Abstract
This article is an attempt to give an account of the problem of historicity in Weber, pointing at the origins of his understanding of identity and identity formation in modern philosophy, more specifically in Hobbes. It is our hypothesis that Weber’s account of history is deeply indebted to Hobbes own account of the emergence of normative, meaning-like, action orientation only within the political. Weber’s account of identity and society remains a paradigmatic necessity and shapes our understanding of how individuals get to have preferences and form a sense of self in modern societies. However, for all its paradigmatic importance, Weber’s account of the formation of self and identity has a blind spot in the notion of representation. It is our understanding that the centrality of the notion of representation for Weber’s understanding of social action and selfhood leaves him in a nominalistic position. Thus, though knowledge is produced locally, social life aims at and is limited by the production of knowledge. This leaves Weber unable to deal with the problem of disorder in social life without resorting to an interpretation of disorder as irrationality, which, we hold, is no longer acceptable.
Highlights
This article is an attempt to give an account of the problem of historicity in Weber
Our conclusion attempts to demonstrate that such focus on knowledge and representation leaves Weber unable to deal with the problem of disorder in social life without resorting to an interpretation of disorder as irrationality, which, we hold, is no longer acceptable
If Hobbes provided us with an account for the individual in the transition between feudalism and capitalism, Weber provides us with a sociology that describes the stages of socio-individual relations in a consolidated capitalist society
Summary
This article is an attempt to give an account of the problem of historicity in Weber. We suggest that Weber’s restrict understanding of personal and group identity in representational terms is too narrow for our ambivalent, and sometimes anarchic, acknowledgment of reality Though, curiously, such acknowledgment of an anarchic, prerepresentational, ground of individual and social constitution seems to presuppose the very methodological standpoint that Weber had introduced. Weber’s historical perspectivism presupposes that personal and group identity, and individual and social action are connected to a stock of representations. That is, they are connected to a meaning-like constitution of individual and personal mores, which is to say, to individuals that act in society, according to a pre-established meaning-complex set of preferences that are historically constituted in a relation between the individual and the social. Our conclusion attempts to demonstrate that such focus on knowledge and representation leaves Weber unable to deal with the problem of disorder in social life without resorting to an interpretation of disorder as irrationality, which, we hold, is no longer acceptable
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