Article

Journal of Classical Sociology

Max Weber and the spirit of

11(1) 75–92
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1468795X10391458
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Bryan S. Turner
City University of New York, USA
University of Western Sydney, Australia

Abstract
This article considers three aspects of the sociology of resentment. Firstly I describe Nietzsche’s
relationship to Max Weber. Secondly this article outlines Weber’s account of resentment as the
driving force behind religious beliefs as a theodicy, specifically an ideology of disprivileged social
groups. Whereas the dominant class seeks legitimacy for its position in society, disprivileged
groups seek compensation. While the dominant pity such subordinate groups, the disprivileged
resent their superiors. Thirdly, the article concludes with a preliminary elaboration of a theory of
social status, competitive relationships and resentment. The hypothesis is that in modern societies
the fluidity of social structures, the apparent absence of any clear relationship between success
and worth, and the propinquity and visibility of competitive social groups have an inflationary
effect on resentment. This hypothesis leads to a question that is largely beyond the scope of this
discussion about the conditions under which individualized resentment evolves into collective
rage. These developments are briefly sketched out by reference to the credit crisis, the Moral
Majority and Tea Party populism in the United States.

Keywords
Nietzsche, pariah groups, resentment, Rousseau, status, theodicy, Weber

The modern theory of resentment can be said to have had its intellectual origins in
Friedrich Nietzsche’s cultural critique of nihilism and modernity. Nietzsche’s concerns
were primarily ethical and aesthetic, and hence the concept of resentment was simply
one aspect of the larger project of a revaluation of values, thereby creating the conditions
that would lead to a more ‘healthy’ habitus. Nietzsche’s purpose was to create a new type

Corresponding author:
Bryan S. Turner, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY
10016, USA.
Email: bturner@gc.cuny.edu
The Centre for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies, Bankstown Campus, University of Western
Sydney, Australia.
Email: bryan.turner@uws.edu.au
76 Journal of Classical Sociology 11(1)

of Man through ‘the politics of the soul’ (Thiele, 1990). Nietzsche’s project remains of
interest to sociologists, because it has been argued frequently enough that Max Weber’s
sociology was deeply influenced by Nietzsche’s thought and hence we might suspect
that Weber took the resentment theme from Nietzsche but transported it to an analysis of
politics and power. We could trace this intellectual development in Weberian sociology
by starting with Raymond Aron’s famous interpretation of Weber’s approach to power.
At the controversial 15th German Sociological Congress held in Heidelberg to com-
memorate the centenary of Weber’s birth, Aron argued that Weber’s Inaugural Freiberg
Address and the lecture on ‘Politics as Vocation’ were both profoundly influenced by
Nietzsche. Aron claimed, with regard to Weber’s ‘power-politics’, that ‘[t]heoretically
all politics, home and foreign, is above all a struggle between nations, classes and indi-
viduals’ (Aron, 1971: 85), and hence for Weber the question ‘What is the best form of
government?’ was meaningless. Specifically the ‘Politics as Vocation’ lecture expressed
Weber’s Weltanschauung

… with a Darwinian component (the struggle for life), a Nietzschean component (not the
happiness of mankind, but the greatness of man), an economic component (the persistent
scarcity of wealth – the ineradicable poverty of peoples), a Marxist component (each class has
its own interests and the interests of any one class, even the dominant one, do not necessarily
coincide with the lasting interests of the national community), and finally a national component,
i.e the interest of the nation as a whole, must outweigh all others, since nationalism is the result
of a decision and not of deeds.
(Aron, 1971: 92)

This succinct summary of Weber’s sociology can be said to lack only one component,
namely that the motivational and emotional force behind such struggles is that of resentment.
This absence does in fact point to an interesting issue in Weber’s sociology. While the
idea of resentment appears briefly in his account of social status, theodicy and social
exclusion, Weber never developed these embryonic ideas into anything resembling a
coherent theory. The point of this article is initially to explore this Nietzsche legacy and
to identify the resentment theme in Weber, but my principal objective is not to provide
yet another exegesis of Weber but to construct the missing sociology of resentment as a
supplement to the theory of social status competition in modern societies.
There is a general Nietzsche influence precisely in Weber’s worldview, in which,
with the collapse of natural law, the secularization of Western Christianity and the decline
of any overarching system of values, social life is characterized by endless struggles in
which there can be no final vocabulary to describe the meaningfulness of human exis-
tence. Whereas Nietzsche saw the death of God as both a tragedy and an opportunity to
reinvent values, Weber experienced modern reality, as he said in the ‘Politics as Vocation’
lecture, as a ‘polar night of icy darkness and hardness’ (2009: 128). In this respect, there
is much in common in their general understanding of modernity. There is, however, a
second and more exact relationship, namely in the connection between religion and
resentment in their reactions to Judaism, to Old Testament prophecy and to the ethical
message of Jesus in the New Testament. While Nietzsche used the idea of resentment as
Turner 77

a cultural critique of Christian asceticism as a no-saying philosophy, Weber objected to

Nietzsche’s views about Christianity, but at the same time interpreted the theme of
resentment in Judaism as a function, to use his terminology, of the Jews’ pariah status.
Although Weber’s notion of pariah group was discussed somewhat acrimoniously at
the 1964 Heidelberg conference, it has not occupied any significance subsequently in
sociology. In this article I want to begin a sociological consideration of resentment as an
important adjunct of any comprehensive sociology of status groups and resentment. As
we shall see, Weber began to outline the sociology of resentment in his comparison
between the Hindu castes and Judaism in Economy and Society (Weber, 1978: 492–499)
as examples of the religion of the disprivileged, but these ideas were never generalized into
a more overarching understanding of conflictual social interaction. His basic idea was
relatively simple but powerful: whereas privileged classes require legitimacy, subordi-
nate social groups require compensation. Consequently I am less concerned to analyse
the place of Nietzsche in Weber’s worldview and more interested to take Weber’s specific
statements about resentment, status and social exclusion as the basis of a general socio-
logical theory of modern society. But first what was Weber’s relationship to Nietzsche?

