Defining a social subject: Weber

How does a sociologist define and conceptualize a subject for research and investigation? And how does a research tradition -- a group of scholars linked by training, scholarly interaction, and mentorship -- do the same thing?  What is the intellectual work that goes into framing an empirical and theoretical conception of a group of related social phenomena -- cities, racism, economic growth, feudalism, or power?

The most evident problem this question raises is the fact that any given social phenomenon itself has multiple aspects and sets of characteristics; so the way we define a research subject is in some important way an expression of what we find "interesting." Let's say that I'm interested in cities.  "How do cities work?"  This might be an economic question; a regional geography question; a cultural question; a question about poverty and segregation; a question about architecture and planning; a question about municipal governance; a question about population characteristics; a question about religion; a question about civil disturbances; and so one, for indefinitely many aspects or features of urban life.

These questions force consideration of several different intellectual acts: selection, conceptualization, and explanation.  Selection has to do with singling out one domain of phenomena for extended empirical and theoretical study.  Conceptualization has to do with providing some intellectual structure in terms of which we can analyze and characterize the phenomena in this domain.  And explanation has to do with discovering meanings, causes, structures, processes, and active social relationships, through which the features of this aspect of the social world takes on the empirical shape that it displays.

I have always thought that Weber had a particularly advanced understanding of this fundamental problem of the social sciences.  His essays on methodology, collected in Methodology of Social Sciences, provide some very interesting thoughts about this set of questions. His essays are primarily aimed at laying out the program of the group of "social economists" who were in the process of defining the research agenda of the Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik.  But his analysis has general relevance to the problem of defining a social-science research agenda.

One question that Weber raises in these essays is the role that the scholar's values play in his or her selection of a subject matter and a conceptual framework.  "The problems of the social sciences are selected by the value-relevance of the phenomena treated. … Together with historical experience, it shows that cultural (i.e., evaluative) interests give purely empirical scientific work its direction" (21, 22). And again: "In the social sciences the stimulus to the posing of scientific problems is in actuality always given by practical 'questions'. Hence the very recognition of the existence of a scientific problem coincides, personally, with the possession of specifically oriented motives and values" (61).

This point about selectivity and the role of values in the definition of a topic of study applies as well to a research tradition: an orienting set of values lead researchers in the tradition to adhere to a given definition of the topics and approaches that their tradition will pursue.  This adherence can be put clearly as a statement about "importance": "These problems are important for us; we need to better understand these problems." Here is how Weber characterizes the "orienting values" that define the approach taken by the new journal:

In general, they were men who, whatever may have been other divergences in their points of view, set as their goal the protection of the physical well-being of the laboring masses and the increase of the latter's share of the material and intellectual values of our culture. (62)

Selectivity applies to the singling out of an area of social phenomena for study.  But it also applies to a singling out of the specific aspects of this area that the researcher will examine.  And this, in turn, raises the possibility of there being indefinitely many different "scientific studies of X."  Here is a typical formulation of Weber's about this form of selectiveness:

The cultural problems which move men form themselves ever anew and in different colors, and the boundaries of that area in the infinite stream of concrete events which acquire meaning and significance for us, i.e., which becomes an 'historical individual,' are constantly subject to change. The intellectual contexts from which it is viewed and scientifically analyzed shift. The point of departure of the cultural sciences remain changeable throughout the limitless future as long as a Chinese ossification of intellectual life does not render mankind incapable of setting new questions to the eternally inexhaustible flow of life.  (84)

The quality of an event as a "social-economic" event is not something which it possesses "objectively." It is rather conditioned by the orientation of our cognitive interest, as it arises from the specific cultural significance which we attribute to the particular event in a given case. (64)

Here is another statement that implies the open-endedness of the social sciences in their definitions of the topics of research:

The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this meaning itself. (57)

I take this to mean that assigning meaning to events, processes, or structures is a human activity rather than the discovery of an objective fact about the world. So it is open to social scientists of various generations to reevaluate prior interpretations of the world -- whether of capitalism or feudalism, or of rational behavior or religious identity.  In Weber's own context:

