Chapter 2 - Interests Without Ideals - Max Weber and Politics of Power

103
Chapter 2 - Interests without Ideals: Max Weber and the Politics of Power
To speak of Max Weber (1864-1920) in the context of American history requires
little in the way of justification. Much like Alexis de Tocqueville, Weber toured the
United States and was astonished by America’s democratic pluralism. That America
shaped Weber’s intellectual bearing can be seen in a work - The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (1905) - of considerable posthumous significance. In turn, Weber
was to influence American political thinking. This latter influence was particularly
evident in the revaluation and reorientation of American liberal-democracy in the 1940s
and 1950s as American intellectuals sought to create both axiomatic and “de-radicalized”
statements about democracy. Here, Weber’s ideas provided a compelling logic behind the
era’s political criticism which combined both an acquiescence to entrenched political
power with a related assumption that one could only effectively carry out a critical role in
realms outside politics. Behind much of this postwar criticism lay a fundamental
assumption of powerlessness before the predicaments of politics in the modern age.
Liberals lost hope in the redemptive power of the public, political sphere and, ultimately,
took on a suspicion of democracy itself which was often couched in a sober and
“objective”minded realism.
As with both Tocqueville and Sigmund Freud, Weber’s ideas were fundamentally
concerned with the attributes of modernity. They were also comments on modernity as
fate. That is, for Weber some form of “legal-rational” society was an inevitability as its
104
corollary, a bureaucratic rationalization, promised to disenchant the world, including
democracy. The promise of politics then was not a resistance to this certainty, but the
value neutral and empirical delineation of possible alternatives within this future.
Methodology determined substance as Weber’s understanding of politics and social
theory began with what sociology would allow, and worked from there; the scope of
politics was delimited by what sociology could legitimately (formally) prove and not on
the content or aims of political action nor on the normative force of abstract ideals (e.g.,
justice, equality). This mode of analysis had a profound affect on American political
theorists searching for a functional political science in an age of totalitarian threat. Under
this Weberian approach, the ideal of democracy was characterized as a moralistic
ideology in conflict with the means of politics - power, and the interests of the ruling
stratums - incumbency and equilibrium.
In a sense then, Weberian sociology was a coping mechanism for the radical
value fragmentation of modernity. Weber characterized modern life as beset with
incommensurable ethical ideals. Thus he sharply divided the political and the ethical,
claiming that politics was solely concerned with issues of power and ethics was the
preserve of private, individual choice. Taking his cue (and many of his examples) from
the extreme, radical eschatology of world religions, Weber asserted that ultimate life
aims could not be publically debated and could never be reconciled or refined into
agreement; “[when] ultimate Weltanschauungen collide,” he wrote in a virtual
justification of decisionism, “ . . . one has eventually to choose between them.” 1 For
1
Max Weber, “The Vocation of Politics,” in The Essential Weber, ed., and trans., Sam Whimster (London:
105
American intellectuals, Weber’s profound claim against the possibility of moral
agreement in public life and his concomitant assertion that meaningful existence could
only reside outside the public, political sphere, served to empty their political
commentary of its public, critical role. Furthermore, his conceptual apparatus was used
by more enthusiastic supporters to explain and justify the moderation of democratic
participation towards politically innocuous ends.
The immediate context of Weber’s ideas was a German nation of distilled
modernization. Rapid industrialization, which hastened the growth of urban areas (and
the flight from rural ones) created new social formations, class differences and a
balkanized public. Rapid population growth also added to the social pressures that
mounted against an authoritarian political system dominated by the Prussian nobility that
did not summon the responsibility to look beyond their peculiar interests to those of
nation at large. Weber’s work stood as response to these dislocations brought about in a
Wilhelmine Germany that lacked a national ethic and a commitment to political
responsibility. Weber’s work was also a response to the democratic challenges brought
about by those seeking to modify the Kaiserreich, as Catholics, farmers, the growing
bourgeoisie and the industrial working class, among other groups, sought political
inclusion. This, Weber realized, was the beginning of modern, mass politics. The populist
Routledge, 2004), pg., 259.

106
success of the Centre and Social Democratic Parties revealed at once the possibilities and
the travails that lay ahead for those concerned about political coherence in the age of
industrialism and modernity. 2
While German politics remained unresponsive to the social changes afoot, Weber
was concerned that the existing political parties were not responsible enough to transcend
their particular interests and lead the nation as a whole. Weber’s decisive response was
his Frieburg Address (1895) which articulated at once a highly nationalist and reformist
position. Weber criticized the Junker aristocracy, called for reform of the state
bureaucracy, the political awakening of the German bourgeoisie, and for the ascension of
sensible, political leadership that could articulate a national ethic. This speech revealed
Weber to be a nationalist who believed that the interests of the state ought to be served by
liberal-democratic rights; it also revealed Weber to be a reformer who sought an end to
the capriciousness of imperial rule in favor of those very privileges. Weber was an
incisive student of the dislocations brought about by rapid modernization. The perceived
incommensurability among various social groups, each seeking particular ends, was
especially important and led Weber to a life-long understanding of politics that took it to
be a constabulary force and narrowly constituted by the issues of leadership and
top-down power, more than a source for change or the realization of ethical aims. 3
2
Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society (Pennsylvania: The Pensylvania State University Press,
1992), pgs., 157-174.
3
Bellamy, Chapter 4; Sven Eliaeson, “Max Weber and Plebiscitary Democracy,” in Max Weber,
Democracy and Modernization ed., Ralph Schroeder (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). Eliaeson includes a
revealing quote from a letter Weber wrote in 1917: “As far as I’m concerned, forms of government are techniques
like any other machinery. . . The governmental form is all the same to me, if only politicians govern the country and
not dilettantish fops like Wilhelm II and his kind.” (58)
107
Weber also sought change in the academic realm. He searched for methodological
innovations in the social sciences that could be used in the analysis and diagnosis of
modern, socio-political ills. His disapproval of the state of German scholarship and
teaching was, much like his criticism of politics, directed at those (the professorate) who
did not acquit themselves responsibly as they indoctrinated students with particular
enthusiasms rather than rendering objective service to the cause of education. As such,
Weber advocated a scientific approach that could meet the requirements of sober,
objective, and reliable political analysis. His thinking did not remain static on the topic,
however. Precipitated in part by a severe mental collapse in 1898, and the tonic of a
recovery in Italy, Weber modified his intellectual orientation and began to express an
increased fascination with the explanatory limits of the natural sciences and attempted to
construct a template for the human sciences that took into account the unique questions it
set out to answer. This led Weber to the notions of Verstehen (understanding), in which
one explored and endeavored to understand the motives of individuals in action; to
“elective affinity” which described how certain ideas became internalized as interests;
and to “ideal-types” which were abstractions used to highlight instrumentally-rational
action in its pure form. Weber was also influenced by Nietzsche, and a number of his key
works, reflecting an existential flair, offered a rather cynical political sociology including
a criticism of progress that bore heavily on his treatment of the masses who he claimed
had little capacity for critical thought let alone charismatic superiority. Yet, despite these
108
intellectual migrations, Weber’s entire corpus was an attempt to characterize and
understand modernity as it unfolded via the rationalization and instrumentalism of life. 4
Weber’s scholarship then, moved beyond the particular and took as its subject the
forces and trajectory of modernization in the West. In an impressively broad archipelago
of works that touched upon world religion to modern capitalism, Weber described an
unfolding and permeating rationalism that promised to make superfluous any ethical
claim on public behavior. Modern institutions and the bureaucracy that governed them
operated according to a cold, objective functionalism which was itself a larger
disenchanting social, political and cultural force. This description had normative pull. For
Weber, illustrations of “what is” were entangled with forecast since modernity was a
form of destiny. Consider this representative phrase: “The fate of our age, with its
characteristic rationalization and intellectualization and above all the disenchantment of
the world, is that the ultimate, most sublime values have withdrawn from public life,
either into the transcendental realm or mystical life or into the brotherhood of immediate
personal relationships between individuals.” 5 The characterization of Western
modernization as “fate” reflected itself in Weber’s academic bearing. His works featured
both an innovative and yet resigned desire “to look at the realities of life with an
unsparing gaze, to bear these realities and be a match for them inwardly.” 6 In this sense,
as Daniel Bell has noted, Weber was merely extending the “tragic vein” in German
4
Sam Whimster, “The Nation-State, the Protestant Ethic and Modernization,” in Max Weber, Democracy
and Modernization.
5
Max Weber, “The Vocation of Science,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 287.
6
Weber, “The Vocation of Politics,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 267.
109
thought by extending its Zeitgeist - alienation - to include the modern forms of
rationalization and bureaucratization. 7 Weber understood his intellectual project (much
like Alexis de Tocqueville) as an exercise in “responsibility” as tragic obligation - that is,
the effort to confront inexorable circumstances realistically. Weber, therefore, criticized
(or ignored) democracy not as a disputant, but as an objective realist (read: social
scientist) bearing troubling but essential news. Weber’s realism, as expressed in his
various works, was subsequently magnified by American theorists. In fact, American,
postwar social science often assumed a Weberian self-characterization as having
transcended the ideological and ethical in favor of sober and solemn thinking.
In his well-known lectures delivered at the University of Munich in 1918 -
“Politics as a Vocation,” and “Science as a Vocation,” Weber confronted the problems of
modern politics and usable knowledge in an age of bureaucratic domination. In
“Science as a Vocation” he described how those who accept science as a vocation must
also accept the tragedy that the ultimate meaning of life is unknowable by scientific
means. Indeed, the search for the meaning of individual existence was anathema to the
scientific quest for knowledge and “whenever the man of science introduces his personal
value judgement, a full understanding of the facts ceases.” 8 Pointing to the gulf that
separates the natural sciences from ethics, Weber claimed that science was not able, by
means of calculation or experimentation, to bridge “the various value spheres of the
7
Daniel Bell, “In Search of Marxist Humanism: The Debate on Alienation,” in Political Thought Since
World War II, ed., W. J. Stankiewicz (Illinois: The Free Press, 1964), pgs., 153-154.
8
Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds., and trans., Hans
Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pg., 146.
110
world [which] stand in irreconcilable conflict with each other.” 9 Therefore, those who
choose science as a vocation must accept the limits of their field. All science could do
was delineate facts and impart a measure of responsibility to its practioners, it could not
stand in the service of moral forces by trying to discern the ultimate meaning of life, or,
as he noted in reference to Nietzsche’s criticism of the “last men,” to be naively used by
those seeking happiness. 10 The scientist, however, must also accept that all in the world
is potentially knowable and that what is knowable is worth knowing. Weber called this
the “disenchantment of the world”, the disappearance of “mysterious incalculable forces”
as an explanatory force in favor of a web of interrelated knowable facts. As Weber
concluded, “That one can, in principle, master all things by calculation . . . means that the
world is disenchanted.” 11
In “Politics as a Vocation” Weber suggested that the politician, much like the
scientist, must accept a tension-filled detachment from ethical aims, and ought to be
concerned with the means of statecraft - power. Weber’s argument that the politician
must observe a fundamental opposition between ethics and politics was a realist and
functionalist argument based on the premises of political sociology. “A sociological
definition cannot be derived from the contents of its [a political group or state]
activities,” Weber wrote, “. . .the modern state can only finally be defined sociologically
in terms of the particular means that is specific to it and every political association:
9
Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in From Max Weber, pg., 147.
10
Weber, “The Vocation of Science,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 277.
11
Weber, “Science as Vocation,” in From Max Weber, pg., 139.
111
namely, those of physical force (Gewaltsamkeit).” 12 Or, as he noted in Gesammelte
Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion,
1920-21), the “success” of those who wield force “is finally dependent on power
relations and not upon what is ethically ‘right’, even if one believed that objective criteria
for what was ethical were in general discoverable.” 13 Politics is about power and
authority and those who claim it; Weber began with what political sociology could
legitimately establish and worked from there.
Weber thus wove both an explanation and a defense of the politician’s inability to
abide by the commands of an individual’s absolute ethics. He labeled this “the ethic of
ultimate ends” (or “ethics of principled conviction”) and argued that the irreconcilability
of value spheres ensured that ethics and mass politics could only co-exist in tension.
Attempting to solve this predicament (or, the unwillingness to accept this fundamental
irrationality of the world) had produced a number of messianic and idealized schemes
which always foundered on the shoals of real life - on having to justify means by ends:
“The person who subscribes to the ethics of conviction (for example, the flame of protest
against the injustice of the social order) is never extinguished.. To kindle that flame again
and again is the purpose of his action, actions which, judged from the point of view of
their possible success are utterly irrational.” 14 Noting that, “‘Consequences’, however are
no concern of absolutist ethics,” Weber further argued that the “ethic of ultimate ends” is
12
Max Weber, “Politics and the State,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 131.
13
Max Weber, “Intermediate Reflection,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 224.
14
112
only applicable to the self, not the public sphere where proximate outcomes prevail. 15 For
most politicians this tension never becomes palpable as they “live off” politics and
simply serve the system. As for those who would “live for” politics, Weber argued that
they ought to acquire an “ethic of responsibility” which was grounded in a recognition of
tragedy and the “ethical paradoxes” of political action whereby a principled act sets off
unintended consequences. 16
“Politics as a Vocation” was a clarion call for intellectuals. As Ahmad Sadri
observes, “[Politics as a Vocation] was inspired by an attempt to dispel the naiveté of
politically motivated intellectuals. . . The recommendation of ‘ethics of responsibility,’ in
other words, is novel and controversial only for the intellectuals; professional politicians
to whom a ‘sense of proportion’ and a lukewarm commitment to ideas come naturally
will not be moved by this aspect of Weber’s political creed.” 17 Political intellectuals
lived this conflict between the realm of ethics and the demands of political power more
than most since the legitimacy of their role was grounded in their ability to offer
independent, evaluative and potentially critical arguments about the status quo. Both
“Science as a Vocation,” and “Politics as a Vocation,” were also criticisms of causes or
enthusiasms as naïve forms of “hunting for ‘experience’” emanating from the inability
“to look the destiny of the time full in the face” including the unavoidable demands of a
15
16
17
Ahmad Sadri, Max Weber’s Sociology of Intellectuals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pg., 98.
113
thoroughly rationalized culture. 18 Here, Weber’s observation became prescription in the
hands of postwar American intellectuals who celebrated the shift from Wertrationalität
(value rationality) to Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality), and the attendant
decrease in “ideologically” driven political behavior. 19 For politicians, the evisceration of
meaning (and its potentially dangerous re-introduction) in the public, political sphere
required, on their part, an acquiescence to that unbridgeable gap between ethical claims
and political truth. For the rest of us, to be rational, according to Weber, was to accede to
this awareness by recognizing that power and political incumbency are the sine qua non
of politics and that our private decisionism as regards life’s meaning(s) is our only real
consolation in a disenchanted world.
In Economy and Society (1922), Weber examined the rationalization of political
and economic life in the West and gave an accounting of democracy under these
conditions. In this work, he expanded his inquiry into politics as the exercise of power
and argued, quite straightforwardly, that domination became legitimate by generating
compliance. Weber’s analysis of authority here, of which his theory of bureaucracy was a
most integral part, profoundly influenced American political theorists. Rather that
illustrating an evolution in the dialectic between state and subjects and the changes in the
legitimacy of state purview thereof, he simply classified - into different categories - the
various means by which state power is acclaimed. For Weber, obedience was the political
objective. He described three modes of authority: the charismatic form, the traditional
18
19
Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans., Ephraim Fischoff et al., and eds., Guenther Roth and Claus
Wittich (New York: Bedminster Press, New York, 1968), pgs., 24-25.
114
form, and the legal-rational form. 20 The omission of democracy as a basis for political
legitimation was the result, in part, of that permeating rationalism and bureaucratization
which prevented individuals from exercising effectively free and informed
decision-making. Moreover, democracy could not be rescued on the basis of appeals to
the moral foundation of rights or the justness of popular participation because politics
and values were at odds. 21 Political legitimacy was based on power, the most effectively
rational and legitimate means of statecraft; in Weber’s analysis, liberal-democracy served
to legitimate that fact. 22 The effect of this approach was to grant little ethical weight to
broad participation. In fact, Weber shares with Marx the aversion to the language of
abstract ethical principles such as justice or equality. “The demos itself, in the sense of an
inarticulate mass, never ‘governs’ larger associations;” he wrote, “rather, it is governed,
and its existence only changes the way in which the executive leaders are selected. . . .” 23
20
Max Weber, Economy and Society, Part I, Chapter III.
21
Weber proved himself a formidable opponent to all forms of ethical politics, including (one might say -
especially) those associated with democracy. In a letter to Robert Michels - his student - who was attempting to
reconcile the ethical ideal of popular sovereignty with the evidence of oligarchic politics, Weber wrote, “Any
thought ..of removing the rule of men over men through even the most sophisticated forms of ‘democracy’” is
“utopian.” He continued, “But oh, how much resignation you will still have to face! Such notions as the ‘will of the
people,’ the true will of the people, ceased to exist for me years ago; they are fictions.” As Mommsen claimed -
“Weber made no attempt to save even the ideal core of the classic democratic theory under the conditions of modern
mass democracy.” Letter to Michels (August 4, 1908), quoted in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German
Politics, 1890-1920, trans., Michael S. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pgs., 394-395.
22
Weber’s description of “plebiscitary democracy” - described as a transitional stage in the legitimation of
authority - is suggestive here. “Plebiscitary democracy - the most important type of leader democracy - is a variant
of charismatic authority, which hides behind a legitimacy that is formally derived from the will of the governed.”
Max Weber, Economy and Society, pg., 268.
23
Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber, 225.
115
Democracy then changed little about the substance of politics; it is not substantively
meaningful, but is yet another way to legitimate authority. 24
Another reason why democracy carried little ethical weight, according to Weber,
was his characterization of political behavior / motivation as the pursuit of interests and
the related interplay of authority. Interests were opposed to ideals he claimed. They were
the rational, means-ends motives for those in positions of functional significance. Thus,
the interests which govern the political sphere are not the substantive demands of the
electorate, or the civic realization of ethical principles, but rather the pursuit of interests
by the leader and those functionaries who have a stake in power. This sort of “insider”
approach to political theory was grounded in a sociological endeavor on Weber’s part to
identify and characterize the various ruling strata whose interest it is to maintain power.
In fact this project was part of a larger frame of analysis in which Weber described (from
religion to capitalism) how change itself - especially the onward march of rationalization
- was carried forward by those whose interests were served by those changing norms.
Weber wrote: “What these presuppositions [concerning rationalization] were has been a
matter, to no small degree, of the historical and social determination by the particular
interest situation of the strata. . . . who were carriers of the relevant methodical way of
life at the time when their influence was decisive.” 25 This calculating approach to social
and political action even applied to the lower classes. Weber cited Nietzsche’s notion of
ressentement to describe how the lower classes’ call for equality was a form of retaliatory
24
Richard Wellen, Dilemmas in Liberal Democratic Thought since Max Weber (New York: Peter Lang,
1996), pgs., 47-52.
25
Weber, “Introduction to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 70.
116
interest as much as an ethical plea. 26 These notions would come to define postwar
pluralism which was, by definition, the power-elite in a competitive but interlocking
pursuit of interests.
Weber also contended that modern liberal-democracy was in a sense caught
between two reasonable promises: freedom and order. The two were particularly difficult
to reconcile in the modern age because these “heterogeneous” polities had citizens who
claimed very different, indeed irreconcilable, value orientations. Thus the modern
liberal-democratic state ensured that its policies were themselves value neutral
(objective) and consistent in application, thereby precluding the venal, capricious or
arbitrary statecraft that characterized older regimes. Weber argued that, “Bureaucracy
inevitably accompanies modern mass democracy in contrast to the democratic
self-government of small homogeneous units. This results from the characteristic
principle of bureaucracy, which is the result of the demand for ‘equality before the law’
in the personal and functional sense - hence, of the horror of ‘privilege,’ and the
principled rejection of doing business ‘from case to case.’” 27 Yet, this bureaucratic
system had become itself the locus of authority. As such, the bureaucratic state
increasingly began to rely on a form of de-humanized, rationalistic authority which was
based on a systematization and standardization brought on by a permeating
Zweckrationalität.(cost-benefit calculation writ large). 28
26
Weber, “Introduction to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” in The Essential Weber,
pg., 59, 65.
27
Max Weber, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber, 224.
28
Derek Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity; an excursus on Marx and Weber (London: Routledge, 1991),
117
Because individual life spheres were governed by different ethical commands,
democratic politics, for Weber, became a plebiscite in which people simply chose which
elites were to govern them, rather than an expression of creative, self-realizing
citizenship. This mode of analysis also assumed that ethical ideals were necessarily
incommensurable and could not be publically debated. Choice not deliberation was
important. He wrote that: “life, as long as it is to be understood in its own terms, knows
only the unending struggle between those gods. Put literally, that means the
incompatibility of the ultimate possible attitudes towards life and therefore the
inconclusiveness of the battle between them. It is thus necessary to decide between
them.” 29 Thus, in the large, developed, complex, pluralistic, heterogenous world,
liberal-democracy had to serve the demands of authority and equilibrium. Ultimately,
only “charismatic” leaders could offer a temporary alternative to this rationalization of
political life, and even they eventually become “spoilsmen” as their compelling
independence is rendered banal by the system.
The public sphere then was stripped of any responsibility for the substance of
higher aims. In fact, Weber’s foregrounding of a formal or instrumental rationality (and
the dissociation of formal and substantive rationality) downplayed the particular ideals or
issues that motivated people. “A political group, or a ‘state’ cannot be defined in terms of
the purpose of the action of its group body (Verband),” Weber wrote, “. . . The ‘political’
character of a group can therefore be defined only in terms of the means . . .indispensable
pg., 96-97, 113-114.

