Abstract
While as a founding father of ‘sociology’ Max Weber has deeply imprinted sociological research, his works are famous for being difficult to be deciphered. Educated in German universities, he was good at and to some extent obsessed with writing lengthy sentences. Although the constructiveness of German guarantees relatively accurate understanding of his writings, scholars nonetheless produce various interpretations. This difficulty is further complicated by two factors. First, Weber had very broad interest in social sciences, including law, economics, history, and politics, which enabled him to cite numerous works in different disciplines. For scholars nowadays, it is arduous to retrieve the information which Weber often only mentioned discursively in footnotes or margins. While these references have been presented well in the complete historical-critical edition (Max Weber-Gesamtausgabe), such hardship is not completely eliminated because reading and understanding the references that were written over 100 years ago under particular historical contexts entail much work as well. Second, almost exclusively, Weber wrote and gave speeches in German which is a complex language for foreigners. General readers in other Western countries except German-speaking countries can only get access to Weber’s writings through translations which are not always perfect.
Similar difficulties existed for Karl Marx in the first place, too. Revolutionaries and disciples of Marx’s political views made Marxian theories much more accessible to international audiences, which instigated massive radical political movements all over the world in the twentieth century. Consequently, Marx confronts more various even polarized interpretations. By contrast, Weber could ‘escape’ from the duty of instructing activists who aimed to ‘change the world’, partly because it is mainly scholars who contribute to the image-building of Weber. More importantly, Weber had the conviction that social sciences have to abstain from value judgments, that is, ‘Wertfreiheit’. Nonetheless, Weber was never indifferent to politics; Partly affected by his family, Weber was a founding father and remained as a very active member of the German Democratic Party (DDP) after the First World War (Mommsen, 2004). In the Weimar Republican government, Weber enthusiastically engaged in legislature activities. In a way, Weber’s attitudes toward politics, specifically the social democratic movement in Europe, reflect the possibility that he proposed a subtle combination of liberalism and nationalism. In addition, different from Marx whose many manuscripts were left severely unfinished when he passed away in 1883, which left huge space for followers to create their own versions of Marxism, Weber’s most manuscripts do not leave so much ambiguity when he died in 1920, although his main projects, such as Economy and Society and Collected Studies on the Sociology of Religion, remained unfinished as well (Schluchter, 2021).
Weber’s political activities were anything but irrelevant to his analytical framework because it would be hard to say that Weber holds an egalitarian attitude toward civilizations if he was an enthusiastic nationalist. Whether Weber holds a monolithic viewpoint is full of controversies. In the late nineteenth century, it was popular among social scientists to applaud the universality of the Western civilization and argue that other civilizations have to follow similar evolutionary pathways as the West did. Some scholars (such as Friedrich H. Tenbruck) suggest that apparently Weber holds a linear evolutionary viewpoint, just like Marx, because he emphasizes the historical primacy of religious ideas in shaping Western rationalism which is obviously more highly evaluated than other sorts of rationalism in his writings. In Weber’s eyes, modernity is closely related to increasing rationality of social actions. The thing is just that Weber presents such attitudes in a more nuanced fashion than Marx who often despises non-western civilizations, such as Russia. However, many sociologists hold firmly the opposite view: Weber is strongly against such a unilinear framework. Conversely, fighting against Marxian theories, Weber rejects not just Marx’s historical materialism but also Marx’s unilinear evolutionary framework. Kalberg clearly holds such an attitude through the entire book.
Kalberg’s monograph integrates Weber’s pieces about civilizations, which disperse widely in different works, into a consistent framework. Categorized into seven parts, this dense book presents Weber’s themes, definitions, methodologies, and specific analyses of civilizations. According to Kalberg, Weber’s analyses of civilizations have a fundamentally uniform framework: departing from subjective meaning and worldviews, certain groups as social carriers form corresponding ethical values and then patterned actions; then such patterned actions contribute to specific rationality which according to Weber varies in different civilizations, that is, particular rationalism. Weber utilizes this framework to isolate diverse ideal types and to further analyze a vast variety of civilizations, such as China, India, the West and ancient Judaism. This book basically unfolds in such a sequence. In Part I, Kalberg introduces Weber’s major themes (Chapter 1) and methodology (Chapter 2). Major themes include five well-defined concepts: subjective meaning, Western rationalism, values and rationalization, diverse rationalism, and societal dynamism. The five themes are organized by Weber’s methodology among which Kalberg highlights ideal types and multi-causality.
