Max Weber and the New Century

Alan Sica

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351506496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"The most profound and enduring social theorist of sociology's classical period, Max Weber speaks as cogently to concerns of the new century as he did to those of the past. Over the past seventy years, those special ideas that have become identified as ""Weberian"" have become especially pertinent to those who would analyze today's socioeconomic and cultural life. They offer the possibility of a more acute understanding of our immediate future than reliance on the ideas of any other social theorist in the pantheon. Alan Sica demonstrates Weber's preeminent position and lasting vitality within social theory by applying them to topics of contemporary concern. The result will appeal to experts and novices alike.Max Weber and the New Century documents the continuing usefulness of Weber's unrivalled social thought. Sica offers a series of linked studies that treat Weber's concept of rationalization as expressed in different cultural forms, the role of Weberian ideas in contemporary historiography, the uses of Weber's image in the popular imagination, the rhetorical structure of Economy and Society, and Weber's relationship to modern philosophical thought. Conceptually and practically, this volume is a companion piece to the author's forthcoming Max Weber: A Comprehensive Bibliography--a 3,600-item bibliography of works by and about Weber in English--which, for the first time, will allow scholars to explore the universe of Weberian analysis.Max Weber and the New Century is a valuable addition to the library of social scientists, historians, philosophers, economists, and students of intellectual history. It shows that Weber--the scholar as much as his ideas--continues to inspire fruitful social and cultural analyses."

1
Weber and the Future of Social Thought

Why Must We Still Read Weber?

As the twentieth century ended, there were signs that the best-educated segments of Western society seemed more eager each day to dispense wholesale with the received past, to hold a monumental garage sale of cultural items in order to make room for those enlightening shifts of viewpoint and values that were widely anticipated to appear soon after the new millennium began. Most of this apparent, almost titillating, newness was a product of computerization and its willing handmaiden, globalization. Implied in this urge to toss out the past’s achievements is the belief, typical of millennial sentiments, that such new ways of seeing the world and of analyzing social life would sharply outdo all those efforts which had captured the imagination of the discarded century. In contrast to this general approach to the change of calendars, this book—by means of its exposition as well as the “data” provided by the large mass of information in its companion volume, Max Weber: A Comprehensive Bibliography—holds to a view which, in such an atmosphere, risks seeming quaint.

I have several arguments to make on behalf of both books, and, at the same time, in support of the claim that during the last dozen years or so, Weber has become the theorist whom informed parties need most urgently to reread and reclaim. In brief, my argument is this: Max Weber’s social theory, inspired by cultural currents and sensibilities available only within the preceding fin de siècle, continues to speak directly to our extant and emerging conditions of social life in a way that overshadows every other available large-scale theory. That is, analyzing contemporary life in industrialized societies by means of ideas conceived or elaborated by Max Weber will bring one closer to a reliable understanding of the immediate future than will using the key ideas of any other social theorist or philosopher still being read with care. Now that Marx has been set aside via an historical transformation of the sort he would have enjoyed observing, and with Freud being denigrated on every side by platoons of detractors, both learned and ignorant, only Weber survives as the principal social theorist of the twentieth century whose ideas can lead us with cognitive confidence into the upcoming era. Durkheim surely remains useful for certain analytic tasks, but his core values as a scholar and person are much more a creature of the nineteenth than the twentieth century and noticeably less applicable as we begin to deal with the twenty-first. And of all the nineteenth and twentieth century theories which most persistently animate discussion and social research, none will survive so much intact as Weber’s—not those of Freud, Marx, Jung, Piaget, nor anyone else. Though there are plenty of social scientists and informed laypersons who might not find this a revolutionary notion, others will surely regard it as blind hero-worship of an almost willfully stupid kind. But before allowing this contrary view to carry the day, allow me to explain why I take a standpoint which might initially seem quixotic or worse to knowing participants in today’s global culture.

