WEBER, MAX

WEBER, MAX (1864–1920), German sociologist, was the most influential (and in many respects the most profound) of twentieth-century social scientists. Educated as a legal historian, Max Weber made original contributions to the study of modern social structure, to the analysis of the economy and the law, to the comparative analysis of civilizations, and to the methodology of the social sciences. Engaged in the politics of his place and time, he brought to his inquiries into authority and power an acute sense of reality. What gave significance and unity to his entire work, however, were his dark reflections on the problem of meaning in human culture. He was acutely aware of the conflict between what he called the metaphysical needs of the human spirit and the constraints of social existence, with the limits of human historical automony. It was in this context that his studies of religion acquired a depth and a pathos unmatched to this day.

Weber was the son of a prominent Berlin lawyer typical of the educated bourgeoisie of the German empire under Wilhelm I, immobilized between his abstract attachment to liberal values and his actual predilection for national power. His mother was a devout Lutheran given to charitable works. The view that the dualism that permeated his life and work, between a sublime sensitivity to ethics and a no less pronounced regard for the iron demands of power, came from the conflict of values in his family is no doubt too simple. The dualism, however, was there, and another aspect of it was expressed in his own marriage to the strikingly independent feminist, Marianne Weber. The politicians and scholars of late nineteenth-century Berlin were familiar figures in the household of the Weber's father. Max himself eventually became a leading, if not the leading, figure of the cultural and political elite of early twentieth-century Germany. Ernst Troeltsch was his colleague and friend at Heidelberg, and the great figure of modern German social Protestantism, Friedrich Naumann, was a close associate. The young Georg Lukàcs, the revolutionary Ernst Toller, and the poet Stefan George frequented his home. Holding chairs successively at Freiburg, Heidelberg, and Munich, Weber quickly rose to fame as both scholar and publicist. He was an editor of the most distinguished social scientific journal of the time, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. He did some of his own most important writing for the encyclopedic project that he planned with Joseph Schumpeter, Werner Sombart, and others, the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, 14 vols. (1914–1928). His political activity included work with Naumann's Evangelischer Sozialkongress and with the "Socialists of the Chair" (a group of university professors advocating social reforms, using the Verein für Sozialpolitik as their main instrument of collective reseach). He frequently contributed articles and editorials to the press. A member of the German delegation to the Versailles peace conference (he abjured the treaty), Weber died before he could participate in the tormented politics of the Weimar republic—or the Third Reich. This bare sketch of his career suggests the complexities with which he struggled: His work is best understood as a desperate effort to effect a precarious synthesis between the contradictory ideas and warring impulses that threaten to sunder modern culture.

Weber's methodological work is often portrayed as an attempt to obtain detachment and distance from the flux and passions of history. This is perhaps true, but his methodology is inseparable from his metahistorical vision of the world. In opposition to those whom he dismissed as enthusiasts or sectarians, he espoused a politics of realism. For Weber, social science is a disciplined way to know reality, but its scientific status does not entail the promulgation of articulated general laws of the kind developed in physics. Rather, social science for him is concerned with particular historical complexes and sequences. Their unique status does not preclude, and indeed makes more necessary, empirical analysis of their origins and structure. The manifold nature of social phenomena means that the starting point of empirical analysis is a question or a problem generated by the interests and values of the social scientist and his public. Once a particular set of interests and values generates a problem, however, its elements and terms can be stated with relative objectivity. A probable sequence of causation can be reconstructed, often with the aid of an instrumental abstraction that Weber terms an "ideal type." Against this model, the complexity and nuance of reality are illuminated.

Weber, then, insists on the distinctiveness of the human and social sciences but rejects a capitulation to total subjectivism or relativizing historicism. Social science relies on understanding of human motive in social contexts; he conceives of motive as the beliefs or values underlying action rather than a system of biological drives. Weber is therefore an exponent of an empirical and systematic hermeneutics that provides the essential elements for his reconstruction of institutions in their historicity. His methodological strictures, however, cannot be understood apart from his own empirical inquiries.

