In order to grasp the connexions between the fundamental religious ideas of ascetic Protestantism and its maxims of everyday economic life, it is necessary above all to refer to those theological writings which can be seen to have had their origins in pastoral practice. For, in a time when the next world was everything, when the social position of the Christian depended on his admission to communion, and when the influence exercised by the clergy in the cure of souls, in church discipline and in preaching, was of a kind which (as the merest glance at the collections of ‘consilia’, ‘casus conscientiae’, etc. will show) we modern men simply cannot any longer begin to imagine, the religious forces at work in pastoral practice are the decisive influences in forming ‘national character’.

For the purposes of our discussions in this section, as opposed to later discussions, we may treat ascetic Protestantism as a single undifferentiated whole. But since that kind of English Puritanism which had its roots in Calvinism aftords the most consistent attempt to work out the basis of the idea of the ‘calling’, we may, in accordance with our principle, take one of its representatives as the focus of our discussion. Richard Baxter is distinguished above many other literary representatives of the Puritan ethic by his eminently practical and conciliatory attitude, and also by the universal recognition of his constantly republished and translated works.

It has always been the case that, when a class has achieved economic power, it begins to think of its expectations of political leadership. It is dangerous and, in the long run, contrary to the national interest for an economically declining class to retain political dominance. But it is even more dangerous when economic strength and so the hope of political power come the way of classes which are not yet sufficiently mature in political terms for the leadership of the state. Both these menaces threaten Germany at the present time and are in reality the key to the present dangers of our situation. Furthermore, the shifts in the social structure of the East, with which the phenomena discussed in the first part of this lecture are connected, belong in this wider context.

Right up to the present day, the dynasty in Prussia has been politically dependent on the Prussian Junker Estate. It is only in cooperation with it (though admittedly also in opposition to it) that it has been able to build the Prussian state. I am well aware that, to South German ears, the word ‘Junker’ has a joyless ring. Perhaps it will be felt that I am speaking in too. ‘Prussian’ a fashion if I say a word in their favour. I do not know. Even today in Prussia that Estate has many opportunities for achieving power and influence, or for reaching the ear of the monarch, which are not open to every citizen.

What lies at the root of the Liberal Democrats' reservations about agrarian reform is this: there is no doubt that the great mass of the peasants themselves could never be won over to an agrarian programme which was ‘individualistic’ in the West European sense. However true it may be that decisions about the allocation of land can be the product of an extremely bitter class struggle, it is certainly not only economic class interests which influence the administration of the commune but also deeply-rooted conceptions of ‘natural justice’. For it is as obvious as it could be that the necessary decision to reapportion land is not reached only with the votes either of those who hope to better their positions by it or of those who have been intimidated by violence or boycott. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that it is equally certain that this very re-allocation of land, which seems from the outside to be the most important element of agricultural democracy in this form of social organisation, very often exists, insofar as it can be thought of as a piece of effective ‘social policy’, only on paper. The rich peasants lease, alienate or bequeath their lands (naturally, only within the commune), relying on there being no decisions about re-allocation; or, alternatively, they are in a position to control other members of the commune who are in their debt, and the re-allocation serves in practice to increase their power.

If we turn from the socially or economically privileged strata of society, we find an apparent increase in the variety of religious behaviour. Amongst the petty bourgeoisie, and in particular especially the artisan class, there are to be found the most striking contradictions side by side. It is impossible to conceive of greater contrasts between different styles of religion than those between caste taboo and the magical or mystagogic forms of religion, both sacramental and orgiastic, to be found in India, Chinese animism, Islamic dervish-religion, early Christianity, especially in the Eastern Roman Empire, with its emphasis on congregational enthusiasm and inspiration, primitive superstition coupled with Dionysiac orgiasticism in ancient Greece, Pharisaic legalism in ancient urban Judaism, the essentially idolatrous form of medieval Christianity which existed alongside all kinds of sectarianism and the various forms of Protestantism to be found in the early modern period. Early Christianity was certainly from the beginning a religion specifically for artisans. Its saviour was a small-town artisan, its missionaries itinerant journeymen; indeed, the greatest of them was an itinerant tent-maker, already so completely estranged from the land that in one of his epistles he makes blatantly absurd use of an image taken from the practice of tree-grafting. Finally, the Christian congregations of the ancient world were, as we have already seen, overwhelmingly urban and recruited mainly from the ranks of artisans, both free and unfree.

