Materialism and Methodology
There are few figures as important as Max Weber in the development of twentieth-century social science. While Weber is not often discussed in the context of furthering a materialist understanding of the world he is actually a very important figure in its development. As I have suggested elsewhere,[1] Weber’s assertion regarding the role and subjective components of human values was significant in the development of twentieth-century philosophy and social science methodology. It also conveys one piece of the relativism that I argue is a central component of materialist philosophy.
It is important to note that Weber always asserted that social science should be made as scientific as possible and should always rely on empirical reference points as it establishes causal hypotheses about the developments in history. He was not interested in metaphysical explanations of cultural and historical change, and openly challenges his readers to leave the religiosity of the past behind.[2]
To Weber, the social scientist is interested in micro-causality. The investigator wants to know what is causally significant for the occurrence of particular events in history. This means that he rejected both dialectical and historicist methodologies as overly vague and general. Instead Weber offers his own system, interpretive sociology. Interpretive sociology seeks specific answers to specific questions of historical change. He rejects the idea that there are overarching laws of historical development. He sees such claims as heuristic devices with little value as social science.
Weber’s methodological system operationalizes and magnifies some of the materialist elements found in the Kantian system. It expands the suspicions of metaphysis outlined in The Critique of Pure Reason and eliminates metaphysics from the discussion of causality. It transforms the Kantian notion of infinite causal threads in history and addresses them as an empirical problem to be addressed by the social sciences. Finally, Weber clearly saw himself and the method he created as constituting a break with the past. One must look forward and that is only accomplished with a materialist understanding of the world.
Does this make Weber the perfect materialist? Such a claim cannot be made. The neo-Kantian system that Weber develops is still heavily influenced by the Kantian ontology. It has static, essentialist elements regarding the structure and content of human subjectivity. It also fails to fully relativize the system of knowledge it relies on for its constructions. Nevertheless, Weber’s significance in moving social inquiry in a materialist direction is undeniable.
A good place to start developing Weber’s position is to examine his critique of Marx. Weber’s criticism of Marx is important for several reasons. First, some of Weber’s points are important on their merits. There are legitimate questions surrounding the extent of Marx’s break with Hegelian historicism and the teleology of history. Are the claims to “economic determinism” warranted? Is there a reformulation that can take place to quell the concerns?
Another reason that the contrast between Marx and Weber is important is that it provides a contrast between two fundamentally different methods, both of which seek to be as materialistic as they see possible. Can Weber somehow overcome the shortcomings in Marx’s materialism and vice versa? Both methods were immensely important in the twentieth century and seen as, largely, mutually exclusive.
Finally, it is important to note some of Weber’s criticisms of Marx because Weber identifies problems with which some of those sympathetic to the Marxian system will have to address. Louis Althusser, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacque Derrida all deal in some way with the issues that are originally raised by Weber, even though they are all sympathetic to Marx’s project. This is particularly true with regard to the issues of class, economic reductionism, and the dialectic as a description of historical change. (These issues will be addressed in a later chapter.)
Max Weber’s critique of Karl Marx’s methodology proceeds from a simple assumption. Even though Marx was critical of Hegelian idealism, Marx was still very much a Hegelian in his method. This is the essence of Weber’s methodological critique of Marx. To put it simply, Weber saw Marx as someone who put the Hegelian ontology “right side up,” but nevertheless maintained the basic historicist methodology. Therefore, while Marx avoids the problems of the Hegelian universal subject, to Weber Marx is still engaging a basic historicist methodology.
Weber concluded that Hegel and Marx take as their point of departure the goal of defining general laws which govern historic change. This takes place using a teleological conception of history. Knowing the end of the historic process, and the causal determinants operating within human history, provides a seemingly powerful method for social analysis. A critique of the existing social order can proceed outside of any normative world view because the law of historic causality is combined with a historically accurate, non-subjective, “end” of social development. Weber questions the epistemological status of this method of historical and social analysis.
Weber also criticized the Hegelian tradition for trying to close the gap between concepts and reality by simply equating concepts with reality.[3] Within historicism, the concept is given a metaphysical status.[4] Weber was critical of the historicist Wilhelm Roscher precisely on this issue. Roscher’s tendency was to treat a concept like “Volk” as a biologic entity and grant it properties such as evolution.[5] Weber was opposed to this position on the status of concepts, regarding them as the constructions of investigators.
According to Weber the result of the historicist’s methodological perspective is that the concept, which is to be used as a tool in social research, has acquired the property of causality. The historicists then proceeds to search for the concepts that, in causal terms, can reproduce reality.[6] This requires that the final, all-inclusive, concept be discovered. Weber asserted that the historicists then propose to deduce reality from the generalized concept that they have created.[7] Weber argued that this is the method that Marx used in his analysis of history.
In Marxism, as in Hegelianism, the critique still emanates deductively from the teleology. Thus, Weber saw his criticism of historicism, that it tries to deduce reality from final abstract laws,[8] as also applicable to Marx’s analysis. Once the abstract law is found, which to Marx was the tendency toward the dissolution of all barriers to humanity’s productive potential, then the critique of existing social order takes place in relation to that abstract teleology. According to the Weberian perspective, the Marxist methodology tries to explain reality from this theoretical abstraction.
