Max Weber (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Winter 2017 Edition)

Max Weber (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Winter 2017 Edition)
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Max Weber
First published Fri Aug 24, 2007; substantive revision Mon Nov 27, 2017
Arguably the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century, Max
Weber is known as a principal architect of modern social science along
with Karl Marx and Emil Durkheim. Weber’s wide-ranging
contributions gave critical impetus to the birth of new academic
disciplines such as sociology as well as to the significant
reorientation in law, economics, political science, and religious
studies. His methodological writings were instrumental in establishing
the self-identity of modern social science as a distinct field of
inquiry; he is still claimed as the source of inspiration by empirical
positivists and their hermeneutic detractors alike. More
substantively, Weber’s two most celebrated contributions were
the “rationalization thesis,” a grand meta-historical
analysis of the dominance of the west in modern times, and the
“Protestant Ethic thesis,” a non-Marxist genealogy of
modern capitalism. Together, these two theses helped launch his
reputation as one of the founding theorists of modernity. In addition,
his avid interest and participation in politics led to a unique strand
of political realism comparable to that of Machiavelli and Hobbes. As
such, Max Weber’s influence was far-reaching across the vast
array of disciplinary, methodological, ideological and philosophical
reflections that are still our own and increasingly more so.
1. Life and Career
2. Philosophical Influences
2.1 Knowledge: Neo-Kantianism
2.2 Ethics: Kant and Nietzsche
3. History
3.1 Rationalization as a Thematic Unity
3.2 Calculability, Predictability, and World-Mastery
3.3 Knowledge, Impersonality, and Control
4. Modernity
4.1 The “Iron Cage” and Value-fragmentation
4.2 Reenchantment
via
Disenchantment
4.3 Modernity
contra
Modernization
5. Knowledge
5.1 Understanding (
Verstehen
5.2 Ideal Type
6. Politics and Ethics
6.1 Domination and Legitimacy
6.2 Charismatic Leadership Democracy
6.3 Nationalism and Power Politics
6.4 The Ethics of Conviction and Responsibility
7. Concluding Remarks
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
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Related Entries
1. Life and Career
Maximilian Carl Emil “Max” Weber (1864–1920) was
born in the Prussian city of Erfurt to a family of notable heritage.
His father, Max Sr., came from a Westphalian family of merchants and
industrialists in the textile business and went on to become a lawyer
and National Liberal parliamentarian in Wilhelmine politics. His
mother, Helene, came from the Fallenstein and Souchay families, both
of the long illustrious Huguenot line, which had for generations
produced public servants and academicians. His younger brother,
Alfred, was an influential political economist and sociologist, too.
Evidently, Max Weber was brought up in a prosperous, cosmopolitan, and
highly cultivated family milieu that was well-plugged into the
political, social, and cultural establishment of the German
Bürgertum
[Roth 2000]. Also, his parents represented
two, often conflicting, poles of identity between which their eldest
son would struggle throughout his life — worldly statesmanship
and ascetic scholarship.
Educated mainly at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, Weber
was trained in law, eventually writing his
Habilitationsschrift
on Roman law and agrarian history under
August Meitzen, a prominent political economist of the time. After
some flirtation with legal practice and public service, he received an
important research commission from the
Verein für
Sozialpolitik
(the leading social science association under
Gustav Schmoller’s leadership) and produced the so-called East
Elbian Report on the displacement of the German agrarian workers in
East Prussia by Polish migrant labours. Greeted upon publication with
high acclaim and political controversy, this early success led to his
first university appointment at Freiburg in 1894 to be followed by a
prestigious professorship in political economy at Heidelberg two years
later. Weber and his wife Marianne, an intellectual in her own right
and early women’s rights activist, soon found themselves at the
center of the vibrant intellectual and cultural life of Heidelberg;
the so-called “Weber Circle” attracted such intellectual
luminaries as Georg Jellinek, Ernst Troeltsch, and Werner Sombart and
later a number of younger scholars including Marc Bloch, Robert
Michels, and György Lukács. Weber was also active in
public life as he continued to play an important role as a Young Turk
in the
Verein
and maintain a close association with the
liberal
Evangelische-soziale Kongress
(especially with the
leader of its younger generation, Friedrich Naumann). It was during
this time that he first established a solid reputation as a brilliant
political economist and outspoken public intellectual.
All these fruitful years came to an abrupt halt in 1897 when Weber
collapsed with a nervous-breakdown shortly after his father’s
sudden death (precipitated by a heated confrontation with Weber)
[Radkau 2011, 53–69]. His routine as a teacher and scholar was
interrupted so badly that he eventually withdrew from regular teaching
duties in 1903, to which he would not return until 1919. Although
severely compromised and unable to write as prolifically as before, he
still managed to immerse himself in the study of various philosophical
and religious topics, which resulted in a new direction in his
scholarship as the publication of miscellaneous methodological essays
as well as
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1904–1905) testifies. Also noteworthy about this period is his
extensive visit to America in 1904, which left an indelible trace in
his understanding of modernity in general [Scaff 2011].
After this stint essentially as a private scholar, he slowly resumed
his participation in various academic and public activities. With
Edgar Jaffé and Sombart, he took over editorial control of the
Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik
turning it into a leading social science journal of the day as well as
his new institutional platform. In 1909, he co-founded the
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie
, in part as a
result of his growing unease with the
Verein
’s
conservative politics and lack of methodological discipline, becoming
its first treasurer (he would resign from it in 1912, though). This
period of his life, until interrupted by the outbreak of the First
World War in 1914, brought the pinnacles of his achievements as he
worked intensely in two areas – the comparative sociology of
world religions and his contributions to the
Grundriss der
Sozialökonomik
(to be published posthumously as
Economy
and Society
). Along with the major methodological essays that he
drafted during this time, these works would become mainly responsible
for Weber’s enduring reputation as one of the founding fathers
of modern social science.
With the onset of the First World War, Weber’s involvement in
public life took an unexpected turn. At first a fervent nationalist
supporter of the war, as virtually all German intellectuals of the
time were, he grew disillusioned with the German war policies,
eventually refashioning himself as one of the most vocal critics of
the Kaiser government in a time of war. As a public intellectual, he
issued private reports to government leaders and wrote journalistic
pieces to warn against the Belgian annexation policy and the unlimited
submarine warfare, which, as the war deepened, evolved into a call for
overall democratization of the authoritarian state that was Wilhelmine
Germany. By 1917, Weber was campaigning vigorously for a wholesale
constitutional reform for post-war Germany, including the introduction
of universal suffrage and the empowerment of parliament.
When defeat came in 1918, Germany found in Weber a public intellectual
leader, even possibly a future statesman, with relatively solid
liberal democratic credentials who was well-positioned to influence
the course of post-war reconstruction. He was invited to join the
draft board of the Weimar Constitution as well as the German
delegation to Versaille; albeit in vain, he even ran for a
parliamentary seat on the liberal Democratic Party ticket. In those
capacities, however, he opposed the German Revolution (all too
sensibly) and the Versaille Treaty (all too quixotically) alike,
putting himself in an unsustainable position that defied the partisan
alignments of the day. By all accounts, his political activities bore
little fruit, except his advocacy for a robust plebiscitary presidency
in the Weimar Constitution.
