capitalist force was its aversion to expansion overseas. This is the result of<br />
fairly recent research, of which <strong>Weber</strong> whad no knowledge. <strong>Weber</strong> might<br />
think that Confucianism was a factor, but the crucial causal factor might<br />
have been naval policy. In a multicausal world, the sheer unknowability of<br />
the variability of factors at work reduces positivist ambitions to a heuristic.<br />
The intriguing question is why <strong>Weber</strong> was embarking upon a comparative<br />
method, even of his own devising. He had found the solution to causality<br />
in the methodological essays of 1904–5. Causal links are attributed after the<br />
event according to the evidence as structured and clarified by ideal typification.<br />
This is the best that can be achieved (one is tempted to say, period), and<br />
it was a position he was to reaffirm in 1918–20.<br />
The comparative role of towns<br />
The role of towns, trade and townspeople differs markedly between the<br />
ancient economy and the inland manorial regime of the European Middle
136 The reluctant sociologist<br />
Ages. This is a developmental comparison that <strong>Weber</strong> sets forth in his ‘Agrarverhältnisse’<br />
article and pursues in his writings on law and on the towns. In<br />
both historical situations, feudalism existed. A warrior stratum was maintained<br />
by grants of land, received rents or compulsory service from dependent<br />
subjects. And in both settings, there was a similarity of urban conditions<br />
– ownership of property, market activity, accumulation of property through<br />
trade, the acceptance of landless peasants as ‘guests’ in the towns, the obligation<br />
to townspeople to make payments to the city lord and a military stratification<br />
between foot soldiers and horsemen. ‘All these elements were present<br />
in the early stages of the medieval town just as they were in the early period<br />
of the ancient polis’ (AS, p. 337).<br />
The distinguishing difference was the relation between the cities and the<br />
countryside and their associated regimes. In the ancient ‘polis’, lordship and<br />
forms of rule remained in the towns – they remained predominantly sites of<br />
urban feudalism and controlled the surrounding countryside and its obligations.<br />
In the European (early) Middle Ages, feudalism or ‘Grundherrschaft’<br />
was rural. The towns remained isolated enclaves of limited political and<br />
economic freedom within a political economy of manorial feudalism, where<br />
obligations to the feudal lord were paid mainly in kind in order to support a<br />
stratum of knights. The new foundations of towns in medieval Europe and<br />
the emergent town economy were dependent in political terms on the local<br />
lord (‘Grundherr’), but the town itself was not, as in ancient Greece, the site<br />
of political power. The townspeople were only of economic interest to rural<br />
lords. As long as rents and taxes and the profits of justice were forthcoming,<br />
the townspeople were allowed to organize their own courts, raise their own<br />
taxes and run their own administration. This enabled the two to develop a<br />
qualitatively different urban existence from that of the ancient city. ‘That the<br />
“Stadtbürgerschaft” had increasingly enlarged its autonomy within the ruling<br />
groups of the state (“staatlichen Verbände”) up until the fifteenth century<br />
while the Hellenistic and Roman cities had been absorbed into monarchical<br />
states, has its basis in the contrasting structure of the state in which both<br />
were embedded’ (AS, pp. 345–6). Across the ancient world, the internal life<br />
of the town was unfavourable to the continuous production enterprise. For<br />
example, the self-equipped hoplite army passed laws against the accumulation<br />
of property. This contrasted with Europe. Prior to their incorporation<br />
into the absolutist and bureaucratic states of the sixteenth century, there<br />
occurred a vital breathing space. ‘During both the early and high middle ages<br />
the self-developing city is given time for the unfolding of its own decisive<br />
characteristics: the main carrier of a money economy and connected with<br />
this administrative obligations, and the (in general) exclusion of the burghers<br />
from the surrounding hierarchy of the power-based relationships of the<br />
feudal and service regime’ (AS, p. 346).<br />
This same argument is repeated in <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘The City’, which is usually<br />
taken in some way to be part of a larger work Economy and Society.
The reluctant sociologist 137<br />
The special position of the medieval city in the history of political<br />
development does not, in the last analysis, derive from the essentially<br />
economic contrasts between the urban burghers and the non-urban<br />
strata and their economic life styles. The crucial element was, rather, the<br />
general position of the city within the total framework of the medieval<br />
political associations and estates. It is this aspect which differentiates the<br />
typical medieval city most sharply from the ancient city . . .<br />
(ES, pp. 1339–40)<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> continues that ‘The political situation of the medieval townsmen<br />
determined his path which was that of a homo economicus; whereas in Antiquity<br />
the polis preserved during its heyday its character as the technically<br />
most advanced military association: the ancient townsman was a homo politicus’<br />
(ES, p. 1354).<br />
Economy and Society: initial drafts and plans<br />
While the strong developmental ‘logic’ of the differential paths of the ancient<br />
and medieval cities enter through ‘The City’ into the analysis of Economy<br />
and Society, the so-called ‘older part’ of that work is not designed primarily<br />
with this in mind. ‘The City’ works with a range of classificatory types not<br />
unlike, nor unconnected to, the seven stages outlined at the start of ‘Agrarverhältnisse’.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> calls them types but, again, as in ‘Agrarverhältnisse’,<br />
they are devices for modelling complex material, and the culturally heuristic<br />
impulse is missing. The phrase ‘ideal type’ does not occur in ‘The City’.<br />
These classificatory models cut across historically contingent developmental<br />
paths. <strong>Weber</strong> is quite happy to classify the citizen democracies of the ancient<br />
and medieval city together. This, as we know, goes against their contrasting<br />
developmental paths. Therefore, it would seem permissible to regard ‘The<br />
City’ as a conceptual grid with rows cross-cutting different civilizations and<br />
columns as developmental paths; although, having said this, <strong>Weber</strong> gives<br />
priority to rows over columns, and we seem to have arrived at a new stage<br />
in his thinking about comparative history.<br />
‘The City’ also relates back to the lectures on national-economy (see<br />
p. 23). It sits quite well with §11 (the city economy and the origins of modern<br />
enterprise). §11 itself sits within a developmental sequence of §8 (the typical<br />
forerunners of the economy), §9 (the economic development of ancient<br />
coastal civilization), §10 (the agrarian basis of medieval inland civilization)<br />
and, following on, §12 (the origin of the modern economy). ‘The City’ opens<br />
with a very <strong>Weber</strong>ian approach to national-economy. Its first section is titled<br />
‘Concepts and Categories of the City’. Sociologically, the city is defined as a<br />
‘settlement of closely spaced dwellings which form a colony so extensive that<br />
the reciprocal personal acquaintance of the inhabitants, elsewhere characteristic<br />
of the neighbourhood, is lacking.’ The city is defined in an economic
138 The reluctant sociologist<br />
sense if its inhabitants live ‘primarily from commerce and trades rather than<br />
from agriculture’ and if the city is ‘a market center’ (ES, pp. 1212–13). <strong>Weber</strong><br />
goes on to discuss the city’s relationship to the surrounding lordship as<br />
well as its relationship to agriculture. Cities are economically classified into<br />
consumer, producer and merchant cities. (Actually, this threefold distinction<br />
was first elaborated by Sombart in the second volume of his moderne<br />
Kapitalismus. <strong>Weber</strong> takes it out of its modern European context and applies<br />
it in a universal manner across civilizations and time periods.) 26 <strong>Weber</strong> also<br />
discusses the urban economy ‘as a stage of economic development’.<br />
The relation of the city as the carrier of the craft and trading activities to<br />
the countryside as the supplier of food forms one aspect of that complex<br />
of phenomena which had been called the ‘urban economy’ (Stadtwirtschaft),<br />
juxtaposed, as a special economic stage, to the ‘household economy’<br />
(Eigenwirtschaft), on the one hand and the ‘national-economy’<br />
(Volkswirtschaft) on the other . . .<br />
(ES, p.1218)<br />
This is a clear, but unfootnoted, reference to Bücher’s schema. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
does not discuss the matter in terms of time and sequential stages, but in<br />
terms of contiguity. He analyses how the town economy seeps into the rural<br />
economy and how the density of settlement marks it out from the village<br />
economy.<br />
Throughout ‘The City’, there is a continuous concern with political<br />
forms: within the city itself, to the surrounding centres of power, and the<br />
role of ruling bodies within the towns in terms of the furtherance of their<br />
own interests as well as the regulation of economic activity.<br />
The attentive reader may well be suffering from overload at this point.<br />
It has just been argued that ‘The City’ is consistent with national-economy<br />
and <strong>Weber</strong>’s periodization of economic history. The theme of developmental<br />
history has been pointed out. And in ‘The City’, <strong>Weber</strong> seems intent<br />
on cross-relating the city economy to the relevant sociological and political<br />
forms, and the work opens with a flurry of ‘concepts and categories’. In<br />
which direction, it might well be asked, was <strong>Weber</strong>’s argument, which is<br />
quite obviously comparative and of some complexity, heading? I will delay<br />
my attempt to answer this question, for we have arrived at the ‘big bang’<br />
phase of <strong>Weber</strong>’s career.<br />
Der Grundriss der Sozialökonomik<br />
The German editor of Die Stadt for the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe writes<br />
in the opening paragraph of his preface, ‘This volume contains Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
uncompleted study “The City” which was first published in the Archiv für<br />
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1921 and then again as a chapter of<br />
Economy and Society in 1922.’ In the first paragraph of his introduction,
The reluctant sociologist 139<br />
the same editor, Wilfried Nippel, writes, ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s posthumously published<br />
and uncompleted treatise “The City” exists in a state of preparation<br />
that can be dated to the period between the end of 1913 and the middle of<br />
1914. It cannot be unambiguously decided for what context <strong>Weber</strong> wrote<br />
the study and, after its possible completion, how he would have wished to<br />
use it (MWG, I, 22-5, p. 1).<br />
When we push open the study door marked ‘Economy and Society. The<br />
Older Part’, a quite alarming number of texts with similar introductions<br />
awaits the reader. Alongside ‘The City’ are the texts on communal groups,<br />
the sociology of religion, the sociology of law, the sociology of rulership,<br />
the sociology of music and an article on the categories of interpretative sociology.<br />
There is a scholarly dispute about what should and should not be<br />
included in this list and even the naming of the texts is problematic. It is<br />
known that <strong>Weber</strong> started to rewrite the whole Economy and Society project<br />
in 1919, and he published it in four chapters in 1920 just before he died. The<br />
older, probably discarded, manuscripts were retrieved from desk drawers by<br />
his wife Marianne who had them published after his death. The strong inference<br />
is that <strong>Weber</strong> himself would not have published them, and certainly<br />
not in the state Marianne found them. They are an amazingly rich store of<br />
special ‘sociologies’ written from the historical and comparative viewpoint.<br />
After their publication in Germany, they have been translated into many<br />
languages, although rarely initially as a ‘complete’ work. Guenther Roth and<br />
Claus Wittich boldly put together a full set of translations of <strong>Weber</strong>’s final<br />
version, the so-called ‘Part One’, along with the texts of the earlier versions,<br />
the so-called ‘Part Two’. It was published as Economy and Society by Bedminster<br />
Press in 1968. <strong>Weber</strong>’s reputation in international social science was<br />
established and cemented by this scholarly ‘tour de force’. The main overall<br />
difference between the final version and the earlier texts is one between<br />
schematic abstraction and historically rich conceptualization. Many scholars<br />
and users have a greater fondness for the earlier versions, which are information<br />
and hypothesis rich, rather than the later final version, which for many<br />
are too dry and casuistic. Looking for an overall pattern for the earlier texts<br />
is considered by some an illegitimate activity as they are disparate and may<br />
be abandoned texts. Working out the ‘logic’ of the final version is no easy<br />
task either, but it can be legitimately presumed that there is rationale behind<br />
it.<br />
The period when <strong>Weber</strong> was writing the earlier versions of Economy and<br />
Society overlaps with the start of another project, ‘Economic Ethics of the<br />
World Religions’ – hence the phrase ‘big bang’. Professor Lepsius, a senior<br />
editor of the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe, reckons that <strong>Weber</strong> was writing<br />
up to four manuscripts at the same time during this period. Hence a dramatic<br />
expansion had occurred compared with the scholarly monograph of<br />
the Protestant ethic study. Against this statement, however, it has to be held<br />
in mind that the framework of the lectures on national-economy (1898)<br />
outlined a set of interrelating topics that, in its scope (though obviously not
140 The reluctant sociologist<br />
content), rivalled the ambitions of Economy and Society. <strong>Weber</strong> had always<br />
thought on the large scale.<br />
When Marianne <strong>Weber</strong> published as much of <strong>Weber</strong>’s work as she could<br />
lay her hands on in the early 1920s, she was (successfully) securing his legacy.<br />
When the German editors of the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe came to publish<br />
the early versions of Economy and Society, they were faced with a series of<br />
quite punishing dilemmas. If there was some discoverable plan or immanent<br />
textual unity, then obviously this should be respected. But if there was not,<br />
how should the texts be treated? Wolfgang Mommsen, a senior editor of the<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe, comments:<br />
Marianne <strong>Weber</strong>’s assumption that the so-called older section of Economy<br />
and Society which she edited from <strong>Weber</strong>’s papers constituted part<br />
of one comprehensive project was obviously mistaken. In fact the earlier<br />
texts were little more than a heap of manuscripts, many of them incomplete,<br />
most without definite titles or no titles at all.<br />
Furthermore, there was no indication of how they might have been<br />
arranged for publication. They represent an earlier version of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
sociology. 27<br />
The Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe have made the decision to break up the<br />
first drafts into five subvolumes, under the running heading of ‘Wirtschaft<br />
und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftliche Ordnungen und<br />
Mächte. Nachlaß’ (‘Economy and Society. The Economy and the Orders and<br />
Powers of Society. Posthumous Work’). The five subvolumes are entitled:<br />
‘Gemeinschaften’, ‘Religiöse Gemeinschaften’, ‘Recht’, ‘Herrschaft’ and<br />
‘Die Stadt’ (‘Communities’, ‘Religious Communities’, ‘Law’, ‘Domination’<br />
and ‘The City’). Within some of these subvolumes, for example ‘Herrschaft’,<br />
the continuity of chapter headings, which is presented in Part 2 of Economy<br />
and Society, is abandoned for freestanding chapters with their own editorial<br />
introduction.<br />
Against this decision, Hiroshi Orihara has argued that the first drafts<br />
were nearly completed and that there does exist an inherent textual unity.<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> repeatedly cross-referenced to the various components of ‘The<br />
Economy and the Orders and Powers of Society’ (as he had entitled his contribution<br />
in 1914), as in ‘this has been discussed above’ or ‘see the discussion<br />
on this below’. Orihara says there are 447 of these cross-references, all but<br />
six of which he has identified in the texts. These cross-references provide the<br />
basis for reconstructing the structure and the sequencing of ‘The Economy<br />
and the Orders and Powers of Society’. Orihara, therefore, sharply criticizes<br />
the editors of the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe, in their ‘Overview of the<br />
Text of Economy and Society’, for their decision to dismember the textual<br />
corpus. 28<br />
The matter is further complicated because Economy and Society is not<br />
a stand-alone project but part of a far wider programme, known as the
The reluctant sociologist 141<br />
Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. Paul Siebeck was the publisher of Gustav<br />
von Schönberg’s Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie, and on the death of<br />
Schönberg he offered its editorship to <strong>Weber</strong> in August 1908. <strong>Weber</strong> agreed<br />
to this in January 1909 on the condition that, while he might be the lead<br />
editor, the project should be carried forwards as a joint project of all the academic<br />
contributors. Effectively, though, it was <strong>Weber</strong>, in consultation with<br />
Paul Siebeck, who determined the coverage and scope of the new edition of<br />
Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie. The national-economists Georg Bücher<br />
and Eugen von Philippovich played supporting editorial roles to <strong>Weber</strong>. By<br />
May 1910, <strong>Weber</strong> had produced an outline plan for an overall conspectus of<br />
national-economy with publisher’s contracts ready to go out to forty, mainly<br />
German, national-economists.<br />
There was a protracted and bitter dispute with the representatives of<br />
Schönberg’s estate as to whether it had residual rights in the new Handbuch.<br />
The previous four editions had come to be known as Schönberg’sche<br />
Handbuch. To emphasize the change of editors, the new Handbuch under<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s direction was called Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, and it was specifically<br />
stated in its preface (in June 1914) that the attempt to publish a fifth<br />
edition of Schoenberg’s Handbuch had failed and that the Grundriss der<br />
Sozialökonomik was a brand new departure. 29<br />
Social economics was <strong>Weber</strong>’s new way of approaching national-economy<br />
and, as already noted above, the discourse of political economy had already<br />
been displaced in <strong>Weber</strong>’s circle of national-economists. What <strong>Weber</strong><br />
planned and intended by the term ‘social economics’ is a major intellectual<br />
endeavour that I can only indicate (in this book). Initially, it is easier to think<br />
about Grundriss der Sozialökonomik as an extensive exercise in nationaleconomy.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> divided up the field of national-economy into five books:<br />
1 Economy and the science of economics.<br />
2 The specific elements of the modern capitalist economy.<br />
3 The individual areas of production in the modern market economy and<br />
the domestic economic policies of modern states.<br />
4 The international-economy and the foreign economy and social–political<br />
policy of the modern state.<br />
5 The social relations of modern capitalism and the domestic social policy<br />
of the modern state.<br />
This outline is recognizably similar in scope to the lecture course outline<br />
of 1898. There is less emphasis on the historical and more detail on the<br />
specific industries and regulatory problems of the modern economy. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
had returned to his didactic task as a lecturer in national-economy, but this<br />
time drawing on the talents of specialist economists. The outline is a massive<br />
confirmation of <strong>Weber</strong>’s abiding interest in capitalism and its development<br />
and the corollary for its study, national-economy. It also confirms that
142 The reluctant sociologist<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s essayistic treatment of the spirit of capitalism in PESC was built<br />
on a secure and continuing knowledge of just about everything that was<br />
then to be known about capitalism. Bücher was commissioned to write on<br />
the epochs and stages of the economy as well as trade; the Austrian von<br />
Wieser to write on price theory; Joseph Schumpeter to write on the history<br />
of economic doctrines; Werner Sombart to write on the principal character<br />
of modern capitalism as a historical phenomenon. Other authors wrote on<br />
the institutions of finance, transport, industry – their types and location,<br />
mining, agriculture, forestry, hunting and fishing – housing and insurance.<br />
The Grundriss der Sozialökonomik would provide the reader and the student<br />
with a comprehensive presentation of the modern capitalist economy.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> put his own name down for a variety of projects. Just to list these<br />
entries, they comprise: economy and race; economy and society; the methodology<br />
of economics; the modern state and capitalism; modern communication<br />
and news services and the capitalist economy; the limits of capitalism<br />
in agriculture; obstacles and reflex effects in the development of the modern<br />
capitalism; agrarian capitalism and population grouping; capitalism and<br />
the middle class (‘Mittelstand’); social position of the working class; and<br />
monopolistic, communal and bureaucratic tendencies in capitalist development<br />
(with Alfred <strong>Weber</strong>). It seems to me unlikely that he would have gone<br />
through with all these entries, probably at the initial stages indicating his<br />
commitment to the project before finding other authors. But, on the other<br />
hand, there is no reason to doubt his expertise in all these areas.<br />
Much of the material under these headings found its way into what has<br />
been published as Economy and Society. In the Outline of 1910, the actual<br />
heading of ‘Economy and Society’ appeared in Book One under <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
name. It is worth giving the major sections and subsections of Book One.<br />
Its formatting has to be understood if the rationale of Economy and Society<br />
itself is to be grasped. The breakdown of the subject of social economics is<br />
handled systematically by <strong>Weber</strong>, and the sequencing of materials also has to<br />
be understood.<br />
Book One. Economy and Economic Science<br />
I Epochs and stages of the economy (Prof. K. Bücher)<br />
II Economic theory (value and price theory, distribution, exchange, etc.)<br />
(Prof. v. Wieser)<br />
III Economy, nature and society<br />
1 Need and consumption as conditions for and as parts of the economy<br />
(Dr Oldenberg)<br />
2 The natural conditions of the economy<br />
a Geographical conditions (Prof. Hettner)<br />
b Economy and population (Prof. Mombert); economy and race<br />
(Prof. Max <strong>Weber</strong>)<br />
3 The technological conditions of the economy
The reluctant sociologist 143<br />
a Economy and technology (Prof. v. Gottl)<br />
b Labour and the division of labour (Prof. Herkner)<br />
4 Economy and society<br />
a Economy and law (1. principal relations, 2. stages in the<br />
development of the present situation) (Prof. Max <strong>Weber</strong>)<br />
b Economy and social groups (family and local groups, estates and<br />
classes, state) (Prof. Max <strong>Weber</strong>)<br />
c Economy and culture (critique of historical materialism) (Prof.<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong>)<br />
IV Economic science<br />
1 The object and logical nature of (scientific) questioning<br />
(‘Fragestellungen’) (Prof. Max <strong>Weber</strong>)<br />
2 Epochs in the history of methods and general theory (Prof.<br />
Schumpeter)<br />
V Paths of development in economic and sociopolitical systems and ideals<br />
(Prof. v. Philippovich) 30<br />
In Parts I and II, the economy is defined, its development outlined and<br />
economic theory is introduced. By Part III, then, the economy is established<br />
in its own right, and the task is to cross-relate it to economic geography,<br />
technology and society. Society is handled by <strong>Weber</strong> according to a modest<br />
set of categories (law, social groups and whatever lies behind the critique<br />
of historical materialism). Wolfgang J. Mommsen has argued that, at this<br />
stage (1910–12), <strong>Weber</strong>’s principal concern is to cross-relate the economy<br />
to the main communal forms of society – kinship groups, neighbourhood,<br />
family. A probable example of this phase of <strong>Weber</strong>’s writing is reprinted<br />
as Chapter 3 of Roth and Wittich’s edition of Economy and Society. 31 The<br />
original German editors supplied, or interpolated, the chapter heading and<br />
section titles.<br />
If we read the opening section of this text, we can obtain a pretty good<br />
sense of what <strong>Weber</strong> was trying to achieve. It has to be remembered that,<br />
while the scope of the Grundriss was extensive, its individual entries were<br />
meant to be didactic and not weighed down by theory or statistics. Economy<br />
and Society adheres to an encyclopaedia format, and its organization of materials<br />
was meant to aid accessibility and easy comprehension. <strong>Weber</strong> starts<br />
by making things easy for the reader. He will not examine ‘the specific, often<br />
highly complex effects of the ways in which social groups satisfy their economic<br />
wants’. A systematic classification of social groups ‘according to the<br />
structure, content and means of social action – a task that belongs to general<br />
sociology’ will be abandoned.<br />
Only the relationship of the economy to ‘society’ – in our case the general<br />
structure of human groups – will be discussed here and not the<br />
relationship between the economic sphere and specific areas of culture<br />
– literature, art, science, etc. Contents and directions of social action
144 The reluctant sociologist<br />
are discussed only insofar as they give rise to specific forms that are<br />
economically relevant.<br />
(ES, p. 356)<br />
The social groups he then discusses in relation to the economy are the<br />
household, the neighbourhood (farm, village, city street, slum – and, in the<br />
year 2006, it is pertinent to note there now exist a quarter of a million slums<br />
in the world) and kinship group.<br />
This already tells us a great deal about Economy and Society. It was not<br />
a general sociology. The basic perspective is how specific social groups meet<br />
their economic needs and, under that perspective, <strong>Weber</strong> sets out the basic<br />
organizational forms of social groups and how they operate. These are classificatory<br />
forms, not ideal types in the 1905 usage of that heuristic; likewise,<br />
there seems little to connect Economy and Society and the Grundriss to<br />
PESC. The materials <strong>Weber</strong> introduces are very historical – clearly predating<br />
modern capitalism – and this is slightly strange, as the general focus of<br />
the Grundriss is the modern economy. But it does demonstrate that <strong>Weber</strong><br />
remained fairly committed to the periodization we have already seen in the<br />
outline of his lecture course and in Bücher’s stage theory.<br />
This is just a snapshot of what <strong>Weber</strong> must have been writing in the first<br />
phases of Economy and Society, but the pattern of what he is doing is clear,<br />
and it repeats through his other areas of interest – law and culture. So, on<br />
the legal and economic order, he writes that social economics ‘considers<br />
actual human activities as they are conditioned by the necessity to take into<br />
account the facts of economic life’ (ES, pp. 311–12). <strong>Weber</strong> then discusses<br />
the principal legal forms – legal norms, laws, customs and conventions – as<br />
a prelude to considering their interaction with economic life. In establishing<br />
the basic forms, whether they are communal or legal, <strong>Weber</strong> is unable to<br />
stop himself from entering into long definitional passages, where he pins<br />
down the different senses of law, convention and custom. The main task of<br />
Economy and Society would surely be to move to a discussion of law in relation<br />
to economy, for example how community law is related to the village<br />
economic activity in certain ways, or how merchants have recourse to city<br />
or to canon law. It is a pronounced feature that definitions become a thing<br />
in themselves for <strong>Weber</strong>, something he himself recognized when he referred<br />
ironically to his ‘casuistry’. This feature of <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings, to an extent,<br />
detracts from accessibility criteria and the overall pedagogic function of the<br />
Grundriss.<br />
When the first volume of the Grundriss to appear was published in 1914,<br />
it carried a new plan of the entire work (‘Einteilung des Gesamtwerkes’).<br />
It shows that <strong>Weber</strong> withdrew from some of his projected entries and had<br />
greatly expanded his contribution to Economy and Society. The plan is a<br />
crucial guide for the overall structure of Economy and Society, as <strong>Weber</strong> was<br />
writing it in the period before the First World War. Most of the texts that<br />
were published in the Roth and Wittich Economy and Society as ‘Part Two’
The reluctant sociologist 145<br />
can be related to this plan. Economy and Society now occupied a third of<br />
Book One, as Section C. This section was split into two.<br />
C. Economy and Society<br />
I The economy and the orders and powers of society (<strong>Weber</strong>)<br />
II The developmental paths of economic and sociopolitical systems and<br />
ideals (Philippovich)<br />
Subsection II remained the same as in the outline of 1910, and it was to<br />
be written by Philippovich. Subsection One, in English the so-called Part<br />
Two of Economy and Society, is in fact called ‘The Economy and the Orders<br />
and Powers of Society’. Strictly speaking, this is the title of the older parts<br />
to the extent that they formed a unity. This indicates a bolder conception.<br />
The economy is to be related not just to legal and social forms (as in 1910),<br />
but society is conceived of as having orders and powers (‘gesellschaftlichen<br />
Ordnungen und Mächte’). <strong>Weber</strong> provides the following breakdown of topics<br />
under this heading.<br />
1 Categories of the orders of society.<br />
Economy and law in their principal relations.<br />
The economic relationships of groups (‘Verbände’) in general.<br />
2 Household, ‘oikos’ and enterprise.<br />
3 Neighbourhood group, kinship groups, local community.<br />
4 Ethnic relationships of community.<br />
5 Religious communities.<br />
Class conditioning of religions; the religions of civilization and economic<br />
mentality (‘Wirtschaftsgesinnung’).<br />
6 Formation of market relationships (‘Marktvergemeinschaftung’).<br />
7 The political group (‘Verband’).<br />
Developmental conditions of law. Estates (‘Stände’), classes, parties. The<br />
nation.<br />
8 Rulership (‘Herrschaft’):<br />
a Three types of legitimate rulership.<br />
b Political and hierocratic rulership.<br />
c Non-legitimate rulership.<br />
Typology of cities.<br />
d The development of the modern state.<br />
e Modern political parties.<br />
Because ‘Part 2’ of Economy and Society provides some of the most read<br />
and applied passages of sociology, and has done for decades – for example,<br />
the excerpts on nation, ethnic groups, class and status groups – it is important<br />
to realize that they do belong to an overall framework, the 1914<br />
Outline Plan. Like the section on law and social groups, these passages can
146 The reluctant sociologist<br />
of course be read for their own sake as freestanding parts. <strong>Weber</strong>, in writing<br />
these sections, himself becomes absorbed in the development of his ideas<br />
– another of his ‘temperamental qualities’. Although he disclaims writing a<br />
general sociology, he certainly created a series of special sociologies that, in<br />
the American Economy and Society, extends over a 1000 pages. The overall<br />
plan makes clear the interrelation of the sections and, above all, that there is<br />
a continuous reference point in all these writings, the economy, even though<br />
that reference point may disappear for long stretches of the work.<br />
One reason for the increase in length at this stage was that <strong>Weber</strong> had<br />
been let down by one of his principal authors, Karl Bücher. <strong>Weber</strong>, as we<br />
have seen in the ‘Agrarverhältnisse’, had ‘saved’ Bücher by turning his stage<br />
theory of economic evolution into ideal types. The tripartite distinction between<br />
the ‘oikos’, city and modern economies was a pivot on which <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
own thinking as a national-economist turned. That is why Bücher was given<br />
‘pole position’ in Section One, Book One in the Grundriss. Unfortunately,<br />
Bücher had slowed up, he was ill and ageing, and he had belatedly delivered<br />
only twenty pages of dry economic reasoning. The Grundriss was already<br />
behind schedule, and <strong>Weber</strong> had to make good the difference himself in his<br />
section. <strong>Weber</strong> wrote to Paul Siebeck (30 December 1913) to explain and<br />
announce the reason for his own ballooning contribution.<br />
Because Bücher’s ‘Stages of Development’ is wholly insufficient, I have<br />
worked out a unified sociological theory and presentation, which places<br />
all the main forms of social groups (‘Gemeinschaftsformen’) in relation<br />
to the economy: from the family and household to the ‘enterprise’ (‘Betrieb’),<br />
to the clans, to ethnic groups, to religion (all main religions on<br />
earth comprising: a sociology of salvation doctrines and religious ethics,<br />
– what Troeltsch has done but now for all religions, but much shorter),<br />
finally a comprehensive sociological theory of rulership and the state<br />
(‘Staats- und Herrschafts-Lehre’). I should say that nothing like this has<br />
been done before, not even in outline. 32<br />
(The reference to Troeltsch was the latter’s The Social Teaching of the<br />
Christian Churches.) <strong>Weber</strong> also added a footnote to his letter to Siebeck.<br />
‘Later at some point I hope to provide you with a sociology of culture, its<br />
contents (art, literature, Weltanschauung) – not part of this work or only as<br />
a free-standing supplementary volume.’ This was a remarkable statement<br />
of his ambitions, creativity and, one should add, a mind that was looking<br />
around for new avenues of investigation. <strong>Weber</strong> never achieved this goal,<br />
although he did mention it again as an ambition around 1920.<br />
The extra historical material (sections 2 and 3 in the 1914 Plan) was<br />
inserted because Bücher had failed to deliver it. The deficiency <strong>Weber</strong> was<br />
in part making up for concerned Bücher’s notion of ‘primitivism’. Classical<br />
Mediterranean societies had achieved the social and economic forms of the<br />
‘oikos’ in its urban and rural forms. Something still remained to be said about
The reluctant sociologist 147<br />
more basic communal and localist forms such as the household, neighbourhood<br />
and an earlier epoch of clans. <strong>Weber</strong> was able to draw upon previous<br />
work he had done in conjunction with the publication of Marianne <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
Wife and Mother in Relation to the Development of Law. 33<br />
Section 4 on ethnic communities appears to exist in a fairly fragmentary<br />
state, and it relates in part to household and family, through a discussion of<br />
racial intermarriage, and in part to ethnic communities and their relation to<br />
the nation. Section 6 would appear to be fundamental to the project of social<br />
economics as it purports to deal with the social nature of market relationships.<br />
And then we come to the fairly clearly defined sociologies of religion<br />
(section 5) and power and rulership (sections 7 and 8).<br />
An interpretative sociology<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s preoccupation with sociology dates from 1910, and it emerges out<br />
of his massive project on, and commitment to, social economics. We might<br />
even describe <strong>Weber</strong> as a reluctant sociologist. In December 1913, he wrote<br />
to his fellow Grundriss contributors to explain the name change from Handbuch<br />
der Politischen Oekonomie to Grundriss der Sozialökonomik and to update<br />
them on publication plans. Because of the non-submission of important<br />
contributions (a veiled reference to Bücher), <strong>Weber</strong> says he will make good<br />
the deficiency himself in the section on ‘Economy and Society’. His piece<br />
would be ‘a pretty comprehensive sociological discussion’ and, apart from<br />
the circumstances outlined ‘he would never have taken the task on’ (MWG,<br />
II, p. 427). The task that had fallen to him was to relate economy to the principal<br />
orders and powers of society. Here he required a sociology to handle<br />
the major social forms of human life. It is quite noticeable that <strong>Weber</strong> has<br />
no prior account or grand theory of society as an entity. He was still standing<br />
by his distaste for the ‘bad authors’ in sociology. What he required was a<br />
way of particularizing the nature of the social relationship as it existed, and<br />
as it changed, in a variety of settings: for example, the clan, the ‘oikos’, cities,<br />
political groups, structures of power, religious communities, etc. These<br />
elements became a grand design – the orders and powers of society – in the<br />
plan of 1914. And from this, we derive the grand sociologist, Max <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
from the publication of Economy and Society. But it has to be understood<br />
that he is most directly concerned with the nature of social relationships as<br />
these exist in the various areas of social life: household, law, religion, politics,<br />
economy.<br />
1910 also marks his commitment to sociology by becoming a founder<br />
member of the German Sociological Society. This met for the first time in<br />
October 1910, providing a forum for those who wanted to discuss ‘the problems<br />
of living in modern society’, as Marianne <strong>Weber</strong> puts it in her biography.<br />
34 Its emphasis was on contemporary problems, and the first conference<br />
took as its themes technology and culture, race and society, the sociology<br />
of panic, economy and law, and legal science and sociology. The problems
148 The reluctant sociologist<br />
of living in modern society, broadly conceived, relate to the ‘Kapitalismus’<br />
problematic. For <strong>Weber</strong>, who was closely aligned with Simmel in the founding<br />
of the Society, the material, psychic and technological problems faced by<br />
the individual in contemporary science were treated as problems of modern<br />
culture. Lawrence Scaff argues that, at the first meeting, <strong>Weber</strong> ‘took it upon<br />
himself to identify the specific problems of modern culture as the relationship<br />
between the technologies and form of objective culture on the one hand<br />
and the subjective “conduct of life” on the other . . .’. <strong>Weber</strong> wanted culture<br />
to be made a thematic focus of the conference. 35 This picked up the theme<br />
outlined at the end of PESC, where <strong>Weber</strong> dramatizes the fate of the individual<br />
in the face of the giganticism of an impersonal economic order (PESC,<br />
pp. 181–3). <strong>Weber</strong> invested considerable effort and time in trying to get an<br />
inquiry of the press under way (although was ultimately unsuccessful in this).<br />
The press represented one of the major shapers of objective culture. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
proposed the questions, ‘What does the press contribute to the formation<br />
of modern humanity?’ ‘What kinds of mass beliefs and hopes, of “feelings<br />
towards life” (Lebensgefühle) as one says today, of possible points of view<br />
will be destroyed or created anew?’ 36 The answers to these questions threw<br />
the emphasis on to how individuals were able to shape their lives and, hence,<br />
a concern with subjective culture.<br />
Scaff quotes an interesting remark from a letter of Simmel’s concerning<br />
the planning of the second conference of the German Sociological Society<br />
in 1912.<br />
In my opinion for meetings where discussion is expected one should<br />
avoid everything that can or even must lead to a quarrel over concepts<br />
and definitions. In sociology we have in this regard suffered to the point<br />
of suffocation, and a discussion about what folk, nation, or race ‘actually<br />
are’ would be deadly for our session . . .. What do members think<br />
of the theme, the relations of handicraft industry to individual spheres<br />
of culture, that is, to political organization, to art, to relationships with<br />
foreign countries, to the nature of the family, etc.? 37<br />
This statement could stand for <strong>Weber</strong>’s own view of sociology – that it<br />
would be a relational study. In Simmel’s example, he uses artisanal industry<br />
as a topic for study, and the relational questions become ones of its influence<br />
on art and politics and so on. These relationships could only be particularized<br />
and could not be contained by discussion of the nature of social groups.<br />
In <strong>Weber</strong>’s own intervention from the floor in the first conference, he discusses<br />
technology (‘Technik’). <strong>Weber</strong> discusses a series of possible relational<br />
links: technology and capitalism, technology and material determination,<br />
technology and art (and its formal values), technology and the modern urban<br />
sensibility. 38 Sociology then may be said to be the study of contemporary cultural<br />
problems in their relational connection; a study bearing a pronounced<br />
interdisciplinarity. There is little sense of <strong>Weber</strong> committing to a pure sociology<br />
as a freestanding discipline.
The reluctant sociologist 149<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> resigned shortly after the second conference in 1912 following<br />
a heated conference debate on the permissibility of academics expressing<br />
normative viewpoints in the guise of scientific statements. <strong>Weber</strong> was committed<br />
to the Archiv’s stance, outlined in the introduction to the ‘Objectivity’<br />
essay of 1904. <strong>Weber</strong> fought for the principle in another policy forum, the<br />
Verein für Sozialpolitik, in its 1909 conference in Vienna. Mixing science<br />
with value judgements, opined <strong>Weber</strong>, was ‘the work of the devil’. 39 There<br />
had to be a clear separation so that questions of scientific validity could be<br />
assessed unclouded by value judgements, which remained a separate sphere<br />
of public debate. <strong>Weber</strong> was particularly concerned that this principle was<br />
incorporated into the statutes of the German Sociological Society. Sociology<br />
was a fledgling science, and the mixing of normative prescriptions with<br />
scientific analysis had to be avoided. For example, in the study of the press,<br />
it would be only too easy to condemn the content of certain newspapers.<br />
What was important, however, was to analyse the growth of press media and<br />
show how it shaped the individual’s way of thinking regardless of normative<br />
content. Scientific comment here had to remain free from value judgements.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s stance was written into the first paragraph of the German Sociological<br />
Society’s statutes.<br />
The aim is to promote sociological knowledge by the arrangement of<br />
purely scientific investigations and enquiries, by the publication and<br />
support of purely scientific works and by the organization of German<br />
sociology conferences to take place periodically. It will give equal space<br />
to all scientific directions and methods of sociology and will reject the<br />
representation of any practical (ethical, religious, political, aesthetic,<br />
etc.) goals. 40<br />
At the 1912 conference, Rudolf Goldscheid argued for a sociology based<br />
on the scientific study of biology. This, for <strong>Weber</strong>, was an example of hated<br />
monism, that physiological forces could extend their explanatory reach to<br />
parts of behaviour that properly belonged in the cultural sphere of meanings.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> resigned in something of a rage that Statute 1 was not being observed.<br />
He unburdened himself in a letter to Roberto Michels.<br />
I resigned from the executive committee of the ‘sociologists’. In a struggle<br />
in permanence my nerves aren’t a match for such pesky insects as<br />
Herr Goldscheid – for his ‘services’ in good faith and his ‘idealism’ too!<br />
Now I am only still trying to organize the scientific activity as best I can.<br />
May these gentlemen, none of whom can stifle the impulse (for that’s<br />
what it is!) to importune the public with his subjective ‘valuations’, all<br />
infinitely uninteresting to me, and everyone of whom must otherwise<br />
still turn his lectures into hard cash (this does not occur in the Verein<br />
für Sozialpolitik) kindly stay in their own circle. I am absolutely fed up<br />
with appearing time and time again as a Don Quixote of an allegedly<br />
‘unfeasible’ principle and of provoking ‘embarrassing scenes’. 41
150 The reluctant sociologist<br />
Like geographers who cannot read road maps in a car, one might observe<br />
that <strong>Weber</strong> was one of those sociologists who are not the most social animals.<br />
However, despite very obvious temperamental difficulties on <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
part, his joining and leaving the German Sociological Society is an episode<br />
that underlines his very specific expectations for sociology, as a science. It<br />
was to do with cultural meanings and social relationships. The ideal type was<br />
its main instrument of investigation, and this coloured <strong>Weber</strong>’s whole view<br />
of a science of society. Others, with more ‘realist’ or ‘monistic’ theoretical<br />
agendas, failed to understand and to agree with what they would have considered<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s eccentric purism.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s first major dedicated exposition of sociology occurred in his article<br />
‘Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology’, which was published in<br />
the journal Logos in 1913. The fact that <strong>Weber</strong> chose to publish this text<br />
has detracted a little from the fact that it has very strong linkages to the<br />
manuscripts of the older parts of Economy and Society (which he did not<br />
publish). This is one of the reasons why the editors of the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe<br />
chose not to include it in the volumes dedicated to the older parts<br />
of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 42 Hiroshi Orihara has convincingly argued on<br />
the basis of explicit references in the text, which can be cross-referenced to<br />
other parts of Economy and Society, that it stands as a ‘head’ in relation to<br />
the ‘torso’ of the other texts. 43 This is a scholarly and technical dispute, but<br />
both sides acknowledge that ‘Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology’ is<br />
a highly significant text in <strong>Weber</strong>’s intellectual evolution – probably the most<br />
important essay since the 1904 ‘Objectivity’ essay.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, in his opening footnote, writes, ‘The second part of the essay<br />
is a fragment from an exposition written some time ago that was to have<br />
served as a methodological basis for substantive investigations, among which<br />
is a contribution (Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft) to a forthcoming series of<br />
volumes and from which other parts will probably eventually be published<br />
elsewhere.’ 44 This sentence (which I have retranslated more precisely) reveals<br />
that the second part of the essay was indeed a methodological statement<br />
intended for the Grundriss and related directly to Economy and Society. The<br />
‘other parts’ that might be published elsewhere implies that pieces would be<br />
taken out of his writing of Economy and Society – with the inference that<br />
this writing could not be contained within howsoever <strong>Weber</strong> was planning<br />
his own contribution. Since the ‘Categories’ essay was published in 1913, it<br />
predates the plan of 1914, and so <strong>Weber</strong> was already thinking of off-loading<br />
material elsewhere.<br />
The first part of the essay recapitulates material, for the Logos readership,<br />
that <strong>Weber</strong> had been dealing with in his ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ since 1900. The<br />
central issue is how there can be an interpretative science of human behaviour.<br />
Logos was a philosophical journal closely connected to Heidelberg circles,<br />
and it took as its starting point culture both as an object of investigation<br />
and as a means of knowing the world – it was another expression of Baden<br />
neo-Kantianism. <strong>Weber</strong>’s task was, therefore, not so much to convince them<br />
of an interpretivist approach as the way to understanding as to show how
The reluctant sociologist 151<br />
this should correctly proceed and to differentiate his method from other<br />
similar but not always correct approaches. In his opening footnote, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
references this general field. The list comprises Simmel, Rickert, Tönnies,<br />
Vierkandt, Gottl, Husserl and Lask who, in their different ways, took the<br />
individual, meaning and its expression, subjectivity and psychology as their<br />
subject matter.<br />
It is not necessary to analyse the essay in detail. It is quite hard to follow<br />
all <strong>Weber</strong>’s arguments, the exposition of certain points could be fuller,<br />
and the justification of certain arguments is sometimes lacking. He revised it<br />
comprehensively after the war, and this included a whole set of terminological<br />
changes. The later version, to an extent a new text, remains a challenging<br />
document, but it does have a strict logical structure of exposition and<br />
informative explanatory sections. The 1913 ‘Categories’ essay is interesting<br />
for what it tells us about <strong>Weber</strong>’s view of methodology at a point when his<br />
horizons had widened – first with the Grundriss, second the comparative<br />
historical sociology of Economy and Society and, third, his writings on the<br />
economic ethics of world religions, which he had also started. It is in this<br />
wider context of intellectual interests that sociology makes its first major<br />
appearance. The interpretative approach is now called sociology whereas,<br />
previously, especially 1904–5, it was an approach that was applied to the<br />
cultural sciences (and sometimes the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> takes only a page to state the basic case for the role of understanding<br />
(‘Verstehen’). This is an even more brusque treatment than in the<br />
‘Objectivity’ essay where, as we have seen, <strong>Weber</strong> was less than fulsome in<br />
mentioning his methodological debts and sources (to Dilthey in particular).<br />
The first paragraph (of this not widely available essay in English), in its conciseness,<br />
is one of the most forward statements of ‘Verstehen’ to be found<br />
anywhere.<br />
Human behaviour (‘external’ or ‘internal’) exhibits both relational<br />
contexts (‘Zusammenhänge’) and regularities in its course, as do all occurrences.<br />
But what is unique to human behaviour – at least in its full<br />
sense – are contexts and regularities whose course can be intelligibly<br />
interpreted. An [intelligible] ‘understanding’ (‘Verständnis’) of human<br />
behaviour achieved through interpretation contains above all a specific<br />
quality of evidence (‘Evidenz’), which varies greatly in degree. That an<br />
interpretation possesses this evidence in especially high measure does<br />
not in itself prove anything about its empirical validity. For identical behaviour,<br />
in its external course and result, can be based on the most varied<br />
constellations of motives whose most intelligibly evident quality is not<br />
always the one actually in play. Rather, the ‘understanding’ (‘Verstehen’<br />
– inverted commas in original German) of the context must always be<br />
controlled as far as possible by the usual methods of causal imputation<br />
(‘Zurechnung’) before an ever so evident interpretation becomes a valid<br />
‘intelligible explanation’.<br />
(GAWL, pp. 427–8, my translation; see also Cat, p. 151)
152 The reluctant sociologist<br />
The observer thinks the motive for action in a particular context is selfevident<br />
or immediately understandable, but this then has to be checked. On<br />
further observation and consideration, the motive attributed may turn out to<br />
be wrong, and another is imputed in its place as more valid.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> appears to preclude any discussion of hermeneutics, the art of<br />
interpretation, by simply saying it is evident and that validation belongs to<br />
causal attribution. But he then goes on to introduce a scale of interpretation.<br />
What is obviously evident is at the top of the scale. Instrumentally rational<br />
action – how best to achieve a goal – is an example of evident behaviour, as<br />
is our ability to understand behaviour motivated by emotion. Other forms<br />
of behaviour are less accessible to understanding, for example religious<br />
mysticism or that of small children. Abnormal behaviour is not in principle<br />
closed to understanding. <strong>Weber</strong> also cites here psychotic behaviour, a clear<br />
reference to Karl Jaspers’ interpretative method and approach to psychopathology.<br />
At the bottom end of the scale are behaviours that completely<br />
lack the quality of self-evidence – they are incomprehensible. ‘The object of<br />
the discussion, “Verstehen”, is ultimately also the reason why interpretative<br />
sociology . . . treats the single individual and his action as its basic unit, as<br />
its “atom”, if this questionable analogy is allowed here’ (Cat, p. 158). <strong>Weber</strong><br />
continues that there is a threshold, below which the sociological study of<br />
meaningful behaviour gives way to other disciplines that treat the individual<br />
as a complex of ‘psychic, chemical and other processes’. Then there is a<br />
threshold above which the individual is treated. Action is comprehended ‘in<br />
the guise of a persistent structure, either of a material entity, or of a personified<br />
force leading a life of its own’. Jurisprudence will treat the ‘state’ as a<br />
legal personality. This is useful for jurisprudence because it ‘deals with the<br />
interpretation of objective meaning, i.e., with the normative content of legal<br />
propositions’. Interpretative sociology, however, deals with ‘certain kinds of<br />
joint human action’ and not a normatively conceived entity such as the state<br />
or the association, or – for the historian – entities such as feudalism.<br />
Sociology, then, sits between other disciplines such as law and sociobiology<br />
and treats the band of meaningful behaviour of people interacting<br />
with each other. Also, it does not deal with persistent structures, only joint<br />
behaviour of plural individuals.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> clarifies an intellectual pitfall. It is the illusion that, because we<br />
understand something as self-evident, the nature of the explanation rests<br />
with psychology. <strong>Weber</strong> is averse to this, and it was the common criticism<br />
levelled at Dilthey that his interpretative method was merely psychological<br />
intuition. It is here that <strong>Weber</strong> distances himself from Simmel who, in his<br />
Problems in the History of Philosophy, asserted that we understood the motives<br />
of historical personalities because, at some deep level, which he called<br />
‘the soul’, there is a common psychological substratum of understanding.<br />
This was Simmel’s somewhat less than plausible transcendental basis for<br />
understanding the internal motives of historical actors. In its place, <strong>Weber</strong>
The reluctant sociologist 153<br />
asserts the need for causal imputation through consideration of the empirically<br />
ascertainable facts of the situation.<br />
The essay picks up an increasing number of references to history, to religion,<br />
to the irrational basis of salvation beliefs, and to magic, to various<br />
types of economies, to racial and language communities and to law, power,<br />
coercion and rulership – signs of <strong>Weber</strong>’s increasing comparative scope.<br />
How does an interpretative sociology help in this enterprise? This is the ‘the<br />
sociological basis for the substantive studies’ of Economy and Society that<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> mentions in his opening footnote, and it occupies the second half of<br />
the essay. The essay is a sustained deliberation on the forms and formation of<br />
social action that sustain the more obviously sociological character of institutions<br />
and social structures. To use <strong>Weber</strong>’s own (‘inappropriate’) analogy, he<br />
is offering an account of the atomic basis of the orders and powers of society.<br />
This, he says, is the individual. I think it is worth insisting that this is not a<br />
claim for ‘methodological individualism’ – a phrase, incidentally, invented<br />
by Schumpeter not <strong>Weber</strong>. Individuals are particles that combine to create<br />
various sorts of social interaction, and the context of these interactions is<br />
saturated in meaning, to which ‘particles’ orient their behaviour. The reductionism,<br />
which is seen as a virtue of methodological individualism, is not a<br />
valid assumption for <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘atomic’ account. Certainly, individuals are the<br />
only units (‘Einheiten’) that can, for <strong>Weber</strong>, be legitimately used in sociological<br />
analysis, but they exist in a state of indeterminacy and openness. The<br />
nature of the interactions is never structured according to clear boundaries,<br />
there is always a fluidity between types of interaction. <strong>Weber</strong> insists upon this<br />
because he wants to eliminate top-down sociological theories. The state or<br />
law or the organization is a nominal entity produced by types of interactions<br />
working with specific textures of meaning. Political science or jurisprudence<br />
or organizational theory may choose to treat these entities as real – or, in the<br />
terminology of legal theory, to concede to them legal personalities – but this<br />
is inadmissible for sociology. These nominal entities should not be assumed<br />
to be real or, as <strong>Weber</strong> sometimes expressed it: they should not be hypostatized;<br />
individual behaviour cannot be deduced from these high-level entities,<br />
nor can higher level structures be induced from individuals.<br />
What does remain a constant for <strong>Weber</strong> are interaction processes and<br />
contexts of meaning. This might seem a little perverse or anti-sociological.<br />
But, as we have seen in the last chapter with respect to J.S. Mill and Comte,<br />
once a methodology commits to either deductive or inductive (or variants<br />
thereof) accounts of individual and society, the justifying theoretical and<br />
epistemological scaffolding becomes extensive and vulnerable to some fairly<br />
basic objections – many of which were raised by Dilthey. The interaction<br />
processes in contexts of meaning do, however, result in regularities. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
asserts this in the opening sentence of the essay, ‘human behaviour . . . exhibits<br />
both relational contexts and regularities’.<br />
In the ‘Categories’ essay, these regularities are shaped by three basic types
154 The reluctant sociologist<br />
of interaction: (1) Individuals might chose to form communal or social links.<br />
The German term that <strong>Weber</strong> uses is ‘Gemeinschaftshandeln’. Literally, this<br />
means communal action, but what <strong>Weber</strong> is denoting by ‘Gemeinschaft’<br />
lies semantically somewhere between the English ‘social’ and ‘communal’.<br />
(2) Individuals might choose to form associational links (‘Gesellschaftshandeln’).<br />
This behaviour is oriented to the assumption that some sort of order<br />
exists with a set of rules, which can be related to rationally. (3) Individuals<br />
might choose to forms links on the basis of coming to an agreement (‘Einverständnishandeln’).<br />
Individuals enter into or become part of these three<br />
types, which are fluid between each other, from opposed or complementary<br />
interests – this is the aspect of external behaviour. In their ‘internal’ aspect,<br />
a variety of motives may be operant. These belong to the sliding scale already<br />
mentioned: subjectively instrumental motives, motivation driven by<br />
emotions, irrational motives extending to the psychotic and non-meaningful<br />
behaviour based on sheer unthinking habit.<br />
This is, so to speak, a summary of <strong>Weber</strong>’s atomic theory of social interaction.<br />
It is so densely written that it can scarcely be reckoned to be a<br />
success. It is an extremely pregnant essay with a wealth of ideas and quite<br />
fundamental thinking – one that could be profitably reworked in a number<br />
of ways. As I said, <strong>Weber</strong> rewrote it when he drastically revised the older<br />
parts of Economy and Society after 1918. The main function and purpose<br />
of the essay is to present interpretative sociology as the undergirding theory<br />
to the substantive part of Economy and Society – the various sociologies of<br />
the economy, law, religion, power and the state. The orders and powers of<br />
society are inevitably going to be discussed, by <strong>Weber</strong> and others, as possessing<br />
qualities of structure, order, hierarchy and boundaries. This is inevitable<br />
because most people will think of society in this way and, secondly, for the<br />
sociologist, it becomes a necessary shorthand. That being said, <strong>Weber</strong> is insistent<br />
that the structuring qualities are interaction processes in relational<br />
contexts of meaning. <strong>Weber</strong>’s word for these power, order or institutional<br />
structures is ‘Gebilde’, which he often place in inverted commas. ‘Gebilde’ is<br />
a polyvalent word: its meanings include thing, object, construction, creation,<br />
pattern, shape, organization and figment (of imagination). Its ambivalence<br />
turns on something concrete yet something also being formed. For <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
this indeterminacy is an inherent feature of structure.<br />
In the last part of this section, I will highlight the (few) examples that <strong>Weber</strong><br />
presents to link interpretative sociology to the substantive sociologies.<br />
‘We shall speak of “social action” (“Gemeinschaftshandeln”) wherever human<br />
action is subjectively related in meaning to the behaviour of others. An<br />
unintended collision of two cyclists, for example, shall not be called social<br />
action.’ But in the resultant aftermath, whether amicable or not, a meaningful,<br />
and so social, relationship is established. Social action can be oriented<br />
in its entirety to meaning, as in the case of devotion to (religious) values.<br />
An obvious example of ‘association’ action is the voluntary association. It<br />
is ‘an associational action wherein all participants have rationally agreed on
The reluctant sociologist 155<br />
an order defining the purpose and the methods of their joint action’ (Cat, p.<br />
163). Agreement between economic actors in the case of a cartel is another<br />
example of associational action. Supermarkets, for example, might form an<br />
ad hoc agreement to fix prices. In <strong>Weber</strong>’s day, the whole structure of production,<br />
pricing and sales was regulated by cartels with a permanent staff. The<br />
whole field of economic exchange throws up a range of examples of types<br />
of association. Some sort of permanent legal (and associational) order can<br />
guarantee the validity of exchange on the markets (with enforceable laws for<br />
breaches of agreements). Or, more minimally, economic actors may develop<br />
their own agreed rules for associating in exchanges. The associational nature<br />
of exchange does not generate, says <strong>Weber</strong>, enduring structures. Similarly,<br />
the history of the state originates in temporary associations, for example in<br />
military expeditions for booty and ad hoc defence associations that could<br />
cease to exist.<br />
A language community is an example of agreed action (‘Einverständnis’),<br />
‘ “as if ” those speaking were orienting their behaviour toward rationally<br />
agreed upon grammatical rules’ (Cat, p. 167). <strong>Weber</strong> introduces this example<br />
specifically to reject alternative explanations of a language community. ‘All<br />
analogies to the “organism” and to similar biological concepts are doomed<br />
to sterility.’<br />
‘Domination as the most significant foundation of nearly all organizational<br />
action, whose analytical problematic begins here, is necessarily an<br />
object of separate consideration not to be explained here.’ This is an explicit<br />
reference to his (massive) sociology of ‘Herrschaft’ as he developed it in<br />
the early parts of Economy and Society. Its sociological analysis ‘depends<br />
decisively on the varying possible subjectively meaningful bases of that legitimacy<br />
agreement . . .’ (Cat, p. 177). Legitimacy was determinative for<br />
submission where naked power and coercion do not intervene. The varieties<br />
of legitimacy in his substantive sociology encompass the belief in tradition,<br />
the belief in the charismatic personality and the belief in rational legitimacy<br />
of an order of rules.<br />
Although these examples, in their sparseness, may not strike us as completely<br />
persuasive of the worth of the approach (an interpretative sociology),<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is offering, in principle, that any part of the substantive sociologies<br />
can be traced back to some type of interaction, or multiplicity of types, and<br />
the particular meanings that context interactions. An organization, a social<br />
group, a religious sect, a rational mechanistic bureaucracy, a retinue and so<br />
on, these are all to be approached through <strong>Weber</strong>’s interpretative sociology.<br />
It is a frequent complaint that <strong>Weber</strong> failed to provide an adequate linkage<br />
between structural and substantive sociology – where wholesale rulerships<br />
and cultures take the stage – and his individualizing method. The ‘Categories’<br />
essay supplies the answer to the complaint: the indeterminacy of interaction<br />
types and meanings underwrites more ‘structural’ sociology but refuses to<br />
confirm structures as entities in their own right.
