Etica
& Politica / Ethics & Politics, 2005, 2
http://www.units.it/etica/2005_2/ELIAESON.htm
Max
Weber: made in the
Abstract
There is a
reciprocity over the |
Max Weber is often seen as a personification of the
German spirit, imprinted by deutscher Sonderweg and delayed
nation-building. In general that is a fair description, of Weber’s context.
However, ideas should not be interpreted merely on the basis of context.
Formative influences and experiences must be taken into account.
Weber is
indeed shaped by a context lost and gone that has to be retrieved, in an
attempt at bridging the gap between present and past. His philosophy of science
is imprinted by German historicism and a response to its problems. His
synthesis of neo-Kantianism and Austrian marginalism is more majeutics than innovation.
This is relatively well-known. Less well-known is that Weber to quite some
extent is a produce of the
This goes for his status as a classic author, which is
a retrospective construction that mainly took place in the
In
Weber’s
life coincided with the Second Reich, Wilhelmine
1. Weber in the USA
That Weber became a big name in the
The Austrian-Jewish Banker Alfred Schütz developed his
phenomenological variation of hermeneutics, taking his departure in Weber’s
ideal-type. He taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, an
institution created by the Danish-American Alvin Johnson, as a sanctuary and
“transit station” for European refugee scholars, pre-dominantly from the German
cultural realm. Arnold Brecht was affiliated with the same institution. He had
a career as important German official and experienced a lot of momentous events
as an “observing participant”, in for instance famous Preussenschlag 1932,
which was really the end of the
In addition Talcott Parsons had his PhD-degree from
When Paul F. Lazarsfeld developed his modern unified
science inspired survey research paradigm at the Bureau for Applied Social
Research at
Within various approaches in the sociology of
organizations Weber has been the master; both human relation and scientific
management schools regard themselves as Weberian, and a balanced judgement
might be that the theory of organization has developed in a sort of interplay
between the two.
The flamboyant enfant terrible of American
sociology, C. Wright Mills, also regarded himself as Weberian, which evidently is
a label for quite different content. In contrast to for instance the case of
Schütz, where the cultivation of the Nachlass early on was monopolized
(by Berger and Luckmann in
We have not exhausted the account of the migrants with
a live Weberian – of sort – legacy. We could include Herbert Marcuse, who
challenged Weber’s views on formal rationality at the
It is a perennial and crucial problem that we need
firm norms, to create a civilized society with a sense of community. But we
cannot prove the validity of those norms; they are useful social fictions.
Human rights are easy to accept but hard to prove.
Even if it seems clear that American social science in
the 20s century is “Weberian” it seems to be no unity about what that is
supposed to mean. It is almost easier to say what is not Weberian. We have
mentioned
There is a lot in common to Christian and Jewish
culture, and in fact many parents sent their offspring to Shils, who was
supposed to give them a good Christian education.
One might add that the religious background of
sociology is relevant also in the European context, since vicars in the
countryside were pioneering in gathering information about how people lived,
social statistics about pauperism. Shils was a teacher of many in several later
generations, including S.N. Eisenstadt. His Swedish contacts also included
Torgny T. Segerstedt and Martin P:son Nilsson. Shils had good contacts also in
Max Weber has not come to play the role in political
science that one might have expected. Naturally his definitions of the
state, with its monopoly of legal violence and his types of legitimate rule (Herrschaft)
is recurring food for students. However, there are in addition some obvious
“affinities” between Weber’s (and Michels’s, his young protégée) way to
conceive of democracy vs efficiency and later theories in the
In foreign policy both Morgenthau and Kissinger appear
as quite Weberian but they are not exactly ostentatiously so (see Mazur 2004
and Smith 1996).
