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Max Weber and the Legal-Historical Ramifications of Social Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 July 2015

John P. McCormick
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Max Weber grappled with the rise of social democracy, the welfare state, or the Sozialstaat, most explicitly in the “sociology of law” sections of his posthumously published Economy and Society. Through a close reading of Weber’s text, this essay argues that the historical and analytic categories Weber deployed in his investigation of the Sozialstaat, its rise and its legal dimensions, were inadequate for an appropriate understanding of the phenomena and for the attempt to offer progressive prescriptions for their further development. Instead, by relying on a faulty historical logic, Weber obscured many realities of the Sozialstaat, and unwittingly laid the groundwork for the neo-conservative critique of the welfare state on both sides of the Atlantic. The essay concludes with some reflections on similar, “Weberian,” theoretical moves observable in literatures dealing with the most recent large-scale transformation of law and the state: the rise of the European Union.

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Research Article
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Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , January 2004 , pp. 143 - 184
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Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 2004

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References

This essay is based on Chapter III of my Weber, Habermas and Transformations of the European State: Constitutional, Social and Supranational Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

1. Weber, Max, Rechtssoziologie in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der Verstehenden Soziologie (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck], 1922), vol. 2 Google Scholar, ch. 7; Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society, trans. Shils, Edward & Rheinstein, Max (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954)Google Scholar. [hereinafter SL]. I cite this translation as revised in Weber, , Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology(orig.1920), ed. by Roth, Guenther & Wittich, Claus, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 311 and 641 Google Scholar. Amended translations correspond with the fifth German edition, published in 1990, edited by Johannes Winckelmann. On the dating and grouping of different sections of the SL, see Guenther Roth’s Introduction in Economy and Society LXV.

2. See Caldwell, Peter C.’s study of German legal theory in the late Kaiserreich and Weimar periods, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the indispensable collection of essays from this era, Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis. Jacobson, Arthur & Schlink, Bernhard, eds., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

3. See, generally, Maier, Charles S., Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade After World War I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Eley, Geoff, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change After Bismarck (Ann Arbor , MI: University of Michigan Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herrigel, Gary, Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Blackbourn, David, The Long 19th Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; & Berman, Sheri, The Social Democratic Moment: Ideas and Politics in the Making of Interwar Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

4. See Peter Mayer, Jacob, Max Weber and German Politics: A Study in Political Sociology (London: Faber & Faber, 1944)Google Scholar; Strauss, Leo, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Mommsen, Wolfgang, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890-1920, trans. Steinberg, Michael S. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar; and Loewenstein, Karl, Max Weber’s Political Ideas in the Perspectives of Our Time (Cambridge, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

5. Werner Gephart demonstrates how separate and sometimes contradictory themes and strategies like these are embedded in portions of the text composed at very different times and pasted together in the final version of SL. See Gephart, “Max Weber’s ‘Sociology of Law’: From Interpretive Complexity to the Multidimensionality of a Text”, paper presented at the Center for Comparative Research, Yale University, 3/4/02. SL was composed between 1908 and 1920 and appeared in 1922. On the background of the work, see Rheinstein’s Introduction to Max Weber on Law at xxv-lxxii.

6. Most famously through Hayek, FriedrichA.’s The Road to Serfdom (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

7. Weber, , The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905/1919), trans. Peter Baehr, & Gordon Wells, (New York: Penguin, 2003)Google Scholar. On the immense difficulties in understanding the causal logic of Weber’s most famous work, see Poggi, Gianfranco, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Weber’s Protestant Ethic (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. See Karl Engisch, “Max Weber als Rechtsphilosoph und als Rechtssoziologe” in Engisch, Pfister, B. & Winckelmann, Johannes, eds., Max Weber: Gedächtnisschrift der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1966) 67 Google Scholar; Turner, Stephen P. & Factor, Regis A., Max Weber: Lawyer As Social Thinker (London: Routledge, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Berman, Harold J. & Reid, Charles J. Jr., “Max Weber as Legal Historian” in Turner, Stephen, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 223 Google Scholar.

