2
HISTORIOGRAPHY: LECTURE 6 Max Weber: concepts, ideal types and the rise of capitalism
In my lecture today I’ll return to my Heimat Germany. We already spoke about two other German scholars of the nineteenth century in this module, Leopold von Ranke and Karl Marx whose thinking is fundamental to the methodological development of our discipline of History (itself a product of 19th century Germany). We have seen also how much their thinking was shaped by specific political, socio-cultural conditions of the times (to put it very crude…Ranke – the rise of German nationalism and Marx: English industrialisation), which they lived. So in order to understand the third German thinker, Max Weber, (image) whom we are dealing with today who shaped (and continues to shape history writing), I suggest, we again turn to his life first before we tackle his thinking.
Life
Max Weber was born in 1864 into a wealthy family of bourgois textile manufacturers in Erfurt. (image) His father was a successful well-to-do lawyer and a national-liberal parlimenarian. Let me just to remind you of what was going on in the German lands at the time in regard to politics:
politics
In 1871 Germany was unified; this was predominantly the work of the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismark. (slide )Minister president between 1862- 1890 Bismark ‘ruled’ the German empire and Europe from the 1860s to the 1890s. Conversative in his politics he was interested in a European balance of power; in regard to national politics, he was concerned about the rise of socialism (the Socialist Party rose) – as a reaction to it he pushed through anti-socialist laws in 1871, and, precaution if you like, he set up the famous German workers’ insurance system (the insurance system is conservative – not socialist as one might assume!). This is, as I’ve said a reaction to the rise of socialism in Germany but also, more widely, a reaction to the German industrialisation. Compared to other European countries, Germany entered industrialisation only in the second half/last third of the 19th century. (just to remind us when Marx is writing his famous Manifesto, for example, Germany is still largely an agrarian country! Marx would have not written his work had he stayed in Germany).
(slide)
Besides his famous socialist laws, Bismark is also famous for his anti-Catholic campaigning he launched in 1871, the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf (battle of culture). He largely had European politics in mind here (prevent pope from meddling into politics) but in the protestant countries of the Germany Empire -- it started a virtual ‘hunt’ for Catholics. Priest and bishops were exiled; I 1872 all the Jesuit order was disvolved and all Jesuits exiled; 1873 he passed anti-Catholic laws – Bismark’s aim was to prevent Catholics from having any influence on politics and cultures in the Empire (directed against the Catholic Party in particular). Modern Germany needed to rid itself from irrational faith and medieval rituals, was the battle cry, far in to the 1890s.
This fitted with the new image of Germany, as the emerging and so it was hoped leading industrial nation (increasing competition with Britain; Germany also experiencing the first capitalistic crises).
Central to this development were the natural sciences which became a major ‘export article’ of Germany and a source of national pride. (lots of international prizes including noble prize) Money was poured into their development particularly in Prussia. However, while we have on one hand the natural science emerging, we do have to remember that they did not yet exercise that influence on cultural, economic and political life as they do now. As I’ve mentioned with Ranke already, Germans at the time felt almost threatened by the forces of industrialisation; the bourgois classes were appauled by its destructive powers – in regard to the environment and to human nature (rationalisation; efficieny, greediness etc; diseases spreading that were related to modern time such as ‘neurasthenia’, the suffering of the nerves – Weber suffers from it) – As a reaction we see a turn to the past and culture as a remedy for such troubling times. ‘Historicism’- a cultural and intellectual movement which I have already explained in regard to Ranke and which celebrated the past as a key to the understanding of the troubling present.
(historicism definition)
These are some important elements to keep in mind when we think about Weber’s upbringing but also his intellectual interests.
Important too, at least according to his many, many biographers was his family background, particularly this parents relationship: His father was a domineering patriachical figure, a man of modern times so to speak, interested in politics and economics, priding himself of a ‘rational mind’; his mother was the the total opposite of her husband. She was woman of culture and extreme protestant piety. (slide) As you can imagine, Weber seniors didn’t get on very well, a source of ongoing frustration for young Weber who had a very close relationship with his mother. Weber junior was intellectually very gifted; after the Abitur he enrolled to study law at Heidelberg and continued studies in Berlin and Goettingen, all of them very famous universities at the time (remember Ranke’s influence and that of von Humboldt). Althought a lawyer, his independent academic work began in the field of law and legal history. His doctoral disseration was entitled ‘A Contribution to the history of Medieval Business Organisations’ (1880) (historicism!). After completing his dissertation Weber started the in-service training required for the German bench or bar. He becomes interested during that time in agrarian legal questions and begins to prepare his second dissertation necessary in German academia to teach at universities, the so-called habilitation. Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and Private Law (1891). While writing his study he prepared himself for the duties of Privatdozent (PD, Beat Kumin is ) in Roman, German and commercial law at the University of Berlin. He also undertook extensive investigations of rural labor in the German provinces east of the river Elbe, which led to a publication of a 900-pages volume in 1892, and he investigated the workings and mechanism of the stock-exchange. In between his enormous workload he marries his wife Marianne in 1893 (slide) who would later becomes the publisher/interpreter of his work after his death (and contributes to rather confusing, even false presentation of him as some of his biographers argue – to be taken with caution because it often is that when women are involved that biographers tend to argue that they meddled with the geniou husband) In fall 1894 he became full professor of national economics in Freiburg University. In 1896 he accepts a full position at the University of Heidelberg.
