Sam Whimster Understanding Weber
Sam Whimster Understanding Weber
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B ook titles can mislead as much they can inform. A case in point is
Understanding Weber. Seeing that title in a publisher’s catalogue
you are likely to assume that this is yet another Weber exegesis directed
towards an undergraduate audience of sociology students. Noticing that
it is published by a commercial, rather than a university press, you might
also suppose a textbook formula: a profusion of bullet points and box
tables honed to “maximize accessibility.” You would be wrong. Sam
Whimster’s Understanding Weber is a dense book in smallish print that
requires students, and the rest of us, to do most of the work. It talks up to
readers. It expects a level of seriousness commensurate with the subject.
Naturally, the book describes aspects of what Weber said. But its primary
goal is to elucidate the frameworks in which he said it: the debates that
Weber joined, the concepts he inherited, the rhetorics he employed. In
creating, single-handedly, a new genre for the appreciation of Weber —
simultaneously didactic, contextual and (mostly) comprehensive — Sam
Whimster’s achievement is considerable.
Should it have been expected? For over thirty years, Whimster has
laboured assiduously over Weber’s oeuvre; indeed no British sociolo-
gist knows more about the genome of Heidelberg Man. Chief editor and
founder of the journal Max Weber Studies, Whimster reads German and
translates it; he has scoured every nook and cranny of the critical edi-
tion of Weber’s collected works. Yet great learning can be a burden. Im-
mersed in the material, it is hard to come up for air. Simplifying may
smack of simplification, the ultimate anathema for the self-respecting
scholar. So the fact that Whimster knows a great deal about Weber is no
guarantee that he would write an excellent book about him. Yet he has.
Understanding Weber consists of nine chapters, one of which —
“Going beyond Weber” — seeks to build on the great thinker’s insights.
Whimster is especially taken by the idea, propounded by Karl Jaspers
and expanded by S.N. Eisenstadt, of “multiple modernities.” For all his
comparative rigour and historical sense, Weber was too quick, Whim-
ster believes, to equate modernity with a singular Western path. Chi-
nese, Indian, and Middle Eastern societies also contained the political,
702 © Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 33(3) 2008
social and material ingredients that, in time, could have produced, and
indeed are producing right now, distinctive modern civilizations. The
other eight chapters of Understanding Weber eschew attempts to im-
prove on the master and seek instead to describe his early formation as a
national economist and an agrarian expert (ch. 1); reconstruct the stages
through which he developed into a sociologist (ch. 5 and ch. 9 painstak-
ingly examine the mutation of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik into
Economy and Society); and explain the disputes that provoked Weber’s
interventions. Chapter 2 contains a superb account of Werner Sombart
and Georg Simmel’s analyses of modern capitalism which Weber both
criticized and adapted. Chapter 4 takes us into more vertiginous meth-
odological territory, as Whimster offers extensive summaries of the Ger-
man neo-Kantians Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert. Chapters 3
and 6 are devoted to Weber’s theories of religion. Repeatedly, Whimster
asks us to step back from Weber so as to get the necessary perspective
from which to view him.
That Whimster is far more curious than most sociologists is evi-
denced by the illuminating section in Chapter 5 on Weber’s studies of
antiquity. Still, it is inevitable that a book on Weber would be influenced
by the author’s proclivities and disciplinary background. Understand-
ing Weber reflects, in many chapters, Whimster’s fascination with the
Protestant Ethic argument and with the problems of establishing histor-
ical causality. In addition, he tries to rescue Weber from some of his
more methodologically individualist pronouncements. Hence we are
told that Weber was principally concerned not with individuals per se
but with “interaction processes and contexts of meaning” (p. 153), “con-
crete” things that are always in the process of being formed. Durkheim
would have approved. Yet even the indefatigable Whimster runs out of
steam. He says next to nothing about Weber as a legal scholar. That is a
pity because, as Stephen Turner has demonstrated, Weber’s legal train-
ing powerfully shaped his sociological casuistry. And the discussion
of “power, legitimacy and democracy” (ch. 8) is weak and derivative.
Weber was a passionate and prolific writer on politics but Understanding
Weber devotes only twenty-six pages to that subject. Moreover, breaking
with his earlier method of deep contextualization, Whimster says next to
nothing about the disputes that helped shape Weber’s work on political
parties and plebiscitary leadership. William Bryce, Wilhelm Roscher (as
a political thinker) and Moisei Ostrogorski among others make no ap-
pearance. Weber’s discussion of politics within his sociology, as distinct
from his political journalism, is also not properly distinguished. Yet it is
only by grasping the relationship between Weber’s political journalism,
on the one hand, and his political-sociological writings (in Economy and
Book Review/Compte rendu: Understanding Weber 703
Society and elsewhere) on the other, that one is able to see what he was
up to.
Consider Weber’s analysis of Caesarism, a term of obloquy associ-
ated for most of the 19th century with Napoleon III and referring to a
popular but authoritarian mode of rule notable for its lack of dynastic
legitimacy. In his correspondence and political journalism — notably,
in the critique of the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck — Weber
made use of standard 19th century motifs and echoed the negative con-
notations that mostly attached to them. Largely coeval with this older
usage, however, he gradually re-worked the concept of Caesarism in a
significantly new way via the lexicon and “ideal-types” fashioned for the
science of sociology. In the process, three changes are apparent. First,
Caesarism is demoted as a concept and becomes gradually absorbed into
the much more expansive notion of “charisma.” Second, Caesarism is
renamed as “plebiscitary” or “leader democracy,” one version of which
— parliamentary Caesarism — Weber actively embraces. And third, and
most importantly, the traditional problem of Caesarism’s legitimacy is
radically re-described in the ostensibly free-of-evaluation language of
sociology; what was once seen as a highly dangerous phenomenon now
becomes normalized as the inevitable accompaniment of modern dem-
ocracy.
Contrary to the Routledge blurb, Sam Whimster’s book is unlikely to
be an “obligatory purchase for undergraduate” students, most of whom
will sink in its sophistication. They and others will discover, however, a
range and intelligence that no other single sociological volume on Weber
possesses. I have mentioned a couple of its weaknesses. But as an orien-
tation to what one needs to know before one properly understands Max
Weber, Whimster’s book is indispensable.
Lingnan University, Hong Kong Peter Baehr
Peter Baehr is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology and Social
Policy at Lingnan University. His latest book is Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism,
and the Social Sciences: Critical Encounters (Stanford University Press, 2009).
[email protected]