The Emerald Guide To Max Weber [1 ed.] 1787691926, 9781787691926, 1787691896, 9781787691896, 1787691918, 9781787691919

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Chapter 1 Weber in Context
Chapter 2 Weber: Life, Career, and Politics
Chapter 3 Studies in Property, Finance, and Class
3.1. Roman Agriculture and Medieval Trade
3.2. Agricultural Workers in Eastern Germany
3.3. The Stock and Commodity Exchange
Chapter 4 A Methodology for the Social Sciences
4.1. Sociology and Social Science
4.2. Social Policy and Cultural Values
4.3. A Critique of Historical Economics
4.4. Theory and Concept Formation
4.5. Interpretive Sociology
Chapter 5 Religion, Spirit, and Modern Capitalism
5.1. The Capitalist Spirit and Capitalist Activity
5.2. Origins of the Protestant Ethic
5.3. Emergence of the Capitalist Spirit
5.4. The Ensuing Debate
Chapter 6 Comparative and Historical Explorations
6.1. The Historical and Comparative Basis
6.2. The Economy and Social Groups
6.3. Domination, Authority, and Political Groups
6.4. The Legal Order
6.5. Urban Communities
6.6. Religious Groups and Roles
6.7. The Cultural Order: Music
Chapter 7 Economic Ethics of the World Religions
7.1. Religious Orientation to the World
7.2. Chinese Patrimonialism and Confucian Traditionalism
7.3. Indian Caste and Hindu Traditionalism
7.4. Ancient Palestine and a Prophetic Code
Chapter 8 Sociology and Political Domination
8.1. Basic Concepts of Sociology
8.2. Stratification, Domination, and the State
8.3. Parliamentary Politics and the Bourgeoisie
8.4. The Scientist and Social Policy
Chapter 9 Economy, Society, and Capitalist Development
9.1. Economic Sociology
9.2. Development of Western Capitalism
9.3. The Material Side of the Capitalist Spirit
Chapter 10 Weber’s Legacy
Appendix 1: Conspectus of Weber’s Works in English
Abbreviations
Appendix 2: Sources and Further Reading
Chapters 1 and 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Appendix 3. Collected Works in German
Index

Citation preview

THE EMERALD GUIDE TO MAX WEBER

Emerald Guides to Social Thought Series Editor: John Scott The Emerald Guides to Social Thought are a series of student-oriented guides to major thinkers on social issues. Each book is an authoritative primer that takes the reader through the key ideas of a thinker in order to provide a firm foundation for an independent reading of primary texts, for engagement with the secondary literature, and for reading contemporary extensions and elaborations of those ideas. The Guides demonstrate the mind of the theorist at work by tracing the development of that thought through successive texts or by elucidating the various topics to which they have been applied. Emerald Guides place the work of a thinker in the context of her or his life and times. Substantive and comprehensive chapters on key issues are followed by full guides to sources of information and translation that provide a clear ‘map’ of the thinker’s intellectual development, and to major items of commentary, debate, and application of their ideas. The Guides are uniquely authoritative and accessible and provide the foundations of a scholarly library that allow the reader to develop his or her own ideas regarding influential thinkers and theorists.

THE EMERALD GUIDE TO MAX WEBER BY

JOHN SCOTT

United Kingdom North America Japan India Malaysia China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2019 Copyright r 2019 John Scott. Published under an exclusive licence. Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78769-192-6 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-78769-189-6 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78769-191-9 (Epub)

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CONTENTS

1. Weber in Context

1

2. Weber: Life, Career, and Politics

13

3. Studies in Property, Finance, and Class 3.1. Roman Agriculture and Medieval Trade 3.2. Agricultural Workers in Eastern Germany 3.3. The Stock and Commodity Exchange

27 28 33 36

4. A Methodology for the Social Sciences 4.1. Sociology and Social Science 4.2. Social Policy and Cultural Values 4.3. A Critique of Historical Economics 4.4. Theory and Concept Formation 4.5. Interpretive Sociology

41 42 46 50 53 56

5. Religion, Spirit, and Modern Capitalism 5.1. The Capitalist Spirit and Capitalist Activity 5.2. Origins of the Protestant Ethic 5.3. Emergence of the Capitalist Spirit 5.4. The Ensuing Debate

63 65 67 73 74

6. Comparative and Historical Explorations 6.1. The Historical and Comparative Basis 6.2. The Economy and Social Groups 6.3. Domination, Authority, and Political Groups 6.4. The Legal Order 6.5. Urban Communities 6.6. Religious Groups and Roles 6.7. The Cultural Order: Music

v

77 80 83 92 99 103 106 114

Contents

vi

7.

Economic Ethics of the World Religions 7.1. Religious Orientation to the World 7.2. Chinese Patrimonialism and Confucian Traditionalism 7.3. Indian Caste and Hindu Traditionalism 7.4. Ancient Palestine and a Prophetic Code

119 122 125 129 131

8.

Sociology and Political Domination 8.1. Basic Concepts of Sociology 8.2. Stratification, Domination, and the State 8.3. Parliamentary Politics and the Bourgeoisie 8.4. The Scientist and Social Policy

135 138 148 154 157

9.

Economy, Society, and Capitalist Development 9.1. Economic Sociology 9.2. Development of Western Capitalism 9.3. The Material Side of the Capitalist Spirit

161 163 169 174

10. Weber’s Legacy

179

Appendix 1: Conspectus of Weber’s Works in English

185

Appendix 2: Sources and Further Reading

193

Appendix 3: Collected Works in German

205

Index

209

CHAPTER 1 WEBER IN CONTEXT

Max Weber has been claimed by many disciplines as ‘their’ pioneer, founder, or key contributor. He has been variously described as a sociologist, an economic historian, or a political theorist, and he has been seen as an important contributor to central concerns in such areas as legal studies, religious history, and the study of education. This diversity of claims is matched by Weber’s own reluctance to identify with any particular discipline. He held university posts in economics and in social studies, but spent large periods of his life as an independent scholar with no disciplinary or institutional affiliation. He was, for a time, a member of the German Sociological Society, helping to organise its attempts to establish sociological study and research, but he was ambivalent in his commitment and eventually gave up his membership. Although he came to describe his final academic publication as his ‘sociology’, he regarded this simply as one part of his wider intellectual concerns. His work was, indeed, wide-ranging. He wrote on Roman history, Chinese religion, political democracy, Western musical harmony, agrarian property, Indian caste systems, forms of legal partnership, the operation of stock exchanges, 1

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the Russian revolutions, and many other matters. His particular concern throughout his life was to understand the origins and distinctive features of modern, Western societies in all their complexity and to contrast this with an understanding of the development of oriental societies. He is, perhaps, best regarded simply as writing in ‘social science’, the branch of intellectual endeavour for which he devised a solid methodological foundation. This designation allows him to be claimed by all who wish to learn from his achievements, and it allows those achievements to be seen in an interdisciplinary context that accords with contemporary developments in academic life. The influences on Weber’s work were as diverse as his own writings. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, German intellectual life was sustained and disseminated by an academically trained body of state officials, church ministers, lawyers, and, above all, university professors, who regarded themselves as a ‘cultivated’ elite able to contribute to the highest aspects of human existence through their cultural activities. The basis of their shared worldview was the idealist philosophy and social theory that had been derived from Immanuel Kant’s philosophy by Georg Hegel, Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich von Schiller, and Friedrich Schelling. At the heart of this idealist system of thought was the claim that the categories, meanings, and values that are the essential conditions for human knowledge are not simply subjective properties of individual minds but are objectively real and valid. These ‘ideas’ are logically necessary in order for there to be any knowledge at all and so had to be seen as something more than simply an individual’s subjective preference or point of view. This led to the claim that they exist as aspects of the ‘objective mind’ or ‘objective spirit’, a view that could all-too-easily be given a religious or metaphysical interpretation as forming a national spirit or ‘soul’.

Weber in Context

3

Idealism became the organising principle for the foundation in 1870 of the University of Berlin by Wilhelm von Humboldt, himself a contributor to the development and articulation of many of its key tenets. The University, with a Philosophy Faculty at its centre, became the model for all subsequent new universities and university reforms. These were the intellectual influences that shaped Weber’s family background and his early academic career in the final decades of the nineteenth century as Germany experienced a period of rapid social change. A strong and influential university-trained intellectual bourgeoisie existed alongside a weak economic bourgeoisie that had emerged with the slow German industrial growth of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This class was politically weak, control over state power being monopolised by the landowning Junker class. From around 1870, a much more rapid industrialisation had begun and there was a growth in large-scale undertakings, resulting in social dislocations as well as economic advances. This new bourgeois class of large financiers and industrialists became more influential in government and the state administration, where they asserted their particular economic interests. Weber was one of the generation of German intellectuals who felt that the consequences of economic growth were threatening the values that lay at the heart of German culture. Many of these intellectuals took a rather conservative view of German culture and allied themselves with the Junkers in opposition to the power of the large capitalists. Their selfdoubt about classical liberal principles led them to support the centrist and interventionist policies of the Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Through the National Liberal party they took a conservative and nationalist position. Others, including Weber, took a more radical view and looked to a strengthening of parliamentary control over

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government and hoped for a Reichstag that would no longer be dominated by a narrow expression of sectional class interests but would have a power base in political parties led by stronger and more mature bourgeois leaders. Those who took this more progressive view saw a need to adapt to mass politics through social reform in order for their cultural concerns to be met and for the economic advances already made to be secured. This gave them a particular stance on intellectual matters. Idealism had given an ‘historical’ orientation to all the human disciplines. These Geisteswissenschaften the spiritual disciplines or cultural studies were first characterised by Hegel and were given their clearest formulation by Wilhelm Dilthey in the 1880s. It was Dilthey who formulated a method of ‘hermeneutics’, according to which human phenomena had to be understood in their larger cultural and historical context and as the outcome of a historical process. This approach had been taken by the historian Leopold von Ranke, who held that the historian must describe past events and periods in their own terms and not by present-day standards. Events must be understood in their specific historical context the historian seeing a situation as the participants saw it and as they interpreted and understood it. This method proposed that economic activities, laws, and religious doctrines should all be studied in relation to an unfolding development of the values contained in and defining the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ of a people. This orientation was closely allied with the view that the soul of the German people the Volksgeist required its expression in distinctive national institutions rather than through the separate and fragmented principalities and kingdoms among which German people were still divided until 1871. Historical studies saw each phase of a people’s development as necessarily shaped by their expression of the inner

Weber in Context

5

spirit of their culture in an ‘objectified’ external form as distinctive social institutions. The philosopher Heinrich Rickert stressed that this objectification of a national spirit had to be seen as driven by the cultural values to which individuals were related by virtue of their membership of a particular, historically defined people. Historical change was seen as a progressive development towards an ever-more perfect expression of the spirit of the people. This approach pervaded the studies that Weber undertook as a student and scholar, and he came to know many of the key figures, even as he developed a critical attitude towards their work. Weber came to reject any idea of a collective soul or spirit, arguing instead that the culture of a society is something shared by the members of a population and is contained only in their individual minds. It was, therefore, to the individual that Weber looked as the creator of values and the force behind social life and historical developments. In taking this individualistic approach, he was close to both earlier idealists such as Johann von Goethe and contemporary philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche. Weber was especially concerned to arrive at an appropriate methodology for all the social sciences, and it was his connections with progressive philosophical colleagues in Heidelberg that helped him to develop these ideas. Rickert, together with Emil Lask and Wilhelm Windelband, had returned to a Kantain basis for idealism, and Weber drew on this in his early view of the cultural sciences seeing them now as what would today be referred to as the humanities from which he saw the social sciences emerging. Weber’s approach to economics was firmly rooted in the arguments of the historical school that began with writers such as Friedrich List and had been developed into an orthodoxy by Wilhelm Roscher, Karl Knies, and Bruno Hildebrand. He was, however, particularly influenced by a

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younger generation of more progressive intellectuals who had revised the historical approach by rejecting much of its emphasis on the idea of a national soul expressed in economic activity. Gustav von Schmoller and Lujo Brentano, for example, stressed simply the need to understand economic phenomena as embedded in their particular, historically specific, social and cultural context. Weber was, however, also influenced by English political economy and, in particular, by the strongly individualistic and analytical approach that was being developed from this by Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in Austria. Menger’s ideas had proved controversial when introduced into the German intellectual mainstream, and the 1880s had been marked by a protracted Methodenstreit methods struggle between Menger and Schmoller. Weber’s work recognised the strengths of each position, and he came to temper Menger’s analytical abstractions with an awareness of the ways in which individual actions expressed subjective meanings and had a historical character. Weber’s view of the modern economy was also influenced by the growing number of socialist writers who took a Marxist view of the specifically ‘capitalist’ economy. Marxism and the labour movement had grown with the increasing scale of industrial activity and posed a growing challenge to the liberal and conservative political parties. While Weber rejected Marxist politics, he recognised the importance of Marx’s ideas on the class basis of the modern state and the role of class action in driving the development of the modern economy. Weber sought to understand modern economies as products of specific historical processes, but he recognised that this reflected the actions and decisions taken by concrete historical individuals and could not be reduced to the expression of a national soul. This led him to join the Verein für Sozialpolitik, founded by Schmoller, Brentano, and Adolph

Weber in Context

7

Wagner to promote policies of state intervention akin to the ‘New Liberalism’ that was developing in Britain. Their policies were to address social problems through collective action without advocating full-blown socialist solutions. Weber was concerned about enlarging the views of these socalled Kathedersozialisten ‘Socialists of the Chair’ by drawing on analytical economic theory to guide effective policies of social improvement and economic efficiency. The work that Weber undertook on politics and law was similarly rooted in idealist concerns. The prevailing view was that the purpose of political theory was to specify the ideal or perfect from of state appropriate to a particular historical time. The central idea was that of the ‘legal state’ (Rechtstaat), by which was meant a state that was to act not arbitrarily at the whim of a monarch but according to formal legal principles. The concern was to show how this could also be a ‘cultural state’ that acted according to ethical values. Johann Droysen had established a view of politics as concerned with the realisation of ethical ideals through power relations, and this approach had been taken forward by Heinrich von Treitschke and Wilhelm Roscher as the view that state policy is to be concerned with a pursuit of the ethical soul of the nation. In this vein, Roscher had posited an evolutionary development in political power in Germany from monarchy through aristocracy to democracy. Weber’s views had been shaped by Georg Jellinek’s critical reconstruction of this tradition. Jellinek, a professor at Heidelberg and later a colleague of Weber, had published his General Theory of State Law in 1900, arguing that the state must be seen simply as an association with the power to enact laws and that ethical considerations have no part to play in politics. This gave a sharper edge to Weber’s own views on social and economic policy and allowed him to develop a

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The Emerald Guide to Max Weber

positive theory of the state and a ‘realist’ theory of international power politics and political sovereignty. This point of view underlay Weber’s interventions in party politics. He was, however, as ambivalent in his political associations as he was in his disciplinary affiliations. Along with other progressive intellectuals such as Meinecke, Ferdinand Tönnies, Brentano, and his own brother Alfred, Weber was associated with the National Liberals and the Progressive Party in an attempt to find a middle way between conservative traditionalism and the Marxism of the Social Democratic Party. This brought him into contact with Friedrich Naumann’s Evangelical Social Union. Committed to both liberal principles and to German national interests, however, Weber could not identify with any one party. His concern for social questions later took him into association with, though not membership of, the Conservatives, the centrists, and the Social Democrats. Towards the end of his life he was, for a while, more closely associated with the German Democratic Party and sought parliamentary representation, but he was never one to regard himself as an uncritical supporter of any one party. It was Weber’s awareness of the historical embeddedness of economic, legal, and political phenomena in a social and cultural context that first brought him into contact with sociologists. Recognising the need to relate these phenomena to the interests, activities, and powers of the social groups that comprise a society, he looked to sociology for insights though he was dissatisfied with what he found. German sociology in the last part of the nineteenth century was dominated by the works of Albert Schäffle and Ludwig Gumplowicz, both of whom worked in the Franco-British traditions of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer and who had begun to have an international influence of their own. Both writers took the view that societies were real phenomena with

Weber in Context

9

distinctive characteristics of their own and with a greater or lesser degree of ‘functional’ integration. Weber encountered these ideas mainly through the contemporary works of Paul Barth in The Philosophy of History as Sociology and Pavel von Lilienfeld in Thoughts on the Social Science of the Future, both of whom integrated functionalist and evolutionist concerns into the German philosophy of history. It was their continued reliance on ideas of a collective national spirit that alienated Weber from this version of sociology. He was similarly isolated from the ethnology and social psychology that had begun with Adolf Bastian and was being pursued by Franz Müller-Lyer and Wilhelm Wundt. Weber was, however, more sympathetic to the emerging ideas of Tönnies in his Community and Association of 1887 and Georg Simmel in Philosophy of Money of 1900. Both writers explored the formal, impersonal, and associational character of modern economies and societies and so connected directly with Weber’s own concerns. Interest in sociological matters had flourished in the first decade of the twentieth century, thanks largely to the efforts of philosopher Martin Buber, who, advised by Simmel, edited a series of books on social studies that included Wernher Sombart’s The Proletariat, Simmel’s Religion, Tönnies’s Custom, and Franz Oppenheimer’s The State. Over the same period, Simmel published a number of analytical papers in sociology and brought these together in enlarged form in his Sociology of 1908. It was this growing interest in sociology that led Tönnies, Simmel, and Sombart to form the German Sociological Society in 1909. Each of the founders used their influence with Weber to induce him to join them. Despite his objections to the established forms of sociology, Weber recognised an intellectual connection with the three leaders of the new Society and he agreed to join it and to become an active member. Opposed to any confusion between a social science

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The Emerald Guide to Max Weber

and practical moral concern for social problems, Weber hoped that a professional association would establish sociology on a properly scientific basis. A failure within the Society to keep its academic concerns separate from discussion of practical moral reform led to Weber’s resignation after just two years of membership. He did, however, retain contacts with Sombart and Simmel, in particular, and came to accept the ‘sociological’ character of much of his own work. This led him closer to identifying with the subject in its period of expansion, holding a Chair in ‘Social Studies’ just a year or so before his death. In his own time, then, Weber refused all disciplinary labels. His posthumous publications were presented by his widow as contributions to sociology, and his reputation began to be made in that field as the discipline expanded during the 1920s. The growth of German sociology was, however, short-lived before its suppression under the Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s. Weber’s works appeared piecemeal in English, ensuring that he came to be known in the various disciplines that now claim him as ‘one of ours’. My purpose in this book is to discuss Weber’s work as a whole in order to convey the range of his concerns. My personal view is that everything that Weber wrote is sociological in the broad sense, but this reflects my particular understanding of sociology as the general social science. It is clear, however, that Weber still has much to offer to all who work and study in the social sciences and that his interdisciplinary approach is in accord with contemporary trends. The approach taken in this book is chronological and biographical. I have sought to follow the development of Weber’s ideas and interests over the course of his life and to convey an impression of how he developed his early ideas by widening and deepening them as his own understanding advanced. I begin, in Chapter 2, with a biographical account of Weber’s

Weber in Context

11

life and family background, including a consideration of the latest understanding of the complexity of his personality. Weber saw no distinction between his personal life and his academic life, and the readers of his work must have some understanding of the personal anxieties and political concerns that shaped it. Chapters 3 to 9 follow through the various stages in his work, from the foundational studies in economic and legal history, through the methodological reflections and his landmark study of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, to the extensive and sprawling working papers that he produced in preparation for a variety of studies and that were to eventually culminate in the posthumous publications that are regarded as his major achievements in the study of religion, political science, and economic sociology. Chapter 10 briefly outlines the reception of the legacy that Weber left for the social sciences.

CHAPTER 2 WEBER: LIFE, CAREER, AND POLITICS

Max Weber was formally named Karl Emil Maximilian Weber but was always known simply by the name Max. He was born in Erfurt in the eastern part of Prussia in 1864, where his paternal family was based. The families of both his parents were prosperous textile manufacturers and merchants who had been involved over a number of generations in international trade and operated from Hamburg and Frankfurt, with business and family connections to London, Manchester, Antwerp, and, further afield, in Argentina. Max’s father, also called Max, had become a lawyer and magistrate, though he had many important political associations through his family connections. Max’s mother, Helene, was the well-educated daughter of a prominent Berlin civil servant. Max was the first of their eight children. The family moved to Berlin while Max was still a young child and grew into adulthood in the affluent Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg. Max Weber senior had moved to Berlin when he had taken a civil service appointment, and he was soon after elected to both the Prussian Chamber of Deputies and the 13

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The Emerald Guide to Max Weber

German Reichstag. Politically, he stood on the conservative side of the National Liberal Party as a staunch supporter of Bismarck and the monarchy. In parliament, he took a special interest in cultural affairs and had close connections with a number of prominent writers and academics. The Weber children were, therefore, brought up in a domestic environment of lively political and intellectual debate frequent visitors to the Weber home were the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey and the historian Theodor Mommsen and Helene sought to complement this intellectualism with her own humanitarian religious convictions that were rooted in the pious Protestantism of her family. Her husband, however, had high expectations for his oldest son, who he saw as destined to be his professional and political successor. Max seems to have embraced this role and responded to his father’s demands by compulsive attempts to meet his expectations. As a result, he grew up with a strong commitment to his father’s political and intellectual concerns. Emotionally, however, Max was closer to his mother and was influenced by her in many personal respects. Though he did not share her religious ethic, he developed a stern and demanding conscience that informed the judgements he made of his own behaviour. He was confirmed into the German Lutheran Church, but in his youth he had rejected its close links with conservative militarism and aristocracy and its alignment with Kaiser Wilhelm II. Max took an independent line, stressing individual conscience and responsibility. He was, nevertheless, like his father, a realist in practical worldly matters and saw no place for moral or ethical considerations in political or economic life. As a child Max was introverted and self-absorbed. A serious bout of meningitis left him extremely nervous and anxious, and he developed phobias about chickens, sea bathing, and numerous other minor everyday phenomena. His shyness

Weber: Life, Career, and Politics

15

and clumsy manner made him unpopular with his school teachers, and he rapidly became bored with their classes, preferring to read independently in history, philosophy, and the classics. He became an obsessive perhaps autistic collector, compiler, and interpreter of historical information. Max’s intellectual interests eventually took him to Heidelberg University, where he followed in his father’s footsteps by studying law. He combined this with a study of national economics, the name by which political economy was generally known in Germany at this time, and this became a significant interest for him. He moved on to Berlin University after his foundation year, and became an active participant in student drinking and duelling activities, joining the same fraternities as his father had before him. His attempts to live up to the example set by his father earned him a slap on the face from his mother when he returned home at the end of term, overweight and with prominent duelling scars. In 1883, Max was called up for his compulsory national service in Strasbourg, the home city of his cousin and fellow student Otto Baumgarten. While in Strasbourg, he was drawn into the warm domestic life of the Baumgarten family and found this to be a considerable contrast with his own rather unsettling family life. He enjoyed free intellectual discussions with his uncle Hermann Baumgarten, Professor of History at Strasbourg University, and he developed a close personal relationship with Hermann’s daughter Emmy. His life with the Baumgartens marked the beginning of a partial detachment from his father’s political outlook and career expectations as he came to appreciate the need to temper immediate practicality with a more intellectual reflection on social issues. Despite this growing estrangement from his father, he was forced to return home in order to begin his studies for a

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doctorate. Specialising in state law and agrarian history, he completed his dissertation and passed his oral examination in 1889. The dissertation became the basis for a first professional publication, on the history of medieval trading companies in Italy. The possession of a doctorate enabled him to begin his planned legal career, though he followed this out of filial duty and it was far from satisfying to him. Weber did, however, find it somewhat attractive because of its practicality and because it set him on the road to financial independence. It was the sustained advice of his uncle Hermann that decided him on a change of direction, and he decided to risk the uncertainty inherent in an academic career in order to pursue his scholarly interests. A reading of Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kirkegaard, who emphasised the necessity for choice and resolute action, seems to have empowered him to choose this new career and to achieve independence from his father and the choices that his father had made for him. He began immediately to prepare for the Habilitation thesis that would qualify him for university teaching. Realising the incompatibility of his undergraduate lifestyle with the required academic study, he felt compelled to work hard obsessively hard in what he now regarded as his calling in life. He embraced the vocation of a scholar and consciously rejected the bourgeois luxury and comfort that he now associated with his father. While continuing to work towards the completion of his legal apprenticeship as a barrister, he simultaneously began working on a thesis on Roman agriculture and property law that would give him his entrée to a scholarly career. It was while juggling these commitments that he also became actively involved in politics and policy discussions. Weber had maintained a distance from both the National Liberals (NLP) and the Social Liberals (FVP), and by the 1880s, he was making common cause with economists who advocated

Weber: Life, Career, and Politics

17

state intervention to address issues of social justice and class disadvantage. It was this that had brought him into the Social Policy Association (Verein für Sozialpolitik), an association of economists, journalists, and businessmen that had been formed by Gustav von Schmoller to counter both laissez-faire and socialist policies and to devise new policies of social intervention. Hugo Thiel, a prominent National Liberal politician, had secured through the Department of Agriculture some research funding for Schmoller and Friedrich Althoff to oversee an Association study into agricultural work and rural migration. It may have been through his father that Weber was recruited as a reliable research assistant to evaluate and interpret the questionnaire returns, from which he produced a massive statistical report and a detailed interpretation of the situation in the East Elbian region. This involvement sharpened his political views, and for a while he tended towards a conservative and Christian Socialist stance on imperial and social issues, and in the election of 1890 he voted for the Conservative Party (DKP). This stance brought him into contact with Friedrich Naumann and his National Social Association (Nationalsozialen Verein), which he also joined. Working as a lawyer attached to the Berlin Court, Weber successfully completed his Habilitation dissertation in 1891 and his substantial contribution to the Social Policy Association study in the following year. On the strength of these achievements he was able to begin teaching at the University of Berlin, though he seems to have been appointed because of political support for him and this caused difficulty with the Faculty. Seeking to establish his credentials among his new colleagues, he took advantage of a considerable public concern over banking failures to produce studies of the stock exchange. These publications were well-enough received for him to be appointed to a Government Commission, and he rapidly consolidated his appointment to

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the new post of Professor of National Economy at Freiburg University. In this post he taught a course in ‘General Economics’, covering money, banking, and finance, as well as a course in commercial law, and in 1895 he delivered an influential inaugural lecture on German economic policy. In his Freiburg address, Weber argued that the German state remained in thrall to the feudal Junker class of landholders, who were a declining class but faced no significant political challenge from the other classes. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat, Weber felt, had the strength and political maturity to replace the Junkers, and so Weber rejected both the liberal and the socialist alternatives to Junker conservatism. German national power, he argued, could be developed only if the bourgeoisie could build the mature political outlook required for parliamentary democracy. Weber’s personal circumstances had altered greatly over the five years since he had completed his doctorate. He had never been able to express any depth of amorous attachment to Emmy Baumgarten, and their relationship had been interrupted by her depressive illness and the periods of treatment that she underwent in a sanatorium. Weber found it difficult to offer the kind of emotional support that might be needed for her recovery, and Emmy, too, felt that he should be released from their implied betrothal. Meanwhile, Marianne Schnitger, the great niece of his father, had been invited to live with the Weber family after the deaths of the grandparents who had brought her up. Max, some years her senior, had, in her own words, ‘uncled’ her when she arrived in the Weber home, but she nevertheless found herself attracted to him. With the support of Helene, she worked at developing a closer relationship. Having ended his troubled relationship with Emmy, Max succumbed to pressure from his family and courted Marianne, seeing marriage as yet another means to his own independence. Max and Marianne

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developed a growing intellectual intimacy and were married shortly before the career move to Freiburg. Weber began an intensive period of university teaching, but his time at Freiburg was short-lived. Karl Knies, Professor of Political Economy at Heidelberg, retired in 1896 and the great attention that Weber’s inaugural lecture had attracted led to his being invited to Heidelberg as Knies’s successor. After a summer vacation in England and Scotland, Weber threw himself into academic life at Heidelberg. He lectured, again, on ‘General Economics’ and also on the history of economics, while lecturing also at Mannheim and elsewhere. He developed wide interests that shaped his understanding of economics, working particularly closely with Georg Jellinek, Ernst Troeltsch, and Wilhelm Windelband, leading figures in law, theology, and philosophy, respectively. It was at this time that he began to form a concept of modern capitalism and of the course of its development in Europe. The summer of 1897 has been recognised as a major turning point in Weber’s life. He was frustrated at his lack of any political influence on German state policies and was unsure of his commitment to the routines of teaching, to the need to focus on purely economic subjects, and to the demands of academic management and university politics. Although he sought a grand academic project, he had no clear research agenda in view, and he threw himself into obsessively long preparations for his lectures. As a result, he felt under considerable strain and suffered from sleeping difficulties. Feelings of anxiety and depression were further compounded by major problems in his family life. During a visit that his parents made to his home in Heidelberg, Max found unbearable the authoritarian attitude of his father towards his mother. After a blazing row, Max ordered his father out of his home and broke off all personal contact. His father died less than a month later, leaving Max feeling an extreme guilt about this

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treatment of his father. His problems of anxiety, sleeplessness, and exhaustion worsened. This was the beginning of a very troubled period for Weber. Both Max and his brother Alfred found difficulty in sexual expression, and some commentators have suggested that the relationship of Max to Marianne was asexual. The latest research, however, points to their marriage as having been sexually satisfying for both of them in its first years. By 1897, however, Max was in a constant fear of recurring anxiety dreams, nocturnal emissions, and unwanted erections. Both he and Marianne recognised the symptoms of an illness, and Marianne recorded Max’s sexual problems in a diary. She regularly reported these problems to his mother, which may not have helped to settle his mind. Sleeplessness and anxiety were particularly difficult problems for someone who felt compelled to follow a rigid work discipline and was driven to meet his academic responsibilities to the full. The death of his father had unleashed a number of repressed tensions but also removed the inner pressure that he felt to work. Weber found any concentration on work becoming more and more difficult, and he spent many hours simply picking at his fingernails while Marianne tried to interest him in clay modelling and building blocks. It was in 1898 that Weber had a complete nervous breakdown, and the next two years were marked by periods of remission and convalescence and a stay in a mental hospital. Unable to keep up with the demands of his work, he sought a not-unwelcome release from his teaching commitments. This alleviated the guilt of not being able to meet his obligations to his students, and in 1903, he resigned from his professorship. Release from his employment and a subsequent inheritance gave him the freedom to live as a rentier and to pursue his research interests as a private scholar. He was able to

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rebuild his intellectual life though not, in all probability, his married life. He continued to live in Heidelberg and worked with the intellectual support and comradeship of Marianne. Both seem to have sublimated their sexuality in their academic work. Weber read widely in history and philosophy and began to read further into sociology. He began working on a number of methodological ideas on ‘understanding’ the meaning of action and on the ‘ideal types’ that were to be employed in historical investigations. This route back into research and publication was given shape by the editorial role that he took on in the newly relaunched Archive for Social Science and Social Policy (Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik), which he used as a vehicle for bringing his reading to a focus and in which a series of lengthy essays were to appear. He pursued a critical examination of the methodology of the economic and legal investigations that he had had to counter in his previous studies, and he outlined a new methodology for the study of history and culture. He also planned but did not undertake a study of industrial work in which he hoped to engage critically with the ‘psychophysical’ framework of ‘energetics’, and he produced a methodological outline for this. Weber first applied his methodology in a reconsideration of the debate on the development of capitalism that had been sharpened by the publication of Werner Sombart’s Modern Capitalism in 1902. He took up Sombart’s recognition of the importance of religion in the rise of capitalism, and during a visit to the United States he began to develop his subsequently famous work on the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, which he published in a two-part article in the Archive along with a shorter account of the Protestant sects. Weber retained his intense passion for knowledge, which he saw as having to be pursued through a rigid discipline,

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and he ruled his life by the clock, giving informal scheduled supervision and discussion sessions and holding an informal Sunday afternoon seminar in his home. This ‘unofficial’ academic role in Heidelberg, free from all external commitments, allowed him to give reign to his intense internal commitment to scholarship. Those who attended his seminar at various times included the sociologists Robert Michels, Paul Honigsheim, and Helmuth Plessner, the Marxist philosophers Georgy Lukács and Ernst Bloch, the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers, the poet Stefan George, and his Heidelberg colleagues Jellinek and Troeltsch. Intensely committed to the pursuit of truth, he was generous and supportive of those who he saw as similarly committed. He was combative in support of those he saw as prevented from pursuing academic positions because of personal or institutional discrimination: he supported the promotion of Georg Simmel (a Jew) and the appointment of Robert Michels (a socialist) when they encountered discrimination for their ethnic and political backgrounds and beliefs. Always interested in politics, he taught himself Russian in order to be able to investigate the Russian Revolution of 1905. He saw in Russia the same weaknesses of the bourgeoisie that he had diagnosed in Germany, and he sought a vehicle for his political stance. His social concerns led to him becoming involved on the margins of the German Social Democratic Party (the SPD), though he never became a member of the party. Always independent in his views, he found it impossible to align himself with any particular party. The year 1909 marked the beginning of a huge outburst of intellectual creativity for Weber. He had overcome his sleep problems and was full of energy and enthusiasm for intellectual work. The immediate trigger for this change seems to have been an intense relationship with his former student Else Jaffé, the wife of the owner of the Archive,

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Edgar Jaffé. Recovering from his illness, Weber had developed a passion for Else around 1907, but it was not until 1909 that Else invited him to a tryst after an academic conference. Marianne, fully aware of the situation, effectively gave him permission to enter into an affair with Else. Weber was not able to take this final step, feeling ethically unwilling to enter into a sexual relationship with her. His brother Alfred, also a sociologist at Heidelberg, felt no such qualms about acting on the feelings that he also had for Else and he began a long-lasting relationship with her after her separation from her husband. Else, for her part, had been willing to enter into a simultaneous relationship with both brothers, but Weber could not countenance this and broke off all contact with her. Weber now felt able to put all his energy into a number of major academic projects. He agreed to take on the editing of a large multivolume Handbook, to which he himself intended to contribute many book-length studies. He also envisaged a comparative study of the development of the modern world that would place European development within a comparative study of civilisations and their religious cultures. In a preliminary work on the agrarian development of the ancient civilisations, he returned to his earlier investigations in economic history from the standpoint of his new methodology and intellectual concerns. This was followed by a series of explorations into the world religions, the city, the state, and the modern economy. By the outbreak of the First World War, Weber had accumulated a large number of substantial working papers from which he aimed to produce a volume that he later called Economy and Society and a set of Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion, both of which were published posthumously. A number of other projected investigations for which he produced draft materials were never completed.

