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Max Weber-the Life and Work of a Social Theorist (1864-1920)

Max Weber-The Life and Work of a Social Theorist (1864-1920)
Max Weber is a German political economist and sociologist. Weber is considered as one of the leading figures in a new generation of historical political economists in the Germany of the 1890s. Max Weber was born in April 21, 1864, in Erfurt, Prussia. After early studies in the history of commercial law, Weber established himself as one of the leading figures in a new generation of historical political economists in the Germany of the 1890s.
In 1895 Weber “became a full professor in political economy at Freiburg, and then, in the following year, at Heidelberg” (Max Weber, n.d.).
A personal breakdown in 1898 led to his with¬drawal from academic teaching, but did little to impair the flow of his writing, the range of which was enormous. Its unifying focus was a concern with the mutual relationship between legal, political and cultural formations on the one hand, and economic activity on the other. His concern with these issues became increas¬ingly theoretical, involving a systematization of the major categories of social and political life, both universally and as definitive of the specific character of modern western civilization.
Weber made his initial reputation in Ger¬many with a study of the impact of capitalist organization on the agricultural estates east of the Elbe, and its implications for the continued dominance of the Junkers over Germany’s political life. It is for a much wider study, however, of the origins of capitalism itself, that he is best known “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”, 1904-1985. The uninten¬ded consequence of this ethic, which was enforced by the social and psychological pres¬sures on the believer to prove his salvation, was the accumulation of wealth for investment.
The crucial ques¬tion about his thesis is whether the employment of wage labour that made unlimited accumu¬lation possible in principle, also made it inevitable in practice; whether, that is, the Protestant ethic should be seen as providing a necessary motivation for capitalist accumu¬lation, or rather a legitimation for it in the face of prevalent values favouring conspicuous con¬sumption on the part of a leisured class.
Weber was only comparatively late in his life that he came to think of his work as ‘sociology’, and it is as one of the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology that he is now known. “These characteristic features of German politics during this period are focused in the personality of Max Weber, Germany’s most outstanding political theorist during this epoch” (Mayer, 1957, p.13. Introductory).
The issue is probably impossible to resolve conclu¬sively, since all later examples of capitalist take-off have been influenced by the impact of the original one. The theoretical importance of Weber’s work, however, lies in the challenge it offers to reductionist attempts to treat ideas as simply the reflection of material interests, rather than as mutually interacting with them, or to provide an account of social change without reference to the motivation of the social agents involved, even though the consequences may not be what they intend.
“The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1904-1905) was only the first of a number of works on the economic ethic of the major world religions; the purpose of these was not, as has been claimed, to prove the capitalist spirit thesis by showing its absence elsewhere, but rather to elucidate the distinctive character of modern western rationalism (Weber, 1958). According to Weber, “instrumental rationality” was a universal character¬istic of social action, only in the modern West had the goal-maximizing calculation of the most efficient means to given ends become gene¬ralized.
Weber believed that social hierarchy was inevitable, and that its analysis lay in the relationship to be found between the analytically distinct dimen¬sions of status, property and political or organizational power. Different societies could be distinguished by the predominance of one dimension over the others. If in early capitalism this was property, in advanced capitalism it was organizational power. It was the imperatives of the latter that determined the subordination of the worker at the workplace, not those of property, and such subordination would therefore continue under a system of social ownership.
In Weberian political sociology, alongside the ‘tradi¬tional’ and ‘rational’ principles of legitimacy was a third principle, the ‘charismatic’. This indicated an authority deriving from die person of the leader himself and the compelling power of his message, rather than from tradition or the rules governing a particular office. It was a specifically innovative, non-routinized force in social life.
Crucial therefore to asserting control over bureaucratic administration and securing innovation in face of its conservative tenden¬cies, was to ensure scope for the charismatic principle in the political process. Weber believed this could be provided by the circum¬stances of mass electoral politics. He observed how elections under universal suffrage were becoming a form of plebiscite for or against the party leaders, and were increasing their scope for determining policy over the heads of the individual parliamentary representatives and the party following.
“The Protestant morality that he had come to accept as inescapable destiny came under attack from the youth movement, from avant-garde literary circles such as the one centred on the poet Stefan George, from Neoromantics influenced by Nietzsche and Freud, and from Slavic cultural ideals, exemplified in Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky (Max Weber, n.d.).
Underlying Weber’s conception of democ¬racy as a procedure for producing political leadership lay a basic philosophical assumption that political principles or values could not be grounded in reason or in the historical process, but were matters of subjective commitment and assertion. In their work Hilton and Turner write: ‘Weber and the Austrian School are not obliged to deny the reality of institutions or the idea that actors may act under institutional constraints, or that this constraint may be experienced as an external compulsive force or imperative. Nor need they hold to a social contract or design theory of institutions” (Hilton and Turner, 1989, p.43).
He defined bureaucracy as a system of administration embodying the following characteristics: hier¬archy (each official has a clearly defined competence and is answerable to a superior); impersonality (the work is conducted according to set rules, without arbitrariness or favouritism, and a written record is kept of every transaction); continuity (the office constitutes a full-time salaried occupation, with security of tenure and the prospect of regular advancement); expertise (officials are selected on merit, are trained for their function, and control access to the knowledge stored in the files).
In 1914, Weber finished “Economy and society”. Central feature of Weber’s critique of socialism was that the attempt to replace the ‘anarchy’ of the market and achieve greater equality through social planning would entail an enormous expansion of bureaucratic power, and hence of unfreedom and economic stagnation. Swedberg describes that Weber singles out three levels: “economic phenomena, economically relevant phenomena and economically conditioned phenomena” He writes: “The first of these categories covers economic phenomena in a strict sense, such as economic events and economic institutions; and Weber has little to say about this category except that it includes phenomena ‘the economic aspects of which constitute their primary cultural significance for us’” (Swedberg 1998, p. 18-19)
Sociological theory has been interested in bureaucracy as a social category, representative of the new middle class, and distinct from both capital and labour. As Max Weber put it: “The individual bureaucrat cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed. (…) He is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march” (Weber, 1958). This is often referred to as Weber’s iron cage. It is possible t conclude that “Weber’s greatest merit as a thinker was that he brought the social sciences in Germany, hitherto preoccupied largely with national problems, into direct critical confrontation with the international giants of 19th-century European thought Marx and Nietzsche” (Max Weber, n.d.).
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