R~ Publica Vol.llI no.2 [1997]
MAX WEBER: STILL RELEVANT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS?
by PAUL REYNOLDS"
Bryan Turner, Max Weber: From History to Modernity, London, Routledge, 1993, s 30.00 hb, 0 415 06751 0, s 12.99 pb, 0 415 11452 7.
The recent reappraisal of sociological thought which has reformulated the work of both Marx and Durkheim, where it has not unceremoniously rejected it, has been altogether kinder to Max Weber. It is he who is now widely regarded as the prescient theorist of both industrial capitalism and command socialism: that is, of modernity, and even, it is increasingly averred, of postmodernity avant la lettre It was, after all, Weber who anticipated that triumph of instrumental rationality (the reduction of reasoning to what Hobbes had called "reckoning with consequences") characteristic of both advanced capitalism and historical communism. Again, it was he who anticipated the emergence of those "democratic" political cultures which, despairing of accommodating any kind of reasoned debate about social values and ends, have settled for nothing more than the mediation of conflicting interests: political, as contrasted with moral, liberalism, as Richard Bellamy has it. 1 But Weber is not only widely proclaimed as the sociologist of modernity: recent scholarship has increasingly stressed both his wider relevance to contemporary social thought and the need to understand his work by situating it in its biographical, historical and intellectual contexts: its German provenance; Weber's vulnerability to mental illness; the invocation of his work by apologists for Nazism; and so on. In Bryan Turner's Max Weber: From History to Modernity one of today's * 1
Department of Applied Social Studies, Edge Hill College of Higher Education. The author acknowledgesthe considerableinput of Marcus Roberts to this piece. R. Bellamy,Liberalism andModern Society: an HistoricalArgument (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992).
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most accomplished Weberian scholars seeks to elaborate, evaluate and develop such re-readings of Weber. In particular, he is occupied with the question of the relevance of Weberian scholarship to the analysis and evaluation of that postmodern existence that is allegedly our fate as we approach the close of the twentieth century. In many respects, he argues, Weber anticipated and addressed the sorts of questions at stake in recent debates concerned with the transition from modernity to postmodernity. In this brief review, then, I shall say something about the conventional reading of Weber; contrast it with more recent readings, as discussed by Turner; and conclude by suggesting that Turner might have been even more strident in his insistence upon Weber's continued relevance for us. To begin with, then, the conventional story. Weber laid the foundations of modern sociology in three closely related ways. First, his work developed the conceptual framework which continues to distinguish what might be called the sociological perspective. Second, in developing this framework he contributed to those philosophical debates which have exercised sociologists a in particular, those concerned with the logic of social scientific explanation and the limitations of human reason. Third, his analysis of the historical emergence of "modernity" succeeded, quite remarkably, in identifying what have remained among its distinguishing characteristics long after Weber departed the scene. Weber, or so the story goes, continues to speak to us in a way that Marx no longer does. In particular, Weber has been praised for rejecting the "social physics" - - social science as a species of natural science - - which can allegedly be traced from Comte through to Durkheim and is evident in cruder readings of Marx's theory of history. Against these projects, Weber proposed a form of social scientific inquiry combining a commitment to certain scientific assumptions and methodologies with deep scepticism regarding any general laws of social development. In his philosophical works, then, he adamantly rejected the theoretical pretensions of those social scientists who sought to discover immutable laws of social development. At the same time, however, and in common with Marx, he was properly sceptical about the prospects for any moral road to social transformation. The'task of sociology was to provide "ideal-type" models which could help to explain, but were always revisable in the light of, patterns of human interaction within definite economic, social and political
Rem Publica Vol.llI no.2 [1997]
MAX WEBER: STILL RELEVANT AFTER ALL THESE YEARS?
by PAUL REYNOLDS"
Bryan Turner, Max Weber: From History to Modernity, London, Routledge, 1993, s hb, 0 415 06751 0, s 12.99 pb, 0 415 11452 7.
