Plymouth University Social Theory Group—Discussion 3

We looked at two readings from Weber, Politics as a Vocation…, and chapter two of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  Both of these are written in the classical academic style, with mercifully few references and footnotes, but with lots of allusions, to classical history, for example, and liberally spattered with Greek and Latin (and occasionally other European languages too).

Politics…  is quite a long piece, and all participants had difficulty in getting through it.  In my view, it came to life at the end, with some critical comments about politics in Germany immediately after World War I, when a number of German cities were occupied by communist and socialist groups, and the fascist reaction was already becoming apparent.  Here, Weber rebukes in particular those who see politics as a matter of having a personal burning vision of the future, especially if they are prepared to justify any means in the pursuit of this end.  Those who choose politics as a vocation must realize what they are doing. It is not just applying some ethical theory.althoug all the major religiouys and ethical systems have tried to provide some sort of account that connects politics and ethics. Weber reminds us right at the start that the State is an insitution that monopolises violence -- politics is about force and violence, at some stage at least.

The real problem is that the revolutionaries of left and right are hoping to sidestep the reality of actual politics, the long arduous business of building support, organizing various political institutions, and engaging in daily struggles with the forces of conservatism (or stability)  such as the professional civil service.  This reality cannot be sidestepped, however, and very often violence and repression ensues as revolutionary visionaries get disappointed and start to blame sectors of the population. Eventually, revolutionary spasms subside.  Weber is well aware that organising conventional politics will dilute the revolutionary vision, however.  This is bad news for radicals, of course, echoed in some later remarks about bureaucracy and its permanence—even revolutionary movements need a bureaucracy to come to power and then maintain it.

We discussed one interesting possibility by trying out Weberian analysis to explain the apparent recent impotence of postmodern cultural politics.  My own view would be that, such politics could also be analysed in the same way as revolutionary socialism (I am not saying that this is my personal view!).  Postmodernists focused hard on developing their philosophical vision, but neglected concrete politics, failed to engage with the business of persuading people, lobbying, taking on and dealing with opponents—and thus ended as a fashionable intellectual movement only,  confined to universities.  Hence the old jibe about cultural politics ending with a mere politics of culture. I had in mind the devastating critique by Fraser of the Derrridavian Centre for deconstructing politics founded in Paris.  There, intellectuals spent their time discussing what was meant by ‘the political’ and whether or not Derridavian deconstruction was political  in any particular sense.  Meanwhile, their political opponents organised an internal coup and took over the Centre.  Fraser argues that intellectual politics is incapable of dealing with actual politics, and that the Derridavians preferred philosophy to a good old fashioned political conflict.

Anyway, with the ending of Weber’s piece in mind, it might be possible to find some particular relevance in the lengthy analysis of politics that precedes that particular commentary.  The way I read it is to see it as an example of Weber’s insistence on complexity, on unintended consequences and emergence, and on ironic outcomes as chronic to historical development.

What the analysis actually offers is a complex account of the development of various political systems in France, Germany, England and the USA.  It is possible to isolate a number of factors in these developments—various social classes (rendered rather as occupational groups not classic Marxist classes, although there are occasional references to dominant groups and powerful elites); religious groups, including organized churches; and professional politicians who include civil servants and administrators as well as journalists.  In western democracies, various local organisations dealing with voters and the way they are organised are also important.

