ASA FORMAT/CITATION

Question:
Politician, lawyer, and a sociologist — does Max Weber provide a good role model for applied sociologists? Why or why not? How do the ideas expressed in the Freiburg Address influence your opinion?

Answer Reference(s):
A Look at Max Weber:
https://youtu.be/ICppFQ6Tabw

Bio Max Weber:
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Max_Weber

Modernist Anti-Pluralism and the Polish Question:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/488244?seq=1

The national state and economic policy (Freiburgaddress):
PDF Uploaded

Note(s):
Among the many contributions Weber makes to sociology are:

his ideas about the nature of authority in society,
his exploration of different religions and their impact upon societies,
his insights into modernity and the power of bureaucracy,
and his more subtle understanding of social class and status.
Weber also explores the power of ideas to shape human behavior — which is one of the things I find especially valuable in his work. I think Weber also advances a human-centered form of sociology in which people play a major role in the construction of a society that stands somewhat in contrast to Durkheim’s view of a world shaped by social facts and Marx’s economic determinism.

Still, there is an ominous spirit in the Freiburg address, all the more ominous when you think that in a little over a decade after Webers death, the Nazis would come to power with their fusion of racism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism.

Did Weber fan flames that fed the latter fire of National Socialism? Perhaps. From our perspective today it at least looks like he was playing with fire. However, I don’t think this was his intention. In fact, his latter work stood in direct counterpoint to what the Nazis stood for. However, the currents of racism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism ran deeply in the west at the time the Freiburg address was written and provided among other things a justification for colonialism.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Weber was quite the nationalist, volunteered for national service, and was put in charge of organizing army hospitals in Heidelberg. As the war drug on his attitude changed dramatically. By the end of the war, he had rejected this nationalistic impulse, was calling for greater democracy and universal suffrage. He co-founded the German Democratic Party and would help write the Weimar Constitution that created the republic which Hitler overthrew.

Nevertheless, these awful themes which Weber echoes in the Freiburg Address, themes that were so ingrained in German and indeed Western intellectual circles certainly fed the ideology and propaganda of the National Socialists, providing inspiration and intellectual cover. Having planted these seeds, the world was about to reap a terrible whirlwind.

So in this section, we’re going to be taking a look at Max Weber. You’ll learn a lot more about Max Weber in the Applied Sociological Theory class where we take a deeper dive into his writings. But in this one, essentially, we will be introducing the last of the three people that are considered to be the sociological trinity — Marx, Durkheim, and now Max Weber. Weber was very much a product of his time. A brilliant German scholar, he was a sociologist, an attorney, very active in the political movements of his day. He was in fact a member of the German equivalent of the German Parliament, and one of the authors of the Weimar Constitution which were the constitution, that guided Germany as a democracy between the end of World War One and the rise of Adolf Hitler. Weber, himself died before the rise of the Nazi party. But Weber was very concerned about the ways in which how we think influences the way we act — and how society reflects and changes and shapes the way we think. As you read through these readings, I think it is a really good exposure to Weber as an applied sociologist. Much of the work he did, he worked outside of academia for most of his career.

Some of his most important work actually was done outside of academia. One of the papers that you’ll read is called “The Freiburg Address.” This was something done early in Weber’s career. It touches on some very unsettling themes of German nationalism. Racial superiority, the idea of different ethnicities, actually being different races. Things that are now completely discredited. They were very much, part of the western intellectual firmament of this time. So he’s reflecting, he’s reflecting a sentiment that’s pretty common among German scholars of his era. If anything, he’s probably a bit liberal for his time. But he undergoes a huge evolution in his thought as his career progresses. And he becomes more, for lack of a better word, more liberal. Not liberal in the sense of conservative-liberal as we describe it in the United States, but liberal in the sense of supportive of liberal democracy. So, as you’re reading through this material, watching these videos, keep this in mind. Keep at the forefront of your mind the idea that Weber is very much in the mold of an applied sociologist, and at the same time is considered one of the founding fathers of the discipline, which I think really highlights this idea that there is a strong applied tradition that runs through the heart of sociology. Interestingly of the three people, we’re discussing here. Weber is the only one that ever visited the United States.

He came in the early 1900s, made a visit to the US prior to this was prior to the First World War, traveled to a meeting of the American Sociological Association, traveled out to the west coast. And actually traveled to North Carolina to a tiny town where he had cousins living in a small rural area in North Carolina. Visited with them, attended the Baptist Church which was sort of interesting. Weber was one of the preeminent scholars of religion at the time. So again, as you go through the material, pay some attention to the idea that Weber’s underlying assumptions and ideas about the world may be shifting somewhat as his career moves forward. Think about what these early ideas say about predominant intellectual currents in western Europe at the time, and think about Weber as sort of an embodiment of an applied sociologist, and whether you think he’s a good role model for applied sociologists today.

Reference(s):
A Look at Max Weber:
https://youtu.be/ICppFQ6Tabw

Bio Max Weber:
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Max_Weber

Modernist Anti-Pluralism and the Polish Question:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/488244?seq=1

Max Weber & Ben Fowkes (1980): The national state and economic policy (Freiburg address)Preview the document, Economy
and Society, 9:4, 428-449 (UPLOADED AS PDF)

Durkheim, Emile. 1997. Suicide. New York: The Free Press.

Price, Jammie, Roger A. Straus and Jeffrey R. Breese. 2009. Doing Sociology: Case Studies in Sociological Practice. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

Steele, Stephen F. and Jammie Price. 2008. Applied Sociology: Terms, Topics, Tools and Tasks. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth.