SOURCE: "Logic and Fate in Weber's Sociology," in For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate, second edition, SAGE Publications, 1996, pp. 3-28.

[In the following essay, Turner discusses Weber as a neo-Kantian thinker, and contrasts his sociological ideas with those of Karl Marx.]

With the development of various radical movements in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, Marxists became increasingly insistent on demonstrating the presence of a sharp dividing line between conventional sociology and Marx's theory of society. In mounting a critique of the claims of sociology to a scientific status, Marxists have frequently selected Max Weber's sociology as the principal illustration of the limitations of sociological reasoning or of its irreducible ideological underpinnings. Weber appears to have come to the forefront of this debate because sociologists themselves have claimed that Weber provides the only valid reply to Marx's analyses of socio-economic relationships. Weber's studies of social class, state and religion have been treated from the time of their publication as decisive alternatives to the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. In addition, Weber's neo-Kantian epistemology has often been treated as the most appropriate epistemological foundation for a discipline which wants to be simultaneously value-neutral and value-relevant. Weber's epistemology can thus be approached as the principal alternative to the post-Hegelianism of Marx's dialectical materialism. According to Carl Mayer, the 'fundamental problem on this level, which is posed with the confrontation of Marx and Weber, is the problem of Hegel vs. Kant, or Kant vs. Hegel'. Alter- natively, other commentators have argued that the fundamental divorce between Weberian sociology and Marxist science is to be found in neither substantive fields of research nor in epistemology, but in the political consequences of Weber's historical pessimism. Since Weber regarded capitalist technology and relations of production as the 'fate' of our times, he dismissed the notion that socialism could produce an alternative to capitalist rationalisation of the means and conditions of production as purely utopian. By contrast, Marcuse claimed that Weber's pessimistic sense of 'destiny' merely generalised the 'blindness of a society which reproduces itself behind the back of the individuals, of a society in which the law of domination appears as objective technological law'.

There is, consequently, massive disagreement over Weber's status as a social theorist. On the one hand, Weber provides the 'paradigm of a sociology which is both historical and systematic.' On the other hand, Weber's sociology is motivated by his commitment to the capitalist system, the German state and blind opposition to revolutionary Marxism. By accepting the 'fate' of capitalist domination, Weber in fact provides a justification for exploitation and imperialism under the guise of a value-free sociology. Although there is fundamental disagreement over the validity and political implications of Weber's sociology (and hence of 'bourgeois sociology' in toto), there is also a curious agreement over the characterisation of the content of Weber's epistemology and substantive sociology. Both conventional sociology and Marxism concur that Weberian sociology is neo-Kantian. Four aspects of Weber's sociology are typically cited as evidence of Weber's dependence on Kantian philosophy. First, there is Weber's fundamental divorce between factual statements and judgments of value. While science may be useful in the selection and development of appropriate means, it cannot help us in determining what ends are important and valuable. In the last analysis, our empirical knowledge of the world is irrelevant in the field of moral choice. Second, there is the strong nominalism of Weber's approach to such general sociological concepts as 'state', 'status group' or 'corporation'. Weber's verstehende soziologie (interpretative sociology) treats all these 'collectivities' as 'solely the resultants and modes of organisation of particular acts of individual persons, since these alone can be treated as agents in a course of subjectively understandable action.' This nominalist position is closely related to the third aspect of Weber's neo-Kantian epistemology, namely Weber's subjectivism. There are various aspects of Weber's subjectivism. At the most general level, the significance and meaning of reality is not given empirically, but is rather imposed on existence by the action of human will. For example, Weber defines 'culture' as 'a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance.' In his typology of social action, Weber distinguishes between behaviour and social action in terms of the subjective meanings which are imposed on action and the subjective meanings which arise from social interaction. Sociology is the science which aims at 'the interpretive understanding of social action in order thereby to arrive at a causal explanation of its course and effects.' Fourth, the neo-Kantianism of Weber's epistemology is evidenced by Weber's rejection of objective, general, causal laws in sociological explanations. From Weber's viewpoint, the rich empirical complexity of history and social organisation could never be reduced to a set of finite laws. Sociology could properly construct typologies and general classifications, but its explanations of social action would always be expressed in terms of probable outcomes.

Once the description of Weber's sociology as neo-Kantian is accepted, it then becomes possible to formulate a nice opposition between Marx and Weber. Those Marxists who have been strongly influenced by the structuralism of French Marxism, especially Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, have argued that while Marx had a clear notion of the central role of objective structural determination, Weber reduces the objective structures of economic and political relations to interpersonal, human subjectivity. One particularly powerful version of this argument occurs in the work of Paul Q. Hirst. In this interpretation, Weber's sociology involves subjective reductionism because all 'social relations are reduced to the plane of inter-subjective relations.' Marx's historical materialism, by contrast, presupposes the independence of objective conditions which are not dissolved by a Weberian commitment to the freedom of individual will. This contrast is particularly marked in Marx's arguments about the primacy of productive relations over relations of circulation and consumption. Marx's economic arguments in this area 'are based on a conception of social relations as objective social forms irreducible to the actions and thoughts of human subjects.'

In attempting to achieve a demarcation line between Marx and Weber in terms of a contrast between the meaningful social actions of individuals and the independent, deterministic role of objective social structures, the Marxist exegesis has often followed the interpretation of Weber by Talcott Parsons. For example, John Lewis in presenting a Marxist critique of Weber's subjectivism refers to Parsons's The Structure of Social Action as 'the authoritative work' which is 'a first-rate and indispensable exposition'. To some extent, the Marxist and Parsonian interpretation of Weber's sociology intersect because it is central to Parsons's thesis that Weber's neo-Kantianism represents a major break with the rationalism and reductionism of classical positivism, pointing sociology in the direction of a voluntaristic theory of action which gives full weight to the importance of freedom of will in the choice of means and ends to goals. In Parsons's approach to Western sociology, therefore, Weber represents a major turning point in the breakdown of positivism and the emergence of the concept of normatively oriented action. Parsons consequently emphasises the difference between Marx and Weber in terms of the latter's concentration on meaningful action, values, subjectivity and choice. Although Marx and Weber agreed about the task of providing an account of modern capitalism as the sine qua non of any valid social theory, Weber provided 'a new anti-Marxian interpretation of it and its genesis.'

There has been, of course, considerable criticism of Parsons's contention that not only Weber, but also Durkheim and Pareto, were forced to abandon positivism in its entirety in favour of a voluntaristic theory of action. Parsons has overstated the importance of values in Durkheim and consequently neglected Durkheim's dependence on Saint-Simon rather than Auguste Comte. In the case of Weber, Parsons has understated Weber's pivotal interest in domination. These critical commentaries on Parsons's view of the history of sociological theory are a necessary and important corrective to Parsons's tendency to interpret all sociologists in such a manner that they prefigure Parsons's own interest in integration on the basis of common values. The problem of the Hobbesian basis of social order was not the common concern of classical sociology. At the same time, however, Parsons recognised what he regarded as a Marxian legacy in Weber's pessimistic view of human freedom under capitalist conditions.

The point of Parsons's argument in The Structure of Social Action is to show that the rationalist, reductionist positivism of nineteenth-century sociology collapsed under the weight of its own analytical problems as a metatheoretical foundation for sociology as a theory of action. Hence Parsons does not regard Weber as unambiguously voluntaristic in his analysis of social, meaningful action. There is a deterministic feature of Weber's sociology in that, while Weber's position is 'fundamentally a voluntarist theory of action,' he did not wish to deny the significance of non-subjective factors (heredity and environmental) as conditions of ultimate values and actions. This recognition of the non-subjective constraints on action is particularly evident in Weber's characterisation of capitalism. Parsons argues that in the 'descriptive aspect of this treatment of capitalism' Weber was 'in close agreement with Marx'. Parsons's statement of the nature of that agreement is particularly interesting. By emphasising the compulsive aspects of the capitalist system, Weber produced

a thesis concerning the determination of individual action within the system, namely that the course of action is determined in the first instance by the character of the situation in which the individual is placed, in Marxian terminology, by the 'conditions of production.'

The precise location of this thesis of the compulsion of individual action by the capitalist system is ironically in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which was first welcomed (by Hans Delbruck, for example) as an anti-Marxist tract. It is worth quoting in full the deterministic element of Weber's position to which Parsons specifically draws our attention:

The capitalist economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him, at least as an individual, as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action. The manufacturer who in the long run acts counter to these norms, will just as inevitably be eliminated from the economic scene as the worker who cannot or will not adapt himself to them will be thrown into the street without a job.

Both phenomenological commentaries, following Alfred Schutz, and Marxist viewpoints, following Louis Althusser, have persistently understated Weber's deterministic view of capitalist relations and overstated the apparent subjectivism of Weber's methodological essays.… In their interpretation of Marx, Hindess and Hirst argue that we must not be seduced by the overt, obvious meaning of Marx's texts. In order to read Marx, we must attempt a symptomatic reading (lecture symptomale) which uncovers the deeper problematic which informs the overt meaning. Furthermore, we should not treat the whole corpus of Marx's writing as of equal value since the later scientific texts (such as Capital) are separated from the early work by an epistemological break which occurred around 1857. The ideological object of analysis of the early Marx, namely human subjectivity, was replaced by the scientific object of the structure of modes of production. The inconsistency of Hindess and Hirst centres on the fact that when they come to perform a 'reading' of Weber they completely abandon these epistemological principles in favour of taking the overt meaning of Weber's methodological texts for granted. They do not identify different stages and problematics in Weber's sociology. They perform not a symptomatic, but a literal, reading in assuming that Weber's substantive studies, for example, actually embody his stated methodological principles. In fact, Weber's analyses of 'social formations' adhere far more closely to a Marxist structuralism than they do to verstehen principles. As Rex points out, there are at least four separate phases in Weber's development associated with the successive influence of Rickert, Dilthey, positivism and Simmel.

