The War: Political Activity and a Return to the University

When the European war broke out in the summer of 1914 Weber was broadly aligned with German national sentiment, although he also hoped that involvement in a European war would lead to major changes in Russian society.

It is, however, instructive to consider what he published during wartime. On the one hand, there are his political writings, ranging from journalism opposing unrestricted submarine warfare to his programmatic “Parliament and Government in a Reordered Germany: A Political Critique of Bureaucratic and Party Organization” (May 1918). On the other hand, all of the substantive new essays that went into the three-volume col­lected writings on the sociology of religion - on Confucianism, Buddhism and Judaism - were published in the Archiv between 1915 and 1918, representing almost the entirety of his wartime scholarly publication. As noted above, during this period he simply put to one side work on the Grundriss.

First, we could perhaps view this intensive engagement with ancient religious systems as a form of wartime therapy; this work involved no academic controversy, rather it was a personal project whose prosecution required simply that he read, think and write. When he did during wartime present his scholarly credo in the form of the lecture “Science as a Vocation”, delivered on 7 November 1917, the very day that the Bolshevik Revolution erupted in Petrograd, the main argumentative components of this are simply boilerplated from work that goes back in places to the 1890s. The lectures he gave in Vienna during the summer semester of 1918 systematized work he had already done in 1913. The essays on the sociology of religion represent by contrast a different level of work.

However, we also know that Weber was not a religious person, that he described himself as “unmusical” in this respect. If he ended up being thought of as a “sociologist of religion” this was certainly not his intention. As Peter Ghosh has observed, through­out the twentieth century Weber’s most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was discussed largely as if it were a book mostly “about” religion; whereas for Weber it was primarily “about” capitalism. If we are forced to summarize his work in two sentences, this would run as follows. He was driven by one question, and by the agenda which was its corollary. The question is, why did capitalism take root and flour­ish in Western Europe, and only in the West? The agenda that follows from this ques­tion is, the investigation of the “cultural problems of capitalism” as the prime task of an empirical social science. The latter is forcefully stated in the “Objectivity” essay of 1904, which is first and foremost a rubric for the new journal:

[W]e characterize the prime work of our journal as the scientific investigation of the general cul­tural significance of the social-economic structure of human communal life and its historical forms of organization The social science that we wish to pursue is a science of reality. Our aim

is an understanding of the uniqueness of the lived reality within which we are placed.

We could also reformulate the above question, and consequent agenda, as follows: the answer to the question is to be found in the relationship between acting human beings and the structures within which they find themselves; and so an agenda directed to the elaboration of the social sciences is the means of forming an adequate answer to the question.

Weber had already referred to elements of “agrarian capitalism” in his book on Roman agrarian history as well as in his essays on East Elbian rural structure. However, Werner Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus of 1902 was the first work to present an account of the formation of modernity in terms of capitalism, moving from the eco­nomic foundations to the creation of an urban culture and new forms of consumption. For Sombart the emergence of “capitalism” as a dominant form of European economic organization was chiefly attributable to double-entry book-keeping and the rationaliza­tion that it implied. Importantly the book II, part III, of the text was devoted to “The Genesis of the Capitalist Spirit”, where he argues that the idea that Protestantism, and Calvinism especially, had played an important role in the development of capitalism, was too well-known to require any further discussion (Sombart 1902, I: 380-81).

So, if there is a “Weber thesis” about the rise of capitalism it cannot be what Sombart here offhandedly dismisses. Weber’s leading question is the origin and continuing advance of occidental capitalism, as opposed to all that had once emerged in Rome, Byzantium, India and China but which, at one point or another, had simply been over­whelmed, or become ossified. Instead, Max Weber’s two essays of 1904 and 1905 on the Protestant ethic sketch an account of the formation of a way of living life through the influence of religious belief - a social mechanism which first creates the “individual”, then sets that individual to work in a rational and calculating manner pursuing not wealth for its own sake, but rather an ascetic, rational way of life pursued for its own sake.

Once this is clearly established it becomes easier to understand quite where Weber’s arguments concerning the role of values in the prosecution of scholarship fit in. He has a question which implies an evaluation; but response to this question requires that values be first acknowledged, then set aside. This argument runs through the “Objectivity” essay, the 1913 memorandum written in response to Verein’s discussion of the issue, and finally “Science as a Vocation”. There Weber points out that without values there would be no science; for science cannot itself provide a rationale for doing science, that rationale is a product of the values of the human beings who dedicate themselves to the scientific life. In this respect “science” is the new religion of modernity.

Keith Tribe

See also:

Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk (I); German and Austrian schools (II); Karl Heinrich Marx (I); Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher (I); Gustav Friedrich von Schmoller (I); Utilitarianism and anti-utilitarianism (III).