Max Weber: From Modernity to Globality – a Personal Memoir

Extraordinary though it may sound in this, Max Weber’s centenary year, at my age 1920 doesn’t seem so long ago. After all, it seems like only yesterday that I spoke at a conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his tragically early death.

I came across him first in 1957. His was the last name to figure on a Cambridge course booklist on the history of historiography. The lecturer never got to the end of his list. I did, and it was a life saver. I had been enduring the derisory comments of a final year tutor who mocked my interest in theory and this was the antidote. ¹ It turned out to be a life changer as well, but I couldn’t know that then.

Here was an author who actually tried to make sense of history. I made up my mind to study him further, for which I had to learn German. So the next year was spent in war-ravaged Cologne, painstakingly working through Marianne Weber’s (1926) biography with a dictionary, attending a language course at the Volkshochschule, while earning my pfennigs as an assistant teacher in a suburban Gymnasium. (‘Don’t listen to him’, the English teacher told the class, ‘he’s got an accent.’).

Then to the LSE to register for a thesis on Max Weber and rationality. ‘Why do you want that topic?’ was the disdainful query from my supervisor, the venerable Morris Ginsberg, successor to Hobhouse in the first chair of sociology in the UK, ‘Hobhouse is much more interesting.’ But I persisted. Rationality fascinated me and has done ever since, for its limits as well as its scope.

As it turned out Ginsberg probably had his own reasons for trying to steer me in another direction. He was then a rather lonely figure left behind by younger stars like Karl Popper, Ernest Gellner, Raymond Firth and Michael Oakeshott. Their lectures stimulated my growing conviction that serious work on Weber required a much deeper understanding of his time and antecedents than my thesis would allow.

So when I happened across a job advertisement in The Times for a post researching bureaucracy in Germany I sent in a speculative inquiry. It turned out to have been placed by Tom Bottomore, who at the time was lecturing on both Marx and Weber at the LSE, and who was the British lead for the new European Centre of Sociology. There were only two applicants, he told me. The other was a retired clergyman. I had the job.

It involved a thoroughly Weberian topic, a sociological study of German civil servants, and meant living in Germany again, working with the young Ordinarius, Ralf Dahrendorf, in Tübingen. As well as him and Bottomore, another lead figure was Michel Crozier (1964), making waves in the study of French bureaucracy. The Centre was a veritable Weberian hothouse. It was headed up by none other than the great Raymond Aron (1957), whose book on German sociology was already an inspiration. What a golden opportunity to acquire that deeper understanding!

To cut a short story even shorter, the project lasted three months only for me. Aron invited me to his flat on the banks of the Seine to tell me I had made a good start, but the French authorities, charged with administering the Ford Foundation grant for the Centre, could not countenance funding a British citizen to do research in Germany. I was out on my ear, but, thanks to the informal LSE network, found myself a month later, in October 1961, along with my friend and fellow graduate student, Tony Giddens, in an initial teaching job as an assistant to Norbert Elias at the University of Leicester.

Weber did not excite much interest in the recently established Leicester department. Bottomore, who had eased my arrival, was the informal network link between it and the LSE, but it was too busy flexing its muscles against the dominance of the much older department, and Elias was already casting his spell.

There was, however, a chance to introduce Weber in the theory course. It was mainly via Edward Shils’ edition of the methodology essays (Weber, 1949) and of course Parsons’ translations of The Protestant Ethic (Weber, 1930) and the first volume of Economy and Society (Weber, 1947). But they were tough going for undergraduates and we were grateful for the help of a new book by a recent immigrant from South Africa, John Rex, whose reliance on Weber in his Key Problems of Sociological Theory (1961) was for years hence to be the best defence of a left Weber interpretation.

Two years later I was in Reading as the first tenured lecturer in sociology, coincidentally able to have a hand in the appointment of the first holder of a sociology chair there, Stanislav Andreski (1984), a Weberian in his own inimitable way. He encouraged me to develop organization theory, and in an article in the Penguin Social Sciences Survey (Albrow, 1968) I was able to express my first tentative reservations on Weber’s fact/value distinction.

The hectic expansion of British sociology in the ’60 s then took me to Cardiff in 1967, still with unfinished ambitions and an unrequited interest in bureaucracy and rationality. Unrequited, because the slim staffing in new sociology departments in those days meant you found yourself teaching comparative social institutions and research methods, as well as theory, and anything else that could contribute to a credible degree course.

