Abstract
Weber's theory of value spheres outlines a project of institutional polytheism, each ordered around a ‘god’. This suggests not only that social theory can build a religious sociology, but that a theory of institutions must be an exercise in comparative religions. Weber's comparative sociology of religions, however, does not align with his theory of value spheres in terms of his distinction between polytheism and monotheism, transcendence and immanence, salvation and mysticism, being possessed and possessing. A theory of institutional logics points beyond Weber's separation of value and instrumental rationality, faith and practice, and hence the ways in which he partitioned the institutions of modernity.
Keywords
Over the last several years I have tried to understand the logic of practice of social movements that aim to make the nation-state into a vehicle of divine purpose. These movements seek to transform both individual and collective subjects. Their reasons for action are tied to the way they reason. Their political practice has a non-arbitrary relation to their purposes. Rather than build the social as an agonistic game between groups seeking power or generic resources, I have explored politicized religions as attempted shifts in institutional architecture, efforts to extend the institutional logic of religion into the sovereign nation-state (Friedland, 2001, 2002, 2007, 2011a, 2011b).
My effort to understand politicized religions brought me to Max Weber. When I read Weber’s extraordinary essay, “Religious rejections of the world and their directions”, I saw that he had, a century before, laid out a way to conceptualize institutional logics (Weber, 1958d: 324). Weber used the “motives” out of which and the “directions” in which religions rejected the world as a vehicle to develop a theory of what he called the modern world’s “value spheres.” These religious rejections of the world follow what Weber termed a value rationality, a conscious orientation towards salvation enacted through commitment to ethical norms of universal brotherhood in opposition to the “possession of …’things wordly’” (Weber, 1958d: 328). 1 The paradox is that by examining the religious modalities of worldly abnegation Weber not only developed an institutional portrait of the world, he also conceptualized that world as religious. Not unlike Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology or Carl Schmitt’s state theory, Weber used a religious rubric for understanding secular world-making.
Religion is often understood as a sociological mirror. Weber rather makes the social into a religious mirror, pointing to the religious nature of all social institutions. Weber, who famously proclaimed the modern world’s “disenchantment,” asks us to think of the social order as composed of a multiplicity of “value spheres,” each a domain of a “god.” Weber’s theory suggests a religious sociology—one that applies to modern science as much as it does to pre-modern monotheisms, and to political leaders of nation-states and professionals as much as priests and other kinds of religious specialists. If we take Weber’s god-talk seriously, institutional theory becomes a genre of comparative religions. I want to take up Max Weber’s institutional polytheism as an exercise in religious sociology and a potential resource for a theory of institutional logic.
Weber distinguished instrumental and value rationality: In the former, actors are instrumentally and cognitively oriented to observable external objects and persons through which they seek to serve their own purposes extrinsic to those means. In the latter they are passionately and expressively oriented to unobservable values they have internalized and the unconditional requirements of which they believe. Value rationality involves an orientation towards an internally binding subjective value, to a “cause,” of which the act is presupposed to be an expression or “relevant” to its “possession” (Alexander, 1983: 22−29; Weber, 1958b: 151−154). In the former, actors are oriented to observable and determinate consequences, to causal relations; in the latter they are oriented to a value from which “practical stands” can “be derived with inner consistency” (Weber, 1958b: 151) or “a way of life” that actors presuppose has an inherent relationship to the possession of that value (Weber, 1958b: 153−154). The one aligns purpose and consequences, and the other value and action: Weber thereby splits the rational pursuit of consequences without respect to value from the realization of value without regard to consequences. This Protestant disjunction is, I believe, a mistake. One of our tasks is to co-implicate instrumental and value rationalities.
Value rationality is regionalized into what Weber calls “value spheres”—relatively autonomous domains of action oriented towards determinate, incommensurable, ultimate values: religion, art, politics, capitalist markets, erotic love, and science. Weber’s value spheres have an institutional logic. Each value sphere, he argues, has a “logical or teleological ‘consistency,” a consistency that exercises a “power over man” (Weber, 1958d: 324). The logical is driven by intellectual elaboration, whereas the teleological is located in the relationship—a “sublimation” or a “direct appropriation”, Weber calls it—between practice and value; in the case of religion, for example, this is between magic, orgy, contemplation, and asceticism on the one hand, and various religious or “holy” states on the other, which are “meant to take possession of the entire man and of his lasting fate” (Weber, 1958c: 278−279).
