Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 2005,
2
http://www.units.it/etica/2005_2/ANTONIO.htm
Max
Weber in the Post-World War II US
Abstract
This essay analyzes Max Weber’s place
in post-World War II US social thought, when English-language translations,
interpretations, and applications of his work proliferated and it became
widely known in American sociology and related fields. The focus is on
shifting interpretations and meanings of Weber’s work in different phases of
postwar American culture, society, and politics from the Cold War era through
the post-9/11 years. Weber’s ideas have been fused with those of diverse
thinkers and traditions and have been applied in ways that he likely would
have rejected and that stricter Weberians castigate. The various Weber
fusions engage modernization theory - arguably the postwar era’s primary
metanarrative for legitimating and challenging the liberal democratic policy
regime. The historical discussion provides context for later sections on
Weber’s salience in the |
Max
Weber has been understood and constructed in divergent ways in different
historical moments and contexts. His rich, multisided corpus is open to diverse
interpretations, and, thus, arguments about its overall shape or main thrust
have varied widely. And just when he seems to have lost relevance, like a
phoenix he appears again on the horizon. This essay analyzes his place in
post-World War II
1. Weber in the Early
Post-World War II Conjuncture: Modernization For and Against
1.1. Parsons’ Weber: Modernization as American-led,
Evolutionary Progress
Weber’s work became widely known in the
Parsons
did not emphasize Weber’s ideas about value conflict, coercion, and hierarchy. Stressing
societal consensus, he translated Weber’s concept of Herrschaft as
“leadership,” “authority,” or
“imperative control,” rather than as “domination.” (7) Parsons conceived of power as a collective
resource to achieve social system imperatives, providing a functionalist twist
that was absent in Weber. Parsons argued that postwar
1.2. Critical Weber: Modernization as Domination
The
introduction, translation, and selection of essays in Hans H. Gerth’s and C.
Wright Mills’ Weber (1946a) collection, which is still widely used today,
countered Parsons’ Weber. Comparing their translation of a section of Weber’s
work to that of Parsons, Mills declared: “The son of bitch [Parsons] translated
it so as to take all the guts, the radical guts, out of it, whereas our translation
doesn’t do that!” (11) Rather than opposing Weber to Marx, Gerth and
Mills saw the two theorists to converge at key points and to offer supplements
to each other’s theories at other important junctures. In Gerth’s and Mills’
(1946, p. 73) view, Weber “incorporated”
into his own theory so much of Marx’s critique of capitalism that he too saw
“the economic system as a compulsive apparatus rather than as the locus of
freedom.” This coercive view of capitalism was the crux of their disagreement
with Parsons. Gerth’s and Mills’ Critical Weber helped stir wider opposition to
Parsons’ structural-functionalism and consensus theories of postwar-US
capitalism.
Translating
Weber’s bureaucracy essay, Gerth and Mills used the term “domination” at
important junctures. In the translations and introductory essay, they drew out
Weber’s emphases on hierarchical subordination, impersonal discipline,
monopolies of resources and information, and mass democracy, which limits participation
and levels the masses below the top. (12)
They also translated Weber’s essays on politics and science as vocations, which
stressed Enlightenment rationality’s limits, criticized claims about progress,
and warned about political demagoguery and the total state. Holding that Weber
acknowledged American capitalism’s material and human waste and racial
problems, they wove his ideas into a formally rational vision of the postwar
US, efficient in domination, but limited in democracy. Conversely to Parsons’
autonomous view of culture and linkage of Weberian theory to German Idealism,
they held that Weber saw ideas to be entwined with material and ideal interests
and to be mediated by groups that seek to realize them. Gerth and Mills also
published Weber’s arguments about religion’s tensions with politics, art,
sexuality, and science and about how modern cultural rationalization multiplies
conflictive value spheres. Rather than stressing convergence with Durkheim,
they noted Weber’s engagement with Nietzsche as well as with Marx and his
affinities with John Dewey’s and George Herbert Mead’s pragmatism. They
rejected Parsons’ functionalist, evolutionist reading of Weber, which implied
that value consensus and normative integration were “in between the lines” of
Weber’s work. Contra Parsons’ effusive cultural optimism, Gerth and Mills
stressed Weber’s fears about the possible fate of modernity (e.g.,
“Egyptification” or the total state) and impassioned warnings about the
possible eclipse of the autonomous individual that he valued so dearly. (13)
Parsons’
Weber amplified sensibilities accompanying the early postwar era’s long
economic boom, major technological advances, and increased inclusion. Parsons’
believed that
Speaking
of “pretentious triviality,” Mills
charged that
1.3. Anti-Liberal Weber: Modernization as Descent
Anti-liberal
“Weberians” are sharply critical of
Weber. They turn his Nietzschean side against his liberalism. (16) In a more singular way than Gerth and
Mills, they stress his views about the leveling and disciplining force of
instrumental rationalization. Weber sometimes implied that the process operated
like a locomotive flattening everything in its path and creating an
all-encompassing “steel-hard casing,” “cage of bondage,” or “iron cage.” For
example, following glowing comments about his experience of local culture in
Anti-liberal
Weberians imply that cultural erosion and loss of collective agency, arising
from instrumental rationalization, are so great that they make a mockery of
liberal democracy. (20)
They ignore, diminish, or reject Weber’s arguments about individual autonomy
and freedom of conscience, bureaucratic accountability and limited authority,
scientific culture and political responsibility, cultural freedom and value
pluralism, countervailing power, and other affirmative facets of his account of
liberal-democratic culture. Anti-liberal versions of the
homogenization-regimentation thesis decouple liberalism from democracy and, thus,
split sharply from Parsons’ Weber and from Critical Weber, which occupy
divergent points on a liberal-democratic continuum. Although converging with
Critical Weber’s pessimistic themes, anti-liberals would never accept Gerth’s
and Mills’ liberal-democratic reformism or fusion of Weber with Marx, American
pragmatism, and Mannheimian sociology of knowledge. Anti-liberals see US-led,
liberal-democratic modernization and individualist, consumer freedom to be a
descent. They imply that liberal democracy’s fragmentation and moral corrosion
create the cultural conditions for totalitarianism. In their view, this liberal
regime cries out for fundamental socio-political and cultural transformation.
However, anti-liberals usually leave vague the legal, institutional, and
political changes called for by their divergent politics (e.g., populism,
aristocracy, theocracy). Thus, the meaning of their anti-liberalism for
actually-existing democracy is an open question.
During
World War II and in the early postwar period, a diverse group of mostly émigré
scholars decried “relativistic” American liberalism.(21) Their anti-liberalism has roots in
Weimar-era thought. Having wide impact on later generations, Marxist Georg
Lukács and proto-Nazi Carl Schmitt attacked Weber, but they deployed facets of
his vision of instrumental rationalization in their dismissive critiques of
capitalism and liberalism.(22)
Influenced by Weber and other Weimar theorists, postwar émigré scholars posed
parallel homogenization-regimentation theses, which portrayed Western modernity
to have lost its moral compass and to be in profound crisis. They contended
that liberalism subverts the firmly held values needed to resist totalitarianism
and to provide an alternative to consumer culture’s mediocrity and excess.
Anti-liberals saw American sociology’s postwar ascendence and, especially, its
positivism to manifest a leveled, degraded culture. Few of these thinkers knew
much about the discipline, but they all had some knowledge of Weber’s social
thought and its wide impact on
Countering
Weber’s liberalism, émigré political theorists, Leo Strauss ([1950] 1965 pp.
35-80) and Eric Voegelin ([1952] 1966 pp. 13-26) advocated “natural right”
theory or the establishment of a regime based on objectively true, absolute
values. Both theorists attacked Weber’s arguments about the separation of facts
and values in scientific practices and about the inevitable conflict of values
in the wider culture. In their view, his nihilistic “historicism” or “Gnostic
immanentism” favors a culture of lost
souls who cannot grasp the good and for whom nothing is forbidden.(26) They saw Weber’s views to cultivate
individualism and egalitarianism, which they argued undermine moral authority
and genuine culture. They held that his rejection of a higher rationality that
can identify true values from the vortex of incommensurable, conflictive
opinions and his limitation of social knowledge of normative matters to
hermeneutic clarification of conflictive values and sociological analysis of
value-oriented action’s consequences abandon truth and good to individual whim.
They wanted cultural leadership by philosophical or religious elites, capable
of exercising reason, forging political rule based on true values, and insuring
that people know the good and observe the duties it commands. They attacked
Weber’s alleged nihilism, but their view of the
Herbert
Marcuse argued that Weber’s type of value relativism and positivism undercuts
the will and imagination to forge a liberated society and, thus, consecrates
the existent liberal order as substantively rational. Although rejecting Weber
more emphatically than either Strauss or Voegelin, Marcuse deployed the
Nietzschean-Weberian homogenization-regimentation thesis more transparently and
sweepingly. He portrayed relentless instrumental rationalization and
bureaucratization constructing an “ever more solid shell of bondage.” (28) Other
These
types of early postwar era, anti-liberalism reappeared with later shifts in
American politics and culture. The
2. The Postwar Era Winding Down: Vicissitudes of Modernization and Postmodernization
2.1. New Sociology and Marx-Weber Fusions: Rethinking
Modernization
By 1970, the idea of progressive modernization was
superceded by concern over fractious splits, crises, and decline. In the
preface of a much debated book, Alvin Gouldner declared that:
Social theorists today work within a crumbling social
matrix of paralyzed urban centers and battered campuses. Some may put cotton in
their ears, but their bodies still feel the shock waves. It is no exaggeration
to say that we theorize today within the sound of guns. The old order has the
picks of hundred rebellions thrust into its hide. (35)
Gouldner
held that social theory is needed to address these crises. This sense of
rupture spurred renewed interest in classical social theory, which, as C.
Wright Mills argued, offered the “big discourse” and sufficient purview to
generate critical thought and debate over the historical directions and
normative foundations of socio-political life. Theorists began to employ the
classics in critiques of postwar capitalism and of modernization theories.
Anthony Giddens (1971, p. vii) opened his highly influential study of classical
theory with the assertion that many sociologists believe that: “contemporary
social theory stands in need of radical revision,” which demands reconsidering
sociology’s founding theorists. (36) Seeing
social theory to be historically rooted and embedded in the wider culture,
Gouldner and Giddens thought that re-engaging the classics would encourage
critical rethinking of the present. Like Mills, they held that the rejection of
normatively-oriented, broad-scope social theory, or classical-type
theory, leaves sociology without systematic means to illuminate and debate its
normative and empirical directions and relations to wider culture and public
life. (37) They hoped that attending to the best
work in classical theory would generate fresh social theory of similar breadth
and stir reflexivity and critical discourse about the bearings of specialized
sociological research and sociological theory. This view of the
classics was a driving force in the new phase of the Weber revival. Social
critics’ and social theorists’ strong normative emphasis was, however, in
tension with Weber’s thought, and this same tension, although usually
overlooked, characterized Marx-Weber fusions.
