Max Weber died at the tail end of a pandemic, amid a growing street battle between the right and the left. What could he possibly have to say to us today? Â I try to answer this, and some other questions, in my review this morning, in The New Yorker, of an excellent new translation, by Damion Searls, of Weber’s Vocation Lectures.
I have to confess, a little guiltily, that I get in a few shots against older leftists, of the ex-SDS type, who like to use (or misuse) Weber’s “ethics of responsibility” against the putative transgressions of younger leftists who are allegedly in thrall to an “ethics of conviction.” It’s one of those tropes in contemporary argument that I really don’t like.
Anyway, this piece took me a year and a half to write, and went through eleven drafts. I’ve never worked so much on a shorter piece of prose, I don’t think.
Many thanks to our Henry, who read an earlier draft, and to the awesome editors and fact checkers (who saved me from a critical error in translation) and production folks at The New Yorker. I also highly recommend the new book on Weber, Arendt, Habermas and more, by political theorist Steven Klein, which I discuss in the piece, and which informed my critique.
A taste:
Weber delivered the first of the two lectures, on the scholar’s work, on November 7, 1917, the day of the Bolshevik Revolution. One year later, a wave of revolution and counter-revolution swept across Germany. It didn’t break until after Weber delivered his second lecture, on the politician’s work, on January 28, 1919. Weber makes occasional, if oblique, reference to the swirl of events around him, but the dominant motif of both lectures is neither turbulence nor movement. It is stuckness. The particles of academic and political life have slowed to a halt; all that was air has become solid.
Weber’s complaints will sound familiar to contemporary readers. Budget-strapped universities pack as many students as possible into classes. Numbers are a “measure of success,” while quality, because it is “unquantifiable,” is ignored. Young scholars lead a “precarious quasi-proletarian existence,” with little prospect of a long-term career, and the rule of promotion is that “there are a lot of mediocrities in leading university positions.” Every aspiring academic must ask himself whether “he can bear to see mediocrity after mediocrity promoted ahead of him, year after year, without becoming embittered and broken inside.” The “animating principle” of the university is an “empty fiction.”
The state is equally ossified. …
When Weber constructed his theory, it was less a description than a prayer, a desperate bid to find friction in a world supposedly smoothed by structure. He was hardly the only social theorist to over-structure reality, to mistake the suspended animation of a moment for the immobilisme of an epoch. Tocqueville suffered from the same malady; Marcuse, Arendt, and Foucault shared some of its symptoms as well. But Weber needed the malady. The question is: Do we?
You can read the rest here.
{ 18 comments }
Mike Adamson 11.12.20 at 4:51 pm
Weber, much like Stacy’s mom, has it going on.
Rob Chametzky 11.12.20 at 5:35 pm
Fascinating that it took so much writing, rewriting, and editing: I had noted to myself how well it read, with elegantly balanced turns-of-phrase and allusions that pushed the ideas forward. I can’t judge whether it was worth the time and work for you, but it was for me.
Two observations: Your discussion of this new book by Klein put me in mind of a rather less recent work, viz., Hirschman’s (it always seems to me strangely underappreciated) 1982 “Shifting Involvements”. From the sound of it, Hirschman’s characteristically wide-ranging, mind-opening, and smile-inducing analysis of the role(s) of “disappointment(s)” in understanding social action would likely be relevant.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691092928/shifting-involvements
Moreover his “brief aside on the sociology of knowledge” with reference to Olson’s “Logic of Collective Action” at the start of Chapter 5 is something anyone with an interest in “Science as a vocation” should read.
And “Science as a vocation” segues to my second observation. Going from the translation of the title of Weber’s second lecture from “Politics as a vocation” to “The politician’s work”, as this one does, loses the possibility (not available in the original either) for perhaps characterizing, say, George W. Bush (or Donald Trump?) as engaging in “Politics as a vacation”.
–Rob Chametzky
MisterMr 11.12.20 at 9:45 pm
If I understand this clearly, Weber, in effing 1920, tought that the world was becoming boring and un-heroic.
A peculiar opinion, at a minimum.
I think that in Weber’s time the theme of the disenchantment (the idea that the moral meaning of the world depends only on religion, but now we are all scientific atheists so there is no meaning anymore) was felt very deeply.
But it is difficult to recocile this with the big ideological movements of the time and the big ideological oppositions of today, rather the problem is that there are many competing value systems, rather than no one.
J-D 11.12.20 at 11:17 pm
The idea that being finite makes something valueless is unlikely to attract much if any support once clearly articulated in that form. The trick is spotting that a position is effectively equivalent to saying ‘finite means valueless’; once this has been spotted most of the work has been done, but it probably isn’t always easy to spot.
