Max Weber

Weber, Max (1864–1920)

Max Weber, German economist, historian, sociologist, methodologist, and political thinker, is of philosophical significance for his attempted reconciliation of historical relativism with the possibility of a causal social science; his notion of a verstehende (understanding) sociology; his formulation, use and epistemic account of the concept of ‘ideal types’; his views on the rational irreconcilability of ultimate value choices, and particularly his formulation of the implications for ethical political action of the conflict between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility; and his sociological account of the causes and uniqueness of the western rationalization of life.

These topics are closely related: Weber argued that the explanatory interests of the historian and social scientist vary historically and that the objects of their interest were constituted in terms of cultural points of view, and that consequently their categories are ultimately rooted in evaluations, and hence subjective. But he also argued that social science cannot dispense with causality, and that once the categories were chosen, judgments of causality were objective. The explanatory interests of the sociologist, as he defined sociology, were in understanding intentional action causally, but in terms of categories that were culturally significant, such as ‘rational action’. Much of his influence flowed from his formulation of the cultural situation of the day, especially the idea that the fate of the time was to recognize that evaluations were inescapably subjective and that the world had no inherent ‘meaning’. The existential implications of this novel situation for politics and learning were strikingly formulated by him: science could not tell us how to live; politics was as a choice between warring Gods. Weber’s scholarly work and his politics served as a model for Karl Jaspers, and a subject of criticism and analysis for other philosophers, such as Karl Löwith, Max Scheler, and the Frankfurt School.

1 Life

Weber was born in Erfurt in Thuringia 12 April 1864. His father was a businessman and prominent National Liberal politician, who served in the Prussian House of Deputies (1868–97) and the German Reichstag (1872–84). The Weber household was a meeting place for prominent academics and political figures. Weber began his university training in Heidelberg in 1882 and continued it in Berlin, Strasbourg and at Göttingen to 1886. He attended lectures on law and history, passing his bar exam in 1887. He received a Berlin doctorate in 1889 for a study of medieval trading companies: his habilitation, in 1891, was for a study of legal aspects of Roman agrarian history. While preparing for his habilitation, he participated in a study under the sponsorship of the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Social Policy Association) on the subject of agricultural labourers in the East Elbian estates. He began a legal career, but soon returned to academic life. From 1894 to 1897 he was a professor of Nationalökonomie at Freiburg; from there he was appointed to a similar position at Heidelberg. A mental breakdown in 1902 led him to relinquish his teaching duties, but he soon returned to an active role as an editor and producing scholar. His sociological works began to appear after the 1904–5 publication of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and included a series of works on the sociology of religion dealing primarily with the theme of the economic ethics of the world religions. It is controversial whether these works or his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), posthumously published in 1922, represented the core of his thought.

His major ‘methodological’ essays (posthumously published as his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (Collected Essays in Scientific Theory) in 1922) included part one of ‘Roscher and Knies’, published in 1903, ‘"Objectivity" in Social Science and Social Policy’, in 1904, part two of ‘Roscher and Knies’ and ‘Critical Studies in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences’, in 1905 and 1906, and, in 1907, ‘Critique of Stammler’. Among the other essays collected in the Wissenschaftslehre were ‘The Meaning of "Ethical Neutrality"’, published in 1918, which grew out of an earlier dispute with the Social Policy Association on the possibility of making policy without making value-choices that cannot be grounded scientifically, and a widely distributed speech, ‘Science as a Calling’, published in 1919. This and another speech, ‘Politics as a Calling’, given and published in 1919, were actively debated by the younger generation of intellectuals.

After the war Weber served as a member of the constitutional commission of the Weimar republic, became a professor of economics at Vienna in 1918 and Munich in 1919, and unsuccessfully pursued a career in politics. His early death came when his influence among intellectuals was at its peak. The ‘Calling’ speeches were an aggressive and telling formulation of a world-view that challenged the cultural and political optimism of the time, and remained in the Weimar era as a central reference in the long-running discussion of the ‘Crisis of the Sciences’. Much of his work was published posthumously in editions that did not reflect his original intentions, but his ‘methodological’ writings were intended to be collected, and the collection largely follows his intentions. The major work published as Economy and Society, however, was unfinished, and his intentions for the texts that compose the extant edition were unclear.

Weber in his political writings and methodological writings rigorously separated factual and evaluative considerations, especially in connection with the consideration of policy means to political ends, in order to demonstrate the concealed and confused value premises of the teaching of the ‘Socialists of the Chair’ and the factual naïveté of ‘ethical’ political postures, and he promoted the idea that intellectual integrity demanded the making of explicit ultimate value choices. He believed that in a democratic age the only political leaders who could make free value choices and rise above mere interest-politics to greatness were those who had the charisma necessary to build a personal following, and he devoted his constitutional efforts to the task of creating means by which such leaders could rise.

2 The methodological essays of 1903–7

Weber’s major methodological article, ‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy’, published in 1904, brought together the key themes of his thinking as a methodologist of social science. Weber argued that the results of the cultural sciences could be valid in an objective sense, and that indeed, ‘scientific truth is precisely what is valid for all who seek the truth’ (1904–17: 84). Yet he also argued that the objects of explanation in social science are constituted by culture-specific and discipline-specific cognitive interests and consequently are historically relative and in this sense subjective (see Explanation in history and social science; Value judgments in social science). He resolved the conflict between these two claims by a complex argument. The premises were epistemic: exhaustive description and hence explanation of concrete reality was impossible; all science is necessarily selective and concerned with a finite portion of reality. The natural sciences are, however, selective in a different way than the cultural sciences. The natural sciences select as important the segment that can be constructed as casual regularities, and take it to be the essence of reality. The cultural sciences, in contrast, begin with the finite segment that is significant to us as cultural beings with a specific culture, and then construct within this segment objects of explanation, which he called, following Heinrich Rickert, ‘historical individuals’ that are significant or meaningful to us as cultural beings. This enterprise is necessarily ‘evaluative’ in the sense that only as cultural beings do we regard these objects as significant, and culture is conditioned by valuative ideas. Accepting as our starting point this distinctive segment of reality has the effect of excluding the possibility of a social science that is based on principles like those of physics or chemistry operating at the level of an atomistic psychology, because a physics-like social science that reduced social life to elementary factors, if such a thing were indeed possible, would simply fail to apply to objects that are configured to be culturally significant to us, and would apply to a different or differently configured finite segment of reality.

One difficulty this line of argument poses arises over the question of whether causation itself is relative to our cultural starting point and interests, and is thus not a truth there for all who seek it? Weber’s response to this question is elaborated in ‘The Logic of the Cultural Sciences’ (1904–17), in which he argues that historical explanation is logically equivalent to establishing legal responsibility, and applies a contemporary legal theory of probabilistic causation, the theory of ‘objective possibility’ and ‘adequate cause’, to the problem of the objectivity of causal explanation. Legal determinations of responsibility perforce employ categories that arise from a particular and distinctive interest, the juridical interest; the cultural scientist simply has different interests and different categories.

The criteria for ‘adequate’ causation in the theory is the existence of a significant difference between the probability of a given result if a particular set of conditions held (the background probability), and the probability of the result if these conditions absent the condition in question. If purely classificatory concepts could be employed and probabilities for the two cases empirically derived, these judgments would be ‘empirical’. Thus the core of causal judgment in this theory is an objective fact. But there are two kinds of selection that are ordinarily involved in historical explanation that are not objective. Whether a difference in probabilities is significant, and hence whether a cause is ‘adequate’, depends on the set of conditions selected to provide the background probability. This choice cannot be made objectively, but must be made on the basis of the historian’s interest. A second kind of selection occurs because ‘historical individuals’, the objects of the concepts of interest to historians, cannot be reduced to the sum of the ways they can be classified. So the historical analyst proceeds by constructing abstract ideal types and comparing them to other causal situations that are also known to be irreducible to the ways they can be classified. Judging the ‘adequacy’ of a historical causal relation is thus, in practice, largely abstract or conceptual, and unavoidably so.

Weber used these considerations to support the claim that explicitly constructed conceptual schemes were necessary in the cultural sciences, for example in economics. But he argued for a particular understanding of these constructions: as ideal types that diverged from empirical reality in its full richness. The constructed types of the cultural sciences resemble those of the natural sciences with respect to selectivity; they differ in the cognitive purposes they serve: the cultural scientist seeks conceptual clarity in relation to the particular intellectual aims of particular disciplines, each of which arises from practical purposes (see Value judgments in social science §§1–2). Weber also used this understanding of ideal-types critically, to argue against the taking of ideal type constructions for a deeper or essential reality. Crude Marxism, he thought, traded on this error, as did German theories of the state.

