## 1. Life and Career



Maximilian Carl Emil "Max" Weber (1864-1920) was
born in the Prussian city of Erfurt to a family of notable heritage.
His father, Max Sr., came from a Westphalian family of merchants and
industrialists in the textile business and went on to become a lawyer
and National Liberal parliamentarian in Wilhelmine politics. His
mother, Helene, came from the Fallenstein and Souchay families, both
of the long illustrious Huguenot line, which had for generations
produced public servants and academicians. His younger brother,
Alfred, was an influential political economist and sociologist, too.
Evidently, Max Weber was brought up in a prosperous, cosmopolitan, and
cultivated family milieu that was well-plugged into the political,
social, and cultural establishment of the German
*Burgertum* [Roth 2000]. Also, his parents represented
two, often conflicting, poles of identity between which their eldest
son would struggle throughout his life - worldly statesmanship
and ascetic scholarship.



Educated mainly at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, Weber
was trained in law, eventually writing his dissertation on medieval
trading companies under Levin Goldschmidt and Rudolf von Gneist (and
examined by Theodor Mommsen) and *Habilitationsschrift* on
Roman law and agrarian history under August Meitzen. While
contemplating a career in legal practice and public service, he
received an important research commission from the *Verein fur
Sozialpolitik* (the leading social science association under
Gustav Schmoller's leadership) and produced the so-called East
Elbian Report on the displacement of the German agrarian workers in
East Prussia by Polish migrant labours. Greeted upon publication with
high acclaim and political controversy, this early success led to his
first university appointment at Freiburg in 1894 to be followed by a
prestigious professorship in political economy at Heidelberg two years
later. Weber and his wife Marianne, an intellectual in her own right
and early women's rights activist, soon found themselves at the
center of the vibrant intellectual and cultural life of Heidelberg.
The so-called "Weber Circle" attracted such intellectual
luminaries as Georg Jellinek, Ernst Troeltsch, and Werner Sombart and
later a number of younger scholars including Marc Bloch, Robert
Michels, and Gyorgy Lukacs. Weber was also active in
public life as he continued to play an important role as a Young Turk
in the *Verein* and maintain a close association with the
liberal *Evangelische-soziale Kongress* (especially with the
leader of its younger generation, Friedrich Naumann). It was during
this time that he solidified his reputation as a brilliant political
economist and outspoken public intellectual.



All these fruitful years came to an abrupt halt in 1897 when Weber
collapsed with a nervous-breakdown shortly after his father's
sudden death (precipitated by a confrontation with Weber) [Radkau
2011, 53-69]. His routine as a teacher and scholar was
interrupted so badly that he eventually withdrew from regular teaching
duties in 1903, to which he would not return until 1919. Although
severely compromised and unable to write as prolifically as before, he
still managed to immerse himself in the study of various philosophical
and religious topics. This period saw a new direction in his
scholarship as the publication of miscellaneous methodological essays
as well as *The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism*
(1904-1905) testifies. Also noteworthy about this period is his
extensive trip to America in 1904, which left an indelible trace in
his understanding of modernity in general [Scaff 2011].



After this stint essentially as a private scholar, he slowly resumed
his participation in various academic and public activities. With
Edgar Jaffe and Sombart, he took over editorial control of the
*Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik*,
turning it into a leading social science journal of the day as well as
his new institutional platform. In 1909, he co-founded the
*Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Soziologie*, in part as a
result of his growing unease with the *Verein*'s
conservative politics and lack of methodological discipline, becoming
its first treasurer (he would resign from it in 1912, though). This
period of his life, until interrupted by the outbreak of the First
World War in 1914, brought the pinnacles of his achievements as he
worked intensely in two areas - the comparative sociology of
world religions and his contributions to the *Grundriss der
Sozialokonomik* (to be published posthumously as *Economy
and Society*). Along with the major methodological essays that he
drafted during this time, these works would become mainly responsible
for Weber's enduring reputation as one of the founding fathers
of modern social science.



With the onset of the First World War, Weber's involvement in
public life took an unexpected turn. At first a fervent patriotic
supporter of the war, as virtually all German intellectuals of the
time were, he grew disillusioned with the German war policies,
eventually refashioning himself as one of the most vocal critics of
the Kaiser government in a time of war. As a public intellectual, he
issued private reports to government leaders and wrote journalistic
pieces to warn against the Belgian annexation policy and the unlimited
submarine warfare, which, as the war deepened, evolved into a call for
overall democratization of the authoritarian state
(*Obrigkeitsstaat*) that was Wilhelmine Germany. By 1917, Weber
was campaigning vigorously for a wholesale constitutional reform for
post-war Germany, including the introduction of universal suffrage and
the empowerment of parliament.



When defeat came in 1918, Germany found in Weber a public intellectual
leader, even possibly a future statesman, with unscathed liberal
credentials who was well-positioned to influence the course of
post-war reconstruction. He was invited to join the draft board of the
Weimar Constitution as well as the German delegation to Versaille;
albeit in vain, he even ran for a parliamentary seat on the liberal
Democratic Party ticket. In those capacities, however, he opposed the
German Revolution (all too sensibly) and the Versaille Treaty (all too
quixotically) alike, putting himself in an unsustainable position that
defied the partisan alignments of the day. By all accounts, his
political activities bore little fruit, except his advocacy for a
robust plebiscitary presidency in the Weimar Constitution.



Frustrated with day-to-day politics, he turned to his scholarly
pursuits with renewed vigour. In 1919, he briefly taught in turn at
the universities of Vienna (*General Economic History* was an
outcome of this experience) and Munich (where he gave the much-lauded
lectures, *Science as a Vocation* and *Politics as a
Vocation*), while compiling his scattered writings on religion in
the form of massive three-volume *Gesammelte Aufsatze zur
Religionssoziologie* [*GARS* hereafter]. All these
reinvigorated scholarly activities came to an end in 1920 when he died
suddenly of pneumonia in Munich (likely due to the Spanish flu). Max
Weber was fifty-six years old.


## 2. Philosophical Influences



Putting Weber in the context of philosophical tradition proper is not
an easy task. For all the astonishing variety of identities that can
be ascribed to him as a scholar, he was certainly no philosopher at
least in the narrow sense of the term. His reputation as a Solonic
legislator of modern social science also tends to cloud our
appreciation of the extent to which his ideas were embedded in the
intellectual context of the time. Broadly speaking, Weber's
philosophical worldview, if not coherent philosophy, was informed by
the deep crisis of the Enlightenment project in fin-de-siecle
Europe, which was characterized by the intellectual revolt against
positivist reason, a celebration of subjective will and intuition, and
a neo-Romantic longing for spiritual wholesomeness [Hughes 1977]. In
other words, Weber belonged to a generation of self-claimed epigones
who had to struggle with the legacies of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche.
As such, the philosophical backdrop to his thoughts will be outlined
here along two axes -- epistemology and ethics.


### 2.1 Knowledge: Neo-Kantianism



Weber encountered the pan-European cultural crisis of his time mainly
as filtered through the jargon of German Historicism [Beiser 2011].
His early training in law had exposed him to the sharp divide between
the reigning Labandian legal positivism and the historical
jurisprudence championed by Otto von Gierke (one of his teachers at
Berlin); in his later incarnation as a political economist, he was
keenly interested in the heated "strife over methods"
(*Methodenstreit*) between the positivist economic methodology
of Carl Menger and the historical economics of Schmoller (his mentor
during the early days). Arguably, however, it was not until Weber grew
acquainted with the Baden or Southwestern School of Neo-Kantians,
especially through Wilhelm Windelband, Emil Lask, and Heinrich Rickert
(his one-time colleague at Freiburg), that he found a rich conceptual
template suitable for the clearer elaboration of his own
epistemological position.



