Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation of the relationship between politics and scholarship in Max Weber's methodology. I argue that there is an implicit politics to Weber's scholarly practice--a politics which Weber himself delineates, however incompletely and ambiguously, but never explicitly acknowledges. While Weber has been traditionally understood as advocating a strict separation of politics and scholarship, I argue that his conception of social science requires not only a separation of the two activities, but a connection as well. This connection is evident in Weber's public lecture "Science as vocation," but also in his more strictly methodological essays such as "The 'Objectivity' of Social-Scientific and Social-Political Knowledge." Here Weber appropriates his colleague Heinrich Rickert's arguments about historical or social-scientific objectivity, without, however, accepting Rickert's philosophical foundations. I argue that in this critical appropriation, Weber implicitly shifts the meaning of social-scientific 'objectivity': 'objectivity,' for Weber, is best understood as a subjective attitude or ethos of impartiality, a gesture of theoretical openness to different possible perspectives. Weber, however, is never entirely open about the practical implications of this appropriation, presenting his own arguments in strictly logical terms. This unwillingness to acknowledge the ethical and political dimensions of his own scholarship leads to a repression of the explicit value dimension of his own work, as is evident in Weber's increasingly exclusive use of instrumentally rational ideal types. 'Objectivity' gradually shifts from a gesture of theoretical openness to a gesture of instrumentality. This rationalist undercurrent, I argue, ultimately contributes, however indirectly, to political disaster. Yet if Weber's gesture of 'objectivity' is inadequate both as a scholarly and as a political response, it is not the only gesture that one could imagine. I conclude that it would be possible to make a gesture of 'objectivity' which would acknowledge more openly its practical commitments and consequences, as well as its own limitations