Max Weber’s Theory of Personality

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Studies in Critical Social Sciences

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David FasenfestWayne State University

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VOLUME 56

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Max Weber’s Theory of Personality

Individuation, Politics and Orientalism in the Sociology of Religion

By

Sara R. Farris

LEIDEN • BOSTON2013

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Cover illustration: Anonymous, “Fool’s Cap Map of the World”, ca. 1580–1590. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

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Farris, Sara R. Max Weber's theory of personality : individuation, politics and orientalism in the sociology of religion / by Sara R. Farris. pages cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences, 1573-4234 ; volume 56) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-25408-4 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Weber, Max, 1864-1920. 2. Religion and sociology. 3. Personality. I. Title.

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For Peter

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................xi

Introduction ................................................................................................................1 1. Max Weber’s Theory of Personality ...........................................................1 2. Individuation ...................................................................................................3 3. Politics................................................................................................................5 4. Orientalism .......................................................................................................6 5. Organisation of the Book ..............................................................................7 6. Summary of the Chapters .............................................................................9

1 From the Historical Individual to the Sociological Personality ............ 15 1. Singularisation and Individualisation of History ................................ 15 2. The Notion of Individuality in 19th Century Historiography ......... 18 3.  The Heidelberg School and the Axiological Foundation of the

Historical Individual ................................................................................... 20   3.1. Windelband, Rickert and Lask ........................................................ 21 4.  Universalism of Values and Anti-Naturalism: Logical

Antinomies and Political Implications .................................................. 27 5. Historical Individual and Subjective Axiology in Max Weber ........ 30   5.1.  Subjectivism and Polytheism of Values. Weber

between Menger and Nietzsche ...................................................... 33 6.  Causality and Rationality Versus Unpredictability

and Irrationality of Action ......................................................................... 39 7. Towards a Theory of Personality ............................................................. 42

2 A Lexicon of Individuation: Bildung, Religion, Personality ................... 47 1. Introduction .................................................................................................. 47 2. Religion, between the Individual and Society ..................................... 50 3.  From Magic to Religion: Disenchantment and

Rationalisation ............................................................................................. 53 4.  Conceptions of God in the Orient and in the Western

World............................................................................................................... 55 5.  The Theodicy of Suffering and the Religions of

Redemption ................................................................................................... 57    5.1.  Exemplary Prophecy and Ethical Prophecy: The

Individual as Container and as Instrument ................................. 60

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viii contents

 6. Ascetic and Mystical Orientation ............................................................ 62     6.1. Asceticism, Mysticism and Social Transformation ................... 65 7.  Irrationalisation of Ends, Rationalisation of Means:

On Formal Rationality ................................................................................ 66 8.  Religion and Economics: Negative Dialectic and the Birth of

Capitalism ...................................................................................................... 70

3 Puritan Personality and Political Leadership of Capital ......................... 75 1. A ‘Partial’ Synopsis ....................................................................................... 76    1.1.  The Protestant Diaspora in North America and ‘Political’

Individualism ....................................................................................... 81 2. Criticisms, Condemnations and Misinterpretations ......................... 83 3.  Avant le Déluge: An Anachronic Approach to Interpreting

“The Protestant Ethic” ................................................................................ 88     3.1. First Analepsis: The Freiburg Address .......................................... 89     3.2.  Second Analepsis: Kulturkampf and the Journey

to the United States............................................................................ 93 4. Rationalisation and Specialisation ......................................................... 97 5. Weber Versus the Neo-Humanism of Wilhelm von Humboldt ...... 99 6. Weber Versus the Realisation of Individuality in Marx ..................102 7. Puritan Personality and Political Leadership of Capital .................105

4 The Roots of Rationalisation: Ancient Judaism .......................................109 1. Social Stratification in Ancient Palestine ............................................111 2. Jewish Hierocracy: Between Bureaucracy and Charisma ...............114     2.1. The Circle of ‘Yahweh Intellectuals’: The Levites ....................115     2.2. The “Titans of Holy Curse”: The Prophets of Doom ................116 3. The Historicity of the World and the Dislocation of Authority ....120 4.  On the Utility and Liability of Marginality for Judaism:

The Community of the Covenant and the Pariah-People ..............123     4.1. Centrality of the Periphery ............................................................124     4.2.  Ethical Universalism and Religious Particularism

of the Pariah-People ........................................................................127 5.  Collective Emancipation Versus Individual Salvation:

The Jewish “Personality” ..........................................................................129

5  Paradoxes of Religious Individualism: On Weber’s Sociology of India.............................................................................................135

 1. The Sociology of India. Hinduism and Buddhism ............................135 2. Hinduisation, Church and Sect ..............................................................135