We may summarise what has been said in this survey of Asian civilisation (extremely superficial as it has been in view of the richness of the structures considered) in the following way:

For Asia as a whole, China has played much the same role as France has done in the modern Western world. From China has stemmed all gentlemanly ‘polish’, from Tibet to Japan and Indo-China. India, on the other hand, has come to have something of the significance that ancient Greece has had in the West. There is little thought about anything beyond purely practical concerns in Asia whose sources are not ultimately to be sought in India. Above all, the Indian salvation religions, both orthodox and heterodox, have had some claim to be considered as playing roughly the role, for the whole of Asia, that Christianity has played in the West. With one big difference: apart from local, and usually short-lived, exceptions, none of them has been elevated for any length of time to the position of the single dominant ‘church’ in the sense in which this was the case in the West in the Middle Ages and indeed right up to the Peace of Westphalia. Asia was, and remained, in principle the land of free competition between religions, of ‘tolerance’ in the sense of late Classical antiquity – subject, that is, to due reservations for the limits imposed by reasons of state, which, it should not be forgotten, continue even in the modern world to set bounds to all forms of religious toleration, albeit taking effect in a different direction.

The various papers on methodology which Weber published between 1903 and 1917 have had a strong and continuing influence despite the fact that they were largely directed to the writings of others and their arguments cannot fully be grasped except by readers already familiar with the history of the disputes among German philosophers and social scientists to which they refer. The subjects under dispute, however, have remained of central concern to philosophers and social scientists, and Weber's contribution to them anticipates to a remarkable degree the preoccupations of subsequent writers in Britain and the United States. These preoccupations have centred on the three topics of causality, meaning and values on which those who have asserted that there is a fundamental difference of kind between the natural and the social sciences have rested their arguments. The relation between the three is itself a matter of controversy and those who have made this assertion have done so on a number of different and sometimes incompatible grounds. But they have tended to maintain, first, that human actions cannot be explained in terms of law-like relations of cause and effect; secondly, that to grasp the meaning which human actions have to those performing them requires a different method from any known to, or required by, practitioners of natural science; and thirdly, that the social scientist's moral, political and/or aesthetic values necessarily enter into his conclusions in a way that those of the natural scientist do not.

The defining characteristic of ‘social life’, its ‘formal’ property, according to Stammler, is that it is a ‘rule-governed’ communal life, consisting of reciprocal relationships ‘governed by external rules’. Let us immediately pause and ask, before following Stammler any further, what might be meant in total by the words ‘rule-governed’ and ‘rule’. ‘Rules’ might mean first (i) general assertions about causal connexions, or ‘laws of nature’. If the term ‘laws’ is to be reserved, in this context, for general causal propositions of unconditional strictness (in the sense that they admit of no exceptions), then the term ‘rule’ may be kept only (a) for all those empirical propositions which are incapable of this degree of strictness; but no less (b) for all those so-called ‘empirical laws’ to which, on the contrary, no exceptions can be discovered empirically, but for which we lack insight (at any rate of a theoretically adequate kind) into the decisive causal determinants of this lack of exceptions. It is a ‘rule’ in the sense of an ‘empirical law’ (sense (b)) that men ‘must die’; it is a ‘rule’ in the sense of a general empirical proposition (sense (a)) that certain reactions of a specific nature are an ‘adequate’ response on the part of a student belonging to a fraternity to a slap in the face.

