Abstract
Max Weber continues to be ‘a source of endless fascination’. The author of these words is Lawrence A Scaff, but that sentiment is shared by the other authors and translators of all three volumes under review here. These books show that we have good reason to continue to be fascinated by Max Weber – by his politics, by his scholarship, and by his life.
Max Weber’s political thinking has drawn considerable interest, ranging from his discussion of Germany’s relationship with other political powers to his observations about the nature and function of the German government. Maley focuses on one specific aspect of Weber’s politics; he specifically offers an account of the ‘heroic leader’ who is able to balance emotion and reason. This leader must be passionate enough to lead the masses but be reasonable enough to understand what is actually best for them. This is a charismatic and elitist political leader who acts in the real interests of his (or her) people. Maley draws on a number of historically important political thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, and John Locke, as well as a handful of contemporary political theorists such as Sheldon Wolin, Peter Breiner, and Mark Warren. Maley emphasizes that it is the ‘heroic’ quality of this type of leader that enables him to command allegiance, but he stresses that this leader also acts to protect and preserve those who are under his rule. Thus, the ‘heroic leader’ is likely to be aristocratic by birth, but is completely democratic in orientation. This type of leader is the one who, in Maley’s words, can try ‘to recreate a new political’ (p. 121). Maley’s picture is both attractive and has much to recommend it, but the problem is that he believes that he can find an account of such a political leader in the works of Max Weber. Maley seems to recognize the difficulty in trying to do so when he acknowledges that his is a ‘reconstruction’ of Max Weber’s political thinking. His attempt is further hampered by his insistence on relying primarily on works written in English and by his dismissal of what he calls ‘the Weber industry’. Maley draws upon a number of Weber’s political writings, but he focuses mainly on Weber’s great speech Politik als Beruf. Maley claims that he provides a ‘detailed analysis of the logic and the style of that lecture’ (p. 77). This speech, which Weber gave in Munich in late January 1919 was, as Maley claims, devoted to the ‘extraordinary’ leader. However, Maley does not follow through on his promise of the detailed analysis and he fails to give an accurate account of Weber’s ideal type of political leader. He also fails to understand Weber’s central notion of ‘Herrschaft’ (‘authority’, ‘domination’) (see the ‘Einleitung’ to Weber, 2005). He also misunderstands the ‘extraordinariness’ of charisma and he underestimates its ‘revolutionary’ power (see Adair-Toteff, 2005). He has a limited understanding of what Weber means by the three cardinal virtues of the true political leader (see Weber, 1992). The true political leader must have ‘passion’ (‘Leidenschaft’); as Weber had pointed out in the companion piece Wissenschaft als Beruf, anything worth doing is worth doing with ‘passion’. He misreads ‘Augenmaß’ as ‘judgment’ when it is more of a ‘distancing’ and ‘having a perspective’. Finally, Maley ignores the critical issue of legitimacy; for Weber, legitimacy comes through tradition, laws, or extraordinary powers; but Maley fails to tell us what the basis of legitimacy is for his ‘heroic politician’.
In Max Weber in America, Lawrence Scaff examines a very small but important part of Weber’s life: the three months that Weber spent in America in 1904. Scaff shows how this journey was extraordinarily rich and how its various aspects significantly impacted Weber’s thinking. Max Weber in America is composed of two parts: one literal and one ‘metaphorical’. The literal first part is an account of the trip that Weber and his wife Marianne took to the United States. The primary reason for the trip was Hugo Münsterberg’s invitation for Weber to give a speech at the Congress of Arts and Sciences in late September 1904. Scaff writes about the speech, about how the German original was never published but a rather shoddy translation appeared in the Congress’ proceedings. He also writes about Weber’s rather unusual thesis: that rural society was disappearing. He argues that this was not as strange as it seemed and that Germany was undergoing a massive transformation from a rural society to an industrial one. More importantly, Scaff discusses the major contrasts that Weber drew between Germany and the United States: not only were there the major differences in size and distance, there were also differences in culture and attitudes. Germany was tradition-bound and had a hereditary aristocracy; America was forward looking and it was the person’s ‘character’ that mattered (pp. 60–3).
Scaff’s account is more than a mere discussion of Weber’s speech; it is an historical, if not an historicist account; that is, it is a genealogical context for Weber’s extended trip. Max and Marianne Weber left Heidelberg on 17 August and returned on 27 November 1904. They visited New York City twice – first, for five days upon arrival; then for two weeks before their return to Germany. They traveled to upstate New York where they met with German immigrants, and from them Weber learned about the importance that Americans placed upon ‘character’. They spent time in Chicago where Max found the industrial conditions both intriguing and appalling. Marianne visited Hull House and learned from Jane Addams about the struggles for women’s education and employment (pp. 42–6).