Parsons’
Weber dominated the early postwar era, but as the liberal consensus eroded in
the national political culture, many theorists attacked
structural-functionalism for being too static, ideological, and blind to
fragmentation and conflict. Expanding upon Gerth’s and Mills’ Critical Weber,
social theorists developed “conflict theories” or “critical sociologies,” which
attacked Parsonsian theory and other mainstream sociological views. Marx-Weber
fusions abounded. (38)
However, they were part of a much broader, second postwar wave of Weber
scholarship and Weberian sociology. More English-language translations of
Weber’s original work appeared.(39) The appearance of the full translation of Economy
and Society ([1921] 1968) was an especially important event, helping fuel
debate over Weber’s relationship to Marx. (40)
However, co-editor and one of the work’s leading translators, Guenther Roth
held that its nonpartisan, sociological thrust illustrated the divergence of
Weber from Marx. In the introduction to a new edition of Reinhard Bendix’s Max
Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, Roth implied that his mentor’s emphasis on
Weber’s comparative-historical studies was a much needed corrective to Parsons’
Weber and antiliberal Weber as well as to Critical Weber. (41) Contributing substantially to the
academic side of the Weber renaissance on both sides of the
Alvin
Gouldner was a leading figure in the 1960s “new sociology,” which championed
the type of theoretically guided and historically and politically engaged
critical sociology that C.Wright Mills advocated.(44)
According to Time Magazine (1970), new sociology overthrew the
In
the 1970s, English-language translations of Frankfurt School and Western
Marxist works proliferated, and interest in the topics grew explosively in
North American, social theory circles. Most theorists, identified with these
traditions, considered Weber to be the leading bourgeois theorist and rejected
him on that basis. However, they often drew substantially, albeit usually
tacitly, from his work on rationalization and bureaucratization and applied the
ideas in critiques of orthodox Marxism, communism, sociology, and capitalism.
By contrast, the leading second generation,
In
the 1970s, Telos was the leading North American outlet for
Pierre
Bourdieu’s views on “cultural capital” focused on the intersection of class and
status, borrowed heavily from Marx and Weber, and framed a cultural turn in
critical theory.(51)
English-language translations of his works and commentaries about them helped
stimulate the rise of a new, North American sociology of culture and
contributed to interdisciplinary cultural studies. Other thinkers employed
Weber against Marx-Weber fusions and critical theory. Jeffery Alexander’s
(1982-83) multi-volume tome revived the
Parsons-Weber fusion. He stimulated
neofunctionalist work, which drew criticism from the left and from
Weberians. Convergent with Habermas, he opposed the
homogenization-regimentation thesis, and affirmed progressive liberalism. Other
theorists attacked progressive liberals and post-1960s liberalized American
culture. For example, conservative, social theorist, Robert Nisbet deployed a
Durkheim-Weber fusion against the liberal-left. Peter L. Berger’s work on
modernity, religion, and disenchantment fused Weberian themes with ideas from
Alfred Schutz,
2.2. Postmodern
Weber: Nietzsche-Weber Syntheses
In
the 1980s, interdisciplinary debates about modernity and postmodernity
intensified in response to major socio-political and technical shifts (e.g.,
withered communism and national liberation movements, ascendent
Thatcherism-Reaganism, deregulation, deindustrialization, new
information-communication technologies, and struggles over national and cultural
identity). Postmodernists held that entirely new theoretical and political
practices were needed to come to terms with the nascent postmodern order. Their
claims about the “end of modernity” expressed, in an exaggerated way, erosion
of the postwar system and, specifically, decline of its chief mode of
legitimation - progress through modernization. Postmodernism subsumed diverse
approaches with varying relations to modern social theory (Antonio 1998).
Postmodernists usually operated in the tracks of modernity discourse; their
views of technocracy, discipline, cultural exhaustion, and negative critique or
“deconstruction” were reminiscent of the
Postmodernist
arguments about rationalization’s homogenizing and regimenting force were
influenced heavily by the postwar, French reception of Heidegger’s thought,
especially his critique of technology and interpretation of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is the most important forerunner of
postmodernism; he raged against western rationality’s excesses and
declared that the end of modernity was at hand. Postmodernists often
acknowledged passingly his influence on them, but he usually had a larger tacit
presence in their works. Frankfurt School-like, Weberian themes also suffused
postmodernism, although they usually were left implicit, mentioned passingly,
or mixed with other thinkers’ views. (56)
For example, the homogenization-regimentation thesis had a central place in
Michel Foucault’s work; his “carceral system” and “normalization” paralleled
Marcuse’s “repressive administration of society” (Foucault 1978, Marcuse 1964).
Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983, p. 166) contended that Foucault took up Weber’s
“concern with rationalization and objectification as the essential trend of our
culture and the most important problem of our time.” Foucault acknowledged his affinity
with Weber and the
Mike
Gane (2002, p. 4) described an “implicit dialogue” between Weber and
postmodern theory (i.e., Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard), and offered
detailed analyses of multiple points of convergence, including prominent
Nietzschean threads. Paralleling Weber’s views, Gane argued, postmodernists
addressed centrally rationalization’s leveling and regimenting tendencies.
However, he held that their “transgressive,” antirationalist moves resisted
processes that Weber deemed inevitable and legitimated. Gane deployed a
Nietzschean-Weberian, homogenization-regimentation thesis to argue that
postmodernists superceded Weber’s views.(58) William Bogart’s (1996)
Baudrillardian-Foucaultian description of “telematic” surveillance
provided a grim, wired vision of total administration in which efforts to
reform or resist it politically simply enhance its power. He claimed to have
updated Weber’s argument about instrumental rationalization, but his portrayal
of postmodern “hypercontrol” is more reminiscent of Piccone’s “artificial
negativity” thesis. By contrast to Piccone’s “organic negativity” and populist
politics, however, Bogart advocated political indifference.(59) Gane’s and Bogert’s Nietzschean-Weberian,
homogenization-regimentation theses heralded postwar modernization theory’s
exhaustion, but they exemplify divergent threads of postmodernism. Gane
considered postmodernist theory to be a method and language to resist
homogenization-regimentation and advance postmodern politics. Treating
postmodernism as a progressive advance over modernization theory, he retained
ties to critical theory and liberal-democratic politics. By contrast, Bogart’s
description of terminal evaporation of modernity’s socio-cultural bases and of
its liberal-democratic potentials and his endorsement of extreme ennui open the
way to anti-modern and anti-liberal countermoves. Taking a very different
direction, postmodernist, Zygmunt Bauman employed a Weberian
homogenization-regimentation thesis to theorize the roots of the Holocaust. He
held that modern bureaucracy’s instrumentally rationalized power, dutiful
officials, and amoral functionality opened the way for genocide - i.e., the
Holocaust was a “hidden possibility” of modernity. (60)
Critics also deployed Weber’s ideas against postmodernism;
they held that his scaled-down views of rationality and science offer a
desirable alternative to its relativist irrationalism (e.g., Raynaud 1997, pp.
148-52). Daniel Bell’s (1976) trenchant critique of postmodern culture bore a
clear imprint of Marx and Weber, but it also expressed a strong Nietzschean
side.
Alan
Bloom’s best seller, Closing of the American Mind (1987) was a major broadside
in the neoconservative attack on postmodern culture and on the ascendant
cultural left. (62) He held that rampant postmodern sensibilities
manifest
2.3. Weber’s Shadow
in the Age of Globalization: Modernization Theory Redux and it Critics
By
the early-1990s, postmodernist works sold briskly at Borders and Barnes and
Noble bookstores. Postmodernism had become a “cultural dominant” in the
humanities and specialty niche in sociological theory. However, the freer
movement of goods, capital, images, and people across national borders,
neoliberal restructuring, and geopolitical realignment (following the collapse
of the Soviet Bloc and first Gulf War) helped stir a shift in interdisciplinary
social theory discourse to US-led “globalization.” Francis Fukuyama’s much
publicized “end of history” thesis appeared at the moment that the Soviet Bloc
was collapsing and pro-democracy protest was raging in
Endings
discourses proliferated in Fukuyama’s wake - diverse social theorists praised
or bemoaned the neoliberal “end of alternatives,” “end of left and right,” or
“end of politics” (66).
“Third Way”theorists, like Anthony Giddens, held that free-market reform
streamlines social democracy to better accommodate to globalization and its
more interdependent, cosmopolitan, and democratic “reflexive modernity” or
“second modernity” (67)
They retained Weberian ideas, but their enthusiasm for the free-market severed
ties to Nietzsche and suggested a nascent Smith-Weber fusion (68). In unabashed, effusive celebration of
deregulated capitalism,
Although
“globalization” became the master discourse of interdisciplinary social
theory, the shift did not diminish the
importance of postmodern cultural representation, hybridization, fragmentation,
homogenization, and retribalization. George Ritzer’s highly accessible works on
global consumer culture have been among the best selling sociology books in the
Theorists
have debated heatedly the degree to which globalization weakens the state’s
regulatory powers and the consequences and inevitability of the alleged
erosion. Even scholars, who counter excessive claims about the state’s eclipse,
concede that globalization has reduced its capacity to control its internal and
external environments. For example, Bauman (1998) and Giddens (2000) have
argued that global markets and global production limit substantially and make
much more problematic state sovereignty. However, Bauman’s description of
consequent polarized economies and criminalized underclasses offers a much
darker vision of globalization than Giddens’ cheery, albeit qualified,
portrayal of the rise of a detraditionalized, democratized “global cosmopolitan
society.” Both theorists agreed, however, that neoliberal globalization’s
beneficial or desired consequences make it
“unstoppable.” By contrast John Gray (1999) and Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc
Wacquant (1999) held that globalization advocates attribute universal
significance to a parochial process that has US origins and that depends on,
for its reproduction, American cultural, economic, and political imperialism.
They portrayed neoliberal globalization
as a
Other
theorists decouple globalization and modernization and decenter the
relationship between globalization and capitalism. (74) For example, Weber scholar, Martin Albrow
(1997) portrayed “globality.”as an epochal rupture from “modernity.” He
contended that an entirely new global cultural, political, and social complex
is emergent and that modern social theories, with their bankrupt Eurocentric
presuppositions, obscure vision of it and blunt imagination about its
possibilities. Albrow argued that capitalist economic change does not drive
globalization, but is a subordinate part of a much more “comprehensive social
transformation.” Rejecting claims about capitalism’s axial status, he aimed to
move beyond Marx and Weber (Albow 1997, pp. 4-6, 85-90, 168-83, and passim).
Yet Albrow’s repeated dismissals of
modernity and modern social theory preserve them as a backdrop and
illustrate their embeddedness in globalization discourse and how difficult they
are to break from entirely. Like extreme market-centered globalization
analysts, however, he held that globality terminally weakens all states, even
that of the
2.4. The Age of
Tribalism: Schmitt-Weber Syntheses and
Friend-Enemy Politics
In
the early postwar era, Wolfgang Mommsen charged that Weber’s ideas of plebiscitary
leadership and legal-rational legitimacy helped inspire Carl Schmitt’s
antiparlimentary and anti-liberal views, which justified Nazi dictatorship.
During the postwar de-Nazification, Mommsen charged, German scholars ignored
this connection because they did not want to address Weber’s nationalist or
elitist themes. He also implied that Parsons’ influence on postwar German
thought helped cultivate a one-sided, liberal-democratic view of Weber.
Although Mommsen’s position has been contested, Weberian facets are transparent
in Schmitt’s work. (75)
Stressing liberalism’s exhaustion, Schmitt’s version of the Weber-influenced
homogenization-regimentation thesis has had major impact on several generations
of diverse thinkers. International interest in Schmitt has grown substantially
in recent decades, stirred by globalization and erosion of postwar geopolitical
arrangements, which also helped generate Nietzsche-Weber fusions. Thinkers from
right and left have combined Schmittean-Weberian themes with ideas from
Nietzsche, Marx, and other theorists. They hold that Schmitt was prescient
about today’s ongoing geopolitical changes - porous territorial borders,
weakened nation-states, and global
Schmitt held that political community and collective
identity necessitate shared culture, which binds most powerfully when it is
experienced against the backdrop of an “other” or “stranger” who personifies
“evil”- a “public enemy” who represents an opposed culture and threat to one’s
way of life. Schmitt held that: “high points of politics are simultaneously the
moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy”
(1996, p.67). Seeing liberal pluralism to preclude such clarity and unity, he
rejected liberalism’s conflictive values, market-centeredness, deracinated
individuals, and multicultural citizenship,
or, in his words, its “entire system of demilitarized and depoliticized
concepts” (Schmitt 1996, p 71). He considered the friend-enemy dichotomy’s
“grand politics”to be the bulwark against globalizing Anglo-American
capitalism and its “possessive individualism,” which he thought neutralize
particularity, fragment culture, and shatter community. He unhinged liberalism
from democracy. However, Schmitt considered democracy to be simply “an identity
of governed and governing” based on shared culture and, therefore, compatible
with Fascist or Bolshevik dictatorship (Schmitt 1988b, pp. 10-17, 90, notes 26
and 28, 91 note 32). He contended that
liberal-democratic pluralism must be defeated at the national level to preserve
a “pluriverse” of culturally distinct nations. He also held that universalistic
claims about spreading democracy and extending human rights justify cultural
homogenization and Anglo-American imperialism. Arguing that divergent national
cultures are incommensurable, Schmitt held that cross-cultural communication
and cooperation are limited to closely related peoples. Although dismissing
Weber’s liberalism and warnings about mass politics, Schmitt’s skepticism about
the creation of transnational cultural consensus and his warnings about the cultural
consequences of capitalism’s instrumental rationality and technical rationality
draw on Weberian themes.
