HISTORIOGRAPHY: LECTURE 6 Max Weber: concepts, ideal types and the rise of

capitalism

In my lecture today I’ll return to my Heimat Germany. We already spoke about two other

German scholars of the nineteenth century in this module, Leopold von Ranke and Karl Marx

whose thinking is fundamental to the methodological development of our discipline of History

(itself a product of 19th century Germany). We have seen also how much their thinking was

shaped by specific political, socio-cultural conditions of the times (to put it very crude…Ranke –

the rise of German nationalism and Marx: English industrialisation), which they lived. So in

order to understand the third German thinker, Max Weber, (image) whom we are dealing with

today who shaped (and continues to shape history writing), I suggest, we again turn to his life

first before we tackle his thinking.

Life

Max Weber was born in 1864 into a wealthy family of bourgois textile manufacturers in Erfurt.

(image) His father was a successful well-to-do lawyer and a national-liberal parlimenarian. Let

me just to remind you of what was going on in the German lands at the time in regard to politics:

politics

In 1871 Germany was unified; this was predominantly the work of the Prussian statesman Otto

von Bismark. (slide )Minister president between 1862- 1890 Bismark ‘ruled’ the German empire

and Europe from the 1860s to the 1890s. Conversative in his politics he was interested in a

European balance of power; in regard to national politics, he was concerned about the rise of

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socialism (the Socialist Party rose) – as a reaction to it he pushed through anti-socialist laws in

1871, and, precaution if you like, he set up the famous German workers’ insurance system

(the insurance system is conservative – not socialist as one might assume!). This is, as I’ve said

a reaction to the rise of socialism in Germany but also, more widely, a reaction to the German

industrialisation. Compared to other European countries, Germany entered industrialisation only

in the second half/last third of the 19th century. (just to remind us when Marx is writing his

famous Manifesto, for example, Germany is still largely an agrarian country! Marx would have

not written his work had he stayed in Germany).

(slide)

Besides his famous socialist laws, Bismark is also famous for his anti-Catholic campaigning

he launched in 1871, the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf (battle of culture). He largely had

European politics in mind here (prevent pope from meddling into politics) but in the protestant

countries of the Germany Empire -- it started a virtual ‘hunt’ for Catholics. Priest and bishops

were exiled; I 1872 all the Jesuit order was disvolved and all Jesuits exiled; 1873 he passed

anti-Catholic laws – Bismark’s aim was to prevent Catholics from having any influence on

politics and cultures in the Empire (directed against the Catholic Party in particular).

Modern Germany needed to rid itself from irrational faith and medieval rituals, was the

battle cry, far in to the 1890s.

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This fitted with the new image of Germany, as the emerging and so it was hoped leading

industrial nation (increasing competition with Britain; Germany also experiencing the first

capitalistic crises).

Central to this development were the natural sciences which became a major ‘export article’ of

Germany and a source of national pride. (lots of international prizes including noble prize)

Money was poured into their development particularly in Prussia. However, while we have on

one hand the natural science emerging, we do have to remember that they did not yet exercise

that influence on cultural, economic and political life as they do now. As I’ve mentioned with

Ranke already, Germans at the time felt almost threatened by the forces of industrialisation; the

bourgois classes were appauled by its destructive powers – in regard to the environment and to

human nature (rationalisation; efficieny, greediness etc; diseases spreading that were related to

modern time such as ‘neurasthenia’, the suffering of the nerves – Weber suffers from it) – As a

reaction we see a turn to the past and culture as a remedy for such troubling times.

‘Historicism’- a cultural and intellectual movement which I have already explained in regard to

Ranke and which celebrated the past as a key to the understanding of the troubling present.

(historicism definition)

These are some important elements to keep in mind when we think about Weber’s upbringing

but also his intellectual interests.

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Important too, at least according to his many, many biographers was his family background,

particularly this parents relationship: His father was a domineering patriachical figure, a man

of modern times so to speak, interested in politics and economics, priding himself of a ‘rational

mind’; his mother was the the total opposite of her husband. She was woman of culture and

extreme protestant piety. (slide) As you can imagine, Weber seniors didn’t get on very well, a

source of ongoing frustration for young Weber who had a very close relationship with his

mother. Weber junior was intellectually very gifted; after the Abitur he enrolled to study law at

Heidelberg and continued studies in Berlin and Goettingen, all of them very famous universities

at the time (remember Ranke’s influence and that of von Humboldt). Althought a lawyer, his

independent academic work began in the field of law and legal history. His doctoral disseration

was entitled ‘A Contribution to the history of Medieval Business Organisations’ (1880)

(historicism!). After completing his dissertation Weber started the in-service training required

for the German bench or bar. He becomes interested during that time in agrarian legal questions

and begins to prepare his second dissertation necessary in German academia to teach at

universities, the so-called habilitation. Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public

and Private Law (1891). While writing his study he prepared himself for the duties of

Privatdozent (PD, Beat Kumin is ) in Roman, German and commercial law at the University of

Berlin. He also undertook extensive investigations of rural labor in the German provinces east

of the river Elbe, which led to a publication of a 900-pages volume in 1892, and he investigated

the workings and mechanism of the stock-exchange. In between his enormous workload he

marries his wife Marianne in 1893 (slide) who would later becomes the publisher/interpreter of

his work after his death (and contributes to rather confusing, even false presentation of him as

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some of his biographers argue – to be taken with caution because it often is that when women

are involved that biographers tend to argue that they meddled with the geniou husband) In fall

1894 he became full professor of national economics in Freiburg University. In 1896 he accepts

a full position at the University of Heidelberg.

From that time onwards, it goes strangely downhill for him….His sudden death of his

father in 1897 with whom he had a terrible fight just before Weber senior’s death – it was never

resolved - plunged him into a deep depression from which he never really recovered. He had to

reduce his work and finally had to suspend his academic work altogether. He travelled for

several years to ease his nerves (neurasthenia) – the only thing he was able to do. In 1904 he

travelled to America to attend the World’s fair in St. Louis and this journey made a lasting

impression on him. (I shall return to this in a minute.) Various explanation of this ‘nerve crisis’

have been offered, such as the conflict between the parental values, sexual repression. (Read it

up on 500 pages biography by Joachim Radkau). A private inheritance finally allowed him to

give us his job for good and he continued to live a life as a private scholar. He served in the

WWI as a hospital administrator – he hated to be reduced to such ninny job and not be able to

fight in the trenches. He also tried politics but didn’t quite make it in the newly founded liberal

party, the Deutsche Demokratische Partei. He died at the age of 56 in 1920 of pneumonia, the

year the Protestant Ethics comes out as a book.