To Weber, no final abstract law has complete explanatory power. A concrete situation in history can never be deduced from abstract laws.[9] Laws and concepts only have heuristic value in historical analysis.[10]
From Weber’s point of view there are two modes of analysis taking place simultaneously within the Marxian discussion of history. First of all, there is a “law” of historic development presented as a fact in the evolution of the human species. History has progressed in a specific direction. History moves toward the ever-increasing productivity of labor, as the mode of production becomes more organized and mechanized. Using concrete historical examples, Marx showed how the production process breaks down all barriers to its increased development. Eventually, capitalism will become a hindrance to this historical movement. It will fall as changes in the mode of production necessitate changes in the relations of production.
In Marx’s analysis, however, there is a second and equally forceful argument regarding the “appropriateness” of capitalism for a truly human existence. Capitalism oppresses the majority of the population. It forces workers into wage slavery, denying them their truly creative powers and their freedom. To Weber’s neo-Kantian world view, the issue of capitalism’s “appropriateness” involves a value commitment.
From Weber’s methodological perspective, Marx intertwines these two types of analysis.
Marx simultaneously presents us with a set of historical facts about the development of the means of production and a value judgment about the appropriateness of capitalism for a truly human existence. The Weberian methodology raises questions about the relationship between these two spheres of analysis. What, specifically, is the relationship between the statement of historical fact and the value positions espoused in Marx’s writings? This relationship is fundamental to the distinction between the methodologies of Marx and Weber. Weber saw Marx as selectively interpreting history from a specific point of view. To Weber, only human beings can hold values, not history. History does not contain a teleology, but has a teleology imposed on it by individuals who interpret historical events.
The enterprise Marx undertook was an interpretation of selected historical facts based on his own values. Historical events were selected and placed into a conceptual framework of study because they reinforced the thesis that changes in the mode of production had a direct causal link to the social and political transformations that societies undergo.
Thus, to Weber, Marx selected historical events for their consistency with his own world view. To Weber, this confuses the relationship between facts and values. Historical facts can never yield values. Values are taken into study by the individual involved in historical research. Thus to Weber, Marx’s teleology is nothing more than an exposition of Marx’s own value system and world view and does not constitute the status of historical fact. Marx’s analysis constitutes an objectification of his own subjective value position through the selected interpretation of history.
For that reason, Weber claimed that Marx was constructing a model for social and historical analysis, not generating iron-clad laws of historical development. Weber called these models “ideal-types,” or pure conceptual schemes for the analysis of historical trends and social phenomena. An ideal-type is a tool for analysis, a framework for the orientation of empirical inquiry. It cannot produce “laws” as its outcome. Thus, claimed Weber, the “laws of history” asserted by Marx are actually ideal types.[11]
An ideal type is a conceptual pattern imposed on events by an investigator in order to promote understanding.[12]
An ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many . . . concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.[13]
In itself, an ideal type does not represent reality, but offers only one possible way of interpreting reality. When Marx claims that “empirical observation must bring out the connection between the social and political structure and the mode of production,”[14] he is expressing a commitment to one particular causal thread between human beings and society.
Weber admits that this one-sided accentuation of reality is precisely how social science proceeds. It cannot be otherwise. Human beings live inside an infinitely rich web of causality. They must choose among all the possible stimuli in order to make sense of it. However, the complete focus on economic causes is too narrow for Weber’s conception of social explanation. The explanation of anything by purely economic causes, said Weber, is never exhaustive, even in economics.[15]
If Marx abandoned the concern for a “law” of historic development and its teleology, and if the materialist conception of history can be expressed as an ideal-typical interpretation of historical events, then Marxism contains its element of truth within the Weberian scheme. However, this truth stems from the fact that Marx imposed his value structure onto the analysis, not because history somehow conveyed a universal ethical standard that involves the liberation of the working class.
The commitment to a value determines the interest and the path of any investigation. This is recognized by Weber as a process which occurs in social scientific analysis. What is important to investigate is determined by the values of the investigator.[16] To Weber, this is precisely the activity in which Marx was engaged in his analysis of history.
Weber tried to make social science as materialistic as possible. However, this had to be accomplished within the confines of the Kantian epistemology under which he worked. As Weber put it, “the fundamental ideas of modern epistemology . . . ultimately derive from Kant . . . ”[17] In the Kantian system, the investigator confronts an external reality, regardless of whether that reality is strictly physical or social, as an object foreign and separate from itself.
It is impossible to understand the Weberian model without appreciating its legacy from Kant. Kant describes material reality as part of an infinitely rich causal web. The mind is not infinite in its capacities, nor in its abilities to convey the infinite through communications. For Kant, this asserts that we only can know the “appearances” of objects, not their essence. For Weber, this means that in the social world the best we can hope for is “understanding” (Verstehen) of the social causality around us. Universal laws of history are beyond the scope of human inquiry.
