Max Weber Didn’t Plow the Field

photo: Adrian Pingstone

In a review of Peter Ghosh’s Max Weber and 'The Protestant Ethic'; Twin Histories (TLS, 2/13/15) Duncan Kelly quotes Weber as saying “I am not a donkey and do not have a field” on the subject of academia. Kelly earlier remarks about Weber, “He never wrote a big book, neither founded or had any interest in founding a school, and never cared about the accoutrements of academic fame even as those around him recognized his presence and power.” Weber may not have written a big book, but along with The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism , he was responsible for coining terms like the “the routinization of charisma” that left an indelible imprint not only on sociology but thought in general. He was part of a school of German sociology that included George Simmel and Ferdinand Tonnies that had an almost novelistic reach and which turned inquiries that could have been undertaken with dry analysis into poetry. Those who practice sociometrics and look at the discipline of sociology as a science might not cotton to many of Weber’s assumptions. Weber’s concept of “disenchantment” whereby scientism looked askance upon metaphysical suppositions perhaps reflects a world that would eventually cast wandering intellectuals of the kind he himself epitomized aside. Today a lot of people know a lot about a little, but few people know anything but what they know a little about. Academic disciplines are religions, spewing forth their own jargon, which is often intentionally impenetrable to outsiders. Weber was a true polymath. As Kelly says, “In a relatively short life, the sheer bulk of what he wrote about with seriousness, purpose and commitment, from agrarian history to rationality and music, from abstract methodological pronouncements  to the workings of the stock market, from the major world religions to war and revolution, is staggering.”  Weber would probably have disagreed with the seventh and last proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

MetaLife

The Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland (illustration by John Tenniel)

Every time you call a cell phone provider or a utility you get a text soon after asking if you would be willing to take part in a survey about customer care. It’s not bad enough that locating some non- automated voice to talk to is like looking for a needle in a haystack with endless prompts sometimes leading to a dial tone--just as you thought you were going to find the Holy Grail. Now Verizon wants to know how they can serve you better or make you even more miserable depending on which way you look at it. “We’re as mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore,” Howard Beale (Peter Finch) urges his audience in Network. In a New Yorker review of Brigid Schulte’s Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has The Time, (“No Time,” 5/26/14) Elizabeth Kolbert asks, “when was the last time someone you know complained of having too little to do?” There is a tradition of social scientists monitoring emotion rather than simply dry statistics or sociometrics. Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers was, of course, a commercialized version of this. But you then you had profound examinations of the zeitgeist beginning with Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit ofCapitalism, Tonnies'  Community and Society, George Simmel’s essay,  "The Metropolis and Mental Life” and in the past century two brilliant tomes, David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Now Kolbert and Schulte and dealing with a condition of inundation, in part caused by the data explosion. E mails may contain viruses, but even when they don’t they tend to be viral with each e mail generating a whole new slew of responses. One wonders how anyone functioned in an age in which letters were typed out, stuck into envelopes and stamped. And forget Edward Snowden and the NSA, even the simplest quid pro quos are no longer pure to the extent that they're the gris for tomorrow’s marketing strategy with simple social gatherings turning into focus groups. Man may be a social animal, but his consciousness is being increasingly swamped by a bureaucracy aimed at recording an evaluating his every breath. If MetLife is an insurance company than metalife is condition in which humanity is buried by its own gift of self-reflexive consciousness.

Max Weber’s Enchantment

In a review of Max Weber’s Collected Methodological Writings in the TLS (“The English Weber," 9/28/12. W.C. Runciman makes the following statement about the brilliant German sociologist and author of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “to Weber, a physicist and a philologist are engaged in the same common enterprise…He would be totally dismissive of C.P. Snow’s ignorant and prejudiced version of ‘two cultures.’ The contrast that he draws is between wissenschaftlich work (Arbeit), which is harnessed…to the cause of progress (Fortschritt) and artistic (Kunstlich) achievement which is timeless.”  Besides writing about the relation between religion and economics, Weber was also interested in the concept of “disenchantment,” whereby both science and humanities had to bear the weight of scientism on their shoulders. While C.P. Snow inveighed against the separations of the two cultures, Runciman’s understanding makes it clear that both were overshadowed by the dominance of materialistic thinking. Despite the advent of sociometrics, concerns with the broader issues were what has continued to make Weber a cynosure in the field of sociology and thinking in general. Weber coined the term “routinization of charisma” to describe the difference between a sect and a church. He inspired a larger movement in sociology championed also by Ferdinand Tonnies in Community and Society and George Simmel in such works as  The Metropolis and Mental Life and The Philosophy of Money-- early giants who didn’t depend on statistics to make their points and who weren’t afraid to take on larger and sometimes unverifiable issues of cosmopolitanism, human character, isolation and ultimately the ways in which individuals create meaning.