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FROM MAX WEBER: Essays m Sociolosy
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From Marianne Weber's Miix Wtbci : em Lebensbild
MAX WEBER
FROM MAX WEBER: Essays in Sociology
TRANSLATED, EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
H. H. GERTH and C. WRIGHT MILLS
NEW YORK
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1946
Copyright 1946 by Oxford University Press, New York, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
X rel;
reiace
One hundred and fifty years ago A. F, Tytler set forth three Principles of Translation: To give a complete transcript of the original ideas; to imitate the styles of the original author; and to preserve the ease of the original text. In presenting selections from Max Weber to an EngHsh- reading public, we hope we have met the first demand, that of faithfulness to the original meaning. The second and the third demands are often disputable in translating German into English, and, in the case of Max Weber, they are quite debatable.
The genius of the German language has allowed for a twofold stylistic tradition. One tradition corresponds to the drift of English towards brief and grammatically lucid sentences. Such sentences carry transparent trains of thought in which first things stand first. Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and Franz Kafka are eminent among the repre- sentatives of this tradition.
The other tradition is foreign to the tendency of modern English. It is often felt to be formidable and forbidding, as readers of Hegel and Jean Paul Richter, of Karl Marx and Ferdinand Tonnies may testify.
It would hardly do to classify the two traditions as 'good' and 'bad.' Authors representing the first believe in addressing themselves to the ear; they wish to write as if they were speaking. The second group ad- dress themselves to the eye of the silent reader. Their texts cannot easily be read aloud to others; everyone has to read for himself. Max Weber once compared German literary humanism to the education of the Chinese Mandarin; and Jean Paul Richter, one of the greatest of German writers, asserted that 'a long period bespeaks of greater deference for the reader than do twenty short sentences. In the end the reader must make them over into one by rereading and recapitulation. The writer is no speaker and the reader is no listener. . .' ^
1 Vorschule der Aesthetik, p. 382, Sammtliche Werke, Vol. 18 (Berlin, 1841).
5jBa039
Vi PREFACE
It is obvious that this school of writing is not what it is because of the inability of its practitioners to write well. They simply follow an alto- gether different style. They use parentheses, qualifying clauses, inversions, and complex rhythmic devices in their polyphonous sentences. Ideas are synchronized rather than serialized. At their best, they erect a grammatical artifice in which mental balconies and watch towers, as well as bridges and recesses, decorate the main structure. Their sentences are gothic castles. And Max Weber's style is definitely in their tradition.
Unfortunately, in his case this style is further complicated by a tendency to Platonize thought: he has a predilection for nouns and participles linked by the economic yet colorless forms of weak verbs, such as 'to be,' 'to have,' or 'to seem.' This Platonizing tendency is one of Weber's tributes to German philosophy and jurisprudence, to the style of the pulpit and the bureaucratic office.
We have therefore violated the second of Tytler's rules for translators. Although we have been eager to retain Weber's images, his objectivity, and of course his terms, we have not hesitated to break his sentence into three or four smaller units. Certain alterations in tense, which in English would seem illogical and arbitrary, have been eliminated; occasionally the subjunctive has been changed into the indicative, and nouns into verbs; appositional clauses and parentheses have been raised to the level of equality and condemned to follow rather than herald the main idea. As Weber has not observed Friedrich Nietzsche's suggestion that one should write German with an eye to ease of translation, we have had to drive many a wedge into the structure of his sentences. In all these matters, we have tried to proceed with respect and measure.
But we have also broken the third rule: Whatever 'ease' Weber may have in English is an ease of the English prose into which he is rendered and not any ease of the original work.
A translator of Weber faces a further difficulty. Weber frequently be- trays a self-conscious hesitancy in the use of loaded words such as democ- racy, the people, environment, adjustment, etc., by a profuse utilization of quotation marks. It would be altogether wrong to translate them by the addition of an ironical 'so-called.' Moreover, Weber often emphasizes words and phrases; the German printing convention allows for this more readily than does the English. Our translation, in the main, conforms to the English convention: we have omitted what to the English reader would seem self-conscious reservation and manner of emphasis. The same holds for the accumulation of qualifying words, with which the English
PREFACE Vll
language dispenses without losing in exactitude, emphasis, and meaning.
Weber pushes German academic tradition to its extremes. His major theme often seems to be lost in a wealth o£ footnoted digressions, exemp- tions, and comparative illustrations. We have taken some footnotes into the text and in a few instances we have relegated technical cross-references which stand in the original text to footnotes.
We have thus violated Tytler's second and third rules in order to fulfil the first. Our constant aim has been to make accessible to an English- reading public an accurate rendering of what Weber said.
* * *
We wish to thank the editorial staff of Oxford University Press for their encouragement of our efforts. Special thanks are due Mrs. Patricke Johns Heine who assisted revisions of the first drafts of chapters iv, x, and XII ; and to Mr. J. Ben Gillingham who performed the same task in connec- tion with section 6 of chapter xiii. Miss Honey Toda partially edited and retyped many pages of almost illegible manuscript and we are grateful for her diligence.
We are grateful for the valuable assistance of Dr. Hedwig Ide Gerth and Mrs. Freya Mills. The administrative generosity of Professor Carl S. Joslyn, chairman of the Department of Sociology, the University of Mary- land, and the support of Professor Thomas C. McCormick, chairman at the University of Wisconsin, have greatly facilitated the work. Professor E. A. Ross has been kind enough to read chapter xii and to give us his suggestions.
One of our translations, 'Class, Status, Party,' has been printed in Dwight Macdonald's Politics (October 1944) and is included in this vol- ume by his kind permission. We are grateful to the pubHshers, Houghton MifHin Company, for permission to reprint a revision of Max Weber's paper given before the Congress of Arts and Science, St. Louis Exposition of 1904.
Responsibility for the selections and reliability of the German meanings rendered is primarily assumed by H. H. Gerth; responsibility for the formulation and editorial arrangement of the EngHsh text is primarily assumed by C. Wright Mills. But the book as a whole represents our mutual work and we are jointly responsible for such deficiencies as it may contain.
Hans H. Gerth C. Wright Mills
Taole ol (contents
\
Preface, v
Introduction: THE MAN AND HIS WORK
/ ^ I. A Biographical View, 3 \ II. Political Concerns, 32 >ij {TlILVntellectual Orientations, 45 ■"^^ \ ** I, Marx and Weber, 46
^y^ Bureaucracy and Charisma: a Philosophy of History, 51 ; ^ 3. Methods of Social Science, 55 j 4. The Sociology of Ideas and Interests, 61
\ 5. Social Structures and Types of Capitalism, 65
\ ,^6. Conditions of Freedom and the Image of Man, 70
Part I: SCIENCE AND POLITICS
IV. Politics as a Vocation, 77 V. Science as a Vocation, 129
Part II: POWER
VI. Structures of Power, 159
1. The Prestige and Power of the 'Great Powers,' 159
2. The Economic Foundations of 'Imperialism,' 162
3. The Nation, 171
VII. Class, Status, Party, 180
1. Economically Determined Power and the Social Order, 180
2. Determination of Class-Situation by Market-Situation, 181
3. Communal Action Flowing from Class Interest, 183
4. Types of 'Class Struggle,' 184
5. Status Honor, 186
6. Guarantees of Status Stratification, 187 - 7. 'Ethnic' Segregation and 'Caste,' 188
8. Status Privileges, 190
9. Economic Conditions and Effects of Status Stratification, 192
10. Parties, 194
ix
X CONTENTS
VIII. Bureaucracy, 196
I. Characteristics of Bureaucracy, 196 •«. 2. The Position o£ the Official, 198
3. The Presuppositions and Causes of Bureaucracy, 204
4. The Quantitative Development of Administrative Tasks, 209
5. Qualitative Changes of Administrative Tasks, 212
- 6. Technical Advantages of Bureaucratic Organization, 214
7. Bureaucracy and Lav/, 216
8. The Concentration of the Means of Administration, 221 — 9. The Leveling of Social Differences, 224
10. The Permanent Character of the Bureaucratic Machine, 228
11. Economic and Social Consequences of Bureaucracy, 230
12. The Power Position of Bureaucracy, 232
13. Stages in the Development of Bureaucracy, 235
V 14. The 'Rationalization' of Education and Training, 240 \^1X. The Sociology of Charismatic Authority, 245
w- I. The General Character of Charisma, 245 U 2. Foundations and Instability of Charismatic Authority, 248 L.^3. Charismatic Kingship, 251 X. The Meaning of Discipline, 253
I. The Origins of Discipline in War, 255
2.. The Discipline of Large-Scale Economic Organizations, 261
3. Discipline and Charisma, 262
Part III: RELIGION
XL The Social Psychology of the World Religions, 267 XII. The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism, 302
XIII. Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions, 323
1. Motives for the Rejection of the World: the Meaning of Their
Rational Construction, 323
2. Typology of Asceticism and of Mysticism, 324
3. Directions of the Abnegation of the World, 327
4. The Economic Sphere, 331
5. The Political Sphere, 333
6. The Esthetic Sphere, 340
7. The Erotic Sphere, 343
8. The Intellectual Sphere, 350
9. The Three Forms of Theodicy, 358
Part IV: SOCIAL STRUCTURES
XIV. Capitalism and Rural Society in Germany, 363 XV. National Character and the Junkers, 386
CONTENTS XI
XVI. India: The Brahman and the Castes, 396
1. Caste and Tribe, 398
2. Caste and Guild, 399
3. Caste and Status Group, 405
4. The Social Rank Order of the Castes in General, 409
5. Castes and Traditionalism, 411 XVII. The Chinese Literati, 416
1. Confucius, 421
2. The Development of the Examination System, 422
3. The Typological Position of Confucian Education, 426
4. The Status-Honor of the Literati, 434
5. The Gentleman Ideal, 436
6. The Prestige of Officialdom, 438
7. Views on Economic Policy, 440
8. Sultanism and the Eunuchs as Political Opponents of the Literati,
442
Notes, 445 Index, 469
Introduction
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
1. A ijiograpnical V lew^
Max Weber was born in Erfurt, Thuringia, on 21 April 1864. His father, Max Weber, Sr., a trained jurist and municipal counselor, came from a family of linen merchants and textile manufacturers of western Germany. In 1869 the Webers moved to Berlin, which was soon to become the booming capital of Bismarck's Reich. There, Weber, Sr. became a pros- perous politician, active in the municipal diet of Berlin, the Prussian diet, and the new Reichstag. He belonged to the right-wing liberals led by the Hanoverian noble, Bennigsen. The family resided in Charlotten- burg, then a west-end suburb of Berlin, where academic and political notables were neighbors. In his father's house young Weber came to know such men as Dilthey, Mommsen, Julian Schmidt, Sybel, Treitschke, and Friedrich Kapp.
Max Weber's mother, Helene Fallenstein Weber, was a cultured and liberal woman of Protestant faith. Various members of her Thuringian family were teachers and small officials. Her father, however, had been a well-to-do official who, on the eve of the 1848 revolution, had retired to a villa in Heidelberg. Gervinus, the eminent liberal historian and a close friend of her family, had tutored her in the several humanist sub- jects. Until she died, in 1919, Max Weber corresponded with her in long, intimate, and often learned letters. In Berlin Helene Weber became an overburdened Hausfraii, faithfully caring for the busy politician, the six children, and a constant circle of friends. Two of her children had died in infancy. The misery of the industrial classes of Berlin impressed her deeply. Her husband neither understood nor shared her religious and humanitarian concerns. He probably did not share her emotional hfe and certainly the two differed in their feelings about many public questions. During Max's youth and early manhood his parents' relations were in- creasingly estranged.
The intellectual companions of the household and the extensive travels of the family made the precocious young Weber dissatisfied with the
3
4 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
routine instruction of the schools. He was a weakly child, who suflfered meningitis at the age of 4; he preferred books to sports and in early adolescence he read widely and developed intellectual interests of his own. At the age of 13 he wrote historical essays, one of which he called, 'Concerning the Course of German History, with Special Regard to the Positions of Kaiser and Pope.' Another was 'Dedicated to My Own In- significant Ego as well as to Parents and Siblings.' At fifteen he was reading as a student reads, taking extensive notes. He seemed to have been preoccupied from an early age with the balanced and qualified state- ment. Criticizing the rather low tastes of his classmates, who, instead of Scott's historical novels, read contemporary trash, he was careful to add: 'Perhaps it sounds presumptuous if I maintain this position, since I am one of the youngest fellows in my class; however, this circum- stance strikes one's eyes so sharply that I need not fear that I am not speaking the truth if I state it in this manner. Of course, there are always exceptions.' He appeared to be lacking also in any profound respect for his teachers. Since he was quite ready to share his knowledge with his schoolmates during examinations, they found him likeable and some- thing of a 'phenomenon.'
Young Weber, 'a politician's son in the age of Bismarck's Rcalpolitif{,' dismissed the universal literary appraisal of Cicero as bunk. In his eyes, Cicero, especially in his first Catilinarian speech, was a dilettante of phrases, a poor politician, and an irresponsible speaker. Putting himself in Cicero's shoes, he asked himself what good could these long-winded speeches accomplish? He felt Cicero ought to have 'bumped off' {ab- murf(sen) Catiline and squelched the threatening conspiracy by force. After detailed arguments, he ended a letter to a cousin: 'In short, I find the speech very weak and without purpose, the whole policy vacillating with regard to its ends. I find Cicero without appropriate resolve and energy, without skill, and without the ability to bide his time.' The older correspondent, a student in Berlin University, responded by intimating that young Weber was parroting books he had read. In self-defense Weber repHed sharply but with dignity:
What you have written sounds as if you believe I had copied from some book, or at least that I had rendered the substance of something I had read. After all, that is, in a nutshell, the meaning of your long lecture. You seek to bring out this point in a form as little concrete as possible because you entertain the opinion that I would mind an opinion which, so far as I my- self know, is not true. Though I have summoned all knowledge of myself,
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 5
I have not been able to admit that I have let myself be swayed too much by any one book or by any phrase from the mouth of my teachers. . . To be sure . . . we younger ones profit in general from treasures that you seniors, and I consider you as one of them, have garnered. . . I admit that probably everything indirectly stems from books, for what are books for except to en- lighten and instruct man about things that are unclear to him? It is possible that I am very sensitive to books, their comments and deductions. This you can judge better than I, for in certain respects it is easier to know someone else than oneself. Yet, the content of my — perhaps completely untrue — state- ment does not come directly from any book. For the rest, I do not mind your criticism, as quite similar things are to be found in Mommsen, as I have only now discovered.^
Young Weber's mother read her son's letters without his knowledge. She was greatly concerned that she and her son were becoming intel- lectually estranged. It is not strange that a sincere and intelligent adoles- cent, aware of the difficulties between his parents and observing the characteristic ruses of a Victorian patriarchal family, learned that words and actions should not be taken at their face value. He came to feel that if one wanted to get at the truth, direct and first-hand knowledge was necessary. Thus when he was sent to 'confirmation' lessons, he learned enough Hebrew to get at the original text of the Old Testament.
Frau Weber worried about her son's religious indifference. She wrote:
The closer Max's confirmation approaches, the less can I see that he feels any of the deeper stimulating influence in this period of his development which would make him think about what he is asked to enunciate before the altar as his own conviction. The other day, when we were sitting alone, I tried to get out of him what he thinks and feels about the main questions of Christian consciousness. He seemed quite astonished that I should presup- pose that the self-clarification of such questions as the belief in immortality and the Benevolence guiding our fate should result from confirmation lessons for every thinking man. I felt these things with great warmth in my innermost being — independent of any dogmatic form, they had become the most vital conviction . . . [yet] it was impossible for me to express it to my own child in such a way that it would make any impression on him.^
With this profound and personal piety, Helene Weber suflfered under the worldliness of her external family life. Nevertheless, she lovingly resigned herself to the somewhat complacent, self-righteous, and patri- archial atmosphere created by her husband. As an adolescent, Weber had less and less of a common ground with his mother in serious mat-
6 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
ters. It was not that he was drawn to his father: the worldly atmosphere of modern intellectual life drew Weber away from the philistinism of his father as well as from the piety of his mother.
Although respectful, he rebelled against the authority of his elders. Yet, rather than take part in the 'frivolous' pursuits of his classmates, the boredom of school routine, and the intellectual insignificance of his teachers, he withdrew into his own world. Such a boy would not sub- mit to the impositions of his father. The thoughtless manner in which his father used his wife did not escape the discerning eye of the seven- teen-year-old boy. At one point, on a journey to Italy with his father, he was admonished for not living up to the appropriate degree of stereo- typed tourist enthusiasm. Max simply declared his intention of returning home, at once and alone.
The confirmation motto that Weber received was: 'The Lord is the spirit, but where the Lord's spirit is, there also is freedom.' Max Weber's widow in her biography comments: 'Hardly any other Biblical motto could better express the law governing this child's life.'
Weber's pre-university schooling came to an end in the spring of 1882. Possessed of exceptional talent, he had had no need to 'strain.' His teach- ers, however, attested to his lack of routine industry and doubted his 'moral maturity.' Like many nineteenth-century thinkers, he made a rather unfavorable impression upon his teachers. The seventeen-year-old> stringy young man with sloping shoulders still appeared wanting in appropriate respect for authority.
He went to Heidelberg and, following in the steps of his father, en- rolled as a student of law. He also studied a variety of cultural subjects, including history, economics, and philosophy, which at Heidelberg were taught by eminent scholars. He accepted provisional membership in his father's dueling fraternity, the father's influence thus bringing him into such circles. From the mother's side, through an older cousin who was studying theology, a son of the Strassburg historian Baumgarten, he par- ticipated in the theological and philosophical controversies of the day.
He began his daily routine at Heidelberg by rising early to attend a lecture in logic. Then he 'fiddled around' in the dueling hall for an hour. He sat through his lectures 'in a studious way,' went to lunch at 12:30, 'for one mark'; occasionally he had a quarter of a litre of wine or
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 7
beer with his meal. Frequently, for two hours in the early afternoon he played a 'solid game of cards.' Then he retreated to his rooms, went over his lecture notes, and read such books as Strauss' The Old and the New Belief. 'Sometimes in the afternoon I go with friends to the moun- tains and walk, and in the evening we meet again at the restaurant and have a quite good supper for 80 pfennig. I read Lotze's Microcosm, and we get into heated argument about it.' ^ Occasionally, invitations to the homes of professors gave him an opportunity to imitate the characteristic peculiarities of people known to the group.
During subsequent semesters, Weber joined heartily in the social life of the dueling fraternity, and he learned to hold his own in drinking bouts as well as duels. Soon his face carried the conventional dueling scar. He fell into debt and remained so during his Heidelberg years. The student and patriotic songs he learned during this period lingered in his memory throughout the course of his life. The stringy youth grew into the robust man, broad-shouldered and rather stout. When he visited his mother in Berlin, now a man with the external characteristics of Imperial Germany, his mother was shocked at his appearance and re- ceived him with a slap in the face.
Looking back upon his Heidelberg years, Weber wrote: 'The usual training for haughty aggression in the dueling fraternity and as an officer has undoubtedly had a strong influence upon me. It removed the shyness and insecurity of my adolescence.'^
After three semesters at Heidelberg, at the age of 19 Weber moved to Strassburg in order to serve his year in the army. Apart from dueling, he had never done any physical exercise, and the military service with its drill was difficult for him. In addition to the physical strain, he suf- fered greatly under the stupidity of barrack drill and the chicanery of subaltern officers. He did not like to give up his intellectual pursuits:
When I come home I usually go to bed around nine o'clock. However, I cannot fall asleep, as my eyes are not tired and the intellectual side of man is not being utilized. The feeling, which begins in the morning and increases toward the end of the day, of sinking slowly into the night of abysmal stupidity is actually the most disagreeable thing of all.^
Weber adjusted to this feeling by having his fill of alcohol in the evening and going through the military routine the next day in the daze of a moderate hangover. Then he felt 'that the hours fly away because nothing, not a single thought, stirs under my skull.' Although
8 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
he finally built up his endurance and met most of the physical demands quite well, he never measured up to the gymnastic acrobatics. Once a sergeant shouted at him, in Berlin dialect: 'Man, you look like a barrel of beer swinging on a trapeze.' He made up for this deficiency by per- fecting his marching endurance and his goosestep. At no time did he cease to rebel against the
incredible waste of time required to domesticate thinking beings into ma- chines responding to commands with automatic precision. . . One is sup- posed to learn patience by observing for an hour each day all sorts of sense- less things which are called military education. As if, my God! after three months of the manual of arms for hours every day and the innumerable in- sults of the most miserable scoundrels, one could ever be suspected of suffering from lack of patience. The officer candidate is supposed to be de- prived of the possibility of using his mind during the period of military training.^
Yet Weber was quite objective; he admitted that the body works more precisely when all thinking is eliminated. And after he received his officer's commission, he quickly learned to see the brighter side of army life. He was well esteemed by his superior officers, and contributed tall stories and a keen sense of humor to the comradeship of the officers' mess; and, as one capable of command, he won the respect of the men under him.
The military year was over in 1884 and at the age of 20 Weber re- sumed his university studies in Berlin and Goettingen, where, two years later, he took his first examination in law. But during the summer of 1885 and again in 1887 he returned to Strassburg for military exercises. And in 1888 he participated in military maneuvers in Posen. There he felt at close range the atmosphere of the German-Slavonic border, which seemed to him a 'cultural' frontier. His discussion of Channing, in a letter addressed to his mother, is characteristic of his thinking at this time.
