Dr Ploetz has described ‘society’ as a living organism, on the basis of the familiar analogy, which he has himself impressively expounded, between societies and such things as cellular organisations. It may well be that, for Dr Ploetz's purposes, there is something of value in such an analogy: he himself, of course, is the best judge of that. But sociological enquiry never gains by the attempt to combine a number of relatively precise concepts into a single vague one. Such is the situation here. It is possible for us to understand the rational actions of individual human beings by re-living them in our own minds. If we sought to understand a human association of any kind only in the way in which one would investigate an animal community, we should be abandoning the means of knowledge which, as things are, are available to us in the case of human beings, but not in the case of animal societies. For this reason and no other, we can see no general advantage for our purposes in drawing the analogy which can undoubtedly be drawn between a bee-hive and any human political association of any kind, and in making it the basis for any sort of enquiry.

The structure of every legal order (not only the ‘state’) has a direct influence on the distribution of power, whether economic or of any other kind, within the community concerned. By ‘power’ we mean very generally the chances which a man or a group of men have to realise their will in a communal activity, even against the opposition of others taking part in it. ‘Economically determined’ power is not, of course, the same thing as ‘power’ in general. On the contrary, economic power may result from the possession of power which rests on other foundations. Conversely, men do not only aspire to power for the sake of economic enrichment. Power, even economic power, may be valued for its own sake, and it is very often the case that men seek power in part for the sake of the honorific social ‘status’ which it brings. Not all power, however, brings status with it. The typical American ‘boss’, like the typical large-scale financial speculator, consciously renounces such status; and generally speaking it is precisely ‘pure’ economic power, especially power based on ‘naked’ cash, which is not accepted in any way as a basis of social ‘status’. On the other hand, power is not the only basis of social status. Quite the contrary: social status or prestige can be, and very often has been, the basis of power, even of economic power. The legal system may guarantee both power and status.

THE ESSENCE OF CHARISMA AND ITS WORKINGS

Bureaucracy, like the patriarchal system which is opposed to it in so many ways, is a structure of ‘the everyday’, in the sense that stability is among its most important characteristics. Patriarchal power, above all, is rooted in the supply of the normal, constantly recurring, needs of everyday life and thus has its basis in the economy – indeed, in just those sections of the economy concerned with the supply of normal everyday requirements. The patriarch is the ‘natural leader’ in everyday life. In this respect, bureaucracy is the counterpart of patriarchalism, only expressed in more rational terms. Bureaucracy, moreover, is a permanent structure and is well adapted, with its system of rational rules, for the satisfaction of calculable long-term needs by normal methods. On the other hand, the supply of all needs which go beyond the economic requirements of everyday life is seen, the further back we go in history, to be based on a totally different principle, that of charisma. In other words, the ‘natural’ leaders in times of spiritual, physical, economic, ethical, religious or political emergency were neither appointed officials nor trained and salaried specialist ‘professionals’ (in the present-day sense of the word ‘profession’), but those who possessed specific physical and spiritual gifts which were regarded as supernatural, in the sense of not being available to everyone.

MEMBERSHIP OF A ‘RACE’

A much more problematic source of communal action than what has been mentioned so far is ‘membership of a race’, or in other words the possession, resulting from actual common descent, of similar inherited or heritable characteristics. Naturally, such common descent only expresses itself in the form of a ‘community’ when the individuals concerned have a subjective feeling of their common identity; and this in turn only develops when people of different races, living in close proximity to each other or associated together in some other way, are involved in some common activity (usually of a political nature), or alternatively when racially similar people share a common fate in virtue of their shared opposition to other groups who are markedly different from them. When communal action results in such a situation, it generally takes a purely negative form: those who feel themselves to have a common identity mark themselves off from the noticeably different group and despise them, or sometimes, on the contrary, regard them with superstitious awe. Someone who is foreign in his external appearance, however he may ‘act’ or whatever he may ‘be’, is despised simply as such; or, on the contrary, if he remains in a superior position over a period of time, is regarded with superstitious veneration. Rejection is thus the primary and normal response.

It is both inevitable and right that someone who is himself the offspring of modern European civilisation should approach problems in world history with the following question in mind: through what concatenation of circumstances did it come about that precisely, and only, in the Western world certain cultural phenomena emerged which, as at least we like to think, represent a direction of development of universal significance and validity?

