As the Hamburg headed for open sea, Max Weber wrote with amusement that New York, the “wonderfully attractive city,” now “lies behind us in the mists of a beautiful winter night, and everything is over—‘après nous le deluge,’ and perhaps ‘dans nous’ also—for yesterday night we were still in the Jewish quarter until 1:30 a.m.” He also did a quick calculation of the costs of the transatlantic passages and the time in America, a total of three months and twelve days from the Heidelberg departure to the return: about 7,000 Marks, minus the Congress of Arts and Science’s honorarium of $500, or 2,100 Marks. The travelers had logged around 5,000 miles, mostly on the railroads—180 hours in all.
What of the results? Always attentive to Max’s moods and well-being, Marianne delighted in the happiness they had experienced: “I often have the feeling as though I’m bringing a convalescent home, who has again become conscious of the intellectual capital that he has slowly, slowly pulled together.” Max did not dispute the assessment, agreeing that a year earlier such a journey would have been impossible, and commenting at one point that “stimulation and engagement of the mind without excessive intellectual exertion” can offer important benefits. At the very end of the correspondence he added a more personal and frank reflection:
Of course, it cannot be said that for me the “scientific” results of the trip can be compared with the expenses. I have won over a considerable number of interesting contributors for our periodical. I am much better prepared than previously to understand the statistics and government reports in the United States. I shall myself write some critiques of the literature on Negroes and the like, perhaps some other small things. But for my cultural-historical work I haven’t seen much more than where the things are that I would need to see, especially the libraries that I would have to use, which are widely scattered across the country in small sects and colleges. Under these circumstances, of course, the trip can be justified in our present situation only from the general point of view of the expansion of the scientific horizon (and improvement of my health). In this respect the fruits of the trip can only show themselves after some time has passed. (After November 19; MWP)
To be sure, the results were far from certain and would only become apparent over the coming months and years, even to the very end of Weber’s life sixteen years later. There were some disappointments: only W.E.B. Du Bois would follow through with an article for the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. The literature critiques Weber envisaged would not be written, with his thoughts about race, class, and status absorbed instead into other work, especially the sections in Economy and Society. But the opening out of the scientific and scholarly horizon was important. What would it mean for Weber’s work?
The return to winter in Heidelberg was difficult. Marianne arrived with a cold, Max with complaints about sleeplessness. The demands of work and public life began to accumulate, the usual struggles ensued, and Marianne’s anxieties returned. “It would be ironic,” she wrote, that if for Max “the quiet measured life here were less tolerable than the roar of life in America” (December 21; DWS). The warm enthusiasms and drama of the journey had been replaced by the cold reality of the everyday. But Max began to manage some events with colleagues, attending a political lecture by the socialist leader Eduard Bernstein, with whom he had corresponded about the Quakers, and appearing at Edgar Jaffé’s inaugural lecture “The Methodological Tasks of Political Economy,” an effort to expand upon Weber’s own essay on the problem of objectivity. Marianne had collected the couple’s correspondence from America, all but one misplaced page, and a secretary was typing the transcript for use in lectures and essays. In January the Eranos Circle also resumed, starting with a session at Ernst Troeltsch’s home, which ended with long disputations spilling into the street and the night air, putting Max in bed for two days with a cold. The discussion was likely an early round in their disagreements over the typological treatment of church and sect, asceticism and mysticism. Despite the setback, Weber recovered in time for the first main event after the return home: an evening at the Nationalsozialer Verein in Heidelberg on January 20.
The association had scheduled an “America evening” open to the public with announced talks by Marianne Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and two others: the businessman Otto Nuzinger, and Professor Otto Cohnheim. Marianne had been asked to address the “woman question” in America, a talk she prepared first for her own women’s group, the Verein Frauenbildung-Frauenstudium, and then repeated afterward at events in Karlsruhe and Mannheim. The theologian Adolf Deissman, the coorganizer of the Eranos Circle, presided on the occasion. Troeltsch sketched travel impressions, especially of New York and Chicago, while the other speakers addressed the topics of business and labor based on their American experiences. Max Weber was not on the printed program, but with Marianne’s encouragement he decided at the last minute to address the packed hotel auditorium. He spoke extemporaneously for an hour until nearly midnight. It was his first public appearance in years.
