Politics, Sociology and Social Theory E-Book

Anthony Giddens

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 577

Beschreibung

Built upon a series of critical encounters with major figures in classical and present-day social and political thought, this volume offers not only a challenging critique of major traditions of social and political analysis, but unique insights into the ideas which Giddens has developed over the past two decades.

Leseprobe

POLITICS, SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIAL THEORY

Encounters with Classical and Contemporary Social Thought

Anthony Giddens

Polity Press

Copyright © Anthony Giddens 1995

The right of Anthony Giddens to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 1995 by Polity Press

in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 2004

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

  1    Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber

  2    Marx, Weber and the Development of Capitalism

  3    Durkheim’s Political Sociology

  4    Durkheim and the Question of individualism

  5    Comte, Popper and Positivism

  6    ‘Power’ in the Writings of Talcott Parsons

  7    The Improbable Guru: Re-reading Marcuse

  8    Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology and Hermeneutics

  9    Habermas on Labour and Interaction

10    Foucault, Nietzsche and Marx

Notes

Index

Preface

The articles which compose this book have been drawn from several sources. The first article in the collection, ‘Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber’, was originally published as a separate booklet. The remainder of the selections come from two further sources: Studies in Social and Political Theory, originally published by Hutchinson, and Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory, published first of all by Macmillan. In choosing papers from these two books, I have been guided mainly by the criterion of contemporary relevance. I hope that the reader might agree that the articles reprinted here retain their interest today. I have made minor alterations to some of the articles included herein and have cut down on surplus notes. However, most of the substance of the articles remains unchanged.

I am grateful to various people who have helped me in preparing this book for publication. Thanks in particular to Katy Giddens, Don Hubert and Nicola Ross.

Introduction

This book offers a series of integrated reflections upon a set of topics in classical social theory and more recent schools of thought. At the time at which the first several articles in this volume were first written, the state of thinking about the sociological ‘classics’ was rather different from what it is now. Two decades ago the ‘classics’ were not what they have since become. At that time, sociology in the English-speaking world was dominated by American perspectives, particularly in respect of theoretical work. The agenda was set by Talcott Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action, which first appeared in 1937 but did not achieve a substantial influence until considerably later in the post-war period. Parsons it was who sought to establish what would later be called a ‘paradigm’ in sociology and who drew up the writings of European thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to do so. Parsons’s work from the beginning was vociferously criticized and continues to be the subject of critical debate down to this day.

Whatever the merits or otherwise of Parsons’s path-breaking book, it was one of the main influences bringing into common currency the idea that there was a distinctive ‘generation’ of thinkers who in some sense established sociology, and to a degree the other social sciences too, as viable enterprises. That generation, the ‘1890–1920 generation’, according to Parsons, had broken in a definitive way with the more speculative forms of social interpretation which preceded them; and that generation had done most of the ground-clearing for the later emergence of a properly founded theoretical framework for social science.

Of course, Parsons was not alone in suggesting these ideas, but his influence was none the less quite profound. Parsons helped initiate the idea that there were distinctive founding fathers in sociology – a notion to which Parsons’s student and intellectual colleague R.K. Merton gave further flesh. Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action was important in another way too. For it was Parsons, more than any other author, who introduced Max Weber to an Anglo-Saxon audience as one of the principal founders of sociology. Parsons translated The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he produced the first English translation of segments of Economy and Society, and he propelled into public view the sociological aspects of Weber’s work.

Parsons’s interpretation of Weber was idiosyncratic, because Parsons wished above all to make use of Weber to develop his own doctrines. Yet whatever objections others might have made to ‘Parsons’s Weber’, there is no doubt that Parsons was the main scholar who early on helped make Weber a figure of such extraordinary stature in English-speaking sociology. This might have happened anyway, but before Parsons came along Weber was thought of by Anglo-Saxon authors mainly as an economic historian and theorist of jurisprudence. This was the way, for example, that Weber had been interpreted by R.H. Tawney and again by Frank Knight, the translator of the texts which appeared in English under the title of General Economic History.

Parsons did not have as much influence over the reception of Durkheim in the English-speaking world. Several of Durkheim’s works had become accessible before those of Weber; and Durkheim was a self-professed advocate of sociology, whose thought had from the beginning had some impact upon both sociology and anthropology in Britain and the United States. Nevertheless, apart from its reception in anthropology – particularly in the writings of Radcliffe-Brown – Durkheim’s thought was only poorly understood among Anglo-American sociological authors. Many thought of Durkheim as a theorist of a metaphysical collective consciousness – someone who thought the ‘collective’ always superior to the ‘individual’. Parsons’s work on Durkheim had many shortcomings, but it did serve to elevate the critical analysis of Durkheim’s works to a new plane of sophistication.

When I wrote my own book, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971), and some of the later pieces included in this collection, Parsons’s influence was at its height. Few people at that time, though, curiously, thought in terms of the triad of classics which later became such a central part of the received wisdom in undergraduate courses in sociology. The Structure of Social Action included only a few brief pages on Marx, whom Parsons regarded as a utilitarian forerunner of the 1890–1920 generation.

There were many authors who sought to use Marx to counteract what they saw as certain one-sided tendencies in Parsons’s thought – Ralf Dahrendorf, John Rex, David Lockwood, among others. Most Marxists, however, had little truck with either Weber or Durkheim, and saw the development of sociological thought mainly in terms of a line of continuity from Marx and Engels through to the various schools of Marxism which developed over the following century or so.