In stressing the subjectivism of Weber, Hirst, in particular, ignores the centrality of the theme of compulsion, fate and irony in human actions. It is odd that a sociologist who is allegedly committed to the centrality of human free will should persistently employ mechanist imagery in describing the interconnection between action, interest and ideas. For Weber, it is not ideas but 'material and ideal interests, directly govern men's conduct. Yet very frequently the "world images" that have been created by "ideas" have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.' These mechanical metaphors follow directly from Weber's abiding interest in historical irony. It is too frequently forgotten that, while Weber is concerned with subjective meaning, he also realised that the effects of human actions are typically the obverse of human intentionality. This aspect of Weber's sociology has been somewhat inadequately conceptualised in functionalist terms as the 'unintended consequences of actions'. Weber 'retains a social determinism by emphasising charisma's routinisation' and thus it is through the notion of unintended consequences that Weber is able to show how charismatic loyalties are inevitably transformed into everyday routines under the sway of material interests.

However, the bland Mertonian conception of 'unanticipated consequences' and 'latent functions' does not capture the evil ambience of Weber's theory of routinisation. It is not simply that purposive actions have consequences which are not recognised by social actors; the outcome of human actions often work against social actors in such a way as to limit or reduce the scope of their freedom. Weber's sense of fate and evil in human history, his contrast between virtu and fortuna, results in a reversal of Bernard de Mandeville's optimistic moral philosophy: our private virtues are our public evils so that our personal striving for salvation works itself out in history as the iron cage of capitalist production. Whereas Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' and Wilhelm Wundt's 'heterogony of purposes' had attempted to identify benevolent trends in society, Weber's sense of the fatefulness of our times draws him to detect the underlying malevolence of social reality. The present is disenchanted and the future is a polar night. This aspect of Weber's historical pessimism has been referred to as a 'negative heterogony of purposes.' Weber's negativity leads him to assume that meaningful actions become meaningless and that morally impeccable actions become morally flawed. This aspect of Weber's sociology finds its ultimate moral substratum in 'the Calvinistic belief in the fall and total perversion of the human race, a fall and perversion so catastrophic that even men's goodness must in the end generate evil.'

While Weber appears overtly to adhere to a neo-Kantian view of human freedom within the noumenal reality of moral choices, Weber also adheres to what might be termed a Calvinistic problematic of evil logic. In reading Weber I am not struck pace Hindess and Hirst by the subjective freedom of the Weberian actor, but by the innumerable instances in which Weber's account of a particular historical process or an abstract model of social structure depends on the notion of an ineluctable logic of structure. The most frequently cited illustration of a Weberian logic in history is the process of rationalistation. In his classic study of rationalisation as the 'guiding principle' of Weber's whole sociology, Karl Loewith (1970) shows how rationality as a mode of life is a fateful inevitability, expressing itself not only at the level of political bureaucracy and industrial organisation but in sociology per se. Sociology is an effect of the process which it sets out to study. A further irony is that rationalistion of means results in the unintelligibility of ends which are no longer given by revelation or prophetic inspiration. For scientist and politician alike, the only honest response to this fate is one of moral resignation. For Loewith, therefore, the ultimate division between Marx and Weber is that Marx's view of human alienation is coupled with a sense of hope, while Weber's notion of rationalisation necessitates an 'unheroic' view of political possibilities.

At one level, therefore, the diversity of interpretations of Weber's sociology appears to result from the fact that Weber's sociology operates as a series of analytical tensions between choice and determinism, subjectivity and objectivity, contingency and logic. For Lukács and Marcuse, these tensions are themselves specific historical manifestations of the 'antinomies of bourgeois thought' which are transcended by Marxist praxis. In my view, these polarities are in fact merely different levels of analysis which have to be treated at different planes of sociological theory. To get at this point, we can do no better than quote Weber's statement of what sociology is about, namely:

The type of social science in which we are interested is an empirical science of concrete reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft). Our aim is the understanding of the characteristic uniqueness of the reality in which we move. We wish to understand on the one hand the relationships and cultural significance of individual events in their contemporary manifestations and on the other the causes of their being historically so and not otherwise.

Weber is concerned to demonstrate the logic of social action and social structure by showing, for example, how the logic of capital accumulation works itself out in history regardless of the subjective preferences of individual capitalists and workers or how the logic of prebendalism results in the arbitrary politics of what he calls 'sultanism' regardless of the 'good intentions' of vizierial reform. As we have seen, this logic of history is fateful, even demonic. However, the particular way in which sociological logic works itself out in history is subject to or influenced by the multiplicity of specific, contingent facts and relationships which happen to obtain in given societies and situations. We can express this relationship between sociological logic and historical contingency in two ways. First, for Weber, there often emerges an 'elective affinity' between ideas and material interests which plays a crucial role in influencing the particular direction of historical trends. In the sociology of religion, Weber demonstrates an 'elective affinity' between the Protestant calling and capitalist rationality, or between Muhammad's moral teaching and nomadism, or between the 'practical rationalism' of 'civic strata' and this-worldly asceticism. These contingent features of the life-style of certain social strata facilitated the logic of routinisation in a particular direction. The concept of 'elective affinity' (Wahlverwandtschaft) points to the great variety of ironic ways 'in which certain ideas and certain social processes "seek each other out" in history' (Berger).

A second and more precise formulation of this relationship between logic and contingency draws on a distinction between sociological generalisation and historical explanation. Guenther Roth argues that Weber's historical analysis involves three separate stages. In the configurational stage, Weber constructs a series of typologies or models with a particular historical content as distinct from the universal categories of sociology (such as the categories of social action). At the second level, we find Weber's developmental theories or 'secular' theories of long-term change and development, but these 'secular' theories are neither evolutionary nor predictive. These developmental theories attempt 'the description of the course and explanation of the genesis and consequences of particular historical phenomena' (Roth). At the third stage, Weber turns to situational analysis which tries to explain the particular timing of a historical event as the effect of 'secular' causation and situational contingency. This final level of analysis looks at the way in which certain historical constellations have 'come about not only by virtue of freely willed actions, organisational imperatives, the logic of the system and a plethora of social trends but also because of historical accidents' (Roth).

These two perspectives on the relationship between 'accident' (contingency) and 'logic' (the configurational and developmental) can be brought together by arguing that the particular ways in which the logic of the system and its secular trends work their way out historically is in terms of the elective affinities between developmental processes and contingent events or conditions. It is in these terms that Weber is able to assert both the peculiarities of given conditions for different societies and the presence of certain general societal 'secular' developments. For Weber, therefore, there are no general theories of the transformation of feudalism into capitalism and no general theory of the collapse of capitalism as a historical stage towards socialism, because the situational circumstances of given societies typically preclude any such application of law-like statements. However, certain contingent features of European society—their religious beliefs, legal norms, city organisation, technological development, political apparatus—contributed directly to the developmental rationality of capital accumulation. To express this relationship in another way, there is no necessary relationship between abstractly formulated economic structures and legal/political superstructures, because whether or not a contingently present set of religious (or other) beliefs has an affinity with economic production cannot be stated in advance. The social and economic pre-conditions for capitalist development in feudal England provide an interesting illustration of this issue for both Weber's and Marx's view of capitalist development. According to the general conditions favouring capitalist development in Weber's General Economic History, England is a deviant case. Weber acknowledges that England did not possess a gapless, systematic legal superstructure, that English cities did not, as on the continent, develop 'autonomous political ambitions' and that in England the Calvinistic calling was watered down by various strands of emotionalism, Arminianism and quietism in the Methodist, Baptists, and Quaker sects. The precise manner in which capitalist relations of production developed in England and the development of rationalisation in economic and political structures can only be determined by situational analysis into the conditions which favoured capitalist development despite, rather than because of, the nature of pre-capitalist social features in English society.

Having now provided a sketch of how I propose to interpret Weber's sociology in terms of the analysis of negative heterogony of purposes and in terms of a distinction between sociological logic and historical contingency, it is possible to return to the question of Weber's relationship to Marx. Just as Weber cannot be treated as merely a neo-Kantian sociologist of purposeful action, so, in the decades following the Second International, most writers on Marx have insisted that Marx's historical materialism cannot be reduced to technological determinism, that Marx did not treat the superstructure as simply a reflection of the economic base and that, in various ways, Marx placed human subjectivity and human agency at the centre of his view of history and social organisation. In denying Marx's economism, neo-Marxists came to concentrate on questions of epistemology (especially epistemo-logical issues which derived from the neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophies of Simmel, Dilthey, Husserl and Croce). The classical focus on substantive questions of economics was partly replaced by a new interest in the superstructure (especially aesthetics and art rather than law and politics). Finally, Marx's optimism in revolutionary struggle gave way to a more 'realistic' but pessimistic assessment of working-class radicalism in late capitalism. These 'thematic innovations' (Anderson) in modern Marxism have had the peculiar consequence of making modern Marxist theory more, rather than less, like Weberian sociology. One of the objectives of this book is to show that attempts to destroy economistic versions of Marxism have often merely repeated Weber's own criticisms of the economism of Social Democratic Party theoreticians. However, it would be wrong to treat modern Marxism as a uniform movement. For example, not all modem interpretations of Marx agree in respect of the apparent subjective humanism of the Paris Manuscripts. If one puts great em phasis on the writings of the early Marx, then Marxism may indeed look rather like a subjectivist sociology in which it would be difficult to distinguish between a neo-Kantian humanism and a neo-Feuerbachian anthropology.

It is precisely in structural Marxism that awareness of this problem has been acute. As we have seen, Marxists who have been influenced by Althusser's formulation of historical materialism (Poulantzas, Hindess and Hirst) have attempted to reject any theory which reduces Marxism to economism or technological determinism or to some form of teleological evolutionism, but their rejection of these interpretations also involved a rejection of the early Marx and Marxist humanism. This position enables structural Marxists to contrast Weber's subjectivism ('the problematic of the subject') with Marx's science of the objective structures of modes of production, while also denying the determinism of technological versions of Marxist materialism. However, this theoretical position, which involves a distinction between the contingency of class struggles at the level of the social formation and the logic of relations of production at the level of modes of production, results in a close analytical parallel between Weber's developmental and situational analysis.

