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) --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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