Contemporary Political Theorists in Context

Anthony M. Clohesy, Stuart Isaacs, Chris Sparks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780415357289
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134248117
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This exciting new textbook presents a clear framework for students to understand how themes and issues in political thought have emerged and developed throughout the 20th Century.

Charting the progression from the preoccupation with the boundaries of the modern state, through to the current debates on rights, identity and justice; the three sections of the book enable the ideas of significant political thinkers to unfold through a telling of the key political events that gave a social context for their thought:

• Section I: The Inter-War Debate: Weber, Gramsci and Schmitt
• Section II: Post-War Debates: Arendt, Oakeshott, De Beauvoir and Adorno
• Section III: Contemporary Debates: Rawls, Nozick, Kymlicka and Foucault

Written in an accessible and concise format, features include:

• 'rewind' and 'fast-forward' indicators to easily guide students around the text
• discussion points, revision notes and further reading in each chapter
• informative text boxes to highlight key concepts, people and events.

By exploring an often ignored relationship in political thought, the influence of thought upon historical change and the influence of historical change upon theory, this text delivers new and exciting angles from which to approach politics today. Contemporary Political Theorists in Context is essential reading for all students of social and political theory.

Part I
The inter-war debate

New theories of the state

1
Weber

No machinery in the world functions so precisely as this apparatus of men and, moreover, so cheaply. Rational calculation reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself into a somewhat bigger cog … the passion for bureaucratization drives us to despair.

Weber (1921)

Max Weber was one of the founding fathers of the discipline of sociology. However, the political impact of his work is immense and it continues to resonate in a number of contexts. He is perhaps best known for The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), in which he examined the relationship, or what he called the ‘elective affinity’, between Protestantism and capitalism. His legacy is also considered in the context of rationalisation (zweckrationalitat) and bureaucratisation. For Weber, these developments led to a disenchantment with the world (a concept he took from Schiller) because they subordinated the spiritual dimension of our lives to the ‘iron cage of reason’ and a deadening ethos of instrumentality. This was one of the central themes that informed the analysis of the Frankfurt School, and it is examined later in this volume in Chapter 7. As we will see, it also has a resonance in the work of Arendt, Oakeshott and Foucault, also examined in this volume. This chapter will also examine the important themes he raised in his celebrated essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, written towards the end of his life. I begin, however, by situating Weber’s work in the context of the profound social and political changes that took place in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Nineteenth-century Germany

The two most significant developments in Germany during this period were, unquestionably, industrialisation and the emergence of a unified German state. Coming to Germany much later than in Britain, industrialisation profoundly changed the nature of German society. Its effects have been summarised as follows: ‘[t]he industrial revolution hit the continent full force after Germany’s unification in 1871, leading to massive social dislocations, rapid urbanisation, incipient class conflict, and the formation of revolutionary political movements’ (Scaff, 1998: 34–5). The process of unification is no less important. It can be traced back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This led to the emergence of a new German confederation of 39 states and four free cities. By far the most important and powerful of these states was Austria, under the leadership of Metternich whose objective, above all else, was the preservation of social and political order. However, the deeply conservative culture that prevailed during these years was upset in 1848 when the middle classes, or ‘bourgeois liberals’, demanded, among other things, constitutional government, political rights and habeas corpus. Initially sympathetic to this call for reform, King Frederick William grew wary of it and Austria’s transition to a more progressive settlement was thwarted.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, Bismarck, arch realist and esteemed member of the Junker class, had replaced Metternich as the most powerful figure in Germany. Bismarck became Prime Minister of Prussia in 1862 and embarked on a highly aggressive foreign policy, defeating Austria in 1866, and France in 1870. In 1871 he presided over the creation of the new German Empire (the second Reich). Bismarck is remembered primarily for his military nationalism and the Kulterkampf – the policy of marginalising Catholics who were concerned about the social implications of his liberal economic policies. However, any study of Weber should remember Bismarck’s other legacy, namely, the extraordinary welfare system he established in Germany. This included health insurance (1883), accident insurance (1884) and old-age insurance (1889). These measures restored Bismarck’s relationship with the Catholic Centre Party, a grouping that shared his concern about the growing popularity of the Socialist Democratic Party. Although Weber was sensitive to the social needs these benefits were intended to meet, he thought that they represented an ominous tightening of the state’s bureaucratic regulation of society. Although Weber was alarmed by the mindless idolisation of Bismarck, he thought the rule of Emperor Wilhelm (who assumed effective control of the country after Bismarck’s resignation in 1890) far worse as he had little understanding of the scale of the problems facing Germany at this time. These problems culminated in the First World War, an event that was welcomed by Weber because he felt that it was only in the wake of such a cataclysmic event that the German nation could confront the enormity of the social, political and economic challenges facing it. This period is important for any study of Weber as his experience of it informed much of his later work about the importance of strong leadership and political vocation. There has been much speculation about how Weber would have reacted to the authoritarian leadership that emerged in Germany in the 1930s. This is an important question and I return to it below.

