Figures of Weberian MarxismAuthor(s): Michael LöwyReviewed work(s):Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jun., 1996), pp. 431-446Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/658052 .Accessed: 16/09/2012 18:01

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Figures of Weberian Marxism

MICHAEL LOWY Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris

The notion of "Weberian Marxism" was invented by Merleau-Ponty in order to define, in his book Les Aventures de la Dialectique (1955), the Western-Marxist thinkers who systematically used certain key ideas of Max Weber - in particular Georg Lukacs and some of his followers. It is a formulation that seems, in many regards, paradoxical: do not Weber and Marx represent two contradictory and mutually exclusive

systems of thought? Are not their scientific theories rigorously incom-

patible?

In any case, that has been - for many years - the dominant viewpoint in the Academy. Talcott Parsons's works, by proposing a neo-positivist (and anti-Marxist) reading of Weber, have surely contributed to this

image. And above all, a tenacious misunderstanding has made The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism a work of "spiritualist" polemic against historical materialism - while its true aim was quite dif- ferent: to reveal the elective affinity between Calvinism and capitalism. It is only in one or two paragraphs of the book - related to Benjamin Franklin and the origins of the "capitalist spirit" in the U.S.A. - that Weber strays from this general paradigm, i.e., the Wahlverwandtschaft between religious and economic forms, in order to suggest - against the

"vulgar sort of Marxism" - the historical priority of the religious fac- tor.1

If we leave aside the "Weberian Marxists" and a few pioneering works such as Karl Lowith's essays, it is mainly during the last few years that a different approach has been proposed, focusing on the numerous con-

vergences between the two thinkers.2 This does not mean that there do not exist substantial - even fundamental - contradictions between the authors of Economy and Society and Capital: essential philosophical (neo-Kantianism as against neo-Hegelianism) and political (national-

Theory and Society 25: 431-446, 1996. ? 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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ism versus socialism) differences shape, to a large extent, their respec- tive interpretations of imperialism, capitalism, power, and social classes. But there exist also several elements of coincidence, and above all, several analytical arguments that, although far from being identical, can be considered as perfectly complementary.

Second International Marxism - either orthodox or revisionist, Ger- man of Russian - completely ignored Weber. Paradoxically - or

logically - thinkers sympathetic to the Communist movement are the first ones to show a greater interest in his writings. One can consider

Georg Lukacs as the first Marxist to take Max Weber seriously and to draw significant inspiration from his ideas. Merleau-Ponty did not err when he designated History and Class Consciousness (1923) as the

beginning of the "Marxist Weberian" current; unfortunately, he gives up very few elements to define in a more precise way Lukacs's debt to the

Heidelberg sociologist.3 The expression "Weberian Marxism" - as there exists a Freudian Marxism or a Hegelian Marxism - is an intel-

lectually productive provocation, on the condition that it be under- stood not as an eclectical mixture of both methods, but rather as the use, for the benefit of an approach basically inspired by Marx, of cer- tain themes and categories from Weber.

The issue here is not to draw attention to the "influence" of Weber on Marxist thinkers, but to the way these thinkers were able to appropriate for themselves Weberian concepts as analytical tools complementary to Marxian dialectics, in order to develop a deeper and (often) more radi- cal critique of capitalism. In this sense the concept of Weberian Marx- ism has both scholarly and political significance.

Georg Lukacs participated for a few years (1912-1915) in the circle of friends who met every Sunday at Max and Marianne Weber's house in Heidelberg. Bonds of friendship and mutual respect grew between both thinkers, which did not dissolve after 1918, when the Hungarian philosopher became a Marxist. Their correspondence continued until 1920.4 This personal and intellectual link is surely one of the reasons

(but not the only one) why certain key Weberian ideas and notions

occupy a strategic place in Lukacs's first Marxist writings.

