Weber's Sociology and Weber's Personality

Author(s): Thomas Burger

Source: Theory and Society , Dec., 1993, Vol. 22, No. 6 (Dec., 1993), pp. 813-836
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/657998

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Review essay

Weber's sociology and Weber's personality

THOMAS BURGER
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale

Of all the major authors sociologists like to claim for their d

Max Weber has proven to be the most intractable. The diffic
partly intrinsic to his work, yet in no small measure they are al
to the particular circumstances of his emergence as a figure
importance for post-classical sociology. This rise to prominen
great deal to Talcott Parsons's groundbreaking effort aimed
solidating sociological thought within the unitary framework
consciously synthetic, general, and comprehensive theory. Th
obviously could not be all things to all people. The converge
pothesis underlying The Structure of Social Action essentiall
effect of downplaying the extent to which Weber sided
German historicists' profound rejection of Anglo-French po
progressivist-generalizing social science. Instead, he was mad
off as an author in the process of transcending the particularism
national tradition toward a more universal position.

To make its case, the Parsonsian synthesis had to project

assumptions on crucial portions of Weber's work that ha
responded to the author's own. Yet by being presented as a s
achievement, The Structure of Social Action also endowed th
sized works with quasi-canonical status. A major way in wh
content with it could be articulated, therefore, was by docum
integrative shortcomings with regard to those works. The cr
interpretation of Weber's writings in this context led to a
recovery of the half-buried and long-ignored tradition of th
constellation of issues within which his work originated, and it r
the systematic foundations and general outline of a soph
counter-sociology to the natural-science-of-society project.
Scaff's Fleeing the Iron Cage' is a stimulating and thoughtful
tion to this revisionist literature, not least because from the

Theory and Society 22: 813-836, 1993.

? 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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814

steers clear of a favorite yet obfuscating orthodoxy of Weber-criticism:

the construction of Weber as the champion of Verstehen.

To gain Weber's just measure, Scaff believes, he must be appreciated as

"the colossus astride the terrain of 'culture' where the struggle to form
modern consciousness was occurring" (4). Scaff claims that Weber was
centrally concerned with delineating the contours of an inner attitude
that would be adequate in the face of modern humanity's fate, i.e., life
in the iron cage of a demagified, vocationally specialized world and
subjectivist culture. Fleeing the Iron Cage attempts to recover the
rationale and directional impetus of Weber's science by interpreting it
as a complex response to, and reflection of, the context of events and
debates within which it took shape: The liberal bourgeoisie's failure to
stand up to Bismarck's Caesarist politics had raised the issue of politi-
cal leadership; the agrarian crisis in the East, the unsettling "social
question," and the challenge of socialism had posed the problem of the
proper goals of economic and social policy; the ever-progressing
organization of the various spheres of social activity in terms of special,
autonomous, and differential "logics" had rendered tenuous any confi-
dence in the possibility of a meaningfully integrated life; and the
German economists' claim of their discipline's unique capacity to
deliver scientific solutions to social problems had called for a clarifica-
tion of the powers and limits of social-scientific knowledge.

Converging in the general question of the proper justification of action

and of an adequate stance toward the world, these issues were met by
Weber through a reflection on principles; his conception of social
science as both Wirklichkeitswissenschaft and Kulturwissenschaft,
according to Scaff, was ultimately grounded in a concern with the ques-
tions "What should we do?" "How should we live?"2 As a science of
actuality, it was designed to dispel illusions and to provide practical
actors with a clear picture of the unique constellations of events within
which they must carry on. And as a science of culture it identified and
presented these constellations as value-relevant, that is, as existentially
significant, to practical actors intent on actualizing cultural values.
Weber's social science, in other words, was not conceived to be practi-
cally relevant by providing nomic generalizations that would enable
actors to adjust the social conditions of their existence to the inevita-
bilities of advancing civilization; rather, it was to bring into relief those
unique constellations of circumstances that challenge individuals to
deal with the world in justifiable and meaningful ways.

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 815

Scaff, like others, detects a link between Weber's conception of social

science and his wider concerns as early as in the Freiburg Inaugural
Lecture,3 where the "curse" of political epigonism was invoked. What
agitated Weber was the self-satisfied mood that had overtaken the
German bourgeoisie upon national unification, the relaxing in the fruits
of past achievements and the preoccupation with their continued
enjoyment, the emotionally and politically comfortable abdication of
political judgment in favor of hero-worship, and the self-congratulatory
faith in the inevitability of progress and human betterment through
science and technology. For Weber, this satisfaction with happiness and
yielding to the attractions of an easy life amounted to disregarding what
is owed coming generations and to neglecting the cultural tasks of the
nation. In his opinion, it was "not how human beings of the future will
feel, but how they will be"4 that mattered most; the quality of the kind
of human being that is fostered by particular social and economic con-
ditions of existence should be the ultimate standard of social policy
measures. Thus Scaff thinks that "for Weber political economy offered
the unrivaled solution to the riddle of epigonism" (30), as it provided
the ground on which the issue of the eudaemonistic mentality and atti-
tude toward life could be met head-on.

Scaff describes Weber's scholarly work as from the beginning focused

on the relations among changes in economic structure, social structure,
political rule, and their consequences for the conduct of life in different
strata. The distinctiveness of these analyses rests on the adoption of a
developmental perspective in combination with an interest in structural
morphologies and - at variance with Marx - an insistence on the
pivotal importance, in the dynamics of agrarian societies, of the organi-
zation of labor (Arbeitsverfassung) as an autonomous causal factor.
Scaff does not view this emphasis on the contraining effects of struc-
tural arrangements and macro-tendencies as evidence of a contradic-
tion between Weber's "structuralist" practice and Verstehen-methodo-
logy. Rather, he perceives it as one component of a dual preoccupation
with status groups, classes, relations of domination, and material in-
terests on the one hand, with religious ethics, normative orders, pat-
terns of legitimation, and ideal interests on the other (35).

Scaff's position is well-taken and in fact identifies, more than he per-

haps realizes, the most central distinctive issue animating Weber: the
power and fate of the ideal impulse within the constraints of social
structure, or, expressed differently, the interplay between the pressure
of the "facts" and the resilience of the inner attitude toward the "facts"

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816

in shaping human fate or "destiny." For Weber's science was charged

with contemporary concerns, and just as it traced the roots of the
modern world to a peculiar conjunction of "ideal" and "material"
developments, it anchored life in that world in a clear-eyed appraisal of
its alterable and unalterable realities and in the adoption of a meaning-
fully adequate inner attitude toward them.