The Nietzsche–Weber relationship

Shortly before his death, in a famous exchange with students in February 1920, follow-
ing a discussion with Oswald Spengler, Weber commented that the ‘honesty’ of modern
scholars could only be assessed by their attitude towards both Marx and Nietzsche. He
went on to observe: ‘The world in which we live intellectually is largely one that bears
[their] stamp’ (Baumgarten, 1964: 554). The impact of Nietzsche on Weber has subse-
quently been much discussed in interpretations of Weber’s sociology (Eden; 1983; Fleury,
2005; Flieschmann, 1964; Hennis, 1988; Kent, 1983; Mommsen, 1965; Stauth and
Turner, 1988; Tiryakian, 1981). As Stephen Kent (1983: 301) has shown, both the last
chapter of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and a section of ‘Science as
a Vocation’ bear the clear mark of Nietzsche with their derisive references to die lezten
Menschen as the bearers of a new spirit of deadening rationality and false happiness. Kent
argues further that ‘Nietzsche’s philosophy is evident throughout his [Weber’s] life’s
work’ (1983: 302). This interpretation appears to be generally accepted across a broad
range of modern Weber scholarship into the question of Nietzsche’s influence.
However, in the recent authoritative biography of Weber, Joachim Radkau (2009)
systematically rejects the idea that Weber was significantly influenced by Nietzsche. In
any case he argues that Weber was all too fond of making exaggerated statements that
appeared to challenge existing assumptions, hence impressing his student audience. In
addition, bibliographical references to Nietzsche are few and far between in Weber’s
own work. Even more damning, when Weber did refer to Nietzsche, it was typically to
dismiss him in highly derogatory terms. For Weber, Nietzsche was simply a ‘German
petty bourgeois’. Nietzsche’s criticisms of Christianity were dismissed as narrow-minded
and indiscriminate in comparison with the magic of ‘Christian brotherhood and
“communism of love”’ (Radkau, 2009: 167). At a psychological level, however, Radkau
does recognize that Weber saw some parallel between his own nervous depression and
78 Journal of Classical Sociology 11(1)

Nietzsche’s eventual descent into insanity, because ‘ebullient intellectual activity can be
the final stage before a madness from which there is no return’ (Radkau, 2009: 167). In
the light of what has been claimed about Nietzsche’s influence on Weber, Radkau’s posi-
tion is revisionist, perhaps in the extreme. It may well be the case that Weber’s work
contained critical references to Nietzsche and further that he did not reference Nietzsche
on a regular basis. This is not, however, conclusive evidence that Weber did not absorb
much from Nietzsche in both his philosophical worldview and the actual epistemological
presuppositions that form the basis of his sociology.
While the direct influence of Nietzsche on Weber’s sociology might have been
modest, there is nevertheless a striking parallel between Nietzsche and Weber in terms
of biography, philosophy and conception of the individual in society. I draw attention in
particular to Nietzsche’s analysis of resentment as a central aspect, not necessarily of
psychological dispositions, but of social relationships. Though resentment as such was
not an integral part of Weber’s work, the Nietzsche idea of the struggle of individuals to
resist and assert themselves over and against the paralysing force of resentment was
richly expressed in his conception of the individual’s imperative to act in the world and
the search for meaning and enchantment in response to the disenchanting world of moder-
nity. In terms of what we might call their background metaphysics, Nietzsche’s idea that
modern nihilism is a key example of resentment found its counterpart in Weber’s analy-
sis of rationalization and disenchantment. Perhaps more surprisingly, Weber did not
fully explore the potential of resentment as a concept for developing his own theory of
social status. Although he made occasional references to the connections between status
and theodicy, these were often little more than digressions rather than a fully developed
sociology of resentment.
Demonstrating intellectual influences on key figures in the historical emergence of
sociology is not necessarily intellectually valuable or satisfying in terms of developing
sociological theory. Hence, the aim here is to begin the construction of the sociology of
resentment, which should occupy a more central place in modern sociology. In short,
resentment was an important aspect of the social theories of both Nietzsche and Weber
(and indeed of a good deal of classical social and political thought), but it is not a prom-
inent part of the contemporary lexicon of social analysis. Given the ubiquity of resent-
ment in social life, especially in the enduring social conflicts along racial, ethnic, class
and gender dimensions, this absence as a serious issue. In what follows, I explore certain
Nietzsche themes in Weber’s sociology of religion, his analysis of charisma, and his
overall conception of modern culture as a contribution to our broader aim, which is to
understand the importance of the concept of resentment in society.
There are many ways of approaching Nietzsche’s intellectual impact on Weber regard-
ing resentment. The first involves the empirical examination of resentment among
subordinated or, in Weber’s terminology, ‘non-privileged classes’. Weber specifically
considered resentment to be central to the worldview of ancient Judaism, also recogniz-
ing its presence in other subordinated groups and classes. The second approach is to look
more broadly at the extent to which Nietzsche and Weber considered modern culture to
be nihilistic and the consequences of that nihilism in terms of human meaning and action.
Weber followed Nietzsche and the general intellectual culture of the German upper classes
in claiming that modern culture was nihilistic and that nihilism or ‘disenchantment’ posed
Turner 79

