{"title":"Too Many Webers for Small Sociology; or, How Critically Sociologists Should Consider Their Canon","authors":"I. Trotsuk","doi":"10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-189-201","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-189-201","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128480793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Soviet Version of Modernity: Weberian and Post-Weberian Perspectives","authors":"M. Maslovskiy","doi":"10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-174-188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-174-188","url":null,"abstract":"The article discusses several approaches to the study of Soviet society drawing on Max Weber’s theoretical models or following a broadly-understood Weberian tradition in historical sociology. Weberian perspectives have been used for the analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath. The early Bolshevik Party has been characterized as a community of “ideological virtuosi” while its further development has been described either as “incomplete rationalization” or as a re-traditionalization. In the article, it is argued that employing the post-Weberian multiple modernities approach allows us to overcome some of the difficulties that have emerged in this case. In particular, the article focuses on Johann Arnason’s analysis of the Soviet model of modernity. For Arnason, the Soviet model incorporated both the legacy of imperial transformation from above and the revolutionary vision of a new society. He claims that communism represented a distinctive version of modernity rather than a deviation from the modernizing mainstream. In recent historical studies of the Soviet period, two approaches have been formed stressing the modernity of the Soviet regime or its neo-traditionalist aspects. The distinction between these approaches has been discussed by Michael David-Fox. The article considers the parallels between the new historical studies of Soviet society, on the one hand, and both Weberian and post-Weberian sociological perspectives, on the other.","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115761542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Max Weber on Russia: Between Modern Freedom and Ethical Radicalism","authors":"C. Emmenegger","doi":"10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-89-106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-89-106","url":null,"abstract":"The Weberian writings on the Russian Revolutions have been mostly overlooked by scholars, and treated as secondary within the large corpus of Max Weber’s sociological and political texts. Nonetheless, they deal with a central question in Weber’s work: the destiny of freedom in late modernity. While questioning the chances of success of the liberal struggle in Russia, Weber turns back to the moment in which modern freedom emerged in history, singling out the specific conditions that made it possible. Among these, a very central (although also very neglected) role is played by what Weber calls “a particular religious viewpoint.” Instead of being a result of economic development (Weber refuses the thesis according to which capitalism is necessarily emancipatory and bounded to democracy), or of an idea of tol-erance grounded on indifference (as a certain interpretation of liberalism would suggest), modern freedom has its cen-tral birthplace in religious radicalism, in particular in the puritan one. Weber seems to suggest that modern (that is, negative) freedom is born in a position of ethical intransigence, when religious virtuosi refuse to obey to political (i.e. worldly) authority in order to follow their own conscience, that is God’s voice. In order to better comprehend this pecu-liar link, the article investigates the Weberian conception of modern freedom as it emerges from his writings on Russia, seeking to deepen the relationship between modern freedom and ethical radicalism.","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124224185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sociology of Max Weber in the 21st Century: From Reception to Actualization","authors":"Alexander F. Filippov, Nail Farkhatdinov","doi":"10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-9-15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-9-15","url":null,"abstract":"This issue of the Russian Sociological Review is dedicated to Max Weber. It could be called an anniversary issue since one of Weber’s famous works will celebrate its centenary immediately after the Review’s publication. At the end of January, 1919, Weber delivered his famous speech Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation), which was published in July of the same year. This is a remarkable coincidence, but still, no more than just a coincidence. In the many contributions to our issue (though not in all of them), Weber appears first as a political thinker and a political figure; meanwhile, we did not plan to celebrate the anniversary of any of his writings (yet some anniversary dates were indicated in the circulated call for papers). Scientists all over the world are reacting to this date and will continue to react to further dates. However, we should admit that these are the external causes to remember Weber and to return to his ideas. The social convention of encouraging the celebration of anniversaries marked by good round figures also holds in science. Weber’s contemporary and great friend, Georg Simmel, would say that we are dealing with the aesthetics of numbers here, 1 which is more formal than a substantial