Starting in the late-1980s, the Telos Circle turned
to Schmitt, deploying his concepts in acid critiques of liberalism and in
support of neopopulism and federalism (e.g., Telos 72 (Summer 1987), 83
(Spring 1990); 85 (Fall 1990); 102 (Winter 1995); 109 (Fall 1996); 122 (Winter
2002); Wolin 1990b; Strong 1996; Müller 2003). They held that his ideas can be
used to formulate alternatives to the failed left and failed right. Regular Telos
author and leading French New Right theorist, Alain de Benoist posed a
Schmittean-Weberian homogenization-regimentation thesis that declared
liberalism and the entire liberal-democratic nation-state system to be moribund.
Drawing on the ancient idea of “empire,” he advocated replacing the European
state system with a loosely-coupled federated regime of self-governing units in
which full citizenship would be based on shared culture and common identity. He
embraced Schmitt’s argument that culturally homogenous communitarian regimes
favor a “democratic” unity of leader and mass. He held that local participation
and direct democracy, anchored in community, would replace liberal-democratic
politics. Benoist did not articulate the political and legal institutions of
the new regime. However, Benoist argued that the imperial regime would put
Telos associate editor,
paleoconservative Schmittean, Paul Gottfried argued that a progressive-liberal
“New Class,” operating in US government offices, higher education,
corporations, and social movement organizations, wield “political correctness”
as a weapon, manipulating welfare, human rights, and multicultural ideas and
policies to eliminate enemies and exert overarching cultural and political
hegemony. He held that left-leaning public intellectuals created a house of
bondage based on therapeutic justifications. Converging with Piccone’s vision
of total administration, Gottfried’s paleoconservative critique of the
“managerial state” employed an extreme homogenization-regimentation thesis that
constructed liberals as the internal enemy. Although warning that this liberal
regime could be further consolidated and even extended into a global domination
system, Gottfried declared that it is unleashing severe disintegrative forces
and is stirring populist resistence, which could forge a post-liberal Schmittian
scenario (1999b, p 140).
Schmitt-Weber
fusions stress limits to communication and to diffusion of knowledge, which
preclude wider or more participatory democracy. Such views counter Albrow’s
vision of emergent global democracy and Barber’s argument about development of
global civil society. Samuel Huntington’s best-seller, The Clash of
Civilizations expresses a strong Schmittean-Weberian current. Like Weber,
Stephen
Turner (2003) employed a self-identified Schmittian-Weberian fusion to explore
knowledge-based limits to democratization. He concurred with Schmitt’s views
that rational persuasion and discussion are central to liberal-democratic
ideals, but are not realized in liberal democracies. Turner countered Habermas
and other left-liberal theorists who advocate creating stronger democracy by
building vibrant civil societies, which improve the quality and reach of
cultural and political communication. Besides the demagogic facets of mass
democracies stressed by Weber and Schmitt, Turner held that the preeminent role
of scientific expertise and highly specialized technical knowledge, today,
effectively precludes average citizens from ever grasping sufficiently complex
public problems (e.g., global warming)
and competently communicating about them and judging them. In his view,
expert-based “knowledge organizations” or “commissions” now set policy in
government, business, and social movement organizations and, thus, expert
discourse supplants public dialogue, bankrupting progressive liberal notions of
popular sovereignty and discursive democracy. Arguably, Turner updated Walter
Lippmann’s elite theory of liberal democracy.(79) However, Turner did not say if his vision of commission-dominated
“democracy” calls for “democratic” reform, points to a fundamental crisis that
demands regime change, or suggests a condition impervious to change.
As should be apparent from the discussion above,
Schmitt-Weber fusions diverged in their evaluations of existent liberal
democratic politics and regimes. Still Schmittean-Weberian
homogenization-regimentation theses posed major questions about the vitality of
liberal-democracy and, especially, about neoliberal globalization. In
particular, New Right, paleoconservative, and conservative Schmitteans rejected
deregulated global markets and transnational regulatory, redistributive, or
human rights regimes. They dismissed hopes that increased global economic
intercourse would lead to socio-cultural and political interdependence. These
Schmitteans held that globalization deepened liberal democracy’s already
profound contradictions or exhausted the regime and called for a regime change.
But nearly all Schmitt-Weber fusions suggested a severe erosion and legitimacy
crisis of postwar liberal democracies.
2.5. Twilight of the Postwar Era; Post-9/11 Schmitteanism,
Terror, and the Camps
The
bitterly contested presidential race between George W. Bush and Al Gore,
decided ultimately by the Supreme Court, polarized the nation and
intensified friend-enemy dichotomies
among party members and among politically interested segments of the
Before
9/11, Chalmers Johnson (2000) argued presciently that “American Empire” has
generated global hostility and violent counter-responses. (81) He
and other Bush Administration critics now hold that US-led globalization,
combined with post-9/11 unilateralism, militarism, and torture scandals, have
helped generate anti-American, friend-enemy binaries that construct Americans
as the unwelcome Other and the
The 9/11 events brought another Schmittean dichotomy to the
foreground - the normal situation versus the “state of emergency” or “state of
exception.” Defining the sovereign as the person who is able to declare a state
of emergency and exercise total power, Schmitt argued that state power is
rooted in decision not in legal norms. He held that the state of exception,
becomes the rule.(83)
After 9/11, President Bush asserted his role as “Commander in Chief” in the
“War on Terror,” holding that he would employ any measures necessary to catch
or kill terrorists. The tragic images of the attack on the
Paleoconservative
and left-leaning Schmitteans have attacked the Bush Administration and
neoconservatives for employing universal claims about spreading democracy and
protecting human rights to justify imperialist interventions, neoliberal
globalization, and US-imprinted cultural homogenization. Left-Schmittean,
Giorgio Agamben employed the idea of a state of exception to criticize the
concentration of state power, rather than to affirm it in the fashion of
Schmitt.(85) Agamben’s fusion of
Schmitt with Benjamin, Foucault, Arendt, and others manifests threads of a
Weberian homogenization-regimentation thesis (likely derived from the theories
he appropriated). (86)
Posing the argument before 9/11, Agamben (1998) held that the growth of
government power over the individual and its extralegal mechanisms and violence
make the state of exception the normal state of affairs today and that the
concentration camp is the dominant political model. His recent work situates
Bush Administration policy in the long-term development of this repressive regime
(Agamben 2005). Critics argue that Agamben does not provide sufficient evidence
to support his sweeping equation of modernity with the camps, but it is hard to
deny that his left-Schmittian argument poses probing questions about the much
increased emphasis on state security and extralegal measures that has followed
9/11. His views converge with fears expressed by others on the anti-Bush left
and even by some critics on the right; that the
3. Conclusion: Weber in the
3.1.
Searching
for Justice: Is the Normative Project of Modernization Reawakening?
By
the late 1980s, even left-leaning thinkers held that a “post-Marxist” era had
dawned and that new social movements, failed communism, and triumphant
neoliberalism had relegated Marx permanently to the “dustbin of history.” Thus,
pundits were caught by surprise when Marx recently won a second straight BBC
Radio 4 poll as history’s greatest philosopher. The survey aside, interest in
Marx has been growing for over a decade. (88) His return comes after the postwar era when memory of
communist regimes and insurgencies is less vivid and contradictions of the
dominant free-market ideology are felt increasingly in daily life. Marx’s
writings offer analytical tools and research questions pertinent to the current
historical moment. However, the revived interest in his thought likely is
animated more by his normative arguments for just distribution of the material
means for relieving unnecessary suffering and for activating individual rights
and powers. In these neoliberal times, Marx is once again emblematic of a
yearning for social justice.
Achieving
liberty and equality has been long a central issue in modernization debates,
and, for liberal democrats, a normative project of the process. Balancing the
two ideals always has been problematic and contested by right and left. In
In
the 1980s and early 1990s, post-Marxists attacked Marx’s limited view of civil
society and Marxism’s one-sided emphasis on labor movements. However, their
celebratory view of the triumph of cultural politics over class politics and
new social movements over labor movements were shortsighted at a moment when
neoliberal hegemony and economic inequality were rapidly on the rise. Today,
antiglobalization politics link culture and class and revive a concern for
labor issues.(90) Still sensitized to the
importance of civil society and generally adverse to authoritarian centralism,
left-leaning movements now operate under the flag of “democracy” (Claus Offe
1996, pp. 260-61). Democratic aspirations animated the peaceful revolutions in
the former communist regimes. Today, they oppose fundamentalist absolutism,
sectarian terror, authoritarian security procedures, and cruelty (e.g,. children’s
rights and animal rights). Democracy discourses suffuse campaigns for minority
recognition (e.g., of women, gay and lesbian people, first peoples,
ethnic/religious minorities), environmental justice, and economic justice.
However, a vague, contested referent, “democracy” also has been deployed to
justify neoliberal deregulation, pre-emptive war, torture, and terror.
At
the end of the postwar era, capitalist development and modernization continue in
a more extensive, rapid, disjunctive fashion than ever before; local and
regional variants multiply. Complexly entwined with these processes, the future
of democracy is hard to envision in a neatly bounded alternative regime.
However, the desire for substantive freedom, or real liberty and real equality,
is as central as ever to aspirations for progress. Polestars of the past
debates, Marx and Weber are themselves embedded in the modernization process
and, thus, continue to be a lingua franca for engaging it. However, their
deficits with regard to theorizing democracy preclude them from being the guide for this vital facet of the
next phase of the big discourse.(91)
Neopragmatists hold that neoliberal
individualism, postmodernist deconstruction, anti-liberal absolutism cannot
come to terms with increased social inequality and eroded social integration
from globalization, tribalism, and the post-9/11 climate. (92) They argue that John Dewey’s thought
contains vital resources for rethinking democracy, absent in Marx’s and
Weber’s’ views, and offers a deeper, wider vision of the cultural problem of
democratization than other theories of the process. Dewey contended that the “human meaning of democracy” is the
“realization of human equality and freedom” (Dewey [1934]1989c, p.103). His
democratic vision resonates with today’s nascent sensibilities that link
economic justice to cultural justice and that counter claims that liberty and
equality cannot be meshed.
Below
I fuse Dewey’s ideas with themes from the progressive-liberal side of Weber’s
thought. Antiliberals usually have seen Dewey to be a counterpoint to their
positions and, thus, rejected his ideas more emphatically than they did Weber’s
thought. Arguing that the problem of democracy cannot be resolved on an
abstract level, Dewey aimed to draw attention to the depth of the crisis of
democracy and articulate a starting point for thinking critically about
alternatives to free-market liberalism and authoritarian centralism. The fusion
below is posed in the same spirit, and counters to the already emergent
Schmitt-Weber alternative. By contrast to the other Weber fusions discussed
above, the Dewey-Weber fusion is a product of theoretical imagination and
speculation about the future, rather than an analysis of neo-Weberian trends.(93)
3.2. The Communication Model Contra Schmitt: A Dewey-Weber Synthesis (94)
In
Weber’s lectures on economic history, delivered during his last year and framed
in the context of the post-World War I economic crisis, he warned that
capitalist society could now be held accountable by the “poorest laborer.” He
argued that Smithean arguments about capitalism’s natural harmony of interest,
which replaced the Protestant work ethic, were embraced mainly by writers who
romanticized the free-market and by economic elites who it justified. He held
that the working class lack religious consolation for their lowly material
station and the misery they suffer in economic crises. Weber said that they see
economic inequality through a this-worldly lens, as a condition “that must be
changed” (giving rise to the idea of “rational socialism”), (Weber [1927] 1981,
pp. 291-92, 369). Although stressing the growing desire for economic justice,
Weber did not believe that it could be achieved or, at least, not without great
economic costs, much instrumental irrationality, and political repression. In
his view, equality would trump liberty. Thus, he stressed, with regret, the
triumph of efficiency over substantive freedom and liberty over equality. By
contrast, Dewey implied that the tension Weber saw between formal rationality
and substantive rationality could be resolved in ways that favor increased
substantive freedom and equality. In the midst of the Great Depression, Dewey
held that free-market liberty masked
unfreedom (e.g., Dewey [1934] 1989b; [1939] 1988e). He rejected the Lockean
view of property as a natural right, arguing that it is a social compact that
could and should be altered to avert sharp inequalities. Dewey embraced
In
the unstable aftermath of World War I, Weber warned about demagogs’ bloody
absolute ethics and “psychic proletarianization” of the masses. By contrast, he
advocated that leaders take responsibility for outcomes and, in that light,
consider means as seriously as ends, evaluate soberly as possible consequences
of their rhetoric and policy, and adjust their action accordingly. His ideas of
“value neutrality” and “objectivity” call for similar realism and prudence in scientific practices.(96) Weber denied vehemently charges that his
views about separation of factual arguments and normative claims endorse
relativism and that value freedom means ethical disengagement. His
“objectivity” essay portrayed science’s perspectival, value-rooted nature and
fluid borders between fact and value (Weber [1904] 1949c, pp. 80-82, 94,
107-12). Conversely to sterile scientism, his position on values and science
manifested, at least, in part, his Nietzschean sensibilities about living
“without illusions”and facing obdurate realities. (97) He thought that inquiry about factual
matters clarifies questions of value and identifies “inconvenient facts,”
which, when engaged honestly, generate critical reflexivity about normative
aims. He believed that highly differentiated cultural spheres, each
rationalized according to its own internal logic, and culturally diverse
citizenry preclude ethical consensus in the public sphere. Weber embraced
pluralism, however, seeing liberal diversity and value conflict to provide
cultural space for autonomous individuality or critical deliberation about
one’s life-course and socio-political participation. And he equated absolutist
belief with “intellectual sacrifice” or a suspension of critical faculties.
Rather than leveling values, Weber held that “scientific” or “objective”
standpoints provide means to inform difficult normative choices and are
essential to the “trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life” that
he declared to be “decisive” in politics. (98) He stressed science’s ethical meaning as much as its
instrumental powers. Weber was aware that science serves diverse and sometimes
destructive ends, but he still saw it as a vital post-traditional, cultural
resource that can provide tools for living, illuminate and moderate political
actions, and counter absolutist illiberality. (99)
Paralleling
Weber, Dewey held that socio-cultural differentiation forbids a return to
traditional authority, except in simulated, authoritarian form. Like Weber, he
spoke primarily about the public sphere and civil society. Both theorists
acknowledged that traditional authority is not extinguished in modernity and
that it may thrive in domains of private and associational life. Neither
theorist treated rationalization and disenchantment as a total leveling
process. Dewey saw plural values and value conflicts to generate splits and
tensions, but he also held that they can nurture ethical reflexivity and
enhanced ability to engage difference (Dewey and Tufts [1932] 1985,
pp.162-310). He argued that absolutist normative beliefs preclude deliberation
and justify elitism and autocracy. Cold-War era, anti-liberal attacks on his
alleged naive optimism and scientism paid little attention to his texts. Dewey
declared bankrupt the Enlightenment equation of technical progress with social
and political progress, and warned emphatically about democratic institutions’
fragility, authoritarian threats, media propaganda, and failed political vision
at home and abroad (Dewey [1939] 1988e, p. 156. See Dewey [1935] 1987; [1927]
1988b; [1929] 1988c; [1929] 1988d; [1939] 1988e; [1939] 1988f ). He railed against science’s service to
war machines and corporate advertisers, but he held that it is still needed to
make complex policy judgments more intelligent and responsible. Engaging
Lippmann’s critique of popular sovereignty, he acknowledged the suffusion of
expert knowledge and information and rampant media manipulation, but he denied
that active citizenship required “omnicompetence.” He held that technical modernity’s
expertise and related complexities call forth the need to cultivate critical
capacities and intelligent citizenry. (100) Like Weber, Dewey embraced a post-Enlightenment conception
of science; its knowledge is uncertain, incomplete, and temporal and thus, is
necessarily open to dialogue, contestation, and revision. Both theorists saw
consequential knowledge and awareness of science’s limits to be essential
facets of a post-traditional ethic of responsibility. By contrast to automatic
obedience to tradition or authority, they held that post-Enlightenment
science’s uncertainty, discursively-mediated nature, and ideal of open, honest,
systematic, uncoerced inquiry has “integrity”in culturally-diverse,
post-traditional settings and provides a fundamental resource for
liberal-democratic culture and deliberative democracy. From their vantage
points, democracy and science are imperfect, convergent historical projects.
That these ideals are not often realized in practice, they held, is all the
more reason for affirming them.
However,
Dewey saw value conflict to be less pervasive, intense, and intractable than
Weber, and had much higher hopes about creation of collective understandings
and substantive democracy. Weber did not theorize the social psychological
processes by which people reach normative understandings or forge social
integration and, thus, in regard to ultimate values, he does not escape the
“philosophy of the subject.” By contrast, the Dewey-Mead communication model
focuses on just these issues. (101)
This approach contends that reflexive
social integration is rooted in people “taking the attitude of the other”
(i.e., “sympathetic placing of themselves in each others roles”), rather than
in simple adherence to shared norms or values per se (Mead [1934] 1964 passim; [1922] 1963c , p. 246).
Dewey and Mead held that individuals reach understandings and cooperate by
imagining themselves in the place of the other emotionally as well as
instrumentally, meshing their action accordingly, and modifying it through
reciprocal communicative acts. They considered this process to be a matrix from
which values and norms originate.(102) They did not equate value judgment and normatively-guided action
with application of a norm per se. In their view, values and norms employed
reflexively are not commands that
orchestrate action, but are cultural means to orient to divergent social
situations and share attitudes with diverse others. Rather than mechanical
compliance to norms, Dewey and Mead held that reflexive ethical decisions
depend on engaging specific conditions of particular situations and choosing
and interpreting norms accordingly. By contrast, they considered fundamentalist
adherence to norms and rigid application of them to be ethically irresponsible.
Finally, their communication model does not
presume that social integration requires consensus or shared identity. For
example, taking the attitude of others with divergent sexual orientations or
ethnicity can forge understandings that resolve conflicts, express respect, and
build friendships, while they increase awareness of difference. According to
Dewey and Mead, one does not have to embrace the sexual activities, food
traditions, or religious beliefs of the other to understand, respect, or
cooperate with her or him. They embraced a pluralistic or multicultural vision
of democracy in which different ways of life coexist and thrive. Creating and
reproducing this type of order, they held, requires effective attitude-sharing,
or communication.
Dewey and Mead were cognizant, however, that social
conflict is sometimes extremely destructive, mean spirited, and enduring and,
thus, is often the source of one-sided, hostile, or even hateful
attitude-sharing, which undermines communicative mediation. Moreover, they
acknowledged that even effective, fairminded communication cannot resolve all
problems and that habit, reification, and coercion will likely endure in cultural
reproduction. However, against conservative anti-liberals, they contended that
friend-enemy dynamics do not inhere in difference per se. In their view,
presupposing that peoples sharing sharply divergent cultures have inherent
animosity toward the other and that all bitter conflicts between them are
immune to discursive mediation erects a massive self-fulfilling,
culturally-constructed barrier to communication and peaceful, cooperative
coexistence. It also denies the empirical reality of the historical settings
where diverse cultures have coexisted peacefully. Mead and Dewey held that
communicative capacities make possible extension of deliberative democratic
processes in local settings, wider voluntary associations, and corporate and
public institutions. They also argued that even apparently intractable
civilizational barriers are sometimes bridged by communication. They saw modern
socio-cultural differentiation and ever wider extension of technical and social means of interchange to
multiply differences, erode normative justifications based purely on tradition
or authority, and make possible much wider attitude-sharing capacities. Yet
they stressed emphatically that attainment of such powers and peaceful
cooperation is not automatic and must be cultivated consciously against
myriad forms of cultural manipulation, distortion, and conflict. In this light,
they would have viewed today’s globalization, with all its contradictory
features, to be both a major problem and great opportunity for building communicative
capacities.
Against
absolutism, Dewey held that shutting down deliberation about norms and values
formalizes them, undermining their “spirit” and legitimacy, depleting resources
for attitude-sharing, and opening the way for friend-enemy politics. (103) From this perspective, absolutist normative
claims are a subterfuge for top-down control favoring authoritarianism, rather
than being a prophylactic against it. Dewey held that natural rights theory is
a fiction erected originally to support individual autonomy against the tyranny
of traditionalist compulsory association and the early-modern absolutist state.
He held that laissez-faire individualism had the same root. However, he
contended that, today, the two theories justify respectively autocratic state
power and unchecked corporate power. Dewey decried demagogic exploitation of
friend-enemy dichotomies, which mask an escape from responsibility and favor
authoritarianism (1988e, pp. 88-89). By contrast to Schmittean contentions
about the incommensurability of culture, futility of dialogue, and need for
national homogeneity, Dewey held that a society rich in difference has a larger
cultural toolbox of resources for sharing attitudes and, thus, for living, coping
with problems, and creating new culture. He thought that promoting openness and
even receptivity to difference can forge multicultural social integration. The
fragmentation decried by antiliberals, he argued, derives not from diversity
per se, but primarily from the failure to achieve substantive equal opportunity
and extend substantive liberty widely enough. Building on Jefferson, Dewey held
that the fate of democratic political and legal institutions depend on building
a democratic culture that provides individuals cultural acceptance and economic
and social means for participation. (104) He argued that the lack of cultural freedom weakens the vitality
of political democracy and paves the way for autocracy. In his view,
democratization of local social relations and civil society - the space where
people lead their daily lives - is essential to substantive democratization and
active citizenship. Dewey and Mead stressed the importance of voluntary
association; they saw its patterns to be a formative force in constituting the
self and linking the individual and society and citizen and state. (105) This theme builds on ideas
that go back to Jefferson and Tocqueville, were stressed by Durkheim
(“professional” or “intermediate”groups), later became a central focus of
American sociology (studies of “secondary groups” or “voluntary associations”),
and are still central to current debates over the state of American democracy.
(106)
Dewey and Weber diverged on many points. Referring to
democratic citizenry, they employed the same metaphor; that “one does not have
to be a shoemaker to know if the shoe fits” (Weber [1921] 1968, pp. 1456-7;
Dewey [1927] 1968, p. 364-65). Weber applied the phrase to qualify his warnings
about abuses of plebiscitary politics, while Dewey used it to call on theorists
to engage “the problem of the public”- to improve or democratize “the
methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion” and fashion a
more participatory, inclusive democracy. Weber expressed grave doubts about the
prospects for establishment of sufficient agreement and mediation of
conflictive interests to advance social justice, but, like Dewey, he embraced
liberal democracy and warned that it would be in peril if such progress is not
achieved. A Dewey-Weber fusion would address this unresolved tension in Weber’s
thought. Weber’s work has more sociological depth than Dewey’s corpus, offering
better tools to detect structural and institutional blockages to
democratization and distinguish plausible possibilities for stronger
democratization from wistful hopes about it. However, Dewey saw democracy as a
work in progress with no endpoint, dependent on variable cultural conditions
and historical contingencies. He implied that the democratization process needs
to be informed by the types of tough-minded cultural science and policy
analysis that Weber called for. In Dewey’s view, treating democracy as a
utopian endpoint sets an impossible standard that denies democratic ideals
incremental advancement and that creates fertile conditions for claims about
exhaustion and autocratic solutions. Dewey and Weber embraced convergent
historicist views, which antiliberal, natural rights theorists and pessimistic
critical theorists assert pave the way for nihilism, fascism, and
communism. From a Dewey-Weber
standpoint, antiliberal critics’ absolutist, formalist, and decisionist
“alternatives” cultivate the very problems that they attribute to historicism
and their homogenization-regimentation theses reflect distorted political
vision, rooted in their “quest for certainty,” rather than actual exhaustion of
the historical process.
4. Postscript: Rupture, Theory, and Reconstruction
It will not be long before new peoples shall arise and new springs rush down into the
depths... The earthquake reveals new springs. Nietzsche (Thus Spoke
Zarathustra)
Dewey
feared that liberal democracy was too thinly institutionalized, or not yet
embedded deeply enough in people’s beliefs and habits, to withstand the global
economic crisis and grave authoritarian threats of the 1930s. He warned that
liberal institutions were unsustainable if they were reduced to formal legal
rights, occasional votes, and consumer freedom for those who could afford it.
Liberal democracy’s survival, he held, depends on forging a “fighting
liberalism” that embraces and extends substantive freedom (Dewey [1927]1988b;
[1929] 1988d; [1935] 1987; [1939] 1988e). He saw the project of democratization
to be a matter of practical politics and active agency. But he held that such
efforts must be “intelligent” and, therefore, include a theoretical moment. He
stressed especially the need to engage and debunk self-fulfilling ideological
assumptions and claims, which block cultural and political vision or the
ability to formulate democratic alternatives and to steel the will to pursue
them against tough opposition. Dewey believed that the deep crises of his time
made people receptive to new political visions. He advocated a fundamental
rethinking of democracy, or what he saw as an effort to recover and reconstruct
the suppressed “spiritual”side of the American tradition. (107)
We likely live on the verge of a moment of rupture. The
return of Schmitt and antiliberal politics already suggest the start of a
seismic shift in cultural and political vision. Today, the range of new
cultural and political alternatives is not yet clear in the postwar era’s
fading twilight, but its sharper outline may be a crisis away. Dark
possibilities already loom on the American horizon in the wake of several
decades of neoliberal policy, the Iraq War and War on Terror, and Hurricane
Katrina’s human and material wreckage. Dewey’s type of radical democratic
sensibilities are embedded in US political culture and have erupted, in times
past, into social movements and policy regimes, which have made American
democracy more inclusive (Dewey 1988e and Foner 1998). While interest in Dewey
has grown, it is an open question whether his vision will return to US
politics. A key facet of his thought has strong affinity for views manifested
in the aforementioned “return of Marx” and other signs of a revived search for
justice. In the shadow of the Great Depression and Nazi and Fascist threat,
Dewey attacked the Liberty League’s reduction of democracy to capitalism and
liberty to free-markets and property rights, He declared:
Let radicals make clear that an infinitely greater amount
of real liberty is possible than our present system provides for. Let them make
clear that they are the ones who would extend the liberties that our
forefathers fought till they include all members of society and until every
normal human being has the opportunity to develop to the full, in peace and
security, the capacities with which [she and] he is naturally endowed. Regiment
things and free human beings. Regiment machines and money and other
inanimate things, and give liberty to human beings (Dewey [1934] 1989b, p 90).
This ideal of substantive equal opportunity has deep
historical roots and lives in American self-identity; most middle-class
Americans like to think that it has already been realized. We want to believe
that our culture is just and that personal success and status are earned
through our own individual efforts in fair competition (108). However, this cherished ideal has long
been in conflict with the society’s chief ideological and lived forms of
liberty and consequent inequalities. Equality remains an unfulfilled project of
American modernization. Will its time ever come?
Concluding
the “objectivity” essay, Weber held that in an “age of specialization” social
researchers would focus on routine work and be oblivious to its “rootedness” in
“ultimate value ideas.” He said that the “analysis of the data” would become an
“end in itself.” “But,” he added: there comes a moment when the atmosphere
changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes
uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great cultural
problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its
analytical apparatus and to view the streams of events from the heights of
thought”(Weber [1904] 1949, p. 112). Weber implied that sweeping social change
makes problematic the normative and analytical presuppositions of taken for
granted routine in science and the broader culture. He was likely pondering the
motivation of his own query into “objectivity.” His generation reformulated
social thought in response to the sudden rise of mechanized, urban, secular
capitalism and, later, to World War I, when modernization when awry. Dewey,
Mills, Gouldner, and others have since held that “social theorists” should
reflect on the directions of science and society in stable times as well as in
moments of rupture. The various Weber fusions, discussed above, engaged
modernization theory - arguably the postwar era’s primary metanarrative for
legitimating and challenging liberal democracy. Multiple waves of
homogenization-regimentation theses express
uncertainties inhering in modernization theorists’ hopes and fears about
progress. Long-term concerns aside, however, global economic, geopolitical, and
cultural changes and catastrophic threats or risks (e.g., global warming,
resource depletion, and terror) have ended the postwar conjuncture and might
call forth the type of fundamental critical reflection of which Weber spoke and,
perhaps, a day of reckoning that will reawaken more broadly the sense of
justice.
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Notes
(1) Thanks to Ira Cohen, Steve Kalberg, Bob
Kent, Hal Orbach, Larry Scaff, Sandro Segre, and David Smith for their critical
readings and good suggestions. Thanks to Pasquale Carraciolo for instruction on
things Nietzschean. While their criticism helped the essay, it would have been
stronger had I been able to carry out all their suggestions. Any mistakes are
mine.
(2) This essay focuses on Weber in the postwar
US, but national borders and intellectual boundaries are fluid. Shifts in Weber
interpretation, originating in non-English speaking parts of the world, often
reach the
(3) Sica
(2004a, pp. 75-104) covers parallel ground in a somewhat different manner. See
Kalberg 1996 and Swedberg 2003 for other periodizations of Weber
interpretation; see Scaff 2004 on Weber’s impact on
(4)
Since the initial publication, Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism has been standard, assigned reading in many sociological theory
classes. The accuracy of the translation has been contested (e.g., see Scaff
2005a; Kalberg 2001a), but it is still in print, with an introduction by
Anthony Giddens (Weber 2001). Two new translations, based on different versions
of the German original, have been published (Weber 2002a and 2002b). On the
relevance of the work and long debate over it, see Lehmann and Roth 1995
(5) R.H. Tawney’s ([1926] 1954) critical
commentary about Weber’s Protestant ethic thesis was one of the earliest
English-language treatments of his ideas. In 1927, Economist Frank Knight’s
translation of Weber’s (1981) economic history lectures appeared. Pitirim
Sorokin (1928, pp. 673-96) and Theodore Abel (1929, pp. 116-59) provided early,
brief accounts of Weber’s ideas in their theory books. Parsons ( [1923-1937]
1991) mentioned Weber in many of his early writings, but his translation of The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904-05] 1930) and
extensive analysis of Weber’s thought in The Structure of Social Action
([1937] 1968) had widest impact. After the war, Parsons (1947) published a long
introductory essay to his edited volume of selections from Weber’s Economy
and Society. The next year Parsons (1948) published another essay on
Weber’s views of capitalism and modern institutions. In the early postwar era,
Weber’s work on the world religions, the city, and methodology were also
translated in to English ([1921] 1947; 1949a: [1920] 1951; [1917-1919] 1952;
[1921] 1958a; [1921] 1958b;1963). Postwar sociological theory texts included
substantial sections on Weber (e.g., Timasheff 1955, pp. 167-83; Martindale
1960, pp. 376-93). Reinhard Bendix (1960) wrote the first English-language
treatise on Weber’s overall corpus. Until publication of this study, Guenther
Roth (1977) argued, English speakers lacked the comprehensive overview of
Weber’s work needed to see his portrayal of the Protestant ethic in the wider
context of his comparative studies of religion and his conception of
bureaucracy in relation to his related typologies of domination structures.
Roth held that Bendix’s work demonstrated the limitations of Parsons’ Weber and
helped stimulate the rise of a Weberian comparative-historical sociology that
countered structural-functionalism. Yet even Roth conceded that Parsons exerted
the widest influence on the early postwar, American vision of Weber (Roth and
Wittich 1968, p. xxvi). Special sections in the American Sociological Review
on Parsons’ thought (June 1964, vol 29) and in honor of the hundredth
anniversary of Weber’s birth (April 1965, vol. 30) provide insight into the
postwar view of Weber. See Parsons 1980, on his encounter with Weber’s thought.
(6) See
e.g., Parsons 1951, p. 368. Parsons (e.g., 1971, p. 7) expressed his debt to
Weber in quasi-Durkheimian arguments about “pattern maintenance” and normative
integration. Parsons argued that Weber started out as a materialist, convergent
with Marx, But after Weber’s nervous breakdown and at the start of his work on
ascetic Protestantism, Parsons held, he forged an “anti-Marxian interpretation”
of modern capitalism. Parsons claimed that Weber’s methodological shift to
explaining capitalism by its “system of values and value attitudes,” was “a
direct polemical challenge to the Marxian type of explanation” ([1937] 1968 pp.
503, 510). He held that Weber’s mature work and bulk of his corpus was inspired
by this “Parsonsian” turn.
(7) See
Reinhard Bendix’s (1960, pp. 481-82) translation of Weber’s concept of Herrschaft
as domination and Parsons’ (1960a, p. 752) critique. On translating Weber, see
Roth 1992.
(8)
Parsons held that postwar
(9)
Favorable references to Weber are scattered throughout Parsons (1951) postwar
tome, The Social System, which is
the most comprehensive statement of his structural-functionalism. Parsons
(1964) also claimed that his later
“evolutionary universals” argument was inspired by Weber. Parsons was aware of
Weber’s scathing criticism of theories of evolutionary progress. However,
Parsons held that Weber leaned toward a systemic or organicist theory of
society even though he objected strenuously to this view on methodological grounds
(Parsons 1947, pp. 18-25). Parsons argued that his own evolutionary views were
consistent with the “spirit” of Weber’s work; i.e., following in the tracks of
his alleged belief in the “universal significance” of Western civilization and
“general pattern of human social evolution” (Parsons 1971, pp. 2-3, 139).
(10) See Godfrey Hodgson’s (1978, pp. 67-98)
succinct yet comprehensive portrayal of the of “the ideology of liberal
consensus” and its key proponents.
(11) See Mills [1943] 2000a, p 53. He was
referring to a section from Weber’s Economy and Society ([1921] 1968) on
Class and Status-Groups. Gerth’s and Mills’ translation appeared first in the
journal Politics ([1921] 1944) and later in their collection (Weber
1946a, pp. 180-95).
