Max Weber, Critical Theory, and the Administered World HARVEY C. GREISMAN Department of Sociology West Chester State College and GEORGE RITZER Department of Sociology University of Maryland ABSTRACT The sociological perspectives of Max Weber and the "Frankfurt School" have been viewed as polarities in much of the recent literature. The Frankfurt sociologists were advocates of a neo-Marxism that stressed dialectical reasoning and rejected the notion of value-neutrality. Weber adhered to the canons of causal logic and cultivated the ideal of objectivity in social research. Notwithstanding these theoretical and methodological differences, Weber and the advocates of critical theory arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions about the "fate" of the modern world. Weber saw the advent of a bureaucratic "iron cage" which would effectively negate the role of the individual, while the Frankfurt sociologists posited the onset of an "administered world" in which human activity would be smothered in an ever-expanding network of management and control Given these commonalities, a revision of the standard evaluation of Weber and critical theory is suggested.
INTRODUCTION T h e w o r k s of M a x W e b e r have p l a y e d a central role in sociology, e s p e c i a l l y since Parsons i n t r o d u c e d W e b e r to a general s o c i o l o g i c a l audience. W e b e r was a t t r a c t i v e f o r a n u m b e r of reasons: his supposed v a l u e - n e u t r a l i t y , his causal Requests for reprints should be sent to Harvey C. Greisman, Department of Sociology, West Chester State College, West Chester, PA 19380.
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logic, his empiricism linked to a theoretical orientation, and his liberal-to-conservative political stance. On the other hand, Karl Marx and his adherents have played a minimal role in the development of academic sociology in North America, at least until recent years. Many American sociologists were put off by Marx and the neo-Marxians because they seemed to stand for positions that were antithetical to those taken by Weber; fact and value were inextricably linked, they substituted dialectical for causal logic, their empiricism was clearly subordinated to their theoretical orientation, and they espoused a revolutionary ideology. Because of these early characterizations, sociologists have been typically blind to the linkages between Weberian and Marxian theory. In line with the recent reevaluation of the importance of Marxian theory, sociologists have begun to see some of these similarities. Our goal in this paper is to call attention to the significance of a particular variety of neo-Marxian theory, critical theory, which, despite growing importance in Europe as well as on the fringes of the discipline in North America, has not been accepted as a sociological paradigm. We hope to make the case that critical theory's image of modern society is remarkably similar to the Weberian perspective despite the fact that it operates from often antithetical theoretical orientations. The argument that follows will try to show that both Weber and the Critical School concluded that bureaucratization, rationalization, and "disenchantment" were turning society into a completely functional and antiseptic place where the mystical and irrational aspects of life had no role save entertainment. Despite differences in politics, method, and ethics, the two sociological approaches .move toward the same conclusion: the social world is being rationalized and administered to the point where human beings emerge as virtual prisoners in an "iron cage" of bureaucratic controls. WEBER AND RATIONALITY Weber was focally concerned with the rationalization of the world and the role played by bureaucracy in that rationalization. For Weber, the bureaucracy was both the paradigm of the rationalization process as well as the "housing" within which much of that rationalization took
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place. Weber was highly ambivalent about bureaucracy, and rationalization in general: No machinery in the world functions so precisely as this apparatus of men and, moreover so cheaply...rational calculation...reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself into a somewhat bigger cog...The passion for bureaucratization.., drives us to despair (1968:1ii). Thus while Weber's conservative sympathies led him to applaud the efficiency of the bureaucracy, he recoiled at its dehumanizing effects. Weber had a similar orientation toward every other aspect of the rational society. While he lauded the efficiency of the market system, he also held that The 'free' market, that is, the market which is not bound by ethical norms, with its exploitation of constellations of interests and monopoly positions and its dickering, is an abomination to every system of fraternal ethics (1968a:637). Although rationality occupies the central position in Weber's sociology, it does so in a rather ambiguous way. Sometimes it is presented as a methodological tool for understanding social action: as such, it " . . . certainly does not involve a belief in the actual predominance of rational elements in human life." Yet throughout his work, Weber makes it clear that he sees life, particularly in the West, coming increasingly under the influence of rationality. Weber uses two separable concepts when he speaks of rationality. One of these is zweckrational, or formal rationality. This emphasizes the social actor's planned and calculated choices in a means-ends schema. The other concept is wertrational, or substantive rationality, in which action is chosen within an overall context of values, such as socialism or communism. For Weber, the signal achievement of the West is the systematic development of zweckrational as it gradually overcame wertrational and other forms of less rational action. Weber traced the development of this formal rationality through several channels of Western social and cultural life. Paramount among these are bureaucracy, capitalism, Calvinism, a professional priesthood, and the parallel diminution of
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aesthetic values, mystical faiths, and tradition in general. Hence, the distinctive and unique attributes of the West became directly identified with the progressive onset of formal rationality. Although Weber was appalled by the effects of rationalization, he saw no way out. In various places throughout his work he viewed bureaucracy, his paradigm of rationality, as "escape proof," "practically unshatterable," and among the most difficult institutions to destroy once it has been created. Similarly, he felt that the individual bureaucrat could not "squirm out" of the bureaucracy once he was "harnessed in it." On most occasions, Weber equivocated on the issue of escaping bureaucracy. He usually prefaced terms like "unshatterable" with qualifiers like "practically." Yet he did say that "the future belongs to bureaucratization" (1968a:1401). We can only judge from the totality of Weber's work what he really saw as the chances of escaping bureaucratization, and more generally, rationalization.
