Max Weber's Insights and Errors

Stanislav Andreski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135657918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Max Weber (1864-1920) is generally recognised as one of the founding fathers of modern sociology. His ideas continue to be discussed by sociologists and historians and much homage is paid to his contribution to knowledge. However, such is the awe which the breadth of his knowledge inspires that most general books about Weber contain summaries rather than criticism. This book is the first attempt to evaluate Weber's entire work in the light of historical knowledge available today and of contemporary analytic philosophy. Professor Andreski shows where Weber's true greatness lies, which of Weber's ideas are still valid, which need either correction or modification and which merit rejection.

Andreski places Weber in his social and cultural context of the intellectual preeminence of German culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. He examines Weber's most famous theses on objectivity, methodological individualism, ethical neutrality; explanation versus understanding; ideal types; rationalisation; bureaucracy, charisma, power, law and religion; as well as the explanation of the rise of capitalism and uniqueness of Western civilization.

Andreski concludes by considering what contemporary scholars should learn from Weber if they want to advance further. He argues that the most important lesson is that comparative study of history (including recent history) is the only method of giving empirical support to an examination of large-scale social processes or a general proposition about them.

This book was first published in 1984.

1 Preliminaries

1.1 The personal and political background

The clustering of geniuses in time and space is often cited as evidence of their dependence on the social environment, as there is no reason to suppose that the frequency of births of individuals with extraordinary abilities varies greatly in large populations. Weber's case corroborates this view: his life (1864-1920) falls squarely within the period of intellectual pre-eminence of the German culture which began around the middle of the nineteenth century and ended abruptly with the assumption of power by Adolf Hitler. Weber was a near contemporary of Freud and Max Planck, while Einstein (though a good deal younger) was already recognised as a great man when Weber died. Among his contemporaries doing similar work in Germany there were at least three whose contributions to knowledge are almost as important as his: Karl Kautsky, Otto Hintze and Werner Sombart. Many other excellent scholars helped to win for Germany (or rather for people of German language and culture) a clear pre-eminence in social and historical studies with the exception of economic theory. Though not free from the common shortcomings of German scholarship of his time — such as ponderousness, convoluted style, needless obscurity and the lack of humour — Weber fully embodies its best qualities: the tremendous dedication to the ideals of science, indefatigable industry and boldness in undertaking daunting tasks.

As the offspring of an affluent family, Weber faced no great obstacles in pursuing an academic career, which in those days was very difficult for people of modest means because nobody below the rank of a professor was paid a living wage, many lecturers receiving no payment at all. In a set-up which valued highly hard work and talent Weber advanced rapidly, becoming a professor at thirty. And it must be remembered that at that time this was an elevated position — much higher than what this title means nowadays in Germany or other countries in Europe, not to speak of America. We must not imagine, however, that Weber's influence during his lifetime was commensurate with his present fame: he was unknown in the English-speaking countries, little known on the Continent and (though respected) by no means a dominant figure in Germany. In the survey of sociological theories which was most widely read in the early 1920s (P. Barth, Philosophic der Geschichte als Soziologie, 2nd edn, 1922) Max Weber is mentioned nine times — the same number of times as the now almost forgotten Karl Buecher. Friedrich Ratzel and Guillaume de Greef, Emile Durkheim and the now little remembered Frenchman Gabriel Tarde are cited six times. Ferdinand Tönnies and Albert Schaeffle get eleven citations, Karl Kautsky twelve; the now completely forgotten Alois Riehl and the American Franklin Giddings thirteen; Rudolf Stammler and Alfred Fouilie fifteen. The star is Weber's German near contemporary Wilhelm Wundt with forty-two citations — the same number as the by then long-deceased Herbert Spencer.

It is perhaps strange that, despite being civil servants and inclined to show many traits of bureaucratic personality such as an intense pre-occupation with their status, the German professors were less prone than their colleagues elsewhere to attach excessive weight to the boundaries between the disciplines. In Britain law, economics, philosophy and history were studied as watertight compartments, with particularly deleterious effects on the writing of history, which remained very narrow. New subjects, originating on the borders of older disciplines — such as social and economic history or sociology of law — were created in Germany in Weber's lifetime. His own career illustrates the permeability of inter-disciplinary borders in the German universities: he began as a lecturer in law in Berlin, then held chairs of economics at Freiburg and Heidelberg, and eventually became a professor of sociology in Vienna and Munich. His doctoral thesis on the history of the medieval trading companies, as well as his 'Habilitationschrift' (a thesis required for qualifying as a university teacher) on the relationship of the Roman agrarian structure with the law, cut across the division between legal and economic history. His next work — a report on the situation of agricultural labourers in the eastern provinces of the German empire — would nowadays be classified as sociological field-work.

