Max Weber's Analysis Research Articles

"Eternal, Slithery Penance": Graham Swift's Waterland and the Secularization of Confession

"Eternal, Slithery Penance":Graham Swift's Waterland and the Secularization of Confession Ryan Siemers (bio) "Your history teacher wishes to give you the complete and final version," the narrator of Graham Swift's Waterland, Tom Crick, tells his high school students (7–8). Crick refers to his personal and family history, his account of which constitutes the novel. Crick's avowed aim echoes auricular confession, which requires the complete recounting of a penitent's sins before he or she receives absolution. Like a religious confessant, Crick seeks absolution for past sins: he feels guilty about the abortion of his would-be son, the death of his childhood friend Freddie Parr, and the suicide of his brother. Indeed, Crick reveals his guilt over these deaths to the police: "I confess my responsibility, jointly with my wife, for the death of three people" (314).1 However, because he speaks to his students, to the police, and (implicitly) to the reader rather than to a father confessor with the purpose and authority to offer him absolution, Crick's secular self-examination and self-narration threaten to be endless. In a desperate and improvisational response to that problem, Crick universalizes his condition over the course of his narrative to assuage his feelings of guilt and bring his secular confession to a close. Crick's narrative should be read in the context of—and as a response to the problems posed by—the secularization of confession. As I use the term here, "secularization" stands not for an inevitable decline of religious affiliation due to modernization (a once-prominent thesis that has undergone revision in sociology), but for an interminable historical [End Page 56] process by which religious concepts and practices are translated or transposed into the secular sphere and by which they continue to function in that sphere, often with unexpected consequences.2 Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith provide examples of secularization understood as transposition: Schmitt claims that "all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts" (37), and Löwith argues that the modern notion of progress and the associated conception of linear history are due to the secularization of Christian eschatology. As I use it here, secularization encompasses the kind of transposition proposed by Schmitt and Löwith, along with the continuing and unpredictable dynamism of once-religious contents following that transposition. Max Weber's analysis may provide an example of the latter: for Weber, the transposition of rational acquisitiveness from Protestantism (wherein wealth provides evidence of election) to modern capitalism (wherein wealth is an end in itself) conditions the modern laborer and makes the current economic order possible—which, of course, is not at all what Martin Luther or John Calvin had in mind. Waterland's Tom Crick demonstrates the transposition of religious contents into the secular sphere, but his narrative also suggests that Weber's rationalization may reverse itself, that disenchantment may prompt re-enchantment. Crick transposes auricular confession into the relationship between himself and his students, but he then appeals to an enchanted circular history as a means to escape the psychological impasse produced by that transposition. Crick critiques progress and prefers cyclical history. Like Löwith, who opts for circular history because it comports with the notion of historical continuity (207), Crick desires historical continuity—especially regarding sexual generation, which in his case has been stymied. (His wife, Mary, is unable to bear children following an abortion.) More importantly, Crick prefers a re-enchanted form of that history—re-enchanted not by a return to ancient Greek paganism, as Löwith ultimately proposes, but through an idiosyncratic mythology of Crick's own making—because it assuages his sense of guilt by relating his individual experience to a universal pattern. Waterland thus illuminates a psychological dimension of Löwith's preferred alternative to linear history: for a subject suffering from a guilty conscience, circular history transforms personal guilt into a universal condition that is less psychologically burdensome due to its impersonality. [End Page 57] Before we examine Crick's narrative in more detail, however, we should address an important objection to the basic premise that secularization entails the transposition of religious concepts and practices...

Parliament and public opinion in Max Weber's analysis

SUMMARYPublic opinion was converted into a mass phenomenon concerning an extended public, through the process of democratization that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. This transformation aroused the interest of social and political scientists: Ferdinand Tönnies, Hermann Oncken, and James Bryce, who highlighted relevant aspects relating to public opinion, the process of its formation, and its social and political meaning. By taking inspiration from these studies, Max Weber stressed the role played by the press in shaping public opinion. He also recognized that public opinion constituted an influential factor in political life, which nevertheless needed politico-institutional mediation reducing its emotional components. From this perspective, Parliament was the most appropriate institution to provide this mediation, since it provided a work of synthesis and elaboration of the different issues circulating in the public sphere. Additionally, the activity of Parliament could also contribute in a relevant way to forming an educated public capable of judging in a reflective and responsible manner, by demonstrating its expertise and efficiency through substantial work and factual decision-making.

