Arguably the foremost social theorist of the twentieth century, MaxWeber is known as a principal architect of modern social science alongwith Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim. Weber’s wide-rangingcontributions gave critical impetus to the birth of new academicdisciplines such as sociology as well as to the significantreorientation in law, economics, political science, and religiousstudies. His methodological writings were instrumental in establishingthe self-identity of modern social science as a distinct field ofinquiry; he is still claimed as the source of inspiration by empiricalpositivists and their hermeneutic detractors alike. Moresubstantively, Weber’s two most celebrated contributions werethe “rationalization thesis,” a grand meta-historicalanalysis of the dominance of the west in modern times, and the“Protestant Ethic thesis,” a non-Marxist genealogy ofmodern capitalism. Together, these two theses helped launch hisreputation as one of the founding theorists of modernity. In addition,his avid interest and participation in politics led to a unique strandof political realism comparable to that of Machiavelli and Hobbes. Assuch, Max Weber’s influence was far-reaching across the vastarray of disciplinary, methodological, ideological and philosophicalreflections that are still our own and increasingly more so.

• 1. Life and Career
• 2. Philosophical Influences
  • 2.1 Knowledge: Neo-Kantianism
  • 2.2 Ethics: Kant and Nietzsche
• 3. History
  • 3.1 Rationalization as a Thematic Unity
  • 3.2 Calculability, Predictability, and World-Mastery
  • 3.3 Knowledge, Impersonality, and Control
• 4. Modernity
  • 4.1 The “Iron Cage” and Value-fragmentation
  • 4.2 Reenchantmentvia Disenchantment
  • 4.3 Modernitycontra Modernization
• 5. Knowledge
  • 5.1 Understanding (Verstehen)
  • 5.2 Ideal Type
• 6. Politics and Ethics
  • 6.1 Domination and Legitimacy
  • 6.2 Democracy, Partisanship, and Compromise
  • 6.3 Conviction and Responsibility
• 7. Concluding Remarks
• Bibliography
  • Primary Sources
  • Secondary Sources
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life and Career

Maximilian Carl Emil “Max” Weber (1864–1920) wasborn in the Prussian city of Erfurt to a family of notable heritage.His father, Max Sr., came from a Westphalian family of merchants andindustrialists in the textile business and went on to become a lawyerand National Liberal parliamentarian in Wilhelmine politics. Hismother, Helene, came from the Fallenstein and Souchay families, bothof the long illustrious Huguenot line, which had for generationsproduced public servants and academicians. His younger brother,Alfred, was an influential political economist and sociologist, too.Evidently, Max Weber was brought up in a prosperous, cosmopolitan, andcultivated family milieu that was well-plugged into the political,social, and cultural establishment of the GermanBürgertum [Roth 2000]. Also, his parents representedtwo, often conflicting, poles of identity between which their eldestson would struggle throughout his life – worldly statesmanshipand ascetic scholarship.

Educated mainly at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, Weberwas trained in law, eventually writing his dissertation on medievaltrading companies under Levin Goldschmidt and Rudolf von Gneist (andexamined by Theodor Mommsen) andHabilitationsschrift onRoman law and agrarian history under August Meitzen. Whilecontemplating a career in legal practice and public service, hereceived an important research commission from theVerein fürSozialpolitik (the leading social science association underGustav Schmoller’s leadership) and produced the so-called EastElbian Report on the displacement of the German agrarian workers inEast Prussia by Polish migrant labours. Greeted upon publication withhigh acclaim and political controversy, this early success led to hisfirst university appointment at Freiburg in 1894 to be followed by aprestigious professorship in political economy at Heidelberg two yearslater. Weber and his wife Marianne, an intellectual in her own rightand early women’s rights activist, soon found themselves at thecenter of the vibrant intellectual and cultural life of Heidelberg.The so-called “Weber Circle” attracted such intellectualluminaries as Georg Jellinek, Ernst Troeltsch, and Werner Sombart andlater a number of younger scholars including Marc Bloch, RobertMichels, and György Lukács. Weber was also active inpublic life as he continued to play an important role as a Young Turkin theVerein and maintain a close association with theliberalEvangelische-soziale Kongress (especially with theleader of its younger generation, Friedrich Naumann). It was duringthis time that he solidified his reputation as a brilliant politicaleconomist and outspoken public intellectual.

All these fruitful years came to an abrupt halt in 1897 when Webercollapsed with a nervous-breakdown shortly after his father’ssudden death (precipitated by a confrontation with Weber) [Radkau2011, 53–69]. His routine as a teacher and scholar wasinterrupted so badly that he eventually withdrew from regular teachingduties in 1903, to which he would not return until 1919. Althoughseverely compromised and unable to write as prolifically as before, hestill managed to immerse himself in the study of various philosophicaland religious topics. This period saw a new direction in hisscholarship as the publication of miscellaneous methodological essaysas well asThe Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism(1904–1905) testifies. Also noteworthy about this period is hisextensive trip to America in 1904, which left an indelible trace inhis understanding of modernity in general [Scaff 2011].

After this stint essentially as a private scholar, he slowly resumedhis participation in various academic and public activities. WithEdgar Jaffé and Sombart, he took over editorial control of theArchiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik,turning it into a leading social science journal of the day as well ashis new institutional platform. In 1909, he co-founded theDeutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie, in part as aresult of his growing unease with theVerein’sconservative politics and lack of methodological discipline, becomingits first treasurer (he would resign from it in 1912, though). Thisperiod of his life, until interrupted by the outbreak of the FirstWorld War in 1914, brought the pinnacles of his achievements as heworked intensely in two areas – the comparative sociology ofworld religions and his contributions to theGrundriss derSozialökonomik (to be published posthumously asEconomyand Society). Along with the major methodological essays that hedrafted during this time, these works would become mainly responsiblefor Weber’s enduring reputation as one of the founding fathersof modern social science.

With the onset of the First World War, Weber’s involvement inpublic life took an unexpected turn. At first a fervent patrioticsupporter of the war, as virtually all German intellectuals of thetime were, he grew disillusioned with the German war policies,eventually refashioning himself as one of the most vocal critics ofthe Kaiser government in a time of war. As a public intellectual, heissued private reports to government leaders and wrote journalisticpieces to warn against the Belgian annexation policy and the unlimitedsubmarine warfare, which, as the war deepened, evolved into a call foroverall democratization of the authoritarian state(Obrigkeitsstaat) that was Wilhelmine Germany. By 1917, Weberwas campaigning vigorously for a wholesale constitutional reform forpost-war Germany, including the introduction of universal suffrage andthe empowerment of parliament.

When defeat came in 1918, Germany found in Weber a public intellectualleader, even possibly a future statesman, with unscathed liberalcredentials who was well-positioned to influence the course ofpost-war reconstruction. He was invited to join the draft board of theWeimar Constitution as well as the German delegation to Versailles;albeit in vain, he even ran for a parliamentary seat on the liberalDemocratic Party ticket. In those capacities, however, he opposed theGerman Revolution (all too sensibly) and the Versailles Treaty (all tooquixotically) alike, putting himself in an unsustainable position thatdefied the partisan alignments of the day. By all accounts, hispolitical activities bore little fruit, except his advocacy for arobust plebiscitary presidency in the Weimar Constitution.

Frustrated with day-to-day politics, he turned to his scholarlypursuits with renewed vigour. In 1919, he briefly taught in turn atthe universities of Vienna (General Economic History was anoutcome of this experience) and Munich (where he gave the much-laudedlectures,Science as a Vocation andPolitics as aVocation), while compiling his scattered writings on religion inthe form of the massive three-volumeGesammelte Aufsätze zurReligionssoziologie [GARS hereafter]. All thesereinvigorated scholarly activities came to an end in 1920 when he diedsuddenly of pneumonia in Munich (likely due to the Spanish flu). MaxWeber was fifty-six years old.

