SOURCE: "Marx, Weber, and Contemporary Sociology," in Max Weber's Political Sociology: A Pessimistic Vision of a Rationalized World, edited by Ronald M. Glassman and Vatro Murvar, Greenwood Press, 1984, pp. 69-81.

[In the following essay, Wrong explains the influence of Marxist theory on Weber's thought.]

The failure of our multiple particular researches conducted with increasingly precise and complex methods to cumulate into a coherent overall vision of the world largely accounts for the immense flowering of interest in recent years in the so-called classical sociologists. This new interest has been especially pronounced in the cases of Marx and Weber, both of whose work was preeminently historical in focus, guided by what the Marxist philosopher Karl Korsch called the "principle of historical specificity."

A major theme of recent discussions of Weber has been his relation to Marx and Marxism, discussions that have revised the simplistic view of Weber as an "idealist" critic of Marxist "materialism" based on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the first of Weber's major writings to be translated into English and to become widely known. The Parsonian interpretation of Weber exaggerated the differences from Marx in many areas and sometimes tended to present Weber as a kind of anti-Marx. One of the first overviews of Weber's sociology in English antedating Parsons's 1937 discussion in The Structure of Social Action was that of Albert Soloman, whose writings on Weber are largely remembered for his description of Weber as the "bourgeois Marx" and his later claim that Weber's sociology was "a long and intense dialogue with the ghost of Karl Marx." The label retains a certain appositeness, but the characterization of Weber's sociology is not really tenable. Weber's stature in the Anglo-American world has become so great that Marxists and neo-Marxists today are prone to try to assimilate him to Marx, seeing him as expanding upon a number of themes first adumbrated by Marx which have become more salient in this century, such as the greater bureaucratization of capitalism and the state and their increasing interpenetration. This perspective was ably presented by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills in their introduction to the first book-length selection in English of Weber's sociological writings, which appeared in 1946. In more recent versions, one some-times detects an inclination to dispose of Weber by annexing him to an essentially Marxist outlook, but that Weber and Marx are less at odds than was formerly believed, at least at the level of their substantive interpretations, seems to me to be undeniable.

Some Marxists of a doctrinaire cast of mind, unable simply to dismiss Weber as a bourgeois ideologue—though efforts to do so continue—have tried to cope with him by claiming that his most valuable ideas are directly borrowed from Marxism. On the other hand, disillusioned Marxists or neo-Marxists, whose hopes have been irretrievably shaken by two world wars, the creation in Russia and elsewhere of new political and social tyrannies in the name of Marxism, and the stolidly non-revolutionary temper of the working class in capitalist countries, have often tended to cannibalize Weber, drawing heavily on his vision while refonmulating it in more congenial neo-Marxist or Hegelian terms. I have in mind particularly the original Frankfurt School theorists. As Raymond Aron, the man who introduced Weber into France, wrote of Herbert Marcuse's famous attack on Weber at the 1964 Heidelberg conference honoring the centennial of Weber's birth:

Have events proved Max Weber wrong …? It is quite obvious that they have borne him out, as even Herbert Marcuse admits.… Herbert Marcuse cannot forgive Max Weber for having denounced in advance as a utopia something that up to now has indeed turned out to be utopian: the idea of a liberation of man by the modification of the system of ownership and a planned economy.

That is what sticks in the craw of Marxists to this day even more than Weber's ironic definition of himself as a "class-conscious bourgeois." For he engaged Marxists on their very own terrain with superior intellectual resources, often reached similar conclusions about past and contemporary history, and yet unreservedly rejected their historical optimism. Marxism, even in the complex and subtle variants that are influential in Western universities today, remains a political faith affirming the unity of theory and practice, however unconsummated that unity is presently conceded to be by "Western" Marxists shorn of any illusions about the oppressive practice of all existing Communist states. Although Weber died just a few years after the Bolshevik seizure of power, he foresaw almost immediately that it would prove to be a historical disaster for the Russian people, producing "mounds of corpses."

