Why Max Weber matters
Peter Ghosh
MAX WEBER AND "THE PROTESTANT ETHIC"
Twin histories
424pp. Oxford University Press. £30 (US $49.95).
978 0 19 870252 8
Max Weber, c.1900 Photograph: AKGWe hope you enjoy this free piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday in print and via the TLS app. This week's issue also features Schiller's Joan of Arc, the further exploits of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the myths of the American frontier, an eighteenth-century manuscript, nineteenth-century Iceland, the many truths of Italy – and much more.
In the past year of major anniversaries, you might have missed the sesquicentennial of one of the greatest German scholars of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Max Weber was born in 1864 and died in 1920, but in a relatively short life, the sheer bulk of what he wrote about with seriousness, purpose and commitment, from agrarian history to rationality and music, from abstract methodological pronouncements to the workings of the stock market, from the major world religions to war and revolution, is staggering. Yet apart from academically necessary early qualifications that required the production of weighty tomes, he never wrote a big book, neither founded nor had any interest in founding a school, and never cared about the accoutrements of academic fame even as those around him recognized his presence and power. He was touchy, often suffered from depression, and was diagnosed as a neurasthenic. He went through the usual arrays of spa treatments, self-diagnosis and drugs, and even dallied with the anarchist communities in Ascona; all of the rituals of his self-consciously "bourgeois" class and status. Nevertheless he remained intellectually uncompromising, so that although the impact of his nervous disorders meant he had to resign from teaching commitments, the freedom this provided allowed him space to pursue a wide array of interests, without having to conform to the norms of disciplinary fields ("I am not a donkey and do not have a field", as he famously remarked).
Although an intense historical sensibility undergirds Weber's work, as Peter Ghosh says in this stylish and extraordinarily detailed new intellectual history, Weber himself was most definitely "not an intellectual historian". It has meant (ironically given Weber's sense of the limited time horizons of academic relevance) that his work has had serious longevity. For he was an engaged, modern thinker, concerned to illuminate the historical development of "tendencies" that created new realities, and out of which certain contemporary problems could be put into sharp relief with appropriate conceptualization. Interested in the power derived from the "economic" way of looking at things, he worked by a mechanism of "causal regression", producing "ideal-type" social and historical models or frameworks. These self-conscious methodological "utopias" would polemically highlight or sideline certain aspects of reality at any one time in order to permit the construction of specific genealogies. One example was his conceptual use of "asceticism" versus "mysticism" to highlight the religious foundations that lay behind modern constructions of "rational" conduct, particularly in the West.
Personality-focused or biographical approaches seem inappropriate to understand a man so concerned with the power of the impersonal
Personality-focused or biographical approaches seem inappropriate to understand a man so concerned with the power of the impersonal. So Ghosh reconstructs Weber's work through a history of his texts. Not for him the "riotous gallimaufry" of psychosexual explanation, outlined in a recent study by Joachim Radkau (and reviewed by Ghosh in the TLS, June 19, 2009). Nor the intellectually limited if personally interesting biography, such as that published by Weber's widow Marianne, shortly after his death. (She had always wanted him to write the sort of "fat" book that she produced, reckoning it would secure him academic fame and personality. He thought her a "silly goose" in such matters.) Instead, Ghosh's answer to Weber's uniqueness is beguilingly simple, and gloriously revisionist in overturning most established scholarship. His claim, very baldly restated, is that around 1904, aged forty, Weber had a scholarly annus mirabilis. He took over joint editorship (with the flashy personality Werner Sombart and the wealthy younger scholar Edgar Jaffé) of the leading social scientific journal in Germany, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. Ghosh undercuts a relatively recent scholarly consensus that Weber both played a central role in the drafting of a new editorial policy, and that this explains something crucial about Weber's ideas, to show instead how central Weber was to the networks involved in the sale, purchase and revised editorial and contributory make-up of the journal. From the backroom, so to speak, he quickly manoeuvred himself into a position where he would become central. Weber's celebrated essays which were later published together as The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism first appeared in the Archiv. They form a pivot around which Ghosh's narrative turns. For Ghosh this is the supremely Weberian text, a synthetic, polemical essay bringing together all his major interests to date in capsule form. Despite its avowedly limited focus, it also laid the foundations for nearly all his future work. It was his "summit". Unsurprisingly, then, Ghosh's "twin histories" entail a game of two halves. The first considers how Weber could have come to write such an account, while the second shows its presence in nearly everything that came after. It is a study of how the historically minded Weber, whose ideas came as often through a good cigar in the evening as through anything else, fares when examined by an absolutely historicist intellectual historian who focuses on a text that was absolutely "not an historicist construction" of the past. Weber might have disapproved of intellectual biography per se, but he would surely have been amused to hear the many echoes in Ghosh's prose of his own pugnacious style and intellectual tenacity.