Only in the West is there a ‘science’ which has reached a stage of development which we today would accept as ‘authentic’. In other cultures, especially in India, China, Babylon and Egypt, we can find empirical knowledge, reflection on the problems of the world and of life, philosophical and theological wisdom of great profundity (though the full development of a systematic theology is unique to Christianity, as influenced by Hellenistic thought, and is only hinted at in Islam and some Indian sects), and extremely sophisticated scholarship and observation. But Babylonian astronomy, like every other, lacked the mathematical foundations first laid by the Greeks: a fact which, indeed, makes the development of Babylonian astronomy in particular all the more astonishing. In Indian geometry there was no concept of rational ‘proof’ – another product of that Greek genius which also created mechanics and physics.

The second specifically modern keyboard instrument, the piano, developed from two historical sources which were technically very different from each other. On the one hand, there was the clavichord, which developed by an increase in the number of strings from the early medieval ‘monochord’, a single-stringed instrument with a movable bridge which was the basis of the rational tone-measurement which prevails across the whole of the Western world. In all probability, the clavichord was a monastic invention. Originally it had grouped strings for several tones, which could thus not be struck at the same time, and free strings only for the most important tones: the number of free strings, however, gradually increased from bottom to top, at the expense of the grouped strings. On the oldest clavichords it was impossible to strike c and e simultaneously – in other words, the third. However, the instrument had by Agricola's time (the sixteenth century) been brought from a range which in the fourteenth century encompassed twenty-two diatonic tones (from G to e′ including b flat next to b) to a chromatic scale from A to b″. Its rapidly fading tones encouraged figuration, and so it was pre-eminently an instrument suitable for genuinely artistic use.

‘Sociology’ is a word which is used in many different senses. In the sense adopted here, it means the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By ‘action’ in this definition is meant human behaviour when and to the extent that the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful: the behaviour may be either internal or external, and may consist in the agent's doing something, omitting to do something, or having something done to him. By ‘social’ action is meant an action in which the meaning intended by the agent or agents involves a relation to another person's behaviour and in which that relation determines the way in which the action proceeds.

METHODOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS

(1) The ‘meaning’ to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the ‘meaning’ to be thought of as somehow objectively ‘correct’ or ‘true’ by some metaphysical criterion.

Max Weber (1864–1920) has come to be widely regarded as the most important European social theorist of the twentieth century. But his writings have only slowly and sporadically become available in English, and have still not been translated in full. This is due in part to the scope and quantity of his work and in part to the interests and purposes of his various editors and translators. But whatever the reasons, there remains a need for a selection which will, so far as is possible within a single volume, give the English-speaking reader an overall picture of Weber's contribution to the remarkably wide range of topics in the social sciences to which he addressed himself over his career. Any selection of this kind will of course be personal and arbitrary. Weber is a difficult author with whom to come to terms. Not only was his major work, Economy and Society, incomplete at the time of his death, but much of his earlier writing is unsystematic and on occasion polemical. It has seemed to me better to include a smaller number of longer, continuous extracts than the other way round; and I have been guided in my choice by the wish to cover not only the most significant and influential of Weber's writings but also some of those which have not been translated into English elsewhere. But these aims inevitably conflict, and the result cannot be other than a compromise.

The short selections which are included in this final section have been chosen partly to illustrate the wide range of Weber's interests but partly also for their intrinsic interest. They all deal with topics which, although peripheral to the major studies on which Weber's reputation rests, nonetheless reflect the same underlying presuppositions with which he approached all aspects of social organisation and culture.

The first selection is from the chapter in Economy and Society which Weber devoted to what he called ‘communal relationships’ of an ‘ethnic’ kind. Under this heading, he deals with what tend nowadays to be called ‘race relations’, including the question how far, if at all, these need to be understood in biological rather than sociological terms. But he extends the discussion to broader considerations of folk, tribal and national relationships and loyalties with which he considered ethnic relationships and loyalties to be closely connected. His view, like that of the overwhelming majority of later anthropologists and sociologists, was that inherited physical characteristics as such play no significant role in ‘ethnic’ relations. It is, however, consistent with Weber's general view of social stratification that he analyses them in terms not merely of cultural selfdifferentiation but also of attempted monopolisation by rival groups of social status and political power.

Writing, as he said, as ‘someone who is himself the offspring of modern European civilisation’, Weber approached his historical studies concerned above all to establish what accounts for the emergence of that civilisation in post-medieval Europe and nowhere else. This involves a twofold contrast: first, between postmedieval Europe and the other civilisations in which an industrial revolution might also have occurred but didn't; secondly, between post-medieval Europe and the civilisation of ancient Rome where many of the conditions for capitalist industrialisation were also present but failed to bring it about until after the complete dissolution of the Roman Empire and the long dominance of the system of social organisation now known to us as feudalism.

A part of Weber's answer lay, as we have seen, in the distinctive economic ethics of European Protestantism and, more generally, the ‘rationalisation’ of thought and behaviour which he held to be peculiar to the West. But this is far from the whole of the story. He also sought to identify the other conditions which could be held to have been necessary for the emergence of industrial capitalism, ranging from double-entry book-keeping (which was an invention of the Italian bankers of the Renaissance) to the development of the concept of citizenship to the supply of a formally free labour force emancipated from the land.

None of Weber's writings has aroused as much controversy both during his lifetime and after it as his two-part article on ‘The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism’, published in 1905, of which the first selection in this section is the concluding part. The extent of the controversy is due partly to the interest of the topic, partly to the complexity of the evidence and partly to the difficulty of specifying precisely the hypothesis which Weber sought to establish. It is clear that he did not claim that Protestantism as such caused the development of industrial capitalism, and that if he had he would have been mistaken. It is also clear that he was right to point out that there is a connexion between Protestantism and capitalism which is not merely coincidental. But what sort of connexion is it? Weber does appear to mean more than that the Reformation was one necessary condition of the emergence in Europe but nowhere else of a form of economic and political organisation which came to transform the rest of the world. He argues that there is a particular affinity between certain of the doctrines of Protestantism implying a conception of salvation through the pursuit of a secular calling and the style of life necessary for the successful accumulation of capital through commercial activity.

§ 12. The term ‘association’ should be understood to mean a social relationship whose rules restrict, or exclude, those outside of it and within which there are particular individuals appointed for the specific purpose of securing the maintenance of its regulations. One or more of these individuals will be the ‘head’ or ‘leader’, and in some cases there will also be an executive staff which will normally have delegated powers in appropriate cases. The leadership, or a share in the functions of the executive (what we may call ‘governmental powers’), may either be (a) appropriated or (b) assigned in accordance with the accepted rules of the association to particular individuals or to persons selected on the basis of particular criteria or in accordance with particular forms. The assignment of powers in this way may be either for a long term or for a period or to deal with specific circumstances. The term ‘associational action’ will be used to refer (a) to actions taken by the executive staff themselves, given legitimacy by their executive or delegated powers and taken in order to preserve the existence of the regulations of the association, or (b) to actions taken by members of the association, operating under instructions given by the executive. (The latter will be called ‘action relative to the association’: see Note 3 below.)

From the third century onwards, the progress of urbanisation encountered constant and manifestly increasing impediments. Before touching on the causes of them, let us examine yet again the special characteristics of the ancient city-state, and ask in particular how it is related to the medieval ‘city’. A number of features are discernible in the beginnings of the medieval city which we have already observed in the early days of the ancient city-state. In both, the basic requirement for citizenship is the combination of landownership and participation in the market; there is a tendency towards the accumulation of landholdings through the investment of trading profits; the landless are treated as ‘resident aliens’ (or ‘metics’); public service to the city is imposed as an obligation on the lords of the city; the citizen body is organised along military lines, especially the members of those trades which are of military importance; and there is a social division between those who fight on horseback and those who fight on foot. However, the differences are also enormous. Admittedly (and this cannot be stressed enough) it is important to bear in mind how widely the medieval cities differ from one another in their social structure.

What can politics as a vocation offer in the way of inner satisfaction, and which personal qualities does it presuppose in anyone who devotes himself to it?

Well, it offers first of all the sense of power. Even in positions which are, formally speaking, modest, the professional politician can feel himself elevated above the everyday level by the sense of exercising influence over men, of having a share in power over their lives, but above all by the sense of having his finger on the pulse of historically important events. But the question which he has to face is this: through which personal qualities can he hope to do justice to this power (however narrow its limits in his particular case) and so to the responsibility it lays on him? At this point we enter the domain of ethical questions; for it is in this domain that the question arises: what kind of man must one be to venture to lay hands on the spokes of the wheel of history?

Three qualities above all, it might be said, are of decisive importance for the politician: passion, a sense of responsibility and judgment. By ‘passion’ I mean realistic passion – a passionate commitment to a realistic cause, to the god or demon in whose domain it lies.