B Nelson 1976

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On Orient and Occident in Max Weber Author(s): BENJAMIN NELSON Source: Social Research, Vol. 43, No. 1, Interaction Between European and American Social Science

(SPRING 1976), pp. 114-129Published by: The New SchoolStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40970216Accessed: 16-08-2014 01:59 UTC

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On Orient and Occident in Max Weber* / BY BENJAMIN NELSON

IVJLax Weber was surely, but he was not solely: (a) a methodologist or logician of the social sciences and sociology; (b) a master theorist ever pressing forward to lay the foundations of an interpretive sociology of social action, acknowledging the possibility and the desirability of causal understanding; (c) a sociologist of religion intent on establishing and illustrating distinctions of church, sect, charisma, asceticism and mysticisms (otherworldy, innerworldly) and the variants of these orientations and structures in different mixes of societies in different parts of the world; (d) a political sociologist whose aim it was to establish the significance of stratum, status, party, and styles of life, as well as class, in defining the patterns of legitimation, authority, conduct, identity, organization, and so on; (e) a political controversialist, whose acts and writings need to be interpreted against the background of his lifelong political participations and even partisanship.

Weber was surely not an epigone of Marx, as too many have recently been saying, one whose contribution - if, indeed, he can be said to have made any distinctive contribution! - consisted in his having deepened our understanding of the power of stratum, status, and party in an era of "bureaucratic domination." I would not even agree that Weber's entire life was devoted to a

"dialogue with the ghost of Marx." 1

iCf. Albert Salomon, "German Sociology," in Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert E.

Moore, eds., Twentieth Century Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945), pp. 58&-614 at 596.


ORIENT AND OCCIDENT 115

From the avowedly civilizational point of view adopted in the present essay, Weber was surely - I do not say only - a comparative historical differential sociologist 2 intent on establishing a new sociological analytic - an analytic he trusted would become supe- rior to Marx, to Simmel, to Toennies, to all others doing sociology. The key to this analytic consisted of his forthright adoption of "universal-historical" horizons and "civilizational-analytic" perspectives as bases for comparative, historical, and systematic inves- tigations. His main aim was to study the processes and patterns of the different constellations of "religion" and "world," or econ- onomy-society-polity illustrated in the varied social and cultural mixes constituted across the world's histories.

The centrality of this viewpoint is clearly illustrated with varia- tions of stress in the two main bodies of his work, his Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie (Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion) and his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society). Put a bit simply, the studies included in the former collection undertake to explain in what ways the concrete distinctive actualities of the contemporary West can only be understood in their depths against the historically specific civilizational realities which came to be fused in the Occident. It is mainly against this background that Weber is here intent on making sense of the patterns, paces of different institutional, social and cultural structures to be found across the world.

These concerns and stresses are surely not absent from Economy and Society but in the main the studies gathered in Economy and Society are more differential sociological rather than comparative historical While surely the fruit of a consuming lifelong interest in the different ways in which economy, society, polity, and religion affected one another in different civilizational settings, this work moves more centrally than do the studies in the Collected Essays

2 See my "Max Weber's 'Author's Introduction' (1920): A Master Clue to His Main Aims," Sociological Inquiry 44 (1974): 269-278, especially at 271 for discussion of this perspective.


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in the Sociology of Religion toward the elaboration of the larger analytic of which I have spoken above.

The "Civilizational-Analytic" Perspective

Weber's distinctive comparative-historical, differential sociological perspectives are implicit in his work from the earliest years of his research. They are already apparent in his very early writings in the two decades before his Protestant Ethic (1904-05): his doctoral dissertation done under the supervision of Levin Gold- schmidt; his habilitation dedicated to August Meitzen; his book- length encyclopedia article on "Agrarverhl misse in Alterum" (1897, 1898, ed. 1909). His luminous essay on "The Social Causes of the Decay of the Ancient World" (1896) also illustrates this focus with particular clarity. In all these essays Weber already showed a sensitivity to certain features of the Western world which had a unique aspect or at least had achieved an extraordinary ascendency and priority in the West.

A new high point which he was himself later to call his "universal historical" horizons came with the studies comprising his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-05).

We must dig well below the conventional surfaces of the familiar readings of this renowned work to grasp the fact that its underlying arguments are reared on the following generally unnoticed foundations which cry out to be grasped in "civilization-analytic" terms:

(1) Diverse sociocultural and civilizational complexes are dis- tinguished from one another by the degree to which they institu- tionalize differential overcomings (in the direction of rationalization and universalization) of invidious dualisms of diverse sorts.