The recent reappraisal of sociological thought which has reformulated the work of both Marx and Durkheim, where it has not unceremoniously rejected it, has been altogether kinder to Max Weber. It is he who is now widely regarded as the prescient theorist of both industrial capitalism and command socialism: that is, of modernity, and even, it is increasingly averred, of postmodernity avant la lettre It was, after all, Weber who anticipated that triumph of instrumental rationality (the reduction of reasoning to what Hobbes had called "reckoning with consequences") characteristic of both advanced capitalism and historical communism. Again, it was he who anticipated the emergence of those "democratic" political cultures which, despairing of accommodating any kind of reasoned debate about social values and ends, have settled for nothing more than the mediation of conflicting interests: political, as contrasted with moral, liberalism, as Richard Bellamy has it. l But Weber is not only widely proclaimed as the sociologist of modernity: recent scholarship has increasingly stressed both his wider relevance to contemporary social thought and the need to understand his work by situating it in its biographical, historical and intellectual contexts: its German provenance; Weber's vulnerability to mental illness; the invocation of his work by apologists for Nazism; and so on. In Bryan Turner's Max Weber: From History to Modernity one of today's * 1
Department of Applied Social Studies, Edge Hill College of Higher Education. The author acknowledgesthe considerableinput of Marcus Roberts to this piece. R. Bellamy,Liberalism andModern Society: an HistoricalArgument (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992).
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have tended to read in(to) society a general theory of progress v/a processes of rationalisation and modernisation. This, however, is to elevate speculative conjectures regarding the trajectories of modernity to the status of general laws of historical development. While there is a suspicion that Weber himself was guilty either of surrogate teleologism or, at least, surrogate determinism in some of his own substantive investigations, it remains a methodological error that he resolutely rejected in his more self-consciously philosophical work. If we are fully to appreciate Weber's critique of modernity, Turner further argues, we must place his work in its biographical and historical contexts. In Weber's native Germany, the Prussian order was succeeded in the early part of this century by weak governments bent upon territorial expansion and therefore committed to a belligerent foreign policy and a costly arms race, finally embarking upon a disastrous European war. Unsurprisingly, then, Weber was far from sanguine regarding the prospects for the development of a rational and stable political order in Germany. It was partly on the basis of this experience that he was profoundly pessimistic about the whole project of modernity. Out of these sorts of reflection emerges Turner's case for the continued relevance of Weber. The issues m methodological, substantive and p o l i t i c a l - that he engaged with in his efforts to theorise modernity are also among the fundamental problems confronting theorists of the transition to, and the nature of, postmodernity. In the first two chapters Turner claims that Weber's central concerns place him close to Nietzsche and to romantic critics of rationalism and secularism. This reorientation takes us from a conventional reading of Weber as an apologist for capitalist modernity to a reading which understands him as a pessimistic witness of the triumph of instrumental rationality (modernity) over spirituality (pre-modernity). This re-reading sees Weber as engaging also in critical dialogue with the ghost of Karl Marx, but insists that these two theorists of capitalism had more similar concerns than is conventionally allowed: for example, the "iron cage" which stifles creativity in Weber's work has a close affinity to the early Marx's conception of alienation. Of course, Turner argues, the conventional readings were quite correct tO insist upon Weber's hostility to determinism in general and to Marxist class analysis in particular. What they failed to pay adequate attention to, however, was the extent of Marx's positive influence on
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him. He explicitly acknowledged Marx's enormous contribution to the theorisation of industrial capitalism; while his hostility to Marxistinfluenced political m o v e m e n t s - in particular to the German Social Democrat Party-- did not preclude an altogether more sympathetic engagement with the theoretical works of Marxism's founders. In his later works, such as Theory of Social and Economic Organisation, 3 his emphasis shifts from a preoccupation with the importance of individual agency in the emergence of modernity to a recognition of the dynamic and systemic logics of capitalism. Weber's position was developed not over the' dead body of Marx, but through a sustained critical dialogue with Marxism. Thus, for example, the development of modernity out of Calvinist Protestantism is analysed by Turner in such a way as to render it fully sensitive to historical contingencies: he rejects those cruder readings of Weber which take him to argue that Protestantism functioned merely and precisely to legitimise capitalism. In this discussion of the relationship between religious and economic and political developments much is made of the point that it is through struggle and violence that new orders are produced and legitimised. However, epochal social change is understood also - - butthis time contra Marxism ~ in terms of multiple conflicts within a whole range of institutions and other sites, in a way that prefigures postmodern critiques of reductionist social scientific theory. Turner then focuses more narrowly upon the key Weberian concept of rationalisation as developed in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.4 Here he argues that Weber's analysis is strikingly congruent with those of both the Frankfurt School and of Foucault. For him, as for them, the triumph of instrumental reason is the triumph of regulatory and disciplinary practices and manipulative social relations. Again in common with more recent critical theorists, Weber is rebuked for invoking a romanticised vision of an idealised pre-regulatory past; and, relatedly, for failing fully to appreciate the new possibilities for human emancipation produced by modernity. At the same time, Weber is shown to share many of the concerns of postmodernists, as in his recognition that control, surveillance and regulation of the body have 3 4
M. Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organisation (1922), trld. A.R. Henderson(London:Hodge, 1947). M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trld. T. Parsons (London:Allen& Unwin, 1976).
