Thomas M. Kemple

Introduction — Allosociality Bridges and Doors to Simmel's Social Theory of the Limit

INSOFAR AS social theory is a way of thinking or viewing (from the Greek theasthai: to look upon or to contemplate) how living and nonliving beings coexist with or succeed one another (from the Latin socius: companion or ally, itself related to sequi: to follow), then neither its objects nor its methods of study can be settled by mere definitions. From its emergence in the 19th century, the theory of the social has been concerned as much with formulating its own rules and fields of inquiry as with improvising a repertoire of techniques for tracking how variously constituted groupings are connected and divided, how they hold together and come apart. Gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, class and status are not adequately conceivable solely as building blocks of social structure insofar as they also serve as mixed media for assembling the disparate and the different. The success of social theory does not hinge only upon the formulation, testing, and verification of hypotheses concerning a supposedly stable social substance, but also on procedures for the documentation of divergent material facts (as recorded in observations or descriptions) and their representation through a variety of literary acts (in the form of essays or reports, for example). Thinking and seeing, reading and writing the social therefore involve myriad ways of accounting not just for enduring patterns that distinguish shifting forms of sociality but also for addressing the problem of allosociality, that is, how actions and actors of all kinds are oriented to, shaped among, and taken over by others. What I am calling ‘allosociality’ is not reducible to social interactions of opposition and duality (hetero), nor is it resolvable in relations of symmetry and sameness (homo) or modes of reflexivity and selfhood (auto) among human subjects. Rather, it encompasses the full spectrum of forms

Introduction: Georg Simmel’s ‘Sociological Metaphysics’: Money, Sociality, and Precarious Life

The articles brought together in this double-length section of the Annual Review of Theory, Culture & Society focus on two intertwined strands of the thought of Georg Simmel, both of them neglected until recent years. A first bears on what might be called Simmel’s metaphysics of the social, or what he himself once called ‘sociological metaphysics’. A second strand centres on the renewed contemporary relevance of Simmel’s ideas about money economies and their relation to precarious individual life-situations in an age of global economic turbulence. Current sensibilities in the wake of global economic crisis and the demise of some of the more euphoric sociologies of globalization of the last two decades provide a timely setting for a reappraisal of Simmel’s thinking. With the completion in 2012 of the Suhrkamp edition of Simmel’s collected works, Simmel’s themes need to be explored more deeply, including particularly his thinking about lived experience, transcendence, death, fragmentary worlds of value, and allegorical representation. This issue of the journal showcases some of the latest scholarly work and foregrounds several pivotal primary pieces unavailable in English until now.

Instrumentum Vocale: A Note on Max Weber’s Value-free Polemics and Sociological Aesthetics

Max Weber’s reply to Werner Sombart’s lecture on technology and culture, presented at the first meeting of the German Sociological Society held in Frankfurt in 1910, is discussed in terms of its conventional and improvised character as a distinctive mode of ‘sociological’ speech. Emphasis is placed on the specific rhetorical circumstances that gave rise to these remarks, especially with regard to Weber’s status as an authorized speaker at the meeting, and their formulation as a response to Marxist theories accepted or criticized by members of the audience. In characterizing the relationship between technology and culture specifically as a topic of sociological discourse, Weber’s comments therefore constitute a speech-act in their own right. They both conform to the protocols of ‘value-free’ academic debate upheld by the Society and experiment with this new genre and forum of intellectual discussion. Weber’s innovative aspirations are ultimately in tension with his efforts to routinize or even rationalize the scholarly vocation (Beruf) of sociology as both an inward calling and an institutionalized profession that can speak critically to the most pressing and relevant issues of the day.