(After 1910 in his studies gathered under the rubric "The Eco- nomic Ethic of the World Religions," Weber was to give great prominence in this differential analysis of the varied paces and



extents of fraternization, as well as rationalization and universalization.)

(2) Two main sorts of dualisms were transcended in special ways and degrees in the course of the Western development: (a) The dualism illustrated by the distinction between the brother or "insider" and the other, the alien or enemy "outsider." (I have treated a paradigmatic instance of this transcendance in some detail in my Idea of Usury, which bears the subtitle: From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood.) (b) The dualism of "religion/world." The overcoming of otherworldly asceticism in the form of innerworldly asceticism as a principle of the life regulation of conduct had especially great salience in the West. Indeed, it was only in the postmedieval West and in the West alone that this extraordinary breakthrough was effected. Only here there occurs the permeation into every corner of the everyday world (including psyche itself) of a new innerworldly asceticism and a new rationalized model of organization of conduct and a new methodical planning in all the linked structures of enterprise, organization, and orientations to work, wealth, welfare, identity, and so on.

(3) It was the overcoming of the later dualism which was affected with the help of "Protestant Ethic." Particular importance on this score attached to the teaching and work of Luther, Calvin, and the Calvinist sects, especially in America.

(4) This innerworldly asceticism eventuated in the sanctification of this-worldly employments - and callings.

(5) It was not rationalism so much as irrationalism, the irrationalism of Luther, Calvin, the Puritans, which spurred this breakthrough toward the unique new rationalizations of the West.

(6) Rationalization has been the most fateful force of the modern world. Its progress throughout the spheres of regulation of conduct, enterprise, organization, technology, law, science has been eventuating in the profound disenchantment of the cosmos characteristic of our age.

Issues of this type and scope almost never arose in the course


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of the heated polemics which quickly followed upon the appearance of Weber's Protestant Ethic. Weber ended this trying debate with the publication of his Anti-Critical Last Word to Felix Rachfahl in 1910. Now free to embark on a vastly extended journey, he quickly plunged into studies which related him to the wider horizons and the range of problems which were to busy him until his death in 1920. These led him to launch a whole series of mental experiments in comparative historical sociology of the world religions and of the central structural constellations illustrated in the histories of the foremost political-economic- societal complexes of the world.

One of these thought-experiments proved to be The Religion of China. Here he engaged himself to test his hypothesis about the critical significance of irrationalism over rationalism in spur- ring the breakthrough toward the unique new rationalizations in the West. China was to prove to be the case of a most highly developed ethical rationalism that had never been dislodged from its prudential, traditional, and calculative cast, this being due to the lack of two orientations which could spark fraternization and universalization: an ontological commitment to a transmundane

reality, and a charismatic opening to prophecy. Arising from this thought experiment were questions that took

the following form: How, in the light of universal history, describe and explain

the uniqueness of pattern and pace of the development and apparent fate of rationalized Western culture and civilization?

How understand and explain the apparent failure of China and India to achieve breakthroughs to modern capitalist organization enterprises, modern science, industrial revolution?

How explain why the highly developed rationalism of Con- fucianism did not eventuate in the full rationalization of Chinese

society? How understand and explain the likely fate of Western man

and the chances for fulfillment and charismatic renewal in the dis- enchanted cosmos of the twentieth century?



How describe the patterns of structural relations so far found to appear - and yet likely to appear - in the economies, societies, politics, and religious institutions of the East and West alike?

How assess the chances for personal and civic liberty in Ger- many, the United States of America and Russia? 3

A fuller discussion of Chinese and Indian developments is re- served for the two next sections of this essay. The preliminary mention above of some larger comparative issues associated with these civilizational complexes serves to underscore that, beginning with what came to be known as the Religion of China, we not only see ever more clearly Weber's differentially "civilizational-analytic" perspective. Indeed, we see this more clearly here than in the earlier Protestant Ethic, although it is not lacking there either, as I have indicated.

Weber was hard at work as early as 1910-1 1 on parts of Economy and Society which he had undertaken to do in connection with the Grundrisse der Sozialkonomik, the encyclopedia he had con- tracted to supervise. It now appears that the first part of Wirt- schaft und Gesellschaft he completed may have been the essay on the Occidental city which he simply entitled "Nicht-Legitime Herrschaft" and later included in his discussion of Herrschaft (which many prefer to translate as "Domination") in Economy and Society.