Even as late as the 1960s, the idea that there were distinctive founding fathers of sociology, and that they were to be found specifically in Europe, had barely taken hold. British sociology up to that period tended to be strongly empirical – dominated by Fabianism and an orientation towards questions of social welfare. The writings of T.H. Marshall represented perhaps the leading example. Theoretical thinking in sociology was overshadowed by anthropological thought. Sociology had no one to compare with the dazzling group of anthropological authors which, besides Radcliffe-Brown, included Bronislaw Malinowski, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Edmond Leach, Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes, Audrey Richards and many others. With the exception of one or two émigré authors, such as Karl Mannheim – whose work was in any case slightly earlier – indigenous social theorists were not in the same league. They looked mainly to previous British thinkers, such as Spencer or Hobhouse, rather than to continental thought for their inspiration: the work of Morris Ginsburg is an example.

In the United States, the majority of sociologists at that date traced back their ancestry to indigenous sources – symbolic interactionism, the Chicago School and so forth. As a result of the influence of Albion Small, the writings of Georg Simmel – or some of them – had for some while been better known in the US than those of either Weber or Durkheim, let alone the work of Marx. Not just the efforts of Parsons, but those of a sizeable group of immigrant authors, served in the end to alter these emphases. Writers such as Hans Gerth, Reinhard Bendix and Lewis Coser were critical of Parsons and put forward their own interpretations. Yet their collective influence served strongly to reorient American interpretations of the past history of sociology towards Europe.

In Capitalism and Modern Social Theory I included sections on Marx as comprehensive as those concerned with Weber and Durkheim. I sought to question Parsons’s idea of the 1890–1920 ‘breakthrough’ generation, as well as some of the specifics of his interpretations of Weber and Durkheim. I also tried to show that Marx anticipated some of the key theorems worked out by Weber and Durkheim; the influence of Marx on Weber was something which appeared only in muted form in Parsons’s account, and I wanted as well to make clear how thoroughly Weber was indebted to Marx. The idea of the trio of founding fathers thereafter became fairly strongly established – a phenomenon which I had not fully anticipated and to which I did not want particularly to contribute.

The past few years have seen basic changes affecting the status of the three main sociological classics. Important debates have occurred in intellectual history – debates which bear upon the interpretation of the past history of all intellectual disciplines, but which have been extensively pursued in the area of sociology. In addition, all of a sudden, the ‘holy trio’ are a trio no longer – because of what seems like the final disappearance of Marxism. In the eyes of many we are more or less back where we started when Parsons first came on the scene. The collapse of Soviet Communism, and the disintegration of socialism as a model for an alternative social order, mean that Marx should again be erased as equivalent in status to Weber or Durkheim. I shall come back to the issue of the current status of Marx later; first of all, however, I shall look at the debates about the status of the sociological classics in general.

What should we mean by the ‘classics of sociology’? Does the term ‘classical social theory’ have some real force, or is it just a vague label of convenience? And are ‘classics’ the same as ‘founders’?

I would take it, first of all, that every intellectual discipline, including sociology, has itself a sociological or, if one prefers, a constructed history. The idea that there was a certain Archimedean point at which a discipline became founded – begotten by its founding fathers – does not stand up to scrutiny. Thus Parsons claimed that the 1890–1920 generation established a ‘great divide’ from what went before. The serious history of sociology, in other words, can be dated from that period. But this claim is a contestable one, to say the least. It accepts at face value the claims of the 1890–1920 generation to have established a new discipline. If we look back to prior periods in the evolution of social thought, we find that a succession of thinkers claimed to have put behind them the lapses of their forerunners and to have instituted a new science of society for the first time. Durkheim argued as much in respect of Marx. Yet Marx believed that he had superseded Comte and Montesquieu; Montesquieu in turn believed the same of his predecessors. Even earlier, Vico thought of himself as the first founder of a ‘new science’ of the social (perhaps in this case, he actually was).

I would suggest that all intellectual disciplines have their commonly recognized founders, but only in some are the works of those founders widely thought of as ‘classics’. All disciplines have their founders because they are part of their myths of origin. There are no more natural divisions between disciplines than there are between countries on a map. Every recognized intellectual discipline has gone through a process of self-legitimation not unlike that involved in the founding of nations. All disciplines have their fictive histories, all are imagined communities which invoke myths of the past as a means of both charting their own internal development and unity, and also drawing boundaries between themselves and other neighbouring disciplines.

Although it might not follow any natural features at all, the territoriality of a nation may gain immense symbolic value. It is at once often the source of devotion and of schism. Much the same is true of the intellectual disciplines, which depend for their identity and their differences upon teaching curricula. Even the terminology is rather similar: a state has a territory and a discipline marks out a ‘field’; in each case the larger area is also mapped into sub-regions, which can sometimes prove a threat to the unity of the whole.

The fictive histories which inform the imagined communities of intellectual domains – just as in the case of national ideologies – are highly selective. What counts, obviously, is not only what is ‘institutionally remembered’ and commemorated in some sort of ritual sense, but what is forgotten in the reshaping of the past. Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel and others are remembered and still read. But who now remembers, let alone reads, Schäffle, Worms or Le Play? The founders have a distinctiveness in retrospect which is at least partly the result of selective remembering; it does not normally correspond to how the individuals in question were thought of by their contemporaries.

As in the case of nationalist ideologies, the ways in which the great figures of the past are viewed are not static. They are interpreted and reinterpreted in the light of changing events, fashions and imperatives. Wolin has argued that the legitimating of founders ‘has both a political dimension and a politics’. Founding is ‘political theorising’ precisely because principles inferred from the work of founders legitimate basic dimensions of intellectual activity. For some ideas to ‘win’ in this retrospective battle, others of course must lose. Political action in this context means the more or less constant struggle between different forces over the legitimate constitution of an intellectual arena. The ‘politics’ of intellectual inheritance becomes obscured from view to the degree to which successful monopolizing claims are registered: dominant presuppositions thereby become taken-for-granted ideas and procedures.

