Sociology of Max Weber - Essay Example

Running head: Max Weber Max Weber [The of the appears here] [The of appears here] Introduction Over the last decade, there has been a quiet revolution in the interpretation of the sociology of Max Weber. The key to these changes has been the disappearance of the obsession with the theme of Marx versus Weber. The gradual erosion in the importance of French Marxism over English social science paved the way for more interesting and more relevant interpretations of Weber. There is now a greater appreciation of the range and depth of Weberian sociology. These intellectual changes have been further enhanced by the political erosion of organized Communism in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Weber's critique of the problems of socialism as an approach to the management of the economy looks increasingly relevant and insightful (Holton and Turner 1989, p 34-45). Two intellectual results have followed from these changes. First, there is a tendency to see Marx and Weber as complementary rather than as alternative social theorists; the second development has been to see Weber's scientific interests on a far broader plane. When these two interpretive changes coalesce, Marx and Weber are seen as complementary theorists of the cultural processes of modernization (Sayer 1991, p 12-14). Thus, the Protestant ethic thesis is seen as a major contribution to the sociological study of the socio-cultural forces which have produced the modern world. The City is a book by Max Weber, a German economist and sociologist. It was published posthumously in 1921 and in 1924 incorporated in larger book, the Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. An English translation was made in 1958 and several editions have been released since then. It is likely that Weber compiled that research in 1911-1913, although it contains materials he found before that time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_(book) Weber was so profoundly ambivalent about the rational character of the modern world; his ambiguities anticipated some aspects of the confrontation between modernity and post-modernity (Holton and Turner 1989). These issues are now seen to be at the centre rather than the periphery of Weber's historical sociology, which should be treated as a global inquiry into the cultural conditions and consequences of the processes of modernization. It is, of course, not entirely legitimate to use the term 'modernization' to describe Weber's interests, but we can regard his discussion of the processes of rationalization, disenchantment, bureaucratization and regulation as broadly standing for an analysis of modernization. Weber's historical sociology attempted to expose the roots of modernization in the life-orders, cultural traditions and ethics, which were the consequences of the rationalization of the ethical systems of the world religions. Of course, within the context of these contemporary interpretations, the attempt to develop a sharp opposition between Marx and Weber looks in retrospect especially artificial and inappropriate. Weber was quite obviously and openly influenced by Marx's sociology. Another development which has influenced the ways in which contemporary sociologists perceive the relationship between Marx's historical materialism and Weber's historical sociology has been a new emphasis on the early writings of Weber. An examination of Weber's early work, on economic organization in the Middle Ages, the importance of Roman agricultural organization for legal relations, and the economic organization of East Elbian Germany and its political implications for the state, forces us to a number of important conclusions. First, there is the issue of treating Weber as a 'founding father' of sociology, because his research was profoundly shaped by interdisciplinary issues, but especially by economic questions (Tribe 1989, p 142-143). Second, the early Weber approached social science problems with the conceptual apparatus of Marx, especially the emphasis on class struggle and relations of production. Finally, these works show that Weber operated within a historical scheme in which transitions from the traditional economy to capitalism were seen to be the key features of world history. History is no longer characterized by a grand design; as an antidote, Weber attempted to develop a modest ethical code around the idea of a vocation in science, whereby some form of intellectual honesty might be developed (Lassman and Velody 1989, p 132). Weber rejected the idea that it was still possible to embrace traditional religious codes, but he also rejected the prophetic romanticism of Stefan George, the eroticism of Otto Gross, and the psychoanalytical solutions of Freudianism. Although Weber embraced the idea of either politics or science as a realistic vocation in a post-Christian Europe, his attitude towards 'the world' remained highly conditional and pessimistic. His life orientation was part of a broad movement of Kulturpessimismus (Kalberg 1987). This fatalism in Weberian sociology (Turner 1981) is rather far removed from Marx's revolutionary optimism that socialism would be a consequence of the structural contradictions of capitalism, and that socialism could generate a new set of values and institutions which will finally destroy the alienation of man. We are very familiar with Weber's negative critique of socialist planning as a system which would reinforce rather than remove alienation; socialist rationality was merely yet another version of a