The Kantian system is built on the notion of a distinction between the empirical world and the realm of intelligibility.[18] Human beings come to know the empirical world through the interaction of the senses with the activities of the mind. However, the mind is restricted in its capacity to grasp empirical reality due to the limited nature of the mechanisms employed. The five senses coupled with the categories of experience found in the mind can never convey the complexity of any object’s true nature. We, therefore, never know an objective reality, only the appearance of reality.[19]
If this is true of the sense impressions left from contact with a concrete physical reality, the problem is compounded when Weber applies these ideas to social reality. Every event in the social world also has a complex nature which the human mind is incapable of grasping in its entirety. “ . . . [A] description of even the smallest slice of reality can never be exhaustive. . . ”[20] With the parameters of social knowledge thus restricted, the problem becomes one of defining a method that will make any aspect of the social world intelligible.
Weber’s acceptance of the Kantian dualism shaped the methodological strategy employed in the study of social reality. The mind may have material premises, but the activities of the mind are unique to it realm. The reasoning mind confronts reality as an object alien to itself. In the study of society, as in the study of physical objects, events are never understood in their entirety. The mind is not capable of grasping the totality of history. Therefore, the social world requires interpretation.
Weber summed up the Kantian approach to epistemology as follows: “Kant took for his point of departure the presupposition: ‘Scientific proof exists and it is valid,’ and then asked, ‘Under which presuppositions of thought is truth possible and meaningful?’”[21] Of Weber, a similar statement regarding social scientific knowledge can be offered. Weber asked, “Given the essential separation of intellect and matter, and given the inherent limitations of the mind to grasp the material and social events of external experience in their entirety, what type of knowledge is possible?”
To Kant knowledge of the physical world was limited by the necessary interaction of subject and object. Sensation must be turned into cognition. To Weber, knowledge of the social environment is of a limited nature as well. His conclusion is simple. We never have a complete explanation of any historical or cultural phenomenon given the infinite causal complexity of each and every event in the world.
Weber responds to this condition by asserting that all social events require human interpretation. The actual occurrence of an event in history can be objectively stated. The complex of causes leading to the event requires that significant causal factors be identified within the infinite richness of the world. However, the assertion of significance has a subjective component. In fact, according to Weber, even the selection of a subject for historical study has a subjective element, as it must be considered important or meaningful to the investigator engaged in the study.
Weber sought to define a methodology that would make the social sciences as scientific as possible, but Weber was not a positivist. He states in The Methodology of the Social Sciences that value judgments are not the subject of causal analysis.[22] However, the interaction of facts and values in the human personality cannot be fully separated from the conduct of social research. What is to be studied, and the indicators of that study, engages the subjective, evaluative ideas of the investigator.[23] Values influence the topic of study and the indicators to be used in the analysis of causality. This is particularly true in the construction of the analytic tools of study, the ideal-type. It also leads Weber to conclusions about the subjective nature of social science validity.
What Weber, and the other neo-Kantians, suggested is that the mind, with its limited capacities, must confront the social environment as an object in the process of seeking to make it intelligible. This is the role played by the ideal-type. The ideal-type is a mental construct, a product of human intuition and cognition. It should never be mistaken for reality itself.[24] Borrowing the notion from Johann Gottfried Herder, Weber’s ideal type is an intellectually pure concept created by an investigator to which empirical reality can be compared.[25] With conceptual purity, any deviation from the logically expected condition can be explained with reference to material circumstances of history.[26]
The ideal-type is particularly useful in the explanation of behavior carried out by groups of individuals. To Weber, concept such as “capitalism” and “bureaucracy” are ideal-types because these terms represent specific sets of substantive conditions and patterns of behavior but cannot be found in pure form in our social reality. Capitalism and bureaucracy are not tangible objects, but represent a collection of activities carried out by discrete individual actors. Deviations from behavior predicted by the model can be the basis for investigation.
However, the method of investigation cannot be carried out in the same way as in the natural sciences. Because social science relies so much on subjective factors and interpretation on the part of the investigator, the criteria for causal sufficiency differs greatly. In the natural sciences matters of causality can be measured and tested. In the realm of social and historical explanation, “[t]he historian’s sense of the situation, his intuition uncover[s] causal interconnections. . . . The contrast with the natural sciences consists indeed precisely in the fact that the historian deals with the explanation of events and personalities which are ‘interpreted’ and ‘understood’ by direct analogy with our own intellectual, spiritual and psychological constitutions.”[27] Causal hypotheses in the social sciences must conform with a common sense notion of causal sufficiency.[28]
What is striking about Weber’s analysis is where he goes next. The validity of the historian’s analysis is actually measured both socially and empirically. The analysis must conform to and engage with the empirical facts of history. Weber makes it very clear that the empirical facts are subject to verification as they must conform to the events of the historical record. However, the facts are also selected and organized by the investigator. Therefore, history is always an interpretation. That means that in the study of historical and cultural phenomena there is also participation from the engaged reader. “In the historical treatise it is . . . the suggestive vividness of its account report which allows the reader to ‘empathize’ with what has been depicted in the same way as that in which it is experienced and concretely grasped by the historian’s own intuition . . . ”[29] The historical must engage with the reader in order to complete the circle, the transmission of historical interpretation to another human being. For this reason, the great historians must have intuitive and artistic “gifts” in order to convey historical understanding. Historians who cannot connect with their readers will not have sway in the telling of history.
As is the case with the notion of charismatic domination, the connection between the actor and the follower is crucial. The telling of history is a social activity. It must replicate notions of causality and significance that are more widely shared in order to be considered historically valid.
In general, Weber has not separated himself from the transcendental elements of Kantian rationalism. Weber sees our reality as part of an infinitely complex causal web which must be interpreted by the finite beings seeking to make sense of it. The mind possesses creativity and intuition in constructing its interpretations.
But the activity of constructing knowledge is strictly carried out by investigators interpreting the historical data. There is no assertion of a law of history or a teleological undercurrent to human action. What must be interpreted is the material nature of causality as it relates to human social and cultural activity. In that sense, Weber has created a very human-centric method for the study of human activity, even as he places limits on the scope and the means of knowledge construction.
Social science is the interpretive study of individuals in a social context. Social actions are defined as those actions which are affected by the existence and behavior of others.[30] But as with the creative process of intuition, only individuals have experiences and motives. Only individuals perform actions. Social science finds it useful to employ collective concepts in explaining action, but “collectivities must be treated as solely the resultants and modes of organization of the particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action.”[31]
Weber’s goal in social scientific research is, therefore, to understand the subjectively meaningful motives and goals of individuals acting in a social context. “Laws” of historic and social change can never convey the uniqueness of subjective meaning, nor the richness of historic events. “Laws” are not the goals of Weber’s sociology, as they must be so general in character that they cannot contain significant content.[32] The complexity of an historical event is never conveyed by the search for regularity, but only in the explanation of its unique character.
There is another aspect to this rejection of “laws” as the goals of Weber’s analysis. The search for laws in the explanation of human behavior implies that there exists an objective level at which analysis can occur outside of a subjective orientation on the part of the investigator and the subject. Weber rejects this idea.
The search for some objective totality is outside the parameters of human understanding. The individual is not able to grasp the infinite complexity of social and historic reality. Subjective interpretation is therefore necessary. The subjectivity of the human experience is clearly portrayed in Weber’s description of culture. “Culture is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.”[33] There is no objective meaning in history. History is significant only to the extent that people consider it so. All history and culture is meaningful only because human beings consider it to be so.
What process occurs in order for the individual to have any objective knowledge of culture from the subjective participation in experience? It should already be clear that the idea of “objective knowledge” has a very qualified meaning in Weber’s work. Objective knowledge is not to be equated with “total” or “perfect” knowledge in any way.
If the mind constructs images of reality out of the infinite complexity of experience in order to orient the individual to the empirical world, then that process is objective in the sense that subjective sensation has been processed, sorted, and categorized as meaningful experience by the mind. Following the Kantian epistemology, experience must be objectified before it can be turned into knowledge. Sensation must be mediated, turned into a cognition. It is different from raw sensation. Knowledge of things and events is knowledge that has gone through the process of reflection.
Conceptual knowledge [gedankliche Erkenntnis], even of one’s own experience, is nowhere and never literally “repeated experience”: of a simple “photograph” of what was experienced: the “experience” when it is made into an “object” acquires perspective and interrelationships which were not “known” in the experience itself.[34]
All experience must be mediated, processed by the mind, before it can be treated as an object of knowledge. This applies whether we are talking about our own experience or that of someone else. The process of turning subjective experience into objective reflection characterizes the acquisition of all knowledge, both in the natural and the social environment. The ideas formed in later reflection of one’s own past action are no different in this respect from the ideas concerning natural events in the external world.[35]
It is clear in Weber’s discussion of cognition the figure of Kant looms in the background. This model of knowledge construction makes sense only if one first accepts the Kantian notion that experience is processed by the “categories” as a means to turn simple sensation into knowledge. Kant also plays a role in Weber’s discussion of the “infinite complexity” of natural and social reality. Such a position is only possible if one accepts the limits of human understanding outlined by the Kantian tradition.
However, this is not to suggest that there are not strong materialist elements in the Weberian methodology. Even with a relatively strong ontological position that stems from Kant, Weber makes it clear that it is the action of concrete individuals that make history. They seek to understand their environment and react to the forces of change within that environment. Weber is interested in what motivates those individuals to action. He leaves open what may be causally significant as he asserts it may change from epoch to epoch. He rejects any teleological conceptions of historical change and the collapsing of causality into some form of determinism.
There are no supernatural causes for historical change, except any that may exist within the subjective beliefs and psychological dispositions of the actors. Therefore, what people believe is important in explaining how people behave. These beliefs may take the form of ideological positions, religious attitudes, or subjectively held values. Any one of these, or others, may direct the action of human beings.
There is also one other component of Weber’s materialism that is important to note. Consistent with the model of materialism outlined in chapter 1, the subjective character of beliefs and values severs the link between human behavior, ethics, and some conception of transcendent, universal, natural law. In contrast to the Kantian system, Weber rejects the transcendental character of ethics. It is to that topic the discussion will now turn.
