Introduction

This chapter will consider Weber’s interpretive sociology and his methodological individualism. The text clarifies the difference between “value freedom,” “value judgment,” and “reference to values.” After reconstructing Weber’s theory of social action, we will delve into Weber’s theory of causality and the importance of the ideal type in causal imputation. Soon after, we will explore Weber’s thesis on the origin of the spirit of modern capitalism and the types of rationality.

The text will also focus on the three types of legitimate authority: Traditional, rational-legal, and charismatic. Particular attention will be devoted to the charismatic succession phenomenon and the figure of Jesus Christ.

Immediately after, we will explore Weber’s theory of social stratification with his concepts of “class,” “status group,” and “party.”

In the final section, we will investigate how Weber’s thinking was influenced by political nationalism by giving the floor to his critics. Did Weber hold nationalist beliefs? If so, what specific type of nationalism did he adhere to? One of the main topics of this chapter is the differences between Weber and Marx. Weber placed conflict at the center of the social world. However, he was critical of historical materialism.

Interpretive Sociology

Max Weber’s interpretive sociology has long represented the most authoritative alternative to Marx’s theory of historical materialism. Weber called “understanding” his approach (from the German Verstehen) to clarify that the explanation of social action must be based on understanding the motives and purposes of those who act. Interpretive sociology requires the sociologist to establish a sympathetic bond with the people under observation to understand the meaning they attach to what they do. The focus is on how individuals interpret their actions, the primary task of interpretive sociology.

Weber distinguished two types of understanding: Direct observational understanding and explanatory understanding.

With direct observational understanding, we see what appears evident, like the anger of men who grind their teeth in anger. Explanatory understanding, on the other hand, is a more complex undertaking because it requires us to reconstruct the subjective reasons for action. What men do is evident; why they do it is a more enigmatic question since behaviors can be based on different “constellations” of motives. The woodcutters are chopping wood, but why are they doing it? Are they venting their anger, working for a profit, or training to keep fit? While direct observational understanding is direct, explanatory understanding is indirect and requires sympathetic imagination or the ability to identify with others to take their point of view.

Familiarity with the social world enhances our sympathetic imagination (Mills 1959). The more our life experiences, the more our empathy penetrates (Einfühlung).

Weber states that we are only sometimes in a position to understand the subjectively intended meaning of action for the simple reason that others are enigmatic. This requires the researcher to collect as much information as possible to reconstruct the observed situation and understand someone else’s motivation. When a radical distance occurs between our ultimate values and aims, and those of the people under observation, fantasy cannot produce sympathetic penetration.

It is relatively simple to re-experiencing (Nacherleben) the anger and fear of a man or the sense of a mathematical operation: All this is grasped with great rational and intellectual evidence. It is much more difficult to relive the mysticism of a Christian monk. However, when the difference between the values of the observer and the observer is too great, empathy is impossible. Then sociologists must limit themselves to ascertaining and recording the acts as they would do with a physical or climatological phenomenon. In some cases, understanding is hampered by the sociologists’ moral repulsion toward the values of the people they observe. In others, however, understanding is hindered by the lack of information: A single piece of information can change our interpretation and, consequently, our understanding of action. Interpretation and understanding are permeated, but the former precedes the latter (Weber 1922/1978, vol. I, 9). The fact that Weber, wanting to clarify how interpenetrating interpretation and understanding were in the Verstehen approach, spoke of “interpretative understanding” should not be misleading. For Weber, understanding is achieved “through” interpretation. Interpretation comes first (Weber 1913/1981, 151).

Weber’s Individualism

A solar feature of understanding sociology is the centrality of the personal individual as the actual agent of social change.

Weber would never say that “society is everything,” and it would never occur to him to speak of “collective consciousness” (Freund 1969, 112). In the Weberian perspective, no society has an autonomous and independent life from its members. For comprehensive sociology, only individuals have a will and intentionality; only individuals can weigh the means against the end and reflect on the possible consequences of their actions. The most complex collective phenomena are nothing more than the result of the aggregation of individual actions. Personal individuals and their actions are the “atom” of sociology. Only they can be the object of interpretation. The individual is the minimum unit of analysis of Weber’s methodological individualism (Ringer 1997, 157). It follows that, like economics, sociology must also adopt individualistic methods, as Weber wrote in a letter to Robert Liefmann on March 9, 1920: “Sociology, too, can only be pursued by taking as one’s point of departure the action of one or more (few or many) individuals, this is to say, with a strictly ‘individualistic’ method” (Weber 1920/2014, 410).

What does that imply terminologically?

When sociologists use nouns such as “State,” “class,” and “party,” they must be aware that these undifferentiated collective concepts are “labels” to simplify reality and make speech more fluent. In Weber’s example, the “interest of the state,” the “class interest of workers,” and the “interest of agriculture” are examples of collective entities beneath which a tangle of contradictions is hidden. Farmers, for example, are divided by a vast number of conflicting interests: Some have an interest in selling their farm and are therefore interested in a rise in the price of land; others, on the other hand, being interested in buying have an opposite interest to the former. Referring to Kant, Weber clarifies that concepts dominate the world’s complexity and invites us not to forget that empirical reality is always more complex than our mental representations.

Weber criticizes those who use collective concepts as if they had a life of their own and expresses his conception of society as an arena of conflicts that arise from opposing interests. However, there is another important theoretical issue that I would like to clarify. If sociologists know that there are only personal individuals behind collective nuns, they can see more easily the conflicts between social groups and within them.

Box 6.1: Interpretive Sociology

Weber sees conflicts not only in relations between states and political parties but in all sections of the population and social classes. Weber sees conflict everywhere. For example, rural and city inhabitants of the same country often have different productive interests, even in nutrition. Some are interested in more food production at a low cost, and others in producing high-quality food at a high cost. The state may be interested in the agricultural population’s growth for foreign or domestic policy reasons, while the agricultural population may have opposite interests. Conflicts also arise between the interests of present generations and those of future generations. Conflicts often arise because fathers and sons defend opposing interests.

In each case, interpretive sociology is interested in social actors’ meaning, motivations, and subjective purposes. But be careful: In the Weberian sense, understanding an action does not mean justifying it. It means interpreting it on the basis of the meaning it assumes for the social actor by putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes to see the world through their eyes. Social action can be understood sociologically and morally condemned simultaneously (Orsini 2020, 300). Interpretive sociology aims to study social actions through the understanding of subjective meanings and is very attentive to values, which influence how reality is interpreted.

As we are about to see, values are central to Weber’s sociology.

Value Freedom

According to Weber, sociologists do not have to indicate the higher values men should strive for. They should avoid disseminating value judgments in classroom teaching and keep their scholarly works free of personal bias. In this sense, sociology is a “value-free” science based on the ethos of value-free neutrality. When value judgments affect the scientific process, they distance scholars from understanding reality. Sociologists must choose: Either they make value judgments and devote themselves to political life and action or they make judgments of fact and devote themselves to science and value-free criticism. Sociologists study the world of meaning but do not teach the ideological meaning of the world. It goes without saying that in the eyes of a Marxist, Weber’s value-free social science is a deceptive way of being impartial, favoring the ruling class’s interests. According to the Marxists, if social scientists do not strive to change the world, the bourgeois will benefit from it since there are no “independent” teachers in a society based on class struggle.

For his part, Weber was very strict with those professors who used their knowledge to head students toward a political creed. University professors are much more cultured than their students, who tend to see them as an authoritative source of knowledge and impartiality. Students’ autonomy should be sheltered from teachers’ political faith. Furthermore, students cannot challenge professors in the classroom since, especially in a state system, they need their help to continue their studies. A professor shouldn’t pass off his biased ideas as scientific truths, using tricks and disguises. Weber deplores proselytism in the lecture room, directing his arrows against teachers and students.

Professors and students have every right to fight for political faith in the squares, where everyone can applaud or whistle. However, in the classroom, they should not behave like party militants. On this point, Weber expressed himself very clearly and equally harshly during a conference held in Munich in 1917, published over the title Science as a Profession, in which he urged not to use the language of science as a “sword” to make opponents capitulate (Weber 1917b/2004, 20).

The task of university professors is to cite those facts, which, in addition to being more uncomfortable with their personal opinions, question their theories. Professors do not have to teach students “what” to think but “how” to think or how to reason in a logically rigorous way. Professors will analyze the forms of democracy, their functioning, and the repercussions they have on the life of individuals, comparing undemocratic regimes with democratic ones. But they will be careful not to impose their ideals from the top of the chair and will not try to win the students to their political cause through the stratagem in the guise of “allowing the facts to speak for themselves,” the most treacherous tactic.

Facts never speak for themselves as the professor chooses the ones to give the floor from the lectern. The selection can be honest and impartial or biased and ideological. Weber called for intellectual honesty and recalled that the prophet and demagogue are not suited to the university chair.

So far, Weber’s speech appears easy to understand: Sociology is an empirical science, and the sociologist must not pronounce value judgments or indicate the ideals to fight for. In reality, the relationship between Weber and the world of values is much more complex and requires deepening. The best way to proceed is to start with the Weberian distinction between “value judgments” and “reference to values.”

Value Judgments and Reference to Values

Making a value judgment means making a moral judgment. Referring to values is a different cognitive activity.

In choosing their object of study, researchers are not value-free and are not required to be. Values are a means of orienting oneself on the journey of life. Why should one turn to a theme that does not arouse ethical tension? However, once the search begins, one must refrain from value judgments. For Weber, science is a question of “being,” not of “having to be”; it is factual judgments versus value judgments. In the classroom, as in historical-social research, value judgments must not merge with factual judgments, forming an indistinct whole that Weber judged fatal for the progress of sociological knowledge. Sociologists may study value judgments and try to understand why one group despises another. Although value-freedom sometimes has psychological costs when it clashes with the moral values of the researcher (Orsini 2013, 345), sociologists cannot morally judge those who despise or those who are despised (Orsini 2017, 208).

Given such premises, it is legitimate to ask what the function of science is.

In the essay “Objectivity” in Social Science and Social Policy (1904a), Weber explains that science has the task of evaluating the adequacy of means to ends. Sociologists can say if the means men intend to pursue their ends are adequate but cannot morally judge them. Ultimate ends, ideological goals, and subjective aims are matters of faith that science can study but not condemn or celebrate. Weber attributed sociology to studying the consequences of an action to understand whether they are in contrast with the desired objectives. Sociology offers to the one who makes a choice the possibility of measuring the distance between the unintended consequences and the desired ones (Weber 1904a/1949, 53). Men want something either for its value or as a means of obtaining something else, and they must have clear ideas about the possible consequences of their actions.

Social Action

We have said that sociologists cannot pronounce value judgments, but we do not yet know what the object of study of sociology is. For Durkheim, it is the social facts; for Weber, it is social actions.

On the first page of Economy and Society, an incomplete work published posthumously by his wife in 1922, Weber writes that social action is the “central and constitutive” object of sociology. “Action” is such only if the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his/her behavior; action is “social” only if the subjective meaning considers the attitude of another individual or group, which may be known or unknown (Weber 1922/1978, vol. I, 4). Those who agree to receive a cash payment (subjective meaning) expect many anonymous people to accept that money in a future exchange (attitude of the others). Social action implicates social relationships, that is, reciprocity between individuals. It follows that not every kind of action is a social action. The prayer of a lonely individual in a deserted room is not a social action. In this case, the individual who prays alone is not in a social relationship with anyone. The religious attitude, not being oriented toward the attitude of other individuals, is simple contemplation or solitary prayer. Likewise, the fact that two individuals come into contact is insufficient for their meeting to take on a social relation. The accidental collision between two cyclists, explains Weber, is not a social action; it is similar to a natural event, like a boulder falling on the road. However, the attempt by cyclists to avoid each other, the bickering after the impact, or coming to blows is a social action.

Not even individuals who passively imitate the crowd by which they are surrounded do not act socially. It is just an action conditioned by the crowd. However, suppose an individual imitates fashion or tradition to please people in a particular social environment. In that case, the action is social because he/she is considering the attitude of the others. Where there is social action, there must also be a relationship of intentional meaning toward the behavior of others. Interpretive sociology is interested only in actions endowed with subjective meaning. The problem is that it is not always easy to determine whether an individual acts passively in relation to others’ attitudes. Misunderstanding is common. Social life is equivocal, complex, and enigmatic. Assuming that the individuals we observe have acted based on meaning, what meaning should we attribute to their actions?

To answer this question, we must first reconstruct the situation or force field in which individuals find themselves. Interpretive sociology is not a psychological analysis of the motivations of individuals but an attempt to understand the situation affects individual actions. Interpretive sociology must always include the structure of the situation and the related situational constraints in its analysis. We must not make the mistake of believing that comprehensive sociology applies only to studying small groups because it places the acting individual’s point of view and aims at the center of its reflection. Weber used the understanding method to explain the birth of capitalism. I think it is very interesting to see how other sociologists have used Verstehen sociology to explain the causes of the collapse of the Soviet economy. The following example will clarify many things very simply.

Zaslavsky used methodological individualism to explain the collapse of the Soviet economy.