more general process of rationalization. The result was that Weber was hostile to any notion of historical teleology; he developed instead a developmental history of major social change (Roth and Schluchter 1979, p 123-27). The second area of irreducible difference lies in the fields of epistemology and methodology. For Weber, scientific concepts were at best approximations to real social processes which we attempt to understand by an inevitable simplification through abstraction. The creation of Weber's famous 'ideal types' in sociological theory represented his idea that sociological theory develops by attempting to elaborate more general and sophisticated typologies of social relationships. Weber was overtly committed to what is occasionally referred to as 'methodological individualism', because he was critical of any reification of concepts such as 'Society' or 'Economy'. The holistic concepts of social science referred ultimately to social actions and social relationships. In principle, although not always in practice (Turner 1977, p 111-13), Weber adhered to a view of human knowledge in which theory building is crucial to the development of human understanding of social relations; the methods of the natural sciences were not immediately or exclusively relevant to the social sciences, which by contrast had to adopt an interpretive methodology for understanding the meaning of social actions. These philosophical principles led Weber to be very sceptical about the scientific value of such notions as 'laws' of historical change, inevitable processes in history, and about the objective status of ideas like 'capitalism' or 'feudalism' (Scaff 1984). The third area of divergence which remains is that of substantive social theory. Although much ink has been spilt over what constitutes the core of either Marx or Weber (Honigsheim 1968; Lwith 1982; Sica 1988; Mommsen 1989), it is difficult to approach Weber's sociology without giving significance to the themes of power, domination and authority in his work as a whole. In broad terms, Weber was concerned to understand how power is constituted and organized in human societies. These issues of domination, social conflict and power struggles were an important feature of his historical sociology, which treated all political formations as formations of violence. In part, this emphasis on power as violence was a feature of the Nietzsche legacy (Stauth and Turner 1988). The analysis of city consists of many different subjects - including study of religion (especially Protestantism), history of development of democracy in Western Europe. Weber argues that the development of cities in European culture (Occidental cities) as autonomous associations with its own municipal officials was influenced by: Religion of Christianity Privileged legal position of the citizens (based upon citizen's obligation for military service) Decline of religious sanctions of kinship solidarity that facilitated creation of unified urban community That made the city's population easily influenced by later ideas of the Reformers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_(book) Weber conceptualized power in terms of a number of key dimensions: military, economic, political and symbolic. It was thus possible for Weber to ask of any social group or society: who controls the means of violence; who enjoys a monopoly over economic resources; who controls the legitimate means of political power; and finally who has control over symbolic force Because these dimensions are relatively autonomous, the history of any given society is a complex and unstable struggle between various classes or strata to dominate these fields of power, and where possible to combine and to consolidate these dimensions into a single ensemble of power relationsWeber's views on the importance of a strong German state and an effective German economy were developed in some detail in his Freiburg inaugural address of 1895 (Tribe 1989a), where he criticized the cosmopolitanism of Manchester economics and argued that political economy had to be German political economy. Furthermore, economic expansion required political imperialism, and thus Weber's 'Freiburg address was the impetus for the rise of liberal imperialism in Wilhelmine Germany' (Mommsen 1984:71). Because Weber believed that political and economic space was limited, competition would become more violent and general as capitalism developed. Political economy suggested not a beneficial hidden hand of the economy producing more wealth, but what Weber called an 'eternal struggle' for elbow room. Weber therefore saw Germany faced with a stark choice between either a world capitalist power which would have to be based on nationalism and imperialism, or a reactionary alliance between the Junkers in the rural estates of the east, the Army and the Grossbrgertum, to produce a stagnant socio-economic system. It was in the context of these difficult options that, according to Mommsen's interpretation, Weber came to embrace the idea of 'plebiscitary democracy' as the best political option for German leadership. The implications of this approach to Weberian sociology are clearly radical. By giving proper weight to the impact of Nietzsche on Weber, Hennis has raised serious questions about the description of Weber as a 'sociologist' who was committed to the separation of values and science in the quest for an objective science of social action. Hennis' reading of Weber's 'central question' has important implications for how we approach Weber's sociology as