Political Critiques of Max Weber: Some Implications for Political Sociology

To some extent scholarly debate on Weber’s work, particularly in regard to bureaucracy and charisma, has been affected by the incompleteness, and the sequence, of the extant translations. Weber’s major comparative treatment of forms of domination, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, has suffered most on this score. This situation will hopefully be ameliorated by my forthcoming complete edition of Economy and Society, 2 vols., Totowa: Bedminster Press, 1966. This edition will also contain some of Weber’s political writings, which are still almost unknown to most English readers, with the exception of the widely read “Politics as a Vocation”—a speech addressed to students. On the differential impact of Weber’s work on American sociology, see Guenther Roth and Reinhard Bendix, “Weber’s Einfluss auf die amerikanische Soziologie,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 11 (1959), pp. 38–53. In diesem Band Kap. 1

Some of these tensions could also be illustrated by referring to Emile Durkheim. But in the United States the political implications of his work have never been an issue, in contrast to France where they were clearly perceived by friend and foe of the Third Republic. In the thirties and forties, some of the same critiques discussed here were directed against Vilfredo Pareto.

This seems to me related to what Benjamin Nelson has called the “social reality principle,” in derivation from Freudian terminology (see fn. 6). The term “sociological ethic” follows Weberian vocabulary and is gleaned from Carlo Antoni, From History to Sociology (Hayden V. White, trans.), Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1959, p. 141. Since Antoni is a follower of Benedetto Croce’s idealist intuitionism, the object of his study must appear to him as “the decline of German thought from historicism to typological sociologism” (see his preface of 1939).

See Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), From Max Weber, New York: Oxford University Press, 1946, p. 126; Marianne Weber, Max Weber, Heidelberg: Schneider, 1950, p. 509.

See “Politics as a Vocation,” loc. cit.

Prominent among Western spokesmen for a sophisticated “critical theory of society” are T. W. Adorno, who called for a critique of Weber’s political philosophy in an address as president of the German Sociological Association at the 1964 annual convention in Heidelberg, and Herbert Marcuse, who delivered the main attack at the same occasion. On Adorno’s basic position, see Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Die Dialektik der Aufklärung, Amsterdam: Querido, 1947; specifically on Weber, see Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, New York: Oxford University Press, 1947, p. 6. For Marcuse’s critique, see “Industrialisierung und Kapitalismus,” Heidelberg address, April, 1964, and the critical rejoinders by Reinhard Bendix and Benjamin Nelson (forthcoming Proceedings). Marcuse has become the bestknown representative of “critical social theory” in the U.S. through his books Reason and Revolution (1942), Eros and Civilization (1955), and the recent One Dimensional Man (1964).

See Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1955; on Weber esp. pp. 474–488. Lukács followed the Stalinist line before 1953 but joined the intra-party opposition before the Hungarian Revolution; after a period of banishment he recently emerged again with an appeal for a self-critical Marxism that can even accept Franz Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmare. Cf. Melvin Lasky’s perceptive review of two Lukács translations in the New York Times Book Review, May 10, 1964, p. 4, especially his remarks on the “simple-minded thirties.” Less known in this country is Hans Mayer, who abandoned his professorship of modern literature at the University of Leipzig in 1963 and sought asylum in Western Germany. For Mayer’s views on Weber, see “Die Krise der deutschen Staatslehre von Bismarck bis Weimar” (partly written before 1933), in Karl Marx und das Elend des Geistes, Meisenheim: Westkulturverlag, 1948, pp. 48–75.

Lukács, op. cit., p. 361.

Marcuse, “Industrialisierung … p. 2 of mimeo. version.,” op. cit.,

Carl Schmitt started from an authoritarian Catholic position. His major scholarly work is his Verfassungslehre, Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1928 (3rd unchanged ed., 1957); on Weber, see pp. 286 f., 307, 314, 335 f., 341 and 347. Scholarly in substance too is his essay Der Begriff des Politischen (1927). See the text of 1932 with a defensive preface (1963), Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1963. This essay contains his famous friend-foe distinction as the basic criterion of the political process. The Nazified edition of 1933 (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt) differs only – but decisively – in tone, terminology and omission. Weber, for whom Schmitt had high regard, is no longer mentioned, but Franz Oppenheimer is suddenly identified as a “Berlin-Frankfurt sociologist” – evoking the image of the two cities as citadels of liberalism-capitalism-bolshevism-­Judaism-sociologism. Schmitt suffered quick decline after 1933, but he was one of the most effective opponents of the Weimar Republic and of sociology during the late twenties.

Christoph Steding, Politik und Wissenschaft bei Max Weber, Breslau: Korn, 1932.

