A Source of Social Action:

Max Weber

Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.

From their several perspectives, it is not enough to say that some Hindus worship Shiva because
they believe in his power or that a Muslim follows the Quran because it holds truths revealed by
God

For Durkheim, Freud, and Marx, religion is always the reflection, never the reality. In the
sociology of Weber, that relationship is just as often mutual, or even reversed. He takes it as his
mission to follow a distinctively nonreductionist trail of complexity in social causation. Religion
is neither always cause nor always effect

The status of religion in this regard is equivalent to that of other human behaviors. For Freud and
Marx, it seems obvious that religion should always be dismissed as an effect and never credited a
cause. For Weber, there is nothing at all self-evident about such a notion. Different forms of
human social activity routinely converge and interact. Causal trains do not run on one-way
tracks; they often circle, and sometimes the route reverses

Background: Family, Politics, and Scholarship

Karl Emil Maximilian “Max” Weber (1864–1920) was the oldest of eight children born to Max
(senior) and Helene Fallenstein Weber. Although the Weber family had long prospered as linen
manufacturers in the region of Westphalia, Max senior chose a career in law and became active
in government. While his first son was still a young child, he moved to Berlin, where he enjoyed
a long parliamentary career, serving first in the Prussian House of Deputies and later in the
German Reichstag as a member of the National Liberal party. Outgoing, self-assured, and
supportive of the empire’s “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, he fit well into the social and
political life of the city, opening his home regularly to colleagues and friends. Helene, the
daughter of a government minister in Berlin, also came from wealth. Highly educated for a
woman of her time, she was more introspective than her husband and devoutly religious, with a
strong social conscience keenly attuned to the hardships of the poor.

These contrasting parental temperaments converged, somewhat uneasily, in the personality of

their son. Max junior shared his father’s active interest ii politics and government but inherited his
mother’s reflective demeanor, as well as her ethical sensitivity and humanitarian idealism.
 Writings on Religion

less obvious, but no less important— is the blueprint he laid down for scientific study of religion
in a long section of Economy and Society. Later translated and published separately in English as
the Sociology of Religion, this analysis has become a standard reference for current theorists of
religion. It expounds some of Weber’s most suggestive typologies and conceptual comparisons.
Third and finally, we will need to take some notice—brief and inadequate, admittedly—of an
ambitious multipart series of studies Weber titled “The Economic Ethic of the World Religions.”
Less than half of that project was finished at his death, but the three books that did appear offer a
window on the full landscape of his thinking.

Sociology of Religion

It begins with the role of religious leaders and then addresses the

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influence of social classes and groups; it turns next to the forms of religious belief and behavior,
and last explores the interaction of religion with other aspects of social life. Each of these topics
merits some comment here.

RELIGIOUS LEADERS: MAGICIAN, PRIEST, AND PROPHET

Magician.

Religion for Weber is rooted in special experiences, what he calls “ecstatic states,” that put
people beyond the realm of everyday activity and disclose to them another level of reality.
Anyone may have such an experience on occasion, but those who can manage it on a regular
basis are naturally regarded as having special talent in spirituality. They have “charisma” (a key
term for Weber, as we have seen); they possess a gift that gives them a claim to the role of
religious leader. In early societies, the magician was the person the tribe regarded as
“permanently endowed with charisma.” When the need arose, people called on the magician to
cure illness, to make the hunt succeed, or to assist the crops in their growth. Frazer, we may
recall, spoke in a similar fashion, but Weber does not see magic as a form of primitive science,
different from religion. Magicians, he says, do not rely only on impersonal principles of contact
and imitation; they also engage the gods or spirits, something Frazer reserved only for religion.
Nor is there a sequence in which religion emerges after magic fails. Magical interest in miracles
and healings may be more common in earlier, simpler cultures, but it can appear at any time,
even in complex, modern religious systems, because it offers things ordinary people need or
want in everyday life.
Priest.

Magic tends to be an occasional thing, focused on immediate concerns; normally people call on
the magicians when the practical need arises. That is not the case with religious leaders who
function as priests. In general, we find a religious priesthood where there is some kind of
permanent system of worship at fixed times and places and associated with a definite religious
community. If we encounter the same ritual routine performed in a certain temple daily at dawn
or weekly at dusk, we normally find a specialized priesthood in charge. The priest, even in most
primitive societies, is a permanent, paid official. We can think of him as having charisma, like
the magician, but it is something derived from his office rather than from his personal
magnetism. The priest’s “professional” status is defined by the rites he controls and by the
religious community of ordinary people, the laity, he directs. In more complex societies, as we
might expect, priests fit into Weber’s category of bureaucratic domination. They are
“professionals” in religion; they have assigned duties and are arranged in ranks with differing
levels of responsibility; they are conscious of their special status, dispensing religious guidance
and benefits to clients; and above all, they prize social and religious order. In ancient India, for
example, it was the community of priests that promoted Varuna and Mitra, the gods of cosmic
law and order, against Rudra, the chaotic god of storms.

