Max Weber and Social Ontology

Abstract

Key elements of John Searle’s articulation of the Standard Model of Social Ontology can be found within Max Weber’s ideal type of legal-rational authority. However, the fact that, for Weber, legal-rational authority is just one of three types of legitimate authority, along with traditional and charismatic authority, suggests limitations to the Standard Model’s scope of applicability. Where Searle takes himself to have provided an account of “the structure of human civilization,” Weber’s taxonomy suggests that Searle has only given us an account of a way of being a civilization. This understanding of traditional authority also reveals why the Standard Model misconstrues the structure of ordinary, informal statuses, such as friendship.

Keywords

Max Weber John Searle Brian Epstein anchoring project grounding project Standard Model of Social Ontology exemplars Linda Zagzebski tradition traditional authority

In the introduction to The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle writes that “[w]e are much in debt to the great philosopher-sociologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—one thinks especially of Weber, Simmel, and Durkheim—but from such acquaintance with their works as I have, it seems that they were not in a position to answer the questions that puzzle me, because they did not have the necessary tools” (Searle 1995, xii). I argue that not only did Max Weber recognize what Searle calls the “building blocks of social reality” (Searle 1995, 13), including the assignment of function, collective intentionality, constitutive rules, and deontological powers,¹ but did so in a way that draws our attention to the limited scope of what has been described as the “Standard Model of Social Ontology,” as exemplified by Searle (Guala 2007, 691-693).

My primary contention is that where Searle takes himself to have provided an account of “the structure of human civilization”—the subtitle of his Making the Social World (2010)—Weber only finds these building blocks within a way of being a human civilization. In particular, I argue that Searle’s version of the Standard Model best fits what Weber calls a legal-rational, bureaucratic mode of legitimate authority or rulership (Herrschaft)²—“a specifically modern form of administration” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 343). However, for Weber, legal-rational authority is just one of three ideal types of legitimate authority, along with traditional authority and charismatic authority. I focus on traditional authority to argue that the Standard Model misdescribes both the grounds and anchors of the statuses which comprise this social order.

Sections 1 and 2 supply the required background. In section 1, I describe the Standard Model of Social Ontology in terms of what Brian Epstein calls the grounding and anchoring projects. In section 2, I review Weber’s ideal types of social action and legitimate authority.

Sections 3 and 4 each develop a premise in favor of the conclusion that the Standard Model best applies, not to human civilization as a whole, but only to legal-rational social orders. Section 3 concerns the grounding project, and I draw from Zagzebski’s (2017) work on moral exemplars to argue that the grounds of traditional statuses are indexically defined by way of exemplars. This contrasts with the grounds of legal-rational statuses, which are defined in terms of rules. I also argue that exemplars help us understand the way in which informal statuses, such as friend, are grounded. Section 4 concerns the anchoring project. I claim that Weber and Epstein agree, against Searle’s “unitary theory” of anchorage, that possible anchors are “radically heterogeneous” (Epstein 2016, 165). However, Weber also helps us see how anchors play the role of legitimating factors which, in turn, gives us a means to individuate social orders. I summarize my findings in section 5.

1. The Standard Model of Social Ontology and the Grounding and Anchoring Projects

A cursory understanding of Searle’s and Weber’s principal theses about the social world would suggest few reasons to think that their contributions could be mutually illuminating. Where Weber tasked himself with explaining the distinctive “spirit” or Menschentum presupposed by rational capitalism, Searle’s inquiries concern abstract “problems in the foundations of the social sciences” (Searle 1995, xii). While it is true that Searle does not take up Weber’s diagnostic question, I will argue the context within which Weber addresses the causes of rational capitalism explicitly entails a set of answers to Searle’s questions. Moreover, because those answers are informed by a set of acute sociological and historical observations, Weber mitigates the risk of overgeneralizing from an impoverished set of examples (e.g., money, chess, and the U.S. presidency).

Searle describes a social reality that is “weightless and invisible,” so that, prereflectively, money and language seem just as natural to us as trees or sunsets. Of course, once we recognize the contingency of the former, we can begin to tackle a series of important explanatory, predictive, and moral questions about our present institutional arrangements. But such investigations can leave untouched foundational questions about the nature of the socially contingent³: “how are institutional facts possible? And what exactly is the structure of such facts?” (Searle 1995, 2). While Searle tends to elide these two questions, in recent years it has become increasingly clear that these are in fact importantly distinct investigations. Epstein suggests that the first question frames what he calls the “anchoring project,” whereas the second frames the “grounding project” (Epstein 2016, 148-149). I will describe these projects, not only because they give us a better sense of the scope of Searle’s investigation into social reality, but also because the present paper is structured around the distinction.

(1) The grounding project. Searle holds that the formula for a constitutive rule, “X counts as Y in C,” specifies the structure of institutional facts, where Y is the institutional fact, X is a brute fact or a lower-order institutional fact, and C is the social context in which X qualifies as Y. For example, a person who, among other conditions, wins the absolute majority of electoral college votes counts as president in the United States.⁴ Since all institutional facts imply normative powers (Searle 2010, 23-24), a full specification of institutional fact Y will also involve a specification of those normative powers, including, for example, the obligation to submit a budget request to Congress.⁵ To fill in the structure provided by the constitutive rule by specifying a status’s constitution conditions and normative conditions is to take up what Epstein calls the grounding project.

In the literature, the phrase “constitutive rule” is used in a variety of overlapping ways, due in part to Searle’s own ambiguous deployment of the phrase (see Ludwig 2017, 101-102). To be clear, the grounds are described by what Epstein calls “frame principles;” if the grounding conditions are the ingredients of instances of a social status, the frame principles are the recipe. Given that a status’s grounds include both its constitution conditions and normative powers, I stipulate that the frame principles which describe a status’s constitution conditions, as specified by X in Searle’s formula, are “constitutive rules” and that the frame principles, which describe the normative powers entailed by status Y, are “deontological rules.”⁶

Common to Epstein’s and Searle’s formulation of this project is the thought that a status’s grounds are specified by rules or principles. In section 3, I argue that Weber’s inquiries into the nature of charismatic and traditional authority raise the possibility that the grounds of some statuses are misdescribed by rules or principles.

