Max Weber on Power and Social Stratification

An Interpretation and Critique

Catherine Brennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429833540
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 1997, this book revolves around a textual analysis of the Weberian thesis that 'classes', 'status groups' and 'parties' are phenomena of the distribution of power within a 'community'. An internal reconstruction of Weber's own ideas on what is called social stratification in contemporary sociological discourse is undertaken. The reason for this reconstruction inheres in the fact that Weber's thought (especially in the field of social stratification) has been modified and misappropriated to such an extent that Weber himself is usually lost in the commentaries. Moreover, this reconstruction is crucial because the secondary literature does not contain a single account teasing out the analytic structure underlying Weber's statements on the nature of social inequality in various societies. It is the principal intention of the book, then, to retrieve the essential form and significance of Weber's ideas on social stratification.

1 Values and social-scientific knowledge

In this chapter I explore the epistemological-methodological principles underpinning Weber's study of social stratification in the modern capitalist market-economy, the feudal estate order and the German nation-state. It is important to examine Weber's epistemological-methodological writings to gain an understanding of his idea of scientific knowledge. For Weber regards his study of social stratification as scientific. In the first section of the chapter I focus attention on Weber's concern with cognition as a method of constituting knowledge. Values are deemed central to the process of cognition. It is argued that Weber's application of the logical principle of value-relevance means that only those empirical phenomena are selected for a scientific investigation in which, according to the social scientist, cultural values are embodied. In this particular section I also investigate how Weber grounds the thesis of the objectivity of criteria for truth in the social sciences. The second section of the chapter comprises an examination of the scientific concept, the ideal-type, constructed by Weber to engage in a scientific analysis of selected empirical phenomena. The final section revolves around an evaluation of Weber's contentious principle of value-freedom.

1.1 Value-relevance

In view of the fact that Weber belongs within the neo-Kantian tradition, he argues that problems of ontology are dependent upon epistemology.¹ The fundamental problem concerns the means by which humans acquire knowledge of empirical reality. How can humans attain knowledge of the 'life' confronting them as a 'stream of immeasurable events...' (Weber 1949, p.84; see also pp.72, 111)?² According to Weber, empirical reality cannot be apprehended independently of the human mind perceiving. It cannot be conceptualized separately from humans being conscious of it. The phenomena comprising empirical reality are 'given in our consciousness' (Weber cited in Burger 1976, p.61). Viewed in this light, human knowledge is not a reproduction of empirical reality in the mind. In this same connection, Weber writes that:

Reflective knowledge, even of one's own experience, is nowhere and never a literally 'repeated experience' or a simple 'photograph' of what was experienced; the 'experience', when it is made into an 'object', acquires perspectives and interrelationships which were not 'known' in the experience itself. (1949, p. 178, emphasis added; see also p.92)

It is impossible to 'analyze reality "without presuppositions'" (Weber 1949, p.78). It is reasonable to assume, then, that Weber regards human knowledge as a selective mental representation of empirical reality.

In fact, Weber is, as Burger (1976, pp.61-3) states, much more precise about the selective intellectual processing of empirical reality, the end-result of which is 'scientific' knowledge. This selective intellectual processing involves three essential steps: immediate experience, concrete facts and scientific concepts. In the first place, what is immediately 'given in our consciousness' is 'experience'. Weber explains that:

...the 'object of immediate experience' is ... constituted by the totality of our 'perceptions' in connection with the undifferentiated 'feelings' and 'desires' that are associated with them ... 'The object of immediate experience' in this sense cannot be the object of a proposition—that is, an empirical explanation of facts. In which case, it remains irrelevant to all empirical knowledge. (1975a, p. 160, emphasis in original; see also pp. 130-36, 148, 151, 161-70, 176-81; 1949, p.158)

The distinction made between immediately experienced reality and empirical knowledge is a logical disjunction. The totality of "'feelings'" and "'desires'" comprising the "'object of immediate experience'" has 'the character of relative "vagueness"' (Weber 1975a, p. 178). Emotions, sensations and the like make up the formless substance immediately 'given in our consciousness'. This being the case, Weber purports that the 'leaden diffuseness of "immediate experience" must be broken...' (1975a, p. 162; emphasis added), if 'factual' knowledge of this experience is to be procured. Sensations, feelings and so forth cannot be 'known' as they are 'experienced'. That is to say, 'the actual "desire" is never "experienced" in the same way that one becomes "aware of' the objects of desire...' (Weber 1975a, p. 132; emphasis in original). As soon as human beings become "'aware of'" their feelings, desires and so on, they cannot help but do so in terms of categories. When humans have ideas of their feelings, desires and the like, they classify them. For Weber, human knowledge is 'related to a categorically formed reality...' (1949, p.188; see also pp.177-8).³ Stated otherwise, when a human being reflects upon his raw experience, a preobjectified, subjective experience 'becomes an "object", a "complex of observed facts"...' (Weber 1975a, p.131; emphasis in original). When a wage-labourer in a modern capitalist factory reflects upon his raw experience, upon the fact, for instance, that his employer is very wealthy whilst he remains poor, a subjective experience is changed into 'a "complex of observed facts"'. The wage-labourer may begin to think in terms of categories like social equality and justice.