a serious existential and moral threat. I want to argue that, in addition to his specific ideas
about resentment, the concept of disenchantment that results from excessive rationalization
suggests a broad sense of resentment about the world. The first approach is more overtly
sociological and occurs in Weber’s Ancient Judaism and more generally in his view of the
religion of the non-privileged classes and in what he referred to as ‘theodicy of the dis-
privileged’. Weber also discussed resentment in his classic essay on ‘The Social Psychology
of the World Religions’. Looking at these various sources, Weber’s view of religion and
resentment remained ambiguous. On the one hand, he sought in general to downplay the
role of resentment in religion, in part because he was impressed by the power of Old
Testament prophecy and the ethical message of the Sermon on the Mount. On the other
hand, he associated resentment with the Jews as a ‘pariah group’. The second issue involves
a more general analysis of the culture of modernity and the struggle of the individual in the
face of seemingly inexorable structural and cultural forces in the theory of resentment.
While Nietzsche’s views on resentment have been examined in some depth, mainly
by philosophers, one can examine his discussion of resentment as a prototypical social
theory that considers it to be a particular kind of disenchantment that restrains or indeed
corrodes authentic human action and meaning. In this sense, Nietzsche’s theory of
resentment anticipated many of the central themes of Weber’s sociology. While phi-
losophers have mainly stressed Nietzsche’s admonitions against the ‘poison’ of resent-
ment and its role in supporting human weakness and thwarting the individual’s will to
self-assertion, Nietzsche’s views on resentment are more robust sociologically in terms
of thinking about how social actors in a variety of social settings apprehend the world
and act in it. In Nietzsche, we discover an elemental model of social action, which found
expression in various aspects of Weber’s work. Indeed, it might be said that, while
Weber may have specifically disavowed an overt influence from Nietzsche, that influ-
ence is there, albeit in somewhat disguised form. In this sense, as opposed to most stud-
ies of the ‘Nietzsche–Weber question’, my method is primarily diagnostic in attempting
to point of influence by references to the homologies in their thought.

Nietzsche and Weber: Towards a theory of power

The intellectual parallels between Nietzsche and Weber are in part the product of the
striking parallels between the lives of both men. They retired from their professorial
careers at an early age as a consequence of continuing medical problems that were invari-
ably both physical and mental. Nietzsche suffered from debilitating headaches and
digestive problems well before his final breakdown in Turin in December 1888. Weber
had to withdraw from lecturing in 1899 and was unable to take up serious research
activity until after 1903, when he was finally released from all teaching duties. Both men
looked for recovery from mental stress through convalescence in the Italian Alps. Both
men had unfulfilled ambitions significantly to influence public opinion – Nietzsche as a
modern prophet and Weber as a liberal politician. Both men were famously frustrated in
their sexual and personal lives. In short they were products of the Protestant and patriar-
chal society of the German bourgeois family with dominating mothers and failing fathers
(Stauth and Turner, 1988).
80 Journal of Classical Sociology 11(1)

One can therefore relatively easily find such parallels in their biographical
circumstances, and it is obvious that these experiences of mental torment had a powerful
impact on their work and outlook. As cultural critics of German or, more precisely,
Prussian society, there is an important convergence in their ideas. Nevertheless I am only
interested in the importance of their actual ideas, because the biographical sources of
these notions are probably of interest to the historian, but of relatively little interest to the
sociologist. Although our aim is to develop a theory of status, disprivilege and resent-
ment, we will start with the issue of methodological individualism in Weber. As Radkau
correctly points out, Weber was a sociologist in a somewhat limited sense in that his
work was directed towards understanding the individual rather than society: that is,

Weber did not think about the logic of social systems : the basic unit for him was not ‘society’
but the individual; and from the beginning the socialization process led in different directions,
which could come into a tense relationship with each other.
(2009: 54)

This intellectual goal of understanding the changing nature of the individual in modern
society was also overtly the aim of Nietzsche’s philosophical investigations. While
Nietzsche was more inclined to use the word ‘soul’ rather than ‘self’ or ‘individual’, the target
of his critical thought was the disappearance of the heroic individual who had achieved
self-mastery through struggle against conventional morality and modern society. The
Übermensch was precisely somebody who had achieved self-mastery through discipline
in a confrontation with hypocrisy and convention. At times Nietzsche argued in a manner
wholly parallel to Weber that the heroic individual was cultivated in the ancient world,
in warrior societies and in the military, but had become unmanly in the standardized
and rationalized world of modern capitalism. The Übermensch was the charismatic
figure capable of breaking through the dead weight of tradition to challenge society with
the vision of new values. The irony of Nietzsche’s criticisms of Protestantism and his
vituperation against Saint Paul is that Paul in fact brought about a major breakthrough in
traditional Jewish values by proclaiming that, with Christ’s resurrection, there is neither
Jew nor Gentile, neither man or woman. In terms of Weber’s theory of charisma, Paul’s
conversion was the charismatic event that turned the course of history (Badiou, 2003).
The further irony is that it is Paul whom Nietzsche most resents (Taubes, 2004).
Nietzsche and Weber also shared in common a view of the world as characterized by
endless struggle. Against the idea that the ancient world was one of tranquillity, Nietzsche
demonstrated that Greek society was characterized by an endless struggle between eroti-
cism and passion (Dionysus) and rationality and formalism (Apollo), and that a healthy
life for the individual would require some reconciliation of these two dimensions of
human nature. The problem with modern society was that an industrial civilization and a
mass society had eclipsed the opportunities for heroic individualism. Nevertheless against
modern nihilism, Nietzsche preached a ‘revaluation of values’ –a critique of culture that
would open up the possibility of recreating heroic men.
Nietzsche’s social philosophy, rather like Weber’s, emphasized the idea of endless
struggle, both individual and social, as necessary for renewal. His criticism of Christianity
was based on the notion that Christian asceticism negated the heroic life of masculinity
Turner 81