Weber’s ideal types of legitimate rule (Herrschaft) were perhaps the most influential of his constructions. Weber distinguished between three kinds of belief in the legitimacy of orders or rulers: traditional, based on unwritten rules; rational-legal, based on written rules; and charismatic, where beliefs about the extraordinary character of a leader justified command. He showed how these beliefs were associated with particular kinds of social organization, and how particular kinds of belief, such as ‘traditional’ patrimonial beliefs were associated with orders that developed in history in particular ways. Charismatic authority, which in its pure form is personal, is unstable and short-lived, though it can be combined with other forms to ground a routinized order, such as a monarchy, which retains some charismatic elements, such as the notion of royal blood. Rational-legal orders make belief in the legality of the order the basis of legitimacy. This form characteristically results in the bureaucratization of administration. Weber explicitly intended the concept of bureaucracy to be a timeless and value free ideal type rather than a historical teleological construct. But the vision of a world of men who are little cogs trying to become bigger cogs in the huge machinery of modern bureaucracies horrified him and represented the end of the practical possibility of an individual making a choice to devote his life to some higher self-chosen goal.

3 The idea of an ‘understanding’ sociology

Weber’s essay on ‘Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’ (1913) and his introduction to Economy and Society stipulated a definition of sociology as the science concerned with the interpretive understanding (Verstehen) of social action, that is, actions that take account of others, and the causal understanding of the course and consequences of actions (see Social action). The intended meaning of an act for its agent is causally essential to an act. Accordingly, a sociological explanation of an action should be correct both on the level of cause and meaning. The understanding of meanings requires the application of type-concepts rather than empathy. Meanings are ascertained by comparing the course of action to an appropriate ideal type of a meaningful act, such as obedience to a command. Many of the causes bearing on social life, such as psychophysical or biological effects, are not intentional in character, and thus are not part of sociology as Weber defines it. ‘Collective’ concepts, such as the state, understood as real entities, are also excluded by Weber’s definition, but the social phenomenon they refer to may be understood sociologically in terms of individual actions: the concepts are ideal-typifications of patterns of action that in turn result from the beliefs and expectations of individuals.

Subsequent commentators on Weber have made a great deal of his use of the notion of Verstehen, and have argued that a social science based on Verstehen or understanding must be radically unlike one based on any analogy to the natural sciences. The distinction between understanding and explanation was treated as a fundamental epistemological divide between two kinds of science. When Weber’s works were imported to the Anglo-American world, especially during the 1930s, primarily to an audience of sociologists, this distinction was often stated as methodological distinction, and Verstehen was understood as a ‘method’. Social phenomenologists, such as Alfred Schütz, attempted to provide a basis for an alternative social science in the problem of understanding and particularly in the problem of the attainment of ‘adequacy’ in the individual’s understanding of another.

Weber’s own statements about Verstehen are characteristically directed toward other issues. Verstehen entered primarily in connection with concepts used by the historical figure whose actions were being explained as well as by those employed by the historical interpreter. Since the historical interpreter often was part of a culture which employed different concepts, there is a positive task of interpreting the purposes and therefore the concepts of the agent whose actions are to be explained in terms of broader and more permanent categories of action or in terms of the concepts of the historian and his own historical audience.

The treatment of intention at the beginning of Economy and Society distinguishes between direct and indirect evidence of intention. This is a distinction borrowed from the law, and reflects Weber’s utterly unmystical attitude to assessing an agent’s purposes and motives. Weber specifically rejected appeals to historical intuition. His discussion of interpretation in the beginning of Economy and Society treats the attribution of motivation and intent as a practical necessity dictated by the task of the inquiry, which could ordinarily be done by examining the course of action and the information available to the agent. Assessing such things requires, to some extent, thinking through a problem from the point of view of the agent, but Weber stressed that one did not need to be Caesar in order to ‘understand’ Caesar, but rather to assimilate the acts of a Caesar to an already ‘understood’ model or ideal type of action. Models of perfect rational action are, in practice, a starting point for reconstructions of intentions in complex situations, such as the battlefield decisions of a general, for which there is no alternative.