The Spatial Sense of Empire: Encountering Strangers with Simmel, Tocqueville and Martineau

This essay takes Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of space as a form of sociation (Vergesellschaftung) in his 1908 masterpiece, Sociology, as a framework for critically re-reading two ninteetnth-century classics in the sociology of empire. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/1940) is shown to illustrate Simmel’s understanding of social-spatial boundaries by portraying the cultural and historical geography of America as an ‘optic space’ of racial (in)equality. Similarly, Harriett Martineau’s study of morals and manners in Society in America (1837) exemplifies Simmel’s ideas on social-spatial sensibilities with its attention to how everyday settings serve as a kind of ‘acoustic space’ of gendered (un)freedom. Drawing on related arguments by recent thinkers and critics, and rectifying the relative neglect of how socio-spatial dynamics are addressed in the texts of classical sociology, the essay examines a description in each work of a particular personal encounter with strangers which exemplifies how the spatial sense of empire disrupts assumptions that new-world democracy has superseded old-world colonialism. Considered as illustrations of Simmel’s thesis concerning the spatial orders of society, the ‘travelling and anecdotal theories’ of Martineau and Tocqueville provide ‘sociological allegories’ designed to instruct reading publics on how law, empire, and social mores constitute bounded fields of struggle within the contact zones of modern empire.

Review: Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar

Austin Harrington’s monumental investigation into the ‘radical centrists’ of the Weimar Republic is discussed in terms of key themes such as universalism, cosmopolitanism, and the critique of Eurocentrism that still resonate with recent debates. Contrasting the voices of lesser known critical intellectuals from this period such as Karl Jaspers and Kark Mannheim with the political writings of Max Weber and Georg Simmel, as well as with the reactionary positions of Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, Harrington’s book affords a useful critical perspective on ‘protesting the West’, yesterday and today.

Narrative Conventions of Political Discourse: Weber’s Prism

The effectiveness of a well-told story cannot be gauged solely by such objective features as plot structure and character development; nor can its achievement be decided by the subjective responses of readers and listeners alone. The skill of a narrator lies both in representing actions and characters convincingly, and in anticipating their reception by readers and their impression on listeners. When the young Weber gave a lecture entitled ‘The Social Causes of the Decay of Ancient Civilization’ in Freiburg in 1896, he began by acknowledging that, although the familiar story (Geschichte) that he was recounting might have a certain appeal to the modern taste for tragedy; its scholarly merit as a history (Geschichte) must rest on its logical structure and empirical rigour. Since his educated listeners were presumably concerned with how modern world powers such as Germany might be defeated or emerge victorious in the struggle between nation-states, his account of the rise and fall of the empires of antiquity could be expected to evoke the sense that ‘this story is told about you’ (de te narratur fabula). But unlike Horace, whom Weber is quoting here, and who is warning readers of his Satires that his portrait of the greedy Tantalus would only require a ‘change in name’ (mutato nomine) to be an account of their own greedy ways, Weber establishes his scholarly good faith (bona fides) by disavowing any direct identification between the events of the past and the conditions of the present.

Resurrecting Charisma: Weber’s Pendulum

The concept of charisma is among the most successful cases in the social sciences of the reverse-translation of a technical term from academic discourse into everyday speech (Derman, 2012:176–215). Weber’s distinctive approach to this idea perhaps surpasses the popular dissemination of Marx’s concept of alienation and Durkheim’s anomie, which have been stripped of their social and historical connotations and transformed into psychological cliches, and even Freud’s concept of the ego, at least in everyday speech where it refers to some kind of narcissistic control centre. By contrast, Weber’s classic keyword continues to carry much of the political and rhetorical charge it had in his later writings and speeches, and in his canonical definition in Economy and Society: ‘The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least, superficially exceptional powers or qualities’ (ES2.III, ¶ 10:241). The ‘gifts of grace’ (from the Greek charismata) that he refers to are personal endowments, and may include the talents of the artist (discussed in Chapter 1), the insight of the wise person (Chapter 2), the persuasive speech of the demagogic leader (Chapter 3), the commanding force of the war hero (Chapter 4), and the eloquence and erudition exemplified by the prophet (examined in this chapter).