2. Philosophical Influences

Putting Weber in the context of philosophical tradition proper is notan easy task. For all the astonishing variety of identities that canbe ascribed to him as a scholar, he was certainly no philosopher atleast in the narrow sense of the term. His reputation as a Soloniclegislator of modern social science also tends to cloud ourappreciation of the extent to which his ideas were embedded in theintellectual context of the time. Broadly speaking, Weber’sphilosophical worldview, if not coherent philosophy, was informed bythe deep crisis of the Enlightenment project in fin-de-siècleEurope, which was characterized by the intellectual revolt againstpositivist reason, a celebration of subjective will and intuition, anda neo-Romantic longing for spiritual wholesomeness [Hughes 1977]. Inother words, Weber belonged to a generation of self-claimed epigoneswho had to struggle with the legacies of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche.As such, the philosophical backdrop to his thoughts will be outlinedhere along two axes — epistemology and ethics.

2.1 Knowledge: Neo-Kantianism

Weber encountered the pan-European cultural crisis of his time mainlyas filtered through the jargon of German Historicism [Beiser 2011].His early training in law had exposed him to the sharp divide betweenthe reigning Labandian legal positivism and the historicaljurisprudence championed by Otto von Gierke (one of his teachers atBerlin); in his later incarnation as a political economist, he waskeenly interested in the heated “strife over methods”(Methodenstreit) between the positivist economic methodologyof Carl Menger and the historical economics of Schmoller (his mentorduring the early days). Arguably, however, it was not until Weber grewacquainted with the Baden or Southwestern School of Neo-Kantians,especially through Wilhelm Windelband, Emil Lask, and Heinrich Rickert(his one-time colleague at Freiburg), that he found a rich conceptualtemplate suitable for the clearer elaboration of his ownepistemological position.

In opposition to a Hegelian emanationist epistemology, briefly,Neo-Kantians shared the Kantian dichotomy between reality and concept.Not an emanent derivative of concepts as Hegel posited, reality isirrational and incomprehensible, and the concept, only an abstractconstruction of our mind. Nor is the concept a matter of will,intuition, and subjective consciousness as Wilhelm Dilthey posited.According to Hermann Cohen, one of the early Neo-Kantians, conceptformation is fundamentally a cognitive process, which cannot but berational as Kant held. If our cognition is logical and all realityexists within cognition, then only a reality that we can comprehend inthe form of knowledge is rational – metaphysics is therebyreduced to epistemology, and Being to logic. As such, the process ofconcept formation both in the natural (Natur-) and thecultural-historical sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) has tobe universal as well as abstract, not different in kind but in theirsubject matters. The latter is only different in dealing with thequestion of values in addition to logical relationships.

For Windelband, however, the difference between the two kinds ofknowledge has to do with its aim and method as well.Cultural-historical knowledge is not concerned with a phenomenonbecause of what it shares with other phenomena, but rather because ofits own definitive qualities. For values, which form its propersubject, are radically subjective, concrete and individualistic.Unlike the “nomothetic” knowledge that natural scienceseeks, what matters in historical science is not a universal law-likecausality, but an understanding of the particular way in which anindividual ascribes values to certain events and institutions or takesa position towards the general cultural values of his/her time under aunique, never-to-be-repeated constellation of historicalcircumstances. Therefore, cultural-historical science seeks“ideographic” knowledge; it aims to understand theparticular, concrete and irrational “historicalindividual”with inescapably universal, abstract, andrational concepts. Turning irrational reality into rational concept,it does not simply paint (abbilden) a picture of reality buttransforms (umbilden) it. Occupying the gray area betweenirrational reality and rational concept, then, its question becametwofold for the Neo-Kantians. One is in what way we can understand theirreducibly subjective values held by the historical actors in anobjective fashion, and the other, by what criteria we can select acertain historical phenomenon as opposed to another as historicallysignificant subject matter worthy of our attention. In short, theissue was not only the values to be comprehended by the seeker ofhistorical knowledge, but also his/her own values, which are no lesssubjective. Value-judgment (Werturteil) as well as value(Wert) became a keen issue.

According to Rickert’s definitive elaboration, value-judgmentprecedes values. He posits that the “in-dividual,” asopposed to mere “individual,” phenomenon can be isolatedas a discrete subject of our historical inquiry when we ascribecertain subjective values to the singular coherence and indivisibilitythat are responsible for its uniqueness. In his theory ofvalue-relation (Wertbeziehung), Rickert argues that relatinghistorical objects to values can still retain objective validity whenit is based on a series of explicitly formulated conceptualdistinctions. They are to be made firmly between theinvestigator’s values and those of the historical actor underinvestigation, between personal or private values and general culturalvalues of the time, and between subjective value-judgment andobjective value-relations. In so positing, however, Rickert is makingtwo highly questionable assumptions. One is that there are certainvalues in every culture that are universally accepted within thatculture as valid, and the other, that a historian free of bias mustagree on what these values are. Just as natural science must assume“unconditionally and universally valid laws of nature,”so, too, cultural-historical science must assume that there are“unconditionally and universally valid values.” If so, an“in-dividual” historical event has to be reduced to an“individual” manifestation of the objective process ofhistory, a conclusion that essentially implies that Rickert returnedto the German Idealist faith in the meaningfulness of history and theobjective validity of the diverse values to be found in history. Anempirical study in historical science, in the end, cannot do without ametaphysics of history. Bridging irrational reality and rationalconcept in historical science, or overcominghiatusirrationalis (à la Emil Lask) without recourse to ametaphysics of history still remained a problem as acutely as before.While accepting the broadly neo-Kantian conceptual template as Rickertelaborated it, Weber’s methodological writings would turn mostlyon this issue.

2.2 Ethics: Kant and Nietzsche

German Idealism seems to have exerted another enduring influence onWeber, discernible in his ethical worldview more than in hisepistemological position. This was the strand of Idealist discourse inwhich a broadly Kantian ethic and its Nietzschean interlocution figureprominently.

The way in which Weber understood Kant seems to have come through theconceptual template set by moral psychology and philosophicalanthropology. In conscious opposition to the utilitarian-naturalisticjustification of modern individualism, Kant viewed moral action asprincipled and self-disciplined while expressive of genuine freedomand autonomy. On this Kantian view, freedom and autonomy are to befound in the instrumental control of the self and the world(objectification) according to a law formulated solely from within(subjectification). Furthermore, such a paradoxical compound is madepossible by an internalization or willful acceptance of atranscendental rational principle, which saves it from falling prey tothe hedonistic subjectification that Kant found in Enlightenmentnaturalism and which he so detested. Kant in this regard followsRousseau in condemning utilitarianism; instrumental-rational controlof the world in the service of our desires and needs just degeneratesinto organized egoism. In order to prevent it, mere freedom of choicebased on elective will (Willkür) has to be replaced bythe exercise of purely rational will (Wille) [Taylor 1989,364]. The so-called “inward turn” is thus the crucialbenchmark of autonomous moral agency for Kant, but its basis has beenfundamentally altered; it should be done with the purpose of serving ahigher end, that is, the universal law of reason. A willfulself-transformation is demanded now in the service of a higher lawbased on reason, or an “ultimate value” in Weber’sparlance.

Weber’s understanding of this Kantian ethical template wasstrongly tinged by the Protestant theological debate taking place inthe Germany of his time between (orthodox Lutheran) Albrecht Ritschland Matthias Schneckenburger (of Calvinist persuasion), a context withwhich Weber became acquainted through his Heidelberg colleague,Troeltsch. Suffice it to note in this connection that Weber’ssharp critique of Ritschl’s Lutheran communitarianism seemsreflective of his broadly Kantian preoccupation with radicallysubjective individualism and the methodical transformation of the self[Graf 1995].

All in all, one might say that “the preoccupations of Kant andof Weber are really the same. One was a philosopher and the other asociologist, but there… the difference ends” [Gellner1974, 184]. That which also ends, however, is Weber’ssubscription to a Kantian ethic of duty when it comes to thepossibility of a universal law of reason. Weber was keenly aware ofthe fact that the Kantian linkage between growing self-consciousness,the possibility of universal law, and principled and thus free actionhad been irrevocably severed. Kant managed to preserve the precariousidentification of non-arbitrary action and subjective freedom byasserting such a linkage, which Weber believed to be unsustainable inhis allegedly Nietzschean age.