(12)
Compare Gerth’s and Mills’ (1946, pp. 61-65) argument about the role of ideas
and interests in Weber’s thought with Parsons’ autonomous view of culture
(e.g., 1971, pp. 1-28)
(13)
Gerth’s and Mills’ interpretation was a more accurate rendering of Weber than
Parsons’ views, but it also a selective or one-sided view and was not free of
translation problems. By the 1950s other English-language works offered
different alternatives to the Parsons’ Weber (e.g., see Hughes [1958] 1977,
passim). On translation problems, see Roth 1992.
(14) Mills was critical of the
(15)
In a Guggenheim Fellowship application, Mills (2000b, p. 79) portrayed his
intellectual roots: “In sociology my main impulse has been taken from German
developments, especially the traditions stemming from Max Weber and, to a
lesser degree, Karl Mannheim.” Mills’ analytical separation of political power
and class converged with Weberian sociology, but, in a critical exchange, he
explained his admiration for Marx: “I happen never to have been what is called
‘a Marxist,’ but I believe Karl Marx one of the most astute students of society
modern civilization has ever produced; his work is now essential equipment of
any adequately trained social scientist as well as any properly educated
person. Those who say they hear Marxian echoes in my work are saying that I
have trained myself well. That they do not intend this testifies to their own
lack of proper education” (Mills [1957] 2000c, p. 237) See e.g., Mills 1951; 1956; 1958; 1963; and
Gerth and Mills 1953. On Mills and Weber, see Tillman 1984, pp. 42-50;
Aronowitz 2003.
(16) Weber’s so-called “despairing liberalism”
is often associated with Nietzschean facets of his work. Poignant references to
Nietzsche are scattered in his corpus. He is supposed to have said that the
“honesty of a contemporary scholar” can be judged by his or her “stand in relation
to Nietzsche and Marx.”(Scaff 1989, p. 6). On Nietzsche and Weber, see e.g., Eden 1982; 1983; 1987;
Schroeder 1987; Warren 1988; Hennis 1988; Mommsen 1989; Scaff 1989; Treiber,
1995.
(17) Quoted in Marianne Weber [1926] 1975, p.
293. Lawrence Scaff (2005b, p. 64) explains that the meaning of the quote is
blurred a bit by lines that she omitted. He holds that Max Weber’s point was
more subtle and qualified than the antimodern or anticapitalist tone of this
fragment. However, homogenization-regimentation theorists also tend to see
Weber’s comments about the leveling force of instrumental rationalization in
isolation from other facets of his work or to ignore qualifications, which
moderate or condition his views about the process. See Kalberg 1980; 2001b;
2005, for a balanced view of the complexities of Weber’s theory of
rationalization and bureaucratization and his related conception of “iron
cage.”.
(18)
According to Weber, “monocratic” or “fully developed” bureaucracy is modern
capitalism’s dominant, formal organizational type. He stressed its machine-like
character, dehumanized activity,
calculative emphasis, narrow
specialization, and top-down domination. In his view, the single head fixes
ultimate responsibility at the top, and makes possible quick, unambiguous,
decisive moves with regard to important matters and crises ([1921] 1946d).
Weber saw science to be a legitimate, major arbiter of modern public culture,
but he also held that it contributes to “devastating senselessness”- it cannot
answer fundamental normative questions about the direction of individual life
or social policy or “Which of the warring gods shall we serve.”See Weber [1919]
1946b; [1919], 1946c; [1915] 1946f, pp. 350-57.
(19) The homogenization-regimentation thesis
has been expressed by diverse thinkers, including liberals. For example,
compare the accounts of American “mass society” by Weber-influenced Daniel
Bell, a culturally-conservative liberal
([1960] 1988, pp. 21-38) and by anti-liberal Weber critic Leo Strauss’
([1968] 1995, pp. 260-72). For criticism of one-sided views of Weber, including
the anti-liberal versions, see e.g., Roth 1965; 1975; Weiss 1987.
(20) Not all facets of “anti-liberal”
theorists’ social thought and political views are anti-liberal. Different
theorists stress the exhaustion of liberalism in varying degrees, and their
theories and overall corpora often combine anti-liberal with liberal elements.
(21) Gunnell (1988, p. 73) held that these
anti-liberal critics (e.g., Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Hans Morganthau, Hannah
Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Franz Neumann, Arnold Brecht, Max Horkheimer, and
Herbert Marcuse) posed “the thesis that liberalism, either inherently or
because of its degenerate condition, was at the core of a modern crisis and
implicated in the rise of totalitarianism.” See also Gunnell 1993. Recall,
however, my qualification that not all facets these thinkers’ thought
and political views were anti-liberal. My focus is on the
homogenization-regimentation thesis, which the theorists employed in varying
degrees.
(22) Earlier German speaking thinkers also
contributed substantially to anti-liberal currents. For example, Nietzsche had
an enormous, multisided impact on them, and Simmel’s arguments about the
leveling and relativizing force of money and consequent growing “tragedy of
culture” influenced younger scholars
(e.g., Lukács).
(23) Bloom’s view of Weber was likely
influenced heavily by his antiliberal, émigré mentor Leo Strauss’s critique.
See Bloom 1987, pp. 147-51 and Horkheimer [1947] 1974, p. 81.
(24) Some of these thinkers saw
Weber-influenced Karl Mannheim’s views about ideology, scientific politics and
planning and, especially, his relativistic sociology of knowledge to be an
influential carrier of these Weberian themes (e.g., Adorno 1981, pp, 37-49).
See
(25) Strauss ([1950] 1965, p.48) criticized
Weber’s “noble nihilism,”or allegedly misguided belief that “intellectual
honesty” and preference for “human freedom” dictate acknowledgment of the
“baseless character” of noble ideals or “objective norms” (i.e., absolute
truths).
(26)
Strauss’s and Voegelin’s approaches have some affinity for Thomist philosophy,
which admonishes ethical individualism and calls for strict adherence to
Catholic dogma. Thomists usually do not embrace Strauss and Voegelin, but they
see them as allies in the fight against relativism and share their critical
view of Weber as a leveler of values. See e.g., Midgley 1983. On Strauss’ and
Voegelin’s reading of Weber, see Gunnell 2004. See McDaniel 1998, for analysis
of Strauss’ view of inequality and an argument that he stops short of
anti-liberalism. Like Weber, Strauss argued that modern secular people try to
“escape into the self and art.” However, Strauss held that such flight is a
denial or flight from true values and from legitimate moral authority. He
declared that “the self... does not defer to anything higher”and its autonomy
today is a source confusion and despair”(Strauss1968, p. 261).
(27) Nietzsche also had a relatively independent
influence on Strauss and Voegelin. They criticized Nietzsche as the master
philosopher of nihilism, but they lauded his recognition of it as a profound
crisis of modernity and converged with his view that philosophical leadership
was needed to fashion a new civilization. Voegelin’s Platonist quasi-Catholic
thrust otherwise departed Nietzsche. By contrast, strong Nietzschean taints are
manifested in Strauss’ points about “exoteric writing” (or “writing in between
the lines”) and the “noble lie,” which imply that his embrace of objective
value was strategic; aimed at empowering the “wise” or a philosophic elite
capable of grasping the dangers of liberalism, cultivating belief and obedience
among the “vulgar,” and, thus, securing and perpetuating western culture’s
highest values. However, Strauss’ hoped-for disciplinary regime contradicted
Nietzsche’s vision of a post-traditional, aesthetic-centered culture. See
Strauss [1952] 1988, pp. 22-37; Gunnell 1978. Strauss spoke of Nietzsche and
Marx, exemplar figures of modernity’s “third wave,” as the culmination of its
nihilistic tendencies and root of fascism and communism. Strauss held that the
triumph of Marxist egalitarianism would produce a future characterized by the
well-fed, comfortable, Nietzschean “last-man” - “the lowest and most decayed
man, the herd man without any ideals or aspirations...” A defense of the
superiority of liberal democracy, Strauss held, requires support from “the
premodern thought of our western tradition.” See e.g., Strauss 1989a, pp. 97;
[1968] 1995, pp. 270-72; 1989b, pp. 3-26; Voegelin [1952] 1966, pp. 162-89.
(28) See Marcuse 1968, pp. 201-26; 1964.
(29)
On the
(30)
For example, Marcuse ([1955] 1966) made a Nietzschean-Weberian aesthetic turn
to the body and sexuality. Favoring utopian vision, he countered his pessimism
and encouraged left radicalism. He had a formative influence on 1960s and 1970s
alternative culture and antiwar politics (i.e., thinkers who proposed new
political alliances between alienated youth, people of color, and the
(31)
For example, Eric Fromm did not stress the homogenization-regimentation thesis
nearly as strongly as Horkheimer and Adorno. Also, Horkheimer and Adorno
contributed to the
(32) Schmitt exerted substantial influence on Strauss
and on various other major postwar thinkers (e.g., Hans Morgenthau and Samuel
Huntington). See McCormick 1998. Schmitt’s Nietzsche-Weber fusion and
“friend-enemy” dichotomy, which will discussed below, provided a theoretical
basis for convergent anti-communism and anti-liberalism.
(33) Compare Löwith’s [1933] 1986, pp. 16-19,
27-61 portrayal of the two men with that of Strauss’s 1989b, pp. 27-46.
(34)
Strauss’ (1989b, pp. 41-46) discussion of
Heidegger’s fears about the possible rise of US- and Russian-led global
technocracy, or “night of the world,” offers insight into the extreme
Heideggerian regimentation-homogenization thesis. Strauss said that he was
first impressed with Weber. However, after engaging Heidegger, he declared,
“Weber appeared to me as an ‘orphan child’ in regard to precision and probing
and competence” (Strauss 1988, pp. 27-8). Strauss drew inspiration from
Heidegger, but Weberian threads are still evident in Straussian thought.
(35)
See Gouldner 1970, pp. vii. The antiwar movement, campus revolts,
counterculture, assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, street
protests and police violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention, and New-Left
revolutionary rhetoric neutralized what remained of the early postwar, liberal
consensus. Centrist and right-wing politicians spoke of a breakdown of “law and
order,” and left-liberal sociologists stressed major structural crises and
fundamental social and political shifts (e.g., Perrucci and Pilisuk 1968;
Skolnick and Currie 1970). Divisions over race, the Vietnam War, and
counterculture animated generational and ideological splits in
(36) Giddens’ contended that Marx, Durkheim,
and Weber engaged incisively capitalist modernity, framing issues and
formulating concepts that are still relevant for today’s capitalism. In the
1970s, many theorists argued that the work of these three classical theorists
illuminate the roots of contemporary theoretical splits and the historical
contexts that generated them. This alleged “holy trinity” became the core
theoretical canon of 1970s American sociological theory. Even introductory
textbooks often began with brief portraits of them, holding that their ideas
were a major source of contemporary paradigmatic and ideological splits.
(37)
By the early-1950s, mainstream, American sociologists had rejected the idea of
using the classics to analyze
contemporary society and, especially, of treating them as a model for creation
of new theory. The dominant view was that the classics are a good source
of hypotheses and ideas, but that the
style of work (i.e., “armchair” speculation) is passé and its decline as a
practice marks sociology’s scientific progress. “Scientific” theorists wanted
broader theories to be “objective” or be based strictly on empirical
“middle-range” theories and related sociological research. See Merton 1957, pp.
3-16, 85-117. For an opposing view that inspired the critics, see Mills 1961,
pp. 143-76. During the 1970s classical theory revival, however, the majority
and, perhaps, even the vast majority of American sociologists (e.g.,
specialized researchers and scientific theorists) still saw classical theory to
be moribund and ignored it in their work.