The central problem for Hindess and Hirst is to produce an account of how modes of production change without recourse to an essentialist teleology or to evolutionary determinism. According to this perspective, there is nothing within, for example, the feudal mode of production which results inevitably in its transformation (the non-reproduction of its conditions of existence) or which inevitably propels it towards the capitalist mode of production. The reproduction of the conditions of existence of the mode of production must be sought at the level of the social formation where they are determined by the conjunctural struggle between social classes. Accordingly,

transition (and non-transition) can only be understood in terms of certain determinate conditions of the class struggle and as a possible outcome of that struggle. 'Transitional conjuncture' refers to a condition of the social formation such that the transformation of the dominant mode of production is a possible outcome of the class struggle.

In any social formation in which the feudal mode of production is dominant, the non-reproduction of the conditions of existence of that mode is the contingent outcome of the class struggle between landlords and peasants over the variant conditions of rent (in kind, money or labour) and over the landlords' control of the labour process. There is no law which states as an iron necessity that the class struggle in feudalism will have a specific and decisive outcome in terms of the transition of the feudal mode. It follows from this argument that there can be 'no general theory of the transition in the sense of a specification of the general structure or process that must be followed in all particular cases of transition from one mode of production to another' (Hindess and Hirst). In other words, the developmental logic of modes of production (such as the law of the tendency of profit to fall in capitalism) is worked out at the social level in the contingent struggle between social classes which are determined at the level of production.

The criticisms which Hindess and Hirst subsequently developed against this formulation in Mode of Production and Social Formation reinforced rather than diminished the Weberian connotations of their view of social transformation. Their 'auto-critique' came to reject much of the Althusserian epistemological underpinning of Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production such as the distinction between abstract modes of production and concrete social formations. Hindess and Hirst now want to concentrate on a more complex range of class relations within given social formations. However, the way in which they now attempt to describe political and economic practices has a peculiarly Weberian dimension. For example, the possession of the means of production is now described as a 'capacity,' while political practice involves 'the calculation of effect.' Because politics involve a constant process of calculation and judgment of effects under political conditions which are constantly changing as a result of political practice, there can be no general knowledge of the political. The political activist has to make calculations in a conjuncture of uncertainty and in this respect the knowledge of the political scientist must be largely irrelevant. If this interpretation of the statement 'there can be no "knowledge" in political practice' (Hindess and Hirst, 1977) is correct, than it follows that there can be no general theory of political practice (which is a matter of calculations in a context of uncertainty) in the same way that there can be no general theory of the transition of a social formation (which is the outcome of contingent class struggle). As Weber believed, politics is about the exercise of power in which the outcome is probable not determinate. Despite constant references to 'determinate' relations of production and 'determinate' social class relationships, the effect of their epistemological critique has been to increase the importance of the notion of contingency in political and economic relationships.

Theoretical attempts to refine or to reject the alleged economism and technological reductionism of Marxism in both humanistic and structuralist neo-Marxism have had the peculiar consequence of making modern Marxism more, rather than less, like Weberian sociology. This unwilling merger can be seen in epistemological and theoretical terms, but it also takes place in substantive issues. when neo-Marxists have come to deal with issues where Marx's theory of society was apparently underdeveloped they have often been forced to confront Weber's sociology. This confrontation has been particularly significant in the analysis of the state, legal relationships, religion, agrarian sociology, race relations and bureaucracy. If modern Marxism and Weberian sociology appear to be forced into an unconscious or unwilling partnership, does this mean that much of Weberian sociology (such as Weber's sociology of religion) 'fits without difficulty into the Marxian scheme' ? The answer to this sort of question depends on whether one believes that neo- Marxism is a radical departure from the historical mate rialism of Marx and Engels and on whether one argues that Weber was mounting a critique of Marxism rather than of Marx. Both of these questions play a large part in this study especially in the opening chapters. At this point, I shall simply turn to the question of Weber's relationship to Marx which will be greatly elaborated in subsequent sections.

We cannot approach the relationship between Marx and Weber in a unidimensional fashion. My commentary so far has been concerned with the analytical relationship between Marx's determinism and Weber's 'negative heterogony of purposes'. Whereas Weber's sense of the limitations of human freedom is closely bound up with his view of historical fate, Marx more characteristically connected human alienation with specific property relations. It would, however, be possible to develop the argument that Marx also possessed a pessimistic view of human purpose. There is, for example, Marx's famous observation in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte' that

Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted. The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.

Certain writers on Marx, like Shlomo Avineri for example, have argued that the ironic passages in Marx's view of history are inherited directly from Hegel's conception of the Cunning of Reason (List der Vernunft). There would be an obvious connection in this circumstance between Hegel's notion of historical fate and that of Weber's. Following the publication of James Steuart's Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Economy, Hegel came to believe that the task of philosophy was not to recapture the values of Greek civilisation in order to halt the regression of history, but to reconcile men to their contemporary fate by grasping the imminent principles of reason in the present. As Hegel poetically expressed this insight, 'To recognise reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to enjoy the present is the rational insight which reconciles us to the actual.' Hegel's view of reconciliation with fate is, like Marx's, a far more active, hopeful doctrine than Weber's Calvinistic pessimism. These theoretical and philosophical link-ages between Marx, Hegel and Weber cannot, however, be properly appreciated without a historical grasp of the relationship between Weber, Marx and Marxism.