Starting in the nineteenth century the popular discourse about America in German-speaking Europe had alternated between two poles: on the one side the inspiring romanticism and adventurous spirit of Karl May’s popular depictions of the American frontier, surfacing in the multiethnic, multicultural utopia of redemption in Peter Rosegger’s The Last Jacob, and on the other side the cultural criticism as expressed in Ferdinand Kürnberger’s notorious dyspeptic novella Der Amerika-Müde, about getting tired or weary of America and everything “American.” Weber was aware of both views, as we have seen. He had summoned Rosegger’s images while touring the Biltmore estate, reflecting on the despoilment and reclamation of nature. And he had appropriated Kürnberger in the first part of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in order to stand him on his head, while in doing so pointing to a third possibility, as obvious as it may seem in retrospect: unprejudiced comparison and analysis of the institutions and practices of social and political life under the conditions of a modern capitalism that North America shared with Europe. The “America evening” presentations reflected the effort in this new direction, with speakers addressing the nature of the American cities, industry and business enterprise, labor unions and labor relations, the orientation toward work, the standard of living, the American family, the prospects for a socialist movement, and the position of women in American democracy. The last topic was Marianne Weber’s choice, her perspective awaited by the audience “with great anticipation” and given the lion’s share of press coverage.
The presentations were a good beginning, though thematically for Max Weber they did not extend as far or probe as deeply as they could have. The Heidelberg press summarized his concluding contribution to the event:
Greeted with enthusiasm, Prof. Weber spoke for almost an hour about political life in America. During his talk he informed the audience about the essential features and significance of American democracy, policy concerning the Negroes, electoral relationships, the Americans’ antipathy toward authority, the different sects, the Congress and the relationship between political representatives and the people, etc., for which he received enthusiastic applause. (Heidelberger Zeitung)
In the discussion period Professor Max Weber spoke about political life in America, the development of the parties, the problem of the Negroes, the system of government, the “Americanization” of the immigrants through democracy, the activity of associations, labor relations, and much more. His inspired and well-informed performance was given the most rapt attention. His criticism of social conditions in our country produced great applause. (Heidelberger Tageblatt)
Although there is no more complete record of these remarks, it is not difficult to imagine how the record of the journey would have figured in them, from the Indian Territory frontier to the Deep South and the cities of the Midwest and Northeast. All the major themes appear to have been present, with the possible exception of education and the universities. Framed in broadly political terms, Weber’s was a perspective that could be used both to improve understanding of the United States and to appeal at home for what Die Hilfe characterized as “a politics more oriented to freedom and popular rule,” goals congruent with the broader shared political orientation of Progressivism.
In her published account of what women could learn from America, Marianne Weber did expand the field of vision to discuss leading feminists she had met, like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley. She included commentary on social norms, cultural attitudes, and differences among classes and status groups. Relying on her conversations and observations, she extolled the advantages of coeducation in the high schools, the promise of education and the colleges, the social work of the settlements, the prospect of careers and family for working women, the role of the clubs and voluntary associations, and the steps toward women’s right to vote in the western states. It was, as reported in the press, a “hymn of praise” that perceived women’s higher standing in America compared with Germany, primarily in terms of a political difference and its social and personal consequences: the “democratic ideals which the American Constitution embodies: belief in freedom, self-determination of the personality, and equal rights for everyone,” quoting Marianne’s phrasing. Racial prejudice and the treatment of minorities, as she had seen, belied the lofty promise of the ideals. Nevertheless, her firsthand observations and interpretation served still as a reminder of a central fact and an image of America that had been ignored too often in popular discourse: the United States as the world’s oldest self-governing democracy.
During these weeks Max Weber had returned to his unfinished study, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, for the next installment was facing a deadline: it had been scheduled already as a talk for the Eranos Circle. For a meeting of a small group of scholars at the Webers’ home in the Hauptstrasse on February 5, Marianne supplied the bodily nourishment of “Burgundy and sliced ham,” as she noted, while Max provided the mental repast: the Eranos Circle members heard him talk on “Die protestantische Askese und das moderne Erwerbsleben.” The title was an interesting choice: literally it translates as “Protestant Asceticism and Modern Working Life or Employment”—that is, an inquiry into the relationship between asceticism, particularly the “worldly” type characteristic of the Protestant sects, and rational acquisitive economic action in the modern capitalist market economy. The words give the inquiry a practical edge: What does asceticism have to do, if anything, with earning a living in the modern world of the money economy, stock and commodity markets, and capitalist production and consumption? Had Weber stayed with the problem and language of “earning a living” his questioning might have been better understood when he put pen to paper for the second part of The Protestant Ethic. He had puzzled over the topic in America, noting the “Puritan survivals” and wondering about labor, entrepreneurial initiative, and the culture of capitalism. The announced title is actually closest to the last chapter of the completed text: chapter 5, “Asceticism and Capitalism,” revised in 1919 to read “Asceticism and the Capitalist Spirit.” The chapter contains the most memorable and most often quoted material in the entire study, including the much-debated imagery of the “iron cage” introduced in Talcott Parsons’s translation, the chilling reference to “specialists without spirit,” or the allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche’s “last men” who invented happiness drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra. We can assume that the earliest formulation of these ideas emerged as Weber brought together the Eranos Circle presentation.
After the presentation Weber proceeded with dispatch. His method of work was not to write in his illegible script and then arrange for a typed transcription, but rather to dictate his thoughts. On March 2 Marianne reported his verbal dictation had begun of “Protestant asceticism” to a Fräulein Hagmann, confirmed a week later when Max wrote to his brother Alfred. The final two chapters began to assume a shape and a direction, and four short weeks later, on April 3, Marianne reported the text completed, scarcely two months after the Eranos Circle meeting. The date coincided appropriately with the opening of the Heidelberg cable car ascending to the heights above the town, the return of chirping birds, and the arrival of spring. Max had dictated chapters 4 and 5, 110 pages in the Archiv printing, to add to the 54 pages published before his departure for America. He could now resume his quiet walks along the parapets above the bustling university town.
When he completed The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism Max Weber suggested that he had made a contribution to cultural history and written as a cultural historian. What kind of imprint, if any, had the American experience made on Weber’s thinking in this cultural-historical essay? Had the scientific horizon opened onto new vistas?
In our present age of digital media, there is naturally a quick and easy answer to these questions, readily available by entering search words like Amerika, Vereinigten Staaten, Franklin, or Individualismus on one of the CD-ROMs of Weber’s main collected works, conveniently supplied by the electronic wizardry of Karsten Worm and Thomas Müller. What this engaging exercise will demonstrate is numerous references to the United States, America, and matters American—many more than any other nation (Germany aside, of course) except England or Great Britain. If we turn specifically to the text of part 2 of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the original published in the Archiv, the results are readily apparent: specific references, often added in footnotes, to (in approximate sequence) Methodism in America; the secularization of American life; the colleges; Brown University; literature on the American colonies; antiauthoritarian tendencies in America; William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience; pragmatism; the concept of the “gentleman;” James Bryce on the American college; Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography; Anglo-American self-control; toleration in Rhode Island (with reference to Roger Williams), Maryland (Lord Baltimore) and Pennsylvania (William Penn); American sects; Northwestern University; the emotional character of Methodism in America; American Negroes; the Colgate University Library on the Baptists; the lack of respect in America; the Quaker meeting at Haverford College; Franklin twice again, announcing that “honesty is the best policy” and “time is money”; Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of Business Enterprise; Washington Irving; the self-made man; the “Europeanization” of America; the Educational Alliance and the “Americanization” of immigrants; the trade unions; music and Trinity Church in Boston; the idea of freedom; inheritance in America; capital formation and trade in New England; Pennsylvania and the Revolutionary War; the dry-goods man in Ohio; and finally, capitalism as “sport” in the United States! The sample is intriguing, and no doubt it could not have been compiled before Weber’s American trip. Of course, it is amplified in his very next essay “‘Churches’ and ‘Sects’ in North America,” published a year later in 1906, which starts from a problematic set explicitly in the United States. But we have already considered the content and sources of this commentary, which tends toward tracing the genealogical descent of aspects of American institutions and culture. As suggestive as it may be, a digitized tour tells us very little, as our question is not about engaging examples and key phrases but about the evolving substantive problematic of a controversial thesis that continued to take shape in Weber’s thinking, even to the end of his life.