The leaders of Soviet societies were required to respect the economic plan decided by the Communist Party. Because of the situation they found themselves in, business administrators pressed central planners to obtain a production plan with not-too-ambitious goals. At the same time, they demanded far more materials and manpower than necessary to increase the likelihood of achieving the government’s goals to please the party’s expectations. However, this increased waste of resources and created economically irrational behavioral patterns. The spontaneous aggregation of many individual actions lead to a mass phenomenon: Tens of thousands of managers falsified financial statements to hide the actual capabilities of their businesses and resisted technological innovations that, if successful, would induce central planners to raise goals and expectations. At the same time, in the event of failure, they would lead managers to a criminal court. Lacking the free market, the directors of Soviet companies did not work to make a profit but to obtain the approval of the Communist Party hierarchies. This situation prevented the development of an economically efficient system of interactions. The chaos of information and the irresponsibility of planners added up to the disinterest of companies in saving resources and increasing productivity. Every ring of the planning system opposed the research and use of new technologies and inventions, since they would have pushed to change the methods already tested going against the vested interests of the main actors of the planned economy. The innovations would have required a continuous redistribution of resources and a reworking of plans, increasing and complicating the work of the Soviet planners (Zaslavsky 2004, 201).

Weber developed a complex conceptual apparatus to reduce errors of interpretation but never thought of being able to eliminate them: A feat that he considered impossible. Weberian men do not have the certainties of Marxist men. Aware that their work is based on an uninterrupted process of interpretation, all they can say at the end of their research is: “Probably, things went this way, but I could be wrong.” Weber does not have absolute certainties. His sociology aims not to revolutionize the world, an undertaking that requires mobilizing the masses. If Marx is the master of suspicion, Weber is the master of doubt. As we saw, Weber’s comprehensive science of social action states that men are not always able to understand the actions of others, mainly when they belong to a cultural universe that is too different from the one of the acting individuals.

Weber identified four types of social action, which he placed in descending order of rationality:

  • Instrumentally Rational Action or Means-Ends Rational Action

  • Value-Rational Action

  • Affectual Action (especially emotional)

  • Traditional Action

The action is instrumentally rational when individuals use a calculation to adjust the resources to the purpose. Individuals who act in rational-purposeful ways are careful planners and skilled calculators. They do not act affectively or emotionally, and they do not act according to tradition either. Instead, they measure the means to the ends, evaluate the possible alternatives, reflect on the consequences that could arise from realizing their goals, and try to understand if they conflict. Examples of means-ends rational action are entrepreneurs who calculate costs to increase profits and army generals who try to prevail over the enemy by maneuvering military units in the open. In evaluating the rationality of an action, what matters is the point of view of the acting individual. The fact that men try to reach a goal based on the knowledge that turns out to be inadequate with time does not make their actions irrational. Instrumentally rational action is attentive to practical results and is typical of the man of action.

Action is value-rational when individuals act to achieve an end that, from their point of view, has value in itself. It doesn’t matter what the consequences of the action are; what matters is the action as long as it conforms to a political ideal, a religious belief, or an ethical or aesthetic principle. This is why value rationality is always irrational from the point of view of rational-purposeful action. Christian martyrs, who went to meet death to bear witness to their faith, acted rationally according to their value system. Interpretive sociology teaches that we often regard as “irrational” people whose value rationality we cannot understand since we are accustomed to thinking in terms of instrumental rationality. Those who act solely in the name of value rationality do not care about the future consequences of their actions. Their only concern is to act coherently with their values, with what seems to them beautiful, right, dutiful, dignified, pious, and religious. In Weber’s terminology: “Value-rational action always involves ‘commands’ or ‘demands’ which, in the actor’s opinion, are binding on him” (Weber 1922/1978, vol. I, 25).

Momentary moods dictate affectual action. The difference between affectual action and value-rational action lies in the fact that, in the second case, there is a greater awareness of the ultimate goals and greater planning of the action. One acts emotionally to satisfy an urgent need for revenge or joy. Strictly affectual behavior is on edge. In most cases, it sits on a ridge between means-ends rationality and value rationality.

Purely traditional action, which is determined by “ingrained habituations,” is similar to passive imitation and, therefore, its orientation according to the subjective meaning is relatively low. Traditional action is mainly an automatic reaction to habitual stimuli. The more men act upon habit, the less they act upon subjective meaning. The level of subjective meaning is minimal in traditional action and maximal in means-ends rational actions.

In theory, social actions are distinct; in reality, they are often interpenetrated. For instance, social scientists act rationally to achieve their purpose, the truth, but searching for truth is also a human value. A current example will make things more straightforward. Islamic terrorists employ means-ends rationally to evade police control and kill as many people as possible, which requires them to be lucid and meticulous in planning their actions. However, their action is also value-rational since they perform an action possessing an intrinsic value for them, even if it fails. At the same time, their action is affectual, being moved by hatred for their enemies. Finally, it is traditional since they act to obey the “mujahideen” tradition.

Weber had a great interest in studying the rationalizing process affecting all aspects of society—economics, art, music, culture, and politics. Anyway, he thought that, in the great majority of cases, individuals acted instinctively, out of habit, in half-consciousness or unconsciousness of the subjective meaning. Acting effectively or fully aware is always an extreme case. Such non-rational features of everyday life should always be considered in any historical and sociological analysis (Weber 1922/1978, vol. I, 21). Man is, above all, a creature of habit.

Weber is a consistent and rigorous elitist (Ferrarotti 1982, 68). Innovations in the action models are introduced by individuals with extraordinary qualities, which then become a habit for the common man. Weber describes the masses as irrational and emotional and, as such, unable to participate broadly and actively in political life (Beahr 1990).

Understanding and Explanation

We have seen the importance of understanding an action’s meaning based on the acting subject’s purposes and motivations. However, Weber believes that understanding alone cannot guarantee the sociological analysis’s completeness. In addition to understanding, the researcher must also explain causally. For Weber, an explanation is scientific only if causal, since “the principle of causality is the presupposition of all scientific work (Weber 1906/1949, 86).

In this passage we are about to read from Economy and Society, Weber conceives of understanding (Verstehen) and explaining (Erklären) as separate moments in social science research. Both require the same care. Researchers must first understand any phenomenon through interpretation and then causally explain what they sense to have grasped empathically. Understanding is not the ultimate goal of Weberian sociology (Hughes 1958, 305; Paci 2013, 111).

This passage by Weber is one of the most important in the history of the social sciences. Let’s read it carefully: “Sociology […] is a science concerning itself with the interpretive understanding of social action and thereby with a causal explanation of its course and consequences. We shall speak of ‘action’ insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behavior—be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course” (Weber 1922/1978, vol. I, 4).

As is evident from this passage, causality is fundamental in Weber. However, it is possible to distinguish three types of causal explanations.

The first type is represented by the causal explanation of the natural sciences, which is based on the deduction of phenomena from general laws: A phenomenon is explained if it can be deduced from a law.

The causal explanation of the historical sciences represents the second type. In this case, phenomena cannot be deduced from general laws since history deals with events that occurred only once. It follows that the historical causal explanation requires reconstructing the unique circumstances that caused a specific event. Historical individualities can be particular events, such as the war of 1914, or very large, such as capitalism.

The sociological explanation represents the third type of causal explanation, which seeks regular relationships between phenomena in a probabilistic form. The sociological explanation does not aim to affirm that A inevitably causes B, but that A favors B. Sociologists will not say that economic crises make revolts inevitable but that economic crises favor the formation of protest movements.

Weber matured his methodological orientation in a famous intellectual debate, the Methodenstreit or “dispute over the method,” which had, among its many protagonists, Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband, and Heinrich Rickert. I will summarize their fundamental theses and subsequently explain how each influenced Weber’s methodology.

The Methodenstreit

In his Introduction to the Human Sciences (1883), Dilthey distinguished the “natural sciences” from the “spiritual sciences.” The former deal with studying phenomena external to man and the causal relations between physical phenomena; the latter, on the other hand, study man from the “inside” through empathy or re-experiencing the thoughts and feelings of the acting individuals. The natural scientist ascertains causal relationships and searches for general laws; the scientist of the spiritual phenomena, on the other hand, is not interested in the causes and studies historical phenomena through identification (Tessitore 2003, 112). According to Dilthey, the world of nature must be explained through external observation. In contrast, the world of men must be understood through the Erlebnis, the “lived experience,” which the historians bring as a personal heritage from which understanding depends. As if to say: Men cannot identify with the Galilean sphere that flows along an inclined plane. Still, they can identify with the protagonists of the battle of Waterloo, human beings with whom they can identify. The more life experiences historians had, the greater their chances of empathizing with others. According to Dilthey: “Nature is alien to us. After all, it is for us only an outer thing, not an inner one. Society is our world. The play of mutual influences in it is something we coexperience with the full force of our entire being, because we inwardly feel the turbulent bustle of those conditions and forces which make up the social system” (Dilthey 1883/1988, 97). For Dilthey, Erlebnis comes first and then Vertsehen, since no one could understand men without having first experienced an intuition, that is, “entering” their psychic and spiritual life (Campelli 1999, 149).

It follows that the differences between human sciences and natural sciences are in the object of study (man vs. nature), in cognitive purposes (understanding vs. explanation), and the method (identification vs. observation). Dilthey distinguished the method of explanation from that of understanding, conceived similarly to that of introspection (Rossi 1957, 7), and expressed his dissatisfaction with the positivist approach, based on the theory of the unity of the scientific method, of which Comte had been a champion. Dilthey’s book is a reaction to Comte’s rigid positivism.

For Comte, all sciences, from astronomy to sociology, share the same positive method based on causal explanation and observation. From the Comtian perspective, the method employed by physics is so fruitful of results that it deserves to be applied in all fields of knowledge. The need to unify the scientific method had been reiterated by Durkheim, who had written that determining the causes of a phenomenon requires general laws capable of enunciating constant relationships between social phenomena. In his A System of Logic (1843), John Stuart Mill clarifies that “explaining” means identifying the causes producing a phenomenon and that human behavior is attributable to laws as universal as those that govern the physical world (Orsini 2019). The problem of general sociology is ascertaining and connecting them with the laws of human nature by deduction. According to Mill: “History […] affords Empirical Laws of Society” (Mill 1843/1930, 598).

Dilthey opposes the theory of the unity of the method and denies that human sciences have an explanatory task. While natural sciences aim at causally explaining their object of study, human sciences do not resort to the category of cause but to that of meaning, purpose, motivation, and value. Dilthey bequeaths a clear distinction between understanding and causation.

Windelband confronted Dilthey’s theses in his 1894 lecture as Rector of the University of Strasbourg, titled “History and Natural Science.” Windelband’s decisive distinction is between the sciences of law and the sciences of events: “The former teaches what always is, the latter what once was” (Windelband 1894/1998, 13). Sciences of law have a nomothetic goal and seek general laws. Sciences of events pursue an idiographic goal and study phenomena in their individuality. From this point of view, the problem is no longer the object of study (man or nature) but the cognitive purpose of the research (generality vs. individuality). Human and natural phenomena can be used as particular cases of general laws or to ascertain their unrepeatability. For Windelband, the same social phenomenon can be the object of nomothetic and idiographic research (Windelband 1894/1998, 12).

An example will make Windelband’s argument more explicit.

If researchers study the unique and unrepeatable characteristics of the storming of the Bastille, then their purpose is idiographic (Skocpol 2015); if, on the other hand, they investigate a certain number of revolutionary ruptures to understand the “dynamics of revolutions,” then their end is nomothetic (Pellicani 1974; Orsini 2005, 121). Windelband devotes much attention to the study of values, which he considers transcendent and universal, and admits the importance of causality in historical studies.

Rickert, who graduated in Strasbourg under Windelband’s supervision, reiterated the distinction between the generalizing method of natural science and the individualizing method of history in humanities studies. In addition, he elaborated a systematic classification of values. According to Rickert, the historical reality is an inexhaustible chaos of events, and the historian needs a scale of values to select the most critical facts. For political history’s purposes—Rickert explains—the rejection of the German imperial crown by Frederick William IV would be a historically essential fact, while his tailor’s skills would be irrelevant. However, it can be imagined that the tailor becomes historically essential for a fashion historian. In the cultural sciences, values perform the functions of laws in the natural sciences. By referring to values, historians can distinguish essential facts from irrelevant ones and make the chaos of reality intelligible.

Therefore, the theoretical relationship to cultural values is fundamental for historical knowledge since—Rickert explains with a suggestive metaphor—scientific research is conditioned by how cuts are made in “the river of reality” and essential elements are chosen according to the values (Rickert 1896/1986, 85; Oakes 1997, 59–78). Without relation to values, events become insignificant, boring, and meaningless.

In Rickert, as in Windelband, values are universal and necessary. Men act to achieve them through history, while historians refer to them to orient themselves in their studies. Historians are guided by values that distinguish the meaningless from the meaningful happening. There could not be historical science without guiding values. The historical-individualizing method refers to value and is as opposed to natural science, which does not care about cultural values.

In Rickert, we also find the formulation of the principle of value freedom in social science. The fact that historians refer to values does not mean they must make value judgments. The historian neither praises nor condemns the French Revolution. They confine themselves to ascertain that one specific event is significant and important. Historians cannot decide whether the French Revolution favored or damaged France or Europe. This would be an evaluation. But no historian will doubt that those events were significant for the cultural development of France and Europe. Judging involves praise or blame. Relating to values, neither of the two. Historians who express praise or blame override the limits of history as a science of real being.

Another Rickert idea, which we also find in Weber, concerns the importance of concepts to exemplify the complexity of reality. To understand the world, we must first simplify it through general concepts. Man can only predict the general, never the particular. To dominate the world, it is necessary to simplify it by elaborating general concepts. If our concepts had only one particular content, no one could imagine the past or the future. Without general concepts, we could only make statements and reasoning about what we have before our eyes.

