Max Weber's Theory of Modernity: The Endless Pursuit of Meaning by Michael Symonds (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 259© Max Weber Studies 2016. United States, and opens a broader agenda for historical research about continuities and discontinuities in political thought and the traffic of political ideas across long distances in the twentieth century. Hubertus Buchstein Greifswald University Michael Symonds, Max Weber’s Theory of Modernity: The Endless Pursuit of Meaning (Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), x + 193pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-1-4724-6286-2. £60.00. If the meaning of meaning can only be deciphered within particular contexts of meaning, then all interpretation seems to be caught in an aporia, a web, or a paradox. Interpretation (in the sense of either Deutung or Verstehen in German) encounters the problem of how and within which contexts literal meaning can be distinguished from figurative connotation, and how each is different from meaning in the sense of significance or importance. Max Weber grappled with this hermeneutic problem throughout his career, but nowhere more directly and explicitly than in the opening pages of the book he was working on in his final days, Economy and Society. There he defines the focus of sociology as ‘subjectively intended meaning which is either…actually existing… [or] conceived as a pure conceptual type’.1 Where ideal typical meaning is the specialist domain of the sociologist , actually existing meaning encompasses the larger world of experience and common sense, the world that is the object of sociological interpretation and explanation. Michael Symonds’s book does not directly address the methodological premises of Weber’s version of interpretive sociology (verstehende Soziologie), but rather makes a broader and bolder claim that Weber’s theory of modernity hinges on ultimate questions of the meaning of life, death, and suffering. Despite the secular and rationalistic character of modern life, these are also the questions that motivate religious belief systems and underlie traditional worldviews . Taking Weber’s Economic Ethics of the World Religions as his primary frame and focus, in particular the ‘Intermediate Reflection ’ (a title Gerth and Mills misleadingly translated as ‘The Social 1. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), p. 4; translation modified. 260 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2016. Psychology of the World Religions’), Symonds’s study ranges across Weber’s writings in search of those moments where themes related to the will to meaning and significance are most pronounced. He argues that ‘the very idea of a meaningful cosmos becomes nonsensical and irrational’ within modernity, and yet ‘there is meaning within meaninglessness’, and therefore perpetual motivation for the endless pursuit of meaning (33, 9). The modern world is unprecedented for the way it turns meaninglessness itself into the driving force of individual and social life, even when some ultimate meaning is attached to death and suffering. The first of the book’s three main parts develops this reading of Weber’s concern with the fateful loss of meaning within modern life as a paradox, that is, as a way of understanding something that is beyond belief or contrary to opinion. The meaning of death turns on the question of how life is conducted in the everyday world (28). The Protestants pushed this question to the limit by interpreting the meaning of worldly work as itself based on a divine and ultimately unfathomable command: ‘The very idea that we are forced to work in the calling both puts forward the idea of meaning and withdraws it at the same time’ (52). Lacking of a coherent system for deciphering the signs of God’s plan and for assigning worth to each of life’s details, the form of modern experience inaugurated with the Protestant Reformation broke into multiple fragments and lost its unifying sense and direction: ‘Meaning works in modernity…as a set of competing valuespheres in the shadow of cosmic meaninglessness’ (91). What Weber expresses allegorically in ‘Politics as a Vocation’ as the polytheism of values is an ironic way of characterizing the godless existence of modern life where death itself has no definitive meaning or purpose. Symonds’s most interesting argument concerns how Weber addresses this general paradox in the ‘Intermediate Reflection’ and other later writings, such as ‘Science as a Vocation...