Channing had made a deep impression upon him, but Weber could not go along with his ethical absolutism and pacifism. T simply cannot see what moral elevation will result from placing military professionals on a footing with a gang of murderers and holding them up for public disdain. War would not thereby gain in humaneness.' Characteristically, Weber does not enter into a theological dispute about the Sermon on the Mount; he keeps at a distance from Channing by locating his perspective in the social and historical situation; he tries thereby to 'understand' and, at the same time, he relativizes Channing's position. 'Channing obviously
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 9
has no idea of such matters [war and desertion]. He has in mind the conditions of American enhsted armies with which the predatory wars of the democratic American federal Government against Mexico etc. have been fought.' ^ The arguments indicate, in nuce, the position that Weber later argues, in the last section of Politics as a Vocation and in the discus- sion of religion and politics in Religious Rejections of the World.^
It is characteristic of Weber's way of life that in Strassburg his main social experience remained within his family situation. Two of his mother's sisters were married to Strassburg professors; and Weber found friendship and intellectual discourse as well as profound emotional experience in their houses. Some of the Baumgarten family were ex- ceptionally prone to mystical and religious experiences, and young Weber participated with great sympathy in the tensions that these experiences occasioned. He became the confidant of almost everyone concerned, learning to appreciate and sympathize with their respective values. He spoke of himself as 'Ich Weltmensch' and tried to find a workable solu- tion for the several persons involved. And for Weber this meant going beyond ethical absolutism: 'The matter does not appear to me to be so desperate if one does not ask too exclusively (as the Baum- gartens, now as often, do) : "Who is morally right and who is morally wrong?" But if one rather asks: "Given the existing conflict, how can I solve it with the least internal and external damage for all con- cerned?"'° Weber thus suggested a pragmatic view, a focus on the consequences of various decisions rather than on the stubborn insistence upon the introspective awareness of one's intense sincerity. His early let- ters and the experiences at Strassburg clearly point to his later distinction between an ethic of responsibility and an ethic of absolute ends.
Weber concluded his studies and took up service in the law courts of Berlin, in which city he lived with his parents. In the early 'eighties, he settled down, a diligent student of law, in the lecture rooms of the eminent jurists of the time. Among them, he admired Gneist, whose lectures directed his attention to current pohtical problems. 'I find his lectures true masterpieces; really, I have wondered about his manner of directly entering questions of politics and about the way he de- velops strictly liberal views without becoming a propagandist, which Treitschke does become in his lectures on state and church.' ^°
Weber concentrated upon a field in which economic and legal history overlapped. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the history of trading com-
10 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
panics during the Middle Ages (1889), examining hundreds of ItaHan and Spanish references and learning both languages in order to do so. In 1890 he passed his second examination in law. He habilitated himself in Berhn for commercial, German, and Roman law with a treatise on what Marx once called 'the secret history of the Romans,' namely, The History of Agrarian Institutions (1891). The modest title actually covers a sociological, economic, and cultural analysis of ancient society, a theme to which Weber repeatedly returned. He had to defend one of the finer points of his thesis against Theodor Mommsen. At the end of the in- conclusive exchange, the eminent historian asserted that he knew of no better man to succeed him 'than the highly esteemed Max Weber.'
In the spring of 1892, a grand niece of Max Weber, Sr., came to Berlin in order to educate herself for a profession. Marianne Schnitger, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a doctor, had attended a finishing school in the city of Hanover. Upon returning to Berlin after an earlier visit to the Weber home, she realized that she was in love with Max Weber. After some confusion, Victorian misunderstandings, and moral attempts at self-clarification, Max and Marianne announced their formal engage- ment. They were married in the fall of 1893.
For some six years before his marriage to Marianne, Weber had been in love with a daughter of his mother's sister in Strassburg, who, for rather long periods, was in a mental hospital. She was recovering when Weber gently broke with her. He never forgot that he had unwillingly caused suffering to this tender girl. It was perhaps an important reason for the mildness of his reactions to others who were guilty in the field of personal relations and for his general stoicism in personal affairs. In addition to this situation, another moral difficulty had stood in the way of the marriage. Perhaps because of Weber's hesitancy in approaching Marianne, a friend of his had courted her, and it was somewhat painful to Weber to cut in.
After his marriage to Marianne, Weber lived the life of a successful young scholar in Berlin. Having taken the place of Jakob Goldschmidt, a famous teacher of economics who had become ill, he was in lecture hall and seminar nineteen hours a week. He also participated in state examinations for lawyers and, in addition, imposed a heavy load of work upon himself. He was active in consultation work for government agen-
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW II
cies, and made special studies for private reform groups, one on the stock exchange, and another on the estates in Eastern Germany.
In the fall of 1894, he accepted a full professorship in economics at Freiburg University. There he met Hugo Miinsterberg, Pastor Naumann, and Wilhelm Rickert. He had an enormous load, working until very late. When Marianne urged him to get some rest, he would call out : 'If I don't work until one o'clock I can't be a professor.'
In 1895, the Webers made a trip to Scotland and the west coast of Ireland. Returning to Freiburg, Weber gave his inaugural address at the University. It was entitled, 'The National State and Economic Policy,' and was a confession of belief in imperialist Realpolitil^ and the House of Hohenzollern. It caused quite a stir. 'The brutality of my views,' he wrote, 'have caused horror. The Catholics were the most content with it, because I gave a firm kick to "Ethical Culture." '
Weber accepted a chair at Heidelberg in 1896, replacing the eminent and retired Knies, one of the heads of 'the historical school.' He thus became the colleague of former teachers, Fischer, Bekker, and others, who still stamped the intellectual and social life of Heidelberg. His circle of friends included Georg Jellinek, Paul Hensel, Karl Neumann, the art historian, and Ernst Troeltsch, the religionist, who was to become one of Weber's greatest friends and intellectual companions, and who for a time lived in the Weber household.
Max Weber's father died in 1897, shortly after a tense discussion in which Max heatedly defended his mother against what seemed to him autocratic impositions. Later Weber felt that his hostile outbreak against his father was a guilty act which could never be rectified.^^ During the following summer, the Webers traveled to Spain and on the return trip Weber became fevered and ill with a psychic malady. He seemed to get better when the academic year began, but towards the end of the fall semester he collapsed from tension and remorse, exhaustion and anxiety. For his essentially psychiatric condition, doctors prescribed cold water, travel, and exercise. Yet Weber continued to experience the sleeplessness of an inner tension.
For the rest of his life he suffered intermittently from severe depres- sions, punctuated by manic spurts of extraordinarily intense intellectual work and travel. Indeed, his way of life from this time on seems to
12 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
oscillate between neurotic collapse, travel, and work. He was held to- gether by a profound sense of humor and an unusually fearless practice of the Socratic maxim.
Eager to make the best of a bad situation and to comfort his wife, Weber wrote:
Such a disease has its compensations. It has reopened to me the human side of life, which mama used to miss in me. And this to an extent previously unknown to me. I could say, with John Gabriel Borkman, that 'an icy hand has let me loose.' In years past my diseased disposition expressed itself in a frantic grip upon scientific work, which appeared to me as a talisman. . . Looking back, this is quite clear. I know that sick or healthy, I shall no longer be the same. The need to feel crushed under the load of work is extinct. Now I want most of all to live out my life humanly and to see my love as happy as it is possible for me to make her. I do not believe that I shall achieve less than formerly in my inner treadmill, of course, always in proportion to my condition, the permanent improvement of which will in any case require much time and rest.^^
He repeatedly attempted to continue his teaching. During one such attempt his arms and back became temporarily paralyzed, yet he forced himself to finish the semester. He felt dreadfully tired out; his head was weary; every mental effort, especially speech, was felt to be detri- mental to his entire being. In spite of occasional wrath and impatience, he thought of his condition as part of his fate. He rejected all 'good counsel.' Since adolescence, everything about him had been geared for thinking. And now, every intellectual pursuit became a poison to him. He had not developed any artistic abilities, and physical work of any sort was distasteful. His wife attempted to persuade him to take up some craft or hobby, but he laughed at her. For hours he sat and gazed stupidly, picking at his finger nails, claiming that such inactivity made him feel good. When he tried to look at his lecture notes, the words swam in confusion before his eyes. One day, while walking in a v/ood, he lost his sensory control and openly wept. A pet cat made him so angry with its mewing that he was quite beyond himself in rage. These symp- toms were present during the years 1898 and 1899. The university authorities granted him a leave with pay. Years later, in a letter to his friend, Karl Vossler, Weber wrote : ' "Misery teaches prayer." . . . Al- ways? According to my personal experience, I should like to dispute this statement. Of course, I agree with you that it holds very frequently, all too frequently for man's dignity.' ^*
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW I3
One fall the Webers traveled to Venice for 'a vacation,' They returned to Heidelberg and again Weber tried to resume some of his duties, but soon collapsed, more severely than ever before. At Christmas he asked to be dismissed from his position, but the University granted him a long leave of absence with a continuance of salary. 'He could not read or write, speak, walk, or sleep without pain; all mental and part of his physical functions refused to work.' ^^
Early in 1899, ^^ entered a small mental institution and remained there alone for several weeks. A young psychopathic cousin of Weber's was brought to the institution, and during the winter, on medical ad- vice, Weber's wife traveled with both men to Ajaccio on the island of Corsica. In the spring, they went to Rome, the ruins of which re-stimu- lated Weber's historical interest. He felt depressed by the presence of the psychopathic youth, who was then sent home. Several years later, this youth took his own life. Weber's letter of condolence to the parents gives us some insight into his freedom from conventional attitudes to- wards suicide.
He was a man [he wrote of the cousin] who, chained to an incurably dis- eased body, yet had developed, perhaps because of it, a sensitivity of feeling, a clarity about himself, and a deeply hidden and proud and noble height of inner deportment such as is found among few healthy people. To know and to judge this is given only to those who have seen him quite near and who have learned to love him as we have, and who, at the same time, personally know what disease is. . . His future being what it was, he has done right to depart now to the unknown land and to go before you, who otherwise would have had to leave him behind on this earth, walking toward a dark fate, without counsel, and in loneliness.^^
With such an evaluation of suicide as a last and stubborn affirmation of man's freedom, Weber takes his stand at the side of such modern Stoics as Montaigne, Hume, and Nietzsche. He was, at the same time, of the opinion that religions of salvation do not approve of 'voluntary death,' that only philosophers have hallowed it.^^
Under the influence of the magnificent landscape of Italy and its his- torically grandiose scenes, Weber slowly recovered. The Webers also spent some time in Switzerland, where his mother, now 57, and his brother Alfred visited them. Shortly after his mother's visit. Max was able to resume reading, a book on art history. He commented: 'Who knows how long I can keep it up.? Anything but literature in my own field.' After three and a half years of intermittently severe disease, in
14 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
1902 Weber felt able to return to Heidelberg and resume a light sched- ule of work. Gradually, he began to read professional journals and such books as Simmel's Philosophy of Money. Then, as if to make up for his years of intellectual privation, he plunged into a vast and universal literature in which art history, economics, and politics stood alongside the economic history of monastic orders.
There were, however, repeated setbacks. He was still unable fully to take up his teaching work. He asked to be dismissed from his profes- sorship and to be made a titular professor. This request was first re- jected, but at his insistence, he was made a lecturer. He had requested the right to examine Ph.D. candidates, but this was not granted. After four and a half years without production he was able to write a book review. A new phase of writing finally began, at first dealing with problems of method in the social sciences.
Weber suffered under the psychic burden of receiving money from the university without rendering adequate service. He felt that only a man at his work is a full man, and he forced himself to work. Yet after only a summer of it, he returned to Italy alone. During the year 1903, he traveled out of Germany no less than six times; he was in Italy, Holland, and Belgium. His own nervous condition, his disappointment at his own insufficiencies, frictions with the Heidelberg faculty, and the political state of the nation occasionally made him wish to turn his back on Germany forever. Yet during this year, 1903, he managed to join with Sombart in the editorship of the Archiv fi'ir Sozialivissenschajt und Sozialpoliti^, which became perhaps the leading social science journal in Germany, until suppressed by the Nazis. This editorship provided Weber an opportunity to resume contact with a wide circle of scholars and politicians and to broaden the focus of his own work. By 1904, his pro- ductivity was in full swing again and rising steeply. He published essays on the social and economic problems of Junker estates, objectivity in the social sciences, and the first section of the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Hugo Miinsterberg, his colleague from Freiburg days, had helped organize a 'Congress of Arts and Science' as part of the Universal Ex- position of 1904 in St. Louis. He invited Weber (along with Sombart, Troeltsch, and many others) to read a paper before the Congress.^^ By August, Weber and his wife were on the way to America.
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW I5
Max Weber's reaction to the United States was at once enthusiastic and detached. He possessed to an eminent degree the 'virtue' which Edward Gibbon ascribes to the studious traveler abroad, that Virtue which borders on a vice; the flexible temper which can assimilate itself to every tone of society from the court to the cottage; the happy flow of spirits which can amuse and be amused in every company and situa- tion.' ^^ Hence Weber was impatient and angry with quickly prejudiced colleagues, who, after a day and a half in New York, began to run down things in America.
He wished to enter sympathetically into the new world without sur- rendering his capacity for informed judgments at a later time. He was fascinated by the rush hour in lower Manhattan, which he liked to view from the middle of Brooklyn Bridge as a panorama of mass trans- portation and noisy motion. The skyscrapers, which he saw as 'fortresses of capital,' reminded him of 'the old pictures of the towers in Bologna and Florence.' And he contrasted these towering bulks of capitalism with the tiny homes of American college professors:
Among these masses, all individualism becomes expensive, whether it is in housing or eating. Thus, the home of Professor Hervay, of the German de- partment in Columbia University, is surely a doll's house with tiny little rooms, with toilet and bath facilities in the same room (as is almost always the case). Parties with more than four guests are impossible (worthy of be- ing envied!) and with all this, it takes one hour's ride to get to the center of the city. . .^^
From New York the party journeyed to Niagara Falls. They visited a small town and then went on to Chicago, which Weber found 'incred- ible.' He noted well its lawlessness and violence, its sharp contrasts of gold coast and slum, the 'steam, dirt, blood, and hides' of the stockyards, the 'maddening' mixture of peoples:
the Greek shining the Yankee's shoes lor five cents, the German acting as his waiter, the Irishman managing his politics, and the Italian digging his dirty ditches. With the exception of some exclusive residential districts, the whole gigantic city, more extensive than London, is like a man whose skin has been peeled off and whose entrails one sees at work.
Again and again, Weber was impressed by the extent of waste, espe- cially the waste of human life, under American capitalism. He noticed
l6 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
the same conditions tliat the muckrakers were pubUcizing at the time. Thus he commented, in a letter to his mother:
After their work, the workers often have to travel for hours in order to reach their homes. The tramway company has been bankrupt for years. As usual a receiver, who has no interest in speeding up the liquidation, manages its affairs; therefore, new tram cars are not purchased. The old cars con- standy break down, and about four hundred people a year are thus killed or crippled. According to the law, each death costs the company about $5,000, which is paid to the widow or heirs, and each cripple costs $10,000, paid to the casualty himself. These compensations are due so long as the company does not introduce certain precautionary measures. But they have calculated that the four hundred casualties a year cost less than would the necessary precautions. The company therefore does not introduce them.^°
In St. Louis, Weber delivered a successful lecture on the social struc- ture of Germany, with particular reference to rural and political prob- lems. This was his first 'lecture' in six and a half years. Many of his colleagues were present, and according to the report of his wife, who was also present, his talk was very well received. This was gratifying to the Webers, as it seemed to indicate that he was again able to function in his profession. He traveled through the Oklahoma territory, and vis- ited New Orleans as well as the Tuskegee Institution; he visited distant relatives in North Carolina and Virginia; and then, in fast tempo, trav- eled through Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and Boston. In New York, he searched the hbrary of Columbia University for materials to be used in The Protestant Ethic.
Of the Americans [whom we met] it was a woman, an inspector of in- dustry, who was by far the most pre-eminent figure. One learned a great deal about the radical evil of this world from this passionate socialist. The hope- lessness of social legislation in a system of state particularism, the corruption of many labor leaders who incite strikes and then have the manufacturer pay them for settling them. (I had a personal letter of introduction to such a scoundrel.) . . . and yet, [the Americans] are a wonderful people. Only the Negro question and the terrible immigration form a big, black cloud.^^
During his travels in America Weber seems to have been most in- terested in labor problems, the immigrant question, problems of politi- cal management — especially of municipal government — all expressions of the 'capitahst spirit,' ^" the Indian question and its administration, the plight of the South, and the Negro problem. Of the American Negro, Weber wrote: 'I have talked to about one hundred white Southerners
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW V]
of all social classes and parties, and the problem of what shall become of these people [the Negroes] seems absolutely hopeless.'
He had arrived in America in September 1904; he left for Germany shortly before Christmas.*
Perhaps the United States was for Weber what England had been for previous generations of German liberals: the model of a new society. Here the Protestant sects had had their greatest scope and in their wake the secular, civic, and 'voluntary associations' had flowered. Here a po- litical federation of states had led to a 'voluntary' union of immense contrasts.
Weber was far from the conceit of those German civil servants who prided themselves in their 'honest administration' and pointed disdain- fully to the 'corrupt practices' of American politics. Friedrich Kapp, a returned German-American, had brought such attitudes home to Weber. But Weber saw things in a broader perspective. Being convinced that politics are not to be judged solely as a moral business, his attitude was rather that of Charles Sealsfield, who had, during the eighteen-thirties, unfolded an epic panorama of the birth of an empire-building nation destined to 'take its place among the mightiest nations upon the earth.' Sealsfield had asked, 'Is it not rather a necessary, absolute condition of our liberty that citizens' virtues, as well as their vices, should grow more luxuriantly because they are freely permitted to grow and increase.?' Weber might have agreed, after what he saw, that 'the mouth which breathes the mephitic vapors of the Mississippi and the Red River swamps is not fit to chew raisins, that the hand which fells our gigantic trees and drains our bogs cannot put on kid gloves. Our land is the land of contrast.' ^^
The key focus of Weber's experience of America was upon the role of bureaucracy in a democracy. He saw that 'machine politics' were in- dispensable in modern 'mass democracy,' unless a 'leaderless democracy' and a confusion of tongues were to prevail. Machine politics, however, i mean the management of politics by professionals, by the disciplined party organization and its streamlined propaganda. Such democracy may also bring to the helm the Caesarist people's tribune, whether in the role of the strong president or the city manager. And the whole process
*Some translations of Weber's letters from the United States are contained in H. W. Brann, 'Max Weber and the United States,' Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, June 1944, pp. 18-30.
THE MAN AND HIS WORK
tends towards increasing rational efficiency and therewith bureaucratic machines: party, municipal, federal.
Weber saw this machine-building, however, in a dialectic fashion: Democracy must oppose bureaucracy as a tendency towards a caste of mandarins, removed from the common people by expert training, exam- ination certificates, and tenure of office, but: the scope of administrative functions, the end of the open frontier, and the narrowing of oppor- tunities make the spoils system, with its public waste, irregularities, and lack of technical efficiency, increasingly impossible and undemocratic. Thus democracy has to promote what reason demands and democratic sentiment hates. In his writings, Weber repeatedly refers to those Ameri- can workers who opposed civil-service reform by arguing that they pre- ferred a set of corrupt politicians whom they could oust and despise, to a caste of expert officials who would despise them and who were irre- movable. Weber was instrumental in having the German President's power strengthened as a balance of the Reichstag; this act should be understood along with his American experiences. He was, above all, im- pressed by the grandiose efficiency of a type of man, bred by free asso- ciations in which the individual had to prove himself before his equals, where no authoritative commands, but autonomous decision, good sense, and responsible conduct train for citizenship.
In 191 8 Weber suggested in a letter to a colleague that Germany should borrow the American 'club pattern' as a means of 're-educating' Ger- many; for, he wrote, 'authoritarianism now fails completely, except in the form of the church.' ^^ Weber thus saw the connection between voluntary associations and the personality structure of the free man. His study of the Protestant sect testifies to that. He was convinced that the automatic selection of persons, with the pressure always upon the in- dividual to prove himself, is an infinitely deeper way for 'toughening' man than the ordering and forbidding technique of authoritarian insti- tutions. For such authoritarianism does not reach into the innermost of those subject to its external constraint, and it leaves them incapable of self-direction once the authoritarian shell is broken by counter-violence.
Upon his return to Germany, Max Weber resumed his writing at Heidelberg. He finished the second part of The Protestant Ethic, which in a letter to Rickert he called 'Protestant asceticism as the foundation
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW IQ
of modern vocational civilization — a sort of "spiritualist" construction of the modern economy.' ~^'
The first Russian revolution redirected his scholarly work; he learned Russian, in bed before getting up each morning, in order to follow events in the Russian daily press. Then he chased 'after the events with his pen in order to pin them down as daily history.' In 1901 he pub- lished two major essays on Russia, 'The Situation of Bourgeois Democ- racy in Russia' and 'Russia's Transition to Sham Constitutionalism.'
Eminent social scientists, such as SchmoUer and Brentano, encouraged him to resume a professorship, but Weber felt he was not capable of doing so. For a while longer, he wanted merely to write. Yet, being universally esteemed, he could not help being drawn into academic poli- tics, judging prospective candidates for positions, or trying to open up room for various younger scholars, such as Georg Simmel and Robert Michels, to whom satisfactory careers were blocked or precluded because of anti-Semitism or prejudice against young socialist docents. The case of Robert Michels, the son of an eminent Cologne family of patrician merchants, especially enraged Weber. At the time, German universities were closed to him because he was a social democrat. Weber asserted that, 'If I compare Italian, French, and, at the moment, even Russian conditions with this condition of ours, I have to consider it a shame of a civilized nation.' Some professor maintained that in addition to political reasons for Michels' exclusion there was the further reason that Michels had not baptized his children. Upon this Weber wrote an article in the Frankjurter Zeitung on 'The So-called Academic Freedom,' in which he said:
As long as such views prevail, I see no possibility of behaving as if we had such a thing as academic freedom. . . And as long as religious communities knowingly and openly allovi^ their sacraments to be used as means for making a career, on the same level of a dueling corps or an officer's commission, they deserve the disdain about which they are so used to complaining.^^
In 1908 he investigated the industrial psychology of his grandfather's linen factory in WestphaUa. He had hoped to promote a series of such studies, and the methodological note he wrote is a causal analysis of physical and psychic factors influencing the productivity of industrial labor. In this same year, he worked out a long essay on the social struc- ture of ancient society, published in an encyclopedia * under the modest
* Handwdrterbitch der Staatswissenschaften, 3rd ed., vol. i.
20 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
and somewhat misleading title, 'The Agrarian Institutions of Antiquity.' A disciple of Freud made his appearance in the intellectual circles in Heidelberg in 1909. Conventional Victorian conceptions of marital fidel- ity and of morally justified jealousy were depreciated in the name of a new norm of mentally healthy living. Full of sympathy for the tragic entanglements and moral difficulties of friends, which resulted from this conduct, Weber reacted sharply against what appeared to him a con- fusion of valuable, though still imprecise, psychiatric insights with an ethic of vulgar pride in 'healthy nerves.' He was not willing to accept healthy nerves as an absolute end, or to calculate the moral worth of repression in terms of its cost to one's nerves. Weber thought that the therapeutic technique of Freud was a resuscitation of the oral confes- sion, with the clinician displacing the old directeur d'dme. He felt that an ethic was disguised in the scientific discussion of the clinician, and that in this matter a specialized scientist, who should be concerning him- self only with means, was usurping from laymen their right to make their own evaluations. Weber thus saw a 'loose' way of life draped in what he felt was a shifting clinical theory. One can easily see that he resisted a theory that is, in principle, directed against asceticism and that conceives of ends only in pragmatic terms, thus deflating the im- perative claim of heroic ethics. Being personally characterized by an extremely stern conscience, Weber was often ready to forgive others but was quite rigid with himself. He believed that many of those who followed in the wake of Freud were too ready to justify what appeared to him as moral shabbiness.
It should, however, be noted that although Weber was not willing to see Freud's disciples use their theories in this personal way, he had
no doubt that Freud's ideas can become a source of highly significant inter- pretations of a whole series of cultural and historical, moral and religious phenomena. Of course, from the point of view of a cultural historian, their significance is not nearly so universal as the understandable enthusiasms of Freud and his disciples, in the joy of their discovery, would have us believe. A precondition would be the establishment of an exact typology of a scope and certainty which does not exist today, despite all assertions to the con- trary, but which perhaps will exist in two to three decades.^'^
In Heidelberg, during these years from 1906 to 1910, Weber partici- pated in intense intellectual discussions with such eminent colleagues as
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 21
his brother, Alfred Weber, with Otto Klebs, Eberhard Gothein, Wilhelm Windelband, Georg JelUnek, Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Neumann, Emil Lask, Friedrich Gundolf, and Arthur Salz. During vacation times or other 'free periods,' many friends from outside Heidelberg visited the Webers. Among them were Robert Michels, Werner Sombart, the phi- losopher Paul Hensel, Hugo Miinsterberg, Ferdinand Tonnies, Karl Vossler, and, above all, Georg Simmel. Among the younger scholars who sought Weber's stimulus were: Paul Honigsheim, Karl Lowenstein, and Georg Lukacs. These circles were not closed to the non-academic; they included a few eminent artists, such as Mina Tobler, the musician to whom Weber dedicated his study of Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as the former actress, Klare Schmid-Romberg, and her husband, a poet, philosopher, and connoisseur of art. Karl Jaspers, a psychiatrist who was to turn philosopher and use Kierkegaard's work in his philosophy of existentialism, and H. Gruhle, a psychiatrist interested in the latest of modern art, also belonged to the circle. Three generations of intellectual and artistic elite were in active discourse at these Heidelberg meeting-s.
In 1908 Max Weber was active in establishing a sociological society. In a selfless manner, he carried the routine burdens of overcoming the usual difficulties of such organizations. He was decisive in setting the level of discussion at the meetings and in defining the scope of future work. He stimulated collective research enterprises, such as an investi- gation of voluntary associations, ranging from athletic leagues to re- ligious sects and political parties. He proposed a methodical study of the press by questionnaires, and directed and prompted studies in in- dustrial psychology. In addition, he assumed responsibility to the pub- lisher Siebeck of organizing an encyclopedic series of social-science studies. This latter project was intended as a two-year job, but it con- tinued even after his death, his own Wirtschajt und Gesellschajt appear- ing posthumously as a volume in the series.
The severity of Weber's sense of honor, his prompt chivalry, and his position as a reserve officer occasionally impelled him to engage in court actions and 'affairs of honor.' It was characteristic of him to act with great impetuosity and righteous indignation. Yet when his opponent had been morally crushed by the machinery he had set in motion, his furor cooled, and he was overcome by mercifulness and sympathy, the more so when he realized that others besides the guilty one suffered from his actions. Close friends who did not feel so strongly as Weber in such matters were inclined to consider him a querulous man who lacked a
22 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
sense of measure, a Don Quixote whose actions might well boomerang. Others hailed him as Germany's foremost educator, whose moral au- thority raised him above the shoulders of the spineless Philistines, out only for their own careers. His Don Quixote aspect comes out clearly in a statement he made to his friend, Theodor Heuss, in 1917: 'As soon as the war has come to an end, I shall insult the Kaiser until he suesjne, and then the responsible statesmen, Biilow, Tirpitz, and Bethmann- Hollweg, will be compelled to make statements under oath.' ^^
When the First World War began, Weber was 50. 'In spite of all,' it was 'a great and wonderful war,' "^ and he wanted to march at the head of his company. That his age and medical condition made this impos- sible was painful to him. But as a member of the reserve corps, he was commissioned as a disciplinary and economic officer, a captain, in charge of establishing and running nine hospitals in the Heidelberg area. In this position he experienced from the inside what had become a central concept in his sociology: bureaucracy. The social apparatus of which he had charge was, however, one of dilettantes, rather than of experts; and Weber worked for and witnessed its transformation into an or- dered bureaucracy. From August 1914 to the fall of 1915, he served this commission, which was then dissolved in a reorganization, and Weber honorably retired. His political frustrations during the war will be dis- cussed presently.
He went to Brussels for a short time in order to confer with Jaffe about the administration of the occupation of Belgium. Then he went to Berlin, as a self-appointed prophet of doom, to write memoranda, seek contact with political authorities, and fight the mad imperialist aspiration. In the final analysis, he debunked the conduct of the war- party as being the gamble of munition makers and agrarian capitalists. From Berlin he went to Vienna and Budapest, in the service of the government, to conduct unofficial conversations with industrialists about tariff questions.
In the fall of 1916 he was back in Heidelberg, studying the Hebrew prophets and working on various sections of Wirtschaft und Gesell- schaft. In the summer of 191 7 he vacationed at his wife's home in West- phalia, reading the poetry of Stefan George and Gundolf's book on Goethe. In the winters of 1917 and 1918, socialist-pacifist students fre- quented his 'open hours' on Sundays in Heidelberg. The young com- munist, Ernst Toller, was among them; frequently he read his poetry aloud. Later, when Toller was arrested, Weber spoke for him in the
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 23
military court and effected his release, although he could not prevent the removal of the student group from the university.
In April 1918, he moved to Vienna for a summer term at the uni- versity. These were his first university lectures for nineteen years. Under the title, 'A Positive Critique of the Materialist Conception of History,' he presented his sociology of world religions and politics. His lectures became events for the university, and he had to perform them in the largest hall available, as professors, state officials, and politicians attended. Yet he experienced compulsive anxieties about these lectures, using opiates in order to induce sleep. Vienna University offered him a per- manent position, but he did not accept.
In 1918 Weber shifted from Monarchist to Republican loyalties. As Meinecke said, 'We have turned from being Monarchists at heart to being Republicans by reason.' He abstained from accepting any political position in the new regime. A whole series of academic positions were offered to him: Berlin, Gottingen, Bonn, and Munich. He accepted the Munich offer, going there in the summer of 1919 as Brentano's suc- cessor. In Munich, he lived through the excitement of the Bavarian Dic- tatorship and its collapse. His last lectures were worked out at the re- quest of his students and have been published as General Economic History. In midsummer, he fell ill, and, at a late stage of his disease, a doctor was able to diagnose his condition as deep-seated pneumonia. He died in June 1920.
Max Weber belonged to a generation of universal scholars, and there are definite sociological conditions for scholarship of the kind he dis- played. One such condition was a gymnasium education, which, in Weber's case, equipped him in such a way that the Indo-Germanic languages were but so many dialects of one linguistic medium. (A read- ing knowledge of Hebrew and Russian was acquired by the way.) An intellectually stimulating family background gave him a head-start and made it possible for him to study an unusual combination of specialized subjects. When he had passed his law examination, he was at the same time a well-equipped economist, historian, and philosopher. And by vir- tue of having participated, through the Strassburg branch of his family, in the theological disputes of the time, he was sufficiently acquainted with the literature of theology to handle it expertly.
It is clear that the enormous amount of work Weber turned out
24 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
would not have been possible without a certain type o£ fruitful leisure. Materially, this was made possible, at first, by his position as a scholar in a German university. The career pattern in these universities gave the German docent time for research during the years when the young American academician is overburdened with teaching. In addition, there was no pressure for rapid publication — as attested by the fact that many book-length chapters of Wirtschaft und Gesellschajt, written before World War I, were published after 1920. In his middle life Weber came into an inheritance that was sufficient to relieve him of serious worry about money.
The relative lack of pressure for 'practical' and immediately 'useful' knowledge, conditioned by a strongly humanist atmosphere, allowed for the pursuit of themes remote from the practical demands of the day. In the social sciences this was the more the case because the impact of Marxism almost required that the academician take up the question of capitaUsm as an epochal structure, rather than narrowed and 'practical' themes. In this connection the freedom of the university from local pres- sures was important.
Long decades of peace for Germany, from 1870 to 1914, coupled with general prosperity, had entirely changed the conditions of German schol- arship. The petty bourgeois professor, harried by money matters, had been replaced by an upper-class academician with a large home and a maid. This change facilitated the establishment of an intellectual salon. It is from this position that Weber saw the residences of American uni- versity professors.
The intellectual traditions and the accumulated scholarship of Ger- many, especially in history, the classics, psychology, theology, compara- tive literature, philology, and philosophy, gave the late-nineteenth-cen- tury German scholar a pre-eminent base upon which to build his work. And the clash of two bodies of intellectual work, the conservative inter- pretation of ideas by academicians in the tradition of Hegel and Ranke, and the radical intellectual production of non-academic socialists, Kaut- sky, Bernstein, and Mehring, formed a unique and challenging intel- lectual tension.
A number of contradictory elements stood in tension with one another and made up the life and views of Max Weber. If, as he wrote, 'men are not open books,' we should certainly not expect to find even an easy index to his many-sided existence. To understand him, we have to grasp a series of irrational half-paradoxes.
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 25
Although he was personally irreligious — in his own words, 'religiously unmusical' — he nevertheless spent a good part of his scholarly energy in tracing the effects of religion upon human conduct and life. It may not be irrelevant in this connection to repeat that his mother and her family were deeply pious and that in his early student days Weber lived close to friends and relatives who suffered extraordinary religious and psychic states; these experiences profoundly impressed themselves upon him. That he despised the conventional 'church' Christianity goes with- out saying, yet he had pity and condescension for those who in political tragedy and personal despair sacrificed their intellects to the refuge of the altar.
Many of his friends considered his sincere devotion to his work, the obvious pathos and dignity of his bearing, and the forcefulness and in- sight of his speech as religious phenomena. Yet his work is hardly un- derstandable without an appreciation of his disenchanted view of re- ligious matters. His love for his mother and his genuine detachment from 'religion' prevented him from ever falling into the Promethean blasphemy of Nietzsche, the greatest atheist of the nineteenth century, which he saw, in the last analysis, as a 'painful residue of the bourgeois Philistine.' '°
Weber was one of the last of the 'political professors' who made de- tached contributions to science, and, as the intellectual vanguard of the middle classes, were also leading political figures. Despite this fact, for the sake of 'objectivity' and the freedom of his students, Weber fought against 'the Treitschkes,' who used cloistered academic halls as forums of political propaganda. Although he was passionately concerned with the course of German policy, in theory he rigidly segregated his role as a professor and scientist from that of a publicist. Yet, when his friend Brentano, in Munich, asked him to accept a position, he answered that were he to accept any professorship, 'I would have to ask whether it would not be better to have someone who holds my views in Berlin at the present time as a counterweight against the absolute opportunism which now has the say there.' ^^
Throughout his life, Weber was a nationalist and believed in the mission of the Herrenvol\, yet at the same time he fought for individual freedom and, with analytic detachment, characterized the ideas of na- tionalism and racism as justificatory ideologies used by the ruling class, and their hireling publicists, to beat their impositions into weaker mem- bers of the polity. He had great esteem for the matter-of-fact conduct
26 THE MAN" AND HIS WORK
of labor leaders during the collapse of Germany, yet he lashed out against the doctrinal drill with which these same men domesticated the masses and trained them to believe in a future 'paradise' to be brought about by revolution. He was proud of being a Prussian officer, and yet as- serted in public that the Kaiser, his commander-in-chief, was something of which all Germans should be ashamed. A Prussian officer and a member of a dueling corps, he nevertheless did not mind rooming in a Brussels hotel over which flew a red, International flag. A model of the self-conscious masculinity of Imperial Germany, he nevertheless encour- ag^ed the first woman labor official in Germany and made vital speeches to members of the woman's emancipation movement of the early twen- tieth century.
Weber appears to have been an eminent academic teacher, and yet his health kept him from academic lectures for almost two decades. Al- though a scholar, he felt out of place in the academic chair and truly at home on the political platform. In his insistence on precision and balance, his prose is full of clauses and reservations, in the most schol- arly and difficult fashion. Yet at times he felt himself to be comparable to the demagogues of ancient Judea haranguing to the crowd in the street.
Among those who had dealings with him, the figure of Weber was highly controversial. At Heidelberg, many of his colleagues saw him as a difficult person, who because of demanding conscience and rigidity of honor was highly inconvenient and somewhat troublesome. Perhaps he was seen as hypochondriac. In the eyes of many friends and disciples, he appeared as an overtowering intellect. A Viennese journalist describes him in the following cliches:
Tall and fully bearded, this scholar resembles one of the German stone masons of the Renaissance period; only the eyes lack the naivete and sensu- ous joy of the artist. His gaze is from the innermost, from hidden passages, and it reaches into the greatest distances. His manner of expression corre- sponds to the man's exterior; it is infinitely plastic. We meet here an almost Hellenic way of seeing things. The words are simply formed, and, in their quiet simplicity, they remind us of Cyclopic blocks.
A disciple in Munich, who was personally distant from Weber, wor- shiping him from afar, compared him to Diirer's knight: without fear or favor, taking a straight course between death and the devil. And Karl Jaspers saw him as a new type of man who had the poise to hold to-
•fida
"WO. ihis
-ad
3»
for
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 27
gether in synthesis the tremendous tensions o£ his own self as well as the contadictions of external pubHc life without resorting to illusions. Every day that Weber 'wasted for things pohtical' instead of objectifying himself' seemed a pitiful loss to Jaspers.
In spite of the pathos of objectivity that is felt so intensely by the student of Weber's work, it nevertheless contains passages that refer to \\^eber's image of himself. The most obvious of these are found in his characterization of certain Hebrew prophets.'" When the course of the war and the collapse of Germany confirmed what Weber had anticipated for two decades, and the German people alone were proclaimed guilty for all the misfortunes of the war, Weber felt that the Germans were a pariah people. During the course of his studies in ancient Judaism, in iQi_6 and IQ17, he was profoundly moved by the analogies he saw be- tween the situation of the ancient Hebrew peoples and modern Ger- many. It was not only the pubhc and historical situation he saw as parallel; in the personality of many prophets and in their irregular and compulsive psychic states, particularly of Jeremiah. Weber saw features he felt resembled his own. When he read passages of this manuscript to his wife, she was touched in immediately seeing that this reading was an indirect analysis of himself.
Perhaps it was only in this fashion that Weber, who since childhood was incapable of directly revealing himself, could communicate his own self-image. Thus, what was most personal to him is accessible and at the same time hidden by the objectification of his work. By interpreting the prophets of disaster and doom, Weber illuminated his own personal and pubHc experiences.
This assimilation of his image of self into a historical figure stands in a broad tradition of humanism, historicism, and romanticism so char- acteristic of the nineteenth century. Eminent intellectuals and even states- men of that century often fashioned their images of themselves in the costumes of historical figures. Thus Napoleon simulated Alexander the Great; and the revolutionary republicans of the great upheavals saw themselves in terms of 'the Hves of Plutarch.' In Germany, this illusionist tendency remained strong throughout the epoch of Hberahsm. Some of the best of German youth, among them Francis Lieber, went out to help the Greeks in their fight for hberation against the Turks. But the ragged horse trader of the Balkan mountains shattered the marble image of the ancient Greek. Historical illusions were used as a backdrop of one's life and perhaps to compensate for the banality of the Philistinism, which
i
26 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
of labor leaders during the collapse of Germany, yet he lashed out against the doctrinal drill with which these same men domesticated the masses and trained them to believe in a future 'paradise' to be brought about by revolution. He was proud of being a Prussian officer, and yet as- serted in public that the Kaiser, his commander-in-chief, was something of yv^hich all Germans should be ashamed. A Prussian officer and a member of a dueling corps, he nevertheless did not mind rooming in a Brussels hotel over which flew a red. International flag. A model of the self-conscious masculinity of Imperial Germany, he nevertheless encour- aged the first woman labor official in Germany and made vital speeches to members of the woman's emancipation movement of the early twen- tjieth century. ^
Weber appears to have been an eminent academic teacher, and yet his health kept him from academic lectures for almost two decades. Al- though a scholar, he felt out of place in the academic chair and truly at home on the political platform. In his insistence on precision and balance, his prose is full of clauses and reservations, in the most schol- arly and difficult fashion. Yet at times he felt himself to be comparable to the demagogues of ancient Judea haranguing to the crowd in the street.
Among those who had dealings with him, the figure of Weber was highly controversial. At Heidelberg, many of his colleagues saw him as a difficult person, who because of demanding conscience and rigidity of honor was highly inconvenient and somewhat troublesome. Perhaps he was seen as hypochondriac. In the eyes of many friends and disciples, he appeared as an overtowering intellect. A Viennese journalist describes him in the following cliches:
Tall and fully bearded, this scholar resembles one of the German stone masons of the Renaissance period; only the eyes lack the naivete and sensu- ous joy of the artist. His gaze is from the innermost, from hidden passages, and it reaches into the greatest distances. His manner of expression corre- sponds to the man's exterior; it is infinitely plastic. We meet here an almost Hellenic way of seeing things. The words are simply formed, and, in their quiet simplicity, they remind us of Cyclopic blocks.
A disciple in Munich, who was personally distant from Weber, wor- shiping him from afar, compared him to Diirer's knight: without fear or favor, taking a straight course between death and the devil. And Karl Jaspers saw him as a new type of man who had the poise to hold to-
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW TJ
gether in synthesis the tremendous tensions of his own self as well as the confadictions of external public life without resorting to illusions. Every day that Weber 'wasted for things political' instead of objectifying himself seemed a pitiful loss to Jaspers.
In spite of the pathos of objectivity that is felt so intensely by the student of Weber's work, it nevertheless contains passages that refer to Weber's image of himself. The most obvious of these are found in his characterization of certain Hebrew prophets.^" When the course of the war and the collapse of Germany confirmed what Weber had anticipated for two decades, and the German people alone were proclaimed guilty for all the misfortunes of the war, Weber felt that the Germans were a pariah people. During the course of his studies in ancient Judaism, in iQij5 and IQ17, he was profoundly moved by the analogies he saw be- tween the situation of the ancient Hebrew peoples and modern Ger- many. It was not only the public and historical situation he saw as parallel; in the personality of many prophets and in their irregular and compulsive psychic states, particularly of Jeremiah. Weber saw features he felt resembled his own. When he read passages of this manuscript to his wife, she was touched in immediately seeing that this reading was an indirect analysis of himself.
Perhaps it was only in this fashion that Weber, who since childhood was incapable of directly revealing himself, could communicate his own self-image. Thus, what was most personal to him is accessible and at the same time hidden by the objectification of his work. By interpreting the prophets of disaster and doom, Weber illuminated his own personal and public experiences.
This assimilation of his image of self into a historical figure stands in a broad tradition of humanism, historicism, and romanticism so char- acteristic of the nineteenth century. Eminent intellectuals and even states- men of that century often fashioned their images of themselves in the costumes of historical figures. Thus Napoleon simulated Alexander the Great; and the revolutionary republicans of the great upheavals saw themselves in terms of 'the lives of Plutarch.' In Germany, this illusionist tendency remained strong throughout the epoch of liberalism. Some of the best of German youth, among them Francis Lieber, went out to help the Greeks in their fight for liberation against the Turks. But the ragged horse trader of the Balkan mountains shattered the marble image of the ancient Greek. Historical illusions were used as a backdrop of one's life and perhaps to compensate for the banaHty of the Philistinism, which
28 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
circumscribed the daily routine of powerless German professors with world-encompassing ideas.
If the older Weber identified himself with Jeremiah in the humanist tradition of illusion, he well knew that he was in truth no prophet. When urged by an admiring young intelligentsia to expound his faith, he re- jected their pleas, asserting that such confession belongs to the circle of intimates and not the public. Only prophets, artists, and saints might bare their souls in public. For Weber, modern society is godless, and prophets as well as saints are singularly out of place. He only offered Isaiah's sug- gestion: 'He calleth to me out of Seir, Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning com- eth, and also the night: if ye will enquire, enquire ye: return, come.' (21:11-12.)
8
If we are to understand Weber's biography as a whole, we must ex- amine his tensions and his repeated psychic disturbances. Several Unes of interpretation are possible; jointly or separately, they may offer an explanation.
