Theory:Max Weber

“Religious doctrines are adjusted to religious needs.”(Sociology 156)

Max Weber

• 1864-1920• Liberal• The Protestant Ethic

and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, Economy & Society, etc.

• Focus on the effects of ideas on social behavior

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Method• Took Marx as a format for analysis

– Accepts historical materialism– Rejects monocausal understanding of history and society

• Means of production important, but more forms of production exist than the economic– Violence– Governance– Cultural power

• Antipositivism• Can’t understand society just by observation of empirical fact

• Comprehension requires an understanding of what people and organizations think that they are doing

• Verstehen: “Understanding meaningfully”, from the perspective of another• Sociology not exclusively an empirical endeavor: humans not just products of the

environments; they actively create meaning and organize the world through their interpretations and understandings of it

• To ignore this is to treat humans as things and to misinterpret society• Thus, an emphasis on culture

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Method

• Ideal types & ideal typical analysis• Not a philosophical definition, but an emphasis of

certain characteristics common to most incidences of a thing or event

• “ideal” = ‘referring to ideas,’ ≠ ‘perfect’

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Major Concerns• Rationalization

– The world increasingly operates on the principles of reason and efficiency• Rational goals, rational means

– Increasing bureaucratization, power of bureaucracy• Decreased space for human freedom• Dehumanization

• Disenchantment– “Demagification”– Desacralization– What binds humans together in a fully rationalized, fully disenchanted

world? What does it then mean to be human?• Charisma

– A quality that makes an individual seem divine or exemplary, making that individual an obvious leader

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Ideal Types• World religions

– “The five religions or religiously determined systems of life regulation which have known how to gather multitudes of confessors around them.” (267)• Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam• Judaism also considered, due to its historical significance

• Economic ethic– “The practical impulses for action which are founded in the

psychological and practical contexts of religions.” – Not purely determined by religion, but by many factors (268)

• Weber intends to “make obvious how complicated the structures and how many-sided the conditions of a concrete economic ethic are.”

• Externally similar forms of economic organization may be compatible with very different economic ethics

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Origins of World Religions• However strong influence of the economic and political

contexts “may have been upon a religious ethic in a particular case, it receives its stamp primarily from religious sources, and, first of all, from the content of its annunciation and its promise. Frequently the very next generation reinterprets these annunciations and promises in a fundamental fashion. Such reinterpretations adjust the revelations to the needs of the religious community. If this occurs, then it is at least usual that religious doctrines are adjusted to religious needs.”– “Other spheres of influence could have only a secondary

influence; often, however, such influence is very obvious and sometimes it is decisive.” (270)

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Origins of World Religions• Theodicy: the problem of evil• In “primeval” religion, suffering (illness, deformity, misfortune) was

believed to be caused by demons or divine wrath– The afflicted thus excluded from religious ceremonies & festivals

• Cult of the community, not of the individual (272)• Thus, these religions cannot be for Weber “world religions”

– This kind of “religion provides the theodicy of good fortune for those who are fortunate. This theodicy is anchored in highly robust (‘pharisaical’) needs of man and is therefore easily understood” (271)• You deserve your good fortune, she deserves her suffering

– Nonetheless, certain kinds of abstinence (sex, sleep, food, etc.) were believed to evoke or facilitate the experience of the sacred, and thus thought of as ‘holy’• Province or prophets and magicians

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Origins of World Religions• Since religion was for the community, individuals

looked to magicians, who eventually evolved to be regarded as prophets or gods themselves.– Individual care– First explain suffering due to ritual transgression,

explain how to remove the suffering– Given the endlessness of suffering, the figure of the

‘redeemer’ appears• Deified hero or prophet

– A rational view of the world• The belief that the world fundamentally makes sense• Vs. “Politics as a Vocation”

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Origins of World Religions

• “With this people, and in this clear-cut fashion only among them and under very particular conditions, the suffering of a people’s community, rather than the suffering of an individual, became the object of hope for religious salvation. The rule was that the savior bore an individual and universal character at the same time that he was ready to guarantee salvation for the individual and to every individual who would turn to him.” (273)