Weber's assessment of the realities of the modern situation identifies

two phenomena whose emergence has been of fateful importance:
capitalism and the destruction of all objective value-foundations. Both
are treated as outcomes of the specific and peculiar rationalism that has
determined the character of the West's social and cultural develop-
ment, and both are considered crucial causes of the modern indi-
vidual's lack of firm moorings for self-assertive and autonomous action:
Everyone is drafted to perform inwardly meaningless tasks within the
slots of a universalized vocational culture, subject to impersonal
bureaucratic domination, burdened with the awareness of an ines-
capable conflict between the value-contents and inner logics of differ-
ent value-spheres, and encouraged to find unstatisfying consolation in
increased material comfort. Scaff views this diagnosis as part of a larger
discourse, crucially shaped by Marx and Nietzsche, concerning the
paradox that modern social and cultural organization, developed to
provide a buffer against human suffering, has itself become a major
source of discontent.

Scaff contrasts Weber's reflections on the inner attitude that would be

adequate to life under these circumstances with those of other partici-
pants in this debate. Sombart recommended a return to a more
"organic" existence to shed the obsession with technological progress
that has filled the world with mechanical contraptions while impover-
ishing the soul. Toennies and Michels proposed to break out of human-
ity's self-confinement within rational culture through liberating action
inspired by the authentic ethical/aesthetic impulse dwelling in each
person. Lukacs contrasted the fragmented and alienated culture of a
society composed of atomistic and self-centered individuals with a
vision of the world where man exists as true man. The most stimulating
participant, however, was Sinlmel, who found the counterpoise to an
objective culture destabilized by an explosion of novel, alternative, and
short-lived cultural forms in a savoring of, and immersion in, the
fascinating fluidity of the ultimate source of all forms - itself unformed
- i.e., the subjectivity of pre-objectified inner experience as the locus of
the true unity of life.

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 817

Scaff presents Weber's own solution to "the problem of modern

culture" - the loss of objective meaning and the modern self's inability
to experience life in the world's objective structures as a whole, unified
on the level of meaning - as predicated on an emphatic rejection of all
these views. He finds Weber's core arguments to be articulated in the
Zwischenbetrachtung, in the form of an assessment of various vantage
points from which historically it has been attempted to give wholeness
to experience by postulating a ground on which all that oppresses
human beings and separates them from each other and from their own
selves can be overcome. Thus, an (absolutist) ethics (Gesinnungsethik)
of brotherliness and compassion promises liberation through a
complete rejection of the world as it is constituted, denying that this
world's inherent principles can ever allow it to be a place for an inter-
nally undivided existence. Aestheticism and eroticism, alternatively,
offer a release from life's encumbrances within the world as it is, the
former by disregarding the external world's substantive significance
and by becoming attuned to occurrences and events as a spectacle of
forms, the latter by treating the obliteration, in the bliss of the sexual
experience, of everything that causes suffering and dividedness as the
indubitable warrant of the person's ultimate unity with himself and the
other.

Weber judges none of these capable of providing the individual with

resources sufficient for weathering the challenges of life in the modern
world, since they all call for redemption-delivering strategies that are
self-defeating. Eroticism plays the transports and all-embracing sweep
of ecstasy against the stranglehold of social life's rational orders and the
deadening banality of everyday existence. Aestheticism retreats from
the world's conflicts and grinding routines through a descent into an
ineffable interiority. An absolutist ethics of brotherliness deflects the
brutality and injustice of this world through a transcendent utopia from
which exploitation and domination are absent and human nature is
transformed. None of these addresses an essential feature of modern-
ity: the inescapability and permanence of value-conflict. That is, none
of these options seriously reflects on the implications of the modern
realization that there is no ultimate foundation for any and all values. In
Weber's view, this does not mean that these values lack validity but
rather that values are equally valid. Thus, the individual's attempt to
live a justifiable life is challenged by the existence of a multiplicity of
mutually incompatible and conflicting, yet equally valid values. A con-
sistent ethics of brotherliness, for example, must be fundamentally at
odds with beauty, dignity, self-worth, and greatness, as these are tainted

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818

by their condoning of exploitation and domination; aestheticism or

eroticism, in turn, are self-immersed and unbrotherly to boot. Conse-
quently, any conduct justified by a particular value is necessarily also a
conduct in violation of other valid values. In modern culture, in other
words, the notion of a completely unified existence, of a life without
contradiction, sin, or guilt no longer makes sense.

Weber, then, posited the inescapability of guilt. On this premise he

once more addressed the alternatives of an (absolutist) ethicism of
brotherliness, of aestheticism, and of eroticism - this time as guilt-
incurring options - and again he rejected them. The latter two, as typi-
cal manifestations of a "subjectivist" culture, he deemed inadequate for
two reasons: First, he considered the carefully cultivated redemptive
flight into the subject's obscure interior recesses recommended by
these two options an escapist response, as it deals with the massively
significant developments in the realms of material culture and technical
achievement by turning a blind eye to their dynamics; thus he believed
it to amount to an abdication of all responsibility before the onslaught
of the powers shaping our objective fate. Second, he objected to the
enthronement of the peculiar quality of a pre-predicative inner
experience (instead of a discursively accessible principle or conception)
as the source of normative validation and justification, since it bestows
the function of arbiter on a subjective, purely private, idiosyncratic,
and entirely incommunicable condition; he therefore judged this solu-
tion to invite arbitrariness and to be incapable of yielding any intersub-
jectively available and binding criteria for the legitimation of a common
objective order. An absolutist ethicism of brotherliness, in contrast, he
acknowledged, does not retreat from the world and does rely on an
objectifiable value-standard, yet by refusing in principle to make any
concessions to the actual powers moving this world (i.e., by pointedly
discounting the conditions of practical success specified by the special
inner logic of action in each differentiated sphere of social life) it is
bound to lead to behavior undercutting its own aims.

Weber himself advocated an ethical attitude that, unlike a guilt-

escaping ethics of conviction, adopted a guilt-conceding ethics of
responsibility. Such an ethics admits domination and exploitation as
inherent features of any social reality and as unavoidable means for
anyone who wants to shape the world effectively. It rejects as utopian
the idea of a redemption from the evils of this life through the dis-
appearance or nullification of their objective sources, and also insists
on two central and related facts: the far-reaching determination of all

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 819

conditions of existence by the dynamics of the special "logics" govern-

ing conduct in differentiated societal spheres, and the subjection of the
individual to the dictates of uninspiring, specialized, routine, and banal
occupational work. Predicated on the demand that we master our (this-
worldly) fate by shaping its objective conditions, it therefore rejects as
frivolous or impotent the retreat into the sublimeness of an inner
experience that leaves the world as it is, as an object to be savored, not
as a site of tasks to be accomplished.