Max Weber may have been hereditarily burdened by a constitutional affliction, which undoubtedly ran through his family line. Some evi- dence for this interpretation, which is the simplest one, is readily at hand. Weber's wife was a distant relative of his, and male relatives of hers ended their lives in insane asylums. Furthermore, a cousin of his entered the asylum, to which Weber himself was sent during his most severe breakdown.
If we are willing to see Weber's affliction as purely functional, we may then follow either one of two different lines of evidence: We may try to locate his personal difficulties in the private contexts of those dear to him: mother, father, loves, wife; or we may deal primarily with him in public contexts.
With reference to his personal relations, we may recall that Weber was a quiet, observant, and prematurely intelligent boy, who must have been worried under the strain of the increasingly bad relation between his father and mother. His strong sense of chivalry was, in part, a re- sponse to the patriarchal and domineering attitude of his father, who understood his wife's love as a willingness to serve and to allow herself to be exploited and controlled by him. This situation came to a climax when Weber, at the age of 31, in the presence of his mother and his
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 29
wife, saw fit to hold judgment over his father: he would remorselessly break all relations with him unless he met the son's condition: the mother should visit him 'alone' without the father. We have noted that the father died only a short time after this encounter and that Weber came out of the situation with an ineffaceable sense of guilt. One may certainly infer an inordinately strong Oedipus situation.
Throughout his life, Weber maintained a full correspondence with his mother, who once referred to him as 'an older daughter,' She eagerly sought counsel with him, her first-born, rather than with her husband, in matters concerning the demeanor of her third son. One should also pay heed to what was, to be sure, a passing phase of young Weber's aspiration: his desire to become a real he-man at the university. After only three semesters, he succeeded in changing externally from a slender mother's boy to a massive, beer-drinking, duel-marked, cigar-puffing student of Imperial Germany, whom his mother greeted with a slap in the face. Clearly, this was the father's son. The two models of identifi- cation and their associated values, rooted in mother and father, never disappeared from Max Weber's inner life.
A similar tension, and subsequent source of guilt, occurred when Weber found himself estranged from an earlier love, another cousin o£ his, whom both his mother and his maternal aunt favored. This situa- tion was all the more painful to him because his mother joyfully saw Marianne, his future wife, wooed by a close friend of Max. In marrying Marianne, Weber was thus beset by guilt from two sources: he was almost ready to resign his love in favor of his friend, and he was almost ready to marry a mentally burdened and unstable girl. His proposal let- ter to his wife, dealing with this situation, seems as much a confession of guilt as a love letter. And later letters to his wife are apologetic for sacrificing his marriage with her by allowing his energies to be used up in the 'inner treadmill' of his intellectual life.
The Webers were childless, and he did not fail to assert his virility in public by summoning others to duels in a manner which stressed his special dignity as a Prussian officer. Yet at the same time, as a writer, he was ready publicly to deflate Prussian militarism and its officer- bureaucracy for standing behind such educational institutions as the dueling corps designed to 'break in' upper-class youth to the discipline required in the career, A profound individual humanism, the 'freedom of a Christian,' and the lofty heights of his ethical demands were derived from identification with his mother.
30 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
We may shift from personal relations and the difficulties that may have arisen from them; Weber was also an intellectual involved in the political events of his day. He made matters of public concern his vol- untary burden. With an extraordinary sense of responsibility, he felt inti- mately called to politics. Yet he had no power and no position from which his word could tip the balance of policy. And tensions arose from this fact.
Weber does not seem to have had much basis for his intense identifi- cation with Germany. He tore down the Junkers, the workers, as well as the spineless Philistines among the middle classes, who longed for a Caesar to protect them from the bogey of socialist labor and from the patriarchalism of the petty dynasties. When Weber traveled, his first idea was to get out of Germany. And only too frequently, with the resentment of the unsuccessful lover, he throws out angry words about turning his back forever upon what he felt to be a hopeless nation. The Kaiser, to whom he was bound by oath as a Prussian officer, was a constant object of his public contempt.
Only rarely do we get a glimpse into what nourished his love of his country and people. At the Exposition in St. Louis he viewed the Ger- man exhibition of arts, crafts, and industrial products with pride, feel- ing that the skill, imagination, and artistic craftsmanship of the Germans were second to none. When he mingled with itinerant socialist workers in Brussels and was told that a good proportion of the most skillful tailors in Paris and of the most skilled cobblers in London were from German Austria, he took pride in belonging to a fellowship of self-for- gotten workers, who knew nothing better than devotion to the work at hand.
This attitude enables us to understand how his own ascetic drive for work was linked with his belief that the most prominent traits of the German people were the plebeian qualities of commoners and workers, lacking the social graces of the Latin courtier as well as the religiously motivated discipline and conventionality of the Anglo-Saxon gentleman. His own devotion to his work was a realization of his duty to the fel- lowship of Germans. At the end of November 1918, he wrote: 'One has seen all the weaknesses, but if one wishes, one may also see the fabulous capacity of work, the superbity and matter-of-factness, the capacity — not the attainment — of beautifying everyday life, in contrast to the beauty of ecstacy or of the gestures of other nations.'
A BIOGRAPHICAL VIEW 3I
Just as his relation to his father was a source of guilt, so Weber de- veloped strong guilt feelings for living under the Kaiser:
The measure of contempt given our nation abroad (Italy, America, every- where!), and after all deservedly so! — and this is decisive — ^because we tolerate this man's regime has become a factor for us of first-rate world political im- portance. Anyone who reads the foreign press for a few months must notice this. We are isolated because this man rules us in this fashion and because we tolerate it and whitewash it. No man or party who in any sense cultivates democratic, and at the same time national, political ideals should assume re- sponsibility for this regime, the continuance of which endangers our world position more than all colonial problems of any kind.^^
Surely Weber's life illustrates the manner in which a man's relation to political authority may be modeled upon his relation to family disci- plines. One has only to add, with Rousseau, that in the family the father's love for his children compensates him for the care he extends to them; while in the State the pleasure of commanding makes up for the love which the political chief does not have for his people.^*
11. X oliticai (^
oncerns
In many ways, Max Weber's life and thought are expressions of political events and concerns. His political stands, which must be understood in terms of private contexts as well as public happenings, make up a theme inextricably interwoven with Weber the man and the intellectual. For he was a political man and a political intellectual. We have noticed how the very young Weber felt that Cicero made a fool of himself in the face of a threatened political conspiracy. To judge poHtic^ and rhetoric, in terms of consequences and_to jTie.asuie_the_motives of men in terms of the intended or unintended results of their actions remained a constant principle of his political thinking. In this fundamental sense, Weber the scholar always wrote from the point of view of the active politician.
His early political position was his father's NationaJ Liberalism. Un- der eminent leaders, this party had moved towards Bismarck during the 'eighties. In this matter, they were compromised liberals: they wished 'neither to follow nor to fight, but to influence Bismarck.' And they allowed Bismarck to fight the Kultur/{ampf against the Catholics and to suppress socialist labor. With such policies being followed, and with the several splits among the liberal and leftist camp, Bismarck could play off these parties against one another.
At the age of 20, Weber was identified with the cause of National Liberalism, but he was cautious not to commit himself definitely to any specific party. He was watchfully interested in the political process as a whole and was an eager student of the possible motives of competing leaders. But he was no 'youthful enthusiast.' It was characteristic of this detachment that when the National Liberals helped Bismarck to pro- long the 'emergency law' against the socialists, Weber commented:
If one wants to justify this law one has to take the point of view, perhaps not quite incorrect, that without this emergency law a considerable restric- tion of many accomplishments of public life would be inevitable, namely, free- dom of speech, assembly, and of association. After all, the Social Democrats,
32
POLITICAL CONCERNS 33
by their manner of agitation, were indeed going to compromise fundamental institutions of public life. . . However, when I think of the matter quietly, sometimes it seems to me as if equal rights for all might be preferable to everything else, and in this case the thing to do is to muzzle everybody rather than to put some in chains. The basic mistake, after all, seems to have been the Danaer present of Bismarck's Caesarism, namely, the universal franchise which was a pure murder of equal rights for all in the truest sense of the word.^
Weber's evaluation of Bismarck, as indicated in this passage, was not to change. He acknowledged and admired his political genius in relent- less pursuit of policy of unifying Germany and in attaining for the newly created state the position of a great power. However, Weber was far from any uncritical surrender to Bismarck; he did not heroize him; indeed, he had nothing but scorn for the essentially apolitical hero wor- ship of Bismarck that spread through the middle classes of Germany. Weber's, basic criticism of Bismarck was of his intolerance of independ-- ent-minded political leaders, that he surrounded himself with docile and obedient bureaucrats. 'The horrible destruction of independent convic- tions which Bismarck has caused among us is, of course, the main reason, or at least one of the main reasons, for what is wrong with our condi- tion. But, do we not bear at least the same guilt as he?' "
The^attainmcnt and preservation of intellectual liberty appears to have been one of Weber's highest conscious values. He rejected, without reservation, BismarcVs Knltur\a7npj, just as much as he rejected the Prussian language-policy for Germanizing the Poles and irritating the Alsatians. Yet he called the progressives 'sterile,' especially in their heads- I-win-tails-you-lose budget figuring. 'One shivers to think that these people would be called upon to take Bismarck's place.' After Kaiser William II ascended to the throne and showed his tendency towards the personal assumption of power, Weber looked to the future with profound anxieties. 'These Boulangist, Bonapartist demonstrations are undesirable, to say the least.' ^
The first traces of Weber's shift away from the National Liberalism — which became more and more a creature of big business — and in the direction of a more progressive 'social liberalism' appears in 1887, when he was 23. At this time he seemed to feel that the state had an obligation towards the weakest social stratum, the metropolitan proletariat, which during the development of Berlin lived under the typical miserable con- ditions of early capitalism. This feeling of social responsibility was, after
OA THE MAN AND HIS WORK
all, one of paternalism. Hence, Weber voted Conservative, though he did not join the Conservative party.
His detailed studies of the Junker economy in East Elbian, Germany, undertaken during the early 'nineties at the instigation of a reform society, which included 'Professorial socialists,' were Weber's first eco- nomic publications. They established his reputation as an expert in agrarian problems. He was trying to get at the economic and social reasons for the displacement of the German population in the east by Polish-Russian settlers. He demonstrated that the real-estate and property interests of Junker capitalism were responsible for the depopulation of the German east, an area that at one time had been a densely populated peasant land, intermixed with estates. By breaking down official census statistics into small units, Weber showed that irresistible depopulation forces went on wherever large entailed estates came into being. At the same time, the agrarian capitalists imported Polish seasonal laborers, who, by virtue of their low standards of living and exploitability, dis- placed the German peasant population.
Insight into this process placed Weber in political opposition to Prussia's ruling class and therewith in opposition to the class which, by virtue of a sham constitutional setup of Prussia, dominated the rest of Germany. His opposition to these landlords rested upon a belief that their interests ran counter to the interests of the nation. 'We wish to forge small peasants to the soil of the fatherland not by legal but by psychological chains. I say it openly: We wish to exploit their land-hunger in order to chain them to the homeland. And if we had to stamp a generation of men into the soil in order to guarantee the future of Germany, we would shoulder this responsibility.' *
In the early 'nineties, Weber argued against historical materialism by playing up the inexhaustible complexity of causal pluralism. For example, he felt, for many historical reasons, that the wages of farm hands did not follow any economic law, least of all an 'iron one.' In his 1894 lecture at Freiburg, he held that national and ethnic diflferences in the competitive struggle for existence were more causally important than economic and class situations. Later his political and intellectual relations with the body of Marxist knowledge were to be quite different and much more complex.
Weber's political mood when he was thirty years of age is revealed by the following passage from his inaugural lecture at Freiburg:
POLITICAL CONCERNS 35
In the main, the fruits of all economic, social, and political endeavors of the present will benefit not living but future generations. If our work can and will have meaning, it can only attempt to provide for the future, that is, for our successors. However, no economic policy is possible on the basis of optimistic hopes for happiness. Lasciate ogni speranza [Man, if you enter here, leave all hopes outside] stands written over the door to the unknown future of human history. It is not a dream of peace and human happiness. The question is not how men in the future will feel, but rather who they will be. That is the question which concerns us when we think beyond the graves of our own generation. And in truth, this question lies at the root of every economic and political work. We do not strive for man's future well- being; we are eager to breed in them those traits with which we link the feeling that they constitute what is humanly great and noble in our na- ture. . . In the last analysis, the processes of economic development are struggles for power. Our ultimate yardstick of values is 'reasons of state,' and this is also the yardstick for our economic reflections. . .^
Thus, in the middle 'nineties, Weber was an imperialist, defending the power-interest of the national state as the ultimate value and using the vocabulary of social Darwinism. He warned that economic power and the call for political leadership of the nation did not always coincide. He called himself an 'economic nationalist,' measuring the various classes with the yardstick of the state's political interests. The acquisition of colonies, the saber-rattling speeches of the Kaiser, and the imperial grandeur — for these Weber had nothing but the disdain of the expert who knew that they were hopeless nonsense.
It is dangerous and, in the long run, irreconcilable with the Interest of the nation if an economically sinking class holds political power in its hands. It is still more dangerous if those classes to whom economic power and therewith the claim for political authority is shifting are politically immature in their leadership of the state. Both are threatening Gerrpr^y'-at this time and, in truth, they provide the keys to the present danger of our situation.^
What was this 'dangerous situation' ."^ German foreign policy was being reoriented: Bismarck's treaty with Russia was not renewed, the oppor- tunity for an alliance with Great Britain was not seized, and a policy o£ planless drifting resulted. It was covered up by braggadocio, Kaiser-bluff, and led to the political isolation of Germany. The leading strata of this nation would not orient it towards the West or towards the East. Ger- man policies were thus erratically directed against everybody and a series of defeats was cloaked in boastfulness.
36 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
It has been cogently argued that this fatal situation was the result of compromise between Western industrialism and Junker agrarianism. The National Liberals, of course, were the imperialists, the Pan-German- ists, the Anglophobes; their pride was hurt and they wanted 'to show the British' that Germans, too, could build ships. They pushed the navy program, which Tirpitz finally put over in one of the most adroit propa- ganda campaigns of modern history." They won the Junkers' co-operation for this course by granting them protectionist tariffs in 1902 against the imports of grain from the United States and Russia. The Junkers as such did not care for the graessliche Flotte, and, landlubbers as they were, they did not think much of over-seas empire, with its commerce and colonies. They remained provincial, they felt politically close to Russian Czarism, and they were suspicious of the interests of Western industry in naval construction, which masqueraded as the National Task.
Both Junkers and industrialists, however, feared the mass organizations of the ascending Social Democrats, the clamor for democracy, and the attacks against the Prussian system of class suffrage. The compromise of the respective class interests of industrial National Liberals and agrarian Junker Conservatives was thus directed against the democratic and socialist Labor party. And their compromise led to the discarding of any foreign policy involving alliances with effective naval or military partners.
The political and economic compromises of the East and West led to the social fusion of Junkerdom with the new industrial stratum. It was symptomatic of these changes that Bertha Krupp, Alfred Krupp's only heir, married the nobleman, von Bohlen, an imperial career diplomat; and the Kaiser attended the wedding. The Crown also lost prestige through the scandalous exposures of the political police in the Tausch trial, the morally unsavory atmosphere of court circles exposed by Maxi- milian Harden in his crusade against Prince Eulenburg, the series of humiliations of the Kaiser in the foreign field, the more intense war scares, and the general armament and naval race. These were some of the events and trends that made Max Weber feel as if he were riding on 'an express train moving towards an abyss and not feeling certain whether the next switch has been set right.'
Weber was friendly with a 'radical' parson, Naumann, who flirted with socialist ideas and who under Weber's influence turned nationalist. In 1894, Parson Naumann founded a 'little magazine' to which Weber contributed.^ For a few years, Weber was in contact with the attempts
POLITICAL CONCERNS 37
of these parsons, teachers, civil servants, artisans, and a few workers — a typical petty bourgeois circle — to organize a little party. They wished to create national unity by spreading a sense of social responsibility among bourgeois classes and training socialist labor for nationalism." Max Weber's mother and Mrs. Baumgarten forwarded Naumann's campaign for a seat in the Reichstag, Although he did not lose a friendly contact, Weber soon impatiently broke his active connection with this group.
In 1897, Weber made a campaign speech in the Saar in the district of Baron von Stumm, the coal magnate, who was pressing for legislation to punish trade-union leaders in case of strikes. Although he spoke in favor of industrial capitalism, which he felt was indispensable for national power, he also believed strongly in 'individual liberty.' He had been a member of the Pan-Germanic League, but he broke with it in 1899 'in order to gain my freedom' and because 'my voice does not count in its policy.' ^°
In 1903, after the worst of his psychic collapses, he cut loose from and attacked the conservative romanticism behind which the material and political class interests of dynasty and Junkers were hidden. This was just before he left for America. After returning to Germany in 1905, his political interests were aroused by the first Russian revolution of 190^- Since he took the trouble to learn Russian, he was able to follow events in several Russian dailies. He was also in frequent conversations with the Russian political scientist, T. Kistiakovski — one of the intellectual leaders of leftist bourgeois liberalism in Russia — who worked for the revolution. The result of these studies was two exemplary essays in political sociology, which Weber published as special issues of the Archiv. By a sociological analysis of classes and parties in Russia, Weber — among other trains of thought — indicated that should the Czar fall, after a European war, and the extreme left come to power in another revolution, an unheard-of bureaucratization of the entire social structure of Russia might well result.
Weber's intellectual production had begun again shortly after his re- turn from America in 1904. This was a time of political crisis for Ger- rnany, brought about in part by the speeches of the Kaiser and his excursions to Africa. By 1906 the entente cordial was shaping, and Ger- many's diplomatic isolation and decline from Bismarckian heights were obvious. The symbol of the nation, the Kaiser, had become the target of international ridicule. Weber saw the root of these difficulties in a politi- cal structure that prevented the efficient selection of responsible political leaders. He was grieved that Germany's sham constitutionalism made
o8 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
political careers unattractive to talented and eflFective men, who preferred to enter business or science.
From such views as these, Weber moved slowly towards a 'democratic' stand, though of a somewhat unique and complex nature. He did not believe in democracy as an intrinsically valuable body of ideas: 'natural law,' 'the equality of men,' their intrinsic claim to 'equal rights.' He saw democratic institutions and ideas pragmatically; not in terms of their 'inner worth' but in terms of their consequences in the selection of effi- cient political leaders. And he felt that in modern society such leaders must be able to build up and control a large, well-disciplined machine, in the American sense. The choice was between a leaderless democracy or a democracy run by the leaders of large-party bureaucracies.
For Weber, the universal franchise, the struggle for votes, and the free- dom of organization had no value unless they resulted in powerful political leaders willing to assume responsibility rather than evade it and cover up their deeds behind court cliques and imperial bureaucrats who happened to have the Kaiser's favor.
Before Weber's critical examination, no single German stratum seemed to be satisfactory for the job at hand. Accordingly, he raised a critical voice, first of all against the head of the nation, the Kaiser, whom he scathingly derided as a dilettante covering behind divine right of kings. The structure of German party life seemed hopeless as a check on the uncontrolled power of a politically docile but technically perfected bureau- cratic machine. He pierced the radical phrases of the Social Democrats as the hysterical howling of powerless party journalists drilling the masses for an intellectual goosestep, thus making them more amenable to manip- ulation by the bureaucracy. At the same time, the Utopian comfort contained in revisionist Marxism's automatic drift into paradise appeared to substitute a harmless complacency for righteous indignation. And he thought that the Social Democrats' refusal to make any compromises with bourgeois parties and assume cabinet responsibilities was one of the factors blocking the introduction of constitutional government. Later political analyses made by Weber sprang from this desperate search for a stratum that would measure up to the political tasks of leadership in an era of imperialist rivalry.
In the fall of 191 1, a militarist-minded official of a German university made a speech in which he chastised pacifist elements as 'silly' and spoke of the 'sentimentality for peace.' A general attending the beer festival that followed the speech saw fit to dub pacifists as 'men who wear trou-
J
POLITICAL CONCERNS 39
sers but have nothing in them and wish to make poHtical eunuchs out o£ the people.' ^^ When several professors of Freiburg defended these speeches against press attacks, Weber wrote a memorandum against what appeared to him as 'small-town stuff.' He warned that if Germany should have to go to war, 'her crowned dilettante' (the Kaiser) would interfere with the leadership of the army and ruin everything. It is interesting that Weber, a confirmed nationalist believing in force as the last argument of any policy, nevertheless submitted the following paragraph: 'To char- acterize a criticism of definite political ideals, no matter how high-minded, as an undermining of moral forces must call forth justified protests. In "ethics" the pacifists are undoubtedly our "betters." . . Policy making is not a moral trade, nor can it ever be.' ^" In spite of this appreciation of the ethical sincerity of such pacifists as Tolstoy^ we must recall Weber's own desire for personal participation in the war.
During the war, he was against the annexation of Belgium, but^ this is not to say that Weber had no imperialist aspirations. He clamored for 'military bases' as far flung as Warsaw and to the north of there. And | he wished the German army to occupy Liege and Namur for twenty * years.
