Talk:Max Weber (1864-1920)
From Studyplace
| Categories Concepts Subjects People Essays Reviews Commons Courses Help | Pathways Concepts Subjects People Essays Reviews Commons Courses Help |
|
Key tabs
| |
| article tab edit tab move tab | study tab history tab watch tab |
Contents |
2008/2009 write-up
Lead off: Brian Veprek
Studying Weber's life
Background figures
Key dates
Life phases
Influential events and contexts
Significant interactions
Struggles and accomplishments
Weber's Key Works
- The Stock Exchange (1896)
- The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905)
- Religion of China: Confuciansim and Taoism (1915)
- Science as a Vocation (1918)
- Politics as a Vocation (1919)
- Ancient Judaism (1917-1919)
- The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (1920)
- Collected Essays on Education (1922)
- Economy and Society (1925)
Critical literature on Weber
Of interest in MSTU5606
- Prager, Jeffrey. “Moral Integration and Political Inclusion: A Comparison of Durkheim's and Weber's Theories of Democracy.” Social Forces 59, no. 4, Special Issue (June 1981): 918-950. CU JSTOR.
- Tiryakian, Edward A. “Neither Marx nor Durkheim . . . Perhaps Weber.” The American Journal of Sociology 81, no. 1 (July 1975): 1-33. CU JSTOR.
- Max Weber. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology(1922). 2. vols. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Vol. 1, chapter 1: "Basic Sociological Terms," pp. 3-62. Electronic Reserve. $49.95.
- Max Weber. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, 1958. "Politics as a Vocation," pp. 77-128; Electronic Reserve "Science as a Vocation," pp. 129-56; Electronic Reserve $31.00.
- Werner J. Cahnman. "Tönnies and Weber," in Cahnman, ed., Ferdinand Tönnies: A New Evaluation -- Essays and Documents. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973, pp. 257-283. Electronic Reserve.
- Marianne Weber. Max Weber: A Biography. Harry Zohn, trans., New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988. This is a quite extraordinary intellectual biography of Weber by his wife, who was an intellectual presence in her own right.
- Dirk Käsler. Max Weber: An Introduction to his Life and Work. Philippa Hurd, trans., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989. Not the most recent of the many, many books on Weber, but still a very useful orientation to the study of his work.
- Max Weber via Google Images.
Conceptual glossary for Weber
social action
Social action is a behavior to which the actor has attached a subjective meaning that "takes into account the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course" (Economy and Society p.4). Weber clarifies this definition by presenting the case of a cycling accident. "A mere collision of two cyclists may be compared to a natural event. On the other hand, their attempt to avoid hitting each other, or whatever insults, blows, or friendly discussion might follow the collision, would constitue 'social action'" (p.23). Weber describes the following four types of social action.
- Instrumentally rational actions are related to the actor's achievement of well-reasoned goals.
- Value-rational actions are prompted by "a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior" (p.24).
- Affectual actions are driven by the actor's feelings and emotions.
- Traditional actions are made out of "ingrained habituation" (p.24).
social relationship
A social relationship is "the behavior of a plurality of actors insofar as, in its meaningful context, the actions of each takes account of that of the others and is oriented in these terms" (p.26). The nature of the orientation can run the gamut from familial love to economic competition, and subjective meaning of the relationship can be as varied as the number indiviual actors. The relationship only exists as long as the oriented social action may occur; thus, one should take care not to 'reify' relationships (such as a state, church, or marriage) and consider them objectively.
- The orientation of actions in a communal social relationship "is based on a subjective feeling of the parties, whether affectual or traditional, that they belong together" (p.40).
- The orientation of actions in a associatative social relationship "rests on a rationally motivated adjustment of interests or a similarly motivated agreement" (p.41). Social action is determined by value-rational or instrumentally rational motivations.
legitimate order
"Action, especially social action which involves a social relationship, may be guided by the belief in the existence of legitimate order" (p.31). Order can be considered valid when orientation of social action within the relationship "is in some appreciable way regarded by the actor as in some way obligatory or exemplary for him" (p.31). Order may be considered legititmate because of tradition, affectual faith, value-rational faith, or instrumentally rational voluntary agreement (p.36).
Talk
I don't know if anyone else saw Freudian overtones in parts of this week's reading (especially on pages 19-22 of Basic Sociological Terms). I only raise this point because Weber struck me as much closer to our modern sensibility than the previous authors...and I wonder if this is because I was reading things back into the text that aren't there or if he marks a genuine pivot in social theory.