Born on April 21, 1864 and dying prematurely on June 14, 1920, a victim of the global influenza pandemic, Weber has proven beyond any real doubt to be the single most creative, influential, diagnostically accurate, and inspiring social theorist and social analyst of the twentieth century. There were many others who at one point or another might have been so designated, but their grand moments are gone. If one equates influence with books in circulation, then it must be said that Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West sold extremely well for twenty years after its publication in 1920—90,000 copies in English alone between 1922 and 1930—especially in view of its extreme length, conjectural quality, and expense. By contrast Weber’s masterpiece, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, sold fewer than 2,000 copies between 1925 and 1945 (according to Hans Gerth, who learned this directly from Paul Siebeck, Weber’s publisher [Gerth, 1994: 555]). Yet who but antiquarians mentions Spengler today except with an ironic smile, admitting that his sweeping theory of culture, borrowed in spirit from Goethe and Nietzsche, is no longer tenable or even interesting considering what has since become known about history, and, along with this, the prevailing tastes for the specific and non-metaphysical. Likewise, one could mention Vilfredo Pareto’s Mind and Society, its four fat volumes for a time in the thirties the very embodiment of “advanced” social thought (so it was claimed at length in May, 1935 Saturday Review of Literature cover story), yet now entirely neglected by social theorists and long out of print. Similarly Pitirim Sorokin, originator and powerhouse of the Harvard sociology department, gave the world his four-volume Social and Cultural Dynamics in the late 1930s, along with dozens of other works, and today has devolved into little more than a historical footnote to the early work of Talcott Parsons, with whom he fought between 1930 and Sorokin’s death in 1970.

It does not require much imagination to see why Weber should be today’s social theorist of choice for those wary denizens of the postmodern condition who hope to comprehend, as best they can, the new century. The only worthy competitors for the title of Master Social Analyst, Marx and Freud, have not proved as durable as Weber in the face of the political and intellectual forces of the last several decades. While it’s quite true that much of Marx’s critique of capitalist social practices remains as telling now as when he wrote it, “Marx” qua political or cultural symbol has so besmirched Karl Marx, the scholar, that it will take some time (in league with a global economic depression) for the latter to reassert himself and regain his rightful place in the pantheon of the indispensable. As for Freud, his ideas—or the universal popularization of them that overtook the postwar West—has become the victim of his own wild success. “Everything is sexual” or “the unconscious rules” might well be summarizing slogans of consumerist societies and the advertising industry that propels it. And this impetus came largely from Freud’s hypotheses about humanity’s fundamental nature, first brought to common awareness in 1900 with his Interpretation of Dreams (and read immediately by Weber). Yet his famously supple German prose, and the subtle persuasiveness that this gave his ideas, have long since been lost from most of what is now considered, however imprecisely, the “Freudian.”

Freud was almost eight years old when Weber appeared on April 24, 1864, and Marx died at sixty-five, just before Weber turned nineteen. If Marx had been granted the same seventy-five years of life as his confederate, Engels, he might well have begun to hear about the young Dr. Weber, a precocious expert on Roman economic history, medieval trading companies, and the political-economy of contemporary agribusiness in Prussia. These were topics close to Marx’s heart, and given his gargantuan appetite for reading technical materials, he would probably have come across Weber’s name. As it was, Weber spent his early career in dialogue “with Marx’s ghost” (as Albert Salomon put it in 1945), as well as those of his followers, teaching his earliest students by means of a careful reading of Das Kapital, and always thinking about the relationship between ideas and economic activity along lines similar to Marx’s. In the case of Freud, Weber’s connection was much closer. He not only read Freud’s work as it appeared, but also in 1914 defended before an Italian court some of Freud’s more literal followers, those who practiced “free love” and other liberated social activities under the banner of a kind of crypto-Freudianism that cropped up again in the 1960s. Weber, then, enjoyed an accident of birth which positioned him between Marx’s revolution in social analysis and Freud’s recalibration of humankind’s internal life. And he was gifted enough to take advantage of these (and many other) intellectual sources in forging his own version of socioeconomic and cultural analysis, the type of thinking that now goes by his own name: Weberian.

In 1935, Ezra Pound, the founder of American literary modernism, began his famous manifesto, Make it New, by announcing that “criticism has at least the following categories” or forms: by means of discussion, by translation, by “exercise in the style of a given period,” “via music,” and “criticism in new composition.” The final form is the most intense and risky, and might affiliate with Thomas Kuhn’s famous notion of “paradigm shifts.” Pound goes on to explain that criticism has “two functions,” first, to “forerun composition,” to serve as a “gunsight,” and second, “excernment - the general ordering and weeding out of what has actually been performed - elimination of repetition.” With this in mind, let us consider where we are in relation to Weber’s gigantic oeuvre, and along the way, to recall another European who during his time defined his national cultural character even more than did Weber.