The central chapter of History and Class Consciousness, focusing on the analysis of reification (Verdinglichung), is in fact, to a large extent, a

powerful and original synthesis of Marx's theory of commodity fetichism and Weber's theory of rationalization. By merging the Weber-

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ian category of formal rationality - characterized by abstraction and

quantification - with the Marxian categories of abstract labor and

exchange-value, Lukacs reformulates the problematic of the German

sociologist in the Marxist theoretical (and political) language. On the other hand, by extending the Marxian analysis of the commodity-form and its fetishism to other spheres of society and culture, he takes direct

inspiration from the Weberian analysis of the process through which modern life is shaped by the capitalist spirit of rational calculation

(Rechnenhaftigkeit).5

This anti-capitalist radicalization of the "value-free" - or at least ambi- valent - analysis of Weber is particularly striking in the Lukacsian rein-

terpretation of the Protestant Ethic book. First of all, surprisingly enough - and unlike most of the Marxist critics of this work - Lukacs shows no interest whatsoever in the "materialist" polemic on the origins of capitalism: "It is quite indifferent, in order to appreciate the facts, that one approves or not of Weber's causal interpretation." Instead, what seems important to him, is the meaning of the Weberian thesis for a critical examination of capitalist reification: "the Calvinist link... between a trial ethics (innerworldly asceticism) and the com-

plete transcendence of the objective powers that move the world and

shape the content of human destiny (Deus absconditus and predestina- tion) represents, in a mythological but pure form, the bourgeois struc- ture of reified consciousness (thing in itself)." In a footnote, Lukacs refers himself explicitly to Weber's writings, as well as to a piece by Engels that also suggests the interdependence between capitalism and Calvinism.6

It should be noticed that Lukacs was not the first Marxist to use - should one say to "divert"? - the arguments of The Protestant Ethic to the benefit of a harsh denunciation of the cold and alienated logic of capitalism. Two years before History and Class Consciousness, Ernst Bloch, who also had been an active participant in the Max Weber Circle in Heidelberg, insisted, in his Thomas Miinzer, Theologian of Revolution (1921), on the role of innerworldly asceticism in the ac- cumulation of capital. In a chapter under the heading "Calvin and the ideology of money" he attributes to Calvinism the fact that "the obliga- tion to save is imposed to richness, conceived as an abstract and self- sufficient quantity which requires, by itself, to grow." Therefore, thanks to the Protestant ethic, "as Max Weber has brilliantly shown, the emerging capitalist economy was entirely liberated, detached and emancipated from all the scruples of primitive Christianity, as well as

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from all that remained relatively Christian in the ideology of the Middle-Ages."7

According to Lukacs, with the development of capitalism, reification progressively seizes all forms of social life - beginning with the state, administration, justice, and law. This structural homogenization has been observed by "all clear-sighted historians of modern capitalism." Who are these insightful thinkers? The only example he mentions - and this is surely not an accident - is Max Weber. He quotes several of Weber's texts, among them this passage from Economy and Society: "The modern capitalist enterprise is based above all internally on calculation. It needs, in order to exist, a Justice whose functioning can be, at least in principle, rationally calculated according to solid general rules, as one calculates the predictable work done by a machine." It is also in Weberian terms that he analyzes the bureaucratic system, but he

puts the relatively "neutral" descriptions of the German sociologist at the service of a ferocious critique of the inhuman and reified character of this purely formal administrative rationality, and of its "growing con-

tempt for the qualitative material essence of 'things'."8

In addition to the problematic of (modern/capitalist) rationalization, Lukacs also borrows the Weberian concept of the "ideal type" and of

objective possibility in order to build his theory of the proletarian "imputed class consciousness" (zugerechnetes Bewusstsein) - a move that introduces a characteristically neo-Kantian moment in contrapo- sition to the rather Hegelian general context of the book. But in this case it is a purely "heuristic" borrowing: as far as the content is con- cerned, it is obvious that the hypothesis of a proletarian consciousness

possessing the objective possibility of breaking through the veil of reifi- cation and overthrowing capitalism was poles apart from Weber's social ideas and political convictions.9

Twenty-five years later, having abandoned his youthfull "subjectivist" Marxism for the supposedly more "orthodox" Soviet Diamat, Lukacs sees in Weber only one of the multiple representatives of the intel- lectual process - "from Schelling to Hitler" - leading to the "destruc- tion of reason" in modern German culture. For sure, he is still able to find in Weber's writings "a spirited and legitimate polemic against the

vulgar irrationalism which was at that time dominant," but he neverthe- less insists that this does not contradict the "irrationality of the central core of his method and world-view." It is only much later, in his conver- sations with Wolfgang Abendroth (1966) that Lukacs ackowledges

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again his intellectual debt towards the "Master of Heidelberg": "Today I do not regret that I took my first lessons in social science from Simmel and Max Weber and not from Kautsky.... This was a favourable circumstance for my own development."10

Most of the other Weberian Marxists are, to a greater or lesser extent, influenced by Lukacs and his concept of reification. This holds parti- cularly for the Frankfurt School.