Weber perceived and wanted to counteract the danger of spiritual

victimization, i.e., the individual's loss of his inner bearings in the face
of the pressures and seductions of modern life - the attractions of
material comfort, the disappearance of a normative center, the
numbing daily grind. He believed that neither the flight into utopian
fantasies, however high-minded and serious, nor the immersion in pre-
objectified inner bliss can provide effective protection against such
victimization as they ignore the significance of two fundamental facts of
modern culture and society: the unavailability of a redeemed or
redemptive life, Christian, socialist, or otherwise, and the centrality of
an organization of specialized occupational labor whose impersonal
demands resist meaningful integration into the individual's life.

The spiritual resilience required in the face of modern life's vicissi-

tudes, Weber argued, can only be gained through a willingness to see
the world as it is while taking it as a place for self-distanced, impersonal
dedication to the service of a larger (non-eudaemonistic) cause. The
meaning of such an attitude obviously cannot be anchored in the pros-
pect of final salvation, although it can be tied to something less perfect
yet more attainable: the actualization of a cultural or personal value.
For Weber's ethos of a clear-eyed, self-distanced, and self-disciplined
matter-of-factness had its indispensable complement in the conception
of a realm of valid personal or cultural values. Distrustful of the healing
powers of deep subjectivity, and unconvinced of the realism of salva-
tion-guaranteeing utopias, Weber recommended a self-depreciating
dedication to larger causes. Thus he hoped to justify individual life as
the disciplined and dedicated execution of vocationally organized
duties in the self-effacing service of a particular value. Such a life
would not be completely redeemed as it remains suspended within the
conflict of values and thus incurs guilt. Yet it would be meaningful and
justifiable to the extent to which "each person finds and obeys the
daemon who holds the fibers of his very life,"5 i.e., serves with passion
the demands of that cause that above all matters to him.6

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820

Fleeing the Iron Cage, which should more properly be called "Facing
the Iron Cage," presents social science inspired, not by a vision of intel-
ligent beings acting under the naturalistic impact of the general con-
straints inherent in their own human nature and in that of social organi-
zation, but of meaning-seeking beings wanting to do the right thing
under the historically developed specific circumstances whose ines-
capability constitutes their "fate." Scaff, obviously in sympathy with the
latter approach, makes no attempts to defend its merits and liabilities;
the considerable accomplishment of his excellent book consists rather
in suggesting an interpretation that goes a long way toward identifying a
coherent structure and rationale in Weber's work. Scaff finds Weber's
diagnosis of the realities of the modern situation more than confirmed
by later developments; as to Weber's prescription, Scaff is as mum as
many other commentators, perhaps because it is a lot easier to feel ill-
at-ease with it than to conceive of a convincing alternative. Convenient-
ly, however, the issue is addressed in Harvey Goldman's Max Weber
and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self,7 an interesting
book that can serve as a complement and addition to Scaff's.

Goldman attributes the salience, for Weber, of the search for the right
attitude toward life to his problematic relationship (shared with
Thomas Mann) to himself and his class of origin: He identified with the
bourgeoisie, whose role he considered crucial in the determination of
Germany's future, yet could not find in it, in its present condition, a
model of action, ethos of work, or pattern of meaning that could
sustain him personally and that would ensure the political and cultural
effectiveness of the class as a whole. This profound dilemma engen-
dered a life-long concern, fundamental to his work (as to Mann's), with
the foundations of personal identity and worth. It issued in the adop-
tion and advocacy of an updated version of the idea of the calling as the
basis for meaningful orientation in modern life, an outcome Goldman
considers to be quite non-accidental. For he believes that Weber's and
Mann's individual difficulties with self-acceptance mirror the crisis of a
bourgeoisie disconnected from the source of its specific strength, that
both authors reveal their attachment to and confinement within the

ambit of this class by affirming a form of life that tries to make th

source accessible again.

Goldman traces Weber's attractedness to the notion of calling throug

a perceptive analysis of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capit
ism, whose core, he believes, "is ... a paradigmatic model of ... how
innovations and transformations are effected between radically diffe

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 821

ent epochs or economic orders: they are mediated by a type of actor

whose strength is rooted in a special kind of character building...."
(33). In this model, social changes do not happen because of nomic
necessity, evolutionary or otherwise, but as a result of practical accom-
plishments achieved by spiritually strong human actors. The back-
ground to this model is provided by Weber's argument, that the promo-
tion of a fundamentally new manner of living exposes its champions to
such pervasive resistance and moral vilification as to require an
unusually firm character: a person of poise, self-control, and, above all,
devotion to the chosen course of action. The prevalence of such a
character at any given time cannot simply be taken for granted: the
larger part of The Protestant Ethic is devoted to uncovering its sources.
What Weber finds is a peculiar set of strongly held beliefs, according to
which the Christian faithful can achieve a sense of certainty regarding
his redemption by transforming himself into a person effectively active
in the service of divine imperatives, who no longer encounters his
natural self as a barrier to godly intent and thus experiences his worldly
success as the manifestation of God's power working through him.

Weber believed that this constellation of ideas, condensed in the notion

of the calling as an unquestioning and selfless devotion to the impera-
tives of the divinely ordained schema, produced individuals of extra-
ordinary practical effectiveness and spiritual fortitude essentially for
two reasons: The view of the human being as a mere tool serving a
higher cause, and the elevation of this total and unreserved heteronomy
of action to the sole factor of positive redemptive relevance, caused
people not only to focus all inner resources on the only thing that mat-
tered - the successful performance of the tasks demanded by the
higher cause - but also to concentrate all personal gratification in one
narrow point: the redemption-assuring experience of being nothing but
a perfect conduit for this cause. The result was the emergence of a type
of person uniquely characteristic, in Weber's view, of Western civiliza-
tion. Individuals equipped with this "occidental personality" were
immune to the pressures and seductions of the world; they took its
obstacles as challenges to be overcome, thrived on denying themselves
any value in their own right, and attached worth only to their service-
ability for a purpose beyond their own lives. Their self-worth, in other
words, was entirely dependent on their successfully overcoming world-
ly obstacles on behalf of a cause outside themselves.

The idea of the calling appealed to Weber, in Goldman's view, because

its peculiar way of justifying and giving meaning to individual life gave

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822

rise to a resilient combination of effective participation in the affairs of

the world coupled with lack of self-indulgence and feelings of self-
importance. It accomplished this by defining the world, not as an arena
for the pursuit of personal gratification, but as a site for the accom-
plishment of impersonal tasks, and by motivating the individual to
connect his ultimate fate to his quality as an agent who personally
counts for nothing but has significance only as an arm of the cause
prescribing the accomplishment of these tasks. Weber knew that these
ideas had lost the underpinnings accounting for their original force; yet
because they were the spiritual source of the modern order and way of
life, he considered the fundamental orientation articulated by them to
be the most adequate basis for a meaningful sustainable existence
within a rationalized world predicated on specialized labor.