29
118
for its nature: violence.” 30 In terms of methodology, this focus on means was to be
magnified in the American context such that Weber became particularly appealing among
those who wanted, in a time of postwar anxiety, to establish control over democratic
theory by making it an objective and predictive science. For American theorists the
recovery of the meaning of an action amounted to placing it in “the meaning context to
which a directly understandable action belongs,” or, as Quentin Skinner argued
concerning this tradition in social analysis, the “recovery of the agent’s motives for
acting is a matter of placing the agent’s action within in a context of social rules rather
than causes” and nothing more. 31 This understanding was based on the idea of rationality
as the conformity of behavior to situational pressures. “This construct of rigorous,
instrumentally rational action therefore furthers the evident clarity and understandability
of a sociology whose lucidity is founded upon rationality,” Weber argued. 32 As such,
verstehende soziologie was not the study of subjectivity so much as it was a highly
rationalistic and predictive system of human action. It was a feature of “ideal-typical
instrumentally rational action,” whereby “Only those statistical regularities which
correspond to the understandably intended meaning of a social action are in the sense
used here understandable types of action. . . .” 33 Weber’s sociological assumption of
formal rationality as the basic datum of analysis explains, in part, the relative neglect of
30
Max Weber, “Basic Sociological Concepts,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 356.
31
Weber, “Basic Sociological Concepts,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 316; Quentin Skinner, “‘Social
Meaning’ and the Explanation of Social Action,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society eds., Peter Laslett,W.G.
Runicman and Quentin Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), pg., 137.
32
Weber, “Basic Sociological Concepts,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 314.
33
Weber, “Basic Sociological Concepts,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 318, 319.
119
democracy in his work. Weber took obedience on the part of the masses to be
uncomplicated and straightforward; whatever was legitimated by elites was sure to be
followed by the masses. Even Weber’s far-flung works revealed this fact. A significant
portion of his scholarly work dealing with comparative cultures was based on a sort of
“armchair” anthropology which took the “official” religious, cultural and social strictures
to be wholly authoritative. That individuals could distort or exploit these legitimations
was less of a concern for Weber who was more interested in the facets of cultural
compliance.
Weber’s differentiation of socio-political group affiliations played a large role
here. His essay entitled “Class, Status, and Party,” (included in Economy and Society)
would come to exert a strong influence on American theorists including those
structural-functionalists who adopted Weber’s notion of a plurality of value systems -
among different strata - as an element in the complex reconciliation of system stability
and social conflict. Following his traditional schema he noted that “‘Classes’, ‘status
groups,’ and ‘parties,’ are phenomena of the distribution of power in a community.” 34
For Weber, class (economic considerations) represented but one possible orientation for
“communal action” and potential social conflict. There were others, including those
oriented around “social honor” - or status. People within a same class may, for instance,
hold opposing views regarding their own fortunes thereby signaling the fact that social
struggle emanates not just from economic interests but also from subjective sources.
34
Max Weber, “The Distribution of Power in Society: Classes, Status Groups and Parties,” in The Essential
Weber, pg., 183.
120
Nonetheless, they are all characterized by their use and “distribution of power” regardless
of their other defining features.
Weber’s section on parties is especially suggestive. The party, which is an
integral element of politics, “is always an organisation which strives for domination and
so is itself organized, often very rigidly, in terms of domination. . . .” 35 Thus
liberal-democracy and its parties served to further the fact “that the business of politics is
the pursuit of interests.” 36 What is also clear, again, is that the masses were not of
meaningful significance in this system, and did not contribute to the substantive agenda
of these power players, nor could the masses effectively thwart their leader’s agendas.
“In this case the political enterprise is in the hands of:. . .the inactive masses of electors
or voters (Mitläufer) [who] are merely objects whose votes are sought at election time,”
Weber argued. “Their attitudes are important only for the agitation of the competing
parties. . . .” 37 By sociological fiat, the masses were made to be outsiders in a
burgeoning liberal-democratic politics. Without a functional foothold in the machinery of
domination and without legitimate recourse to abstract ideals, they played a supporting
role in a larger drama about elite authority. Weber continued:
One fact, however, is common to all these forms [the different internal
structures that parties can adopt], namely, that there is a central group of
individuals who assume the active direction of party affairs, including the
formulation of programs and the selection of candidates. There is,
35
Weber, “The Distribution of Power in Society: Classes, Status Groups and Parties,” in The Essential
Weber, pg., 194.
36
Weber, “The Distribution of Power in Society: Classes, Status Groups and Parties,” in The Essential
Weber, pg., 195.
37
Max Weber, “Parties,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 196.
121
secondly, a group of ‘members’ whose role is notably more passive, and