Das Reich und die Krankheit der europäischen Kultur, Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1938.

Carl Schmitt also construed a theory of political decline from the 16th century to the liberal-bourgeois age of “neutral” and “unpolitical” attitudes and social spheres. See “Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierungen und Entpolitisierungen” (1929), reprinted in Der Begriff des Politischen, op. cit., 1963, pp. 79–95.

See Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (4th ed., Johannes Winckelmann, ed.), Tübingen: Mohr, 1956, pp. 242 ff.

For Weber’s own dead-pan references to George’s charismatic exaltation, see op. cit., pp. 142, 664.

See, for example, Hans Mayer, Thomas Mann: Werk und Entwicklung, Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1950, and “Thomas Manns ‘Doktor Faustus’: Roman einer Endzeit und Endzeit eines Romans,” in Von Lessing bis Thomas Mann, Pfulligen: Neske, 1959, pp. 383–404; Georg Lukács, Thomas Mann, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1949; see also Hans Mayer’s “revisionist” review essay, “Georg Lukács’ Größe und Grenze,” Die Zeit, July 24, 1964, p. 12. Mann and Weber were impressed with Lukács’ pre-Marxist Theory of the Novel (written in 1914/1915). The figure of Naphta in the Magic Mountain (1924) is said to have drawn on Lukács’ personality. On Lukács personal acquaintance with the Webers, see Marianne Weber, op. cit., pp. 508 f., 511, 533, and his autobiographical statement of 1962 in Die Theorie des Romans, Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963, pp. 5–9.

In Locarno (Switzerland) in 1925, Belgium, France, England, Italy and Germany concluded the famous treaty that guaranteed the existing frontiers and seemed to create the basis for lasting peace among the European nations. This was the era of the “Spirit of Locarno.”

This intellectual game of arguing by facile as­ sociation or spurious correspondence has infinite variations. One latter-day version would consist in linking the meetings of the International Sociological Association in Liege, Amsterdam and Stresa (where, in 1935, England, France and Italy protested unsuccessfully against German rearmament) to the “neutralist” atmosphere of these localities, on the one hand, and the “neutralist” or, if need be, “instrumental” character of sociology on the other. For the 1962 meetings in Washington, D.C., other labels could easily be found (“Cold War stalemate,” etc.).

Cf. Steding, Max Weber, op. cit., pp. 108 and 31.

See the letter of Heinrich Himmler to Reinhard Heydrich, February 1, 1939, in Leon Poliakov and Josef Ulf (eds.), Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker: Dokumente, Berlin: Arani, 1959, p. 282.

See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, Ch. 2; Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, pp. 13–26.

Strauss, op. cit., p. 36.

Op. cit., p. 163.

See op. cit., p. 164.

Op. cit., p. 20.

As a young man, Voegelin was under Weber’s spell and wrote an excellent analysis of Weber’s rationalism, in particular, of the difference between the necessary resignation of the responsible political activist (Weber’s theory) and that of the esthetic creator (Simmel’s theory); see Erich Voegelin, “Über Max Weber,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Literatur, 3 (1925), pp. 177–193.

Strauss, op. cit., p. 2. In contrast, in the wake of the First World War some English scholars felt that one of its benefits had been liberation from the yoke of “German” value-free science; see Voegelin, op. cit., p. 189.

See Strauss, op. cit., p. 42.

Paradoxically, however, some liberals have been more sympathetic with the extreme German left than with the convinced supporters of parliamentary government in the Social Democratic labor movement – after both 1918 and 1945 – because the former seemed to promise a utopian reconstruction. Cf. my study, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany, Totowa: Bedminster Press, 1963, pp. 323 ff. For a recent textbook illustration of this moralistic bias, see John E. Rodes, Germany: A History, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964, preface.

See Ellsworth Faris, “An Estimate of Pareto,” American Journal of Sociology, 41 (1935), pp. 657–668.

J. P. Mayer, who feels more at home with Tocqueville’s older conservative liberalism, wrote his reflections on Weber and German politics in the early thirties, contemporaneous with the work of Lukács, Hans Mayer and Steding, and published them in war-time England. J. P. Mayer, Max Weber and German Politics, London: Faber and Faber, 1943. Hans Kohn, life-long student of nationalism, recently echoed Mayer and placed Weber squarely in the ranks of narrow-minded nationalists; see his The Mind of Germany, New York: Scribner, 1960, pp. 269, 278–287.

