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HISTORIOGRAPHY: LECTURE 6
Max Weber: concepts, ideal types and the rise of
capitalism
In my lecture today I’ll return to my Heimat Germany. We already spoke about two other
German scholars of the nineteenth century in this module, Leopold von Ranke and Karl Marx
whose thinking is fundamental to the methodological development of our discipline of History
(itself a product of 19th century Germany). We have seen also how much their thinking was
shaped by specific political, socio-cultural conditions of the times (to put it very crude…Ranke –
the rise of German nationalism and Marx: English industrialisation), which they lived. So in
order to understand the third German thinker, Max Weber, (image) whom we are dealing with
today who shaped (and continues to shape history writing), I suggest, we again turn to his life
first before we tackle his thinking.
Life
Max Weber was born in 1864 into a wealthy family of bourgois textile manufacturers in Erfurt.
(image) His father was a successful well-to-do lawyer and a national-liberal parlimenarian. Let
me just to remind you of what was going on in the German lands at the time in regard to politics:
politics
In 1871 Germany was unified; this was predominantly the work of the Prussian statesman Otto
von Bismark. (slide )Minister president between 1862- 1890 Bismark ‘ruled’ the German empire
and Europe from the 1860s to the 1890s. Conversative in his politics he was interested in a
European balance of power; in regard to national politics, he was concerned about the rise of
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socialism (the Socialist Party rose) – as a reaction to it he pushed through anti-socialist laws in
1871, and, precaution if you like, he set up the famous German workers’ insurance system
(the insurance system is conservative – not socialist as one might assume!). This is, as I’ve said
a reaction to the rise of socialism in Germany but also, more widely, a reaction to the German
industrialisation. Compared to other European countries, Germany entered industrialisation only
in the second half/last third of the 19th century. (just to remind us when Marx is writing his
famous Manifesto, for example, Germany is still largely an agrarian country! Marx would have
not written his work had he stayed in Germany).
(slide)
Besides his famous socialist laws, Bismark is also famous for his anti-Catholic campaigning
he launched in 1871, the anti-Catholic Kulturkampf (battle of culture). He largely had European
politics in mind here (prevent pope from meddling into politics) but in the protestant countries of
the Germany Empire -- it started a virtual ‘hunt’ for Catholics. Priest and bishops were exiled; I
1872 all the Jesuit order was disvolved and all Jesuits exiled; 1873 he passed anti-Catholic laws
– Bismark’s aim was to prevent Catholics from having any influence on politics and
cultures in the Empire (directed against the Catholic Party in particular). Modern Germany
needed to rid itself from irrational faith and medieval rituals, was the battle cry, far in to the
1890s.
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This fitted with the new image of Germany, as the emerging and so it was hoped leading
industrial nation (increasing competition with Britain; Germany also experiencing the first
capitalistic crises).
Central to this development were the natural sciences which became a major ‘export article’ of
Germany and a source of national pride. (lots of international prizes including noble prize)
Money was poured into their development particularly in Prussia. However, while we have on
one hand the natural science emerging, we do have to remember that they did not yet exercise
that influence on cultural, economic and political life as they do now. As I’ve mentioned with
Ranke already, Germans at the time felt almost threatened by the forces of industrialisation; the
bourgois classes were appauled by its destructive powers – in regard to the environment and to
human nature (rationalisation; efficieny, greediness etc; diseases spreading that were related to
modern time such as ‘neurasthenia’, the suffering of the nerves – Weber suffers from it) – As a
reaction we see a turn to the past and culture as a remedy for such troubling times.
‘Historicism’- a cultural and intellectual movement which I have already explained in regard to
Ranke and which celebrated the past as a key to the understanding of the troubling present.
(historicism definition)
These are some important elements to keep in mind when we think about Weber’s upbringing
but also his intellectual interests.
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Important too, at least according to his many, many biographers was his family background,
particularly this parents relationship: His father was a domineering patriachical figure, a man of
modern times so to speak, interested in politics and economics, priding himself of a ‘rational
mind’; his mother was the the total opposite of her husband. She was woman of culture and
extreme protestant piety. (slide) As you can imagine, Weber seniors didn’t get on very well, a
source of ongoing frustration for young Weber who had a very close relationship with his
mother. Weber junior was intellectually very gifted; after the Abitur he enrolled to study law at
Heidelberg and continued studies in Berlin and Goettingen, all of them very famous universities
at the time (remember Ranke’s influence and that of von Humboldt). Althought a lawyer, his
independent academic work began in the field of law and legal history. His doctoral disseration
was entitled ‘A Contribution to the history of Medieval Business Organisations’ (1880)
(historicism!). After completing his dissertation Weber started the in-service training required for
the German bench or bar. He becomes interested during that time in agrarian legal questions and
begins to prepare his second dissertation necessary in German academia to teach at universities,
the so-called habilitation. Roman Agrarian History and its Significance for Public and
Private Law (1891). While writing his study he prepared himself for the duties of Privatdozent
(PD, Beat Kumin is ) in Roman, German and commercial law at the University of Berlin. He also
undertook extensive investigations of rural labor in the German provinces east of the river
Elbe, which led to a publication of a 900-pages volume in 1892, and he investigated the workings
and mechanism of the stock-exchange. In between his enormous workload he marries his wife
Marianne in 1893 (slide) who would later becomes the publisher/interpreter of his work after his
death (and contributes to rather confusing, even false presentation of him as some of his
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biographers argue – to be taken with caution because it often is that when women are involved
that biographers tend to argue that they meddled with the geniou husband) In fall 1894 he
became full professor of national economics in Freiburg University. In 1896 he accepts a full
position at the University of Heidelberg.
