Bureaucracy as Scapegoat by Joachim Radkau

In the positions that Weber took in public, dissatisfaction with the welfare state is combined with a horror of bureaucracy. This too is not the matter of course that many of admirers of Weber the great liberal think it to be.

In Weber’s writings there is very little of the solemn liberal emotionalism with regard to freedom; his later thought, in particular, revolved far more around political rule or domination. He had no reason to come away from childhood feeling particularly angry with officialdom, and in fact the nineteenth century had shown that Prussian-German officials had a considerable potential for liberal and social reforms. The Prussian reform era was legendary for its tales of heroism in the upper reaches of state. ‘The will to renewal’, according to Heinrich Heffter, was alive ‘only in the educated elite, essentially in liberal officialdom, which virtually alone embodied political progress and .  .  . political resolve.’ This innovative spirit was especially impressive in the university reforms of the of the early nineteenth century. In Weber’s own day, Otto Hintze gave a still classical appreciation of the achievements of the Prussian civil service. And today, when world-wide comparisons are made, the merits of a correct, competent and efficient administration are recognized more than ever.


In those days many Germans – including Max Weber –took these qualities so much for granted that they were scarcely able to evaluate them. It is true that Weber was prepared to recognize the special efficiency and rationality of German officials, but he did not think such merits were very important for the strength of the nation. Instead, he took over the concept of bureaucracy, which had started life in  opposition to late absolutism, more as a rallying cry than a ‘value-free’ designation: it conjured up images of bloodless pen-pushers, the raw material for many a cartoonist.


In Weber’s day it was not only the liberal opposition that railed against bureaucrats; there had long been a conservative anti-bureaucratism as well. Even Treitschke, the herald of the Prussian-German state, denounced the ‘refined stupidity of our mandarinate’, whose ‘examination torture’ seemed designed to ‘suppress any healthy energy in the ‘state youth’. In 1850 none other than 35-year-old Bismarck, who soon afterwards abandoned a civil service career out of frustration, directed one of his first rhetorical fireworks against the Prussian bureaucracy, then still permeated by the liberal spirit of reform. Comparing it to a boa constrictor, he wrote: ‘A state that cannot shake off a bureaucracy like ours by means of a salutary thunderstorm is and will remain doomed. The bureaucracy is cancerous in its skin; only its stomach is healthy, and the laws that it excretes are the simplest muck anywhere in the world.’ Today, when we are used to bureaucratism of quite different dimensions, we are struck by the lack of bureaucracy at the apex of the Bismarckian state. The civil service remained essentially an affair of individual states, the central bureaucracy never employing more than a couple of thousand people before 1914. Bismarck worked with a tiny apparatus which, by today’s standards, seems inconceivable for the head of government of a major power; he fought against any tendency for it to become autonomous, and studiously ensured that the reins were firmly in his hands.

Neither empirically nor theoretically, then, did Weber have any reason to feel the horror of bureaucracy, nor does it appear that his aversion to it was rooted in his own experience. It is not clear if or when Weber suffered personally from bureaucratic harassment. As we shall see, he was repeatedly incensed at the way in which Friedrich Althoff,  the Prussian official in charge of university matters, treated scholars. But this highly unconventional, not at all bureaucratic, man was anything but a pedantic enforcer of the rules; he got his way more through charisma than through office regulations.  And the state enforcement of labor regulations that Weber had observed in Baden, in the impressive person of Friedrich Woerishoffer, was by contemporary standards and even present-day standards a commendable institution, which took many initiatives and was far from seriously hindering the development of industry.

So, once again, how did the civil service become Max Weber’s scapegoat ‘bureaucracy’? Jurgen Kocka suggests that his main target of attack was civil servants who rose to positions in government and brought with them a ‘bureaucratic incapacity for power politics. HE became a critic of domestic policy for reasons that had mainly to do with foreign policy. This would fit the fact that Weber’s main assault on bureaucracy dates from the period after te first Morocco crisis (1905-6), when the central government – in the view of impatient imperialists and their mouthpiece, Harden’s Zukunft – had lost a unique opportunity (with Russia’s defeat by Japan and ensuing revolution) to achieve a decisive victory over France through the cold-blooded use of war threats. Although the term ‘bureaucracy’ emphasized the element of rule in the civil service apparatus, Weber’s main criticism was that it did not know how to rule effectively, did not really understand the game of power. However, Weber attacked not only the pedantic professionalism of the bureaucracy but also the highly unprofessional ‘dilettantism of the Kaiser, who repeatedly alarmed the world with his verbal saber-rattling.