finally, the great mass of citizens whose role is only that of objects of
solicitation by the various parties. They merely choose between the
various candidates and programs offered by the different parties. . .It is
this which is meant by the statement that party activity is a matter of ‘play
of interests’. 38
The political pronouncements as articulated in Economy and Society and the
Vocation lectures were of great influence in postwar America. The themes developed
there, however, had their intellectual anchoring in another powerful work - The
Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism (1905) - as well as Weber’s studies on the
sociology of religions. In the Protestant Ethic, Weber said it took the rationalization of a
religious conscience to foster the growth of capitalism. He stated that, “the religious
valuation of restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest
means to asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and
genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of
that attitude toward life which we have here called the ‘spirit’ of capitalism.” 39 Thus
Weber revealed how a “psychological sanction (Antrieb),” was created by the conception
of “labour as a calling,” and when coupled with the “accumulation of capital through
ascetic compulsion to save,” the foundations were laid for the take-off of capitalism. 40
Therefore, capitalism, in Weber’s sketch, was not the simple aggregate of individualistic,
38
Weber, “Parties,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 198.
39
Max Weber, “Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 28.
40
Weber, “Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 31, 28.
122
voluntary, entrepreneurial activity, but a rather disciplined formal rationality applied to
economic ends. 41
As must be pointed out, Weber did not suggest that the Protestant ethic started
capitalism, rather “it favoured the development of a bourgeois, economically rational
way of life; it was the most important, and above all the only consistent support for the
development of that life. It stood as the cradle of the modern economic man.” 42 As this
quote suggests, Weber claimed for it something more. Modernity itself, characterized by
the triumph of rationalism, was carried forward by this ethic and its religious rationalism.
“One of the fundamental elements of the spirit of modern capitalism, and not only that
but of all modern culture: rational conduct on the basis of the idea of the calling was
born. . .from the spirit of Christian asceticism,” Weber proclaimed. 43 This was a
formidable argument and a somewhat unhappy one. Weber noted that this asceticism was
bound up in our disillusionment because “the direct attempt of the religious ethic to carry
through practically an ethical rationalization of the world,” led directly to
disenchantment. 44 Or, put another way: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are
forced to do so.” 45 The rationalization of the religious calling was a form of constraint
41
Sayer, 96-98.
42
Weber, “Puritanism and the Spirit of Capitalism,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 29.
43
44
Weber, “Intermediate Reflection on the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” in The Essential
Weber, pg., 244.
45
123
and modern life was unavoidably bound up with the loss of a certain type of free
selfhood.
What is key (and sometimes underappreciated) is the significance of Weber’s
notion of “elective affinity” which explained how this religious conviction would
eventually give way to secularization and rationalization as a capitalistic ethic became a
secularized version of the Puritan conscience. For Weber, “elective affinity” was an
account of change and explained the motivational mechanism whereby “A specifically
bourgeois vocational ethic had grown up,” from the seeds of the Puritan conscience. 46
Weber used his concept of elective affinity to illustrate how the transition between
Puritan ethical norms and rudimentary capitalist pursuits was not a self-consciously
directed development, but one of unplanned but fruitful commensurability. “Here also,
with the dying out of the religious root,” Weber stated, “the utilitarian interpretation crept
in unnoticed, in the line of development which we have again and again observed.” 47
Simply put, elective affinity turned ideas into interests. Capitalism was nourished by the
Puritan conscience and was furthered by the interest-situation of the bourgeois strata,
who cultivated a system though their functional roles - “in the case of the bourgeois
stratum, elective affinities with certain types of religiosity do stand out,” as Weber put
it. 48 This notion of change would permeate political sociology making it difficult for
sociologists to envision change as the conscious and willed action of the masses, or as the
46
47
48
Weber, “Introduction to the Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 73.
124
product of thoughtful conviction. It also revealed a disciplinary penchant for describing
forces that acted upon people, rather than through them.
In the end, Weber found that the entrance of the masses into politics did not
change the fundamental constitution of modern politics which was the exercise of
authority and force by elites. Broadened political participation did not fundamentally
change the meaning of politics, but the ways in which, elite-driven political aims could
be legitimated. It was this political sociology that contributed most to the re-evaluation
and eventual marginalization of American democracy. This disciplinary problem about
how to sociologically define modern political legitimacy reached a highpoint in postwar
political analysis as American theorists argued that ethically oriented behavior and
popular political activism were in fact undemocratic, something Weber had noted when
he claimed that “there are similar tendencies displayed by popular democracy on the one
hand and the authoritarian power of theocracy or patriarchal monarchs on the other.” 49
This would be a common postwar trope that was helped along by a sociological
methodology which political theorists used to make “objective,” normative statements
without the appearance of being ideological.
II
Weber’s spell on American intellectuals had a manifold genealogy. While his
influence in the 1940s and 1950s followed the translation of his major works, a number
49
Max Weber, “Formal and Substantive Rationalization,” in The Essential Weber, pg., 254.
125
of American intellectuals studied in Germany after World War One and read Weber’s
works in German. Many of these scholars pursued graduate work at Weber’s university
in Heidelberg, and a significant role in Weber’s posthumous influence can also be traced
to the immigration of prominent German intellectuals fleeing Nazism who found
academic jobs throughout the United States.
Any mention of Weber’s bearing on American intellectuals must therefore
foreground Americans such as Howard Becker and especially Talcott Parsons both of
whom studied in Germany and were instrumental in expounding and expanding Weber’s
methodology in the United States. Among those émirgrés who were familiar with
Weber’s work were Hans Gerth, C .Wright Mills’ professor at the University of
Wisconsin, and Paul Honigsheim, one of Becker’s teachers in Germany and a member of
Weber’s circle in Heidelberg. 50 Those American theorists who were not fluent in German
(especially the younger generation of sociologists who less of a need to study in
Germany) awaited English translations the first of which was Frank H. Knight’s English
rendering of the General Economic History, in 1927, followed by Parsons’ translation of
The Protestant Ethic in 1930. Only after the war, however, did the availability of
Weber’s work in English reach a critical mass with C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth’s
anthology From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946) and the translation Weber’s
Methodology of the Social Sciences (1949) among other translations. 51
50
Joseph Bensman, Arthur J. Vidich, and Nobuko Gerth., eds., Politics, Character and Culture:
Perspectives from Hans Gerth (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), Chapter 16; Jennifer Platt, Weber’s
Verstehen and the History of Qualitative Research: The Missing Link,” in The British Journal of Sociology, Vol 6.
No. 3. (Sep., 1985), pgs., 449-452;
51
Platt, 449-455.
126
Other early American expositors of Weber were Pitirim Sorokin who, in 1931,
established the sociology department at Harvard. Robert K Merton, one of Sorokin’s
students and a colleague of Paul F. Lazarsfeld (who himself established the Bureau of
Applied Social Research at Columbia University), published on Weber’s bureaucratic
and sociological theory. At Columbia too was Robert MacIver, the author of significant
works of social theory that drew upon Weberian insights and who had worked with
Weber scholar Alexander von Schelting, the author of an influential work, Max Webers
Wissenschaftslehre (1934). On the faculty of the New School for Social Research were
Hans Speier, Adolph Lowe, and Albert Salomon all of whom were affiliated with the
University in Exile and its exemplary journal Social Research, which published a number
of early pieces on European social thought, including some devoted to Weber. 52
The political import of Weber’s ideas would really only emerge after the gradual
dissemination of his sociological and economic theories in specialized works. Generally
the early interpreters wrote about Weber in English from the later 1920s onwards, but it
was not until the 1930s that more than a handful of them were active in American
universities. It can safely be said, then, that a number of influential Weberian scholars
were at work in American universities in the decade preceding World War Two.
Salomon, Merton, Becker, and Parsons, writing in specialized journals such as the
American Journal of Sociology, Publications of the American Sociological Society, The
Economic Historical Review, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Journal of
52
Bensman, Vidich, and Nobuko Gerth, Politics, Character and Culture, Chapter 16. Guy Oakes and
Arthur Vidich, Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life: Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pg., 7.
127
Political Sociology, and The Journal of Applied Sociology were among the authors of the
earliest influential American articles on Weber. And while Weber’s influence began to
spread as the articles on, or directly citing him, increased in number and began to appear
in publications with a larger and broader readership, these early articles evoked a number
of important themes that would become representative for American interpreters of
Weber who followed. Among them was an understanding of Weber’s sociological
method which took understanding (verstehen) to mean an instrumental means-end
discussion of motives rather than a phenomenological look at subjective perceptions.
Here, rather than tempering the American penchant for empiricism, Weber’s sociological
theory scientized understanding. Moreover, the early conveyance of Weberian ideas was
filtered through the efforts of those who were actively interested in Weber as a theorist
and an exemplar of German sociology. Thus these early expositors themselves produced
models that were designed to expand upon Weber’s ideas and perhaps influence later
generations of social scientists.
At the leading edge of this early diffusion were ideas concerning class and
stratification, as well as general studies on social causation and economics. In the latter
part of the 1920s and into the 1930s, the concept of “class” (re)emerged as a topic of
interest in American sociology. Works by the ecological school at the University of
Chicago and the community surveys of F. Lloyd Warner, for example, demonstrated an
appreciation of class as an effective unit of sociological analysis. As both an economic
condition and a sociological designate the idea of class was widened to include broad
forms of “stratification” based on education, occupation and other life-circumstances.

128
The enlargement of its scope can be seen, for instance, in Helen Merrell Lynd and Robert
S. Lynds’ second Middletown study of 1937, the publication of John Dollard’s Caste and
Class in a Southern Town (1937) and Herbert Goldhamer and Edward Shils’s “Types of
Power and Status,” (1939). 53 This trend continued such that Harold V. Pfautz, in his
work, “The Current Literature of Social Stratification: Critique and Bibliography,” listed
over three hundred titles devoted to stratification published between 1945 to 1952. When
compared with Hans Gerth’s 1949 bibliography of works devoted to Weber, the
increasing influence of Weber’s ideas in the areas of both stratification studies and
analyses of capitalism is apparent. 54 Particularly important was a 1927 book by Pitirim
Sorokin entitled Social Mobility. Written in a Weberian vein, Sorokin’s analysis helped
expand the bounds of class analysis by way of a detailed look at social stratification.
Sorokin’s work would also presage later sociological analyses in illustrating that
“permanent struggle . . . between the forces of stratification and political leveling
[democracy].” 55 As the great “leveller” democracy was often, according to Sorokin and
to others who would follow, in a persistent and ineffectual conflict with the forces
stratification. In such a schema, democracy came to stand for “sameness” - a vehicle of
political equality as well as the harbinger of a social, intellectual and cultural
53
Hellen Merrell Lynd and Robert S Lynd, Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1937). John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1937). Herbert Goldhamer and Edward Shils, “Types of Power and Status,” in The American Journal of Sociology
45, no. 2 (1939): pgs., 171-182.
54
Hans Gerth and Hedwig Ide Gerth, “Bibliography on Max Weber,” in Social Research 16, no. 1 (1949):
pgs., 70-89. Milton M. Gordon, Social Class in American Sociology (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1958),
pgs., 3-12.
55
Pitirim Sorokin, Social Mobility (New York: Harper and Row, 1927), pg., 94
129
homogenization (read: mindlessness). Sorokin was also the author of an influential
sociological survey, Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928), which contained
expositions of Weber’s ideas within a comprehensive analysis of various sociological
schools and theories.
In the realm of methodology and social causation, Theodore Abel’s Systematic
Sociology in Germany: A Critical Analysis of Some Attempts to Establish Sociology as an
Independent Science (1929) stood out. An innovator in Weber scholarship, Abel came to
the United States from Europe as a graduate student. Systematic Sociology, based on his
dissertation, had chapters devoted to Georg Simmel, Alfred Vierkandt, Leopold von
Wiese and “The ‘verstehende Soziologie’ of Max Weber. This latter chapter was an
excellent early introduction to Weber who, Abel claimed, “has penetrated more deeply
into the methodological problems of the social sciences than any other sociologist in
Germany.” 56 As with Parsons, Abel highlighted the universally applicable features of
Weberian methodology, especially its focus on rationality. In this regard he argued that
for Weber, “social relations are concepts of certain behavior-sequences for which the
probability of their occurrence or reoccurrence under given circumstances exists. All
collective terms then represent merely chances that certain action will be repeated.” 57 As
such, he continued, “verstehen has no phenomenological aspects. He [Weber] takes it in
its simplest sense, to imply that it intends to achieve certain results, and that by
ascertaining the effect which was expected, we are able to understand a particular case of
56
Theodore Abel, Systematic Sociology in Germany; A Critical Analysis of Some Attempts to Establish
Sociology as an Independent Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), pg., 116.
57
Abel, 122.
130
behavior. . . .” 58 Highlighting the Weberian notion of rationality as that congruency
between expected consequence and behavior, Abel asserted that “To Weber
‘understanding’ is just as ‘objective’ as any other form of causal explanation in spite of
its element of subjectivity,” since he “accepts a thoroughgoing regularity in social life
and the possibility of prediction of behavior.” 59 Abel also noted that “irrationality” or
deviance from received norms played little or no role in this schema and Weber’s project
therefore constituted a “nomothetical science” engaged in predictive analysis. 60 Thus
began an American social action theory.
With increasing intensity in the pre-war era, works that addressed the political
and economic import of Weber’s ideas also began to appear. Among the articles
exploring Weber’s ideas in some depth were Frank Knight’s, “Historical and Theoretical
Issues in the Problem of Modern Capitalism,” (1928) Erich Hula’s, “Max Weber, Scholar
and Politician,” (1928) and Heinrich P. Jordan’s, “Some Philosophical Implications of
Max Weber’s Methodology,” (1938) all of which were characteristic in the way they
described Weber as a “liberal in despair” and a preeminent theorist who explored - unlike
Marx - the complex motivations (and plurality of value systems) behind individual action
and within the context of social ordering norms. Interestingly, Heinrich Jordan presented
Weber’s “penetrating analysis” of the heterogeneity of ethical systems as an avenue
58
Abel, 130-131.
59
Abel, 132, 139.
60
Abel, 146.
131
which left open the all-important possibility of human agency in an age of administered
culture. 61
Yet of these early articles the most influential was a tripartite study in the journal
Social Research by Albert Salomon, a social theorist who studied for a PhD at
Heidelberg and took a position at the New School in the 1930s. Published between May
1934 and February 1935, these articles appeared under the titles - “Max Weber’s
Methodology,” “Max Weber’s Sociology,” and “Max Weber’s Political Ideas.” Typical
of many early articles on Weber, Salomon’s pieces served more as introductions to
Weber’s work (and as efforts to distinguish him from Marx) than as critical engagements
with it. All three essays underscored Weber’s existential awareness of the tension
between individual morality and the ineluctable rationalization and bureaucratization of
the world. In “Max Weber’s Methodology,” for instance, Salomon observed that “Weber
repeatedly emphasized the tension between political and ethical decisions. . . the man
who is active in politics must place national ideals and realistic considerations of
statecraft above ethical values.” 62 In “Max Weber’s Sociology” Salomon argued that
Weber’s work “represents the first grand attempt to realize an empirical sociology of the
forms of rationalism and its interacting influences on the emotional and irrational
attitudes of Western man.” 63 Salomon also noted in this piece that Weber’s
61
Erich Hula, “Max Weber, Scholar and Politician,” in Contemporary Review 134, (1928): pgs., 478-483.
Heinrich P. Jordan, “Some Philosophical Implications of Max Weber’s Methodology,” in Ethics 48, (1938): pgs.,
221-231. Frank Knight, “Historical and Theoretical Issues in the Problem of Modern Capitalism,” in The Journal of
Economic and Business History 1, (1928): pgs., 110-135.
62
Albert Salomon, “Max Weber’s Methodology,” in Social Research 1, no. 2 (1934): pg., 165.
63
Albert Salomon, “Max Weber’s Sociology,” in Social Research 2, no. 1 (1935): pg., 71.
132
methodological individualism was such that Weber “operates entirely without the
concept of society.” 64
“Max Weber’s Political Ideas,” drawing from the ideas of the first two articles,
described Weber’s politics in light of this sociological perspective and found a
fundamental struggle that revolved around the preservation of inner autonomy and
personality. Salomon wrote, “For Weber the human individual took on greatness and
worth only in so far as he was able by conscious decisions to preserve his personality
amidst the irrationality of the world and amidst the struggle between the forces and
demons of the order of life.” 65 Furthermore, Salomon claimed, Weber, unlike Marx,
refused to speculate about the ultimate meaning of history precisely because “the
historical process has no apparent objective meaning and one can speak of progress only
in a technical sense or from the point of subjective values.” 66 In light of this “deep
irrationality” and dizzying plurality in the historical process, Salomon noted how Weber
recognized that the “exercise of political power is the most perfect school for
disillusionment.” 67 Politicians should scale back their ambitions in acknowledgment of
the apparent meaninglessness of the world. “For both Weber and Marx the existential
point of departure for their scientific interests was a finite idea of man,” he wrote. 68 Yet,
unlike Marx the utopian, “Max Weber’s political thought was that of a Machiavelli or a
64
Salomon, “Max Weber’s Sociology,” pg., 68.
65
Albert Salomon, “Max Weber’s Political Ideas,” in Social Research 2, no. 3 (1935): pg., 379.
66
Salomon, “Max Weber’s Political Ideas,” pgs., 376.
67
Salomon, “Max Weber’s Political Ideas,” pg., 371.
68
133
Tocqueville. It was that of a practical statesman, faced with concrete tasks in concrete
situations. . . .” 69 Weber’s realism (a “negative theology of history”), as both an
existential willingness to confront fate and as a method to delineate the options available
in a world without apparent progress, fairly jump off the pages of Salomon’s article. 70
Any discussion of Max Weber’s influence in 1930s America, however, must
center on the sociologist Talcott Parsons who published a 1930 translation of The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and whose work The Structure of Social
Action (1937) introduced American audiences to Weber’s thought in the general context
of European social theory. Parsons’s dissemination of Weber’s ideas in America was
remarkable, as one can discern from the many subsequent scholars who mined his
translations and who were first introduced to Weber through the four chapters dedicated
to his ideas in The Structure of Social Action. As Weber’s advocate and translator, and as
a teacher (Robert Merton was one of his students) and founder of the Department of
Social Relations in 1946 at Harvard, Parsons served as the prism through which many
American intellectuals came to first read and interpret Weber’s basic claims. Parsons
introduced Weber as a theorist who offered a complex criticism of traditional economics
and who laid the theoretical groundwork for a sociology relevant for the modern,
rationalized world.
69
70
134
In a two-part essay entitled “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature,” (1928
and 1929) Parsons offered a perceptive analysis of Weberian ideas in relation to the role
of rationalism in modernity. “The common characteristic of all the principal features of
modern society, noneconomic as well as economic, Weber sees in their peculiar type of
rationality,” Parsons argued. “Its principal institutions belong to his general type of
‘rational organization,’ or what he calls in a special sense ‘bureaucracy.’” 71 Hence Weber
claimed that capitalism flourished not because of some psychological greediness at work
on people. Rather, “It is the objective system to which the individual must conform if he
wants to do business at all,” that determined capitalistic behavior. 72 So conceived,
capitalism “spread. . .primarily upon its purely technical superiority . . Capitalism is, one
may say, simply bureaucratic organization placed in the service of pecuniary profit.” 73
The idea that Weber offered an alternative to the Anglo-American story of capitalist
development as the embodiment of progress and individualism was a clear theme in
many of Parsons’ works. The fact that Weber explored “the ‘sociology of ‘economic’
life” and burst the confines of traditional economic analysis by emphasizing the
“compulsive disciplinary side of the modern economic order,” made his project most
important for the modern age. 74 In the effort to understand this economic rationality as
instrumentality, Parsons illustrated how Weber made use of a number of innovations such
71
Talcott Parsons, “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber (Concluded),” in The
Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Feb., 1929), pg., 37.
72
Parsons, “‘Capitalism’ in Recent German Literature: Sombart and Weber (Concluded),” pg., 35.
73
74
Talcott Parsons, “‘Sociological Elements in Economic Thought: II. The Analytical Factor View ^1,” in
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 49, No. 4 (Aug., 1935), pg., 654, 655..
135
as the ideal-type which is “based upon the perfectly rational adaptation of means to given
ends (what he calls zweckrational). . . It makes no assumption as to the actual relative
importance of the rational elements in social life.” 75 On this latter point Parsons offered
an excellent criticism of Weber’s penchant for claiming his ideal-types to be pure
abstraction only to explicitly identify them “with historical reality” and to deduce from
them “very important consequences.” 76
Parsons further developed these themes in the postwar era in an excellent book
chapter for An Introduction to the History of Sociology (1948) by Harry Elmer Barnes.
Here he lauded Weber’s theoretical sophistication which ate away at the “naïve”
empiricism (and historicism) of social science and, thanks to such innovations as ideal
types, provided a frame of analysis that illustrated a “normative pattern which may be
considered binding on the actors.” 77 This was a novel approach that freed social theory to
offer more ambitious generalizations and conclusions about human action. As Parsons
said, “once this empiricism is abandoned, the harmfulness of systematic theory to the
legitimate interests of social science disappears.” 78 Thus Weber’s “profound
methodological insight” was really the beginning of a social action theory freed from
fact. Noting that now “it had become essential to pay attention to questions of systematic
generalized theory,” Parsons argued one had to look - in the abstract - at the disciplinary
75
76
77
Talcott Parsons, “Max Weber’s Sociological Analysis of Capitalism and Modern Institutions,” in An
Introduction to the History of Sociology ed., Harry Elmer Barnes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948),
291.
78
Talcott Parsons, “Max Weber’s Sociological Analysis of Capitalism and Modern Institutions,” pg., 292.
136
conventions offered up by a social system, rather than the substantive aims of people’s
actions. 79 “Action is not oriented merely toward specific goals,” he admitted, “but also in
social systems to an order which defines, within certain limits, the conditions under
which goals may be pursued.” 80 Weber’s methodology was thus a victory for the
legitimate generalization of social behavior based on a means-end rationality that
operated on individuals, rather than through them.
Of the prewar works devoted to Weberian analysis, The Structure of Social Action
was the most influential. The subtitle of Structure was “A Study in Social Theory with
Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers” and while Vilfredo Pareto,
Emile Durkheim, Alfred Marshall and Max Weber served as the European subjects of
Parsons’s inquiry, Weber clearly stood at the conceptual center of the work. Parsons
chose these figures to highlight a new stage in the development of sociological theory
“the outline of what in all essentials, is the same system of generalized social theory, the
structural aspect of what has been called the voluntaristic theory of action.” 81 By
isolating and developing this “voluntaristic theory of action,” Parsons was able to explain
how individual action was not determined by, but voluntarily upheld its social
conventions. Parsons did so by sketching a “structural-functional” theory of society
which depicted social life as a system that ensured social stability. Thanks to a form of
value integration - a cluster of common values which bid individuals to maintain the
79
80
81
Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action; A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a
Group of Recent European Writers (1937; Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949), pgs., 719-720.
137
prevailing social order - Parsons depicted society as sustained by a similar type of
functionally oriented Weltanschauung that Weber described as the Protestant Ethic. 82
And, by depicting how individuals shared a system of integrated values that served to
orient action and not command it, Parsons, much like Weber, preserved the subjectivity
of human action within a larger canvas of social necessitation. Parsons conceived this as
a necessary corrective to both the utilitarian notion of society as the aggregate of
pleasure-maximizing, isolated individuals and the prevailing forms of behaviorism.
The attempt to explain individual volition as a constitutive part of both an
individual’s character and the sustenance of the social structure would remain as a
persistent theme in Parsons’s work as it was for Weber. Using the notion of Verstehen,
Weber oriented much of his sociological investigations around an attempt to describe that
complicated harmony between one’s interests (volition) and the legitimacy of authority.
And so it was for Parsons as well. Even as he incorporated more from the realm of
psychology in his later works, Parsons was equally explicit about his objection to all
forms of strict materialist determinism as well as the socio-historical forms of social
analysis then popular. The consistent effect of this oeuvre, however, was to describe
democracy as a function of a larger, more fundamental system.
82
Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 250-264, 398-408.
138
Parsons was closely followed, early on, by Robert Merton, who in articles such as
“Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” (1940) explained how the bureaucrat came to
internalize his role such that “the social structure . . . conduce[s] toward ‘the
transformation of motives.’” Merton claimed, “Adherence to the rules, originally
conceived as a means, becomes transformed as an end-in-itself; there occurs the familiar
process of displacement of goals whereby ‘an instrumental value becomes a terminal
value.” 83 Both Merton and Parsons shared Weber’s understanding of the inescapable
pressures modern rationalistic and bureaucratic society exerted on individual behavior -
as well as that form of discursive analysis which blended the normative and descriptive.
For Parsons this expressed itself in The Structure of Social Action as a concern with the
coalescing of individual interest (individual ends) and legitimacy (social norms) via a a
elective affinity. “The two elements of interest and legitimacy are interwoven in a
complex way. The fact an order is legitimate in the eyes of a large proportion of the
community makes it ipso facto an element of the Interessenlage of any one individual,
whether he himself holds it to be legitimate or not.” 84 Clearly this theory of action did not
constitute a psycho-social explanation of aberrance, but a Weberian way to reconcile
freedom, order and equilibrium.
III
83
Robert K. Merton, “Bureaucratic Structure and Personality,” Social Forces 18, no. 4 (1940): pg., 563.
84
Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, pg., 652.
139
By the 1940s then, a small but influential and theoretically ambitious coterie of
American academics, familiar with Weber’s work in German, established an American
reading of Weber that accepted the inevitability of bureaucratization (and instrumental
rationality), the methodological soundness of the separation of fact and value, and the
related problem of adapting politics to a “disenchanted” world. What remained was to
posit a connection between these ideas and the evidence of political crisis illustrated by
the rise National Socialism.
Here again, Parsons loomed large. In a set of articles for the Review of Politics in
1942, Parsons wrote with a representative sense of urgency - “We are living in a time
when men most urgently feel the need of intellectual clarification of the social and
political situation in which they stand.” 85 So began his two part analysis entitled, “Max
Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis.” Clarion calls for the (re)definition of
political categories including those of liberal-democracy were now beginning to appear.
For Parsons, as for a number of others, what this entailed was an analysis of political
legitimacy. Foremost among the questions asked in this regard was how authority itself
was to be legitimated, and the starting point was often Max Weber. After an illustration
of Weber’s three modes of authority, whose relevance is foremost “in the nature of the
claim to legitimacy,” Parsons went on to analyze the specific problems of politics in the
West. According to Parsons, politics in the West was dominated by rational-bureaucratic
systems (the legal-rational type in Weber’s triptych) which co-exists in tension with other
political conditions, such as democracy. The problem, Parsons claimed, is that “these
85
Talcott Parsons, “Part I - Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis,” in The Review of Politics 4
140
various elements of malintegration” have led to political changes in the system such that
“charismatic” or “traditional” forms of authority have increasingly been favored. 86
Contributing to this “malintegration” was the fact that leaders must, at once, be subject to
the people and to impersonal, functionally-specific and universalistic standards of office.
This latter commitment to rationalization, Parsons claimed, created generalized
“insecurity” and “anxiety” in which “charismatic movements of various sorts seem to
function. . . as mechanisms of ‘reintegration’ which give large numbers of disorganized
insecure people, a definite orientation, give ‘meaning to their lives.’” 87 Using the
example of the party boss who must be accountable to his constituents, Parsons claimed
that there is a great deal of “evidence available to show that modern western society
provides particularly fruitful soil for this [transition to the charismatic type] kind of
development.” 88
Using Weber, Parsons had established how the inevitable bureaucratization at
work in modern legal-rational societies served to homogenize differences among
individuals and ossify public projects and institutions as well as to generate dangerous
charismatic countervailing tendencies. Going further than the more speculative
conclusions in Part I, however, Parsons used Weber, in Part II, to formulate a classic
postwar argument about democracy as the locus of the “mass” with totalitarian potential.
Instead of democracy being a counterpoint to bureaucratic-rationalism, the democratic
no.1 (1942): pg., 61.