From that time onwards, it goes strangely downhill for him….His sudden death of his
father in 1897 with whom he had a terrible fight just before Weber senior’s death – it was never
resolved - plunged him into a deep depression from which he never really recovered. He had to
reduce his work and finally had to suspend his academic work altogether. He travelled for several
years to ease his nerves (neurasthenia) – the only thing he was able to do. In 1904 he travelled
to America to attend the World’s fair in St. Louis and this journey made a lasting impression
on him. (I shall return to this in a minute.) Various explanation of this ‘nerve crisis’ have been
offered, such as the conflict between the parental values, sexual repression. (Read it up on 500
pages biography by Joachim Radkau). A private inheritance finally allowed him to give us his
job for good and he continued to live a life as a private scholar. He served in the WWI as a
hospital administrator – he hated to be reduced to such ninny job and not be able to fight in the
trenches. He also tried politics but didn’t quite make it in the newly founded liberal party, the
Deutsche Demokratische Partei. He died at the age of 56 in 1920 of pneumonia, the year the
Protestant Ethics comes out as a book.
Mention the founding of Verein and sociology…
Difficulty with oeurvre:
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Its breaths of knowledge and interests is enormous. Like all middle class members, Weber had
enjoyed a classical German education (classical authors, languages and heavy dose of history).
made it difficult to discover a coherent organisation theme or principle, which would integrated
his rather diverse publications. On top of that his writing are difficult to understand; his style is
complicated and he tends to bury the main points of the argument in a jungle of statements that
require detailed analysis, or in long analyses of special topics that are not clearly related to either
the preceding or the ensuring materials. Weber usually undertook several independent lines of
investigation simultaneously and put all his research notes into the final text without making their
relative importance explicit. The search for principle of thematic unity in his oeurve has been
complicated by the peculiarities connected with the way his work was actually published and
translated. (he was sick, much of his stuff in state of manuscript; published and organised later
by his wife – a scholar in her own right -- who had a certain legacy in mind; student publications
which but articles together which might fit by theme but do not chronologically represent
Weber’s changing thinking.)
In short Weber’s work is incredibly large, complex and diverse. It follows the order of
knowledge of his own time, a time whch our order of knowledge ----the separation of
humanities from social social sciences to which we today count sociology, and that from the
political sciences and eocnomics do not yet exist. The complexity of the publishing history of his
legacy has provided an ideal and fertile breeding ground for a variety of interpretations of his
work.
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Weber’s oeuvre is difficult to say the least. He mastered 8 classical and modern
languages, and although he is known as a ‘sociologist’ my brief overview of his career showed
that he didn’t start of a such, as I’ve said he as a lawyer by training and he was very knowledgible
in economics.
We have to remember too that sociology – as an indepenende discipline with a
research methodologies, own departments and journals did not exist yet at the time when
Weber started off. In ‘founder’ in France was August Compte – remember, it is the man
who ‘invents’ positivism – and the first study which is counted as sociological appears in
Germany in 1887 ("Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft" (Community and Society’ by Ferdinand
Tönnies, Georg Simmel is another pionieer. ) Max Weber is a pioneer in this area of study; in fact
he hailed as the German founder of ‘sociology’ (socio= together; logos=word).
Before I go into the ‘Protestant Ethic’, the work that presents best his theoretical thinking about
‘belief and social action’ methods and procedures:
(slide)
1. Focus on individual
Weber is adamant that the fundamental unit of investigation must always be the
individual. He thus focuses upon the individual and not on groups or collectives; only the
individual he believes is capable of ‘meaningful’ social action. As far as the ‘subjective
interepretation of action’ is concerned, ‘collectives must be treated as soleley the
resultants and modes of organisation of the particular acts of individual persons:
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(slide here)
‘for sociological purposes there is no such thing as a collective personality, which
‘acts’. When reference is made in a sociological context to a state, a nation, a
corporation, a family or army corps, or to similar collectives, what it means is …
only a certain kind of development of actual or possible social action of individual
persons.’ (Weber, economy and Society, 1968, p. 13)
Collectives cannot feel, cannot think, perceive, only individual people can. To assume otherwise,
Weber argues is to impute a spurious reality to what are in effect conceptual abstractions.
Furthermore he argues that the task of the socioligst -- a scholar who is interested in
understanding the ‘togetherness’ of people – to penetrate the subjective understandings of the
individual, to get at the motives for social action.
This enterprise, Weber argues, is very different from that of the natural science. (Remember
Ranke!) Human behavior Weber argues cannot be reduced to laws. Natural scienstist
‘explain’ (erklaeren) nature by such laws ; but human scientist such as a historian or sociollogis
‘understand’ (understand) human behavoir and require different methods and skills for that. The
explain motives, and have to deal with subjectives meanings, moreover, actors explain what they
do – not like bacteria who are just observed by the natural scientist and cannot speak. People
have their own concepts through which they explain their world, such as ‘class’, or ‘sin’ or
‘redemption’ and they live their lives according to these man-made concepts. (– again we see
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here again is the influence of the German historcisit and idealist distinction between the
investiation of nature – and the investiation of human life which already played a role in Ranke.).
(reminder slide)
Weber stands in start opposition here to French school of sociology, forming around the same
time. the most eminent man here is Emile Durkheim for whom the only unit that really counted
for exlanatory purposes was the collective.
(slide of Durkheim)
2. Verstehenssoziologie
(slide)
‘…the science which attempts the interpretative understanding (deutend verstehen) of social action in
order thereby to arrive at a casual explanation of its course and effects’ (Weber, Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft, 1980, p.1)
According to Weber sociology attempts to ‘understand’ (verstehen) human action not only
the past but also in the present – (being a historicist he of course believed that one needed to
understand the past to get at the present…) Distinction to the natural sciences which ‘explain’
(erklaeren) nature. He therefore calls his way of doing socioloty ‘Verstehensoziologie’ (and
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you find him often therefore labelled as an ‘antipositivist’ – which is not totally correct as
we shall see…)
What is meant by this is the attempt to comprehend social action through a kind of
empathetic liaison with the actor on the part of the observer. The strategy is for the
investigator to try to identify with the actor and his or her motives and to view the
course of conduct through the actor’s eyes rather than his own.
Again, we need to understand this notion within the wider universe of German idealism
and historism. Ranke also was trying to verstehen *understand’ his actors. Like Weber he
assumed a common humanity, and it is through this idea of a common humanity and shared
spirit (Geist) of a time that the observer is able to ‘feel’ his way into the mind of the observed
(shared language, shared culture, shared habits and behavoir, ahistorical idea of human
nature…)
He makes clear though that this is not to be thought of as the be-all and end-alll of social
explanation. The Verstehen approach needed to be supplemented by other technoliques of
investigation, including some of the ‘natural scientific’ efforts favoured by the positivitst.