Weber’s life and times

Weber was born into a wealthy Protestant family in Erfurt (formerly Prussia) on 21 April 1864. His mother was a deeply religious woman from a staunch Huguenot background. His father’s disposition, always more secular, led him towards a career in the National Liberal Party (NLP). This party was opposed to the authoritarian rule of Bismarck but recognised the value of the national unity it encouraged. To foster this sense of unity a strong economic foundation was vital. The NLP was, therefore, fully in support of Bismarck’s policies of laissez-faire and colonial expansion. The Weber household during the 1870s and 1880s was a centre of political debate in which all of these issues were passionately discussed. There is little doubt that this fervent political atmosphere had a profound effect on Weber who, in his early youth, identified far more with the world of his father. However, this affiliation changed in later life as he developed a passionate interest in religion and grew to resent what he saw as his father’s indifferent attitude to his family.

Weber’s first step into his father’s world came when he began his legal studies at the University of Heidelberg in 1882. After three semesters here he embarked on his military service in Strasbourg. Leaving the army in 1884, now aged 20, Weber resumed his legal studies in Berlin and Goettomgem. After graduating Weber practised as a lawyer in the Berlin courts, completed a PhD dissertation on the history of trading companies in the middle ages (1889) and a habilitation on the history of agrarian institutions (1891). Weber’s uncertainty about whether to follow a legal or academic career was resolved when he was appointed to a professorship at the Frieburg University in 1894. In his now infamous inaugural address the following year he set out his political position in no uncertain terms.

Key event: Weber’s 1895 inaugural address

It was during this address that Weber outlined the importance of maintaining a realist foreign policy. He argued that it is ‘only in a hard struggle between man and man that elbow room can be won in our earthly existence’. Weber was deeply concerned about the threat to German sovereignty and culture posed by the Russians and Poles to the East and the growing economic power of the United States and Britain to the West. He argued that in order to protect Germany it was vital that the economy remained the preserve of the state, a view that ran counter to Adam Smith’s widely held free-trade theory. It also ran counter to the prevailing neo-Kantian argument that mankind’s destiny was to live in universal harmony.

After his appointment to the prestigious University of Heidelberg in 1896 and his marriage to Marianne Schnitger in the same year, life for the young Max Weber looked promising indeed. However, when Weber’s father died in 1897, his life took a most unexpected turn. Much has been written about Weber’s ambivalent attitude to his father, but his death seems to have been a trigger for a serious mental collapse that resulted in Weber having to resign his university position and spend time in a sanatorium. His friend Friedrich Meinecke remarked that his collapse had all the characteristics of a classical Oedipal conflict. However, by 1901 Weber’s intellectual forces were fully restored and although he did not return to teaching until the final years of his life, the period from 1903 until his untimely death in 1920 was characterised by an extraordinary degree of activity and the publication of all of Weber’s major political and sociological texts.

Intellectual influences

Kant

Weber subscribed to a neo-Kantian methodology in that he held that action could not be reduced to universal laws of causality. For Kant, empiricism was limited because it failed to account for morality and freedom. So, although for Weber it was important to work within a context of objectivity and value-neutrality, it was also important that human action be understood in the context of the meaning the actor gives to it. Although Weber’s hermeneutical approach – what he called ‘verstehen’ or Interpretative Sociology – held that action is not reducible to economic or social structures, he argued that its interpretation did require a conceptual apparatus to allow the social scientist to compare its ‘multitude of particularities’ with research findings from other societies and cultures. It was for this reason that Weber relied on the concept of the ideal type.

Key concept: ideal type

This is an abstraction or heuristic device (capitalism, rationality, the Protestant work ethic and charismatic authority would all be examples) that allows for a ‘gathering together’ of related concepts under one heading. This makes possible the production of general but meaningful statements about the world. Although the category of the ideal type does not claim to capture the specificity of the different phenomena gathered together under it, it is argued that it remains too general a device to be useful for explaining society. Weber identified four ideal types useful for understanding and interpreting behaviour: zweckrational (rational means to pursue rational ends), affectual (emotion), traditional and wertrational (rational means to pursue irrational ends).

Although Weber was critical of the philosophical assumptions made by positivism, it would be misleading to describe his epistemological approach as unequivocally idealist. Rather, his approach understood action as resulting from an unfathomable interplay between the subjective will and the ‘forces of society’. For Weber, therefore, unlike Marx, action and identity could not be reduced to economic laws. However, like Marx, he disavowed the existential or phenomenological perspective that focused exclusively on the constitutive role or inner life of the subject.

Marx

Much has been said of the seemingly stark theoretical and political differences between Marx and Weber. However, it is important that these differences are understood in a wider context in which their affinities can also be considered. Weber remarked that

the intellectual world of his time had been formed in large measure by the work of Marx and Nietzsche. They had defined the major themes for the 20th century: the question of social justice, the nature of the capitalist economy, the fate of western civilisation, the problem of our relationship to history and knowledge, modernity and its discontents.