CONTROL AND OPPOSITION In a variety of public lectures to politicians, scientists, and others, Weber urged his audience to adopt personal charisma, to be innovative, independent, and creative. In so doing, he was urging them to take a position outside of, and opposed to, the bureaucracy and its controls. He felt that the onty hope for society was at least a few personally independent people who were capable of opposing the bureaucracy. One of his favorite themes was that "Politicians must be the countervailing force against bureaucratic domination" (1968a:1417). There is something pathetic in these feeble efforts to drum up some sort of opposition to the bureaucracy, and to rationalization in general. These harangues really fly in the face of his entire work. Furthermore, they contradict a basic strand in his work which sees both professionalization and bureaucratization as rationalizing forces (Ritzer, 1975:627-634). Since the professional politician and the professional scientist were both products of the rational society, it is difficult to see how they could come to represent meaningful opposition to their brethren in the rationalizing process--the bureaucrats.
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In the end, it is Weber's focus on rationalization and his theoretical orientation toward that process that dooms him, and everyone else, to the iron cage. Mitzman has pointed out that Weber may be seen as engaged in a sociology of reification, a process whereby "a value developed by men expressly to satisfy a psychological need leads them unwittingly to create new institutions which then impose their value on their successors" (1970:172). This is related to Weber's interest in the sociology of unanticipated consequences. Courses embarked on for one reason often lead to developments unforeseen by the initiators. More importantly, they lead to the creation of unanticipated structures and institutions that come to enslave their creators. This applies to many aspects of Weber's work, but is nowhere more evident than in his ideas on how Calvinism led to a totally unanticipated structure, rational capitalism, that encapsulated the heirs of Calvinism in a system that was opposed to their religious beliefs. Weber makes this quite clear in The Protestant Ethic: In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the saint like 'a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.' But fate decreed that the cloak should become a housing hard as steel (1958:181). The hope of meaningful opposition to the bureaucracy was for Weber only a public hope. It is hard to believe that in the quiet of his study that Weber really believed in a Messiah, but this hope for escape through charisma was the only possibility for freedom that he held out for the thoroughly rationalized, bureaucratized, adminstered world.
CRITICAL THEORY AND TOTAL ADMINISTRATION Critical theory accepts the Marxian premise that all forms of domination issue from society's production-based substructure, but stresses the fact that in the current stage of social development, the consumption of culture as a commodity assumes critical importance. Culture as a commodity becomes an agent of administration. When culture, which previously assigned the negative, ironic, and ecstatic aspects of social life to a protected realm, itself becomes administered, then the world is close to being totally controlled. The
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ominous and sinister world of total administration is a major concern for critical theory, and it is viewed through the special cluster of concepts that critical theory has come to denote. As distinct from standard sociological practice, critical theory does not focus on discrete portions of the social process. For critical theory, "society" itself is the concept that deserves and receives extended treatment. A polemical justification for this involves a critique of "mainstream" sociology which allegedly supports the status quo by describing it in hypnotic detail: A sociology which allows itself to be diverted, and which sacrifices the central category, that of society itself, for the sake of the idol of controllable data...would regress and would join ranks with that spiritual regression which must be counted among the most threatening symptoms of total sociation (Frankfurt Institute for Socia~ Research, 1973:33). "Total sociation"--the behavioral counterpart of the administered world--sums up critical theory's appraisal of the most recent phase of bourgeois society. The society's economic base engenders rationalization and standardization, it aims to bring all factors under control, its goal is total administration. These tendencies are abetted by technology, transport, communication, information retrieval, and the overall decentralization of industry which spreads late capitalism all over the map to the point where " . . . t h a t which still appears to be 'outside' owes its extraterritoriality more to toleration or to intentional planning, rather than that something 'exotic' still exists" (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, 1972:31; Adorno, 1974:83). ADMINISTERED SOCIETY AND ITS CULTURE Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno concentrated on the historical antecedents of total administration, Marcuse stresses its more concrete behavioral and cultural aspects. These are elaborated in his One-Dimensional Man, the book that earned him the epithet, 'theoretician of the New Left' and first brought critical theory to some prominence outside Eu rope.