(2) The anchoring project. When Searle inquires into the possibility of institutional facts, he takes up a second question. It is easy to appreciate that the conditions specified by the constitutive rules of, for example, the U.S. presidency could have been otherwise. In 2019, for example, the U.S. executive branch would have looked very different had the grounds for this office not implicated the electoral college. Given that the grounds of a institutional fact could be different, Searle’s second question concerns the factors that makes it the case that it is, for example, the electoral college vote and not the popular vote that grounds the U.S. presidency. Such an answer would also explain the stability or stickiness of a given set of grounds—why, despite the fact that they could be otherwise, an individual cannot just will the grounds of the U.S. presidency to be otherwise. Epstein calls this the anchoring project, which aims to specify the facts that “glue” or “put in place” the (frame principles for the) constitution and normative grounding conditions of a given status. See Figure 1 for an overview of the grounding and anchoring projects.

Figure 1.

The grounding and anchoring projects.

Because the anchoring project concerns the question of how the contingent becomes a felt necessity, readers of Weber might already see that an inquiry into the factors that legitimate political authority is a specific version of the anchoring project. I will explore this connection in section 4.

The Standard Model of Social Ontology, as exemplified by Searle’s account, completes the anchoring project in a distinctive way (Epstein 2015, 81): according to this model, only collective acceptance can anchor the constitution and normative conditions of a given status. Theorists who endorse this aspect of the Standard Model include Searle (1995, 51) and Kirk Ludwig: “powers that come with status roles are real powers. . . . But they reside entirely in the collective acceptance of the relevant community that those with those roles have those powers” (Ludwig 2017, 141).

By contrast, Epstein contends that collective acceptance is only one of many factors that might anchor the grounds of a given social status.

The anchors for the grounding conditions of social facts are . . . radically heterogeneous. Their grounding conditions are not exclusively anchored by collective acceptance or by any other well-circumscribed set of other facts. In many cases, they are anchored by a mix of historical tokens, miscellaneous features of the environment, legal enactments, community beliefs and practices, and more. (Epstein 2016, 165)

If Weber is to prove relevant to contemporary social ontological discussions, he must minimally be shown to have addressed both the grounding and anchoring projects. After reviewing Weber’s ideal types of social action and legitimate authority in section 2, I consider Weber’s relevance to the grounding project in section 3. In section 4, I consider his relevance to the anchoring project.

2. Ideal Types, Legal-Rational Authority, and the Standard Model

Weber’s generation witnessed accelerated social and political transformation, wherein technological, economic, and bureaucratic innovations dovetailed with the emergence of constitutional nation states, to change the face of traditional European life. Where Marx sought structural explanations of capitalism in the form of law-like regularities, Weber was concerned to describe the emergence of a Menschentum or lifestyle—what he called “the spirit of capitalism”—that would be capable of sustaining these rationalizing forces. As Wilhelm Hennis argues, the nature and cause of this characteristic Menschentum is the “central question” that unifies Weber’s various works (Hennis 1988, 36). In particular, to understand the spirit of capitalism is to understand how, for example, the tendency to reinvest one’s profits into one’s business becomes intelligible or subjectively meaningful in (what he thinks is) a historically unprecedented way. The outlines of Weber’s explanation are well known: a cluster of subjectively meaningful proclivities, well-suited for the demands of rational capitalism, were, at least initially, among the “characterological” effects of a Protestant asceticism (Weber [1905] 2002, 112).

As discussed, Weber’s central question is not Searle’s. However, the elaborate typological scheme that Weber develops in Economy and Society to clarify this central question remains highly relevant to Searle’s investigations, and so to the subject matter of social ontology. After reviewing Weber’s ideal types of social action and legitimate authority, I suggest that Weber’s ideal type of legal-rational authority prefigures key features of the Searlean Standard Model of Social Ontology.

2.1. The Ideal Types of Social Action and Legitimate Authority

Ideal types are “one-sided accentuations” (Weber [1904] 1949, 125) of recurrent social phenomena as roughly understood by idealized, hypothetical participants in a given social context. Typological schemes or sociological theories, including the ideal types of social action and legitimate authority, are systemically interrelated clusters of ideal types (Rosenberg 2016, 91).⁷

The four ideal types of social action—instrumentally or purposively rational action, value-rational action, affectual action, and traditional action—are characteristic ways a given action can be subjectively meaningful, especially when the action is not immediately understood as instrumentally efficacious (Rosenberg 2013, 50-51; Weber [1920b] 2019, 83), or is otherwise aberrant, unexpected, or outré. Such an action might be explanatorily understood (Weber [1920b] 2019, 84) as a value-rational action if we come to discover that the agent, for example, acted “without regard to the foreseeable consequences of action in the service of convictions” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 102). Even the irrational ideal types of traditional and affectual action are subjectively meaningful explanatory patterns, because, by modus ponens, every ideal type of social action is subjectively meaningful: the ideal types of social action “can be rational or irrational . . . but . . . are always constructed as meaningfully adequate” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 97). I will discuss the ideal type of traditional action in greater detail in section 3.3.

However, behaviors which continue to defy understanding by way of one or more of these patterned and meaningful action-orientations (Kalberg 1994, 31) are eventually explained away as the results of exogenous forces. Accordingly, Weber contrasts subjectively meaningful action with “merely reactive behaviour” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 79), a category that includes, for example, the behaviors of those who constitute a mob (Weber [1920b] 2019, 100) but excludes subjectively meaningful irrational actions, such as traditional and affectional actions.

In addition to the four ideal types of social action, Weber also identifies three ideal types of legitimate authority or rulership (Herrschaft), each of which has sub-types and intermediate types: legal-rational authority, traditional authority, and charismatic authority. Authority is a modality of power and the ideal types of authority are “based on different motives for compliance” (Weber [1922] 2003, 133), so that, for example, compliance to traditional authority is understood as a mode of traditional action.⁸ In this way the ideal types of social action systematically interrelate with the ideal types of legitimate authority, and so jointly compose a typological scheme.

It was Weber’s contention that in the 19th century, Europe came to exemplify legal-rational authority in a way that was historically unprecedented. Generalizing Weber’s central question as described above, he was concerned to explain how the characteristic instrumental and value-rational actions that individuate the compliance profile that is characteristic of legal-rational authority could emerge from the importantly different traditional and charismatic-affectual modes of compliance. And Weber’s studies highlight various relevant factors including, for example, the way in which various religious ideologies promoted or suppressed this Menschentum or spirit, and the way in which charismatic authority, which is necessarily unstable, is both a revolutionary and routinizing force.

