the previously mentioned article by Mannheim), German Idealism and Judaism (cf. Habermas’s study), or Darwinism and Malthusianism; at the turn of the century, between Kantian moral philosophy and the positivist epistemology of the social sciences; and in the twentieth century, between psychoanalysis and Marxism, Surrealism and anarchism, etc. If we are to make systematic use of the concept, however, we need to be rather more precise in its definition. First of all, we must take into consideration that elective affinity has several levels or degrees:
(1) The first level is that of simple affinity: a spiritual relationship, a structural homology (a concept used in Lucien Goldmann’s sociology of literature), a correspondence (in the Baudelairean sense).
The first systematic formulation of the theory of correspondences was Swedenborg’s mystical doctrine which postulated a one-to-one correspondence between heaven and earth and between spiritual and natural things. Baudelaire referred several times to Swedenborg as the person who had taught him ‘that everything, form, movement, number, colour, scent, spiritually as well as naturally, is meaningful, reciprocal, converse, correspondent’. In Baudelaire, however, the concept loses its original mystical connotations and designates the system of mutual analogies in the universe, ‘the intimate and secret relations of things’.11
It is important to emphasize that correspondence (or affinity) is an analogy that remains static; it creates the possibility, but not the necessity, of active convergence or attractio electiva. (I am here taking into account Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s criticism that I used the term too imprecisely in my 1981 article on messianism and utopia.)12 Transforming potentiality into activity, making the analogy dynamic, having it evolve towards active interaction – this depends upon concrete historical circumstances such as economic transformation, the reactions of classes and social categories, cultural movements or political events.
(2) The election, reciprocal attraction and active mutual choice of the two socio-cultural configurations lead to certain forms of interaction, mutual stimulation and convergence. Here the analogies and correspondences start to become dynamic, but the two structures remain separate.
It is at this level (or at the transition between it and the next) that Weber’s Wahlverwandtschaft occurs between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.
(3) The articulation, combination or ‘alloying’ of partners can result in various modalities of union: (a) what might be called ‘cultural symbiosis’, in which the two figures remain distinct but are organically associated; (b) partial fusion; and (c) total fusion (Boerhave’s ‘chemical wedding’).
(4) A new figure may be created through the fusion of the component elements. This possibility, suggested by the ‘Goethian’ meaning of the term, is absent from Weber’s analyses. It is not easy to distinguish between levels three and four: for example, is Freudo-Marxism the articulation of two component parts or a new mode of thought, as distinct from psychoanalysis as it is from historical materialism?
In order to grasp the specificity, and possible interest, of the concept, it is useful to compare it with other categories or expressions that are commonly employed in analysing the relationship between meaningful structures. Elective affinity, as I have defined it here, is not the ideological affinity inherent in different variants of the same social and cultural current (for example, between economic and political liberalism, or between socialism and egalitarianism). The election, the mutual choice, implies a prior distance, a spiritual gap that must be filled, a certain ideological heterogeneity. On the other hand, Wahlverwandtschaft is not at all the same as ‘correlation’, a vague term that merely denotes a link between two distinct phenomena. Wahlverwandtschaft implies a specific type of significant relationship, which has nothing in common with (for example) the statistical correlation between economic growth and demographic decline. Nor is elective affinity synonymous with ‘influence’, for it entails a much more active relationship and a mutual articulation (that can even go as far as fusion). The concept allows us to understand processes of interaction which arise neither from direct causality nor from the ‘expressive’ relationship between form and content (where, for example, the religious form is the ‘expression’ of a political or social content). Without claiming to be a substitute for other paradigms of analysis, explanation and comprehension, the concept may provide a new angle of approach, little explored until now, in the field of the sociology of culture. It is surprising that, since Max Weber, so few attempts have been made to re-examine it and to use it in real research.
Of course, elective affinity occurs neither in a vacuum nor in the azure of pure spirituality; it is encouraged (or discouraged) by historical and social conditions. Whereas the analogy or likeness as such derives only from the spiritual content of the relevant structures of meaning, their contact and active interaction depend on specific socio-economic, political and cultural circumstances. In this sense, an analysis in terms of elective affinity is perfectly compatible with a recognition of the determining role of economic and social conditions. Contrary to a common belief, this also applies to the classic Weberian analysis of the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism – an analysis which, apart from a few polemical digressions, seeks less to define a ‘spiritualistic’ causal relationship than to grasp the Wahlverwandtschaft between religious doctrine and economic ethos. Let it be said in passing that, in a passage from the Grundrisse – a work unknown to Max Weber, as it was first published in 1939 – Marx himself refers to the relationship (Zusammenhang) between English or Dutch Protestantism and the accumulation of money-capital.13
Jewish Messianism andLibertarian Utopia:From ‘Correspondences’ to ‘Attractio Electiva’
What could there be in common between Jewish messianism and twentieth-century libertarian utopias: between a religious tradition indifferent to the realm of politics, turned towards the supernatural and the sacred, and a revolutionary social imaginary that has generally been atheist and materialist? It seems evident that the messianic religiosity of rabbis and Talmudists, so deeply rooted in tradition and ritual, had no common ground with the subversive anarchist ideology of a Bakunin or a Kropotkin – especially since the cultural ethno-centrism of the Jewish religion was poles apart from the militant universalism of revolutionary utopias.
Yet the increasingly active role of Jewish intellectuals (from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards) in generating radically anti-establishment ideas inspired attempts to find Jewish religious roots within socialist utopias. Max Weber was probably one of the first among the sociologists of religion to suggest that the religious tradition of ancient Judaism had a potentially revolutionary nature. In the Bible, he argued, the world was perceived not as eternal or unchanging, but as an historical product destined to be replaced by a divine order. The whole attitude to life was determined by this conception of a future God-guided political and social revolution.1 Weber’s hypothesis, though extremely fertile, is still too general. For it does not allow us to identify, within the heterogeneous group of modern revolutionary doctrines, those that might have had a real affinity with the Jewish tradition. In the opinion of many authors, such as Max Scheler, Karl Löwith and Nikolai Berdyaev – some of whom were Weber’s disciples – Marx’s thinking was typically a secularized version of biblical messianism. However, this is a questionable and rather reductionist interpretation of the Marxist philosophy of history.
Karl Mannheim would seem to have stood on firmer and more accurate ground when, in Ideology and Utopia (1929), he put forward the idea that ‘radical anarchism’ was the modern figure par excellence of the chiliastic principle, the purest and most genuine form of the modern utopian/millennial consciousness. Mannheim did not differentiate between Christian millenarianism and Jewish messianism;
