.
Neoliberalism, warns
Professor Wendy Brown, has created a form of reasoning in which
human beings are reduced to their economic value and activity, and in which all fields of human activity are treated as
markets and institutions, including the state, are increasingly run as if they were
corporations. This logic is even applied to activities with no connection to wealth creation, such as education, dating, or physical exercise, which are increasingly governed according to market rules. People are treated in this schema, as
units of human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.
Unlike
Émile Durkheim, Weber did not believe in
monocausal explanations, proposing instead that for any outcome there can be multiple causes. As such, he was a key proponent of methodological
anti-positivism, arguing for the study of
social action through
interpretive (rather than
empiricist) methods, based on understanding the purpose and
meanings that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber's main intellectual concern was in understanding the processes of
rationalisation,
secularisation, and "
disenchantment", which he took to be the result of a new way of thinking about the world, associating such processes with the rise of
capitalism and
modernity.
Weber is best known for his thesis combining
economic sociology and the
sociology of religion, emphasising the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism (in contrast to Marx's
historical materialism). Weber would first elaborate his theory in his seminal work,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), where he attributed
ascetic Protestantism as one of the major "elective affinities" involved in the rise of
market-driven capitalism and the
rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. Arguing the boosting of capitalism as a basic tenet of Protestantism, Weber suggested that the spirit of capitalism is inherent in Protestant religious values. Protestant Ethic would form the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion, as he later examined the
religions of China and
India, as well as
ancient Judaism, with particular regard to their differing economic consequences and conditions of
social stratification. In another major work, "
Politics as a Vocation", Weber defined "the
state" as an entity that successfully claims a "
monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory". He would also be the first to
categorise social authority into distinct forms:
charismatic,
traditional, and
rational-legal. Among these categories, Weber's analysis of
bureaucracy emphasized that modern state institutions are increasingly based on the latter (rational-legal authority).
Weber also made a variety of other contributions in
economic history,
theory, and
methodology. His analysis of modernity and rationalisation would significantly influence the
critical theory associated with the
Frankfurt School. After the
First World War, he was among the founders of the liberal
German Democratic Party. He also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in parliament and served as advisor to the committee that drafted the ill-fated democratic
Weimar Constitution of 1919. After contracting
Spanish flu, he died of
pneumonia in 1920, aged 56.
Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Chair at UC Berkeley, where she teaches political theory. Drawing from Freudian, Weberian, Marxist, and Foucauldian angles of vision, she writes about the powers operating beneath the surface of liberalism and generating many of its limits and predicaments. She is best known for her interrogation of identity politics and state power in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (1995); her analyses of contemporary discourses of tolerance in Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (2006); her account of the inter-regnum between nation-states and globalization in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2010); and her analyses of neoliberalism’s assault on democratic values, institutions, and citizenship in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (2019). Her work is translated into more than twenty languages, and she has held a number of visiting professorships as well as Guggenheim, ACLS, and Institute for Advanced Study fellowships. She credits her thinking life to the excellent, accessible public universities of her youth and has worked in recent years to prevent their extinction.