Weber’s analysis of the role of values is based on a clear distinction between “facts” and “values” in all forms of communication. Weber asserted that there is a logical distinction between statements that describe what “is” and those statements which judge the “appropriateness” of a given state of affairs.[36] Value judgments are to be understood as the “ . . . practical evaluations of the unsatisfactory or satisfactory character of phenomena subject to our influence.”[37]
Values have a pivotal role in orienting the individual to the environment. Creative intuition is the mind’s mechanism to confront and make sense out of the experience of the environment. But, what is it that causes the organism to seek orientation in some areas and not in others? We seek orientation in areas of life that we consider important. Values assist in sorting through the complexity of experience itself because “[l]ife with its irrational reality and its store of possible meanings is inexhaustible.”[38] Therefore, value commitments are an essential part of the personality. They assist in orienting the individual to the environment. “The light which emanates from those highest evaluative ideas always falls on an ever changing finite segment of the vast chaotic stream of events, which flows away through time.”[39] Values provide a form of continuity in a world of inexhaustible sensation.
Just as the individual finds personal meaning through the adherence to values, so the social sciences are made “significant” in relation to the values that give a study its meaning. Weber was never to claim that values could be removed from social research. Quite the contrary is actually the case.
In the empirical social sciences, . . . the possibility of meaningful knowledge . . . is bound up with the unremitting application of viewpoints . . . [which] are oriented on the basis of evaluative ideas . . . but their validity cannot be deduced from empirical data as such.[40]
Values cannot be eliminated from social research because the motivation of the investigator has its origins in his or her value positions. Our desire to confront certain aspects of our experience through social science is explained by what we consider valuable. It needs to be added here that Weber is not suggesting that social science is strictly an arena for competing value positions. Social science is not the assertion of mere opinion. The task of social science is the assertion of hypotheses that can be empirically demonstrated, but have their significance bound to the value positions of the investigator.
“Importance,” “significance,” and “meaning” result from value commitments. Weber wants to make social science as value-free as possible, but he recognizes that the influence of values in social research cannot be completely eliminated. Therefore, much of the discussion of values is to show the ways in which values enter the process of social scientific investigation. Given Weber’s acceptance of an infinitely complex external reality, the influence of values in social research is a necessary condition for confining the domain of discourse.
The individual is the repository of values. Although values may be shared by individuals in a collective setting, only the material human being can possess and orient behavior according to them. For this reason, Weber claimed that social action must always be explained as the action of individuals.
[T]he subjective interpretation of action . . . must be treated as “solely” the resultant . . . of particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action. . . . [T]here is no such thing as a collective personality which “acts.”[41]
This claim was not a matter of convenience for social explanation. It is, rather, an ontological assertion about the character of the individual and the nature of meaningful action. Only organic life has the prerequisites for experience and the ability to reflect upon it. Only human beings can acquire and act according to values.
If values are the results of a need for ethical orientation, out of what process does the content of value commitments emerge? Weber gave a very clear answer: “the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.”[42] The reason for the struggle of value position is also clearly enunciated by Weber. There is no objective way to verify and validate value positions. It can certainly not be achieved through the social sciences. The validity of any value position cannot be demonstrated by science. “It can never be the task of an empirical science to provide binding norms and ideals . . . ”[43] “ . . . [T]o judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith.”[44] Weber suggested that we all have some “meta-empirical” faith in the validity of our ultimate and final values.[45]
With no objective criteria for assessing the appropriateness of any value position the individual is left to formulate his or her own attitude toward the world. Meaning and significance cannot be found transcendentally, nor can an “appropriate” attitude be found in relation to history. Values are subjectively held and formed in relation to the attitudes one encounters in society and culture.
Therefore, every individual’s value position may be different. The result is tension and conflict. “Every meaningful value judgement about someone else’s aspirations must be . . . a struggle against another’s ideals from the standpoint of one’s own.”[46] Life is an unceasing struggle of value positions.
Conflict cannot be excluded from social life. One can change its means, its objects, even its fundamental direction and its bearers, but it cannot be eliminated . . . It is always present.[47]
Or, as Weber put it in the essay, “The Logic of the Cultural Sciences:”
[S]o long as life remains immanent and is interpreted in its own terms, it knows only of an unceasing struggle of these gods with one another. Or speaking directly, the ultimate possible attitudes toward life are irreconcilable, and hence their struggle can never be brought to a final conclusion.[48]
Life is immanent and interpreted in its own terms. There is no external objective position from which norms and values can be constructed. There is only the materiality of existence, the psychological dispositions of the participants, and the desire to understand where we have come from and where we are going.
The subjective nature of values and their importance to human life led Weber to another conclusion. “[I]t is necessary to make a decisive choice” among these competing value positions.[49] Choosing among competing value alternatives defines the personality. The validity of values themselves comes from the fact that the personality can chose to organize its life around them.[50] For Weber, this is part of the character of life itself, and a component of life that bestows meaning and significance on the individual.[51]
It is often argued that Weber has a “great man” theory of historical change. This is largely true. However, there is no necessary tension between this view and a material understanding of reality. If we accept that human beings are material creatures, then the assertion that they are the source of historical transformation does not commit an offense against a materialist world-view. Even with Weber’s hard ontology, the materiality of change remains. In fact, if one accepts Weber’s general epistemological stance, there is a very strong commitment to the material explanations of historical change.
