International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1991

Review Essay On Max Weber Franco Ferrarotti

Wilhelm Hennis, Max Webers Fragestellung Studien zur Biographie des Werks, 1987, J. C. B. Mohr Tiibingen: It. trans. II problema Max Weber, Laterza Rome-Bari 1991. Wilhelm Hennis has written a book that is first and foremost a caveat as impassioned as it is well-documented and logical. The former characteristic may seem to contradict the latter. However, it is one of the author's considerable merits that he contrives to make them co-exist. From his foreword on, Hennis warns the reader against an intellectually improper strategy which he argues is being mounted quite openly - - the massive takeover of Max Weber, which is as swift and greedy as it is irresponsibly careless of the author's deepest original intention. It should not thus surprise us that the book brings to mind the warning call of a conscientious inspector of the ministry of Fine Arts, roused by the unscrupulous tomb-robbers smashing and looting Etruscan necropolises by night. The comparison is not too far-fetched. Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with current sociological 'production' will quickly see that the immense and apparently unsystematic output of Max Weber is cheerfully appropriated and decanted, as it were, by means of lifting it out of context. Whole propositions, concepts and standpoints are purloined for current studies in sociology, not unlike the way the first Christians behaved in constructing their basilicas with the aid of the pagan temples of classical antiquity. Hennis especially deplored the fact that this use of Weber is at once now universally practised and wholly unmindful, indeed, alien, to the author's basic intention. In the early 1960's, when I was writing Max Weber e il destino della ragione (Laterza, Bari 1964 English ed., Sharpe, N.Y. 1980), I discovered the Erfurt sociologist had been more or less crudely 'embalmed'. Wilhelm Hennis fiercely supports this same point of view in the present work. However, whereas I confined myself to attributing this sterilizing and embalming to a more or less conscious plan, under the 'systematic' attentions of Talcott Parsons and other North American sociologists 127 9 1991 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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inadequately informed or aware of the historical roots and basic outlooks of European social thought, Hennis tends to absolve Parsons and his followers. He acknowledges their merit of having diffused on an international scale Weber's name, if not the real substance of his teaching. On the other hand, Hennis identifies the cultural roots of Weber's thought with extraordinary analytical meticulousness and linguistic passion. He discovers the roots and lays them bare on the basis of a complete, probing reading of Weber's works, including the rich and still unpublished correspondence. His evidence includes basic strands of nineteenth century German culture, which, moreover, continue to influence current intellectual d e b a t e s - the historical school, neo-Kantianism, classical economics, political economy and socio-economic and political history. Hennis's basic argument is that Weber's central idea lay in the 'problematic that directed him', that his overriding problem or, in other words, his basic intention, 'has not yet been revealed'. Contrary to what most modern interpreters believe, 'rationality' or 'social stratification' is 'not the central problem'. Weber's central interest lies in 'the development of humanity', but, Hennis maintains, this 'anthropological and character motif', though central, was paradoxically expressed by Weber only in obscure passages. Hence there arises the need to read all of Weber's work slowly and with due attention. But this too is the reason why modern sociology (so obedient to the orders of those who commission research and almost wholly absorbed by mathematically processed 'social engineering') finds itself practically disabled from understanding Weber and his central question: What kind of social order provides what kind of man those kinds of opportunities needed for them to become the dominant type of a whole epoch? In Hennis's view, Weber is thus primarily, essentially, an educator. His primary concern was not to construct the timelessly valid 'social system', far ewig~ as is obvious in Talcott Parsons and our own pale imitators. To Hennis, Weber in all his studies posed the question - - what type of man do the on-going social orders give us, and what will they give us in the future? Confirmation that this is Weber's problematic, bracketing off the 'system' whilst bringing out the pedagogical concern, is Hennis's real tour de force. The only scholars he considers close to discovering Weber's underlying purpose are Landshut and L6with. In fact, from their initial studies, "none of the interpreters who have dug most deeply in Weber's work has ever stopped believing that all his questions started with the problematic of modem 'humanity' and took their orientation from an 'idea of man'." However, in Hennis's view, this excellent start was then carelessly and uncritically 'off-loaded' onto the shoulders of Weber the 'philosopher', letting it fall into oblivion in favour of partial, instrumental 'sociologizing' interpretations.

