Dilemmas in Liberal Democratic Thought Since Max Weber
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Richard Wellen Dilemmas In Liberal Democratic Thought Since Max Weber Wellen, Richard Dilemmas in Liberal Democratic Thought Since Max Weber ISBN: 978-0-9738413-0-5 First edition published in 1996 by Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York. © by Richard Wellen This work is licensed by Richard Wellen under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc- nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. Anyone is free to copy, distribute and transmit this work on condition that the work is attributed to the author, that it is not used or distributed for commercial purposes and that it is not altered, transformed or used as a source for derivative works. Author’s contact information: [email protected] For Sally, Sarah and Ruthie Contents Acknowledgements ix 1. Weber’s Challenge to Political Thought 1 2. The Necessity of Choice: Toward a 31 Convergence of Personality and Politics 3. Liberalism as a Moral Tradition: 57 Vice as Virtue? 4. The Modernization of Political Reason: 83 Reflections on Habermas 5. The Crisis of Liberalism in Social Science: 111 Strauss on Weber 6. Rorty’s End of Philosophy: 135 A New Beginning for Liberalism? 7. On the Moral Contingency of 159 Liberal Democratic Politics Bibliography Index Acknowledgements The idea of addressing the relevance of Max Weber's work to contemporary political thought was suggested to me by John O'Neill during the formative stages of this project. For this, and for his patient insights into how this study could be improved in its own terms, I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude. Tom Wilson led me to an appreciation of how Max Weber, who was a product of his times and the victim of his own ambiguous insights into the nature of intellectual and political problems, nevertheless remains a figure inviting new interpretations. I have been tremendously influenced by Brian Caterino's ambitious understanding of how both Habermas’ work and contemporary debates on liberalism could be combined as a context for understanding Weber. I count myself very fortunate to have drawn so heavily from his exacting approach to the issues addressed in this study. Finally, the late Millie Bakan always displayed an unflinching support for my work. I am particularly grateful for her nourishing combination of critique and conversational generosity which it was my great fortune to enjoy for so many years. Thanks also go to Ron Beiner for his especially close reading and valuable comments on the text. I am also grateful to York University which has generously afforded me several conference grants to present earlier versions of some of the chapters. Unfortunately, there is really no space here to acknowledge the support of so many other colleagues and friends whose imprint on my work has been worth so much more than the thanks I could ever hope to give them. Of course, this study would not have been possible had my wife and my two children not given me the confidence that they would survive (if not always relish) the many seasons in which they were subjected to the renewal of this work. Chapter One WEBER'S CHALLENGE TO POLITICAL THOUGHT Max Weber’s work has become famous for its portrait of the ambiguous legacy of the forms of rationalization in religion and society, Enlightenment liberalism, modern democracy, “rational bourgeois capitalism,” and the spread of objectification and depersonalization in modern spheres of conduct and organization. However, the recent lively controversies about liberalism among political philosophers in North America have rarely spawned much sustained discussion of Weber’s core themes. This is ironic since some of the most frequently cited protagonists in these debates—primarily Leo Strauss, Jürgen Habermas and Alasdaire MacIntyre—have treated Weber as the thinker who has presented perhaps the greatest challenge to the intellectual foundations of liberalism. It is the purpose of this study to recover Weber as a touchstone for contemporary debates in political theory. In doing so I will usually not deal with lengthy expositions of his ideas or with a straightforward defense or criticism of his work. Rather the hope is that I can show how the challenges Max Weber posed might help us better understand what is actually at stake in contemporary criticisms of liberalism and in recent attempts to provide it with new foundations and justifications. WEBER AS AN AMBIGUOUS FIGURE Donald Levine, one of the most sensitive recent interpreters of Weber’s place in the 2 Weber’s Challenge to Political Thought sociological tradition, has shown that the keystone of Weber’s approach was to contextualize, in a careful way, the modern ideals of freedom and rationality, rather than to characterize the modern age in univocal terms as many of Weber’s critics maintain.1 Although too often theorists like Levine and Parsons ‘reconstruct’ Weber in ways that make his view of modern developments look rather benign, they do offer an antidote to readings that stress only Weber’s statements regarding threats to freedom and the inevitability of cultural loss in the face of the increasing instrumental rationalization of life. It is clear that Weber was often centrally preoccupied with this trend which he tried to capture in his remarks about the “iron cage” of modern rationalized institutions. However, in another respect his analyses were self-consciously meant to train the eye upon selective aspects of reality. In social science, Weber argued, one must avoid confusing comparative results, diagnostic insights and interpretive achievements with the discovery of laws of social development or objectively valid criteria for justifying or criticizing the evaluative ideals that motivate actual conduct. For this reason, of course, Max Weber’s name has become synonymous with one of the central obstacles to solving the intellectual crises and impasses in modern social and political theory.2 If political philosophers (of all persuasions) have familiarized themselves with any aspect of Weber’s work, it has usually been for the purpose of contesting Weber’s insistence on the separation between facts and values. Questions about the choiceworthiness of “substantive” value-postulates or evaluative premises, which Weber claims must be the focus of practical and political life, are deemed by him not to be resolvable by rational or scientific analysis. This is because science properly deals with considerations about the problem situation in which those postulates may be chosen or accepted, or the problem situation which a given evaluative standpoint may bring about. Consequently, there is no way of moving from a rational understanding of the context that frames our choices or the consequences that might follow from the implementation of a given choice to a 1 Donald N. Levine, The Flight from Ambiguity, chs. 7 and 9. 2 See also Stephen Turner and Regis Factor, Max Weber and the Dispute over Reason and Value. Weber’s Challenge to Political Thought 3 rational judgement about which substantive postulate is worth choosing.3 Some have concluded that, for Weber, any value-judgement is itself simply an expression of an arbitrary subjective preference for a given or proposed state of affairs. Although it is debatable whether this picture of Weber as a nihilistic or emotivist thinker is accurate,4 one line of discussion in this study deals with the consequences of moral scepticism in the context of philosophical debates rather than from the standpoint of Weber’s social theory of modernity. To be sure, any attempt to defend liberal values must itself contend with the view of moral- evaluative issues which reduces them to choices among competing “faiths” (liberalism being one of them) whose conflict cannot be rationally settled. In chapter five below I examine Leo Strauss’ argument that Weber, as a moralist, knew he had entered a realm in which liberalism, and its attendant value of “intellectual integrity,” had to sanction either intolerance to faith or an unqualified commitment to private dogmatism over reason. Strauss believes that Weber knew he was on the precipice of nihilism. For his part, Weber proposed that all human attachments to ideas and interests can, in a certain respect, be clarified by reason. He also believed that although social theorists must have an abiding interest in informing the possible evaluative stances of his or her own world, this does not lead to contradiction with the aim of value-neutrality or objectivity. On the other hand he knew he could neither eliminate nor rationally control the inevitable element of subjectivity in knowledge. Nevertheless Weber claimed not to embrace wholeheartedly an irration-alist or nihilist interpretation of his doctrine of the infinite “complexity” of (historical) reality. Max Scheler was perhaps the first thinker to argue that Weber wrongly supposed he could prevent a lapse into nihilism by the sheer power of nominalist thinking. According to Scheler Weber’s doctrine of ideal types is the attempt to substitute a capricious constructivism for genuine philosophy: 3 See Weber, “The Meaning of ‘Ethical Neutrality’ in Sociology and Economics,” in The Methodology of the Social Sciences. 4 This point is made in a parallel way in Richard Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, pp. 45–50. 4 Weber’s Challenge to Political Thought [the] power [of Weber’s ideal typical concepts] to order the given