Minerva (2008) 46:385–389 DOI 10.1007/s11024-008-9104-0

Review: Re-Reading Max Weber Sam Whimster, Understanding Weber, Routledge, London and New York, 2007, x + 296 pp, ISBN: 980-415-37076-9 Thomas M. Kemple

Published online: 12 August 2008
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

The grand themes of Max Weber’s massive writings have become canonical references, if not ritualistic cliche´s. Thus we have the rise of industrial capitalism, the bureaucratic legitimation of power, the disenchantment of cultural world-views, the fragmentation of values, and the spread of an ascetic work ethic and other forms of disciplined conduct. What distinguishes Sam Whimster’s new book from other recent contributions to the so-called ‘Weber renaissance’ is that it sheds new light on these themes by closely engaging with the literary, rhetorical and semantic subtleties of the Weberian corpus. More than any other English-speaking commentator on Weber writing today, Sam Whimster is the most qualified to take on this task: as editor of the journal Max Weber Studies, as editor of two major collections—Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity (Whimster 1987) and Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy (Lash and Whimster 1999), and as translator and editor of Essential Weber (Whimster 2004), to which the present work serves as a companion. Instead of merely summarizing concepts and arguments, Whimster produces a critical portrait of Weber by scrutinizing his sources and methods. ‘Weber planned to write books that he never got around to executing’, Whimster observes, in describing what he calls the ‘big bang’ from 1910 to 1914, when Weber planned and drafted his two most ambitious projects—namely, ‘The Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ and Economy and Society. ‘And the converse is just as important: he wrote texts that were subsequently published but that he himself would not have published—and certainly not in the unrevised state in which they appeared after his death’ (p. 156). The unruly and unstable character of Weber’s writings requires delving into the minutiae of bibliographic and biographical dating, the intricacies of personal and scholarly correspondence, and the labyrinths of footnotes and references. This work T. M. Kemple (&) Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia, 6303 N. W. Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1 e-mail: [email protected]

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in turn demands a thorough familiarity with Weber’s idiosyncratic German and even his handwriting, and close attention to the editorial introductions to the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works, Baier et al. 1984), especially those by Wolfgang Mommsen, Wolfgang Schluchter, Hans Kippenberg, and Edith Hanke, which give clues to the original state and transmission of these texts. The objective of all this effort is not simply to ‘get Weber right’, or to shed light on obscure aspects of his work after generations of misinterpretation or oversight. Rather, Whimster’s aim is both to clarify Weber’s achievements, in the interest of extending his most promising lines of argument; and to expose the gaps and flaws in his arguments, in attempting to correct for them. The early discussion of ‘Weber before Weberian Sociology’ (a phrase he borrows from Lawrence Scaff, another pioneer of the Weber archives) sets the pattern for the book as a whole. The enormously productive phase of Weber’s early career from 1889 to his breakdown in 1899 is shown to have been crucial in establishing his lifelong commitment to the historically-oriented study of ‘national economics’ (Volks- or Nationalwirtschaft), even after becoming a sociologist, albeit a ‘reluctant’ one. His dissertation on medieval commercial partnerships (the only work Weber published that can claim the status of a ‘book’), his habilitation thesis on Roman agrarian law, his commissioned study of East Elbian agricultural workers, and his gargantuan writings on the stock and commodity exchanges were all brought into focus in the lecture course he gave on general theoretical economics in 1898, some of the notes of which Whimster has meticulously transcribed and translated (pp. 25–27). While approaching Weber’s genius in terms of these early signs of disciplinary breadth and theoretical insight at first seems arcane, it ultimately serves to highlight the originality of Weber’s concern with the social meaning or Geist (spirit) of economic conduct, and the cultural significance of industrial capitalism, rather than with the psychology of utility or acquisitive drives. From this point of view, Chapter 2, on ‘types of economic activity’, in Weber’s final version of Economy and Society, drafted in the last year of his life in 1920, can be viewed as the culmination of attempts to establish ‘economic sociology’ as the central reference for other, more specialised sociologies of religion, law, domination, communities, and organizations. Drawing on the often heated debates surrounding the editing and presentation of Weber’s works, Whimster also turns his attention to the problem of what a ‘Weberian sociology beyond Weber’ might look like. This objective is most successfully realized in his chapters on Weber’s celebrated studies of religion. Here we learn that the ‘Protestant ethic’ study of 1904–1905 began as a critical ‘review’ of Werner Sombart’s monumental Modern Capitalism (1902) for the new journal that he, Sombart and Edgar Jaffe´ co-edited, but grew into an extensive two-part ‘essay’, indeed, an exploratory investigation formulating the basic problematic (Fragestellung) of his life’s work. In later revising the essay for his collected essays on the sociology of religion, Weber was concerned not simply to defend his thesis on what Whimster calls ‘the characterology of the ascetic work ethic’ against a decade of sustained attack, but to recontextualize the argument within a global framework in order to analyse leading ‘culture-carriers’.