2006/2007 write-up
Lead off: Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
Sociology
If we are to take the readings from Economy and Society as our truth-witness, Max Weber wanted to carve out sociology as 'a science concerning itself with the interpretative understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences' (E&S, p. 4). I will not even attempt to lie out all the facets of this enterprise as he envisioned it, but instead use his crisp definition as the starting point for an exploration of the model of understanding and explanation offered. I focus on how sociology precisely through interpretative understanding can aim for causal explanation – two kinds of insight that has been (and is) thought of as two fundamentally different. In a sense, everything hinges upon the word 'thereby' in the quotation above. For Weber, sociology is different – it is only through both understanding and explanation that a social science can produce something fully deserving of that prestigious term 'knowledge'.
At the end, I raise a couple of points for discussion and relate them to the question of agency, using the example of politics brought up in Politics as a Vocation.
Understanding and Explanation
Weber defines social action as action that is oriented towards the behaviour of others (E&S, p. 22). This is what sociology takes as its object. The point of giving understanding pride of place in the analysis is not to replace Durkheim's external social facts with individual internal states of mind, but to highlight that we have not explained social actions till we have understood them. Weber's sociology is a sociology that is also interpretive, not exclusively interpretive. He explicitly underlines that not all parts of all explanations necessarily involve understanding. Some causal processes can be reduced to phenomena devoid of subjective meaning (E&S, p. 7).
Phrased with haiku economy, what Weber argues is that a sociologist trying to get to properly know social action must (1) reconstruct its meaning, (2) understand what this entails, and (3) thereby relate it to generalizations that can make clear when one would expect the pattern identified to repeat itself, and when not. In a sense, what we have here is a theory, a method, and an epistemology, all rolled into one, outlining what sociology is, how it should be conducted, and what it means for it to know. I will focus mainly on the first and the third aspect here.
In each of the three steps, Weber de-familiarize the meaning of the key term by presenting a sociological alternative to ordinary usages.
First, meaning. Weber distinguish between concrete (& particular) meaning and hypothetical, (& typical) meaning. The first is what an actor herself attributes to social action. The second is what an analyst attribute to it through a reconstruction of a train of events.
Second, understanding. Here, the distinction offered runs between direct understanding and explanatory understanding. The first is understanding 'what people are doing'. The second is understanding 'what people are doing in doing it', and involves reconstructing motives and context.
In both cases, sociological explanation deals with the second, de-familiarized version of meaning and understanding. To illustrate the difference, permit me a silly example to make this more concrete. Think about what is on the screen or paper in front of you. You are reading this, and you were meant to, so what we have here is not solipsism, but social action that has taken you (others) into account.
The first version of meaning and understanding would go like this: This is meaningful action because reading and writing is what we do every day. We understand that what I have done here is that I have written a presentation, and we understand that what you are doing is that you are preparing for class by reading it. Nothing mysterious about it.
The second, sociological version could go something like this: Writing and reading about this is meaningful because it is part of an educational process. We can understand that process through reference to the motives (gratification, increased knowledge, acquisition of symbolic capital) and context (social roles as students and professors, institutional setting like the university) involved.
Now, imagine a family member with no sociological training coming up to you as you are reading this. The person asks you what you are doing. You could truthfully answer that you are taking part in an educational process because it is a key to social mobility and, besides, given who you are as a student or professor, there are social and potentially economic sanctions that kick in if you are not prepared for your classes. If you do that, your relative’s reaction will make it obvious in what way sociology, to put it somewhat paradoxically, de-familiarize meaningful and understandable social action in the process of trying to grasp it as meaningful and understandable. The second version is not completely detached from subjective experience the way a vulgar Marxist reply to your relative’s question could be (Q:‘What are your doing?’ A:‘I am reproducing the ideological superstructure of Capitalism.’). But it is not familiar to subjective experience.
Generalization
What is left is generalization. It is clear that the first track above does not lead to a general explanation of the social action at hand, something that would become mercilessly clear as soon as I did the exact same thing I am doing now – wrote about Weber - but disconnected it from the motives and context only brought to light in the second version by posting it on a Wiki that had nothing to do with this course. I could even post this very text. You would never read it. Knowing this, I would never have written it in the first place, though reading and writing is what people like us do.
The coming weeks' substitution of names in place of me, Weber, and you (as readers) will demonstrate that explaining our social action has everything to do with motives and context, and little to do with me, my subjective intention, Weber, or the intrinsic properties of this text – things versions of the first track could lead one to think where relevant.