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Marcuse's work is premised from the outset on the concept of total administration; he does not develop or justify the idea, it is taken as a fait accompli and his analysis of advanced industrial society is built on it. The critical theorist confronts a state of unfreedom because its total administration is systematic restriction of (a) 'technically' available free time; (b) the quantity and quality of goods and services 'technically' available for vital individual needs;(c) the intelligence(conscious and unconscious)capable of comprehending and realizing the possibilities of self-determination (1964:49). Marcuse is quick to note that this administered world is quite capable of satisfying its population's needs in a genuine and emancipated way, but it prefers to manipulate minds and bodies with a panoply of synthetic, false needs. Since, once created, these false needs can only be satisfied by the quixotically irrational system that invented them, masses of people develop a harmful and enslaving dependency on the very administration that dominates them. Within the parameters of critical theory, culture is viewed from a materialist position. In German social science, divisions between "culture" (Kultur) and civilization had become popular. Culture was thought of as something transcendental in Oscar Wilde's sense, extramundane, separate from society's give-and-take and originating in another dimension. Critical theory, following Marx, brought culture down to the level of commodity exchange. In doing so, it departs radically from Weber's position as articulated in The Protestant Ethic in which he rejected the hypothesis that culture is determined by the means of production. As the economic sub-structure of society becomes less individualistic, less anarchic, less predicated on laissez-faire, and more centralized, administered, and governable, culture follows suit. Culture, too, became the object of administration. Its rough spots were smoothed out, distinctions between "mass" and "high" culture were obliterated, and it was marketed in the same fashion as other consumer goods. Culture is an integral part of society, yet at times critical theory tends to break it out of the analysis of society as a whole. This is done because Marcuse and the other critical theorists saw culture as one of the last possible hiding places
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of non-rationalized, non-adminstered values and behavior. It follows from their dialectical approach that leftovers of past centuries, which might hold symbolic qualities of freedom, could still exist in transmuted form in the culture of late capitalism. Hence, culture assumes a special significance since with its administration the society of total control comes perilously close to fulfillment. Culture plays a role in the Critical School's work similar, but not identical, to that of charisma in Weber's. That is, both of them are last bastions against the assault of total administration, but they too must ultimately fall. The reason for the demise of the unadministered culture lies in mass production. The sheer bulk of mass produced items makes a world of its own, a quality of existence that emerges from the enormous quantity of its artifacts. In summing up this problem, Marcuse writes that: the productive apparatus and the goods and services it produces 'sell' or impose the social system as a whole.., the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole.., the products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood (1964:12). Critical theory's critique of mass culture describes a new pathology which arises under these conditions; and "media poisoning" becomes a legitimate problem as human existence is modulated by the mass-produced melodies of the entertainment industry. New styles in music, "stars," fashions, art pummel the brain in rapid succession, then simply vanish. The production of culture is too fast for the circuitry of the human brain to process and evaluate; standards crumble, individual aesthetic judgment disintegrates under the bombardment, and shattered minds assume a "consumer" stance. People become passive receptors of commercial phenomena. They "clamour for what they are destined to get" and become immune to genuine variation and craftsmanship. As a result of total administration, the senses become constricted and attenuated. Affective and libidinal drives atrophy as experience becomes pre-digested. Chronic boredom sets in as the culture industry, pushed toward an infinity-vector, begins to recycle and repeat its programmed output. Hence, "nostalgia" becomes marketable as the line between past and present fades.