Frustrated with day-to-day politics, he turned to his scholarly
pursuits with renewed vigour. In 1919, he briefly taught in turn at
the universities of Vienna (
General Economic History
was an
outcome of this experience) and Munich (where he gave the much-lauded
lectures,
Science as a Vocation
and
Politics as a
Vocation
), while compiling his scattered writings on religion in
the form of massive three-volume
Gesammelte Aufsätze zur
Religionssoziologie
GARS
hereafter]. All these
reinvigorated scholarly activities ended abruptly in 1920, however,
when he succumbed to the Spanish flue and died suddenly of pneumonia
in Munich. Max Weber was fifty six years old.
2. Philosophical Influences
Putting Weber in the context of philosophical tradition proper is not
an easy task. For all the astonishing variety of identities that can
be ascribed to him as a scholar, he was certainly no philosopher at
least in the narrow sense of the term. His reputation as a Solonic
legislator of modern social science also tends to cloud our
appreciation of the extent to which his ideas were embedded in the
intellectual tradition of the time. Broadly speaking, Weber’s
philosophical worldview, if not coherent philosophy, was informed by
the deep crisis of the Enlightenment project in fin-de-siècle
Europe, which was characterized by the intellectual revolt against
positivist reason, a celebration of subjective will and intuition, and
a neo-Romantic longing for spiritual wholesomeness [Hughes 1977]. In
other words, Weber belonged to a generation of self-claimed epigones
who had to struggle with the legacies of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche.
As such, the philosophical backdrop to his thoughts will be outlined
here along two axes: epistemology and ethics.
2.1 Knowledge: Neo-Kantianism
Weber encountered the pan-European cultural crisis of his time mainly
as filtered through the jargon of German Historicism [Beiser 2011].
His early training in law had exposed him to the sharp divide between
the reigning Labandian legal positivism and the historical
jurisprudence championed by Otto von Gierke (one of his teachers at
Berlin); in his later incarnation as a political economist, he was
keenly interested in the heated “strife over methods”
Methodenstreit
) between the positivist economic methodology
of Carl Menger and the historical economics of Schmoller (his mentor
during the early days). Arguably, however, it was not until Weber grew
acquainted with the Baden or Southwestern School of Neo-Kantians,
especially through Wilhelm Windelband, Emil Lask, and Heinrich Rickert
(his one-time colleague at Freiburg), that he found a rich conceptual
template suitable for the clearer elaboration of his own
epistemological position.
In opposition to a Hegelian emanationist epistemology, briefly,
Neo-Kantians shared the Kantian dichotomy between reality and concept.
Not an emanent derivative of concepts as Hegel posited, reality is
irrational and incomprehensible, and the concept, only an abstract
construction of our mind. Nor is the concept a matter of will,
intuition, and subjective consciousness as Wilhelm Dilthey posited.
According to Hermann Cohen, one of the early Neo-Kantians, concept
formation is fundamentally a cognitive process, which cannot but be
rational as Kant held. If our cognition is logical and all reality
exists within cognition, then only a reality that we can comprehend in
the form of knowledge is rational — metaphysics is thereby
reduced to epistemology, and Being to logic. As such, the process of
concept formation both in the natural (
Natur
-) and the
cultural-historical sciences (
Geisteswissenshaften
) has to be
universal as well as abstract, not different in kind but in their
subject matters. The latter is only different in dealing with the
question of values in addition to logical relationships.
For Windelband, however, the difference between the two kinds of
knowledge has to do with its aim and method as well.
Cultural-historical knowledge is not concerned with a phenomenon
because of what it shares with other phenomena, but rather because of
its own definitive qualities. For values, which form its proper
subject, are radically subjective, concrete and individualistic.
Unlike the “nomothetic” knowledge that natural science
seeks, what matters in historical science is not a universal law-like
causality, but an understanding of the particular way in which an
individual ascribes values to certain events and institutions or takes
a position towards the general cultural values of his/her time under a
unique, never-to-be-repeated constellation of historical
circumstances. Therefore, cultural-historical science seeks
“ideographic” knowledge; it aims to understand the
particular, concrete and irrational “historical
individual”
with
inescapably universal, abstract, and
rational concepts. Turning irrational reality into rational concept,
it does not simply paint (
abbilden
) a picture of reality but
transforms (
umbilden
) it. Occupying the gray area between
irrational reality and rational concept, then, its question became
twofold for the Neo-Kantians. One is in what way we can understand the
irreducibly subjective values held by the historical actors in an
objective fashion, and the other, by what criteria we can select a
certain historical phenomenon as opposed to another as historically
significant subject matter worthy of our attention. In short, the
issue was not only the values to be comprehended by the seeker of
historical knowledge, but also his/her own values, which are no less
subjective. Value-judgment (
Werturteil
) as well as value
Wert
) became a keen issue.
According to Rickert’s definitive elaboration, value-judgment
precedes values. He posits that the “in-dividual,” as
opposed to mere “individual,” phenomenon can be isolated
as a discrete subject of our historical inquiry when we ascribe
certain subjective values to the singular coherence and indivisibility
that are responsible for its uniqueness. In his theory of
value-relation (
Wertbeziehung
), Rickert argues that relating
historical objects to values can still retain objective validity when
it is based on a series of explicitly formulated conceptual
distinctions; that between the investigator’s values and those
of the historical actor under investigation, between personal or
private values and general cultural values of the time, and between
subjective value-judgment and objective value-relations.
In so positing, however, Rickert is making two highly questionable
assumptions. One is that there are certain values in every culture
that are universally accepted within that culture as valid, and the
other, that a historian free of bias must agree on what these values
are. Just as natural science must assume “unconditionally and
universally valid laws of nature,” so, too, cultural-historical
science must assume that there are “unconditionally and
universally valid values.” If so, an “in-dividual”
historical event has to be reduced to an “individual”
manifestation of the objective process of history, a conclusion that
essentially implies that Rickert returned to the German Idealist faith
in the meaningfulness of history and the objective validity of the
diverse values to be found in history. An empirical study in
historical science, in the end, cannot do without a metaphysics of
history. Bridging irrational reality and rational concept in
historical science, or overcoming
hiatus irrationalis
(à la Lask) without recourse to a metaphysics of history still
remained a problem as acutely as before. While accepting the broadly
neo-Kantian conceptual template as Rickert elaborated it,
Weber’s methodological writings would turn mostly on this
issue.
2.2 Ethics: Kant and Nietzsche
German Idealism seems to have exerted another enduring influence on
Weber, discernible in his ethical worldview more than in his
epistemological position. This was the strand of Idealist discourse in
which a broadly Kantian ethic and its Nietzschean critique figure
prominently.