The most impressive study on this score, superseding J. P. Mayer, is Wolfgang Mommsen’s Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 1890–1920, Tübingen: Mohr, 1959; for Mommsen’s implicit natural rights view, see p. 407. As a German historian, Mommsen is, of course, far removed from the interest of American sociologists in Weber, but his treatment becomes questionable to them the moment he interprets Weber’s sociological analyses as political ideology. Accordingly he was criticized on both historical and methodological grounds in a symposium by three American (formerly German) social scientists: Reinhard Bendix, Karl Loewenstein and the late Paul Honigsheim in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 13 (1961), pp. 258 ff. Mommsen replied at length against what he called the Weber orthodoxy in ibid., 15 (1963), pp. 295–321.

The facts on the presidential issue have now been uncovered in the excellent study by Gerhard Schulz, Zwischen Demokratie und Diktatur: Verfassungspolitik und Reichsreform in der Weimarer Republik, Berlin: Gruyter, 1963, I, pp. 114–142. Schulz points out that far from taking a blunt position in favor of a “Caesarist” leader, Weber gradually shifted his opinions in response to the changing political situation and the diversity of opinion in committee meetings. Eventually he came to favor a popularly elected president as a mediator between the Reichstag and the States, between the unitary and the federative principle. Cf. Weber, Gesammelte politische Schriften (Johannes Winckelmann, ed.), Tübingen: Mohr, 1958, pp. 394–471, 486–489. Schulz also delivered the commemorative address on “Weber as a Political Critic” before the Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung, Heidelberg, 1964.

See Wilhelm Hennis, “Zum Problem der deutschen Staatsanschauung,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 7 (1959), pp. 1–23. For a similar construction making Schmitt a terminal point of a long development passing through Weber, see Heinz Laufer, Das Kriterium politischen Handelns: Eine Studie zur Freund-Feind-Doktrin von Carl Schmitt, Munich: Institut für politische Wissenschaften der Universität München, 1961. For Mommsen’s interpretation of Schmitt’s “logical” elaboration of Weber, see Mommsen, op. cit., pp. 379–386. For a judicious assessment, in the wake of the 1964 Heidelberg convention, of the link and the difference between Weber and Schmitt, see Karl Loewith, “Max Weber und Carl Schmitt,” a full­page essay in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 27, 1964. Loewith also delivered the main address on “Science as a Vocation” at the Weber commemoration of the University of Heidelberg, April, 1964.

In addition to Eric Voegelin, see Jacob L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, New York: Praeger, 1960, and Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase, London: Secker and Warburg­, 1960; Georg Iggers, The Cult of Authority: The Political Philosophy of the Saint-Simonians, The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1958, and id. (ed.), The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958, pp. ix–xlvii. For a critique of this approach, see Alfred Cobban, In Search of Humanity: The Role of the Enlightenment in Modern History, New York: Braziller, 1960.

“Max Weber vor dem Faschismus,” Der Staat, 2 (1963), pp. 295–321; see also his major comparative study of French, Italian and German Fascism, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, Munich: Piper, 1963.

Cf. Ernst Topitsch, “Max Weber und die Soziologie heute,” address before the 1964 Heidelberg convention.

This is not to deny that Weber had a vociferously nationalist phase when he supported the extreme Conservatives, at about the age of 30, but he quickly moved on to the liberal Left, advocating the integration of the Social Democratic labor movement (cf. Roth, op. cit., Chaps. 10 and 11). See Weber’s autobiographical statement on his shift of opinion in the preface to “Parlament und Regierung …,” Politische Schriften, op. cit., pp. 297 f. Very useful for an historical judgment are the documents selected and commented on by Eduard Baumgarten in Max Weber: Werk und Person, Tübingen: Mohr, 1964.

Cf. Nolte, “Max Weber …” op. cit., p. 18.

Cf. Carl Cerny, “Storm Over Max Weber,” Encounter, August 1964, pp. 57–59, and the report in Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 16 (1964), pp. 404–424.

The former President of the Federal Republic, Theodor Heuss, one of Weber’s friends and political collaborators (deceased in December, 1963), had intended to lead the public tribute to Weber; all major newspapers took note of the centenary in essays and extensive news coverage of commemorative meetings and particularly of the various Heidelberg meetings – evidence of public attention to a social scientist which is still ­ unlikely in the U.S. For Heuss’ last literary tribute to Weber, see “Max Weber in seiner Gegenwart,” his 1958 introduction to Weber’s political writings, op. cit., pp. vii–xxxi.

See Raymond Aron, “Max Weber et la politique de puissance,” address before the 1964 Heidelberg convention. For Aron’s earlier appreciation of Weber, see his German Sociology (M. and T. Bottomore, trans.), Glencoe: Free Press, 1957, pp. 67–106 (first French edition, 1936).

Cf. Heinz Hartmann, “Sociology in Cuba”, American Sociological Review, 28 (August, 1963), pp. 624–628.