86
Parsons, “Part I - Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis,” pg., 73
87
Parsons, “Part I - Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis,” pg., 76.
88
Parsons, “Part I - Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis,” pg., 75.
141
public itself, came to “constitute a relatively undifferentiated mass, without fixed status
or loyalties.” 89 That is, democracy came to replicate bureaucratic norms. This mode of
argumentation would become a familiar one: first, he claimed “an inherent connection
between a legal-rational system of authority and democracy”; then, positing, as did
Weber, that bureaucracy is the defining feature of the legal-rational system, he claimed
that bureaucracy inhered toward a “levelling” of social, cultural and political distinctions.
Ultimately what these changes foretold was a “massification” including a “shift in the
basis of appeal from that which is ordinarily thought of as democratic, in a charismatic
direction.”31 The problems for democratic politics were now clear - a mass without
independent moral, intellectual or ethical volition was vulnerable to demagogic appeals.
Under these circumstances, Parsons claimed, legitimation is not generated “by
incorporating the preferences of the electorate, but by their [the public’s] ‘recognition’ of
the rightness of his [the leader’s] position.”32 Real-world evidence for this highly
theoretical argument was at hand in the demagogic or plebiscitary appeals made by the
Nazis who served to legitimate their position as the only “right” political option.
“Hitler’s use of the plebiscite to legitimize so many of his decisive steps of policy,”
Parsons wrote, “ fits admirably into Weber’s analysis.”33 How one was to distinguish a
plebiscite from a legitimate (majoritarian) vote, however, remained opaque.
89
Parsons, “Part II - Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis,” in The Review of Politics 4 no. 2
(1942): pg., 155.
31
Parsons, “Part II - Max Weber and the Contemporary Political Crisis,” pg., 157.
32
33
142
It is remarkable how many of the era’s works devoted to political criticism
resembled this approach. Beginning with a commonly accepted or idealized definition of
liberal-democracy, the authors often proceeded to undermine it with examples of wartime
authoritarianism, all the while searching for normative and chastened ways to describe,
justify, and explain what liberal-democracy might still be in light of that evidence. For
many, Weberian social theory provided the methodological assurance to make such
claims.
IV
The postwar period was an era of Weber translations. Frank Knight’s 1927
translation of Weber’s General Economic History (based on student transcriptions) and
Parsons’s translation of the Protestant Ethic were extant, and they were supplemented
over the course of the 1940s and the 1950s, with a number of important English versions
Weber’s works. Chief among these was Mills and Gerth’s From Max Weber (1946).34
Their thirteen year collaboration produced, among other works, this translation as well as
34
Chapter one of Guy Oakes and Arthur Vidich’s, Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American
Academic Life: Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, offers an interesting description of the “Shils Affair.” In the fall of
1944, Edward A. Shils was preparing his own volume of Weber translations for the International Library of
Sociology. While at work on this volume, he came across the translation of Weber’s “Class, Status, Party,” in
politics in 1944, and, much to his chagrin, the notice at the end of the magazine announcing that Oxford University
Press would bring out a volume of Weber translations by Gerth and Mills in the spring of 1945. This prompted a
series of increasingly unfriendly volleys between Gerth and Shils. This competition was complicated by the fact
that Shils had been instrumental in helping Gerth to establish himself as an academic in the United States -
including helping him publish his first American piece - a Weberian look at the Nazi party entitled “The Nazi Party:
Its Leadership and Composition,” in The American Journal of Sociology (1940). While Shils was blamed for
undertaking his project in such secrecy, Gerth and Mills thought it best to do the same as they rushed to publication.
Oakes and Vidich present Mills here as the intemperate if shrewd academic who, among other things, pressed the
mild-mannered Gerth into adopting a more adversarial stance.
143
Character and Social Structure (1953) one of the first sociology textbooks based on
Weberian themes. Yet it was the influence of From Max Weber that served to introduce
many American readers to Weber’s lesser known sociological essays. “Politics as a
Vocation,” “Science as a Vocation,” excerpts from Economy and Society illustrating the
evolution and substance of bureaucratic power, and Weber’s writings on the “social
psychology” of the world’s religions, all appeared between its covers. This turned out to
be a standard reference used by sociologists, historians and others in their analyses of
American political culture. Weber’s ideas also achieved wider exposure in the 1940s and
1950s thanks to a number of intellectuals, who, drawing upon such recent translations,
began to write in broad circulation magazines and to publish books of considerable
popular and scholarly significance. A number of important articles in both Partisan
Review and politics, for example, circulated Weber’s ideas among anti-Stalinist left
intellectuals who found themselves reassessing Marxism, capitalism, democracy and
other forms of political and economic commitment in light of both world events and
Weber’s theories.
Both politics and the Partisan Review emerged in the 1940s, as representative
journals of left-of-center political opinion as well as exemplars of the intellectual
de-radicalization that we have come to associate with the immediate postwar period.
Political critique, in both publications, ceded pride of place to disaffected cultural
commentary, often taking the form of a censorious critique of mass culture. Associated
with this trend was a fatalistic skepticism about politics which assumed its inability to
represent a morally meaningful view of the world and its impotence as a force of real
144
change. For many, this position directly corresponded to Weber’s view that individual
moral claims were the only sanctuary against the inevitable bureaucratization and
rationalization of the world which itself had engulfed the world of politics. The Weberian
repudiation of democratic political engagement among intellectuals in the immediate
postwar period was something more than the familiar story of intellectuals choosing the
West in the early Cold War confrontation of capitalism and Stalinism; it was a retreat
from political commitments altogether.
Thanks in large part to C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth, politics magazine
became the site of a series of provocative discussions concerning Weber’s ideas. Weber
defined a set of problems and framed a theory for handling them such that he set the
conceptual agenda for many subsequent politics editorials. As Gregory Sumner notes in
Dwight Macdonald and the politics Circle (1996), Weber’s “dark evaluation of
modernity” proved so attractive to many in the politics circle that he “merits
consideration” as one of the magazine’s “full-fledged ‘ancestor[s].’”35 Gerth and Mills
were instrumental in Weber’s American dissemination and an early gambit in this regard
was a prophetic article by Mills in the April 1944 issue entitled, “The Powerless People:
The Role of the Intellectual in Society.” Written during the period he was collaborating
with Gerth on From Max Weber, this piece was a Weberian analysis of the tragedy
confronting intellectuals in the modern age.36 Facing a modern, bureaucratized and
35
Gregory D. Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the politics Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1996), pg., 115.
36
The first product of their collaboration was a Weberian appraisal of James Burnham’s The Managerial
Revolution, entitled “A Marx for the Managers” in Ethics 52, no. 2 (1942): 200-215. Gerth and Mills criticized
Burnham’s “assumption that the technical indispensability of certain functions in a social structure are taken ipso
145
rationalized world increasingly impervious to their influence, Mills argued that
intellectuals must at once acknowledge the paradox of their social position without letting
nihilism set in. To do this, Mills claimed, intellectuals must not let “understanding” serve
as a substitute for action and, most importantly, they must scale down their political
ambitions and develop realistic goals.
“If he is to think politically in a realistic way,” Mills wrote, “the intellectual must
constantly know his own social position.”37 This understanding of one’s social role must
include the observation that between the intellectual and the public stands a bureaucratic
world hostile to radical reform. This sense of powerlessness grounded in the knowledge
of inconsequentiality, Mills argued, is one in which “the political failure of nerve has a
personal counterpart in the development of a tragic sense of life.”38 Akin to Weber’s
discussion of the “ethic of ultimate ends” and the “ethic of responsibility,” Mills
suggested that the avoidance of a messianic political culture or complete alienation,
began with a recognition of the “iron cage” we all inhabit and an understanding that
reform will target this shared reality and not represent a personal moral worldview.
Mills referred to this sagacity as “responsibility.” “Any philosophy which is sensitive to
the meaning of various societies for personal ways of life,” Mills claimed, “will give the
facto as a prospective claim for political power.” Highlighting the variety of social, political and economic groups
who must compete - in various ways - for “a grab and hold of power,” Gerth and Mills suggested that Burnham’s
framework (what they termed his “short-cut”) established “too automatic an agreement between the social economic
order and political movements.” pgs., 203-204.
37
C. Wright Mills, “The Powerless People: The Role of the Intellectual in Society,” in Politics 1, no. 3
(1944): pg., 72.
38
Mills, “The Powerless People,” pg., 69.
146
idea of responsibility a central place. That is why it is central in the ethic and politics of
John Dewey and of the late German sociologist Max Weber.”39
Mills followed this article with a translation of a passage from Weber’s Economy
and Society entitled “Class, Status, Party.” A collaborative effort with Hans Gerth which
also found its way into From Max Weber, the eight page selection appeared in politics in
October 1944. It began with a preamble introducing Weber’s life and work to an
audience who may not have been familiar with its details. Affirming a description of
Weber as the “Marx of the bourgeoisie,” Gerth and Mills described Weber as “deeply
concerned with man’s freedom” and a thinker whose predictive capacities exceeded those
of Marx.40 While they mentioned his striking prediction of bureaucratic socialism for
Russia during the first phase of the Russian Revolution, they also noted that Weber
forecast the same fate for capitalism and politics in legal-rational societies. This
hyper-rationalized and bureaucratized state, they informed readers, would be one in
which “the pursuit of personal freedom become[s] private. . . .”41 And, they continued,
since the pursuit of one’s individual life ethic was removed from political life, Weber
assumed that political leaders ought to be efficient administrators rather than ethical
moralists. Weber began “as a monarchist,” they wrote, “. . . [and] ended as a sceptical
39
Mills, “The Powerless People,” pg., 70.
40
C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth, “Class, Status, Party,” in Politics 1, no. 9 (1944): pg., 271.
41
Mills and Gerth, “Class, Status, Party,” pg., 272.
147
liberal for whom democracy was a mere technique for selecting efficient political
leaders.”42
The selection itself was a passage describing the rationalistic process behind the
creation of bureaucracy and the differences, similarities and interconnections among
conceptions of status, class and political parties. The concept of status would loom large
in American sociological analyses, but what is of particular importance was the exchange
this piece generated concerning Weber’s limited democratic commitments. One such
response was Meyer Schapiro’s “A Note on Max Weber’s Politics,” which appeared in
February 1945. Drawing from Mills and Gerth’s introduction, Schapiro argued that
Weber combined an understanding of the bureaucratic rationalization of life, with an
antidemocratic and antisocialist politics. In suggesting that Weber’s defense of individual
freedom was eventually eclipsed by his political theory (which, in the end, offered an
explicit endorsement of German power politics), Schapiro illustrated how Weber
abandoned liberalism by claiming freedom as a personal not a public responsibility.
Weber’s belief that elections were merely mechanisms designed to choose between
political leaders who could, in the end, rise above politics, suggested to Schapiro that for
Weber, the power of the state became the only justification for political behavior. Yet,
Schapiro’s critical reading of Weber did not deviate from the essentials of Mills and
Gerth’s interpretation. All assumed (in agreement with Weber) that the rationalization or
“disenchantment” of the world was the inevitable issue of the age, even if, as Schapiro
wrote, “[Weber] failed to perceive how deeply incompatible were his personal values and
42
Mills and Gerth, “Class, Status, Party,” pg., 271.
148
his more ultimate social or national ones.”43 Surely, Schapiro noted, Weber’s claim that
one ought to carve out “a breathing space of private existence” separate from politics and
the everyday world was an admission of defeat.44 Indeed, for Mills, his own radical
reading argued that politics could indeed become effective as a leaven for the
bureaucratized collectivity.
For the better part of American intellectuals though, Weber explained the tensions
facing an intellectual in the modern world without ever articulating a sociology of
political deviance or explaining how leaders acquired (and retained) assent from the
masses in a democracy. For many radical intellectuals, reconciling Marx’s historical
teleology with the increasing evidence that the tragedy of modern existence was
achieving a certain permanence, proved too difficult and they abandoned radicalism in
full. Most often this was articulated as repudiation of the ameliorative possibilities of
political action and a willingness to retreat to the pristine moral vision (“ethic of ultimate
ends”) of the sovereign individual. This was the thrust behind politics articles like
“Socialism in Extremis,” by D.S. Savage (January 1945), and Will Herberg’s
“Personalism against Totalitarianism,” (December 1945), which coupled Weberian
observations about the bureaucratization of socialism with arguments that otherworldly
religious faith represented the only way to rehabilitate moral values. Here was the nexus
at which an abandonment of political criticism (and potential political solutions), became
a de-radicalized debate centered around an agreement that the only way to a
43
Meyer Schapiro, “A Note on Max Weber’s Politics” in Politics 2, no. 2 (1945): pg., 48.
44
Schapiro, pg., 45.
149
cosmopolitan humanism was to transcend the bureaucratic regimentation of the shared
world, in favor of the moral (e.g., religious) haven distilled in the conscience of the
solitary individual.
Perhaps the most revealing example of this trend was a long, two part article by
Dwight Macdonald entitled “The Root is Man” (April, July 1946). This contribution to
the “New Roads in Politics” series, marked the abandonment of the admittedly tiresome
and outworn Marxist assumptions that had grounded radical reform in politics. Writers in
the “New Roads in Politics” series attempted to develop a new political vocabulary for
radical political criticism and increasingly this meant a refuge in the morality of
individual action and the abandonment of a meaningful public sphere. The depth of
questioning involved in the pursuit to re-define political legitimacy was immediately
clear. Macdonald opened the second part of “The Root is Man” with an earnest
admission: “Questions which formerly seemed to me either closed or meaningless are
now beginning to appear open and significant. Such questions are those of Determinism
v. Free Will, Materialism V. Idealism, the concept of progress, the basis of making value
judgements. . . .”45 While the conceptual doors were thrown wide open, Macdonald
later noted that “What seems to the ‘New Roads’ writers the most important problem. . .
[was] how to relate their political values to an ethical basis.”46 Here, Weberian themes
slowly prevailed over Marxist ones. Weber’s ideas helped at once to explain and help kill
the notion of progress and therefore the “objective grounding” of political ethics that so
45
Dwight Macdonald, “The Root is Man: Part Two,” in Politics 3, no. 6 (1946): pg., 194.
46
Macdonald, “Reply by the Editor,” in Politics 3, no. 6 (1946): pg., 140.
150
distinguished Marxism. In Marxist analysis, all ethical and political action was to be
judged against the barometer of the ideal of progress, but against the evidence of
increasing disenchantment, “Marx’s ethical aims are now in ashes.”47 All that was left
was to “first reject the magnificent system which Marx elaborated on its [progress’]
basis” and originate a whole new system based on Weberian realism.48
“Technological progress, the organization from the top of human life (what Max
Weber calls ‘rationalization’), the overconfidence of the past two centuries in scientific
method,” Macdonald wrote in the second instalment of “The Root is Man,” “these have
led us, literally, into a dead end . . . We must emphasize the emotions, the imagination,
the moral feelings, the primacy of the individual human being once more.”49 Such was
the thrust of his reconstruction: that confronted with the onward march of rationalization,
bureaucratization and the totalitarian menace, the more each individual must retreat to a
sacrosanct private realm. For Macdonald this had clear political implications. The
increasing disenchantment of life, what Macdonald called “The Third Alternative of
Bureaucratic Collectivism,” had revealed not only the shortcomings of Marxism but that
political debate had become ineffective as a tool for reform. In what would become a
familiar refrain, Macdonald claimed that the political labels of “left” and “right” were
outmoded as viable alternatives in a bureaucratic world. “This great dividing line has
become increasingly nebulous with the rise of Nazism and Stalinism, both of which
47
Macdonald, “The Root is Man: Part I,” in Politics 3, no. 4 (1946): pg., 104.
48
Macdonald, “The Root is Man: Part I,” pg., 105.
49
Macdonald, “The Root is Man: Part Two,” in Politics 3, no. 6 (1946): pg., 214.
151
combine left and right elements in a bewildering way,” Macdonald wrote in a passage
with the appropriate subtitle “We Need a New Political Vocabulary.”50 Most of all,
reform itself, premised as it was on moral action, was in jeopardy because of the need to
isolate politics from ethics. Marxism, after all, had dangerously attempted a political
reconciliation “between scientific method and value judgements.”51 Macdonald urged,
therefore, that ethical considerations ought to orient our individual actions, not our
political ones.52
Therefore, in his own contribution to the series, Macdonald rejected the
prevailing optimism of the left and even, eventually, relinquished hope for more modest
criticisms of the status quo. In the end, Macdonald maintained a Weberian distinction
that assumed the inevitability of “disenchantment” and the problematic co-existence of
rationality and moral value as the essential challenges of modern politics - specifically
modern liberalism. Because politics was not able to justify moral action, Macdonald
wrote, “one thing seems to follow: we must reduce political action to a modest,
unpretentious, personal level - one that is real in the sense that it satisfies, here and now,
the psychological needs and the ethical values of the particular persons taking part in
50
Macdonald, “The Root is Man: Part I,” in Politics 3, no. 4 (1946): pg., 99.
51
Macdonald, “The Root is Man: Part Two,” in Politics 3, no. 6 (1946): pg., 210.
52
Macdonald was clear in his assertion that while values ought to orient individual action they ought not to
determine it by means of a “complete” or panoptic system. Rather, they should be flexible and dialectic enough such
that they might negotiate the contradictions, arbitrariness and subjectivity of a life well-led. In a foreshadowing of
Riesman’s famous use of the term, Macdonald used “gyroscope” to describe the “model” worth emulating in this
regard. Macdonald, “The Root is Man: Part Two,” pg., 197. See also, David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel
Denney, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950).
152
it.”53 The implication of this shift in Macdonald’s thought was profound. Macdonald,
along with Philip Rahv and William Phillips, founded the Partisan Review, but in 1944,
he resigned as editor in protest over the magazine’s uncritical acceptance of Allied war
aims. He then launched politics, and, since he was its founding editor, main contributor,
and its resourceful publisher, the magazine served primarily as his mouthpiece.54 In such
a role, Macdonald established himself as a tenacious radical who refused to subscribe to
any orthodoxy of thought or criticism. Eventually, however, even politics would follow
the path of the Partisan Review and adopt a form of alienated cultural criticism which
signaled a loss of confidence in the redemptive possibilities of political debate or the
force of the classical democratic ideal.
This series and the responses it generated occupied a substantial amount of space
in the years leading up to the magazine’s demise in 1949. Many noticed the “abstract
quality” of the discussion and Macdonald himself gravely noted the highly philosophical
and “rarefied atmosphere of the magazine of late.”55 Still, the search for new political
legitimations needed to be done. As Macdonald wrote, “For the only way one can rethink
one’s basic [political] assumptions is to meet the issue on its own ground, which is an
abstract, theoretical and even somewhat metaphysical one.”56 And yet, while some
deplored Macdonald’s de-radicalization and others applauded his understanding of the
53
Macdonald, “The Root is Man: Part Two,” pg., 209.
54
Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press,
1985), pgs., 20-26.
55
David T. Bazelon, “”New Roads and Old Footpaths,” in Politics 3, no. 6 (1946): pg., 184. Macdonald,
“Reply by the Editor,” pg., 141.
56
Macdonald, “Reply by the Editor,” pg., 141.
153
modern world, all the responses seemed to signal a shift in emphasis. Even a critic such
as Don Calhoun, a frequent contributor to politics, did not propose a rehabilitation of
politics or progress, but took Macdonald’s fundamental premises for granted - the
inevitability of the bureaucratic alternative and the gulf between politics and the world of
individual morality - to criticize Macdonald for his abandonment of science as a way to
mitigate America’s social ills. It is also clear that Macdonald did not completely abandon
his critical spirit, rather he continued to wrestle with the separation between “private
values and political action.” In subsequent articles he admitted the intractability of the
dilemma. The gulf between private ethics and political action is a problem that “has been
an agonizing one among philosophers . . .it bothered Max Weber, whose subtle analysis
of the question, in his ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ I have just been reading,” Macdonald
wrote in late 1946 in an article criticizing Partisan Review.57 While critical of the
Partisan Review’s political realism, he concluded - “I must grant one point to the PR
[Partisan Review] realpolitikers: no one so far, from Plato to Weber, has succeeded in
finding a satisfactory answer to the problem.”58
Such an understanding of Weber had achieved conspicuous prominence with
Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942). A German
immigrant who was trained as an economist, Schumpeter was familiar with Weber’s
writings when he wrote this treatise illustrating how capitalism’s very successes were
creating inhospitable sociological conditions for its continued prosperity. Specifically,
57
Dwight Macdonald, “‘Partisan Review’ and ‘Politics,’” in Politics 3, no. 12 (1946): pg., 402
58
Dwight Macdonald, “‘Partisan Review’ and ‘Politics,’” pg., 402
154
the bureaucratization of capitalism (of which the routinization of technological and
scientific progress played a large role) was destroying the entrepreneurial ethos - the
spirit of capitalism. “Since capitalist enterprise, by its very achievements tends to
automatize progress,” Schumpeter wrote, “we conclude that it tends to make itself
superfluous - to break to pieces under the pressure of its own success. The perfectly
bureaucratized giant industrial unit not only ousts the small or medium-sized firm and
‘expropriates’ its owners, but in the end it also ousts the entrepreneur and expropriates
the bourgeoisie.”59 Socialism would eventually succeed this bureaucratized capitalism,
but for Schumpeter this was more a sociological phenomenon than a strictly materialist
one. Max Weber’s discussion of bureaucracy as the product of capitalism’s maturity (the
secularization of its Protestant ethic) was a clear influence on this argument.
Yet Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy also exemplified how Weber’s
sociology had a lasting political dimension of considerable influence. While Weber’s
discussion of charismatic leadership has been passionately debated, leading some
scholars to identify a “Caesarist” element in his thought, what is clear is that Weber
considered the masses to be politically submissive. Bureaucracy had created a large
group of citizens who were unprepared to serve their democratic function since they
could only reproduce the norms of their functional roles. Furthermore, because politics
was not the arena to debate moral ends but to acclaim “responsible” statecraft, Weber
questioned the value of popular political participation. For Schumpeter as well, popular
political participation within a democracy (voting) was merely a means to authorize
59
Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942; New York: Harper Torchbooks,
155
governments, not a mechanism to debate different sets of moral ends. Democracy was
about sanctioned process. He famously claimed that the “democratic method is that
institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire
the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”60 For both
Schumpeter and Weber, power within a democracy was dominated by a coterie of elites
who competed for the votes that entitled them to rule. Participation then was not valued
as intrinsically worthwhile, nor was it the means by which society debated its higher
purpose. This was democracy without a moral dimension; one that registered the people’s
evaluations of leaders, not what they wished to achieve.
Schumpeter’s postwar influence was profound as he came to serve as an
intellectual mentor for those who espoused a form of “equilibrium” or “pluralist-elite”
model of democracy including, Robert Dahl, Anthony Downs, William Kornhauser,
Bernard Berelson and Seymour Martin Lipset. Anthony Downs, for example, in his
well-received work - An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) - described how
democracy amounted to the competition for votes among sovereign political parties and
claimed, “Schumpeter’s profound analysis of democracy forms the inspiration and
foundation for our whole thesis, and our debt and gratitude to him are great indeed.”61
The social component of democratic participation, according to Downs, resided almost
exclusively in the vote and while his democratic model was oriented around the
competition for the vote among elites, this competition was also stabilized as parties
1950), pg., 134.

