The man, his life and sociology

Max Weber was born in 1864 in Erfurt (Thuringen) and died in Munich in 1920. His father came from a family of industrialists and tradespeople. He was a lawyer (and after 1866 became a city adviser in Berlin) and without doubt stimulated his son’s early studies in the history of commercial law and his emergence as one of the major personalities in a new generation of historical political economists in Germany in the 1890s.

Although Weber is mainly considered as a founding father of sociology (a term he began to use not long before the 1910s), his writings deal with the interpenetration of law, economy and society. Turner and Factor (1994) put forward an interpretation of Weber as being mainly a translator of Rudolf von Ihering’s legal philosophy into sociology, see also Loos (1970), Breuer and Treiber (1984), Rehbinder and Tieck (1987), Zippelius (1991), Marra (1992), and the introductions by Rheinstein (1954a) and Winckelmann (1960); a general overview about the debate on Weber in the secondary literature has been put together by Hamilton (1991); as a valuable introduction, see Kasler (1988).

After his retreat from academic teaching (resuming full-time teaching as professor in Munich, in 1919 only shortly before his death) owing to a longlasting nervous breakdown beginning in 1898, his interdisciplinary orientation can also be found in his editorship of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik and his further publications.

The speciality of Weber lies in his reference to historical research (he never plunged into the upcoming literature of neoclassical economics) and a con­cept of understanding (comparable to today’s hermeneutical approaches: see Lavoie, 1991), but at the same time he tried to integrate understanding and explaining (for example, by the application of statistical methods). At the beginning of his opus magnum posthumum, Economy and Society (1978), he therefore defines sociology as

a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences. We shall speak of ‘action’ insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior - be it overt or covert... Action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course. (Weber, 1978, p. 4, emphasis added; this part was written from 1918 to 1920)

An analysis of the understanding paradigm in the German Historical school, in Austrian economics and in American ‘old’ institutionalism has been under­taken in Peukert (1997).

As in the historical approach, understanding involves the interpretative grasp of the actually intended meaning of concrete individual action. But Weber continues, ‘or (b) as in cases of sociological mass phenomena, the average of, or an approximation to, the actually intended meaning; or (c) the meaning appropriate to a scientifically formulated pure type (as ideal type) of a common phenomenon’ (Weber, 1978, p.

Weber’s method of understanding therefore goes far beyond a mere under­standing of concrete, individual meaningful actions. It does not investigate objectively correct or metaphysical true, but rationally meaningful, construc­tions by the social scientist (ideal types), that is, an instrumentally rational (‘zweckrationaT) reconstruction of actions excluding errors or emotional factors, if actions were completely directed to a single end or a set of coher­ent ends.

Weber distinguishes four non-reducible, possible orientations of action:

(1) instrumentally rational (zweckrational), that is, determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings; these expectations are uses as ‘conditions’ or ‘means’ for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends; (2) value rational (wertrational), that is, determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious, or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects of success; (3) affectual (especially emotional), that is, determined by the actor’s specific affects and feeling states; (4) traditional, that is, determined by ingrained habituation. (Ibid., pp. 24-5)

Historically, the universal process of rationalization can be described in terms of these four pattern variables, but structures can also be analysed vertically with them: a society is composed of different levels of social relationships which can be described according to their relative mixture of the four action types along the axis traditional/affectual, value rational and finally instrumentally rational, like usage (‘Brauch’), including fashion (‘Mode’), and custom (‘Sitte’), which have to be distinguished from convention (‘Konveniion') and law (‘Recht’), the last category having the highest degree of instrumental rationality. On a micro level, Weber then analyses social relationships such as communal and associative, open and closed, voluntary and compulsory associations.