According to Nietzsche, “will to truth” cannot be contentwith the metaphysical construction of a grand metanarrative, whetherit be monotheistic religion or modern science, and growingself-consciousness, or “intellectualization” à laWeber, can lead only to a radical skepticism, value relativism, or,even worse, nihilism. According to such a Historicist diagnosis ofmodernity that culminates in the “death of God,” thealternative seems to be either a radical self-assertion andself-creation that runs the risk of being arbitrary (as in Nietzsche)or a complete desertion of the modern ideal of self-autonomous freedom(as in early Foucault). If the first approach leads to a radicaldivinization of humanity, one possible extension of modern humanism,the second leads inexorably to a “dedivinization” ofhumanity, a postmodern antihumanism [Vattimo 1988, 31–47].

Seen in this light, Weber’s ethical sensibility is built on afirm rejection of a Nietzschean divination and Foucaultian resignationalike, both of which are radically at odds with the Kantian ethic ofduty. In other words, Weber’s ethical project can be describedas a search for non-arbitrary freedom (his Kantian side) in what heperceived as an increasingly post-metaphysical world (his Nietzscheanside). According to Paul Honigsheim, Weber’s ethic is that of“tragedy” and “nevertheless” [Honigsheim 2013,113]. This deep tension between the Kantian moral imperatives and aNietzschean diagnosis of the modern cultural world is apparently whatgives such a darkly tragic and agnostic shade to Weber’s ethicalworldview.

3. History

3.1 Rationalization as a Thematic Unity

Weber’s main contribution as such, nonetheless, lies neither inepistemology nor in ethics. Although they deeply informed his thoughtsto an extent still under-appreciated, his main concern lay elsewhere.He was after all one of the founding fathers of modern social science.Beyond the recognition, however, that Weber is not simply asociologist par excellence as Talcott Parsons’squasi-Durkheimian interpretation made him out to be, identifying anidée maîtresse throughout his disparate oeuvrehas been debated ever since his own days and is still far fromsettled.Economy and Society, his allegedmagnumopus, was a posthumous publication based upon his widow’seditorship, the thematic architectonic of which is unlikely to bereconstructed beyond doubt even after its recent reissuing under therubric ofMax Weber Gesamtausgabe [MWG hereafter].GARS forms a more coherent whole since its editorial edificewas the work of Weber himself; and yet, its relationship to his othersociologies of, for instance, law, city, music, domination, andeconomy, remains controvertible. Accordingly, his overarching themehas also been variously surmised as a developmental history of Westernrationalism (Wolfgang Schluchter), the universal history ofrationalist culture (Friedrich Tenbruck), or simply theMenschentum as it emerges and degenerates in modern rationalsociety (Wilhelm Hennis). The first depicts Weber as acomparative-historical sociologist; the second, a latter-day Idealisthistorian of culture reminiscent of Jacob Burckhardt; and the third, apolitical philosopher on a par with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau.Important as they are for in-house Weber scholarship, however, thesephilological disputes need not hamper our attempt to grasp the gist ofhis ideas. Suffice it for us to recognize that, albeit with varyingdegrees of emphasis, these different interpretations all converge onthe thematic centrality of rationality, rationalism, andrationalization in making sense of Weber.

At the outset, what immediately strikes a student of Weber’srationalization thesis is its seeming irreversibility andEurocentrism. The apocalyptic imagery of the “iron cage”that haunts the concluding pages of theProtestant Ethic iscommonly taken to reflect his fatalism about the inexorable unfoldingof rationalization and its culmination in the complete loss of freedomand meaning in the modern world. The “Author’sIntroduction” (Vorbemerkung toGARS) alsocontains oft-quoted passages that allegedly disclose Weber’sbelief in the unique singularity of Western civilization’sachievement in the direction of rationalization, or lack thereof inother parts of the world. For example:

A child of modern European civilization (Kulturwelt) whostudies problems of universal history shall inevitably and justfiablyraise the question (Fragestellung): what combination ofcircumstances have led to the fact that in the West, and here only,cultural phenomena have appeared which – at least aswelike to think – came to haveuniversal significance andvalidity [Weber 1920/1992, 13: translation altered]?

Taken together, then, the rationalization process as Weber narrated itseems quite akin to a metahistorical teleology that irrevocably setsthe West apart from and indeed above the East.

At the same time, nonetheless, Weber adamantly denied the possibilityof a universal law of history in his methodological essays. Evenwithin the same pages ofVorbemerkung, he said,“rationalizations of the most varied character have existed invarious departments of life and in all areas of culture”[Ibid., 26]. He also made clear that his study of variousforms of world religions was to be taken for its heuristic valuerather than as “complete analyses of cultures, howeverbrief” [Ibid., 27]. It was meant as acomparative-conceptual platform on which to erect the edifyingfeatures of rationalization in the West. If merely a heuristic deviceand not a universal law of progress, then, what is rationalization andwhence comes his uncompromisingly dystopian vision?

3.2 Calculability, Predictability, and World-Mastery

Roughly put, taking place in all areas of human life from religion andlaw to music and architecture, rationalization means a historicaldrive towards a world in which “one can, in principle, masterall things by calculation” [Weber 1919/1946, 139]. For instance,modern capitalism is a rational mode of economic life because itdepends on a calculable process of production. This search for exactcalculability underpins such institutional innovations as monetaryaccounting (especially double-entry bookkeeping), centralization ofproduction control, separation of workers from the means ofproduction, supply of formally free labour, disciplined control on thefactory floor, and other features that make modern capitalismqualitatively different from all other modes of organizingeconomic life. The enhanced calculability of the production process isalso buttressed by that in non-economic spheres such as law andadministration. Legal formalism and bureaucratic management reinforcethe elements of predictability in the sociopolitical environment thatencumbers industrial capitalism by means of introducing formalequality of citizenship, a rule-bound legislation of legal norms, anautonomous judiciary, and a depoliticized professional bureaucracy.Further, all this calculability and predictability in political,social, and economic spheres was not possible without changes ofvalues in ethics, religion, psychology, and culture. Institutionalrationalization was, in other words, predicated upon the rise of apeculiarly rational type of personality, or a “person ofvocation” (Berufsmensch) as outlined in theProtestant Ethic. The outcome of this complex interplay ofideas and interests was modern rational Western civilization with itsenormous material and cultural capacity for relentlessworld-mastery.

3.3 Knowledge, Impersonality, and Control

On a more analytical plateau, all these disparate processes ofrationalization can be surmised as increasing knowledge, growingimpersonality, and enhanced control [Brubaker 1991, 32–35].First, knowledge. Rational action in one very general sensepresupposes knowledge. It requires some knowledge of the ideationaland material circumstances in which our action is embedded, since toact rationally is to act on the basis of conscious reflection aboutthe probable consequences of action. As such, the knowledge thatunderpins a rational action is of a causal nature conceived in termsof means-ends relationships, aspiring towards a systematic, logicallyinterconnected whole. Modern scientific and technological knowledge isa culmination of this process that Weber called intellectualization,in the course of which, the germinating grounds of human knowledge inthe past, such as religion, theology, and metaphysics, were slowlypushed back to the realm of the superstitious, mystical, or simplyirrational. It is only in modern Western civilization, according toWeber, that this gradual process of disenchantment(Entzauberung) has reached its radical conclusion.

Second, impersonality. Rationalization, according to Weber, entailsobjectification (Versachlichung). Industrial capitalism, forone, reduces workers to sheer numbers in an accounting book,completely free from the fetters of tradition and non-economicconsiderations, and so does the market relationship vis-à-visbuyers and sellers. For another, having abandoned the principle ofKhadi justice (i.e., personalizedad hoc adjudication),modern law and administration also rule in strict accordance with thesystematic formal codes andsine ira et studio, that is,“without anger or passion.” Again, Weber found the seed ofobjectification not in material interests alone, but in the Puritanvocational ethic (Berufsethik) and the life conduct that itinspired, which was predicated upon a disenchanted monotheistictheodicy that reduced humans to mere tools of God’s providence.Ironically, for Weber, modern inward subjectivity was born once welost any inherent valuequa humans and became thoroughlyobjectified vis-à-vis God in the course of the Reformation.Modern individuals are subjectified and objectified all at once.

