Abstract
Amidst the recent resurgence of interest in religion as one of the main ‘sources of the self’, Max Weber’s argument in the Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie can make an important contribution. The importance of individuation 1 to the rise of capitalism in Weber’s account has usually been related to the process of autonomisation of the individual from the ‘community of blood’ that took place in the Jewish-Christian tradition in the West. The author argues that Weber in fact proposed a much more sophisticated reconstruction of the processes of individuation than is commonly supposed. By means of a comparative reconstruction of the relation between religion, individual and society in several cultural contexts, Weber proposed a complex analysis of different processes of individuation, in which the notion of ‘personality’ plays a crucial role.
Introduction
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of both public and academic interest in religion. This renewed interest is due in particular to the role that religion has increasingly played in mobilising political participation, particularly in the last decade. A key element of interest and concern for what has been termed a post-secular turn (Habermas, 2008) has been the fact that religion is regarded as still being an important factor in identity formation, or one of the main ‘sources of the self’, to paraphrase Taylor’s appropriate formula (Taylor, 1992). The role of religion in the shaping of an inner self also had, however, a foundational role for sociology itself. The study of the religious roots of subjectivation occupied large and crucial parts of the work of its founding fathers, from Karl Marx to Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel and Max Weber. By means of their investigation into the role played by religious belief as a privileged medium of primary socialisation and individuation, they provided crucial elements for the understanding of their mechanisms and of the dialectic between individual and society.
In this article, I aim particularly to address Max Weber’s writings on religion in terms of their treatment of the role played by religions in shaping the individual’s self. Weber’s hypothesis regarding the religious dimensions of individuation is still crucial to contemporary sociological readings of the renaissance of religion, as it helps us to understand the intimate dynamics between social conditions, economic and political structures, religious beliefs and personal identity.
In Weber’s Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Sociology of Religion) the importance of the process of ‘individuation’ was related above all to the rise of capitalism. Most readings thus have highlighted how such a process was associated with the emancipation of the individual from the ‘community of blood’ that took place in the Jewish-Christian tradition. Abercrombie, for instance, argues that, for Weber, ‘Christianity was more conducive to the rise of the individual than were other religions … [and that] individualism had its roots in the Judaic-Christian inheritance. It was thus peculiar to the West’ (Abercrombie et al., 1986: 16–17). However, this argument confuses what we could call the making of ‘individuals’ (i.e. the process of individuation) with a specific ideological formation, namely ‘individualism’. While the latter has certainly characterised the rise of capitalism and Western modernity, with its emphasis upon individuals’ autonomy and freedom, it is the former that is the more appropriate label for the process of ‘becoming individual’ to which Weber referred (albeit implicitely) in his studies on Weltreligionen. 2
We could thus start by noticing that, for Weber, while individualism could certainly be ascribed specifically to Western social formation, processes of individuation, albeit in different forms and especially with different results, took place also in the other cultural contexts that he analysed, particularly world religions. Weber detected the roots of both the rise and the absence of capitalism and modernity in different patterns of individuals’ formation.
In order to highlight this aspect of Weber’s work, I will first recall the main problematic of the Sociology of Religion by paying particular attention to Weber’s use and articulations of the concept of ‘personality’, which, as I argue, represents the golden thread of his analysis of world religions. I will then analyse the discussion in the Sociology of Religion of the different processes of individuation that Weber believed were to be found in ancient Judaism, Protestantism, Hinduism and finally Confucianism. The order of exposition adopted in this study, therefore, does not follow the organisation adopted in the Sociology of Religion. 3 Rather, I propose a thematic reading that attempts to focus on the essential elements of Weber’s fully developed concept of Western, ‘complete individuation’.
Religious ‘determinants’ of Weber’s lexicon of individuation
It is well known that Weber started the study and comparison of different religions and civilisations in order to corroborate his initial thesis: namely, that only Protestantism (and especially Calvinism) could give rise to modern capitalism, via the concept of Beruf and the theory of predestination. A ‘superstructural’ element was regarded as a crucial explanatory factor for the rise of a new economical system, thus setting Weber’s thinking against the structure-based explanations and economical determinism that he believed to be characteristic of Marxist accounts (see Salvadori, 1990).
By studying the main features of ancient Judaism, Protestantism, Hinduism and Confucianism, along with other ‘hetherodox’ Asian religions, Weber argued that they could not generate a forma mentis with an ‘elective affinity’ with capitalism, because of the different rationalisations of the world that they produced and, consequently, because of the diverse ‘personalities’ that they had helped to shape.