The question is: how arbitrary are the frameworks which thereby become legitimated? If history had in some way taken a different course, would we now have books by Schäffle, Worms and Le Play on our bookshelves, instead of Marx, Durkheim, Weber and the others? Have they withstood a ‘test of time’ which has a kind of quasi-evolutionary value? Here we make the transition from the notion of founders to that of classics. All intellectual disciplines have founders, but it tends to be only the social sciences which recognize the existence of ‘classics’. Classics, I would take it, are founders who still speak to us in a voice which is held to be relevant. They are not just antiquated relics, but can be read and re-read with profit as a source of reflection upon today’s issues and problems.

Probably several reasons exist as to why this sense of the ‘classical’ has a particular force in the social sciences. One is methodological. There is a logical gulf between the natural and social sciences; in the social sciences there is not the same kind of cumulative knowledge which can be claimed for natural science. Second, and related to this, is the inevitable reflexive engagement of sociology and the other social sciences with the subject matter – human actions as historically constituted – which they seek to analyse or explicate.

Two somewhat paradoxical consequences follow. On the one hand, ideas and findings can become banal as they are ‘swallowed up’ and incorporated into the everyday knowledge of actors in society itself; as contexts of action change, they can come to seem archaic or trivial. On the other hand, there are, as it were, wisdoms in the work of some authors which speak to long-standing aspects of human social existence.

Wolin’s ‘epic theorists’ are individuals whose work contains just such wisdoms. Epic theorists, Wolin suggests, are not just legitimated as such by retrospective invention, but earn their status through their deeds. Such deeds are heroic endeavours on the level of thought: they involve essentially the invention of novel perspectives upon states of affairs which were previously looked at in a different way. Some epic theorists, therefore, weather the ‘test of time’ just because of the sheer scale of their achievements, when compared either to prior or to subsequent thinkers. The judgement of ‘history’ undeniably has a certain arbitrariness about it, as well as having a mobile character. Yet epic status has to be earned; it cannot merely be dispensed.

Suppose one were to ask why sociologists now still read Weber, but do not read Sombart. In his day, Sombart was probably the more famous of the two, and his writings ranged very widely. Yet Sombart’s work is largely forgotten, whereas the lively dialogue with Weber continues. I think that, were one to undertake a systematic comparison of the achievements of Sombart and those of Weber, one would have to conclude that the forgetting of Sombart is to some degree an arbitrary matter. That is, one could imagine a possible world of intellectual development in which Sombart continued to figure as an author of continuing relevance. At the same time, looked at dispassionately, one would also conclude that Weber was an epic theorist on a scale beyond anything that Sombart managed to achieve. The same conclusion would be reached were one to make a comparison between the works of Durkheim and those of Schäffle, Worms, Le Play or a host of other comparable authors whose works have long ago ceased to command a wide audience.

Since I first started writing about Marx, Weber, Durkheim et al., various controversies have arisen about the proper status of intellectual history. It is plain enough that the history of sociology encapsulates what it is about. Problems of the interpretation of meaning, intentionality and the historical character of cultural creation are not simply discussed in sociology texts, but have to be coped with when analysing the significance of those texts themselves. Puzzling through the implications of this phenomenon has produced quite widely different standpoints; and, of course, different standpoints in turn reflect wider theoretical variations in views of the issues involved.

I shall not try to deal with this diversity here. One approach which has been particularly debated, however, is that suggested by Quentin Skinner and others. The so-called ‘historicists’ criticize both Whig versions of intellectual history and the more relativistic positions taken by some influenced by structuralism or post-structuralism. Intellectual history, they suggest, should be written with due sensitivity to context. The uses which we might make of the ‘classics’ in the present day, for example, might be quite different from the impulses which originally drove the production of a given set of ideas in a particular context. ‘Context’, in this style of reasoning about intellectual history, must be given precision. It does not mean just situating ideas or writings in a wider framework of intellectual production. We have to investigate thoroughly, the historicists say, what authors were intending when they wrote their texts, what kinds of audience they wrote those texts for and what sorts of problem or question they had in mind in generating them. Works can be understood as embedded in a nexus of illocutionary acts – acts that are always practical and constitutive as well as sheerly intellectual.

Thus Robert Jones has argued that to understand Durkheim one must grasp Durkheim’s intentions in producing his texts under descriptions which the author himself would have accepted as authentic. Durkheim ‘cannot be said to have meant or done something if he could not, at least in principle, have accepted the statement as an accurate account of what he was saying or doing’. It is easy to see how closely such a view of an author reproduces more general aspects of hermeneutics. The principle is more or less the same as that enunciated, not so much by J.L. Austin, as by Wittgenstein. To know what an agent is up to, an observer or interpreter must know what the agent knows and applies in relation to his or her actions. A description of an action which ignores this quality of ‘adequacy’ is liable to be mistaken.

Historicism has been widely criticized, both in the version developed by Skinner and in its more sociological guise. It has been pointed out, for instance, that many authors – and this would apply with particular force to the ‘epic theorists’ – do not in fact orient their arguments only to the local contexts of their activities. Authors may not only write with an indefinite future audience in mind, but also see themselves to be dealing with very general questions which form part of overall intellectual traditions. ‘Context’, which seems to be a way of narrowing down and delimiting the audiences to whom works were addressed, becomes then widened out again and reconnected with overall parameters of culture.

The main thesis of the historicists is not refuted by such an observation, although it does lose some of its apparent hard-headedness. The issue of understanding an author’s intentions in context remains important; if it is philosophically valid, as I think it is, it provides a firm bulwark against the eccentricities of relativism.

Consider the various interpretations I offer of Weber and Durkheim in the opening chapters in this book. There I discuss the socio-political contexts in which Weber and Durkheim developed their sociological ideas. These contexts are interesting in and of themselves, but, crucially, they allow us to gain a greater sense of what led the two authors to write in the way in which they did. When we get to know more about the context in which Weber and Durkheim wrote, we can infer more about their intentions; and inference from their intentions in turn allows us to elucidate further the contexts of their writing.

