Suggestions for Further Reading

Arnold, N. Scott. Marx’s Radical Critique of Society: A Reconstruction and Critical Evaluation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A sophisticated, thorough, and detailed modern analysis of Marx’s economic concepts and formulations.

Berlin, Isaiah. Karl Marx. New York: Time Inc., [1939] 1963. A classic intellectual biography which analyzes the development of Marx’s thought in the context of European intellectual traditions.

Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen. Karl Marx and the Close of His System. Edited by Paul M. Sweezy. London, England: Merlin Press, [1896] 1974. Analyses by the foremost economic critic of Marxism.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. One of the first appraisals of the collapse of communism, written by the former national security advisor for President Jimmy Carter.

Carver, Terrell, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Marx. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Instructive essays on the changing estimates of Marx, his political theories, views of science, economic analyses, and other topics.

Carver, Terrell. A Marx Dictionary. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. A useful reference work especially for key concepts in Marx’s thought.

Gottlieb, Roger S. Marxism, 1844–1990: Origins, Betrayal, Rebirth. London: Routledge, Chapman, & Hall, Inc., 1992. An attempt by a sympathetic mind to rehabilitate Marxism in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.

Kee, Alistair. Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology. London: SCM Press, 1990. A wide-ranging recent critique of Marxism and the mostly Latin American theology that seeks to combine Marxist theory with Christian belief.

Leff, Gordon. The Tyranny of Concepts: A Critique of Marxism. London: Merlin Press, 1961. An older work, but still a searching philosophical analysis and criticism of Marxist ideology.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion. Introduced by Reinhold Niebuhr. New York: Schocken Books, 1964.

McKown, Delos B. The Classical Marxist Critiques of Religion: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kautsky. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975. An informative comparative study of differing critiques of religion offered by major Marxist thinkers of the early twentieth century.

McLellan, David. Friedrich Engels. New York: Viking Press, 1977. A biography of Marx’s collaborator and friend, with attention given to the relationship between the two men as well as their differences amid affinities.

McLellan, David. Karl Marx. Modern Masters Series. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1976. A brief biographical account of Marx’s career, controversies, and ideas.

McLellan, David. Karl Marx: His Life and Thought. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. An authoritative recent biography of Marx in English.

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McLellan, David. The Thought of Karl Marx: An Introduction. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971. By the same author, a study focused on Marx’s ideas, methods, and theory.

Plamenatz, John, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1975. A subtle, scholarly examination of the ideas and arguments at the core of Marx’s thought.

Rockmore, Tom. Marx After Marxism. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. An attempt, occasioned by the great collapse of 1989, to get behind thick layers of official Marxist dogma and recover the thought of the real, historical Marx.

Talmon, J. L. The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1952. An important study of absolutist style revolutionary movements during the French Revolution and afterward.

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Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

Clifford Geertz on the guiding theorem of Max Weber¹

If we take Freud, Durkheim, and Marx together, one thing seems clear: Each develops a decidedly functional view of religion. From their several perspectives, it is not enough to say that some Hindus worship Shiva because they believe in his power or that a Muslim follows the Quran because it holds truths revealed by God. They choose instead to show how these beliefs are traceable to conditions or needs that lie deeper—below the surface of the mind’s assent. They further believe that such functionalist approaches lead logically to reductionist conclusions. This is not just a matter of explaining one aspect of religion while other theories explain other aspects. The premise of such functionalism is that it has found what is basic and fundamental. Religion—all of religion—can be fully accounted for by tracing it to a single underlying circumstance or elemental cause: to humanity’s universal state of neurosis, to the universal claims of society on the individual, or to the world dynamic of class struggle. Such explanations reach wide to sweep evidence from all cases into the embrace of a single formula. That is the key to their appeal. But do such explanations in fact yield the best result? What if the true story of religion is not quite so simply told? What if we were to start instead from the stubborn complexity of religious behavior and ask whether such a dense compound can be so easily distilled to a single substrate? What if these reductionist explanations get to their stated goals just a little too easily?

