Marx Weber's Conception of History: Introduction
Contents
- Introduction
- The Era of Magic
- The Era of Religion
- The Modern Era
Introduction
The entry of human society into modernity has inspired many sociologists to comment on it. Some sociologists favored this move, while others remained suspicious of this event. Entry into modernity also meant new rules of the game: new modern nation-states, market capitalism, bureaucracy and rationality. It was in this situation that Weber argued that humanity was moving towards an iron cage. He rightly imagined that formal rules and laws along with the formalized principles of bureaucracy would lead to a state in which people and their relationships would become objectified. This disenchantment dear to Weber bears a certain resemblance to Hegel's phenomenology of Spirit and to that of Marx's dialectical materialism. For Weber, however, the transformation of European history is best explained not in terms of long struggles for political freedom and equality or for proletarian revolution and emancipation, but as a progressive and degenerative process which dilutes humanity by a world that is robotic.
One thing that stands out very clearly about Weber's historical process is that he sees history as a rational process. The engine of history is rationality. There is a movement from more primitive ways of understanding the world to more modern ways. There is a movement from tradition to rationality, from magic to religion and from religion to science; science that is an end product of the Enlightenment movement and the French and Industrial Revolutions.
As he delves deeper into the historical analysis, one thing emerges clearly in Weber's telling of the story, the game dimension of the formation of useless types. The idle forms of Protestantism and capitalism are fluid and interchangeable; they turn the tables, conquering each other at different times and influencing each other. There is also an element of chance in Weber's historical account. The fact that the theological conception of vocation and predestination appears at certain moments in history, and that a form of profit-oriented economic enterprise also arises, is not the result of any logic that guides history, but rather of chance. When we relate the works of Weber and Marx, we see that Karl Marx was more interested in the economic history of human history and for him the relations of production, the means, the modes of production and the ownership of production were the ways in which the story could be understood. Some scholars consider Weber more sophisticated in his understanding of the multiple causes of the ideology and politics of modernity and capitalism. Just as Marx was able to see human history from a broader perspective, although some scholars consider his perspective to be teleological and Eurocentric, so was Weber's understanding. But Weber is more attuned to the variability and complexity of human cultural and historical patterns. Where Marx oversystematizes and emphasizes the importance of economic relations, reducing all cultural and historical complexities to a single cause and multilinear historical process, Weber's "idle types" methodology acknowledges complexity and multicausality. Finally, Weber's historical process is contained in the struggle in which rationality, a product of modern society (virtue), transcends irrationality (vice), freedom over unfreedom. Having briefly summarized the trajectory of Max Weber's conception of history, we now turn to the three periods represented in the process. This will help us when we talk about disenchantment. Weber also tried to paint human history in broad strokes, like Marx, and argued that human history has generally gone through phases: magic, religion, and modernity.
The Era of Magic
The Age of Magic falls into the Enchanted Age. In the enchanted age of magic, Weber argued that the means of control were conditioned by the belief that the natural environment is governed by spiritual forces that lie within and outside the immanent order of nature itself. This means that in the age of magic, the basis of controlling nature is basically a matter of establishing a way to influence the supernatural forces that affect it. It is worth noting before proceeding that the Age of Magic is often referred to by Weber as the traditional society.
For Weber, magic means an art that has its purpose, the expansion of power over a spiritualized natural realm. Moreover, one of the distinctive characteristics of magic, according to Weber, and which clearly distinguishes it from modern technology, is its relative inability to effect any real control over natural processes. Magic is therefore an important art for Weber. Its successes are largely accidental, and its failures are conveniently interpreted by its practitioners as a sign of impending success. One of the reasons why the enchanted world of magic has been less successful is because nature's will to command obedience has been supplanted by a contrary will, nature's will, or more precisely , the will of the spiritual forces driving the operation. is inhibited.
The Era of Religion
In Weber's rational historical process, he sees religion as a force that has transformed society and things. The world or the society or the magical era gave way to the society or the religious era. What happened to religion is that religion and science served to rationalize and ultimately erode the magical and mythical worldview. The change in historicity at this point, as we have already seen, is the change from magic to religion. What was at stake in the age of religion, religion demanded a more consistent and meaningful justification of human suffering8 and, above all, an enumeration of guidelines describing the way of life most likely to procure salvation.
Another important aspect of this era is religious discipline; Neither leisure nor contemplation were interpreted as signs of the glory of God. Work was seen as a simple means of satisfying the immediate material interests of the individual and his community. For Weber, worldly work was ennobled and endowed with an inner dignity if it was understood in Calvinist thought as a kind of visible confirmation of one's own faith. But in modern times, the work ethic, as Weber will say, will express itself in a more secular form. We will discover that in modern times, any ascetic act is considered an activity of intrinsic value as a good in itself.
At its height, the stage of religion (refers to Catholic Christianity) was dominant in the Middle Ages or Middle Ages as many will call it. Medieval religious practices were tied to the Church, mired in tradition and the belief that performing miracles was the most effective means of demonstrating its monopoly of faith. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the lives of saints had assumed a stereotypical pattern of extolling the miraculous deeds of holy men, discussing how to prophesy, control the weather, protect against fire and flood, and bring relief to the sick. Again, an enchanted worldview was at play here.
While such ideas have continued into modern times, there has been a decline in religion and the supernatural worldview has begun to suffer erosion. Although the erosion began during the Renaissance and the Reformation, Weber would say that it has increased considerably since the days of the Industrial Revolution.
The Modern Era
The Renaissance and later the Age of Enlightenment brought drastic changes to human history. The French Revolution, the American Revolutionary War, brought reason, science, rationality and logic as the basis for the assumption of human society and human reality. In the Enlightenment period, there was a change in the belief structures and normative order of society. There was a great rational revolution and the values and unity of meaning that prevailed in the magical-mythical society were pushed out of the realm of rationality. The ancient cosmos of meaning has been replaced in modern times by a cosmic configuration characterized by the emergence of differentiated spheres of value, for example, political, scientific and aesthetic, each with its own immanent norms. In modern society, reason has reigned, religion belongs to the past; there has been a movement from the sacred to the profane. We pass from the supernatural to the natural, from the divine to the human. Science now becomes the true religion. According to Weber, the rational person becomes the controlling agent of capitalism and all other social systems of society. Thus Max Weber takes us into a time of disillusion and deconstruction. All institutional ethics and traditionalism are relegated to the background. The main terminology responsible for this change and movement is the disenchantment with Weber's terminology or secularization as many philosophers of the time would call it.
This period can be characterized by its transformation in terms of ideas and processes. There is a rejection of mysticism in favor of materialism, of superstition in favor of science, of ecclesiastical divine right rule in favor of government based on contractual principles of law, of human inspiration and originality in favor of method and of repeatability, of moral action. by reflex and conditioning as determinants of behavior, and by oral tradition with a centuries-old belief in historical progress in terms of scientific and technological progress, expanding economies, and the realization of utopian and social possibilities. Protestant science and industry, in which Weber was deeply interested, put knowledge within reach of the common man and made the acquisition of wealth a positive social goal for all. This is called the Protestant ethic and capitalism becomes the order of the day. This Protestant ethic of cultivating science and industry according to Weber in this era was able to perpetuate the myth of progress or rapid upward evolution thanks to the vast reserves of fossil fuels, mainly coal and oil, which modern societies could exploit. It was typical of Germany at the time.
References
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