This essay marks a decisive turn in the way Weber thought about the relations of East and West. Here Weber gives powerful emphasis to the unique characteristics of the Occidental city that was apparently never paralleled anywhere else in the world. It was only the Occidental city which developed autonomous structures, which legislated on its own behalf, which had an independent militia, a market, a court system, and which was a deter-

3 Wolfgang Mommsen, "Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika im politischen Denken Max Webers," Historische Zeitschrift 213 (1971): 358-381, offers an especially suggestive essay on this point; cf. Benjamin Nelson, "Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and George Jellinek as Comparative Historical Sociologists," Sociological Analysis 36 (1975): 229-240.


120 SOCIAL RESEARCH

minate political entity and not simply the site of an imperial or hierocratic bureaucracy.

How had the distinctive Occidental city come into existence? Here Weber placed central emphasis upon the significance in the West of a breakthrough transformative process that was most closely linked to the unique Western heritage and influence of Jewish and Christian notions of brotherhood, a process that Weber described as fraternization.4

As Weber read the evidence, the medieval city (unlike its Ori- ental counterpart) was marked by a unique degree of fraternization and universalization stemming from the three main axes of West- ern development - the Greek, the Roman, and the Jewish-Chris- tian. Interestingly, Weber highlights this last axis and its part in the process of fraternization in a passage which few have troubled to emphasize, when he remarks that there would not have been a

unique Occidental city had there not occurred the breaking through of restrictive particularisms among the early Christians in their commensalism in Antioch.6 Weber had a very deep understanding of the critical importance of overcoming the restraints on wider commercium, connubium, and commensalism in the development of wider universalities, new communities, new com- munications, new communions.

It is hardly possible in this setting to detail the vast insights spread through Weber's pages on "Orient and Occident." Here we can only call direct attention to a few neglected issues.

* Nelson, "Max Weber's 'Author's Introduction'," p. 272; see also Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Too few authors have noted and built upon Weber's emphases on this process. This is even true for Wolfgang Schieder, "Brderlichkeit, Bruderschaft, . . . Verbrderung, Bru- derliebe," in Reinhart Kosselleck and others, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1973), who, however, offers many interesting Western European historical illustrations. See also his Anfnge der deutschen Arbeiter- bewegung: Die Auslandsvereine im Jahrzehnt nach der Julirevolution von 1830

(Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1963). B Max Weber, The Religion of India: Hinduism and auddmsm, translated Dy

H. H. Gerth and Don Martindale (New York: Free Press, 1958), p. 98; cf. Max Weber, Economy and Society, translated and edited by G. Roth and C. Wittich, 3 vols. (Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press, 1968), 3: 1242.



Failed Rationalization in China

Weber's views on the East are both historically general and historically specific in character. They are general in the sense that Weber sees certain sorts of phenomena that generally char- acterize the East, whether in comparison or contrast to the West. Weber perceived that both China and India could, indeed, be found to exhibit extraordinary institutional and cultural structures which notably influenced the West and might have served as springboards of indigenous development paralleling the West; other structures are discovered to have largely served as counter- vailing influences that have had a part in slowing the transformative breakthroughs of the East to the complex structures of rationalizations and rationalisms which developed in the West.

Weber's views are historically specific in that the differentiated patterns of individual Eastern civilizations are discussed in their historical specificity. We shall, therefore, focus this section mainly on Weber's approach to specification of the Chinese developments and the comparison of China and the West. Our next section will be centered on India.

Weber reminds us, as Joseph Needham 6 is nowadays doing on a monumental scale, that long before the West, China knew the compass, the fore-and-aft rudder, printing, paper money, and a host of other inventions essential to passages to higher development. However, as Weber understood - here again Needham and others have been more recently exploring in detail - the Chinese did not effect the breakthrough to the ' 'Industrial Revo- lution" or a universal rational science, a mathematical physics of the Galilean type.7 Why?

6 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 5 vols, in 7 parts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954-74); Benjamin Nelson, "Sciences and Civilizations, 'East' and 'West': Joseph Needham and Max Weber," in Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky, eds., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 11 (Dordrecht and Botson: D. Reidel, 1974), pp. 445-493.

7 Nathan Sivin has distinctive approaches in this area; these have been reviewed in Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. 5, Pt. 2. Sivin is now at work on an essay describing his recent and current studies.


