A Historian Reads Max Weber: Essays on the Protestant Ethic (Studies in Cultural and Social Sciences, 1) by Peter Ghosh , Stefan Breuer , Eckart Otto , Hubert Treiber (review)

Abstract

140 Max Weber Studies Unfortunately, Weber had started his thinking on methodology under the influ ence of Heinrich Rickert's theory of historical concept formation. According to this theory, value relations constitute the objects of historical research. This caused a bunch of conceptual problems, which Bruun discusses in detail. Nonetheless, with his turn from histoiy to sociology Weber emancipated himself from Rickert's theory. Sociology does not need value-relations because this science is not concerned with historical individuals but with typical modes of social action. Moreover, like science in general, it should also be devoid of judgements drawn from the values of other social spheres. This does not mean, however, as Bruun clearly shows, that sociology is not concerned with values. They are the objects of inquiry insofar as they guide many social actions. Weber's turn from history to sociology followed the transformation from the bourgeois-liberal society of modernity into the mass-democratic society of post modernity (Kondylis 1991). The bourgeois individual was superseded by the homme moyen and the belief that all parts of society could be integrated into a harmonic whole that the bourgeois society had inherited from Christianity was replaced by a view of life that completely destroyed the idea of a whole and transformed the parts in fragments that can—but must not—be combined in an arbitrary manner. The unusually fragmented character of Weber's work corresponds to this trans formation that he himself had promoted by separating the value of truth from all others values. Weber was the Baudelaire of science, a member of the descending bourgeois class with an anti-bourgeois demon who held the threads of his life. After all, it is thanks to Bruun's subtle investigations that we are able to understand better what Weber actually meant. References Bourdieu, Pierre 1992 Les règles de l'art: genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Editions du Seuil). Kondylis, Panajotis 1991 Der Niedergang der bürgerlichen Denk- und Lebensform. Die liberale Moderne und die massendemokratische Postmoderne (Weinheim: VCH Acta humaniora). Gerhard Wagner Frankfurt/M. Peter Ghosh, A Historian Rends Max Weber: Essays on the Protestant Ethic (ed. Stefan Breuer, Eckart Otto and Hubert Treiber; Studies in Cultural and Social Sciences, 1; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 302pp. ISBN: 978-3-44705-777-6. €53.99. When the British historian Peter Ghosh in his 1999 article on Max Weber for the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (Routledge) wrote: how one could speak of Weber as a historian at all was the fundamental question, he pointed to the fact that Weber had been a lawyer—as a student, as a PhD and as an assistant professor—and that all his later professorial activities were located in the field of© Max Weber Studies 2012. Book Reviews 141 economics. From the point of view of his formal qualifications, Weber was no his torian. If, however, one notes that Weber himself was convinced that current phe nomena could be understood only in light of their historical development, Ghosh concluded, Weber could very well be considered as a historian, albeit more 'in the broader sense'. Ghosh's book with its programmatic title 'A Historian reads Max Webe/ documents such judgment: he vigorously announces that he wants to read and interpret Weber in an 'uncompromisingly historical' way. Peter Ghosh (born 1954) has taught since 1982 as a tutor at St. Anne's College, Oxford, where he now holds the position of 'Jean Duffield Fellow in Modern History' and teaches inter alia in the area of Modern Social and Political Theory. In his career to date, Ghosh has been noted for studies of Edward Gibbon and Benjamin Disraeli, and (to a wider audience) by his sceptical criticism of the work of Richard J. Evans and Peter Clarke in the London Review of Books. Ghosh found his own—involuntary — access to Weber, according to his own statements, through the Examination Decrees of the University of Oxford, which define the curriculum for teachers, and in which Weber's writings appear on the mandatory reading list—most certainly in English translations. Ghosh entered the field of international Weber research with an essay in 1994 on the all...