Another answer to the question of the origins of Weber’s anti-bureaucratic passion is quite simple: Alfred Weber. Alfred h had preceded his elder brother in polemicizing against the bureaucracy; he outlined a terrible vision of it in Prague to none other than the young Franz Kafka, whose friend, Max Brod, was a student of his. Unlike Max, Alfred Weber had suffered a lot from school in his youth, and this must have laid the emotional basis for his hatred of bureaucracy .His vitalist world-view then helped this affect to develop intellectually: the bureaucracy became a cold, soulless apparatus, whose mechanical application of the law threatened to stifle life brimming with laws of its own. This chimed with Max Weber’s painful experience of the ‘iron cage’ which seems to appear out of the blue at the end of The Protestant Ethic.

In 1909, at the Vienna congress of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, Alfred Weber gave a widely notice speech attacking the Historical School of political economy, in which the state and its officials were treated as bearers of the common good. He recognized that the bureaucracy had the virtue of technical efficiency, but its transmission to the whole polity was making ‘our entire society petty-bourgeois and philistine’ and – in an allusion to the recent cartoon by Olaf Gulbrannson in the weekly Simpicissimus – bringing into being a ‘new human type’: ‘German, loyal and entitled to a pension’. ‘There is a terrible danger that these little daddy and mummy existences will trickle down and poison or spoil the only great and viable element for the future, from which we might accede to new and great cultural possibilities.’


Alfred Weber’s outburst has something of the late adolescent about it: he seems to be belatedly giving vent to a grudge that built up in his youth. A Prussian ministry official relied drily and to the point that the state offered greater freedom than a private entrepreneur, since the latter would have shown Weber to the door after such an attack. Max Weber, however, found his brother’s polemical wit infectious and took the same line himself. He ever tried to out-trump Alfred:


My brother is assuredly .  .  . as convinced as I am that the advance of bureaucratic mechanization is irresistible. Indeed, there is nothing in the world, no machinery in the world, which works with such precision as these human machines do – nor so cheaply either! . .  . The technical superiority of the human-operated machinery over handicraft .  .  .We are happy to acknowledge that there are honorable and talented people at the top of our civil service . . .And even though the idea that some day the world would be filled with nothing but those little cogs is even more frightening, that is, with people who cling to a small position and strive for a better one .   . . This passion for bureaucratization .  .  . is enough to make a man despair! It is as though in politics a char-woman, with whose mental horizon a German can get along best anyway, were permitted to run things all by herself, as if we intentionally were to become people who need order and nothing but order, who get nervous and cowardly when this order becomes shaky for a moment, who become helpless when they are torn out of their exclusive adjustment to this order.

Today’s reader, looking back at the experience of totalitarian bureaucracies, is at first amazed by the effectiveness – and even cheapness- that Weber here attributes to bureaucracy. There is no mention of inertia , the squandering of taxpayers’ money or the failure to make cost-benefit calculations; Weber’s civil servants are truly well-oiled cogs in the great machinery of state. In this he fully shared Schmoller’s point of view. And it is true that, in the German Reich at the time, there was a comparatively well-functioning ‘apparatus’ of officials.

While Alfred Weber openly proclaimed a vitalist world-view, his brother’s attacks on bureaucracy also contained subterranean elements of vitalist thinking. In so far as bureaucracy creates a separation between office and people, turns individuals into interchangeable bearers of a function, fixes them to a special area of competence and subjects their activity to firm rules, the resulting self-estrangement is similar to what Marx ascribes to capital. In Economy and Society, Weber says of bureaucracy: ‘It develops the more perfectly, the more it is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is appraised as its special virtue by capitalism’. This ‘dehumanization takes its toll in a lack of vitality, so that, if bureaucracy gets mixed up with big industry, things happen s they did with King Gunter in the Nibelungen epic, who was chained by Brunnhilde to the marriage bed-a story that Weber found piquant enough to repeat more than once.