These inquiries are a singular amalgam of cultural and social analyses. In them the social organization, politics, and culture of the modern Western world are depicted as results of an irreversible process of rationalization. Behavior is controlled by explicit and formal norms, the person is legally separated from the function or office, and the relationship of ends to means is subject to continuous examination and revision. Rationalization makes possible an enormous expansion of market relationships and, therewith, the explosive productivity of the capitalist economy. The separation of market from community, household, and state is the work of modern law and lawyers. Bureaucracy, with its rules, is the opposite of a hindrance to economic development; it is its precondition.

In these arguments Weber is describing, of course, many of the processes others have termed secularization. Indeed, much modern analysis of secularization leads back to his work. His unmatched portrayal of the autonomy of modern social structures and his relentless critique of oversimplified notions of social conflict contributed to that systematic reinterpretation of Marxism that is one of the more enduring achievements of twentieth-century thought. Weber insists on the relatively restricted historical focus of Marxism and argues that the modern bureaucratic state (and ideologies like nationalism) has attenuated class conflict where it has not subordinated it to other social processes. The struggle of bureaucrats against citizens, he argues, is often as important as class conflict proper. Withal, his notion of the nature of social causation is far from linear. His structural approach to the history of institutions is infused with a large component of Social Darwinism. Society is a system of meanings imparted to routine and of legitimations attached to power. It is also the locus of perpetual conflict in which groups and nations struggle for their very existence.

It was in this intellectual framework that, despite his description of himself as "religiously unmusical," he undertook those studies of religion and society that still read as if they were new. He began with the studies of Protestantism exemplified but hardly terminated in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). It is not his intention, he writes, to oppose a one-sided idealistic interpretation of the rise of capitalism to an equally one-sided materialistic one. In fact, his work on Protestantism employs many of the sociological concepts later expanded in his studies of ancient Judaism, and of Chinese and Indian religions.

The analysis of the social identity of the bearers of Protestantism, the distinctive tasks imposed by its beliefs, and above all, the practical consequences drawn by Protestants from doctrine for the conduct of their lives, anticipates the recurrent elements of his sociology of religion. The idea of inner, worldly asceticism in The Protestant Ethic and of the pursuit of sanctification by ceaseless devotion to the world's work ultimately leads to the exquisitely passionate typology of paths to salvation that crowned his comparative studies.

Weber's early work on Protestantism places much emphasis on the differences between Calvinism and Lutheranism, the archetypical Protestant sects, and has much to say on Roman Catholicism as well. When Troeltsch, in his The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912), achieved what was for the time being a definitive sociology of Christianity, Weber sought more distant horizons. He began to study the "universal historical relationship of religion and society." He dealt with prophets and priests in ancient Judaism, with the alternation and fusion of world rejection and world affirmation in Buddhism and Hinduism, with Mandarin rationality and Daoist pantheism in China, and with much else as well. He contrasted the religions of virtuosi with those of popular strata and explored the world religions' very different consequences for communal life, economic system, and political structure. He examined their origins in the psychological response to social conflict, considered their compromises with social constraints, and showed how religions generated entire systems of belief and value, indeed, how they gave institutional structure and cultural content to civilizations.

Weber's studies of the world religions, like his work on Protestantism, reflect his spiritual critique of modern culture. The world religions were theodicies, and in general attempted to answer the implacable questions of human existence. They sometimes affirmed their worlds, sometimes rejected them, and invariably formed them. Some believers thought of themselves as active instruments of the supernatural and others as passive vessels of divinity. All struggled against accident and appearance and sought the essence of things. Religions invariably conflicted with the concrete structures of existence, with family and the state, with economic forces, and with the immediate demands of sexuality. The "disenchantment of the world" effected by Calvinism also banished from the world the metaphysical pathos of religion. Contemporary bureaucratic and capitalist society is calculable and efficient. It is also without poetry and speaks only banal prose. Religious revivals, because inauthentic, are bound to fail. The substitute religions of aesthetics and sexuality in the modern world cannot perform the moral functions of the historical religions. In any event, they are baubles for the intelligentsia, not doctrines that can move nations. The West's course of cultural and social development is indeed unique, but it is impossible not to be skeptical about its ultimate value. Contemplation of the world religions can teach one stoicism about his or her own fate and admiration for the deep spirituality of other civilizations. The refusal of artificial spirituality and of nostalgia is the necessary corollary of the political attitude that Weber so favors. His ethic of responsibility is a piece of residual Protestantism, a determination to do the work of the world even when that world is brutal, corrupt, or merely profane.