9. My approach differs from the following similarly-concerned treatments of SL: Kronman, Anthony, Profiles in Legal Theory: Max Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, and Kettler, David & Meja, Volker, “Legal Formalism and Disillusioned Realism in Max Weber” (1996) 18 Polity 307 Google Scholar. Kronman is not concerned with the context of legal change that often imposes itself on Weber’s text; rather, he chooses to focus on what he understands to be the conceptual unity of the work. Kettler and Meja most articulately address the decisive role of this context of transformation for the arguments of the work, but do so mostly in Weber’s own explicit terms. In what follows, I tease out the subtextual references to the rise of the Sozialstaat in SL, on the one hand, and confront Weber with alternative accounts of its emergence, on the other. This essay has also benefited from the following articles in the SL literature: Feldman, Stephen M., “An Interpretation of Max Weber’s Theory of Law: Metaphysics, Economics, and the Iron Cage of Constitutional Law” (1991) 16 L. & Soc. Inquiry 345 Google Scholar; Trubek, David M., “Reconstructing Max Weber’s Sociology of Law” (1985) 37 Stan. L. Rev. 919 Google Scholar; and Tronto, Joan, “Law and Modernity: The Significance of Max Weber’s Sociology of Law” (1984) 63 Texas L. Rev. 48 Google Scholar.

10. Thus the emphasis on consensus in this passage does not chase away the cloud of coercion that hovers over Weber’s efforts. Elsewhere in SL, Weber evaluates validity in terms of the relative compliance of subjects with the law, as measured empirically and factually (SL 311). This approach is ultimately indifferent as to whether compliance with the law is secured through the coercion of subjects to whom it is applied, or as a result of the latter’s subjective belief in the law. Both are of sociological interest. Weber initially attempts to distinguish the blatantly coercive aspect of this definition from the freely believed-in aspect of it. Yet he finally collapses the two since he concludes that all law is to some extent based upon force: The distinction between an order derived from voluntary agreement and one which has been imposed is only relative ( Weber, , Economy and Society, supra note 1 at 37 Google Scholar; cf., also at 214).

11. This passage does not of course, reflect Weber’s more complicated theories of political participation and democracy. In fact, Peter Breiner derives a rather substantive democratic theory from Weber, ’s work in Max Weber and Democratic Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

12. In the German context, the 19th century Rechtsstaat refers to the period from the initial consolidation of the Kaiserreich to the onset of the Great War (1867-1914). See Korioth, Stefan’s introduction to the section, “The Shattering of Methods in Late Wilhelmine Germany” in Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis 41 at 43 Google Scholar.

13. A recent theorization of constitutions as coordination mechanisms that shares commonalties with Weber’s account is Hardin, Russell, Liberalism, Constitutionalism, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. See Benhabib, Seyla, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) at 252 Google Scholar; and Fraser, Nancy, Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

15. On the excesses and limits of this kind of analysis—in which Weber and Weber scholarship has played no small part—see Yack, Bernard, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought (South Bend , IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. On Weber specifically, see Roth, Guenther & Schluchter, Wolfgang, Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

16. Again, as Sven Eliaeson points out Weber rarely used the word Rechtsstaat because he associates natural-law normativism with the term. See Eliaeson, , “Constitutional Caesarism: Weber’s Politics in their German Context” in Turner, , ed., supra note 8 at 137Google Scholar and 139. However, since Weber describes the bourgeois formal law in the precise terms of the structural characteristics of the Rechtsstaat, I deem it appropriate for use in this context.

17. Friedman, Kathi V. reconstructs and responds to Weber’s conception of law and the Sozialstaat, and applies it to post-WWII conditions in Legitimation of Social Rights and the Western Welfare State: A Weberian Perspective (Chapel Hill , NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

18. On this crucial aspect of Weber’s methodology, see Hekman, Susan J., Weber, the Ideal Type, and Contemporary Social Theory (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983)Google Scholar. Berman and Reid argue that Weber’s use of ideal types led to important insights but also serious distortions of legal history, what they call an unhistorical use of legal history: see “Max Weber as Legal Historian” in Turner, , ed., supra note 8 at 223Google Scholar and 231.

19. See, on the right, Hayek, Friedrich, Law, Liberty, Legislation, 3 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and on the left, Neumann, Franz L. & Kirchheimer, Otto, The Rule of Law Under Siege: Selected Essays, ed. by Scheuerman, William (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar. The infamous jurist Carl Schmitt, in some sense a student of Weber, celebrated and revived the archaic air of such authority. See Schmitt, , Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (orig. 1922), trans. Schwab, George (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1985)Google Scholar, and McCormick, John P., Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