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In 1912, he met the concert pianist Mina Tobler, who developed an intellectual infatuation for him. She looked on him as a genius and he responded to her as a pontificating teacher. There was undoubtedly an erotic aspect to their relationship, and Marianne again tolerated this. For a number of years there were regular meetings on Saturday afternoons, but the relationship with Mina probably did not advance beyond that of guru and disciple. It was at this time, however, that Weber began an investigation into the sociology of music and studied the development of the piano as a key element in Western culture. During the first year of the 1914 18 war, Weber served in the Reserves as a disciplinary officer, with the rank of Captain, working at the Heidelberg military hospital. He was released from this post in 1915 and hoped to be invited to participate in government discussions of war policy. The failure of the government to respond to him led to a concentration on the publication of some of his articles on religion and civilisation in China, India, and the Near East. He continued to engage in extensive correspondence with government officials, urging moderation in German war aims, opposing the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and Poland and the resettlement of non-Germans, and contributing to discussions on the annexation of Belgium. In late 1915, he joined Naumann’s Working Commission on Central Europe, which was investigating an economic policy for the German and Austrian zones of influence, but he found no official role. He pushed his point of view in journalistic writing on war aims for the Frankfurter Zeitung and in public speeches. In a number of publications he returned to the themes of his Freiburg address and began to develop a view of Germany’s post-war constitution in relation to his emerging ideas on the modern state. In 1916, Weber had discussed the possibility of a return to academic life at the University of Vienna and he accepted the

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offer of a chair in political economy shortly before the end of the war. Turning to the working papers on religion and the state that he had drafted before the war, he prepared and presented a series of lectures on ‘Economy and Society’, with the subtitle ‘A Positive Critique of Historical Materialism’. Two years later he was reconciled with Else Jaffé and began a sexual affair with her, though she herself regarded this affair as secondary to her long involvement with his brother Alfred. The relationship with Max was sado-masochistic, Else taking the role of dominatrix, flogging and biting Max. Sexual relations with Marianne may also have been restored at this time: she referred in a letter to his being restored to ‘full virility’, though this may have referred to his relationship with Else or even to his intellectual virility. Weber’s political involvement also increased at this time. Invited by students in Munich to speak at the university, he presented two key lectures on the vocations of politics and science. He joined the German Democratic Party (DDP), of which his brother Alfred had been a founder member. He was an unsuccessful DDP candidate for the Reichstag in the 1919 elections, but he failed to be given any official position in the post-war government. He was, however, recruited as an informal adviser on constitutional matters to the Ministry of the Interior. Some months later he was invited to join the German delegation to the Versailles peace conference. He continued to publish his political views in reflections on German parliamentarism and the revolution in Russia. Weber found his return to full-time teaching duties burdensome and faced renewed anxieties, resorting to opiumderivatives to help him to sleep. In 1919, he took up the offer of a chair at Munich, where Else was living and he could more easily continue their affair. The title of his chair was ‘Gesellschaftwissenschaft, Wirtschaftsgeschichte und Nationalkökonomie’ (Social Science, Economic History and

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National Economics), and there was an agreement that he should teach principally on sociology while undertaking the reworking of his working papers for Economy and Society and the Collected Essays. His lecture courses, following student demand, were on ‘General State Theory and Politics’ and ‘Outline of Universal Social and Economic History’. His course on political sociology was largely conceptual, and he was forced to abandon it when students found it too difficult. He thereafter concentrated on the course in economic history in which he returned to his developmental account of the rise of modern capitalism, using sociological ideas from his work on Economy and Society to provide a complement to the thesis presented in the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber did not enjoy lecturing to large groups of noisy and unruly students who were unwilling to engage with his ideas. He lectured from small slips of paper containing his key points and spoke rapidly. Many students found his delivery unappealing and attendance dropped off. However, fellow academics who attended the lectures found him inspiring. As earlier in his career, he found it impossible to combine lecture preparation with the pace of work required to complete his books, and although he completed some preliminary work for the planned publications, they were far from complete when he caught the so-called Spanish flu, which developed into pneumonia. Seriously affected by this, he died on 14 June 1920, aged 56. It was left to Marianne to attempt to complete and publish the books that he had planned.

CHAPTER 3 STUDIES IN PROPERTY, FINANCE, AND CLASS

Weber’s first published studies were firmly rooted in his reading of legal and economic history. His inspiration came from Marx’s views on capitalism, which were receiving an increasing amount of attention in the academic world as a result of the growing influence of the Marxist-oriented Social Democratic Party (SPD). Weber was attracted by the Marxist approach, which focused on the material conditions driving capitalist development, recognising this as providing an important corrective to the prevailing approach in historical economics, which reduced all economic phenomena to expressions of a national ‘spirit’. While Weber rejected this argument, he recognised that it contained an important insight into the role of the cultural and legal factors that Marxism ascribed to the ‘superstructure’. Weber’s own approach reflected his contacts with Simmel, who he had got to know in Berlin while working on his doctorate and Habilitation and whose publication of The Philosophy of History in 1892 was especially important for Weber. It was in this same period that Weber read the recently published works of Nietzsche, who had also 27

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influenced Simmel. Weber may also have read Kirkegaard at this time. These influences all led Weber to an awareness of the importance of the choices that people make when faced with particular circumstances and the consequent ‘meanings’ that they give to their actions. Culture, or spirit, he felt, affected actions only through the subjective choices made by individuals in their material situations. Weber realised the possibilities of exploring the relationship between these ‘psychological’ concerns and the structural matters that Marx had emphasised. This was the approach that Weber adopted, to varying degrees, in his early studies. These were his doctoral study of ancient patterns of land ownership and agriculture, the work for his Habilitation on medieval commerce, his work for the Social Policy Association on land ownership and farm labour in eastern Germany, and a series of papers on the contemporary operations of stock and commodity markets. His central themes were the class relations of capitalist societies, as shaped by agrarian landownership and bourgeois commerce and as generating the conditions under which agricultural and industrial labourers had to live.

3.1. ROMAN AGRICULTURE AND MEDIEVAL TRADE Weber’s essay of 1891 on Roman land tenure and land use, based on his doctoral thesis, investigated the legal innovations that had made possible a development from the communal, clan ownership of land to individual household private property in land. Originally, he argues, the rights of access to land and to its use were tied to a person’s membership in a kinship unit. There were no individual rights of ownership; only the collective rights of a clan could be asserted or defended. With the establishment of a central state and a

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system of law, however, it became possible for individuals to assert land claims on the basis of their occupation of particular farms. The imperial expansion that had opened up new tracts of land required the introduction of new legal forms to assign this land which had become ‘public land’ (ager publicus) to individual citizens by lease and to reconcile competing claims. The emerging forms of individual tenure and ownership could be employed and, eventually, the new legal form of the traditio allowed a free, contractual transfer of land from one individual to another. Weber shows that the legal forms through which land came to be held influenced the work of the official surveyors who assessed the land for taxation purposes and so affected its distribution. He argues that the division and leasing of public land allowed wealthy families to accumulate substantial holdings as individualised private property. This made possible the growth of a class of substantial capitalist farmers, which comprised the patriarchal heads of the clan households (the oikos). These households included the male heads with the wives, children, and slaves, and the oikos comprised a family estate operated as a commercial undertaking. Weber’s view of capitalist agriculture in Rome owed a great deal to Theodor Mommsen’s History of Rome. As understood by Mommsen, capitalism is any commercial and acquisitive system that produces great wealth through an appropriation of the wealth generated by the immediate producers. Weber sees the latifundia or landed estate, and its system of plantation agriculture, as having been organised along these capitalist lines and as motivated by a supporting ‘spirit’. He was not, however, at this stage in his work, convinced by Marxist arguments that there are particular features of modern capitalism that distinguish it from ancient forms. In an essay of 1896, Weber placed the ultimate decline of Rome in the larger context of the decline of the ancient

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civilisations of the Mediterranean and the near East. The decline of Roman society, he argues, predated the fall of the Roman imperial structure by some time and was a result of internal dislocations that undermined the empire from within. Thus, Roman civilisation had decayed and disintegrated before the political structure of the empire collapsed. In his doctoral thesis, Weber had argued that agricultural profits from individually owned land had been a source of a growing social conflict between the capitalist farmers and peasants that shaped the course of Roman political development. The growing power of the capitalist farmers seriously disadvantaged the peasantry, which had been the predominant social group in the pre-imperial stage of communal landownership. The additional point made in the later essay is that peasants lost their rights to land and so were forced to search for an alternative means of subsistence. Capitalist agriculture, however, was increasingly sustained through the use of a growing number of slaves that had been acquired through imperial conquest. The use of slaves was at the expense of the employment of wage labourers, and so the dispossessed peasantry were often unable to find employment. Expanding capitalist power resulted in the growth of towns and cities, which, as trading centres, also became the centres of culture and civilisation. The urban centres, however, were ‘autarkic’: they were largely self-sufficient and traded predominantly with those in their immediate rural hinterlands. External trade was largely limited to trading in luxury goods, and so the major trading cities were located on the coastlines of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, where they could have easy access to other societies by sea. There was, therefore, no significant network of internal trade between Roman cities. For this reason, Weber argues, the political integration of the empire was not matched by any corresponding economic integration into a market economy.

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The exchange economy was a mere ‘superstructure’ erected on the base of a largely ‘natural’ subsistence economy. As the empire expanded continentally, the new territories that were acquired could not be integrated into the existing economic structure and the maritime cities became even more dissociated from the centres of political expansion. When Roman territorial expansion slowed down, the supply of slaves to the slave markets faltered and the economy of the latifundia became more problematic. An increase in the labour supply could be achieved only by transforming slaves into serfs and, by allowing them to marry and reproduce, increasing the supply of available labour. Peasants, too, were required to perform labour services and were forced into serfdom. These pressures meant that each estate had to become more self-sufficient as a natural economy oikos. Declining production for exchange meant that the cities declined and, with this, the cultural dynamic of the empire decayed. This ‘feudalisation’ of the empire posed further restrictions on market behaviour as the loose network of exchange shrivelled further. Lower surpluses meant that imperial tax revenue declined and the state, too, had to become more self-sufficient and to survive with limited administrative resources. Weber depicts the Roman state as becoming a largely military entity, comprising undisciplined mercenaries who were disconnected from the native populations. In this condition, the empire found it difficult to withstand the ‘barbarian’ invasions that threatened its borders. Unable to fully feudalise its political and military power, the empire had lost its ‘economic basis’ and it inevitably collapsed in the fifth century AD. A firmer basis for political unity in Europe was not established until the ninth century, when Charlemagne successfully feudalised his realms. This feudal structure allowed new cities to develop and to become a basis for a renaissance of classical civilisation in the medieval period.

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Weber’s Habilitation dissertation of 1889 had been the first of his publications to appear, but can actually be considered as the historical completion of his early work on the ancient and medieval worlds. In the dissertation he examined aspects of commercialism in medieval times. The context for this account was his uncovering of the medieval origins of the contemporary German forms of limited and joint enterprise partnerships used in modern capitalist undertakings. Weber explored the emergence of these forms of business enterprise in the maritime trading cities of Pisa, Florence, Venice, and Genoa that were the descendants of the Roman coastal cities. Italian commerce, Weber argues, involved participation in risky trading ventures, and there was a need to ensure that the risk was shared among a number of individuals, who would also share the anticipated profit in appropriate proportions. Mercantile shipping ventures operated initially through the Roman legal form of the commenda. However, a wider pooling of capital was made possible from the twelfth century by the introduction of the societas maris, which made possible a more reliable sharing of risk between a sleeping partner, who provided finance, and an active partner, who undertook the venture. The societas involved a shared set of accounts and a common balance sheet, which gave it an autonomous legal identity separate from those of its individual participants. The active partner the tractator thereby became an entrepreneur. Similar principles were adopted for inland trade in the societas terrae, which allowed a more enduring relationship rather than the single venture partnerships that were used to finance maritime trade. Weber notes that these legal forms did not provide a satisfactory basis for all forms of trade or for production, and he examined the other forms of partnership that arose in these activities. Production and trade were in the hands of the patriarchal household the oikos which operated as a

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joint family undertaking. Weber shows that this form of association could be extended to the business activities of unrelated artisans by translating the principles of family law into new principles of property law. These new legal forms gave businesses a common legal identity and partners joint shares in profits and joint liability for debts, though this liability was ‘limited’ to the extent of the capital invested. Family businesses, in turn, found it increasingly useful to employ these new and more flexible corporate forms. Given various names, such as the fraterna compagnia of Venice, this legal form became the basis of the modern limited partnership or company. It gave birth to the ideas of the ‘office’ and the ‘firm’ that together comprised an ‘enterprise’ and made possible a separation between the business itself and the private affairs of its investors or shareholders.

3.2. AGRICULTURAL WORKERS IN EASTERN GERMANY Having joined the Social Policy Association, Weber became involved in its investigation into agricultural work in contemporary Germany. The study collected extensive data on hours of work, pay rates, crop yields, and other agricultural costs and used questionnaires to obtain information on recruitment patterns. Weber analysed the results and produced a substantial statistical report. Drawing on these results, Weber also published an article in the Archive in 1894 in which he focused on the East Elbian region and explored its property relations and class divisions. Weber’s analysis of the situation east of the Elbe begins by noting that by the middle of the nineteenth century the large estates of the east, headed by members of the Prussian nobility the Junkers had each come to be a ‘centre of

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domination’ for its region. The noble landowners controlled their estates from their manor houses and had considerable power over their workforces. The nobility as a whole, however, had lost the collective political power within the state that they had formerly enjoyed unchallenged. Politically, they faced a challenge from the rising urban bourgeoisie, with their base in commerce and industry. The Junkers attempted to keep up with the rising living standards and life style that they saw as being enjoyed by the bourgeoisie, but the great majority of the landed estates were insufficiently productive to allow this. What had formerly been the secure ‘material base’ for a privileged social stratum had become a declining asset that depended on agricultural protectionism and state support to maintain its income. A key reason for these economic difficulties was that the landowners relied on traditional forms of labour and so had failed to make use of new techniques of production. This failure to innovate meant that their estates perpetuated forms of communal economy in which the labourers had to remain bound as serfs unless they were able to acquire their own smallholdings. There was little opportunity for any growth in wage labour. The condition of rural workers was such that they could develop only a consciousness focused on their opposition to individual masters rather than this taking a collective form similar to the class consciousness that was developing among industrial workers. The lack of commercialism among landowners was matched by the apathetic fatalism and dependence of their labourers. Weber notes that the acquisition of landed estates by bourgeois interests that operated them on capitalist lines had begun to force the Junkers to act more commercially and to adopt more intensive methods of production. As a result, the personal, patriarchal relation between lord and peasant was breaking down and being reformed as the impersonal

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monetary relation between a capitalist and a wage labourer. This growth of rural capitalism was transforming the situation of the labourer, bringing a true rural proletariat into being. It was also involving Junkers in the money economy, rather than the natural economy. Weber argues that this emerging class division was unlikely to develop into an open state of class struggle because of growing divisions within the workforce. The number of permanent workers, he shows, was decreasing because of a growing reliance on seasonal migrant workers. These migrants came initially from those areas that were shedding labour, but there was an increasing reliance on the recruitment of Polish migrants. The Polish workers lived in barracks on the estates, far removed from their families. Their working conditions, Weber argues, are similar to those of the slaves in antiquity, though they remained free, albeit on low pay. The migrants were willing to accept this low pay because their basic subsistence was provided for and they were able to save more from their income than they could do if working in Poland. The money they were able to send home meant that their families were able to enjoy a higher standard of living. German peasants and farm labourers were losing economic opportunities to the Poles and were leaving the countryside and migrating to the German cities and to North America. In parts of Silesia, where the transformation in class relations was most advanced, migrant workers were forming the core of the agricultural labour force. Weber concludes that the movement of workers from the countryside to the cities would continue unless the state took action. He argues that this would change only if the state took the land of the Junkers into state ownership and broke it up into small peasant holdings for sale to German workers. Only then would the reliance on migrant Polish workers be

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halted. Weber notes that, of course, this would finally end the economic power of the Junkers.

3.3. THE STOCK AND COMMODITY EXCHANGE The protracted economic depression of the 1870s and the ensuing slumps of the early 1880s and 1890s had led many in Germany to question the long-term prospects for German capitalism. In response to a number of banking failures and its own difficulties in servicing international loans, the Government had set up a Commission of Enquiry into the stock exchange. The Commission examined the effects of its commercial practices on industry and agriculture and drew up regulatory legislation that was eventually introduced in 1897. Once Weber had completed his work on the East Elbian agricultural workers, he planned to undertake a review of the Commission’s publications in four journal articles and in two pamphlets that were published in Naumann’s Göttinger Arbeiter-Bilbliothek. As a result of these publications, Weber was appointed to the new Exchange Commission that had been set up in 1897 to monitor the new legislation. Weber’s papers describe the specific characteristics of the stock and commodity exchanges as originating in the new commercial forms that had displaced the self-sufficient patriarchal household economy and created modern capitalist commerce. Mercantile enterprises, he argues, resulted from the gradual building of an extensive system of exchange that had broken down the traditional structures of the local community and the natural economy and so made it possible to produce more than people required to meet their immediate needs and to trade their surpluses. This system of production and exchange depended upon new methods of distribution through regional, national, and international markets. City-

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based merchants emerged as the key agents in this expanding system of trade, organising the work of cottage labourers and eventually becoming the directive entrepreneurs of a factory system of production. Those merchants who remained in the role of the essential commercial intermediaries undertook their business of buying and selling in urban ‘exchange’ buildings. In these exchanges, merchants were able to buy and sell commodities that were not physically present, that they did not own, and that may not yet have been produced. They were able to do so because they dealt in legal claims, expressed in abstract quantities, to goods deliverable at a particular time, and relied on paper documents to record their transactions. These documents bills and notes of exchange became objects of exchange in their own right, forms of money that were tradeable on specialised securities markets. Today, Weber argues, the securities markets deal in bills of exchange, in government bonds, and in company shares and bonds. These financial securities represent the impersonal relations that exist among impersonal entities in the market and are the means through which the payment of interest and dividends can be managed. Large corporations, he argued, have huge capital requirements that go beyond the means of individual entrepreneurs and their families and so must raise their funds through the sale of shares to many thousands of individuals whose sole involvement in a company is the dividend that they hope to earn on their shares. The stock exchanges therefore complement the legal forms that Weber had traced back to medieval Italy. They are the means through which companies can raise capital for investment from a large pool of savers who do not seek any active involvement in a company’s affairs. A securities market, therefore, is central to modern capitalism.

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Weber’s account gives much attention to a detailed description of the economic basis of the commercial practices of the exchange, familiar today but far less so in his time. He examines the setting of prices through the balancing of supply and demand, the listing rules, and the publication of rates and prices as a flow of information that influences offers and deals. These practices, he argues, allow the everyday exchange of securities and commodities and are the basis of forms of brokerage, speculation, and futures trading. Turning from the economic to the social organisation of the exchanges, Weber argues that the social structure and context of the markets vary considerably from one country to another. Britain and the United States have closed and autonomous associations of professional traders that generally operate in a number of differentiated and specialised markets. In France, on the other hand, the market is more open but has a significant degree of state involvement. The German exchanges, however, are quite diverse. While the large exchanges of Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt that trade in all kinds of securities and commodities are similarly open to all men (but not to women), the Berlin exchange relies on concessions from the Prussian state and is supervised by the Chamber of Commerce. Traders in Germany also differ considerably in their personal wealth and the financial backing available to them, and they lack the closed class character of the London stock market. Weber concludes with his reflections on whether the German stock and commodity exchanges are organised in ways that are appropriate for the essential function that they have in the modern capitalist economy. In particular, he asks, do they have the capacity to provide the necessary guarantees on which modern business depends? He identifies certain necessary reforms, arguing for the importance of the largescale capitalists to the market and holding that there is a need

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for stronger monetary guarantees for entrants to the market. This can be achieved, he concludes, by establishing an enforceable code of conduct that regulates market behaviour on the basis of an institutionalisation of ‘honour’ and honesty that allows it to operate in the same way as the London exchange. Weber’s early work concerned the class relations that come into existence with the invention and utilisation of legal relations of property ownership that regulate access to productive resources. He showed that these class relations shaped the attitudes and consciousness of the members of the various classes and were the driving force behind social conflict and social change. It was changing property relations, he argued, that brought about the capitalist forms of economic activity that have shaped the modern world. Financial activity, he shows, has been central to capitalist commerce, and in modern capitalism the legal forms of money, credit, and investment have become the basis of all production. This was the economic history that Weber constructed as an alternative to the historical economics of his contemporaries. His challenge to their views of the modern economy and its origins were, however, dependent on his awareness of the importance of individual consciousness and subjectivity. Weber’s own circumstances were, however, to cast him into a deep state of depressed subjectivity that prevented him from pursuing this insight. Not until his recovery from his breakdown was he able to develop more fully the methodological advances that he had made and to begin his further explorations into the development of modern capitalism.

CHAPTER 4 A METHODOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Weber began his return to academic writing in 1903 with a paper on social scientific methodology in which he directly confronted the ideas of Wilhelm Roscher. He followed this up with a two-part article on Karl Knies, the other leading figure in national economics and who Weber had succeeded as Professor at Heidelberg. When Edgar Jaffé, a banker and social science graduate, bought control of Schmoller’s Archive for Social Science and Social Policy, he brought in Weber and Werner Sombart to be its joint academic editors and so provided Weber with a platform on which he could further develop his methodological views. The Archive was, until then, largely statistical in character, and Jaffé intended that its new editors would relaunch it as a theoretical and methodological journal that would redefine the relevance of scientific work for social and economic policy. Weber worked on a series of methodological essays in which he set out his critical views on the current form of national economics and began to formulate an alternative basis for the science of economics. Taken together with the 41

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papers on Roscher and Knies, the three principal essays, published in the Archive in 1904, 1906, and 1907, comprised a systematic corpus of methodological ideas on ‘ideal types’, ‘understanding’, and the analysis of economic development. These methodological papers were completed by a paper on ‘interpretive sociology’ that Weber wrote in 1909 but did not publish until 1913. This six-year burst of creativity was not purely methodological. Its purpose was to allow Weber to take up the link between Puritanism and capitalism that Sombart had set out in his influential book Modern Capitalism. Weber took the opportunity to expand his own understanding of the development of capitalism in a two-part article for the Archive on ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, an essay that comprised the first outing for his new methodology. In this chapter I will look at the methodological essays; I will consider his substantive essay in the next.

4.1. SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE Weber saw the Archive as a journal of ‘social science’ concerned with scientific contributions to problems of ‘social policy’. His first task for the journal was, therefore, to set out his view that social science is a ‘cultural science’ that provides a theoretical and historical treatment of those things that are the objects of social policy. The term ‘cultural science’ was used in Germany to refer to what in Britain would be called the ‘humanities’: it referred to studies of art, law, literature, theology, and history. Whereas the natural sciences study physical phenomena in terms of causal and deterministic processes that could be formulated in ‘laws’, the cultural studies study human phenomena in terms of their particular and unique characteristics and meanings. The general concepts of

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the cultural sciences are not ‘laws’ but simply summaries of common features found in specific events and processes. Social science, therefore, comprises those cultural disciplines that formulate general concepts relating to matters of social policy and that can be used in historical studies of their origins and development. As is the case with all cultural sciences, Weber argues, the social sciences are concerned with human behaviour though this is not found in discrete packages with neat disciplinary labels already attached. Human behaviour is complex and diverse, and can be relevant to many disciplines. Each particular discipline must identify those aspects of behaviour that it regards as being of particular significance to it. Weber refers to this as an identification of the ‘cognitive interest’ that it has for a particular discipline, and he sees this as comprising a judgement of its ‘cultural significance’. A judgement of cultural significance, he argues, is made in terms of the ‘values’ that define a discipline. Values are things of worth or of interest, and it is cognitive values that define what is worth knowing for those who practice a particular discipline. Disciplines are therefore differentiated from each other as particular spheres of cognitive values that illuminate and give significance to different aspects of human life. Cognitive values define what aspects of behaviour are of primary interest to each particular cultural scientist. For example, economists prioritise the material struggle for existence and the satisfaction of needs on the basis of limited means and so define these aspects of behaviour as ‘economic’ and as their particular concern. On the same basis, other disciplines might value a concern for ultimate meanings, forms of aesthetic expression, or attempts to influence a state as being the defining characteristics, respectively, of ‘religious’, ‘artistic’, or ‘political’ phenomena.

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There are complex relations among the cultural sciences. While a science may be defined by the core behavioural concerns highlighted through its cognitive values, it is likely that there will be matters that are the concerns of other disciplines but that are ‘relevant’ for or ‘conditioned’ by behaviour of another kind. Thus, Weber points to religious, political, and other forms of behaviour that are ‘economically relevant’ because they shape and inform economic activity or that are ‘economically conditioned’ because they are shaped by economic activity. This led him to identify ‘social economics’, which was to be the principal social science considered by the Archive. It is a hybrid discipline that goes beyond the economic aspects of behaviour, studied in economic theory, to consider also economically relevant and economically conditioned behaviour. Economic theory itself is concerned with technical problems of market behaviour, price formation, and financial techniques, but social economics is concerned with wider economic practices and forms of organisation and also with the ways in which material needs and the means of action through which they are met are shaped by culturally formed religious, political, legal, and other norms and institutions and by the ways in which these are, in turn, conditioned by economic activity. Weber later saw ‘economic sociology’ as one aspect of social economics and as concerned with the economically relevant phenomena. Similarly, a number of other hybrid disciplines can be considered. A wider study of religion goes beyond the concerns of theology to consider the social influence and conditioning of religious phenomena, and a study of politics goes beyond constitutional theory to consider the influence of political structures on other social phenomena and the social conditioning of political activity. In like manner, the study of law is broader than jurisprudence, the study of education is broader than pedagogy, and so on.

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Social economics, like all social sciences, is selective. It has a specific point of view and object of study. By focusing on the ‘materialist’ point of view, social economics provides a ‘one-sided’ view of the world, and so it provides only a part of a more comprehensive account of the social world. However, Weber sees this limitation as being partly overcome through its combination with the equally one-sided and partial perspectives of other social sciences. A larger and more comprehensive picture of human behaviour requires the cooperation of various specialised social sciences. Weber did not, however, think that these disciplines could be combined into a general social science. The term ‘social’, Weber argues, must always have a specific predicate that designates its culturally significant object of study. There can be a social science of economics, a social science of religion, a social science of law, and so on, but there can be no universal science of the social world as a whole. He saw, instead, a division of intellectual labour in which each disciplinary practitioner focuses on the particular issues that are of direct interest or value to their discipline. This allows specialised research work to be undertaken as part of a collective effort to understand the complexity of human activity. This argument was the basis of his ambivalence over the very idea of ‘sociology’: he accepted that the word ‘sociology’ could be used as a shorthand for referring to ‘social science’ or to any ‘social study’ or ‘social discipline’, but he did not accept the idea of a generic sociology concerned with some particular aspect of behaviour that is distinct from its economic, political, religious, or other content or that constructs theories of social life as a whole. He was especially scathing about the kind of sociology proposed by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. He was, nevertheless, willing to recognise some value in a sociology of the kind that his contemporaries in Germany, Tönnies and Simmel, were outlining in their

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‘formal’ sociologies. For these writers, sociology was concerned with the ‘form’ taken by social behaviour rather than with its specific, meaningful content. Weber sees this as a basis for regarding the specialised social sciences as ‘sociologies’ of particular phenomena (economics, law, religion, etc.) and for seeing ‘sociology’ per se as the generalising approach within social science that constructs general concepts for use in the concrete historical studies undertaken within particular specialised disciplines. Weber would, in due course, see his own work on economics, politics, law, and religion as having a strongly ‘sociological’ character.

4.2. SOCIAL POLICY AND CULTURAL VALUES The preface drafted for the first issue of the relaunched Archive set out the intellectual programme that Weber and Sombart wanted to see represented in the social economics that was to figure prominently in the journal. The journal was to investigate the social problems of labour under capitalism from a variety of political positions, presenting factual knowledge and critically assessing legislation from the standpoint of their social-policy relevance. Weber rejects the idea that policy prescriptions could be based simply on expressions of value preference for one course or another. Any policy proposal, he argues, must have a scientifically demonstrable chance of achieving its goals. Policy proposals without such a scientific basis are unacceptable. Contributors to the journal should take the development of capitalism as given and irreversible and should propose only such legislative measures as proposed ways of addressing its problems through realistic, evidence-based programmes of reforming current social conditions. Thus, contributors might propose ways of properly integrating the industrial proletariat into

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capitalist relations but should not propose the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. In setting out a commitment to these aims for the journal, Weber held that it was necessary to give far greater attention to the methodological issues that are involved in the appraisal of social policy. It was in relation to this that Weber contributed an opening essay on ‘objectivity’. His intention was to clarify the nature of the value judgements involved in the critical assessment of social policy and to show how they relate to empirical scientific investigations into social conditions. Weber points out that economics in Germany emerged as a practical undertaking that made judgements on economic matters in order to inform public policy. However, national economists thought that they could take factual knowledge of the economy as the basis for drawing objectively valid conclusions about policy. National economists based their judgements about the particular policy measures to pursue on their assumption that they can identify the economic laws or evolutionary principles that govern economic development. They therefore assumed that policy measures can simply be derived from those laws, that policy prescriptions must recognise and be adapted to ‘necessary’ economic laws. Thus, Weber shows that the mainstream national economics of Wilhelm Roscher holds the view that policy proposals can be derived objectively from the ‘needs’ of the economy. Government policies could, therefore, be presented as bringing about an improvement in the ‘health’ of the economy, in much the same way as medical treatments and therapies can improve the health of the human organism. Weber holds that this argument is unsustainable. Even if economists did, indeed, know the laws of economic development an argument that Weber rejected it can never be assumed that what ‘is’ the case can require us to make binding judgements about what ‘must’ or ‘ought’ to be

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the case. A knowledge of the necessary physiology of the human body and its pathologies can never justify the conclusion that particular patients must or ought to be treated. Similarly, a knowledge of the fundamental operations of the economy cannot, in itself, justify a proposal to intervene with corrective measures. The question of whether or not to intervene is quite distinct from the question of what kind of intervention might be most effective in achieving a particular goal. National economists are entitled to use their knowledge of economic development as a basis from which to derive policy prescriptions that can enhance the efficiency with which particular economies operate, but the ‘laws’ themselves can never dictate those policies. Economics can specify how employment opportunities might best be increased, but it cannot tell us whether those opportunities ought to be increased. Policy prescriptions are not factual statements but are value judgements. Weber holds that making a rational value judgement always involves a weighing up of the benefits and costs that are attached to alternative courses of action and an assessment of the specific ways in which the achievement of one valued end would affect the achievement of any others. This calculative task, however, is not a purely technical task. A person who makes a value judgement must choose between alternatives, weighing the salience of the various values in relation to his or her own conscience and value standards. Scientific knowledge is able to provide information concerning the actual consequences of the different courses of action, but it cannot pre-empt the need to choose, to ‘take sides’ in favour of one value and against another. Weber further argues that while it may be thought that the ultimate value standards on which particular value judgements are made are objectively valid and so are compelling, this is not the case. Value standards are not universal

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standards appropriate for all times and places. They are diverse and conflicting, and a choice to subscribe to one value rather than another is a personal preference based on arbitrary and irrational choices. It was Weber’s reading of Nietzsche that had convinced him of the fundamentally ‘irrational’ character of human choice. He holds that the choices made by individuals are expressions of the values of the particular culture or people into which they are born and bred. Roscher and others had attempted to absolutise these values by referring them to a Volksgeist, a spirit of the people, rooted in their racial identity as a nation, but Weber rejects such resort to biology. Following Nietzsche, he recognised the ultimate meaninglessness of the world. Meaning is given to the world by individual human beings and so there is an arbitrary character to all cultural values. Individual choices are made in the Kantian attitude of ‘freedom’. As human culture may vary from one people and period to another, choices have no universal or absolute validity. Value choices are rooted in belief not fact, and so are arbitrary assertions of individual preferences. This means that the making of value judgements is always, actually or potentially, a matter of dispute, a matter of struggle between contrary and, perhaps, incompatible values that inform our moral conscience and are taken as standards by which we feel we should live our lives. Furthermore, Weber argues, value disputes cannot be resolved by a simple synthesis or by the taking of a compromise ‘middle way’ between rival values. Values must be seen as rooted in different ‘world views’ that may themselves be grounded in the different lived experiences of class, ethnic, or other social groups and so are ultimately irreconcilable. For Weber, then, the Archive must be committed to both objective scientific truth and to the making of policy prescriptions, to both social science and social policy. However, its

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contributors must recognise the distinctive character of each type of activity and must make it perfectly clear to their readers whenever they go beyond the scientifically determined facts to make value judgements. Policy prescriptions must never be passed off as scientific conclusions; and scientific judgements can never pre-empt political choices. Social policy must be based on an appropriate combination of political choices and scientific evidence. In making this point for the contributors to the Archive, Weber was, of course, holding that it applies equally forcibly to all social scientists and to the wider cultural and historical sciences.