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contents ix

 3. The Caste System .......................................................................................138   3.1. The Brahmanic Hierocracy.............................................................143 4. The Dharma of Caste, Karma and Samsara .......................................146 5. The Heterodox Religions: Jainism and Buddhism ............................150 6. Egotism and Conformism: Religious Individualism in India .........155

6  The Land of The ‘Well-Adjusted Man’: Weber’s Sociology of China ..............................................................................................................159

 1. From Feudalism to Patrimonialism ......................................................160 2. State Bureaucracy and Political Capitalism .......................................164 3.  On the Sacred Nature of Tradition: The Precarious

Equilibrium between Centre and Periphery ......................................167 4. Confucianism as a “Religious Ethic for Cultivated Men” ................170 5. The Taoist and Buddhist Heterodoxies ...............................................173 6. The Theoretical Challenge of Confucian Rationalism .....................176    6.1. Rational Accomodation to the World Versus Rational

Dominion Over the World.......................................................................177 7. On the Absence of Personality ...............................................................182   7.1. ‘State of Minority’ and Ascribed Roles ........................................186

7 Politics and Orientalism of the Occidental Personality ........................193 1. The Protestant Sects and the Puritan Personality ............................195 2. In the Beginning was Charisma .............................................................197 3. Homo Politicus and Homo Puritanus ..................................................201 4. The Asiatic Non-Personality ...................................................................204 5. Homo Asiaticus and Homo Bureaucraticus .......................................207 6.  Concluding Remarks: Politics and Orientalism of the

Occidental Personality .............................................................................210

Bibliography ...........................................................................................................215Subject Index .........................................................................................................225Names Index ..........................................................................................................229

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have incurred numerous debts both to institutions and to people while this book was in the making. I wish to thank the Department of Methodology and Social Sciences of the University “La Sapienza” in Rome for the financial support provided during my doctoral research. Periods of study in the UK and Germany were also possible thanks to the Funding Programme for International Mobility of Phd Students of the University “La Sapienza” in Rome, and to the research scholarships of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). For their support and intellectual stimulus during these periods, I wish to thank Alberto Toscano, who enabled me to use the facilities of the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, becoming a friend as well as a challenging intellectual interlocu-tor, and Professor Hans-Peter Müller, who welcomed me at the Institut für Sozialwissenschaften of the Humboldt University in Berlin and discussed with me several parts of this book. For their much needed logistic support during my stay in London, I wish to thank Cinzia Arruzza, Sebastian Budgen, Marie-Jose Gransard and Stathis Kouvelakis, Anna Ruju and Yousaf Hassan. I owe special thanks to Marcel van der Linden for his invaluable help during periods of work in Amsterdam, allowing me to use the marvellous resources of the library of the International Institute of Social History (IISH).

I am especially thankful to the people who have read and commented on parts of the manuscript or with whom I have had important discus-sions related to the book’s topics. Here I cannot help but to thank some people twice. It goes without saying than none of them is responsible for any mistakes that might remain in this work, or for the direction it has eventually taken: Gilbert Achcar, Maria Stella Agnoli, Maurizio Bonolis, Enzo Campelli, Gaetano Congi, Dimitri D’Andrea, Leonardo Donnaloia, Antonio Fasanella, Loris di Giammaria, Bart van Heerikhuizen Carmelo Lombardo, Michel Löwy, Christine Moll-Murata, Marcel van der Linden, Alessandro Pizzorno, Jan Rehman Rehmann, Pietro Rossi, Guenther Roth, Manuela Satta, Francesco Truglia, Antonio Regano, Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, and Alberto Violante.

I wish to thank the members of my dissertation committee who encour-aged me not to be afraid of the challenges facing the scholar who continues to dig into the endless literature accumulated on Max Weber: Giuseppe Giampaglia, Antonio Scaglia, and Mario Aldo Toscano. Special thanks are

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xii acknowledgements

also due to Jennifer Delare for her help with the linguistic revisions of large portions of this book.

My parents Antonio Farris and Maria Meledina and my sister Elisabetta have provided me with all the support and love I needed in all stages of this process. To them goes my heart-felt gratitude.

This book is dedicated to my partner, Peter D. Thomas; there are few words to express the infinite gratitude I owe to him. His constant support, his continuous constructive criticisms and his high standards of intellec-tual rigour have been simply the most important lesson I have leant from the adventure of writing this book.