approach. If there","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127313495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Weber’s and Sorokin’s Analytical Treatment of the Russian Revolutions","authors":"E. Ozhiganov","doi":"10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-120-137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-120-137","url":null,"abstract":"The roots and dynamics of the Russian collapse of 1917–1918 provide an occasion for considering the question of the lessons that modern sociology can draw from the “sociology of revolution” of Max Weber and Pitirim Sorokin. This paper reviews the relevance of the approaches demonstrated by Weber’s “understanding sociology” and Sorokin’s “sociology of factors” on the testing ground of the emergency and confrontation of various forces of the Russian political scene in 1917–1918. Neither Weber nor Sorokin set forth methodological guidelines for their analysis of the Russian revolutions and this paper does not intend to reconstruct their views on the basis of the comparative taxonomies of their categories and concepts. This paper identifies the reasons for the opposing assessments which Weber and Sorokin gave for the causes of the Russian Disorder of 1917–1918 and the consequences they have for their claims to comprehend the revolutionary situation. The paper highlights the circumstances that prompted them to free themselves from obligations to their own theories and to use the authority of science to promote plans for Westernization, i.e. the proposed reconstruction of the political and state institutions of Russia on the model of the leading Entente states. The paper shows that the limits of the Weberian analytical vision of the Russian political scene were due to his consideration of the events in Russia mainly through the question of Russia’s further participation in the World War I and its consequences for imperial Germany, while Sorokin’s views were constrained by the fact that he represented Russian political positivism and Russian political masonry.","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130492118","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Protestant Ethic in the Russian Context: Peter Struve and Sergey Bulgakov Read Max Weber (1907–1909)","authors":"A. Teslya","doi":"10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-107-119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-107-119","url":null,"abstract":"The paper focuses on two Russian interpretations of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the first written by Peter Struve, whose reaction on Weber’s research was among the first in Russia, and the second by Sergey Bulgakov, who attempted a reinterpretation of Weber’s concepts with their subsequent application to the conditions of Imperial Russia. It is widely known that Max Weber had a number of well-educated readers in Russia. The first was Bogdan Kistiakowsky who was directly connected with Weber’s academic circle through his teacher, the prominent German jurist Georg Jellinek. Yet, this paper addresses the reflections of other intellectuals who belonged to the generation born in 1870s, including Peter Struve and Sergei Bulgakov and their younger fellows such as Semyon Frank who joined this intellectual circle through his older friend and supporter, Peter Struve. Despite the fact that Weber’s The Protestant Ethic did not cause intense intellectual debates in Russia during 1906-1910, Struve and Bulgakov were those who responded to the main arguments, providing two views on this classic book. Peter Struve proceeds from the premise of the loss by modern Christianity (both Western and Eastern) of an effective, real faith in the Resurrection, and the consequent impossibility of true religious community. As a result, Christianity turns out to be an asceticism exercised outside this world. Bulgakov’s analysis interprets the Weberian concept as a general model of the “deep idealistic enthusiasm” influence on economic life, and translates this reasoning into a pragmatic plane, that is, into the possibility of economic “pedagogics” and the rise of a “spirit” of a new economy as an alternative to capitalism.","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"6 11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115598706","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Calling and Humility Scale: Extending the Weberian Approach to the Research of the Elective Affinity between Religion and the Economy","authors":"I. Zabaev, E. Prutskova","doi":"10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-62-88","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-62-88","url":null,"abstract":"Weber’s famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has been widely applied in sociological re-search. Weber formulated the question of the relationship between religion and the economy in the sense that certain types of Protestant denominations fostered the development of capitalism. One of the main factors which Weber paid attention to was the “Protestant ethic” concept of calling/vocation. The authors of this research have integrated these findings and extended the original Weberian approach in which ethics plays the central role in the analysis of the elec-tive affinity between religion and the economy. It can be shown that humility is the second component of the ethical variable used by Weber in his sociology of religion. This approach makes the concept of economic ethics relevant for studying all major Christian denominations, that is, not only Catholic and Protestant, but also