Under Weber's Shadow

Modernity, Subjectivity and Politics in Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre

Keith Breen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317005254
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Under Weber's Shadow presents an extended critical evaluation of the social and political thought of Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre. Although hailing from very different philosophical traditions, these theorists all take as their starting-point Max Weber's seminal diagnosis of late modernity, the view that the world-historic processes of rationalization and disenchantment are paradoxical in promising freedom yet threatening servitude under the 'iron cage' of instrumental reason. However, each rejects his pessimistic understanding of the grounds and possibilities of political life, accusing him of complicity in the very realities he sought to resist. Seeking to move beyond Weber's monological view of the self, his subjectivism and his identification of the political with domination, they offer alternative, intersubjective conceptions of the subject, ethics and politics that allow for positive future possibilities. But this incontrovertible gain, it is argued, comes at the cost of depoliticizing key arenas of human endeavour and of neglecting the reality of struggle and contestation. Engaging with important current debates and literature, Keith Breen provides a rigorous analysis of the work of Habermas, Arendt, MacIntyre and Weber and a highly accessible and original intervention within contemporary social and political thought. Under Weber's Shadow will therefore be of interest to students and researchers alike within the areas of social and political theory, as well as those within the disciplines of ethics, sociology and philosophy.

Chapter 1 Modernity, Politics and Max Weber

DOI: 10.4324/9781315549316-1

He who seeks the salvation of the soul, of his own and of others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence (PV: 126).

To understand the fraught character of modern politics is to understand Max Weber. On the basis of this claim, this study advances a threefold argument as regards the political theories propounded by Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt and Alasdair MacIntyre. The first stage in this argument is to show that Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre, three very different thinkers, are bound together by Weberian themes, each beginning and largely concurring with his diagnosis of modernity. It is his account of society as increasingly regimented and meaningless, of politics as a struggle over the means of domination and of ethics as a question of the inner will that best encapsulates what they take the challenges faced by modern men and women to be. This leads to the second stage in my argument, the attempt to explain why, despite this fundamental connection, their work spurns his conclusions. For various reasons and to different ends, but united by a critical urge to think beyond the present, Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre challenge Weber’s depiction of the grounds and possibilities of political life, thereby illustrating his complicity in the realities he sought to resist. The third stage in the argument, however, is to show how in moving beyond Weber these thinkers both aid and hinder our understanding of these possibilities. Advancing an intersubjective vision of political and ethical life, they rightly contest Weber’s equation of politics with domination and of ethics with an unfathomable inner will, but at the unfortunate and unnecessary cost of dividing reality into ‘free’ and ‘fallen’ realms and of ridding politics of contestation, struggle.

Here the foundations of this threefold argument are laid by exploring Weber’s understanding of modernity and of modern politics. I begin by explaining why modernity emerges in his thought as a predicament that nonetheless has to be affirmed (1.1). Weber’s deep ambivalence towards the modern age hinges on two momentous themes, the world-historic process of ‘rationalization’ and the fate of the free individual in an era of ‘disenchantment’. As themes they encapsulate the dark nature of modern politics, insofar as rationalization tragically concludes in an ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic routine and specialization that negates human freedom and disenchants cultured achievement, themselves paradoxically the products of the same rationalization process.

Having set out his theory of rationalization and disenchantment, I then move to explore Weber’s account of politics and his vision of mature or responsible personhood (1.2). Resigned to the truth that all activity now takes the form of a specialism, Weber argues that a minimally meaningful way of life can be achieved by a fundamental act of choice between the antagonistic realms of art, science, religion and politics. For the ‘responsible politician’, the Verantwortungsethiker, this choice demands acceptance of three elemental facts: that politics is an elitist sphere of violence utterly inimical to the religious ‘ethic of brotherliness’; that modern politics is inevitably machine-like, dependent on a bureaucratic apparatus; and that political life cannot be justified or legitimated by reference to shared values, since politics is an instrumental means which admits of a boundless plurality of conflicting values. Arguing from these facts and his belief that ethics and normative justification reduce to a question of subjective individual decision, Weber insists that meaning and freedom endure only if exceptional individuals assume control over political machines so as to dominate and steer the passive mass of modern citizens. The chapter concludes with a brief outline of the alternatives offered by Habermas, Arendt and MacIntyre to Weber’s ‘anti-prophetic prophecy’, their view that his thought is both a diagnosis and yet a perpetuation of the ‘iron cage’ (1.3). This outline provides a necessary background to the claims and arguments defended in the subsequent parts of the book.

