At the end of May 1917, Max Weber attended a “cultural congress” at the picturesque castle of Lauenstein in Thuringia. The congress had been organized by the publicist Eugen Diederichs of Jena and by the Patriotic Society for Thuringia 1914. The moment was a particularly tense one in the life of the embattled German Reich. Against the advice of many cooler heads within the country, Germany had declared unrestricted submarine warfare in January, which together with other antagonistic moves on its part, had led to the entry of the United States into the war in April. By this point it was clear to all but the most indefatigable optimists that Germany would lose the war.Footnote 1 In this atmosphere of dread and of new hope that a phoenix-like new Germany or a new humanity would arise out of the ashes of the war, the participants outlined their visions of the future. The eccentric former Social Democrat-turned-nationalist Max Maurenbrecher denounced capitalist mechanization but called for a revival of the traditional Prussian concept of the state, for an “idealistic state” and for workers to be educated towards national consciousness by means of the German literary and philosophical classics (Kaesler, 747–52).
This speech was supposed to be the relaunch of Maurenbrecher's political career. Instead, his position was taken apart piece by piece in a furious and fiery reply by Max Weber. Maurenbrecher was nothing but a “romantic”, mechanization was inevitable, manifesting itself in bureaucracy and private enterprise, and Germany's parliament was a sorry spectacle of bribery and mediocrity. Weber continued to rage against the Kaiser and his entourage and even dared his audience to formally accuse him of insulting the emperor. What had been until then a mundane, or at least tame, gathering was brought suddenly and brusquely to life. This was one of many episodes in which a pugnacious, irritable and passionate Weber lost his temper in a political or academic setting, and indeed in the curious mixture of the two provided by a certain type of organization in Protestant Wilhelmine Germany, like the Protestant Social Congress and the Association for Social Policy.Footnote 2 Yet this episode unites a string of political and historical phenomena that are of crucial importance for understanding Weber and his Germany.
In his novel Der Untertan, which appeared in 1918, Heinrich Mann famously satirized a (fictional) environment in which Majestätsbeleidigung, an insult to monarchy, was taken seriously. In imperial Germany that law was unevenly enforced and the Kaiser was often a figure of disdain. In Mann's novel, a liberal factory owner and town notable is imprisoned in the local castle for the offence. The petty nationalism and the horse-trading but ultimately impotent parliamentary politics that Weber so despised both come to the fore in Mann's fictional town. Weber was not arraigned for Majestätsbeleidigung. But by appealing to the traditional Prussian state and for a scheme that would place workers under a kind of stultifying tutelage in 1917, Maurenbrecher touched raw nerves and pointed in the direction of themes that fascinated and alarmed Weber's Germany. The Protestant Social Congress, founded in 1890, and the Association for Social Policy, founded in 1872, in both of which Weber participated, were scenes of important debates about the problem and potential of human struggle, both in terms of “social policy”—a rubric which included workers’ rights and industrial conditions—and in terms of geopolitics and international competition.Footnote 3 Indeed, at stake was often the link between them, and Weber would later concentrate on the link between parliamentary constitutional politics and international power status. A generation before Maurenbrecher's speech, figures like Gustav Schmoller, the founder of the Association for Social Policy, had appealed to a “neutral” Prussian model of the state, standing above class struggle and with an emphasis on workers’ education and state intervention in the economy.Footnote 4
Some years later Gerhart von Schulze-Gävernitz, who preceded Weber in his Freiburg post, had argued that more highly educated workers resembling those of Britain could be weaned away from Marxism with the German classics, especially Kant. In this way, a social harmony could be established in preparation for serious international competition.Footnote 5 In 1897 the economist Werner Sombart wrote a thundering manifesto in favour of a ruthless capitalist competition between different industries and between the social strata attached to them. Unlike Schmoller, Sombart saw in the formation of new classes not family members to be peacefully incorporated, but rather “new fighters.” Social reformers had to “choose sides in the struggle.”Footnote 6 Sombart's condemnation of traditional craft workers to oblivion in favour of high industrial capitalism was controversial and signalled a vitalist commitment to the potential dynamism of workers and to the benefits this would bring to the nation.