Goldman, who goes into some welcome detail on relevant phases of

German thought concerning the shaping of the self, argues that Weber's
attempt to revitalize the calling was able to rely on the concept's affinity
with the Kantian ideal of personality. Like the Puritan model of the self
transformed in the calling, this conception postulated a natural self, i.e.,
a repository of action dispositions, annihilated by the imposition of a
discipline issuing from a higher law, and supplanted by a new self
ensuring freedom and independence from the mechanisms of nature, in
particular from the organism's passions and emotions. Entirely in line
with the Puritan's ascetic emphasis, Kant proposed a secular ideal
whose "inner comfort is ... purely negative, with respect to all that may
make life happy.... It is the effect of a respect for something quite dif-
ferent from life, in comparison and contrast with which life, with all of
its enjoyment, has rather no worth at all. He still lives out of duty, not
because he finds the least taste for life."8 Weber replaced Kant's invoca-
tion of a moral law based on pure practical reason and the categorical
imperative with valid personal or cultural values whose demands can
become the contents of individuals' wills. Weber thus defined the

essence of personality as the constancy of an inner relation to speci

ultimate values and life meanings that determine goals of action
issue in purposive-rational behavior.

Goldman has his misgivings concerning the personality ideal embra

by Weber, that is, the ideal of personal "redemption" through the deve
opment of a self finding its fulfillment in innerworldly asceticism
the efficient service of a higher cause. The self-denying rejection of th
imperatives and enjoyments of life indicates to him "that the regard fo
personality and duty is a response to an experience that has made l

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 823

seem senseless and valueless; living 'out of duty' provides the means for
living despite the loss of a 'taste' for life" (122). This is the experience
of self-alienation, i.e., of the personal and social unacceptability and
worthlessness of one's own (natural) self; liberation from oppression by
this self is then sought through a battle whose actions combine a
successful struggle against both the obstacles of the external world and
the resistance of the intolerable inner self, aiming at the former's
mastery and the latter's erasure and replacement. The conception of
the calling is attractive to someone involved in such a struggle as it
supplies a model and strategy for overcoming the hated (natural) self in
disciplined and effective service. Yet the dangers of this strategy,
Goldman thinks, become all-too-clear in the writings of Thomas Mann.

Mann's protagonists are men who experience themselves as distanced

from normal life, understood as an existence comfortable within an
accepted bourgeois calling, and who attempt to maintain or reestablish
a connection because they can find neither meaning nor self-accept-
ance in separation from it. The problem these men must face is the
combination of their estrangement from conventional bourgeois life-
concerns with their inability to conceive of any justifiable existence
other than in a calling; accordingly, the only way they can combat self-
rejection and attain self-legitimation is by viewing themselves in a
calling that requires or accommodates the estranged self. Mann admits
only one "true", i.e., unalienated life: the bourgeois one, both in its pur-
suits and in the interpretation of these pursuits as a calling. Only bour-
geois activities are acceptable as useful and life-affirming; they redeem
the individual - inwardly through self-acceptance, outwardly through
success - when undertaken by a devoted self. For "the ordering and
domination of the soul and the restraint of all that threatens to tear
loose within are the source of worldly fortune. Inner strength alone
controls the world, and failure to control is a failure of the self" (69).

Self-justification in Mann's society, then, is tied to positively sanctioned

action in which external effectiveness and internal control coincide in a
mutually reinforcing fashion. Saddled with selves unable to feel at
home with the pursuits they consider truly legitimate, and for that
reason unable to find their complete ease with the activities to which
their hearts draw them, Mann's artist-heroes have all but one avenue
blocked to them: the pursuit of their wayward activities in the manner
of a calling. Accordingly they discipline their selves in the service of
their art and seek redemption through their success - yet not mainly
before the tribunal of the cause to which they are devoted, i.e., art, but

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824

before the "world" that is the object of their love, i.e., the bourgeois
class. Thus they do not really mend the split in the internally divided
self but rather institutionalize it in the form of a highly unstable com-
promise. Their redemption is only a quasi-redemption as they remain
suspended between two worlds and suffer from the lack of reconcilia-
tion.

Mann realizes that in such a situation the (unconventional) calling per

se, by cementing the individual's suffering and loss, his separation from
the "life" for which he longs, may no longer function as a source of
vitality only, but as one of exhaustion as well. He responds with a con-
version of this very suffering into an element of strength: the concep-
tion of service in the calling as a necessary suffering in the calling. Yet
he ignores that through this move the greatness of the cause has been
replaced by the greatness of the suffering as the warrant of the indi-
vidual's worth, and that in this fashion participation in "life" has been
terminally placed out of reach. This substitution, according to
Goldman, brings to the fore the soldierly aspect of the calling, the ethos
of determined and heroic self-sacrifice in battle, never questioning
whether the cause is worth the cost.

Goldman believes that Mann's analysis unwittingly reveals "the hidden

form and essence of the personality" (173), which he calls the "mili-
tarized self" (ibid.). It is the fate of the person who, imperiled by the
inner exhaustion produced by the service of a "life"-denying cause,
labors to overcome his weakness by force and goes on fighting the
natural self and the world because he cannot find inherent value in
himself. The emphasis on soldierly suffering as the ground on which
the self is justified blocks an undistorted perception of reality as it is;
the inner and outer world are seen only as value-less obstacles, posing
continuous challenges to be overcome. The militarized self's perma-
nent fatigue and tormented condition thus are taken as the essential
and crucial characteristics of the worthy life, not "as a sign that there is
something the matter with the nature of the calling itself or that there is
a disharmony between ... self and its needs ... and the requirements of
the calling" (191).

Aschenbach's fate in Death in Venice exposes, in Goldman's view, the

intellectual and moral aporia of the puritanical-soldierly heritage in
Wilhelminian Germany (204). It "calls into question the whole model
of personality built on self-conquest through a calling,... a model in
which the self 'dies to life' in order to render life totally available for

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service" (202). For the cause to which the self is to be devoted does not
have the power to bring it back to a new life. Work in the calling has
ceased to be natural and needs to be willfully stimulated through active
effort. The cost involved in this undertaking is fearsome. Death in
Venice describes, unbeknownst to its author, the revenge of the real self
and inner man that were put to death in the name of a calling (art). "It is
revenge because the personality, the reborn self of art, is now a coffin
for the soul and nothing more.... The religion of suffering ... does not
recognize that the suffering is the product of the choice for the death of
life among the living, but believes in this death as the source of its
heroism, as a form of nobility, as the meaning of its life" (204).