The second version go beyond wilful obscurity (goes from being simply extraintuitive to being extraintuitive knowledge) insofar as the reference to motives and context allow us to understand more than the singular event of me writing – and you reading – this. It has to add something to the meaning and understanding that was not present in the first version above, has to relate to the ‘thereby’ linking understanding and explanation in the opening quote. This ‘something’ is a link to the supposed persistence of motives reconstructable as rational and social roles and institutions as factors explaining what we and millions of people like us to. The typologies of rationalities, legitimacies, collectivities, relationships, organizations and so on that Weber develops in the rest of the assigned reading from Economy and Society are tools to analyse and better understand these explanatory variables. But given the starting point in social action as meaningful for someone, Weber’s project never lose touch with the subjective dimension absent from Durkheim’s work. Motives and contexts are not only social facts as characterised in the Rules of Sociological Method, objective, external, coercive. They are also subjectively meaningful, and this is part of their ‘grip’ – in so far as preparing for a course stops making sense to me, the context alone is unlikely to exert the kind of influence it has in tandem with motives, and a new situation has emerged. Therefore, interpretive elements like motives and cultural contexts are part of a 'casually adequate' (E&S, p. 11) explanation of what is going on here in so far as they not only can be considered causes, but that they are causes, and that they furthermore are the kind of causes that allows one to distinguish between statistical regularities and actual social causations. The sociologist has to deal with subjective intention to distinguish between motives and our motives, between context and our context. This is why the interpretative historian of ideas Quentin Skinner once remarked that even behaviouralists and deconstructivists who are reluctant to talk about meaning and intention should strive to rise to the interpretive level attained by a dog who can tell the difference between its master kicking it on purpose or by accident.
What the dog and the sociologist know is the difference between description (whatever form it takes – statistics or behavioralism) on the one side, and sociology on the other: ‘Statistical uniformities constitute understandable types of action, and thus constitute sociological generalizations, only when they can be regarded as manifestations of the understandable subjective meaning of a course of social action’ (E&S, p. 12). Weber continues in a vein that also differentiates his enterprise from history and biography ‘conversely, formulations of a rational course of subjectively understandable action constitute sociological types of empirical process only when they can be empirically observed with a significant degree of approximation.’ These lines constitute the battle plan of interpretative sociology in the scientific turf wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and helped carving out a field for it.
Agency and potential limits of interpretive sociology
There are a number of things I would like to discuss about the strengths and weaknesses of the approach. To put the praise on the record, it is worth noting the Weber, in contrast to Durkheim and Tönnies, does not have the habit of making constant references to ‘society’ as an organic entity, it is also worth noting that his approach allows for agency and through these two traits (no holism, and the introduction of agency) also allows for the introduction of questions of conflict, power, interest, and domination hitherto absent from the readings – history is suddenly filled with human agents slugging it out instead of ‘money’ or ‘the division of labour’ animating things.
The most important question for me, however, is how the kind of generalized causal explanations he offers relate to agency. In Politics as a Vocation, he distinguishes between those who live of politics and those who live for it. Leave aside those who submerge themselves in the motives and contexts intrinsic to the political life of their day, and turn to those that rise above it in the sense that they relate reflexively to relations that both bind and facilitate – for Weber, the charismatic leader that can make the world an object and shake its tendency to work as a perpetual motion-machine (others would take a less individualistic approach to the same burning question, how can men remain or become the makers of their own history?).
I wonder what tools Weber provide for understanding the persistence of the regularities sociology may uncover against such action. When Weber in another quotable passage defines ‘politics [as] a strong and slow boring of hard boards’ (PaV, p. 128), I wonder how hard which of those boards are. I appreciate resisting the temptation to anchor regularities in human nature or historical logics, but we may be left with regularities we maybe understand, but the ontological character of which we may not comprehend. If a political agent wants to change the course of history by taking on one of the grand trends our readings have characterised so far (transformations of social cohesion and solidarity, the objectification and externalisation of inter-human relations through the spread of a money economy, and in Weber’s own analysis the disenchantment of the world through the spread of instrumental-rational administration), what are the forces arrayed against the reassertion of political agency – and can interpretive sociology help us understand them? The causal explanations Weber’s enterprise produce should account for the meaning and general character of social actions, but what about their resilience? If we do not grasp this, do we grasp enough? Should we try to?