Third, control. Pervasive in Weber’s view of rationalization isthe increasing control in social and material life. Scientific andtechnical rationalization has greatly improved both the human capacityfor a mastery over nature and institutionalized disciplinevia bureaucratic administration, legal formalism, andindustrial capitalism. The calculable, disciplined control over humanswas, again, an unintended consequence of the Puritan ethic of rigorousself-discipline and self-control, or what Weber called“innerworldly asceticism (innerweltlicheAskese).” Here again, Weber saw the irony that a modernindividual citizen equipped with inviolable rights was born as a partof the rational, disciplinary ethos that increasingly penetrated intoevery aspect of social life.

4. Modernity

4.1 The “Iron Cage” and Value-fragmentation

Thus seen, rationalization as Weber postulated it is anything but anunequivocal historical phenomenon. As already pointed out, first,Weber viewed it as a process taking place in disparate fields of humanlife with a logic of each field’s own and varying directions;“each one of these fields may be rationalized in terms of verydifferent ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from onepoint of view may well be irrational from another” [Weber1920/1992, 27]. Second, and more important, its ethical ramificationfor Weber is deeply ambivalent. To use his own dichotomy, theformal-procedural rationality (Zweckrationalität) towhich Western rationalization tends does not necessarily go with asubstantive-value rationality (Wertrationalität). On theone hand, exact calculability and predictability in the socialenvironment that formal rationalization has brought about dramaticallyenhances individual freedom by helping individuals understand andnavigate through the complex web of practice and institutions in orderto realize the ends of their own choice. On the other hand, freedomand agency are seriously curtailed by the same force in history whenindividuals are reduced to a “cog in a machine,” ortrapped in an “iron cage” that formal rationalization hasspawned with irresistible efficiency and at the expense of substantiverationality. Thus, his famous lament in theProtestantEthic:

No one knows who will live in this cage (Gehäuse) in thefuture, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirelynew prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideasand ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished witha sort of convulsive self-importance. For the “last man”(letzten Menschen) of this cultural development, it mightwell be truly said: “Specialist without spirit, sensualistwithout heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level ofhumanity (Menschentums) never before achieved” [Weber1904–05/1992, 182: translation altered].

Third, Weber envisions the future of rationalization not only in termsof “mechanized petrification,” but also of a chaotic, evenatrophic, inundation of subjective values. In other words, thebureaucratic “iron cage” is only one side of the modernitythat rationalization has brought about; the other is a“polytheism” of value-fragmentation. At the apex ofrationalization, we moderns have suddenly found ourselves living“as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchantedof its gods and demons” [Weber 1919/1946, 148]. Modern societyis, Weber seems to say, once again enchanted as a result ofdisenchantment. How did this happen and with what consequences?

4.2 Reenchantmentvia Disenchantment

In point of fact, Weber’s rationalization thesis can beunderstood with richer nuance when we approach it as, for lack ofbetter terms, a dialectics of disenchantment and reenchantment ratherthan as a one-sided, unilinear process of secularization.Disenchantment had ushered in monotheistic religions in the West. Inpractice, this means thatad hoc maxims for life-conduct hadbeen gradually displaced by a unified total system of meaning andvalue, which historically culminated in the Puritan ethic of vocation.Here, the irony was that disenchantment was an ongoing processnonetheless. Disenchantment in its second phase pushed asidemonotheistic religion as something irrational, thus delegitimating itas a unifying worldview in the modern secular world.

Modern science, which was singularly responsible for this latedevelopment, was initially welcomed as a surrogate system of orderlyvalue-creation, as Weber found in the convictions of Bacon (science as“the road totrue nature”) and Descartes (as“the road to thetrue god”) [Weber 1919/1946,142]. For Weber, nevertheless, modern science is a deeply nihilisticenterprise in which any scientific achievement worthy of the namemust “ask to be surpassed and made obsolete” in aprocess “that is in principlead infinitum,” atwhich point, “we come to theproblem of the meaning ofscience.” He went on to ask: “For it is simply notself-evident that something which is subject to such a law is initself meaningful and rational. Why should one do something which inreality never comes to an end and never can?” [Ibid.,138: translation altered]. In short, modern science has relentlesslydismantled all other sources of value-creation, in the course of whichits own meaning has also been dissipated beyond repair. The result isthe “Götterdämmerung of all evaluativeperspectives” including its own [Weber 1904/1949, 86].

Irretrievably gone as a result is a unifying worldview, be itreligious or scientific, and what ensues is its fragmentation intoincompatible value spheres. Weber, for instance, observed:“since Nietzsche, we realize that something can be beautiful,not only in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather inthat very aspect” [Weber 1919/1946, 148]. That is to say,aesthetic values now stand in irreconcilable antagonism to religiousvalues, transforming “value judgments (Werturteile)into judgments of taste (Geschmacksurteile) by which what ismorally reprehensible becomes merely what is tasteless” [Weber1915/1946, 342].

Weber is, then,not envisioning a peaceful dissolution of thegrand metanarratives of monotheistic religion and universal scienceinto a series of local narratives and the consequent modern pluralistculture in which different cultural practices follow their ownimmanent logic. His vision of polytheistic reenchantment is ratherthat of an incommensurable value-fragmentation into a plurality ofalternative metanarratives, each of which claims to answer the samemetaphysical questions that religion and science strove to cope within their own ways. The slow death of God has reached its apogee in thereturn of gods and demons who “strive to gain power over ourlives and again … resume their eternal struggle with oneanother” [Weber 1919/1946, 149].

Seen this way, it makes sense that Weber’s rationalizationthesis concludes with two strikingly dissimilar prophecies – oneis the imminent iron cage of bureaucratic petrification and the other,the Hellenistic pluralism of warring deities. The modern world hascome to be monotheistic and polytheistic all at once. What seems tounderlie this seemingly self-contradictory imagery of modernity is theproblem of modern humanity (Menschentum) and its loss offreedom and moral agency. Disenchantment has created a world with noobjectively ascertainable ground for one’s conviction. Under thecircumstances, according to Weber, a modern individual tends to actonly on one’s own aesthetic impulse and arbitrary convictionsthat cannot be communicated in the eventuality; the majority of thosewho cannot even act on their convictions, or the “last men whoinvented happiness” à la Nietzsche, lead the life of a“cog in a machine.” Whether the problem of modernity isaccounted for in terms of a permeation of objective, instrumentalrationality or of a purposeless agitation of subjective values, Weberviewed these two images as constituting a single problem insofar asthey contributed to the inertia of modern individuals who fail to takeprincipled moral action. The “sensualists without heart”and “specialists without spirit” indeed formed two facesof the same coin that may be called thedisempowerment of themodern self.

4.3 Modernitycontra Modernization

Once things were different, Weber claimed. An unflinching sense ofconviction that relied on nothing but one’s innermostpersonality once issued in a highly methodical and disciplined conductof everyday life – or, simply, life as a duty. Born in thecrucible of the Reformation, this archetypal modern subjectivity drewits strength solely from within in the sense that one’sprinciple of action was determined by one’s own psychologicalneed to gain self-affirmation. Also, the way in which this deeplyintrospective subjectivity was practiced, that is, in self-mastery,entailed a highly rational and radically methodical attitude towardsone’s inner self and the outer, objective world. Transformingthe self into an integrated personality and mastering the world withtireless energy, subjective value and objective rationality onceformed “one unbroken whole” [Weber 1910/1978, 319]. Webercalls the agent of this unity the “person of vocation”(Berufsmensch) in his religious writings,“personality” (Persönlichkeit) in themethodological essays, “genuine politician”(Berufspolitiker) in the political writings, and“charismatic individual” inEconomy and Society.The much-celebrated Protestant Ethic thesis was indeed a genealogicalreconstruction of this idiosyncratic moral agency in modern times[Goldman 1992].