Precisely in the revolutionary period after 1918, however, when the unbroken continuity of the imperial bureaucracy became a real political danger, Max Weber did an about face. Now the main peril for him was the administrative dilettantism of the political newcomers, which was further weakening Germany vis-à-vis the victorious powers and destroying the reputation of German industry. Even earlier he had talked of  the ‘sterile complaints about the Blessed Saint Bureaucracy. Yet his critique of bureaucracy had an impact as great as that of any of his other work, not the least in the United States. Weber later became famous for having anticipated ‘Parkinson’s Law’ of the irresistible growth of bureaucracy, at a time when bureaucratism by today’s standards seemed quite harmless, and for having foreseen that socialism would bitterly disappoint its dream of freedom by stumbling into the bureaucratic trap as soon as it came to power.

Charisma

First one must grasp what Weber meant by ‘rationalization’. On the CD-ROM edition of Weber’s  works, the term Rationalisierung appears no fewer than 455 times: most frequently (forty-six times) – one will be amazed – in his study of music. Here he developed, earlier and more consistently than elsewhere, the concept that he further deployed in the Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen: rationalism combined with technology as the kernel of the West’s special path in world history. In Weber ‘rationalization’ means a methodical striving for rule-bound order, it has little to do with ‘rationality’ in the sense of reason; rather, it is ‘highly ambiguous’. Only this made it possible for Weber to arrive at the concept of rationalization through music of all things; it was here, in this unexpected context, rather than much earlier in his study of the stock exchange, for example, that he discovered the ubiquitousness of rationalization. Unlike Kant, Weber did not think that natural reason was inborn in man: he mocked it in a letter to Mina Tobler, as the ‘utterly naïve and childish belief in the power of the rational’. On the other hand, he held the view that man strives by nature to bring order into his affairs, routine into his conduct; Weber found some form of rationalization everywhere, even in magical rites of supposedly ‘primitive peoples’. There is also something instinctual in rationalization. Weber’s concept is related to the idea of rationalization in psychoanalysis, which Ernst Jones introduced in 1908: that is, a procedure which gives a (visually, logically or morally) acceptable form to inherently irrational conduct.


Does the concept of charisma have any logic that can be derived from Weber’s general ideas on the course of history and the process of socialization? At first sight, it sharply conflicts with Weber’s analysis of the ubiquitous processes of rationalization and bureaucratization. But, for Weber, there is also something in human nature that rebels against disenchantment and routinization, against the straight jacket imposed on the individual. And it is this non-everyday element, passionate, ecstatic and bound by no fearful circumspection, which breaks the force of habit in history and creates something new. Here is the link to Weber’s fundamental insights. He does not understand rationalization and bureaucratization as evolutionary processes advancing with a law-like constancy. The individual always remains the basic reality, never a mere function of structures and this is why the power of individuality is able to break through structural constraints. It has something natural about it, and so too does charismatic leadership. Wolfgang Mommsen speaks of ‘charismatic eruptions’.


Nevertheless, one cannot arrive at charisma purely through a conceptual logic; it has always been a stumbling-block for those who would like to construct a logical system out of Weber’s teachings. Not by chance did this concept appear at a time when Weber suddenly had a personal experience of grace and caught a glimpse of salvation. He learned that there are moments in human existence at which the inertia of the everyday breaks down. And now, more clearly than in the past, his whole thought was carried on by the realization that man lives not only on everyday routine but on moments of ecstasy, of ‘standing outside oneself’.

Again and again Weber underlines that charismatic rule breaks from the everyday, though ‘non-every-dayness’ is a term that hardly meets the requirements of of scientific precision. Weber like to use it at a time in his life when he felt capable of non-everyday intellectual fireworks: his own self-esteem was based on this talent for the non-everyday. By ridding oneself of petty egoism, one gains the opportunity for a special kind of strength; then many things become possible which previously seemed impossible. Marianne too seems to have assumed that Max, in a coded manner, was speaking of himself when he talked of charisma.

