Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society: Beyond Historismus(Historicism) (2023.12)
- Author : Chiwon Choi
- Publication : Zeitschrift der Koreanisch-Deutschen Gesellschaft fuer Sozialwissenschaften
- Publisher : Koreanisch-Deutsche Gesellschaft Fuer Sozialwissenschaften(K-G Association For Social Sciences)
- Volume : 33(4)
- Date : December 2023
A ‘class-conscious bourgeois’ as citizen, Max Weber’s politics of civil society is a product of the political-practical attempt to overcome the crisis of Historismus. In the most comprehensive sense, it provides a new ‘Historie’ which corresponds to that of Marx and Nietzsche who are responsible for the crisis of Historismus. It internalizes methods of Marx and Nietzsche, which Historismus couldn’t provide. Above all, although Weber was a ‘child of the historical school,’ he accepts the critical problematique of Hegel and especially Marx: His concept of politics of civil society attempts to preserve the value and meaning of politics in respond to the demands of the times by requestinf a reexamination of the entire Bilder of the existing Historie. His unique ‘source’ of thoughts, which opens a new perspective on society and politics, has its specific content in his concept of politics of civil society. His concept is not related to the traditions of natural rights theory or social contract theory, which equated civil society with political society, nor should it be understood as the product of a naive political interpretation based on the religious ego or self and mentality. A concept of politics of civil society captured not only by moral ethics (voluntarism) based on the ego-idea of Parsonianized Weber but also by a creative individualism in the manner of Tocqueville and Mill, which furthermore is colored by Verba’s ‘civic culture’ and Putnam’s ‘social capital’, vulgarizes, simplifies and misleads Weber’s thoughts. In the academic and intellectual climate of the United States, such Parsonianized romantic version of politics of civil society may be possible. At best, such concept only results in the politics of civil society as Zivilgesellschaft, which has nothing to do with Weber. Weber, with his theoretical and practical cool-headedness, however, would not accept such naive and lax concept of politics of civil society as an ‘Americanized version of Romanticism’.