Weber did not provide an explicit and univocal definition of religion. The section on ‘The Sociology of Religion’ in Economy and Society indeed begins by stating that ‘to define “religion”, to say what it is, is not possible at the start of a presentation such as this’ (Weber, 1978: 399). Nonetheless, Weber characterised religion, or at least a function of it, in terms of a psychological ‘stamping’ (Prägung) that conditioned collective behaviour and that, in its turn, was conditioned by the social strata that bore different methods of salvation during the decisive moment of their formation. Thus, understanding religious doctrines meant also being able to trace them back to the social classes and groups of which they were expressions. As a consequence, the economic ethic (Wirtschaftsethik) was the result of causal reciprocity between the ‘socially determined interest situation and the psychologically determined interest situation’ (Weber, 1948: 281); namely, an expression of the interests and psychological incentives (Antriebe) of those groups and social classes that at determinate and determinant – or axial, to use Jaspers’ famous concept – historical conjunctures imposed a practical orientation on individuals’ behaviour.
For the purposes of the present essay, it is important to highlight how Weber’s pattern of explanation was threefold insofar as it conceived religion as the middle term between social and individual conditions. Social and political dimensions, in his view, were the elements responsible for shaping the very content and the essential characteristics of religious rationalisations (or theodicies). At the same time, religious rationalisations were translated into a coherent set of prescriptions and motives that forged individuals’ behaviour and personality.
Thus the concept of personality, which plays a crucial role in Weber’s reconstruction of religion’s historical role, is not conceivable without reference to the very social and political circumstances in which religions themselves arose. What precisely, however, does personality mean? Does it have a specific and privilegd status in Weber’s account of the subjective factors of historical development? By briefly answering these questions, I aim to clarify the specifity of Weber’s vocabulary and to provide an analytical map for understanding the main developments and results of his studies on religion that will be presented in the following paragraphs.
Weber uses the terms ‘individual’, ‘individuality’ and ‘personality’ at different moments. For instance, he employs the concept of individual (Individuum) along with the concept of person (Person) and, more often, of single (einzeln) in order to identify both the singular human being and the unity of analysis proper to the social sciences. The concept of individuality (Individualität) and especially of personality (Persönlichkeit), on the other hand, have a more defined profile. In general, the concept of individuality in German culture acquired its own specificity starting with Romaticism. Here it entailed a notion of ‘uniqueness, originality, self-realisation … in contrast to the rational, universal and uniform standards of the Enlightenment’ (Lukes, 1973: 17). As Lukes has noted, with the passing of time the concept of individuality, widespread in German culture in general, ‘soon became transformed into an organic and nationalistic theory’ of personality, nation, community and the state. It ended up being regarded as a manifestation of the spirit that tended to embody itself in more individualised forms – and not necessarily in more rational ones, as in Hegel (cf. Iggers, 1975). Thus, the notion of personality itself acquired the significance of full accomplishment of the individuality embodied in it, or the self-realisation of the individual. It was especially through education (Bildung) that a harmonious developed personality was supposed to be achieved.
Weber was much influenced by these notions of individuality and personality. He explicitely referred to the term Persönlichkeit as ‘a complex of constant motives’, to be conceived in relation to ultimate meanings and values of life that are translated into goals, transforming the acting individual into a rational individual.
‘Personality’ is a concept that finds its ‘essence’ in the consistency of its intimate relationship to certain ultimate ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ of life. These values and meanings have their effect by being forged into purposes and thereby translated into rational-teleological action. (Weber, 1968: 132)
In the light of this, religions had the role of shaping individuals as autonomous personalities inherently forged by a set of coherent motives. The concept of individuation (Individuation) then refers to the path through which an individual can develop a unitary individuality, namely a personality. In each study of the Sociology of Religion, we find outlined the elements distinctive to each religion that were translated into particular types of personality, forged along different paths of individuation.
Ethic particularism and religious universalism in the construction of the Jewish personality
For Weber, the roots of the process of formal rationalisation that characterises the West were to be found in the Jewish religion and in the particular relation that it instituted between God and the world.
Like most of the Semitic divinities, the God of the Hebrews initially had a naturalist and local character. Only with the passing of time did he assume a universal quality as the guarantor of the social order who made an agreement with the people of Israel. He was not the only God but simply the most important one. His strength derived especially from being the creator of the world and human beings.
The world was conceived as neither eternal nor unchangeable, but rather as being created. Its present structure was a product of man’s actions, above all those of the Jews, and God’s reaction to them. Hence the world was a historical product designed to give way to the truly God-ordained order. (Weber, 1967: 5)
The first element of rationalisation, therefore, could be traced back to the following fact: Judaism considered the world to be a historical product, the effect of an inscrutable will that could not be influenced through magical means or rituals, but must simply be followed by assuming an ethical and rational conduct of life according to the laws of God. In the Weberian reconstruction of the psychological connections that shaped the typical Hebrew character we can identify at least two elements that set the stage for the construction of personalities potentially oriented towards social change, although not towards a capitalist organisation of society.