Karl Marx died in London in 1883 when Weber was in the process of leaving his law studies at the University of Heidelberg to take up his military service at Strasbourg at the age of nineteen. In Weber's early manhood, specific works by Marx and Engels were not widely read or commented upon, but deterministic and economic interpretations of history were often fashionable among the German intelligentsia and educated bourgeoisie. By the 1880s The Communist Manifesto, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Capital (volumes I and II), The Poverty of Philosophy, Anti-Dühring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State were all available in Germany. In addition, Weber would have been familiar with Marxist literature through writers like August Bebel, cofounder of the Social Democratic Party and author of Die Frau and der Sozialismus (1883). Other avenues for the influence of Marx and Engels on Weber included Werner Sombart (Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung, 1896 and Der modern Kapitalismus, 1902), Karl Kautsky (Der Ursprung des Christentums, 1908) and Levin Goldschmidt, professor of law at Heidelberg and Berlin. The influence of Marx and Marxism on Weber was not significant and continuous. As a general perspective on this relationship, Marianne Weber possibly overstated the case:

Weber expressed great admiration for Karl Marx's brilliant constructions and saw in the inquiry into the economic and technical causes of events an exceedingly fruitful, indeed, a specifically new heuristic principle that directed the quest for knowledge (Erkenntnistrieb) into entire areas previously unilluminated. But he not only rejected the elevation of these ideas to a Weltanschauung, but was also against material factors being made absolute and being turned into the common denominator of causal explanations.

This commentary from Marianne Weber's biography did, however, reiterate Weber's own judgment of 'the great thinker' and of the problems of converting Marx's heuristic devices into an 'assessment of reality' in Weber's ' "Objectivity" in Social Science and Social Policy' from the Archiv far Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik in 1904.

The problem with this assessment is that Weber did not possess many of Marx's major works, which were not published until after Weber's death in 1920. The crucial feature of these lucanae in Weber's appreciation of the full extent of Marx's unpublished work is that it has been precisely the unpublished material which came to play such a dominant part in the reevaluation and reinterpretation of Marx's thought. These critical works included the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), Theses on Feuerbach (1845), The German Ideology (1846), Grundrisse (1857-8) and Remarks on Wagner (1880). These texts provided the basis for arguments by Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse, Alfred Sohn-Rethel and István Mészaros pointing to the fact that iron laws of economic causation as the basis of a cultural superstructure were completely alien to Marx's dialectical thought. These new interpretations of the early Manuscripts and Grundrisse suggest that the theme of alienation is central to Marx, that Marx's break with Hegel was never absolute, that Marx was committed to a view of human praxis rather than inevitable material causes and consequently that the very idea of material laws is itself the manifestation of a reification in political economy. Weber's criticisms of Marxist materialism, therefore, cannot be criticisms of Marx's authentic theory.

The view that Weber had only a very partial understanding of Marx's complex view of economic relationships has been judicially stated by Mommsen. In general, Weber never approached Marx's materialist sociology 'in a systematic, let alone in a comprehensive way' and, to the extent that Weber did directly and specifically confront Marx's theory at first hand, this theoretical appraisal occurred late in Weber's intellectual career in Economy and Society. Weber's public lecture on 'Socialism' (in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik) in 1918 to Austrian officers does provide direct evidence of Weber's attitude to Marx, but it cannot be accepted as a reliable guide, given its politically motivated content and the peculiarity of the circumstances. Weber's sources on Marx's original theoretical development were slight, unrepresentative and largely second-hand. This fact is sufficient warning against the view, originally expressed by Albert Salomon, that Weber's sociology can only be understood as a life-long debate with Karl Marx. What we must consider instead is Weber's political and theoretical opposition to institutionalised Marxism in the form of the Social Demo cratic Party in Germany.

With the demise of Bismarck's anti-Socialist legislation, the SDP became from 1890 onwards the largest and electorally the most successful socialist party in Europe operating within a parliamentary framework. The Erfurt Conference of 1891 committed the party to a revolutionary Marxist programme. This Marxist platform was strengthened by Karl Kautsky's editorship of the party's organ, the Neue Zeit. The electoral success of the party and the growing prosperity of the still backward German working class resulted in a gap between the revolutionary theory of the SDP leadership and the reformist, parliamentary socialism of its political practice. The goal of a proletarian dictatorship was submerged in the day-to-day championship of working-class demands within parliamentary democracy. There emerged, therefore, an obvious contrast between Kautsky's positivistic view of the inevitability of Marx's economic laws pointing to the inexorable victory of a revolutionary working class and the essentially limited objectives of practical politics (Plamenatz, 1954). By focusing on Marx's materialism as a scientific theory of economic laws providing a description of the 'facts' of the capitalist crisis, Kautsky was forced reluctantly into a position where Marx's moral critique of capitalism was divorced from science to become a largely residual feature of Marx's work., For Kautsky 'there appears occasionally in Marx's scientific work the impact of a moral ideal. But he always and rightly attempted to eliminate it so far as possible' (Ethik und materialistische Geschichtsauffassung). By accepting an implicit distinction between facts and values, Kautsky was forced into a general Weberian problem of the is-ought dichotomy in that one set of moral judgments can have no authority over any other set of moral opinions. Commitment to the Marxist critique of capitalism would thus become simply a matter of idiosyncratic preference.

