The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber

Abstract

The sociological treatises of Max Weber form a corpus of narratives peculiarly suited for analytical techniques developed in the study of myths and other types of imaginative literature. Such an approach will require a distance from Weber's work and an attitude towards it quite different from that of official sociology: for the latter naturally enough wishes first to inquire into the accuracy of Weber's descriptions and the validity of the hypotheses he proposes to account for them. In the present study, however, we will find it necessary from the outset to suspend such judgments, which bear on the referent of these texts, in order the more clearly to disengage the latter's internal structure. Surely, in the case of a theoretically sophisticated scholar, who in his own writings explicitly discusses the use and functions, in the practice of historiography, of models or, as he calls them, ideal types, there can be no room for the reactions of a scandalized positivism to an approach which, like our own, seems to assimilate sociology and discursive prose to the various other forms of overt or disguised fantasy or storytelling. Still, one can admit the paradox inherent in a search for personal or unconscious, somehow psychological structures, in the work of a man who aimed at the establishment of sociology as a value-free discipline and who struggled to provide a methodological foundation for a genuinely objective and scientific analysis of social institutions. But a growing literature reevaluating Weber from a radical point of view' has made it plain that Weber's Wertfreiheit was itself a passionate value judgment which has nothing in common with that positivistic and academic type of objectivity to which it has so often been assimilated by Weber's American interpreters. We must therefore initially determine the meaning of this concept, before proceeding to an analysis of the practical work which Weber executed in its name.