Biological Aspects of Social Order
Turner & Factor on social sciences, Ihering, Weber, Nietzsche
Turner and Factor wrote:
The divergence in Weber’s and Ihering’s views of animal behavior is revealing … In the first edition of his book, Ihering had insisted that two fundamental differences between animals and humans were that animals used other animals only as means and that animals do not learn and transmit their learnings. In later editions he recanted both claims. In particular, he recognized many cases of mutual aid and he accepted that “even the idea of society, i.e. of regulated living together for the purpose of pursuing common ends, already appears in the animal world” ([1877] 1913:59). In this case, as elsewhere, Ihering is satisfied to infer purpose, on the basis of apparently purposive behavior. He refuses to deny the animals’ “purposing power the name of will because of a defective self-consciousness which is less complete than man’s own” ([1877] 1913:6). Even “the idea of a future event,” which is readily attributed to animals, he argues, “means an idea subsumed under the category of possibility,” and this implies the “use of the categories of purpose and of means” and therefore the control of these by “understanding”.
Weber considered such imputations of purpose to be epistemically unwarranted anthropomorphization. Like Ihering, he accepts that “many animals ‘understand’ commands, anger, love, hostility, and react to them in ways which are evidently often by no means purely instinctive and mechanical and in some sense both consciously meaningful and affected by experience” ([1922] 1978:15–16). But where Ihering used this fact to collapse animal behavior into the category of purposive action, Weber’s strategy was more complex. He suggests that “biological analogies” may prove suggestive in connection with “the question of the relative role in the early stages of human social differentiation of mechanical and instinctive factors, as compared with that of the factors which are accessible to subjective interpretation generally”.
He argues that these factors are “completely predominant” in the earlier stages of human development. But he also claims that they are “often of decisive importance” in later stages, particularly in connection with “traditional action” and charisma. He observes, for example, that “the seeds of certain types of psychic ‘contagion’” are at the root of “many aspects of charisma,” and claims that they “are very closely related to phenomena which are understandable either only in biological terms or can be interpreted in terms of subjective motives only in fragments” ([1922] 1978:17). Compared with Ihering, this is quite a drastic extension of the domain of the biological. Moreover, this reasoning went hand in hand with the expression of strong doubts about the relevance of “interpretation in terms of subjective motives” to understanding phenomena that are primarily determined by biological causes. At one point he remarks that “In a way our ability to share the feelings of primitive men is not very much greater” than our ability to share those of animals ([1922] 1978:16) .…
… The effect of Weber’s alternative picture of human conduct is to place conscious intentions and biological causes on par with one another. Each can serve as a cause of human conduct, but in most cases the determinants are largely or wholly biological. Action, as Weber depicts it, is a small island of self-conscious intentionality in a sea of conduct which is determined largely biologically— “reaction,” “habit,” and the like. Most of the island is itself a swamp, made up of a kind of quasi-action, largely determined — causally — by the biological forces of habit and reaction but distinguished from purely habitual and reactive conduct by the fact that there is some “meaning,” often only dimly apprehended by the agent, to the action.
