Max Weber (max + weber)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


THE INCOMPATIBILITY OF VALUES AND THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSEQUENCES: MAX WEBER AND THE KANTIAN LEGACY

PHILOSOPHICAL FORUM, Issue 1-2 2010
HANS HENRIK BRUUN
First page of article [source]


Max Weber on Democracy: Can the People Have Political Power in Modern States?

CONSTELLATIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CRITICAL AND DEMOCRATIC THEORY, Issue 1 2008
Tamsin Shaw
First page of article [source]


Max Weber on the Relation between Power Politics and Political Ideals

CONSTELLATIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CRITICAL AND DEMOCRATIC THEORY, Issue 4 2007
Marcus Llanque
First page of article [source]


3. THE PUBLIC RELEVANCE OF HISTORICAL STUDIES: A REJOINDER TO HAYDEN WHITE,

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 3 2005
A. DIRK MOSES
ABSTRACT Hayden White wants history to serve life by having it inspire an ethical consciousness, by which he means that in facing the existential questions of life, death, trauma, and suffering posed by human history, people are moved to formulate answers to them rather than to feel that they have no power to choose how they live. The ethical historian should craft narratives that inspire people to live meaningfully rather than try to provide explanations or reconstructions of past events that make them feel as if they cannot control their destiny. This Nietzschean-inspired vision of history is inadequate because it cannot gainsay that a genocidal vision of history is immoral. White may be right that cultural relativism results in cultural pluralism and toleration, but what if most people are not cultural relativists, and believe fervently in their right to specific lands at the expense of other peoples? White does not think historiography or perhaps any moral system can provide an answer. Is he right? This rejoinder argues that the communicative rationality implicit in the human sciences does provide norms about the moral use of history because it institutionalizes an intersubjectivity in which the use of the past is governed by norms of impartiality and fair-mindedness, and protocols of evidence based on honest research. Max Weber, equally influenced by Nietzsche, developed an alternative vision of teaching and research that is still relevant today. [source]


Max Weber on Causal Analysis, Interpretation, and Comparison

HISTORY AND THEORY, Issue 2 2002
Fritz Ringer
Max Weber's methodological writings offered a model of singular causal analysis that anticipated key elements of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of the social and cultural sciences. The model accurately portrayed crucial steps and dimensions of causal reasoning in these disciplines, outlining a dynamic and probabilistic conception of historical processes, counterfactual reasoning, and comparison as a substitute for counterfactual argument. Above all, Weber recognized the interpretation of human actions as a subcategory of causal analysis, in which the agents, visions of desired outcomes, together with their beliefs about how to bring them about, cause them to act as they do. [source]


Political legitimacy: new criteria and anachronistic theories

INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE JOURNAL, Issue 196 2009
Mattei Dogan
Two of the three types of legitimacy identified by Max Weber over a century ago, traditional and charismatic, are virtually inapplicable today. The third and only type that remains valid, rational legitimacy, has become an amalgamation of many different varieties, an incoherent collection of cases. Due to this diversity the type is no longer meaningful. Weber's typology is therefore out of touch with the contemporary world. The reasons behind this obsolescence are analysed empirically and the need for new distinctions demonstrated. The role of elites in the legitimation and delegitimation processes is given particular attention, as well as the links between illegitimacy and mistrust. [source]


A Critique of Occidental Geist: Embedded Historical Culturalism in the Works of Hegel, Weber and Huntington

JOURNAL OF HISTORICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 1 2006
FETHI AĮIKEL
Hegel's contribution to the philosophy of history is most clearly seen where he introduces a theory of historical development based on the secularisation of Christian cosmology. With Hegel, the Spirit (Geist), previously theologically understood, gradually becomes the embodiment of historical development. In the Hegelian vocabulary, the phenomenology of religion is formulated along with the theory of historical progress. In this article, I will argue that the question of historical development has been continuously elaborated in a culturalist fashion in works of Friedrich Hegel, Max Weber and Samuel Huntington as those scholars, through different intellectual traditions, essentialises the spiritual backgrounds of world religions and ties the phenomenology of religion with the philosophy of history in their historical analyses. This paper will argue that these scholars, by relying on the idealised images of religions and particularly of the Occidental Spirit, subtly elaborate the historical culturalist notion of development within Western thought. By arguing for an inherent link between religion and development, these scholars implicitly institutionalize a Eurocentric understanding of Western Christianity and the Occidental path of development within mainstream social theory. Be they philosophical (Hegel), sociological (Weber) or political (Huntington), the historical culturalism of these approaches shape our understanding of historical change, and ironically, instead of countering the excesses of crude materialism, they lead social theory into a form of Eurocentic historical culturalism. [source]