Weber was equally blunt in rejecting the revolutionary means as well as the utopian ends cherished by Marxism: "He 'who wishes to live as modern man,' even if this be 'only in the sense that he has his daily paper, railways, electricity, etc.,' must resign himself to the loss of ideals of radical revolutionary change: indeed he must abandon 'the conceivability of such a goal."' Recent events in France in 1968, in Chile and Portugal in the 1970s, and the appearance of what has come to be called "Eurocommunism" have in different ways powerfully confirmed this conclusion. Today's "Marxists of the chair," a species at long and welcome last becoming established in the American university, often expound a Marxism that owes more to non-Marxist thought than to the original doctrine. In particular, the eschatological hopes invested in the proletariat have been considerably diluted or abandoned to the point where some latter-day self-described Marxist theoreticians remind one of the death-of-God theologians who made a brief stir in the 1960s. They have tacitly accepted the diagnosis of modTi industrial civilization that Weber advanced with break but unsurpassed clarity over sixty years ago. Yet Marx remains for them an iconic figure while Weber continues to arouse their ambivalence.

Western Marxists who long ago rejected the world of the Gulag Archipelago often remain reluctant even to acknowledge that world as a form of Marxist "praxis," if not the only imaginable one. Self-declared Marxists, after all, rule states containing over a third of the world's population, whereas Weberians control no more than a few professorships. An American Marxist professor once complained to me rather bitterly of an eminent colleague: "He thinks it fine to love Tocqueville, but you're not supposed to love Marx." Such an attitude was certainly not uncommon in American sociology until fairly recently, but I could hardly refrain from remarking—though I did refrain—that in the world at large people have been killed for not loving Marx, or for not loving him in the prescribed way. To be sure, people have also been killed for loving him, though not quite as many; the numbers in both cases, however, run to the millions. But no one has ever been killed for not loving Tocqueville or Max Weber.

Twenty years ago I described Max Weber as "the one great man we sociologists can plausibly claim as our own," a judgment with which I concur if anything more than ever today. But the word plausibly was deliberately inserted in the statement with Marx in mind, for it is possible to deny that Marx was essentially or fundamentally a sociologist but not that he was a great man who, whatever the fate of the movements launched in his name, achieved an encompassing grasp of wide swaths of human history without sacrificing, like so many of his contemporaries and his own epigoni, concrete detail to the conceptual demands of an abstract scheme. In reaction against such schemes, Weber was deeply suspicious of wide-ranging developmental theories, but the scope and depth of his own historical work achieves as much as Marx's does the level of universal history. Marx and Weber are therefore likely to continue to be linked together less as antipodal figures than as sources of inspiration for the large-scale comparative historical sociology toward which the more ambitious social scientists in a number of countries are increasingly moving now that the view that the natural sciences present an appropriate model for the social sciences to emulate has been epistemologically dethroned.

The present revival of broad comparative history which recognizes both Marx and Weber as ancestors is an inter-disciplinary project involving both sociologists and historians who have overcome the traditional barriers that have long divided them. In its fidelity to the actual historical record, the new comparative history even at its most ambitious bears little resemblance to the all-embracing systems of such nineteenth-century sociologists as Comte and Spencer, who tried to impose abstract nomological straitjackets on the disorderly and varie-gated materials of actual history. If we turn, however, to the discipline of sociology as presently conceived in the United States, Weber's influence is considerably more pervasive than that of Marx.

Let us assess Weber's impact on American sociology, considering it in relation to the established specialties of the field rather than according to the natural lines of division in his work that have been carefully drawn by recent Weber scholars.

FORMAL ORGANIZATIONS

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the very existence of formal organizations as a specialty stems from Weber's conception of bureaucracy. Weber, of course, did not invent the concept of bureaucracy: Hegel and Marx used it, Saint-Simon at least implied it, and such nineteenth-century novelists as Gogol, Balzac and Dickens (not to speak of Kafka early in the present century) satirized it. Weber's achievement was to extend it from the realm of government to other areas of social organization, to identify bureaucratization as a master trend in modern society, and—most important to American sociologists—to define it formally as a generic type of social structure. American social scientists took the Weberian model as a point of departure for the empirical observation and analysis of a huge variety of special-purpose organizations which, not surprisingly, were often found to deviate from the attributes of the model.

