Kapitalismus bei Max Weber—zur Rekonstruktion eines fast vergessenen Themas by Talcott Parsons (review)

Abstract

98 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2020. to a sudden halt by 1975 with the collapse of the Democratic consensus .34 This was a peculiarly American development that arrested the progress of a historically European social democratic order travelling from an originally Idealist conception of the state in the British and German 1830s to its ultimate Keynesian destination.35 What replaced it is a materialist conception of the state constituted of rotating corporate hierarchies,36 in an originally American ‘corporate liberalist’ tradition from the 1900s in which entrepreneurs actively shape the state by ‘adapting to their own ends the ideals of middle class social reformers, social workers and socialists.’37 Weber’s thought is germane to our condition which it describes as resulting from a battle of ideas where, in that context, the state has the potential to make any ends its own.38 Neoliberalism is not, per Douglass , a condition brought about by public attitudes, except trivially. It is originally a set of calculated ideas long in the making, promoted by élites to prise the grip of a European idea of the state off the body of the peculiarly, per Thorstein Veblen, ‘pecuniary’ institutions that developed in America. Progressives had conceived of the countervailing forces they brought to bear on those institutions in terms of this European idea, until the collapse of the Democratic consensus. Omar Kassem Private scholar, Sevenoaks, Kent Talcott Parsons, Kapitalismus bei Max Weber—zur Rekonstruktion eines fast vergessenen Themas, edited by Uta Gerhardt (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019), v + 167 pp. (pbk). ISBN 978-3-65810-110-7. €37.99. The centerpiece of Uta Gerhardt’s volume is a document that Talcott Parsons prepared as a dissertation for his Dr. phil. degree from 34. Henry J. Aaron, Politics and the Professors: The Great Society in Perspective (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1978), especially p. 154. 35. David P. Calleo, Coleridge and the Idea of the Modern State (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1966). 36. G. William Domhoff, State Autonomy Or Class Dominance?: Case Studies on Policy Making in America (Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 1996); G. William Domhoff et al., Studying the Power Élite (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2017). 37. James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), pp. xiii-xiv. 38. Andreas Anter, Max Weber’s Theory of the Modern State: Origins, Structure and Significance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 22. Book Reviews 99© Max Weber Studies 2020. the University of Heidelberg. However, Gerhardt introduces the dissertation with an essay that reviews Parsons’s education prior to his arrival in Heidelberg and also characterizes aspects of the intellectual environment he encountered at the university. She then adds a lengthy postscript to the dissertation that reviews the importance of Max Weber’s works for Parsons’s thought throughout his career, with particular emphasis on Parsons’s advocacy for Weber’s thesis on the importance of the ‘Protestant ethic’ for the emergence of the spirit of capitalism and the development of rationalistic modern capitalism— a career-long advocacy that began with the dissertation manuscript. It is her thesis that without Parsons’s advocacy the importance of Weber’s works, especially his analysis of the sources and origins of modern capitalism, may well never have become prominent in contemporary social science. The outline of Talcott Parsons’s early career has been fairly clear, but Gerhardt’s introduction relates part of the story with new details, supported by quotations from correspondence she has found in archives at both the University of Heidelberg and Harvard University . Parsons was an undergraduate at Amherst College, an intellectually thriving and challenging institution, where he studied biology and institutional economics and took an influential course on Kant, reading the Critique of Pure Reason. He then spent a year at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced primarily by Malinowski’s seminar in which key figures of later British social anthropology, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth, were also students. Through the support of the Amherst professor who had taught the course on Kant, Parsons then obtained a fellowship for a year’s study in Germany. He was assigned...