In The Social Psychology of World Religions, Weber makes the following statement, “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern men’s conduct.”[52] Here Weber is trying to expand the idea of what constitutes the domain of human motivations beyond pure economic calculation. To Weber, the commitments of individuals to spiritual and religious ideals during the Middle Ages has to be taken into account in order to understand what is causally sufficient during that period. In the modern age, one would need to address the commitment to the nation-state, modern culture, and the scientific world-view in order to make sense of historical change. These patterns of belief constitute the cultural background for the formation of evaluative ideas at any point in history.
In trying to broaden the array of value commitments that motivate people to action, Weber is trying to both broaden the potentials for empirical study and convey something about the human personality. What motivates human beings to action may change in the course of history. In contrast to Marx, economic explanations may not, in all cases, be the decisive elements in explaining social change.[53]
If human beings are seen as being motivated by values, in addition to material interest, there is a much broader array of potential drives for human behavior. Further, if values are not objectively determined by history but are the result of cultural norms and social conditions in which they are formed, then there are material premises to the formation of these values in the real conditions of social existence. Values need not be treated as fully autonomous choices of free will, but neither do they need to be treated as fully determined by an objective process in history. For example, religiosity or patriotism may be motivators to action just as much of the economic factors in history.
The materiality of this claim is in the fact that the individual is the repository of these commitments. Only individuals think, feel, and act, even though they can create “collective action” through the coordination of their shared interests. To Weber, then, it seems natural that the carrier of historical change remains the individual.
History has no intrinsic values. It contains no teleology, no goal or objective. It can pronounce no values, and can assert no inevitable path. “History” is only the term that human beings assign to their interpretive understanding of the events that have brought them to their present condition. Only human beings have the ability to have a feeling or assessment of that condition.
The need for historical transformation occurs when human beings have come to an assessment that the current set of conditions is insufficient to satisfy their ideal or material interests. At this point the conditions for social transformation present themselves. However, this can be carried out only by the actions of discrete individuals. Here the notion of charisma is important to Weber’s understanding of change.
“In this purely empirical and value-free sense charisma is indeed the specifically creative revolutionary force of history.”[54] Charisma is a “special gift of body and mind” that is perceived in an individual by their followers.[55] Charismatic leaders emerge in times of social distress. Followers are compelled to search for a solution to the distress in their historical epoch. Charismatic figures provide a new orientation, or prophesy, around which the followers can organize their actions. This new prophesy’s value is that it provides a conceptual reorientation for the people to their social, political, or environmental conditions.
Revolutionary change has its source in the perceptions of concrete human beings in the world. These perceptions are going to be shaped by a multitude of factors owing to the differing values and material interests of society’s members. But for Weber, when it comes to social action, only individuals can move individuals in a new direction. The new rational orientation is a product of human creativity coupled with the desire for a new direction among a collection of individual followers.
There are two elements of Weber’s work on political power that are worth noting in relation to materialism. The first is the way in which Weber seeks to study power and the workings of what can generally be called “politics.” The second concerns the content of Weber’s statements about politics. Weber can be characterized as a “realist” when it comes to the definition of power and its role inside society. Further, as power is directly connected to what motivates people to action, its materiality cannot be denied.
Much has already been stated about Weber’s method, but a few additional observations regarding its material premises are worth noting. In the study of political power Weber looks for material reference points. In seeking to explain migration patterns in West Prussia Weber engages data on tax yields from the land, data on social stratification, population density, religious and national affiliations, as well as a host of other demographic and economic data.[56] The point here is simply that even if one does not accept the hard ontology that is part of Weber’s personal orientation, the methodology is empirically focused to such a degree that the ontological position does not have a major impact on the method of social research. For example, one of Weber’s conclusions in the study of West Prussia is that the pursuit of freedom is a motivator to migration, but even this is not treated as an abstraction. Freedom is treated as the ability to create a set of conditions to improve the living standards for people engaged in migratory activity.[57]
Regarding the definition of political power, Weber gives a statement that speaks to the material elements of power. Power is the ability for someone to carry out their will despite resistance.[58] When it comes to the state’s relationship with power, Weber asserted that the state is founded on power, and has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory.[59]
But politics is not asserted to have any historical dynamics driving it in a particular direction. Instead, power is seen as a manifestation of political life. The direction of collective action results from the struggles among competing material and ideal interests. The tensions and struggles are everywhere in the political and social environment. The logic of capitalism is in a state of tension with the sublime values of brotherliness contained in religion.[60] The rise of bureaucracy conflicts with the worth of the individual in society.[61] Money and wealth are part of a political dynamic that can undermine democratic practice and can shape the outcome of political competitions.[62] Even the scientific method creates the conditions of normlessness and social anomie. In discussing the loss of purpose in modern scientific culture, Weber states that “culture’s every step forward seems condemned to lead to an ever more devastating senselessness.”[63] All of these examples convey the complex cross-currents in modern culture.
The closest Weber comes to some conclusions about the future of political life come in his observations about the future of individualism in a formally rational, bureaucratized society. These same discussions take place at both the end of the Protestant Ethic and Economy and Society. However, to Weber these are empirically based observations that relate to research that Max carried out with his brother, Alfred, going back to the late nineteenth century.
For Weber, these and the myriad of other observations about the workings of society, politics, and history have their basis in observable, empirical phenomena. Does that mean that every hypothesis that emerges from this process of analysis will be complete and correct? Such a position is rejected by Weber. His claim is simply that as an investigator he must look to the empirical evidence and make a plausible case for what he sees as a trend based on the selective interpretation of the historical facts. This is the basic way all social inquiry is conducted. There will be other, competing, interpretations. Such is the nature of all investigations into the actions found in our social environment.