Apart from legitimating a new field of empirical research, the early users of Weber's concept were actuated by two extrasociological aims. First, the Weberian model could be used to defend the welfare state of the New Deal—and even the idea of "socialism"—against its conservative political opponents, who made an epithet of "bureaucrat" in their diatribes against "red tape," desk-warming civil servants feeding at the public trough and the like. Weber's emphasis on the efficiency of bureaucracy as a means to the achievement of clearly defined collective goals served as a defense against its detractors: "The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its purely technical superiority over any other form of organization. The fully bureaucratic mechanism compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with nonmechanical modes of production." At the same time, Weber's insistence that bureaucratization was not confined to government but encompassed the corporate economy as well drew the sting from the arguments of the defenders of "free enterprise" against state intervention in the economy.

A second aim, following from the first, was to reformulate the idea of bureaucracy in order to make it less incompatible with the American democratic and egalitarian ethos. This involved divesting the Weberian concept of its heavy emphasis on hierarchical authority, impersonal relations and the suppression of individual initiative. The accounts by the Harvard industrial sociologists of the emergence of an "informal structure" of social relations in large organizations, modifying and bypassing the formally prescribed rules and lines of authority, were widely employed for this purpose. Weber's relative neglect of "staff as opposed to hierarchical "line" positions in organizations and his failure to discuss the collegial ties central to the professions were also stressed in this connection, especially by Talcott Parsons.

These uses and modifications of Weber's model tended to ignore the duality of his own outlook toward bureaucracy as, on the one hand, an indispensable rational instrumentality under the conditions of modern life, and, on the other, as a "living machine" which "in union with the dead machine … is laboring to produce the cage of that bondage of the future to which one day powerless men will be forced to submit like the fellaheen of ancient Egypt." American liberal democratic social scientists found Weber's historical pessimism, based on the fear of a trend toward total bureaucratization, no easier to stomach than did Marxists. The "counterculture" of the 1960s, on the other hand, has given far greater resonance to Weber's despair over the "iron cage" of modem society, though it often assumed oppositional stances that he would have regarded as sentimental and unrealistic.

Indeed, the negative side of Weber's view of bureaucracy has in recent years almost completely overshadowed the positive side. What one writer has called "bureaucracy baiting" has become as characteristic of the left as of the right. Bureaucracy is presented as an implacable force opposing both personal freedom and popular democracy. Weber's emphasis on the essential passivity of bureaucracies, their availability to any political leaders strong and determined enough to use them, is ignored in this view. Nor has the possibility of combining democratic leadership and control with a reliable and efficient civil service, advocated by Weber in the last few years of his life, received anything like the attention given to his more pessimistic statements about the spread of bureaucratization.

SOCIAL STRATIFICATION

Marx, of course, long ago placed classes and class structures at the very center of sociological and historical analysis, and his views have loomed large in most theoretical discussion ever since. However, the Weberian triad of status, wealth and power is indispensable to the study of social inequality and class structure, although the interdependences among the three are as important a subject of investigation as the distinction itself. This has not always been recognized by American sociologists, whose quick acceptance of the triad was not free of selective distortion. The concept of "status group" is sometimes employed as a counter to the economically based Marxist concept of class, although Weber never contended that status groups were more important in modern society than classes, which he, like Marx, grounded in the economy, merely that they were distinguishable. Weber's emphasis on status was also sometimes invoked in support of a quite different use of the term: its equation with the prestige rankings of individuals or positions (usually occupations derived by the favored methods of survey research). But Weber wrote of status groups, not of status as an attribute of individuals or positions, and he did not identify status groups with a rank-order reflecting an underlying consensus on values in society. Far from implying consensus, conflict between status groups was in Weber's view just as prevalent as class conflict.

POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY

Nearly all of the classical sociologists were concerned at some level with politics, even though—or perhaps because—the hallmark of the sociological perspective, as it arose in the nineteenth century was to claim historical, causal and normative priority for society over the state. This, in conjunction with the later almost simultaneous development of political science as a discipline, retarded the emergence of political sociology as a sociological specialty.

