Weber

Sociologist of Empire

Kieran Allen

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786801999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Max Weber is one of the founding fathers of sociology. He is often referred to as a sophisticated 'value-free' sociologist. This new critical introduction argues that Weber's sociology cannot be divorced from his political standpoint. Weber saw himself as a 'class conscious bourgeois' and his sociology reflects this outlook. Providing clear summaries of Weber's ideas - concentrating on the themes most often encountered on sociology courses - Kieran Allen provides a lively introduction to this key thinker. Kieran Allen explores Weber's political background through his life and his writing. Weber was a neo-liberal who thought that the market guaranteed efficiency and rationality. He was an advocate of empire. He supported the carnage of WW1 and vehemently attacked German socialists such as Rosa Luxemburg. Weber's most famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ignores the bloody legacy associated with the early accumulation of capital. Instead, he locates the origins of the system in a new rigorous morality. Using a political framework, Kieran Allen's book is is ideal for students who want to develop a critical approach.

1

Introduction

We live in a strange world, with inequalities on a scale never dreamt of before. Three billionaires, for example, now own more than the population of sub-Saharan Africa. The small unelected boards of directors of companies such as General Motors control more resources than South Africa or Poland. Virtually every area of life from the human body to sporting activities has been turned into a commodity. And overhanging much of this dismal state of affairs is a new era of global permanent warfare. Under the rubric of an unending ‘war against terrorism’ the greatest military empire of the world has given itself the right to fight ‘preventative’ wars in any region of the planet it deems to be harbouring a threat to its interests.

The most elementary question many will ask is: why? Why is our society so violent, unequal and often dehumanised? Each year, thousands not only ask this question but also decide to study how this society functions. They enrol in colleges, for courses in sociology, hoping to get critical insights into how society works – and maybe what can be done to change it. The mere act of wanting to understand rather than simply accept is often the first incipient sign of a rebellion against social norms. An opening is created for a sense of unease about the world.

To its detractors, sociology is a soppy subject. It has none of the hard and fast mathematical models of economics. Its academic practitioners turn up on televisions to discuss ‘trends’ in alcohol drinking among teenagers or the relationship between crime and ‘family breakdown’. The more serious commentary about the economy or the changes in the political spectrum is left to other ‘experts’. Some have claimed that the marginal role of sociology in official society results from it being a left-wing subject. Irving Horowitz, a Hannah Arendt Distinguished Professor of Sociology, has arrived at the startling conclusion that sociology has been taken over by ideologues of the far left and is now ‘largely a repository of discontent’.¹ It has changed from being an objective social science to an outpost of political extremism. He claims that in areas like criminology, sociologists are now ‘eclipsed by the expertise of police officers, legal and para-legal personnel and so on’.² The punishment for the politicisation of the discipline is that funding has been cut and its status has been downgraded.

There are, of course, many sociologists who profess sympathy with the left. This is hardly surprising as the task of sociology is, after all, to defend the idea of ‘the social’ – that we live in a society, and not just an economy. As the global political elite try to turn everyone from hospital patients to students into ‘customers’, defending the idea of society against notions that we are simply an aggregate of market consumers can radicalise some. One the best representatives of this trend was Pierre Bourdieu. The huge strikes in France in 1995 over pensions and social welfare payments spurred him into an active engagement with workers. He denounced corporate globalisation because ‘it is in the name of this model that flexible working, another magic word of neo-liberalism, is imposed meaning night work, weekend work, irregular working hours, things which have always been part of employers’ dreams’.³

Bourdieu is, however, by no means the norm. For every radical critic of the system, there are scores of others who advocate support for the existing framework of society. The best-known sociologist in the English-speaking world today is probably Anthony Giddens. Many entering sociology courses encounter him through his textbook, titled simply Sociology. Giddens alongside his German co-thinker, Ulrick Beck, have become ideologists for Third Way politics. They profess to offer advice to social democratic parties on how best to adapt to the new challenges posed by globalisation. This advice is often quite vague and amounts to accepting corporate globalisation. Third Way politics fits easily with the political outlooks of New Labour in Britain or with that of the former US president Bill Clinton. ‘No one has any alternatives to capitalism’, Giddens sternly asserts, ‘the arguments that remain concern how far and in what ways capitalism should be governed and regulated’.⁴

Sociology is, thus, mainly a site for conflict about interpretations about society. It may profess to be non-political – to focus on wider social trends rather than immediate political issues which people have interests in – but it nevertheless deals with issues that people passionately fight over. Sociologists often adopt a non-political guise because of the pressure of their jobs and careers – even as they make the most outrageously political statements. Many of the disputes within sociology occur at a highly abstract theoretical level, often surrounded by the most forbidding jargon. However, in their complex and confusing ways, they often reflect debates in the wider society about whose interests should be served or which direction society needs to go in.

At the heart of the conflicts there is often a reference back to the argument between Marx and Weber who are described as the founding fathers of the discipline. Their varying interpretations about the origin of capitalism, its nature, the role of class and their ideas on how societies change – or do not change – all impinge on, and re-emerge in, modern debates. The reason for this is that both men provided stunningly comprehensive overviews of modern capitalism.

A study of the writings of both men can be highly rewarding and they cannot simply be dismissed as ‘dead white men’ with few insights to offer today’s society. Marx and Weber wrote in a very different style to present-day sociologists. With the exception of one early work by Weber, they did not carry out detailed quantitative or qualitative studies. They did not confine themselves to simply testing a few isolated and relatively narrow hypotheses. Instead, their work is characterised by a grand sweep that searches for what constitutes the fundamental dynamic of modern society. They were not subject to the now quite rigid divisions between different academic subjects – between history, politics, economics and what is now considered sociology. Instead, they straddled all these areas of inquiry, producing masterpieces which provided interpretations of what was unique about modern capitalism and what were the historical factors which went into its creation. As a result, their writings reach for the totality of experience of life under capitalism.