Once different, too, was the mode of society constituted by and inturn constitutive of this type of moral agency. Weber’s socialimagination revealed its keenest sense of irony when he traced theroot of the cohesive integration, intense socialization, and severecommunal discipline of sect-like associations to the isolated andintrospective subjectivity of the Puritan person of vocation. Theirony was that the self-absorbed, anxiety-ridden and even antisocialvirtues of the person of vocation could be sustained only in the thickdisciplinary milieu of small-scale associational life. Membership inexclusive voluntary associational life is open, and it is suchmembership, or “achieved quality,” that guarantees theethical qualities of the individuals with whom one interacts.“The old ‘sect spirit’ holds sway with relentlesseffect in the intrinsic nature of such associations,” Weberobserved, for the sect was the first mass organization to combineindividual agency and social discipline in such a systematic way.Weber thus claimed that “the ascetic conventicles and sects… formed one of the most important foundations of modernindividualism” [Weber 1920/1946, 321]. It seems clear that whatWeber was trying to outline here is an archetypical form of socialorganization that can empower individual moral agency by sustaininggroup disciplinary dynamism, a kind of pluralistically organizedsocial life we would now call a “civil society” [Kim 2007,57–94].

To summarize, the irony with which Weber accounted for rationalizationwas driven by the deepening tension betweenmodernity andmodernization. Weber’s problem with modernityoriginates from the fact that it required a historically uniqueconstellation of cultural values and social institutions, and yet,modernization has effectively undermined the cultural basis for modernindividualism and its germinating ground of disciplinary society,which together had given the original impetus to modernity. The modernproject has fallen victim to its own success, and in peril is theindividual moral agency and freedom. Under the late moderncircumstances characterized by the “iron cage” and“warring deities,” then, Weber’s question becomes:“How is it at all possible to salvageany remnants of‘individual’ freedom of movementin any sensegiven this all-powerful trend” [Weber 1918/1994, 159]?

5. Knowledge

Such an appreciation of Weber’s main problematic, whichculminates in the question of modern individual freedom, may help shedlight on some of the controversial aspects of Weber’smethodology. In accounting for his methodological claims, it needs tobe borne in mind that Weber was not at all interested in writing asystematic epistemological treatise in order to put an end to the“strife over methods” (Methodenstreit) of histime between historicism and positivism. His ambition was much moremodest and pragmatic. Just as “the person who attempted to walkby constantly applying anatomical knowledge would be in danger ofstumbling” [Weber 1906/1949, 115; translation altered], so canmethodology be a kind of knowledge that may supply a rule of thumb,codifieda posteriori, for what historians and socialscientists do, but it could never substitute for the skills they usein their research practice. Instead, Weber’s attempt to mediatehistoricism and positivism was meant to aid an actual researcher makeapractical value-judgment that is fair and acceptable in theface of the plethora of subjective values that one encounters whenselecting and processing historical data. After all, the questionsthat drove his methodological reflections were what it means topractice science in the modern polytheistic world and how one can doscience with a sense of vocation. In his own words, “thecapacity to distinguish between empirical knowledge andvalue-judgments, and the fulfillment of the scientific duty to see thefactual truth as well as the practical duty to stand up for our ownideals constitute the program to which we wish to adhere with everincreasing firmness” [Weber 1904/1949, 58]. Sheldon Wolin thusconcludes that Weber “formulated the idea of methodology toserve, not simply as a guide to investigation but as a moral practiceand a mode of political action” [Wolin 1981, 414]. In short,Weber’s methodology was as ethical as it wasepistemological.

5.1 Understanding (Verstehen)

Building on the Neo-Kantian nominalism outlined above [2.1], thus,Weber’s contribution to methodology turned mostly on thequestion of objectivity and the role of subjective values inhistorical and cultural concept formation. On the one hand, hefollowed Windelband in positing that historical and cultural knowledgeis categorically distinct from natural scientific knowledge. Actionthat is the subject of any social scientific inquiry is clearlydifferent from mere behaviour. While behaviour can be accounted forwithout reference to inner motives and thus can be reduced to mereaggregate numbers, making it possible to establish positivisticregularities, and even laws, of collective behaviour, an action canonly be interpreted because it is based on a radically subjectiveattribution of meaning and values to what one does. What a socialscientist seeks to understand is this subjective dimension of humanconduct as it relates to others. On the other hand, anunderstanding(Verstehen) in this subjective sense is notanchored in a non-cognitive empathy or intuitive appreciation that isarational by nature; it can gain objective validity when the meaningsand values to be comprehended are explained causally, that is, as ameans to an end. A teleological contextualization of an action in themeans-end nexus is indeed the precondition for a causal explanationthat can be objectively ascertained. So far, Weber is not essentiallyin disagreement with Rickert.

From Weber’s perspective, however, the problem thatRickert’s formulation raised was the objectivity of the end towhich an action is held to be oriented. As pointed out [2.1 above],Rickert in the end had to rely on a certain transhistorical,transcultural criterion in order to account for the purpose of anaction, an assumption that cannot be warranted in Weber’s view.To be consistent with the Neo-Kantian presuppositions, instead, theends themselves have to be conceived of as no less subjective.Imputing an end to an action is of a fictional nature in the sensethat it is not free from the subjective value-judgment that conditionsthe researcher’s thematization of a certain subject matter outof “an infinite multiplicity of successively and coexistentlyemerging and disappearing events” [Weber 1904/1949, 72].Although a counterfactual analysis might aid in stabilizing theprocess of causal imputation, it cannot do away completely with thesubjective nature of the researcher’s perspective.

In the end, the kind of objective knowledge that historical andcultural sciences may achieve is precariously limited. An action canbe interpreted with objective validity only at the level of means, notends. An end, however, even a “self-evident” one, isirreducibly subjective, thus defying an objective understanding; itcan only be reconstructed conceptually based on a researcher’sno less subjective values. Objectivity in historical and socialsciences is, then, not a goal that can be reached with the aid of acorrect method, but an ideal that must be striven for without apromise of ultimate fulfillment. In this sense, one might say that theso-called “value-freedom” (Wertfreiheit) is asmuch a methodological principle for Weber as an ethical virtue that apersonality fit for modern science must possess.

5.2 Ideal Type

The methodology of “ideal type” (Idealtypus) isanother testimony to such a broadly ethical intention of Weber.According to Weber’s definition, “an ideal type is formedby the one-sidedaccentuation of one or more points ofview” according to which “concrete individualphenomena … are arranged into a unified analyticalconstruct” (Gedankenbild); in its purely fictionalnature, it is a methodological “utopia [that] cannot be foundempirically anywhere in reality” [Weber 1904/1949, 90]. Keenlyaware of its fictional nature, the ideal type never seeks to claim itsvalidity in terms of a reproduction of or a correspondence withreality. Its validity can be ascertained only in terms of adequacy,which is too conveniently ignored by the proponents of positivism.This does not mean, however, that objectivity, limited as it is, canbe gained by “weighing the various evaluations against oneanother and making a ‘statesman-like’ compromise amongthem” [Weber 1917/1949, 10], which is often proposed as asolution by those sharing Weber’s kind of methodologicalperspectivism. Such a practice, which Weber calls“syncretism,” is not only impossible but also unethical,for it avoids “the practical duty to stand up for our ownideals” [Weber 1904/1949, 58].