and warrior societies; it was a religion of the dispossessed and the weak, and hence it could
not contribute to the health of the individual. The healthy individual had to overcome the
illusions and the sickly life of the world-denying monks and priests. Nietzsche’s ethic
was to reject nihilism and no-saying philosophies and embrace a manly ethic and a yes-
saying philosophy. At the root of his ethic of action was a stinging criticism of the para-
lytic force of resentment, because resentment, unlike rage, turns inwards and corrodes
the life of those who resent rather than those who are resented.
Weber’s famous Freiberg inaugural lecture of 1895 had all of these Nietzsche themes,
albeit with a more explicitly Darwinian touch: social struggle, politics as a vocation, the
collapse of manly virtues, and the importance of youthfulness for nations if they were to
avoid cultural degeneracy. Rejecting utilitarian notions about the greatest happiness or
the importance of mutual benefit from free trade, Weber roundly proclaimed the impor-
tance of struggle for German influence. Perhaps one area of disagreement and difference
between the two men was that the Freiberg address was overtly nationalistic, emphasiz-
ing the need for imperial expansion and international markets for German goods, but also
warning against the encroachment of Polish farm workers in eastern Prussia. Weber
notoriously saw Poles as racially inferior and hence it was necessary to encourage German
farmers to settle on Germany’s eastern borders and to develop social policies to prevent
their drift westwards. By contrast, Nietzsche was deeply opposed to Prussian values and
German identity and argued that his name in fact pointed to his Polish ancestry. Although
these claims about his Polish background may be mere fantasy, we can imagine why
Weber sought to distance himself from Nietzsche.

Resentment and the religion of the disprivileged

Weber, like most scholars of his period, was sparing in his references to sources, but one
of his most specific references to Nietzsche, as I have said, occurred in Ancient Judaism.
Weber’s engagement with the issue of resentment appeared in his controversial comments
on Jewish society in the Old Testament period as a ‘pariah community’. Weber was con-
cerned more specifically to describe ‘the dualism of in-group and out-group morality’.
Because the Jews were an exiled community in Egypt, they set up a number of barriers to
prevent their assimilation into a hostile world or the dilution of their religion and culture.
These barriers included special dietary rules and prohibitions on inter-marriage. These
group norms had the effect of isolating the Jewish community from strangers, and for
Weber, more importantly, these group structures did not encourage the growth on an eco-
nomically rational ethic similar to the Protestant inner-worldly asceticism. As a guest
people in a land of strangers, Jewish norms did not promote any rational mastery of the
world, but rather promoted a ritualistic attitude towards everyday practices, especially
dietary regulations. As a result, Weber argued, ‘[s]ince Antiquity, Jewish pariah capital-
ism, like that of the Hindu trader castes, felt at home in the very forms of state- and booty-
capitalism along with pure money usury and trade, precisely what Puritanism abhorred’
(1952 :345). While these religious norms had important consequences for economic
behaviour, dietary restrictions had equally important consequences for communal rela-
tionships and for social stratification, leading to a heavy concentrated of Jews in specific
82 Journal of Classical Sociology 11(1)

occupational niches. Thus Weber noted that ‘ritualization of dietary habits made
commensalisms very difficult’ (1952: 353), and hence pious practices on the part of obser-
vant Jews had the effect of segregating religious communities from contact with Gentiles.
Weber was preoccupied by the question of Jewish economic behaviour, and therefore
the question of resentment played only a minor role in Ancient Judaism. When it did
emerge it was in conjunction with the issue of what he called ‘the theodicy of the dis-
privileged’. This theodicy of disprivilege is the wellspring of resentment, because it
entails, in Weber’s view, a definition of the absence of authenticity or deservedness
among the privileged. The pariah group is strengthened by its theodicy, and the central
aspect of that theodicy is resentment. It was particularly strong in the Jews because it was
this-wordly and the dream of future success necessitated a theodicy of the present, a
resentment that kept the individual acting and moving forward. Weber actually noted
this is not just a quality of religious groups, but also of secular groups – he mentioned the
proletariat. There is an important gap therefore in Weber’s account of resentment, namely
the absence of a more generalized analysis of resentment and powerlessness, especially
since his sociology in general placed such an emphasis on status groups, hierarchical
domination and social conflict. He never followed through with looking at resentment
more generally as an affective condition that occurred across a broad range of social
classes and strata.
If the Jews were a Chosen People, why had they been forced into Exile, why had their
lands been occupied, and why had the Temple been destroyed? The demand that the
people atone for their collective guilt was often too large a burden, and the resentment
of the pious poor became palpable, especially in relation to the privileged classes, who
were the stratum standing in the way of the prophesied rewards for their faith in Yahweh.
In this context, Weber suggested that a distinction emerged between the humble piety of
the poor and the haughty arrogance of the rich. Finally he concluded this preliminary
discussion of resentment with an interesting contrast between Judaism and early Christianity.
The catastrophic plight of the Jewish community with the destruction of the Temple led
the rabbis to concentrate on the ‘ethical problems of the resentment of repressed and
sublimated revenge’, but early Christianity ‘was less sophisticated and has given less
thought to these facts … . [Christianity] shows some examples of a rather open ethic of
resentment’ (Weber, 1952: 404).
Weber’s analysis of in-group and out-group morality also appeared in his study of The
Religion of India, where the question of ‘guest peoples’ (Gastvolk) appeared as a descrip-
tion of people who have lost their land through conquest and invasion, or communities
that have been marginalized and live a nomadic and migratory existence. Where the bar-
riers between guest people and the dominant community are reinforced by ritual norm of
pollution, Weber spoke of ‘pariah peoples’. This hierarchy of in-group and out-group in
terms of ritual purity formed the basis of the Hindu caste system, in which pariah groups
came to dominate occupations that were regarded as inherently unclean. Therefore the
caste system rules out commensalisms: ‘Complete fraternization of castes has been and
is impossible because it is one of the constitutive principles of the castes that there should
be at least ritually inviolable barriers against complete commensalisms among different
castes’ (Weber, 1958: 36). Once more Weber argued that this form of social closure
inhibited the growth of capitalism: ‘… it must be considered extremely unlikely that the
Turner 83