Our intellectual access to these quasi-actions — the possibility of our “understanding” it is limited. Understanding is understanding “meaning,” and these quasi-actions are on the borderline of the meaningless. In some cases— charisma, the doings of primitive man, and group feeling or contagion — we are simply unable to “understand”. The causes are not “meaningful” but are rather biological, and “meaning” is not a clear guide to causation in these cases …
… When Weber … characterizes the subject matter of the sociological point of view, namely action, in terms of facts about causality and claims about which actions are and are not predominantly determined by biological causes …
… We know, simply as a result of our general familiarity with human beings, that some of what does not match may be attributed to biological causes, though we may be vague about what the precise scientific character of these causes might be …
In the great majority of cases actual action goes on in a state of inarticulate half-consciousness or actual unconsciousness of its subjective meaning. The actor is more likely to be “aware” of it in a vague sense than he is to “know” what he is doing or to be explicitly self-conscious about it. In most cases his action is governed by impulse or habit. Only occasionally and, in the uniform action of a large number of individuals, often only in the case of a few individuals, is the subjective meaning of the action, whether rational or irrational, brought clearly into consciousness. The ideal type of meaningful action where the meaning is fully conscious and explicit is a marginal case. ([1922] 1978:21–2)
… For Nietzsche, “originally…everything was custom, and whoever wanted to elevate himself above it had to become lawgiver and medicine man and a kind of demi-god: that is to say he had to make customs — a dreadful, mortally dangerous thing!” ([1881] 1982: aph. 9). Weber’s variation on this image appears in his commentary on the categories “Law, Convention, and Custom [Sitte],” which is devoted to the traditional problem of the relation of custom to law. Weber makes the Nietzschean point that “The further we go back in history, the more we find that conduct, and particularly social action, is determined in an ever more comprehensive sphere exclusively by orientation to what is customary.” He adds to this another Nietzschean premise, to the effect that there is a biological basis for conformity — a basis not mentioned in his main exposition of his classification of action. “Deviation from the customary,” he says, acts “on the psyche of the average individual like the disturbance of an organic function” ([1922] 1978:320).
Reactions themselves are quasi-biological responses which demand no sociological accounting. So the force of morality is rooted in biology. Indeed, morality itself appears to be a quasi-biological phenomenon. At one point Weber comments that “Perhaps, a rudimentary conception of ‘duty’ may be determinative in the behavior of some domestic animals to a greater extent than may be found in aboriginal man, if we may use this highly ambiguous concept in what is in this context a clearly intelligible sense” ([1922] 1978:321). Of course, this claim opens up the series of methodological puzzles familiar from Ihering’s discussions of animals. One problem is attribution. Weber, as we have seen, was restrictive, at least in principle, with respect to the attribution of purposes in the absence of conscious awareness of purposes. He restates this objection here. “It would be,” he says, “far-fetched…to assume in every…case [of human or animal reactions to deviance] the existence of a consensually valid norm, or that the action in question would be directed by a clearly conceived conscious purpose” ([1922] 1978:321). But here the objection is interpreted to mean that the fact that there are reactions to deviance does not show that there is a hidden purpose behind these reactions. The causal force behind the reactions that sustain orders is to be found instead in the presumably organic fact of “inhibitions against innovation,” the effects of which “can be observed even today by everyone in his daily experiences” ([1922] 1978:321) …
… The facts of “inhibition” are presumably universal, and universally observable. However, they might be conceived differently by the people of other cultures or epochs, they are phenomena visible to them — like other phenomena of biology …
… The phenomenon of inhibition and reaction is indeed from the point of view of sociology an explanatory asymmetry or dead end. It accounts for sociological facts, yet it cannot be sociologically accounted for. But the reason for this is that they are facts of a different kind — biological causes, which happen to operate at the edge of action and consciousness and mix within conscious and semi-conscious action …
… The genealogical relation between this biologically grounded causal force and conscious belief is this: people come to consciousness of the fact that they share reactions with others, and there is a
point of transition from the stage of mere custom to the, at first vaguely and dimly experienced, “consensual” character of social action, or, in other words, to the conception of the binding character of certain accustomed modes of conduct. ([1922] 1978:320)
… Conscious beliefs in binding norms themselves are then given “strong support” by these “inhibitions.” So conscious conceptualization strengthens or focuses the force that is already there, typically by sacralizing, in accordance with the generalized belief in the sacredness of custom …
… Weber thus does arrive at an answer to the question that puzzled Ihering, the question of how obligations arise. The problem is defined out of sociology — it cannot be solved in terms of “action.” But it can be solved by reference to biology. Weber’s answer works by inverting the problem. Instead of starting with practices and explaining how they come to be obligatory, as in Ihering’s paradigm case of tipping (a paradigm as well of normative functionalism in sociology), Weber starts with the dim sense of consensus and the fact of “reaction” to deviance from it. He does not need to explain how the sense of bindingness first appears, because it is given in the “organic” facts of reaction against innovation. Ihering’s model required his tippers to be conscious of mutual benefit. To recognize a mutual benefit is a cognitive or conceptual achievement, parallel to the recognition of the necessity of law, and it is difficult to see how the element of obligation becomes attached. Weber avoids any such complex hypothesis. The empirical recognition and conceptualization of observed common reactions is no more mysterious than any inference from observation … No complex insights involving the recognition of beneficial social consequences are required by Weber’s account …
