Handlung, Ordnung und Kultur: Studien zu einem Forschungsprogramm im Anschluss an Max Weber by Wolfgang Schluchter (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 261 rational communication and public deliberation' (p. 92). By contrast, Weber7s analy sis emphasized the formation of a cohesive and dynamic civil society through disci pline, through shared moral purpose and common moral vision, which then infused public life with vigorous citizen initiative and a robust pluralism. For the author two major problems emerge from this discussion, both of which are woven into the fabric of Weber7s thought as well. The first is that the modern conditions of our disenchanted world challenge and threaten to vitiate the social basis for the type of civil society Weber believed he had encountered. In modern mass society atomization sets in, promoting passivity ('passive democratization7 in Weber7s phrase) and indifference to the public realm of civil society. We start bowling alone, lose our sense of common moral purpose, and leave local problems to distant bureaucracies. Second, it turns out that the quality of civil society's voluntary associations does matter: not just any club or group promotes the qualities of charac ter and personality found in a Sektengesellschaft, but only those where a serious and consequential 'moral testing7 still prevails. The choral society can appear to embody the virtues of voluntaristic action, whereas in practice it may simply serve the yearn ings for a cosy, self-satisfied and apolitical Gemeinschaft. There can, in other words, be a quantitatively successful civil society, but one that is nevertheless qualitatively retrograde, a point worth making against overly optimistic neo-Tocquevilleans. To expect a 'solution7 to these two modern problems would be excessive. They are woven into the very fabric of our historical situation. But in the last two chapters Kim does sketch the kind of contestation, competition and struggle that the Webe rian perspective encourages, and that Weber at times promoted in his efforts to defend the political education of the modern citizen. This emphasis is in itself useful as a corrective to the illiberal, antimodern accusations and confusions that have con founded Weber's unusual politics of civil society. Kim's argument and thesis thus represent another important step in the direction of rebalancing our views about Weber7 s political thought, an effort evident as well in his publication with an intro duction of Weber7s 1910 German Sociological Society comments on 'Voluntary Asso ciational Life7 (Vereinswesen) in this journal (volume 2, May 2002, pp. 186-209). The Weber who is revealed in this perspective has become a far more interesting political and social thinker than previously, and one who now speaks directly to our contem porary discontents concerning civil society and associational life. Lawrence A. Scaff Wayne State University, Detroit Wolfgang Schluchter, Handlung, Ordnung und Kultur: Studien zu einem Forschung sprogramm im Anschluss an Max Weber (Tübingen: J.C.B Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 2005), pp. x + 258. ISBN 3-16148-545-9. €49.00. In this collection of essays on Weberian themes, the author provides what one might call intermediary reflections. They are reflections because they represent and are intended as brief expositions of a diverse and complex subject matter rather than defini tive analyses. They are intermediary because they point to a much larger project on the horizon that has yet fully to materialize. That project is a study entitled Action, Order and Culture: Studies in the Foundation of Interpretive Sociology, which the author notes (p. 1 n. 1) to have announced on the occasion of a 1998 revision of one of his earlier© Max Weber Studies 2008. 262 Max Weber Studies analyses, Die Entstehung des modernen Rationalismus (translated into English as 77k Rise of Western Rationalism, 1981) but which in effect had already been mentioned in the second instalment of the English translation of Religion und Lebensführung, Paradoxes of Modernity (19%, p. 347 n. 1). Including Religion und Lebensführung's first instalment, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination (1989), the three volumes constitute the pillars of Schluchter's analyses of Weber in the English-speaking world, whereas the author's more recent publications containing extensions of those studies, Unversöhnte Moderne (iUnreconciled Modernity, 19%) and Individualismus, Verantwortungsethik und Vielfalt (Individualism, Ethic of Responsibility, and Diversity, 2000), have not been translated into English. The present book might be considered the third in...