6 The Sociology of Religion<br />
The period 1910 to the summer of 1914 stands as a period of exceptional<br />
productivity. <strong>Weber</strong> had put on hold his Protestantism studies, only returning<br />
to them in 1919 to revise them for their inclusion in his ‘Collected Essays<br />
in the Sociology of Religion’. In the last chapter, his move into an encyclopaedic<br />
charting of the principal relations of economy and society were<br />
outlined. Using an abbreviated version of the Outline Plan of 1914, I have<br />
listed the main headings of this in the right hand column of Figure 6.1. In<br />
the left hand column are listed his studies – actualised and planned – on the<br />
‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’.<br />
Feeding into this diagram are the ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ and the<br />
essay ‘Sociological Categories of Interpretative Sociology’, both of which<br />
were discussed in the last chapter. I have not entered them into the diagram.<br />
The ‘Categories’ essay is central to this expansive period of <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings.<br />
‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ precedes the period, but sets up the<br />
scaffolding for a comparative approach. It provided a three-way comparison<br />
between Rome, Greece and the Near East. The analysis of the Near East<br />
offered a linkage in the form of the bureaucratic liturgical state to the ideal<br />
type of patrimonialism, and was able to include Chinese structures of rulership.<br />
Religion, which had only be touched upon in terms of the economic<br />
functions of temple treasuries and the place of priests within the ruling elites,<br />
was to be expanded as a set of sociological categories and applied to China,<br />
India, the Near East and the traditions of Christianity in the Mediterranean<br />
and inland Europe.<br />
It is important to grasp the specific status of these texts and plans. There<br />
is a large discrepancy between what <strong>Weber</strong> intended and what was subsequently<br />
published. <strong>Weber</strong> planned to write works that he never got around<br />
to executing. And the converse is just as important: he wrote texts that were<br />
subsequently published but that he himself would not have published – and<br />
certainly not in the unrevised state in which they appeared after his death.<br />
This gives us three main categories of his texts and plans:
Collected Essays<br />
in the Sociology of<br />
Religion<br />
Prefatory Remarks 3<br />
The Protestant<br />
Ethic and the Spirit<br />
of Capitalism 3<br />
Protestant Sects<br />
and Spirit of Capitalism<br />
3<br />
EEWR<br />
Introduction 3<br />
Confucianism 3<br />
Intermediate<br />
Reflection 3<br />
Hinduism and<br />
Buddhism 3<br />
Ancient Judaism 3<br />
Mesopotamia, Eygpt,<br />
Persia 1<br />
European Bürgertum 1<br />
Talmudic Judaism 1<br />
Islam 1<br />
Oriental Christianity 1<br />
Occidental<br />
Christianity 1<br />
Figure 6.1 Publication plans.<br />
The<br />
Sociology<br />
of Religion 2<br />
Versions of Economy and Society for<br />
Grundriss der Sozialökonomik<br />
Outline Plan of 1914<br />
Economy and the Orders and Powers<br />
of Society<br />
1. Categories of the orders of society 2<br />
2. Household, Oikos, and Enterprise 2<br />
3. Neighbourhood group, kinship<br />
groups, local community 2<br />
4. Ethnic relationships of community 2<br />
5. Religious communities 2<br />
6. Formation of market relationships 2<br />
7. The political group (‘Verband’)<br />
Developmental conditions of law<br />
Estates (‘Stände’), classes, parties<br />
The nation 2<br />
8. Rulership (‘Herrschaft’):<br />
a) Three types of legitimate rulership 2<br />
b) Political and hierocratic rulership 2<br />
c) Non-legitimate rulership 2<br />
Typology of cities<br />
d) The development of the modern<br />
state 1<br />
e) Modern political parties 1<br />
Economy and Society. Final Version<br />
(1920)<br />
Basic Sociological Concepts 3<br />
Basic Sociological Concepts of<br />
Economizing 3<br />
Sociology of Domination 3<br />
Classes and Status Groups 3
158 The Sociology of Religion<br />
1 Planned but unrealized texts.<br />
2 Texts that were written but due to be revised, or not published at all, yet<br />
were published after his death.<br />
3 Texts that were written and brought to publication by <strong>Weber</strong> himself.<br />
Each of these categories is registered in superscript in Figure 6.1.<br />
Moving to the columns, on the right is ‘The Economy and the Orders and<br />
Powers of Society’. What has to be held in mind at this point is that it was<br />
essentially a commissioned work for the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. As<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> was the lead editor for the Grundriss, he had considerable leeway to<br />
adapt his own contribution. We can see in his relationship, and correspondence,<br />
with his publisher (Siebeck) that the specifications of his contribution<br />
underwent a number of changes. There still remains, however, a tension<br />
between the encyclopaedia format of ‘The Economy and Orders and Powers<br />
of Society’ (hereafter EOPS), including the requirement that it relate to the<br />
overall architecture of the Grundriss, and the historical themes and ideal<br />
types that belonged distinctively to <strong>Weber</strong>’s own plans. (One of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
major headaches here was inflation. In pursuing a number of not necessarily<br />
compatible goals, <strong>Weber</strong> tended to overwrite his contribution. This is one of<br />
the reasons why he needed to revise the manuscripts of the ‘older part’, and<br />
so these texts carry the superscript 2.)<br />
The column on the left is headed ‘Collected Essays in the Sociology of<br />
Religion’. The contents carry the superscript 1 and 3. The studies on Confucianism,<br />
on Hinduism and Buddhism and on Ancient Judaism are among the<br />
most famous and respected essays <strong>Weber</strong> wrote and, as such, do not require<br />
much additional comment here. <strong>Weber</strong> published them first in the Archiv<br />
and then revised them – the Confucian study considerably – for publication<br />
in his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (‘Collected Essays in the<br />
Sociology of Religion’). What stands out in the list are the titles bearing<br />
superscript 3 – the texts he planned but never wrote.<br />
Between the two columns stands the work known in English as The<br />
Sociology of Religion and, in German, as Religiöse Gemeinschaften. Typen<br />
religiöser Vergemeinschaftung (‘Religious Communities. Types of Religious<br />
Sociation’). Strictly speaking, it belongs in the right hand column and is<br />
the same as no. 5, as the title indicates. But <strong>Weber</strong> extracted whole sections<br />
from it and used them in the works in the left hand column, in particular the<br />
‘Introduction’ to ‘The Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ and the ‘Intermediate<br />
Reflection’ essays. Marianne <strong>Weber</strong> published the old manuscript<br />
of The Sociology of Religion in its entirety after <strong>Weber</strong>’s death, even though<br />
bits had already been published and the manuscript was unfinished. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
would have had to rework the manuscript had he chosen to publish it in the<br />
revised Economy and Society, which he worked on in the last two years of<br />
his life. The Sociology of Religion, to give it its English book title translation,<br />
stands at the centre of the matrix.<br />
It is quite hard to come to grips with this period of <strong>Weber</strong>’s creativity,<br />
because of the sheer scale and depth of his researches. (Also, it should be
The Sociology of Religion 159<br />
noted, I have omitted from the diagram his study on the sociology of music,<br />
which <strong>Weber</strong> deliberately abandoned because of doubts about its value;<br />
also his study, on The City, which most probably belongs within this period,<br />
standing somewhere between the ‘Agrarverhältnisse’ and the manuscripts for<br />
‘The Economy and the Orders and Powers of Society’.) Some economy of<br />
mental effort might be had if the upper part of the right hand column is<br />
ignored on the grounds that <strong>Weber</strong> intended to revise those chapters. This is<br />
an unconvincing move for various reasons. The chapters have all been published,<br />
some as freestanding books – especially in translation – so some effort<br />
must be made to understand the original context. The right hand column<br />
operates as a counterweight to the studies on the world religions (in the left<br />
hand column). Then, finally, one has to be able to understand the rationale<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong>’s late and uncompleted revision of the chapters in the right hand<br />
column. The final revision was a very intellectually assertive exercise, and it<br />
goes to the heart of how <strong>Weber</strong> thought modernity should be studied. The<br />
phase of 1910–14 had not quite found the right balance and method.<br />
The interrelation between the left hand and right hand columns can be<br />
grasped if the correspondence between <strong>Weber</strong> and his publisher is followed.<br />
This has become available with the publication of most of the relevant volumes<br />
in the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe. As noted in the previous chapter,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> wrote (in December 1913) to Paul Siebeck about the progress (or lack<br />
of it) of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik.<br />
Because Bücher’s ‘Stages of Development’ is wholly insufficient, I have<br />
worked out a unified sociological theory and presentation, which places<br />
all the main forms of social groups (‘Gemeinschaftsformen’) in relation<br />
to the economy: from the family and household to the ‘enterprise’ (‘Betrieb’),<br />
to the clans, to ethnic groups, to religion (all main religions on<br />
earth comprising: a sociology of salvation doctrines and religious ethics,<br />
– what Troeltsch has done but now for all religions, but much shorter),<br />
finally a comprehensive sociological theory of rulership and the state<br />
(‘Staats- und Herrschafts-Lehre’). I should say that nothing like this has<br />
been done before, not even in outline. 1<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> continued that in a fortnight he would send a table of contents.<br />
This has not been found, but the Outline Plan of 1914, which is reproduced<br />
in abbreviated form in the right hand column (see p. 145 for full outline),<br />
corresponds to what <strong>Weber</strong> lists in the above letter. Item 5 of the Outline<br />
Plan of 1914 ‘Religiöse Gemeinschaften’ also includes ‘The Class Determination<br />
of Religions. The Religions of Civilization and Economic Mentality’.<br />
Schmidt-Glintzer’s comments that this indicates the insertion of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
comparative research on religion into the plans for the Grundriss. <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
analysis would provide a critical analysis of both sides of the argument on<br />
determination – does class determine religion? does religion determine class?<br />
– and the analysis would involve material taken from the main religions of<br />
civilization.
160 The Sociology of Religion<br />
Schmidt-Glintzer also comments that we cannot establish any chronological<br />
or substantive sequencing of the materials in both right and left columns.<br />
In the period 1910–14, <strong>Weber</strong> was writing for both the ‘Economic Ethics’<br />
project and for his contribution to the Grundriss. 2<br />
The correspondence on the ‘Economic Ethics of World Religions’ is informative.<br />
Although these essays started to appear in October 1915 in the<br />
Archiv, it appears that they belong to the same period of composition as the<br />
Sociology of Religion. <strong>Weber</strong> volunteered for service duties the day after war<br />
was declared in August 1914, and he only turned back to academic work in<br />
the summer of 1915, and then only partially. He was not fully released from<br />
his hospital administrative post until the end of September. The Grundriss<br />
project was placed on hold until the war was over. Siebeck’s were starved of<br />
copy. <strong>Weber</strong> wrote to the publisher on 12 June 1915.<br />
I would be prepared to give the Archiv a series of essays on the ‘Economic<br />
Ethics of World Religions’ which have sat here since the start of<br />
the war and only need to be read through for style – preliminary work<br />
and elucidation for the systematic sociology of religion in ‘G. d. S. Ö’.<br />
They will have to appear as they are – with almost no footnotes, since<br />
at the moment I can’t do any work whatsoever on them. They comprise<br />
Confucianism (China), Hinduism and Buddhism (India), Judaism, Islam,<br />
Christianity. I flatter myself that these essays, which bring to bear the<br />
general application of the methods of the essay ‘The Prot. Ethic and<br />
Spirit of Capitalism’, will likewise provide a strong contrast to the relevant<br />
volumes. They can be published separately later along with that<br />
essay, if you wish. But not now, since in their present form they are only<br />
appropriate as journal essays. As always I offer them first to the Archiv. If<br />
that doesn’t suit – that is if you and Jaffé only want war-time issues, then<br />
I won’t take offence and on this occasion perhaps try another journal.<br />
The essays are quite long. Some 4 essays of 4–5 Bogen. It will be good<br />
for the G. d. S. Ö. if they were published soon, at least some of them.<br />
For the publication in the G. d. S. Ö. will have to be more limited and<br />
‘systematic’. I’ve spoken to Dr Lederer about this. Please send this letter<br />
to Jaffé if you wish.<br />
(MWG, I/19, pp. 35–6)<br />
It should be noted that <strong>Weber</strong> was offering his publisher studies on Islam<br />
and Christianity. While these were never published, the implication of the<br />
letter is that they were to hand. More still was to be offered. When the first<br />
instalment on Ancient Judaism was published in the Archiv in October 1917,<br />
its opening footnotes read, ‘The following presentation is published omitting<br />
the debates on Egyptian, Babylonian and Persian circumstances. This will be<br />
added in a future collection and revised publication (including references for<br />
China and enlarged) together with older and some still unpublished essays.’ 3<br />
On 24 May 1917, <strong>Weber</strong> wrote to his publisher, ‘The revision and expansion
The Sociology of Religion 161<br />
of the first essays for the Gesamtausgabe (if you wish the “Collected Essays”<br />
together with Kapitalismus and Protestantismus) will happen after the war.<br />
This could be three medium sized volumes if collection extended to study<br />
on Christianity.’<br />
After the war, in August 1919, <strong>Weber</strong> informed his wife of his publishing<br />
schedule. ‘I’m now getting to work on “Protestant Ethic” in preparation<br />
for printing. Then, the “Economic Ethics”. After that the Sociology . . . I<br />
work slowly on the “Protestant Ethic” edition and other articles and will see<br />
through the other things.’<br />
And on 11 September 1919, he wrote to Siebeck,<br />
The Preliminary Remarks (Vorbemerkung) is not yet written, it will follow<br />
soon after the manuscript of the revised ‘Spirit of Capitalism’ is<br />
ready. ‘Church and Sects’ will follow in 8 days.<br />
Then the essays of ‘Economic Ethics of World Religions’ would have<br />
followed. China (Confucianism) is already partly enlarged, but needs a<br />
few weeks extra work. India is ready for printing as it is, after proofreading.<br />
Then an essay needs to be inserted, which is not yet written<br />
(but is in my head) over the general reasons of occidental separate<br />
development. Then follows Judaism (just has to be corrected).<br />
Of ‘Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft’ (GSÖ) I could send the start, but its<br />
continuation has still and unconditionally to be thoroughly revised.<br />
(MWG, I/19, p. 44)<br />
For the ‘Collected Essays in Religion’, he wrote out the following advert,<br />
which was received by the publisher on 24 September 1919:<br />
Almost all the essays collected together have appeared in the Archiv für<br />
Sozialpolitik und Sozialwissenschaft but are now not only checked but<br />
enlarged through considerable insertions and the adding of material. At<br />
the start is the much discussed essay on ‘The Protestant Ethic and the<br />
Spirit of Capitalism’. Then, following a sketch on the ‘The Protestant<br />
Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’ (revision of an essay from the Christliche<br />
Welt), the essays on the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’<br />
enlarged with a short presentation of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and<br />
Zoroastrian religious ethics, but in particular through a short sketch – on<br />
the origins of the social distinctiveness of the Occident – of the development<br />
of the European Bürgertum in Antiquity and the Middle Ages.<br />
The presentation of Judaism stretches back to the beginning of the Maccabaean<br />
period. A third volume will contain the presentation of early<br />
Christianity, of Talmudic Judaism, of Islam and of Oriental Christianity,<br />
a final volume on the Christianity of the Occident. The overall subject<br />
concerns the question: What are the grounds for the economic and social<br />
distinctiveness (‘Eigenart’) of the Occident, as it has originated and,<br />
in particular, how it connects with the development of religious ethics. 4
162 The Sociology of Religion<br />
The various items in both columns can be checked against these letters.<br />
Very broadly speaking, the Economic Ethics of the World Religions in the<br />
left-hand column is concerned with the developmental history of whole civilizations.<br />
The right hand column with the first drafts (EOPS) and their later<br />
revision as Economy and Society were intended as <strong>Weber</strong>’s contribution to<br />
the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik and, in that respect, would follow a more<br />
systematic format. Even though <strong>Weber</strong> did not meet his publication plans<br />
for EEWR, the inference is that these belonged to the period before 1914.<br />
The letter of 12 June 1915 indicates that <strong>Weber</strong> did not rigidly separate the<br />
two projects: the EEWR studies were preliminary studies for the Grundriss,<br />
almost implying that they were working papers. He allowed the Archiv to<br />
publish them as a wartime contingency, but they had to be brought up to<br />
proper publishing standard for the publication of the ‘Collected Essays in<br />
the Sociology of Religion’ in 1920. The Grundriss commanded priority in<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s mind. He wrote to Siebeck, his publisher, in February 1917, ‘If only<br />
the war would end then I could return to my Grundriss volume. But within<br />
myself it is just not possible and I prefer to pursue the articles on the Relig.<br />
Sociology further. But my desire is for the other.’ 5<br />
The exact relationship of these two contemporaneous projects has been<br />
a source of some fascination to <strong>Weber</strong> specialists. Friedrich Tenbruck, in a<br />
seminal article, argued that <strong>Weber</strong>’s main insights were contained in the<br />
studies for EEWR. Tenbruck was writing at a time when cultural analysis<br />
was not yet fashionable, and the full thrust of <strong>Weber</strong>’s arguments were not<br />
fully appreciated (not least because of the vagaries of translation). 6 Tenbruck<br />
picked up on the simple but very powerful idea that worldviews, provided<br />
by religion and culture, structure people’s actions at the level of perception<br />
and the interpretation of the meaning of the world. This contrasted with<br />
Economy and Society where the main determinants appear to be socioeconomic<br />
and political in nature. This set up a fairly stark debate between some<br />
sort of materialist/power analysis versus the role of cultural determination.<br />
Tenbruck himself inclined to a version of cultural conservatism and clearly<br />
felt that culture and civilization had to be assessed in terms of fundamental<br />
values. In this respect, a post-1945 civilization based on American values<br />
– material well-being and political democracy – seemed ill-equipped to ask<br />
the deeper, more Tolstoyan questions of the purpose of the conduct of life<br />
and the underlying nature of society. Only by grasping in a comparative<br />
manner the way in which cultures underwrote civilizations could some critical<br />
purchase be applied to a contemporary diagnosis. Tenbruck questioned<br />
whether modernity and progress could be so glibly equated, although at<br />
times his position verged towards an anti-modernity. While <strong>Weber</strong> on many<br />
occasions struck the pessimistic chord (usually most plangently), it would<br />
have been wrong for Tenbruck to term <strong>Weber</strong> an anti-modernist. The Grundriss<br />
was a wholesale document for the modernization of the German-speaking<br />
world by making available the most up-to-date social science knowledge.<br />
But Tenbruck did draw attention to a very <strong>Weber</strong>ian theme. Modernity was<br />
not a given, it was the product of a historical and cultural determination, and
The Sociology of Religion 163<br />
this was a proper object of critical discourse. Even as his letters to Siebeck<br />
above show, <strong>Weber</strong> wished to advert to the singularity and distinctiveness of<br />
the Occident. Belonging to modernity meant knowing about its constitution<br />
and, through civilizational analysis, its alternatives. 7<br />
Johannes Winckelmann, the German editor of the fifth edition of Wirtschaft<br />
und Gesellschaft, unsurprisingly defended its claims as <strong>Weber</strong>’s main<br />
work. <strong>Weber</strong>, as we have just seen, certainly saw it as his main priority. There<br />
is also, however, the undeniable point that <strong>Weber</strong> never finished it. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
was not prepared to let it be published in its pre-1914 state – it had to<br />
be ‘unconditionally’ revised. But he revised in full only three chapters of a<br />
work that in 1914 was to contain eight chapters. Wolfgang Schluchter was<br />
the first scholar to outline meticulously the chronology of both projects,<br />
and he was able to show a high degree of interdependence between them. 8<br />
Schluchter also worked his way through the conceptual arguments of both<br />
projects and was able to re-engineer a schematic presentation of all the main<br />
ideas and concepts that belonged to both projects. One perhaps unwanted<br />
consequence of this reconstruction was to bring the dry systematic character<br />
of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft to the much more free-flowing and, at times,<br />
more passionately written studies on the world religions. The two projects<br />
might be related, but they belonged to two different intellectual styles within<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s thinking. There is no standardized <strong>Weber</strong> analysis but, instead, a<br />
multiplicity of styles and formats.<br />
The Sociology of Religion certainly gave Schluchter a substantial pretext,<br />
for it can be seen from the diagram to be part of both projects, thus furnishing<br />
arguments of interdependence. The Sociology of Religion is a brilliant, freely<br />
formulated text. It was also left unfinished, would not have been published<br />
without major revision by <strong>Weber</strong> and is, on first acquaintance, bewildering<br />
to follow. In what follows, I draw attention to some of its oddities and weaknesses<br />
rather than simply assuming that its textual status is an unproblematic<br />
basis for interpretation.<br />
The Sociology of Religion was having to meet and satisfy quite a number<br />
of challenging demands. In the Grundriss, <strong>Weber</strong>’s specific task was to follow<br />
the series of enduring institutions – household, neighbourhood, ethnic community,<br />
religious groups, market association, the political group, law, social<br />
stratification and the major types of rulership – and to show the various lines<br />
of co-determination of these institutions with the economy. This was the task<br />
of social economics and the rationale of the Grundriss itself. And, to perform<br />
this task, <strong>Weber</strong> had developed his ‘Categories of Interpretative Sociology’<br />
to analyse more exactly the nature of the social interactions involved. The<br />
Sociology of Religion became a special sociology, like those of law and rulership.<br />
Like them, it became a book-length treatment. Partly, this was because<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> could not resist the legalistic casuistry of minute conceptual definition<br />
and accompanying explanations and examples; partly, because he was increasingly<br />
drawn into a comparative orbit beyond the circle of occidental<br />
history.<br />
The Sociology of Religion, in going beyond its original basis, gave birth to
164 The Sociology of Religion<br />
the studies in the world religions. All the titles, both realized and planned,<br />
in the left hand column are mentioned, discussed and analysed in the Sociology<br />
of Religion. Whole sections in EEWR are lifted straight out of the text<br />
of the Sociology of Religion – in the ‘Introduction’, ‘Confucianism’ and the<br />
‘Intermediate Reflection’ 9 – and hence there is some justification in thinking<br />
that it served as an outline sketch for thinking about other religions and<br />
civilizations and their development. And, in being pulled in this direction,<br />
it became a less systematic treatise on the relation of religion, economy and<br />
basic institutions.<br />
Debates over religion in ‘Religionswissenschaft’<br />
The editor of the Sociology of Religion for the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe,<br />
Hans Kippenberg, has reconstructed the debates and the sources on which<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> drew. Kippenberg’s work is a major scholarly intervention, because<br />
it shows how dependent <strong>Weber</strong> was on the new scientific study of religion<br />
when it came to dealing with the subject in comparative perspective. Because<br />
the Sociology of Religion has no footnotes, nor any kind of introductory<br />
literature review of current debates, it has been assumed that all the<br />
concepts were <strong>Weber</strong>’s own. This is quite misleading, and it should also be<br />
remembered that <strong>Weber</strong>, while being highly original, was also a very reactive<br />
author. Also, there has been a tendency to assimilate his Sociology of Religion<br />
with his other writings. But examining his sources, and the major debates<br />
that were involved, a different picture emerges. Many of the major concepts<br />
that he took from ‘Religionswissenschaft’ were in themselves unresolved and<br />
still open. Despite the brilliance of some of his writing, The Sociology of Religion<br />
should be regarded as an exploratory work. In going comparative, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
had logged into a new set of problems – and without properly escaping<br />
the issues raised by the critical debates over PESC. Much of the exposition<br />
of sources in this section is taken from Kippenberg’s ‘Einleitung’ to Religiöse<br />
Gemeinschaften in the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe.<br />
The major scriptural sources of the main world religions were being<br />
translated and commented upon by European scholars in this period. The<br />
German discipline of ‘Religionswissenschaft’ was developing an objective<br />
study of religion without prioritizing the revelatory superiority of Christianity.<br />
In particular, it was establishing the historical provenance of sacred texts<br />
– when they were written and under what societal circumstances. Much of<br />
the conceptual structure and terminology of the Sociology of Religion were<br />
taken directly from this academic context with which <strong>Weber</strong> had obviously<br />
been staying in close contact. The study of religion in Germany was guided<br />
by neo-Kantian methodology, and Rickert and Windelband were influential.<br />
At the first conference of the German Sociology Society in October 1910,<br />
an afternoon of debate was given over to religion. Troeltsch gave the opening<br />
paper on ‘Stoic–Christian Natural Law and Profane Natural Law’ and,<br />
in the subsequent (stenographically recorded) debate, Ferdinand Tönnies,
The Sociology of Religion 165<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Georg Simmel, Martin Buber and Hermann Kantorowicz were<br />
contributors. Then there was the Eranos club in Heidelberg to which <strong>Weber</strong><br />
belonged. From 1904 to 1908, a small group of professors would meet on a<br />
monthly basis in semester time to give papers on religion and society, treated<br />
historically and comparatively.<br />
The conceptual train of <strong>Weber</strong>’s argument in The Sociology of Religion<br />
can be aligned alongside contemporary approaches. Reduced to a conceptual<br />
skeleton, <strong>Weber</strong> argues that no definition of religion can be provided other<br />
than that it revolves around various attempts – religion, magic, frenzy, cults,<br />
totemism, etc. – to utilize, by coercion or by pleading, extraordinary powers<br />
for protection against nature or human foes. These attempts most usually<br />
concern goals in this world – prosperity, health, security – whereas developed<br />
religions tend to concern other-worldly goals such as immortality, the soul,<br />
nirvana and so on. What <strong>Weber</strong> wishes to explain is how the more frequent<br />
naturalistic state of ‘religion’, in which this-worldly goals are thought about<br />
as being deliverable by natural objects, is transformed into religions that are<br />
capable of devising abstract gods whose worship and attendance is oriented<br />
to godly purposes, not human needs in this world. For this to occur, personal<br />
bearers (charismatics, magicians) and ways of delivering extraordinary powers<br />
(frenzy, cultic rites) have, as religious action, to detach themselves from<br />
earthly ends. As Kippenberg summarizes <strong>Weber</strong>’s argument,<br />
The sequence of magician–priest–prophet involves transferring the principle<br />
of religious social action from magic to that of cult, and of cult to<br />
that of ethics. The failure of the non-specialist magician worked in favour<br />
of the priests. On the orders of the political group, the priests did not<br />
wish to compel the gods but to influence them through the cult. It was<br />
they who conceive the world as a permanent and meaningfully ordered<br />
cosmos. They make the believers themselves responsible for misfortune<br />
in so far as they have disregarded the divine order. Prophets gave this<br />
declaration an ethical turn and integrated ‘the relation of human beings<br />
to the world on ultimate and unified value-positions’. Around these are<br />
formed communities based on an ethic. The following distinction then<br />
becomes important: the prophet of the Near East, where the conception<br />
of a personal transcendental god predominates, is seen as the bringer of<br />
the word of god and a preacher of an ethic of obedience. The prophet<br />
in India, by contrast, where the idea of a divine cosmic order predominates,<br />
follows an exemplary life of flight from the world as the way<br />
to holiness – as in the example of Buddha. Prophetic communities can<br />
only become permanent, if the priests establish doctrine as binding and<br />
through preaching and the cure of the soul they have an effect upon the<br />
conduct of life of the laity. 10<br />
Once the idea of an ordered and divine cosmos has been established,<br />
which is no easy task and <strong>Weber</strong> is hesitant in his argumentation here, a
166 The Sociology of Religion<br />
second phase of the text starts. This is a discussion, in historical comparative<br />
terms, of the triangle of priests, prophets and laity. Societies are composed of<br />
negatively and positively social strata, and this affects their choice of religion<br />
and conduct of life. The laity are an independent agent in the take up of religious<br />
views of the world propagandized by priests and prophets. This section<br />
was reused and expanded in the ‘Introduction’ <strong>Weber</strong> wrote for EEWR.<br />
The third phase of the text concerns the relation of priests and intellectuals<br />
in constructing pictures of a meaningfully ordered cosmos. It is built on the<br />
premise that religion stands in opposition to the other orders of the world.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> reused this section in the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ of EEWR.<br />
The Sociology of Religion is a work that does not explain itself, and it<br />
pays to turn to its academic hinterland for clarification. One large question<br />
was how to analyse primitive societies. The anthropology of Edward<br />
Burnett Tylor and James George Frazer was evolutionary, and was influenced<br />
by Auguste Comte’s law of three stages of how people thought about<br />
the world: from theological and the idiom of spirits, to metaphysical terms<br />
and, finally, to positivist terms and science. It was Frazer who, through his<br />
collection of data on folklore and ethnology, argued that magic and cultic<br />
practices, such as sacrifice, were used as a source of power over the natural<br />
world. In archaic societies, kings would control the weather – the rain maker<br />
– through the practice of magical rites and, for Frazer, this was the origin of<br />
political power. Tylor argued that the move from magic to religion was part<br />
of the evolution of culture, which he defined not in the normative sense of a<br />
superior civilization but, as Adam Kuper notes, in the German sense.<br />
Culture in this usage, included not only the products of élite civilization,<br />
but the whole gamut of learnt skills, habits, modes of communication<br />
and beliefs which went to make up a particular way of life, and it was<br />
the proper object of anthropological study. Cultures progressed along<br />
uniform lines, either as a result of borrowing or by independent inventions<br />
which took similar forms at particular levels of development. 11<br />
Frazer’s major book, The Golden Bough, was first published in 1890, and<br />
Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871. Hans Kippenberg points out that the criticisms<br />
of their work by Robert Marett had been republished in 1909 in the<br />
Archiv für Religionswissenschaft. Magic, for Tylor, represented a primitive<br />
form of belief in which objects were thought to possess spirits that exercised<br />
superempirical power. This was primitive mythic thinking. Marett argued<br />
that thinking about the natural world proceeded not through myths, but<br />
through the use of symbols where users were aware of the ‘as if ’ status of<br />
symbolic knowledge. Early man could distinguish the symbolization from<br />
the real, whereas the attribution of myth to archaic societies imposed a false<br />
credulity. Marett, then, was providing early man with rational capacities in<br />
a world that lacked scientific explanation. In place of magic (animism – the
The Sociology of Religion 167<br />
belief in spirits), Marett advanced the idea of preanimism. He also rejected<br />
the evolutionary account of change in Tylor and Frazer.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, of course, followed Marett in rejecting an evolutionary theory of<br />
religion. But many of the specific ideas in the debates are in evidence in the<br />
Sociology of Religion. Frazer’s linking of power and magic and cultic rites<br />
provides <strong>Weber</strong> with his starting point. ‘It is primarily, though not exclusively,<br />
these extraordinary powers that have been designated by such special terms<br />
as “mana”, “orenda”, and the Iranian “maga” (the term from which our<br />
word “magic” is derived). We shall henceforth employ the term “charisma”<br />
for such extraordinary powers’ (SocRel, p. 2). The Melanesian term ‘mana’<br />
and the Iroquois term ‘orenda’ described the attributes of power, supernatural,<br />
out of the ordinary that attached to people or to things. Tylor’s idea of<br />
‘survivals’ – magic and rite in the early modern world – is an evolutionary<br />
survival in the sense that rocks contain fossil ‘survivals’ from earlier aeons.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> rejected the evolutionary method but repeatedly stressed that magic<br />
and rite are never eliminated by developed religions.<br />
To this day, no decision of church councils, differentiating the ‘worship’<br />
of God from the ‘adoration’ of the icons of saints . . . has succeeded in<br />
deterring a south European peasant from spitting on the statue of a saint<br />
when he holds it responsible that a favour he sought did not materialize,<br />
even though the customary procedures were performed.<br />
(SocRel, p. 2)<br />
Frazer’s idea that Christianity was originally a cultic practice is a notion<br />
that <strong>Weber</strong> frequently alludes to. Eating together – commensality – is an<br />
early and strong form of social bonding based on the magical qualifications<br />
of the participants; Christianity was based on extending cultic meals beyond<br />
restricted ethnic and kinship boundaries. <strong>Weber</strong> actually pinpoints the<br />
growth of Christianity to Antioch when the apostle Peter tells Paul that he<br />
must eat with the uncircumcised, i.e. the ritualistically separate non-Jewish.<br />
Edwin Rohde’s book on frenzy (‘Rausch’) was also influential. <strong>Weber</strong> frequently<br />
notes that one way of calling up supernatural forces was through the<br />
route of ecstatic visions, voices, possession, which could be artificially stimulated<br />
through drugs, alcohol, overeating meat, dancing, music and sexual<br />
orgies. <strong>Weber</strong> often uses the term orgy, but it is less the sexual content as the<br />
creation of a state of frenzy through arousal.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> steers well clear of any one unifying theory whether evolutionary,<br />
or totemism, or primitive ‘Rausch’. The whole opening section of the<br />
Sociology of Religion reflects <strong>Weber</strong>’s reluctance to embrace any one theory,<br />
yet also to advance the claim of a range of practices as the manipulation<br />
of the superempirical for this-worldly and everyday purposes. To this day,<br />
anthropologists have shied away from committing to any one theory of<br />
magic, religion, rite, cult, totemism and taboo. No one theory can account
168 The Sociology of Religion<br />
for so many disparate phenomena, and the boundaries of what differentiates<br />
religion from magic, and both from social behaviour, have proved hard to<br />
define. As the anthropologist Maurice Bloch has observed: ‘Anthropologists<br />
who specialize in the study of preliterate societies have always been faced<br />
with the difficult problem of defining what kind of phenomena can be called<br />
religious.’ 12<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> faced a dilemma not too dissimilar from the controversy over<br />
Bücher’s theory of evolution. <strong>Weber</strong> is dealing with three stages: (1) primitive<br />
practices – cults, taboos, totemism; (2) magic; and (3) religion. The<br />
stages overlap and have no necessity of succession on an evolutionary basis.<br />
He does not deploy the methodology of ideal type in order to say that these<br />
stages are a means of classification, as he did when defending Bücher in<br />
‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’. Indeed, the ideal type does not feature at<br />
all. He does refer to ‘pure types’, for example of priests, magicians and types<br />
of prophets. But pure types relate to practitioners or bearers, not to a periodization.<br />
To an extent, he handles the problem by keeping the discussion<br />
to examples and case studies. When he talks about religions or magic or<br />
cults, he particularizes it to empirical data taken from history, ethnology and<br />
anthropology. Nevertheless, the thrust of The Sociology of Religion remains<br />
to outline the properties of the main world religions, which are markedly<br />
different in their internal dynamics when compared with magic and preanimism.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> writes,<br />
Transitions from pre-animistic naturalism to symbolism were altogether<br />
variable as regards specific details. When the primitive tears out the heart<br />
of a slain foe, or wrenches the sexual organs from the body of his victim,<br />
or extracts the brain from the skull and then mounts the skull in his<br />
home or esteems it as the most precious of bridal presents, or eats part<br />
of the bodies of slain foes or the bodies of especially powerful animals<br />
– he really believes he is coming into possession, in a naturalistic fashion,<br />
of the various powers attributed to these physical organs.<br />
(SocRel, p. 9)<br />
A war dance at first is simply a heroic frenzy prior to battle – it is naturalistic<br />
and tries to evoke greater powers over the enemies. But a transition<br />
occurs when the patterns of a war dance become fixed through magical manipulation:<br />
‘mimetically anticipates victory and seeks to insure it by magical<br />
means’. Likewise, animals can be sacrificed but according to fixed rites. This<br />
is the threshold of the move to symbolism. By eating a sacrificed animal, the<br />
participants see themselves as being bonded together because ‘the soul of<br />
the animal has passed into them’. This can be termed mythological thinking<br />
but, as <strong>Weber</strong> notes, the actual processes of transition from naturalism to<br />
symbolism are varied and complex (SocRel, p. 9).<br />
The symbolism of rites and of magical practices is retained in religion,
The Sociology of Religion 169<br />
which is more obviously concerned with belief and dogma. <strong>Weber</strong> notes<br />
that controversy is often sparked by a change to symbolism rather than to<br />
doctrine. A schism was caused in the seventeenth century in the Russian<br />
Orthodox Church over how many horizontal bars the cross should have.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> has a similar problem in his discussion of gods. As with the concept<br />
of religion, which <strong>Weber</strong> refused to define, he expounds instead the large<br />
number of forms in which they are conceived. Gods may be naturalistic – in<br />
the Vedas, fire is god – they may be impersonal – ‘numina’ in Rome – or they<br />
may be personalized as in the Greek gods. ‘The gods frequently constituted<br />
an unordered miscellany of accidental entities held together fortuitously by<br />
the cult, and this condition was by no means confined to periods of meager<br />
social development’ (SocRel, p. 10). <strong>Weber</strong> points out that the sociological<br />
factors in the ‘choice’ of gods is by no means obvious. One would expect<br />
agrarian societies to honour chthonic deities – i.e. gods rooted in the earth<br />
such as the ‘Mother Earth’ cult – ‘but such parallelism is not always direct’<br />
and, here, <strong>Weber</strong> enters into an inconclusive account of heavenly versus<br />
earthly (tellurian) gods. However, <strong>Weber</strong> does offer a limited formulation<br />
of the dynamics of god formation. ‘Both the increasing objective significance<br />
of typical components and types of conduct and subjective reflection about<br />
them [gods] lead to objective specialization among the gods’ (SocRel, p. 14).<br />
Some gods, by virtue of abstraction (Brahma) or priority (Janus), achieve<br />
supremacy over other gods. God formation is closely related to the need of<br />
the social group. Each group, whether household, clan or prince, requires<br />
its own god, for this unifies its members ‘into a strongly cohesive group’<br />
(SocRel, p. 15). The political dynamics of a patrimonial leader being lord<br />
over other households leads to a situation in which his special god becomes<br />
superior over other domestic gods. Taken another step, the patrimonial ruler<br />
becomes the high priest, as in the case of the Chinese emperor and the Roman<br />
ruler (‘princeps’). In the case of a confederation of clans, an oath may<br />
be taken to a god who then makes the federation sacred; the example <strong>Weber</strong><br />
gives is of Jews with Midianites. The god – in this case Yahweh – imposes a<br />
contractual obligation on the peoples of Israel and ‘from this, various ritual,<br />
canonical, and ethical obligations which were binding upon the human partner<br />
were presumed to flow’ (SocRel, p. 16). In contrast, the Greek ‘polis’<br />
did not allow the formation of an overarching priesthood, but remained a<br />
personal association of ‘confrères with cultic associations related to tribe,<br />
clan and household gods’. <strong>Weber</strong> comments that this marked the ‘polis’ out<br />
as a group body (‘Verband’) rather than an institution (‘Anstalt’), like the<br />
modern state.<br />
In the next section of the Sociology of Religion, a stronger argument<br />
emerges. The endpoint of his discussion is monotheistic, salvation world<br />
religions, which is how Protestant Christianity is reconceptualized. First,<br />
the internal and external factors affecting the development of religion from<br />
local, to universal and, finally, to world status have to be outlined. Factors<br />
intrinsic to religion include consistency, and religions that are tied to stellar
170 The Sociology of Religion<br />
and planetary regularities achieve well. Monolatry, the worship of one god<br />
instead of many, and an ethical dimension also contribute. External factors<br />
consist of a religion being taken up by a dominant ruler. Judaism scores<br />
well on both sets of factors – Yahweh is occasioned through political federation<br />
and Yahweh also comes to demand ethical behaviour of his followers.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> also suggests that one way of distinguishing sorcery from religion is<br />
whether priests and lay people attempt to coerce a spirit or divinity. Prayer,<br />
and religion, is an entreaty to a higher lord, whereas sorcery is a matter<br />
of routines and practices as devices to compel an extraordinary power to<br />
favour the practitioner. The common theme in both is to do something in<br />
order to get something back, and the overlaps between magic and religion in<br />
this respect are apparent. Silent prayer would count as religion, prayer beads<br />
or machines or prayer strips as magic.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own concept rationalization appears at this juncture. Sorting out<br />
a mass of gods into some kind of pantheon is an example of rationalization,<br />
or ‘ratio’ – a word he sometimes prefers. There is at work in religion<br />
‘a special evolutionary process’ . . . , ‘there is an ever-broadening rational<br />
systematization of the concept of god and of the thinking concerning the<br />
possible relationships of the divine’ (SocRel, p. 27). There can also be ‘primitive<br />
rationalism’ – sorcery is a straightforward request for something. The<br />
end goal of religion, in contrast, is successively ‘irrationalized’ (a term <strong>Weber</strong><br />
himself puts in quotation marks). The Puritan prays and behaves for otherworldly<br />
purposes, not daring to be venal enough to ask for good fortune.<br />
Judged comparatively, this is irrational and departs from the common reason<br />
for religion – to invoke out-of-the-ordinary powers to ensure good fortune.<br />
Rationalization, as ‘ratio’, is a mental or ‘geistlich’ phenomenon; hence, factors<br />
of rationalization intrinsic to religion as an intellectual product can be<br />
seen to drive it forwards. This is not, however, an inevitable process, because<br />
any number of contingent external circumstances can intervene to stop rationalization<br />
processes within religion. The most common is the demand<br />
of the laity for the retention of magical elements – ‘an accessible and tangible<br />
religious object’ rather than an abstract concept such as a monotheistic<br />
other-worldly god (SocRel, p. 25). There are, says <strong>Weber</strong>, very few consistent<br />
monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam and Protestant Christianity. ‘The<br />
Hindu and Christian forms of the sole or supreme deity are theological concealments<br />
of the fact that an important and unique religious interest, namely<br />
in salvation through the incarnation of a divinity, stands in the way of strict<br />
monotheism’ (SocRel, p. 20). Elsewhere, <strong>Weber</strong> refers to Christ as a magician<br />
– useful for popularity, but not wholly consistent with the Abrahamic<br />
conception of god.<br />
In the next section, <strong>Weber</strong> attempts or, rather, feels his way towards the<br />
distinction between magicians and priests. The exercise is not completely<br />
successful for, as <strong>Weber</strong> admits, the magical and the religious can rarely be<br />
absolutely separated; also, <strong>Weber</strong> is unable to pin down exactly what marks<br />
a transition point from magic to religion. Obviously, he was conscious that
The Sociology of Religion 171<br />
evolutionary manoeuvres were illegitimate. <strong>Weber</strong>’s theory of transition is<br />
that they were rare and historically contingent, yet were in some way part<br />
of a process of rationalization whose dynamics <strong>Weber</strong> tries to specify. Those<br />
dynamics turn on the inability of magicians to rationalize belief in spirits<br />
into a ‘rational’ system of ethics and beliefs, which was an accomplishment<br />
achieved (in rare cases) by priests. Priests, in this reading, are a permanent<br />
enterprise (‘Betrieb’), whereas magicians are more of an occasional pursuit.<br />
This is bound up with how to explain a move from trying to compel a divinity<br />
through sorcery and trying to influence a god through entreaty.<br />
Another, and compatible, reading of this section of the text is its orientation<br />
to EOPS. Here, an extensive array of examples is outlined in the consideration<br />
of the role of gods in relation to, first, the social order and, second,<br />
the economy. He makes a principled statement about the requirements of the<br />
social order under conditions of: (1) large settled pacified political groupings<br />
for legislation; (2) the increased need of a rational comprehension of an<br />
external, permanent and orderly cosmos, and this relates to the (agricultural)<br />
needs for meteorology; (3) with increased human interaction, a dependence<br />
on conventional rules and that people observe these rules; and (4) a growth<br />
in the dependence of trust in the given word – between friends, vassals and<br />
lords, officials, actors in economic exchange and so on (SocRel, pp. 35–6).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does not say it, but this was the condition, historically, of settled<br />
agrarian societies from China to Europe. <strong>Weber</strong> here states an a priori case<br />
for the strengthening of the basis of order in societies based on increasing<br />
interdependence. Therefore, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s argument, there was a predilection<br />
to attach the ethical systems of human interaction to cosmic accounts of<br />
obligations; calling up extraordinary power now extends to the social order<br />
itself.<br />
Underlying these empirical observations is a neo-Kantian predilection<br />
to link meaning and order (‘Sinn’ and ‘Ordnung’), a characteristic missing<br />
from the ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’, where external, structural factors<br />
prevail in <strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis.<br />
For the ancient Greeks, it was the idea that the gods to which they turned<br />
were in themselves ‘subject to some social and moral order’ – that order<br />
was ultimately predetermined by the fates (‘moira’). Confucianism and Brahmanism<br />
were cases of theocratic strata upholding the social order to which<br />
is imparted cosmic authority and an ethical–rational character. In Hindu<br />
rites, a fixed order of religious ceremony, together with a fixed order of the<br />
cosmos, led to a fixed sense of human activity. This leads <strong>Weber</strong> to note that<br />
the important role of ethics could be supplied equally by magical practices<br />
alongside obedience to a religious law. Taboos are proscriptive, with evil<br />
consequences following their transgression. Totemism, the alleged powers of<br />
animal and natural objects, has a role in creating strong kinship bonds and<br />
kinship patterns. Taboos, when extended to dietary restrictions, define the<br />
inner group of those who eat together, and also add strength to caste systems.<br />
Moving the argument on to the economic consequences, a caste order
172 The Sociology of Religion<br />
leads to an immutable occupational system and a traditionalist economic<br />
ethic. The ‘feng shui’ system of spirits restricted the development of trade in<br />
China (although <strong>Weber</strong> predicts that the railway system would undermine<br />
both the caste system in India and the belief in spirits in China). Ascetic<br />
Protestantism stands out uniquely in giving ethical support to ‘economic<br />
rationalism’ (SocRel, p. 42).<br />
This brings <strong>Weber</strong> up against the problem of how ethical religions can develop<br />
out of the more predominant mode of magic-based prohibitions – how<br />
‘the belief in spirits became rationalized into belief in gods’, the move from<br />
coercive magic to prayer as entreaty (SocRel, p. 43), i.e. how does <strong>Weber</strong><br />
initiate the developmental path of religion that would culminate, much later,<br />
in Protestant Christianity, which adhered so strongly to an ethical transcendental<br />
god and abhorred any vestige of magic? To answer this – it has to be<br />
said, at this stage, tentatively – he goes back to early developments in Judaism.<br />
The Old Testament or Hebrew Bible has a well-developed sense of good<br />
and evil as religiously buttressed. The question becomes one of returning to<br />
before good and evil and, here, <strong>Weber</strong> appears to offer an intermediate situation<br />
pitched between magic and religion. In magic, it is rational to ask and<br />
propitiate a god for victory over one’s enemies. In this sense, salvation is the<br />
literal sense of being saved from one’s enemies. ‘In the Old Testament, the<br />
idea of “salvation”, pregnant with consequences, still has the elementary rational<br />
meaning of liberation from concrete ills’ (SocRel, p. 44). Propitiating<br />
a god is a form of piety, which <strong>Weber</strong> defines here as ‘behaviour acceptable<br />
to a god’. ‘In its earliest stages, the religious ethic consistently shares another<br />
characteristic with magical worship, in that it is frequently composed of a<br />
complex of heterogeneous prescriptions and prohibitions, derived from the<br />
most diverse motives and occasions . . . any infraction of an ethic constitutes<br />
sin.’ It was the Israeli prophets, such as Isaiah, who convinced the believers<br />
in Yahweh that misfortune was the result of the people’s sin. Sin at this<br />
point amounts to annoying a god who punishes his believers, and it does not<br />
have a metaphysical sense. Behaving correctly may be more important than<br />
believing properly. (Incidental to this, as Kippenberg notes, was Julius Wellhausen’s<br />
scholarship that had established that the first five books of the Old<br />
Testament did not belong to the earliest history of Israel and Judaea. ‘In the<br />
beginning’ was not metaphysical belief and the awesome word of god instituted<br />
by Moses, but a collection of tribes pursuing magic and cultic gods. 13 )<br />
Holiness and piety tend to be associated with goodness, sin with evil. Even<br />
at this point, however, ‘The conceptions of sin and piety as integral powers,<br />
envisaged as rather like material substances, still remained within the circle<br />
of magical notions. At this stage, the nature of the “good” or “evil” of the<br />
acting person is construed after the fashion of a poison, a healing antidote,<br />
or a bodily temperature.’<br />
It is a long way from the notion that the person who acts with goodness<br />
has received into himself a special soul of divine provenience . . . So
The Sociology of Religion 173<br />
too, it is a far cry from the conception of sin as a poison in the body of<br />
the malefactor, which must be treated by magical means, to the conception<br />
of an evil demon which enters into possession of him, and on to<br />
the culminating conception of the diabolical power of the radical evil,<br />
with which the evildoer must struggle lest he succumb to its dangerous<br />
power.<br />
(SocRel, p. 45)<br />
The culmination of good and evil as something sublimated from its origins<br />
in this-worldly salvation and punishment is, says <strong>Weber</strong>, a road few ethics<br />
travel. Confucianism lacked a concept of radical evil, as did the ethics<br />
of Greek and Rome. Certain developments and contingencies are required.<br />
‘Prophets and priests are the twin bearers of the systematization and rationalization<br />
of religious ethics.’<br />
At this stage in my exposition of <strong>Weber</strong>’s Sociology of Religion, enough<br />
has probably been said to demonstrate the text’s failure to fit the systematic<br />
criteria required for the Grundriss, but enough to show the many ways in<br />
which ‘religion’ might contribute to the developmental paths of different<br />
civilizations. The different world religions can be analysed to establish what<br />
is distinctive to them and, conceptually, <strong>Weber</strong> has the means to achieve<br />
this. Different notions of divinity, different ways of attaining salvation, the<br />
role allotted to priests and prophets – these are the analytical tools for distinguishing<br />
between the world religions. And in Chinese civilization, where<br />
magic prevailed in the relationship between ruler and people, this created<br />
a strong harmonious order with an aversion to change. <strong>Weber</strong> imports the<br />
same uncertainties of process into the separate studies of EEWR. Preanimistic<br />
or naturalistic understandings of nature are taken to be a stage common<br />
to all the world civilizations; the question then becomes one of trying to explain<br />
the major transformation process required to become a religion based<br />
on written doctrine and abstract belief, and how typical forms of conduct are<br />
generated that contribute to a particular social order. In one sense, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
does not require a theory of the dynamics of transition, because he is content<br />
to write the studies as developmental narratives. How Christianity or Judaism<br />
developed becomes a theme in its own right; and we can see from the<br />
volumes he planned that he was quite happy to extend the narrative over<br />
different periods of Christianity and Judaism.<br />
His method rested on an internal–external distinction. The science of<br />
religion (‘Religionswissenschaft’) in Germany provided an elaborate set of<br />
concepts for analysing the internal dynamics of religions. The debates over<br />
Frazer and Tylor have been mentioned. To this should be added Tiele’s analysis<br />
of India and China as being transcendental impersonal rational world orders,<br />
and the Near East embracing a concept of transcendental personal god.<br />
Tiele also distinguished between local, universal and world religions. When<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> dove-tailed Troeltsch’s Christianity-based split between mysticism<br />
and asceticism (the latter’s contribution at the German Sociology Society
174 The Sociology of Religion<br />
conference) with Tiele’s bifurcation, he had the basis of his own comparative<br />
developmental accounts: the mystical inclined to an impersonal transcendentalism<br />
of Indian religions, and the ascetic to a personal transcendental<br />
god of the Occident. Further conceptual advances were made by Hermann<br />
Siebeck, who advanced the concept of divine salvation (‘Erlösung’) as a way<br />
of denying the power of malificence and evil in the world; the believer looks<br />
beyond the world to the only real truth for him or her – salvation in another<br />
world. At this point, religion offered a new capacity of detachment – not<br />
only from evil but from social communities. In ‘Types of Religion’, Fabricius<br />
showed how a study of experiential piety could be related to life in the<br />
world. Piety was a behavioural attitude to the world and did not involve<br />
the difficulties of defining the essence of religion. By studying this attitude<br />
empirically, three types could be induced: conforming to the world (‘weltförmig’);<br />
fleeing the world (‘weltflüchtig’); and the overcoming the world<br />
(‘weltüberwindend’). Respectively, conformity resulted in morality based<br />
on custom (‘Sittlichkeit’); world flight led through asceticism to Christianity,<br />
and through mysticism to Buddhism. Christianity stood out as the only<br />
religion able to move to an active relationship to the world despite its otherworldly<br />
and world-denying beliefs. Troeltsch had handled the same issue in<br />
his distinction between different religious attitudes to profane natural law.<br />
The latter is the social order as it is and how it is governed. The strictly<br />
Christian attitude would see only a divine order, and that the social order<br />
on earth should be a reflection of this. In the Stoic tradition, however, there<br />
was a recognition that some compromise has to be made between heavenly<br />
and earthly orders. Under Christianity in the west, it was the Church that<br />
effected this compromise. It is not too hard to see the Puritans as a variant<br />
awaiting to happen: an asceticizing movement emerging within a Christian<br />
culture that was already heavily compromised with the orders of the world.<br />
When <strong>Weber</strong> returns to the theme of Puritanism, which he does in his comparison<br />
of Puritanism with Confucianism at the end of the China study of<br />
EEWR, 14 the panoply of ‘religionswissenschaftliche’ concepts are used. This<br />
can be judged if the concepts not deployed in PESC (1904–5) are picked out:<br />
disenchantment (which derives from the Chinese spirit-imbued magic garden),<br />
practical attitude to the world, rejection of the world, contemplation,<br />
hystericizing asceticism, pneumatic spiritual gifts, man as an instrument of<br />
god versus a vessel of the holy spirit, accommodation to the world, mastery<br />
of the world, ethical rationalization, transcendentally ordered rational ethic<br />
of Puritanism, and theodicy problem.<br />
What is striking about the literature of ‘Religionswissenschaft’ is how<br />
much of importance had appeared in the collection edited by Paul Hinneberg,<br />
Die Kultur der Gegenwart (1906) and in Die Religion in Geschichte<br />
und Gegenwart published in five volumes by Siebeck from 1909 to 1913.<br />
While the interrelating of economic behaviour to Puritan doctrine had been<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own discovery in 1904–5, the study of religion on a comparative<br />
basis was an achievement within the academic community independent of
The Sociology of Religion 175<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>. The question may be asked to what extent <strong>Weber</strong> was therefore a<br />
(willing) prisoner of tenets of German historicism that characterized the<br />
German academic study of religion. German ‘historicism’ is a fairly striking<br />
description, and is used by Hans Kippenberg to describe the approach of<br />
‘Religionswissenschaft’. It is composed of the following features.<br />
Theory and classification are part of the attempt to make scientific sense<br />
of the vast variety of religious phenomena and willingness to debate and<br />
change concepts in the light of evidence presented. Theory excluded evolutionism,<br />
but did allow that developments in religions could be a product<br />
of internal dynamics. <strong>Weber</strong> went as far as anyone in this respect when he<br />
spoke of inherent logics (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’). Priests frequently push doctrine<br />
forward. For example, the relatively simple idea of Christian salvation<br />
could develop its own logic towards predestination in the hands of reformist<br />
thinkers, such as Jean Calvin. This intellectual rationalization occurs because<br />
priests at times attempt to achieve consistency of doctrine. If a god is all<br />
powerful and all knowing, it would therefore follow that he would know all<br />
events in the past, present and future and exactly which persons were to be<br />
saved. Whether and under what conditions the laity would wish to follow<br />
the consistency of this argument in everyday life stands as a separate variable<br />
in <strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis.<br />
Theory was offset by the more normally accepted sense of German historicism<br />
– an insistence on evidence, historical facts, philological skills in the<br />
reading and dating of sacred texts. The Indian Vedas, Zoroastrian Arvesta,<br />
Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform were being deciphered<br />
and translated. The importance of documents and evidence did not extend<br />
to the insistence on the uniqueness of each culture studied, a feature of early<br />
nineteenth-century historicism associated with Herder, for whom different<br />
cultures were ‘equal in necessity, equal in originality, equal in value, equal in<br />
happiness’. Analytically, as the categories of preanimism, magic and religion<br />
show, similarities could be demonstrated across cultures. <strong>Weber</strong> explicitly<br />
refers to the preanimistic or naturalistic phenomena found in early phases of<br />
all the Abrahamic religions as well as in Buddhism and Confucianism. Preanimist<br />
cultic behaviour was a characteristic of early humankind, period. Herder’s<br />
historicism saw culture as an emanation of popular spirit (‘Volksseele’)<br />
that was a living and growing entity. <strong>Weber</strong> had firmly rebutted such ideas in<br />
his Roscher and Knies essays.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> was dependent on secondary sources for his studies on world religions,<br />
and so on other scholars’ translations and interpretations of texts.<br />
Hence, he was dependent on a slightly more controversial feature of German<br />
historicism, hermeneutics. As I have argued in Chapter 4 that hermeneutics<br />
was c. 1900 an essential part of philology and the establishment of the correct<br />
interpretation, there is no need to get too excited about this feature.<br />
The case of Julius Wellhausen is a case in point. Was his breakthrough in<br />
the dating of the books of the Old Testament reliant on philology or hermeneutics?<br />
One would say both, so it would be mistaken at this date (c. 1900)
176 The Sociology of Religion<br />
to separate the knowledge of languages from the interpretation of meaning.<br />
But, because <strong>Weber</strong> was not able to work with primary sources to the same<br />
degree that he did in the Protestant ethic studies, the emphasis on meaning<br />
and its interpretation (‘Sinndeutung’) could not be turned into the methodological<br />
question of causation in quite the same way. In the ‘Objectivity’<br />
essay, <strong>Weber</strong> was able to distance himself from the neo-Kantian position<br />
of Rickert by tying interpretation of meaning to the attribution of causes<br />
through empirical investigation. Such a forensic approach to meaning can<br />
only operate if the investigator has primary access to empirical materials.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is remarkably acute in his assessment of the books and articles he was<br />
reading on the world religions and, for example, is only too well aware of<br />
the biases in the writings of missionaries. But to argue the long prehistory<br />
of the cult in Sinai and Judaea, he was dependent on Wellhausen and other<br />
scholars and their knowledge of Hebrew and other languages of the Near<br />
East. <strong>Weber</strong> is far closer to the neo-Kantian emphasis on ‘Sinndeutung’ in<br />
EEWR than he might have wished to be and, as will be noted shortly, his<br />
‘Introduction’ to the EEWR offers another version of causation.<br />
Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart took Rickert as its methodological<br />
mentor, describing his approach: ‘The justification of historical science<br />
in its autonomy and uniqueness is the purpose of his work . . . a theory<br />
of knowledge for history should attain and safeguard the particular right of<br />
the science of history.’ 15 A scientific study of religion would be especially<br />
interested in a methodology that insisted on the separation of ‘Sein’ and<br />
‘Sollen’, of what is and what ought to be. The empirical study of religions<br />
could operate according to academic rules of evidence, verification and falsification,<br />
and it would not be expected to make value judgements about the<br />
substance of religion – that Buddha was better than Christ. Doctrinal theology,<br />
as the exegesis of Christian thought as taken-for-granted revelation, was<br />
duty bound to make such judgements, explicitly or implicitly. But the neo-<br />
Kantian separation of the realm of values from the concrete empirical world<br />
meant that the pressure to ‘prove’ a set of religious values as more true or<br />
valuable than another set was removed. Values were non-real for Rickert. It<br />
was open to philosophy to prioritize and systematize values, and that is what<br />
Rickert outlined in his 1913 essay ‘System der Werten’. Equally, it would be<br />
open to a philosophy of religion to debate the virtues of predestination over<br />
nirvana but, epistemologically, this sort of question would not be settled by<br />
a scientific treatment of the empirical. Philosophical questions and scientific<br />
questions belong to different orders with their own criteria of validity.<br />
This falls far short of the requirements of a sociology of religion, because<br />
it is exactly how values impact upon human action and how internal religious<br />
values interact with external sociological factors that is its practical subject<br />
matter. No satisfactory sociological answer is forthcoming from Rickert<br />
– and this is one of the reasons why <strong>Weber</strong>, in his ‘Objectivity’ essay, pushes<br />
on beyond values to causation. But, for the scientific study of religion concerned<br />
predominantly with the internal dynamics of religious behaviour, the
The Sociology of Religion 177<br />
interpretation of meaning through Rickert worked very well. It was assumed<br />
that there was a subjective side to religious ideas, feelings and actions accessible<br />
to and comprehensible by the academic inquirer. For example, Hermann<br />
Siebeck (in his Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie) 16 interpreted what he<br />
called the ‘natural religion’ of early man as the belief that gods were able to<br />
ward off external evil. People’s beliefs or values can be made sense of within<br />
their context, and this would extend without limit to magic, totemism, cult<br />
rituals or the salvationist contortions of Calvinist predestination. Siebeck<br />
had a concept of the objective – scriptures, doctrines, rites and so on. But the<br />
assumption was made that the inquirer, through intellectual imagination or<br />
re-creation, could envisage the perspective of all forms of religion. We have<br />
seen above how <strong>Weber</strong> thinks it possible to understand the ‘rationality’ of<br />
the head hunter or the magician, and to paraphrase him on Caesar, one does<br />
not have to be a Bornean headhunter to understand cannibalism.<br />
Whether and how this assumption can be justified was discussed in Chapter<br />
4 (in relation to the ‘transcendental presupposition’). Its use for archaic<br />
societies and early man stands apart from English and French anthropological<br />
traditions. Evans-Pritchard criticized <strong>Weber</strong> for his ‘intellectualism’. 17 By<br />
this, he meant that making sense of early kinship-based societies could proceed<br />
through mental re-creation alone. In the field, the anthropologist uses<br />
special theories and ways of gathering data (ethnography). In part, Evans-<br />
Pritchard’s criticism is directed at the ‘armchair’ theorist; in part, for not<br />
recognizing that kinship patterns explain the functioning of society and that<br />
religion is integrated into kinship. Comparing Durkheim’s theory of the role<br />
of the sacred and profane with Troeltsch’s account of sacred and profane<br />
natural law shows that, in the French tradition, religion performs a societal<br />
function, and it can only do this by existing as a reality in its own right. Here,<br />
the subjective is not an understandable attitude to a body of doctrine, rites<br />
and ceremonies. Instead, the objective is the primary reality, which structures<br />
and codes the subjective attitudes of the community. The sacred and profane,<br />
for Durkheim, was a demarcation line specifying, with great strictness, actions<br />
that could and could not be performed. Practices such as totemism and<br />
taboo specified a whole range of rules that structured the patterning of kinship<br />
and sense of community. The sacred and profane were fundamental categories<br />
of thought that underlay the structuring of early societies. Troeltsch’s<br />
argument on Stoic and Christian attitudes to the earthly social and political<br />
order is that the early Christians believed only in a perfect divine order and<br />
that earthly existence was worthless by comparison. Political power and law<br />
on earth had to be a direct reflection of the divine order, allowing no possibility<br />
for sin and evil. The German subjectivist approach tended to account<br />
for actions as flowing from beliefs. The Stoics had a greater acceptance of the<br />
imperfection of the world; therefore, their communities were open to the<br />
claims of political rulers. The Christians were absolutists and therefore chose<br />
to form sects apart from society. The Durkheimian response would be along<br />
the lines that the apartness of Christian sects was the primary sociological
178 The Sociology of Religion<br />
fact that was policed through a strict separation of sacred and profane in all<br />
areas of life, especially kinship.<br />
It has been argued, for example by Donald Macrae, that Durkheim was the<br />
beneficiary and enthusiastic reader of contemporary ethnography, whereas<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> lay outside the English and French anthropological traditions. 18<br />
Hence, he failed to appreciate the separateness and the extent of difference<br />
of early societies from other known historical societies. ‘Verstehen’ and imaginative<br />
re-creation could not be applied at a distance to what, for the anthropologist,<br />
would be a field study and expect to produce viable sociology.<br />
Hans Kippenberg’s recent edition of the text qualifies this viewpoint. The debate<br />
on animism and preanimism was informed by recent ethnography. The<br />
work of Franz Boas, the pioneer of modern twentieth-century anthropology,<br />
and other ethnology was feeding into the German ‘Religionswissenschaft’.<br />
Marett had assessed the respective claims of Durkheim against the British<br />
approach in anthropology. 19 The international debate did not go unnoticed<br />
in Germany. Their choice of approach was deliberate not uninformed.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> followed the strong tendency in German ‘Religionswissenschaft’<br />
not to integrate religion as a functional disposition within society, but to<br />
treat it as a sphere in its own right – moreover, one in fundamental opposition<br />
to the other spheres of society. Tiele had argued that religions expand<br />
the number of their believers by escaping the chains of family, tribe, people<br />
and government. As religions expand beyond the narrower boundaries of<br />
institutions, they undergo a corresponding internal development. Natural<br />
religions, confined to clans, have magic at their core; prophetic religions<br />
represent another internal developmental stage – they attack magic and develop<br />
ethical religion, and so become first national religions and then world<br />
religions. These stages have their counterpart in <strong>Weber</strong>’s less determinative<br />
transitions from magic to ethics and from ritual to prophecy. The rise of<br />
world religions involves a kind of emancipation from the closed institutions<br />
that would hold them back. In addition, the emergence of the ethical and<br />
other-worldly ideas of salvation directed behaviour to oppose the world.<br />
Taken to its extreme, in Buddhism and Christianity, the believer fled or<br />
turned away from the world and its orders. In <strong>Weber</strong>, magic is adapted to<br />
the world, in its instrumentalist guise – and hence is more integrationist;<br />
salvation religions represent an ‘irrationalization’ where the salvation goal<br />
lies beyond the world.<br />
A similar argument was deployed by Hermann Siebeck in his engagement<br />
with Tiele’s theories. Religion was a cultural factor alongside other factors<br />
such as language and custom, morality and law, family and state, school and<br />
education, art and science. But, unlike the spheres of (Hegelian) civil society,<br />
religion, in seeking to judge worldly life, stands apart. Religion perceives,<br />
unlike the other spheres, that cultural life is not unified but divided. And we<br />
have already considered Troeltsch’s exposition on sacred and profane natural<br />
law, which is an elaboration of the same position. Mysticism, which for<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> stands predominantly for eastern religion, and asceticism are attitudes<br />
that represent a discomfort with the world as it is.
The Sociology of Religion 179<br />
Windelband introduced the concept of antinomic orders – an idea used<br />
to great effect by <strong>Weber</strong> in his ‘Intermediate Reflection’ essay. As a neo-<br />
Kantian, he restated the –ultimately irrational – divide between the world<br />
as it is and how it should be (‘Sollen und Sein’), and between the normative<br />
and the natural law. Human consciousness is marked by both the normative<br />
and the resistance to norms (‘Norm und Normwidrige’). These are all antinomic<br />
spheres of existence, clashing against each other. Holiness or salvation<br />
(‘heilige’) is a transcendental concept operant in the cognitive, ethical<br />
and aesthetic spheres. Salvationism is everywhere and yet in opposition to<br />
all other worldly orders. 20<br />
What can be provisionally concluded from this discussion is that German<br />
sources had an internalist account of religious behaviour, placing an<br />
emphasis on the discovery of meaning within its context. <strong>Weber</strong> adds to this<br />
an insistence on external factors of economics and power. This does not<br />
create a unified theory because the internal and external belong to different<br />
dimensions. Unlike functionalist analyses in the French and British tradition,<br />
which can integrate theory as flowing from one standpoint, <strong>Weber</strong> leaves the<br />
exact linkage between the external and internal causation unresolved. Elective<br />
affinity stands in lieu of such integration, but it is not apparent whether<br />
this is a metaphor or a substantive theory of causation (see discussion below,<br />
p. 190). Also, culture exists as a set of meaningful values, constructive of<br />
order, but not functionally harmonious.<br />
Thanks to Hans Kippenberg’s scholarly introduction to MWG’s Religiöse<br />
Gemeinschaften, <strong>Weber</strong>’s close relationship and dependence on ‘Religionsswissenschaft’<br />
becomes evident. In conclusion, I develop some points that<br />
come out of this discussion.<br />
1. Actions, inner and outer states<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s sociological approach to religion is clearly signalled in his ‘Categories<br />
of Interpretative Sociology’ essay. While he is about to draw deeply from<br />
the new sources in the German academic study of religion, he also makes<br />
the subject his own and goes beyond previous work. He writes, ‘in the sociological<br />
analysis of understandable relationships, rationally interpretable<br />
behavior very often constitutes the most appropriate “ideal type”: sociology<br />
begins, as does history, by interpreting “pragmatically”, that is, on the<br />
basis of rationally understandable contexts of action.’ All types of religious<br />
phenomena, then, are to be placed in context, and it is assumed that the<br />
pragmatic reasons for actions are interpretable. The exotic and far distant in<br />
time or geography in principle do not resist interpretation for <strong>Weber</strong>. Interpretative<br />
sociology,<br />
because of its specific focus is not simply any kind of ‘inner state’ or<br />
outer behavior whatever, but rather, action. And to us, ‘action’ (‘Handeln’)<br />
(including intentional omission and acquiescence) is always intelligible<br />
behaviour toward objects, behaviour whose ‘actual’ or ‘intended’
180 The Sociology of Religion<br />
subjective meaning may be more or less clear to the actor, whether<br />
consciously noted or not. Buddhist contemplation and Christian asceticism<br />
are, for the actors, subjectively related to ‘inner’ objects; the<br />
rational economic transaction of a person with material goods is related<br />
to ‘outer’ objects. 21<br />
This is a crucial statement of method. The science of religion may certainly<br />
be concerned with religious ideas, but its sociology takes as its subject<br />
matter action. Action is revealed in the empirical world and, in principle,<br />
capturable by data-gathering methods, whether history, ethnology or sociology.<br />
Methods such as Simmel’s intuition through psychology are by implication<br />
dismissed. Actions are preceded by subjective meanings that are<br />
interpretable, not through facile intuition of some inner state, but through<br />
the pragmatic assessment of action within its situation. This involves a retrospective<br />
attribution of causes for action. Action, by definition, is oriented<br />
to an object. There is a hint of Husserl in this statement. 22 Intentionality<br />
for Husserl was a mental state of feeling, wishing, believing, fearing, which<br />
should be studied not through a psychology of motives but because they had<br />
an object. For <strong>Weber</strong>, an object is the materialization of intended meaning.<br />
This is also the same argument of Rickert’s that values in themselves were<br />
not real and had to be attached to some empirical referent. ‘Kulturgüter’ embodied<br />
values. ‘Heilsgüter’, one of <strong>Weber</strong>’s genuinely puzzling terms, now<br />
begins to make sense. Salvation values – clearly part of the mental states of<br />
believers of certain world religions – can only be studied in the sociology of<br />
religion as objects of desire. 23<br />
In the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ essay, <strong>Weber</strong> summarizes the full intellectual<br />
scaffolding of his world religions project. It is a terminology of ends,<br />
means, routes, pathways. Take religious salvation, which, in non-<strong>Weber</strong>ian<br />
hands, looms as a metaphysical property subject to doctrinal exegesis. With<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, it becomes a desired end, a salvation good (‘Heilsgut’); it is offered<br />
by someone (prophet or god) who is a saviour (‘Heiland’); there are means<br />
for its attainment – magical rituals and ascetic or mystical ways of life (‘Lebensführung’).<br />
Although all these processes stem from internal mental states,<br />
they have an external empirical reference because mental states of belief<br />
are realized through actions – the cult dinner, the officiating magician, the<br />
prophet at the king’s court, the prophet in the countryside excluded from<br />
court, the church priest and the institutionalization of the distribution of<br />
grace (godly favour) and, above all – and this is <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociological masterstroke<br />
– the actual conduct of believers in their daily lives: conduct of life.<br />
These are the experiential regularities of life itself. They form patterns and<br />
are noted by observers. They contribute to a historical record, to historical<br />
data. Take monks, who are one of the best examples of conduct of life or<br />
lifestyle – <strong>Weber</strong> uses both terms more or less interchangeably. The Indian<br />
wandering mendicant monk living only on what people give him or picking<br />
berries follows a style of life. In crude terms, this is determined by his beliefs.
The Sociology of Religion 181<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> insists that the beliefs have to be interpreted through a framework of<br />
objects. From what is he fleeing (the world as a distraction) and to what salvation<br />
object is he oriented (a oneness with the universe) defines more precisely<br />
the pattern of behaviour. It is a pity that <strong>Weber</strong> never wrote a study on<br />
monasticism which, in some Christian versions, produced highly disciplined<br />
conduct. Flight from the world, salvation objects and means of attainment in<br />
part structure the conduct of life. In addition, techniques and rules are employed,<br />
as external means, to achieve conformity to a style of life. Internal<br />
goals and external techniques meet in the routinization of conduct. Franciscans<br />
broke the twenty-four hours of the day into religious duties – praying,<br />
singing, processing, fasting, not talking, reading, copying, labouring. This<br />
acted as an external discipline and, in the medieval idea of salvation, the<br />
monk worshipped each minute of existence as an affirmation of the divine.<br />
The case of Puritan asceticism was discussed previously. Worldly asceticism<br />
was disciplined through the rigour of work and the removal of idleness on a<br />
daily basis. The ideational spur to the conduct of life was the notion that, at<br />
any point, the Puritan might die and be called to judgement, not in a state of<br />
grace. This, it will be recalled, drove Bunyan close to psychosis. Interpretation<br />
inquires into the internal objects to which belief is directed. Its analysis<br />
requires an intellectual framework of magic and other religious phenomena<br />
– and this was elaborated by <strong>Weber</strong> in Sociology of Religion. Causal attribution<br />
is the investigation of empirical regularities, working ‘back’ so to speak<br />
(retrodiction) to infer internal mental states. In his EEWR studies, <strong>Weber</strong> has<br />
often to generalize this, dependent as he was on secondary sources.<br />
2. Meaning and intellectuals<br />
A common expectation of all the various and sometimes competing approaches<br />
to the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ in the nineteenth-century Germanophone<br />
world was the emphasis placed on meaning. There was an obligation<br />
on the academic not only to interpret the world, but also to convey the<br />
significance of an interpretation to the reader. Historicism meant not only<br />
a commitment to historical context, but to relay this in terms that were<br />
meaningful for the audience. The ‘bad’ old evolutionists such as Hegel and<br />
later Roscher and Knies did this by running the past into the present. Spirit<br />
(‘Geist’), whose substance was located in history, comes to unfold its potential<br />
in the present – as in, for example, the rather dubious anecdote that<br />
Napoleon was Reason on horseback. It is interesting to note that two of<br />
the MWG editors – Kippenberg in Religiöse Gemeinschaften and Schmidt-<br />
Glintzer in Konfuzianismus – do not dismiss Hegel in their introductions.<br />
Hegel had included the religions of India and China in his philosophy of<br />
history as a way of understanding the different realizations of religious spirit<br />
in history. It was Hegel’s method that made him completely unacceptable to<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>. But Hegel’s widespread diffusion in German thought derived from<br />
what was then accepted as a credible narrative of meaning.
182 The Sociology of Religion<br />
Dilthey and Rickert turned this obligation to convey meaning into a methodological<br />
device. With Rickert, it was selection through values; indeed,<br />
determination by the contemporary ‘communis opinio’ of cultural values.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s methodology gives an explicit role to the academic as interlocutor<br />
between cultures. <strong>Weber</strong>’s Sociology of Religion is self-consciously aware of<br />
the problems of intellectualizing non-intellectual cultures – in the debate<br />
over animism and naturalism. But, in his ‘Introduction’ to EEWR and in<br />
his ‘Intermediate Reflection’, he delivers interpretations of religious action<br />
as not just what they meant to historical actors but also what they might<br />
mean to a contemporary audience. Meaning, in this latter aspect, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
hands, is a kind of value-added interpretation.<br />
He imbues his discussion of magic with a tinge of romanticism. He constructs<br />
a universal of humankind’s search for supernatural powers. In many<br />
cultures, this idea is expressed in folklore – the idea of harnessing spirits<br />
for practical purposes. Gad Yair and Michaela Soyer point out in German<br />
folklore the prevalence of the Golem myth and the Dr Faustus story. 24 The<br />
‘high’ religions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Abraham saturate the world<br />
with meaning. These ideational structures of meaning were created by religious<br />
intellectuals – prophets and priests.<br />
The modern capitalistic world is devoid of meaning, following on the historic<br />
consequences of Puritanism’s exclusion of magic from the world. This<br />
is the move from magic garden to iron cage, and is appropriately termed<br />
the disenchantment of the world (‘Entzauberung’). One consequence of the<br />
banishment of superempirical meaning is the fate of intellectuals. Prior to<br />
the modern, scientific world, they had a twofold task. First, to create rational<br />
structures of meaning and, by this, <strong>Weber</strong> is referring to some ability<br />
to make magical or religious ideas interrelate with some approximation of<br />
consistency. As often as not, this ‘consistency’ involves covering up lack of<br />
consistency, and the early church councils had to work hard to integrate an<br />
Abrahamic god, which met all the necessary requirements of belief, ethics<br />
and behaviour, with a charismatic magician and with a spirit life. Secondly,<br />
to make this meaningful to lay believers.<br />
The task of intellectuals has predominantly been to take the possession<br />
of religious salvation (‘Heilbesitz’) and to refine it into the belief in ‘redemption’.<br />
[. . .] But redemption only achieved a specific ‘worldview’<br />
(‘Weltbild’) 25 and the stance taken to the world. [. . .] What redemption<br />
could and wished to signify in terms of its meaning and its psychological<br />
quality has depended on that worldview and stance.<br />
It is the worldview that has directed ‘from what’ and ‘to what’ one<br />
would be ‘saved’ and, let us not forget, could be saved: whether from a<br />
political and social slavery to a messianic realm in this world; or from<br />
the defilement of ritual uncleanliness or from the impurity of being<br />
imprisoned within the body to the purity of body, soul and beauty and<br />
a purely spiritual existence; or from the eternal and senseless play of
The Sociology of Religion 183<br />
human passions and desires to the calm peace of the pure sight of the<br />
divine; or from radical evil and the servitude of sin to the eternally free<br />
goodness in the arms of a fatherly god; or from the submission to the<br />
astrologically conceived determination of the constellation of the stars<br />
to the dignity of freedom and the partaking in the substance of a hidden<br />
divinity; or from mortality expressed in the constraints of suffering,<br />
privation and death and the threat of punishment in hell to an eternal bliss<br />
in an earthly or future existence in paradise; or from the cycle of rebirth<br />
and its pitiless revenge of living out time to the eternal peace; or from<br />
the senselessness of worry and contingency to a dreamless sleep. There<br />
are still plenty more possibilities. What stands hidden behind all of these<br />
examples is a position and stance towards something that was perceived<br />
as specifically ‘meaningless’ in the world. This resulted in the demand<br />
that the fabric of the world in its totality be in some wise a meaningful<br />
‘cosmos’, or rather, that it could or should be. This longing, which is<br />
the nucleus of religious rationalism, has been invariably carried by the<br />
intellectual strata. The directions and the results of this metaphysical<br />
need, and also the extent of its efficacy, have varied greatly.<br />
(EW, p. 69)<br />
The content of religious ideas is the work of intellectuals, and it is the<br />
work of academics in the study of the science of religion to demonstrate how<br />
these structures of meaning operated. In the modern disenchanted world,<br />
the role of the intellectual becomes problematic. One of the key features of<br />
all the above instances of magic and religion is that they offer a theodicy. By<br />
this, <strong>Weber</strong> means a superempirical justification of why there exists an inequality<br />
in the human condition: why do some people have beauty and some<br />
ill-health, why do whole strata live in poverty while others are wealthy? The<br />
consequences do not follow from human worth, as goodness rarely translates<br />
into good fortune and evil often rewards well. An example of a secular<br />
theodicy is meritocracy – that everyone’s status in society is due to ability<br />
and hard work. (Although this does not explain or justify the distribution<br />
of ability or the capacity to work.) All cultures have various cosmologically<br />
derived answers to this universal feature of societies. A universal problem<br />
requires a pragmatic solution. This is how <strong>Weber</strong> treats the religious construction<br />
of intellectuals.<br />
One prominent secular theodicy in <strong>Weber</strong>’s day was Marxism. It offered<br />
a scientific explanation for a social situation of extreme stratification, drawn<br />
from classical economics, and it offered the eschatology of utopia of a free<br />
and classless society. For <strong>Weber</strong>, Marxism was best understood through the<br />
categories of the sociology of religion as by political economy. Another new<br />
role of the contemporary intellectual was to re-enchant the world. At the<br />
end of the nineteenth century, art was seen as the substitute for religion,<br />
where the salvation benefits were derived from aesthetic and emotional sensibility.<br />
Symbolist artistic currents in Europe and America fed this demand.
184 The Sociology of Religion<br />
Figures from this movement, such as the poet and magus Stefan George,<br />
irritated <strong>Weber</strong>, because he saw them as false charismatics. Had <strong>Weber</strong> been<br />
slightly more value neutral – as it was not for him to judge charismatic power<br />
except through the behaviour of George’s followers – he could have allotted<br />
a larger role to re-enchanters. The phenomena would seem to be predictable<br />
in the face of disenchantment. 26<br />
Part of <strong>Weber</strong>’s irritation was his role as an intellectual. The essential<br />
message, stemming from his Protestant ethic studies, was that the world<br />
could no longer be regarded as a meaningful cosmos underpinning ideas<br />
of progress, coherence, justice and ethics. Secularization, knowledge and<br />
science were driving out the illusionary ideas of a meaningfully ordered cosmos.<br />
Modernity, in its embrace of industry and cities, was turning away from<br />
the long era in agrarian settlements of gods and spirits. <strong>Weber</strong>’s message as<br />
an intellectual was not to look for meaning beyond the empirical. <strong>Weber</strong> was<br />
slightly premature here in that he failed to anticipate the era of nationalism<br />
and the role of the intellectuals as ideologists of national consciousness and<br />
nation state modernization. He was not unaware of nationalists, but they<br />
also seem to have irritated him.<br />
His intellectual message drew on the German tradition of religion standing<br />
in opposition and in conflict to the world. The ‘Intermediate Reflection’<br />
essay is a disquisition on this theme: that where salvation ethics have created<br />
supra-institutional communities of believers, then there must be conflict with<br />
the powers and orders of society. The true believer places faith higher than<br />
family bonds; the realm of economic necessity detracts from the search for<br />
a transcendental salvation; the order of power and politics is a reflection of<br />
the corruption of humankind and is essentially flawed and beyond reform;<br />
aesthetics and sexuality have to be rejected as dangerous competitors to religious<br />
deliverance; and knowledge and its intellectualist demands remain<br />
an enemy of communicative consciousness with a god. Following on from<br />
disenchantment and cosmic meaning, these value spheres, as <strong>Weber</strong> terms<br />
them, have no necessary connection with each other. In modern life, there is<br />
no transcendent unity underlying what you believe in, how you earn your living,<br />
what your politics are, what your aesthetic tastes are and how you make<br />
love. 27 It might be thought that science, education and knowledge could provide<br />
new underpinnings. <strong>Weber</strong>, in his intellectual’s role and giver of truth<br />
– in his lectures on science and politics to wartime students – declared that<br />
science cannot in itself generate the values by which we could lead our lives.<br />
How we lead our lives is a somewhat portentous theme and, here, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
was looking to the Russian intellectuals Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, whom he<br />
thought had gone furthest in probing the issue of meaning in the modern<br />
world. In Dostoyevsky, in a world of ethical irrationality, the analysis points<br />
to a realism shorn of illusions. 28 With Tolstoy, it becomes the basic question<br />
of life – how should it be led and, hence, his famous question – how it is to<br />
be lived (somewhat overshadowed by Lenin’s ‘what is to be done?’). 29 <strong>Weber</strong><br />
did not extend the question ‘how should we live?’ to ‘how should we live
The Sociology of Religion 185<br />
together?’ as the project of politics. <strong>Weber</strong> here never squared his intellectual<br />
objections to the illusion of political community and brotherhood with his<br />
rational obligation to participate in politics as a responsible citizen. (<strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
analysis of power is taken up in Chapter 8.)<br />
3. Historical determination<br />
In the EEWR, <strong>Weber</strong> is unable to deploy causal attribution as the deciphering<br />
of possible motives in relation to the situational context. He is dealing<br />
on a more wholesale scale with world religions, and he does not have access<br />
to primary sources and detailed situational information as he did in PESC.<br />
Whole social strata stand in as sociological actors, and the concept of carriers<br />
(‘Träger’) becomes the empirical referent of religious goals. Different<br />
forms of religion have their own characteristic sociological proponents: the<br />
magician or sorcerer is the practitioner of magic, the priest officiates over<br />
the cult, and the prophet is the bringer of ethics. In the wider social structure<br />
seen comparatively,<br />
If one wishes to characterize succinctly, in a formula so to speak, the<br />
types representative of the various classes that were primary carriers<br />
or propagators of the so-called world religions, they would be the following:<br />
In Confucianism, the world-organizing bureaucrat; in Hinduism,<br />
the world-ordering magician; in Buddhism, the mendicant monk<br />
wandering through the world; in Islam, the warrior seeking to conquer<br />
the world; in Judaism, the wandering trader; and in Christianity, the<br />
itinerant journeyman. To be sure, all these types must not be taken as exponents<br />
of their own occupational or material class interests, but rather<br />
as the ideological carriers of the kind of ethical or salvation doctrine<br />
which most readily conformed to their social position.<br />
(SocRel, pp. 131–2)<br />
This same exposition is taken into the ‘Introduction’ to EEWR and expanded.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> has an obligation in his ‘Introduction’ to outline his main<br />
ideas to the reader, as it is a preface to the studies on the world religions.<br />
He cannot afford to be as discursive and exploratory as the Sociology of<br />
Religion. He has to establish how religions as sets of meanings and values<br />
can be thought of as exercising causal efficacy in the face of the material<br />
necessities of the world. As a national-economist writing in the Archiv für<br />
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, his subject was economic ethics.<br />
No economic ethic has ever been determined solely by religion. It is evident<br />
that economic ethics possess to a high degree a lawlike autonomy<br />
(‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’) closely determined by economic geography and<br />
historical conditions in contrast to the attitudes of human beings to the<br />
world as determined by religious or other ‘inner’ factors of a similar
186 The Sociology of Religion<br />
nature to religion. But it is true to say that among the determinants of an<br />
economic ethic – and these determinants it should be noted are multiple<br />
– belongs the religious definition of conduct of life.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> goes on to note that religious-determined life conduct is strongly<br />
influenced by ‘geographical, political, social and national factors’ (EW, p.<br />
56). This produces the diagram in Figure 6.2.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> points out that it would be a ‘never-ending task’ to detail all the<br />
interactions involved in this model. He simplifies the problem to the conduct<br />
of life and some of their typical carriers. ‘What is presented here is merely<br />
an attempt to bring to light only those social strata which, in giving direction<br />
to the conduct of life, have most strongly influenced the practical ethic of<br />
the relevant religion . . .’ (EW, p. 56). This is a simple and robust model,<br />
and it allows <strong>Weber</strong> to make any number of comparisons across civilizations.<br />
The internal sources of action and religion have their own structure,<br />
their law-like character. This is the intellectual or rationalist character of<br />
salvation ideas or magical ceremonies or cultic rites. External factors are<br />
analysed according to the normal methods of the social sciences. Conduct<br />
of life is an observable regularity of actual behaviour and can be tied to a<br />
particular social stratum. <strong>Weber</strong> himself identifies the Confucian official, the<br />
Brahman, the Buddhist wandering monk, the Christian journeyman and the<br />
Islamic warrior as key strata decisive for the developmental path of those<br />
civilizations. Needless to say, other strata with other beliefs and external<br />
determinants and, therefore, with different conduct of life can be identified<br />
and their historical efficacy assessed. This then becomes a matter of academic<br />
debate. So, in the case of Islam as being carried by feudalistic warrior<br />
castes, there have been numerous challenges to <strong>Weber</strong>’s interpretation. The<br />
town-based Islamic merchants, for instance, could equally be seen as decisive<br />
for the course of Islamic societies. 30 <strong>Weber</strong> could have been mistaken in his<br />
identification. But this does not affect the soundness of the model, only the<br />
empirical evidence and its interpretation. (In principle, the academic debate<br />
could be as intensive as the Protestant ethic debate. This is slightly alarming<br />
– for a sociologist! – as the major determining forces can become engulfed<br />
in disputes over historical detail. But this has to be allowed – especially by<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own methodology of scientific progress. A specialist will arrive and<br />
overturn previous assumptions, and the lines of the debate will have to be<br />
redrawn. Something like this occurred in the subsequent Protestant ethic<br />
Religious definitions (internal factors)<br />
Politics, geography, nations etc. (external factors)<br />
Figure 6.2 Determination of economic ethics.<br />
Conduct of life Economic ethics
The Sociology of Religion 187<br />
debates, in which <strong>Weber</strong>’s devout Calvinists were shown to be Erasmist<br />
humanists escaping economic persecution in the enforcement of Catholic<br />
dogma in the sixteenth century. Continuing in this vein, the whole of the<br />
world religions project could be redrawn, although whether in the strong<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>ian brush-strokes seems unlikely.)<br />
‘Various efforts have been made to interpret the interrelationship between<br />
a religious ethic and the interest position of its carriers, so that the former<br />
appears only as a “function” of the latter.’ <strong>Weber</strong> disputes the Marxist case<br />
here, and also Nietzsche’s theory of ‘ressentiment’ – that religion is an expression<br />
of the impotent and the oppressed. His model brings to fruition the<br />
statement made in his 1898 Lecture Course that similar economic conditions<br />
give rise to entirely different cultures, and also to the subheading in the 1914<br />
Outline ‘The Class Determination of Religions’. Karl Marx’s assertion that<br />
religion is epiphenomenal to class and that religion is ‘the sigh of the oppressed<br />
creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of the soulless<br />
conditions. It is the opium of the people . . .’ was not directly confronted. 31<br />
It is debatable whether Marx’s writings on religion at that time formed a<br />
corpus worthy of academic attention. Instead, <strong>Weber</strong>, through his linking of<br />
economic mentality with religiously determined life conduct, demonstrates<br />
that the patterning and pathways of religious thought as they were constituted<br />
in people’s actions and behaviour were extremely complex, and had<br />
developmental consequences. Rhetorical asides to opium are no more than<br />
literary flourishes compared with the actual use of opium in cultic practices.<br />
It might be thought that <strong>Weber</strong> is inverting Marxism in his terminology of<br />
salvation goods (‘Heilsgüter’) – as if religions sell salvation as a commodity.<br />
There is certainly something of the language of commerce and nationaleconomy<br />
in <strong>Weber</strong>’s usage. He was clearly aware that religions have to be<br />
marketed in order for them to have a mass appeal. ‘Religions promise and<br />
offer different salvation goods (‘Heilsgüter’) . . .’ (EW, p. 66). By this, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
is indicating that, in comparative terms, salvation can be of this world or<br />
other-worldly, and different salvation paths are offered to the masses. It is an<br />
empirical matter for investigation. This also recalls Rickert’s comment that<br />
cultural values (‘Kulturgüter’) have no validity until realized in empirical<br />
reality. <strong>Weber</strong>’s usage, then, has a historical, empirical and (non-Marxist)<br />
materialist quality. A corollary of this is that his usage cannot be taken for<br />
being idealistic. While the German tradition had, to an extent, studied the<br />
content of religious ideas, <strong>Weber</strong> rendered them as ends of actions, objectified<br />
in social processes. This makes it harder (but not impossible) to mount<br />
a Marxian critique of <strong>Weber</strong> as an ‘idealist’ opposed to ‘materialism’.<br />
The role of intellectuals – priests, prophets and sorcerers – has already<br />
been mentioned in the construction of salvation goods and pathways – a<br />
process, <strong>Weber</strong> says, that attains its own inherent autonomy (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’).<br />
To this, <strong>Weber</strong> adds a cognitive component. ‘But redemption only<br />
achieved a specific meaning when it became the expression of a systematically<br />
rationalized “worldview” (“Weltbild”) [<strong>Weber</strong>’s quotes] and the stance
188 The Sociology of Religion<br />
taken to the world.’ ‘It is the worldview that has directed “from what” and<br />
“for what” one would be “saved” and, let us not forget, could be saved . . .’.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does not define what a worldview is – neither does he say where he<br />
got the term from. It most probably derives from Dilthey’s ambitions for<br />
philosophy. ‘If ’, Dilthey wrote, ‘we are to bear illness, death or banishment,<br />
a special frame of mind is needed in life. Most people receive this from<br />
religion; once dogmas have been discredited the educated classes need a<br />
substitute which is based on religious or philosophic reflection.’ 32 This is<br />
quite close to being a secular theodicy. Individuals, in their lives, are faced by<br />
adversity, injustice and the workings of forces beyond their ken. Philosophy,<br />
for Dilthey, should be able to articulate a vision of the age in which people<br />
live, and provides guides for action. <strong>Weber</strong> uses the term ‘Weltbild’ in place<br />
of Dilthey’s ‘Weltanschauung’ (view of the world, literally). Both terms are<br />
often given the same translation: ‘worldview’. <strong>Weber</strong> did not share Dilthey’s<br />
philosophical ambitions, and ‘Weltbild’ is a more neutral term. It is the notion<br />
of a framing device through which the world is viewed and made sense<br />
of. It is informed by values – religious or magical and, in the modern world,<br />
art rather then philosophy. In this framing sense, it would now be reckoned<br />
to have a cognitive aspect – although <strong>Weber</strong> did not himself explore<br />
the perceptual qualities of worldviews. (More is said about this in the next<br />
chapter.)<br />
In his revision, in 1919–20, of the ‘Introduction’ to EEWR, <strong>Weber</strong> inserted<br />
a sentence between the two sentences on worldviews, quoted above.<br />
‘It is interests (material and ideal), and not ideas, that have directly governed<br />
the actions of human beings. But the “worldviews” that have been created by<br />
ideas have very often, like switchmen, decided the lines on which the dynamic<br />
of interest has propelled behaviour.’ A switchman is, or rather was, the person<br />
who pulled the large metal lever to change the points on a railway track.<br />
It is a striking image and encapsulates <strong>Weber</strong>’s thinking about the paths or<br />
tracks that developmental history follows. Take the late medieval European<br />
economy. Economically, this was building up considerable forward drive in<br />
terms of trading, money transactions, property rights, institutional changes,<br />
etc. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this was as much a south European<br />
as a northern European phenomenon. The Reformation intervenes,<br />
the path of development bifurcates between a new level of dynamism and<br />
stagnation. The switchman, for <strong>Weber</strong>, is Puritanism. Or take, at the same<br />
time, China and Europe. China had considerable economic advantages over<br />
Europe, but one track (Confucianism and the maintenance of harmony) is<br />
the slow or delayed train, while the other (switched by Puritanism) is the<br />
path of world-overcoming and capitalistic expansion.<br />
It is only a sentence and not a methodological statement of causal verification<br />
in comparative history. <strong>Weber</strong>’s methodology specifies the empirically<br />
attested attribution of motive and reasons to individual behaviour. Individuals<br />
as a mass of the similarly acting constitute a social stratum, so causation<br />
may be generalized to the group. That, as we shall see, is as far as <strong>Weber</strong>
The Sociology of Religion 189<br />
wants to proceed. But subsequent and recent work in comparative sociology,<br />
very much in the <strong>Weber</strong>ian mould, has been far more preoccupied in coming<br />
up with an integrated theory of material and ideal factors. This is guided by<br />
the idea of factorial analysis – that somehow, in a multicausal situation, the<br />
various causative factors can be weighed against each other.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> did not have such an encompassing ambition. Turning points in<br />
developmental history were what mattered and could be empirically isolated<br />
and noted, e.g. the Christian apostle Peter at Antioch or Judaic legacy.<br />
Everything else remained history, intensively and extensively infinite in<br />
extent. There are material and ideal interests, not factors. Interests can be<br />
made sense of by the social scientist, and they have both consequences and<br />
meaning. <strong>Weber</strong>’s final position on this in his ‘Preliminary Remarks’ to the<br />
‘Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion’ was to say that outcomes are<br />
the result of a concatenation of circumstances. In the examination of those<br />
forces, the obligation is to grasp the significance and meaning of historical<br />
development. Explanation resides in meaning, not in correct factorial analysis.<br />
The meaning that <strong>Weber</strong> draws out of occidental development is the<br />
imprint of rationalism. History may contain blind forces, but the switchman<br />
is not blind – he sees, or rather searches for, nirvana, a hidden god, paradise,<br />
earthly perfection, earthly satisfactions – and he prescribes the way of life<br />
or conduct for achieving these goals. The role of sociology is to go beyond<br />
events and to grasp types of social action displayed by social groups and<br />
social strata, and to understand their meaning and significance.<br />
It is a mistake, therefore, to exaggerate the comparative ambitions of the<br />
studies in the world religions. It does look as though <strong>Weber</strong> wants to isolate<br />
the factor that accounts for the rise of the west by a process of elimination:<br />
the west had this crucial factor that the Orient lacked. In one sense the simple<br />
answer is western rationalism, but then this gives way to a more complex<br />
set of questions. For <strong>Weber</strong>, it is a concatenation of circumstances, or if one<br />
likes, an accident. But knowing how it came about and what ideal interests<br />
were implicated in its emergence is important and something that can be<br />
comprehended, and the accident is not without significance.<br />
To say history in its developmental outcome is an accident is perhaps<br />
too strong a term. Conduct of life is a subjectively intended orientation in<br />
a situation and capable of sociological explanation; equally external factors<br />
such as economic and political forces and the environment of economic geography<br />
exert a discernible determination. How these two aspects interact,<br />
which they will do continuously, and what joint outcome is produced would<br />
be better termed fortuitous. In German, fortuitous and accidental is the same<br />
word: ‘zufällig’. Fortuitous is better because it implies that things happen for<br />
a reason or reasons. In <strong>Weber</strong>’s historical sociology, outcomes happen for<br />
reasons – motivational states and the pattern of external determination. But<br />
how they interact and combine is hard to predict.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> has an interesting discussion of this issue in his ‘Categories’ essay.<br />
The problem of fitting subjective motivation with the external play of forces
190 The Sociology of Religion<br />
would be solved if somehow intended meanings were ‘objectively right’ in<br />
the situation. But this is rarely the case. <strong>Weber</strong> outlines two possibilities, both<br />
of which illustrate the perversity of outcomes. ‘On the one hand, there is behaviour<br />
that seems wholly irrational but has an unperceived (“disavowed”)<br />
yet relatively extensive rationality; it is “understandable” because of that rationality.’<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does not provide the example that this statement requires,<br />
although he could well have had a Freudian-type explanation in mind.<br />
‘On the other hand, there is the fact, substantiated hundreds of times (especially<br />
in cultural history), that phenomena apparently directly conditioned<br />
by instrumental rationality actually originated historically through wholly<br />
irrational motives; and subsequently, because changing conditions nurtured<br />
in them a high degree of technical “correct rationality”, they survived as<br />
“adaptations” and occasionally became universal’ (Categories, pp. 155–6).<br />
This takes us back to the Protestant ethic. The Puritans’ rational, sober and<br />
systematic attitude to work appears to conform to the criteria of instrumental<br />
rationality: action that achieves its goal in the most effective and<br />
efficient manner. Benjamin Franklin, in his advice on how to get on in the<br />
world, offers an instrumentalist view of managing oneself. In PESC, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
suggests a continuity between Franklin and Puritanism, as Franklin’s father<br />
was a Calvinist. Franklin Sr’s conduct of life was formed from an irrational<br />
motivation – predestinarian beliefs. Franklin Jr is brought up with the same<br />
mental outlook, and his behaviour will, as America’s nascent capitalism gets<br />
under way, be ‘adaptive’. W.G. Runciman has recently demonstrated how<br />
this can be underpinned by modern evolutionary theory. 33 Calvinism represents<br />
a cultural gene, or meme, to follow Dawkins. It does not necessarily fit<br />
well with the economy of early modernity but, over time and with capitalist<br />
development, it came to be highly adaptive in an economic world that demands<br />
a dedication to labour.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> himself was highly averse to evolutionary theory – for its monist,<br />
Hegelian and Comtean drawbacks – so the evolutionist concept of adaptation<br />
goes into inverted commas. Modern evolutionary theory, however,<br />
has a theory of change based on selectionism. There is no logic in history<br />
as in Hegel or Comte. Cultural forms, further down the historical road,<br />
prove to be adaptive to changing circumstances. This is a more theoretically<br />
reasoned account of historical change, for it seeks to explain fortuitous<br />
outcomes. In his ‘Prefatory Remarks’, <strong>Weber</strong> falls back on the concatenation<br />
of circumstances, i.e. it was a fortuitous set of conditions. Runciman draws<br />
an important contrast between ‘selectionism’ and ‘elective affinity’. 34 The<br />
causal model in the former holds that a cultural attitude is empirically verified<br />
and is taken as a given rather than its causative effects being derived as<br />
immediately following. A cultural meme can lie, so to speak, ‘dormant’ for<br />
generations (although it does exist handed down over generations) before,<br />
under favourable circumstances, releasing its causal impact. For <strong>Weber</strong>, elective<br />
affinity is a coming together of circumstance and a culturally determined<br />
form of life conduct; the relational link displays what <strong>Weber</strong> terms ‘causal<br />
adequacy’, the one supporting the other. Culture (‘Kultur’), for <strong>Weber</strong>, is
The Sociology of Religion 191<br />
always live rather than dormant, and does not exist as a rotating flywheel in<br />
neutral, so to speak, waiting its engagement with history. Culture embedded<br />
into life conduct is fate or destiny, and it is either realized or frustrated.<br />
4. Value spheres and modernization<br />
Runciman’s use of selectionism is a fairly recent development in social theory.<br />
In the decades approximately 1955–85, neo-evolutionary sociological<br />
theories provided the basis for explaining modernization. Their key idea is<br />
differentiation. Modern societies are inherently complex and, to reach such<br />
a level, a process of differentiation has to take place. In Talcott Parsons’<br />
hands – by far the most influential theorist of the second half of the twentieth<br />
century in this respect – this differentiation proceeds according to the<br />
AGIL (adaptation, goal attainment, integration, latency function) schema.<br />
Parsons conceptualized modern industrial societies as a system that has differentiated<br />
subsystems: politics, economy, social institutions and culture.<br />
Each of these performs subfunctions that are integrated into an overall system.<br />
Politics is concerned with adapting the system to a changing environment,<br />
what Habermas was to rephrase as the steering mechanism of society.<br />
The economic subsystem is instrumentalist in achieving economic goals. The<br />
social subsystem organizes actors into role positions that fit them for the<br />
various institutions within a society – the family, the workplace, etc. Culture<br />
is a kind of coding mechanism that integrates system maintenance with individual<br />
behaviour in the subsystems.<br />
Parsons did not regard his social system theory as antithetical to <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
legacy. Parsons was a <strong>Weber</strong> scholar and translator of his work. It is not<br />
unreasonable to read Economy and Society as an account of fairly simple<br />
social institutions such as the clan, the neighbourhood and the household<br />
together with their relationship to cults and magic and how they are transformed<br />
under conditions of salvation religions, the rise of rationality and the<br />
emergence of contract and exchange relationships. This could be deemed<br />
as a move from simple to complex societies, and as an elaboration of Tönnies’<br />
communal groups bound by ties of blood and kinship to associational<br />
forms bound through rational association – the move from ‘Gemeinschaft’<br />
to ‘Gesellschaft’. Secondly, the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ essay would certainly<br />
seem to describe a process of differentiation even if <strong>Weber</strong> did not<br />
use this term. The early or archaic societies, in which clan, neighbourhood<br />
and household predominate, did not distinguish social relationships of kin,<br />
politics, economics, religion/magic and art. <strong>Weber</strong> says they have a primitive<br />
(‘urwüchsig) natural attitude to the world. Only with the advent of salvation<br />
religions can a process of differentiation emerge. Religion as an autonomous<br />
value sphere stands in opposition to the values spheres of kinship, economy,<br />
politics and art. Thirdly, with his concept of ‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’ as well as<br />
rationalization, <strong>Weber</strong> would appear to permit autonomous mechanisms of<br />
development.
192 The Sociology of Religion<br />
Hence, in Parsons’ thinking, why not overcome <strong>Weber</strong>’s aversion to evolutionary<br />
thinking and introduce differentiation as a process–concept in the<br />
way that Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim did? The move from simple<br />
to complex must involve phases of differentiation, and the task for Parsonian<br />
historical sociology is to show how increased differentiation makes complexity<br />
possible. Rainer M. Lepsius has recently suggested a similar manoeuvre at<br />
the level of institutions. 35 The actual terms that <strong>Weber</strong> uses in the ‘Intermediate<br />
Reflection’ essay are value spheres and life orders (of religion, economy,<br />
politics, culture, art and sexuality). If these are treated as equivalent to institutions,<br />
then a <strong>Weber</strong>ian analysis can be built on institutional differentiation,<br />
each with their own ideal and material interests. These moves place <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
sociology far more in accord with the preoccupations of late twentieth-century<br />
sociologists. As it stands, <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology is overly restrictive; for instance,<br />
not only does it not have a concept of societal differentiation, neither<br />
does it have a concept of role. Theories of role explain how the individual<br />
is able to operate across a range of institutional contexts –family, work, culture,<br />
politics – with some element of integration.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s historical sociology is actually quite recalcitrant to such manoeuvres.<br />
In order to update <strong>Weber</strong>, cardinal emphases have to be removed.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s value spheres are denominated by values held by individuals. The<br />
individual occupies the central circle of a series of overlapping circles. The<br />
respective values of family, friendship, work, politics, culture and religion<br />
are all different, but the individual as a ‘personality’ experiences all these<br />
values – in their harmonies and in their conflicts. This is what gives his or her<br />
existence meanings. The human being is a thinking, feeling, wishing, affectual<br />
person, confronted with the various orders of the world. <strong>Weber</strong> refuses<br />
to turn the actual person into the abstract individual of ‘homo sociologicus’.<br />
Value spheres are immediate to the individual, and they are not mediated<br />
by role playing. The antinomic stresses of values in conflict – brotherhood<br />
versus power for example – are parts of the conditions of existence. Parsons’<br />
subsystems create second-order spheres of values mediated by cultural<br />
pattern variables and roles. With <strong>Weber</strong>, existence, values and action are<br />
the stuff of the human or cultural sciences, and the precondition of their<br />
possibility. The scientist is part of the social world, he or she relates through<br />
values to other societies and cultures and, through academic study, draws out<br />
the significance of human existence. This position owes much to the German<br />
heritage, much of which has been referred to, and it also places blocks on<br />
the refinement of theories of society and societal change. One cannot move<br />
away from the base material of human existence – affectual and instrumental<br />
mental states in the face of the exigencies of the world. One might complain<br />
of want of further refinement in <strong>Weber</strong> but, equally, one might wish to recall<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s judgement on religious intellectuals – overelaborate accounts of the<br />
meaning of the cosmos (society) tend to alienate the laity (public).