The way in which Weber understood Kant seems to have come through the
conceptual template set by moral psychology and philosophical
anthropology. In conscious opposition to the utilitarian-naturalistic
justification of modern individualism, Kant viewed moral action as
simultaneously principled and self-disciplined
and
expressive
of genuine freedom and autonomy. On this Kantian view, freedom and
autonomy are to be found in the instrumental control of the self and
the world (objectification) according to a law formulated solely from
within (subjectification). Furthermore, such a paradoxical compound is
made possible by an internalization or willful acceptance of a
transcendental rational principle, which saves it from falling prey to
the hedonistic subjectification that Kant found in Enlightenment
naturalism and which he so detested. Kant in this regard follows
Rousseau in condemning utilitarianism; instrumental-rational control
of the world in the service of our desires and needs just degenerates
into organized egoism. In order to prevent it, mere freedom of choice
based on elective will (
Willkür
) has to be replaced by
the exercise of purely rational will (
Wille
). Instrumental
transformation of the self is thus the crucial benchmark of autonomous
moral agency for Kant as well as for Locke, but its basis has been
fundamentally altered in Kant; it should be done with the purpose of
serving a higher end, that is, the universal law of reason. A willful
self-transformation is demanded now in the service of a higher law
based on reason, or an “ultimate value” in Weber’s
parlance.
Weber’s understanding of this Kantian ethical template was
strongly tinged by the Protestant theological debate taking place in
the Germany of his time between (orthodox Lutheran) Albrecht Ritschl
and Matthias Schneckenburger (of Calvinist persuasion), a context with
which Weber became acquainted through his Heidelberg colleague,
Troeltsch. Suffice it to note in this connection that Weber’s
sharp critique of Ritschl’s Lutheran communitarianism seems
reflective of his broadly Kantian preoccupation with radically
subjective individualism and the methodical transformation of the self
[Graf 1995].
All in all, one might say that:“the preoccupations of Kant and
of Weber are really the same. One was a philosopher and the other a
sociologist, but there… the difference ends” [Gellner
1974, 184]. That which also ends, however, is Weber’s
subscription to a Kantian ethic of duty when it comes to the
possibility of a universal law of reason. Weber was keenly aware of
the fact that the Kantian linkage between growing self-consciousness,
the possibility of universal law, and principled and thus free action
had been irrevocably severed. Kant managed to preserve the precarious
duo of non-arbitrary action and subjective freedom by asserting such a
linkage, which Weber believed to be unsustainable in his allegedly
Nietzschean age.
According to Nietzsche, “will to truth” cannot be content
with the metaphysical construction of a grand metanarrative, whether
it be monotheistic religion or modern science, and growing
self-consciousness, or “intellectualization” à la
Weber, can lead only to a radical skepticism, value relativism, or,
even worse, nihilism. According to such a Historicist diagnosis of
modernity that culminates in the “death of God,” the
alternative seems to be either a radical self-assertion and
self-creation that runs the risk of being arbitrary (as in Nietzsche)
or a complete desertion of the modern ideal of self-autonomous freedom
(as in early Foucault). If the first approach leads to a radical
divinization of humanity, one possible extension of modern humanism,
the second leads inexorably to a “dedivinization” of
humanity, a postmodern antihumanism [Vattimo 1988, 31–47].
Seen in this light, Weber’s ethical sensibility is built on a
firm rejection of a Nietzschean divination and Foucaultian resignation
alike, both of which are radically at odds with a Kantian ethic of
duty. In other words, Weber’s ethical project can be described
as a search for a non-arbitrary form of freedom (his Kantian side) in
what he perceived as an increasingly post-metaphysical world (his
Nietzschean side). According to Paul Honigsheim, his pupil and distant
cousin, Weber’s ethic is that of “tragedy” and
“nevertheless” [Honigsheim 2003, 113]. This deep tension
between the Kantian moral imperatives and a Nietzschean diagnosis of
the modern cultural world is apparently what gives such a darkly
tragic and agnostic shade to Weber’s ethical worldview.
3. History
3.1 Rationalization as a Thematic Unity
Weber’s main contribution as such, nonetheless, lies neither in
epistemology nor in ethics. Although they deeply informed his thoughts
to an extent still under-appreciated, his main preoccupation lay
elsewhere. He was after all one of the founding fathers of modern
social science. Beyond the recognition, however, that Weber is not
simply a sociologist par excellence as Talcott Parsons’s
Durkheimian interpretation made him out to be, identifying an
idée maîtresse
throughout his disparate oeuvre
has been debated ever since his own days and is still far from
settled.
Economy and Society
, his alleged
magnum
opus
, was a posthumous publication based upon his widow’s
editorship, the thematic architectonic of which is unlikely to be
reconstructed beyond doubt even after its recent reissuing under the
rubric of
Max Weber Gesamtausgabe
MWG
hereafter].
GARS
forms a more coherent whole since its editorial edifice
was the work of Weber himself; and yet, its relationship to his other
sociologies of, for instance, law, city, music, domination, and
economy, remains controvertible. Accordingly, his overarching theme
has also been variously surmised as a developmental history of Western
rationalism (Wolfgang Schluchter), the universal history of
rationalist culture (Friedrich Tenbruck), or simply the
Menschentum
as it emerges and degenerates in modern rational
society (Wilhelm Hennis). The first depicts Weber as a
comparative-historical sociologist; the second, a latter-day Idealist
historian of culture reminiscent of Jacob Burckhardt; and the third, a
political philosopher on a par with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau.
Important as they are for in-house Weber scholarship, however, these
philological disputes need not hamper our attempt to grasp the gist of
his ideas. Suffice it for us to recognize that, albeit with varying
degrees of emphasis, these different interpretations all converge on
the thematic centrality of rationality, rationalism, and
rationalization in making sense of Weber.
At the outset, what immediately strikes a student of Weber’s
rationalization thesis is its seeming irreversibility and
Eurocentrism. The apocalyptic imagery of the “iron cage”
that haunts the concluding pages of the
Protestant Ethic
is
commonly taken to reflect his dark fatalism about the inexorable
unfolding of rationalization and its culmination in the complete loss
of freedom and meaning in the modern world. The “Author’s
Introduction” (
Vorbemerkung
to
GARS
) also
contains oft-quoted passages that allegedly disclose Weber’s
belief in the unique singularity of Western civilization’s
achievement in the direction of rationalization, or lack thereof in
other parts of the world. For example:
A child of modern European civilization (
Kulturwelt
) who
studies problems of universal history shall inevitably and justfiably
raise the question (
Fragestellung
): what combination of
circumstances have led to the fact that in the West, and here only,
cultural phenomena have appeared which — at least as
we
like to think — came to have
universal
significance and
validity [Weber 1920/1992, 13: translation altered]?
Taken together, then, the rationalization process as Weber narrated it
seems quite akin to a metahistorical teleology that irrevocably sets
the West apart from and indeed above the East.
At the same time, nonetheless, Weber adamantly denied the possibility
of a universal law of history in his methodological essays. Even
within the same pages of
Vorbemerkung,
he said,
“rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in
various departments of life and in all areas of culture”
Ibid.
, 26]. He also made clear that his study of various
forms of world religions was to be taken for its heuristic value
rather than as “complete analyses of cultures, however
brief” [
Ibid.
, 27]. It was meant as a
comparative-conceptual platform on which to erect the edifying
features of rationalization in the West. If merely a heuristic device
and not a universal law of progress, then, what is rationalization and
whence comes his uncompromisingly dystopian vision?
3.2 Calculability, Predictability, and World-Mastery
Roughly put, taking place in all areas of human life from religion and
law to music and architecture, rationalization means a historical
drive towards a world in which “one can, in principle, master
all things by calculation” [Weber 1919/1946, 139]. For instance,
modern capitalism is a rational mode of economic life because it
depends on a calculable process of production. This search for exact
calculability underpins such institutional innovations as monetary
accounting (especially double-entry bookkeeping), centralization of
production control, separation of workers from the means of
production, supply of formally free labour, disciplined control on the
factory floor, and other features that make modern capitalism
qualitatively
different from all other modes of organizing
economic life. The enhanced calculability of the production process is
also buttressed by that in non-economic spheres such as law and
administration. Legal formalism and bureaucratic management reinforce
the elements of predictability in the sociopolitical environment that
encumbers industrial capitalism by means of introducing formal
equality of citizenship, a rule-bound legislation of legal norms, an
autonomous judiciary, and a depoliticized professional bureaucracy.
Further, all this calculability and predictability in political,
social, and economic spheres was not possible without changes of
values in ethics, religion, psychology, and culture. Institutional
rationalization was, in other words, predicated upon the rise of a
peculiarly rational type of personality, or a “person of
vocation” (
Berufsmensch
) as outlined in the
Protestant Ethic
. The outcome of this complex interplay of
ideas and interests was modern rational Western civilization with its
enormous material and cultural capacity for relentless
world-mastery.
3.3 Knowledge, Impersonality, and Control
On a more analytical plateau, all these disparate processes of
rationalization can be surmised as increasing knowledge, growing
impersonality, and enhanced control [Brubaker 1991, 32–35].
First, knowledge. Rational action in one very general sense
presupposes knowledge. It requires some knowledge of the ideational
and material circumstances in which our action is embedded, since to
act rationally is to act on the basis of conscious reflection about
the probable consequences of action. As such, the knowledge that
underpins a rational action is of a causal nature conceived in terms
of means-ends relationships, aspiring towards a systematic, logically
interconnected whole. Modern scientific and technological knowledge is
a culmination of this process that Weber called intellectualization,
in the course of which, the germinating grounds of human knowledge in
the past, such as religion, theology, and metaphysics, were slowly
pushed back to the realm of the superstitious, mystical, or simply
irrational. It is only in modern Western civilization, according to
Weber, that this gradual process of disenchantment
Entzauberung
) has reached its radical conclusion.
Second, impersonality. Rationalization, according to Weber, entails
objectification (
Versachlichung
). Industrial capitalism, for
one, reduces workers to sheer numbers in an accounting book,
completely free from the fetters of tradition and non-economic
considerations, and so does the market relationship vis-à-vis
buyers and sellers. For another, having abandoned the principle of
Khadi justice (i.e., personalized
ad hoc
adjudication),
modern law and administration also rule in strict accordance with the
systematic formal codes and
sine irae et studio
, that is,
“without regard to person.” Again, Weber found the seed of
objectification not in material interests alone, but in the Puritan
vocational ethic (
Berufsethik
) and the life conduct that it
inspired, which was predicated upon a disenchanted monotheistic
theodicy that reduced humans to mere tools of God’s providence.
Ironically, for Weber, modern inward subjectivity was born once we
lost any inherent value
qua
humans and became thoroughly
objectified vis-à-vis God in the course of the Reformation.
Modern individuals are subjectified and objectified all at once.
Third, control. Pervasive in Weber’s view of rationalization is
the increasing control in social and material life. Scientific and
technical rationalization has greatly improved both the human capacity
for a mastery over nature and institutionalized discipline
via
bureaucratic administration, legal formalism, and
industrial capitalism. The calculable, disciplined control over humans
was, again, an unintended consequence of the Puritan ethic of rigorous
self-discipline and self-control, or what Weber called
“innerworldly asceticism (
innerweltliche
Askese
).” Here again, Weber saw the irony that a modern
individual citizen equipped with inviolable rights was born as a part
of the rational, disciplinary ethos that increasingly penetrated into
every aspect of social life.
4. Modernity
4.1 The “Iron Cage” and Value-fragmentation
Thus seen, rationalization as Weber postulated it is anything but an
unequivocal historical phenomenon. As already pointed out, first,
Weber views it as a process taking place in disparate fields of human
life with a logic of each field’s own and varying directions;
“each one of these fields may be rationalized in terms of very
different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from one
point of view may well be irrational from another” [Weber
1920/1992, 27]. Second, and more important, its ethical ramification
for Weber is deeply ambivalent. To use his own dichotomy, the
formal-procedural rationality (
Zweckrationalität
) to
which Western rationalization tends does not necessarily go with a
substantive-value rationality (
Wertrationalität
). On the
one hand, exact calculability and predictability in the social
environment that formal rationalization has brought about dramatically
enhances individual freedom by helping individuals understand and
navigate through the complex web of practice and institutions in order
to realize the ends of their own choice. On the other hand, freedom
and agency are seriously curtailed by the same force in history when
individuals are reduced to a “cog in a machine,” or
trapped in an “iron cage” that formal rationalization has
spawned with irresistible efficiency and at the expense of substantive
rationality. Thus his famous lament in the
Protestant
Ethic
No one knows who will live in this cage (
Gehäuse
) in the
future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely
new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas
and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with
a sort of convulsive self-importance. For the “last man”
letzten Menschen
) of this cultural development, it might
well be truly said: “Specialist without spirit, sensualist
without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of
humanity (
Menschentums
) never before achieved” [Weber
1904–05/1992, 182: translation altered].
Third, Weber envisions the future of rationalization not only in terms
of “mechanized petrification,” but also of a chaotic, even
atrophic, inundation of subjective values. In other words, the
bureaucratic “iron cage” is only one side of the modernity
that rationalization has brought about; the other is a
“polytheism” of value-fragmentation. At the apex of
rationalization, we moderns have suddenly found ourselves living
“as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted
of its gods and demons” [Weber 1919/1946, 148]. Modern Western
society is, Weber seems to say, once again enchanted as a result of
disenchantment. How did this happen and with what consequences?
4.2 Reenchantment
via
Disenchantment
In point of fact, Weber’s rationalization thesis can be
understood with richer nuance when we approach it as, for lack of
better terms, a dialectics of disenchantment and reenchantment rather
than as a one-sided, unilinear process of secularization.
Disenchantment had ushered in monotheistic religions in the West. In
practice, this means that
ad hoc
maxims for life-conduct had
been gradually displaced by a unified total system of meaning and
value, which historically culminated in the Puritan ethic of vocation.
Here, the irony was that disenchantment was an ongoing process
nonetheless. Disenchantment in its second phase pushed aside
monotheistic religion as something irrational, thus delegitimating it
as a unifying worldview in the modern secular world.
Modern science, which was singularly responsible for this late
development, was initially welcomed as a surrogate system of orderly
value-creation, as Weber found in the convictions of Bacon (science as
“the road to
true
nature”) and Descartes (as
“the road to the
true
god”) [Weber 1919/1946,
142]. For Weber, nevertheless, modern science is a deeply nihilistic
enterprise in which any scientific achievement worthy of the name
must
“ask to be surpassed and made obsolete” in a
process “that is in principle
ad infinitum
,” at
which point, “we come to the
problem of the meaning
of
science.” He went on to ask: “For it is simply not
self-evident that something which is subject to such a law is in
itself meaningful and rational. Why should one do something which in
reality never comes to an end and never can?” [
Ibid
.,
138: translation altered]. In short, modern science has relentlessly
deconstructed other sources of value-creation, in the course of which
its own meaning has also been dissipated beyond repair. The result is
the “
Götterdämmerung
of all evaluative
perspectives” including its own [Weber 1904/1949, 86].