In 1906, seventy-five years after Hegel’s death, the greatest Italian philosopher of the modern period, Benedetto Croce, asked a rhetorically charged question. It has been repeated ever since, applied not only to Hegel, but to nearly every other thinker of note who lived before our own time: “Ciò che è vivo e ciò che è morto nella filosofia di Hegel” (What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel?). We must ask the same question as it pertains to Max Weber, yet with much less defensiveness than was the case with Croce’s spirited reclamation of Hegel’s reputation, which, by the turn of the last century, was tarnished very nearly beyond saving. Yet the history of thought is a strange animal, for now Croce is forgotten while Hegel’s troops continue to stream out of the academy. And whereas Pound’s most famous clarion call, to “make it new,” is burdened by a heavily ironic load of meaning that it surely did not have in the mid-thirties, Weber’s work seems almost entirely alive in ways that Pound’s seems almost entirely bypassed—for good or ill.

Forty-three years ago the Harvard social theorist, Talcott Parsons, who at that time was as widely esteemed by his peers as today he is sidestepped, began a review-essay in the American Sociological Review with this judgment: “Just forty years after his death the figure of Max Weber stands as a kind of great hovering Presence [sic] over the discipline of sociology, to say nothing of the broader intellectual situation of our time” (Talcott Parsons, “Max Weber” [review of Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber], ASR, 25:5 [October 1960], 750-752.) He ended the review by suggesting that Weber’s “theoretical contribution as such” should be further examined—something Bendix had not done in his admirable primer—and that “a broader treatment of the place of Weber in intellectual history” ought to be undertaken as well. Dozens of similar published statements between 1920 and today could be trotted out to demonstrate that Weber continues to influence how the social, economic, and political worlds are perceived globally, not only by social scientists, but increasingly by the informed laity as well. We are now as far removed in time and historical memory from Parsons’ observations as he had been from Weber’s death when he published the essay quoted above. Yet nothing seems to have changed in terms of the veneration in which Weber’s achievements continue to be held. Acknowledging his indispensability to a wide range of intellectual projects in multiple disciplines has become a ritual act.

It has turned out to be rhetorically convenient that Talcott Parsons quoted Crane Brinton in 1937 when he asked, a bit waspishly, “Who now reads Spencer?” since it gave ample license for theorists in succeeding generations to retort: “Who now reads Parsons?” This was both ironically amusing and humanly understandable given the ideological distance that had grown up between Parsons and his younger detractors. But the humor eventually faltered when newer theorists of “The Postmodern” leeringly upped the ante. They fired an even more potent piece of rhetorical artillery by converting Parsons’s attack on his immediate intellectual past to their own, more damaging devices: “Who now reads anything?” they want to know, in a mixture of chipper obedience to the onrushing wave of electronic communications, combined with token shock at what has been lost—to the extent it can be remembered. “Read” in this context means, of course, examining print in the “traditional” sense of studying words on paper that make up a coherent narrative, rather than staring at printed advertisements, or rapid-fire images projected from electronic screens.

With this bad news for readers in mind—a general phenomenon lately christened “the Gutenberg elegies”¹—it might reasonably be argued that the exhaustive bibliography of Weberiana mated with this Weber treatment renders the expository material that precedes it superfluous. Even moderately good libraries already own worthy primers about Weber’s ideas—those by Bendix (1962), Freund (1968), and Käsler (1988) have weathered particularly well. And given that the definitive edition of Weber’s work in German is still a very much a work in progress,² where, one might fairly ask, on the steep slopes of Mount Weber might this book secure a foothold?

A reflex animus against non-living, non-colored, non-Asian, non-homosexual, non-females who thrived during the epoch of high imperialism has sprung up over the last two decades. With it one perceives a widespread assumption, most noticeable among those whose knowledge of social theory begins, for example, with Foucault’s later works or Judith Butler’s writing of the 1990s, that little is left to learn from theorizing that was created prior to our immediate cultural period. Whereas this view lightens considerably the load that would-be theorists must bear in terms of “start-up costs,” it can easily turn out to be a crippling error of judgment. It correlates with the fantasy sometimes voiced regarding modern music which holds that because we have Stravinsky, Haydn becomes dispensable; or, with the Beatles on tap, Irving Berlin’s tunes can safely be deleted from cultural memory. For many of the same reasons, while thrown into a different register, disregarding what has oddly become known as “classical” theory runs the gravest risks for those who wish to understand our plight today, and our chances for societal improvement. And casually minimizing Weber’s importance to the ongoing project of self-clarification and social critique, prior even to a study of his work, is the most worrisome part of the wholesale rejection of the immediate past that has so taken over much of the avant-garde and its imitators. These may seem to be strong and heterodox claims, but they are not made lightly or without reasons.