At the turn of the last century no theorist was more intrigued by the baffling intricacy of human behavior than the German social scientist Max Weber, a man who began his studies, like Marx a half century earlier, at the University of Berlin, where his main interest was not in religion but in economics and law. Though he is often paired with Durkheim as one of the twin founders of modern sociology, the term “sociologist” does not do justice to the wide array

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Karl Emil Maximilian “Max” Weber (1864–1920) was the oldest of eight children born to Max (senior) and Helene Fallenstein Weber. Although the Weber family had long prospered as linen manufacturers in the region of Westphalia, Max senior chose a career in law and became active in government. While his first son was still a young child, he moved to Berlin, where he enjoyed a long parliamentary career, serving first in the Prussian House of Deputies and later in the German Reichstag as a member of the National Liberal party. Outgoing, self-assured, and supportive of the empire’s “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, he fit well into the social and political life of the city, opening his home regularly to colleagues and friends. Helene, the daughter of a government minister in Berlin, also came from wealth. Highly educated for a woman of her time, she was more introspective than her husband and devoutly religious, with a strong social conscience keenly attuned to the hardships of the poor.

These contrasting parental temperaments converged, somewhat uneasily, in the personality of their son. Max junior shared his father’s active interest in

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Weber’s formal education was no less stellar. At preparatory school in Berlin, he took an interest in philosophy and in both ancient and medieval history, reading widely in classical authors—Homer, Herodotus, Virgil, and Cicero— while also working his way through all the works of Goethe, mostly as a personal diversion from unexciting classwork. In 1882 he entered Heidelberg University to study legal and economic history as well as philosophy and theology. He also joined a fraternity, where, like Marx, he learned to duel and drink—both with more skill than wisdom, to judge by his mother’s unhappy reports. After a year of combined study and military service in Strasbourg, where he formed a friendship with the historian (also his uncle) Hermann Baumgarten, Weber returned to further university work in Berlin. There, over the next eight years and while still living with his parents, he pursued advanced studies in legal and economic history. In 1889 he took a doctoral degree with a dissertation on medieval Italian trading companies; soon afterward, he completed his work in law and took a position in the Berlin courts. In 1892 he earned his Habilitation, or license, as a university lecturer with a study of agriculture and law in ancient Rome. At about this time he also became engaged to Marianne Schnitger, a distant cousin; they were married a year later, just as Weber was entering professional life.

With his marriage at age twenty-nine, Weber’s life story divides into a tale of two selves. Professionally he had established himself as a scholar of exceptional promise; positions awaited him in both government and the academy. He had become active in the Verein für Socialpolitik, or Union for Social Policy, an organization of professional economists for whom he conducted an important study of immigration and farm labor in eastern Germany. He also published an analysis of the newly established German stock exchange.³ In 1895 he accepted a university appointment (remarkable for a scholar of his age) as a

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On a personal level, however, his life took a disturbing turn. The marriage to Marianne turned out to be unusual, at least by normal measures of affection. Though he and his new wife were ideal personal and intellectual companions, they chose, apparently by mutual consent, a marital relationship that was to be not just childless but almost certainly also asexual. It is not clear just why. Weber’s capacity for self-denial was well known, and it appears to have converged with something similar in his wife—an apparent aversion to physical sexuality. The full truth of this intimate matter is probably beyond discovery. (Marianne, who wrote the first biography of her husband, had all personal papers burned after his death.⁴) But it doubtless set the stage for emotional unsettlement, which was only further complicated by other tensions. Though he respected both of his parents, Weber as an adult drew closer to his mother and felt a need to support her against his father, who could be personally domineering. On the occasion of a fierce quarrel over his mother’s right to visit her newly married son and daughter-in-law, now living away from Berlin, Max junior took his mother’s side, angrily opposing his father. A few months later, before they could reconcile, his father suddenly died of a heart attack. Whether or not feelings of guilt were involved, Weber soon found himself slipping into serious emotional collapse. From 1897 to 1901 and even beyond, he struggled with episodes of paralyzing anxiety that left him by turns exhausted, restless, sleepless, and unable to function in his role as a professor. After taking several leaves for health reasons, he resigned his post at Heidelberg, effectively withdrawing from any professional position.⁵ Not until 1918 did he bring himself again to accept an academic post, this time at the University of Vienna. Less than two years later, he was stricken with pneumonia. Inadequately treated, it took his life at the relatively young age of fifty-six, in the very prime of his intellectual career.