In 1904, Weber also took up an invitation to speak on rural societies to an audience at the Congress of Arts and Sciences, affiliated with the World's Fair at St Louis. It was there that he met W. E. B. Du Bois (whom he tried to recruit for the Archiv), and, though away for several months, Weber also published a seminal methodological essay (again in the Archiv) roughly translated as "The Objectivity of Social Scientific and Socio-Political Knowledge". This was his original and most fully elaborated claim about the importance of constructing "ideal types" as a solution to the problems of relativism that historicism might fall prey to. His training in the great traditions of Roman and commercial as well as private law provided him with exquisite tools for such high-level conceptual abstraction. And conceptual abstractions like asceticism, vocation (Beruf), even capitalism and rule (Herrschaft), were then pressed into service to structure his developmental claim about a contemporary Kultur whose "magic" had been progressively stripped away by rational and impersonal forms of conduct that originated in an earlier "ascetic Protestantism". Such terms structure Ghosh's individual chapters, and help to buttress his account of what Weber meant when he said that Kultur is a "secular substitute for Christianity".
Thus outlined, Weber's twin interests clearly coalesced in a concern with the fate of politics and religion as the two oldest and noblest "human ideals", but whose configurations had been changed, and changed utterly, by modern capitalism. In order to explain their new co-ordinates, Weber tried to fix the position of capitalism in his mind, and his struggles to do so form another pivot for Ghosh's text. Here, Weber remains a frontiersman in the quest for a peculiarly "bourgeois" (read Western) form of capitalism, but it stands on the "uncertain frontier" between religion and politics. Each in turn has its different types of Herrschaft, but capitalism, like politics and religion, also has no singular "essence". Early on, therefore, we find Weber talking about capitalism and "character" in The Protestant Ethic, and elsewhere engaging critically with contemporary economic theories of capitalism as rational and acquisitive behaviour. But as a verifiable "fact", the existence of something called "capitalism" was intensely insecure – perhaps (Ghosh speculates) indicating a "failure" of method on Weber's part. He had discussed the effects of capitalism on agrarian forms of economic organization much earlier, and whether through familial contact (his uncle Carl David Weber's linen mill in Oerlinghausen was close at hand), or through individual projects on the psychophysics of industrial labour, the psychological dynamics of those effects remained of interest.
The sheer bulk of what Weber wrote about with seriousness, purpose and commitment is staggering
Similarly, the difference between formal and material "rationality" was implied, if not fully elaborated, in the process. Weber was trying to move beyond Marx to think of capitalism as something more profound than just a capitalist mode of production, and this had something to do with the relationship between capitalism and law. Weber's view of the formalistic legality of the Puritans and their substantive concern with natural law was that it led them towards a legally derived conception of "rational" behaviour. That sort of conduct, he concluded, would ultimately find genealogical affinity with the sort of economic and calculating action necessary for the development of "bourgeois" capitalism.