Weber indeed was, for example, not against statistics or so (favoured by people like Durkheim).
Statistical probablility was an important check upon the general validity of any proposition.
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Now, there are lots of problems with this and most of them Weber himself didn’t know how to
answer. For example, what if the investigator and investigated person do not share the same
cultural background? How can you ever ‘verstehen’? Or, even if they do share it … how can I be
sure that I have in fact grasped and understood the subjective state of the actor? How would I
know if I had misunderstood? Verstehen is ultimately unverifiable…. (welter here)
3. Ideal type:
But let me turn to another central, if also vexing, methodology tool, Weber introdues, the ‘ideal
type’. An ‘idea type’ for Weber is an hypothetical concept, an abstract concept. He invented
this conceptual idea when he grappling with the question of whether ‘objectivity’ – hailed by the
natural sciences of the time as the key behavior to all knowledge production which was also
creping into the new discipline of sociology at the time.
(reminder slide of objectivity from Ranke)
Weber was convinced that ‘reality’ – in the past or present -- could not be comprehended by the
human mind – contrary to what positivists believed. To be able to grasp the ‘real essence’ of
social reality was an illusion to him. Social reality does not posses a real essence because it is
always capable of being constructed or represented in various different ways. What counts as
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social reality depends pretty much upon the conceptual apparatus through which we view it in the
first place. (Differet from Durkheim, Marx was inclinded to believe in mere appearance of
reality and the essence of relality …. there is a reality beyond our construction of it which needed
to be laid bare). So, Weber suggest that we should leave the tiresome question of the essence of
‘real’ phenomena – let’s say the essence of religion – behind and let us examine how it appeared
in human behaviour and human society at large. Let’s investigate its different forms and how
they changed. So, that can be very confusing because religion appears in endless forms of course.
What we need therefore, Weber argues, it a so-called ‘ideal type’ that brings order in the chaos.
He suggests that the ideal-type is to be used as a yard-stick against which to compare and evalute
empirical cases. An ‘ideal type’ is formed from characteristics and elements of the given phenomena,
let’s say the protestant religion, but it is not meant to correspond to all of the characteristics of any one
particular case. It is not meant to refer to perfect things, moral ideals nor to statistical averages but
rather to stress certain elements common to most cases of the given phenomena. It is also important to
pay attention that in using the word “ideal” Max Weber refers to the world of ideas (German
Gedankenbilder "thoughtful pictures") and not to perfection; these “ideal types” are idea-constructs that
help put the seeming chaos of social reality in order. (
‘Whatever the content of the ideal-type…it has only one function in an empirical
investigation. Its function is the comparison with empirical reality in order to establish its
divergencies or similarities…and to understand and explain them causally.’ (Weber,
(slide with quote to exemplyfiy the meaning of objectivey)
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‘The external courses of religious behavior are so diverse that an understanding of this
behaviour can only be achieved from the viewpoint of the subjective experiences, ideas, and
purposes of the individual concerned – in short from the viewpoint of the religious
behaviour’s ‘meaning’. (Weber, Economy and Society, p. 399)
What he argues through the invention of ‘ideal types’ is important and at the same time
confusing. He argues that social facts only exist by virtue of the concepts employed to define
and organise them. So, ‘social class’ is an ‘ideal type’ of you like, but does it disspear if we
don’t use it as a concept in real anymore (think about contemporary Britain….) also, he says
they are set up to test empirical reality….but didn’t say that here is no such thing? That
‘reality’ is but the concepts through which we perceive it….vexing problems indeed. And
Weber’s followers dispared over his varying view and definitions of these problems.
But we keep in mind the ‘idea type’ when we now investigate ‘the protestant ethics in more
detail.
Protestant ethics and the problem of rationalisation
The ‘Protestent ethics’ was to the frist study of a much broader and truly global enterprise, an
investigation into the relationship between economics and religion. (he writes other works on
China, buddism. In English in 1930. Because of this book Weber is often understood as antimaterialist – as a enemy of Marx’ idea that religion as other beliefs as by-products of class or
material interests. That is actually wrong `I think. Yes, Weber tries to show how the path of
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causation runs the opposite way – from religious precepts to a capitalist mentality – but he had
quite strong materialist leanings himself.
To reduce his book to the simple formula – Calvinism was the principal cause of capitalims is far
too simplistic. In fact the case he present is replete with ambiguities, inconcistencies and other
intellectul curiosity, which he does not solve or wipe out to state his thesis. He leaves these
problems in the text and it is therefore a difficult text to understand and fertile ground for
misinderpretation – or I should say productive misinterpretations.
The text deals with religion but at its core it deals with a problem that fastinated Weber all
his life, the problem of ‘rationalisation’ in modern culture. Just remember what I’ve said at
the beginning of his time. The rise of industrialisation and its rationalisation of labour; also the
‘rationalisation’ of nature through the natural sciences..they believe that they grasp nature by
reason and mathematics;
(slide)
By rationalisation, Weber referred to a ‘set of interrelated social processes by which the
modern world had been systematically transformed’. Or to phrase it otherwise, rationalisation
refers to a process in which an increasing number of social actions become based on
considerations of teleoigical efficiency or rational calculation rather than rather than on
motivations derived from morality, custom or tradition.
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Weber saw this process going on in all areas of his contemporary life; he perceived what he
described a ‘disenchantment of modern life’. For example he saw the rise of capitalist society
as an illustration of this general pattern of rationalisation. As a social process, rationalisation
includes the systematic application of scientific reason to the everyday world and the
intellectualisation of routine activities through the application of systematic knowledge to
practice. Rationalisation. more generally, in everyday life was also associated with the
disenchantment of reality, that is the secularisation of values and attitudes. In institutional
terms, this process involved the decline of the authority of the Church, and the erosion of the
status of the clergy. In religious terms, rationalisation involved the development of the
intellectual stratum of theologians who produced religious thought as a systematic statement
about reality. Within the political sphere, it was associated, with the decline and disappearance
of traditional norms of legitimicay, such as the dependence upon charismatic leadership of kings
for example. In social terms, generally, rationalisation was constituted by the spread of
bueurocratic control, the establishment of modern systems of surveillance, the dependence on the
nation-state as a controlling agency and the rise of new forms of administration. Rationalisation
as a master theme in Weber’s work has therefore often been compared with the themes of
‘alienation’ and ‘estrangement’ in the work of Marx, the other great German thinker on
capitalism. (I’ll come back to this relationship at the end of my talk.)