… For Weber, there is no normative “problem of order” at the social, much less the “economic,” level, because it has already been resolved at the organic level. Sitten [manners] do not have to be created; they are already there in the nascent form of consistent reactions against behavioral innovation …
… As with action, Weber does not attempt to systematically describe the distribution of actual uniformities of action on this conceptual map. But he makes a number of comments that make it clear that the actions that make up “uniformities” are rarely cases of action proper, that is to say fully conscious intentional acts in which the intention is the cause. The true causes are such things as the inconveniences that result from failure to conform. The violation of customary morality is not, as Ihering or Tönnies would have it, upheld by some sort of social will that manifests itself in the expression of disapproval of deviant acts. For Weber, the cause of the force of disapproval is not “social” at all. It is rather a blind biological negative reaction to innovation. Weber says that this biological response is easily observed and is part of everyday experience. He treats these causal phenomena not as rare but as ubiquitous, even in modern society …
… Weber, as we have seen, rejected the image of early humans as animals needing to be tamed; they were, on the contrary, self-taming, driven by biological forces to react against deviance. For Ihering, force plays a continuing role in the evolution of legal order, for the simple reason that there are always potential conflicts between interests, including the “social” interest, and the law …
… The issues here are complex. But they can be grasped simply in terms of the primordial situation of the pre-legal social herd inhibited by its biological bias against innovation and biologically inclined to “react” to deviance. To overcome this force for stability by “making new Sitten,” as Nietzsche says, one cannot simply rely on the tendencies of the human herd. Some new force must be added, something which compels “recognition” even in the face of the biological bias against it …
… The systematic process of conceptual substitution that Weber undertakes with ideas like legal validity and justice and the externality of obligation and the demands of morality proceeds by replacing … teleologically tinged ideas with categories involving such biological facts as blind, directionless “reactions” to deviance and such things as semi-conscious “decisions” to accept “values” as binding. At the end of this process of conceptual substitution, we have a fully developed alternative to the categories of Ihering and, by extension, the categories of the legal tradition, Naturrecht, utilitarianism, and teleological social theory generally. This new scheme of categories ends up with some leftover phenomena that cannot easily be explained in its terms, such as the powerful message of leaders speaking in God’s name or in the name of higher justice. But what is left over — the unexplained remainder — is something quite different than what Weber’s competitors wished to explain …
… The concept of charisma is Weber’s attempt to deal with these phenomena, or at least what is left of them after he categorizes “uniformities of action.” To be sure, it is not an overall substitute for the concept of a supra-individual “moral” force — Weber’s new category scheme and his accounts of the causal bases of the various uniformities of action suffice to account for much of the domain that the idea of a supra-individual moral force was constructed to explain. Yet, “charismatic” phenomena clearly cannot be explained in the terms that most “uniformities of action” can be explained, namely self-interest and convenience …
… Weber … makes charisma a “type” to be used for “understanding”. To be sure, as is the case with his comments on uniformities of action, he makes “causal” comments about charisma. These suggest that charisma, in actual cases, is a kind of compound of conscious motives that lead a person to “recognize” and become devoted to a leader and quasi-biological phenomena (such as imitation and contagion) ([1922] 1978: 23–4, 242) …
… Weber simply did not believe that any sort of sociological evidence or reasoning could overcome a fundamental question: whether the purposes we can attribute to people are the real causes of their actions. “Real causes” is a peculiar phrase to use in connection with Weber. But it is nevertheless apt, for Weber’s concern is that “meaningful” explanations may often merely mask biological, psychophysical, and other causes, the “reality” of which he makes no attempt to deny ([1922] 1978:321) …
… Bacon “wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor”, in Harvey’s famous phrase. Weber, we have argued here, thought of social science like a lawyer. His academic contemporaries in Germany, France, and the United States sought, in various ways, to make social theory scientific and to make sociology a science. The ideas they had about what sort of “science” of society was possible were diverse. Some simply identified science with the elimination of superstitious and theological elements. Others saw in the relationships that had been established by the social statisticians of the nineteenth century the basis of a hope that laws, like the laws of physics, could be discovered underlying social life. Others thought of “science” on the model of philosophy, and sought first principles or organizing concepts, such as “the social,” on which a science could be founded. Still others thought that the analogy between the organism of society and biological organisms made biology a model for sociology. Others thought that reducing social facts to other, “harder”, facts, such as the supposedly determining facts of race and physical environment, would make social life scientifically comprehensible.