Strangely enough, the name of Max Weber does not appear even once in the major Frankfurtian philosophical opus, Adorno and Horkhei- mer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Nevertheless, their vision of history is significantly inspired by Weber's perspective. Like Weber, they perceive the historical evolution of Western civilization as a mil- lenarian process of rationalization and disenchantment of the world (entzauberung der Welt), which has its outcome in the modern indus- trial and bureaucratic world. The rationality that triumphs in the uni- verse of the commodity, in the cultural industry, and in the administrat- ed society is purely formal and instrumental, indifferent to the aims and finalities of the action.

The distinction between instrumental and substantive rationality, which occupies such a central place in the Frankfurt School's social theory is, to a large extent, the re-formulation of a Weberian problematic. Not in Dialectic of Enlightenment but in another work written more or less at the same period, Eclipse of Reason (1947), Horkheimer acknowledges this genealogy, by comparing his own concepts of subjective and objec- tive reason with those of functional and substantive rationality devel- oped by Max Weber and his school (particularly Mannheim in his book Man and Society from 1940). According to Horkheimer, the subjective or functional reason confines itself to the fact of knowing how to calcu- late probabilities, and therefore to coordinate the convenient means for a given end; while the objective or substantive reason (from Plato to Hegel) aims at the idea of the highest good and at the way to accom- plish the ultimate finalities.l1

In a curious dialogue between Habermas and Marcuse in 1977, the question of the origin of the concept of instrumental rationality is raised. Although Habermas attributes the paternity of the term to Horkheimer, Marcuse designates Max Weber as the first source.12 In fact, both are right and wrong at the same time. Weber uses the terms of purposive-rationality (Zweckrationalitat) and value-rationality (Wert-

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rationalitat) - as well as those of formal and material rationality. The distinction between functional and substantial rationality belongs to Mannheim's book. Finally, the concept of instrumental rationality appears for the first time with the Frankfurt School (particularly in Dialectic of Enlightenment). The continuity is obvious, but during these three stages, the term acquires an increasingly critical meaning.

The pessimistic diagnostic of modern society presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment is largely inspired by Weber - except that the Frank- furtian viewpoint is much more radical and grounded on a Marxist

(Lukacsian) perspective. While Weber tries to establish a "neutral" and

"objective" - or at least resigned - record of the facts, Adorno and Horkheimer denounce without hesitation the reification produced by calculating reason, which reduces everything to an abstract quantity, destroying not only the gods and the magic spirits, but also all qualita- tive values. The principle of number unifies all the areas of social life: "the same equations dominate bourgeois justice and the commodity exchange." Rationality ceases to be a critical force in order to become a

simple tool at the service of domination: "reason itself is no more than an auxiliary of the economic apparatus that includes everything. It functions as an universal instrument useful to the production of all the other instruments, strictly rational, as dangerous as all manipulations of material production exactly calculated." Under the aegis of capital, rationality tends to transform itself into its contrary, myth: "With the extension of the bourgeois mercantile economy, the somber horizon of

myth is illuminated by the sun of calculating reason, whose frozen light

ripens the seed of barbarism." This passage is emblematic, because it

associates the most classical images of Aufklarung - the light, the sun,

reason, germination - with the threatening shadow of catastrophe.13

This kind of criticism goes well beyond the ambivalences of Weber, but

certain key moments of his work - the insistence on the formal charac-

ter of modern rationality, the analysis of the reversal of the rational/

emancipatory aspirations of modernity into a bureaucratic system, the fear that this may lead to a new Egyptian serfdom, to an "iron carge" or

to a "mechanical petrification" - seem to anticipate the Frankfurtian "dialectic of Enlightenment."14

What most starkly distinguishes Adorno and Horkheimer from the

author of Economy and Society is first of all their humanist and socialist

parti-pris, their refusal of capitalism and bureaucracy as the necessary and inevitable forms of modernity (an unescapable "fate" according to