To assess Weber’s contribution to materialism a distinction must be made between his view of science and his view of social science. Science, to Weber, is the study of regularities among the non-animate objects of physical reality. Science seeks to create hypotheses that explain the regularity of the patterns found among those physical objects. The subject of social science is fundamentally different. Its domain is the study of beings that are simultaneously both subject and object. Not only does Weber’s methodology account for this distinction, it seeks to do so in a very self-conscious way.
Weber’s methodological system is complex and powerful. It occupies a kind of middle ground between phenomenology and empiricism. It manages to account for the development of consciousness as a psychological disposition toward the external environment, and still stress the fundamental role of empirical phenomena in constructing causal and non-causal relationships in social reality.
Key to understanding the empirical reference points is the Kantian idea that our experiences are always mediated, in the sense that our mind turns direct experience into cognitions. In this sense, experience may be a direct cause of human action, like moving out of the way of a rolling boulder, or a person putting up an umbrella in a rain storm. However, as Weber makes clear, these are not social actions. Social actions are oriented toward the behavior of other human beings.
Thus, when one considers social action it must always be in relation to the material and ideal interests maintained by human beings. As with Marx, this means that ideas can be the motivators to actions as they represent a subjectively held understanding about social reality and the way it functions. However, Weber broadens the field of what may be causally significant in explaining historical change.
Further, rather than fixing the factors that are relevant to historical change, as is the case with Marx, Weber relativizes the important factors initiating historical transformation. In each age and in each culture the factors that are causally significant may change. This makes the study of social reality far more complex, requiring investigators to explore the infinite richness of causal connections for each historical or cultural event they seek to study. Such a position clearly moves Weber in the direction of epistemological relativism and furthers his materialist credentials. Furthering those credentials is Weber’s insistence that the explanations of social reality are always hypothetical and subject to multiple interpretations. Scientific syntax produces only hypotheses, whether in the physical or the social realm. Therefore, there can be no universal truth. This is the same for physical and social science, although, Weber does not address the full relativity of science.
The discussion of ethics and values is where relativism fully emerges. The individual personality makes its mark in the world by taking a value position toward that world. These values are shaped by the social experiences that one has in the formation of those values. Science cannot tell us what values to hold. They are subjective commitments that reflect the historical, social, and cultural influences in which an individual finds themselves in the process of their growth and development.
This position constitutes one of Weber’s major breaks with Kant. The Kantian ethics relies on an assumption of free will as a universal human faculty and the formation of natural law principles formulated on that assumption. Weber clearly rejects that position. In a section of Economy and Society focused on the topic of natural law, Weber gives a definition, a survey of the history of its use, and a description of its sociological relevance. Discussions of natural law are relevant from a sociological standpoint only to the extent to which they give rise to “practical consequences.” That is, “[T]hey become sociologically relevant only when practical legal life is materially affected by the conviction of the particular ‘legitimacy’ of certain legal maxims . . . ”[64] After noting that this idea still has impact in the United State,[65] Weber goes on to say:
While it would hardly seem possible to eradicate completely from legal practice all the latent influence of unacknowledged axioms of natural law, for a variety of reasons the axioms of natural law have been deeply discredited. . . . All metajuristic axioms in general have been subject to ever continuing disintegration and relativization. . . . The disappearance of the old natural law conceptions has destroyed all possibility of providing the law with a metaphysical dignity by virtue of its immanent qualities.[66]
Such a claim is not just about natural law. All metaphysical explanations of the world are being discredited by the march of rational, material culture. This is part of the general process of “disenchantment” that Weber discusses in “Science as a Vocation.” Metaphysical explanations of the world are being replaced with a materialist understanding of the world. Such a condition reflects the current world culture.
This leaves people with both a problem and a choice. Ancient metaphysics lacks the validity of empirical discourse. However, modern science cannot answer the question of how we should live. Therefore, each has to make a choice as to what is god and what is devil in our daily lives.[67]
Clearly such a broad array of societal factors in the formation of value commitments would include the reward structures in the political system as well as the creation of complex systems of programming and propaganda that exist within the nation-state system, as well as the conditions of capitalist development. Weber does not give an extensive elaboration of all those mechanisms. Nevertheless, he clearly shows sensitivity to the materiality of the process.
In this regard, Weber also demonstrates a clear position on the materiality of power. Weber is not an anarchist. He believes that power can be converted into authority through a logic of legitimation. The legitimacy of that power resides in the belief among the followers that their interests are served by following its directives. This is the case for all the legitimating mechanisms of power that Weber mentions: charismatic, traditional, or rational-legal.
From the perspective of politics, this means that there is also relativity introduced into the realm of power and politics. There is no simple linear notion of political progress in Weber. In contrast to Kant, constitutions do not simply beget better constitutions through the span of time. Change can be initiated from an infinite array of causal factors. The beliefs of the population may be transformed and a different mix of legitimating mechanisms may emerge. There is no final teleology reached with constitutional democracy. Weber admits to a variety of possibilities for the future.
