MAX WEBER, DEMOCRACY AND MODERNIZATION

Also by Ralph Schroeder

MAX WEBER AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE

POSSIBLE WORLDS: The Social Dynamic of Virtual Reality Technology

Max Weber, Democracy and Modernization

Edited by

Ralph Schroeder Professor School of Technology Management and Economics Chalmers University

palgrave

First published in Oreat Britain 1998 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire R021 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-333-71254-2 ISBN 978-1-349-26836-8 (eBook)

First published in the United States of America 1998 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010

ISBN 978-0-312-21244-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Max Weber, democracy and modernization 1 edited by Ralph Schroeder. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-21244-5 (cloth) 1. Weber, Max, 1864-192O--Contributions in political science. 2. Weber, Max, 1864-1920-Views on democracy. 3. Democracy. I. Schroeder, Ralph. JC263.W42M37 1998 301'.092-dc21 97-38682

Selection, editorial matter and Chapter 6 © Ralph Schroeder 1998 Chapters 1-5,7-12 © Macmillan Press Ltd 1998

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DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-26836-8

Contents

Abbreviations of Weber's Works vii

Notes on the Contributors viii

Introduction x

The Concept of Democracy in Weber's Political Sociology Stefan Breuer

2 Democratization in World-Historical Perspective Randall Collins 14

3 State Formation and the Disciplined Individual in Weber's Historical Sociology Roland Axtmann 32

4 Max Weber and Plebiscitary Democracy Sven Eliaeson 47

5 The Nation-State, the Protestant Ethic and Modernization Sam Whimster 61

6 From Weber's Political Sociology to Contemporary Liberal Democracy Ralph Schroeder 79

7 Tocqueville and Weber on the Sociological Origins of Citizenship: The Political Culture of American Democracy Stephen Kalberg 93

8 Max Weber and European Integration Carl Levy 113

9 Back to 'Mitte/europa'? Weber, Germany, and Contemporary Central Europe Zdzislaw Krasnodebski 129

10 Soviet Communism and Weberian Sociology Stefan Breuer 145

v

1

vi Contents

11 Western Impact and Asian Values in Japan's Modernization: A Weberian Critique Wolfgang Schwentker

12 Reframing Orientalism: Weber and Islam Mohammad Nafissi

Index

166

182

202

Abbreviations of Weber's Works

The following abbreviations are used whenever reference is made to Max Weber's works. Where references in brackets list both the German and English versions of the same text, this indicates that authors have preferred to use their own translation.

AC

AJ CS

ES FMW

GEH GSW

MSS MWG PE

PEK

PS PW ROC

ROI

RS

STA

WG WIR WL

The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London: New Left Books, 1976. Ancient Judaism. New York: Free Press, 1952. '''Churches'' and "Sects" in North America: An Ecclesiastical Socio­Political Sketch'. Sociological Theory. 3: 7-13,1985. Economy and Society. New York: Bedminster Press, 1968. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948. General Economic History. New York: Greenberg, 1927. Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte. Ttibingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1924. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press, 1949. Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. Ttibingen: J.c.B. Mohr, 1984-. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. London: Allen and Unwin, 1930. Die Protestantische Ethik I/. Hamburg: Siebenstern Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972. Gesammelte Politische Schriften. 4th edn. Ttibingen: J.c.B. Mohr, 1980. Weber: Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. New York: Free Press, 1951. The Religion of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism. Glencoe, Ill., Free Press. Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie. 3 vols. Ttibingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1920-1. 'Ein Vortrag Max Webers tiber die Probleme der Staatssoziologie (Wien)' . Neue Freie Presse. no.19102, 10,26.10.1917. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. 5th edn. Ttibingen: J.c.B. Mohr, 1980. Wirtschaftsgeschichte. 4th edn. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1981. Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Wissenschaftslehre. 5th edn. Ttibingen: J.e.B. Mohr, 1982.

Vll

Notes on the Contributors

Roland Axtmann is a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Rela­tions at the University of Aberdeen. His publications include Liberal Democracy into the Twenty-First Century.

Stefan Breuer is Professor of Sociology at the Hochschule fUr Wirtschaft und Po­litik in Hamburg. He has published two books in German on Weber's political sociology, Max Webers Herrschaftssoziologie [Max Weber's Sociology of Domi­nation] and Biirokratie und Charisma [Bureaucracy and Charisma].

Randall Collins is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include two books on Weber; Max Weber: A Skeleton Key and Weberian Sociological Theory. His most recent book is The Sociology of Philoso­phies.

Sven Eliaeson is Professor of Political Science at the University of Karlstad and a docent at the University of Stockholm. In addition to a number of articles on Weber, he has published Bilden av Max Weber [The Image of Max Weber] and the forth­coming Max Weber's Methodologies.

