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4U4 II'( V H'Jl:r NL .£.1:.J 1 LlN Politics in the Iron Cage IRVING M. ZEITLIN Wolfgang j. Mommsen. The Political and Social Theory of Mnx Weber University of Chicago Press 1989 Few serious students of social theory would dissent from the view that Max Weber may be regarded as the outstanding social scientist of the twentieth century. And Wolfgang Mommsen is surely among the most thoughtful and sophisticated Weber scholars writing today. In this splendid collection of essays he not only does full justice to the extraordinary complexity of Weber's thought, but also calls attention to several neglected considerations where Weber's theory and political conduct are concerned. In 1959 Mommsen published a major study entitled Max Weber und die deutsche Politik, 189frI920, a study systematically documenting Weber's ardent nationalism and hard-headed advocacy of imperialist expansion. Although the book caused a major upheaval in the world of Weber scholarship, Mommsen was not a pioneer in advancing that thesis, since J.P. Mayer, in 1944, had already presented a far more critical appraisal in his Max Weber and German Politics. Mommsen opens the present volume by focusing on the relationship of politics to scholarship in Weber's life. He contends that other scholars, notably Reinhard Ben and Gunther Roth, have maintained that Webers scholarship can be dearly separated from his politics. Mommsen argues, however, 'that contemporary politics exerted a great influence on Max Weber's academic work without thereby detracting from its scientific character.' I have emphasized the last phrase because, to my mind, it shows that, notwithstanding his impression to the contrary, there is no basic disagreement in that regard between Mommsen, on the one hand, and Ben and Roth, on the other. When the latter scholars assert that Weber's politics and scholarship may be 'clearly separated: I take their meaning to be precisely the same as Mommsen's - that however much Weber involved himself in politics, his political interests never penetrated his scholarship to the extent of rendering it ideological. Indeed, this is the most striking characteristic of Weber's intellectual work, that he successfully practised what he preached, maintaining objectivity throughout. Weber consistently obeyed his own methodological injunction that one must always observe the boundaries between Politik als Bent! and Wissenschaft als Berut. I am not suggesting that Ben and Roth fully accept Mommsen's thesis concerning Weber's nationalist and imperialist views, for I know they do not. But I am insisting that neither they nor he would allege that Webers political opinions and conduct did in fact detract from the scientific character of his scholarship. So while it is true, as Mommsen states, that 'Weber stood on the threshold between politics and science all his life,' it is also true that his major substantive works, for which he is so highly esteemed, remajned relatively impervious to distorting ideological influences. There is a need, I believe, to clarify further what appears to be a confusion on Mommsen's part, with regard to a fundamental, methodological issue. He writes: Essential elements of his [Weber's] sociology of domination and especially his theory of democratic rule are owed directly or indirectly to insights he had gained in the contemporary political struggles of his day, And the sociology of domination in its turn is oriented around the central issue of how freedom, however understood, may be possible under different social conditions, and in particular in the conditions of highly bureaucratized capitalist societies. What Mommsen is saying here is that the impulse leading to the selection of questions for scientific research may have been derived, in Weber's case, from his concerns with contemporary political struggles and debates. Yes, of course! - and no informed student of Weber's lifework would deny that. Just as no competent philosopher of science would gainsay that the selection of a problem for research is often influenced by a scientist-scholar's interests and values. Virtually all philosophers of science would agree that the pre-investigatory stage of research is influenced by values and/or interests, and that the postinvestigatory stage, i.e., the findings, may often be used to advance or oppose a variety of economic, politicat...

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