Undoubtedly the selection of the social-economic aspect of cultural life signifies a very definite delimitation of our theme. It will be said that the economic, or as it has been inaccurately called, the "materialistic" point of view, from which culture is here being considered, is "one-sided." This is true and the one-sidedness is intentional. The belief that it is the task of scientific work to cure the "one-sidedness" of the economic approach by broadening it into a general social science suffers primarily from the weakness that the "social" criterion (i.e., the relationships among persons) acquires the specificity necessary for the delimitation of scientific problems only when it is accompanied by some substantive predicate. (67)

Or in other words: there is no general or comprehensive or synoptic approach to defining the social; there is only the possibility of a series of selective and value-guided approaches to defining specific aspects of the social world.  And these one-sided and selective approaches have an enormous epistemological merit: they can allow us to discover specific, concrete forms of interconnection among social phenomena as we have defined them.

The justification of the one-sided analysis of cultural reality from specific "points of view" -- in our case with respect to its economic conditioning -- emerges purely as a technical expedient from the fact that training in the observation of the effects of qualitatively similar categories of causes and the repeated utilization of the same scheme of concepts and hypotheses offers all the advantages of the division of labor. (71)

There is no absolutely "objective" scientific analysis of culture -- or put perhaps more narrowly but certainly not essentially differently for our purposes -- of "social phenomena" independent of special and "one-sided" viewpoints according to which...they are selected, analyzed, and organized for expository purposes.  The reasons for this lie in the character of the cognitive goal of all research in social science which seeks to transcend the purely formal treatment of the legal or conventional norms regulating social life. (72)

All the analysis of infinite reality which the finite human mind can conduct rests on the tacit assumption that only a finite portion of this reality constitutes the object of scientific investigation, and that only it is "important" in the sense of being "worthy of being known". (72)

For me, all of this comes down to a rather straightforward and compelling conclusion on Weber's part: there is no social topic or problem for which we might provide a complete, final, and comprehensive analysis.  Rather, we are forced, and we are entitled, to always bring forward new perspectives and new aspects of the problem, and arrive at new insights about how the phenomena hang together when characterized in these new ways.

Or in other words, whether he ever actually said it or not, Weber was forced to believe that the history of Rome is never complete; each generation is free to create its new frameworks and perspectives on Rome, and telling its story according to a different set of concepts and insights.

(In the course of thinking about this topic I came across this very interesting paper by Richard Swedberg on "Max Weber's Vision of Economics" (link). The paper presents a very compelling critique of the way that neoclassical economics defines the subject matter of "economics," and gives a strong statement of how Weber's broader and more historical understanding of the subject -- which he referred to as "social economics" -- is of contemporary importance.)

Weber in America

Lawrence Scaff offered a fascinating preview of his forthcoming book, Max Weber in America, at a sociology seminar in Ann Arbor this week.  Scaff has written extensively on Weber in the past, and this current research is particularly intriguing and stimulating.  The book offers a careful reconstruction of Weber's visit to the United States in 1904, and it then goes on to provide a brilliant interpretation of the "discovery" of Weber in the United States in the 1940s and forward.

Let's start with the obvious: it is startling for those of us who are not Weber experts to learn that Weber spent time in the United States at all.  It's weirdly dissonant for me to imagine this quintessentially German sociologist, wandering the streets of Chicago and the plains of Oklahoma.  What did he make of Chicago 1904?  How did it influence his development as a sociological thinker?

It's even more eye-opening to learn that Weber met W. E. B. Dubois during his visit, and may have shifted some of his later thinking in fairly important ways as a result of his exposure to some of Dubois' ideas about race in America.  (Dubois' The Souls of Black Folk appeared in 1903.)

Scaff also writes quite a bit about the intellectual connections between Weber and William James during this period.  He explores important parallels between The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.  This is significant, because the first part of The Protestant Ethic was written and presented for publication just before the trip to America, whereas the second part was written after the visit.

Scaff seems to have done a great job of piecing together archival materials to arrive at a new telling of the story of the trip to America with Marianne.  So this addition to the biography of Weber is of great value all by itself.  (Marianne Weber's biography of Max provides only limited information about the trip; Max Weber.)

But even more important is the effort that Scaff makes to get inside the developing sociological imagination of the thinker.  This is what is most intriguing about the book, and what makes me most eager to read it when it appears in early winter.