Clearly, Weber's Germany was divided along political, confessional, social and economic lines.Footnote 7 But its intellectual culture was also divided between what we might call “irenic” and “agonistic” languages of political economy, languages that always also advanced an explicit link to Germany's position on the world stage. Irenic languages sought to promote the idea of the neutral state creating harmony and directing its efforts towards social peace. Agonistic languages sought to harness the force of upwardly striving sectors of society, however defined, and distrusted the tutelage of the traditional state, intimating that Germany could assert its power more effectively by tapping into a reservoir of vitality and leadership sidelined by the establishment or the political system. During crucial debates in the Association for Social Policy in 1905 Weber had opposed schemes to place trade unions under state oversight.Footnote 8 His, then, was a variety of agonistic political economy. Indeed, Gangolf Hübinger, one of the editors of Weber's collected works currently in progress, wrote that Kampf, or struggle, was a more central concept of Weber's oeuvre than such ideas as that of the formation of particular types of personality, something advanced by Wilhelm Hennis.Footnote 9
Weber also espoused an agonistic variety of politics, with a sophistication and refinement never attained by Sombart. The leadership he envisaged in the writings of 1917–18 would act with a subtlety and skill that could match and surpass the rhetorical powers demonstrated during the war by the propaganda and leadership of the Western democracies. In Western parliaments, unlike the German Reichstag, the prospect of executive power fell to those who led parliamentary majorities. These parliamentary chambers, after all, had trained the men now beating Germany. But this too was part of an older conversation.Footnote 10 Under the auspices of an intellectual and political confrontation with the still powerful political arm of the agrarian economy, democratic thought in Germany had made a crucial transition from the 1890s: instead of the popular sovereignty called for in 1848, and in contrast to liberals wary of universal suffrage in 1866, electoral democracy came to be seen by some liberal thinkers as the means for selecting a new elite.Footnote 11 It would no longer be intimidated by the authority of the state but reliant instead upon an alliance of economically vibrant sectors. Agonistic political economy was seeking ways to become agonistic politics. The complexities and significance of this transition in democratic thought have not yet been mastered by the literature but they are part of the intellectual world that Weber both inherited and shaped.Footnote 12
Yet Weber's engagement with struggle was also part of a deeper enterprise, the contours of which can be discerned in nascent German sociology and the philosophy of history. Georg Simmel was a contemporary with whom Weber had a complex, often critical, intellectual relationship.Footnote 13 In an essay of 1908 his eminently philosophical, almost poetic, sociology posited a new psychological reality, characteristic of modern urban society, whereby, with the passing of systems of slavery, power ultimately revolved around the possibility not of physical domination, but of winning over the soul of the other by means of a more substantial connection. Of course, the danger was that the seeker of such power, the artist, journalist or political leader, would succumb to the whims of the masses and reverse the relationship of rank between them. This was the challenge of agonistic politics in modern Germany, a challenge rendered more acute by the collapse of the old regime in 1918, and Weber took it on directly.Footnote 14 In 1908 he had published an account of agriculture in antiquity, which concerned the role of slavery in sustaining a fully “political” capitalism, one where the goals and personnel of political leadership and the leading economic enterprises were the same (Ghosh, 162–74). These ideas were rooted in, and in turn nourished, an intense engagement with the trajectories of modernity around 1900: with the origins and development of capitalism, with the challenges of mass politics and the phenomenon of the “crowd,” with the rise of socialism, with the vexed question of “values” and their relation to science and scholarship.Footnote 15
Weber's historical work and his enquiry into the conditions of rural labourers in eastern Germany in the 1890s thus ran parallel to the work of Simmel, albeit from a historical and political perspective and with different purposes. The passing of serfdom in Prussia, in 1807, was relatively recent and the transformations it had wrought in the countryside were still in progress.Footnote 16 The transition from slavery to the need for a competition for souls that Simmel delineated philosophically was for Weber a multifaceted and complex historical process, which underlay the necessity and the possibility of a new agonistic politics in Germany, as well as forming part of the evolution of occidental Kultur. His public speeches and articles denounced the remnants of feudal culture such as duelling and the lack of a class-conscious, strident bourgeoisie that could take up leadership of the country.Footnote 17 His scholarship evoked the evolution, breakthroughs, pathos and prospects of individual autonomy. This evolution and these breakthroughs were themselves embedded in a multiplicity of historical struggles, played out between concrete parties but also between abstract entities of world-historical import, like his most famous construct, ascetic Protestantism.