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Weber), and their utopia of a society delivered from reification and domination. This is precisely the Marxian dimension of their thinking, and the stand-point from which they re-interpret the Weberian argu- ments and "divert" them to the benefit of a critical and revolutionary vision. More Hegelian than Weberian (Weber remains, in the last anal- ysis, a neo-Kantian), they aim at a concrete, substantive, "objective" rationality, concerning the ends of action as well as the means. They criticize Weber for his practical irrationalism, his surrender of the clas- sical ("objective") rationalist tradition, and his renunciation of the idea of a rational science or philosophy able to define the aims of human society.'5

Among the other thinkers of the Frankfurt School, the one who has most in common with Weberian Marxism is probably Herbert Mar- cuse. Already in 1934, Marcuse mentions the Weberian analysis of capitalist rationality - as calculation of profits and losses - in order to reveal the limits of the liberal (i.e., private) ratio: the privatization of reason surrenders the structure of social and economic totality to irra- tional forces, both on the economic level (crisis) and the political one (charismatic leadership). In an essay from 1941, which anticipates cer- tain topoi'of Dialectic of Enlightenment, he refers to Weber in order to

argue that "the objective and impersonal character of technological rationality bestows upon bureaucratic groups the universal dignity of reason." The individual rationality, in its origin a critical and opposi- tional force, transforms itself into competitive rationality and leads to the "standardized submission to the all-embracing apparatus which it had itself created."'6

These Weberian-inspired issues are taken up in One-Dimensional Man (1964) although Marcuse hardly mentions Weber. According to Mar- cuse, technology has become the great vehicle of reification: the social position of the individual appears not only to be determined by objec- tive laws, but these laws appear as calculable manifestations of (scien- tific) rationality. The formalization, functionalization and quantification of science has been transferred to society through technology and capi- talist production. Thus, these became instrumentalities for the domina- tion of man by man through the domination of nature: "the web of domination has become the web of Reason itself." In other terms: in the advanced industrial civilization, "the instrumentalist horizon of reason opens on a rationally totalitarian society" and the Logos of technics has been made into the Logos of servitude.'7

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The implicit relation of One-Dimensional Man to the Weberian anal- ysis of rationality is explicit in Marcuse's contribution at the fifteenth conference of German sociologists, dedicated to Weber, which took place in 1964. Attempting to draw a general balance-sheet of the Weberian theory of rationalization, Marcuse emphasizes its limitations, but, at the same time, pays homage to its insightfulness: by defining capitalist rationality as formal, functional, abstract, based on the num- erical calculation and on the reduction of quality into quantity, Weber allows one to understand why it leads necessarily to the reified domina- tion of a bureaucratic apparatus. Bureaucracy is formally rational domination, i.e., the reification of reason, reification as reason, the apotheosis of reification: although Weber accepts bureaucracy as an inexorable fate (the apologetic moment of his work), his concept of capitalist/bureaucratic rationality is a critical concept against reifica- tion. Weber did not live long enough to see all the consequences of bureaucratic rationality, but he "foresaw with remarkable clarity" the danger, with his prediction of a new serfdom similar to the ancient Egyptian state. He also perceived the tendency of the rational bureau- cratic administrative apparatus, by virtue of its own rationality, to sub- mit to an irrational supreme authority.18

To understand the "elective affinity" among some of the main figures of Western Marxism and Weber, I propose the following hypothesis: if Lukacs and the Frankfurt School could borrow so largely from Weber's

theory of modern rationalization, it is also because they share with him a certain Kulturpessimismus, rooted in a protest of Romantic inspira- tion against the industrial/capitalist civilization - i.e., in a critique of

modernity based on pre-capitalist social and cultural values. One of the main topoi' of this Romantic world-view is precisely the fear of social life's quantification, the critique of the abstract and calculating reason that reduces all qualitative values to figures.19 Now, this theme is pre- cisely the moment in the Weberian analysis of modern rationality that is most directly appropriated by the Weberian Marxists in their critical theory - and specifically, in their critical assessment of reifica- tion and instrumental reason. However, one should add that this Romantic dimension is partially neutralized in Weber's writings by his

resignated ("heroic") acceptance of modernity as "fate," and in the works of the Weberian Marxists by their (critical) adherence to the Enlightenment.

This Romantic affinity between Weber and certain Marxist thinkers is decisive for the formation of Weberian Marxism. However, it would be

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wrong to deduce, as some critics of the Frankfurt School, that Adorno and Horkheimer shared with Max Weber "the sense of decline in a par- ticular stratum of society, that of the educated upper middle-class, or more specifically, the "mandarins," and the nostalgia for a traditional German Kultur."20 In contrast to the "mandarins" and to Max Weber, the Frankfurt Critical Theorists categorically refused both a return to the pre-modern German past and a forced reconciliation with capi- talist-bureaucratic modernity; their thought was inspired, from the beginning to the end, by the utopian project of an emancipated future.