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INTRODUCTION

1. Max Weber’s Theory of Personality

In their famous introduction to the English translation of Weber’s perhaps most well-known essays, Gerth and Wright Mills (1946) recalled a letter Weber wrote to a colleague in 1918. Here he suggested that “Germany should borrow the American ‘club pattern’ as a means of ‘re-educating’ Germany; for, he wrote, ‘authoritarianism now fails completely, except in the form of the church’” (1946, 18). As Gerth and Wright Mills suggest, what prompted Weber to adopt such a view was the fact that he had envisaged a link

between voluntary associations and the personality structure of the free man. His study of the Protestant sect testifies to that. He was convinced that the automatic selection of persons, with the pressure always upon the indi-vidual to prove himself, is an infinitely deeper way for ‘toughening’ man than the ordering and forbidding technique of authoritarian institutions. For such authoritarianism does not reach into the innermost of those subject to its external constraint, and it leaves them incapable of self-direction once the authoritarian shell is broken by counter-violence (Gerth and Wright Mills 1946, 18, my emphasis).

In its concise way, this passage brings to the fore some key elements of Weber’s theory of personality, which constitutes the fundamental frame-work for understanding both his idea of the individual vis-à-vis society and the process of individuation, or subject formation (Rehmann 1998), that lie at the heart of his sociology. They are the fact that the Protestantism, or better, the Puritanism of the American sects, constituted the model for Weber’s ideal type of personality; the fact that autonomy from authoritar-ian institutions and capacity for self-direction are the fundamental traits of such an ideal type; and, finally, the fact that Weber conceived of the American Puritan personality structure as potentially a pedagogical model for the education of the German bourgeoisie. Most readings of Weber’s concept, and problematic, of personality have tended to focus upon these aspects. However, widespread emphasis amongst scholars upon the aforementioned elements has arguably also resulted in the neglect of equally significant facets whose careful consideration could lead to a deeper comprehension of Weber’s theory of personality. These largely neglected facets are the counter-images or alter egos of the Puritan

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2 introduction

personality structure, which Weber identified in his exploration of the Oriental religions. Without taking into account these non-Occidental alter egos, in dialogue, and mostly in confrontation with which Weber formulated his theory of personality, the latter cannot be fully grasped, appreciated and productively criticised. This book aims above all to bring to light these ignored elements and this overlooked dialogue and confron-tation, all of which are essential to complete our picture of Weber’s theory of personality.

Beside Gerth and Wright Mills classical path-breaking contribution, there have been several important works that have emphasised the impor-tance of the concept of personality in Weber’s work, particularly within the key texts Weber devoted to the methodology of the social sciences and to world religions. Beginning with the existentialist reading of Weber by Karl Löwith in the authoritative essay Max Weber and Karl Marx – origi-nally published in German in 1932 – personality has been understood in tandem with the notions of ethics of responsibility and vocation [Beruf]. Thus, it was linked to an entirely Occidental problematic, as a concept belonging to the “ontology” of Weber’s “post-Christian analysis of human beings”, as Bryan S. Turner put it in his introduction to the English transla-tion of Löwith’s book (Turner in Löwith 1993, 8). Likewise, Wolfgang Mommsen defined the idea of personality as the “keystone” of Weber’s thinking (Mommsen 1965, 28) and related it to his admiration for the Puritan pattern of life. This perspective can also be found in Schluchter’s lengthy study Rationalism, Religion and Domination (Schluchter 1989), as well as in Harvey Goldman’s inspired book on Weber’s concept of person-ality and the ‘self’ in the context of the crisis of the traditional model of Bildung. In his philologically attentive reconstruction of Weber’s work, Wilhelm Hennis insightfully relates the concept of personality to Weber’s “anthropological” interest in the formative factors of different human types (Hennis 1983). Hennis’s in-depth analysis, which is based on the vari-ous editions of, and texts generated by, the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, implies that, if “this [anthropological interest] is the stake in PE [Protestant Ethic] (…) there is no reason to believe that it was any dif-ferent in WEWR [Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen]” (Hennis 1983, 158). Hennis, however, did not explore the implications potentially deriving from an extension of Weber’s anthropological interest in the notion of personality beyond the Protestant Ethic.1 Other scholars, on the other

1 More recently see Koch 2006.

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introduction 3

2 Although there are numerous notes and references to Islam throughout Weber’s work, he did not devote a systematic study to it, though he had planned to do so. For this reason, a discussion of Weber’s treatment of the process of individuation within Islam is not included in this book. For a detailed reconstruction and analysis of Weber’s frag-mented commentary on Islam, see the classical studies by Turner 1978; Rodinson 1978; Huff and Schluchter 1999.

hand, have paid attention mainly to the concept of personality in Weber’s methodological writings, in the attempt both to relate it to its sources of philosophical inspiration and to discuss its implications for the socio-logical theory of action (Portis 1978; Hagemann 1979; Schroeder 1991; Hartmann 1994; Mackinnon 2001). Overall, the end result of these readings has been that of assuming, implicitly or explicitly, that personality is a purely Occidental category, a blending of the values of the Puritan virtu-oso and of the Goethian Bildungsroman character. In other words, all these works have discussed the concept of personality mainly in terms of its elaboration within his writings on Protestantism, with little to no men-tion of its function in other studies on world religions.

