Politics, Sociology and Social Theory

Encounters with Classical and Contemporary Social Thought

Anthony Giddens

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745615400, 9780745615394
• eBook ISBN: 9780745666563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Built upon a series of critical encounters with major figures in classical and present-day social and political thought, this volume offers not only a challenging critique of major traditions of social and political analysis, but unique insights into the ideas which Giddens has developed over the past two decades.

1 Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber

The aim of this chapter is to elucidate some of the connections between Weber’s political writings and his more academic contributions to the social sciences. As a preface to the main part of the discussion, it will be useful to mention a few of the important moments in his political and intellectual career.

Max Weber was born in 1864, the son of a prominent politician, a member of the National Liberal Party. In her biography of her husband, Marianne Weber described in some detail the richness of the influences which the young Weber experienced in his father’s home. From an early age he came into contact with many of the leading figures in the Prussian political and academic worlds, including Treitschke, Knapp, Dilthey and Mommsen. His childhood spanned a period of years which was of decisive significance for German political development: the crucial phase in German history at which, under the leadership of Bismarck, the country at last became a centralized nation-state. The German victory over France in 1870–1 had an effect upon the Weber household which left a lasting emotional impact upon Max, although he was no more than six years old at the time.¹ While he never obtained political office, there was no point in his life at which political and academic interests did not intertwine in his personal experience. His youthful impressions of politics, filtered first through his father’s circle and, as a young man, through the influence of his uncle, Hermann Baumgarten, produced in Weber an ambivalent orientation towards the achievements of Bismarck which he never fully resolved, and which lay at the origin of the whole of his political writings.

Weber’s earliest academic writings concerned legal and economic history. What appeared to be purely technical, scholarly works, however – such as the dissertation on land tenure in ancient Rome, which Weber wrote in 1891 – actually held broader social and political implications in his thinking. In the thesis, Weber rejected the view, taken by some scholars of the day, that the economic history of Rome was a unique set of events, totally unamenable to analysis in terms of concepts derived from other situations; and he perceived in the social and economic structure of Rome some of the characteristics later to be discerned in the formation of capitalism in post-medieval Europe. Moreover, although he refused to accept some of the more specious comparisons which others had attempted to draw along these lines, the tensions which developed in the ancient world between the agrarian economy of large landed estates and emergent commerce and manufacture seemed to him to illuminate some of the problems facing contemporary Germany. He had the opportunity to confront these problems directly in a study, published in 1892, of the Junker estates to the east of the Elbe. This work formed part of a larger piece of research sponsored by the Verein für Sozialpolitik, investigating the conditions of land tenure in several main regions in Germany. Through his affiliation to the Verein, a group of ‘academic socialists’ concerned with current social and political issues, Weber was able to participate in discussion and interchange of ideas with a number of younger economists and historians interested above all in the problems facing Germany in its transition to industrial capitalism. While the founder members of the Verein, the ‘older generation’ of economists such as Wagner, Schmoller and Brentano, were interested primarily in questions connected with formulating policies of partial state intervention in economic life, the ‘younger generation’ – including, besides Weber, such authors as Sombart, Schulze-Gaevernitz and Tönnies – concerned themselves more broadly with the nature and origins of capitalism, and were heavily influenced by Marx.

Weber was appointed to a professorship of economics in Freiburg in 1894, and the following year delivered his Antrittsrede (inaugural lecture) there.² In the lecture, Weber developed some of the conclusions which he had reached in his study of agrarian conditions to the east of the Elbe, and related them specifically to the political and economic problems of Germany as a whole (see below, pp. 20–23). He gave particular attention to the so-called ‘boundary problem’ in the east. East Prussia, the homeland of the Junker landowners, had provided the springboard for the unification of Germany, and was the ultimate basis of Bismarck’s power. But the position of the landed estates was being undermined by a burgeoning emigration of agricultural workers to other parts of Germany, attracted by the expansion of industrial production there. This situation was causing an influx of Polish workers from the east, which, according to Weber, threatened the hegemony of German culture in those very areas where it had been strongest. Hence the influx of Poles had to be stopped, and the eastern boundaries of Germany made secure. For Germany, he concluded, political and economic questions were inextricably linked; the country had forged its unity in conflict with other nations, and the maintenance and furtherance of its culture depended upon the continued assertion of its power as a bounded nation-state.

