Descripción de los procesos del negocio mediante los Diagramas de

Chapters three and four discuss two members of the (petty) bourgeoisie, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, and their sociologies of morality. Although I will argue that Durkheim, like Marx, has a ‘strong program,’ while Weber’s is ‘weak,’ both Weber and Durkheim appear to be neo-Kantians, at least insofar as they accept a version of the gap between is and ought that also implies a permanent gap between practical and scientific reason and, subsequently, in the validity of professional bourgeois sociology. Instead of viewing that gap as the fissure through which revolutionary energy should flow, Durkheim adopts a reformist/progressivist position, emphasizing the need for meliorist policies aimed at

41 The simplest response to the claim that ‘ought’ cannot be derived from ‘is’ has always been to point out that there is no such thing as an ‘is’ that is not already imbued with an evaluative charge. Indeed, both Durkheim and Weber accept something like this caveat without therefore rejecting the methodological distinction between facts and values. The methodological distinction between facts and values is just the evaluative starting-point that characterizes science.

addressing inadequate levels of modern integration and regulation. Weber, by contrast, emphasizes the tendency for human action to have unintended consequences and advocates a kind of pessimistic existentialist heroism. To put it briefly, for Marx, revolution, for Durkheim, reform, and for Weber, decision.

I shall prepare the discussion of Weber and Durkheim by means of a comparison of Marx with Friedrich Nietzsche, a thinker that, like Marx, rejected both Kant and academic sociology (cf. their mutual distaste for Spencer and, by extension, for Social Darwinism), but for rather different reasons. Nietzsche’s reframing of late 19^th century European social philosophy contributed significantly to the ways that Weber and Durkheim diverged from Marx on issues of value, class, and bourgeois morality.

Especially important, in this regard, is the relationship between Marx’s labour theory of value and Nietzsche’s pseudo-economism, which entails, among other things, the philological move by which he associates guilt (Schuld) with debt (Schulden) (1989:61–

63, 70) setting the stage for his polemic against ressentiment and ‘slave morality.’ The move is pseudo-economistic because Nietzsche’s ultimate view is vitalist, not economic (‘more life!’ exceeds utilitarian calculation). The ‘assaying animal’ is already a reactive form of human. The ‘pathos of distance,’ the aristocratic feeling of self-unity that precedes any comparison antedates the ‘propensity to truck and barter’ and to ‘value.’

One starts with ‘good’ and only later considers the other to be ‘bad’ by comparison. This is Nietzsche’s vitalist recasting of Augustine’s understanding of evil as privation. In the end Nietzsche is uninterested in grounding a theory of justice in a monolithic theory of

value (whether a ‘labour theory of value’ or a ‘value theory of labour’). The production of new ‘tables of value,’ the ‘transvaluation of value,’ is more original, more active, than calculative and comparative assessments of value. Marx, on the other hand, intended for the concept of ‘use value’ to avoid the reduction of human activity to economic valuation.

He only partially succeeds in making this distinction.

The gaps and tensions between Marx and Nietzsche on issues of conventional scholarship and morality, and on the origins of value, provide some of the space and potential energy that Durkheim and Weber used to develop their understandings of contemporary morality. They do this in a very general and somewhat indirect sense, since neither Durkheim nor Weber spend much time explicitly addressing Marx and Nietzsche.

Nevertheless, Marxian and Nietzschean ‘regions’ of thought affected Durkheim and Weber’s respective views of the role of professional social scientists as they (both) sidestepped revolutionary or radical activity, whether Marxist political activity or Nietzschean ‘transvaluation of values.’ Weber and Durkheim, both suspicious of Marx’s economism, were influenced in varying ways by Nietzsche on the question of value.

While Weber accepts the more Nietzschean position, Durkheim sociologizes values by recourse to an analysis of ritual action, locating value in a realm of the sacred distinct from economic behaviour.