The question of ‘rationalisation’ is key in his Protestant ethics.
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The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism is Weber’s most famous as well as most
controversial book. In it he traces the influence of religious ideas and beliefs upon the conduct of
men and challenges the Marxist thesis that man’s consciousness is determined by his class
(relationship to the economic forces). It was first published in 1905 and 1904 as a series of
essays, and, although subsequently it came out in book (1920) form remained a fragment. Instead
of completing his investigations of Protestantism, Weber began a comparative analysis of urban
communities and of political organisations as well as a study of the relation between religion and
society. These wide ranging studies had the common purpose of defining and explaining the
distinguished characteristics of Western civisliaation. The protestant ethics was destined to serve
as an introduction to this major theme of Weber’s life work, a specification of the interrelation of
religious ideas and economic behavior.
Weber starts off the book by explaining tendencies in the society of his time that appear typical
and universal.

He observed a general resistance to personal subservience, reflecting a decline in kinship
solidarity

And that economic conduct seemed to possess an ethical content of its own.
Weber argues that the idea of hard work as a duty that carries its own intrinsic reward is a typical
attribute of man in modern capitalist world. A man should work well in his gainful occupation,
not merely because he had to but because he wanted to; it was a sign of his virtue and a source of
personal satisfaction. ‘it is an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel
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towards the content of his occupational activity, no matter in what is consists’, Weber argues.
Hard work is a virtue and hence a moral obligation. It is these ideas and habits that favor a
rational pursuit of economic gain, in fact, it stands at the basis of what Weber comes to call
‘rational capitalism’.
There are other forms of capitalism all over the world and he lables them as you
remember in his book: The ‘booty capitalism of robber barons, the pariah capitalism of general
commercial activity encouraged by usury; the traditional capitalism of large-scale undertakings.
But only the form of ‘rational capitalism’, characterised by a systematic pursuit of profit through
the employment of free labour, and the combination of a disciplined labour force, and the regular
investment of capital is a Western phenomenon. Only in the West argues Weber can we find the
accumulation of capital for its own sake. Now, how do we come to this ‘rational capitalism’?Th
accumulsyion of capital for its own sake.
Now, for Weber it had to do with the development of a certain moral attitude, which considered
‘work as a moral obligation’. This maxim represents the ‘modern spirit of capitalism’ for him.
Of course, he said, in its modern form this spirit of capitalism is devoid of all higher
transcendental purpose. Orginally, however, he reminds us, this spirit had profound religious
significance. It has religiously grounded. It was to this religious past of the ‘capitalistic spirit’
that Weber turned his attention to in the book you’ve read. And he looked for its origin in the
religious ideas of the Reformation.
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In his books he talks you through why he things there is a good reason to do so ( talks you
through what was perceived as almost a commonplace at this time)
a) astute observers, particularly in the eighteenth and 19th century had argued for a close
affinity between Protestantism and the development of commerical spirit.
b) In some instances the protestant aptitude for commerce and industry had become an
article of secular policy. A good example was Prussian which ‘important’ Protestants
from other countries in which they were prosecuted to do economic trading.
c) Weber made his own students investigate the relation between religious affiliation and
educational choices in the state of Baden. It showed statistically that Protestants appeared
to be more ready than Catholics to choose highter education which resulted in better jobs
and higher earnings.
d) Some protestant sects are proverbials for their wealth.
Weber sets out to solve what he saw as a paradox. He wanted to show how certain types of
Protestantism became a fountainhead of incentives that favoured the rational pursuit of economic
gain. Worldly activities had been given positive spiritual and moral meaning during the
Reformation. Strangely however at recisely a time in which economic gain was officially
desposed by all religious leaders. In order to understand this paradox Weber believed it necessary
to analyse certain theological doctrines of the Reformation.
Now, none of the great Reformers had any thought of ‘promoting the spirit of capitalism’ of
course but Weber aimed to show that their doctrines nevertheless contained incentives in this
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direction. And he particular was interested in Calvinism and its doctrine of predestination,
according to which each individual’s state of grace was determined by God’s inexorable choice,
from the creation of the world and for all times. It as impossible for the individual to whom it had
been granted to lose God’s grace as it was for the individual to whom it had been denied to attain
it. John Calvin who figure that out, claimed that we can only know that some men are safed and
the rest are damned. However, we can never know who the chosen person is! That is the trick.
Weber believed now that this ‘message’ that the ordinary man was bound to feel profoundly
troubled by a doctrine that did not permit any outward sign of his state of grace and that imparted
to the image of God such terrifying majesty that He transcended all human entreaty and
comprehension. Before his God, man stood alone. The priest could not help because the elect
could understand the work of God only in their own hearts. Sacraments could not help because
their strict observance was not a means of attaining grace. Calvin had taught that one must find
solace solely on the basis of the true faith. Each man was duty-bound to consider himself chosen
and to reject all doubt as a temptation of the devil. A lack of self-confidence was interpreted as a
sigh of insufficient faith. To attain that self-confidence, unceasing work in a calling was
recommended. By his unceasing activity in the service of God, the believer strengthened hs selfconfidence as the active tool of the divine will.
This idea implied a tremendous tension: Calvinism had eliminated all magical means of attaining
salvation. In the absense of such means the believer could not hope to atone for hours of
weakness or of thoughtlessnesss by increased good will at other times…There was no place for
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the very human Catholic cycle of sin, repentance, atonement, release, followed by renewed sin
…The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic
character …Only a life guided by constant ‘thought’ could achieve conquest over the state of
human sinful nature. It was this rationalisation, which gave the Reformed Calvinist faith its
peculiar ascetic tendency …(ciritque: W inferred a psychological condition – the feeling of
religious anxiety – from an analysis of doctrines and institutions.)