But it should be noted that Weber makes several claims that qualify any mechanical equating of his formally-inclined critique of the Sozialstaat with those of neo-conservatives and authoritarians. Weber’s distinction between administration and legislation rests on a more fundamental one between formal and substantive law. Substantive law involves state interference into the life, liberty, or property of the citizens, while formal law corresponds to the fact that it is issued from the legislature, irrespective of its contents (see the note by editors, Roth & Wittich: SL 662, n.9.). This means that for Weber, as opposed to Schmitt and Hayek, there are laws that are substantive, which are not automatically decrees or measures. Measures, in the continental sense, do not interfere with civil liberties and hence need not be valid in a formal sense, that is, sanctioned by statute. They are simply administrative acts like those which set the budget. However, tax and customs provisions must be passed by statute, that is, they must conform to formal validity (SL 663, n. 9). The other theorists mentioned above attempt to hold hostage a social democratic state or liberal welfare state to a notion of law that can never concretely address the economic needs of a market or an industrial society. In other words, such a state can never redistribute wealth or regulate prices, as just two examples, without being charged with lawlessness. As perilously close as Weber veers to such positions, his definition of law is not so rigidly formal as to level charges against the Sozialstaat identical to Schmitt or Hayek.

20. On these criticisms of the welfare state, see Cristi, Renato, “Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law” (1984) 17 Can. J. Pol. Sci. 311 Google Scholar; and Scheuerman, Bill, “The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek” (1997) 4 Constellations 234 Google Scholar. In a more leftist vein, these are the conditions that make possible Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s immanent critique of the administrative state/society through an ostensible tracing it back to primitive social forms and Homeric epics—a critique that is too often taken literally and at face value. See Adorno, T.W. & Horkheimer, Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment (orig.1944), trans. Cummings, John (London: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar.

21. This approach to law is most fully elaborated in the 20th century context by Luhmann, Niklas, A Sociological Theory of Law, trans. King, Elizabeth & Albrow, Martin (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985)Google Scholar.

22. See Baehr, Peter, ed., The Portable Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000)Google Scholar. On this aspect of her thought see Fenichel Pitkin, Hanna, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt Concept of the Social (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar; while serious mitigating concerns on this point are raised by Benhabib, Seyla’s The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (London: Sage, 1996)Google Scholar.

23. Legal theorists of the right and left who agree with this depiction of juridical reality and do not necessarily think of it as a bad thing are, respectively, Carl Schmitt and the lawyers associated with the Critical Legal Studies movement (CLS): see Schmitt, , Political Theology, and Legality and Legitimacy (1932), trans. Seitzer, Jeffrey; intro. McCormick, John P. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and the CLS compendium, Boyle, James. ed., Critical Legal Studies (New York: New York University Press, 1994)Google Scholar. On the similarities and differences between these legal approaches, see McCormick, John P., “Three Ways of Thinking ‘Critically’ about the Law” (1999) 93 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 413 Google Scholar.

24. See Selznick, Philip, Law, Society and Industrial Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1980)Google Scholar.

25. Weber seems to read his historical evidence here and elsewhere through Nietzsche’s account of the rise of morality and law from injury in The Genealogy of Morals. See Nietzsche, Friedrich, Basic Writings, ed. and trans. Kaufmann, Walter (New York: Random House, 1968)Google Scholar.

26. See “The Profession and Vocation of Politics” and “Parliament and Government in Germany Under a New Political Order” in Lassman, Peter & Speirs, Ronald, eds., Weber, , Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 309 Google Scholar and 130.

27. On the conceptual distinction between, yet mutual deployment of, separation of powers and checks and balances, see Manin, Bernard, “Checks, Balances and Boundaries: The Separation of Powers in the Constitutional Debate of 1787 in Biancamaria Fontana”, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

28. Sally Ewing argues against interpretations that claim that Weber considered English Common Law as irrational jurisprudence. She shows that Weber recognized that English empiricism contributed greater calculability to the common law than, for instance, Kadi-like systems. See Ewing, , “Formal Justice and the Spirit of Capitalism: Max Weber’s Sociology of Law” (1987) 21 L. & Soc. Rev. 487 Google Scholar.

29. See Weber, “The Profession and Vocation of Politics, and Parliament and Government”, supra note 26.

30. On corporatism generally, see Wiarda, Howard J., Corporatism and Comparative Politics: The Other Great Ism (Armonk, NJ: M.E. Sharpe, 1997)Google Scholar; and with a more recent focus: Streeck, Wolfgang & Schmitter, Philippe C., eds., Private Interest Government: Beyond Market and State (London: Sage, 1985)Google Scholar; and Teulings, Coen N. & Hartog, Joop, Corporatism or Competition?: Labour Contracts, Institutions and Wage Structures in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. See Sung Kim, Ho, “‘In Affirming Them, He Affirms Himself’s Politics of Civil Society” (2000) 28 Pol. Theory 197 Google Scholar.

32. A more serious treatment of the Khadis, or the religious courts of Islam, can be found in Coulson, Noel J., Conflicts and Tensions in Islamic Jurisprudence (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

33. See Müller, Ingo, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich, trans. Lucas Schneider, Deborah (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. Weber’s prophecy would be both re-issued and fulfilled by Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy, supra note 23.

34. See Hirst, Paul Q., ed., The Pluralist Theory of the State: Selected Writings of G.D. Cole, J.N. Figgis, and H.J. Laski (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar.

35. See Korioth, supra note 12. He introduces essays by Weber, Jellinek, Kelsen, and Schmitt from the first decade of the 20th century that grapple with the limits of formally positivist conceptions of judicial application.

36. See Caldwell, supra note 2.

37. See Stolleis, Michael, “Die Entstehung des Interventionsstaates und das öffentliche Rechtsstaat” (1989) 11 Zeitschrift für neuere Rechtsgeschichte 129 Google Scholar.

38. A recent example of the long tradition focusing on Weber’s fixation on antinomial or incommensurable principles is Patrick Diggins, John, Max Weber: Politics and the Spirit of Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 1996)Google Scholar.

39. On the specific ways that Weber misses the compatibility of Sozialstaat practices and legal standards, see Kettler, & Meja, , supra note 9 at 329–31 Google Scholar. On this issue in general: in the European context, see Teubner, Günther, ed., Dilemmas of Law and the Welfare State (New York: de Gruyter, 1988)Google Scholar, and MacCormick, Neil, Legal Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and in the US context, Sunstein, Cass R., After the Rights Revolution: Reconceiving the Regulatory State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990)Google Scholar, Sunstein, , Free Markets and Social Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; and Ackerman, Bruce, Social Justice and the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

40. For explorations along these lines, see the following contributions to Horowitz, Asher & Maley, Terry, eds., The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, viz., David Beetham, “Max Weber and the Liberal Political Tradition” and Tracy Strong, “Max Weber and the Bourgeoisie”.

41. See Mann, Michael, The Sources of Social Power: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for the US context see Adamic, Louis, Dynamite: A Century of Class Violence in America, 1830-1930 (New York: Left Bank Distribution, 1990)Google Scholar.

42. On the status of law and democracy in the present context of globalization and European integration, see: Held, David, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Hirst, Paul & Thompson, G., Globalisation in Question: The International Economy and the Possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Sassen, Saskia, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: New Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Rawls, John, The Law of Peoples: with The Idea of Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999)Google Scholar; MacCormick, Neil, Questioning Sovereignty: Law, State, and Nation in the European Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weiler, J.H.H., The Constitution of Europe: Do the Clothes Have an Emperor? and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Mancini, G.F., Democracy and Constitutionalism in the European Union (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000)Google Scholar; Alter, Karen J., Establishing the Supremacy of European Law: The Making of an International Rule of Law in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Eder, Klaus & Giesen, Bernhard, eds., European Citizenship: National Legacies and Transnational Projects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

43. Exceptions are Christian Joerges and Andrew Moravcsik, who basically argue that, to use my terms, the Rechtsstaat and Sozialstaat are inappropriate models of comparison for evaluating, respectively, the legal and political dimensions of the EU. See Joerges, & Neyer, Jürgen, “From Intergovernmental Bargaining to Deliberative Political Processes: The Constitutionalization of Comitology” (1997) 3 Eur. L. J. 273 Google Scholar; and Moravcsik, , In Defense of the Democratic Deficit: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union (2002) 40 J. Common Market Stud. 603 Google Scholar.

44. See Joerges, Christian & Vos, Ellen, eds., EU Committees: Social Regulation, Law and Politics (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 1999)Google Scholar; and Sabel, Charles F. & Cohen, Joshua, “Directly-Deliberative Polyarchy” 3 (1997) Eur. L. J. 313 Google Scholar.

45. See Streeck, Wolfgang & Schmitter, Philippe C., eds., Private Interest Government: Beyond Market and State (London: Sage, 1985)Google Scholar; and Teulings, Coen N. & Hartog, Joop, Corporatism or Competition?: Labour Contracts, Institutions and Wage Structures in International Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.