America found a place in the thesis of The Protestant Ethic for two obvious reasons: amid its polyglot and multilayered culture, the United States offered instances of the ascetic ethos Weber was looking for, the “survivals” of a habitus emphasizing the methodical rationalization of the conduct of life. The religious sects, whatever their denomination, fascinated Weber for precisely this reason: there he came in contact with the human character having some resemblance to the “ideal type” sketched in the pages of The Protestant Ethic. The portrait should not be overdrawn. Too often the ascetic strain is modeled on an American Gothic motif, the gray on gray of pinched features, furrowed brow, tragic demeanor, and dogged marching to the cadence of hard work and a life of quiet and intense rectitude. But Weber, we should remember, was taken by the enthusiasm, raw energy, taste for adventure, social engagement, creative powers, and sense of humor of his American subjects, a desire to master the self and the world that he even seemed to emulate from time to time. That, too, belonged to the sketch developed in his imagination.
The other reason was equally compelling: because of historical conditions Weber knew all too well, America offered the most fertile ground for the flourishing of the modern market economy, the rational capitalist enterprise and a capitalist culture of seemingly unlimited scope. Capitalism and its “spirit” had existed elsewhere, of course, but in the New World it seemed comparatively unfettered and able to express itself in a concentrated and even exuberant form. Weber had carefully dissected the defining features of the modern capitalist economy, distinguishing enterprises in antiquity and the European Middle Ages from the new modes of rational capital accounting and investment in modern industrial economies with “free” or “self-regulating” commodity, labor, and capital markets. In America he was obviously struck by the dynamism and prospects, for good or ill, of the rapid growth, the expenditure of labor, the massive demographic shifts, the sources of social conflict, and the unsettling transformation of nature into material wealth. The elemental quality of the transformation could not be overlooked in the ports, on the railroads, in the cities, in the immigrant towns, through the Cotton Belt, or on the frontier. Nor could it be missed in the practical, matter-of-fact outlook on life and accomplishments of the most American of social types, the “self-made man.” Weber found him—as well as the “self-made woman”—at every turn, as union leader, politician, financier, businessperson, preacher, journalist, administrator, community activist, and social worker. One of these types might even one day climb to the pinnacle of political power as president.
For Weber in America the visible juxtaposition of these two competing forces—the ethical and the material powers—would have been all too obvious, symbolized from the first day in Manhattan by the spire of St. Paul’s Chapel set against the towering facade of the Park Row skyscraper. The travelers commented on the symbolic contrast themselves, after all. So we have arrived at the core issue: What does Weber make of this most essential tension between the demands of a certain kind of moral life and the competing demands of the “capitalist spirit?” We know how he resolves the contradiction through the “elective affinities” of Parsons’s prized detective story, the master narrative of the sacred text. But what about the American narrative itself? Has Weber found in his American observations any hint of a reconciliation? Is there a way out of the dilemmas of capitalist modernity? Does the distinctive pattern of associative life in America—Vergesellschaftung, once again—offer a possible escape route from the “iron cage” of increasing bureaucratization and the petrifaction of institutions? Can these distinctive social forms counteract the worst excesses of capitalist culture? Properly stated, this is a question not just for Weber but for American historiography as well.
