Modernity, the Politicizing of Life: From Weber to Agamben
This [life according to the good] is the greatest end both in common for all men and for each separately. But men also come together and maintain the political community in view of simple living, because there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself [kata to zēn auto monon]. If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life [kata ton bion], clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [zoē] as if it were a kind of serenity [euēmeria, beautiful day] and a natural sweetness. (Aristotle, Politics, 1278b, 23-31; qtd. In Agamben, Homo Sacer, 2)
Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight […] (John 18:36)
Henceforward the Church, endowed with the gifts of her founder and faithfully observing his precepts of charity, humility and self-denial, receives the mission of proclaiming and establishing among all peoples the Kingdom of Christ and of God, and she is on earth the seed and the beginning of that kingdom. (Catechism of the Catholic Church §768)
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the earth; no Navigation, nor use of commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no instruments of moving, and removing of such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes, Leviathan, Pt 1, ch 13)
[…] a respect for something entirely different from life, in comparison and contrast to which life and its enjoyment have absolutely no worth. [Man] lives because it is his duty, not because he has the least taste for living. Such is the nature of the genuine drive [echte Triebfeder] of pure practical reason. (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, ch. III (p. 113 Pluhar, trans.); qtd. in Zupančič, Ethics of the Real, 7-8)
[…] without a concept of secularization we cannot understand our history of the last centuries. To be sure, Protestant theology presents a different, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as “wholly other”, just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as “wholly other”. We have to come to recognize that the political is the total, and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. This holds also for the question whether a particular theology is a political or an unpolitcal theology. (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, 2)
Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy […] because the enemy does not cease to be a human being. [A war waged in the name of humanity is not a war waged] for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent [thus] denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and [such] a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity. (Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 54)
Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. (Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life”, in History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 137)
And only a reflection that, taking up Foucault’s and Benjamin’s suggestion, thematically interrogates the link between bare life [la vita nuda] and politics, a link that secretly governs the modern ideologies seemingly most distant from each other, will be able to bring the political out of its concealment and, at the same time, return thought to its practical calling. (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 4-5)
Max Weber
Life
Max Weber was born in 1864 in Erfurt. In 1869 his family moved to Berlin where his father where his father began a career as a politician. Max received a copy of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography from which he quotes in our readings when he was eleven years old as a Christmas gift. When he reached university age he began his studies in legal history then shifted his attention to pre-modern economics and wrote his Habilitationsschrift on Roman agrarian history. He began a promising academic career teaching law and political economics.
In 1897 he had a particularly destructive quarrel with his father, soon after which his father died. This seems to have triggered a period of acute psychological distress during which he found himself unable to teach or concentrate on writing. He traveled, especially to Italy but also to America (to St Louis) where he was enthralled and mystified by the frenetic pace of democratic life in American cities.
During WWI, Weber organized and managed military hospitals. After the war he worked on the Weimar Constitution and was critical of the punitive measures aimed at Germany taken by the victorious powers. In from 1898 to 1904 he wrote his most well-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism whose chief theses remain both extremely well known and controversial. This was followed by further important works on religion, society, and the state. He died in 1920.
Thought
Not until 1908 did Weber define himself as a sociologist; until that time he was chiefly known as an economist even though he had no interest in the technical aspects of economics. Indeed, Joseph Schumpeter has declared that Weber, made no significant contribution to the science of economics as it is now practiced. Of course, this depends on how one defines economics. He practiced what we might call ‘sociological economic history’ or economics lato sensu. At any rate, he was perpetually interested in the geneses of social phenomena (and particularly capitalism), the organization of social practices, and on relationships between economic and other social institutions (in his later years, particularly religion). He conceived of economics as a social activity rather than as a science (as it is now often conceived).
His thought is organized around elaborate conceptual typologies, or schemas, or paradigms. For this he is routinely criticized by both “scientific” economists and Marxists. In the course of his investigation he created categories that have become commonplace in the study of society and politics. These include “vocation”, “organization of life”, “rationalization”, “charisma”, the “disenchanted” world, the notion of “calculable mastery”, “aesceticism”, and others. He is the spiritual father of the Frankfurt school (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas, and others); he influenced the American sociologist Talcott Parsons and then Parsons’ student, the systems-theory sociologist Niklas Luhmann (whose work can be read as a dramatic radicalizing of Weber’s notion of atomized and systematized “vocations”.)