Neel Krishnaswami 11.12.20 at 11:52 pm
MisterMr @2: That the age was unheroic was a commonplace observation in 1920s — World War I had just ended, having fed an entire generation of young people into a meat grinder for no good reason at all. Recall the end of Wilfred Owen’s poem:
<
blockquote>
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
<
blockquote>
J-D 11.13.20 at 1:03 am
On my reading of the poem, an old lie is being denounced for all time, not merely for the contemporary age: there was never a heroic age when death in war was glorious.
demi 11.13.20 at 5:57 am
I’m too basic to really know Weber, but his well-known comment that “politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards” is often needed and comforting.
Demigourd 11.13.20 at 5:57 am
I’m too basic to really know Weber, but his well-known comment that “politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards” is often needed and comforting.
Neel Krishnaswami 11.13.20 at 7:37 am
J-D: I agree with you (and Owen)! But Owen was writing at a specific time, and that time was one where the public currency given to the old lie was at a low ebb — in no small part due to the efforts of writers and artists who had survived the abbatoir.
Tm 11.13.20 at 9:52 am
The trope of an „unheroic“ age can only be understood in contrast to 1914. It is hard to understand in retrospect but the war was enthusiastically welcomed as a heroic, cathartic enterprise. Not just by the usual warmongers and militarists- this feeling was universally shared and the few intellectuals who didn’t participate, like Stefan Zweig, never had felt so lonely and isolated.
Off topic: Corey Robin‘s last post denying authoritarian tendencies in the US Right wing has not aged well at all. Die
Tm 11.13.20 at 9:53 am
The trope of an „unheroic“ age can only be understood in contrast to 1914. It is hard to understand in retrospect but the war was enthusiastically welcomed as a heroic, cathartic enterprise. Not just by the usual warmongers and militarists- this feeling was universally shared and the few intellectuals who didn’t participate, like Stefan Zweig, never felt so lonely and isolated.
Off topic: Corey Robin‘s last post denying authoritarian tendencies in the US Right wing has not aged well at all.
steven t johnson 11.13.20 at 6:50 pm
The notion that Machiavelli wrote before the emergence of the state requires denying the Republic of Florence, much less the Republic of Venice, were city-states. This seems quite bizarre.
Similarly, the notion of an analysis of Weber’s political theories that don’t reference his actual politics, whether they were National Liberal or whatever, seems quite bizarre.
I suspect the reason is the fundamental biases that led Weber to pretend the events of 1918 on were merely a carnival are so congenial judgment flees in despair. Or, to put it another way, notions of charisma and ethic as independent causes simply cannot be foregone, no matter how doubtful. (The alternative is unthinkable.)
But then, my opinions of Weber were sharply influenced by Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, where the sermons of Richard Baxter were held to be more important than the number of feast days, tithes, church property, canon law and so forth. Now my vague memory says, by “calculation” Weber may have meant the equality of money eclipsing the quality of persons…but then again, he may not?
J-D 11.14.20 at 12:23 am
In November 1918, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom was quoted as having described the task ahead as making ‘a fit country for heroes to live in’. Presumably he thought then that even after the war the idea of the fighting of it as a heroic enterprise could be the basis for an effective slogan. Was he wrong?
The idea that there actually is a distinction between heroic ages and unheroic ages has had some currency since ancient times, but is clearly wrong.
Hidari 11.14.20 at 8:51 am
‘Off topic: Corey Robin‘s last post denying authoritarian tendencies in the US Right wing has not aged well at all’
Counterpoint: yes it has (also, that’s a grossly misleading description of Robin’s piece) .
MisterMr 11.14.20 at 10:29 am
@J-D 4
On further reflection, I think that the problem is not finite VS infinite, but the idea of morality as a duty, that therefore has to come from an higer authority. If you remove the authority then you remove morality, and therefore values, and therefore meanings.
@Neel Krishnaswami 5
I understand this, but it is curious that people at the time blamed the war on an absence of values, whereas we blame WW2 generally on excessive ideologies and totalitarianisms, hence on an excess of values.
It is as if Weber et al where whining of not being totalitarian enough.
Matt 11.14.20 at 11:41 am
I don’t know Weber well enough to have an opinion on the merits, but since I’ve seen it passed around on twitter and some other sites, I thought it might be good to link to this reply to Robin’s piece:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2020/11/thats-not-the-weber-youre-looking-for#comment-5151246739
Hidari 11.14.20 at 4:46 pm
@ 16
This is not really relevant to the specific points that Robin and the LGM writer want to talk about, but I was struck by this paragraph, which I infer (perhaps wrongly) is a reasonably accurate description of Weber’s thinking:
‘Weber’s diagnosis is that we heirs of the European Enlightenment tradition are standing at the end of a long historical process and project of “disenchantment,†literally the “de-magification†(Entzauberung) of everyday life.’
Given that, I was wondering what Corey would make of works like Bruno Latour’s ‘We Have Never Been Modern’, ‘The Myth of Disenchantment’ by Storm, and the works of James Webb’s (especially The Flight From Reason).
Tm 11.14.20 at 8:20 pm
Thanks for the link Matt ðŸ™
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