Let us now try to understand what Weber accepted and rejected of the conclusions of Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert, who used the concept of Verstehen to divide natural and human science (Käsler 1988, 181).

First, Weber accepted Dilthey’s idea about the importance of empathetic identification in historical science, but he believed that this intuitive act should be enriched and completed by causal explanation. Social scientists cannot pretend their analysis is valid based on intuition alone. In Weber’s perspective, intuition is just a hypothesis to be tested empirically. The great discoveries all spring up as hypotheses thanks to intuition and imagination and then are verified based on the facts. Intuition is not enough. The socio-historical sciences require explanation too. The nose serves to discover, not to demonstrate. Intuition concerns the psychological origin of knowledge, which must be distinguished from the logical structure of knowledge. In addition to empathetic identification, the researcher must also study the causes of historical phenomena and make public, controllable, and repeatable what they believe they discovered empathically. Weber was fascinated by science and, understandably, he paid great attention to causal explanations in history. It must be reiterated that, to Weber, a scientific explanation is always a causal explanation (Cavalli 1981a, 37).

Historians may have exceptional prose, but without causal imputation; their book is a “novel” and not a scientific work. To leave no doubt about the importance of the causal explanation, Weber added that the most important phase of historical work is precisely the establishment of the “causal regress” (Weber 1906/1949, 176). Historians must and want to establish explanatory causal regress. For Weber, causality is the principle that guarantees the objectivity of all knowledge, and it is valid both in the natural sciences and in the historical and social sciences (Rossi 1975, 18).

Second, Weber accepted Windelband’s distinction between nomological and idiographic knowledge, attributing to sociology the task of generalizing and to history that of individualizing. For Weber, idiographic and nomological knowledge must collaborate, as Windelband stated. Historians possess “ontological knowledge,” knowledge relating to specific facts ascertainable through historical sources; sociologists, on the other hand, possess “nomological knowledge,” a knowledge relating to “rules of experience” about how men usually react to given situations.

Third, Weber embraced Rickert’s idea that historians must refer to a scale of values to distinguish essential facts from irrelevant ones. Also, for Weber, empirical reality is pure chaos, which takes on meaning from the point of view of the researcher: “‘Culture’ is a finite segment of the meaningless infinity of the world process, a segment on which human beings confer meaning and significance” (Weber 1906/1949, 81). However, Weber believed values were not universal but relative to every man. The relativity of values pervades the work of Weber, who, on this point, was extraordinarily influenced by Nietzsche.

How?

The Influence of Nietzsche and the Polytheism of Values

Nietzsche had killed all metaphysical beliefs and absolute truths, inviting men to accept the “death of God,” indicating the decline of all absolute truths. Life has no intrinsic meaning, and men have the task of finding their own. The rational and disenchanted world, based on a constant tension toward science and technology, has killed a conception of the world that sees the hand of a God hidden behind every natural event and that believes in the existence of eternal and absolute truths. Due to the advance of the profane to the detriment of the sacred, men are forced to build their truths and certainties to give meaning to life and death. The “Superman” is the one who succeeds in the enterprise of replacing the laws of the “dead God” with his/her own without being annihilated by the “disenchantment of the world.”

This passage by Nietzsche, contained in Thus Spake Zarathustra, expresses the sense of anthropological metamorphosis and spiritual conversion that afflicts contemporary men. But it also expresses the sacrifice, the existential drama, and the inner labor which afflict men who surpassed Christian morals. More generally, it expresses a tragic conception of human life, understood as the continuous construction and reconstruction of one’s own “meaning.” Zarathustra addresses a large mass of people gathered at a marketplace and says: “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal” (Nietzsche 1883–1885/1917, 8).

There is another passage by Nietzsche, taken from The Gay Science, which describes the existential drama in which those who, having killed God, are forced to wander as desperate in search of new truths that give meaning to their lives adrift. Not surprisingly, the proposed passage is found in the aphorism entitled “The Madman,” which tells of a man who, at the first light of the morning, ran to the market with a lantern lit and began to shout incessantly: “I am looking for God! I am looking for God!” Since many of those who did not believe in God were gathered right there, it caused great laughter. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his looks: “Whither is God?” he cried, “I will tell you! We have killed him: you and I! All of us are his murderers” (Nietzsche 1882/1974, 181).

The madman’s invective continues, increasingly rich in suggestive and poetic metaphors describing men killing God. The insane man wonders how men could have emptied the sea by drinking it to the last drop; he wonders where men have taken the sponge with which they have erased the entire horizon and, above all, how they could break the “chain” that binds the earth (man) to the sun (God). The madman shouts that the gravediggers are burying God, in general indifference: “God is dead!” and we are “the murderers of all murderers.” The stench of divine putrefaction—the madman affirms—is so strong that it imposes a terrible truth on all of us: We are the “gravediggers of God,” the expression that Nietzsche uses in The Gay Science to refer to a secularized man.

Nietzsche’s demolition of absolute human certainties affected Weber’s idea, according to which there are no “universal truths” but values or subjective truths. Weber’s freedom from value judgments is a tribute to Nietzsche (Weber 1917b/2004, 22), who attacked positivism by stating that there are no “facts” but only “interpretations.” Nietzsche represents the triumph of the subjective against the objective and the relative against the absolute. Weber’s methodological conception is based on a general philosophy—influenced by Nietzsche and Kant—according to which men cannot know the social world without taking a particular point of view to give order to the pure chaos of the empirical world. From Kant, Weber learned that knowledge is a subjective process which strips the world of its ambiguity, making its complexity accessible (Poggi 2006, 20–24).

He had learned from Nietzsche that there are no universal values and that every man is engaged in an interpretative process in search of the meaning of the outer world that is “meaningless” itself (Weber 1913/1981, 153).

With the notion of “polytheism of values,” Weber indicated that values are a matter of personal choice in modern societies and that they are irreconcilable and armed against each other. When men fight to establish a system of values, they unleash a death struggle without the possibility of reconciliation or compromise, like that between God and the Devil (Weber 1917a/1949, 17).

How would it be possible to reconcile the axiological universe of those who act based on the ethics of conviction with those who act based on the ethics of responsibility? In the case of the ethics of responsibility, individuals are held responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their actions, to which they attach the utmost importance. Their decisions are influenced by a consideration of what might happen. Based on the ethics of responsibility, an action inspired by a noble ideal must be avoided if it risks causing consequences damaging the cause for which one fights.

What matters for the ethics of conviction is to align actions with values, regardless of the foreseeable consequences. The ethics of conviction is an “absolute ethics” whose maxim, formulated in religious terms, reads as follows: “A Christian does what is right and leaves the outcome to God” (Weber 1917b/2004, 83).

If the consequences of an action, inspired by a just principle, are dire, the fault lies with the stupidity of others, the wickedness of the world, or the God who created it with all its defects. On the contrary, those who act inspired by the ethics of responsibility believe that good does not always come from good and only evil from evil. Those who do not see it are politically immature. On the other hand, those who act on the basis of the ethics of principles aspire to rekindle the flame of protest against the injustice of the social order, worried only that the ardor will not go out. His actions are entirely irrational from the point of view of the possible outcome.

Whether we should act based on the ethics of principles or of responsibility, to which Weber’s preferences went, is a matter of subjective values.

Objectivity and Adequate Causation

Since the social world is a world of subjective values and meanings, it is legitimate to ask what possibilities sociology has for producing objective knowledge. Weber answers that objectivity takes shape during research. Objectivity lies in the method, that is, in applying a series of logical procedures with which the researcher justifies what he has discovered through intuition.

First, the research begins with the choice of the topic. This choice depends on subjective values, but researchers must clarify the procedures they followed to reach their conclusions. The method must be transparent so everyone can verify whether the conclusions are based on the initial methodological principles. In other words, researchers must make their research “repeatable,” placing other scholars in a position to retrace the steps that led them to conclude, for example, that Bismarck played a decisive role in the outbreak of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866. It doesn’t matter what the reader’s values are. They must be able to conclude that that method makes those results possible.

In summary, the choice of topic and the process of selecting the facts are subjective, but the research results are objective. But be careful: The results are not “objective” because the researcher reproduces reality in its essence and entirety. The results are objective in the sense that they are “intersubjective.” And they are such because scholars recognize themselves in a shared method or the validity of a particular set of formal procedures. The method creates an intersubjective bond, which makes the research findings valid even for those with different ethical imperatives. For Weber, objectivity is not a metaphysical question, it is not an intrinsic feature of reality, and it is not found in things. Weber does not fall into the “essentialist fallacy” and does not think that thought can draw on essences (Marradi 2007, 60). Objectivity is in the method; it resides in the logic of the social sciences in a series of logically connected formal investigation procedures (Statera 1997, 20; Campelli 1997, 57; Agnoli 1994, 20).

However, the procedure’s transparency is insufficient to guarantee objectivity. It is also necessary for the sociologist to conduct a posteriori verification of the results consisting of resorting to imagination to “subtract” from the historical process a specific cause that the researcher holds to be crucial. Thus, for example, Weber believed that the Protestant religion was one of the fundamental factors in the birth of the capitalist mentality in the West. This method provides that the researcher identifies a society that, while presenting many elements that made possible the birth of capitalism in the West, lacks precisely a religion with the characteristics of Protestantism. Suppose China possessed all the elements necessary for the birth of capitalism but not a religion with the characteristics of Protestantism. In that case, the sociologist can conclude that the Protestant ethic was, most likely, an essential cause of the birth of the modern economy. Weber’s concept of causality is dominated by probability and not by necessity. Causality is the probability that an event follows or accompanies a specific event.

To carry out such a posteriori verification, researchers must first identify a relevant historical development factor. They cannot conduct retrospective verification if they do not identify a relevant cause.

But how do we identify it?

Causal Imputation and Judgments of Possibility

To identify a relevant cause, the researcher resorts to causal imputation: The logical procedure by which individuals attribute a concrete effect to a particular cause. Causal imputation, first of all, needs fantasy, which Weber continually praised in his essays. Causality itself is a category of thought that takes shape through the imagination: “The attribution of effects to causes take place through a process of thought which includes a series of abstractions” (Weber 1906/1949, 171).

However fervent it may be, fantasy cannot reproduce empirical reality in the totality of its particular qualities. Since the number and type of causes that determine a social phenomenon are always infinite, the researcher discards an infinity of elements of the real process, which he considers causally irrelevant, and focuses only on some of them. Caesar’s cardiac arrest under the blows of the conspirators may be relevant from a medical point of view. Still, it is irrelevant for its consequences on the course of universal history; therefore, it will not be the object of historians’ attention.

Immediately afterward, historians carry out a hypothetical process and evaluate the probability that the event they investigated would have occurred even without some antecedent factors. Put more simply, they imagine that an antecedent has taken place differently or that it is absent to test its importance and possibly promote it to the role of a relevant cause.

Weber draws his example from Eduard Meyer’s historiography of the importance of the Persian wars for the cultural development of the West. According to Meyer, the victory of the Greeks in the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) triggered the process that allowed the West to embrace the culture of the Hellenic world and its spiritual freedom instead of the religious-theocratic values of Persian culture. The battle of Marathon triggered a process that produced a series of decisive consequences: From a military point of view, it stimulated the construction of the Athenian naval fleet; and from a cultural point of view, it favored the full development of the drama and of all that particular Greek spiritual life, which we still feed on today.

To arrive at a historical judgment on the battle of Marathon, the researcher creates “imaginative constructs,” isolates some elements, and then makes an unreal construction of the real process. Historians imagine the defeat of the Greeks and reflect on the consequences that the victory of the Persians would have had on the development of universal history. If they conclude that the victory of the Persians would change the cultural values of the West, then the Greek triumph in Marathon is a relevant cause. The assertions about what would have happened if a particular causal component had changed take the name of “judgments of objective possibility” because they are judgments on the development possibilities of a certain historical phenomenon.

One last question remains: If historical imputation requires building a fantastic picture, in what sense are the judgments of possibility “objective”? How can we combine fantasy with objectivity in the study of history?

The judgments of possibility, which we use in unreality, are made “objective” by our knowledge of reality. We know that the Persians used to impose their cultural system on the subjugated peoples. It is, therefore, an objective possibility that, by winning in Marathon, they would have also ended up imposing their values on the Greeks. We cannot have absolute certainty regarding such a development. However, we can speak of an objective possibility based on our historical knowledge of what the Persians had done to the subjugated peoples before the battle of Marathon. Having subjected them to their theocratic values, it is objectively possible that they would have done the same with the Athenians.

The historian must not be embarrassed to have recourse to the counterfactual method or the objective possibility and must not even apologize for imagining the development of history differently from the real one. Like it or not, this cognitive activity characterizes all the minds involved in causal imputation. On every page of any historical work, there are, or rather, there cannot be, judgments of possibility. Replying to those who considered it a waste of time to question the possible developments of a theoretical fiction, Weber wrote that his problematic approach was by no means “idle.”

What is he meant to say?

To identify the most relevant causes of any phenomenon, historians must tell themselves what would have happened if Bismarck had not decided to make war. What causal significance should the investigator attribute to this individual decision within the totality of infinitely numerous factors to be arranged? Historians must ask such questions to rise above a mere chronicle of events and personalities worthy of memory. History has proceeded like this ever since it was a science.

The theory of objective possibility, based on the works of the physiologist Johannes von Kries (1853–1928), whom Weber claimed to have “plundered,” had been probed primarily by jurists specialized in criminal law (Weber 1906/1949, 186; Massimilla 2009, 493; Heidelberger 2015, 14).