Furthermore, the action types are used to demarcate four ideal types of legitimate political order. According to Weber, there are no relatively stable political units without a certain belief in their existence and legitimacy, transforming power relations in domination (‘Herrschaff), characterized by the probability that a command with a specific content will be obeyed and accepted by a group of persons. ‘The actors may ascribe legitimacy to a social order by virtue of: (a) tradition: valid is that which has always been; (b) affectual, especially emotional, faith: valid is that which is newly revealed or exemplary; (c) value-rational faith: valid is that which has been deduced as an absolute; (d) positive enactment which is believed to be legal’ (ibid., p. 36). Three ideal type legitimate orders are distinguished: the rational, the traditional and the charismatic order (divided, for example, into hereditary and charisma of office). Charismatic order, first based on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, consequently leads to a traditional or legal order; that is, a routinization of charisma takes place; the administrative staff and his followers develop vested interests, the necessity of the economy as a going regular concern, the prob­lem of succession and so on.

Weber’s underlying world view as a universal historian was a tragic one: affectual charismatic new beginnings always fade into bureaucratic routines or, put more generally, the increasing instrumental rationality of the modern world comes at the cost of affectual anthropological impulses being left out, an iron cage opening up and the loss of liberty occurring as the result of mechanization, the increase in formal rules and procedures, and an instru­mental efficiency without further general value directions, and the privatization of the questions of ultimate concern in the face of the disenchantment of the world take place. For Weber, the adoption of a complex technical division of labour and a hierarchical structure of administration fostered an overarching bureaucratic mode of organization (and, Weber would add, a new method of domination) which is the most characteristic trait in the modernization pro­cess from the traditional to the rationalized pattern.

As mentioned, Weber tried to integrate the concepts of understanding and explaining, that is the level of meaning (‘SinnadaquanE') and causal ad­equacy (‘Kausaladaquanz''). Sociology should also be an empirical science, transcending a distinction between natural (empirical testability) and social sciences (or Geisteswissenschaften'), made, for example, by Wilhelm Dilthey and his concept of vague intuition. His attempt to mediate tried to take into account the crisis of historicism, the critique of (logical) positivism, a lost sense in history, the debate on value judgements and the liberation of these questions from a narrow economic science background. A causal explanation depends on the probability of an observable set of action clusters; sociologi­cal generalizations like ideal-type constructions therefore can be tested as statistical uniformities. For Weber, between a hermeneutical concept of the social sciences and a more empirical/statistical/econometric/fallibilistic ap­proach a complementary relationship exists which also cross-cuts the different schools in economic science. Weber even mentions his first example of a hermeneutical constructivist ideal-type method:

[T]he concepts and ‘laws’ of pure economic theory are examples of this kind of ideal type. They state what course a given type of human action would take if it were strictly rational, unaffected by errors or emotional factors, and if, further­more, it were completely and unequivocally directed to a single end, the maximization of economic advantage. In reality, action takes exactly this course only in unusual cases, as sometimes on the stock exchange; and even then there is usually only an approximation of the ideal type.

Although never discussing more formal neoclassical approaches in detail, and criticizing their ahistorical universalizing aspirations on an epistemologi­cal level, Weber accepts and interprets their research as ideal type reasoning. He probably would have criticized a certain ‘fallacy of misplaced concrete­ness’ (Alfred V. Whitehead), that is, taking constructivist ideal types as quasi-empirical real types and deriving practical policy conclusions from them. The question whether behaviour can be identified as ‘strictly rational’ outside very narrow confines of a static maximization under given constraints will not be discussed here.