Study Group
I reserved Room 303 in the Russell Hall Library for Tues 10/3 from 7:30 - 9:30pm. The room can accommodate 6 people. If more than 6 show interest, I'll look into finding another place to hold the group. Brian Gregory 14:13, 2 October 2006 (EDT)
- I don't know if this is the place to show interest, but I'll be at the study group - not for 2 hours, but I'll be there. Eric Strome 16:57, 3 October 2006 (EDT)
- And me is three! Marion Duignan
- I don't know if this is the place to show interest, but I'll be at the study group - not for 2 hours, but I'll be there. Eric Strome 16:57, 3 October 2006 (EDT)
Weber, Conceptual Sociology, and Political Agency
The first chapter of Economy and Society provides an approach to sociological inquiry apparently distinguished by conceptual clarity, coherence, and systematicity; but Rasmus's expert discussion suggests the thicket of complex methodological and philosophical issues under the surface. I would especially agree with Rasmus that Weber's sociology begins but does not end with the 'interpretation' of social action - he's no mere hermeneuticist. That is, Weber the sociologist wasn't preoccupied simply with recovering subjective states of mind but rather with reconstructing institutional arrangements (e.g. 'legal-rational order') and historical sequences (e.g., 'rationalization') in ideal-typical fashion, i.e., as highly selective representations of intentional states and material constraints combined into complex nexuses of action and order.
I'm uncertain in my own mind to what extent Weber's conceptual apparatus hangs together as a whole - for instance, I think some of his concepts (such as those on power, domination, the state, organizations, associations, etc.) are still very useful for purposes of theoretical reflection and development. However, I am not convinced that any of these really depend on those seemingly 'basic' or 'fundamental' concepts which have been used (I say this somewhat facetiously) to brand and sell Weberian sociology. Take the definition of 'social' action as action oriented toward the behavior of others: if my action is not oriented toward the behavior of others, does it mean that it's sociologically irrelevant or uninteresting? Hardly, and I don't see how Weber's sociology is even possible on the basis of a faithful and rigorous application of this demarcation.
I may be missing the point on this, but never mind. What I would like to remark on are the criticisms/questions that Rasmus raises in Section 4 of his discussion, concerning the unclear relation of Weber's work to political agency and resistance, and to the lack of analysis of the resilience of historical forces and trends which an individual might oppose. On the one hand, I am not entirely clear I understand the thrust of this query because as Rasmus himself points out, Weber's writings are replete with 'human agents slugging it out,' and moreover, notions of resistance are built directly into his concepts of power and conflict, among others. And as to resilience, Weber's writings on rationalization, on the growth of legal administration, on specialization in the sciences, etc., are all still-acute accounts of institutional resilience in modern society. So it would seem that Weber would be able to reply to this in various ways by deploying his concepts in more or less perceptive and imaginative ways.
On the other hand, there is something quite troubling about Weber's outlook. Rasmus indicates that we may be faced with 'regularities we maybe understand, but the ontological character of which we may not comprehend.' The virtue of Weber, I think we would agree, is precisely his abandoment of any attempt to grant a distinctive ontological (metaphysical?) status to social or historical forces: the world is disenchanted. Humans in their variegated ways make and act in history (although not, to paraphrase Marx, in the 'conditions of their own choosing'). The apparent resilience of historical forces and trends is nothing more than the complexity and depth of human history bearing down upon us in its full weight. But this realization comes at a cost, forcing us to clarify and make our (agentic) decisions in accordance with values that are ultimately unjustifiable: they are simply 'chosen' and cannot be 'proven.' To put it another way, in the absence of a distinctive ontological status that can be assigned to these historically resilient forces, anyone who is specifically interested in 'resistance' must do so without the assurance that he or she is fighting something that is 'out there'; since what is 'out there' are only the 'gods and demons' (SaV) that are in the end, nothing more than our fundamental and utterly 'unscientific' existential and ethical choices. So, Weber might respond: if you are interested in resistance, resistance against what? And why - or more precisely, to what end, for what purpose, and with what imagined means? Only once you have answered these questions first can sociology be of assistance in helping to clarify your options and assessing your chances of successfully facing your chosen demon.