Weber seemed to wrestle with this question through a series of ruminations on the “Europeanization” of American life, an idea surely present in his mind in 1904, and its obverse, the “Americanization” of European institutions, a locution appearing when he turned his attention to the problem of science, the universities, and the quality of associational activity in his own country. In using the phrase the “Europeanization of America” he actually referred to several different phenomena: first, bureaucratization and the unintended consequences for state development of progressive civil service reform—the growth of a professional, trained, salaried administrative staff. “In large states everywhere modern democracy is becoming a bureaucratized democracy,” was his pithy formulation in the speech “Socialism” in 1918. The trend was institutional and structural, aided in the American case by the distribution of land and settlement of the frontier that he described in St. Louis, Missouri, and viewed in the Indian Territory. The second reference was social and had to do with the intrusion of status-seeking norms of social honor, the “aristocratic” pretensions of the plutocracy that were lumped, even by Americans themselves, under the heading “feudalization.” Laura Fallenstein’s husband, Otto von Klock, had established a business upon this foundation. The trend was important because it seemed diametrically opposed to the unpretentious practices of the voluntary associations. Third, Europeanization was sometimes a placeholder for the long-term process of secularization that Weber thought was accompanying the massive influx of immigrants from the hinterlands of the Old World. But his judgments about both secularization and immigration vacillated, and his prognostications were often wide of the mark. The final usage was institutional and appeared occasionally when Weber reflected on the emergence of the modern research university devoted to the enterprise of science, such as Jacob H. Hollander’s Johns Hopkins or Edwin R. A. Seligman’s Columbia, alongside the pedagogical model of the American college with its impressive spiritual genealogy. This final sense of “Europeanization” already reveals the lack of clarity in the concept, however, for—agreeing with Veblen—Weber also realized that the modern research universities also embodied an exactly opposite developmental tendency.
These references were provocative but casual, and hardly the stuff of science. In Weber’s thinking, the “Americanization” theme and hypothesis remained even more ambiguous and underdeveloped, perhaps the weakest part of his analysis. There was a good reason, for in Weber’s usage the term referred most narrowly either to changes in the political party system and electioneering of the kind Bryce had cataloged in The American Commonwealth—that is, the emergence of the mass party as an electoral “machine,” a message Weber kept delivering to Robert Michels and repeated in his political essays. In the university setting, especially in the big privately endowed university, it referred to adopting an entrepreneurial—or as Weber said, “capitalist”—model for attracting externally funded research.
Yet, at a deeper level, “Americanization” for Weber alluded to something radically different and much more serious: the development of the dense web of group affiliation, civic culture, and social capital modeled on the voluntary association nurtured at its origins in the crucible of the sect. The idea emerged in his wartime essays, especially “The Suffrage and Democracy in Germany” (1917), a line of reasoning understandably excerpted by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills for their Weber reader. In these late essays Weber proposed a number of institutional reforms for the “new Germany,” keeping in mind especially American, British, and French examples. But at the level of social relations and political culture, the attractions of the American model returned to his imagination. It was actually one of the few positive alternatives Weber pointed to for Germany in the soul searching during the first months of the Weimar Republic, a matter of nothing less in his words than “massive” political education. Fearing misunderstanding, when she published the comment, Marianne Weber added the explanation, “Youth clubs: children are selected into the clubs by their own members, if they conduct themselves properly”! Max’s recommendation had nothing whatsoever to do with the cultural leveling, materialism, and consumerism associated in popular stereotypes with “Americanism.” Indeed, it came from a radically different alternative, the demanding school of inner-worldly asceticism. But the thought was far too exotic and fell on deaf ears. It was hopelessly ahead of its time.
Today we may have a more satisfactory perspective. In the Adorno Lectures Claus Offe has taken up the challenge of interpreting the results of Weber’s American journey. According to his summation, Weber
brought from America a social-theoretical theme for his life’s work: namely, the question of whether US society represented a viable social and political formation that might even be reproduced in Europe; whether this might make it at least possible to avoid the bureaucratization, rationalization, reification, depersonalization, secularization and meaningless occupational and professional specialization (Berufs- und Fachmenschentum) encouraged by capitalism; and whether individual freedom could thus be preserved not only … for minorities at the top of state, party and administrative apparatuses but collectively at the base of the citizen body and its associations.
