The idea that a healthy and vibrant civil society provides an essential basis for democratic polities has become a mainstay of contemporary political theory. The so-called civil society argument has been put forward as transcending a rather blunt dichotomy between liberal individualism and Marxian collectivism. Current interest in this area engages the intersection between what Ernest Gellner referred to as the “modal” self of the modern age, and the neo-Tocquevillian concern with the institutional and character-forming elements of associational life. Fitting Max Weber—typically viewed as either founding father of sociology, nationalist apologist, or aristocratic liberal—within these positions is an engaging project that requires a keener awareness of the overall subtlety of his thinking than normally presented, as Sung Ho Kim recognizes (p. 17). Reconciling Weber's concern for the ethical presuppositions of action with his understanding of the difficulties of maintaining a sense of individuality in an increasingly rationalized and bureaucratic world suggests a very particular vision of civil society. It is a sphere that ties together a concern with “statecraft,” on the one hand, and “soulcraft,” on the other, both in terms of the particular concerns of legitimate political rule, but also in terms of the requirements of personality more generally.

For Weber, the only chance of giving meaning to one's life is to meet the demands of the everyday by choosing a vocation and recognizing the particular requirements of the specific “order of life” that this choice engenders. Such structural and soulful concerns gave rise, of course, to his most famous portraits of those men of vocation, the scientist and the politician, though the requirements of personality (Persönlichkeit) within particular life orders (Lebensführung) are of more general concern, applying as much to the religious and the erotic spheres as to the intellectual and political. For civil society, this account produces a contestatory model of interaction, where the social realm becomes a site where individuals struggle to find their vocation. This can be examined by a genealogical reconstruction of the particular type of character both formed by, and formative of, contemporary modern society, the “sect-man” (Sektenmensch) of Puritan origin.

At first, such a construction seems puzzling. As Kim rightly argues, for many, the dour and individualist Puritans would appear to be an unlikely set of characters out of which the seeds of a sociable civil society could be expected to blossom. Yet, in a detailed reconstruction of Weber's essays on the Protestant ethic, the author suggests that in attempting to reconcile subjective values and objective rationality Weber identified the notion of a person in a calling, a character with a Beruf, and thereby highlighted the important relationship among rationality, modernity, and freedom. The Puritan, famously, “wanted” to work in a calling, but we moderns are in some sense “forced” to do so, says Weber. But the reason the Puritan wanted to work in a calling, according to Kim, was not because of some radically individualist Calvinist reworking of Lutheran piety. Instead, it was because of the Puritan capacity for socially cohesive behavior that enabled individuals to become personalities in their own right, a theme noticeably bound up for Weber with more contemporary reflections on the German tradition of self-cultivation, or Bildung, and its relationship to specialization (pp. 124ff.). Importantly, too, Kim asserts the politically active tradition of Puritan communities that can be seen in such contexts as the English civil war and Revolution, for it is precisely its formation as a sect community (Sektengesellschaft) that renders its political and social potential so explosive (pp. 71 ff.).

Tying his interpretation of the transformation of a voluntary sect into a sociable community has important implications not only for the account of the Protestant ethic. Its importance within Weber's oeuvre can also be illustrated by his contemporaneous account of Protestantism after his trip to the St. Louis World's Fair and around America in 1904. What struck Weber most forcefully, apart from the traditional response of the high-cultured European to both American dynamism and American vulgarity, was the religiosity of American society. And this religiosity, he supposed, was largely due to the foundation of sociable American society out of a community of sects.

Critically comparing church and sect in North America, Weber contrasted the compulsory institutional form (Anstalt) of the church with the free and voluntary association of the sect. Such vibrancy as one could find in contemporary sect life also provided an illuminating contrast with European and specifically German associations. The university fraternity, for example, was a key comparative indicator for Weber; and while American societies were premised on the assumption that this was a training ground for commercial and civilizational advance, German fraternities remained rather too much like old-boys clubs and insurance societies (p. 74). For Weber, the disjunction between the two was symptomatic of a wider cultural and intellectual malaise, related to something Kim does not discuss more fully, namely, the issue of academic freedom that also perplexed Weber during the years in which he was recovering from his first major mental crisis. America could not long remain in such a state, though; Weber thought it was destined to succumb to European-style bureaucratization.

Overall, however, predicating modern sociability upon particularistic, voluntary, associational membership for Weber was beneficial because of the charisma of both leaders and members of sects; they had to be charismatic precisely because membership of a sect is not universal. Civil society here, then, is both “disciplining and formative,” where “certain moral traits and civic virtues are cultivated via collective achievement and ethical qualities” (pp. 67 ff., 80, 83). It is this sort of argument that renders Weber's arguments in part quite Kantian in inspiration, Kim thinks, because of the connection between principled and self-disciplined moral action in the mature individual, which is broadly teleological in terms of finding meaning in action through the duty to act according to a calling. Here, by virtue of our very disenchantment, we are in fact continually able to find reenchantment and meaning renewed (pp. 96, 105).

Such antifoundational and nonutilitarian ethics are revealed in Weber's discussion of the worthy politician and the intellectual integrity of the scientist. And although Kim thinks that Weber's ethical project fails, it does not fail for broadly Straussian reasons. The sectlike dynamism of civil society resembles, in fact, Michael Oakeshott's “enterprise association” model of the European state, but the attachment to both Nietzschean heroism and Socratic agnosticism is too much to bear for everyday life; in effect, the Weberian calling demands too much of us, even though it relies upon a heterogeneous, rather than a homogeneous, pluralist model of society (pp. 163–70, 179, 186). Such a conclusion chimes well with contemporary political theory in its recognition of the tragic character of all political action and the tense relationship in particular between liberalism and group rights. This is an engaging attempt to bring Weber to bear, so to speak, on issues of contemporary concern that pays attention to textual interpretative issues in Weber scholarship, as well as widening out key issues to discuss political thought more generally. The life led politically, nevertheless, remains a goal to come to terms with for all who take Weber's teachings seriously.