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TOTAL ADMINISTRATION AND THE INDIVIDUAL Like Weber, critical theorists view the individual as potentially significant, but in the current stage of capitalism, the individual per se ceases to exist. Bourgeois society is predicated on free labor and on the distinction between the individual and social realms. As the difference vanishes under the total administration of monopoly capital, ideological affirmations of individualism increase in their vehemence. Adorno saw the real individual as mythical in the current stage of societal development. So, "the illusory importance and autonomy of private life drags on only as an appendage of the social process." In the "open-air prisons" constructed by total administration, the basic tendency of the human species toward variation is eliminated and "it is no longer important to know what depends on what, such is the extent to which everything is one" (1967:30,34). In an ironic way, the idea of the individual has gone through an historical cycle. It was once the cornerstone of humanism, and became the doctrine that accompanied the bourgeoisie in its ascendency. Today, the myth of being different from the next person forestalls a collective nervous breakdown and preserves the commodity-character of human relationships. In his essay, "The Latest Attack on Metaphysics," Horkheimer sees the "dreams of metaphysics" as a last refuge for neurotics seeking escape from total administration. "In these dreams the isolated, insignificant individual can likely identify himself with super-human forces, with omnipotent nature, with the stream of life, or an inexhaustible worldground" (1972:138). These are just dreams however, and the individual falls back on reality, desperately advertising his/her uniqueness through idiosyncracy, exhibitionism, and megalomania. Cultivation of the "inner life" with its attendant isolation becomes crucial; on it depends " . . . t h e power to withstand the plastic surgery of the prevailing economic system which carves all men into one pattern" (1972:273). Much like Weber, the critical theorists stressed the role of rationality in this process. However unlike Weber, critical theory does not distinguish between weft- and zweck-rational. Rather, rationality is tied to the concept of enlightenment, in which legend, fantasy, superstition, and animism were to be replaced by a world view predicated on the primacy of human reason. This process of rationalization which, along
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with Weber, the critical theorists refer to as "disenchantment," is traced to ancient sources by Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment wherein they elaborate a kind of global analysis of the phenomenon as rigid and as false as the "unscientific" beliefs it claims to displace. Indeed, the bourgeois concept of rationality is more replete with repressive capacities than the old mythical cosmology. The discipline, sensory denial, and appeals to reason are, it is argued, merely new and sinister forms of myth which in the hands of an international corporate elite and the immense organizations at their disposal, move society toward the goal of a total and rationalized state of administration. Just as in Weber, the works of the Critical School reflect a certain philosophy of world history in which rationalization is seen as a "master phenomena" that ultimately brings about the bourgeois goal of a managed society. As bourgeois society moves ahead, its basic contradictions are exacerbated. In trying to erase or hide these antagonisms, the structure of falsification becomes shakier, and it is on these fundamental contradictions that capitalism will ultimately founder. For example, the rapid-fire attempts of world administrators to achieve global control--a Kafkaesque version of Wendell Wilkie's "One World"--brings forth a bipolar military situation. And, "it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the development toward the total society is irrevocably accompanied by the danger of the total destruction of mankind" (Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, 1972:31). Even with this apocalyptic warning, the critical approach of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and their colleagues should not be interpreted as pessimism. They have held that only critical reason can break through the encrusted mystifications of a total society" where everything hardens into ideology. Critical theory aims toward emancipation. In Mannheim's sense, it is fundamentally utopian (Remmling, 1975:64-79). DE-RATIONALIZATION OF THE WORLD An overriding concern with the phenomena of secularization, rationalization, bureaucratization, and the so-called "disenchantment of the world" was unique to neither Weber nor the Critical School. The major German philosopher of the nineteenth century, Hegel, voiced a similar anxiety that ra-
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tionalization, when carried to what a romantic temperament would judge extreme limits, could denude the world of spiritual qualities and so create its own nemesis: It will yet be seen whetherenlightenment can continue in its state of satisfaction; that longing of the troubled, beshadowedspirit, mourning over the loss of its spiritual world, lies in the background. Enlightenment has on it this stain of unsatisfied longing. (1967:589).
Although he clearly anticipated reaction to "disenchantment," Hegel may have been surprised at the forms it assumed during the mid-twentieth century. The myths which animated the pre-industrial world were cruel and even sadistic in their repression of the individual. If mortals defied the gods, they were made to suffer exquisite torture. And the gods, who were models of human frailty, dispensed justice with whimsy and spite. Judeo-Christian myths quake with the fury of a jealous and vengeful god who controls everything by himself. Twentieth century m y t h - - o f which bureaucratized science is part and parcel--depersonalizes cosmic power in the form of a method of thought that was created by humans, but which now stands above them as a supreme criterion of realit% The essence of the new myth is neither jealous nor whimsical. It is rational and hence superior to the human race for which pure reason can never be realized Institutions, groups, and individuals are modeled on what is taken to be both efficient and sacred. So the form, if not the content, of human relationships is altered. There are a series of ongoing contemporary events that might seem to cast doubt on the images of the modern world portrayed by both Weber and the Critical School. Since both view the world as increasingly rationalized, bureaucratized, and controlled by total administration, how can the openly irrational and mystical character of so many modern doctrines and social movements be explained? Is this not a move away from oppressive rationality and its control? It has been held that the newer forms of irrationalist enthusiasm herald a genuine liberation and "re-enchantment of the world" (Greisman, 1976:497-506). Jack Douglas (1971) has noted the "growth in mysticism, astrology, Buddhism, Yoga, and other forms of the new 'secret religion'...millions of people are involved in this underground movement and many
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of them are the educated young who have supposedly been 'brainwashed' for years by the 'scientific' educators." Some members of the current generation turn away from science and seek "answers" instead from mystical faith. People like the teenage Perfect Master Guru Maharahji, and the Maharishi who heads the Transcendental Meditation movement attract huge audiences. They offer explanations of life that are predicated on discovering an inner light or harnessing cosmic energy. They offer ecstatic communion with The All. In a more gothic vein is Satanism whose appeal is ironic and materialistic. The resurgence of Satanism in the United States, Britain, and Germany has caused alarm among clergymen as its adherents daily increase in number. The counterculture of the 1960"s similarly called for a rebirth of spiritual and sensual values in an age of materialism and discipline: psychedelic drugs were advertised as an aid in this process. Divination, the I Ching, the Tarot, and astrology have taken their places as competitors to the "disenchanted" ways of explaining phenomena (Baum, 1970:153-202). The millennial and apocalyptic fantasies of past years have also been cited as "evidence" of the de-rationalization of social life. In June, 1968, hundreds of hippies camped out on a mountain near Boulder, Colorado: they were convinced that the comet Icarus was going to smash into the earth, and that only those on high elevations would be saved. The next year a young suburban housewife--Elizabeth Steen of Richmond, California--predicted that at 5:10 AM, April 14, 1969, the world would end. Newspaper accounts noted that crowds assembled in downtown Los Angeles at the appointed hour so that they could witness the end of the great city. To these could be added the violence of the Manson "family," itself built on a media-inspired image of the Apocalypse, and the melancholy "revolutionary suicide" of seven hundred members of the People's Temple in Jonestown, Guyana. The quaking hysteria of masses pursuing the millennium could be interpreted as support for the assertion that administration is breaking down, rationality is losing adherents, and the bars of the iron cage are melting down under the white heat of mystical intensity (Greisman, 1974:511-524; Scimecca, 1975:180-196; New York Times, June 15, 1968:38; White, 1970:17). If we accept these episodes as legitimate indicators of social consciousness without question, then it may be true
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that the trend toward administration is being slowed if not reversed. What, however, is the source of such beliefs and movements? Does not the Maharishi employ a massive cadre of managers, administrators, and computer-technicians to administer the various enterprises of his TM kingdom? Have not Satanism and Astrology become immense commercial enterprises run by rational, profit-oriented business persons? Have not evangelical churches also become a part of the managed society? Even the counter-culture of the 1960's, which was a kind of "spontaneous" response to the dominant culture, became administered and marketed as exotica: its styles have been integrated into fashions and diets without too much difficulty. These are questions that must be asked if we are to determine the extent of "derationalization" and breakdown of the iron cage. Of all the modern entrepreneurs of escape, Walt Disney must rank among the greatest. His Disneyland epitomizes the bureaucratization of myth in a place where fairytales are animated by the spirit of rational organization. Today, most forms of escape are themselves administered with an efficiency that Hegel, Weber, or even the Frankfurt sociologists would find upsetting (Roof, 1978).
WEBER AND THE CRITICAL SCHOOL Despite the predictive similarities between the two perspectives, there is some truth to the stereotypes that led earlier sociologists to see these perspectives as oppositional. For one, they are concerned with different theoretical issues. Marx himself was primarily concerned with an intensive analysis of capitalism, while for Weber the issue was rationalization which he viewed as a "master" phenomenon encompassing a variety of specific phenomena including capitalism. For another, Weber was primarily an empiricist who often found his data far more interesting than the theoretical and practical conclusions he could derive from them. The Critical School also used data, particularly on capitalism and social psychology, but these were subordinated to theoretical conclusions. This difference may stem from the divergence between the two on the issue of the relationship between fact and value. For Weber, it was possible, at least to some extent, to separate the two. Although Weber never took the naive "value free" perspective adopted by
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some of his modern "disciples," he did believe that one could keep one's values in check in at least some aspects of the research process. It might be noted parenthetically that Weber was never quite successful in doing this and his own data analyses are liberally studded with value-laden statements. On the other hand, the Frankfurt (critical) sociologists operating dialectically never believed that fact and value should, or could, be separated. Thus, data presentations are often indistinguishable from value statements. A particularly important difference between Weber and the neo-Marxians is their attitudes toward the future. Marx himself viewed an ideal communist state as a dialectical necessity. This is not to say that he felt that the proletariat and its supporters could sit back and wait for the capitalist system to destroy itself. He certainly believed that the actions of people were the central factor, and as those actions culminated the ideal communist society would emerge. Critical theorists, given their allegiance to the dialectic, tend to share Marx's optimism, although as we will see, their bourgeois mentality leads them to be more ambivalent about the future than Marx. Weber, of course, was the "pessimist." He felt disdain for those vulgar Marxists who promised a future utopia: "We must not and cannot promise a fool's paradise and an easy road to it, neither in thought nor in action" (1968a:223-224). Similarly, at the founding of the German Sociological Association in 1909 he said: "The Association rejects, in principle and definitely, all propaganda for action-oriented ideas from its midst." Instead, he urged the members to study "what is, why something is the way it is, for what historical and social reasons" (1968a:liv). It is this sort of position that made Weber's empiricism far more attractive to most sociologists than Marx's far more actionoriented position. Weber also felt that Marxism was a counterfeit faith, a secular theory of salvation, which was above all unscientific. Weber's work is studded with his affirmations of a theory of "pluralist causality" that throws out the Marxian position that social and cultural forms issue from the production based substructure of human organization. In an essay on method, Weber stated his case succinctly, " . . . the historian's problem of causality also is oriented towards the correlation of concrete effects with concrete causes, and not towards the establishment of abstract 'uniformities' " (1968b:186). This
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throws down the gauntlet at the heirs of the dialectical, Hegelian tradition which tended to conceive of human society in developmental terms and sees each epoch as symbolic of the incremental perfection of the world spirit. Similarly rejected is the Marxian tenet that history was propelled by the ubiquity of class conflict, and that only a dialectical approach to world-historical events could capture the pattern and meaning of history which, according to Marx, was the triumph of the proletariat (Mommsen, 1965:26, Kolko, 1959:21). On a more specific level, Weber was opposed on theoretical grounds to those who were urging the need for a socialist revolution. It was his view that a massive, modern society, no matter how it was run politically, could not operate without bureaucracies. If a socialist state wanted to operate without bureaucracies, it would have to revert to a small-scale society. Since reversion to such a society was not advocated by most socialists, and more importantly since it would contradict his view that the world was moving toward ever greater rationalization, Weber felt that this was neither likely nor possible. This meant that socialism, like capitalism, would be bureaucratized. Weber went even further however, and argued that socialism would create an even more bureaucratized society than the capitalist world. "Indeed, if in the latter case [socialism] a comparable level of technical efficiency were to be achieved, it would mean a tremendous increase in the importance of professional bureaucrats" (1968a:223-224). In addition to being even more bureaucratized, the socialized state would also bring with it a number of other negative consequences. In capitalism, at least the leaders of industry, the state, and other bureaucracies are, themselves, not bureaucrats. They offer the possibility of a countervailing power to the rule of the bureaucrat. Though even this possibility would be eliminated in socialism where the top management of the rationalized or socialized enterprises would become bureaucratic (1968a:1402). Weber also believed that in capitalism there was at least some balance of power between state bureaucracies and private capitalistic bureaucracies. This balance served to prevent the state bureaucracy from gaining total hegemony. In socialism, with the private sector virtually eliminated, the state bureaucracy would rule alone. And this rule would be even more
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rationalized, and more oppressive, than the situation in capitalist society. The ideal of a world united by commerce, government, reason, and common interest has been frequently advocated by humanists. In these designs for a better global life, the nastiness and isolation of nationalisms, the prejudice of race and religion, and the backwardness of competition and scarcity is replaced by a streamlined world community in which boundaries vaporize before the principle of rationality. Both Weber and the Critical School were uncomfortable with this ideal. They viewed its realization as a moment of domination over the human race. The dreams and hopes for world unity which for centuries have advanced against the most stupendous odds would end, from their point of view, in the iron cage of total control. Neither Weber nor the Critical School point toward a way out of total administration in the measurable future. Weber wondered aloud just how many people would be alive when the iron cage at last falls to pieces. If and when it does happen, it will be at a future time whose distance stretches the vectors of human time-consciousness, while Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and the other critical theorists limit their hopes for emancipation to a "perhaps" and a "someday." The frozen and ossified world to which these sociologists point remains in its ultimate possibilities a source of mystery and terror (Burroughs, 1966:21). Weber and the critical theorists began their investigations from disparate, if not actually opposing premises. Weber argued for value-neutrality and causal logic, opposed socialism, and supported the German Machtstatt. The critical theorists opposed the bifurcation of fact and value, were neoMarxist dialecticians, and regarded nationalism as a cruel and unfortunate ideology. The idea of revolution, theoreticall~/ central to the concerns of the "Frankfurt School," was anathema to Weber: As Marcuse notes, Weber "...demanded that political opponents from the radical left be sent to the madhouse, the zoo, or the firing squad" (1972:138). Yet these polar varieties of sociological thought arrived at quite similar conclusions about a world of total administration. This leads one to hypothesize that the labels popularly applied to Weber and the Critical School may be, in part, incorrect. Weber has been cast as a "classical liberal," and at times he could become a sabre-rattling nationalist who
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romanticized war, called for German domination of Europe, and clamoured for bigger and better armies (cf. Mayer, 1974:74; Mommsen, 1965:27; Weber, n.d.). In the end however, his critique of rationality contains radical elements, and his gloomy picture of a "polar night of icy darkness and hardness" (Gerth and Mills, 1958:128) portrays the administered world in a way that resonates well with the polemics of the early Marx. Elsewhere, Weber says that bureaucratic organization is a "lifeless machine" which: •.. is at work erecting the prison-house of that future bondage, into which men in their impotence will probably be forced.., if they find that a rational official administration which is good purely from a technical point of view is the final and sole value determining the direction of their affairs (Marcuse, 1972:149).