The final step in the selective intellectual processing of immediately given reality bears on a scientific analysis of the constituted facts through the construction of concepts. These concepts are, according to Weber, 'primarily analytical instruments for the intellectual mastery of empirical data...' (1949, p. 106, emphasis added; see also pp.60, 68). A scientific concept is a specific arrangement of facts in the human mind. In this regard, Burger (1976, p.62) discerns that Weber is not always sufficiently consistent about the point that the 'content' of 'scientific' knowledge is 'facts'.⁴ Weber, for instance, states that 'valid judgments always presuppose the logical analysis of what is concretely and immediately perceived, Le. the use of concepts' (1949, p. 107; emphasis in original). Weber is saying here that 'science' pertains to the 'logical analysis' of immediate experiences, feelings and so on.⁵ The crucial issue, though, Is that the transformation of raw experience into facts represents the vital intermediate step in the development of scientific knowledge.

Pertinent to the issue at hand here also is that although all scientific knowledge is knowledge of facts, a complete representation of facts cannot be the purpose of a scientific investigation. Facts are infinitely varied (Weber 1949, p.78). Moreover, the 'finite human mind' (Weber 1949, p.72) is only capable of analyzing a finite part of the infinitely many facts. This being the case, science concentrates on a partial representation of these facts. Scientific knowledge entails only a knowledge of those facts which are relevant to the goals of a scientific investigation of a specific type.

Regarding the constitution of the facts of the social sciences, it is first of all important to understand that human individuals make value-judgements about certain phenomena.⁶ When a human individual makes a value-judgement about a particular phenomenon, it is removed from the sphere of that which is merely 'experienced' and 'felt'. Weber explains that:

In contrast to mere 'emotional contents', we ascribe 'value' to an item if and only if it can be the content of a commitment: that is, a consciously articulated positive or negative 'judgment', something that appears to us to 'demand validity'... it is the determinateness of content which removes the object of the value judgment from the sphere of that which is merely 'felt'. (1975a, pp.182-3, emphasis in original; see also 1949, pp.1, 10, 150)

Weber is stressing the cognitive dimension of value-judgements in contrast to mere emotions and feelings which are indeterminate and, hence, incommunicable.⁷ Certain phenomena, then, are detached from immediately given reality and become discursively accessible, because humans make value-judgements about them. And these phenomena, by the same token, become subjectively meaningful for the humans who assign value to them. In effect, valuation (Wertung), on Weber's interpretation, provides a necessary criterion by means of which the inexhaustibility of immediately experienced reality is overcome, and meaningful social facts are constituted (Weber 1975a, p.185).⁸

Put another way, Weber is conveying the idea here that Kultur is a finite segment of the infinite manifold that is Realität. Culture represents a finite slice of Realität invested with meaning and value by human beings. When workers, for example, in the modern capitalist market-economy challenge the juristic precision of modern rational law because of its failure to serve their needs and, further, demand 'a "social law" to be based upon such emotionally colored ethical postulates as "justice" or "human dignity"...' (Weber 1978a, p.886)—they are making a value-judgement. These workers are making clear their preference for a substantive law as opposed to a strictly formal law.

However, Weber goes on to say that '"valuation" is the normal psychological transitional stage for "intellectual understanding"' (1975a, p. 184; emphasis in original). The 'immediate valuation of the "attitude-taking subject"' (Weber 1949, p. 158) such as the wage-labourer is a 'practical' rather than a strictly 'scientific' means of surmounting the diffuseness and infinity of immediately given reality. But the social scientist's fundamental goal in a scientific investigation, on Weber's interpretation, is 'the analysis of facts' (1949, p.60; see also pp.59, 63). Stated otherwise, scientific knowledge 'can be produced only by "objectification": i.e., by artificially divorcing the object from the primordial subject who "understands and evaluates'" (Weber 1975a, p. 133).