This book proposes a different approach. In particular, it suggests that a close investigation of the category of personality throughout Weber’s methodological writings and within all of his systematic studies of reli-gions,2 and not one limited to his writings on Protestantism, reveals a more complex treatment of this notion and a greater role for it to play within three strictly entangled problematics associated with Weber’s influential comparative historical sociology and theory of social action: individuation, politics and orientalism. Together they shape and consti-tute what is distinctive in Max Weber’s theory of personality.

2. Individuation

The investigation of the category of personality throughout Weber’s meth-odological writings and his studies of world religions reveals the elabora-tion of two main personality formations in Weber’s writings on religion. It thus enables us to challenge the diffused idea according to which there is mainly one personality structure to which Weber devoted most of his attention. The concept of personality that Weber outlined in the method-ological writings and in the writings on Protestantism functioned as an ideal type to which he compared the different patterns of personality that he saw emerging in his studies of the non-Christian and non-Western ‘civilisations’. Weber, therefore, used personality as a ‘yardstick’ – as

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4 introduction

Kalberg aptly calls the ideal type’s function in Weber’s comparative his-torical sociology (Kalberg 1994, 89 and ff.) – in the attempt to test his work-ing concept and to see how different religious doctrines initiated processes of individuation and personality formation. Only at the end of this com-parative inquiry, Weber concluded that his ideal type of a “unified person-ality” – i.e., the Puritan personality, one according to which life becomes “a whole placed methodically under a transcendental goal” (Weber 1951, 236), a whole of which autonomy and anti-authoritarianism are constitu-tive properties – did not spring from any of the ‘Oriental’ religions. It did not originate in ancient Judaism, which Weber saw as having failed to enhance autonomy from ascribed groups within the individual self. Nor did it stem from religions adopting the doctrine of karma (Buddhism and Hinduism), which, according to Weber, promoted autonomy and egotism at the expense of anti-traditionalism and anti-authoritarianism. Nor, least of all, did it arise from Confucianism, which Weber regarded as fostering gregariousness and conformism rather than self-direction from authori-tarian institutions, be it the state or the family. In this comparative jour-ney, thus, the concept of personality became an heuristic tool to ‘measure’ the variations of the processes of individuation taking place in different cultural, socio-economic and religious contexts and the different person-ality structures that Weber thought originated from those processes.

Weber paid enormous attention to the ways in which the Oriental rel i-gious doctrines, Hinduism and Confucianism in particular, contributed to shaping different structures of the self in their respective contexts. Each of his monographic studies on religion depicts complex and rich paths of individuation and patterns of the self. This notwithstanding, this book contends that ultimately Weber ended up opposing to the Puritan Occidental personality one main counter Oriental formation: the Asiatic non-personality. In the last chapter of The Religion of India, entitled “The General Character of Asiatic Religion”, Weber portrayed the non-Puritan and non-Occidental personality “at a point negatively evaluated in the Occident” (Weber 1958, 338). In this text, Weber sought to sketch out what he regarded as the main ethical and psychological components of the two great non-Western civilisations – Indian and Chinese – in a compounded manner. Here Weber set the uniqueness of the Occident against the pecu-liarity of the Orient, both treated as homogenously geo-historical and cultural-political wholes. On the one side stands the Occident, with its rational, methodical and autonomous individuals. On the other side is the Orient, exhibiting fundamentally traditionalist, dependant and irrational human types. Weber thus regarded what he saw as the lack of complete

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introduction 5

3 For an overview of this theme, see more recently Kelly 2004.

‘disenchantment’ [Entzauberung] of the world, coupled with a fundamen-tally disengaged attitude towards mundane matters, as the main obstacles to the development of the type of inner-worldly asceticism that he deemed to be necessary for the rise of capitalism. Moreover, and more fundamen-tally in the context of this study, he maintained that “Asiatic thought” could not conceive of the “specifically occidental significance of ‘personal-ity’” (Weber 1958, 342) as such. Weber argued that the striving for inner clarity and consistency that he evocatively depicts as the attempt “to take the self by the forelock and pull it out of the mud” (ibid.) was unthinkable in Asia. The individualities nurtured by Asiatic thought were, therefore, by  (Weber’s) definition, incoherent constellations of inarticulate traits that could not develop into proper personalities.