The legal charge does not consider all the actions carried out by the accused, but only those relevant for reconstructing their crime according to the laws in force. In legal imputation, the criterion for selecting the facts is represented by laws and not by values. Causal imputation is the basis of the work of all judges. The question of criminal guilt is a pure question of causality—and has the same logical structure as historical causality.

The process of abstraction required by causal imputation unites scholars and ordinary men. To demonstrate this, Weber imagines a young “temperamental” German mother who, after slapping her capricious child in the face, wonders about the pedagogical correctness of her gesture, perhaps pursued by her husband, eager for an explanation. The woman replies that she acted irrationally because she was uneasy due to an earlier fact: A quarrel with the cook. In this way, the wife imagines that day without a real element: The emotional turmoil caused by an unexpected quarrel. Thanks to her empirical knowledge about her usual way of behaving with her child, the woman concludes that her slap was an “accidental reaction,” that is, a reaction not adequately caused to the little child’s behavior. In Weber’s language, the mother makes a causal imputation by resorting to an objective possibility judgment through recourse to adequate causation.

Weber was interested in understanding the logical structure of knowledge. Faced with the “hole of logic,” Meyer and the temperamental mother are no different. The young mother imagines her reaction in the absence of the quarrel with the cook, and Meyer imagines the development of Western culture without the battle of Marathon. When historians analyze the weight of a decision by Napoleon or Bismarck, they logically proceed like the German mother: They imagine reality without Bismarck or Napoleon to understand what importance to attribute to their choices through a hypothetical process. Let’s assume that historians have just finished reconstructing the chain of causal regression of a specific historical event. If they conclude that, by removing or modifying an antecedent, history would still have turned in the same direction, then the antecedent is not causally relevant. It means that we can understand real causal connections by constructing an unreal course of historical events. Judgments of objective possibility help scholars distinguish what is causally essential from what is not.

At this point, Weber concludes his essay by distinguishing between adequate and chance causation, which represent the two extremes of the scale on which a judgment of possibility can be made.

Adequate and Chance Causation

Accidental causation emphasizes the determining importance, or indispensability, of a specific factor, without which we hypothesize that the course of history would most likely have had a different course. Adequate causation, on the other hand, expresses the idea that an event would have occurred even without a specific antecedent factor. Adequate causation indicates that the totality of previous circumstances produced an event, while chance causation suggests that a single cause produced an event.

Adequate causation indicates non-indispensability. On the contrary, chance causation indicates indispensability. Since Weber is extremely convoluted when explaining the difference between the two types of causation, I will first cite the clear examples of Johannes von Kries to deal, only later, with the less clear examples with which Weber expounds his thinking.

Let’s imagine, von Kries writes, that a drunk or sleepy coachman takes the wrong road and their passenger dies struck by lightning. In this case, since falling asleep while driving does not increase the chances of being struck by lightning, we will say that an accidental causal relationship links the driver’s drunkenness and the passenger’s death. The tragedy was fortuitous (Aleo 2009, 329). If the coachman hadn’t taken the wrong turn, the passenger would have been in a safe place.

Things are different if the drunken coachman overturns and the passenger dies. In this case, we speak of adequate causation because drunk driving often results in fatal accidents. A is the adequate cause of B, and B is the adequate effect of A if A generally favors B (Buss 1999, 322). Drunk driving favors the loss of control of the vehicle: If the carriage overturns, the event is appropriate to the situation.

In the first case, the driver’s drunkenness was the chance cause of the effect that the passenger was killed by lightning. We speak of chance causation when an event (drunkenness) produces a consequence (electrocution) that is non-adequate for the situation.

In the second case, the driver’s drunkenness is to be considered as the adequate cause of the tragic effect. The drunkenness of a coachman does not necessarily cause their carriage to overturn, but it does have a certain tendency to have this type of accident occur. We speak of adequate causation when an event (drunkenness) produces a consequence (electrocution) that is adequate to the situation.

The distinction between adequate causation and chance causation is not found in outer reality as an objective fact to be grasped with a simple glance: It is the fruit of our mental manipulation of reality, so much so that scholars often disagree on what the adequate causes and accidental causes of a phenomenon are.

Weber cites the example of the two gunshots in front of the Berlin castle that prompted the people to raise the barricades, giving rise to the “March Revolution” or German Revolution of 1848, when the reaction of the army caused over 200 civilian casualties (Price 1989, 40).

Suppose historians conclude that, without those two bullets, the March Revolution would not have happened. In that case, accidental causation exists between the two gunshots and violence, and the two bullets assume a decisive causal power. If, on the other hand, historians conclude that the revolution would have broken out even without the two gunshots because the insurrectional climate in Berlin was overloaded, the relationship between shooting and violence is of adequate causation. The two bullets lose much of their causal importance.

This passage explains how Weber explained the difference between adequate and chance causation. Since the period is convoluted, I have highlighted Weber’s basic words in bold to bring out his thinking more clearly:

If, on the contrary, for example, it were to be argued convincingly that without those two shots in front of the Berlin Castle, a revolution “would,” in the light of general empirical rules, have been avoidable with a decidedly high degree of probability, because it could be shown in the light of general empirical rules that the combination of the other “conditions” would not, or at least not considerably, have “favored”—in the sense explained before the outbreak—without the intervention of those shots, then we would speak of “chance” causation and we should, in that case—a case, to be sure, very difficult to envisage—have to “impute” the March Revolution to those two shots. (Weber 1906/1949, 185)

For the sake of clarity, I will rephrase this passage from Weber simply and directly: Suppose it were to be believed that those two shots in front of the Berlin castle caused the revolution. In that case, we should speak of chance causation and therefore causally impute the revolution to those two shots, which, in this way, become fundamental and indispensable because they unleashed a great riot in a peaceful context that did not make such a civil catastrophe imaginable.

Suppose Weber’s thinking continues to appear difficult. In that case, Frank Parkin’s clarity will come to our aid with an example of the outbreak of World War I and another on the start of the October Revolution:

Adequate causation applies where the cumulative build-up of social and political tensions has reached such an explosive pitch that any one of a number of quite different critical events could provide the spark needed to set off the powder keg. Thus, even if the Archduke had not been assassinated, the tense political situation in Europe at the time might lead us to suppose that some other major “incident” would have produced a similar result. Chance causation, on the other hand, applies where the social explosion is caused by one unique spark, a factor or event for which there was no substitute. An example of this would be Trotsky’s assessment of Lenin’s role in the October revolution. According to Trotsky, if Lenin had not been present to take personal charge of events there would have been no revolution. To “think away” Lenin is to posit a very different outcome to Russian history. (Parkin 1988, 38)

Let us now let Fritz Ringer explain the difference between adequate and chance causation:

The revolution of 1848 in Berlin was the adequate effect of prevailing social and political conditions, and the two untraced shots were not even ‘accidental’ causes, since the upheaval would have occurred without them. […] Thus where an actual result was brought about by a complex of antecedent conditions that made it ‘objective probable,’ ‘the cause’ may be called ‘adequate’ in relation to ‘the effect.’ Where a causal factor contributed to a historically interesting aspect of an outcome without being ‘adequate’ in this sense, it may be considered its ‘accidental cause.’ (Ringer 1997, 68)

In a book on sociological theory, Raymond Aron’s explanation of the difference between adequate and chance causation cannot be missing:

An example of sociological causality would be the proposition that, given France’s over-all situation in 1848, revolution was probable, meaning that any of a large number of accidents of all kinds could have brought it about. Similarly, to say that in 1914 war was probable means that, the European political system being what it was, any of a large number of different accidents could have produced the explosion. Thus, the causality between a situation and an event is adequate when we feel that the situation made the event, if not inevitable, at least very probable. Of course, the degree of probability of this relation varies with circumstances. (Aron 1970, vol. II, 241)

For Weber, causality is an interpretation: “Theory—Weber argues quoting Goethe—is involved in the fact” (Weber 1906/1949, 173). Before Weber, Nietzsche had written against positivism: “There are only facts—I would say: no, there are no facts, only interpretations. […] It’s all subjective. […] The world […] can be interpreted differently, it has no meaning behind it, but innumerable senses ‘perspectivism’” (Nietzsche 2021, 136).

With his theory of causality, Weber attacked the version of historical materialism contained in The Communist Manifesto, where Marx ensures that historical development will lead to the world revolution of the proletariat under the pressure of objective and necessary forces. Weber denied that the future was predictable with such precision. Every social phenomenon is caused by a “constellation” of causes. History can always take an unpredictable turn based on the choices of a political leader, an accidental event, or a decisive military battle (Aron 1970, vol. II, 243). In so doing, Weber safeguarded the importance of the man of action and politics in forging history.

Weber never stopped challenging historical materialism, as he did in his most famous work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904b), to which I am about to dedicate myself.

The Definition of Capitalism

Weber saw the triumph of rational action over purpose in modern capitalism, which permeates Western civilization. Capitalists calculate everything and leave nothing to chance. They calculate income and expenses methodically, constantly, and rationally.

Before presenting his definition of capitalism, Weber rapped those who persisted in indicating the characteristic trait of capitalist action in the thirst for money. The auri sacra fames is as old as the history of humanity. It would be entirely wrong to think that the greed for gold arose with Western capitalism. On the contrary, capitalism has disciplined irrational impulses. The capitalist is not an irrational social figure, wriggling in a thousand directions like a starving man. The greed for gold has nothing to do with the attitude of mind Weber names the “spirit of capitalism.”

In Weber’s definition, capitalist action is oriented toward the constant growth of capital by increasing profits, achieved peacefully through market exchange. The characteristic feature of modern capitalism is profitability or systematically and rationally renewed profit.

Weber excluded profit obtained by violent means and exploitation from his definition of capitalism. The insistence on exploiting workers appeared to him as a form of moral denunciation, which was badly reconciled with his value-free sociology (Jedlowski 2019, 131). Weber argued that his studies on capitalism were rigorously empirical and added controversially: “Whoever wants a sermon should go to the conventicle” (Weber 1904b/1958, 29).

Weber observed that economic systems, similar to modern capitalism, had developed in China, India, Babylon, Egypt, Mediterranean antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern age. History has known various types of capitalism, including booty capitalism, pariah capitalism, traditional capitalism, and rational capitalism (Parkin 1988, 41).

Booty capitalism accumulates wealth through warfare, plunder, and speculation. Its typical representative is the “robber baron.”

Pariah capitalism is animated by social groups not belonging to the ruling classes that seek to accumulate wealth through commercial activities, including interest-bearing loans. Its typical representative is a Jew.

Traditional capitalism is supported by large companies and has been found in all civilizations since ancient times. However, these enterprises pursued specific and limited earnings goals, not being designed to accumulate steady and increasing profits.

Weber believed that rational capitalism had a peculiarity of its own: The rational organization of formally free labor, namely the employment of legally free wage workers.

The affirmation of Western capitalism required a series of “components of indisputable importance,” including (1) private appropriation of all material means of production: Land, equipment, machines, tools, and so on must concentrate in the hands of entrepreneurs and be under their control for profit so that decisions regarding their purchase and use can be calculated with maximum efficiency. (2) Freedom of market, which must be free from irrational limitations, which hinder trade. In a free market, the classes cannot impose a particular way of leading life on entire categories of individuals or a certain type of consumption; nor can they prevent a bourgeois from owning a noble estate or a knight from working. (3) Rational technology, that is a highly calculable and therefore mechanized technique so that it is possible to accurately calculate the costs of production and the costs of moving goods. (4) Rational or calculable law: To act economically rationally, the capitalist economic enterprise must be able to assume that justice and public administration act predictably according to a system of universal rules. Capitalist action is incompatible with the king’s discretionary justice, which continually disturbs economic calculations. (5) Free labor, or individuals who are free to sell their labor power on the market and forced to work to survive. Capitalism needs a social stratum without property. Otherwise, there would be no “reserve army” to be hired at low prices under the pang of hunger; at the same time, these hungry men have to offer themselves spontaneously on the market so that the capitalists can calculate the costs of products based on labor contracts. (6) The commercialization of economic life or the possibility of using commercial instruments to represent share rights in enterprise and property ownership (Weber 1927/1961, 208–209).

Weber also attached great importance to the role of the modern bureaucratic state, which provided the basis for creating a reliable system of banking, investment, contract, and property supported by courts of justice that make universally binding decisions. Furthermore, the state has pacified large territories, demolished customs barriers, and standardized currency and taxation (Collins 1980, 928; Rossi 1982, 32).

But the affirmation of capitalism is not just a question of workers who can refuse a job. It is also a question of ideas capable of eradicating the traditionalist mentality, which prevails when workers prefer to earn less rather than work more; when they raise the “wall of habit” against innovations in production (Weber 1904b/1958, 62); and when they try to get as little fatigue as possible in the workplace. Traditionalism prevails over economic rationalism even when entrepreneurs work little and comfortably; when they prefer to have direct and personal relationships with workers, customers, and competitors, thus limiting the range of action of their companies; and when, once they have reached comfort, they do not feel the need to enrich themselves more.

Weber attributes Protestantism, particularly one of its most rigorist and austere versions, Calvinism, a decisive role in this cultural battle against economic traditionalism. Calvinism forged the spirit of capitalism, which freed men from the ambivalent conception of money, desired and, at the same time, condemned as the source of sin. The spirit of capitalism is the rational spirit. From a historical point of view, Weber wanted to reconstruct the genesis of capitalism; from a methodological point of view, he wanted to affirm the causal power of ideas.

I now turn my attention to the ideas emanating from Reformed Christianity, to which Weber attributed such an important role in forming the capitalist spirit.

Calvinism and the Spirit of Capitalism

It is known—Weber writes in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism—that an intense religiosity distance oneself from mundane affairs and that a life dedicated to economic pursuit makes one indifferent to religious life (Bendix 1977, 57). However, he believed he had caught an exception to this rule in the first Calvinist entrepreneurs, who worked to enrich themselves under the pressure of a religious obsession: The soul’s salvation.

Unlike Catholicism, the Calvinist theory of predestination denied that man could determine his otherworldly future with good works. For Calvin (1509–1564), God decides which men are destined for salvation and whom to damnation before entering the world. Since this “decretum horribile” is unchangeable for eternity and God’s will is inscrutable, men can only have the hope, never the certainty, of being among the predestined, since divine grace cannot be derived from any outward sign: Even those who attend church could be damned. Thanks to the theological corrections that Calvin’s successors made to this doctrine of inhuman pathos, the Protestant masses were pushed toward a laborious life rather than toward fatalism and despair. The Puritan preachers developed a particular conception of life, combining intense religiosity and great industriousness. Their sermons conceived the world as an instrument for the glory of God, to whom they attributed the bourgeois desire to see his earthly kingdom dominated by prosperity and wealth. Economic and professional success thus became the hope to hold on to. Entrepreneurs and Calvinist workers could not have the certitudo salutis, but they could at least hope their success in working life resulted from divine benevolence. Why would God make a damned rich and prosperous?

From the point of view of the early Calvinist entrepreneurs, the chosen Christian exists only to increase the glory of God in the world through the execution of his commandments. Calvinism conceived of work as a “calling” (beruf), a task assigned by God for the glory and splendor of his kingdom on earth (Zaretti 2003, 32). Calvinists exclusively work in “majorem gloriam Dei.” In their ethical system, labor is a “vocation-profession” to serve the mundane life of the Christian community in such a way as to correspond to God’s purpose (Weber [1904] 1958, 108). Working to get rich was a worldly activity but at the service of a severe and demanding God. Richard Baxter (1615–1691), a Puritan preacher who became popular under Charles I, argued that God was served and honored mainly through action. This was tantamount to saying that the true believer spends more time working than contemplating. This is “worldly asceticism,” the religious effort to transform the profane world to adapt it to God’s will (Poggi 1983, 40). Worldly asceticism is not monastic asceticism; the Weberian Calvinist is not the medieval monk locked in the cloister to meditate.

These religious contents of consciousness also played a role in capitalist accumulation. The early Calvinist entrepreneurs, instead of squandering their earnings on material pleasures, led a sober life, accumulating wealth that they reinvested. The fruits of labor, a means of glorifying God, could not be squandered for the pleasures of the flesh or unproductive entertainment. Performing one’s religious duty in worldly professions became the highest ethical behavior of all. This was a new historical fact, never happened before.

Furthermore, Calvinism provided the capitalist with meek, hardworking, and attached workers to work, and also legitimized social inequalities, leading to the belief that the social structure, with its significant differences between rich and poor, was the product of God’s will that no one should have tried to understand since God’s will is inscrutable.

Weber did not intend to replace the materialistic explanation of capitalism with a spiritualistic one. If the world is an “immense cosmos,” as he defined it, sociology must speak of contributing causes and propose multicausal explanations. Ascetic Protestantism was one of the cultural influences that made it possible for capitalism to take root and not its only cause.

Another important aspect of Weber’s analysis is that capitalism did not arise from a planned and conscious project of the Calvinists. It was formed spontaneously, unintentionally, from the combined action of those individuals who, animated by the same acquisitive mentality, contributed to shaping the modern economy’s structures. Once built, those structures imposed themselves from the outside coercively. In a language similar to that of a holist like Durkheim, Weber writes that today’s capitalist order is an “immense cosmos” in which individuals are brought into being, as a practically non-changeable environment, in which they are forced to live (Weber 1904b/1958, 54). Present-day capitalism imposes its rules of action on those involved in the system of market relationships. The manufacturer, who constantly contravenes these norms, is eliminated economically, and the worker who cannot or does not want to adapt to them is forced to beg.

In Weber’s methodological individualism, individuals create social structures through interaction. Still, these take on a life of their own and escape the control of their creators, sometimes taking unexpected and even unwanted paths. The Calvinists who gave birth to ascetic capitalism could not have imagined that the process of secularization would have stripped capitalism of its ethical-religious sense to transform it into a cold and impersonal economic system, animated by agonal, competitive passions which—Weber writes—often make it similar to a “sport,” especially in the United States, where the pursuit of wealth has reached its highest development. Weber did not like this type of capitalism stripped of its ethical meaning (Weber 1904b/1958, 182).

Capitalism, Confucianism, and Hinduism

Weber’s studies on capitalism allow for greater clarity on the procedure for guaranteeing objective knowledge. Let’s see how he eliminated a historical fact from the complex of factors under consideration to weigh its causal significance.

In his comparative analysis of religions in different civilizations, Weber noted that China had many characteristics similar to those that had made the emergence of Western capitalism possible. However, the Chinese only developed rudimentary capitalism, devoid of rational economic enterprises. Weber analyzed the obstacles to the development of modern capitalism in the social structure of Chinese society, which prevented the state from effectively centralizing power. Referring to the studies of Wilhelm Grube (1855–1908), Professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Berlin, he included, among the various obstacles, the language, which, persevering in its figurative character, was not rationalized in alphabetic writing like that created by the mercantile peoples of the Middle Ages, thus hindering the development of systematic thought, unlike the Hellenic, Latin, French, German, and Russian languages. Writing and reading, not speaking, were considered the authentic activities of the gentleman.

Talking remained a plebeian practice that did not bring social prestige. In contrast to Hellenism, which exalted conversation and spoken dialogue, the highest exponents of Chinese literary culture remained “deaf and mute in their silken splendor” (Weber 1968, 124). With this beautiful metaphor, Weber means that the Chinese men of letters were far from the Socratic dialogues. Gentlemen didn’t like to speak and listen. Writing and reading were artistically valued practices worth of refined men.

Furthermore, China failed to equip itself with a rational administration and a system of formal laws necessary for developing large-scale industries and protecting the market. In this universe of contributing causes, including the lack of wars and overseas trade, Weber turned his gaze to Confucianism and Taoism, which he compared with Calvinism.

Confucianism had a “highly bookish” conception of the formation of literati. The best minds in China, being educated in a courtly conception of culture, ended up considering the problems of the administration of the economy as a cowardly job to be entrusted to men of lower rank. The Confucians devoted their time to a type of intellectuality far removed from the material problems of everyday life. Although they appreciated wealth, they opposed the common man, of whom they disdained manual labor and frugal life. Working in an economic enterprise to make a profit was considered a shame by those who, in possession of the culture, had the power to influence the values of the ruling class. In Confucianism, there was no idea that physical work was an ethical duty and the idea of salvation through works was absent. If anything, there was the idea of preserving tradition. The Chinese rulers took little interest in giving impetus to the rationalization of economic life and society. The thought of Confucius, adopted as a state ethics starting from the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), shaped the bureaucratic-administrative system of China. To take up government posts, it was necessary to have passed the state exams based on the knowledge of classical texts, which collected the historical, poetic, and philosophical knowledge of Chinese civilization from the ninth to the fourth century BC. This traditionalism was reinforced by the law which allowed only Confucian scholars to assume official positions, from which the bourgeois and priests were excluded. The worldly asceticism of Calvinism was not incubated even by Taoism, with its mysticism, its magical-ascetic techniques, and its traditionalism hostile to innovations.

As for the relationship between economics and religion in India, Weber identified a formidable bulwark for the development of modern capitalism in the caste system. The priestly caste of the Brahmins, occupying the top of Hindu society, conditioned its developments in a strongly traditionalist sense. The Brahmanic religion was based on a contemptuous education toward worldly affairs. Brahmins too displayed a haughty detachment from business, profit, manual labor, interest-bearing loans, and attached great importance to cultural education. All of this does not suggest a world centered on rational actions with respect to purpose. Instead, rational action with respect to value and traditional action prevailed, enemies of the company’s accounting.

In addition to India’s social structure and the Brahmins’ ethos, the Hindu religion added another obstacle to the birth of modern capitalism: The doctrine of reincarnation, according to which men are born into the caste they deserve on the basis of their actions in a previous life. To evolve socially, men must first die physically, as it is impossible to pass through a higher caste until the next reincarnation. While waiting for death, merits are obtained by cultivating the spirit, not economic activities. Manual labor and success in professional life cannot change the caste situation and are not helpful for future reincarnation. The Hindus are, therefore, required to lead their lives within the social perimeter where their cast has confined them since birth and to respect the precepts of tradition. Capitalism is change; tradition is conservation.

Ideal Type of Domination and Causal Imputation

We have seen that empirical reality is an infinite becoming. To give a cognitive order to empirical chaos, Weber endowed sociology with a heuristic tool, the ideal type: A mental image that contains the most relevant properties of a social phenomenon. Capitalism, bureaucracy, religious sect, state, and the battle are examples of ideal types that allow the sociologist to make measurements and comparisons.

Once the fundamental characteristics of capitalism have been described, a sociologist can compare different economic systems or forms of capitalism. The reason is obvious: A comparison is correct if it compares the same properties of other empirical cases. The ideal type of bureaucracy, for example, makes it possible to compare the precision, speed, univocity, publicity of the documents, continuity, discretion, cohesion, rigid subordination, reduction of contrasts, objective expenses, and personnel of the Chinese bureaucracy with the European one or to compare the state bureaucracy with that of private industry. The religious sect, in its ideal-typical form, is a “pure ecclesia” formed by a spiritual aristocracy, which has the task of keeping away “the mangy sheep so that they do not offend the gaze of God. By the time the researchers agree that the “obsession with purity” is one of the main characteristics of the religious sect (Orsini 2011, 3), they can compare the level of closure to the outside world of two or more sects or of the same sect at different times (Pozzi 1992, 165; Maniscalco 1998, 20).

In addition to making comparison and measurement possible, the ideal type plays a vital role in the causal imputation procedure. By describing the usual course of a particular social action, the ideal type makes it possible to compare a recurring behavior with one that deviates from the norm. In this way, it becomes easier to identify the causes that have altered the typical way of acting of an individual or an institution. The ideal type favors explanation through the description. Only by having a mental image of the typical way of acting of stock market investors, to cite the example of Weber, can the sociologist realize if an irrational element has altered their usual interactions. The ideal action allows us to evaluate real action, and we can say that an action is irrational only if we know the characteristics of a rational action. This is why analyzing stock market panic requires the sociologist first to know how individuals would have acted fearlessly. To establish the cause that triggered the panic, it is necessary to know the expected behavior of investors when the stock market is governed by pure means-ends rationality (Weber 1913/1981, 154).

In the same way, the ideal type of battle, describing the characteristic development of a military confrontation, makes it possible to grasp the errors of the commanders and to pronounce a historical judgment on their conduct: A judgment which, according to the principles of inclusive sociology, must take account of the knowledge the generals possessed at the time they acted.

I will try to clarify the fundamental function of the ideal type with a question: If we don’t know how soldiers should act in certain circumstances, how can we assess whether they acted rationally, axiologically, affectively, or traditionally?

Only after having worked out the ideal type of battle can researchers measure the distance between historical reality and the theoretical frame of reference they built in their thought. This means that the value of an ideal type depends on its usefulness and, therefore, can only be appreciated during research. The ideal type does not have to be true; it must be useful and immediately abandoned as soon as it proves it is inadequate (Freund 1969, 66).

No less important is the ideal type’s function in probabilistic predictions. By attributing to specific individuals a recurrent way of acting, the ideal type allows us to hypothesize how they will behave, with a certain degree of probability, in a situation ruled by a system of choices and constraints. Think of the economic man in economics textbooks, created through the accentuation of one characteristic at the expense of others, namely the search for personal profit. In short, the ideal type has nothing to do with an ethical ideal of conduct and is never found in its pure state in the outer reality. It is obtained by accentuating some characteristics of human conduct to the detriment of others, which is considered secondary.

This is precisely the task that Weber attributed to sociology: To identify the “empirical uniformities” that characterize the way of acting of specific individuals or institutions. Sociology’s generalizing task and history’s individualizing task are plain clear. Sociology investigates typical modes of action, whereas history is concerned with the causal explanation of individual events that influenced human destiny (Weber 1922/1978, vol. I, 29).

For Weber, scholars who refuse to elaborate ideal types end up using them anyway without being aware of them or filtering reality through prejudices and clichés since knowledge of the world cannot progress without having a mental image of its particular aspects. Conceptual rigor is decisive in the scientific enterprise because the progress of science implies the continuous creation of concepts. No concepts, no progress in science.

The conceptual purity of the ideal type serves to study the empirical reality.

The theory of the ideal type also makes it possible to clarify the relationship between sociology and history. According to Weber, the first elaborates abstract models for studying empirical reality, while the second causally explains why a certain phenomenon deviates from its ideal-typical representation (Roth 1976, 307). The Weberian distinction between history and sociology could be summed up with the following question: “Given that, according to the sociologist, the typical battle takes place in this way, why, according to the historian, did that particular battle unfold differently?” In a letter to Georg von Below, dated June 21, 1914, Weber states that history must determine what the specific characteristics of the medieval city are, but this requires establishing what is lacking in the ancient, the Chinese, and the Islamic city. History intervenes to find the causal explanations of these specific traits identified by sociology (Bendix 1946, 522). Randall Collins argued that thanks to the ideal type, Weber could explain the birth of capitalism on the basis of a real “causal chain,” which Randall Collins reconstructed in a complex scheme (Collins 1986, 27–28).

