Max Weber

Frank Parkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317828402
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This study of Weber's sociology, written by an eminent authority, is a clear and illuminating discussion of the most important elements of Weber's thinking. The book concentrates on four main elements of Weber's work: his approach to sociological method, ethical neutrality and historical explanation; his influential work on religion and capitalism; his theory of authority and political power; and his contribution to the analysis of class, status and party.

1Methods and Procedures

DOI: 10.4324/9781315822280-1

I

Weber's pronouncements on method are commonly drawn upon by those theorists who seek to press a sharp distinction between the aims and procedures of the natural sciences and the aims and procedures of the social sciences. Although this is a line of thought that certainly precedes Weber, it is not too surprising that his teachings should be so frequently used as ammunition by those who oppose the pretensions of ‘scientific’ social theory. To begin with, no one is more insistent than Weber that the fundamental unit of investigation must always be the individual. This perspective in itself, of course, would not necessarily rule out the kinds of methods and procedures favoured by men in white coats, as the work of behavioural psychologists makes clear. Rather, it is the reason Weber gives for focusing upon the individual and not upon groups or collectivities; namely, that only the individual is capable of ‘meaningful’ social action. Weber says that it may often be useful, for certain purposes, to treat social groups or aggregates ‘as if they were individual beings. But this is nothing more than an allowable theoretical fiction As.^[1] far as the “subjective interpretation of action” is concerned, “collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons…”^[2] His position is summed up as follows:

for sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality which ‘acts’. When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, a corporation, a family or an army corps, or to similar collectivities, what is meant is … only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social actions of individual persons.^[3]

Collectivities cannot think, feel, perceive; only people can. To assume otherwise is to impute a spurious reality to what are in effect conceptual abstractions. Furthermore, because it is the task of social science to penetrate the subjective understandings of the individual, to get at the motives for social action, this enterprise is bound to be quite different from that undertaken by the natural sciences. Weber says that we do not ‘understand’ the behaviour of cells or the movement of the planets. We observe the structure of the cells and the motion of the stars and then try to formulate general laws about structure and motion. We, the observers, impose our own explanations upon these phenomena by the application of our own concepts and categories.

With social behaviour it is all very different. People, unlike molecules or planets, have motives for their actions. Their behaviour is guided by subjective meanings. What is more, social actors have their own ideas and explanations as to why they behave in the way that they do, and these ideas and explanations themselves are an indispensable part of any comprehensive account of their conduct. It is a fairly safe bet that falling apples do not have a concept of gravity. Contrast this with, say, political or religious behaviour. People most certainly do have their own concepts associated with politics and religion. They employ notions like ‘nationalism’ and ‘class struggle’, or ‘sin’ and ‘redemption’. Indeed, their behaviour is only explicable in the light of such notions. These notions or concepts enter into the actors’ conduct as motivational forces.

Understandably enough, some latter day theorists have concluded from all this that the principal task of sociology is to address itself directly to the meanings and concepts that enjoy common currency among the actors themselves, unsullied by the formal constructs of the observer. Looked at from this angle, the activity of social science is more akin to that of the philosophy of science than to natural science proper. The philosophy of science is concerned less with understanding the physical universe than with understanding the subjective meanings of scientists themselves as a professional body. It examines the procedures and assumptions, social as well as technical, that inform the conduct of scientists as actors. It is thus a ‘second order’ activity because it constructs theories about theories.^[4] Sociology, too, is said to be a second order activity in so far as it deals with the theories and conceptions of social actors themselves, and not with their conduct in the raw, as it were. This is precisely the charge often levelled against positivism – that it does seek to make sense of behaviour in the raw by ignoring the motives and subjective states of the actors concerned. Durkheim's sociology stands out as the obvious target.

At any rate, Weber's heavy emphasis on the individual and internal meanings could hardly be in greater contrast to Durkheim's position. For Durkheim, the only unit that really counted for explanatory purposes was the collectivity, and to make individual motives and perceptions the principal object of enquiry would be to forfeit everything of sociological interest. The reason for this was that in the course of their dealings with one another, individuals created a kind of synthesis or social compound, rather in the way that the combination of certain chemicals produces an entirely new compound. It is this synthesis, or emergent property, which is the very stuff of social reality and hence the proper object of enquiry. Since this reality could never be reduced to its constituent parts, it was clearly not accessible via the mental or emotional states of individual actors.