3. Politics

As I noted in the first section of this introduction, Weber conceived of the American Puritan personality structure as potentially a pedagogical model for the education of Germany. This element has been emphasised by several scholars in their search for an understanding of the political prem-ises and implications of Weber’s theory of personality (Barbalet 2008; Rehmann 1998). In a recent study, Jacques Barbalet (2008) discusses how Weber sketched the outlines of the Puritan personality in his writings on Protestantism in an attempt to find answers for a question he had already dealt with ten years earlier in the Freiburg Address: the problem of the absence of political Beruf in the German bourgeois class. Other scholars have noted how the features of the Puritan personality and of the charis-matic political leader overlap, and how they both embody Weber’s ideal of humanity [Menschentum].3 While sharing this perspective and building upon it, this book discloses hitherto overlooked dimensions deriving from an analysis of this overlap. On the one hand, Weber’s description of the qualities of the charismatic political leader, as contained in “Politics as a Vocation”, coincides with the portrayal of the Puritan virtuoso he depicted in his writings on Protestantism. If the type of man who is to “be allowed to put his hand on the wheel of history” must possess the qualities of Sachlichkeit, of far-sightedness as a sense of responsibility and distance “to things and men”, of passion as a feeling of true fervour for the cause that guides his actions, this “kind of a man” then is embodied most completely

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6 introduction

in Weber’s portrayal of the Puritan berufliche Persönlichkeit. The Puritan personality was therefore the pedagogical-political model for the German bourgeois class because it possessed the very psychological features that Weber regarded as the epitome of the Occidental personality and the sine qua non for the establishment of true political leadership. This was an issue that Weber felt urgently needed to be solved in the wake of the German Revolution, which constituted the background context for his text “Politics as a Vocation”. To Weber’s mind at that time, the main prob-lem Germany had to solve was precisely that officials and civil servants, rather than gifted politicians, had been “again and again in leading posi-tions” (Weber 1946, 95). This book opens up a new path for scholarly reflection by proposing that parallel to, or underneath, Weber’s estab-lished opposition between the charismatic political leader and the bureaucrat lies another binary: an opposition between the Puritan Occidental personality and the Asiatic non-personality. In other words, I contend that not only the political charismatic leader but also the figure of the civil servant is mirrored in one of the personality patterns Weber iden-tified in his studies on world religions. When one compares Weber’s description of the traits of the civil servant with Weber’s portrayal of the features of the Confucian, the similarities distinctly emerge. They point to an implicit and yet discernible conflation. Like the bureaucrat sine ira et studio that Weber describes in “Politics as a Vocation”, the Confucian too lacks passion, personal autonomy and initiative and, above all, vocation [Beruf]. The gregariousness and conformism of the Confucians, in Weber’s reconstruction, meant above all that they lacked “personality per se” (Weber 1951, 230); Weber indeed regarded them as non-personalities.

4. Orientalism

Ultimately, by discussing the political premises and implications of Weber’s theory of personality and by disclosing the largely neglected influ-ence that not only the studies on Protestantism but also those on the Oriental religions exercised upon some of the key concepts and problem-atic of Weber’s political theory, we are also in the position to better under-stand the Orientalist features of his sociology. As Edward Said aptly noted in his 1978 ground-breaking book, Orientalism, among the operations undertaken by orientalists was, on the one hand, that of depicting the Orient, and oriental civilisations, as homogenous and immobile wholes, whose authoritarian structures impeded the development of historical entities potentially subject to social change. On the other hand, another

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introduction 7

orientalist operation was that of portraying Orientals as individuals caught in a constitutive “state of minority”, fundamentally lacking psychological autonomy from ascribed social groupings, or devoid of personality alto-gether (see Said 2003, 154). With the methodology of the ideal type, which Weber used to emphasise one-sided perspectives about different civilisa-tions as well as to classify and compare them, and with his characterisa-tion of the Oriental self as a non-personality, Weber arguably deployed both orientalist dispositives; something that Said did not fail to notice. This book goes further and shows how the clearly orientalist underpin-ning of Weber’s depiction of Asian civilisations in general and Chinese civilisation in particular were not only developed at the level of a merely biased and Eurocentric description of non-Western civilisations. His charac terisation of the polar opposite of the charismatic political leader, namely the bureaucrat, which Weber despised as an element of disem-powerment of German politics, was also informed by a deeply orientalist rationale. By focusing on the theory of personality as a crucial axis of Weber’s Orientalism, this book can thus be seen as a contribution to a more in-depth understanding of the complex, ‘Westocentric’ roots that so greatly shaped one of the most important paradigms of sociological thought. In particular, it enables us to see that, far from operating as a neutral device, or merely as a ‘yardstick’ by which to compare different religions and civilisations, Weber’s ideal type of personality is construed and operates as a powerful political dispositive. The ‘negative’ traits that he saw as the breeding ground of supposed oriental immobility and lack of personality were also the traits he aimed to exclude, or exorcise, from political life in his own context in Germany. An orientalist rationale was thus operating at the very heart of his political theory and agenda.