Among Weber’s most famous ideal types is that of authority, which he distinguished into rational-legal, traditional, and charismatic.

First, Weber distinguishes power (Macht), domination (Herrschaft), and discipline that are just uncritical automatic obedience in stereotyped forms under habituation.

Power is a sociologically “amorphous” concept because it does not require purposes or motivations on the part of the subject who acts upon external submission or coercion: “Power (Macht) is the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance, regardless of the basis on which this probability rests” (Weber 1922/1978, vol. I, 53). Power procures forced obedience without consent.

On the other hand, domination is legitimate authority based on a willingness to obey and can be of three types.

Rational-legal authority derives its legitimacy from formal legality. In this case, individuals obey an impersonal order based on a system of laws. The willingness to obey is based on the belief in the legality of the established legal systems. More than obeying the person, men obey the juridically sanctioned precepts. Rational-legal authority is clearly manifested in the bureaucracy of industrial societies. Emotionless, bureaucratic power is concerned only with mechanically adjusting the means to the ends. The more perfect the bureaucratic power becomes, the more inhumane it becomes. Bureaucracy develops through dehumanizing itself. In fulfilling office affairs, bureaucracy excludes all human feelings: Love, hatred, and everything that is irrational or incalculable.

Traditional authority rests on the belief that tradition is sacred and has always been valid. In this case, men obey a person of flesh and blood, the lord, who is bound to respect the tradition from which he/she derives respect.

Charismatic authority is founded on the belief in the extraordinary virtues attributed to the leader. Charismatic leaders enjoy the personal trust of their followers, who recognize in them a heroic strength. Charisma is an extraordinary quality attributed to a person. Charisma can derive from a gift of the body, such as the physical strength of the charismatic warrior, or the spirit, such as the extraordinary virtues attributed to Jesus.

Whether the will to obey is rooted in law, charisma, or tradition, the authority holders must strive to convince the dominated that their subordinate status is just and that authority must not be challenged. According to Weber, the consensus-based domain is much more stable than the force-based domain. Weber was particularly interested in the transformations charismatic authority undergoes when the extraordinary gifts attributed to the leader wear off or when the leader dies.

The Charismatic Community

Weber specifies that value-free sociology is not interested in verifying whether a person objectively has an extraordinary gift or if this gift is execrable or admirable. Weber studies charisma in a value-neutral manner (Tucker 1968, 735). What matters to value-free sociology is that charismatic leaders must pass tests to prove their powers are true or have not vanished. Otherwise, they will lose their followers.

The risk of repudiation is always lurking because the charismatic community is an “emotional community” and, as such, rather labile. It is not based on a stable body of officials, regularly salaried for their professional skills. Promotions and the growth of social prestige take place irrationally, based on the mood of charismatic leaders or their revelations. Since the charismatic community has no administrative apparatus based on a body of officials, it has no internal careers, legal principles, or hierarchies. Income is occasional, mostly linked to generous offers, donations, and begging. Such a fluid community, which rests much more on enthusiasm than material interest, falls apart more quickly in the face of difficulties than a community with solid economic and legal foundations.

From a psychological point of view, the recognition of charisma is a personal act of faith determined by the followers’ enthusiasm, need, and hope, which must be continually renewed. If he/she is a prophet, the charismatic hero needs to renew his/her miracles; if he/she is a leader, he/she must always win new battles with astonishing and unprecedented actions. Charismatics leader are doomed to report continued successes.

When they fail in their mission, charismatic leaders can even transform themselves into the scapegoat: From heroes capable of curing the followers’ ills, they become the only ones responsible for their misfortunes and are punished with death. Weber cites the parable of Jesus as a case of the disappearance of the charisma: Jesus had announced that he was the son of God and that he had superhuman powers, but then he was arrested and humiliated, like an ordinary mortal. Ultimately, he dies crucified, abandoned by his father, who does not intervene to save him.

Luciano Cavalli has dedicated an in-depth study of the figure of Jesus in Weber’s work. The Lord, understood as a historical figure, was a genuinely charismatic leader who demanded obedience from his disciples. He posed not only as a spiritual guide but also as a leader who takes every decision on his own, communicating it without discussing it. Jesus orders and commands in the typical domination language. Those who express doubts and fears are reprimanded. The son of God shows detachment and superiority toward his followers, with the typical attitude of those who feel they belong to an aristocracy and who conceive their simple physical presence as a remuneration for which to be grateful. Like all pure charismatic leaders, Jesus practiced commensality and communism of love in his community. If, however, the scribes and Pharisees proved to be incredulous and hostile, Jesus moved to the attack instead of turning the other cheek showing himself to be a ready and flexible fighter who knew how to use all the weapons of intelligence and dialectic. He is supported by a high passion, which can make him imperious, aggressive, and even violent, even driving the merchants from the temple. A fighter who is always, in any case, a winner (contrary to what Nietzsche says), up to the passion of the cross. The charisma of his word allows him to prevail over anyone and subjugate the mass (Cavalli 1981b, 165; 1986, 67–81).

Weber thinks that genuine charisma, pure and uncorrupted, always had the hours numbered. No community can live forever on momentum and emotion. Suppose the charismatic community does not dissolve due to its leader’s death or failures. In that case, the miseries of everyday life contaminate the purity of the charismatic rulership, which faces “a slow death by suffocation under the weight of material interests” (Weber 1922/1978, vol. II, 1120). The collective excitement produced by extraordinary events that gave birth to charismatic rulership cannot last forever.

The fact that the charismatic community does not have a rational economic and bureaucratic organization does not mean it lacks a social structure. On the contrary, Weber speaks of “the social structure of charismatic domination” and of a “charismatic aristocracy,” made up of a small group of adherents who have government duties by virtue of their proximity to the leader, a consequence of fervent discipleship, based on devotion and loyalty to the supreme leader. Everything is conceived as a voluntary act. Although there are no formal obligations, those who are charismatically dominated perceive offering gifts or goods to charismatic leadership as a duty of conscience. Charismatic leaders must be careful about redistributing resources because the distribution of material goods also incorporates the distribution of prestige and honor. Does the fact that a follower received less mean that he/she is less virtuous? Despite the absence of formal accounting, bearers of charismatic authority must carefully respect the claims of communality relating to the goods they have received. The internal divisions alter the purity of the charismatic structure, which turns toward other structural forms. Weber does not conceive of the charismatic community as free of tensions. Charismatic rulers also have to deal with the ordinary problems of everyday life.

Charismatic authority, being an extraordinary power resulting from emotional states, stands in open contrast to traditional and rational-legal authority, which, on the other hand, are ordinary powers. Charismatic leaders deny and upset the tradition. They say: “It is written, but I tell you of a truth.” They establish new principles and affirm a new conception of the world. Charismatic certainty is so strong that it can overturn the past without wavering in uncertainty. This is why charisma is an eminently revolutionary force.

The contrast between charismatic and bureaucratic authority is also evident. The latter is a specifically rational power based on rules susceptible to critical discussion, which can be analyzed discursively. Conversely, charismatic power is irrational, unstable, and unregulated. Its irrationality makes conflicts between charismatic leaders competing for leadership very bitter. When a charismatic antagonist claims to be the source of truth, the contrast can only be resolved with magical means or with a pronouncement by the community, called to take sides with its emotional charge. In charismatic conflicts, the law can only be on one side. The defeated party has attempted to carry out a usurpation and now it must atone for its boldness. The fight for charismatic leadership involves a zero-sum game: Only one of the two revelations can be true. Irrationality and lack of rules exacerbate the conflict over legitimacy. There are two fields: Truth on the one hand and fraud on the other.

Pure charisma despises and rejects using the gift of grace to obtain an income. Charismatic leaders do not despise money but the ordinary economy, whether rational or traditional, based on regular and continuous economic activity. Yet, charismatic rulers need to cover their needs and can even resort to violence against an occasional prey to take possession of its goods. However, from the point of view of rational economics, charisma is an anti-economic force. Its earnings can only be occasional, and it must always flaunt inner indifference and detachment in the face of earning possibilities. The phrase of St. Paul, “those who do not work do not eat,” is not an invitation to develop a rational economy but a condemnation of the parasitism of the missionaries and an encouragement to procure for themselves the means to survive. Charisma, being a revolutionary form of authority, produces, in its followers, an inner change based on necessity and enthusiasm, which opens up a new way of thinking and standing before the world.

In the early stages of its formation, when it is still in its nascent state, the charismatic power takes on an extraordinary character and the social relationships on which it is based are strictly personal. However, if charisma is consolidated and establishes a community, it is obliged to normalize itself to face daily life’s practical problems. This requires the charism to undergo an essential change and to transform itself in a traditional sense, in a rational-legal sense, or through a combination of rationalism and traditionalism.

The Charismatic Succession

What happens when charismatic leaders die?

The men closest to him and his followers may have an ideal or material interest in giving their union a stable and lasting character to prevent it from dissolving. The emotional community, orphaned by the leader, must ensure his continuous resuscitation, raising the succession problem. How the emotional community identifies the successor is decisive for the type of social relationships on which it will be founded.

The succession can be solved through six methods of charismatic succession.

The first method is “search”: The community searches for a new leader on the basis of some charismatic signs. Suppose the successor is identified in this way. In that case, a tradition is born based on a system of rules that leads back to the original personalization of charisma: Followers must obey a person of extraordinary qualities. When the new leader is also dead, it will be necessary to search for another person with the signs of charisma.

The second method is “revelation”: The community resorts to an oracle, a lottery, a judgment of God, or another rule, which creates a “legalization.” The new bearer charismatic leader derives his/her right to be obeyed from the legitimacy of a technique, which allows the new leader to reveal his/her extraordinary qualities.

The third method is “designation by original leader”: The charismatic leader indicates the charismatic successor before dying and is then recognized by the ruled community once the ruling leader passes away. In this case, Weber speaks of “acquired legitimacy.”

The fourth method is “designation by qualified staff” which comes from the administrative apparatus invested in the charismatic legitimacy of deciding who is the new bearer of charisma. Community recognition of the designated leader is equally necessary.

The fifth way is “hereditary charisma,” based on the idea that charisma is a quality of blood. In the case of “hereditary charisma,” the gift of grace is inherent in the group of relatives closest to the dying leader. If the relatives are numerous, a conflict may arise around the order of succession, which can be resolved using one of the four methods listed above as long as the search occurs within the parental group. In Medieval Western Europe and Japan, the univocal principle of the hereditary right of the firstborn was affirmed, avoiding many fratricidal struggles for the charismatic inheritance and consolidating the political group. The principle of the hereditary right of the firstborn has fused traditionalization with legalization, evaporating the problem of the signs of charisma. The firstborn was not required to possess the gift of divine grace, nor was ruled involved in recognizing the ruler. This is the case with the hereditary monarchies and hereditary hierocracies of Asia.

The sixth way is the “objectification of the charisma” or the charisma of office, that is, the conception that the charisma can be transmitted from bearer to another man through ritual means (Clark 1997, 582–601). Legitimacy no longer concerns the individual person but the ritual. The gift of grace is acquired by transmission. Weber cites the case of the priestly charism, transmitted through purification, anointing, or the laying on of hands, and that of the “royal charism,” transmitted and confirmed by the anointing and coronation.

The transformation of charisma into daily practice does not end with the designation of the new power-bearer. The main problem, Weber explains, is represented by the transformation of the charismatic administration apparatus, which must pass from the emotionally extraordinary phase to the rationally ordinary phase. The charismatic incandescent nucleus cannot last forever without basing its existence on regular income administered rationally. In the nascent state, a small layer of disciples and followers can follow the charismatic leader and live on enthusiasm, patronage, prey, and occasional income. However, such an existence cannot last forever and, above all, it is not suitable for very large groups.

Bureaucratization and Types of Rationality

Weber saw in “universal bureaucratization” the darker side of the rationalization process in the Western world. According to him, an omnipotent bureaucracy endowed with an indestructible power would have impoverished our lives and reduced our freedoms. The bureaucracy is, in fact, an apparatus of the state which, by constantly producing new laws and regulations, grows continuously. With the expression “universal bureaucratization,” Weber referred to the immeasurable growth of the state’s ability to imperatively intervene in the lives of individuals, who, with time, would have become even more potent than that of ancient Egypt. The modern bureaucracy is distinguished, in fact, from the ancient bureaucracy for the fusion of specialization with rational professional education, which makes the power of the modern bureaucrat unbreakable. For Weber: “The future belongs to bureaucratization” (Weber 1922/1978, Vol. II, 1401).

The same parties are increasingly governed by permanently paid employees who work behind the scenes and have the power to make the most important decisions regarding the candidacies and the program to be implemented. Mass society and the progressive enlargement of electoral suffrage force political parties to struggle for consensus incessantly. The one with the best organization or the best body of officials with permanent employment and specialized education wins.

Weber saw a valid obstacle to bureaucratic power in private entrepreneurs, the only ones who can compete with the specialized training of bureaucrats since they are interested in directly managing the information necessary to resist economic competition. But what would have happened if the private entrepreneur had been canceled from economic planning? Weber was greatly distressed by this possibility and expressed concern in his post-World War I writings (Ferraresi and Spreafico 1975, 26; Adler 2012, 244).