2.2. Legal-Rational Authority and the Standard Model of Social Ontology

In a legal-rational social order, an official is able to exercise power over certain others because of a shared belief in the legitimacy of the rules that specify the grounding conditions of an office within that order. Searle describes four building blocks of social reality: assignment of function, constitutive rules (which describe constitution conditions), normative or deontological powers (as described by deontological rules), and collective intentionality or agreement. As discussed above, the grounds of a given institutional fact include constitution conditions and deontological powers. Because they could be otherwise, these grounds are, for Searle, anchored by our collective agreement and justified by appeal to the way in which they would help us realize certain functions or purposes.

Legal-rational social orders are built upon dependable bureaucracies—the “purest type of legal rule” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 347). Of the four building blocks that comprise the Standard Model, the first three building blocks⁹ (assignment of function, constitutive rules, and deontological powers) are explicitly featured as part of the first of six characteristics Weber famously attributes to a modern bureaucratic order:

There is the principle of official jurisdictional areas, which are generally ordered by rules, that is, by laws or administrative regulations. This means:

(1) The regular activities required for the purposes of the bureaucratically governed structure are assigned as official duties.

(2) The authority to give the commands (Befehlsgewalten) required for the discharge of these duties is distributed in a stable way and is strictly delimited by rules concerning the coercive means, physical, sacerdotal, or otherwise, which may be placed at the disposal of officials.

(3) Methodical provision (planmäßige Vorsorge) is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of these duties and for the exercise of the corresponding rights; only persons who qualify under rules (generell geregelten Qualifikation) are employed. (Weber [1920a] 1978, 956)

(1), (2), and (3) describe varieties of normative or deontological power carried by bureaucratic offices or statuses, including “official duties” and “corresponding rights,” such as the powers of command (Befehlsgewalten).¹⁰ The distribution of these normative powers is justified according to their capacity to realize an office’s duties or functions, or more generally, “the purposes of the bureaucratically governed structure,” as referred to in (1). And the rules that specify the general qualifications (generell geregelten Qualifikation) for a given office, as described in (3), are roughly equivalent to constitutive rules, which specify the constitution conditions of a given office.

There thus appears to be a remarkable correspondence between Weber’s and Searle’s views, so long as we confine our attention to the statuses which mediate legal-rational social relationships: official statuses (offices) are functional kinds that imply normative powers as described by deontological rules and constitution conditions as described by constitutive rules.¹¹ Examples of the ideal type of legal-rational authority include modern states, public and private hospitals, the Catholic priesthood, corporations, political parties, and the army (Weber [1920b] 2019, 348).

Traditional and charismatic types of legitimate authority are to be distinguished from legal-rational social orders. The ideal types of traditional and affectual action are predominant in forms of traditional and charismatic authority, respectively. Traditional authority is founded on the belief in the sanctity of tradition and charismatic authority is a revolutionary and highly personalized power that can overturn other modes of authority. In this paper, I focus on traditional authority to argue that the Standard Model misdescribes the statuses that comprise that order.

3. The Grounding Project and Traditional Social Orders

In section 1, I reviewed the Searlean Standard Model of Social Ontology in terms of what Epstein describes as the grounding and anchoring projects. In section 2, I discussed how Weber’s ideal types of social action and legitimate authority contribute to the task of explaining the spirit of capitalism. I also argued that the ideal type of legal-rational authority prefigures the building blocks of the Standard Model. In this section, I present the first of two arguments to the effect that the Standard Model of Social Ontology describes, not all social statuses whatsoever, but Weberian legal-rational statuses. In particular, I argue that the Model misdescribes at least a subset of traditional statuses.

My argument to this effect is summarized as follows. As we have seen, Weber attributes (what Epstein calls) constitution conditions and normative powers—respectively described by constitutive and deontological rules—to legal-rational statuses. I claim that the grounds of many traditional statuses are, contra the Standard Model, misdescribed by constitutive and deontological rules because they are indexically defined by way of exemplars (Zagzebski 2017). In that way, a “traditional ruler” refers to whatever person is a member of the same status as that person (Zagzebski 2010, 50), where ‘‘that person’’ refers to an particular leader, either as experienced by members of a traditional community or as described in the community’s “documents of tradition” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 227). In other words, I claim that, for Weber, the grounds of at least a subset of traditional statuses are exemplarized rather than principled, in the sense that they are shown in the traits and behaviors of a particular other, rather than described by rules or frame principles.

As Weber does not directly discuss traditional statuses in terms of the grounding project, the route to this conclusion will be circuitous. In 3.1, I briefly entertain the Standard Model’s treatment of traditional statuses, wherein the grounds of traditional statuses are thought to be describable in terms of constitutive and deontological rules. In 3.2 to 3.4, I claim that Weber’s contention about the flexibility of tradition, together with his claim that traditional statuses cannot be legally enacted, demonstrates that the grounds of some traditional statuses cannot be described by rules or principles that aim to specify features that must co-vary with every instance of a status (Epstein 2015, 72, 76). I argue, instead, that the grounds for these traditional statuses are exemplarized rather than principled. In 3.5, I gesture to some of the ways in which exemplarized statuses are to be distinguished from principled statuses. I also suggest that non-traditional, informal statuses, such as friend, are also a species of exemplarized statuses.

The contention that the grounds of Weberian traditional statuses are exemplarized rather than principled is the first premise of an argument aimed at showing that, while Searle’s account of social reality more or less correctly describes the statuses of an ideally typical legal-rational social order, his account misconstrues the statuses which comprise other forms of legitimate authority, including traditional authority. A second premise will be discussed in section 4, when I consider Weber’s contribution to the anchoring project.

3.1. Traditional Statuses and Constitutive Rules

A key status within a traditional social order is the traditional ruler and “[t]he ruler (or rulers) are determined by traditionally established regulation” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 354). The facts described by or grounded in traditional regulation are not anchored in legal enactment or collective acceptance, but in tradition: “these norms are not enacted but sanctified by tradition” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1006).

Those within a traditional social order are realists or non-constructivists about key statuses: “the belief in [traditional] authority is based on personal relations that are perceived as natural (naturgewachsene)” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1007). This is a claim about the internal point of view of traditionalists. “Paternal power and filial piety” provide the bases for this naturalized relationship (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1007), so that “the household unit is a kernel of traditional rulership” (Weber [1922] 2003, 137, see also [1920a] 1978, 1006, [1920b] 2019, 124).

