Weber and the Weberians

Lawrence Scaff

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781350314481
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Understanding Max Weber's contribution to social theory is vital for students and scholars of social science. This insightful text offers critical discussion of Weber's ideas, focusing on their uses - how they have been appropriated and applied to contemporary events. Written by one of the world's leading Weber scholars, this is an essential read.

1

Weber and His Legacy

Weber and Weberian social theory

The narrative of the emergence of Weberian concepts, analysis, or ‘theory’ is unusual and contested. As an historical artefact, the Weberian imprimatur is only contingently related to a clearly identifiable body of leading ideas or principles presented systematically by Max Weber in his own work and in his lifetime. No clearly demarcated Weberian school of thought has existed over time, as it has for Marx, Durkheim, or Freud. Weber certainly had a ‘circle’ of colleagues, acquaintances, friends, and partners in discussion, but he never intended to found a school of thought. Several reasons account for this state of affairs. Some factors were institutional: Weber’s university professorships were limited to a mere six and a half years, mostly at the beginning of his career. He had few actual students or followers, notwithstanding subsequent claims to the contrary. In his dispersed writing, lecturing, and public speaking he addressed a variety of very different audiences, from professional colleagues to university students, the general educated public, intellectuals with quite varied orientations, and those swept up in the modern cultural and political movements of the day.

Other considerations were more personal: Weber’s mind moved quickly from one topic and problem to another, rarely pausing to take stock, systematize, and clarify. He cared little about the style and form for presenting his ideas, many of them recorded by dictation. His favoured means of expression was not the finished book or polished treatise, but the exploratory essay, the handbook article, the encyclopaedia chapter, the critical commentary, or the polemical rejoinder. And most importantly, he was always most interested in concrete historical problems, not in elaborating an abstract body of thought that could be systematized, codified, simplified, and transmitted easily to others. Contemporaries were alert to this cast of mind. As Eric Voegelin once wrote to Talcott Parsons, for Weber ‘the problems went always from the historical materials towards their systematization’. In sharp contrast to Parsons’ systematizing ambition, Voegelin astutely observed, Weber ‘never placed himself in the centre of systematic thought in order to organize the materials from such a center’ (letter of 24 September 1941, in the Talcott Parsons Papers). Weber’s intellectual passions were in any case invariably engaged by historical problems and actual contemporary debates. He had little patience with speculative exercises. From the standpoint of theoretical systematization it cannot be surprising that the work as a whole remained scattered, tentative, partial, and incomplete. Such an outcome represented at least in part choices Weber himself made about his interests and mode of expression.

Weber’s ideas have nevertheless found their way into the perspectives of the human sciences, as well as the language of public discourse. The latter may seem incongruous and unexpected. But the usefulness of Weber’s ideas have sometimes become evident not through theoretical elaboration, but through practical applications to contemporary circumstances. For instance, among the more timely popular inventions, Weber’s concept of ‘charisma’ is applied today to leaders and performers of all kinds, from politicians to entrepreneurs and rock stars. No cultural icon can avoid the inevitable question about this elusive personal quality, and no election season can pass without candidates’ charisma (or lack of it) assessed and compared with competitors and predecessors. So it is also with ‘bureaucracy’: any discussion of modern life and modern organizations cannot avoid echoes of Weber’s critical writings and worries on the subject. Or consider the ubiquitous ‘work ethic’ of Protestant Ethic fame that emerges as a category whenever the topic is economic development, modernization, the fate of the underclass, cultural decay, the rise or decline of the West or East. Other features of the modern world, such as its apparent ‘disenchantment’ and efforts at re-enchantment have become part of our vocabulary. Even Weber’s striking analysis in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (1919/1946) of the two opposed ethics for guiding action – responsibility and absolute conviction or ‘ultimate ends’ – has appeared on editorial pages and in public speeches.

Underlying such outcomes are the labours of science itself – that is, the recovery, consolidation, reading, interpretation, and extension of the work. In this respect ‘Weberian’ can apply to quite disparate varieties of social theory. There are those friends and associates, such as Karl Jaspers, Paul Honigsheim, and Karl Loewenstein, who knew Weber, wrote about his work, and sometimes used his ideas in their own writing and teaching. There are other insiders, such as Karl Löwith, Albert Salomon, or most notably Marianne Weber, who provided constructive interpretations of Weber’s life and work, contributing to the storehouse of knowledge that has been called ‘Weberology’. Many later scholars read Weber’s work carefully and addressed it explicitly in various ways as teachers, translators, critics, or social and political theorists in their own right – a very large group that includes Frank Knight, Edward Shils, Talcott Parsons, Reinhard Bendix, Hans Gerth, C. Wright Mills, Raymond Aron, Wolfgang Mommsen, Wolfgang Schluchter, Guenther Roth, W. G. Runciman, Wilhelm Hennis, Jürgen Habermas, Quentin Skinner and Raymond Geuss. Closely related to the work of such scholars and intellectuals is a loosely defined neo-Weberian orientation that appears in the work of figures as different as Hans Morgenthau, Frank Parkin, Anthony Giddens, Randall Collins, Richard Swedberg, Michael Mann, Theda Skocpol, Douglass North, or Pierre Bourdieu. Phrases like ‘analytical Weberianism’ or ‘Weberian Marxism’ are sometimes invoked to capture a particular strain within this family of intellectual orientations. Finally, there are major figures of twentieth century thought who lie on the periphery, so to speak, such as Georg Lukács, Ernst Block, Carl Schmitt, Herbert Marcuse, Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, or Michel Foucault – all of whom engaged at times and in particular contexts in critical dialogue with some of Weber’s ideas, often only indirectly, and typically starting from non-Weberian premises.

