Classical Sociology

42 Classical Sociology
experience, there is a reality which can transcend the relativism of the
historicist problem.
It is only a short step to the argument that industrial capitalism
through the application of rational science technology has transformed
the relationship between human beings and their environment; it has
undermined the authenticity of the life-world through the commodification
of culture. For Weber, rational capitalism has demystified the everyday
world and incorporated the sphere of Erlebnis into the system of
rational economic exchange. In Weber’s pessimistic view of ‘the iron
cage’, there is no escape from the process of rationalization which,
through the application of science, has embraced all spheres of life including
the spiritual domain (Bendix, 1960). It is the ‘fate’ of the modern world
to suffer the routinization of life through bureaucracy, science and discipline
in which the magical and charismatic aura of social existence is
slowly but surely effaced.
While the overt thesis of Antoni’s extraordinary study is the problem of
historicism, the covert and more important argument is the general crisis
of European culture, which, as we have seen, was a crisis of relativism in
the intellectual class resulting in a profound sense of instability and uncertainty
at the end of the century. Industrial capitalism and urbanization had
totally transformed European social structure. There was a sense of the
exhaustion of ideas, the collapse of Christian certainty and the inauthentication
of the everyday world. This erosion of confidence was expressed in
debates about anomie, alienation and ennui. One response was to seek out
security in a re-evaluation of the importance of the irrational in theories of
the unconscious realm in Freud, intuition in Bergson, revolutionary violence
in Sorel or moral passion in Durkheim.
The covert theme of Antoni’s exploration of the crisis of historicism is
the quest for a political solution to the complexity and diversity which
flowed from cultural relativism. This crisis in Germany was a question of
the failure of liberalism as a political movement and the growth of Prussian
authoritarianism. In one sense, Bismarck’s unification of Germany and the
autocratic policies towards working-class politics, the early trade union
movement and the religious divisions in Germany between Catholics,
Protestants and Jews were also a ‘solution’ to historicism – Bismarck’s
authoritarianism represented a political route out of the crisis of moral
uncertainty. With the decline of organized religion, Troeltsch and Weber
came to the pessimistic conclusion that moral solutions to the problem of
civilization in Germany were no longer viable, and a strong and decisive
political leadership for Germany, following the decline of Bismarckian
Germany and the disaster of World War One, was essential if the state was
to remain, alongside America and Britain, a powerful nation in the competition
for world power. Troeltsch and Weber both felt that power politics
would inevitably be Machiavellian insofar as politics is in its essence
morally neutral (Mommsen, 1984). Power and values were the two central