NEO-KANTIANS
This psychological “reorientation” had a specific impact on Wilhelm Dilthey, who sought to replace natural-science models in the writing of history with a phenomenological approach that could delineate meaningful patterns of thought. Dilthey’s concerns were taken up in turn by various schools of “neo-Kantians,” who sought to sharpen the distinction between the natural sciences as nomothetic and the cultural sciences as idiographic. They came to define these idiographic sciences as the study of the mental categories that permit people to construct their distinctive life worlds, and they devoted their energies to developing strict interpretive methods for this kind of study. They accepted Kant’s insistence that the human mind was not a tabula rasa on which perceptions were recorded as on a “white sheet of paper” but an organ that possessed a priori the ability to construct mental categories and thus make knowledge possible. For Kant, as for the neo-Kantians, these categories were not innate in themselves; what was innate was the human requirement for categories in order to inhabit this world, whatever particular conceptual schemata might specify these categories.
How we structure our knowledge of the external world also became a central problem for the anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas, who read Kant in his igloo in Baffin Land in 1883 as the outside temperature hit forty degrees below zero, moved from a “rather hirsute” materialism (Stocking 1968, 140) toward a neo-Kantian conception of culture as a study of “the human mind in its various historical, and, speaking more generally, ethnic environments” (p. 160; also pp. 143, 152). This neo-Kantian emphasis led Boas to a form of ethnography that differed from that of the British functionalists. Where the functionalists emphasized behavior in the genesis of social and cultural forms, Boas saw culture as ideas in action. This understanding was to shape his study of the Kwakiutl, to whom he devoted a major part of his anthropological efforts.
The neo-Kantian movement developed numerous variants, but its two most important “schools” were centered respectively at the University of Marburg and in the Southwestern “cultural province of the upper Rhine” (Hughes 1961, 46), at the universities of Freiburg, Heidelberg, Strassbourg (then in German hands), and Basel. The Marburgers focused on the origins and development of scientific knowledge. Their most notable exponent was Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945)—the first Jewish rector at a German university—who charted the changes from substantial to relational concepts in European thought from the late Middle Ages to the present and who later focused on the role played by language in the formation of scientific knowledge. In contrast to the Marburgers, who looked to science as the prototype of knowledge, the South westerners insisted on drawing a sharp line between the nomothetic acquisition of knowledge in the natural sciences and Dilthey’s idiographic method for study of the “sciences of the spirit” (Geisteswissenschaften) that embraced history and the humanities.
WEBER
The most important figure influenced by the Southwestern neo-Kantians was the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who studied at Heidelberg. Although he achieved considerable intellectual and political prominence in Germany during his lifetime, his work came to be known outside Germany only by slow increments, through translated papers and essays (with his political writings excluded). His major book on Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society) was not translated into English in its entirety until 1968.
Weber’s politics crucially influenced his interests and choice of topics. He was born into a Germany unified by Bismarck, whose power base lay in Prussia. The state was governed by an alliance of Junker landowners with civil bureaucrats and army officers, many of them recruited from Junker families. This class alliance set the new state on the road to industrialization under capitalist auspices, but—in contrast to England, the leader in capitalist development—it did not grant the class of capitalist entrepreneurs a role in managing the affairs of state. Weber wanted a strong Germany, able to play its part in “the eternal struggle for the maintenance and cultivation of our national integrity” (in Giddens 1972, 16). In his estimation, the traditional classes leading Germany were unsuited to the task of building a successful industrial society, while the ascending class of the liberal bourgeoisie and the new class of proletarians were unqualified for political leadership. Thus, his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of 1920 (Weber 1930) not only was intended to demonstrate the importance of religion in economic development but was written to “sharpen the political consciousness of the bourgeoisie” in Germany (Giddens 1972, 12). To advance German development, Weber said, it would be necessary to break the political power of the Junker class, control the state bureaucracy, and reform the parliamentary system of the state in order to draw the socialist working class into participation in government and to support capitalist development. This, however, would also require separating the workers from their Marxist-inspired Social Democratic leaders, whom he characterized as petit bourgeois innkeepers and revolutionary visionaries, likely to amplify bureaucracy and thus choke off industrial growth.
Weber’s sociology played out a number of neo-Kantian themes. Weber rejected any kind of general causal theory, especially the economic determinism then preached by the Social Democrats, who predicted an inexorable forward march of world history based on the development of the economy. Instead, he always concentrated on the study of particular cases. Sociology might recognize repetitive patterns or variations on common themes and propose “hypothesis-forming models” (Kalberg 1994, 12). Such models might draw on a wide range of comparative studies, but they were merely “ideal types,” to be used to examine particular cases, not to chart any lawlike unilineal process. While Weber saw rationalization—the imposition of a means-ends calculus upon relations—as a recurrent trend in the world and feared that bureaucratic rationalization would enclose the human spirit in an “iron casing” (the usual translation as “iron cage” is in error), he “always refused to present rationalization as the self-unfolding logic of history” (Arato 1978, 191–92).
Weber further denied universal and dominant power to the economic factor: economics was likely to play a major role in framing the possibilities of any concrete situation, but it would co-occur always with multiple other social and ideational factors. Methodologically it was always necessary, Weber held, to investigate the “meanings” that action held for the acting individual, and not to understand people simply as products of social forces. Following the lead of Dilthey, he saw such investigation as involving Verstehen, empathetic understanding reached by putting oneself in the position of others, in order to comprehend how they themselves define their situation and the purposes of their actions. Many of his treatises dealt with ideas that shaped the characteristic orientations to religious or economic action. These orientations always addressed particular social contexts; they defined the “meaning” of action for individuals and underwrote their ability make “sense” of the world. Weber’s study of such orientations and their “carrier” groups retains an enduring importance for our understanding ideas in relation to the conditions of specific social groups. Yet he saw that relationship as potential but not determined, and he refused to develop any general theory of how ideas were shaped in interaction with economy and society. In his most general statement on the matter, Weber opined: “Not ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern man’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ which have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamics of interests” (in Gerth and Mills 1946, 63–64).
Combining Marxism and Neo-Kantianism
Understanding how Weber related to Marx has long constituted a cottage industry in the social sciences. Some scholars have stressed Weber’s tragic vision of human life as fatefully threatened by rationalization. Others have cast him as a precursor of National Socialism in his views about the need for a state based on concentrated power and his call for a mobilization of the working class on behalf of national capitalist development. For some sociologists, like Talcott Parsons, Weber offered an alternative to Marx. More recently, as time has passed and the passionate disputes of yesterday have become muted, it has become easier to recognize the ways in which the Marxian and Weberian legacies converge and