This background in Weber’s personal experience does not make it easier to operationalize the charisma concept in research; the inflated use of the term, which can now be monitored on the internet in book titles such s Charisma Training in Thirty Minutes, leaves one in doubt whether authors who lack Weber’s experiential  background and meticulous approach are capable of applying it in an intellectually productive manner. At one point Weber himself points to the difficultly of empirically demonstrating charisma by any external indicators: ‘It is not directly visible whether the companionage of a war leader with his followers has a patrimonial or a charismatic character: this depends upon the spirit which imbues the community.’ The social scientist needs to have a feel for this spirit in order to identify charisma such; and such a feel is best developed through a charismatic experience of one’s own.


Charisma can be terraced historically only as a connecting link of a community. But is it rooted in the community, or does it arise through, and depend for its effectiveness on, the radiant power of the charismatic? Whether charisma is essentially the gift of a leadership personality or arises only in the  heads of his followers: this remains a controversial issue that provides the material for a ping-pong game of quotations from Weber . . . (page 397)

The New Segregation by Ben Crump

The supposed American Dream is built on the premise that if you study in school, you will be rewarded with a good job that allows you to care for your family. But poor kids in America, mostly children of color, hardly stand a chance. And the odds start widening very early.

Research continues to show that access to quality preschool is a primary driver of later school success. In an article in the Journal of Research in Childhood Education,  Linda Bakken repots that from birth to age five are crucial to the development of the foundations of thinking, behaving and emotional well-being. Based on a body of research, Bakken concludes that access to quality preschool during this time improves later learning, reduces the need for special education, increases high-school achievement, lowers the rate of high-school drop-outs, the number of juvenile arrests, and the need for state-funded financial assistance as an adult.

But access to quality preschool is out of reach for most children growing up in poverty – largely Black and brown children- and that gap begins a trajectory of failure from the earliest days of life. As Julia Isaacs documents in an article for the Center on Children and Families at Brookings, ‘less than half of poor children are ready for school at age five,’ compared to 75 percent of children from families with moderate or high incomes.’

A report by the National Institute for Early Education Research suggests that the achievement gap that disproportionately  affects African  American children later in childhood is really due to an ‘opportunity gap’ - the inability to access quality preschool programs. 45 percent of young African American children live in poverty and 70 percent in low income families, so subsidizing care only for those living below 200 percent of the federal poverty level leaves many Black children without a chance to access preschool at all. And much of the nations subsidized preschool is no high quality, negating the benefits described in the study.

The landmark longitudinal Perry Preschool Study, comparing two groups of at-risk African American three-and-four-year- olds, found that those who received a quality preschool education completed more education, including graduation from high school, had much lower teen pregnancies and out-of-wedlock births, and were much less likely to be arrested for violent crimes or serve time in prison. In fact, those who did not receive the quality preschool services were five times as likely to be arrested for violent crimes, four times more likely to be arrested for drug felonies, and seven times more likely to have been sentenced to jail or prison by age forty.

Besides being economically disadvantaged, minority children, especially Black children, are far more likely to be labelled as having behavioral problems, to be disciplined and removed from the very educational settings that could level the playing field for them. From the earliest stages, the educational system treats Black children more harshly than white kids. Research from the Yale Child Study Center confirms that preschool teachers are more likely to expect and identify disruptive behavior from Black kids, particularly boys, than white ones.  .  .

A study by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights released in 2014 was both shocking and enlightening. The study found that, ‘Black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment but make up 48 percent of preschool children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension. This early racial disparity in suspension continues through-out grades K-12. Black students are almost four times as likely as whites to receive out-of-school suspensions in those grades.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology studies found that white female undergraduates ‘viewed black boys as older and less innocent than their white peers’.  .  .from photographs they estimated Black boys were an average of four and a half years older than they actually were. Black boys as young as ten ‘may not be viewed in the same light of childhood innocence as their white peers’, instead, they are more likely to be mistaken as older, perceived as guilty, and face police violence if accused of a crime. Children are supposed to be protected, not punished.