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Weber's main theses here include the following reflections: The overripe Confucian rationalism of conduct and belief

persistently reinforced traditionalist particularism, patrimonial- ism, and a praxism of ritual etiquette and sacromagical observance.

The overwhelming authority of the five axial relationships stood in the way of the passages to ethical and juridical universality. Forensic structures of the Western variety were slow to develop. Thus, a system of rationalized judicial procedures and courts based upon formalized juridical canons did not fully emerge.

Weber also develops correlated contrasts between key structures of China and the West:

China remained untouched by the great transformations associated with scientific rationalism of the Greeks, the juridical rationalism and universality of the Romans, the prophetic demag- icization of the Hebrews, and the universal fraternization associated with Christianity. If universal rational science and technology, if self-regulation of conduct in the spirit of innerworldly asceticism, failed to appear in China, it was because, among other facts, China was not penetrated by a Euclid, a Ptolemy, an Ulpian, an Amos, a Paul, a Benedict, an Abelard, a Luther, a Calvin.

Despite the advances in respect to shipping, manufacture, money lending, money changing and banking, the Orient never did develop a powerful foundation for rationalized mass produc- tion. Mark Elvin and others have sought to explain this by writing on the significance for China of what Elvin calls the high- level "equilibrium trap." 8

Lacking a transmundane horizon to spur prophetic insur-

gency, the Chinese were never shaken from their tradition. When this did come as in the Taiping Rebellion, China was already in the throes of European and American colonialism. China was to learn of what the Chinese were to call "Mr. Science" and "Mr.

Democracy" directly from the West.9 s Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 1973), pp. 298-316. William T. de Bary and others, eds., Sources of Chinese Iradttton, 2 vois. (iNew

York: Columbia University Press, 1964).



With specific reference to the cultural sphere, all of the following were notably lacking in China:

Universities which were the center of relatively free-ranging intellectuals and professionals who were drawn together from many lands or provinces. Nothing like the international medieval university appeared in China.

Voluntary associations and committees of correspondents of intellectuals who made it their responsibility to promote fuller intelligence of scientific and philosophical developments in different lands. Thus, there were no academies in China comparable to those which flourished in Europe at the time of Galileo.

Cumulative developments in mathematics.10 Chinese developments in the sciences were mainly in the service of the imperial structures of astrological forecasting for the sake of maintaining the appropriate ritual responses in respect to the calendar.11

Throughout Weber's discussions of China, and even more ex- plicitly throughout his discussion of India, he continues to place the strongest stress on the critical passages toward societal fraternization in the direction of universalization and universalities in every sphere of social relations and culture - science, law, conscience, ^etc. Without himself ever saying so in so many words, Weber was aware of the two-way relations between passages to universalization in the spheres of cultural expression. In one of my previous essays, I have called this the "double dialectic of double universalization processes." 12

Weber did understand that the two directly and reciprocally affected one another most powerfully. In the absence of fraterni- zations in the social and societal spheres one could not expect the full breakthrough in the cultural horizons and symbolic constella-

10 Particularly valuable illustrations and discussions of these issues will be found in Ulrich Libbrecht, Chinese Mathematics in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973).

n The learned and suggestive older study of W. Eberhard, "Contributions to the Astronomy of the Han Period," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 1 (July 1936): 194-235, remains truly helpful here.

12 Nelson, "Max Weber's 'Author's Introduction'."


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tions. In the absence of effective widenings of universalities in communication, "conscience/* science, and law, passages in the direction of expanded communities and communions beyond family and clan particularisms lack for a continuing spur.

We turn now to Weber's discussion of India.

Failed Fraternization in India

Not surprisingly, the issue of fraternization receives the greatest possible stress in Weber's analyses of the major differences between the West and India. Weber fully understood that even at the time he was writing, India was far from having experienced the overcoming of inherited barriers to full social fraternization, cultural universalization, and institutional rationalization.

The key elements of Hinduism and Buddhism, he was con- vinced, had been the spirit of caste and otherworldly ascetic world- denial. While these prevailed, there could not be a single ethical standard for all, nor could there occur decisive steps in the breaking down of the restrictive distinctions between "religion" and "world," "insiders" and "outsiders," folk traditionalism and higher culture.

However alike in appearance particular Indian institutions seemed at times to Occidental analogues, the Indian prototypes did not truly parallel the distinctive Western institutions such as the guild and other elements of the occupational structures or the Occidental city. From at least the High Middle Ages forward, Western economy, polity, the Western university, philosophy and science were very different in character and ran different courses from the Indian institutions.

