This article focuses on the sociology of law in the work of Max Weber, and some problems related to its reception in legal thinking. As a social and legal thinker, Weber had long been stigmatized as a representative of “bourgeois pseudo-science“ in Slovakia and his original works on the sociology of law were unavailable for decades. Thus, the reception of his sociology of law suffers due to this discontinuity. An analysis of Weber’s sociology of law can divide his ideas in two categories: 1. law and social statics, including social structure and related issues, 2. law and social dynamics, including actors of societal changes. This paper stresses two key problem fields in his sociology of law: 1. the reflection of extralegal factors in the content of law and 2. the formalization of the social role of participants in legal relations by means of the construction of “legal status.“ The author claims that focusing on these two topics, together with the concept of rationalization, can broaden our contemporary knowledge about law and society.
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate historically conditioned context of Weber's analysis of “religion of India”. Weber and his work is part of orientalistic discourse – Weber assumes then Western image of India, and reproduces and incorporates this image into sociological thinking. This text focuses on some elements of this image: caste system as the most important element of Hinduism, confidence to sacred texts and secret sexualism as opposite of noble official religion of intellectual elite. These stereotypes have helped the defence of notion of European exceptionalism, by which other cultures may not develop modern capitalism as the base of modernity.
The article is concerned with interpretations of Max Weber in general sociology. It describes the 'Parsonization' and the 'de-Parsonization' of Weber in the American sociological literature, interpretations in the theory of action, empirical sociology, the sociology of race as well as in the theory of social stratification. The influence of Weber on the rational choice theory and the 'neo-charismatic' theory of leadership are discussed. Two questions are asked: whether Weberianism can be an appropriate program for transition and whether history should dominate over sociology?
The study explores the question whether and under what conditions the fundamental concepts of Max Weber's interpretive sociology - in particular "meaning" (Sinn) and "understanding" (Verstehen) - can be applied to animal behaviour, and whether and under what conditions Weber's concepts can be used to study the relationship of humans to animals as a relationship of social actors to other social actors. With regard to the possibility of building an interpretive sociology of animals in Max Weber’s spirit, his shift in the analytical concept of "meaning" is very important, namely the shift from the meaning which is fully conscious to the half-consciousness or unconsciousness of the meaning which is felt by the actor. Since the understanding of the animal and the human action is achieved in principle by the same means – through qualitative evidence and its verification by the rate of practical success - the rejection of the meaningfulness of animal action could also be applied to human actors. Apparently, denying the human actors an understanding explanation of their actions through the interpretation of subjective meaning would not only "destroy" the legitimacy of the interpretive sociology, but it would also "rule out" the possibility of understanding human communicative acts as such. Therefore, it is reasonably of greater benefit to include animals among (potential) social actors and rather focus on their sociologically relevant differences from other - primarily human - social actors.
In despite of the fact that Max Weber has not elaborated a coherent theoretical conception of everyday life, his contribution to the crystallisation of this sociological sub-discipline is very significant. This paper is an attempt to reconstruct Weber’s sociology of everyday life by using his own considerations, which are dispersed throughout his works. He begins with the dichotomy of everydayness and non-everydayness, which was developed long ago by the representatives of German romanticism (Novalis, Tieck, Brentano, E. T. A. Hoffmann). But unlike them, Weber considers non-everyday phenomena as extraordinary psychical states of a charismatic nature (ecstatic, mystic, hysterical, orgiastic, visionary), which are mainly associated with religion. Everydayness, however, is mainly linked to economic aspects of ordinary life. Unlike an ethnographical approach, which would propose the descriptions of various aspects of everyday life, Weber concentrates on its metaphysical and religious foundations. It seems that the matrix of metaphysical meanings is more important for him than the traditional temporal distinction between ordinary and extraordinary days. Non-everydayness embodies the sacred, just as everydayness represents the profane. According to Weber, this antinomy may be overcome by the method of active asceticism, which we find in the Protestant ethic. It supports the economic activity of the representatives of the middle classes. Their efforts contribute to the creation of everydayness, which successively gets rid of the non-everyday elements in the form of contemplative, orgiastic, and ecstatic religiosity. Therefore everyday life emerges from non-everydayness as a consequence of the long process of rationalization that was developed at the Occident. Thus the sociology of everyday life by Weber appears as a derivation of the sociology of religion.
Two versions of the civilizational approach are represented in the contemporary social theory. One of them, identified with Norbert Elias and his disciples, focuses on the idea of the civilizing process, understood as a transformation of power structures and a corresponding reorganization of individual conduct. The other, most systematically developed by S. N. Eisenstadt, stresses the plurality of civilizational patterns and the need for comparative analysis. Here the main emphasis is on cultural interpretations of the world and their intertwining with social structures. Both these paradigms draw on Weber's legacy, the first on his problematic of rationalization and the second on the idea of cultural worlds. The aim of this essay is to examine more closely the importance of Weber's work for civilizational analysis, particularly for Eisenstadt's version of it, but with a view to integrating some aspects of Eliasian’s. For this purpose, Benajmin Nelson's interpretation of Weber is discussed; Nelson was the first author to combine a civilizational turn in social theory with a close reading of Weber's key texts. His emphasis on structures of consciousness, understood as cultural patterns, is taken as a key to Weber's writings on the cultural premises of politics, with particular emphasis on the theory of legitimacy. A neglected topic of the latter, the question of sacred ruler ship, is shown to be particularly important for comparative studies.
This article discusses various attempts in the Weber literature to reconstruct the logic underlying Weber’s typology of social action and concludes that means-ends rationality enjoys only what has been called a heuristic primacy over other types (Wolfgang Schluchter). The article rejects the claims that value rationality is not a form of rationality or is just a defective form of means-ends rationality. It explores the relationships between subjective types of rationality and objective structures of rationality and concludes that many interpretations under scrutiny here have identified these relationships incorrectly. It is argued that formal rationality cannot be identified with means-ends rationality, or substantive rationality with value rationality. The drawbacks of taking Weber’s statements regarding the priority of means-ends rationality in a substantive sense rather than as a heuristic device are demonstrated on two important interpretations that distort means-ends rationality in Weber: Parsons’ 1937 The Structure of Social Action and Jeffrey Alexander’s 1983 Theoretical Logic in Sociology.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.