In opposition to a Hegelian emanationist epistemology, briefly,
Neo-Kantians shared the Kantian dichotomy between reality and concept.
Not an emanent derivative of concepts as Hegel posited, reality is
irrational and incomprehensible, and the concept, only an abstract
construction of our mind. Nor is the concept a matter of will,
intuition, and subjective consciousness as Wilhelm Dilthey posited.
According to Hermann Cohen, one of the early Neo-Kantians, concept
formation is fundamentally a cognitive process, which cannot but be
rational as Kant held. If our cognition is logical and all reality
exists within cognition, then only a reality that we can comprehend in
the form of knowledge is rational - metaphysics is thereby
reduced to epistemology, and Being to logic. As such, the process of
concept formation both in the natural (*Natur*-) and the
cultural-historical sciences (*Geisteswissenschaften*) has to
be universal as well as abstract, not different in kind but in their
subject matters. The latter is only different in dealing with the
question of values in addition to logical relationships.



For Windelband, however, the difference between the two kinds of
knowledge has to do with its aim and method as well.
Cultural-historical knowledge is not concerned with a phenomenon
because of what it shares with other phenomena, but rather because of
its own definitive qualities. For values, which form its proper
subject, are radically subjective, concrete and individualistic.
Unlike the "nomothetic" knowledge that natural science
seeks, what matters in historical science is not a universal law-like
causality, but an understanding of the particular way in which an
individual ascribes values to certain events and institutions or takes
a position towards the general cultural values of his/her time under a
unique, never-to-be-repeated constellation of historical
circumstances. Therefore, cultural-historical science seeks
"ideographic" knowledge; it aims to understand the
particular, concrete and irrational "historical
individual" *with* inescapably universal, abstract, and
rational concepts. Turning irrational reality into rational concept,
it does not simply paint (*abbilden*) a picture of reality but
transforms (*umbilden*) it. Occupying the gray area between
irrational reality and rational concept, then, its question became
twofold for the Neo-Kantians. One is in what way we can understand the
irreducibly subjective values held by the historical actors in an
objective fashion, and the other, by what criteria we can select a
certain historical phenomenon as opposed to another as historically
significant subject matter worthy of our attention. In short, the
issue was not only the values to be comprehended by the seeker of
historical knowledge, but also his/her own values, which are no less
subjective. Value-judgment (*Werturteil*) as well as value
(*Wert*) became a keen issue.



According to Rickert's definitive elaboration, value-judgment
precedes values. He posits that the "in-dividual," as
opposed to mere "individual," phenomenon can be isolated
as a discrete subject of our historical inquiry when we ascribe
certain subjective values to the singular coherence and indivisibility
that are responsible for its uniqueness. In his theory of
value-relation (*Wertbeziehung*), Rickert argues that relating
historical objects to values can still retain objective validity when
it is based on a series of explicitly formulated conceptual
distinctions. They are to be made firmly between the
investigator's values and those of the historical actor under
investigation, between personal or private values and general cultural
values of the time, and between subjective value-judgment and
objective value-relations. In so positing, however, Rickert is making
two highly questionable assumptions. One is that there are certain
values in every culture that are universally accepted within that
culture as valid, and the other, that a historian free of bias must
agree on what these values are. Just as natural science must assume
"unconditionally and universally valid laws of nature,"
so, too, cultural-historical science must assume that there are
"unconditionally and universally valid values." If so, an
"in-dividual" historical event has to be reduced to an
"individual" manifestation of the objective process of
history, a conclusion that essentially implies that Rickert returned
to the German Idealist faith in the meaningfulness of history and the
objective validity of the diverse values to be found in history. An
empirical study in historical science, in the end, cannot do without a
metaphysics of history. Bridging irrational reality and rational
concept in historical science, or overcoming *hiatus
irrationalis* (a la Emil Lask) without recourse to a
metaphysics of history still remained a problem as acutely as before.
While accepting the broadly neo-Kantian conceptual template as Rickert
elaborated it, Weber's methodological writings would turn mostly
on this issue.


### 2.2 Ethics: Kant and Nietzsche



German Idealism seems to have exerted another enduring influence on
Weber, discernible in his ethical worldview more than in his
epistemological position. This was the strand of Idealist discourse in
which a broadly Kantian ethic and its Nietzschean interlocution figure
prominently.



The way in which Weber understood Kant seems to have come through the
conceptual template set by moral psychology and philosophical
anthropology. In conscious opposition to the utilitarian-naturalistic
justification of modern individualism, Kant viewed moral action as
principled and self-disciplined while expressive of genuine freedom
and autonomy. On this Kantian view, freedom and autonomy are to be
found in the instrumental control of the self and the world
(objectification) according to a law formulated solely from within
(subjectification). Furthermore, such a paradoxical compound is made
possible by an internalization or willful acceptance of a
transcendental rational principle, which saves it from falling prey to
the hedonistic subjectification that Kant found in Enlightenment
naturalism and which he so detested. Kant in this regard follows
Rousseau in condemning utilitarianism; instrumental-rational control
of the world in the service of our desires and needs just degenerates
into organized egoism. In order to prevent it, mere freedom of choice
based on elective will (*Willkur*) has to be replaced by
the exercise of purely rational will (*Wille)* [Taylor 1989,
364]. The so-called "inward turn" is thus the crucial
benchmark of autonomous moral agency for Kant, but its basis has been
fundamentally altered; it should be done with the purpose of serving a
higher end, that is, the universal law of reason. A willful
self-transformation is demanded now in the service of a higher law
based on reason, or an "ultimate value" in Weber's
parlance.



Weber's understanding of this Kantian ethical template was
strongly tinged by the Protestant theological debate taking place in
the Germany of his time between (orthodox Lutheran) Albrecht Ritschl
and Matthias Schneckenburger (of Calvinist persuasion), a context with
which Weber became acquainted through his Heidelberg colleague,
Troeltsch. Suffice it to note in this connection that Weber's
sharp critique of Ritschl's Lutheran communitarianism seems
reflective of his broadly Kantian preoccupation with radically
subjective individualism and the methodical transformation of the self
[Graf 1995].



All in all, one might say that "the preoccupations of Kant and
of Weber are really the same. One was a philosopher and the other a
sociologist, but there... the difference ends" [Gellner
1974, 184]. That which also ends, however, is Weber's
subscription to a Kantian ethic of duty when it comes to the
possibility of a universal law of reason. Weber was keenly aware of
the fact that the Kantian linkage between growing self-consciousness,
the possibility of universal law, and principled and thus free action
had been irrevocably severed. Kant managed to preserve the precarious
identification of non-arbitrary action and subjective freedom by
asserting such a linkage, which Weber believed to be unsustainable in
his allegedly Nietzschean age.



According to Nietzsche, "will to truth" cannot be content
with the metaphysical construction of a grand metanarrative, whether
it be monotheistic religion or modern science, and growing
self-consciousness, or "intellectualization" a la
Weber, can lead only to a radical skepticism, value relativism, or,
even worse, nihilism. According to such a Historicist diagnosis of
modernity that culminates in the "death of God," the
alternative seems to be either a radical self-assertion and
self-creation that runs the risk of being arbitrary (as in Nietzsche)
or a complete desertion of the modern ideal of self-autonomous freedom
(as in early Foucault). If the first approach leads to a radical
divinization of humanity, one possible extension of modern humanism,
the second leads inexorably to a "dedivinization" of
humanity, a postmodern antihumanism [Vattimo 1988, 31-47].



Seen in this light, Weber's ethical sensibility is built on a
firm rejection of a Nietzschean divination and Foucaultian resignation
alike, both of which are radically at odds with the Kantian ethic of
duty. In other words, Weber's ethical project can be described
as a search for non-arbitrary freedom (his Kantian side) in what he
perceived as an increasingly post-metaphysical world (his Nietzschean
side). According to Paul Honigsheim, Weber's ethic is that of
"tragedy" and "nevertheless" [Honigsheim 2013,
113]. This deep tension between the Kantian moral imperatives and a
Nietzschean diagnosis of the modern cultural world is apparently what
gives such a darkly tragic and agnostic shade to Weber's ethical
worldview.