In Parts II and III, Kalberg presents Weber’s specific conceptual frameworks. Weber holds that social actions can be driven by four types of rationality: practical, theoretical, substantive, and formal rationality. They are neither completely isolated nor representing a ‘progressive’ sequence. While the four types of rationality predominate in different ideal types, they all lead to patterned actions, which form different processes of rationalization. In Chapters 4–7, Kalberg introduces how rationalization of social actions sprouts, grows, and burgeons in four societal domains: rulership (‘Herrschaft’), law, religion, and economy. Here, Weber integrates specific historical facts into his analysis. For example, in the law domain, Weber presents how primitive law progressed into logical-formal law in which formal rationality predominates. Similar situations also occur in the religion and economy domains. In Chapter 8, Kalberg emphasizes the role of social carriers in the rationalization process. Only through social carriers devoted to particular values can rationalization be realized; social carriers with particular rationality can contribute to social changes, which comprise a bridge linking the past to the present (pp. 460–464).
Parts IV and V present Weber’s analyses of particular rationalism, including ancient China and India, and the West. Rejecting a monolithic stance, Weber suggests that ancient China and India also possess unique rationalism, which comprises comparisons to the West. In the China case, Confucianism does not advocate a salvation path through believing in any supernatural power, thus leading to unique values and then patterned actions. The effect facilitated the rise of the literati class and the state examination system in which official bureaucrats were selected based on merits and performance in examinations. While formal rationality exists in such bureaucratization, Weber argues that ubiquitous ancestor cult that Confucianism requires contributes to widespread and age-old traditions in China. Basically, Weber holds that China was an anachronic combination in which some formal rationality emerged earlier than in the West, while in many other spheres, traditional values prevail.
As a focus of Weber’s sociological research, the rise of Western rationalism occupies eight chapters (Chapters 12–19). In the early 1900s, when Weber published his famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he paved a unique way different from previous analytical methods, such as Marxian historical materialism and organism, to interpret the ‘individuality’ of the West. Later Weber expanded the analytical perspectives when he marched into religious and economic sociological research, which is perfectly reflected in Part V. Utilizing concepts of rationality and patterned actions and tracing the developmental history of specific societal domains, including religions, legal systems, economic systems (in particular modern capitalism), bureaucracy, and world-oriented individual values, Weber explains the particular origins and trajectories of Western rationalism. In this regard, Weber presents the most systematic research which left followers with not just substantive content but also a comprehensive application of his theoretical methodology (Schluchter, 1985).
Parts VI and VII provide a recollection of themes addressed in previous chapters and further guidelines about how to abstract lessons from Weber’s research on civilizations. As an echo of themes and approaches mentioned previously, Kalberg highlights the significance of ideal types which could be counted as one of the most important approaches in Weberian sociology. For general readers, its most famous usage is the three ideal types of legitimacy: charismatic, traditional, and rational-legal rulership. For Weber, ideal types as an approach are far more helpful than just demarcating legitimacy. They can ‘facilitate empirical inquiry’ (p. 40). To some extent, ideal types to Weber are just like theoretical models to economists who abstract key facts from economic realities and discard unnecessary subtlety. With the ‘models’ which abstract and refine key facts Weber manages to conduct large-scale comparative positivistic research on civilizations. In sociology, this is a significant methodological legacy that Weber left to us (p. 478).
As a guidebook, Kalberg’s monograph has a couple of prominent merits. Regarding substantive content, it makes outstanding contributions in collecting dispersed pieces about relevant themes and organizing them in a systematic fashion. Given the fact that Weber’s works were not finally completed and are famous for their literal complexity, this monograph will constitute a cornerstone for future research. Regarding the long-lasting debate about Weber’s philosophy, Kalberg highlights Weber’s insistence on multi-causal approaches and proves that Weber objects firmly the monolithic stance regarding civilizational progress, which comprises a new stone. Regarding the structure, the book is constituted of a series of concepts and analyses which link closely with each other. A consistent framework permeates the entire book, of which recurring themes and methods continuously remind readers. In addition, Kalberg’s writing style is moderately academic, which makes the book accessible to general readers who have interest in Weberian sociology and also helpful for professional scholars since it uses common language to interpret Weber’s ideas and inserts academic terms when necessary.
In sum, Kalberg’s monograph provides a comprehensive handbook for Weber’s ideas about civilizations. By addressing Weber’s own concepts, methodology, and themes of civilizations, it presents how Weber identifies a civilization’s unique rationalism and constructs a multi-causal analysis that explains its origins, contours, and trajectories (p. 501). Apart from specific analytical conclusions, readers can also get more abstract lessons – the methodological approaches of Weberian sociology. After reading Kalberg’s monograph, we can grasp the essence of Weber’s comparative-historical sociology and hugely improve our understanding of it.