(38)
Weberian-influenced theories contributed substantially to the
functionalism-conflict debate, which raged in American sociology from the
mid-1960s to the early-1970s. See e.g., Demerath and Peterson 1967. On Weberian
conflict theory, see Collins 1975; 1979. Irving Zeitlin’s (1968) theory
textbook, which interpreted classical theory as a debate with “Marx’s ghost”
was widely read by sociologists. On the Marx-Weber connection see e.g., Bryan
Turner 1981; Antonio and Glassman 1985; Weiss 1986; Wiley 1987. See Löwith’s
([1960] 1982) classic essay on Marx and Weber, and Schroeter’s (1985) review of
the German literature on the Marx-Weber relation. On Weber and critical theory,
see Kellner 1985.
(39) See e.g., Roscher and Knies
([1922] 1975); Critique of Stammler ([1907] 1977); The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient
Civilizations ([1924] 1976). The earlier translation of Weber’s General
Economic History (1981) was republished with a new lengthy introduction,
and Marianne Weber’s ([1926] 1975) biography of Weber was translated.
(40) This extremely important translation was
republished again in 1978 by the
(41)
Roth (1977) held that Bendix’s work expressed Weber’s approach comprehensively
and accurately and, therefore, demonstrating shortcomings of Parsons’ Weber and
of the various political readings of Weber. See also Roth’s (1968) lengthy
introduction to Economy and Society, where he asserted that he intended
simply to supplement Bendix’s work.
(42)
Translations, commentaries, and applications following in the wake of the
second wave, English-language Weber revival are too massive to summarize here.
These still flow profusely. For examples of diverse types of work, see Poggi,
1983; Glassman and Murvar 1983; Hekman 1983; Eden 1983; Midgley 1983; Huff
1984; Collins 1985; Lehmann and Roth 1987; Whimster and Lash 1987; Käsler 1988;
Oakes 1988; Goldman 1988; Sica 1988; Jaspers 1989; Bologh 1990; Sayer 1991;
Abraham 1992; Horowitz and Maley. 1994; Pellicani 1994; Turner and Factor 1994;
Kalberg 1994; Breiner 1996; Swedberg 1998; Stephen Turner 2000; Eliaeson 2002;
Sica 2004a. See Sica’s (2004b) comprehensive English-language Weber
bibliography.
(43) Increasingly, social theorists operated
at the margins of the disciplines in which they earned their degrees and were
employed. Rather than focusing on specialized work in their disciplinary
fields, they read and engaged largely the work of other similarly located
social theorists. On social theory’s independence from disciplinary work, see
Stephen Turner 2004.
(44) Mills died of a heart attack at the age
of 45 in 1962. On Mills and “New Sociology,” see Horowitz 1964;
(45)
The seeds of this approach are visible in his early work; see Gouldner 1950,
pp. 6-9, 53-66, 644-59.Gouldner cited, and likely was influenced by Gerth’s and
Mills’ Weber collection.
(46)
Gouldner’s project included his trilogy, or
The Dark Side of the Dialectic, -
The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology ([1976] 1982a); The
Future of Intellectuals and The Rise of the New Class ([1979] 1982b); and The
Two Marxisms ([1980] 1982c) and his posthumously published Against
Fragmentation (1985). His earlier Enter Plato (1965) and The
Coming Crisis of Sociology (1970) set the stage for this project. A final
volume was said to be ready for publication, but did not appear. For analysis
of Gouldner’s project, see Antonio 2005b.
[1]
Gouldner implied that post-traditional normative arguments should have a
sociological moment, deploying empirical-historical knowledge in claims about
the consequences of value-oriented positions and actions. Moral principle does
not disappear from such arguments, but it is historicized and emphasis on
consequences replaces justification on the basis of authority per se.
(47)
See e.g. Habermas 1970, pp. 81-122; 1984; 1987a. On 1970s Habermas discourse,
see e.g., Habermas 1970; 1971; 1973; 1979;
McCarthy 1978; and Telos 39 (Spring 1979).
(48)
Gouldner was loosely associated with Telos. He was not officially part
of the staff, but he interacted with the editors and was friendly with chief
editor, Piccone. Gouldner taught at
(49)
See especially, Piccone 1977; 1978; Luke 1978. However, the same currents could
be found easily in a perusal of Telos throughout the middle and later
1970s. Piccone claimed that liberal-left Democratic Party officials,
welfare-state functionaries, educators, social movement leaders, and their
professional-class allies were an hegemonic elite that shaped
(50)
The ascendence of Piccone’s views, sharp attacks on Habermas, and drift toward
populism led Telos’ Habermasian wing to break with the journal in the
early-1980s. However, Weber still had an obvious, albeit usually tacit,
presence in Telos’ pervasive debates over rationalization, disenchantment, and
bureaucratization, which remained central even after the journal staff severed
its ties with critical theory and veered toward anti-liberal populism. See Telos
78 (Winter 1988-89) for a symposium and special section on Weber.
(51)
Ferry and Renaut (1990, pp. 168) stated: “Bourdieu’s position still explicitly
calls for a ‘generalized materialism,’ which it is true, he defines by bringing
together both Marx and Weber.” See e.g., Bourdieu 1993, pp. 176-191; 1973;
1987.
(52)
Berger’s and Luckmann’s (1966) analysis of reality construction processes
employed analytical themes from Marx’s thought and was later embraced, to
Berger’s displeasure, by some left-leaning social constructionists. Horowitz’s
Transaction Publishers remains a leading outlet for Weberian works.
(53)
David Smith suggested that I address these thinkers, and they deserve more
thorough attention than can be provided here. See Nisbet, e.g., 1966; 1975;
Berger, e.g.1967; 1970; 1977; 1986; 1990; 1992a; 2004; Berger, Berger, and
Kellner 1974; See Berger 1992b and Horowitz 1993, on the decomposition of
sociology and of progressive liberalism. See Lasch e.g., 1977; 1979; 1984;
1991; 1996; and Sennett [1974] 1992. Daniel Bell (1976) also contributed
centrally to this stream of criticism, but his work will be discussed in the
next section. These thinkers contributed to a broader wave of cultural criticism,
stressing the eroded American work ethic, depleted Puritan character, and
overall
(54) Many sociological works on the Marx-Weber
connection were published in the mid- and late-1980s, but the peak, critical
intellectual force of this theme had already passed.
(55)
Postmodernism included conflictive political and antipolitical threads.
Thinkers who advocated “postmodern politics” retained ties to modern social
theory. See e.g., Arac 1986; Giddens 1991; 1992; Grossberg, Nelson, and
Treichler 1992; Guttman 1994; Melucci 1996; Benhabib 1996; 1998; Hetherington
1998; for Marxist critique, see e.g., Perry Anderson 1983, 1998; Best and
Kellner 1991; see Stephens 1996, on the roots of postmodern politics in 1960s
“antidisciplinary” politics. By contrast, radical postmodernists, declaring an
“end to politics,” broke much more sharply with modern social theory. See e.g.,
Baudillard 1983; 1988.
(56)
Nietzsche’s ideas had a formative impact on the
(57)
Habermas (1987b, pp. 211-42) held that Bataille’s earlier engagement of Weber
and deployment of Weberian ideas in radical cultural criticism, likely
influenced Foucault’s generation. On Weber and Foucault, see Gordon 1987; Whimster
1995. Depending on the disciplinary background, some North American
postmodernists read directly Nietzsche and Weber. However, they seldom
addressed their texts closely.
(58) However, Gane presented Weber’s views
carefully and mostly sympathetically, and supported continued engagement
between Weberian theory and postmodernist thought.
(59)
Following Baudrillard, Bogart held that, in the absence of its simulated
opposition, the postmodern system of control would implode from indifference
and boredom. Bogart 1996, pp 179-83 and passim; Baudrillard 1983, pp. 77-104
and passim; 1987, pp. 97-101 and passim.
(60)
Bauman ([1989] 2000) made many direct references to Weber as the theorist who
expressed most compellingly modernity’s bureaucratic formalism and, to some
degree, justified it. Bauman’s argument countered Daniel J. Goldhagen’s much
debated view that the Holocaust originated strictly from widespread German
hatred of Jews (Bauman 2000, pp. 222-50). Ira Cohen drew my attention to
Weber’s role in the ongoing Holocaust debate. However, this important matter
deserves more attention than can be given it here.
(61)
On the need to reconstruct Marxist theory to take account of postmodern
culture, see
(62)
Postmodernism’s “antidisciplinary”or “multicultural” politics helped fuel the
intense culture war between the cultural left and neoconservatives, manifested
recently in heated battles over Jacques Derrida’s legacy in the media reportage
of his death. His supporters portrayed him as a cultural genius, while critics
described him as a culture destroyer. See
Antonio 2005a.
(63)
This type of tacit convergence also appears in
(64)
(65)
(66) See Titunik 1997 for a critique of this
type of Weber application; See Bobbio 1996 and Antonio 1998 on 1990s “endings
discourses.”
(67)
See e.g., Giddens 1990; 1994; 1998; Beck 1992; Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1994. On
(68)
In the later 20th century US, Adam Smith, has tended to be
reinterpreted and radicalized through the lens of Austrian economic theory.
Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Heyak’s work has had major influence in
neoconservative circles and on broader arguments about the need to roll back
state regulation. Milton Friedman has also shaped these views. But Weber was a
critic of Austrian economics and libertarianism. For a libertarian critique of
Weber, see Anderson 2004.
Full citizenship in Friedman’s deregulated,
market-dominated democracy requires participation in stock-market and financial
trading. The extent of participation depends on how much an individual owns and
invests. Friedman held that the neoliberal regime accelerates vastly the
creation of wealth and that its benefits, although very highly concentrated,
trickle down to almost everyone. On the 1990s phase of globalization, see
Antonio and Bonanno 2000.
(69)
Full citizenship in Friedman’s deregulated, market-dominated democracy requires
participation in stock-market and financial trading. The extent of
participation depends on how much an individual owns and invests. Friedman held
that the neoliberal regime accelerates vastly the creation of wealth and that
its benefits, although very highly concentrated, trickle down to almost
everyone. On the 1990s phase of globalization, see Antonio and Bonanno 2000.
Marxist, Perry Anderson declared that “the virtually uncontested consolidation,
and universal diffusion, of neoliberalism” was the most distinctive feature of
the 1990s (2000, p. 10).
(70)
Ritzer’s postmodern points about re-enchantment, simulation, hybridity are
developed more comprehensively in the
later versions of his McDonaldization thesis and in his works on consumption
and globalization. See Ritzer 1995; [1993] 2004a; 2004b; [1999] 2005.
(71) As stated above, however, Weber’s ideas
are embedded in modernization discourses and are often implicit in
globalization debates, especially in arguments about its continuities with and
departures from modernity. Yet Weber’s impact should not be exaggerated. It is
often indirect and hard to trace, and it is not present in all globalization
discourse.
(72)
Castells (1996; 1997; 1998) mapped technical-economic, organizational,
political, and cultural transformations, and addressed regional differences as
well as overall trends. His hefty three volume work has affinity for
(73) On
Weber, see Castells 1996: 195-200. Castells engaged Marxism seriously in his
earlier work, and traces of Marx’s ideas appear in his discussion of
globalization. For example, Castells’ vision of “information capitalism”
parallels Marx’s view that science and technology would reduce greatly “living
labor’s” role and drive overall development in advanced capitalism.
(74) For a discussion of the varieties of
globalization discourses and divergent stances over the role of capitalism and
the state, see e.g., Held et al 1999, pp. 1-31 and passim.
(75)
Schmitt criticized Weber, and claimed to go beyond his thought (e.g., Schmitt
1988b, p. 7-8). As Mommsen acknowledged, Schmitt put aside the liberal
democratic side of Weber’s thought. On
Schmitt and Weber, see Mommsen [1959] 1984, pp. 381-89, 404-5, 448-51;
1989, pp. 171, 190-92. For criticism of Mommsen’s views on this matter and
related approaches, see Roth 1965. Also, see Bryan Turner 2002.
