Michael Löwy,La cage d’acier: Max Weber et le marxisme wébérien

Reviewed by Robert Sayre, Professor Emeritus of English Studies, University of Paris Est Marne-la-Vallée, France

In the introduction to this study of Max Weber and “Weberian Marxism,” Michael Löwy informs the reader that he has been thinking and writing about Weber since the late 1960s. This makes his interest in Weber more or less coextensive with his intellectual career. Although Löwy’s exceptionally rich record of publication over more than forty years covers a great diversity of subject matters, Weberian concepts and analyses have figured in many of them during the course of his publishing history. Löwy also tells us in the introduction that he came to specialize in the sociology of religions via his interest in Weber. His studies in this area—published in French, English, and a plethora of other languages—have focused particularly on Jewish messianism in its relation to libertarian utopias, and leftwing Catholicism, especially in Latin America. Whereas Weber has been present in much of his earlier work, in La cage d’acier Löwy brings together for the first time his reflections on this key thinker and his relation to Marxism. ¹

“La cage d’acier” is the approximate French equivalent of “the iron cage,” the phrase by which Talcott Parsons rendered into English, in his classic translation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber’s famous characterization of modern capitalist civilization at the conclusion of that work. The original formulation, in German, is “Stahlhartes Gehäuse,” and Löwy has reservations about Parson’s translation of the phrase (as he does about the translation as a whole). In chapter two of his study, Löwy explains why, discussing in detail the words of the German original and their different translations. But he adopts Parson’s term for his title because it has become widely accepted and recognized, taking on a life of its own. As for “Weberian Marxism,” it is an apparent oxymoron that was coined by Merleau-Ponty in Les Aventures de la dialectique (1955), in which the author explicitly named only the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness as a representative of the type, while suggesting that there were others to which the notion could be applied as well. Löwy’s work takes off from Merleau-Ponty’s not-fully-developed perception, to explore the relevance of the designation for a wide range of Marxist intellectuals.

Though carried out with scholarly rigor, Löwy’s book is far from a purely academic exercise. He is convinced of the importance of some Weberian insights for Marxist socio-cultural analysis and critique, and conversely believes that understanding of Weber can be enhanced by being brought into meaningful relationship with Marxism. In several places Löwy emphasizes that his treatment of Weber highlights only selected aspects of the latter’s thought, acknowledging Weber’s complexities, contradictions, and also distance in many respects with regard to the Marxist perspective. But Löwy considers the dimensions of Weber that he brings to the fore to be crucial to an understanding of capitalist modernity, just as relevant today as when Weber developed them more than a century ago. Although he does not explicitly make the point, Löwy himself clearly exemplifies the Weberian Marxist point of view that he is discussing.

La cage d’acier is organized into three parts, each made up of two chapters. Part One, entitled “Weber, Marx and the ‘iron cage’,” first compares Marx and Weber’s analyses of capitalism, and then discusses the aspect of Weber that Löwy wishes to focus on—his “cultural pessimism.” Part Two takes up Weber’s concept of “elective affinity”—an analytical tool that Löwy has used in much of his own earlier work. It also is central to the book at hand, because such a link is precisely what Löwy wants to establish between Marx and Weber. The first chapter discusses the concept itself, whereas the second elaborates on one particular case, not of positive affinity but of its negative pole: the lack of affinity, or antagonism, between Catholicism and the “spirit of capitalism.” Part Three, finally, brings Marx and Weber together in the configuration of “Weberian Marxism.” The first chapter of this part focuses on one idea coming out of that nexus—“capitalism as religion,” a notion enunciated in different ways by Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and Erich Fromm. The final chapter then goes on to broaden the discussion to other “figures of Weberian Marxism:” Lukacs, Gramsci, José Carlos Mariategui, some members of the Frankfurt School, and others. The chapter closes with consideration of a significant counter-example: Jürgen Habermas.

In his initial comparison of Marx and Weber, Löwy does not gloss over the divergences. In respect to their political viewpoints the opposition is stark, given Weber’s conservative nationalism, but also in the realm of sociological analysis the differences in emphasis are substantial. Moreover, for the most part Weber’s attitude toward modern society is one of resigned acceptance. Löwy argues convincingly, however, that the widely-proclaimed opposition between a spiritualist Weber and a materialist Marx is considerably oversimplified. Weber respected Marx as a thinker, and gave real weight to economic factors himself; conversely, Marx was no vulgar materialist and his understanding of the relation between religion and economics in the rise of capitalism was by no means unilateral. Löwy examines at length the passages in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that have been pointed to as indicating an anti-Marxist position, showing that Weber’s approach is in fact more open-ended than is usually recognized. More important than this relativizing of differences, though, is Löwy’s demonstration of nodal points of convergence in the two thinkers’ analysis of capitalism. Löwy identifies two elements of Weber’s comprehension of capitalism as being particularly penetrating and fruitful, each having some counterpart in Marx’s conceptualizations: the inversion of means and ends, which transforms rationality into irrationality, and the imprisonment of the human being in a cruelly oppressive mechanism of his own making—the “iron cage”—visually evoked on the cover of Löwy’s book, incidentally, by an image taken from Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis.

Löwy then discusses “cultural pessimism” (Kulturpessimismus), which in his view constitutes the terrain on which Weber’s convergence with Marxism takes place. This was a German intellectual and cultural tendency of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly associated with the milieu of university “mandarins,” notably including writers such as Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig as well as a host of influential German sociologists—Ferdinand Tönnies, Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, etc. Löwy sees this current of thought as part of a much broader “romantic” worldview, which arises, starting in the eighteenth century, as a multiform protest against and critique of capitalist “modernity” in the name of values and ideals drawn from the pre-capitalist past. Although “cultural pessimism” has sometimes been accused of being an entirely reactionary movement that sowed the seeds of Nazi ideology, Löwy demonstrates its extreme political heterogeneity and points out that it included leftists and Jews. For Löwy, Weber’s vision of the modern world stems from this neo-romantic matrix, which manifests strong affinities with Marx’s own radical critique.

In Part Two—which makes an excursus into the concept of “elective affinity”—Löwy makes a considerable contribution to Weberian studies and sociological theory by delving into an essential notion of Weber’s that has wide applicability in sociological study but which has been relatively little discussed, and when it has, has sometimes been trivialized. Weber himself never fully defined the idea, and so to elucidate it Löwy examines Weber’s use of the term and then attempts to extrapolate a definition. Löwy’s discussion of the idea lays emphasis on the active nature of the interaction between the two entities between which such an affinity appears, and outlines a series of steps by which the interrelationship may deepen, sometimes culminating in a kind of “cultural symbiosis.” The application which Löwy then makes of the reverse side of the concept—repulsion of two phenomena—contributes more specifically to the sociology of religion by investigating the antagonistic tension between Catholicism, one of the predominant religions of the western world, and the latter’s increasingly hegemonic socio-economic system. Here Löwy proceeds in a way similar to his treatment of elective affinity, starting from fragmentary leads in Weber’s writing to elaborate a theory of negative affinity between the “Catholic ethic and the spirit of capitalism”—a complement, implicit but not developed in Weber, to his analysis of Protestantism.

In the first chapter of the last part of the book, Löwy introduces yet another modality of relationship between capitalism and religion. Weber posited an elective affinity between certain forms of Protestantism, especially Calvinism, and the development of modern capitalism; Löwy posits, based on rudiments taken from Weber, an antipathy between certain fundamental aspects of Catholicism and capitalism. Now it appears that a number of thinkers associated with Weberian Marxism—Bloch, Benjamin, and Fromm—posited an identity of a sort between religion and capitalism, with the claim that in a real sense the latter is a religion. For these anti-capitalist thinkers, though, the religion instituted by the capitalist ethos is demonic—one that negates true values and degrades its worshippers.

The book’s last chapter, which discusses a range of figures as “Weberian Marxists,” is careful nonetheless to avoid oversimplification. Löwy is at pains to differentiate degrees and forms of Weberian Marxism, and recognizes that the phenomenon is heterogeneous. He sees Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as being quite close to Weber’s historical vision, and their distinction between instrumental and substantial rationality as in effect reformulating a Weberian distinction without overt reference to Weber. But Löwy insists that some other Frankfurt School members, notably Marcuse, cannot be called Weberian Marxists in the full sense. Löwy’s treatment of Merleau-Ponty’s own relation to the configuration is equally nuanced. His delineation of Weberian Marxism as a meaningful and valuable intellectual constellation is compelling, though, as is his critique of Habermas’s “exit” from it as constituting a loss.

All in all, La cage d’acier can be strongly recommended to readers of French as a perceptive, multi-faceted, and in many respects ground-breaking, excursion on the frontiers of Weberian and Marxist territories. To broaden its readership, a translation of this book into English would be welcome indeed.