And it was this ascetic tendency that explained for Weber the affinity between Calvinism
and the ‘spirit of capitalism’.
He demonstrated how Calvinism doctrines provided effective incentives for the layman by
examining pastoral writings of Puritan divines such as the English Richard Baxter or the works
of Benjamin Franklin. They praise work as a defense against all such temptations as religious
doubt, the sense of unworthiness, or sexual desires. In this negative sense the praise of work gave
rise to a detailed code of conduct. To waste time is a deadly sin, for the span of life is too short
and prescious and man must use his every minute to serve the greater glory of God and make
sure of his ‘election’. What developed was an ethic of unremitting commitment to a worldly
calling/duty/task (the workd and role one was called by God to fulfil). Economic productivity
was higher in Protestant communicities than it was in Catholics, even in modern times, because it
was the practical result of such old ethical beliefs and practices, Weber said. The most rapid
possible accumulation of capital was the sign of the elect.
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In his Protestant ethic Weber did not go substantially beyond the analysis of theological doctrines
and pastoral writings. He aimed to show that the inherent logic of these doctrines and of the
advice based upon them both directly and indicrectly encouraged planning and self-denial in the
pursiuit of economic gain.
He stated that he investigated specifically:
(image) ….whether and at what points certain ‘elective affinities’ are discernible between
particular types of religious beliefs and the ethics of work-a-day life. By virtue of such
affinities the religious movements have influenced the development of material culture,
and (an analysis of these affinities) will clarify as far as possible the manner and the
general direction (of that influence)…We are interested in ascertaining those
psychological impulses which originated in religious belief and the practice of religion,
gave direction to the individual’s everyday way of life and prompted to adhere to it’.
It is important to point out that all this was the unintional consequence of claims that
dedication to a calling (Beruf) was a path to God’s favour and grace, as was thriftiness in
consumption. Over the centuries the religious aspect of this ethical ‘calllig’ got lost but it
continues to shaped people’s behaviors. The bourgois classes, Weber claimed, in the West have
accumilated tremendous wealth, due to this specific ascetic attitude to life. Webers famously
coins the saying that it had become our ‘iron cage’, from which we can never escape and which
keeps us going on like a hamster in its wheel.
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Weber and critics of Protestant ethics:
Weber has been actively misunderstood or perhaps to frame it more positivity creatively
misunderstood.
To broad, too superficial etc…however they disgergard that Weber although using really
characters such as the seventeenth century Richard Baxton, he describes so-called ‘ideal-types’.
Weber’s thought from 1949 (Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences) an idealtype is a : (image)
Term used by Max Weber to denote entities (including types of action, societies,
institutions) as constructed `hypothetically’ by an investigator from component .
The elements out of which a `type’ is constructed are either empirically
observable or historically recognised. The ideal is not a norm or an average; it is
rather a construction that emphasises certain characteristics (of actions, societies,
institutions, persons) that can be combined to form a coherent whole, or
description.
(Scotland Calvinism cited to proof that he was wrong; but Weber used it as a tool to
accommodate the infinited complexity of reality. The institutions and individuals he describes
only tend towards rather than embody the hypothetical ideal: Baxter is the ‘ideal type’ of
Calvinism; Benjamin Franklin the ideal type of capitalist. Neither embodies the whole
complexity)
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In my view, the reason why Weber thinking is often misunderstood particularly in the
English speaking world, is that one take not into account the intellectual framework in which he
worked. In a way he suffers the same fate as Ranke who worked in very much the same
framework of neo-Kantian German idealism. Especially important to Weber's work is the belief
that reality is essentially chaotic and incomprehensible. All rational order derives from the way in
which the human mind focuses its attention on certain aspects of reality and organises the
resulting perceptions. (ideal-types is understood in this wider belief). Reality for Weber is
inaccessible, what we see and experience is human rationality. Weber’s work also has be
understood within the historicist world of late 19th/20th century Germany. His works are
histories because I’ve said in my Ranke lecture, educated Germans at the time believed that
history – the supreme science at the time -- offered the key to the understanding of the present.
He also subscribed to the distinction between the methods of the natural sciences – looking for
laws – and those of the histories and other humanities – which investigated and explained the
unique actions of humans in the past.
This is why Weber did not go down the way as other scholars at the time – also celebrated as
fathers of sociology such as the French Emile Durkheim who focused on society as a whole and
tried to detect general patterns, if not laws. (Emile Durkheim set up the first deparment of
‘sociology’ at the university of Bordeaux in 1895; the term has been coined by August Compte in
1824 and made more avaible in his Compte’s Cours de philosophie positive) Weber was more
focused on individuals and their action. He also differs from Karl Marx – who some scholars
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argue is the true father of sociology. Marx argues, as we have seen for the primacy of the material
world over the world of ideas, Weber valued ideas as motivating actions of individuals and in the
material production of culture, as we have seen in the Protestant Ethics.
Sociology, for Max Weber, (image)
...a science which attempts the interpretive understanding of social action in order
thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects.’
And social action he defines as follows: (same image)
Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the
acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behaviour of others
and is therefore oriented in its course. (1922)
He therefore turns against the attempt made to analyse culture ‘objectively
(image)
There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture... All knowledge of
cultural reality... is always knowledge from particular points of view. ... an "objective"
analysis of cultural events, which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science
is the reduction of empirical reality to "laws," is meaningless... [because]... the knowledge
of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one of the various aids used
by our minds for attaining this end. Max Weber, "Objectivity" in Social Science, 1897
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What is useful about him now?
Process of rationalisation as a major trend in capitalism is still very useful, even if postmodern
writers such as Anthony Giddens – recently famously involved in the LSE scandal about bribrary
from Libya –think he is passé. Giddens argues that postmodernity – its global approach -- is a
complelt different socity and cannot be analysed with Weber’s tools. I see no reason why. Also,
can’t we not all see a moralisation of ‘work’. Ony those who work are good british citizens?
Individuals like Sir Ian Surgar are celelbrated as examples of ‘the capitalist spirit’, always
working, risking, putting everything behind their work. Appauling treatment of others is
considered good practice in the ‘accumulation of wealth’. I think there are many ways we can see
Weber’s ideas still floating around.