Max Weber’s time at the St. Louis Congress was followed by trips to the West (Oklahoma), where he saw first-hand the American approach to the land, and to the South where he learned about race problems (pp. 98–114). Then, he rejoined Marianne and they traveled to Tennessee and North Carolina to visit relatives. Whereas Marianne had enjoyed most of the trip, she felt out of place in Mt. Airy, North Carolina. Max, however, seemed to be in his element and learned more about North American religious sects. Weber observed various church services in North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, DC, and New York City which helped him write the second part of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (pp. 118, 132–3, 146). Scaff contends that it was in America that Weber observed instances of the ‘ascetic ethos’ and where he witnessed the competing forces of ideal and material interests (pp. 186–7).
Scaff provides such a wealth of information that at times the book seems more about turn of the century America than about Weber. Scaff also devotes a considerable amount of attention to Marianne and her interest in women’s rights. As a consequence, Max Weber sometimes seems to disappear from view. This might seem to be a criticism, but Scaff’s ability to discuss such a wide range of issues is so good and his focus on Marianne is justly warranted, that this is no drawback to his book.
The second ‘metaphorical’ account is of Weber’s reception in America; beginning in 1927 and ending in the early 1960s. Scaff regards five universities as being critical for the early interest in Weber. Of the five, Scaff singles out the University of Chicago and Harvard University for special consideration. In 1927 Frank Knight was teaching economics at Chicago; by 1933 he was joined by Melchoir Palyi and Alexander von Schelting. Palyi was one of the editors for Weber’s Wirtschaftsgeschichte which was the last lecture course that Weber gave in Munich and was translated by Knight as General Economic History. In addition, Knight gave seminars on Weber and economics throughout the 1930s and Von Schelting was noted for his pioneering work Max Webers Wissenschaftslehre.
Talcott Parsons was responsible for the interest in Weber at Harvard, first with his dissertation on modern capitalism devoted to Weber and Sombart and then with his translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Scaff seems to have mixed feelings about Parsons: on the one hand Parsons was the one who shaped (or misshaped) American views about Weber and his translation of The Protestant Ethic was fundamentally flawed. On the other hand, Parsons was not responsible for many of those flaws. Scaff tells the story of Parsons’ translation and reveals that many of those translation problems were caused by others who insisted on changes, changes that fundamentally altered both the style and the content of Weber’s work. In the end, Scaff notes that Parsons was responsible for some of the enduring phrases that we associate with Weber, like ‘iron cage’. And he credits Parsons for his 1947 translation of the notoriously difficult first chapters of Economy and Society.
Another cluster of scholars formed at the University of Wisconsin. This included Hans Gerth and C Wright Mills who, in 1946, published a ‘source book’ entitled From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Like Knight, Gerth wanted reliable texts for his students and From Max Weber not only fulfilled this need but, as Edward Shils admitted, ‘put Max Weber on the map’ (p. 231). A third group of scholars helped generate interest in Weber, but unlike the Chicago, Harvard, and Madison groups, this one was not associated with a specific location. These were émigré scholars like Emil Lederer at the New School for Social Research, Karl Löwenstein at the University of Massachusetts, and Paul Honigsheim at Michigan State University. These were people who had known Weber personally and were highly influenced by him.
A third volume can be added to the growing corpus of Weber translations: The Methodology of the Social Sciences published in 1949 by Edward Shils and Henry Finch. To this compilation which focused on Weber’s methodological writings, a further number of translations of Weber’s writings on religion and law were added in the 1950s. Some of these were then used as the basis for the complete translation of Economy and Society. This appeared in 1968, edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, and by then Weber’s reputation as a theorist had been firmly established. Scaff argues that Weber’s ‘thirst for empirical and intellectual sobriety’ held a particular appeal for Americans. It is a pity that Scaff stops his account there, because it would have been highly interesting for him to have continued his account and include scholars like himself. It is his writings, especially Fleeing the Iron Cage (Scaff, 1989), along with works by Alan Sica and Stephen Turner, which have generated new interest in different aspects of Weber; that is, Weber as philosopher of culture. This is the Weber who asks ‘What should we do? How should we live?’ and ‘Does death have any meaning?’ – this is the ‘all too human’ side of Weber (Weber, 1992: 93, 87). Weber intrigues us with his methodology and his political thinking, but, as Scaff writes, it is Weber’s ‘preoccupation with the human condition, with “statecraft and soulcraft”’ that is the real source of our ‘endless fascination’ with Max Weber (p. 250).