Weber's influence on modern thought is ecumenical and large; it is also contradictory. Thinkers as different as Raymond Aron, Georg Lukàcs, Karl Mannheim, and Carl Schmitt have fashioned or refashioned his ideas to suit their purposes. His comparative and historical work influenced the Annales school in France well before World War II. The initial introduction of Weber's thought into the United States was the work of the reflective political economist G. A. Frank Knight. The European émigrés of the 1930s not only brought Weber with them, but they also brought the world of thought (and politics) that rendered his work significant. Talcott Parson's reading of Weber was, by contrast, narrow and even tendentious. Among the American social scientists who have both grasped and extended Weber's legacy are Robert N. Bellah, Reinhard Bendix, Clifford Geertz, Alvin Gouldner, and C. Wright Mills. Not surprisingly, American Protestant theologians such as H. Richard Niebuhr and Reinhold Niebuhr and historians such as Perry Miller have recognized the implications of Weber's oeuvre for their evaluation of the fate of the churches in the New World. They (with, to be sure, many of their Continental counterparts) have developed Weber's ideas for purposes true to one of Weber's main intentions: the self-critique of Protestantism.

Bibliography

A new edition of Max Weber's complete works began publication in Tübingen in 1984 under the general title Gesamtausgabe. Of the following lists, the first consists of English translations of those works by Weber most relevant to the study of religion; the second provides an extremely abbreviated selection of secondary works on Weber in English.

Works by Weber

The Religion of China. Edited and translated by Hans H. Gerth. Glencoe, Ill., 1951.

Ancient Judaism. Edited and translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, Ill., 1952.

The Religion of India. Edited and translated by Hans H. Gerth and Don Martindale. Glencoe, Ill., 1958.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons. New York, 1958.

The Sociology of Religion. Translated by Ephraim Fischoff. Boston, 1963.

Economy and Society. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich; translated by Ephraim Fischoff et al. Berkeley, 1978.

Critical Studies

Antoni, Carlo. From History to Sociology. Detroit, 1959.

Aron, Raymond. Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 2. Garden City, N. Y., 1970.

Baumgarten, Eduard, ed. Max Weber: Werk und Person. Tübingen, 1964.

Bendix, Reinhard. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. Garden City, N. Y., 1960.

Bendix, Reinhard, and Guenther Roth. Scholarship and Partisanship. Berkeley, Calif., 1971.

Fleischmann, Eugène. "De Weber à Nietzsche," Archives européennes de sociologie 5 (1964): 190–238.

Freund, Julien. The Sociology of Max Weber. New York, 1968.

Jaspers, Karl. Max Weber. 2d ed. Bremen, 1946.

Käsler, Dirk. Einführung in das Studium Max Webers. Munich, 1979.

Löwith, Karl. "Max Weber und Karl Marx." Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft 67 (1932): 53–99.

Mitzman, Arthur. The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber. New York, 1969.

Parsons, Talcott. The Structure of Social Action. 2d ed. New York, 1966.

Stammer, Otto, ed. Max Weber and Sociology Today. New York, 1971.

Schluchter, Wolfgang. The Rise of Western Rationalism. Berkeley, Calif., 1981.

Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography. New York, 1975.

Wrong, Dennis, ed. Max Weber. Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1970.

New Sources

Berlinerblau, Jacques. "Max Weber's Useful Ambiguities and the Problem of Defining 'Popular Religion.'" Journal of the American Academy of Religion 69/3 (2001): 605–626.

Brubaker, Rogers. The Limits of Rationality and an Essay on the Social Moral Thought of Max Weber. St. Leonards, Australia, 1984.

Buss, Andrea. "The Concept of Adequate Causation and Max Weber's Comparative Sociology of Religion." British Journal of Sociology 50/2 (1999): 317–329.

Kasler, Dirk. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Translated by Phillipa Hurd. Chicago, 1988.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism. Los Angeles, 1995.

Norman Birnbaum (1987)

Revised Bibliography