Searching for the Spirit of American Democracy: Max Weber's Analysis of a Unique Political Culture, Past, Present, and Future by Stephen Kalberg (review)

Book Reviews 271 Stephen Kalberg, Searching for the Weher's Analysis of a Unique Politic (Boulder, CO and London: Paradig 978-1-61205-444-5. $138.00. In this slim volume, Stephen Kalb of democracy in America, or the s decried on both left and right. He yses such as Robert Putnam's ce America's declining social capita the specifically religious underpinn Instead, Kalberg turns to Max We of American society and culture. A implicit theoretical debate between endnotes, Kalberg pits the fundam thesis against essentially structura equality as the key to understandin nesses of values favourable to dem political) contribution to the debat racy, Kalberg's intentions in this are primarily pedagogical, as evide of Weberian terms and appendice United States in 1904 and on his Kalberg wants more to show ho ideal-typical analysis of singular h contemporary understandings of p America's 17th century Puritan roo the potential salvation of the 'spiri Kalberg succinctly defines the s 'civic individualism,' a 'symbio affirm themselves through pract rational, or utilitarian) action in berg's argument, or rather his expl into American democracy, posits keystone of American political cul interpretation in the Protestant alone before God sought certitud tion of his or her righteousness in the elective sect. In the 19th centu self-worth and social status transla of multiple associations whose m© Max Weber Studies 2015. 272 Max Weber Studies individualism in conformity with col Weber thus understood that American ized, anomic mass of individuals as Toc become and as Weber's German social was the inevitable fate of all modern s a brief interesting comparison with late Germany to suggest how the absence o to the United States reinforced Vergesell tion as well as the relegation of ethics to Weber of course recognized that th immune to the iron-cage logics of moder wanted to practice the grinding disciplin while the modern capitalist industrialist the practical-rationality of the ultimatel of productivity, the Protestant ethic und can democracy' would give way to the pu the political corruption and heightened in cultural pessimism is well-known, but, as an ideal-typical exaggeration that negle minism of Weber's social theory. Thus, of optimism. Certain traits of salutary civ example, in the moralistic tone of politica form professional organizations that do n bers' interests but establish norms for intensity of social conflicts such as the 'cu tive, powerfully held beliefs about social derly political culture, but it belongs to tradition to which Weber also subscribe competitive partisan parliamentary demo In short, Kalberg offers the reader a so Weber's political thought through the for American democracy. At times Kal very Weberian language of positivism sequences and the like). I suspect, how with his framing of his exposé of Web American political culture in current deb racy, was to make Weber more accessib rian scholars will forgive him and appr of his maître à penser. Laurence McFalls Université de Montréal© Max Weber Studies 2015. Laurence McFalls ...

READING WEBER AMONG THE SIKHS: ASCETICISM AND CAPITALISM IN THE 3HO/SIKH DHARMA

This paper explores the utility of applying Max Weber's analysis of the unique relationship between the Protestant ethic and capitalism to the 3HO/Sikh Dharma. The diverse Yogi Tea and Akal Security brands – the former a health food enterprise, the latter specializing in prison and other private security contracts – comprise a multi-billion dollar concern founded and operated within the 3HO/Sikh Dharma organization's Khalsa International Industries. Is the success of these businesses a reflection of Weber's notion of capitalist asceticism, in keeping with the central position of white converts from Western religious traditions in 3HO/Sikh Dharma, or, might it reflect uniquely Sikh efforts to refuse a distinction between spiritual and material realms?

Max Weber, the Exchange, and the possibilities of political and parliamentary intervention

Max Weber's analysis of the Exchange focuses on the one hand on the meaning of this institution for modern economy, and on the other hand on the need to create political frames regulating its activity. According to Weber, the Exchange brings about a rationalization of the financial and economic system based on quantification, globalization, and impersonality, abstracting from concrete situations and relationships. Nevertheless, this also implies limiting personal responsibility and reducing the capacity of control and overview. In order to overcome the negative effects, it is necessary to define the forms of intervention of politics as well as its margins. Weber's scientific issues are supported by the personal experience he had in Germany by participating in the provisory board created after the financial crisis of 1890. Weber conceives of internal representative-like institutions supervising the Exchange, but he also ascribes to the parliament a central function consisting of regulating transactions and taking measures at a legislative level. A parliament elected by means of a universal and equal suffrage is for him the most adequate institution to supervise the Exchange, as it equalizes social as well as economic differences and it takes into consideration the fundamental needs of the people. Nevertheless, since the Exchange is also a global institution, Weber stresses in addition the relevance of international agreements, in order to guarantee more transparency and stability.

Charisma and Space

AbstractThis article uses Max Weber's analysis of charisma to differentiate types of symbolic places. Although Weber did not include the role of space in his analysis of charisma, we can construct different types of spatial charisma based on his distinction between traditional and bureaucratic regimes. Heritage sites and monuments are used by traditional regimes to legitimise their rule by looking back to their charismatic origins, while futuristic places are used to convince the population that bureaucratic regimes will provide a brighter future. In reality these ideal types of charismatic places are almost always mixed. Nation‐states combine both types of charismatic places. The analysis of the Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Germany shows that the meaning of a place can change and incorporate both types of spatial charisma at the same time and place. This was the consequence of a deliberate policy to legitimise a new economic regime in Germany's Ruhr area.