So the characterization of Weber as an "aristocratic liberal" and a nationalist has to be tempered with the fact that he was painfully aware of the dehumanization of the social world under a developing bureaucratic imperium. Critical theory, by contrast, took pains to advertise its proletarian sympathies. But it is possible that this intent became increasingly unimportant as the sociologists of the "Frankfurt School" began to impact academic social science. It will be noted that upon Horkheimer's assumption of the directorship of the famous Institute for Social Research, its journal's name was changed from "Archive for the History of Socialism and the Labour Movement" to "Journal for Social Research" (Jay, 1975:10-21; Buck-Morss, 1977). To be sure, most of the Critical School's output was addressed to middle class intellectuals, not factory workers or peasants, and it is significant that Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and many other members of the Institute emigrated to New York and Los Angeles when the Nazis took power, while Lukacs and other diehard, orthodox Marxists fled to Moscow. The Critical School was composed of professed Marxists who eschewed politics, came from secure bourgeois backgrounds, and exhibited a firm preference for theory over practice. Perhaps for these reasons, the despair that they voiced at the prospect of an administered world bears more of a resemblance to the writings of Henry Adams and Ortega y Gasset than to those of Marx. The critical theorists were
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cultivated intellectuals, patrons of the arts, and highly civilized inhabitants of the world created by the GermanJewish symbiosis. Their depiction of the administered world indicates a personal loss at the disappearance of bourgeois high culture, and is reminiscent of Minister Talleyrand's remark that "he who has not lived before the Revolution [of 1789] cannot know the sweetness of life." This life was doubtless pleasant for a small caste of hereditary nobles, and exceedingly distasteful for their countless subjects. In this sense, the onset of a "totally administered world" as depicted by the Critical School may be interpreted in an elitist sense insofar as Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and their colleagues experienced the passing of unrestrained capitalism as accompanying the degeneration of culture, and saw in its successor the signs of a "new barbarism." Just what real difference exists between Weber's image of slow death by suffocation in the iron cage of bureaucracy and critical theory's "open air prison of a totally administered world" remains to be seen. The most telling of the differences between Weber and the Critical School involved the rift between causal and d i a l e c t i c a l approaches (Weinstein and Weinstein, 1972:173-189). Weber was a causal thinker in the classical liberal tradition. He viewed cause-effect relationships as discrete entities, and saw social phenomena as finite and measurable parts of the empirical universe. Critical theory took a dialectical approach, and posited no linear causal chain between happenings. Rather, the relationships between phenomena were not seen as linear: as one form of social life superseded another, it bore something of that prior form within it, as well as future potentialities which were aufgehoben in the dialectical process. For Weber, the complexity of this metaphysic precluded science, and for the Critical School, Weber's multi-causal liberalism was blind to the interrelationships between phenomena and the goal of history. This difference can be traced to the philosophical roots of the two approaches. Weber's logical orientation was directly influenced by the causal approach advocated by Kant. Within this optic, the world is a buzzing confusion of happenings which must be ordered by the establishment of a sophisticated conceptual schema. And Weber's use of ideal types is a spin-off of this effort to develop such a conceptuaB
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arsenal. The deployment of such concepts is not, however, the goal of Weber's sociology, but simply a means to the end of analyzing causal probabilities within the "real world." This led Weber to look at causal relationships between the world's great religions, the phenomenon of capitalism, and the idea of rationality in general. Although he was aware of the ability of different factors to influence one another reciprocally, he tended toward an approach that was dominated by a one-way causal logic. Thus, he looked to Calvinism as the prime "cause" of capitalism, but largely ignored the impact of capitalism on Calvinism. Had Weber utilized a more dialectical approach, he might well have analyzed the feedback relationship between these two factors. Hegel's dialectical approach outweighed the Kantian influence on the critical theorists. The dialectic gives the work of the Critical School a number of distinguishing features missing in Weber, including a sensitivity to the feedback relationship between factors, awareness of the inevitability of internal contradictions, and the need to look beyond appearances to essences. Although Marx himself came to focus on economic factors, and the Critical School on cultural ones, the dialectic led both to an awareness of the reciprocal impact of other dimensions of social reality. Ultimately, the dialectic leads toward consciousness of a "way out" of contemporary evils and inequities since internal contradictions create the conditions for the radical overhaul of society as it is. By contrast, Weber's one-way causal logic leads down a dead-end street of despair. SUMMARY Weber's acceptance of a "sociology of despair" leads him to foresee the onset of a completely bureaucratized world as inevitable and, more to the point, he envisions no end to this grim state of affairs. Weber wrote, "When this night shall have slowly receded, who of those for whom spring apparently has bloomed so luxuriously will be alive?" (Gerth and Mills, 1958:128).Critical theory's exponents permit the luxury of a more tangible hope in that the Marxist projection of a just and human society emerging from the wreckage of bourgeois civilization is taken seriously. The utopian strain in critical theory is strong, and can be found in Marcuse's concept of