In October 1915 he wrote: 'Every victory brings us further from peace. This is the uniqueness of the situation.' He was beyond himself when Austria allowed Italy to break away from her. 'The entire statesmanship of the last twenty-five years is collapsing, and it is very poor satisfaction always to have said it. The war can now last forever.' He wrote a memo- randum addressed to the Government and to members of the German Parliament, but it remained on his own desk. In it are such statements as: 'It is against German interests to force a peace of which the main re- sult would be that the heel of the German boot in Europe stands upon everyone's toes/^^ He saw that sheer prolongation of the war would bring world industrial supremacy to America. He was alarmed about the imperialism, which ran rampant through heavy industry and the princely houses. Desperately he wrote: 'I will learn Polish and then seek to make contacts with the Poles.' He asked the under-secretary of state for access to the official archives on Poland and to be allowed to contact Polish in- dustrialists. Although he used a member of the Catholic Center party as a front, he was of course refused. By March 1916, Weber was disgusted with 'the whole Berlin atmosphere, in which all talented people are in- capacitated by the resentful stupiditv which prevails in the Reich offices.' "
Weber believed that the First World War was a result of a constella-
AO THE MAN AND HIS WORK
tion of economic and political rivalries of nations. In so far as elements of 'guilt' might enter the picture, he thought that Germany was guilty of romantic and inefficient management of her affairs. He decried the aspirations of the war-party as idiotic and, from the very beginning, felt that it could only lead to disaster. He was particularly enraged by Tirpitz's naval policy, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the reliance upon the weapon of the submarine. He anticipated America's entrance into the war, and in February 1916 stated the following results of this development :
First, that half of our merchant marine, one-quarter in American and one- quarter in Italian harbors (!), will be confiscated and used against us; thus at once the number of British ships will be increased — a matter which these asses [of the German navy] do not calculate. Second, we shall have 500,000 American sportsmen as volunteers, brilliandy equipped, against our tired troops, a matter which these asses do not believe. Third, forty billion in cash will be available to our enemies. Fourth, three more years of war; thus, certain ruin. Fifth, Rumania, Greece, etc. against us. And all this in order that Herr von Tirpitz may show what he can do! Never has anything so stupid been thought of.^^
In October 1916, Weber spoke in a political meeting of progressive liberals on Germany among the Great Powers of Europe. In this speech he judged policy with the yardstick of international result: the geographic position of Germany in the midst of powerful neighbors should make for a policy of sober alliances rather than a policy of boastful vanity and conquest. In Weber's view, Russia was 'the main threat.' Accordingly, he wished an understanding with England. Events in Eastern Europe brought world-historical decisions to the fore, compared to which changes in Western Europe appeared trivial. The ultimate cause of the war was Germany]s late development as an industrial power-state. 'And why have we become a nation organized into a power state.''' he asked.
Not for vanity, but for the sake of our responsibility to world history. The Danes, Swiss, Norwegians, and Dutch will not be held responsible by future generations, and especially not by our own descendants, for allowing, without a fight, world power to be partitioned between the decrees of Russian officials on the one hand and the conventions of Anglo-Saxon 'society' — perhaps with a dash of Latin raison thrown in — on the other. The division of world power ultimately means the control of the nature of future culture. Future genera- tions will hold us responsible in these matters, and rightly so, for we are a nation of seventy and not seven millions.^"
POLITICAL CONCERNS 4I
On 3 November 1918, the sailors at Kiel mutinied. The next day, Weber spoke in Munich on Germany's reconstruction. He was heckled by revolutionary intellectuals, among them the Russian Bolshevist Levien, as well as by veterans in the audience. Shortly afterwards a revolutionary government of workers and soldiers' councils was set up.
Max Weber was against those professors who at the moment of col- lapse placed the blame upon the German home front by rationalizing the collapse as 'a stab in the back,' Yet he was also against 'the revolution,' which he called 'this bloody carnival' and which he felt could only secure worse peace terms than might otherwise have been possible. At the same time, he realized that the revolution could not lead to lasting socialistic institutions.
His wife has stated that his sympathy with the struggle of the prole- tariat for a human and dignified existence had for decades been so great that he often pondered whether or not he should join their ranks as a party member — but always with negative conclusions. His reasoning, according to his wife, 'was that one could be an honest socialist, just like a Christian, only if one was ready to share the way of life of the unpropertied, and in any case, only if one was ready to forego a cultured existence based upon their work. Since his disease, this was impossible for Weber. His scholarship simply depended upon capital rent. Further- more, he remained personally an "individualist." '
He accompanied the German peace delegation to Versailles as an ex- pert. He suggested that 'the designated war criminals,' Ludendorff, Tirpitz, Capelle, Bethman, should voluntarily offer their heads to the enemy; only then, he thought, the German officer corps could again rise to glory. He wrote LudendorfT a letter to this effect, but Ludendorfl curtly refused. Weber then arranged to meet Ludendorfl personally and disputed with him for several hours. He reproached him with the politi- cal mistakes committed by the general staff and was in turn reproached by LudendorfT for the sins of the revolution and the new regime. Weber asked Ludendorff to offer his head to the enemy.
ludendorff: How can you expect me to do anything of the sort?
weber: The honor of the nation can only be saved if you give yourself up.
ludendorff: The nation can go jump in the lake. Such ingratitude!
weber: Nevertheless, you ought to render this last service.
ludendorff: I hope to be able to render more important services to the nation.
weber: In that case, your remark is not meant so seriously. For the rest,
^2 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
it is not only a matter of the German people but a matter of restoring
the honor of the officer corps and of the army. ludendorff: Why don't you go and see Hindenburg? After all he was the
General Field Marshal. WEBER : Hindenburg is seventy years of age, and besides, every child knows
that at the time you were Number One in Germany. ludendorff: JThank goodness.
The conversation soon drifted into politics, LudendorfiF blaming Weber and the Frankjurter Zeitung for the 'democracy.'
weber: Do you believe that I think this swinish condition which we have at present is democracy.?
ludendorff: If you talk that way, maybe we can reach an agreement.
weber: But the preceding swinish condition was not a monarchy either.
ludendorff: Then, what do you mean by democracy? t weber: In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then i the chosen leader says, 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party
I are then no longer free to interfere in his business.
ludendorff: I could like such democracy.
weber: Later the people can sit in judgment. If the leader has made mistakes — ^to the gallows with him!
Weber was profoundly disappointed in Ludendorflf's human stature. 'Perhaps,' he wrote, 'it is better for Germany that he does not give himself up. His personal impression would be unfavorable. The enemy would again find that the sacrifices of a war which put this type out of commission were worth their while. I now understand why the world defends itself against the attempts of men like him to place their heel upon the necks of others. If he should again mingle in politics, one will have to fight him remorselessly.' ^^
Max Weber thus looked upon German party Ufe with disdain. It struck him as petty and as suffocating in the atmosphere of guild squabbles. In this respect, he shared the attitude of Carl Jentsch.^®
Having absorbed the Marxist criticism of 'bourgeois democracy,' Weber turned away from conservatism, Pan-Germanism, and monarchi- cal loyalties. He did so not because he had learned to believe in the in- trinsic value of democratic constitutional government as a 'government of the people, for the people, and by the people,' but because he believed constitutional democracy was the only solution for Germany's problems at home and abroad. In April 1917, he wrote:
POLITICAL CONCERNS 43
I would not fire a single shot and I would not buy a penny war bond if this war were anything but a national war; if it concerned the form of the state and possibly was a war for retaining this incapable monarchy and this apolitical bureaucracy, I don't give a damn for the form of the State, if only politicians were to rule the country and not such vain simpletons as Wil- liam II and his like. . . For me constitutions are techniques just like any other machines. I would be just as ready to strike against parliament and for the monarch if he were a politician or if he gave promise of becoming one.^^
Weber agitated for constitutional democracy because he hoped the Reichstag might become a balancing factor against the overwhelming weight of Prussian, and therewith German, bureaucracy and its mental- ity. A parliamentary competition of parties should bring political leaders of perspective and of passionate will to power. They should possess the technical know-how required for subduing the bureaucracy to their will. They should steer the bureaucracy, which for Weber made sense only as a technical means and never as a policy-making and politically responsible agency. In the best case, Weber hoped for the rise of charismatic leaders, though he felt the drift towards ever-denser and indestructible institu- tions in modern society narrowed the opportunity for this 'purely per- sonal element' to be decisive in the social structure.
It is, of course, quite vain to speculate whether Weber with his Machiavellian attitude might ever have turned Nazi. To be sure, his philosophy of charisma — his skepticism and his pragmatic view of demo- cratic sentiment — might have given him such affinities. But his human- ism, his love for the underdog, his hatred of sham and lies, and his un- ceasing campaign against racism and anti-Semitic demagoguery would have made him at least as sharp a 'critic,' if not a sharper one, of Hitler than his brother Alfred has been. " ^~
Weber was far from following Troeltsch, who felt it necessary to speak of the 'most basic dispositions and volitional tendencies' ultimately underlying the social institutions, and ideological structures of history: 'We have no words for this and, in this case, speak of races, of plastic, historical forces, or of primeval impulses.' ^^ Weber was far from this quest for a metaphysical anchorage in 'blind nature.' One may sum up Weber's dispersed and repeated disclaimers of racial arguments in the words of John Stuart Mill: 'Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences.'^^
4^ THE MAN AND HIS WORK
Weber, one might say, was constitutionally incapable of making 'the intellectual sacrifice' that he believed all 'faith' demands. The nightmare of faith represented by modern fascism would hardly have intrigued as passionate a servant of rational social science as Max Weber. The basic style of thought that informs his work is Western positivism, a heritage of the enlightenment. The basic volitional tendency of his thought is not, with the Ranke school, artistically to construct great tableaux of periods each of which is 'equally near to God,' but to fashion intel- lectual tools that would yield hindsights serviceable to foresights: savoir pottr prevoir, prevoir pour pouvoir — this impulse of Comte's positive philosophy was basic to Weber's outlook. Even though he stemmed from the 'historical school' he had no use for any edifying attitude towards history and its uniqueness. By-passing the hostility of historians, he po- litely suggested an enquiry into 'lawful regularities' as an 'auxiliary' science to history. He then proceeded to write social history in the grand manner.
Urbanism, legal history, economics, music, world religions — there is hardly a field which he left untouched. He thus continued the tradition of encyclopedic scholarship of Wundt and Ratzel, of Roscher and Schmoller.
He worked through masses of data not in order to seek in the con- templation of man's historical estate a quietistic refuge for a homeless religious need, comparable to the Rousseauistic sentiment of nature, but rather in order to snatch from comparative enquiries a set of rules which would serve him in his search for political orientation in the contempo- rary world. That knowledge is somehow power — that is the impulse behind this quest of a powerless man for knowledge. And it is in view of this political concern that one may understand his intellectual orienta- tions.
111. Intellectual Orientations
The intellectual situation in Germany during Weber's lifetime was singularly unfavorable for the development of academic sociology. His- toriography was largely dominated by the traditions of Hegel and Ranke, and conservative thinking was extremely potent in checking any de- velopment of theory in the social sciences. This was especially the case in economics. For in this field, the historical school discouraged systematic theory by opposing to it a massive treasure of historical detail, legal fact, and institutional description.
Liberalism, on the other hand, had been developed by an intelligentsia that was independent o£~any entrepreneurial middle class. Compared with the Western countries, from which the models of thought for German liberalism had been derived, everything in Germany seemed topsy-turvy. The agrarian Junkers and their following clamored for Adam Smith and free trade, that is, for free grain exports to England rather than sales to the emerging industrial cities of Germany. The liberal Friedrich List advocated protective tariffs. Bismarck and the German \ princes, rather than the middle classes, had geared the German people i into a national state.
The liberal academic intelligentsia had scarcely recovered from the shock of 1848 and the reaction to it, when Lassalle inaugurated a Socialist party that soon turned Marxist and attracted a brilliant group of journal- ists and organizers, historians and sociologists. These men took pride in their detachment from national loyalties. And, in Germany, Marxism was able to establish a tradition that tried to draw into its orbit the social and political history of all ages, the interpretation of literature and phi- losophy, as well as the ♦development of social and economic theory.
In 1848 the liberals bad been afraid of the bearded, itinerant journey- men; under Bismarck they were afraid of Bebel and Liebknecht. Even in 1878 the doctrinaire liberal Eugen Richter advised his followers to vote for the Conservative rather than for the Social Democratic candi-
45
46 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
date, should their choice be Hmited to these two.^ And ten years later, when Ferdinand Tonnies published his Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, a work rightly considered basic for modern German sociology, he made himself a hopeless outsider from 'respectable' society. For sociology smacked of socialism. Even so discerning a mind as Ludwig Bamberger spoke of the 'internal affinity of militarism and socialism.' ^ Thus the in- tellectual traditions of Germany were channeled into conservative, liberal, and socialist ways of thought.
German political parties, having no opportunity to wield power, re- mained doctrinaire parties of principled world views, each rather strictly oriented towards special classes and status groups. Agrarian conservatives were in coalition with Lutheran orthodoxy, urban merchants and bankers with liberal professional men, socialist wage workers with a low-browed intelligentsia who elaborated high-browed Marxism. The get-rich-quick atmosphere of the new industrialism, the intoxication of the parvenu with power after 1870, the Philistinism of the socially arriving burghers working their ways into dueling corps, baronial estates, and the officer corps — all this bred political apathy and fear of the upthrust of labor. And it led to a wide political accommodation to the power of the Junker.
Within this context of conflicting classes, parties, and intellectual cur- rents. Max Weber worked out his intellectual orientations. He aimed at the comprehensiveness of a common ground. And he did so in spite of the intellectual departmentalization of sharply opposed world views. By reflecting upon some of his analytic conceptions and broad historical views, we may be able to indicate how conservative, liberal, and socialist elements of thought were assimilated, transformed, and integrated into the complex pattern of his work. As a liberal, fighting against both con- servative and Marxist thought. Max Weber opened himself to certain in- fluences from each of his opponents.
i: Marx and Weber
Upon taking over the editorship of the Archiv Fitr Sozialwissenschajt und Sozialpolitif{, Weber proposed systematically to devote attention to the questions the Marxists had raised. Much of Weber's own work is of course informed by a skilful application of Marx's historical method. Weber, however, used this method as a 'heuristic principle.' As a view of world history, Marxism seemed to him an untenable monocausal the-
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 47
ory and thus prejudicial to an adequate reconstruction of social and his- torical connections. He felt that Marx as an economist had made the same mistake that, during Weber's days, anthropology was making: raising a segmental perspective to paramount importance and reducing the multiplicity of causal factors to a single-factor theorem.
Weber does not squarely oppose historical materialism as altogether wrong; he merely takes exception to its claim of establishing a single and universal causal sequence. Apart from whether or not he 'under- stood' dialectical thought in his reduction of it to a causal proposition, the approach did prove eminently fruitful.
Part of Weber's own work may thus be seen as an attempt to 'round out' Marx's economic materialism by a political and mihtary materialism. The Weberian approach to political structures closely parallels the Marx- ian approach to economic structures. Marx constructed economic periods and located major economic classes in them; he related the several social and political factors to the means of production. In political matters, Weber looks for the disposition over weapons and over means of admin- istration.
Feudalism, for example, is characterized by Weber in terms of pri- vate property of the means of military violence (self-equipped armies) and in the corporate appropriation of the means of administration. The 'ruler' could not monopolize administration and warfare because he had to delegate the implements required for such a monopoly to the several privileged groupings. In time, these latter become 'owners' in their own right. This attention to the control of the material means of political power is as crucial for grasping the types of political structure as is attention to the means of production in the case of Marx for grasping economic structures.*
Whereas Marx is less careful in distinguishing between economic power and political power, Weber, as a liberal, is eager to keep these spheres clearly distinct. Thus, his criticism of most Marxist contributions is that they fail soberly to distinguish between what is strictly 'economic,' what is 'economically determined,' and what is merely 'economically relevant.' Pilgrimages to Rome are certainly relevant for the money market, but that does not make them economic enterprises. The im- port of religious or of poHtical ideas for economic institutions does not
* See in this volume: 'Politics as a Vocation,' 'Bureaucracy,' and 'The Social Psychology of World Religions.'
;x '-
48 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
thereby transform these ideas into economic factors: the question con- cerns their 'economic relevance.'
Having focused upon the struggle for the means of political rule, Weber sees European political history since the feudal period' as an in- tricate parade of rulers, each attempting to appropriate the financial and military means that in feudal society were relatively dispersed. In fact, Weber formulates the very concept of the 'state' in terms of a 'monopoly' of the use of legitimate force over a given territory. The territorial aspect enters into the conception of the state in that Weber distinguishes coastal and inland states, great river states, and states of the plains. The geo- graphical factor also seems to have a dispositional bearing in that the coastal, and hence maritime, state offers opportunities for city democracy, overseas empire; whereas the state of the plains — for example, Russia and the United States — seems to favor schematization and bureaucracy, al- though of course this tendency is not without exceptions.
With Marx, Weber shares an attempt to bring 'ideological' phenomena into some correlation with the 'material' interests of the economic and political orders. Weber has a keen eye for 'rationalizations,' that is, for 'fictitious superstructures,' and for incongruities between the verbal as- sertion and the actual intention. He fought imperial and bureaucratic bombast, and especially the phrases of the Pan-Germanists and/or revo- lutionary 'literati,' with a wrath comparable to Marx's campaign against Victorian cant.
The debunking technique by which ideological assertions are revealed as false cloaks for less respectable interests is obvious in Weber's attack upon the revolutionary left of 1918. Weber expressly stated at this time that Marxism is not a carriage, which one may arrest at will: he wished to extend the debunking of ideologies to include the 'proletarian interest,' and he attempted to narrow down this interest to the interests of the literati, politicians, and revolutionary guardsmen in 'the spoils of vic- tory.' His debunking of socialist aspirations is also obvious in his reflec- tions on imperialism. Here he obviously accepts national units as histori- cal ultimates that can never be integrated into more comprehensive and harmonious wholes. At best there will be strong socialist nation-states energetically exploiting weaker states. The concept of the nation and of national interest is thus the Umit of Weber's political outlook and at the same time constitutes his ultimate value. Yet it is characteristic of his restless analysis that he breaks down 'national sentiment' into a com- posite of various communal sentiments and attitudes.
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INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 49
In addition to this attention to 'interests' and 'ideologies,' Weber's sociology is related to Marx's thought in the common attempt to grasp the interrelations on all institutional orders making up a social structure. In Weber's work, military and religious, political and juridical institu- tional systems are functionally related to the economic order in a variety of ways. Yet, the political judgments and evaluations involved differ entirely from those of Marx. For Marx, the modern economy is basically irrational; this irrationality of capitalism results from a contradiction between the rational technological advances of the productive forces and the fetters of private property, private profit, and unmanaged market competition. The system is characterized by an 'anarchy of production.'
For Weber, on the other hand, modern capitalism is not 'irrational'; indeed, its institutions appear to him as the very embodiment of ration- ality. As a type of bureaucracy, the large corporation is rivaled only by the state bureaucracy in promoting rational efficiency, continuity of oper- ation, speed, precision, and calculation of results. And all this goes on within institutions that are rationally managed, and in which combined and specialized functions occupy the center of attention. The whole structure is dynamic, and by its anonymity compels modern man to be- come a specialized expert, a 'professional' man qualified for the accom- plishment of a special career within pre-scheduled channels. Man is thus prepared for his absorption in the clattering process of the bureaucratic machinery.
The concept of rational bureaucracy is played off against the Marxist concept of the class struggle. As is the case with 'economic materialism,' so with 'class struggle': Weber does not deny class struggles and their part in history, but he does not see them as the central dynamic. Nor does he deny the possibility of a socialization of the means of produc- tion. He merely relegates this demand to a far distant future and dis- putes any hope of 'socialism for our time.' He does not see anything attractive in socialism. In his eyes, socialism would merely complete in the economic order what had already happened in the sphere of political means. The feudal estates had been expropriated of their political means .. and had been displaced by the salaried officialdom of the modern bureau- cratic state. The state had 'nationaUzed' the possession of arms and of w^ administrative means. Socialization of the means of production would merely subject an as yet relatively autonomous economic life to the bureaucratic management of the state. The state would indeed become total, and Weber, hating bureaucracy as a shackle upon the liberal indi-
48 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
thereby transform these ideas into economic factors: the question con- cerns their 'economic relevance.'
Having focused upon the struggle for the means of poHtical rule, Weber sees European political history since the feudal period' as an in- tricate parade of rulers, each attempting to appropriate the financial and military means that in feudal society were relatively dispersed. In fact, Weber formulates the very concept of the 'state' in terms of a 'monopoly' of the use of legitimate force over a given territory. The territorial aspect enters into the conception of the state in that Weber distinguishes coastal and inland states, great river states, and states of the plains. The geo- graphical factor also seems to have a dispositional bearing in that the coastal, and hence maritime, state offers opportunities for city democracy, overseas empire; whereas the state of the plains — for example, Russia and the United States — seems to favor schematization and bureaucracy, al- though of course this tendency is not without exceptions.
With Marx, Weber shares an attempt to bring 'ideological' phenomena into some correlation with the 'material' interests of the economic and political orders. Weber has a keen eye for 'rationalizations,' that is, for 'fictitious superstructures,' and for incongruities between the verbal as- sertion and the actual intention. He fought imperial and bureaucratic bombast, and especially the phrases of the Pan-Germanists and/or revo- lutionary 'literati,' with a wrath comparable to Marx's campaign against Victorian cant.
The debunking technique by which ideological assertions are revealed as false cloaks for less respectable interests is obvious in Weber's attack upon the revolutionary left of 1918. Weber expressly stated at this time that Marxism is not a carriage, which one may arrest at will: he wished to extend the debunking of ideologies to include the 'proletarian interest,' and he attempted to narrow down this interest to the interests of the ^literati, politicians, and revolutionary guardsmen in 'the spoils of vic- tory.' His debunking of socialist aspirations is also obvious in his reflec- tions on imperialism. Here he obviously accepts national units as histori- cal ultimates that can never be integrated into more comprehensive and harmonious wholes. At best there will be strong socialist nation-states energetically exploiting weaker states. The concept of the nation and of national interest is thus the limit of Weber's political outlook and at the same time constitutes his ultimate value. Yet it is characteristic of his restless analysis that he breaks down 'national sentiment' into a com- posite of various communal sentiments and attitudes.
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 49
In addition to this attention to 'interests' and 'ideologies,' Weber's sociology is related to Marx's thought in the common attempt to grasp the interrelations on all institutional orders making up a social structure. In Weber's work, military and religious, political and juridical institu- tional systems are functionally related to the economic order in a variety of ways. Yet, the political judgments and evaluations involved differ entirely from those of Marx. For Marx, the modern economy is basically irrational; this irrationality of capitalism results from a contradiction between the rational technological advances of the productive forces and the fetters of private property, private profit, and unmanaged market competition. The system is characterized by an 'anarchy of production.'.