The first element, which is also the more important one, is the anti-authoritarian trait that characterises the Jewish redemptive religion, orienting the personalities of its followers. This first element, for Weber, was impressed on ancient Judaism above all by the prophecy of doom. It was diffused in the ninth and tenth centuries BC as a reaction to the excesses of the monarchy, considered to be a betrayal of the orthodoxy of the berìt with God (see Parente, 1978). 4
With the passing of time, poor monarchical policy led to continuous tensions and discontent within Israelite society. According to Parente,
with the rise of the monarchy, the idea of alliance was extended to the lower classes and the ancient contraposition between semi-nomadic peasant and shepherd tribes … increased following the progressive urbanisation of the former, due especially to security reasons. Moreover, in the city, during the monarchy, the major articulation of economical life determined disparity between the various families by creating or increasing those social differences that we find denounced by the Prophets. Yet these denunciations are not formulated in the name of an abstract justice … Rather, these denunciations function as a re-affirmation of the need to restore the ancient pre-monarchical order which was based upon the berìt. (Parente, 1978: 1381)
In Parente’s observation we can find some key aspects for understanding the ambivalent character of anti-authoritarianism within prophecy; ambivalent in the sense that there was a tension between revolutionary and restorative impulses. In Weber’s reconstruction, ‘in status origin the prohets were diverse [uneinheitlich]. [However, i]t is out of the question that they were, for the most part, derived from proletarian or negatively privileged or uneducated strata’ (1952: 277). 5 The call for respect of the covenant with God and the non-sacredness of men’s laws had its origins also in ‘negatively privileged’ status that, in Weber’s view, is associated with the rise of religiosity of the ‘personal redeemer’. On the other hand, the anti-authoritarian character, which afterwards became an essential trait of Jewish Persönlichkeit, was possible because the divine legality to which it was necessary to orient one’s action was contrasted with human institutions. The accordance of authority with divine legality, therefore, was a condition for the de-sacralisation of the human institutions and for the possibility of challenging them. Redemptive prophecy challenged the established order by positing a divine natural absolute law as a religious duty, according to the principle that ‘we must obey God rather than men’. 6
The second important element in the constitution of Jewish personality was the fact that the community of faith was more important than the community of blood. Thus, there was a form of emancipation of the individual from the authority of family insofar as the first power with which prophecy came into conflict was the natural community of the family group. According to Weber, in ancient Judaism ‘the relationships of the sib and of matrimony have been, at least relatively, devalued. The magical ties and exclusiveness of the sibs have shattered, and within the new community the prophetic religion has developed a religious ethic of brotherliness’ (Weber, 1967: 329–333).
For Weber, the idea of a privileged relation with God by means of this agreement also contributed to the identification of Jews as a ‘pariah people’ (ein Pariavolk), that is, ‘a guest people who were ritually separated, formally or factually, from their social surroundings’ (1952: 3; trans. modified). The term pariah people designated the condition of marginality to which the Hebrews were confined but also, according to Weber, to which they had confined themselves. However, this condition also included a substantially revolutionary potentiality, which was a historical characteristic of peripheral conditions and of declassed social strata (cf. Schluchter, 1988).
However, in Weber’s reading, this anti-authoritarian characteristic and the condition of marginality as privileged positions from which new, radical ideas can be born were necessary but not sufficient conditions for the promotion of change and, in particular, the type of change in which Weber was interested: that is, the unique historical conjuncture with a universal character from which capitalism arose.
The doctrinal elements of ancient Judaism were not favourable to the development of inner worldly asceticism, nor to the idea of Beruf (both fundamental to the affirmation of the capitalist spirit) due to the latter’s ‘dual morality’, external and internal. This dual morality consisted of the assignment of different behaviours depending on whether the social and economic interaction occurred with a member of the faith or with a member of another religion. The promotion of a universalist religion alongside a particularist ethic and a particularist secular conduct, moreover, constituted the elements that obstructed the full realisation in Judaism of the rationality peculiar to the West. However, precisely in the antinomy between universalism of God (as the God of all human beings) and ethical particularism (only His people would enjoy His promise of salvation) there was hidden the particular component of ‘virtuoso religiosity’. It was the primary factor that made the Jews a pariah people; but it was also a legacy that remained in the doctrine of predestination.
The element that Weber thus found to be missing from the combination of potentially revolutionary ingredients was that of the individual and its centrality (Seidman and Gruber, 1977; Nelson, 1969). Judaism stressed ‘collective’ responsibility in the face of the berìt, with the effect of discouraging a process of integral ‘personal’ responsibility and the rise of radical individualism.