His later thought was an investigation into the relation between religion and economic life, or, the ways in which ideal interests with which religion is concerned interacted with material interests which is the economic sphere. As such he is apart from the Marxists for whom religion is a mask, a “false consciousness” that serves to obfuscate dialectical class struggle. For Weber, however, religion is one primary way in which life is organized and life practices are conducted. Weber calls this Lebensführung which can be translated as life-management. This is intellectually daring for, if Weber is read closely, we are asked to see that economic concepts are underwritten by theological concepts, that the western world bequeaths two distinct paradigms: monotheistic political theology which culminates in a distinct notion of the state and its sovereign on the one hand, and, on the other hand the notion of Lebensführung in which the political in the prior sense is eclipsed and subverted by management of life, or biopolitics, as we now call it. Thus, in my view, Weber remains extremely relevant to political thought. He can be read as opposing the notion of Carl Schmitt and many others that what distinguishes the modern west is that society became secular and autonomously divorced from the religious sphere.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Weber wanted to account for modern capitalism and its unprecedented success in subordinating all areas of social production into profit-oriented wage labor and rationalized generation and distribution of wealth. Weber does not believe that this, now global, organization of production came about in any way “naturally” nor as a result of larger-than-life economic “heroes”. Weber wished to define the circumstances and relationships to which modern capitalism owes its existence and in doing so he took a unique theoretical risk because he locates the subject of this development in a small but stubborn religious group. He wanted to understand the dramatic transition from a generally Pauline (from St Paul) view to a modern, capitalist one. In the Pauline view:
the systematic seeking after wealth was considered morally damaging (with the exception of the church itself because of its dual status as both this-worldly and otherworldly
the pursuit of worldly goals was considered trivial when compared to the search for the salvation of one’s soul
spiritual contemplation and prayer were considered more worthy than social activity; social activities (holidays, celebrations, etc.) were carried out as traditions to be respected; and traditions were generally held to be guides for life rather than innovation and change
Weber’s task in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was to try to map out how the West became “modern”. He attempted to define a profound transition from a culture dominated by the Church of Rome (Roman Catholicism)—which was always fixated on and oriented toward the Afterworld, the Afterlife—to a culture dominated by a concern with this world, and this life. The world where, Weber says:
“one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means, however, that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits[…] Technical means and calculation perform the service. This above all is what intellectualization means” (from “Science as a Vocation”).
This is a transition from the religious world to the secular world where the secular world is a process of secularizing (a setting outside of the religious, monastic order) of what had been the profane world (the impure, unholy, the polluted, the defiled). Or, although Weber himself does not put it this way, he describes a transition from a culture in which death was sacred to one in which life is sacred.
One of the paradoxes that Agamben and Foucault are/were attentive to is the fact that the modern age—when the focus was turned this world, to this life, indeed in which ‘to live’ became a categorical imperative, a “duty”—is also the age of western humanity’s most atrocious slaughters of its fellow human beings as well as a global banalization (or, it amounts to the same thing, a ‘commoditization’) of cultural, ethical, scientific, and erotic life (‘forms-of-life’, qualified life as opposed to bare life) into industrious “vocations”. Another who saw this Weberian transition was George Bataille whose thinking is remarkably proximate to Agamben’s, and who wished to resuscitate sacrifice (as opposed to calculation, rationalism and industry) as the kernel of community and which in fact had “survived” the great transition Weber studied in various forms such as war and the Marshall Plan.
We’re going to follow that map a little bit just to get into the background of how and why life has taken on the political stakes it has in the west—stakes which both Foucault and Agamben, in different ways, have painstakingly and masterfully detailed. (Žižek has called Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ the last great contribution to political theory of the 20th century.) In the course of mapping out this transition Weber developed the notion of a ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism. Certainly, Foucault is also interested in a profound transition from, for him, the Classical Age to Modernity (or, in his schema, from an age of representation to an age of history—cf. The Order of Things) but he rejects the latent Hegelianism in Weber and instead focuses on specific practices whereby bodies are inserted, or insert themselves (subjectify themselves), into the disciplines of modern life and politics. Still, both are looking at largely the same phenomenon. Also, not to deemphasize their obvious differences, I think that Foucault’s notion of “ethics” as a care of self” derives from Weber’s emphasis on vocation. In late Foucault, in an interesting and paradoxical way, one takes one’s own self as one’s vocation in aestheticizing one’s existence.
