Weber, Max(1864-1920) – German economist, historian and major classical sociologist and, along with Marx and Durkheim, usually regarded as one of a ‘trinity’ of major classical sociologists. Weber

Weber, Max (1864-1920) – German economist, historian and major classical sociologist and, along with Marx and Durkheim, usually regarded as one of a ‘trinity’ of major classical sociologists. Weber was born in Erfurt, Thuringia, and educated at the Universities of Heidelberg, Berlin and Gottingen. After initial studies in philosophy and law, his interests gravitated towards economics, history and latterly sociology. As a result, Weber’s scholarship cannot be confined within narrow disciplinary boundaries; he taught law in Berlin from 1892, before becoming professor of political economy at Freiburg in 1894, and professor of economics at Heidelberg in 1897, when a depressive illness interrupted his research and precluded further involvement in teaching until he accepted chairs in sociology at Vienna in 1918, and at Munich in the following year. Throughout his life Weber took an active interest in the social and political affairs of Germany; his politics were nationalist in tendency, yet critical, liberal and anti-authoritarian, especially in his defense of academic freedom against those who sought to make the universities subserve the interests of the state.

Weber's scholarly output is formidable in extent and controversial in its content and interpretation. In summary his aims were:

(a) to put the social sciences on a sound methodological footing;

(b) to establish their limits with respect to value relevance and social policy issues;

(c) to provide a range of generalizations and concepts for application to the study of substantive problems;

(d) to contribute to the study of issues that interested him, especially those associated with the nature and origins of modern industrial society and of the process of rationalization that underpinned it.

In pursuit of these aims he wrote extensively on the methodology and philosophy of the social sciences (especially see Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 1949), and contributed to the study of ancient society, economic history, the comparative religion and social structures of China, India and Europe, andto the sociologies of law, politics and music. For translations of these see The Religions of China (1951), Ancient Judaism (1952), The Religion of India (1958), The City (1958). The most comprehensive systematization of his sociological thinking is Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922).

For Weber, the aim of sociology was to achieve an interpretative understanding of subjectively meaningful human action which exposed the actors' motives, at one level ‘the causes’ of actions, to view. Acting individuals constituted the only social reality, and so he was opposed to the use of collective concepts (like the state, society etc.) unless these were firmly related to the actions of individuals. He also opposed the idea that the social sciences could discover laws, especially development laws, in the manner of the natural sciences, though he thought that social scientists could, and should, employ lawlike generalizations – statements of tendency – about the nature, course and consequences of human conduct. These were possible because human behavior tended to follow more or less regular patterns. They were necessary in order to establish the causal adequacy of explanation (see postulate of adequacy), and could be given statistical expression provided that the statistics were supported by a meaningful interpretation of the conduct to which they referred.

Weber’s work abounds in generalizations, and in concepts ranging from a basic typology of social action (see types of social action to well-known constructs like bureaucracy, charisma, etc., all of which are designed to facilitate the analysis of action and to elucidate its causes, consequences and institutional expressions. Many of these concepts are ideal types, i.e. logical simplifications of tendencies more or less present in a complex reality, constructed from a one-sidedly selective viewpoint by the sociologist. Weber insisted that scientific concepts cannot exhaust reality, which is infinite and too complex for the finite human mind to grasp completely. Concepts, therefore, could never stand as final, exhaustive, definitive accounts, but were rather heuristic devices against which reality could be compared and measured for the purposes of its further exploration and explanation.

The intimate connection between social sciences and values arose from this need for selectivity; social science was ‘value relevant’ in that the problems which scientists selected for study, and their conceptualization, were determined by the values of the scientists and/or those of their communities (see value relevance). Yet social science also had to be value free insofar as values should not be allowed to intrude into the actual investigations and their results (see value freedom) and science could never finally validate value judgements, moral choices or political preferences. In this sense, the world of science and the world of moral and political choice were seen by Weber as logically disjunct. To assume otherwise would be to abdicate the human responsibility for making choices and standing by their consequences.