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Origins of World Religions• Sin at first ritual, but then a matter of belief in a prophet’s

revelations– Voluntary suffering (penance, fasting, self-denial, etc.) becomes

a means of expiating sin for everyday people (274)– At the same time, the ‘primeval’ theodicy of deserving

“encountered increasing difficulties. Individually ‘undeserved woe was all too frequent; not ‘good’ but ‘bad’ men succeeded” (175)

• Thus, suffering becomes positively evaluated, as a sign of goodness, not of ritual impurity (274)– Compensatory promises: reincarnation, better world for

descendents, afterlife– A rational world

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Origins of World Religions• Resentment may be a part of this, but it is not true that it

must be (276)– Nietzsche

• “The sense of dignity of socially repressed strata or of strata whose status is negatively (or at least not positively) valued is nourished most easily on the belief that a special ‘mission’ is entrusted to them; their worth is guaranteed or constituted by an ethical imperative, or by their own functional achievement. Their value is thus moved into something beyond themselves, into a ‘task’ placed before them by God.” (277)– Notice: dignity posited as a basic need of social groups

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Psychological Experience of Religion

• But religion, even if oriented toward another world, is a matter of the present– “Psychologically considered, man in quest of salvation

has beer primarily preoccupied by attitudes of the here and now.” (278)• Contemplation, ecstasy, certitudo salutis, love, orgiastic

frenzy, unio mystica, etc., “these states undoubtedly have been sought, first of all, for the sake of such emotional value as they directly offered the devout.” (278)

– Orgy and sacrament both intended to evoke this response

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Psychological Experience of Religion

• “The empirical fact, important for us, that men are differently qualified in a religious way stands at the beginning of the history of religion.” (287)

• Prophets– Charismatic authority (287)

• Can not be claimed by just anyone, neither by custom or law– “Exemplary prophets point out the path to salvation by

exemplary living, usually by a contemplative and apathetic-ecstatic life.”• Ideal, static ‘god’

– “The emissary type of prophecy addresses its demands to the world in the name of a god. Naturally these demands are ethical; and they are often of an active ascetic character.” (285)• Active god

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Sources of Authority• Charisma (charismatic)– “An extraordinary quality of a person, regardless of

whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed. [...] “A rule over men, whether predominantly external or predominantly internal, to which the governed submit because of their belief in the extraordinary quality of the specific person.” (295)• “Charismatic rule is not managed according to general

norms, either traditional or rational, but, in principle, according to concrete revelations and inspirations, and in this sense, charismatic authority is ‘irrational.’ It is ‘revolutionary’ in the sense of not being bound to the existing order: ‘It is written, but I say unto you...!’” (296)– Revelation or the sword (297), prophets & founders of dynasties

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Sources of Authority

• Tradition (traditional)– Rests on “the psychic attitude-set for the habitual

workaday and ... the belief in the everyday routine as an inviolable norm of conduct. [Traditional authority is] domination that rests upon this basis, that is, upon piety for what actually, allegedly, or presumably has always existed” (296)• Most important form of traditional authority: Patriarchalism:

the power of the father or elder, master over slaves, and lord over peasants. Power in this case belongs to the patriarch personally, as an individual. Personal, not functional, and in this sense irrational. (296)

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Sources of Authority• Rational rules (regulatory or rational authority)• Because charismatic authority is non-transferrable, those

who come after the charismatic founder cannot inherit it. Thus charismatic authority is inevitably routinized.– Submission of the irrational and unpredictable to the rational

and controllable– “Rules in some form always come to govern. The prince or the

hierocrat no longer rules by virtue of purely personal qualities, but by virtue of acquired or inherited qualities” (297)

– The further rationalization has progressed, the more “submission under legal authority is based upon an impersonal bond to the generally defined and functional ‘duty of office.’” (299)

– Heirs follow kings, priests follow prophets

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Psychological Experience of Religion