His answer to this question, in brief, is that the alleged “null hypothesis” did not pan out in Weber’s work, and that today, in any case, speculations about “convergence” or “divergence” between America and Europe have been overtaken by events. In this view, notwithstanding certain “American anomalies” conditioned by historical differences, there is only one more-or-less consistent and unified model of capitalist development and modernization under the heading of Weber’s prized category: “occidental rationalism.” There are not alternative paths to the modern world, or multiple modernities. There are no well-lit and well-traveled escape routes from the consequences of capitalist modernity.
This is an important conclusion, and if properly understood, it is the most compelling conclusion we can reach. But it still moves too quickly and too far, for we can penetrate deeper into the biography of the work by acknowledging that Weber took a major, fully developed theme with him to America—a hypothesized relationship, an “elective affinity,” between an ethos based in religious conviction, a type of worldly orientation exemplified in Benjamin Franklin’s sayings, and “capitalist” economic activity—and then returned with both persuasive evidence supporting the postulated relationship, and new questions about the implications of a novel type of social formation: the “cool objectivity of sociation” in the voluntary association. It is only in America, and nowhere else, that Weber confronts this social phenomenon. What then forms in his mind is the typological accentuation of the possibility of its realization. At the center of this “ideal type” is the moral personality of the Berufsmensch, the person committed to a calling or identified through vocation. Socially, this type of person is made possible only by a particular form of civil society, in which voluntaristic associational activity involves the self-governing selection and moral testing of group members. A robust, authentic civil society in this kind of democracy thus requires a specific social construction of the modern self, a particular kind of “characterology.” It is striking to realize that Weber thought the “Americanization” of immigrant youth that he witnessed in clubs and small groups took precisely this form, or that his characterization of the American “college” was tailored to such social requirements. In his view these small local microcosms merely replicated and in turn reinforced a pattern firmly established in the larger social order.
It would be dramatic and satisfying to suppose that this ideal typical pattern of sociation and type of civil society, constructed on the template of the sect, could offer a way out of the grinding rationalization and disenchantment of life produced by the forces unleashed by capitalism. Weber wisely refrained from ever giving this social formation a name. Since bürgerliche Gesellschaft with its “bourgeois” connotations is out of the question, Sung Ho Kim has proposed calling it “sectlike society,” a phrase that is sociologically accurate but linguistically inelegant and opaque. Whatever the term, in the actual historical world of group affiliation the route of escape, the great alternative, is hardly ever found, and its discovery only becomes a possibility, paradoxically, within the parameters of the self-governing and self-sustaining association. Beyond those boundaries, the usual conceptual antinomies—the choices among diametrically opposed action orientations that Parsons, standing on Weber’s shoulders, called the “pattern variables”—will always apply. The history of communal movements in America to the present day, both religiously inspired and secular, is replete with efforts to suppress such choices and remain true to the “warrantable calling,” using the Puritans’ long-forgotten term. We know how the impulse arises. The incubator for these movements has already been faithfully described, with a nod to Weber’s “Protestant ethic,” in Perry Miller’s classic The New England Mind. As for the prospects of planting such a seed on foreign soil, we have only to remember Weber’s skeptical warnings about the prospects for liberal democracy in Russia.
Aside from the possibility of distinctive American forms of association, there is the further question about the expanded scientific horizon of Weber’s work, for repeatedly after 1905 his thinking comes back to American examples, models, and comparisons, especially in the public setting. The topics and contexts are remarkably varied: the debates in the Verein für Sozialpolitik over trusts, cartels, the state, bureaucracy, and productivity; the discussions in the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie of the press, the modern media, the sociology of voluntary associations, race, religiosity, the sects, the conceptual and sociological complexity of legal entities like “the United States,” and the problem of conceptualizing the “nation” and national identity; the replies to Felix Rachfahl about the sects, acquisitiveness and the “capitalist spirit,” which he calls a habitus for the first time; the speeches and articles on higher education triggered by disputes over “academic freedom,” the politics of university administration under Friedrich Althoff in the Prussian Ministry of Education, and the discussions at the German Association for Higher Education (Deutscher Hochschullehrertag); the unsuccessful discussions with Georg Jellinek over a proposed Institute for Comparative Politics and Jurisprudence at the University of Heidelberg, funded by Andrew Carnegie; and finally, of course, repeatedly in the political essays of 1917 to 1919, the references to American political and social conditions finding their way even into Weber’s comments as a member of Hugo Preuss’s committee for drafting the Weimar constitution.