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been central to the project of modernity. Finally, Turner focuses on the Weberian critique of capitalism and, relatedly, on his intellectual formation, locating his thought in relation to Nietzsche, Simmel, Marx and their respective progeny. Turner stresses that Weber was a harsh critic of market economies and questioned the legitimacy of the capitalist state. He is particularly concerned to follow Weber behind the fa~des of rationalisation in order to confront the irrational that lurks behind them: that is, the fetishism and totemism inscribed within bureaucratic, rationalism. The premodern does not disappear in the modern world, it only disappears from view. This brings to mind those critiques of postmodernism (such as those deployed by Habermas, Norris, CaUinicos and Giddens) according to which postmodernity has left behind neither modernity nor premodernity. Rather, it has simply sought to conceal the pre-modern and modern elements inscribed within the postmodernist position and condition. This is a comprehensive and thought-provoking survey of recent rereadings of Weber's work. It will be of considerable interest not only to Weber scholars, but also to those engaged in debates concerning the alleged transition from modernity to postmodernity. Weber offers a basis for a complex, non-linear, theorisation of epochal social changes, as well as a critique of modernity. Behind the politics of pluralism, bureaucratic technocracy and the rule of law is an ~lite which monopolises symbolic power and the means of violence, using "reason" to do so. Modernity is incapable of delivering on the promises of those rationalist moral and legal transformations which has ushered it in: liberty, equality and fraternity. Nor can it provide any substitute for theology: it will ever continue under the threat of a resurgence of pre-modern theologies, given that its rationalist epistemology encompasses no spiritual episteme. In rejecting the "grand narratives" of both pre-modernity and modernity Weber creates the space for the contingency, individual agency and pluralism which are central to the postmodernist celebration of diversity and differentiation. Given that people can, if against considerable constraints, transform their world and are not bounded by transhistorical developmental laws, there is room in this theory for hope, if not quite for optimism: for the re-emergence of radical political movements dedicated to the pursuit of solidarity and social justice. There is some irony here, of course, for postmodernists are typically
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taken to task for their political quietism and failure to produce an adequate theorisation of structures of domination and oppression: that is, to answer questions such as who oppresses whom and how. The destruction and deconstruction of all "grand narratives", while it may appear to emancipate us from all linear histories, often seems to leave us with nothing else. Weber may offer a middle path between the grand narratives of modernity and those versions of postmodernism which, having kicked the Enlightenment away, leave us with no ground beneath our feet. He was undermining, even deconstructing, "grand narratives" long bdrore the postmodernists declared this to be the exclusive vocation of anti-philosophical enquiry. Weber, however, unlike the postmodernists, never lost sight of the fact that this was only one aspect of a sociological practice which continued to seek explanations of social development and remained committed to the identification of those, often concealed, forces which determine the course of historical development and the distinctive forms of domination and oppression. Weber continues to offer a way forward. Most importantly, and in contrast to the celebrants and celebrities of postmodernity - - who have won plaudits within the academy while having no detectable impact without it (except perhaps to deflect attention from the troubles of our times) - - h e embodies the Gramscian maxim: pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