For German and Austrian Marxists who were also steeped in Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) and verstehende Geisteswissenschaft (social science based on understanding and re-experiencing), Kautsky's positivism and its adjunct in fatalism were totally inadequate philosophical foundations on which to validate Marx's historical materialism. In Germany and Austria, the revisionist critique of Kautsky's orthodox Marxism came to borrow extensively from neo-Kantian philosophy in its attempt to rescue institutionalised Marxism from a positivist epistemology. Eduard Bernstein, who engaged in the theoretical debate of the relationship between Marxism and Darwinistic science, contrasted Kautsky's faith in a cataclysmic class war with what he took to be the facts of Germany in the 1890s, namely the increasing evidence of social order, economic prosperity and political security. Bernstein, however, also had to live through the bitter experience of fighting the reformist faction of the SDP which came to accept the entire programme of German imperialist expansion in 1914-18. Amongst the AustroMarxists it was Max Adler who emphasised the continuity between the Kantian philosophy of active human consciousness and Marx's philosophy of social consciousness. For Adler, the inner connection between Marxism, sociology and social revolution is also

a connection with classical German philosophy which, likewise, as a philosophy of social consciousness, can only be revolutionary. German classical philosophy always aspired to be a philosophy of action. But it could only achieve this idea; Marxism gave it the scientific knowledge that allowed it to realise this action historically. (Der soziologische Sinn der Lehre von Karl Marx, 1914)

In the perspective of Adler and Karl Renner, Marx's historical materialism was equated tout court with general sociology as an objective science of society equipped with a neo-Kantian epistemology, namely a science which occupied the space between natural science and idealist historiography.

Against this background of revisionist criticism of Kautsky's fatalistic positivism, Weber's criticisms of the Marxism of the SDP are not isolated and original objections, but part of the neo-Kantian opposition to an institutionalised Marxism which assumed that Marx's critique of capitalism could be assimilated without loss into a natural science model of social laws. Like the revisionists within Marxism, Weber objected to the conversion of Marx's concept of the laws of modes of production as a heuristic device into proven laws of empirical reality. Weber did not follow the neo-Kantian revisionist argument that Marxism represented the historical solution to the riddle of philosophy and action, values and reality. However, Weber's judgment of the hiatus between revolutionary philosophy and political reformism in the SDP was not wholly divorced from the revisionist position. Of course, Weber drew very different conclusions from this hiatus. For Weber, the German working class was politically immature and incapable of providing the German state with effective leadership. Weber was opposed to both the 'socially-minded' Christian of the Evangelical-Social Congress and to the secular socialists who believed that the material prosperity and political emancipation of the working class could be realised without a strong state. In the years before the First World War, Weber was convinced that the economic surplus created by capitalist development could not be secured without imperialist rivalry.

We can now state Weber's theoretical objections to the Marxism of the SDP in greater detail. While Weber accepted the heuristic value of historical materialism, he developed five general criticisms of Marxism. These were: (1) a rejection of all monocausal explanations of history and society in terms of ultimate causes as unscientific, (2) an assertion that the same economic base may have different legal and political superstructures, (3) a denial that socialism was a genuine alternative to the rationality of the market mechanism in capitalism and therefore that historical materialism and socialism were necessarily connected, (4) a critique of the theory of marriage and property as developed by Engels and Bebel, (5) a critical recognition of the logical incompatibility between Marxism as a deterministic science and Marxism as an ethical theory of human agency. The irony of neo-Marxist recoveries and revisions of the pristine theories of Marx and Engels is that they have often unwittingly reproduced Weber's neo-Kantian critique of the Marxism of the SDP.

One of the central problems of Marxism is to reconcile the centrality of human action and consciousness in Marx's Paris Manuscripts and Theses on Feuerbach with the apparent economic determinism of Capital. There are numerous subsidiary themes which flow from this paradox: humanistic versus scientific Marxism, Lebensphilosophie versus natural science, neo-Kantian epistemology versus positivism. This paradox is also behind many of the specific debates in modern Marxism concerning the relative autonomy of law and state from the economic base and concerning the status of 'social class' in relation to 'mode of production'. In broad terms, there are two major solutions to this paradox in Marxism. On the one hand, the Austro-Marxists, Lukács and the Frankfurt School stress the continuity between classical German philosophy (Hegel and Kant) and Marx in order to argue that Marxism is a critical theory which transcends the epistemological dilemmas of bourgeois thought (especially positivistic sociology). On the other hand, Althusserian structuralism emphasises the break between Marx and classical German philosophy in order to show that Marxism (or more precisely, historical materialism) is a science of modes of production, but a science which cannot be reduced to a set of simple deterministic laws about the economy. This second option, as I have attempted to demonstrate, ends by showing that the effect of the mode of production is contingent on the complex effect of social class conflict on the conditions of existence of the mode of production. While it is more conventional to bring out the analytical relationship between Weber and the first Marxist solution (for example, between Weber and Lukács), there is in fact also a strong connection between Weber and structural Marxism on the grounds that Weber contrasted the logic of ideal type constructions and the fateful contingency of historical situations. On both counts, Max Weber has been an unwanted and largely incognito guest in modem Marxist debates about the real nature of Marx's historical materialism.