1.1 Occidental Rationalization and Polytheistic Disenchantment

Weber approached the problem of modernity in his roles as both social scientist and philosophical anthropologist. A central presupposition of his ‘interpretive sociology’ is the individual rationalizing subject as the fundamental unit of analysis. All action, that is, behaviour distinguished by conscious or semiconscious intention, has meaning only if it arises from individuals or individuals acting in groups; all else is the product of non-rational habituation or biological impulse. That key opposition between meaning and animal-like habituation leads not to idealism, for Weber fully recognized the importance of ‘material interests’, but rather to an understanding of social action attuned to the normally slight, but sometimes world-altering role of ideas, as can be seen, for instance, in the charismatic genesis of salvation religions (SPWR: 280). In Weber’s view, it is imperative to free sociology from the romantic deception of collective concepts, which are frequently disingenuous slogans for partisan political ends. Spurning the politicization of scholarly research by conservatives and radicals in Wilhelmine Germany, their transformation of ‘nation’ into ‘Nation’ and ‘class’ into ‘Class’, a central impulse to Weber’s methodological individualism is, consequently, a desire to ground a value-free (werturteilsfrei) science.

Weber affirmed the methodological stricture to render facts unto the scientist and values unto the preacher because he deemed all scientific attempts to ground political orders a species of gross self-deception. Truth and value are equally important, yet perfectly separable. His understanding of scientific practice stresses personal integrity as coming-to-clarity, and in this sense draws from the Kantian project of epistemic critique, which is premised on the claim that human knowledge is constructed and limited knowledge. But Weber explicitly disavows the emancipatory sense of Kantian critique and thus sets himself apart from the majority of Kant’s appropriators, both liberal and radical. The goal of science, and of interpretive sociology in particular, is not to provide a guide to emancipatory endeavour or to change the world, but to investigate that world in all its chaos and to submit one’s investigations to empirical falsification (SV: 145). Weber believed that as regards facts one could know them. Yet the attempt to come to an intersubjective rational appreciation or justification of ideals or values is conceptually impossible, since values reside primarily within the heart of the individual and issue from norm-originating prophecy or, which has often been overlooked, are the products of quasi-biological determination (Turner and Factor 1994: 86–90). Values can be rationalized, that is, rendered ever more coherent and principled (Wertsteigerung), and such has been absolutely crucial to the development of the West, but this rationalization rests on an epistemologically ungraspable and inscrutable commitment. Every significant human accomplishment originates from a fundamentally irrational yea-saying, even science, for science requires a commitment to truth, a devotion to honesty (SV: 143, 152). But although the scientist must feel the mysterious attraction of truth and must, as well, interpret each object of study in light of the relevance it has for his or her own culture, its contingent values and epistemological interests, truth is achievable by those with the integrity and responsibility to see reality unadorned.

This methodologically and ethically ordained separation of fact and value explains why Weber understands his historical and general sociological studies as providing a diagnosis of, rather than a normative meditation upon, the modern age. By ‘modernity’ Weber means the unique contemporary constellation of the Western world, and to comprehend the origins of this constellation he introduces the interrelated concepts of ‘rationalization’ and ‘disenchantment’. Rationalization denotes the multifaceted and contingent processes that human thought and action have undergone through time and are still undergoing. It means both humankind’s conscious attempt to make the cosmos and life ever more intelligible, involving increasing knowledge and value coherence, and the desire to increase mastery, control, over every aspect of the world. So understood, there are three interwoven and yet in many ways antagonistic strands to Occidental rationalization: it means an advance in ‘substantive rationality’, in terms of ultimate and often ‘otherworldly’ values being rendered ever more coherent in thought and in life conduct; an advance in terms of ‘theoretical rationality’ or intellectual conceptualizations of the world, that is, metaphysics and science; and, finally, an advance in terms of ‘formal rationality’, that is, increasing codification or routinization of behaviour and ever more efficient techniques or methods of control. These varied strands highlight the perspectivism at the heart of Weber’s theory. Something is ‘rational’ only from a specific viewpoint, religious asceticism being incomprehensible to the hedonist and ‘value’, in general, being ‘irrational’ from a formal-rational perspective (SPWR: 293–4; PE: 37–8, 140).