According to Weber, a clear value commitment, no matter howsubjective, is both unavoidableand necessary. It isunavoidable, for otherwise no meaningful knowledge can beattained. Further, it isnecessary, for otherwise the valueposition of a researcher would not be foregrounded clearly andadmitted as such – not only to the readers of the researchoutcome but also to the very researcher him/herself. In other words,Weber’s emphasis on “one-sidedness”(Einseitigkeit) not only affirms the subjective nature ofscientific knowledge but also demands that the researcher beself-consciously subjective. The ideal type is devised forthis purpose, for “only as an ideal type” can subjectivevalue – “that unfortunate child of misery of ourscience” – “be given an unambiguous meaning”[Ibid., 107]. Along with value-freedom, then, what the idealtype methodology entails in ethical terms is, on the one hand, adaring confrontation with the tragically subjective foundation of ourhistorical and social scientific knowledge and, on the other, a publicconfession of one’s own subjective value. Weber’smethodology in the end amounts to a call for the heroiccharacter-virtue of clear-sightedness and intellectual integrity thattogether constitute a genuine person of science – a scientistwith a sense of vocation who has a passionate commitment toone’s own specialized research, yet is utterly “free ofillusions” [Löwith 1982, 38].

6. Politics and Ethics

Even more explicitly ethical than his methodology, Weber’spolitical project also discloses his entrenched preoccupation with thewillful resuscitation of certain character traits in modern society.At the outset, it seems undeniable that Weber was a deeply liberalpolitical thinker especially in a German context which is not well knownfor political liberalism. This means that his ultimate value as apolitical thinker was locked on individual freedom, that “old,general type of human ideals” [Weber 1895/1994, 19]. He was alsoabourgeois liberal, and self-consciously so, in a time ofgreat transformations that were undermining the social conditionsnecessary to support classical liberal values and bourgeoisinstitutions, thereby compelling liberalism to search for afundamental reorientation. To that extent, he belongs to thatgeneration of liberal political thinkers in fin-de-siècleEurope who clearly perceived the general crisis of liberalism andsought to resolve it in their own liberal ways [Bellamy 1992,157–216]. Weber’s own way was to address the problem ofclassical liberal characterology that was, in his view, beingprogressively undermined by the indiscriminate bureaucratization ofmodern society.

6.1 Domination and Legitimacy

Such an ethical subtext is legible even in Weber’s stark realismthat permeates his political sociology – or, a sociology ofdomination (Herrschaftssoziologie) as he called it [for theacademic use of this term in Weber’s time, see Anter 2016,3–23]. For instance, utterly devoid of moral qualities that manyof his contemporaries attributed to the state, it is defined all toothinly as “a human community that (successfully) claims themonopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within agiven territory” [Weber 1919/1994, 310]. With the same brevity,he asserted that domination of the ruled by the ruler, or moreliterally, “lordship” (Herrschaft), is animmutable reality of political life even in a democratic state. Thatis why, for Weber, an empirical study of politics cannot but be aninquiry into the different modalities by which domination iseffectuated and sustained. All the while, he also maintained that adomination worthy of sustained attention is about something far morethan the brute fact of subjugation and subservience. For “themerely external fact of the order being obeyed is not sufficient tosignify domination in our sense; we cannot overlook the meaning of thefact that the command is accepted as avalid norm”[Weber 1921–22/1978, 946]. In other words, it has to be adomination mediated throughjustification andinterpretation in which the ruler’s claim to authority,not mere threat of force or promise of benefits, is the reason for theobedience, not mere compliance, by the ruled. This bipolar emphasis onthe factuality of coercive domination at the phenomenal level and theessentiallynoumenal nature of power (à la RainerForst) is what characterizes Weber’s political realism [Forst2012].

In terms of contemporary political realism, Weber seemed to hold thatthe primary concern of politics is the establishment of anorderly domination and its management within a giventerritory rather than the realization of such pre- or extra-politicalmoral goals as justice (Kant) or freedom (Hegel) – thus thebrevity with which the state is defined above. Sharing this Hobbesianoutlook on politics, or what Bernard Williams calls the “FirstPolitical Question” (FPQ), enables Weber to square his diagnosisof agonistic value pluralism with an entrenched suspicion ofnatural-law foundation of liberalism to sustain a democratic politicsthat is uniquely his own [see 6.2 below]. He went beyond Ordorealism,however, when an evaluative perspective on politics is advocatedwithout recourse to the moral commitments coming from outside thepolitical sphere. The making of a workable political order cannot beauthorized by virtue of its coming-into-being and has to satisfy whatWilliams called the “Basic Legitimation Demand” (BLD) tobe an acceptable arrangement of social coordination. A legitimatepolitical order is an institutionalized modus vivendi for collectivelife that “makes sense as an intelligible order” (MSIO) inthe eyes of the beholder [Williams 2005, 1–17]. Since such anacceptance by those living under a particular arrangement depends onthe political morality animating that particular community, theruler’s claim to authority can meet with success only when basedon a reasonable fit with the local mores, values, and cultures[Cozzaglio and Greene 2019, 1025–26]. Like Machiavelli’sPrincipe, then, Weber’sHerren do not behavein a normless vacuum. They rule under certain political-normativeconstraints that turn on the congruence between the way theirdomination isjustified and the way such a publicjustification isinterpreted as acceptable to the ruled.Weber’s concept of domination is as much noumenal as phenomenal.To that extent, it is little wonder that his name figures not onlyprominently but also uniquely in the pantheon of political realists[Galston 2010].

From this nuanced realist premise, Weber famously moved on to identifythree ideal types of legitimate domination based on, respectively,charisma, tradition, and legal rationality. Roughly, the first type oflegitimacy claim depends on how persuasively the leaders prove theircharismatic qualities, for which they receive personal devotions andemotive followings from the ruled. The second kind of claim can bemade successfully when certain practice, custom, and mores areinstitutionalized to (re)produce a stable pattern of domination over along duration of time. In contrast to these crucial dependences onpersonality traits and the passage of time, the third type ofauthority is unfettered by time, place, and other forms of contingencyas it derives its legitimacy from adherence to impersonal rules andgeneral principles that can only be found by suitable legal-rationalreasoning. It is, along with the traditional authority, a type ofdomination that is inclined towards the status quo in ordinary timesas opposed to the charismatic authority that represents extraordinary,disruptive, and transformative forces in history. Weber’s fameand influence as a political thinker are built most critically uponthis typology and the ways in which those ideal types are deployed inhis political writings.

As such, Weber’s sociology of domination has been suspectedvariously of its embedded normative biases. For one, his theory oflegitimacy is seen as endorsing a cynical and unrealistic rejection ofuniversal morality in politics that makes it hard to pass an objectiveand moral evaluative judgment on legitimacy claims, a charge that iscommonly leveled at political realism at large. Under Weber’sconcept of legitimacy, anything goes, so to speak, as long as theruler goes along with the local political morality of the ruled (evenif it is formed independently of any coercive or corrosiveinterference by the ruler, thereby satisfying Williams’s“critical theory principle”). Read in conjunction with hisvoluminous political writings, especially, it is criticized to thisday as harbouring or foreshadowing, among others, Bonapartistcaesarism, passive-revolutionary Fordist ideology, quasi-Fascistelitism, and even proto-Nazism (especially with respect to his robustnationalism and/or nihilistic celebration of power) [interalia, Strauss 1950; Marcuse in Stammer (ed.) 1971; Mommsen 1984;Rehman 2013]. In addition to these politically heated charges,Weber’s typology also reveals a crucial lacuna even as anempirical political sociology. That is to say, it allows scant, orambiguous, a conceptual topos for democracy.

In fact, it seems as though Weber is unsure of the proper place ofdemocracy in his schema. At one point, democracy is deemed as afourth type of legitimacy because it should be able toembrace legitimacyfrom below whereas his three ideal typesall focus on thatfrom above [Breuer in Schroeder (ed.) 1998,2]. At other times, Weber seems to believe that democracy is simplynon-legitimate, rather than another type of legitimatedomination, because it aspires to an identity between the ruler andthe ruled (i.e., no domination at all), but without assuming ahierarchical and asymmetrical relationship of power, his concept oflegitimacy takes hardly off the ground. Thus, Weber could describe theemergence of proto-democracy in the late medieval urban communes onlyin terms of “revolutionary usurpation” [Weber1921–22/1978, 1250], calling them the “firstdeliberately non-legitimate and revolutionary politicalassociation” [ibid., 1302]. Too recalcitrant to fitinto his overall schema, in other words, these historical prototypesof democracy simply falloutside of his typology ofdomination as non- or not-legitimate at all.

