Soc (2014) 51:318–320 DOI 10.1007/s12115-014-9784-z

BOOK REVIEW

Joshua Derman: Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought From Charisma to Canonization Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 271 pp. (ISBN: 978–1107025882) $96.95 Stephen Turner

Published online: 25 April 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Max Weber is now owned by a scholarly industry, with its own dedicated journal, Max Weber Studies, and an increasingly distant relation to the discipline that made him famous in the first place, sociology. Despite this, Weber, as a topic, flourishes. His letters and edited writings continue to appear as part of the vast Max Weber Gesamtausgabe project, which continues to promise revelations, especially about the work known as Economy and Society, a new translation of his methodological writings in English by Hans-Henrik Bruun (Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings 2012) has been published, more than one biography is in the works, and studies of his reception and relevance, such as the book edited by Álvaro Morcillo Laiz and Eduardo Weisz (Max Weber. Una mirada iberoamericana forthcoming), continue to appear. It was of course not always so. Becoming canonical depended on the efforts of many people on both sides of the Atlantic. Joshua Derman’s book tells the story of his “canonization” from Weber’s emergence as a Heidelberg sage to the recent past. This is a reception history, but one focused on the uses made of Weber, uses that were often far from his original intent. Some of this covers material that Regis Factor and I discussed in Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value (1984); a book published 30 years ago, which he generously cites and quotes from. At the time, there was almost no secondary literature on the reception or the figures involved in the reception. Scholarship marches on: now there is an enormous amount. So Derman’s task is to provide a narrative that takes account of this S. Turner (*) Department of Philosophy FAO 226, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA e-mail: [email protected]

vast literature. There is no possibility of summarizing: there is simply too much and too many players. Derman takes an interesting approach. He is concerned with the uses of Weber, whether or not these uses conformed with Weber’s own views. And he finds a large number of important instances where Weberian ideas get appropriated for purposes completely alien to their original sense, but in striking ways. He attributes this oddity of the Weber reception to the peculiarities of Weber himself. The context of Heidelberg is a large part of this story. Weber was a Professor for only part of his adult life, first at Freiburg, then at Heidelberg, then briefly at the end of his life in Vienna. After his retirement for health reasons from Heidelberg in 1904, he and his wife and Ernst Troeltsch lived in a magnificent house across the river from the romantic castle ruins. His wife held a salon, a typically Germanic affair for intellectuals, with paper presentations, which introduced him to many of the young up and coming scholars at the University. Weber’s reputation while he was alive was a mixed thing: son of a Senator, he had been given a prestigious appointment to study Polish guest workers on the estates East of the Elbe, had impressed his elders with his habilitation on Roman agricultural land, and as he left the university became the co-editor of the major social science journal of the time, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, and had published several “methodological” essays and the Protestant Ethic ([1905] 1958). Yet he had no secure home in any discipline, though he was to help found (and soon resign from) the German Sociological Society. Sociology was not to secure its first academic chair until 1920. So Weber’s reputation was to an extraordinary extent bound up with his personal relations to the young scholars who surrounded him, who came from several fields, and to what we might call his personal charisma.