The fundamentally important contrast between caste and the

guild, or any other occupational association of the West, is strik-

ingly revealed in Weber's characterization of "world-historical differences":



The uniqueness of the development of India lay in the fact that these beginnings of guild organization in the cities led neither to the city autonomy of the Occidental type nor, after the development of the great patrimonial states, to a social and economic organization of the territories corresponding to the "territorial economy" of the Occident.18

The existence of the caste system, which preceded these organizations, became paramount. In part, this caste system entirely dis- placed the other organizations; in part, it crippled them; it pre- vented them from attaining any considerable importance. The "spirit" of this caste system, however, was totally different from that of the merchant and craft guilds.

Although, as Weber believed, "fraternization at all times pre- supposes commensalism," it does not have to be actually practiced in everyday life, but it must be ritually possible. The caste order precluded this. Another difference between guild and caste is of even greater importance.

The occupational associations of the medieval Occident were often engaged in violent struggles among themselves, but at the same time they evidenced a tendency towards fraternization.14

Complete fraternization of castes has been and is impossible because it is one of the constitutive principles of the castes that there should be at least ritually inviolable barriers against complete commensalism among different castes. As with all sociological phenomena, the contrast here is not an absolute one, nor are transitions lacking, yet it is a contrast which in essential features has been historically decisive.

Weber does not let his book on India close without venturing a number of notable contrasts, e.g., contrasts of India and China, contrasts of Confucianism and Buddhism. Several of Weber's most felicitous depictions of these contrasts occur in the course of his exciting attempts to provide comparative analyses of civiliza-

is Weber, The Religion of India, p. 33. 14 Ibid., p. 35.


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tional differences against intercivil izational backgrounds.15 Thus, he writes:

For Asia as a whole China played somewhat the role of France in the modern Occident^ All cosmopolitan "polish" stems from China, to Tibet to Japan and outlying Indian territories. Against this India has a significance comparable to that of antique Hel- lenism. There are few conceptions transcending practical interests in Asia whose source would not finally have to be sought there. Particularly, all orthodox and heterodox salvation religions that could claim a role in Asia similar to that of Christianity are Indian. There is only one great difference, apart from local and pre-eminent exceptions - none of them succeeded in becoming the single dominating confession, as was the case for us in the Middle Ages after the peace of Westphalia.

Asia was, and remains, in principle, the land of the free com- petition of religions, "tolerant" somewhat in the sense of late antiquity. That is to say, tolerant except for restrictions for reason of state, which, finally, also for us today remain the boundary of all religious toleration only with other consequences.

Where these political interests in any way came into question, in Asia as well they had religious consequences in the grand style. They were greatest in China, but they also appeared in Japan and, to some extent, in India. As in Athens in the time of Socrates, so in Asia a sacrifice could be demanded in behalf of Deisdaimonie. And, finally, religious wars of the sects and militaristic monastic orders also played a role in Asia until the nineteenth century.16

The difference of stress between ancient Buddhism and Con- fucianism is put as follows:

Ancient Buddhism represents in almost all, practically decisive points the characteristic polar opposite of Confucianism as well as of Islam. It is a specifically unpolitical and anti-political status religion, more precisely, a religious "technology" of wandering and of intellectually-schooled mendicant monks. Like all Indian philosophy and theology it is a "salvation religion," if one is to use the name "religion" for an ethical movement without a deity and without a cult. More correctly, it is an ethic with absolute indifference to the question of whether there are "gods" and how they exist. Indeed, in terms of the ''how," "from what," "to what end" of salvation, Buddhism represents the most radical form of

15 Donald Nielsen, "Two Civilizational Equations Comparing 'East' and 'West' in Max Weber's Sociology," unpublished manuscript.

i Weber, The Religion of India, pp. 329-330.



salvation-striving conceivable. Its salvation is a solely personal act of the single individual. There is no recourse to a deity or savior. From Buddha himself we know no prayer. There is no religious grace. There is, moreover, no predestination either. . . .

Buddhism negates the ordinary concepts of salvation. A concept of sin based on an ethic of intentions is as little congenial for Buddhism as it was for Hinduism in general. Certainly there were sins for Buddhistic monks, even deadly sins which excluded the offender forever from the fellowship. And there were sins which only required penance. However, everything that hinders salvation is by no means a "sin." In fact, sin is not the final power inimical to salvation. Not "evil" but ephemeral life is the obstacle to salvation; salvation is sought from the simply senseless unrest of all structures of existence in general.

