Max Weber, Anarchist.

Sung Ho Kim, a scholar who studied the works of Max Weber at the University of Chicago, seems to me to have his finger on the pulse of our (post?) modern political predicament. His revised doctoral thesis Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) attempts to demonstrate that Weber was more than just a diagnostician of the political malaise that has diseased our Evening-Lands in these dark days of their accelerating decline (the notorious "iron cage" metaphor). Weber also holds relevance as a physician with a prescription for what ails us.

When I entered my Ph.D. program in 2001, the mantra of "those in the know" as to how to repair our dysfunctional politics was "civil society." As a Chomskian Left Libertarian, I was encouraged by the prospect of liberals embracing the notion that the procedural state may not be the ne plus ultra of human social organization. Unfortunately, liberals tend to invoke magical formulae (the "audacity of hope" syndrome) in lieu of direct political action and, as anyone who was paying attention understood, the mere repetition of the mantra proved empty.

With this magical chanting ringing in my ears, I read Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country and allowed him to persuade me (for the last time) to give liberals another chance to repair the mess they had made of the country when they abandoned progressive politics after the debacle of McGovern's ill-fated campaign for the Presidency in 1972. Kim, on the other hand, was immersing himself in the body of work bequeathed us by Max Weber and asking the right questions. At the center of his inquiry are these two beauties: (1) Can a liberal democratic regime sustain itself in a robust form while remaining neutral to the moral dispositions and civic virtues of its citizens? and (2) What is the role of civil society with regard to the continuing viability of a liberal democratic regime (statecraft) and the self-constitution of its citizens (soulcraft)? (Kim, p.5). In response to these questions, Kim offers a Weber who had concluded that

"The cultivation of a certain type of moral agent ... called 'the person of vocation' (Berufsmensch) is critical for the continuing vitality of the modern liberal democratic regime; that its virtues, dispositions, and characters can be fostered only in a peculiar context of civil society ... called 'sectlike society' (Sektengesellschaft); and that the decline of civil society and the concomitant degeneration of the liberal self must be restored as one of the central agendas for late modern politics. Statecraft and soulcraft are not separated in Weber's politics of civil society, nor can they or should they be separated" (Kim, pp. 6-7).

Weber contended that "not all forms of civil society are conducive to a robust liberal democratic regime; some are in fact detrimental to it. Through a genealogical reconstruction ... he [sought] to resuscitate a peculiar mode of civil society as the site where his liberal politics of voluntary associational life and the unique ontology of modern self intersect and interact" (Kim, p. 7).

The "peculiar mode of civil society" that Kim claims Weber hoped to "resuscitate" is the "sectlike associations" of early modern Europe (and, I would add, medieval Muslim societies). As Kim reads Weber, the "iron cage" is a late modern phenomenon and not characteristic of the modern period (or project) as a whole. Kim argues that,

"...in the Protestant ethic thesis Weber aimed to isolate an ontology of the self in which subjective value and objective rationality are willfully brought together to form a systematic whole, thereby enabling modern individuals to act in accordance with the principled sense of moral duty--a view that is distinguishable from both Enlightenment naturalistic anthropology and Victorian liberal characterology and rather resembles the Kantian ideal of the self-legislating self. Although this type of modern self, which Weber called Berufsmensch, is constituted in inward, subjective isolation ... it does not usher in an atomized social realm of individual rights in Weber's social imagination. On the contrary, Weber held that a novel mode of sociability results from the modern empowerment of the individual agency, which is institutionalized as a sectlike society. Weber saw that the Berufsmensch can be maintained only in a rigorous social mechanism of ethical discipline, which demands a small-scale, pluralized, and voluntary associational life in opposition to state intervention. The result is a permeation of small voluntary associations into modern political society ... The nature and mechanism of sectlike society [is to be found in] Weber's essays on Puritan sects ... [and, based upon his findings in those studies,] Weber wanted to revive a secularized form of Protestant individualism and associational pluralism..." Kim, pp. 25-26.

The advocacy of "small-scale, pluralized, and voluntary associational life in opposition to state intervention" is a fundamental tenet of Left Libertarianism. Moreover, as every history of Anarchism acknowledges, the Protestant Reformation and the English Revolution were periods rife with Anarchistic experimentation.

We shall continue to explore Kim's remarkable reading of Weber in subsequent posts.