Etica & Politica / Ethics
& Politics, 2005, 2
http://www.units.it/etica/2005_2/GUESTEDITOR.htm
Guest Editor’s Preface
Dipartimento di Politica, Istituzioni, Storia
1. This special number of Etica
& Politica / Ethics & Politics devoted to
Max Weber (1864-1920) faces a challenging question: how much of his thought and
work is alive today? The occasion is the centenary of
the publication of Weber’s best-know work, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05). The essays
presented here, all by major Weber specialists, demonstrate that many important
aspects of his thought are still at the centre of scholarly attention.
Needless to say, the historical and social context in
which Weber’s ideas developed is profoundly different from ours, but the basic
issues which occupied him are still very much with us. This makes Max Weber a
“contemporary classic” in every sense. Here I shall list just a few of his more
fertile themes, with a view to suggesting some further possible lines of
investigation.
2. As a whole, Weber’s work can be seen as a grand attempt to fashion a sociology of Western culture and of the meaning structures
underpinning the social orders in which individuals live. This problematic is
also the context of his interpretative sociology, which aims to trace collective
concepts back to the meanings that individuals ascribe to their own actions in
relation to those of other individuals. Once he has set up these terms of
reference, Weber is able to take account of both the structural coercion
exerted on individuals by the autonomous legality of social orders, and the
source of such orders in the individual. This basic feature of Weber’s thinking
has important consequences for his theory of knowledge in the
historical-cultural sciences, where truth is never seen as a matter of adapting
the mind to an supposedly external object but of
constructing a possible object of knowledge. It is thus a matter of interpretation,
in which the object is determined by a subjective value-relation that is
constitutive of its very reality. The “ideal type” itself, through a process of
idealization, makes it possible to identify an object of knowledge which, by reflecting
the subjective perspective of its construction, testifies to the possibility of
breaking down the objective into set of perspectives (see the essays by Stephen
Turner and Ola Agevall).
The ultimate source of this possibility is located by Weber in anthropology, in
the fact that we are “cultural beings” given to taking positions and ascribing
meaning to the world on the basis of ideas of value: culture itself is a value
concept. Any possibility of cultural essentialism or of reducing cultures to
supposed biological or racial substrata is ruled out. At the same time Weber precludes
the possibility of totalizing historical-cultural sciences and thereby denying
their anthropological premises.
3. The genealogy of the West is traced by Weber to the
logic of the relationship between ideas and interests: «Not ideas, but material
and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the
“world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like switchmen, determined
the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest». The
cultural significance of modern capitalism as «the most fateful force in our
modern life» becomes the primary object of Weber’s inquiry. The West is thereby
seen as an epistemic and systemic space capable of defining the criteria of
capitalist rationalization itself. In this respect, Weber’s American experience
– his ambivalent fascination with Taylorist
capitalism – was of great importance. As a preliminary, however, it must be
stressed that Weber is concerned to bring out the peculiar features of the
Western experience (nur im Okzident…) from the vantage point of cultural comparativism. This means that for Weber the concept of
“the West” is more the expression of the failure and impossibility of cultural
universalism than of hegemonic universalism (see the essays by R.A. Antonio and
Sven Eliaeson).
Two things need to be emphasized here: on the one hand
the West has its roots in a process of religious rationalization of world
images that derives from an experience of the ethical irrationality of the
world, and hence from the idea of conferring meaning on that which lacks it,
from a theocentric, dualistic standpoint (the
“rejection of the world”). On the other hand the life orders stemming from the
“disenchantment of the world” then develop autonomous norms (political,
economic, aesthetic, scientific) that bring them into collision with the
unitary rational ethic from which they arose, confining religion to the
irrational and imprisoning individuals in the “iron cage” of a new servitude.
The unifying vector of this process is technical-scientific rationalization,
which – above and beyond the specific normative features of each order –
permeates every aspect of society. This sequence is clearly traced by Weber in
the Ethic, where he writes that «the Puritan wanted to work in a vocation; we must do so». But it is also clearly shown in his sociology of
power, which starts from the link between the duty of free obedience to a
personal command (Gehorsampflicht)
and discipline as the blind acceptance of an impersonal commanding apparatus.
The problem is thus the ethical and cognitive dispossession of individuals (the
“savage” knows more of his environment than civilized man) that is final
outcome of the intellectualizing of the world and the disciplining of society
by a capitalist domination capable of working even in the absence of “spirit”.
The central issue in Weber’s thinking is thus how to
preserve the unity between vocation and the ethical core of the personality, a
unity which, under the conditions of modern life, is rent between the
fossilizing specialisation of social roles and the irrational cultivation of
personal experience, especially in the artistic sphere (see the essays by L.A. Scaff and Claudio Tommasi).
Stated in more general terms, what most concerns Weber is the anthropological
issue of the link between social orders and the conduct of life (Lebensführung) –
in other words, the “human type” with the best chance of survival in a world
where the rational conduct of life has filled every interstice of social space
while being experienced as passive adaptation to an inert mechanism. Weber
insists that the crucial question for cultural sciences and social policy is
not how human beings will live in the future but what they will be like. The
key issue is the shaping of an autonomous personality: in other words, the
problem of the Beruf
and the “daemon” which hold the fibers of our life in
a radically pluralistic horizon of norms. It is not only a question of ethical
and rational clarity about the ultimate convictions an individual must obey,
but also a question of “strong relativism” in an age of “polytheism of values”
(see the essay by Peter Lassman).
4. These topics are also relevant to the political sphere, especially to
Weber’s project for the bourgeois and industrial modernization of German
society (see the essay by Maurizio Ricciardi).
Weber’s is a thoroughgoing “microphysics of power” according to which power
(along with struggle) is seen as the pervasive feature of all social relations.
It is a concept that can by no means be reduced to a definition of the state as
a “compulsory association which organizes domination” and which holds a
monopoly of legitimate force. Weber’s analysis of power goes beyond the paradigm
of sovereignty, contract, constitution and legal obligation with which modern
political thought has theorized the legitimation of
power. The converging processes of universal
bureaucratization and democratization (the factory as model for the whole of
society) leads Weber to redefine the criteria for the legitimation of political authority on the basis of the
link between personal leader and apparatus of command. Again his aim is to
combine the personal roots and the charismatic matrix of legitimation
(conceived as “faith” and the duty to acknowledge the extraordinary qualities
of a person) with the coercion of bureaucracy characterized as the
objectification of charisma itself, and to lay bare the contradictions of legitimation reduced to merely procedural legality. But for
Weber it is also important to take cognizance of the mutual implication and the
fluidity of the three types of power rather than their distinctness: the
processes of institutionalization, traditionalization
and legalization of charisma, as well as the drift of rational-legal power into
traditional or automatic forms of obedience. This also means acknowledging that
there exists a plurality of normative factors, regularities and empirical uniformities
of social action: custom, consent, convention, law. Weber’s underlying
anthropological-political aim is to retrieve forms of personal, conscious
devotion, an ethics of intention capable of endowing empty discipline with meaning;
but, in the terms of his bourgeois political realism, this also means
establishing a criterion for the personal political management of bureaucratic
apparatuses in both political and capitalist enterprises. In this way Weber
tests the validity of the categories of interpretative sociology in the political
sphere, thereby bringing together science and politics (see the essay by Kari Palonen).
There is no doubt that Weber
shared one thing with us: the obsession that Nietzsche’s vision of the “last
men”, «specialists without spirit, hedonists without hearts» might turn out to
be the epitome of the anthropological make-up of homo democraticus.