Notwithstanding his extraordinary intellect, in his tastes and values Weber did not diverge from the norm: in politics he was fairly conservative and nationalist. He was also a monarchist, although he thought that Wilhelm II was a vainglorious fool. Weber's moderate conservatism stemmed from scepticism about the chances of great improvements rather than from illusions about the existing state of affairs. As far as his perception of reality is concerned, he can be located neither on the right nor on the left: a rabid marxist could have agreed with what he said at a sociological conference about how the industrialists rule the Saar, while a die-hard conservative could have agreed with what he said about the prospects of socialism. Weber had no vision of a brighter future: he was a pessimist whose goal was to help to avoid disaster. During the war he began to write articles for newspapers and take an active interest in politics, becoming a member of the German delegation negotiating the peace treaty in Versailles. It is doubtful, however, whether he could have been successful as a party politician because he did not mince his words in voicing personal opinions which were too realistic and too bluntly expressed to please the public. Although he did not regard the policies of Germany's rulers as wicked, he made impassioned attacks on them because he thought they were stupid. For instance, like every other nationalist he wished for victory in the war but he thought that the actions of the leaders (especially of the Kaiser) endangered this goal. In contrast to most generals, he was not misled by the smallness of the American army and the lack of militaristic attitudes in the population and recognised the great potential strength of the United States. For this reason he opposed the actions (especially the methods of submarine warfare) which entailed the danger of provoking the entry of the United States into the war against Germany. Had his advice been followed, the First World War might have ended in a truce rather than a defeat for Germany. A quarter of a century earlier he criticised the policy of the German government towards its Polish subjects: again he agreed with its goal of turning these Poles into Germans, but argued that the attempts to suppress Polish language and customs by coercion were counter-productive. His contributions to the debate about a constitution for the new republic after the collapse of the empire were anything but doctrinaire. He favoured a parliamentary constitution on the British lines not because he regarded government by the people as either possible or desirable but because he thought that a powerful parliament would assure a better selection and practical training of political leaders than promotion along the bureaucratic channels, which tends to bring to the helm yes-men incapable of independent judgment.

As his pronouncements concerned the concrete problems of German policy of the time, rather than more general and enduring issues, they are now of only historical interest. He bequeathed neither a programme of social reform nor a statement of political or ethical ideals like, for example, John Stuart Mill's philosophy of liberalism. As far as guidance in any practical action is concerned, the only thing that we can learn from Weber is the hard-headed and deeply probing but not cynical realism which he applied to every question which he discussed.

Weber left neither a school nor even individual disciples who would have continued his work. To a large extent this can be attributed to the complexity and many-sidedness of his thought and the lack of neat and final formulations; which may have been a salutary reaction to the over-simplifications of Comte and Marx but does not alter the fact that we cannot find in Weber's explicit statements the kind of structure which can be discerned in the theories of Marx, Spencer or Freud where we see a few fundamental concepts or assumptions on which the others rest. Despite (or because of) the extraordinary comprehensiveness of his interests, Weber has built no system: he looked at problems from various angles, offering definitions, uncovering causal relations, suggesting explanations or formulating ad hoc general isations on the basis of 'the rule of the thumb' induction. The products were insufficiently co-ordinated to provide a rallying ground for a school. Even in methodology, the value of his contributions lies in the importance of the questions which they raise rather than in the applicability of the answers. The only definite methodological lesson which he has left to posterity is a demonstration of the power of wide-ranging comparative analysis of historical materials. This approach, however, is too difficult to attract many followers, as it requires a confluence of a talent for analysis and theoretical formulation with the taste and capacity for digesting large amounts of historical data. To found a school on the basis of such requirements would be just as difficult as starting a sports club where being near a world record would be a qualification for entry. It is not surprising, therefore, that the reverence which nowadays surrounds his name is not matched by a rush to work along the paths which he has opened.

