Robbie Shilliam

Two principles are at stake in the debates over the Ramsay Centre: 1) that academia must be a space of impartial inquiry, one not swayed or influenced by economic or political interests, whether in the form of outside funders or inside “left-wingers”; 2) that academic study should not be dogmatic but critical and – as even new Ramsay Board member Michael Easson argues – interrogative. However, the Ramsay debates have been at their most contentious when these principles have been mobilized for two propositions: 1) that impartiality and critical inquiry are the unique possession of Western Civilization; or, 2) that an impartial and critical inquiry of Western civilization is possible and desirable.

In what follows, I address my concerns to those who are less enamoured by 1) and more committed to 2). I am speaking of those who believe that it is desirable and possible to undertake critical and impartial inquiry of Western civilization without having to defend the West’s civilizational uniqueness. I want to question whether any academic centre for Western civilization is desirable. For this purpose, I’m going to engage with the work of German sociologist Max Weber, and especially his text – Science as a Vocation.

Weber (1864-1920) remains an incredibly influential scholar. He is taught as part of the trinity of the sociological canon alongside Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx; his comparative analysis of types of political rule and of religions still frames much contemporary sociological and political research; above all, his fin de siècle musings on European modernity, secularization, disenchantment and the Protestant roots of the culture of capitalism pre-empted key themes of the “culture wars” of the late 20^th century. Academically speaking, any argument concerning the uniqueness of Western civilization (as well as the stakes at play in critically assessing said uniqueness) owes to – or must at least engage with – Weber.

Weber was certainly not a proponent of scientific racism. Still, as a number of authors have argued, he did embrace “cultural racism”. Weber categorized humanity into differentiated and distinct cultural groupings whose socially-relevant features expressed the racialized attributes that European imperialism had organized, over the course of the 19^th century, into civilizational hierarchies. Especially important in Weber’s investigations was the categorical distinction between occidental (western) and oriental (eastern) cultures whereby the former represented civilized humanity and the latter barbaric humanity. But crucially, Weber also graded cultural distinctions between occidental – i.e. European – cultures, distinctions that reflected the challenges of consolidating the German nation within the fractious European geopolitics of his age. 

Much like today’s white nationalism, Weber’s cultural racism was mobilized more for defending Europe’s “civilized humanity” than it was towards justifying imperial expansion. At stake for Weber was not just the threat posed by orientalist culture but a wager that defending the “power-political interests” of his own nation against other European nations was precisely the best chance of defending civilized humanity.  Later I will examine the logic of this claim. But for now it is enough to point out that this double-sided defense – a civilizational and nationalized one – is what made Weber’s concerns lie principally in the cultural integrity of the German nation. In fact, Weber believed that the nation was threatened in two ways: firstly, by the immigration of peoples of more barbaric cultures, primarily Poles, and secondly, by the political immaturity of Germany’s own Bildungsbürgertum (educated class).

Both concerns are evident in Weber’s early writings and especially in his Inaugural Address in 1895 as chair of economics at the University of Freiburg. There, Weber drew attention to the influx of Polish peasants in the eastern provinces caused by the marketization of agriculture and the concomitant replacement of old paternalistic relations by free labor. Weber worried that despite Polish labor being more flexible and cheaper than local populations, the physical, martial, mental and cultural competencies of Polish migrants were inferior to those of the German workers whom they replaced. Even if an economically rational policy, “Polonization”, as Weber put it in an address two years earlier, was nevertheless causing Germany to descend a “cultural step” in ways that were even worse than if “Chinese coolies” had been imported.

                Weber’s anxieties with Europe’s eastern “others” in some ways resonate with concerns for white working class culture and their betrayal by cosmopolitan elites that informed debates in 2016 over Brexit and EU (especially Polish) immigration. When it comes to Brexit, some political analysts have argued that the “people” are not only swayed by instrumentally economic concerns. Weber’s criticism of political economy was similar. He bemoaned the way in which political economy scholars conflated analysis of the world market with cosmopolitan ethics.Provocatively, he argued that the “economic struggle between nationalities” was a constant even in peace time (Weber 1994c, 14). In other words, Weber did not believe that the German national interest could be understood simply in terms of material basic needs but by reference to the cultural and existential issue of  “what kind of people they will be” (Weber 1994c, 15).  

                Weber’s concerns over Polonization direct us towards the other great threat that he perceived to face the standing of Germany. Otto Von Bismarck, first Chancellor of the German Empire, had succeeded in bringing the country into existence as a distinct political entity out of a hodgepodge of principalities. Yet Weber believed that the way in which Bismarck did so had produced a nation “entirely lacking in any kind of political education … and above all a nation entirely without any political will”. Hence, much of Weber’s oeuvre was framed by a concern over the relative backwardness of the Bildungsbürgertum –  the educated class that should have been leading Germany’s bid to pre-eminence rather than the political or economic classes. Weber sough to overcome this cultural inadequacy by charging academia with providing a competent political education to its students. 

Contextualized thus, Weber’s intellectual project was driven by a cultural racism that induced in him a fear of cultural contagion, which manifested also as an abiding desire to educate the educators. For Weber, the Bildungsbürgertum had to develop a cognitive competency by which they could inject “clarity” into public debate. Above all, public debate needed to come to terms with the fact that, in current conditions, the defense of civilized humanity could only be pursued by the advance and preservation of German culture. This cultural defense framed many of Weber’s interventions into the philosophy of science and none more so than his famous lecture on the vocation of science, given in 1917 at Munich University, which he directed to the children of the Bildungsbürgertum attending university.

Much of the lecture sought to disabuse this student youth of any romanticism towards the human condition and to critically orient them towards their national/civilizational duty. The civilizational framing of Weber’s famous argument can be gleaned in his presentation of the vocation of science as the search for meaning in a disenchanted world. The social scientist, