Max Weber
This problem of throwing out an ideology because it is scientifically untenable remained a constant in these years. Very important for the formation of my attitude in science was my early acquaintance with the work of Max Weber, whose volumes on the Sociology of Religion, as well as Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, came out in these years and were of course devoured by us students. The lasting influence of Max Weber can be concentrated in the following points. First, the essays of Max Weber on Marxism going back to 1904–1905 completed my rejection of Marxism as untenable in science, which had been prepared by the courses in economics and in the history of economic theory that I had taken earlier. Second, Weber’s later lectures on Wissenschaft und Politik made it clear that ideologies are so-called “values” that have to be premised when one acts but are not themselves scientific propositions. The question became acute through Weber’s distinction of Gesinnungsethik and Verantwortungsethik—ethics of intention and ethics of responsibility, as they are usually rendered in English. Weber was on the side of the ethics of responsibility—i.e., of taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s action, so that if one, for instance, establishes a government that expropriates the expropriators, he is responsible for the misery that he causes for the people expropriated. No excuse for the evil consequences of moralistic action could be found in the morality or nobility of one’s intentions. A moralistic end does not justify immorality of action.
This fundamental insight of Max Weber, even though he did not analyze its implications fully, remained a firm possession. Ideologies are not science, and ideals are no substitute for ethics. As I later found out, the distinctions of Max Weber were closely connected with the neo-Kantian methodology of the historical sciences developed by the so-called Southwest German School of Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband. In Weber’s context, it became clear that social science, if it wanted to be a science, had to be value-free. That meant for Weber that the sociologist had to explore relations of cause and effect in the social process. The values that he would use to select these materials were premises and not accessible to scientific treatment; value judgments thus had to be excluded from science. That left him with the difficulty that the premises of selection of materials for science, as well as the premises for an ethics of responsibility, had to remain in the shadow. Weber could not analyze these areas. The external symptom of this gap in his theory is the fact that in his sociology of religion, wide as it ranged, there was no treatment of early Christianity or of Classic philosophy. That is to say, the analysis of experiences that would have supplied the criteria for existential order and responsible action remained outside his field of consideration. If Weber nevertheless did not derail into some sort of relativism or anarchism, that is because, even without the conduct of such analysis, he was a staunch ethical character and in fact (as the biography by his nephew, Eduard Baumgarten, has brought out) a mystic. So he knew what was right without knowing the reasons for it. But of course, so far as science is concerned, that is a very precarious position, because students after all want to know the reasons why they should conduct themselves in a certain manner; and when the reasons—that is, the rational order of existence—are excluded from consideration, emotions are liable to carry you away into all sorts of ideological and idealistic adventures in which the ends become more fascinating than the means. Here is the gap in Weber’s work constituting the great problem with which I have dealt during the fifty years since I got acquainted with his ideas.
But, third, before going into that matter, I should stress that one important further influence of Max Weber was the range of his comparative knowledge. So far as I am concerned, Weber established once and for all that one cannot be a successful scholar in the field of social and political science unless one knows what one is talking about. And that means acquiring the comparative civilizational knowledge not only of modern civilization but also of medieval and ancient civilization, and not only of Western civilization but also of Near Eastern and Far Eastern civilizations. That also means keeping that knowledge up to date through contact with the specialist sciences in the various fields. Anybody who does not do that has no claim to call himself an empiricist and certainly is defective in his competence as a scholar in this field.