Classical Sociology

18 Classical Sociology
Weber’s sociology was driven by a concern for ‘human dignity’, but Weber
was basically pessimistic about the outcome of capitalism which was fateful
in the sense of producing an iron cage within which human beings were
trapped. Löwith’s interpretation of Weber developed from a philosophical
indebtedness to the work of Martin Heidegger (1962). Since human beings
live in a condition of existential homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit), Heidegger
(1977) developed a profound critique of the technological conditions of
capitalist society, which result in profound alienation. Löwith was also able
to appreciate the importance of Nietzsche’s critique of conventional metaphysics
as the background to Heidegger’s approach to everyday reality.
Nietzsche’s rejection of traditional religion as a viable orientation to the
lifeworld was the background to Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics.
Weber’s anxieties about the problem of cultural slavery in the modern
bureaucratic machine were partly generated by Nietzsche’s analysis of the
problem of modern existence in terms of the death of God.
Löwith’s social philosophy was grounded in the view that the decisive
characteristic of western culture is to be located in the divorce between the
classical view of the world in which there was no real history but merely
the harmonious repetition of the same and the Christian world-view in
which the birth of Christ created a revolutionary teleological framework
for reality. History was now meaningful in terms of the revelation of grace
through the advent of Christ, the lives of the saints, and the creation of the
Church leading towards a Second Coming (Löwith, 1966; 1970). In a similar
fashion, Weber recognized that the problem of theodicy in Christian
theology drove the Protestant Reformers to a new perception of history as
catastrophic. These philosophical views about the meaning of history
within a Christian framework have been replaced in a secular epoch by the
idea that history has no meaning and that we are living in a post-historical
period (Niethammer, 1992).
We can see in the recent interpretation of Weber’s sociology a common
theme, namely the profoundly ethical character of Weber’s social theory
and its underpinning in a particular anthropology of personality and lifeorders.
Both Tenbruck and Löwith share this interest in the religious theme
within Weber’s life and work, particularly the focus on questions relating
to theodicy. Hennis (1988: 24) is wrong, in my view, to suggest that Löwith,
because of the analysis of the relationship of Weber to Marx, was fascinated
by the problem of rationality and thereby missed the underlying significance
of this question in Weber’s sociology. On the contrary, Löwith recognized
that the rationalization theme was a product of the existential
question of meaning in Weber’s sociological framework.
Weber and Postmodernity
We have noted that in the last twenty years there has been a continuing and
growing fascination with the sociological work of Weber. How might we