The implications of these observations should be made clear. The point is not that an author has in some sense a final say – or would have, were he or she to be available for interrogation – over what a text means. The author has no such ultimate privilege. What is at issue, instead, is grasping what an ‘author’ is. We are all the authors of our own actions, no matter whether there be influences which affect us which we do not fully understand, or whether there be consequences of our activities which we do not in any way anticipate.

To be an ‘author’ of a text has a connection with being the author of an action. Foucault and others argue that an author is a kind of assemblage of ‘discursive’ qualities. But this is not so; to write something, just as to do anything, implies agency, reflexivity and the meshing of intentions with longer-term projects. In intellectual history – as opposed to the latter-day use of works as classics – authorship is essentially interrogated just as actions, no matter how trivial or large, can be interrogated in the contexts of everyday life. In everyday speech and action, we do not allow an individual ultimate control over the meaning of what he or she says or does; but we do accord the speaker or agent special privileges of explication.

When someone says or does something which appears initially incomprehensible, or with which we want for some reason to take issue, we do ask for a story of intentionality and we grant the individual in question special access to that intentionality. However, we also assess the guiding threads of what an individual says or does, on the level of intentionality, in terms of wider criteria than the individual is likely to be able to supply. We look to slot particular actions, or sequences of actions, into a wider biographical interpretation. What we do in casual everyday inquiries bears a logical similarity to what goes on in the ‘interrogations’ of intellectual history or of the writing of biographies. Why are biographies normally only satisfactory if they are rather detailed? The reason is that on the whole the more we know about someone, the more we are able to grasp the ‘author’ who stands behind the ‘life’.

The articles comprised in this book do not concentrate solely upon classical social theory, but try to strike a balance between the classical and the present-day. The chapter which discusses Auguste Comte and the origins of positivism provides a useful link between the nineteenth century and our current preoccupations. A dictionary of modern culture recently gave this tongue-in-cheek definition of post-modernism: ‘Postmodernism: This word is meaningless. Use it often.’ Much the same could be said of ‘positivism’, save that it has become more of an epithet than a word used in an approving way. Yet, defined with some rigour, the idea of positivism traces the main connecting thread of sociology from the mid-point of the nineteenth century to at least three-quarters of the way through the twentieth.

For Comte, positivism meant both a logic for the social sciences and a practical programme of social reform. Comte’s version of the religion of humanity might have been bizarre, but the outlook he developed, on the level of both logic and practice, anticipated many later developments. Comte had a directly political influence too. For a while his followers in political associations in Europe and in the Americas outstripped those of Marx.

Most of the methodological debates in sociology of the past century and a half have in some sense concerned the relation between the natural and social sciences. Until some twenty or thirty years ago two main lines of orientation could be distinguished. The positivists looked to natural science as an exemplar for sociology – along the way, of course, drawing upon various models of the logic of natural science. The traditions of interpretative sociology, particularly hermeneutics, on the other hand, have mostly seen natural science as more or less irrelevant to the study of human institutions and human social action. Curiously enough, it is scholars from the second of these traditions who have been most concerned with the impact of science and technology on society – presumably in large part because for them these are more ‘alien forces’ than they are for the positivists.

Something of a new chapter was opened in social theory when, over about the last twenty or thirty years, the division between positivism and hermeneutics began to be questioned. A diversity of figures were involved in such questioning, including Jürgen Habermas, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and many others – and a diversity of standpoints has resulted. At one time it looked as though sociology would dissolve into a welter of conflicting theoretical perspectives, none of which could properly communicate with the others. I do not think that this is in fact what has happened. The questioning of the opposition between positivistic views and the perspectives of hermeneutics has proved both important and fruitful in reorienting social and political theory.

Rather than standing apart from mainstream sociological thinking, hermeneutics and ordinary language philosophy have increasingly been absorbed into it. This also applies to structuralism, even if there remains a certain lunatic fringe of post-structuralist thinking. There is no ‘orthodox consensus’ today to replace that which used to hold sway until sometime in the 1970s. Yet there is nothing like complete disarray either. The philosophy of language, particularly those approaches which stress language as praxis, has made a major contribution to this reorientation. ‘Society’ is not like a language, yet none the less can be conceptualized in terms which borrow something from language practice. In other words, ‘society’ is not an entity, and does not have a time-space presence; it exists only as social practices reproduced in an indefinite diversity of milieux.

Of course, some of the major recent debates which have reshaped the social sciences have not been particularly concerned with methodological questions. They have been bound up above all with the reinterpretation of modern society, its trajectory of development and its likely future. A certain terminological shift has occurred which symbolizes a movement in intellectual orientations. Whereas some decades ago most discussion concentrated upon notions of ‘industrial society’ or ‘industrial capitalism’, now the more usual terminology is that of ‘modernity’ (or ‘post-modernity’). Not long ago, all the talk was of ‘industrial society’ versus ‘capitalism’. The difference between the two, by and large, corresponded to an opposition between orthodox and Marxist sociology. To speak of ‘capitalism’ was not simply to identify a particular type of socio-economic system; it signalled a recognition that capitalism could, or should, be superseded by socialism. The proponents of the notion of industrial society, by contrast, from Saint-Simon through to Dahrendorf, Bendix and Lipset, already had their own version of the end of history – and, explicitly, of the end of ideology. For them, ‘industrial society’ was a more inclusive notion than ‘capitalism’, which it subsumed; and industrialism created a set of institutions which rendered the aspirations of socialists either futile or dangerous.

Now all this has changed. In the real world, capitalism, as it were, is everywhere, while socialism is dead on both the level of theory and that of practice. Many now speak of a post-industrial society, rather than sheerly an industrial one; curiously, however, ‘capitalism’ as such in sociology seems to be spoken of less and less. The reasons seem to be either that it is so ubiquitous that it barely needs mentioning, or that it was mainly applied in the past as part of a critical discourse of socialists.