Goldman's finding of the ultimate viciousness of the calling and the

personality gives prominence to the vista opened by Mann rather than
Weber's. The difference between the two derives from obviously diver-
gent starting points. To Weber, the calling recommends itself as a way
of disconnecting the person from the world through offering a prospect
of fulfillment independent from what this world has to offer, and
superior to it. Mann, in contrast, employs it to reconnect the person
with "real" life, which is not inferior. In view of the inherent implication
of the notion of the calling, that "life" is irrelevant, Mann's project can
only appear as incoherent from the start, and this incoherence is
reflected in his heroes' inability to overcome their dividedness against
themselves. Unlike Aschenbach, a Weberian personality would not die
in Venice. Weber's protagonists are committed to their causes wholly
and with passion; they find satisfaction in nothing else. Excepting
perhaps Tonio Kroeger, this is not so with Mann's, who do not want to
subvert "life,' whose loyalties are divided, who are not fully convinced
of the superior justness and worth of their cause, and who are therefore
not sustained but exhausted by their service to it. Although both
authors are united in their belief that valued causes are crucial to the
individual's spiritual survival, Weber, in contrast to Mann, assumes that
values not only deserve and demand exclusive devotion to them, but
that they indeed have enough power to energize the person against
"life."

Goldman's failure to dissect the implications of this contrast, which he

notices (91), is surprising but perhaps not entirely accidental; for it can
be taken as an indication that his espousal of Mann's unwitting revela-
tion of the calling as a dead-end-street for a bourgeoisie in crisis is not
predicated on an acceptance of Mann's premises as more realistic than,
or otherwise superior to, Weber's. Rather, he appears to focus on the

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826

impasse described by Mann because it underscores something of which

he has become convinced on quite independent grounds, namely the
internal fragility, forced artificiality, and fundamental misguidedness of
the entire analytic outlook within which the notions of calling and per-
sonality attain significance. This outlook, Goldman claims (ix), pro-
vides the foundation of Weber's and Mann's social thought and renders
them unable to acknowledge that the modern person's experiences of
meaninglessness and confusion "are expressions of estrangement
rooted in social life: the experience of failure in society, isolation from
others, and pressure and judgments from within and without. They
both see the problem instead as the loss of a 'god.' In Mann's work, as in
Weber's, rather than recognizing this tangible state of things, the
'heroes' are driven once more to find a 'holy' purpose to justify their
sacrifice and self-domination" (106).

Goldman thinks that for both Mann and Weber, the calling functions as
a magical device through which (their) personal rejection and loss are
transformed into impersonal and sanctified service, creating in the indi-
vidual a sense of grace and purpose. Yet, in the calling, work is denied
as a source of self-satisfaction or of the satisfaction of craftsmanly
desires, as the fulfillment of talents or as satisfying involvement with a
loved activity. Instead, it is made to serve the needs of self-definition,
self-justification, and identity (110). The calling thus is an elaborate con-
trivance to overcome nature: natural limits of strength, doubts about
life, negative judgments by others, and one's self-image as unsoldierly
and unfaithful to one's ancestors, one's descendants, or one's task. Yet
neither Mann nor Weber ever stopped to examine this calling for its
worth, meaning, function, and effect on the self and the world, or for its
real purposes (205). Accordingly they could never fully discover or
accept the self as it truly is or may be, with its strengths, weaknesses, and
needs. Nor could they ever understand the personal and social reasons
for their belief that the self must be fashioned and redeemed through a
calling. By relying instead on an inherited ascetic self-discipline rooted
in religion and in the bourgeois class, they foreclosed to themselves the
insight into the deeper nature of Europe's and their own crisis (210).

Goldman's protest gives voice to a sentiment with which everyone who

has ever been depressed by Weber's joyless universe cannot but feel
sympathy. As a critique, however, it falls short, since presenting no
real arguments, only a few bald assertions. Thus, when Goldman notes
that Weber's model of the strong self is so narrowly conceived as
to exclude practically any alternative to the self structured in the

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 827

discipline of the calling, he offers a valuable insight, and one that

opens the possibility of beating Weber at his own game. He might have
shown, for instance, that individuals with strong selves do not have the
significance for sociocultural development Weber attributed to them,
or that selves can be strong on grounds other than Weber could envi-
sion. More generally, he might have scrutinized Weber's ideas about the
charisma of values. Had he attempted something of this sort, Goldman
would have been led to reveal the nature of his own premises, thus
giving his readers a chance to appreciate the power of his objections.
Unfortunately, rather than articulating his position, he simply pro-
claims that Weber's (and Mann's) (mis)understanding of their own and
their society's troubles was mediated through a flawed perspective:
Instead of seeing an alienation-producing set of social arrangements at
the root of the contemporary crisis, they perceived the loss of a sacred
cause. Reading between the lines, one gathers that Goldman seems to
believe in the possibility of a self that is strong because it is unalienated,
therefore not plagued by feelings of doubt and worthlessness, and thus
not in need of self-justification. His objection to Mann's and Weber's
inability fully to "discover or accept the self as it truly is or may be, with
its strengths, weaknesses, and needs" (210) appears to be predicated on
the assumption that there is such a thing as a true self. It is not at all
clear whether Goldman is entirely aware of the size of the can of worms
whose lid he has ever so briefly lifted. The sociological reader, in any
event, cannot but feel frustrated by a criticism that is silent on its own
premises and specifics while rejecting, without much discussion, what it
claims to be the "foundations" of Weber's social thought.

Weber's concern with finding his bearings in life is also central to Alan
Sica's Irrationality and Social Order,9 albeit with less encouraging
results. Sica is much bothered by the "totemic status" (4) of "rational-
ity" in contemporary American sociology. He notes the odd contrast
between scholars' free admission of a considerable, even overwhelming
irrational component in social behavior, and their almost exclusive
theoretical preoccupation with its rational aspect. He thinks that in
slighting the irrational, mainstream American sociologists have fol-
lowed the lead of Weber's penchant for rationalistic idealization,
strongly legitimated - at the expense of Pareto's perspective - by
Parsons's early interpretation, and he argues for a major shift in focus.
For he believes that "increasingly, rationality as a component of social
action and as a valued quality of personality is becoming inversely
related to meaning in human life; that is, zweckrational behavior and
the major institutions it is usually thought to dominate no longer hold

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828

the appeal for social actors that they are believed to have held in an
earlier period.... In turn, those institutions previously deemed less vital
to social order (e.g., the aesthetic, supernatural, or recreational) are
being invested with much more personal energy... in the pursuit of
meaningful experience...." (33). If social theory is to capture what
makes their existence important (i.e., "meaningful") to individuals, what
people might do to enhance their lives in ways that were anathema to
Weber, namely eudaemonistically, and what makes actors behave other
than "rationally," it must incorporate more than a rationality assump-
tion in its models of personality and social action. "I hope," announces
Sica, "to find analytic concepts which are not in themselves alienated
from the nature of contemporary humankind, a nature still apparently
encumbered by demons of nonrationality" (33).