5. Organisation of the Book

Weber’s body of work known as “Sociology of Religion” refers to the arti-cles and studies on specific religious doctrines as well as on general cate-gories and theories related to religious phenomena that were written and published between 1904, with the appearance of the first part of what became The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and 1922, with the posthumous publication by Marianne Weber of Economy and Society. Thus, the “Sociology of Religion” includes: (a) The “Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion” [Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziolo-gie],  a  collection of studies and essays on world religions which had appeared initially as separate articles in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und

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8 introduction

4 For a detailed reconstruction of the development and structure of Economy and Society, see the introduction by Guenther Roth to the 1978 English edition. More recently, see Camic et al. 2005.

Sozialpolitik, Frankfurter Zeitung and Christliche Welt between 1904 and 1919 and were then collected in three volumes as “Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion” in 1920 and 1921; and (b) “Religious Groups (Sociology of Religion)” [Religionssoziologie (Typen religiöser Vergemeinschaftung)], a long section included in Economy and Society, devoted to a systematic analysis of the relation between religious doctrines, the organisational and class structures of their carriers, supporters and followers.4

The order of publication and assemblage of the studies included in the “Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion” [Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie] deserves some attention. While detailed information regarding their context of composition and publication will be provided in each chapter of this book, here I will refer only to the order of appear-ance of the studies in the three volumes that compose the “Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion”. In the 1920–1923 edition of these texts, the order of inclusion of the monographs on world religions followed their sequence of publication throughout Weber’s life, from the oldest to the most recent. Thus, Volume One includes the studies on Protestantism “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” [Die Protestantische Ethick und der Geist des Kapitalismus] and “The Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism”, the theoretical essays on the “Economic Ethic of World Religions” [Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen] (which is trans-lated into English as “The Social Psychology of the World Religions” in Weber 1946) and the study on Confucianism and Taoism [Konfuzianismus und Taoismus] (translated into English as The Religion of China in Weber 1951). Volume Two includes the study on Hinduism and Buddhism [Hinduismus und Buddhismus] (translated into English as The Religion of India in Weber 1958) and the theoretical text “Intermediate Reflec-tions:  Theories of the Stages and Directions of Religious Rejections” [Zwischenbetrachtung: Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religiöser Weltablehnung] (translated into English as “Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions” in Weber 1946). Finally, Volume Three includes the study on ancient Judaism [Das antike Judentum] (translated into English as Ancient Judaism in Weber 1952).

Most readings of Max Weber’s “Sociology of Religion” have provided ‘chronological’ journeys through these texts in the attempt to follow Weber’s table of contents, their order of publication over time and, in

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some cases, seeking to relate their sequence of appearance with their role in Weber’s intellectual project and development (Bendix 1960; Tenbruch 1980; Schluchter 1989). Instead, the reader will notice that this book pro-poses a different order. It starts from a discussion of the conceptualisation of personality in the methodological writings and the section on religion in Economy and Society. It then moves to consider, in order: the studies of Protestantism, ancient Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, and finally Confucianism and Taoism. This order is informed above all by the theo-retical proposal to conceive of Weber’s concept of personality as a key ideal type in his historical comparative sociology. Consequently, this book provides both the working definition of the ideal type of personality, which Weber elaborated in his methodological writings and in the section “Religious Groups (Sociology of Religion)” in Economy and Society, and the contextual framework in which the reflection upon this concept matured (Chapter One and Chapter Two). It moves to discuss the studies on Protestantism, in which Weber’s concept of personality appears in its purest ideal typical form (Chapter Three), and then proceeds to an exami-nation of the studies in which the concept of personality appears progres-sively more distant from the ideal type in its purest form. Thus, we move to the study of ancient Judaism (Chapter Four), which Weber considered the seedbed of Western rationalism and whose personality formation was more closely affine to the Protestant one; we then pass through the study of Hinduism and Buddhism (Chapter Five), in which Weber reflected upon the paradoxes of religious individualism for the process of individu-ation and personality formation; and we finally arrive at the study of Confucianism (Chapter Six), which stands amongst Weber’s studies on world religions as the one in which he conceptualised the complete absence of personality altogether. In other words, the type of self that Weber saw as originating from Confucianism and the Chinese socio-his-torical formation was the most distant from the ideal type of the Puritan personality. Hence, the organisation of the chapters follows a thematic and theoretically informed order, in order to disclose hitherto neglected elements, rather than a philological and chronological one.

