Abstract
Among historians of ideas, any number of ‘elective affinities’ have been sought between Weber and his predecessors or contemporaries. Here I suggest another: between Weber’s formulations of the relationships between church, sect and democracy and certain themes in Dostoyevsky’s writing. Dostoyevsky was not a central influence on Weber, but we do know that he had read and discussed The Brothers Karamazov, making explicit reference to it on more than one occasion.3 We know from Honigsheim that scarcely a week passed without Dostoyevsky’s name being heard at the Webers’ Sunday gatherings.4 What Weber ‘took’ from Dostoyevsky is perhaps no more than what he tried to take from any great novelist: an awareness of the tragic irreconcilability of opposed value positions and a corresponding ability to do equal justice to rival world-views. As one who was religiously ‘unmusical’, nowhere would his admiration have been greater than in Dostoyevsky’s treatment of lives lived according to, or in defiance of, religious precepts.5
if, with the Romans, we understand being alive as synonymous with inter homines esse (and sinere inter homines esse as being dead), then we have the first important clue to the sectarian tendencies in philosophy since the time of Pythagoras: withdrawal into a sect is the second-best cure for being alive at all and having to live among men1
Hannah Arendt
When we received our commissions we were ready to shed our blood for the honour of our regiment, but scarcely any of us knew anything about the meaning of real honour, and if anyone had known it, he would have been the first to jeer at it2
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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Notes
H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicage: Chicago University Press, 1982), p. 23.
F. Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (London: Penguin, 1957), p. 377.
See Max Weber in his discussion of Ernst Troeltsch at the first German Sociological Society meeting, ‘Das stoisch-christliche Naturrecht und das moderne profane Naturrecht’, Verhandlungen des ersten deutschen Soziolgentages (Tübingen: Mohr, 1911), p. 199; PW, p. 361
Marianne Weber, Max Weber (New York: Wiley, 1975), p. 490.
P. Honigsheim, ‘Max Weber in Heidelberg’, in R. König and J. Winckelmann, Max Weber zum Gedächtnis (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1964), p. 241.
M. Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: California University Press, 1978), pp. 54–5, 1163–4, 1196–8, 1204–10.
See G. Poggi, Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit. Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’ (London: Macmillan, 1983).
J. Alexander, ‘The Cultural Grounds for Rationalisation’, in his Structure and Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
See W. Hennis, Max Weber. Essays in Reconstruction (London: Allen & Unwin, 1989)
L. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
This view, it has to be admitted, is not common in the literature which overwhelmingly discusses parliamentary democracy as a proving ground for statesmen. See W. J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984)
R. Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism (Tampa: University Press of Florida, 1983).
But see also L. Scaff, ‘Max Weber’s Politics and Political Education’, American Political Science Review, 67 (1973), pp. 128–41.
E. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936), pp. 91, 94.
E. Troeltsch, ‘Das stoisch-christliche Naturrecht und das moderne profane Naturrecht’ Verhandlungen des ersten deutschen Soziologentages (Tübingen: Mohr, 1911), pp. 169–73.
Translated as’ stoic-Christian Natural Law and Modern secular Natural Law’, in O. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957).
G. Simmel, ‘The Conflict of Modern Culture’, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1971).
See the letter to Harnack of 1906 quoted by Jaspers in his On Max Weber (New York: Paragon House, 1989), pp. 168–9.
D. H. Lawrence, in R. Wellek ed., Dostoyevsky (New York: Prentice Hall, 1962), p. 94.
K. Mannheim, ‘The Democratisation of Culture’, From Karl Mannheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)
This theme is brilliantly explored by Norbert Elias in The Germans (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).
G. Tarde, On Communication and Social Influence (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969), pp. 177–91.
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Turner, C. (1999). Weber and Dostoyevsky on Church, Sect and Democracy. In: Whimster, S. (eds) Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27030-9_8
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