The Romantic moment is almost absent from the work of the most recent representative of the Frankfurt School, Jiirgen Habermas, whose social philosophy is essentially aimed at the accomplishment of the Enlightenment promises. Habermas is obviously an inheritor of the Weberian-Marxist problematic, but his whole intellectual evolution is an attempt to go beyond this political/theoretical framework.

The first step is taken in his well-known essay from 1968, "Science and technology as 'ideology,'" where he takes as his starting point Mar- cuse's Weber-inspired critique of the technological and scientific ra- tionality as instrumental reason leading to a new sort of totalitarianism. Rejecting Marcuse's idea that there could be an alternative to existent scientific-technological progress, he then introduces his path-breaking distinction between "labor," as the sphere of purposive rational action, including the economic and state subsystems, and "interaction," as the sphere of communicative action - the socio-cultural lifeworld. Techno- cratic ideology should be criticized not in the name of a "different" technology (as in Marcuse) but because it eliminates from human con- sciousness the difference between purposive rational action and com- municative interaction, and therefore hurts the general human emanci- patory interest in a domination-free communication.21

Should the economic issues be under the control of the lifeworld, as the object of unfettered public debate and democratic decision? This key question (in fact the rational kernel of socialism) seems to receive a positive answer in Habermas's Legimitation Crisis from 1973 - prob- ably his most "Weberian-Marxist" work - where he clearly states: "Genuine participation of citizens in the process of political will-forma- tion, that is, substantive democracy, would bring to consciousness the contradiction between administratively socialized production and the continued private appropriation and use of surplus. In order to keep this contradiction from being thematized, then the administrative sys-

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ter must be sufficiently independent of legitimating will-formation." In another key passage he emphasizes the contradiction between the rational answer to the crisis of the ecological balance and the quantita- tive logic of capitalism: "Capitalist societies cannot follow imperatives of growth limitation without abandoning their principle of organiza- tion; a shift from unplanned, nature-like capitalist growth would re- quire that production be planned in terms of use values. The develop- ment of productive forces cannot, however, be uncoupled from the production of exchange-values without violating the logic of the sys- tem." The book ends with a call to "take up the struggle against the stabilization of nature-like systems over the heads of its citizens" - a phrase that may apply both to the capitalist market and the bureau- cratic apparatus.22

A quite different approach is to be found in his systematic opus major from 1981, The Theory of Communicative Action, which distances itself substantially from the Weberian-Marxist tradition. Modestly enough, Habermas claims only to "reconstruct" Marxian historical materialism and the Weberian diagnosis of the age, but in fact he has created a new theory, making an extensive usage of Durkheim, Parsons, and Luhmann. The basic hypothesis is the one already suggested in the early essays: the distinction between: a) the material reproduction of the lifeworld, assured by functional (economic and state-bureaucratic) systems steered by the media of money and power, and b) the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld, based on mutual understanding and con- sensus through communicative means, as in the family, in voluntary associations, and in the public spheres.23

But, unlike the views suggested in Legitimation Crisis, Habermas now believes that bureaucratization and the money (capitalist) economy are normal components of modernization. He criticizes Marx for failing "to

recognize the intrinsic evolutionary value that media-steered subsys- tems possess." If the monetarization of labor power and the bureaucra- tization of government performance have gained wide acceptance, it is because they "can better fulfill the tasks of materially reproducing the world" - i.e., because of their functionalist "rationality." One can speak of pathology only if and when instrumental rationality transgresses the borders of the systems and penetrates into the sphere of symbolic reproduction, when money and power enter into the areas dependent on mutual understanding, i.e., when the imperatives of the autonomous

subsystems "colonize" the communicative lifeword.24

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The great change in relation to the German Weberian-Marxist tradition is not so much the relativization of the class dimension or of the para- digm of production - both are already suggested in Dialectic of Enligh- tenment - as it is the following are two key principles of Habermas's latest social philosophy: a) that the bureaucratic state and the mon- etarized market economy should be accepted as "functionally rational," and b) that their imperatives can be limited to their own systemic spheres, without necessarily "colonizing" the whole lifeworld. The first statement supersedes Marx, and the second one Weber, and their com- bination makes up a new theoretical framework for which the term "Weberian Marxism" is probably inadequate.