## 3. History


### 3.1 Rationalization as a Thematic Unity



Weber's main contribution as such, nonetheless, lies neither in
epistemology nor in ethics. Although they deeply informed his thoughts
to an extent still under-appreciated, his main concern lay elsewhere.
He was after all one of the founding fathers of modern social science.
Beyond the recognition, however, that Weber is not simply a
sociologist par excellence as Talcott Parsons's
quasi-Durkheimian interpretation made him out to be, identifying an
*idee maitresse* throughout his disparate oeuvre
has been debated ever since his own days and is still far from
settled. *Economy and Society*, his alleged *magnum
opus*, was a posthumous publication based upon his widow's
editorship, the thematic architectonic of which is unlikely to be
reconstructed beyond doubt even after its recent reissuing under the
rubric of *Max Weber Gesamtausgabe* [*MWG* hereafter].
*GARS* forms a more coherent whole since its editorial edifice
was the work of Weber himself; and yet, its relationship to his other
sociologies of, for instance, law, city, music, domination, and
economy, remains controvertible. Accordingly, his overarching theme
has also been variously surmised as a developmental history of Western
rationalism (Wolfgang Schluchter), the universal history of
rationalist culture (Friedrich Tenbruck), or simply the
*Menschentum* as it emerges and degenerates in modern rational
society (Wilhelm Hennis). The first depicts Weber as a
comparative-historical sociologist; the second, a latter-day Idealist
historian of culture reminiscent of Jacob Burckhardt; and the third, a
political philosopher on a par with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Rousseau.
Important as they are for in-house Weber scholarship, however, these
philological disputes need not hamper our attempt to grasp the gist of
his ideas. Suffice it for us to recognize that, albeit with varying
degrees of emphasis, these different interpretations all converge on
the thematic centrality of rationality, rationalism, and
rationalization in making sense of Weber.



At the outset, what immediately strikes a student of Weber's
rationalization thesis is its seeming irreversibility and
Eurocentrism. The apocalyptic imagery of the "iron cage"
that haunts the concluding pages of the *Protestant Ethic* is
commonly taken to reflect his fatalism about the inexorable unfolding
of rationalization and its culmination in the complete loss of freedom
and meaning in the modern world. The "Author's
Introduction" (*Vorbemerkung* to *GARS*) also
contains oft-quoted passages that allegedly disclose Weber's
belief in the unique singularity of Western civilization's
achievement in the direction of rationalization, or lack thereof in
other parts of the world. For example:



> 
> A child of modern European civilization (*Kulturwelt*) who
> studies problems of universal history shall inevitably and justfiably
> raise the question (*Fragestellung*): what combination of
> circumstances have led to the fact that in the West, and here only,
> cultural phenomena have appeared which - at least as *we*
> like to think - came to have *universal* significance and
> validity [Weber 1920/1992, 13: translation altered]?
> 



Taken together, then, the rationalization process as Weber narrated it
seems quite akin to a metahistorical teleology that irrevocably sets
the West apart from and indeed above the East.



At the same time, nonetheless, Weber adamantly denied the possibility
of a universal law of history in his methodological essays. Even
within the same pages of *Vorbemerkung**,* he said,
"rationalizations of the most varied character have existed in
various departments of life and in all areas of culture"
[*Ibid.*, 26]. He also made clear that his study of various
forms of world religions was to be taken for its heuristic value
rather than as "complete analyses of cultures, however
brief" [*Ibid.*, 27]. It was meant as a
comparative-conceptual platform on which to erect the edifying
features of rationalization in the West. If merely a heuristic device
and not a universal law of progress, then, what is rationalization and
whence comes his uncompromisingly dystopian vision?


### 3.2 Calculability, Predictability, and World-Mastery



Roughly put, taking place in all areas of human life from religion and
law to music and architecture, rationalization means a historical
drive towards a world in which "one can, in principle, master
all things by calculation" [Weber 1919/1946, 139]. For instance,
modern capitalism is a rational mode of economic life because it
depends on a calculable process of production. This search for exact
calculability underpins such institutional innovations as monetary
accounting (especially double-entry bookkeeping), centralization of
production control, separation of workers from the means of
production, supply of formally free labour, disciplined control on the
factory floor, and other features that make modern capitalism
*qualitatively* different from all other modes of organizing
economic life. The enhanced calculability of the production process is
also buttressed by that in non-economic spheres such as law and
administration. Legal formalism and bureaucratic management reinforce
the elements of predictability in the sociopolitical environment that
encumbers industrial capitalism by means of introducing formal
equality of citizenship, a rule-bound legislation of legal norms, an
autonomous judiciary, and a depoliticized professional bureaucracy.
Further, all this calculability and predictability in political,
social, and economic spheres was not possible without changes of
values in ethics, religion, psychology, and culture. Institutional
rationalization was, in other words, predicated upon the rise of a
peculiarly rational type of personality, or a "person of
vocation" (*Berufsmensch*) as outlined in the
*Protestant Ethic*. The outcome of this complex interplay of
ideas and interests was modern rational Western civilization with its
enormous material and cultural capacity for relentless
world-mastery.


### 3.3 Knowledge, Impersonality, and Control



On a more analytical plateau, all these disparate processes of
rationalization can be surmised as increasing knowledge, growing
impersonality, and enhanced control [Brubaker 1991, 32-35].
First, knowledge. Rational action in one very general sense
presupposes knowledge. It requires some knowledge of the ideational
and material circumstances in which our action is embedded, since to
act rationally is to act on the basis of conscious reflection about
the probable consequences of action. As such, the knowledge that
underpins a rational action is of a causal nature conceived in terms
of means-ends relationships, aspiring towards a systematic, logically
interconnected whole. Modern scientific and technological knowledge is
a culmination of this process that Weber called intellectualization,
in the course of which, the germinating grounds of human knowledge in
the past, such as religion, theology, and metaphysics, were slowly
pushed back to the realm of the superstitious, mystical, or simply
irrational. It is only in modern Western civilization, according to
Weber, that this gradual process of disenchantment
(*Entzauberung*) has reached its radical conclusion.



Second, impersonality. Rationalization, according to Weber, entails
objectification (*Versachlichung*). Industrial capitalism, for
one, reduces workers to sheer numbers in an accounting book,
completely free from the fetters of tradition and non-economic
considerations, and so does the market relationship vis-a-vis
buyers and sellers. For another, having abandoned the principle of
Khadi justice (i.e., personalized *ad hoc* adjudication),
modern law and administration also rule in strict accordance with the
systematic formal codes and *sine ira et studio*, that is,
"without anger or passion." Again, Weber found the seed of
objectification not in material interests alone, but in the Puritan
vocational ethic (*Berufsethik*) and the life conduct that it
inspired, which was predicated upon a disenchanted monotheistic
theodicy that reduced humans to mere tools of God's providence.
Ironically, for Weber, modern inward subjectivity was born once we
lost any inherent value *qua* humans and became thoroughly
objectified vis-a-vis God in the course of the Reformation.
Modern individuals are subjectified and objectified all at once.



Third, control. Pervasive in Weber's view of rationalization is
the increasing control in social and material life. Scientific and
technical rationalization has greatly improved both the human capacity
for a mastery over nature and institutionalized discipline
*via* bureaucratic administration, legal formalism, and
industrial capitalism. The calculable, disciplined control over humans
was, again, an unintended consequence of the Puritan ethic of rigorous
self-discipline and self-control, or what Weber called
"innerworldly asceticism (*innerweltliche*
*Askese*)." Here again, Weber saw the irony that a modern
individual citizen equipped with inviolable rights was born as a part
of the rational, disciplinary ethos that increasingly penetrated into
every aspect of social life.


## 4. Modernity


### 4.1 The "Iron Cage" and Value-fragmentation



Thus seen, rationalization as Weber postulated it is anything but an
unequivocal historical phenomenon. As already pointed out, first,
Weber viewed it as a process taking place in disparate fields of human
life with a logic of each field's own and varying directions;
"each one of these fields may be rationalized in terms of very
different ultimate values and ends, and what is rational from one
point of view may well be irrational from another" [Weber
1920/1992, 27]. Second, and more important, its ethical ramification
for Weber is deeply ambivalent. To use his own dichotomy, the
formal-procedural rationality (*Zweckrationalitat*) to
which Western rationalization tends does not necessarily go with a
substantive-value rationality (*Wertrationalitat*). On the
one hand, exact calculability and predictability in the social
environment that formal rationalization has brought about dramatically
enhances individual freedom by helping individuals understand and
navigate through the complex web of practice and institutions in order
to realize the ends of their own choice. On the other hand, freedom
and agency are seriously curtailed by the same force in history when
individuals are reduced to a "cog in a machine," or
trapped in an "iron cage" that formal rationalization has
spawned with irresistible efficiency and at the expense of substantive
rationality. Thus, his famous lament in the *Protestant
Ethic*:



> 
> No one knows who will live in this cage (*Gehause*) in the
> future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely
> new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas
> and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with
> a sort of convulsive self-importance. For the "last man"
> (*letzten Menschen*) of this cultural development, it might
> well be truly said: "Specialist without spirit, sensualist
> without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of
> humanity (*Menschentums*) never before achieved" [Weber
> 1904-05/1992, 182: translation altered].
> 



Third, Weber envisions the future of rationalization not only in terms
of "mechanized petrification," but also of a chaotic, even
atrophic, inundation of subjective values. In other words, the
bureaucratic "iron cage" is only one side of the modernity
that rationalization has brought about; the other is a
"polytheism" of value-fragmentation. At the apex of
rationalization, we moderns have suddenly found ourselves living
"as did the ancients when their world was not yet disenchanted
of its gods and demons" [Weber 1919/1946, 148]. Modern society
is, Weber seems to say, once again enchanted as a result of
disenchantment. How did this happen and with what consequences?


### 4.2 Reenchantment *via* Disenchantment



In point of fact, Weber's rationalization thesis can be
understood with richer nuance when we approach it as, for lack of
better terms, a dialectics of disenchantment and reenchantment rather
than as a one-sided, unilinear process of secularization.
Disenchantment had ushered in monotheistic religions in the West. In
practice, this means that *ad hoc* maxims for life-conduct had
been gradually displaced by a unified total system of meaning and
value, which historically culminated in the Puritan ethic of vocation.
Here, the irony was that disenchantment was an ongoing process
nonetheless. Disenchantment in its second phase pushed aside
monotheistic religion as something irrational, thus delegitimating it
as a unifying worldview in the modern secular world.



Modern science, which was singularly responsible for this late
development, was initially welcomed as a surrogate system of orderly
value-creation, as Weber found in the convictions of Bacon (science as
"the road to *true* nature") and Descartes (as
"the road to the *true* god") [Weber 1919/1946,
142]. For Weber, nevertheless, modern science is a deeply nihilistic
enterprise in which any scientific achievement worthy of the name
*must* "ask to be surpassed and made obsolete" in a
process "that is in principle *ad infinitum*," at
which point, "we come to the *problem of the meaning* of
science." He went on to ask: "For it is simply not
self-evident that something which is subject to such a law is in
itself meaningful and rational. Why should one do something which in
reality never comes to an end and never can?" [*Ibid*.,
138: translation altered]. In short, modern science has relentlessly
dismantled all other sources of value-creation, in the course of which
its own meaning has also been dissipated beyond repair. The result is
the "*Gotterdammerung* of all evaluative
perspectives" including its own [Weber 1904/1949, 86].



Irretrievably gone as a result is a unifying worldview, be it
religious or scientific, and what ensues is its fragmentation into
incompatible value spheres. Weber, for instance, observed:
"since Nietzsche, we realize that something can be beautiful,
not only in spite of the aspect in which it is not good, but rather in
that very aspect" [Weber 1919/1946, 148]. That is to say,
aesthetic values now stand in irreconcilable antagonism to religious
values, transforming "value judgments (*Werturteile*)
into judgments of taste (*Geschmacksurteile*) by which what is
morally reprehensible becomes merely what is tasteless" [Weber
1915/1946, 342].



Weber is, then, *not* envisioning a peaceful dissolution of the
grand metanarratives of monotheistic religion and universal science
into a series of local narratives and the consequent modern pluralist
culture in which different cultural practices follow their own
immanent logic. His vision of polytheistic reenchantment is rather
that of an incommensurable value-fragmentation into a plurality of
alternative metanarratives, each of which claims to answer the same
metaphysical questions that religion and science strove to cope with
in their own ways. The slow death of God has reached its apogee in the
return of gods and demons who "strive to gain power over our
lives and again ... resume their eternal struggle with one
another" [Weber 1919/1946, 149].



Seen this way, it makes sense that Weber's rationalization
thesis concludes with two strikingly dissimilar prophecies - one
is the imminent iron cage of bureaucratic petrification and the other,
the Hellenistic pluralism of warring deities. The modern world has
come to be monotheistic and polytheistic all at once. What seems to
underlie this seemingly self-contradictory imagery of modernity is the
problem of modern humanity (*Menschentum*) and its loss of
freedom and moral agency. Disenchantment has created a world with no
objectively ascertainable ground for one's conviction. Under the
circumstances, according to Weber, a modern individual tends to act
only on one's own aesthetic impulse and arbitrary convictions
that cannot be communicated in the eventuality; the majority of those
who cannot even act on their convictions, or the "last men who
invented happiness" a la Nietzsche, lead the life of a
"cog in a machine." Whether the problem of modernity is
accounted for in terms of a permeation of objective, instrumental
rationality or of a purposeless agitation of subjective values, Weber
viewed these two images as constituting a single problem insofar as
they contributed to the inertia of modern individuals who fail to take
principled moral action. The "sensualists without heart"
and "specialists without spirit" indeed formed two faces
of the same coin that may be called the *disempowerment of the
modern self*.


### 4.3 Modernity *contra* Modernization



Once things were different, Weber claimed. An unflinching sense of
conviction that relied on nothing but one's innermost
personality once issued in a highly methodical and disciplined conduct
of everyday life - or, simply, life as a duty. Born in the
crucible of the Reformation, this archetypal modern subjectivity drew
its strength solely from within in the sense that one's
principle of action was determined by one's own psychological
need to gain self-affirmation. Also, the way in which this deeply
introspective subjectivity was practiced, that is, in self-mastery,
entailed a highly rational and radically methodical attitude towards
one's inner self and the outer, objective world. Transforming
the self into an integrated personality and mastering the world with
tireless energy, subjective value and objective rationality once
formed "one unbroken whole" [Weber 1910/1978, 319]. Weber
calls the agent of this unity the "person of vocation"
(*Berufsmensch*) in his religious writings,
"personality" (*Personlichkeit*) in the
methodological essays, "genuine politician"
(*Berufspolitiker*) in the political writings, and
"charismatic individual" in *Economy and Society*.
The much-celebrated Protestant Ethic thesis was indeed a genealogical
reconsturction of this idiosyncratic moral agency in modern times
[Goldman 1992].



Once different, too, was the mode of society constituted by and in
turn constitutive of this type of moral agency. Weber's social
imagination revealed its keenest sense of irony when he traced the
root of the cohesive integration, intense socialization, and severe
communal discipline of sect-like associations to the isolated and
introspective subjectivity of the Puritan person of vocation. The
irony was that the self-absorbed, anxiety-ridden and even antisocial
virtues of the person of vocation could be sustained only in the thick
disciplinary milieu of small-scale associational life. Membership in
exclusive voluntary associational life is open, and it is such
membership, or "achieved quality," that guarantees the
ethical qualities of the individuals with whom one interacts.
"The old 'sect spirit' holds sway with relentless
effect in the intrinsic nature of such associations," Weber
observed, for the sect was the first mass organization to combine
individual agency and social discipline in such a systematic way.
Weber thus claimed that "the ascetic conventicles and sects
... formed one of the most important foundations of modern
individualism" [Weber 1920/1946, 321]. It seems clear that what
Weber was trying to outline here is an archetypical form of social
organization that can empower individual moral agency by sustaining
group disciplinary dynamism, a kind of pluralistically organized
social life we would now call a "civil society" [Kim 2007,
57-94].



To summarize, the irony with which Weber accounted for rationalization
was driven by the deepening tension between *modernity* and
*modernization*. Weber's problem with modernity
originates from the fact that it required a historically unique
constellation of cultural values and social institutions, and yet,
modernization has effectively undermined the cultural basis for modern
individualism and its germinating ground of disciplinary society,
which together had given the original impetus to modernity. The modern
project has fallen victim to its own success, and in peril is the
individual moral agency and freedom. Under the late modern
circumstances characterized by the "iron cage" and
"warring deities," then, Weber's question becomes:
"How is it at all possible to salvage *any remnants* of
'individual' freedom of movement *in any sense*
given this all-powerful trend" [Weber 1918/1994, 159]?


## 5. Knowledge



Such an appreciation of Weber's main problematic, which
culminates in the question of modern individual freedom, may help shed
light on some of the controversial aspects of Weber's
methodology. In accounting for his methodological claims, it needs to
be borne in mind that Weber was not at all interested in writing a
systematic epistemological treatise in order to put an end to the
"strife over methods" (*Methodenstreit*) of his
time between historicism and positivism. His ambition was much more
modest and pragmatic. Just as "the person who attempted to walk
by constantly applying anatomical knowledge would be in danger of
stumbling" [Weber 1906/1949, 115; translation altered], so can
methodology be a kind of knowledge that may supply a rule of thumb,
codified *a posteriori*, for what historians and social
scientists do, but it could never substitute for the skills they use
in their research practice. Instead, Weber's attempt to mediate
historicism and positivism was meant to aid an actual researcher make
a *practical value-judgment* that is fair and acceptable in the
face of the plethora of subjective values that one encounters when
selecting and processing historical data. After all, the questions
that drove his methodological reflections were what it means to
practice science in the modern polytheistic world and how one can do
science with a sense of vocation. In his own words, "the
capacity to distinguish between empirical knowledge and
value-judgments, and the fulfillment of the scientific duty to see the
factual truth as well as the practical duty to stand up for our own
ideals constitute the program to which we wish to adhere with ever
increasing firmness" [Weber 1904/1949, 58]. Sheldon Wolin thus
concludes that Weber "formulated the idea of methodology to
serve, not simply as a guide to investigation but as a moral practice
and a mode of political action" [Wolin 1981, 414]. In short,
Weber's methodology was as ethical as it was
epistemological.


### 5.1 Understanding (*Verstehen*)



Building on the Neo-Kantian nominalism outlined above [2.1], thus,
Weber's contribution to methodology turned mostly on the
question of objectivity and the role of subjective values in
historical and cultural concept formation. On the one hand, he
followed Windelband in positing that historical and cultural knowledge
is categorically distinct from natural scientific knowledge. Action
that is the subject of any social scientific inquiry is clearly
different from mere behaviour. While behaviour can be accounted for
without reference to inner motives and thus can be reduced to mere
aggregate numbers, making it possible to establish positivistic
regularities, and even laws, of collective behaviour, an action can
only be interpreted because it is based on a radically subjective
attribution of meaning and values to what one does. What a social
scientist seeks to understand is this subjective dimension of human
conduct as it relates to others. On the other hand, an
understanding(*Verstehen*) in this subjective sense is not
anchored in a non-cognitive empathy or intuitive appreciation that is
arational by nature; it can gain objective validity when the meanings
and values to be comprehended are explained causally, that is, as a
means to an end. A teleological contextualization of an action in the
means-end nexus is indeed the precondition for a causal explanation
that can be objectively ascertained. So far, Weber is not essentially
in disagreement with Rickert.



From Weber's perspective, however, the problem that
Rickert's formulation raised was the objectivity of the end to
which an action is held to be oriented. As pointed out [2.1 above],
Rickert in the end had to rely on a certain transhistorical,
transcultural criterion in order to account for the purpose of an
action, an assumption that cannot be warranted in Weber's view.
To be consistent with the Neo-Kantian presuppositions, instead, the
ends themselves have to be conceived of as no less subjective.
Imputing an end to an action is of a fictional nature in the sense
that it is not free from the subjective value-judgment that conditions
the researcher's thematization of a certain subject matter out
of "an infinite multiplicity of successively and coexistently
emerging and disappearing events" [Weber 1904/1949, 72].
Although a counterfactual analysis might aid in stabilizing the
process of causal imputation, it cannot do away completely with the
subjective nature of the researcher's perspective.



In the end, the kind of objective knowledge that historical and
cultural sciences may achieve is precariously limited. An action can
be interpreted with objective validity only at the level of means, not
ends. An end, however, even a "self-evident" one, is
irreducibly subjective, thus defying an objective understanding; it
can only be reconstructed conceptually based on a researcher's
no less subjective values. Objectivity in historical and social
sciences is, then, not a goal that can be reached with the aid of a
correct method, but an ideal that must be striven for without a
promise of ultimate fulfillment. In this sense, one might say that the
so-called "value-freedom" (*Wertfreiheit*) is as
much a methodological principle for Weber as an ethical virtue that a
personality fit for modern science must possess.


### 5.2 Ideal Type



The methodology of "ideal type" (*Idealtypus*) is
another testimony to such a broadly ethical intention of Weber.
According to Weber's definition, "an ideal type is formed
by the one-sided *accentuation* of one or more points of
view" according to which "*concrete individual*
phenomena ... are arranged into a unified analytical
construct" (*Gedankenbild*); in its purely fictional
nature, it is a methodological "utopia [that] cannot be found
empirically anywhere in reality" [Weber 1904/1949, 90]. Keenly
aware of its fictional nature, the ideal type never seeks to claim its
validity in terms of a reproduction of or a correspondence with
reality. Its validity can be ascertained only in terms of adequacy,
which is too conveniently ignored by the proponents of positivism.
This does not mean, however, that objectivity, limited as it is, can
be gained by "weighing the various evaluations against one
another and making a 'statesman-like' compromise among
them" [Weber 1917/1949, 10], which is often proposed as a
solution by those sharing Weber's kind of methodological
perspectivism. Such a practice, which Weber calls
"syncretism," is not only impossible but also unethical,
for it avoids "the practical duty to stand up for our own
ideals" [Weber 1904/1949, 58].



According to Weber, a clear value commitment, no matter how
subjective, is both unavoidable *and* necessary. It is
*unavoidable*, for otherwise no meaningful knowledge can be
attained. Further, it is *necessary*, for otherwise the value
position of a researcher would not be foregrounded clearly and
admitted as such - not only to the readers of the research
outcome but also to the very researcher him/herself. In other words,
Weber's emphasis on "one-sidedness"
(*Einseitigkeit*) not only affirms the subjective nature of
scientific knowledge but also demands that the researcher be
*self-consciously* subjective. The ideal type is devised for
this purpose, for "only as an ideal type" can subjective
value - "that unfortunate child of misery of our
science" - "be given an unambiguous meaning"
[*Ibid*., 107]. Along with value-freedom, then, what the ideal
type methodology entails in ethical terms is, on the one hand, a
daring confrontation with the tragically subjective foundation of our
historical and social scientific knowledge and, on the other, a public
confession of one's own subjective value. Weber's
methodology in the end amounts to a call for the heroic
character-virtue of clear-sightedness and intellectual integrity that
together constitute a genuine person of science - a scientist
with a sense of vocation who has a passionate commitment to
one's own specialized research, yet is utterly "free of
illusions" [Lowith 1982, 38].


## 6. Politics and Ethics



Even more explicitly ethical than his methodology, Weber's
political project also discloses his entrenched preoccupation with the
willful resuscitation of certain character traits in modern society.
At the outset, it seems undeniable that Weber was a deeply liberal
political thinker especially in German context which is not well known
for political liberalism. This means that his ultimate value as a
political thinker was locked on individual freedom, that "old,
general type of human ideals" [Weber 1895/1994, 19]. He was also
a *bourgeois* liberal, and self-consciously so, in a time of
great transformations that were undermining the social conditions
necessary to support classical liberal values and bourgeois
institutions, thereby compelling liberalism to search for a
fundamental reorientation. To that extent, he belongs to that
generation of liberal political thinkers in fin-de-siecle
Europe who clearly perceived the general crisis of liberalism and
sought to resolve it in their own liberal ways [Bellamy 1992,
157-216]. Weber's own way was to address the problem of
classical liberal characterology that was, in his view, being
progressively undermined by the indiscriminate bureaucratization of
modern society.


### 6.1 Domination and Legitimacy



Such an ethical subtext is legible even in Weber's stark realism
that permeates his political sociology - or, a sociology of
domination (*Herrschaftssoziologie*) as he called it [for the
academic use of this term in Weber's time, see Anter 2016,
3-23]. For instance, utterly devoid of moral qualities that many
of his contemporaries attributed to the state, it is defined all too
thinly as "a human community that (successfully) claims the
*monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force* within a
given territory" [Weber 1919/1994, 310]. With the same brevity,
he asserted that domination of the ruled by the ruler, or more
literally, "lordship" (*Herrschaft*), is an
immutable reality of political life even in a democratic state. That
is why, for Weber, an empirical study of politics cannot but be an
inquiry into the different modalities by which domination is
effectuated and sustained. All the while, he also maintained that a
domination worthy of sustained attention is about something far more
than the brute fact of subjugation and subservience. For "the
merely external fact of the order being obeyed is not sufficient to
signify domination in our sense; we cannot overlook the meaning of the
fact that the command is accepted as a *valid* norm"
[Weber 1921-22/1978, 946]. In other words, it has to be a
domination mediated through *justification* and
*interpretation* in which the ruler's claim to authority,
not mere threat of force or promise of benefits, is the reason for the
obedience, not mere compliance, by the ruled. This bipolar emphasis on
the factuality of coercive domination at the phenomenal level and the
essentially *noumenal* nature of power (a la Rainer
Forst) is what characterizes Weber's political realism [Forst
2012].



In terms of contemporary political realism, Weber seemed to hold that
the primary concern of politics is the establishment of an
*orderly* domination and its management within a given
territory rather than the realization of such pre- or extra-political
moral goals as justice (Kant) or freedom (Hegel) - thus the
brevity with which the state is defined above. Sharing this Hobbesian
outlook on politics, or what Bernard Williams calls the "First
Political Question" (FPQ), enables Weber to square his diagnosis
of agonistic value pluralism with an entrenched suspicion of
natural-law foundation of liberalism to sustain a democratic politics
that is uniquely his own [see 6.2 below]. He went beyond Ordorealism,
however, when an evaluative perspective on politics is advocated
without recourse to the moral commitments coming from outside the
political sphere. The making of a workable political order cannot be
authorized by virtue of its coming-into-being and has to satisfy what
Williams called the "Basic Legitimation Demand" (BLD) to
be an acceptable arrangement of social coordination. A legitimate
political order is an institutionalized modus vivendi for collective
life that "makes sense as an intelligible order" (MSIO) in
the eyes of the beholder [Williams 2005, 1-17]. Since such an
acceptance by those living under a particular arrangement depends on
the political morality animating that particular community, the
ruler's claim to authority can meet with success only when based
on a reasonable fit with the local mores, values, and cultures
[Cozzaglio and Greene 2019, 1025-26]. Like Machiavelli's
*Principe*, then, Weber's *Herren* do not behave
in a normless vacuum. They rule under certain political-normative
constraints that turn on the congruence between the way their
domination is *justified* and the way such a public
justification is *interpreted* as acceptable to the ruled.
Weber's concept of domination is as much noumenal as phenomenal.
To that extent, it is little wonder that his name figures not only
prominently but also uniquely in the pantheon of political realists
[Galston 2010].



From this nuanced realist premise, Weber famously moved on to identify
three ideal types of legitimate domination based on, respectively,
charisma, tradition, and legal rationality. Roughly, the first type of
legitimacy claim depends on how persuasively the leaders prove their
charismatic qualities, for which they receive personal devotions and
emotive followings from the ruled. The second kind of claim can be
made successfully when certain practice, custom, and mores are
institutionalized to (re)produce a stable pattern of domination over a
long duration of time. In contrast to these crucial dependences on
personality traits and the passage of time, the third type of
authority is unfettered by time, place, and other forms of contingency
as it derives its legitimacy from adherence to impersonal rules and
general principles that can only be found by suitable legal-rational
reasoning. It is, along with the traditional authority, a type of
domination that is inclined towards the status quo in ordinary times
as opposed to the charismatic authority that represents extraordinary,
disruptive, and transformative forces in history. Weber's fame
and influence as a political thinker are built most critically upon
this typology and the ways in which those ideal types are deployed in
his political writings.



As such, Weber's sociology of domination has been suspected
variously of its embedded normative biases. For one, his theory of
legitimacy is seen as endorsing a cynical and unrealistic rejection of
universal morality in politics that makes it hard to pass an objective
and moral evaluative judgment on legitimacy claims, a charge that is
commonly leveled at political realism at large. Under Weber's
concept of legitimacy, anything goes, so to speak, as long as the
ruler goes along with the local political morality of the ruled (even
if it is formed independently of any coercive or corrosive
interference by the ruler, thereby satisfying Williams's
"critical theory principle"). Read in conjunction with his
voluminous political writings, especially, it is criticized to this
day as harbouring or foreshadowing, among others, Bonapartist
caesarism, passive-revolutionary Fordist ideology, quasi-Fascist
elitism, and even proto-Nazism (especially with respect to his robust
nationalism and/or nihilistic celebration of power) [*inter
alia*, Strauss 1950; Marcuse in Stammer (ed.) 1971; Mommsen 1984;
Rehman 2013]. In addition to these politically heated charges,
Weber's typology also reveals a crucial lacuna even as an
empirical political sociology. That is to say, it allows scant, or
ambiguous, a conceptual topos for democracy.



In fact, it seems as though Weber is unsure of the proper place of
democracy in his schema. At one point, democracy is deemed as a
*fourth* type of legitimacy because it should be able to
embrace legitimacy *from below* whereas his three ideal types
all focus on that *from above* [Breuer in Schroeder (ed.) 1998,
2]. At other times, Weber seems to believe that democracy is simply
*non-legitimate*, rather than another type of legitimate
domination, because it aspires to an identity between the ruler and
the ruled (i.e., no domination at all), but without assuming a
hierarchical and asymmetrical relationship of power, his concept of
legitimacy takes hardly off the ground. Thus, Weber could describe the
emergence of proto-democracy in the late medieval urban communes only
in terms of "revolutionary usurpation" [Weber
1921-22/1978, 1250], calling them the "first
*deliberately non-legitimate and revolutionary* political
association" [*ibid.*, 1302]. Too recalcitrant to fit
into his overall schema, in other words, these historical prototypes
of democracy simply fall *outside* of his typology of
domination as non- or not-legitimate at all.



Overlapping but still distinguishable is Weber's yet another way
of conceptualizing democracy, which had to do with charismatic
legitimacy. The best example is the Puritan sect in which authority is
legitimated only on the grounds of a consensual order created
voluntarily by proven believers possessing their own quantum of
charismatic legitimating power. As a result of this political
corollary of the Protestant doctrine of universal priesthood, Puritan
sects could and did "insist upon 'direct democratic
administration' by the congregation" and thereby do away
with the hierarchical distinction between those ruling and those ruled
[*ibid.*, 1208]. In a secularized version of this group
dynamics, a democratic ballot would become the primary tool by which
presumed charisma of the individual lay citizenry are aggregated and
transmitted to their elected leader who become "the agent and
hence the servant of his voters, not their chosen master"
[*ibid.*, 1128]. Rather than an outright non-legitimate or
fourth type of domination, here, democracy comes across as an
extremely rare subset of a diffused and institutionalized form of
*charismatic* legitimacy.


### 6.2 Democracy, Partisanship, and Compromise



All in all, the irony is unmistakable. It seems as though one of the
most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century cannot
come to clear terms with its zeitgeist in which democracy, in whatever
form, shape and shade, emerged as the only acceptable ground for
political legitimacy. Weber's such awkwardness is nowhere more
compelling than in his advocacy for "leadership democracy"
(*Fuhrerdemokratie*) during the constitutional politics of
post-WWI Germany.



If the genuine self-rule of the people is impossible, according to his
unsentimental outlook on democracy, the only choice is one between
leaderless and leadership democracy. When advocating a sweeping
democratization of defeated Germany, thus, Weber envisioned democracy
in Germany as a political marketplace in which strong charismatic
leaders can be identified and elected by winning votes in a free
competition, even battle, among themselves. Preserving and enhancing
this element of struggle in politics is important since it is only
through a dynamic electoral process that national leadership strong
enough to control the otherwise omnipotent bureaucracy can be made.
The primary concern for Weber in designing democratic institutions
has, in other words, less to do with the realization of democratic
ideals, such as freedom, equality, justice, or self-rule, than with
cultivation of certain character traits befitting a robust national
leadership. In its overriding preoccupation with the leadership
qualities, Weber's theory of democracy contains ominous streaks
that may vindicate Jurgen Habermas's infamous dictum that
Carl Schmitt, "the *Kronjurist* of the Third
Reich," was "a legitimate pupil of Weber's"
[Habermas in Stammer (ed.) 1971, 66].



For a fair and comprehensive assessment, however, it should also be
brought into purview that Weber's leadership democracy is not
solely reliant upon the fortuitous personality traits of its leaders,
let alone a caesaristic dictator. "[A] genuine charisma is
radically different from the convenient presentation of the present
'divine right of king'... the very opposite is true
of the genuinely charismatic ruler, who is responsible to the
ruled" [1922/1978, 1114]. Such responsibility is conceivable
because charisma is attributed to a leader through a process that can
be described as "imputation" *from below* [Joose
2014, 271]. In addition to the free electoral competition led by the
organized mass parties, Weber saw localized, yet public associational
life as a breeding ground for such an imputation of charisma. When
leaders are identified and selected at the level of, say neighborhood
choral societies and bowling clubs [Weber 1910/2002], the alleged
authoritarian elitism of leadership democracy comes across as more
pluralistic in its valence, far from its usual identification with
demagogic dictatorship and unthinking mass following. Insofar as a
vibrant civil society functions as an effective medium for the
horizontal diffusion of charismatic qualities among lay people, his
notion of charismatic leadership can retain a strongly democratic tone
to the extent that he also suggested associational pluralism as a
sociocultural ground for the political education of the lay citizenry
from which genuine leaders would hail. Weber's charismatic
leadership has to be "democratically manufactured" [Green
2008, 208], in short, and such a formative political project is
predicated upon a pluralistically organized civil society as well as
such liberal institutions as universal suffrage, free elections, and
organized parties.



In this respect, however, it should be noted that Weber's take
on civil society is crucially different from a
communitarian-Tocquevillean outlook, and this contrast can be cast
into sharper relief once put in terms of the contemporary democratic
theory of partisanship [cf., *inter alia*, Rosenblum 2008;
Muirhead 2014; White and Ypi 2016]. Like the contemporary advocates of
partisanship, Weber is critical of the conventional communitarian view
that simply equates civil society with voluntary associational life
itself. For not all voluntary associations are conducive to democracy;
some are in fact "bad" for its viability. Even in a
"good" civil society, those "associative
practice," or *Vergesellschaftung* in Weber's
parlance [Weber 1910/2002], may cultivate the kind of *civil*
virtues that regulate our private lives, but such social capital
cannot be automatically transferred to the public realm as a useful
set of *civic* virtues and skills for democratic politics.
Political capital can be acquired by living *political*
experiences daily. This realization led Weber as well as a growing
number of contemporary democratic theorists to converge on an
insistent call for the politicization of civil society in the form of
not less, but better partisanship, making his politics of civil
society crucially different from that of a communitarian-Tocquevillean
persuasion [see Kim in Hanke, Scaff & Whimster (eds.) 2020].



Also different from this intensely political civil society is a
liberal-Habermasian "public sphere," a
rational-communicative haven in which the open exchange and fair
deliberation of impartial opinions take place until reasonable
consensus emerges. By contrast, Weber's civil society is to be
an agonistic arena of organized rivalry, competition, and struggle on
behalf of the irreducibly *partial* claims between which
consensus - be that reasonable, overlapping, or bipartisan
- may not always be found. Given the incommensurable value
fragmentation of the modern politics and society, Weber would
wholeheartedly embrace the so-called "circumstances of
politics" under which deep disagreements are reasonable
*and* permanent, agreeing that it is not necessarily a bad
thing for democracy as long as those "permanent
disagreements" remain peaceful [Waldron 1999]. From such an
agonistic perspective, the best that can be expected is some kind of
mixture of those partial claims - a *compromise* wherein
lies the true meaning of *political* virtue. That is to say,
although no "overlapping consensus" can be expected, it is
precisely because all partisan claims are so partial that a political
compromise can be made at least between *good* partisans. For
neither too unprincipled (as in opportunistic power-seekers) nor too
principled (as in moral zealots), good partisan citizens welcome a
political compromise, albeit their passionate value convictions,
because they know that some reasonable disagreements are permanent.
Then, the kind of political capital expected to be accumulated in a
good partisan civil society is a mixture of "principle and
pragmatism" [Muirhead 2014, 41-42] - a political
virtue much akin to Weber's syncretic ethics of conviction
(*Gesinnungsethik**)* and responsibility
(*Verantwortungsethik*) [see 6.3 below].



Together, Weber's ethics also demand that the political leaders
and public citizenry combine unflinching commitments to higher causes
(which make them different from mere bureaucratic careerists) with
sober realism that no political claim, including their own, can
represent the whole truth (which makes them different from moral
purists and political romantics). This syncretic ethic is the ultimate
hallmark of those politicians with a sense of vocation who would fight
for their convictions with fierce determination yet not without a
"sense of pragmatic judgment"
(*Augenmass*)that a compromise is unavoidable between
incommensurable value positions, and all they can do in the end is to
take robust responsibility for the consequences, either intended or
unintended, of what *they* thought was a principled compromise.
This is why Weber said: "The politician must make compromises
... the scholar may not cover them (*Der* *Politiker
muss Kompromisse machen ... der Gelehrte darf sie nicht
decken*)" [MWG II/10, 983; also see Bruun 1972 (2007, 244)]. It is
this type of political virtue that Weber wants to instill at the
citizenship as well as leadership level, and the site of this
political education is a pluralistically organized civil society in
which leaders and citizens can experience the dynamic and
institutionalized politicization (re)produced by partisan
politics.


### 6.3 Conviction and Responsibility



What are, then, these two ethics of conviction and responsibility
exactly that Weber wanted to foster through a
"'chronic' political schooling*"*
[Weber 1894/1994, 26]. According to the ethic of responsibility, on
the one hand, an action is given meaning only as a cause of an effect,
that is, only in terms of its causal relationship to the empirical
world. The virtue lies in an objective understanding of the possible
causal effect of an action and the calculated reorientation of the
elements of an action in such a way as to achieve a desired
consequence. An ethical question is thereby reduced to a question of
technically correct procedure, and free action consists of choosing
the correct means. By emphasizing the causality to which a free agent
subscribes, in short, Weber prescribes an ethical integrity between
action and consequences, instead of a Kantian emphasis on that between
action and intention.



According to the ethic of conviction, on the other hand, a free agent
should be able to choose autonomously not only the means, but also the
end; "this concept of personality finds its
'essence' in the constancy of its inner relation to
certain ultimate 'values' and 'meanings' of
life" [Weber 1903-06/1975, 192]. In this respect,
Weber's central problem arises from the recognition that the
kind of rationality applied in choosing a means cannot be used in
choosing an end. These two kinds of reasoning represent categorically
distinct modes of rationality, a boundary further reinforced by modern
value fragmentation. With no objectively ascertainable ground of
choice provided, then, a free agent has to create purpose ex nihilo:
"ultimately life as a whole, if it is not to be permitted to run
on as an event in nature but is instead to be consciously guided, is a
series of ultimate decisions through which the soul - as in
Plato - chooses its own fate" [Weber 1917/1949, 18]. This
ultimate decision and the Kantian integrity between intention and
action constitute the essence of what Weber calls an ethic of
conviction.



It is often held that the gulf between these two types of ethics is
unbridgeable for Weber. Demanding an unmitigated integrity between
one's ultimate value and political action, that is to say, the
*deontological* ethic of conviction cannot be reconciled with
that of responsibility which is *consequentialist* in essence.
In fact, Weber himself admitted the "abysmal contrast"
that separates the two. This frank admission, nevertheless, cannot be
taken to mean that he privileged the latter over the former as far as
political education is concerned.



Weber keenly recognized the deep tension between consequentialism and
deontology, but he still insisted that they should be forcefully
brought together. The former recognition only lends urgency to the
latter agenda. Resolving this analytical inconsistency in terms of
certain "ethical decrees" did not interest Weber. Instead,
he sought for a moral character that can manage this
"combination" with a sheer force of will. In fact, he also
called this synthetic ethic as that of responsibility without clearly
distinguishing it from the merely consequentialist ethic it sought to
overcome, thus creating an interpretive debate that continues to this
day [de Villiers 2018, 47-78]. Be that as it may, his advocacy
for this willful synthesis is incontrovertible, and he called such an
ethical character a "politician with a sense of vocation"
(*Berufspolitiker*) who combines a passionate conviction in
supra-mundane ideals that politics has to serve and a sober rational
calculation of its realizability in this mundane world. Weber thus
concluded: "the ethic of conviction and the ethic of
responsibility are not absolute opposites. They are complementary to
one another, and only in combination do they produce the true human
being who is *capable* of having a 'vocation for
politics'" [Weber 1919/1994, 368].



This synthetic political virtue seems not only hard to achieve, but
also without a promise of felicitous ending. Weber's synthesis
demands a sober confrontation with the reality of politics, i.e., the
ever-presence of "physical forces" and all the unintended
consequences or collateral damages that come with the use of coercion.
Only then may it be brought under ethical control by a superhuman
deployment of passion and prudence, but, even so, Weber's
political superhuman (*Ubermensch*) cannot circumvent the
so-called "dirty-hands dilemma" [cf. Walzer 1973; Coady
2009]. For, even at the moment of triumph, the unrelenting grip of
responsibility would never let him or her disavow the guilt and
remorse for having employed the "physical forces," no
matter how beneficial or necessary. It is a tragic-heroic ethic of
"nevertheless (*dennoch*)" [see 2.2] and, as such,
Weber's "tragicism" goes beyond politics [Honigsheim
2013, 115]. *Science as a Vocation* is a self-evident case in
which the virtue of "value freedom" demands a scientist to
confront the modern epistemological predicament of incommensurable
value-fragmentation without succumbing to the nihilistic plethora of
subjective values by means of a disciplined and willful devotion to
the scholarly specialization and scientific objectivity [see 5.2].
From this ethical vintage point, *The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism* may as well be re-titled *Labour*
*as a Vocation*. It was in this much earlier work
(1904-5) that Weber first outlined the basic contours of the
ethic of vocation (*Berufsethik*) and a person of vocation
(*Berufsmensch*) and the way those work practices emerged
historically in the course of the Reformation (and faded away
subsequently). The Calvinist doctrine of predestination has amplified
the innermost anxiety over one's own salvation, but such a
subjective fear and trembling was channeled into a psychological
reservoir for the most disciplined and methodical life conduct
(*Lenbensfuhrung*), or labour in calling, that created the
"spirit" of capitalism. Paradoxically combining subjective
value commitments and objective rationality in the pursuit of those
goals, in short, the making and unmaking of the *Berufsmensch*
is where Weber's ethical preoccupations in politics, science,
and economy converge [cf. Hennis 1988].



In the end, Weber's project is not about formal analysis of
moral maxims, nor is it about substantive virtues that reflect some
kind of ontic telos. It is too formal or empty to be an Aristotelean
virtue ethics, and it is too concerned with moral character to be a
Kantian deontology narrowly understood. The goal of Weber's
ethical project, rather, aims at cultivating a character who can
willfully bring together these conflicting formal virtues to create
what he calls a "total personality"
(*Gesamtpersonlichkeit*). It culminates in an ethical
characterology or philosophical anthropology in which passion and
reason are properly ordered by sheer force of individual will. As
such, Weber's political virtue resides not simply in a
subjective intensity of value commitment nor in a detached
intellectual integrity and methodical purposefulness, but in their
willful combination in a unified soul. In this abiding preoccupation
with *statecraft-cum-soulcraft*, Weber was a moralist and
political educator who squarely belonged to the venerable tradition
that stretches back to the ancient Greeks down to Rousseau, Hegel, and
Mill.


## 7. Concluding Remarks



Seen this way, we find a remarkable consistency in Weber's
thought. Weber's main problematic turned on the question of
individual autonomy and freedom in an increasingly rationalized
society. His dystopian and pessimistic assessment of rationalization
drove him to search for solutions through politics and science, which
broadly converge on a certain *practice of the self*. What he
called the "person of vocation," first outlined famously
in *The Protestant Ethic*, provided a bedrock for his various
efforts to resuscitate a character who can willfully combine
unflinching conviction and methodical rationality even in a society
besieged by bureaucratic petrification and value fragmentation. It is
also in this entrenched preoccupation with an ethical characterology
under modern circumstances that we find the source of his enduring
influences on twentieth-century political and social thought.



On the left, Weber's articulation of the tension between
modernity and modernization found resounding echoes in the
"Dialectics of Enlightenment" thesis by Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer; Lukacs's own critique of the perversion
of capitalist reason owes no less to Weber's problematization of
instrumental rationality on which is also built Habermas's
elaboration of communicative rationality as an alternative. Different
elements in Weber's political thought, e.g., intense political
struggle as an antidote to modern bureaucratic petrification,
leadership democracy and plebiscitary presidency, stark realist
outlook on democracy and power-politics, and value-freedom and
value-relativism in political ethics, were selected and critically
appropriated by such diverse thinkers on the right as Carl Schmitt,
Joseph Schumpeter, Leo Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, and Raymond Aron.
Even the postmodernist project of deconstructing the Enlightenment
subjectivity finds, as Michel Foucault does, a precursor in Weber. All
in all, across the vastly different ideological and methodological
spectrum, Max Weber's thought will continue to be a deep
reservoir of fresh inspiration as long as an individual's fate
under (post)modern circumstances does not lose its privileged place in
the political, social, cultural, and philosophical reflections of our
time.