‘Modernity’ is taken by most who use it, including myself, to refer to an historically specific socio-economic and cultural formation whose claims to universality are questionable. As I would understand it, modernity is not the end of history; but the modern has not dissolved into an amorphous, fragmented, non-linear post-modernity. For me the idea of the ‘post-modern’ implies transcendence, not simply ‘modernity come to its senses’ or being forced to face up to its limitations. I would not write off the possibility of a post-modern order in the sense I have just mentioned; but this would not, and could not, come about through the mechanisms of socialism.

It is not the crisis of capitalism as a rational mode of economic management which has come to dominate our era. Rather, it is the ecological crisis around which most tensions – but also most future possibilities – today are grouped. The ecological crisis is a crisis of a ‘damaged modernity’, but should not be identified solely with environmentalism. Modernity is indeed running up against its limits. Yet these limits do not only, or even primarily, concern the physical ‘limits to growth’. What is at issue, rather, is coming to terms with the ‘social repressions’ upon which modernity is built. Not physical ecology but an ‘ecology of life’ is what has to be confronted and elucidated here. A society where most things have become ‘plastic’ – open to human intervention, but not actually subject to universal human control – is one where political initiatives are called for which owe little to classical conceptions of socialism.

And this is a point at which we can return briefly to Marx. Should Marx now be seen as a founding father whose legacy has turned out to be dross? To this I would certainly say no. Some years ago, I often felt myself to be swimming against the stream when suggesting that Marx’s writings showed fundamental flaws. Now, when even Marx’s most seemingly devoted supporters have melted away, it is time to swim the other way. As a system of economic management, socialism is no more. Much of what Marx fought to achieve, therefore, no longer holds much sense for us. Yet in a world where many sorts of disaster threaten, and where the possibilities of a good society remain to be fully elucidated, critical theory still retains its importance. Marx’s weaknesses lay at those very points at which he thought himself strongest and most original: his reflections on the transcendence of capitalism by socialism. Marx’s most enduring contributions, which ensure that he will remain a ‘classic’, with whom a continuing dialogue is carried on, lie in his analysis of the order of industrial capitalism, which he wrongly imagined would be short-lived.

1   Politics and Sociology in the Thought of Max Weber

The aim of this chapter is to elucidate some of the connections between Weber’s political writings and his more academic contributions to the social sciences. As a preface to the main part of the discussion, it will be useful to mention a few of the important moments in his political and intellectual career.

Max Weber was born in 1864, the son of a prominent politician, a member of the National Liberal Party. In her biography of her husband, Marianne Weber described in some detail the richness of the influences which the young Weber experienced in his father’s home. From an early age he came into contact with many of the leading figures in the Prussian political and academic worlds, including Treitschke, Knapp, Dilthey and Mommsen. His childhood spanned a period of years which was of decisive significance for German political development: the crucial phase in German history at which, under the leadership of Bismarck, the country at last became a centralized nation-state. The German victory over France in 1870–1 had an effect upon the Weber household which left a lasting emotional impact upon Max, although he was no more than six years old at the time.1 While he never obtained political office, there was no point in his life at which political and academic interests did not intertwine in his personal experience. His youthful impressions of politics, filtered first through his father’s circle and, as a young man, through the influence of his uncle, Hermann Baumgarten, produced in Weber an ambivalent orientation towards the achievements of Bismarck which he never fully resolved, and which lay at the origin of the whole of his political writings.

Weber’s earliest academic writings concerned legal and economic history. What appeared to be purely technical, scholarly works, however – such as the dissertation on land tenure in ancient Rome, which Weber wrote in 1891 – actually held broader social and political implications in his thinking. In the thesis, Weber rejected the view, taken by some scholars of the day, that the economic history of Rome was a unique set of events, totally unamenable to analysis in terms of concepts derived from other situations; and he perceived in the social and economic structure of Rome some of the characteristics later to be discerned in the formation of capitalism in post-medieval Europe. Moreover, although he refused to accept some of the more specious comparisons which others had attempted to draw along these lines, the tensions which developed in the ancient world between the agrarian economy of large landed estates and emergent commerce and manufacture seemed to him to illuminate some of the problems facing contemporary Germany. He had the opportunity to confront these problems directly in a study, published in 1892, of the Junker estates to the east of the Elbe. This work formed part of a larger piece of research sponsored by the Verein für Sozialpolitik, investigating the conditions of land tenure in several main regions in Germany. Through his affiliation to the Verein, a group of ‘academic socialists’ concerned with current social and political issues, Weber was able to participate in discussion and interchange of ideas with a number of younger economists and historians interested above all in the problems facing Germany in its transition to industrial capitalism. While the founder members of the Verein, the ‘older generation’ of economists such as Wagner, Schmoller and Brentano, were interested primarily in questions connected with formulating policies of partial state intervention in economic life, the ‘younger generation’ – including, besides Weber, such authors as Sombart, Schulze-Gaevernitz and Tönnies – concerned themselves more broadly with the nature and origins of capitalism, and were heavily influenced by Marx.

Weber was appointed to a professorship of economics in Freiburg in 1894, and the following year delivered his Antrittsrede (inaugural lecture) there.2 In the lecture, Weber developed some of the conclusions which he had reached in his study of agrarian conditions to the east of the Elbe, and related them specifically to the political and economic problems of Germany as a whole (see below, pp. 20–23). He gave particular attention to the so-called ‘boundary problem’ in the east. East Prussia, the homeland of the Junker landowners, had provided the springboard for the unification of Germany, and was the ultimate basis of Bismarck’s power. But the position of the landed estates was being undermined by a burgeoning emigration of agricultural workers to other parts of Germany, attracted by the expansion of industrial production there. This situation was causing an influx of Polish workers from the east, which, according to Weber, threatened the hegemony of German culture in those very areas where it had been strongest. Hence the influx of Poles had to be stopped, and the eastern boundaries of Germany made secure. For Germany, he concluded, political and economic questions were inextricably linked; the country had forged its unity in conflict with other nations, and the maintenance and furtherance of its culture depended upon the continued assertion of its power as a bounded nation-state.