Weber did not develop the full implications of these views until later. For a period of several years, from 1897, he was incapacitated by an acute depressive disorder which forced him to abandon academic work altogether. While he did not return to university teaching until much later on in his life, he was able to resume his scholarly activities shortly after the turn of the century. This period was the most productive of his career. He continued his studies of the Junker estates, but he was able for the first time to work out what had been latent in his earlier writings: a broad treatment of certain fundamental aspects of modern capitalist development, which found an initial statement in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5). At the same time he wrote and published essays dealing with the epistemology and methodology of the social sciences. These works undoubtedly both influenced and were influenced by a clarification of his political views which he attained during this period. In his Antrittsrede he had already set out a preliminary version of the ‘leadership problem’ facing Germany. The country had achieved unification in the political sphere while beginning to experience a rapid period of industrial development. Junker power had provided the main foundation for the achievement of political unity, but the future of Germany as a ‘power-state’ in Europe depended upon its becoming an industrialized country. Thus Junker domination, founded upon landownership, had to be replaced by a new political leadership. But, as Weber had stated in 1895, neither the bourgeoisie nor the working class was as yet capable of providing that leadership. Bismarck had systematically fragmented and weakened the liberals; and he had stunted the leadership potential of the labour party, the Social Democrats, by passing the antisocialist laws which, until they were repealed in 1890, had effectively placed the working class outside the political structure of the German state.

It became increasingly apparent to Weber, after the turn of the century, that the immediate future of Germany had to lie with a sharpening of the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie. An important underlying motif of The Protestant Ethic was certainly that of identifying the historical sources of such a ‘bourgeois consciousness’. The essays in epistemology and methodology which he wrote at this time also reflected political problems with which he was concerned, on a personal as well as an intellectual plane. Throughout his life, Weber was subject to two conflicting impulsions: towards the passive, disciplined life of the scholar, and towards the active and practical vocation of the politician. On the intellectual level, he sought to draw a clear-cut distinction between these two competing inspirations, recognizing an absolute dichotomy between the validation of ‘factual’ or ‘scientific’ knowledge on the one hand, and of ‘normative’ or ‘value’ judgements on the other. Hence, while the activity of the politician could be guided or informed by scientific knowledge of the kind established by history, economics or sociology, such knowledge could never ultimately validate the goals after which the political leader strove. This position had the effect of distancing Weber from the two major political movements competing with the liberals in Germany: the Conservative nationalists on the right, and the Marxist Social Democrats on the left. Each of these, in Weber’s view, adhered to a ‘normative’ conception of history which they introduced into politics, claiming historical ‘validation’ of their right to rule.

In 1906 Weber also wrote two long essays on Russia, assessing the chances of the development of liberal democracy there following the first Russian Revolution. The so-called ‘constitutional’ government in Russia seemed to him as much of a sham as that in Germany, and for not altogether different reasons: in Russia, as in Germany, a politically conscious bourgeoisie had not yet emerged, and the country was still dominated by the traditional, agrarian elite. The question of the nature of the constitutional reforms required in Germany, if the necessary bourgeois political leadership were to be forthcoming, increasingly occupied Weber’s attention during the years of World War I, especially as it became apparent to him that Germany’s military fortunes in the struggle were declining. In the period immediately before the outbreak of hostilities, and in the early part of the war, he wrote voluminously, producing his long essays on the ‘world religions’, Hinduism, Confucianism and Judaism, and a draft of Economy and Society (which was not published until after his death). But the war years brought to a head the tensions in German society which he had begun to analyse two decades earlier, and he gave over much of his time to the examination of political issues. He had for some while been strongly critical of what he once referred to as the ‘hysterical vanity’ of William II, and later on in the war changed from his previous advocacy of constitutional monarchy to arguing in favour of republicanism. In the two years prior to his death in 1920, he took up an active role in both the academic and political worlds. He accepted a professorship at the University of Vienna, and gave a series of lectures – a version of which was subsequently published as General Economic History³ – in which he attempted to sum up the major themes in his sociology of economic life and capitalist development. Weber made a number of important political speeches during the period of the German Revolution of 1918–19, and narrowly missed selection as a parliamentary candidate for the newly formed Democratic Party. One of his last political activities was as a member of the commission which drafted the Weimar Constitution.

Main themes in Weber’s political writings

The following analysis is divided into three principal sections. This section analyses the main elements in Weber’s political standpoint at the various stages of his career. The next section examines the influence of his political involvements upon the structure and substance of his more academic works. The final part ‘reverses’ this perspective, in order to specify how far his assessment of German politics was itself conditioned by the framework established in his other works.

Weber’s writings in both politics and sociology had their roots in an attempt to analyse the conditions governing the expansion of industrial capitalism in Germany in the post-Bismarckian era. The background to this is well known to anyone with a cursory knowledge of German social history. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, Germany lagged behind both Britain and France in definite respects – especially in terms of its lack of political unification and, as compared to Britain particularly, in its relatively low level of industrial development. Moreover, when an integral German state did come into being, it was achieved under the leadership of Prussia, whose semi-feudal autocracy, founded upon the power of the Junker landowner, the civil service bureaucracy and the officer corps, contrasted considerably with the more liberalized constitutions and traditions of some of the southern German states. The full impact of industrial development, experienced during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, thus took place within the framework of a social and political order which was in important ways quite different from that characterizing the emergence of capitalism in its ‘classical’ form: that is to say, in the case of Britain in the earlier part of the century. The Industrial Revolution in Britain took place in a society where prior developments had created a ‘compromise’ social order in which, as Marx once expressed it, the aristocratic landowners ‘rule officially’, while the bourgeoisie ‘in fact dominate all the various spheres of civil society’.⁴ But in Germany, the liberal bourgeoisie did not engineer a ‘successful’ revolution. Germany achieved political unification as a consequence of Bismarck’s promotion of an aggressively expansionist policy; and industrialization was effected within a social structure in which power still devolved upon traditionally established elite groups.