Although the nervous disorder deflected him from his university duties, Weber over time managed gradually to regain his capacity for scholarly labor. He coped well enough to travel in both Europe and the United States, where he participated in conferences on social theory and policy. While no longer in a professorial post, he was able by 1904 to accept an editorship (alongside economists Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffe) at an important scholarly journal, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik (Archive for Social Sciences and Social Policy). This step was both emotionally therapeutic and intellectually opportune. Aided by family funds and (after 1907) by a comfortable inheritance, Weber began to work as a private scholar, pursuing a steady program of research that grew more productive with each passing year, even amid the occasional nervous relapse. He made the Archive the forum

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Methods are to scholars what tools are to craftsmen. All need them; few give them much thought. Weber, however, is one of those few. Amid the recovery from his illness, he wrote a number of articles, including a first editorial essay for the Archive (1904), which centered on the main issue of sociological method: How do we proceed when we try to explain human social actions? Weber developed his answers to this question in several technical essays that outline three guiding principles of social inquiry.⁶

Weber’s first and fundamental principle is best stated in the single word Verstehen, the German term for “understanding.” He was not the first or only scholar of his time to stress this idea, the hallmark of what would later be known as interpretive sociology, but he made it decidedly central to his labors. On the surface, it is a notion easy enough to grasp. The principle of Verstehen presumes that we cannot explain the actions of humans as we explain occurrences in nature. Natural science centers on nonmental objects and processes; social science explains the mentally driven activities of human beings. It is true that within nature, humans too can be called objects, but clearly they are objects of a special kind. Unlike stones and trees, they are conscious; they assign meaning to the things they do. Their behavior is guided not just by external forces such as gravity but by internally held ideas such as the belief in freedom and inwardly experienced emotions such as the feeling of love. This distinction may seem a matter of mere common sense, but applied to complex social issues and institutions, it can become controversial.

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In Weber’s day, it sparked a scholarly debate so long and fierce that it acquired its own name: the great Methodenstreit, or “dispute about methods.” At the center of the argument stood the great success achieved in fields like chemistry and physics by framing universal laws of cause and effect. Why, some asked, could not laws like these, with their wondrous applications in medicine and industry, also be framed to explain human affairs? Economists were the first to make this case, claiming some success in applying scientific “laws of the market” to human action. Similar views soon sprouted elsewhere, suggesting that perhaps an entire natural science of all human behavior could be created. Others sharply dissented. The philosopher Wilhelm Windelband asserted that while science deals with processes that repeat themselves, allowing us to explain things “nomothetically” (Greek for “making rules”), human actions are singular events, requiring explanations that are “idiographic” (Greek for “uniquely descriptive”) in character. On this view, there is a fundamental divide between Natur- or Gesetz-wissenschaft (“sciences of nature or of laws”) and Geistes- or Kultur-wissenschaft (“sciences of the spirit or of human culture”). Wilhelm Dilthey went even further, contending that we cannot really “explain” such things as human action at all, at least in the scientific sense of the word “explain.” We must use Verstehen to “feel our way” intuitively, one might say, into the minds of others. By acts of imagination rather than reason, we re-create their thoughts in our own minds.

To say Verstehen is a rational procedure is not to say that human beings always act in rational ways. Weber was well aware that there are very different forms and degrees of rationality. In his later landmark work Economy and

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Society, he observes that actions can be either instrumentally rational (seeking the means to achieve a goal) or value-rational (seeking a goal as good in itself); they can also be affectual (driven purely by emotions) or traditional (done purely out of habit).⁷ He systematically charts differing levels of rational action, starting with behavior that is rightly rational and moving through grades of partial and unconscious rationality and down even to the disordered motives of the mentally disturbed.⁸ Admittedly, he says, social science cannot achieve the certainty or predict with the confidence of natural science, but it does nonetheless reach useful explanations of human behavior by detecting the inner motives that govern outward actions.