Overlapping but still distinguishable is Weber’s yet another wayof conceptualizing democracy, which had to do with charismaticlegitimacy. The best example is the Puritan sect in which authority islegitimated only on the grounds of a consensual order createdvoluntarily by proven believers possessing their own quantum ofcharismatic legitimating power. As a result of this politicalcorollary of the Protestant doctrine of universal priesthood, Puritansects could and did “insist upon ‘direct democraticadministration’ by the congregation” and thereby do awaywith the hierarchical distinction between those ruling and those ruled[ibid., 1208]. In a secularized version of this groupdynamics, a democratic ballot would become the primary tool by whichthe presumed charisma of the individual lay citizenry are aggregated andtransmitted to their elected leader who becomes “the agent andhence the servant of his voters, not their chosen master”[ibid., 1128]. Rather than an outright non-legitimate orfourth type of domination, here, democracy comes across as anextremely rare subset of a diffused and institutionalized form ofcharismatic legitimacy.

6.2 Democracy, Partisanship, and Compromise

All in all, the irony is unmistakable. It seems as though one of themost influential political thinkers of the twentieth century cannotcome to clear terms with its zeitgeist in which democracy, in whateverform, shape and shade, emerged as the only acceptable ground forpolitical legitimacy. Weber’s awkwardness is nowhere morecompelling than in his advocacy for “leadership democracy”(Führerdemokratie) during the constitutional politics ofpost-WWI Germany.

If the genuine self-rule of the people is impossible, according to hisunsentimental outlook on democracy, the only choice is one betweenleaderless and leadership democracy. When advocating a sweepingdemocratization of defeated Germany, thus, Weber envisioned democracyin Germany as a political marketplace in which strong charismaticleaders can be identified and elected by winning votes in a freecompetition, even battle, among themselves. Preserving and enhancingthis element of struggle in politics is important since it is onlythrough a dynamic electoral process that national leadership strongenough to control the otherwise omnipotent bureaucracy can be made.The primary concern for Weber in designing democratic institutionshas, in other words, less to do with the realization of democraticideals, such as freedom, equality, justice, or self-rule, than withcultivation of certain character traits befitting a robust nationalleadership. In its overriding preoccupation with the leadershipqualities, Weber’s theory of democracy contains ominous streaksthat may vindicate Jürgen Habermas’s infamous dictum thatCarl Schmitt, “theKronjurist of the ThirdReich,” was “a legitimate pupil of Weber’s”[Habermas in Stammer (ed.) 1971, 66].

For a fair and comprehensive assessment, however, it should also bebrought into purview that Weber’s leadership democracy is notsolely reliant upon the fortuitous personality traits of its leaders,let alone a caesaristic dictator. “[A] genuine charisma isradically different from the convenient presentation of the present‘divine right of king’… the very opposite is trueof the genuinely charismatic ruler, who is responsible to theruled” [1922/1978, 1114]. Such responsibility is conceivablebecause charisma is attributed to a leader through a process that canbe described as “imputation”from below [Joose2014, 271]. In addition to the free electoral competition led by theorganized mass parties, Weber saw localized, yet public associationallife as a breeding ground for such an imputation of charisma. Whenleaders are identified and selected at the level of, say neighborhoodchoral societies and bowling clubs [Weber 1910/2002], the allegedauthoritarian elitism of leadership democracy comes across as morepluralistic in its valence, far from its usual identification withdemagogic dictatorship and unthinking mass following. Insofar as avibrant civil society functions as an effective medium for thehorizontal diffusion of charismatic qualities among lay people, hisnotion of charismatic leadership can retain a strongly democratic toneto the extent that he also suggested associational pluralism as asociocultural ground for the political education of the lay citizenryfrom which genuine leaders would hail. Weber’s charismaticleadership has to be “democratically manufactured” [Green2008, 208], in short, and such a formative political project ispredicated upon a pluralistically organized civil society as well assuch liberal institutions as universal suffrage, free elections, andorganized parties.

In this respect, however, it should be noted that Weber’s takeon civil society is crucially different from acommunitarian-Tocquevillean outlook, and this contrast can be castinto sharper relief once put in terms of the contemporary democratictheory of partisanship [cf.,inter alia, Rosenblum 2008;Muirhead 2014; White and Ypi 2016]. Like the contemporary advocates ofpartisanship, Weber is critical of the conventional communitarian viewthat simply equates civil society with voluntary associational lifeitself. For not all voluntary associations are conducive to democracy;some are in fact “bad” for its viability. Even in a“good” civil society, those “associativepractice,” orVergesellschaftung in Weber’sparlance [Weber 1910/2002], may cultivate the kind ofcivilvirtues that regulate our private lives, but such social capitalcannot be automatically transferred to the public realm as a usefulset ofcivic virtues and skills for democratic politics.Political capital can be acquired by livingpoliticalexperiences daily. This realization led Weber as well as a growingnumber of contemporary democratic theorists to converge on aninsistent call for the politicization of civil society in the form ofnot less, but better partisanship, making his politics of civilsociety crucially different from that of a communitarian-Tocquevilleanpersuasion [see Kim in Hanke, Scaff & Whimster (eds.) 2020].

Also different from this intensely political civil society is aliberal-Habermasian “public sphere,” arational-communicative haven in which the open exchange and fairdeliberation of impartial opinions take place until reasonableconsensus emerges. By contrast, Weber’s civil society is to bean agonistic arena of organized rivalry, competition, and struggle onbehalf of the irreduciblypartial claims between whichconsensus – be that reasonable, overlapping, or bipartisan– may not always be found. Given the incommensurable valuefragmentation of the modern politics and society, Weber wouldwholeheartedly embrace the so-called “circumstances ofpolitics” under which deep disagreements are reasonableand permanent, agreeing that it is not necessarily a badthing for democracy as long as those “permanentdisagreements” remain peaceful [Waldron 1999]. From such anagonistic perspective, the best that can be expected is some kind ofmixture of those partial claims – acompromise whereinlies the true meaning ofpolitical virtue. That is to say,although no “overlapping consensus” can be expected, it isprecisely because all partisan claims are so partial that a politicalcompromise can be made at least betweengood partisans. Forneither too unprincipled (as in opportunistic power-seekers) nor tooprincipled (as in moral zealots), good partisan citizens welcome apolitical compromise, notwithstanding their passionate value convictions,because they know that some reasonable disagreements are permanent.Then, the kind of political capital expected to be accumulated in agood partisan civil society is a mixture of “principle andpragmatism” [Muirhead 2014, 41–42] – a politicalvirtue much akin to Weber’s syncretic ethics of conviction(Gesinnungsethik) and responsibility(Verantwortungsethik) [see 6.3 below].

Together, Weber’s ethics also demand that the political leadersand public citizenry combine unflinching commitments to higher causes(which make them different from mere bureaucratic careerists) withsober realism that no political claim, including their own, canrepresent the whole truth (which makes them different from moralpurists and political romantics). This syncretic ethic is the ultimatehallmark of those politicians with a sense of vocation who would fightfor their convictions with fierce determination yet not without a“sense of pragmatic judgment”(Augenmaß)that a compromise is unavoidable betweenincommensurable value positions, and all they can do in the end is totake robust responsibility for the consequences, either intended orunintended, of whatthey thought was a principled compromise.This is why Weber said: “The politician must make compromises… the scholar may not cover them (DerPolitikermuß Kompromisse machen … der Gelehrte darf sie nichtdecken)” [MWG II/10, 983; also see Bruun 1972 (2007, 244)]. It isthis type of political virtue that Weber wants to instill at thecitizenship as well as leadership level, and the site of thispolitical education is a pluralistically organized civil society inwhich leaders and citizens can experience the dynamic andinstitutionalized politicization (re)produced by partisanpolitics.