a whole, even when Weber appears to be writing as a 'conventional' economic sociologist. Let us take, once more, Weber's Freiburg Inaugural Address of 1895. For Hennis, when Weber refers to economics as a 'science of man', he was not talking about economic theory in its modern, technical sense, as the study, for example, of marginal utilities. For Weber, economics as a science of man involved the study of the relationship between social 'conditions of existence' and the quality or 'virtue' of man. Weber's 'universal history' was thus the study of human action. However, Weber's views on ethics here were thoroughly grounded in Nietzsche. They were organized around the question: how can spiritual values survive the onslaught of modernization in the shape of capitalism and state bureaucracy Hennis, therefore, argues that, even when Weber appears to be writing about issues which are far removed from the question of the ethical development of Menschentum, he was in fact addressing his 'central question', which involved an 'anthropological' analysis of the relationship between 'personality and life-orders'. Modern interpretations of Weber, which use Nietzsche to redefine him as a cultural theorist of life-orders, or more conventionally to redefine Weber as a theorist of the will to power in order either directly or indirectly to show that he was not a sociologist, have not grasped the full implications of the challenge to modern social sciences of Nietzsche's philosophy. Nietzsche obviously had very profound implications for the many ways in which we might read the Frankfurt School, or Sigmund Freud, or Michel Foucault (Stauth and Turner 1988). It is not simply sociology which comes under scrutiny, but the whole idea of the sciences of 'Man', the humanities, and the natural sciences as a consequence of Nietzsche's critique. Nietzsche as a critic is an equally profound challenge to the idea of economics or political theory as a coherent discourse, an ancient tradition or an object of analysis. Perhaps only Habermas, who apparently has got Weber wrong, has fully understood the depth of the question posed by Nietzsche against conventional conceptions of the sciences, their divisions, privileges, audiences and self-legitimizing symbols, but Habermas may also have identified the central problem of post-modern criticisms of conventional or rational versions of truth. For Habermas, writers like Foucault are caught in the paradox of a 'performative contradiction', that is they are forced to use the tools of reason to mount an attack on reason itself. The same problem in general confronts postmodernism in social theory. Most post-modern accounts of the grand narratives of western reason, such as the account by Lyotard (1986), are forced to depend on modernist versions of history to show how modernity is, for example, an effect of capitalist imperialism and economic development (Turner 1990a). The question is: is it possible to have a post-modern account of the character of postmodernism Although the post-modern critique of the Habermasian notion of consensus is clearly profound, Habermas' logical criticism of the assumptions of postmodernism is equally damaging. The consequence is that the full implications of the Nietzsche legacy for the very possibility of a social science are unclear, and therefore open to debate. What is clear is that if the Nietzschian Weber can be used as an attack on sociology, then perspectivism and post-modern deconstructionism are equally problematic for political theory and economics. Basically nobody is safe. There might, however, be a modest, eleventh-hour defence of sociology which could be undertaken through an ironic defence of Talcott Parsons By the end of his career, Parsons had in any case been subject to a number of fundamental criticisms from conflict theory, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism. Turning to more specific issues, we might note first that in The Structure of Social Action, Parsons (1937), in criticizing the positivistic basis of utilitarian economic theory did not assimilate Weberian sociology to an empiricist tradition in American sociology. On the contrary, Parsons himself remained committed to a theoretical explication of the fundamental problems in sociology. Parsons gave full prominence to Weber's contribution to the foundation of the sociology of religion, and recognized the importance of Weber's treatment of the various 'solutions' to the salvational drive in theodicy. Third, because Parsons was also fully committed to an understanding of the 'human condition' in his later sociology where he came to an analysis of death, life as an exchange or gift, and the contemporary problems of religion in providing meaning in a secular world, there may be a convergence between Weber's understanding of 'the conditions of existence' of ethical life and Parsons' final analysis of action and the human condition (Holton and Turner 1986). When Parsons attempted to analyse the complex relationships between culture, social relations and personality, and in particular when he examined how different patterns of socialization produced different types of personality, was this activity in any way essentially different from Weber's analysis of personality and life-orders In short, the sociological interpretation of Parsons' work is in need of as much renewal as we have seen in contemporary approaches to Weber's work. One crucial problem for the nature of sociology in relation to other social science disciplines is a contradiction between treating