Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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political prominence in Germany during his lifetime, his work came to be known outside Germany only by slow increments, through translated papers and essays (with his political writings excluded). His major book on Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society) was not translated into English in its entirety until 1968.
Weber’s politics crucially influenced his interests and choice of topics. He was born into a Germany unified by Bismarck, whose power base lay in Prussia. The state was governed by an alliance of Junker landowners with civil bureaucrats and army officers, many of them recruited from Junker families. This class alliance set the new state on the road to industrialization under capitalist auspices, but—in contrast to England, the leader in capitalist development—it did not grant the class of capitalist entrepreneurs a role in managing the affairs of state. Weber wanted a strong Germany, able to play its part in “the eternal struggle for the maintenance and cultivation of our national integrity” (in Giddens 1972, 16). In his estimation, the traditional classes leading Germany were unsuited to the task of building a successful industrial society, while the ascending class of the liberal bourgeoisie and the new class of proletarians were unqualified for political leadership. Thus, his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1920 (Weber 1930) not only was intended to demonstrate the importance of religion in economic development but was written to “sharpen the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie” in Germany (Giddens 1972, 12). To advance German development, Weber said, it would be necessary to break the political power of the Junker class, control the state bureaucracy, and reform the parliamentary system of the state in order to draw the socialist working class into participation in government and to support capitalist development. This, however, would also require separating the workers from their Marxist-inspired Social Democratic leaders, whom he characterized as petit bourgeois innkeepers and revolutionary visionaries, likely to amplify bureaucracy and thus choke off industrial growth.
Weber’s sociology played out a number of neo-Kantian themes. Weber rejected any kind of general causal theory, especially the economic determinism then preached by the Social Democrats, who predicted an inexorable forward march of world history based on the development of the economy. Instead, he always concentrated on the study of particular cases. Sociology might recognize repetitive patterns or variations on common themes and propose “hypothesis-forming models” (Kalberg 1994, 12). Such models might draw on a wide range of comparative studies, but they were merely “ideal types,” to be used to examine particular cases, not to chart any lawlike unilineal process. While Weber saw rationalization—the imposition of a means-ends calculus upon relations—as a recurrent trend in the world and feared that bureaucratic rationalization would enclose the human spirit in an “iron casing” (the usual translation as “iron cage” is in error), he “always refused to present rationalization as the self-unfolding logic of history” (Arato 1978, 191–92).
Weber further denied universal and dominant power to the economic factor: economics was likely to play a major role in framing the possibilities of any concrete situation, but it would co-occur always with multiple other social and ideational factors. Methodologically it was always necessary, Weber held, to investigate the “meanings” that action held for the acting individual, and not to understand people simply as products of social forces. Following the lead of Dilthey, he saw such investigation as involving Verstehen, empathetic understanding reached by putting oneself in the position of others, in order to comprehend how they themselves define their situation and the purposes of their actions. Many of his treatises dealt with ideas that shaped the characteristic orientations to religious or economic action. These orientations always addressed particular social contexts; they defined the “meaning” of action for individuals and underwrote their ability make “sense” of the world. Weber’s study of such orientations and their “carrier” groups retains an enduring importance for our understanding ideas in relation to the conditions of specific social groups. Yet he saw that relationship as potential but not determined, and he refused to develop any general theory of how ideas were shaped in interaction with economy and society. In his most general statement on the matter, Weber opined: “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern man’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ which have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamics of interests” (in Gerth and Mills 1946, 63–64).
Combining Marxism and Neo-Kantianism
Understanding how Weber related to Marx has long constituted a cottage industry in the social sciences. Some scholars have stressed Weber’s tragic vision of human life as fatefully threatened by rationalization. Others have cast him as a precursor of National Socialism in his views about the need for a state based on concentrated power and his call for a mobilization of the working class on behalf of national capitalist development. For some sociologists, like Talcott Parsons, Weber offered an alternative to Marx. More recently, as time has passed and the passionate disputes of yesterday have become muted, it has become easier to recognize the ways in which the Marxian and Weberian legacies converge and intersect (Turner 1981; Sayer 1991). My own sense is that Marx and Weber complement one another, each addressing a different level of relationships. Even in the period around World War I, however, when the issues underlying their differences still provided flammable tinder for politics, some major figures worked to combine their apparently divergent perspectives and to bring them to bear conjointly upon social science.
With the rise of Marxian methods of inquiry, there developed Marxian variants that attempted to combine Marxism with approaches influenced by neo-Kantian thought. Two of these focus on the relationship between ideas and power and are especially pertinent to anthropological understandings. One is represented by the work of Karl Mannheim (1893–1947); the other, by that of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937).
Mannheim was destined to become one of the “free-floating” intellectuals he later described. Born in Budapest, he joined the radical “Sunday Circle” that included Gyorgy Lukács; and, like Lukács, he fled to Germany in the wake of the failed Hungarian revolution in 1919. Hitler’s grasp for power in 1933 then forced him to move to England. While in Germany, he—like Lukács—came into contact with Max Weber, then intent on developing his neo-Kantian approach to a systematic sociology, and both Lukács and Mannheim would attempt to combine Marx with Weber. In History and Class Consciousness (1971), Lukács used Weber’s concept of “objective possibility” to endow the Marxian proletariat with a “potential” (as opposed to an empirical) class consciousness. Yet where Lukács then opted for communism, Mannheim moved toward sociology.
Mannheim accepted the hypothesis of a link between forms of knowledge and social groupings, but he also insisted in Weberian fashion that class intersected with many other memberships in generational cohorts, status groups, professions, and elites. His methodology, used to demonstrate the ties between social entities and ideas, was “essentially anthropological” (Wallace 1970, 174). His essay on “Conservative Thought” in Germany (1953) pointed to the declining nobility as the main social base of support for an intelligentsia that produced conservative theories. The work also exemplified Mannheim’s major concern with the social role of intellectuals. In a second work, Ideology and Utopia (1936), Mannheim counterposed varieties of ideology that supported the status quo, as against forms of utopian thought that envisioned alternative futures. He delineated different kinds of utopias: the orgiastic chiliasm of Thomas Münzer’s Anabaptists; the liberal-humanitarianism of the Enlightenment, which embraced the idea of rational progress as well as German pietism’s faith in progress under the stewardship of God; conservative counterutopias; and socialist-communist utopias. In Mannheim’s method, each of these perspectives was to be depicted in its own terms, as a prerequisite for an eventual evaluative solution (1936, 98). His great hope was that sociology would affect politics by communicating to the contending participants the sources of their modes of action and would thus facilitate negotiations among them.
Gramsci combined Marx and neo-Kantianism in a different way, developing an approach to understanding how ideas are generated and distributed within a field of force. Born in Sardinia, he went on to study linguistics in Turin, where he was drawn into politics and became a leader of Italian communism. Arrested by the fascist regime in 1926, he was sent to prison, where he died in 1937.
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