Irretrievably gone as a result is a unifying worldview, be it
religious or scientific, and what ensues is its fragmentation into
incompatible value spheres. Weber, for instance, observed:
“since Nietzsche, we realize that something can be beautiful,
not only in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather in
that very aspect” [Weber 1919/1946, 148]. That is to say,
aesthetic values now stand in irreconcilable antagonism to religious
values, transforming “value judgments (
Werturteile
into judgments of taste (
Geschmacksurteile
) by which what is
morally reprehensible becomes merely what is tasteless” [Weber
1915/1946, 342].
Weber is, then,
not
envisioning a peaceful dissolution of the
grand metanarratives of monotheistic religion and universal science
into a series of local narratives and the consequent modern pluralist
culture in which different cultural practices follow their own
immanent logic. His vision of polytheistic reenchantment is rather
that of an incommensurable value-fragmentation into a plurality of
alternative metanarratives, each of which claims to answer the same
metaphysical questions that religion and science strove to cope with
in their own ways. The slow death of God has reached its apogee in the
return of gods and demons who “strive to gain power over our
lives and again ... resume their eternal struggle with one
another” [Weber 1919/1946, 149].
Seen this way, it makes sense that Weber’s rationalization
thesis concludes with two strikingly dissimilar prophecies — one
is the imminent iron cage of bureaucratic petrification and the other,
the Hellenistic pluralism of warring deities. The modern world has
come to be monotheistic and polytheistic all at once. What seems to
underlie this seemingly self-contradictory imagery of modernity is the
problem of modern humanity (
Menschentum
) and its loss of
freedom and moral agency. Disenchantment has created a world with no
objectively ascertainable ground for one’s conviction. Under the
circumstances, according to Weber, a modern individual tends to act
only on one’s own aesthetic impulse and arbitrary convictions
that cannot be communicated in the eventuality; the majority of those
who cannot even act on their convictions, or the “last men who
invented happiness” à la Nietzsche, lead the life of a
“cog in a machine.” Whether the problem of modernity is
accounted for in terms of a permeation of objective, instrumental
rationality or of a purposeless agitation of subjective values, Weber
viewed these two images as constituting a single problem insofar as
they contributed to the inertia of modern individuals who fail to take
principled moral action. The “sensualists without heart”
and “specialists without spirit” indeed formed two faces
of the same coin that may be called the
disempowerment of the
modern self
4.3 Modernity
contra
Modernization
Once things were different, Weber claimed. An unflinching sense of
conviction that relied on nothing but one’s innermost
personality once issued in a highly methodical and disciplined conduct
of everyday life — or, simply, life as a duty. Born amidst the
turmoil of the Reformation, this archetypal modern self drew its
strength solely from within in the sense that one’s principle of
action was determined by one’s own psychological need to gain
self-affirmation. Also, the way in which this deeply introspective
subjectivity was practiced, that is, in self-mastery, entailed a
highly rational and radically methodical attitude towards one’s
inner self and the outer, objective world. Transforming the self into
an integrated personality and mastering the world with tireless
energy, subjective value and objective rationality once formed
“one unbroken whole” [Weber 1910/1978, 319]. Weber calls
the agent of this unity the “person of vocation”
Berufsmensch
) in his religious writings,
“personality” (
Persönlichkeit
) in the
methodological essays, “genuine politician”
Berufspolitiker
) in the political writings, and
“charismatic individual” in
Economy and
Society
The much-celebrated Protestant Ethic thesis was indeed a genealogical
account of this idiosyncratic moral agency in modern times [Goldman
1992].
Once different, too, was the mode of society constituted by and in
turn constitutive of this type of moral agency. Weber’s social
imagination revealed its keenest sense of irony when he traced the
root of the cohesive integration, intense socialization, and severe
communal discipline of the “sectlike society”
Sektengesellschaft
) to the isolated and introspective
subjectivity of the Puritan person of vocation. The irony was that the
self-absorbed, anxiety-ridden and even antisocial virtues of the
person of vocation could be sustained only in the thick disciplinary
milieu of small-scale associational life. Membership in exclusive
voluntary associational life is open, and it is such membership, or
“achieved quality,” that guarantees the ethical qualities
of the individuals with whom one interacts. “The old ‘sect
spirit’ holds sway with relentless effect in the intrinsic
nature of such associations,” Weber observed, for the sect was
the first mass organization to combine individual agency and social
discipline in such a systematic way. Weber thus claimed that
“the ascetic conventicles and sects … formed one of the
most important foundations of modern individualism” [Weber
1920/1946, 321]. It seems clear that what Weber was trying to outline
here is an archetypical form of social organization that can empower
individual moral agency by sustaining group disciplinary dynamism, a
kind of pluralistically organized social life we would now call a
“civil society” [Kim 2007, 57–94].
To summarize, the irony with which Weber accounted for rationalization
was driven by the deepening tension between
modernity
and
modernization
. Weber’s problem with modernity
originates from the fact that it required a historically unique
constellation of cultural values and social institutions, and yet,
modernization has effectively undermined the cultural basis for modern
individualism and its germinating ground of disciplinary society,
which together had given the original impetus to modernity. The modern
project has fallen victim to its own success, and in peril is the
individual moral agency and freedom. Under the late modern
circumstances characterized by the “iron cage” and
“warring deities,” then, Weber’s question becomes:
“How is it at all possible to salvage
any remnants
of
‘individual’ freedom of movement
in any sense
given this all-powerful trend” [Weber 1918/1994, 159]?
5. Knowledge
Such an appreciation of Weber’s main problematic, which
culminates in the question of modern individual freedom, may help shed
light on some of the controversial aspects of Weber’s
methodology. In accounting for his methodological claims, it needs to
be borne in mind that Weber was not at all interested in writing a
systematic epistemological treatise in order to put an end to the
“strife over methods” (
Methodenstreit
) of his
time between historicism and positivism. His ambition was much more
modest and pragmatic. Just as “the person who attempted to walk
by constantly applying anatomical knowledge would be in danger of
stumbling” [Weber 1906/1949, 115; translation altered], so can
methodology be a kind of knowledge that may supply a rule of thumb,
codified
a posteriori
, for what historians and social
scientists do, but it could never substitute for the skills they use
in their research practice. Instead, Weber’s attempt to mediate
historicism and positivism was meant to aid an actual researcher make
a practical value-judgment that is fair and acceptable in the face of
the plethora of subjective values that one encounters when selecting
and processing historical data. After all, the questions that drove
his methodological reflections were what it means to practice science
in the modern polytheistic world and how one can do science with a
sense of vocation. In his own words, “the capacity to
distinguish between empirical knowledge and value-judgments, and the
fulfillment of the scientific duty to see the factual truth as well as
the practical duty to stand up for our own ideals constitute the
program to which we wish to adhere with ever increasing
firmness” [Weber 1904/1949, 58]. Sheldon Wolin thus concludes
that Weber “formulated the idea of methodology to serve, not
simply as a guide to investigation but as a moral practice and a mode
of political action” [Wolin 1981, 414]. In short, Weber’s
methodology was as ethical as it was epistemological.