Stephen Kalberg is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University. He is the author of Max Weber's Comparative-Historical Sociology, the forthcoming Max Weber and the Sociology of Civilisations, and a number of articles on Weber and on comparisons of German and American society. He is currently researching the cultural foundations of citizenship.

Zdzislaw Krasnodebski is Professor for Eastern European Cultural History at the University of Bremen. His main publications (in Polish) include The Understand­ing of Human Behaviour, The Decline of the Idea of Progress, The Postmodern Cultural Dilemma, and a forthcoming book on Max Weber.

Carl Levy is lecturer in European Politics at Goldsmith's College. He has writ­ten a number of essays on Weber and has edited Socialism and the European Intelligentsia, 1880-1914 and Italian Regionalism: History, Identity, and Politics. He is also the coeditor of The Future of Europe: Problems and Issues for the Twenty-First Century.

Mohammad Nafissi is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Policy, Politics and Social Research at the University of North London. He has completed a study of

viii

Notes on the Contributors ix

Weber, Karl Polanyi and Moses Finley and published a number of essays on con­temporary Middle Eastern politics.

Ralph Schroeder is Professor in the School of Technology Management and Eco­nomics at Chalmers University in Gothenburg. He is the author of Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture and Possible Worlds: The Social Dynamic of Virtual Reality Technology.

Wolfgang Schwentker is lecturer in modem history at the University of Diissel­dorf. He coedited Max Weber und seine Zeitgenossen [Max Weber and his Contem­poraries] and volume 16 of Weber's Collected Works in German [Political Writings 1918-20]. He has published widely on German and Japanese history and his forth­coming book, Max Weber in Japan. Eine Untersuchung zur Wirkungsgeschichte 1905-95 is about Weber's reception in Japan.

Sam Whimster is Reader in Sociology at London Guildhall University. He has edited Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity and Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy.

Introduction

Before the end of the Cold War, there was a constant rivalry between Marxian and Weberian sociologists which revolved around the economic determination of polit­ical change (Marx's position) as against the autonomy of political institutions (Weber's). This volume takes as its point of departure that this pitched theoretical battle, which only ever reached a stand-off, is now over. After the collapse of com­munism, it is clear that a number of areas - including nationalism, state-formation, legitimacy, and especially the preconditions of democracy and its strengthening -must be reexamined outside the constraints of this polarized debate. And at its broad­est, the whole question about politics and modernization needs now to be recon­sidered in sociology.

Weber's political sociology has entered subsequent sociological thinking in two ways: on one side, there have been attempts to explicate and systematize his writ­ings on politics. This literature has not, on the whole, brought Weber's thought to bear on contemporary change. Recent political sociogists who argue in a Weberian vein, on the other hand, have tended to make use of only a few of Weber's ideal types - the state, legitimacy, and bureaucracy - and ignored the question of the dis­tinctiveness ofthe Weberian perspective. In other words, they have used Weber as a toolkit without engaging with the substance of his ideas.

This split reflects a tension within Weber's own writings on politics, some of which were interventions in the political debates of his day, while others were part of the conceptual apparatus that he developed, mainly in Economy and Society. Here the distinction between his various writings will be left to one side; this book is not about the interpretation ofW eber' s work, but about applying his ideas to contempo­rary political change.

The chapters themselves need no lengthy introduction since they are all self­contained and do not assume familiarity with debates about Weber or about their respective subject-matter. It may be useful, however, to draw out some of the themes to get a sense of the range of uses that are made here of Weber's work.

Chapters 1 to 6 address a number of general problems in Weberian political socio­logy. The absence of a concept of democracy has been regarded as the most serious omission in Weber's writings. In Chapter 1 Stefan Breuer shows how this deficit can be corrected and how there is a great variety of types of rule - from personal follow­ership to mass representative democracy - to which a Weberian concept of demo­cracy can be applied. In doing this, Breuer applies Weber's comparative-historical method which, in Chapter 2, Randall Collins uses in a different way to explain the first emergence of modem democracy. Collins argues that, contrary to the common view that a democratic culture is crucial to democracy, it was rather the shifting

x

Introduction xi

balance of geopolitical power in medieval and early modem Europe, as well as the con­sequent division of powers within the state, that account for the waxing and waning strengths of democratic rule.

