Max Weber’s Birthday

These paragraphs have stuck with me since I first encountered them as an undergraduate. Most of us are more familiar with Marx than Weber, and Karl Löwith’s Max Weber and Karl Marx struck me, when I read it years ago, as an illuminating interpretation of each of their views in comparison with the other’s. Another classic essay on Weber I recall liking is Sheldon Wolin’s “Max Weber: Legitimation, Method, and the Politics of Theory” in Political Theory.

(It’s too bad that there’s no gender-neutral perfect synonym for “seminal”.)

Ha! My supervisor insisted I read Weber some time ago as I had never done so, and the most interesting thing about him to me ( as sometimes happens with the authorities my supervisor recommends) is how much he is a Great White Man.

I think it’s in Politics as a Vocation (I don’t have access to anything much at present) that he wrote that the origin of the state is competition between men over cattle, land, slaves and women.

(Happy to come back in a week or so when I get home with quotes, etc)

He is a prime example of patriarchal thinking. Indeed he believed in patriarchy explicitly as I understand it – he thought it offered stability. His wife Marianne was not so sure though he may have convinced her.

His work is illuminating in this respect. I am trying to write an article on this but not making much progress so far,

Thanks for this. I’ve often taken vocational comfort in this little gem, also from SaaV:

Consider the historical and cultural sciences. They te
ach us how to understand and
interpret political, artistic,
literary, and social phenomena in terms of their origins.
But they give us no answer to the question, whether
the existence of these cultural phenomena have been and
are worth while. And they do not answer the further
question, whether it is worth the effort required to kno
w them. They presuppose that there is an interest in
partaking, through this procedure, of the community of
‘civilized men.’ But they cannot prove ‘scientifically’
that this is the case; and that they presuppose this inte
rest by no means proves that it goes without saying. In
fact it is not at all self-evident.

HA!

Mike Otsuka: That Wolin essay on Weber is indeed wonderful. I highly recommend it to everyone.

The last four paragraphs you have extracted sound a bit puzzling, but the puzzle quickly resolves itself as you read the essay in its entirety. It is an interesting sort of unravelling of the mystery.

Three comments:
* Weber is good in the first 4 pages.
* Very weak in the last 3 pages.
* Very poor in his analysis of theology versus science and, in fact, gets some of it wrong.

> I’m moderately embarrassed to admit that I know almost nothing about
> Weber (read “The Protestant Ethic” a couple of times, didn’t like it — really
> didn’t like it — or maybe didn’t get it).
It is useful to think of it as a work for its time. As Europe moved from a primarily agricultural society to an industrial one, the Protestant Ethic seemed, to Weber, the reason why Western Europe “ticked” while Asia didn’t. Now, it is clear that it hadn’t nothing to do with the Protestant Ethic and everything to do with the design of a good society. Just my take on Weber.

And while we are on the topics of Weber, patrimonialism, dystopian societies and modernity, you would be pleased to know that my handle on Crooked Timber (AJtron the Invincible) is exactly the same as my handle on Clash of Clans. (Troops, your chief will be back soon! :))

afaik Confucianism has been used to explain Chinese growth (in part – but then it was also used to explain Chinese lack of economic development in previous decades)

@Ronan
yeah, I was sort of thinking Confucianism — now that you’ve said it, I can say it ;) — but like you I don’t know too much about Confucianism.

(Notwithstanding that as a college freshman almost 40 years ago I took a lecture survey course on China (with J.K. Fairbank and B. Schwartz); if I had to write an essay on Confucianism right now, I doubt I could pass to save my life; whatever I wrote would be mostly gibberish.)

What stuck with me from The Protestant Ethic is the well-known argument that Calvinism saw wealth as an outward sign of ‘election’ and hence sanctified, so to speak, money-making, a previously often denigrated activity. But ‘the disenchantment of the world’ then stripped money-making of its religious aura or sanction.

And this is certainly an interesting argument — one well worth thinking about. It’s the fact that he seemed to link this to a story about the origins of capitalism that I really couldn’t get past. It’s the Marxist in me of course, but that one could tell what sounds like a story about the origins of capitalism without really any mention of expropriation, enclosure, the creation of the landless proletariat really — even granting that the latter isn’t the whole story — was just incomprehensible to me. I do of course realize that I’m outlining my intellectual limitations rather than Weber’s.

@js.
that one could tell what sounds like a story about the origins of capitalism without really any mention of expropriation, enclosure, the creation of the landless proletariat really … was just incomprehensible to me.

Fair enough, I guess, and my reading of PE was a long while back also. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the origins of capitalism rt now, but if I were going to read (which, frankly, I’m probably not) something recent that at least sounds relevant, it might be Philip Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (2003) (mentioned here before by Dan Nexon, who cites it in his The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe (2009)). Of course, “the rise of the state” and “the rise of capitalism” are not the same, but at least on some tellings they are fairly closely connected. Older but possibly interesting: Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory (1986) (on Weber and capitalism, chs. 2 and 3).

Thanks for the references, LFC.