All "morality" could only be a means, hence, could have mean- ing only insofar as it is a means to salvation. In the last analysis, however, this is not the case. Passion per se, passion for God, even in the form of the loftiest enthusiasm is absolutely inimical to salvation because all desire means attachment to life. Basically, hatred is no more inimical to salvation than all forms of passion. It is on the same footing as the passionately active devotion to ideals. The concept of neighborly love, at least in the sense of the great Christian virtuosi of brotherliness, is unknown.17

As one might anticipate, Weber's discussion of India places stress on the immense importance of otherworldly asceticism and mysticism in India. To be sure, the structures which were to be realized in the Western monastic communities had their origin in India. But India was not to undergo what was decisive for the West, the breaking through of traditional structures and the full institutionalization of innerworldly asceticism as well as (I am

currently contending) innerworldly mysticism. I have sought to tell part of this story of "double conjunction" elsewhere.18

The Meeting of East and West

Our present discussion of the Orient in Weber must stop here. A comprehensive report would truly need to include Weber's

it Ibid., pp. 206-208. 18 Nelson, "Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and George Jellinek."


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analysis of ancient Judaism and Islam along with his discussions of the Far East. Fortunately, several specialized discussions of Weber's analysis of Judaism and Islam are now available.19

Finally, any reflections in this theme would need to speak to an issue too often neglected in older discussions of Weber, one which is currently proving to be at the center of many of the latest writings on Weber's central aims. Where, one must ask, would Weber have stood in the worldwide debate now in progress on the issues of the possible ultimacy and irreversibility of the West- ern pattern of development? 20

Did Weber teach, as some now seem to claim, that the Western development represents the highest form of civilizational achieve- ment which has yet appeared in mankind's social evolution? 21 Is Weber committed to the view that the Western patterns were not only unique but necessary and irreversible?

I permit myself to offer a provisional opinion on these questions at this time:

Weber did contend that the West had, so far, seen a unique development in respect to the complex structures of institution- alized rationality, rationalism, fraternization, and universality. He never meant to claim that these structures were independent of Eastern influence, ultimate in point of development, irreversible. So far as I can tell, he would have had no trouble in admitting that the West could go East and the East could - and would - go Western.22

i See especially Julius Guttmann, "Max Webers Soziologie des antiken Juden- tums," Monatsschrift fr Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 69 (July- August 1925): 195-223; Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 1974): and Bryan S. Turner, Weber and Islam (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

20 I sought to convey the spirit of this discussion in "Max Weber's 'Author's Intro- duction'."

2i See especially Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971); cf. Nelson, "Max Weber's 'Author's Introduction'."

22 Benjamin Nelson, "Civilizational Complexes and Intercivilizational Encounters," Sociological Analysis 34 (1973): 79-105.



Weber died in 1920 too soon to have a reliable understanding of what were to be the shapes of things to come.

Today fifty-five years later we are far from having closed the gap resulting from the drastic remakings of the structure of the world since his passing. Would this not be a good time to intensify our efforts to explore the civil izational and intercivilizational realities he sought to illuminate during the last decade of his life? 28

28 The main contributions of leading scholars who have sought to carry forward Weber's work in these spheres is discussed in Benjamin Nelson and Donald Nielsen, "Civilizational Patterns and Intercivilizational Encounters, A Bibliography/' Bul- letin of the International Committee for the Comparative Study of Civilizations 9 (Summer 1973): 3-15; cf. Nelson, "Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and George Jellinek"; Benjamin Nelson, "Max Weber as a Pioneer of Civilizational Analysis," Comparative Civilizations Bulletin (in press).


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Issue Table of ContentsSocial Research, Vol. 43, No. 1 (SPRING 1976) pp. 1-195Front MatterHannah Arendt: 19061975 [pp. 3-5]Problems of Sociological Method [pp. 6-24]Preliminary Remarks on the Interaction Between American and European Social Science [pp. 25-45]"That All Governments Rest on Opinion" [pp. 46-61]Developmental Interaction Between American and German Sociology [pp. 62-76]Responsibility Today: The Ethics of an Endangered Future [pp. 77-97]Technology, Ethics, and International Relations [pp. 98-113]On Orient and Occident in Max Weber [pp. 114-129]The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society [pp. 130-152]Policies of the Social Sciences [pp. 153-168]John Locke on Robert Nozick [pp. 169-195]Back Matter

B Nelson 1976

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