Prophet.

The notions of cosmic order and a universal ethic bring us to the third ideal-type: the prophet.
Among those who become social leaders, says Weber, there is hardly a single type—statesman,
artist, intellectual, or conqueror—more consequential to the course of civilizations than the
commanding figure of the prophet. He is a person recognized as “a purely individual bearer of
charisma.”14 The prophet may appear at any time in a culture, acting on a powerful sense of
mission, to proclaim for all a comprehensive “religious doctrine or divine commandment.” A
prophet is not a magician, centered on securing everyday practical benefits—foretelling the
future, curing illness, changing the weather. He may have some magical appeal, but the center of
his life is his mission: He has been specially called by either the voice of God or a vision of
Truth to proclaim a life-altering message. He would find it absurd to be paid for his labors. His
calling sustains him, and he is content if need be to live in poverty, accepting only what people
voluntarily give him to subsist. A prophet is also unlike a priest. His authority is not derived
from his religious office. It anchors itself in the revolutionary power of his personality and his
message. It is clear that most of the great world religions trace their origin to a transforming
prophetic figure whose charismatic life and compelling message revolutionized the world of his
day.

Historically, prophets have been of two main types. The “exemplary prophet”—the wise man
who teaches by his own powerful example—has predominated in the Far East. In India, Gautama
the Buddha belongs to this type, as do the teachers Lao-tzu and Confucius in China. Each offers
a path of wisdom and truth meant for all, even if only some have the full capacity to follow it.
The “ethical prophet” has predominated in the Near East and in Western civilization. Zoroaster
in ancient Persia, the prophets of Israel, Jesus of Nazareth, and Muhammad in Arabia fall within
this distinctive type. Here too the prophets offer a universal ethic, reaching beyond self-interest
and the ties of family or tribe. But on an essential point they differ from the great Oriental sages,
who shared the worldviews of Asian civilizations that found the ultimate Reality of the universe
to be impersonal, as in the Chinese Tao, or “Way of Nature.” Western prophets embrace
monotheism. They present themselves not as wise men modeling the life of wisdom but as
instruments chosen by an almighty and personal God to proclaim his will. Their mission is to
speak as his oracles and to demand obedience to the universal ethic he imposes. They reject
magic as a useless exercise, addressed only to petty interests; they are suspicious also of priests,
whose concern with ritualized ceremonies and orderly administration tends to smother the vital
flame of religion. That holy fire is something found only in a deep inner commitment carried out
in obedience to a moral code; it is neither selfish nor tribal but is anchored in the sovereign
universal will of the world’s Creator and Lord.

Prophets, of course, are exceptional people—capable of living an entire life at the highest level
of personal commitment. The prophet’s followers, being normal human beings, are less likely to
possess such total dedication. So in any religious community, if it is to sustain itself over time,
the charisma of the founder must somehow be kept alive by successors. The ideal-type Weber
frames for this critically important process is, as noted, the “routinization” of charisma—the
transformation of the prophet’s inspirational gift into something permanent, something fixed in
the bureaucracy of an institution.15 After the death of Jesus, for example, it fell to the twelve
apostles, then to the Church fathers, and later to the priests and bishops of the Catholic Church to
make his charisma routine by molding it into institutional systems, by giving it fixed forms that
would make it last. In this way, the priestly bureaucracy, by nature opposed to the unpredictable
inspirations of prophecy, can become the prophet’s best ally after his death. Only a conservative
bureaucratic system— aimed at maintaining the prophet’s truth (now that it has won a following)
— can frame his message into a system of teaching and administration that will be able to guide
an ever-enlarging community, or “congregation” (Weber’s preferred term for this ideal-type), of
followers through the ages. This structural support comes at a price, of course, for bureaucracies
tend to smother the fires of the spirit. Reformers with charisma of another kind will on occasion
need to challenge priestly authority and restore the original vigor of the prophet’s message.
Episodes of tension are thus to be expected, for the vitality of the original message is always put
at risk by the dead hand of bureaucratic officialdom.