‘Religion’ in der Soziologie Max Webers by Hartmann Tyrell (review)

Abstract

122 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2016. On one area that Ghosh should have made more of, in the light of his goal of hooking up the 1890s lectures on economy with the final version of ‘Economy and Society’, is Weber’s economics. Ghosh, however, is not interested in the substantive sense of economics, or indeed of sociology, politics, and law; and the studies on Hinduism, Buddhism, and China degenerate, for him, into merely historicalempirical studies. He wishes only to use Weber’s terminology as names to be placed in a chronological context of his own making. The continuity between 1890 and 1919–1920 is the problematic of capitalism and the causal explanation of how acquisitive capitalism came to define the modern economy and society. By 1920 the part of Protestant mentality in this explanation is greatly reduced, though its salience as Kulturkritik—the restless rationalism of occidental culture —remains. Ghosh’s determination to foreground the Kulturkritik does not necessitate him perversely reducing the whole oeuvre to the 1904/1905 Protestant Ethic study. This is an artful reading of Weber, full of intellectual surprises, many of them alarming. Sam Whimster London Hartmann Tyrell, ‘Religion’ in der Soziologie Max Webers (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014), liii + 357 pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-447-06888-8. €74.00. One of the articles in this volume begins with the following quotation from the famous introduction to Weber’s collected essays on the sociology of religion: It is true that the path of human destiny [Menschlichkeitsschicksale] cannot but appal him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentaries to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. Weber stressed the need for a distanced perspective and warned his readers not to indulge in dilettantism, intuition, and vision (Schau). Specialists could enter into long discussions about the merits of this translation,1 but here I want to consider the way the passage is 1. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (1930), with an introduction by Randall Collins (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 1996), p. 29. Book Reviews 123© Max Weber Studies 2016. examined by Hartmann Tyrell. The German original is quoted in his article on ‘Religion and “Intellectual Reasonableness” [or honesty: Redlichkeit]’, subtitled ‘The Tragedy of Religion in the Thought of Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche’. The often subterranean influence of Nietzsche’s thought in Weber’s work is a common thread that runs through Tyrell’s book. Nowadays, Tyrell observes, a sociologist or historian might react to the pathos of Weber’s admonition with curiosity about its meaning or function within his oeuvre. But Tyrell is not primarily interested in these issues. Instead, he tells his readers that he is interested in the following question: Which world-historical destinies or developments—such as the process of rationalization—made a profound impact on Weber? It is remarkable, according to Tyrell, that Weber was so strongly fascinated by the sometimes tragic destinies of religions. This is a topic that Tyrell wants to examine by addressing the relationship between religion and truth, especially as raised in Weber’s famous lecture ‘Science as a Vocation’. Tyrell then follows with two ‘specifications’ (Präzisierungen) of his focus. The first reveals that the tragedy in the title of his essay refers to the rationalizing tendencies of religion that, in modern times, have led to its own impossibility, or perhaps more precisely , its own ‘getting impossible’ (Verunmöglichung). The German word is put between quotation marks without any further reference . The second ‘specification’ concerns the influence of Nietzsche on Weber’s idea of the tragedy of religion. Here Tyrell points to Weber’s later sociology, in which Russian influences are also to be noted. This last remark is not further explained here, as Tyrell moves on to a passage in Nietzsche’s Gay Science about the ‘victory of scientific atheism’. The aim of the essay remains vague, and Tyrell’s meandering way of presenting his thoughts makes it rather difficult to see...