Max Weber's 'Sociology of the State' and the Science of Politics in Germany

Abstract

[MWS 9.1/9.2 (2009) 17-32] ISSN 1470-8078 Max Weber's 'Sociology of the State' and the Science of Politics in Germany* Gangolf Hübinger From the beginning of his academic career Weber had raised the question how politics and the state could be a subject of scientific analysis and how the leading political strata should be trained. In his inaugural lecture ('The Nation State and Economic Policy'), which he gave as professor of economics at the University of Freiburg, 13 May, 1895, Weber concentrated on economic policy and stated, 'the science of a country's economic policy is a political science. It is a servant of politics, not the day-to-day politics of the persons and classes who happen to be ruling at any given time, but the enduring power-political interest of the nation' (Weber 1994: 16). From this point onwards to his death in 1920, Weber thematised in his work new perspectives on the complex structure of the political order and economic action. The combination of 'the forms of the state and the economy' was to conclude his summer semester lecture course on the Sociology of the State, as indicated in his dictated lecture pro spectus (Disposition). First, however, the basic question has to be clarified, which he addressed to his audience of Freistudenten inhis famoslecture on 'Politics as a Vocation': 'what is the "state" in the context of all the human communities?' (Weber 1994: 310). In all the phases of his work Weber was always alert to what the sciences of the state could contribute to his research themes. When he, together with Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffé, took over the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1904, they established in the Foreword (Geleitwort) the new direction of the journal. The journal would proceed 'from a quite specific standpoint , that of 'the economically conditioned nature of cultural phenomena'. This task could only be accomplished by 'keeping in close contact with neigh bouring disciplines—the general theory of the state, the philosophy * Translated by Sam Whimster.© Max Weber Studies 2010, Global Policy Institute, London Metropolitan University, 31 Jewry Street, London, EC3N 2EY. 18 Max Weber Studies of law, social ethics—and with social psychological inquiry and those inquiries commonly grouped under the name of sociology' (Weber 2010:100). What then had the neighbouring disciplines of the theory of the state and philosophy of law to offer? An institutionalised discipline of politics did not exist in Weber's time and the state had yet to become an independent topic for research. But when Weber in his first contribution to the Archiv published his critical epistemological reflections on the subject of the social and cultural sciences in the essay 'The "Objectivity" of knowledge in social science and social policy', the state served as an illustration of what an ideal type is. It was the state that provided a weighty example: That complex of human relationships, norms and relations deter mined by norms we refer to as the 'state' is, for example, an 'economic' phenomenon with respect to state finances: to the extent that it has an impact on economic life through legislation and so on (and indeed in those aspects where its behaviour is governed by factors far removed from economic perspectives) it is 'economically relevant'; finally, where its behaviour and its attributes are determined by motives other than those of its 'economic' relationships, then it is 'economically conditioned' (2004: 369). The 'question of the logical structure of the concept of the state', and so for the construction of an ideal type, Weber then terms 'the most complicated and interesting case'. The major challenge of the 'Gen eral Theory of the State' is to treat adequately as an object of research and teaching 'an infinity of diffuse and discrete active and passive human actions, relations regulated factually and legally, sometimes unique, sometimes recurrent in character, all held together by an idea, a belief in actually or normatively prevailing norms and relations of rule of man by man' (Weber 2004:394). It is precisely here, however, where ideas created by theorists of the state themselves—most of all the 'the metaphysics of the organic state...