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This personal appeal is difficult to recapture, and one of the strengths of Derman’s book is his sustained effort to do so. Weber was no shrinking violet, and his strong personality, together with his distinctive views on the nature of scholarship made him into a model admired for his scholarly rectitude. His polemics against scholars he took to be cheating by ignoring the fact value distinction and sneaking valuative judgments into scholarship resonated. But they had, among other effects, the effect of marking out Weber as a hero of truth and scholarship. It was this effect, together with his own public performances in the Vocation of Science and the Vocation of Politics speeches (1919), that enabled him to be turned into a heroic figure by his admirer Karl Jaspers. Weber, the personality who could be interpreted as a radical individualist advocate of the principle of personality or Personlichkeit, thus took on a mythic life of its own. After this, the German discussion of Weber was entangled with evaluations of his personality and the question of whether he was a hero and whether Germany needed a hero. Persona and cultural attitude, especially toward modernity, merged in the Vocations speeches, which had, as Derman shows, a deep impact on many young intellectuals. But what was the impact? There were a variety of interpretations of his stance. The essay on the Protestant Ethic ([1905] 1930) reinforced his association with individualism, and also generated a vast amount of commentary, much of it irrelevant to the actual text. But the main line of discussion was set shortly after his death by a wide-ranging dispute over the role of intellectuals in supplying world views: Weber was cast on the side that denied that Wissenschaft was or could be in this business; his critics on the literary and artistic side held that providing comprehensive world views was the task of intellectuals. Weber’s public identity was, ironically, fixed by this debate around the question of what world view he did provide. Derman distinguishes three categories of response to his de-magification and anti-utopian rational resignation, each of which was an interpretation of Weber himself. One he calls “cold anti-utopianism”: “a principled rejection of the utopian movements of his time as intellectually dishonest, fanatical, or escapist” (121), which left Weber “untethered to any value that might ground him, heroically enduring the lonely existence of modern life” (121). Another he calls “hot antiutopianism” which depicts Weber as a Kierkegaardian Knight of Faith, defending his personal convictions in the face of a resisting world. The third, “temperate anti-utopianism” is “resignation with passion,” accepting the tragic character of a de-magified cosmos, but affirming the dignity of human life and action. Elements of these ideas, Derman points out at length, especially the denial of the present relevance of past values, reappear in the writings of Nazi theorists, who style him as a

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radical individualist and thus alien to Nazi communitarianism, but important for his recognition of the historical pastness of Christian morality. These uses of Weber do not reappear in American social science, where Weber’s closely related ideas of value-free science gets inserted into pre-existing discussions of the role of sociology. Economy and Society ([1968] 1978), the book named in a poll of the International Sociological Association as the most influential sociological work of the century, had a difficult birth as a posthumously patched together collection of unintegrated and unrevised scraps. Its reception was chilly: it fell between the stools of “formal sociology,” the kind of systembuilding conceptual elaboration characteristic of the neoKantian influenced philosophical sociology of the interwar years and concrete sociological study. Derman emphasizes the shifting ways in which Weber defined the relation of sociology and history, one conceptual the other causal, as a source of incoherence in the text and in Weber’s project as a whole. Nor were the key ideas of the text, which Derman understands to be focused on the conceptualization of social groups, readily assimilated. Such concepts as charisma were only sparingly applied to Hitler in Germany itself, and only became important later and as a result of their (surprisingly slow) adoption in American sociology. So how did this combination of culturally untranslatable issues and obscure texts lead to the triumphant Weber that eventually appeared in American sociology and on the world stage? Derman gives the bulk of the credit for Weber’s canonization to Talcott Parsons, for his novel idea of linking Weber to modernization theory. It was Weber’s idea of linking various spheres—religiosity, capitalism, bureaucratization, and so forth, that enabled Parsons to do this. And it was the power of Parsons at Harvard, and the influence of his model “Social Relations” department, with its ambitious interdisciplinary connections, that assured that his ideas would be imprinted on the leading social scientists of the generation that came out of graduate school in the early 1950s. But this also meant that Weber had been transformed, against his own inclinations, into a holist and a prophetic diagnostician of modernity. Derman does not tell the story of how Weber was painfully rescued from the interpretations that prevailed in the 50s and 60s, a rescue that led to the present Weber industry. This is a story that needs to be told, as the generation that recovered something closer to the original Weber did so against great opposition and hostility. Acknowledging the political Weber was a bridge too far for many in the generation that still held power over publication in the 70s and 80s. The methodological writings were systematically misunderstood, following the misinterpretations of von Schelting and Parsons, and the resistance to correcting these misunderstandings was also bitter. The review system of American sociology and book

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publishing forced much of the discussion off shore, and out of the premier presses. But the revolution prevailed. The revolutionaries are now at the end of their careers. But they left the Weber that Derman writes about: a complex thinker who is also apparently inexhaustible, demanding to interpret, and whom no discipline could contain.

Soc (2014) 51:318–320 Stephen Turner is Distinguished University Professor in Philosophy at the University of South Florida. His books include the standard history of American Sociology, The Impossible Science, with Jon Turner, The Social Theory of Practices 1994, and many articles and chapters and several books on Weber, including two with Regis Factor, Max Weber and the Dispute Over Reason and Value: A Study in Philosophy, Ethics, and Politics, 1984.and Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker, 1994. His most recent book is Explaining the Normative, 2010.