Although Weber’s main interest is to explain social rather than personal behavior, his stress on the inner motives of human actions has led others to describe his perspective as “methodological individualism”—a term that is instructive. For him, social values or beliefs acquire reality only insofar as they gain assent in the minds of individuals. Whenever he refers in abstract terms to a moral value such as, say, physical courage, Weber reminds us to think of the specific individuals or subgroups in a society whose leadership or influence makes them what he calls the “bearers” of such an ideal. Ideas and values, in other words, have effects only because certain people embrace them and induce others to follow their lead. This accent diverges from that of Durkheim, who tends to think of society as an abstract entity, standing apart from its individual members and imposing duties upon them from above. Weber is disposed instead to think of the community as a mixed assemblage of individuals in which the many defer to the few, to those who by tradition, privilege, or personality claim the authority to lead them. They are the custodians of cultural values; they shape society as much as it shapes them and others.

Individuals may carry the ideals of society, but sociology does not center only on individuals. If it did, it would be neither social nor scientific. Making valid statements about general classes of things is the entire purpose of the endeavor. To clarify the role of these general categories in social research, Weber employs another technical German term—Ideal-Typus. An ideal-type is a general concept, but it is different from what is known as a generalization in natural science. Generalizations identify a single trait or characteristic common to a group, as when we say, “All kings have countries.” A country to rule is a kind of bare minimum qualification for a king. When we create an idealtype of a king, however, we form almost the very opposite of a generalization.

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We frame a sort of purposeful exaggeration, or maximum outline, of what a ruler should be, adding to the country he rules a large set of further attributes: royal birth, male gender, rule by “divine right,” a queen, a palace with courtiers, a crown, nobles sworn to uphold it, and so on. No real-world monarch, past or present, will possess all of these characteristics. Some may have more; others, less, but that does not matter. The key is that the ideal-type furnishes a conceptual framework into which all cases can be brought for analysis. With it, we can compare kings over time and across locales. We can trace changes from one type of monarchy to another, and we can make inferences about cause and effect, as in the French Revolution, when an assault on religion demolished the idea that kings rule by “divine right.”

One of Weber’s most celebrated ideal-typologies offers an apt illustration. In Economy and Society, he singles out three main types of social authority: traditional, legal, and charismatic. All three express what he calls “legitimate domination.” In the case of traditional authority, people acknowledge a pattern of power that seems to have “always existed,” as in tribal societies where rule of the elders has been accepted from time immemorial. Similar forms include “patriarchalism” and “patrimonialism,” where a single person or family inherits power to rule. Conversely, the authority most common to modern societies can be defined as legal, or rational. It finds purest expression in the modern bureaucracy, which presumes consent among all to abide by a set of rules consistently applied by trained, specialized, paid officials who work in a graded hierarchy and with a sense of professional duty. Weber’s writings on bureaucratic authority have generated wide discussion among analysts of public and corporate administration. He finds bureaucracy the most rationally ordered form of authority, offering great efficiency, though often by suppressing creativity. By contrast, the third of the types—charismatic domination—is the most dynamic, and it holds special importance in the sphere of religion. It is on clear display in the prophets and sages of world history, though it applies as well to warriors or to statesmen. In such cases, leadership is acquired through a single characteristic: the compelling personal magnetism of one or a few

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individuals. The prophets of Israel, Gautama and his community of monks, Confucius and his followers, Jesus and his apostles—all of these cases demonstrate the social impact of an exceptional personality, the spiritual hero, the singular gifted person who alone can work miracles, deliver an oracle, or energize disciples. When such a figure appears in a society, he or she can, on the sheer strength of a claim to power, wisdom, or divinity, win a following and alter the course of civilization. Charisma is the most compelling agent of change in society and history.