Weber did not develop the full implications of these views until later. For a period of several years, from 1897, he was incapacitated by an acute depressive disorder which forced him to abandon academic work altogether. While he did not return to university teaching until much later on in his life, he was able to resume his scholarly activities shortly after the turn of the century. This period was the most productive of his career. He continued his studies of the Junker estates, but he was able for the first time to work out what had been latent in his earlier writings: a broad treatment of certain fundamental aspects of modern capitalist development, which found an initial statement in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5). At the same time he wrote and published essays dealing with the epistemology and methodology of the social sciences. These works undoubtedly both influenced and were influenced by a clarification of his political views which he attained during this period. In his Antrittsrede he had already set out a preliminary version of the ‘leadership problem’ facing Germany. The country had achieved unification in the political sphere while beginning to experience a rapid period of industrial development. Junker power had provided the main foundation for the achievement of political unity, but the future of Germany as a ‘power-state’ in Europe depended upon its becoming an industrialized country. Thus Junker domination, founded upon landownership, had to be replaced by a new political leadership. But, as Weber had stated in 1895, neither the bourgeoisie nor the working class was as yet capable of providing that leadership. Bismarck had systematically fragmented and weakened the liberals; and he had stunted the leadership potential of the labour party, the Social Democrats, by passing the antisocialist laws which, until they were repealed in 1890, had effectively placed the working class outside the political structure of the German state.

It became increasingly apparent to Weber, after the turn of the century, that the immediate future of Germany had to lie with a sharpening of the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie. An important underlying motif of The Protestant Ethic was certainly that of identifying the historical sources of such a ‘bourgeois consciousness’. The essays in epistemology and methodology which he wrote at this time also reflected political problems with which he was concerned, on a personal as well as an intellectual plane. Throughout his life, Weber was subject to two conflicting impulsions: towards the passive, disciplined life of the scholar, and towards the active and practical vocation of the politician. On the intellectual level, he sought to draw a clear-cut distinction between these two competing inspirations, recognizing an absolute dichotomy between the validation of ‘factual’ or ‘scientific’ knowledge on the one hand, and of ‘normative’ or ‘value’ judgements on the other. Hence, while the activity of the politician could be guided or informed by scientific knowledge of the kind established by history, economics or sociology, such knowledge could never ultimately validate the goals after which the political leader strove. This position had the effect of distancing Weber from the two major political movements competing with the liberals in Germany: the Conservative nationalists on the right, and the Marxist Social Democrats on the left. Each of these, in Weber’s view, adhered to a ‘normative’ conception of history which they introduced into politics, claiming historical ‘validation’ of their right to rule.

In 1906 Weber also wrote two long essays on Russia, assessing the chances of the development of liberal democracy there following the first Russian Revolution. The so-called ‘constitutional’ government in Russia seemed to him as much of a sham as that in Germany, and for not altogether different reasons: in Russia, as in Germany, a politically conscious bourgeoisie had not yet emerged, and the country was still dominated by the traditional, agrarian elite. The question of the nature of the constitutional reforms required in Germany, if the necessary bourgeois political leadership were to be forthcoming, increasingly occupied Weber’s attention during the years of World War I, especially as it became apparent to him that Germany’s military fortunes in the struggle were declining. In the period immediately before the outbreak of hostilities, and in the early part of the war, he wrote voluminously, producing his long essays on the ‘world religions’, Hinduism, Confucianism and Judaism, and a draft of Economy and Society (which was not published until after his death). But the war years brought to a head the tensions in German society which he had begun to analyse two decades earlier, and he gave over much of his time to the examination of political issues. He had for some while been strongly critical of what he once referred to as the ‘hysterical vanity’ of William II, and later on in the war changed from his previous advocacy of constitutional monarchy to arguing in favour of republicanism. In the two years prior to his death in 1920, he took up an active role in both the academic and political worlds. He accepted a professorship at the University of Vienna, and gave a series of lectures – a version of which was subsequently published as General Economic History3 – in which he attempted to sum up the major themes in his sociology of economic life and capitalist development. Weber made a number of important political speeches during the period of the German Revolution of 1918–19, and narrowly missed selection as a parliamentary candidate for the newly formed Democratic Party. One of his last political activities was as a member of the commission which drafted the Weimar Constitution.

Main themes in Weber’s political writings

The following analysis is divided into three principal sections. This section analyses the main elements in Weber’s political standpoint at the various stages of his career. The next section examines the influence of his political involvements upon the structure and substance of his more academic works. The final part ‘reverses’ this perspective, in order to specify how far his assessment of German politics was itself conditioned by the framework established in his other works.

Weber’s writings in both politics and sociology had their roots in an attempt to analyse the conditions governing the expansion of industrial capitalism in Germany in the post-Bismarckian era. The background to this is well known to anyone with a cursory knowledge of German social history. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, Germany lagged behind both Britain and France in definite respects – especially in terms of its lack of political unification and, as compared to Britain particularly, in its relatively low level of industrial development. Moreover, when an integral German state did come into being, it was achieved under the leadership of Prussia, whose semi-feudal autocracy, founded upon the power of the Junker landowner, the civil service bureaucracy and the officer corps, contrasted considerably with the more liberalized constitutions and traditions of some of the southern German states. The full impact of industrial development, experienced during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, thus took place within the framework of a social and political order which was in important ways quite different from that characterizing the emergence of capitalism in its ‘classical’ form: that is to say, in the case of Britain in the earlier part of the century. The Industrial Revolution in Britain took place in a society where prior developments had created a ‘compromise’ social order in which, as Marx once expressed it, the aristocratic landowners ‘rule officially’, while the bourgeoisie ‘in fact dominate all the various spheres of civil society’.4 But in Germany, the liberal bourgeoisie did not engineer a ‘successful’ revolution. Germany achieved political unification as a consequence of Bismarck’s promotion of an aggressively expansionist policy; and industrialization was effected within a social structure in which power still devolved upon traditionally established elite groups.

