Introduction to Max Weber and the Political Sphere

Abstract

[MWS 9.1/9.2 (2009) 7-15] ISSN 1470-8078 Introduction to Max Weber and the Political Sphere Hirmerk Bruhns and Patrice Duran The scope of Max Weber's work is immense and influences all the social sciences. Regularly crossing the boundaries of history, law, economics and sociology, he himself defines them as Wirklichkeits wissenschaften (sciences of reality) to emphasise their empirical base. He sought to combine the elucidation of social regularities with the explanation of the particularity of historical processes, developing powerful research perspectives which are still right at the heart of the way in which social scientists from various disciplines think, showing how porous disciplinary boundaries are. The place of Max Weber in the social sciences in France is so con siderable that, as the presenters of a special issue of the Revue fran çaise de sociologie (Chazel and Grossein 2005) devoted to his work, state: 'it has now become a matter of good form to claim to be a Weberian', even if, as also noted, it is often difficult to distinguish legitimate academic links from the mere appropriation of prestige. In France and elsewhere, the collapse of Marxism and its multi ple variants and the disaffection with both structuralism and post structuralism has opened wide the path to rediscovering, indeed in many cases discovering the great German thinker. The sociology of action has now become highly dominant, although this common label masks very different research perspectives. It undoubtedly crystallises the new research orientations which exerted such a profound influence on the transformation of the intellectual cli mate in the social sciences in the 1980s. It would appear to be gen erally accepted today that it is difficult to ignore the subjectivity of the actors even if there remain many differences as to how this is applied and the methods for accessing it. The relative fading of national traditions has happily brought an end to misunderstand ings and the sterile opposition between Dürkheim and Weber is© Max Weber Studies 2010, Global Policy Institute, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London, EC3N 2EV. 8 Max Weber Studies a thing of the past in France. In-depth analyses of the two writers show how simplistic and counter-productive it is to lock oneself into a rigid epistemological distinction between individualism and holism. The same applies to the classic controversy between expla nation and understanding, at least in its French version, which has it that Durkheimian sociology is the exemplary illustration of the former, whereas Weber is the archetypal case of the latter. The sup posed validity of the vulgate was clearly denounced by Catherine Colliot-Thélène (2001). In the last analysis, as we now know, the opposition between the two sociologists is nowhere as great as has been claimed. Although Dürkheim gave a masterly demonstration of 'sympathetic interpretation' of the social in Suicide, Weber per sistently stresses, as Charles-Henry Cuin (2000) underscores, the incomplete adequacy of the explanations which are solely 'mean ingful'. The problem is that in France interpretative sociology is very often confused with the hermeneutic tradition. It is impor tant, however, to recall that understanding in the Weberian sense of the term has virtually nothing to do with hermeneutic proce dures and in no way implies intuitionist epistemology. For Weber, the understanding of the motivations for an action is intrinsically a form of causal explanation and the definition of sociology hinges on the logical and causal link between understanding and expla nation. The indisputable originality and the strength of Dürkheim and Weber's classic work reside in their repeated desire to combine theoretical breadth with empirical studies. The collection of articles that we present in this double issue of Max Weber Studies reproduces in English a good half of the book Max Weber et le politique (Bruhns and Duran 2009). The aim of this work was not to give an overview of the considerable output of the great German thinker but to give specific consideration to his contribu tion to the analysis of the political —its nature, forms and actions. The political has a particular status in Weber's work, since it is both the object of sociological analysis (historical...