4.3. A CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL ECONOMICS Weber’s ideas on the methodology that must be adopted in social economics were developed as a critical reaction to the historical economics of its leading practitioners. These were Karl Knies, Weber’s predecessor as Professor of National Economics at Heidelberg, and Wilhelm Roscher. In critically examining the arguments of these two scholars, Weber was also criticising a whole disciplinary practice and moving forward the methodology that he had used in his earlier work. His aim in the critique of Roscher and Knies was to clear away what he regarded as misconceptions in order to prepare the way for the new methodology that he had come to see as necessary for the investigation of social and economic history and for the construction of theoretical explanations in social science. According to Roscher, the ‘historical method’ that is employed in German jurisprudence, political theory, and political economy aims to produce concrete descriptions of the social world in its full actuality. In the words of the historian Leopold Ranke, it is a matter of describing a historical situation ‘as it really is’. Historical economics aims at a faithful

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‘reproduction’ of the total reality of economic life at a particular time and place. Roscher also held that it is possible to arrive at historical laws. These are not, however, abstract and universal idealisations of the kind found in the natural sciences, as all laws of economic life are specific to particular historical situations. Historical laws summarise the succession of economic conditions found in a particular place, and he saw these laws of the historical development of national economies as the only valid type of scientific law in the social and historical sciences. On this basis, Roscher had concluded that it is also possible to identify those similarities between nations that allow the formulation of more general historical laws of the development of national economies per se, laws of the development from, say, antiquity to feudalism or from feudalism to modern economies. Weber noted that this position restated much of the Hegelian developmental view of history, notwithstanding Roscher’s own critical views on Hegel. Thus, Roscher referred to the unique and unchanging ‘soul’ of a nation as being subject to a process of development, with a similar process occurring for all nations. Roscher’s argument implicitly relied on the idea that a nation could be seen as a ‘social organism’ and so as a cultural entity that rises, matures, and declines, as does any organic entity, as a result of its own ‘vital’ internal processes. Roscher drew the conclusion from this that all nations pass through three economic stages based, respectively, on the dominance of the productive factors of nature, work, and capital, but he had no conception of the specific mechanisms through which the rise, maturation, and decline of nations might occur. Instead of invoking specific laws of development, Roscher simply alluded to the ‘ageing’ of a nation. Metaphor and analogy displaced knowledge of scientific laws, suggesting that the very search for these laws might be unfounded. Weber contends that an alternative position that

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searches for genuine explanatory principles is the way forward for historical economics. He sees this alternative in the ‘Marxist orientation’ of Sombart and a new generation of economists. These economists were not Marxists in politics but did adopt a properly materialist and causal account of history. This is the approach that Weber thought could be developed in social economics. Weber went further, however, and rejected the whole idea that social science could identify autonomous social organisms or social systems with distinctive properties of their own. This was the basis of his rejection of the idea of a general ‘sociology’. Roscher agreed with Adam Smith and the classical economists that economic institutions are the products of individual actions that function purposively as part of a social organism. He added to this the claim that the collective or communal purposes that lie at the heart of the national organism and form its soul are inexplicable in terms of self-interest or any other individual factor. The structures and relations that constitute the national organism are, for Roscher, vital phenomena in their own right. Weber completely rejects this idea of a collective purpose, arguing that all such complex social phenomena are explicable in terms of the individual human actions from which they are composed. This view was derived from the more rigorous methodological individualism that was emerging in the new economic theories of those such as Carl Menger, who proposed an analytical account of economic processes in terms of the complex interplay of rational individual actions. Weber saw his own key task as generalising this account as the basis for all the social and cultural sciences, which would then be able to dispense with the mysterious and misleading collective concepts once and for all. First, however, he recognised a need to clarify the basis of concept formation in these sciences.

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4.4. THEORY AND CONCEPT FORMATION The first positive outcome of Weber’s reflections on methodology, presented along with his discussion of objectivity, was a statement of how the social scientist should go about constructing and using concepts. Weber had already argued in his discussion of disciplinary differentiation that there can be no direct description of the world ‘as it really is’. Any description, and therefore any explanation, involves a selection of what is valuable or important to know. Once a discipline has defined its particular perspective on the world, each practitioner of that discipline must identify the specific phenomena that are of interest to him or her in a particular study. The individual scientist must devise concepts that enable this selection to take place, and the totality of concepts produced by the practitioners of a science will constitute the conceptual tools available to future researchers in their investigations. Weber’s argument is based on a Kantian epistemology according to which it is never possible to directly experience the world in its full complexity. He found it impossible to accept Roscher’s view, that a scientist can produce a description of the whole of even a single event. The real world, Weber held, is ‘infinitely manifold’ in its complexity, and any description involves a selective focusing on particular aspects of the infinitely manifold reality. Human beings can only ever know the world as it appears to them through their particular sensory apparatus and on the basis of the ideas that they have acquired through their socialisation into a particular culture. This is the subjective basis on which they are able to select from the infinite complexity of reality those aspects of it that are important to them. The reality that the scientist perceives and describes has, therefore, to be seen as a constructed reality.

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Those who work in the humanities or cultural sciences among which Weber included all social scientists must formulate concepts that grasp the culturally significant aspects of the particular phenomena that are of interest to them within their discipline. Economists, for example, construct concepts that are clarified and logically systematised as analytical devices to grasp particular aspects of the already differentiated economic reality. Adopting the terminology of Heinrich Rickert, and despite having some reservations about Rickert’s wider position, Weber held that these scientific concepts are ‘value relevant’. That is to say, in relating perceptions and experiences to cultural concepts that give them a meaning, the scientist is identifying what he or she regards as worth knowing. All disciplinary concepts, therefore, are related to the valuations that define the discipline and find their place within a corpus of concepts built up by its practitioners. The ‘values’ referred to here are cognitive values. They are values in the sense that particular aspects of the world are identified as being worth knowing about. The value relevant concepts of social science are defined in relation to cognitive values but not in relation to the moral values that enter into value judgements. This is the basis of his continued separation of empirical statements from value judgements. A social scientific concept brings together a number of analytically distinguishable elements of social phenomena into a mental image that represents a concrete phenomenon. This image is a logically systematised and idealised model that allows one aspect of the concrete world to be investigated in abstraction from other aspects of the complex reality. As such, it ‘accentuates’ certain aspects of reality and minimises or disregards others. It is for this reason that Weber refers to scientific concepts as ‘ideal types’. They are analytical abstractions, not moral idealisations, and serve a definite cognitive function. Weber cites as an example the

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basic concepts of rational action and free competition in economic investigation, where he holds that such concepts are well established. Other examples of ideal types that Weber cites or that he came to use in his work include the modern market economy, the medieval city, craft work, capitalist culture, imperialism, feudalism, individualism, church, sect, medieval Christianity, Methodism, socialism, and the state. The task of the historical or empirical social scientist is to establish, for each time and place studied, how far a particular idealisation seems to correspond to the concrete reality. If it can be assumed that the causal mechanisms depicted in the ideal type do actually seem to reflect factors that operate, to some extent, in reality, then it is possible to draw inferences from the ideal type that allow the formulation of hypotheses about what might be expected to occur in reality. Thus, it is through the confirmation or refutation of hypotheses that ideal types can be used to yield knowledge about the causal processes at work in the social world. As each scientist may have particular scientific interests, they may each construct a slightly different ideal type to investigate the same concrete reality. Thus, one researcher may define capitalism as a system of production organised around a competitive market, while another may define it as a system of production organised around private ownership of the means of production. Both may be equally valid as scientific concepts and differ only because of the particular theoretical problem that a scientist aims to investigate. Because there is no one correct way of defining capitalism or any other aspect of reality there can be no single truth about the world. So long as each scientist adopts strict principles of logical consideration and undertakes rigorous empirical testing through the systematic collection of relevant data, their work can be assessed for its truth or falsity, despite the varying definitions that they use. ‘Truth’ is relative to the particular

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ideal types used, and the truth value of a proposition depends only on the evidence brought forward in support of it and the rigour with which that evidence is assessed. It is, furthermore, the case that no statement can be regarded as absolutely true for all time. All scientific findings are tentative truths, constructed to understand a constantly changing social world, and so any truthful conclusion is likely to become outdated as knowledge of the social world is constantly renewed.

4.5. INTERPRETIVE SOCIOLOGY The final aspect of Weber’s new methodology was to outline the view of action that he thought was required in social explanations. Weber outlined this view of understanding and interpretation in his second paper on Knies, where he was also critical of the approach to understanding an interpretation taken by Simmel in his Philosophy of History. Weber employs this view of subjectively meaningful action in a methodological report prepared for a study by the Social Policy Association into occupational careers and recruitment, where he highlighted the need to go beyond studies of the ‘psychological’ capacities and abilities involved in labour to investigate the subjective motivations that shape work behaviour. This involves, he argues, a study of the character, temperament, or personality as the general ‘spiritual’ aspect of human behaviour. His argument was most fully developed in the paper that he wrote in 1909, in preparation for a larger work on social economics, but did not publish until sometime later, in 1913. His view of social economics was that it is a social science that investigates the ways in which social actions generate the complex social phenomena relevant to economic activity. The model that he took for this form of social and historical

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explanation was the marginalist economics of the Austrian economist Carl Menger. This had set out the view that an understanding of rational action must be the starting point for all economic investigation. Menger held that by assuming that all action was completely rational it was possible to undertake a logical and methodological investigation of the choices and preferences involved in economic action and so to explain how the concatenation of rational decisions within a market generates changes in price levels, employment levels, and other system-level phenomena. Economic theory can, therefore, depict individuals as rationally allocating the goods and labour available within a given legal order for the pursuit of an optimal satisfaction of wants. It looks at how people adapt their actions to their circumstances by regarding this as a purely rational process. Economic theorems state what must be the case if people’s actions are actually rational. Actual behaviour approximates to this to a greater or lesser extent. A key feature of the modern economy is that individuals are increasingly constrained to act in rational ways, and so economic theory can achieve a high degree of accuracy. Weber saw this as providing a way forward for social economics and the other social sciences, which could abandon the idea that there are any real social-level organisms or souls and could, instead, recognise collective entities as the emergent outcomes of courses of individual action. By using an ideal type of rational action, Weber argues, the social scientist can study people’s actions as if they are purely rational and calculative and so can emulate some of the advances that were being made in economic theory. It is important to recognise that Weber simply claims that action could be studied ‘as if’ it were rational. He does not assume that all actions are fully rational but simply holds that this one-sided accentuation of reality gives a viable basis for social science. He

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holds, nevertheless, that it is important to try to grasp as much as possible of what actually motivates people if a social scientist is to know how realistic it is to assume a rational motivation. For Weber, all such action carries a subjective meaning and it is the task of the social scientist to discern this meaning rather than to describe it from the outside. A social scientific interpretation of human behaviour, Weber argues, involves ‘understanding’ it. This means uncovering, through a process of empathy with others, the motives that drive the action. The regularities involved in social life can be explained by relating them back to the complexes of individual motives that drive people to act in one way rather than another. The presence of a motive can be inferred by imagining something that the researcher is able to re-experience and so can judge as being a plausible reason for the observed behaviour. Although it is possible to understand both the rational and the emotional aspects of human behaviour, action can be most clearly understood when it is fully rational. Action that is completely irrational is inaccessible to rational, scientific interpretation. This is the reason why marginalist economic theory, with its ideal type of purposively rational action in which subjectively appropriate means are adopted in order to achieve a particular end, is able to achieve a high level of explanatory adequacy. In social economics, however, the economically relevant and conditioned norms and institutions cannot be understood in terms of such purely rational action alone. Weber therefore points to the need to recognise a number of different ideal types of action on a continuum that ranges from purposively rational action to emotionally and value-driven irrationality. Each type on this continuum, he argues, may be relevant to a different aspect of the infinitely complex patterns of human action.

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Weber’s formal outline of his basic sociological concepts presents action as behaviour that is oriented towards objects or goals that may be ‘internal’ (as in the case of religious actions involving an inner conviction) or ‘external’ (as in economic action concerned with material goods). Sociology is specifically concerned with action that is oriented to the behaviour of others, and Weber refers to this as ‘social action’. Social action involves an expectation that others will behave in certain ways and that it is, therefore, possible for an actor to estimate the chances that a particular course of action will be successful in achieving its aims. As two actors are involved in such action, there is a reciprocity of perspectives: each person acts on the assumption that others are acting solely according to the same subjective meanings. The most important types of social action are those in which reciprocal expectations are grounded in an ‘institutional order’ of shared behavioural norms. Weber cites the example of a legal order that defines the roles of buyers and sellers in a market in terms of their legally guaranteed rights and obligations. People may act from a variety of motives, but they act in their institutional capacities when they can be understood as acting as if they had made the norm the reason for their action. While rejecting the idea of autonomous collective entities, Weber recognises a number of groupings or ‘purposive associations’ that individuals form through their social actions. These ‘constructions’ (Gebilde) such things as states and churches are not to be seen in static terms. A static view is one of the limitations that Weber identifies in the term ‘social structure’. Constructions are, rather, relatively stable regularities of action that rest upon a ‘constellation of interests’ on the part of their participants. They are ‘interconnections’ (Zusammenhängen) that can be studied apart from the intentions that produce them, but are merely transient regularities. They can be

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personified in the way that the jurist treats the state as a legal personality or the historian treats ‘feudalism’ as a persistent form of social relations, but they must ultimately be recognised as patterns of association or joint action that have no substantial reality of their own. They exist only in the sense that each individual believes that he or she has an interest in being able to count on the actions of others also being in accordance with the relevant institutional order and so can orient his or her own action accordingly. This view of the precarious stability of social regularities underlies Weber’s objections to the hypostatisation of the ‘state’ and ‘society’ as social organisms or systems with an independent existence apart from the actions of those who sustain them. Complexes of social action that occur in the absence of an institutional order are what Weber terms ‘communalised’ actions. They are organised in terms of more diffuse, informal norms and expectations. An example of such a complex is a language community in which the speakers of a language speak as if they are following informal rules of grammar. Many aspects of everyday social life, Weber argues, are similarly organised communally. However, the key feature of modernity, Weber argues, is that the comprehensive communal organisation of social life that once prevailed wherever humans lived together has given way to ever-more rational structures of organised economic and political action in purposive associations. In making this point, Weber is recasting Tönnies’s argument that there has been a historical shift from ‘community’ to ‘association’. Weber’s methodological arguments, set out in ten or more papers in the seven years following the five ‘lost years’ of his depressive illness, are a major achievement that aim to do nothing less than reorientate the social sciences by establishing a clear basis for their advance. Weber sees this as enabling him to rebuild his own intellectual agenda. Though he

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was not yet completely clear what this would be, he had begun to glimpse in Sombart’s study of capitalism a gap that he could fill. Exploring the relationship between religion and capitalist activity, producing a case study in historical social economics, was the basis on which he was, at last, able to move forward.

CHAPTER 5 RELIGION, SPIRIT, AND MODERN CAPITALISM

Weber’s most famous work, his two-part essay on ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, was composed at the very time that he was formulating the methodology that he was applying to his particular historical problem. The question of the origins of modern capitalism was one that was central to the questions of social policy with which the Archive was concerned. Germany had been late to industrialise, by comparison with Britain, and discussion about how it could rapidly ‘catch up’ with its international competitors had led to much controversy over whether it could sustain its role in the world. Questions about its future raised questions about its past: had the factors responsible for the early development of capitalism been firmly enough established to ensure that German capitalism had a secure future? These concerns had been a major factor in inspiring Weber’s own early reflections on capitalism in agriculture and commerce. His inaugural lecture at Freiburg had made the question of German economic power a major theme, and this same question was central to the political concerns of the National 63

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Liberals. A growing number of academics had begun to address the question of capitalist development, and outside the universities an increasingly influential body of Marxist thought was promoting the view that the rise of capitalism was a result of an economic process that would also, eventually, bring about its downfall. Weber regarded his own work and that of his editorial colleague on the Archive, Werner Sombart, as taking forward a materialist and quasi-Marxist approach, though he rejected both Marxist politics and its deterministic depiction of an inexorable process of historical development. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Sombart had begun a major project on capitalism, aiming to provide a comprehensive account of its origins and contemporary character. His book on Modern Capitalism was published in 1902 and attracted considerable attention. Sombart had identified a variety of economic factors that he saw as responsible for the rise of capitalism. He identified, in particular, what he called ‘the capitalist spirit’ of rational acquisitiveness as an unusual system of ideas that, he held, had arisen only in Europe and that had been important in stimulating capitalist economic activity. He saw this capitalist spirit as having emerged in the Middle Ages among Jewish merchants who were outsiders to the societies in which they lived and so were less bound by their traditional cultural values. Sombart had also explored the relationship between Protestant beliefs and capitalism that had earlier been recognised by both Eberhard Gotlein and Georg Jellinek. Weber was dissatisfied with Sombart’s account of the spirit of capitalism. Having failed to persuade Lujo Brentano to write a review of Sombart’s book for the Archive, Weber decided to undertake his own investigation into the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism. His particular concern was to elucidate the unique character of the modern

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capitalist world, which he found in the high degree of rationality exhibited in capitalist economic activity. His earlier confrontation with the ideas of Nietzsche had led him to an awareness of the contrast between the irrationality of human choice and the attempts of actors to give their lives a form and a pattern through rational reflection on those choices and the conditions under which they are made. The rationality of modern capitalism, he now argued, was rooted in a religious irrationalism that it was now eliminating from social life. Weber sought to examine the historical development of capitalism in order to uncover and assess the part played by religious factors in the origins of its distinctive, rational economic outlook. He saw his work as leading to a one-sided ‘spiritualistic’ account that emphasised the impact of religiously inspired cultural world views. This, he argued, nevertheless highlighted a factor that was neglected in the equally one-sided Marxist views that assigned religion to a passive ‘superstructure’. He was, however, very clear about the fact that in criticising Marxism he was not seeking to set up a cultural determination in place of Marx’s economic determinism. Rather, he saw his exploration into the spiritual and cultural aspects of capitalist development as a complement to the materialist account offered in Marxism and in the work of Sombart.

5.1. THE CAPITALIST SPIRIT AND CAPITALIST ACTIVITY Weber began his investigation with a review of some wellknown statistical material showing that Catholics are underrepresented in business activity relative to their numbers in the population, while Protestants, conversely, are overrepresented. He observes that in denominationally mixed regions, those who are engaged in capitalist business and

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commerce or who are employed by capitalist entrepreneurs are drawn disproportionately from Protestant backgrounds. Finding inadequate all the current explanations for this correlation that alluded to a ‘fit’ between Protestant beliefs and economic activity, Weber argues for the need to construct a new historical explanation. There is clearly, he argues, some kind of ‘affinity’ between Protestant beliefs and modern capitalist culture, but the key to this relationship is not to be found in the present-day religious beliefs and practices of business and proletarian families, but in the attitudes and outlook that had developed long before the development of modern capitalism. In contemporary societies, Weber argues, economic practices are maintained through what he calls the ‘economic selection’ of entrepreneurs and workers. What he means by this is that they are constrained to rigorously follow norms of commercial economising and work discipline by the fear of bankruptcy or unemployment. There is no need for them to be morally committed to capitalist activity: their conformity to capitalist practices is a simple consequence of self-interest. However, this had not always been the case. In the past, before capitalist production had been firmly established, it was necessary for a particular system of ideas and attitudes to be inculcated in those who sought employment or to participate in business. Investors, entrepreneurs, and workers all had to be inspired by ideas that allowed them to reject or neutralise the traditional norms and customary practices that restricted and inhibited both rational commercial calculation and disciplined work practices. This system of ideas and attitudes is what Sombart had come to call the ‘spirit of capitalism’. Without this spirit, Weber argues, there would never have been a capitalist take-off in societies hitherto dominated by traditionalism.

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This cultural spirit, Weber argues, is a subjective outlook that legitimates the acquisitiveness involved in the adoption of a rational, calculative, and disciplined performance of commercial, financial, and industrial work tasks. It was the presence of this spirit of capitalism that enabled the incipient capitalist entrepreneurs to break with all traditional restrictions on profit seeking and to employ a disciplined workforce that no longer limited its work time by customary considerations.

5.2. ORIGINS OF THE PROTESTANT ETHIC Weber goes on to pose the question of how this spirit had originated. He sees it as having first arisen in Protestant religious communities during the seventeenth century, and its prescriptions as subsequently being established as norms of business and work behaviour as the capitalist system expanded. Conformity to these norms eventually became a matter of self-interest, reinforced by the fear of business failure, and modern capitalism could persist without any ongoing spiritual or moral support. Weber shows that it was in the early Calvinist and Baptist communities of north-west Europe that support for the capitalist spirit first arose. The basis for this support had, however, developed in the earlier challenge that Martin Luther had posed to the doctrine and traditionalism of the Catholic Church. Luther had introduced two fundamental ideas concerning the ultimate salvation of Christians that were to prove important in the development of a religious ethic supportive of the capitalist spirit. First, he had argued that salvation could be achieved by the individual believer without the intercession of the Church hierarchy and the rituals of confession that were strictly maintained by its priests. According to Luther, individuals are to take responsibility for their own

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actions and to be reliant on their individual conscience. Secondly, Luther held that each individual should follow his or her ‘calling’ in life, following the path that God had laid down for them. Salvation, then, is to be achieved through an individual’s calling and conscience. The idea of the calling or vocation, which Luther had introduced in his vernacular translation of the Bible, referred to a person’s subjective understanding of the occupation or way of life for which they had been designated or destined by God. Following a designated occupation, and so acting in a way that had been directed by God, was seen by Luther as the only appropriate way of living a life that is pleasing to God and that, therefore, would result in salvation into a life everlasting with God. Luther saw it as a person’s duty to diligently undertake the tasks to which God had called him or her. This idea of the calling involved a complete rejection of both the Catholic Church’s denigration or indifference to work and its emphasis on monastic withdrawal from everyday life. The pursuit of a vocation, Luther argued, requires active engagement with the world, not withdrawal from it. Weber argues, however, that Protestantism as formulated by Luther retained a strong traditionalist character, as Luther held that individuals should be satisfied with their station in life, whatever it may be. Individuals must accept their calling the work in which they are involved and submit to it as a command from God. They should remain in whatever occupation to which they had been called by God, and they should restrict their striving to the limits set by that way of life. The recognition of a calling required an individual to adapt to the existing social order rather than to actively create and pursue new opportunities. All individual effort, therefore, was to be oriented to the inner purity of faith and the soul rather than to activity in the external world.

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Weber contends that this idea of the calling received a more radical interpretation in Calvinist and certain Baptist forms of Protestantism. Among the communities of adherents to these Protestant beliefs, it became the crucial stimulus to the innovative commercial activity that gave rise to modern capitalism. The central and most characteristic dogma of Calvinism and the various Pietist, ‘Particular Baptist’, and ‘Independent’ sects of the seventeenth century was the idea of a transcendent god. God was seen as remaining completely separate from the world, playing no part in its development and not interfering in human affairs. The state of the world is simply whatever humans make it to be. Associated with this belief was the idea of predestination, or of election by the grace of God. This was the view that God had, at the beginning of time, decided who is to receive salvation after death by being received into everlasting life. Conversely, God had also determined who is destined for everlasting death. This choice or election had been made by God without any consideration of the good works or evil deeds that people may perform in their lives. Indeed, the very course of their lives on earth had also been determined by God. A transcendent God did not disclose his choices directly to those who he had created, and so individuals are born without any knowledge of their ultimate, pre-destined fate. Furthermore, there is nothing that they can do in their life that can change God’s decision or alter their own fate. Each person in the community would feel that they must live a life that moves inexorably towards death and so towards their eternally decreed but unknown destiny. Faced with such total uncertainty concerning their salvation, Weber argues, individuals must choose how to act, and they must make this choice without any ethical guidance from priests, sacraments, or fellow adherents. Weber argues that this doctrine must have been immensely troubling for Calvinist adherents. Their total uncertainty

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about their salvation would leave them with an intense feeling of ‘inner loneliness’ and an extreme anxiety. They were completely on their own in having to deal with the single most important question of their existence: were they one of the ‘elect’, one of those chosen for salvation and everlasting life in heaven? It was this subjective feeling of inner loneliness, Weber argues, that shaped the whole conduct of life and world view of those living in the Calvinist communities. Weber recognises that those who were faced with this extreme uncertainty would seek some way to alleviate their anxiety. They would look for an answer and their preachers would seek to provide one. He shows that, faced with this anxiety, Calvinist preachers began to teach that it would not be appropriate for one of the elect to disregard God’s will and so the true believer should act as if they were among the elect. They must follow a Christian way of life because it would glorify God, and they should organise their life in such a way as to constantly increase his glory. The Lutheran idea of the calling was reinterpreted in this light. By identifying their calling and pursuing it diligently, individuals could assuage their sense of loneliness by convincing themselves that God must have called them to a particular occupation and way of life that is appropriate for one of the elect. In acting in this way, Calvinists could somewhat alleviate their anxieties. While they could have no doctrinal certainty about their ultimate fate, they could convince themselves psychologically that they must be destined for salvation. The inner loneliness of the Calvinist was the source of their extreme individualism and of the ‘ascetic’ way of life that characterised Calvinist communities. The Calvinist could not rely on the authority of priests or the Church, and in religious matters was completely self-reliant. Adherents had to make their own choices in life and take responsibility for

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them. They rejected traditional authority in all matters and sought to create self-governing communities in which individual choices could be made and expressed without external intervention. Within these communities they developed an ascetic way of life that, in Catholicism, had been found only amongst monks who had withdrawn from the world into a life of other-worldly contemplation. Asceticism involves serious and sustained effort in pursuit of a goal. For the Calvinist, this is sustained effort in relation to practical goals: their concerns are ‘inner worldly’, or thisworldly, unlike the asceticism of the monk that is otherworldly. Calvinists aim at a disciplined mastery of their own circumstances and of the way in which that they pursue their calling. Asceticism in the Reformed Protestant communities came to involve a rejection of all sensual and emotional enjoyment as being irrelevant to the ultimate question of salvation and so as detracting from the need to engage in the sustained and diligent work that would glorify God. Ascetic Protestants who came to be known as ‘Puritans’ were to pursue a methodical, disciplined, and systematic engagement with the practical aspects of life. In many of the Puritan communities, success in a calling came to be taken as a sign of God’s grace and so of salvation. The ascetic, Puritan way of life, therefore, came to be seen as something to be sustained by and for the elect. The ‘irrational’ idea of the calling that had been introduced by Luther had thereby been cast in a systematically rational form. Weber next shows that an individualistic and ascetic way of life also developed among the Mennonite and Quaker sects that grew out of the earlier Baptist groups. These sects were not strict Calvinists but were organised as communities of those who had chosen to affiliate to their sect through a personal revelation of God. They adhered to the idea that the principal source of authority was the believer’s personal

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experience of the word of God and their ‘witness’ to an ‘inner light’ that informed their individual conscience. Not believing in predestination, they were subject to different psychological pressures from those in the Calvinist sects. As organisations, they were based on a voluntary commitment that was to be exemplified through the ways in which they lived their personal lives. The sects therefore imposed a discipline on their members, aiming at maintaining an active drive for the individual to prove him or herself through hard work in their calling. They held, however, that God spoke to believers only when they were silent and contemplative and so it was necessary to ‘wait’ until God’s wishes were known. By waiting to hear what God wanted of them, they would discover their calling in life. This encouraged a calm consideration of all actions in relation to the demands of the individual conscience. In this way, the same rational and methodical practical conduct of everyday life that had developed in the Puritan communities was also apparent in these later communities. A refusal to take public office or to serve in the armed forces meant that their ascetic and methodical way of life was especially strongly directed towards economic activity. Thus, it was not the theology or doctrine of the Protestant sects that Weber considered to be of primary importance. What was important was the way of life that had been nurtured and sustained through their pastoral teaching and community membership. This was to be explained through an empathic understanding of how the adherents experienced their spiritual existence and the rational responses that they made to the feelings that this induced. The typical response was to engage in the systematic, rational, and methodical pursuit of their work in a calling that Weber described as a ‘rationalisation of the conduct of life’.

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5.3. EMERGENCE OF THE CAPITALIST SPIRIT What Weber claimed to have shown by this point in his discussion was that in those areas occupied by the Calvinist and Baptist sects, a particular ethic had developed. He next sought to show the ways in which this ethic shaped the economic behaviour of the sect members. Taking the English Presbyterian Richard Baxter as an example, he looked at Puritan pastoral writings that expressed this ethic in the guidance that was offered on how individuals should act in practical affairs. Baxter and similar writers advised their congregations to avoid indulgence and luxury, not to waste time, to engage in hard, productive work, to make effective use of skills, to ensure that work is regular and orderly, to pursue profit when God makes opportunities available, and to increase the wealth that God has made available to them. This social ethic enjoined workers and business owners to conduct their labour, exercise their skills, and run their businesses in ways that broke fundamentally with all traditional restraints on the acquisition of wealth. Commercial acquisition so long as it was not mere greed or ‘Mammonism’ came to be seen as legitimate because it was felt to be directly willed by God. It gave birth to modern ‘economic man’, and thus to the capitalist spirit that Sombart had identified. Weber found the exemplary expression of this spirit its ideal type in the writings of the eighteenthcentury American statesman Benjamin Franklin, a descendent of English Puritans but himself non-observant. Franklin’s economic exhortations underpinned the expansion of capitalist economic activity in the eighteenth century. The religious value accorded to systematic labour in a calling that had been nurtured within Protestant communities had brought about, unintentionally, a capitalist spirit and the subsequent growth of a system of capitalist activity. Those

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who were found, in Weber’s time, to be disproportionately represented in capitalist business were the descendants of the ascetic Protestants, though they may no longer be Puritans, or even religiously observant. They sustained the conduct that had been enjoined in the capitalist spirit, but were motivated to do so by the compulsive pressures of the market competition inherent in an institutionalised system of capitalist economy. This meant that actors were constrained by economic pressures that contained their actions as if within a ‘steel-hard shell’. It was this social constraint that ensured the conformity of Protestants and non-Protestants alike to those forms of behaviour that would ensure the continued existence and global expansion of modern capitalism.

5.4. THE ENSUING DEBATE Weber felt that he had provided a satisfactory explanation of one key factor in the development of modern capitalism and that he had done so through using the methodological tools of the ideal type and interpretive understanding that he had begun to set out in his methodological writings. His argument did not, however, go unchallenged. Critics of Weber’s argument in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ made two principal points, to both of which Weber responded in terms that shaped his later work. First, they argued that both Catholicism and Judaism were supportive of a capitalist outlook, and, second, they rejected what they saw as a reliance on a spiritual or idealist determinism. Felix Rachfahl, Sombart, and, later, Brentano pointed to aspects of Catholicism that they held to be directly relevant to the capitalist spirit. They highlighted, in particular, the attitudes of the wealthy Venetian and Florentine merchants and their pursuit of luxurious consumption. Weber had, of

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course, himself investigated the Italian trading enterprises of the Middle Ages in his earlier work. Weber responds to this criticism by emphasising the crucial importance of the Protestant idea of the calling, which stressed the rational and disciplined pursuit of work as a vocation and that was antithetical to the Mammonism and luxurious lifestyle of the Italian merchants. This was, furthermore, a lifestyle that precluded any systematic investment in capital accumulation. Weber also refers to the Catholic doctrine of confession and atonement, which effectively removed the salvation anxiety that he sees as driving the practical pursuit of a vocation. The easy availability of these sacraments to the Catholic removed any anxiety about salvation and meant that the Catholic was not motivated by the same anxieties that had driven the Reformed Protestants towards the rational and diligent pursuit of their calling. Sombart made the further critical point that Jewish merchants and bankers had also been important pioneers of acquisitive behaviour in Europe. In relation to this argument, Weber argues that their role in the development of capitalism could be explained by their outsider position as ‘pariahs’, which allowed them to act towards non-Jews in ways different to the ways in which their religion required them to act towards each other. This argument that he made about the Jews as a social group also highlights Weber’s response to the second criticism that was made of his work. His critics had rejected the idealist determinism that they thought they had detected in his argument. Weber replies that, in accordance with his methodology, he had constructed ideal types that would allow him to selectively investigate one aspect of a complex historical reality. He recognises, however, the vital importance of other work, such as that of Sombart, that investigates the material factors on the other side of the causal chain. This

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work, like his own, was partial and incomplete, and a fuller picture depended on both materialist and idealist arguments. Sombart had developed his materialist response to Weber in his books on The Jews and Modern Capitalism and The Quintessence of Modern Capitalism (originally Der Bourgeois), developing the argument that Puritanism itself had been shaped by social conditions. It was partly in response to Sombart’s materialist view that, after 1913, Weber began a more systematic investigation into the role of the various world religions in supporting or restricting capitalist development. The key insight in Weber’s work was the disclosure of the high degree of rationality that marked capitalist economic activity. The development of capitalism, thanks to Protestant asceticism, involved a systematic ‘rationalisation’ of economic life. The idea of rationalisation as a general process that reduces the salience of ‘irrational’ factors in social life was, henceforth, a prominent theme in Weber’s work, informing much that he wrote and eventually being made the central theme that he sought to develop.

CHAPTER 6 COMPARATIVE AND HISTORICAL EXPLORATIONS

It was during 1908 that Weber agreed with the publisher of the Archive to take on the job of editing a replacement for Gustav Schönberg’s Handbook of Political Economy (Handbuch der Politischen Ökonomie). Although not initially envisaged as a major scholarly task, the idea of revising it to reflect new trends in economic thought was appealing to Weber. He probably saw it as a minor task, but as he began to plan the work he rapidly realised that his own intended contributions could be made into what would be a major and lasting intellectual project. Having decided on a plan, he drew up an outline that could be sent out to the potential contributors that he wanted to recruit. Weber envisaged that the Handbook would comprise a multi-volume encyclopaedia organised into five nominal ‘Books’. One whole Book Book One was to be largely written by himself. This was to be called ‘Economics and Economic Science’ and was itself to be divided into a number of separate ‘Sections’, the Section on social economics carrying the title ‘Economy and Society’. This latter was itself to include three ‘Parts’ covering, 77

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respectively, ‘Economy and Law’, ‘Economy and Social Groups’, and ‘Economy and Culture’. Elsewhere in the Handbook he was intending to write on ‘Economy and Race’ and a variety of other topics. With this project in mind, he began work on a number of substantial working papers, which he worked on comprehensively between 1909 and 1914. These are known to us today largely in the form that they had reached by the beginning of the First World War and in various stages of completion. Weber seems to have had difficulties in finding appropriate contributors for his project and in 1914 he felt compelled to reorganise his plans. He now referred to the project as the Outline of Social Economics (Grundriss der Sozialökonomik) and gave Book One the new title ‘Foundations of the Economy’. Its third Section was now to be ‘Economy and Society’ and the major Part was given the title ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’. Weber saw this Part as including the material on which he was working in his working papers. He now planned to organise this Section into eight chapters: (1) Categories of the Societal Orders; (2) The Household, Oikos, and Enterprise; (3) The Neighbourhood Association, Sib, and Community; (4) Ethnic Community Relations; (5) Religious Communities; (6) Market Organisation; (7) The Political Association; and (8) Domination This structure of intended chapters was the basis on which Weber had already organised many of his working papers,

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though they were all far more wide-ranging than was actually required by his plan for the Outline. In addition to papers that were related to the various chapters of his publication plan, Weber had also produced an elaboration of his earlier work on agrarian relations in antiquity, a paper on the medieval city that further developed this argument, a paper on western musical notation and instrumentation, and the earlier paper on the basics of his view of sociology as a science of ‘social groups’ that he published as a free-standing essay in 1913. Some of these additional papers were intended for publication as independent studies, but much of the material was intended for eventual inclusion in his major work. However, the main working papers were self-evidently not simply draft chapters for the Outline. Some of the topics to be covered were split between two or more working papers, and the subject matter of each paper was generally covered discontinuously in the order that ideas occurred to him rather than always being presented in a definitive logical order. There was a great deal of overlap in the contents of the papers, reflecting the fluidity of his argument and publication plans. Weber clearly intended to mine his working papers in order to produce new drafts that he intended to work up into final form for publication in ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’. These revisions would also have drawn on notes that he was writing for his developing project of a completely separate volume on the world religions. His plans for this volume discussed in Chapter 7 below were, in part, a replacement for his originally intended chapter on ‘Economy and Culture’. He planned to incorporate much of its intended content into the new chapter on ‘Religious Communities’ and to use other material, suitably expanded, in the larger sociology of the world religions. The ways in which the papers were compiled after his death into the published version of the posthumous volume

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that came to be called Economy and Society will be examined in Chapters 8 and 9. My purpose in the present chapter is to recapture the state of Weber’s argument as it stood in his working papers at the beginning of the First World War. This involves much reconstruction and reorganisation of the disorganised thoughts that he poured into his working papers.

