A Spanish-German colloquium on the contemporary relevance of the thinker held in Madrid
Reyes Mate
4 DEC 1989 – 00:00 CET
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Max Weber, the most important German thinker at the hinge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seeks his place in the history of ideas: historian, national economist, or sociologist? A lucid analyst of a democracy in decline, or a cynical defender of the established order? Around these and other questions, the German Institute organized a series of lectures on The Contemporary Relevance of Weber’s Thought, held in Madrid last week. [The Spanish-German colloquium entitled The Contemporary Relevance of Max Weber’s Thought was organized by the German Institute in collaboration with the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council and the Complutense University of Madrid.]
Like so many other consecrated figures, the real Weber lies buried under clichés such as, for example, “indifference toward values.” W. Hennis goes to war against them in a demythologizing paper. The Frankfurt School has popularized the image of a positivist, conservative Weber, if not even a precursor of fascism, with the idea that modern reason is concerned only with achieving goals, caring little or nothing about where the endpoint is placed. None of that, says Hennis. It is out of respect for morality that matters as serious as deciding ends and establishing values cannot be left in the hands of science.
If something so fundamental could have been forgotten and distorted, it is because the context of Weberian discourse has been lost. It all began in a local dispute over whether to industrially reconvert East Elbia —thereby uprooting and impoverishing the peasants, but increasing productivity— or to respect their small-scale production. The moral criterion could not be mere Produktivität. The same logic applied to politicians and intellectuals. In the face of excessive ideologization, nothing is better than value-neutrality so that the one who decides is the listener, the reader, the citizen.
W. Mommsen wants to understand the place of history in Weber, a concern that never left him. Weber’s work was a scientific investigation into the cultural significance of the socioeconomic structures of human life; a systematic reconstruction of the great historical types of social interaction —the nation, religion, etc.— where there is an element of scientific elaboration, but where meaning is supplied by man, as Nietzsche might say.
Tension
There is always that tension between science and decisionism, a tension given by the objective Weber pursued: to reconstruct social processes and historical structures, but from the standpoint of their cultural significance. The criticisms of him as a positivist, at times, and as a decisionist, at others, perhaps explain why only Troeltsch continued his work in a homogeneous way. Mommsen believes that Weber’s complex and ambitious method can still be fruitful.
Weber is known as a technician of the bureaucratization process, and Kafka as its most ruthless critic. For José María González García, both are consummate critics —one from science and the other from literature— of the most important organizational process of modernity. A long German bureaucratic tradition, strengthened by Taylorism, modern labor legislation, state interventionism, and mass parties, sets in motion an army of officials, lawyers, secretaries, courts, and so on, which is extremely dangerous.
“The prisons of future humanity are made of office papers,” Kafka writes. The first victim is the civil servant, who has exchanged his soul for dull security; but so too is the revolution, hijacked by the apparatus shortly after being born. Bureaucracy literally becomes a machine of torture and extermination. Lukács, who did not take Kafka seriously, ended up experiencing in his own flesh that “Kafka was a realist.”
To hear that democracy only allows us to choose between masters, and that it is plebiscitary because what the people choose is either a leader or a demagogue; that politics is a struggle for power; that power is the essence of freedom and truth —all this could well be understood as expressions of a cynical theory of democracy.
Democracy
It is, however, Max Weber’s analysis, which Ignacio Sotelo spoke about. One must recognize, he pointed out, “that the Weberian critique of democracy and its replacement by an elitist theory of democracy corresponds to the reality of existing Western democracies.”
Many have used Weber’s realist analysis to legitimize that type of democracy —Weber did not. But, just in case, Sotelo made two critical clarifications: the very Hobbesian identification of freedom and power cuts off any critical way out. On the other hand, the fact that Max Weber’s political thought culminates in the idealization of the leader gives one pause, especially once such leadership has actually taken place.
W. Schluchter, an accomplished specialist in Weber as sociologist of religion, who has just published a voluminous work on the subject (Religion und Lebensführung), explained the methodology of Weber’s historical reconstructions of religious phenomena.
Economic, political, and religious elements are involved there, as well as institutional factors, causal networks, and so on. They do not establish a stable causal relationship among themselves; rather, in each phase they form different constellations with different causal orders. There are results, such as the explanation of the Protestant origin of capitalism, that demonstrate the fruitfulness of the approach.
Original source: https://elpais.com/diario/1989/12/04/cultura/628729207_850215.html