Weber traced the radical Calvinist origins of such a vision, to show how it was gradually overturned by utilitarianism, before becoming the sort of fully fledged, modern conduct applicable to Benjamin Franklin's injunction that "time is money". He saw his problem everywhere though, and strict historical accuracy when discussing ideas seemed unimportant. For him, utilitarianism was the heir to seventeenth-century asceticism, but the latter already had a "utilitarian character". Similarly, Calvinist theodicy was an asynchronous, "sacralized version of Adam Smith's 'invisible hand"', making possible the separation of legal from bureaucratic and economic forms of rationality. Recognizing practical overlays but conceptually fixing points of transition along the tracks, he used the idea of an "elective affinity" between different elements to help structure his argument. For Ghosh, Weber was quite the idealist in this regard, concerned first and foremost with getting ideas straight, even when their material histories were crooked.
The forms of authoritative rule that most interested Weber (traditional, rational-legal, charismatic and, on occasion, "democratic") could either be explored in world-historical perspective, or, in tandem with his focus on capitalism. The latter would come to be seen as historically conditioned by the transformation of religious "sects", and the importance of the "sectarian idea" within them. Indeed, their nourishing of radical individualism and heterogeneous values made the sects distant cousins of modern ideological divisions. Weber also aligned his discussion with a historical account of the rise of the city in European history, to signify another unique attribute of modern Western Kultur. His account of the sects was originally supposed to issue in a third essay in the Protestant Ethic series, and although early bits appeared, full discussion had to wait because Weber allowed himself the luxury of letting his close friend and colleague Ernst Troeltsch, the historian of religion, complete his voluminous masterwork Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen (The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches), which appeared in early 1912. Weber was grateful (though his publisher was not) for the chance to postpone re-engagement with Protestant Ethic-style questions until an acknowledged expert had had a chance to work out if he was onto something or not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Troeltsch the expert became his "authoritative vindicator".
During this time, Weber's many letters to his publisher suggest the usual sorts of authorial prevarications in response to polite cajoling, but also contain hints of his struggle to find out again and again how much he could "bear" or "stand" both in and of his own personality. Weber took on new and Herculean labours, working towards a new sociology of religion (broadly complete by 1913) alongside an account of the economic ethics of world religions in comparative perspective. He had also taken on the task of radically updating and editing a major and massive multi-author handbook on political economy. Frustrations with that meant that much of his own contribution would end up in the multilayered treatise that we now know as Economy and Society. And most of this was achieved despite the intervention of a world war, nervous exhaustion, legal disputes (with colleagues among others) and fraught personal relationships.
In fact, his focus on the relationship between the strictly internal demands of the individual personality (Persönlichkeit) and the objective requirements of particular orders of life (Lebensordnungen) that personality might choose and which would fix its outward ethical form, was immortalized in two panoramic lectures on the vocations of science and politics. Given at the height of major interest and political unrest in 1917 and again in 1919 in Munich, these public displays were definitely not "drivel", as he described his usual student lectures. Though suitably huge, they display breathtaking command and control. For both scientist and politician, hot passion and the sense of a calling must be aligned with a cooler demand for objectivity and responsibility. Both combinations take different forms, in part because they have different means at their disposal, violence and state power versus intellect and scholarly integrity. And both vocations have deep roots in ideas first presented in The Protestant Ethic, where an originally religious "cosmos" which framed the Puritan world of ethical conduct, has become a new and steely sort of housing for everyone. Weber's history of the present found its denouement in the famous conclusion of The Protestant Ethic, where he wrote that although the Puritan "wanted" to follow a "calling", today we are simply forced or compelled to. Years later, in the crucible of war and revolution, what might such compulsion mean?
In a key interpretation, again contrary to the prevalent view of Weber as a committed German nationalist, Ghosh finds that the war principally offered Weber a welcome break from debilitating academic work on Economy and Society, and made little difference to his politics at all. Partly, that's because in Ghosh's eyes Weber was never properly a "nationalist". Rather, his was a "multicultural" world, governed by conflicts over values, but where resolution was to be found neither in relativism nor resignation, but rather in a principled "objective" commitment to taking the measure of what we conventionally render as value pluralism. Yet Weber's account of the values behind German politics since Bismarck was deeply unflattering; the Reich was simply bureaucratic politics without either charisma or responsible leadership. Noting that economic dominance normally, though not automatically, translates into political power, Weber suggested that his own "bourgeois" class in Germany lacked the political education for power for which its economic predominance should have been preparing it. This made it difficult to deal with real problems, and Weber attacked Left and Right for trying to valorize the past, for proposing organic visions of the German nation as a collective personality, and for trying to talk about the end of realpolitik in the dream world of socialist utopia. War couldn't and didn't change the realistic background of political choice in his mind, and socialism was simply code for the "bureaucratization of the economy".