7 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
The last chapter established that, although meaning and causation in <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
historical sociology are not to be separated, the idea that all the factors<br />
behind developmental paths could be assessed and weighed is never<br />
entertained by <strong>Weber</strong>. Equally, he dismissed evolutionary theories and would<br />
probably have rejected neo-evolutionary theories of system differentiation.<br />
The developmental pathways of different civilizations can be shown to possess<br />
a narrative of meaning (cyclical in India, harmony in China and rationalism<br />
in the west). This is not of itself determinative of outcomes and directionality.<br />
Outcomes are the fortuitous coming together of internal views of<br />
the world and a variety of external forces. Some outcomes, which structure<br />
future patterns of history, survive, and it would seem to be possible from<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s stance to allow an account based on new forms, or reforms, as being<br />
adapted to the environment – not by design but by fortuitous endurance.<br />
History is not one damned thing after another, to paraphrase the playwright<br />
Alan Bennett. It displays meaning, and the historian forges a value relationship<br />
between the contemporary reader and the past. PESC established that a<br />
way of everyday life formed by Calvinism was both causative of capitalistic<br />
modernity and significant for understanding the nature of modern society.<br />
Origins determined the means–end mentality of modernity. In the EEWR,<br />
a wider historical picture is drawn, in which certain key strata carried a<br />
worldview that was causative for particular developments – itinerant artisans<br />
for early Christianity, Calvinistic rising middle classes in the sixteenth and<br />
seventeenth centuries – in the course of the long historical development of<br />
the Occident.<br />
In this chapter, I want to examine some of the implications of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
expansion from the specialist, almost case study, approach of PESC to the<br />
wide-ranging comparative approach of EEWR and, finally, to the summation<br />
of his thinking on the distinctiveness of the west, in terms of rationalism,<br />
from other civilizations or cultures. The expansion in the scope of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
thinking should not be deliberated over as if it was a planned or preconceived<br />
strategy. Rather, it is perhaps better thought of as an efflorescence<br />
in <strong>Weber</strong>’s remarkable capacity to develop an original thesis in a variety
194 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
of different contexts. The original explanandum was how to explain the<br />
origins of capitalistic modernity, and that is what he is still trying to explain<br />
in his final summation – his ‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the ‘Collected Essays in<br />
the Sociology of Religion’. There is no one complete answer to the original<br />
question, although what does stay constant in his approach is the insistence<br />
that causation and meaning remain interlinked. That said, the causation–meaning<br />
linkage looks very different if Calvinism alone is being studied<br />
or if whole stretches of the development of western Christianity are being<br />
studied. To argue that the nature of western modernity originates in the<br />
fairly narrow particularism of Calvinism and certain Puritan sects, and then<br />
to go on to argue that western modernity is the outcome of a rationalistic<br />
tendency that is expressed over centuries, is to produce two different accounts<br />
of the causation–meaning linkage. <strong>Weber</strong> himself would have seen<br />
both accounts as compatible. He never abandoned or revised the essential<br />
explanatory thrust of PESC when he came to republish it in 1920. What I<br />
will argue in this chapter is that, if the scope of the argument is widened,<br />
the causal arguments also change, and this has implications for the place<br />
allotted to the interpretation of meaning. I raise the stakes in comparative<br />
sociology by introducing two post-<strong>Weber</strong>ian theories that demonstrate with<br />
greater clarity how expanding the causal field leads to different assessments<br />
of meaning. The first of these theories was put forward by the Canadian economic<br />
historian Harold Innis, who showed that the capabilities of political<br />
and salvation messages are determined by the technology of communication.<br />
The accessibility and diffusion of messages, and so of meaning, are dependent<br />
on technology. The second theorist is Karl Jaspers, who reconfigured the<br />
era of the world religions as the ‘axial age’. Religions present a new modality<br />
of thought and a larger cradle of civilization, within which it is conceivable<br />
that more than one modernity could have emerged. This idea has been pursued<br />
by S.N. Eisenstadt, who argues for ‘multiple modernities’.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s argument in PESC, 1904–5, is what I will call a singularity argument.<br />
A unique ‘chemical’ bonding – an elective affinity – occurred between<br />
a rising middle class and a Calvinist-influenced conduct of life. Something<br />
singular happened, and the Calvinist worldview became constitutive of modernity,<br />
and there is an inescapable component of modernity that always carries<br />
the singularity of its origins. <strong>Weber</strong>’s contribution rests on this assertion.<br />
Modern capitalism ‘worked’ in a way that no other previous capitalisms had<br />
been capable of by concentrating not on the ends of production and wealth<br />
but solely on the means. <strong>Weber</strong>’s Puritans are narrow-minded. Wearing the<br />
blinkers of other-worldly salvation, their lives were organized to accumulate<br />
wealth as a confirmation and sign of their election and to deny previous<br />
notions of Christian brotherhood and ethics to fellow human beings. PESC<br />
is full of suggestions as to how this particularistic attitude entered into politics,<br />
society and science. Oliver Cromwell and the Puritan discipline of his<br />
soldiers won the English Civil War and, in marking a decisive stage in the<br />
centralization of the English state, it represented a superior sort of military
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 195<br />
violence. The Puritan soldier–saint cared little for his own life or for the lives<br />
of others – so justifying some of the more spectacular of Cromwell’s brutalities.<br />
The rights of man originated not in a free-thinking Enlightenment but<br />
in the absolute conviction that no authority should intervene between God<br />
and the individual’s textual and prayerful communing with the deity. Liberty,<br />
as <strong>Weber</strong> was fond of pointing out to his German contemporaries, was established<br />
through regicide, and this was inseparable from religious radicalism.<br />
Puritanism, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s vivid phrase, descended like a hoar frost on Merrie<br />
England and, to this day, is inseparable from a certain gloominess, all of<br />
which can be traced back to the Puritan’s almost complete devaluation of the<br />
body as a worthless and corrupt vessel. And in <strong>Weber</strong>’s hands, science, while<br />
an instrument of enormous emancipation, is driven by a sober, systematic<br />
and empiricist outlook and is remorseless in its progress, so amounting to a<br />
form of disenchantment. The origins of modernity are features intrinsic to<br />
modernity, however overlaid they might have become through subsequent<br />
influences.<br />
There is a subargument to the singular creation of modernity. Although<br />
the fortuitous nature of historical development is acknowledged by <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
at least in his 1913 ‘Categories’ essay and in his discussion of why particular<br />
worldviews take hold, there is a strong sense of agency in the Protestant<br />
ethic studies of 1904–5. The Puritans meant to change the world according<br />
to their religious ideas, and they were historically consequential in achieving<br />
this. Singularity, therefore, is determinative of future developments.<br />
Johannes Weiss has drawn attention to a paradox in this position. 1 Puritan<br />
doctrine and its interpretation introduced something new. Metaphysics and<br />
mankind’s relation to the world had never before come up with such an<br />
imaginative permutation (redemption, grace and its attainment). This was<br />
causative in changing the development of history in an irreversible way. The<br />
movement of the Reformation had produced a spontaneous innovation that<br />
thereafter proved irreversible in the texture of human society and its mentality.<br />
This is not a determinative law at the general level of society, but a determination<br />
at the level of agency. Singularity attaches to innovation, agency,<br />
cause and meaning. Karl Popper has insisted, as a normative imperative, on<br />
the openness of history and, like <strong>Weber</strong>, that there are no laws formulable<br />
within the generality of society. Weiss points out that the (<strong>Weber</strong>ian) converse<br />
of this position is that social groups can intervene decisively in human<br />
history. Human agency can be determinative in an irreversible manner. To<br />
take a contemporary example, human rights as both discourse and practice<br />
may have the capacity to transform what were/are dictatorial regimes. Human<br />
rights, as a form of human agency, would then effect and determine an<br />
irreversible change.<br />
The notion of singularity contains another paradox. The western selfimage<br />
of modernity emphasizes its universalist characteristics: law, science,<br />
politics and economics all conform to criteria that go beyond the means–end<br />
rationality. Law operates according to high-level criteria such as justice and
196 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
equity; science and education are seen as the emancipation of humankind<br />
over nature as well as self-understanding; politics is seen as deliberative,<br />
democratic and a process of reconciling opposed interests; and economics as<br />
overcoming poverty and the rational allocation of resources. <strong>Weber</strong>’s notoriety<br />
as a theorist of modernity is to render all these goods, defined by a sense<br />
of higher purpose, as compromised by a darker side. Justice takes second<br />
place to the administration of law and bureaucratic imperatives; likewise,<br />
politics, which also can never escape what <strong>Weber</strong> terms the pragma of power<br />
– there is a logic to the exercise of power irrespective of its inclusive and<br />
benign intentions; knowledge leads to disillusion and not to joyous emancipation;<br />
and the mechanisms of wealth creation impose a new serfdom on<br />
human personality and its autonomous expression.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is (in)famous for drawing attention to these antinomies. In the<br />
singularity argument, what claims to be universalist is in fact the effectiveness<br />
of diffusion, and what is diffused may be effective because of the<br />
particularism of its origins. Modern rational capitalism originates from the<br />
deliberately blinkered conduct of life of Puritan groups. Because economic<br />
behaviour is divorced from wider questions of the ends to which economic<br />
activity should be put, it is so successful. Singular ideas and practices succeed<br />
by virtue of their extensive diffusion and not necessarily by virtue of<br />
intrinsically universal criteria. To give a contemporary example, a make of<br />
software might achieve global dominance through successful marketing and<br />
support, not because it is the best written software adjudged by universalist<br />
criteria such as design, economy, task fulfilment and generative capacity. By<br />
this argument, the singular breakthrough to modernity contains within it<br />
shortcomings traceable to the point of origination.<br />
Modernity is a singular and, in part, vitiating event. This is not a happy<br />
place to leave the argument. If <strong>Weber</strong> has got the causation wrong or exaggerated<br />
it (as I think he did), we can vacate it; also it is not a wholly convincing<br />
argument to say that the circumstances of origination are determinative<br />
for future situations. Changes in the causal model can produce more benign<br />
outcomes.<br />
The bias of communication<br />
In this section, I will discuss the economic historian, Harold Innis. His work<br />
impacts upon <strong>Weber</strong>’s concept of worldview and suggests that <strong>Weber</strong> was<br />
right to stress its importance, but that he remained unaware of the dimensions<br />
of its operation. Innis made no direct comment about <strong>Weber</strong>. He established<br />
his reputation with the Fur Trade in Canada and The Cod Fisheries. 2<br />
Although these studies appeared specialist and seemingly localist in emphasis,<br />
Innis was able to show the penetrative effects of commodity trading on<br />
the development of a society. Also, the localism is misleading. The main<br />
fur trading company in Canada was the Hudson Bay Company, a capitalist<br />
concern whose headquarters were in London. The company was effectively
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 197<br />
run from London through a continuous supply of trading reports from the<br />
bases on and around Hudson Bay. And from Hudson Bay itself, there existed<br />
precarious lines of communications to the trappers of the interior. That this<br />
business was conducted as a capitalistic enterprise was taken for granted by<br />
Innis. The novel question for Innis was how did it operate, and this led him<br />
to consider not just the extensiveness of trading routes but the lines of communication<br />
themselves as an enabling precondition. Hence, the question is<br />
not one of where did capitalism come from and develop into (which, in a<br />
sense, was the German ‘Fragestellung’ of Marx, Rodbertus, Bücher, Sombart<br />
and <strong>Weber</strong>), but how was it enabled through the media of communication?<br />
Harold Innis, in Empire and Communications (first edition, Oxford,<br />
1950), put forward the bold hypothesis that the political systems of empires<br />
and kingdoms were conditioned by their medium of communication. Where<br />
writing is restricted to the media of clay and parchment, i.e. durable but<br />
heavy media, then an emphasis is placed on time, hierarchy and decentralization.<br />
The materials of writing themselves place a cognitive emphasis on<br />
the permanence of what is written and place physical limitations on the<br />
transmission of written material. When writing moves to the less durable<br />
materials of papyrus and paper, political systems gain an extension over<br />
space and experience a reduction in hierarchy and an increase in centralization.<br />
Writing in durable media such as stone (lithographs) and clay, such as<br />
the monuments of dynasties, seeks to emphasize the everlasting longevity of<br />
rulership. Examples of this type are Sumerian civilization c. 3000 bc and the<br />
Old Kingdom of Egypt c. 2700 bc. Papyrus is produced in restricted areas<br />
under centralized control to meet the demands of a centralized bureaucratic<br />
administration, and is limited to the smooth waters of navigation because<br />
of its fragile state. Roman rulership is the major example of a political system<br />
based on papyrus as a means of communication. Innis points out that<br />
both papyrus and parchment are accompanied by the monopolization of<br />
knowledge by rulers and priests. The political systems of the Near East and<br />
the Mediterranean world of antiquity were profoundly affected by the emergence<br />
of papyrus and the associated development of alphabets.<br />
Innis presents a model of what Robert Bellah terms archaic kingdoms. 3<br />
Their political capacities of rulership are determined by the availability of<br />
media of communication. The historical record is more ambiguous in classifying<br />
centralized versus decentralized rulership in terms of light versus heavy<br />
media of communication. What is important in modelling is not historical<br />
veracity but providing ways of thinking and being able to understand the<br />
limitations of rulership in eras of restricted means of communication. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
would have designated the Innis thesis an ideal type. What he would<br />
not have appreciated, however, is that the meaningful content of messages<br />
– which for <strong>Weber</strong> is the primary datum – is itself determined by its medium.<br />
Marshall McLuhan, at one point a junior colleague of Innis at the University<br />
of Toronto, rather overemphasized the point through his aphorism, ‘the<br />
medium is the message’. One modality of change in archaic kingdoms is the
198 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
switch from stone and clay to papyrus. A change in technology alters the<br />
content of messages.<br />
In late medieval Europe, to which I now turn, the major switch is from<br />
parchment to paper. A series of events – the importing of paper from China,<br />
its manufacture in Europe, the breaking of monopolies of paper production<br />
– and the parallel history of printing (the movement of small workshops from<br />
Gutenberg in 1450 across Europe, the switch from manuscript uncials to the<br />
roman, gothic and italic fonts, and the evasion of censorship) – underwrite<br />
the key developments in early modernity: vernacular languages, the breaking<br />
of religious and priestly monopolies, the formation of recognizably modern<br />
polities, the formation of self-regulating political communities – albeit only<br />
fleetingly in Scotland, Geneva, England and the Low Countries – and the<br />
ability to transmit financial information and financial assets as a basis for the<br />
formation of markets. Paper, quickly followed by the introduction of printing,<br />
allowed a massive leap in extension over a number of fields: political<br />
administration, economic markets, religious and humanistic sensibility and<br />
learning – both literature and science.<br />
This suggests that explanations of modernity should be sought in emergent<br />
universalisms taking the place of static particularisms. As Tenbruck<br />
emphasized, world religions for <strong>Weber</strong> represent a cognitive leap forward<br />
in the movement to more universalizing worldviews. What Innis brings to<br />
the debate, however, is an argument rooted in the materiality of knowledge<br />
transmission. Obviously, he has to acknowledge, like Comte and <strong>Weber</strong>, the<br />
crucial move from magic to religions of the world based on sacred revelation.<br />
In <strong>Weber</strong>’s view, magic has no inherent logic because it is based on things<br />
or objects: stars, rivers, stones, patterns, mysteries and their divination.<br />
For Innis, with the advent of writing, ‘man is provided with transpersonal<br />
memory’. ‘Men were given an artificially extended and verifiable memory of<br />
objects and events not present to sight and recollection.’ 4<br />
It is instructive to reassemble <strong>Weber</strong>’s PESC along the lines of Innis’ argument,<br />
not least because it provides a way of seeing how <strong>Weber</strong> assembled his<br />
own argument. In what follows, my own argumentation is schematic. I use<br />
Innis’ hypothesis as a heuristic in order to probe the threads of <strong>Weber</strong>’s own<br />
arguments in PESC.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s periodization can be construed as follows:<br />
1 medieval monasticism as orders of a world-escaping asceticism;<br />
2 Calvinism and the Puritan sects where the monkish attitude is released<br />
into the world as inner-worldly asceticism.<br />
In the next section, I develop a number of points through the expedient<br />
of inserting Innis’ hypothesis into the above periodization. Accordingly, the<br />
two periods become:<br />
1 Monasticism, most notably Benedictine monasticism, is a form of<br />
asceticism whose most important accomplishment is the production of
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 199<br />
hand-written manuscripts. These writings are devoted to a particular<br />
conception of time. Just as the pyramids stood for the conceit that the<br />
dynasts live forever, so the copying of the religious texts becomes a<br />
way of asserting that the word of God is eternal. Enormous amounts<br />
of intellectual, human and economic capital are poured into copying<br />
the sacred texts in a variety of fairly complex manuscript styles. The<br />
earliest existing Bibles are the wealth equivalents of medieval cathedrals<br />
– the Codex Argenteus (in Carolina Redivina in Uppsala) and the<br />
Codex Amiatinus, which was produced in Jarrow in Northumbria.<br />
The latter took the skins of over 1500 calves and required numerous<br />
copyists – strong men pushing the quill across the vellum for six hours<br />
a day and dependent on the intellectual resources of the ‘armarium’<br />
and ‘scriptorium’. It was Cassiodorus in his Institutiones divinarum<br />
lectionum who created, in ad 531 in his monastic foundation at<br />
Vivarium, a scheme of study for monks and provided an account of the<br />
methods and techniques of transcription. Innis notes that Cassiodorus<br />
completed the work of St Benedict ‘by making the writing of books and<br />
the preservation of authors a sacred duty and an act of piety’. 5 It was as<br />
a result of these developments that the Codex Amiatinus emerged from<br />
Jarrow around ad 700.<br />
While it is quite correct to attribute to this monastic labour the<br />
transmission of the Bible, the early church fathers and classical authors<br />
of Greece and Rome, indeed the preservation of literacy and the alphabet<br />
itself, seen as a medium, the monastic manuscript was highly restricted.<br />
Manuscript Bibles were the monuments of the ‘Dark Ages’ and, in this<br />
sense, they were meant to be revered rather than read. Transmission<br />
was confined to the perpetual task of copying; also, what was copied<br />
and what was read were subject to tight control and censorship.<br />
Hand-written script encourages conservatism as well as conservation.<br />
Extension over space – the potentiality within a rationalized alphabet<br />
– was limited by the huge resource that went into writing and the sheer<br />
weight of parchment (the Codex Amiatinus weighs over 70 lbs, consists<br />
of 1030 folios, is ten inches thick and measures 14 by 20 inches). These<br />
manuscripts were monuments of the word and, in this respect, they<br />
memorialized sacred revelation over time – for all time. The monastic<br />
escape from the world signified not only a break with the rest of the<br />
world spatially but an entirely different conception of time. While the<br />
secular world was defined by its (worthless) transience, the monastic<br />
world was based on the illusion that time, through the memorialization<br />
of the word, would be eternal.<br />
With the transfer of Abbot Alcuin from York to Aachen in ad 781,<br />
Charlemagne became the first medieval ruler to realize the potentiality<br />
of the vector of space. The Carolingian miniscule (rationalized at<br />
Corbie in Northumbria) and parchment became, as capitularies, the<br />
medium of political administration in Europe’s first medieval empire.<br />
Patrimonialism is not solely defined by dependency relationships within
200 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
the ‘Herrschaftsverband’, but also through its media of communication.<br />
Writing comes out of the cloister, but only as the new medium that gives<br />
extension to political rulership. Within the cloister and the cathedral,<br />
the latent power of extension within a reasonably rationalized form<br />
of writing remains deliberately confined. Political time is temporality<br />
and marked by contingency. Monastic time, other than the daily round,<br />
never moves.<br />
2 <strong>Weber</strong> prefaces his account of the Puritan movement with the pathbreaking<br />
role of Luther in triggering the Reformation. For Innis, a crucial<br />
episode was Erasmus’ version of the Greek Testament in 1516, printed<br />
by the Basle printer John Froben. Erasmus’ desire was that the scriptures<br />
be translated into every language, ‘that the husbandman should say them<br />
to himself as he follows the plough, that the weaver should hum them<br />
to the tune of his shuttle, that the traveller should beguile with them<br />
the weariness of his journey’. 6 Innis quotes approvingly Mark Pattison’s<br />
remark that this ‘contributed more to the liberation of the human mind<br />
from the thraldom of the clergy than all the uproar and rage of Luther’s<br />
many pamphlets’. 7 Innis would place the stress on the emergence of<br />
printed Bibles and pamphlets. What is significant about Luther’s 95<br />
theses pinned to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517 is that they<br />
were quickly printed and widely distributed. Like the Internet, the new<br />
medium of paper and printing for a while evaded censorship and made<br />
information available to a new audience.<br />
The move from asceticism in the monastery and the cathedral cloister<br />
to an asceticism pursued in the world, by the Puritans, is the move from a<br />
parchment-based scripture to a paper-based press. Both remain sacred, but<br />
the medium, let us say, enables the message. Parchment does not travel, it is<br />
not meant to, it stays within the monastic house. The Tyndale Bible (1525)<br />
belongs to a new medium: paper, print, vernacular language. It is one of the<br />
first ‘handy’ Bibles, in its octavo format literally fitting into the palm of a<br />
man’s hand. It marked the breaking of a large number of monopolies: paper<br />
production, the control of printing presses, the monopoly of the Church and<br />
monasteries over the sacred scriptures and the breaking of Latin and Greek<br />
‘codes’ through translation into vernacular languages. The Tyndale Bible is<br />
contemporary with the Luther Bible of 1522, the Czech Bible of 1488, the<br />
Dutch Bible of 1526, the French Bible of 1530, the Swedish Bible of 1541,<br />
the Finnish New Testament of 1548 and the Danish Bible of 1550.<br />
The pietistic attitude of the Puritan to the text only becomes possible<br />
when the text itself is placed in a transmittable medium. Bibles, prayer<br />
books, sermons, etc. become permanently accessible to a newly literate society.<br />
These few books are learnt by heart, are the constant companion of<br />
religious groups and form the bases of the fanaticism of the conventicles.<br />
To know your Bible, in one’s vernacular language, makes possible literacy<br />
and defines its limits. Everything is to be found within the book – morality,
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 201<br />
practical guidance, faith obviously, but also politics and economics or householding.<br />
The Bible took popular culture from orality to literacy. The Bible<br />
was the iPod of its day, thumbed and pored over by its enthusiastic users. It<br />
is of course a complex history with countless setbacks lasting over more than<br />
two hundred years. But its basis was paper, the printing press and written<br />
vernacular languages.<br />
Of the new literacy generated by the printed English Bible, Adam Nicolson<br />
has recently written: ‘This increasingly word-orientated section of the<br />
population was the seed-bed in which the highly intellectual, questioning<br />
and quizzing form of religion we know as Puritanism has its beginnings. A<br />
puritan ate and drank the word of God. That word was his world.’ 8 And of<br />
the King James Bible, he writes: ‘If you think of the King James Bible as the<br />
greatest creation of the seventeenth century, a culture drenched in the word<br />
rather than the image, it is easy to see it as England’s equivalent of the great<br />
baroque cathedral it never built, an enormous and magnificent verbal artifice,<br />
its huge structures embracing all four million Englishmen, its orderliness and<br />
richness a kind of national shrine built only of words.’ 9 Panegyric aside, the<br />
established medium of print becomes the cognitive and material basis for the<br />
differentiation process of the increasing separation of Church, state, morality<br />
and learning that enables the development of modernity in Europe.<br />
Obviously the ‘rewrite’ I have suggested above – that monastic asceticism<br />
be regarded in terms of the vector of time, that the new Puritan sensibility<br />
be thought of as an extension over space – gives us a different book from<br />
PESC. <strong>Weber</strong> does not seem to have given serious attention to the medium<br />
of transmission. He more or less takes the extreme textuality of ascetic Protestantism<br />
as a given without comment. In his treatment of Methodism, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
establishes the centrality of a revived Puritanism for the new industrial<br />
working classes. But it only takes a slight nudge to move his whole treatment<br />
of the role of revivalist religion into a movement of mass literacy. Methodism<br />
was not only methodical with its rotas of preaching, but also positively<br />
industrial in its attitude to printing the sacred texts, their dissemination and<br />
the insistence on literacy. If the word is to be made known to the unlettered<br />
working class, literacy as well as preaching is essential. And <strong>Weber</strong>’s whole<br />
argument in Chapter 4 on Calvinism and the Puritan sects is to demonstrate<br />
the intensity of belief translated into practical ethics. Overall, he weights his<br />
argument towards the psychology of belief: the factors that intensified and<br />
sustained belief as a continuous practice. But if we reweight the argument,<br />
it is the profound literacy and textuality of the Puritan divines that might be<br />
considered the medium of instruction. Jean Calvin’s huge influence can be<br />
seen in the translation of the Bible into French by his kinsman Pierre Robert<br />
Olivétan, and the near simultaneous publication of his own Institution de<br />
la religion chrétienne (1540) in both Latin and French; Latin to influence<br />
the traditional authorities of Church, state and schoolmen, French to appeal<br />
to the new mass constituency. Likewise, as <strong>Weber</strong> himself reprises his<br />
arguments at the start of Chapter 5, practical ethics take their literal cues
202 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
from Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory (for English Puritans), Spener’s<br />
Theologische Bedenken (German Pietists) and Barclay’s Apology for Baptists<br />
(PESC, p. 156). Gangolf Hübinger has pointed out to me that <strong>Weber</strong> may<br />
well have been reluctant to explore the world of print because it was taken<br />
up by Karl Lamprecht, whose work he detested, as a research theme.<br />
The materiality of the medium of communication ensures that ideas cannot<br />
be treated as free-floating suppositions loosely connected to the materiality<br />
of power and interests. It was this critique that <strong>Weber</strong> struggled<br />
with, continuously and angrily, as his answers to the critiques of Rachfahl,<br />
Fischer and Sombart demonstrate. <strong>Weber</strong> vehemently protested that his interpretation<br />
was not a one-sided idealist account that challenged the equally<br />
one-sided materialist–marxist account for the rise of western capitalism. But,<br />
until he came up with a satisfactory methodological way of treating ideas<br />
sociologically, which the neo-Kantian perspective of 1904 did not offer,<br />
then his thesis was always a legitimate object of attack from the materialist<br />
viewpoint. The weaknesses were not rectified until the ‘Einleitung’ essay<br />
of 1914, which advanced the concept of ideal interests as the equivalent of<br />
material interests. By this device, <strong>Weber</strong> ensured that ideas were no longer<br />
philosophical and theological notions, but objects of competition and power<br />
and so embedded within social structure. 10 With Innis, we encounter the<br />
materiality of the media themselves, an approach completely different from<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s solution.<br />
Innis himself did not deal directly with the question of how modernity<br />
originated but, clearly, he would have reserved a large role for the new medium<br />
of paper, press and vernacular that gave a hitherto immense extension<br />
to politics, religion, economics, learning, literature and science. Once the<br />
extension of paper and print is seeded into these separate fields, then an<br />
internal dynamic can proceed within each field. In those civilizations which<br />
either never develop writing as a medium extendable to the majority of<br />
a society’s population or suppress and censor paper and press, then this<br />
would effectively bar the development of anything recognizable as modernity.<br />
‘Limited supplies of satisfactory writing material in India strengthened<br />
the monopoly of the oral tradition held by the Brahmans . . .’, ‘The bias of<br />
paper as a medium was evident in China with its bureaucratic administration<br />
developed in relation to the demands of space.’ But, given the complexity<br />
of Chinese characters, printing was easily controlled as a government<br />
monopoly (p. 139). ‘In areas dominated by Mohammedanism’, Innis notes<br />
‘abhorrence of the image delayed the introduction of printing’ (p. 165). 11<br />
In Innis’ discussion of the bias of communication in early modernity – as<br />
the emergence of the printing press and paper as the new extendable medium<br />
– there is also a concern with the content of these writings. This content<br />
can be characterized as humanistic: primarily Erasmus’ intent that Everyman<br />
should be able to read and learn the scriptures in their own language and that<br />
this would form the basis of a new pedagogy free of the scholasticism of the<br />
medieval schoolmen, but also embracing the claim that reason and nature
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 203<br />
were not incompatible; that induction and experiment were the new mode<br />
of science replacing the Aristotelian worldview; that philosophy would proceed<br />
by the example of Descartes – his Meditations, a book to be read from<br />
beginning to end without the countless and repetitive recourse to holy writ<br />
and scholastics; the philosophical anthropology of Montaigne that discussed<br />
the human, quotidian condition in a language accessible to ‘l’homme moyen<br />
sensuel’; that political community could be thought about in an increasingly<br />
secular and rational manner as in Machiavelli, Pufendorf and Althusius.<br />
This last paragraph raises issues of content and meaning. It is part of the<br />
standard history of humanism as contributory to the development of key features<br />
of western civilization and modernity. Science, education, philosophy,<br />
everyday life and its understanding, and politics belong to the print revolution<br />
and the emergence of a literate and humanistic sensibility. The ability<br />
to communicate, and to break the monopoly of writing, is causative for a<br />
decisive stage in European history. Although the stern rigours of Puritanism<br />
and the reactionary features of the counter-Reformation would slow and<br />
alter the humanist breakthrough, the decisive development lay in the vast<br />
increase in communicative capacity.<br />
Innis does not address the matter of Puritan conduct of life on economic<br />
behaviour and, for <strong>Weber</strong>, the decisive changes in the economies of northwest<br />
Europe. Trevor-Roper has, however, put forward an argument that accommodates<br />
the economic side of the question. Like Innis, he places emphasis<br />
on the expansion of humanist knowledge, and he argues that this outlook<br />
characterized the economically sophisticated merchants of southern Europe<br />
and leading Italian cities. 12 In the counter-Reformation, the Papacy insisted<br />
on strict doctrinal purity and was intolerant of humanism. As a result, there<br />
was a middle class migration northwards to the more tolerant societies of<br />
Holland and England, which were also Protestant. The economic migrants<br />
adopted Calvinism as their religion, but practised it in a tolerant undogmatic<br />
way. It was Erasmian Christian humanism that determined their conduct of<br />
life, and their leading economic role derived from the advances in banking,<br />
finance, industry and trade that marked out some of the Italian and south<br />
German cities. This is not the place to rehearse and argue the details of the<br />
argument – not an easy one: how Calvinist were certain Calvinists?<br />
What Innis’ approach reveals is that worldviews require not just carriers<br />
in a sociological sense of social groups, but that the cognitive aspects of<br />
worldviews require a technology for their dissemination and that the interaction<br />
between medium and message creates the revolutionary effect. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
would not have denied the historical facts concerning the breaking of the<br />
monopoly of writing. It was a given in his argument but, as such, neutral<br />
in its implication. It would also be open to him to retort that Puritan ideas<br />
displaced Erasmian ideas, and the former were the ultimate beneficiaries<br />
of the print revolution. The point to note from this is that an alteration in<br />
the causal origins and mechanisms results in different meanings being highlighted<br />
whose historical significance carries a different message.
204 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
Multiple modernities<br />
Karl Jaspers, a younger colleague and friend of <strong>Weber</strong>’s in Heidelberg, introduced<br />
the concept of the axial age in his book The Origin and Goal of<br />
History, first published in 1949. This offered a schematic overview of the<br />
development of civilizations throughout history and prehistory – from the<br />
origins of humankind to its future in one global world. As a philosopher,<br />
writing for a lay audience, his intention was to indicate that humankind<br />
belonged together from its earliest origins to its future purpose. He was<br />
pleading for common human consciousness in the light of the known past<br />
and, as such, he can be considered an early proponent of the global age.<br />
Jaspers sketched out four levels of civilization: (1) prehistory; (2) the ancient<br />
high civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus and Hwang-ho; (3) the<br />
axial age in the east and west and China and India; and (4) the scientific and<br />
technological age in Europe, North America and Russia.<br />
The axial age is when<br />
for all countries (‘Völker’) a common framework of historical self-understanding<br />
has arisen. This axis in world history would appear to have<br />
occurred around 500 years before Christ . . . it is here there occurs the<br />
deepest break in history. It was here that the human being with whom<br />
we live today originated. This period is to be termed, in brief, the ‘axial<br />
age’. The extraordinary came together concentrated into a period of<br />
time. It was the time Confucius and Lao-Tse lived and all the directions<br />
of Chinese philosophy began and Mozi, Zhuangzi, Lie-Tsi and countless<br />
others worked; in India the Upanishads originated, Buddha lived, and,<br />
as in China, all the philosophical possibilities from scepticism, to materialism<br />
to the sophists and to nihilism were developed; in Iran Zoroaster<br />
taught the challenging worldview of the struggle between good and evil;<br />
in Palestine the prophets appeared from Elijah to Isaiah and Jeremiah<br />
and Deutero-Isaiah; Greece produced Homer, the philosophers – Parmenides,<br />
Heraclitus, Plato, the tragedians, Thucydides, and Archimedes.<br />
Everything that these names indicate arose in these few centuries almost<br />
simultaneously in China, India and the Occident without any awareness<br />
of each other. 13<br />
It is in this period that, for the first time, the human being becomes aware<br />
of human existence itself and the limits of human existence. There occurs<br />
the first consciousness of what the world is capable of and the powerlessness<br />
of the individual, and of emancipation and salvation. This consciousness implies<br />
reflection, that thinking can be directed to thinking itself; also that spiritual<br />
(‘geistige’) conflict begins with the attempt to persuade others through<br />
communication of ideas, reasons, experiences. This intellectual conflict and<br />
the breaking up of the previously unconsidered viewpoints and customs into<br />
opposing camps brought intellectual chaos. Out of this chaos were created
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 205<br />
the fundamental categories of thought, and in which we still think. These<br />
were the basis of the world religions. ‘In every sense a step was taken into<br />
the universal.’ The axial replaced the mythical age. The prophets and philosophers<br />
began a fight ‘against the mythical from the side of rationality and<br />
of rationally explained experience (of Logos and against Mythos); further,<br />
a fight for the transcendence of one god against demons . . . and a fight<br />
against false figures of gods driven by ethical indignation.’ 14 Jaspers writes<br />
that this change in human existence can be termed one of intellectualization/spiritualization<br />
(‘Vergeistigung’). Human beings can ask questions they<br />
never asked before. It is the age of the philosophers, by which Jaspers means<br />
the wandering thinker in China, ascetics in India, philosophers in ancient<br />
Greece, prophets in Israel. What they have in common, despite substantive<br />
differences, is the ability to think within themselves and place human existence<br />
with its mental, corporal and instinctual attributes in opposition to the<br />
world. This gives rise to the discourses and practices of ataraxia, meditation,<br />
the consciousness of Atman, or Nirvana, harmony with Tao, or in submission<br />
to the will of God. The axial age is the (first) time that revelations can<br />
be announced (‘Offenbarwerden’), which later become the ideas of reason<br />
(‘Vernunft’) and individuality (‘Persönlichkeit’). Because there is a consciousness<br />
of the human being’s position in the world – that there is a gulf rather<br />
than an unreflexive oneness between the individual and nature – the idea of<br />
the individual as a person appears.<br />
This is obviously broad-brush philosophy attuned to the large question<br />
of what has defined our sense of common humanity. It can hardly be said<br />
to be an advance on the academic study of religion at the beginning of the<br />
twentieth century, which insisted on not intellectualizing other cultures, and<br />
which had great difficulty in separating out just what distinguished magic,<br />
cult and religion and the nature of their dynamics. Although Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
might have been flattered that Jaspers made such productive use of his work<br />
on world religions, he would surely have queried the divide between, essentially,<br />
the philosophical and the prephilosophical as an era-defining category.<br />
But then <strong>Weber</strong> had not experienced the shattering impact of science in the<br />
service of war and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.<br />
Jaspers, quite rightly, was a worried man, and his book is an assertion<br />
of the common origin and destiny of humankind – a sentiment not in the<br />
foreground of <strong>Weber</strong>’s thought. The validity of Jaspers’ thesis still requires<br />
assent by those not in the German philosophical tradition – by scholars in<br />
China, India, Persia and so on. Modern ‘Offenbarwerden’ will be both declaration<br />
and dialogue.<br />
These very pertinent issues aside, Jaspers makes an observation that escaped<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, who was preoccupied by the differences between world religions<br />
even though he perfectly understood the move from magic to revelation.<br />
Each of the world religions, for <strong>Weber</strong>, has a directional potentiality<br />
– the switchman image. This potentiality itself is what Jaspers grasps. A new<br />
dynamic is introduced into world history by the philosophical attitude itself,
206 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
and this is more important to understand than the actual developmental<br />
paths influenced by the world religions. The implication of Jaspers’ thesis is<br />
that modernity is not to be tied down to a specific working out of the claims<br />
of redemption and action in the world, as occurred in the Puritan revolution,<br />
but the impulse to modernity is part of a wider axis in world history where<br />
the tensions between human existence in the world and the superempirical<br />
or transcendental framing of that existence lead to new ambitions. How the<br />
challenges of thinking about and, in part, resolving these tensions would be<br />
specific to the different world religions and their societal context – a matter<br />
that Jaspers did not enter into. But for Jaspers, all the world religions and<br />
their civilizations are in their different ways harbingers of modernity.<br />
S.N. Eisenstadt and others have drawn the conclusion from this that modernity<br />
is not singular to the Puritan revolution in north-west Europe, but<br />
should be thought of as multiple. Eisenstadt states his thesis thus:<br />
The conception of Multiple Modernities entails the view that although<br />
obviously the first modernity developed in the West, in Europe, and that<br />
this modernity was presented by its bearers as the ‘natural’ modernity<br />
and was for long periods of time often conceived in this way also by<br />
many groups in other societies, yet in fact from the very beginning of the<br />
modern era there developed throughout the world, with the expansion of<br />
modernity, distinct patterns of modernization and of converging industries-<br />
the European or Western pattern need not be repeated elsewhere,<br />
especially as these later modernities were no longer ‘first’ modernities<br />
and developed already in periods and situations in which European and<br />
later Western modernities were already fully established and acquired a<br />
hegemonic status in the new, modern, international systems. 15<br />
One implication of the Jaspers’ thesis is that modernity could have originated<br />
in China or India, or in an Islamic country. The classical historian<br />
Arnoldo Momigliano articulates this far wider set of possibilities. He dates<br />
the axial age to between 600 and 300 bc (not 800 to 200, which was Jaspers’<br />
dating) and writes,<br />
It has become a commonplace, after Karl Jaspers’s Vom Ursprung und<br />
Ziel der Geschichte – the first original book on history to appear in postwar<br />
Germany in 1949 – to speak of the Achsenzeit, of the axial age,<br />
which includes the China of Confucius and Lao-Tse, the India of Buddha,<br />
the Iran of Zoroaster, the Palestine of the Prophets and the Greece<br />
of the philosopher, the tragedians and the historians. There is a very<br />
real element of truth in this formulation. All these civilizations display<br />
literacy, complex political organization combining central government<br />
and local authorities, elaborate town-planning, advanced metal technology<br />
and the practice of international diplomacy. In all these civilizations<br />
there is a profound tension between political powers and intellectual
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 207<br />
movements. Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity,<br />
greater justice, greater perfection and a more universal explanation<br />
of things. New models, either mystically or prophetically or rationally<br />
apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the<br />
prevailing models. We are in the age of criticism. 16<br />
In Eisenstadt’s extensive writings, this is an inference that is never ruled<br />
out and, certainly, in the construction of other non-western modernities,<br />
different philosophical heritages are drawn upon. With <strong>Weber</strong>, they are<br />
ruled out by his methodological approach. In his studies of China or India,<br />
or Islam, he always makes statements along the lines that capitalism, markets,<br />
finance, trade, law and technology existed in these civilizations. But<br />
the switchman intervenes in conjunction with the particular dynamics of<br />
interests, so that inevitably no rational capitalistic modernity could emerge.<br />
Confucianism was so adjusted to the world that it regarded with distaste any<br />
transcendental idea (which was the basis of the Christian transformation of<br />
the social world according to an ethical vision of what a god decreed). Hinduism<br />
had a superempirical vision, but its conduct of life led in the direction<br />
of contemplation and the lessening of the pain between earthly life and a life<br />
beyond, i.e. in the direction of apathy. The era of world religions for <strong>Weber</strong><br />
offers the possibility of complex outcomes, but only one of these produces<br />
modernity – which happens for a series of identifiable reasons to occur in the<br />
west. Hence, the commonality of world religions as offering sophisticated<br />
accounts of humankind’s relation to the universe, and being able to conceptualize<br />
such a thing, is the basis of difference in their actual developmental<br />
paths. Accordingly, modernity is singular to the west. In the Protestant ethic<br />
studies of 1905, <strong>Weber</strong> draws this singularity in narrow terms – Calvinism<br />
and the Puritan sects. It could not have happened elsewhere and, if it did,<br />
we would not be calling it modernity; rather The Way, The Umman or The<br />
Garden, perhaps.<br />
The issue for Eisenstadt is that modernity is realized in a number of institutional,<br />
ideological and individual–state relationship formats. Modern<br />
twentieth-century societies exhibited a great variety: western European societies<br />
differ from British society, just as American society is different from<br />
Japanese. And Russia and the eastern bloc offered an alternative solution to<br />
modernity, and so on. Modernity, in this reading, is an inherently divergent<br />
phenomenon not a convergent one, as some argued in the 1950s – that modernization<br />
across the world would occur as a replication of the institutions,<br />
structures and values of the United States.<br />
Tracking the developmental paths of diverging modernities is a major<br />
academic industry in comparative historical sociology, all registering various<br />
allegiance to Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings. The multiple versus singular question<br />
still arises here, however. If one traces the various divergent developmental<br />
strands back in time, do they have a common origin, root or theme? Is<br />
there a singularity that originates this complex called modernity, and then
208 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
unfurls outwards in different trajectories? Or is modernity a multiple birth<br />
phenomenon?<br />
I take the Eisenstadt school to be saying the latter (and I take <strong>Weber</strong> to be<br />
saying the former). Eisenstadt is a modernization theorist, not the Parsonian<br />
AGIL convergent model, but a differentiation model that produces divergence<br />
in its formation. Speaking of developments in societies after 1945,<br />
Eisenstadt writes: ‘While a general trend toward structural differentiation<br />
developed across a wide range of institutions in most of these societies – in<br />
family life, economic and political structures, urbanization, modern education,<br />
mass communication, and individualistic orientations . . . this gives<br />
rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns.’ 17 The same manner<br />
of argument would seem to apply to early modernity. In a chapter with<br />
obvious homage to <strong>Weber</strong>. ‘The Sectarian Origins of Modernity’, Eisenstadt<br />
outlines the start of modernity as an institutionalization of value positions.<br />
Those value positions belonged in the sphere of religion and were marked<br />
by conflict as to how a transcendental vision, such as redemption, was to be<br />
realized in the world.<br />
. . . the implementation of such visions constituted an inherent part of<br />
their institutionalization in the Axial civilizations. Historically such process<br />
of institutionalization of transcendental visions was never a simple<br />
peaceful one, it was usually connected with a continuous struggle and<br />
competition between many groups and between their respective visions.<br />
Because of this multiplicity of visions, no single one could be taken as<br />
given or complete. Once the conception of a basic tension between the<br />
transcendental and the mundane order was institutionalized in a society,<br />
or at least within its center, it became itself very problematic. Thus<br />
the very process of such institutionalization generated the possibility of<br />
different emphases, directions and interpretations of the transcendental<br />
visions. 18<br />
Institutionalization is a conflictual process of resolution – in his words, it<br />
‘crystallizes’ the tensions in an institutional outcome. Without the crystallization,<br />
the axial age would remain in a state of chaos. Institutionalization<br />
operates across a number a dimensions. There is a political–religious struggle<br />
as to how transcendental visions are to be realized in the world. For example,<br />
the foundation of Buddhism was reliant on the huge support of King<br />
Ashoka, Christianity to the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine.<br />
Within the realm of doctrine and philosophy, revelation is tempered to an<br />
extent by reason, the latter providing the capacity of reflexivity, of being<br />
able to consider critically what in a religious sense is beyond question. Transcendental<br />
visions raise profound questions of how an ethical or godly order<br />
will be created in the mundane world. Christian theorists referred to this as<br />
realizing the Kingdom of God on earth (or, in Troeltsch’s terms, reconciling<br />
sacred law with profane law). Various ‘social contracts’ seek to regulate the
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 209<br />
mundane life and its tendency to anarchy and selfishness with the vision of<br />
what a godly order should be like.<br />
‘The cultural program of modernity entailed a very distinct shift in the<br />
conception of human agency of its autonomy, and of its place in the flow<br />
of time’. Again, this is resolved through institutionalization. The English<br />
historian R.H. Tawney saw the developments in English society from the<br />
fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries as one of the Church, supported by<br />
the crown, moving away from the insistence that the community was the<br />
‘summum bonum’ to one in which the individual, as an economic agent<br />
in his own right, could pursue his own ends. 19 The acquisition of wealth<br />
could become legitimate activity in a way, as the medieval church said, ‘is not<br />
pleasing to God’. Agency – the idea that men can make their own fortune,<br />
or even that they might make their own history – is a new awareness that becomes<br />
internalized into political and economic arrangements. How agency,<br />
reason, revelation and transcendence are institutionalized is country specific.<br />
Liah Greenfeld’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity demonstrates this<br />
extensively by itemizing the differential experiences of England, France,<br />
Russia, Germany and the United States. For her, how national communities<br />
are formed and constituted in early modernity (not the nineteenth century<br />
as the title might seem to imply) is the crucial ground on which the tensions<br />
of the axial age are resolved.<br />
Enough has been outlined about the multiple modernities position to<br />
show that the origination process throws up diversity. It is an institutional<br />
differentiation process that ‘crystallizes’ values that are intrinsically not resolvable<br />
in themselves. This I do not think can be claimed as Max <strong>Weber</strong>ian,<br />
at least not directly. Values do not crystallize in institutional formats for <strong>Weber</strong>.<br />
They can become routinized through institutional carriers. Values here,<br />
while no longer vibrant and pristine, still belong to individuals and groups.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s nominalism has it that institutions do not speak for the individual,<br />
although they may well influence the individual’s outlook. Crystallization<br />
takes actually held values of individuals and renders them second-order phenomena<br />
at the level of institutions. This is a separation that <strong>Weber</strong> never<br />
undertakes. His separation is between value spheres and their inevitable existential<br />
conflicts for people, such as Cromwell, who have two masters (God<br />
and politics); and his resolution is through conduct of life as a practice of life<br />
and so always an existential choice.<br />
Of course, this does not mean that <strong>Weber</strong> is right and Eisenstadt wrong. It<br />
is far more agreeable to follow Eisenstadt because a condition of modernity<br />
in its inception is the capacity of agency, of controlling one’s own destiny<br />
and the directionality of society. In politics, this reached a new high point in<br />
the English revolution of the seventeenth century, of self in the Renaissance,<br />
of society in the ideas of the Enlightenment. Eisenstadt is also quite explicit<br />
that modernity has a prodigious capacity for going wrong and for violence.<br />
This is a very long chapter, which I will not relate. But agency and renewal<br />
are linked together in Eisenstadt’s account. Societies have the capacity to
210 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
reform themselves politically and socially and to escape their episodes of<br />
blood-letting.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> regarded agency and reflexivity (to use Eisenstadt’s terms) less benignly.<br />
European societies did not choose to be modern. Instead, they chose<br />
and struggled to be Puritan or some other religious denomination. English<br />
Puritans had a life conduct constructed to maintain piety, not to give birth to<br />
money-making machines. <strong>Weber</strong>’s vision of reform, or routinization of values,<br />
or control, and of violence, and of ethical dehumanization is far darker.<br />
Modernity arose through the honouring of an absent god, and rationalism<br />
was an unstoppable and unceasing effort of religious intellectuals to introduce<br />
consistency and order into irrational metaphysical revelation and what<br />
were taken by intellectuals to be its assumptions. Reflexivity was not a term<br />
used by <strong>Weber</strong> and, although intellectuals are involved in reflective activity,<br />
this has an internal dynamic all of its own (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’) that would<br />
exclude ‘second-order reflexivity’.<br />
A highly relevant part of the debate over modernity is its relation to a<br />
globalizing world. Eisenstadt and others have quite rightly given this due<br />
attention: ‘one of the most important implications of the term “multiple<br />
modernities” is that modernity and Westernization are not identical; Western<br />
patterns of modernity are not the only “authentic” modernities, though<br />
they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point<br />
for others.’ The history of modernity, for Eisenstadt,<br />
is a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity<br />
of cultural programs. These ongoing reconstructions of multiple institutional<br />
and ideological patterns are carried forward by specific social<br />
actors in close connection with social, political, and intellectual activists,<br />
and also by social movements pursuing different programs of modernity,<br />
holding very different views on what makes societies modern. 20<br />
During the twentieth century, this has produced nation states differing<br />
through their cultural and ethnic traditions, fascism and communism, as<br />
well as new nationalist movements in the Third World. What makes these<br />
different regimes modern is their reference to the forces that had created<br />
the original modernity. In a global world, there is an attempt to appropriate<br />
modernity by societies on their own terms, ‘to appropriate the new international<br />
global scene and the modernity for themselves for their traditions<br />
of “civilizations” – as they were continually promulgated and reconstructed<br />
under the impact of their continual encounter with the West’. 21 Modernity<br />
for Eisenstadt is the ability of leading groups to confer agency on societal<br />
development, and this is no longer seen as a western monopoly.<br />
In the case of India, Eisenstadt quotes Myron Weiner:<br />
The classical conceptions of the state and the political order were closely<br />
linked to basic concepts around which society was organized – notions
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 211<br />
concerning equality and hierarchy, rights and duties, the individual’s<br />
place in the community and the relationship between the community<br />
and authority. The introduction of European institutions and political<br />
concepts notwithstanding, India continues to retain a social order that is<br />
very different from the one upon which European political institutions<br />
were built. Moreover, many of the beliefs that underlie this social order<br />
remain intact. The result is not that Indian political institutions do not<br />
or cannot work, as some of its critics suggest, but that they work differently<br />
. . . 22<br />
The introduction of modern institutions of government, civil service,<br />
democracy and political parties has reflected the immense linguistic, ethnic<br />
and social stratification of the country. Governments have tended to be<br />
grand coalitions representative of religious and linguistic groups, cultural<br />
autonomy has been upheld – as opposed to the homogenizing imperative in<br />
western national states – and minority rights are guaranteed. The working<br />
through of a modern political system downwards through the mass of the<br />
people has been an intricate, gradual and pragmatic process involving the<br />
charismatic–ascetic movement of Gandhi in asserting the rights of the peasant.<br />
This is just a snapshot, but enough to demonstrate the point that the<br />
multiple modernities concept allows that modernity itself is malleable and<br />
open to different political, cultural and religious influences. Modernity, for<br />
Eisenstadt, is practically the same as modernization. The differentiated capacity<br />
within separate institutional spheres that incorporate the crystallization<br />
of tensions within axial civilization is what makes modernity possible<br />
in the first place. In this argument, there is no singularity and no originary<br />
modernity. In the singularity argument, the actual creation of modernity is<br />
a fortuitous coming together of circumstances, driven by strong values and<br />
commitments within a dynamic of interests. Modernity as a singularity is like<br />
a great number of eschatological movements – blindly driving forwards to a<br />
superempirical goal, but more a prisoner of circumstances, even self-created<br />
ones, than controlling one’s destiny.<br />
Once modernity is seeded, then institutional patterns of law, governance,<br />
economic activity, science and education do start to perform in the way<br />
described by modernization theorists. But whether modernization can be<br />
extrapolated backwards to explain the singular event itself has to be queried.<br />
How values and interest positions are crystallized out of what Jaspers termed<br />
the ‘chaos’ of the axial age presents a problem of how order (modernization<br />
patterns) emerges from chaos. Robert Bellah writes of axial ‘breakthroughs’,<br />
‘. . . there is no clear indication of the causal relation of these changes to the<br />
emergence of strikingly new cultural–religious formations’. 23 Modernization<br />
theory places the emphasis on the variety of outcomes and the complexity<br />
of process. <strong>Weber</strong> remained preoccupied with the causal question: why here<br />
in the west and not elsewhere? It is not implausible to see his work as an
212 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
attempt to answer this question without ever being able to achieve closure<br />
of it.<br />
Does this argument between singularity and multiple modernities matter?<br />
Clearly, by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe and North<br />
America, patterns of modernization can be discerned and, although subject<br />
to wide-ranging academic debate as to the exact shape, the general movement<br />
of law, economy, government, society and culture is unmistakable.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is not terribly helpful here in his writings, in that having gone into<br />
the origins of the event – capitalist modernity and a rationalistic culture<br />
– he displayed no great interest in tracking its subsequent history. Likewise,<br />
in his brief remarks on how capitalist modernity would spread internationally,<br />
he simply notes that China in 1910 was well on the way to embracing<br />
capitalism, and that, in India, the caste system would disappear under the<br />
impact of nationalism. 24 What we want to know from <strong>Weber</strong> is whether he<br />
thought that capitalism in China was simply going to replicate, say, nineteenth-century<br />
British capitalism, and whether – as he does seem to imply<br />
– a modern movement such as nationalism would have a levelling effect on<br />
India’s heterogeneous social structure.<br />
‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the ‘Collected Essays in the Sociology<br />
of Religion’<br />
The ideas of singularity are most pronounced in PESC 1904–5, not least<br />
because, of all his religious studies, it has the closest historical focus. But the<br />
same insistence on how distinctive Puritanism was, and its impact upon occidental<br />
development, can be found in the well-known comparison between<br />
Confucianism and Puritanism. This was the last chapter of his ‘Religion of<br />
China’, which as we know was revised for publication in his ‘Collected Essays<br />
on the Sociology of Religion’. The whole programme of the study of<br />
the economic ethics of the world religions was undertaken to discover the<br />
uniqueness of Christianity (including its Judaic heritage) on western development.<br />
His comparative studies cannot be criticized for a falsely construed<br />
image of ‘the Orient’ as an idealized other – in the way, for example, Edward<br />
Said has shown how a literary image of the Orient has been created by western<br />
writers and artists. <strong>Weber</strong> charts the differences at the level of religion,<br />
social structure and politics. He may have made scholarly mistakes and been<br />
dependent on unreliable sources, as he himself admitted. But his comparative<br />
studies establish the internal and external reasons for the separateness of<br />
the world religions and the effects on their corresponding societies.<br />
When it came to the publication of his ‘Collected Essays on the Sociology<br />
of Religion’ in 1920, <strong>Weber</strong> was faced with the task of writing a preface<br />
that would link the original Protestant ethic studies of 1904 and 1905 with<br />
his studies of the economic ethics of the world religions. The same causal<br />
model is offered up for both the world religions and the Protestant ethic<br />
studies. Religious ideas as well as magic impact upon the practical conduct
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 213<br />
of life, and this has consequences for economic life and for prevailing social<br />
structures. The Protestant ethic exemplifies the positive causal factors; the<br />
other world religions flag up the ‘spiritual obstacles’ to the development of<br />
rational economic conduct (pp. 26–7). The world religions are only studied<br />
from the viewpoint of how they differ from the situation in the Occident.<br />
This enables the unique causal factors of the Occident to be better understood<br />
in terms of their distinctiveness. <strong>Weber</strong> uses a series of words here:<br />
‘eigentumlich’, ‘Eigenarten’ and just plain ‘eigen’. Parsons translates these<br />
as peculiar or peculiarities. My preference is for ‘distinctive’ or ‘distinctiveness’.<br />
But the overall sense of what <strong>Weber</strong> is trying to capture is that the<br />
development of the Occident is something ‘sui generis’ to a whole culture<br />
– it was unique to itself.<br />
The ‘Prefatory Remarks’ (termed ‘Author’s Introduction’ by Talcott Parsons)<br />
introduce a change in tone and a change of argument. His preface<br />
alters the terms of comparison from why and how the Occident is different,<br />
to its being different ‘tout court’. Throughout his studies, he had been creating<br />
platforms on which to analyse difference: Calvinism against Lutheranism,<br />
magic against religion, Confucianism against Islam, the western city<br />
against the city in patrimonial regimes. Each comparison could throw up<br />
possible causal factors that had meaningful consequences. Lutheranism was<br />
accommodating to the world, Calvinism was not – it was inherently radical<br />
in all its dealings with the world. Magic is rational and this-worldly, religion<br />
alters the worldview and leads to behaviour orientated to obtaining salvation<br />
goods. The western city produced the social stratum of the burghers<br />
(‘Bürger’), who achieved a degree of economic and jurisdictional autonomy<br />
and self-rule, whereas the Islamic merchant was subordinate to the patrimonial<br />
ruler. In saying that the west was different in its entirety, <strong>Weber</strong> was<br />
giving up a platform on which to base his comparison.<br />
The ‘Prefatory Remarks’ stretches the historical timespan of the Occident,<br />
almost as if it had no beginning. Western culture or civilization is generalized<br />
over its whole extent, and it has no clearly defined starting point. Perhaps<br />
its starting point lay in Abrahamic religion 600 bc, perhaps earlier in archaic<br />
kingdoms. Throughout his writings, <strong>Weber</strong> was keen to emphasize key<br />
episodes and developments, which mark points of divergence and change:<br />
the Greeks on the plain of Palatea, St Peter in Antioch, the role of Hebrew<br />
prophets in the face of Babylonian invasion. In the ‘Prefatory Remarks’, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
generalizes occidental ‘Kultur’ to one characteristic, rationalism.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> opens his ‘Prefatory Remarks’ by listing the various ways in which<br />
the Occident differs from other civilizations: it has science based on empirical<br />
knowledge and experimentation; its law, historiography, painting, music<br />
and architecture have a uniquely rational character; its universities and<br />
academies pursue rational and systematic science and train specialist personnel.<br />
The Occident is unique in producing the trained, specialist official, in<br />
government, business and the professions. Its politics is based on rational,<br />
written constitutions, rationally ordained law and an administration bound
214 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
to rational rules and laws. Its capitalism is unique, not for its pursuit of<br />
gain, which is universal, but ‘forever renewed profit by means of continuous,<br />
rational, capitalistic enterprise’. This continuous dynamic capitalism is based<br />
on profit calculations made possible by budgets and distinguishing profit and<br />
loss over a fixed time period in terms of capital invested. ‘Only the Occident<br />
has developed capitalism both to a quantitative extent . . . in types, forms,<br />
and directions which have never existed before’. Only the Occident has developed<br />
‘the rationalistic organization of (formally) free labour’, and this<br />
has been made possible by the separation of the household from the business<br />
(unlike the classical ‘oikos’ and the manorial household). Both bourgeoisie<br />
and proletariat are unique, because nowhere else existed ‘rational organization<br />
of free labour under regular discipline’.<br />
At this point in his preface, <strong>Weber</strong> puts the question of origins: ‘We must<br />
hence ask, from what parts of that structure [social structure of Occident]<br />
was it [modern capitalism] derived?’ His answer is the rational structures of<br />
law and administration. But he has already listed these, and they cannot claim<br />
any special originating status. Having built up his list, <strong>Weber</strong> rephrases the<br />
question: ‘Why did not scientific, the artistic, the political, or the economic<br />
development there [China and India] enter upon that path of rationalization<br />
which is peculiar (‘eigen’) to the Occident?’ (p. 25).<br />
His answer states, ‘For in all the above cases it is a question of the specific<br />
and peculiar “rationalism” of Western culture’ – ‘einen spezifisch gearteten<br />
“Rationalismus” der okzidentalen Kultur’ (pp. 25–6).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> has the opportunity at this point to distinguish the culture of the<br />
Occident in terms of the philosophical validity of rationalism. It would seem<br />
to be a strong term, implying the systematic exercise of reason and intellect<br />
in relation to a world whose empirical status (epistemologically) is acknowledged.<br />
Distinctiveness could then become superiority according to criteria of<br />
validity. Ancient India developed numbers but had no systematic mathematics,<br />
China had technology but, because of magic, no grasp of the potential of<br />
science, and it was only in Greece that there developed an awareness of how<br />
concepts conferred a critical grasp of the world and man’s place in it. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
makes all these points and numerous similar ones, in his various texts, but<br />
he insists on placing rationalism in quotation marks to indicate that western<br />
rationalism should not claim any special validity.<br />
Spelling out validity criteria would have given <strong>Weber</strong> a platform from<br />
which he could declare the distinctiveness of western rationalism. Instead,<br />
he does the opposite. He argues that all civilizations display rationalistic<br />
tendencies. Mysticism may be rationalized by its practitioners, for example.<br />
There can be rationalizations of the ‘specifically irrational, just as much as<br />
there are rationalizations of economic life, or technique, of scientific research,<br />
of military training, of law and administration’ (p. 26). <strong>Weber</strong> uses<br />
the concept of rationalism extensively in his writings. In his ‘Introduction’<br />
to the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’, he outlines several (interrelated)<br />
usages of the concept:
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 215<br />
1 The increasing theoretical mastery of reality by means of increasingly<br />
precise and abstract concepts. Systematic thinkers undertake this work<br />
on (religious) worldviews.<br />
2 The methodical attainment of a defined and given practical end by means<br />
of ever more precise calculation of the necessary means.<br />
3 Methodical in the sense of a planned routine for achieving some end.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> gives the example of Buddhist prayer machines – a sequence is<br />
established and has to be followed. 25<br />
The ends to which these rationalisms are put are not in themselves rational.<br />
Buddhist salvation goals have led to a ‘rationalist’ method. Puritan ideas<br />
of predestination have received intense systematization. Confucian ethics are<br />
the closest thing to the ‘rationalist’ ethics of utilitarianism, in that both have<br />
clear rules of what to do and what not to do. Confucianism seeks to achieve<br />
perfection and a utilitarian happiness. Neither of these ends is validated by<br />
the rationalist system itself.<br />
The process of applying rationalism to the conduct of life, <strong>Weber</strong>’s primary<br />
interest, is termed rationalization. Each of the world religions achieves<br />
high levels of rationalization, and so the determination of life conduct.<br />
There is, then, no priority given to western forms of rationalism, which is<br />
characterized by the means–end calculativity of point 2 above. Returning to<br />
‘Prefatory Remarks’, <strong>Weber</strong> notes of the various areas of life,<br />
. . . each one of these areas may be ‘rationalized’ according to very different<br />
ultimate viewpoints and directions, and what is ‘rational’ from<br />
one point of view may well be ‘irrational’ from another. Hence rationalizations<br />
of the most varied character have existed in various areas of<br />
life (‘Lebensgebieten’) and in all areas of culture (‘Kulturkreise’). To<br />
characterize their cultural–historical differences it is necessary to know<br />
what spheres are rationalized and in what direction. This then depends<br />
first of all on recognizing the particular character (‘Eigenart’) of occidental<br />
rationalism – and within this of modern occidental rationalism<br />
– and of explaining how it came into existence (‘in ihrer Enstehung zu<br />
erklären’). 26<br />
The last phrase in this quote indicates that the distinctiveness of western<br />
rationalism is to be sought in terms of origins. Parsons, in his translation, emphasizes<br />
this: ‘to explain genetically the special peculiarity of the Occident’<br />
(p. 26). This points to a singularity argument – that there is some genetic<br />
origin in western history that seeded its peculiar (means–end) rationalism.<br />
But this is countermanded by the position that <strong>Weber</strong> had arrived at in 1920<br />
through his extensive comparative studies. It was the whole of western history<br />
that displayed rationalism, and it becomes very difficult and extremely<br />
implausible to trace this back to one originating event. Rationalism can be<br />
dated back to the Jewish prophets of the exilic period of Israel, but this could
216 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
hardly be held to account for Attic rationalism in the second century bc or<br />
for the rationalist features of Roman law. What <strong>Weber</strong> says is that, in the<br />
various spheres of life, within occidental history, rationalism is a commonality.<br />
It might have made more sense for Parsons to translate ‘Enstehung’ as<br />
‘memetically’ – that there was a cultural ‘gene’ within the civilization able to<br />
replicate the occidental features of rationalism across history and in different<br />
areas of life. This is unfair on Parsons because ‘meme’ is a concept that was<br />
only invented by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1986 (in<br />
The Selfish Gene). It is an interestingly line of thought, because a meme is a<br />
cultural artefact and has no biological basis in sexual reproduction (and so in<br />
genetics). It may well be that societies and civilizations can socially generate<br />
cultural patterns that are enduring and replicable. This line of inquiry, in<br />
relation to Puritanism, has been initiated and developed in a series of essays<br />
by W.G. Runicman. 27<br />
But this takes us far beyond <strong>Weber</strong>. His summation of both world religions<br />
and Protestant ethic studies in ‘Prefatory Remarks’ is a statement<br />
that ‘rationalism’ as a modality of thought (abstract and methodical thought,<br />
consistency, calculability) is common to all world religions. His investigations<br />
would show that the content and substantive goals of rationalism are<br />
various, and that their realization within the different areas or spheres of<br />
life adds more empirical variability. World religions display distinct patterns<br />
of development by virtue of the ordering of their salvation beliefs and how<br />
these are carried into practical conduct. The spheres of life – politics, kinship,<br />
economics, art, etc. – will in their turn receive differential impacts from<br />
religion and, conversely, religion will be impacted upon by the particular<br />
dynamics of these other spheres. Comparative history is a matter of what<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> terms a ‘combination of circumstances’ – it is a matter of contingency.<br />
Western rationalism is contingent upon a set of circumstances, and there is<br />
no adequate or valid theory that could deliver an explanation of that set of<br />
circumstances. Hence, all that is left ultimately in comparison is the comprehension<br />
of difference.<br />
A child of modern European civilization will necessarily and rightly<br />
treat problems of universal history in terms of this question: [to] what<br />
combination of circumstances may the fact be attributed that in western<br />
civilization and only in it, cultural phenomena have appeared, which<br />
– nevertheless as we like to think at least – lie in a line of development<br />
having universal significance and value? 28<br />
This is the opening paragraph in full to the ‘Prefatory Remarks’. <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
answer to the question he poses so dramatically is that western rationalism is<br />
contingent on its own history and can claim no universal validity. Westerners,<br />
especially with the global expansion of the western model of rational<br />
capitalism at the start of the twenty-first century, tend to assume the validity
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 217<br />
and superiority of many aspects of their civilization. It is a historicist statement<br />
writ large, an amplification of Herder.<br />
It is not a rhetorical question. It is the opening question to three volumes<br />
of essays in the sociology of religion. The studies in the world religions<br />
outline the directionality and contents of rationalization processes. All the<br />
world religions have an equivalence, what separates them is the content of<br />
their salvation messages, the cognitive framework of worldviews and the<br />
contingent directionality of rationalization processes. Schluchter has captured<br />
the equivalences and differences in the world religions with respect to<br />
their rationalist tendencies (Figure 7.1). 29<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> wrote of this as his ‘contribution . . . to the typology and sociology<br />
of rationalism’ (EW, p. 216). All the world religions are arranged on the<br />
bottom row, including their variant forms. In the first row, the big divide is<br />
between rationalist systems that affirm or are adjusted to the world (such as<br />
Confucianism) and those rationalist systems that confront religious values to<br />
those of worldly values. And, in the second row, the major divide is between<br />
salvation religions that turn away from the world and those that live in the<br />
world. Buddhist contemplation and (western) monastic asceticism lead to<br />
a compartmentalization of religion separate from the world. Puritanism<br />
separates itself from the other Abrahamic legacies by, uniquely, embracing<br />
asceticism within the world. Puritanism distinguishes itself by the enormous<br />
tension that it generates by superimposing transcendental demands upon<br />
its believers while they live and work in the world – hence the example of<br />
Bunyan. This schema also usefully places Puritanism within the religions of<br />
the Near East. This allows the judgement that modern capitalism was a result<br />
of a late variant. Puritanism is a singularity, but one that comes out of a much<br />
longer tradition of religious rationalisms.<br />
This, as <strong>Weber</strong> insists, is a typology. He has heuristically constructed tendencies<br />
within world religions that rarely appear with such consistency. But<br />
because the feature of religious rationalism is their striving for consistency<br />
and the attainment of salvation goals through methodical means, the clarity<br />
of the typology is in part justified in historical reality. What cannot be<br />
included in the diagram is the historical and contingent impact of all the<br />
other spheres of life and their various economic, political, artistic and kinship<br />
values. For example, Islam follows one trajectory when carried within a<br />
feudalistic warrior stratum and an entirely different one as an urban religion<br />
with mystical tendencies. Confucianism and a polity that looks territorially<br />
inwards led to a sort of equilibrium and stasis within the Chinese Empire.<br />
But had an outward-looking trading or political class become influential,<br />
then some of the principles of Confucianism might have undergone change<br />
or challenge. The contingency of politics in relation to Protestantism is extremely<br />
well documented. Had the Habsburg emperor, Phillip II of Spain,<br />
crushed the Protestant opposition in the Low Countries, Puritanism may<br />
never have made its historical rendezvous with the rising middle classes.