6.1. THE HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE BASIS Weber’s papers on methodology and the basic concepts for social science had set out an approach to the ideal types that Weber employed throughout his working papers to identify the types of social group that were of interest to him for ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’. He also produced and published a paper that took up some of his early ideas on Roman society and anticipated a renewed discussion of agrarianism and capitalism. This much enlarged essay on ‘The Agrarian Sociology of the Ancient Civilisations’ revisited his very early work of 1897 and 1898 on the agrarian relations of ancient society and set the historical scene for his subsequent work. Published in 1909, the article used the ideal types of feudalism, capitalism, and the domestic economy (the oikos), together with their variants and sub-types, to investigate the contrasting patterns of development that Weber found in the Western and Oriental worlds. The particular societies on which he concentrated for his comparisons were the GraecoRoman and Egyptian civilisations. In Greece and Rome, he argues, early forms of kingship had developed into a form of feudalism, a precursor of the system established later in central and western Europe. The militaristic ruling classes that dominated these societies secured military and political services from their subservient populations through the use of

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rentals and labour service on their landholdings. Their Mediterranean locations, however, made it possible for mercantile interests to expand from the maritime urban centres. Ancient feudalism, therefore, took the form of a ‘city feudalism’ rather than the more individualistic ‘manorial feudalism’ that developed later in western Europe. City feudalism concentrated power in the urban centres, which were organised around the ‘citizenship’ rights of members of the polis. In Egypt, on the other hand, the oikos was strongly established as the basic economic unit. The technical and financial requirements of a river-based irrigation system led to the formation of a centralised and bureaucratic monarchy referred to by Weber as an ‘authoritarian-liturgical state’ that inhibited any autonomous commercial development. While the later Roman Empire, too, took this authoritarian form, it was not initially so dependent on the domestic economy and slavery. Weber shows that these economic and political differences shaped the development of each civilisation and that only in Roman society was there the basis for a form of capitalist development. Capitalism in Rome could develop only as a limited form of market economy because of its heavy dependence on slave labour, but Weber thinks it still possible to identify it as ‘ancient capitalism’, albeit different in form from ‘modern capitalism’. It was in this account of the contrasting development of Western and Oriental societies that Weber first fully expressed an idea that was to structure the whole of his subsequent work. This was the idea of the ‘rationalisation’ of culture that he had glimpsed in the rationalisation of practical conduct in the Puritan religious communities when writing ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. The idea of the ongoing rationalisation of culture became the unifying theme of his working papers, and he sees it as a process occurring in politics and law as well as in religion and the

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economy. This process of cultural and social development he saw as having progressed further in the West than in the Orient and as having produced the characteristic ‘rationalism’ of modern civilisation. Rationalisation, as Weber gradually clarified the term, involved a cultural ‘disenchantment’ through which magic, religion and traditionalism were displaced through the critical exercise of human reason, resulting in social life becoming subject to ever greater levels of rationality. An activity or complex of meaning is ‘rational’ to the extent that it is methodical, systematic, and purposeful, resulting in a high degree of calculability, formality, impersonality, and consistency. Humans in the West, Weber argued, increasingly live within social organisations characterised by technique and formality. It was this increased rationality, he argues, that had given these societies such a high degree of technical control over the natural and human worlds. At a cultural level, the elimination of traditional and religious justifications for value choices had resulted in the cultural relativism that led Weber to formulate his views on value judgments and objectivity. In a disenchanted, rationalised culture there can no longer be any certainty in the making of moral decisions about how people ought to live their lives. In achieving the possibility of technically and efficiently pursuing their goals, modern societies had lost any possibility of arriving at a rational consensus over which value commitments might inform these goals. Not until the 1920 Introduction to his essays on the sociology of religion did Weber discuss this rationalisation at any length. However, the idea informed all that he wrote in his working papers. He outlined various developmental tendencies that could be identified as processes of rationalisation occurring within the various ‘life orders’ of a society and within the various cultural contexts of the world civilisations. Within a particular society, these life orders economic,

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religious, political, and so on have varying degrees of autonomy and so may co-exist in more or less contradictory relations. It was through this idea of rationalisation that Weber was able to produce his developmental history of the multiple modernities of the great civilisations. In his view, there was no simple, unilinear process of evolution but there were, rather, parallel and intersecting rationalising tendencies that moved through distinct stages of development towards particular patterns of modernity. These were the ideas that he was exploring and trying to articulate in his working papers.

6.2. THE ECONOMY AND SOCIAL GROUPS The central part of Weber’s work concerned social economics and, in particular, his development of a sociology of the economy that focusses on the relationship between the economy and the various social groups that comprise a society. This is what he began to construct in his working paper on ‘The Economy and Social Groups’ that was to provide the core material for his projected book on ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’. Initially, therefore, his task was to define economic actions, the nature of social ‘groups’ or ‘communities’, and to specify those that are relevant to or operate in the economic sphere. He starts by defining economic action itself: it is a calculative and instrumental act of ‘economising’ in which needs are satisfied through choosing from among what are perceived to be a limited number of alternative ways of acting in relation to the use of the relevant scarce resources. Economic actions are, therefore, instrumental in relation to individual interests. The two principal sub-types of economic action are those concerned with the immediate satisfaction of practical needs and those concerned with the

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making of profits through control over scarce goods. The whole complex of such economic actions in any given territory comprises an ‘economic order’, a term referring to an organised use of the powers of disposition or control available to individuals that comprises a distribution of access to and use of goods and services. This pattern of control comprises a balancing of the cooperating and contending interests of the various individuals involved in the economic order. The clearest example of an economic order is the ‘market’ for a particular commodity or service. An economic order is said to be organised as a market whenever its participants pursue their interests through competing for opportunities to exchange with each other in actions that are purely rational and free from all non-economic influences. That is to say, a market is an economic order in which action has been fully rationalised and is no longer restricted by religious or traditional considerations. Such an order may be found in a particular physical location such as an urban market square, a regional fair, or a mercantile ‘exchange’ building, but it may also exist in dispersed form as an ongoing series of transient transactions, undertaken instrumentally and calculatively, in chains of relations across a whole territory. Actions in a market are always undertaken in relation to all its potential participants, not simply the immediate exchange partners. What Weber means by this is that sellers are not tied to selling to particular individuals or groups of individuals. In market exchange, the sellers of a commodity or service act on the basis that they could, in principle, sell, now or in the future, to any one of a large number of other buyers who may not be immediately present. Weber held that the regulation of an economic order is achieved through institutional or normative structures, particularly those of the legal system. For example, laws of property, contract, and employment guarantee the transfer of

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rights over the goods or services exchanged on a market. The institutional regulation of credit relations guarantees the economic interests of all of who participate in an economic order and so allows the creation and use of money. This leads Weber to the view that money has value only because there is an expectation that others will continue to want it and so will accept it in exchange as payment for goods and services. It is this expectation that others will be willing to accept money that is guaranteed by the framework of law. Money is, therefore, the means through which a purely calculative economic orientation is made possible, enabling actors to calculate alternatives by assigning a numerical value to them. This whole legal and social structure of institutions is the basis for the ‘impersonality’ of the market: transactions can be concerned with the sale or purchase of a commodity alone without any need to consider the personal characteristics or social identity of the particular exchange partner. There is a rational and purposeful pursuit of interests in the market and all are expected to behave according to norms of rational legality. Having outlined the features of an economic order, Weber turned to identify the social groups that are economically relevant: that is, the groups that shape the economic order and that may be conditioned by it. He looks initially at social groups that act economically or act within an economic order. His discussion, at this stage in his work, tends to use the word ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) as a generic term for ‘social group’ and the term ‘communal action’ as the term for what he would later call ‘social action’. This terminology limited his ability to make distinctions that became important in his later work and that I consider in Chapter 8. Any social group that acts in relation to an economic order must establish a degree of ‘closure’ or cohesion that gives them the ability to secure their control over desired resources. A group whose members feel they have common

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interests may achieve this closure by taking an identifiable characteristic such as ‘race’, language, residence, education, or training as a basis for excluding others from membership in the group and so establishing their exclusive monopoly over economic opportunities. This strategy of monopolisation may be pursued through joint action or perhaps through forming a legally constituted and guaranteed ‘association’ that can protect them and regulate their activities. It is in this way, Weber argues, that class or status groups have established property rights, guild monopolies, professional privileges, and craft restrictions. Business enterprises that secure finance through the public issuing of shares are economic associations with a more ‘open’ constitution, as their shares can be bought on a stock exchange by anyone who can afford them. This and other kinds of ‘open’ associations are, Weber argues, of central importance in the modern market economy. Despite their openness, however, Weber recognises that monopolies may still arise in a free market on the basis of the power inherent in the property available to a capitalist enterprise. A monopolistic business enterprise has a mastery of market capacities that is entirely rationally calculated. Weber recognises, however, that people and economic groups do not typically act on the basis of a rational consideration of legal principles. They do not rationally consider the content of the legal statutes and then apply them in their actions. Rather, actual conformity results from a variety of motives. Individuals may act through habit or because they have anticipated the positive or negative sanctions that may be applied by others to enforce lawful behaviour. This potential for enforcement means that a market, like any economic order, rests on the existence of a coercive apparatus that is able to enforce conformity whenever necessary. This apparatus comprises various ‘regulatory groups’ of a political,

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religious, or other extra-state character that are economically relevant social groups. The existence of an impersonal market is, Weber argues, a historically specific feature of modernity. Economic orders in pre-modern societies have more typically been regulated by political and religious groups, which often have a class or status basis and that have established substantial restrictions on the freedom of economic action in their societies. In order to become autonomous and impersonal, market relations have had to be gradually freed from all such communal restrictions, from the monopoly requirements of powerful social groups, and from relations of force and coercion. This, Weber argues, has been the case in western Europe. To understand how this happened, Weber saw a need to explore the historical emergence of purely economic relations from within other types of social group. The basic social group in a settled agrarian society, he argues, is the family ‘household’, a social group that is organised around the authority that a senior male has over his wife and children. The household is a solidaristic group that undertakes a common economic role and operates internally as a form of ‘communism’ in which all members share in the household’s resources. These households may exist within a larger ‘neighbourhood’ group, a local community of interest rooted in the physical proximity of a particular street, district, or village. The solidarity of the domestic household is somewhat weakened whenever the extended kinship group in which it is embedded coincides with a territorial neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is principally a community of mutual support among various separate households, but it may achieve a tighter closure and boundaries if a neighbourhood association can be formed. Weber mentions agricultural and forestry cooperatives as examples of such associations.

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At this economic stage, the household is the social group that is responsible for all economic activity and there is no separate economic order. Specifically economic relations and specialised economic groups originate in the transformation of the household through the establishment of individual property rights. When organised military groups acquire and farm land and form political associations to regulate their landholdings and economic activity there is a legal basis for the inheritance of property through the household and kinship group. This legal basis for property, independent of household relations, weakens the unlimited and arbitrary power of the father over the household. As political and economic groups became more active in the emerging economic order, Weber argues, this power is further weakened. The final disintegration of the household as an economic group came with the strengthening of capitalist enterprise and the building of a money economy based on the capitalist culture of acquisitiveness. Within the expanding economic order, the range of opportunities available to individuals increases and their commitment to individual calculation strengthens. As a result, Weber holds, they become discontented with the ways of life traditionally sanctioned by their membership in a family household. The household is no longer seen as the exclusive bearer of the cultural values to which individuals are committed and they no longer look to the household for protection. With the establishment of capitalist enterprises, continuous capitalist acquisition becomes the specialist responsibility of an economic organisation separate from the household. The family household becomes a mere unit of consumption separate from the capitalistically organised groups involved in production and distribution. Capitalist enterprises, Weber argues, initially became major economic powers in medieval Florence and northern Italy, where the unique Western practice of the contractual

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regulation of business had first been invented. The legal and financial separation of an enterprise from the household was the development that made possible the introduction of the joint stock company, which became the characteristic form of capitalist enterprise in the modern economy. For much of human history, however, economic activities have been pursued by monopolistic groups with a primarily political purpose. These groups have operated through establishing autonomous and self-sufficient activity as a collective economy (an oikos), such as a manor or a royal household. Through taxes and fees attached to market transactions, through payments for privileges granted, and through monopolistic transactions, these groups have been able to restrict the free development of the market and private capitalism. Only when political associations have relied on taxation and direct market operations has the capitalist market been relatively free to grow. Political change is, therefore, another condition for the development of a capitalist economic order. Politically organised societies with private property relations are inegalitarian societies and Weber traces the formation of unequally ranked social groups and their political regulation. He is concerned, in particular, with those groups that are unequal to one another with respect to the power that they derive from either economic resources or social honour. Weber refers to these as differences of ‘class’ and ‘status’, seeing these as complementary determinants of the ‘life chances’ of individuals. A class is a category of people whose possession of goods and services or opportunities for income within an economic order gives them specific life chances. It is the operations of commodity and labour markets that form individuals into distinct ‘class situations’. These class divisions are seen as most fundamentally rooted in property and lack of property, as they were seen by Marx. However, Weber recognises that

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property relations can be differentiated according to the kind of property and the kind of marketable services that are involved. For example, a propertied class might comprise both rentier and entrepreneurial elements, and these can be considered as occupying distinct class situations. Those who occupy a similar class situation are likely to act in similar ways in relation to their economic circumstances, exhibiting a uniform but unorganised response. However, if they develop a consciousness and understanding of their situation they may form a trade union or other form of association that can pursue their shared interests through a coordinated form of collective action. A social estate (a Stand, sometimes translated as a ‘status group’) is a category of people, normally forming a group, whose position in a social distribution of honour gives them specific life chances: the life chances of the group depend on the positive or negative social estimation of honour that is accorded to them. Estimations of social honour are expressed in the expectation that individuals will follow a particular style of life with restrictions on interaction, intermarriage, and other bases of group closure. Unlike differences of class, status differences always involve a conscious awareness of social honour and of relative social standing. A social estate, therefore, typically has a conscious identity, a degree of group solidarity, and a capacity for collective action. Status differences have often been based on property or wealth. The ownership of land, for example, has often been regarded as honorific. Where this is the case, there may be a close correlation between status and class divisions, but Weber argues that the style of life associated with the honour of landholding may still tend to hinder the development of market relations. It may denigrate commerce and limit any involvement in acquisitive behaviour by imposing restrictions on the freedom of market exchange. More generally, Weber

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concludes that when class and status differences co-exist, status differences will prevail when economic processes are relatively stable and class relations will prevail where technical and economic changes are forcing a rapid development of the market. Status differences may be rooted in factors other than property or wealth, including lineage, religion, and ethnicity. Weber sees ethnic differences as being particularly important and as the basis of the most extreme form of closure that occurs in the ethnically defined ‘caste’. Weber’s understanding of ethnicity eschews all biological accounts of race, but he recognises that inherited physical traits may become socially significant when they are subjectively perceived as rooted in common descent. In these circumstances, the traits become markers of cultural differences and so are seen as a relevant basis for social inclusion and exclusion. This exists, he says, where contact between social groups is subjectively defined in terms of racial difference and is expressed in antagonistic action. In such situations, an ‘ethnic’ consciousness develops and comes to inform people’s actions. This ethnic awareness arises through cultural contacts and is reinforced by involvement in or memories of migration and colonisation. An ethnic identity leads individuals to see themselves, and to be seen by others, as a stock, tribe, or people, often tied to a past, current, or desired political grouping. This identity is sustained through the continuity of kin-group intermarriage and sociability and may be reinforced by a common language or religion. Such a belief in a common ethnic identity may become the basis of group formation in the political sphere and an ethnic group may build a political association around their ethnic identity. In its most developed form this politically expressed ethnicity involves the idea of a ‘nation’ and a corresponding desire for an autonomous political existence as a nation state. A

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nation state exists, Weber argues, where the members of a state regard themselves as the carriers of the specific culture of an ethnic group, most specifically and typically the cultural values attached to a common language, that gives them a sense of solidarity in relation to other groups. A state may consist of a number of such nations, and the national interests of such a state will tend to be those of its most privileged and powerful strata. Weber recognised the great importance of nation states in capitalist development. Where nation states involved in power struggles with each other have ongoing capital requirements, they have tended to enter into alliances with capitalist groups. This ‘mercantilist’ structure of alliances coincided in Europe with the emergence of industrial production and made possible an expansion of capitalism on a scale unknown in antiquity. Modern states today, Weber argues, compete with each other to assert ‘national’ interests and national power in imperialist rivalries. Hence, the political competition of states has remained an important feature of modern economic protectionism.

6.3. DOMINATION, AUTHORITY, AND POLITICAL GROUPS Weber saw the question of power as central to economic life, both as a feature of the ways in which economic groups operate and as a feature of the constraints imposed on those acting within an economic order. He approaches this question of power through considering the forms of ‘domination’ found in social life. Domination can occur in any social order, but Weber was particularly interested in the forms of domination found in the political and religious orders relevant to the economic order and within the economic order itself.

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Domination is a particular kind of power relation, of which Weber recognised two contrasting types. These he called domination by virtue of a constellation of interests and domination by virtue of authority. The former is based upon power in relation to marketable and other resources, such as goods, services, and skills, where the subordination of others is based exclusively on the rational calculation of interests by all the participants. It involves some kind of concentration or monopolisation of control over those resources. Domination by virtue of authority, on the other hand, involves a relation of ‘command’ and obedience rather than any calculation of advantage. The superior claims a right to command and the subordinate has an obligation to obey. It is this latter kind of domination that Weber was particularly concerned to examine in his working paper and so he focussed exclusively on this ‘authoritarian power of command’. Focussing specifically on political forms of such ‘authority’, he argues that political associations develop slowly from purely militaristic groups of warriors and come to monopolise the legitimate use of violence as the basis for a coercive apparatus. The diverse forms of political association, from chiefdoms to patrimonial empires and feudalism, each have a characteristic structure of authority that involves ‘rulers’ who influence the conduct of others through the making of commands that express their will, and an ‘administrative apparatus’ of officials who carry out the decisions of their leaders or masters. Authority exists when people act as if they had explicitly followed a command as a valid principle of action, though their conformity may actually result from a complex variety of motives. Weber’s focus is on the principles of justification or ‘legitimation’ that lie behind group domination. Legitimacy does not relate to the motives that people have for acting in one way or another. It is, rather, a matter of the

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reasons for which a law or other norm is claimed or recognised to be valid. As he outlined in his discussion of the legal basis of the economic order, people may actually conform, or fail to conform, through fear, self-interest, habit, or conviction, rather than through explicit consideration of or commitment to normative or legal principles. Thus, people do not typically act by taking the command as a rule to be followed, but may still acknowledge the relevance of the selfjustifications put forward by the rulers and their legitimate right to act on their commands. By acknowledging that the relevant laws or norms were validly enacted, they acknowledge that they can, with justification, be applied to their acts. Weber argues that rulers may claim legitimacy on three bases in relation to a system of rational norms, by virtue of the sacredness of tradition, or through the personal ‘charisma’ of the ruler and he examines each of these ideal types. The original forms of authority are charismatic in nature. Charismatic authority is purely personal and is based on a claim that others should recognise both a particular individual’s ‘gift’ of out-of-the-ordinary bodily and mental powers and the mission that the individual intends to pursue. Charisma is a principal source of new ideas. It is at its clearest in the prophets or messiahs who operate in a religious context, but is also the basis of the authority of warlords who emerge in tribal societies at times of extreme difficulty. The charismatic leader is supported by a select group of devoted followers who are united by personal loyalty, accept the leader’s pronouncements as authoritative, and form an administrative body. These followers are supported by ad hoc disbursements from the leader rather than by regular payments or grants of land. In adapting to the ‘ordinary’ circumstances of practical life, charisma is ‘routinised’. What Weber means by this is that charisma can become institutionalised or transformed

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into a less personal and individualised form of authority. Many early forms of kingship originated in this way. In these more complex systems, charisma is treated as a hereditary quality attached to the lineage of the original leader. Because the charisma is ‘depersonalised’ in this way it may be systematised into a coherent system of ideas as it becomes attached to certain positions and offices. Prominent families associated with these positions may thus claim a particular hereditary right to participate in the exercise of authority. In many such systems, the inherited charisma of the ruler is recognised through processes such as anointing, which symbolises the transferring of charisma, and becomes apparent on such occasions as coronations and elections. Where a charismatic leader builds a more permanent organisational structure, this typically involves building on the patriarchal authority of the head of a household. The legitimacy of a master’s orders come to be guaranteed by personal subjection under a framework of norms that are grounded in the inviolability of traditional practices. Where patriarchal authority is extended from the individual household to larger political units, for example through the appointment of government servants to a ruling household, authority takes a ‘patrimonial’ form. Patrimonial administration operates through an apparatus of offices based in the ruling house. These include such positions as house priest, personal physician, and the supervisors of the various branches of the administration: stewards, marshals, chamberlains, seneschals, and their subordinate administrators and servants. The ethos of patrimonialism is that of personal service and the efficient performance of a function that serves the ruler’s wishes. Weber cites Egypt, China, India, and most of the great historical Empires as examples. Patrimonialism is a properly ‘political’ form of association and the principal form of traditional authority in human

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history. A group or association is ‘political’ when it is concerned with the forcible maintenance of control over a territory and its people. While force may be used by households, neighbourhoods, and other groups, a political association is one that allies force with sustained legitimate domination over a territory’s internal order and external defence. Its concern may be limited to the maintenance of its control, or it may pursue economic and other values. While an economic order integrates individuals through their economic interests, a political order is concerned with the relations of authority through which a territory and those living within it are regulated in ways other than the purely economic. In a patrimonial system of traditional authority, the king or other ruler is able to extend authoritative control by appointing district administrators who support themselves through an income, benefice, or tax privilege from the ruler. Over time, as the ruler’s administrative needs become more complex, clerical and accounting officials become more important in the extensive and growing administrative apparatus. The ruler becomes increasingly dependent on gifts, duties, and concessions as sources of income to support the expanding political apparatus, but the extent of these exactions is limited by tradition and by such military force as the ruler is able to mobilise. Weber diagnoses an endemic struggle within patrimonialism between the ruler and those officials who are able to establish a degree of autonomy as a social group enjoying privileges and rights to official positions and able to appropriate benefices and concessions. Where such local autonomy is strong, the officials may form an honorific social estate of ‘notables’ or ‘dignitaries’ who are able to exercise a collective counter power to central rule. Where this autonomy exists, there can be a decentralisation of administration and a consequent disintegration of the ruler’s power. Rulers typically

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attempt to prevent this disintegration through requiring attendance at court, making visitations to various parts of their realm, and building a division of responsibilities. ‘Feudalism’, Weber argued, is a particularly extreme form of decentralised patrimonialism, based on a relationship between a lord and a vassal. Instead of a paternal, patriarchal bond between ruler and local administrator there is a personal contractual bond in which military service is provided in return for the granting or recognition of territorial rights over a piece of land and its population. In Western feudalism which Weber sees as the clearest example of the type fealty was combined with a fief, a rent-producing complex of rights in land and population that can maintain a lord in a manner appropriate to his style of life. The fief is organised internally as a ‘manor’ on a patriarchal basis with its administration undertaken through a hierarchy of ranks based in a structure of subinfeudation. As a fief becomes de facto hereditary, relationships with the ruler are ‘depersonalised’ into mere rent relationships. Where lords form alliances and engage in collective action, they organise themselves as a social estate and gain legal recognition as a politically autonomous group. In Europe, where a ‘clerical estate’ of dependent landholding bishops and abbots existed as a counter balance to the secular lordly estate, a Ständestaat or polity of estates was formed. This involved the formation of a corporate assembly or parliament to represent lordly and clerical interests to the ruler. The ethos of a feudal order is one of status honour and personal loyalty and it is antithetical to the impersonal commercialism of the market. The ethos does, however, enjoin a style of life of ostentation, glamour, and splendour to assert the honour of high status. Authority in modern states has been rationalised, just as economic activity in a modern economy has been rationalised. Rulers are not bound by traditionalism but exercise

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rational or legal authority, issuing commands on the basis of formally enacted laws. The ruling group acts impersonally in terms of a system of rational norms, and neither they nor their officials exercise authority personally but solely as occupants of a legally constituted position. Within the modern state, as in all large associations, it is ‘parties’ that compete for ruling positions. A party, in the most general sense, is an association that strives for a goal in a planned manner, and parties are concerned with achieving the power that will enable them to achieve their goals. Parties may recruit from classes and estates or from any combination of social groups, such as those based on ethnicity or religion. They struggle for authority as a way of furthering the interests of those that they represent. In modern political systems, Weber argues, the electorate only ever chooses between a small number of candidates who have been pre-selected by their parties and so the outcome of an election is a process of quasi-appointment. The administrative apparatus in a modern state takes the form of a ‘bureaucracy’. Bureaucrats are appointed officials and their administrative powers are formally separated from their own private households and from the households of the ruling group. This separation between public and private spheres characterises state agencies, business enterprises, and other rationally organised associations. Within such a public form of association, the area of responsibility within which an official can issue commands is strictly delimited by rules that define the powers attached to the office and the eligibility of its occupant. There is a clear hierarchy of positions with rule-governed supervision at all levels, and the making of decisions is based upon and recorded in written files that are stored and archived by clerks and scribes. The specialised tasks are undertaken by those with appropriate education and training and administration is regarded as a full-time occupation or vocation. The bureaucrat

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is paid a salary according to his or her level of responsibility and follows a ‘career’ path with definite stages of promotion. A bureaucracy, therefore, depends upon the existence of a money economy in which business enterprises can generate profits and states can raise regular taxation to finance administrative salaries. Weber sees a bureaucracy as technically superior to the system of patrimonial administration because of its precision, speed, and knowledge base. For this reason, it has spread from the civil administration of the state and the business enterprise to the military, the university, and the mass political party. Bureaucracy becomes increasingly ‘indispensable’, and the expertise and knowledge of the official can enhance their power position wherever there is strict administrative secrecy. This does not mean, however, that bureaucratic officials will necessarily usurp the position of the ruler. There may be struggles between elected rulers and their officials, and it is always a matter for empirical investigation whether bureaucrats outweigh the influence of representative bodies at local and national parliamentary levels.

6.4. THE LEGAL ORDER Weber’s discussion of domination showed that the exercise of rational authority is closely tied to the existence of a legal order: a formally rational system of authority co-exists with a formally rational legal order. Legal regulation is also an essential condition for the property and contractual relations that are central to the modern economic order. For Weber, this meant that it is essential for social economics to include an understanding of the economically relevant legal order as a specific type of normative system. This was to be provided by a sociology of law rather than by the legal theories of

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jurisprudence. Weber argued that jurisprudence can be distinguished from the sociology of law in the same way that economics can be distinguished from social economics. Jurisprudence, or legal dogmatics, regards the legal order as a logical system of propositions. It aims to discern the correct meaning of legal propositions, their validity and logical form, and the ways in which they are related to particular situations and types of act. The sociology of law, on the other hand, studies actions that are oriented towards the legal order and examines the extent to which actual social behaviour is in conformity with legal norms. Its particular concern is with the motivation that lies behind legally oriented actions and the determination of legal norms. It regards legal norms as binding obligations that are enforced or ‘guaranteed’ through a coercive apparatus able to ensure that certain types of behaviour will take place. Weber would not take Marxist theories as the basis of his sociology of law as he was critical of their reduction of legal forms to simple reflex consequences of economic processes. He argues instead that laws have to be seen as the outcome of the social relations through which domination is exercised. The development of modern, rational systems of government and administration led to a ‘rationalisation’ of law that made possible the stance taken by jurisprudence. The high degree of ‘formal rationality’ in modern legal systems resulted from the adoption of generalised legal ideas and their procedurally strict application to the facts of particular cases. Formally rational law is law that is enacted and enforced in accordance with procedure. It is rational by virtue of the formal process through which lawful decisions are made. Rational law is the counterpart to rational bureaucracy in the modern state. The ‘substantively rational’ law found in pre-modern societies, by contrast, is concerned with the practical results of a legal decision and whether these accord with a particular

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value. The ongoing rationalisation of law drives normative systems in the direction of formal rationality. Weber traced the long pre-history of substantively rational law in premodern societies. He saw law as emerging gradually from the customs and conventions that prevail in patriarchal tribal systems and early chiefdoms. Actions that result simply from established habits tend to be mere ‘mass’ actions: they are individualised responses to recurrent situations and involve no conscious awareness of commonality on the part of the actors. They come to be recognised simply as the factual regularities of custom. Where actions are oriented to the likely reactions of approval or disapproval from others, the resulting regularities of action are binding ‘conventions’. Weber sees the earliest forms of law as deriving from conventions. They are identified and asserted as binding requirements, and a coercive apparatus is established to enforce them. Early bodies of law are largely traditionalistic in character. They derive their legitimacy from the sacredness of tradition, rooted in customs and conventions and known and interpreted in accordance with established usage by elders and patriarchs and, when it takes a religious form, by the priests who maintain the oral traditions. In such a system, new laws result only from the adaptation of the conventions to new situations. Genuine legal innovations, however, must always come into being through a non-traditional mechanism of enactment, that is, through deliberate law-making. Typically, such innovations have come about through oracular or charismatic revelation, and the ritual enactment of law through the revelations of an oracle mark the beginning of the formal, procedural enactment of law. The oracle must perform the conventional magical practices formally and correctly, albeit on the ‘irrational’ basis of mystical and unpredictable revelation. In patrimonial systems of authority, legal norms are imposed from above and the formal enactment of law by

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administrative officials begins to become more important. The administration of justice, however, is concerned with establishing ‘truth’ rather than with following the correct procedure. Such a system remains ‘irrational’, as the focus is on individual cases taken separately and decisions are made on the basis of the particular circumstances of those involved. For example, people are recognised as members of particular families or social estates and not as abstract ‘individuals’. As a result, laws and rights of all kinds are specific to particular categories of persons and their shared identities. Weber saw this as especially characteristic of Islamic systems of ‘kadi justice’. Not until administration itself is more rationalised and impersonal does justice become rationalised through the use of codified norms of behaviour. As religious systems provide the normative basis for law, Weber highlights the role of specialists in religious law as the key agents in this process. Through their training in religion and philosophy, legal officials are able to draw on objectively formulated ethical norms that can be applied to specific cases. This substantive rationalisation appeared first with the idea of a ‘natural law’ that underlies and is supposed to inform positive law. Only in modern, rational systems of domination can law be formally rationalised, with ethical norms and principles giving way to logical and procedural principles in the determination of decisions. Of particular importance, however, is the process of ‘disenchantment’ through which legal norms become differentiated from revelation and tradition, and legal requirements become simply those that have been formally enacted. Law, then, becomes separated from all substantive ethical considerations. The legal order comes to be concerned with the impersonal administration and enforcement of all prescriptions and proscriptions that have been established through logical and formally correct procedures. This development of

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formally rational law was furthered by the secular legal specialists who arose with the development of modern commerce and sought to codify the legal regulation of the market relations and monetary transactions of freely contracting individuals. As Weber had shown in his discussion of the economic order, the legal order also guarantees the right of individuals to enter into a contract but is not concerned with what it is that the parties are contracting to do or with the motives that inform their actions. People are treated by the legal system as abstract ‘individuals’, not as members of a particular estate. There is, then, a move from status contracts to pure ‘purposive’ contracts. In a formally rational legal system, what a law requires or proscribes is a matter merely of political choice, and ethical values have no bearing on whether or not a particular act is lawful. Such a legitimate legal order guarantees the form of the modern state, which tends to operate in a purely technical or instrumental way in relation to arbitrary political choices and expressions of interest.

6.5. URBAN COMMUNITIES While Weber’s working papers on the economy, law, and domination have a clear focus on the rise of modern, rational capitalism and its forms of governance and administration, his working paper on the city seems to stand very much alone. It is concerned, almost exclusively, with discussions of the ancient and medieval Italian cities. Nevertheless, it has an important place in his overall scheme and has some significant connections with his discussion of the economic order. The paper on the city was, in fact, explicitly cast in relation to the sociology of domination, but where the main focus of his work had been on authority, Weber saw his discussion of

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the city as an examination of ‘non-legitimate domination’. This term is related to the category of domination by virtue of a constellation of interests, which he had discussed in his papers on domination and that he saw as a feature of economic activity in the market. His account of the ancient and medieval cities of Europe was designed to show the origins of this particular form of domination. Weber draws a contrast between the Western city and the cities of the Oriental world. The cities of the Asian civilisations, he argues, were politically embedded in their surrounding agrarian societies. Their members were tied by relations of kinship or caste solidarity to the villages of the surrounding countryside and so had only limited opportunities to develop any significant political autonomy as urban centres. In the West, on the other hand, such personal bonds to the countryside were weak or non-existent and urban centres were able to establish an autonomy as ‘communes’. Cities in the West that were fortified and based around a local or regional market were able to establish legal regulations and forms of judicial administration that were specific to them because of their ‘privileged’ standing relative to the feudal ruler. The cities were legally defined as ‘burghs’ or boroughs by royal charter, and their citizens were recognised as ‘burghers’ or as ‘bourgeois’. Urban merchants were therefore able to enjoy an independent participation in the local government of their city and they were able also to form burgher fraternities such as trade guilds to regulate their economic activities and promote their collective interests. The medieval Western city, then, was a settlement in which the domination exercised by a patrimonial or feudal ruler had been usurped by groups of the ruled. The city was an enclave within which autonomous but non-legitimate domination had been established by rentiers, entrepreneurs, and merchants who could achieve a dominance over others

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living within their cities by virtue of their power to spend, employ, or trade with urban artisans and professionals and with agrarian interests in the surrounding countryside. Their domination rested on this constellation or conjunction of economic interests. Weber recognises two variants of the Western city. Where landed rentiers formed an important element among the urban residents and maintained a status superiority over commercial burghers, they were able to dominate urban governance, control the city’s trading activities, and operate as a city state. These ‘patricians’ did not act as acquisitive, rational capitalists but retained a status legitimacy and lived on rents and on urban taxes and duties. They did little to encourage the development of the rational capitalist market. This was the ideal type that Weber referred to as the ‘patrician city’, and of which he saw Venice as being the principal example. Where, on the other hand, landowners remained in the countryside or had been successfully opposed by a powerful bourgeoisie, popular urban dominance was established in the form of the ‘plebeian city’ and its ‘democratic’ structures. In the plebeian city, bourgeois economic activity was free of traditional restrictions on labour and allowed those who were legally defined as serfs or slaves to accumulate sufficient wealth to purchase their freedom or to acquire it simply by virtue of their urban residence. They could therefore become free wage labourers. The domination of the propertied burghers over artisans, labourers, and small traders was a bourgeois class domination, a domination by virtue of a constellation of interests that appeared in an increasingly naked form. These groups subsequently sought to establish a legitimacy for their domination and, in so doing, helped to build the foundations for the rationalisation of culture that was such a critical condition for the development of modern societies.