Ultimately, Weber contrasted Jewish eschatology and the theory of predestination in order to show that only the latter could have given rise to bourgeois individualism and, consequently, to capitalism. The search for salvation, for the Jew, was a collective hope, because he ‘anticipated his own personal salvation through a revolution of the existing social stratification to the advantage of his pariah people’ (Weber, 1978: 494). On the other hand, Calvinist doctrine was merciless, inhuman and characterised by a feeling of total solitude. As Weber argued, ‘it seems at first a mystery how the undoubted superiority of Calvinism in social organisation can be connected with this tendency to tear the individual away from the close ties with which he is bound to this world’ (Weber, 1930: 108). Hope for salvation for the Calvinist was therefore entirely individual and even though it could not be favoured by actions according to the laws of God, it could be nourished by worldly action in majorem Gloria Dei.
Individualism, anti-authoritarianism and particularism of grace: the Protestant Persönlichkeit
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber defined the features of the individuality that arose from ascetic Protestantism in ideal-typical terms. Its compendium was a structuration of personality organised around a unitarian ethical core that became the compass of acting in the world.
A socio-economical contextualisation of the Reformation is completely absent from the first monograph of Sociology of Religion. Nonetheless, Weber highlighted how the reformers’ followers – that is, the social groups that promoted the Protestant ethic practically and that Weber described as innovators – belonged to the petty-bourgeoisie of craftsmen. As in the case of the biblical prophets (or prophets of doom), the social group that supported such a doctrinal turning point did not belong to the ranks of the dominant classes. However, unlike the class that supported prophecy, it was a rising social group that carried out the Reformation.
This is certainly one of the reasons that led Protestantism to be deeply marked by the anti-authoritarian feature already present in ancient Judaism. The Protestant anti-authoritarian trait was, essentially, the manifestation of a political fight for economical power. Starting with Luther’s challenge of the authority of the Roman Church, this element accompanied the creation and organisation of all Protestant Churches.
For instance, while Weber refers to the historical struggle between the Stuarts and the first Puritan sects in England during the 17th century (when the laws were enacted that allowed some Sunday entertainment after the hours of religious devotion), he wrote that ‘the King’s threats of severe punishment for every attack on the legality of those sports were motivated by his purpose of breaking the anti-authoritarian ascetic tendency of Puritanism, which was so dangerous to the State’ (Weber, 1930: 167). 7
Beside this aspect, what constituted the particular and decisive sign of the Protestant character was the promotion of individualism as the ideology of the self-made man and as a universalist, non-discriminatory economical morality. The affirmation of ‘utilitarian’ radical individualism was possible, first, by means of a doctrine according to which salvation was an entirely private affair. The institution of a personal, direct relationship with God, by means of a personal reading of the holy texts, without priestly intermediary, was another step towards the delegitimisation of the authority of the Church’s ministers. However, it also promoted a more individualistic attitude as it forced the individual into a deeper personal reflection on him/herself and to the complete acceptance of responsibility for his/her actions. 8
This combination of radical individualism and anti-authoritarianism led to a paradoxical situation in which the human world was, on the one hand, discredited vis-a-vis the divine world and, on the other hand and at the same time, taken into greater consideration as the space in which signs of grace could be made visible. It is by means of this paradoxical fusion that Calvinism in particular developed the ‘inner-worldly asceticism’ that was at the origin of the doctrine of Beruf, predestination and certitudo salutis. Weber states this point clearly in the following passage:
The religious virtuoso can be placed in the world as the instrument of a God and cut off from all magical means of salvation. At the same time, it is imperative for the virtuoso that he ‘proves’ himself before God, as being called solely through the ethical quality of his conduct in this world. This actually means that he ‘proves’ himself to himself as well. No matter how much the ‘world’ as such is religiously devalued and rejected as being creatural and a vessel of sin, yet psychologically the world is all the more affirmed as the theatre of God-willed activity in one’s worldly ‘calling’ [Beruf]. For this inner-worldly asceticism rejects the world in the sense that it despises and taboos the values of dignity and beauty, of the beautiful frenzy and the dream, of purely secular power, and the purely worldly pride of the hero. Asceticism outlawed these values as competitors of the kingdom of God. Yet precisely because of this rejection, asceticism did not fly from the world, as did contemplation. Instead, asceticism has wished to rationalise the world ethically in accordance with God’s commandments … Rationally raised into a vocation [Beruf], everyday conduct becomes the locus for proving one’s state of grace. (Weber, 1948, pp. 290–291)
The refusal of the world and, at the same time, its re-affirmation as the place of confirmation of grace, were therefore central aspects to the rationalisation of economic activity and social change as permanent conditions of a society founded upon the de-sacralisation of its secular institutions and upon personal responsibility. Nevertheless, it was necessary that the same religious ethic that could give rise to such a Copernican revolution within the ethic-religious and worldly field also accomplished other important tasks. That is, it had to dismiss the magical, to abandon every foolish ambition of knowing the sense of the world and, therefore, every hope of changing the course of destiny with its own action. In other words, it was necessary to eliminate the concept of atonement and forgiveness.
Only an ethic that could promote rational conduct at such a level of mercilessness, for Weber, could have led to the impersonality of bureaucracy that characterises Western formal rationality. What permitted such a combination was not only an intrinsic anti-authoritarian element, potentially able to challenge tradition and already present in the Jewish-Christian personality, but especially the promotion of bourgeois individualism through the epocal shift that led – to use Benjamin Nelson’s (1969) effective formula – ‘from tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood’.
Weber highlighted this aspect especially in the pages of ‘“Churches” and “Sects” in North America’ and ‘Protestant Sects and the Spirit of Capitalism’. 9 Here, he completed his depiction of the Berufsmensch and of its relation to bourgeois individualism, aiming to provide another historical confirmation of his thesis. In the USA of the first decade of the 20th century, where aspiration to profit showed its ‘most extreme manifestation’, he saw again the original connection that promoted the rise of the bourgeois spirit and the most accomplished expression of capitalism. What emerges is a fascinating and contradictory picture that sheds more light on the type of individualism Weber thought to be at the origin of Western modernity.
In Weber’s eyes, despite the intuitive image of an atomised society, the USA was an intricate web of groups and sects, membership of which was a precondition for being admitted to the world of business. Thus Weber defined American society as a Sektengesellschaft. The reason for this ‘sectarian’ organisation, in Weber’s view, was to be found in the particularist conception of grace appertaining to ascetic Puritanism, according to which all human beings were equally outcast and insufficient from an ethical point of view, but not all had the same qualifications from a religious point of view. Only a few in the massa perditionis were called for salvation.
Therefore, the sectarian constitution of American society, seemingly a hybrid type between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in Tönnies’s terms (see Kim, 2000), favoured and emphasised elements that constituted the individual inclined to change and, above all, to capitalist organisation.
Sects were the place in which religious zeal was re-incited, in which a spirit of exclusivity and proud resistance to worldly institutions was cultivated, and in which individual affirmation was a precondition for social cohesion. Weber argued that
the ascetic conventicles and sects formed one of the most important historical foundations of modern ‘individualism’. Their radical break away from patriarchal and authoritarian bondage, as well as their way of interpreting the statement that one owes more obedience to God than to man, was especially important (Weber, 1948: 321).
The individual shaped by ascetic Protestantism, of which membership of a sect was an expression, also constituted the basis on which Weber defined the modern self as a manifestation of Vereinsmensch, ‘associational man’. This bourgeois individual, who emerges from the pages of his writings on Protestantism, is precisely the individual who can define him/herself only in relation to the group and more particularly to an acquired group (the community of faith) rather than to an ascribed group (the family). It is an essentially political, social individual, the Aristotelian politikon zoon, who, as Bobbio (1997) wrote, ‘is not considered in itself but only as a member of a social group, whatever it is (the family, the village or the polis)’. In this sense, the Vereinsmensch is qualitatively different from the subject of economic activity, which is the singular individual and which constitutes the starting point of methodological individualism.
Far from being a ‘doctrine’ of isolation and atomisation, modern individualism, in Weber’s depiction, was deeply characterised by a social-collective dimension. What was crucial to such an individualism, indeed, was precisely that the group to which the individual bounded him/herself was not an ascribed one. In this respect Weber recognised that other religions (such as Hinduism, as we will see) also promoted an individualised, personal search for salvation that could develop forms of individualism, or self-centeredness. Yet this factor alone was not sufficient, as the emancipation of the individual ‘from the close ties with which he is bound to this world’ turned out to be an element of decisive importance.
The solipsistic and conformist personality of Hinduism
In his study of India, Weber detected deviation from the tracks of a potential rational economical development in a capitalist sense primarily in the so-called ‘Hindu or Brahminic restoration’. This enabled the Hindu hierocracy (the Brahmins) to affirm themselves as the caste at the apex of the social pyramid. Moreover, in Weber’s view, it also promoted a doctrine which contributed greatly to the segregation of social relations, thus inhibiting the possibility of the onset of capitalism and of any kind of change.
In this case, the work Weber essayed was essentially the reconstruction of the complex Indian system of castes, the reasons for its affirmation and the ideology on which it was based. The extraordinary capacity of these prisons of ranks to ‘resist every assault of modernity’ appeared to him as crucial, with serious consequences for the social and economic system in general.