But the question how of far Weber separates himself from Kant remains an issue. Weber is clearly influenced by the Kantian epistemology. What about Kant’s ontology? Weber treats the content of consciousness as being altered by historical conditions but not the fundamental makeup of human nature. He still has a static view of human nature, even while acknowledging the flux of historical dynamics. The social world is dominated by the search for individual freedom. Self-transcendence comes through creative intuition and personal commitments. One would have to consider this “hard ontology” that contains elements that are ahistorical in nature.
Are these assumptions metaphysical in nature? It is undeniable that there are metaphysical elements here. Here Max Weber and Jacques Derrida agree, albeit for slightly different reasons. For Derrida, it is impossible to get all the metaphysics out of our discourse. For Weber, assumptions cannot be escaped. Even science itself rests on presuppositions and norms, the worth of which cannot be demonstrated by science.[68]
Weber is interested in creating a method of social research that is as materialistic and as objective as possible. To that end, he employs empirical methods but is, himself, not an empiricist. To Weber, pure empiricism is too unselfconscious of its own limitations. Empiricism seeks to solidify its objectivity, hence its materiality, with reference only to that which is objectively verifiable through the senses. Empiricism focuses on behavior as the material element of analysis. It seeks to identify trends and create causal hypotheses that provide the ability to predict and control future events based on that data.
In this sense, the use of empirical methods is not inconsistent with Weber’s general methodological strategy. But there are two major differences. Within the Weberian model, empiricism seems unconcerned about the limitations of objectivity. Weber went to great lengths to explain these limitations. Empiricism’s focus on observed behavior does not mitigate the subjective nature of the investigator’s interest and values in establishing the study. Further, it does not make self-conscious the subjective nature of indicators for any explanation of causality. Empiricism, in its pure form, simply ignores the way in which objectivity is tainted by historical and contextual biases. For Weber, social research cannot be collapsed into pure positivism or empiricism because of the influence of personal values or historically driven interests in the conduct of social research.
The other major difference concerns the goal of engaging in social research itself. Through the study of behavior, empiricism seeks to have a causal explanation of events. This can assist in the future prediction of events and, possibly, the control of outcomes. While Weber is also concerned with causality, his objective is different. Weber is interested in “understanding.” This means that while he is interested in the causal sequences that explain the events of social and historical reality, he is also interested in what makes the event “subjectively meaningful.” Weber wants to know not only what happened and why it happened, but his methodology is also interested in explaining why people care about the events in question. What is it that makes the event meaningful for both the participant and the observer?
Therefore, Weber’s method makes both the participant and the observers subjects of inquiry, with both having subjectively meaningful engagement in the conduct of inquiry. There is an implicit relativity to such a claim. Both the subject and the investigator are placed within the context of history. Both are engaged in actions that have subjective meaning.
Weber’s method was an attempt to make the social science materialistic in the sense that human beings and their behavior were the central focus of research. Human beings exist. They hold beliefs that shape their behavior. Weber always focused on the material origins of those beliefs, recognizing that human beings will always act in relation to their understanding of reality. This is true for the actors and those who study the actors in history. Determining what constitutes the “real” is, itself, always the issue.
Weber conveyed the magnitude of what is implied by a materialist understanding of the world in one of his last addresses of his life, “Science as a Vocation,” presented in Munich in 1918. After stating that the gap between science and religion is “unbridgeable”[69] he goes on to speak about the materialist character of the contemporary age and the rupture it causes in modern society.
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations . . . To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him.[70]
The “disenchantment of the world” is another way of saying that religious and metaphysical systems of knowledge are being replaced with a materialist understanding of both physical reality and the social institutions in which people live.
Nevertheless, one cannot read the last few pages of “Science as a Vocation” and not come away with the feeling that Weber is personally conflicted about the results of the very society that he is helping to create. The old religion welded people into communities. Modern scientific culture cannot perform that function because each must choose his or her own god.
Something is gained, and something is lost in the modern world. However, the condition of the present is clear. A materialist understanding of the world is the condition of our current culture. Weber was interested in finding the proper methods to study it.
See Romance and Reason: Ontological and Social Sources of Alienation in the Writings of Max Weber. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006.)
See “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).
Max Weber, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics (New York: Free Press, 1975), 66-67.
Weber, Roscher and Knies, 67.
Weber, Roscher and Knies, 73-74.
Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1949), 106.
Weber, Roscher and Knies, 69-72.
Weber, Roscher and Knies, 70.
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Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 84.
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Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, 54.
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Weber The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 55.
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Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, 1949, 68.
Weber, Economy and Society, 1117.
Weber, Economy and Society, 1112.
Max Weber, “The Nation State and Economic Policy,” in Weber: Political Writing (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3-8.
Weber, “The Nation State and Economic Policy,” 8.
Weber, Economy and Society, 53.
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Weber, Economy and Society, 138.
Weber, Economy and Society, 1402.
Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber, 97.
Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in From Max Weber, 357.
Weber, Economy and Society, 866.
Weber, Economy and Society, 866.
Weber, Economy and Society, 874-875.
Weber, “Science as a Vocation” in From Max Weber, 148.
Weber, “Science as a Vocation” in From Max Weber, 143.
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