• Religious ‘virtuosos’ and the ‘unmusical’– Virtuosos: Prophets, saints, founders, reformers– Unmusical: everyone else

• Tension between religious institutions and virtuosos• Apocalypse Island

– “The church, being the holder of institutionalized grace, seeks to organize the religiosity of the masses and to put its own officially monopolized and mediated sacred values in the place of the autonomous and religious status qualifications of the religious virtuosos. By its nature, that is, according to the interest-situation of its officeholders, the church must be ‘democratic’ in the sense of making the sacred values generally accessible.” (288)• Routinization (297)

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Types of Religious• Intellectuals– “The rationalism of hierocracy grew out of the

professional preoccupation with cult and myth or—to a far higher degree—out of the cure of souls, that is, the confession of sin and counsel to sinners. Everywhere hierocracy has sought to monopolize the administration of religious values. They have sought to bring and to temper the bestowal of religious goods into the form of ‘sacramental’ or ‘corporate’ grace,’ which could be ritually bestowed only by the priesthood and could not be attained by the individual.” (283)• Monopolizing the means of the production of salvation

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Types of Religious

• Rulers– “Every body of political officials, on the other

hand, has been suspicious of all sorts of individual pursuits of salvation and of the free formation of communities as sources of emancipation from domestication at the hands of the institution of the state. Political officials have distrusted the competing priestly corporation of grace and, above all, at bottom they have despised the very quest for these impractical values lying beyond utilitarian and worldly ends.” (286)

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Types of Religious

• Chivalrous warriors– Characteristic of them to “pursue absolutely

worldly ends and to be remote from all ‘mysticism.’ Such strata, however, have lacked—and this is characteristic of heroism in general—the desire as well as the capacity for a rational mastery of reality.” (283)• Subject to the whims fate or the service of destiny

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Types of Religious

• “Peasants have been inclined toward magic. Their whole economic existence has been specifically bound to nature and has made them dependent upon elemental forces. They readily believe in a compelling sorcery directed against spirits who rule over or through natural forces, or they believe in simply buying divine benevolence.” (283)– However, they can be swept up in rationalized

religious movements

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Civic classes• The ‘civic’ classes

• Artisans, traders, cottage industry, etc.– “The tendency towards a practical rationalism in conduct is

common to all civic strata; it is conditioned by the nature of their way of life, which is greatly detached from economic bonds to nature. Their whole existence has been based upon technological or economic calculations and upon the mastery of nature and of man”

– Thus, “precisely for these, there has always existed the possibility—even though in greatly varying measure—of letting an ethical and rational regulation of life arise.” (284)• Active asceticism and God-willed action

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Rationalism

• “‘Rationalism’ may mean very different things.” (293)– Systematic thought & ‘world picture’• Theology, philosophy, science

– Methodical and calculated attainment of a practical end• Politics & economy

– ‘Systematic arrangement’• Ritual

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Rationalism• “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s

conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. ‘From what’ and ‘for what’ one wished to be redeemed and, let us not forget, ‘could be’ redeemed, depended upon one’s image of the world.” (280)– Defilement Purity– Flesh Spirit– Being Peace– Sin Benevolence– Fate Freedom– Finitude Infinity– Cycle of rebirth Peace– Toil Sleep

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Rationalism

• “Behind them always lies a stand towards something in the actual world which is experienced as specifically ‘senseless.’ Thus, the demand has been implied: that the world order in its entirety is, could, and should somehow be a meaningful ‘cosmos.’” (281)– Meaning– Rationalization• The task of a religion’s intellectuals (281)

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Rationalism• Modern rationalization (science) has so disenchanted

the world that religion has moved increasingly into the space of the irrational (281)– Mystic experiences: the limits of language (282)

• Even so, as practical life has been rationalized, there remains the negative space where the irrationality of religion once was (281)– The spirit of capitalism– “Wherever the direction of whole way of life has been

methodically rationalized, it has been profoundly determined by the ultimate values toward which this rationalization has been directed. These values and positions were thus religiously determined.” (287)

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