Ashiotani 01:45, 2 October 2006 (EDT)
Social Action
I would like to offer a quick reply to sketch out why I think we may not want to discuss the definition of social action at length when discussing Weber. The reason is that Ashiotani's criticism of the concept is spot on. The argument why we despite this may not want to discuss the problematic character of this key concept is that is seems to me that the problem is largely inconsequential for the use of Weber's approach. The sleight-of-hand definition of social action seems to me to be part of the whole academic turf war of the early twentieth century where each discipline was supposed to have its own demarcated domain of reality that it preoccupied itself with. If a part of reality was already 'covered', in this case by, say psychology and political economy as it was practiced within moral philosophy, a new approach had a hard time acquiring disciplinary status. This is not merely an intellectual issue of wanting to carve out a respectable place for inquiry into problems you (Weber) care about, but also a very practical one - no discipline of sociology, no professors of sociology to carry out sociological inquiry as part of their job (and no research grants, no students, and so on). Simmel certainly suffered under this problem.
If we ignore the definition and in a good pragmatist spirit let the proof be in the pudding, Weber's approach can be applied to all sorts of things, transgressing the social action/other action 'boundary', and the criteria for its appropiateness becomes what the application produces. An analyst is free to analyse religious belief, something that is hardly solely behavior oriented towards others, using Weber's approach, and, lo and behold, Weber did so, and produced fascinating insights. An analyst is also free to try to use it to understand the behaviour of primates, and may find that it does not produce much worth knowing. In short, I am fine with intellectual incoherence as long as it is practically inconsequential. It seems to me that with the distintegration of the strong programme of a unitary science parcelling out reality in distinct sectors each analysed by their own scientific sub-division, the kind of pragmatism I advocate is widely accepted. Economists are not met with a 'that is none of your business' when they analyse politics (but those of their results that are nonsense are savagely criticised as being produced by inapplicable theoretical categories, and often rightly so), just as political scientists analysing the internal organizational politics of commercial companies are not met with a 'stay out of our lawn' by economists, but by a smug recognition of the fact that they are not very good at maths, often paired with a genuine interest in those of their conclusions that hold out.
For the record, I find you other point about ontology et al fascinating, but I need to think more about it that I can find the time to do right now.
Meaning and Persistence
I wanted to add a couple of quick comments to follow up on today's discussion and Rasmsus's very thought-provoking presentation.
First, on 'meaning' in Weber. I don't have sophisticated views on this topic so I pulled out my cheat sheet - notes from a class I took long ago - and found the following uses of the term 'meaning' in Weber. The general argument is that Weber uses the term in a variety of ways not apparent even from the conceptual exposition in Economy and Society. Depending on the context and purpose, Weber uses it in overlapping ways:
1. the subjectively intended substance or content of an act ("Napoleon intended to accomplish X by going to Waterloo")
2. the intelligibility of a historical context or sequence (the course of Waterloo may become 'meaningful' only in the sense that we detect an interpretible pattern to its place in myriad possible trajectories and sequences of events)
3. the causal significance of an action (what consequences did the battle of Waterloo have for the subsequent continental settlement)
4. related to the above, 'meaning' as the content of an ideal type used to explain a historical event or phenomenon (how does Waterloo instantiate the ideal type of a 'historical turning point', if there is such a thing)
5. the moral or cultural significance of an event (how did Waterloo affect the subsequent development of Western cultures, values)
6. the subjectively existential importance or significance of an event or object (the history of Waterloo means nothing to me, but enjoying a good cup of coffee does -- OK, bad example).
The examples aren't great and the types of uses could be expanded with a closer inspection of all of Weber's writings, but the list gives a good sense of the complexity of the topic. Again, I'm cheating here so don't ask me to cite references on each of the above.
On persistence, my revised response to Rasmus's question is to say again that Weber's sociology and political writings as tending deeply toward a kind of fatalism in which 'agency' (in the sense of rational resistance) is something of a shot in the dark; only 'fate' determines the ultimate outcome of the struggle between gods and demons. Thus for all of his concessions to agency, Weber strikes me as a thorough-going pessimist given to a dramatic view of the nature of ethical and political conflict, and this view is informed by his sociological analyses. It is a problem that Rasmus is right to detect and in my mind cannot be resolved within the framework of Weber's sociology itself. The sociology dictates that the world has become thoroughly rationalized and disenchanted, highly productive but ultimately stripped of its existentially satisfying, soul-nourishing elements (these can only be found instead in the private realms to which they have retreated - mysticism and religion, counter-cultural and avant-garde art, love and sexuality, etc). Likewise, modern political agency either means participating in a highly rational, highly organized but ultimately cynical and 'soul-less' endeavour; or resorting to the emotional, reactive, and irrational. Hence the emphasis on the demagogue as the exemplar of the charistmatic leader. Is Weber presenting a false choice? Ashiotani 18:48, 4 October 2006 (EDT)
Except where