For Weber, on the other hand, modern capitali^mis not 'irrational'; indeed, its institutions appear to him as the very embodiment of ration- ality. As a type of bureaucracy, the large corporation is rivaled only by the state bureaucracy in promoting rational efficiency, continuity of oper- ation, speed, precision, and calculation of results. And all this goes on within institutions that are rationally managed, and in which combined and specialized functions occupy the center of attention. The whole structure is dynamic, and by its anonymity compels modern man to be- come a specialized expert, a 'professional' man qualified for the accom- plishment of a special career within pre-scheduled channels. Man is thus prepared for his absorption in the clattering process of the bureaucratic machinery.
The concept of rational bureaucracy is played off against the Marxist concept of the class struggle. As is the case with 'economic materialism,' so with 'class struggle': Weber does not deny class struggles and their part in history, but he does not see them as the central dynamic. Nor does he deny the possibility of a socialization of the means of produc- tion. He merely relegates this demand to a far distant future and dis- putes any hope of 'socialism for our time.' He does not see anything attractive in socialism. In his eyes, socialism would merely complete in the economic order what had already happened in the sphere of political means. The feudal estates had been expropriated of their political means and had been displaced by the salaried officialdom of the modern bureau- cratic state. The state had 'nationalized' the possession of arms and of i/ administrative means. Socialization of the means of production would merely subject an as yet relatively autonomous economic life to the bureaucratic management of the state. The state would indeed become 7' total, and Weber, hating bureaucracy as a shackle upon the liberal indi-
50 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
vidual, felt that socialism would thus lead to a further serfdom. Tor the time being,' he wrote, 'the dictatorship of the official and not that of the worker is on the march.' ^
Weber thus saw himself as holding paradoxical opinions. He could not but recognize the inevitability of bureaucratic management in public administration, in large capitalist enterprises, and in politically efficient party machines. During the war he personally scolded the stupidity of the Berlin bureaucrats, yet in his classic account of bureaucracy he is very far from John Stuart Mill's verdict against 'pedantocracy.' On the contrary, for Weber nothing is more efficient and more precise than bureaucratic management. Again in his pride in bureaucracy, 'in spite of all,' one may discern an attitude comparable to Marx's admiration for the achievements of bourgeois capitalism in wiping out feudal survivals, the 'idiocy' of rural life, and various spooks of the mind.
Marx's emphasis upon the wage worker as being 'separated' from the means of production becomes, in Weber's perspective, merely one special case of a universal trend. The modern soldier is equally 'separated' from the means of violence; the scientist from the means of enquiry, and the civil servant from the means of administration. Weber thus tries to relativize Marx's work by placing it into a more generalized context and showing that Marx's conclusions rest upon observations drawn from a dramatized 'special case,' which is better seen as one case in a broad series of similar cases. The series as a whole exemplifies the comprehensive underlying trend of bureaucratization. Socialist class struggles are merely a vehicle implementing this trend.
Weber thus identifies bureaucracy with rationality, and the process of rationalization with mechanism, depersonalization, and oppressive routine. Rationality, in this context, is seen as adverse to personal free- dom. Accordingly, Weber is a nostalgic liberal, feeling himself on the defensive. He deplores the type of man that the mechanization and the routine of bureaucracy selects and forms. The narrowed professional, publicly certified and examined, and ready for tenure and career. His craving for security is balanced by his moderate ambitions and he is re- warded by the honor of official status. This type of man Weber deplored as a petty routine creature, lacking in heroism, human spontaneity, and inventiveness : 'The Puritan willed to be the vocational man that we have to be.'
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS
2: Bureaucracy and Charisma: A Philosophy of History
The principle of rationalization is the most general element in Weber's philosophy of historyJFor the rise and fall of institutional structures, the ups and downs of classes, parties, and rulers implement the general drift of secular rationalization. In thinking of the change of human atti- tudes and mentalities that this process occasions, Weber liked to quote Friedrich Schiller's phrase, the 'disenchantment of the world.' The extent and direction of 'rationalization' is thus measured negatively in terms of the degree to which magical elements of thought are displaced, or positively by the extent to which ideas gain in systematic coherence and naturalistic consistency.
The urge towards such a comprehensive and meaningful interpreta- tion of the universe is ascribed to groups of intellectuals, to religious prophets and teachers, to sages and philosophers, to jurists and experi- mental artists, and finally, to the empirical scientist. 'Rationalization,' socially and historically differentiated, thus comes to have a variety of meanings. In this connection Weber makes a masterful contribution to what has come to be known as the ^sociology of knowledge.' *
Weber's view of 'disenchantment' embodies an element of liberalism and of the enlightenment philosophy that construed man's history as a unilinear 'progress' towards moral perfection (sublimation), or towards cumulative technological rationalization. Yet his skeptical aversion to any 'pHiIos6phic~af~eIement in empirical science precluded any explicit con- structions of historical time in terms of 'cycles' or 'unilinear' evolution. 'Thus far the continuum of European culture development has known neither completed cyclical movements nor an unambiguously oriented "unilinear development." ' * We nevertheless feel justified in holding that a unilinear construction is clearly implied in Weber's idea of the bureaucratic trend. Even so 'inward' and apparently subjective an area of experience as that of music lends itself to a sociological treatment under Weber's concept of 'rationalization.' The fixation of clang pat- terns, by a more concise notation and the establishment of the well- tempered scale; 'harmonious' tonal music and the standardization of the quartet of wood winds and string instruments as the core of the sym- phony orchestra. These are seen as progressive 'rationalizations.' The
* We have included one chapter from Weber's study of China for the sake of acquaint- ing the reader with this aspect of his work.
X
52 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
musical systems of Asia, of preliterate Indian tribes, of Antiquity, and of the Middle East are compared in regard to their scope and degree of 'rationalization,' The same comparative focus is of course used in the account of religious systems, as may be seen in the typological sketch contained in 'The Social Psychology of World Religions.'
This process of rationalization is punctured, however, by certain dis- continuities of history. Hardened institutional fabrics may thus disinte- grate and routine forms of life prove insufficient for mastering a growing state of tension, stress, or suffering. It is in such crises that Weber intro- duces a balancing conception for bureaucracy: the concept of 'charisma.'
Weber borrowed this concept from Rudolf Sohm, the Strassburg church historian and jurist. Charisma, meaning literally 'gift of grace,' is used by Weber to characterize self-appointed leaders who are fol- lowed by those who are in distress and who need to follow the leader because they believe him to be extraordmarily qualified. The founders of world religions and the prophets as well as military and political heroes are the archetypes of the charismatic leader. Miracles and revela- tions, heroic feats of valor and baffling success are characteristic marks of their stature. Failure is their ruin.
Although Weber is aware of the fact that social dynamics result from many social forces, he nevertheless places great emphasis upon the rise of charismatic leaders. Their movements are enthusiastic, and in such extraordinary enthusiasms class and status barriers sometimes give way to fraternization and exuberant community sentiments.^ Charismatic heroes and prophets are thus viewed as truly revolutionary forces in history.®
Bureaucracy and other institutions, especially those of the household, /are seen as routines of workaday life; charisma is opposed to all institu- tional routines, those of tradition and those subject to rational manage- ment. This holds for the economic order: Weber characterizes conquista- dores and robber barons as charismatic figures. When used in a strictly technical manner, the concept of charisma is free of all evaluations. Stefan George as well as Jeremiah, Napoleon as well as Jesus Christ, a raving berserk warrior of Arabia as well as the founder of Mormonism — all these are typified as charismatic leaders, for they have in common the fact that </ people obey them because of faith in their personally extraordinary quali- ties.
A genuinely charismatic situation is direct and inter-personal. In the contrast of the everyday life of institutions with the personalized and
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 53
spontaneous nature of charismatic leadership, one may readily discern the heritage of liberalism that has always confronted similar dichotomies: mass versus personality, the 'routine' versus the 'creative' entrepreneur, the conventions of ordinary people versus the inner freedom of the pioneer- ing and exceptional man, institutional rules versus the spontaneous indi- vidual, the drudgery and boredom of ordinary existence versus the imaginative flight of the genius. In spite of the careful nominalism of his method, Weber's conception of the charismatic leader is a continua- tion of a 'philosophy of history' which, after Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Worship, influenced a great deal of nineteenth-century history writing. In such an emphasis, the monumentalized individual becomes the sover- eign of history.
Weber's conception of the charismatic leader is in continuity with the concept of 'genius' as it was applied since the Renaissance to artistic and intellectual leaders. Within the confines of 'moral' history, W. E. H. Lecky broadened the conception in such a way as to apply it to leaders of human conduct rather than merely to creators of symbols. Not only men^of ideasJbuLJdeal men thus came into focus, as the following pas- sage indicatGfrfp, v-
There arise from time to time men who bear to the moral condition of their age much the same relations as men of genius bear to its intellectual condition. They anticipate the moral standard di a later age, cast abroad con- ceptions of disinterested virtue, of philanthropy, or of self-denial that seem to have no relation to the spirit of their time, inculcate duties and suggest motives of action that appear to most men altogether chimericaU Yet the magnetism of their perfections tells powerfully upon their contemporaries. An enthusiasm is kindled, a group of adherents is formed, and many are emancipated from the moral condition of their age. Yet the full effects of such a movement are but transient. The first enthusiasm dies away, surrounding circumstances resume their ascendency, the pure faith is materialised, en- crusted with conceptions that are alien to its nature, dislocated, and distorted, till its first features have almost disappeared. The moral teaching, being un- suited to the time, becomes inoperative until its appropriate civilisation has dawned; or at most it faintly and imperfectly filters through an accumulation of dogmas, and thus accelerates in some measure the arrival of the condition it requires. ''^
It is clear that Lecky was interested in the genius as an extraordinary man who transcends the bounds of everyday routines; and in this, his
eA THE MAN AND HIS WORK
^ Statement foreshadows one of the key theories of Weber: the routiniza- tion of charisma. I Like Lecky, Weber sees the genuine charismatic situation quickly give way to incipient institutions, which emerge from the coohng off of ex- traordinary states of devotion and fervor. As the original doctrines are democratized, they are intellectually adjusted to the needs of that stratum ^which becomes the primary carrier of the leader's message. If these ideas are not adaptable in this way, then, regardless of their intrinsic merit, either their message will fail to influence the conduct of everyday life or those whom they do influence will remain enclosed in a special way of life and alien to the larger social body. The religions of India, accord- ing to Weber, have very often ended up as the doctrines of such aristoc- racies of salvation.*
Emphasis upon the 'sovereignty of the charismatic man' does not minimize the mechanics of institutions; on the contrary, by tracing out the routinization of charisma, Weber is able to assign a heavy causal weight to institutional routines. Thus he retains a social determinism by emphasizing charisma's routinization. His handling of this problem testifies to his constant endeavor to maintain a causal pluralism and to bring the economic order into the balance.
In general, Weber's construction of historical dynamics in terms of charisma and routinization is an attempt to answer the paradox of unintended consequences. For the charisma of the first hour may incite the followers of a warrior hero or prophet to forsake expediency for ulti- mate values. But during the routinization of charisma, the material in- terests of an increased following are the compelling factor, fc-^ A charismatic movement may be routinized into traditionalism or into \ bureaucratization. Which course is taken does not depend primarily upon the subjective intentions of the followers or of the leader; it is
y . dependent upon the institutional framework of the movement, and espe- ? cially upon the economic order. 'The routinization of charisma, in quite essential respects, is identical with adjustment to the conditions of the economy, that is, to the continuously effective routines of workaday life. In this, the economy leads and is not led.' ^ Just as in this particular con- text a leading role is given to the economy, so does the very title of his key work. Economics and Society, bespeak an appreciation of the de- termining weight of the economic bases.
* See chapter xi, 'The Social Psychology of World Religions.'
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 55
The 'philosophical' element in Weber's construction of history is this \ antinomic balance of charismatic movements (leaders and ideas) with A rational routinization (enduring institutions and material interests). | Man's spontaneity and freedom are placed on the side of heroic enthusi- I asm, and thus there is an aristocratic emphasis upon elites ('virtuosos'!). / This emphasis is intimately associated with Weber's attitude towards"^ modern democracy, which we have already indicated.
Yet Weber sees in the concept of 'personality' a much-abused notion referring to a profoundly irrational center of creativity, a center before which analytical inquiry comes to a halt. And he combats this poeticized and romantic element." For his conceptual nominalism and his prag- matic outlook are opposed to all reification of 'unanalyzed' processes. The ultimate unit of analysis for him is the understandable motivations of "^ the single individual. His concepts are analytical tools with which he»-^ reconstructs various mechanisms. They are not descriptive categories, with which one tries to 'taste' the color and grasp the surface image of the 'spirit of the times.' They are not concepts that contemplate the supposed substances of great men and epochs. In fact, despite Weber's emphasis on charisma, he is not likely to focus on 'the great figures of history.' Napoleon, Calvin and Cromwell, Washington and Lincoln appear in his texts only in passing. He tries to grasp what is retained of their work x/^ in the institutional orders and continuities of history. Not Julius Caesar, but Caesarism; not Calvin, but Calvinism is Weber's concern. In order to understand this fully, we have to understand his conceptual tools: the constructed type, the typological series, the comparative method. j[
3: Methods of Social Science , '^^ii
Weber's methodological reflections are clearly indebted to the philos- , ophy of the enlightenment. His point of departure and the ultimate unit ( of his analysis is the individual person:
Interpretative sociology considers the individual [Einzelindtviduum] and his action as the basic unit, as its 'atom' — if the disputable comparison for once may be permitted. In this approach, the individual is also the upper limit and the sole carrier of meaningful conduct. . . In general, for sociology, such concepts as 'state,' 'association,' 'feudalism,' and the like, designate certain categories of human interaction. Hence it is the task of sociology to reduce these concepts to 'understandable' action, that is, without exception, to the actions of participating individual men.^"
^[
56 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
The 'Robinson-Crusoe approach' of the classical economists and the rationalist philosophers of the contract is echoed in this emphasis upon the individual. But within Weber's thought such emphasis stands in opposition to the tradition of Hegel and Ranke.
This latter tradition attempts to 'interpret' the individual person, insti- tution, act, or style of work by seeing it as a 'document,' 'manifestation,' or an 'expression' of a larger morphological unit that underlies particular data. 'Interpretation' thus consists in understanding the union of the more comprehensive totality with its part. The aspect partakes of the quality of the whole. Thus Sombart, writing a book on The Jews and Economic Life, tries to show the contribution and the paramount signifi- cance of Jewry for the rise and workings of modern capitalism by 'under- standing' Jewry and capitalism as partaking of the same 'spirit.' This mode of 'understanding' the particular by seeing it as a document of an underlying whole is rooted in German romantic and conservative thought — a style that was elaborated in great detail and with surprising subtlety and fruitfulness by Wilhelm Dilthey.
Max Weber incorporated the problem of understanding in his socio- logical approach, which, as he was prone to emphasize, was one type of sociology among other possibilities. He therefore called his perspective 'interpretative' or 'understanding' sociology. It is characteristic of his rational and positivist position that he transformed the concept of under- standing. 'Understanding' remained for him, however, a unique ap- proach of the moral or cultural sciences, which deals with man rather than with other animals or with lifeless nature. Man can 'understand' or attempt to 'understand' his own intentions through introspection, and he may interpret the motives of other men's conduct in terms of their professed or ascribed intentions.
Weber distinguishes different 'types' of motivated actions. Character- istically he rated as the most 'understandable' type those actions which are in the nature of rational expediencies, and of which the conduct of the 'economic man' is a prime example.
Less 'rational' actions are typed by Weber in terms of the pursuit of 'absolute ends,' as flowing from affectual sentiments, or as 'traditional.' Since absolute ends are to be taken as 'given' data by the sociologist, an action may be rational with reference to the means employed, but 'irra- tional' with respect to the ends pursued. 'Affectual' action, which flows purely from sentiment, is a less rational type of conduct. And finally, ap- proaching the 'instinctual' level, there is 'traditional' conduct: unreflective
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 57
and habitual, this type is sanctified because it 'has always been done' and is therefore deemed appropriate. These types of 'actions' are construed operationally in terms of a scale of rationality and irrationality. A typo- logical device rather than a 'psychology' of motivations is thus described. This nominalist approach, with its emphasis upon the rational relations of ends and means as the most 'understandable' type of conduct, distin- guishes Weber's work from conservative thought and its documentary 'understanding' by assimilating the singularity of an object into a spirit- ualized whole. Yet, by emphasizing the understandability of human conduct, as opposed to the mere causal explanation of 'social facts' as in natural science, Weber draws the line between his interpretative sociology and the 'physique sociale' in the tradition of Condorcet, which Comte called sociologie^^ and Durkheim worked out in such an eminent man- ner. It has correctly been observed that the basic types of social structure that Weber uses — 'society,' 'association,' and 'community' — correspond closely with his 'types of action' — the 'rationally expedient,' the 'affective,' and the 'traditionalist.' ^^
Were one to accept Weber's methodological reflections on his own work at their face value, one would not find a systematic justification for his analysis of such phenomena as stratification or capitalism. Taken literally, the 'method of understanding' would hardly allow for Weber's use of structural explanations; for this type of explanation attempts to account for the motivation of systems of action by their functions as go- ing concerns rather than by the subjective intentions of the individuals who act them out.
According to Weber's method of understanding, we should expect him to adhere to a subjective theory of stratification, but he does not do so. Similarly, one may point to Weber's refutation of a widespread German stereotype of America as a nation of 'atomized individuals': 'In the past and up to the very present, it has been a characteristic precisely of the specifically American democracy that it did not constitute a form- less sand heap of individuals but rather a buzzing complex of strictly exclusive, yet voluntary, associations.' * Again, Weber sees the drift towards Athenian democracy as determined by a change in military or- ganization: Democracy emerged when the older army of Hoplites gave way to Navalism. Similar structural explanations are displayed in the manner in which he links the spread of bureaucracies with the task of
* See pp. 307 ff., this volume.
c8 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
administering large inland empires, such as Rome and China, Russia and the United States.
In using the structural principle of explanation, Weber comes quite close to the analytical procedure of Marxist thought, which, in a 'de- spiritualized' way, makes use of the originally Hegelian and conservative way of thinking.
In his methodological emphasis upon understanding- the individual as the ultimate unit of explanation, Weber is polemical against this organi- cist thought of conservatism as well as the Marxist use of objective mean- ings of social action irrespective of the awareness of the actor.
Like Hegel and Adam Smith, Marx ascribed meanings to the process of social interactions. Adam Smith's 'unseen hand' and Hegel's 'ruse of the idea' appear in Marx's system as an objective logic of dynamic insti- tutions that work themselves out behind the backs of the actors. In so far as men know not what they do, they realize the blind forces of society. Although these forces are the work of men, they simply remain, in Veblen's term, 'opaque.' Thus Marx measures the subjective notions of the actors of the system against the objective meaning as revealed by scientific study. And in the comparison and typical incongruity between what men think they do and the objective social functions of their acts, Marx locates the ideological nature of the subject's 'false consciousness.'
In his writings on method, Weber rejects the assumption of any 'ob- jective meaning.' He wished to restrict the understanding and interpre- tation of meaning to the subjective intentions of the actor. Yet, in his actual work, he is no less aware than is Marx of the paradoxical fact that the results of interactions are by no means always identical with what the actor intended to do. Thus the Purit^an wished to serve God, but he helped to bring about modern capitalism. The point is also shown in the following passage concerning capitalism and the individual:
This masterless slavery in which capitalism enmeshes the worker or the debtor is only debatable ethically as an institution. In principle, the personal conduct of those who participate, on either the side of the rulers or of the ruled, is not morally debatable, as such conduct is essentially prescribed by objective situations. If they do not conform, they are threatened by economic bankruptcy which would, in every respect, be useless.^^
One might easily accumulate statements from Weber's work that would reinforce this point, as the translations in the present volume make clear. It is understandable that Weber felt it equally wrong to consider
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 59
his work as an idealist interpretation of history as it was to consider it as a case of historical materialism.
The nominalism of Weber's method may be understood in terms of V his attempt to avoid a philosophical emphasis upon either material or \ ideal factors, or upon either structural or individual principles of ex- \ planation. His attachment to Western positivist thought is shown in his I scorn for any 'philosophical' or 'metaphysical' elements in the social / sciences. He wants to give these sciences the same matter-of-fact approach / with which the natural sciences approach nature. /
A quantitative method goes hand in hand with such a conception and stands in opposition to a perspective in which all phenomena are seen as qualitatively unique entities. For Weber, historical and social uniqueness results from specific combinations of general factors, which when iso- lated are quantifiable. Thus the 'same' elements may be seen in a series of other unique combinations. '. . . Of course, in the last analysis, all qualitative contrasts in reality can somehow be comprehended as purely quantitative differences made up of combinations of various single factors.' ^* He does not say that quality can be 'reduced' to quantity; in- deed, as a nominalist, he is quite sensitive to the qualitative uniqueness of cultural reality and to the qualitative differences resulting from quan- titative changes. For instance: 'From our special point of view, where the increased fear of the world has led to a flight from occupational pursuits in the private economy, pietism not only turns into something differing in degree but into an element differing in quality.' ^^
The much-discussed 'ideal type,' a key term in Weber's methodologi- cal discussion, refers to the construction of certain elements of reality into a logically precise conception. The term 'ideal' has nothing to do with evaluations of any sort. For analytical purposes, one may construct ideal types of prostitution as well as of religious leaders. The term does not mean that either prophets or harlots are exemplary or should be imitated as representatives of an ideal way of life.