Like formal organizations and social stratification, political sociology began to emerge as a specialty not long after publication of the first translations of Weber's sociological writings. (His many commentaries on the political issues of his time remain untranslated, as does Mommsen's important study of his political views.) Weber's concept of legitimation, his threefold typology of legitimate authority, his definitions of the state and of power and his treatment of bureaucracies as power structures (which influenced his contemporary, Robert Michels) have had a far-reaching effect on the theoretical formulations of political scientists as well as political sociologists. Weber alone of the "classical" sociologists, including Marx, did not treat the state and politics as secondary phenomena subordinate to autonomous "social forces." Of nineteenth-century social thinkers, only Tocqueville bears comparison with Max Weber in this respect, and his insights were less systematically developed. Traditional Marxism, like its bourgeois counter-parts, has a dusty Victorian ring and has required strong infusions from later thinkers, including Weber, in order to retain the appearance of relevance to our time, not to speak of its embarrassments in confronting the record of the movements and regimes it has itself inspired. Max Weber of all the classical sociologists seems most to be our contemporary, for the troubled history of the twentieth century has cast doubt, to put it mildly, on the classical ascription of primacy to the social over the political. Totalitarianism has merely deviated furthest in achieving the complete ascendancy of the latter over the former.

The three specialities influenced by Weber that I have reviewed are all primarily concerned with social organization. If a sociology of economic life ever develops as a recognized specialty, it will join them in owing a large debt to Weber. The sociology of culture rather than of social organization is a larger component of the other specialties in which Weber's influence has been great. He is with Durkheim one of the two major theorists of the sociology of religion. Without reducing religious ideas to simple reflections of the social location of the classes and communities that upheld them, he explored their intimate connection with the concrete situations in which their creators and carriers found themselves. Weber was formally educated in the law and his earliest scholarship dealt with legal institutions. Since much of it remains untranslated, or has been translated only recently, his influence on the sociology of law, especially in comparative historical scholarship, is bound to increase. His writings on the sociology of music and of architecture are major contributions to these undeveloped fields.

Weber does not easily lend himself to the categorizations favored by writers of textbooks and taxonomists of sociological theories. Specious though such pedagogic labeling often is, at least a modicum of plausibility exists for calling Marx a "conflict theorist," Durkheim and Parsons "functionalists" or "consensualists," and various other people "exchange" or "phenomenological" or "symbolic interactionist" theorists. Weber fails to fit under any of these familiar rubrics or under those that stress epistemo-logical standpoints ranging from strict positivism to pure hermeneutics. Historicist perhaps suits him best, but most sociologists have felt uncomfortable with the label. Their historical knowledge, especially in America, has usually been limited, and in Weber they confront a man whose works, in Mommsen's words, "display an abundance of historical knowledge which has so far not been surpassed by anyone else, with the possible exception of Arnold Toynbee." American sociologists have often regarded sociology as a kind of intellectual short-cut providing nomological formulae under which historical particulars can be subsumed, thus eliminating the necessity of understanding them directly in their complex particularity. Weber's vast and detailed knowledge seems to reproach sociologists for their hubris, especially since he makes little claim to derive from it universal generalizations, in contrast to Toynbee's "challenge and response" theory of civilization, which can be identified with a familiar tradition of theorizing and criticized for its vague, metaphorical character.

But Max Weber was more than a scholar of prodigious learning. Even his most specialized and objective writings communicate an underlying tension and moral passion, a "pathos of objectivity" in Gerth and Mills' incisive phrase. Moreover, he never confined himself to "scholarship as a vocation" but was constantly drawn to politics even if in the end his career as a political man was abortive. Thus he demands to be assessed according to the ultimate values that gave his life and work a unity despite the apparent fragmentation of his omnivorous intellectual concerns.

