Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber

Anthony Giddens

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745670966
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745672137
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides an interpretation of one of the key aspects of Max Weber's work: the relationship between his political and sociological writings. Weber's sociological studies have often been treated as if they were completely separate from his political attitudes and interests, and in general his political writings have remained less well-known than his sociological work.

The book contains three main sections. The first of these analyses the principal concerns underlying Weber's political assessment of the prospective development of post-Bismarckian Germany. The second examines some of the way in which these views channelled his interests in sociology and influences his studies of capitalism, authority and religion. Finally, the third main section 'reverses' this perspective, showing how his conceptions of sociology and social philosophy in turn influenced the evolution of his assessment of German politics.

1.INTRODUCTION

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable revival of scholarly interest in the writings of Max Weber. To paraphrase Erich Fromm’s comment upon developments in Marxist scholarship, one might say that Weber has become transformed from a ‘dead saint’ into a ‘living thinker’.¹ Today, opinions polarise about the contributions of Weber almost as completely as they do about those of Marx. The sharpest controversy over Weber’s thought in the recent literature has concerned the relationship between his political and sociological writings.² In 1953, Georg Lukács published Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (‘The Destruction of Reason’), a work which attempts to trace the development of irrationalism in German social thought from Schelling to Hitler. The book includes a section on Weber, in which Weber is treated as a prominent spokesman for the bourgeois imperialism of Wilhelmine Germany. Lukács’s book, however, gives far more space to Nietzsche than it does to Weber, and the analysis of the writings of the latter is somewhat cursory. Although the work set something of the framework for the controversy which followed, the most important stimulus to debate was provided by Wolfgang Mommsen, in his Max Weber und die deutsche Politik (‘Max Weber and German Politics’), published in 1959.

Mommsen’s work is a detailed and closely documented study of Weber’s political writings and involvements. The book places much stress upon Weber’s commitment to the welfare of the German state as an ultimate political value, and, although somewhat critical of Lukács’s analysis in this respect, insists strongly upon Weber’s endorsement of German military imperialism. Although Mommsen does not discuss Weber’s academic writings in detail, he seeks to draw various important lines of relationship between his political views and his academic works, tending to treat the latter often as something like direct ideological expressions of the former. Mommsen’s book concludes with an analysis of the intellectual relationship between Weber’s political writings and those of Carl Schmitt, thereby again linking aspects of Weber’s work directly to the rise of fascism. On its appearance, Mommsen’s work was heavily criticised for these interpretations by those whom he later referred to as the ‘orthodox’ adherents of Weber: in particular, Bendix, Löwenstein and Honigsheim. Although Mommsen himself was only marginally involved, the debate re-emerged, this time in a blunter and more extreme form, in the 1964 meetings of the German Sociological Association, held to commemorate the centenary of the birth of Max Weber.

These interchanges, whatever their own obvious political and ideological implications – which it is not my object to discuss in this study – have pushed to the forefront certain extremely significant questions, which hitherto have definitely not received the attention they deserve, concerning the social ‘rooting’ of Weber’s sociology. One of the most urgent tasks confronting modern social theory is a reflexive one : that of re-examining the social and political environments which generated the main parameters of social thought which exist today. In the case of Weber, this means making something of a return to the sort of discussion which his works stimulated in Germany during his own lifetime. For most of his career Weber was a controversial figure, in both the academic and political worlds; and his contemporaries, of course, were very well aware that these two spheres of his activities were closely interconnected. But until a few years ago, most of the secondary literature on Weber – especially that which has appeared in English – has chosen to analyse his sociological studies in abstraction from his political views and involvements. It is entirely legitimate, of course, to sift the valid ‘scientific’ content from Weber’s works, and to attempt to construct sociological theories which utilise some of his concepts and findings, and reject others. But in sociology, where the sort of cumulative formation of abstract theory characteristic of certain of the natural sciences is not possible, it is equally important to be conscious of the social and political context in which sociological theories come to be formulated. This in itself helps to offer, particularly in retrospect, a clearer perception of the elements in the ideas of a given thinker which are particularly ‘time-bound’. However, there are additional gains to be made in examining some of the lines of interrelationship between Weber’s political concerns and his academic works. Weber’s writings cover an enormous span of fields in sociology, history, economics, jurisprudence and philosophy. Consequently, some of the leading secondary discussions of Weber’s thought have stressed inconsistencies or discrepancies which are presumed to exist between the various parts of his life’s work. But however diverse their substantive content, his works do have an intrinsic unity : the specific importance of Weber’s political writings is that, far from adding to the apparent ‘dispersal’ of his interests, they provide an essential source of illumination of the continuity and coherence in his thought.

The primary aim of this study, therefore, is to elucidate some of the interconnections between Weber’s political writings on the one hand, and his more academic contributions to the social sciences on the other. As a preface to the main part of the work, it will be useful to indicate a few of the important elements 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 has 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, Kapp, 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 centralised 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.³ 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 lies at the origin of the whole of his political writings.

Weber’s earliest academic writings concern legal and economic history. What appear 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.⁴ 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.⁵ 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. 16–18). 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 becoming 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 must be stopped, and the eastern boundaries of Germany made secure. For Germany, he concluded, political and economic questions are 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 industrialised state. Thus Junker domination, founded upon landownership, must 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. B...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and Bibliographical Note 
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Main Themes in Weber’s Political Writings
• 3 The Political Context of Weber’s Sociology
• 4 The Sociological Framework of Weber’s Political Thought 
• 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography