Max Weber on Economy and Society (Routledge Revivals)

Robert Holton, Bryan Turner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136830693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1989, this re-issue concerns itself with the relevance of Max Weber's sociology for the understanding of modern times. The book outlines key tenets of Weber's sociology and points to the valuable legacy of Weber's thought in contemporary intellectual debate, particularly with regard to secularization and rationalization of global cultures, the crisis of Marxism, the rise of the New Right and the emergence of post-modernism. This book offers an authoritative and insightful study which brings to light, not only the contemporary relevance of Weber's social theory, but also offering a broad perspective for the analysis of social questions.

Chapter One
SOCIOLOGY, INDIVIDUALISM, AND LIBERALISM

In very general terms, it is often assumed that sociology is profoundly hostile to individualism and liberalism, tending to collective perspectives or even collectivist responses to social issues. Within the French sociological tradition (connecting together the work of Claude Saint Simon, Auguste Comte, and Emile Durkheim), for example, there is often thought to be a complete opposition to the liberal-individualistic tradition of both classical Kantian philosophy and English economic theory. Indeed, it would not be difficult to find sources to support this notion, notably the attempt by Durkheimian sociology to destroy any individualistic assumptions in sociological theory. This attack on individualism appears to be most prominent in Durkheim’s treatise on suicide. Within the German philosophical and sociological tradition, there was also an antipathy to English economic individualism, especially in the work of Karl Marx, who regarded the utilitarian tradition of writers like Bentham and J.S.Mill as merely ideological legitimations of individualistic capitalism. By way of contrast, it is often claimed that Weber’s sociology was unambiguously committed to methodological individualism, providing a strong critique of collectivist concepts and the reification of concepts in sociology. The position is, however, seen as very much a minority one.

On closer inspection, it can be argued that in fact the whole tradition of classical sociology, far from being opposed to individualism per se, presented a well-established critique of economic utilitarian and hedonistic individualism while supporting an ethical or social notion of individualism. This argument is important because it shows that classical sociology was not necessarily opposed to individualism tout court, but merely opposed particular forms of individualism, namely those emanating from social utilitarian psychology and the Manchester economic tradition.

Writers like Durkheim saw the utilitarian and egoistic tradition of Herbert Spencer’s sociology as a corrosive element within the social structure. It represented a cultural environment in which suicide was more likely to flourish and in which self-seeking and self-interested actions would be incompatible with more collective or social goals (Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner 1986). In a similar fashion, we find in the philosophical doctrines of J.S.Mill an opposition to all Darwinistic forms of thought which he associated with hedonism, and worse still, with animality; Mill thought that what was essential for both society and the individual was the cultivation of virtue, individual taste, and sentiment (Semmel 1984).

We can detect at least some similarities between Mill’s notion of individual perfection and Weber’s ideas about the importance of personality. Weber feared that the iron cage of bureaucracy would obliterate individual autonomy, reducing the individual to a mere cog within the machine. Weber’s ideas on individual virtue were derived partly from the work of Goethe and partly from the theological tradition represented by writers like Albrecht Ritschl (Ward 1987). For Weber, ‘personality’ meant the development of an individual plan or project for life, involving the regulation and control of sexual and emotional relations. Personality, therefore, was a calling in life in which the individual directed actions towards the achievement of a coherent project in the world. Finally, in the development of The Structure of Social Action, we find Parsons returning to rather similar themes in the idea of the individual autonomy of the agent requiring a certain degree of freedom from constraint and, through socialization, the development of a life project.

Classical sociology was, therefore, not fundamentally opposed to individualism and liberalism. And while classical sociologists might have associated utilitarian individualism with capitalism, they did not see moral individualism as necessarily coterminous with economic individualism or the simple product of an urban industrial society. On the contrary, this notion of moral individualism was derived via Kant from classical, Christian, and humanistic traditions, which were clearly very ancient and historically complex.