For Weber, the process of individuation in India is not understandable without a detailed analysis of the caste system and of the complex and refined intertwining of interests (especially those of the Brahmins) upon which it was based.
The Brahmins were priests and scholars of high status. They were initially employed in the administrative service, and they were able to affirm themselves as the only legitimate priestly rank. Initially, they promoted themselves as the personal priests of princes and nobles and then, thanks to systems of conservation of acquired position that they developed, they defined themselves as the priestly caste that was the only depositary of Vedic knowledge and paths to salvation. The social power of the Brahmins, therefore, was based especially upon their acquired position as the spiritual advisors of princes, and through the doctrinal principles they propagated they demonstrated themselves to be extraordinarily effective in preserving the status quo. Furthermore, Weber pointed to the necessity of religious and political groups for the promotion of a strictly segregated organisation in order to guarantee the stability of their position.
In order to analyse the way in which the type of rationalisation promoted by Hinduism addressed the practical conduct of life and shaped recognisable cores of personality, Weber referred essentially to three elements: the role of caste dharma and the doctrinal principles of samsara and karman. In India, the corpus of rules of action that ordered the social and political life of individuals was constituted by dharma, that is, ritual duty, the precepts of which changed according to the caste to which a person belonged. According to dharma, every change of profession or even of position could result in social debasement. A set of prescriptions of this type was not adequate to produce economic and technical transformations, or even simply to make their germination possible. What were the reasons that every change of social position was so strongly inhibited? Weber argued that these reasons were to be found in the two basic principles of the Hindu doctrine: the principle of the transmigration of souls (samsara) and the principle of compensation (karman). 10
The principle of samsara had its origins in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, according to which the soul was destined to be reborn in a series of successive lives. The specific individual existence in which it is incarnated each time depends upon the doctrine of compensation (karman), according to which
all (ritual or ethical) merits and faults of the individual formed a sort of ledger of accounts; the balance irrefutably determined the fate of the soul at rebirth, and this in exact proportion to the surplus of one or other side of the ledger. (Weber, 1958: 119)
These merits and faults consisted essentially in the individual’s respect or contravention of the dharma of the caste. The central idea, therefore, is that one’s present life is the result of how one has behaved in the previous one. It was especially on this point that Weber saw the decisive connection with the system of castes.
The interconnections between ritual duty (dharma) and the principles of karman and samsara, their reinforcement of the caste system and, thus, their inhibiting of change, led to a paradoxical result. On the one hand, Hindu doctrine, promoted by the priestly bureaucracy that had contributed to the creation of a caste-divided society, oriented the conduct of individuals in corporative terms. This was the case insofar as the individual was obliged to comply with the ritual duty of his/her caste in order to obtain a better re-birth of the soul. On the other hand, the search for salvation was entirely individualised; that is, it was contemplative, undertaken in solitude and detached from mundane interests. Moreover, the strong accent placed by Hinduism on personal responsibility for one’s reincarnation promoted an extreme form of individualism. In Weber’s words:
religious individualism [is] characteristic of all mystical holy seeking in the attainment of which the individual can and will, in the last analysis, help only himself. … Apart from the belief in predestination, the religious solitude of the single soul has never been placed on such a sounding-board as in this conclusion from Brahminical doctrine. In polar opposition to the belief in election by divine grace, this doctrine left it entirely to the individual soul to work out its own fate. (1958: 169)
In this passage, Weber points to an important difference between Hinduism and Protestantism. The type of individualism and personal responsibility promoted by Protestantism encourages an individual (rather than mediated) relation with the divine, a personal interpretation of the Holy books and a behaviour in the world oriented towards the search for confirmation of grace. In the last instance, however, the individual can do nothing in order to change his/her destinty, which is entirely decided by God, the sole and unique source of authority.
Hinduism, on the other hand, promotes an individual search for salvation that is undertaken in total solitude; its achievement is entirely a personal responsibility. At the same time, the tools of this search are not personally chosen, as the Hindu believer does not have direct access to the Holy books but needs an intermediary. Furthermore, this type of ‘religious individualism’, as Weber termed it, lacks any sort of anti-authoritarian idea, insofar as every action is dictated by the rules of the caste to which the individual belongs and which, in turn, is the caste that the individual has gained through his/her previous behaviour. It is indeed scarcely possible to think of a more ‘ascribed’ community or group than the one to which one belongs by birth and by necessity.
As a consequence, to Weber, the type of ‘individualism’ promoted by Hinduism was a form of extreme self-closure without any worldly appeal. In other words, the structure of the personality shaped by Hinduism was strongly marked by a major form of egotism and pursuit of particularist objectives. At the same time, it was oriented in a way that conformed completely to authority. Thus, it was a form of individualism better termed as solipsistic and conformist; a form of individualism, furthermore, that was accompanied by the most resolute denial of anti-authoritarianism.