Weber was free of these ambitions. He gave “sociological” historical explanations and constructed sociological categories, and wrote critically on questions of “methodology.” But he did not erect an ideal social science to which he urged others to aspire. He considered the limitations and prospects of the social science he himself practiced to coincide with the limitations of the possibility of social science, and sought in his methodological writings to understand these limits. What he understood was that social science is not a special heightened form of knowledge, but a cognitive enterprise with much in common with the sorts of cognitive enterprises that already existed, notably jurisprudence and the legal determination of responsibility …
… The focus of much of the literature on Weber as a value thinker has been on the idea of meaning and the associated idea that the seeking of meaning is a fundamental, quasi-telic, human property. But as we have seen, Weber’s image of human nature is altogether less flattering. The conscious strivings of individuals are for Weber a small portion of conduct. This is not to say that the effects of ideas and the like are not important, but that for the most part conduct is governed by biology. Indeed, Weber may be usefully regarded as one of the irrationalists of the late nineteenth century, along with Pareto, Gabriel Tarde, and LeBon. The denials that Weber issues about the possibility of making the behavior of primitive peoples intelligible, and the grounds he gives for this, namely that they are governed primarily by biological forces, are indicative, as are his assertions about the mixed causal character of daily action in more advanced eras …
… [Comparing] Weber with Ihering with respect to the explanation of the conduct of animals, what Weber believed was that it was a mistake to attribute purposes … and indeed that it was an “imposition” to attribute purposes to the kinds of quasi-actions that make up the bulk of human conduct. It was an “imposition” because the causes were mixed, and the attributed intention represented only part of the cause …
… The major concepts that Weber introduced in place of the concepts of telic social theory rely on the idea that in most if not all actual cases the causes of social action were mixed. In the case of charisma, the causes are familiar from the crowd psychology of the time and are interpreted by Weber as biological rather than “sociological.” They include such things as “contagion.” The same holds for the basis of “morality”, which rests in large part on biologically rooted “reaction”. Order, for Weber, was assured by the biological fact of the reactive repression of “deviant” conduct. The mold-breaking actions of the heroic charismatic leader could transform morality and standards of legitimacy … Material interests, of course, are largely rooted in biology as well.
But Weber was very far from being a biological determinist. Though he carefully circumscribed his claims about their causal importance, he gave a considerable role in historical development to fully conscious intentional actions and their semi-conscious counterparts. In the realm of values, this led not to the rational recognition of a single good, as in Ihering, but to the recognition of the rational necessity of arbitrary choice or faith. The instrumental rationalization of one domain of thought after another was a central theme in Weber’s historical account of Western civilization, and the impediments that prevented this process were a central focus of his studies of non-Western civilization. But rationalization was not and could not be a new telos.
The Source:
Stephen P. Turner and Regis A. Factor, Max Weber: The Lawyer as Social Thinker, Routledge 1994 [pp. 32-41, 82-86, 101, 107, 114, 152, 157, 165-166]
The Source’s References:
Rudolph Von Ihering, ([1877] 1913) Law as a Means to an End, vol. I, 4th edn, trans. I. Husik, New York: Macmillan.
Friedrich Nietzsche, ([1881] 1982) Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J.Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, Max ([1922] 1978) Economy and Society: an Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. E.Fischoff et al., eds. G.Rothand C.Wittich, 2 vols, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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