(Scaff, 1998: 35)

As noted above, the most cited difference between Marx and Weber was that Weber’s work was less determinist than that of Marx. That is, Weber was more willing to include an account of ideas and culture (which, for the later Marx, were epiphenomenal) as part of his theory of history and society. It is worth remembering, however, that although Weber did not share Marx’s view about the inevitable collapse of capitalism, he did come to see it as having its own inner developmental or evolutionary logic. To put it less theoretically, for Weber, as for Marx, the realm of the economy was hugely important in terms of the profound influence it exercised over our social, cultural and political lives. In other words, Weber agreed with Marx that any explanation of social action must have an economic or materialist dimension.

This is linked to the theme of alienation. Certainly Marx and Weber differed in their understanding of this concept. For Marx, it was understood in the context of ownership of the means of production whereas, for Weber, it results from the twin processes of rationalisation and bureaucratisation. However, both Marx and Weber shared the view that alienation (or, for Weber, disenchantment) was a tragic consequence of modern life as it denied freedom and the possibility of meaning. In this sense it is possible to regard both Weber and Marx as ‘liberals in despair’, although Marx, unlike Weber, foresaw a resolution to the problem of alienation. Another important difference that needs to be acknowledged is that, for Weber, the prospect of such a resolution, in the form of communism, would result in what he called the ‘dictatorship of the administration’ which would exacerbate the problem of alienation rather than alleviating it.

Key concept: disenchantment

For Weber, disenchantment refers to how the rise of modernity, bureaucratisation and secularisation had resulted in the rationalisation of religion and the displacement of a way of being in the world governed by belief in God, tradition, ritual, myth and magic. This process, which culminated in the ‘Protestant work ethic’ was, for Weber, deeply damaging to human beings and it is the source of much of his pessimism about the future.

Other related differences can be noted, such as Weber’s criticism of Marx’s view of class as an unmediated ontological category. For Weber, this was a meaningless metaphysical assertion that told us nothing about the complexities of the real world. In this sense Weber’s account of social stratification was more nuanced and less reductionist than that of Marx, and he was more concerned with showing how our relationship to political monopolies also has a significant effect on our life chances. On the question of religion a clear difference is discernible. While Weber understood it as a respite from the demands of a brutally mechanised society, Marx saw it as a means of distracting the attention of the workers from the objective reality of their economic position. Weber was also more ambivalent than Marx about the nature and impact of science, which he saw in terms of its capacity to disenchant and emancipate. However, in his essay ‘Science as a Vocation’ he stressed the importance of ensuring that science did not enjoy privileged access to politics as he thought this would lead to the emergence of a ‘scientistic’ view of society and the further erosion of the autonomy of politics. Finally, we should consider what many see as a tension in Weber’s work concerning its precise theoretical status. Concerned to distance himself from evolutionary or teleological accounts of history, Weber was firmly positioned in the ‘counter-Enlightenment’ camp. However, at the same time and rather perplexingly, his account of the development of rationality appears to be compatible with ‘grand narrative’ accounts. Such accounts chart the course of history as following a pre-destined path unmediated by politics, history and culture. At the end of this chapter I examine how, on this and on many other issues, Weber’s legacy remains tantalisingly ambiguous.

Discussion point

Is Weber’s account of the development of rationality consistent with his rejection of a teleological view of history?

Nietzsche

We have seen how Weber’s inaugural speech at the University of Freiburg in 1894 was resonant with the spirit of Nietzsche. Weber’s primary concern here was to show the importance of strong national leadership for Germany at a time when he felt its essential values and destiny were at stake. This is sometimes seen as the sociologisation of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’. The ‘will to power’ is a complex and frequently misunderstood concept in Nietzschean philosophy. It does not refer to a Darwinian instinct to acquire power to maximise survival chances. Rather, it relates to a quest to control those forces that govern our lives, those forces that seek to reduce us to the level of the ‘common herd’. In this sense the ‘will to power’ was seen by Weber as an aesthetic demand that we become free. This is an abstract formulation, but it was important for Weber’s view of the charismatic leader who, as the embodiment of the ‘will to power’, represented a means of escape from the ‘polar night of icy darkness’ – Weber’s memorable description of the terror of modern societies’ embrace of rationality. However, it should be remembered that Weber was deeply ambivalent about the figure of the leader, or ubermensch. Indeed, in many respects, he favoured the legal-rational mode of authority as a more stable and democratic alternative, hence his enthusiasm for British parliamentary democracy. This is ironic as it is precisely this mode of legitimation that Weber saw as the antithesis of the romanticist tradition in German poetry which championed the life-affirming, Dionysian spirit over the life-denying conformity represented by the Apollian, ‘ontologically destructive’ life order of rationality.

Fast forward to Adorno Chapter 7

Adorno, following Weber and Freud, described how modernity crushes our life spirit.

Weber is considered a dark and pessimistic figure because he was unable to foresee the means by which we could escape the destructive ‘life order’ of rationality and modernity. The charismatic figure of the ‘overman’ is considered as such a means but, for Weber, the prospect of the emergence of such a figure was ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The inter-war debate: new theories of the State
• PART II Post-war debates: the recory of politics
• Part III Contemporary debates: rights, identity and justice