Max Weber

[Anonymous No.12307924]

Why does /lit ignore dis nibba?

[Anonymous No.12307953]

Sociology 101. Nothing impressive. People work because they believe that generating wealth through work is good in itself.

[Anonymous No.12307961]

>>12307953
The idea that capitalism and it's excesses originated out of protestant virtue is extremely impressive though. It's one of the few alternatives to Marx's materialist conception of progress.

[Anonymous No.12307964]

People who say nibba usually have never worked before.

[Anonymous No.12307975]

>>12307964
I'm a 20 something trying to blend in wit the kids nibba

[Anonymous No.12307997]

>>12307975
Embarrassing

[Anonymous No.12308010]

>>12307961
that idea has been discredited. he's only worth reading for historical value, at best.

[Anonymous No.12308014]

>>12308010
how exactly has it been discredited?

[Anonymous No.12308198]

Weber is amazing. If you can handle a dense book, check out Wolfgang Mommsen's Max Weber and German Politics.

Basically, Weber's attempt at a kind of "first sociology" of modern society and capitalism was absolutely central to the German post-'45 generation's attempts to make sense of the war. Weber's shadow looms incredibly large over German historiography because a variant of his "modernisation thesis" is arguably at the centre of it. Most of the people who used Weber in this way (explicitly or implicitly) tried to argue that Germany had, or should have had, a "normal" course of development alongside the rest of Western Europe (implicitly meaning, toward liberal market democracy), that was covered over and smothered in the first half of the 20th century by its atavistic superstructure of old Junker elites, and later panicked radicalism and tyranny.

Mommsen's book came at a really important time and questioned whether this thesis actually corresponds to the views of Weber himself, and he ends up grouping Weber with his very fin de siecle generation who did not at all want "liberal democracy."

Subsequent literature on Weber superficially tends to agree with Mommsen but sort of imply that Weber was still fundamentally "good," just unable to jettison in his atavistic category of the nation and imperial struggles between nations. But he's much more complex than this, and the real Weber is still covered up by it.

If you're into critiquing capitalism, the rule of money, modernity, the phenomenon of rationalization, etc., especially from the right and without a priori presumptions of a normal, liberal-democratic course of history, Weber is absolutely fascinating. He was grappling with all the shit these pomo theorists grapple with, but unlike them, he was there at the ground floor, instead of a century later when you can make the appearance of a novel "intervention" by modifying the jargon-piles of two or three other thinkers. Weber just sat down and systematically thought out the nature and consequences of capitalism and modernity.

He's a first-rate mind and would probably be Heidegger-tier famous if he had written in philosophy instead of sociology.

[Anonymous No.12308810]

>>12307924
Weber is pretty based. His stuff on rationalization is very similar to Ellul's work on technology.

[Anonymous No.12308880]

Sociology isn't talked about much here, unfortunately. Weber is a good thinker but much of his thought is a composite of individually boring texts. Very interesting, but not particularly memeable. Though I think "science as vocation" could get memed for it's attack on Scientism and the Academic system.

[Anonymous No.12309061]

>>12308810
>Once fully established, bureaucracy is among those social structures which are the hardest to destroy. Bureaucracy is THE means of transforming social action into rationally organised action. Therefore, as an instrument of rationally organising authority relations, bureaucracy is a power instrument of the first order for one who controls the bureaucratic apparatus. Under otherwise equal conditions, rationally organised and directed action is superior to every kind of collective behaviour and also social action opposing it. Where administration has been completely bureaucratized, the resulting system of domination is practically indestructible.
>The individual bureaucratic cannot squirm out of the apparatus into which he has been harnessed. In contrast to the “notable” performing administrative tasks as an honorific duty or as a subsidiary occupation, the professional bureaucrat is chained to his activity in his entire economic and ideological existence. In the great majority of cases he is only a small cog in a ceaselessly moving mechanism which prescribes him an essentially fixed route of march. The official is entrusted with specialised tasks, and normally the mechanism cannot be put into motion or arrested by him, but only from the very top. The individual bureaucrat is, above all, forged to the common interest of all functionaries in the perpetuation of the apparatus and the persistence of its rationally organised domination.