The individualities that were constituted in South Asia thus appeared to Weber more like monads, singularly responsible for their faults and conditions. They were individualities adequate for the achievement of beatitude by means of the immanent purification of the human being, conceived as an absolute individual; but this form of extreme (or, as I have called it, solipsistic) individualism, for him, could not carry within itself the seeds of social change.
The ritualistic and gregarious individual of Confucian China
The study of China constitutes perhaps the most complete and persuasive of Weber’s four monographs on the sociology of religion. It is the text on which Weber worked for the longest time and to which he made the most numerous changes (see Schluchter, 1988). The final chapter of The Sociology of China is devoted to a systematic comparison between the ideal types of ascetic Puritanism and the Confucian ethic, with the aim of showing the differential element that accounted for the rise of capitalism in the West but not in China. It was in this study that Weber also analysed the role of hierocratic groups as ‘organic intellectuals’ – to use a term of Gramsci’s – of the ruling class.
Weber begins by analysing the strategical importance of intellectual rank in relation to those who had mastered the holy art of writing. He depicts the formation of this group as the result of a long process of territorial unification and administrative centralisation. The work of the cultured strata was essential for the administrative homogenisation of the empire. However, in order to avoid feudalisation, it was equally important that they did not demand the acquisition of the governed territories. Apart from the prohibition on the inheritance of administrative posts, the establishemnt of roots in the provinces was also discouraged by means of a system of time-limited assignments and destinations different from the places of origin of the mandarins.
It was in the light of these restrictions, both rational and dynamic, that Weber defined Chinese bureaucratic power in terms of rational-legal domination legitimated by formally constituted institutions. However, the element that could have constituted a dynamic aspect of the administration – namely, the mobility of the officials as an atidote to the crystallisation of interests – was the cause of major immobilism and of regression into administrative traditionalism. These aspects led Weber to characterise the Chinese order as an ‘incomplete bureaucracy’, as a hybrid between legal and traditional power, which he defined as ‘patrimonial bureaucracy’. Mandarins did not have any interest in promoting the renewal or modernisation of the administrative apparatus, because their principal source of sustenance, apart from a state income, was the prebends accumulated through tax collection. What enabled them to keep their acquired position was the principle of unconditional reverence (hsiao) towards superiors, of which family groups were the bearers and guardians. In their turn, the family groups did not have any interest in promoting change, as they were the guardians of the cult of the ancestors’ spirit (on which the concept of hsiao was based) and beneficiaries, like the mandarins and governors, of the spirit of obedience and devotion that it guaranteed.
Although Weber emphasised the consequences of the complex balance between central and peripheral forces for the Confucian type of, the supposed stability of this form of rationality was explained, in the last instance, by aspects linked to personality. Weber thus procedeed to a detailed and pointed analysis of Confucianism as the key to the traits of Chinese individuality.
As I have argued, the combination of anti-authoritarianism and individualism constituted, in Weber’s view, the key mixture for explaining both the origin of modern capitalism and change as a possibility that was open to individuals and as an immanent condition of the social system. While ancient Judaism, in contrast to Hinduism (and heterodox oriental religions), had the first but not the second element, Confucianism negated both. In Weber’s reading, Confucianism thus gave rise to a conventional, ritualist and gregarious individuality, extremely rational and disenchanted. It was this assessment that represented the principal challenge to Weber’s basic thesis on the inextricable link between Protestantism and capitalism via the constitution of anti-authoritarian and individualist-autonomous personalities.
The first crucial feature of Weber’s explanation was the claim that Confucianism, in itself, was not a religion but a philosophy, a purely utilitarian social ethic. Unlike other religions, it did not debase the world but, on the contrary, considered it the best world possible. The paths to salvation, in their turn, were entirely inner-worldly: health, a long life and wealth. Practical conduct, moreover, was imbued with the maximum of rationality, sobriety and lack of passion. As in Protestantism, rational economic action based upon saving was promoted. In principle, therefore, Chinese political economy did not pose any obstacle to the rise of a rational system of a capitalist type, but this did not occur.
Weber thus stressed how the stability of Chinese society and the lack of an impulse to intervene in and to change the world (as promoted instead by the Puritan ethic) were due to two features: on the one hand, the absence of a tension between God and the world that could have led to the downgrading of the latter and consequently to the possibility of prefiguring its transformation; on the other hand, the element of resistance to change and social control found in the fierce devotion to forefathers from which devotion to superiors also derived. The absence of a level of transcendence thus had the practical consequence of inhibiting the internal development of ‘personality per se’.