First of all, Weber personifies and exemplifies, perhaps as no one else of his large circle, a quintessential practitioner of that “high literacy” peculiar to the Victorian age, so much written about.³ Whereas most of the famous Victorian polymaths and polyhistors were students or creators of literature, comparative religion, philosophy, or history, Weber is unique in bringing together all these areas, in addition to law and legal history, musicology, economics, social policy, comparative politics, survey research, and the first glimmerings of German sociology. If there is still much to be learned from the great “Victorian sages”—Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, George Eliot, Darwin, Huxley, Max Müller, and others—the same could be said about their direct descendants, those Edwardian creators of social science, like Weber, Simmel, Troeltsch, and Durkheim.

Moreover, behind even the most abstract presentations and analyses of his work, one senses profound admiration for Max Weber the man. It is this obvious attachment to his character that motivates the best Weber scholarship, and not disembodied theoretical interest alone. The key to his personal narrative was a Kantian acceptance of “tension”— Spannung or Streckung—and its theoretical and practical unavoidability in his century. He was not the first German social theorist or moralist to fasten on to the term, but he pursued it, as it pursued him, more exhaustively than any predecessor. Marx, by comparison, always claimed to know where science and politics met, and he tried to position himself at their nexus without much handwringing. Perhaps this is why, though it is still easy to admire Marx’s boisterous political adventures, American and German (“bourgeois”) theorists today feel almost “natural” standing in the queue headed by Weber, with fact on one side, value to the other. Precisely what angered those like Georg Lukács (The Destruction of Reason, 1980: 601ff), this willingness to put on and take off the scientist’s uniform, rationally and apolitically, is the central characteristic of Weber, man and scholar, that has guaranteed his symbolic sponsorship of Western sociology for a half-century. Voices against him are small in compass or intensity of attack, and his importance accordingly grows with time. Twenty years ago, Against Weber by Greg Philo was announced for publication, then did not appear, almost as if the presses refused to commit this sort of sacrilege; meanwhile, Bryan Turner’s For Weber, a substantial and lavish book in two editions, does not cause surprise, unless one expects from it more coals to Newcastle. In this happy spirit the Weber Industry—now with its own journal, Max Weber Studies—steams along, not pure hagiography to be sure, yet hardly tearing at its object’s imperial robes. One wonders what the old man would think of this.

Secondly, Weber’s vitality for today’s readers can easily and without casuistry be linked to our complex concerns that surround the idea of “diversity,” particularly regarding those various cultures which have vied for hegemony over the last several centuries of global history. Weber’s methodological basis for social analysis lies principally within the practice of comparison. His ceaseless pursuit of fine-grained information about a dozen major cultures, historically and in his own period, propels his theorizing to generalized heights neither his contemporaries nor successors could reach. His ambition for cross-cultural knowledge knew no real limits, and given his exquisite education and the social setting provided him by his class position within Bismarck’s Germany, he was able to synthesize and appropriate to his unique purposes a stock of knowledge that no other individual could claim up to that point, or probably since. In short, his work has not been superseded or equaled by any single scholar, and the worldview that it expresses can be found only in his work. He was and remains in this regard “an original.”

There are ways to demonstrate—even to the recalcitrant or harried postmodern citizen who lives in a post-literate condition—that Weber’s ideas speak in a language that is our own, but with more rigor and with a degree of historical and cultural sensitivity which elude most writers today. Take, for instance, two popular claims made today by cultural critics. One argues that computer programming has not exhibited much originality in China because Chinese students, taught to think by means of ideograms, find it difficult to conceptualize in computer “language,” which takes alphabetical form. Another, not unrelated...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Weber and the Future of Social Thought
• 2. Weber as a Writer: Rhetoric and Reason in Economy and Society
• 3. Weber in the Public Sphere
• 4. Weber and the Meaning of Rationalization
• 5. Weber, Historiography, and the U.S. Case
• 6. Weber and Pareto
• 7. Weber and Modern Philosophy: A Note
• 8. Weber and Mann
• Name Index
• Subject Index