For Searle, the fact that traditionalists regard their social statuses as natural or inevitable makes no difference to the applicability of the notion of a constitutive rule. For the Kwakiutl, “whether conscious or unconscious,” a “feast is a potlatch in the first place only because of the collective intentionality and the imposition of status-functions by the participants” (Searle 1995, 98). The feast counts as an instance of the traditional status, potlatch, only because the Kwakiutl unconsciously accepted rules by which the feast qualifies as such, as demonstrated by the “justified expectations” of those involved (Searle 1995, 88).

There are, and in support of Searle’s contention that the notion of a constitutive rule is applicable to traditional statuses, passages where Weber describes traditional statuses as being rule-governed. When Weber writes that “the fact and the limits of [the traditional ruler’s] power of control are derived from ‘norms’ (‘Normen’)” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1006), he appears to be articulating a version of Searle’s distinction between constitutive rules and regulative (or deontological) rules. Constitutive rules specify constitution conditions for “the fact” that someone is a traditional ruler, as when, within traditional patriarchalism, a ruler is “determined by strict rules of heredity” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 360). Regulative or deontological rules specify the normative powers that “limit” the traditional ruler’s power.

Weber does not infrequently refer to rules or norms¹² in his account of a traditional social order and defenders of the Standard Model might cite such passages to suggest the applicability of the Standard Model’s notions of constitutive and deontological rules to Weberian traditional statuses, despite the fact that traditionalists think their social kinds are natural kinds. This interpretation of Weberian traditional statuses is not implausible and has modest textual support. However, I will argue that it is not applicable to all traditional statuses. To see this, I begin with the observation that Weber describes these traditional rules as both “flexible” and “instable.” This ultimately sets the stage for the claim, made in 3.4, that the grounds of at least some traditional statuses are not principled (describable in terms of constitutive and deontological rules) but exemplarized.

3.2. The Flexibility of Traditional Rules

In the social construction literature, there may be a tendency to think that making a status “visible as a social category” (Haslanger 2003, 318-319) is the only antidote to status reification. However, Weber makes the surprising claim that those within a traditional order also have the resources to change their statuses despite a commitment to realism regarding those statuses. More specifically, Weber grants that while traditionalists do not (knowingly) anchor their statuses in acceptance or enactment, he nevertheless insists that actual innovation is not only possible within a traditional order, but that such orders have a kind of flexibility that legal-rational orders do not.

By contrast, H.L.A. Hart argues that the legal rules of “primitive communities” have a “static character” because such communities lack secondary rules and, so, have “no way of deliberately changing the general rules” (Hart 2012, 92-93). While Weber agrees that in “the pure type of traditional rule, it is not possible for laws or administrative principles to be deliberately ‘created’ by statute” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 355), he thinks this is compatible with “the mythical but inwardly genuine flexibility of those customs” (Weber [1917] 2003, 281). Traditionalists had, in other words, non-enactive mechanisms for creating “new rules when a change in economic or social conditions had created novel and unsolved problems” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 761, see also [1922] 2003, 135, [1920b] 2019, 116).

What are the sources of flexibility and innovation within a traditional social order? In what follows, I provide two, increasingly radical accounts of the flexibility of traditional statuses. I describe the first account, presented in 3.3, as “buried grounds” and the second, presented in 3.4, as “exemplarized grounds.” The second account gives us the conceptual resources to show how the notions of constitutive and deontological rules misdescribe the grounds of some traditional statuses.

3.3. Buried Grounds: A First Source of Traditional Flexibility

The first account of status-flexibility within a traditional social order continues to work within the framework of constitutive rules as found within the Standard Model in general and the grounding project in particular. As we have seen, within a traditional order, “belief in authority is based on personal relations that are perceived as natural (naturgewachsene)” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1007). The grounds by which a person comes to be seen as an instance of a traditional status tend to be surface features of the agent: just as traditional fathers beget children instead of bearing them, the grounds for being a traditional ruler are typically cashed out in terms of manifest facts about a person’s sex, age, familial line, physical power, accomplishments, etc. For the traditionalist, a child, for example, cannot be a ruler, but is rather dependent on the ruler, “because of his objective helplessness” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1007).

With this emphasis on grounds as surface features, it is somewhat unexpected when Weber remarks that, from the point of view of the traditionalist, the “woman is dependent because of the normal superiority of the physical and intellectual energies (Spannkraft) of the male” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1007). Physical and intellectual energies are not manifest or perceivable, but are dispositional properties and, so, are hidden or buried. If the constitutive rules for counting as, for example, a traditional ruler come to cite these buried or dispositional characteristics as constitution conditions, then we have located one source of status-flexibility within a traditional social order.

How so? The clear liquidity of water, once thought to give meaning to the natural kind term, “water,” can come to be seen as merely reference-fixing. One implication of this shift is that features once thought to disqualify something from counting as water, such a solidity, can come to be regarded as compatible with its being water. Consider, then, Plato’s treatment of key statuses in Republic while rigorously maintaining the internal point of view.¹³ Against those who claim that having a penis is among the necessary grounds for being a Guardian, when Plato appeals to the quality of metal as found in one’s soul he effectively buries the grounds:

if the male sex is seen to be different from the female with regard to a particular craft or way of life, we’ll say that the relevant [sex] must be assigned to it. But if it’s apparent that they differ only in this respect, that the females bear children while the males beget them, we’ll say that there has been no kind of proof that women are different from men with respect to what we’re talking about, and we’ll continue to believe that our guardians and their wives must have the same way of life. (Plato 1992, 454d-e)

And again, in ancient Rome, while most wives had wombs, someone with a penis could nevertheless be taken on as a wife if they were thought to lack the essential but hidden masculine virtus, defined as a psychic disposition to dominate others (Fone 2000, 48-49).

If the constitution conditions cited by constitutive rules are necessarily hidden, then no particular surface feature is necessarily status-excluding: just as something can be water even if it is not liquid, one might be found to be a traditional ruler even if one has a womb, so long as one is also deemed to have the hidden feature. Note that these traditional statuses are still thought to be sexed and naturalized by traditionalists, but the grounding conditions that qualify one as an instance of these traditional statuses no longer exactly co-vary with any observable property. This is one source of status-flexibility within a traditional social order.

3.4. Exemplarized Grounds: A Second Source of Traditional Flexibility

The “buried grounds” account of traditional status-flexibility does not fundamentally challenge the applicability of the notion of a constitutive rule to traditional statuses. The constitution conditions of a given traditional status may be buried but are still principled in the sense that they are articulated or articulable in terms of constitutive rules: for example, those with a gold soul count as guardians. However, in what follows, I argue that for Weber, there are at least a sub-set of traditional statuses whose grounds are indexically identified by way of a shared exemplar. Not only do such exemplarized grounds provide an additional explanation and clarification of the flexibility Weber attributes to traditional statuses, but because, unlike legal-rational statuses, their grounds are articulated in an unprincipled way, this explanation drives a more profound wedge between traditional and legal-rational statuses.

Traditions, for Weber, consist in the shared exemplars that show or embody the grounds, including habituated normative expectations, a traditional community associates with a given status (Rust 2018). These exemplars give traditionalists the means to indexically define a status term in a way that makes no essential reference to constitutive or deontological rules. Thus, while both traditional and legal-rational statuses have grounds, we might distinguish exemplarized grounds from principled grounds according to the means by which those grounds are specified.

Constitutive rules articulate the conditions by which one qualifies as an instance of a given status. Exemplars perform this function in a non-principled way. Someone is deemed an instance of a traditional status to the extent that they are deemed sufficiently analogous to the common exemplar that indexically defines the status. The capacity for analogical judgment might be propositionally supported, but it need not involve the formulation and subsequent application of rules, as when one simply sees that a baby’s brow resembles the brow of her father. Likewise, following Linda Zagzebski, if we see that someone is a good person (or a leader, friend, etc.), we might struggle to articulate a basis for that judgment over and above the fact that they are like the paradigms of good people (leader, friend, etc.): “it is not necessary that anybody knows what makes a good person good in order to successfully refer to good persons, any more than it was necessary that anybody knew what makes water water in order to successfully refer to water before the advent of molecular theory” (Zagzebski 2017, 15).

For Weber, substantively-irrational or traditional law proceeds by analogical reasoning of this kind. As Weber notes in the Rechtssoziologie, such adjudication is

bound by precedent and analogies drawn from precedent. . . . [O]ne always moves from the particular to the particular but never tries to move from the particular to general propositions in order to be able subsequently to deduce from them the norms for new particular cases (Einzelentscheidung). This reasoning is tied to the word, the word which is turned around and around, interpreted, and stretched in order to adapt it to varying needs, and, to the extent that one has to go beyond, recourse is had to “analogies” or “technical fictions.” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 787)

These traditional precedents are nothing other than exemplars, and these exemplars, thus, are akin to constitutive rules in that they enable traditionalists to see others as instances of a social status. However, unlike constitutive rules, this selective function is realized in a way that does not rely on the preliminary articulation of “general propositions” or principles. New instances of a status are simply seen as sufficiently analogous to the exemplar or precedent.¹⁴

According to the Standard Model, deontological rules describe the normative grounds or powers, specified in terms of rights, obligations, and abilities, of a given status. Likewise, exemplars show or embody the normative expectations associated with a given traditional status. And the exemplar can define these normative grounds or powers without those expectations first being codified into deontological rules. As Amy Olberding notes about the exemplars as found in the Analects, the general claims and programmatically applied rules as found in the text presuppose the reader’s capacity to pre-theoretically respond to an admired exemplar, not the other way around:

To read the Analects is to encounter a rich assembly of people, from the familiar stock heroes of early Chinese history to the students who struggle to apply Confucius’ instructions for self-cultivation and learning. . . . The more abstract and general claims of the text reflect an effort to craft criteria and conceptual schemata that elaborate on pre-theoretical responses to these people. . . . One of the most potent strategies for self-cultivation presented in the Analects is the emulation of exemplars. (Olberding 2008, 628-629)

On Olberding’s and Zagzebski’s views, admired exemplars directly prompt the desire to imitate: “The feeling of admiration is a kind of attraction that carries the impetus to imitate or emulate with it” (Zagzebski 2017, 20). For Weber, traditional action, which is predominant in a traditional social order and which Weber characterizes as “determined . . . through ingrained habituation” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 101), is closely linked to our capacity to imitate: if “the action of another is imitated because it is ‘fashionable’ or is considered to be traditional, exemplary, socially (ständisch) ‘proper,’ or anything similar, then meaning is oriented either to the behaviour of the source of imitation, or to that of third parties, or to both” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 101). While there is a category of “purely reactive imitative behaviour” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 102), as when a child mechanically picks up the linguistic idiosyncrasies of a parent, traditional actions, which are among the ideal types of social action, are meaningful as imitations. In the latter case, someone’s action is seen as meaningful in virtue of the fact that it is the kind of thing a given exemplar does. For example, Euthyphro’s prosecuting his father for murder is cast as a traditional action to the extent that he (unconvincingly) attempts to render it intelligible by pointing to what Zeus—the exemplar or “source of imitation”—had supposedly done to his father, Chronos (Plato 2002, 5e-6a).

How does the possibility of exemplarized grounds explain how traditional statuses can be flexible, despite their not being enacted or otherwise collectively accepted as socially contingent statuses? Buried grounds make it possible for someone to be an instance of a traditional status even when they have untypical surface properties. This is also the case for traditional statuses with exemplarized grounds, except that the analogical determination of statuses drops the pretext that there is even some hidden property that must co-vary with each instance of a given status. In other words, if different individuals are deemed to fall under the same category in virtue of the fact that they are each deemed to be like a particular exemplar, this is the Wittgensteinean point that there is no property that all those individuals must share.

3.5. Exemplarized Grounds: Five Implications

I have tried to drive a wedge between legal-rational statuses and (at least some) traditional statuses by suggesting that where the grounds for the former are principled, the grounds for the latter are irreducibly exemplarized. And this is a reason why, following Weber, it is a mistake to project the structure of a legal-rational social order onto a traditional social order. In this sub-section I unpack five implications of those statuses which have exemplarized grounds. In the next section, I consider Weber’s relevance to the anchoring project.

(1) The indeterminacy of traditional statuses

Grounds-citing constitutive rules tend to be all-or-nothing—either someone wins the electoral college vote or they do not. Perhaps those who would seek to reduce exemplarized grounds into principled grounds might contend that Weber only shows that the properties that ground a given traditional status might be complicated and disjunctive, but not unprincipled: a person is a traditional leader if and only if this person has, for example, [(P₁ · P₂) ∨ (P₁ · P₃) ∨ (P₂ · P₃)], where each of the P_i designates a constitution condition and no two of the P_i designate the same condition.

One arrives at this reductive conclusion by stepping outside of time to catalogue the different features had by each instance of a given status. However, the significance of exemplarized grounds can only be appreciated within time and from the point of view of those facing the question of whether or not someone is enough like the exemplar to qualify as a leader. In many cases, the question is easily answerable and, so, might appear to have been reached in a rule-governed way (Brännmark 2018, 4). But in borderline cases, it is misleading to say the question is simply difficult to answer, as if the traditionalists’ task is to recall the complicated, highly disjunctive rule that in every case applies. Rather, traditional statuses with exemplarized grounds exhibit genuine indeterminacy. All the facts, both about the exemplar and the candidate might be known, and in such cases the question, “Is this person a traditional leader?,” remains empty.¹⁵ To answer an empty question requires, not the recollection of a complicated rule, but a choice (although traditionalists also have reason to suppress this final feature of traditional adjudication).

A corollary of this view is that the relevant exemplar is itself a moving and historically constituted target as new precedents are established. In this way, it is less misleading to speak of the exemplars, rather than the exemplar, of a traditional status.

(2) The blurring of the distinction marked by constitutive and deontological rules

Where, for legal-rational statuses, there is a bright line between the constituting grounds that make a person a U.S. president (winning the majority of the electoral college vote) and the deontological powers or grounds to which one is subject upon becoming president (one ought to submit a budget request to Congress), in the case of traditional statuses there are just the properties and deeds associated with the exemplar. The same exemplarized grounding feature that might be among those that qualify one person as an instance of a traditional status might, for another instance, have normative weight. For example, imagine that the exemplar of a leader within a traditional community is, among other things, a member of a certain family, male, and brave in battle. Within a given community, where one person might come to be seen as a traditional leader in virtue of being a male member of a certain family, they aspire to be more like the exemplar by participating in contests of war. But another male comes to be seen as an instance of the traditional leader in virtue of his heroic deeds, but aims to join a certain family through marriage. Perhaps not all properties of an exemplar can be objects of aspiration, but if the person seen as a leader happens to have a vagina, sex and/or gender can be performed. Thus, when the grounds of a status are exemplarized, the distinction between those grounds that perform a selective function and those grounds that perform a normative function is muddied.

(3) Deontological power versus telic power

One class of grounds are, as we have seen, the deontological or normative powers that are associated with a given status. However, if those powers are not identified by way of deontological rules, but indexically identified by appeal to the deeds of an admired exemplar, then the normative pressure exerted on instances of a traditional status typically take the form, not of rights and obligations, but of ideals. Along these lines, Åsa Andersson (Åsa Burman) distinguishes the “deontological powers” that are the focus of the Standard Model from “telic powers.” Where “deontic normativity concerns what we can demand of each other,” Andersson claims that “telic normativity concerns ideals that we try to live up to and others expect us to live up to” (Andersson 2007, 14).¹⁶ Johan Brännmark explicitly cites exemplars as a non-principled means by which the normative grounds of certain statuses are indexically determined: “Rather than shared representations of rules, it could be a matter of sharing sets of similar-enough exemplars (representations of remembered instances) or prototypes (representations of clusters of properties which members of a category tend to share)” (Brännmark 2018, 3). As an instance of a given status, one aspires to do the kind of thing these exemplars do or are taken to have done. I will have more to say about the shape of telic power in the following discussion of informal statuses.

(4) Traditional statuses and informal statuses

So far, we have been thinking about traditional statuses in historical terms. Since an ideal type is a “one-sided accentuation” of a phenomenon, and the point of formulating ideal types is “to understand the distinctive character of the reality of the life in which we are placed” (Weber [1904] 1949, 114), I want to say something about how Weber’s account of traditional authority can illuminate informal social statuses, as found in our form of life.

The suggestion that the Standard Model distorts our understanding of traditional statuses by construing them as more determinate and rule-governed than they are also applies to the more familiar, informal statuses which partially constitute our social reality. Searle appears to insist that informal statuses, such as friend, are not unlike the formally defined statuses which serve as his stock examples, such as U.S. dollar, except that the rules which animate the former are tacit and codifiable, rather than explicit and codified.

A test for the presence of genuine institutional facts is whether or not we could codify the rules explicitly. In the case of many institutional facts, such as property, marriage, and money, these indeed have been codified into explicit laws. Others, such as friendship, dates, and cocktail parties, are not so codified, but they could be. (Searle 1995, 87-8)

Could the regulative and constitutive rules of friendship be codified explicitly? There are no constitutive rules for friendship. Rather, there are exemplars or embodiments of friendship, which are more or less approximated by actual friends. This seems to be what Alexander Nehamas was getting at when, after vividly describing an incident wherein a friend, Tom, came to his rescue by changing a flat tire in the rain, he wrote, “no words could ever describe what exactly I saw. Friendship . . . is always embodied; its depictions require embodiment as well. . .” (Nehamas 2010, 279). In this way, informal statuses seem like traditional statuses in that both imply exemplarized, rather than principled grounds. Of course, there are differences, as traditionalists also think that their statuses are natural; by contrast, many informal statuses, such as friend and cocktail party, are transparently social.

Are there deontological rules of friendship, specified in terms of rights and obligations, which could be codified or otherwise surfaced? Searle appears to think so: “If the rights and duties of friendship suddenly became a matter of some grave legal or moral question, then we might imagine these informal institutions becoming codified explicitly. . .” (Searle 1995, 88). However, Searle misconstrues the normative pressure of friendship by casting it in terms of the second-person standpoint, wherein we make and acknowledge claims on one another’s conduct and will (Darwall 2009, 3). Tom did not come to Nehamas’s rescue from a sense of obligation or duty. Indeed, Michael Stocker writes that “[d]uty seems relevant in our relations with our loved ones and friends, only when our love, friendship and affection lapse” (Stocker 1976, 465n8).¹⁷ Tom fixed the tire because that is what friends do. The force of this claim is not found in any deontological specification of what friends are required or obliged to do, but in the great exemplars of friendship—including, now, Tom himself—that prompt admiration and imitation. This is, as suggested above, none other than the gap between deontological powers and telic powers (Andersson 2007, 14).

At one point, Searle appears to recognize that these informal statuses, like traditional statuses, resist capture by the Standard Model. Despite claiming that informal statuses, like friend, are just variants of formal, legalized statuses, insofar as the former “could be . . . codified into explicit laws,” at the end of the same paragraph Searle flirts with self-contradiction when he concedes that “explicit codification has its price. It deprives us of the flexibility, spontaneity, and informality that the practice has in its uncodified form” (Searle 1995, 88).

This last claim is a profoundly Weberian thought. Social constructivist projects can have a liberatory, consciousness-raising dimension when they aim to reveal the contingency of statuses, including traditional statuses, that self-present as natural or inevitable (Hacking 1999, 6; Haslanger 2003, 318). While re-anchoring of this kind is vitally important, Weber would remind us that the deontological form that such constructed statuses take is, as compared to informal and some traditional statuses, binding in a different way. Constitutive rules sharply divide the qualificatory space into two categories: someone is either, for example, a citizen (legally blind, a woman, etc.), or they are not. And deontological rules, cashed out in terms of deontological powers, are no less dichotomizing: if a status gives someone a right or obligation to act, this distinction either maximizes or minimizes discretion within a deontologically constructed possibility space, eliminating weight and judgment. Anthony Laden colorfully compares the rational appeal to such deontological powers to “a kind of normative bulldozer that clears paths for action” (Laden 2012, 46). But the comparison between rules and machines is originally Weber’s: a legal-rational economic order, bound as it is “to the technical and economic conditions of mechanical and machine production,” “determines, with overwhelming coercion, the style of life not only of those directly involved in business but of every individual who is born into this mechanism” (Weber [1905] 2002, 120). The traditionalist incorrectly thinks that social kinds are natural kinds. But those of us born into a legal-rational social order find ourselves confined in an “iron cage”¹⁸ of enablements and requirements, even as we recognize that the cage is of our own making (Weber [1920c] 2001, 123). Or, as Searle says, “explicit codification has its price.”

(5) Grounds as anchors

Most legal-rational statuses are not enacted ex nihilo. Rather, traditional or informal, exemplarized social kinds are given legal significance by way of enactments that sharpen or codify exemplarized grounds into principled grounds. Thus, the traditional or informal status, woman (immigrant, war, money, law, race, care giver, etc.), might have exemplarized grounds, such that people are assumed to fall closer to or further from whatever exemplars of womanhood can be found within a cultural context. If the right economic and social conditions are in place, a legislative body might enact a set of constitutive rules that (attempt to) specify all-or-nothing constitution conditions for counting as a woman. And to the extent that such enactments are partially sourced in traditional or informal, exemplarized statuses, then the latter do not simply co-exist with their newly created legal-rational counterparts, but partially anchor those legal-rational statuses. For example, the anchors of the status, legally blind, would include, not just the legal enactment itself, but the exemplarized grounds of the non-legal status, blind, upon which the enactment builds.

4. Legitimacy and the Anchoring Project

In section 3, I considered Weber’s relevance to the grounding project. Where the Standard Model assumes that the grounds of all social statuses are describable in terms of rules, I argued that the grounds of some traditional statuses are indexically defined by appeal to exemplars. I also argued that this accounts for the flexibility Weber attributes to traditional statuses.

Social statuses are such that their grounds could be otherwise—it is not inevitable that the U.S. presidency has the constitution and normative conditions it does. Anchors are factors that “glue” or “put in place” those conditions and the anchoring project is concerned with describing these factors.

In this section, I consider Weber’s relevance to the anchoring project. In section 4.1, I claim that because Weber arrives at his view about anchors via a discussion about political legitimacy, he invites a distinction between two sub-projects within the anchoring project. In section 4.2, I claim Weber’s discussion of legitimate forms of authority entails, not only an appreciation of the anchoring inquiry in general, but an appreciation of Epstein’s point, directed against Searle and others, that there are a plurality of anchors. In section 4.3, I show that Weber’s path to a discussion about anchorage also shows that the anchoring project includes an illuminating classificatory dimension: we can distinguish social orders according to the anchors that are predominant within those social orders. This third conclusion lends additional support to the principal finding of this paper—that what Searle describes as the structure of human civilization is in fact only a way of being a human civilization.

4.1. Two Sub-Projects Within the Anchoring Project

Searle’s and Ludwig’s views both embody the Standard Model insofar as they maintain that collective acceptance is the only factor that can anchor or attach constitution and deontic conditions to a given status.

Collective acceptance is especially relevant to the “easy cases,” where the settling of statuses helps us achieve goals that we already had, would be difficult to attain otherwise, and the realization of which imposes few costs on the participants. For example, if we each wanted to play checkers, we could simply decide to use pennies and dimes as the required pieces; this is a kind of anchoring (we could have decided to use different tokens instead), wherein collective acceptance implicates the straightforward application of instrumental rationality.

Weber, however, is interested in how statuses might come to be anchored when those statuses asymmetrically impose costs on the participants, even if they also jointly benefit them. Accordingly, Weber focuses on the possibility of legitimate Herrschaft or authority, defined in terms of “the Chance that a command of a particular kind will be obeyed by given persons” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 134). And the ideal types of authority are “based on different motives for compliance” (Weber [1922] 2003, 133). Because Weber is ultimately interested in describing the “characterological” conditions for rational capitalism, his question is focused on how different social orders differently anchor a ruler’s power to issue orders.

Many social ontologists, including Lewis (1969), Bratman (2014), and Guala (2016), have suggested that the model which explains anchoring in the easy cases can be variously extended to the hard cases. Rather than evaluate these attempts, at this point I only want to make the modest suggestion, which I do not think has been appreciated, that Weber’s inquiry into conditions of legitimate authority is an instance of the anchoring project. Moreover, Weber’s focus on compliance suggests that the anchoring project can be subdivided into two projects, roughly corresponding to what I have described as the easy and hard cases. This distinction invites the more substantive claim—against these authors—that legitimate authority is anchored differently in different social orders. I explore this thought in the next two sections.

4.2. Against a “Unitary Theory” of Anchorage

According to the Standard Model, because anchoring is always a matter of collective acceptance, political authority is legitimate to the extent that it is collectively accepted as such. By contrast, Weber points to the “most varied motives for conformity: from dull habituation to purely purposively rational considerations” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 338).

Of course, within a legal-rational social order, collective acceptance, either of the status or of the procedures that give rise to the status, is central to a subject’s willingness to comply. Subordinates are willing to obey the rules which describe a legal-rational social order:

(α) by virtue of an agreement among interested parties;

(β) by virtue of its [legal] imposition, on the basis of the legitimacy ascribed to the rule of man by man, and conformity. (Weber [1920b] 2019, 115; see also 131)

However, the phenomena which anchor and legitimize statuses within non-legal-rational social orders, including traditional and charismatic forms of legitimate authority, are even more diverse.