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The two works under review navigate these fascinating and troubled waters with new insight. The scale of their ambition is monumental; their style is engaging and demanding in different ways. They are both milestones of Weber scholarship, offering contrasting portraits of this canonical author, sometimes with diametrically opposed views. Kaesler offers us a Prussian Faust, deeply rooted in and animated by inherently Prussian political problems, prompted to new insights by journeys, encounters and experience, longing at times for successful political activity. Ghosh evokes instead a universalist puritan, a philosopher of history whose central thread is religion and its ubiquitous, layered and powerful impact, shaping the Occident and the non-Occident; a man preoccupied with the spiritual development of millennia whose core ideas were all laid out in the Protestant Ethic in 1904–5 and not prompted or significantly altered by his journeys and encounters. Ghosh's Weber, unlike Kaesler’s, was not crestfallen when he failed to gain a foothold in practical politics. Neither was he, unlike Kaesler’s, a staunch nationalist, for whom the German nation was a supreme value and ever-present allegiance of the first order. Ghosh's Weber withdrew during the First World War to the distant climes of the world religions in order to identify the features that made their historical development and that of their societies divergent from that of the West. Kaesler's Weber fundamentally stayed at home to manage military hospitals, to support Germany's position in the war (though without sympathizing with annexationists and insisting on the restoration of Belgium), and to discuss and dispute with naive political enthusiasts at places like Burg Lauenstein.
The two volumes have set themselves very different tasks. Kaesler is offering a full biography, “warts and all,” a monumental undertaking by any reckoning, and by tacitly advancing his Faustian–Goethean biographic paradigm Kaesler's Weber becomes a theatralisches Wesen, “a theatrical being.” Receptive to formative experiences, in the sense of the much more charged German term Erlebnis, like Goethe, Kaesler's Weber is interested in Lebensformen, or “forms of life” (516–17). Like Goethe, he travels to Italy and drinks in the forms of life he encounters there and important thought processes are set in train (500–22). There is, of course, a long tradition of German pilgrimage to Italy for all sorts of reasons, and such characters range from the great classicist Winckelmann and Goethe himself to Thomas Mann and his fictional author, Gustav von Aschenbach, in Death in Venice. Much like Edward Gibbon, all were inspired by their particularly Roman surroundings to launch daring, insightful and innovative historical speculations.Footnote 18 Both Kaesler and another recent biographer of Weber, now an editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Jürgen Kaube, attribute to Weber's stay in Rome around 1901 an important impetus in the formulation of the Protestant Ethic.Footnote 19 Gibbon was said to have contemplated the contrast between the Catholic Rome of his day and the empire in its heyday, and both Kaesler and Kaube adopt the Gibbonian premise that contrasting his phenomenon, Protestantism, with the forms of life encountered in Catholic Rome was in some way decisive for Weber. Both authors adhere to what, after the appearance of Peter Ghosh's book, we might call the traditional appraisal of the Protestant Ethic; that is, as essentially an undertaking to prove the Protestant and un-Catholic provenance of capitalism, the so-called “Weber thesis.”
