Your experience was no doubt typical of many. I'd wager that this less true now. Weber's appeal to a more contemporary crop of sociologists lies in his affinity to Marx and less so in his opposition (that part of Weber is more likely alive and well in academic political science). Which might explain why some are bothered by your remarks as well as Yoshie's prosecution - booting Weber out of the revolutionary reindeer games seems bad form. But the disdain for Weber is akin to that of, say, the Democratic Party. Those that appear to be one's allies are actually more dangerous enemies. So whatever promise can be derived from Weber, for example, in allowing for greater consideration of things contigently and contingently cultural and political in a critical analysis is dismissed as either running counter to aims of class struggle or is already present in the M-E canon. This theoretical and political closure makes these discussions rather fruitless.
> Anyhow, my only interest here is a positive one of establishing
> the uniqueness of capitalism as a mode of production and to
> separate marxism from the various deterministic theories of
> history (such as the commercialization model).
Or to separate one rendition of Marxism from the rest. These sectarian struggles only reinforce my gut feeling that Weber's pessimism was well placed - tho I've no clue whether this actually has a Weber pedigree. Are the various criteria put forward to judge a theory acceptable or not mutually compatible? A theory only of the workers, by the workers, for the workers that is also indeterminate (to allow for human agency) and yet respect the laws of motion as well as the M-E canon that also isn't circular but directly and simply causal and represents the best fit with facts but also yields emancipation and is able to forswear a science of its future manifestation?
> Your (Kelly's) posts only
> talk about Weber's ideas -- not about where those ideas come
> from or, most importantly yet, whether or not Weber himself
> recognized that ideas emerege from human action.
Weber did indeed recognize this and it was a key feature of one of his various methodological principles. Which ideas and which actions matter are another thing entirely.
> Does he
> recognize that an understanding of capitalism is impossible from
> any other perspective than that of the working class? From what
> you have written, apparently not. He thinks understanding can
> come from intellectuals thinking in abstraction from practice.
Realizing this must be rhetorical, well of course he didn't recognize this. I may not agree with your theoretical criteria but at least you don't mince words. John Houseman utters a line from some movie I've forgotten that the thing he most misses from the past is clarity. Your last sentence, of course, is one the - how many? - commandments issued by Marx. I, like a lot of others, never had much facility in obeying those of the other people and I haven't had much success with Marx's.
> Incidentally, what difference does it make to you what anyone
> thinks of Weber? Why is it important? Is there something in
> Weber that no one else provides and that is essential to
> building opposition to U.S. imperialism? Are there any crucial
> ideas in Weber that exist no place else? Can he tell me
> something about ancient Greece that I can't learn from
> Finley, de Ste. Croix, Wood, Starr, or Cornford?
My interest in this thread started with your snipe at Kelly.
Clearly you were bothered by Kelly's brief comment that actually
was part of a very different thread. And you too coy here since
you know the answers: Weber is important insofar as he represents
a fairly important figure in comparative historical analsys,
especially dealing with the so-called rise of the West. And
more importantly, he's perhaps the most well-known purveyor
of apostasy.
>
> In any case, my debate is not really with you but with other
> marxists who tend to slip into some version or other of ahistorical
> understanding of history.
I've never understood how or why Weber of all people suffers from this or is the source for infecting others. There's a real dearth of grand theorizing in the "corpse" of his writing. He suffers a similar fate to Marx whereby Weber would probably be opposed to most "Weberians" who are most responsible for the grand unfolding of rationalization (inside or independent of capitalism. And yet it seems Weber's significance lies precisely in giving legitimacy to a historical sociology that recognizes contingency, chance, accident in accounting for historical patterns (though patterns they be and not unique happenings). Then again, if you're looking for simple and elegant (and politically inspiring) causal models, Weber is bound to be unsatisfying.
I read somewhere how Weber rarely allowed himself to wax speculatively on what it all meant. One of the few times he did so in his scholarly writings was the infamous reference to the trap of bureaucratic rationality. But Weber, I think, never said the future must necessarily follow from the past; only that given the grip of bureaucracy, he couldn't see any way out. Others see a way out but can't manage to get there short of the economist's trick of assuming a ladder.
> The assumption that capitalism "naturally"
> flows from preceding history, when accepted by marxists, tends
> also to encourage the belief that there can be a "science" of a
> socialist order just as there is a science of capitalism. That way
> leads to an oligarchic conception of socialism.
I say continuity, you say discontinuity. And vice versa.
Dennis Breslin