By using this term, Weber did not mean to introduce a new con- ceptual tool. He merely intended to bring to full awareness what social scientists and historians had been doing when they used words like 'the economic man,' 'feudalism,' 'Gothic versus Romanesque architecture,' or 'kingship.' He felt that social scientists had the choice of using logically controlled and unambiguous conceptions, which are thus more removed from historical reality, or of using less precise concepts, which are more I closely geared to the empirical world. Weber's interest in world-wide
6o THE MAN AND HIS WORK
comparisons led him to consider extreme and 'pure cases.' These cases became 'crucial instances' and controlled the level of abstraction that he used in connection with any particular problem. The real meat of history would usually fall in between such extreme types; hence Weber would approximate the multiplicity of specific historical situations by bringing various type concepts to bear upon the specific case under his focus.
The quantitative approach to unique cultural constellations and the conception of ideal types are intimately hnked with the comparative method. This method implies that two constellations are comparable in terms of some feature common to them both. A statement of such common features implies the use of general concepts. The manner in which Weber construes the world religions as variant interpretations of 'senseless suffering' displays his technique of arranging 'cases' on a typo- logical scale.* The same technique is at work in his typology of capital- ism, built along a scale of different avenues for profit-opportunities. As general concepts, ideal types are tools with which Weber prepares the descriptive materials of world history for comparative analysis. These types vary in scope and in the level of their abstraction. When Weber characterizes 'democracy' as 'a minimization of power,' he has the broad- est formulation, and the least specific historically. Several techniques of minimizing power, such as short terms of office, checks and balances, thq referendum, and so on, are possible in particular historical cases. These cases are worked into sub-types of democracy. By incorporating selected historical features into the general conception of democracy, he is able to restrict this general type and approximate historical cases more closely.
His concern with specific historical problems and his interest in a com- parative sociology of a generalizing nature are thus related; the difference between them is one of emphasis. By the use of a battery of ideal types, he builds up a conception of a particular historical case. In his compara- tive studies, he uses the same ideal type conceptions, but he uses history as a storehouse of examples for these concepts. In short, the respective research interest — in elaborating a concept or in constructing a historical object — determines his procedure.
(In any case, Weber is concerned with using generalized conceptions n order to understand society as subject to lawful regularities. For such
* See chapter xi, 'The Social Psychology of World Religions.'
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 5 1
regularities are necessary in order to satisfy an interest in causation. To understand a sequence of regular events causally, one must examine comparable conditions. Thus, in an attempt to validate his causal analy- sis of religion and capitalism in the Occident, Weber examined many other civilizations. Although capitalist beginnings could be observed in these other civilizations, capitaHsm in the Western sense did not emerge. Weber wished to find those factors in other civilizations which blocked the emergence of capitalism, even though there were many favorable conditions present for its emergence. By such a comparative analysis of causal sequences, Weber tried to find not only the neces- sary but the sufficient conditions of capitalism. Only in the Occident, par- ticularly where inner-worldly asceticism produced a specific personality type, were the sufficient conditions present. In his pluralism, he naturally did not consider this type of personality the only factor involved in the origin of capitalism; he merely wished to have it included among the conditions of capitalism.
4: The Sociology of Ideas and Interests
The discussion of bureaucratic institutions and personal leaders, of workaday routines and extraordinariness, is paralleled by Weber's con- ception of the relations between ideas and interests. Both Marx and Nietzsche had contributed to a theory of the function and content of ideas; both of them shifted the traditional emphasis upon the content of ideas to an emphasis upon the pragmatic connection of ideas with their results. They developed techniques for interpreting ideas in terms of their intended or actual service rather than in terms of their face value.
Marx viewed ideas in terms of their public function in the struggles of classes and parties. Nietzsche approached ideas in terms of their psychological service to the individual thinker, or at least when he did speak of the public context, his sociological tools were so crude that only the psychological mechanisms were fruitfully brought out in his analysis. If for Marx ideas of practical import became ideologies as weapons in the struggles of groups, for Nietzsche^ they turned into the rationaliza- tions of individuals, or at best of 'masters and slaves.' Marx commented that ideas become material forces as soon as they take hold of the masses; he linked the historical vitality of ideas to their role in justifying economic interests. Nietzsche modified Matthew's statement, 'He who humbles himself shall be raised,' into 'He who humbles himself wants
62 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
to be raised.' Thus he ascribed voHtions to the speaker which lay be- neath the content of his ideas. ' "I did that," says my memory, "I could not have done that," says my pride and remains inexorable. Eventually — the memory yields.' ^^
Weber attempts to incorporate the points of view both of Marx and of Nietzsche in his discussion: With Marx, he shares the sociological approach to ideas: they are powerless in history unless they are fused with material interests: And with Nietzsche, he is deeply concerned with the importance of ideas for psychic reactions.*
Yet, in contrast to both Nietzsche and Marx, Weber refuses to con- ceive of ideas as being 'mere' reflections of psychic or social interests. All spheres — intellectual, psychic, political, economic, religious — to some ex- tent follow developments of their own. Where Marx and Nietzsche are quick to see a correspondence between ideas and interests, Weber is also eager to state possible tensions between ideas and interests, between one sphere and another, or between internal states and external demands. iThus, in analyzing Hebrew prophecy, he seeks to balance psychological and historical influences:
In any case, one can hardly assume that an unambiguous psychic determi- nation of 'political hypochondria' has been the source of the prophets' stand. The prophecy of doom has to be deduced, to a large extent, from the psychical disposition of the prophets, as determined by constitutional endowments and personal experiences. Yet, it is no less certain that the historical destinies of Israel have indeed given the prophecies of doom their place in religious de- velopment. And this is so, not only in the sense that tradition has of course preserved those oracles of the prophets that were fulfilled, which have ap- peared to be fulfilled, or whose advent could still be expected. The increas- ingly unshatterable prestige of prophecy in general has rested upon those few cases that were terribly impressive for the prophet's contemporaries, and in which the prophets by their success were unexpectedly in the right.^^
The decisive conception by which Weber relates ideas and interests is that of 'elective affinity,' rather than 'correspondence,' 'reflection,' or 'expression.' For Marx, ideas 'express' interests; thus, the hidden God of the Puritans expresses the irrationality and anonymity of the market. For Nietzsche, asceticist Christianity 'reflects' the resentment of the slaves, who thus 'express' their 'revolt in morals.' For Weber, there is hardly ever a close connection between the interests or the social origin
* A brief discussion of Nietzsche's theory of resentment will be found in chapter xi, 'Social Psychology of World Religions,' and chapter vii, 'Class, Status, Party.'
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 63
of the speaker or of his following with the content of the idea during its inception. The ancient Hebrew prophets, the leaders of the Reforma- tion, or the revolutionary vanguard of modern class movements were not necessarily recruited from the strata which in due course be- came the prime bearers of their respective ideas. Only during the process of routinization do the followers 'elect' those features of the idea with which they have an 'affinity,' a 'point of coincidence' or 'convergence.'
There is no pre-established correspondence between the content of an idea and the interests of those who follow from the first hour. But, in time, ideas are discredited in the face of history unless they point in the direction of conduct that various interests promote. Ideas, selected and reinterpreted from the original doctrine, do gain an affinity with the interests of certain members of special strata; if they do not gain such an affinity, they are abandoned. Thus by distinguishing the phases of the personal and charismatic origin of ideas and their routinization and social impact, Weber is able to take into account a number of complica- tions, which are reflected in changing shades of meaning. Both the ideas and their publics are seen as independent; by a selective process ele- ments in both find their affinities.
Throughout his Hfe, Max Weber was engaged in a fruitful battle with historical materialism. In his last course of lectures in Munich at the time of the Revolution, he presented his course under the title, 'A Positive Critique of Historical Materialism.' Yet there is a definite drift of emphasis in his intellectual biography towards Marx.
When writing the Protestant Ethic, Weber was eager to emphasize the autonomous role of ideas in the origin of modern capitalism — though not, of course, in the sense of Hegel. He felt that modern capi- talism in its beginnings required a certain type of personality. This personality type, in turn, was psychologically construed as a result of belief in a set of ideas that unwittingly resulted in the development of those specific personality traits useful in capitalist conduct. Thus in giving 'a spiritualist construction' of the background of modern capital- ism, Weber begins with religious conceptions. In his last essays, how- ever, he begins his analysis of China, for instance, with chapters on the economic basis. The more embittered Weber became with German politics, the more he came to appreciate the weight of material interests in the success of ideas, however lofty in content and intention they might be. Thus during the war he wrote: 'Not ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern man's conduct. Yet very frequently the "world
64 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
images" which have been created by "ideas" have, like switchmen, de- termined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic o£ interests.' ^®
Such passages remind one of the mechanical metaphors of Marx, with his revolutions as the 'locomotives of history,' or of Trotsky with his 'ideological switchmen.' ^^ Mechanical imagery of this sort seems to stand opposite the organic metaphors of growth and development favored by more conservative writers. Where images of organic nature are utilized they are not images of gradualism and vegetative growth, but of incubation and birth.
In Weber's handling of specific ideas, one may discern different levels of sociological interpretation at work. In a sweeping way, he locates entire 'world images' as symbol constructions associated with the social conditions of specific strata. Thus he sees a connection between the re- ligious conception of a quietistic and passive Being and the mystic states and contemplative techniques of genteel and literary intellectuals, especially in India and China. He tries to establish an intimate relation between the nature of a predominant psychological state, the structure of an act of perception, and the meaning of an object. All three aspects, in turn, are facilitated by and have an affinity to the social-historical situ- ation of the intellectuals within the social structure. This historical struc- ture, by itself, does not determine the direction in which the strata of intellectuals may elaborate their conceptions; rather it permits or blocks the attempt, characteristic of intellectuals, to tackle the senselessness of suffering and of the world.\ln the Occident, intellectuals also experi- mented in the direction of mystic contemplation; but such endeavors, according to Weber, were repeatedly frustrated. A more volitional and active search for meaning became predominant in the Occident. ^
The active interests of Occidental intellectuals in mastering political events have been connected with the volitional and anthropomorphic image of a wrathful yet benign God. The main stream of Christianity is thus seen in continuity with Hebrew prophecy. The prophets of ancient Judaism are characterized as active demagogues, who by the power of the word aimed at a mastery of the course of historical events. The priesthood was not strong enough to suppress effectively such self- appointed religious demagogues.
Weber, in his sociology of knowledge, was not, however, exclusively concerned with such world images. He also concerned himself with
INTELLECTUAL ORIENWTIONS 67
many particular ideologies, which he saw as->f land, as well as com- motivate materially interested strata. matically led raids on
Here are some examples: The acceptance of the reiiyres may be ex- o£ the Crusades is linked to the imperialist aspirations oiiered princes, who were interested in securing fiefs for their progeny. Calry of the of course, displayed other motives. The emergence and diffusion Hemi- mendicant monk order, or Franciscans, is linked to the interests otites ula^ power leaders in exploiting their skill as unpaid teachers, or as urban demagogues who during crises were able to tame urban masses. Whether or not these mendicant monks would have survived against the opposition of the Pope and the priesthood without having had these skills is an open question. The same situation applies to the Jesuit order, after the Pope outlawed them and Frederick the Great gave them asylum in Prussia. The advocacy of the intrinsic value of a particular language is often associated with the material interests of publishers in national- ism. The commands of modern bureaucracies assume the form of 'general rules' rather than of 'particular decrees,' as may be seen in con- nection with their general rationalizing tendency. When Weber deals with political problems, he seems to use this mode of interpreting ideas as simple justifications. When he handles religious problems, he is more likely to emphasize the concept of 'elective affinity.'
5: Social Structures and Types of Capitalism
The pragmatic view of ideas, which Max Weber shares with Karl Marx and John Dewey, is associated with a refutation of the Hegelian tradition. Weber thus rejects such conceptions as 'national character' and 'folk spirit,' which have permeated German historiography and which, in conservative thinking, have served as tools of interpretation. He construes social dynamics in terms of a pluralistic analysis of factors, which may be isolated and gauged in terms of their respective causal weights.. He does this by comparative analyses of comparable units, which are found in different cultural settings.
This does not mean that he has no total conceptions of social struc- tures. On the contrary, the more Weber comes to an analysis of the con- temporary era, the more ready he is to speak of capitalism as a unit. The unit is seen as a configuration of institutions, which by the logic of their own requirements increasingly narrow the range of effective choices open to men.
66 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
For Weber, a unit, such as capitalism, is not an undifferentiated whole to be equated with 'an acquisitive instinct' or with 'pecuniary society.' Rather it is seen, as Marx and Sorel saw it, as a scale of types, each of which has peculiar institutional features. The further back Weber goes historically, the more he is willing to see capitalism as one feature of a historical situation; the more he approaches modern industrial capitalism, the more willing he is to see capitalism as a pervasive and unifying affair. High capitalism absorbs other institutions into its own image, and nu- merous institutional crisscrosses give way to a set of parallel forces head- ing in the same direction. This direction is towards the rationalization of all spheres of life. In such an increasingly unilinear construction of history, one may discern a sublimated conception of the liberal notion of 'progress.'
In conformity with liberal thinking, which is interested in separating politics and economics, ^ypbf-r djsringiiishes between two basic types of capitalism : 'political capitalism' and 'modern industrial' or 'bourgeois capitali^p.' * Capitalism, of course, can only emerge when at least the beginnings of a money-economy exists.
In political capitalism, opportunities for profit are dependent upon the preparation for and the exploitation of warfare, conquest, and the pre- rogative power of political administration. Within this type are imperial- ist, colonial, adventure or booty, and fiscal. In addition, with a view of locating the peculiar marginal situation of trading groups, Weber speaks of pariah capitalism. This concept is applied to Occidental Jewry from later Antiquity to the present, and to the Parsees in India. Although functionally indispensable, for reasons of ethnic and religious back- ground, such strata are socially segregated and reduced to a pariah status. By imperialist capitalism, Weber refers to a situation in which profit interests are either the pacemakers or the beneficiaries of political ex- pansion. The greatest examples are the Roman and the British Empires, and the competitive imperialism of the present epoch. Colonial capital- ism, intimately connected with political imperialism, refers to those capitalisms which profit from the commercial exploitation of political prerogatives over conquered territories. Such prerogatives include po- litically guaranteed trading monopolies, shipping privileges, the politi-
* 'In my opinion Sombart has, in important respects, quite adequately characterized what should be understood by the early capitalist epoch. There are no "definitive" his- torical concepts. I do not share the vanity of contemporary authors who conduct them- selves in the face of a terminology used by some one else as if it were his toothbrush.' Archiv jiir Soziahvissenschaft tind Sozialpolitik., 1906, p. 348.
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 67
cally determined acquisition and exploitation of land, as well as com- pulsory labor. Adventure capitalism refers to charismatically led raids on foreign countries for the sake of treasure. Such treasures may be ex- tracted from temples, tombs, mines, or the chests of conquered princes, or they may be raised as levies on the ornaments and jewelry of the population. The heroic period of the conquest of the Western Hemi- sphere by the Spaniards, the overseas enterprises of the Italian city-states during the Middle Ages, the Hanseatic League, and the merchant ad- venturers of England are pre-eminent historical examples. Whereas ad- venture capitalism emphasizes the discontinuous and charismatic nature of these operations, the term booty capitalism emphasizes the objectives sought.
In certain contexts, Weber is eager to distinguish the extraordinary capitalist from the routine activities of the workaday enterpriser; in the former case he speaks of charismatic capitalists as 'economic supermen.^' Such figures have occurred in many historical contexts: in the new empire of ancient Egypt, in ancient China, India, in western Antiquity, in the waning of the Middle Ages, as well as in nineteenth-century America. The Fuggers and Rockefeller, Mellon, and Cecil Rhodes are examples. The difference between such charismatic capitalists and 'sober bourgeois' capitalists has been overlooked quite frequently in contro- versies over the problem of the Protestant ethic and its causal relevance for the rise of 'modern capitalism.' "°
Fiscal capitalism, as used by Weber, refers to certain profit opportuni- ties that accrue from the exploitation of political prerogatives. The most important phenomenon of this type is the farming out of tax collection to private enterprisers, as was the rule in ancient Rome and the ancien regime in France. The leasing of the sale of indulgences to Italian mer- chants as compensations for their loans to the Vatican; the entrepreneurial organization of military and naval forces by condottieri; the leasing of the right to com money to private enterprisers, such as Jacob Fugger, are further examples.
These analytical types of capitalism serve to emphasize different aspects of historical situations that are themselves quite fluid. The unique- ness of modern industrial capitalism consists in the fact that a specific production establishment emerges and is enlarged at the expense of pre- capitalist production units. This production establishment has its legal, political, and ideological preconditions, but it is nevertheless historically unique. It is based on the organization of formally free labor and the
68 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
fixed plant. The owner of the plant operates at his own risk and pro- duces commodities for anonymous and competitive markets. His opera- tions are usually controlled rationally by a constant balancing of costs and returns. All elements, including his own entrepreneurial services, are brought to book as items in the balance of his accounts. I X,ike Marx, Weber insists upon locating the basic institutional unit ■ of modern capitalism in production rather than in commerce or finance. A system of capitalism grows from these units of production. This system undergoes various historical phases; its highest stage is char- acterized by the separation of ownership and management and the financing of corporations by sales to the public of shares in the possible returns from future operations. For this late stage of capitalism, Weber accepts Sombart's term, 'High Capitalism.'
Unlike Marx, however, Weber is not interested in investigating the problems of capitalist dynamics. The problem of the business cycle and the capitalist crises, which were so essential for Marx's characterization of capitalism as 'an anarchy of production,' have httle part in Weber's analysis. This omission is of consequence for Weber's conception of ra- tionality in modern society. For Marx, the rational elements of society were the means which served, yet which increasingly contradicted, un- mastered and irrational elements. For Weber, capitalism is the highest form of rational operations; yet it is implemented by two irrationalities: the remains of an originally religiously anchored attitude: the irrational calling and drive for continuous work; and modern socialism, seen as the 'utopia' of those who cannot stand up under what seems to them the senseless injustice of an economic order which makes them dependent upon propertied entrepreneurs. Being keenl) aware of the institutional pressures of modern capitalism, Weber, at this point, is ready to make use of the category of social totalities as 'going concerns.' Once in the saddle, for instance, capitalism no longer needs religious motives.
In sociological theory, a 'subjective' theory of the stratification of capitalism has often been opposed to an 'objective' one. The classic Eng- Hsh economists, prominently Ricardo, as well as Marx represented the objective theory, defining 'class' in terms of typically recurrent incomes: rent, profit, wage. Accordingly, for them, landlord, entrepreneur, and worker make up the class structure. It does not matter whether these agents conceive of themselves as Britons, highlanders, or what not; their class positions are strictly located by their place and function within the objective economic order. Marx, adhering to this tradition, added a
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 69
historical aspect by emphasizing the specifically modern nature of bourgeois and proletarian classes.
Subjective theories of class, on the other hand, have placed great em- phasis upon the psychic traits of 'class members.' Those holding this subjective theory have been eager to speak of the 'fourth estate' as emerging side by side w^ith the older estates. Conceptions of respecta- bility and of social honor, descriptive elements of political and religious opinions, and sentiments corinec'ted with local and regional ways of life displace the strict theoretical approach of the economists. It was left to Moeller van den Bruck, author of The Third Reich, to carry the sub- jective theory of classes to absurdity: 'He is a proletariat who wants to think of himself as one. The proletarian consciousness makes man a proletariat, not the machine, not the mechanization of labor, not wage- dependency on the capitalist mode of production.' ^^
Max Weber is not ready to let man overcome hard economic fate by such acrobatics of will power. Class situations are determined by the relations of the market; in the last analysis, they go back to the differ- ences between the propertied and the non-propertied. He thus shares with the objective school the emphasis upon the economic order and the strict distinction between objectively characterized positions and a variety of shifting and subjective attitudes that may be related to such positions.
In locating the class problem in the market and in the streams of income and property, Weber points towards production and its modern unit, the capitalist enterprise. He is prepared to give full credit to Marx for his insight into the historical nature of the modern class structure. Only when subjective opinions can be attributed to men in an objective class situation does Weber speak of 'class-consciousness'; and when he focuses upon problems of 'conventions,' 'styles of life,' of occupational attitudes, he prefers to speak of prestige or of 'status groups.' These latter problems, of course, point towards consumption, which, to be sure, de- pends upon income derived from production or from property, but which goes beyond this sphere. By making this sharp distinction between class and status, and by differentiating between types of classes and types of status groups, Weber is able to refine the problems of stratifica- tion to an extent which thus far has not been surpassed.*
* See chapter vii, 'Class, Status, Party,' for his analjsis.
70 the man and his work
6: Conditions of Freedom and the Image of Man
The habit of the modern pohtical inteUigentsia of cloaking the aspira- tions of their parties under historical necessity, and of advancing such constructions with the pathos of 'iron necessity,' is characteristic of con- servatism as well as Marxism. In both cases the concept of freedom fol- lows Hegel's 'Fata nolentem trahunt, volentem ducunt' (The fates drag the one who does not will; they lead the one who does). On the political right, the pre-eminent prophet of doom was Oswald Spengler, whose morphological construction of culture cycles Weber criticized as arbi- trary intuitions exploiting historical literature for non-scientific ends.
Weber's liberal heritage and urge prevented him from taking a determinist position. He felt that freedom consists not in realizing alleged historical necessities but rather in making deliberate choices between open alternatives. The future is a field for strategy rather than a mere repeti- tion or unfolding of the past. Yet the possibilities of the future are not infinite, nor are they clay in the hands of the wilful man.
Weber saw social life as a polytheism of values in combat with one another, and choices were possible among these values.* The decision- making, morally responsible individual is, of course, a specifically modern and Occidental type of personality. This man can be more than a mere cog in his occupational groove. If he is responsible, he will have to make informed decisions. To Weber, sociological knowledge is of a kind that the complexity of modern civilization requires of one who would take intelligent stands on public issues. Such responsible decisions are equally remote from the emotional fanaticism of followers of dema- gogues as from the cynical sophistication of the snob or the blase smug- ness of the Philistine.