Max Weber's Analysis of the Unique American Civic Sphere

Max Weber's analysis of the American civic sphere has been seldom investigated. Indebted to the ascetic Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, his major concepts and analytic framework are summarized here. An unusual symbiotic dualism between the civic arena and a world-mastery individualism, as well as an antagonism between this value-grounded individualism and practical-rational individualism, remain pivotal throughout his analysis. Nonetheless, although powerful, the Weberian model is seen to be foreshortened. Three complementary constructs, grounded in his rich set of concepts, extend Weber's analysis. Taken in combination, all four models provide a Weberian analysis of the American civic sphere's unique origins, expansion, and past and present oscillations across a demarcated spectrum. Weber's emphasis upon the deep cultural contexts of social action, the influence of the past upon the present, and arrays of operationalizable hypotheses diverges distinctly from Tocqueville's approach, as well as present-day modernization, neo-functionalist, and neo-Marxist analyses of the civic sphere.

Kaldet til selvrealisering—mod en ny arbejdsetik

In this article, I examine the use of personal development programs in the world of business. In recent decades, there has been an increasing interest in the cultivation of the Self and this tendency has found expression in the New Age movement and modern management. I suggest a rethinking of Max Weber's analysis of the connection between the upcoming of a new religious behavior, such as the New Age movement, and a new way of thinking about the work expressed in New Human Resources Management. The French philosopher Marcel Gauchet's interpretation of the modern religious practices bound to the believer's inner life is central to my analysis. The ideal employee is in a permanent state of reflection, learning and experience; he sees himself in a state of growth. The focus here is directed towards the individual's potential and is based on the notion that the individual has resources hidden in the subconscious, waiting to be accessed through the development of the Self. My argument is that personal development programs in the business community seek to nurture a particular attitude towards work. Through personal development courses the employee should obtain a pleasurable relationship to his/her work, which ideally should be experienced as a vocation. The ideal employee no longer sees his/her work from a perspective of duty but work done con amore—as a way to self-realization. The cultivation of the individual's emotional inner life emphasizes extroverted practices, whereby modern management and the New Age movement overlap in the establishment of the ethics of sensitivity.

Rationality and Capitalism in Max Weber's Analysis of Western Modernity

Rationality and Capitalism in Max Weber's Analysis of Western Modernity

In the Grip of Freedom: Law and Modernity in Max Weber

Cary Boucock, In the Grip of Freedom: Law and Modernity Max Weber. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000, 230 pp., $60 cloth; $24.95 paper. Max Weber's analysis of modern law is among the least familiar aspects of his sociological oeuvre. This is not surprising. Unlike Weber himself, who was a qualified lawyer accredited to practice Berlin, most sociologists lack both legal training and, it would appear, legal curiosity. Combine that with the forbidding character of Weber's dense and convoluted propositions, and you have a kind of collective incomprehension that does not apply to, for instance, the writings on the sociology of religion. For a long time, we have needed a book that both clarifies the intricacies of Weber's legal theory and connects them to his wider comparative sociology. Gary Boucock's the Grip of Freedom does just that--and more, by offering a bracing reconstruction of one of Weber's more disturbing findings. The first two thirds of the book comprise a lucid account of a paradox that Weber discerned at the heart of modern life. Modern, capitalist society enables an unprecedented degree of freedom. The formal-positive legal rationality, that both preceded capitalism and that is now symbiotically bound up with it, helps produce a self that is typically unencumbered by fixed, ascribed role expectations. Under such a regime, individuals are deemed autonomous to the extent that they are socially atomistic, mobile, and purposively oriented by mean-ends calculation. Rational legality is formal the sense that it is depersonalised and abstract, indifferent to the substantive normative obligations of kin and community, and aimed at maximizing the predictability, calculability and transparency of social arrangements. Correspondingly, rational legality is positive the sense that it derives legitimacy from the belief that legal norms are derived from correct enactment and individual consent (p. 10). Taken together, formal-positive legal rationality enjoins us to obey the rule of law not the rule of man, to comply with paragraphs not sentiments, and to treat judicial idiosyncrasy as a blot on the social landscape. This legal development and its associated model of personhood have enabled modern people to escape the injuries and rigidities of tradition-bound societies. In such ways, we are free to exercise choices that, previously, did not exist. The problem is that the quest to liberate the ostensibly sovereign self from unwelcome encumbrances, to enhance control over our relationships and our environments, entraps us within legal and other rules that create new forms of coercion and dehumanisation. Just as bureaucratization has spread over most forms of modern organizations, so, with it, legal impersonality has become the template of our relationship with others. Modern individuals, caught in the grip of are liberated from traditional ascriptions and personal domination. Yet divested of commun al attachments and existential certainties, they are obliged to inhabit a world that is inhospitable, governed by techno-managerial forms of reason, and ever more subject to rules and regulations of baffling and proliferating complexity. The rights-oriented polity, far from loosening the grip of freedom, actually serves to tighten it. In an epoch where sacred norms have been disenchanted and secularised, the quest for rights is a post-traditional means of grounding objective validity claims. Yet seeking to acquire such rights so as to expand or entrench autonomy, individuals give increasing power to the regulatory state apparatus and to the judiciary. The regulatory state is, of course, required to sanction the law; the judiciary has a vital role to play establishing justice. But a major concern of Weber's is the developmental tendency of modern states to remove issues properly disputed a political arena, among citizens and their legislative representatives, and to make them instead the province of judicial decision-making. …