Leo Panitch describes “Marx and Engels’s distinctive political practice...[as]...the combination of social-scientific analysis, based on their materialist interpretation of history, with engaged political writing and speaking—pamphlets, lectures...—in which

they tried to make current history intelligible to activists” (2001:116). What neither of them did, however, was to try to found academic disciplines and institutionalize them in the university. Isaiah Berlin, in his influential liberal biography of Marx, suggests that this was not really possible, even had Marx wished to have an academic career. Marx’s academic options disappeared due largely to external events like the death of his father and the political condemnation of the Hegelian left (Berlin 1963:72). So, what happens when scholars attempt what could only be, for Marx, the ill-advised and ill-fated project

—insofar, for instance, as it endorses the mental/physical division of labour—of instituting social science disciplines within the university, thus seeming to revert to the Kantian position on the ‘public’ and ‘private’ use of reason (1992; 1996)? To address this question, we must address the idea of sociology as a vocation, as well as a secondary idea, the relation of this ‘calling’ to guilt or debt. That is, perhaps the profession of sociology—professing to be a social scientist and professionalizing sociology as an academic discipline—is also a confession, an acknowledgement of undischarged responsibility or guilt. To endorse a gap between facts and values, as both Weber and Durkheim did, is to accept the existence of (or even to produce) unfulfilled (and perhaps unfulfillable) obligations.⁴² Adorno later formulates this as ‘the guilt in thinking,’ a guilt arising from the facts of modern life (1973:364).

Marx and Nietzsche rejected some element of what is involved in making this kind of profession (of guilt). Marx viewed it as an unjustified acquiescence to the

42 Here both Durkheim and Weber echoed, in their personal work ethics, Kant’s claim that the highest form of physical pleasure, the most innocent, comes from resting after work (Kant 1974:276).

bourgeois division of labour, one to be avoided by engaging in active political organizing.

The guilt of the ‘professional’ scientist is just the guilt of not embracing revolutionary activity. Concern with individual salvation already begins to miss the point. In exchange for security and status one agrees to merely interpret the world instead of changing it. Yet Dixi et salvavi animum meam: we save our souls when we speak up and speak the truth, in the crucial political moment, about bourgeois hypocrisy and proletarian suffering.

Nietzsche, by contrast, blamed the hemming-in [hemmung] of will to power by the will to truth, not the failure to acknowledge economic exploitation or suffering or to build links of solidarity with the working-class. Bourgeois intellectuals may have an admirable

“intellectual conscience...[but]...They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in truth” (1989:150).

Weber and Durkheim knew and accepted elements of the critiques of bourgeois science developed by Marx and Nietzsche, but this did not, in the end, dissuade them from playing key roles in the institutionalization and professionalization of sociology in Germany and France, respectively. We can find important elements to understanding the professionalization of sociology in the details of the responses Weber and Durkheim made in the context provided by these two critiques of 19^th century Enlightenment science. This period of professionalization incorporated (and perhaps also encrypted) some of the issues and subject matter of 19^th century social philosophy of ‘independent scholars’ and ‘learned societies,’ of socialism, radical journals, and the social gospel, while discarding or divesting others. The gendered differentiation/hierarchization that

developed in early Chicago sociology between social work and social research provides a paradigmatic example (cf. Deegan 1988). The optimism (hubris?) of paternalistic

professionalizing positivist sociologists can be seen in the work of Franklin Giddings, an early American advocate for both quantitative methods and for its use in eugenics, as can be seen in the article he used to introduce the first issue of The Journal of Social Forces (1922). This kind of social-engineering optimism persists here and there in various sociologies even to the present.

Marx rejected politically bourgeois science. Still, in Marx’s terms, true members of the bourgeoisie are engaged in a type of revolutionizing practice. It is, however, a type of revolutionizing practice that undermines itself by constantly extending the reach of commodification into realms hitherto unexplored by the market while simultaneously rendering its old work uncompetitive or obsolete (as Weber knew). Thus one learns how to ‘sell’ ideas (cf. Horkheimer and Adorno 1988:197–198). As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers” (Marx and Engels 1972:338). In other words, the bourgeois vocation does away with all fixed vocations, even if one is a “man of science.”

Marx and Engels’ position here is rather ambiguous. A clear articulation of this ambiguity is found in Marshall Berman’s commentary on this position as it is found in Marx’s later master-work, Capital. In the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter,

Berman describes the performative contradiction in which Marx and Engels

simultaneously covet and criticize the modern intellectual’s faith in the sanctity of his calling (1982:116).