As he was not willing to see bureaucrats as harbingers of freedom, Weber felt that the field of responsible freedom was shrinking. He saw himself, in this connection, as an old-fashioned liberal, unafraid of being on the defensive or of swimming against the stream. The following pas- sage, which we reproduce at length, may illustrate Weber's fears as well as his assertion of the conditions of modern freedom. It was written in 1906.
* See chapter v, 'Science as a Vocation,' and chapter xiii, 'Rehgious Rejections of the World.'
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 7I
The opportunities for democracy and individualism would look very bad today were we to rely upon the lawful effects of material interests for their development. For the development of material interests points, as distinctly as possible, in the opposite direction: in the American 'benevolent feudalism,' in the so-called 'welfare institutions' of Germany, in the Russian factory con- stitution . . . everywhere the house is ready-made for a new servitude. It only waits for the tempo of technical economic 'progress' to slow down and for rent to triumph over profit. The latter victory, joined with the exhaustion of the remaining free soil and free market, will make the masses 'docile.' Then man will move into the house of servitude. At the same time, the in- creasing complexity of the economy, the partial governmentalization of eco- nomic activities, the territorial expansion of the population — these processes create ever-new work for the clerks, an ever-new specialization of functions, and expert vocational training and administration. All this means caste.
Those American workers who were against the 'Civil Service Reform' knew what they were about. They wished to be governed by parvenus of doubtful morals rather than by a certified caste of mandarins. But their pro- test was in vain.
In the face of all this, those who constantly fear that in the world of the future too much democracy and individualism may exist and too little author- ity, aristocracy, esteem for office, or such like, may calm down. Only too much provision has been made to see to it that the trees of democratic individualism do not shoot into the sky. According to all experience, history relentlessly gives rebirth to aristocracies and authorities; and those who deem it necessary for themselves, or for 'the people,' may cling to them. If only material con- ditions and interest-constellations directly or indirectly created by them mattered, then every sober reflection would convince us that all economic weathercocks point in the direction of increasing servitude.
It is utterly ridiculous to see any connection between the high capitalism of today — as it is now being imported into Russia and as it exists in Amer- ica— with democracy or with freedom in any sense of these words. Yet this capitalism is an unavoidable result of our economic development. The ques- tion is: how are freedom and democracy in the long run at all possible under the domination of highly developed capitalism? Freedom and democracy are only possible where the resolute will of a nation not to allow itself to be ruled like sheep is permanently alive. We are 'individualists' and partisans of 'democratic' institutions 'against the stream' of material constellations. He who wishes to be the weathercock of an evolutionary trend should give up these old-fashioned ideals as soon as possible. The historical origin of modern freedom has had certain unique preconditions which will never repeat them- selves. Let us enumerate the most important of these:
First, the overseas expansions. In the armies of Cromwell, in the French
^2 THE MAN AND IMS WORK
constituent assembly, in our whole economic lift wt today this breeze from across the ocean is felt . . . but there is no new ( tincnt at our disposal. Irresistibly the point of gravity of the population u! 'cstcrn civilization ad- vances toward the great inland areas of the Noril nicrican continent on the one side and of Russia on the other. This hapfK::d once before, in late antiquity. The monotonous plains of Russia anti tlu- Iniied Slates facilitate schematism.
Second, the uniqueness of the economic and suei. ..iructure of the early capitalist i poch in western Europe,
Third, the conquest of life by science, 'the sclf-rdization of the spirit.' The rational construction of institutional life, «1' iter having de-
stroyed innumerable 'values,' today, at least in prn done its work.
In the wake of the standardization of production, u js made the external way of life uniform. Under present conditions of I" impact of such
standardization is universal. Today, science itsrif i rents universal
IKTsonalilies.
Finally, certain conceptions of ideal values, grown ct ol a world of defi- nite religious ideas, have stamj)ed the ethical peculian- and cultural values of nuHJtTn man. They have done so by working with omcrous |x>litical con- stellations, themselves quite unique, and with the marial preconditions of
early capitalism. One luril merely ask whether atn - ' ' ' mcnt or
even any ilevclopment of the high capitalism of ttxl. ■; create
again these unique historical conditions of freedom an democracy in order to know the answer. No shadow of probability ' ut that
economic 'socialization' as such must harbor in its pnicnt
of inwardly 'free' {xrrsonalities of 'altruistic' idcaU.
Tin- defensive j)cssimisni for the I mure of frccdon ^.vhirh i« displayed
in this passage and which is a major theme of V forced by the fate he sees for charisma in the mo<l he gives a quite nominalist definition of charisni.i concept serves him as a metaphysical vehicle of man That Ireedom, as carried by charisma, is doomed is < gic remark concerning the French Revolution. After ing modern liberties, Weber indicates that .such lilx male justification in the concept of the natural law . 'The charismatic glorification of "reason" found its ^ sion in Robespierre's apotheosis. This is the last ft has assumed in its long road of varied and rich • concern with freedom was not only historical; it iii. of contemporary man as an individual.
k, is rein- Alt hough [ that the 111 history. his nostal- nl classify- luir ulii- i;ul then:
t \piC ^
I charisma
Weher's
his image
>
■5 5J' «»■* »■
tat* ••
W 'Biteaiq
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 73
He conceived ■ individual man as a composite of general character- istics derived fror social institutions; the individual as an actor of social roles. He s holds only for men in so far as they do not-
transccnd cs of everyday institutions. The concept of charisma
serves to under! : Weber's view that all men everywhere are not to be comprehended ricly as social products.
H. Mead the T is ordinarily in tension with the social
ic expectations of others, so for Weber the potentially
of man stands in tension with the external demands
For Mead, the tension between the I and the role-
1 in the creative response of the genius. For Weber,
charismatic leader to distress unifies external demands
^. In a broad sense, one may say that externality is
straint and charisma with freedom. Weber's concep-
cdom thus partakes of the humanist tradition of
concerned with the freedom of the individual to
'MS. Having incorporated the Marxist critique of capi-
cconomic system as a compulsive apparatus rather
of freedom.
Mfalism is the embodiment of rational impersonality;
um is identified with irrational sentiment and privacy.
:st a tarrying for loving companionship and for the ca-
c of art as a this-worldly escape from institutional
!<rivilcgc of the propertied and educated: it is freedom
is .i!
r(jic.s ...; - charisma 1 1 of ini!. demands the rcsjM.i, and intiri identified tion of li liberali'>r" create i talism. than .1' For ' the i]\: Freedom ih,-'" ro
In this CO
now on the icnsivc against both capitalism and bureaucracy, Weber MM and cultural liberalism rather than economic liberal- s; tradition in which Schiller wrote that 'Der Meiisch ', isi frci, und wiird' er in ketten geboren' is evidenced in with the decline of the cultivated man as a well-rounded vor of the technical expert^ who, from the human point !cd.* Weber's own work is a realization of his self-image lan concerned with all things human. And the decline of d the ascendancy of the expert is another documentation ic diminished chances for freedom. hcsc two types of men, Weber sees modern civilization orld history. Past civilizations produced various types of
S< , "Hurcaucrac).'
ncHion of freedom as a historically developed phenomena,
reprc*^ ism. '! ist Wc |xr
Ot N
as
e 11 W
In as i;
C^fr
72 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
constituent assembly, in our whole economic life even today this breeze from across the ocean is felt . . . but there is no new continent at our disposal. Irresistibly the point of gravity of the population of Western civilization ad- vances toward the great inland areas of the North American continent on the one side and of Russia on the other. This happened once before, in late antiquity. The monotonous plains of Russia and the United States facilitate schematism.
Second, the uniqueness of the economic and social structure of the early capitalist epoch in western Europe.
Third, the conquest of life by science, 'the self-realization of the spirit.' The rational construction of institutional life, doubtless after having de- stroyed innumerable 'values,' today, at least in principle, has done its work. In the wake of the standardization of production, it has made the external way of life uniform. Under present conditions of business, the impact of such standardization is universal. Today, science itself no longer creates universal personalities.
Finally, certain conceptions of ideal values, grown out of a world of defi- nite religious ideas, have stamj)ed the ethical peculiarity and cultural values of modern man. They have done so by working with numerous political con- stellations, themselves quite unique, and with the material preconditions of early capitalism. One need merely ask whether any material development or even any development of the high capitalism of today could maintain or create again these unique historical conditions of freedom and democracy in order to know the answer. No shadow of probability speaks for the fact that economic 'socialization' as such must harbor in its lap either the development of inwardly 'free' personalities of 'altruistic' ideals."^
The defensive pessimism for the future of freedom, which is displayed in this passage and which is a major theme of Weber's work, is rein- forced by the fate he sees for charisma in the modern world. Although he gives a quite nominalist definition of charisma, it rs clear that the concept serves him as a metaphysical vehicle of man's freedom in history. That freedom, as carried by charisma, is doomed is evident by his nostal- gic remark concerning the French Revolution. After tracing and. classify- ing modern liberties, Weber indicates that such liberties find their ulti- mate justification in the concept of the natural law of reason; and then: 'The charismatic glorification of "reason" found its characteristic expres- sion in Robespierre's apotheosis. This is the last form which charisma has assumed in its long road of varied and rich destinies.' ^^ Weber's concern with freedom was not only historical; it influenced his image of contemporary man as an individual.
INTELLECTUAL ORIENTATIONS 73
He conceived of individual man as a composite of general character- istics derived from social institutions; the individual as an actor of social roles. However, this holds only for men in so far as they do not- transcend the routines of everyday institutions. The concept of charisma serves to underline Weber's view that all men everywhere are not to be comprehended merely as social products.
Just as for George H. Mead the T is ordinarily in tension with the social roles derived from the expectations of others, so for Weber the potentially charismatic quality of man stands in tension with the external demands of institutional life. For Mead, the tension between the I and the role- demands is resolved in the creative response of the genius. For Weber, the response of the charismatic leader to distress unifies external demands and internal urges. In a broad sense, one may say that externality is identified with constraint and charisma with freedom. Weber's concep- tion of human freedom thus partakes of the humanist tradition of liberalism which is concerned with the freedom of the individual to create free institutions. Having incorporated the Marxist critique of capi- talism, he sees the economic system as a compulsive apparatus rather than as the locus of freedom.
For Weber, capitaHsm is the embodiment of rational impersonality; the quest for freedom is identified with irrational sentiment and privacy. Freedom is at best a tarrying for loving companionship and for the ca- thartic experience of art as a this-worldly escape from institutional routines. It is the privilege of the propertied and educated: it is freedom without equality.
In this conception of freedom as a historically developed phenomena, now on the defensive against both capitalism and bureaucracy, Weber represents humanist and cultural liberalism rather than economic liberal- ism. The humanist tradition in which Schiller wrote that 'Der Mensch ist freigeschaffen, ist frei, und wiird' er in ketten geboren' is evidenced in Weber's concern with the decline of the cultivated man as a well-rounded personality in favor of the technical expert, who, from the human point of view, is crippled.* Weber's own work is a realization of his self-image as a cultivated man concerned with all things human. And the decline of the humanist and the ascendancy of the expert is another documentation for Weber of the diminished chances for freedom.
In terms of these two types of men, Weber sees modern civilization as unique in world history. Past civilizations produced various types of
* See chapter viii, 'Bureaucracy.'
74 THE MAN AND HIS WORK
humanist elites: in China, the mandarin, a stratum of gentlemanly literati; in antiquity, a leisured stratum o£ athletic and cultured men; in England, the modern conventional gentlemen, a result of compromises between 'merry old England' and middle-class Puritanism consummated in the masculine club; in Latin civilizations, the French cavalier and the Italian cortegiano, compromises between court nobilities and urban pa- tricians, consummated in the salon of the lady. Such cultivated types are now unfit for the management of economic and political affairs; they are being displaced by the specialist bureaucrat and the professional poli- tician. Weber gave little weight to followers of artistic and literary cult leaders, who must belong to or depend upon circles of rentiers, or else serve the literary fashions promoted by shrewd publishers.
In contrast to the liberalism of Kant and Fichte, and some modern American educators. Max Weber saw education and the social produc- tion of personalities as dependent upon politics and economics. His pes- simism about political and economic freedom is thus supplemented by his pessimism about the realms of art, cultivation, and the personality types possible for contemporary man.
Parti
SCIENCE AND POLITICS
IV. Politics as a Vocation
This lecture, which I give at your request, will necessarily disappoint you in a number of ways. You will naturally expect me to take a posi- tion on actual problems of the day. But that will be the case only in a purely formal way and toward the end, when I shall raise certain ques- tions concerning the significance of political action in the whole way of life. In today's lecture, all questions that refer to what policy and what content one should give one's political activity must be eliminated. For such questions have nothing to do with the general question of what politics as a vocation means and what it can mean. Now to our subject matter.
What do we understand by politics? The concept is extremely broad and comprises any kind of independent leadership in action. One speaks of the currency policy of the banks, of the discounting policy of the Reichsbank, of the strike policy of a trade union; one may speak of the educational policy of a municipality or a township, of the policy of the president of a voluntary association, and, finally, even of the policy of a prudent wife who seeks to guide her husband. Tonight, our reflections are, of course, not based upon such a broad concept. We wish to under- stand by politics only the leadership, or the influencing of the leadership, of a political association, hence today, of a state.
But what is a 'political' association from the sociological point of view? What is a 'state'? Sociologically, the state cannot be defined in terms of its ends. There is scarcely any task that some political association has not taken in hand, and there is no task that one could say has always been exclusive and peculiar to those associations which are designated as po- litical ones: today the state, or historically, those associations which have been the predecessors of the modern state. Ultimately, one can define
'Politik als Beruf,' Gesammelte PoUtische Schriften (Muenchen, 1921), pp. 396-450. Originally a speech at Munich University, 191 8, published in 191 9 by Duncker & Hum- blodt, Munich.
77
^8 SCIENCE AND POLITICS
the modern state sociologically only in terms o£ the specific means peculiar to it, as to every political association, namely, the use of physical force.
'Every state is founded on force,' said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of 'state' would be eliminated, and a condi- tion would emerge that could be designated as 'anarchy,' in the specific sense of this word. Of course, force is certainly not the normal or the only means of the state — nobody says that — but force is a means specific to the state. Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. In the past, the most varied institutions — be- ginning with the sib — have known the use of physical force as quite normal. Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human com- munity that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only ' to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence. Hence, 'politics' for us means striving to share power or striving to influence the distribution of power, either among states or among groups within a state.
This corresponds essentially to ordinary usage. When a question is said to be a 'political' question, when a cabinet minister or an official is said to be a 'political' official, or when a decision is said to be 'politically' determined, what is always meant is that interests in the distribution, maintenance, or transfer of power are decisive for answering the ques- tions and determining the decision or the official's sphere of activity. He who is active in politics strives for power either as a means in serving other aims, ideal or egoistic, or as 'power for power's sake,' that is, in order to enjoy the prestige-feeling that power gives.
Like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legiti- mate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be. When and why do men obey? Upon what inner justifications and upon what external means does this domination rest?
To begin with, in principle, there are three inner justifications, hence basic legitimations of domination. First, the authority of the 'eternal yesterday,' i.e. of the mores sanctified
/
POLITICS AS A VOCATION 79
through the unimaginably ancient recognition and habitual orientation to conform. This is 'traditionaT jomination exercised by the patriarch and the patrimonial prince o£ yore.
There is the authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace (charisma), the absolutely personal devotion and personal confidence in revelation, heroism, or other qualities of individual leadership. This is 'charismatic' domination, as exercised by the prophet or — in the field of politics — by the elected war lord, the plebiscitarian ruler, the great dema- gogue, or the political party leader.
Finally, there is domination by virtue of 'legality,' by virtue of the belief in the validity of legal statute and functional 'competence' based on rationally created rules. In this case, obedience is expected in dis- charging statutory obligations. This is domination as exercised by the modern 'servant of the state' and by all those bearers of power who in this respect resemble him.
It is understood that, in reality, obedience is determined by highly robust motives of fear and hope — fear of the vengeance of magical powers or of the power-holder, hope for reward in this world or in the beyond — and besides all this, by interests of the most varied sort. Of this we shall speak presently. However, in asking for the 'legitimations' of this obedience, one meets with these threejpure' J^es : 'traditional,' 'charis- matic,' and 'legal.'
These conceptions of legitimacy and their inner justifications are of very great significance for the structure of domination. To be sure, the pure types are rarely found in reality. But today we cannot deal with the highly complex variants, transitions, and combinations of these pure types, which problems belong to 'political science.' Here we are inter- ested above all in the second of these types: domination by virtue of the devotion of those who obey the purely personal 'charisma' of the 'leader.' For this is the root of the idea of a calling in its highest ex- pression.
Devotion to the charisma of the prophet, or the leader in war, or to the great demagogue in the ecclesia or in parliament, means that the leader is personally recognized as the innerly 'called' leader of men. Men do not obey him by virtue of tradition or statute, but because they believe in him. If he is more than a narrow and vain upstart* of the moment, the leader lives for his cause .and 'strives for his work.' ^ The devotion of his disciples, his followers, his personal party friends is oriented to his person and to its qualities.
So SCIENCE AND POLITICS
Charismatic leadership has emerged in all places and in all historical epochs. Most importantly in the past, it has emerged in the two figures of the magician and the prophet on the one hand, and in the elected war lord, the gang leader and condotierre on the other hand. Political leadership in the form of the free 'demagogue' who grew from the soil of the city state is of greater concern to us; like -the city state, the dema- gogue is peculiar to the Occident and especially to Mediterranean cul- ture. Furthermore, political leadership in the form of the parliamentary 'party leader' has grown on the soil of the constitutional state, which is also indigenous only to the Occident.
These politicians by virtue of a 'calling,' in the most genuine sense of the word, are of course nowhere the only decisive figures in the cross- currents of the political struggle for power. The sort of auxiliary means that are at their disposal is also highly decisive. How do the politically dominant powers manage to maintain their domination? The question pertains to any kind of domination, hence also to political domination in all its forms, traditional as well as legal and charismatic.
Organized domination, which calls for continuous administration, re- quires that human conduct be conditioned to obedience towards those masters who claim to be the bearers of legitimate power. On the other hand, by virtue of this obedience, organized domination requires the control of those material goods which in a given case are necessary for the use of physical violence. Thus, organized domination requires con- trol of the personal executive staff and the material implements of ad- ministration.
The administrative staff, which externally represents the organization of political domination, is, of course, like any other organization, bound by obedience to the power-holder and not alone by the concept of legiti- macy, of which we have just spoken. There are two other means, both of which appeal to personal interests: material reward and social honor. The fiefs of vassals, the prebends of patrimonial officials, the salaries of modern civil servants, the honor of knights, the privileges of estates, and the honor of the civil servant comprise their respective wages. The fear of losing them is the final and decisive basis for soli- darity between the executive staff and the power-holder. There is honor and booty for the followers in war; for the demagogue's following, there are 'spoils' — that is, exploitation of the dominated through the monopo- lization of office — and there are politically determined profits and
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premiums of vanity. All of these rewards are also derived from the domination exercised by a charismatic leader.
To maintain a dominion by force, certain material goods are required, just as with an economic organization. All states may be classified accord- ing to whether they rest on the principle that the staff of men themselves own the administrative means, or whether the staff is 'separated' from these means of administration. This distinction holds in the same sense in which today we say that the salaried employee and the proletarian in the capitalistic enterprise are 'separated' from the material means of production. The power-holder must be able to count on the obedience of the staff members,' officials, or whoever else they may be. The ad- ministrative means may consist of money, building, war material, ve- hicles, horses, or whatnot. The question is whether or not the power- holder himself directs and organizes the administration while delegating executive power to personal servants, hired officials, or personal favor- ites and confidants, who are non-owners, i.e. who do not use the mate- rial means of administration in their own right but are directed by the lord. The distinction runs through all administrative organizations of the past.
These political associations in which the material means of adminis- tration are autonomously controlled, wholly or partly, by the dependent administrative staff may be called associations organized in 'estates.' The vassal in the feudal association, for instance, paid out of his own pocket for the administration and judicature of the district enfeoffed to him. He supplied his own equipment and provisions for war, and his sub- vassals did likewise. Of course, this had consequences for the lord's position of power, which only rested upon a relation of personal faith and upon the fact that the legitimacy of his possession of the fief and the social honor of the vassal were derived from the overlord.
However, everywhere, reaching back to the earliest political forma- tions, we also find the lord himself directing the administration. He seeks to take the administration into his own hands by having men personally dependent upon him: slaves, household officials, attendants, personal 'favorites,' and prebendaries enfeoffed in kind or in money from his magazines. He seeks to defray the expenses from his own pocket, from the revenues of his patrimonium; and he seeks to create an army which is dependent upon him personally because it is equipped and provisioned out of his granaries, magazines, and armories. In the association of 'estates,' the lord rules with the aid of an autonomous 'aristocracy' and
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hence shares his domination with it; the lord who personally administers is supported either by members of his household or by plebeians. These are property less strata having no social honor of their own; materially, they are completely chained to him and are not backed up by any com- peting power of their own. All forms of patriarchal and patrimonial domination, Sultanist despotism, and bureaucratic states belong to this latter type. The bureaucratic state order is especially important; in its most rational development, it is precisely characteristic of the modern state.
Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince. He paves the way for the expropriation of the autonomous and 'private' bearers of executive power who stand beside him, of those who in their own right possess the means of administration, warfare, and financial organization, as well as politically usable goods of all sorts. The whole process is a complete parallel to the development of the capitalist enterprise through gradual expropriation of the inde- pendent producers^ In the end, the modern state controls the total means of political organization, which actually come together under a single head. No single official personally owns the money he pays out, or the buildings, stores, tools, and war machines he controls. 'In the contempo- rary 'state' — and this is essential for the concept of state-^the 'separation' of the administrative staff, of the administrative officials, and of the workers from the material means of administrative organization is com- pleted. Here the most modern development begins, and we see with our own eyes the attempt to inaugurate the expropriation of this expropria- tor of the political