Weber held these views during the bitter debates about methodology and values which took place in early 20th-century German social science. At the same time he developed his own research interests which found a major focus in the process of rationalization underpinning modern industrial society. Weber applied the term rationalization to the West in order to capture a process of disenchantment or demagification of the world, in which action was increasingly reduced to prosaic calculation and oriented to the routine administration of a world dominated by large-scale organizations and the specialized division of labor which found their ultimate expression in bureaucracy. Weber felt uneasy about this process which he saw as destructive of human vitality and freedom; the rule-bound bureaucratic milieu compelled people to become narrow specialists; orientation to its values made people into conforming moral cowards who preferred the security of the routine to the exercise of creative imagination and responsibility which were necessary for the preservation of human freedom – the highest ideal of the West.

Weber saw this process as uniquely European in origin. In a sweeping comparative analysis of European and Oriental religion and social structures – somewhat misleadingly subsumed under the rubric of the sociology of religion – he tries to show how human beings, orienting to different religious, social and political values, created ideas and structures than inhibited the process in the East and facilitated in the West. In these studies he tried to indicate how Western religion alone broke the power of magic and thus exercised a decisive influence, independently of economic interests, on the rationalization of economic and social life. Here also he sought to demonstrate how the decentralized Western political stricture, together with the legacy of the Roman law, created the conditions for the development of individual rights and rational administration which capitalism needed and further fostered as it grew. The much discussed, sometimes maligned and much misunderstood Protestant Ethic thesis is, therefore, but a small fragment of a much larger analysis of Western capitalist society and its origins.

Weber’s emphasis on the power of religious interests to influence human conduct makes it tempting to regard him as a thinker opposed to Marx. Yet this judgment may be too simple. Weber regarded Marx and Neitzsche as the two intellectual giants of his age. Thus, while he rejected the crude economic determinism of vulgar Marxists, in is by no means obvious that he imputed such determinism to Marx himself. Weber, in fact, accepted that economic interests were a prime, indeed often a decisive, mover in shaping human action. More, his concern about modern society’s implications for human freedom and creativity have something in common with the concern that Marx expressed through his concept of alienation. Nevertheless Weber’s analysis of the structure and dynamics of modern capitalist society differs from Marx’s. He does not, for example, see it splitting up into two great hostile classes based on property relations. Instead he saw the bases for control group formation as being wider, involving:

(a) a larger number of classes, determined by market relationships and thus by credentials and skills as well as property relations;

(b) potentially complicating considerations of status and party which provided possible foci for conflict independently of class.

Above all, however, Weber did not share Marx’s optimism about the possibilities for liberation held to inhere in socialism. Insofar as socialism involved the centralization of economic and political power it would extend bureaucratization and thus intensify rather than alleviate, the problems confronting freedom.

When it touches the future of Western society, therefore, Weber’s work is shot through with pathos; it seems ironic to him that a people who established individual freedom should have created conditions that did so much to diminish it. His analysis of modern mass-democratic politics did little to reassure him. Based as they were on mass bureaucratic parties led by individuals who compromised their ideals in the interests of preserving their organizations, and their jobs, these politics tended to be supportive of the status quo and provided little scope for critical input from the individual. Weber’s longing for great charismatic leaders, for people who, by sheer force of their personalities, could rouse the masses and challenge the structure of bureaucratic domination, is perhaps understandable in the light of this analysis, even if in is a little distasteful in the light of a figure like Hitler. Weber, however, was not a proto-Nazi; he clearly believed in political conflict, in which the leaders and their parties competed for the power through the mechanism of elections; he defended academic freedom and the rights of Jewish and Marxist intellectuals against a state that tended to discriminate against them. Nevertheless, his nationalism was undoubted, and this makes it difficult for some people to accept him as a liberal thinker.

Weber’s output has not escaped criticism. Some have suggested that he failed in his aim to provide an adequate foundation for a ‘meaningful sociology’, and’ indeed, others have suggested that his empirical work is more concerned to elucidate the structural determinants of action than with meanings. His views on ethical neutrality have also come under attack (especially by Gouldner, 1973), though they also attract considerable support in contemporary sociology. As Boudon and Bourricard (1989) suggest, however, ‘the Weberian heritage has furnished a series of continually relevant landmarks to those researchers who have not given upthe association of both a wide-ranging historical-comparative perspective with careful institutional analysis and personal commitment with methodological detachment’.

Jary D, Jary J. Collins Dictionary of Sociology. Glasgow, 1995

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