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After the talk: Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy – weberscholars

After the talk: Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy

After the talk: Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy

by Yannis Ktenas

Let me start by saying that I feel very happy and honored to be here as a discussant today, for the 25th anniversary of the publishing of Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy (1999), a unique work edited by Sam Whimster.

The existence of this collective work had been quite important for me during the writing of my dissertation. The reason is the following: as I was working on the intellectual affinities that connect Max Weber and Cornelius Castoriadis, a Greek-French political philosopher who was in favor of radical democracy and self-management, colleagues often used to look at me suspiciously. How could one possibly connect Weber, a sui generis liberal (if not conservative and nationalist), to Castoriadis, a proponent of direct democracy and council socialism? In this context, Sam Whimster’s collective volume made me feel less alone and persuaded me that I was not chasing my own tail.

Against this background, let me open a parenthesis and make an observation on the current political status of Weber studies. One thing that has not stopped impressing me since I joined Weber Scholars Network is the political orientation of its younger members. To put it in a rather simplistic way, I would say that, while the old guard of the experienced and well known Weber scholars tend to place themselves within the liberal tradition (Kari Palonen is a good example here) or perhaps in the camp of social-democracy, younger Weber scholars tend to approach Weber from a more radical political point of departure. This is, for instance, true for Lucia Pinto, Victor Strazzeri and myself, but also for other young members of the Network, such as Octavio Majul. I think this has interesting implications for the contemporary sociology of knowledge (and perhaps for the sociology of contemporary academia). In this context, the book Sam Whimster edited and we’re discussing today gains new relevance and appears as an important forerunner.

Let me now come briefly to the 7th chapter of this book, written by our very own Edith Hanke and entitled “Max Weber, Leo Tolstoy and the Mountain of Truth”. In this chapter, Hanke follows the fascinating life of Ernst Frick, a Swiss anarchist, syndicalist, newspaper editor and painter, who since 1911 found himself living in Ascona, along with his companion Frieda Gross, her son Peter and their daughter Eva Verena. At first, Weber was supposed to help Frick and Frieda Gross in their legal adventure, as Frieda was facing the risk of losing custody of her son. However, coming to know Frick and estimating his personal integrity, Weber soon enough found himself interested in Frick’s life orientation and worldview in a more profound way. They had long discussions on questions of Lebensführung, life conduct, and Weber seems to have identified a sort of Tolstoian ethics as the guiding principle in Frick’s life. As Edith Hanke writes, “Max Weber saw Frick in the light in Tolstoy’s ideal, and sought to measure him by it” (p. 145).

What is very interesting in Hanke’s contribution to the book is that, through the brief yet detailed narration of Ernst Frick’s story, she manages not only to reconstruct some of the most important aspects of Weber’s take on Tolstoy, but also to explore possible convergences and divergences between Tolstoian pacifism, Ernst Frick’s political activism and Gustav Landauer’s political thought. Frick had indeed contacts with Landauer (p. 150) and they both referred to Tolstoy’s anarchism, although Frick rejected its religious and non-violent foundations. Let us remember here that sometimes Weber, in his analysis of charismatic authority, speaks of a “spirit” (Geist) that animates the community (see Soziologie der Herrschaft, «Entstehung und Umbildung der charismatischen Autorität», p. 662), an idea in some respects quite similar to the central concept of Gustav Landauer – despite, of course, their enormous political differences. Combining Edith Hanke’s analysis with the very interesting information provided by Carl Levy in the 4th chapter of the book, regarding the intersection of Weber’s environment with circles that included revolutionary figures such as Landauer, Ernst Bloch, Kurt Hiller, Georg Lukacs and Ernst Toller (p. 88), we can shape a good idea for the intellectual and political atmosphere in Germany during the first two decades of 20th century.

In any case, what Weber identified Tolstoian ethics (and perhaps, to some degree, Frick’s life and political engagement) with was the element of rigorous consistency. Weber indeed showed great respect for people who remained consistent with their own values and were ready to pay the price that came along with their guiding principles, even if he personally rejected those principles. From this standpoint, Tolstoy represents a positive example of Gesinnungsethik, the ethics of conviction. As Edith Hanke writes, “[i]n the midst of the World War, at a time when pacifists were increasingly inclined to invoke Tolstoy, Weber employed Tolstoy, the man whose ethic was based upon conviction, as a weapon against those who were lukewarm and half-hearted” (p. 157).

Of course, Weber himself was closer to the ethics of responsibility, since he conceived politics as an affair that always involves violence and power relations, hence necessitating the computation of the foreseeable consequences of every action. The ethics of pure conviction is not suitable for this world, which is not governed by the God of goodness. However, Hanke concludes, there might still be a place for people like Tolstoy and Frick: “far away, among virtuosi, on the Mountain of Truth” (p. 157).

At the same time, following Edith Hanke, we can see how Weber spotted a contradiction between Frick’s polyamorous life and ideas and his effort to support a socialist community based in the solidarity of brotherly love, which he also connected to Tolstoy’s paradigm. We can discuss later on this question, which requires more time and space, however it can be noted that Weber touches upon it in his Zwischenbetrachtung. We see here how personal questions and theoretical issues are for Weber intertwined and articulated in this case.

A lot more could be said on Weber and Tolstoy, some followers of whom were among the founders of the community of Monte Verità. Let us for example remember that Weber also quotes Tolstoy in a loose manner towards the end of his famous lecture on Science as a Vocation, attributing to him the idea that science cannot show us how to live our lives. Weber also planned to publish a book on Tolstoy – an ambition never realized. In any case, we can reflect upon Martin Green’s observation in the 3rd chapter of the book, according to which in Weber’s thought we encounter mainly “not Tolstoy the great erotic novelist, but the late Tolstoy, the Christian radical pacifist” (p. 72).

But since our goal here today is not to have an extensive description of the chapters of the book, but rather to pose some questions on the relevance of Sam Whimster’s collection on Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy, I will end this short presentation with a question, addressed to the editor of this seminal work, but also to all of us: if, as Sam Whimster wrote in his note on today’s event, this edited volume was in a way a product of “cultural, political, and anarchist threads [that] were brought together at a Weber study group in 1998”, what is the driving force behind Weber and the “new culture of anarchy”, or at least the new culture of radicality, I tried to describe in the beginning? Why are we inclined today to read Weber from a radical perspective and why do young scholars occupying themselves with radical politics engage more and more often with Weberian concepts? After all, what are the inherent characteristics of Weber’s thought that make him inspire critical thinkers over the course of time?

Of course this question is an open one. But, for me at least, the beginning of a possible answer is not necessarily to be found in Weber’s explicitly political texts, but rather in his broader way of thinking; in the way he conceptualizes history as a contingent yet to some extent knowable field, in his emphasis on meaning as a constitutive element of social life, in his lucid and intellectually honest effort to face the unsurmountable contradictions of human and political agency.