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Hennis's most lethal poisoned darts are kept for a German scholar, Wolfgang Schluchter, and a well-known American sociologist, Reinhard Bendix. To Hennis, were we to adhere to their heuristic canons and interpretations, we could certainly say "that a Weber who might provide something really vital for research does not exist." So, what of Weber, the real Weber, remains? Hennis does not make us wait for an answer; indeed, it recurs on almost every page, and necessarily gives this book its repetitive character. The answer weighs, sarcastic and bitter, like a sentence without appeal,on modern sociology. There remains only "the 'philosophical' Weber, the 'person', as object of studies on the 'spirit of the time', intended, in an enlightenment sense, to correct the past." There remains too " ' t h e work', not yet to be interpreted as 'sociology and nothing but sociology', a mausoleum of dead concepts where one burrows unconcernedly so as to be able to adorn today's coldly functionalist magnificence with antiques." Hennis, on the contrary, sets out to document Weber's development from jurist to economist, then to political economist and finally to student of sociology as 'science of culture', by means of a reconstruction of the 'biography of Weber's work'. The parallel traced in this context by Hennis between Weber and Marx is impressive. Far from Weber as the 'Marx of the bourgeoisie' as he has often, unfortunately, been described! Hennis argues that "Weber saw the world as Marx did": he did not reduce Marxism to a simple historiographic canon by hollowing it out as Benedetto Croce, to name but one of many, did in Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica. As a good polytheist, Marxism was for Weber an interpretative hypothesis among others. Indeed, not only did Weber not counterpose himself to Marx, he went deeper than him by bringing out his neoteric one-sidedness: "As regards Marx, Weber had something 'in his heart' that allowed him to look further than Marx." In order to understand this essential point, Hennis argues that it is not enough to study Weber from the viewpoint of the social sciences as they are conceived of today, using him aseptically as a source, a mine, of concepts and methodical hints. Hennis forcefully maintains that Weber must be studied historically, within his own historical context. In passing, I should like to point out that at least from this point of view, Hennis lapses into a venial contradiction when he chides me for having, precisely, studied him in the context of his times (especially in L'orfano di Bismarck, Rome 1982, Eng. edn. Max Weber and the crisis of Western Civilization, New York 1987). However, it may be that Hennis's critical interrogative in my regard concerns the fact I did not sufficiently clarify Weber's ability to transcend his own specific time-scale, a capacity which is naturally limited and which at any rate must be illustrated step by step.

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Hennis's 'programme' is one of extraordinary breadth, referring us to scenarios normally overlooked by contemporary students of Weber. In particular, he takes up everything of the 'young Weber', of the 'agrarian' studies and investigations in the field. The programme involves a formidable settling of accounts: that is, a) a specific history of the 'German spirit'; b) Weber's observation in the context of his great controversy with the 'bourgeois world', on the same level as, and indeed as 'direct successor' of Marx and Nietzsche; c) finally, a study of Weber in the wider history of modern thought but, the author warns, not in the tradition of 'bourgeois' thought. His, rather, was "the v i e w p o i n t - always irritating for m o d e r n s - which concerns the 'full development' of humanity, the viewpoint marked out by political thought, from Machiavelli to Weber, passing through Rousseau and Tocqueville." Hennis thus restores to Weber the value dimension which is anything but 'neutral', and has been on the contrary wholly blanked out, especially in its Anglo-Saxon version. For Hennis, there are excuses for such misunderstandings. Weber's ethical dimension was in fact expressed explicitly only in seemingly marginal, lesser known texts. For instance, in one of his earliest works on political economy, Weber writes, "The problem which haunts m e . . . is not that of knowing how the men of the future will manage but how they will b e . . . We should like to educate men to raise not their level of welfare, but those qualities associated with the feeling that they are part of human greatness and the nobility of our nature." This is a statement that is today too redolent of the elitist spirit to be accepted at face value, and from which the mature Weber was moreover to take his distance. However, they express his main purpose very well. Weber was obsessed by the 'quality of men' much more than, over and above, the 'quantity of goods produced'. On this point, it is hard to fault Hennis's reconstruction. In this intellectual framework, it becomes quite easy to grasp the deficiencies of interpretation to be encountered in the Anglo-Saxon world, a 'democratic' one, which has a background of pragmatic, quantitative utilitarianism. Inevitably, the problematic charge underlying Weber's works drops. Whereas Weber saw in the whole of social.life the dramatic unfolding of a constant struggle whose outcome was uncertain, his work is there judiciously reduced to an innocuous conceptual armory for use ad lib in the most diversified research projects. From the time of his 'immature' academic inaugural, Weber had clearly stated the need to examine, in the last analysis, every order of social relations by also looking at its 'anthropological' consequences. Thus, terms and concepts such as 'institution', 'group', 'enterprise', 'exchange', 'power', etc., must always be understood in relation to the type o f man to whom a given order places obstacles or opens pos-