Many of the issues of vocation and guilt/debt that emerge in the period of sociology’s professionalization can be understood as a response to this tension between vocation and wage-labour. While Berman points out that Marx implicitly includes himself in the ranks of modern professionals, Marx’s account attempts to confine guilt to the hypocritical among the bourgeoisie without incorporating a confession of social guilt or debt into scientific method more generally. Marx’s science reveals suffering and hypocrisy, and lays blame, but evades the possibility that the scientist, too, even the one that ‘speaks the truth,’ may be guilty of bad faith, or may speak from a position of moral compromise. Indeed, Nietzsche claims that the ‘will to truth’ tends not to admit the extent to which the meaning of its activity derives from or parasitizes suffering and hypocrisy. I will discuss the limits of Marx’s strategy in terms of two critiques, first of Marx’s notion of class, and second of his understanding of human nature and motivation. Nietzsche is important to both of these critiques, and an interpretation of how Nietzsche’s writings on science, truth, and human motivation change the parameters of these questions may help us understand why both Durkheim and Weber subject issues of human classification and motivation to extended analysis.

While on the one hand we can read Durkheim and Weber as responding to Marx’s accusations concerning the hypocrisy and mendacity of the bourgeoisie in a way that

partly concedes, partly defends, partly extends, it is also more than this. The ‘moralities of method’ (Rose 2009; Nietzsche 1966:48) that we find in both Weber and Durkheim were attempts to complete, correct, or otherwise sustain Kant’s notion of duty—as a principle that transcends mere inclination—in the context of science, but they were, at the same time, responses to a growing suspicion about the very will to truth that characterizes Marx’s project. Not only does Marx’s concept of class border on metaphysics, his

understanding of science’s relation to rationality begins to appear naive in the light of Nietzsche’s critique.⁴³ After Nietzsche we have to answer the question of the will to power behind the scientist’s will to truth; and Marxist conceptions of economic class conflict may not do enough to explain the complexities of the character, motivation, and self-relation of the individual scientist. Accordingly, Durkheim’s and Weber’s moralities of method, their pursuit of the autonomy of reason, lead them to two different neo-Kantian conclusions: the foundational character of validity or of value. That is, in

pursuing the ‘will to truth’ to its end (i.e., methodically carrying out hypothetical lines of reason), we find, at the origin of the truth, a new version of Kant’s ‘Copernican

Revolution.’ Truth originates in an act of will, a simple assertion, whether value or validity, whether the individual or the collective will (Rose 2009:1–50).

In the previous chapter we addressed disputes between Marx and the theories of reflection developed by Hegel and Adam Smith. In this chapter, we face some of Nietzsche’s darker claims about the nature of human drives (i.e., that they cannot be so

43 These days we need to keep in mind Foucault’s analysis of the ambiguities of subjectivity and discipline. See Butler’s critical readings of Foucault (e.g., 1990:129–141; 1997:83–105; 2005:22–26, 111–

136) and also Pearce’s preference for Durkheim’s reading of subjectivation (2001:156–157n.4).

easily reduced to a self-formative struggle for recognition), and the possibility that

bourgeois morality and bourgeois science may be less about economic class divisions and social alienation and more about the sado-masochistic nature of modern selfhood.

C. ‘TO FACE WITH SOBER SENSES’: REVOLUTIONARY VOCATION

Nietzsche is perhaps only a kind of proxy for changes in late 19^th century European social life and thought that compelled Weber and Durkheim to craft a response to a question that Marx was still able to skirt, even if not exactly in the way that Mannheim suggested in Ideology and Utopia (1972). As I have already suggested, Marx avoided the question of his own scientific vocation in the same way that he avoided having to lay out a positive moral program: by focusing on world historical questions of revolutionary class struggle against the suffering of the people. For Marx it was enough to identify and analyze how a revolutionary class may find itself faced with its world historical role; the section of the bourgeois class that ‘cuts itself adrift’ is mentioned in passing and is structured around metaphors of visibility, unveiling, and unbinding, rather than ‘calling.’ Indeed, insofar as the proletarian revolution is the ‘social’ revolution—the revolution that does away with Klassen in its character as a vestige of religious Klēsis, the persistence of ‘sacred’ callings

—it is the kind of answer that does away with, or overcomes (Aufheben) the transcendent call. The industrial ‘detail worker’ must give way to the “fully developed individual...to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers” (1978:458). Berman suggests that Marx

“embraces enthusiastically the personality structure that this economy has produced”

(1982:96) even more than the bourgeoisie, who have a bad conscience about their

revolutionizing activity: “In The German Ideology (1845–1846), the goal of communism is ‘the development of a totality of capacities in the individuals themselves.’ For ‘only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions...’” (97). Faustian free development in all directions appears as a replacement for the one-sided ‘vocation.’ It follows, Terry Eagleton writes, that “Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists...Marxism is meant to be a strictly provisional affair, which is why anyone who invests the whole of their identity in it has missed the point” (2011:1–2).