One might further add that Wilhelm Hennis’s attempt at
a “Greek” Weber, regaining him for a classical political philosophical
discourse relating to Plato and Thucydides, has a great following in the
Weber has, moreover, a role to play also within
anthropology. Here one might recall Donald N. Levine’s investigations of the
Amhara people in
One might, however, say that Talcott Parsons is the
pivotal figure, the by far most momentous one for the American reception of
Weber’s ideas. The paradox is that his flawed or at least extended and/or
“creative” Weber-interpretation secured Weber his position on the
It is thanks to Parsons that Weber becomes “Weber” and
that a habit to read Weber through Durkheimian spectacles is established, while
Weber’s own identity as a sociologist is pretty weak, one might almost say a
retrospective construction. Of course Weber is a sociologist, of sort. But he
is even more a law scholar, historian and economist. Both Durkheim and Simmel
are more sociological in a genuine sense of the term, dealing with cultural
phenomena and phenomena under the surface, while Weber basically is a
rationalist, or even arguably sort of rational choice theorist. Weber is less
sophisticated than his protégée Simmel, but more testable and in that sense
more “scientific”.
Weber has inspired political analysis and perhaps in
particular Hans Morgenthau. The school of power realism depends on Weber – and
Hobbes. Weber evidently plays a role for Francis Fukuyama, also in his recent
books on economic development. This might be less noticed in Weberian circles.
Weber is almost inevitably an inspiring source for theories about The End of
Ideology and various convergence theories, through his Dystopia about the human
being as caught in a disenchanted and dull “iron cage of rationality”, a
metaphor which is really an erroneous albeit fortuitous translation and with
roots in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. However, Weber also emphasizes the
role of ideas, the unintended role of religious belief structures for material
wealth and prosperity and revolutionary technical innovations that transforms
also our everyday life and are universal and irreversible in character
(Schroeder and Swedberg 2002 and Robert K. Merton 1938). While
Above does not exhaust the topic. The reception
history also includes for instance a couple of colloquia, with Bob Antonio (
Stephen Kalberg has recently translated Weber’s
classic work on the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was
much needed since Parsons’s old translation was not top quality. It is odd that
it survived as long as it did (see Kalberg 2001). (2)
We must not forget that Gunnar Myrdal’s An American
Dilemma is a Weberian application. He has a whole chapter on value premises
and the method is really a politruk (political commissar) variation of
Weber-Rickert value orientation. Values should be relevant and significant to
serve as points of departure for policy analyses – and have to be made explicit
in order to avoid uncontrolled value intrusion. Although Gunnar Myrdal is a
very well known public intellectual and still today has a considerable
omnipresence in the American scene, it is less noticed that his Carnegie book
actually is an elaboration of Weber-Rickert and their view on objectivity in
social research, Wertbeziehung (value orientation) as a qualification of
value freedom. Explicit points of departure should help us avoid uncontrolled
value-intrusion and provide a starting point for rationalization of
value-hierarchies. Weber saw culture as the norm-sender while Myrdal had a more
“social movement” attuned solution, rather typical of social engineering in the
20th century, with its close connections between political power and
intellectuals. (3)
2. American influences on Max Weber
The role of religion brings us over to the other, and
somewhat neglected, aspect of Weber and
2.1 Protestantism and Capitalism
Already at age eleven little Maximilian had received
as a gift Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. “Advice to a young tradesman” is
part of this book. The book was a gift from Friedrich Kapp, according to
Guenther Roth (2000: 119). Roth is a German-American scholar from Darmstadt who
once published the classical work The Social Democrats in Imperial
Germany (1963) and in recent years has dedicated most of his time to write
Weber’s family-history (see also Roth 1987 and 1995).
There are many indications that seemingly confirm Weber’s
Calvinist thesis, about a link between the Protestantism Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism. John D. Rockefeller was keeping book over his expenditures and
his warm religiosity had several manifestations. His favourite hobby – expect
for philanthropy – was to be a Sunday school teacher for children.
“Weber’s thesis” has been much debated. There are
numerous alternative explanations to the Breakthrough to Modern capitalism.