Unable to find regular war work in Brussels, where he had travelled in 1915 as an unofficial political consultant following the German invasion of Belgium, Weber refused to descend into propaganda, like many of his colleagues. He self-consciously recused himself to his publisher, again, from fully continuing with his epic academic projects under the circumstances. But while he took up a position as a hospital orderly when he could, he also collected several of his essays from the Archiv on world religions for quick publication, when copy was much in demand. As the war went on, but particularly in the last few years of his life, he engaged in several passionate affairs, and went between universities in Munich and Vienna lecturing on the state, sociology and general economic history. Politics still mattered, and his engagement with the conditions of a peace settlement was unblinking, as one would expect, but in his work, religion occupies nearly three times as much space. On Ghosh's account of Weber's priorities, the balance sheet is clear.
Weber was trying to move beyond Marx to think of capitalism as something more profound than just a capitalist mode of production
As Ghosh notes, Weber had always been a superb political analyst. His "probability" theory about when peace would come and the possibilities of German victory was as ruthlessly realistic as anything else he wrote. Yet if objectivity in the midst of war set him apart, one of Ghosh's major points is that politics for Weber, although a grand human ideal, had been on the decline for centuries as the crucial arbiter of human conduct. Now, it meant nothing more or less than earthly Herrschaft, so that there were only so many ways one could talk about its development, or think about its valences. For those who hold fixed ideas about Weber the political animal, Ghosh's claims will be hard reading. But part of the problem with seeing him as a straightforward nationalist was that even incandescent rage about national shame was allied to a profound understanding of geopolitics and political responsibility. This made it clear to him that "reaction" and public retribution, or power politics without content, were futile modes of engagement. Subtler and more "responsible" policy was required if long-term success was to be achieved, and that would have to take place in diplomatic back channels by "responsible" statesmen. Germany was actually quite successful at this when seen in comparative perspective, a point amplified recently by Adam Tooze in The Deluge: The Great War and the remaking of global order (2014).
Weber's well-known refrains about the dangers of a politics of national vanity (Eitelkeit), made most famously in his lecture on the vocation of politics, were in fact extant in his writings from the start. For example, in a perspicacious essay realistically assaying the prospects of Germany against the European world powers during the war, he once more stated his belief that "objective politics" was not a "politics of vanity", but one whose actions necessarily took place in the shadows. In the darkness personality could really count, rather than in public, when it was too often just for show. Whether in The Protestant Ethic or in his later essays and lectures on politics, Weber worried about the fate of personality and responsibility in what has infamously (if incorrectly) come to be known as the "iron cage" of a rationalized and bureaucratized modern world. In The Protestant Ethic, he wrote that perhaps the mechanization of life would continue unchallenged until the last ounces of fossil fuel had been used up, and the danger was that we might simply fail to notice. In later work, such environmental imagery had turned into a worry about the future as a polar night of icy darkness. In order to guard against these dangers, inner personality had to be focused, hardened and retooled, made able to resist superficiality in its own engagement with the impersonal force of fate. In our own age, where borderlands between environmental crisis, near-pathological boredom and disaffection with mainstream politics, and tensions driven by religion have if anything become more rigidly crippling than ever, Max Weber looks a more profound guide than we might care to think.
Duncan Kelly teaches Political Thought at the University of Cambridge, and is a Fellow of Jesus College. His most recent book is The Propriety of Liberty, 2010, and he is currently working on a new intellectual history of the First World War.
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