World-rejecting<br />
cultural religion<br />
or salvation religion<br />
World-affirming<br />
cultural religion or<br />
‘political’ religion<br />
1. World-affirming/<br />
world-rejecting<br />
Salvation religion<br />
turning towards the world<br />
Salvation religion<br />
turning away from the world<br />
2. Turning towards/<br />
turning away from<br />
the world<br />
Ascetic Contemplative or<br />
ecstatic<br />
Ascetic Contemplative or<br />
ecstatic<br />
3. Ascetic,<br />
contemplative<br />
or ecstatic<br />
Overcoming the world World flight World mastery Accepting fate in the<br />
world<br />
Adjustment to the<br />
world<br />
Basic attitudes<br />
toward the world<br />
Protestant ethic Ancient Judaism,<br />
Early Christianity,<br />
Oriental Christianity,<br />
Islam (?)<br />
Hinduism and<br />
Buddhism<br />
Western Christianity<br />
(monasticism)<br />
Studies Confucianism and<br />
Taoism, Islam (?)<br />
Figure 7.1 Classification of cultural religions.
Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong> 219<br />
Religious rationalism, and a different modernity, would have travelled on a<br />
different and less agonizingly individualistic path.<br />
This brings us back to the fortuitous nature of modernity. History favoured<br />
a particular form of rationalism that turned out to be highly adaptive<br />
and consequential. It did not possess intrinsic validity. This perhaps is the<br />
sense of peculiarity or distinctiveness of the Occident that <strong>Weber</strong> is always<br />
worrying away at. Modernity’s triumph over other civilizations is its peculiarity.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is quite comfortable analysing, and digressing on, the two millennia<br />
of Confucianism, and he is explicit in his admiration of the religiosity<br />
of Indian intellectuals.<br />
It stands out by virtue of its consistency as well as by its extraordinary<br />
metaphysical achievement: It unites virtuoso-like self-redemption by<br />
man’s own effort with universal accessibility of salvation, the strictest rejection<br />
of the world with organic social ethics, and contemplation as the<br />
paramount path to salvation with an inner-worldly vocational ethic.<br />
(FMW, p. 359)<br />
Religion and its relation to the social and economic order in India achieved<br />
an impressive stability over three millennia.<br />
Modernity acculturated in Puritanism, in contrast, has a disturbing dynamic.<br />
Religion’s enduring function was to create meaning by placing the<br />
human being in a wider cosmology. Puritanism, by the peculiarity of its<br />
path to salvation and life conduct, led to secularization and the destruction<br />
of cosmology. Science and rationality, which in the western enlightenment<br />
tradition is cause enough for validity, for <strong>Weber</strong> remains the source of disenchantment<br />
and perhaps the last step out of Edenic paradise. In civilizational<br />
comparison, there is nothing self-evident about reason, the rights of man,<br />
and a science able to validate itself through criteria of proof and evidence.<br />
While these give rise to what <strong>Weber</strong> suggests is the illusion of universality<br />
(not to say the actual empirical diffusion of this universality), it remained the<br />
fortuitous gift of individuals striving for salvation.
8 Power, legitimacy and<br />
democracy<br />
Power is a subject that is inextricably linked to the work of Max <strong>Weber</strong> – in<br />
a double sense. Not only was he a theorist of power, but he also provided<br />
some of the most acute analyses of the political situation of his day. I will<br />
summarize very briefly his contemporary situation and his commentary on<br />
it. I will then present his academic analysis of power in the two versions<br />
provided, in the earlier version and final version of Economy and Society,<br />
respectively, and relate them to some recent treatments of power in political<br />
sociology. I examine his analysis of democracy and ‘leadership democracy’<br />
in particular, which I argue should be looked at anew in the light of recent<br />
tendencies within British and American democracy.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s political background<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own family belonged to the political and cultural elite of Wilhelmine<br />
Germany and played a part in the supporting the Kaiserreich, which was<br />
founded by Chancellor Bismarck in 1871 and disintegrated dramatically at<br />
the end of 1918 with the cessation of the First World War. <strong>Weber</strong>’s working<br />
life belonged to the same timespan of the Kaiserreich, he remained closely<br />
involved in the politics of the period, and he was an influential and cogent<br />
analyst of the regimes many tensions and contradictions. The origins<br />
of those difficulties can be traced through <strong>Weber</strong>’s family history, and what<br />
emerges are some of the main components for the formation of the modern<br />
nation-state. As we now know, to our cost, the harmonious coming together<br />
of these components tends to be the exception rather than the rule.<br />
His grandfather, Georg Friedrich Fallenstein (his mother’s father), was a<br />
volunteer at the age of 23 in the ‘War of Liberation’ in 1813 against Napoleonic<br />
rule. He joined the Lützow corps, which was not a regular army unit<br />
but a band of comrades in arms who took great pride in their German heritage,<br />
creating romantic ballads in the course of their campaign. In military<br />
terms these volunteer units were insignificant, measured against the regular<br />
armies that were deployed by many states to counter Napoleon. But in the<br />
formation of the idea of the German people, the episode became hugely
Power, legitimacy and democracy 221<br />
significant. Of it, James Sheehan writes, ‘The Volk’s role in its own liberation<br />
was, at best, a minor one. Napoleon was defeated by regular armies,<br />
not patriotic poets and quaintly attired gymnasts. Eventually, however, the<br />
apostles of nationalism were able to create a historical memory of liberation<br />
which projected their own enthusiasms onto the nation.’ 1 Fallenstein<br />
went on to be a middle ranking Prussian official, who was held back in any<br />
preferment by his obvious enthusiasm for all things German. 2 His superiors’<br />
loyalty lay with the Prussian monarchy and they were distrustful of patriotic<br />
fervour advancing, as it did, the cultural unification of the German people as<br />
a political force in its own right.<br />
Fallenstein retired to Heidelberg, built a grand villa on the banks of the<br />
Neckar (in which Max and Marianne <strong>Weber</strong> were eventually to live) and<br />
supported the celebration of German language, literature and folk traditions<br />
– for example the work of the brothers Grimm. At his Heidelberg home,<br />
Fallenstein took in Gervinus, one of the mostly widely read and most liberal<br />
historians of his day. As a professor at Göttingen, Gervinus had been exiled<br />
for refusing an oath of allegiance to the Prince Regent, who had suppressed<br />
the existing constitutional rights in the state of Hanover. Gervinus took his<br />
case to the supreme court of the German Confederation. He lost the case<br />
but became the champion of constitutional rights among the liberal middle<br />
class. Their political hour came in 1848 when Europe was convulsed by<br />
revolutions of peasants and workers, from Spain to Russia. Gervinus was a<br />
leading force in the National Assembly in Frankfurt, a collection of reformers<br />
and radicals that sought to put in place the first constitutional system for<br />
the peoples of central Europe. The reformers, given their opportunity by<br />
the widespread protests, deliberated too long and were split along too many<br />
cleavages: the politics of language and ethnicity versus the claims to self-determination,<br />
and the politics of constitutionalism for the privileged middle<br />
class versus the (then) radical demands of the democrats for a republic and<br />
parliamentary rule. 3<br />
Fallenstein may be thought of as the ethnically defined cultural component,<br />
Gervinus as the liberal constitutionalist component. The option of<br />
a democratic republic was resisted by Fallenstein and, initially, Gervinus.<br />
Instead of looking to a newly enfranchized people as the basis of political<br />
power, the liberals sought to conjoin their constitution to an existing dynastic<br />
state, which would retain the continuity of monarchy and the attributes<br />
of state power – an army, fiscal system, judiciary and policing. The aspiration<br />
of the liberals was to transfer legitimacy from dynastic autocracy to constitutional<br />
liberalism that would, in addition, recognize the basic rights of all<br />
the people. After much wrangling in the National Assembly the leadership<br />
of the German Nation was offered to the King of Prussia. This decision in<br />
itself represented a betrayal of two elements in the National Assembly: those<br />
elements who wanted self-government and democracy without monarchical<br />
state rule from above, and the multifarious elements (Poles, Hungarians,<br />
Ruthenes, Slovaks, Italians etc.) who wanted self-determination outwith a
222 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
German nation. These facts tend to be overlooked in face of the historic<br />
disappointment caused by the response from the Prussian king who rudely<br />
refused the offer of becoming the head of the new nation. 4<br />
Over the second half of the nineteenth century Prussia achieved hegemony<br />
over the separate thirty-nine German territories, which were agreed upon in<br />
1817 at the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon. But in 1848<br />
the geo-politics of central Europe did not automatically favour Prussia. Bismarck<br />
was the supreme strategist, who as Minister-President of the Prussian<br />
kingdom achieved this in the 1860s. He manipulated the balance of political<br />
forces both within the state and between states. He regarded the Austrian<br />
Empire as the main threat to Prussia. Liberal as well as democratic protest<br />
was widespread across Austria in 1848. It was eventually suppressed by the<br />
Austrian authorities, just as the outbreaks of democratic radicalism in Frankfurt<br />
were suppressed by Prussian troops. Bismarck perceived that liberalism,<br />
vocalized in Frankfurt, and German unity under Austrian leadership could<br />
combine to sideline Prussia. Accordingly, in 1866 Bismarck engineered a<br />
successful war against Austria, very much against the sentiment of liberal,<br />
middle class opinion in Prussia. And in 1870 he provoked France into a war,<br />
where Prussia was again successful. This placed German territorial fortunes<br />
beyond the interference of foreign powers (Russia, Austria, France and England).<br />
The war against France was welcomed with popular enthusiasm in<br />
Germany. Bismarck devised a constitution of his own making and the Kaiserreich<br />
(or second German Empire) was founded in 1871. The German<br />
states, excluding Austria, were incorporated into the Empire under Prussia’s<br />
leadership. Nominally the monarchic constitution offered federalism<br />
to the incoming territories and universal male franchise to the people. In<br />
reality, neither people nor previously independent territories had any executive<br />
power. The historian Geoffrey Barraclough summed up the situation:<br />
‘In Bismarck’s system, nationalism, long the concomitant of liberalism, was<br />
deliberately fostered as an antidote to liberal and radical demands; he offered<br />
the German people unity, but at the expense of the radical reform<br />
which alone made unity worth while.’ 5 But in the attainment of German<br />
unity under Prussian rulership, Bismarck had unleashed a populist nationalism<br />
that by the 1890s had become anti-Semitic and anti-foreigner, fostered<br />
a trust in militarism, and created powers for monarch and aristocracy beyond<br />
the reach of parliamentary accountability. Although he had introduced<br />
male suffrage for elections of political parties to the Reichstag, that body<br />
had no real parliamentary powers to appoint ministers and administrations<br />
or budgetary oversight. Real power lay with the Prussian aristocracy and<br />
their ‘Landtag’ which had an outrageously unfair electoral system favouring<br />
the rich. And above both ‘Reichstag’ and ‘Landtag’ was the unaccountable<br />
power and influence of the Emperor. The liberals had got a constitution<br />
and German unity but the system ‘was, in fact, a veiled form of monarchical<br />
absolutism vested in the King of Prussia.’ 6 <strong>Weber</strong> learnt at first hand from his
Power, legitimacy and democracy 223<br />
family what compromises and choices were involved in the construction of<br />
the German Empire.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s uncle, Hermann Baumgarten, acted as a secretary to Gervinus<br />
in Heidelberg in the early 1850s. Gervinus deplored the reactionary turn in<br />
Prussian policy after the fervour of the events of 1848 had cooled, and he<br />
regretted the offer made by the National Assembly to the King of Prussia. In<br />
1853 he wrote publicly that the political future belonged not to the middle<br />
classes but to the fourth estate of workers and peasants. For this he was<br />
charged with treason and Fallenstein, Hermann Baugarten and other friends<br />
had to organize his defence.<br />
Following Bismarck’s military successes in the 1860s, Baumgarten broke<br />
with Gervinus. In 1866 he wrote a self-critique of German liberalism, which<br />
he held was preoccupied with freedom, ideals and constitutionalism. ‘Politics<br />
is action, it must always want something and achieve something; liberalism’s<br />
problem is its ability to adapt its demands to reality, it must seek… to become<br />
capable of government’. State power and the ‘real relations’ of power<br />
had to be grasped. This was the new liberalism – and the ‘unity through<br />
freedom’ of the ‘old liberals’ was an ‘obvious chimera’. 7 If Germany was to<br />
be united, then it would have to accept the leadership of Prussia. This was<br />
the new ‘realpolitik’, a phrase invented by Ludwig von Rochau, a journalist<br />
friend of Baumgarten’s.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own father was a member of the National Liberal Party, which<br />
had despite a split given its guarded support to Bismarck. He held a number<br />
of important governmental posts in Berlin in budgetary committees and in<br />
the administration of Berlin itself. The young <strong>Weber</strong> learnt that Bismarck<br />
could govern with the support of the National Liberals and he could govern<br />
without their support. The Chancellor was not subject to parliamentary<br />
political parties, as in the English case, but only to the confidence of the<br />
Emperor. What he learnt from Hermann Baumgarten was his uncle’s subsequent<br />
extreme disillusion with Bismarck’s rule, which he thought had not<br />
lived up to the ideals of a Protestant German state.<br />
Baumgarten accused Bismarck of ‘Caesarism’. Bismarck had introduced<br />
universal male suffrage with the belief, it is said, that the masses would be<br />
conservative and patriotic. Bismarck would rule with popular approval. This<br />
approval was not forthcoming and Bismarck was forced to govern by manipulating<br />
and overriding an often hostile Reichstag, which sought to exercise<br />
its legislative powers. Baumgarten himself disapproved of universal suffrage,<br />
preferring a graduated suffrage – empowering the middle class prior to the<br />
entry of the working people.<br />
This brings us to <strong>Weber</strong>’s own politics. He was a bourgeois liberal, which<br />
in his case meant that he took the supreme political value to be the power of<br />
the state, and that middle class liberals should displace the incumbent Prussian<br />
aristocracy as the political class. Like his father’s generation, he had no<br />
way of achieving this against the deeply entrenched power of the Prussian<br />
aristocracy. His political writings reflect his seething resentment at the lack
224 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
of bourgeois leadership and they are marked by an angry but forensic skill<br />
in analysing the real interests that underlay political rhetoric. Only later in<br />
life (around 1910) did <strong>Weber</strong> seriously consider the reform of the Prussian<br />
‘Landtag’ and making its powers subordinate to the Reichstag. 8 His politics<br />
also reflected his views as an economist. Germany should be a world power,<br />
taking its part in competition with the other great powers in the search for<br />
economic opportunities (trade, emigration, colonies). To this end he supported<br />
the re-arming of the German navy and he contributed a journalistic<br />
article supporting Tirpitz’s Naval Bill of 1898. 9 He realized this aggressive<br />
stance could lead to war, but argued that announcing Germany’s imperial<br />
claims would deter other nations from frustrating its ambitions. 10 <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
‘nationalism’ was therefore based on the power of the German state in relation<br />
to other nations, his liberalism was a belief in an expanding capitalism<br />
at national and international levels as the new competitive reality, and his<br />
political reforms were directed at making the government more vital and<br />
more responsive to the interests of the nation. He accepted that trade unions<br />
and working class political parties were inevitable under modern capitalist<br />
industrialization and he was a vigorous reformer for their right to participate<br />
in the political and economic life of the country.<br />
When war broke out in 1914, he supported the German patriotic cause<br />
and joined up as a reserve officer. His wartime and postwar political articles<br />
for leading German newspapers are some of the best things he wrote. In the<br />
light of the sacrifices of the troops, he demanded a proper parliamentary<br />
and fair electoral system. Under pressure, and in a minority, he criticised the<br />
Kaiser and High Command. He immediately recognized the foolhardiness<br />
of unrestricted U-boat warfare by the German marine – because it would<br />
bring America into the war, as it did. After the war he helped to found the<br />
German Democratic Party within the political framework of the Weimar<br />
Republic – whose constitution he had influenced through his writings and<br />
political reputation.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s participation, however much on the sidelines, in world historical<br />
events has made him a controversial figure. His name is linked with the<br />
idea of ‘realpolitik’. <strong>Weber</strong> argued that Germany could not shirk its power<br />
responsibilities on the world stage. He rejected the Christian message of<br />
pacifism, which a small peace movement in Germany had been advocating.<br />
No politician at the national or international level could ignore what <strong>Weber</strong><br />
termed the pragma of power. To act weakly, to ‘turn the other cheek’, was<br />
a dangerous illusion that ignores the rules of the game, and puts one’s own<br />
constituents or country at risk (EW, pp. 261–2). The countering Enlightenment<br />
position was formulated by Immanuel Kant. ‘Nature herself ’ whether<br />
by fate or providence should produce ‘concord among men, even against<br />
their will and by means of their very discord.’ 11 Kant argued against secret<br />
treaties activated by states in time of war and against territorial acquisition.<br />
He argued for the reduction of standing armies, the raising of national debt<br />
for foreign policy objectives, and for the observance of the laws of war.
Power, legitimacy and democracy 225<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> is also controversial for his advocacy of leadership within democracy.<br />
His justification for strong leaders was in part based on his view that<br />
bureaucratic growth within the state, government and political parties would<br />
stifle the voice of the true political leader, who would articulate national values<br />
and formulate his own goals in the face of the levelling effects of modern<br />
politics. The political leader was, however, accountable to parliament and<br />
subject to constitutional laws. The mature political leader has to combine<br />
conviction, the awareness of the consequences of political actions, and an<br />
ability and judgement to cope with the normal business of politics. 12 Unfortunately,<br />
this normative list of criteria has often been cruelly abbreviated by<br />
twentieth century politicians – conviction without responsibility, and gesture<br />
over the substance of politics. <strong>Weber</strong>’s case has also been diminished by the<br />
democratic election of the leaders Hitler and Mussolini, who suppressed<br />
democracy, put in train genocide and unleashed the most violent war in the<br />
history of the world. This has led to and re-asserted the view that democracies<br />
are made safer through the reduction in the powers of political leaders.<br />
The case for benign strong leaders, like Franklin Roosevelt and General de<br />
Gaulle and Willi Brandt, can, of course, be made also.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, therefore, was a political commentator and activist in his own<br />
right, in addition to his academic writings on the topics of power, interests,<br />
rulership and politics. His acute sense of power and the political enters into<br />
the academic writings. He was an academic who lived through a momentous<br />
period of German history and he rarely stopped observing, debating and<br />
commentating on the political situation of his day. <strong>Weber</strong> was a scholar,<br />
but not the dry as dust variety. It is quite hard to single out his real passion<br />
– politics or scholarship. Ernst Troeltsch, it will be recalled, observed of<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> that he had two minds in one head. One was political, always<br />
cynically and cleverly reducing the utterances and actions of politicians to<br />
their underlying self-interest; the other mind pleaded for an absolute sense<br />
of justice and fairness – this other mind belonged in the western humanist<br />
tradition. 13<br />
This places <strong>Weber</strong> in a unique position: as a kind of modern Machiavelli<br />
who could impartially analyse the practice of power and was not repulsed by<br />
its choices and outcomes. The power and prestige of the nation was a noble<br />
cause for <strong>Weber</strong>, imparting dignity, culture and worth to human existence.<br />
This, he recognized, was true of all leading nations and, in addition, they<br />
were compelled to struggle for power and prestige in the international arena<br />
– hence the politics of nations could not escape a diabolical element. 14 Political<br />
leaders had to make decisions that were guided by what <strong>Weber</strong> termed an<br />
ethic of responsibility – weighing up and thinking through the consequences<br />
of their actions. They were also accountable to the values of the nation,<br />
its culture, and the prestige of the state. The leader’s political values here<br />
depended on firm convictions that may, ultimately, not be compatible with<br />
the more rational ethic of responsibility (EW, pp. 261–8). <strong>Weber</strong> belonged in<br />
the long western tradition of the secular enlightenment of politics, but one
226 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
sceptical of any self-evident natural law. The irrationalities of power could<br />
not be squared with philosophies that took the end of the politics of living<br />
together to be happiness. 15<br />
The dimensions of power<br />
I now turn to his academic writings in the various versions of Economy and<br />
Society. ‘Domination (‘Herrschaft’) in the quite general sense of power, i.e.,<br />
of the possibility of imposing one’s own will upon the behavior of other<br />
persons, can emerge in the most diverse forms’ (ES, p. 942). Power is the<br />
ability to impose your will on others, even if they resist. <strong>Weber</strong>’s definition<br />
follows most people’s understanding of power. ‘Domination in the most<br />
general sense is one of the most important elements of social action’ (ES,<br />
p. 941). It is to be found everywhere: ‘a position ordinarily designated as<br />
“dominating” can emerge from the social relations in a drawing room as well<br />
as in the market, from the rostrum of a lecture-hall as well as from the command<br />
post of a regiment, from an erotic or charitable relationship as well as<br />
from scholarly discussion or athletics.’ The ubiquity of power, that it is to be<br />
found in all possible social relationships, creates difficulties for a sociology of<br />
power. ‘Such a broad definition would, however, render the term “domination”<br />
scientifically useless’ (ES, p. 943).<br />
The earlier drafts of Economy and Society, read as a whole, produce three<br />
sociological dimensions of power: economic power, social power and political<br />
power. His sociology of rulership (‘Herrschaftssoziologie’) analyses the<br />
last dimension in depth and breadth. The rationale and structure of Economy<br />
and Society does not pursue a general theory of power, because it is the<br />
relation of the various orders of society in relation to the economy that is its<br />
focus. Rulership stands alongside economic activity as one of the enduring<br />
and salient features of all societies. In the modern economy, the operation<br />
of power and control in both the economic enterprise and politics resembles<br />
each other. The basic social relationship is rationally ordered according to<br />
fixed rules with operations carried out by trained officials and personnel. For<br />
most of human history, the economy has never achieved such self-direction,<br />
but remains embedded within the prevailing structures of kinship and kingship.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology of rulership analyses the major types of rulership<br />
and shows their controlling and shaping effects on economic activity.<br />
This should not obscure the point that the major elements of a more<br />
general theory of power are in place in these writings. <strong>Weber</strong> recognizes the<br />
centrality of economic power.<br />
A comprehensive classification of all forms, conditions, and concrete<br />
contents of ‘domination’ in that widest sense is impossible here. We will<br />
only call to mind that, in addition to numerous other possible types<br />
there are two diametrically contrasting types of domination, viz., domination<br />
by virtue of a constellation of interests (in particular: by virtue
Power, legitimacy and democracy 227<br />
of a position of monopoly), and domination by virtue of authority, i.e.,<br />
power to command and duty to obey.<br />
(ES, p. 943)<br />
The exclusive possession of an economic resource places its holder in a<br />
position of domination over all those who need that resource. If a water supply<br />
is controlled unrestrictedly by one owner, or if the provision of computer<br />
software was controlled by one supplier, then this places huge economic<br />
power in the hands of those owners. In finance, <strong>Weber</strong> notes, any large central<br />
bank through its monopolistic position can control capital markets.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> uses the phrase ‘domination by virtue of a constellation of interests’.<br />
By this, he means that the attributes of power in the economic sphere<br />
are qualitatively different from rulership itself. <strong>Weber</strong> gives the example of<br />
a powerful bank which owns the debt of another company. It can exercise<br />
its interest over that company through economic devices, for example by<br />
varying or threatening to vary the terms of its loan. Or, the relationship of<br />
power could be altered by bringing the company director(s) into the authority<br />
structure of the bank itself. Those directors would then be subject to the<br />
commands of the bank itself. This latter situation belongs to the structure<br />
of rulership within an organization and, hence, belongs to the sociology of<br />
rulership, not the ‘constellation of interests’. It is the specific quality of the<br />
power relationship that is <strong>Weber</strong>’s concern.<br />
The sociology of economic power is further analysed in his writings on<br />
class and status groups. <strong>Weber</strong> defines class in terms of two variables: the<br />
ownership of property and the possession of skills that can be sold. This<br />
provides a simple but widely applicable stratification of very many societies.<br />
Slave-owners, patriarchal owners of landed estates, capitalists who own<br />
companies and stock are positively privileged, in terms of class, by virtue<br />
of property. Underneath and economically subordinated are the slaves, the<br />
peasants and serfs and the wage-earners. Possession or non-possession of<br />
skills provides a more complex picture of stratification, in that skills are<br />
often more graduated through a society. In today’s societies, the economic<br />
division of labour produces a myriad of gradations in terms of types of skills<br />
in particular areas: semi-skilled, unskilled and professional skills. These gradations<br />
are not fixed, but change according to the development and dynamic<br />
of the economy, as certain skills are made redundant while new ones appear.<br />
In a medieval economy, skill differences were institutionalized through guild<br />
regulations as well as by status ascription; if one was born a peasant, one<br />
almost always remained a peasant on the lord’s estate.<br />
Status distinctions represent the third dimension of power, social power.<br />
In European medieval societies, a person belonged to a fixed status group<br />
within a clear hierarchy of social power. The feudal lord was at the top of the<br />
hierarchy, his knights in an inferior status (but only to him), with dependent<br />
peasants completely subservient. In the medieval towns, a different status<br />
order had been established, especially in those towns that had achieved
228 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
jurisdictional autonomy from feudal lords, which they could have achieved<br />
by buying the privilege of autonomous rule within the city walls or by fighting<br />
the feudal lord for those rights. This then produced the status hierarchy<br />
of guild master, journeyman and apprentice. Closed status hierarchies border<br />
on becoming caste societies, in which no movement whatsoever occurs<br />
between status groups. Marriage across status boundaries is not permitted,<br />
and status distinctions are maintained through strict rituals of a religious<br />
nature. Status boundaries are policed by extraordinarily powerful measures<br />
such as pollution, magical rites and totemic symbols.<br />
In contrast with the ‘class situation’, which is determined by purely<br />
economic factors, we shall use the term ‘status situation’ to refer to all<br />
those typical components of people’s destinies which are determined by<br />
a specific social evaluation of ‘status’ whether positive or negative, when<br />
that evaluation is based on some common characteristic shared by many<br />
people.<br />
(EW, p. 187)<br />
Social power involves a struggle for social esteem. Social groups such as<br />
medieval merchants or religious priests, e.g. Brahmans, can develop into<br />
occupational status groups. Some special qualification can also be claimed<br />
through hereditary descent, or an office or profession can be appropriated<br />
through political power.<br />
As can be expected, <strong>Weber</strong> immediately acknowledged that the dimensions<br />
of economic power interact with social power. In European medieval<br />
society, status distinctions defined economic opportunities. In today’s capitalistic<br />
societies, class distinctions are becoming almost completely dominant<br />
over status distinctions, and this can be seen in the inability of professional<br />
groups to defend their special skills in the face of those who control economic<br />
and financial power. This is referred to as the ‘marketization’ of society.<br />
Status distinctions can also be used to buttress economic class position and,<br />
conversely, economic power may be consolidated into status distinctions.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> covers many pages of text discussing and illustrating the interactions<br />
that occur in different periods of history and in different societies between<br />
rulership, economic power (class) and social power (status).<br />
The overall conclusion is that all societies are engaged in a perpetual struggle<br />
for the distribution of power along these three dimensions. In addition,<br />
power registers in most forms of social relationship – for example between<br />
lovers – beyond the major dimensions picked out for treatment by <strong>Weber</strong>.<br />
An international footballer has obvious economic power through selling his<br />
skill. That economic power can be translated into status by those footballers<br />
who become celebrities, eventually becoming independent of those footballing<br />
skills. But, in theory, the celebrity footballer is subject to the complete<br />
rule of the football manager who might choose to praise or humiliate the<br />
player in whatever way he wishes. Each of the three dimensions of power
Power, legitimacy and democracy 229<br />
comes into a single case. The three dimensions are ideal typical ways of modelling<br />
power that, in its multidimensionality, would be extremely difficult to<br />
analyse in the concrete case.<br />
In these last paragraphs, I have recapitulated the introduction provided<br />
for Part 2 of The Essential <strong>Weber</strong>. Reading Gianfranco Poggi’s thoughtful<br />
and informed book Forms of Power, I realize I should have made clear that<br />
this exposition is not the standard account of <strong>Weber</strong>’s theory of power.<br />
Poggi asks: ‘if we seek to differentiate forms of social power by referring<br />
to the different “bases” of it, how many forms should we come up with?’ 16<br />
He quotes <strong>Weber</strong>: ‘Classes, status groups and parties are phenomena of the<br />
distribution of power within a collectivity’. 17 This formula, for Poggi, produces<br />
a ‘basic trinity of social power forms (again: normative/ideological;<br />
economic; political) . . .’. 18 Classes are the form of economic power, status<br />
groups of normative/ideological power, and parties the form of political parties.<br />
Poggi rightly observes that this tripartite division has been followed<br />
by the sociologist and philosopher, Ernest Gellner, and the Italian political<br />
theorist, Norbert Bobbio. Michael Mann’s massive account of The Sources<br />
of Social Power makes a similar tripartite classification, but adds in a further<br />
dimension, military power.<br />
Taking a closer look at Mann, he outlines ‘the four sources and organization<br />
of power’. These are: (1) ideological power, where a claim to meaning is<br />
monopolized by a social group, or moral norms are monopolized; likewise,<br />
the ritualistic and aesthetic constructions of meaning can be monopolized.<br />
Hence, those who control rite, morals and religion are termed, by Mann, as<br />
exercising ideological power. (2) ‘Economic power derives from the satisfaction<br />
of subsistence needs through the social organization of the extraction,<br />
transformation, distribution, and consumption of the objects of nature.’<br />
Mann echoes here the definitions of social economics provided by <strong>Weber</strong><br />
and Sombart, other than that these writers include the motivational bases of<br />
behaviour – which in Mann are included but await his further analysis. He<br />
continues: ‘A grouping formed around these tasks is called a class . . . which<br />
is therefore purely an economic concept.’ (3) Military power ‘derives from<br />
the necessity of organized physical defence and its usefulness for aggression’.<br />
(4) ‘Political power . . . derives from the usefulness of centralized, institutionalized,<br />
territorialized regulation of many aspects of social relations’. 19<br />
Mann uses these definitions to provide a historical sociology of power as farranging<br />
as <strong>Weber</strong>’s comparative studies. Each of the four forms is an ideal<br />
type, which enables the conceptual clarification of human history that would<br />
otherwise appear to be hopelessly complicated. But in an empirical case,<br />
these four types would come together, through their specific organizational<br />
forms, to provide ‘the dominant power structure of a given area’.<br />
Poggi is quite explicit in acknowledging <strong>Weber</strong>, and Mann is more reluctant<br />
in this regard, but the similarities to <strong>Weber</strong> are fairly obvious. In my<br />
exposition, I argue that <strong>Weber</strong> outlines three dimensions of power, but these<br />
do not map to subsequent accounts, as suggested by Poggi and Mann. Social
230 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
power is not the overall outcome of the three or four dimensions of power,<br />
it is simply one (important) dimension in the multiplicity of relationships<br />
of power. Social power for <strong>Weber</strong> is the negative and positive distribution<br />
of prestige in status groups. The Brahman’s lifestyle is an expression of his<br />
social power over lesser lifestyles. The category of prestige is couched in<br />
meaning, but is not of itself normative or ideological. It is a practice, a lifestyle,<br />
an embodiment of conduct and habitus; it is visible and forms a basis<br />
of social measurement.<br />
This is not the same as ideological and normative power as Poggi would<br />
have it. Mann’s placing it as his first form is a departure from <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
writings. <strong>Weber</strong>’s Sociology of Religion is the closest text to what Mann<br />
summarizes under ideological power. Priests, magicians, cultic mystagogues<br />
propagandize – <strong>Weber</strong>’s term – their various beliefs and practices within<br />
social groups, and world religions represent successful propaganda on a<br />
mass scale. <strong>Weber</strong> would have had no problem with the concept ‘ideological’<br />
(which in his day had a fairly narrow Marxist usage). But religion is not<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong> a dimension of power. There is a sense that religion exercises<br />
power within people’s minds and behaviour, and <strong>Weber</strong> had the option<br />
of including it in his threefold division of power in the text ‘Class, Status<br />
Group and Party’. But he did not do this. Instead, the power of religion is<br />
rendered by <strong>Weber</strong> as an ‘ideal interest’ and, in the architecture of his work,<br />
ideal interests are counterpoised to ‘material interests’. Power belongs to the<br />
realm of material interests, and social prestige, economic class and political<br />
power are all forms of material interests. As the Outline Plan of 1914 shows,<br />
the (unfinished) chapter on religion would be separate from the chapters<br />
on power. The dynamics of ideal interests has an autonomy (‘Eigengesetzlichkeit’)<br />
different from the spheres of the social, economic and political<br />
order. They are not equivalent as factors in a multicausal scenario, which<br />
is how Mann conceives of the development of human societies. This brings<br />
us back to <strong>Weber</strong>’s recalcitrance in treating religion as just another factor.<br />
It is a separate element, and the best that can be achieved is determination<br />
through the idea of elective affinity. Much turns on this insistence because,<br />
for <strong>Weber</strong>, historical outcomes cannot be deduced from the various input<br />
factors. The combination of ideal and material factors introduces a new and<br />
unpredictable historical element.<br />
Nevertheless, both Poggi’s and Mann’s analysis of power forces an interesting<br />
dialogue with <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings on the subject; specifically, how <strong>Weber</strong><br />
arranged his chapters or sections in the various versions of Economy and<br />
Society. Both Mann and Poggi assume that the whole point of the analysis<br />
of power is to explain the allocation of resources in society. Resources,<br />
argues Poggi, can be allocated by custom, by exchange and by command. 20<br />
Normative, economic and political power control these resources. I am not<br />
certain that this is the thrust of Economy and Society. In the final version of<br />
that work, <strong>Weber</strong> would have seemed to have placed the chapter ‘The Basic<br />
Concepts of Economic Activity’ at the core (see Chapter 9). This was then
Power, legitimacy and democracy 231<br />
followed by the chapter on ‘The Types of Rulership’ and then ‘Classes and<br />
Status Groups’. At that point, he unfortunately died. But he would have expected,<br />
surely, to have drawn down and revised the early drafts on religion,<br />
law and social groups. Stratification (in ‘Classes and Status Groups’) would<br />
be but one field of determination and co-determination in relation to the<br />
economy. Stratification, therefore, cannot be privileged as the explanandum,<br />
as the thing to be explained. Social economics was more than resource allocation<br />
– it was the principal types of economic activity or ‘economizing’<br />
through history as conceived by <strong>Weber</strong> in terms of motivations for economic<br />
goals and organizational forms. Stratification would obviously impact upon<br />
this, but economic classes did not belong to the core analysis.<br />
Mann provides his reader with a schematic diagram (Figure 8.1) of how<br />
he interlinks the goal-directed behaviour of human beings; how this flows<br />
through the ‘boxes’ of the four types of power and results in a power structure<br />
which itself contributes to the evolution of further societal development.<br />
What might an equivalent diagram look like, were <strong>Weber</strong> to have supplied<br />
one for Economy and Society? In the central circle would be economizing<br />
activities and their types. Around this, in a series of overlapping circles,<br />
would be the types of law, types of rulership, face-to-face types of community<br />
and wider communities, types of religious groups and types of social<br />
stratification. The ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’ (Chapter 1) are intrinsic to<br />
all the other special sociologies. Chapter 1 appears to stand apart from the<br />
succeeding chapters, but it has to be read as an accompanying presence to<br />
those other chapters. Therefore, diagramatically, it has to be ‘fed into’ the<br />
cluster of other sociologies, for which it provides a terminological grounding<br />
(Figure 8.2).<br />
Mann’s schema demonstrates a clear linearity of motives being translated<br />
into the resources and organization of power and resulting in the evolution<br />
of societies. <strong>Weber</strong>, as we have seen, continuously rehearses and reprises<br />
themes of narrative and developmental history, but never commits himself to<br />
Original motor Major sources of<br />
social power<br />
Human beings<br />
pursuing their<br />
goals<br />
Ideology<br />
Economy<br />
Military<br />
Types of state<br />
Institutionalization<br />
Dominant power<br />
structure of areas<br />
Figure 8.1 Mann’s four sources and organization of power.<br />
Emergence<br />
of rival power<br />
networks
232 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
Figure 8.2 Simulation of the final version of Economy and Society.<br />
any sort of evolutionary account of societal change. Instead, Economy and<br />
Society, most especially in its final version, pulls back away from historical<br />
development in favour of interactions between spheres of activity that are<br />
conceptualized as types of social relationships.<br />
Figure 8.2 is hypothetical, although I would argue a reasonable surmise<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong>’s final version. Discerning the overall plan of Economy and Society<br />
is a contentious and scholarly issue. What also has to be held in mind is<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s readiness to execute such a programme. A sphere, such as power<br />
and rulership, is treated as a major theme in its own right. Then, it is related<br />
extensively to types of economic activity. And then, the economic bases of<br />
rulership are discussed. This procedure would then be repeated through all<br />
the special sociologies – law, religion and all the subsidiary circles of Figure<br />
8.2. Each time <strong>Weber</strong> makes one of these manoeuvres, his mind always carries<br />
with it a ready supply of examples and empirical materials. The illustrative<br />
material is allowed to dominate the exposition, but <strong>Weber</strong> will then<br />
switch the theme and line of analysis.<br />
Keeping this discussion in mind – admittedly, given <strong>Weber</strong>’s ambitions<br />
and capabilities, not an easy task – I examine <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’<br />
in the two versions that he wrote for Economy and Society. The older version<br />
is Chapters 10–15, and the final version is Chapter 3 of Economy and<br />
Society, edited by Roth and Wittich.<br />
What follows greatly benefits from Edith Hanke’s editing of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ in MWG I/22-4. Her introductions and footnotes<br />
clarify many issues.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s political sociology<br />
‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ was a special sociology, like those of law and of religion,<br />
and was designed to feed into Economy and Society. But it was also<br />
a subject especially close to <strong>Weber</strong>’s heart. As a national-economist, he had
Power, legitimacy and democracy 233<br />
to deal with issues of law, government and power structures, but it was not<br />
until 1909 that <strong>Weber</strong> started to develop his own political sociology. One<br />
impetus for this was discussions with Georg Jellinek on the setting up of a<br />
German–American Institute to be supported by the Carnegie Foundation.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> recommended that it should research the legal, political, economic<br />
and the general cultural dispositions (‘allgemeine Kulturverhältnisse’) and<br />
how these determined modern nations and international relations. Other<br />
topics for study included: the internal structures of states; the role that military,<br />
bureaucratic and feudal or industrial, commercial and other bourgeois<br />
strata have on the political culture (‘politische Geist’) of the state; the political<br />
division of powers and the practical role of public law and administrative<br />
machinery; how all these contribute to the formation of the political<br />
culture (‘öffentliche Meinung’) of a country and determine its relation to<br />
other countries. ‘Therefore the direct analysis of the international legal and<br />
political relations must go hand in hand with the internationally comparative<br />
analysis of the legal, political, economic and cultural structure of individual<br />
countries and states.’ 21 This initiative never came to fruition and, as<br />
Hanke notes, it would have undertaken much empirical work for his ensuing<br />
contribution to Economy and Society.<br />
Power, state, administration were all part of any national-economist’s<br />
vocabulary, especially <strong>Weber</strong>’s with his comparative abilities that, up to the<br />
point of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, had culminated in ‘Agrarverhältnisse<br />
im Altertum’. The switch to a more specialized political sociology is<br />
marked by the gradual introduction of the concept of ‘Herrschaft’. There is a<br />
long-running issue as to how ‘Herrschaft’ should be translated into English.<br />
Semantics are determined by problematics in this dispute. Talcott Parsons<br />
used the term ‘authority’. In his sociology of societies and social systems, he<br />
emphasized the coordination functions of authority. Modern societies not<br />
only command, they organize and execute complex policies. For Parsons,<br />
the essence of power was not the relationship of the command of superior<br />
over subordinate, so that one person gained and one lost in the transaction<br />
– the so-called ‘zero-sum’ account of power. What was more important was<br />
the capacity to organize and administer, the advantages of which flowed to<br />
all members of a society.<br />
In America, C.W. Mills embraced a conflict model of society, most notably<br />
in his book The Power Elite (1956). This rehearsed a tradition first articulated<br />
in modern times by Gaetano Mosca, the Italian political scientist who<br />
noted how a small organized group will always dominate a larger disorganized<br />
group. Mills brought this insight up to date, noting that US cities were<br />
controlled by small interlocking elites of administrators, political representatives<br />
and economic leaders. He also expanded on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s<br />
warning, in 1955, that democratic power in the United States<br />
was falling into the hands of the military–industrial complex. In Germany in<br />
1959, Wolfgang J. Mommsen brought out his controversial Max <strong>Weber</strong> und<br />
die deutsche Politik, which argued that <strong>Weber</strong> was less a constitutional liberal
234 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
(which had been the accepted picture) than a ‘realpolitiker’ who favoured<br />
the interests of the German state in the competitive international arena<br />
over the values of democracy, which had to take second place. 22 Following<br />
on from these influences, domination became the preferred translation of<br />
‘Herrschaft’ – because it brought out the conflictual, realist side of power.<br />
And this flowed back into the problematic, with theorists such as Anthony<br />
Giddens favouring the realist view of power, in his Nation-State and Violence<br />
(1981).<br />
These tensions are all expressed in the Roth and Wittich edition of Economy<br />
and Society. This is an amalgam of translators and translations. Parsons<br />
used ‘authority’, Guenther Roth uses ‘domination’ (in the ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’)<br />
and Benjamin Nelson expressed a preference for ‘rule’ and ‘rulership’.<br />
My preference, which I should declare at this point, is for ‘rule’ and<br />
‘rulership’. (In the quotations below, I have not changed the translators’<br />
choice of words, although the translations in The Essential <strong>Weber</strong> do reflect<br />
my preferences.)<br />
Hanke’s discussion of the aetiology of ‘Herrschaft’ in <strong>Weber</strong>’s usage is<br />
relevant here. There was clearly a ‘realist’ school for the analysis of power. I<br />
have already mentioned <strong>Weber</strong>’s own tutelage under Hermann Baumgarten.<br />
In addition, <strong>Weber</strong> had read in Italian the first volume of Mosca’s Elementi di<br />
scienza politica, which appeared in 1896 (although not the second volume,<br />
which appeared in 1923). <strong>Weber</strong>’s close friend and academic colleague (until<br />
they fell out over German politics during the First World War), Roberto<br />
Michels, also used Mosca’s ideas to argue that the revolutionary aspirations<br />
of socialism could never be achieved because of the constraints of organization.<br />
Similarly, a Grundriss author, Friedrich von Wieser, argued a revisionist<br />
line that mass movements have to accept the inevitability that power can<br />
only be wielded by small organized groups. This provenance points towards<br />
a realist conception and elites.<br />
Simmel was also an influence. He published two chapters – ‘The Sociology<br />
of Super- and Subordination’ and ‘Towards a Philosophy of Power<br />
(‘Herrschaft’) in his 1908 book, Soziologie. Within the general theme of the<br />
tension between freedom and authority and individuality and compulsion,<br />
Simmel probed the social–psychological issues of why free individuals allow<br />
themselves to be subject to authority and power. As Hanke notes, this is the<br />
psychologically equivalent question to Locke and Hobbes’ formulation of<br />
the acceptance of a social contract between the ruler and the ruled.<br />
This psychological aspect is directly reflected in <strong>Weber</strong>’s definition of<br />
‘Herrschaft’, that is<br />
the situation in which the manifested will (command) of the ruler or<br />
rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or more others (the<br />
ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way that their conduct to<br />
a socially relevant degree occurs as if the ruled had made the content of
Power, legitimacy and democracy 235<br />
the command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake. Looked<br />
upon from the other end, this situation will be called obedience.<br />
(ES, p. 946)<br />
Hanke makes the very pertinent point that this formulation is close to<br />
Kant’s categorical moral imperative. Morality is internalized by the individual,<br />
and moral imperatives are followed for their own sake (and not for some<br />
other instrumental purpose). This does not mean that <strong>Weber</strong> had adopted<br />
the German Lutheran idea of obedience or, for that matter, Heinrich Mann’s<br />
obsequious notion of ‘the subject’ (‘Untertan’). The phrase ‘as if ’ is crucial<br />
in <strong>Weber</strong>’s definition. Commands are obeyed – obviously a feature of power<br />
– but ‘as if ’ the command is accepted legitimately as an obligation on the<br />
behalf of the ruled.<br />
Explaining why someone should so accept a command in this way is finely<br />
balanced between psychology and sociology. There is a large field of psychology<br />
that deals with hierarchical dispositions in human beings, and the very<br />
word ‘domination’ signals the wide variety of forms of dominance and abjection<br />
between human beings. <strong>Weber</strong> did indeed recognize this psychological<br />
side, for example in erotic relationships but, as a political sociology, the<br />
issue for him is the acceptance of legitimacy in a particular power structure<br />
(‘Gebilde’). This brings the balance down firmly on the side of sociology, or<br />
– more exactly – interpretative sociology. Hanke argues convincingly that<br />
the essay ‘Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology’ not only expounds<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s distinctive emphasis on meanings and types of social action, but that<br />
‘Herrschaft’ is used as a major example of the new method.<br />
For its [‘Herrschaft’] sociological analysis depends decisively on the<br />
varying possible subjectively meaningful bases of that legitimacy consensus<br />
that determines in fundamentally significant fashion the specific<br />
character of domination wherever naked fear of directly threatening<br />
power does not condition the submissiveness.<br />
(Cat, p. 177)<br />
The idea of consensus is a direct extension of <strong>Weber</strong>’s concept of agreement<br />
through consensus (‘Einverständnis’) – a fundamental concept of action<br />
that <strong>Weber</strong> elaborates in the ‘Categories’ essay (Cat, pp. 166–8). Likewise,<br />
‘Verband’, another sociological category, is crucial for the analysis of closeknit<br />
power groups.<br />
Legitimacy represents the validity claims of rule in the minds of the ruled.<br />
The whole of <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ follows according to this formulation.<br />
The ‘validity’ of a power of command may be expressed, first, in a<br />
system of consciously made rational rules (which may be either agreed
236 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
upon or imposed from above), which meet with obedience as generally<br />
binding norms whenever such obedience is claimed by him whom the<br />
rule designates . . . Obedience is thus given to the norms rather than to<br />
the person.<br />
The validity of a power of command can also rest, however, upon<br />
personal authority.<br />
Such personal authority can, in turn, be founded upon the sacredness<br />
of tradition, i.e., of that which is customary and has always been so and<br />
prescribes obedience to some particular person.<br />
Or, personal authority can have its source in the very opposite, viz.,<br />
the surrender to the extraordinary, the belief in charisma, i.e. actual<br />
revelation or grace resting in such a person as a savior, a prophet, a<br />
hero.<br />
The ‘pure’ types of domination correspond to these three possible<br />
types of legitimation. The forms of domination occurring in historical<br />
reality constitute combinations, mixtures, adaptations, or modifications<br />
of these ‘pure’ types.<br />
(ES, p. 954)<br />
It should also be said that the type of legitimacy is interdependent with<br />
the structure of rulership. <strong>Weber</strong> organizes his chapters (in the old version<br />
of Economy and Society) in the following sequence: ‘Bureaucracy’; ‘Patriarchalism<br />
and Patrimonialism’; ‘Feudalism, Ständestaat and Patrimonialism’;<br />
‘Charisma and its Transformation’. Bureaucracy not only proceeds on<br />
grounds of rule-bound behaviour, but this is also the precondition of its<br />
elaborate rational, centralizing and hierarchical apparatus. Traditional legitimacy,<br />
as exemplified in the manorial household or ‘oikos’, is a far looser<br />
‘organization’ where, while there might be status distinctions between members<br />
of the household, they are all ultimately dependent on the lord/ruler.<br />
Charismatic structures are not organized, they simply represent the ‘following’<br />
of the charismatic ruler. Traditional rulership has limitations placed on<br />
its apparatus formation; power structures based on charisma are inherently<br />
unstable. Michael Mann places great emphasis on the extensibility of power<br />
structures in their political and military forms. This is not ignored by <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
but he brings his analysis back to the ideal typical principle of legitimacy.<br />
Hanke’s scholarly research has provided the best approximation that we<br />
have of the dating of the various chapters of the ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’.<br />
Chapter 15 in Economy and Society, ‘Political and Hierocratic Domination’,<br />
is one of the earliest compositions. It lacks the social action types and, hence,<br />
is not a beneficiary of <strong>Weber</strong>’s interpretative sociology. It does not have any<br />
cross-references to other sections of Economy and Society. It stands in close<br />
relationship to the ‘Agrarverhältnisse’, and its excursus on sacerdotal power<br />
and the economy indicates that it is a direct reworking of the Protestant ethic<br />
studies. The chapter on patrimonialism also lacks the use of ‘Herrschaftsverhältnis’<br />
as a concept, and <strong>Weber</strong>’s treatment emphasizes the structure
Power, legitimacy and democracy 237<br />
and apparatus of power and its constraints. The chapters on bureaucracy<br />
and charisma do display the interpretative categories of legitimacy, but there<br />
is some evidence that <strong>Weber</strong> inserted this into the draft at a later date (c.<br />
1913). This is especially apparent in the chapter on bureaucracy, which tends<br />
to read as an analysis of structure rather than social action.<br />
‘The City’ was not completed and is certainly a very early composition.<br />
The first editors of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Marianne <strong>Weber</strong> and Melchior<br />
Palyi, had difficulties integrating it into the volume. Two major topics,<br />
which were trailed in the 1914 Outline – ‘The Development of the Modern<br />
State’ and ‘Modern Political Parties’ – never received a proper exposition.<br />
Hence, the circles of political groups and rulership in Figure 8.2 are themselves<br />
incomplete. <strong>Weber</strong> revised his political sociology (‘Herrschaftssoziologie’)<br />
in 1919–20 – as Chapter 3 of ‘Part 1’ of Economy and Society. <strong>Weber</strong><br />
achieved a highly disciplined encyclopaedic format as well as providing a<br />
cross-analysis with the economy. The analysis flows directly from the definitions<br />
of power and legitimacy. The historical illustration and developmental<br />
digressions are severely pruned, and all civilizational arenas are treated<br />
equally. Wilhelm Hennis has observed that the ‘Herrschaftssoziologie’ would<br />
be extremely hard work if we possessed it in only this final version. 23 Hanke<br />
recommends the public lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’ as the most complete<br />
summation of <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology of rulership: the sociological conceptualization<br />
of the state, the types of rulership and their corresponding forms of<br />
administration in their mature formulation. 24<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s conceptualization of democracy<br />
A frequently asked question of <strong>Weber</strong>’s three types of legitimacy is why there<br />
is no separate category for democratic legitimacy. Stefan Breuer, in an essay<br />
entitled ‘The Four Pure Types of Democracy. A Proposal for Systematization’,<br />
has provided the most resolute response. He argues that the ideal<br />
types of legitimacy are a value-free conceptualization. They do not involve<br />
criteria of normative desirability or undesirability. In a normative sense of<br />
justice, probably most people, if they were offered the choice, would prefer<br />
to live in a democracy. The answer to this Rawlsian hypothetical question<br />
is quite unsurprising – who would elect, if they did not know what position<br />
they might be born into, for a tyranny or traditional rulership or a charismatic<br />
rulership (although some might prefer the last for its excitements)? To<br />
demand normative criteria for the analysis of rulership entirely misses the<br />
thrust of <strong>Weber</strong>’s political sociology. Legitimacy is a way of analysing the<br />
nature of obedience, organization and the inequality of power. In universal–historical<br />
terms, <strong>Weber</strong> offers three main, not to say gargantuan, ideal<br />
types. To demand normative criteria is to ask <strong>Weber</strong> to become a political<br />
philosopher who should frame his argument in terms of legitimation criteria.<br />
Legitimation criteria provide validity. When <strong>Weber</strong> uses the term validity, he<br />
usually places it in quotation marks to indicate that no normative judgement
238 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
is being made. The traditional ruler would argue that he provided a sense of<br />
continuity and security for his subjects. The charismatic ruler would point<br />
to his grace, his protection against all enemies and the belief in the extraordinary.<br />
Legal–rational rulership offers the assurance that everything that<br />
happens accords with legally enacted procedures – safe even though rather<br />
predictable.<br />
These are all value judgements, and the political philosophy of legitimation<br />
is dedicated to arguing the normative superiority or inferiority of the<br />
various principles of rulership. <strong>Weber</strong>, instead, is interested in the empirical<br />
grounds on which those subject to commands should carry them out, even<br />
against their resistance and reluctance, because they accept the legitimacy of<br />
the command. Very many people in societies operating under legal–rational<br />
rulership might not wish to obey the commands or instructions of their employer,<br />
their tax office or parking fines, but they do so because they accept<br />
the underlying legitimacy of the command structure. In individual cases,<br />
they can and often do refuse to do what is asked, but this does not alter the<br />
salience of <strong>Weber</strong>’s ideal type of legal–rational rulership/authority. (I have<br />
expanded here on Breuer’s insistence on value-free conceptualization.)<br />
Breuer’s second point is that <strong>Weber</strong> did have a concept of democratic legitimacy<br />
– indeed, there are a number of subtypes, all of which expressed the<br />
principle of rule from below. In Chapter 3 of Economy and Society, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
devotes a section (7) to ‘The Transformation of Charisma in a Democratic<br />
Direction’. In successor stages of a charismatic leadership, the ‘following’<br />
can come to elect their next leader. This marks a shift ‘to the belief that the<br />
group has a right to enact, recognize, or appeal laws, according it its own<br />
free will, both in general and for an individual case’ (ES, p. 267).<br />
A second subtype is rule by notables (Chapter 3, Section 20), whose<br />
principal feature is that the notable is economically qualified to provide the<br />
administration of rule from his own resources. Selecting this person can involve<br />
democratic procedures. ‘In the American township the tendency has<br />
been to favor actual rotation on grounds of natural rights. As opposed to<br />
this, the immediate democracy of the Swiss Cantons has been characterized<br />
by recurrence of the same names . . .’ (ES, p. 291). As <strong>Weber</strong> indicates,<br />
there are limitations to this route to democracy. ‘Both immediate democracy<br />
and government by notables are technically inadequate, on the one hand in<br />
organizations beyond a certain limit of size, constituting more than a few<br />
thousand full-fledged members, or on the other hand, where functions are<br />
involved which require technical training or continuity of policy’ (ES, p.<br />
291). <strong>Weber</strong> notes that the permanent technical officials appointed to assist<br />
the notable tend to control ‘actual power’, while the nominal leaders<br />
‘remain essentially dilettantes’.<br />
The third subtype is discussed in the representative forms of rulership<br />
(Chapter 3, Section 9). ‘The primary fact underlying representation is that<br />
the action of certain members of an organization, the “representatives”,<br />
is considered binding on the others or accepted by them as legitimate and
Power, legitimacy and democracy 239<br />
obligatory’ (ES, p. 292). A patriarchal ruler can choose to appoint a representative<br />
in his stead; feudal nobles can form an estate and represent<br />
their appropriated rights and privileges as independent from the feudal or<br />
patrimonial king; a representative can be instructed and given a mandate<br />
– <strong>Weber</strong> notes, in the context of the period 1917–19, that this was a feature<br />
of revolutionary soviets and was used as a substitute for mass democracy and<br />
its organization. Finally, <strong>Weber</strong> comes to ‘free representation’ and parliamentary<br />
rule. <strong>Weber</strong> devotes a page to this. As this subtype conforms to the<br />
normatively most accepted form of rule, parliamentary democracy, a close<br />
examination of this page of text is required.<br />
The free representative is not mandated by a community but makes his<br />
own decisions.<br />
He is obligated only to express his own genuine convictions, and not to<br />
promote the interests of those who have elected him . . . the representative,<br />
by virtue of his election, exercises authority over the electors and is<br />
not merely their agent. The most prominent example of this type is the<br />
modern parliamentary representation. It shares with legal authority the<br />
general tendency to impersonality, the obligation to conform to abstract<br />
norms, political or ethical.<br />
This feature is most pronounced in the case of the parliaments, the<br />
representative bodies of the modern political organizations.<br />
(ES, pp. 293–4)<br />
Reading this passage is rather like trying to find somebody famous in<br />
Who’s Who? At last, in a very large book, there the person is, just as we might<br />
have been beginning to doubt his or her inclusion. Likewise with democracy.<br />
Nevertheless, <strong>Weber</strong> has included one of the most preferred types of representative<br />
rule in modern history, even though, in the sweep of universal<br />
history, it does appear as a subtype. Clearly, the treatment is ideal typical,<br />
the intensified contrast turning on the instructed mandate and the freely<br />
deciding agent. The most important point to grasp is that parliamentary rule<br />
is an example of legal–rational legitimacy. It is subsumed under that type.<br />
Also, it has normative principles, which <strong>Weber</strong> treats in a value-free manner.<br />
These norms are abstract and therefore confer an impersonality upon<br />
parliamentary rulership. The sorts of abstract norms that <strong>Weber</strong> would have<br />
had in mind are the rights of man or the commitment to happiness (to think<br />
of the United States).<br />
Breuer’s systematic comment on <strong>Weber</strong>’s treatment of democracy draws<br />
a contrast between those forms of direct democracy that possess no apparatus<br />
(in a Swiss commune or soviet, or in the charismatic following) and<br />
those forms that exist through structures (parliamentary representation and<br />
plebiscitary democracy). <strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis of power in these two situations<br />
is that democracy may be genuine in the small face-to-face groupings, but it<br />
cannot acquire extension of its powers as it lacks the organizational means.