4 The conflict of values and world-view

Weber’s writings on the subject of values, value-orientations, and value conflicts were directed at specific topics, such as the ethics of advocacy in the classroom, but had a well-defined philosophical core. Weber held that there were rational grounds for the selection of means to ends, and for assessing the consistency of sets of choices of ends, but that ultimate value choices could not be rationally justified. He also held that hidden conflicts became apparent when means and the subsidiary consequences of the use of the means to obtain given ends were considered, and that such conflicts were common.

In the sphere of politics, Weber argued, the decisive means is violence, and this inevitably produces conflicts of a particular kind. Consider the political leader who is an adherent to what Weber calls an ‘ethic of uncompromising conviction’ with respect to truth-telling in politics, that is, who upholds the value of truth-telling come what may. A foreseeable subsidiary effect of an instance of truth-telling might be to unleash uncontrollable passions. Weber argues that the only way an ethic of uncompromising conviction may be consistently upheld in the political sphere would be for its adherents to disclaim responsibility for such results of their actions, as do religious ethics which counsel their followers to ‘do rightly and leave the results with God’. Weber contrasted such ethics with what he called ‘ethics of responsibility’, which hold their adherents to responsibility for the foreseeable consequences, both good and evil, of their actions. He rejected political moralists who obscured the tragic character of politics through wishful thinking, such as the belief that only good comes from good and only evil from evil.

Weber’s characterization of the modern situation, and his explanation of it, are the subject of continuing controversies of interpretation. Weber posed the problem of explaining the distinctive ‘rationality’ of Western society, and particularly the dynamic process of continuing rationalization. The most famous portion of Weber’s account of this process takes the form of an ideal-typical construction of the genetic development of the psychological effect of particular religious ideas. Weber argued that the Calvinist doctrine of predestination was a source of deep anxiety to believers, who sought signs that they were among the elect. He argued that the pastoral practice of responding to this anxiety through the idea that diligence in the pursuit of worldly callings and the living of a self-disciplined life were signs of election, channelled this psychological force in a direction that produced a new type of person. The presence of this new type – rationalistic, individualistic, self-examining, conscience-driven, and work-sanctifying – facilitated the process by which capitalist economic conduct and the rational organization of work displaced traditional modes of economic conduct. In the later stages of this development, however, the routines of capitalistic rationalization become inescapable, and these routines undermined religious belief. In response, religion became more ‘other-worldly’, and culture became the increasingly senseless pursuit of mutually antagonistic self-chosen ends in a world that had itself become ‘disenchanted’ or ‘meaningless’.

Weber’s Protestant ethic essay could be construed as an alternative to the Marxian account of the rise of capitalism. The idea that religious ideas were an extra-economic cause of economic development is in conflict with Marx’s Überbau or superstructure theory of ideology. Weber greatly expanded on his insight that different religious traditions create characteristically different ‘economic ethics’ or modes of thinking morally about the economic world. Most of these modes precluded the development from within the society of modern capitalism of the Western kind, which Weber took to be based on the rational organization of labour. But Weber did not address Marx’s history of capitalism directly until his late lectures on economic history, in which he provided an overall account of the history of capitalism that incorporates the few elements of Marx’s account of the development of factory production that Weber accepted. The differences in their views of this topic are characteristic: where Marx saw the organization of work into factories simply as a means of increasing exploitation, Weber argued that production was itself rationalized, and that factory work required the new type of worker that the rationalizing discipline of Protestantism was producing.

In the Weimar era, during which Marx was taken more seriously as a thinker, interpreters such as Karl Löwith, compared the two more systematically. Weber came to be regarded as the bourgeois alternative to Marx, and former members of Weber’s circle, such as Georg Lukács and Karl Jaspers, also construed Weber in this way, each for their own purposes. Jaspers made Weber into a heroic figure whose radical liberal leadership Germany had tragically failed to accept. In a work by Lukács designed to discern and root out the sources of his own ideological deviations from Communist orthodoxy, Weber was classed as a powerful exponent of irrationalism, to which dialectical materialism was the alternative. Weber later became both subject and hidden interlocutor for the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, and as they and their successors became concerned with the problem of modernity, Weber came to be regarded as a major theorist of modernity (see Frankfurt School).