It is this narrow perspective which, according to Ghosh, leads to so many misinterpretations of this famous work and to critiques, both then and now, which fall well short of an engagement with the deeper intentions and rich signals contained in the two essays originally published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1904–5. For Ghosh, Weber was seeking to escape the constraints of the narrow economics syllabus he had to teach in the mid-1890s and was already thinking in terms of Kultur, the underlying psychological, moral, spiritual framework of historical development. He was preoccupied with the transition between the personal ethic of the medieval Church and the impersonal culture of modern capitalism (Ghosh, 12–30). In writing the Protestant Ethic, Weber did not primarily set out to show that modern rational capitalist enterprise was indebted to the anxieties and behaviours brought on by Calvinist soteriology. Rather, the Protestant Ethic was the intellectual hub of an enterprise seeking to encompass the vastness and profundity of the transition in the spiritual, political and economic orientations of Western humanity. As such, it is the heart of Weber's entire oeuvre and confers unity to it in a way not previously understood. This is the premise of Ghosh’s study. The successful establishment of this premise would be sufficient in itself to give this work a high degree of importance. Yet what then follows is an exposition of the various dimensions of Weber's enterprise. This exposition contains claims which do nothing less than inaugurate a new phase of Weber scholarship.Footnote 20
In order to understand these claims and their significance it is worth contrasting Prussian Faust and universalist puritan with regard to a selection of key themes. One of the most significant is the question of Weber's nationalism. Kaube and Kaesler follow the classic work by Wolfgang J. Mommsen, first published in 1959 and translated into English as Max Weber and German Politics. Weber, Mommsen tells us, was a child of his time for whom the German nation and its power interests were of supreme importance.Footnote 21 Kaube emphasizes his nationalism in the wake of defeat after 1918 while at the same time detailing his clashes with a militant right.Footnote 22 For Mommsen, Weber's contempt for what he believed was an impotent Reichstag full of mediocrities arose from his anxiety about the nation's ability to project its power. Here is Prussian Faust, raging at the cultural inferiority of Poles in 1895, which in Kaesler's account hardly differentiates Weber, at least at this stage of his career, from more rabid nationalists (Kaesler, 407–8). Yet the universalist puritan was no nationalist at all, and the nation as such was not a unit of historical analysis endowed with any great spiritual or historical significance (Ghosh, 76–84). It was a palpable reality and yet an almost redundant category. One way to understand these divergent interpretations is to examine their treatment of Weber's relationship with Friedrich Naumann, the Protestant pastor turned political organizer who dreamed of an alliance between Kaiser and workers to defeat the Junkers and landed interests, motivated at the start of his career by a wish to make the Gospels the basis of social policy.Footnote 23
In October 1896, at the founding meeting of Naumann's National–Social Union in Erfurt, Weber told Naumann that his party's statist paternalism would not attract the upwardly mobile units of society but only the “dregs.”Footnote 24 Here was Weber's agonistic political economy. Here too was the centrality of the transition away from the mentalities born of serfdom. Like Sombart and the younger generation in the Association for Social Policy, Weber wanted vitality, dynamism and initiative to break free from the power of the narrow-minded and unimaginative Prussian–German state. All accounts agree that Weber was a powerful influence on Naumann, who went on to be one of the founders of the German Democratic Party at the start of the Weimar era. Weber helped wean him off the ambition to accommodate modern social policy to the Gospels. According to Kaesler, Weber made Naumann more of a nationalist. Influenced by Weber, Kaesler writes, “Naumann now understood that not human happiness but struggle would determine the future” (430). This is an important encounter with the “anti-eudaimonistic” moments in Weber's thinking, where not happiness but the human quality of the next generation, as he told his audience in Freiburg in 1895, should be the prime concern. The power interests of the nation were now a political goal for Naumann but one that aimed ultimately to affect social policy; that is, to unite the workers behind the nation. For Kaesler's Weber, by contrast, the power-political interests of the nation were themselves paramount.
In Ghosh's account Weber's rejection of the early Naumann's Christian–social ethics had much deeper roots than a practical orientation towards national power politics. For Weber, individuals were no longer located within personally defined relationships of rule. They had to rely on themselves. Naumann's personal ethical appeals were thus incommensurate with the social and spiritual conditions of modern capitalism, which evoked an individual “struggle for existence.” But impersonality was also a central trait of ascetic Protestantism, the phenomenon that Ghosh's Weber turned into one of the key ciphers and one of the central determinants of occidental modernity. It was part of its “ethic” in the sense of doing everything for the glory of a transcendent and impersonal God and nothing out of personal regard or emotional attachment (Ghosh, 26–7). Weber's anti-eudaimonism and the salience of struggle, both central to his dealings with Naumann, now acquire a very different countenance to that which they had in the hands of Kaesler. Weber's understanding of man's long-term spiritual trajectory negated the plausibility of Naumann's personal ethics, and Ghosh's first major claim is that Weber's relation to politics, capitalism and social policy was not merely rooted in but directly informed by his sense of the long-term evolution of occidental humanity.