What I particularl like is his doom and gloom of capitalism. While both saw capitalism as
ultimatively destrutive of human life, Marx believed in a glorious future once the revolution was
there, Weber saw no escape of it. (image). After the collapse of the communists regimes and he
recent crisis of capitalism he might be after all the one who was right when he said about
capitalism and its tendencies to rationalise human life
How is it at all possible to salvage any remnants of 'individual' freedom of
movement in any sense given this (capitalism) all-powerful trend?
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Why should is be important now? How does it fit into what we’ve done so far.
I’ve said in the beginning that Weber’s Protestant Ethics wished to bring back thought and idea
into the explanation of human action, particular into the explanation of Western rational
capitalism. With this Weber explored other avenue than Marxist scholars. Indeed have claimed
that it was direct attack on Marxist explanations of historical development.
However, there were many affinities. For example, they both deeply disliked and were suspicious
of modern forms of capitalis. They both shared interest in the problem of ‘man’ or ‘human
nature’ in bourgois capitalism. They both saw it as a destrutive system that destroyed human
nature. In fact Weber is much more pessimistic if you like than Marx as he does not believe in
revolutions but an ever titenting of the iron cage which, through time, would leave less and less
freedom for the the individual. In contrast to Marxism, Weber – and also in conrast to other
sociologies of his time e.g. Durkheim -- he focussed on the individual. (However, since the
demise of Marxism, the debate between the differences between Marx and Weber, which have
often dominated the discussion became quiet.)
Scholars began to investigate Webers’ relation to wider the cultural critique of late nineteenthcentury German society in which many more intellectual participated and raised their voices, in
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particular I am thinking here the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. They lived through a time in
which the mentality of the professional specialist was beginning to dominate cultural debate and
ascetic appreciation. Weber himself underline many times that the danger of the modern world
was characterised by the expanding rationalisation, which resulted, he claimed, in religious and
moral disenchantment. In short, scholars have begun to focus on Weber and the more general
questions of ‘modernity’ (not socialism anymore). However, we are living in postmodern
conditions. Therefore some scholars – Anthony Giddens or Ulrich Beck have claimed that we
have to go beyond Weber, that he can tell us nothing about our lives now. We need a new
theoretical paradigm they’ve claimed. They’ve claimed that Weber focussed on the national state
and does not offer our globalised conditions. Scholars who are wedded to postmodern ideas
claimed similar things.
I personally think he is highly interesting, partly because of his pessimistic view. Capitalism has
shown and will show even more in the future his ugly face. Even more than ever we’ll forced to
deny any other human emotion than ‘work’, now we have to do two jobs or even three to come
by but we have to do this happily...in fact, in fact we come to believe that it is sooo cool. In times
of ‘austerity’ we have even less right to enjoy life other than through work. People who don’t
work – by choice or by sheer inability to find work – are austracied by the government and each
of us. They are morally in the wrong and can be shunned by all of us. The super rich – and
remember that they are all sitting in the government – do not like to display their wealth, not a
good thin to do because that is morally not good to display. So, all goverments in Uk pretend to
be frugal, to be in service of work. In fact, there is a new campaign planned how to instill
ambition back into Uk citizens, how to be more efficient to be more productive and more money
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is spend to increasing administration to work out plans that we behave that way. The iron cage is
getting smaller and smaller.
is not much studied by modern sociologists. Weber is presented to modern sociology students as
a sociologist of religion (comparative religion) and as a theorist of social action. `Social Action’
is an important concept in modern sociological analysis. This is what Weber said about it.
Action is social in so far as, by virtue of the subjective meaning attached to it by the
acting individual (or individuals), it takes account of the behaviour of others
and is
therefore oriented in its course.
Note the focus on `society’/`the social’ … What makes something social? How do you define
and describe `society’? Also note the emphasis on subjective experience. Weber appears to be
saying that subjective experience is as important as the subject’s `reading ‘ of other people ‘s
experience. What sociologists mean when they talk of `social action’, varies enormously. But
whatever the variation, the term is inextricably bound up with Weber’s work. Weber considered
the meanings that people attach to their actions in different social situations; and also the ways in
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which they anticipate what others may think and do, and how they respond accordingly. One
of Weber's key concerns was to explore an important shift in Western societies, from action
guided by tradition (by religious and other traditional values) toward modern `rational action’.
Meaning; - motivation; - what people think and have thought; - historical change in ways
of thinking; - the idea of human subjectivity; - that human action is subject to change (is
historical); that historical actors are thinking, acting agents, taking notice of others. These
are some of the key concepts in Weber’s account of societies, past and present. No wonder some
modern historians have found value in Weber’s understanding of social process, and how ideas
operate in social worlds.
Who produced this major contribution to modern sociological analysis? Max Weber was
born in 1864 to a bourgeois family in the Hanseatic town of Erfurt. The family had made its
fortune in the linen trade. Why mention the Hanseatic League, a powerful trading alliance
between Northern European cities that existed between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries?
Because biographers and other commentators on Weber make quite a bit of Weber’s upbringing
in this mercantile town. Intellectual biographies of Weber also describe him as engaged in a kind
of emotional tug-of-war between intellectual (university) life, and business. His original careerplan had been to become a commercial lawyer. In 1893 he was appointed to a temporary
lectureship in jurisprudence at the University of Berlin. He was made full professor in political
economy at Freiburg University in 1895, and then, in the following year (1896), at Heidelberg.
This was a meteoric academic career; but it didn’t last very long. His doctoral thesis (PhD) had
been on the agrarian history of ancient Rome. His post-doctoral thesis (not something that has
ever pertained in the UK) was about the evolution of medieval trading societies. He did work in
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what we would now call the field of economic history. During these academic years he also
wrote a comprehensive analysis of the agrarian problems of eastern Germany. He did this for the
Union for Social Policy (this was an academic society). He wrote essays on the German stock
exchange, and (a very different topic) the economic and social decline of the Roman Empire.
Weber was politically active in the 1890s, belonging to a left-liberal organisation called the
Protestant Social Union. Then: death of father (1897); nervous breakdown; often in hospital
between 1897-1903; travel for recuperation … He breaks cycle of depression and anxiety in 1903
and started to work again. In 1907 he inherited a considerable private fortune; and longer
needed paid work; in fact he didn’t teach again until after the First World War. So he became
what we now call `an independent scholar’. But that was not at all unusual. Most `great
thinkers’ of the nineteenth century did their work outside the academy. As did Darwin; as did
Karl Marx (living off his journalism, and subventions from his friend Frederick Engels); as did
Sigmund Freud (who supported his family out of fees he charged his patients.) By becoming
`independent’, Weber was only unusual in the context of the German system, not in the context
of European, or Western, intellectual life. Most of the nineteenth-century ideas that shaped
modernity were developed by non academics, or `independent scholars’.
A life-long fascination of Weber’s was the emergence of Protestant and Puritan England
and North America. He was particularly interest in the economic structures of these societies. If
you search on-line biographies, or read Joachim Radkau’s new account of Weber’s life, you may
notice how frequently his intellectual and academic interests are attributed to the circumstances
of his childhood, and to the religiously divided household in which he grew up. His mother,
Helene Weber, had herself been raised in Calvinist orthodoxy (or: for those of you who have
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already forgotten your Early Modern religious history, an extreme form of Protestantism, that
stressed the difference between predestination (being saved), and the role of good works in
earning salvation). A Puritan morality guided Helene Weber’s life and mothering. She became
estranged from her husband, particularly shocked at his inability to share her prolonged grief at
the death of two of their children, and a very long illness of young Max. I’m only telling a
personal story of the origins of Weber’s ideas because that’s what they all do. Twenty years ago,
a woman’s thought and writing was frequently traced back to childhood experience; men’s
rarely was. Now all sorts of male thinker are given a childhood by their biographers. Historians
and biographers do this because they want to tell a life, in a historical context, in a particular
way. I’m alerting you to the ways in which all sorts of idea - including historical ideas - are
mediated by modern scholars.
Next: Max Weber: contemporary context: Weber on religion: Weber’s academic interest in
religion and religious identity may equally well have originated during the Kulturkampf (struggle
over culture; Culture Wars) of the 1870s and 1880s. Under Bismarck there was an on-going
struggle between the Roman Catholic Church and the German government for control over
school and ecclesiastical appointments, and civil marriage. Another way of putting this, is that a
contemporary conflict between secular and religious authority shaped Weber’s view of religion
in society, past and present. Weber himself was almost certainly agnostic, but very sensitive
indeed to tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism, and even more sensitive to tensions
within German Protestantism, especially between Calvinism and Lutheranism. His years of
illness and despair led him to develop a series brilliant insights into the relationship of Calvinist
morality and compulsive work, and into the relationship between various religious beliefs and
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social and economic behaviour. Most of Weber's most important work appeared in the sixteen
years between the worst part of his illness and his death.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was written as two linked journal
articles in 1904-5, and appeared as a book in 1920. The connections Weber made between
economic success and Protestantism were in fact, a commonplace of late nineteenth century
social inquiry. What Weber did was provide new and striking explanations for a connection that
was taken for granted. He asked a familiar question: why did Protestants dominate the modern
economy?; - then he used evidence from the past to answer it. He noted (as so many other late
nineteenth-century scholars had) the statistical correlation between success in capitalist ventures
in Germany, and Protestant background and culture (as in the long history of the Hanseatic
trading communities of his native Thuringia). Then he attributed the relationship between
capitalist success and Protestantism to the unintended psychological consequences of the
Calvinist faith. What he highlighted in particular were notions of predestination and the calling
in Puritan theology. These were promulgated with the greatest logical severity by Calvin and his
followers. (Jean Calvin [1509-1564] theologian of the Protestant Reformation). Weber’s book
contains many examples of such prescriptions dating from the sixteenth century, as they were felt
and used by living men and women: Weber presented religious ideas in action, in individual
lives. In the theology of Calvin and his followers, the doctrine of predestination invested God
with such omniscience that sinful human beings could not know either to whom God had
extended the grace of salvation, or why He had done so. In Weber’s account, this doctrine
imposed a severe psychological insecurity on Calvininists. They sought signs that might indicate
the divine will. What developed was an ethic of unremitting commitment to a worldly
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calling/duty/task (the work and the role that one was called to fulfil). Any lapse would indicate
doubts about one's state of grace. Enjoyment of the profit reaped from such labours was not the
point. Ascetic abstinence from pleasure was the norm across Calvinist communities. Economic
productivity was higher in Protestant communities than it was in Catholic ones, for the practical
result of such beliefs and practices was, Weber said, the most rapid possible accumulation of
capital.
The book (or the two original articles) were a kind of pilot project for a wider
comparative sociology of religion. Weber acknowledged that Calvinist Protestantism was not the
only factor in the development of capitalism, but deliberately decided to treat it in isolation.
(This was a pilot study, after all.) Weber concluded that the idea of `capitalist accumulation’ (the
accumulation of profit as a good in itself) was shaped by the Protestant Ethic. This was not
because Calvinist and other Protestant doctrines condoned acquisitiveness (in fact, quite the
opposite). Rather, acquisitiveness (the desire to accumulate more and more) was an unintended
consequence of claims that dedication to a calling (Beruf) was a path to God’s favour and grace,
as was thriftiness in consumption.
Weber presents a picture of men and women (actually, all his examples are male)
attempting to alleviate the unbearable spiritual burdens and loneliness of their faith. In doing so,
they helped create the enormous edifice of modern economic life: the way we live now (`now’ in
1900; now in 2010). In chapter 5 of The Protestant Ethic Weber discusses the psychology of
men like the seventeenth-century English divine, Richard Baxter. Weber writes that if you
peruse Baxter’s sermons and spiritual writings, you find Baxter saying that desire and care for
material goods - for things - should only lie on the shoulders `like a light cloak, which can be
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thrown aside at any moment’. That’s what Baxter actually wrote. Weber adds: `But fate decreed
that the cloak should become an iron cage’. If you read The Protestant Ethic as a story, then it is
an unbearably sad one, about the psychological and spiritual fate of numberless Western men and
women from the early modern period up to the present day.
We can now introduce ourselves to another sociological concept developed by Weber.