Sica's stated ambition, then, is to point the way to a sociological

perspective in which human "irrationality" is given theoretical weight
commensurate with its empirical significance. It seems that the pursuit
of this aim would have to proceed via an investigation and critique of
the theoretical justification of ratio-centric social science, its perceived
shortcomings, and its reliance on Weber as a protagonist, toward the
formulation of a systematic conceptual framework ensuring a theoreti-
cally meaningful (i.e., non-residual) place for "irrationality" in sociol-
ogy's analytical apparatus. However, Sica offers nothing of the sort; his
various and divergent statements concerning his goals are verbal trim-
mings that only obscure the true substance of his book: a reading of
central passages in Weber's writings as documents of their author's
"positions on irrationality" (11) at successive stages of his life - "posi-
tions" in the sense of "inner attitudes."

According to Sica, Weber felt an inordinate tension when faced with

irrationality both in life and in theorizing; behavior and thought violat-
ing the model of Zweckrationalitdt at the same time appalled and
fascinated him. The negative component of this attitude derived from
his struggle with his psychopathology, and it ensured his permanent
hostility as a scientist toward any theory that did not either argue irra-
tionality away or condemn it as a primitive mental state leading to self-
destructive action. Consequently, emulating the example of neoclassi-
cal economics, he formulated a sociolology that through hypostatized,
one-sided, ideal-typical abstractions permitted the depiction of the
world as one in which irrationality was pushed to the margin. Yet he
never felt at ease with the course he had taken as he knew that the "real
kernel" of life is not situated in the rational. "This he admitted freely
and even documented over and over again" (228).

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 829

Sica's assertion that Weber knew life's genuine and innermost core to
be wrapped in irrationality is based on a complete misunderstanding of
Weber's interpretation of the cultural dialectics characterizing a civili-
zation in which ordinary, routine, everyday life is in the grip of ration-
alization, and in which the extra-ordinary is associated with
"irrationality": to the extent to which in such a culture the extra-ordina-
ry is viewed as the realm of life-enhancing charismatic powers, the irra-
tional "appears" as the real kernel of life.'l However this may be, Sica
proceeds on the assumption that Weber acknowledged the domination
of "life as lived" (16) by irrationality, i.e., by spurs to action located on a
level not reached by societal and self-repression and therefore outside
and beyond predictability (223). The puzzle posed, on this premise, by
the rationality-emphasizing formulations in Economy and Society is
resolved in the claim that Weber's psychodynamics foreclosed the pur-
suit of any fundamental alternative. The ensuing question of just how
Weber managed to suppress what he knew, namely the centrality of
irrationality to personal and social life, Sica answers through meander-
ing discussions suggesting four major ploys on Weber's part. The first
consists simply in his dogmatic espousal of rationality as the essence of
humanity, serving him to reject - not really refute - the idea embraced
by Knies and others, that the irrationality of the personality is the true
source of human dignity. The second consists in the designation of
instrumentally rational (zweckrational) action as the prototype of all
meaningful conduct. The third consists in the narrowing of sociology's
subject-matter to understandable, that is, meaningful, behavior, there-
with instituting "rational interpretation" as its pre-eminent task and
eliminating the concern with the irrational. The fourth consists in a
rationalistic dressing-up of essentially irrational phenomena by
stretching the meaning of terms, using "rational," "logical," and kindred
epithets in an incantational fashion, and by concocting fanciful pseudo-
rational constructions. "An overview of the entire Religionssozio-
logie ... discloses a single unmistakable tendency... coercion ... of even
the most constitutionally irrational religious beliefs and practices
into some form of rational explanation. This reaches ludicrous
extremes at times, though for the most part Weber saves himself from
clumsy rationalism with his usual arrangement of qualifications
coupled with linguistic craftiness" (218).

Both Weber's presumed dilemma, i.e., the conflict created by his insight
into, and simultaneous denial of, the irrationality of the true center of
life, and the strategems used for dealing with it, are artifacts of Sica's
misinterpretations. At their root are two never scrutinized axiomatic

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830

convictions: that the bulk of "life as lived," i.e., of meaning-seeking

activity, is fundamentally and irredeemably irrational (71), and that the
task of sociolological theory is to examine and to explain all human
behavior, not just certain narrow types (21, 34-35). These convictions
concern matters of such obviousness to Sica that he never stops to
reflect whether his views were shared by Weber; he simply assumed
this to be the case. Accordingly, he is faced with the question of how
such a great mind could settle for a theory so hopelessly distorting real-
ity, and found the answer in Weber's convulsed psyche. Yet whatever
Weber might have believed concerning the world's basic irrationality,
his view of the task of sociological theory most certainly differs from
Sica's. He did not think that theory must in some sense reproduce or
represent the "essential" structure of (a sector of) empirical reality, and
therefore he needed no stratagems for disguising to himself the reality-
distorting nature of his constructions.

To begin, Weber indeed rejected Knies's conception of personality,

partly because, as Sica correctly claims, he found it theoretically un-
palatable, in fact, untenable, to conceive of human freedom as in any
way related to irrationality, hence to unpredictability (174). Sica attri-
butes this rejection to the psychological needs of an author just
recovering from a prolonged nervous breakdown. The possibility that
Knies's case might be weak is never seriously investigated. Sica believes
what Weber seems to deny: that human worth and dignity are tied to
capacities rooted in an irrational center. Sica is so imbued with the self-
evident truth of this view that he not only feels no need for arguments
in support of it, he is incapable of dealing with disagreement in other
than psychotherapeutic terms. It never occurs to him that if Weber did
not see this "truth," he needed no defense mechanism to protect him-
self against its threat. In the same vein, Sica's declaration, that Weber's
sociology of religion is marked by the tendency to force phenomena
into rational patterns, is not based on any careful critique and assess-
ment of empirical evidence. For Sica knows that religion is "by defini-
tion a manifestation of irrationality" (200-201, note 8), of "the most
absolutely irrational of all human cognitive propensities: the need, nay,
demand, to know unknowables. Since his need lies so close to the sur-
face of all religious systems and since it does emanate from a splendidly
irrational substrate, Weber subdues it whenever he could...." (220).