Moreover, they come at this society as relative strangers. Capitalism was only in its infancy in Germany when Marx wrote and the country had only recently been united when Weber was writing. Sociologists have often stressed that the eye of the ‘outsider’ can see far more than those who have grown accustomed to their surroundings. Marx and Weber, therefore, had huge advantages when it came to analysing social phenomena such as bureaucracy or the working of the ‘free market’. They were not so accustomed to these societies that they regarded them as natural. They did not assume that issues to do with the distribution of income or human freedom had been put beyond argument. Quite the opposite. They subjected the wider social structure to a piercing scrutiny that led, despite their differing perspectives, to quite bleak visions about its future.

Unfortunately, however, students are often introduced to the writings of Marx and Weber in a dry, abstract manner that is shorn of their political contexts. This is more difficult with Marx because of his open advocacy of revolt and his links with the socialist movement. However, if his political activity is recognised, it is then bracketed out again by references to his ‘controversial’ views and by the suggestion that he was over-focussed on class. Marx is, above all, presented as a reductionist because he stressed the importance of economic factors and outmoded because he failed to see the new complexities that could emerge with a globalised knowledge economy. Thus a recent textbook boldly claims ‘analyses of race (and indeed gender) in the contemporary world have pointed to new issues of inequality and power that are not adequately addressed by classical Marxism’.⁵

The winner of the debate within classical sociology is often deemed to be Weber. Of course, few apart from his ardent followers, directly award him plaudits. Weber’s main reward comes in the form of a praise of his sophistication. Instead of a crude two-class model of modern society, Weber advocated a complex multi-class model. Instead of Marx’s economic determinism, Weber appreciated multifactoral causation. Instead of naive hopes of a better world, Weber was able to warn of the impending danger of bureaucratisation. He appears in most sociology courses as a well-packaged figure that is the doyen of ‘value free’ sociology. Whereas Marx advocated revolution, Weber appears detached and engaged with ‘complexities’ that Marx never considered.

Weber’s sociology fits in more easily with a form of academic learning which defines itself as neutral while disguising its own hierarchies and biases. He holds out many intellectual advantages for this tradition. Weberian sociology can recognise the existence of social conflict – but can also imply that there is no need to challenge the wider system. It can provide a powerful appreciation of how social phenomena are historically constructed but deny there are any inherent contradictions within the present society. Weber’s overall pessimism, which assumes that domination of human beings by fellow human beings is inevitable, enables sociologists to make a critique of society – but also to imply there is little prospect of overall systemic change. All of this cuts the link between critical knowledge and political action – and that is extremely helpful to a purely career-minded academic.

The great irony, of course, is that Weber was passionately political. His own injunctions about the need for ‘value free’ sociology were honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Weber was an ardent German nationalist and a free market liberal. His crude endorsement of nationalism offers few attractions for academics of today and so has often been ignored. When Weber, for example, writes at length in his classic book Economy and Society about ‘the great powers’ and the inevitability of imperialist expansion displacing ‘pacifist’ forms of free trade,⁶ many sociologists simply ignore the passage. Their focus is on the more general remarks that apply to many different historical societies rather than concrete stances that Weber took. Weber had a tendency to write in generalities even while promoting the most specific political positions. His overall style indeed lent itself to an apolitical reading of his texts. The problem, though, is that this abstract reading of Weber as the pure academic carries its own undeclared political punch.

The packaging of the academic Weber began after his death and owed much to mainstream American sociology. Weber’s influence in Germany was minimal in the years immediately after his death in 1920. Essays and reviews which dealt with his work often appeared in journals that were quite tangential to social science. The major social science journal of the time, Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, did not review a single book of his.⁷ During the period 1922 to 1947, less than 2,000 copies of Weber’s Economy and Society were sold.⁸ Few German sociologists regarded themselves as his followers and so his influence was ‘fragmentary and patchy’.⁹ With the Nazi seizure of power and the purge of universities, even this was virtually wiped out. His influence grew eventually because of the activities of three key figures.

The first was his wife, Marianne, who helped to construct Economy and Society and gathered together four collections of his writings after his death.¹⁰ Marianne Weber’s editing of these works reflected some of her personal concerns. In 1926, she also produced the now standard biography from which most subsequent biographies have drawn heavily. Her approach to her husband contains a paradox. She was an active feminist who wrote books on marriage and the women’s movement but her biography of Weber is effectively a hagiography. Much is left out and often incidents are referred to only vaguely. The overall aim of the book is clearly to construct a ‘great man’. Marianne Weber and her friend Karl Jaspers were part of the Heidelberg Circle in the 1920s. The central belief of this circle was that Max Weber was a personality of outstanding rank who never found the acclaim he deserved among fellow academics or the general public.¹¹ The aim of Marianne Weber was to correct this alleged wrong.

The second key figure who helped construct the modern Weber was Johannes Ferdinand Winckelmann. This former judge and state official who served the Nazi regime faithfully believed that Weber offered an alternative account of historical development to Marx and so he systematically began to assemble his work after the Second World War...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Sociologist of Empire
• 3. The Spirit of Capitalism
• 4. Why Didn’t Asia Develop?
• 5. Methodology
• 6. Class, Status and Party
• 7. Domination and Bureaucracy
• 8. The Fall and Rise of the West
• 9. Capitalism, Socialism and Bureaucracy
• 10. War and Revolution
• 11. Conclusion
• Notes
• Additional Reading
• Bibliography
• Index