5.1 Understanding (
Verstehen
Building on the Neo-Kantian nominalism outlined above [2.1], thus,
Weber’s contribution to methodology turned mostly on the
question of objectivity and the role of subjective values in
historical and cultural concept formation. On the one hand, he
followed Windelband in positing that historical and cultural knowledge
is categorically distinct from natural scientific knowledge. Action
that is the subject of any social scientific inquiry is clearly
different from mere behaviour. While behaviour can be accounted for
without reference to inner motives and thus can be reduced to mere
aggregate numbers, making it possible to establish positivistic
regularities, and even laws, of collective behaviour, an action can
only be interpreted because it is based on a radically subjective
attribution of meaning and values to what one does. What a social
scientist seeks to understand is this subjective dimension of human
conduct as it relates to others. On the other hand, an
understanding(
Verstehen
) in this subjective sense is not
anchored in a non-cognitive empathy or intuitive appreciation that is
arational by nature; it can gain objective validity when the meanings
and values to be comprehended are explained causally, that is, as a
means to an end. A teleological contextualization of an action in the
means-end nexus is indeed the precondition for a causal explanation
that can be objectively ascertained. So far, Weber is not essentially
in disagreement with Rickert.
From Weber’s perspective, however, the problem that
Rickert’s formulation raised was the objectivity of the end to
which an action is held to be oriented. As pointed out, Rickert in the
end had to rely on a certain transhistorical, transcultural criterion
in order to account for the purpose of an action, an assumption that
cannot be warranted in Weber’s view. To be consistent with the
Neo-Kantian presuppositions, instead, the ends themselves have to be
conceived of as no less subjective. Imputing an end to an action is of
a fictional nature in the sense that it is not free from the
subjective value-judgment that conditions the researcher’s
thematization of a certain subject matter out of “an infinite
multiplicity of successively and coexistently emerging and
disappearing events” [Weber 1904/1949, 72]. Although a
counterfactual analysis might aid in stabilizing the process of causal
imputation, it cannot do away completely with the subjective nature of
the researcher’s perspective.
In the end, the kind of objective knowledge that historical and
cultural sciences may achieve is precariously limited. An action can
be interpreted with objective validity only at the level of means, not
ends. An end, however, even a “self-evident” one, is
irreducibly subjective, thus defying an objective understanding; it
can only be reconstructed conceptually based on a researcher’s
no less subjective values. Objectivity in historical and social
sciences is, then, not a goal that can be reached with the aid of a
correct method, but an ideal that must be striven for without a
promise of ultimate fulfillment. In this sense, one might say that the
so-called “value-freedom” (
Wertfreiheit
) is as
much a methodological principle for Weber as an ethical virtue that a
personality fit for modern science must possess.
5.2 Ideal Type
The methodology of “ideal type” (
Idealtypus
) is
another testimony to such a broadly ethical intention of Weber.
According to Weber’s definition, “an ideal type is formed
by the one-sided
accentuation
of one or more points of
view” according to which “
concrete individual
phenomena … are arranged into a unified analytical
construct” (
Gedankenbild
); in its purely fictional
nature, it is a methodological “utopia [that] cannot be found
empirically anywhere in reality” [Weber 1904/1949, 90]. Keenly
aware of its fictional nature, the ideal type never seeks to claim its
validity in terms of a reproduction of or a correspondence with
reality. Its validity can be ascertained only in terms of adequacy,
which is too conveniently ignored by the proponents of positivism.
This does not mean, however, that objectivity, limited as it is, can
be gained by “weighing the various evaluations against one
another and making a ‘statesman-like’ compromise among
them” [Weber 1917/1949, 10], which is often proposed as a
solution by those sharing Weber’s kind of methodological
perspectivism. Such a practice, which Weber calls
“syncretism,” is not only impossible but also unethical,
for it avoids “the practical duty to stand up for our own
ideals” [Weber 1904/1949, 58].
According to Weber, a clear value commitment, no matter how
subjective, is both unavoidable
and
necessary. It is
unavoidable
, for otherwise no meaningful knowledge can be
attained. Further, it is
necessary
, for otherwise the value
position of a researcher would not be foregrounded clearly and
admitted as such — not only to the readers of the research
outcome but also to the very researcher him/herself. In other words,
Weber’s emphasis on “one-sidedness”
Einseitigkeit
) not only affirms the subjective nature of
scientific knowledge but also demands that the researcher be
self-consciously
subjective. The ideal type is devised for
this purpose, for “only as an ideal type” can subjective
value — “that unfortunate child of misery of our
science” — “be given an unambiguous meaning”
Ibid
., 107]. Along with value-freedom, then, what the ideal
type methodology entails in ethical terms is, on the one hand, a
daring confrontation with the tragically subjective foundation of our
historical and social scientific knowledge and, on the other, a public
confession of one’s own subjective value. Weber’s
methodology in the end amounts to a call for the heroic
character-virtue of clear-sightedness and intellectual integrity that
together constitute a genuine person of science — a scientist
with a sense of vocation who has a passionate commitment to
one’s own specialized research, yet is utterly “free of
illusions” [Löwith 1982, 38].
6. Politics and Ethics
Even more explicitly ethical than was his methodology, Weber’s
political project also discloses his entrenched preoccupation with the
willful resuscitation of certain character traits in modern society.
At the outset, it seems undeniable that Weber was a deeply liberal
political thinker especially in a German context that is not well
known for liberalism. This means that his ultimate value as a
political thinker was locked on individual freedom, that “old,
general type of human ideals” [Weber 1895/1994, 19]. He was also
bourgeois
liberal, and self-consciously so, in a time of
great transformations that were undermining the social conditions
necessary to support classical liberal values and bourgeois
institutions, thereby compelling liberalism to search for a
fundamental reorientation. To that extent, he belongs to that
generation of liberal political thinkers in fin-de-siècle
Europe who clearly perceived the general crisis of liberalism and
sought to resolve it in their own liberal ways [Bellamy 1992,
157–216]. Weber’s own way was to address the problem of
classical liberal characterology that was, in his view, being
progressively undermined by the indiscriminate bureaucratization of
modern society.
6.1 Domination and Legitimacy
Such a concern with ethical character is clearly discernible in
Weber’s stark political realism that permeates his political
sociology. For instance, utterly devoid of any moral qualities that
many of his contemporaries attributed to the state, it is defined all
too thinly as “a human community that (successfully) claims the
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force
within a
given territory” [Weber 1919/1994, 310]. With the same sobriety
or brevity, he asserted that, even in a democratic state, domination
of the ruled by the ruler(s) is simply an inescapable political
reality. That is why, for Weber, a study of the political, even a
value-free, empirical sociology, cannot but be an inquiry into the
different modalities by which a domination is effectuated and
sustained. For sure, Weber also maintained that a domination worthy of
scholarly attention – or, literally, “lordship”
Herrschaft
) – is about something much more than the
brute factuality of subjugation and subservience. For “the
merely external fact of the order being obeyed is not sufficient to
signify domination in our sense; we cannot overlook the meaning of the
fact that the command is accepted as a
valid
norm”
[Weber 1921–22/1978, 946]. In other words, it has to be a
domination mediated through mutual
interpretation
, in which
the rulers claim legitimacy and the ruled acquiesce to it
voluntarily.