While I have been making some introductory observations on the analytical parallels between Weberian sociology and Marxism, I do not want to understate the enormous gulf which separates Weber from Marx and Marxism in political, ideological and ethical grounds. However, even if these assertions about the theoretical overlap between Weberian sociology and Marxism should prove to be unwarranted exaggerations, we would still be left with the paradox of substantive overlap between the empirical interests of Weberians and Marxists. In spite of all the methodological and theoretical differences, 'there exists far-reaching accord in the substantive analysis of the themes identical in both [Marx and Weber]: the structure of what has been called the modem world; its development; and its consequences' (Mayer). This 'far-reaching accord' in substantive characterisation of 'the modem world' is true both in general and in particular. There is an overlap between their view of capitalism as a dynamic and self-destructive system in comparison with the relative stability of feudalism and the stationariness of Oriental societies which is evident in Marx's Asiatic mode of production and Weber's prebendalism (Tumer). Both Marx and Weber agreed that imperialism was not an accidental but necessary feature of capitalist growth. Their characterisations of the conditions by which classical slavery collapsed have many common features. In more recent debates, Weber's study of the agrarian problem in Germany which was published in the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1892 ('Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland') instigated the general debate in the SDP over the agrarian question and stimulated Kautsky's reply in his Agrarian Question (Die Agrarfrage, 1899).

In a similar fashion, developments within the Marxist theory of law have often directly or indirectly returned to analytical problems and substantive issues which lay at the centre of Weber's treatment of law-making and the nature of law in capitalist society. Just as Weber thought that religion in providing rational theodicies of the world had its own inner logic, so Weber attempted to show that the Western system of law, developing from a common Roman base, possessed its own internal logic which drove the law towards an increasingly gapless system of abstract rules. This autonomous process of legal rationalisation had, as a contingent fact, an 'affinity' with the requirements of the capitalist mode of production for Normal system of dependable law. By raising questions about the form and function of law, developments in Marxism with respect to the relative autonomy of the law from relations of production have often produced theoretical solutions which reflect aspects of Weber's treatment. While E. B. Pashukanis (1978) attempted to demonstrate that the form of law was intimately related to the commodity form in capitalism and therefore the form of law under socialism would be revolutionised, Karl Renner (1949) in 1929 attempted to show that the form of law was always neutral. For Renner, the social functions of law were dictated by historically given specific social class interests, but the form of law, such as the abstract form of a legal contract, could never be reduced to economic interests arising from the economic base. This issue of the relative autonomy of the law continues to play a prominent role in Marxist legal theory.

One reason for the continuing relevance of Weber's sociology for Marxism is that contemporary Marxism has been faced with the issue of whether 'late' capitalism has institutional and productive features which distinguish it sharply from the competitive capitalism of the nineteenth century. The increasing role of the state in production, the internationalisation of ownership and production, the decline of private capital and the emergence of a new middle class were aspects of capitalism to which Austro-Marxism specifically drew attention. In contemporary Marxism the analysis of monopoly capitalism has been the theoretical driving force behind the writing of Nicos Poulantzas, Elmar Altvater, Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, Ralph Miliband and Ernest Mandel. By focusing on the Bismarckian state in the rise of German capitalism, the role of imperialism in advanced capitalism, the weakness of the German middle class and the rise of a new salariat, Weber's sociology predates many of these contemporary Marxist themes. Of course, the conventional criticism of Weber, in respect to Weber's analysis of social class for example, is that he concentrated on the market and the phenomenal forms of circulation rather than the relations of production which determine these surface institutions of the capitalist mode of production. In this respect, it could be argued that the capitalist mode of production has Marxist causes (the relations of production) and Weberian effects (Protestant religion, status groups, the market mechanism, plebiscitarian democracy). Even on these grounds, one could still claim that Weber provides a masterly, detailed description of the concrete reality of capitalist institutions. However, in my view the value of Weber's sociology goes far beyond this descriptive level on the grounds that Weber's concept of the logic of rationalisation operating independently of the will of agents is directly compatible with Marx's concept of the logic of modes of production.

It has become fashionable to combine the perspectives of Marx and Weber into a theory which attempts to show how social reality is continuously constructed by the social actions of individuals; social reality becomes alienated and reified by the forgetfulness of conscious agents.… [What] sociologists and Marxists have in common is a deterministic perspective of social reality whose structure and process has a logic independent of the will and consciousness of individual agents.… The operation of this logic is, however, partly shaped and directed by the accidental or contingent features of sets of institutions which happen to be present in given societies. It is not a logical requirement of the capitalist mode of production that capitalists should possess Protestant beliefs. The fact that capitalists did espouse Protestantism rather than Catholicism gave a particular twist to the logic of capital accumulation. In this respect the logic of capital had an affinity with the internal rationalisation of Christian theodicy in its Protestant form. Weber's notion of fate, therefore, places Weberian sociology at the very centre of the sociological enterprise. Sociology's preoccupation with fatefulness can be summarised in the cynical aphorism that, if economics is about scarcity and choice, sociology is about why those choices cannot be realised.