Rationalizations of Music

Although Max Weber's analysis of rationalization is considered indispensable to the study of modern society, his work on the rationalization of music has remained neglected because of its musicological complexity. In this paper, his unfinished work on music is reconstructed in terms of the two principles of rationalization that he distinguished : the distance-principle and the harmonic principle.Rationalization based on the distance-principle defines the relations of musical tones by the distance or the symmetry between them. Weber says that melodious music, for example, ancient Greek music and a host of non-Western music, which has no connection with rationalized polyphony (music which has two or more relatively independent parts), is characterized by the distance-principle. This principle makes possible the free and subtle movement of a melody.On the other hand, harmonic rationalization, which is based on the harmonic principle, tries to construct a musical scale by harmonious sounds. This latter rationalization is the basis of modern Western tonal music, in which all musical tones and chords are ordered around a central tone (tonic). These two principles of rationalization contradict each other, in that free movement of a melody breaks harmony and, vice versa, harmony prevents free movement of a melody.It is considered that modern tonal music has its foundations in the harmonic principle, but has gradually been shaped by the intertwining of these two processes of rationalization. Harmonic rationalization inevitably has contradictions. In order to solve these contradictions the distance-principle is coupled with harmonic rationalization. It is this contradictory process of rationalization in the historical development of Western tonal music that Weber intended to explore. This paper presents an explanation of this process of the dual rationalization of modern music.

Max Weber's Analysis of Marginal Utility Theory and Psychology Revisited: Latent Propositions in Economic Sociology and the Sociology of Economics

Dans son essai sur la theorie de l'utilite marginale, Max Weber a refute toute explication d'ordre psychologique, contrairement a quelques economistes de l'epoque, faisant mention de la loi de Weber-Fechner (en reference au psychologue allemand Ernst Weber). En faisant appel a la sociologie de la connaissance, l'A. nuance l'affirmation de Max Weber, a travers ses references aux conditions sociales, historiques et culturelles de son temps

Tribute, Turf, Honor and the American Street Gang:

American street gangs have always been committed to the defense of turf and the attainment of honor. Street gangs have, however, changed markedly with respect to their goals, their age and racial composition, their relationship to the wider political, economic and cultural environment, their commitment to delinquency and their level of violence. These changes have resulted from immigration, population movement, economic transformations, racial and ethnic conflict and the changing fabric of neighborhood and family life. This article identifies and analyses patterns of continuity and change in the American street gang since the 1820s by drawing on Eric Wolf's neo-Marxian analysis of modes of production and Max Weber's analysis of honor-based conflict.

Weber and Rickert: Concept Formation in the Cultural Sciences

Philosophers and social scientists will welcome this highly original discussion of Max Weber's analysis of the objectivity of social science. Guy Oakes traces the vital connection between Weber's methodology and the work of philosopher Heinrich Rickert, reconstructing Rickert's notoriously difficult concepts in order to isolate the important, and until now poorly understood, roots of problems in Weber's own work.Guy Oakes teaches social philosophy at Monmouth College and sociology at the New School for Social Research.

Les guerres de succession du Kremlin (1924-1984)

The Kremlin wars of succession (1924-1984), Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. The difficulties of succession which the Soviet System experienced on the deaths of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Andropov are discussed. No apparent rule could ever be established in the USSR to ensure the transfer of power without a crisis. But a careful examination of the circumstances and the stakes of the wars of succession clarifies successively the roles of individuals until 1953, of the apparatus until 1982, and of the generational conflict within the party since the death of Brezhnev. History seems to reinforce Max Weber's analysis of the routinization of power and the final victory of the System over the individuals.