From this allegedly realistic premise, Weber famously moved on to
identify three ideal types of legitimate domination based on,
respectively, tradition, charisma, and legal rationality. Roughly, the
first type of legitimacy claim depends on how persuasively the leaders
prove their charismatic qualities, for which they receive personal
devotions and emotive followings from the ruled. The second kind of
claim can be made successfully when certain practice, custom, and
mores are institutionalized to (re)produce a stable pattern of
domination over a long duration of time. In sharp contrast to these
crucial dependences on personality traits and the passage of time, the
third type of authority is unfettered by time, place, and other forms
of contingency as it derives its legitimacy from adherence to
impersonal rules and universal principles that can only be found by
suitable legal-rational reasoning. Weber’s fame and influence as
a political thinker are built most critically upon this typology and
the ways in which those ideal types are deployed in his political
sociology – or, more literally, sociology of domination
Herrschaftssoziologie
).
As such, it should be clear from the outset that these ideal types are
not to be taken as supplying normative grounds for passing judgments
on legitimacy claims. After all, these are political-sociological
categories rather than full-blown political-philosophical concepts. Be
that as it may, Weber’s political sociology has been accused
variously of its embedded normative biases. Read in juxtaposition to
his voluminous political writings, it is criticized to this day as
harbouring or foreshadowing, among others, Bonapartist caesarism,
passive-revolutionary Fordist ideology, quasi-Fascist elitism, and
even proto-Nazism (especially with respect to his robust nationalism
and/or nihilistic celebration of power) [
inter alia
, Strauss
1950; Marcuse in Stammer (ed.) 1971; Mommsen 1984; Rehman 2013]. In
addition to these politically heated charges, Weber’s typology
also reveals a crucial lacuna even as an empirical political
sociology. That is to say, it allows scant, or ambiguous, a conceptual
topos for democracy.
In fact, it seems as though Weber is unsure of the proper place of
democracy in his schema. At one point, democracy is deemed as a
fourth
type of legitimacy because it should be able to
embrace legitimacy
from below
whereas his three ideal types
all focus on that
from above
[Breuer in Schroeder (ed.) 1998,
2]. At other times, Weber seems to believe that democracy is simply
non-legitimate
, rather than another type of legitimate
domination, because it aspires to an identity between the ruler and
the ruled (i.e., no domination at all), but without assuming a
hierarchical and asymmetrical relationship of power, his concept of
legitimacy takes hardly off the ground. Thus, Weber could describe the
emergence of proto-democracy in the late medieval urban communes only
in terms of “revolutionary usurpation” [Weber
1921–22/1978, 1250], calling them the “first
deliberately non-legitimate and revolutionary
political
association” [
ibid.
, 1302]. Too recalcitrant to fit
into his overall schema, in other words, these historical prototypes
of democracy simply fall
outside
of his typology of
domination as a- or illegitimate.
Overlapping but still distinguishable is Weber’s yet another way
of conceptualizing democracy, which had to do with charismatic
legitimacy. The best example is the Puritan sect in which authority is
legitimated only on the grounds of a consensual order created
voluntarily by proven believers possessing their own quantum of
charismatic legitimating power. As a result of this political
corollary of the Protestant doctrine of universal priesthood, Puritan
sects could and did “insist upon ‘direct democratic
administration’ by the congregation” and thereby do away
with the hierarchical distinction between those rulling and those
ruled [
ibid.
, 1208]. In a secularized version of this group
dynamics, a democratic ballot would become the primary tool by which
presumed charisma of the individual lay citizenry are aggregated and
transmitted to their elected leader who become “the agent and
hence the servant of his voters, not their chosen master”
ibid.
, 1128]. Rather than an outright non-legitimate or
fourth type of domination, here, democracy comes across as an
extremely rare subset of a diffused and institutionalized from of
charismatic
legitimacy.
6.2 Charismatic Leadership Democracy
The irony is unmistakable. It seems as though one of the most
influential political thinkers of the twentieth century cannot come to
clear terms with its zeitgeist in which democracy, in whatever shape
and shade, emerged as the only acceptable ground for political
legitimacy. Weber’s such awkwardness is nowhere more compelling,
even alarming, than in his advocacy for “leadership
democracy” (
Führerdemokratie
) during the
constitutional politics of post-WWI Germany.
If the genuine self-rule of the people is impossible, according his
somber realism, the only choice is one between leaderless and
leadership democracy. When advocating a sweeping democratization of
defeated Germany, thus, Weber envisioned democracy in Germany as a
political marketplace in which strong charismatic leaders can be
identified and elected by winning votes in a free competition, even
battle, among themselves. Preserving and enhancing this element of
struggle in politics is important since it is only through a dynamic
electoral process that national leadership strong enough to control an
otherwise omnipotent bureaucracy can be made. The primary concern for
Weber in designing democratic institutions has, in other words, less
to do with the realization of democratic ideals, such as rights,
equality, justice, or self-rule, than with cultivation of certain
character traits befitting a robust national leadership. In its
overriding preoccupation with the leadership qualities, Weber’s
theory of democracy contains ominous streaks that may vindicate
Jürgen Habermas’s famous critique that Carl Schmitt,
“the
Kronjurist
of the Third Reich,” was “a
legitimate pupil of Weber’s” [Habermas in Stammer (ed.),
1971, 66].
For a fair and comprehensive assessment, however, it should also be
brought into the purview that Weber’s leadership democracy is
not solely reliant upon the fortuitous personality traits of its
leaders, let alone a caesaristic dictator. In addition to the free
electoral competition led by the organized mass parties, Weber saw
localized, yet public associational life as a breeding ground for the
formation of charismatic leaders. When leaders are identified and
trained at the level of, say neighborhood choral societies and bowling
clubs [Weber 1910/2002], the alleged authoritarian elitism of
leadership democracy comes across as more pluralistic in its
conceptualization, far from its usual identification with demagogic
dictatorship and unthinking mass following. Insofar as a civil
society, or “sectlike society” in his own parlance [see
4.3 above], functions as an effective medium for the horizontal
diffusion of charismatic qualities among lay people, his notion of
charismatic leadership can retain a strongly democratic tone to the
extent that he also suggested associational pluralism as a
sociocultural ground for the political education of the lay citizenry
from which genuine leaders would hail. Weber’s charismatic
leadership has to be “democratically manufactured” [Green
2008, 208], in short, and such a formative political project is
predicated upon a pluralistically organized civil society as well as
universal suffrage, free elections, and organized parties.