Weber’s views were controversial from the very beginning and competed with Karl
Marx’s and Werner Sombart’s. Marx thought that the enclosure movement in the
The original accumulation of capital could also
perhaps be the result of monasteries combined with celibacy, leaving a lot of
legacies to the Catholic Church. Some of that took place in Inner Asia and not
merely
These examples of course by no means exhaust the topic
of capitalist take off into early Modernity, triggering off the irreversible
process of rationalization that Weber had such an ambiguous attitude towards.
There might be multiple routes to Modernity, but it was in
Weber’s thesis is quite simple: Der Puritaner wollte
Berufsmensch sein, wir müssen es sein. Through an ascetic life-style, saving money for the
future, and hard work, etc, in short the petit bourgeois virtues
Many preconditions for a breakthrough existed in
several places. It is a fascinating problem in history to explain how small
fractured
To Weber there is no causal orthodoxy involved. There
are many pre-conditions required, only to mention the availability of energy
resources. In addition a combination of individualism and security is required
(rational calculations, individual self-interest without asocial egoism) and
facilitates a capitalist take-off. These virtues are only to some extent
cultivated in the East. But where they are cultivated the result is often
striking, such as in the Japanese case. The
2.2 The Trip to
Weber saw the role of the belief in pre-destination
more clearly in the
Weber travelled with his wife Marianne and Ernst
Troeltsch, who was his neighbour at the shores of
Weber travelled all the way to the frontier out West,
to Guthrie in
Weber also travelled the South. He visited Booker T
Washington’s college for coloured people in
Weber
had recently recovered from a long and very inhibiting period of illness, a
nervous breakdown that started back in 1897 and made him a “tourist in life”
for about half a decade, with numerous sojourns at Italian resorts, etc.
Actually Weber’s lecture in
Weber was now ready to start
out on new projects, and in fact 1903-05 is the time when Weber initiates both GARS
(with PESC as first part), his methodological essays and his writings on
Russian affairs as well. 1905 his famous work on PESC appears, as two
texts in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft (Bd 20 and 21) and this turns out
to be the beginning of his whole comparative sociology of religion, which to
the rest of it only appears posthumously. One year later Weber’s publishes an
essay on the Protestant sects, drawing on his American experiences and in
particular his encounters with his own relatives in
I should add that Weber’s impressions
are very similar to my own, when I visited American relatives in
Even if everyday experiences
are telling and seminal for the creation of hypotheses it might nevertheless be
the case that Weber was misinformed about Mount Airy, the meaning of the
baptizing ceremony misinterpreted by the younger relative. Bill Swatos jr, a
priest in
Webers also visited
Weber enjoyed
3. The American Influences
It could be questioned how deep the US-influences on
Weber really were. Judgements vary. There are strong echoes of Ferdinand
Kürnberger’s Der Amerikaműde in Weber’s depictions of the noisy
hectic in American life – and they also have central sources in common (Ben.
It is nevertheless obviously the case that Weber was very
fond of American examples, both in his scholarly and political writings.
Weber’s “political sociology” (a somewhat amorphous term) about religion,
transformation and social stratification is quite “American”. Party system and
political leadership are also areas where Weber takes impression from the
Of course Weber is “made in
4. USA Europe : Communicating Bowls?
But what can we learn from Weber’s American
connections? I think the basic observation is the mutual reciprocity, which is
a long story with deep roots. The Auseinandersetzung some years ago
between Jeffrey Alexander and Richard Münch appears as exaggerated. (7)
American social science had a life of its own but all the time European
influences, for very natural reasons, had a major impact. Sociology in general
was highly stimulated by the discovery of new continents and civilizations. In
the case of
In intellectual history questions such as “Why is
Swedish – and European - social science so American?” are very well motivated.
The immigration laws from the 1920s maintained the
There is,
for instance, no department for the study of European Affairs at
Today’s communitarian wave in the USA (Sandel,
Etzioni, Putnam, etc) is really a re-export of originally Greek ideas practised
also in Switzerland; and in Straussian circles in today’s Chicago virtues from
Antiquity are very much alive, for instance at the Olin center where Allan
Bloom was active, and Nathan Tarcov still is. To a certain extent the Americans
have – also in their self-perception – been the better Europeans.
