Max Weber
1864-1920
Bureaucratic Management
Max Weber is best known as one of the
leading scholars and founders of modern sociology, but Weber also
accomplished much economic work in the style of the "youngest" German
Historical School.
Although Weber and Sombart are often lumped together as part of that
generation in German economics, no two men could be less alike. The
superficial, fanciful and Kaiser-worshipping Sombart was nothing like
the thorough, rational and Kaiser-despising Weber. Nonetheless, while
Weber was not completely immune from German nationalism, he was just not
the military-imperial jingoist Sombart was. Weber firmly believed that
the Herrenvolk should circumscribe their ambitions.
That personal attitude was reflected in
his most famous economic work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (1905). In it, Weber argued that the presumed anti-capitalist
Puritanical rhetoric of eschewing earthly acquisitiveness was actually
an impetus for that very acquisitiveness. The thesis was novel and
well-known. Catholicism, Weber argues, was tolerant towards the
acquisition of earthly gain and winked at lavish expenditure, an idea
engendered by hierarchical structure of the Church (which required
struggling and jockeying for "position") as well as its own tradition of
lavish expenditure (the church) and its oft-used earthly powers of
forgiveness for sin. This might make one conclude that the Catholic
ethic was more predisposed towards capitalism than the Protestant (as
others, before and since, have argued).
But no, replied Weber. It is true that
the Protestant doctrines asked men to accept a humbler station and
concentrate on mundane tasks and duties and, without a hierarchical
church structure, there was no example of upward-mobility,
acquisitiveness and expenditure. Yet it was precisely this that
engendered the "work-and-save" ethic that gave rise to capitalism.
Dedication to and pride in one's work, Weber claimed, is inevitably a
highly productive attitude. The Calvinist ethic of "godliness" through
the humble dedication to one's beruf (calling/duty/task), meant economic
productivity was consequently higher in Protestant communities. In
contrast, the upward-mobility that was possible in hierarchical Catholic
society meant that a lot of people found themselves in jobs which they
saw only as way-stations to higher and better positions - thereby
dedicating only a minimal or nominal attention to the given task as
finding it either beneath their dignity or certainly not worth resigning
to as their end in life. Consequently, Weber concluded, Catholic
communities tended to be less productive.
The higher productivity of Protestant
communities was coupled with higher thriftiness. The sinfulness of
expenditure and lavish display of earthly goods was a notable Protestant
principle. So too was it Catholic, but the Catholic Church had been more
prepared to forgive these (and other) sins. The Protestant church had no
such power and thus the inducement to the faithful to stay modest in
consumption was high. Yet the higher productivity of the Protestant
essentially meant that they earned more than the Catholic, and yet
because they saved more, they essentially accumulated; the Catholic was
less productive but spent more.
Thus, Weber concluded, the idea of
"capitalist accumulation" was born directly out of the Protestant ethic
- not because the Protestant churches and doctrines condoned
acquisitiveness as such (quite the contrary), but rather quite
inadvertently through its claim to productive dedication to beruf and
thriftiness in consumption. The subsequent ethical "legitimization" of
capitalist acquisitiveness in later society under the rubric of "greed
is good" was simply a distorted statement of what was already a fact. In
no sense, claimed Weber, is the capitalist ethic of "greed" the creator
of "capitalist society" (however much it might later be a propagator),
but, rather, quite the opposite.
Weber's 1905 thesis (echoed independently by R.H. Tawney) was naturally
quickly disputed and has since been more or less discredited as a
"complete" theory of the rise of the capitalism. Whatever the case, it
certainly engendered much debate.
Weber's other main contributions to
economics (as well as to social sciences in general) was his work on
methodology. There are two aspects to this: his theory of Verstehen, or
"Interpretative" Sociology and his theory of positivism.
His Verstehen doctrine is as well-known
as it is controversial and debated. His main thesis is that social,
economic and historical research can never be fully inductive or
descriptive as one must/should/does always approach it with a conceptual
apparatus. This apparatus Weber identified as the "Ideal Type". The idea
was essentially this: to try to understand a particular economic or
social phenomena, one must "interpret" the actions of its participants
and not only describe them. But interpretation poses us a problem for we
cannot know it other than by trying to classify behavior as belonging to
some prior "Ideal Type". Weber gave us four categories of "Ideal Types"
of behavior: zweckrational (rational means to rational ends),
wertrational (rational means to irrational ends), affektual (guided by
emotion) and traditional (guided by custom or habit).
Weber admitted employing "Ideal Types"
was an abstraction but claimed it was nonetheless essential if one were
to understand any particular social phenomena for, unlike physical
phenomena, it involved human behavior which must be
understood/interpreted by ideal types. Economists prick up your ears -
for here is the methodological justification for the assumption of
"rational economic man"!
Weber's work on positivism or rather
his controversial belief in "value-free" social science, is also still
debated. While his arguments in this respect were not novel, they did
signal a complete and forceful break with Schmoller and the "Young"
Historical School.
Weber's other contributions to
economics were several: these include a (seriously researched) economic
history of Roman agrarian society (his 1891 habilitiation), his work on
the dual roles of idealism and materialism in the history of capitalism
in his Economy and Society (1914), present Weber on his anti-Marxian
run. Finally, his thoroughly researched General Economic History (1923)
is perhaps the Historical School at its empirical best.
Max Weber's position as an economist
has been debated, and indeed, it is generally accepted now that it is in
sociology that his impact was greatest. However, he comes at the end of
the German Historical School where no such distinctions really existed
and thus must be seen as an "economist" in that light.
Major Works of Max Weber
* Roman Agrarian History, 1891.
* "Roscher and Knies and the Logical Problem of Historical
Economics", 1903-5, Schmoller's Jahrbuch.
* "The Objectivity of the Sociological and Social-Political
Knowledge", 1904, .
* The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905.
* Economy and Society, 1914.
* "Politics as a Vocation", 1918.
* General Economic History, 1923.
* The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 1949.
Max Weber
Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (21
April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German political economist and
sociologist who was considered one of the founders of the modern study
of sociology and public administration. He began his career at the
University of Berlin, and later worked at Freiburg University,
University of Heidelberg, University of Vienna and University of Munich.
He was influential in contemporary German politics, being an advisor to
Germany's negotiators at the Treaty of Versailles and to the commission
charged with drafting the Weimar Constitution.
Weber's major works deal with rationalization in sociology of religion
and government. His most famous work is his essay The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, which began his work in the sociology of
religion. In this work, Weber argued that religion was one of the
non-exclusive reasons for the different ways the cultures of the
Occident and the Orient have developed, and stressed importance of
particular characteristics of ascetic Protestantism which led to the
development of capitalism, bureaucracy and the rational-legal state in
the West. In another major work, Politics as a Vocation, Weber defined
the state as an entity which claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of
physical force, a definition that became pivotal to the study of modern
Western political science. His most known contributions are often
referred to as the 'Weber Thesis'.
Biography of Max Weber
Weber was born in Erfurt in Thuringia, Germany, the eldest of seven
children of Max Weber Sr., a prominent liberal politician and civil
servant, and Helene Fallenstein, a moderate Calvinist. Weber Sr.'s
engagement with public life immersed the family home in politics, as his
salon received many prominent scholars and public figures.
The young Weber and his brother Alfred, who also became a sociologist
and economist, thrived in this intellectual atmosphere. Max's 1876
Christmas presents to his parents, when he was thirteen years old, were
two historical essays entitled "About the course of German history, with
special reference to the positions of the emperor and the pope" and
"About the Roman Imperial period from Constantine to the migration of
nations". At the age of fourteen, he wrote letters studded with
references to Homer, Virgil, Cicero, and Livy, and he had an extended
knowledge of Goethe, Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer before he began
university studies. It seemed clear that Weber would pursue advanced
studies in the social sciences.
In 1882 Weber enrolled in the University of Heidelberg as a law student.
Weber joined his father's duelling fraternity, and chose as his major
study Weber Sr.'s field of law. Along with his law coursework, young
Weber attended lectures in economics and studied medieval history and
theology. Intermittently, he served with the German army in Strasbourg.
In the autumn of 1884, Weber returned to his parents' home to study at
the University of Berlin. For the next eight years of his life,
interrupted only by a term at the University of Goettingen and short
periods of further military training, Weber stayed at his parents'
house; first as a student, later as a junior barrister, and finally as a
Dozent at the University of Berlin. In 1886 Weber passed the examination
for "Referendar", comparable to the bar association examination in the
British and American legal systems. Throughout the late 1880s, Weber
continued his study of history. He earned his law doctorate in 1889 by
writing a doctoral dissertation on legal history entitled The History of
Medieval Business Organisations. Two years later, Weber completed his
Habilitationsschrift, The Roman Agrarian History and its Significance
for Public and Private Law. Having thus become a "Privatdozent", Weber
was now qualified to hold a German professorship.
In the years between the completion of his dissertation and
habilitation, Weber took an interest in contemporary social policy. In
1888 he joined the "Verein für Socialpolitik",[6] the new professional
association of German economists affiliated with the historical school,
who saw the role of economics primarily as the solving of the
wide-ranging social problems of the age, and who pioneered large-scale
statistical studies of economic problems. He also involved himself in
politics, joining the left leaning Evangelical Social Congress.[7] In
1890 the "Verein" established a research program to examine "the Polish
question" or Ostflucht, meaning the influx of foreign farm workers into
eastern Germany as local labourers migrated to Germany's rapidly
industrialising cities. Weber was put in charge of the study, and wrote
a large part of its results. The final report was widely acclaimed as an
excellent piece of empirical research, and cemented Weber's reputation
as an expert in agrarian economics.
n 1893 he married his distant cousin Marianne Schnitger, later a
feminist and author in her own right, who was instrumental in collecting
and publishing Weber's journal articles as books after his death. The
couple moved to Freiburg in 1894, where Weber was appointed professor of
economics at Freiburg University, before accepting the same position at
the University of Heidelberg in 1896. Next year, Max Weber Sr. died, two
months after a severe quarrel with his son that was never resolved.
After this, Weber became increasingly prone to nervousness and insomnia,
making it difficult for him to fulfill his duties as a professor. His
condition forced him to reduce his teaching, and leave his last course
in the fall of 1899 unfinished. After spending months in a sanatorium
during the summer and fall of 1900, Weber and his wife traveled to Italy
at the end of the year, and did not return to Heidelberg until April
1902.
After Weber's immense productivity in the early 1890s, he did not
publish a single paper between early 1898 and late 1902, finally
resigning his professorship in fall 1903. Freed from those obligations,
in that year he accepted a position as associate editor of the Archives
for Social Science and Social Welfare next to his colleagues Edgar Jaffé
and Werner Sombart. In 1904, Weber began to publish some of his most
seminal papers in this journal, notably his essay The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism. It became his most famous work, and laid
the foundations for his later research on the impact of cultures and
religions on the development of economic systems. This essay was the
only one of his works that was published as a book during his lifetime.
Also that year, he visited United States and participated in the
Congress of Arts and Sciences held in connection with the World's Fair
(Louisiana Purchase Exposition) at St. Louis. Despite his successes,
Weber felt that he was unable to resume regular teaching at that time,
and continued on as a private scholar, helped by an inheritance in 1907.
In 1912, Weber tried to organise a left-wing political party to combine
social-democrats and liberals. This attempt was unsuccessful, presumably
because many liberals feared social-democratic revolutionary ideals at
the time.
During the First World War, Weber served for a time as director of the
army hospitals in Heidelberg. In 1915 and 1916 he sat on commissions
that tried to retain German supremacy in Belgium and Poland after the
war. Weber's views on war, as well as on expansion of the German empire,
changed throughout the war. He became a member of the worker and soldier
council of Heidelberg in 1918. In the same year, Weber became a
consultant to the German Armistice Commission at the Treaty of
Versailles and to the commission charged with drafting the Weimar
Constitution. He argued in favour of inserting Article 48 into the
Weimar Constitution. This article was later used by Adolf Hitler to
institute rule by decree, thereby allowing his government to suppress
opposition and obtain dictatorial powers. Weber's contributions to
German politics remain a controversial subject to this day.
Weber resumed teaching during this time, first at the University of
Vienna, then in 1919 at the University of Munich. In Munich, he headed
the first German university institute of sociology, but ultimately never
held a personal sociology appointment. Weber left politics due to
right-wing agitation in 1919 and 1920. Many colleagues and students in
Munich argued against him for his speeches and left-wing attitude during
the German Revolution of 1918 and 1919, with some right-wing students
holding protests in front of his home. Max Weber died of pneumonia in
Munich on June 14, 1920.
Achievements of Max Weber
Along with Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim, Weber is regarded as one of the
founders of modern sociology, although in his times he was viewed
primarily as a historian and an economist. Whereas Durkheim, following
Comte, worked in the positivist tradition, Weber created and worked –
like Werner Sombart, his friend and then the most famous representative
of German sociology – in the antipositivist, hermeneutic, tradition.
Those works started the antipositivistic revolution in social sciences,
which stressed the difference between the social sciences and natural
sciences, especially due to human social actions (which Weber
differentiated into traditional, affectional, value-rational and
instrumental). Weber's early work was related to industrial sociology,
but he is most famous for his later work on the sociology of religion
and sociology of government.
Max Weber began his studies of rationalisation in The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he shows how the aims of certain
ascetic Protestant denominations, particularly Calvinism, shifted
towards the rational means of economic gain as a way of expressing that
they had been blessed. The rational roots of this doctrine, he argued,
soon grew incompatible with and larger than the religious, and so the
latter were eventually discarded. Weber continues his investigation into
this matter in later works, notably in his studies on bureaucracy and on
the classifications of authority. In these works he alludes to an
inevitable move towards rationalization.
It should be noted that many of his works famous today were collected,
revised, and published posthumously. Significant interpretations of
Weber's writings were produced by such sociological luminaries as
Talcott Parsons and C. Wright Mills.
Sociology of religion
Weber's work on the sociology of religion started with the essay The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and continued with the
analysis of The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, The Religion
of India: The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism, and Ancient Judaism.
His work on other religions was interrupted by his sudden death in 1920,
which prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with studies of
Psalms, Book of Jacob, Talmudic Jewry, early Christianity and Islam. His
three main themes were the effect of religious ideas on economic
activities, the relation between social stratification and religious
ideas, and the distinguishable characteristics of Western civilization.
His goal was to find reasons for the different development paths of the
cultures of the Occident and the Orient, although without judging or
valuing them, like some of contemporary thinkers who followed the social
Darwinist paradigm; Weber wanted primarily to explain the distinctive
elements of the Western civilization. In the analysis of his findings,
Weber maintained that Calvinist (and more widely, Protestant) religious
ideas had had a major impact on the social innovation and development of
the economic system of Europe and the United States, but noted that they
were not the only factors in this development. Other notable factors
mentioned by Weber included the rationalism of scientific pursuit,
merging observation with mathematics, science of scholarship and
jurisprudence, rational systematisation of government administration,
and economic enterprise. In the end, the study of the sociology of
religion, according to Weber, merely explored one phase of the freedom
from magic, that "disenchantment of the world" that he regarded as an
important distinguishing aspect of Western culture.
Sociology of politics and government
In the sociology of politics and government, one of Weber's most
significant contribution is his Politics as a Vocation essay. Therein,
Weber unveils the definition of the state that has become so pivotal to
Western social thought: that the state is that entity which possesses a
monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, which it may
nonetheless elect to delegate as it sees fit. In this essay, Weber wrote
that politics is to be understood as any activity in which the state
might engage itself in order to influence the relative distribution of
force. Politics thus comes to be understood as deriving from power. A
politician must not be a man of the "true Christian ethic", understood
by Weber as being the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount, that is to say,
the injunction to turn the other cheek. An adherent of such an ethic
ought rather to be understood to be a saint, for it is only saints,
according to Weber, that can appropriately follow it. The political
realm is no realm for saints. A politician ought to marry the ethic of
ultimate ends and the ethic of responsibility, and must possess both a
passion for his avocation and the capacity to distance himself from the
subject of his exertions (the governed).
Weber distinguished three pure types of political leadership, domination
and authority: charismatic domination (familial and religious),
traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism), and legal
domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy).[43] In his view, every
historical relation between rulers and ruled contained such elements and
they can be analysed on the basis of this tripartite distinction.[44] He
also notes that the instability of charismatic authority inevitably
forces it to "routinize" into a more structured form of authority.
Likewise he notes that in a pure type of traditional rule, sufficient
resistance to a master can lead to a "traditional revolution". Thus he
alludes to an inevitable move towards a rational-legal structure of
authority, utilising a bureaucratic structure. Thus this theory can be
sometimes viewed as part of the social evolutionism theory. This ties to
his broader concept of rationalisation by suggesting the inevitability
of a move in this direction.
Weber is also well-known for his critical study of the bureaucratisation
of society, the rational ways in which formal social organizations apply
the ideal type characteristics of a bureaucracy. It was Weber who began
the studies of bureaucracy and whose works led to the popularization of
this term. Many aspects of modern public administration go back to him,
and a classic, hierarchically organised civil service of the Continental
type is called "Weberian civil service", although this is only one ideal
type of public administration and government described in his magnum
opus Economy and Society (1922), and one that he did not particularly
like himself – he only thought it particularly efficient and successful.
In this work, Weber outlines a description, which has become famous, of
rationalization (of which bureaucratization is a part) as a shift from a
value-oriented organisation and action (traditional authority and
charismatic authority) to a goal-oriented organization and action
(legal-rational authority). The result, according to Weber, is a "polar
night of icy darkness", in which increasing rationalization of human
life traps individuals in an "iron cage" of rule-based, rational
control. Weber's bureaucracy studies also led him to his analysis –
correct, as it would turn out, after Stalin's takeover – that socialism
in Russia would lead to over-bureaucratization rather than to the
"withering away of the state" (as Karl Marx had predicted would happen
in communist society).
Economics
While Max Weber is best known and recognised today as one of the leading
scholars and founders of modern sociology, he also accomplished much in
other fields, notably economics, although this is largely forgotten
today among orthodox economists, who pay very little attention to his
works. The view that Weber is at all influential to modern economists
comes largely from non-economists and economic critics with sociology
backgrounds. During his life distinctions between the social sciences
were less clear than they are now, and Weber considered himself a
historian and an economist first, sociologist distant second.
From the point of view of the economists, he is a representative of the
"Youngest" German historical school of economics. His most valued
contributions to the field of economics is his famous work, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This is a seminal essay
on the differences between religions and the relative wealth of their
followers. Weber's work is parallel to Sombart's treatise of the same
phenomenon, which however located the rise of Capitalism in Judaism.
Weber's other main contribution to economics (as well as to social
sciences in general) is his work on methodology: his theories of
"Verstehen" (known as understanding or Interpretative Sociology) and of
antipositivism (known as humanistic sociology).
The doctrine of Interpretative Sociology is one of the main sociological
paradigms, with many supporters as well as critics. This thesis states
that social, economic and historical research can never be fully
inductive or descriptive as one must always approach it with a
conceptual apparatus, which Weber termed "Ideal Type". The idea can be
summarised as follows: an ideal type is formed from characteristics and
elements of the given phenomena but it is not meant to correspond to all
of the characteristics of any one particular case. Weber's Ideal Type
became one of the most important concepts in social sciences, and led to
the creation of such concepts as Ferdinand Tönnies' "Normal Type".
Weber conceded that employing "Ideal Types" was an abstraction but
claimed that it was nonetheless essential if one were to understand any
particular social phenomena because, unlike physical phenomena, they
involve human behaviour which must be interpreted by ideal types. This,
together with his antipositivistic argumentation can be viewed as the
methodological justification for the assumption of the "rational
economic man" (homo economicus).