When Weber began to take an active interest in politics, he found the liberal wing of the German bourgeoisie in decline, a phenomenon which could be directly traced to the results of Bismarck’s domination.5 In the face of the ‘social question’ or the ‘red spectre’ – the growth of the Social Democratic Party – the liberals opted for the security and economic prosperity seemingly offered by a continuing affiliation to conservative interests. Weber’s Antrittsrede of 1895 contained his first systematic analysis of this situation. In the Antrittsrede, he set himself firmly both against the proponents of an ‘ethical’ approach to politics, and against those who looked to economic development to lead inevitably to the furtherance of political liberties:

There can be no peace in the economic struggle for existence; only he who confuses appearance with reality can believe that the peaceful enjoyment of life is what the future holds for our descendants.... It is not for us to show our successors the way to peace and human contentment, but rather to show them the eternal struggle for the maintenance and cultivation of our national integrity.6

The lecture expressed a fervent advocacy of the interests of the ‘power-state’ as the necessary foundation of German politics. Germany had secured its unity through the assertion of its power in the face of international rivalry; the future of Germany thus lay with the preservation of the capacity of the nation to exert its will in international affairs. But the political leadership necessary to accomplish this, Weber asserted, was lacking. The creation of such a leadership was not merely a matter which depended upon the economic power of the various classes in German society: ‘We ask whether they are politically mature: that is to say, whether they possess respectively the understanding and the capacity to place the political power-interests of the nation above all other considerations.’7

The Junkers, Weber continued, were a declining class, who could not continue to monopolize the political life of the society. But while it was ‘dangerous’ for an economically fading class to maintain political power, it was even more so if the classes which were acquiring an increasingly secure economic position aspired to national leadership without possessing the political maturity necessary to guide the fortunes of a modern state. Neither the working class nor the bourgeoisie as yet possessed such a maturity. The working class was led by a collection of ‘journalistic dilettantes’, at the head of the Social Democratic Party: they had no organic connection with the class they claimed to represent, and their revolutionary posture in fact acted against the further advancement of the working class towards political responsibility. The bourgeoisie remained timid and unpolitical; they longed for the emergence of another ‘Caesar’ who would shelter them from the need to assume a leadership role. This was a consequence of their ‘unpolitical past’, which no amount of economic power in itself could replace. Weber concluded:

The threatening thing in our situation ... is that the bourgeois classes, as the bearers of the power-interests of the nation, seem to wilt away, while there are no signs that the workers are beginning to show the maturity to replace them. The danger does not... lie with the masses. It is not a question of the economic position of the ruled, but rather the political qualification of the ruling and ascending classes which is the ultimate issue in the social-political problem.8

Thus, in 1895, Weber saw as the principal question affecting the future of Germany that of whether the economically prosperous bourgeoisie could develop a political consciousness adequate to undertaking the leadership of the nation. The bulk of his subsequent political writings and actions can be interpreted as an attempt to stimulate the emergence of this liberal political consciousness in Germany. For Weber, this could not be achieved on ‘ethical’ grounds: there could be no question of refounding German liberalism upon a ‘natural law’ theory of democracy. He rejected, moreover, the classical conception of ‘direct’ democracy, in which the mass of the population participated in decision making; this might be possible in small communities, but was quite irrelevant to the contemporary age. In the modern state, leadership had to be the prerogative of a minority: this was an inescapable characteristic of modern times. Any idea ‘that some form of “democracy” can destroy the “domination of men over other men”‘ was Utopian.9 The development of democratic government necessarily depended upon the further advance of bureaucratic organization.

According to Weber, the relationship between democracy and bureaucracy created one of the most profound sources of tension in the modern social order. There was a basic antinomy between democracy and bureaucracy, because the growth of the abstract legal provisions which were necessary to implement democratic procedures themselves entailed the creation of a new form of entrenched monopoly (the expansion of the control of bureaucratic officialdom). While the extension of democratic rights demanded the growth of bureaucratic centralization, however, the reverse did not follow. The historical example of ancient Egypt gave an illustration of this, involving as it did the total subordination of the population to a bureaucratized state apparatus. The existence of large-scale parties, then, which themselves were bureaucratic ‘machines’, was an unavoidable feature of a modern democratic order; but if these parties were headed by leaders who had political expertise and initiative, the wholesale domination of bureaucratic officialdom could be avoided. Weber saw the likelihood of ‘uncontrolled bureaucratic domination’ as the greatest threat of the hiatus in political leadership left by Bismarck’s fall from power. The development of representative democracy became for him the principal means whereby this could be avoided: ‘there is only the choice: leadership-democracy [Führerdemokratie] with the “machine”, or leaderless democracy – that is, the domination of “professional politicians” without a vocation, without the inner charismatic qualities that alone make a leader.’10

But for most of his life Weber found himself unable to identify wholly with any one of the organized political parties in Germany. At the turn of the century, several of the leading parties offered elements of what he sought, but none combined these elements in an acceptable way. He shared the nationalistic aspirations of the Conservative Party, but rejected both the ‘mystic fervour’ with which these were expressed, and the policy of giving economic support to the semi-feudal agrarian structure in the east. Neither of the two main liberal parties seemed to him to give any indication that it could overcome the lack of political inspiration analysed in the Antrittsrede. He accepted, with the National-Liberals (the right wing), the need for the expansion of industrial capitalism as necessary to the foundation of a modern economy; but the National-Liberals, through promoting protective tariffs, maintained close ties with Conservative interests, and continued to support the Prussian ‘three-tier’ system of suffrage in the face of Social Democratic demands for a democratic franchise. The Left-Liberals Weber regarded as having little appreciation of the ‘power’ characteristics of politics: their position was primarily based upon an ‘ethical’ support of democratic ideals of constitutional government, and consequently they posed no threat to the existing order.11