modern organization of industrial capitalism would every have originated on the basis of
the caste system’ (Weber, 1958: 112).
Weber addressed the issue of social position, theodicy and resentment more explicitly
in The Sociology of Religion, where he suggested that resentment is a consequence of the
opposition of non-privileged classes against the privileged, in which the unequal distri-
bution of resources is caused by ‘the sinfulness and illegality of the privileged’. However,
‘the religion of suffering acquires the specific character of ressentiment only under spe-
cial circumstances’ (Weber, 1966: 111). It was absent in Hinduism and Buddhism, where
suffering is the result of individual wrong-doing, but the situation was quite different in
Judaism. The Psalms are full of the need for legitimate revenge against worldly and arro-
gant powers. Moreover, a theodicy of the disprivileged is an inevitable adjunct of any
salvation religion which draws most of its followers from the disprivileged classes.
Weber, however, rejected the view that the teachings of Jesus were driven by resentment,
since the Gospels were largely indifferent to the problems of this world, promising
instead salvation in the next. Similarly, ‘Buddhism constitutes the most radical antithesis
to every type of ressentiment morality’ (Weber, 1966: 116). While Weber did not have
much to say about Islam, he regarded the early ummah as a federation of tribes and saw
the militarization of the early Muslim empire as further evidence of the fact that Islam
was ‘a national Arab warrior religion’ and as a result was ‘never really a religion of sal-
vation’ (Weber, 1978: Vol. 2, 462). In short, Islam evolved, in Weber’s eyes, as the
religion of a privileged warrior stratum and as a result it was far removed for the mille-
narian hope of the religions of the disprivileged (Turner, 1974).
Weber’s views on resentment in Judaism and Christianity bring into focus interest-
ing but problematic questions about the relevance of his sociology of religion to
Buddhism. Weber’s critics point out that he inherited a typical late-nineteenth-century
view of Buddhism as a guru-centred, a-social and a-political religion of mendicant
monks, and hence for Weber Buddhism could never be a dynamic force for historical
change (Newell, 2010). Its other-worldly characteristics meant that it could never play
the revolutionary social role that Weber attributed to this-worldly asceticism of the
Protestant sects. One problem with Weber’s interpretation is that the Buddhism of
South Asia is often very different from Buddhism in the rest of Asia. Weber did partly
recognize this problem, for example, in his brief commentary on Shin Buddhism in
Japan. The ‘Shin sect’ of Japan was interesting from Weber’s perspective because it
shared some characteristics with Protestantism. It rejected celibacy and the hierarchical
organization of the monastic institutions.

However, it did not develop a rational innerworldly asceticism to the same degree and for the
same reasons as Lutheranism. It was a a salvation religion which met the feudally bound up
soteriological and emotional needs of the middle classes without accepting the orgiastic and
ecstatic and magical turn of the old Hindu folk piety or our Pietism.
(Weber, 1958: 303)

In his Interpreting Amida (1997), Galen Amstutz criticized Weber for reproducing
many of the problematic assumptions of ‘Buddhology’ and neglecting the social impact
of Shin on Japan, because he had dismissed other-worldly Buddhism as irrelevant to
84 Journal of Classical Sociology 11(1)

modernization. Without going too deeply into the whole problem of Orientalism, what is
important about the Shin tradition is that it rejected monasticism and brought Buddhism
into the everyday lives of the Japanese. From the perspective of this article, what is
interesting about Buddhism is precisely the tensions between the laity and the Buddhism
monk, because only the latter can fulfil the demanding and time-consuming requirements
of the life of a virtuoso. In Buddhism the bodhisattva mediate between the Buddha and
the lay community and show their compassion towards the ordinary lay person who has
to struggle in this world. Throughout Asia, Mahayana Buddhism created a pantheon of
deities or celestial beings such as bodhisattvas who are the compassionate manifestation
of the Buddha. The bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, or ‘the lord who looks down’, was
especially important. In China, Avalokeshvara evolved into the female bodhisattva Guanyin
or Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Compassion, and she became associated with Mount
Putuo in Zhejiang, where pilgrims from all over China seek her blessing (Paul, 1985).
In popular religion, the female goddess of both Daoism and Buddhism, rather than male
figures such as the Buddha or the Jade Emperor, are sought after by the downtrodden and
impoverished (Palmer and Ramsay, 1995).
I hypothesize that resentment in Buddhism therefore evolved in two directions. First
there is the resentment of women against men, and this feminization of Buddhism in the
figure of Kuan Yin compensates for the dominant male principle supremely represented
in the Jade Emperor. Secondly, resentment was directed by the downtrodden illiterate
laity against the educated stratum of monks whose contemplative life places them close to
the final goal of emptiness. A flourishing Buddhist community in a traditional society
required the patronage of a prince, the loyalty of the laity and the caring ministrations of the
sangha (the religious community largely composed of educated monks). These relations
frequently broke down, especially when the sangha became rich and corrupt, and where
the abstract belief system of the monastic life became too far removed from the daily lives
of the peasantry (Ling, 1973: 251). The material inequalities between sangha and lay
community gave rise to resentment, when the monks were regarded as little more than
parasitic ‘rice eaters’. Whereas resentment in Weber’s account sprang from the experi-
ences of a pariah community that sought revenge against its oppressors by the intervention
of a High God, resentment in Buddhist Asia perhaps assumed less dramatic proportions. In
conclusion, we can simply note that Weber associated resentment first with the Judaeo-
Christian tradition and secondly with the conflicts around the caste system in South India.
He did not regard Buddhism as a fruitful foundation for virulent resentments.
As one might expect, Weber’s analysis of ‘pariah people’ has been the subject of
much criticism (Sigrist, 1971). It has been argued that Weber mistakenly compared the
plight of the Jews with the Indian caste system and that his analysis ignores ‘Jewish
sensibilities’ (Love, 2000: 212). Two comments may be appropriate here. The first is that
this analysis of privileged and disprivileged religion might be connected to a broader
concern in Weber’s sociology of religion, which was to identify the different religious
needs of different social strata. While the dominant classes wanted legitimacy, the sub-
ordinate strata wanted compensation and, in the absence of compensation, revenge. The
second is that Weber took from Nietzsche not only the somewhat narrow sociology of
status groups and their worldviews, but also the analysis of modern society as nihilistic.
Turner 85