For Weber all value rationalities are religious. Value rationalities are socially grounded in “value spheres” or “life-spheres, each of which is governed by different laws” (Weber 1958a: 123; 1958d: 323−324, 328). Judgment of the “validity of such values,” Weber writes, “is a matter of faith” (Weber, 1949: 55). Religious values can neither ground themselves in reason nor senses. The value rationality of religion depends on intellectual unreason, what Weber calls “the sacrifice of the intellect” (Weber, 1958d: 352).
Weber argues that, in their respective spheres, values function as “gods of the various orders,” or “godheads,” which in their plurality must be considered a “polytheism” (Weber, 1958b: 148−149). Weber figures these ultimate values as warring gods. “So long as life remains immanent and is interpreted in its own terms,” he writes, “it knows only of an unceasing struggle of these gods with one another” (Weber, 1958b: 152). This war becomes manifest as each sphere is increasingly rationalized, its value absolute, floating free of its enactments, irreducible to particular practices or maxims, on the one side, and the basis of an increasingly conscious and intense interior commitment, or inner faith, on the other side (Weber, 1958d: 328). Weber secularized Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature—in fact a war between Christian gods—into a genuine institutional polytheism (Weber, 1958b: 149, 153).
Weber espied a divinity in the social, unlike Durkheim, who saw the social in divinity. For both Durkheim and Weber the sacred and value were understood respectively as involving an irrational passion beyond reason, exceeding, indeed undoing, the autonomous and instrumental individual (Friedland, 2005). As Durkheim’s account of effervescent rite makes clear, the category of the sacred has no cultural content, it being the transmuted form of the social, deriving its authority from the collectivity, known through the groups who form around it and sanction its violation. The Weberian category of value, in contrast, has cultural content, a substantive value with a “determinate content” that derives its authority from the will of those who value it, known through the particular discourse and practices through which it and its constituting conflict with other values is effected.
Value rationality as objectless love
Weber’s polytheistic analysis of value spheres figures the task of institutional theory as a kind of comparative religion. What manner of deity do we worship in the non-religious value spheres? How does Weber’s institutional polytheism align with his sociology of religion? The answer is: It doesn’t.
Weber distinguishes between the immanent, impersonal God who anchors mysticism and the transcendent, personal creator God who anchors salvation religions (Weber, 1958d: 325). In the first, one seeks to possess the divine in the moment, hungering for a sign that one possesses the divine in the now. In the second, one is an instrument of the divine, seeking evidence through practice that one is loved by God for all time. Immanent deities are associated with ritualism, where suffering is interpreted as the result of offenses against those rites, whereas suffering under transcendent deities is interpreted through disbelief in the “prophet and in his commandments,” as an inner failure of ethical commitment (Weber, 1958b: 272, 274). An immanent deity is not only associated with polytheism, but with the mystical virtuoso’s possession of the deity through contemplative or orgiastic withdrawal from the world (Weber, 1958b). Transcendent deities, on the other hand, are associated with monotheism and a universalistic, ethical world mastery in which one seeks to be an instrument of an unknowable divine will.
Weber’s value spheres do not line up on one side or the other of this sociology of religion. They are ordered around a polytheistic pantheon of immanent gods, in which there is a “having,” an apparent “possession,” of the sacred value (Weber, 1958d: 328). One “has” the market’s “worldly goods,” political power, culture, knowledge, and a passionate love. Even erotic love, for example, Weber says, is “equivalent to the having of the mystic” and “the immediacy of the possessed reality” (Weber, 1958d: 347). Like the magician who instrumentally manipulates an immanent god to achieve his purposes, there is a correlative instrumental rationality to the spheres.