6. Summary of the Chapters

In 1903 when he gradually went back to intellectual work, after the paren-thesis of inactivity that kept him far from university rooms, Weber published a number of metholodological studies and, in those same years, the famous essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

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Chapter One discusses how it is in the methodological writings that Weber delineated the contours of a theory of the rational individual, or personal-ity, able to respond to the theoretical and methodological challenges posed by the Methodenstreiten that traversed the human and social sci-ences in Germany. Integrating into his thought numerous aspects from the main figures of the neo-Kantian school of Heidelberg – Windelband, Rickert and Lask – Weber went further and radically re-elaborated one of their key-concepts, namely, the notion of the historical individual [histo-rische Individuum]. This concept had both represented the legacy of a long philosophical tradition that conceived of history as a theatre of manifesta-tions of the spirit in individualised forms (Iggers 1975), and emerged from the process of singularisation of the concept of history that was at the ori-gin of the distinction between Natur- and Geisteswisseschaften (Koselleck 2004). This chapter shows that it is the notion of historische Individuum in the thought of the neo-criticists of Baden that became the foundation upon which Weber constructed his theory of personality. As the latter came to be defined by Weber as “a concept that finds its ‘essence’ in the consistency of its intimate relationship to certain ultimate ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of life (…) values and meanings [that] have their effect by being forged into purposes and thereby translated into rational- teleological action” (Weber 1968, 132), personality ultimately referred to the habitus from which the patterns of individuals’ behaviours and action derived, thereby playing a central role in his overall theory of rational action and agency.

Chapter Two discusses the influences upon, and employment of, Weber’s rationalist definition of personality that was outlined in Chapter One. Like all German intellectuals of his time, Weber’s notion of personal-ity was influenced by the debate on education [Bildung]. In particular, the context of Weber’s reflection was one in which the general problematic associated with the notions of personality and of Bildung was going through difficult times. As Goldman argues, “at the end of the nineteenth century the new techniques and practices that had aided in shaping and equipping bourgeois individuals for lives and roles in nation, culture, and class were seriously weakened and persistently challenged by the pres-sures of a rapidly developing capitalist society” (Goldman 1993a, 163). Weber thus intervened in the debate on the status of the subjectivity of the German bourgeoisie in a moment in which the traditional models of individuation, in particular the religious models, were in crisis. As religion had previously been the primary wellspring of individuals’ identity, Weber thus seemed to surmise that it was there that he had to begin in order to

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understand the mechanisms of personality formation and consolidation. By focusing upon the text “Religious Groups (Sociology of Religion)” [Religionssoziologie (Typen religiöser Vergemeinschaftung)], a long section included in Economy and Society in which Weber arguably sought to sys-tematise the mass of material he collected in his studies of world religions, Chapter Two aims to lay out the main categories of his theoretical infra-structure on religion and the religious personality, in order to orient dis-cussions in subsequent chapters.

Chapter Three focuses on the concept of personality, particularly as it emerged from Weber’s writings on Protestantism, i.e., The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and the texts on the Protestant sects in North America. Building in particular upon Rehmann’s (1998) and Barbalet’s (2008) contributions, in this chapter I argue that with his writings on Protestantism Weber implemented a research programme that he had outlined ten years earlier in his inaugural lecture at Freiburg, and to which he was prompted to return and to elaborate further upon the occasion of his trip to the United States. The Freiburg Address of 1895 outlined themes that Weber would reconsider and deepen in the writings on Protestantism: namely, the role of religious factors for the explanation of the different economic behaviours of Protes tants and Catholics; the critique of histori-cal materialism; the link between political-economic leadership and the concept of Beruf. Fascinated by the dynamics of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Weber argued that the versions of Protestantism that had emerged there (particularly Puritanism) and the personality formation to which they led, were the key for understanding the nature of Western modernity and capitalism. Here lies the centrality of the notion of Puritan personality as harmonious unity of the self which develops autonomously from authori-tarian societal structures and engages in self-direction: according to Weber, it was the Puritan personality, in the end, that which had demon-strated that it was able to go through and to lead the epochal transition towards a society dominated by capital.

Chapter Four considers Weber’s study of ancient Judaism, which was crucial for his understanding of the process of rationalisation in the West. By focusing upon those elements of the structure of the Jewish personality that Weber regarded as being intrinsically inadequate for the promotion of the bourgeois mentality and of industrial modern capitalism, Weber aimed in large part to challenge Sombart’s thesis on the elective affinities between Judaism and capitalism (Sombart 1951 [1902]). Weber empha-sised primarily what he termed a double-standard morality within Judaism, one that he saw as having led to a form of particularism in the

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economic world, which stood in sharp contrast to the universalism that had been affirmed with western capitalism. From this combination of aspects – gregariousness, economic particularism and forms of pariah-collectivism that failed to develop a proper individualist ideology – Weber saw the Jewish religion as inhibiting the rise of a Protestant type of personality.

