Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization by Joshua Derman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization by Joshua Derman Lawrence A. Scaff Joshua Derman, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 271. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1107025882. The reputation of a thinker and writer is often difficult to fathom. There are those like Goethe whose eminence grew in his own time and increased long after his death. There are others like the theologian Adolf von Harnack, prominent in his own day [End Page 675] but largely forgotten in ours. And then there are figures like Max Weber, known if at all only in small circles during his lifetime, but growing dramatically in stature and recognition well after his death in 1920. Weber offers a striking case of posthumous fame, a lengthy journey from relative obscurity to international prominence and the invention of a distinctive “Weberian” approach to knowledge about society and history. How and why this development occurred is an engaging intellectual and historical question. The answer tells us something important not only about Weber’s ideas, but also about the cultural and political crises and the intellectual history of the last hundred years. There are many reasons, an unusual “combination of circumstances” to speak with Weber, that account for the growth of engagement with Weberian ideas, concepts, and perspectives. Drawing upon the tradition of scholarship in Rezeptionsgeschichte and Begriffsgeschichte, Joshua Derman has written an important study that explores many of these reasons. Presented in its first version as a history dissertation at Princeton, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought investigates the transatlantic reception of Weber’s ideas primarily in Germany and the United States. The author emphasizes that the narrative of Weber’s ascendancy is filled with surprises. The study is concerned not with something as opaque as “influence,” but rather with the uses of Weber’s thought in the twentieth century. To use a major thinker’s ideas is to engage with them in dialogue, or as the author points out, to think with Weber and to extend, elaborate, and apply his questions and concepts in novel ways or in unanticipated contexts. To be sure, authors have intentions and try to control the way in which their ideas are borrowed, interpreted, and applied. But control has limits. Most complex ideas have elasticity, depth, and reach, as Weber’s writings illustrate. Weberian analysis has gained currency, shown resilience, and become an identifiable approach in the human sciences in important measure because of its conceptual richness and capacity for extension into uncharted terrain. Derman explores the theme of reception and conceptual history in six well-considered chapters, beginning with a sketch of the circles of scholars and intellectuals associated with Max Weber and knowledgeable about his ideas, and ending with a chapter on the concept of “charisma” and its introduction into the language of social science and public discourse. Along the way he discusses some of the major features of Weber’s contribution: the well-known dispute over “values” and “value freedom”; the famous debate about modern capitalism and its origins and significance; the problem of belief and conviction in a “disenchanted” world; and the nature of “sociology” itself as Weber came to understand the subject. These are not new topics, of course. But there are two significant advantages to the author’s approach: first, it is resolutely historicist in the most constructive sense. That is, unlike discussions that decontextualize and abstract Weber’s positions, ignoring his actual targets and the rhetorical and polemical aims of those who used his arguments, Derman’s account [End Page 676] pays close attention to the intellectual and political contexts in which the ideas were appropriated and the arguments advanced. The result is both a fresh perspective on familiar topics and an expansion of the field of Weberian Rezeptionsgeschichte. The chapter on charisma is a case in point, as the discussion shows clearly how interwar social scientists began to borrow and rework Weber’s ideas in response to the emergence of fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In the era of postwar decolonization, the same concept was transposed to address the politics of...