(76)
On the weakened European nation-state system, see Schmitt [1950] 2003. For
critiques of neoliberalism and globalization influenced by Schmittian ideas,
see e.g., Mouffe 1993; 1999; Benoist 1996; Gottfried 1999a; Hardt and Negri
2000; Müller 2003, pp. 229-43. On the “friend and enemy” dichotomy, see Schmitt
[1932] 1996. On neotribalism, see, e.g., Barber 1996; Maffesoli 1996; Hughey
1998; Antonio 2000.
(77) However,
(78)
(79)
Turner does not mention Lippmann. Schmitt ([1926] 1988, pp. 6) admired
Lippmann’s Public Opinion ([1922] 1997), which held that democratic
participation is limited and distorted by symbolic politics and “manufactured
consent” and that elite decision-making is inevitable. Lippmann advocated the
increased role of experts, which parallels Turner’s rule by commission.
(80)
Some and perhaps many persons in the Republican foreign policy network,
especially those associated with neoconservative think tanks and organizations,
such as the “Project for a New American Century,” have, at least, some
knowledge of Strauss and Schmitt and express themes rooted in their theories.
However, these threads are often hard to trace. On Schmitt and Strauss, see
Strauss [1932] 1996; Drury 1997, pp. 65-96; On Schmitt’s and Strauss’ relation
to
(81) Taints of this dynamic appear in popular
works such as Barber’s Jihad versus McWorld (1996) and Friedman’s Lexus
and the Olive Tree (2000).
(82) A
group of wealthy liberals announced recently that they will fund development of
opposition Democratic think tanks to counter the Republican attacks (Edsall
2005).
(83) Schmitt ([1922] 1988a) justified full
executive control of the state apparatus in a crisis, neutralizing the role of
parliament and the courts. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution already
allowed the president unlimited power in a state of emergency. However,
Schmitt’s argument about the state of exception, combined with his friend-enemy
politics (which envisioned the liberal world to be in perpetual crisis),
provided grounds for a permanent state of exception and authoritarian
concentration of power. Schmitt did not only analyze the state of exception,
but he embraced it normatively. Moreover, his actions as a star
(84)
CNN employed the term “State of
(85)
Few contemporary Schmitteans dwell on the issue of the state of exception or
its connections to fascism. Rather they usually deploy Schmitt’s ideas to
attack liberal democracy’s shortcomings, defend the need rein in or
institutionally embed neoliberalism’s hegemonic economism, or criticize
(86)
He and Negri express a related variant of homogenization-regimentation theory,
expressing a growing Italian, left-Schmittean influence on
(87) His equation of modernity with the camps
converges with Bauman’s ([1989] 2000) view of the holocaust as inhering in the
structure of modernity.
(88)
Wittgenstein was a distant second in the 2005 vote. Marx also won the BBC
1999 poll - Einstein was second! Caught by surprise and very disappointed by
the outcome, the liberal Economist (2005) magazine charged that the vote
must have been rigged. See also, Wheen 2005; and
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/greatest_philosopher_vote.shtml).
See e.g., John Cassidy’s (1997) New Yorker
article about how the consequences of neoliberalism are bringing about a
“return of Marx.” Certain left-leaning, cultural theorists and social theorists
moved from postmodernism back toward Marx or stressed the need to address the
issues of economic inequality and social justice. For example, Derrida’s Specters
of Marx (1994) broke with the anti-Marxist left-Heideggerianism portrayed
by Bloom. Jameson and Harvey also shifted back toward Marx. Jameson (2002, p
215.) concludes a recent work on modernism with the argument that theorists
should substitute the term capitalism for modernity, and
(89)
The American idea of liberty is multi-sided, but it has stressed especially
strongly property rights, free markets, and consumer freedom. On the historical
development of the
(90)
New political forces are stirring. For example, diverse international groups
supported the July 2005 “Live 8" concerts, rally and protests at the
Gleneagles, Scotland, G8 meeting of economic ministers and movement to “make
poverty history.” The earlier electoral victory of the left-wing, Venezuelan
populist, Hugo Chavez took US pundits by surprise. His anti-neoliberal stances
have made him an example to other Latin American groups wanting to seek
alternative policy regimes. Chavez’s use of oil revenues to pay for programs
for the poor helped inspire the 2005 peasant and worker uprising in
(91)
Ira Cohen (1985) posed a similar argument years ago. I have much more
appreciation for his prescient theoretical insights now than I did then.
(92) The later 20th century pragmatism revival (e.g., Richard Rorty, Nancy Fraser, Cornell
West, Benjamin Barber) fuse cultural politics with class politics and oppose
neoliberalism’s minimalist vision of democracy and antiliberal
homogenization-regimentation theses.
(93)
Like other theorists discussed above, neopragmatists have sometimes absorbed
themes from Weber via arguments about modernization, rationalization, and
bureaucratization (e.g., in the Habermas
debate; see Aboulafia, Bookman, and Kemp 2002). Indirect fusions also appear in
their theories of “deliberative,”
“pragmatic,” or “communitarian”
democracy (e.g., Anderson 1990; Kloppenberg 1998, pp. 82-89; Selznick 1992).
Kloppenberg (1986) engaged Dewey and Weber directly at key junctures in his
intellectual history. However, the Dewey-Weber fusion here is my own effort to
trace convergences and mesh differences between the two theorists.
(94)
Although I speak of a Dewey-Weber fusion to be succinct and for ease of
expression, George Herbert Mead contributed substantially to the “Deweyan”
position and is also discussed below. Dewey and Mead were colleagues early in
their careers, and developed their basic views of pragmatism together. Dewey
was a much more prolific writer than Mead, and developed a much larger corpus
of social theory and political theory. However, Mead developed the social
psychology presumed by Dewey’s theories of communication, society, and
politics. Dewey asserted that Mead’s social psychology “worked a revolution” in
his thought, after he grasped its “full implications.” He saw Mead to be the
most “original mind” of his generation in American philosophy. On Mead’s
seminal contribution, see Dewey 1989a. However, most of the theory of democracy
and science that I link to Weber comes from Dewey.
(95)
(96)
Weber saw value judgements and empirical-historical judgments to be based on
fundamentally different types of discourse, and argument. Ignoring the
difference, he held, abjures “responsibility” and “the elementary duty of
scientific self-control” ([1904] 1949c, p. 98).
(97)
Like Nietzsche, Weber stressed that science in the broad sense, or systematic
inquiry, has a usually tacit, normative basis that makes the knowledge “worth
knowing” and that directs inquirers’ attention to a finite portion of
experience. Although not free of values per se, Weber argued that “cultural
science” demands highly disciplined restraint, or a focused effort to hold back
from snap judgements; inquirers must be open to the world’s obdurate facets to
engage “inconvenient facts,” which contradict their cherished values, firm
expectations, pet theories, linguistic conventions, and moral beliefs. Marianne
Weber’s ([1926] 1975, pp. 684) reference to Max Weber’s “illusion-free
illumination of the various roots of existence” referred to his storied
capacity for this type of restraint or, in his words, “objectivity.” This theme converges with Nietzsche’s views
about overcoming moral illusions. He called for an education that teaches us
“to see - habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things
come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual
case in all of its aspects. This is the first preliminary schooling in
spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the
restraining, stock-taking instincts in ones control” (Nietzsche [1888] 1968, p.
65). Mead ([1934] 1967, pp. 98-9) also saw this “delayed reaction” as a
fundmental feature of intelligence.
(98) Describing hearing Weber’s “science as a
vocation” speech, Karl Löwith ([1960] 1982, p. 17) stated: “The acuteness of the
questions he posed corresponded with his refusal to offer any cheap solutions.
He tore down all the veils from desirable objects, yet everyone none the less
sensed that the heart of this clear thinking intellect was profoundly humane.
After innumerable revolutionary speeches by literary activists, Weber’s words
were like a salvation.”
(99)
See Weber 1949b, p 18; 1946b, pp. 126-27; 1946c, pp. 154-56. Marianne Weber’s ([1926] 1975, pp. 659-84)
discussion of his heroic realism implies that Max Weber saw science as a
post-traditional normative ethic as well as an instrumental tool. Löwith’s
([1933] 1986, p. 17) portrayal of Weber’s “Science as a Vocation” speech
implies the same type of normative vision of science. On Weber’s ethics and
science, see Bruun 1972; Schluchter 1979; 1981; 1989; Roth and Schluchter 1979;
Roth 1984; Breiner 1996.
(100)
Regardless of the extension of expert knowledge production and decision-making,
Dewey held that educated citizens can still make informed choices between
conflictive positions, detect and resist forms of manipulation, and distinguish
democrats from demagogs. He stressed that these capacities are always imperfect
among the masses, but that the same holds for judgment of technical and
political elites.
(101) Fusing threads from Mead and Dewey with those
from Durkheim and other classical and contemporary theorists, Habermas also
aimed to forge a communication model that escapes western epistemology’s
dualistic subject-object split and consequent contradictions. By giving
privilege to the normative realm of “symbolic interaction” over the
instrumental realm of social organization and holding that they are in inherent
tension, however, he splits entwined
social processes into separate domains and, thus, continues the
subject-centered, epistemological dualism he claims to overcome. This split or
dualism inheres in his self-described “quasi-transcendental”move to communicative
ethics. Like Weber, Habermas does not escape from the philosophy of the subject
or philosophy of consciousness (Antonio 1989). By contrast, Mead and Dewey saw
the domains of symbolic interchange and social organization to be co-present in
the social process; they treated communication as an embodied practice entwined
with cooperative activity and associational and organizational life. Mead
stated that: “Communication is a social process whose natural history shows
that it arises out of cooperative activities... in which some phase of the act
of one form, which may be called a gesture, acts as a stimulus to others to
carry on their parts of the social act” ([1927] 1964e, p. 312). See Mead [1934]
1967, for a detailed account of “taking the attitude of the other” and other
social psychological aspects of the communication model. See also Mead [1908] 1964a; [1917-1918] 1964b; [1922]
1964c; [1924-1925] 1964d; [1927] 1964e; [1929]1964f. See Dewey [1925] 1988a, pp. 132-61, for a brief account
of his view of meaning and communication.
(102) Like Jefferson,
Dewey and Mead held that the “moral sense” arises from cooperative social
intercourse. Dewey and Mead argued that cooperation and moral judgment require
“taking the attitude of others.” In their view, this capacity is forged in
face-to-face social relationships, beginning in parent-child relations and
extending into informal play groups, schools, and other local associations).
Participating in wider networks of local cooperative activities (e.g., a sports
team), they held, gives rise to the “generalized other”or, the ability to share
attitudes, though abstraction, with distant others (e.g., a particular manager)
and collective others (e.g., district managers or the firm) and, thereby, grasp
one’s location and duties in relation to complex sets of related, impersonal
roles. On the generalized other, see Mead
[1934] 1967, pp. 151-63.
(103) For an earlier version of the argument above,
see Antonio and Kellner 1992a. See e.g., Dewey and Tufts [1932] 1985, pp.
275-84. See Beth Singer 1999, for a contemporary Mead- Dewey theory of rights
and related critique of natural rights theory.
(104) Dewey’s conception of the rise of democratic
government counters libertarian claims about split between public and private.
See Dewey1988b, pp. 238-58 1988e, pp. 173-88.
(105) These links have to be rethought in today’s
global context, but Dewey and Mead imagined already the development of
transnational “generalized others” and the formation of larger international
connections and forms of cultural integration. In their view, wider attitude
sharing in a regional or national cultures favor transnational connections and
the converse.
(106) See e.g., Putnam 2000. Bob Kent reminded
me of convergence between Dewey and Weber on the importance of voluntary
association in American democracy. This issue deserves more attention than I
can give it here. See Weber [1906]1946e.
(107) Dewey
argued that this task requires re-embracing and broadening a tradition that
originated with