Yet, consistent with a transcendental god, each of the value spheres involves a kind of world-mastery, no matter how small the world. Institutional values are salvational gods, not in that they seek to save us from the meaninglessness of this world, but from worldlessness itself. The salvational God proper is a world-creator who affords humans the opportunity to both acknowledge His creation and participate in its perfection through the “practical postulates” of an ethical order (Weber, 1958d: 324). It is only through one or another god that each world, no matter how miniature, can be created. Valuations, which, for Weber, are simultaneously devaluations, or anti-worlds, must necessarily take place. Those places are “worlds,” even if they are not on this earth.
Immanent and transcendent, instrumental and ethical, polytheistic and monotheistic: The value spheres do not line up neatly on one side or the other. One possibility is to understand them as different kinds of gods. Another, the one I want to explore here, is to suggest that there is an inherent, on-going oscillation of transcendence and immanence in each institutional sphere, a possibility towards which Weber himself gestures, however briefly. Weber claims that people do not want to become aware of the irresolvable conflicts between these values, because they do, implicitly or explicitly, choose which value to serve in a world with neither the one god nor a prophet to guide and ground that choice (Weber, 1958b: 153). We do not want to face up to the fact that we serve values as though they were deities, and groundless ones at that. We rather imagine that our choices are externally constrained by the causal nature of an object world. This means that dominant forms of instrumental rationality screen operative value rationalities, enabling us to occlude value as interest. As the claims for and the scope of religious ethical systems have been challenged and attenuated, we moderns fail to recognize that the “routines of everyday life” are likewise grounded in their respective “gods”:
Today the routines of everyday life challenge religion. Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another (Weber, 1958b: 149).
Substances as institutional gods
What Weber calls the “gods” of the value spheres I have termed institutional “substances,” the unobservable, but essential, “value” anchoring an institutional logic (Friedland, 2011b). An institutional logic is a trinitarian order of production. In the institutional logics framework, which counter-intuitively has had most impact in that domain where instrumentally rational understandings of social action have primacy, namely business and management schools, I posit socially regionalized orders of practice which are simultaneously orders of subjectification and objectification, that is, orders of practice that depend on the particular identities of subjects and ontologies of objects, which in turn depend on these same orders of practice (Friedland, 2009, 2011a, 2011b; Friedland and Alford, 1991). A substance is the metaphysical foundation of an institutional logic, as a telos of the subject, the basis of her identity and the ontology of objects deployed in her practice. Institutional logics join subjects, practices and objects into bundled sets that have an inner referentiality—orders in which the central object, the substance, is unobservable, while being endlessly invoked by name and enacted in practice. Substances create resources, they are the ground of powers, not as exterior legitimations, but as interior constitutions.
The category of substance derives from Aristotelian metaphysics where substance, or substantial form, is the foundation, or essence, of a thing that cannot be reduced to its accidental properties that attach to it nor to the materiality of its instances (Aristotle, 1998). For Aristotle, substance is not matter, but the form that makes matter a “this,” “that by virtue of which the matter is in the state it is in” (Aristotle, 1998: 167, 229). A substance exceeds its attributes, cannot be reduced to a thing’s materiality, and thus cannot be described, only pointed to and named. Although the category of substance is epistemologically problematic, it captures institutional reality rather well. Like Aristotle’s soul as the substance of human, an institutional substance does not exist; it is rather an absent presence necessary to institutional life. Institutional substances are unfounded, not because they are arbitrary and misrecognized media for empowerment—they are that too—but because they depend on practices of good faith.
Thinking of institutional logic as an exercise in comparative religions helps clarify their nature. Substances, like “hidden” or transcendent gods, are invoked by name, as though they are eternal subjects who act in this world or as though they refer to knowable objects to which one has an instrumental or possessive relation. But a substance is not, and cannot be, an object—observable, manipulable, instrumentalizable—and cannot be had or even known. Substances are, however, enacted through practices organized around objects, through things and bodies, and the words by which they are named and constituted. Thus property is enacted through the commodified exchange of goods, God in the prayers for birth, death, or healing, popular sovereignty through electoral votes, love through intimate sharing of voice, body, and babies, knowledge in the experimental observation, or abstract logical representations such as these. Through the ontology of objects, substance is transmuted into the real, value into schema, and the normative into the categorical. They possess; they cannot be possessed. They center each institutional domain. We are made and make ourselves in their image.
