On Tue, 18 Nov 1997, Bill Schell wrote:
> All of Weber's modeling was done from concrete historical example based in
> culture as well as in materialist theory -- which is one reason his work
> has held up better than marxism.
Weber used historical examples, but they were far from concrete. First,
Weber did not believe in concrete theorizing because he argued you can
never grasp the totality and therefore should not theorize from that
standpoint. Weber rejected the realism and organicism of his German
historical materialist contemporaries--adopting a logic of causation (in
the social realm) drawn from legal studies, e.g., concerning
responsibility (leading to charges that he was an empiricist and a
positivist, in the limited sense)--and instead adopted, in part (Weber was
eclectic), the subjectivist position of the historicist. Weber's method
(e.g., the ideal type) was to abstract from a fragmentation of the
concrete, which leads one away from historical reality.
On this basis, Weber rejected unity in science. This is the opposite of
concrete theorizing, as I have noted, for the basis of this method is an
emphasis in abstraction from fragments, rather than explicit abstraction
from the concrete (totality). Weber's economics, as an example of his
method, were marginalist, i.e., reflecting the assumptions of the
neoclassical and rational choice models.
Secondly, Weber often theorized using counterfactual conditionals; here he
would (mentally) remove events from history and develop imaginary lines of
historical development from these starting points of unreality. This is in
line with Weber's subjectivist epistemic. From this standpoint, Weber
engaged in extended polemics against materialist historians (such as
Eduard Meyer), claiming that it was imaging events that didn't happen, or,
more precisely, thinking away events that did happen, that was useful for
historiography. (Indeed, his disagreements with Stammler weren't really
about Stammler's attempt to dissolve the connection between law and
economics, but rather with legalistic matters of procedure.) For instance,
in the review essay "The Logic of Historical Explanation," Weber started
from an assumption that the historical subject is a rational actor and
then supposes what would happen if that historical subject made a
different decision.
In other words, Weber's theorizing starts with the premises that (a)
individual actors are rational and (b) history is the product of rational
action. Both these assumptions are dubious, and in my view entirely
incorrect.
Importantly, Weber always claimed that he went into sociology to rid the
discipline of what he considered reified concepts such as "class,"
"structure," "relations," and "history." Weber argued that these were only
mental constructions with no objective reality. Of course, Weber
ultimately used realist vocabulary to describe the world he saw (because
science is nonsensical without it) and moved more towards a position of
realism as he matured; but he always took up polemics against realism in
historical and social science. This was a mistake. And it is a mistake to
follow Weber's lead.
Judging from what Weber hoped would be the character of social science,
and judging from the realism that I find in the work of those who frequent
World-Systems Network, and in the work I am in, it would seem that Weber's
system has not held up so well, contrary to what has written in the post
to which I am responding. Class relations are real and do constitute
objective reality; for Weber class is more or less the arbitrary
description of imagined orders of stratification. This will not do as a
social science.
So it would seem, in the end, that historical materialism, at least the
core assumptions upon which Marxism rests, have held up much better than
Weberian subjectivism. I am thankful for this.
Andy