Actors can ascribe legitimate validity to an order

(a) by virtue of tradition: the validity of the ever-existing;

(b) by affective, especially emotional, belief: the validity of the newly revealed, or the exemplary;

(d) by virtue of positive statute, whose legality is believed. (Weber [1920b] 2019, 115)

Weber and Epstein agree, against Searle’s and Ludwig’s “unitary theory” of anchorage, that possible anchors are “radically heterogeneous” and include factors like legal enactment, tradition, and, as we saw in 3.3, features of the natural world itself, such as the objective helplessness of the child.

I have claimed Weber shares Epstein’s conviction that the factors which anchor a given mode of authority are diverse. Since this paper has been especially concerned to contrast legal-rational and traditional social orders, it will be helpful to gesture to how, exactly, compliance is engendered in these social orders and their variants. Bureaucracy is the “purest type of legal rule” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 347), and compliance in a bureaucratic social order involves accepting an enacted rule structure: “The reduction of modern office management to rules is deeply embedded in its very nature” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 958). As the quotations above indicate, typically such compliance is a matter of voluntary acceptance, although Weber concedes that “the contrast between an order based on assent and one that is simply imposed is relative, not absolute,” as when, in a democracy, the will of the majority is imposed on a dissenting minority (Weber [1920b] 2019, 119).

In a traditional social order, compliance is anchored, not in collective acceptance or enactment, but in tradition. Here, obedience is sourced, as discussed in section 3, in the habitualized perception that some personal relations are “natural” (naturgewachsene) (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1007)—a “psychological ‘adjustment’ arising from habituation to an action causes conduct that in the beginning constituted plain habit later to be experienced as binding” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 754; see also Camic 1986).¹⁹ Here a subject is responsive, not to an enacted and accepted order of rules, but to a person, insofar as that person embodies the authority felt to be implicit in a patriarchal familial structure. Accordingly, Weber describes patrimonialism—the principle form of traditional authority—as a decentralized, “special case of patriarchal domination (Herrshaft)” (Weber [1920a] 1978, 1011), wherein filial and loyalty relations are adapted to serve the requirements of large political communities. Patrimonialism manifests as sultanism or estate-type domination (Ständische Herrschaft) depending on how centralized or decentralized the power distribution is between the ruler and an administrative staff (Weber [1920b] 2019, 361-5). Since the traditional authority’s power to command is anchored in the habitualized acceptance of seemingly natural or inevitable personal relations, we distort the anchoring power of tradition if we construe it as a modality of collective acceptance or legal enactment.

4.3. Social Orders Are Differentiated According to the Anchors That Are Predominant Within Them

In the last subsection I claimed that Weber is relevant to the anchoring project insofar as he is shown to be an ally of Epstein’s view about the heterogeneity of anchors. While true, this formulation understates Weber’s contribution to the anchoring project. Epstein presents these various anchors as a loose assemblage of factors which might, under various circumstances, fix the content of a status term: in addition to collective acceptance, a status might be “anchored by a mix of historical tokens, miscellaneous features of the environment, legal enactments, community beliefs and practices, and more” (Epstein 2016, 165). However, as the quotations in the previous section indicate, Weber is interested to show how this aggregate of anchors might be historically and conceptually related. While explicit agreement in the form of legal enactment might be a central anchoring mechanism in a modern legal system, as section 3 shows, such a mechanism presupposes or is built upon importantly different modes of anchoring; the previously anchored grounds become anchors for new groundings.

More generally, because, for Weber, ideally typical social orders are distinguished according to the anchors that are prominent within them, Weber draws our attention to the possibility that the anchoring project will have a taxonomic dimension; to understand the factors which could anchor a status—especially in the hard cases—is to understand something about the nature of the social order within which those statuses are found. As we have seen, Weber’s different modes of legitimate authority are essentially individuated by the anchors that are predominant within them. Finally, because any actual social order implies multiple, overlapping anchoring mechanisms, the anchoring project becomes a promising lens through which to understand the conditions of certain kinds of social conflict, which is a key theme of Weber’s (Weber [1913] 2012, 295).

A final implication of the suggestion that Weber’s investigation into legitimate authority is an expression of the anchoring project directly bears on the thesis of this paper. If social orders are distinguished by the anchors that are predominant within those orders, and if legal-rational statuses are principally anchored in collective acceptance and legal enactment, then this suggests that the Standard Model misconstrues social orders in which their statuses are anchored differently. In other words, Weber’s historical and sociological contributions are relevant to social ontological inquiry by reminding us, not just about the contingency of the grounds of a social status, but about the contingency in the ways in which those grounds come to be anchored. It is relatively easy to appreciate that social facts could be otherwise. What Weber teaches us is that the means by which social facts are constructed could also be otherwise. The Standard Model assumes that the structure of human civilization is founded on the kind of acceptance a joint declaration makes possible; but these anchors are only predominant in our way of being a human civilization.²⁰

5. Conclusion

Weber is freshly relevant to contemporary social ontological discussions. My primary conclusion is that where the Searlean Standard Model of anchoring and grounding correctly describes the statuses that comprise a legal-rational social order, other statuses, including traditional and informal statuses, resist articulation in these terms.

My first premise, discussed in section 3, concerns the grounding project. The grounds of some traditional statuses are indexically defined by way of a shared exemplar, in contrast to the principled (codified or codifiable; rule-described) grounding conditions of legal-rational statuses. While not discussed in this paper, Weber also makes it clear that the Standard Model would be inhospitable to an adequate understanding of a charismatic social order: “Bureaucratic rule is specifically rational in the sense of being bound to rules open to discursive analysis; charismatic rule is specifically irrational since it is alien to all rules” (Weber [1920b] 2019, 376).

My second premise, discussed in section 4, concerns the anchoring project. Social orders are individuated by their anchors. Where the normative powers that partially ground legal-rational statuses are principally anchored in collective acceptance and legal enactment, the normative-telic powers that ground traditional statuses are principally anchored in both habit and the seemingly natural features of patriarchal, familial life. Additionally, Weber thinks that a charismatic social order is principally anchored in “affectual surrender,” which implicates an inclination towards novelty (Weber [1922] 2003, 138-139), but also, because the resulting social order is unstable, sets the stage for routinization. Both of these anchors are misdescribed in terms of collective acceptance.

Thus, the Standard Model, as exemplified by Searle’s account, articulates, not the structure of human civilization, but a way of being a human civilization.²¹

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author is grateful to Stetson University for providing financial support for this project in the form of a sabbatical leave.

ORCID iD

Joshua Rust

Notes

Author Biography

Joshua Rust is a professor of philosophy at Stetson University. He is the author of several contributions to the field of social ontology and two books on John Searle.

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