Roland Axtmann addresses a second problem which is often thought to be over­looked by Weber, the relationship between the state and the individual. In Chapter 3 he suggests that Weber's theory of state-formation, combined with his sociology of religion, explains the rise of a unique modem political 'subject' which must now be reconciled with the demands of liberal democracy in a globalizing world. A cent­ral aim of Weber's political sociology was, of course, to rescue the individuality of the subject from the overwhelming forces of bureaucratization and routinization. But, as Sven Eliaeson argues in Chapter 4, his notion of plebiscitary democracy, which can be interpreted as promoting the greatest possible scope for individual leadership, was also a functional - and in a sense appropriate - response by Weber to Germany's late political development and lack of a democratic tradition. Sam Whimster similarly notes how Weber's ideas about nationalism are bound up with the German problem: Weber's almost brutal language in describing the homogeniz­ing force of nationalism can be attributed to his grappling with Germany's peculiar path to modernization; but, Whimster argues, his view of nationalism also fore­shadows some intractable problems in contemporary theories of nationalism. Finally, in Chapter 6, I pull together the threads of Weber's political sociology - from the geopolitical level, via the state, to legitimacy. In doing so, I try to establish where Weber fits (or sits uneasily) with liberal and democratic orientations in contem­porary political sociology.

In the second half of the book, the arrangement of the chapters becomes geo­graphical rather than problem-oriented, moving from West to East and finally 'South'. Apart from geography, however, the chapters also differ in the time­scale they cover and in their approaches. In his comparison between Weber and Tocqueville, for example, Stephen Kalberg wants to ascribe the emergence of Amer­ican democracy to religious sources in the sense that a particular ethic - and with it, a distinctive form of civil association - developed through the Protestant denomina­tions (recall, by contrast, Collins' geopolitical determinants of democracy: Collins' geopolitical and state-centred structural perspective is perhaps as far removed as possible from Kalberg' s focus on understanding ethics and social action, though the two accounts are not incompatible and both adopt a comparative-historical explan­atory strategy).

Moving to Europe, the main concern becomes to compare Weber's time with our own. Thus Carl Levy and Zdzislaw Krasnodebski make the point, albeit in different ways, that Weber's attempts to reconcile the imbalances between political and eco­nomic power in Central Europe in his own time are still relevant; that is, now that the questions of European unity and Europe's relation to 'Mitteleuropa' have reemerged after they were overshadowed by Germany's expansive role and later held in check by the Cold War. It may be hoped that Weber's - again, brutal -assessment of how the fate of the smaller nations is caught up in the geopolitical

xii Introduction

ambitions of the larger ones can perhaps be avoided in the future through greater economic and military cooperation. Yet a sober and pessimistic Weberian assess­ment can also be a useful tool for thinking about how to put into place the structures that are necessary to achieve this cooperation in the first place.

Further East, Breuer outlines how the alternative Soviet path to modernization can be understood in terms of the 'charisma of reason' , as an attempt at a revolution­ary rationalization of society. According to Breuer, the failure of this project was a result of the sclerotic effect of the party becoming absorbed within a bureaucrat­ized administrative apparatus. Japan, on the other hand, has been regarded as a highly successful rather than a problematic model of late development. Wolfgang Schwentker traces how both Japanese social thinkers (as well as Western modern­ization theorists) held up Weber's sociology as a model for modernization and inter­preted it in the light of the Japanese experience to fit their own ideas about development. Finally, Islamic modernizers, as Mohammad Nafissi shows, were also aware of a Western ideal of modernization, but they were torn between this ideal and a monocratic faith. He argues that the present situation of Islamic states points neither to a democracy-resisting assertion of this faith, nor to the emergence of a monolithic alternative to modernity.

Where does Weberian political sociology stand now? At its broadest, it is com­parative-historical and centres on various interpretations of the autonomous devel­opment of the state and of its central features. But, as this book demonstrates, Weberianism also consists of a range of powerful concepts and substantive analyses of specific aspects of contemporary political change. The main current alternatives to a Weberian analysis of politics are the extremes of social constructionist relativ­ism and the economistic science of rational choice - neither of which has produced empirical and comparative-historical studies with a similar scope and depth. If, after 1989, Weberian political sociology helps us to clarify the prospects of demo­cratization and modernization, it will undoubtedly continue to be one of our most powerful resources for understanding contemporary politics.

It remains for me to thank all the contributors to the volume for their sterling efforts. Seven of the chapters in this collection were initially presented at a confer­ence of the Max Weber Study Group held at Royal Holloway - University of Lon­don and the German Historical Institute in June 1996. I would like to thank the Department of Social Policy and Social Science at Royal Holloway and the British Sociological Association for financial support for this conference and the German Historical Institute for its kind hospitality. I am also grateful to Mary Shields for her excellent translation of Stefan Breuer's essay on democracy, and to David Chalcraft and Sam Whimster for all their help in organizing the conference. Last but not least, Tim Farmiloe, Annabelle Buckley and Linda Auld ensured a smooth transition from manuscript to book.

Ralph Schroeder