Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti-Humanism by Coole Diana H

Author:Coole, Diana H.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461640127
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Published: 2013-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Weberian Sociology

In understanding social totalities as gestalten, Merleau-Ponty still needed to explain how their internal logic might be grasped. His solution is exemplified by the strengths and weaknesses he discerned in Weberian sociology. This methodological example is important because Weber tried to overcome the kind of dualisms Merleau-Ponty was rejecting and this spilled over into Weber’s advice to political actors; who must practise a rather similar mode of engagement with the present to the one exercised by the historian in relation to the past.

At first, Merleau-Ponty explains, Weber approached the past as a Kantian constructionist, recognizing on the one hand the subjectivity of the historian’s perception of it and, on the other, the objectivity that comes from following certain rules (AD 10). His ideal types look from this perspective like constructs that are imposed upon the past from outside it. Even though Weber was aware of their provisionality, he worried lest the past defy understanding, or lest it be arbitrarily reconstituted through the lens of the present. He was also concerned from this perspective that while the historian is able to suspend judgment and to maintain a critical distance from the past, the actor who takes on the present has no such luxury, but must make decisions that are absolute yet unjustifiable. In resolving the first problem, of historical method, Merleau-Ponty believes he was able to reappraise the nature of political action and thus to address the second, too. Over time he came, in effect, to a more dialectical and phenomenological understanding of the genesis of historical forms and of his relationship with them (although Merleau-Ponty concedes that Weber “has nowhere given this formula” [AD 11]). By recognizing the continuity between past and present Weber was able both to refine his methodology and to outline an exemplary mode of political engagement, since he realized that the “historian’s condition is not so different from that of the man of action” (AD 11).

Drawing on a rather free rendition of Weber’s account of the relationship between Protestantism and capitalism, Merleau-Ponty explains how Weber discerned recognizable social forms or epochs emerging when scattered historical elements acquire an “elective affinity” He saw how reversals of cause and effect wove religion and economics into one fabric, the rationalizing principles of which became expressed in modern art, science, the state, and so on. In isolation, the empirical facts of each dimension mean nothing: it is only through their encounter with one another that a rationalist system comes into being in its own right. There is, then, both a historical process at work and a similar theoretical one, whereby the theorist elicits and provisionally composes the essence of an age from its ambiguous signs. Weber began by choosing certain facts simply because they looked interesting or important: this was his creative moment. But it transpired to be a fertile choice because these facts revealed “a certain logical structure which is the key to a whole series of other facts.” Initially he could not have known this would be

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