If there are no causal laws in society and history, it means that all events within history are unique. How can we theorise about the studium of unique events?
According to Weber we can follow ideal types, constructions of eg. a typical image of a commercial capitalist in the 18:th century. There might not be any particular to which that ideal type applies, but we can get a general idea of what the ideal type is representing, and it gives us a constructed ability to compare and describe events.
They are like tools which we can compare historical events with.
Weber develops three ideal types of legitimate domination (Herrschaft).
Weber is interested in analysing data from all through history and looking at ideal types present legitimately in all of these times.
The first: Rational-Legal domination.
Based on the belief in the legality of rules. There are a rational set of rules that can govern society correctly. This is the kind of domination present in modern societies. Power is exercised according to the law (generally), the rule of law. We pereceive the power that the government exercises as legitimate because they base their rulings on the law.
Bureaucracy: for Weber is a neutral term. In modern society we have a lot of institutions that require massive organisation, eg a university, and these, according to our ideal of instrumental rationality, need to be standardised rationally. A rational assessment of how to organise it most effectively. You split roles and accord them functions, and assign these rules that apply to them impersonally. In societies we often find these rules somehow compiled. Bureaucracy also exhibits a clear hierarchy with formal decision-making procedures rather than quick decision-making.
The rules in bureaucracy are in theory objectively determined and not ruled by individuals. Furthermore, individuals do not own their position. They can be dismissed and be replaced. It means that someone has a relation with the function of their position without it being theirs, it can always be occupied by others.
However, in the ancien regime for example, people owned their positions. If you had been given a position no one could take it from you, except through buying you out of your position, with your agreeing to it.
Thus, Weber says that the move from systems like in the ancien regime to bureaucracy is rational progression.
This is the ideal type of a bureaucracy. But, if we put it next to reality, there will be other elements that play a role. Eg. in our university, despite the rules being impersonal and equal for everybody, there are very few female professors and there have never been female principle.
Bureaucracy is ”from a technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense foramlly the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings” (instrumental rationality at its peak afawk).
There is however a kind of ambivalence; Weber things bureaucracy is positive because it is both efficient and objective, people will get an equal treatment within bureaucracy. It is not a system of personal preference (in theory). But there is a downside: because these bureaucratic organisations work on objective rules, they also have to make abstractions constantly, everyone becomes no more than a number and thus we become dehumanised; it doesn’t matter who the person behind a number is. It leads to alienation: we become a piece of paperwork that we do not even remotely understand. We feel that we are treated impersonally; something very peculiar of the modern experience.
Someone in the middle ages would have never felt that experience. In the feudal society, all relations were that of personal dependance. There were no impersonal relations at all. In modernity, we see a process of depersonalisation of organisation. You can be part of an organiation for ever and still not having any idea at all about what that organisation actually is as a whole.
(In Marx the alienation is about a domination of the things you produce and in which you cannot have any contact with the final product, so remember that the alienation is different though still leading to the same kind of feeling of ousting.)
(In feminist sociology these kind of objective rules are not enough for an organisation. There will be social cues and social reality that go beyond the problem of equal rights.)
When bureaucracy confronts problems: the answer will always be to expand bureaucracy.
eg. mental well-being at KU leuven. If you study psychology with a first year of 700 students, you won’t develop any kind of friends at all because the scale is just too big. Thus mental well-being decreases in these areas. So the university increases bureaucracy by creating a new sub-institution that monitors and takes care of the well-being of others.
The problems that bureaucracy has created, is solved by creating more bureaucracy.
Weber calls this phenomenon the ”iron cage” of bureaucracy: restated above in bold.
So what could be a solution?
How could we deal with mental well-being without creating more bureaucracy within bureaucracy?
The Second: Traditional domination.
Based on the belief in traditions, eg. patriarchalism or feudalism.
The Third: Charismatic domination.
Leadership through charisma: something that is usually seen as an intrinsic something which radiates and captivates other people, that view is unacceptable for Weber, it explains nothing. We need instead to understand the dynamic between the leaders and the followers, and it is in this dynamic that the leader comes to be perceived as special. Cultural, and revolutional renewal is often based on charismatic forms of domination.
Based on ”devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person”.
Charisma is a product of collective enthusiasm.
One comes to be perceived as charismatic because the crowd cheers. (It is similar to Durkheim’s collective effervescence.)
The charismatic leader is a product of their followers; the belief by the followers that the leader has special qualities leads to reinforcement of them having special characteristics, often reified by direct addressation.
Charismatic leadership disrupts the normal state of affairs, it generally does not work to reinforce tradition, unless the revolution in itself is desiring to reinstate traditionalism, at which point this is a societal breaking of the status quo anyways.