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sibilities This connection is wholly lacking in the Anglo-Saxon mode of 'receiving' these concepts. In this way, Weber has been not only impoverished, but de-historified. H e himself was well aware, and Hennis reminds us of it often, that "it would be bad for empirical science too if these higher problems, to which it gives no answer, could never be posed." In the light of these premisses, it should come as no surprise that, in Hennis's somewhat drastic assertion, Weber's 'interpretative' sociology is not today's sociology. The problem that arises here, as explicitly tackled by Hennis, is that of 'value-freedom'. To understand this requirement as an untouchable 'neutrality' is certainly an error of interpretation with serious consequences. For Weber, research had its 'heat' and importance precisely where 'the arid figures of normal statistical information cannot provide the emotional reaction in the hearts of men'. The problem of Weberian 'value-freedom' is clearly to be grasped in the polemical remarks Weber makes regarding the academic world (possibly more so than in the ponderous methodological essays) especially regarding the methods of recruiting instructors and of "freedom of teaching". Once more we are dealing with lesser-known texts, articles and contributions to newspapers of the period. Yet it is here that Wertfreiheit stands out as the supreme requirement of 'intellectual integrity', which not only produces a certain 'modesty as regards commitment', but principly inhibits the passing off of mere opinions or private, personal conjectures as scientific results which are thus intersubjectively binding. The polemical jottings on this, and especially on the 'Althoff system', have a surprisingly modem ring, with their pitiless condemnation of academic speculators and the systematic confusion between scientific research and that of commercial combines and political success, to the profit of professors who have stopped believing in science. Once more there emerges the central problem of how a man becomes a 'personality', and of the impossibility of giving an ethical connotation to apersonal social relations. Indeed, in every personal relation, even a violent one, ethical postulates can have an influence. However, this is impossible when the relation is reified and becomes impersonal. The twisted logic of gangsterism is involved here: the group, the gang is at once omnipotent and irresponsible. The individual, when called to account, denies any moral responsibility and takes refuge behind anonymous 'group decisions'. For Weber, sociology appears as the 'science of social action', or the action of the individual in society, and thereby as the science of the whole man, as against that of fictional man as product of a pure, 'unreal' 'theoretical construct'. This distinguishes his science from the science of society, abstractly conceived of according to canons of modelling more in vogue today than in his time, whereby the arbitrary model and historically specific theory are cheerfully confused or presented as more or less equivalent. His

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science, then, is that of historical man, as against that of man as 'ideal mathematical figure', created by 'abstract theory'. In this regard Hennis is right to observe that "this was the point round which the polemic with Western theory was initiated, especially in the 'old' Historical School, chiefly through Roscher and Knies; and this was still the background of the methodological argument between Menger and Schmoller." Thus convinced, Hennis even raises a doubt on Weber's belonging to sociology: "[Weber's] work, if we consider it in the perspective of the time, does it allow of its self-evident incorporation into sociology? It is true that Weber was a leading force at the moment of the foundation of a German Society for sociology. But as soon as he had founded it, he was out of it. He almost always spoke of 'sociology' with a sense of distance, often of irony, in agreement with his friend Georg Simmel, who said, "I should like to settle my debts with sociology so as to pass on to something else, more serious". When he accepted the term as related to his own efforts, he tried not only to isolate it with definitive adjectives ('interpretative', 'explanatory'), but even reduce it to the singular." On the other hand, there is no doubt Weber took basic elements from Knies. If a demanding, disenchanted reader finds Hennis's work excessively admiring as regards Weber, to the extent of approaching the tones and essence of enraptured hagiography, I should advise by way of antidote that he reads the passages where Hennis analyzes the relations between Weber and Knies. Hennis had already remarked that Weber suffered from a kind of 'mania for novelty' at all costs. Here, this criticism becomes sharper. Hennis does not confine himself to stressing a psychological tendency or nervous tic. Ideas are at stake here. To Hennis Weber borrowed from Knies (and much more from neo-Kantians, the 'masters' of the Historical School, and from Heinrich Rickert himself) basic concepts (though for a different view, cf. Guy Oakes, Weber and Rickert; Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass 1988). Hennis most carefully points out the 'bifurcation' in Knies, as political economist, between natural resources and 'human activity'; "The first basic factor influencing economic l i f e . . , is "the influence of the general power of the State on the progression and development of the economy in historic nations . . . " Parallel to the influence of the "general power of the State" . . . Knies analyzes especially closely the 'effective influence of a second social power', the influence of the Church, and thus of religion, neither, surprisingly, satisfactorily appreciated and in general ignored." Hennis concludes that we find here outlined, down to its conceptual terminology, the problematic of Weber's sociology of religion. Then, against this "illustrious master" who often anticipated him to the letter, given that Weber's work grew and developed "on the ground of German political