Weber’s methodological work has a reputation for being difficult to understand; Stephen Turner began his ‘Weber on Action’ by observing that ‘Weber’s methodological writings are notoriously difficult’ (Turner, 1983: 506). There are many reasons for this high degree of difficulty. First, unlike his friend and colleague Heinrich Rickert, Weber never considered himself a philosopher and he never regarded himself as a specialist in methodology. Second, the articles tend to be lengthy responses to methodological issues and logical problems of the day. Third, he often adapted technical terms for his own use, thus obscuring the context and the traditional sense. They are difficult to understand even for a German scholar; they are even worse for someone who tries to understand them in an English translation. As Bruun and Whimster, the editors of Max Weber: Collected Methodological Writings, point out, the essays which appeared in Weber’s collected writings on methodology have already been translated into English. The editors also point out that these translations suffer from a number of flaws. They are very old in that they were published in the 1940s. They are widely scattered; while many are found in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology and The Methodology of the Social Sciences, others are not. And, they vary in quality; some are fairly accurate but others are not (pp. xiii–xiv). Two further complaints can be leveled at these previous translations: many of them are prone to bias and almost all of them lack context. Happily the translations in the Collected Methodological Writings do not suffer from such flaws. They are up to date translations, they are uniformly accurate, there is no bias, and the editors place them in the proper context – all of which contributes to a better understanding of Weber’s writings on methodology.
To take the issue of translation: Bruun uses his native Danish to help bridge the gap between German and English, but, far more importantly, he adheres to his principles of translation. His primary principle is the ‘greatest possible faithfulness’ to the source (p. xxxi). He faithfully follows Weber’s tendency to place words in quotation marks and strives to follow Weber’s own sense. One of the main criticisms of Talcott Parsons’ translation of The Protestant Ethic was that his version omitted quotation marks and generally tried to make the text ‘more readable’. In contrast, Bruun uses a variety of punctuation marks in order to convey Weber’s meaning and he always indicates when he has intervened as a translator (p. xxxii). Mostly though, Bruun allows Weber to come through as he does in German; and that means ensuring that all of the ‘small words’ that Weber uses are indicated in English. Bruun spells out what this entails and this is worthwhile advice for anyone translating from German into English (p. 494). Bruun’s dedication to textual faithfulness and clarity comes through in Weber’s ‘standard methodological works’ such as ‘The “Objectivity” of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy’ (1904) where Weber discusses causality and sets out his account of ‘ideal types’. It also comes through in ‘On Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology’ (1913) where he covers action and association, as well as in ‘The Meaning of Value Freedom’ in which Weber sets out the need to keep declarations of values separate from discussions of facts and he warns against the temptation to be an exciting ‘prophet’ rather than a sober teacher. These are themes which Weber sets out even more powerfully in Wissenschaft als Beruf (1992), where Weber also expresses his conviction of the importance of ‘distance’ and clarity and he emphasizes the absolute need for passion in scholarship.
A number of smaller and less well-known pieces are included which shed considerable light on various important aspects of Weber’s thinking. The ‘Accompanying Remarks’ is the Inaugural Editorial to the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik that Weber wrote with Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffé, in which they emphasize the social-economic direction of the journal. There is also Weber’s fragment in which he offers a spirited defense of Simmel’s sociological writings and he examines his attempt to base sociology on the Kantian notion of ‘interactions’. Various letters help clarify Weber’s relationship with Heinrich Rickert, and Weber’s joint ‘Declaration’ with Sombart emphasizes their belief in the importance of theory and the need for a new path between the ‘historical school’ and the ‘theoretical’ or ‘Austrian School’ of economics.
Finally, Bruun and Whimster provide a suitable and a necessary context for Weber’s methodology; this includes the extremely clear and helpful Introduction in which they discuss the historical background to his writings and they clarify how Weber’s logic and values intersect. They also explain Weber’s difficult notion of causality and tie it to his heuristic device of ‘ideal types’. The index is extensive and the 43-page glossary is for the most part extremely helpful. There are, however, a number of terms that do not seem quite right. ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ is rendered as ‘sciences of the human spirit’, when ‘human sciences’ is probably more accurate. Bruun rejects it for being too ‘institutional’ but I think that it better conveys the meaning than ‘human spirit’ does. It is, as he notes, ‘a classic conundrum, and no ideal solution can be found’ (p. 484). ‘Lehre’ does not suffer in the same way, so it just seems odd that it is often translated as ‘theory’ – Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre is rendered ‘Theory of Science’ (pp. xii, xvii) while Wilhelm Windelband’s Die Lehren vom Zufall is translated as ‘The Theories of Chance’ (p. 519). ‘Doctrine’ or even ‘teaching’ are better choices and this is underscored by translating Ernst Troeltsch’s Soziallehren as either Social Doctrines or Social Teachings. These are rare occurrences and do not detract from the overall accuracy of Bruun’s translations. In short, this is an extremely welcome book treating some of Weber’s most notoriously difficult writings. Its importance is underscored because it makes Weber’s writings on methodology relatively accessible to the non-specialist.
Each of these three books significantly adds to our understanding of various aspects of Weber’s life and thought. And each of them demonstrates how Max Weber continues to be a ‘source of endless fascination’.