True, reading Weber’s map takes on a bit of what Lyotard (also a part of the same generalized anti-Hegelian climate in Paris, as was Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, others) calls a ‘Grand Narrative’. Indeed, subtract the “spirit” from The Spirit of Capitalism and you have the germs of Foucauldian non-totalizeable micro-practices and disciplines, Lyotardian discursive incommensurabilites (differends), and Luhmannian autopoetic systems, and (in my opinion) the Žižek-Lacan notion of drive. Weber himself was left somewhat trapped by his own observations which his well known intellectual integrity did not allow him to deny. Although a believer that the sociologist must not only map out but also intervene in society, he is said to have lacked the intellectual tools to do so. Sympathetic to Marxist analysis, he rejected the idea that class-struggle is the motor of modernity, that revolution might be the ‘way out’ of the modern impasse, and he certainly felt that religion was more than an epiphenomenon of class difference. In fairness to Weber, while the impetus may have been (somewhat) Hegelian, he did focus on doctrinal principles which were transformed into concrete practices (and then drives, impulses) that fairly quickly (within a generation or two) no longer relied on any “spiritual” dimension to continue to be in effect. In his analyses, the “spirit” of capitalism subtracts itself from history. (Agamben’s often repeated concern with legal and juridical categories that remain in force but that have been emptied of any ethical content derives from Weber’s analysis of how the spiritual contents of the Calvinist drive to organize everyday life atrophied.)
The “Spirit”
The core of Weber’s analysis about the unprecedented saturation of western life with ascetic practices that today have become so normalized so as to have become seemingly inevitable began from a simple observation he made. He noticed that Protestants were substantially over-represented in various entrepreneurial and technical positions; that, in general, Protestants (and a particular sect of Protestants) were owners of capital much more widely than Catholics.
In the course of his thinking he finally concluded that the “spirit” of capitalism is neither a hedonism nor a utilitarianism, is neither fundamentally rational nor irrational, but is instead a modification of the notion of Beruf from Luther’s translation of the Greek klēsis (from which we get the word ‘ecclesiastical’, meaning ‘the community of those who are called’) which leads to a asceticism that precludes rest, enjoyment or satisfaction*. A drive, in short. In his analysis he sees that it was not, however, either Luther or Lutherist Protestatism that allowed the seed of the particular notion of “calling” or “vocation”; instead it was the relatively small, severe, and sombre Protestant sect of Calivinists (or, in England and America, “Puritans”) for whom the “calling” they were born into and their success in it became the paramount motivation for life and its organization.
(*A footnote: Žižek’s celebrated notion of “enjoyment as a political factor” retains the basic architecture of Weber’s analysis of Calvinism in that, according to Žižek, we are today compelled to enjoy as a duty to capitalist expansionism. Žižek’s ‘enjoyment’ is paradoxical: it is an ascetic enjoyment.)
The Calvinist mechanism in a nutshell is this: Human life is predestined by God to either Heaven or Hell, and nothing can change that, nothing. This doctrine leads the Calvinist to have to concede that the worst, most brutal and unrepentant of murders—say, somebody from out of the pages of Sade—may very well be ‘elected’ (destined to go to Heavenly reward), while Mother Teresa is destined to suffer forever the torments of Hell. The theology is impeccable, if accepted: God is God, “wholly other” and no man can ever, not even a little bit, comprehend God. Counter-intuitively, the doctrine of predestination did not lead to resignation or psychological fatalism. Instead, the good Calvinist is led to a certain conduct in the service of his or her God by methodically and systematically remaking the world in His image. The world had to be ‘glorified’, not enjoyed. Worldly success was celebrated as an accumulation of God’s glory.