Strident anti-eudaimonistic statements and pathos were important strands in German ethics and the philosophy of history. In 1797 Immanuel Kant derided the political primacy of “happiness” as the device of despots, and Hegel famously said in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History in the 1820s that periods of happiness were blank pages in history. In some ways, the rejection of self-interested criteria and emotion in ethical conduct, something Weber read into seventeenth-century Calvinism, anticipates a similar move in Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785). Nietzsche's denunciations of “sentimentality” and Rousseau in the 1870s, inspired by Schiller's account of the distinction between naive and sentimental poetry of 1795, could be said to be another influential salvo in the anti-eudaimonistic cannon.Footnote 25 While Ghosh is loath to make comparisons between Weber and other thinkers, often for very good reasons, it would have served his purpose at least to indicate the place of Weber's own universal concern with ethical history and the personal–impersonal dichotomy within this wider panoply and to impose some order upon it. Nevertheless, Ghosh's work allows us to see the important, sometimes subtle, differences between Weber and figures like Troeltsch and Tolstoy.
Ghosh is anxious to definitively liberate Weber from the assumptions of Mommsen and others about his nationalism. His scepticism about “national character,” Ghosh writes, was part of a “life-long protest against the tradition of völkisch nationalism in German Kultur going back to Herder” (79). To cement Weber's hostility to this, Ghosh chooses a passage from his famous letter to Michels in 1908, stating that “such concepts as the “will of the people” . . . are fictions.” This letter, however, was not a denial of the plausibility of national character but rather a denial of the possibility of the passing of authority in government, of the rule of man over man, written to a Michels, who was himself evolving out of an allegiance to radical democracy and syndicalist politics. It is thus an odd document to bring to bear upon the question.Footnote 26
As already noted, Ghosh's Weber evoked a powerful immediacy in the relationship between quotidian modernity and its deep antecedents. That sense of unity is the first step in the emergence of our transformed understanding of this feverishly productive and thinking man. A further set of important claims made by Ghosh can be grouped under the heading of “plurality.” The problems of “value-pluralism” or the anarchy of values, of value-free scholarship, so long associated with Weber, all come down to the fundamental reality of a plurality of ethics, of morals, of values and the passing of that unitary cosmos which had preceded it. This plurality has been seen by Weber scholars as an unresolved, pathos-laden problem which Weber tried to solve by frantically searching for a new locus of meaning in music, in charismatic leadership, and in eroticism.Footnote 27 For Kaesler, this plurality fundamentally represented a scholarly scientific challenge for Weber and led him to develop a powerful set of methodologies to understand how values shaped conduct and institutions (Kaesler, 555–62).
Instead of the anxious search for a locus of meaning as a refuge from a merciless pluralism of values, Ghosh's universalist puritan plunged into the characteristic uncertainty and conflicts of the age. He affirmed the plurality of values, especially in the lecture “Science as a Vocation” in 1917. Being equal to the demands of the day, Weber asserted in an echo of Socrates, meant finding the daimon or spirit that holds the threads of our life in its hands, and obeying it. Ghosh explains that the free selection of values or finding one's daimon was not an arbitrary act of “decisionism,” as some have claimed, but an assertion of freedom in an overall context of constraint, an incipiently charismatic or extra-rational act, even for the everyday person. Thus Weber was not, as Habermas famously claimed, the “natural son” of the arch-decisionist Carl Schmitt (Ghosh, 280). The Prussian Faust wished fundamentally to explain the world while keeping himself at a distance from the abyss of its ultimate reality. The universalist puritan, by contrast, embraced that reality and strove to serve the daimon, a spirit that took him towards the examination of the world religions.