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To demonstrate what is at stake in merging these projects, Whimster turns to a critical assessment of Weber’s use of primary sources. The results are impressive when Weber examines the significance of subjective beliefs and religious worldviews, as in his use of Edward Dowden’s (1902) study of Bunyan, and in his intervention into the scholarly debates in which Paul Hinneberg was a leading figure (see pp. 59–63 and 164–179). But Weber’s selective use of quotations from Calvin’s Westminster Confession of 1647 is shown to be vulnerable to criticism for overlooking how the severe doctrine of predestination was mollified in significant ways. Also problematic is Weber’s narrow focus on what Whimster calls the ‘singularity argument’ which asserts that the rationality of the West is simply unique, thereby downplaying a concern with determining the causes, consequences, and possible alternatives to this system. Some of the most illuminating sections of Whimster’s book point to promising research that could compensate for these deficiencies. For example, while Harold Innis’s work on the cultural bias of communications media does not specifically address Weber, his approach to economic history helps us to see beyond Weber’s focus on Luther and other Protestant reformers to understand how a literacy movement was facilitated by the mass production of Bibles on a paper-based press. Likewise, the studies of Karl Jaspers and S. N. Eisenstadt on the so-called ‘axial age’ (*800–200 B.C.) can be read to suggest that the emergence of rationalized world religions from myth-based civilizations opened up multiple paths to modernity, and not just that which happened to emerge in the occident. In any case, we can see that Weber’s comparative sociology of religion lays the foundation for ‘a differential historical sociology of socio-cultural processes and civilizational configurations’ (p. 3), which scholars now have the means both to build upon and surpass. Perhaps Whimster’s most significant insights concern Weber’s preliminary studies and revised outlines and drafts for Economy and Society (summarized in the diagram on p. 157). Although this work began as a commissioned collection of articles for an academic handbook—the Outline of Social Economics (Grundriss der Sozialo¨konomik), Weber hoped it would be his crowning achievement. In fact, Whimster notes, the essays that make up the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ were ‘preliminary studies for the Grundriss, almost implying that they were working papers’ (p. 162). However, it is clear that their emphasis on cultural worldviews were meant to supplement the search for socio-economic factors in the other project. The groundwork for Economy and Society, and the bridge to that work from the Protestant ethic debates, were sketched in several studies during the previous decade. These earlier studies include his 1910–1914 draft essay on ancient and medieval cities, which traced the rise of homo economicus in the guise of town burghers; and his essays on Protestant sects in America, on democratic-revolutionary movements in Russia, and on the psycho-physics of labour in Germany. But perhaps the most important of these was his long 1909 encyclopedia article on ancient agrarian regimes, which sketched the bifurcation of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ civilizations through the priesthood, and through the shift from the coastal Athenian oikos (household economy) to the inland Roman oikoi (industrial workshops). With the withdrawal of key contributors to the Grundriss, especially the influential historian Karl Bu¨cher, Weber’s plans for developing his own elaboration