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Western cities before the modern era, however, remained as largely religiously organised communities and Weber highlighted the ways in which Christianity had prevented the participation of Jews in the guilds and other fraternal associations of the cities. As a result, the Jews came to form an outsider, ‘pariah’ group that was able to disregard traditional Christian restrictions on usury and commercial profit making.

6.6. RELIGIOUS GROUPS AND ROLES Weber’s discussion, in his study of the Protestant ethic, of the restrictions on rational capitalist activity inherent in cultural traditionalism had suggested the importance of religious beliefs and practices in sustaining traditionalism and inhibiting the rise of capitalism. He therefore regarded a study of religious groups as an integral aspect of his consideration of economically relevant social groups. His social economics therefore required that he develop a sociology of religion. Weber did not preface his sociology of religion with a discussion of its disciplinary distinctiveness from theology, though this is implied in all that he wrote. Theology studies the contents of religious beliefs and doctrines, aiming to uncover a coherent meaning to them, but these are not Weber’s concerns. His sociology of religion is to examine the social conditions that are responsible for different forms of religious belief, the social groups that are the carriers and articulators of particular forms of religion, and the impact of religious beliefs and practices on practical life. His working papers on religion develop this sociological point of view and he extended this into the specific comparative investigations that he carried out on the history of the major world religions. In this section I will outline his general sociological

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framework. His discussion of the world religions will be considered in the next chapter. Religiously oriented actions, Weber argues, are rational, rule-governed actions that are concerned with the empirical world but have a subjective meaning relating to a supernatural world of spiritual beings that are held to be causally responsible for the behaviour of objects and persons in the empirical world. Religious action is ‘magical’ when the rules through which it is organised concern the ‘correct’ ways in which to evoke or influence the behaviour of these spiritual beings. The magical manipulation of hidden spiritual powers is of central importance in the earliest forms of religion, and the principal religious role here is the professional ‘magician’, a charismatically endowed individual who is able to achieve ecstatic states and exercise magical powers through healing, divination, and other practical activities. This magical activity is organised as forms of ‘sorcery’. At a later stage of religious development, Weber argues, the spiritual powers may come to be personified as ‘gods’, and the ‘soul’ of a person is then likely to be identified as having a particular relationship to the spiritual world inhabited by the gods. In these circumstances, belief becomes properly religious, in the narrower sense, and is organised into various ‘cults’ around the gods associated with particular social groups as their household or tribal gods. Weber traces what happens when the gods come to be seen as ‘lords’, on the basis of analogies made with earthly rulers. In these circumstances, he argues, ‘worship’ comes to be seen as necessary in order to placate and propitiate the gods. ‘Priests’ emerge as functionaries concerned with the organisation of this worship. A priesthood is an organised and permanent body of these religious functionaries based in the cult centres and associated with a specific ‘cultic apparatus’. While a magician seeks to coerce or compel a god to

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act, a priest organises the worship of a god and invokes it into action through prayer or sacrifice rather than through following magical formulae. Priests, nevertheless, continue to rely on certain magical rites, especially those concerned with the soul and the bodies of the dead. Priests maintain the oral traditions that define the rites of the cult. They have a specialised knowledge of doctrine and belief, and they are organised into ‘guilds’ and office hierarchies in order to administer the cults. When a patriarchal household or kin-group adopts a god of their own, a domestic cult of ancestor worship tends to develop in parallel with the patriarchal structure of the household. This domestic cult forges the household into a strongly cohesive group and so influences its economic relationships. Within a tribe, the various household gods co-exist with, perhaps, one having a dominant position. Where tribal groups develop into federations, there is a tendency for an overarching god of the federation to be recognised. This, Weber argues, happened in ancient Palestine, leading to the establishment of the religion of Yahweh. A particular and fateful characteristic of this religion, Weber notes, is the idea of a covenant or contract prescribing the performance of ritual and ethical duties and the corresponding obligations of a god to protect its people. Religion, in these circumstances, has direct implications for personal behaviour. Wherever gods are worshipped, the idea soon develops that those who disregard the norms of behaviour upheld by the god are likely to incur that god’s displeasure. Weber sees this as the origin of the idea of ‘sin’. It is believed that sins must be punished, but they may also impose burdens on the individual conscience from which the believer hopes to be granted ‘salvation’. In their cult rituals, especially those concerned with salvation, the magical actions of priests become increasingly symbolic and religious beliefs are increasingly

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elaborated intellectually as mythology. Weber argues that this growth in the systematic character of religious thinking results in a tendency for the various spiritual entities to be seen as forming a pantheon of gods, each with specialised powers and characters. Weber found evidence of this tendency in Greece and Rome as well as in Indian religion. Weber notes that when traditional and patrimonial political associations have allied themselves with particular gods who are believed to guarantee their success in military and political actions, a close articulation between religious and political domination is established. The classical polis, for example, rested on a fusion of tribal, clan, and domestic gods and their cults. In fully patrimonial systems the personal gods of the royal household will predominate over the domestic gods of all other households, and the priesthood is able to establish a religious sanction for patrimonial rule. Successful political and military conquests by the ruler are then seen as signs that the king’s god is stronger than the gods of the conquered peoples. When dominance of one all-powerful god is established in a patrimonial empire, a basis exists for the emergence of forms of monotheism. The interests of the priesthood often preclude the development of full monotheism, as the various priests or guilds of priests will each have interests in the regulation of the cult of a particular god and will seek to maintain their cult. Monotheism proper developed only in Judaism and Islam, and later in Protestant Christianity, all other religions continuing to invoke subordinate gods and spiritual entities. Unified structures of religious and political domination in patrimonial systems take a ‘hierocratic’ or ‘theocratic’ form whenever priests prevail over temporal rulers. Spiritual and temporal powers may, however, differentiate into separate structures of ‘church’ and state that nevertheless remain closely articulated in a hierocratic form. Following the

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distinction that he had drawn in his earlier paper on the Protestant sects, Weber constructed an ideal type of the church that his Heidelberg colleague Ernst Troeltsch was simultaneously setting out in his 1911 book The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches. A church, Weber argues, is a religious group that is based around a professional priesthood that lives separately from the temporal and practical world and with its own social organisation and way of life. Such a church claims universal authority over a territory and regards membership as being compulsory for all who live there. The church exercises a comprehensive religious and ethical regulation over its populace. Churches in this sense, Weber argues, have been found only in Christianity, Islam, and Lamaist Buddhism, although more limited forms are found in Judaism and in ancient Egypt. Cults and churches, as the two earliest forms of religious grouping, require a way of involving the laity in their rituals. In cult religions a key role has often been played by ‘prophets’. Prophets are charismatic law-givers who emerge from the laity, in opposition to the priests, and organise their activities through a group of committed ‘disciples’ or personal devotees who aid them in pursuing their mission. A charismatic mission may become routinised wherever the prophet tries to build a more permanent structure or to find a successor. As a result, there may be formed a ‘community’ of believers, a group of those who provide support for the leader and expect to receive succour or salvation through his, or her, mission. Within a religious community, the disciples may take on the role of priests and such a community and its routinised religion may then develop into a church. The role of the laity is especially important in a church. To maintain its position, the priesthood must meet the needs of the laity, from which new prophets or intellectuals are likely to arise. Priests must therefore codify their doctrines and

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ensure their acceptance by the laity. Scripture becomes of greater importance than the oral tradition, and religious belief tends to become intellectually closed in the form of orthodoxy and dogma. These doctrines are likely to become the objects of a systematic education in the hands of the professionally organised priesthood. Where this codification involves an ethical component the need for preaching and pastoral care is often met by prophetic individuals. The communities that form around such prophetic individuals may then develop into ‘sects’ that split off from the parent church. Sects are religious groups that individuals join voluntarily and become participants in their democratic, ‘congregational’ administration. There is, Weber argues, an ‘elective affinity’ between the sect and political democracy. A church that accumulates land and other economic resources and in which monastic bodies are engaged in craft and trade activities tends to come into conflict with urban commercial activities and may become a fetter on the development of market relations. The medieval European Church, for example, asserted a proscription on usury, the earning of interest on the lending of money. Only with the development of the Protestant sects, Weber argues, was hierocratic church power weakened and a religious basis for capitalist development established. This issue, however, was a matter that he was intending to take up in his essays on the economic ethics of the world religions, and Weber came to recognise the need to separate this historical argument from his general sociology of religion. It will be considered in Chapter 7 below. Weber finally contrasted the typical religious orientations of privileged and disadvantaged groups. Privileged strata are satisfied with their social position and so seek to justify their advantages in what Marxists called ‘ideological’ terms. They are attracted to religions of legitimation that explain why they deserve these. Disadvantaged groups, on the other hand,

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are dissatisfied with their circumstances and so look towards a change in their fortunes in the future. They are attracted to utopian ‘religions of compensation’ that give them the hope of salvation or a release from suffering in the future. Thus, warrior nobles have tended to adhere to strong gods who protect them and provide support for military victories. Their religious orientation is irrational. In the case of bureaucratic officials in patrimonial systems, however, the more rationalised orientation of the bureaucrat towards political administration is reflected in a more rationalised form of religion. Traditionally sustained social order tends to become an absolute standard of value, though cult religions may be maintained to control the masses. Mercantile strata involved in rationalised forms of commerce, Weber argues, have tended to be associated with rational ethical religions, and the modern bourgeoisie justifies its privileges and advantages in utilitarian terms. Peasants have a sense of dependence on natural forces and tend to affiliate with nature-bound cults, Their beliefs are irrational and become rationally systematised only when peasants are under threat from enslavement or proletarianization. Artisans, with a sense that they can enhance their circumstances through their own efforts and achievements, tend towards congregationalism and salvationism based on a rational ethic. Labourers and proletarians have a sense of their dependence on economic and political power relations, and have a great affinity with salvation religions. In a secular society they seek the compensation promised in socialism. These religious affiliations provide the basis for adherence to particular systems of thought, but these systematic doctrines are always those of priesthoods that have developed an ‘intellectualism’. As ‘intellectuals’, the priests engage in a rational elaboration and systematisation of religion. Weber sees such intellectualisation as the basis for the development

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of the world religions. High-status intellectuals systematised Confucianism in China and Hinduism in India, while low status ‘pariah’ intellectuals were the basis of diaspora Judaism. Islam, Weber argues, was the product of a warrior elite and the intellectualisation of the religion took the form of a closed and consolidating ‘scholasticism’. Similarly, the medieval Christianity formed from the early Christianity of itinerant craft workers had also developed into a scholasticism until secular intellectuals produced Humanism and the Reformation, allowing mercantile and proletarian strata to break with traditional religion and adopt a rational asceticism. A final section of Weber’s sociology of religion looked briefly at the implications of the various religious orientations for economics, politics, sexuality, and art. Thus, he suggests that in ethical religions, religious prescriptions for familial and neighbourly support were extended to require mutual support among social strata through practices of charity and protection. This was the basis for a rejection of usury in many religions, setting limits on the development of acquisitive economic behaviour. Only where ethical prophecies have broken with the rigid structures of ritual law, he argues, does religion become less restrictive of economic life. Similarly, tensions exist between ethical religions and political action, especially as the priesthood achieves an autonomy from the political authorities. The developmental tendency is for a religious opposition to military activity and an espousal of brotherly love. Weber argues that there can be no ethical basis for politics, whether internally or in power struggles between states. Ethical religions have also tended to oppose erotic sexuality and to prescribe marriage as solely a conjugal unit for the rearing of children. In the cultural sphere, ethical religion has devalued art in favour of ascetic or mystical virtues.

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6.7. THE CULTURAL ORDER: MUSIC The last of Weber’s working papers to be considered is the one that fits least well into the grand project for ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’. It is, however, an application of his key idea of the rationalisation of culture and, like the papers on religion, contributes to his longstanding desire to explore those aspects of social life that Marxist theory assigned to the ‘superstructure’. The paper concerns the development and distinctiveness of Western music and instrumentation. Weber began this investigation of music as part of an examination of the rationalisation of art and aesthetics more generally, a study that he intended to become a separate publication. Only the draft on music, however, was ever completed. Inspired in this work by his intimate relationship with the pianist Mina Tobler, he set out his argument not by examining the conditioning of music by its social organisation, as might be the case in a sociology of knowledge or culture, but through an internal analysis of the development of the cultural forms employed in Western music. He argues that non-Western systems of music are concerned purely with melody and rhythm. In the West, by contrast, there has been a distinctive concern for harmony since the end of the medieval period. In developing harmonic forms, Western composers and musicians took a characteristically rational approach, defining the harmonic relationships of their music in mathematical terms. Weber shows that Western music is based on an octave that is formed through the use of various mathematical intervals. An interval of a full octave comprises any two notes that have a frequency ratio of 2:1 and is divided into the eight notes of the diatonic scale. Intervals of thirds, fourths, and fifths, for example, are defined by the number of notes between the top and bottom of the interval. Thus, a perfect fifth comprises two notes with

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a frequency ratio of 3:2, a perfect fourth is an interval with a ratio of 4:3, and so on. The notes of the diatonic scale can be combined in formulaic ways to produce harmonic triads or chords. Such triads can be further extended in rational, rule-governed ways to produce a complex harmonic chord system. Within this system, certain ‘dissonant’ harmonies that result from introducing the seventh and other ‘irrational’ non-mathematical intervals allow the construction of a number of altered chords that form an important part of the harmonic system. Weber argues that the chord sequence associated with the diatonic scale and system of chordal harmony occurred as a result of two factors. On the one hand, there were changes in instrumentation and in techniques of instrument production and, on the other hand, there was the development of music making as a profession. Thus, wind and string instruments that created particular tone intervals simply as a determinate result of the physics of a vibrating string or a column of air were the basis of the Greek modal scales. Modern tonality, however, began with the adoption of multiple-voice singing and the need to ensure the ‘harmonic’ integration of the various voices. It was, most importantly, the introduction of the piano that allowed its further development. A rationalisation of music occurred through an arbitrary equalisation of the tones of the scale. Keyboard instruments were redesigned to ensure arbitrary but equal tonal steps along the whole range of the keyboard. This ‘temperament’ depended on the development of the piano from the clavichord and the harpsichord and made possible the introduction of chordal harmony. This new system of tuning was furthered by the conceptual innovations made by J. S. Bach in the system of fingering that he introduced for his ‘well-tempered piano’. It was with Mozart, Weber argued, that the piano eventually achieved dominance in Western music and

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both the scale and the system of harmony were completely rationalised as a system transposable to all keys and all octaves. Modern stringed instruments violins, violas, and cellos have replaced earlier viols to reflect this system of harmony and the needs of chamber and orchestral music that combined stringed instruments with the already rationalised piano. Rationalised harmony, then, is the basis of all Western music, distinguishing it from Oriental forms. Even contemporary atonal music that appears to depart from it, Weber argues, is a form of reaction that retains the harmonic system as a model with which to contrast its own atonality. The working papers that Weber intended for use in ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’ referred, in addition to the economic order, to a number of the social orders to which economic action is related. The orders that were specifically defined are the legal order, the political order, and the religious order, but towards the end of his discussion of religion he briefly mentions the intellectual and/or aesthetic order, and the erotic order. Although he gives the concept no specific definition, it can be surmised that a social order is a sphere of activity that is subject to customary, conventional, or legal regulation in terms of cultural values that define the meanings given to that activity. In the earliest stages of human history, Weber argues, all activity is ‘communalised’ as a single sphere of activity and it is only gradually that distinct types of activity become differentiated into more or less autonomous and specialised orders in which groups are able to exercise their specific powers. The differentiation of the various orders is a product of the rationalisation of action that Weber explored throughout his working papers. The rationalisation of economic activity involves the transformation of the household economy into a more specialised economic order formed around the

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patriarchal oikos. This is subsequently transformed into the large capitalist enterprise operating rationally within a market freed from all emotional and traditional constraints. The rationalisation of domination and law involved the development from patriarchalism and patrimonialism to the modern state, from charisma and tradition to enacted law and bureaucratic commands, and from magically conditioned ritual and substantive legal systematisation to procedural rationality. In the sphere of religion, rationalisation as a process of disenchantment was a development from magical and practical activity to intellectual conceptions of gods and ethical values, and finally to a rationalised practicality that became fully secularised. These comprised the overall process of rationalisation that Weber had been exploring in the detailed accounts that he set out in his working papers. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought a temporary end to Weber’s burst of creativity and his working papers were left largely untouched. This delayed the finalisation of the Outline of Social Economics, and his publisher put pressure on him to complete some of the work for publication. Weber’s response to this pressure was to finalise his work on the world religions, for publication in the Archive, further exploring cultural rationalisation. The resulting essays are the topics of the following chapter.

CHAPTER 7 ECONOMIC ETHICS OF THE WORLD RELIGIONS

By the beginning of the First World War, Weber had completed a considerable amount of preparatory work for his intended volume on ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’, compiling this into the working papers that were considered in the previous chapter. His war-time work prevented him from making any immediate progress with the final manuscript and his publisher became increasingly impatient. Weber felt able to meet his publisher’s demands by revising and developing some ideas on the world religions for publication in the Archive. The exact state of his notes for these articles at this time is not known, but he seems to have had sufficient material to produce a series of essays on Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism that he was able to complete and publish between 1915 and 1917. He began this work on the world religions with a substantial paper on Confucianism in China that he published together with a brief preface and introduction to what he saw as being a larger project entitled ‘The Economic Ethics of the World Religions’. Some material on religious ethics was taken 119

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from the final sections of his working paper on religious communities and was published as a supplement to the Confucianism essay. These ‘Intermediate Reflections’ were intended to contextualise Confucianism in relation to other religious orientations and to prepare the way for the following essay on Hinduism and Buddhism in India. He completed this sequence of war-time publications with an essay on Judaism, although he intended to follow-up with a consideration of medieval Christianity and the ethic of the Protestant sects. Weber’s work on the world religions seems originally to have been planned for inclusion in the Outline. His original plan of 1909 had seen religion as a major topic within the analysis of ‘culture’ and so as being central to his intended critique of historical materialism. As he looked into religious thought, however, he made an important discovery that led him to completely recast his ideas and to project an entirely separate volume on religion. His intended work on culture was stripped down to a focus on religion alone, and he made no further additions to his sociology of music and completely abandoned any work on poetry, painting, and architecture. After the war, Weber was able to return to the task of completing both ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’ and the book on religion that he now called the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion. The essays were to begin with revised versions of the essays on the Protestant ethic and the Protestant sects, followed by revisions of those that he had published in the Archive as ‘The Economic Ethics of the World Religions’. These essays were to be supplemented by new essays on the Middle Eastern religions of Egypt, Babylon, and Persia that would precede the essay on ancient Judaism, and then an essay on Islam and a study of Christianity that would examine the development of Catholic Christendom in the West prior to the Protestant Reformation. There is some evidence that he may have

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intended to eventually append the essay on the Protestant ethic to the larger study of Christianity, rather than leaving it as a free-standing introductory essay. He may also have intended a more systematic overview of the ‘disenchantment’ of human life and the development from magical and religious thought to scientific thought, though none of these additional essays were actually produced. The previously published essays were revised during 1919 1920, but Weber undertook no further work on the volume before his death. Marianne Weber brought together the revised versions of the previously published essays for posthumous publication as the Collected Essays, and this is all that we now have of Weber’s comprehensive sociology of the world religions. The discovery that Weber made and that he announced systematically in his new introductory material was the ‘rationalisation’ of culture in Europe and its distinctiveness from the cultural trends apparent in other world civilisations. This theme, as I have shown, had been developed in his working papers on economics, domination, and law, and the planned volume on religion was intended to explore this discovery in the sphere of religion and so to relate it back to the argument on ascetic rationalisation that he had set out in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. Weber constructs a continuum from the ‘irrational’ to the ‘rational’ and sees rationalisation as the giving of form to the necessarily irrational impulses and drives that motivate human orientations to action. Rationalisation is, therefore, a reflective intellectualisation that gives a conscious and deliberate pattern to the pursuit of irrational drives. Weber argued that the sphere of culture had experienced a rationalisation of both aesthetics and religion. The rationalisation of aesthetics was apparent in such diverse areas as rational harmony, instrumentation, and orchestral forms in music, in the use of the vaulted arch as an architectural device for distributing

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pressure and creating roof spaces, and in the utilisation of perspective in art. Religious thinking had undergone an ongoing ‘intellectualisation’ that had eliminated magic and spirits from conceptual understandings of the world. This intellectual disenchantment meant that people no longer looked to mysterious forces for their explanations of practical matters and came to see all practical phenomena as explicable through technical inspection and calculation. Thus, rationalisation produced a culture dominated by scientific knowledge and scientifically oriented technology. Weber’s aim in his studies of religion was to compare the trajectory and pace of rationalisation in the West with that found in the Orient. No account of the development of the modern world, he argued, could be satisfied with the one-sided causal account that was provided by orthodox Marxism, an account that saw religion as a mere reflex of economic processes. Weber recognised, however, that this could not simply be replaced with an equally one-sided analysis of spiritual factors of the kind that his critics had mistakenly seen him as providing in the Protestant ethic essay. He concluded that a fuller study of cultural rationalisation required an investigation of both sides of the complex causal chain.

7.1. RELIGIOUS ORIENTATION TO THE WORLD Weber’s discussion of religious orientations in his ‘Intermediate Reflections’ draws directly from his working paper on religious communities. His argument is that the world religions differ in the ways in which they respond to the issue of ‘salvation’, the question of how individuals are able to escape or achieve redemption from the imperfections and misfortunes of the human world. Confucianism, he argues, has no conception at all of salvation. It is a religion

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or philosophical system without a conception of gods or the supernatural world and with an orientation towards ‘world affirmation’ that emphasises accommodation to the world as it is and harmony between the world and an impersonal and eternal cosmic order. Hinduism and Buddhism are also concerned with an eternal cosmic order but are ‘worldrejecting’ religions that provide a means to salvation through the mystical contemplation of the ‘other world’ of perfection. Judaism and Christianity, too, are religions of salvation, and Weber is concerned with the varying ways in which they handle this problem. Weber investigates salvation through a consideration of the doctrines of ‘theodicy’ involved in the world-rejecting religions that recognise the existence of a powerful god. Theodicy, he says, is the philosophical problem of how evil and suffering can be reconciled with the idea of an allpowerful god. It is the problem of why a god with extraordinary powers is unable to resolve the imperfections of the world that he has created or to prevent evil things from happening. Such a god is seen to allow people to suffer rather than intervening to alleviate their suffering. In the face of this paradox of an all-powerful god seeming to tolerate evil and imperfection, Weber argued, adherents experience a particularly deep concern for their ‘salvation’. They are concerned with the question of how they might escape or be released from suffering and the senselessness of life that seems to result from the action or inaction of a god. Adherents to world-rejecting religions find themselves in a growing state of tension with the world and a conceptual need to engage in particular forms of religious action to resolve this. Weber argues that they have tended to develop a practical ethic based on the internalised commitment of the believer rather than one that stresses mere compliance with externally imposed prescriptions. In Hinduism and Buddhism

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the tension is resolved through a withdrawal from the world into mystical contemplation. Medieval Catholicism did not stand apart from the wider society but was integral to it. Its ideas, norms, and practices were comprehensively diffused throughout medieval European society, ordering and organising all aspects of practical life. Catholics could achieve salvation through the mediation of the Church in rituals of atonement and repentance. Thus, anxieties about salvation that were experienced after wrongdoing could be completely alleviated through confession. The Catholic felt no compulsion to act methodically and diligently in pursuit of an ethically appropriate way of life. There was, therefore, no basis for any religious challenge to the traditional economic order. Catholic world rejection was expressed only in the withdrawal of the monk into private contemplative mysticism. The mystic, by withdrawing from the world, seeks personal salvation through passive contemplation and so leaves the world unchanged. There is no challenge to traditional economic practices and no tendency to any transformation of them. As Weber had shown in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, Calvinists and Baptists responded to this tension through their attempts at practical mastery of the world, and this disciplined technical activity was the basis of an ascetic way of life that proved highly conducive to economic action and the development of commercialism and the market. Ascetic Protestantism, then, involved a distinctive ‘economic ethic’, a system of ethical prescriptions with an affinity for the capitalist spirit. Weber’s study of the world religions aimed to explore these varying patterns of world rejection and world affirmation in order to understand the particular orientations towards economic activity that they encouraged. His studies of Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism each begin with an account of the societies in which they

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arose, reflecting his view that religious beliefs that are relevant for economic activity must be seen as conditioned by the communal organisation of the societies in which they develop. In each case he contrasts the social structures with that of Western Europe, where Christianity, and later Reformed Christianity, had developed.

7.2. CHINESE PATRIMONIALISM AND CONFUCIAN TRADITIONALISM Weber sees the period from the sixth century to the third century BC, the second half of the Chou dynasty, as the key period for explaining Chinese religious development. In this early phase of Chinese society, he finds the same ‘Oriental’ pattern of feudalism that he had previously described for Egypt. A need to construct extensive irrigation systems and to build protective defences against hostile invaders had produced a highly centralised state with a large administrative staff and a centrally controlled military force. Landlords, nevertheless, retained a considerable power within their particular localities, thanks to the strong bonds of kinship that tied them to their ancestral lands, to urban merchants, and to regional officials. The strength of these kinship ties underpinned both the hereditary patriarchal authority of landed chiefs in a ‘clan economy’ and the persistence of ancestor worship. However, they were not able to use these links to build an autonomous urban power base as the cities lacked the autonomy and corporate character of those in Europe. As a result, the Chinese emperors had to contend with noble families that were individually powerful but that were not collectively organised as a social estate. While those who were appointed as officials did acquire some corporate identity and solidarity, individual officials were not able to

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establish any hereditary control over their administrative positions. This meant that there was a precarious balance and reciprocity between the Emperor and the nobility. Nobles sought government appointments as sources of income, while the Emperor depended on the nobles to fill key positions in the government administration. Imperial power could be maintained only by building shifting coalitions with the major feudal landowners, and this period of Chinese history was marked by phases of disintegration followed by phases of relative unity. Weber argues that it was not until the third century BC, when the Emperor succeeded in expropriating a significant number of landlords from their land and settling peasants in their place, that this changed. Feudalism was effectively ended and a centralised patrimonialism established in which the central imperial power coexisted with a small number of very powerful regional landlords. In the new system that had been formed, provincial governors were responsible for raising taxes on behalf of the Emperor. As they had no manorial base that could generate any revenue, the governors needed to pass on any increase in the tax burden to the heads of families and to arbitrarily defined groups of families if they were to continue to meet their own administrative costs and secure a personal income. The Emperors, for their part, maintained and enhanced the balance of power between themselves and their provincial governors through a formal examination system that made all official appointments and promotions dependent on the continuing scrutiny and accreditation exercised by an imperial body. The ‘literati’ the educated and accredited officials were superior in status to other landowners as a nonhereditary social estate and were initially differentiated by their educational grades that defined their social rank or status relative to others. They formed a patrimonial bureaucracy of cultivated gentlemen whose superior status prevented the

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emergence of a feudal status group comprising all landowners. The Imperial government exercised its control over the literati by ensuring an oversupply of potential recruits and a high failure rate in the examinations, resulting in a high level of competition among families that were desperate to improve their chances of success. This competition limited the building of any collective solidarity among the contenders for official posts. Combining this with the regular circulation of officials from one province to another, the Emperor was able to weaken their links to their home region and so limit both their opportunities to build a local power base and their capacity for establishing any collective cohesion and solidarity. Weber argues that this was the political structure that persisted for two millennia until the collapse of the Manchu dynasty, which had ruled China from the seventeenth century AD. The country fell into a state of anarchy in the very years around 1911 when Weber was working on his study. Through this long period, Chinese popular religion had been organised as a state cult under the Emperor, who claimed legitimacy as the ‘Son of Heaven’. There being no independent priesthood, religious rituals and magical practices were subject to the authority of individual household heads. The structure through which taxes were collected strengthened the solidarity of the extended kinship groups and reinforced the power of the elders, ensuring the persistence of an ancestor worship that underpinned the power of the Emperor. The prescriptions and proscriptions imposed by the Emperor, royal aristocrats, and family elders were, however, subject to the advice and guidance given by the educated officials. Their education in ancient texts and literature gave these officials the authority to interpret the will of Heaven and to pronounce on correct and inappropriate forms of conduct. The literati became a kind of secular priesthood.

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Confucius and Mencius were members of the Chou dynasty officials and were central to a reworking of the classical texts that emphasised moral propriety, the maintenance of social harmony, and filial piety. When the Imperial system of training and examination for officialdom was established, the literati were drilled in Confucian ideas, which became ever stronger as each generation of officials was socialised into and contributed to its body of ideals. They became the carriers of the Confucian ethical code. This intellectual and political structure sustained a framework of traditionalism in which there could be no separate religious challenge to secular power. The Confucian ethic enjoined rational self-control as a means to a practical accommodation to the world as it is, a practical pursuit of contentment that sustained traditionalism. Confucianism also led the literati to derogate any engagement in practical economic activity, which was seen as being incompatible with their status. This denigration of acquisitiveness and disparagement of all purely commercial activity precluded any tendency towards the growth of capitalist activity. Popular religious cults, in which magical rites and practices continued as an important element, persisted outside the intellectual framework of Confucianism, but did not threaten its dominance. Indeed, Weber argues that as the cults developed into Taoism under Lao Tzu in the late sixth century BC, an accommodation and complementarity emerged between it and Confucianism. The Taoist belief in spirits and magical remedies, Weber argues, by emphasising accommodation to the world as it is, inhibited practical innovation and change and so reinforced both traditionalism and the rejection of economic activity. Weber concludes that Confucianism contrasted sharply with sectarian Protestantism, especially in its relation to the practical world and economic activity. Confucianism

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emphasised adjustment and the self-control needed to act in accordance with traditional obligations and traditional status, seen as expressions of an imperial and eternal cosmic order. Its focus was on what can be achieved in this world and not on any concern at all for salvation in another world. This meant that it provided no basis for influencing everyday conduct through inner motives that had been freed from tradition.

7.3. INDIAN CASTE AND HINDU TRADITIONALISM Weber’s study of Hinduism sees the formative period of Indian history as lasting from about the ninth century to the second century BC. This was the period in which a social structure and religious pattern developed that lasted until the establishment of the Mogul Empire in the sixteenth century AD. The central feature of Indian social structure, Weber argues, was its system of caste stratification that made India the exemplary case of a status society. Castes are hereditary and endogamous groupings with sharply differentiated ways of life that stand in a clear hierarchy of status, at the top of which are the Brahmin priesthood. These caste relations had their origin in the Aryan conquest of Indian tribal society, which also initiated a feudalisation of landholding. While many Brahmins had been endowed with grants of land, most of the land was held by the ruling and militaristic Kshatriya caste. Weber sees Kshatriya power as combining both patrimonial and feudal principles: military support and tax revenues were ensured both through feudal grants of land and the provision of tax-collecting powers. Although this system involved a clear distinction between spiritual and temporal authority, the combination of feudalism and patrimonialism led to constant struggles between the Brahmins and the

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secular rulers and to periodic cycles of fragmentation and Imperial centralisation. The Brahmins, like the kings and princes that they advised, were descendants of the original invaders. They were carriers of a belief system, embodied in the Vedic traditional scriptures, that justified the ethnic and occupational separation of the castes and specified ritualistically sanctioned lifestyles appropriate for each caste. Weber sees this as having been, from the sixth century BC, the basis on which the Brahmins produced Hinduism as a synthesis of ideas. As a religion of world renunciation, Hinduism was indifferent to the world, its doctrines seeing salvation from it as a possibility for the devout. The ideas of dharma and karma enjoined the correct and ordered ways of living and specified the retribution for failures to act in this way. Thus, salvation was seen as requiring a series of reincarnations into a higher caste for those who followed the requirements of their given caste way of life. Once reborn into a Brahmin caste, a Hindu could hope for salvation and could prepare for this through an ascetic withdrawal from everyday life to live as a contemplative monk or to engage in religious teaching as a guru. The growth of Buddhism among the Kshatriya and the wealthy Vaisyas weakened Hinduism and challenged the position of the Brahmins and the language and texts with which they were associated. Buddhism, however, achieved only a very weak social base and when, eventually, it virtually disappeared from Indian society, the Brahmins were able to re-establish their dominance. Weber concludes his account by emphasising the great difference between the economic ethic of Hinduism and that of Protestantism. The Hindu emphasis on the need to escape from the world through conformity with the traditional, religiously sanctioned lifestyle of a person’s caste ensured the persistence of traditional economic practices. The monk’s

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escape into mystic contemplation aimed at the eventual achievement of a state of perfect enlightenment provided no stimulus towards a rational transformation of the world. Acquisitiveness was, therefore, pursued through the use of magical means rather than through rational and deliberate action in the market. The all-pervasive traditionalism of Hindu society, therefore, precluded any significant development of capitalist economic activity.