Seen in this light, what social scientists require is a principle of selection which enables them to select facts in order to analyze them, without taking a positive or negative stance towards them. Value-relevance (Wertbeziehung) is such a principle. Value-relevance establishes an interrelationship between empirical phenomena and certain values without evaluating them. According to Weber:

...'relevance to values' refers to the philosophical interpretation of that specifically scientific 'interest' which determines the selection of a given subject-matter and the problems of an empirical analysis. In empirical investigation, no 'practical evaluations' are legitimated by this strictly logical fact. (1949, p.22, emphasis added; see also pp.72-85, 143-63; 1975a, pp. 157-8,181-6; 1977)⁹

More pointedly, the application of the logical principle of value-relevance means that only those empirical phenomena are selected for a social-scientific investigation in which, according to social scientists, cultural values are embodied.¹⁰ Weber writes, for example, that:

The 'interpretation' of 'Faust' or of 'Puritanism' or of some specific aspect of 'Greek culture' in this sense is an inquiry into those 'values' which 'we' can find 'embodied' in these objects. (1975a, p. 181; emphasis in original)¹¹

Those empirical phenomena in which for social scientists cultural values are incorporated, provide a wide-ranging group of cultural phenomena (social facts) appropriate for a social-scientific inquiry. And given that those empirical phenomena which for social scientists embody cultural values, were constituted in the first instance by individuals like capitalist entrepreneurs, wage-labourers, feudal knights and charismatic leaders making value-judgements about them— these evaluating individuals are part of any social-scientific investigation (see Weber 1949, pp. 150-51).

Therefore, the fact that cultural values are for social scientists embodied in certain empirical phenomena, represents a valid means of overcoming the infinite diversity of existing empirical phenomena. Such cultural values are contained in a finite number of the innumerable concrete phenomena. Weber affirms that:

Order is brought into this chaos only on the condition that in every case only a part of concrete reality is interesting and significant to us, because only it Is related to the cultural values with which we approach reality. Only certain sides of the infinitely complex concrete phenomenon, namely those to which we attribute a general cultural significance—are therefore worthwhile knowing. (1949, p.78, emphasis in original; see also pp.76-84)¹²

Moreover, when Weber asserts that only those empirical phenomena are 'worthwhile knowing' to which social scientists assign 'a general cultural significance', he is underlining the fact that these phenomena are of general interest. They are 'cultural' phenomena. Western feudalism, modern capitalism and the modern nation-state, for instance, are all designated as 'cultural' phenomena—'only because and only insofar as their existence and the form which they historically assume touch directly or indirectly on our cultural interests...' (Weber 1949, p.81; emphasis in original). And of course, such phenomena will continue to be of 'general cultural significance' only so long as the cultural values embodied in them, relate to the collective interests of the society of which the social scientist is a member. Accordingly, Weber declares that the social scientist 'must understand how to relate the events of the real world consciously or unconsciously to universal "cultural values" and to select out those relationships which are significant for us' (1949, pp.81-2).

Of particular relevance also is that social scientists can find a large number of cultural values of general significance contained in empirical phenomena. What is more, new general cultural values are always being discovered. According to Weber, the reason for this lies in the fact that:

Life with ... its store of possible meanings is inexhaustible. The concrete form in which value-relevance occurs remains perpetually in flux, ever subject to change in the dimly seen future of human culture. (1949, p.111, emphasis in original; see also pp.84, 159)

And owing to the possibility of new general cultural values being constantly found, 'a systematic science of culture', on Weber's interpretation, 'would be senseless in itself (1949, p.84; see also p.72). For instance, the key cultural value of general significance in the feudal estate order in the West, social honour, is an obsolete value in modem capitalist society. But this is not to say that Western feudalism no longer relates in a direct or indirect way to 'our cultural interests' in modem capitalist society. Indeed, one reason for Weber's (1978a, pp. 1099-1102) analysis of Western feudalism was to unravel the causes which hampered capitalist development in this social structure.

For all this, there is, in my view, an apparent inconsistency inherent in Weber's notion of general cultural values being continually subject to historical change. Weber speaks, for example, of 'metahistorical values' (1975a, p. 111; emphasis in original) and of value-analysis having a status 'beyond history' (1949, p. 147). He also alleg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Values and social-scientific knowledge
• 2 Sociology of action
• 3 Power and domination
• 4 Class
• 5 Status
• 6 Political leadership, party organization and the masses
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index