Reflecting on the hypothesis of a concentration of the means of production in the hands of the bureaucracy, Weber wrote that had capitalism been eliminated, state bureaucracy would dominate society. Workers and salaried employees would be less free than in private capitalism because every power struggle against state bureaucracy power would be hopeless. The top management of private enterprises and state bureaucracy that now compete and keep each other in check would merge into one all-powerful body forming a single unbeatable hierarchy. Limiting the employer’s power would be impossible since no agency would commit itself to fighting a losing battle against a machine similar to the Oriental-Egyptian type but even more unbreakable due its inhuman rationality. For Weber, nobody could have denied that the womb of the future is pregnant with this tragic potentiality: The end of “individualist” freedom.

Even the parliamentary system did not seem to him an effective remedy to counteract the power of state bureaucracy because Germany then had a parliament occupied by bureaucrats. In the modern state, true power does not manifest itself in parliamentary speeches or declarations by sovereigns. The true power is in the hands of the military and civilian bureaucracy that manipulate the administration of the daily life of millions of people. In Weber’s words, a condemnation of the Bolshevik power system is implicit.

Anthony Giddens noted that of the three founding fathers of sociology, Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, the most pessimistic was Max Weber, who saw in the modern world a paradox in which material progress was achieved only at the expense of an expansion of bureaucracy that ended up suffocating the creativity and autonomy of the individual (Giddens 1990, 7). Due to his pessimistic theory of bureaucracy, Weber has also been considered a contributor to the theory of the “disciplinary society” (O’Neil 1986, 42–60).

The principle that researchers need to keep their biases and moral judgments out of their research should not lead us to believe that Weber was devoid of political ideals and passions. Nor should we believe he had a high opinion of modern capitalists just because he ennobled their genesis in his The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

As for the society in which he lived, Weber was critical of Bismarck’s authoritarianism, which he reproached for having stifled all independent leadership, toward the German monarchy and Emperor Wilhelm II, whom he accused of amateurism and incompetence (Lukacs 1981, 70), but also toward the German bourgeoisie, whom he reproached for having a weak class consciousness and for not fighting against the power of the state bureaucracy. Equally severe were his judgments against the agrarian aristocracy for supporting militarism and authoritarianism and opposing the growth of the citizenship rights of the working class. Not to mention his criticisms of the agrarian aristocracy’s uncritical obedience to German public officials. He was also critical of German workers, who appeared to be too kneeling to authority, although he admired their professional skills and sense of duty (Kalberg 2017, 72).

Weber was also critical of the capitalism of his time. On the one hand, he believed it was the best means of increasing the power of Germany; on the other hand, it seemed to him that he had lost all ethical thrust, creating many businessmen who, full of themselves, did not realize they were “nullities.” Weber, after apologizing for making a value judgment, writes that capitalism created an “iron cage” in which external goods dominate the lives of individuals as never before, and which, moreover, tends to produce “[s]pecialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that is has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” (Weber 1904b/1958, 182).

The degeneration of capitalism appeared to him as a consequence of the triumph of formal rationality over substantive rationality, on which we must dwell by distinguishing four types of rationality in Weber’s work: Practical, theoretical, substantive, and formal rationality (Kalberg 1980, 1148).

Practical rationality is typical of ordinary men, who try to rationally solve the practical problems of everyday life by calculating means and ends. Still, their calculation depends on egoistic and pragmatic interests.

Theoretical/intellectual rationality is typical of intellectuals, committed to solving problems with the mind, giving a cognitive order to the surrounding reality. They try to dominate the world with thought through causal imputation, logical deduction, or induction.

Substantive rationality is typical of those who calculate the means and the ends in compliance with a system of values and not on the basis of mere egoistic interests.

Finally, formal rationality is typical of bureaucrats and capitalists who have lost the ethos of their origins. Formal rationality is based on respect for universal rules, laws, and norms, insensitive to the exceptions that often afflict individuals. Formal rationality arose only in the West with the industrialization process, unlike the other three types of rationality found in all civilizations.

Weber was very critical of practical and formal rationality insofar as they shape an entire community. As for theoretical/intellectual rationality, he believed that it had little ability to affect actual actions directly. Its influence on it is mostly indirect. Weber’s preferences went to substantive rationality.

Social Stratification

Sociologists imagine society as a pyramid where those with scarcer resources occupy the upper strata. For Marx, the decisive element of social stratification is social class; for Weber, three elements of paramount importance for power distribution within a community are class, status group, and party. If researchers want to study stratification from an economic point of view, they will have to resort to the concept of class; if they intend to study how politics affects stratification, they will have to focus on parties, pressure groups, and the state. Finally, if they want to study stratification from the point of view of social prestige, they will have to resort to the concept of status.

In the study of stratification, Weber exalts individuals and conflict. History is moved by individuals who unite and coalesce to defend and promote economic, political, and symbolic interests, creating an ever-changing arena of conflict. Although individuals are central to Weber’s political sociology, social groups are the real protagonists of the struggle for material and symbolic resources. For Weber, individuals become the protagonists of history after having come together as a group. And groups act as ram’s heads against opposing groups. The single individual, alone, cannot bring about social change or stop it. It is as if to say: The soldier cannot make history; an army can.

Let us now ask ourselves how Weber conceptualized social stratification.

First, Weber based the class on private property. However, he attributed two further elements to it: The free market and the performance an individual can offer based on the laws of supply and demand. Those without private property can equally improve their class position by acquiring skills in producing goods or providing services required by the market. “Life chances” depend on the class situation (Weber 1922/1978, vol. II, 927). Weber makes it plain clear that classes are not community. They only represent possible bases for social action.

However, if the system is not based on the market and the wage contract, professional skills cannot be used to climb the social pyramid. Slaves and servants work by physical coercion and cannot improve their social position with professional skills. Weber does not conceive society as an arena divided into two opposing camps. What he has in mind is a much more fragmented reality, where a plurality of individuals competes in the market, asserting their professional qualifications. Weber’s society is a flock of conflicts moving in multiple directions. Each individual fights its battle in the anarchy of the market in a sort of Hobbesian war of all against all, as each group struggles to win its place in the chaos of the marketplace (Parkin 1988).

This battle takes place for economic interests but also social prestige and ideas.

When Weber is interested in conflicts in the world of culture, he resorts to the concept of status group, indicating social prestige. A status group is a group of people who feel they share a lifestyle associated with a particular way of conceiving social honor. Belonging to a status group means sharing consumption, conventions, and privileges. An example is the samurai warriors of Japan, who have left their mark on an entire civilization. For Weber, history is not just the history of class struggles but also the history of the status groups fighting to acquire the most significant possible amount of social esteem. That economic power is not everything is demonstrated by great wealth not always providing access to the upper classes. For example, entrepreneurs who get rich quickly often live in the frustration of being despised by entrepreneurs of older lineage, who expect their daughters to be courted by suitors of an equal status group. Belonging to the same class is not enough to unite individuals on a common front if they are divided by the struggle for social honor.

Economic power does not encompass all other forms of power. In capitalist societies, it is common for an individual to have a lot of money and little prestige. Being an objective and impersonal force, the free market can allow rapid enrichment even for men despised for their social origins or previous deviant conduct.

Just as Durkheim had studied mixed suicides, in the same way, Weber reflected on the relationships between classes, status groups, and parties, focusing above all on the interdependencies between the first two.

Sometimes, belonging to a prestigious class is a means of accumulating wealth; at other times, wealth allows access to the upper classes. Furthermore, status groups can be aggressive and use social prestige to pursue material goals, just as classes do. Status group members may have an even greater awareness of their identity than class members; they can be very effective at recognizing their interests and extremely practical in pursuing their material goals. I want to highlight this aspect of Weber’s thought as it will also appear in the second part of this book when we deal with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of revolutionary change. For Weber, as for Marx indeed, identity is the criterion for focusing on our material and immaterial interests and pursuing them with more determination. Only by knowing what we are can we know what we want.

Furthermore, the status group can weaken a social class from the inside when the differences in the prestige of its members are too pronounced. Strategies for establishing due social distances make it difficult for the class to effectively act as a united force in the struggle for scarce resources. The distribution of social consideration is a struggle that can occur within the same class. The upper classes impose rules to keep the lower classes in a condition of subordination. These rules create a “cascade of contempt” when becoming rigid and intolerant (Poggi 2006). The lower classes look up in admiration, and its members acquire consideration through “usurpation,” that is, by imitating the lifestyles of the upper classes, which retain the right to despise the lower classes.

Weber further explained that class conflicts tend to prevail when an economic crisis shakes society; when, on the other hand, society is in equilibrium, status group class conflicts are prevalent: The fact that wealth abounds allows individuals to focus more on conflicts related to symbolic resources and less on those related to material resources. The status structure can be very rooted either because they are sanctioned by law, as was the case in the Medieval West, or because they are sanctioned by religion, as in the Hindu caste system.

Weber does not rank the class, the status group, and the party in order of importance. They can influence the development of society with the same force. It is up to the researcher to establish, from time to time, which of the three prevails, even supposing for the sake of argument that the prevalence of only one element is possible, given that, in historical reality, they are almost always intertwined. For example, classes and parties can mitigate the crude class struggle for economic power or transfer it to the arena of culture or politics. Furthermore, classes and parties can moderate class conflict by subjecting the conflicts between employers and workers to a system of rules. In summary, in the struggle for scarce resources, the interaction between classes and parties can (1) moderate the conflict; (2) push it within boundaries that have nothing to do with classes; and (3) neutralize it.

As for the party, Weber had a rather broad conception of it. The party is any political organization capable of intervening autonomously in the conflict for scarce resources. The state is one of the most powerful levers at the party’s disposal to prevail in the struggle. Ultimately, the state can coerce and destroy its opponents through the monopoly of organized violence. The most evident strength of the political party lies in its power to issue and enforce decrees valid for an entire community. Political power legitimately establishes mandatory rules for everyone. The idea that it is destined to always succumb to economic power—in the short or long term, it doesn’t matter—is an idea that Weber considered an article of faith incompatible with the logic of scientific investigation. How can researchers decide that economic power prevails over political power if they have not conducted research first? Finally, the conflict between competing groups does not always have a destructive outcome. More often than not, conflict generates accommodations and compromises, which allow for peaceful coexistence, however turbulent, and allow a community to pursue common goals.

Weber’s model underlies what sociologists call the “multidimensional model” precisely because it holds together three dimensions of social conflict—classes, group status, and parties—rather than just one (Parkin 1972, 17).

Weber’s analysis turned out to be more founded than Marx’s prediction: Capitalism proved to have a greater elasticity than that which had been attributed to it by Marx. Despite the crises and the persistence of class conflicts, capitalism continues to exist and world society has never known the final clash between bourgeois and proletarians, predicted in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. On the other hand, the communist society, based on the abolition of private property and the integral nationalization of the means of production, collapsed, demonstrating internal rigidity and contradictions not foreseen by Marx.

In summary, history is not always made up of class struggles. This statement is true in some cases but not in all. In Weber, there is no philosophy of history according to which class interests will lead to a classless society. For Marx, the class struggle produces revolutions that change the mode of production; for Weber, revolutions can also occur to obtain a different distribution of resources without changing the mode of production.

Weber always argued with the theory of historical materialism he reproached too many totalizing statements. That material interests are the main engine of historical development is an eventuality to be demonstrated with historical-sociological research rather than a truth to be inculcated. The fact that Engels had affirmed that economic movements are decisive “in the last resort” did not seem to him sufficient to remedy the logical aporias of historical materialism. Economic interests are not always the primary cause of conflicts. Marx’s statement, according to which the history of every society is a history of class struggles, is not wrong but all-encompassing. If reality is indefinite chaos, and if history has no immanent end to accomplish, how can sociologists establish, before starting their research, that economic forces are more powerful than political and cultural forces and that they will ultimately push the world toward an apocalyptic conflict? Weber thought that only the laymen and dilettantes adhered to historical materialism in the version presented in the Communist Manifesto: “The so-called ‘materialistic conception of history’ as a Weltanschauung or as a formula for the causal explanation of historical reality is to be rejected most emphatically” (Weber 1904a/1949, 68).

Weber’s Nationalism

It is generally accepted that Weber was a nationalist who described economic policy as the servant of the nation-state (Weber 1988, 218).

Karl Jaspers wrote that Weber was a conservative enemy of everything that compromised the future of the German nation. For him, the life and power of the German people were the conditions of everything else. A powerful German Empire was his point of departure (Jaspers 1989, 32).

The problem is identifying the type of nationalism by which it was animated. For some, it is an aggressive nationalism (De Feo 1971, 78). Albert Salomon compared Weber to Machiavelli. Both were animated by a very pragmatic conception of politics, which they placed at the service of their community, with which they were deeply identified and whom they deeply loved (Salomon 1935, 371).

For other scholars, instead, Weber’s nationalism was a moderate one. Far from being an aggressive nationalist, Weber regarded the expansion of a civilization [kultur] as legitimate only if it respects other civilizations and fought against German expansion in World War I. For Weber, the German expansion during World War I was supported by purely capitalist interests, in contrast to the nation’s overall interest (Segre 1981, 396). If Weber had been an aggressive nationalist, why would he have had to oppose the military occupation of Germany when it expanded?

David Beetham distinguished Weber’s nationalism into two periods: The one that precedes the World War and the one that takes shape during the conflict, continuing beyond.

