Max Weber
Founding Father(1864-1920)
• Rationalization
• Bureaucracy
• Authority
• Verstehen
• Sociology of Religion
QUOTATION
“The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.'’’ - Max Weber. [11]
In the above quote, Max Weber describes the “disenchantment of the world” as it results from the intersection of the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber explains that these paradigm shifts have inaugurated a more rational understanding of events as people began to rely more on scientific investigations as the way to truth. This ultimately resulted in a decline of the use and belief in magic, God, and myth and a rise of secularization and bureaucracy. Overall, for Weber, a Protestant work ethic facilitated the rise of capitalist economic systems coinciding with this new paradigm of reason. [9]
CONTEXT
Karl Emil Maximilian Weber was born in Erfurt, Germany on April 21, 1864, to Max Weber Sr., Doctor of Law, and his wife, Helene Fallenstein-Weber. [2] He was born into a wealthy family and was the oldest of seven children. Because of the lives that his parents lived, Weber's home was immersed in both politics and academia. As a result, at the age of 13, Weber wrote 2 essays entitled "About the course of German history, with special reference to the positions of the Emperor and the Pope," and "About the Roman Imperial period from Constantine to the migration of nations." His father was a bureaucrat who sought to uphold the current political system, while his mother was a devout Calvinist. Thus, their conflicting differences and marital tension affected both Max Weber’s intellectual orientation and his psychological development. In 1882, Weber attended the University of Heidelberg for three terms as a law student before he left for the military. When he returned in 1884, he enrolled at the University of Berlin and remained there for eight years. While there he earned his Ph. D, became a lawyer, and began teaching at the University. [7] As a teacher and writer, aside from contributing to the origins of capitalism, Weber dealt extensively with the nature of modernity, rationality, politics, methodology, and various substantive areas of sociology. [2] Although plagued by psychological problems as a result of his father’s death in 1897, he eventually returned from a seven-year hiatus to publish his most important work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In it, Weber argued that Puritan ethics and ideas influenced the development of capitalism. On June 14th, 1920, he died from pneumonia while writing Economy and Society, often seen as the single-most important contribution to sociology today. [9]
CONNECTIONS
Weber and Marx, two of the founding fathers of sociological theory, have conflicting viewpoints on capitalism and Marxism. Thus, to understand Weber's work, it is important to understand his attitude towards Marx. [4] Weber views Marxists as economic determinists who offer single-cause theories of social life. To him, they believe that ideas are simply the reflections of material interests. Instead of focusing on economic factors and their effect on ideas, however Weber devotes his attention to the ideas and their effect on the economy. [9] He contended that developments in the intellectual, psychic, scientific, political, and religious spheres have relative autonomy even though they all mutually influence one another. Ultimately, his theory is considered to be more comprehensive than, and not symmetrical with, the Marxist one. [4] Furthermore, Immanuel Kant also had an important impact on Weber. Kantian philosophy led him to take a more static perspective and view the world through processes that filter, select, and categorize the confusing events in the world. [7]
PERSPECTIVE
Weberian Tradition. A Weberian sociological perspective is established throughout Weber’s major concepts and works and focuses on the relationship between history and sociology. In Weber’s view, history is composed of unique empirical events. He believes there can be no generalizations at the empirical level. Therefore, sociologists must separate the empirical world from the conceptual universe that they construct. Furthermore, he believed that history is composed of an inexhaustible array of specific phenomena. To study these phenomena, it was necessary to develop a variety of concepts designed to be useful for research on the real world. He thought that the task of sociology was to develop these concepts, which history was to use in casual analysis of specific historical phenomena. In this way, Weber sought to combine the specific and the general in an effort to develop a science that did justice to the complex nature of social life. [7].
THEORETICAL CONTRIBUTIONS
Rationalization. Weber believes society is under the impact of science, technology, industrialism, expanding capitalism, bureaucratization, and political centralization. He defines rationality as the process by which explicit, abstract, intellectual rules and procedures are substituted for tradition and rules of thumb in all areas of activity. This means there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. [13] In simpler terms, he uses “rationality” to describe an economic system based not on custom or tradition, but on the deliberate and systematic adjustment of economic means to obtain profit. [8] To Weber, rationalization includes increasing knowledge, growing impersonally, and enhanced control of social and material life. He admits that it is responsible for much advancement, however, over time, rationalization is a bad thing. Weber argued that there are four types of rationality: practical, theoretical, formal, and substantive. He was most concerned with processes of formal and substantive rationalization, especially as propelled by capitalism and bureaucracy. [7] Rationality is methodical, predictable and reduces all areas of production and distribution as much as possible to a routine. [2] Weber introduced the concept of the “iron cage” as a result of the increased rationalization inherent in social life. The “iron cage” traps individuals in systems based on rational calculation and control, thus keeping them from acting out against society’s acceptable human behavior. [1] Within the idea of rationalization lie bureaucracy and its control over these modern systemic activities.
Bureaucracy. Weber believes that rationalization, by creating new elite groups to set limits to the spread of equality and democracy, is a key feature of modernity. Individual freedom and rational self-determination are reduced by the rationality in rules of systemic procedures and coordinated activity. [13] Bureaucracies, which are thought of as the most powerful of all status groups, are organizations purposefully adapted to attaining a single functional goal rather than multiple goals. [6] They are organized hierarchically with strict commands from top to bottom and create a division of labor that assigns specialized roles to their people, ultimately reducing the status of that individual. This spread of hierarchical bureaucratic forms of social organization exemplifies the process of rationalization in social structures and explains how bureaucracy is the sociological expression of rationalization. Weber is not an advocate of bureaucracy, but he argues that one must have a bureaucratic organization if he or she wishes to achieve certain administrative or productive goals in a large and territorial society. [13].
Verstehen. Weber’s concept of verstehen is German for “understanding.” The concept serves as an aid in framing hypotheses that can be put to the test of empirical verification, thus representing the basic method of all science. Verstehen is a method of arriving at hypotheses because at each stage in the process, humans develop and test a conception of the rationale for the actor’s conduct instead of resting content with either its subjective plausibility or a correlation of stimulus and response. [13] One common misconception about verstehen is that it is simply the use of “intuition” by the researcher. Weber, however, categorically rejected this idea, and saw it as a rational procedure of study. Ultimately, he uses this term to understand actors, interaction, and all of human history. For Weber, in order to fully understand action, we must identify the sense of action as intended by the actors and recognize the context in which the action comes from[7].
Authority. Weber’s discussion of authority relations represents a legitimate form of domination that we all accept. He distinguishes three types of claiming legitimacy: Traditional, Charismatic and Rational-Legal authority. Traditional authority governs pre-modern societies and is based on the belief in the sacredness of tradition. It represents those who acquired power through inheritance or by a higher authority. Charismatic authority rests on the appeal of leaders who claim allegiance because of their extraordinary intelligence, whether ethical, heroic, or religious. In other words, these leaders are chosen because they are able to lure the population. Lastly, rational-legal authority, which has come to characterize hierarchical relations in modern society, represents leaders who are legally enacted or contractually established. Overall, Weber is describing pure types, but understands that in reality, most societies will inevitably have a mixture of authorities. [10]
Sociology of Religion. Weber’s discussion on Sociology of Religion began in his essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism(1904-1905). He continued with his analysis of Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Before he could expand to other religions, however, his life was unexpectedly cut short. The prevented him from looking into Ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. During his work, He looked into the effect of religious ideas on economic activities, and religion as a basis for social stratification. Weber believed religion was one of the main pillars of society. In his studies, he maintained that Calvinist ideas had a major impact on social advancement and economic innovation in the west. In the end, the sociology of religion focused on the decline on the beliefs of magic, or what he referred to as the “disenchantment of the world”
MAJOR WORKS
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905). Between the years 1904 and 1905 Weber published his most influential work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which stems from his interest in investigating the roots of modern capitalism. [5] In order to understand the many relationships between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of Capitalism, he asserts that one must try and understand the characteristics and differences among the many Christian religious thoughts. He says that capitalism was a social counterpart of Calvinist theology – the force behind an unplanned influence that created the development of capitalism, which influenced many people to engage in work in the secular world, develop their own enterprise, and engage in trade for the accumulation of wealth. [8] Hard work and economic success were taken as signs of salvation. [8] These ideas, having to do with both capitalism and religion, carried into his essays.
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber attempts to investigate the behaviors caused by certain religions. More specifically, he studies the relationships of religious ideas to economic activity as an insight into the process of transformation and rationalization. [3] First, he attempts to distinguish factors that explain why an abundance of Protestants owned capital, were entrepreneurs, and made up most of the higher-qualified personnel in modern business. [12] He also stresses the idea that modern capitalism involves the individual’s duty to prosper. He notes however, that¬ earning more money is not a means for purchasing other goods, but rather reveals a type of proficiency that exemplifies the capitalist ethic. He believes that capitalism educates and selects the economic subjects through a process of economic survival of the fittest and where the people who succeed are those completely devoted to their business. [10] As a whole, The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism helped explain the differences among religions and the effect these religions had in the economic field.