Mention the founding of Verein and sociology…

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Difficulty with oeurvre:

Its breaths of knowledge and interests is enormous. Like all middle class members, Weber had

enjoyed a classical German education (classical authors, languages and heavy dose of history).

made it difficult to discover a coherent organisation theme or principle, which would integrated

his rather diverse publications. On top of that his writing are difficult to understand; his style is

complicated and he tends to bury the main points of the argument in a jungle of statements that

require detailed analysis, or in long analyses of special topics that are not clearly related to either

the preceding or the ensuring materials. Weber usually undertook several independent lines of

investigation simultaneously and put all his research notes into the final text without making

their relative importance explicit. The search for principle of thematic unity in his oeurve has

been complicated by the peculiarities connected with the way his work was actually published

and translated. (he was sick, much of his stuff in state of manuscript; published and organised

later by his wife – a scholar in her own right -- who had a certain legacy in mind; student

publications which but articles together which might fit by theme but do not chronologically

represent Weber’s changing thinking.)

In short Weber’s work is incredibly large, complex and diverse. It follows the order of

knowledge of his own time, a time whch our order of knowledge ----the separation of

humanities from social social sciences to which we today count sociology, and that from the

political sciences and eocnomics do not yet exist. The complexity of the publishing history of his

legacy has provided an ideal and fertile breeding ground for a variety of interpretations of his

work.

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Weber’s oeuvre is difficult to say the least. He mastered 8 classical and modern

languages, and although he is known as a ‘sociologist’ my brief overview of his career showed

that he didn’t start of a such, as I’ve said he as a lawyer by training and he was very

knowledgible in economics.

We have to remember too that sociology – as an indepenende discipline with a

research methodologies, own departments and journals did not exist yet at the time when

Weber started off. In ‘founder’ in France was August Compte – remember, it is the man

who ‘invents’ positivism – and the first study which is counted as sociological appears in

Germany in 1887 ("Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft" (Community and Society’ by

Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel is another pionieer. ) Max Weber is a pioneer in

this area of study; in fact he hailed as the German founder of ‘sociology’ (socio=

together; logos=word).

Before I go into the ‘Protestant Ethic’, the work that presents best his theoretical thinking about

‘belief and social action’ methods and procedures:

(slide)

1. Focus on individual

Weber is adamant that the fundamental unit of investigation must always be the

individual. He thus focuses upon the individual and not on groups or collectives; only the

individual he believes is capable of ‘meaningful’ social action. As far as the ‘subjective

interepretation of action’ is concerned, ‘collectives must be treated as soleley the

resultants and modes of organisation of the particular acts of individual persons:

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(slide here)

‘for sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality, which

‘acts’. When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, a

corporation, a family or army corps, or to similar collectives, what it means is …

only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social action of

individual persons.’ (Weber, economy and Society, 1968, p. 13)

Collectives cannot feel, cannot think, perceive, only individual people can. To assume otherwise,

Weber argues is to impute a spurious reality to what are in effect conceptual abstractions.

Furthermore he argues that the task of the socioligst -- a scholar who is interested in

understanding the ‘togetherness’ of people – to penetrate the subjective understandings of the

individual, to get at the motives for social action.

This enterprise, Weber argues, is very different from that of the natural science. (Remember

Ranke!) Human behavior Weber argues cannot be reduced to laws. Natural scienstist

‘explain’ (erklaeren) nature by such laws ; but human scientist such as a historian or sociollogis

‘understand’ (understand) human behavoir and require different methods and skills for that. The

explain motives, and have to deal with subjectives meanings, moreover, actors explain what they

do – not like bacteria who are just observed by the natural scientist and cannot speak. People

have their own concepts through which they explain their world, such as ‘class’, or ‘sin’ or

‘redemption’ and they live their lives according to these man-made concepts. (– again we see

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here again is the influence of the German historcisit and idealist distinction between the

investiation of nature – and the investiation of human life which already played a role in

Ranke.).

(reminder slide)

Weber stands in start opposition here to French school of sociology, forming around the same

time. the most eminent man here is Emile Durkheim for whom the only unit that really counted

for exlanatory purposes was the collective.

(slide of Durkheim)

2. Verstehenssoziologie

(slide)

‘…the science which attempts the interpretative understanding (deutend verstehen) of

social action in order thereby to arrive at a casual explanation of its course and effects’

(Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 1980, p.1)

According to Weber sociology attempts to ‘understand’ (verstehen) human action not

only the past but also in the present – (being a historicist he of course believed that one

needed to understand the past to get at the present…) Distinction to the natural sciences

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which ‘explain’ (erklaeren) nature. He therefore calls his way of doing socioloty

‘Verstehensoziologie’ (and you find him often therefore labelled as an ‘antipositivist’ –

which is not totally correct as we shall see…)

What is meant by this is the attempt to comprehend social action through a kind of

empathetic liaison with the actor on the part of the observer. The strategy is for the

investigator to try to identify with the actor and his or her motives and to view the

course of conduct through the actor’s eyes rather than his own.

Again, we need to understand this notion within the wider universe of German idealism

and historism. Ranke also was trying to verstehen *understand’ his actors. Like Weber he

assumed a common humanity, and it is through this idea of a common humanity and shared

spirit (Geist) of a time that the observer is able to ‘feel’ his way into the mind of the

observed (shared language, shared culture, shared habits and behavoir, ahistorical idea of

human nature…)

He makes clear though that this is not to be thought of as the be-all and end-alll of social

explanation. The Verstehen approach needed to be supplemented by other technoliques of

investigation, including some of the ‘natural scientific’ efforts favoured by the positivitst.