7.4. ANCIENT PALESTINE AND A PROPHETIC CODE Weber’s discussions of China and India were intended to show the various social bases for the traditionalism of Oriental social structure and religious practice that persisted up until the sixteenth century AD. His essay on ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, on the other hand, had shown that it was at precisely this point in the history of the West that Puritan religious communities challenged religious and social traditionalism and so helped to kick-start a process of capitalist development. Weber sought to explain why this breakthrough had been possible within Europe, while the Oriental societies persisted in their traditionalism. He concluded that there must have been something distinctive about medieval Catholicism that prepared the way for Puritan asceticism. While Catholicism sustained an economic traditionalism, its ethical character had roots in the Jewish idea of salvation and it was, therefore, the Judaism of ancient Palestine that Weber felt he needed to examine if he was to discover the crucial factors that differentiated western from Oriental religiosity. Weber’s account of the social structure of Palestinian society highlighted its persistent tribal character and, as a result, the precarious and unstable political federations that these

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tribes were able to achieve. After the ending of Egyptian rule in the thirteenth century BC, a loose confederation of agrarian and pastoral tribes had been formed under the military and religious leaders called the ‘judges’. Separate tribal identities were maintained through the bonds of kinship and adherence to the tribal cults that shared the theocentric idea of personal creator gods with the other religious cults of the near East. The solidarity of the whole confederation was increased only in times of war which were frequent when the prominent cult gods were identified as gods of war that could bring victory. The Hebrew monarchies were city-based and had to rely on the support of urban groups, but only a weak city life had been developed by merchants and absentee landlords. Nevertheless, under Solomon in the tenth century BC, an ‘Oriental’ style patrimonialism, modelled on that of Egypt, was established. The new administrative officials of Solomon’s patrimonial staff were the tribal cult priests charged with maintaining the records of the tribal traditions. The religion of Yahweh, the root of ancient Judaism, developed as one of the cult traditions during this period of tribal confederation. The Yahweh cult was based around the unique idea that the Hebrews had chosen Yahweh as their particular god and that he, in turn, had made them his ‘chosen people’. He was to be their protector-god in return for their worship of him. Weber saw the cult prophets as the group responsible for introducing an ethical element into the religion by claiming that what Yahweh had disclosed were ‘commandments’ to which individuals were required to conform. The ideas and rites of the Yahweh cult were, therefore, laid down as an ethical code. The Judaic prophets saw themselves as the charismatic bringers of the commands of a personal, transcendent god and an ethic of obedience. It was, however, an occupational group of priests who routinised this view and were the interpreters of these commandments

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and the underlying tribal traditions. It was through the priests during the monarchical period that the prophetic commandments were routinised as doctrine and the Yahweh cult was gradually transformed, through priestly struggle against rival religious traditions, into the religion that came to be called Judaism. Central to this scriptural consolidation was the claimed ‘discovery’ of an ancient book of law in the temple at Jerusalem the book of ‘Deuteronomy’ which became the established basis of its ethical code. This was the form in which religion was carried by the Jews in their exile and diaspora, Weber argues, and that thereby introduced its rational religious ethic of social conduct, free of all magical and irrational ideas of salvation, to the West, so shaping the whole development of Western civilisation. Salvation was to be achieved through conformity to the ethical code that had been commanded by God and that regulated daily life. This ethical conformity ‘proved’ the strength of a person’s faith and individuals were able to assess their personal chances of achieving salvation through rational reflection on their actions and the consequences of those actions. Actions were to be oriented towards bringing about a future that conforms to God’s desires. Jewish prophets had prepared the way for Christianity and its key role in creating Western civilisation and the modern world. What Weber referred to as the ‘economic ethic’ of a religion is the practical economic impulse to action that is embodied in the behaviour and attitudes of its adherents. The ethic concerns what people should and should not do in their economic activity. In each case that Weber considered, he aimed to identify the principal social strata that were decisive in forming the economic ethic of the religion. In Confucianism the key role was played by the status ethic of the literati of office holders, while in Hinduism it was the status ethic of a caste of ritual and spiritual advisers. In

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Buddhism, on the other hand, the key role was taken by mendicant monks who rejected the world. In the ‘missing’ accounts of Islam and Christianity, Weber would have developed this further, but he simply suggests that the early Christian ethic was carried by urban artisans while in Islam it was initially warriors and then contemplative mystics who carried the faith and its ethic. Judaism, of course, was the religion of the ‘pariah’ groups who carried its ethic across Europe in the Jewish diaspora. Weber saw the economic ethics as developing within particular religious cultures. Religious ideas, then, develop in a specific social context and are shaped by the ‘religious needs’ of social groups whose world views act as ‘switchmen’ (railway point operators) to move people onto particular tracks in life. Each world view was subject to a particular form of rationalisation: the rationalisation of life conduct is a systematic and comprehensive organising of life in relation to the values enshrined in a world view. In the modern world, he argues, life had been rationalised, theoretically and practically, in terms of the logical and technical means to given ends. As a result, religion has been shifted into the realm of the ‘irrational’: the ends of action are no longer given by a god or required by spiritual forces but are simply arbitrary value choices.

CHAPTER 8 SOCIOLOGY AND POLITICAL DOMINATION

By the end of the First World War and his return to academic life in Vienna, Weber had rethought his publication plans for the Outline as a result of his new project for the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion. He decided to make his own contribution shorter and both more analytical and more pedagogic in character, focusing on definitions and the conceptual elaboration of ideal types. His aim was to provide a common vocabulary that would allow social scientists of all kinds and political persuasions to debate with each other and to compare the merits of their varying bodies of work. He returned to the various working papers that he had prepared for his work on ‘The Economy and the Social Orders and Powers’ in order to extract and systematise the material for what he was now referring to simply as ‘my sociology’ and to which he had given the title Economy and Society. It appeared in his publisher’s catalogue as Economy and Society: Sociology. His revised plan for the book reflected his now established view that social economics comprised economic theory, economic sociology, and economic history. 135

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The finally projected form of Economy and Society was to contain a general introduction to sociology and then an economic sociology together with parts of those other sociologies that are ‘relevant’ to economic activity. To pursue this plan he seems to have envisaged Economy and Society as having eight chapters: (1) Basic Concepts of Sociology; (2) Basic Sociological Categories of Economic Action; (3) The Types of Domination; (4) Estates and Classes; (5) Household, Neighbourhood, and Nation; (6) Sociology of Religion; (7) Sociology of Law; and (8) Sociology of the State He intended this sociological discussion to be presented in a more didactic way than he had done in his working papers, as befitting an encyclopaedia, and perhaps intended to use the more substantive material in other publications, as he had partly done with his sociology of religion. This other work might have included contributions on economic history, the subject on which he was teaching at the time. It is possible that he envisaged transforming the remaining material into a historical sociology as a Positive Critique of the Materialist Conception of History, but his actual intentions are unknown. He began by compiling a new conceptual introduction of definitions that substantially revised the terminology that he had introduced in his earlier paper on sociological categories. He then went on to write a completely new section on the economy, which is not known to have existed as an earlier working paper apart from the fragment on ‘The Market’.

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He also substantially revised his account of domination. These first three chapters were sent to his publisher and were typeset as printers’ proofs, Weber regarding them as being in almost complete form. He then began work on his material on ‘Estates and Classes’, which he had brought forward as a more important part of his discussion. Although he made some revisions to his earlier account and may have intended to recast this as a fuller discussion of the ‘social groups’ arising from inequalities and social divisions, only a brief fragment was completed, though this, too, was typeset by the printer. The remaining four chapters had not even been begun by the time of his death, and the material was left in the form of his original working papers. In fact, the very general titles that he gave to the final three chapters suggest that he had barely decided how he should start to present that material. Marianne Weber saw it as her task to complete the publication of his sociology, as Economy and Society, in the same way that she was also doing for the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion. The volume that she published as Economy and Society in 1921 was divided into two Parts. Part One comprised the four revised and typeset chapters, but Part Two printed most of his remaining pre-war working papers in largely unchanged form. Her editing of these working papers, which she had found in his desk in unmarked brown envelopes, consisted largely of the addition of titles and sub-headings, which had not been supplied by Weber himself. Her rationale for this was that Part One would present the sociological ideal types and Part Two would present the concrete empirical applications of these concepts. The volume as published and largely as later translated into English is clearly not the volume that Weber intended. It is replete with repetitions and contradictions between its two parts, contains versions of material that Weber had already

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transferred to the Collected Essays, and is in no sense a coherent or complete work. A discussion of Weber’s final, definitive work must, therefore, be limited to the first four chapters of the published work, the earlier material having already been discussed in Chapter 6. In this chapter I will consider his definitive views on the basic sociological categories of action and his discussion of stratification and domination. I will use this discussion as the basis for contextualising the various political writings that Weber published over his lifetime as he explored the nature of parliamentary democracy in a modern rationalised state. I will, finally, consider his revision of his views on science and policy. In the following chapter I will examine his outline of the economy itself the core of his whole economic sociology and I will use what is known from his final lectures on the historical development of capitalist economies.

8.1. BASIC CONCEPTS OF SOCIOLOGY Weber had first set out a system of sociological categories while compiling the notes for his working papers, publishing this in 1913 as a provisional statement of what he intended to be the theoretical introduction to his book. Once the final plans for Economy and Society had been decided, he revised and extended this draft to reflect the advances that he had made and the needs of the encyclopaedia. His underlying view was that there can be no general sociology, only special sociologies of economics, politics, religion, and so on, but that it is, nevertheless, possible to construct a number of general sociological concepts that can be used by specialist sociologists to construct the ideal types required for their particular studies and that historians could use in their empirical investigations.

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In setting out his revised views he summarised his methodological principles, following the terminology of his earlier account but using the term ‘sociology’ in preference to the earlier idea of ‘social science’ and making no reference to the ‘cultural’ or ‘spiritual’ sciences. He begins, then, with a discussion of action and its meaning in order to clarify what is involved in an ‘interpretive understanding’ of human behaviour. He reiterates his earlier definitions of action and social action, though now using the term ‘social’ action (sociales Handeln) rather than ‘communal’ action (Gemeinschaftshandeln) that he had formerly employed. This change in terminology reflected his recognition that a more general term was needed because the term ‘community’ referred only to one particular emotional quality of actions and relations. While some behaviour may be purely reactive or affectively driven, most of the things that people do involve some degree of conscious and deliberate intention or purpose and so must be seen as meaningful. Action, then, he sees as behaviour to which an actor has attached a subjective meaning. Action becomes social action when this meaning relates to the past, present, or expected behaviour of other actors. Subjective meaning is always to be understood as the actual meaning that is given and held by the actor concerned. The sociologist must therefore take account of the cultural frames, representations, and definitions that inform the actor’s view of his or her own behaviour. Sociological analysis always takes account of the actor’s point of view. This means, Weber argues, that the material objects, environmental conditions, and bodily states that comprise the situation in which an action takes place are sociologically relevant only in so far as they are identified and given a meaning by an actor who takes account of them. Weber was at pains to point out that his emphasis on subjectivity does not require a resort to psychological explanations. The mental phenomena studied by

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psychologists, he argues, are important conditions for action, but the sociologist must go beyond these neurological processes and feeling states to grasp the meanings that actors give to their actions. Where it is not possible to identify a subjective meaning in a pattern of behaviour, it cannot be understood or interpreted and so cannot be explained sociologically. Weber concludes that an explanatory understanding of a course of action involves a grasp of the motives that are responsible for it, a motive being understood as a complex of meaning that, from the actor’s point of view, provides an adequate reason for acting one way rather than another. The sociologist must employ a combination of intellectual comprehension and emotional empathy in order to understand human social behaviour. Conscious and deliberate rational action is most easily understandable as it can be understood in purely intellectual terms by relating it to the context of meaning from which it originates and so understanding the logic behind it. Other forms of action can be understood only through achieving a degree of empathy with the irrational emotional states that inform them or through an emotional appreciation of their aesthetic qualities. The possibility of achieving this empathy is limited whenever the values of the actor being studied differ greatly from those of the sociologist. Nevertheless, the sociologist must aim to grasp the irrational elements that enter into the subjective meaning of an action to the best of his or her ability and so to understand the degree to which the action departs from formal rationality. Sociological method, then, must involve the construction of ideal types of purely rational acts in order to assess the influence that irrational elements have in bringing about deviations from these ideal types. The sociologist does not assume that people do actually act rationally in all situations but seeks methodologically to try first to understand them as

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acting rationally and then gradually introduce more irrational elements until an approximation to the reality of the observed behaviour is attained. When a sociologist explains action, then, he or she must identify a motive, or combination of motives, that are thought to be adequate in terms of subjective meaning. This construction of the action is then compared with the actually observed course of events in order to see if the interpretation is ‘causally adequate’. An explanation is causally adequate when the relationship between motive and action is found to be a typical pattern in the society in question: that is, when it is something that has been observed in many other situations and so is a ‘usual’ occurrence. Causal adequacy therefore concerns the causal link between motive and action and not any causal link between action and its consequences. All sociological explanations of empirical phenomena must be cast in terms of the social actions involved in them. Weber was highly critical of the unwarranted use of collective concepts. From a sociological point of view, collective entities such as states, corporations, and associations, and ideas of an ‘economy’ or ‘society’ must be seen solely as complexes of actions undertaken by individual persons. They have no substantial existence apart from those individual actions: they are the resultants of individual courses of action and are not to be seen, sociologically, as having the capacity for action in their own right. The sociologist can use such terms only to refer to certain typical combinations of individual action. Collective entities may, however, be objects of thought for the individuals themselves and may serve as representations towards which they orientate their own actions. For example, if actors think about what they believe ‘the state’ or ‘the church’ may require of them, then these representations of collective entities become an element in their motivation. Similarly, such representations may be objects of discourse in

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jurisprudence and political debate, where certain rights and obligations might be attributed to them. Weber recognises, however, that sociologists may make a limited use of these various collective concepts and even refer to their ‘functional’ connections as a way of building a provisional frame of reference for understanding action. The concepts provide a useful shorthand way of delineating a field of social action prior to giving an explanation of it. In giving that explanation, however, it is always necessary to relate it to the individual actions that comprise the social situation. Any generalisations that might be made about relations between collective entities are not to be regarded as ‘laws’ but simply as typical statistical regularities that require explanation in terms of the individual actions that produce them. Following these methodological preliminaries, Weber goes on to outline the basic concepts of social action, social relationship, and social group that he thought should form the core elements in sociological explanation. His first step was to construct an illustrative classification of the ideal types of social action, ranging from the most irrational to the most rational. The four types in this classification are affectual, habitual, value-rational, and purposive-rational. Action is irrational, to a greater or lesser extent, whenever it expresses an emotion or an ultimate value. Affectual or emotionally driven action is the most irrational the least intellectualised and is on the borderline of merely reactive behaviour. It is driven by a desire to satisfy a strongly felt urge and is patterned by an individual’s conscious and deliberate expression of this natural or instinctive need. Habitual action for which Weber uses the slightly misleading term ‘traditional’ is also largely unreflective. It is irrational in that it gives unreflective expression to a usual or customary pattern on the basis of a tendency or disposition that is ingrained through long habituation. It is the basis of the routinised actions of everyday social

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life in which there is a strong sense of recurrence or repetition. Actors behave as they always have and without considering alternatives. Value-rational and purposive-rational actions are forms of interest-driven action: they involve a desire to achieve something and so are always rationally oriented, to a greater or lesser degree. Value-rational action is motivated by what Weber referred to as ideal interests, such as the desire for valued religious benefits or status honour. When individuals consciously orient themselves to values, there is a necessary element of choice and so of intellectual reflection: their action must, to a greater or lesser extent, be rationalised. They must consider how best to express or pursue the value and so give their actions a shape or form. Value-rational action is therefore devised as a way solely of putting into practice the ethical, aesthetic, or religious values to which an actor is committed. Value-rational action is undertaken as a duty or out of loyalty; it is regarded as binding or obligatory and so is undertaken for its own sake. Commitment to an absolute value is always irrational and the rationality of this type of action lies only in its planning. It involves what Weber calls ‘substantive rationality’ in that the value itself is the ultimate basis of the action and the actor’s sole intellectual concern is for the most ‘appropriate’ way of realising it. Purposive-rational action is that in which all absolute commitments have been abandoned and the ends towards which individuals are motivated are accepted simply as given facts without any ultimate justification. Irrationality has been reduced to the absolute minimum of the arbitrary acceptance of a discrete and given ‘want’. It is motivated by purely practical interests such as the desire for useful material goods or services. The actor can, therefore, be concerned solely with achieving a particular and given goal in the most efficient and expedient way. It is purely instrumental in form, based on a

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calculation of the costs and benefits attached to the available means and alternative ends, as these are perceived by the actor, and a calculation of the chances that a particular action will be successful. Actions, of all four types, tend to persist as what Weber calls ‘uniformities’ or common and recurrent patterns. A uniformity that is simply a typical and commonly occurring practice is termed a ‘usage’, while one of long-standing is a ‘custom’. Usages and customs are sustained by considerations of both self-interest and factual expectations (or de facto norms) about how others will normally act. In the case of a customary practice, actors are expected to act in a particular way because that has always been the case. Uniformities resulting from self-interest include the typical usages in a market, where a mutual consideration and adjustment of interests on the basis of purposive-rational motivations shape individual actions. In many situations, however, normative regulation is an important factor, and where this is the case the norms will tend to be binding rather than merely factual. Norms that are regarded as binding, Weber argues, comprise a ‘legitimate order’, or what in his earlier work he had referred to as an ‘institutional order’. A legitimate or institutional order is a system of norms that are held to be ‘valid’ and hence obligatory in a particular sphere of activity. Uniformities of action that result from binding norms are termed ‘conventions’ and ‘laws’. Conventions are typically sustained by diffuse and informal communal sanctions; laws are additionally and primarily sustained by a staff of officials capable of exercising coercive sanctions. By virtue of their legitimacy, Weber argues, conventional and legal forms of regulation contrast directly with the non-legitimate regulatory forms of custom and usage.

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Uniformities of all four kinds are the result of action orientations or motivations in which there is a varying combination of conformity with norms and the mutual adjustment or constellation of interests. In the usages and customs of non-legitimate regulation, actors orientate themselves to factual norms and to the avoidance of disadvantages, while when acting in relation to the conventions and laws of legitimate regulation they orientate themselves to the values underpinning the binding norms and to calculations of selfinterest. Thus, a fully developed market breaks with all customary practices and the rationalisation of economic action involves a shift from customary normative regulation to interest-based coordination within a framework of law. Weber notes, however, that most regulated action in a society is undertaken as a matter of routine and habit rather than principled or expedient calculation. Laws are invoked, most typically, after the event to justify or criticise actions already taken on the basis of affect or habit. Weber therefore distinguishes between the issue of why actors conform to norms and that of the bases upon which the legitimacy of those norms is justified. He suggests that legitimacy may be justified on the basis of tradition, faith, or the enactment of norms through formal procedures, but leaves further detail on this for consideration in his sociologies of law and domination. Having looked at the regulation of patterns of action, Weber turns to consider the kinds of social relationships that might be established through these actions. A social relationship exists, he argues, wherever each actor in a situation takes account of the actions of all others. In this case, there is a probability that the actors will together engage in a meaningful course of action. The clearest example, Weber argues, is that of ‘reciprocity’ or symmetry, where subjective meanings are fully shared: each participant orientates their action in relation to the same definition of the situation as all others. In

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many cases, however, this kind of consensus may not exist. Nevertheless, despite holding to different meanings, actors may still be mutually orientated to each other when there is some kind of complementarity in meanings. This is the basis on which Weber recognised three aspects or dimensions of social relationships that he referred to as the degree of opposition, cooperation, and closure involved. A relationship of opposition is one in which differences of interest or advantage are involved, and Weber refers to conflict, competition, and ‘selection’ as sub-types of opposition. Conflict and competition involve varying degrees of struggle and resistance and are explored by Weber as relationships of relative ‘power’. Selection, on the other hand, involves the securing of advantages without any actual struggle. It is the situation of structural bias in a relationship, the interests of some actors being advantaged over those of others, even though the actors may not engage in any overt conflict or competition. Cooperation or joint action, Weber argues, may be communal or associative, a distinction made possible by Weber’s recognition that the ‘social’ is wider than the ‘communal’. When cooperation is rooted in a subjective sense of belonging together, whether this sense is affective or habitual, it is a communal relationship of emotional solidarity. Where, on the other hand, individuals cooperate on the basis of a rational adjustment of their interests, whether value-rational or purposive-rational, it is associative: individuals associate together but have no sense of solidarity as a community. Finally, a relationship is closed when usages, customs, conventions, or laws preclude certain people from participation in the relationship. Examples are the monopolistic exclusion of actors in a market and legal proscriptions on the involvement of particular ethnic groups in public offices. Where, on the other hand, a relationship is ‘open’ there are no

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restrictions of any kind and there is equality of actual or potential participation. The term ‘relationship’ applies not only to dyadic or other simple interactions but may refer also to larger structures of action. While seeking to avoid reference to unreal collective entities, Weber does recognise that individuals may be related together into larger structures that do have to be recognised as collective actors. Actors build social entities that are involved in the organisation of their actions but that must be explained as the results of those actions. His particular concern in the introductory section of Economy and Society was to delineate the concept of an ‘organisation’ and the various types of organisation. Other types of social grouping were to be introduced in the remaining sections of his book. An organisation, for which Weber uses the German term Verband, is seen as a closed group with a structure of authority through which internal regularities of action among its members are enforced by a ‘chief’, perhaps operating with an administrative staff. Such an organisation is able to ‘represent’ a wider group, such as a class or religious group, and to act on their behalf through its leadership. Its authority may be limited to its own members or it may be exercised across a whole population and its territory. An organisation that has a continuing and rationally operating staff is referred to as an ‘operational organisation’ (a Betriebsverband), the two principle sub-types being the voluntary association (the Verein) and the compulsory association (the Anstalt). Weber cites a number of examples of these. A business enterprise is an example of a voluntary association that is engaged in continuously rational activity, while a sect is a voluntary association based on a commitment to a particular doctrine. A state, on the other hand, is a compulsory organisation with a territorial base that, by virtue of its focus on the use of violence, is ‘political’ in character.

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A church is a compulsory organisation with territorial authority that relies on ‘psychic coercion’ and so has a ‘religious’ character. These ‘basic concepts’ of sociology, as ideal types, are the building blocks from which more complex ideal types can be constructed for use in empirical studies. It was these more specific and complex ideal types that Weber began to build for Economy and Society in his completed chapters on economic and political relationships and that he employed in his Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion.

8.2. STRATIFICATION, DOMINATION, AND THE STATE Weber’s reworking of his discussions of stratification and domination resulted in a shorter and more systematic account that added little that was new to the core ideas outlined in his earlier working papers. The short fragment on class and status followed a more extended discussion of domination and its relationship to class and status divisions, and Weber added to this a detailed reconstruction of his views on political participation and party representation and of political party leadership in modern democratic systems. In the new discussion, classes were seen more clearly as rooted in propertied or commercial locations. They were no longer seen as specific to market systems but as occurring also in traditional societies wherever divisions of property were to be found. It is these propertied and commercial locations that generate the typical probabilities of satisfying desires for goods and social positions through control over goods and skills within an economic order. These probabilities constitute an individual’s life chances. Propertied classes are based in ownership and control, or lack of control, over

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consumer goods, wealth, investment capital, executive positions, or educational privileges. The principal propertied classes in any society are the rentiers and the propertyless, together with the ‘middle classes’ that actually make a living from their property or skills. Commercial classes are based on involvement in market relations and comprise entrepreneurs and labourers (with varying degrees of skill) and a middle class of the self-employed and officials. Weber recognises the social mobility that occurs wherever an individual moves from one class situation to another, whether this takes place over the course of the individual’s lifetime or is intergenerational. This mobility, he argues, is a major factor in opening or closing boundaries around class situations and so forming more or less distinct social strata, each stratum comprising a group whose members typically associate and interact with each other. These strata he referred to as ‘social classes’. Thus, social classes are combinations of class situations within which social mobility is easy and frequent, though the degree of closure found in any particular social class is quite variable. Weber sketched an outline of the four social classes that he believed could be found in contemporary capitalist societies, referring to the working class, the petty bourgeoisie, the propertyless intelligentsia and specialists, and the privileged classes with property and education. Weber’s revised view of status holds that individuals occupy particular status situations in so far as they successfully claim specific privileges and social recognition from others on the basis of conventional or legal differences in their styles of life, their education, or their occupation. Status may be accorded to those in particular class situations, whether propertied or commercial, but this is rarely the sole determinant of status. Status differences involve connubium and commensality (living together and eating together),

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privileged modes of acquisition, and a variety of status conventions. Status situations, too, are formed into social strata, in this case referred to as ‘social estates’. Social estates are strata formed from those occupying particular status situations that are linked to each other through the intermarriage and cohabitation of those who occupy them. Class and status divisions exist in all societies and are associated with each other in complex ways. For this reason, Weber argues, the actual social strata that are found in particular societies will always combine together some of the characteristics of both a social class and a social estate. As this combination varies from one society to another, according to the nature and strength of their class and status relations, Weber argues that particular societies can be described as being either ‘class societies’ or ‘status societies’, depending on the relative strength of the two causal factors that are combined. Weber might be expected to have gone on to delineate the forms of stratification that can be found in particular societies, covering slavery, caste, ethnic relations, feudal estates, social notables, and the various other types that he touched on in his working papers. This would have provided a more detailed context for his discussion of domination and for whatever other sociologies were to follow in his book. However, nothing further was added to the fragment that survives. He does, however, discuss the implications of class and status recruitment to positions of political domination, seeing this as central to the need to legitimate this power and to exercise governance. In discussing forms of political domination, Weber was especially concerned with authority, the legitimate power of command and obedience held by a ruling group. He begins, therefore, with a reprise of the three types of authority

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legal, traditional, and charismatic and the various forms of administrative staff that he had completed in his working papers, contextualising this discussion in terms of his conceptualisation of a legitimate order. He developed some of these same ideas in a paper on the typology of authority written in 1917. This discussion sees legal authority as a structure in which the right to issue commands is justified in terms of strict conformity with a framework of legal enactment and as involving an impersonal system of bureaucratic administration. In charismatic and traditional systems of authority, on the other hand, commands and administration are based on personal devotion or patrimonial principles. Rulers and their administrators in each of these three systems of authority are drawn from various class and status situations, and Weber restates his view that modern class-based bureaucratic authority, unlike estate-type authority, involves a strict separation between the administrative office and the personal household of the official. The novel element in Weber’s final discussion of political domination is his attempt to explore more fully the specific features of modern democratic politics. He recognised that his coverage of this in his working papers had been somewhat undeveloped and he aimed to set out in this section of Economy and Society the concepts that could inform his proposed work on the sociology of the state. Though the latter was never written, some of the ideas were used in his analysis of German and Russian politics and in his essay on ‘Politics as a Vocation’. The problem that Weber addresses is that in a modern, fully rational state, legitimate decision-making must be purely instrumental: it must be in accordance with formally rational principles. Disenchantment and rationalisation have eliminated the possibility of any substantive rationality, of realising a cultural value, in a modern society. There is, he argues,

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no rational basis for choosing among alternative ends other than in terms of the technical means available to achieve them. The party system of a modern democracy, operating through formally rational election procedures, is unable to legitimately impose any direction on government policy without seeming to act non-rationally. Parties, representing classes, churches, or ethnic groups are themselves formally rational associations that promote merely the interests of their adherents. The tendency of modern politics, therefore, is for purely instrumental decision-making in relation to sectional interests. A ruling group is therefore subject to a tendency for rule by the technically qualified bureaucrats who operate the state and party ‘machines’ and will do so in a ‘directionless’ way. There appears to be no basis for human values to shape policy choices. Weber’s solution is to emphasise the importance of having relatively independent political leaders who are able to make value choices and build electoral support to promote them. In the modern political order, Weber argues, the politician must be one who determines the goals of public policy on the basis of freely chosen values, through choices made on the basis of inner convictions. A politician comes to these value choices from a particular class or other standpoint but must be sufficiently secure economically to be able to distance him or herself from these class conditions and to rationally reflect upon values and their implications. In the system of ‘free representation’ characteristic of the constitutionally organised parties, a party leader, by virtue of his or her election, is able to make decisions and not merely to represent the interest of party supporters. As a party leader, then, the autonomous politician must build charismatic authority, pursuing a personal mission or cause, though Weber strangely does not use the term charisma here. While electors may unreflectively vote for the party that represents their interests, they are likely to be

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swayed by a charismatic leader able to use the tools of rhetoric and demagoguery. The party leader must be a conviction politician able to attract devoted followers who will be willing to vote for the leader’s party. Parties must also, however, include administrative officials who are able to rationally administer the party programme and to manage its involvement in elections. Where a charismatic leader can attract the support of a mass electorate on the basis of his or her personality and demagoguery becoming a ‘plebiscitary’ leader he or she can ensure that the party’s bureaucratic machine does not predominate in policy discussions. Officials are obliged to enact the decisions of the charismatic party leadership. Charismatic leaders, then, may achieve a ‘democratic legitimacy’ through a rationalisation of the form of plebiscitary leadership. In democratic elections, the masses must choose between the various leaders and their parties. Charismatic party leaders become leaders within the state by virtue of the recognition freely given by their followers in an act of election. This, Weber argues, is the basis of the modern system of cabinet government and of the relationship of the cabinet to officialdom. The position of the various Ministers and Secretaries of State appointed by the elected leader, forming a cabinet, depends on the electoral success of their party; they all rise or fall along with it and do not form a permanent ruling group. When elected, the charismatic leader is empowered to pursue a political mission that has been legitimated by the electorate and so can rely on the formal, legally grounded administration of bureaucratic officials to implement that mission. It is the charismatic leader, then, who provides the direction for public policy. The value choices made by the leader and endorsed by a democratic electorate become, until the next election, the legitimate source of all policy decisions that can, thereby, be enacted through the formally legal principles of the modern state.

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8.3. PARLIAMENTARY POLITICS AND THE BOURGEOISIE These definitional and systematic views derived from and informed Weber’s own political position and his reflections on contemporary politics. Indeed, he had first outlined a part of his argument about modern parliamentary politics in his 1895 inaugural address at Freiburg. An adherent first of the same National Liberalism as his father, Weber had been concerned to explore the weakness of bourgeois liberal politics in the Reichstag. His inaugural lecture drew on his study of agricultural relations in Prussia, showing that state policy had been directed towards maintaining and enhancing the German character of the region in the face of a growing ethnic and religious divide between Protestant Germans and Catholic Polish migrants. He identified, then, a strongly ‘national’ character to state policy. By contrast with the prevailing idealism nurtured in mainstream political philosophy, Weber saw the temporal character of the nation state as the basis of this policy orientation. He concluded that the economic policy of a German national state could not be anything other than a distinctively German policy. However, he pointed to the lack of any proper political leadership that was able to recognise this and to successfully pursue a national economic policy. The new Reich had established a parliament and had set out a strategy of industrial modernisation, but was held back by an authoritarian monarchical structure that prevented the formation of autonomous and responsible party leadership. Neither the declining landlord class, tied to estates only recently freed from feudalism and epitomising traditionalism, nor the rising bourgeois class has the democratic ‘maturity’ to play this leadership role. The bourgeoisie as represented in the liberal parties was weak and remained subordinate to the Junkers.

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Weber argued, then, that there was a need for a parliamentary system in which strong bourgeois parties could compete in a system of ‘leadership democracy’. Modernisation required a strong, legally regulated bureaucracy to implement policy, but it also required strong political parties able to make value choices and direct the bureaucracy. Before the bourgeoisie could take control and determine the direction of state policy, however, there was a need for political education to raise their political consciousness. The economic policy of the Archive and similar organisations, Weber had argued, was to contribute to this political education. Even before the post-war abdication of the Kaiser, Weber had come to recognise that the monarchy could not be relied on to be an effective counter-weight to the bureaucracy. Only a monarch who rules through a parliament based on strong political leadership he cites Britain and Belgium can survive in the modern world. Power in parliament must lie with professional politicians exercising their leadership through a political party apparatus. Weber identified great similarities between the political problems of Germany and those of Russia, seeing the prospects for parliamentary liberalism in both countries as requiring the cultural rationalism and comprehensive capitalist development that had been achieved in western Europe but not yet in central Europe and further east. He had begun to explore these ideas in an early paper on Russian politics, and he further developed this after the war in examining the Russian revolution. He had learned sufficient Russian to be able to read political digests and to produce a detailed chronicle of the initial Russian revolution of 1905. He argues that, in the face of violently voiced popular demands, the Tsarist government had only reluctantly introduced a national parliament the Duma and the corresponding rights of free speech and association. While the bourgeois intelligentsia

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was the predominant force in Russian liberalism, Weber recognises the financial and industrial bourgeoisie as being ambivalent, and often hostile, towards it. This division within the bourgeoisie precluded any effective leadership role for it in building popular support for the new constitution. Combined with the opposition of state bureaucrats and the opportunist tactics of the Bolsheviks and other Social Democrats, Weber argues, there was no likelihood that a strong political bloc could be built that would sustain liberalism in the long term. The pressing need for agrarian reform to meet the demands of the peasantry posed a further problem for liberalism in Russia. The peasants sought a collectivist rather than a capitalist solution to their problems and had little if any concern for liberal individual rights. The limited reforms in Russia, then, had resulted merely in a ‘pseudoconstitutionalism’ that weakened the Tsar but strengthened the autocratic power of the state bureaucracy. Turning again to Russia in an article of 1917, Weber sees the October Revolution and the abdication of the Tsar as consequences of the intransigence and oppression of the Tsarist system itself. The Tsar had failed to develop any capable political leadership and had lost the support of both the bourgeoisie and the industrial workers. The February Revolution had created only a ‘pseudo-democracy’ that made the October Revolution almost inevitable. Only a thorough democratisation of the state and a strengthening of the bourgeois parties, he argues, could have prevented this. This is the fate that Weber wanted Germany to avoid, and he explored this in a post-war article on ‘Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany’. His concern in this paper, following the abdication of the Kaiser, was to emphasise the importance of a strong parliamentary system. Political leaders, he argued, must come through the parliamentary system and be elected from the parliament. By now

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he had recognised the importance of the charismatic party leader who could build the necessary mass support to secure a parliamentary majority, and he supported a universal franchise as the only way of ensuring that such a mass electorate had the necessary power. He saw parliament itself as the training ground for charismatic leadership as it was through debate within parliament aimed at securing majority votes that a basis for developing the required skills of rhetoric and demagoguery could be secured. In some of his post-war political writings Weber came to see an important role for directly elected Presidents in providing the mass, charismatic element that could counter the bureaucratisation of decision-making.