We have social action in place. Now for ideal-type. This was a term used by Weber in his later
writing. It is used in The Protestant Ethic several times. But I have chosen a definition taken
from a book about social-science methodology, published in 1949 - because I want to indicate the
ways in which Weber was - and is - understood to have contributed to sociological method, and
to point to the flurry of attention to Weber in the mid-twentieth century, following the translation
of his work into English. As you can see from a guide to Weber’s thought from 1949 (Max
Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences) an ideal-type is a :
Term used by Max Weber to denote entities (including types of action, societies,
institutions) as constructed `hypothetically’ by an investigator from component
elements, with a view to making comparisons and developing theoretical explanations.
The elements out of which a `type’ is constructed are either empirically observable or historically
recognised. The ideal is not a norm or an
average; it is rather a construction that emphasises certain characteristics (of
actions, societies, institutions, persons) that can be combined to form a coherent
whole, or description.
On the one hand, this is a wonderfully useful concept, engaging in its simplicity and ease of
application. Eight year olds doing their history projects in a primary-school classroom, have not,
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of course, heard of Max Weber; but they know that the Stone Age Man, or the Stone Age
Woman they are drawing and writing about, is a type: that He, or She, never actually existed as a
person: that He or She is made up `from component elements’ of prehistoric culture, combined to
form `a coherent whole, or description’(or a drawing in a project book). On the other hand, the
ideal-type as used in The Protestant Ethic is complicated, and perhaps contradictory for many
historians. For Richard Baxter - and all the other writers and diary-keepers of the English
seventeenth-century cited by Weber, like John Bunyan, and John Milton - were actually-existing
persons, who wrote texts (produced documents) that we are used to treating as evidence in
particular ways. The historical jury is out on the question of how you actually use Milton’s
Paradise Lost in analysing the cultural aftermath of the English Civil War. But no historian
would find it strange to add Milton’s epic poem to the pile of documents used in this endeavour.
Milton was `real’, his existence is verifiable; we have many documents and sources that
emanated from his pen. He is not an ideal-type for the historian. Does this matter? I think that
this conundrum in sociological method and historical method is really worth pursuing.
Round about p. 90 (Chapter 3) of the Protestant Ethic when Weber is already deep into a
discussion of Luther he writes about how he wants his book to be read. He hopes that it will be
seen as a `modest ... contribution’ to many other scholars’ attempts to understand `the manner in
which ideas become effective forces in history'. The project seems so strikingly modern on first
reading: to understand how ideas become social forces ... . And then: what does he mean? Did
he mean: How did ideas (about salvation, predestination etc) become active in the social worlds
of the past? What is this `history’ in which ideas come to operate? Did Weber mean `The
manner in which ideas became effective forces in the past’? Now, at the beginning of the
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twenty-first century it is conventional use the distinction between The Past, and History; between
The Past - Everything that has ever happened -; and History, which is a selection from
Everything, usually made by a historian, to produce an explanation of a series of events, and
usually written down. I am most at ease with the interpretation `The manner in which ideas
became effective forces in the past’. I think it a great and important project, and think it describes
what many modern historian do.
The idea with which Weber was most concerned, was capitalism - which was and is, both
an idea and a social form. He was absolutely clear that his focus was the West, and Western
ideas. The book opens with a declaration (in the Introduction), that he the writer, Weber, is `a
product of Western civilisation’, studying universal history. He will ask what `combination of
circumstances’ led to the subject under scrutiny (capitalism); what `cultural phenomena’ have
appeared `in Western civilisation only’, and that can be used to explain `the spirit of capitalism’.
He believes that this Western cultural phenomenon (capitalism) has universal significance; but he
is quite clear that his focus is the West; developments elsewhere will be treated as comparisons.
He will use a comparative method. Weber then, announces The Subject of Europe, a phrase with
which we will become familiar, when next term we consider the work of Michel Foucault and
Edward Said, and the impact it has had on history-writing in general, and the development of
global history in particular. Here and now (in 1904-5, or in 1920) Weber’s Subject is Europe.
He will stand in Europe, and consider the rest of the world. Europe is his standpoint.
How does Weber proceed, then, as a historian of Western civilisation, and the ideas that
shaped it? He uses the divisions The East and The West. He asks for example, what has
distinguished Europe from India and China. He readily accedes that forms of capitalism did
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develop in East; but focuses on the factors that produced European/Western capitalism: nonhousehold production; urbanisation; legal systems that supported the acquisition of capital; he
focuses on the development of `rational’ bureaucracies across Europe; he describes the erosion of
serfdom, and the evolution of free wage-labour (men and women `free’ to sell their labour on the
open market). All of these factors made the West conducive to `rational’ capitalism - created an
environment in which it flourished. Of course, there are many types of capitalism, and Weber
describes them: `booty capitalism’: wealth and riches acquired by plunder, war, and illegal,
speculative adventure; `pariah capitalism’, an example of which is money-lending, carried on by
social groups outside the mainstream. `Traditional capitalism’ is observed in all societies, in the
remotest of times, for instance, large-scale manufacturing enterprises that serve limited purposes.
But Rational Capitalism is Weber’s subject: rational capitalism is the `systematic pursuit of
profit by means of continuous rational enterprise’. And he claims that it is Western.
He pursued the origins of Western, rational capitalism in the ways we have seen. The
novelty and importance of his approach lay in an analysis of the way in which the relationship
between religious belief and capitalism actually worked. He shows how `inner worldly
asceticism’, and the values of industry, thrift and sobriety, were part of the psychology of Richard
Baxter, for example; or Benjamin Franklin in the new USA. He uses literature (proto-novels,
poetry, religious autobiography) as evidence of this psychology. He introduced the idea of the
unintended consequences of beliefs and behaviours. The unintended consequence of Protestant
belief-systems was the creation of wealth.
Read the last sentence of The Protestant Ethic. Weber emphasises his determination not
to offer a one-dimensional account; he did not intend to offer a one-sided spiritual explanation,
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to replace a one-sided materialist explanation, for the development of capitalism and Western
civilisation. But Weber was actively misunderstood, particularly on this point The second part
of the Handout sketches out the fate of the Weberian thesis in the years after 1920.