Customer Reviews

Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait

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I want to give a shout out to Henri Edward Dongieux who authored the Amazon.com guide to "get to know Weber and Habermas". I want to give my stand disclaimer: I am not a sociologist or a student of sociology, just a general reader with an interest in the history of ideas.

Funny story about this book: I bought Weber's theory of social and economic organization (with the foreword by Talcott Parsons). I don't know what I was thinking there. I read about thirty pages of Parsons introduction to Theory and was like, "forget this."

So then the next day I'm surfing around Amazon trying to figure out how I'm going to figure out Weber and I see the above mentioned list. Well, Henri was right: this book is THE place to start if you're looking to access the ideas of Weber.

One further digression before I actually review the book itself: Weber is hard to access for a couple of reasons: First, all his stuff has been translated from the German. This is compounded by the fact that Weber, despite his highly rigorous thought, was kind of making up terminology as he went and also by the fact that German has tons of words that don't translate well into English.
Second, Weber kind of died before he finished pulling together the various strands of his grand theory together, leaving his work uncomplete.

So, preliminary matters aside, I will move on to a description of the book. Since this is the first review of this work on Amazon (and how can that be?). I will provide a non-judgmental description of content and then a few observations.

The book is divided into three Parts. Part One is called "German Society and The Protestant Ethic". Part Two is "Society, Religion, and Secular Ethic: A Comparitive Study of Civilisations" and Part Three is "Domination, Organization, and Legitimacy: Max Weber's Political Sociology". Before Part One, Bendix includes an introduction and a chapter on Weber's "Career and Personal Orientation". That first chapter is most illuminating and serves to ground Weber in place and time.

The first part of the book is divided into two chapters. The first chapter talks about his very interesting early studies of eastern german agarian society and the various german stock exchanges. Bendix refers to these two early studies over and over through out the book. The second chapter of the first part of the book discusses Weber's most popular and well known ideas about the protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Having laid out the touchstones of Weber's work, Bendix moves into part two, which concern Weber's studies of world religion.

Part two deals exclusively with Weber's interest in world religion. Bendix devotes a chapter each to his studies of China, India and Palestine. Bendix notes that it is obvious that Weber's main interest was in the roots of the west that he found in Palestine and so the chapters on China and India are of limited use (except as a guide to what Weber THOUGHT about China and Indian religion. Bendix concludes part two with a chapter summarizing Weber's "sociology of religion".

Part three has a similar structure to part two. Bendix runs off a couple of chapters on charsmatic domination and traditional domination as a means to explicate Weber's theories of "Legal Domination" which represent, perhaps, Weber's main achievment. Again, Bendix points out that Weber's interest in chasmatic domination and traditional domination are really only "foils" for his overriding interest in "legal domination", in the same way that his studies of India and China are foils for his interest in the society of ancient Palestine.

In part three, Bendix also includes a couple of chapters that tie the book together and link the three parts, as well as a further attempt to ground Weber in the thought of his day.

OK, so that is the descriptive part. Now, some observations:

First off, as someone who really didn't know anything about Weber's thought (outside of a cursory understanding of his thesis in the "Spirit of Capitalism"), I found this book to be immensely compelling.

One can dismiss all of Weber's substantive conclusions about the nature of society and government and still be Wowed by the tremendous influence he has had on all social thinkers in the past century. I now see Weber's influence everywhere I look!

I also feel like any further attempts to read Weber will be made about a thousand times easier becaue I have read this book.

Although I read all but about twenty pages of this five hundred page book, I believe one could derive the same meaning from reading chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 12,13, and 15, while skipping the rest.

This book also has a handy index!

Max Weber was a true independent academic who studied the power struggle among individuals, groups or nations. He was also a true liberal, in the European sense, personally committed to the cause of reason and freedom and the safeguard of the legacy of the Enlightenment against the power-State and the bureaucratization of modern society

Society and power
A society for him was an arena of competing status groups with their own economic and ideal interests. The all important factor was power, `the possibility of imposing one's will upon the behavior of other persons.'

Three forms of domination
A charismatic one: power exercised by a leader. This power can be depersonalized by institutionalization of an authority (e.g., a church).
A traditional one: power based on the belief of the legitimacy of inherited authority. Patrimonialism is a system where the State is administered like the household of the ruler. Feudalism is based on a contractually fixed fealty.
A legal one: a system of judicial and administrative rules valid for all members.

The modern State
Legal matters, bureaucracy, compulsory jurisdiction and monopolization of the legitimate use of force are the essential characteristics of the modern State.

Religious ideas and economic activities
As a challenge to Marx, Max Weber showed that man's consciousness is not only determined by his social class, but also by religion.
As Calvin said, `man is a tool of the divine will.' Puritanism sought to transform the world. The usefulness of labor was judged by the fruits that signify its favor in the sight of God. The spirit of capitalism is a whole of ideas and habits that favor a rational pursuit of economic gain.
In China, land sales and inventions were thought to disturb the ancestral spirits. The patrimonial organization militated against rational administration. Confucianism aimed at self-perfection turning away from material interests.
In India, the caste system was a barrier against capitalism, because man has to be obedient to the dharma of his caste. Each life is merely an instant in an unending sequence of lives.

Vision
Max Weber's somber vision that populations would become prisoners of enormous bureaucratic machines became partly true in some one party totalitarian States. But, those machines fell apart or transformed themselves into capitalist economies.

This book contains also valuable historical information (e.g. on the role of the Junkers in Germany).
It is a must read for all scholars of sociology and for all those interested in the ideas of a great liberal.

Very well done summary of Max Weber's life and intellectual heritage. A classic that anyone interested in Max Weber's sociology should read.