In setting out his case against the individualist perspective Durkheim did not have Weber specifically in mind. Yet his argument does read uncannily like a direct riposte to Weber's recommendation to treat collectivities as the “particular acts of individual persons”. If Durkheim had chosen to address his remarks specifically to Weber he would not have had to alter them at all.

Weber's case for taking the individual's subjective meanings as the starting point of social enquiry is spelled out in the course of his advocacy of the method called Verstehen. What is meant by this is the attempt to comprehend social action through a kind of empathetic liaison with the actor on the part of the observer. The strategy is for the investigator to try to identify with the actor and his motives and to view the course of conduct through the actor's eyes rather than his own. Weber did not regard Verstehen merely as a way of sounding out a person's own account and evaluation of his conduct by way of interviews and the like. He saw it as a method that could be applied to the understanding of historical events, when there was no one left around to interview. We could seek to show why actors followed a certain path of conduct by reconstructing the situational choices and constraints facing them at the time. We are perfectly capable of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes and imagining how we might have acted in similar circumstances. As Weber puts it, “one need not have been Caesar in order to understand Caesar”.^[5] We can readily make sense of Caesar's actions by seeing them as the working out of an “understandable sequence of motivation”.^[6]

The argument being canvassed by the Verstehen approach is that social actors are always faced with choices. Conduct is not governed by inexorable social forces that propel people in one direction or another. Actors decide to take certain courses of action in preference to others, and their decisions are powerfully affected by their perception of opportunities and constraints. It is therefore necessary, in any given case, to get some understanding of how the options were actually weighed up and assessed. This is an approach which is obviously not too congenial to any school of thought that seeks to uncover some hidden purpose or logic to history. Far from unfolding in accordance with a pre-ordained pattern, history becomes virtually open-ended. Almost anything can happen.

Weber distinguishes between two types of Verstehen. These are ‘direct observational understanding’ (aktuelles Verstehen) and ‘explanatory understanding’ (erklärendes Verstehen).^[7] He gives as an example of direct observational understanding our ability to grasp the fact that someone is angry simply by reading his facial expression. We experience the same kind of understanding when we observe a woodcutter chopping wood, or a hunter aiming his rifle at an animal. Merely observing these acts is enough to tell us what is going on. However, to comprehend why it is going on we need to have recourse to explanatory understanding. It is through erklàrendes Verstehen that we try to grasp the motives and subjective meanings of the various actions. We understand the action of the woodcutter in this second sense once we discover whether he is chopping wood to earn a wage, to build up a supply for his own use, or to work off a fit of temper. Similarly, we arrive at explanatory understanding of the action of the hunter when we learn whether he is killing for food or for sport. Expressed in general terms, we achieve explanatory understanding by placing the act in question in an intelligible “sequence of motivation, the understanding of which can be treated as an explanation of the actual course of behaviour”.^[8] In other words, we make sense of an act by placing it in a wider context of meaning. It is only by reference to a broader framework of knowledge that any social act can be properly understood and explained.

Weber makes it perfectly plain that the Verstehen approach is not to be thought of as the be-all and end-all of social explanation. It has to be supplemented by other techniques of investigation, including the ‘scientific’ efforts favoured by the positivists.^[9] In fact, Weber occasionally seems to look upon Verstehen as a fruitful source of hypotheses about behaviour – hypotheses that must then be subjected to empirical scrutiny and validation. And in doing this it is quite in order to bring into play forensic skills and quantitative methods in the classic Durkheimian fashion.