 A similar study tested 176 mostly white male police officers, whose average age was thirty-seven, from large urban areas to determine their levels of two distinct types of bias- prejudice and unconscious dehumanization of Black people using animal comparison choices. When the researchers reviewed the police officer’s personnel records to determine use of force while on duty, they ‘found that those who dehumanized Blacks were more likely to have used force against a Black child in custody than officers who did not dehumanize Blacks.’ Use of force in the study was described as using  a ‘take-down or wrist lock; kicking or punching; striking with a blunt object; using a police dog, restraints or hobbling’; using tar gas or electric shock; or killing. According to the study, ‘only dehumanization and not police officers’ prejudices against Blacks – conscious  or not- was linked to violent encounters withy Black children in custody.’

Often, discipline at school, for even the slightest infraction such as truancy or lateness, can lead to trouble with the law. In fact, Black students are more than twice as likely as white students to have an interaction with law enforcement or be subjected to a school-related arrest. A 2010 study found that more than 70 percent of all students involved in school-related law-enforcement incidents were Black or Latino. This phenomena is called the ‘school-to-prison pipeline.’ There are differences, based on race, in how students are disciplined: students of color are much more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, even when the infractions are the same.

Black and brown children are essentially being single-out and funneled towards a lifetime of failure almost from the start of their school years. Many are trapped in poor minority neighborhoods where they find little opportunity in a woefully inadequate educational system. Inherent segregation and underfunded schools contribute to the under-education of children. Black and brown students tend to have less experienced teachers and often more teachers who have implicit bias and skewed perceptions of them. They also have fewer tools to work with, such as books, computers, internet access, and online learning. And many enter school already at such a disadvantage due to conditions that seemed to be determined by economic and racial status that there’s little hope of ever catching up.

Behavioral scientists have found a fascinating correlation between intelligence and culture. Psychologist Robert J. Sternberg, of Yale University, writes ‘Intelligence cannot  fully or even meaningfully be understood outside its cultural context.’ Conduct that is considered intelligent in one culture may be considered unintelligent in another. Chiefly due to the performance of Black children on IQ tests, an erroneous notion has lingered far too long that they have a diminished intellectual capacity.

The truth is that IQ is culturally and ideologically based, and it has been misused for decades, for eugenics purposes and to separate some children from others. In using the IQ test, the American educational system has continuously misevaluated Black children. After the de-segregation case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka we as handed down in 1964, opponents of integration searched for new ways to discriminate. Separation by “IQ” became one way of mismanaging the placement of minority students.

In some public-school districts, children may be subject to skill testing at very early ages. Students who do poorly on those exams often are labeled at ‘at-risk’ students. As early as kindergarten, some minority boys and girls, not blessed with an early education and quality preschool advantages available to other children, are labeled as potential failures. They and their parents then bear the burden of this mislabeling, which then follows them emotionally and on their records for the rest of their school life. With resources in short supply, with teachers overburdened by large classes and ever-changing standards, with lawmakers relentlessly shifting money from public to ‘charter’ and other private schools, many of these children will never lose this label, even though they might yearn and even strive to succeed.  . .

The US Department of Education reports that ‘high poverty schools have a higher percentage, on average, of teachers who were not fully certified than schools with low poverty rates and that ‘schools with high proportions of students of color had a higher percentage of teachers who were not fully certified, compared with schools with low proportions of students of color. Segregation by race and class are linked to other deprivations, such a a paucity of college-preparation and career-education courses. Also, because these institutions are managed poorly and do not provide sufficient staff training for professional counselors, their students tend to have much greater numbers of suspensions, expulsions, and law-enforcement issues.

Technology could be a potential equalizer between children of privilege and those born with multiple strikes against them, but access to technology represents another divide according to race. According to the Pew Research Center, as of November 2016, 35 percent of Black Americans and 42 percent of Hispanics lack broadband  internet service at home, compared to 22 percent of white Americans.

A child without access to a computer is as blatantly discriminated against as a Black child once denied the opportunity to read or write. Making the internet affordable, accessible, and available is one way to raise up the disadvantaged and disenfranchised - and to level  the educational and technological playing field.

Former Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn is spearheading efforts to slay educational and technological racism by fighting for universal telephone and high-speed internet access nationwide. But others on that same commission are doing everything they can to block her – and to serve the interests of the same corporate titans who have held minorities down.

In August 2017, a civil rights attorney filed a complaint against AT&T with the FCC on behalf of three Black women accusing the communications giant of ‘digital redlining.’ The Dallas News reports that, ‘the complaint refers to a March report by two non-profits, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Connect Your Community, that mapped internet availability and speeds in Cleveland. The groups alleged in the report tat AT&T had ‘systematically discriminated’ by not making fiber-enhanced broad and improvements in most Cleveland neighborhoods with high poverty. Making certain that computers, access to the internet, and online educational opportunities are available to everyone- these too are civil rights issues.

Max Weber's Religiosity by Joachim Radkau

Discussions with Max about religion had an exciting effect on Else Jaffe. Religion for him was not simply a cultural phenomena, as it was for the ‘cultural Protestantism’ of his time, or a mere superstructure of society or an instrument for the stabilization of a social system, as it was for Durkheim – on the contrary, religion was often an eternal reproach against everyday structures. It came from the depths of the human being and had a similar power to erotic love: partly akin to, partly in struggle with it. In his writings on the sociology of religion, was he speaking simply of a phenomena he had observed from a distance, or of a power that he felt in himself? Weber’s own religiosity is the greatest puzzle in the whole area of Weber studies, up to now even more obscure than his sexuality. Here he was even shyer about revealing his inner being than he was in relation to his sexual life; perhaps he was also loath to focus on substrata of his thoughts and feelings, lest it interfere with his creative powers. After all, for many years he had to endure the torture watchfulness that prevented him from sleeping.

To one young participant in the discussions at Lauenstein Castle (July, 1917), who had evidently heard intimate confessions from him, Weber wrote: “To me the limit of “confessing” is where things involved that are ‘sacred”’; they should be spoken of only in a ‘good hour’ and in a circle of close friends. This implied that there really were areas of ‘the sacred’ within  his inner being. If Weber took up the cudgels against value-judgments in science, he did so not because there were no values in his eyes, but because his values were too ‘sacred’ to be mixed up with science. As Marianne wrote of the lectures on science and politics as vocations, ‘final judgments sparkle . . .here and there, as lodestars through ‘open secrets’ – more in indirect than in direct communication, it is true – and for that very reason stimulate those who hear and read them to ask and search.’

He (Weber) ‘is suspected of being such an extremely “moral” person’, Weber wrote with exclamation marks in 1912 to Sombart, who was suspected of being the opposite. Asked what was so mysterious about Weber, the art historian Carl Neumann replied that in conversation with him one sensed a “’limitless moral energy’ ‘although he only gave out scraps about himself’- by which was probably meant ‘about the origin of his morality’. But the question is whether there  actually was one origin. Weber was not the closed personality he seemed to be to others; his ‘polytheism of values’ corresponded to the fissures within himself. The values that gave life meaning for him did not all originate in the same spirit. But the fact that they were sacred to him, and that he timidly kept them hidden, indicated that they came from religious roots that were removed from the discussion.

Be this as it may, a lifelong fascination for religious phenomena is scarcely conceivable without some religious experience of one’s own, and not at all in a man who pursued science out of passion. At the age of eighteen, he was ‘already deeply immersed in theology’, although it was distracting him from his studies. No other of his major research focuses came so entirely from within himself. And, as Hennis has written: ‘There could in the history of social sciences have been very few Germans who retained such a fine sense of the meaning of religion.’ His detailed knowledge of religious issues and his capacity to empathize with  religious states of mind became his main trump cards in comparison with other economists and political theorists. His thesis that the power of religion unleashed capitalism made him famous around the world. HE thought he understood better than most intellectuals what fear of hellfire and hopes of salvation meant for people in earlier times., and what effect they had on lifestyles and the general zest for life; he thought he could differentiate more precisely than others between various forms of asceticism and ecstasy, between genuine and feigned mysticism and charismatics- distinctions that are hard to derive from the sources alone unless one has also had personal experience of them.