Scaff makes a point that I find really intriguing about the way in which "Weber" was constructed as the founding sociologist we now summarize in courses on sociological theory.  This falls generally into the topic of the sociology of knowledge: how did concrete historical and institutional processes influence the construction of "sociology" or "physics"?  Scaff argues that much of our current representation of Weber derives, not from Weber directly, but from the ways in which Weber was appropriated and "re-broadcast" by American sociologists in the 1940s and 1950s, including especially Talcott Parsons. (Ironically, Scaff argues that the "Weber" who became important in German sociology in the 1960s was this American version, not a systematic re-reading and re-thinking of Weber's corpus.  Weber was more or less forgotten in German intellectual circles during the Nazi period.)  So this standardized version of Weber's sociology reduces the rich sociological thought of the thinker over a long career to a few standard theses.

One of Scaff's goals, then, is to "blow up" the sociology expressed across Weber's writings and try to see how the parts might be fitted together in other ways. Can the canonical Weber be interpreted in significantly different and more nuanced ways? This is a particularly interesting and fertile question, and it contributes directly to the important project of trying to rethink the making of modern sociological imagination and frameworks.

Several members of the Ann Arbor seminar commented on the fact that there are some parallels between Weber's interpretation of the "American difference" (chiefly a higher level of civic involvement than in Germany) and the main lines of Tocqueville's observations of America in Democracy in America.  Scaff shared that two things are known about this question -- first, that Weber never refers to Tocqueville anywhere in his corpus; and second, that he read Democracy in America in French at some point, since an edition of the book annotated in his hand is contained in his book collection in Heidelberg.  (Klaus Offe comments on this parallel in Reflections on America: Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno in the United States, based on the Adorno Lecture that he presented in Frankfurt in 2003.  Here is a limited Google Books view (link).)

This is all really important material for those of us who are interested in the contingent development of modern sociology.  So Scaff's book is one that I'm eagerly anticipating when it appears in January.

Here is the table of contents for the book.

MAX WEBER IN AMERICA

Lawrence A. Scaff

Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Introduction

Part I. The American Journey

Chapter 1 Thoughts about America
Traveling to Progressive America
The Horizons of Thought
A “Spiritualist” Construction of the Modern Economy?

Chapter 2 The Land of Immigrants
Arriving in New York
Church and Sect, Status and Class
Settlements and Urban Space

Chapter 3 Capitalism
The City as Phantasmagori
Hull House, the Stockyards, and the Working Class
Character as Social Capital

Chapter 4 Science and World Culture
The St. Louis Congress: Unity of the Sciences?
The Last Time for a Free and Great Development: American
Exceptionalism?
The Politics of the Arts and Crafts
Gender, Education and Authority

Chapter 5 Remnants of Romanticism
The Lure of the Frontier
The Problems of Indian Territory
Nature, Traditionalism, and the New World
The Significance of the Frontier

Chapter 6 The Color Line
Du Bois and the Study of Race
The Lessons of Tuskegee
Race and Ethnicity, Class and Caste

Chapter 7 Different Ways of Life
Colonial Children
Nothing Remains except Eternal Change
Ecological Interlude
Inner Life and Public World
The Cool Objectivity of Sociation

Chapter 8 The Protestant Ethic
Spirit and World
William James and His Circle
Ideas and Experience

Chapter 9 American Modernity
Strange Contradictions
Becoming American
Cultural Pluralism

Chapter 10 Interpretation of the Experience
The Discourse about America
A Way Out of the Iron Cage?
America in the Work

Part II. The Work in America

Chapter 11 The Discovery of the Author
Author and Audience
Networks of Scholars
Translation History
The Disciplines

Chapter 12 The Creation of the Sacred Text
An American in Heidelberg
Parsons Translates “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism”

Chapter 13 The Invention of the Theory
Gerth and Mills Publish a Weber “Source Book”
Parsons’ “Theory of Social and Economic Organization”
Weber Among the Emigrés
Weberian Sociology and Social Theory
Weber Beyond Weberian Sociology

Appendix I: The Webers’ Itinerary
Appendix II: Selected Correspondence with Americans, 1904-1905
Bibliographic Notes
Index