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economy", Weber surrendered himself to a polemic whose tones soon reached heights of ingratitude and 'meanness'. " I f . . . one bears in mind the fact that in 1896 Weber directly followed Knies in the chair at Heidelberg, and undoubtedly, as the Grundriss demonstrates, accepted his basic positions and, from the essay on the Categories to the Basic sociological concepts asserted that 'social action' is the specific object of 'interpretative sociology', then the mean polemic with K n i e s . . . can only appear at least peculiar, however indulgent we may be." Hennis's interrogation starts to become harsh, and often brings to mind the fierce punctiliousness shown by Stephen Hawking in recounting (in A brief history of time) Newton's incredible meanness and injustice at the expense of Leibniz. Hennis says, "One often has the impression that Weber is stubbornly involved in lifting Knies's ideas so that in their reformulation there remains not even the echo of their original form." The only explanation Hennis can give is that perhaps Weber needed to give a defective picture of the position he proposed to supercede, so as "to confirm that this had not yet identified the problem in its real dimensions." This does not alter the fact that Hennis, far from being Weber's hagiographer, ends up by accusing the latter of being Knies's 'parricide'. "Perhaps [Weber] . . . became aware on his own account of the scarcely edifying way in which he had polemicized with a highly important figure of both teacher and theorist; his was really a kind of parricide!" Moreover, Weber is also miserly in regard to explicit citations from his two greatest 'interlocutors', Marx and Nietzsche. Hennis has no doubts about Marx's influence on Weber as regards capitalism, which is for him the "power most pregnant with destiny for our modern age", just as, for Hennis, Weber the educator seems wholly Nietzschean when he summarizes his whole pedagogy in the maxim "Become what you are." For this basic reason too, Hennis cannot understand how Tenbruck, Schluchter, Habermas, and the legion of contemporary commentators can exhaust themselves in searching out and establishing the characteristics of an 'evolutionary' Weber. Hennis says, "It is hard to understand h o w . . , individuals as different as Friedrich Tenbruck, Wolfgang Schluchter and Jiirgen Habermas should insist on wishing to discover elements of an evolutionary theory in Weber's work. For Weber, history proceeds by a 'concatenation of circumstances'.... Only one thing did not occur in history, "evolution", or conformity to an internal law and a determinate teleological direction of development." Thus Weber was neither a progressive nor a liberal. Basically, he was not even a democrat either, in the current sense. Politics was his 'secret love'. But it was an essentially elitist politics, profoundly concerned that "decisions concerning the world should no longer be taken in Berlin." Hen-

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nis is quite right to recall Thomas Mann's Considerations of an Unpolitical Man, to make us grasp the spiritual climate and the particular social temperature of Weber's world. However, it then seems to me paradoxical to exalt 'farsightedness' as Weber's higher political v a l u e - - j u s t like the phronesis of the ancient Greeks or Cicero's prudentia represented the preeminent virtues of the statesman, and as Leo Strauss, following Edmund Burke, was ultimately and decisively to demonstrate, viscerally anti-Weberian though he was. In this exhaustively documented, painstaking reconstruction of Max Weber's work and personality, and beyond the polemical sparks destined soon to be extinguished, what seems to me valuable to retain is the reply to the question of what constitutes Weber greatness and 'genius' as a scientist: "No more and no less than his unique ability to grasp links of interdependence which are precluded from the sight of those less gifted than he." However many doubts Hennis may have in this respect, I believe this is also the reason that compels us to assign Weber a prominent place among modem sociologists, alongside those 'moralists without moral dogmas' - - Emile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto.