He worked as a reserve officer in military hospitals. Later, he became disillusioned with the war, questioning the competence of the military and political regime.
Weber tried to convince the generals to stop fighting, but this had no effect. After the war, Weber served as an advisor to the German delegation at Versailles, helped draft a German constitution and became an important political figure.
He opposed the Kaiser's conservative government, but was also opposed to the socialist parties. Given that there was not a middle grouping in Germany at the time, this left him little opportunity to make much positive contribution. Weber took up teaching again late in his life, this time at Munich.
He debated Marxists concerning the nature of capitalism, and seemed ready to resume an active role again. In he caught pneumonia, and he died at age Weber was familiar with, and part of, the major German intellectual debates of his time, first in his parents' household, and then in his own and through his professional, academic contacts.
As Ritzer notes pp. Weber felt that historical sociology should be "concerned with individuality and generality. The philosopher who dominated German philosophical thought during Weber's time was Immanuel Kant Kant argued that "the methods of the natural sciences give us true knowledge about the external phenomenal world — the world we experience through our senses.
At the same time, Kant argued that moral philosophy or a system of morality, is also important and "involves reflection on moral axioms that appear to be innate and are understandable without reference to human experience. That is, empirical analysis and moral judgment are two separate systems — sociology could not set out moral values, but could discuss the effects of these.
While sociology must be concerned with empirical analysis of society and history, the method of sociology would have to be different from that of the natural sciences. Sociological analysis would have to examine social action within a context of social interaction, and would have to be interpretive, not viewing people as object just driven by impersonal forces.
Marianne Weber's biography argued that Max Weber believed that the purpose of political and social institutions is the development of autonomous, free personality. These influences can be seen in Weber's approach to methodology, understanding and social action. Paragraph based on Ashley and Orenstein, pp. One of Marx's major influences and struggles was with Hegelian idealism. While Weber never seemed to have a similar set of problems with philosophical views, the political situation of Germany occupies a similar position in Weber's thought.
That is, a large part of Weber's writing and analysis was an attempt to make sense of political features in Germany, and an attempt to promote a liberal economic system in a country torn between reaction and socialism. Germany was backward economically, compared with France and Britain.
Landowners still held political power, but wanted free trade so they could export food to Britain, the liberal Friedrich List advocated protective tariffs, and it was Bismarck and the aristocrats who unified Germany, not the emerging bourgeoisie. The liberal intellectuals were detached from the entrepreneurial middle class. Thus Weber could not find an easy model from France, Britain or the United States, from which he could draw practical political lessons.
This may have been part of what led Weber to look on the political sphere as disconnected from the strictly economic, at least in the Marxian manner.
For example, Weber considered European political history as a struggle by different rulers "to appropriate the financial and military means that in feudal society were relatively dispersed. That is, economic factors affected politics, but not through the direct route from the bourgeoisie to the ruling class of Marx.
Military factors, the control of territory, and political power in itself all played important roles in affecting politics and history. Weber also looked toward the national units as the "historical ultimates that can never be integrated into more comprehensive and harmonious whole. This is part of what made Weber antagonistic to socialism, especially the international socialism of this period. In addition, Weber viewed the rationality of capitalism within a national unit as the most that could be hoped for in terms of achieving human freedom.
To integrate the state with control of the economy, as socialist doctrine urged, would mean an even further centralization, with a consequent loss of freedom. According to Weber, "the state had 'nationalized' the possession of arms and of administrative means [from the feudal estates].
Socialization of the means of production would merely subject an as yet relatively autonomous economic life to the bureaucratic management of the state. The state would indeed become total, and Weber, hating bureaucracy as a shackle upon the liberal individual, felt that socialism would thus lead to a further serfdom. While Weber sympathized with the struggle of the proletariat, he was too individualistic to join this struggle. As an example of the Weberian approach, consider the power of ideas such as nationalism and independence.
While Weber himself did not analyze these in great detail, these have become extremely important today, and have developed as guiding notions and political programs for large groupings of people. The power of these ideas show the contemporary relevance of Weber's approach. Ideas of independence and the demands for autonomy may be promoted by economic considerations.
A group may be economically oppressed or exploited, and out of this can come demands for more political and economic autonomy and a felt need for economic and political independence. The struggle for independence could then be interpreted in a fairly straightforward Marxist fashion. People band together to overthrow their oppressors, and gain more control over their economic and political situation. For Marxists the solution may be to oust the oppressors capitalist and imperialist exploiters and develop the movement for independence in the direction of socialism.
A Marxist would likely recognize that these movements carry with them a number of other features. Considerations such as language, territory, culture, religion, the notion of a common history and the idea of a people are often expressed through these movements and the ideas that go along with them. For the Marxist though, it is likely to be oppression and exploitation, and the economic factors that dominate the discussion.
The others are features that help concentrate and form opinion, but economic considerations are central. The Weberian approach may provide some useful insights and an alternative approach to these issues. Ideas related to nationalism and independence may override economic factors, or even be in opposition to the best economic interests of the population.