Protestantism and the birth of tragedy

There is much unresolved dispute about the central theme of Weber’s sociology (Tenbruck,
1980). I want to suggest here that Weber’s central question was in fact about the ethical
character of human existence and not about the narrow question relating to the cultural
foundations of Western capitalism in the theology of the Protestant sects. As a result we
can better understand that ‘Weber was a German thinker, from the land of “Dr Faustus”’
(Hennis, 1988: 195). The tragic problem of Weberian sociology is that the heroic per-
sonality of Protestant asceticism is no longer compatible with the secular world of capi-
talism. As Weber declares nostalgically at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism:

Today the spirit of religious asceticism – whether finally who knows? – has escaped from the
cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no
longer. The rosy blush of its laughing heir, the Enlightenment, seems also to be irretrievably
fading, and the idea of duty in one’s calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead
religious beliefs.
(Weber, 1976: 181–182)

Modern society is the disenchanted garden in which a meaningful life is replaced by

mere routine, mechanical discipline and technical efficiency. It is a world that Nietzsche
criticized as simply cultural nihilism. In this respect, there might have been in Weber’s
mind a deliberate reference in the title The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (in the 1866 edition The Birth
of Tragedy. Or Hellenism and Pessimism) (Edgar, 1995). Nietzsche’s characterization of
Greek tragedy in terms of the struggle between Apollo and Dionysus found an echo in
Weber’s idea that the birth of modern tragedy was the unintended consequence or fateful
effects of the spirit of pietism (Turner, 1996).
The common theme in these accounts is the recognition of the profoundly ethical
character of Weber’s social theory and its underpinning in a set of anthropological
assumptions about personality and life orders. We can argue, therefore, that Weber was
working towards the sociology of piety, namely the rules of pious activity in the every-
day world. Piety eventually produces ‘character’ as a result of such training. We can
better understand Weber’s concern for the interconnections between piety and ethics by
recognizing how his sociology as a whole was shaped by the long-lasting impact of
Kant’s philosophy of religion. Religion as an ethical activity of self-creation had to be
distinct from popular religion as merely a set of rituals for bringing good fortune and
good health. Religion as a radical faith of self-transformation had to be concerned not
with Gluck, or simple good fortune, but with Leid, or the deeper problem of misfortune
and suffering. This was the problem of routinization, in which a radical religion of inner
conviction became merely a therapeutic practice of folk religiosity. In adopting these
moral issues from Kant, Weber also had to, as it were, look over his shoulder to Nietzsche
and especially to the questions: are these Christian morals in fact merely driven by
resentment, in which case they are not a self-reflexive moral worldview, and, secondly, is
a warrior religion somehow ‘healthier’ than the religion of slaves, namely early Christianity?
86 Journal of Classical Sociology 11(1)

To what extent is Islam, which does not privilege suffering and repentance, a healthier
(more life-affirming) doctrine than the religion of the crucified Jesus?

Towards the sociology of resentment

Having cleared the theoretical ground, so to speak, I want now to start the task of con-
structing the sociology of resentment. My starting point is to claim a greater visibility
between social groups in modern societies, especially within the mega-city. In more
traditional societies, people lived within tight communities often separated by forests
and wilderness from other communities. The peasantry as a social class were also physi-
cally and culturally separated from landowners. In modern societies, communities are
more open, fluid and contiguous. We also ‘rub shoulders’ – sometimes literally – with
elites on modern transport systems in the mega-city and, if we don’t, then we see them
on TV, read about them in magazines and hear them on radio. Wealth is on display. We
are exposed to the lives and activities of celebrities both in the political world and in the
entertainment world. Indeed in modern societies these two spheres overlap and support
each other. For example, we know about the public and private life of Silvio Berlusconi
because his wealth, politics and sexual life are displayed on the global media. Wealth is
displayed to the underprivileged and the disprivileged in large doses. This propinquity
and visibility enhance the opportunities for resentment. It is the constant and oppressive
visibility of wealth and success that creates conditions for comparison and resentment.
My starting point is that the visibility of social relationships in the crowded spaces of
modernity is the breeding ground of general resentment.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was perhaps the first political philosopher to comment on this
emerging issue. In the Letter to M. d’Alembert he developed his famous critique of the
theatre; we can regard this essay as a contribution to the sociology of spectacle. His writ-
ing on spectacle in the theatre was a moral as well as a political criticism of d’Alembert,
who had defended the introduction of theatre whereas Rousseau regarded these enter-
tainments as yet another occasion for the corruption of the natural goodness of people. In
rejecting the Christian doctrine of original sin, Rousseau (1993), in Émile, which appeared
in 1762, concluded that it is society that corrupts the innocent natural subject and not the
depraved individual who corrupts society.
For Rousseau, the problem with modern society – as pre-eminently illustrated in the
theatre – is that people can no longer be themselves, because there is, as it were, a falsi-
fication of authenticity by the need to display the self within the public arena. The need
for status display creates a need for the fabrication of a social mask in which this outer
persona contradicts the person who we really are. With the evolution of urban society, it
was now in

… the interest of men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two
totally different things; and from this distinction sprang insolent pomp and cheating trickery,
with all the numerous vices that go in their train.
(Rousseau, 1977: 86)

Men had to learn artful methods of presenting themselves.