From that time onwards, it goes strangely downhill for him….His sudden death of his father in 1897 with whom he had a terrible fight just before Weber senior’s death – it was never resolved - plunged him into a deep depression from which he never really recovered. He had to reduce his work and finally had to suspend his academic work altogether. He travelled for several years to ease his nerves (neurasthenia) – the only thing he was able to do. In 1904 he travelled to America to attend the World’s fair in St. Louis and this journey made a lasting impression on him. (I shall return to this in a minute.) Various explanation of this ‘nerve crisis’ have been offered, such as the conflict between the parental values, sexual repression. (Read it up on 500 pages biography by Joachim Radkau). A private inheritance finally allowed him to give us his job for good and he continued to live a life as a private scholar. He served in the WWI as a hospital administrator – he hated to be reduced to such ninny job and not be able to fight in the trenches. He also tried politics but didn’t quite make it in the newly founded liberal party, the Deutsche Demokratische Partei. He died at the age of 56 in 1920 of pneumonia, the year the Protestant Ethics comes out as a book.
Mention the founding of Verein and sociology…
Difficulty with oeurvre:
Its breaths of knowledge and interests is enormous. Like all middle class members, Weber had enjoyed a classical German education (classical authors, languages and heavy dose of history). made it difficult to discover a coherent organisation theme or principle, which would integrated his rather diverse publications. On top of that his writing are difficult to understand; his style is complicated and he tends to bury the main points of the argument in a jungle of statements that require detailed analysis, or in long analyses of special topics that are not clearly related to either the preceding or the ensuring materials. Weber usually undertook several independent lines of investigation simultaneously and put all his research notes into the final text without making their relative importance explicit. The search for principle of thematic unity in his oeurve has been complicated by the peculiarities connected with the way his work was actually published and translated. (he was sick, much of his stuff in state of manuscript; published and organised later by his wife – a scholar in her own right -- who had a certain legacy in mind; student publications which but articles together which might fit by theme but do not chronologically represent Weber’s changing thinking.)
In short Weber’s work is incredibly large, complex and diverse. It follows the order of knowledge of his own time, a time whch our order of knowledge ----the separation of humanities from social social sciences to which we today count sociology, and that from the political sciences and eocnomics do not yet exist. The complexity of the publishing history of his legacy has provided an ideal and fertile breeding ground for a variety of interpretations of his work.
Weber’s oeuvre is difficult to say the least. He mastered 8 classical and modern languages, and although he is known as a ‘sociologist’ my brief overview of his career showed that he didn’t start of a such, as I’ve said he as a lawyer by training and he was very knowledgible in economics.
We have to remember too that sociology – as an indepenende discipline with a research methodologies, own departments and journals did not exist yet at the time when Weber started off. In ‘founder’ in France was August Compte – remember, it is the man who ‘invents’ positivism – and the first study which is counted as sociological appears in Germany in 1887 ("Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft" (Community and Society’ by Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel is another pionieer. ) Max Weber is a pioneer in this area of study; in fact he hailed as the German founder of ‘sociology’ (socio= together; logos=word).
Before I go into the ‘Protestant Ethic’, the work that presents best his theoretical thinking about ‘belief and social action’ methods and procedures:
(slide)
1. Focus on individual
Weber is adamant that the fundamental unit of investigation must always be the individual. He thus focuses upon the individual and not on groups or collectives; only the individual he believes is capable of ‘meaningful’ social action. As far as the ‘subjective interepretation of action’ is concerned, ‘collectives must be treated as soleley the resultants and modes of organisation of the particular acts of individual persons:
(slide here)
‘for sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality, which ‘acts’. When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, a corporation, a family or army corps, or to similar collectives, what it means is … only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social action of individual persons.’ (Weber, economy and Society, 1968, p. 13)
Collectives cannot feel, cannot think, perceive, only individual people can. To assume otherwise, Weber argues is to impute a spurious reality to what are in effect conceptual abstractions. Furthermore he argues that the task of the socioligst -- a scholar who is interested in understanding the ‘togetherness’ of people – to penetrate the subjective understandings of the individual, to get at the motives for social action.
This enterprise, Weber argues, is very different from that of the natural science. (Remember Ranke!) Human behavior Weber argues cannot be reduced to laws. Natural scienstist ‘explain’ (erklaeren) nature by such laws ; but human scientist such as a historian or sociollogis ‘understand’ (understand) human behavoir and require different methods and skills for that. The explain motives, and have to deal with subjectives meanings, moreover, actors explain what they do – not like bacteria who are just observed by the natural scientist and cannot speak. People have their own concepts through which they explain their world, such as ‘class’, or ‘sin’ or ‘redemption’ and they live their lives according to these man-made concepts. (– again we see here again is the influence of the German historcisit and idealist distinction between the investiation of nature – and the investiation of human life which already played a role in Ranke.).
(reminder slide)
Weber stands in start opposition here to French school of sociology, forming around the same time. the most eminent man here is Emile Durkheim for whom the only unit that really counted for exlanatory purposes was the collective.
(slide of Durkheim)
2. Verstehenssoziologie
(slide)
‘…the science which attempts the interpretative understanding (deutend verstehen) of social action in order thereby to arrive at a casual explanation of its course and effects’ (Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1980, p.1)