Max Weber on ,ethnic communities': a critique

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 1 2007
MICHAEL BANTON
ABSTRACT. An untitled draft found among Weber's posthumous papers was published. In English translation it was given the title `Ethnic Groups'. In the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe it is titled `Ethnic Communities'. In this manuscript, Weber treated the feeling of belonging together because of shared ethnic origin as a social construct, underlain by a desire to monopolise power and status. Subsequently, Weber determined to put an end to the use of collectivist concepts, but at the time of writing he treated groups as real entities, instead of using the concept of group as an aid in the explanation of behaviour. The causal connections in ethnic group formation and maintenance have been more closely identified in subsequent sociological analysis. [source]


Church and Culture: Protestant and Catholic Modernities

NEW BLACKFRIARS, Issue 1026 2009
Anthony J. Carroll SJ
Abstract This article reviews the church and culture relationship developed in Gaudium et Spes and Lumen Gentium and proposes a Catholic account of modernity as a way in which the contemporary mission of the church in today's culture can be creatively and faithfully carried forward. After an initial outlining of the definitions of church and culture proposed by the Vatican documents, I then go on to position my proposal of a Catholic modernity in relation to some important current accounts of the church and culture relationship that tend towards a rejection of secular culture. I argue that Protestant accounts of modernity have dominated in philosophical and sociological theories and draw on my previous work on Max Weber to illustrate the significance of this for developing a Catholic account of modernity. I conclude by sketching some of the important issues which would need to be addressed in formulating a systematic account of a Catholic modernity. [source]


Protestants and Catholics: Similar Work Ethic, Different Social Ethic,

THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL, Issue 547 2010
Benito Arruņada
This article develops two hypotheses about economically-relevant values of Christian believers, according to which Protestants should work more and more effectively, as in the ,work ethic' argument of Max Weber, or display a stronger ,social ethic' that would lead them to monitor each other's conduct, support political and legal institutions and hold more homogeneous values. Tests using current survey data confirm substantial partial correlations and possible different ,effects' in mutual social control, institutional performance and homogeneity of values but no difference in work ethics. Protestantism therefore seems conducive to capitalist economic development, not by the direct psychological route of the Weberian work ethic but rather by promoting an alternative social ethic that facilitates impersonal trade. [source]


Sharing experience, conveying hope: Egalitarian relations as the essential method of Alcoholics Anonymous

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT & LEADERSHIP, Issue 2 2006
Thomasina Borkman
The predictions of Max Weber's "iron cage" of bureaucracy and Michels's "iron law of oligarchy" failed to materialize in Alcoholics Anonymous. AA has maintained an alternative form of collectivistic-democratic voluntary organization for more than seventy years. Its organizational form was developed within its first five years and articulated in its foundational text, Alcoholics Anonymous, published in 1939. Based on detailed histories of its early years, an analysis of AA's crucial ingredients suggests that six factors interacted to avoid the temptations of power, money, and professionalization that would have resulted in a bureaucratic form of organization or oligarchic leadership. In order to avoid death and to obtain or maintain abstinence, the desperate cofounders stumbled on the essential method: egalitarian peers share their lived experiences, conveying hope and strength to one another. In the context of the essential method, the two cofounders, from the Midwest and New York City, held similar spiritual beliefs and practiced a self-re?exive mode of social experiential learning gained from the Oxford Group, a nondenominational group that advocated healing through personal spiritual change; they downplayed their charismatic authority in favor of consulting with and abiding by the consensus of the group. [source]