In the first period, an imperialist nationalism emerges clearly from some passages by Weber. In a speech on unemployment to the 1896 Protestant Social Congress, Weber argues that Germany needed more room externally for demographic and economic reasons and that Germany must be ready to send warships to the coast of East Asia to promote German trade since trade treaties—he says—can be dissolved at any time (Beetham 1974, 134).

In the second period, moderation prevails, and Weber disavows his positions of the 1990s, admitting the failure of pre-war German politics (Bruno 1970, 48). When the war broke out, Weber was convinced that the Germans had made the mistake of frightening other states with a “policy of national vanity,” which favored forming an anti-German coalition. Despite having very modest colonial possessions, the Germans had armed themselves with too much clamor as if Germany intended to “ swallow half the world” (Weber 1970, 129; Mommsen 1984, 63).

Although continuing to cheer for the international expansion of German trade, Weber believes that such a result would be achieved more easily with political and economic agreements than with colonial expansion and militarist rhetoric. The break with the first period appears clear. Weber does not doubt the importance of Germany’s international political role and the necessity of expanding German capitalism. Still, he now recognizes that political alliances could guarantee these goals more effectively than military force. This indicates that contrary to what some critics have claimed, Weber—Beetham points out—did not see military might as an end in itself; in reality, he came to recognize its limits even as a political tool (Beetham 1974, 142).

In short, in the second period, Weber continues to place national interests at the center of every consideration but takes sides in favor of peaceful coexistence and respect between peoples. A year before his death, Weber censored the vanity of those politicians concerned only with appearances and condemned “power politics” as an end in itself along with the “worship of power for its own sake,\” and the “cult of power”: “An energetically fostered cult that has grown up in Germany, as elsewhere, has sought to idealize the mere ‘power politician.’ Such figures may take a strong impression, but in actual fact their activity is empty and meaningless. The critics of ‘power politics’ are completely right about this” (Weber 1917b/2004, 78).

As for nationalism in domestic politics, Weber advocated a growth of the national consciousness of the workers against the class consciousness. The first seemed to him unifying and the second disintegrating. Weber was in favor of advancing workers’ rights. However, he was worried about the spread of a political conscience inimical to the existing order. No nation, continually upset by internal uprisings, can conduct an effective foreign policy. Weber’s confidence in the rise of a political leader is linked to concern over the escalation of class conflict. Weber believed that the interest of the German nation should prevail over any partisan position. In his latest proposals to reform the Constitution, he conceived a system in which the political leader, in addition to being separated from the parliament as a whole, had an autonomous power base in the mass electorate precisely because he thought that such autonomy would allow future leaders to transcend partisan egoism in parliament and society (Beetham 1974, 226; Eliaeson 1998, 47–60; Green 2008, 187–224).

In Weber’s political writing, the love for Germany is almost everywhere.

According to him, Germany’s expansion of international trade would have raised the population’s standard of living, including the poorest strata. For this reason, too, he hoped that the German proletariat would learn to look further ahead of its immediate interests and pointed to an example to be imitated by the British workers, who had supported imperialism to benefit from the external power of their nation. According to him, German workers should have imitated British workers who had supported British imperialism to benefit from their nation’s external power.

Weber was aware of the class conflict and wanted to orient it in favor of the bourgeoisie. Still, he was never so naive or ideological as to believe that the proletariat’s interests coincided with those of the bourgeoisie. Weber was always convinced that conflict was unavoidable in social life. Rather than being resolved, conflicts are postponed, disguised, and diluted. These words are from him: “There is no peace in the economic struggle for existence” (Weber 1970, 89).

In his essay, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics” (1917a), Weber adds: “Conflict cannot be excluded from social life. One can change its means, its objects, even its fundamental direction and its bearers, but it cannot be eliminated” (Weber 1917a/1949, 26). Peace is nothing but conflict postponed.

The idea that conflict is inseparable from social life also recurs in Weber’s theory of the state he would have liked to write a treatise on. Still, sudden death prevented him from realizing his project (Dusza 1989, 71).

According to Marx, the state is, first and foremost, an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie to suffocate conflicts by imposing its domination over the proletariat. Above all, Marx is interested in the state’s repressive function in domestic politics, although he does not neglect its role in colonialism and wars among states. Class structure and exploitation need the state; anyone wanting to end them must conquer it. The state will not disappear because of a great international war, a war among states, but because of a tremendous interior war between the bourgeois and the working class.

For Weber, too, the essential characteristic of the state is the monopoly on the legitimate use of force. However, he believes that the primary function of state violence is protecting and expanding a nation’s territory. State violence serves to protect one’s territory and to assault that of others. Weber’s state has more to do with international affairs than domestic politics.

According to this perspective, the state cannot disappear as long as other states threaten its territory for the simple fact of existing. Weber writes that all states prefer weak rather than strong neighbors. All large political communities that aspire to increase their prestige pose a threat to their neighbors. It seems only right to underline that history proved him right. In societies where private property has been eliminated, the state has become more powerful and has waged many wars with other states or prepared for them, as evidenced by the vast nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China eliminated private property but failed to eliminate concern for defending their territory.

According to Parkin, Weber’s political sociology does not allow distinguishing between different types of state—capitalist, socialist, fascist, bourgeois, military totalitarian, or whatever—since they employ the same physical means of violence. Weber assures that one state is pretty much like another: “Dictatorship and democracy, strawberry and vanilla” (Parkin 1988, 73).

I disagree with Parkin’s interpretation.

Weber did not attribute the same aggressiveness and hunger for territorial conquest to all states. “Not all political structures are equally ‘expansive’” (Weber 1922/1978, vol. II 910). Not all states strive to expand their territory and power. Not everyone invests in the army to subjugate and incorporate other people. All political structures use force but differ in how they use it or threaten to use it against other political organizations. Weber makes it plain clear that these differences affect the shape and fate of political communities. I conclude that Weber’s political sociology offers the possibility of distinguishing between different types of states and, therefore, between dictatorship and democracy.

Criticism of Weber

Weber’s work has given rise to a vast literature. In this section, I will only deal with the criticisms directed at his thesis on the role of the protestant ethic in forging the spirit of capitalism since the criticisms of his most famous book allow us to highlight many other contradictions present in his sociological thought. The weaknesses of his thesis on the Protestant ethic coincide with the weaknesses of his interpretive sociology. I mean that criticism of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism implies criticism of Weber’s interpretive sociology.

Frank Parkin reproached Weber for not exhibiting any credible evidence to show that early Calvinists worked tirelessly to ward off fear of being damned. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber has forgotten that there is always a notable difference between the way of living the faith of the religious elites and that of the masses: A principle he enunciated. The fact that the educated Puritan preachers conceived of work as a vocation does not imply that the masses were captivated by the same idea. Weber exhibits no convincing evidence that the Protestant masses worked willingly to glorify God or were obsessed with soul salvation. This is an assumption without empirical evidence. If anything, Parkin insists, historical documents lead us to believe the opposite, that is, that the Protestant capitalist resorted to the “wage whip” to make workers work (Parkin 1988, 54). To demonstrate the existence of extraordinary harmony between capitalists and workers, Weber should have studied the living conditions in the English workshops of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but he did not. The punitive regime that prevailed in the Victorian workshops in the nineteenth century is well known: What led Weber to believe that the situation was better in the Protestant workshops of the seventeenth century?

I want to add a critique to those developed by Parkin and observe that the civil war, which led to the beheading of Charles I Stuart (1649) during the English Revolution, contrasts with Weber’s thesis, according to which the Protestant ethic had created masses of docile and meek individuals, inclined to accept the established order because it is considered an emanation of the will of God (Orsini 2011, 165–179). The history of the Protestant sects is, to a significant extent, a history of revolutionary movements (Hutchinson 2020). The first “authentic revolutionaries,” which is to say the first authentic subverters of the established order, were the Puritans themselves (Mathieu 1992, 193).

According to Parkin, Weber invented a Calvinist worker who never existed and set it in motion. I delved into The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. From this passage, we get the impression that Weber proceeded precisely in the methodologically reckless way reproached by Parkin: “The question, Am I one of the elect? Must sooner or later have arisen for every believer and have forced all other interests into the background. And how can I be sure of this state of grace?” (Weber 1904b/1958, 110).

Weber does not produce documents to show that this distressing question dominated the lives of millions of Protestants. Weber seems to have betrayed his own method: In the passage just quoted, he resorted to sympathetic penetration to take the point of view of the Calvinist workers, without then making an adequate effort to document the validity of his intuition.

Furthermore, it is not clear why Calvinists should see precisely economic success as the only proof of their predestination. They could have looked for the signs of their predestination in many different spheres of life. Devout Calvinists—Parkin goes on—could see the hand of God moving in their favor in a hundred ways, most of which detached from economic rationalism. For example, pious believers can notice that they enjoy good health while others get sick or that their children survive at a high infant mortality rate. Signs of predestination could also be found in exemplary asceticism: Why not?

Weber would have betrayed his methodology on another point as well. His studies on religions aim to show that people adhere to religious messages on the basis of their status group and class. The message that Weber sends in his sociology of religions is clear: Tell me the place, the status group, or the social class you occupy in the division of labor or the production process, and I will say what the nature of the religious faith to which you adhere as a member is. Individuals adhere to religious messages selectively, based on their position in the social stratification: Buddhism, for example, could not conquer the masses of the urban proletariat. Religions do not have a universal significance but a particular one. Under the impulse to be clear, one would say that the pope’s Christianity differs from that of an uneducated peasant. However, when it comes to Calvinist workers, Weber argues that poor workers and wealthy entrepreneurs, while belonging to different classes and social strata, were dominated by the same religious beliefs and acted in the same spirit toward work.

The debate on the genesis of nationalism is wide-ranging and involves historians, sociologists, and political scientists (Orsini 2008). Luciano Pellicani is the one who attacked Weber’s thesis most vigorously. In his book, The Genesis of Capitalism and the Origins of Modernity, he rejected Weber’s thesis arguing that an anti-capitalist spirit animated Calvinist preachers and that Calvinism was an enemy of modernity because it aimed to halt the process of secularization. The Protestant Reformation was a resurgence of medieval spirit and, as such, quite hostile to the spirit of capitalism (Pellicani 1994). Pellicani also denied that modern capitalism took shape after the Protestant Reformation. The origins of European capitalism are found in the conflict between the Empire and the Church, which took place in the eleventh century. The Church and the Empire, weakening each other with the Investiture Controversy, left a power vacuum filled by the municipal movement that began in Northern Italy (Pirenne 1925, 180).

Thus a “new Europe” began, which coincided with the birth and development of civil society. But it was also the beginning of the history of the bourgeoisie, the social class that would transform European civilization. Cities were the cradle of mercantile capitalism, with its typical institutions that guaranteed their inhabitants that the fruit of their labor would no longer be arbitrarily expropriated. Thanks to the institutionalization of private property, an economy governed by the law of supply and demand emerged based on the methodical search for profit and rational calculation. Resorting to an objective possibility judgment, Pellicani argues that capitalism would not have been born in the West if the trading and manufacturing cities had been defeated in their age-old struggle for political autonomy. Modern capitalism originated several centuries before Calvinist preaching. This is why the solution to the enigma must be sought in the “political polycentrism” determined by the weakness of the political structure of the feudal system, which could not count on a bureaucratic apparatus, a solid financial basis, and an army to stifle the cities’ struggle for autonomy.

Weber was as value-free in science as he was passionate about politics. He wrote: “For nothing has any value for a human being as a human being unless he can pursue it with passion” (Weber 1917b/2004, 8).

Conclusion

This chapter explored Weber’s key concepts: Interpretive sociology, value freedom, understanding and explanation, capitalism, power, ideal type, authority, power and domination, adequate and chance causation, bureaucratization, types of rationality, and social stratification. The text also distinguished between Weber’s methodology of social science and Marx’s dialectical method to understand the differences between these two great social thinkers. Weber is a classic sociology author whose concepts are continually used by sociologists of our time. One example among many possible to clarify the relevance of Weber’s concepts is the death of Osama bin Laden. The transfer of his powers to al-Zawahiri is a typical case of charismatic succession that terrorism scholars can only understand by considering Weber’s studies.

Three of Weber’s methodological lessons are particularly lasting from the science education perspective.

The first lesson is that, whatever social phenomenon they deal with, sociologists should reach their conclusions after conducting specific and in-depth research without starting from preconceived ideological theories that attribute more importance to one social factor than another. What is more important in social change between economics, politics, and culture? The answer to these questions should be given at the end of a research instead of before. It is impossible for anyone to know the answers beforehand without thoroughly searching for the underlying causes.

The second lesson is that complex social phenomena always result from multiple causes, never just one.

The third lesson is that research can only exhaust some of the causes of a social phenomenon.

Self-Test Path

  1. 1.

    What is the basic principle of interpretive sociology?

  2. 2.

    What are the types of social action in Weber?

  3. 3.

    What is the relationship between understanding and explanation in Weber?

  4. 4.

    What was Nietzsche’s influence on Weber?

  5. 5.

    What are the judgments of possibility?

  6. 6.

    What is the difference between adequate and chance causation?

  7. 7.

    What is Weber’s thesis on the spirit of capitalism?

  8. 8.

    What is the function of the ideal type?

  9. 9.

    What is the difference between power and legitimate domination?

  10. 10.

    What are the methods of charismatic succession?

  11. 11.

    Talk about Weber’s theory of social stratification.

  12. 12.

    What are the main criticisms of Weber’s thesis on the spirit of capitalism?