[Anonymous No.12309066]

>>12309061
>The ruled, for their part, cannot dispense with or replace the bureaucratic apparatus once it exists, for it rests upon expert training, a functional specialisation of work, and an attitude set on habitual virtuosity in a single yet methodically integrated function. If the apparatus stops working, or if its work is interrupted by force, chaos results, which is difficult to master by improvised replacements from among the governed. This holds for public administration as well as for private economic management. Increasingly the material fate of the masses depends upon the continuous and correct functioning of an ever more bureaucratic organisations of private capitalism, and the idea of eliminating them becomes more and more utopian.
>Increasingly, all order in public spaces is dependant on a system of files and the discipline of officialdom, that means, its habit of painstaking obedience within the wanted sphere of action. The latter is the more decisive element, however important in practice the files are. The naive idea of Bakuninism of destroying the basis of “acquired rights” together with “domination” by destroying the public documents overlooks that the settled orientation of MAN for observing the accustomed rules and regulations will survive independently of the documents. Every reorganisation of defeated and scattered army units, as well as every restoration of an administrative order destroyed by revolts, panics, or other catastrophes, is affected by an appeal to this conditioned orientation, bred both in the officials and the subjects, of obedient adjustments to such [social and political] orders. If the appeal is successful it brings, as it were, the disturbed mechanism to “snap into gear” again. The objective indispensability of the once-existing apparatus, in connection with the particularly “impersonal character,” means that the mechanism—in contrast with the feudal order based upon personal loyalty—is easily made to work for anybody who knows how to gain control over it. A rationally ordered officialdom continues to function smoothly after the enemy has occupied the territory; he merely needs to change the top officials. It continues to operate because it is to the vital interest of everyone concerned, including above all the enemy. Such an apparatus makes “revolution,” in the sense of the forceful creation of entirely new formations of authority, more and more impossible—technically, because of its control over the modern means of communication, and also because of its increasingly rationalised inner structure. The place of “revolutions” is under this process is replaced by coup d'état.
Very Similar.

[Anonymous No.12309090]

>>12307961
Marx's historic account of materialism is pretty much discredited at this point. Nearly all scholars agree that his history is grounded on false assumptions about humans and culture. Nobel Savage, Victorian racism, etc.

[Anonymous No.12309107]

>>12309090
Scholars of what? History? Many sociologists, if not most, are still essentially materialist and Marxist -- they just throw out those things you mentioned.

[Anonymous No.12309148]

>>12309090
Most social sciences I expect. I did a degree in anthro and that was one of the take aways after reading him pretty extensively - dialectical materialism was a novel approach blah blah. There have been more recent attempts to rehabilitate Marx, see Wolf, Sahlins, etc. But, even the post-structuralists like Foucault had dropped dropped most of Marx and kept what was convenient by the 1970s.

[Anonymous No.12309301]

>>12309066
That's a very pessimistic view of human nature desu

[Anonymous No.12309334]

>>12308810
I am interested in his ideas about charisma as a pre bureaucratic organisational matrix...

[Anonymous No.12309339]

>>12307953
It's only sociology 101 because he founded sociology 101.

[Anonymous No.12309355]

>>12308198
Great post and recommendation. Any other literature you can share?

[Anonymous No.12309587]

>>12307953
Weber is phenomenal desu. His theories have aged remarkably well and are still used a lot in sociology and social history.

>>12308010
His 'protestant ethic' thesis isn't really the most significant thing he did. His characterisation of modernity as well as his methodology and hermeneutics is where he gets based.

[Anonymous No.12310009]

>>12309587
Have you read Economy and Society?

[Anonymous No.12310029]

>>12309339
This

[Anonymous No.12310593]

>>12307953
>Don't read Plato he's Philosophy 101

[Anonymous No.12310607]

>>12307924
Sociology in general is ignored on /lit/

[Anonymous No.12310615]

>>12307924
I got to page 157 of Democracy in America and couldn't go any further. He's boring af. I did write a short story about salamander rape using a few paragraphs from the first page of Dem. in America as justification so I got that going.

[Anonymous No.12310620]

He reminds me of Moldbug

[Anonymous No.12310633]

>>12310615
I think you’re talking about someone else than Weber.

