Max Weber

Reference
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/
www.sociosite.net/topics/weber.php
www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/weber.htm


From: Max Weber - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Maximilian Carl Emil 'Max' Weber (1864-1920) was a German lawyer, politician, historian, political economist, and sociologist, who profoundly influenced social theory and the remit of sociology itself. Weber's major works dealt with the rationalization and so called 'disenchantment' which he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity. Weber was, along with his associate Georg Simmel, a central figure in the establishment of methodological antipositivism; presenting sociology as a non-empirical field which must study social action through resolutely subjective means. He is typically cited, with �mile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science, and has variously been described as the most important classic thinker in the social sciences."


Key points
- (1864-1920) prosperous merchant class industrialist upbringing, cultivated Westfalia Germany
- principle architect of social science along with Karl Marx and Emile Durkheim.
- modern social science and sociology as discipline, of law, economics, political science, religion
- analysis of modern industrial society
- rationalist culture as it emerges and degenerates in modern rationalism society.
- “rationalization thesis,” a grand meta-historical analysis of the dominance of the west in modern times, and the “Protestant Ethic thesis,” a non-Marxist genealogy of modern capitalism.
- "action" human behaviour, cause and effect. Action may consist of "positive intervention in a situation, or of deliberately refraining from such intervention or passively acquiescing in the situation".
- action has a subjective meaning to each actor
- rational action is action after having deliberated the consequences. rational action presupposes some knowledge of the situation. Therefore knowledge acts in a causal nature upon action.
- modern western society in culminating all the knowledge of the past has reached its conclusion. Process of disenchantment.  
- world must bow to Western modern society, inevitable, metahistorical teleology (direction, purpose, goal)

- Protestant Ethic is commonly taken to reflect his dark fatalism about the inexorable unfolding of rationalization and its culmination in the complete loss of freedom and the evaporation of meaning in the modern world. Weber's belief in the unique singularity of Western civilization's achievement in the direction of rationalization, or lack thereof in other parts of the world. For example:Taken together, then, the rationalization process as Weber narrated it seems quite akin to a metahistorical teleology that irrevocably sets the West apart from and indeed above the East.

A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value [Weber 1920/1992, 13].

- uncompromising dystoptian vision (A dystopia or anti-utopia is a vision, of an often futuristic society, which has developed into a negative version of Utopia. A Dystopia is often characterized by an authoritarian or totalitarian form of government. It often features different kinds of repressive social control systems, a lack or total absence of individual freedoms and expressions and a state of constant warfare or violence.
- “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation” [Weber 1919/1946, 139]. For instance, modern capitalism is a rational mode of economic life because it depends on a calculable process of production. This search for exact calculability underpins such institutional innovations as monetary accounting (especially double-entry bookkeeping), centralization of production control, separation of workers from the means of production, supply of formally free labour, disciplined control on the factory floor, and other features that make modern capitalism qualitatively different from all other forms of economic life. From: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/


- increased impersonality and increased control. objectification (workers become just numbers or part of a process of productivity)
- laws are abided to "without regard to person" ("just doing my job)


- Weber found the seed of objectification not in material interests alone, but in the Puritan vocational ethic (Berufsethik) and the life conduct that it inspired, which was predicated upon a disenchanted monotheistic theodicy that reduced humans to mere tools of God's providence. Ironically, for Weber, modern inward subjectivity was born once we lost any inherent value qua humans and became thoroughly objectified vis-à-vis God in the course of the Reformation. Modern individuals are subjectified and objectified all at once. From: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weber/
- "THIS IS HOW WE AS A SOCIETY WILL ACT and THINK"