While classical sociologists were critical of utilitarian individualism, they saw the main threat to the moral coherence of the individual in terms of either bureaucratic rationalization, or socialist regulation, or from the blind opinion of democratic institutions. One of the most influential books of the nineteenth century was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. We know that this work had a profound influence on Nietzsche and upon J.S.Mill, both of whom saw the threat of democracy in terms of the destruction of cultivated belief. For example, J.S.Mill wrote that

M.de Tocqueville’s fears, however, are not so much for the security and the ordinary worldly interests of individuals, as for the moral dignity and progressiveness of the race. It is a tyranny exercised over opinions, more than over persons, which he is apprehensive of. He dreads lest all individuality of character, and independence of thought and sentiment, should be prostrated over the despotic yoke of public opinion.

(Mill 1977:81)

We know that Weber was also profoundly ambivalent about the desirability of unregulated and undirected democracy. For Weber, both democracy and socialism would tend to increase the surveillance of populations through centralized bureaucratic mechanisms, precluding or limiting the possibility for moral autonomy and individuality. Socialism would be merely an extension of the bureaucratic tendencies within organized capitalism, merely another step in the great unfolding of rationality. Weber supported the notion of plebiscitarian democracy in which the ruled would occasionally give some support or legitimacy to leadership which would, in fact, be relatively autonomous and free from daily bureaucratic regulations (Mommsen 1987). Weber feared not only unregulated dominance by so-called democratic opinion, but also the domination of professional politicians who lacked any moral calling, and therefore he held out as the best hope a form of leadership democracy within a party machine. Weber’s views on the problems of democracy have, of course, been closely associated with the work of Robert Michels, who developed the idea of the iron law of oligarchy as a necessary tendency within bureaucratic democracy which would result in the dominance of the party (Bentham 1977).

To summarize some aspects of the political sociology of classical sociology, we can argue that it was based upon a well-established criticism of utilitarian, egoistic individualism, while supporting a form of moral or institutional individualism guided by ethical norms. Second, the classical sociological tradition of Durkheim, Pareto, Simmel, and Weber was sceptical about the claims of socialism to be an alternative system to capitalism. Especially in the writings of Weber, we find the idea that socialism would be merely an extension, and indeed, application of the underlying principles of rationalization which would exclude and eventually destroy any notion of personal autonomy. While there was this critique of the collectivist version of socialism, there was also an anxiety about the growth of democratic egalitarianism as a system which would further destroy and undermine the individualism of the private citizen. Mill, in particular, thought of this unguided form of democracy as ushering in a period of ‘Chinese stationariness’.

SOCIOLOGY AS ‘BOURGEOIS SCIENCE’?

In contrast to the view of sociology as hostile to individualism and liberalism, there is an alternative viewpoint which links sociology to bourgeois social science. A version of this view surfaced in the 1960s and 1970s when British sociology and, more broadly speaking, social philosophy was profoundly influenced by French Marxist structuralism, especially by the work of Louis Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas. They attempted to show that Marxism was a science in contrast to sociology, psychology, and other social science disciplines. The latter were dismissed as individualistic and subjectivist. Because of sociology’s often negative relationship to socialism, it was often possible to characterize sociology as a bourgeois science, because its principal concepts were said to reflect or to legitimize some of the underlying structures of the capitalist market-place.

This type of critique was also found in the famous debate between Ralph Miliband and Nicos Poulantzas. Here political sociology was criticized by structuralist Marxism as methodologically individualistic and epistemologically naïve because sociology merely accepted the everyday, taken-for-granted notions of social actors, rather than transforming these notions into the real concepts of science (Urry and Wakeford 1973). Fortunately, the contemporary view of the relationship between Marxism and sociology is a good deal more sophisticated and scholarly. There are now rather fewer polemics seeking to erect a divide between Marxism and sociology, and far greater common ground between various theoretical traditions. There is, for example, a consensus (however flimsy) that a certain parallel exists between Weber’s views on rationalization and Marx’s view of alienation, that there is much common ground between Marx and Weber in the conceptualization of capitalism, that Weber’s view of social classes is not entirely incompatible with Marx’s analysis of economic classes, that Weber’s emphasis on power and conflict is an important addition to or complementary with Marx’s idea of economic domination, and that their views of the progressive and revolutionary character of capitalism were, in fact, very similar. These parallels are significant even if a number of very profound differences separate Weber and Marx, particularly in terms of political prognosis, epistemology, and theoretical strategy.