Turner 87

This way of reading Rousseau brings out a striking resemblance to the sociology of
interpersonal behaviour in the work of Erving Goffman. In his famous The Presentation
of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Goffman studied the micro-rituals by which we routinely
construct a self in social encounters. In this respect, his work invites the assumption that
these social selves are fabricated, because successful interactions require strategies in
which, for example, we may try to avoid any loss of face. Because Goffman’s analysis
of social situations involved a distinction between the front stage and the back stage, the
implication can be legitimately drawn that the back stage is where the authentic self – the
natural person - is lodged. This way of examining society was defined as the ‘dramatur-
gical approach’ to social reality, insofar as Goffman recognized that we often play social
roles in which we can distance ourselves from the immediate situation. Like the script in
a stage play, the interactions of everyday encounters have to be performed and enacted.
The point of this dramaturgical approach was to avoid the impression created by the
sociology of Talcott Parsons that roles are fixed and secure. The idea that society has in
fact become a drama is a remarkable conclusion to Rousseau’s criticisms of the theatre.
The social environment which Goffman described in the 1950s in America represented
the historical realization of Rousseau’s worst fears. With the ‘theatricalization’ of every-
day life, conformity to social norms of behaviour is no longer linked to virtue. In the
post-war suburban society described by Goffman in his interaction rituals or in the con-
formist world of the ‘organization man’ of corporate America (Whyte, 1956), surface
behaviour rather than moral intention came to be the significant issue and as a result all
moral concerns were dissolved under the weight of corporate culture.
Goffman’s world was therefore closer to the sterile suburban world of ‘the organiza-
tion man’ than to the more abrasive neo-conservative world of Reagan and Thatcher. The
world as described by William F. Whyte was a world of managed emotions and standard-
ized lifestyles. MacIntyre captures this world perfectly in his commentary on Goffmanesque
role-playing:

The unit of analysis in Goffman’s accounts is always the individual role-player striving to
effect his will within a role-structured situation. The goal of the Goffmanesque role player is
effectiveness and success in Goffman’s social universe is nothing but what passes for success.
There is nothing else for it to be. For Goffman’s world is empty of objective standards of
achievement; it is so defined that there is no cultural or social space from which appeal to such
standards could be made. … Because success is whatever passes for success, it is in the regard
of others that I prosper or fail to prosper; hence the importance of presentation as a – perhaps
the central – theme.
(MacIntyre, 1984: 115)

Successful role-playing requires only interactional skills in managing the front stage,
carefully avoiding any embarrassment and strategically protecting oneself from any loss of
face. The social world is a game in which winning and losing take an arbitrary character.
MacIntyre argues that we cannot criticize Goffman’s sociology as a cynical portrayal of
the corporate world of modern America, because ‘there can be no such thing as a cynical
disregard for objective merit for the cynic to disregard’ (MacIntyre, 1984: 116). Because
the shared moral framework is shattered, there are no objective, shared criteria by which
88 Journal of Classical Sociology 11(1)

the virtue of an actor or the merit of an action-situation could be judged. The result is to
inflame resentment.
In a Goffmanesque world, because prestige is inevitably scarce, its distribution must
be unequal and uneven. The quest for prestige must equally inevitably lead to disappoint-
ment. Disappointment easily evolves into more active resentment against others, because
where there is no shared moral vocabulary, success (in prestige terms) will always appear
to be random. Modern success has the character of a lottery system in which rewards are
arbitrarily allocated with regard to merit or worth. Consequently, the modern status
system is volatile and unpredictable. There are equally rapid moves upwards and down-
wards in which success does not appear to depend on individual effort. The achievement
of prestige appears to be random (‘the luck of the draw’), and there is equally ample
scope for disappointment, frustration and resentment. Such fragile and precarious reward
systems create conditions for an inflationary growth of resentment within the modern
occupational system and income ladder. Where success is broadcast through prizes,
public awards and status-conferring ceremonies, the opportunities for resentment are
further enhanced. Institutions where such ritualized rewards for celebrities are still
emphasized – the academy and the film industry – are sites or occasions of smouldering
resentment. In the past one might anticipate that in societies where class loyalties were
still important, resentment would evolve into rage and then into rebellion, but resentment
in modern societies is an individualized emotion or disposition which, while it might be
shared by a large number of people, does not lend itself to collective action.
This way of looking at resentment appears to be especially relevant to the recent his-
tory of the financial crisis in the West from 2007 to the present times, in which large
fortunes have been lost and many social certainties destroyed. There has been wide-
spread resentment against bankers and financiers, perhaps best illustrated by the resent-
ment against such figures as Bernie Madoff. The identification of the villains such as the
AIG executives and finance mangers of the large banks allowed public criticism to fall
on individuals rather than on the problems of the economy as a whole. Since the crises
are unavoidable (at least according to economic theories of the business cycle), the
resulting ‘greed talk’ is also pervasive. The current form of late capitalism generates high
levels of personal indebtedness, and, because personal status depends on consumption,
modern consumer society requires that everybody become greedy. With the pressure to
consume, citizens acquire liabilities rather than assets and hence they are highly depen-
dent for their status on the cycle of accumulation that produces periodic economic crises.
Hence the paradox of modern society is the structural requirement of acquisitiveness and
the ubiquity of ‘the blame game’, to use the language of Robert Skidelsky (2009), in
which resentment is an inevitable outcome of this combination of uncertainty, visibilty
and the amoral character of success and failure.
Religious fundamentalism and especially the religion of the Moral Majority fit this
social system relatively well. In this regard, the greed talk maps perfectly on to the social
structure of a declining industrial power, because it provides a ready-made language for
the male, blue-collar worker who experiences his economic redundancy as one of social
decline. William E. Connolly (1995) has grasped this general sense of resentment in his
account of the creation of a fundamentalist ideology, the rise of the Republican Right, the
crisis of a number of foreign adventures, from the Vietnam War to modern-day Afghanistan,
Turner 89

