Max Weber

German sociologist, political economist, and philosopher of history (1864–1920); author of Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1905), Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (posth. 1922), "Politik als Beruf" (1919), and methodological essays collected as Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre (1922). For this wiki, Weber is central as the thinker Merleau-Ponty adopts in 1955's "The Crisis of the Understanding" (Ch 6) as the model for a "Weberian Marxism" — a Marxism chastened by the philosophy of history's open horizon, rejecting any "key to history" while preserving historical materialism's insight that all domains of human activity form a system.

Key Points

  • Weber's liberalism is "completely new" because it admits "truth always leaves a margin of doubt... history is the natural seat of violence." It does not claim to be the law of things; it perseveres in becoming such a law through a struggle that never closes.
  • Ideal types (Weber's Idealtypen) are "not keys to history" but "precise guideposts for appreciating the divergence between what we think and what has been, and for bringing into the open what has been left out of our interpretation." Knowledge is conditional, not categorical.
  • Elective affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften) — the term Weber uses for the historical bonding of Protestantism and capitalism — name a mode of historical causation neither determinist nor voluntarist. Elements acquire historical meaning only through their encounter with others.
  • Rationalization is the formal figure Weber uses for Western modernity; it is "a fecund scheme" that unites law, science, technology, Protestant ethic, and capitalism.
  • Politics of the understanding: "The taste for violence, he says, is a hidden weakness; the ostentation of virtuous feelings is a secret violence. These are two sorts of histrionics or neurosis, and there is a force, that of true politics, which is beyond these" (Weber on Politik als Beruf, cited by MP p. 229).
  • Weber refused the dogmatic opposition of ethic of heart (Gesinnungsethik) and ethic of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik): "The ethics of heart and the ethics of responsibility are not absolutely opposed but complementary, and only the man in whom they are joined has the political calling."
  • Weber's description of the post-Calvinist "iron cage": "Specialists without spirit, libertines without heart, this nothingness imagines itself to be elevated to a level of humanity never before attained."

Details

MP's Reading of Weber

Ch 6 of the 1964 volume is MP's most extended engagement with Weber. The chapter traces Weber's analysis of Protestantism and capitalism as an example of a philosophy of history that is neither Hegelian idealism nor dogmatic Marxism. MP's key interpretive moves:

  • Weber's "ideal types" are not a-priori concepts but "typical ways of treating natural being, of responding to others and to death... symbolic matrices which have no preexistence."
  • The "elective affinity" between Calvinism and capitalism is not causation but co-constitution: each confirms the other, and the system emerges from their encounter.
  • Historical meaning is retrospective: "The meaning of a system in its beginnings is like the pictorial meaning of a painting which directs the painter's movements less than it is a result of them and progresses with them" (p. 220).
  • Weber's liberalism knows itself to be a product of history: "Weber is aware that scientific history is itself a product of history, a moment of the 'rationalization,' a moment of the history of capitalism."

Weber's Relation to Marxism

Weber wrote that Marxism is "the most important instance of the construction of ideal types" — provided one takes its "forces" as meanings. MP takes this as the bridge: Weber does not oppose Marxism; he transforms its ontological commitments into methodological tools. "There had been Marxists who understood this, and they were the best. There had been a rigorous and consequential Marxism which also was a theory of the historical understanding of the Vielseitigkeit [many-sidedness] of the creative choice, and a philosophy which questioned history" (p. 230).

But Weber himself was not a revolutionary; he judged the revolutionary movements in post-1918 Germany "as if he were a provincial, bourgeois German." He was opposed to dogmatic Marxism in both its theoretical form (economic determinism) and its practical form (the revolutionary party).

Politics of the Understanding

MP reads Weber's Politik als Beruf (1919) as articulating a politics based neither on dogmatic ethics nor on pure opportunism. The mature politician joins the ethic of heart and the ethic of responsibility; he has distance from himself, which the academic and intellectual classes lack. "The politician is patient or intractable when he must be — that is to say, when he has compromised as much as he will allow himself and when the very sense of what he is doing is involved."

Weber's secret, according to MP: "to not try to form an image of himself and of his life... Because his action is a 'work,' a devotedness to a 'thing' [Sache] which grows outside him, it has a rallying power of the sort which is always lacking in undertakings which are done out of vanity" (p. 229).

Critical Assessments

MP does not uncritically endorse Weber:

  • Weber is "a liberal" in a limited sense — "easily eliminated" from his attempt to found a political party, perhaps because a party that does not play by the rules of the game would be "a utopia."
  • Weber misjudged the revolutions after 1917 — he saw them as "a carnival of intellectuals dressed up as politicians" rather than as the creation of historical wholes.
  • Weber's "methodology came after his scientific practice" — his methodological writings rationalize post-hoc what he had done, which limits their self-understanding.

Yet these are criticisms from within Weber's own framework. MP's verdict: "What he has shown definitively is that a philosophy of history which is not a historical novel does not break the circle of knowledge and reality and that it is more a meditation upon that circle" (p. 230).

Connections

  • is the model for "Weberian Marxism" in MP Ch 6.
  • is contrasted with dogmatic Seinsgeschichte — Weber's history is open, not destinally sent.
  • connects to two-historicities — Weber's "confused question that is not sheltered from regressions" is a precursor to MP's advent / event distinction.
  • connects to humanism-in-extension — the 1947 essay and the 1955 Weber essay are the two poles of MP's political position.
  • informs MP's interrogation — Weber's "questioning history" is structurally related to MP's philosophical interrogation.
  • contrasts with friedrich-nietzsche — both reject dogmatic philosophy of history; but Weber builds a methodology, while Nietzsche operates rhetorically.
  • contrasts with Koestler (humanism-in-extension) — Weber accepts that politics is violence; Koestler retreats into pacifist moralism.

Open Questions

  • How does MP's 1955 Weberian Marxism square with his 1947 "Marxist reprieve" (humanism-in-extension)? MP does not explicitly bridge them.
  • Is MP's Weber a historical Weber or an MP-Weber? Weber scholars have questioned whether MP's "elective affinity" reading — which emphasizes retrospective meaning over causal explanation — is faithful to Weber's own intentions.
  • Does the late ontology absorb the Weberian framework? V&I uses "style" and "symbolic matrix" in ways continuous with the 1955 Weber reading; but the explicit Weberian vocabulary recedes.
  • What is the relation between Weber's "ethic of responsibility" and MP's conditioned-freedom? Both reject the "pure intention" model of moral action, but the conceptual architectures differ.

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1964-primacy-of-perception — Ch 6 "The Crisis of the Understanding" (originally the opening chapter of Les aventures de la dialectique, Paris 1955), pp. 213–230. Primary citations of Weber's Die protestantische Ethik, "Politik als Beruf," and Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre. Raymond Aron is cited as the French interpreter of Weber MP follows; Karl Löwith for "Max Weber und Karl Marx" (1932).
  • merleau-ponty-1955-adventures-of-the-dialectic — the primary source. "The Crisis of Understanding" is Ch 1 of this book; the Weber reading is sustained through Ch 2 (where Lukács is diagnosed as Weber's pupil radicalizing him into "Weberian Marxism") and into the Epilogue (where the "new liberalism" is explicitly continuous with "Weber's heroic liberalism," AD 225). The Ch 6 / Ch 1 duplication note: Primacy of Perception reprints AD Ch 1 in English translation; the Bien translation has the integral book.