When Weber began to take an active interest in politics, he found the liberal wing of the German bourgeoisie in decline, a phenomenon which could be directly traced to the results of Bismarck’s domination.⁵ In the face of the ‘social question’ or the ‘red spectre’ – the growth of the Social Democratic Party – the liberals opted for the security and economic prosperity seemingly offered by a continuing affiliation to conservative interests. Weber’s Antrittsrede of 1895 contained his first systematic analysis of this situation. In the Antrittsrede, he set himself firmly both against the proponents of an ‘ethical’ approach to politics, and against those who looked to economic development to lead inevitably to the furtherance of political liberties:

There can be no peace in the economic struggle for existence; only he who confuses appearance with reality can believe that the peaceful enjoyment of life is what the future holds for our descendants.... It is not for us to show our successors the way to peace and human contentment, but rather to show them the eternal struggle for the maintenance and cultivation of our national integrity.⁶

The lecture expressed a fervent advocacy of the interests of the ‘power-state’ as the necessary foundation of German politics. Germany had secured its unity through the assertion of its power in the face of international rivalry; the future of Germany thus lay with the preservation of the capacity of the nation to exert its will in international affairs. But the political leadership necessary to accomplish this, Weber asserted, was lacking. The creation of such a leadership was not merely a matter which depended upon the economic power of the various classes in German society: ‘We ask whether they are politically mature: that is to say, whether they possess respectively the understanding and the capacity to place the political power-interests of the nation above all other considerations.’⁷

The Junkers, Weber continued, were a declining class, who could not continue to monopolize the political life of the society. But while it was ‘dangerous’ for an economically fading class to maintain political power, it was even more so if the classes which were acquiring an increasingly secure economic position aspired to national leadership without possessing the political maturity necessary to guide the fortunes of a modern state. Neither the working class nor the bourgeoisie as yet possessed such a maturity. The working class was led by a collection of ‘journalistic dilettantes’, at the head of the Social Democratic Party: they had no organic connection with the class they claimed to represent, and their revolutionary posture in fact acted against the further advancement of the working class towards political responsibility. The bourgeoisie remained timid and unpolitical; they longed for the emergence of another ‘Caesar’ who would shelter them from the need to assume a leadership role. This was a consequence of their ‘unpolitical past’, which no amount of economic power in itself could replace. Weber concluded:

The threatening thing in our situation ... is that the bourgeois classes, as the bearers of the power-interests of the nation, seem to wilt away, while there are no signs that the workers are beginning to show the maturity to replace them. The danger does not... lie with the masses. It is not a question of the economic position of the ruled, but rather the political qualification of the ruling and ascending classes which is the ultimate issue in the social-political problem.⁸

Thus, in 1895, Weber saw as the principal question affecting the future of Germany that of whether the economically prosperous bourgeoisie could develop a political consciousness adequate to undertaking the leadership of the nation. The bulk of his subsequent political writings and actions can be interpreted as an attempt to stimulate the emergence of this liberal political consciousness in Germany. For Weber, this could not be achieved on ‘ethical’ grounds: there could be no question of refounding German liberalism upon a ‘natural law’ theory of democracy. He rejected, moreover, the classical conception of ‘direct’ democracy, in which the mass of the population participated in decision making; this might be possible in small communities, but was quite irrelevant to the contemporary age. In the modern state, leadership had to be the prerogative of a minority: this was an inescapable characteristic of modern times. Any idea ‘that some form of “democracy” can destroy the “domination of men over other men”‘ was Utopian.⁹ The development of democratic government necessarily depended upon the further advance of bureaucratic organization.

According to Weber, the relationship between democracy and bureaucracy created one of the most profound sources of tension in the modern social order. There was a basic antinomy between democracy and bureaucracy, because the growth of the abstract legal provisions which were necessary to implement democratic procedures themselves entailed the creation of a new form of entrenched monopoly (the expansion of the control of bureaucratic officialdom). While the extension of democratic rights demanded the growth of bureaucratic centralization, however, the reverse did not follow. The historical example of ancient Egypt gave an illustration of this, involving as it did the total subordination of the population to a bureaucratized state apparatus. The existence of large-scale parties, then, which themselves were bureaucratic ‘machines’, was an unavoidable feature of a modern democratic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber
• 2. Marx, Weber and the Development of Capitalism
• 3. Durkheim’s Political Sociology
• 4. Durkheim and the Question of individualism
• 5. Comte, Popper and Positivism
• 6. ‘Power’ in the Writings of Talcott Parsons
• 7. The Improbable Guru: Re-reading Marcuse
• 8. Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology and Hermeneutics
• 9. Habermas on Labour and Interaction
• 10. Foucault, Nietzsche and Marx
• Notes
• Index