Is it possible to speak of a Weberian Marxism in France? To a certain extent, Merleau-Ponty's Les Aventures de la Dialectique seems to be the best example. But it has to be considered rather as a project than as an accomplished synthesis.

In his chapter on Max Weber, "The crisis of understanding," one can find an original and profound attempt to follow up on certain contribu- tions of the German sociologist. Merleau-Ponty does not hide his sym- pathy for the Weberian method, which he defines as an approach based on an authentic understanding of the ambiguity of historical facts, of their Vielseitigkeit, of their multi-dimensionality. It is this method which allows the author of The Protestant Ethic to discover, in the relation- ships between religion and economy, the exchanges, interlaces, and reversals where the effect turns back on its cause, and particularly, the parentes de choix (elective parenthood) - the (slightly too literal) trans- lation that Merleau-Ponty proposes for the key Weberian concept of Wahlverwandtschaft.

But his interest is not limited to the scientific method: he also cele- brates what he calls Weber's phenomenology, because, unlike Hegel's, it does not result in an absolute knowledge; it acknowledges that "truth always leaves a margin of obscurity," and it takes into account "human beings' freedom and history's contingency." However, as far as Weber's politics are concerned, Merleau-Ponty takes a very critical stand: in his eyes, this great mind judges the revolutionary movements in Germany after 1918 "as a provincial German bourgeois." The only advantage that Weber's "politics of the understanding" (politique de l'entende- ment) - Raymond Aron's expression - has over traditional liberalism is that it is an understanding that has learned to doubt itself.

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"Weber's surest accomplishment" could, according to Merleau-Ponty, be summarized in the following terms: "if history has, not a direction (un sens) as a river, but some meaning (du sens), if it does teach us, not a truth, but mistakes to avoid, if practice cannot be deduced from a

dogmatic philosophy, it is not superficial to ground a policy on the

analysis of the politician." The least that could be said about this

strange syllogism formulated in conditional terms is that the logical sequence between the (quite interesting) premises and the (very debat-

able) conclusion is far from being obvious. This is particularly the case if we consider that the ambiguous concept of "politician" (homme poli- tique) refers, in Merleau-Ponty's eyes, to the "human quality" of "leaders" (chefs) that "truly give life to the political apparatus" and whose "most personal acts belong to all." Although he mentions Lenin and Trotsky as examples of this rare quality, this kind of theory of

political action is more akin to Weber's ideas on the necessary char- ismatic leadership than to the Marxist theory of class struggle.

However, this is not the main argument of the book: Merleau-Ponty's stake in Les Aventures de la Dialectique is without doubt the renewal - with Weber's help - of Marxist thought. This is why he draws a parallel between both conceptions of history and pays homage to "the rigorous and consequent Marxism that was equally a theory of historical under-

tanding, of Vielseitigkeit, of creative choice, as well as an interrogative philosophy of history." In other words - and this is the conclusion of this first chapter - "it is only by reference to Weber and to this Weberian Marxism that one can understand the adventures of dialec- tics during the last thirty five years."

"Weberian Marxism"? This is the only moment in the book where this notion appears. What does it mean exactly? Who are the thinkers that

represent this theoretical option? In principle, the answer should be found in the next chapter, "The 'Western' Marxism," but the only exam-

ple mentioned and analyzed is Georg Lukacs's History and Class Con- sciousness. Merleau-Ponty seems to ignore - as most of the French intellectuals at that time! - the Frankfurt School and its relationship to the Weberian heritage.

Lukacs's Marxism is, according to Merleau-Ponty, "an integral and un-

dogmatic philosophy"; while Weber remains prisoner of the idea of a truth without conditions or view-points, Lukacs supersedes his master

by his dialectics of the subject and the object and by the unrestricted

acknowledgement of history as the only medium of our mistakes and

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our verifications. Lukacs's decisive contribution - provoking the con- demnation of Soviet orthodoxy (the hostile comments of the Pravda in 1924) - was "a Marxism that incorporates the dimension of subjec- tivity to history without making of it an epiphenomenon."