Like Darwin, Weber suffered for many years from a mysterious illness which began with a 'nervous breakdown' when he was 33. He was on sick leave from the University of Heidelberg for six years, and at the age of 39 was put into semi-retirement with the title of Honorary Professor. He did not take up regular teaching again until 1918 when he was 54. The illness, however, did not prevent him from working in military hospital administration during the 1914-18 war. Nor did it prevent him from carrying out his massive studies. It is puzzling that while apparently too ill to deliver two or three lectures per week, he was able to write his monumental tomes. Was he malingering to avoid the tedium of repetitive teaching? It seems unlikely in view of what we know about his character. According to the personal reminiscences of Edgar Salin, the Webers used to hold receptions every Sunday which were veritable seminars devoted to high powered debates. At the beginning Weber usually was reclining on a sofa as a sick man, listening passively. Eventually, however, he would sit up and make a contribution to the discussion which sounded like a well-rounded lecture. Although apparently documents exist, still withheld from the public, which throw some light on this matter, no published materials permit inferences about possible emotional and sexual disturbances. If such could be diagnosed, we might have another example (like Comte's and Spencer's) which fits Freud's idea that creativity stems from repression and sublimation of sexual desire. However that may be, it seems likely that (like Darwin's) Weber's illness was psychosomatic. His death from pneumonia at the age of 56 proved no organic debility because it took place during the worst epidemic of influenza on record, when millions were carried off.

Neither his nor Darwin's case offers any support for the popular notion that genius is next to madness: they might have had what we call 'hang-ups', but these do not reveal themselves in their works, which are written in a sober and very level-headed manner. It is easy to find contrasting examples: some of the writings of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, for instance, clearly show a powerful mind going off the rails. There is nothing like that in Weber. Even when reading the articles about the issues of the days where he proffers advice from the standpoint of an old fashioned German nationalist — that is, the values which I cannot share — I am struck by the soundness of his diagnoses and sobriety of his language. No rantings, argumenta ad hominem, fulminations nor appeals to emotions can be found in his writings. Whatever complexes or hang-ups he may have had, he was well able to keep them under control in his work.

1.2 The style

There are many reasons why, though commonly cited and quoted, Weber is seldom understood. The most obvious (though not the most important) is that he died before he finished his major works, some parts of which were left as disjointed notes. His volumes on Confucianism, Hinduism and Judaism were to be followed by studies of Islam and Christianity. It seems likely that the final volume would have contained some kind of general summing up. Actually, the last four chapters of General Economic History do provide a kind of summary or conclusion; however, this book was not written by Weber but produced from the notes taken by his students. It is likely, therefore, that he would have prepared an improved version for publication had he lived longer.

A more important reason for the widespread misunderstanding of Weber's thought is his heavy and convoluted style. Though a great scholar and thinker, Weber was a thoroughly bad writer. Indeed, of all the great founders of the social sciences, he scores the lowest in the skill of presentation. In comparison with the lucidity and elegance of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill or de Tocqueville, Weber appears like a blunderbuss. Even within the Germanic cultural tradition — where ponderous and convoluted style was regarded as a testimonial of academic respectability —Weber seems more obscure than many other writers, and much worse than Engels, Freud, Sombart or Kautsky; though not as bad as Georg Simmel. Reading his main works I had the impression that he never revised what he wrote, as even the volumes of Religionssoziologie, published while he was alive, contain many repetitions, not a few self-contradictions (though mostly apparent rather than real) and the arrangement lacks order. Later, I found a confirmation of my suspicions in his biography by his wife Marianne, where she says (to quote Reinhard Bendix's translation):

He was entirely unconcerned with the form in which he presented the wealth of ideas. So many things came to him out of that storehouse of his mind, once the mass [of ideas] was in motion, that many times they could not be readily forced into a lucid sentence structure. And he wants to be done with it quickly and be brief about it on top of that, because ever new problems of reality crowd in upon him. What a limitation of discursive thought that it does not permit the simultaneous expression of several lines of thought which belong together! Therefore, much must be pressed hurriedly into long involved periods and what cannot be accommodated there has to be put into the footnotes. After all, let the reader take as much trouble with these matters as he had done himself.

Bendix goes on to add:

In addition, Weber indicated reservations of every kind by the ample use of quotation marks, conditional phrases, and other linguistic symbols of scholarly caution. He also used italics, differently numbered paragraphs, different type faces and other devices to structure his material and distribute his emphases. Therefore no simplification of sentence structure, terminology and paragraphing in an English translation can remedy the defects of exposition from which the original suffers (Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait).