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"positive freedom," a convergence of particular and general interests, that will replace the false freedom of the marketplace that exists in the administered world (Jay, 1975:59-60). That the Critical School does not see this transformation occuring very soon was made evident by the attacks on Adorno by the German SDS in 1968: the student rebels were impatient for revolution, and critical theory replied to this demand with a stern admonition to wait and let the evil system self-destruct (Der Spiegel, 1968: 116-124). This was to happen at some future time, and not [n the immediacy of ado[escent hopes. As dialecticians, the exponents of critical theory viewed the administered world as just a moment in the historical process, and until it passes, they counsel an attitude that comes close to Weber's "sublime resignation" in which the individual leads a disciplined life "one day at a time," and in this way attempts to preserve some possibilities for freedom. Weber, however, rejected dialectical reasoning. For him, the administered world bore no elements of past or future emancipation. The iron cage was not something that was part of larger future developments; it was a brutal fait accompli that settled down on human society and froze it solid. Thus, while in agreement about the current state of unfreedom, Weber and critical theory are at odds over the future. His oneway causality moves Weber to despair, while the dialectical logic of critical theory retains some ground for emancipation. Agreement on the contemporary world is combined with differences of opinion on the future. The differences notwithstanding, Weber and the Critical School did start from different positions to arrive at similar theories of modern society. And this irony did not escape Adorno, when, in speaking of Weber in 1964, he observed t h a t " . . , it has taken the more than forty years since Weber's death to appreciate the deadliest and most suffocating implication of bureaucratic authori t y - t h e administered world" (1965:100). REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. 1965 "Rede being offiziellen Emfang,, ." in Otto Stammer (ed,), Max Weber und die Soziologie Heute, Tubingen: J,C.B, Mohr. 1967
Prisms. Samuel and Shierry Weber (trs.). London: Neville Spearman.
1974
"The stars down to earth." Telos 40:83.
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Baum, Gregory 1970 "Does the world remain disenchanted?" Social Research 37: 153-202. Buck-Morss, Susan 1977 The Origins of Negative Dialect. New York: The Free Press. Burroughs, William 1966 Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press. Der Spiegel 1968 "Gesl~rach mit Theodor W. Adorno." (February 26):116-124. Douglas, Jack 1971 American Social Order. New York: The Free press. Frankfurt Institute for Social Research 1972 Aspects of Sociology--Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. John Viertel (trs.). Boston: Beacon Press. Gerth, Hans and C. Wright Mills 1958 From Max Weber. New York: Oxford University Press. Greisman, H.C. 1974 "Marketing the millennium." Politics and Society 4: 511-524. 1976 "Disenchantment of the world." British Journal of Sociology 27: 497-506. Hegel, G.W.F. 1967 The Phenomenology of the Mind. JB. Baille (trs.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. Horkheimer, Max 1972 Critical Theory. Matthew J. O'Connell (trs.). New York: Herder and Herder. Jay, Martin 1975 The Dialectical Imagination. Boston: Little, Brown. Kolko, Gabriel 1959 "A critique of Max Weber's philosophy of history." Ethics 70(I): 21. Marcuse, Herbert 1964 One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press. 1972 "Industrialization and capitalism." in Otto Stammer (ed,), Max Weber and Sociology Today. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Mayer, J.P. 1974 Max Weber and German Politics. London: Faber and Faber. Mitzman, Arthur 1970 The Iron Cage. New York: Knopf. Mommsen, Wolfgang 1965 "Max Weber's political sociology and his philosophy of world history." International Social Science Journal 17(I): 26. New York Times June 15, 1968. p. 38 Remmling, Gunter W. 1975 The Sociology of Karl Mannheim, New York: Humanities Press. Ritzer, George 1975 "Professionalization, bureaucratization, & rationalization: The views of Max Weber." Social Forces 53: 627-634. Roof, Wade Clark 1978 Community and Commitment. New York: Elsevier. Scimecca, Joseph 1975 "Paying homage to the father: C. Wright Mills and radical sociology." Sociological Quarterly 17: 180-196. Weber, Max 1958 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Charles Scribner.
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1968a Economy and Society. Totowa, New Jersey: Bedminister. 1968b The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Edward Shils and Henry Finch (trs.). New York: The Free press. N.D. "Nation, state and power." Rodolf Failer (trs.) Unpublished. Weinstein, Michael and Deena Weinstein 1972 "Blau's dialectical sociology," Sociological Inquiry 42: 173-189. White, John Wesley 1970 Re-entry. Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