To what extent can Lukacs's Marxism be qualified as Weberian? The brilliant second chapter of Les Aventures de la Dialectique does not really give an answer to this question. The author mentions (as many others) the Weberian origin of the concept of "objective possibility" as used by Lukacs to define the proletarian class-consciousness; he notices also - but this is too vague - that "in his work as in Weber's, knowledge is rooted in existence, where it also finds its limits." It is per- haps at the level of what he calls "an interrogative philosophy of his- tory" that could be found the deepest bond between both thinkers and the one that links Merleau-Ponty himself to what he calls "Weberian Marxism": "When one says that Marxism discovers a meaning in his- tory, this should not be understood as the affirmation of an irresistible orientation towards certain ends, but as the immanence in history of a problem or an interrogation in relation to whom what happens at a given moment can be classified, situated, appreciated as progress or regression."25 Surprisingly enough, Merleau-Ponty does not take up the issue that is at the heart of the Weberian Marxist critique of modern industrial/capitalist civilization: the fateful connection between formal rationality and reification, technical reason and bureaucratic domina- tion.

It is by reference to the "interrogative" conception of history, which insists on contingency, on subjectivity and on choices, that Merleau- Ponty unfolds, in the following chapters, his sharp criticism of Pravda's "Marxism-Leninism" and of Sartre's "ultra-bolchevism." But one does not find either in these chapters nor in the epilogue of the book, dedi- cated to the dialectics of revolution, any specific analysis or develop- ment of the concept of Weberian Marxism. As a matter of fact, this notion remains, in his work, a proposition, a hypothesis, and a useful provocation, rather than an accomplished project.

The proposition was not taken up by other French authors. Of course, one can find a certain number of sociologists that are interested in Marx and Weber, like Pierre Bourdieu; but usually these two references are combined with others (particularly Durkheim and his school) and do not imply any privileged or "organic" relationship.

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There are also some French explicitly Marxist authors who do take Weber's work seriously (Lucien Goldmann, Nicos Poulantzas, Jean- Marie Vincent, and others). But most of them insist on the differences between the Marxist and the Weberian method, conceived as mutually exclusive.

It is impossible to enter, in the framework of this short essay, into an

analysis of the figures of Weberian Marxism in other countries. Let us

just mention, very briefly, that in the U.S.A. there is a whole generation of critical sociologists - Daniel Bell, Irving Louis Horowitz, Alvin

Gouldner, C. Wright Mills - who refer themselves in a significant way both to Marx and Weber. The one that seems to come nearest to the notion of Weberian Marxism is perhaps the last one: his introduction

(together with Hans Gerth) to the first collection of Weber's writings in the English language (1948) has as its central focus a most enlightening parallel between the sociologist of Heidelberg and the author of Capi- tal. The methodological hypothesis that runs implicitly through this text is that of the complementarity between both, presented in a very original way: "Part of Weber's own work may thus be seen as an attempt to "round out" Marx's historical materialism by a political materialism. The Weberian approach to political structures closely parallels the Marxian approach to economic structures."26 However, it is difficult to

characterize Mills's main sociological writings - The Power Elite, White

Collar, and The Sociological Imagination - as Weberian-Marxist. Other

sociological traditions, from Veblen to the "New Machiavelians" (Mos- ca, Pareto, Michels) are as much, if not more, influential in his work as

the two "classic" German thinkers.

As a sort of provisory conclusion, one must acknowledge that "Weber-

ian Marxism" is quite a heterogeneous intellectual field, even if one can

discover certain genealogies - for instance, from Lukacs to the Frank-

furt School or to Merleau-Ponty. Some of the most innovative and

original figures of the heterodox history of Marxism in the twentieth

century belong to it. And the fact that a thinker as pessimistic and

resigned as Weber could inspire theories as critical and as utopian is

not the smallest paradox of this history.

Notes

1. I have tried to discuss this question in the essay "Marx and Weber: Notes for an

implicit dialogue," published in Science and Society and re-edited in my book On

445

Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benja- min (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1993).

2. One can mention, among others, the recent book by Derek Sayer, Capitalism and

Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber (New York: Routledge, 1991). 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la Dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955),

42-80. 4. On the personal and intellectual links between Weber and Lukacs during the

Heidelberg years, see my book Georg Lukacs: From Romanticism to Bolchevism

(London: Verso, 1980) as well as John E. Seery, "Marxism as Artwork: Weber and Lukacs in Heidelberg, 1912-1914," Berkeley Journal of Sociology XXVII (1982); Zoltar Tar, and Judith Marcus, "The Weber-Lukacs Encounter," in Ronald M. Glassman and Vatro Murvar, Max Weber's Political Sociology (London: Greenwood Press, 1984), and Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage. An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Universal Library, 1971), chapter 9.1.