Underlying these strands of rationalization and their accompanying forms of rationality is Weber’s ideal-typical categorization of the forms of social action. Weber speaks of ‘instrumentally rational’ (zweckrational) action as a form of action orientated to calculating the most efficient deployment of objects and human beings as means to an actor’s given ends. ‘Value-rational’ (wertrational) action, conversely, consists in the adherence to an ultimate value, such as beauty, goodness or duty, for its own sake and regardless of success. These two forms of action underpin formal and substantive rationality respectively, and are in their pure form ‘limiting cases’, the one devoid of moral reference, the other a fanatic moralism (ES: 26). Because theoretical rationality, however, connotes cognitive processes, it has only an indirect link to action. The remaining action-types are the ‘affectual’ and ‘traditional’, both of which are defined as non-rational because of being largely unconscious. Affectual or emotionally charged action is action determined by the feelings of the actor. Although distinct, affectual action can transform into value-rational action once actors reflect upon their emotions, a point key, for Weber, to grasping how revolutionary impulses and charismatic prophecies undergo substantive rationalization. Traditional action concerns actions done on the basis of unconscious habituation and custom. Everyday life generally takes this form; it is a mix of instrumentally rational or value-rational action that has become unreflective. Once reflected upon, however, traditional action can transform into value-rational or instrumentally rational action. Weber (ES: 26) insists that these modes of action are simply ideal types, which in reality are quite mixed and whose classificatory ‘usefulness’ can ‘only be judged in terms of its results’.

Although Weber explores rationalization in its various forms, his main concern is with formal rationalization, which he thinks has come to dominate the modern West. Thus, the task of his sociology is to explore how a purposive-rational, instrumental mode of action guided by formal and calculating modes of thought gained contingent ascendancy over other modes of human action and thought, in particular the substantive or value-rational, and why, consequently, ‘culture’ itself appeared to face extirpation (Kalberg 1980: 1176). In this context, a central theme in Weber’s work is religious prophecy’s effect on forms of ‘economic rationalism’, by which he means the modes of everyday, practical life (PE: xxxix; GEH: 354; SPWR: 293). In everyday life material interests and instrumentally rational means-end calculations predominate, yet these interests and calculations are shaped by the remnants of once visible religious-ethical values. Not actual theological doctrines, but their psychological and social consequences, how they have been applied to everyday activity, have been of momentous significance in the West’s transformation (PE: 137–8). In Weber’s view, religion, now deemed irrational by a hegemonic science to which it gave birth, was the prime engine of rationalization in driving humanity from nature to culture, by which he means the living of a mature, reflective or free way of life. The origins of rationalization lie in the magical and natural pre-history of man. Culture arose in the turn against magical polytheism, the primal adherence to nature deities, towards an intellectualized and ever more consistent monotheism, as embodied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that sought to render suffering comprehensible, rational, by showing that the world ‘in its totality is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful “cosmos”’ (SPWR: 281).

It is Weber’s fundamental claim that a tragic irony permeates this turn. Religion’s theodicies, the metaphysical wellspring of reflective appraisals of the world and of the ‘ethic of brotherliness’ underpinning the Abrahamic faiths, provoke a historical movement of which religion itself, in the end, falls victim (SPWR: 281; RRW: 329–30, 351). This is evinced most clearly in the fate of the early modern Puritan. Puritanism plays a pivotal role in Weber’s thought insofar as the Puritan’s ‘systematic rational ordering of the moral life as whole’ represents the culmination of Western rationalization, the affirmation of self-discipline and responsibility as the defining attributes of mature individuality (PE: 73, 79). However, assured of salvation in their calling to a God-glorifying labour, the Puritans could not have known that their austere and world-altering values would, in industrial capitalism, finally give way to a ‘nullity’ that ‘imagines … it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved’ (PE: 124). A nullity because the religious urge to render the mysterious intelligible suffers extinction at the hands of an unthinking discipline which religion itself helped bring about by forcing all activity to conform to an ascetic ideal of methodical life conduct that subsequently divested itself of any value-rational orientation. And a false civilization insofar as the urge to move beyond animal nature to culture, to a state of conscious and deliberate mastery of the world and a reflective understanding of it, ends in ‘mechanized petrification’ and unreflective hedonism (PE: 124).