But why glory? Why does God, or in general, why does power need (or desire) glory? The Calvinists have no clear answer to this question. Agamben in working on an answer to this question in his Il Regno e la Gloria. (The book is out now in Italian, I don’t know if it is already being translated.) In that book, Agamben de-couples power from violence (law and violence remain coupled), and couples power with government, or management, or organization-of-life, or economy in the broadest sense of the term. He insists, with Weber’s Calvinists, that power requires glory—and more glory. In an argumnent I can barely understand, it appears to be Agamben’s argument that glory is something like the ‘bare life’ of power, the sensible evidence of the existence of power. In part of the book he reminds us of Mauss’s studies of Hindu religion in which various forms of glorification are what ‘make the gods alive’, or ‘give the gods life’. Anyways, for Agamben, glory is a religio-political and not an aesthetic concept. In Weber, the drive to glorify God became the basic architecture of the Capitalist Drive. (See Karatani’s Transcritique (chs 5.3, 5.4) on the notion of Capital and Drive in which a true Marxist (for once) approvingly cites Weber.)
Thus, for Weberians, modern life which derives from this Calivinistic doctrine and practice is dominated by rational organization (or management), and accumulation (which is a form of glorification)—all of which is a deep religiously spirited drive that is neither a hedonism nor a utilitarianism.
The Lutherans and those influenced by them tended toward a personal spiritual oneness with God, a miraculous “contact” of sorts; Catholics tended to be content with ritualistic sacramentalism. In both cases, one’s vocation was of secondary importance. However, to the Calvinist, one’s vocation was of primary importance, for, success in it was considered to be evidence of honest proficiency, that one was fulfilling one’s duty to one’s calling secondarily, a possible sign of God’s approval, but in any case that one was increasing God’s glory. The Calvinist always “has a job to do”: work in the world for God.
Because the translation of klēsis as Beruf for the first time in history, ordinary labor was infused with religious meaning. Beruf is an ordinary German word meaning both a spiritual calling and also one’s trade. The Calvinist simply conflated the two: one’s trade was one’s spiritual calling. (See Agamben, The Time that Remains [21ff] for his version of this essentially Weberian insight.) In contrast to the Calvinist, for the Catholic inspired by St. Paul, one’s vocation was to be accepted and undertaken but to be internally nullified as of no value in what is usually called “eschatological indifference”. For the Lutherian, one’s vocation was a fate to be merely borne and accepted while awaiting a true calling from a mystical communication with God (e.g. to “convert the heathens”, or to build a “crystal city”). In later chapters of The Protestant Ethic Weber attempts to show how religious practices direct everyday behavior in such a way that impulses toward methodical and self-denying behavior are produced. Once the impulse is produced, one no longer needs the theological exhortations of the minister, priest, church elder. Indeed, every parent knows that the goal of parenting is not perpetual policing but is directed to the point where the child has the impulse to be a “good” boy or girl. At that point, the “law” is in effect without any spiritual or ethical content required. As Weber says, once this drive had taken hold principally in America and then in Europe: “The Puritan wanted to be a man identified with his calling—we have to be”. The “spirit” of capitalism was only required to be consciously enforced for a couple of generations.
This saturation of everyday, banal, mundane life with religious significance was, for Weber, the first decisive step in the transition to the modern world. At the end of the project of modernity—in the 1960’s in France and Germany especially—everyday life was taken over as the primary political terrain. Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, Guy Debord and the Situationists, Louis Althusser, feminism and others saw the everyday as the political element par excellence, as politically saturated. Everyday life, private life, the “obvious” were seen to be infused with politics. In a reversal of Stalinist Marxism, everyday life was to commandeered and liberated from below, from the everyday, not from above, not from the superstructures.
One important conclusion to be drawn from Weber is: The West never became secularized. The inner structure of Western life remains and has remained essentially religious (Calvinist); its theological roots continue to operate even in the apparent absence of anything religious, that is, in the guise of a rationalism. Any attempts to show the west shifting from a religious economy (governance of life) to a secular one is misguided. The West simply shifted from a (Roman Catholic) ambivalence about this world to a (Calvinist) ascetic intensification of this-worldliness. Western everyday life remains saturated with religious drive.
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