Abstract
Sesquicentennial celebrations are common these days. Many land-grant colleges in the United States were founded about 150 years ago, yet the ceremonial aspects of these ritualized memorializings do not cause the heart to flutter in thrilling anticipation of great speeches or fine dining. Indeed, lots of intriguing events happened on or about April 21, 1864, but only one of them brings satisfied smiles to the faces of working sociologists around the globe. Other occurrences, far more noteworthy at the time, now fill forgotten histories of the small scale, yet none ring so strongly as the “difficult” birth immortalized by an adoring spouse 62 years later.
For instance, on April 21, 1864 Abraham Lincoln wrote a letter to the “Honorable Secretary of War” saying “I forget the name of the man who is ordered to be executed tomorrow [“Lorenzo Stevens at Elmira”] at Syracuse, New York. I have concluded to suspend the sentence, and have him examined on the question of sanity by the same man who made a similar examination for us last year at Norfolk” (Lincoln 1864). A very important event for Mr. Stevens, and characteristically wise of Lincoln, especially when weighed in the context of his recent movie incarnation.
On the next day the United State Congress passed “The Coinage Act of 1864,” which inserted “In God We Trust” on all specie issued by the government. Sociologists of religion could make much of that, and may have already done so.
In Europe, the Second Schleswig War (also called the German-Danish War) had been raging since February, and at around 1000 hours on April 18, three days before our targeted date, ten thousand Prussian soldiers attacked Danes holding Fort Dybbøl following a six-hour artillery pummeling, leaving 1,700 of the defenders and 1,200 of the attackers dead. The battle is still officially remembered in Denmark, recalling that the war began over ethnic conflicts and an unstable Danish political system. One wonders if historically or comparatively minded political sociologists have used this instance in their studies, but one can be certain that for the 2,900 dead soldiers, this became an essential day.
Also three days before our favored date was the Battle of Poison Springs, Arkansas, where the First Kansas Colored Infantry suffered its worst losses during the War at the hands of Confederate soldiers, who murdered the captured and wounded. Six hundred Union troops using 198 wagons had been sent to capture 5,000 bushes of corn and other edibles for their starving comrades. They were eventually reinforced by 500 more troops, but lying in wait for them were 3,600 Confederate soldiers and twelve cannons under the command of John Sappington Marmaduke. After defeating and chasing the Yankees for over two miles, the Rebels returned to the battlefield and killed the wounded former slaves from Arkansas and Missouri who had become Union soldiers. Henceforth black soldiers would cry out “Remember Poison Springs” when rallying in battle, commemorating the 117 who died there.
In India, nothing memorable occurred on April 21 according to sources which claim to chronicle such things, though one suspects they missed something.
Two months after the German infant who exhibited cephalopelvic disproportion arrived (see title above), a large number of war tourists in Cherbourg witnessed a unique event just beyond French waters: a battle to the death between the novice U.S.S. Kearsarge and the world-famous C.S.S. Alabama, which ended a two-year game of cat and mouse between the two when the Alabama sank after 2.5 hours of battle. In the preceding three years, the Confederate vessel had triumphed over 83 ships dedicated to the Yankee cause, so was a prime target of the Union navy. This duel made newspapers worldwide, and all the local Cherbourg hotels were crammed with onlookers, who took the long contest between the two ships as a sporting event (Foote 1974 [Vol. 3]: 380-390).
And yet, sociologically speaking, nothing more important transpired worldwide than the heroic efforts of Helene Fallenstein Weber, struggling to bring her large-headed son to life, in Erfurt, Thuringia, near the center of Germany today. (Max, Jr. was not the only notable Erfurt resident. Martin Luther—whose ideas were central to so many of Weber’s, even if in a different register—won his BA and MA degrees there; J.S. Bach’s father and cousin were born in Erfurt, and his parents married in a church that still stands in the town; the composer of Pachelbel’s “Canon” [the “Yesterday” of classical music] worked there as organist in a church for some years, and Boogie Pimps was also born there). As Helene Weber’s daughter-in-law explained six decades later: “Helene contracted a fever, and she was not able to breast-feed him, as she did her later children. This was done by another woman, the wife of a Social Democratic carpenter, and the boy dreamed his first weeks away in a laundry basket under a carpenter’s bench. When later his social and democratic views developed in opposition to the political heritage of his ancestors, the family used to joke that ‘Max drank in his political views with his nurse’s milk’“ (Weber 1975: 31). One wonders if they also did not connect Weber’s carpenter affiliation with that of Jesus. Thus Karl Emil Maximilian Weber arrived in the world so that he could invent a form of sociology which has become as essential to our way of thinking as John Philip Sousa’s 130 tunes remain crucial for marching bands. He was the first of eight children, named after his politician father, and those double inherited burdens weighed on him throughout his busy life of 56 years. His accomplishments during this brief existence (recalling that Claude Levi-Strauss recently died at 100, and Paul Ricoeur at 101), even while sidelined from 33 through 39 due to a gigantic emotional crisis, beggar the claims to real achievement of ordinarily gifted scholars in their fields of study. He not only excelled in a range of separate scholarly spheres, but invented some of them as well: the sociology of music, the sociology of law, the sociology of comparative religion, the sociology of bureaucracy, the sociology of power, while perfecting survey research and the sociology of stock and commodity markets, to name a few.