I hope these reminiscences are not just self-indulgence. They intend to convey both the magnetic influence of Weber’s whole thought world on a young scholar, but also how the vast scope of his enquiries could encourage deep immersion in just one small aspect of them. There was something else too. Weber was an engaged intellectual, alert to and involved in all the political currents of his time. He delighted in controversy. These were qualities that persuaded me sociology was my calling.

Paradoxically, to my regret later, Weber’s own unremitting polemics encouraged the same acerbic temper in my criticisms of other scholars. I was grateful when 40 years later Amitai Etzioni (1964) graciously accepted my apology for gratuitously savage comments (‘simplistic’, ‘banal’) on an early work. They appeared in my first novice publication, a review article of recent books on organization (Albrow, 1964). My tone was probably the displacement of my own deep but still incoherent dissatisfaction with the place rationality had in Weber’s thought. Fortunately, I did also commend his earlier book (Etzioni, 1961) as ‘most remarkable’.

Given the centrality of rationality for him, both in concept formation and in his historical and comparative accounts of rationalization, adopting the true Weberian spirit entailed being critical of Weber’s whole enterprise. Not that this was a lonely endeavour. Studies of bureaucracy and organization in the ’50 s and ’60 s were all proposing significant amendments to Weber’s ideal type of bureaucracy. They contributed to a golden era for Weber-inspired empirical research, led by Robert Merton and taken forward by his students, Peter Blau and Alvin Gouldner. These were pioneers who would have a prominent place in my first book, the student primer Bureaucracy (1970a).

In the same year as the publication of that book, the British Association for the Advancement of Science gave me a wonderful opportunity for a more expansive public treatment of the same theme. In the conference I referred to earlier, the sociology section of the Association was commemorating Max Weber, and I was invited to give its keynote Lister lecture, choosing the theme ‘Public Administration and Sociological Theory’.

Considering Weber from widely different perspectives, of functionalists and systems theorists, of Marx, Alfred Schütz and political scientists, I concluded that Weber’s ideal type could no longer be sustained as an appropriate model for contemporary civil services. Professionalism and personal responsibility were intrinsic to their operation. The lecture’s final reflections may well be considered relevant even to this day: The professional official has achieved emancipation from the machine to follow the objectives of his professional conscience. It makes the content of that conscience of immediate concern to us all (Weber trs. Albrow, 1975-6: 132; Albrow, 1975)

Those sentiments rounded off ten restless years, searching for a position on Weber and bureaucracy between competing theoretical schools that would be both distinctively mine and provide a solid enough base to allow for the more comprehensive consideration of his corpus that was now my ambition. There followed a period that was to last, for many reasons, both personal and political, in national and academic settings, for another 20 years.

The ’70 s and ’80 s were turbulent times for academics in general and sociologists in particular. The rival theoretical schools became proxies for wider conflicts that had spread beyond the universities in 1968, and the atmosphere within universities often remained toxic. Running a sociology department challenged both personal and intellectual qualities.

Weber provided a lode star for me in this period, a stable reference point, all the more paradoxical since his work reflected the conflicts of his own time and was also the target of rival interpretations. But it was the very complexity and density of his work that encouraged so many rival standpoints, and I was content to follow my own path between them. My intention had by then crystallized to provide my own distinctive synoptic account of Weber’s theoretical position.

It was to be a long and protracted process. Buoyed up by the success of Bureaucracy and rewarded for past administrative duties with leave of absence, I accepted a Leverhulme Fellowship to join the legendary Johannes Winckelmann’s Max Weber Institute in Munich in 1973/74. It was a heady time, bringing many new friends, including Weber scholars Horst Helle, Gert Schmidt and Stephen Kalberg, whose outstanding work on Weber, that includes applying his method to the contemporary United States (Kalberg, 2014), has been a pleasure to follow to the present day.

But it was colleagues in Cardiff who prompted me to take another direction in Weber studies. On my return to Wales the journal of the newly established Faculty of Law, The British Journal of Law and Society, invited me to contribute a paper on Weber and law, another vast segment of his concerns, though of course linked to his ideas on bureaucracy. I decided to concentrate on a formative early essay, his critique of the jurist Rudolf Stammler, and followed it up with a translation for the same journal (Weber, 1975–6).

Overall my sympathies were with Stammler, whose infringements of the is/ought dichotomy Weber castigated with the ‘zeal of a reformer of sexual morality’. He was ‘a little like a reviewer for a “quality” newspaper faced with the first issue of the Communist Manifesto deciding, because it falls neither in the category of “literature” or “history” it has therefore nothing worthwhile to say’ (Weber trs. Albrow, 1975--6: 132; Albrow, 1975).