From the point of view of the community at large, there is a more important question than that of whether and how the public can be protected against the consequences of its own gambling mania. This is the question of the influence exerted by the forms of commercial transaction, especially trading in futures, on the way in which the stock exchange discharges its most important function, that of controlling prices. In this respect, too, the advantages and drawbacks of futures trading are almost inseparably mixed. There is no doubt that it performs in a technically perfect manner the function of equalising prices, which is extremely useful and is indeed essential in speculative dealings. In buying cheap in Paris and at the same time selling dear in London, the arbitrageur increases demand in the one place and supply in the other, and so brings about a geographical redistribution of stocks. The speculator, following the harvest, expects a rise in prices in the winter, so buys grain per June; expecting a rise in prices in spring, he sells per June; thus he brings it about that there is in winter a section of those possessing grain who will not now sell it off locally at the low price, but will sell it at the June settlement date at the price which the speculator promises, and so will keep their grain in store until that date arrives.

What, in this context, do we mean by socialism? The word has, as argued earlier, many meanings. But the opposite of socialism which usually comes to mind is the private enterprise system: that is, the system in which the provision of economic needs is in the hands of private entrepreneurs and so is effected in such a way that these entrepreneurs provide themselves, by means of contracts of sale and wage contracts, with material plant, a clerical staff and a manual labour force, and then, at their own economic risk and in expectation of profit for themselves, cause goods to be produced which they then sell on the market. This private enterprise system has been labelled in socialist theory ‘the anarchy of production’, because it allows the provisioning of those who need the goods produced to depend on the outcome of the workings of the private interest in making a profit which the individual entrepreneurs have in selling their products.

The question of which of a society's requirements should be supplied entrepreneurially – that is, by private enterprise – and which should not be supplied in this way but, in the widest sense, socialistically, that is, by planned organisation, has had various answers in the course of history. In the Middle Ages, for instance, republics like Genoa allowed their great colonial wars against Cyprus to be waged for them by limited liability companies, the so-called Maone.

(1) ‘Class situation’ means the typical chances of material provision, external position and personal destiny in life which depend on the degree and nature of the power, or lack of power, to dispose of goods or qualifications for employment and the ways in which, within a given economic order, such goods or qualifications for employment can be utilised as a source of income or revenue.

‘Class’ means any group of human beings which shares a similar class situation. A ‘property class’ is one in which differences in propertyownership primarily determine the class situation. An ‘income class’ is one in which the chances of utilising goods or services on the market primarily determine the class situation. A ‘social class’ is the totality of those class situations, between which mobility either within the lifetime of an individual or over successive generations is a readily possible and typically observable occurrence.

Associations based on common class interests (or ‘class associations’) may arise within any of these three categories of class. But this is not necessarily the case: the terms ‘class situation’ and ‘class’ in themselves refer only to situations in which an individual finds himself sharing the same, or similar, typical interests with a number of others.

In what follows, except where a different sense is either explicitly mentioned or obvious from the context, the term ‘value-judgment’ is to be understood as referring to ‘practical’ evaluations of a phenomenon which is capable of being influenced by our actions as worthy of either condemnation or approval. The problem of the ‘freedom’ of a particular science from value-judgments of this kind – that is, the acceptability and meaning of this logical principle – is in no way identical with the entirely different question which we shall briefly consider first: the question whether, in the academic context, the teacher's practical value-judgments (whether based on ethical standards, cultural ideals or some other kind of ‘world view’) ought or ought not to be ‘acknowledged’. This question cannot be discussed in scientific terms, since it is itself entirely dependent on practical value-judgments and so irresoluble. Even if we only mention the extremes, two positions have been represented: (a) the view that, while it is quite correct to distinguish between, on the one hand, logically demonstrable or empirically observable facts and, on the other, the value-judgments which are derived from practical standards, ethical standards or world views, nevertheless, in spite of (or perhaps even just because of) this, both categories of problem come within the scope of academic teaching; (b) the view that, even if this distinction could not be carried through with complete logical consistency, nevertheless it is desirable as far as possible to keep all practical value-questions in the background in one's teaching.

