File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9709, message 100


From: Carrol Cox <cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu>
Subject: M-I: Wood on Weber, Marx, and the Englightenment
Date: Sat, 6 Sep 1997 10:48:37 -0500 (CDT)


I quote below (without comment) the final paragraphs of Wood's chapter,
"History or teleology? Marx versus Weber." The heading of this section
is "History, Progress and Emancipation."

	Max Weber my turn out to be the prophetic ideal type of the
(post-)modern intellectual in our *fin de siecle*. In his work are
prefigured two of the principal themes in Western intellectual culture at
the close of the twentieth century, what might be called the end
Enlightenment progressivism in two antithetical (or not?) modes: the
triumphalist conviction that Progress has rerached its destination in
modern capitalism and liberal democracy -- the glorification of "the
market" and the "end of History"; together with post-modernist
irrationalism, pessimism, and the assault on the "Enlightenment Project,"
its conceptions of reason and progress.

	Weber, his criticism of concepts of progress nothwithstanding, was
still deeply indebted to the Enlightenment tradition with its belief in
the advance of reason and freedom. Yet he ended with a much narrower and
more pessimistic vision, and with a profound ambivalence toward
Englightenment values. The rise of capitalism certainly represented for
him the progress of reason, but "rationalization"  was a two-edged sword:
progress and material prosperity, on the one hand, the iron cage, on the
other; the progress of freedom and liberal democracy, on the one hand, the
inevitable loss of freedon, on the other -- to which the only available
response may be the embrace of irrationalism. 

	Ambivalence is not an ureasonable stance to adopt in relation to
the fruits of modern "progress." What makes Weber's attitude more
problematic is that his is an ambivalence that preserves the teleology of
Enlightenment triumphalism while giving up much of its critical and
emancipatory vision. The consequences are visible in his profoundly
ambiguous response to the crises of his time. The Russian Revolution and
Germany's defeat in World War I confirmed his fear that Western
civilization as a whole was under threat. His reaction was not only deeply
pessimistic but anti-democratic and irrationalist. Human emancipation was
eclipsed in his political vision by German nationalism, even by the
historic mission of the German nation as the bulwark against barbarian
(especially Russian) threats to Western civilization. In this, he joined
what was to be a long tradition -- still flourishing today -- of German
conservatism (though this strand in his thought no doubt had a longer
history, since even his earlier association with German liberalism had
represented less a commitment to the advancement of freedom than to the
liberals' nation-building project). {Wood's note: For a discussion of
Weber's liberalism and other aspects of his thought in relation to the
politics of his time and place, see W. Mommsen, *Max Weber und die
deutsche Politik 1890-1920* (Tubingen, 1950).} Finally, his main political
legacy to the German nation ws the provision in the Weimar Constitution
which called for a popularly elected "plebiscitary" president invested
with vast powers, whose primary function was to command the blind
obedience of the masses. In this new type of "charismatic" leader,
irrationalism was to be harnessed against the threat of revolution. 

	If Weber's thought is shot through with an ambivalence toward
the fruits of Enlightenment progress, there is nonetheless a certain
logic in that ambivalence which may tell us something *mutatis 
mutandis*, about our current "post-modern" condition, in which a
submission to the inevitability of capitalism, together wih an
uncritical acceptance of its basic assumptions, can elicit no other
response than celebration or despair. To that Hobson's choice, Marx
still offers the possibility of an alternative.

	Marx's position in the Englightenment tradtition is in a sense
exactly the reverse of Weber's. Like Weber, he acknowledged both the
benefits and costs of progress, and especially of capitalism; but he
jettisoned the teleology while preserving the critical and emancipatory
vision of the Enlightenment. His critique of political economy and his
concept of the mode of production liberated history and social theory from
the limiting categories of capitalist ideology. But having departed from
the Enlightenment concept only as far as was necessary to break out of its
bourgeois teleology, and having replaced teleology with *historical
process*, he took up and expanded the Enlightenment programme of human
emancipation. While supremely conscious of cpaitalism's systematic
coercions, he ended with a *less* deterministic vision. By offering
*history* instead of teleology, he also offered the possibility of change
instead of despair or unstinting embrace. By putting a *critique* of
political economy in place of an uncritical submission to the assumptions
and categories of capitalism, he made it possible to see within it the
conditions of its supersession by a more humane society. The result was
both a greater appreciation of historical specificity and a more
universalistic vision. 

	This combination may hold some fruitful lessons in the face
of an unholy alliance between capitalist triumphalism and socialist
pessimism, at a time when "grand narratives" are out of fashion and
when even on the left we are being asked, in the interests of
"difference" and the politics of "identity," to abandon all universal
projects of human emancipation, while submitting to the irresistible
power of capitalism.

	(*Democracy Against Capitalism*, pp. 176-8)


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