Marx emphasizes the class consciousness of the mass movement, not the particular calling of the individual.⁴⁴ The question of individual vocation is, as Rosa

44 Later Marxists (e.g., Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács, Luxemburg, Bernstein, Althusser, etc.) were left to deal with the question of vocation, as the practical demands of governing and organizing unfolded in ways that were increasingly difficult to confine, by repeated identifying “the workers” as the revolutionary class thus skirting individual anxiety about one’s calling. The problem of anxiety is addressed in chapter six.

Lenin’s “Better Fewer, But Better” [1923] channeling older understandings of calling, in which practices of discernment are the responsibility of the community and the church, recommended instituting bureaucratic standards of expertise as well as ideological tests (1968:367). Whether Lenin’s bureaucratic and Party-centred approach internally presaged Stalin’s methods or whether opting for the Party over the local soviets was merely a strategic or theoretical mistake remains a disputed question.

In History and Class Consciousness, Lukács addressed Party discipline and the Communist Party role in providing leadership to the revolution, arguing that “Organisation is the form of mediation between theory and practice” ([1922]1971:298). Theoretical disputes should be tied to concrete organizational decision-making and problem-solving. The organization mediates between the (spontaneous) mass and the individual actor, and individual vocation only makes sense when addressed as a concrete problem of organization (300). He emphasized the importance of party discipline (315–316), argued that in order to avoid developing a party along the bourgeois pattern (active leaders and passive mass) the party must engage the “total personality” (320), and depicted the party as the solution to the problem of vocation, for

The party as a whole transcends the reified divisions according to nation, profession, etc., and according to modes of life...by virtue of its action. For this is oriented towards revolutionary unity and collaboration...Its closely-knit organisation with its resulting iron discipline and its demand for total commitment tears away the reified veils that cloud the consciousness of the individual in capitalist society. (339)

At the close of the essay Lukács endorses the need for Party purges. Nigel Gibson and Gillian Rose argue that Lukács (and later Adorno) return to neo-Kantian ethical imperatives (Gibson 2002:280,

Luxemburg put it, “the angle of the isolated capitalist” (1973:34). For a Marxist, the call, in nuce, is simply this: “Workers of the World, unite!” (cf. Lenin 1968:78). This is not a matter of attending to the ‘still, small voice’ of conscience, but of responding to the harsh everyday realities of economic exploitation. The call, then, is neither ‘inner’ nor

‘transcendental.’ Neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian that becomes a revolutionary responds to a call so much as he or she faces reality ‘with sober senses’ and goes ‘where the action is.’ In Lenin’s “What is to be done?” [1902] the question of the relation between “spontaneity” and “consciousness” renders the idea of vocation an unnecessary mediation. Here he advocates exposures over calls: “To catch some criminal red-handed and immediately to brand him publicly in all places is of itself far more effective than any number of ‘calls’...Calls for action...in the concrete, sense of the term can be made only at the place of action...Our business as Social-Democratic publicists is to deepen, expand, and intensify political exposures and political agitation” (1968:51). Recognizing (collective) job insecurity and exploitation, and that, as the saying goes, ‘we must hang together or we will hang separately,’ becomes the main focus, not anxiety about one’s

291n30; Rose 2009). See also the recently reissued ‘Tactics and Ethics’ (2014) written by Lukács in 1919.

The “reform or revolution?” question is also relevant, here. Luxemburg accused Bernstein of inventing this either/or (Luxemburg 1973:8) as well as the question of “ethical” socialism. According to Luxemburg, Bernstein’s revisionism returns to bourgeois morality as to an “ethical simulacra” (58). Siding with reform against revolution involves (opportunistic) acceptance of the social distribution of roles and an abortive or merely opportunistic break with one’s (inherited) social position (contemporary labour unions

The “reform or revolution?” question is also relevant, here. Luxemburg accused Bernstein of inventing this either/or (Luxemburg 1973:8) as well as the question of “ethical” socialism. According to Luxemburg, Bernstein’s revisionism returns to bourgeois morality as to an “ethical simulacra” (58). Siding with reform against revolution involves (opportunistic) acceptance of the social distribution of roles and an abortive or merely opportunistic break with one’s (inherited) social position (contemporary labour unions