Weber indeed was, for example, not against statistics or so (favoured by people like

Durkheim). Statistical probablility was an important check upon the general validity of any

proposition.

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Now, there are lots of problems with this and most of them Weber himself didn’t know how to

answer. For example, what if the investigator and investigated person do not share the same

cultural background? How can you ever ‘verstehen’? Or, even if they do share it … how can I be

sure that I have in fact grasped and understood the subjective state of the actor? How would I

know if I had misunderstood? Verstehen is ultimately unverifiable…. (welter here)

3. Ideal type:

But let me turn to another central, if also vexing, methodology tool, Weber introdues, the ‘ideal

type’. An ‘idea type’ for Weber is an hypothetical concept, an abstract concept. He invented

this conceptual idea when he grappling with the question of whether ‘objectivity’ – hailed by

the natural sciences of the time as the key behavior to all knowledge production which was also

creping into the new discipline of sociology at the time.

(reminder slide of objectivity from Ranke)

Weber was convinced that ‘reality’ – in the past or present -- could not be comprehended by the

human mind – contrary to what positivists believed. To be able to grasp the ‘real essence’ of

social reality was an illusion to him. Social reality does not posses a real essence because it is

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always capable of being constructed or represented in various different ways. What counts as

social reality depends pretty much upon the conceptual apparatus through which we view it in

the first place. (Differet from Durkheim, Marx was inclinded to believe in mere appearance of

reality and the essence of relality …. there is a reality beyond our construction of it which

needed to be laid bare). So, Weber suggest that we should leave the tiresome question of the

essence of ‘real’ phenomena – let’s say the essence of religion – behind and let us examine how

it appeared in human behaviour and human society at large. Let’s investigate its different forms

and how they changed. So, that can be very confusing because religion appears in endless forms

of course.

What we need therefore, Weber argues, it a so-called ‘ideal type’ that brings order in the chaos.

He suggests that the ideal-type is to be used as a yard-stick against which to compare and evalute

empirical cases. An ‘ideal type’ is formed from characteristics and elements of the given

phenomena, let’s say the protestant religion, but it is not meant to correspond to all of the

characteristics of any one particular case. It is not meant to refer to perfect things,

moral ideals nor to statistical averages but rather to stress certain elements

common to most cases of the given phenomena. It is also important to pay attention

that in using the word “ideal” Max Weber refers to the world of ideas (German

Gedankenbilder "thoughtful pictures") and not to perfection; these “ideal types” are

idea-constructs that help put the seeming chaos of social reality in order. (

‘Whatever the content of the ideal-type…it has only one function in an empirical

investigation. Its function is the comparison with empirical reality in order to establish its

divergencies or similarities…and to understand and explain them causally.’ (Weber,

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(slide with quote to exemplyfiy the meaning of objectivey)

‘The external courses of religious behavior are so diverse that an understanding of this

behaviour can only be achieved from the viewpoint of the subjective experiences, ideas, and

purposes of the individual concerned – in short from the viewpoint of the religious

behaviour’s ‘meaning’. (Weber, Economy and Society, p. 399)

What he argues through the invention of ‘ideal types’ is important and at the same time

confusing. He argues that social facts only exist by virtue of the concepts employed to define

and organise them. So, ‘social class’ is an ‘ideal type’ of you like, but does it disspear if we

don’t use it as a concept in real anymore (think about contemporary Britain….) also, he says

they are set up to test empirical reality….but didn’t say that here is no such thing? That

‘reality’ is but the concepts through which we perceive it….vexing problems indeed. And

Weber’s followers dispared over his varying view and definitions of these problems.

But we keep in mind the ‘idea type’ when we now investigate ‘the protestant ethics in more

detail.

Protestant ethics and the problem of rationalisation

The ‘Protestent ethics’ was to the frist study of a much broader and truly global enterprise, an

investigation into the relationship between economics and religion. (he writes other works on

China, buddism. In English in 1930. Because of this book Weber is often understood as anti-

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materialist – as a enemy of Marx’ idea that religion as other beliefs as by-products of class or

material interests. That is actually wrong `I think. Yes, Weber tries to show how the path of

causation runs the opposite way – from religious precepts to a capitalist mentality – but he had

quite strong materialist leanings himself.

To reduce his book to the simple formula – Calvinism was the principal cause of capitalims is

far too simplistic. In fact the case he present is replete with ambiguities, inconcistencies and

other intellectul curiosity, which he does not solve or wipe out to state his thesis. He leaves these

problems in the text and it is therefore a difficult text to understand and fertile ground for

misinderpretation – or I should say productive misinterpretations.

The text deals with religion but at its core it deals with a problem that fastinated Weber all

his life, the problem of ‘rationalisation’ in modern culture. Just remember what I’ve said at

the beginning of his time. The rise of industrialisation and its rationalisation of labour; also the

‘rationalisation’ of nature through the natural sciences..they believe that they grasp nature by

reason and mathematics;

(slide)

By rationalisation, Weber referred to a ‘set of interrelated social processes by which the

modern world had been systematically transformed’. Or to phrase it otherwise, rationalisation

refers to a process in which an increasing number of social actions become based on

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considerations of teleoigical efficiency or rational calculation rather than rather than on

motivations derived from morality, custom or tradition.

Weber saw this process going on in all areas of his contemporary life; he perceived what he

described a ‘disenchantment of modern life’. For example he saw the rise of capitalist society

as an illustration of this general pattern of rationalisation. As a social process, rationalisation

includes the systematic application of scientific reason to the everyday world and the

intellectualisation of routine activities through the application of systematic knowledge to

practice. Rationalisation. more generally, in everyday life was also associated with the

disenchantment of reality, that is the secularisation of values and attitudes. In institutional

terms, this process involved the decline of the authority of the Church, and the erosion of the

status of the clergy. In religious terms, rationalisation involved the development of the

intellectual stratum of theologians who produced religious thought as a systematic statement

about reality. Within the political sphere, it was associated, with the decline and disappearance

of traditional norms of legitimicay, such as the dependence upon charismatic leadership of kings

for example. In social terms, generally, rationalisation was constituted by the spread of

bueurocratic control, the establishment of modern systems of surveillance, the dependence on

the nation-state as a controlling agency and the rise of new forms of administration.