Although orthodox Marxist theories are far less influential in the 1980s than they were in previous decades, the Marxist criticism of liberalism and sociology as ideological disguises for bourgeois interests probably still colours critical attitudes towards the liberal tradition. We would like to pick out three common criticisms of liberalism which owe much to Marxist writing but which have a wider currency in social and political thought.

The first criticism concerns the character of the individual within liberalism. For socialist social philosophy, the liberal concept of the individual is often thought to be artificial and unsociological by taking the autonomy and voluntarism of individual life either for granted or as excluding social relations. Collectivist thought criticizes liberalism for describing the individual in terms of an isolated Robinson Crusoe figure, somehow free from social relations and ahistorical in character. In C.B.Macpherson’s famous study of the theory of possessive individualism (1962), it was argued that the liberal individualistic tradition of Hobbes and Locke was a possessive tradition in which the genuine individual was the property-owning individual. This line of criticism suggests that the liberal individual can only exist on the basis of private property, yet the social nature of private property remains disguised and unanalysed within the liberal philosophical tradition. Possessive individualism excludes those members of society who lack property, and thus may be said to lack the self-proprietorship necessary for individuality, and the other liberal values of individual responsibility and rationality.

The second criticism is that liberalism is merely an ideology of a bourgeois property-owning class which, through the doctrine of individual political rights, in fact legitimizes its collective class rule within the democratic system. Democracy is held to be a sham in western capitalism because the ritualized forms of opinion-formation and attitude testing via the mechanism of the vote obscure and block opinion, rather than allowing opposition groups to shape the direction of government policies. Once again, there is the argument that real power lies in the hands of property owners and that formal liberal democratic rights act either as a mystification or as a safety valve rather than as a means of genuine opinion-formation and regulation of government by democratic processes. Liberal democracy is held to be a particularly suitable ideology for capitalism because it appears to allow for individual rights while, in reality, legitimizing indirectly the power of owners of property. In short, ‘liberal democracy is the political form most compatible with the market place of industrial capitalism’ (Hearn 1985:130).

A third and related criticism of the traditional liberal political philosophy is that liberalism acts as a legitimation of ongoing inequality and blocks the development of superior or, at least, more desirable collectivist values such as equality and solidarity. Liberalism is often associated with the doctrine of opportunity (in particular the notion of equality of opportunity which allows people to compete in the market-place). Critics argue that this very competition favours the continuation of individual inequalities, because individuals entering the market-place already bring with them various assets which are both cultural and material. Against the idea of individual rights, socialist or various forms of humanistic philosophy tend to emphasize the equality of human beings qua human beings, or argue in favour of equality of outcome as opposed to equality of opportunity. Liberalism is seen to be the ideology of competitive capitalism, permitting the continuity of inequality. Doctrines about the importance of equality of outcome tend to be associated with various forms of socialism, but especially with centralized socialism, since the achievement of equality of outcome would require massive state intervention to regulate the market, education, and family life.

We accept that these arguments contain some powerful criticisms of elements of the liberal tradition. We do not advocate a return to some mythical unreconstructed liberalism on the model of Hayek. None the less, we wish to argue that the criticisms outlined here are not fatal objections to the broad traditions of liberalism as these have developed in the last two hundred years. While there may be other criticisms of liberalism, we will take these three to be characteristic of the core objection to liberalism as a political and philosophical tradition.