Dr Ploetz has described ‘society’ as a living organism, on the basis of the familiar analogy, which he has himself impressively expounded, between societies and such things as cellular organisations. It may well be that, for Dr Ploetz's purposes, there is something of value in such an analogy: he himself, of course, is the best judge of that. But sociological enquiry never gains by the attempt to combine a number of relatively precise concepts into a single vague one. Such is the situation here. It is possible for us to understand the rational actions of individual human beings by re-living them in our own minds. If we sought to understand a human association of any kind only in the way in which one would investigate an animal community, we should be abandoning the means of knowledge which, as things are, are available to us in the case of human beings, but not in the case of animal societies. For this reason and no other, we can see no general advantage for our purposes in drawing the analogy which can undoubtedly be drawn between a bee-hive and any human political association of any kind, and in making it the basis for any sort of enquiry.

The structure of every legal order (not only the ‘state’) has a direct influence on the distribution of power, whether economic or of any other kind, within the community concerned. By ‘power’ we mean very generally the chances which a man or a group of men have to realise their will in a communal activity, even against the opposition of others taking part in it. ‘Economically determined’ power is not, of course, the same thing as ‘power’ in general. On the contrary, economic power may result from the possession of power which rests on other foundations. Conversely, men do not only aspire to power for the sake of economic enrichment. Power, even economic power, may be valued for its own sake, and it is very often the case that men seek power in part for the sake of the honorific social ‘status’ which it brings. Not all power, however, brings status with it. The typical American ‘boss’, like the typical large-scale financial speculator, consciously renounces such status; and generally speaking it is precisely ‘pure’ economic power, especially power based on ‘naked’ cash, which is not accepted in any way as a basis of social ‘status’. On the other hand, power is not the only basis of social status. Quite the contrary: social status or prestige can be, and very often has been, the basis of power, even of economic power. The legal system may guarantee both power and status.

THE ESSENCE OF CHARISMA AND ITS WORKINGS

Bureaucracy, like the patriarchal system which is opposed to it in so many ways, is a structure of ‘the everyday’, in the sense that stability is among its most important characteristics. Patriarchal power, above all, is rooted in the supply of the normal, constantly recurring, needs of everyday life and thus has its basis in the economy – indeed, in just those sections of the economy concerned with the supply of normal everyday requirements. The patriarch is the ‘natural leader’ in everyday life. In this respect, bureaucracy is the counterpart of patriarchalism, only expressed in more rational terms. Bureaucracy, moreover, is a permanent structure and is well adapted, with its system of rational rules, for the satisfaction of calculable long-term needs by normal methods. On the other hand, the supply of all needs which go beyond the economic requirements of everyday life is seen, the further back we go in history, to be based on a totally different principle, that of charisma. In other words, the ‘natural’ leaders in times of spiritual, physical, economic, ethical, religious or political emergency were neither appointed officials nor trained and salaried specialist ‘professionals’ (in the present-day sense of the word ‘profession’), but those who possessed specific physical and spiritual gifts which were regarded as supernatural, in the sense of not being available to everyone.

MEMBERSHIP OF A ‘RACE’

A much more problematic source of communal action than what has been mentioned so far is ‘membership of a race’, or in other words the possession, resulting from actual common descent, of similar inherited or heritable characteristics. Naturally, such common descent only expresses itself in the form of a ‘community’ when the individuals concerned have a subjective feeling of their common identity; and this in turn only develops when people of different races, living in close proximity to each other or associated together in some other way, are involved in some common activity (usually of a political nature), or alternatively when racially similar people share a common fate in virtue of their shared opposition to other groups who are markedly different from them. When communal action results in such a situation, it generally takes a purely negative form: those who feel themselves to have a common identity mark themselves off from the noticeably different group and despise them, or sometimes, on the contrary, regard them with superstitious awe. Someone who is foreign in his external appearance, however he may ‘act’ or whatever he may ‘be’, is despised simply as such; or, on the contrary, if he remains in a superior position over a period of time, is regarded with superstitious veneration. Rejection is thus the primary and normal response.