Struggle against groups that have exploited people may be associated with the emergence of a new groups of exploiters and oppressors. Features such as culture, language and religion may dominate some of these movements, and they may be characterized by a situation whereby the notion of independence becomes more important than purely economic considerations. In the case of Eastern Europe, the desire to get rid of "communist" rule appears to have been motivated as much by ideas as by the practical consequences of this.
If this is so, then Weber's approach may tell us as much or more about what is happening than does a Marxian approach which concentrates mostly on economic issues. The ideas of independence take on a real meaning to the participants in the struggle for independence, acquiring enough meaning that some people are willing to sacrifice their lives. Note that features such as culture and language are real — each having a history and a real presence.
While a Marxist may consider religion as an ideological device that masks exploitation, for many people religion is a force in daily life and a set of experiences that has real meaning in many aspects of life. Language and culture are similar, and for Weber, these cannot be reduced to the economic situation, but present forces that do affect people in a real sense.
A careful study of these movements would look not only at the possible economic changes as a result of independence, but at how the ideas of independence are stated and interpreted. Participants may view these in quite a different manner than what is at first apparent.
In addition to the importance of ideas in themselves, Weber's approach also demonstrates the multiple bases from which people act, and from which power is derived. Economic factors are important for Weber, but language, culture, religion, etc. These can all be seen in nationalist struggles. In addition, the economic base is not the only source of power, with political power in nationalist struggles being a result of military power, charismatic leadership, ability to express the nationalist ideal well, and so on.
While Weber did not analyze independence movements as they have emerged in the contemporary setting, Weber's approach provides a useful method of looking at them. For Weber, it is the meaning that people attach to ideas, affecting how people act, that is the proper subject of sociology. It has been a mainstay of sociological study since it was first translated into English by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in This text is notable for how Weber merged economic sociology with his sociology of religion, and as such, for how he researched and theorized the interplay between the cultural realm of values and beliefs, and the economic system of society.
Weber argues in the text that capitalism developed to the advanced stage that it did in the West due to the fact that Protestantism encouraged the embrace of work as a calling from God, and consequently, a dedication to work that allowed one to earn a lot of money. This, combined with the value asceticism -- of living a simple earthly life devoid of costly pleasures -- fostered an acquisitive spirit.
Later, as the cultural force of religion declined, Weber argued that capitalism was freed from the limits placed on it by Protestant morals, and expanded as an economic system of acquisition.
Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products.
List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Objectivity in historical and social sciences is, then, not a goal that can be reached with the aid of a correct method, but an ideal that must be striven for without a promise of ultimate fulfillment.
Keenly aware of its fictional nature, the ideal type never seeks to claim its validity in terms of a reproduction of or a correspondence with reality. Its validity can be ascertained only in terms of adequacy, which is too conveniently ignored by the proponents of positivism.
According to Weber, a clear value commitment, no matter how subjective, is both unavoidable and necessary. It is unavoidable , for otherwise no meaningful knowledge can be attained. At the outset, it seems undeniable that Weber was a deeply liberal political thinker especially in a German context that is not well known for liberalism. He was also a bourgeois liberal, and self-consciously so, in a time of great transformations that were undermining the social conditions necessary to support classical liberal values and bourgeois institutions, thereby compelling liberalism to search for a fundamental reorientation.
With the same sobriety or brevity, he asserted that, even in a democratic state, domination of the ruled by the ruler s is simply an inescapable political reality. That is why, for Weber, a study of the political, even a value-free, empirical sociology, cannot but be an inquiry into the different modalities by which a domination is effectuated and sustained.
In other words, it has to be a domination mediated through mutual interpretation , in which the rulers claim legitimacy and the ruled acquiesce to it voluntarily.
From this allegedly realistic premise, Weber famously moved on to identify three ideal types of legitimate domination based on, respectively, charisma, tradition, and legal rationality. Roughly, the first type of legitimacy claim depends on how persuasively the leaders prove their charismatic qualities, for which they receive personal devotions and emotive followings from the ruled.
The second kind of claim can be made successfully when certain practice, custom, and mores are institutionalized to re produce a stable pattern of domination over a long duration of time. In sharp contrast to these crucial dependences on personality traits and the passage of time, the third type of authority is unfettered by time, place, and other forms of contingency as it derives its legitimacy from adherence to impersonal rules and universal principles that can only be found by suitable legal-rational reasoning.
As such, it should be clear from the outset that these ideal types are not to be taken as supplying normative grounds for passing judgments on legitimacy claims. After all, these are political-sociological categories rather than full-blown political-philosophical concepts. That is to say, it allows scant, or ambiguous, a conceptual topos for democracy. In fact, it seems as though Weber is unsure of the proper place of democracy in his schema.
At one point, democracy is deemed as a fourth type of legitimacy because it should be able to embrace legitimacy from below whereas his three ideal types all focus on that from above [Breuer in Schroeder ed.
At other times, Weber seems to believe that democracy is simply non-legitimate , rather than another type of legitimate domination, because it aspires to an identity between the ruler and the ruled i.