Rationalisation as a master theme in Weber’s work has therefore often been compared with the

themes of ‘alienation’ and ‘estrangement’ in the work of Marx, the other great German thinker

on capitalism. (I’ll come back to this relationship at the end of my talk.)

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The question of ‘rationalisation’ is key in his Protestant ethics.

The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism is Weber’s most famous as well as most

controversial book. In it he traces the influence of religious ideas and beliefs upon the conduct of

men and challenges the Marxist thesis that man’s consciousness is determined by his class

(relationship to the economic forces). It was first published in 1905 and 1904 as a series of

essays, and, although subsequently it came out in book (1920) form remained a fragment.

Instead of completing his investigations of Protestantism, Weber began a comparative analysis

of urban communities and of political organisations as well as a study of the relation between

religion and society. These wide ranging studies had the common purpose of defining and

explaining the distinguished characteristics of Western civisliaation. The protestant ethics was

destined to serve as an introduction to this major theme of Weber’s life work, a specification of

the interrelation of religious ideas and economic behavior.

Weber starts off the book by explaining tendencies in the society of his time that appear typical

and universal.

He observed a general resistance to personal subservience, reflecting a decline in kinship

solidarity

And that economic conduct seemed to possess an ethical content of its own.

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Weber argues that the idea of hard work as a duty that carries its own intrinsic reward is a

typical attribute of man in modern capitalist world. A man should work well in his gainful

occupation, not merely because he had to but because he wanted to; it was a sign of his virtue

and a source of personal satisfaction. ‘it is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel

and does feel towards the content of his occupational activity, no matter in what is consists’,

Weber argues. Hard work is a virtue and hence a moral obligation. It is these ideas and habits

that favor a rational pursuit of economic gain, in fact, it stands at the basis of what Weber comes

to call ‘rational capitalism’.

There are other forms of capitalism all over the world and he lables them as you

remember in his book: The ‘booty capitalism of robber barons, the pariah capitalism of general

commercial activity encouraged by usury; the traditional capitalism of large-scale undertakings.

But only the form of ‘rational capitalism’, characterised by a systematic pursuit of profit through

the employment of free labour, and the combination of a disciplined labour force, and the

regular investment of capital is a Western phenomenon. Only in the West argues Weber can we

find the accumulation of capital for its own sake. Now, how do we come to this ‘rational

capitalism’?Th accumulsyion of capital for its own sake.

Now, for Weber it had to do with the development of a certain moral attitude, which considered

‘work as a moral obligation’. This maxim represents the ‘modern spirit of capitalism’ for him.

Of course, he said, in its modern form this spirit of capitalism is devoid of all higher

transcendental purpose. Orginally, however, he reminds us, this spirit had profound religious

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significance. It has religiously grounded. It was to this religious past of the ‘capitalistic spirit’

that Weber turned his attention to in the book you’ve read. And he looked for its origin in the

religious ideas of the Reformation.

In his books he talks you through why he things there is a good reason to do so ( talks you

through what was perceived as almost a commonplace at this time)

a) astute observers, particularly in the eighteenth and 19th century had argued for a close

affinity between Protestantism and the development of commerical spirit.

b) In some instances the protestant aptitude for commerce and industry had become an

article of secular policy. A good example was Prussian which ‘important’ Protestants

from other countries in which they were prosecuted to do economic trading.

c) Weber made his own students investigate the relation between religious affiliation and

educational choices in the state of Baden. It showed statistically that Protestants appeared

to be more ready than Catholics to choose highter education which resulted in better jobs

and higher earnings.

d) Some protestant sects are proverbials for their wealth.

Weber sets out to solve what he saw as a paradox. He wanted to show how certain types of

Protestantism became a fountainhead of incentives that favoured the rational pursuit of economic

gain. Worldly activities had been given positive spiritual and moral meaning during the

Reformation. Strangely however at recisely a time in which economic gain was officially

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desposed by all religious leaders. In order to understand this paradox Weber believed it

necessary to analyse certain theological doctrines of the Reformation.

Now, none of the great Reformers had any thought of ‘promoting the spirit of capitalism’ of

course but Weber aimed to show that their doctrines nevertheless contained incentives in this

direction. And he particular was interested in Calvinism and its doctrine of predestination,

according to which each individual’s state of grace was determined by God’s inexorable choice,

from the creation of the world and for all times. It as impossible for the individual to whom it

had been granted to lose God’s grace as it was for the individual to whom it had been denied to

attain it. John Calvin who figure that out, claimed that we can only know that some men are

safed and the rest are damned. However, we can never know who the chosen person is! That is

the trick.

Weber believed now that this ‘message’ that the ordinary man was bound to feel profoundly

troubled by a doctrine that did not permit any outward sign of his state of grace and that

imparted to the image of God such terrifying majesty that He transcended all human entreaty and

comprehension. Before his God, man stood alone. The priest could not help because the elect

could understand the work of God only in their own hearts. Sacraments could not help because

their strict observance was not a means of attaining grace. Calvin had taught that one must find

solace solely on the basis of the true faith. Each man was duty-bound to consider himself chosen

and to reject all doubt as a temptation of the devil. A lack of self-confidence was interpreted as a

sigh of insufficient faith. To attain that self-confidence, unceasing work in a calling was

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recommended. By his unceasing activity in the service of God, the believer strengthened hs self-

confidence as the active tool of the divine will.

This idea implied a tremendous tension: Calvinism had eliminated all magical means of attaining

salvation. In the absense of such means the believer could not hope to atone for hours of

weakness or of thoughtlessnesss by increased good will at other times…There was no place for

the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin

…The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic

character …Only a life guided by constant ‘thought’ could achieve conquest over the state of

human sinful nature. It was this rationalisation, which gave the Reformed Calvinist faith its

peculiar ascetic tendency …(ciritque: W inferred a psychological condition – the feeling of

religious anxiety – from an analysis of doctrines and institutions.)

And it was this ascetic tendency that explained for Weber the affinity between Calvinism

and the ‘spirit of capitalism’.

He demonstrated how Calvinism doctrines provided effective incentives for the layman by

examining pastoral writings of Puritan divines such as the English Richard Baxter or the works

of Benjamin Franklin. They praise work as a defense against all such temptations as religious

doubt, the sense of unworthiness, or sexual desires. In this negative sense the praise of work

gave rise to a detailed code of conduct. To waste time is a deadly sin, for the span of life is too

short and prescious and man must use his every minute to serve the greater glory of God and

make sure of his ‘election’. What developed was an ethic of unremitting commitment to a

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worldly calling/duty/task (the workd and role one was called by God to fulfil). Economic

productivity was higher in Protestant communicities than it was in Catholics, even in modern

times, because it was the practical result of such old ethical beliefs and practices, Weber said.

The most rapid possible accumulation of capital was the sign of the elect.

In his Protestant ethic Weber did not go substantially beyond the analysis of theological

doctrines and pastoral writings. He aimed to show that the inherent logic of these doctrines and

of the advice based upon them both directly and indicrectly encouraged planning and self-denial

in the pursiuit of economic gain.

He stated that he investigated specifically:

(image) ….whether and at what points certain ‘elective affinities’ are discernible

between particular types of religious beliefs and the ethics of work-a-day life. By virtue

of such affinities the religious movements have influenced the development of material

culture, and (an analysis of these affinities) will clarify as far as possible the manner and

the general direction (of that influence)…We are interested in ascertaining those

psychological impulses which originated in religious belief and the practice of religion,

gave direction to the individual’s everyday way of life and prompted to adhere to it’.

It is important to point out that all this was the unintional consequence of claims that

dedication to a calling (Beruf) was a path to God’s favour and grace, as was thriftiness in

consumption. Over the centuries the religious aspect of this ethical ‘calllig’ got lost but it

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continues to shaped people’s behaviors. The bourgois classes, Weber claimed, in the West have

accumilated tremendous wealth, due to this specific ascetic attitude to life. Webers famously

coins the saying that it had become our ‘iron cage’, from which we can never escape and which

keeps us going on like a hamster in its wheel.

Weber and critics of Protestant ethics:

Weber has been actively misunderstood or perhaps to frame it more positivity creatively

misunderstood.

To broad, too superficial etc…however they disgergard that Weber although using really

characters such as the seventeenth century Richard Baxton, he describes so-called ‘ideal-types’.

Weber’s thought from 1949 (Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences) an ideal-

type is a : (image)

Term used by Max Weber to denote entities (including types of action, societies,

institutions) as constructed `hypothetically’ by an investigator from component .

The elements out of which a `type’ is constructed are either empirically

observable or historically recognised. The ideal is not a norm or an average; it is

rather a construction that emphasises certain characteristics (of actions, societies,

institutions, persons) that can be combined to form a coherent whole, or

description.

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(Scotland Calvinism cited to proof that he was wrong; but Weber used it as a tool to

accommodate the infinited complexity of reality. The institutions and individuals he describes

only tend towards rather than embody the hypothetical ideal: Baxter is the ‘ideal type’ of

Calvinism; Benjamin Franklin the ideal type of capitalist. Neither embodies the whole

complexity)

In my view, the reason why Weber thinking is often misunderstood particularly in the

English speaking world, is that one take not into account the intellectual framework in which he

worked. In a way he suffers the same fate as Ranke who worked in very much the same

framework of neo-Kantian German idealism. Especially important to Weber's work is the belief

that reality is essentially chaotic and incomprehensible. All rational order derives from the way

in which the human mind focuses its attention on certain aspects of reality and organises the

resulting perceptions. (ideal-types is understood in this wider belief). Reality for Weber is

inaccessible, what we see and experience is human rationality. Weber’s work also has be

understood within the historicist world of late 19th/20th century Germany. His works are

histories because I’ve said in my Ranke lecture, educated Germans at the time believed that

history – the supreme science at the time -- offered the key to the understanding of the present.

He also subscribed to the distinction between the methods of the natural sciences – looking for

laws – and those of the histories and other humanities – which investigated and explained the

unique actions of humans in the past.

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This is why Weber did not go down the way as other scholars at the time – also celebrated as

fathers of sociology such as the French Emile Durkheim who focused on society as a whole and

tried to detect general patterns, if not laws. (Emile Durkheim set up the first deparment of

‘sociology’ at the university of Bordeaux in 1895; the term has been coined by August Compte

in 1824 and made more avaible in his Compte’s Cours de philosophie positive) Weber was

more focused on individuals and their action. He also differs from Karl Marx – who some

scholars argue is the true father of sociology. Marx argues, as we have seen for the primacy of

the material world over the world of ideas, Weber valued ideas as motivating actions of

individuals and in the material production of culture, as we have seen in the Protestant Ethics.

Sociology, for Max Weber, (image)

...a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order

thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects.’

And social action he defines as follows: (same image)

Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the

acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behaviour of others

and is therefore oriented in its course. (1922)

He therefore turns against the attempt made to analyse culture ‘objectively

(image)

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There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture... All knowledge of

cultural reality... is always knowledge from particular points of view. ... an "objective"

analysis of cultural events, which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of

science is the reduction of empirical reality to "laws," is meaningless... [because]... the

knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one of the

various aids used by our minds for attaining this end. Max Weber, "Objectivity" in Social

Science, 1897

What is useful about him now?

Process of rationalisation as a major trend in capitalism is still very useful, even if postmodern

writers such as Anthony Giddens – recently famously involved in the LSE scandal about

bribrary from Libya –think he is passé. Giddens argues that postmodernity – its global approach

-- is a complelt different socity and cannot be analysed with Weber’s tools. I see no reason why.

Also, can’t we not all see a moralisation of ‘work’. Ony those who work are good british

citizens? Individuals like Sir Ian Surgar are celelbrated as examples of ‘the capitalist spirit’,

always working, risking, putting everything behind their work. Appauling treatment of others is

considered good practice in the ‘accumulation of wealth’. I think there are many ways we can

see Weber’s ideas still floating around.

What I particularl like is his doom and gloom of capitalism. While both saw capitalism as

ultimatively destrutive of human life, Marx believed in a glorious future once the revolution was

there, Weber saw no escape of it. (image). After the collapse of the communists regimes and he

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recent crisis of capitalism he might be after all the one who was right when he said about

capitalism and its tendencies to rationalise human life

How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of 'individual' freedom of

movement in any sense given this (capitalism) all-powerful trend?

Why should is be important now? How does it fit into what we’ve done so far.

I’ve said in the beginning that Weber’s Protestant Ethics wished to bring back thought and idea

into the explanation of human action, particular into the explanation of Western rational

capitalism. With this Weber explored other avenue than Marxist scholars. Indeed have claimed

that it was direct attack on Marxist explanations of historical development.

However, there were many affinities. For example, they both deeply disliked and were

suspicious of modern forms of capitalis. They both shared interest in the problem of ‘man’ or

‘human nature’ in bourgois capitalism. They both saw it as a destrutive system that destroyed

human nature. In fact Weber is much more pessimistic if you like than Marx as he does not

believe in revolutions but an ever titenting of the iron cage which, through time, would leave

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less and less freedom for the the individual. In contrast to Marxism, Weber – and also in conrast

to other sociologies of his time e.g. Durkheim -- he focussed on the individual. (However, since

the demise of Marxism, the debate between the differences between Marx and Weber, which

have often dominated the discussion became quiet.)

Scholars began to investigate Webers’ relation to wider the cultural critique of late nineteenth-

century German society in which many more intellectual participated and raised their voices, in

particular I am thinking here the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. They lived through a time in

which the mentality of the professional specialist was beginning to dominate cultural debate and

ascetic appreciation. Weber himself underline many times that the danger of the modern world

was characterised by the expanding rationalisation, which resulted, he claimed, in religious and

moral disenchantment. In short, scholars have begun to focus on Weber and the more general

questions of ‘modernity’ (not socialism anymore). However, we are living in postmodern

conditions. Therefore some scholars – Anthony Giddens or Ulrich Beck have claimed that we

have to go beyond Weber, that he can tell us nothing about our lives now. We need a new

theoretical paradigm they’ve claimed. They’ve claimed that Weber focussed on the national state

and does not offer our globalised conditions. Scholars who are wedded to postmodern ideas

claimed similar things.

I personally think he is highly interesting, partly because of his pessimistic view. Capitalism has

shown and will show even more in the future his ugly face. Even more than ever we’ll forced to

deny any other human emotion than ‘work’, now we have to do two jobs or even three to come

by but we have to do this happily...in fact, in fact we come to believe that it is sooo cool. In

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times of ‘austerity’ we have even less right to enjoy life other than through work. People who

don’t work – by choice or by sheer inability to find work – are austracied by the government and

each of us. They are morally in the wrong and can be shunned by all of us. The super rich – and

remember that they are all sitting in the government – do not like to display their wealth, not a

good thin to do because that is morally not good to display. So, all goverments in Uk pretend to

be frugal, to be in service of work. In fact, there is a new campaign planned how to instill

ambition back into Uk citizens, how to be more efficient to be more productive and more money

is spend to increasing administration to work out plans that we behave that way. The iron cage is

getting smaller and smaller.

is not much studied by modern sociologists. Weber is presented to modern sociology students as

a sociologist of religion (comparative religion) and as a theorist of social action. `Social Action’

is an important concept in modern sociological analysis. This is what Weber said about it.

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Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the

acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behaviour of others and is

therefore oriented in its course.

Note the focus on `society’/`the social’ … What makes something social? How do you define

and describe `society’? Also note the emphasis on subjective experience. Weber appears to be

saying that subjective experience is as important as the subject’s `reading ‘ of other people ‘s

experience. What sociologists mean when they talk of `social action’, varies enormously. But

whatever the variation, the term is inextricably bound up with Weber’s work. Weber considered

the meanings that people attach to their actions in different social situations; and also the ways

in which they anticipate what others may think and do, and how they respond accordingly.

One of Weber's key concerns was to explore an important shift in Western societies, from action

guided by tradition (by religious and other traditional values) toward modern `rational action’.

Meaning; - motivation; - what people think and have thought; - historical change in ways

of thinking; - the idea of human subjectivity; - that human action is subject to change (is

historical); that historical actors are thinking, acting agents, taking notice of others. These

are some of the key concepts in Weber’s account of societies, past and present. No wonder some

modern historians have found value in Weber’s understanding of social process, and how ideas

operate in social worlds.

Who produced this major contribution to modern sociological analysis? Max Weber was

born in 1864 to a bourgeois family in the Hanseatic town of Erfurt. The family had made its

fortune in the linen trade. Why mention the Hanseatic League, a powerful trading alliance

between Northern European cities that existed between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries?

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Because biographers and other commentators on Weber make quite a bit of Weber’s upbringing

in this mercantile town. Intellectual biographies of Weber also describe him as engaged in a

kind of emotional tug-of-war between intellectual (university) life, and business. His original

career-plan had been to become a commercial lawyer. In 1893 he was appointed to a temporary

lectureship in jurisprudence at the University of Berlin. He was made full professor in political

economy at Freiburg University in 1895, and then, in the following year (1896), at Heidelberg.

This was a meteoric academic career; but it didn’t last very long. His doctoral thesis (PhD) had

been on the agrarian history of ancient Rome. His post-doctoral thesis (not something that has

ever pertained in the UK) was about the evolution of medieval trading societies. He did work in

what we would now call the field of economic history. During these academic years he also

wrote a comprehensive analysis of the agrarian problems of eastern Germany. He did this for

the Union for Social Policy (this was an academic society). He wrote essays on the German

stock exchange, and (a very different topic) the economic and social decline of the Roman

Empire. Weber was politically active in the 1890s, belonging to a left-liberal organisation called

the Protestant Social Union. Then: death of father (1897); nervous breakdown; often in hospital

between 1897-1903; travel for recuperation … He breaks cycle of depression and anxiety in

1903 and started to work again. In 1907 he inherited a considerable private fortune; and longer

needed paid work; in fact he didn’t teach again until after the First World War. So he became

what we now call `an independent scholar’. But that was not at all unusual. Most `great

thinkers’ of the nineteenth century did their work outside the academy. As did Darwin; as did

Karl Marx (living off his journalism, and subventions from his friend Frederick Engels); as did

Sigmund Freud (who supported his family out of fees he charged his patients.) By becoming

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`independent’, Weber was only unusual in the context of the German system, not in the context

of European, or Western, intellectual life. Most of the nineteenth-century ideas that shaped

modernity were developed by non academics, or `independent scholars’.

A life-long fascination of Weber’s was the emergence of Protestant and Puritan England

and North America. He was particularly interest in the economic structures of these societies. If

you search on-line biographies, or read Joachim Radkau’s new account of Weber’s life, you may

notice how frequently his intellectual and academic interests are attributed to the circumstances

of his childhood, and to the religiously divided household in which he grew up. His mother,

Helene Weber, had herself been raised in Calvinist orthodoxy (or: for those of you who have

already forgotten your Early Modern religious history, an extreme form of Protestantism, that

stressed the difference between predestination (being saved), and the role of good works in

earning salvation). A Puritan morality guided Helene Weber’s life and mothering. She became

estranged from her husband, particularly shocked at his inability to share her prolonged grief at

the death of two of their children, and a very long illness of young Max. I’m only telling a

personal story of the origins of Weber’s ideas because that’s what they all do. Twenty years

ago, a woman’s thought and writing was frequently traced back to childhood experience; men’s

rarely was. Now all sorts of male thinker are given a childhood by their biographers. Historians

and biographers do this because they want to tell a life, in a historical context, in a particular

way. I’m alerting you to the ways in which all sorts of idea - including historical ideas - are

mediated by modern scholars.

Next: Max Weber: contemporary context: Weber on religion: Weber’s academic interest in

religion and religious identity may equally well have originated during the Kulturkampf

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(struggle over culture; Culture Wars) of the 1870s and 1880s. Under Bismarck there was an on-

going struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and the German government for control

over school and ecclesiastical appointments, and civil marriage. Another way of putting this, is

that a contemporary conflict between secular and religious authority shaped Weber’s view of

religion in society, past and present. Weber himself was almost certainly agnostic, but very

sensitive indeed to tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism, and even more sensitive to

tensions within German Protestantism, especially between Calvinism and Lutheranism. His

years of illness and despair led him to develop a series brilliant insights into the relationship of

Calvinist morality and compulsive work, and into the relationship between various religious

beliefs and social and economic behaviour. Most of Weber's most important work appeared in

the sixteen years between the worst part of his illness and his death.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was written as two linked journal

articles in 1904-5, and appeared as a book in 1920. The connections Weber made between

economic success and Protestantism were in fact, a commonplace of late nineteenth century

social inquiry. What Weber did was provide new and striking explanations for a connection that

was taken for granted. He asked a familiar question: why did Protestants dominate the modern

economy?; - then he used evidence from the past to answer it. He noted (as so many other late

nineteenth-century scholars had) the statistical correlation between success in capitalist ventures

in Germany, and Protestant background and culture (as in the long history of the Hanseatic

trading communities of his native Thuringia). Then he attributed the relationship between

capitalist success and Protestantism to the unintended psychological consequences of the

Calvinist faith. What he highlighted in particular were notions of predestination and the

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calling in Puritan theology. These were promulgated with the greatest logical severity by Calvin

and his followers. (Jean Calvin [1509-1564] theologian of the Protestant Reformation).

Weber’s book contains many examples of such prescriptions dating from the sixteenth century,

as they were felt and used by living men and women: Weber presented religious ideas in action,

in individual lives. In the theology of Calvin and his followers, the doctrine of predestination

invested God with such omniscience that sinful human beings could not know either to whom

God had extended the grace of salvation, or why He had done so. In Weber’s account, this

doctrine imposed a severe psychological insecurity on Calvininists. They sought signs that

might indicate the divine will. What developed was an ethic of unremitting commitment to a

worldly calling/duty/task (the work and the role that one was called to fulfil). Any lapse would

indicate doubts about one's state of grace. Enjoyment of the profit reaped from such labours was

not the point. Ascetic abstinence from pleasure was the norm across Calvinist communities.

Economic productivity was higher in Protestant communities than it was in Catholic ones, for

the practical result of such beliefs and practices was, Weber said, the most rapid possible

accumulation of capital.

The book (or the two original articles) were a kind of pilot project for a wider

comparative sociology of religion. Weber acknowledged that Calvinist Protestantism was not

the only factor in the development of capitalism, but deliberately decided to treat it in isolation.

(This was a pilot study, after all.) Weber concluded that the idea of `capitalist accumulation’

(the accumulation of profit as a good in itself) was shaped by the Protestant Ethic. This was not

because Calvinist and other Protestant doctrines condoned acquisitiveness (in fact, quite the

opposite). Rather, acquisitiveness (the desire to accumulate more and more) was an unintended

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consequence of claims that dedication to a calling (Beruf) was a path to God’s favour and grace,

as was thriftiness in consumption.

Weber presents a picture of men and women (actually, all his examples are male)

attempting to alleviate the unbearable spiritual burdens and loneliness of their faith. In doing so,

they helped create the enormous edifice of modern economic life: the way we live now (`now’ in

1900; now in 2010). In chapter 5 of The Protestant Ethic Weber discusses the psychology of

men like the seventeenth-century English divine, Richard Baxter. Weber writes that if you

peruse Baxter’s sermons and spiritual writings, you find Baxter saying that desire and care for

material goods - for things - should only lie on the shoulders `like a light cloak, which can be

thrown aside at any moment’. That’s what Baxter actually wrote. Weber adds: `But fate decreed

that the cloak should become an iron cage’. If you read The Protestant Ethic as a story, then it is

an unbearably sad one, about the psychological and spiritual fate of numberless Western men

and women from the early modern period up to the present day.

We can now introduce ourselves to another sociological concept developed by Weber.

We have social action in place. Now for ideal-type. This was a term used by Weber in his later

writing. It is used in The Protestant Ethic several times. But I have chosen a definition taken

from a book about social-science methodology, published in 1949 - because I want to indicate

the ways in which Weber was - and is - understood to have contributed to sociological method,

and to point to the flurry of attention to Weber in the mid-twentieth century, following the

translation of his work into English. As you can see from a guide to Weber’s thought from 1949

(Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences) an ideal-type is a :

Term used by Max Weber to denote entities (including types of action, societies,

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institutions) as constructed `hypothetically’ by an investigator from component

elements, with a view to making comparisons and developing theoretical explanations.

The elements out of which a `type’ is constructed are either empirically observable or

historically recognised. The ideal is not a norm or an

average; it is rather a construction that emphasises certain characteristics (of

actions, societies, institutions, persons) that can be combined to form a coherent

whole, or description.

On the one hand, this is a wonderfully useful concept, engaging in its simplicity and ease of

application. Eight year olds doing their history projects in a primary-school classroom, have

not, of course, heard of Max Weber; but they know that the Stone Age Man, or the Stone Age

Woman they are drawing and writing about, is a type: that He, or She, never actually existed as a

person: that He or She is made up `from component elements’ of prehistoric culture, combined

to form `a coherent whole, or description’(or a drawing in a project book). On the other hand,

the ideal-type as used in The Protestant Ethic is complicated, and perhaps contradictory for

many historians. For Richard Baxter - and all the other writers and diary-keepers of the English

seventeenth-century cited by Weber, like John Bunyan, and John Milton - were actually-existing

persons, who wrote texts (produced documents) that we are used to treating as evidence in

particular ways. The historical jury is out on the question of how you actually use Milton’s

Paradise Lost in analysing the cultural aftermath of the English Civil War. But no historian

would find it strange to add Milton’s epic poem to the pile of documents used in this endeavour.

Milton was `real’, his existence is verifiable; we have many documents and sources that

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emanated from his pen. He is not an ideal-type for the historian. Does this matter? I think that

this conundrum in sociological method and historical method is really worth pursuing.

Round about p. 90 (Chapter 3) of the Protestant Ethic when Weber is already deep into a

discussion of Luther he writes about how he wants his book to be read. He hopes that it will be

seen as a `modest ... contribution’ to many other scholars’ attempts to understand `the manner in

which ideas become effective forces in history'. The project seems so strikingly modern on first

reading: to understand how ideas become social forces ... . And then: what does he mean? Did

he mean: How did ideas (about salvation, predestination etc) become active in the social worlds

of the past? What is this `history’ in which ideas come to operate? Did Weber mean `The

manner in which ideas became effective forces in the past’? Now, at the beginning of the

twenty-first century it is conventional use the distinction between The Past, and History;

between The Past - Everything that has ever happened -; and History, which is a selection from

Everything, usually made by a historian, to produce an explanation of a series of events, and

usually written down. I am most at ease with the interpretation `The manner in which ideas

became effective forces in the past’. I think it a great and important project, and think it

describes what many modern historian do.

The idea with which Weber was most concerned, was capitalism - which was and is, both

an idea and a social form. He was absolutely clear that his focus was the West, and Western

ideas. The book opens with a declaration (in the Introduction), that he the writer, Weber, is `a

product of Western civilisation’, studying universal history. He will ask what `combination of

circumstances’ led to the subject under scrutiny (capitalism); what `cultural phenomena’ have

appeared `in Western civilisation only’, and that can be used to explain `the spirit of capitalism’.

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He believes that this Western cultural phenomenon (capitalism) has universal significance; but

he is quite clear that his focus is the West; developments elsewhere will be treated as

comparisons. He will use a comparative method. Weber then, announces The Subject of

Europe, a phrase with which we will become familiar, when next term we consider the work of

Michel Foucault and Edward Said, and the impact it has had on history-writing in general, and

the development of global history in particular. Here and now (in 1904-5, or in 1920) Weber’s

Subject is Europe. He will stand in Europe, and consider the rest of the world. Europe is his

standpoint.

How does Weber proceed, then, as a historian of Western civilisation, and the ideas that

shaped it? He uses the divisions The East and The West. He asks for example, what has

distinguished Europe from India and China. He readily accedes that forms of capitalism did

develop in East; but focuses on the factors that produced European/Western capitalism: non-

household production; urbanisation; legal systems that supported the acquisition of capital; he

focuses on the development of `rational’ bureaucracies across Europe; he describes the erosion

of serfdom, and the evolution of free wage-labour (men and women `free’ to sell their labour on

the open market). All of these factors made the West conducive to `rational’ capitalism - created

an environment in which it flourished. Of course, there are many types of capitalism, and

Weber describes them: `booty capitalism’: wealth and riches acquired by plunder, war, and

illegal, speculative adventure; `pariah capitalism’, an example of which is money-lending,

carried on by social groups outside the mainstream. `Traditional capitalism’ is observed in all

societies, in the remotest of times, for instance, large-scale manufacturing enterprises that serve

limited purposes. But Rational Capitalism is Weber’s subject: rational capitalism is the

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`systematic pursuit of profit by means of continuous rational enterprise’. And he claims that it is

Western.

He pursued the origins of Western, rational capitalism in the ways we have seen. The

novelty and importance of his approach lay in an analysis of the way in which the relationship

between religious belief and capitalism actually worked. He shows how `inner worldly

asceticism’, and the values of industry, thrift and sobriety, were part of the psychology of

Richard Baxter, for example; or Benjamin Franklin in the new USA. He uses literature (proto-

novels, poetry, religious autobiography) as evidence of this psychology. He introduced the idea

of the unintended consequences of beliefs and behaviours. The unintended consequence of

Protestant belief-systems was the creation of wealth.

Read the last sentence of The Protestant Ethic. Weber emphasises his determination not

to offer a one-dimensional account; he did not intend to offer a one-sided spiritual explanation,

to replace a one-sided materialist explanation, for the development of capitalism and Western

civilisation. But Weber was actively misunderstood, particularly on this point The second part

of the Handout sketches out the fate of the Weberian thesis in the years after 1920.

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