Max Weber's Genteel Racism (was Re: weber)

Dennis Breslin dbreslin at ctol.net
Thu Dec 7 11:26:11 PST 2000


If this foray into Weber's high crimes and misdemeanors is instructive of anything, its the limited ability to talk across theory. What Yoshie alleges about Weber is really unassailable outside of the theoretical bubble she and others exist in. If she wants to claim that Weber was representative of a kind of cultural racism among intellectuals or operated within a eurocentric bias that blinded him to the prejudice contained in his theoretical treatment of capitalism's emergence or got his idealist cart in front of the materialist horse, well, it makes sense within the theory she's advancing. And as much as I disagree and find her judgments a tad strong, I have only to recall the disdainful and dismissive tone mainstream social scientists visit upon any hint that class and class struggle might be relevant to explaining the past, present, or future.

Defending Weber is a risky thing. After a century or so Weber should look rather anachronistic, especially in the details and tone. Weber's racism is also indefensible, though the reminders that Weber's treatment of racial science and scientific racism remains useful today. But his comments were not central to the theoretical case(s) he was developing. And sociology, for example, culls only some from Weber, as Wojtek notes.

And the give and take over Weber's fatal flaw of idealism looks threadbare. I think its a pretty one-sided fight at this point because only one side is jumping up and down.

If there's been anything productive, it lies in Yoshie's and others warming to the word contingency. And in this regard Weber may have lost the battle in the details, but he won the war. However much contingency has a pedigree in Marx's writings, it's never been a strong suit among Marxists (notwithstanding a genuflection toward dialectics). As I was reading Yoshie's post I was amazed, when she dug down, how much her historical argument has an elective affinity to Weber. And it would become clearer if interpretive concepts like enclosure, class interests, slave trade, etc. weren't left at face value. Michael Pollack was instructive here. And why so restrictive an analysis? Were not commercial interests and relations elsewhere important? Was not the city significant as a force propelling changes in class formation, and percolating commercial relations between labor, production, finance, and trade? Were not the relations between urban classes and feudal classes important? Weber is nothing if not nuanced and his analyses remain powerful where more mechanical explanations crack in their rigidity. To be fair, the emphasis on slavery has been an area where Marxist scholarship has force others to turn their eye away from a total immersion in the internal churning in ... ah, Europe.

The remaining charge, of eurocentrism, is more difficult to disentangle. I wonder if this, like the concern that rationality be viewed largely as a result of capitalism rather than vice versa, isn't part and parcel of the larger theoretical goal of trying to keep certain things free and pure from the taint of capitalism. If rationality is historically capitalist then whatever future beyond capitalism can promise something like a fresh start, a rationality with no root in the previous social formation. The same seems to hold true for portraying the evils of the state as largely due to its manifestion under capitalism. The same holds true for loosening the connection between Europe and capitalism? (That one sounds weird, as if there were a covert Rostowian operating here). Sounds like a theoretical strategy working toward getting the cake and eating it too. Then again, Weber is a spiritual godfather to relative autonomy (tho I suppose Althusser might turn over in his grave). Capitalism beginnings have multiple threads and even notions of chance and necessity are too clunky to handle.

Dennis Breslin



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