Orthodox. The aim of the current article is to develop an empirical research method based on this theoretical approach. We propose a scale meas-uring the ethics of calling and humility which can be assessed in quantitative surveys. The scale was pre-tested in Oc-tober-November 2017 in four countries (233 respondents in Russia, Switzerland, Georgia, and Romania). After correc-tions based on the pre-test results, the scale was applied in a survey of parishioners of four Christian denominations in Russia (1262 respondents), those of the Orthodox, Catholic, “traditional” Protestant (Lutheran, Baptist, etc.), and the “new” Protestant (Pentecostal) denominations, in 2017-2018.","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124992318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Weberian Bureaucracy to Networking Bureaucracy","authors":"V. Kvachev","doi":"10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-28-40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-28-40","url":null,"abstract":"Max Weber viewed organizational bureaucracy as one of the inevitable premises for genesis of capitalism, and his concept of bureaucracy has been the authoritative instrument in the analysis of organizations for many years. The Fordist Modern social organization cannot be imagined without bureaucratic organization. Up to recent times, bureau-cratic organization, existing as a general pattern of organizing social life, seemed to prove to be the ultimate efficiency as a means of organizing governmental bodies as well as big corporations. Today, Weberian bureaucracy as theory and practice come under criticism as rigid, obsolete, and ineffective. Under the conditions of late capitalism, modern or-ganization is claimed to be more flexible and more adaptive to changes. It is my belief that the phenomenon of bureau-cracy cannot be analyzed in isolation from other theories of social order. With its strict rules and regulations, Weberian bureaucracy is the embodiment of Foucauldian disciplinary power at the organizational level. Foucault’s diagrams expressing power through systematic relations between humans, objects, and spaces could be the perfect study of bu-reaucracy. Bureaucracy changes with the transition from disciplinary power relations to postmodern power relations. The traditional disciplinary instruments (rules, codes, and regulations) give space for more flexible and even (at first sight) democratic inter-organizational relations. However, this supposed freed without freedom has its priceк. Deregu-lation paradoxically leads to even more regulation, which now appears as self-control and self-surveillance. Being microscopic (mostly due to novel technological opportunities) and de-regulative at the same time, this new networking bureaucracy restructures power relations in organizations in a way that produces behavior leading to atomization and individualization without a freedom.","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"102 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116111840","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Max Weber and the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany; or, Why Bolshevism Had No Chance in the West","authors":"T. Dmitriev","doi":"10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-146-173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192x-2019-2-146-173","url":null,"abstract":"Among the canonic genres of the modern social-philosophical and social-scientific thought, in German sociology and social theory of the 20th century, there is a special type of research called “the diagnosis of the era” (Zeitdiagnose), i.e. the analysis of a specific historical situation. Max Weber’s articles, publications and speeches in the last years of the war and first post-war years are an excellent example of such an application of the social-theoretical knowledge for the diagnosis of the modernity. The article considers Weber’s political and social diagnosis of the time in his articles of 1917-1919 on the post-war reorganization of Germany on democratic principles. The author focuses on Weber’s assessment of the ways of the political and social development of Germany after the defeat in the World War I and the November Revolution of 1918. The article also analyzes Weber’s proposals on the reform of the political and electoral system of the German Empire and considers Weber’s views on the prospects for a socialist revolution in Central Europe after the end of World War I on the model of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia. The final part of the article provides a generalized assessment of the theoretical scheme that Weber applied in the analysis of the events and processes of the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany, and identifies its significance for understanding the historical fate of the modern world.","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116115762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the “Topological” Reading of Max Weber","authors":"Oleg Kil'dyushov","doi":"10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-202-205","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17323/1728-192X-2019-2-202-205","url":null,"abstract":"Рецензия: Mario Rainer Lepsius. Max Weber und seine Kreise: Essays (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 2016).","PeriodicalId":128581,"journal":{"name":"The Contemporary Relevance of a Classic: Max Weber in the 21st Century","volume":"451 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131903606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}