These groups interact in particular ways, forming alliances with each other in order to oppose and manage their opponents, and then reforming alliances but with those opponents if necessary (there’s a similarity here with the work of Elias on figurations).  There is no central tendency towards class domination in the Marxist sense, as in the 18^th Brumaire.  Various complex outcomes are possible.  To give just one example, Weber compares the struggle between the politicians and the professional civil servants and how this is resolved in England and Germany.  In England, elected politicians are also expected to undertake administrative tasks, to learn how to manage budgets and so on.  This gives them some inside knowledge with which to stave off the influence of the civil service bureaucrats.  By contrast, Germany (in the Weimar period) had political parties which considered themselves to be much more purist, organised more around political principles.  Well and good, except that they were particularly vulnerable to the influence of their civil service bureaucrats.  To take another quick example, England, when it developed an extension of the franchise, enrolled the assistance of the Church in organising and regulating local organisations of voters.  America was far too anti-clerical to develop that system, so it developed local party bosses and party machines, which delivered votes, although at the expense of corruption, as in Tammany Hall politics.  There are several occasions when charismatic leaders arise to shake up the established political system, and they get dealt with in various ways. While we are here, Weber is rather cynical about proportional representation, which he sees as giving undue influence to professional politicians to cobble together coalitions, removing the direct influence of the electorate!

The Protestant Ethic...  is much better known, but it was a good idea to return to this specific chapter.  People noticed the interesting methodological procedures at the start of the chapter where Weber announces that he is constructing a conceptual model of the spirit of capitalism.  Discussion turned on whether this was genuine constructivism, or merely a seduction technique, well-known in academic circles, to introduce an analysis that was already well developed.  In this chapter, Weber illustrates what he means with extensive quotations from the work of Benjamin Franklin, who invented all those mottoes about how time is money, we should not waste a single hour, that lying in bed meant we had lost the chance to earn more money and thus improve our lives, and so on.  This, he says, shows how hard work to earn money became a religious calling, based particularly clearly in Franklin’s case on his Calvinist upbringing.

It is this idea of work as a religious calling, as a duty,  that is the hallmark of modern capitalism.  Weber tells us that proto-capitalist enterprises in various forms were widespread in the past, but they were driven by motives such as greed, the love of gold.  Modern capitalism is religious.  The actual book goes on to demonstrate this by citing comparative examples of different cantons in Switzerland, and different European countries, some protestant some catholic, and suggesting that there is a correlation between dominant religion and capitalist development (heavily criticised since).

This is a familiar argument, and again is often taken to indicate Weber’s insistence on unpredictability and ironic outcomes.  No protestant sect ever intended to develop capitalism.  Indeed, Weber tells us in later chapters, Calvin and Knox specifically preached that any sort of activity in this world was futile—God had already chosen the Elect, our fate was predetermined, and nothing we could do in this world could affect it.  To gloss the argument here, Weber goes on to argue that nevertheless protestants still held some personal hope that virtuous conduct just might be seen as some clue that the actor was among the Chosen.  In any event, chosen or not, protestants could not spend their lives in idleness and indulgence.  They had to work hard, apply a personal ethic to everything they did, save and invest, and not indulge themselves with idle consumerist luxuries.  It just so happens that this is the perfect kind of personality and character set to develop early capitalism, and it is not surprising that puritans played a major part in the emergence of banking systems (the Barclays were Quakers), and early manufacturing (Cadbury, Rowntree). 

This ‘primitive accumulation’ explanation for the rise of capitalism is particularly ridiculed by Marx in Capital.  Here, Weber is continuing the famed ‘dialogue with the ghost of K Marx’ deliberately reminding us of a crucial role played by the so-called superstructures, especially religion.  The material conditions for the emergence of capitalism existed long ago, he argues, but it needed a particular strong personal commitment to break the force of tradition.  That tradition is still around, and can be seen in the behaviour of ‘traditional’ people (Weber includes women!)  on first encountering capitalism—workers who work just long enough to earn a daily wage, rather than attempting to maximise their wages, for example.

Right at the end of this chapter, Weber throws in a reference to the idea that history can be seen as the steady, inevitable growth of rationalisation.  This is often seen as Weber’s own position, although he attributes it to Sombart.  His own position can be seen as suggesting that there are no general historical trends or social roles again but only contingency and unintended consequences, even when discussing rationalisation.  Weber says that the role played by Protestantism indicates that irrational impulses are also decisive in particular circumstances.