The interdependence between
Despite Europe and the USA having common roots, such
as Western Christianity and Enlightenment reason, the political culture is
otherwise very different, with regard to propensity to risk taking, mobility,
paying taxes, etc, etc. Already in the Western world we find multiple routes to
Modernity and secularisation/rationalization. The state has decisively a more
dominant role in nation building and Modernization, in particular in the
North-Western European welfare states of today, where taxation, wars, national
Bible translations and state churches were the driving forces, combined with
the rise of a national administration, a civil service tradition originally of
domesticated middle level nobility background, as a tool of state power against
feudalism. In the
Visiting Europeans, such as Bryce, de Tocqueville and
Gunnar Myrdal, also Adorno & Horkheimer, often provided the problem
formulations while the Americans were good at finding the solutions. Already
the first pilgrims to
The many affinities between Weber and Tocqueville have
not gained the notice they deserve among scholars of intellectual history,
although this is changing. (9) Weber’s concept Caesarism has several
roots, and also some in Tocqueville’s writings, less noticed by posterity.
Caesarism is a variation of plebiscitary leadership and refers to a technique
to appeal directly to the masses, above the head of the legislature.
Weber was no “religious” – value-rational - democrat
but nevertheless a pioneer for parliamentarianism and democratisation,
promoting the development from an Obrigkeitsstaat to a Volksstaat.
His democratic creed is very explicit, in particular in “Wahlrecht und
Demokratie”. But his correspondence with for instance Michels also indicates
that it is a functional Vernunftsdemokratie, related to the options of
human kind to remain an autonomous cultural being, rather than any Lockean
principles. There is of course something puzzling with a scholar whose
positions make him simultaneously a forerunner of Nazism and a pioneer of
modern democracy. But there is no necessary contradiction involved. Weber’s
“decisionism” and retrospective democracy with its stress on accountability –
pretty well caught in the famous conversation with Ludendorff after the war –
could be extended in various directions (pp 146-7 in Eliaeson 2000).
Weber did not really see Western rationalization as a
precondition for modern democracy, but rather as a threat. It is somewhat
difficult to understand how various evolutionist convergence theorists, such as
W W Rostow, can invoke the authority of Weber, whose dark visions have rather
little in common with Condorcean optimism, the idea of progress.
However, Weber saw socialist planning in what we later
labelled command economies as a greater threat. His quarrel with Schumpeter in
Landtman’s café in
Returning to the topic of social science: American
social science is leading and ahead of the crowd. Going through the history of
various disciplines, such as sociology and political science, the general
picture is that what happens in
Of course there are a number of differences to take
into account, such as the role of social movements, which never got that strong
in the
The leading role of America depends not only upon
meeting some problems first but also has to do with resources, that Rockefeller
and other philanthropists invested money in new universities and sponsored
empirical survey research, about what was going on “under the surface” in
modern industrial society. The
American money also is poured into Swedish social
science. Gösta Bagge’s professor chair in
Reversed American social science is shaped by
immigrants, often diaspora scholars. Relatively few leading sociologists are of
old American origin. Homans is one exception. Otherwise first or second generation
immigrants are dominant, only to mention the examples of Shils, Merton, Coser,
etc, etc.
Znaniecki’s role for the
Often The New School for Social Research in
Alvin Johnson (see his autobiography from 1952) was
industrious and had rich friends and could create an independent institution
that has meant a lot for the USA-European contacts, still today.
Probably a certain distance (detachment and
secularised perspective) is only good for the study of society for the purpose
of explanation, to be able to watch one’s surrounding social reality with the
innocent eye of a child or a visitor from outer space. This seems to be
confirmed by several indications. In the German cultural realm the Germans in
We here touch upon the proper pursuit of intellectual
history, how to approach and understand the classic authors, and how to make
use of them. (14)
We cannot go into any detail here, but evidently that context and formative
experiences also matter, as do origin and context. It also seems clear that
American trips give European scholars an energizing “kick”.