60
Schumpeter, pg., 269
156
tended to converge around a sensible and managed middle of popular office-seeking.
Downs claimed, “Our model is based on the assumption that every government seeks to
maximize political support. We further assume that the government exists in a democratic
society where periodic elections are held, that its primary goal is reelection, and that
election is the goal of those parties out of power”62 The voters then choose among these
parties that “formulate policies in order to win elections” and, by extension, parties do
not represent social groups nor do they articulate social issues, rather, “they are
autonomous teams seeking office per se and us[e] group support to attain that end.”63
Gabriel Almond provided a similar model though with a comparative and
internationalist focus. Almond was himself a well-respected political theorist influenced
by a wide range of European social theory and he also served as chairman of the
Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from
the mid-1950 to the early 1960s. In well-received essay, “Comparative Political
Systems,” in The Journal of Politics (1956), Almond argued that a new conceptual
scheme was needed for a coherent comparative approach to Western political systems.
His use of the term “systems” was a deliberate one: “In contrast to process, the concept
of system implies a totality of relevant units, an interdependence between the interactions
of units, and a certain stability in the interaction of these units (perhaps best described as
61
Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), pg., 29.
62
Downs, pg., 11.
63
Downs, pgs., 11, 97.
157
a changing equilibrium).”64 Thus the term “systems” satisfied a desire to describe
inter-functioning stability. Other terms of note for Almond were “action,” which
suggested “that the description of a political system can never be satisfied by a simple
description of its legal or ethical norms,” and “Role,” which Almond described as “a set
of complementary expectations” that orient an actor in the social process. Thus the terms,
which “emerged out of the Weber-Parsons tradition in social theory,” described a system
in almost self-governing order.65 The final piece in the methodological preamble was the
notion of politics as the use of force. Almond wrote: “My own conception of the
distinguishing properties of the political system proceeds from Weber’s definition - the
legitimate monopoly of physical coercion over a given territory and population.”66 Thus
Almond defined the political system as “the patterned interaction of roles affecting
decisions backed up by the threat of physical violence.”67
Setting his sights on the Anglo-American political system, Almond put to use this
framework and found “a rational-calculating, bargaining, and experimental political
culture,” that took on the qualities of a game, meaning that “the stakes are not too
high.”68 This game was made stable by a rational and organized diffusion of power;
“Most of the potential ‘interests’ have been organized and possess bureaucracies,”
64
Gabriel Almond, “Comparative Political Systems,” in The Journal of Politics, Vol. 18, No. 3 (Aug.,
1956), pg., 393.
65
Almond, “Comparative Political Systems,” 393.
66
67
68
Almond, “Comparative Political Systems,” 398, 399.
158
Almond argued. Moreover, “there is in contrast to some of the other systems a relatively
high degree of stability of function of the various parts of the structure.”69 Thus the
bureaucratization of the system for Almond meant a stable functionalization of the
system, as well as a source of non-ideological interest making. Almond in fact
deliberately avoided the terms “ideology” and “political party” because they too narrowly
implied political causes and could not account for the more formal, instrumental political
orientations at work. Interestingly, Almond found the American system more vulnerable
to destabilizing “intervention in policy-making through the transient impact of ‘public
moods,’” than the British system.70 Continental European political systems, however,
were most unstable and most susceptible to totalitarianism since “the organized political
manifestations of this fragmented political culture take the form of ‘movements’ or sects,
rather than of political parties. This means that political affiliation is more an act of faith
than of agency.”71 These latter systems, dominated by those seeking to politicize their
ethics of ultimate ends, meant that “these systems have a totalitarian potentiality in
them.”72
Weber’s conceptual observation of the plebiscitary approval of elites in
legal-rational democratic systems, was, by the 1950s, becoming a matter of advocacy.
Seymour Martin Lipset was one who acknowledged Schumpeter’s influence and who
also helped formulate the prevailing trend towards pluralist, consensual politics. His
69
70
71
159
seminal collection of essays, Political Man (1960), was an explicitly Weberian and
Tocquevillian book; it was equally a product of that ominous shadow cast by wartime
fascism and it therefore found itself at the intersection, as Carole Pateman has claimed, of
the two events - “the development of political sociology, and . . . the rise of totalitarian
states” - that made political conservatism so appealing to post-war American theorists
who came to fear the transformative potential of democratic action.73 Political
sociology, whose roots can be traced to the European social theorists of the nineteenth
century, came of age during the post-World War Two era in analyses of democracy,
bureaucracy and issues associated with political stability. “The theories of Weber and
Michels on bureaucracy and democracy, together with those of Marx and Tocqueville on
conflict and consensus, established the basic concerns of modern political sociology,”
Lipset explained in the opening chapter to Political Man.74 Political sociology, in the
hands of Robert Merton, David Riesman, Edward Shils, Lipset, and others, amounted to
the examination of the social conditions of democracy though a rigorous analysis of the
relationship between politics and other social institutions. Voting studies, investigations
pertaining to the concentration of economic power, studies of political ideologies,
bureaucracy, political parties and private-sector organizations were all used to this end.
But to engage in this practice was to accept key bounds of analysis. Replacing Marxist
determinism with the manacle of Weberian disenchantment, the problem was, Lipset
72
73
Carol Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press,
1970), pg., 2
74
Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1959; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
160
frankly admitted, “no longer the changes needed to modify or destroy the institutions of
capitalism . . the question then [became]: What institutional arrangements are possible
within bureaucratic society?”75
In light of this disciplinary precondition, the question with which Lipset opened
Political Man - “Under what conditions can a society have ‘sufficient’ participation to
maintain the democratic system without introducing sources of cleavage which will
undermine the cohesion?” - came with a foreordained answer.76 Lipset’s intimation of
democratic suicide, brought the debate back to the “vital center” with a predetermined
purpose - to set in relief only those conditions possible to maintain, without destabilizing,
the status quo. What allowed many of the pluralists, including Lipset, to claim that
stability was the central conceptual and practical problem for democracies was to
illustrate the association between totalitarian and democratic political systems using
Weberian bureaucratic theory. Pluralists collapsed the conceptual distance separating
totalitarianism and democracy using a Weberian analysis of bureaucracy in which
increasing bureaucratization was seen as a feature not only of totalitarian states, but also
as a product of democracies. This contention that democracy encouraged the growth of
bureaucracy inverted the traditional argument which saw bureaucracy, as a feature of
advanced capitalist states, imposing itself on politics; now, as Lipset phrased it, “some of
the initial consequences of democracy, such as bureaucracy, may have the effect of
undermining democracy. . . democracy is an initial condition which favors its
University Press, 1981), pg., 12.

75
Lipset, 9-10.
161
[bureaucracy’s] development.”77 Thus democracy was at the leading edge of modernity’s
disenchantment.
American theorists constructed this argument by highlighting Weber’s analysis of
how “equality before the law” - administering without privilege or discrimination - was
both the central principle of democracy and the opening wedge for bureaucracy.
Bureaucratic policies based on impersonal and objective qualifications reduced the
possibility of discrimination and served as a democratizing influence. Drawing a direct,
but intricate link between bureaucratic procedure and democratic demands was an
attractive claim for postwar intellectuals as it satisfied their reluctance to offer any
materialist or quasi-Marxist analysis of contemporary life. In this regard, American
postwar theorists tended increasingly to downplay (or even ignore) Weber’s
investigations of capitalism and chose instead to demonstrate how democratic objectives
would be impossible to attain without a stabilizing bureaucratic organization, all the
while pointing to an administrated, bureaucratic culture as a most important problem of
investigation. Here, in the minds of American postwar theorists, Weber became part of a
complicated conversation with Marx’s legacy. As they retreated from Marxist intellectual
commitments, these theorists - many of whom were former leftists - adopted a
de-radicalized Weberian vocabulary of political criticism which took for granted that the
most sensible democratic political orientation was to circumscribe political debate by
accommodating oneself to the “hard realities” of politics in a disenchanted age.
76
Lipset, 14.
77
Lipset, 42.
162
As an “institutionalized method of organizing social conduct in the interests of
administrative efficiency,” Peter Blau noted in yet another of the era’s urgent
bureaucratic analyses, bureaucracy became a “laboratory for both social research and
political theorizing.”78 Having now acquired a specific political value (and having been
accepted as sociological fact), the growth and spread of bureaucracy became a
centerpiece of political thought. This era, not surprisingly, saw the proliferation of texts
analyzing bureaucracy and its effect on democracy. Reinhard Bendix, Robert Merton,
Peter Blau, Robert Dublin, Alvin Gouldner, Herbert Simon, Seymour Martin Lipset, and
Philip Selznick among others, engaged in focused empirical analyses of bureaucracy and
more general inquires into its political import. Alvin W. Gouldner’s study of a gypsum
plant in Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954), Peter Blau’s analysis of
bureaucracies in government organizations in The Dynamics of Bureaucracy (1955), and
Lipset’s studies of union bureaucracy in Union Democracy (with Martin Trow and James
Coleman, 1956) and his kindred essays collected in Political Man, for instance, all
purported to illustrate how the specifics of bureaucratic culture - from its spirit of
accomodationism, to its functionalization and standardization of social roles - both
threatened and stabilized American liberalism. Lipset, for instance, revealed how
individuals with commitments (the ideological) found themselves at a disadvantage in
seeking leadership positions within bureaucratized organizations - including unions.
“Men with a ‘calling’ are likely to be viewed as irresponsible by the heads of
bureaucracies who prefer to select persons who will work within the framework of the
78
Peter Blau, Bureaucracy in Modern Society (New York: Random House, 1956), pg., 60.
163
organization’s goals as defined by the leaders. Weber’s discussion of the
bureaucratization of charisma is relevant to the situation in the trade-union movement as
men with a calling are replaced by bureaucrats,” he claimed.79
The fascination with bureaucracy, the autonomous personality and political
culture, occasioned a well-received Reader in Bureaucracy (1952) edited by Columbia
University colleagues Robert K. Merton, Ailsa P. Gray, Barbara Hockey and Hanan C.
Selvin. “The growth of bureaucracy,” the editors wrote, “is widely recognized as one of
the major social trends of our time.”80 And, as one might expect, this collection of
pieces gathered around the notion of bureaucratic thought took as its central core the
work of Weber who, “beyond all others. . . may be regarded as the founder of the
systematic study of bureaucracy.”81 Selections from Weber’s works served as focal
points for discussion, which tended to converge around a conception of modernity as
increasingly rationalized and moving toward an appointed destiny of maximum
ossification with little hope of forestalling it. The thesis of increasing bureaucratization as
a feature of modern industrial societies made appearances before the war in such books
as James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1942) and Robert Brady’s Business as
a System of Power (1943) both of which argued that bureaucratic centralism was
subverting liberal-capitalism. Subsequent analyses of bureaucracy however, explicitly
79
Lipset, pg., 421.
80
Robert K. Merton, Alisa P. Grey, Barbara Hockey, and Hanan C. Selvin, eds., Reader in Bureaucracy
(Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1952), pg., 11.
81
Merton, Grey, Hockey, and Selvin, pg., 17.
164
used Weber to fashion analyses concerning the democratic significance and incubation of
bureaucratic centralism.
Here, Weber’s theory explicitly served an ideological function. By minimizing
differences between democracy and totalitarian systems, postwar American theorists
highlighted both the vulnerability of democracy and its fragility - fighting for democracy
became a matter of preservation, of defense. The political options were manipulated such
that these theorists chose to emphasize those conservative aspects that maintained
liberalism’s “vital center.” Such an analysis also served to illustrate the differences
between the two systems as encompassing irreconcilable conflicts of value rather than
formally different political agendas. As noted earlier, Lipset, in an analysis indebted to
Weberian bureaucratic theory, did not suggest the absolute incompatibility of totalitarian
and democratic systems, rather he revealed that the two political systems stood on the
same continuum; democracy was not only vulnerable to totalitarianism - but inhered
towards it. Thus, the issue became about how to steer a middle path not necessarily
between the political left and right, but between ossification or radicalization. So put, the
options appeared to be those of suicide or petrification, not a matter of different,
legitimate political choices and, as such, participation became a problem for and of
democracy in a way it had not before. Insulating political elites from hoi polloi was a
matter of political survival - not just legitimate politics. “Political activism tends to be
undemocratic,” William Kornhauser wrote in his popular work, The Politics of Mass
Society (1959), “because it abrogates institutional procedures intended to guarantee both
majority choice and minority rights, and denies respect for principles of free competition
165
and public discussion as the bases for compromising conflicting interests.”82 Political
activism as undemocratic was a cruel irony indeed.
But American commentators went further. Participation was often severed from
the practice of democracy and made a corollary of totalitarianism. “The belief that a very
high level of participation is always good for democracy is not valid,” Lipset claimed.
“As the events of the 1930s in Germany demonstrated. . . an increase in the level of
participation may reflect the decline of social cohesion and the breakdown of the
democratic process; whereas a stable democracy may rest on the general belief that the
outcome of an election will not make too great a difference in society.”83 For pluralists
then, moderation through consensus was paramount. In this endeavor, separating political
elites from the forces of popular control became a classic refrain since consensus
depended upon the detachment of elites from their public seeking an activist role in the
formation of social ends. For postwar theorists this was not just a matter of determining
what made a healthy democracy, but what served to justify it. “Since the existence of a
moderate state of conflict is in fact another way of defining a legitimate democracy,”
Lipset wrote, “it is not surprising that the principal factors determining such an optimum
state are closely related to those which produce legitimacy viewed in terms of
continuities of symbols and statuses.”84 Consensus had became democracy’s legitimacy.
82
William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (New York: The Free Press, 1959), pg., 46.
83
Lipset, 14.
84
Lipset, pg., 41.
166
While American theorists made “activist” participation undemocratic, they also
knew that the freedom to choose among political and social alternatives was the
foundation of liberal-democratic life. Furthermore, they noted that while bureaucracy had
important integrative functions (and social justice functions) it also unleashed certain
unavoidable political side-effects, the most important of which was a “sameness” and a
centralism which encouraged the growth of mindless democratic majorities. This
“sameness” represented a political flashpoint in which a vulnerable collectivity awaited
its charismatic leader. So a dilemma was created such that political theorists at once
welcomed participation and feared it. To navigate this quandary, American intellectuals,
using Weber’s (and Tocqueville’s) conceptual apparatus, re-evaluated participation and
judged it qualitatively for its “character.” The quality of participation now mattered - not
the issues that gave rise to activism in the first place. As Philip Selznick phrased it in his
work on Communist “strategy and tactics” - “Mass behavior connoted weakened social
participation; and yet ‘mass organization’ is associated with a high degree of
involvement. This apparent inconsistency is soon resolved, however, if we consider the
meaning of mobilization”85 By eventually investigating the character of the participants,
the sources of disaffection, the contexts of democratic participation and other variables,
postwar intellectuals were able to critically determine what constituted “legitimate”
democratic opposition - and even more importantly, to define what was not.
Drawing heavily from both Tocqueville and Weber, postwar theorists used
“status” in just this way. Using a Weberian understanding of status as a form of “social
85
Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (New York:
167
honor” which engendered conflicts for power more than wealth, American intellectuals
contrasted “status conflicts” with proximate ones, thereby drawing out the former’s
espousal of far-reaching moral ends. In seeking to gain social ground against those who
had surpassed them, the status conscious were a politically dangerous mass who
responded to moralistic politics “as an expression of their feelings of resentment against
the present and hope for something completely new in the future.”86 Describing the
problem of ethics and politics in much the same way Weber had, American intellectuals
spoke about the need to dissever an ethic of ends from one of “responsibility.” The
former was uncompromising and undemocratic, the latter was restrained and reasonable.
In this regard, status politics was the politics of “resentment” and moral crusade and was
condemned as undemocratic within a Weberian lexicon that assumed democracy to be
the servant of statecraft, not social redress. Moreover, these theorists claimed, status
politics used ideology to threaten democratic consensus. Ideology, in lieu of more
temperate, quotidian goals, was an artifice used by unscrupulous leaders to bind a group
of individuals together such that they shared a common social outlook. Moving beyond a
simple reconciliation with the demands of the here and now, these activists on behalf of
status sought a Weltanschauung that could promise them “something completely new in
the future.” Democracy facilitated this “artificial” solidarity by politicizing the masses
and awakening their participatory entitlements.
McGraw-Hill, 1952), pg., 288.