Too recalcitrant to fit into his overall schema, in other words, these historical prototypes of democracy simply fall outside of his typology of domination as a- or illegitimate. The best example is the Puritan sect in which authority is legitimated only on the grounds of a consensual order created voluntarily by proven believers possessing their own quantum of charismatic legitimating power.
Rather than an outright non-legitimate or fourth type of domination, here, democracy comes across as an extremely rare subset of a diffused and institutionalized from of charismatic legitimacy. The irony is unmistakable. It seems as though one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century cannot come to clear terms with its zeitgeist in which democracy, in whatever shape and shade, emerged as the only acceptable ground for political legitimacy.
If the genuine self-rule of the people is impossible, according to his somber realism, the only choice is one between leaderless and leadership democracy. When advocating a sweeping democratization of defeated Germany, thus, Weber envisioned democracy in Germany as a political marketplace in which strong charismatic leaders can be identified and elected by winning votes in a free competition, even battle, among themselves.
Preserving and enhancing this element of struggle in politics is important since it is only through a dynamic electoral process that national leadership strong enough to control an otherwise omnipotent bureaucracy can be made. The primary concern for Weber in designing democratic institutions has, in other words, less to do with the realization of democratic ideals, such as rights, equality, justice, or self-rule, than with cultivation of certain character traits befitting a robust national leadership.
In addition to the free electoral competition led by the organized mass parties, Weber saw localized, yet public associational life as a breeding ground for the formation of charismatic leaders. There can be no denying that Weber was an ardent nationalist.
And yet, his nationalism was unambiguously free from the obsession with primordial ethnicity and race that was prevalent in Wilhelmine Germany. Even in the Freiburg Address of , which unleashed his nationalist zeal with an uninhibited and youthful rhetorical force, he makes it clear that the ultimate rationale for the nationalist value-commitment that should guide all political judgments, even political and economic sciences as well, has less to do with the promotion of the German national interests per se than with a civic education of the citizenry in general and political maturity of the bourgeois class in particular.
Weber suggested two sets of ethical virtues that a proper political education should cultivate — the ethic of conviction Gesinnungsethik and the ethic of responsibility Verantwortungsethik. According to the ethic of responsibility, on the one hand, an action is given meaning only as a cause of an effect, that is, only in terms of its causal relationship to the empirical world.
The virtue lies in an objective understanding of the possible causal effect of an action and the calculated reorientation of the elements of an action in such a way as to achieve a desired consequence. An ethical question is thereby reduced to a question of technically correct procedure, and free action consists of choosing the correct means.
By emphasizing the causality to which a free agent subscribes, in short, Weber prescribes an ethical integrity between action and consequences, instead of a Kantian emphasis on that between action and intention. These two kinds of reasoning represent categorically distinct modes of rationality, a boundary further reinforced by modern value fragmentation.
This ultimate decision and the Kantian integrity between intention and action constitute the essence of what Weber calls an ethic of conviction. It is often held that the gulf between these two types of ethic is unbridgeable for Weber.
This frank admission, nevertheless, cannot be taken to mean that he privileged the latter over the former as far as political education is concerned. Weber clearly understood the deep tension between consequentialism and deontology, but he still insisted that they should be forcefully brought together. The former recognition only lends urgency to the latter agenda. It is too formal to be an Aristotelean virtue ethics, and it is too concerned with moral character to be a Kantian deontology narrowly understood.
It culminates in an ethical characterology or philosophical anthropology in which passion and reason are properly ordered by sheer force of individual volition. His dystopian and pessimistic assessment of rationalization drove him to search for solutions through politics and science, which broadly converge on a certain practice of the self. It is also in this entrenched preoccupation with an ethical characterology under modern circumstances that we find the source of his enduring influences on twentieth-century political and social thought.
Even the postmodernist project of deconstructing Enlightenment selfhood finds, as Michel Foucault does, a precursor in Weber. The first editorial committee of consisted of Horst Baier, M.
This monumental project plans a total of forty-five plus two index volumes in three divisions, i. In English, too, new translations have appeared over the past decade or so. Reflecting the latest Weber scholarship, both editions have many virtues, especially in terms of enhanced readability and adequate contextualization.
Hans Henrik Bruun, Routlege, The earlier anthology, for all its uneven quality of translation, is still used in this article for the same reason of availability. Adorno, Theodor W. Life and Career 2. Philosophical Influences 2. History 3. Modernity 4. Knowledge 5. Politics and Ethics 6. Philosophical Influences Putting Weber in the context of philosophical tradition proper is not an easy task.
Primary Texts In English, too, new translations have appeared over the past decade or so. Weber, Max. Lassman and R. Speirs ed. Oakes trans. Shils and H.
Finch ed. Parsons trans. Giddens intro , London: Routledge. Economy and Society , 2 volumes, G. Roth and C. Wittich eds. Weber, Marianne ed. Max Weber: A Biography , H. Zohn trans. Roth intro , New Brunswick: Transaction. Anthologies Gerth, H. Wright Mills eds. Lassman, P. Speirs eds. Shils, E. Finch eds.
0コメント