Weber arrived at the conclusion that an ‘incomplete’ individuality was developed in China (incomplete, that is, in comparison with Western individuality). Weber followed missionary accounts (almost the only sources available to a westerner without knowledge of Chinese in the years in which Weber wrote) in depicting typical Chinese behaviour as self-contradictory. This aspect, which Weber defined as an expression of an unbridgeable hiatus between the unity and immovableness of the psycho-physical habitus promoted by Confucianism and the instability of features of life conduct, was ultimately related to the absence of any form of transcendence. All the disharmonious manifestations that Weber enumerated depended, in his view, upon the fact that the conduct of life was not regulated from inside, i.e. psychologically, but from outside, ritually, by means of strictly established rules and conventions. Confucian behaviour was therefore not a rational acting that had its foundation in an interior habitus (innerer Habitus), but a conventional-ritual behaviour that respected tradition because of the holiness of the concepts of devotion and honour. It was therefore not driven by any internal impulse towards the infringement of tradition itself, as occurred in the cases of both ethical and exemplary prophecies. Weber argued that Confucianism:
meant adjustment to the outside, to the conditions of the ‘world’. A well-adjusted man, rationalising his conduct only to the degree requisite for adjustment, does not constitute a systematic unity but rather a complex of useful and particular traits … Not reaching beyond this world, the individual necessarily lacked an autonomous counterweight in confronting this world. … Such a way of life could not allow man an inward aspiration toward a ‘unified personality’, a striving which we associate with the idea of personality. Life remained a series of occurrences. It did not become a whole placed methodically under a transcendental goal. (Weber, 1951: 237, my italics)
The absence of a unitary and coherent conduct that was driven from inside and oriented to demonstrate devotion to a superior entity, or to overcome the fallen state and sufferings of the world, prevented the emergence of a more rational economical conduct (in a capitalistic sense). This occurred not only in the sense that Confucianism developed a form of merely conventionalist rationalism. It also prevented the emergence of the form of individualism that, according to Weber, was essential to the rise of civil society and, ultimately, capitalism. Furthermore, both the centrality of the concept of hsiao, i.e. decorum and devotion to superiors, and the patriarchal structure of society and the state prevented the form of emancipation from the family that Weber continuously stressed was a central factor in order to understand the process that led to modern capitalism (cf. Bellah, 1970).
Ultimately, the study of Confucianism enabled Weber to focus and to explicate his thesis regarding the elements that alone could give rise to change. They included a doctrine that was an expression of marginalised, but not subjugated, social groups, which by reason of their social position and capacity of responding politically and actively to this condition, could promote enduring characteristics for the construction of personality: namely, anti-authoritarianism and individualism as the capacity to emerge from the constraints of the ascribed group.
Concluding remarks
In each of his monographs on world religions, Weber delineated the profile of different individualities as different structures of personalities. We have seen that the notion of personality that goes through his work, from the methodological essays to Economy and Society, implies a ‘complex of constant motives’. The role of religions, in Weber’s view, was thus that of shaping a complex of constant, regular motives of action by means of spiritual rewards and promises of salvation. Each religion led to the formation of constellations of personalities and thus contributed to the process of individuation.
Some of the aspects of this process upon which Weber focused were the orientations of accommodation (or adjustment) rather than of anti-authoritarianism. It was the combination of these orientations with those of autonomy or gregariousness that could lead to a process of change or, rather, to immobilism and traditionalism. Their intertwining gives rise to particular constellations of personalities, which in turn are typical of their respective religious and socio-economical contexts.
As Weber delineated the process of individuation in each context of study and identified their historical promoters, he attempted to describe the types of individuality or personality that inaugurated Western modernity, or those that inhibited it, as well as their socio-economic profiles. In the final analysis, he argued that these orientations and possible combinations were the expression of specific social classes and interest groups that, due to their position, were more or less in favour of breaking with tradition and established powers.
Undoubtedly, there remain many problematic aspects of Weber’s analysis, not least of which are his well known historically inaccurate depictions and cultural and religious misunderstandings. Furthermore, given that he posited the roots of social change in the ‘Western personality’ alone, and suggested that there is an ‘ontological difference between Eastern and Western economic (as well as religious) “mentalities”’ (Said, 1978: 259), Weber has justly been identified as one of the most important 20th-century representatives of Eurocentrism and Orientialism. Nevertheless, his attempt to understand by means of historical and transcultural comparative inquiry the ways in which the intertwining of religious beliefs and social, economical and political structures may constitute ‘sources of the self’ still constitutes an important resource with which debates in social theory about the role of religion in the contemporary world may profitably engage.
Footnotes
1.
It must be clarified at the outset that here I employ the term ‘individuation’ as the process of formation of patterns of individuality or individual types. However, the term itself is not employed by Weber.