8.4. THE SCIENTIST AND SOCIAL POLICY At Munich, Weber was to deliver a lecture course on ‘General Theory of the State and Politics’. However, he delivered only a half of this course before succumbing to his fatal illness. The course had been designed to follow his completed discussion of domination and stratification before going on to cover the themes of his paper on post-war Germany. Although the work was not incorporated into Economy and Society as his projected ‘Sociology of the State’, some of its themes were set out in two essays on politics and social policy in which he returned to the themes of his 1904 account of objectivity. These papers on the vocations of politics and science and on value freedom further outlined the nature of political leadership and the idea of a rational social policy. Weber traces the emergence in the West of the professional politician as one who has entered the service of the state rather than the service of a lord. The professional politician is one who makes politics his vocation and so is both charismatic and methodically diligent. Such a person must live ‘for’

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politics and not ‘off’ politics. That is, the autonomous politician must be economically independent and not dependent on the income that can be gained from political office. This implies the recruitment of political leaders from among the wealthy bourgeoisie and landowners, and Weber notes that if politics is to be made accessible to the propertyless it must be appropriately remunerated. There must, he argues, be a parliamentary salary that is sufficient to insulate the politician from corruption and ensure independence from the influence of vested interests. Freedom from financial need gives the politician the same independence of action as the bureaucratic official. In exercising a leadership role, the professional politician must combine passion with a sense of responsibility and a sense of proportion. A passionate devotion to a cause that expresses values grounded in faith and rooted in worldviews that define an ideology is necessary for any charismatic leader. However, this must be combined with a responsibility to the cause as a basic motive, making the striving for power subordinate to the cause. While the politician is, therefore, motivated by values, these values must be pursued on the basis of an ethic of responsibility and not purely as an ethic of ultimate ends. An ethic of ultimate ends pursues religious and absolute values through value-rational action, regardless of their practical consequences. An ethic or responsibility involves a rational concern for the foreseeable results of actions. A sense of proportion means that the politician must work realistically with calmness and concentration, through ‘coolness’ or methodical diligence. While political choices are made with the heart, the politician must, nevertheless, be objective: politics is what Bismarck described as ‘the art of the possible’. The scientist, too, may have personal values that guide preferences for particular social policies, but, as Weber had

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already argued, the scientist is not a politician and must not act as a politician by advocating particular policies. Science is itself a vocation and the scientist must adhere to the principles of scientific activity. Weber holds that the motive and orientation of the academic scientist must rest on a passionate devotion to the truth of an idea or conjecture that is pursued through a dogged determination to test its validity. The scientist must have an ‘imagination’ and must diligently pursue the means to establish or confound the truth of conjectural explanations. He Weber assumes the male gender must be wholeheartedly committed to this truth, recognising that any result achieved is a stepping stone that will eventually be surpassed and forgotten. The scientist, like the politician, requires formal independence to act in this way. A graduate student in Germany enters professional science as an unpaid Privatdozent and so must have sufficient personal economic wealth to be able to take the risk of aspiring to a scientific career. Without this financial independence there is an inability to withstand the political pressures that seek to limit objectivity and freedom of speech. In America, he notes, junior academics are paid as teaching assistants and so have the greater security of the bureaucrat. However, they deliver the syllabus of the professor, and so lack the intellectual freedom of the German academic to devise their own research strategy. Weber notes that German universities were beginning to follow the American pattern, as Germany as a whole was becoming ‘Americanised’. He sees a danger that the characteristic vocational spirit of the German academic would be lost. Weber restates his argument that science cannot provide answers to value questions, questions of what is worthwhile. Nor can it draw political conclusions for social policy. He argues that the ‘passionate’ scientist may express his practical valuation of political actions, for these motivate his work,

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but he must make it perfectly clear that these are valuations rather than empirical statements or logical deductions. This is particularly true in a world where there is such a diverse plurality of value standpoints, no one of which can appear, as might have been the case in the past, as self-evidently correct. The scientist should not claim to speak, in academic settings, as a statesman or cultural reformer. A scientist may take a political position, bringing his scientific knowledge to bear upon it, and argue for it in public meetings, but must not express that position in lectures or scientific conferences, where empirical and analytical considerations must prevail. There is, therefore, a division of labour and a basis for cooperation between the vocational scientist and the vocational politician.

CHAPTER 9 ECONOMY, SOCIETY, AND CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT

The idea of a new discipline of social economics was central to Weber’s intellectual concerns and was the basis of the plan behind his work on the Outline. Social economics was envisaged as an interdisciplinary venture that would be the principal element in the whole corpus of the social sciences. At its heart was to be economic theory itself, which Weber saw as an analytical and explanatory investigation of economic activity using the ideas that were being rapidly developed by Carl Menger and other Austrian economists. Alongside economic theory was to be economic sociology, which has the task of examining the various social groups and relations through which economic actions are undertaken and the wider groups and relations in which they are embedded. The final element within social economics was economic history, which was to carry forward many of the concerns of German historical economics on the new basis of the methodology that Weber had set out before the First World War. Economic history was to use and apply the ideal types of economic sociology to investigate trends of change in economic 161

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life. Any empirical investigation into contemporary economic activities was to be a part of this economic history in so far as Weber regarded all economic processes as matters to be studied historically. Thus, the various studies that are today regarded as part of empirical sociology would, for Weber, be integral elements in various branches of history. These forms of history would, of course, be informed by the appropriate branch of sociology. Economy and Society, as the keystone volume of the Outline, was to set out the basis of Weber’s economic sociology. Beginning with the fundamental sociological concepts that were reviewed in the previous chapter, it would systematically set out the specific concepts that are important for analysing economic actions, economic relations, and economic institutions. It would also, however, consider those other social groups and relations that are ‘economically relevant’ in sustaining or inhibiting the play of economic forces. These political, religious, and other social groups and relations would also be considered from the point of view of the effects that the operations of the economic order had on their development: what Weber called the ‘economic conditioning’ of social groups. Weber’s fundamental concepts and his analysis of economically relevant and conditioned groups and relations, in so far as he had completed them, have been considered in Chapter 8. In the present Chapter, I will concentrate on his economic sociology and I will relate it to Weber’s view of economic history. The historical study of economic activity was not considered in Economy and Society, but it was a topic on which he lectured in his final years. In these lectures, he returned to the issues that he had been exploring in his very earliest works and in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ in order to examine the development of modern capitalism. His lectures were delivered in a style that

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permitted their transcription by students, who were able to make detailed shorthand notes on what he said. A surviving set of student notes was published in 1923 and was translated into English four years later as General Economic History. This text allows us to glimpse the ways in which Weber applied his own concepts in a historical investigation of capitalist development.

9.1. ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY Economic sociology was, paradoxically, the one area of social life for which Weber seems to have produced no draft material or working papers: only the fragment on the market is known to exist. He had, however, been working on economic matters from his earliest days and undoubtedly turned to rough notes, lecture notes, and his published studies to find the basis for what he needed to provide in the second chapter of Economy and Society. He began his analytical summary with a discussion of the basic concept of economic action, building towards an understanding of modern capitalism. An action, he argues, can be said to be economically oriented when its subjective meaning concerns the satisfaction of a desire for useful outputs and is based on an estimation of the advantage that the object or service might give an actor if used in present or future action. This type of action can be considered as specifically economic action when it involves the peaceful use of an actor’s power of control and disposal over resources in order to achieve its desired ends. Thus, economically oriented action that involves the use of force or violence or that is concerned with the use of economic means to religious or other ends is not ‘economic’ action in the strict sense and so is not of direct concern to economic theory. Social economics, however, may be interested in such action

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in so far as it is economically relevant or economically conditioned. An economic action orientation may be based on traditional or rational considerations. Traditionalism in the economic sphere enjoins value rational considerations that limit economic activity to certain permitted forms and precludes innovative practices that threaten traditionally sanctioned institutions. In the West, the overcoming of economic traditionalism through a process of rationalisation led to the purely rational economic action a form of purposiverational action that is the basis of modern capitalism. Rational economic action, then, is the exemplary model of scientifically explicable human action. The social relationships entered into by economic actors may have typically involved a direct exchange among individuals, on the basis of their competition and a compromise of interests. In many societies, however, individuals may act together in a group that enters into exchange relationships and Weber gives particular attention to the formation of organisations as the units of economic action. A specifically economic organisation, such as a business enterprise, a cooperative, a cartel, or a partnership, is a system of economic action that is able to enter into exchange relations to regulate or administer access to the resources needed by economic actors. An economic organisation engaged in production, commerce, or credit, rather than in the regulation or administration of economic activity, is, Weber argues, an economic ‘operational organisation’ or economic unit, a key example being the business enterprise with its various factories, workshops, and offices. Economic operational organisations that have a regulative function include merchant guilds, trades unions, and employers’ associations. In addition to these economic organisations, non-economic organisations such as states and churches may be ‘economically active’ and so

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relevant to social economics. Examples of administrative organisations that are active in the economy, Weber says, include the laissez-faire state, the planned state, and the war state. An autonomous complex of economic action and relations among individuals and organisations that is not subject to any higher authority is an ‘economy’ or economic order. An economy can, therefore, be seen as the means through which the peaceful pursuit of control over resources can achieve a satisfaction of the desire for useful goods. In any economy there is a coordination of the various constituent economic activities, and Weber produces a detailed classification of the possible ways in which these activities can be combined into a division of labour. There are, he argues, three dimensions to this combination and division of labour: the economic, the technical, and the social. The economic dimension, in the narrower sense of this word, is the most basic and refers to the extent to which the originally unitary household economy is differentiated into separate domestic units of consumption and specialised units of production. This economic division of labour constitutes production and consumption as specifically ‘economic’ activities. This is what makes economic theory possible, as the theory looks at the household demand for and the enterprise supply of goods and services as the factors involved in the explanation of prices and levels of output. The technical dimension of the division of labour refers to the extent of the functional specialisation of work tasks, their degree of mechanisation, and the differentiation of industry into various specialised sectors. Economics and social economics are concerned with the ways in which such differentiated tasks and activities are integrated into a coherent process of production. The social dimension in the combination of economic activity involves the ways in which economic resources (as

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the bases of profit and income) become the objects of property relations and thus are ‘appropriated’ as factors of production. Thus, labour may be organised as free artisan labour, free contractual labour, free collective labour, or unfree labour. Management, on the other hand, may be technically separated from physical labour and undertaken by an owner or by administrative staff, and the means of production themselves may be controlled by the worker, the owner, or by an organisation such as a business enterprise or state. These three aspects of the combination and division of labour can be brought together to define the specific occupations in which individuals are engaged. Weber uses the term Beruf, which he often uses in the sense of the ‘vocation’ or calling of a person. In this context, however, ‘occupation’ is a preferable translation as it emphasises the specifically economic aspect of work that is Weber’s concern. The overall division of labour appears, therefore, as a structure of differentiated occupations that are, Weber holds, a causal influence on the life chances of individuals and underpin the stratification of societies by class and status. The ways in which occupations are structured in relation to these three intersecting distinctions are numerous, and Weber notes that it is possible to construct a simpler classification of the actual types that have been important factors in human history. He does not review these in detail, but gives as an example the high degree of economic and technical division combined with the expropriation of the workers from the means of production in modern capitalism, which results in the ownership of those means of production by an entrepreneur or business enterprise that employs the workers as formally free contractual labour for a wage. The exercise of this wage labour in production is managed by administrative officials who are themselves formally free contractual employees appointed by the owners.

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In order to fully understand modern capitalism, Weber argues, it is necessary to consider the monetised nature of economic exchange relations in which these occupational relations are contained. Exchange that goes beyond the direct barter that takes place in a ‘natural economy’ always involves the use of a ‘medium of exchange’, some kind of physical object that will be accepted by others because there is a high probability that all others will similarly accept it in the future. When a medium of exchange designates an abstract unit of value that can be divided or multiplied into other units, and when it is also guaranteed by convention or law, it is called ‘money’. Money, then, is a physical ‘token’ that has no intrinsic value independently of its function as a means of exchange. Weber holds that money, as an easily calculable measure of value, is formally the most rational means for orientating economic activity and so is central to the rationalisation of all economic actions. The modern state, Weber argues, acts as an administrative organisation to guarantee the money that it issues for use in the territory that it rules and so makes it a legal form of payment. This legal guarantee ensures that there is a binding obligation on all economic actors within the territory to accept payment in the legitimate legal tender. Therefore, the state itself is a necessary condition for the secure monetary system required by an expanding economy. The use of money as a medium of exchange is a condition for both a great spatial and temporal extension of exchange relationships and for the storage of claims to payment for goods and services. These are central to the growth of a market economy, where actors are oriented to the calculation of advantages in exchange on the basis of self-interest and will cooperate with each other only through advantageous exchange relationships. All economic activity in a market economy is driven by the calculative pursuit of interests and

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especially by the striving for monetary income. This striving for income is the basis of capitalist ‘acquisitiveness’, which Weber defines as an economic action in which profits are sought through the exploitation of market situations. A capitalist economy particularly depends on a monetary calculation that allows the granting of credit. Through forms of accounting in which the relative profitability of alternative courses of action can be assessed in terms of the monetary value of the available means for profit-making, credit is able to make possible extended opportunities for acquisition. Economic actors are, in this way, able to gain income on capital that they do not themselves own. This is the basis of an economic actor’s ‘capital’, and an economic operating organisation that engages in capital accounting is defined as an ‘enterprise’. Although capitalist enterprises may be involved in trading, commercial, or productive activity, Weber gives particular attention to trading enterprises and the commercial forms to which they give rise. Capitalist trade is based on a system of ‘free trade’, by which Weber means the situation where a specialised occupational group engages in trading activities as a profit-making enterprise. Goods are bought and sold with the expectation of making a profit, now or in the future, on the difference between the purchase and sale prices. Such capitalist trade may be retail or wholesale, according to whether the transaction is between a household and an enterprise or between two enterprises. In both cases, the trader deals with goods produced, in a capitalist economy, by the ‘factories’ operated by a capitalist enterprise. Of particular importance in mediating among traders and between traders and producers is the ‘bank’. A bank is a specialised trading enterprise concerned with the administration or procurement of money. Banks make their profit by lending against deposits. By maintaining a particular deposit ratio,

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their lending activities can increase the amount of money circulating in the economy and so can contribute to the total amount of capital available for investment. Banks that earn their profits by transferring their loans into securities, lending to businesses, or creating mergers or cartels, are engaged in ‘financing’. Weber’s economic sociology had a definite focus on the forms of economic activity found in modern capitalism. Many of his concepts have a wider application, but it is to modern capitalism that he gives the most attention. It is the consequences of the actions engaged in by individuals and enterprises in a capitalist economy that provides the subject matter of economic theory. The concepts constructed by Weber were also intended, however, for use in economic history.

9.2. DEVELOPMENT OF WESTERN CAPITALISM In the lectures that Weber delivered on economic history, he constructed a stage model of world economic history, returning to the topics that he had discussed in his very earliest work and using the ideal type concepts introduced in his later works. He traced a move from a household economy through antiquity to feudalism and then examined the impact of capitalism on feudal manors. Having traced change in agrarian relations, he traces patterns of industrial development over the same period, exploring the mercantile and craft guilds and early workshop production. Finally, he traced commercial development through the medieval trading companies and the emergence of money and banking. Weber reiterates his view that the earliest form of property was that of the household community and goes on to consider the then current theories of matriarchy and the Marxist idea of primitive communism, popularised, respectively, in Johan

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Bachofen’s Mother Right and Fredrich Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State. Rejecting both views, Weber sees the household economy as typically a patriarchal community based on settled agriculture. In this community, the male head of household monopolises property rights and exercises despotic powers over his wife, children, and slaves. Weber cites as an example the Germanic tribal society that persisted into the first millennium AD, though he sees it as the form of social life found in all agricultural areas of the world. He goes on to trace the transformation of this system into patrimonial and feudal forms of lordship in which one household achieves a dominance over all others. He notes that this transformation occurred for various reasons and followed various trajectories. In Egypt, China, and Asia Minor, the royal household operated as a self-sufficient oikos using the labour services of the subject population to produce for its own needs and for a limited surplus to sell on the market. In this Oriental pattern, lordship required an expansion of the burden of taxation in order to finance irrigation schemes and other major public works. This system had inbuilt instabilities because its feudalisation was based on peasant tributes to officials and warlords rather than on a manorial economy. Patriarchy ended in the Roman Empire when military chieftains established trading monopolies over the maritime trading cities. Weber argues that in these cities an urban trading class developed and expanded only when it could secure a degree of autonomy from the rural militaristic lordship. This militaristic organisation was also imposed on neighbouring areas through conquest or voluntary submission to overlordship. Where the military chief assigned land rights to his warriors, as in Italy and Germany, ‘feudal’ relations involving fiefs land grants in return for the provision of military service were established. This created a class division

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between warrior lords and peasant serfs, the lords being able to support themselves through servile labour. Europe therefore became, in this way, a fully feudal system on a manorial basis. This form of feudalisation, Weber argues, was also the case in Russia, and weaker forms were found in Japan and Turkey. European feudalisation, then, established a manorial economy in which the household authority of the lord was extended from the family to the whole of the lord’s territory. The manor comprised the lord’s demesne together with the land held by the peasants. Demesne land was farmed by an official using compulsory peasant labour. The remaining land was allocated as individual plots from which the peasant families could support themselves. The feudal lord ruled over his manor and exercised judicial powers over all living within his territory. Free individuals could participate in a manorial court that eliminated arbitrary lordly power and established traditionalised authority. Village settlements were typically based on a system with three common fields that were divided into the separate strips farmed by each individual peasant family. Villages were organised into larger ‘mark’ groupings on a neighbourhood basis with wider clan or tribal loyalties. This was the case in Germany, Scandinavia, England, Northern France, Belgium, and Italy, though Weber documents only the varying forms found, in particular, in France, Italy, and England. Weber sees the production of material goods for the market as beginning to develop as a major factor in Europe through the medieval urban guilds, though these remained subject to tight political and religious regulation. Tracing the history of various of the craft guilds in some detail, he shows how they came to form associations of traders in major goods, especially the luxury goods that could be traded on international markets. Associations of merchants had achieved great importance

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in England by the thirteenth century and became a significant economic force in Italy and Germany by the sixteenth century. The more prominent of the merchants developed banking interests and were able to build a monetary and credit system. Guild craftsmen became more active as merchants of produced goods in the late middle ages and they began to organise the process of production itself, employing homeworkers for a piece-work wage. This home-based production for the market transformed the merchants into a bourgeois class of capitalist entrepreneurs and the larger bourgeoisie gradually set up workshops and factories in which they brought workers together to work in one place under their direct control. This development, Weber argues, was most marked in England and was at its weakest in Germany. The growth of commerce led some manors to become more oriented to the market and so to develop their agriculture along commercial capitalist lines and to become estate economies. The latifundia of imperial Rome had previously developed in this way, as Weber had shown in his early work, and he finds similar developments occurring in England from the fourteenth century, where common land was enclosed to form large farming units in place of the dispersed peasant holdings. Internationally, this process was uneven. In Germany, capitalist farming was most strongly developed in the west, but in the east and in Austria feudal relations and the power of the Junker class persisted. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the colonial expansion of European powers into the Americas and the Caribbean translated manorial principles into the creation of planation economies run with slave labour. The slow growth of the commercial economies led to the demise of the manorial system as it came under pressure. In England, the serfs were emancipated and were expropriated from the land, becoming rural proletarians. In Prussia, there

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was a partial freeing of the serfs but, especially in the east, the landlords became more subject to the power of the state. In France, the landlords were dispossessed in the revolutionary upheavals and peasant proprietorship became the norm. Across Europe, however, this breakdown of the manorial system eliminated all judicial, political, and religious restrictions on land ownership and use, expanding opportunities for the growth of specifically economic action. Wherever wealthy bourgeois merchants purchased landed estates, agricultural labourers were emancipated and proletarianised and agricultural production was intensified. The economies of the Orient had developed very differently, and none of these Oriental societies, Weber claims, provided the basis for capitalist development. In China, he points to the strong patrimonial structure that had been established by the third century BC. In India, manorialism remained strong but was unchallenged by commercialism. Feudal relations persisted in both Persia and Turkey, and a fully feudal system persisted in Japan until 1861. In these societies, he argues, development occurred only as a result of the influence of Western societies. Weber’s account, then, traced the divergent paths of agricultural and commercial development in the Orient and the West, but he also brought out the variations within each pattern. In England, he shows the emergence of a rentier class of landed aristocrats able to play a major role in politics. In France, the landowners did not have this freedom from the need to work on the land and politics came to be dominated by an urban plutocracy. In Germany, a weak landlord class of petty gentry survived in the east but had no substantial political role. These variations helped to explain the subsequent development of each economy, but Weber faced a larger explanatory question: how to explain the origins of modern capitalism itself.

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9.3. THE MATERIAL SIDE OF THE CAPITALIST SPIRIT Returning to the thesis that he had set out in ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ and in the other essays on ‘The Economic Ethics of the World Religions’, Weber set out an account of the material factors that operated alongside the religious and spiritual factors. Capitalist activity, he notes, has been found in many societies and at all periods of history, but it was only in the West that it came to provide the whole of the population’s needs through its distinct organisational forms. And only from the mid-nineteenth century, he argues, did capitalism achieve this predominance. Capitalism in its most general sense, Weber argues, is simply the commercially acquisitive making of profits, and forms of such capitalist activity have existed in both the East and the West. The form of capitalism that can be found most commonly throughout human history is the purely mercantile activity of speculating in commodities and money. Weber identifies also certain politically oriented forms of capitalism that were especially prominent in the East. These are forms in which there was a predatory orientation to the financing of political organisations, a forceful acquisition of profits through colonial or fiscal activities, or profiteering from the financing of political activities in the form of gifts or donations to political leaders. These he had earlier referred to as forms of adventurer or booty capitalism. It is only in the contemporary West, however, that the specifically modern form of capitalism can be found. In this system, rational capitalist enterprises operate with fixed capital, private property in the means of production, free wage labour, and a rational specialisation and combination of functions based around a rational technology expressed in the mechanisation of production. They engage in rational capital accounting in order to operate through a continuous

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orientation to a market economy free of all irrational considerations. Only in the West are enterprises financed through the use of share capital, as the basis of property rights and income, and is credit, in the form of securities, central to the financing of business activity through organisations engaged in the speculative trading of securities in a capital market. Having identified the various factors that define the essential features of the existence of modern capitalism, Weber turns to an investigation of the material conditions responsible for their combined emergence in the commercialising agrarian societies of the West. His account is far from comprehensive and he provides several separate accounts of the key factors, but he focuses on the legal and political factors that made this historical event possible. Modern capitalist enterprise is undertaken by joint stock companies that are able to pool the capital of large numbers of individuals and make it available for investment in industry and this was made possible through a number of separate innovations. Commercial securities and legal forms that allow joint enterprise, he argues, had existed in Rome, but it was not until the development of the partnership forms in medieval Italy that this became an established way of undertaking business. It was in the large colonial trading companies that the idea of capital being raised through a stock exchange became a model for other enterprises to adopt and combine with the limited liability of their ‘shareholders’. ‘Company’ or ‘corporate’ enterprise was, he argues, a slow and gradual innovation that was made in response to the growing needs of commercial expansion and the need to mitigate the effects of the speculative crises that marked this acquisitive expansion. The modern business enterprise operates one or more factories in which machinery and resources are brought together with labour in order to produce for the market. Another crucial condition for its growth was that there be a mass market

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demand, which Weber sees as resting on a class division between a wealthy bourgeoisie and a far less wealthy mass of propertyless workers. Machine production in factories controlled by an entrepreneur was uncommon before the eighteenth century. It developed rapidly at that time because of the transplantation of the cotton industry from the continent to England and the consequent struggle of cotton producers against those involved in woollen production. Cotton entrepreneurs made huge technical improvements in their spindles and introduced new sources of power in order to enhance their competitive situation. It was, however, the use of coal and iron the new forms of energy and new forms of smelting giving greater productive capacity that brought about a rationalisation of work and the revolutionary transformation of industrial technology. The growing application of science to technology was possible only in the West, as rationalised scientific thought was known nowhere else, though formally enacted patent law was also necessary to protect the technical innovations. These innovations reduced the prices of finished goods and made possible the growth of a mass market. Weber contends that the various legal conditions for rational capitalism could develop only in the West because of the existence of modern states with professional, bureaucratic administration and a system of law based on citizenship. The modern state pursued mercantilist policies that sustained and supported the expansion of national capitalist groups in their global expansion and so created the conditions under which powerful capitalist enterprises could build a system of free trade. More importantly, the modern rational state and the formally rational law that it enacts through its rationalised professional administration all unique to the West allowed the creation of the legal forms of business enterprise and property that are required for expanding capitalist enterprises. The whole

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framework of rational law underpins private property in the means of production, free wage labour, and the free market. The modern concept of the ‘citizen’ a status extended to all subjects of the state and no longer restricted to privileged strata as the basis of individual rights in property and their own labour made possible a comprehensive calculation of the means and conditions involved in commercial activity. Thus, a number of material conditions that facilitated capitalist expansion were unique to the West, their absence in the Orient helping to explain the failure of capitalism to develop there. However, Weber reiterates that capitalism would never have expanded in the way that it did in the West if a specific capitalist spirit had not also provided the stimulus to break with the traditional restrictions that, in the Orient, were holding back capitalist development. At this point in his lectures Weber returns to the arguments that I reviewed in Chapter 7. He concludes that traditionalism has been the principal inhibiting factor in capitalist development in all parts of the world and that economic interests and acquisitiveness could be unleashed only when the traditional outlook was challenged and broken. In Europe, the anti-capitalist attitudes of Catholic and Lutheran ethics were broken by ascetic Protestantism and its idea of the calling. As he showed in his early studies, the Protestant ethic enabled the growth of a capitalist spirit that drove capitalist expansion and built a system that could continue to expand without any spiritual underpinning. In his final work, Weber came full circle. He returned to the themes that he had raised in his earliest publications on medieval trade, agrarian property relations, and the stock exchange, and he used his array of ideal types to redescribe the contrast between the Orient and the West and the historical development of the West. He drew on his working papers and his evolving work on religion to provide a sketch for an explanation of that unique process of development.

CHAPTER 10 WEBER’S LEGACY

During his own lifetime Weber produced no major monographs, most of his work appearing in journals and technical reports. The great majority of his major articles appeared in the Archive under his own editorship. A number of these articles were of book length, but not until after his death did any free-standing books appear. His widow, Marianne Weber, published a volume with the title Economy and Society and a series of volumes of Collected Essays on religion, methodology, and economic history. It was with the publication of these volumes that Marianne hoped to secure an enduring place for Weber in German academic life, though his influence was cut short by post-war events in Germany. German academic life was seriously affected and disrupted through the 1920s and 1930s as the security and confidence of university professors were eroded by a gradual extension of state control over the universities and by the establishment of new metropolitan universities with a more practical orientation in Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Cologne. Hyper-inflation reduced professorial incomes and led to a deterioration in working conditions that exacerbated their already ambivalent views on Weimar parliamentary democracy. Weber’s political views 179

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were, therefore, already being abandoned and denounced by more orthodox academics. Politically, even progressive intellectuals were alienated from Weimar politics and felt a sense of crisis. The growing strength of nationalist and authoritarian sentiments meant that Weber’s views on historical method and historical change were far less favourably viewed than the pessimistic view of cultural disintegration expressed by Oswald Spengler in his The Decline of the West. The rise in support for the Nazi party and Hitler’s accession to power led to a far stronger and more insidious political control over university curriculums and a direct suppression of radical and Jewish staff and critical teaching areas through the 1930s. The Nazi suppression of critical thought had its greatest impact on the social sciences. The sociology that became established in the 1920s was that of Alfred Vierkandt and Leopold von Wiese: a formal and analytical sociology that lacked historical and empirical content. However, even this form of sociology faced opposition and suppression during the 1930s. Sociologies more acceptable to orthodox opinion and to university leaders were those of Hans Freyer and Othmar Spann, both of whom restated idealist concerns for the collective spirit of a nation. Sombart, too, moved away from his materialist position and towards an accommodation with collectivist and Nazi views. Weber’s ideas, then, were clearly marginal to these post-war trends and the rise of Nazism closed off any possible acceptance of his views among those social scientists who survived or prospered during the 1930s. A number of those scholars influenced by Weber were forced out of the country, taking their ‘Weberian’ influences to the United States and Britain. By the time that German emigré intellectuals arrived in the English-speaking academic world, Weber’s work had already begun to appear in translation. A first glimpse of Weber’s thought among American and British academics occurred

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with the translation of his lectures on General Economic History, which Frank Knight produced in 1927. This provided a condensed and highly didactic view of Weber’s work in economic history, but did begin to build an awareness of his significance in that field. Talcott Parsons, later to become the pre-eminent American sociologist, had spent a year during the mid-1920s studying in Heidelberg and investigating German social thought on modern capitalism. Inspired by his encounter with the ideas of Weber and Sombart, he secured the support of Marianne Weber for a translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This translation of the version that appeared in the Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion appeared in 1930, but was subject to heavy editing by the publisher. It was also provided with an uncomprehending Preface by the economic historian Richard Tawney, whose own Religion and the Rise of Capitalism had appeared in 1926. The translation was not completely successful in its first four years and was, like Knight’s translation of the lectures, read mainly by economic historians. Parsons’s translation had actually been produced as a part of his attempt to build a basis for the development of an academic sociology of which Weber would appear as one of the founders. Parsons completed this work in the middle of the 1930s and published his argument in The Structure of Social Action in 1937. The argument of this book was that Weber in Germany and Durkheim in France, together with certain other theorists, had provided complementary foundations for a wide-ranging sociology. Parsons’s work was itself translated into various languages but had little impact in the United States or Britain until after the Second World War. It was after the War that Parsons began another translation project, this time for Part One of Weber’s Economy and Society, which was published in 1947 under the title The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. Thanks to

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Parsons’s Introduction and his own growing influence, the text was received as a major precursor to Parsons’s own ‘structural-functional’ conception of sociology. Simultaneously with Parsons’s publication of the first part of Economy and Society, two other translations appeared. In 1946 C. Wright Mills worked with Hans Gerth, a former student of Alfred Weber and Karl Mannheim, to produce a series of substantial extracts from Weber’s work under the title From Max Weber. This was the first volume to properly introduce Weber’s work on domination, bureaucracy and stratification, and his work on the world religions. Three years later, a part of Weber’s Collected Essays on Methodology appeared under the editorship of Edward Shils as The Methodology of the Social Sciences. By the end of the 1940s, then, a more-rounded appreciation of Weber was becoming possible, though his work was largely interpreted through the lens either of Parsons’s structuralfunctionalism or of Mills’s more critical contribution to a ‘conflict theory’. The details of Weber’s work were filled out through the 1950s and early 1960s, with the appearance in translation of various of his working papers: on law in 1954, the city and music in 1958, and religion in 1963. This was also the period in which his essays on religion in China, India, and ancient Palestine were translated and published in book form. Though these translations were of varying quality, a fairly comprehensive view of Weber could be achieved, though the fragmentary way in which the translations appeared made it difficult to appreciate their relationship to each other or to discern the development of Weber’s own ideas. Eventually in 1968, a translation of Economy and Society, in the form in which Marianne had prepared it, appeared. This was presented as a combination of Parsons’s translation of Part One with the translations of the principal working papers that had already appeared. A major achievement in

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bringing the German image of Weber to an English-speaking audience, this translation nevertheless presented the material in the form that Marianne and not Max had intended it to appear. A view of Weber that departed from structuralfunctionalism had already begun to appear as a result of From Max Weber in 1946 and by the appearance of Raymond Aron’s account of German Sociology a decade later. When Reinhard Bendix’s Max Weber. An Intellectual Portrait appeared three years later, a picture of Weber as a more historically and politically aware theorist was possible. In Germany, too, this historical and conflict-aware version of Weber had been championed by Ralf Dahrendorf in his Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society, published in German in 1957 and in English two years later. Weber was similarly presented by John Rex in 1962, in Key Problems in Sociological Theory, as a major ‘conflict theorist’ and continuator of a Marxistoriented social theory and as an alternative to Parsonian ‘consensus theory’. When Aron’s Main Currents in Sociological Thought appeared in 1965, an alternative to Parsons’s view of the history of sociology was available. Weber could be seen as providing a radically different, but still complementary, view to that of Parsons in his Structure of Social Action. The history of the discipline was beginning to be rewritten as involving the contributions of three principal ‘founding fathers’ Marx, Weber, and Durkheim a view presented most influentially in Anthony Giddens’s Capitalism and Modern Social Theory of 1971. Weber was however, coming to be seen in the light of the growing interest in symbolic interactionism as a theorist of action, subjectivity, and meaning. This was rapidly simplified and distorted into the idea that there were three forms of sociology focusing on conflict (Marx), structure (Durkheim), and action (Weber).

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Since the 1970s, however, more of Weber’s lesser known publications have appeared in translation. A journal Max Weber Studies is dedicated to discussions of Weber’s work, and an ever-growing number of secondary discussions have appeared. One author in the 1980s estimated that five books a year were being published on Weber. A search today on Amazon yields more than 2000 book titles by or about Weber. In Germany, a comprehensive critical edition of Weber’s publications has almost been completed and it is to be hoped that improved English-language translations of these will eventually appear. This book aims to provide a guide to reading the available translations in English and has the aim of conveying an understanding of the complexity of Weber’s thought and the impossibility of identifying him simply as a theorist of ‘action’, ‘conflict’, or any other one-dimensional label.