Chapter Five discusses Weber’s study of India and the religious ortho-doxies and heterodoxies developed therein. As with his other comparative studies, the aim of Weber in the Sociology of India was to reconstruct the features of the interior habitus, or the specific type of personality, that had been produced by the socio-economic structures of the subcontinent. In order to analyse the ways in which the type of rationalisation that had occurred within Hinduism contributed to the formation of a distinctive type of personality, Weber concentrated essentially on three elements: caste dharma, and the doctrinary principles of samsara and karma. The reading of the interconnection between these elements, in his view, led to paradoxical results. On the one hand, Hindu doctrine promoted by the priestly bureaucracy of Brahmans oriented individuals’ conduct in extremely corporative terms. On the other hand, beside the promotion of practical action that maintained the characteristic of corporative action, the search for salvation was a private affair. Not only the strict observance of ritual duty, but also the emphasis put by Hinduism on individual responsibility for the achievement of reincarnation, promoted the para-doxes of religious individualism. The structure of the self that was shaped by Hinduism, therefore, was for Weber egotistic and conformist, and thus poles apart from that which structured the Puritan personality.

The monograph on China occupies a special position in Weber’s series of studies on world religions. Chapter Six addresses this particularity and links it to Weber’s overall theory of personality. Though Weber had ini-tially thought that Confucianism constituted the religious ethic closest to Puritanism, he finally arrived at the conclusion that it was, rather, the most different one (see Schluchter 1989). By reconstructing the complex equilibrium between centre and periphery and the central role played by Mandarins in imperial China, and by scrutinising the nature of Confucian doctrine in terms of an ethic rather than a religion, Weber portrayed the image of a country that could be the potential theatre of formal rational-isation and that, instead, had stopped at the level of a state bureaucracy. Weber believed a fundamentally ritualist and conformist self had been produced in such a context. The lack within Confucianism of a tension between God and the world, or of a level of transcendence, in particular,

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was what, according to Weber, had prevented ab origine any solicitation to the intervention and transformation in and of the world and consequently, any impetus to social change. Only this type of tension, however, could lead to the depreciation of worldly matters and as a consequence to the possibility of thinking their change. There was no psychological reward for the Confucian that was not that of the acquisition of eudemonistic goods through a sober, decorous and exterior conduct. This set of reasons in Weber’s reconstruction, i.e., the lack of a promise for redemption that could orient individuals’ behaviour in the view of its attainment, and the absence of transcendence, had led to the absence of a unitary self, and ultimately of a proper personality formation altogether.

In conclusion, Chapter Seven further explores the thesis laid out in Chapter Three concerning the connection between Weber’s political- pedagogical agenda and the focus upon the type of personality developed within American Puritanism. This exploration reveals that not only was the Puritan personality itself quintessentially political, deriving its defin-ing traits from a configuration of sociality developed in a voluntarily cho-sen but highly cohesive and controlled community, such as the Protestant sects. A close textual analysis of the writings on Protestantism and of “Politics as a Vocation” also reveals the fundamental conflation between the Puritan personality and the charismatic personality of the political leader. It was the latter that Weber wished to see at the head of Germany on the eve of Weimar; such a leader was the only remedy, according to Weber, against the bureaucrats sine ira et studio who instead had been deciding of the destiny of German politics. In light of the powerful influ-ence that the studies on religion exercised upon Weber’s political catego-ries, this chapter also explores the hypothesis that the figure of the bureaucrat, like that of the charismatic leader, was similarly modelled on an ideal type of personality originating from a religious doctrine. As I argue, it is the ideal type of the Asiatic non-personality in general, and of the Confucian in particular, that seemingly haunts Weber’s detested figure of the political bureaucrat. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how these elements can contribute to our understanding not only of the political but also orientalist implications of Weber’s studies on Occidental and Oriental religions.

***

Ultimately, this book aims to show that Weber’s concept of personality was not a peripheral or only one-faceted category of his enormous

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conceptual apparatus. On the contrary, it was a complex and articulated theoretical construct that played a crucial role in the development of Weber’s theory of social action. Furthermore, this book argues that this concept, far from being a neutral analytic device, was strongly marked by a political agenda as well as by the presuppositions of the Orientalist dis-course. This is the case not merely because Weber saw capitalism and the capitalist spirit, or personality, as entirely endogenous to the West. Nor is it due simply to his portrayal of the West and its process of individuation as the site of all progressive and transformative virtues that set social change in motion, in contrast to what he described as a passive and immo-bile Orient. Weber’s concept of personality underwrites a precise political goal and is informed by an orientalist rationale fundamentally because it was grounded upon a class-based and Eurocentric understanding of pro-cesses of individuation, and the intersection of religion, economy and selves. Weber’s political agenda and orientalism thus also fundamentally penetrated and shaped other aspects, methodologies and concepts of his broader sociology. As we have inherited those aspects, methodologies and concepts as part of the sociological toolbox, the time has come to subject them to rigorous scrutiny and to critically interrogate their origins, their functions and their implications for sociological research. Should this book contribute to this task, it will have achieved its aims.

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