The thread woven through all these commentaries is the appropriation of American institutions and social practices as a logical anchor point, a point of departure, or a baseline for comparison in a pattern of observation or a process of reasoning. The construction of contrasts, oppositions, alternatives, or antinomies was in any case the hallmark of Weber’s restless typological cast of mind. Sometimes the intention is polemical, as in the attack on Gustav Schmoller’s defense of cartels in Germany and dismissal of American antitrust legislation. On other occasions the message is didactic—for example, in the report to the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie proposing a large-scale study of associations (Vereinswesen), Weber’s language suggests nothing less than a comparative inquiry into civil society and the sources of social capital. As he moves from generalization to examples—bowling clubs, choral societies, political parties, voluntaristic sects, artistic cults—it becomes clear that the quality of associational activity is essential to the character and strength of civil society and that the American practices of “selection” and demonstrating “proof” of character serve as a yardstick for measurement: “How does this compare with the way things are here in Germany? Can we find analogous examples here, and, if so, what is their nature and extent? Where, and with what consequences? Where not, and why not?” And, adding to the farrago, “How does a certain associational membership influence the inner workings of the individual members or the personality as such?” Weber’s excitability is palpable in this outpouring: In what direction does a particular form of sociation move the individual—toward passive and quiescent subjection, or toward active and engaged citizenship? This is not just a question about the formation of social capital but a question about the construction of the kind of person appropriate to a democratic social order.
Nowhere is such insistent questioning more obvious than in the two well-known speeches, “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation.” Considering the context and the audience for these talks to students in Munich on November 7, 1917, and January 28, 1919—a struggling but still undefeated nation at war, and a city torn apart by political upheaval after the armistice—it must seem extraordinary that they are framed in part by thoughts about America. In Weber’s vision the “internal,” inward conditions and requirements for an absolute commitment to the pursuit of knowledge or an unqualified choice for the political vocation are not bounded by time and space. Such matters belong to a conversation for the ages. They could be called transcendent. But the “external” institutional and material circumstances for the practice of science or politics as vocations are determined by historical and social conditions. So, he asks, what do we find today? Regarding “external” conditions, we find in the community of science the rapid shift of universities away from the old model of cultivated learning or Bildung based on principles of collegiality to a bureaucraticized and capitalized enterprise oriented toward competition, production, and the separation of the scientist/worker from the means of production; and we find in the political realm the replacement of politics as an avocation for notables by the professional politician, the party as a machine, and the ascendency of the “plebiscitarian principle” for leadership selection, as Weber calls it. Let us strip away the illusions and drop all pretense, he counsels; in these developments American institutions point the way. Sometimes he is blunt: “In very important respects German university life is being Americanized, as is German life in general.” Yet at other times he only extends an invitation: “Permit me to take you once more to America, because there one can often observe such matters in their most massive and original shape.” The word Weber chooses is Ursprünglichkeit—the true source, the most original, native and natural form.
Yet with this summons we have been led across a boundary, for the last sentence is not about mere “externals” but about the inward calling, the problem of the meaning of science in the totality of life. We might ask, What arsenal of concepts would William James have brought to solve that problem? Weber’s words that follow supply the answer: the message is a bracing dash of cold water, a sudden plunge into the stream of pragmatism, a lesson in practicality and the “cash value” of ideas and the pursuit of knowledge. The problems of meaning are resolved not transcendentally but with a matter-of-fact appeal to “self-clarification” and the sense of “responsibility”—in science, responsibility for knowledge and its uses, and in politics, responsibility for the exercise of power and its consequences for history.
There are, of course, other words left untouched by this resolution: principally the chapters, sections, and fragments collected posthumously as Economy and Society. But they are appropriately a part of the work in America.