against the backdrop of the transformation of manufacturing industry and the financiali-
zation of American capitalism. He writes that ‘[t]he Southern Baptist Church was con-
solidated through a common feeling of betrayal and resentment. This combination of
military defeat, deep resentment against the victorious forces, and aggressive moraliza-
tion to overturn those forces forms the recurrent basis of fundamentalism in America’
(Connolly, 1995: 110). The political fundamentalism of the South has combined with
other dimensions of American life in the late 1960s. Connolly invites us to ‘[c]onsider
northern , male, white, blue-collar workers and white-collar workers of modest means’
(Connolly, 1995: 111) and the Southern white workers who are the backbone of funda-
mentalism. This constituency felt under seige from middle-class feminism, the welfare
program of the Great Society, the growth of the service sector, middle-class environmen-
talism and more recently the election of President Obama. The result is that white working-
class men who have lost out in the credit crisis aggressively assert their grievances
against feminists, gay men, East Coast intellectuals and African-Americans. Connolly also
recognizes that much of this resentment emerges in the academy in the struggle against
relativism, postmodernism, and so forth, in the ‘culture wars’.
The Republican Party has been successful in tapping into these pools of resentment.
The Republican agenda came to be orchestrated around George Wallace and Richard
Nixon and consolidated by Ronald Reagan. Workers who had been traditional Democrats
were attracted to the Republican Party by resentments conjured up by the Vietnam War,
the cultural movements of the 1960s, affirmative action on race and gender, the decline
of factory work, gay and lesbian marriage, and so forth. These sectors of society, who
have already been victims of the rust belt and the Internet bubble, and have now been
subjected to the housing market crisis, the liquidity crisis, the slide in the value of the
dollar, the banking meltdown and the economic recession, are relatively easily drawn
into the public condemnation of bankers and fraudulent financiers. The greed talk and
the blame game offer an explanation of their plight, a channel for their resentment and,
in some cases, a spectacular show of revenge, such as the death threats made against AIG
managers. The mass media, comparing current malefactors with Gordon Gekko, demanded
the ‘disgorgement’ of such wrongdoers.
Modern greed talk and the blame game are negative – they are about revenge and not
about re-building. Their content is moral rather than theological. It is about the allocation
of blame on an individual basis for those whose behaviour exceeds what we might call
normal greed. The public language around the modern crises of capitalism has a moral
and occasionally religious framework, but the mainstream churches lack any effective
language to analyse or comment on the contemporary structure and functions of a society
that is going through a process of financialization.

Conclusion
To begin to summarize this argument: resentment in modern societies is associated firstly
with the relatively open nature of status hierarchies and status games, and I am assuming
consequently that the social characteristics of a class society are no longer immediately
relevant to this theory. The sociological focus here is on the fluidity of status hierarchies.
Whereas Weber was concerned with resentment in societies that were sharply divided
90 Journal of Classical Sociology 11(1)

between the privileged and the disprivileged, in which the latter developed theodicies of
resentment against the arrogance of wealth, modern resentment dwells in the fluid spaces
between the amoral affluence of the socially mobile and justified resentment of those
whose declining position traps them in a suburban wasteland. Secondly what counts is
the visibility or the display of status wealth, with the proliferation of modern commodi-
ties that can so easily carry the hallmarks of superior status – automobiles, wristwatches,
homes, attire, holidays, sport, and so forth, namely the cornucopia of commodities that
are on display every weekend in Sunday newspapers. At random one might refer to the
special watch portfolio of ‘the special advertising supplement’ to The New York Times
of 24 October 2010 presenting an array of wristwatches, the prices of which it would be
too vulgar to divulge. Thirdly, the commodification of everyday life opens up new and
infinitely elastic opportunities for status games – of social climbing, social comparisons
and social exclusions, but also of social decline, marginalization and invisibility. Nobody
can really escape from these status games, since every object in a consumer society is or
may become a commodity.
The real key to modern resentment is the disjuncture between material or status suc-
cess and personal worth. Because we no longer live in an industrial society based on
production where personal worth was connected to hard work, skill levels and education,
in a consumer society the traditional virtues (saving and asceticism) have no place and
success has the appearance of a lottery. Hence chance and risk appear to play a large role
in material success and failure. Because effort and reward no longer have a clear connec-
tion, the scope for resentment is enhanced. Sudden riches – from speculation and finan-
cial gambles – and sudden disaster appear to have no connection with moral worth, and
hence we can feel a sense of justified resentment.
In this discussion of resentment, I have drawn firstly on Nietzsche and Weber to lay
the foundations of a theory and then on Rousseau and Goffman to develop it as an inter-
pretation of modern society where the promise of success is never matched by actual
experience and where rewards appear to be randomly distributed. These crises appear
to be especially evident in modern America. To conclude this discussion, therefore,
I turn finally to that great theorist of American democracy Alexis de Tocqueville who
in Democracy in America tied resentment to the disjunction between the promise and
the experience of equality:

Democratic institutions awaken and flatter the passion for equality without ever being able to
satisfy it entirely. This complete equality is always slipping through people’s fingers at the
moment when they think they grasp it, fleeing, as Pascal says, in an eternal flight; the people
grow heated in search of this blessing, all the more precious because it is near enough to be
seen but too far off to be tasted.
(De Tocqueville, 1966: 198)

Commenting on this passage in her study of de Tocqueville, Cheryl Welch comments:

‘An illusory goal, equality generates exquisite resentments and ever-more discriminating
sentiments of envy’ (2001: 74). These consequences, I have argued, taking my inspiration
from Weber and Rousseau, are an inevitable outcome of visibility, propinquity and the
see-saw quality of wealth in late capitalism.
Turner 91

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Author biography
Bryan S. Turner is the Presidential Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City
University of New York, and Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University
of Western Sydney. His most recent publication is Religion and Modern Society (Cambridge
University Press, 2011).