With regard to the first argument that liberalism adopts an artificial view of the individual, necessarily promoting the notion of the asocial individual, we would suggest that this does not apply to many significant strands of liberal thought. We have already seen that liberal writers within the classical sociological tradition objected strongly to the legitimacy or primacy of utilitarian, egoistic, and hedonistic individualism. On the contrary, they advanced the notion of a social individual, equipped with a social consciousness whose actions are oriented to other actors and towards moral (and therefore collective) goals and objects. The idea that the actions of the individual could or should be entirely monological without restraint or hindrance, or that the individual in some way preceded society may well be found in Locke, but it was alien to sociological liberalism as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Neither classical sociology nor liberalism required, theoretically, a doctrine of the isolated, egoistic, pre-social individual. On the contrary, it was largely through the further development of liberal traditions through Weber, Durkheim, and Parsons, that a more developed theoretical account has emerged of how individuals are socialized into the role of individual. Where Durkheim and especially Parsons went beyond Weber was in elaborating more clearly the inter-personal context of individual action.

Many critics of liberalism continue to rehearse Marx’s critique of the asocial utilitarian thoughts of the 1840s and 1850s as if it was the last word on the liberal analysis of the individual. Marx, however, failed to discriminate between different varieties of liberalism, branding them all with the same brush. For example, Marx frequently criticized writers like J.S.Mill for adhering to egoistic individualism and for believing that the individual within capitalism in a way defined the characteristics of humanity as a whole. We know, however, from Mill’s own autobiography that he rejected this whole position outright, arguing against the Benthamite tradition by insisting upon the social training of the individual into virtue and rejecting the Darwinistic idea of the survival of the fittest through an evolutionary struggle. Kant and the neo-Kantian tradition had a strong influence on sociology, leading sociologists like Weber to put a particular emphasis on the notion of personality which was not an asocial or pre-social conception. To argue for the existence of individual rights or for certain mechanisms to protect the individual against bureaucratic or state regulation is not ipso facto to take up an asocial conception of the individual.

One of the main problems with this critique is its elevation of the asymmetrical bargaining power of capital and labour within the market-place to the status of the over-arching power relation in society. The effect was both to diminish awareness of countervailing forms of bargaining power by labour, and to diminish the broader cultural and political economy of the mass of the population. While not denying the endemic existence of poverty and unemployment, this line of analysis took as abstract and asocial, types of individual autonomy, such as political citizenship rights or consumer choice that had an increasing, though often precarious and sometimes contested, reality for the majority of the population. Problems like ‘commodity fetishism’ or ‘reification’ were simply assumed on a priori theoretical grounds rather than demonstrated in careful empirical and historical research. One reason for the revival of interest in liberalism is that it highlights the cultural authenticity of individual autonomy and responsibility in modern culture.

With respect to the second range of criticism of the liberal tradition, it is clear that Locke and the nineteenth-century liberals held to a rather limited conception of democracy. The view of citizenship within this early liberal tradition was restricted to some notions of minimal legal protection and minimal political involvement. However, this conception of democracy was developed in a society in which the mass of the population had very limited literacy and a very elementary educational attainment. Mill’s fears can be explained on the grounds that he held that democracy could only work in a society with a very extensive educational tradition. While in this respect Mill adhered to a somewhat limited conception of democracy, it is possible to present his argument in a more positive form, namely that democracy depends upon an educated public and that democratic freedoms can only operate in a society in which there is freedom of enquiry, communication, and expression. In turn, the existence of democratic publics requires a lively and democratic educational tradition capable of growth and development. There is nothing, as it were, indigenous to the liberal tradition which precludes radical democratization.

It is therefore possible to reformulate the liberal tradition via the work of T.H.Marshall (1977) to note that the twentieth century has seen at least potentially a major expansion of citizenship rights from the legal and the political through the social to the economic. An expansion of liberal citizenship through democratization would be perfectly compatible with the Mill tradition, provided that there were educational and welfare developments to accompany purely political a...