Max Weber formulated a three-component theory of stratification, with
Social class, Social status and party (or politicals) as conceptually
distinct elements.
* Social class is based on economically determined relationship to
the market (owner, renter, employee etc.).
* Status is based on non-economical qualities like honour, prestige
and religion.
* Party refers to affiliations in the political domain.
All three dimensions have consequences for what Weber called "life
chances".
Weber's other contributions to economics were several: these include a
(seriously researched) economic history of Roman agrarian society, his
work on the dual roles of idealism and materialism in the history of
capitalism in his Economy and Society (1914) which present Weber's
criticisms (or according to some, revisions) of some aspects of Marxism.
Finally, his thoroughly researched General Economic History (1923) can
be considered the Historical School at its empirical best.
Critical responses to Max Weber
Influence from and on the Austrian
school
During his own lifetime, Weber was critical of the neoclassical economic
approaches of authors such as Carl Menger and Friedrich von Weiser,
whose formal approach was quite different from his own historical
sociology. The work of these authors eventually led to the creation of
the Austrian School of economics. This includes followers of Friedrich
von Hayek and, more recently, authors Daniel Yergin and Joseph
Stanislaw. In their pro-globalization book Commanding Heights: The
Battle for the World Economy, they attack Weber for claiming that only
Protestantism could lead to a work ethic, pointing to the "Tiger
Economies" of Southeastern Asia. (Likewise, Weber's blending of
economics with Calvinism has been satirized by such works as "America's
Keenest City" by Mongo.)
However, in these debates, it is easy to overlook that the methods
advocated by these later generations of the Austrian School are heavily
indebted to the work of Weber. His "action sociology", as they called
it, was a frequent topic in the "Mises Circle", an influential group
headed by Ludwig von Mises, a key figure in the Austrian School. Among
the attendees was a student of Mises, the philosopher of sociology
Alfred Schutz, who sought to clarify Weber's interpretive approach in
terms of the analytic phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Hence, although
Schutz's work, especially The Phenomenology of the Social World (1932),
is in effect a profound critique of Weber's method, it is nevertheless
an attempt to further it. Hayek also frequently attended these
discussions, and the subjective method advanced in his The
Counter-Revolution of Science: Studies in the Abuse of Reason (1952)
reflects these influences. Ludwig Lachmann, a later member of the
Austrian School, made explicit the Austrian School's indebtedness to the
Weberian method.
Interestingly, given their methodological and sociological differences,
Weber and Mises were not only acquainted, they shared an admiration for
each other’s work. Mises considered Weber a "great genius" and his death
a blow to Germany. Likewise, Weber comments that Mises’s Theory of Money
and Credit is the monetary theory most acceptable to him. Weber accepted
Ludwig von Mises's criticism of socialist economic planning and added
his own argument. He believed that under socialism workers would still
work in a hierarchy, but that now the hierarchy would be fused with
government. Instead of dictatorship of the worker, he foresaw
dictatorship of the official.
Historical Critiques about Max Weber
The economist Joseph Schumpeter argued that capitalism did not begin
with the Industrial Revolution but in 14th century Italy. In Milan,
Venice, and Florence the small City-state governments lead to the
development of the earliest forms of capitalism. In the 16th century
Antwerp was a commercial center of Europe. It was also noted that the
predominantly Calvinist country of Scotland did not enjoy the same
economic growth as Holland, England, and New England. In addition, it
has been pointed out that Holland, which was heavily Calvinist,
industrialized much later in the 19th century than predominantly
Catholic Belgium, which was one of the centres of the Industrial
Revolution on the European mainland.
Emil Kauder expanded Schumpeter's argument by arguing the hypothesis
that Calvinism hurt the development of capitalism by leading to the
development of the labor theory of value. Kauder writes "Any social
philosopher or economist exposed to Calvinism will be tempted to give
labor an exalted position in his social or economic treatise, and no
better way of extolling labor can be found than by combining work with
value theory, traditionally the very basis of an economic system." In
contrast, Catholic areas that were influenced by the late scholastics
were more likely to adhere to the subjective theory of value.
References
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/weber.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber
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