The Cosmopolitan Ethics of War and Peace: Weber’s Machine

Rather than think of ethics narrowly as a set of personal axioms or social rules for distinguishing what is morally good or just from what is bad or evil, I want to approach ethics more broadly as system of practical prescriptions and principles that articulate one’s relationship to oneself and to others. Generally speaking, an ethic regulates relationships of sameness and difference, such as how one might experience oneself as a stranger, or how people cohabit a certain place and time. Likewise, the celebrated contrast that Weber makes in the second part of ‘Politics as a Vocation’ (PV:83–92) between the ethics of conviction (Gesinnungsethik) and the ethics of responsibility (Verantwortungsethik) does not just delineate the qualities necessary for effective political leadership in a modern nation-state. His larger concern is also to address the general question of how the call of conscience may itself be experienced as a reply to the call of others. The voice that one addresses to oneself (in the sense that Gesinnung implies a principled mindset, sensibility, or attitude) implies or presupposes one’s answerability to others (in the sense that Verantwortung invokes a sense of liability, justification, or accountability). These two ethics are therefore not mutually exclusive, but rather ‘supplements’ that may either endanger or enhance the pursuit of a vocation in the institutionalized realms of politics, science, or art and in the mundane worlds of private and public life.

Casuistic Disciplines of Capitalist Science: Weber’s Bifocals

Like many of the early social scientists, including Marx, Durkheim, and Freud, Weber was expected to become a lawyer before he eventually committed himself to the academic life. In fact, though, he carried many of the methods of legal inquiry and skills of argumentation that he learned as a law student over into his teaching and research, among them an appreciation of the authority of precedent; a respect for the freedom of discretionary thought within the boundaries of applied rules; the use of counterfactual speculation and thought-experimentation within the logic of argumentation; a rigorous use of definitions or even a syllogistic interpretation of norms; and a selective appeal to evidence in support of or against a specific case. As a young acquaintance, Arthur Salz, wrote shortly after Weber died, a certain juridical spirit or legal charisma animated all of his written and spoken words. Drawing from Salz’s portrait, I want to expand upon this theme of the conscientious judge as value-free sociologist. In Weber’s case, this image of the open-minded yet partial lawyer as social thinker invites us to consider what it means not just to read Weber but to ‘voice’ the questions that he posed and to reassess the problems that he raised in our own way. As Stephen Turner and Regis Factor (1994) point out, and as Weber himself suggested in a essay from 1913 (CMW:281), interpretive sociology is not just a scientific procedure or an aesthetic intuition guided by tact (Takt) on the part of the scholar, but also a strategic intervention into contemporary intellectual disputes over the meaningful relationship between reason and value.

Interim Reflections: Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism

In the last decade of his life, Weber intensified his efforts to make sociology into a field of scientific inquiry distinct from the realm of political and moral judgments, and from the domain of aesthetic evaluations and tastes. Upholding a certain heroic ideal of scholarship as a bearer of high culture and a model of rational clarification in a world governed by machines rather than men, he resisted the temptation to yearn nostalgically for the days of the disengaged intellectual or to bemoan the ‘end of the age of the professor’, with its modernist canons of scientific validity, aesthetic freedom, and personal sovereignty (Ringer, 1969). In his closing remarks in ‘Technology and Culture’, where he asks his audience to consider ‘finally the intellectual cultural values!’, he rejects recent attempts to reduce the study of social and cultural life to mechanistic or materialistic processes, as if ‘anything, call it technology or the economy, is the “last” or “final” or “actual” cause of anything’ (TC:31). The ideals that he values are not only scientific and political but also aesthetic, perhaps following the lead of the Renaissance innovators in music and architecture who strove to invent experimental instruments for new ways of thinking, living, and acting. When a young colleague once asked him to identify what his own ‘leading supreme value’ might be, he reportedly responded by comparing his own method of work to the compositions and performances of a musical maestro silently conducting an orchestra of texts: Imagine that hanging from the ceiling of my study there are violins, pipes and drums, clarinets and harps. Now this instrument plays, now that. The violin plays, that is my religious value. Then I hear harps and clarinets and I sense my artistic value. Then it is the turn of the trumpet and that is my value of freedom.