Old Roads by Way of Max Weber

February 4, 2007

At the close of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Max Weber makes a curious point about the limitations of his work:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great re-birth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrifaction, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved." [124]

In the very next paragraph Weber backs off these statements about the future, noting that it brings him to the sort of judgments with which "this purely historical discussion need not be burdened". It is as if this brief glance to the future has taken him outside the bounds of scholarship, and he must beat a retreat.

As Weber makes this retreat I feel like shouting: keep going! As Emily and I talk about a vision for our scholarship, one of the points we come back to is the idea that scholarship can bring about change.. it can do something more than describe what has happened. The whole point of Old Roads is that through studying the past.. whether that means the actions of 17th century Quaker women or the culture of a medieval city like Cairo.. we can arrive at new cultural models. It is a conscious push for one outcome that Weber ponders: "...there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals..."

A second more negative future is also envisioned. The capitalism of the latter days will produce "specialists without spirit" and "sensualists without heart". The specialists without heart may well be a description of the academy as Weber saw it developing. At first it seems ironic that Weber would lodge this complaint since his ideas are so central to academic identities today.. but from the "author's introduction" (a later essay tacked onto the Protestant Ethic) it becomes clear that Weber did not necessarily see himself as a specialist:

The Sinologist, the Indologist, the Semitist, or the Egyptologist, will of course find no facts unknown to him. We only hope that he will find nothing definitely wrong in points that are essential. How far it has been possible to come as near this ideal as a non-specialist is able to do, the author cannot know. [xl]

From this point of view Weber is a generalist connecting the facts unearthed by specialists. If I return to my own earlier blog about the divisions of academic study, we could identify him as a "synthesizer". It is possible even that he would be surprised to learn that he is best known as a founder of an entirely new specialization..

I am left wondering who a "sensualist without heart" might be. I imagine it is a person who lives for the pleasure of the senses but is unable to connect these things to a vital center that gives emotional unity. Perhaps that should be another area of focus for Old Roads.. to locate a center.. a way of processing this passing and beautiful world. To which Weber might reply: "whoever wants a sermon should go to a conventicle" (xli). Ah, but there again.. he has too small a view of scholarship.