After college, and in between stints of military training, he obtained a law degree, then wrote a dissertation about medieval trading relationships in northern Italy using dusty data he collected in antique Italian and Spanish archives. In the serious ritual of a public dissertation defense, he was certified before a substantial audience as sure to be the future of historiography by Theodor Mommsen himself, dean of nineteenth century ancient historians, a celebrity, and future Nobel laureate (Weber 2003: 9). Weber then rocketed to youthful stardom as a Roman history expert (Weber 2008), and not yet out of energy, oversaw and wrote up the results of two large social surveys of agricultural workers and 15,000 priests in Prussia, creating a 900-page book. After this he wrote an expert-level treatment of the stock market, and lectured at Berlin University in place of his ill professor. All of these disparate research materials were in print before he turned 30. Meanwhile, he had been living at home with a pious mother and pragmatic father, neither of whom probably understood exactly what their ingenious son was doing. In each field he entered, the precocious scholar raised the stakes for those who would follow, innovating research practices and theoretical development. He was the young man to watch in the German academy until his emotional collapse at 33.
All of this ought to be fairly well known to sociologists today. In addition to Marianne Weber’s lovingly detailed biography (1926; English translation, 1975), we now have a less adoring but even more revealing biography by a German historian (Radkau 2009) and, still untranslated, a major biography of Marianne herself, which of course includes much information about her husband (Meurer 2010). For German readers, the collected works project has provided his letters in multiple volumes, which illustrate his humanity far more than do his straight-backed, tightly-strung scholarly writings. Already in 2004 when the largest bibliography of Weberiana in English was published, nearly 5,000 items were presented (Sica 2004), and since then the stream has not slowed. Max Weber Studies is in its 13th year of existence, offering technical articles that probe Weber’s life, writings, and the extension of his ideas in ways that would be useful if available for other classical theorists as well.
So why has the Weber Industry thrived nearly a century after his death in 1920? He explicitly argued that in science, newness must prevail: “each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. This is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work” (Weber 1946: 138). The obvious answer revolves around his bright ideas, those that fill introductory theory textbooks (rationalization, demagicalization/disenchantment, routinization, charisma, ideal types, legitimation processes, types of social action, and so on). Yet as with Marx, (especially the earlier works), but also Durkheim, Simmel, Lukács, Mannheim, Sorokin, Merton, de Beauvoir, and other notables in the history of theorizing, the ideas themselves, shorn of the special rhetorics with which they were delivered to the public, would not have been enough to guarantee a continuing audience. Similarly, Hemingway is read fifty years after his death not because he had great ideas—quite the contrary, since most of his ideas about men, women, war, alcohol, hunting, and death have become intolerable within the context of today’s norms of enlightened interaction. Yet his books still sell, his style is aped, and his letters are being published in twelve volumes. Readers respond to skillful rhetoric, and scholarly readers accept ideas when presented in certain ways which they would otherwise reject or ignore. Everyone wants to be charmed, particularly when trying to ingest new ideas, or restatements of old ones.
Weber’s German is famously overwrought, underpunctuated, hyper-technical, and not user-friendly. But through the labor of many translators, some of them virtuosic, anglophone audiences have gained access to his ideas through a recognizably Weberian form of writing that is dense, insistent, encyclopedic, hypnotically choked with qualifiers, taxonomic, heavily footnoted, and passionate (when it made sense to be so). One way to commemorate in few words the sequicentennial of his birth is to listen to his scholarly voice as it grew between 1889 and 1920.
From his first dissertation (1889), we learn this about “Industrial Wealth in Florence”: “The development of commercial law in Florence has been perceived and depicted repeatedly by Lastig as a contrast to that of the Italian maritime cities. At the time when the independent statutory creation of law began in the communes, Florence was a city on land whose access to the sea—its only trade route free of toll barriers—was blocked by Pisa’s areas that lay in between. Large and distance trade could not serve as the foundation of the creation of capital here, and the forms of law that governed trade did not lead to an original creation of law. Rather, economic activity depended on commercial labor; large industrial wealth was the backbone of the city’s economic power” (Weber 2003: 151).
The principal ingredients of Weberian sociology are already evident: close attention to the historical record, conceptualization of socio-economic changes over time, a refusal to accept other experts’ opinions if they contradict Weber’s own data or his reading of theirs, qualification of the argument only to interject contradictory data in the interest of “objectivity,” and so on. He was also brutally honest about the disappointing fruits of his own vigorous archival research that attempted to prove his hypotheses about “gesamte Hand“ (“‘joint hands’ and the institutions that served as the basis of the general partnership”): “If one were to inquire now into the legal-dogmatic and practical significance of the results of the analyses carried out here, one would have to admit that the signifiance does not lie in the individual findings” (ibid.:180). He complained to his wife in letters home about the difficulties of the research: “I had to read hundreds of Italian and Spanish collections of statutes, and first I had to master both languages sufficiently for me to read books in them after a fashion; in the case of Spanish, this was somewhat time-consuming. Then, too, most of the stuff was written in disgusting ancient dialects, and one is surprised that the poeple understood that gibberish! Well, I had plenty to do, and if the results are meager rather than copious, it is less my fault than that of the Italian and Spanish city councillors who failed to put in the statutes precisely those things that I was looking for!” (Weber 1975: 113). Though uncharacteristically light-hearted, even humorous, when compared with famous passages in From Max Weber by which most students know his work, his capacity for droll wit and ironic observation livened up his letters and also, so it was reported, his interaction with students and friends.
Roman Agrarian History (1891), his habilitation (second dissertation) bore no relation whatsoever to his first dissertation, and begins with a manual on Roman surveying techniques: while “surveying ager centuriatis . . . first the decumanus maximus and cardo maximus were established as base lines, and then a system of parallel lines—decumani and cardines—were laid down as boundaries. They were spaced so that usually—although not always—they framed square lots which were each 20 by 20 actus (120 Roman feet), making 400 quadratactus in area, equivalent to 200 iugera, and these lots were called centuriae“ (Weber 2008: 11-12; he also provided illustrations, 176-177). Weber bathed in data whenever he could, but never for its own sake. When young he confided to a cousin that he would never become a first-rate scholar because he became too bored with the tedium of serious research, a claim we now find preposterous. But his fascination with The Big Picture gave him the gumption to search out and systematize deeply buried data, in a dozen languages if need be, not because he enjoyed it, but due to the requirements of “science” of the kind he wished to do.
Weber was always alert to the “So What?” question that scholars are routinely asked, and must ask themselves. If his habilitation necessarily began with minutiae, it ended with a sweeping historical vision: “The Roman Republic organized its conquests as a confederation of cities, and it purposely repressed national patriotism. Later developments under the Empire destroyed the local patriotisms of the cities as effective forces. In their stead came the ideal of world citizenship, which had its roots and also its effects in the religious, not political, sphere . . .Those necessities thrust more than half the Empire’s citizens into autarchic manors and compulsory state services. . . And when the Empire collapsed and its place was taken by local and territorial authorities a new development could begin, a new era. In this new era the Empire was no longer held together by its fiscal and administrative organizations. But the ancient unity of the Roman Empire was remembered, and it remained as an Utopian ideal of the unity of mankind, an ideal that could flower and shape new developments” (ibid.: 172). Moving between microscopic data and ideas to the very large generalizations constituted Weber’s model of how comparative-historical research ought to be done. Though he did not write a Rules of Sociological Method for this kind of work, simply watching him go about his labors points the way.
Marching through samples of his scholarly rhetoric would require a monograph, but a sense of his style can be enlarged by examining works rarely discussed or quoted. For instance, the opening of his Musiksoziologie, which he invented around 1912: “All rationalized harmonic music rests upon the octave (vibration ratio of 1:2), and its division into the fifth (2:3) and fourth (3:4) and the successive subdivisions in terms of the formula n/(n+1) for all intervals smaller than the fifth. If one ascends or descends from a tonic in circles first in the octave followed by fifths, fourths, or other successively determined relations, the powers of these divisions can never meet on one and the same tone no matter how long the procedure is continued. The twelfth perfect fifth (2/312) is larger by the pythagorean comma than the seventh octave equaling (1/27). This unalterable state of affairs. . . forms the fundamental core of facts for all musical rationalizations” (Weber 1958: 3). Marianne Weber recalled Weber at his new Steinway piano playing and lecturing his bewildered friends and colleagues for several hours as he worked out the meaning of rationalization in music written or performed in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. To understand his text, it is necessary to have studied musical theory, but even more is required, since Weber added the vital sociological twist, considering which instruments contributed to the growth of Western music in ways that did not occur elsewhere. Few U.S. sociologists have ventured into this corner of Weberianism because the cost of admission is high, but musicologists who have studied the work agree on its innovative importance.
The University of California Press in its wisdom has just reissued Economy and Society in a two-volume set, Weber’s masterpiece, first published in 1968 by a small press in New Jersey, reissued in 1978 by California, and now in a fresh edition 50 years later (with a new preface by one of the original editors, Guenther Roth). Though not inexpensive, it could once again serve as a brain-bursting inspiration for graduate students who have not been exposed to large-caliber sociology. Studying its 1,600 pages is more than a weekend adventure (the index alone is 64 pages). But prolonged meditation on its contents provides solid background in the sociology of cities, of law, of power, or social action, of bureaucracies, of religion, of status relationships, of legitimation processes, of nationalism, and other enduring topics within the field. There is no equivalently intelligent and encylopedic work, and likely never will be. It is the lingua franca of modern sociology.