The question of Weber’s religiosity is usually much too hastily dismissed with a reference to his claim, made to Ferdinand Tonnies, that he was ‘absolutely unmusical in religious matters’. Even there, however, one only has to read the whole sentence and the ones that follow it to recognize the ambiguity of the statement, which was addressed to a man notoriously contemptuous of all theology.

For I am absolutely ‘unmusical’ in religious matters and have neither the need nor the ability to erect any spiritual; structures of a religious kind within me – that is simply not on, or I decline to do it. But, on closer examination, I am neither anti-religious nor irreligious. In this respect too I feel a cripple, a mutilated person, whose inner destiny it is to have to admit this honestly.

‘Unmusical in religious matters’ was an allusion to Schleirermacher, who spoke of music as his ‘religion’. But this kind of religion was not Weber’s ‘thing’; what he felt as divine was not associated with the sonorous harmony of intoxicating organ music. Nor would it ever have occurred to him to construct an edifying theological system. The quotation does clearly reveal, though, how in both religion and eroticism he felt himself to be a ‘cripple’, who would like to do something of which he was actually incapable. A complete person had the capacity for religion as well as love; religious potency appeared as a natural disposition akin to sexual potency, with none of the bigotry that anti-clericalists used to ascribe to the devout.

So, when Weber became an erotic man, did he also not feel a new energy for religious experience? Two weeks after the letter quoted to Tonnes, on 2 March 1909, he returned to the ‘unmusical in religious matters’ and remarked, from the point of view of an outsider, that the ‘problems of the historical significance of mysticism’ were unfathomable. And Weber, who otherwise used to react allergically to the cult of ‘experience’, acknowledged: ‘There, only there, do I have the impression . . .that I must experience these mental states to understand their consequences. I have to confess this, although I myself an ‘unmusical’ in religion.’ Later he wrote about mysticism and felt competent to analyze the states of mind associated with it; he must have experienced them, if we take  him at his word. And in that domain, as well as in erotic love, he no longer felt a ‘cripple’.

In ‘Science as a Vocation’, Weber speaks of the ‘religious organ’ of ‘a truly religiously musical’ man’. Already in many letters from his youth, there is a conviction that human beings have a natural predisposition to religion; and the same premise is discernible between the lines of his sociology of religion- where he mentions quite in passing the ineradicable demand for theodicy’ as if it were a well-known fact. Even in the economic context of the satisfaction of needs, he points to the ‘religious need’ that an be met in diverse ways: one basic need, therefore, behind the various phenomena of religion.

The young Weber thought that the de-mythologizing programme of liberal Bible critics was rather silly; their know-all attitude to the stories of Jesus diverted attention from the sources of religious energy. He taught (his brother) Alfred that religion made a mark even on people who wanted nothing to do with it; that we all behave ‘involuntarily’ in accordance with Christian doctrines. The starting point of his sociology of religion is the idea that religion impacts on the world where we least suspect it: in the genesis of modern capitalism. In sharp contrast to notions prevalent at the time, he always worked on the assumption that religion and rationality are not necessarily opposites, and that the history of religion- especially of Judaism and Christianity – is shot through with processes of rationalization and spell-breaking ( Entzauberung). As Hartmann Tyrell notes, Weber became ‘magnetically attracted to issues of religious-ethical rationality; the modern disenchantment of the world therefore des not necessarily entail secularization. At times Weber does give the impression that the power of religion is a thing of the past, but on the whole he gives reasons to expect that religious-like beliefs will in the future continue to cast their spell on many people, since modern man in particular hankers after salvation. Today it looks as if Weber’s vision in this respect was clearer than that of many other pioneering theorists of modernization.*

*see: https://johnshaplin.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-triumph-of-religion-by-jacques-lacan.html