There is much justification for regarding Weber as an existentialist avant la lettre. To his close friend, Karl Jaspers, Weber himself was an existentialist hero, and Jaspers claimed that his own existentialist philosophy was inspired by the example of Weber as "the man who embodied human greatness," who "lived in the only way possible for a man of integrity in those times; breaking through all illusory forms he disclosed the foundations of human Existenz." Weber's indebtedness to Nietzsche, generally regarded now as one of the fathers of existentialism, has been increasingly recognized by his more recent interpreters. Weber's conception of the relationship between values and knowledge can now be seen as much more existentialist than positivist. His insistence on "value freedom" or "ethical neutrality" as a prerequisite for any social science worthy of the name has long been upheld by American sociologists as the first commandment of their calling. Younger sociologists involved in the protest movements of the 1960s attacked value neutrality as a self-serving defense of professional interests, as an excuse for political indifference and simply as a sham violated in the actual research of many who proclaimed it. Neither side in this rancorous dispute, now thankfully showing signs of moving to higher intellectual ground, did justice to Weber's position, whether in claiming to affirm it or to reject it.

Weber did not argue for the exclusion of value judgments from social science because he regarded them as blind, irrational eruptions of human emotion posing a threat to the majestic authority of pure science. It was rather the other way around: He wished to preserve values as the realm of individual freedom subject to the dignity of responsible choice uncoerced by the constraints of the world of fact revealed by science, even in the face of a full and stoical awareness of these constraints. This was, of course, a Kantian position reflecting Weber's neo-Kantian philosophical heritage. But Weber differed from the Kantians in denying that there were objective values on which rational consensus was possible. He insisted rather that there was a plurality of irreconcilable values, that the world was one of "warring gods" and that to align oneself with one of the gods meant to deny the claims of another who might be equally attractive and powerful. This position is existentialist or Nietzschean rather than Kantian: We are condemned to the often painful and even tragic choice between rival values, and we cannot slough off the burden of choice by claiming that it is not ourselves but the world as understood by science that dictates our conduct.

For politics, Weber favored an "ethic of responsibility" in preference to an "ethic of intention" (or of "absolute ends" as it has often—misleadingly, I think—been translated). An ethic of responsibility takes into account the consequences and further ramifications of realizing a particular end and also appraises an end in terms of the costs of attaining it. Empirical knowledge therefore enters into the consideration of ends to be pursued regardless of their status in some "ultimate" scheme of values. Here Weber places less of an existentialist emphasis on the autonomy and irreducibility of the choice of ends and gives weight to the interaction of ends and means and their frequent interchangeability, treating knowledge and values as complementary rather than as sealed off from one another.

It is impossible to confront Weber without a sense of the man behind the work. He is the only one of the classical sociologists who has been the subject of a psychobiography, whose life and character have been made into a cultural symbol in a brilliant if tendentious study by a literary scholar, and whose love letters, no less, are shortly to be published. Even Marx's life and personal history have not attracted comparable interest, largely because Marx's message was ultimately an affirmative one embraced by an entire movement whereas the tension and ambivalence of Weber's thought points in the direction of personal stoicism rather than collective commitment. The spell cast by the passion and the pathos Weber projects has been a source of irritation to his critics.

Donald MacRae, a proper Scotsman, who has written a little book deliberately intended to "demystify" Weber, remarks that "practically all that is written on Weber is written in awe," with the result that "when one is knocking one's forehead on the floor one's vision is certainly limited and probably blurred."

Why then Weber's continuing spell? I write unashamedly from within the circle of the bewitched, also as one who in middle age feels historical nostalgia for the time of his parents' childhood, the years of Weber's manhood, and, moreover, as one with little inclination to apologize for his own "bourgeois values." Part of the answer lies in one remark of Donald MacRae's with which I can agree: "Our century has apparently dedicated itself, only halfknowingly, to acting out the ideas and dreams of [early twentieth-century Europe] in deadly earnest." By the late 1970s we are perhaps entitled to conclude that the acting out has almost ended. This too is a source of Weber's relevance, for he anticipated the trajectories of our belief, disbelief and unbelief. A world of "specialists without vision and sensualists without heart" today sounds painfully more like a description of the way we live now than like the possible future described by Weber in 1905. And we have had a good deal of unsatisfactory experience with the "entirely new prophets" and "great rebirth of old ideas and ideals" that he expected to arise in reaction to the world of modernity. although the imperatives facing us are scarcely the same, we are unable to improve upon his conclusion that "nothing is gained by yearning and tarrying alone" and that what remains is for us to "set to work and meet the 'demands of the day,' in human relations as well as in our vocation."