I also refuse to respond to arguments made by virtue of quotes lifted from other thinkers. If you are familiar with Weber's work, fine. My experience of these quotes? They are more or less transparent, sometimes humorous, sometimes clever attempts to undermine by engaging in dubious rhetorical tactics designed to malign the subject or authors under consideration on the part of those who are either incapable of thinking for themselves or are curiously and without cause lacking confidence in their own intellect. That said, and as I've said repeatedly, maligning someone for their interest in an author, for the decision to understand a body of scholarship on its own terms, is deeply problematic. As the estimable Mr. Byfield pointed out long ago: doing so means that you reserve for yourself (and deny others) the right to speak to a topic and/or author by advancing an unrelated series of quote mongering posts, indicating you are familiar with that body of scholarship but prefer to filibuster and shut down other perspectives based on what typically amounts to the facile claim that a particular author or subject matter is not pertinent to marxist and/or leftist dialogue.
Weber and History
Does Weber support a grand theory of hisotry? Does he advance history as some sort of great chain of ideas unfolding like Hegel's Geist toward some utopian or dystopian future? In short, no. Weber does not advance an evolutionary, linear history through which the forces of rationality move. Nor does he advance a stagist view of history as some sort of movement, by natural selection, through ever increasingly rational forms of social/cultural organization. Weber grinds one axe throughout his work: the pattern of relations among the various factors is absolutely crucial in terms of their effect on economic rationalization. Indeed, if Weber is to be faulted, he ought to be faulted, as Bhaskar complains, for advancing a theory of social change in which change is extrinsically accidental: for Weber, a certain confluence of conditions leads to a development and a change in any one factor is enough for history to have moved in a completely different direction. There was no inevitability to the emergence of rationalized capitalism in the West. Instead, large-scale rationalized capitalism was the result of a series of complexes of conditions--intermediate, background, and ultimate conditions--which had to occur together. As I suggested, Bhaskar complains that social change, for Weber, is based on the concatenation of unique events and complex combinations of conditions and factors that are so rare that they seem accidental, particularly on Weber's account.
In fact, Weber explicitly argues that the development and transformative events associated with rationalized capitalism are so unique as to be singular events that are unlikely to occur at other places and times, contra Marx. What Weber says here, however, is what ought to be the source of Marxist criticism--certainly not his use of the word "Negro," let alone misreadings of or exaggerations of a Eurocentrism that was and remains fairly typical, but isn't and shouldn't be grounds to dismiss an author's insights and contributions. What a Marxist might criticize Weber for, then, is that a Weberian theory of history insists that, in terms of the social organization of the economy, what was part and parcel of the complex of original conditions that were important to the rise of rationalized capitalism are not necessary for its continuation. It is here that Weber seriously departs from a number of Marxist scholars who hinge their analysis on the contradictions inherent in capitalism, contradictions that Weber thinks are transformed and subsumed into social relations of economic production, distribution and consumption which are no longer determined by the original contradictions. More bluntly, Weber was arguing that there is no necessary path toward rationalized capitalism; socialism, itself, might simply be the name of the social organization of a rationalized economy that need not develop the institutional structure that capitalism did in the West. <...>
Given that Weber was acutely aware of the accident that produced capitalism, democracy, industrialization, given that his theory of history is surely not mechanical evolutionist and stagist, it is not surprising that when Weber's insights suggested the increasingly rationalization and dehumanization of life under capitalism, he steadily fell into a severe depression, staring out the window, picking at his fingernails. That is, Weber saw no way in which history could be driven toward one end or another and, as such, Weber fell into despair about how to address what he saw as the tragedy of capitalism --what Horkheimer would later call, "the eclipse of reason (and freedom)".