5. Concerning the Weber-Lukacs theoretical relationship, there exists an important critical literature. Among the most interesting contributions, one can mention: Andrew Feenberg, Lukdcs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (Totowa: Row- man and Littlefield, 1981); Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukdcs and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979); Kurt Beiers- dorfer, Max Weber und Georg Lukacs. Ueber die Beziehung von Verstehender Sozio- logie und Westlichen Marxismus (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1982).

6. G. Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusst (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1968), 379. See also page 350 for the analysis of the duplication of the capitalist personality into "an element of the commodities movement and a spectator (objectively powerless) of this movement," which finds its expression in the theories of so-called abstinence: "This is what explains the importance, underlined by Weber, of the 'innerworldly asceticism' for the birth of the 'spirit' of capitalism." Engels's document mentioned is the 1892 preface to the English edition of Utopian and Scientific Socialism.

7. Ernst Bloch, Thomas Muinzer as Theologue der Revolution (Frankfurt aim Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 118-119. In a similar vein, Erich Fromm, in an essay from the 1930s published in the Journal of the Frankfurt Institute, referred to Som- bart and Weber to denounce the role of Calvinism in the establishment of the pro- fessional duty, of the acquisition of commodities and of saving as dominant bour- geois ethical norms - instead of the inborn right to happiness acknowledged by the pre-capitalist societies. See Erich Fromm, "Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung fur die Sozialpsychologie," Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, 1932, in E. Fromm, Gesamtausgabe (Deutsche Verlag-Anstalt, 1980), 59-77.

8. G. Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, 270-274. 9. G. Lukacs, Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, 224. As usual, it is in a footnote

that one finds the reference to his friend from Heidelberg: "It is unfortunately impossible to further examine here certain forms taken by these ideas in Marx- ism ... or even to indicate the links of Historical Materialism with similar tenden- cies in bourgeois science (as Max Weber's ideal types)."

10. G. Lukacs, Die Zerstorung der Vernunft. Der Weg des Irrationalismus von Schelling zu Hitler (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1955), 486; ed. Theo Pinkus, Conversations with Lukdcs (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1975), 100.

11. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), chapter 1.

12. Juirgen Habermas and Silvia Bovenschen, Gesprdche mit Herbert Marcuse (Frank- furt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 29.

446

13. Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufkldrung (Frankfurt: Fischer

Verlag, 1969), 10, 30-32. 14. This thesis is argued, in a convincing way, by Phillipe Raynaud in his book Max

Weber et les Dilemmes de la Raison Moderne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987), 135-138,157-158, 212.

15. Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston, Little Brown and Company, 1973), chapter 4. Philippe Raynaud, Max Weber, 137-138; Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, chapter 1.

16. Herbert Marcuse, "The struggle against liberalism in the totalitarian view of the state" (1934), in Negations (London: Free Association Books, 1988), 17 and "Some social implications of modern technology," Studies in Philosophy and Social Sci- ences IX (1941), 430-433.

17. H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 157-159,169. 18. H. Marcuse, "Industrialism and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber," Negations,

205-208,217,220,223. 19. On this issue, see Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Revolte et Melancolie. Le

Romantisme d contre-courant de la Modernite (Paris: Payot, 1992). 20. Tom Bottomore, The Frankfurt School (London: Ellis Horwood Publishers, 1984),

42-43. 21. Jurgen Habermas, Technik und Wissenschaft als 'Ideologie' (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp

Verlag, 1968), 53, 57-58, 63-65, 84, 89. 22. J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (London: Polity Press, 1988) 36, 42-43, 143. 23. J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984),

vol II, 310-311,322. 24. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 330, 339, 355. Habermas does

not seem to share the Romantic attitude toward modernization as does the older Frankfurt School: "In an extensively rationalized lifeworld, reification can be measured only against the condition of communicative sociation, and not against the nostalgically loaded, frequently romanticized past of premodern forms of life"

(342). 25. M. Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la Dialectique, chapters I and II, passim. 26. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, "Introduction. The man and his works," in From

Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London: Routledge, 1967), 47.