sociology as a special discipline with its own topic (such as the analysis of 'the social') and regarding sociology as a synthesis of social sciences (especially politics, economics and anthropology). This dilemma was never resolved in the work of Parsons. On the one hand, because Parsons was involved in creating a viable department of interdisciplinary research and teaching on social relations, he was inclined to see sociology as a synthesis of research on the social system which had economic, political, cultural and psychological sub-systems or dimensions. The task of sociology is to provide a general understanding of the various prerequisites (specifically the allocative and integrative requirements) of the social system, which involve exchanges between various sub-systems. On the other hand, Parsons felt the need to create, protect and defend the 'new' discipline of sociology in the context of interdisciplinary. In this latter respect, sociology was regarded as merely a special case of theories of action, where the special domain of sociology was the analysis of the cultural integration of the social system through such processes as integration and socialization. To put this in another perspective, we can either approach Parsons as a social theorist whose original attempt to rewrite economic theory brought him, via an analysis of sociology, to an interdisciplinary analysis of social systems, or we can regard Parsons as a theoretical sociologist whose commitment to a general theory of social action forced him to take full cognizance of the contributions of political theory, psychoanalysis, economic science, cybernetics and anthropology. In both cases, however, it is impossible to think about Parsons as offering a narrow defence of sociology which excluded openness to other disciplines. In addition, Parsons' scientific interest was not even limited to the social sciences, since he retained an active interest in biology, medical science, theology, cybernetics and psychoanalysis; these broader interests became part of his general orientation to scientific work. In this perspective, our inability to place Weber within any single discipline is matched by our inability to place Parsons squarely either in sociology or interdisciplinary social sciences. Of course, there is a well-known objection to any attempt to draw parallels between Weber and Parsons which falls into two related arguments. There is the well-known argument that Parsons was, as a structural-functionalist, unable to explain, or possibly even to understand, social change, because he had no adequate appreciation of social conflict. There is the additional objection to Parsons that he had a naively optimistic view of the possibilities of social stability in advanced industrial societies, partly because his view of human psychology was based on an over socialized concept of man. Both of these objections are related to the fact that, while Weber drew his intellectual and moral inspiration from Marx and Freud, Parsons was more influenced by Durkheim, Kroeber, Malinowski and Kant. Where Parsons did incorporate Freud, it is alleged that he converted Freud's cultural critique of the discontents of modern civilization into a bland, conformist theory of socialization. There has been a profound reorientation in the exegesis of Weber's sociology, which has involved an examination of the relationship between Nietzsche and Weber. These contemporary interpretations have often involved a rejection of the Parsonian analysis of Weber as an interpretive sociologist of social action, and occasionally they have gone further to suggest that Weber was not a sociologist at all. While these strategies in my view illegitimately downgrade the status of Economy and Society, they also involve a serious misunderstanding of Parsons' sociology. More importantly, they neglect the implications of Nietzsche for their own interpretive standpoint. Perspectivism is a two-edged sword, because it may be that the whole of social science, and not just sociology, is brought into question by Nietzsche's prophetic and ecstatic 'joyous science'. We can either go down the path of deconstruction, but we have no idea what the consequences might be, or we can attempt some modest defence of traditional social science disciplines and their divisions. Reference: Holton R J. and Turner, B.S. (1989), Max Weber on Economy and Society. 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(1991) Capitalism and Modernity, an Excursus on Marx and Weber. (London: Routledge). Scaff, L.A. (1984), 'Weber before Weberian sociology'. British Journal of Sociology, 35, pp. 190-215. Sica, A. (1988), Weber, Irrationality and Social Order. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Simmel, G. (1978), The Philosophy of Money. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Stauth, G. and Turner, B.S. (1988), Nietzsche's Dance, Resentment, Reciprocity and Resistance in Social Life. (Oxford: Blackwell). Tribe, K. (ed.) (1989), Reading Weber. (London: Routledge). Turner, B.S. (1977), 'the structuralise critique of Weber's Sociology'. British Journal of Sociology, 28(1) pp. 1-16. Turner, B.S. (1981), For Weber, Essays on the Sociology of Fate. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Turner, B.S. (1984), The Body and Society, Explorations in Social Theory. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). Turner, B.S. (1988), Status: Milton Keynes. (Open University Press). Turner, B.S. (ed.) (1990), Theories of Modernity and Post-modernity. (London: Sage). Read More