Even worse sources of confusion can be found: often Weber changes the subject without any indication. For instance, in one of the passages included in the selection Max Weber on Capitalism, Bureaucracy and Religion, the main topic is the Chinese imperial administration. Into it is inserted a paragraph which compares it with certain arrangements in the medieval German empire, but which is written in such a way that most readers would think it is still the Chinese administration that he is talking about. Only with some knowledge of German historical terminology can one see that this paragraph must refer to the German empire and is inserted as a comparison. In my translation I have inserted the word German where it was needed. There are many other examples of this kind of thing. However, whereas with many writers obscurity masks the emptiness of thought, with Weber it is always worth it to struggle through the bush to find the gold underneath. Even the parts which are not his best are worth studying carefully. He is convoluted, often unclear and sometimes wrong but never trivial or given to padding. It is for this reason that trying to interpret Weber is such a fascinating pastime. Every great thinker, of course, deserves attentive study — and it is always interesting to find out more about his character, life, environment and sources of inspiration — but a clearer writer's work calls for less exegesis. Although I have edited some of his writings, I have never been tempted to write a book about Herbert Spencer. Not being an historian, I have no desire to write an intellectual biography; and he is such a clear writer that there is little doubt about what he says, while for an evaluation of where he was right or wrong an article seems to suffice. With a writer of this kind, it is unlikely that a commentator will have enough to say to fill an entire book without slipping into unrewarding summarising, which can be better done by selecting extracts. It is quite different with Weber: often what he says appears to be completely wrong on the face of it because of injudicious choice of terms. However, if we try to figure out what he might be getting at, we can see that it is possible to recast his statements in a way which makes them substantially true. Moreover, it is often possible to correct what appears to be one-sidedness by putting the statement in question into a wider context of what he says elsewhere. For instance, people who have only read his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (when the other works were not available in English) have criticised him for propounding a religious determinism as one-sided as the economic. Nobody who had read his work on the ancient Mediterranean societies can agree with this criticism. Trying to understand Weber is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, the pieces of which have to be trimmed in various places to make them fit.

1.3 The different kinds of writings and their salient features

The writings of Max Weber reflect his extraordinary versatility and fall into several distinctive categories.

(1) The first can be described as more or less straightforward history but of the 'structural' (as opposed to the 'evential') kind, to anglicise Fernand Braudel's useful terms. We can put under this heading his earliest works: the first of which is his doctoral dissertation, A Contribution to the History of the Trading Associations in the Middle Ages, published in 1889. Although it is still very far from the comparative perspective of his later works, it shows his pioneering and synthesising mind by striding across the conventional divisions of historiography, as it fits neither the pigeon-hole of economic history nor that of legal history, but studies the interaction between the economy and the law. The choice of the topic reveals the interest in the problem of the conditions of the rise of capitalism which remained in the centre of all his studies. The interest in the interaction between economy and law is even more explicit in his 'Habilitationschrift' — a thesis on the basis of which the right to teach independently at a university was rewarded — as can be seen from its title: Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private Law. It was published in 1891 which was only two years after his previous book, and when he was 27.

(2) The next category consists of fairly conventional sociological and economic studies of the descriptive kind. One of them is about how the stock exchange works and it was published as a little volume in a series called Gottingen Workers' Library. It seems the least interesting of Weber's publications. Much the same can be said about his excursions into the field of industrial sociology and psychology, as conventionally conceived, which were produced when he was active in the Society for Social Policy and one of the three editors of the Journal of Social Sciences and Social Policy (Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft una Sozialpolitik). The first of these studies appeared in 1908 under the lengthy title Methodological Introduction to the Survey of Selection and Adaptation (Vocational Choices and Careers) of Workers in Enclosed Large Scale Industry. By 'enclosed' (geschlossene) he means 'where work is carried on on the premises' as opposed to sub-contracting or putting out. As always, what he says is intelligent: he warns, for example, against attributing to biological heredity what might be better explained by the environme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Preliminaries
• 2 Philosophy of the social sciences
• 3 Presiding substantive ideas
• 4 Systematic comparative sociology
• 5 Historical comparative sociology: the explanation of the rise of capitalism
• 6 Conclusion: what should we learn from Weber to advance farther?
• Index