No Men But These
'JUST forty years after his death the figure of Max Weber stands as a kind of great hovering Presence over the discipline of sociology, to say nothing of the broader intellectual situation of our time.' These words of Talcott Parsons, in reviewing the US edition of Professor Bendix's new book, would be echoed by almost any sociologist. and by many historians as well. \Veber is (to use one of his own terms of art) the only 'charismatic' figure sociology has yet pro- duced. Volume after vast volume shows that he was endowed with an almost superhuman capacity for scholarly synthesis. But this alone would not account for his growing influence. One explanation is that Max Weber is needed to replace Karl Marx, or at any rate to comple- ment him. One hero is gone; let us reach for an ideological substitute, and who better than another bearded German intellectual, also the author of big books written in obscure language, also influenced by Hegel's philosophy of history? These are incidental assets. Weber's great advan- tage is that his unpolemical style and his sub- stantive account of how mankind has got where it is are so much more in keeping with the spirit of the modern Western world.
This book by Professor Bendix of the famous sociology faculty of the University of California is extremely welcome. Shils and Parsons in the US and Mannheim in England have on many occasions either translated or summarised parts of Weber's works, and the three of them are re- sponsible for much of Weber's present-day in- fluence. But the student without a good command
of German has been unable to get any compre- hensive view of the author's life-work. From now on it will be much easier. Professor Bendix has written the-most complete general exposition of Weber's work that has yet been published anywhere. His book will be a happy introduction for any student, and for anyone else who wants to understand why, while Marx's influence is falling, Weber's is doing the opposite.
One reason, as Professor Bendix makes clear, is that Weber's account of the origins of 'capi- talism' has such great historical depth. His best- known book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, is only a fragment of a much greater whole. The fragment was designed to explain some of the reasons why the ethos of rationalism and 'ascetic activism' took hold in England and some other countries before it did in other parts of Europe. The bigger question, why the Occident rather than the Orient, led Weber to make a detailed inquiry into the social structure and religions of ancient China and India, as well as into the origins of Christianity in ancient Palestine. The scale is far greater than anything that Marx attempted, and also more fairly balanced. Weber did not consign either the techniques of production or the religious and other ideas that lie behind them, the requirements of war or the organisation of political power, to either 'structure' or 'superstructure.' He tried to show part of the almost infinitely intricate pattern in what Pollock and Maitland called the 'seamless web' of history.
But the main reason for Weber's appeal is that he stressed a trend in social organisation which is of increasing concern to all liberal-minded people. He divided authority into three main kinds, charismatic, traditional and bureaucratic, which can properly be distinguished even though they are nearly always present together. Churchill, the charismatic leader, co-existed with the traditional authority of Parliament and the bureaucratic authority of the civil service. Weber believeo that while charismatic and traditional authority will never be extinguished, the trend in
every country is not towards the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' but towards the 'dictatorship of the bureaucrats.' The means of administration are concentrated in the hands of bureaucrats who act according to impersonal but predictable rules and for the most part reject as irrelevant all personal bonds of affection, hatred or love; bureaucrats who are recruited for their educa- tional qualifications and technical competence; bureaucrats who are paid by salary according to their defined status within a hierarchy of authority. Precisely because of its unquestioned superiority as an administrative instrument, bureaucracy is dominant in the government, in the economy, in the armed services, in scientific research, in the mass media, and in the universi- ties of every 'civilised' country.
Since we are not willing to do without electric light or Danish bacon or the latest news about Kennedy, we cannot do without bureaucracy. But Weber also saw that we must do all we could to escape from this dilemma.
It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving to- wards bigger ones—a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy . , is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics • . we were deli- berately to become men who need 'order' and nothing but order, who become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is in such an evolu- tion that we are already caught up, and the great question is therefore not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of man- kind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.
MICHAEL YOUNG
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