Essays in Sociology

Overview

About four hundred and ninety pages, the selection of Weber’s writings from 1906 to 1920 translated by Gerth and Mills and published in 1946, the form in which most English readers meet him. The chapters assigned by the Great Books set include the lectures Politics as a Vocation and Science as a Vocation, the essay on the three types of legitimate authority, the analyses of bureaucracy, class, status and party, the sociology of charismatic leadership, and studies of the religions of China and India and the Protestant sects.

Running through them is Weber’s account of the rationalisation and disenchantment of the modern world.

What happens

Politics as a Vocation. Weber defines the state by its monopoly of legitimate force, describes the three grounds of legitimacy and the rise of the professional politician and the party machine, and closes by contrasting the ethic of ultimate ends with the ethic of responsibility, and asking who has the calling for politics.

Science as a Vocation. He describes the academic career and its chances, argues that science gives us methods and clarity but no answer to the question of how we should live, and tells his students that the world is disenchanted and that they must choose among warring gods themselves.

The types of authority. Traditional, charismatic and legal-rational authority are set out as pure types, with the routinisation of charisma explaining how movements become institutions.

Bureaucracy. Weber describes the bureaucratic office, with its fixed jurisdictions, hierarchy, files, expert training and full-time officials, as the most efficient form of organisation ever devised, and warns that its expert knowledge is a power that elected politicians can barely control.

Class, status and party. Economic class, social honour and political party are distinguished as three orders of power, and Weber refuses to reduce the second and third to the first.

The religions. Studies of the religions of China and India, and of the Protestant sects in America, trace how different faiths shaped economic conduct, and how the rationalisation of the West drove the gods out of the world and left the calling behind.

How to read it

Read the two vocation lectures first, since they are the form in which Weber addressed a public directly and the place where the collection’s argument about what modernity costs is made plainest.

Pay close attention to the definition of the state by force, and to how it strips the state of every claim to be anything more than power lawfully held.

Notice the three types of authority and the analysis of bureaucracy, and test the typology against the institutions you know.

Consider the disenchantment of the world, and what Weber means by saying that science can never tell us which god to serve, and whether his sobriety is a counsel or a despair.

Read these essays alongside The Protestant Ethic to see the general theory of rationalisation and the single case study of how a faith made a world it then no longer needed.

Questions it raises

• Is the state really nothing but the monopoly of legitimate force, and what has to be true of legitimacy for the definition to work?
• Does the ethic of responsibility, which accepts the consequences of one’s acts, really oppose the ethic of ultimate ends, or does every politician need both?
• Is the world disenchanted, and if so, is that a loss, a liberation, or a description that says nothing about how to live?
• Is bureaucracy the most efficient form of organisation, or the most efficient at what it measures, and what does Weber’s admiration for it conceal?
• Why does Weber refuse to reduce status and party to class, and does the refusal answer Marx or evade him?
• What does it mean that most English readers meet Weber through an anthology assembled by two American sociologists, and what Weber did Gerth and Mills make?