Max Weber
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 159th anniversary of the birth of Maximilian Karl Emil Weber (21 April 1864–14 June 1920), better known to posterity as Max Weber, who was born in Erfurt, Prussia on this date in 1864.
Weber’s contributions to sociology and economics changed the way we think about history. One of his most influential ideas is the “disenchantment of the world” (“Entzauberung der Welt”) which Weber expressed in this way:
“…there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means.” (Originally a speech at Munich University, 1918, published in 1919 by Duncker & Humblodt, Munich. From H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Translated and edited), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, pp. 129–156, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.)
Casual references to “disenchantment” and “re-enchantment,” or claims that the world never ceased to be enchanted, are all references to this passage by Weber, whether affirming his interpretation of history, extrapolation a future in which enchantment returns, or denying his interpretation of history.
A book-length study of Weber’s conception of History, Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods, by Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter concludes with this paragraph:
“Weber’s philosophy of history was pragmatic rather than pessimistic. Unless we save ourselves, nothing and nobody will save us. Historical knowledge, which comprises the levels of analysis discussed here, is necessary for self-clarification, for deciding what we want and where we want to go. But that knowledge cannot lead to the kind of science of society that would unlock the secrets of history and provide a master key to the future.”
Each of the claims made in this passage can be examined in turn. To state that Weber’s conception of history is “pragmatic rather than pessimistic” implies that Weber has been charged with pessimism, and the authors want to dispute this. One could interpret Weber’s disenchantment thesis as being a pessimistic view of history, insofar as it deprives us of our treasured illusions, but, if one takes the Enlightenment view of science that it frees us from our self-imposed limitations and is therefore a force for liberation (a common view today), then the disappointment that attends disenchantment is nothing more than the disappointment a child feels in learning that there is no Santa Claus; no one considers this disappointment to be of historical significance.
The idea that we must save ourselves is of a piece with Husserl’s last work, and unfinished final section of which was going to be “Humanity’s Responsibility for Itself” (Husserl and Weber were contemporaries). I don’t maintain that there was any direct influence between Weber and Husserl, but they belonged to the same milieu. Here is a paragraph that not only suggests a relationship to Husserl’s thought, but also his relationship to several figures in the philosophy of history that we have had occasion to mention:
“Weber’s polemic was concerned with the methodology of the human sciences propounded by Wilhelm Wundt, in particular his concept of ‘creative synthesis’; it led further to a rejection of the Kantian conception of causality through freedom. Consequently the concept of interpretation assumed a leading role in Weber’s analysis, and he emphasized the inability of this concept to distinguish between the procedures of historical and natural scientific knowledge. His criticism was expressly directed against Hugo Miinsterberg’s Grundzuge der Psychologie [Outline of Psychology] (1900), the second edition of Georg Simmel’s The Problems of the Philosophy of History (1905) and Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld’s Herrschaft des Wortes (1904). In the background, however, there also emerged references to Dilthey and Rickert, marked in different ways. In the case of Dilthey, it was not only the distinction of natural from human sciences that was rejected on the grounds that its objective foundation was methodologically misleading, but also the conception of Verstehen, together with the relation between experience (Erleben) and Verstehen; in the case of Rickert, Weber accepted not only the distinction of natural from cultural sciences on the basis of their different cognitive purposes, but also the general methodological approach that was laid out in his Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung [The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Science] (1902). And, finally, the polemic against the reduction of epistemology to psychology (and against the confusion of an epistemological with a psychological approach) found support in Edmund Husserl’s Logical Investigations, which had been published in 1900–1.” (“Max Weber and Benedetto Croce” by Pietro Rossi)
To return to the above quote about Weber’s vision of history, I take it that the claim that historical knowledge “cannot lead to the kind of science of society that would unlock the secrets of history and provide a master key to the future,” is a nod to the familiar idea of “laws of history,” which in turn is an instance of cultural evolutionism, which the authors take Weber to deny. But this is not made explicit, and what the authors mean by “the secrets of history” is not at all clear, though we can easily speculate that a “master key to the future” would be a predictive science of history, which the authors are also taking Weber to deny. Corroboration of this view can be found in the following:
“Max Weber, the corpus or whose work is, in my opinion, the most fundamental and the most learned achievement in sociology, went further than any other sociologist in the pursuit of these combined aims of understanding human societies in a universal setting and modern Western society in its uniqueness. He produced the most differentiated set of categories for the analysis of all societies regardless of epoch and territory, he analysed a number of particular civilizations and cultures — China, India and ancient Judaism — in order to contrast them with modern Western societies, and to discover what there was in them which disposed them to move along paths other than that taken by Western civilization in arriving at its modern pattern. Max Weber’s general categories, which he intended to be applicable to all societies, were also intended to permit the discernment of the distinctiveness of modern societies. Although he did not believe in ‘laws of historical development’ or in a ‘philosophy of history’ that purported to describe a meaningful pattern in the temporal sequence of societies or civilization, he did regard ‘rationalization’, which was present in some degrees and forms in all large-scale societies and in all civilizations and which he thought reached its most pervasive and most penetrating ascendancy in modern Western society, as both a universally applicable category and as a means of delineating the unique features of particular societies.” (“Max Weber and the World since 1920” Edward Shils)
Suppose, then, that we have to give up “laws of historical development” but we can still hope for the “rationalization” — what would a “rationalization of history” look like that was not a “philosophy of history” or “laws of historical development”?
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