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of ‘the economy and the social orders and powers’ expanded significantly. At the same time, his focus shifted from the genetic analysis of historical causes and tendencies to the presentation of interrelated typologies of universal-historical themes. Among the most important of these is his delineation in several drafts (including a final version from 1919 to 1920) of the types of Herrschaft, a difficult term which Talcott Parsons translated as ‘authority’, and C. Wright Mills called ‘domination’, but which Whimster (following Benjamin Nelson) prefers to render as ‘rulership’. Again referring to the rearrangement of chapters and headings in the text, Whimster argues (following Michael Mann) that Weber’s political sociology of the legitimacy of power on the basis of economic interests and social prestige can be extended to military force. The same political sociology can also be extended to an analysis of ‘plebiscitary leadership democracy’, either as a ‘mixed’ type of charismatic and legal-rational rulership, or as a ‘value-rational’ ideal type of its own. There are times in Understanding Weber when Whimster’s excitement at finding some unnoticed textual link or new line of inquiry is dampened by a tendency to which Weber fell prey (especially in the later version of Economy and Society)— namely, to express ideas in the form of an encyclopedia entry or a systematic treatise, with main headings, descending subsections, and conceptual definitions accompanied by explanations, examples, and cross-references. This habit becomes prominent in the discussions of the interpretive method which Weber developed from the hermeneutics of Wilhelm Dilthey (among others) in his pathbreaking discussions of ‘Objectivity’ (1904, Weber 2004a), ‘Interpretive Sociology’ (1913, Weber 1981), and ‘Basic Sociological Categories’ (1920, Weber 2004b). While the latter two set the conceptual templates for the 1910–1914 and 1918–1920 versions of Economy and Society, respectively, it is above all the essay on ‘Objectivity’ that ‘marks the coming of age of twentieth century social science and the removal of the comforts of positivism, naı¨ve empiricism, and the transcendentalism of ideas and values’ (p. 104). Despite arguing that the ideal type—a ‘heuristic net cast in the flux of social reality’ (p. 267)—furnishes the basic Weberian paradigm, Whimster offers only schematic summaries of this method, rather than indicating how it might be pursued towards, say, a social phenomenology, ethnomethodology, deconstructive sociology, or actor-network theory. Weber’s contributions are likewise given an overall negative characterization: Weber’s thinking about sociology is not broadly accommodating. He always turned his back on a general sociology, disputing its claims to a totalizing, or organicist, or positivist, or evolutionary view of the world. He had a disinclination to build in the features that the later twentieth century has thought indispensable. He preferred to conceptualize the sociological field exclusively in terms of social relationships of particular kinds. He did not develop an explicit theory of institutions, he had no notion of role and he rejected a formal theory of system differentiation. Above all, he was never tempted to construct a frame or social system within which the actions of the individual were to be integrated (p. 266). In concluding his study with an appeal to the task of developing Weber’s approach to social economics, hermeneutics, the philosophy of history, and the

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singularity of modernity, Whimster seems to suggest that only by frankly acknowledging fissures in the edifice are we capable of seeing how Weber helps us understand the forms of modernity that dominate our world. It is therefore fitting for us to recall Weber’s own programmatic statement of his larger project in ‘Objectivity’: The social science that we wish to pursue is a science of reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft). Our aim is an understanding of the uniqueness of the lived reality within which we are placed … to understand the context and cultural significance of individual phenomena in this lived reality – and, on the other hand, the reasons for their being historically so and not otherwise (quoted p. 106).

References Baier, Horst, M. Rainer Lepsius, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Johannes Winckelmann, ed. 1984. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Dowden, Edward. 1902. Puritan and anglican. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tru¨bner. Weber, Max. 1981. Some categories of interpretive sociology (trans: Graber, Edith E.). Sociological Quarterly 22: 166–182. Lash, Scott, and Sam Whimster, ed. 1999. Max Weber and the culture of anarchy. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Weber, Max. 2004a. The ‘‘objectivity’’ of knowledge in social science and social policy. In Essential Weber, trans/ed. Sam Whimster, 359–404. London and New York: Routledge. Weber, Max. 2004b. Basic sociological categories (trans: Tribe, Keith). In Essential Weber, trans\ed. Sam Whimster, 311–358. London and New York: Routledge. Whimster, Sam, ed. 1987. Max Weber, rationality and modernity. London and Boston: Allan & Unwin. Whimster, Sam, ed. 2004. Essential Weber. London and New York: Routledge.

Author Biography Thomas M. Kemple teaches social and cultural theory at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’ (Stanford University Press, 1995), and is currently working on a companion study of the literary, aesthetic, and rhetorical construction of Max Weber’s later speeches and essays.

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