Weber's reason for the decline of a universal ethical religiosity and thus for the plurality of values, was, according to Ghosh, precisely ethical. By this he means the “acknowledged collapse of universal value systems in late nineteenth-century Kultur, the anarchy of values” (283), as the assumption with which Weber grew up. Given Ghosh's powerful and detailed elucidation of the spiritual–ethical trajectories that Weber discerned in history, this fundamental caesura of the “late nineteenth century,” the origin of the plurality of values he embraced, is curiously left undeveloped. What was it about this historical moment that was decisive in the passing of a universal religious ethic or for the advent of a new conflict of values? For the beginnings of an answer we may turn to Ulrich Sieg's recent work Geist und Gewalt, a study of the political and philosophical problem of values that begins in 1878, the year of the failed assassination attempts on Kaiser Wilhelm I. Much of the Protestant professoriate discerned here a crisis of traditional values and undertook to reformulate a metaphysical philosophy of values, often seeking the embodiment of such a philosophy in the power of the state. For Sieg, these leaders of opinion had more than a hand in the intellectual justification of the First World War and in anti-democratic thought in the Weimar era, mentalities which can thus be seen to crystallize around the impact of events in 1878.Footnote 28 Clearly the problem of values and value-pluralism and the potency of decisions taken under this rubric in Germany deserve close examination. Certainly, Ghosh shows us that Weber was a democrat in the sense that he believed in a widening participation in Kultur; that for him class conflict was a clash of interests and not of values, and workers belonged within a bourgeois Kultur, something that would be furthered by a labour aristocracy as existed in England (81). But it would be interesting to learn the reasons for Ghosh's choice of the same period as Sieg for his own value caesura and what conclusions he derives from it.
Weber's democratic conception of broadening participation in Kultur in Ghosh's account is itself part of an important claim unfolded in instalments throughout the book. The Protestant Ethic showed how ascetic Protestantism was articulated in powerful ways as an anti-authoritarian phenomenon. It contained important clues about Weber's thinking concerning forms of religious and political association, forms that were often characterized by the defiance of central authority. In this way, Ghosh links the Protestant Ethic to Weber's interests in sects as anti-political, free forms of association and to his interests in the ancient and medieval cities (339–86). The sects, the cities and ascetic Protestantism are historical manifestations linked by what we might call Weber's understanding of the history of freedom. In such a history, Weber's account of the long-term, layered, sometimes sublimated, sometimes augmented impact of religious ethics and practices becomes the central animating factor. The most creative forces in history were actuated by religious ethics and stood outside conventional politics. This is the heart of Ghosh's treatise and it is convincingly laid out.
Like Polybius, too, Ghosh's Weber is interested in windows of opportunity and creativity opened by history. “Like the sects, the moment of city autonomy created a lasting deposit within the historical accumulation of Occidental Kultur,” with important consequences for politics and the economy (Ghosh, 118, 126). Ghosh uses terms like “deposit” and “continuum” to grasp Weber's understanding of history. The deposit, it would seem, is the window of possibility opened up by dynamic phenomena of relatively short duration like the sects, whereas the continuum refers to Weber's understanding of the lasting effects of forms of religious practice and social organization dating back to antiquity. The study of the world religions undertaken during the war was a quest to ascertain the causes of the uniqueness of occidental Kultur on the basis of the most powerful formative forces in history: religious ethics. By contrast, Kaesler believes that Weber's study of ancient Judaism manifests the centrality in his thought of the state and its relation to nations (837–8). Whereas other historians continue to see a restless but powerful mind shifting between discrete preoccupations, Ghosh has created a unity. That unity is born of the paradox of a man who was, by his own admission, religiously “unmusical” yet driven by an inexorable impulse to discover the depths of the formative powers of religion.
The Prussian Faust and the universalist puritan have become powerful contenders in the ongoing contest for a holistic portrait of Weber. They will force us to confront our assumptions and conventional wisdom and posit many familiar questions anew. Yet in their ambition and thoroughness, and in their divergent accounts of the forces animating this herculean scholar, they have preserved and enriched the intellectual plurality that was the challenge and foundation of Weber's own achievements.