Whereas the first and fourth of Weber's alleged stratagems of irra-

tionality-denial are discerned on the basis of axiomatic tenets, the
second and third originate in Sica's conceptual confusions and

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 831

blunders of interpretation. Sica asserts that by equating "rational" and

"meaningful," and "meaningful" and "understandable" (213, 264 note
40), Weber managed to eliminate irrational, therefore meaningless,
behavior as a concern of interpretive sociology (71, 176), having
decided "he would rather study behavior subject to ... [rational] 'ideal'
description than concern himself with ... life as lived" (177). This
astonishing claim derives from the failure to maintain certain con-
ceptual distinctions - not explicitly introduced by Weber but abun-
dantly obvious from the context of his remarks. The first of these dis-
tinctions concerns the difference between "meaningful"/"meaningless"
(sinnvoll/sinnlos) as "sensible"/"senseless" (i.e., appropriate or inap-
propriate in a particular situation 1 on the one hand, and understood as
"endowed with (subjective) meaning"/"devoid of (subjective) meaning"
on the other hand. The second distinction is that between the "irra-
tionality" (of "nature") in the epistemological sense of its "inacces-
sibility to the meaning-interpretive capacity of the human mind"
(meaning-embodying events, being accessible to empathic re-experi-
encing, are held by Weber to be cognitively less opaque and thus more
"calculable" than ununderstandable events of "dead nature""1 and
"irrationality" in the material sense of "absence of (valid) instrumental
considerations."13 The third distinction separates "meaningful" in the
wider sense of "guided by (any kind of) understandable consideration
or emotion" from "meaningful" in the narrower sense of "guided by
instrumentally rational reflections."

The source of Sica's failure to maintain the first and third distinctions is
the result of yet another of his projections onto Weber: of his own
usage of "meaningful" as "existentially significant," "subjectively satis-
fying," of "central to the individual's identity and justification of self."
("Meaning ... can be understood as 'whatever subjectively defined
qualities of one's life make active persistence appealing'" (6, note 6).)
Weber, of course, when he declared the subject-matter of sociology to
be subjectively "meaningful" action did not use the term in this
emphatic sense but quite blandly in the sense of "understandable" or
"intelligibly motivated." Sica, attributing to him the emphatic version,
gets off on the entirely wrong track; the ensuing disaster is of enormous
proportions. This error produces not only an entirely distorted overall
reading of Weber's sociology as the effort of a man driven to deny the
significance of the irrational in human existence because he could not
conceive of any meaningful life for himself except a compulsively
rational one; it also transmogrifies the work into a monument to stag-
gering incoherence. Thus, Sica constantly throws up his arms at

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832

Weber's confusions and self-contradictions, which he then explains as

manifestations of tensions, ambiguities, secret longings, etc., or as
evasive maneuvers. Yet most of the unholy mess is not of Weber's
making, but instead flows directly from Sica's unexamined prior
notions and conceptual equivocations.

For example, convinced from the beginning that Weber's ideal-typical

constructions establish instrumentally rational interpretation as "the
objective of verstehende Soziologie" (188), Sica can do no better than
dismiss Weber's frequent warnings against a rationalistic view of the
world as merely rhetorical (209). His difficulty here stems from a pro-
foundly mistaken assumption - which, ironically, he shares with
Parsons - that in assembling his ideal types, Weber was aiming to
formulate elements of something like a general sociological theory in
the neo-positivist sense, i.e., a set of general formulations claiming to
reveal the inherent structure of a sector or aspect of empirical reality
(189). However, this was precisely not the aim. For Weber believed that
knowledge of the significant structural features of the social world
could be attained only through historiographical treatment, and he
intended his ideal types as nothing more than auxiliary devices to that
end.'4 And Sica himself admits that Weber's empirical analyses do not
display a rationalistic bias (190).

On the basis of his misconstrual of Weber's ideal types as constitutive

elements of a systematic, empirical theory of action and society, Sica,
helped by his other misapprehensions, is able to arrive at a variety of
conclusions: (1) Weber's preference for types of objectively correct
rational (objektiv richtigkeitsrational) action favors the observer's point
of view and thus contradicts his own demand for the understanding of
action's subjective meaning (204). (2) Weber refused to assess the
empirical validity and utility of his models (189). (3) Weber's focus on
rationality rests on a subterranean emotional structure riven by con-
flicts (107). (4) Weber was forced into a view of the human being as cal-
culatingly rational (34-35) and had to toss aside "a prime task of the
social theorist: to determine ... the relation between (irrational)
psyche-personality and (rationalized) structure...." (190). (5) Theo-
rizing about action for Weber meant bringing it within the actor's
reflection (229), deploying "irrationality" as a global error term desig-
nating empirically present but theoretically irrelevant static. (6) Weber
considered all affectual, impulsive, arbitrary, uncalculated, rebellious,
physically demanded, habitual, whimsical, spontaneous, mystic, charis-
matic, eudaemonistic, ecstatic, etc. behavior mere deviations from the

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 833

rational type (162, 205, 229). (7) Weber associated the incalculability
of action with an animal-level of existence, with insanity, and with a
freedom-threatening subjection to the blind forces of nature (180,
181). (8) Weber was reluctant to investigate irrationality-drenched
issues such as ethnicity and nationalism (217). (9) Weber's compulsive
dependence on, and incantational invocation of, the rationality-irra-
tionality dichotomy is indicative of some great private meaning it held
for him.

None of this, of course, sits well with Sica, the ultimate sources of
whose unhappiness with Weber must be gleaned from a few rudimen-
tary remarks strewn through his book. As one might suspect and fear,
nothing less than the nature of human freedom is at issue. Sica appears
to believe that sociology must analyze society as the site where the
essence of humanity is on display and manifests itself. This essence -
the specific hallmark of the human being's dignity - for him is by no
means "rationality" as conceived by Weber. He does not accept the
model that implicitly informs Weber's statements on the matter, and
that might be described as follows: Action is an actor's contextually
conditioned dealing with objects in a manner intended to satisfy the
instrumental requirements of his or her situationally predominant
action impetus. This impetus is not necessarily irresistible, but the actor
may be more or less able to control it, that is, may be able to interpose a
reflective stage between the ascendancy of the impetus and its imme-
diate precipitation into action. Weber is silent on the mental "mecha-
nisms" involved, but it is fair to say that he attributes three major effects
to their operation, amounting overall to a transposition of the impulse
from a level of dim feeling and undifferentiated immediate experience
to a level of conscious awareness and objectification. These effects are
(1) clear insight into the impulse's specific identity; (2) increased
control over nature and direction of the impulse's impact on the course
of action; and (3) harnessing of the impulse and its impact on conduct
to personal and cultural values and meaning patterns. This processing
of the impulse life by the objectifying, analytic and synthetic, cognitive
and normative structuring powers of the intellect using its cultural
resources Weber associates with "freedom," i.e., with the actor's capac-
ity to assert, in the structuring of his or her conduct, the influence of the
actor's "'own' 'deliberate considerations' (Erwdgungen) undisturbed by
'external' coercion or irresistible 'affects'...."'15