86
Kornhauser, pg., 48.
168
In the postwar era then, pluralist theory served as judgement on the character of
participation. To these theorists, the competition of groups - from elite groups in politics
to informal groups in bureaucracies - established alternatives from formal organizational
structures. Group structures established “legitimate” deviations from bureaucratic
governance and thereby set the channels of democratic conflict thereby preventing any
possible recourse to democratic radicalism. If participation mediated through elite-groups
was safe, “active” participation was dangerous. This is precisely the point at which those
inclined to consensus used pluralism as a way to delimit what types of resistance or
political deviance was acceptable. In the end, a democracy that worked well, worked
towards moderation through the sensible and consensual competition of elite groupings.
Cross-pressures from a “a plurality of independent groups,” Lipset claimed, “[helped] to
regulate popular participation by integrating people into a wide range of proximate
concerns.”87 By such definitions, it became virtually impossible to have a justified basis
for radical political opposition.
These ways of judging participation were put to use in various ways that undercut
leftist politics. For the political scientist Robert Dahl, for instance, a look at the hard
realities of politics led him to a pluralist reconciliation of powerlessness and democracy
and turned the scientific study of democracy into a prescriptive account of future
(desired) outcomes. In his contribution to Research Frontiers in Politics and Government
(1955), a collection of Brookings Lectures, Dahl admitted that “What I am concerned
87
169
with here, however, is not the moral problem of power but the scientific problem. . . .”88
That the two could be so neatly separated suggested a method of analysis that promised
to insulate Dahl from the ethical force of classical democratic theory. In fact, he noted a
“full-blown contrast that has arisen between the assumptions of many of the older
democratic theorists and what now appear to be the actual facts of democratic life.”89
That older democratic theory - the ethically loaded one which idealized the robust
participation of the masses and a belief in their capabilities to do so responsibly - was at
odds with the facts: “Thus I think we need to lay down as our basic hypothesis in
examining the necessary and sufficient conditions for these different kinds of decision
making that: The proportion of individuals who will avail themselves of formal
opportunities to participate in decision-making, at least in the United States, will be
relatively small in all forms of social organization.” 90 Despite a desire to separate the
evaluative and the scientific, the future-oriented phrasing had an implicit normative
impact. And by neglecting the ethical aims of democracy, Dahl created a sort of
argumentative atrophy whereby the status quo was projected into the indeterminate future
- “low participation is simply a fact of all political life,” he asserted - with little hope or
justification for change.91
88
Robert Dahl, “Hierarchy, Democracy, and Bargaining in Politics and Economics,” in Research Frontiers
in Politics and Government (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1955), pg., 50.
89
Dahl, “Hierarchy, Democracy, and Bargaining in Politics and Economics,” pg., 57.
90
91
Dahl, “Hierarchy, Democracy, and Bargaining in Politics and Economics,” pg., 61-62.
170
The crux of Dahl “hypothesis” in this piece was that a plebicitary-elite form of
government, that is the autonomous competition among leaders, ought to replace the
unstable pluralism brought on by public engagement:
As to democracy, the hypothesis calls attention to the crucial