Unlike some of his intellectual heirs, Weber by no means regarded the use of statistical techniques as an exercise in mystification or as a distortion of the subtle realities of social life. Statistical probability was an important check upon the general validity of any proposition. At the same time, caution was called for in attaching explanatory significance to numerical correlations. The fact that two variables showed a consistently high degree of correlation would not in itself suffice to establish a causal connection between them. For causation to be proven it would be necessary to show that the relationship between the variables was intuitively meaningful. If it could be demonstrated that the rise and fall of the pound on the foreign exchange markets exactly paralleled the rise and fall in the divorce rate, we would not be warranted in claiming a causal link between the two events. There is no plausible ‘sequence of motivation’ that connects actions on the money market with decisions about the fate of marriage. As Weber expresses it,

If adequacy in respect to meaning is lacking, then no matter how high the degree of uniformity and how precisely its probability can be numerically determined, it is still an incomprehensible statistical probability … Statistical uniformities constitute understandable types of action, and thus constitute sociological generalizations, only when they can be regarded as manifestations of the understandable subjective meaning of a course of social action ^[10]

While statistical correlations may sensitize us to the possibility of a causal link, such a link can only be established if we can satisfy ourselves that there is a connecting sequence of motivations. All this suggests that Verstehen is to be understood not as an alternative to positivism and the scientific method, as it is sometimes said to be, but as a corrective against the too mechanical application of this method ^[11]

II

Be this as it may, Weber's exposition of Verstehendesoziologie raises a number of awkward questions that are left for the most part unanswered. In the first place, his distinction between two types of Verstehen – direct observational understanding and explanatory understanding – is neither helpful nor altogether plausible. It is difficult to see why the direct observation of an act qualifies as any kind of ‘understanding’ of it at all. If, for example, we were to come across a group of people sitting in a circle with their eyes shut we would not be in much of a position to understand even what they were doing. They could be rehearsing a play, communing with the spirits, or getting quietly stoned. Only when we had garnered further information that would enable us to discover the social purpose of their activity, and relate it to some familiar cultural context, would we be in a position to say that we understood it. Weber regards this as the second type of Verstehen – explanatory understanding; this is understanding arrived at by placing the act in question in a wider framework of meaning. But surely this is the only one possible type of understanding. Merely observing an act is no kind of understanding whatsoever. We cannot in fact properly comprehend what is going on unless we know why it is going on.

Weber's own examples can be used to illustrate the point. We can only be said to ‘understand’ what the woodcutter or the hunter are doing when we find out the reason why one is wielding his axe and the other is aiming his gun. The only real distinction is between merely seeing or observing an action on the one hand, and understanding an action on the other. There are not two types of understanding involved. The oddity of Weber's distinction is made especially apparent by his claim that we can “understand by direct observation … the meaning of the proposition 2X2 = 4 when we hear or read it. This is a case of the direct rational understanding of ideas”.^[12] But it hardly needs to be said that in order to understand even this simple proposition the observer would need to have at least some background knowledge of the mysteries of arithmetic before these symbols could be invested with meaning. For anyone not equipped with the appropriate cultural framework the sight of these numbers would result not in aktuelles Verstehen but blank incomprehension.

There are certain other difficulties about Verstehen as a method or procedure that Weber now and then alludes to but never really comes to grips with. One such difficulty is that in order to understand the actor's conduct by way of empathy, it is necessary that the observer should be on roughly the same normative and moral wavelength as the actor. If they have widely divergent outlooks or incompatible beliefs the empathetic connection cannot be fully made. Weber remarks that

… many ultimate ends or values toward which experience shows that human action may be oriented, often cannot be understood completely … The more radically they differ from our own ultimate values … the more difficult it is for us to understand them empathically.^[13]

This is held to be especially true in the case of deeply held spiritual or political beliefs. Serious obstacles to empathetic understanding would confront observers who were themselves

… not susceptible to unusual acts of religious and charitable zeal, or persons who abhor extreme rationalist fanaticism (such as the fanatic advocacy of the ‘rights of man’).^[14]

A similar point is made by Peter Winch, himself an enthusiast of the Verstehen approach.

[An] historian or sociologist of religion must himself have some religious feeling if he is to make sense of the religious movement he is studying and understand the considerations which govern the lives of its participants.^[15]

Weber sometimes goes further than this by suggesting that there is something inherently impenetrable about certain types of rel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Foreword
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Biographical Sketch
• Chapter 1 Methods and Procedures
• Chapter 2 Beliefs and Social Action
• Chapter 3 Domination and Legitimacy
• Chapter 4 Class, Status, and Party
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Notes
• Index