APPENDIX 1: CONSPECTUS OF WEBER’S WORKS IN ENGLISH

This Appendix lists Weber’s major writings in chronological order, showing the most accurate and useful English sources. The abbreviations used for these sources are detailed below. The English titles given are, wherever possible, translations of those used in the original German versions. Where the title of the English publication differs significantly from the German, this is shown after the source. The titles given to Working Papers W24 W39 are translations of the titles given to them by Marianne Weber in the posthumous publication of Economy and Society and may not correspond to the nowunknown titles (if any) that Weber himself gave to them. The Reference numbers W1 W59 are those used in Appendices 2 and 3, to show the relationship with the chapters in this book and with the comprehensive collected works in German. Translated

Best Available

English Title

English Source

The History of Commercial

HCP

1889 W1

Partnerships in the Middle Ages

185

Appendix 1

186

(Continued ) Translated English Title

Best Available English Source

The Agrarian History of Rome and Its Significance for Public

RAH

1891 W2

and State Law 1892 W3

Developmental Tendencies in the Situation of East Elbian

Tribe, 158 184

Rural Labourers 1894 W4

The Exchange

TS, 305 338 as ‘Stock and Commodity Exchanges’

1895 W5

The National State and Economic Policy

Tribe, 188 209

Exchange Economics

TS, 339 371, as ‘Commerce on the Stock and Commodity

1896 W6

Exchanges’ 1903 W7

Roscher’s Historical Method

CMW, 3 28

W8

The Social Causes of the

ASAC, Part IV

Decline of Ancient Culture 1904 W9

The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy

CMW, 100 138

Appendix 1

187

(Continued ) Translated English Title

Best Available English Source

1905 W10 The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism

Baehr and Wells

W11 On the Situation of Bourgeois

RR, 41 147

Democracy in Russia W12 Knies and the Problem of Irrationality, I

CMW, 28 67

1906 W13 ‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America

Baehr and Wells, 203 220 (Revised in 1920, see below)

W14 Critical Remarks in Response

Baehr and Wells, 221 231

to the Foregoing Contributions (of Rachfahl and others) W15 Knies and the Problem of

CMW, 68 93

Irrationality, II W16 Critical Studies in the Logic of

CMW, 139 184

the Cultural Sciences 1907 W17 Remarks on the Foregoing

Baehr and Wells, 232 243

Reply (of Rachfahl) W18 R. Stammler’s ‘Overcoming’ of

CMW, 185 226

the Materialist Conception of History 1908 W19 A Research Strategy for the Study of Occupational Careers and Mobility Patterns

Eldridge, 103 155

Appendix 1

188

(Continued ) Translated English Title

Best Available English Source

1909 W20 Agrarian Relations in Antiquity

ASAC, Parts I and II, as ‘Economic Theory and Ancient Society’ and ‘The Agrarian History of the Major Centres of Ancient Civilisation’

1910 W21 Rebuttal of the Critique of the

Baehr and Wells, 244 281

‘Spirit’ of Capitalism W22 A Final Rebuttal of Rachfahl’s

Baehr and Wells, 282 339

Critique of the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism W23 On Some Categories of

CMW, 273 301

Interpretive Sociology 1910-14 W24 The Most General Relationships of Economy and

ES, 311 339 as ‘The Economy and Social Norms’

Law W25 The Economic Relationships of Organised Groups W26 Market Structures

ES, 339 341 ES, 635 640 as ‘The Market: Its Impersonality and Ethic’

W27 The Social Determinants of Legal Development W28 Neighbourhood Association, Sib, and Community W29 Household, Oikos, and Enterprise

ES, 641 900 as ‘Economy and Law (Sociology of Law)’ ES, 356 369 as ‘Household, Neighbourhood and Kin Group’ ES, 370 384 as ‘Household, Enterprise, and Oikos’

Appendix 1

189

(Continued ) Translated English Title W30 Ethnic Community Relations

Best Available English Source ES, 385 398 as ‘Ethnic Groups’

W31 Religious Communities

ES, 399 634 as ‘Religious Groups (The Sociology of Religion)’

W32 The Political Association

ES, 901 940 as ‘Political Communities’

W33 Domination

ES, 941 955 as ‘Domination and Legitimacy’

W34 Political and Hierocratic

ES, 1158 1211

Domination W35 Patriarchalism and

ES, 1006 1069

Patrimonialism W36 Feudalism, Ständestaat, and

ES, 1070 1110

Patrimonialism W37 Charisma and Its

ES, 1111 1157

Transformation W38 Bureaucracy

ES, 956 1005

W39 Non-legitimate Domination: The ES, 1212 1372 as ‘The City Typology of Cities W40 Rational and Social

(Non-legitimate Domination)’ RSFM

Foundations of Music 1915 1918 W41 The Economic Ethics of the

EW, 55 80 as ‘Introduction to

World Religions. Sketches in

the Economic Ethics of the

the Sociology of Religion: Introduction

World Religions’; FMW, as ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’

W42 Confucianism

RC (as revised in 1920)

Appendix 1

190

(Continued ) Translated English Title W43 Intermediate Reflections:

Best Available English Source EW, 215 243; FMW, as

Theory of the Stages and

‘Religious Rejections of the

Directions of World Religion

World and their Directions’

W44 Hinduism and Buddhism

RI (as revised in 1920)

W45 Ancient Judaism

AJ (as revised in 1920)

1917 W46 The Meaning of ‘Value

CMW, 304 334

Freedom’ in the Sociological and Economic Sciences W47 Russia’s Transition to Pseudo-

RR, 148 240

Constitutionalism W48 Parliament and Government in

ES, 1381 1462

a Reconstructed Germany W49 The Three Types of Legitimate

EW, 133 145

Rule 1918 W50 Politics as a Vocation

FMW, 77 128

1919 W51 Science as a Profession and Vocation

CMW, 335 353; FMW, 129 156

1920 W52 General Economic History

GEH

W53 Basic Sociological Terms

ES, 3 62

W54 Sociological Categories of

ES, 63 211

Economic Action W55 The Types of Legitimate

ES, 212 301

Domination W56 Status Groups and Classes

ES, 302 307

Appendix 1

191

(Continued ) Translated English Title

Best Available English Source

W57 The Protestant Ethic and

Kalberg, 3 125

the Spirit of Capitalism W58 Prefatory Remarks (to the

EW, 101 112; Parsons, 13-3

Collected Essays on the

as ‘Author’s Introduction’;

Sociology of Religion)

Kalberg, 149 164

W59 Protestant Sects and the

FMW, 302 322

Spirit of Capitalism

ABBREVIATIONS AJ

Ancient Judaism, Max Weber, Glencoe, Free Press, 1952

ASAC

Agrarian Sociology of the Ancient Civilisations, Max Weber, London, New Left Books, 1976

Baehr and Wells

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, ed., Peter Baehr and Gordon Wells, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 2002

CMW

Collected Methodological Writings, Max Weber, ed., Sam Whimster and Hans Bruun, London, Routledge, 2012

Eldridge

Max Weber. The Interpretation of Social Reality, John E. T. Eldridge, London, Nelson, 1971.

ES

Economy and Society, Max Weber, ed., Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, San Francisco, University of California Press

EW

The Essential Weber, ed., Sam Whimster, London, Routledge, 2004.

192

Appendix 1

FMW

From Max Weber, ed., Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948

GEH

General Economic History, Max Weber, ed., Frank Knight, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1927

Kalberg

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, ed., Stephen Kalberg, Oxford, Blackwell, 2002

HCP

The History of the Commercial Partnerships in the Middle Ages, ed., Lutz Knelber, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003

Parsons

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1930

RAH

Roman Agrarian History, Max Claremont, Regina Books, 2008

RC

The Religion of China, Max Weber, Glencoe, Free Press, 1951

RI

The Religion of India, Max Weber, Glencoe, Free Press, 1958

RR

The Russian Revolutions, Max Weber, ed., Wells and Baehr, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1995

RSFM

Rational and Social Foundations of Music, Max Weber, Carbondale, Southern Illinois Press, 1958

TS

Theory and Society, Volume 29, 2000

Tribe

Reading Weber, ed., Keith Tribe, London, Routledge, 1989

Weber,

APPENDIX 2: SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

In this Appendix I show, chapter by chapter, the principal sources in which Weber’s ideas can be pursued more fully. These sources use the cross references listed in Appendix 1. I also give some further reading of commentaries and interpretations in which Weber’s sociological approach is used and extended in a variety of directions. I am grateful to Sam Whimster for advice and for some comments and corrections on the text. CHAPTERS 1 AND 2 The most important source on Weber’s life is Marianne Weber’s Max Weber: A Biography (New York, NY: John Wiley, 1975, originally 1926). Now somewhat dated, it must be complemented by the more critical but also contentious argument of Joachim Radkau in his Max Weber: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011, originally 2005). The historical context of German intellectual culture in the time of Weber is usefully discussed in Fritz Ringer’s The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890 1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). 193

Appendix 2

194

CHAPTER 3 Basic sources for this chapter are W1 W6 and W8. A comprehensive discussion of Weber’s view of Roman society is John Love’s Antiquity and Capitalism: Max Weber and the Sociological Foundations of Roman Civilization (London: Routledge, 1991). Some of the same issues that Weber raised in his study of Western Europe after the collapse of Rome are further examined by Perry Anderson in his Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974). The much earlier book by Karl Wittfogel on Oriental Despotism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957) is a classic though somewhat flawed account of the societies of the East. Among recent writers, Shmuel Eisenstadt has brought together a vast amount of research on comparative civilisations into an impressive investigation of variant paths to modernity in his Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities (Vol. 1, Leiden: Brill, 2003). Weber’s work on medieval trading partnerships has been directly pursued in a series of works by John Padgett, most notably in three articles: ‘Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400 1434’ (American Journal of Sociology, 98, 6, 1259 1319, 1993, with Christopher Ansell), ‘Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems In Renaissance Florence’ (American Journal of Sociology, 111, 5, 1463 1568, 2006, with Paul McLean), and ‘Economic Credit in Renaissance Florence’ (Journal of Modern History, 83, 1, 1 47, 2011, with Paul McLean). Weber’s study of securities markets is discussed in Sandro Segre’s ‘A Weberian Account of Social Norms and Trust in Financial Markets’ (Max Weber Studies, 5, 2, 2005). An interesting theoretical development of the argument is Wayne Baker’s ‘The Social Structure of a National Securities Market’ (American Journal of Sociology, 89, 4, 775 811, 1984).

Appendix 2

195

Some recent innovative work in the same area can be found in Karin Knorr-Cetina and Alex Preda, eds, The Sociology of Financial Markets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Polish migrant labour in Germany has been placed in a larger historical context of European migration patterns by Robert Rhoades in ‘Foreign Labor and German Industrial Capitalism, 1871 1978: The Evolution of a Migratory System’ (American Ethnologist, 5, 3, 553 573, 1978). An excellent discussion of contemporary patterns of labour migration, which places these in relation to nation states and economic globalisation, can be found in Robin Cohen’s Migration and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 2006).

CHAPTER 4 Basic sources on methodology are W7, W9, W12, W15 W16, W18 W19, and W23. Two good general discussions of Weber’s methodology are Sven Eliaeson’s Max Weber’s Methodologies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002) and Fritz Ringer’s Max Weber’s Methodology (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Despite its title, Stephen Kalberg’s Max Weber’s Comparative and Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) comprises a thorough discussion of the methodology and its uses. A more detailed account of the philosophical background to the methodology is that of Guy Oakes in Weber and Rickert (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).

CHAPTER 5 Sources for this chapter are W10, W13 W14, W17, W21 W22, and W57 W59. The major essay W10 may usefully be compared with the revised version in W57.

196

Appendix 2

A comprehensive study of the origins of the Protestant ethic thesis in Weber’s life and work has been published by Peter Ghosh in Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Aspects of Weber’s account are discussed in a number of collections, the most useful being The Protestant Ethic Turns 100: Essays on the Centenary of the Weber Thesis (edited by William Swatos and Lutz Kaelber, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2005) and the journal double-issue Max Weber and the Spirit of Modern Capitalism 100 Years On, (Max Weber Studies, Vols. 5, 2, and 6, 1, 2005 2006). A comprehensive critical review of the empirical basis of Weber’s argument is in the various contributions to Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth, eds, Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Weber’s argument was interestingly applied to the case of Scotland in Gordon Marshall’s Presbyteries and Prophets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). A very different use of Weber’s argument can be found in Gordon Redding’s The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism (New York, NY: W. De Gruyter, 1993), which explores capitalist enterprise in the overseas Chinese communities of south-east Asia. A novel extension of Weber’s argument can be found in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2007, originally 1999). Though it is not directly concerned with the Protestant ethic thesis, Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans (New York, NY: John Wiley, 1966) is a fascinating exploration of social pressures in Puritan communities and their role in the New England witchcraft accusations of the seventeenth century.

Appendix 2

197

CHAPTER 6 Basic sources for this chapter are the overview essay W20 and the working papers W24 W40. The classic summary of Weber’s views on comparative social structure is that of Reinhard Bendix in Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1960). In Max Weber on Economy and Society (London: Routledge, 1989), Robert Holton and Bryan Turner discuss the connections between various of the themes explored by Weber in his working papers. The most important, though rather difficult, discussion of Weber’s argument in his working papers is Wolfgang Schluchter’s Rationalism, Religion and Domination (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). The sociology of law is well-covered in Paul Walton’s ‘Max Weber’s Sociology of Law: A Critique’ (Sociological Review, 23, 1, 7 21, 1975); Alan Hunt’s ‘Max Weber’s Sociology of Law’ in his The Sociological Movement in Law (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978); and Isher-Paul Sahni’s ‘Max Weber’s Sociology of Law’ (Journal of Classical Sociology, 9, 2, 209 233, 2009). Aspects of politics and domination are considered in Peter Blau, ‘Critical Remarks on Weber’s Theory of Authority’ (American Political Science Review, 57, 2, 305 316, 1966) and Harry (T.H.) Rigby ‘Weber’s Typology of Authority: A Difficulty and Some Suggestions’ (Journal of Sociology, 2, 1, 2 15, 1966). Administration and bureaucracy are considered in Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber ‘Authority and Power in Bureaucracy and Patrimonial Administration’ (World Politics, 31, 2, 195 227, 1979) and Martin Albrow’s Bureaucracy (London: Pall Mall, 1970). Weber’s view of the modern state is covered in Gian Poggi’s The Development of the Modern State (London: Hutchinson, 1978).

198

Appendix 2

Various issues in the sociology of religion are covered in Werner Stark’s ‘Max Weber’s Sociology of Religious Belief’ (Sociology of Religion, 25, 1, 41 49, 1964); Martin Riesebrodt ‘Charisma in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion’ (Journal of Religion, 29, 1, 1 14, 1999); and Christopher Adair-Toteff Fundamental Concepts in Max Weber’s Sociology of Religion (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2015). The often misunderstood work on stratification is discussed in Rajendra Panday’s ‘Max Weber’s Theory of Social Stratification’ (Sociological Bulletin, 32, 2, 171 203, 1983); Jack Barbalet’s ‘Principles of Stratification in Max Weber: An Interpretation and Critique’ (British Journal of Sociology, 31, 3, 401 418, 1980); and most comprehensively in John Scott’s Stratification and Power: Structures of Class, Status and Command (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996) The ancient city is discussed in Moses Finlay’s ‘The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond’ (Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19, 3, 305 327, 1977), while a more general approach is taken in Robert Holton in Cities, Capitalism, and Civilization (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986). Weber’s sociology of music is rarely pursued, but general discussions and critiques include Alan Turley’s ‘Max Weber and the Sociology of Music’ (Sociological Forum, 16, 4, 633 653, 2001) and Isabelle Darmon’s ‘Weber on Music’ (Cultural Sociology, 9, 1, 20 37, 2015). One of the few attempts to apply Weber’s ideas is Thomas Segady ‘Consequences of the Increasing Rationality of Music’ (Sociological Spectrum, 13, 4, 451 463, 1993). Though working in a different tradition, a study that illustrates how the class relations of aristocracy and bourgeoisie shaped musical culture is Tia DeNora’s Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1793 1803 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

Appendix 2

199

1995). Important in showing how musical performance is a product of social action is Howard Becker and Robert Faulkner, Do You Know …? The Jazz Repertoire in Action (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

CHAPTER 7 Basic sources for this chapter are W41 W45 and W58. Weber’s view of China is discussed by Gary Hamilton in ‘Patrimonialism in Imperial China and Western Europe’ (Theory and Society, 13, 3, 393 425, 1984) and by Dingxin Zhao in ‘Max Weber and Patterns of Chinese History’ (Chinese Journal of Sociology, 1, 2, 201 230, 2015). An important and exhaustive study of the literati is Ping Ti Ho’s The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1962). For contemporary Chinese societies, Gary Hamilton’s Commerce and Capitalism in Chinese Societies (London: Routledge, 2006) can usefully be read alongside Gordon Redding’s book mentioned earlier. Contemporary economic developments in mainland China are well discussed in Victor Nee and Sonja Opper, Capitalism from Below (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). India and its religions are discussed by Detlef Kantowsky in ‘Max Weber on India and Indian Interpretations of Weber’ (Contributions to Indian Sociology, 16, 2, 141 174, 1982) and by David Gellner in ‘Max Weber, Capitalism and the Religion of India’ (Sociology, 16, 4, 526 543, 1982). A classic overview of Indian caste relations is that of Radhikamal Mukerjee in ‘Caste and Social Change in India’ (American Journal of Sociology, 43, 3, 377 390, 1937). André Beteille gives a theoretically informed account in Caste, Class and Power (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1965), while Murray Milner presents a definitive theoretical

Appendix 2

200

statement in Status and Sacredness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). A comprehensive overview of Indian society is that of David Mandelbaum in Society in India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970). Aspects of contemporary capitalism in India are examined in Barbara Harris and Judith Heyer, eds, Indian Capitalism and Development (London: Routledge, 2015). China and India are compared and related to developments in Europe in Barrington Moore’s important study of Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (London: Allen Lane, 1967). Early sources on Judaism that relate to Weber’s argument are the influential account of the religions of Palestine in W. Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1901) and the work of Weber’s editorial colleague Werner Sombart in The Jews and Modern Capitalism (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913). Weber’s numerous remarks on Islam are brought together in Bryan Turner’s Weber and Islam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974). Detailed considerations of Islamic societies are those of Reuben Levy in The Social Structure of Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) and W. Montgomery Watt’s Islam and the Integration of Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961). Maxime Rodinson’s Islam and Capitalism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1974, originally 1966) is an important critical discussion of Weber’s view.

CHAPTER 8 Sources for this chapter are W11, W46 W51, W55 56. The Weberian typology of action and its types is discussed in Donald Levine’s ‘The Continuing Challenge of Weber’s

Appendix 2

201

Theory of Rational Action’ and Mustafa Emirbayer’s ‘Beyond Weberian Action Theory’, both in Charles Camic et al., eds, Max Weber’s Economy and Society (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). A thorough, but difficult, exploration of Weber’s use of the ideas of irrationality and rationality is Alan Sica’s Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988). The classic accounts of Weber’s political views and his political sociology are those of Wolfgang Mommsen in Max Weber and German Politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984, originally 1959) and David Beetham in Max Weber and The Theory of Modern Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974). Still useful is the short account by Anthony Giddens in Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber (Houndmills, Macmillan, 1972). These views are related to Weber’s theory of the state in Karl Dusza’s ‘Max Weber’s Conception of the State’ (International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 3, 1, 71 105, 1989) and Andreas Anter’s Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, originally 1995). C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1956) uses Weber’s stratification concepts and sets out a particular view of class domination. The relation between Weber and elite theories is considered in Jan Pakulski’s ‘The Weberian Foundations of Modern Elite Theory and Democratic Elitism’ (Historical Social Research, 37, 1, 38 56, 2012). The relevance of Weber’s work for American politics is reviewed in Patrick La Pierre’s ‘Max Weber and American Political Modernity’ (Intellectual History Review, 23, 2, 225 242, 2013). Weber’s view of power and its empirical relevance is reviewed in John Scott ‘Contemporary Capitalism and the Distribution of Power in Society’ in Edith Hanke, Lawrence Scaff, and Sam Whimster,

Appendix 2

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eds, The Oxford Handbook on Max Weber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

CHAPTER 9 Basic sources for this chapter are W52 and W54. Weber’s social economics and its relation to his economic sociology is usefully set out in Richard Swedberg’s, Max Weber and the Idea of Economic Sociology (London: Routledge, 1992). Explorations into a Weberian view of the business enterprise and its implications are John Scott Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) and Maurice Zeitlin’s The Large Corporation and Contemporary Classes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). A general sociological account of markets that extends Weber’s view can be found in Neil Fligstein’s The Architecture of Markets (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Two interesting but different sociological accounts of money are Nigel Dodd’s The Sociology of Money (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994) and Geoff Ingham’s The Nature of Money (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). In addition to the discussions of the Protestant ethic thesis referenced above, the Weberian view of capitalist development is explored and related to that of Marx in Anthony Giddens’s ‘Marx, Weber and the Development of Capitalism’ (Sociology, 4, 3, 289 310, 1970) and Mark Gould’s ‘Marx and Weber and the Logic of Historical Explanation’ (Journal of Classical Sociology, 16, 4, 321 348, 2016). Discussion of the diversity of forms taken by contemporary capitalism throws new light on Weber’s argument. See the influential statement of this in Peter Hall and David Soskice’s Varieties of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

Appendix 2

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CHAPTER 10 The best general overviews of Weber’s work are those by Sam Whimster and Stephen Kalberg. In Understanding Weber (London: Routledge, 2007), Sam Whimster looks at the construction of Weber’s work and its conceptual basis, while Kalberg’s The Social Thought of Max Weber (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2017) presents an overview of his comparative sociology.

APPENDIX 3. COLLECTED WORKS IN GERMAN

A complete scholarly edition of all Weber’s writings, letters, speeches, and lectures is being published as a definitive chronological collection by Weber’s publishers Mohr-Siebeck. Known as the Gesamtausgabe, each volume contains a critical discussion and some additional volumes discuss the construction of Economy and Society in all its various versions. Some key works are published in shorter students’ editions. Full details can be found at https://www.mohr.de/mehrbaendigeswerk/max-weber-gesamtausgabe-323700000. The collection is organised into three sections: Section I. Writings and Speeches; Section II. Letters; Section III. Lectures and Transcriptions of Lectures. Section I comprises 30 volumes that cover all the material referred to in this book. The principal relevant sources and their dates of republication (cross-referenced to the listing in Appendix One, are: I/1 Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter. (W1). 2008 I/2 Die römische Agrargeschichte in ihrer Bedeutung für das Staats- und Privatrecht. (W2). 1986

205

Appendix 3

206

I/6 Zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Altertums. (W8, W20). 2006 I/7 Zur Logik und Methodik der Sozialwissenschaften. (W9, W12, W15, W18). 2018 I/9 Asketischer Protestantismus und Kapitalismus. (W10). 2014 I/12 Verstehende Soziologie- und Werturteilsfreiheit. (W23, W46). 2016 I/14 Zur Musiksoziologie. (W40). 2014 I/17 Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919 1919. (W50, W51). 1992

Politik als Beruf

I/18 Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. Die protestantischen Sekten und der Geist des Kapitalismus. (W57, W58). 2016. I/19 Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Konfuzianismus und Taoismus. (W42 and its revision of 1920, W43). 1989 I/20 Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Hinduismus und Buddhismus. (W44). 1996 I/21 Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Das antike Judentum. (W45). 2005 I/22-1 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaften. (W25, W26, W28, W29, W30, W32). 2001 I/22-2 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Religiöse Gemeinschaften (W31). 2001 I/22-3 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Recht. (W24, W27). 2010

Appendix 3

I/22-4 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Herrschaft. (W33 W38, W49). 2005 I/22-5 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Die Stadt. (W39). 1999 I/22-6 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Soziologie. (W53 W56) 2013

207

INDEX Action, 139 140 types of, 59, 142 144 see also Affectual action; Economic action; Habitual action; Purposive-rational action; Rational action; Value-rational action Administrative structures, 93, 96, 101 102 see also bureaucracy Affectual action, 142 Agrarian civilisations, 80 82 Agrarian property in East Elbe, 1, 17, 28, 33ff., 172 Althoff, Friedrich, 17 Archive for Social Science and Social Policy, 21, 41ff., 117, 119, 120, 179 Aron, Raymond, 183 Asceticism, 70 71, 72, 124, 131, 177 Association, 86, 147

compulsory association (Anstalt), 147 voluntary association (Verein), 147 Associative action, 146 Authority, 83ff., 150 151 Bachofen, Johan, 169 170 Banking, 168 169, 172 see also Money, Stock exchange Baptists, 67, 69, 71, 124 Barth, Paul, 9 Bastian, Adolf, 9 Baumgarten, Emmy, 15, 18 Baumgarten, Hermann, 15, 16 Baumgarten, Otto, 15 Baxter, Richard, 73 Bendix, Reinhard, 183 Bismarck, Otto von, 3, 13, 158 Bloch, Ernst, 22 Bourgeoisie, 3, 105, 154ff., 173 Brahmins, 129 130 Brentano, Lujo, 6, 8, 64, 74

209

Index

210

Buber, Martin, 9 Buddhism, 119, 120, 123, 124 125, 130, 134 Bureaucracy, 98 99, 151, 152, 155, 176 Böhm- Bawerk, Eugen von, 6 Calling, 68, 70, 71, 166, 177 Calvinism, 67, 69, 70, 71, 124 Capitalism, 6, 21, 27, 35, 174 ancient capitalism, 81 modern capitalism, 28, 37, 63ff., 81, 163, 167, 168, 169ff., 174 175 rationality of, 64 Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, 183 Caste, 1, 91, 104, 129 130, 133 Catholicism, 65, 67, 68, 74 75, 120, 124, 131, 134, 177 Charismatic authority, 94ff., 110, 132, 151, 152 153, 157 routinisation of, 94 95 Chinese religion and society, 1, 119, 125ff., 170 Christianity. See Catholicism; Protestantism Christian Socialism, 17

Church, 110 111, 148 Cities, 30, 81, 103ff Class, 6, 39, 86, 89ff., 98, 137, 148ff. Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society, 183 Closure, 85 86, 146 147 Collected Essays on Methodology, 182 Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion, 23, 26, 82, 120 121, 135, 137, 148, 179, 181 Collective entities, 52, 57, 59, 141 142, 147 148 Communal action, 85, 139, 146 Comte, Auguste, 8, 45 Concept formation, 52ff. Confucianism, 113, 119 120, 122 123, 125ff., 133 Conservative Party, 17 Convention, 101, 144 Corporations, 37 see also Joint stock company Cults, 107, 128, 132 Cultural sciences, 4 5, 42, 54 Cultural significance, 43 Custom, 101, 144 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 183 Demagoguery, 153

Index

Democracy, 1, 7, 151ff., 155, 156, 179 Diaspora, 134 see also Pariah groups Dilthey, Wilhelm, 4, 13 Disenchantment, 82, 102, 121, 151 Division of labour, 165 166 Domination, 92ff., 137 by virtue of a constellation of interests, 93, 104 105, 145 by virtue of authority, 93 see also Authority Droysen, Johann, 7 Durkheim, Emile, 181, 183 Economic action, 83 84, 163 164 Economic order, 84, 96, 99, 103, 148, 165 Economics, 6, 19, 41, 44, 56, 161 Economic sociology, 44, 82ff., 135, 161 162, 163ff. Economy and Society, Weber’s plans for, 23, 26, 77, 78, 135 136, 137, 148, 151, 162, 163, 179, 181, 182 Egyptian society, 81, 120, 132, 170 Elections, 98 Energetics, 21 Engels, Friedrich, 170

211

Ethnicity, 91 Evangelical Social Union, 8 Evolutionism, 9 Feudalism, 31, 60, 81, 93, 97, 125, 129, 169, 170 171 Fichte, Gottlieb, 2 Franklin, Benjamin, 73 Freyer, Hans, 180 From Max Weber, 182, 183 Functional analysis, 9, 183 Geisteswissenschaften, 4 General Economic History, 163, 181 George, Stefan, 22 German Democratic Party, 8, 25 German industry and industrialism, 3, 63 German politics, 154ff. German Sociological Society, 1 German Sociology, 183 Gerth, Hans, 182 Giddens, Anthony, 183 Goethe, Johan von, 5 Gotlein, Eberhard, 64 Gumplowicz, Ludwig, 8 Habitual action, 86, 94, 142 143 Handbook of Political Economy, 23, 77 78 see also Outline of Social Economics

212

Hegel, Georg, 2, 4 Hermeneutics, 4 Hildebrand, Bruno, 5 Hinduism, 119, 120, 123, 124 125, 129ff., 133 Hitler, Adolf, 180 Honigsheim, Paul, 22 Household, 87 88, 95, 165, 168, 169, 170 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 3 Idealist philosophy, 2 3, 4, 7 Ideal types, 21, 42, 54 55, 75 Indian religion and society, 129ff., 173 Inner loneliness, 70 Institutions and institutional order, 84, 144 Intellectuals, 112 113 Interpretive sociology, 42, 56ff., 139ff. Islam, 109, 113, 134 Jaffé, Edgar, 22, 41 Jaffé, Else affair with Max Weber, 22 23, 25 Jaspers, Karl, 22 Jellinek, Georg, 7, 19, 22, 64 Jews, 64, 75, 76, 106, 133, 180 Joint stock company, 175 Judaism, 74, 109, 113, 119, 120, 123, 131ff.

Index

religion of Yahweh, 108, 132 133 Junkers, 3, 18, 33ff., 172 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 53 Kathedersozialisten, 7 Key Problems in Sociological Theory, 183 Kirkegaard, Søren, 16, 28 Knies, Karl, 5, 19, 41, 50ff. Knight, Frank, 181 Labour, forms of, 166 Lask, Emil, 5 Law, 7, 17, 44, 84 85, 94, 144, 176 Leadership in political parties, 152 153, 155 Legal order, 99ff. Legitimate order, 144, 151 see also Institutions and institutional order Legitimation, 93 94, 145 Life chances, 89, 90 Life orders, 82, 116 see also Economic order; Legal order; Political order Lilenfeld, Pavel von, 9 Limited liability, 31 see also Corporations List, Friedrich, 5 Literati, 126, 127, 128, 133 Lukács, Georgy, 22 Luther, Martin, 67 68, 71

Index

Magic, 82, 101, 107, 121, 128, 131 Main Currents in Sociological Thought, 183 Mannheim, Karl, 182 Market, 84 85, 87, 137, 144, 145, 167 168 Marxism, 6, 8, 27, 64, 65, 89, 100, 122, 169, 170, 183 Mass action, 101 Max Weber. An Intellectual Portrait, 183 Medieval trading companies and commerce, 16, 28, 32ff., 75, 88 89, 172, 175 Meinecke, Friedrich, 8 Menger, Carl, 6, 52, 56, 161 Methodology in Weber, 41ff. Michels, Robert, 22 Migrant labour, 35 Mommsen, Theodor, 13, 28 Money, 85, 167 Music, 1, 24, 114ff., 120, 121 Müller-Lyer, Franz, 9 Nation, 91 92 National Liberal Party, 3, 8, 13, 16, 17, 63 64, 154

213

Nation state, 154 Naumann, Friedrich, 8, 17, 24, 36 Nazi Party, 10, 180 New Liberalism, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 16, 27, 49, 64 Objective mind, 2 Objectivity, 46, 82, 159 Occupation, 166 see also Calling Oikos, 29, 31, 32, 81, 89, 117 Oppenheimer, Franz, 9 Organisation (Verband), 147, 164 165 Oriental societies, 2, 81 82, 104, 122, 125, 131, 132, 170, 173, 177 Outline of Social Economics, 78 79, 117, 120, 135, 161, 162 Pariah groups, 75, 106, 134 see also Jews Parliamentary government, 3 4, 8 Parsons, Talcott, 181 Partnerships, 1 see also Limited liability Patriarchal household and authority, 95, 101 102, 108, 125, 170

214

Patrimonialism, 93, 95, 96, 109, 126, 129, 132, 151 Plebiscitary leadership, 153 see also Charismatic authority Plessner, Helmuth, 22 Policy, 46ff., 159 160 Political parties, 4, 6, 8, 98, 148, 152ff. Politics, 7, 8, 89, 96, 157 158 political order, 96 Power, 7 8, 89 Predestination, 69 Priests, 101, 107 108, 132 133 see also Brahmins, Literati Progressive Party, 8 Property, 88, 90, 99, 148, 169 Prophets, 110, 132 Protestant ethic, 21, 120 121 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (articles and book), 26, 42, 63ff., 82, 121, 124, 131, 162, 174, 181 Protestantism, 67, 109, 120, 177 Psychophysics, 21 Puritanism, 71, 73, 82, 131 Purposive-rational action, 143 144, 164 Quakers, 71

Index

Rachfahl, Felix, 74 Ranke, Leopold von, 4, 51 Rational action, 57 58, 82, 140 141 Rational authority, 98, 102 Rationalisation, 72, 76, 81 82, 84, 98, 100, 116 117, 121 122, 134, 151, 164 Regulatory groups, 86 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 181 Religion. See Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion; Baptists; Buddhism; Calvinism; Catholicism; Confucianism; Hinduism; Islam; Judaism; Protestantism; Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Quakers Religions of compensation, 112 Religious groups, 106ff. Rex, John, 183 Rickert, Heinrich, 5 Roman history, 1 agriculture and property law, 16, 28ff., 80, 170 Roscher, Wilhelm, 5, 7, 41, 47, 49, 50ff. Russian revolution, 2, 22, 155 156

Index

Salvation, 68, 69 70, 75, 108, 122ff., 130, 131, 133 Schelling, Friedrich, 2 Schiller, Friedrich von, 2 Schmoller, Gustav von, 6, 17 Schäffle, Albert, 8 Schönberg, Gustav, 77 Science as a vocation, 158 160 Sects, 71, 111, 120 Selection, 66, 146 Shils, Edward, 182 Simmel, Georg, 9 10, 22, 27, 45, 56 Slavery, 81, 105 Smith, Adam, 52 Social Democratic Party, 8, 22, 27 Social economics, 44, 45, 56, 135, 161 162 Social estate, 89ff., 97, 98, 125, 137, 150 Social honour, 90, 96 Social Liberal Party, 16 Social mobility, 149 Social sciences, 5, 10, 45, 54 Sombart, Wernher, 9 10, 21, 41, 42, 61, 64, 66, 73, 74, 75 76, 180 Spann, Othmar, 180 Spencer, Herbert, 8, 45 Spengler, Oswald, 180 Spirit, 2, 4 5, 9, 28 Spirit of capitalism, 21, 64, 177

215

State, 7 8, 24, 92, 147, 164 165 modern state, 97 98, 167, 176 Status, 86, 89 90, 105, 126, 129, 133, 148ff. Status group. See Social estate Stock exchange, 1, 17, 28, 36ff., 86, 175 Taoism, 128 Tawney, Richard, 181 The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 182 Theodicy, 123 The Structure of Social Action, 181, 183 The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, 181 Thiel, Hugo, 17 Tobler, Mina infatuation with Max Weber, 24, 114 Traditional action. See Habitual action Traditionalism and traditional authority, 71, 95, 101, 112, 124, 129, 130 131, 151, 164, 177 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 7 Troeltsch, Ernst, 19, 22, 110 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 8, 9, 45, 60

216

Understanding (Verstehen), 21, 42, 58, 72, 139, 140 see also Interpretive sociology Value judgements, 47ff., 54, 82, 159 160 Value-rational action, 143, 158, 164 Value relevant concepts, 54 Verein für Sozialpolitik, 6, 17 Vierkandt, Alfred, 180 Vocation. See Calling; Occupation Volksgeist, 4, 49 Wagner, Adolph, 6 7 Weber, Alfred, 8, 19, 23, 25, 182 Weber, Marianne (nee Schnitger), 18, 25, 26 editing of Weber’s work, 137 138, 179, 181, 182 Weber, Max depressive illness, 19ff. education, 15 16

Index

family background and childhood, 13ff. independent scholar, 21 marriage, 18ff. party activity, 25 reception of his work, 179ff. return to academic life, 24 sexuality, 20, 25 views on sociology, 9 10, 45 46, 135, 138ff. wartime work, 24, 25, 117, 119 working papers for Economy and Society, 78 80, 116 See also Jaffé, Else; Tobler, Mina Wiese, Leopold von, 180 Windelband, Wilhelm, 5, 19 World-rejecting religions, 123 Wright Mills, C., 182 Wundt, Wilhelm, 9

The Emerald Guide to Max Weber Economy, Society, and Capitalist Development John Scott,

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