Effectively in line with my commentary on that debate (Stammler had replied), I was shaping a position that was then commonly called social constructivism, arguing that although one could concede that lawyers might focus more on the normative and sociologists on the empirical, nonetheless both engaged with real society where the two sides of the dichotomy intersected, and it was in that shared and disputed space that both professions became agents of social change.

It was a position that tallied with my other work as a sociologist, which had included acting as a consultant to a local community (Neath) in South Wales contesting proposals for a new road that would divide it in two. That practical experience had led me to arrive four years before at a position that much more closely approximated to a public view of the sociologist representing the ‘human factor’ than ‘some self-deceiving concept of the value-free professional’ (Albrow, 1970b: 18).

That experience of course was also consistent with the reality of Weber’s passionate, even at times reckless, engagement in both public affairs and in academic politics. There he spoke from the heart, covering his commitments sometimes with reference to the irrationality of ultimate value standpoints.

On that point I share a centuries-old Anglo-Saxon rationalism, reiterated in 1962 by Runciman at the beginning of the take-off period for British sociology, namely that while Weber may be correct in saying disputes on rival philosophies may be in practice unresolvable it is ‘a mistake to argue that they can be shown necessarily incapable of ever being resolved’ (Runciman, 1963: 168).

Value positions are always open to argument, even where their proponents refuse to argue, but the application of rational methods in the world around us has effects that go beyond argument. This is the nub of Weber’s distinction between rationality and rationalization that became a focus for me in the 1980s.

Rationalization was a concept embedded in Weber’s historical and sociological accounts that effectively bypassed his methodological reflections. It applied to the uses of either or both logical (formal) and ends/means (material) thinking, whether their application was in any ultimate sense correct or not. Rationalization could also be a cumulative process and its long-term consequences could be experienced in the capitalist system of his time.

His last statement on the matter, the famous introduction to the essays on the sociology of religion, with their poignant dedication to Marianne (1893 ‘bis ins Pianissimo des höchsten Alters’), dated 7 June 1920, just seven days before his death, pointed to the varieties of rationalization in different sectors and in different cultures, the specific nature of Western rationalization and its cumulative nature (Weber, 1920: 1–16). In the West it was associated with a general demystification of the world, and an iron framework for people’s lives that made them ready to accept the message of charismatic leaders.

When it came to his personal attitude towards rationalization Weber occasionally lets his value-free guard down in an incidental comment like ‘the path of human destiny cannot but appal him who surveys a section of it’ (Weber, 1930: 29), but an idea that gained some traction with his critics, namely that he somehow prepared the way for Hitler, is preposterous. ² I have to concede that my early and very jejune reaction to his rationalization account was similar to Alvin Gouldner’s (1955) dismissal of ‘metaphysical pathos’. It all seemed to smack of a non-Marxist historical determinism.

But in the course of the ’80 s, more mature engagement with social realities in the UK in particular led me to give rationalization much more credence. It helped to leverage an angle on developments in Thatcher’s Britain, a theme I explored in a paper for the World Congress of Sociology in Mexico in 1982. It increased contact too with the developing small community of young Weber scholars in the UK, beginning a discussion that continues pleasurably to this day with Sam Whimster, who has been pivotal in the growth of worldwide Weber scholarship by founding the journal Max Weber Studies.

Whimster invited me to contribute (Albrow, 1987a) to the book he edited with Scott Lash, Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, where I had the chance to explore in some detail how British legislative developments around data protection and artificial human reproduction illustrated an elaboration and intensification of the idea of rationality compared with its earlier treatments by Kant and Weber.

Another friend, Johannes Weiss (1987), who was already well ahead of me in writing on the foundations of Weber’s thought, came to much the same view of rationalization in a paper in the same volume. The contemporary relevance of Weber made engagement with Marxism inevitable, and Weiss’ prompting led to a contribution to a volume he edited (Böckler and Weiss, 1987), comparing Marx and Weber on their treatment of the idea of the social (Albrow, 1987b).

That theme was to have been presented at a Beijing conference in 1989, yet another Weber anniversary, 125 years since his birth. The events that year in Tiananmen Square meant it was called off. But in any case the tenor of the paper was already contained within the book that was the culmination of 20 years of struggle with Weber and myself. ³

Wrestling with Weber and rationality had pre-occupied me then for well-nigh 30 years. It had taken me in many different directions – challenging the split between rationality and emotions, grounding objectivity in social science, exploring bureaucratic culture, deconstructing linkages between rationality and rationalization, defending the idea of society against Weber, exploring his relations with Marxist theory – culminating in a synoptic view of Weber’s contribution to social theory in 1990. But it turned out to be mainly a personal satisfaction, one submerged in the tumult of the time, and too late to make any lasting impact.

Max Weber’s Construction of Social Theory (1990) was written at a turning point, or rather many turning points, personal and political. My employer University College Cardiff, to put it in recognizable terms, had ‘gone into administration’, and I had been pensioned off, even as I had begun editing a new journal in Cardiff for the International Sociological Association, International Sociology. All that paled into insignificance against the backcloth of subsequent geopolitical upheavals with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, the clamp-down in China and announcements of ‘one world’ with a single superpower, the United States.

There was a (relatively) new term that went with the upheavals, globalization, appearing in the print media as well as academic journals. The recently founded TCS was in the vanguard, publishing Robertson’s and Lechner’s (1985) rejection of Wallerstein’s economism and headlining the idea of globalization. The Economist by 1990 was running a leader (4 May 1990) declaring: ‘For big companies further globalisation is a golden opportunity’ – followed by an article in the same issue on ‘brand-stretching’ that cited firms pursuing a strategy of ‘globalisation of their brands’.

Editing the ISA’s new journal, I was involved too in the planning of its 1990 World Congress to be held in Madrid. There was an intense if not torrid atmosphere among the planners debating how to capture the sense of a historical turning point, to own a trope in public discourse as well as occupy the appropriate academic heights. Discussion converged on the theme of ‘sociology for one world’, but pushback came from many directions, objecting to an implicit Western triumphalism, and so the theme was amplified with ‘unity and diversity’.

That in itself was not enough to satisfy sociologists eager to seize the moment. The new journal had, since its first issue in 1986, published papers reflecting just that balance, diverse viewpoints arising in different cultures, written originally in many languages, converging on common issues. Globalization was in the air and on its pages. ⁴ It represented the spirit of the ISA.

So it was decided every Congress delegate should receive a conference volume consisting of selections from the journal and entitled Globalization, Knowledge and Society (1990). Given as it was to over 4000 delegates from every continent, it was a great marketing opportunity for SAGE, but also an effective promotion of globalization as the new central theme for sociology.

Weber did not loom large in the early globalization writing. He was cited in only 6 of the 23 contributions to another seminal globalization collection that also appeared in 1990, Mike Featherstone’s special issue of TCS, Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity. But there were two incidental references in the two most influential books on globalization for sociologists that were highly significant.

Anthony Giddens of course had long before regularly lectured and written on Weber, but in The Consequences of Modernity mention of him belonged only to the preliminaries. Based on lectures in Stanford in 1988, this book burst like a tornado on the rather stale modernity/postmodernity common room conversations, taking the consequences of global interdependence and the reshaping of social relations in everyday life in a direction that was to lead Giddens subsequently into public life. His mention of Weber was incidental, but allusion to rationalization as the key for his thinking on capitalism gave me pause for thought.

Robertson, on the other hand, acknowledged the formative influence on his own thinking of Weber’s repeated return to two ideas of the world, the religious sense of the word and the arena of international struggle (Robertson, 1992: 2–3). At the same time Robertson declared him ‘relatively (his emphasis) uninterested in what we now call globalization’ (1992: 143). My gloss on Robertson was that he considered that Weber belonged to a period of modern history where globalization was beginning to advance but had long since passed beyond him.

Weber provided Robertson and Giddens then with two different starting points, and this was mirrored in their entirely divergent accounts of globalization. For Robertson he was a voice from an earlier stage of modernity, and that fitted with his version of globalization passing through historical stages. By contrast Weber’s account of rationalization in Giddens’ eyes was an early intimation of the new technologies that underpinned globalization.

In both cases Weber was enclosed within his own iron cage of modernity. At one level I could agree with them. He was the unrivalled commentator on his own time, effectively establishing its own self-image as modern. Yet neither Robertson nor Giddens gave him more than marginal importance for understanding their and my own time. Implicitly, then, our time was either postmodern, which occasionally they allowed, or a new period in human history altogether, which they never did.

The paradox for me was that my 1990 account of his work applauded Weber’s capture of his time: ‘his sociology, then, has succeeded in grasping the spirit of the twentieth century in an extraordinary manner’. His studies of religion, nationalism, power and the market linked to the ‘universalisation of Western culture and the penetration of rationality into other cultures provide the basis for understanding the relationship between multi-culturalism and globalisation’ (Albrow, 1990: 284). But if leading commentators of our new world could say that it had moved on so much beyond Weber, surely we needed to grasp its radical novelty.

Could it be a coincidence that Robertson, Giddens and I converged on globalization at that time? Like, by happenstance, all three of us in 1960 used to relax together in the LSE graduate student common room? Our work had nothing that linked us then, only co-presence. Now being contemporaries was enough for us, and many others of course, to come quite independently to a similar sense that something fundamental had changed.

Where I differed from them was that I felt that consigning Weber to an earlier period of an ever-advancing modernity simultaneously underestimated him and downplayed the rift with the past. Two things were then going on for me in the ’90 s: one was the developing idea of a period that not merely came after the modern but represented a profound break with it. Given that I considered Weber not just to have intuited the deeper currents of his time, but also provided intellectual tools to understand any time, I was then led to ask: What would Weber have made of the 1990s? And harking back to my days as a history student, I preferred to look at globalization against a background of shocks, crises and epochal change.

Of course Weber could not foresee the catastrophic rupture with the past that came with the explosion of the hydrogen bombs over Japan in 1945, recognized by the leading intellectuals of the time like Arnold Toynbee and Aron as ushering in a new age. This was the decisive turning point where the equation of modernity with progress could no longer be reasonably upheld. He was not a prophet, and he was famously scathing of his contemporaries who claimed to be, but the question remains could his conceptual frame allow for epochal change.

My view was that Weber’s sense that rationalization brought values into conflict with each other and the allowances he made for the influence of charismatic individuals gave sufficient latitude within his conceptual frame to accommodate epochal shift. He had a profound sense of the novelty of modernity. A break with the past was, after all, the premise of his account of the Protestant Ethic, and his method in no way precluded the possibility of similar future breaks.

I put these considerations to a meeting of the Max Weber Study Group of the British Sociological Association (Albrow, 2014 [1996a]), arguing that it was his analytic methods that would have encouraged him to acknowledge an epochal break with the past. It is all the more plausible in view of the steady development of his thinking in theory and method throughout his career. I said we were ‘all post-Weberians now’. That did not go down too well with a group of dedicated Weber scholars!

After 1990, then, my engagement with globalization, coupled with the sense of having established my own position on Weber’s contribution, allowed him to be an inspiration but no longer a restraint. The sense of novelty of our own time I expressed in my The Global Age: State and Society beyond Modernity (1996b) that argued against seeing globalization as a one-way street into the future. Yet it was the global that was the signature of our time, displacing the modern as the dominant motif for public discourse.

Since then that predominance of the global has been challenged by the digital. In a way, that is the vindication of Weber’s emphasis on advancing rationalization. For the digital operates in a direct line from the rational bureaucracy and Fordism of his time, and it often supplants global issues in the public mind.

Globalization takes one in many directions, and in my case to China, that offers wonderful opportunities to pick up on Weber’s own fascination with Eastern cultures. China’s rise today is coupled with the desire to ride the tide of Western globalization for its own benefit while maintaining continuity with its ancient culture. In this respect, a century after Weber, the questions he addressed to Chinese culture in relation to modernity have their close equivalent today.

The renewed relevance of Weber for understanding China prompted Whimster and me to join forces once again in mounting the conference on ‘Max Weber and China: Culture, Law and Capitalism’ in London in 2013. We were aided in this by Xiangqun Chang, who had recently established her Global China Institute to bring Chinese social science to the West. It prompted me to return to Weber’s accounts of Confucianism and Taoism with the added advantage that he didn’t have, of collaboration with a Chinese scholar, Zhang Xiaoying, from the Beijing Foreign Languages University where for three years I lectured on globalization.

Those exchanges with China bear fruits in every season, always fertilized by delving deeper into Weber. In two papers (Albrow and Zhang, 2014; Zhang and Albrow, 2016) we have traced changing sequences in Weber’s understanding of China over the last decade of his life. For example, he moved away from his earlier emphasis on adaptation as a key feature of Confucianism towards finding tension (Spannung) with the world and a striving to shape it. Nietzsche’s ossified Chinaman gave way to the Mandarin chief executive of the railways.

His developing reflections on China give every reason to think that Weber’s ideas would have continued to evolve with the changing times had he been spared the influenza in 1920. In a paper written specially for a volume on China’s role in world society (Albrow, 2018b), I suggest that Weber today would be examining rationalization processes in the digital revolution and looking for ethical agents in a world of convergent global capitalism.

The commemoration of Weber in Beijing in 1989 had to be cancelled in the aftermath of a quintessential modern event, one entirely intelligible within his own political experience. There is a profound poignancy in the attempt to mount another one in Shanghai this year. ⁵ There may well be another cancellation, this time in a global frame he never knew, but caused by something close in nature to the influenza that killed him. The Covid-19 virus demonstrates a universality beyond the modern and the global. Plagues kill people in all ages and cultures.