Substances are the god-terms of institutional life. They exceed the order of exchange and theft. One might think of them as foundations or standards of value, whose measurelessness is mimed through certain material practices like the gold kept in a treasury used to undergird a polity’s currency, the grand monumentality or fatal excesses of the sovereign, the rites of care, hospitality, and gift-giving that bind families, the sacrifices and pilgrimages of religion, the rending ecstasies of passionate love, or the endless experimental devotions to the assembly of knowledge. They are necessarily excessive terms. Bataille mislocated “expenditure” in the non-productive, indeed in the potlatch-like, destructions of value rather than as a divine domain of creation, of the excess necessary to institute, to give place to, new worlds—not to escape this one (Falasca-Zamponi, 2011). There was a reason that early states located their treasuries in their temples—Jerusalem and Athens: Value had divine provenance. Gods created value and could destroy it, hence the ability of the sovereign or the deity to forgive debts—to cancel assymetrical balances derived from cycles of circulation.
Substances, like gods, give value, ex nihilo—a kind of civilizational gift-giving. 3 They also give us to ourselves. Institutional substances operate as if they are beings not just by linguistic fiat, but because they authorize us as the social basis of our being, not that we reify social relations presumed between autonomous individuals, but that social relations between individuals, and hence the individuals themselves, are possible because these substances are presumed to exist. 4 We know ourselves and each other through the particularity of our service to these gods. We are given to ourselves through a call from elsewhere.
Substances are immanentized through material practice. Weber made a fateful analytic choice, refusing to locate value rationality in material practice, but rather in the conjunction of value and commitment, sign and subjectivity. 5 It is the autonomy of values with respect to practice that both makes individual will so essential in this theory and also provides the basis of their socially transformative potential. Weber’s subordination of practice in part derives from the way he understood the development of religions of salvation—his template for value rationality. His distinction between instrumental and value rationality is a rough homologue of that between magic and religion, the latter evolving based on the charismatic gifts the prophet gleaned from the former. In magic one is oriented to compelling supernatural powers to one’s this-worldly interests, whereas religion involves an ethical stance wherein one recasts one’s subjectivity so as to approach divine intention (Gorski, 2012). The distinction of instrumental and value rationality appears also to be a secular echo of Augustine’s distinction between uti and frui—that which is loved as a means to something else and that which is loved for its own sake.
Weber’s theory of value rationality, with its marginalization of material practice, parallels the post-Reformation supersession of ritual practice on the one side and the emphasis on faith in and ethical commitment to a transcendent deity independent of consequences on the other. Weber saw in Catholic priestly rite the residues of magical instrumentalism. Value rationality in salvation religion, in contrast, involves an intellectual rationalization of an ethic on the one side and its orientation towards “inward sacred values as means of salvation” on the other (Weber, 1958d: 328).
An institutional substance—a “god,” or transcendental value, in Weber’s sense—requires, I would argue, not only the repeated calling out of its name—a discursive renewal of commitment and belief, and a pretense that an unknowable substance functions like a knowable object—but also enactment through routinized practical conventions. These are the dual sociological grounds of its eternality. Values must be both exteriorized as material practices that deploy objects, and interiorized as possessions that possess their practitioners. Institutional logics presuppose an immanent, internal relation between value and practice, not as in Weber, a conscious, increasingly rationalized “deduction” of “practical postulates” (Weber, 1958d: 324), but a transcendence that requires immanentization as its condition of social possibility. This means that unobservable substances must be transmuted into observable objects—nested and interlocked—which are the means by which practices are anchored, effected, and oriented. Just as one “has” the divine through material rite, one “has” property as a deed or contract, knowledge as a represented result, sovereignty as the defense of a border, or the institution of a law. Institutional logics, in other words, require a more Catholic deity, transcendent and immanent, capable of incarnation—not just in a savior’s sacred body, but in the object of the host—produced and accessed in and through material practice. Catholic rite is not a residue of magical instrumentalism, as Weber contends, but of performative material practice that inhabits every institutional sphere, although we may, as Weber himself noticed, fail to notice it. This transom between transcendence and immanence suggests that the material world—its objects and the practices that depend on them—is a constituent, not a substrate, of institutional life—that the materialist−idealist divide is a false, forced choice.
Material practices ground values; they manifest their actionability in an object world. Substances are not objects, but they depend on them. Material practices are instrumental regimes whose actionability depends on substances—substances that are ontologically subjective, but whose objectivity as social forces depends on that practice. These regimes of routinized material practices are also what enable participation in these spheres to proceed without passion, without possession, as a relation to what appear to be exterior objects in all their skeletal impersonality. A relentless materialism can be just as much a carrier of false-consciousness as are ideas and ideologies; things themselves can be veils. The reifications denounced by Marx point to a sociological reality that cannot be objectified. Weber himself failed to fully appreciate the value rationality undergirding economic and political instruments which were at the core of his understanding of instrumental rationality (Alexander, 1983). The transformation of the capitalist ethic into “success” values—for example, the replacement of duty to increase capital by “technical and pragmatic rules”—overstates the nature of the transformation (Schluchter, 1996: 68−69). Capital never ceases to be a “god” —a quality that is a quantity in all things, capable of infinite expansion and transmutation, independent of person and place, and yet a determinate, finite, quantifiable expression. One misses its divinity by misrecognizing capital, or property for that matter, as if they were ontologically objective—a “thing,” a “worldly possession” or “good” in Weber’s language (Weber, 1958d: 332). 6 Capital, too, is a god that has to be defended from other “gods” who threaten its existence, its reach, its powers to make the world.
Instrumental rationality, which involves the manipulation of objects, is, in each domain, a vehicle for the naturalization of value rationality. Instrumental rationality always contains and conceals a value rationality, which is its foundation—an instrumental rationality that depends on and manifests causal mechanisms (taken-for-granted means−ends regularities) that naturalize the cause. The notion of institutional logic suggests that value rationality is ordinary, not as Weber thought, extraordinary—not because institutions have value beyond their effects as formulations of institutionalism once propounded, but because these effects depend on primordial valuations. Value rationality as absolute ungrounded belief and rationalized ethical commitment is rare; as a congeries of categorical utterance and material practices it is a commonplace. The most important “objects” or “values” of institutional life are performative, symbolically constructed, to which some practices have a non-arbitrary relation. If substances must be objectified, this also suggests that the refashioning of objects, of material practices, can be the occasion for the transubstantiation of a new deity onto the stage (Arjalies, 2011). 7 And it raises the question both of the practical specificity of substance, when variable practices may be taken to enact or void a given substance, and the substantial specificity of practices—the extent to which practices may be incorporated into other institutional domains, with either enormous or little consequence to an institution’s logic.
Loving mortal institutional gods
Institutional theory is a terrain in which it is not only possible to develop a religious sociology, but also a theory of passionate fields. An institutional value or substance is a mortal god—one that repeatedly risks death—who is forever dying, becoming inert, dead letter, only to be brought to life again as it is enacted in practice. Death’s possibility is systemic, there in financial collapse, the erosion of marriage, the repudiation of scientific truth, or the evacuation of the practical scope of sovereignty. But the elemental death is in the heart of the believer. I have cast institutional substances as institutional gods, which one loves and by which one is authorized as a lover, and hence formed into a particular kind of individual and collective subject.
Institutional life does not operate based solely on a cognitivism, through differentially activated schema—a taken-for-grantedness (Thornton et al., 2012: 90). It demands myriad moments of located passion, an order of desire to which Max Weber once ambivalently attended and we appear to have forgotten. Love is a being given oneself through a relation with an other. It is worth returning to the non-Kantian aspect of Weber’s value rationality, not just the passionate irrationality of will, but its non-autonomy, and its inevitable incompletion in enactment. Value rationality never completes us; it is a pleasurable agony to which we aspire over and over again. Possession did not end in the post-Reformation world, such that our “ultimate purposes are those that arise within” (Taylor, 2011: 41). 8 We live for those moments of possession, repeatedly returning to the prospect of this be-coming. Animated by desire, it is also fraught with danger that one will be destroyed, found not worthy, able only to go through the motions, remaining untouched, untransformed and transforming nothing. In the moment of grace or illumination the religious person becomes a new being—reborn or redeemed, as Weber glosses the “highest conceptions” of salvation (Weber, 1958c: 279)—temporarily aligned with something he can never secure, that will always exceed him. And it is through his rebirth that the institutional value is reproduced, brought alive once again, able thereby to call others.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Warren Goldstein for his comments on an earlier draft.
1
Indeed, “the need for salvation,” Weber argues, is “at all times and in all places” the “substance of religiosity” in an increasingly rationalized world (Weber, 1958d: 352−353).
2
The implication, I think, is that what appear as conflicts with spheres where instrumental rationalities are dominant—between market and state on the one hand and religion on the other, for instance (Brubaker, 1984: 77) —are really still based in conflicting value rationalities. This may be consistent with Weber’s historical generalization that the “objectification of the power structure” or the “rationalization of coercion” is accompanied by a “flight into apolitical emotionalism,” which includes eroticism, an “acosmic ethic of absolute goodness,” and mysticism (Weber, 1975: 601). The relation is not clear. Weber could be pointing to the consonance between impersonal, or personless, forms of action, each organized around an inaccessible, or invisible, value. Or he could be pointing to a substitution of a re-personalization, a hyper-subjectification, in response to depersonalization, the covering over of the god that once animated state and capitalism. This would be a substitution of a personalized world for a depersonalized one, or one that hinges on an illusionary having as against a political world where there are only power mechanisms, not a leader who wields power with an ethic of conviction towards a particular value. Whatever the specification, a sociological relation is posited between value spheres which can be read as more than just an escape from rationalization.
3
Levi-Strauss argued that women were the first currency, the first basis of exogamous exchange, and hence of ever more complex forms of social solidarity. Although it is entirely speculative, if my understanding of substances is correct, then, following Weber’s historical account of the origins of religion, kinship groups are formed through gift-giving in the sense of giving the elemental givers of value.
4
This is a variant of Weber’s hypothesis that human freedom depends on transcendent values, autonomous of worldly goods, to which individuals may decide to orient themselves (Alexander, 1983).
5
Another reason this is so is because of his understanding of the contradiction between political means and ethical ends in a democratic nation-state (Weber, 1958e). The means of politics—violence, party organization and emotional manipulation—contravene whatever ethical commitments a political leader brings to the political arena.
6
Weber also uses the terms “possession of economic goods” and “external and internal possession of things worldly” (1958d: 328).
7
Diane-Laure Arjalies, exploring the emergence of socially responsible investment, conceptualizes the trajectory of transformation as a movement back and forth from “technical” to “epistemic objects,” and the ways in which the latter “provide a medium” by which actors transform practices and hence the institutional logic of their field, here the uneasy and unstable weld of two institutional logics of capitalist profitability and “social responsibility” (Arjalies, 2011).
8
Taylor points to the ways in which the Reformation prepared the autonomous self, whose religion was personal, grounded in interior belief and faith, not in embodied, collective rites. Such a self, he argues, where there is not a “porous” boundary between “mind and world,” is not subject to possession. “I have been speaking about the moral influence of substances, such as black bile,” he writes, “but a similar point can be made about the relation of spirits. The porosity of the boundary emerges here in the various kinds of “possession,” all the way from a full taking over of the person, with a medium, to various kinds of domination by, or partial fusion with, a spirit or God.” (Taylor, 2011: 42). Just how belief in black bile, a spirit, or God can be distinguished as a regime of practice from belief in love, justice, or property remains to be determined. It is arguable that it is because of the cultural heritage of Protestantism that we now also fail to see the continued duality of possession and to imagine that the world is constituted by individuals (Taylor, 2011: 48).