6.3 Nationalism and Power Politics
Weber’s preoccupation with civic education runs like a thread
through his nationalism as well. There can be no denying that Weber
was an ardent nationalist. And yet, his nationalism was unambiguously
free from the obsession with primordial ethnicity and race that was
prevalent in Wilhelmine Germany. Even in the Freiburg Address of 1895,
which unleashed his nationalist zeal with an uninhibited and youthful
rhetorical force, he makes it clear that the ultimate rationale for
the nationalist value-commitment that should guide all political
judgments, even political and economic sciences as well, has less to
do with the promotion of the German national interests per se than
with a civic education of the citizenry in general and political
maturity of the bourgeois class in particular. At a time when
“the ultimate, most sublime values have retreated from the
public sphere” [Weber 1919/1946, 155], Weber found an
instrumental value in nationalism insofar as it can imbue patriotic
feelings among the otherwise apathetic citizenry and thereby increase
their participation in public affairs.
Crucial to this civic educational project was, according to Weber,
exposing citizens to the harsh reality of “eternal
struggle,” or power-politics (
Machtpolitik
) among the
nation-states with which Germany had to engage actively [Weber
1895/1994, 16]. Weber observed with more than a hint of envy, for
example, that it was “the reverberation of a position of world
power” that exposed the English citizens “to
‘chronic’ political schooling,” and it was this
political education that made possible both the empire-building
and
liberal democracy [
Ibid
., 26]. In this sense,
Weber’s nationalism can be surmised as a variant of liberal
imperialism, or social imperialism (
Sozialimperialismus
) as
it was called in Germany; to that extent, one might say that his
political thinking is not free from the problems of liberalism in
turn-of-the-century Europe [Beetham 1989, 322]. Be that as it may,
Weber’s liberal nationalism was still significantly different
from his contemporaries’ in its preoccupation with a liberal
characterology and civic education [Kim 2007, 133–72]. The next
question that Weber’s ethico-political project raises is, then,
what kind of character virtues are necessary for the kind of
leadership and citizenship that can together make a great nation,
while holding inevitable bureaucratization in check.
6.4 The Ethics of Conviction and Responsibility
Weber suggested two sets of ethical virtues that a proper political
education should cultivate — the ethic of conviction
Gesinnungsethik
) and the ethic of responsibility
Verantwortungsethik
). According to the ethic of
responsibility, on the one hand, an action is given meaning only as a
cause of an effect, that is, only in terms of its causal relationship
to the empirical world. The virtue lies in an objective understanding
of the possible causal effect of an action and the calculated
reorientation of the elements of an action in such a way as to achieve
a desired consequence. An ethical question is thereby reduced to a
question of technically correct procedure, and free action consists of
choosing the correct means. By emphasizing the causality to which a
free agent subscribes, in short, Weber prescribes an ethical integrity
between action and consequences, instead of a Kantian emphasis on that
between action and intention.
According to the ethic of conviction, on the other hand, a free agent
should be able to choose autonomously not only the means, but also the
end; “this concept of personality finds its
‘essence’ in the constancy of its inner relation to
certain ultimate ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of
life” [Weber 1903–06/1975, 192]. In this respect,
Weber’s problem hinges on the recognition that the kind of
rationality applied in choosing a means cannot be used in choosing an
end. These two kinds of reasoning represent categorically distinct
modes of rationality, a boundary further reinforced by modern value
fragmentation. With no objectively ascertainable ground of choice
provided, then, a free agent has to create a purpose
ex
nihilo
: “ultimately life as a whole, if it is not to be
permitted to run on as an event in nature but is instead to be
consciously guided, is a series of ultimate decisions through which
the soul — as in Plato — chooses its own fate”
[Weber 1917/1949, 18]. This ultimate decision and the Kantian
integrity between intention and action constitute the essence of what
Weber calls an ethic of conviction.
It is often held that the gulf between these two types of ethic is
unbridgeable for Weber. Demanding an unmitigated integrity between
one’s ultimate value and political action, that is to say, the
deontological
ethic of conviction cannot be reconciled with
that of responsibility which is
consequentialist
in essence.
In fact, Weber himself admitted the “abysmal contrast”
that separates the two. This frank admission, nevertheless, cannot be
taken to mean that he privileged the latter over the former as far as
political education is concerned.
Weber clearly understood the deep tension between consequentialism and
deontology, but he still insisted that they should be forcefully
brought together. The former recognition only lends urgency to the
latter agenda. Resolving this analytical inconsistency in terms of
certain “ethical decrees” did not interest Weber at all.
Instead, he sought for a moral character that can produce this
“combination” with a sheer force of will. He called such a
character a “politician with a sense of vocation”
Berufspolitiker
) who combines a passionate conviction in
supra-mundane ideals that politics has to serve and a sober rational
calculation of its realizability in this mundane world. Weber thus
concluded: “the ethic of conviction and the ethic of
responsibility are not absolute opposites. They are complementary to
one another, and only in combination do they produce the true human
being who is
capable
of having a ‘vocation for
politics’” [Weber 1919/1994, 368].
In the end, Weber’s ethical project is not about formal analysis
of moral maxims, nor is it about substantive virtues that reflect some
kind of ontic telos. It is too formal to be an Aristotelean virtue
ethics, and it is too concerned with moral character to be a Kantian
deontology narrowly understood. The goal of Weber’s ethical
project, rather, aims at cultivating a character who can willfully
bring together these conflicting formal virtues to create what he
calls “total personality”
Gesamtpersönlichkeit
). It culminates in an ethical
characterology or philosophical anthropology in which passion and
reason are properly ordered by sheer force of individual volition. In
this light, Weber’s political virtue resides not simply in a
subjective intensity of value commitment nor in a detached
intellectual integrity, but in their willful combination in a unified
soul.
7. Concluding Remarks
Seen this way, we find a remarkable consistency in Weber’s
thought. Weber’s main problematic turned on the question of
individual autonomy and freedom in an increasingly rationalized
society. His dystopian and pessimistic assessment of rationalization
drove him to search for solutions through politics and science, which
broadly converge on a certain
practice of the self
. What he
called the “person of vocation,” first outlined famously
in
The Protestant Ethic
, provided a bedrock for his various
efforts to resuscitate a character who can willfully combine
unflinching conviction and methodical rationality even in a society
besieged by bureaucratic petrification and value fragmentation. It is
also in this entrenched preoccupation with an ethical characterology
under modern circumstances that we find the source of his enduring
influences on twentieth-century political and social thought.
On the left, Weber’s articulation of the tension between
modernity and modernization found resounding echoes in the
“Dialectics of Enlightenment” thesis by Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer; György Lukács’s own critique of the
perversion of capitalist reason owes no less to Weber’s
problematization of instrumental rationality on which is also built
Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration of communicative rationality
as an alternative. Different elements in Weber’s political
thought, e.g., intense political struggle as an antidote to modern
bureaucratic petrification, leadership democracy and plebiscitary
presidency, uncompromising realism in international politics, and
value-freedom and value-relativism in political ethics, were selected
and critically appropriated by such diverse thinkers on the right as
Carl Schmitt, Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, and
Raymond Aron. Even the postmodernist project of deconstructing
Enlightenment selfhood finds, as Michel Foucault does, a precursor in
Weber. All in all, across the vastly different ideological and
methodological spectrum, Max Weber’s thought will continue to be
a deep reservoir of fresh inspiration as long as an individual’s
fate under (post)modern circumstances does not lose its privileged
place in the political, social, cultural, and philosophical
self-reflections of our time.
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