importance of competition among political leaders combined with the
opportunity for ordinary citizens to switch their support from one set of
leaders to another. If it is unreasonable to suppose that large numbers of
citizens will bring their influence to bear upon the making of decisions,
then for such control as we exert over our political leaders in
democratic organizations, we must rely heavily on the competitiveness
of leaders, that is, on their constant and unending rivalry in satisfying
the demands of relatively small groups.92
Indeed this system was “imperfect” Dahl noted. It was a form of political monopoly in
which the “activities of quite small groups - ‘minorities’ if you will - operat[ed] within a
context of relatively apathetic ‘majority,’” yet the dilemma was the lack of elite turnover
more than it was the uninvolved masses.93 In fact, Dahl used the gap between the
promise and performance of the democratic system virtually to abandon hope in the
former’s participatory ideal, and settling instead “only to regulate, so as may be possible,
the great political oligopolies.”94 This was democracy as an ex post facto method of
checking elites and Dahl lumped democracy along with “hierarchy,” “bargaining,” and
the “price system,” as “social techniques” or what he also called “control systems” to be
used by a political system at any one time to ensure equilibrium.95
92
93
94
95
Dahl, “Hierarchy, Democracy, and Bargaining in Politics and Economics,” 49, 66.
171
In an effort to illustrate the weakness of Marxist analysis, pluralist theorists such
as Dahl, demonstrated how political power was widely diffused among various,
competing political and economic groups. In his influential work, A Preface to
Democratic Theory (1956), Dahl termed this “polyarchy.”
[I]f there is anything to be said for the processes that actually distinguish
democracy (or polyarchy) from dictatorship, it is not discoverable in the clear-cut
distinction between government by a majority and government by a minority. The
distinction comes much closer to being one between government by a minority
and government by minorities. As compared with the political processes of a
dictatorship, the characteristic of polyarchy greatly extend the number, size, and
diversity of minorities whose preferences will influence the outcome of
governmental decisions.96
In an analysis of New Haven, Connecticut, Dahl used both a Weberian and
Tocquevillian mode of analysis in separating status and economic power, to argue that
economic and status elites were such a varied lot that inequalities “tend to be
noncumulative or dispersed” across the socio-economic spectrum.97 In an effort to square
the idea of democratic equality with the fact of unequal power, Dahl claimed the thesis of
“oligarchic control” (rule by a small, invariable elite) was invalidated by the pluralist
dispersal of authority in which groups were able to “reduce inequalities in political
resources” by “exploiting . . . superior access to a different resource.”98 This thesis was
echoed by a number of other theorists who claimed that political non-involvement among
96
Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pg., 133.
97
Dahl, “Equality and Power in American Society,” in Power and Democracy in America, eds., Peter F.
Drucker, Delbert C. Miller and Robert A. Dahl (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), pg., 83. See
also, Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1961), Chapter 7.
172
the masses was a measured response by those who chose to exercise influence through
informal means. As Kornhauser claimed, “people in pluralist society engage in relatively
little direct participation in national decisions, not because elites prevent them from
doing so, but because they can influence decisions more effectively through their own
groups. . . Since pluralist society engenders a variety of values and interests,
self-selective involvement in national politics tends to limit the number of people who
are vitally concerned with any given issue.”9 9
In his more theoretical work, A Preface to Democratic Theory, Dahl offered a
clear contrast between democratic theory and practice. He suggested that while the
dispersal of political influence was not able to bring about a “full measure of justice” for
the less powerful, he also claimed that this ideal of justice was itself a by-product of the
excessively rigorous ideal demands of political theory. While ideal justice is not
achieved, democracy qua consensus is realized. “Nearly every group has enough
potential influence to mitigate harsh injustice to its members,” Dahl claimed. “The
system thus tends to be self-corrective . . . To this extent, the system attains one of the
important ends of political equality without the means.”100 To be sure, this polyarchical
equilibrium was not the unmediated product of the free competition of diverse power
brokers. All groups had to affirm the regnant social arrangements (social norms) and the
“rules of the game.” Dahl alternately described this consensus as a democratic “creed”
98
Dahl, “Equality and Power in American Society,” pg., 83.
99
100
Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), pg., 75.
173
which “limits the character and the course” of democratic opposition.101 Rather than
advocate on behalf of the issues that gave rise to disaffection or desire, the leadership
cadre served this “creed” or consensus and the demands of its own functional roles -
thereby ensuring a measure of political stability. “When disagreements arise, these are
adjudicated by officials who share the beliefs of the political stratum rather than those of
the populace,” Dahl wrote. “This is the essence of their code of democratic
legitimism.”102 Assigning the term “democracy” to normative philosophizing, Dahl
substituted “dispersed inequalities” or “polyarchy,” for empirical use. Democracy as such
had become utopian.
This Weberian social theory was also used to comprehend McCarthyism. The
authors of an innovative and influential analysis of McCarthyism - The New American
Right (1955) - assumed status to be at the center of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s appeal.
Using a Weberian framework in condemning McCarthy for his “populist” brand of
politicking, the authors collectively pointed to “a dangerous situation” in which the
“tendency to convert issues into ideologies, to invest them with moral color and high
emotional charge,” threatened the democratic fabric.103 Richard Hofstadter, Daniel Bell,
Lipset, Riesman and Parsons, were just a few of the notable contributors who claimed
democratic vulnerability was made real by the “moral crusade” of those who assaulted
the democratic consensus, rather than the actual issues that led to disaffection. To them,
101
Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), pgs., 324-325.
102
Dahl, Who Governs? (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961), pg., 321.
103
Daniel Bell, “Interpretations of American Politics,” in The Radical Right (The New American Right,
expanded and updated), (New York: Arno Press, 1979), pg., 57.
174
the “status conscious” were a cohort of middle-class citizens who felt that the esteem and
power they wielded relative to other socio-economic groups were in decline or lagging
relative to their advancing economic condition. What they sought therefore was not more
wealth (many were beneficiaries of postwar prosperity) but a sort of miasmic crusade for
social regard. This was a problem, as Bell explained it, born of prosperity and
democracy. “The new divisions created by the status anxieties of new middle class
groups pose a new threat. The rancor of McCarthyism was one of its ugly excesses.”104
The essays for The New American Right were written separately and, as such,
they reveal the agreement that existed among social theorists about how the Weberian
“confusion” of ethics and politics was the principal crime among McCarthy’s unruly
supporters. In describing democracy as “bargaining and consensus” the contributors
claimed McCarthy had by-passed the proper channels of legitimate politics.105 This is
precisely what made McCarthy and his supporters a “radical right” - in ostensible service
to the anti-communist cause, they deliberately appealed to those segments of the
malcontent who could only be awakened by a mass movement. Soliciting those who
perceived their influence and social prestige to be in decline, McCarthy fastened upon a
set of moral appeals - ideology - whose attractive force threatened political
equilibrium.106 Charismatic leaders followed hard on the heels of the gathering feckless
masses, Weber claimed, and similarly, “McCarthy demonstrated that an irresponsible
104
Bell, pg., 59.
105
Bell, pg., 57.
106
Lipset, pg., 173.
175
demagogue who combines a nationalist and antielitest appeal can still secure
considerable support from the less educated.”107 More dangerous than an anti-communist
zealot generating a crusade against civil liberties, McCarthy was a democratic
demagogue assailing the social compact.
For Daniel Bell in particular, McCarthyism revealed some of the basic truisms of
Weberian political sociology. His introduction to the essays collected in The New
American Right offered a historical background that attempted to explain how political
moralism was the last gasp of those unwilling to accept the heritage of vital-center
politics. By establishing the separation of morals and politics as sociological and
historical fact - “The historic contribution of liberalism was to separate law from
morality,” he claimed - Bell illustrated how McCarthyism was a dangerous form of
political messianism that violated objective norms.108 Here, Bell used the term
“ideology” as a framework to undermine value judgements in politics. Ideologies were
the tangible manifestations of the moralization of politics; they served as seductive
panaceas (“the facade of general interest and universal values which masks specific
self-interest”) for those seeking something beyond what moderate bargaining could offer
them.109 It is little wonder then, that Bell along with Lipset, celebrated what they saw as
the “end-of-ideology.” In Bell’s collection of essays entitled, The End of Ideology; On
the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, he explained how ideologies were no
107
Lipset, pg., 125.
108
Bell, pg., 57.
109
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (1960; Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pg., 279.
176
longer meaningful because of a gratifying consensus on ends. Bell wrote, “In the Western
world, therefore, there is today a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues:
the acceptance of a Welfare State; the desirability of decentralized power; a system of
mixed economy and of political pluralism. In that sense, too, the ideological age has
ended.”110 Referring to a list of the same criteria, Lipset echoed Bell, but with the
suggestion that they had already been achieved - “This change in Western political life
reflects the fact that the fundamental political problems of he industrial revolution have
been solved. . . This very triumph of the democratic social revolution in the West ends
domestic politics for those intellectuals who must have ideologies or utopias to motivate
them to political action.”111
Bell was deeply influenced by Weber’s work and his essays collected in The End
of Ideology are suffused with implicit and explicit Weberian inflections. Many were
involved in end-of-ideology ruminations, but Bell’s book - his title even - has come to
represent the phenomena. The maturation of Bell’s ideas concerning the long-term social
transformation of American democracy began at the University of Chicago, where he
team-taught a social science course with, among others, David Riesman, Edward Shils
and Philip Rieff. From there, Bell moved to Columbia where Philip Selznick, Seymour
Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer, Alvin Gouldner and Bernard Rosenberg were colleagues.
Many were sometime graduate students of Merton and Lazarsfeld and all were interested
in the general outlines of political sociology and the practice of large-scale theorizing.
110
Bell, The End of Ideology, pg., 402-403.
111
Lipset, pg., 442-443.
177
According to Bell, those who introduced him to the Weberian tradition were the most
instrumental in his intellectual maturation, including “Robert MacIver and the
Horkheimer group, as well as a neglected figure, Alexander von Schleting who had
written a book on Max Weber’s Wissenschaftslehre, and gave a reading course in
Weber’s Wirtschaft und Geselschaft that I took.”112
Bell’s important twelfth chapter - “The Failure of American Socialism: The
Tension of Ethics and Politics” - began with a quote from Max Weber - “He who seeks
the salvation of souls, his own as well as others, should not seek it along the avenue of
politics.”113 Using this idea, Bell argued that socialism had failed because of “its inability
to resolve a basic dilemma of ethics and politics,” - a dilemma “most clearly formulated
by Max Weber.”114 Here, Bell was describing the inexorable conditions under which
modern politics operated. Socialism foundered precisely because it refused to accept
“that no group can, though the civil arm, impose its moral conceptions on the whole
society.”115 Such an analysis was based on a Weberian understanding of the separation of
“instrumental” and “substantive” rationality as the necessary prerequisite for political
legitimacy. “The foundation of a pluralist society rests, therefore, on this separation of
ethics and politics and on limiting ethics to the formal rules of the game.”116
112
Malcolm Waters, Daniel Bell (London: Routledge Press, 1996), pg., 22.
113
Bell, The End of Ideology, pg., 275.
114
Bell, The End of Ideology, pgs., 278, 279.
115
116
178
As many subsequent commentators have noted, Lipset and Bell were entirely
vague about the content of the term ideology. Part of this was a disciplinary issue - in the
neutral language of social science (political sociology) - evaluative judgments were often
couched in neutral language and vice versa. The very word “disenchantment” for
instance, was a Weberian term used to describe a process of unfolding rationalization and
other times it was used to describe that process as undesirable. When Bell wrote - “But
history is the process of progressive disenchantment”- who can be sure to what ends that
word was used? 117 One can find passages celebrating the rationalization of American
politics and passages with noted ambivalence. But this debate may itself be a product of
too fine a focus on the term ideology. Ideology (or its diminution) was a product of
democratic practice. Thus, while Bell and Lipset were sometimes hesitant to definitively
bury the term, they were completely celebratory about a democracy that channeled
political opposition into “legitimate” means. The premises of both analyses centered not
so much on the fact that the age of ideology was in its decline, but that democracy was
“legitimately” leading it there.118 As Lipset opened his chapter “The End of Ideology?”
in Political Man, “A basic premise of this book is that democracy is not only or even
primarily a means through which different groups can attain their ends or seek the good
117
118
This may explain, to a certain extent, why and how Lipset and Bell could claim they were misread. See
Lipset, Political Man (1981), Chapter 15 and Bell, End of Ideology (1988), “Afterword.” Lipset and Bell have been
vigorous in their claims that the “end-of-ideology” was not an apology for Cold War power politics, political
quiescence, or even invalidated by the dramatic revolts of the 1960s. Going against some of the most lucid passages
of their works (and the frequency with which they were repeated), much of their subsequent defense has lingered on
an oracular reading between the lines and fallen back on a sort of “you- should-have known-what-I-meant” denial.
More convincing, however, is the notion that they were not prescribing the content of ideology, but were, in fact,
referring to their version of democratic practice as the most efficient and effective means to attain goals in the first
place.
179
society; it is the good society itself in operation.”119 This was politics in service of a prior
stability. Herein, the notion of “ideology” became another symptom of a Weberian mode
of analysis in which claims about the “character” of democratic participation became a
way to censor its content.
The postwar analysis of McCarthism and the end-of-ideology thesis were
episodes in critical evasion and political de-radicalization. Clearly, left-of-center and
radical calls for political engagement - the moralistic basis of leftist politics - had the
most to lose from such analyses. Many theorists were hard-pressed to keep this logical
inevitability from surfacing and frequently did so by claiming that the masses were often
not the best advocates of their own interests. Parsons well noted in his 1942 analysis that
those “political movements of the ‘left’ have, with varying emphasis, been bound up with
the element of ‘emancipation’ in our society.”120 Similarly, Lipset admitted that the
malcontent tended “to support those political parties that attack the existing distribution
of privilege. The data clearly show that feelings of low status are close correlated with
liberal politics.”121 While Lipset noted that the “democratic left” had itself “recognized”
that an increase in state power was not a healthy political option, he, and others including
Bell, focused much of their criticism on those who still upheld (and led others to do the
same) “radical” or “utopian” values - the intellectuals.122 “The decline of political
ideology in America has affected many intellectuals who . . . must function as critics of
119
Lipset, Political Man, pg., 439.
120
121
180
the society to fulfill their self image,” Lipset wrote.123 And, how better to criticize radcial
political positions than to make their advocates easy targets by suggesting that political
responsibility and democracy itself hung in the balance.
In The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills observed that “The
sociological imagination is becoming. . . the major common denominator of our cultural
life and its signal feature.”124 In the 1950s a number of works had proved Mills to be an
astute observer. Popular works such as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and
William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) spoke to those acutely concerned
about the emerging collectivized order. Much like the articles in politics and the more
turgid works in political sociology, these books invoked a Weberian analysis to sound the
alarm about conformity and the increasing irrelevance of political action.
This increased interest in Weberian bureaucratic theory and the fear that
individuals would be absorbed by bureaucratic routinization and depersonalization was
the theme behind Whyte’s The Organization Man. Whyte wrote, “Max Weber and
Durkheim many years ago foretold the change . . . the problems they speak of stem from
a bureaucratization of society that has affected every western country.”125 The
Organization Man illustrated a modern antagonism between the “harsh facts of
[bureaucratic] organization” and the entrepreneurial ethos of the Protestant ethic.126
122
Lipset, Political Man, pgs., 442-443. Bell, End of Ideology, pg., 84.
123
124
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pg., 14.
125
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), pg., 4.
126
Whyte, pg., 4.
181
Whyte’s preference clearly resided in a nostalgic portrait of the latter which once stood at
the heart of American achievement and which stipulated that individual salvation would
arrive via hard work, thrift, and competitive struggle. Whyte explicitly recapitulated
Weber’s definition of the Protestant ethic only to invoke it in secular form as a way to
recover individual initiative. In the end, however, Whyte had less to offer regarding
political solutions precisely because cognizance of the problem (honestly confronting the
world) and self-preservation were seen as the only practical means of resistance; there
was little room for social hope here. “But what is the ‘solution’? many ask. There is no
solution,” Whyte admitted toward the end of his book.127 “A recognition of this dilemma
is the condition of it. . . unless the individual understands that this conflict of allegiances
is inevitable he is intellectually without defenses.”128
One of the most prominent arguments in this vein was Riesman’s The Lonely
Crowd, which proved to be one of the enduring successes of the sociological imagination.
Much like Weber’s socio-historical methodology, Riesman’s description of the modern
American social character was driven by an analysis of the historical evolution of certain
characterological types. Using ideal-types as explanatory tools, Riesman explained how
feudal society was organized around a “tradition-centered” social character, “determined
by characterologically grounded obedience to traditions,” which was replaced during the
Renaissance by “inner-directed” character types, “who can manage to live socially
without strict and self evident tradition-direction.” Finally, Riesman illustrated the
127
Whyte, pg., 400.
128
Whyte, pg., 362.
182
emergence of a post-war “other directed” character whose “contemporaries are the source
of direction for the individual . . . .[and whose] goals toward which the other-directed
person strives shift with that guidance.”129 The other-directed person’s contemporaries
that Riesman described might include the peer group, one’s schoolmates, and, those who
inhabit the bureaucratic world and who can only represent the norms of their functional
roles.
Riesman’s exploration of the postwar “other-directed” American character
revealed a disturbing conformity that Riesman encapsulated in his title - “Lonely
Crowd.” In Weberian fashion, Riesman sought to preserve the demand for personal
meaning by suggesting that “autonomy” might offer protection from the demands of
modern social life. Described as someone “capable of transcending their culture at any
time or in any respect,” Riesman was claiming, much like Macdonald, that one’s
individual life ethic could only be preserved by seeking a refuge from the threatening
collectivity.130 But Riesman’s endorsement of autonomy was tepid. Reviewers noticed
his barely concealed preference for the “inner-directed” type who in taking advantage of
new conditions, developed an adaptive flexibility and maintained a sense of independent
selfhood within a social setting.131 Riesman described the “inner-directed” in a manner
129
David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (1950; New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1961), pgs., 11, 14, 21.
130
Riesman, pg., 245.
131
Riesman, like Lipset and Bell (see note 117)claimed that he too was mis-read and that he did not make a
claim of preference for the “inner-directed” type, but was merely describing the ontogeny of character-types
relative to their environments and that, in fact, he thought the “other-directed” type had much to recommend it.
While not minimizing the positive attributes he ascribed to all three categories, this charge (again, like that against
Bell and Lipset) is hard to understand given the clarity (and the tone) with which, in numerous passages, Riesman
described that inner-type. An insensitivity to the complexity of the various character types - yes; but a clear
183
directly kindred to Weber’s description of the early capitalist entrepreneur whose inner
conscience represented a strong, yet flexible selfhood in a precipitate time - one that
served the demands of reason and worldly requirements, but not the prejudice of
others.132 Also, paralleling the notion of “elective affinity,” Riesman described social
change as the internalization of new interests over time - that is, individuals did not
intentionality direct change as they were unconscious stewards of new motivations.
Finally, making an argument whose similarities with Schumpeter and Whyte are also
clear, Riesman lamented the bureaucratic and routinized capitalist ethos which had
replaced the entrepreneurial system.
In these many ways the postwar sociological imagination revealed the dominance
of Weber’s sociological vision. This does not mean that Weber’s ideas were the sole
catalyst for bringing these perspectives to the forefront of American thought. The
bureaucratization of Russian socialism, the consolidation of American corporate power at
home, and the general sense of anomie within America’s mass culture all contributed to
perspectives we have come term Weberian. In many ways, Weber followed Alexis de
misreading - no.
132
Riesman’s very term “inner directed” is similar to Weber’s use of the term “inner-worldly” to describe
an ascetic ethos. According to Weber, “inner-worldly asceticism, the grace and the chosen state of the religiously
qualified man prove themselves in everyday life.” Gerth and Mills, eds., and trans., From Max Weber, pg., 291.
Thus, Riesman’s use of the term “inner-directed” to describe someone who uses the “gyroscope” of inner purpose to
direct him or herself in the everyday world, is akin to Weber’s “inner- worldly” character type - and the opposite of
the “other-worldly” mystic - who used religion to do the same.
184
Tocqueville’s assertion that at the heart of American democracy stood a profound tension
between a tyrannous majority and the individual. What is clear, however, is that social
scientists, political commentators and other interested Americans began during the years
following World War Two, to view the political, social and economic world, from a
perspective profoundly indebted to Max Weber.

Chapter 2 - Interests Without Ideals - Max Weber and Politics of Power

Diunggah oleh

Informasi Dokumen

Deskripsi Asli:

Hak Cipta

Format Tersedia

Bagikan dokumen Ini

Bagikan atau Tanam Dokumen

Opsi Berbagi

Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

Chapter 2 - Interests Without Ideals - Max Weber and Politics of Power

Diunggah oleh

Hak Cipta:

Format Tersedia

103

To speak of Max Weber (1864-1920) in the context of American history requires

Spirit of Capitalism (1905) - of considerable posthumous significance. In turn, Weber

evident in the revaluation and reorientation of American liberal-democracy in the 1940s

era’s political criticism which combined both an acquiescence to entrenched political

assumption of powerlessness before the predicaments of politics in the modern age.

corollary, a bureaucratic rationalization, promised to disenchant the world, including

Methodology determined substance as Weber’s understanding of politics and social

this Weberian approach, the ideal of democracy was characterized as a moralistic

stratums - incumbency and equilibrium.

value fragmentation of modernity. Weber characterized modern life as beset with

agreement; “[when] ultimate Weltanschauungen collide,” he wrote in a virtual

justification of decisionism, “ . . . one has eventually to choose between them.” 1 For

American intellectuals, Weber’s profound claim against the possibility of moral

by more enthusiastic supporters to explain and justify the moderation of democratic

participation towards politically innocuous ends.

The immediate context of Weber’s ideas was a German nation of distilled

Wilhelmine Germany that lacked a national ethic and a commitment to political

Routledge, 2004), pg., 259.

industrialism and modernity. 2

liberal-democratic rights; it also revealed Weber to be a reformer who sought an end to

be a constabulary force and narrowly constituted by the issues of leadership and

one explored and endeavored to understand the motives of individuals in action; to

and to “ideal-types” which were abstractions used to highlight instrumentally-rational

intellectual migrations, Weber’s entire corpus was an attempt to characterize and

understand modernity as it unfolded via the rationalization and instrumentalism of life. 4

forces and trajectory of modernization in the West. In an impressively broad archipelago

operated according to a cold, objective functionalism which was itself a larger

characteristic rationalization and intellectualization and above all the disenchantment of

personal relationships between individuals.” 5 The characterization of Western

thought by extending its Zeitgeist - alienation - to include the modern forms of

rationalization and bureaucratization. 7 Weber understood his intellectual project (much

like Alexis de Tocqueville) as an exercise in “responsibility” as tragic obligation - that is,

the effort to confront inexorable circumstances realistically. Weber, therefore, criticized

various works, was subsequently magnified by American theorists. In fact, American,

postwar social science often assumed a Weberian self-characterization as having

In his well-known lectures delivered at the University of Munich in 1918 -

“Politics as a Vocation,” and “Science as a Vocation,” Weber confronted the problems of

modern politics and usable knowledge in an age of bureaucratic domination. In

means of calculation or experimentation, to bridge “the various value spheres of the

as he noted in reference to Nietzsche’s criticism of the “last men,” to be naively used by

the “disenchantment of the world”, the disappearance of “mysterious incalculable forces”

as an explanatory force in favor of a web of interrelated knowable facts. As Weber

functionalist argument based on the premises of political sociology. “A sociological

namely, those of physical force (Gewaltsamkeit).” 12 Or, as he noted in Gesammelte

Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion,

legitimately establish and worked from there.

they ought to acquire an “ethic of responsibility” which was grounded in a recognition of

“Politics as a Vocation” was a clarion call for intellectuals. As Ahmad Sadri

observes, “[Politics as a Vocation] was inspired by an attempt to dispel the naiveté of

politically motivated intellectuals. . . The recommendation of ‘ethics of responsibility,’ in

to whom a ‘sense of proportion’ and a lukewarm commitment to ideas come naturally

“Science as a Vocation,” and “Politics as a Vocation,” were also criticisms of causes or

thoroughly rationalized culture. 18 Here, Weber’s observation became prescription in the

(value rationality) to Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality), and the attendant

decrease in “ideologically” driven political behavior. 19 For politicians, the evisceration of

consolation in a disenchanted world.

In Economy and Society (1922), Weber examined the rationalization of political

and argued, quite straightforwardly, that domination became legitimate by generating

which prevented individuals from exercising effectively free and informed

decision-making. Moreover, democracy could not be rescued on the basis of appeals to

rational and legitimate means of statecraft; in Weber’s analysis, liberal-democracy served

inarticulate mass, never ‘governs’ larger associations;” he wrote, “rather, it is governed,