240 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
Or, where it does possess an administrative bureaucracy, the organizational<br />
machine becomes more powerful than the voice and convictions of the politicians<br />
themselves.<br />
Breuer correctly identifies the critical thrust of <strong>Weber</strong>’s political sociology.<br />
Obviously, it is not a celebration of democracy or a justification of its<br />
philosophical validity. This strikes the reader quite forcibly today when the<br />
process of democracy can make a strong case for universal validity, both in<br />
terms of diffusion and in terms of reasoned arguments. Instead, <strong>Weber</strong> treats<br />
democracy just like any other rulership: it has legitimacy grounds, it is organized<br />
on certain principles, it has various structural limits and contradictions.<br />
So, while we might wish to complain that <strong>Weber</strong>’s coverage of democracy<br />
could have been more expansive and not have been placed in the subtype<br />
classification, there is still something to be learnt from its critical intent.<br />
Leadership democracy<br />
Because democracy has now spread and is spreading so extensively around<br />
the world – it is not just a European-bound invention – we need to attend to<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s critical remarks, whose applicability may be all the more pertinent.<br />
In many democracies, a gap is opening up between the face and the content<br />
of those rulerships. ‘The Transformation of Charisma in a Democratic Direction’<br />
is a perverse way of alighting upon the presence of democracy – it is<br />
hardly the normal route to democracy – but the section is worth pursuing.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> says that leaders who are dependent on the vote of their predecessor’s<br />
following are a transitional case of plebiscitary leadership. ‘Both the Napoleons<br />
are classical examples, in spite of the fact that legitimation by plebiscite<br />
took place only after they seized power by force. The second Napoleon also<br />
resorted to the plebiscite after a severe loss of prestige’ (ES, p. 267).<br />
Both the Napoleons acquired power in very unstable situations. The first<br />
Napoleon emerged from a period of vicious revolutionary in-fighting in the<br />
new French republic and consolidated his power through military means as<br />
a general. A plebiscite, a ballot of the whole of the French people, confirmed<br />
him as Emperor. The second Bonaparte did the same with the added threat<br />
of the deposed monarchy claiming to be the ‘Legitimists’. Hanke notes that<br />
these debates and events were still very current when <strong>Weber</strong> was writing. 25<br />
The critical thrust of this argument is to point out that a democratic procedure<br />
is used to legitimize what is little more than an opportunist grab for<br />
power.<br />
This leads <strong>Weber</strong> to put forward plebiscitary democracy as ‘the most important<br />
type of Führer-Demokratie’, i.e. leadership democracy (ES, p. 268).<br />
Contemporary democracies have generally built up thick structures or dense<br />
interweavings of democratic culture, democratic accountability, democratic<br />
media (i.e. not censored), representative and party structures, intermediate<br />
groupings of civil society, overlapping constituencies (local, regional, national,<br />
federal) and different voting systems and so on. In these respects, they
Power, legitimacy and democracy 241<br />
are far more robust than some of the pseudodemocracies of the nineteenth<br />
century. But very many contemporary democracies approximate to or are<br />
tending towards a form of leader democracy. In certain countries, the power<br />
of Presidents and Prime Ministers has grown, and grown in such a way<br />
that the organization of rulership structures and legitimacy is coming to be<br />
moulded around the leader. This does not amount to a leadership principle,<br />
which would be antithetical to democratic norms. But, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s always<br />
dispassionate analysis of rulership, it is the task of the political sociologist to<br />
analyse power – its distribution, its hierarchies, its organization, its choice<br />
of meanings and emotions. Democratic rulership, even direct democracy,<br />
involves the exercise of power, the construction of hierarchy and the building<br />
of organizational structures. Democracy is just another form of rulership<br />
and is not immune to conflict and hierarchy.<br />
Using his long historical perspective, <strong>Weber</strong> supplies a chastening list of<br />
measures through which the democratic leader has consolidated power. In<br />
‘Führer-Demokratie’, the leader hides behind a legitimacy ‘that is formally<br />
derived from the will of the governed. The leader (demagogue) rules by<br />
virtue of the devotion and trust which his political followers have in him<br />
personally. In the first instance his power extends only over those recruited<br />
to his following, but if they can hand over the government to him he controls<br />
the whole polity’ (ES, p. 268). This happened in the ancient classical<br />
world, in the medieval towns and in Reformation Switzerland. ‘In modern<br />
states the best examples are the dictatorship of Cromwell, and the leaders of<br />
the French Revolution and of the First and Second Empire.’<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis of demagoguery is a good example of his value-free approach.<br />
As a political commentator in his day writing for the public, <strong>Weber</strong> expressed<br />
judgements, many of which condemned the demagogue. On the<br />
other hand, in academic mode, he makes a cool and considered assessment<br />
of the role and function of demagoguery in democracy. Democracy in Athens<br />
would not have emerged had it not been for the demagoguery of its first<br />
democratic politicians.<br />
The charismatic politician – the ‘demagogue’ – is the product of the<br />
western city states. In the city state of Jerusalem he appeared in religious<br />
garb as the prophet; the Athenian constitution after the innovations of<br />
Pericles and Ephialtes was tailored to the existence of the charismatic<br />
politician, without whom the state machine would have had no prospect<br />
of functioning.<br />
(EW, p. 140)<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> emphasizes that his comments should be understood in a valuefree<br />
sense – ‘the demagogic gifts of Cleon [a tyrant] are in sociological terms<br />
just as good “charisma” as the qualities of a Napoleon, Jesus or Pericles’.
242 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
And in his public lecture, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, he reminds his audience<br />
of the unavoidability of demagoguery.<br />
Since the time of the constitutional state, and definitely since democracy<br />
has been established, the ‘demagogue’ has been the typical political<br />
leader in the Occident. The distasteful flavor of the word must not make<br />
us forget that not Cleon but Pericles was the first to bear the name of<br />
demagogue. In contrast to the offices of ancient democracy that were<br />
filled by lot, Pericles led the sovereign Ecclesia of the demos of Athens as<br />
a supreme strategist holding the only elective office or without holding<br />
any office at all. Modern demagoguery also makes use of oratory, even<br />
to a tremendous extent, if one considers the election speeches a modern<br />
candidate has to deliver. But the use of the printed word is more enduring.<br />
The political publicist, and above all the journalist, is nowadays the<br />
most important representative of the demagogic species.<br />
(FMW, p. 96)<br />
‘Periclean democracy, too, which according to the intent of its creator<br />
was the domination of the demagogos by means of the spirit and the tongue,<br />
received its characteristic charismatic trait by virtue of the election of one of<br />
the strategoi, the other being determined by lot, if Eduard Meyer’s hypothesis<br />
is correct’ (ES, pp. 1126–7). Needless to say, <strong>Weber</strong> was fully informed<br />
about Athenian political history. The ‘strategie’ was a military command of<br />
nine people, eight of them elected by lots cast by clan groups. For the first<br />
time, the people of Athens were given the opportunity of voting for the<br />
ninth member. Pericles’ rhetorical gifts swung the vote his way. Hence, in<br />
one of those historical first instances much loved by <strong>Weber</strong>, both the art<br />
of speaking and the first emergence of democracy were tied together. It is<br />
probably also from Greece that <strong>Weber</strong> learns his cool dispassion. Ancient<br />
democracy was a winner-take-all scenario. Losers were killed, ostracized or<br />
exiled. Ancient democracy, as <strong>Weber</strong> reminds the reader in The City, was<br />
intimately connected to war. Under democracy, war was chronic. ‘Almost<br />
every victorious battle was followed by the mass slaughter of the prisoners,<br />
and almost every conquest of a city ended with the killing or enslavement of<br />
the entire population’ (ES, p. 1362).<br />
Modern constitutional democracy also cannot exist without the demagogue.<br />
Bismarck was one, and <strong>Weber</strong> disapproved of the use to which he<br />
put his gifts (ES, p. 1452). The British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, is obliquely<br />
referred to as a plebiscitary leader. He would not have achieved the<br />
premiership had it been decided by ‘the confidence of the parliament and its<br />
parties’. Instead, as a war leader, he received the support of the masses and<br />
the army in the field. <strong>Weber</strong> could well have added that Lloyd George’s ability<br />
to reach beyond the parliament and his (Liberal) political party was based<br />
on his oracular artistry. He knew how to speak to the people – the issues they<br />
cared about, and in a language that captured their imagination and attention.
Power, legitimacy and democracy 243<br />
Furthermore, Lloyd George was supported by Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail<br />
– the first mass newspaper to become an effective tool for propaganda. The<br />
same points can be made in relation to Winston Churchill, who followed<br />
the career route <strong>Weber</strong> saw as typical of the modern politician: From being<br />
a journalist to adoption by a political party and then through demagogic<br />
talents, the construction of a party beyond rapport with the electorate – also<br />
supported by leading newspapers. This was a typical route for the leader in a<br />
democracy (‘Führer-Demokratie’). ‘Democratization and demagogy belong<br />
together . . .’ (ES, p. 1450).<br />
In ‘Führer-Demokratie’, the arts of demagoguery can extend to the manipulation<br />
of the emotions of voters and to the use of spectacle.<br />
It is characteristic of the Führer-Demokratie that there should in general<br />
be a highly emotional type of devotion to and trust in the leader. This<br />
accounts for a tendency to favor the type of individual who is most<br />
spectacular, who promises the most, or who employs the most effective<br />
propaganda measures in the competition for leadership. This is a natural<br />
basis for the utopian component which is found in all revolutions. It also<br />
dictates the limitations on the level of rationality which, in the modern<br />
world, this type of administration can attain. Even in America it has not<br />
always come up to expectations.<br />
(ES, p. 269)<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s comment on America is that the pattern of leadership in the<br />
American political system tends to produce leaders who articulate not the<br />
normative criteria of democracy (whose values flow from the American<br />
Revolution of 1776 and the founding of the Constitution) but psychological<br />
values of trust. Examples of this would be American populism where leaders<br />
have presented themselves as having the same ‘folksy’ values as lower strata<br />
of the population.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> noted that, in America, the appointment of officials may follow<br />
charismatic not legal–rational principles. Civil servants and administrators<br />
in Germany and Great Britain would accord to <strong>Weber</strong>’s ideal type of rational–legal<br />
bureaucracy. They would be trained officials who gained their<br />
posts through competitive examinations whose criteria would be formally<br />
rational. Candidates are selected according to administrative competence<br />
– for example the ability to work with complex documents – and not because<br />
they possessed a sympathetic attitude to citizens or sections of them.<br />
But, using America as an illustration, <strong>Weber</strong> writes:<br />
Once the elective principle has been applied to the chief by a reinterpretation<br />
of charisma, it may be extended to the administrative staff.<br />
Elective officials whose legitimacy is derived from the confidence of the<br />
ruled and who are therefore subject to recall, are typical of certain democracies,<br />
for instance, the United States. They are not ‘bureaucratic’
244 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
types. Because they have an independent source of legitimacy, they are<br />
not strongly integrated into a hierarchical order.<br />
(ES, p. 267)<br />
If these two statements are taken together, <strong>Weber</strong> would seem to be suggesting<br />
that America has the capability of becoming a plebiscitary leadership<br />
democracy with its administrative officials chosen on charismatic criteria.<br />
Emotional and demagogic appeals to the electorate are possible, and these<br />
stand outside modern legal–rational legitimacy. In fact, <strong>Weber</strong> is not being<br />
as ‘tough’ on America as the above passages suggest. He deeply admired<br />
the American political system for its vitality, its openness, its fluidity, and he<br />
held it up as an example to his German compatriots of the primacy of politics<br />
over bureaucratic administration. The major critical thrust of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
political sociology is directed against the soullessness of bureaucracy. It was<br />
a machine, impersonal, formally rational, ‘sine ira et studio’ (an aloof impartiality).<br />
He joined his brother Alfred in 1909 in an attack on the Prussian bureaucratized<br />
state, where the administrative class had displaced democratic<br />
politics and where the bureaucracy was seen as a deadening and suffocating<br />
force in society. Alfred <strong>Weber</strong> referred to Germans as being in love with the<br />
‘metaphysics of bureaucracy’. 26 America, in refreshing contrast, cut its civil<br />
service down to size, making it directly electable. Hence, the usual interpretation<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong>’s political sociology is that he saw and analysed the danger<br />
of legal–rational bureaucracies stifling the life blood of politics. And it is for<br />
these reasons that <strong>Weber</strong> is associated with the call for strong parliamentary<br />
leaders who can override the power of bureaucracy in the civil service and<br />
in their own political parties. 27 Rather in the same way as today George<br />
Ritzer predicts the ‘McDonaldization’ of the world, so <strong>Weber</strong> bemoaned<br />
the bureaucratization of the world – not only politics, but also trade unions,<br />
companies, voluntary associations, the churches and so endlessly on. (And,<br />
of course, all these are rationalization processes that seem to possess an<br />
inherent and unstoppable dynamic in which rational procedure and instrumentalism<br />
become the sorcerer’s apprentice – enabling yet controlling.)<br />
The peculiarity of <strong>Weber</strong>’s treatment of democracy is that he does not<br />
start from the normative grounds of legitimation and its presumed superiority<br />
over other political systems. That, one suspects, would be to accept<br />
democracy’s credentials at face value and impede the political sociology of<br />
power, interest and bureaucratization. <strong>Weber</strong> places democratic rule within<br />
the ideal type of charismatic rulership, and this gives the analysis a critical<br />
awareness of tendencies not immediately associated with democracy. In the<br />
case of America, populism, recall and elected officials introduce a vigour into<br />
the political system (whose merits have subsequently been much debated<br />
over the twentieth century). In the case of the British political system, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
pointed out the dangers of ‘Caesarism’, that the British prime minister<br />
can, without adequate safeguards in the constitutional system, assume semidictatorial<br />
powers.
Power, legitimacy and democracy 245<br />
Parliament’s function, writes <strong>Weber</strong>, is to protect the people against the<br />
supreme ambitions of the leader, who might have what <strong>Weber</strong> terms ‘Caesarist’<br />
ambitions. It safeguards the continuity of leaders and oversees their<br />
power position. It preserves civil rights and serves as a proving ground for<br />
‘wooing the confidence of the masses’. It steps in to peacefully eliminate the<br />
leader when he [or she] has lost the confidence of the masses (ES, p. 1452).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> then notes: ‘However, since the great political decisions, even and especially<br />
in a democracy, are unavoidably made by few men, mass democracy<br />
has bought its successes since Pericles’ times with major concessions to the<br />
Caesarist principle of selecting leaders’ (ES, p. 1452). <strong>Weber</strong>’s overall judgement<br />
of the tendencies towards caesarism and demagoguery are conditional<br />
upon the system concerned. He is scathing about demagoguery without<br />
parliament – addressing the masses in the street. Strong leaders and weak<br />
parliaments (the Bismarck case) also attracted his condemnation. Britain and<br />
the United States would seem to have enough democracy in depth for these<br />
tendencies to be held in check.<br />
Political scientists have recently been drawn to the cases of the prime<br />
ministers Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, because of – in <strong>Weber</strong>ian<br />
terms – their ‘Führer-Demokratie’ tendencies. While they have emerged as<br />
parliamentary leaders through their respective political parties, they have<br />
also – not least through their rhetorical skills – appealed to the mass of the<br />
electorate over the head of their parties. Both have been dependent on the<br />
support of the most powerful sections of the mass media, who have been<br />
happy to amplify attacks on political opponents within both their parties<br />
and the parties of opposition. <strong>Weber</strong> took the locus of political power to lie<br />
in the British Cabinet, which he observed has no constitutional underpinning<br />
or check. It exists within the political framework of parliament and its<br />
oversight. This is not out of line with the concern of political scientists today.<br />
Their concern is the movement of the locus of power to the leader and his or<br />
her private office, and the relegation of members of parliament to a passive<br />
rather than an active role in parliamentary debate. 28<br />
From these examples, it makes more sense today to examine the potentiality<br />
of a transition from and within constitutional and parliamentary democracies<br />
to plebiscitary and Caesarist features as described by <strong>Weber</strong>. The<br />
transition from charisma to plebiscitary democracy, as expounded by <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
is not very often exemplified historically, ‘pace’ Pericles. It is the universal–historical<br />
constants of power that matter. As Kari Palonen has shown,<br />
the exercise of power through persuasion leads to the analysis of rhetorical<br />
discourse – whatever the normative pretensions of the rulership. 29<br />
There is a further step in these arguments on power and democracy. Power<br />
does not belong to the dimension of politics and rulership alone. What happens<br />
when the dimensions of status and class are brought into the analysis?<br />
Power is a distributional process within society, working within the channels<br />
of politics, economics and status. This not only has allocation outcomes, it<br />
also determines the structuring of outcomes, as Poggi quite rightly stresses. 30
246 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
If class comes to determine status, as it does increasingly in the twenty-first<br />
century world (for reasons yet to be adequately explained), then two dimensions<br />
of power are aligned. The sphere of politics and rulership has its own<br />
dynamic, but what happens when its operation becomes dependent on the<br />
financial backing of the wealthy? A contemporary <strong>Weber</strong>ian would be asking<br />
these questions, which revisit the debates between C.W. Mills’ analysis of the<br />
power elites and the thick and resistant structures of pluralist democracy and<br />
stratification.
9 Sociological categories and<br />
the types of economic activity<br />
A final account<br />
The ‘logic’ of the final version of Economy and Society has now been established.<br />
Developmental histories take second place to universal–historical<br />
themes. Ideal types are built on meanings and social relationships, and they<br />
tend towards being classificatory devices. Arguably, this is a tension. An ideal<br />
type cannot be a culturally heuristic explanatory instrument as well as a<br />
method of classifying different types of societies and their structures (‘Gebilde’).<br />
When the ideal type was first presented in PESC in 1904, it referred<br />
to a ‘historical individual’, and was highly specific in what it referred to and<br />
intensified in terms of meaning. At the level of universal–historical comparison,<br />
this ‘historical individualism’ is given up in favour of interrelated<br />
typologies. But, nevertheless, meaning remains crucial to the method.<br />
The last chapter examined Michael Mann’s ideal typical analysis of the<br />
sources of social power. This was a modelling device that allowed the analysis<br />
and comparison of a huge range of empirical cases, which in their specificity<br />
offered complexity and combinations of ideal types. <strong>Weber</strong> developed the<br />
ideal type to perform just this sort of exercise. But, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s political sociology,<br />
the classification turns on meaning. Power is ubiquitous in all societies<br />
and in a large range of situations. The value-related question is: what aspects<br />
of power is the researcher interested in investigating? With <strong>Weber</strong>, it is the<br />
legitimacy bases of rulerships with structures, hierarchies and apparatus following<br />
on from the identification of the typifying meanings that structure<br />
the social relationships of power.<br />
By following the Outline Plan of 1914, we can form a good idea of what<br />
special sociologies should have been in the final version of Economy and<br />
Society: the ‘gemeinschaftlich’ communities, the sociologies of religion, the<br />
market, law and rulership and the state, and stratification of class and status<br />
groups. We know from the revised first four chapters of Economy and<br />
Society how he handled ‘Herrschaft’ (Chapter 3) and ‘Classes and Status<br />
Groups’ (Chapter 4). It is possible to speculate how he would have amended<br />
the special sociologies of law and religion. His basic task here was to make<br />
these fit within the cross-referring structure of Economy and Society as a<br />
contribution to the encyclopaedic Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. He had to
248 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
stop treating them as subjects in their own right. Law in its first (and only)<br />
version was his own area of expertise by training, and his draft generated an<br />
enormous complexity of classification, definitions, examples and historical<br />
digressions. We still await the ‘definitive’ version of this draft in the Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe, which it is hoped will provide the ‘correct’ sequencing<br />
of the chapters as well as his thinking behind his legalistic conceptualization.<br />
The sociology of religion, we have established, was a problem case,<br />
in that no ready classification on universal–historical terms was available,<br />
and evolutionary accounts, while attractive for explaining an inner logic of<br />
development, created all sorts of problems of fitting to a recalcitrant reality.<br />
As Robert Bellah notes, nothing is forgotten: rites, magic and religion are<br />
still to be found in all areas of modern societies. 1<br />
In the final version of Economy and Society, he had to relegate his grand<br />
question: why did modernity originate in the west? In part, this had gravitated<br />
into the question: what is so specific and unique to the west? A Millsian<br />
logic of causation simply could not be made to work. The comparative studies<br />
of the world religions might have suggested the method of difference<br />
would produce the decisive causal factor that was present in the west but absent<br />
elsewhere. But comparison, as in its nature, tends to confirm difference,<br />
period. The ‘Prefatory Remarks’ to the ‘Collected Essays in the Sociology of<br />
Religion’ came up with a summating answer to the question of difference. It<br />
was western rationalism. But this was diffuse across occidental history and<br />
societies and had none of the clarity of Puritan ascetic conduct that could<br />
be identified as the crucial causal factor. In conducting his world religion<br />
studies, and not forgetting all the studies he planned to carry out, Puritan<br />
asceticism turned out to be one episode in a longer and wider tradition of<br />
religious rationalism. And, finally, <strong>Weber</strong> was quite happy to concede that all<br />
the world religions had rationalization processes whose ‘rationalist’ motors<br />
drove them in directions simply different from that of western religion; he<br />
refused to accord any superiority to the validity claims of western rationalism<br />
over other cultures.<br />
One issue that still reverberated was the issue that Bücher was supposed to<br />
have addressed and dealt with. Could the dynamic of historical development<br />
be dealt with legitimately (in social science terms) through a stage theory? To<br />
this was added the question of moving out of ‘primitivism’ – how did societies<br />
attain a developmental path that would pull them out of the circle of<br />
face-to-face ‘gemeinschaftlich’ relationships into what Jaspers would call ‘the<br />
axial age’? This question underlay the whole German approach to nationaleconomy.<br />
In 1919–20, <strong>Weber</strong> was again lecturing as a national-economist,<br />
at the University in Munich, and he was still lead editor of the Grundriss der<br />
Sozialökonomik. More still had to be said about social economics.<br />
Bearing these issues in mind, in this chapter, I will examine what are probably<br />
the least understood parts of <strong>Weber</strong>’s oeuvre. These are Chapters 1 and<br />
2 of Economy and Society: ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’ and ‘Basic Sociological<br />
Categories of Economising (‘Wirtschaftens’)’. (The Talcott Parsons’
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 249<br />
translation of Chapter 2 is ‘Sociological Categories of Economic Action’. I<br />
have preferred the more literal translation.)<br />
Economy and Society, Chapter I: Basic Sociological<br />
Concepts<br />
I have given a fairly extensive exposition of Chapter 1 in The Essential <strong>Weber</strong><br />
(EW, pp. 296–308), not least because it is a summation of his writings. It is<br />
often taken out of the context of Economy and Society. It has been published<br />
as a stand-alone book, and is frequently seen as a kind of fundamental<br />
statement of how sociology should proceed. This is not unconnected with<br />
the theory of social action, which has remained one of the central debates<br />
in the discipline. <strong>Weber</strong> was seen, by different camps, to assert the primacy<br />
of meaning, of individual action and of social relationships, in place of the<br />
reifications of market, state, mode of production, class as living entities and<br />
social system. He was seen as anti-market (as a reification), anti-social system,<br />
anti-positivism. All these assertions were valid but, somehow, Chapter 1<br />
taken in isolation produced a rather bland version of sociology. Where were<br />
the determining structures that govern people’s lives? Where were the issues<br />
of power, of economic inequality and culture couched in meaningful terms<br />
current to contemporary issues? Not so many authors use <strong>Weber</strong>’s theory of<br />
social action, tying it to issues of power, market and the structuring of social<br />
groups. 2 Rex and Moore’s Race, Community and Conflict is a good example<br />
of how to approach <strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’. In this study of a<br />
West Midlands town in the 1960s, the housing market was analysed in terms<br />
of stratification of ownership and renting, and the ‘gemeinschaftliche’ attitudes<br />
were interpreted in terms of ethnic groups and attitudes. Social action<br />
theory was used to probe issues of market power, social prestige and prejudice,<br />
and the working of local politics and local government. 3 A more recent<br />
example in the same vein, but with different conclusions, is Dench, Gavron<br />
and Young’s study, The New East End. The study investigates housing<br />
markets and their (limited) opportunities for the communities of London’s<br />
East End, the values that underpin the face-to-face communal relationships<br />
of family and neighbourhood – and the dispersion of those communities<br />
by individualistic values, how ethnicity affects the sense of different communities,<br />
and the changing political prioritization of welfare needs by local<br />
government. 4<br />
Rex and Moore’s study uses an explicitly <strong>Weber</strong>ian framework, the Dench,<br />
Gavron and Young study does not. But in both studies, the investigators<br />
operate with a conceptual language not dissimilar to the ‘Basic Sociological<br />
Concepts’. This is unsurprising because what <strong>Weber</strong> outlines in that chapter<br />
is a set of universal categories that are relevant to any investigation of social<br />
reality. The survey and interviewing methods, which inform The New East<br />
End, reach the same language by a different route. What makes both studies<br />
important, within the sphere of inner city living, is their ability to relate the
250 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
experience of key social relationships of neighbourhood, family and settlement<br />
to the wider structures of society – economic markets, stratification<br />
and demographic movements.<br />
It would clearly be artificial to separate the concepts of social action from<br />
those wider structures or, as <strong>Weber</strong> would put it, the social ‘Gebilde’ with<br />
the German word’s more mutable emphasis. But, when we turn to the final<br />
version of Economy and Society, there is an impression of isolation, and<br />
so of artificiality, of the theory of social action. <strong>Weber</strong> himself knew that<br />
his ‘casuistry’, which is how he referred to ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’<br />
and which was also delivered as a lecture course at Munich, was driving his<br />
students away in droves. 5<br />
The chapter can only be rescued from its seeming abstractness – an irony<br />
as the whole position is to argue for the understanding and explanation of<br />
actual behaviour. Above all, the chapter has to be related to the ensemble<br />
of Economy and Society. Just to repeat the remarks made in the previous<br />
chapter with reference to Figure 8.2 (p. 232), Chapter 1 sits apart from<br />
all the other chapters (both those that were written and those intended) as<br />
a key. Small groups, household economizing, market economies, political<br />
groups, rulerships, structures of law, ethnic communities and so on – these<br />
should relate to the compendium of basic sociological concepts. The basic<br />
concepts underwrite the analysis of the substantive sociologies. <strong>Weber</strong> had<br />
undertaken this process once already with the ‘Categories’ essay of 1913,<br />
whose conceptualization occurs more or less across the range of the first<br />
drafts of his writings in the period 1911–14. The ‘Categories’ essay, however,<br />
was too difficult and too abstruse. Nobody understood what he was<br />
trying to achieve. 6 Chapter 1 represents a very careful and very clear reworking<br />
of his concepts – to make them accessible and applicable. These then<br />
become ‘basic’ to the rest of the exposition of Economy and Society. But the<br />
rest of that exposition was never completed, adding to the sense of limbo of<br />
Chapter 1. This perceived difficulty can only be got around by referring back<br />
to the Outline Plan of 1914, which presents the full range of substantive<br />
sociologies as originally conceived by <strong>Weber</strong> (see above, p. 157).<br />
Chapter 2, on economizing, should probably be assumed to be the centre<br />
of gravity of the final version of Economy and Society. In the first drafts<br />
(1910–14), the smallish chapter on economic groups was dwarfed by the<br />
special sociologies. The new version would rectify that problem, but <strong>Weber</strong><br />
only got as far as Chapter 4 (and this chapter itself, as its notation form<br />
suggests, might not have been the final version). Hence, Chapter 2 predominates,<br />
but itself remains somewhat stranded in the absence of the completion<br />
of the whole project. It is reasonable to place the major stress on Chapter 2,<br />
as national-economy and then social economics were his constant concern<br />
from his lecturing in the 1890s, through his editorship of the Archiv, the<br />
studies on the economic ethics of the world religions and, finally, the Grundriss<br />
der Sozialökonomik.<br />
Chapter 2 along with the other chapters, both completed and intended,
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 251<br />
therefore has to be read through the explanatory exposition of Chapter 1.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s revision of Chapter 1 reflects a clarification and maturing of his<br />
views on the central issues of understanding, meaning, causality, explanation,<br />
the proper subject matter of the social sciences and the exposition of<br />
concepts central to the special sociologies. It reprises, in a compressed form,<br />
the debates on meaning and causation that arose in the context of PESC<br />
1904 and the essay on ‘Objectivity’. <strong>Weber</strong>’s conclusions, in clarified form,<br />
are relevant and applicable to universal–historical investigations, but they do<br />
not constitute a ‘general sociology’. ‘Sociology, a word used in quite diverse<br />
ways, is to mean here: a science which seeks interpretative understanding of<br />
social action, and thereby will causally explain its course and effects.’ <strong>Weber</strong><br />
is interested only in behaviour that is meaningful to the social actor. Behavioural<br />
psychology or evolutionary psychology would be excluded by <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
in the first instance, because its subject matter deliberately excludes behaviour<br />
governed by meanings (in favour of behaviour governed by revealed<br />
preferences – outcomes independent of intention, or evolutionary traits in<br />
the human brain). Behaviour becomes social action ‘where the meaning intended<br />
by actor or actors is related to the behaviour of others, and conduct<br />
so oriented’ (EW, p. 312).<br />
‘Correct causal interpretation of a concrete action requires its apparent<br />
course and motive to be accurately recognized and meaningfully understood<br />
in context’ (EW, p. 319). Motive, action and context of meaning involve the<br />
operation of ‘Verstehen’, in the way I outlined in Chapter 4, and followed<br />
in the footsteps of Dilthey (even though <strong>Weber</strong> renounced his tutelage). In<br />
line with German hermeneutics, the establishment of understanding enables<br />
the grasping of the truth of what was intended. This is an empirical matter<br />
because it involves the investigations of the expression of motives (in a<br />
document, in a cultural artefact, in observed behaviour). <strong>Weber</strong>, in his opening<br />
footnote to Chapter 1, distances himself from the subjective method of<br />
Simmel that appealed through empathy to a common medium of the soul or<br />
psyche. This was interpretation with no means of ascertaining truth. Because<br />
the observed, or the artefact, has an objective concretization, a courtroom<br />
method of imputation after the event can be used to establish correct motive.<br />
In sciences of culture (rather than the actual courtroom), imputation is<br />
enabled by the construction of ideal types. Is an action a pure type of rage<br />
(affect), or tradition, or of purposeful rationality? Having constructed the<br />
ideal type, to what extent does social action in empirical reality diverge from<br />
the pure type? Causation involves the understanding of motive and meaning<br />
and its empirical elucidation in concrete cases that the imputed motive did<br />
in fact result in specific outcomes and consequences.<br />
Although social action is always denominated in and by the individual<br />
person – all other entities are abstract and not real, i.e. state, law, market, society<br />
– the individual exists in social contexts invariably made up of various<br />
groups. The sociologist is interested in individuals insofar as their actions<br />
are similar, and interpretative sociology is interested in meaningfully similar
252 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
behaviour. It rains and many individuals on the street put up their umbrellas<br />
in a non-meaningful reaction to rain. A football crowd collectively leap<br />
to their feet to applaud (or condemn) a brilliant goal – this is meaningful<br />
behaviour in common to a group of people.<br />
Individuals orientate their action and behaviour to laws and customs. Laws<br />
and customs form part of their context of meaning and cannot be ignored<br />
(or else would have to consciously be rejected, i.e. ignoring or breaking the<br />
law). Individuals relate, therefore, not to other isolated individuals, but to<br />
what a group or a law or a convention means in the minds of individuals.<br />
Again, something like the law may be regarded by jurists as having an objective<br />
reality with normative obligations but, for <strong>Weber</strong>, the law as a living<br />
entity cannot be presupposed. Its consciousness in the minds of individuals<br />
can be presupposed. ‘Pace’ Durkheim, social facts are not social things<br />
(‘choses’), but they can exert obligation on the individual. <strong>Weber</strong> articulates<br />
this as the orientation of the individual to law or particular laws. So, a whole<br />
‘order’ may be regarded by individuals as legitimate by virtue of tradition,<br />
or emotional appeal, or values or, lastly, legality. The legality of law does not<br />
exist by virtue of its enactment as legal (positive law) but because it is either<br />
agreed to or imposed. Each of the reasons for accepting the legitimacy of<br />
an order relates to the creation of meaning (by <strong>Weber</strong> in the ideal type) and<br />
the imputation of motives to social actors (EW, pp. 337–9. The ‘Categories’<br />
essay also discussed this more extensively, but with less clarity.) The typology<br />
of legitimacy of an order, <strong>Weber</strong> then signals, will form the basis for the<br />
special sociologies of law and rulership.<br />
The seesaw point in the developmental histories of so many societies – the<br />
central problem in economic history within German national-economy – is<br />
handled through the concepts of the forming of community (‘Vergemeinschaftung’)<br />
and the forming of associative relationships (‘Vergesellschaftung’).<br />
The former turns on feelings of mutuality and smaller scale, local<br />
interactions, the latter on association through rational motives or the pursuit<br />
of interest (which <strong>Weber</strong> appears to assume is self-evidently rational).<br />
In the sociology of religion, we saw how Tiele and other scholars saw this<br />
breaking out beyond the bounds of communal face-to-face groups as being<br />
achieved through religion, just as, in economic history, Sombart thought of<br />
it as the acquisitive drive or, in the work of Bellah or Innis, the rise of archaic<br />
kingdoms. 7 Sociology assists the historian in ascertaining cause-specific<br />
explanations by being able to note the fundamental changes in social action.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> does note (EW, pp. 344–5) that associative relationships turn around<br />
struggle and competition in a way not true of the mutuality of communal<br />
relationships.<br />
The first reference to Chapter 2 occurs here – to markets. It gives an<br />
indication of <strong>Weber</strong>’s approach to social economics.<br />
Participation in a ‘market’ (see ch. II of Economy and Society) is structured<br />
differently. A market creates associational relationships (princi-
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 253<br />
pally one of ‘competition’) between prospective exchanging parties, for<br />
in each case these agents have to orient their behaviour towards each<br />
other. But associational activity only develops from this if some of the<br />
participants seek to improve their competitive situation, or reach agreement<br />
on ways to regulate and stabilize transactions. (The market and the<br />
commercial economy based upon it is incidentally the most important<br />
type of mutual influence of action through sheer self-interest, characteristic<br />
of modern economic organization.)<br />
(EW, pp. 345–6)<br />
‘Market behaviour’ is a term that is now frequently heard. An entity is<br />
assumed – the market – and people orient their behaviour towards it. With<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, the assumption in the first instance still has to be justified. A market<br />
presumes an attitude of conflict, pursuit of self-interest and benefit to participants;<br />
only then can a ‘market’ be understood to exist. ‘Market behaviour’,<br />
like marginal utility, can then be analysed by economic theory.<br />
Paragraph 10 of ‘Basic Sociological Concepts’ defines open and closed<br />
social relationships. A market is an open economic relationship, and a guild<br />
is at times open and expanding its numbers and, at other times, restrictive.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> also refers to the English ‘closed shop’, which restricted entrance<br />
to certain occupations. Neo-liberal reforms in Britain in the 1980s forced<br />
many of these closed shops to move to open market labour access. Again,<br />
this demonstrates that ‘market behaviour’ is a construct of specific types of<br />
social relationships that are either reached through agreement or imposed<br />
from outside.<br />
Section 12 takes up the definition of a ‘Verband’. ‘A social relationship<br />
that is either closed to outsiders or restricts their admission according to set<br />
rules will be called a group body (‘Verband’). ‘Verband’ is quite difficult to<br />
translate. Normally, one would use ‘organization’. But that implies that the<br />
group has a degree of openness, whereas ‘Verband’ has the sense of a small<br />
band of people who act together as a controlling group within a range of organizations.<br />
Within government, an opposition party, a university, a church,<br />
a company, a warrior band, a criminal network, there is a ‘Verband’ who<br />
control the wider organization. The translator Dr Yano suggested ‘corps’<br />
as in army corps to try to get this sense. <strong>Weber</strong> retains something of the<br />
legal theorist and historian, Otto von Gierke’s, usage. The ‘Verband’ is like<br />
an ‘individuum’, it is a ‘leiblich–geistige Lebenseinheit’ – ‘a bodily–spiritual<br />
entity’. 8 It is a central concept for the analysis of power and relates directly<br />
to the discussions in the previous chapter, 9 as do the concepts of power<br />
(‘Macht’) and rulership (‘Herrschaft’) in Section 16. A ‘Verband’ can be hierocratic<br />
– order is guaranteed by psychic coercion in a religious context.<br />
There is no application of hierocracy in the final version of Economy and<br />
Society, although it is discussed in a brilliant historical digression in an earlier<br />
version (ES, pp. 1158–204). <strong>Weber</strong>’s own imposed intellectual division<br />
of labour is between preparatory, not to say bland, conceptualization and
254 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
brilliant sketches of developmental history on a comparative basis. A close<br />
reading of Chapter 1 should register the full range of applications that <strong>Weber</strong><br />
intended for his compendium of terms (although this cannot be undertaken<br />
here).<br />
Economy and Society, Chapter II: The Basic Sociological<br />
Categories of Economising<br />
This opens with a rather deprecatory admission.<br />
What follows is not intended in any sense to be ‘economic theory’.<br />
Rather, it consists only in an attempt to define certain concepts which<br />
are frequently used and to analyze certain of the simplest sociological relationships<br />
in the economic sphere. As in the first chapter, the procedure<br />
here has been determined entirely by considerations of convenience.<br />
(ES, p. 63)<br />
This tends to imply that <strong>Weber</strong> is going to duck the big question about the<br />
origins and emergence of modern capitalism, just as in Chapter 1 the whole<br />
question of moving out of ‘primitivism’ was made into one of appropriate<br />
terminology. What we are offered in subject matter does not differ greatly<br />
from his 1898 lectures in national-economy. All the topics in Book One of the<br />
lecture course (see above, pp. 23–27) are repeated in Chapter 2 of Economy<br />
and Society, although the latter expands its treatment of the technical and<br />
the social division of labour and, post 1917, registers the economic arrangements<br />
of communism. Although <strong>Weber</strong> says he is not offering economic<br />
theory, the chapter does provide an opportunity to show how he finally<br />
dealt with the opposition of the ‘two economic schools’ – marginalist and<br />
historicist. In addition, the chapter should be read according to the schema<br />
in Figure 8.2 (p. 232). The special sociologies of groups, law, religion and<br />
rulership cannot be separated from the economy, just as economic relationships<br />
cannot be divorced from those special sociologies. <strong>Weber</strong> is supplying<br />
in Chapter 2 a complex piece of cross-referencing for universal–historical<br />
comparative studies.<br />
The opening definition is standard national-economy put into the language<br />
of social action theory.<br />
Action will be said to be ‘economically oriented’ so far as, according to<br />
its intended meaning, it is concerned with the satisfaction of a desire for<br />
utility (‘Nutzleistungen’). ‘Economising’ (‘Wirtschaften’) is a peaceful<br />
use of the actor’s control over resources, which is rationally oriented,<br />
and so deliberately planned, to economic ends. An ‘economy’ is an autocephalous,<br />
and ‘economic enterprise’ an organized system of continuous<br />
economic action.<br />
(ES, p. 63)
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 255<br />
What has to be brought out is the meaning that all economic processes<br />
and objects have for human action in terms of ends, means, obstacles and<br />
by-products. Returning to the scene of his anti-psychologism, <strong>Weber</strong> notes<br />
that, while valuation of goods is subjective, the explanation is not to be<br />
found within a psychologism of utility; rather, explanation is given through<br />
meaning underlying economic action. Satisfaction of consumption does not<br />
constitute a sufficient explanation. There has to be a desire for certain needs<br />
and, as in his 1898 lecture course, <strong>Weber</strong> goes on to discuss how desires are<br />
sociologically given. Economic action is a conscious orientation to achieving<br />
or choosing between certain ends. These ends are valued for certain reasons<br />
by economic actors. They also have to think about the means for their<br />
achievement, but activity solely oriented to means without thinking about<br />
ends is relegated to the category of ‘the technical’ (ES, pp. 65–6).<br />
It is difficult to expound the intricacies of <strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis without this<br />
chapter becoming a textbook treatment itself. <strong>Weber</strong> proceeds in the steps<br />
of the Austrian school and places their analysis within a framework of social<br />
action. The Austrian school formulated economic analysis in terms of the<br />
motivations of economic ‘units’ (‘Einheiten’) in their mutual relation to each<br />
other. This was ready-made, so to speak, for <strong>Weber</strong>’s absorption of their<br />
analysis into his own theory of social action, which had the same ‘individualizing’<br />
methodology. Austrian utility theory, however, tempted theorists to<br />
produce an underlying psychology of utility, which <strong>Weber</strong> regarded as futile<br />
and pointless. Why someone values an extra five sheep to be exchanged<br />
against one cow can quite simply be referred to the value of one farming<br />
enterprise and the structure of its household economy, for example, against<br />
another. The values placed on objects represent desire which, in its turn, is<br />
formed by a person’s social environment. The theory of marginal utility, provided<br />
by Menger, gives a rationalist explanation of the exchange. In Section<br />
3, entitled ‘Modes of Economic Exchange’, <strong>Weber</strong> points out that economic<br />
orientation may be traditional or may be goal-oriented rationality. In the<br />
latter, the exchange of sheep against cows will follow according to marginal<br />
utility as a form of calculation; in the former, it is set by custom.<br />
In Section 4, <strong>Weber</strong> discusses the rational allocation of goods and services<br />
in terms of present and future uses following Menger’s own analysis of the<br />
individual using marginal utility. (Menger provided an important strand of<br />
investment theory by thinking of the choice between present consumption<br />
and investment for future consumption in terms of a choice of marginal utility<br />
– foregoing ‘x’ units of consumption for ‘y’ future units.) In the process<br />
of exchange, agreements are reached between parties – this is ‘Vergesellschaftung’,<br />
one of <strong>Weber</strong>’s basic sociological concepts.<br />
Section 5 produces a flurry of sociological terms applied to the economy.<br />
According to its relation to the economic system, an economically oriented<br />
organization may be: (a) an ‘economically active organization’<br />
(wirtschaftender Verband) if the primary non-economic organized action
256 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
oriented to its order includes economic action; (b) an ‘economic organization’<br />
(Wirtschaftsverband) if its organized action, as governed by<br />
the order, is primarily autocephalous economic action of a given kind;<br />
(c) an ‘economically regulative organization’ (wirtschaftsregulierender<br />
Verband) if the autocephalous economic activity of the member is directly<br />
oriented to the order governing the group; that is, if economic<br />
action is heteronomous in that respect; (d) an ‘organization enforcing<br />
a formal order’ (Ordnungsverband) if its order merely guarantees, by<br />
means of formal rules, the autocephalous and autonomous economic<br />
activities of its members and the corresponding economic advantages<br />
thus acquired.<br />
(ES, p. 74)<br />
This is difficult to understand, and it is hard to grasp its significance; it<br />
also stands as an indication of why Chapter 2 does not count as the most<br />
read piece of <strong>Weber</strong>iana. (d) is a free market order with little interference or<br />
regulation by the state; (b) is when a body, such as a medieval gild, regulates<br />
economic activity. (b) is simply an economic enterprise from the smallest<br />
workshop to the largest international company, and (a) is a non-economic<br />
institution such as a church or a state that manages its own financial affairs.<br />
When this analysis is rendered as a 2 by 2 matrix, it forms the basis of a<br />
theory of regulation. Medieval gilds and modern companies or corporations<br />
are primarily economic organizations. The Church is primarily a religious<br />
organization, but does act in an important secondary capacity as an owner<br />
of extensive real estate (Figure 9.1).<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> adds that, even in economically independent enterprises with light<br />
regulations, principles of law and taxation will have a considerable effect<br />
upon the enterprise, and he cross-references to his sociology of law.<br />
Section 6 offers a sociology of money, drawing on the monetary theory<br />
of Knapp and von Mises. <strong>Weber</strong> outlines two axes: means of payment and<br />
means of exchange. In a modern market economy, both are automatically<br />
thought of in terms of money. But in economic history, exchanges occur<br />
Type of economic<br />
organization<br />
Primary Medieval gild<br />
Figure 9.1 Types of economic regulation.<br />
Regulation<br />
High Low<br />
Company in free<br />
market environment<br />
Secondary Church lands Voluntary organization
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 257<br />
without money through the use of ornaments, clothing or other useful objects.<br />
Whether through money or other means, value has to be guaranteed<br />
by law or conventions that confer their validity (‘Geltung’). Money itself is<br />
subdivided by <strong>Weber</strong> into free available coinage (through a national mint),<br />
limited money and regulated money, both of the last two operating under<br />
restrictions of the issuing body. The means of exchange and the means of<br />
payment rarely coincide in ‘primitive conditions’, whereas the modern state<br />
is dependent on both coinciding – effective taxation assumes a monetized<br />
economy. The argument can be used today where financial instruments, exclusive<br />
to financial traders, represent innovative means of payment that have<br />
repercussions for exchange in the modern economy. As economic activity is<br />
always time related – decisions are made in the present with regard to future<br />
outcomes, e.g. consumption versus investment – the nature of the economy<br />
would change if the means of payment no longer coincided with the means<br />
of exchange (Figure 9.2).<br />
A similar sort of analysis can be carried out for Section 8 ‘The Market’,<br />
in which <strong>Weber</strong> introduces the two axes of regulation of markets and the<br />
extension of marketability of goods and a further subdivision of rational and<br />
non-rational regulation (ES, p. 83).<br />
Section 9 ‘Formal and Substantive Rationality of Economic Action’ produces<br />
a complex set of options. One axis is formal rationality, which <strong>Weber</strong><br />
defines as quantitative calculation or accounting. Calculation in terms of<br />
money (the other option is in kind) is closely tied to accounting, which is<br />
designed to allow a periodical comparison of expenditure and revenue. Substantive<br />
economic rationality is the meeting of the needs of groups of persons<br />
where economic action is oriented to certain specific values that are treated<br />
as ultimate, ‘whether they be ethical, political, utilitarian, hedonistic, feudal,<br />
egalitarian or whatever’. Economic activity could therefore be orientated to<br />
feudal and knightly ostentation, i.e. governed by a lifestyle, or it could be<br />
governed by wartime economic criteria of austerity and armaments. Today,<br />
in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)<br />
countries, economic competence is judged in terms of formal procedures<br />
Means of payment<br />
Fully circulating Monetary economy<br />
Restricted<br />
circulation<br />
Figure 9.2 Economic sociology of money.<br />
Medium of exchange<br />
Chartal Non-chartal<br />
Private coinage<br />
Tokens e.g. shells in<br />
simple economy<br />
Futures and options in<br />
commodities
258 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
(fiscal prudence, open markets, commercial law, accountancy methods).<br />
These criteria approximate to what <strong>Weber</strong> means by formal rationality. In<br />
substantive terms, they are seen to deliver wealth and hedonism, but these<br />
substantive goals are subsidiary to the means of attainment. <strong>Weber</strong>’s analysis<br />
of modernity is borne out in that means are elevated over ends. But this is<br />
a fine judgement. The motivational bases of the modern economy would<br />
probably not be sustained without a commitment to consumerist hedonism,<br />
which, as a substantive goal, strongly influences the nature of capitalist<br />
production. Also, other substantive goals remain a focus of oppositional<br />
groups and social movements. The fight against poverty is an egalitarian<br />
goal, just as environmental sustainability is an ethical goal, both of which<br />
are substantively rational. They could only be forced through by political<br />
means. This would then permit economic policy to introduce rational economic<br />
measures for the attainment of those substantive goals. <strong>Weber</strong>, as an<br />
academic, would have remained value free in such debates, not least because<br />
the interaction between formal and substantive rationality is complex, and<br />
the adoption of substantive goals would undoubtedly have unintended and<br />
unwanted consequences. Amartya Sen’s work on famine relief, which is substantively<br />
rational in moral criteria, demonstrates that certain features of the<br />
market – its ability to process information quickly, i.e. the needs of starving<br />
people – favour formal rationality. 10<br />
In Section 11 ‘The Concept and Types of Profit-making. The Role of<br />
Capital’, <strong>Weber</strong> distinguishes the interests of consumers from those of<br />
profitability of the entrepreneur. There is a distribution of power between<br />
consumer and owner. Economic theory treats each decision as governed by<br />
marginal utility. <strong>Weber</strong>, however, holds that the accounting calculations of<br />
profit-making enterprises differ fundamentally from those of consumers’<br />
utility. This inserts an opposition of interests in their respective economic<br />
activities. Furthermore, the entrepreneur will try to ‘direct’ and to ‘awaken’<br />
the wants of the consumer, i.e. the capitalist, given the opportunities, will<br />
manipulate the consumer. The market is a ‘battle of man with man’ (ES, p.<br />
93; <strong>Weber</strong>’s emphasis). ‘Profitability is indeed formally a rational category,<br />
but for that very reason it is indifferent with respect to substantive postulate<br />
unless these can make themselves felt in the market in the form of sufficient<br />
purchasing power’ (ES, p. 94). A contemporary example of the latter would<br />
be ‘fair trade’ products in supermarkets.<br />
Ownership and property tends to be taken as axiomatic in market economies.<br />
In Section 11, <strong>Weber</strong> refers the reader back to his definition of property<br />
in Chapter 1. The relevant section there concerns closed relationships. ‘Appropriated<br />
advantages will be called “rights” ’. ‘Appropriated rights which are<br />
enjoyed by individuals through inheritance or by hereditary groups, whether<br />
communal or associative, will be called the “property” of the individual or<br />
of groups in question; and, insofar as they are alienable, “free” property’<br />
(ES, p. 44). It is helpful here to think of the appropriation of communally<br />
held rights in the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China – first, by
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 259<br />
the respective Communist Parties and, then, by individuals. Such, in an accelerated<br />
case (compared with England), is the process of creating property.<br />
Considerable legal effort is now being expended in making those property<br />
rights alienable, i.e. they can be bought and sold. The Russian oil giant Yukos<br />
is doing this (in 2006) through the expedient of bringing the company on<br />
to the market through the London Stock Exchange, although this would not<br />
necessarily exclude Russian citizens legally disputing the right to do this. At<br />
a later point, <strong>Weber</strong> points out that the firm, like any technological product,<br />
has first to be ‘invented’ (ES, p. 200; <strong>Weber</strong>’s quotation marks).<br />
It becomes increasingly apparent in the course of the long Chapter 2 how<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> inserts a sociology underneath economic theory and its treatment of<br />
markets and other related phenomena; also that <strong>Weber</strong>’s social economics<br />
still has direct relevance today to uncover the sociological foundations of<br />
processes that would otherwise be glossed over as normal market behaviour.<br />
The trend to formal economic rationality, as <strong>Weber</strong> noted, gathers pace with<br />
the move to a market economy and its extension.<br />
The organization of economic activity on the basis of a market economy<br />
presupposes the appropriation of the material sources of utility on the<br />
one hand, and market freedom on the other. The effectiveness of market<br />
freedom increases with the degree to which these sources of utility, particularly<br />
the means of transport and production, are appropriated.<br />
(ES, p. 112)<br />
On capital accounting, <strong>Weber</strong> writes, ‘it will be shown that the most varied<br />
sorts of external and subjective barriers account for the fact that capital<br />
accounting has arisen as a basic form of economic calculation only in the Occident’<br />
(ES, p. 92). These two quotes indicate a developmental trend: only in<br />
the west is there the rationalism of markets, accounting and formal rationality.<br />
Chapter 2 is repeating the overwhelming trend to rationalism in the<br />
west, summarized in ‘Prefatory Remarks’. Yet, the predominant impression<br />
of Chapter 2 is a neutrality towards history in favour of universal–historical<br />
analysis (often of a conceptual matrix character or conceptual algorithm, as<br />
in the above figures, rather than ‘mere’ classificatory typologies). How, it<br />
may be wondered, will <strong>Weber</strong> deal with his pronounced ‘historicist’ phase<br />
of the PESC?<br />
A number of passages cast light on the question. In Section 11, <strong>Weber</strong><br />
insists on a conceptual distinction between private wealth and capital, and<br />
the household unit and the profit-making enterprise. Wealth and profit making<br />
may seem to be identical but are, in fact, driven by different motivations<br />
and meanings. The enterprise is oriented to maintaining and improving<br />
profitability and its market position. It will ensure this through accurate<br />
budgeting. The holder of wealth will orientate his behaviour to security of<br />
wealth and its increase: ‘the purchase of securities on the part of a private<br />
investor who wishes to consume the proceeds is not a “capital-investment”,
260 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
but a “wealth-investment” (ES, pp. 98–9). This is of course no surprise today<br />
when wealth holders are able to destroy enterprises for their capital assets.<br />
What is surprising is that <strong>Weber</strong> applies this to the economy in the ancient<br />
world and the dispute over the ‘oikos’, ignited by Rodbertus, and resolved,<br />
to an extent, by Bücher. Without these distinctions, says <strong>Weber</strong>, ‘it is impossible<br />
to understand the economic development of the ancient world and<br />
the limitations on the development of capitalism of those times. (The wellknown<br />
articles of Rodbertus are in spite of their errors and incompleteness,<br />
still important in this context, but should be supplemented by the excellent<br />
discussion of Karl Bücher.)’ (ES, p. 99).<br />
Unpacking this comment a little: <strong>Weber</strong> argues that antiquity had capitalism<br />
and wealthy owners, but they did not have profit making on a rational<br />
basis capable of reckoning the return of investment and expenditures over a<br />
fixed time period. The ancient world had capitalism (as well as the ‘oikos’,<br />
‘pace’ Rodbertus) but, without rational profit making, it lacked any continuous<br />
dynamic growth. This is a more sophisticated version of his comments<br />
in 1909 in the ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’. But, unlike his 1909 article,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> has a marked disinclination to involve himself in developmental history<br />