[Anonymous No.12310647]

>>12310633
You're right, it was Democracy in Education by Dewey. I could've sworn it was Weber tho.

[Anonymous No.12310650]

How can anyone take structural functionalism seriously in 2019

[Anonymous No.12310655]

>>12310607
Its a shame. Lots of interesting authors like pic related never mentioned

[Anonymous No.12310673]

>>12307953
It was sociology 101. Now that's awful misreadings of Foucault and Butler filtered through three tumblr posts which is already just philosophy for brainlets with a heavy dose of bourgeois moralism.

[Anonymous No.12311410]

>>12310673
Do you speak from experience?

[Anonymous No.12311468]

>>12310650
Weber is not a structural-functionalist..

[Anonymous No.12311560]

Sociology is an unfortunate discipline in that it tends toward various fads of hyperpositivism and quantification fetishism. As a discipline it is more like economics, political science, and other "I'm only getting this degree as a prelude to being a shallow public intellectual or government bureaucrat" studies, and far less like history or anthropology.

Its history begins with the ultraconfident Auguste Comte and his Mill-esque positivist 'nomothetic' science of humanity, whose methods are tempered by (the still overconfident) Durkheim, then it slumps from its isolation, then it resurges through a methodological fusion with anthropology (born around the same time) and history (notably Weber). It gets infusions from some interesting Italian guys. In France and Germany, it is then mostly eaten and subsumed by those various other disciplines (history+anthro especially). In the Anglosphere, it becomes an overbearing tyrant of quantification fetishism, becoming difficult to distinguish from economics, and monolithically structural-functionalist under Talcott Parsons.

Nowadays if you "study Sociology" what you mean is "I should have gone into economics so I could at least be rich being a soulless cultureless retard; instead, I am writing a ten-year PhD thesis on the rigorously quantified social stratification of how many people ride certain kinds of buses, so I can maybe try to get a public policy job or something (also historians and anthropologists would laugh at my thesis as naive and atavistic)"

[Anonymous No.12311596]

>action motivated by your values is not rational action

Yeah, he was a retard

[Anonymous No.12311620]

>>12310607
Mostly because modern sociology is a fucking joke. Im glad that people like Lasch and Spengler are getting more recognition, though.

[Anonymous No.12311894]

>>12311596
well since you put forth this arguement..
I say values dont need to have a rational basis,
while they would operate on an internal logic, they would be comin from your emotions largely, if not entirely.

[Anonymous No.12311920]

Guys, how many of you are actual sociologists? You pretty much don't know more than just some opening paragraphs of weber. The guy had many more ideas than "protestant ethics".
With that said, yeah, he is kinda lame im many ways.

[Anonymous No.12311926]

>>12311560
If you focus on microsociology, you can become a therapist or go to social psychology. Your view of sociology is extremely stereotypical and you seem to identify it with politics and macroeconomics.

[Anonymous No.12311931]

>>12311926
Macrosociology*. My bad.

[Anonymous No.12311953]

>>12311920
what a contribution to the thread, be more specific, fgt

[Anonymous No.12311960]

>>12311560
Who are these interesting italian guys?

[Anonymous No.12313602]

>>12311920
>You have to be a sociologist to talk about Weber

[Anonymous No.12313650]

>>12311920
i am

weber is based

[Anonymous No.12313768]

>>12310647
American Pragmatists are rather boring, to be honest.

[Anonymous No.12313809]

>>12308198
Know that your post is appreciated, even as the tide of shitposting is reaching nearly unbearable levels.

[Anonymous No.12313896]

>>12307924
He is a reductionist as much of his compatriots.
> invents some cute idea
> forces facts to fit in this idea
> writes in a hard 'scientific' manner to make your writing look more solid

basically charlatan

[Anonymous No.12313976]

>>12308198
Thanks for this. Why do you know so much about Weber? Are you a sociologist or a German historian?

>>12308880
>Very interesting, but not particularly memeable
/lit/ in a nutshell

[Anonymous No.12313988]

>>12313896
>forces facts to fit in this idea
Except that's exactly not what he does. His entire 'ideal types' typology is based on the premise that they almost never perfectly reflect reality, and should only be used as models for comparison. Don't talk shit.

[Anonymous No.12314488]

>>12311560
shit why did I pick political science