In this situation, it was inevitable that Weber should have felt drawn towards the Social Democratic Party (SPD): this was the only party of considerable political strength which was openly committed to a ‘progressive’ platform. Marianne Weber wrote that Weber often considered joining the SPD; but he was effectively deterred from doing so by several basic factors in his assessment of the role of the party in German politics. He regarded what he saw as a dogmatic insistence upon Marxism on the part of the SPD leadership as one of the main elements producing the stagnation of German political development. The interests of bourgeoisie and working class, Weber held, were compatible for the foreseeable future: both stood to gain from the emergence of a fully industrialized German state. Moreover, if it were the case that the Social Democrats were to come to power by revolutionary means, the result would certainly be a vast expansion of bureaucratization, since the economy would become centrally administered – Weber commented on several occasions that such an eventuality would produce a society which would be comparable to the bureaucratic state of ancient Egypt. But he was clear at an early date that the revolutionary ideology of the Social Democrats was markedly different from the actual interests of the party in German politics. This in itself provided ample evidence of the political naïveté of the party’s leaders: the leadership of the party, according to Weber, was distinguished by its ‘complacent innkeeper face, the visage of the petty bourgeois’.12 His assessment of the SPD in 1907 is well conveyed in the following statement: ‘What has most to fear in the long run, bourgeois society or Social Democracy? As concerns those elements within it which advance a revolutionary ideology, I believe it is the latter. It is now quite plain that there are definite conflicts with the Social Democratic bureaucracy.’ The more, he went on to say, the Social Democrats succeeded in becoming a recognized party, the more they would come to find that their ‘revolutionary ardour’ would be ‘in great danger’: ‘We should see then that Social Democracy would never permanently conquer the towns or the state, but that, on the contrary, the state would conquer the Social Democratic Party.’13 Thus he wrote to Michels in 1907 that he felt, at least for the immediate future, that there was little chance of his working together with the Social Democrats; while he was not officially affiliated to any party, he stood nearer to the bourgeois parties.

In the effects of World War I upon German society, Weber saw both a vindication of his earlier analysis of the German social structure and the possibility of transforming the political order. For some time prior to 1914, he had foreseen the increasing likelihood of the outbreak of a major European conflict. Moreover, he made no secret of the positive sentiments which the ‘great and wonderful’ war inspired in him: the passivity, and the lack of a national political sense, which he had criticized in the past were replaced by a collective assertion of the integrity of the nation in the face of the other world powers. But even in the midst of the early military successes, he was also pessimistic about the chances of a German victory. The most that could come out of the war, concerning Germany’s position among the other European nations, would be the successful establishment of Germany as a recognized ‘great power’ in Central Europe – thus in effect finally bringing about what Bismarck had originally sought to attain. Most of Weber’s attention, even from early on in the war, was in fact directed towards what could be achieved in changing the internal political structure of the country. Of the various political writings which he published towards the end of the war, the most important consisted in a number of articles first published in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 1917, later collected together as Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten Deutschland (‘Parliament and government in a reconstructed Germany’). Here he again deals with the ‘Bismarckian legacy’ – but in the context of the changes wrought by the war upon the character of German politics.

In Parlament und Regierung, on the basis of a sociological interpretation of German political institutions, Weber set out an analysis of the conditions necessary to implement a parliamentary system in Germany which would be something more than what he had previously referred to as the ‘sham constitutionalism’ of the Wilhelmine era. The earlier forms of liberal and Social Democratic critique of government in Germany, for the most part, had been ‘arrogant and extravagant’, and had failed ‘to understand the preconditions of effective parliaments’. But Weber still insisted that the formation of a genuine parliamentary system was a necessity which was imposed by the position of the German national state, and was a means, not an end: ‘For a rational politician the form of government appropriate at any given time is a technical question which depends upon the political tasks of the nation.... In themselves, technical changes in the form of government do not make a nation vigorous or happy or valuable. They can only remove technical obstacles and thus are merely means for a given end.’ In every modern state, he reiterated, but especially in Germany, the main problem facing the formation of political leadership was that of controlling ‘bureaucratic despotism’. The trend towards bureaucratization, moreover, was characteristic of other institutions besides the state: decision making increasingly became an ‘administrative’ matter, carried out according to the regularized precepts of ‘experts’. Thus the modern military commander directed the conduct of battles from his desk. In industry, the private officialdom of white-collar employees increased in numbers relative to the proportion of manual workers. The bureaucratization of the division of labour was founded in ‘the “separation” of the worker from the material means of production, destruction, administration, academic research, and finance in general [which] is the common basis of the modern state, in its political, cultural and military sphere, and of the private capitalist economy’.14 The significance of parliamentary government, according to Weber, was that it offered both the possibility of effective control of officialdom and a source for the education of political leaders. In holding that political leaders should be elected from within parliament, he looked, of course, to the British model. But parliament as a whole could not ‘rule’ any more than the rank-and-file members of a modern political party could do so. As with the latter – and, indeed, with the mass of the population, who remained a ‘passive’ force in politics except at periods when they exercised their voting rights – members of parliament had to accept the leadership of a minority. A ‘Caesarist’ element was inseparable from the modern state; a party leader had to possess the charismatic qualities necessary to acquire and maintain the mass popularity which brought electoral success. The ‘plebiscitary’ leader could use his charismatic appeal to initiate new policies and to depart from established bureaucratic procedure. It was a primary objective of parliament, however, to act as a safeguard against the excessive acquisition of personal power by a plebiscitary leader.