and its controversies.<br />
A similar comment occurs in Section 15, ‘Types of Economic Division of<br />
Labor’. <strong>Weber</strong> makes the still valuable analytical separation of the technical<br />
division of labour (organizing production), the social division of labour<br />
(how autonomous firms exist in a given social structure and its system of<br />
social stratification) and the economic division of labour (how the organization<br />
of production relates to budgetary administration and profit-making<br />
enterprise). Schmoller had advanced a theory of economic development that<br />
identified a series of stages: domestic economy, village economy, seigneurial<br />
and princely patrimonial household economy, town economy, territorial<br />
economy and national-economy. <strong>Weber</strong> rejected this stage theory because its<br />
descriptors did not pick up the underlying division of labour. Karl Bücher<br />
reworked the stage theory according to a more theoretical account of the<br />
division of labour (in Die Enstehung der Volkswirtschaft – see above, p. 127).<br />
In Chapter 2, <strong>Weber</strong> endorses Bücher against Schmoller – to an extent. Then<br />
in a long passage explains why his chapter did not relate to history.<br />
It should be emphatically stated that the present discussion is concerned<br />
only with a brief summary of the sociological aspects of these phenomena,<br />
so far as they are relevant to its context. The economic aspect is<br />
included only insofar as it is expressed in what are formally sociological<br />
categories. The presentation would be economic in the substantive sense<br />
only if the price and market conditions, which so far have been dealt<br />
with only on the theoretical level, were brought in. But these substantive<br />
aspects of the general problem could be worked into such a summary<br />
introduction only in the form of terse theses, which would involve some<br />
very dubious distortions.<br />
(ES, p. 115)
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 261<br />
What <strong>Weber</strong> finds dubious is the use of economic theory in economic<br />
history.<br />
‘To take an example: It might be argued that for the development of<br />
medieval, corporately regulated, but “free” labor the decisive period should<br />
be seen in the “dark” ages from the tenth to the twelfth century, and in particular<br />
in the situation during that period of the skilled (peasant, mining and<br />
artisan) labour force whose production activity was oriented to the revenue<br />
chances of the feudal lords . . .’ (ES, p. 115). Feudal lords fought to secure<br />
these revenue sources through their control over manpower, creating a spurt<br />
forward in the economy. <strong>Weber</strong> declares his disinterest in applying theory<br />
to history in this way, fearing it could be erroneous. (It is interesting to note<br />
that one of the major theories, now canvassed, for this economic spurt is<br />
climate warming.)<br />
At a later point in the chapter – the section on the ‘Social Division of Labour’<br />
– <strong>Weber</strong> returns to Rodbertus and Bücher as well as his own work on<br />
agrarian conditions east of the Elbe. Each of these subjects was strongly tied<br />
to historical and developmental change; Rodbertus because of his ‘oikos’<br />
theory, Bücher an amended stage theory, and <strong>Weber</strong>’s own study that showed<br />
the dynamism of capitalistic labour relations in place of traditional ones. The<br />
historical dimensions are all ‘flattened’ to fit within a systematic exposition<br />
of types of the social division of labour. The ‘oikos’ represented ‘autarky of<br />
want satisfaction through the utilization of the services of household members<br />
or of dependent labor . . .’ (ES, p. 124). The agricultural estate ‘of the<br />
German East with a labour force holding small plots of estate land on a<br />
service tenure and entirely oriented to the order of the estate (Instleute)’<br />
is equated with the enterprise and division of labour of the ‘putting out’<br />
system (ES, p. 125). And Bücher is mentioned in connection with household<br />
enterprises and casual labour. <strong>Weber</strong>’s comparisons here work across history,<br />
not with history as a developmental sequence.<br />
He gives another example, provocatively, from sixteenth-century Europe.<br />
‘The decisive period for the development of capitalism could be claimed to<br />
be the great chronic price revolution of the sixteenth century.’ The economic<br />
theory, <strong>Weber</strong> notes, argues that rising prices stimulated agrarian economic<br />
activity – in England, as capitalistic enterprise, and East of the Elbe, through<br />
forced labour. Also, according to theory, industrial prices fell relative to<br />
agricultural prices, triggering changes in the organization of enterprises<br />
to improve competitiveness. Of these theories, <strong>Weber</strong> opines, ‘In order to<br />
verify theoretical reasoning about the substantive economic conditions of<br />
the development of economic structure, theses such as these and similar ones<br />
would have to be utilized.’ One such ‘similar theory’ could of course be<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own Protestant ethic thesis. <strong>Weber</strong> makes it abundantly clear that<br />
he has no interest in becoming engaged in such manoeuvres. ‘These and<br />
numerous other equally controversial theories, even so far as they could be<br />
proved not to be wholly erroneous, cannot be incorporated in the present<br />
scheme which is intentionally limited to sociological concepts.’ <strong>Weber</strong> is
262 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
being severe, and it should not be overlooked that, had he chosen, he could<br />
have put up his own theory against the erroneous theory of price inflation,<br />
which after all is how knowledge progresses. But no.<br />
In renouncing any attempt of this sort, however, the following exposition<br />
in this chapter explicitly repudiates any claim to concrete ‘explanation’<br />
and restricts itself to working out a sociological typology. The same is<br />
true of the previous discussion in that it consciously omitted to develop<br />
a theory of money and price determination. This must be strongly emphasized.<br />
For only the facts of the economic situation provide the flesh<br />
and blood for a genuine explanation of also that process of development<br />
relevant for sociological theory. What can be done here is only to supply<br />
a scaffolding adequate to provide the analysis with relatively unambiguous<br />
and definite concepts.<br />
It is obvious not only that no attempt is made here to do justice to the<br />
historical aspect of economic development, but also that the typology of<br />
the genetic sequence of possible forms is neglected. The present aim is<br />
only to develop a schematic system of classification.<br />
(ES, p. 116)<br />
This statement is reinforced towards the end of the chapter in Section 39<br />
where <strong>Weber</strong> discusses the impact of intellectual disciplines that have incorporated<br />
ethical and religious values and convictions. These ‘have tended to<br />
limit the development of an autonomous capitalistic system of the modern<br />
type to certain areas.’ He continues,<br />
In an historical analysis, we can only point out certain circumstances<br />
which exert negative influences on the relevant thought processes – that<br />
is, influences which impede or even obstruct them – or such which exert<br />
a positive, favoring influence. It is not, however, possible to prove a<br />
strictly inevitable causal relationship in such cases, any more than it is<br />
possible in any other case of strictly individual events.<br />
(ES, p. 200)<br />
I have made clear from the start of this book that we should be wary of<br />
trying to draw connections and unities and trajectories when they might well<br />
not exist. But the above statements so trumpet <strong>Weber</strong> disinterest with history<br />
in its development and genetic sequence that they deserve some comment.<br />
Clearly, this is not the <strong>Weber</strong> of 1904–5, who sought to develop heuristically<br />
honed cultural concepts in order to explain a causal process of a crucial<br />
juncture in European history. That may well have been a too adventurous<br />
undertaking, but one nonetheless undertaken by an extremely well-informed<br />
lecturer in national economics. And <strong>Weber</strong> always defended the Protestant<br />
thesis to the hilt against his critics.<br />
The move into the respective projects c. 1910 of ‘Economy and Society’<br />
and the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ cannot be described as the
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 263<br />
abandonment of the Protestant ethic thesis – although as noted below (pp.<br />
122–3), <strong>Weber</strong> did fail to follow up on detailed studies of the Reformation.<br />
Rather, the two projects represent a dilution of the thesis and its highly<br />
culturally attuned methodology. Puritanism becomes but one episode in the<br />
long history of occidental rationalism, and the comparative studies into the<br />
religious influence of economic ethics reveal not causative factors but simply<br />
the difference between ways of life and cultures. The final version of<br />
Economy and Society is forced to withdraw from the developmental thrusts<br />
that characterized the special sociologies of law, rulership and religion. Typologies,<br />
while built around orientation in respect to meaning, are offered<br />
as a practical step to further detailed research. The typologies in the final<br />
version are universal–historical and ‘renounce’ any claim to stages, development<br />
and genetic history.<br />
Chapter 2 is infrequently studied and has remained something of a puzzle.<br />
Its purpose, I think, is pretty clear – it was to be the key text of Economy<br />
and Society as it fitted into the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. This is not<br />
a very satisfying thing to say, because the final version of the whole book<br />
was never completed, so it is extremely hard to gain a sense of how it fitted<br />
into the overall scheme. But it does repay study, it is still very relevant, and<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s discipline of social economics needs to be relaunched. It is a highly<br />
considered and dense piece of writing. We may ask whether <strong>Weber</strong> himself<br />
considered he had gone out on a limb with the Protestant ethic thesis. The<br />
consensus of scholarly opinion is that it is a very hard thesis to sustain, not<br />
least, as I have shown in Chapter 4, because of its (impossible) methodological<br />
demands. <strong>Weber</strong>, like a good professional sportsman, never showed or<br />
admitted weakness. His footnotes addressing his critics in the revised 1920<br />
PESC are pugilistic. But in crafting Chapter 2, <strong>Weber</strong> was demonstrating<br />
that he not only understood economics but, above all, capitalism. Further<br />
research to settle the issues more decisively would, for <strong>Weber</strong>, require a firm<br />
sociological underpinning.<br />
Coda: is there a <strong>Weber</strong> paradigm?<br />
In early 1920, <strong>Weber</strong> broke off from writing his ‘Basic Concepts of Sociology’<br />
to read the 240 pages of Volume 1 of Robert Liefmann’s The Principles<br />
of Modern Economic Theory. 11 Liefmann had been pressing <strong>Weber</strong> for his<br />
views of the book, which included a critique of sociology and a presentation<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong>’s own standpoint. <strong>Weber</strong> replied to Liefmann on 9 March with a<br />
long letter. <strong>Weber</strong> pointed out that he was now also a sociologist under the<br />
terms of his contract. As a sociologist, he is making an end of the bad enterprise<br />
with collective concepts, ‘for sociology is individualistic’.<br />
The state, for example, is a place where one finds prospects of certain<br />
types of action, the action of definite people. ‘Subjective’ means that action<br />
is oriented to definite ideas (‘Vorstellungen’). The ‘objective’ for us
264 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
observers is the chances that with this orientation to ideas the action will<br />
ensue. So, if certain actions did not ensue, there would not be a state.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> raises this clarification as a correction to Liefmann’s treatment of<br />
utility and prices in economic theory. Subjective value, writes <strong>Weber</strong>, in an<br />
economic transaction is what one party reckons or estimates a particular<br />
commodity is worth to him. The actual price paid for a commodity is an<br />
objective, historical fact.<br />
Liefmann had written of <strong>Weber</strong> that he says that the knowledge value of<br />
theory is ‘small’. 12 <strong>Weber</strong> protested.<br />
Where did I say that? Theory creates ideal types and for me this function<br />
is simply indispensable. That sociology and economic history never replace<br />
theory is one of my basic convictions. What interests me (according<br />
to your page 17) is more the ‘special’ situation (‘Zusammenhang’)?<br />
Yes, if one is asking the question: why only in the Occident has rational<br />
(profit-making) capitalism originated, and one can call that a ‘special’<br />
situation! There have to be people who investigate this question. In this,<br />
only highly paradoxical complexes are important. The modern economy<br />
presupposes not only the rational state, in the sense of its calculable<br />
functions, but also rational technology (science) and a defined form of<br />
rational life-conduct. Why didn’t modern capitalism originate in China?<br />
It had many thousand years for that! For centuries they have had exchange,<br />
paper money for 1100 years, coinage for 2600 years. 13<br />
These passages are part of a point-by-point rebuttal and discussion of<br />
Liefmann’s book, and so are contextually specific. It is also worth noting that<br />
Liefmann appears to misunderstand the fundamentals of <strong>Weber</strong>’s approach.<br />
One inference to be drawn from the exchange between Liefmann and <strong>Weber</strong><br />
is that it is difficult to be conclusive about <strong>Weber</strong>. When he wrote the letter<br />
– with its summating insights as to his approach – he was in another of<br />
his expansionary periods of work. He was completing the final version of<br />
Economy and Society – at speed – and he had revised his collected essays in<br />
the sociology of religion. He might have continued with his advertised plans<br />
to expand his studies on the world religions. But he might not have. Bavaria<br />
and Munich had experienced revolution, rule by soviets and counter-revolutionary<br />
violence – all before his own eyes. In Russia, the revolution of 1917<br />
had held. <strong>Weber</strong> could have returned to his studies of Russia and expanded<br />
his political sociology of revolution, and of the limits of direct democracy.<br />
The conclusion to be drawn from this book is that <strong>Weber</strong> was unpredictable<br />
in the direction of his writings. His was not a neatly built academic career<br />
and reputation.<br />
Nevertheless, certain constants can be drawn throughout the variation in<br />
his studies. Methodology is the foremost. <strong>Weber</strong> does give the impression<br />
that he had solved the methodological problems in national-economy and
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 265<br />
its related disciplines to his satisfaction. There is a consistency from his essay<br />
on ‘Objectivity’ in the social sciences (1904) through to ‘Basic Sociological<br />
Concepts in 1920. His position presumes that academic knowledge in the<br />
social sciences is precarious and provisional in a way that is less so for the<br />
natural sciences, which are able to uncover more enduring regularities and<br />
produce law-like statements. His epistemology, i.e. his assumptions about<br />
social scientific knowledge, held that there was an unbridgeable gulf between<br />
investigator and the ever-changing flux of social reality. Moreover, the investigator<br />
was himself, or herself, part of the ongoing flux of reality. Academic<br />
knowledge does not stand apart from the world, fixed somehow in time<br />
while an objective study of social reality is conducted. What distinguishes<br />
academic knowledge is the motivation of the social scientist to choose a<br />
topic or research problem for study, because it has knowledge value (‘wissenwert’).<br />
These values could be intrinsic to a discipline as a community of<br />
researchers, which is how Rickert thought about this issue. Or the individual<br />
researcher might be motivated by a wider pool of ideas, including that of his<br />
or her own creativity, which at its extreme reaches the artistic licence of a<br />
Nietzsche. The connection between investigator and the social/cultural/historical<br />
situation studied is transmitted through the medium of values and<br />
meanings. It was Dilthey who pointed out that this was not only the distinguishing<br />
feature of the human sciences that separated it from the natural<br />
sciences, it was also its major advantage and not a limitation. Human beings<br />
can understand other human beings through a process of interpretation of<br />
meaning. The medium through which this interpretation of meaning operates<br />
was and remains an issue of controversy. Simmel and others inclined to<br />
the view that there existed some kind of psychological meta-soul, into which<br />
we could also somehow dip and intuit the motivation of other people, now<br />
and across time. Dilthey, to his credit, pointed out that the interpretation<br />
of meaning is worked out, more arduously and with claims to correctness<br />
and truth, through the techniques of textual hermeneutics. <strong>Weber</strong> assumes<br />
that the interpretation of meaning is possible and is achieved through the<br />
Diltheyan route of empathy and re-experience. He asserts this, rather than<br />
justifying it in his methodology. He secures the reliability of interpretation<br />
through the procedure of casual attribution of motivation, which, as a retrospective<br />
and empirical exercise, ascertains the hypothetical nature of understanding<br />
motives and meanings.<br />
The ideal type functions as the equivalent of experimental design in the<br />
natural sciences. The methods of both are quite easy to outline. In an experiment,<br />
the investigator matches two situations with the exception of one<br />
key factor. In the ideal type, an interpreted meaning is intensified in order<br />
to provide conceptual clarity. In both situations, the complexity and sheer<br />
messiness of the world in its immediate state have to be manipulated to<br />
discern underlying causal mechanisms. Pure affect, pure instrumental rationality,<br />
pure tradition are ways of heuristically manipulating what is being<br />
studied to reach an empirical assessment of how each meaning should be
266 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
weighed – how ideas are actuated in social reality. The ideal type in <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
hands is, however, more than a method. Just as an academic psychologist<br />
will point out that it is not the experimental method per se but the cleverness<br />
of the design that is the real contribution to knowledge, so with the imaginative<br />
and theoretical power of <strong>Weber</strong>’s own ideal types. <strong>Weber</strong>’s comments to<br />
Liefmann slot in here. Ideal types stand for theory and are ‘indispensable’.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own ideal type of ascetic life conduct and its effects on economic<br />
behaviour have become part of the canon of sociological ideas as well as<br />
entering public consciousness, just as charisma has. To some small degree,<br />
the world is seen through <strong>Weber</strong>’s ideas, testifying to the power and creativity<br />
of the ideal type.<br />
‘That sociology and economic history never replace theory is one of my<br />
basic convictions.’ <strong>Weber</strong>’s position on methodology and ideal type, which<br />
are generic to the social and cultural sciences, are in my view paradigmatic;<br />
his views on sociology less so. In Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm, it<br />
was not simply a new unifying theory and research programme, but the<br />
accommodating capacity of a theory to researchers on institutional, normative<br />
and social grounds. <strong>Weber</strong>’s thinking about sociology is not broadly<br />
accommodating. He always turned his back on a general sociology, disputing<br />
its claims to a totalizing, or organicist, or positivist, or evolutionary view<br />
of the world. He had a disinclination to build in the features that the later<br />
twentieth century has thought indispensable. He preferred to conceptualize<br />
the sociological field exclusively in terms of social relationships of particular<br />
kinds. He did not develop an explicit theory of institutions, he had no notion<br />
of role and he rejected a formal theory of system differentiation. Above<br />
all, he was never tempted to construct a frame or social system within which<br />
the actions of the individual were to be integrated. This sets him apart from<br />
prominent sociologists such as Talcott Parsons or Pierre Bourdieu, whose<br />
whole oeuvre is a continuing attempt to reconcile action at the level of the<br />
individual and group with the structures or systems of society. For <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
this would be akin to trying to square a circle. The same point can be made<br />
with respect to sociologists such as James Coleman and George Ritzer, who<br />
would unify the micro with the macro. For <strong>Weber</strong>, there is only one level<br />
– sociology is ‘individualistic’ – as he wrote to Liefmann. This I do not think<br />
should be read that sociology is atomistic; rather, as a statement against<br />
any form of reification. Of all the major sociologists, <strong>Weber</strong> had the lowest<br />
tolerance threshold to reification. Structures, classes, regimes, orders, value<br />
spheres all feature, unavoidably, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s sociology, but not as sociological<br />
objects or things. Law, noted <strong>Weber</strong>, exists as a living entity insofar as<br />
the state enacts law, and lawyers and courts process it. But sociologically,<br />
what counts is the idea or meaning of law in the mind and actions of the<br />
individual. The operation of ‘structures’ (<strong>Weber</strong>’s ‘Gebilde’) is denominated<br />
in the motives, meaning, thinking and actions of individuals. Hence, the<br />
purpose of sociology is to depict the basic sociological relationships.<br />
In one sense, this is dismaying for sociology because it is permanently
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 267<br />
reduced to an underlabouring role: to theory on one side and to verification<br />
on the other, which is carried out by historians and economic history. But<br />
underlabouring does not capture <strong>Weber</strong>’s fashioning of sociology, which for<br />
him, in the form of a theory of social action, underwrites any study in the<br />
social sciences, to the extent that meaning is constitutive of people’s actions.<br />
Hence, sociology also turns out to be indispensable even though it does have<br />
to restrict its ambitions.<br />
Dismay, however, on the part of sociologists can be countered by the<br />
place of theory. The whole thrust of the <strong>Weber</strong>ian enterprise is theoretical.<br />
Ideal types are heuristic nets cast into the flux of social reality. They create<br />
a rapport at the level of meaning; they are interventions into social reality.<br />
Theory is generated by economists, political scientists, academic theologians<br />
(‘Religionswissenschaft’), the study of law, ethnography and anthropology.<br />
Referring back to Figure 8.2 (p. 232), these other disciplines can be envisaged<br />
as substantive sociologies. Today, we would say that <strong>Weber</strong> demands<br />
an interdisciplinary science of society, with the basic sociological concepts<br />
underwriting the enterprise. A pure sociology, therefore, is somewhat ineffectual<br />
by itself. To ask the important questions about power, interests, want<br />
satisfaction, culture, religion, the nature of the human animal requires the<br />
presence of substantive sociologies committed to the large issues and questions<br />
of the day.<br />
Future tasks and debates<br />
In the Introduction to this book, I stated that the revaluation of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
work would involve a critical engagement with some of his central questions.<br />
In one part, this demands a critical scholarship in relation to his writings,<br />
and this has taken up the majority of this book. But another part necessitates<br />
emerging from the scholarly cave and engaging with contemporary issues<br />
and debates. There are a number of central questions that are relevant to<br />
both <strong>Weber</strong>’s day and ours and, in this sense, they may be described as classic.<br />
A critical scholarship should be making the full complexity of his writing<br />
accessible to contemporary debates, and it should also challenge interpretations<br />
that patronize, reconstruct or fail to acknowledge both the complexity<br />
and the multiple directions of the writings. I list four central questions for<br />
further debate.<br />
1 Social economics. <strong>Weber</strong>’s whole academic life existed within the<br />
intellectual framework of national-economy. He was one of the very<br />
few proponents in Germany of the Austrian marginalist revolution in<br />
economics, yet clearly he remained committed to the historical, cultural<br />
and social analysis of economic activity. The marginalist heuristic<br />
exercise, the fiction of pure rationality, entered into his formulation of<br />
the ideal type. His sociology developed in parallel with his immense<br />
project to found a social economics. But very little of that latter project
268 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
remains, and the critical question is whether we should be making more<br />
use of that buried legacy. It is a little strange that <strong>Weber</strong> can be honoured<br />
as a sociologist but more or less forgotten as an economist. Richard<br />
Swedberg has made important contributions in this department, but<br />
are we yet able to characterize social economics and state what value it<br />
still has in relation to the dominant paradigm of neo-classical economic<br />
theory – a huge and powerful edifice that <strong>Weber</strong> would have termed<br />
economic rationalism. 14<br />
Part of this task involves a critical scrutiny of the account provided<br />
of social economics and of <strong>Weber</strong> in general by Joseph Schumpeter in<br />
his History of Economic Analysis. Schumpeter was part of the stable of<br />
authors who composed the project of social economics. His contribution<br />
to the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik – first published in German in<br />
1912, translated as Economic Doctrine and Method and published<br />
after his death in 1954 – makes a more measured assessment of the<br />
potential of <strong>Weber</strong>’s approach than that provided in his later History<br />
of Economic Analysis. 15 No mention is made by Schumpeter of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
familiarity with the economic writings of Carl Menger, Bohm-Bäwerk<br />
and von Wieser. Much of this is perhaps bound up with the disastrous<br />
situation of economic life and economic policy in central Europe after<br />
1918 and the sense that marginalist economics was to be developed in<br />
the Anglo-Saxon world. Nevertheless, the question remains whether our<br />
remembrance of <strong>Weber</strong>’s social economics is adequate.<br />
2 <strong>Weber</strong>’s central position on hermeneutics (a term he did not use)<br />
connects meaning with causal attribution. <strong>Weber</strong> can be criticized for<br />
not engaging in an explicit acknowledgement and critique of Dilthey.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> used his method of ‘Verstehen’, but wanted to remain distant<br />
from any hint of psychologism and of ‘Lebensphilosophie’. This is a<br />
disservice to nineteenth-century hermeneutics, whose function and<br />
technique was to establish textual truth. The great bifurcation between<br />
analytical philosophy and the positivism of the Vienna circle, on the<br />
one side, and phenomenological and interpretive philosophies on the<br />
other side – which gets under way in the 1920s – might have developed<br />
differently had hermeneutics not been seen as reductive, relativist and<br />
unreliable. <strong>Weber</strong>’s method of ‘Verstehen’ in practice resisted any such<br />
bifurcation. The interpretation of meaning is an attribution of a cause<br />
or reason for acting, whose consequences are empirically ascertainable.<br />
The debate remains. It is still controversial to assume that a reason for<br />
acting can be considered as a cause of acting. Also the interpretation of<br />
meaning as a reason or motivation for acting requires the application<br />
of ordinary language philosophy, as for example in Donald Davidson’s<br />
essays.<br />
3 Philosophy of history. <strong>Weber</strong> was against this in its guises of Hegelian<br />
idealism, Marxist historical materialism, and evolutionism in its Comtean<br />
or Frazerian forms. <strong>Weber</strong> held that the empiricism of historical
Sociological categories and the types of economic activity 269<br />
‘nacheinander’, the cause and effect of concrete events, was a necessary<br />
discipline and source of verification. But his historical sociology was<br />
founded in strong theory construction. His developmental history on<br />
a comparative basis revolved around the coming together of certain<br />
material and ideal interests. The causal model that underlay this coming<br />
together was the theory of ‘elective affinity’. Culture bonds with material<br />
and political interests to produce determinative outcomes in the course<br />
of civilizational history. I cannot see that <strong>Weber</strong> ever progressed beyond<br />
this conception, which was introduced as an explanatory metaphor<br />
in PESC in 1904–5. Chemical bonding – and elective affinity is its<br />
nineteenth century equivalent – is, as we now know, an immensely strong<br />
force. Just how one can explicate the mechanisms of elective affinity<br />
within historical sociology is an issue that remains unresolved, indeed<br />
barely even addressed seriously. For <strong>Weber</strong>, it is handled as cultural<br />
ideas determining life conduct in interaction with material interests.<br />
The alternatives are the programme developed by W.G. Runciman of<br />
selectionism in history, in which the initiation of cultural ideas and<br />
interests becomes subsidiary to their uptake within the temporally<br />
subsequent social environment. Or the most popular alternative is the<br />
historical sociology of multifactorialism, discussed in relation to Michael<br />
Mann’s work on power. Multifactorial causation and selectionism can<br />
claim lineages to Max <strong>Weber</strong> but, along with elective affinities, they are<br />
each separate and different programmes.<br />
4 Singularity of modernity. The benign position on the origins and nature<br />
of modernity is to argue that its constitution includes a reflexive capacity<br />
in politics, science, technology and culture to steer the direction of<br />
societal development in a desired direction; also that the modernity,<br />
which originated in the west, is in fact adaptable by other cultures and<br />
civilizations to their own values. This is the multiple modernities position<br />
as developed by S.N. Eisenstadt and colleagues. It owes more to Karl<br />
Jaspers than it does to Max <strong>Weber</strong> who, I would argue, saw modernity<br />
as the singular accomplishment of western rationalism. At root, it is a<br />
pessimistic vision. Western science was rooted in the reflexive innovation<br />
that concepts, resulting from rational thought, could be intervened<br />
between the human beings and their immediate experience of the world.<br />
As such, it was the intellectual successor to cultural religions, which had<br />
already made metaphysical interventions of various sorts. In that sense,<br />
science represented progress but also disenchantment. Once the tree of<br />
knowledge is bitten into, the magic garden of existence becomes subject,<br />
inescapably, to rational discourse. Puritanism was uniquely inimical to<br />
magic, rite and superstition, and jolts, as a minor but historic episode, a<br />
civilizational configuration into an irreversible direction. To an extent,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> might even have underplayed the role of what the Toronto school<br />
would term the ‘symbolic technologies’ at work in this process, which<br />
accelerate social relationships away from the ‘Gemeinschaft’ of face-
270 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
to-face relationships to the associative patterns of relationships made<br />
possible through modern communication.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> writes that mechanism supervenes over meaning:<br />
This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of<br />
machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals<br />
who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned<br />
with economic acquisition, with irreversible force. Perhaps it will so<br />
determine them until the last ton of fossil fuel is burnt.<br />
(PESC, p. 181) 16<br />
This has an even more ominous ring to it some hundred years after it<br />
was written. In another hundred years, it is most probable that the last ton<br />
of fossil fuel will have been burnt. In the singularity argument, this is an<br />
irreversible process of rationalization driven by the inner logic of occidental<br />
rationalism; and if modernity is singular, there is no other, alternative modernity.<br />
By its nature, modernity is concerned with the perfection of means<br />
rather than the deeper reflection on the ends of humankind.
Notes<br />
Introduction<br />
1 Nelson, B., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s “Author’s Introduction” (1920): A Master Clue to his<br />
Main Aims’, Sociological Inquiry, 44, 4, 1974, pp. 269–78.<br />
2 Nelson, p. 275.<br />
3 Colliot-Thélène, C., La Sociologie de Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Paris: La Découverte, 2006,<br />
p. 6.<br />
4 See his The Rise of Western Rationalism. Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Developmental History,<br />
Roth, G. (transl.), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981 and Rationalism,<br />
Religion and Domination. A <strong>Weber</strong>ian Perspective, Solomon, N. (transl.),<br />
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.<br />
5 Scaff, L., ‘<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology’, in Reading <strong>Weber</strong>, Tribe, K. (ed),<br />
London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 15–41.<br />
6 See Roth, G., Max <strong>Weber</strong>s deutsch–englische Familiengeschichte 1800–1950,<br />
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001; Radkau, J., Max <strong>Weber</strong>. Die Leidenschaft des<br />
Denkens, Munich: Hanser, 2005; Whimster, S., (ed.), Max <strong>Weber</strong> and the Culture<br />
of Anarchy, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.<br />
7 See the collection Max <strong>Weber</strong> zum Gedächtnis, König, R., and Winckelmann, J.<br />
(eds), Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1963.<br />
8 Graf, F.W., ‘Ernst Troeltsch’s Evaluation of Max and Alfred <strong>Weber</strong>. Introduction<br />
and Translation of a Letter by Ernst Troeltsch to Heinrich Dietzel’, Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
Studies, 4.1, 2004, p. 105.<br />
9 Lepsius, M.R., ‘Münchens Beziehungen zu Max <strong>Weber</strong> und zur Pflege seines<br />
Werks’, Das Faszinosum Max <strong>Weber</strong>s. Die Geschichte seiner Geltung, Borchardt,<br />
K. and Ay, K.-L. (eds), Constance: UVK, 2006, p. 23.<br />
10 Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter. Nach südeuropäischen<br />
Quellen (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1889) has been recently translated and edited<br />
by Lutz Kaelber, as The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle<br />
Ages (Lanham, Mary: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).<br />
11 In April, 1919 <strong>Weber</strong> became ‘Professor für Gesellschaftslehre, Wirtschaftsgeschichte<br />
und Nationalökonomie’. See Lepsius, Faszinosum, p. 19 and p. 259<br />
below.<br />
12 Strauss, L., Natural Right and History, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press,<br />
1953, pp. 35–80.<br />
1 <strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian sociology, revisited<br />
1 First published ‘<strong>Weber</strong> before <strong>Weber</strong>ian Sociology’, British Journal of Sociology,
272 Notes<br />
35, 1984, pp. 190–215; reprinted in Reading <strong>Weber</strong>, Tribe, K. (ed.), London:<br />
Routledge, 1989, pp. 15–41.<br />
2 Scaff, L., in Reading <strong>Weber</strong>, p. 16.<br />
3 Turner, B.S., For <strong>Weber</strong>. Essays in the Sociology of Fate, London: Routledge,<br />
1984, p. 354.<br />
4 Turner, p. 353.<br />
5 Dawe, A., ‘The Two Sociologies’, British Journal of Sociology, 21, 2, 1970, pp.<br />
207–8.<br />
6 Giddens, A., Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction<br />
in Social Analysis, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979;<br />
Modernity and Self Identity, Oxford: Polity, 1991.<br />
7 Colliot-Thélène, C., La Sociologie de Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Paris: La Découverte, 2006, p.<br />
5.<br />
8 Schroeder, R., Max <strong>Weber</strong> and the Sociology of Culture, London: Sage, 1992,<br />
p. 9. The reference to Kalberg, S. is ‘<strong>Weber</strong>, Max (1864–1920)’ in The Social<br />
Science Encyclopaedia, Kuper, A., and Kuper J. (eds), London: Routledge, 1985.<br />
Stephen Kalberg’s integration of social action types with macrohistorical process<br />
was further developed in his Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Historical-Sociology, Chicago, IL:<br />
Chicago University Press, 1994.<br />
9 Scaff, L., in Reading <strong>Weber</strong>, p. 16.<br />
10 In 1871, a number of German kingdoms, principalities and small states were<br />
consolidated under Prussian leadership into a unitary state. The King of Prussia<br />
became its Emperor, and an electoral franchise and parliamentary system were<br />
introduced. The German (Second) Empire ceased to exist in November 1918.<br />
The period 1892–1918 is also often termed Wilhelmine Germany after the name<br />
of its emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II.<br />
11 Webb, S.B., ‘Agricultural Protection in Wilhelmian Germany: Forging an Empire<br />
with Pork and Rye’, reprinted in The Economic Development of Germany since<br />
1870, Fischer, W., (ed.), Lyme: Edward Elgar, 1997, pp. 400–18. See also the recently<br />
discovered article by Max <strong>Weber</strong>, ‘Germany – Agriculture and Forestry’,<br />
reprinted in Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 6.2, 2006, pp. 207–18.<br />
12 This was a long established tradition in the autocratic Prussian state. See Rosenberg,<br />
H., Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy. The Prussian Experience,<br />
1660–1815, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958.<br />
13 Riesebrodt, M., ‘Einleitung’ to Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Die Lage der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen<br />
Deutschland, 1892, in MWG, I/3, pp. 1–33.<br />
14 Mommsen, W.J., and Aldenhoff, R., ‘Einleitung’ to Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat<br />
und Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Schriften und Reden 1892–1899, MWG I/4,<br />
pp. 16–20.<br />
15 From the point of view of research design, the Verein’s questionnaire favoured<br />
an inductive methodology. The study was not designed to test specific propositions,<br />
such as for instance the relationships between wages and migration. Data<br />
were gathered and conclusions were drawn afterwards.<br />
16 Those who left the land were mostly unmarried and young, although curiously<br />
no explicit demographic questions were included in the main questionnaire.<br />
17 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland, Leipzig:<br />
Duncker & Humblot, 1892, p. 4.<br />
18 Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 5. The emphases are <strong>Weber</strong>’s.<br />
19 ‘Employment regime’ is a little strong as a translation but does pick up the element<br />
of national-economy in his thinking. The alternative translation is work<br />
organization, which is somewhat misleading.<br />
20 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., ‘Entwickelungstendenzen in der Lage der ostelbischen Landarbeiter’,<br />
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Marianne <strong>Weber</strong><br />
(ed.), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988, p. 474.
Notes 273<br />
21 Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 16.<br />
22 Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 701.<br />
23 Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 795–6.<br />
24 For a more detailed analysis of <strong>Weber</strong>’s argument, see Agevall, O., ‘Science,<br />
Values, and the Empirical Argument in Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Inaugural Address’, Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 4, 2, 2004, pp. 157–77.<br />
25 Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter, p. 797.<br />
26 Mommsen, W.J., Max <strong>Weber</strong> and German Politics, 1890–1920, Steinberg, M.<br />
(transl.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984, pp. 35–59.<br />
27 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., Die römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und<br />
Privatrecht, Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1891. This has now appeared in the Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe, edited by Jürgen Deininger, MWG I/2.<br />
28 MWG I/2, p. 160.<br />
29 MWG I/2, p. 216.<br />
30 Mommsen, W.J., ‘From Agrarian Capitalism to the “Spirit” of Modern Capitalism:<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Approaches to the Protestant Ethic’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 5, 2,<br />
2005, pp.185–6.<br />
31 Mommsen, pp. 186–7.<br />
32 Kaelber, L., ‘Introduction. Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Dissertation in the Context of his Early<br />
Career and Life’, The History of Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages,<br />
Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. See also Kaelber, L., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
on Usury and Medieval Capitalism: From The History of Commercial Partnerships<br />
to The Protestant Ethic’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 4, 1, 2004, pp. 51–75.<br />
33 Borchardt, K., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Writings on the Bourse: Puzzling Out a Forgotten<br />
Corpus’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 2, 2, 2002, p. 153.<br />
34 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., quoted in Borchardt, p. 160, n. 53.<br />
35 Quoted in Borchardt, 154.<br />
36 Bruhns, H., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s “Basic Concepts” in the Context of his Studies in<br />
Economic History’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, Beiheft 1, 2006, pp. 61–8.<br />
37 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen über Allgemeine (“theoretische”) Nationalökonomie<br />
(1898), Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990.<br />
38 <strong>Weber</strong> commissioned Schumpeter to write this book as part of the encyclopaedia<br />
Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. It appeared as Epochen der Dogmen- und Methodengeschichte,<br />
Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1912. It was published in<br />
English translation by George Allen & Unwin in 1954.<br />
39 Subsection 7 of Section 2 of <strong>Weber</strong>’s lecture outline is paraphrased below. It<br />
contains an exposition of value taken from the theory of marginal utility.<br />
7 Economic value (‘Wertschätzung’) in the isolated economy.<br />
7.1 The ‘laws of value’ (‘Wertgesetze’).<br />
Goods whose value is given through exchange and price. This is the normal<br />
quality of economic goods. Neither the urgency of need nor the scarcity of a<br />
good determines the price level. The specific economic good being exchanged by<br />
economic actors (‘Einzelwirtschaften’) is valued according to a subjective component<br />
plus motive. Cannot see this in the complexity of today’s economy, so<br />
abstract theory constructs an isolated economy with no exchange, like a primitive<br />
household in the past or a communist society in the future. Economic subject<br />
meets perceived economic needs and their subjective urgency through economic<br />
decision on consumption and means of production (as above). Economic subject<br />
proceeds like a modern businessman in calculating the whole situation of supply<br />
and need. Theoretically, this operates (1) from simplified assumption of an<br />
isolated economy with given, fixed needs in a fixed period of employment of<br />
labour and material needs of production that are also fixed; (2) through assumption<br />
that the supply of goods can be increased in relation to consumption
274 Notes<br />
and production means available to the household. Economic subject makes an<br />
estimate of value of the particular goods, as presumed above (1 and 2).<br />
What is the motive that determines the level of value of a unit (‘Einheit’) of the<br />
absolute limited supply of consumption good ‘x’? Supply of ‘x’ will be expended<br />
on most (subjectively) pressing needs and, at a certain point, will be forced to<br />
stop expenditure; the shorter the supply, the more pressing psychic need, the<br />
more plentiful, the less pressing. Satiation of least pressing need is dependent on<br />
an unrestricted supply of units of ‘x’. This is the marginal utility of the unit of<br />
‘x’. Restriction in the supply of units of ‘x’ places the satiation of psychic need<br />
(‘Bedürfnisregung’) in question – the economic subject knows he is dependent<br />
on unrestricted supply. The consciousness of dependence is the source of value,<br />
and the intensity of dependence corresponds to marginal utility. So, declining<br />
marginal utility (increasing supply), and rising marginal utility with declining<br />
supply.<br />
So case (1) is a law of marginal utility, the estimation of value in a monopoly<br />
situation (limited goods in isolated economy) according to measure of rank<br />
ordering of needs economically to their expected (‘erzielenden’) ‘marginal utility’.<br />
Case (2) is like (1) except a consumption good ‘y’ is reproducible (and not<br />
limited). There is a decline in the marginal utility of ‘y’ with the more complete<br />
satisfaction of needs, which ‘y’ serves, and ‘costs’. In buying in ‘y’, the marginal<br />
utility of other goods rises. Supply of ‘y’ could increase costs of ‘z’ so long as the<br />
marginal utility of ‘y’ does not drop below that of ‘z’.<br />
The value of increasable goods (‘cost goods’) follows the specific formulation<br />
of ‘law of costs’ under (1) conditions of labour and capital under given technical<br />
conditions, (2) rank ordering of needs to lowest marginal utility possible. State<br />
of need and costs (not costs of labour but economic material goods) are the<br />
components of value estimation of cost goods.<br />
40 Bohm-Bäwerk, E., Karl Marx and the Close of His System, McDonald, A.<br />
(transl.), London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898. Reprinted in Karl Marx and the Close<br />
of His System, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949.<br />
41 In his inaugural lecture in Freiburg in 1895, <strong>Weber</strong> went out of his way to<br />
demonstrate that all economic policy judgements have to be referred in the last<br />
instance to the interests of the state. In this sense, he was not ‘value free’, a<br />
scientific norm that he insisted upon. In his lecture course, however, <strong>Weber</strong> was<br />
quite prepared to outline views and theories that he personally would not support.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> thought it was wrong to reveal to students what one’s own personal<br />
viewpoint was. Quite how he squared that with his inaugural lecture remains a<br />
mystery – unless the lecture was only open to academic staff.<br />
42 Quoted by Mommsen, p. 194. The quote itself comes from <strong>Weber</strong>’s own lecture<br />
notes, which will be published shortly in MWG III/1.<br />
43 Mommsen, p. 194.<br />
2 Capitalism in contemporary debates<br />
1 Lehmann, H., ‘Friends and Foes. The Formation and Consolidation of the Protestant<br />
Ethic Thesis’, in The Protestant Ethic Turns 100. Essays on the Centenary<br />
of the <strong>Weber</strong> Thesis, Swatos, W.H., Jr, and Kaelber, L. (eds), Boulder, CO: Paradigm<br />
Publishers, 2005, pp. 1–22.<br />
2 Lehmann, p. 3.<br />
3 This letter, Brentano’s reply, has yet to be found.<br />
4 Lehmann, p. 4.<br />
5 Lehmann, p. 4.
Notes 275<br />
6 Quoted by Lehmann, p. 5.<br />
7 ‘Geleitwort der Herausgeber’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik<br />
(Neue Folge), I, 1904, pp. I–VII.<br />
8 Quoted by Lindenlaub, D., Richtungskämpfe im Verein für Sozialpolitik. Part 2:<br />
Wissenchaft und Sozialpolitik vornehmlich von Beginn des “Neuen Kurses” bis<br />
zum Ausbruch des ersten Weltkrieges (1890–1914), Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner,<br />
1967, p. 276.<br />
9 Naumann, F., ‘Das Suchen nach dem Wesen des Kapitalismus I’, Die Hilfe, 17,<br />
37, September 1911.<br />
10 Lindenlaub, p. 280. Friedrich Naumann is cited in Lindenlaub, p. 281. These<br />
are averaged judgements, by Naumann and followed by Lindenlaub, for a group<br />
of national-economists. <strong>Weber</strong>, however, should be judged as below the average<br />
with respect to the Marxist problematic. As we have seen, <strong>Weber</strong> had already<br />
accepted the economics of marginalism and, it should be noted, <strong>Weber</strong> had an<br />
ability to hold on to not necessarily compatible positions.<br />
11 Sombart, W., Der moderne Kapitalismus, Berlin, Duncker & Humblot, I, 1902.<br />
12 Sombart’s progressive views of 1902 drift away to romantic anti-modernity, and<br />
his downgrading of racial characteristics in 1902 falls prey to ethnic characterizations<br />
of capitalism.<br />
13 See the article by Lehmann, ‘Friends and Foes’; also Lenger, F., Werner Sombart.<br />
1863–1941. Eine Biographie, Munich: Beck, 1994.<br />
14 mK, p. 51.<br />
15 Talcott Parsons’ influential essay ‘ “Capitalism” in recent German literature:<br />
Sombart and <strong>Weber</strong>’ (1928–9, reprinted in Talcott Parsons. The Early Essays,<br />
Camic, C. (ed.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991, pp. 3–37) uses<br />
the second editions of mK (1924 onwards) and PESC (1920) and overlooks<br />
the linkages as they existed in the first editions. See also the informative essay<br />
by Lehmann, H., ‘The Rise of Capitalism: <strong>Weber</strong> versus Sombart’, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
Protestant Ethic. Origins, Evidence, Contexts, Lehmann, H., and Roth G. (eds),<br />
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.<br />
16 mK I, p. 383.<br />
17 mK I, p. 391.<br />
18 Gothein, E., Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Schwarzwaldes, I, p. 674, Strasbourg:<br />
Trübner, 1892. Quoted by Sombart, mK I, p. 381, note 1. Gothein’s book is<br />
generally supportive of Sombart’s position in that he comes down against the<br />
institutionalist/jurisdictional analysis of historians such as Georg von Below, but<br />
it is organised very much within those problematics and lacks the primacy of<br />
economic principle that Sombart demanded.<br />
19 For a contemporary account of Darwinian selectionism applied to the Protestant<br />
ethic thesis, see the series of articles by Runciman, W.G., ‘Was Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
a Selectionist in Spite of Himself?’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 1.1, 2001,<br />
pp. 13–32.<br />
20 See PESC, p. 47 and GARS, I, Mohr Siebeck, 1920, p. 30: ‘In der Überschrift<br />
dieser Studie ist der etwas anspruchsvoll klingende Begriff: “Geist des Kapitalismus”<br />
verwendet. Was soll darunter verstanden werden? . . .’ The quotation<br />
marks around ‘Geist’ become quite intriguing at this point. If <strong>Weber</strong> is objecting<br />
to the pretentiousness of ‘Geist’, the quotation marks become scare quotes.<br />
But they could only become scare quotes through an implicit recognition that<br />
Sombart was the one who was pretentious. Note also the remark by Lehmann in<br />
‘The Rise of Capitalism: <strong>Weber</strong> versus Sombart’: ‘In my view, we should not be<br />
misled by the fact that <strong>Weber</strong> mentioned Sombart only two or three times in the<br />
first version of his essay, that is, in 1904 and 1905, and that those places were<br />
quite insignificant’ (p. 198).
276 Notes<br />
21 mK I, p. 193.<br />
22 mK I, pp, 396–7.<br />
23 Not to say flamboyance. In 1530, Anton Fugger, when entertaining the Emperor<br />
Charles V, lit a cinnamon fire using an imperial i.o.u. Simmel observes that the<br />
Fuggers came to grief because their banking empire operated internationally at<br />
a time (sixteenth century) of restricted money economy. Lending money to the<br />
Emperor in Madrid did not extend his credit in Holland where it was needed.<br />
Die Philosophie des Geldes, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900, p. 139.<br />
24 PESC, p. 64; GARS, I, p. 49.<br />
25 PESC, p. 75; GARS, I, p. 60. <strong>Weber</strong> entered a long footnote in 1920 attacking<br />
Sombart’s position. PESC, note 29, pp. 202–3; GARS, I, pp. 56–9.<br />
26 Friedrich Lenger needs to be credited with the insight that Sombart, Simmel and<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> can be usefully tied to together on the subject of ‘Geist’. See his Werner<br />
Sombart 1863–1941. Eine Biographie, pp. 121–3.<br />
27 Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft, vol. 13, no. 4,<br />
1889, pp. 1251–64; now best archived through the Heptagon CD, Berlin, 2001:<br />
Georg Simmel. Das Werk.<br />
28 See ‘Introduction to the Translation’, p. 37, note 3, in The Philosophy of Money,<br />
Frisby, D., and Bottomore, T. (eds/transl.), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,<br />
1978.<br />
29 <strong>Weber</strong>, Marianne, Max <strong>Weber</strong>. A Biography, Zohn, H. (transl.), New Brunswick,<br />
NJ: Transaction Books, 1988, p. 253.<br />
30 See Sombart, mK, I, p. 383: ‘Damit aber war die Zeit erfüllt, daß sich jener<br />
merkwürdige psychologische Prozeß in den Menschen abermals vollzog, dessen<br />
Verlauf uns neuerdings mit gewohnter Meisterschaft Georg Simmel geschildert<br />
hat: die Erhebung des absoluten Mittels – des Geldes – zum höchsten Zweck.’<br />
Parsons provides an excellent summary of Sombart on money, not realizing it is<br />
taken from Simmel: ‘All the qualitative differences of the most diverse economic<br />
goods are reduced to a single common denominator, money. This quantitative<br />
measure gives a means of comparison of diverse goods on the one hand. On<br />
the other hand it gives an objective purpose for all economic activity, which is<br />
primarily the making of profit in terms of money, and only indirectly the securing<br />
of the goods for which money can be exchanged. Thus a wedge is driven<br />
between the “natural” end of economic action, the satisfaction of needs, and the<br />
means to that satisfaction.’ Early Essays, p. 8. Sombart, in applying Simmel’s<br />
theory to the period of the end of the Middle Ages, left himself short of historical<br />
evidence; this is reflected in the criticisms of the historians, from which the<br />
Sombart thesis never really recovered.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, PESC, p. 52; GARS, I, p. 34, note 1: ‘The concept of the spirit of<br />
capitalism is here used in this specific sense [Franklin not Fugger], it is the spirit<br />
of capitalism.’ <strong>Weber</strong> footnotes this sentence as follows: ‘This is the basis of our<br />
difference from Sombart in stating the problem.’ ‘For Sombart’s view see op. cit.<br />
[mK] pp. 357, 380, etc. His reasoning here connects with the brilliant analysis<br />
given in Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes (final chapter).’<br />
31 This is difficult to reference because it takes us to the heart of Simmel’s analysis.<br />
But: ‘The projection of mere relations into particular objects is one of the<br />
great accomplishments of the mind; when the mind is embodied in objects, these<br />
become a vehicle for the mind and endow it with a livelier and more comprehensive<br />
activity. The ability to construct such symbolic objects attains its greatest<br />
triumph in money’ (Simmel, G., Philosophy of Money, 1978, p. 129). ‘All the<br />
implications of money for other parts of the cultural process result from its essential<br />
function of providing the most concise possible expression and the most<br />
intense representation of the economic value of thing.’ . . . ‘This process might<br />
be called the growing spiritualization (‘Vergeistigung’) of money, since it is the
Notes 277<br />
essence of mental activity to bring unity out of diversity’ (Philosophy of Money,<br />
p. 198; 1900 German edition, p. 175).<br />
32 ‘Über einige Kategorien der verstehenden Soziologie’, Logos. Internationale<br />
Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur, 4, 3, 1913, pp. 253–94; reprinted in<br />
GAWL, p. 427; translated as ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’, Graber,<br />
E.E. (transl.), The Sociological Quarterly, 22, 1981, pp. 151–80. In footnote<br />
1, <strong>Weber</strong> references Simmel’s Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. At the end<br />
of the footnote, he indicates he wishes to separate subjectively meant meaning<br />
more sharply from the objectively valid. This same point is repeated in the ‘rewrite’<br />
of ‘Soziologische Grundbegriffe’ of 1921 (GAWL, p. 541), but this time<br />
Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes is explicitly mentioned, as is his Soziologie.<br />
33 This corresponds to the distinction drawn by Martin Hollis, in a different idiom,<br />
between plastic man and autonomous man. See Hollis, M., Models of Man. Philosophical<br />
Thoughts on Social Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,<br />
1977, pp. 1–21.<br />
34 This is quite a remarkable statement for it offers a unification of the human<br />
and natural sciences. The natural sciences take as foundational the assertion of<br />
causality – the influence of one event on a subsequent event – and that of energy.<br />
The English translation does not quite capture the significance of the original<br />
statement. ‘Der Kompetenzstreit zwischen Kausalität und Teleologie innerhalb<br />
unseres Handelns schlichtet sich also so: indem der Erfolg, seinem Inhalte nach,<br />
in der Form psychischer Wirksamkeit da ist, bevor er sich in die der objektiven<br />
Sichtbarkeit kleidet, wird der Strenge der Kausalverbindung nicht der geringste<br />
Abbruch getan; denn für diese kommen die Inhalte nur, wenn sie Energien<br />
geworden sind, in Betracht, und insofern sind Ursache und Erfolg durchaus geschieden,<br />
während die Identität, die die ideellen Inhalte beider zeigen, wiederum<br />
mit der realen Verursachung überhaupt nichts zu tun hat’ (Simmel, G., Philosophy<br />
of Money, 1978, p. 205; Heptagon CD, Berlin, 2001, p. 198).<br />
35 It is possible for advanced paper currencies to operate in complex but premodern<br />
societies, such as the Tang dynasty, c. ad 1000.<br />
36 Nipperdey, T., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Protestantism and the Debate around 1900’, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
Protestant Ethic, p. 73.<br />
37 Simmel, Philosophy of Money, p. 56.<br />
38 It is as well to note that, in the first edition, Simmel qualified what he meant<br />
by historical materialism: ‘it might be more exact to call this historical sensualism’.<br />
39 Simmel, Philosophy of Money, p. 54.<br />
40 Simmel, Philosophy of Money, p. 56.<br />
41 Riesebrodt, M., in The Protestant Ethic Turns 100, p. 33.<br />
42 Riesebrodt, M., in The Protestant Ethic Turns 100, p. 35.<br />
3 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism<br />
1 There is neither an exact translation equivalence between ‘Kultur’ and civilization<br />
nor between ‘Kultur’ and culture.<br />
2 Winckelmann, J. (ed.), Die protestantische Ethik, Gütersloh, Gütersloher Verlagshaus<br />
Mohn, 5th edn, 1979.<br />
3 ‘Studies’ in the plural because, in 1906, <strong>Weber</strong> wrote a second (and shorter)<br />
essay on the Protestant sects and modern capitalism, reflecting his experience of<br />
contemporary religion in North America.<br />
4 Green, R.G., Protestantism and Capitalism. The <strong>Weber</strong> Thesis and its Critics,<br />
Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1959.<br />
5 Max <strong>Weber</strong> and the Spirit of Capitalism – 100 Years On, special edition of Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 5.2 and 6.1, 2005–6; Das Faszinosum Max <strong>Weber</strong>s, Ay, K.-L.
278 Notes<br />
(ed.), Constance: UVK, 2006; Swatos, W.H. Jr and Kaelber, L. (eds), The Protestant<br />
Ethic Turns 100. Essays on the Centenary of the <strong>Weber</strong> Thesis, Boulder, CO:<br />
Paradigm Publishers, 2005.<br />
6 To be edited by Peter Ghosh.<br />
7 Hedstrom, P., and Swedberg, R. (eds), Social Mechanisms: An Analytical Approach<br />
to Social Theory, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.<br />
8 The translator, Talcott Parsons, makes a half-hearted cross-reference to <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
‘Wissenschaftslehre’ at this point.<br />
9 To gauge this, consider the complexity and scholarship involved in a recent<br />
‘generalist’ history – see MacCulloch, D., Reformation. Europe’s House Divided.<br />
1490–1700, London: Penguin, 2003.<br />
10 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., Roscher and Knies. The Logical Problem of Historical Economics,<br />
Oakes, G. (ed./transl.), New York: Free Press, 1975.<br />
11 <strong>Weber</strong>, Marianne, Max <strong>Weber</strong>. A Biography, Zohn, H. (transl.), New Brunswick,<br />
NJ: Transaction Books, 1988, p. 310.<br />
12 See Baumgarten, E., Werk und Person, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck),<br />
1964. See also Baehr, P., The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and<br />
Other Writings, Baehr, P., and Wells, G.(eds/transl.), London: Penguin, 2002, p.<br />
12.<br />
13 Baehr, P., and Wells, G. (eds/transl.), The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of<br />
Capitalism and Other Writings, London: Penguin, 2002, p. 28.<br />
14 Liebersohn, H., ‘<strong>Weber</strong>’s Historical Concept of National Identity’, in <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
Protestant Ethic. Origins, Evidence, Contexts, Lehmann, H., and Roth, G. (eds),<br />
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 125.<br />
15 Ghosh, P., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Idea of “Puritanism”: a Case Study in the Empirical<br />
Construction of the Protestant Ethic’, History of European Ideas, 29, 2003, pp.<br />
183–221.<br />
16 Dowden, E., Puritan and Anglican. Studies in Literature, London: Kegan Paul,<br />
Trench, Trübner, 1900, p. 235.<br />
17 Dowden, Puritan and Anglican, p. 235.<br />
18 Dowden, Puritan and Anglican, p. 232.<br />
19 Dowden, Puritan and Anglican, p. 248.<br />
20 PESC, p. 129.<br />
21 PESC, p. 119.<br />
22 See Dilthey’s analysis of Luther’s hymns.<br />
23 Davies, N., ‘Gesang’ in Davies, N. (ed.), Europe. A History, Oxford: Oxford<br />
University Press, 1996, p. 486.<br />
24 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, pp.<br />
35–6.<br />
25 MacCulloch, p. 378.<br />
26 MacKinnon, M.H., ‘The Longevity of the Thesis. A Critique of the Critics’, in<br />
Lehmann and Roth, <strong>Weber</strong>’s Protestant Ethic.<br />
27 See Geyerz, K. von, ‘Biographical Evidence on Predestination, Covenant, and<br />
Special Covenant’ in Lehmann and Roth, <strong>Weber</strong>’s Protestant Ethic; Kaelber, L.,<br />
‘Rational Capitalism, Traditionalism and Adventure Capitalism. New Research<br />
on the <strong>Weber</strong> Thesis’, in Swatos and Kaelber, The Protestant Ethic Turns 100,<br />
pp. 157–61.<br />
28 Westminster Confessions: ‘Those who truly believe in the Lord Jesus, who honestly<br />
love him and try to walk in good conscience before him, may in this life be<br />
assured with certainty that they are in a state of grace.’ Quoted by MacKinnon<br />
in Lehmann and Roth, <strong>Weber</strong>’s Protestant Ethic, p. 220.<br />
29 Zaret in Lehmann and Roth, <strong>Weber</strong>’s Protestant Ethic, p. 249.<br />
30 An important area of research, see Kaelber, L., in Swatos and Kaelber, The Protestant<br />
Ethic Turns 100, pp. 154–6.