To consider all five orientations equally deserving of attention would be to stretch the meaning of ‘Weberian’ beyond its normal parameters. Our main focus must remain, especially, the circles of scholars, teachers, and intellectuals who identified explicitly with Weber’s ideas or used them in creative ways, and the more diffuse, though closely related set of thinkers who have worked with neo-Weberian assumptions, arguments, or problematics. For it is in these intellectual environments that the idea of distinctive ‘Weberian’ ways (in the plural) of thinking about social, political, cultural, and economic phenomena was constituted and given distinctive form and substance.

Within this intellectual context a tentative agreement has begun to emerge about the essential features of Weberian ideas for the human sciences or the social sciences, though there is still disagreement about the appropriate classificatory labels (Albert et al., 2003; Müller, 2007, pp. 260–3; Chalcraft et al., 2008). Should Weberian analysis be considered a theory, paradigm, research program, set of methodological tools, an epistemological position, or simply an approach or perspective? Depending on the answer to this question, are there essential characteristics attached to Weberian analysis? What intellectual commitments are required if one is to follow in the footsteps of Weber and the Weberians? What view of the phenomenal world is indicated by use of the term ‘Weberian’ or ‘neo-Weberian’?

For most purposes, Weberian analysis can be considered a distinctive approach to knowledge, a way of thinking about social, political, cultural, and economic phenomena. But we should be clear that the approach is a creation of subsequent reconstruction, interpretation, and sharp disagreements, not an intentional design issuing from Weber’s pen. The contested nature of the subject should not be overlooked: analysis that is regarded as insightful interpretative reasoning by some may be considered unreliable mis-interpretation by others. In view of this kind of disagreement, other levels of meaning – from the epistemological and methodological to the political – can be invoked in Weberian inquiry, depending on the nature of the problem under investigation and the intentions of the investigator.

Bearing such qualifications in mind, by nevertheless accepting the idea of an approach reconstructed from Weber’s own texts, we are able to identify several distinctive signposts that point toward the direction, parameters, and field of Weberian analysis. The chapters that follow map this terrain in some detail. At the beginning of our discussion it may still prove useful to clarify briefly and provisionally what these signposts are in the eyes of Weberian practitioners in the sciences. Six generalizations are most important.

First, Weberian inquiry employs configurational analysis: that is, it tends to emphasize the distinctive and singular ‘combination of circumstances’ (using Weber’s own phrase) that characterizes a particular set of social relationships or pattern of historical development, and that provides an adequate level of explanation for historical outcomes. Configurational analysis proceeds by investigating social structure and the ‘social’ – which is to say, political, cultural, and economic – bases of action. Moreover, in the Weberian usage it proposes to investigate the dynamics of individual action as well, or the aspect of social life that some would call the types of life-style and life-conduct, of Lebensführung, which are characteristic of a given social order and are reproduced by this order.

Second and most obviously, a configurational analysis seeks an understanding of social action that is multi-level. It aims for explanation at the level of the external ‘objectively’ existing processes, institutional forms, and normative constraints of social life – the ubiquitous ‘rules of the game’, so to speak. But it also insists on taking into account the level of the internal relations of actors’ intentions, purposes, and rationality – thus the ‘subjective’ meaning ascribed to action that plays a role in determining historical outcomes. In this sense the Weberian approach is consistent with the kind of historical and linguistic contextualism defended by the Cambridge School of historical thought. For the social science disciplines the issue of how the two levels – ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, or ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ in the terminologies that are widely used today – are related to each other is the great puzzle that Weber and others following him have attempted to resolve in various ways, including for Weber the methodological deployment of the ‘ideal type’.

Third, a Weberian approach is invariably multi-causal as well as multi-level. That is, it not only proceeds at both the individual or ‘micro’ level and the social or ‘macro’ level, but it accepts the possibility in the phenomenal and historical world of multiple causal factors producing a given effect. Weberian analysis tends to be sceptical about theoretical frameworks that impose a single level of analysis, such as an insistence that all outcomes be explained in terms either of subjective individual consciousness or of allegedly ‘objective’ socioeconomic structures. It rejects the a priori assertion of the primacy of a single type of cause, such as the economic or the cultural tout simple. In this view successful causal inference requires immersion in the substance of a problem-complex and mastery of its details.

Fourth, from a Weberian point of view social and economic action is always embedded in social institutions and practices. For analytic purposes science can of course use abstract models of action and the actor, such as the notion of a purely instrumentally rational homo economicus whose action is oriented toward the efficient maximization of utility. But to explain action and choice in the world of actual socia...