6.3 Conviction and Responsibility

What are, then, these two ethics of conviction and responsibilityexactly that Weber wanted to foster through a“‘chronic’ political schooling”[Weber 1894/1994, 26]. According to the ethic of responsibility, onthe one hand, an action is given meaning only as a cause of an effect,that is, only in terms of its causal relationship to the empiricalworld. The virtue lies in an objective understanding of the possiblecausal effect of an action and the calculated reorientation of theelements of an action in such a way as to achieve a desiredconsequence. An ethical question is thereby reduced to a question oftechnically correct procedure, and free action consists of choosingthe correct means. By emphasizing the causality to which a free agentsubscribes, in short, Weber prescribes an ethical integrity betweenaction and consequences, instead of a Kantian emphasis on that betweenaction and intention.

According to the ethic of conviction, on the other hand, a free agentshould be able to choose autonomously not only the means, but also theend; “this concept of personality finds its‘essence’ in the constancy of its inner relation tocertain ultimate ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ oflife” [Weber 1903–06/1975, 192]. In this respect,Weber’s central problem arises from the recognition that thekind of rationality applied in choosing a means cannot be used inchoosing an end. These two kinds of reasoning represent categoricallydistinct modes of rationality, a boundary further reinforced by modernvalue fragmentation. With no objectively ascertainable ground ofchoice provided, then, a free agent has to create purpose ex nihilo:“ultimately life as a whole, if it is not to be permitted to runon as an event in nature but is instead to be consciously guided, is aseries of ultimate decisions through which the soul – as inPlato – chooses its own fate” [Weber 1917/1949, 18]. Thisultimate decision and the Kantian integrity between intention andaction constitute the essence of what Weber calls an ethic ofconviction.

It is often held that the gulf between these two types of ethics isunbridgeable for Weber. One cannot demand an unmitigated integritybetween one’s ultimate values and political action, that is tosay, thedeontological ethic of conviction cannot bereconciled with that of responsibility which isconsequentialist in essence. In fact, Weber himself admittedthe “abysmal contrast” that separates the two. This frankadmission, nevertheless, cannot be taken to mean that he privilegedthe latter over the former as far as political education isconcerned.

Weber keenly recognized the deep tension between consequentialism anddeontology, but he still insisted that they should be forcefullybrought together. The former recognition only lends urgency to thelatter agenda. Resolving this analytical inconsistency in terms ofcertain “ethical decrees” did not interest Weber. Instead,he sought for a moral character that can manage this“combination” with a sheer force of will. In fact, he alsocalled this synthetic ethic as that of responsibility without clearlydistinguishing it from the merely consequentialist ethic it sought toovercome, thus creating an interpretive debate that continues to thisday [de Villiers 2018, 47–78]. Be that as it may, his advocacyfor this willful synthesis is incontrovertible, and he called such anethical character a “politician with a sense of vocation”(Berufspolitiker) who combines a passionate conviction insupra-mundane ideals that politics has to serve and a sober rationalcalculation of its realizability in this mundane world. Weber thusconcluded: “the ethic of conviction and the ethic ofresponsibility are not absolute opposites. They are complementary toone another, and only in combination do they produce the true humanbeing who iscapable of having a ‘vocation forpolitics’” [Weber 1919/1994, 368].

This synthetic political virtue seems not only hard to achieve, butalso without a promise of felicitous ending. Weber’s synthesisdemands a sober confrontation with the reality of politics, i.e., theever-presence of “physical forces” and all the unintendedconsequences or collateral damages that come with the use of coercion.Only then may it be brought under ethical control by a superhumandeployment of passion and prudence, but, even so, Weber’spolitical superhuman (Übermensch) cannot circumvent theso-called “dirty-hands dilemma” [cf. Walzer 1973; Coady2009]. For, even at the moment of triumph, the unrelenting grip ofresponsibility would never let him or her disavow the guilt andremorse for having employed the “physical forces,” nomatter how beneficial or necessary. It is a tragic-heroic ethic of“nevertheless (dennoch)” [see 2.2] and, as such,Weber’s “tragicism” goes beyond politics [Honigsheim2013, 115].Science as a Vocation is a self-evident case inwhich the virtue of “value freedom” demands a scientist toconfront the modern epistemological predicament of incommensurablevalue-fragmentation without succumbing to the nihilistic plethora ofsubjective values by means of a disciplined and willful devotion tothe scholarly specialization and scientific objectivity [see 5.2].From this ethical vintage point,The Protestant Ethic and theSpirit of Capitalism may as well be re-titledLabouras a Vocation. It was in this much earlier work(1904–5) that Weber first outlined the basic contours of theethic of vocation (Berufsethik) and a person of vocation(Berufsmensch) and the way those work practices emergedhistorically in the course of the Reformation (and faded awaysubsequently). The Calvinist doctrine of predestination has amplifiedthe innermost anxiety over one’s own salvation, but such asubjective fear and trembling was channeled into a psychologicalreservoir for the most disciplined and methodical life conduct(Lenbensführung), or labour in calling, that created the“spirit” of capitalism. Paradoxically combining subjectivevalue commitments and objective rationality in the pursuit of thosegoals, in short, the making and unmaking of theBerufsmenschis where Weber’s ethical preoccupations in politics, science,and economy converge [cf. Hennis 1988].

In the end, Weber’s project is not about formal analysis ofmoral maxims, nor is it about substantive virtues that reflect somekind of ontic telos. It is too formal or empty to be an Aristoteleanvirtue ethics, and it is too concerned with moral character to be aKantian deontology narrowly understood. The goal of Weber’sethical project, rather, aims at cultivating a character who canwillfully bring together these conflicting formal virtues to createwhat he calls a “total personality”(Gesamtpersönlichkeit). It culminates in an ethicalcharacterology or philosophical anthropology in which passion andreason are properly ordered by sheer force of individual will. Assuch, Weber’s political virtue resides not simply in asubjective intensity of value commitment nor in a detachedintellectual integrity and methodical purposefulness, but in theirwillful combination in a unified soul. In this abiding preoccupationwithstatecraft-cum-soulcraft, Weber was a moralist andpolitical educator who squarely belonged to the venerable traditionthat stretches back to the ancient Greeks down to Rousseau, Hegel, andMill.

7. Concluding Remarks

Seen this way, we find a remarkable consistency in Weber’sthought. Weber’s main problematic turned on the question ofindividual autonomy and freedom in an increasingly rationalizedsociety. His dystopian and pessimistic assessment of rationalizationdrove him to search for solutions through politics and science, whichbroadly converge on a certainpractice of the self. What hecalled the “person of vocation,” first outlined famouslyinThe Protestant Ethic, provided a bedrock for his variousefforts to resuscitate a character who can willfully combineunflinching conviction and methodical rationality even in a societybesieged by bureaucratic petrification and value fragmentation. It isalso in this entrenched preoccupation with an ethical characterologyunder modern circumstances that we find the source of his enduringinfluences on twentieth-century political and social thought.

On the left, Weber’s articulation of the tension betweenmodernity and modernization found resounding echoes in the“Dialectics of Enlightenment” thesis by Theodor Adorno andMax Horkheimer; Lukács’s own critique of the perversionof capitalist reason owes no less to Weber’s problematization ofinstrumental rationality on which is also built Habermas’selaboration of communicative rationality as an alternative. Differentelements in Weber’s political thought, e.g., intense politicalstruggle as an antidote to modern bureaucratic petrification,leadership democracy and plebiscitary presidency, a stark realistoutlook on democracy and power-politics, and value-freedom andvalue-relativism in political ethics, were selected and criticallyappropriated by such diverse thinkers on the right as Carl Schmitt,Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, and Raymond Aron.Even the postmodernist project of deconstructing the Enlightenmentsubjectivity finds, as Michel Foucault does, a precursor in Weber. Allin all, across the vastly different ideological and methodologicalspectrum, Max Weber’s thought will continue to be a deepreservoir of fresh inspiration as long as an individual’s fateunder (post)modern circumstances does not lose its privileged place inthe political, social, cultural, and philosophical reflections of ourtime.

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Acknowledgments

The SEP editors would like to thank Edoardo Bellando for noting anumber of infelicities in the text. These were corrected in December2024.