Weber refers to a strict standard of value neutrality in economic research. This was one of the reasons why he was critical of the Verein fur Socialpolitik and became co-founder of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Soziologie in Berlin in 1909, and which he left in 1912 for the same reasons - the problem and principle of Wertfreiheit - which did not prevent him from making utterances as a natural zoon politicon; at least he tried to separate academic analysis and political practice and zeal. In 1895, he gave his inaugural academic lecture on ‘The national state and economic policy’. He accepted Realpolitik and Ger­man imperialism and supported the First World War with national enthusiasm and as a volunteer, quickly criticizing the German annexation policy and the harsh submarine war. But even in 1918 he was still regarding a constitutional monarchy as ideal and possible. He joined the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP) of Friedrich Naumann and considered constitutional-parlia­mentary reform as necessary, but he never became a republican of the heart and was strictly opposed to the left-wing workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils. His position can be described as that of a more or less progressive national-liberal. He was opposed to the supposed paternalism of the social­ists of the chair and the one-sided assumptions of class conflict in Marxism (Weber thought that status group cleavages are important too), but his writ­ings can also be regarded as a critique of the ahistorical theorizing of Carl Menger and his Austrian school and neoclassical economics in general and perhaps of their untrammelled support of laissez-faire capitalism and the spread of market values into all areas of life.

In Weber’s opinion the strictly goal-oriented, instrumentally calculating, welfare-maximizing behaviour of individuals in neoclassical theories was not a universal characteristic of human rationality as such, but a product of modern Western rationalism. He shared the critique of socialist planning of Ludwig von Mises: an efficient system of allocation is impossible without markets indicating scarcity. In conjunction with his thesis of the spread of bureaucracy, he saw socialist planning mainly as another force to increase the degree of bureaucratic serfdom and stagnation. The hitherto separate eco­nomic, legal and political hierarchies would be fused and the dictatorship of the official and not of the worker would ensue - a prediction which came true in the former ‘socialist’ countries (Nove, 1990).

With the Historical school, Weber shared the main research topic: the explanation of modern Western capitalism or what Weber called ‘occidental rationalism’, where capitalism is only one facet of a more general rationaliz­ation process. His sociology of religion, that is the study of the major world religions like Hinduism, Confucianism, Christianity, Buddhism and ancient Judaism, came to be understood as an implicit critique of basic neoclassical preconceptions (Veblen, 1919) in underlining the distinctiveness and specificity of economic action in different cultural settings (compare Edgar Salin’s dictum that different economic stages need different economic theories).

[His studies] showed that, while instrumental rationality was a universal category of social action, only in the modern West had the goal-maximizing calculation of the most efficient means to given ends become generalized. And while other cultures had attempted to make the world intelligible through the development of elaborate theodicies, or to create internally consistent systems of ethics or law, the distinctive feature of western rationalism was the scientific assumption that all things could be comprehended by reason, together with the attitude of practical mastery which sought to subject the world to human control rather than merely adjust oneself to it. (Beetham, 1994, p. 887)

Weber (1985) first developed his conception in his most famous book about the spirit of capitalism, written in 1904/5. As an empirical starting point he mentions that, among entrepreneurs, a disproportionate percentage of Protes­tants (mainly Calvinists, Pietists and Methodists) can be found. According to Weber, this is not due to a weakening of religious bonds, but to the contrary: a systematic increase in religious demands in everyday life as innerworldly asceticism took place, furthermore it supported the specific orientation of non-traditional economic rationalism which spread in the Netherlands, France and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Capitalism, the profit motive, existed everywhere, but the specific trait was a new ethos in a disen­chanted world.

Analysing theological writings (for example those of Baxter), Weber tried to demonstrate the connection between religious beliefs and ideas, between the puritan idea of calling and asceticism and the maxims of everyday life, that is the capitalist spirit. The lonely individual in a disenchanted cosmos tries to find out if he or she belongs to those chosen by God (predestination in Calvinism). The successful accumulation of wealth was interpreted as an indicator of being chosen:

The worldly Protestant asceticism... acted powerfully against the spontaneous enjoyment of possessions; it restricted consumption. On the other hand, it had the psychological effect of freeing the acquisition of goods from the inhibitions of traditionalistic ethics. What was condemned as covetousness. was the pursuit of riches for their own sake. For wealth in itself was a temptation. the inevitable practical result is obvious: accumulation of capital through ascetic compulsion to save. (Weber, 1985, pp. 170-72)