Notes 279<br />
31 Zaret, D., ‘The Use and Abuse of Textual Data’ in Lehmann and Roth, <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
Protestant Ethic, p. 247.<br />
32 In the German, <strong>Weber</strong> does not use the subjunctive tense, which indicates indirect<br />
speech.<br />
33 I have changed the Parsons’ translation from ‘coal’ to ‘fuel’, and ‘iron cage’ to<br />
‘casing as hard as steel’.<br />
34 Nielson, D.A., ‘The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism as Grand<br />
Narrative: Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Philosophy of History’, in Swatos and Kaelber, The<br />
Protestant Ethic Turns 100, p. 75.<br />
35 <strong>Weber</strong> himself treats the ‘isolated economic man’ (‘Wirtschaftsmenschen’) as<br />
a Robinson Crusoe figure (p. 176). It is merely an aside in his argument, but<br />
indicates that <strong>Weber</strong> was well aware of the way in which a form of rationalism<br />
came to give birth to this construction. This is further underlined by referring<br />
in his lectures on national-economy, in which he had grasped the scientific (as<br />
opposed to novelistic) fiction of ‘economic man’.<br />
36 Max <strong>Weber</strong>. Das Werk, Müller, T. and Pentzel, A. (eds), Berlin: Heptagon Reader,<br />
2002. Many of these are lost by Parsons who may well have been affronted by<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s tendency to vitalism. Or he may well have interpreted the work from<br />
the side of the sober Protestant rather than the sensuous individual. The art of<br />
translation is the art of interpretation, going as deep as the fundamental attitudes<br />
of the translator himself or herself. See the recent research by Lawrence Scaff<br />
on the Parsons translation, ‘The Creation of the Sacred Text’, MWS 5.2/6.1,<br />
2005–6, p. 205–28.<br />
37 Lepsius, R.M., ‘Mina Tobler and Max <strong>Weber</strong>: Passion Confined’, Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
Studies, 4.1, pp. 9–21. There is a Goethean flourish in Tobler’s statement. From<br />
his retreat in Dornburg in 1828, Goethe wrote, ‘the rational world can be considered<br />
as a great, immortal individual which ceaselessly produces that which is<br />
necessary and thereby comes to control the accidental’. Quoted by Dilthey, W.,<br />
Introduction to the Human Sciences, Makreel, R.A., and Rodi, F. (eds), Princeton,<br />
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 103.<br />
38 Lepsius, p.19.<br />
4 ‘Wissenschaftslehre’<br />
1 J.G. Fichte presented his ideas on ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ at the University of Jena<br />
during the 1790s and reformulated them on his move to the University of Berlin<br />
in 1800. The <strong>Weber</strong>–Fichte link cannot be entered into here, even though there<br />
is more to be said on the subject. Fichte is conventionally seen as an arch-proponent<br />
of philosophical idealism, a post-Kantian who switched German philosophy<br />
in the direction Hegel developed further. In this account, there is nothing<br />
Fichtean about <strong>Weber</strong>. The young philosophy don at Heidelberg, Emil Lask,<br />
wrote on Fichte, and we know that <strong>Weber</strong> was in conversation with Lask around<br />
1900. At the same time, Marianne <strong>Weber</strong> wrote a dissertation on Fichte and<br />
Marx, with both Lask and Max <strong>Weber</strong> acting in the role of supervisors. There is<br />
a sense in which Fichte was talismanic for the Heidelberg circle. In the preface of<br />
his book on Fichte, Lask makes clear that he is indifferent to Fichte’s own philosophical<br />
system but is drawn to the individuality and irrationality problematic,<br />
which is revealed by a historical treatment of Fichte’s philosophy; see his Fichtes<br />
Idealismus und die Geschichte, Tübingen: Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1902, p. vi.<br />
2 Turner, S.P., ‘Defining a Discipline: Sociology and its Philosophical Problems,<br />
from its Classics to 1945’, Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 15:<br />
Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, Turner, S., and Risjord, M. (eds),<br />
Amsterdam: Elsevier; Eliaeson, S., Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Methodologies, Cambridge: Polity<br />
Press, 2002.<br />
3 Harrington, A., Hermeneutic Dialogue and Social Science: A Critique of Gad-
280 Notes<br />
amer and Habermas, London, Sage, 2001. Friedman, M., A Parting of the Ways:<br />
Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Company,<br />
2000. Turner, S. ‘The Continued Relevance of <strong>Weber</strong>’s Philosophy of Science’,<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 7.1, forthcoming 2007.<br />
4 See the glossaries in Hodges, H.A., Wilhelm Dilthey. An Introduction, London:<br />
Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1944, pp. 157–60; and Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected<br />
Works, Vol. 1, Makreel R.A., and Rodi, F. (eds), Princeton, NJ: Princeton<br />
University Press, 1989, pp. 503–9.<br />
5 See “Max <strong>Weber</strong> on the Road to Prague”, transcribed and translated by Messer,<br />
E., Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 3.2., 2003, pp. 223–6.<br />
6 ‘Introduction’ to W. Dilthey. Selected Writings, Rickman, H.P. (ed.), Cambridge:<br />
Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 12.<br />
7 Dilthey, W., Introduction to the Human Sciences, Makreel R.A., and Rodi, F.<br />
(eds), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 56.<br />
8 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, pp. 57 and 96.<br />
9 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 57.<br />
10 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 58.<br />
11 <strong>Weber</strong> takes this line of thought furthest in his research on the industrial psychology<br />
of workers – see ‘Zur Psychophysik der industrielle Arbeit (1908–09)’,<br />
in <strong>Weber</strong>, M., Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik, Tübingen:<br />
J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1988, pp. 61–255.<br />
12 It is worth noting the similarity of Simmel’s definition of desire to that of<br />
Dilthey’s definition of will. On Simmel, see above, pp. 42–3.<br />
13 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., ‘Logic of the Cultural Sciences’, <strong>Weber</strong>, M., The Methodology of the<br />
Social Sciences, Shils, E.A., and Finch, H.A. (eds/transl.), New York: Free Press,<br />
1949, p. 124.<br />
14 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 78.<br />
15 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 92. In the sciences of biology<br />
and zoology in Germany, there had been a tendency – actually stemming from<br />
Goethe – for life to be defined by an essence, a ‘vital’ life force that was part<br />
of nature. This naturalism was carried over only too enthusiastically into the<br />
human and cultural subjects, and allowed the contemporaneous formulation of<br />
nation and race on biological lines, leading eventually to social Darwinism and<br />
eugenics. See Whimster, S., ‘Liberal Eugenics and the Vitalist Life Sciences: Incongruities<br />
in the German Human Sciences in the 19th Century’, History of the<br />
Human Sciences, 8, 1, 1995, pp. 107–14. It is entirely to Dilthey’s credit that he<br />
saw what a mistaken approach this was.<br />
16 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 84.<br />
17 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 154.<br />
18 Popper, K., The Open Society and its Enemies, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University<br />
Press, 1950, and The Poverty of Historicism, London: Routledge and Kegan<br />
Paul, 1957. What lacks from Popper’s criticism is a distinctive way forward for<br />
the human sciences, other than a reflection of the correct protocol of the natural<br />
sciences.<br />
19 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 158.<br />
20 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 95.<br />
21 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 112.<br />
22 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 109.<br />
23 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 120.<br />
24 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 95.<br />
25 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 95.<br />
26 In a letter to his mother (24 January 1886), <strong>Weber</strong> relates Frensdorff ’s uncanny<br />
ability to make the student doubt what he at first thought was certain.<br />
27 See Evans, R.J., In Defence of History, London: Granta, 1997.
Notes 281<br />
28 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, Rickman, H.P. (ed./transl.), Cambridge:<br />
Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 247.<br />
29 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, pp. 248–9.<br />
30 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, p. 249. Emphases are Dilthey’s.<br />
31 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, p. 256.<br />
32 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, p. 254.<br />
33 See Graf, W.F., ‘Friendship between Experts: Notes on <strong>Weber</strong> and Troeltsch’, in<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> and his Contemporaries, Mommsen, W.J., and Osterhammel, J. (eds),<br />
London: Allen & Unwin, 1987; and Whimster, S. ‘R.H. Tawney, Ernst Troeltsch<br />
and Max <strong>Weber</strong> on Puritanism and Capitalism’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 5.2, 2005,<br />
pp. 297–316.<br />
34 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, pp. 255–7.<br />
35 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, p. 257.<br />
36 See <strong>Weber</strong>’s footnote in his first reply to Rachfahl, where he quotes the Puritans’<br />
dictum: ‘We must obey God rather than men’ – a sentiment that was lacking<br />
in the Lutheran formation of German political culture; The Protestant Ethic<br />
Debate, Chalcraft, D., and Harrington, A. (eds), Liverpool: Liverpool University<br />
Press, p. 83.<br />
37 Modern hermeneutics would insist on a greater separation of explication and the<br />
different phases of understanding. See Mueller-Vollmer, K., The Hermeneutics<br />
Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 12 and 45.<br />
38 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, pp. 257–9.<br />
39 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 50.<br />
40 For the full exposition of the categories of life, see Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected<br />
Writings, pp. 231–45.<br />
41 Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, p. 51.<br />
42 See the introduction by his editors, Makreel and Rodi, pp. 3–43.<br />
43 Smith, Woodruff, D. Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840–<br />
1920, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.<br />
44 Marianne <strong>Weber</strong>, p. 260. See the argument in Hans Henrik Bruun that, even by<br />
1903, <strong>Weber</strong> was sceptical of the metaphysical implications of Rickert’s value<br />
selection position – ‘<strong>Weber</strong> on Rickert: From Value Relation to Ideal Type’,<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 1.2, 2001, pp. 138–60. Rickert himself acknowledged that<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>’s own paths led him away from a Rickertian philosophy of values and<br />
retained only a pragmatic use of his ‘logic’. For Rickert’s (almost tearful) assessment<br />
of <strong>Weber</strong>’s relation to his writings, see the Preface to the 3rd and 4th editions<br />
of Rickert, H., The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences,<br />
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 8–11.<br />
45 Quoted in Bruun, H.H., Science, Values and Politics in Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Methodology,<br />
Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1972, p.85.<br />
46 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., Roscher and Knies. The Logical Problem of Historical Economics,<br />
New York: Free Press, 1975, pp. 55–73.<br />
47 Bruun, H.H., Science, p. 89.<br />
48 An example of this might be Michael Thompson’s Theory of Rubbish, Oxford:<br />
Oxford University Press, 1979.<br />
49 Bruun, H.H., Science, pp. 91–2.<br />
50 This procedure also carries with it a danger of imposing current public values<br />
on to the past, what Skinner terms retrospective interpretation. In large part,<br />
historians contemporary to <strong>Weber</strong> were guilty of this on a massive scale. The<br />
search for the state in the medieval period, in German nineteenth-century historiography,<br />
predetermined what was studied and, in part, how it was studied.<br />
See Whimster, S., ‘Patrimonialism: Its meaning for nineteenth century German<br />
historians with special reference to Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s adoption and use of the term<br />
in his Herrschaftssoziologie’, Doctoral dissertation, London: University of London,<br />
1976; and Schorn-Schütte, L., Karl Lamprecht. Kulturgeschichtsschreibung
282 Notes<br />
zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984.<br />
In contrast, Dilthey’s treatment of the processes of communal and associational<br />
life are entirely open-ended, and his analysis is explicitly concerned with avoiding<br />
premature conceptual closure (see above).<br />
51 Rickert, H., The Limits of Concept Formation in the Natural Sciences, Cambridge:<br />
Cambridge University Press, 1986 (translation based on 4th edn, 1921),<br />
p. 145. This is a strange title, as its thrust is the possibility and conditions of<br />
concept formation in the historical sciences. It perhaps acknowledges a book<br />
that Dilthey explicitly addresses: du Bois-Reymond, E., Über der Grenzen der<br />
Naturerkennens, Leipzig: Veit, 1872; see Dilthey, Introduction to the Human<br />
Sciences, p. 61, note 10.<br />
52 Rickert, p. 146.<br />
53 Oakes, G., <strong>Weber</strong> and Rickert, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 69.<br />
54 Rickert, p. 141. I have changed ‘goods’ to ‘things’ in the translation.<br />
55 It is no less strange, however, than the work of modern logicians, such as Quine,<br />
who face the same problem – how do our descriptions of reality stand in relation<br />
to reality? A technical language is used by ‘logicians’ in the theory of knowledge,<br />
and this probably sounds strange to social scientists.<br />
56 Rickert, p. 159, note 29.<br />
57 Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, pp. 258–9.<br />
58 Rossi, P., ‘<strong>Weber</strong>, Dilthey und Husserls Logische Untersuchungen’, in Wagner,<br />
G., and Zipprian, H., (eds), Max <strong>Weber</strong>s Wissenschaftslehre, Frankfurt a.M.:<br />
Suhrkamp, 1994, pp. 199–223.<br />
59 Huff, T.E., Max <strong>Weber</strong> and the Methodology of the Social Sciences, New Brunswick,<br />
NJ: Transaction Books, 1984, p. 50.<br />
60 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., ‘Marginal Utility Theory and the Fundamental Law of Psychophysics’,<br />
Scheider, L. (transl.), Social Science Quarterly, 56, 1975, pp. 21–36.<br />
61 Quoted in Huff, T.E., Max <strong>Weber</strong> and the Methodology of the Social Sciences, p.<br />
61.<br />
62 Simmel, G., The Problems of the Philosophy of History, Oakes, G. (ed./transl.),<br />
New York: Free Press, 1997, p. 94.<br />
63 Huff, T.E., Max <strong>Weber</strong> and the Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 72–4.<br />
See also the recent article by Turner, S. ‘The Continued Relevance of <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
Philosophy of Science’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 7.1, forthcoming 2007.<br />
64 Die Herausgeber, ‘Geleitwort’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik,<br />
XIX, 1, 1904, pp. I–VII.<br />
65 There is not, however, a direct correspondence between Kant’s triad and <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
elaboration of value spheres. See Harrington, A., ‘Value spheres and validity’,<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 1.1, 2000, pp. 84–103.<br />
66 See Rickert, H. ‘Vom System der Werte’, Logos, 4, 1913, pp. 295–327.<br />
67 Habermas, J., Knowledge and Human Interests, London: Heinemann, 1972.<br />
Habermas’ position assumes, ‘contra’ Dilthey, the opposition of science and<br />
hermeneutics. For Habermas, the latter rests on the transcendental possibilities<br />
of intersubjectivity. Dilthey, in contrast, wanted to create a science of mental life<br />
but one made possible by a human science based on hermeneutics.<br />
68 Bruun, H.H., Science, p. 79.<br />
69 It is unclear whether <strong>Weber</strong> is saying that the world out there is irrational or<br />
that mankind is placed in an irrational stance because it has no secure basis for<br />
overcoming the divide. The first position is not strictly logical for, if you cannot<br />
know the nature of reality, how can one say it is an irrational chaos. Bruun has<br />
discussed this issue in relation to Dieter Henrich’s Kantian and perceptual attitude<br />
to reality and Tenbruck’s ontological assumption of the irrationality of the<br />
world – Science, pp. 140–4.<br />
70 ‘The Vocation of Science’, EW, pp. 283–7.
Notes 283<br />
71 We have seen this with Dilthey, but it is a position firmly asserted by Spinoza,<br />
whose influence over German thought at the time was considerable.<br />
72 EW, pp. 359–404.<br />
73 <strong>Weber</strong>, M., The Methodology of the Social Sciences, Shils, E.A., and Finch, H.A.<br />
(eds/transl.), New York: Free Press, 1949.<br />
74 Hollis, M., ‘Two Models’, in Models of Man, Philosophical Thoughts on Social<br />
Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.<br />
75 Durkheim said this in Suicide, and <strong>Weber</strong> in ‘The Logic of the Cultural Sciences’,<br />
The Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 126–8.<br />
76 In a <strong>Weber</strong>ian world of infinite complexity, there would be little sense in pursuing<br />
a long counterfactual train of thought, as if a historical event, such as the<br />
Russian Revolution, had not happened. <strong>Weber</strong> is concerned with actual events<br />
and their attribution back to causes.<br />
77 See Turner, S.P., and Factor, R.A., Max <strong>Weber</strong>. Lawyer as Social Thinker, London:<br />
Routledge, 1994. Wagner, G. and Zipprian, H. ‘The Problem of Reference<br />
in Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Theory of Causal Explanation’, Human Studies, 9, 1986, pp.<br />
21–42.<br />
78 Strauss, A., and Corbin, J., Basics of Qualitative Research. Grounded Theory<br />
Procedures and Techniques, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990. On sensitizing concepts,<br />
see Atkinson, P., and Hammersley, M., Ethnography. Principles in Practice,<br />
London: Routledge, 1995.<br />
5 The reluctant sociologist<br />
1 Lehmann, H. ‘<strong>Weber</strong>’s Use of Scholarly Praise and Scholarly Criticism in The<br />
Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 5.2, 2005,<br />
pp. 233–4.<br />
2 Quoted in The Protestant Ethic Debate, Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Replies to his Critics,<br />
1907–1910, Chalcraft, D.J., and Harrington, A. (eds), Harrington, A., and<br />
Shields, M. (transl.), Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001, p. 27.<br />
3 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, Baehr, P.,<br />
and Wells, G. (eds/transl.), London: Penguin, 2002, p. 26.<br />
4 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism and Other Writings, pp.<br />
264–5.<br />
5 Troeltsch, E., Protestantism and Progress. A Historical Study of the Relation of<br />
Protestantism to the Modern World, Montgomery, W. (transl.), London: William<br />
& Norgate, 1912.<br />
6 Kippenberg, H., ‘Einleitung’ to Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Religiöse Gemeinschaften,<br />
MWG I/22-2, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001, pp. 7–8.<br />
7 PE Debate, p. 118.<br />
8 PE Debate, p. 131.<br />
9 Reference to Georg Siebeck.<br />
10 Peter Ghosh argues that capitalism ‘was the central element in <strong>Weber</strong>’s conception<br />
of modernity’ in the period from 1890 to around 1907–8. Thereafter<br />
‘capitalism was replaced as a central focus by rationality and rationalization. As<br />
a result <strong>Weber</strong>’s central conceptual reading of modernity would now be routed<br />
through bureaucracy and not capitalism, though he always supposed that the<br />
two were closely linked.’ Ghosh, P., ‘Not the Protestant Ethic? Max <strong>Weber</strong> at St<br />
Louis’, History of European Ideas, 31, 2005, p. 382.<br />
11 Briefe, MWG II/5, 26 December 1907, p. 426.<br />
12 Quoted in ‘Introduction’ by Roth, G., in <strong>Weber</strong>, M., Economy and Society, New<br />
York: Bedminster Press, 1968, p. lxiv.<br />
13 M.I. Finley, letter to F. Hinchelheim, 17 November 1947, quoted in Nafissi, M.,<br />
Ancient Athens and Modern Ideology. Value, Theory and Evidence in Historical
284 Notes<br />
Sciences. Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley, London: Institute of Classical<br />
Studies, 2005, p. 213.<br />
14 The English translation rather garbles its title and subheadings. The Agrarian Sociology<br />
of Ancient Civilizations, Franks, R.I. (transl.), London: New Left Books,<br />
1976.<br />
15 Roth, Introduction, p. xlv.<br />
16 See Deininger, J., MWG I/6, p. 139.<br />
17 <strong>Weber</strong> opens the section on Mesopotamia with this paragraph: ‘Cuneiform<br />
scholars have astonishing achievements to their credit, but nevertheless the<br />
sources – including the Code of Hammurabi – have not yet been made available<br />
for interpretation by non-specialists, The scholar who has not mastered the field<br />
and must depend on translated texts cannot therefore reach definite conclusions<br />
regarding the Mesopotamia economy. Furthermore it is precisely the texts<br />
most important for legal and social history which often elude interpretation (AS,<br />
p. 83).<br />
18 Colognesi, L.C., Max <strong>Weber</strong> und die Wirtschaft der Antike, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck<br />
und Ruprecht, 2004. Bruhns, H., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s “Basic Concepts” in the<br />
Context of his Studies in Economic History’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, Beiheft 1, 2006,<br />
pp. 33–69. Deininger, J, ‘Einleitung’, Zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte des<br />
Altertums. Schriften 1896–1909, MWG I/6, 2006. Nafissi, M., Ancient Athens<br />
and Modern Ideology. Value Theory and Evidence in Historical Sciences. Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley, London: Institute of Classical Studies,<br />
2005.<br />
19 Bücher, C., Industrial Evolution, (trans S. Morley Wickett), London: George<br />
Bell, 1901, pp. 83–149.<br />
20 Nafissi, p. 44.<br />
21 Quoted in Nafissi, pp. 45–7.<br />
22 Quoted in Nafissi, p. 37.<br />
23 See Chapter 8.<br />
24 Sombart, W., ‘Der kapitalistische Unternehmer’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft<br />
und Sozialpolitik, XXIX, 1909, pp. 689–758.<br />
25 See EW, pp. 35–54.<br />
26 See Nippel, W., ‘Einleitung’ to Die Stadt, MWG, I, 22-5, 1999, pp. 12–13.<br />
27 Mommsen, W.J., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s “Grand Sociology”: The Origins and Composition<br />
of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie’, History and Theory, 39, 2000,<br />
p. 366.<br />
28 Orihara, H., ‘From “A Torso with a Wrong Head” to “Five Disjointed Body-Parts<br />
without a Head”: A Critique of the Editorial Policy for Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe<br />
I/22’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 3.2, 2003, pp. 133–68. Baier, H., Lepsius, M.R,<br />
Mommsen, W.J., and Schluchter, W., ‘Overview of the Text of Economy and<br />
Society by the Editors of Gesamtausgabe’, Harrington, A. (transl.), Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
Studies, 1.1, 2000, pp. 104–14.<br />
29 Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, I. Abteilung, Wirtschaft und Wirtschaftswissenschaft,<br />
brought to press by Bücher, K., Schumpeter, J., and Freiherrn von Wieser,<br />
Fr., Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1914, p. vii.<br />
30 The outline of materials for the ‘Handbuch der politischen Ökonomie’, which<br />
comes from the Siebeck archive, is reprinted in Briefe, MWG, II/6, pp. 766–74.<br />
31 The editorial report on this text in the Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe reckons it to<br />
have been written in 1910, MWG, I, 22-1, p. 108.<br />
32 Briefe, MWG, II/8, pp. 449–50.<br />
33 <strong>Weber</strong>, Marianne, Ehefrau und Mutter in der Rechtsentwicklung. Eine Einführung,<br />
Tübingen: Mohr, 1907. On the reciprocal influences of Max and Marianne<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, see Lichtblau, K., ‘Die Bedeutung von “Ehefrau und Mutter in der<br />
Rechtsentwicklung” für das Werk Max <strong>Weber</strong>s’, in Marianne <strong>Weber</strong>. Beiträge zu
Notes 285<br />
Werk und Person, Meurer, B. (ed.), Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004, pp. 208–9;<br />
and Editorial Report to ‘Hausverband, Sippe und Nachbarschaft’, MWG, I/22-<br />
1, pp. 282–90. Roth had already noted the link in 1968, see his Introduction,<br />
ES, p. lxvii.<br />
34 <strong>Weber</strong>, Marianne, Max <strong>Weber</strong>. A Biography, Zohn, H. (transl.), New Brunswick,<br />
NJ: Transaction Books, 1988, p. 420.<br />
35 Scaff, L.A., Fleeing the Iron Cage. Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought<br />
of Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989, p. 141.<br />
36 Scaff, p. 142.<br />
37 Scaff, p. 141.<br />
38 See Whimster, S., ‘The Secular Ethic and the Culture of Modernism’, in Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, Rationality and Modernity, Whimster, S., and Lash, S. (eds), London:<br />
Allen & Unwin, 1987, pp. 278–80.<br />
39 Quoted in Käsler, D., Max <strong>Weber</strong>. An Introduction to his Life and Work, Cambridge:<br />
Polity, 1988, p. 188.<br />
40 Quoted in Käsler, p. 190.<br />
41 Quoted in Scaff, pp. 143–4. Letter to Roberto Michels, 9 November 1912.<br />
42 For a translation of the MWG views, see ‘Overview of Economy and Society by<br />
the Editors’, p. 104–14.<br />
43 Orihara, pp. 133–68.<br />
44 ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology, Graber, E.E. (transl.), Sociological<br />
Quarterly, 22.2, 1981, p. 179.<br />
6 The Sociology of Religion<br />
1 Briefe, MWG, II/8, pp. 449–50.<br />
2 Schmidt-Glintzer, MWG I/19, p. 31–4.<br />
3 Quoted by Schmidt-Glintzer, MWG I/19, p. 40.<br />
4 Reproduced in MWG, I/19, pp. 28–9.<br />
5 Quoted by Schmidt-Glintzer, MWG I/19, p. 40.<br />
6 The American translations were scattered over different books. The situation<br />
is discussed in Whimster, S., ‘Translator’s Note on <strong>Weber</strong>’s Introduction to the<br />
Economic Ethics of the World Religions, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 3.1, 2002, pp.<br />
74–98.<br />
7 A theme given recent prominence by Shlomo Eisenstadt.<br />
8 Schluchter, W., Rationalism, Religion and Domination. A <strong>Weber</strong>ian Perspective,<br />
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 411–61.<br />
9 Discussion of pre-animism, magic and religion in SocRel (pp. 3–10) are to be<br />
found in the ‘Introduction’ (to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions)<br />
(EW, pp. 66–9); likewise exemplary prophecy (SocRel, p. 24) in the ‘Introduction’<br />
(EW, pp. 73–4), theodicy (SocRel, pp. 138–140) in ‘Introduction (EW, pp.<br />
62–4), carriers of religion (SocRel, pp. 80–94) in ‘Introduction’ (EW, pp. 57–8<br />
and 71–2), and virtuosi (SocRel, p. 163) in ‘Introduction’ (EW, pp. 76–7). Chapters<br />
13 and 14 of the Sociology of Religion correspond to the main argument and<br />
its divisions of the ‘Intermediate Reflections’ (EW, pp. 215–44).<br />
10 Kippenberg, H., ‘Einleitung’ to Religiöse Gemeinschaften, MWG, I/22-2, p. 4.<br />
11 The Social Science Encyclopaedia, Kuper, A., and Kuper, J. (eds), London:<br />
Routledge, 1985, p. 871.<br />
12 The Social Science Encyclopaedia, p. 698.<br />
13 Wellhausen, J., Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1883.<br />
See Kippenberg, MWG I/22-2, p. 41.<br />
14 See Essential <strong>Weber</strong>, pp. 35–54.<br />
15 Kippenberg, MWG I/22-2, p. 31.<br />
16 Siebeck, H., Lehrbuch der Religionsphilosophie, Freiburg: Mohr Siebeck, 1893.
286 Notes<br />
17 Evans-Pritchard, E.E., Theories of Primitive Religion, Oxford: Oxford University<br />
Press, 1965, Ch. 2.<br />
18 Macrae, D.G., Max <strong>Weber</strong>, London: Fontana, 1974, pp. 80–1.<br />
19 Marett, R.R., The Threshold of Religion, London: Methuen, 1909. See the discussion<br />
in Kippenberg, MWG, I/22-2, p. 47.<br />
20 Windelband, W., ‘Das Heilige’, in Präludien, Aufsätze und Reden zur Einleitung<br />
in die Philosophie, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1907.<br />
21 Cat, p. 154.<br />
22 Tracing Husserl in <strong>Weber</strong> is not an easy task, but <strong>Weber</strong> had read his Logische<br />
Untersuchungen. In the context of Hugo Münsterberg’s psychological approach<br />
to understanding, <strong>Weber</strong> wrote, ‘See also Husserl, Logical Investigations, Appendix<br />
to Volume II, p. 703. He contests the view that inner experience possesses a<br />
specific “certainty” and a higher “ontological status”.’ <strong>Weber</strong>, M., Roscher and<br />
Knies, The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, Oakes, G. (transl.), New<br />
York: Free Press, 1975, p. 261.<br />
23 Gerth and Mills translated, presumably wittingly in the case of Hans Gerth,<br />
‘Heilsgüter’ as ‘cultural values’ – more homage to Rickert than confronting<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>.<br />
24 Yair, G. and Soyer, M., ‘The Golem myth in German thought’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies,<br />
6.2, 2006, pp. 231–55.<br />
25 <strong>Weber</strong>’s quotes; it was Dilthey’s term.<br />
26 See Jenkins, R., ‘Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> at the Millennium’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 1.1, 2000, pp. 11–32.<br />
27 EW, pp. 220–41.<br />
28 EW, pp. 263 and 266.<br />
29 EW, pp. 274 and 277.<br />
30 See the discussion in Zubaida, S., ‘<strong>Weber</strong> and the Islamic City’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies,<br />
6.1, 2006, pp. 111–18.<br />
31 See the discussion in EW, pp. 17–18.<br />
32 Quoted in Rickman, H.P., Wilhelm Dilthey. Selected Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge<br />
University Press, 1976, p. 44.<br />
33 Runciman, W.G., ‘Was Max <strong>Weber</strong> a Selectionist in Spite of Himself?’, Journal of<br />
Classical Sociology, 1.1, 2001, pp. 13–32; ‘Not Elective but Selective Affinities’,<br />
Journal of Classical Sociology, 5.2, 2005, pp. 175–87; and ‘Puritan American<br />
Capitalists and Evolutionary Game Theory’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 5.2, 2005, pp.<br />
281–96.<br />
34 Runciman, W.G., ‘Not Elective but Selective Affinities’, pp. 180–3.<br />
35 Lepsius, M.R., ‘Eigenart und Potenzial des <strong>Weber</strong>-Paradigmas’ in Das <strong>Weber</strong>-<br />
Paradigma, Albert, G., Bienfait, A., Sigmund, S., Wendt, C. (eds), Tübingen:<br />
Mohr Siebeck, 2003, pp. 32–41.<br />
7 Going beyond <strong>Weber</strong><br />
1 Weiss, J., ‘On the Irreversibility of Western Rationalization and Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s<br />
Alleged Fatalism’, in Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Rationality and Modernity, Whimster, S., and<br />
Lash, S. (eds), London: Allen & Unwin, 1987, pp. 154–63.<br />
2 Innis, H.A., The Fur Trade of Canada, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1927;<br />
The Cod Fisheries: the History of an International-economy, New Haven, CT:<br />
Yale University Press, 1940.<br />
3 Bellah, R.N., ‘What is Axial about the Axial Age?’, Archives Européennes de<br />
Sociologie, 46, 1, 2005, pp. 69–89.<br />
4 Innis, H.A., Empire and Communications, Toronto: Toronto University Press,<br />
2nd rev. edn, 1972, p. 10.<br />
5 Innis, Empire and Communication, p. 118.
Notes 287<br />
6 Quoted in Fisher, H.A.L., A History of Europe, London: Edward Arnold, 1936,<br />
p. 490.<br />
7 Innis, Empire and Communication, p. 144.<br />
8 Nicolson, A., Power and Glory. Jacobean England and the Making of the King<br />
James Bible, London: HarperCollins, 2003, p. 122–3.<br />
9 Nicolson, p. 70.<br />
10 I have sought to explain this in ‘Translator’s Note on <strong>Weber</strong>’s “Introduction to<br />
the Economic Ethics of the World Religions” ’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 3/1, 2002,<br />
pp. 74–98.<br />
11 Innis, Empire and Communications, pp. 139 and 165.<br />
12 Trevor-Roper, H.R.‚ Religion, The Reformation and Social Change and other<br />
Essays, London: Macmillan, 1967, pp. 1–45.<br />
13 Jaspers, K., Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, Frankfurt: Fischer, 1955, p.<br />
14.<br />
14 Jaspers, p. 15.<br />
15 Eisenstadt, S.N., Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, vol. 2,<br />
Leiden: Brill, 2003, p. 575.<br />
16 Quoted in Bellah, p. 72.<br />
17 Eisenstadt, p. 535–6.<br />
18 Eisenstadt, p. 643.<br />
19 Tawney, R.H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. A Historical Study, London:<br />
John Murray, 1926. See also Whimster, S., ‘R.H. Tawney, Ernst Troeltsch, and<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> on Puritanism and Capitalism’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 5.2, 2005, pp.<br />
297–316.<br />
20 Eisenstadt, p. 536.<br />
21 Eisenstadt, p. 517.<br />
22 Quoted in Eisenstadt, p. 811.<br />
23 Bellah, pp. 170–1.<br />
24 The Religion of China. Confucianism and Taoism, Gerth, H.H. (ed./transl.) New<br />
York: Free Press, 1951; The Religion of India. The Sociology of Hinduism and<br />
Buddhism, Gerth, H.H., Martindale, D. (eds/transl.), New York: Free Press,<br />
1958.<br />
25 See FMW, pp. 293–4.<br />
26 ‘Prefatory Remarks’, p. 26 – translation modified.<br />
27 Runciman, W.G., ‘Was Max <strong>Weber</strong> a Selectionist in Spite of Himself?’, Journal of<br />
Classical Sociology, 1.1, 2001, pp. 13–32; ‘Not Elective but Selective Affinities’,<br />
Journal of Classical Sociology, 5.2, 2005, pp. 175–87; and ‘Puritan American<br />
Capitalists and Evolutionary Game Theory’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies, 5.2, 2005, pp.<br />
281–96.<br />
28 See the discussion in Scaff, L., ‘The Creation of the Sacred Text. Talcott Parsons<br />
translates: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies,<br />
5.2, p. 220. The quote used is taken from the manuscript version of Parsons’<br />
translation of PESC.<br />
29 Schluchter, W., ‘<strong>Weber</strong>’s Sociology of Rationalism and Religious Rejections of<br />
the World’, in Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Rationality and Modernity, Whimster, S., and Lash,<br />
S.(eds), London: Allen & Unwin, 1987, p. 112.<br />
8 Power, legitimacy and democracy<br />
1 Sheehan, J.J. German History. 1770–1886, Oxford: Oxford University Press,<br />
1989, pp. 385–6.<br />
2 See Roth, G., Max <strong>Weber</strong>s deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte 1820–1950 mit<br />
Briefen und Dokumenten, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001, p. 210.<br />
3 For a fuller exploration of the discourses being articulated in Frankfurt, see
288 Notes<br />
Vick, B., Defining Germany: The 1848 Frankfurt Parliament and National Identity,<br />
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2002.<br />
4 See Barraclough, G., The Origins of Modern Germany, Oxford: Blackwell, 1946,<br />
p. 415; Namier, L. 1848. The Revolution of the Intellectuals, Oxford: Oxford<br />
University Press, pp. 24–33.<br />
5 Barraclough, p. 418.<br />
6 Barraclough, p. 424.<br />
7 Baumgarten, H., Hermann Baumgarten: Der deutsche Liberalismus. Eine Selbstkritik,<br />
Birke, A.M. (ed.), Frankfurt: Ullstein, pp. 14–15.<br />
8 Mommsen, W.J., Max <strong>Weber</strong> and German Politics 1890–1920, Chicago: Chicago<br />
University Press, 1984, pp. 148-53.<br />
9 Roth, G., ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>’s Articles on German Agriculture and Industry in the<br />
Encyclopedia Americana (1906/7) and their Political Context’, Max <strong>Weber</strong> Studies,<br />
6.2., 2006, pp. 185–8; on Germany as a world power, see Roth, Max <strong>Weber</strong>s<br />
deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte, pp. 25–57.<br />
10 See Wolfgang Mommsen’s assessment of this position in his Max <strong>Weber</strong> and<br />
German Politics, pp. 64–7<br />
11 Caygill, H., A Kant Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, p. 314.<br />
12 See his lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in EW, p. 269.<br />
13 Graf, F.W., ‘Ernst Troeltsch’s Evaluation of Max and Alfred <strong>Weber</strong>: Introduction<br />
and Translation of Letter by Ernst Troeltsch to Heinrich Dietzel’, Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
Studies, 4.1, 2001, pp. 101–8.<br />
14 This viewpoint is most strongly presented in <strong>Weber</strong>’s inaugural lecture at<br />
Freiburg in 1895: ‘The national state and economic policy’, Reading <strong>Weber</strong>,<br />
Tribe, K. (ed.), London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 188–209.<br />
15 As Wolfgang Mommsen points out he shared something of Baumgarten’s pessimism<br />
as well as Burckhardt’s view of politics. See Mommsen, Max <strong>Weber</strong> and<br />
German Politics, pp. 47–8.<br />
16 Poggi, G., Forms of Power, Cambridge: Polity, 2001, p. 16.<br />
17 EW, p. 182.<br />
18 Poggi, p. 19.<br />
19 Mann, M., The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1, Cambridge, Cambridge University<br />
Press, 1986, pp. 22–30.<br />
20 Poggi, p. 18.<br />
21 Hanke, E., ‘Einleitung’, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen<br />
Ordnungen und Mächte. Nachlass, MWG, I, 22–4, Herrschaft,<br />
Hanke, E. (ed.) with Kroll, T., Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2005, p.<br />
51.<br />
22 David Beetham provided a more balanced analysis of power and the role of<br />
parliament in <strong>Weber</strong>’s writings. See his Max <strong>Weber</strong> and the Theory of Modern<br />
Politics, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1985.<br />
23 Hennis, W., Max <strong>Weber</strong> und Thukydides. Nachträge zur Biographie des Werks,<br />
Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003, p. 163.<br />
24 Hanke, MWG, I/22-4, pp. 90–1.<br />
25 Hanke, MWG, I/ 22-4, pp. 45–6.<br />
26 Hanke, MWG, I/ 22-4, p. 53.<br />
27 See Mommsen, W.J., The Age of Bureaucracy. Perspectives on the Political Sociology<br />
of Max <strong>Weber</strong>, Oxford: Blackwell, 1974.<br />
28 On these themes, see Beetham, D., Democracy under Blair. A Democratic Audit<br />
of the United Kingdom, London: Politico, 2002, also his discussion in Max <strong>Weber</strong><br />
and Theory of Modern Politics, p. 115; Hennessy, P., Rulers and Servants of the<br />
State. The Blair Style of Government, 1977–2004, London: Office for Public<br />
Management, 2004.<br />
29 Palonen, K., Politics, Rhetoric and Conceptual History, Jyväskulä: Julkaisuja Pub-
Notes 289<br />
lications, 1994; also Das ‘<strong>Weber</strong>sche Moment’. Zur Kontingenz des Politischen,<br />
Wiesbaden: Westdeutsche Verlag, 1998.<br />
30 Poggi, pp. 15–28.<br />
9 Sociological categories and the types of economic activity<br />
1 Bellah, R.N., ‘What is Axial about the Axial Age?’ Archives Européennes de Sociologie,<br />
46, 1, 2005, pp. 69–89.<br />
2 In the United States, the most accomplished practitioner of a <strong>Weber</strong>ian approach<br />
was Reinhard Bendix in a series of substantive studies. For an exemplary instance,<br />
see his Work and Authority in Industry. Ideologies of Management in the<br />
Course of Industrialization, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974.<br />
3 Rex, J., and Moore, R., Race, Community and Conflict: A Study of Sparkbrook,<br />
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.<br />
4 Dench, G., Gavron, K., and Young, M., The New East End. Kinship, Race and<br />
Conflict, London: Profile Books, 2006.<br />
5 See Roth, G., ES, p. xciv.<br />
6 <strong>Weber</strong> wrote to Hermann Kantorowicz in December 1913. The latter had complained<br />
of being unable to understand his ‘Some Categories of Interpretative Sociology’.<br />
<strong>Weber</strong> replied how ‘miserably he must have formulated’ the essay. ‘It is<br />
an attempt to eliminate all “organicist”, Stammlerian superempirical “valid” (=<br />
the normatively valid) and to understand the “sociological theory of the state”<br />
(“Staatslehre”) as a theory of the purely empirical typical human action – in my<br />
view the only way – and the individual categories are questions of practicality<br />
(‘Zweckmäßigkeitsfragen’)’ (MWG, II/8, pp. 442–3). Whether Kantorowicz was<br />
enlightened by this reply is not known.<br />
7 On archaic kingship, see Bellah.<br />
8 Hanke, E., MWG, I/22-4, p. 21.<br />
9 A ‘Verband’ and associative behaviour should probably not be taken to belong<br />
to the same sort of social relationships. Much of modern organizational life is<br />
instrumentally rational, but it is instructive to think of its controlling body as<br />
operating according to the rules of a clique or gang bound by norms of face-toface<br />
camaraderie.<br />
10 Sen, A., Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Oxford:<br />
Clarendon, 1981.<br />
11 Liefmann, R., Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftlehre, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-<br />
Anstalt, Vol. 1, 1917, Vol. 2, 1919.<br />
12 Liefmann, Vol. 1, p. 15: ‘Max <strong>Weber</strong>, among others, in his essay “The objectivity<br />
of knowledge in social science and social policy” in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft<br />
und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 19, 1904, p. 59ff, puts forward the proposition<br />
that the knowledge value (‘Erkenntniswert’) of economic theory is small.’<br />
13 ‘Doch nun zum Einzeln. (Seite 15) Ich soll behaupten der Erkenntniswert der<br />
Theorie sei “gering”. Wo wäre das geschehen? Die Theorie schafft Idealtypen<br />
und diese Leistung ist gerade bei mir die unentbehrlichste. Dass Soziologie und<br />
Wirtschaftsgeschichte Theorie nie ersetzen ist eine meiner Grundüberzeugungen.<br />
Mich interessieren (nach Ihnen Seite 17) mehr die “spezielle” Zusammenhänge?<br />
Ja, wenn man die Frage: Warum nur im Okzident rationaler (Rentabilitäts-)<br />
Kapitalismus entstanden ist, einen “speziellen” Zusammenhang nennt! Es muss<br />
doch auch Leute geben, die dieser Frage nachgehen. Hierfür sind nun einmal<br />
höchst paradoxe Zusammenhänge massgebend gewesen. Moderne Wirtschaft<br />
setzt sich nur den rationalen d.h. in seinen Funktionen berechenbaren kalkulierbaren<br />
Staat, sondern rationale Technik (Wissenschaft) und eine bestimmte Art<br />
rationaler Lebensführung voraus. Warum wäre sonst der moderne Kapitalismus<br />
nich in China entstanden? Er hatter viele Jahrhtausende Zeit dazu! Getauscht
290 Notes<br />
worden ist dort seit Jahrtausenden, Papiergeld gab es vor 1100 Jahren, Münzen<br />
vor 2600 Jahren. Dass ich irgendwo bestritten hätte, dass man Tauschvorgänge<br />
anders als aus den Erwägungen der Einzelnen bestimmen könne, ist mir unbewusst<br />
(Seite 37).’ Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Rep. 92,<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, Nr. 30, Bd. 8, Aufnahme 78.<br />
14 Swedberg, R., Max <strong>Weber</strong> and the Idea of Economic Sociology, Princeton, NJ:<br />
Princeton University Press, 1998.<br />
15 Compare p. 172 of Schumpeter, J., Economic Doctrine and Method, London:<br />
George Allen and Unwin, 1954, with pp. 818–19 of Schumpeter, J., History of<br />
Economic Analysis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954. See Swedberg, pp.<br />
158–62.<br />
16 Talcott Parsons made a crucial translation slip here, rendering ‘Brennstoff ’ as<br />
‘coal’ rather than ‘fossil fuel’.
Index<br />
Agevall, Ola 273<br />
agrarian question 13–19<br />
Alcuin 199<br />
Alfonso of Liguori 68<br />
Althusius 203<br />
anthropology 71<br />
Archimedes 204<br />
Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und<br />
Sozialpolitik 7, 30, 45, 74, 100–1,<br />
105, 149, 185, 250<br />
Aristotle 71, 85<br />
Aron, Raymond 12<br />
asceticism 5, 41, 69, 181<br />
Ashoka 208<br />
Augustine, St, of Hippo 65<br />
Barraclough, Geoffrey 222<br />
Baumgarten, Hermann 223, 234<br />
Baxter, Richard 53, 54, 62, 64, 66, 70,<br />
202<br />
Bayley, Bishop 53, 62<br />
Beetham, David 288<br />
Bellah, Robert 211, 248, 252<br />
Bendix, Reinhard 9, 289<br />
Bennett, Alan 193<br />
Bismarck, Otto von 16, 220, 222–3,<br />
242<br />
Blair, Anthony 245<br />
Bloch, Maurice 168<br />
Bobbio, Norbert 229<br />
Boccaccio 88<br />
Bohm-Bäwerk, Eugen von 24–5, 268<br />
Borchardt, Knut 22<br />
Bourdieu, Pierre 266<br />
Brahmanism 171, 202<br />
Brandt, Willi 225<br />
Braun, Heinrich 100<br />
Braverman, Harry 86<br />
Brentano, Lujo 29–31, 32, 45, 49<br />
Breuer, Stefan 237–40<br />
Bruhns, Hinnerk 126, 273<br />
Bruun, Hans Henrik 103, 281<br />
Buber, Martin 165<br />
Bücher, Karl 44, 127–9, 131, 141, 142,<br />
146, 159, 248, 260–1<br />
Buddha 204, 206<br />
Buddhism 7, 175, 182<br />
Bunyan, John 53, 59–62, 68, 70, 217<br />
bureaucracy 9, 244<br />
Caesar, Julius 99<br />
Caesarism 223, 244–6<br />
calling 56–7<br />
Calvin, Jean 86, 175, 201<br />
Calvinism 36–7, 38, 63–70, 190,<br />
193–4, 212<br />
capitalism 6, 20, 31–40, 55, 127–8<br />
Caprivi, Leo von 16<br />
Cassiodorus 199<br />
causation 7, 42, 108, 110, 123, 188–9,<br />
194–5, 248, 251, 268–9<br />
Chalcraft, David 119<br />
charisma 9, 236, 238, 240, 243, 244,<br />
266<br />
Charlemagne 199<br />
Charles I of England 69<br />
Churchill, Winston 243<br />
class 227–31<br />
Cleon 241–2<br />
Coleman, James 266<br />
Colliot-Thélène, Catherine 2, 12<br />
Colognesi, Luigi 126<br />
commercial partnerships 21–22<br />
communication 196–203
292 Index<br />
Comte, Auguste 77, 78, 80, 81, 91,<br />
153, 166, 190, 198<br />
Confucianism 4, 7, 135, 171, 185, 212,<br />
215, 217<br />
Confucius 204, 206<br />
Conrad, J. 125<br />
Constantine 208<br />
Cromwell, Oliver 194–5, 241<br />
cults 165–170<br />
Dante 57–8<br />
Davidson, Donald 100<br />
Dawe, Alan 12<br />
Dawkins, Richard 190, 216<br />
de Gaulle, General 225<br />
Deininger, Jürgen 127<br />
demagogue 241–6<br />
democracy 237–40; leadership<br />
democracy 240–6<br />
Demosthenes 125<br />
Dench, Geoff 249<br />
Dent, Arthur 62<br />
Derrida, Jacques 74<br />
Descartes 203<br />
Dilthey, Wilhelm 7, 53–4, 74, 75,<br />
76–83, 92, 95–9, 107, 109, 151,<br />
152, 153, 182, 188, 251, 265<br />
Diocletian 128<br />
disenchantment 9, 182<br />
division of labour 260–1<br />
Döllinger, Johann von 68<br />
Dostoyevsky 184<br />
Dowden, Edward 59–63, 67, 72<br />
Durkheim, Emile 49, 53, 73, 77, 78,<br />
109–110, 119, 177, 192, 252<br />
Ebbinghaus, H. 98<br />
Eisenhower, Dwight D. 233<br />
Eisenstadt, S. N. 8, 194, 206–210, 269<br />
elective affinity 120–2, 190<br />
Elijah 204<br />
elite 243, 246<br />
energy 42–3<br />
Engels, Friedrich 31, 92<br />
Ephialtes 241<br />
Erasmus 200, 202–3<br />
ethnography 178<br />
Evans, R.J. 280<br />
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 177<br />
evolutionary theory 190–1<br />
Fallenstein, Georg Friedrich 220–1<br />
Fechner, G. 91<br />
Feuerbach 110<br />
Fichte, J. G. 74, 279<br />
Finch, Henry A. 105<br />
Finley, Moses 125<br />
Fischer, Karl 49, 118–20, 202<br />
Flacius 86<br />
Franklin, Benjamin 37, 54–6, 67, 70,<br />
117, 119, 190<br />
Frazer, James George 166–7, 173<br />
Frensdorff, Ferdinand 83<br />
frenzy 167<br />
Freund, Julien 9, 12<br />
Friedman, Michael 75<br />
Froben, John 200<br />
Fugger, Anton 275<br />
Fugger, Jacob 38, 52, 54, 56<br />
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 74<br />
Gandhi, Mahatma 211<br />
Gavron, Kate 249<br />
Gellner, Ernest 229<br />
George, Stefan 184<br />
Gerhard, Paul 63<br />
German Sociological Society 147–50<br />
Gerth, Hans H. 286<br />
Gervinus 221–3<br />
Ghosh, Peter 59, 123<br />
Giddens, Anthony 12, 234<br />
Gierke, Otto von 253<br />
Goethe 88, 279, 280<br />
Goffman, Erving 86<br />
Goldscheid, Rudolf 149<br />
Goldschmidt, Levin 22<br />
Goltz, Freiherr von der 124<br />
Gothein, Eberhard 37, 275<br />
Gottl, Ottlilienfeld 143, 151<br />
Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm 271, 281<br />
Greenfeld, Liah 209<br />
Grimm, brothers 221<br />
Habermas, Jürgen 102, 191, 282<br />
Haeckel, Ernst 91<br />
Hammurabi 126<br />
Hanke, Edith 232–6, 240<br />
Harnack, Adolf 86<br />
Harrington, Austin 75, 282<br />
Hedstrom, Peter 51<br />
Hegel 181, 190<br />
Heidegger 84<br />
Hennessy, Peter 288<br />
Hennis, Wilhelm 9, 71, 237<br />
Henrich, Dieter 282<br />
Herder 175, 217<br />
Herkner, Heinrich 143<br />
hermeneutics 54–9, 66, 83–90, 96,<br />
97–8, 111, 152<br />
Herrenhuter 44, 111
Hettner, A. 142<br />
heuristics 111<br />
Heuss, Alfred 124, 125<br />
Hindenberg, Paul 174<br />
Hinduism 7, 171, 182<br />
historicism 175, 181<br />
Hitler 225<br />
Hobbes 234<br />
Hollis, Martin 109<br />
Homer 204<br />
Hübinger, Gangolf 202<br />
Huff, Toby 97, 99–100<br />
Hume, David 88–9, 107<br />
Husserl, Edmund 75, 109, 151, 180,<br />
286<br />
ideal types 111–2, 131–4, 247, 264–6<br />
Innis, Harold 8, 194, 196–8, 252<br />
instrumental rationality 9<br />
intellectuals 182–5<br />
Isaiah 204<br />
Islam 186, 202, 213<br />
Jaffé, Edgar 30, 100, 160<br />
James I of England 53, 69<br />
Jaspers, Karl 152, 194, 204–6, 248, 269<br />
Jellinek, Georg 233<br />
Jenkins, Richard 286<br />
Jeremiah 204<br />
Jesus ben Sirach 56, 118<br />
Jesus of Nazareth 241<br />
Jhering 82<br />
Judaism 7<br />
Kaelber, Lutz 21<br />
Kant, Immanuel 88–9, 91, 102, 107,<br />
224, 235<br />
Kantorowicz, Hermann 165, 289<br />
Kautsky, Karl 32, 92<br />
Keller, Gottfried 68<br />
Kippenberg, Hans 7, 122, 164–6, 172,<br />
175, 179, 181<br />
Knapp, Georg Friedrich 256<br />
Knies, Karl 92, 97, 175, 181<br />
Kuhn, Thomas 114, 266<br />
Kuper, Adam 166<br />
Kürnberger, Ferdinand 55–6<br />
Lamprecht, Karl 91, 124, 202<br />
Lao-Tse 204<br />
Lask, Emil 89, 151<br />
leadership democracy 8<br />
Lederer, Emil 160<br />
legitimacy 9, 235–40<br />
Index 293<br />
legitimation 234<br />
Lehmann, Hartmut 29, 45, 49, 275<br />
Lenger, Friedrich 276<br />
Lenin 184<br />
Lennon, John 54<br />
Lepsius, M. Rainer 5, 72, 139, 192<br />
Lexis, W. 125<br />
Liebersohn, Harry 57<br />
Liefmann, Robert 263–4, 266<br />
Lie-Tsi 204<br />
life 71, 90, 115; philosophy of 95, 99<br />
life conduct 9, 71, 180–1, 186, 189<br />
Lindenlaub, Dieter 33, 275<br />
Lloyd George 242–3<br />
Locke, John 88–9, 234<br />
Löwith, Karl 9<br />
Luther, Martin 52, 54, 56–7, 63, 68,<br />
70, 118, 119, 200<br />
McCluhan, Marshall 197<br />
MacCulloch, Diarmaid 64<br />
Machiavelli, Niccolò 68, 71, 203, 225<br />
MacKinnon, Malcolm H. 65–6<br />
Macrae, Donald 178<br />
magic 164–78, 182, 198<br />
Mann, Heinrich 235<br />
Mann, Michael 8, 229–31, 269<br />
Marett, Robert 166, 178<br />
Marx, Karl 31, 32, 33, 44, 45, 110,<br />
129, 187, 197<br />
Marxism 2, 30, 45, 92, 110, 183<br />
Marxist sociology 11<br />
Max <strong>Weber</strong> Gesamtausgabe 2, 3, 7<br />
mediation 42–3<br />
Menger, Carl 24–5, 75, 255, 268<br />
Methodism 210<br />
methodology 7, 74–5, 87, 264<br />
Meyer, Eduard 127, 129, 242<br />
Michels, Roberto 149, 234<br />
Mill, J.S. 78, 80, 81, 118, 134–5, 153,<br />
233<br />
Mills, C. Wright 233, 246<br />
Milton, John 57–9, 63<br />
Mises, Ludwig von 256<br />
modernity 5, 9<br />
Mohl, Robert von 82<br />
Mombert, P. 142<br />
Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 9, 27, 140,<br />
143, 233<br />
money 41–3, 45–6<br />
monism 91–2<br />
Montaigne 203<br />
Moore, Robert 249<br />
Momigliano, Arnoldo 206
294 Index<br />
monasticism 198–200<br />
money 41–2, 44, 46, 257<br />
Mosca, Gaetano 233–4<br />
Mozi 204<br />
multiple causation 7–8<br />
multiple modernities 8, 194, 206–12<br />
Münsterberg, Hugo 286<br />
Mussolini 225<br />
Nafissi, Mohammad 127<br />
Napoleon I 220–2, 240<br />
Napoleon III 240<br />
national-economy 5–6, 19–28, 73,<br />
100–1<br />
Nau, Heino 22<br />
Naumann, Friedrich 32<br />
Nelson, Benjamin 1–2, 4, 9, 234<br />
Nicolson, Adam 201<br />
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg 83<br />
Nielson, Donald, A. 70<br />
Nietzsche, Friedrich 75, 95, 108, 187,<br />
265<br />
Nippel, Wilfried 139<br />
Nipperdey, Thomas 45<br />
Northcliffe, Lord 243<br />
objectivism 105<br />
objectivity 100–9<br />
Occident 212–3, 219<br />
oikos 127–31, 260<br />
Oldenberg, K. 142<br />
Olivétan, Pierre Robert 201<br />
Orihara, Hiroshi 140, 150<br />
Ostwald, Wilhelm 92<br />
Paciola, Luca 36<br />
Palonen, Kari 245<br />
Palyi, Melchior 237<br />
Parmenides 204<br />
Parsons, Talcott 36, 58, 67, 191, 233,<br />
266<br />
patriarchal estates 18<br />
patrimonialism 199–200<br />
Pattison, Mark 200<br />
Paul, St 56, 167<br />
Pericles 241–2, 245<br />
Peter, St 167<br />
Petty, Sir William 119<br />
phenomenology 89<br />
Philippovich, Eugen von 141, 143, 145<br />
Phillip II of Spain 217<br />
Plato 83, 204<br />
Poggi, Gianfranco 8, 229–30, 245<br />
Popper, Karl 80, 114, 195<br />
power 8–9, 221<br />
pragmatism 89<br />
progress of knowledge 112–3<br />
property 258<br />
psychologism 91, 98, 255<br />
Pufendorf 203<br />
Puritanism 2, 43–4, 59–63, 69–70, 135,<br />
194–5, 201, 212, 218–9<br />
Quakerism 36, 44<br />
Rachfahl, Felix 49, 119–120, 123–4,<br />
202<br />
Ranke, Leopold von 83<br />
rationalism 2, 189, 213–219, 248;<br />
economic 36, 40, 41<br />
rationalization 9, 170<br />
Reformation 64–5, 122<br />
regulation 255<br />
Rex, John 249<br />
rhetoric 67–8, 71<br />
Rickert, Heinrich 7, 51, 53, 74, 90,<br />
92–7, 107, 109, 114, 151, 164, 176,<br />
182, 187, 265<br />
Riesebrodt, Martin 46<br />
Ritschl, Albrecht 86<br />
Ritzer, George 244, 266<br />
Robinson Crusoe 279<br />
Rochau, Ludwig von 223<br />
Rodbertus, Karl 44, 128–9, 197, 260–1<br />
Rohde, Edwin 167<br />
Rome: agrarian capitalism 20; agrarian<br />
history 19–20; slavery 20<br />
Roosevelt, Franklin 225<br />
Rorty, Richard 114<br />
Roscher, Wilhelm 92, 97, 175, 181<br />
Roth, Guenther 9, 49, 139, 143, 144,<br />
232, 234, 284<br />
Runciman, W.G. 190–1, 216, 269<br />
sacred and profane law 164–5, 174,<br />
177–8<br />
Said, Edward 212<br />
Scaff, Lawrence 3, 11, 148, 279, 287<br />
Schäffle, Albert 82<br />
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst 54, 82,<br />
85–8<br />
Schluchter, Wolfgang 3, 9, 163, 217<br />
Schmidt-Glintzer, Helwig 158–60, 181<br />
Schmoller, Gustav von 14, 30–1, 32, 92<br />
Schönberg, Gustav von 141<br />
Schroeder, Ralph 12–13<br />
Schulze-Gaevernitz, Gerhart von 31, 32<br />
Schumpeter, Joseph 24, 142, 143, 268
Schutz, Alfred 109<br />
science 90–1, 101<br />
Sennett, Richard 86–7<br />
Shakespeare, William 59<br />
Sheehan, James 221<br />
Shils, Edward 104–5<br />
Siebeck, Hermann 174, 177–8<br />
Siebeck, Oskar 124<br />
Siebeck, Paul 141, 146<br />
Simmel, Georg 4, 6, 28, 32, 41–6, 53,<br />
75, 77, 92, 98–9, 148, 151, 152,<br />
165, 180, 234<br />
singularity 194–6, 269–70<br />
social action 42–3, 154–5, 179–80,<br />
251–2, 267<br />
Social Democratic Party 32<br />
social-economics 105–6, 141–5, 250,<br />
254–263, 267–8<br />
sociology: interpretative 7, 11–12,<br />
147–55, 251–4; structural 11–12<br />
Sombart, Werner 4, 6, 29, 31, 32,<br />
33–41, 44–6, 49, 79, 92, 100, 118,<br />
128, 134, 142, 197, 202, 252<br />
Soyer, Michaela 182<br />
Spencer, Herbert 118, 192<br />
Spener, Philip Jacob 202<br />
Spinoza, Benedict 46, 104<br />
spirit of capitalism 34–42, 79, 93, 123,<br />
124, 134<br />
Stammler, Rudolf 92<br />
status 227–231<br />
stock exchange 19, 21–2, 259<br />
stratification 9<br />
Strauss, Leo 9<br />
Swedberg, Richard 51<br />
taboo 167–8, 171<br />
Taoism 7<br />
Tawney, R.H. 209<br />
Tenbruck, Friedrich 162–3, 198, 282<br />
Thatcher, Margaret 245<br />
theodicy 183<br />
Thucydides 204<br />
Tiele, Cornelis 173–4, 177, 252<br />
Tirpitz, Alfred von 224<br />
Tobler, Mina 71–2<br />
Tolstoy, Leo 5, 184<br />
totemism 167–8, 171<br />
Trevor-Roper, Hugh 203<br />
Troeltsch, Ernst 4, 32, 86, 119, 122–3,<br />
164, 173–4, 177–8, 208, 225<br />
Tönnies, Ferdinand 4, 28, 31, 32, 151,<br />
164<br />
towns 135<br />
Index 295<br />
Tribe, Keith 22, 104<br />
Turner, Bryan 11–12<br />
Turner, Stephen 75, 279, 283<br />
Tylor, Edward Burnett 166–7, 173<br />
value heterogeneity 104<br />
value judgements 101, 274<br />
value, law of 273–4<br />
value rationality 9<br />
value relation 94<br />
value spheres 9<br />
Verein für Sozialpolitik 14–15, 30, 45,<br />
149<br />
Verstehen 97, 107, 151, 268<br />
Vierkandt, A. 151<br />
Vossler, Karl 75<br />
Wagner, Adolf 31, 32<br />
Wagner, Richard 68<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, Alfred 4, 31, 142, 244<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, Marianne 5, 32, 41, 53, 74,<br />
125, 139–40, 147, 158<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, Max: ‘Agrarverhältnisse im<br />
Altertum’ 123–36; ‘The City’<br />
136–9; Economy and Society 145–6,<br />
150, 226–32, 247–64; Grundriss<br />
der Sozialökonomik 138–47, 150;<br />
Grundriss zu den Vorlesungen<br />
über Allgemeine (“theoretische”)<br />
Nationalökonomie 23–7, 273–4;<br />
Herrschaftssoziologie 232–45; The<br />
History of Commercial Partnerships<br />
in the Middle Ages 21–2; as nationaleconomist<br />
8, 13, 19–28, 130, 137,<br />
232, 248; ‘The “objectivity” of<br />
knowledge in social science and<br />
social policy’ 74, 100–15; ‘Prefatory<br />
Remarks’ to ‘Collected Essays in<br />
the Sociology of Religion’ 212–6;<br />
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit<br />
of Capitalism 37–41, 48–72, 198;<br />
Die römische Agrargeschichte in<br />
ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und<br />
Privatrecht 19–21; The Sociology<br />
of Religion 156–82; ‘Some<br />
Categories of Interpretive Sociology’<br />
150–5, 235; Die Verhältnisse<br />
der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen<br />
Deutschland 14–19<br />
<strong>Weber</strong>, Max, Sr 76<br />
Weiner, Myron 210<br />
Wellhausen, Julius 172, 175–6<br />
Wesley, Charles 70<br />
Wesley, John 54, 70
296 Index<br />
Whimster, Sam 279, 281<br />
Wieser, Friedrich von 24–5, 142, 234,<br />
268<br />
Winckelmann, Johannes 49, 163<br />
Windelband, Wilhelm 53, 75, 77, 90,<br />
92, 107, 164, 179<br />
Wittich, Claus 139, 143, 144, 232, 234<br />
worldview 187–8, 196, 203<br />
Wundt, Wilhelm 91<br />
Yair, Gad 182<br />
Yano, Yoshiro 253<br />
Young, Peter 249<br />
Zaret, David 66<br />
Zhuangzi 204<br />
Zoroaster 204, 206<br />
Zubaida, Sami 286<br />
Zwingli, H. 54