The capacity to act "freely" is the central precondition of Weber's con-

ception of personality. This ideal of a formed self requires the individ-

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834

ual to find a cause that makes his or her life a worthy one, and system-
atically, comprehensively, and continuously to choose and to structure
activities in accordance with its demands. From this perspective, the
kind and manner of behavior that most directly reflect involvement in
the cause may be said to be (existentially) the most meaningful for this
person. Sica, too, presumes existentially meaningful behavior to be
autonomous, i.e., to follow a course plotted by the individual, and this
involves, for him, its governance by the actor's self-defined calculus of
satisfaction. Conversely, existentially meaningless actions for him are
those whose performance is imposed on individuals through external
constraints; such actions are not fulfilling in terms of the personal cal-
culus of satisfaction. Thus, it can in this sense be quite "rational," for an
actor to disregard and withdraw from institutionally pre-plotted kinds
and courses of action. Sica, who says nothing about the "inner" sources
of action orientations' dimness, perturbation, and weakness so central
to Weber, believes that an empirically adequate sociology requires a
tenable conception of the relationship between personality and social
structure, "that juncture where subjectivity, or organized experience,
enters the rigidity of social structure and struggles to overcome, tran-
scend, or alter it in pursuit of its own goals" (129). Weber, in his
opinion, has it all wrong: Instead of treating rationality as the impulse
toward a meaningful existence that is thwarted by running into the
barriers of socially and culturally imposed patterns, he views it as a
matter of impulse control with the help of these patterns, and therefore
of increased calculability of behavior. This kind of "rationality" glorifies
the fetters placed on the search for meaning, i.e., the disciplining of
"those intra-psychic forces which resist cultural rationalization" (116),
for the sake of calculability.

Sica's protest, predicated on the equation of "existentially meaningful"

and "rational," imputes to Weber the assumption that the individual's
impulse control leads to existential meaning and simultaneously to
greater calculability because it is accomplished on behalf of a more
perfect conformity with rationalized patterns of institutional conduct.
"Most theorists apparently presume a fit between rationalized culture
and rational personality..." (3). This observation certainly does not
apply to Weber, who grounds the superior calculability of rational
actors in their conscious and consistent orientedness to meaning struc-
tures governed by an understandable "logic." There is no presumption
that these structures have to be the same as institutionalized patterns,
and that calculability and rationality therefore are tantamount to social
conformity. Weber's rational actor is not so stamped by society as to

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 835

inescapably make the meanings objectified in institutionalized prac-

tices and arrangements his or her own. Sica reads into Weber the
notion of a one-to-one correspondence between the rational actor's
search or demand for existentially significant, "meaningful" action and
the rationalities embodied in society's institutionalized patterns of con-
duct. Against this he places his own stake on "coercion or conformity -
the mechanisms for producing calculable behavior" (175) - and irra-
tional subjectivity as the source of existential meaning. Yet, whatever
the merits of this position may be, they do not include providing Sica
with the wherewithal for understanding Weber's sociology.

The books reviewed here converge in the assumption that Weber's con-
cern over the possibility of a meaningful existence structured his socio-
logical perspective, and that one gains access to this sociology as one
grasps his outlook on the problem of meaning in life. Scaff's book is
proof of the soundness of this interpretive strategy, yet only because it
is careful to separate the question of the validity of Weber's arguments
from the question of the circumstances of their genesis. For certain
purposes it may be interesting and revealing to treat an author's
writings as documents of the distinctiveness of an age, a class culture, a
type of thought. Yet their documentary value should not be confused
with their value as arguments. If sociology is to be more than intel-
lectual history, crypto-moralizing, or politics in a different guise, its
focus must be on the scrutinizing of the validity of its claims. Assuming
for the sake of argument that Weber opted for the construction of
rational ideal types because of his emotional problems, that he adopted
the view of life as a calling because of his confinement within a bour-
geois horizon - what conclusions should be drawn by those interested
in promoting sociology as an empirical science? That the precondition
for better or valid theory is a healthy mind and a social location
guaranteeing distortion-free vision?

The larger question is whether a concern, on the part of the investi-

gator, with the problem of a meaningful attitude toward life is a precon-
dition for a perceptive sociology. Here it must suffice to suggest that
Weber's premises are systematically conducive to sociologically inter-
esting investigations, i.e., research into the general structural features
of social life, only in combination with his partisanship for innerworld-
ly asceticism. For by insisting on effective activity in the world, this
stance places a premium on "disinterested," detailed, valid knowledge
of how this world operates. What makes Weber a sociologist rather
than a cultural analyst is his focus on the operation of the social world

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836

based on the assumption that events in that realm are inherently subject
to constraints and thus form discoverable and solid general structures.
Yet, whereas positivists ontologize these into "necessity" and "laws," he
speaks of (historical) "fate" and "inherent logic" (Eigengesetzlichkeit).
This divergence is crucial as it involves profound disagreement on how
to deal with the meaningful aspect of action phenomena. One may not
be satisfied with Weber's solution, but there should be little doubt that
it cannot be easily dismissed.

Notes

1. Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage. Culture, Politics, and Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989).
2. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, 3rd ed. (Tiibingen:
Mohr, 1968), 598; Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, editors, From Max Weber
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 143.
3. Max Weber, Gesammelte Politische Schriften, 3rd ed. (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1971);
Max Weber, "The National State and Economic Policy" [1895], Economy and
Society 9.4 (November 1980): 428-449.
4. Politische Schriften, 12; "National State and Economic Policy," 437.
5. From Max Weber, 156.
6. Wissenschaftslehre, 589; From Max Weber, 135.
7 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
8. Quoted in Max Weber and Thomas Mann, 122.
9. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
10. Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsdtze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. I (Tiibingen: Mohr,
1920), 560; From Max Weber, 347; Irrationality and Social Order, 196.
11. Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949),
52-53; Wissenschaftslehre, 149; Irrationality and Social Order, 151-152.
12. See Weber's discussion in Wissenschaftslehre 67f.; Max Weber, Roscher and Knies:
The Logical Problems of Historical Economics (New York: Free Press, 1975), 125f.
13. Irrationality and Social Order, 175f.
14. Wissenschaftslehre, 129-130; Roscher and Knies, 189-190.
15. Wissenschaftslehre, 13; Roscher and Knies, 191.

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