Charismatic leadership is fragile however, because once a new movement has been created, it wants itself to last. That means it needs to be oranised. Thus it approaches instrumental-rationality, and will keep encrouching onto it by giving the charismatic movement a social routine. Thus the charismatic character is eventually entirely lost.
A key for Weber is how new things arrise, and then lose their impetus.
Weber is trying to make ideal types that actually work to describe the societies that we ourselves believe ourselves to exist in. They have none of their own objective reality, and so an ontic status of mental construction. No actually existing phenomena are a perfect instantiation of that ideal type.
Usually they are combinations of at least 2 of these.
Weber himself defended plebiscitary democracy: charismatic authority + bureaucratic-legal domination.
Plebisicitary means that there is a direct relationship between the leader and the mass.
Circularity of Weber’s argument: power is legitimate if the people believe in its legitimacy.
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Laws are legitimate if they are enacted according to the law
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Traditional domination is justified by tradition
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Charismatic domination is justified by belief in charisma
→ no transcendental value
→ each form of domination is only justified on its own grounds: in terms of the beliefs of individuals.
(The figure of the monarch in Hegel is a kind of particularisation of different abstract concepts and their reality, saying that they are intrinsically there and acting on phenomena, which makes absolutely no sense to Weber.)
Objectivity in sociology:
Durkheim: stick to the facts, put aside preconceptions.
Marx: no distinction between facts and values, every praxis is value-laden, social theory should strive for human emancipation.
Weber: ’Wertfreiheit’, value-neutrality.
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Separation between facts and values.
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Science cannot solve value problems.
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Science only describes the state of the world as it is, but cannot point us in what direction life should go.
But values are nevertheless important:
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Science is value-laden: integrity, rigour, truth etc. Science is a value-laden activity from the get-go.
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Scientists choose their topics (and methods) of study on the basis of values. You choose your topic of study because you believe there is a need for that kind of research to be done. Values select what kind of topics should be researched.
”Life with its irrational reality and its store of possible meanings is inexhaustible. The concrete form in which value-relationship occurs remains perpetually in flux, ever subject to change in the dimly seen future of human culture. The light which emanates from those highest value-ideas always falls on an ever changing finite segment of the vast chaotic stream of events, which flows away through time.
- Objectivity of social science.
Weber was a Nietzschean.
Nietzschean pluralism of values + commitment to those values that engender scientific objecitivity.
The scoiologist make a choice within the plurality of values, and needs to be clear and open about that.
To be a good scientist we need to make clear that our values play a role, and we need to be reflexive about this.
Keep the gap between knowledge and values open: knowledge can never affirm or refute our values.
Value-neutrality is a value we choose in order to engender science as being meaningful. We build science through the values we hold of science.
One of Weber’s most famous sociological investigations is the emergence of modern capitalism.
Weber looks at history: He is interested in the development of rationalisation.
How did we get to modernity?
Weber depicts a view of history which brings about a form of rationality (but it is not a picture of progress) rather it is a logic of unintended consequences.
Weber called a ”tragic” liberal: individuals are unintendedly caught in an ’iron cage’ of history. We are free but that freedom sometimes takes us in directions which make us unfree.
In the world there are philosophical or religous traditions which are led by priest-class individuals that live by understanding the religious tenets, but by doing so, they set in motion a process of rationalisation. This process tends to move beyond the religion in which it is, because at some point it will begin to question religious beliefs, it will begin questioning irrational concepts within religion. Which in the end has unintended side effects.
This type of logic is fundamentally at work in process of history.
eg. right now there is no fundamental belief that we all share. This is the thesis of value-pluralism. These values are what remains of the rationalisation process of questioning everything. And this in itself might go so far as to undermine even these values, leading us to choosing which values we have. There is a kind of chaos of values.
The plurality of values can be described as the reemergence of polytheism. We live in a warring gods period.
Modernisation = rationalisation of a specific type: predominance of instrumental rationality.
The distinctive property of modern societies is the maxim of instrumental rationality.
The process of instrumental rationalisation which we see at work in the buildup of bureaucracy leads to a number of important effects, such as disenchantment.
Disenchantment means that the world loses its special or magic meaning. ’Primitive’ societies might believe that there are divine forces present in the world, but the instrumental rationality of capitalism makes these beliefs impossible. You cannot believe in divine properties inherent in things when things exist only as resources that exist for value.
Nature is a thing and that is all it becomes.
Furthermore we see social differentiation. Society gets split up into different domains. Religion and economic activities used to be intertwined in the middle ages and before, whilst in modern societies this is considered inefficient. It would be crazy to think that in a factory we could pray in the morning to hope for good production. This makes no sense for a modern society. That is what functional/social differentiation is.
There are clearly separated spheres in society. Politics, culture, faith, etc. Nothing is intertwined.
What is focused on here is the change in menaning, so it is not the same as alienation.
It makes us believe that all events are without meaning, we shouldn’t look for it because there is none. eg. with the pandemic. We see it as a virus that spread because of bad luck and there is nothing more to it.
Capitalism
Orientation to profis has existed in many different societies.
But it took a specific from in the west.
There was a specific type of rationality in the west.
”What combination of circumstances should be attributed tthe fact that in Western civilisation, and in Western civilisation only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value”
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Protestant Ethic 1920
From where does capitalism arrise?
In Marx: Primitive accumulation.
Weber: calls this imperialist capitalism, based on violence but in addition, Weber stresses the role of the ’spirit’ of capitalism: an ’ethical’ oritentation.
Capitalism is not just a set of structures (like in Marx), but requires a type of spirit behind it (a kind of order of meaning) that makes the capitalist mentality possible.
There were entrepeneurs already in the middle ages, but they had a mentality of ”enough”. As long as they could live well they would limit themselves. So they might have traded in the same way, but still they decide to stop after a while. Furthermore the ethic of the worker needs to change to view work as an end in itself. They need to consider work as something that will always be able to accumulate and still be good.
According to Weber, protestantism contains this ethic that can lead to the acceptance of continuing the chain of acquisition as the ultimate purpose of life. ”The earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life. Man is dominated by the making of money.”
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This requires asceticism rather than hedonism
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Not catholic ascetism of the manasteries (denial of the flesh)
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But inner-worldly ascetism: Self-denial in order to shape and control this world.
→ sacrifice happiness and enjoyment in order to become someone in the world.
Something happened on a religious level that created a new attitude toward the world which was key to making the ethic of capitalism possible.
Weber is not saying that the protestants were capitalists; intially they were interested entirely about religious affairs; believers should have a direct relationship to God, the church hierarchy is not necessary in the same way that they existed in the catholic church. This relation comes through the pure reading of the bible. Everyone must learn to read and books must be printed at such a speed so that everyone can read the bible and everyone has to individually interpret the bible.
→ development towards individualism.
This has nothing to do with capitalism; but the changes which protestantism brought about, led to a new mentality which underpins the spirit of capitalism.
Weber’s main example of this is Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin wrote books for a broad audience about how one can become rich.
”Time is money” can be considered the ethos of Franklin.
Credit is money. (you need to have a certain ethical attitude in life so that you can take loans)
Money begets money.
Careful accounting.
Prudence and industry, against idelenss.
→ increasing your capital is your duty.
For Franklin it is a kind of moral duty to partake in capitalism. You do not have a choice if you are also to be morally right. For him, if you are concerned about religious salvation, this is the kind of life we have to live.
There is a reversal between means and ends.
”Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for the satisfaction of his material needs. This reversal of what we should call the natural relationship, so irrational from a naive point of view is evidently as definitely a leading principle of capitalism as it is foreign to all peoples not under capitalist influence.”
In Marx this reversal is the result of relations of productions, and in Weber it is a spiritual change.
But: making money is ultimately not an end in itself for Franklin. Getting rich has an underlying meaning. It means we are virtuous and proficient in relation to a calling.
In German, the word beruf is used to explain someone’s job, and it is related to a calling, and furthermore, a religious calling. When we are working diligently, we are also working diligently at our religious salvation.
For Luther you respond to the calling of God by dedicating yourself to your work, that God has given you. Behind this is a view of divine providence. God has given me a calling and it is my duty to do this as well as I can.
In the followers of Calvin, we can find this kind of ethic as wel. The question in Calvinism is however of salvation. And the question is about who will receive grace from God. In Calvinism we must be self-confident in our having been chosen. The means to achieve this self-confidence is inner-worldly activity: control of yourself and your world.
Business success = sign that one is chosen to be elect.
Business success aquires a religious meaning.
Thus, protestants will lead a life that is instrumentally rational so that they can dedicate as much time as possible to labour and the accumulation of wealth. They reorganise their daily lives in lieu of becoming wealthy.
Through the logic of unintended effects, the protestants did not intend to create capitalism, but created the conditions under which capitalism could flourish.
Karl Kautsky: the puritan ethic is a product of the class struggle of the emerging bourgeoisie and craftsmen against feudalism: it has an economic class.
Protestantism did not cause capitalism, but created the conditions for it.