Economy and Society (1920) . This book is concerned with the mutual and developmental relations within society, law, religion, economy, and domination. [5] Weber’s work gives a formal analysis of the general definitions of power and domination in the economy. He defines power as the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance and regardless of the basis on which this probability rests. Domination is defined as the probability that certain specific commands (or all commands) will be obeyed by a given group of persons. [10] In Weber’s writing, he attempts to escape the one-sidedness of purely functionalistic approaches just as much as that of purely materialistic approaches. His theme touches on the multiple effects of the interaction of ideal, social, and material factors. [5]
Economy and Society also discusses the sociological view of the economic field. Weber claims that a sociological view of the economic field must proceed from the fact that all economic processes and objects are characterized entirely by the meaning they have for human action in such roles as ends, means, obstacles, and by-products. Furthermore, in his explanation of “social action,” Weber indicates that economic action does not have to be social action from the outset. Instead, an individual’s economic action only becomes social action if it takes account of the “behavior of someone else…in so far as the actor assumes that others will respect his actual control over economic goods.” [5]
The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism. This was Weber’s second major work on the Sociology of Religion. In this, Weber focused on the aspects of Chinese society that were different fro Western Europe. He especially looked into aspects that contrasted with Puritanism. He was especially curios as to why capitalism did not develop in China. To feed that curiosity, Weber looked into Chinese development, especially the parts that differed from Europe.
Through his work, Weber concluded that Confucianism and Puritanism were types of rational thought. As a result, he noted that such religions valued self control and restraint. Actively working for wealth was not the way of a Confucian. Therefore, Weber concludes that it was this difference that shaped the economic systems in Europe and China, which lead to the development of Capitalism in one and the absence in the other.
CRITICISMS
After Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, there was controversy about the impact of religious beliefs on the economic actions of mankind. [13] Moreover, many sociologists believe he lacks a critical theory and that his theories cannot be used to point out opportunities for constructive change. This criticism manifests in his theory of rationalization; for bureaucracy and formal rationality, two types of rationalization, were developed because of their efficiency, calculability and control in an achieving given goal. But as rationalization develops, the original goal is often forgotten and tasks are accomplished for pure pleasure. For this reason, some see rationalization, among other Weberian theories, as something that is imposed on them. Finally, Weber is criticized for his concept of verstehen because it falls between two meanings and people become confused about how to implement the concept in everyday life. On the one hand, it could mean a subjective intuition because this would not be scientific. On the other hand, the sociologist could not just proclaim the “objective” meaning of the social phenomenon. [7]
IMPACT
Weber’s concepts have had an enormous impact on sociological theory today. His methodological work provides a framework for research and instruction, and his substantive explorations in religion, economics, history and politics give a unique insight into the origins of the modern world and its evolution. [3] He did not find a new sociological paradigm, but he did introduce a new perspective through which new positions on problems, new concepts, and new methods were created. He articulates the idea that the world is becoming increasingly dominated by norms, and values of rationalization. [5] Most importantly, Weber studied the relationship between religious ideas and the effect they have on the economic system. For example, he researched how the West developed a rational religious system (Calvinism) that played a key role in the rise of a rational economic system (capitalism). [7] Through the influence his concepts and ideas have had across many parts of the world, Weberian theory is very significant today.
FURTHER READING
• Bruun, Hans Henrik. 2007. Max Weber's "Objectivity" Reconsidered. Toronto, Canada: Univ of Toronto Press.
• Lough, Joseph. 2006. Weber & the Persistence of Religion: Social Theory, Capitalism & The Sublime. NY: Routledge.
• Mommsen, Wolfgang J. 1989. The Political and Social Theory of Max Weber. Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press.
• Whimster, Sam. 2004. The Essential Weber: A Reader. London: Routledge.
CITATIONS
1. Bendix, Reinhard. 1960. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
2. Collins, Randall. 1986. Weberian Sociological Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Farganis, James. 2008. Readings in Social Theory: The Classic Tradition to Post-Modernism. NY: McGraw-Hill.
4. Ferrarotti, Franco. 1982. Max Weber and the Destiny of Reason. New York: M.E Sharpe, Inc.
5. Kasler, Dirk. 1988. Max Weber: An Introduction to his Life and Work. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
6. Parkin, Frank. 1982. Max Weber. London: Tavistock.
7. Ritzer, G. 2008. Sociological Theory. NY: McGraw-Hill.
8. Weber, Max. 2003. “Foreward” Pp. I(a)-13 inThe Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, edited by R.H. Tawney. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
9. Shull, Kristina K. 2005. “Is the Magic Gone? Weber’s ‘Disenchantment of the World’ and its Implications for Art in Today’s World.” Pp. 61-73 in Anamesa. Anamesa. NYU.
10. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society.New York: Bedminster Press, Inc.
11. Weber, Max. 1948. “Science as a Vocation.” Pp. 129-156 in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.
12. Weber, Max. 2003. The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc.
13. Wrong, Dennis. 1970. Makers of Modern Social Science: Max Weber. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