Weber also explains this paradoxical process in terms of a historically unfolding conflict between individual action and social order, this conflict taking the form of an antinomical dynamic between value-originating ‘charisma’, which in the form of prophecies gave rise to substantive rationalizations of religious-ethical worldviews, and the necessary ‘routinization’ (Veralltäglichung) of charisma and worldviews into institutional forms. Drawing from Protestant theology, he defines charisma as ‘a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’ (ES: 241). For Weber, charisma in whatever form captures the vital element of human existence, that which is novel and uniquely individual. The origin of every belief system and every institutional form, no matter how regimented it may now appear, is generally some charismatic figure or moment.¹ Prophecy is revolutionary in demanding a break with the past, for the prophet, ‘like the genuine military leader and every true leader in this sense, preaches, creates, or demands new obligations’ (ES: 243; SPWR: 296). In order to endure over time, however, these extraordinary and socially precarious obligations require both conscious substantive rationalization and routinization into durable and therefore ordinary institutional forms (ES: 246–54, 1121–23). Routinization can be of a traditional or bureaucratic rational-legal kind, largely depending on whether hierarchical positions are decided by custom or by calculable tests and qualifications. In the modern West the latter form increasingly wins out, because the traditional represents a profoundly non-rational uncreative force, whereas formal rationality facilitates the growth and expansion of novel modes of organization. The problem, however, with modern rational-legal routinization is that its rigid instrumental formalism now threatens to evaporate the substantive wellsprings of its own development, the originary charisma of great individuals and the substantive rationalization they inspired suffering dissipation.

1 ‘Prophecies have released the world from magic and in doing so have created the basis for our modern science and technology, and for capitalism’ (GEH: 362).

Although Weber places strict qualifications on his rationalization thesis, the implication is that it outlines a contingent world-historic movement having a retrospectively discernible path. The end-point of that movement finds trenchant portrayal in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where he argues that the movement of modernity consists in a ruthless, progressively secular systematization of thought and activity (PE: xxviii–xxxiii). Apart from the idea of increasing coherence, systematization entails the elimination of uncertainties and an accelerating increase in clear and replicable patterns of behaviour. Here it is important to recognize that Weber holds to a ‘monistic’ understanding of the fate of the West, a vision of ineluctable systematization across all spatial boundaries and spheres of life, the totality of human activities (Barnes 1995: 208). Thus, intellectual enquiry has become wedded to the rational method of experimentation and subordinated to the criteria of rational proof, as has historical scholarship. Music and architecture are organized according to the ever greater calculation of sounds through notation and orchestral divisions and a repeatable, principled utilization of line and spatial perspective. The university, the state and the political party, as phenomena unique to the West, are now dependent upon a division of labour that facilitates subject and task specialization and necessitates highly developed bureaucratic hierarchies with sophisticated techniques of control. These bureaucratic hierarchies are machine-like insofar as their division into higher and lower offices, dependence on abstract rules and trained officials, use of files and specialization of functions enable a ‘monocratic’ organizational structure ideally suited to the instrumental and predictable achievement of policy goals (ES: 220–26, 956–8). Life in the modern West would be unthinkable without these organizations and their specially trained officials, for it is their expert and formally superior knowledge that underpins and facilitates modern mass dem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Modernity, Politics and Max Weber
• PART I JÜRGEN HABERMAS AND THE PROJECT OF MODERNITY
• PART II HANNAH ARENDT AND THE PROMISE OF POLITICS
• PART III ALASDAIR MACINTYRE AND THE POLITICS OF VIRTUE
• Bibliography
• Index