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List of abbreviations
Weber’s work:
GARS = Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie.
GAW =
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre.
GPS =
Gesammelte politische Schriften.
MWG =
Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe.
PEKA = The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism.
WuG =
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.
"Einleitung" = "Einleitung" till
"Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen" (ingår i GARS).
"Vorbemerkung" = The first pages in GARS, vol 1.
"Zwischenbetrachtung" =
"Zwischenbetrachtung: Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser
Weltablehnung", part of GARS.
"Freiburger Antrittsrede" =
"Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtscahftspolitik. Akademische
Antrittsrede. Freiburg i. Br.", part of GPS.
Other abbreviations
AJS = American Journal of
Sociology
APSR =
Americam Political Science Review.
ASR = American Sociological
Review
FAZ = Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung
FZ = Frankfurter Zeitung
IJPCS = International Journal of
Politics, Culture and Society.
KZfSS = Kölner Zeitschrift für
Soziologie und Sozialpsykologie.
TdKH = Theorie des
Kommunikativen Handelns
ZfP = Zeitschrift für
Politik
ZfS = Zeitschrift für
Soziologie
Archiv = Archiv für
Sozialwissenschaft und Sozial-politik.
Verein = Verein für Sozialpolitik.
Good bibliographies over Weber’s oeuvre has been done
by Käsler (orig. published in KZfSS 1975) and Riesebrodt (in Prospekt toMWG).
For a good bibliography over the
secondary literature, see Seyfarth. Constance & Schmidt, Gert:
Max Weber Bibliographie: Eine
Dokumentation der Sekundärlitteratur.
For a documentation of the
Anglo-Saxon secondary literature, see Kivisto, Peter & Swatos Jr, William
H: Max Weber. A Bio-Bibliography.
Notes
(1) He remembered young Jan G Myrdal quite well, “that
dreadful kid, they should, have beaten him more when he was young”, as Shils
said to me (conversation in
(2) There is also a new British translation Max Weber. The
Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings. Ed.,
translated, and with an introduction an notes by Peter Baehr and Gordon C Wells.
Penguin Books, 2002.
(3) See Sven Eliaeson: “Gunnar Myrdal as a Weberian
Public Intellectual” (unpublished manuscript), and E Stina Lyon: Researching Race Relations:
Myrdal’s American Dilemma from a Human Rights Perspective.
(4) The main theme in Stephen Kalberg’s recent edited
Weber-volume (Weber 2005).
(5) The originals are in Berlin-Dahlem, in Weber’s Nachlass
at Geheime Preussiche Staatsarchiv, in Archivstrasse. Copies are kept at STABI (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek)
in
(6) The sect-essay is translated into English (Loader and
Alexander 1985).
(7) Here I abstain from details, since it was an exchange
over time in the Newsletters from ISAs RC16, Theory Research Group.
(8) This is a point in Lipset (1996) and I recall Sam
Erwin saying precisely this in a seminar in Upsala in the mid 70s.
(9) Main references are Dorrit Freund (1974), Kalberg
(1997), Offe (2004) and Kaesler (2004).
(10) Weber’s lecture on Socialism was held twice, since it
was repeated in München. English translation in fro instance J E T Eldridge
(ed): 1971, pp 191-219.
(11) See Andreen, Per G: Bagge får tacka Rockefeller
(Bagge thanks Rockefeller). Sthlm: Univ.
Socialhögskolan, 1987. ISSN
0281-6288; 3.0.
(12) This was a feuilleton in International Journal of
Politics, Culture and Society a handful of years ago; I abstain from detailed
references.
(13) Arnold Brecht is most well-known for his Political
Theory (1959) but also wrote an autobiography, full version in two Germna
volumes and a condensed English one volume version (1970).
(14) “Quentin Skinner and his Critics” could be a headline
for this nexus. There are lots of references. I abstain from details.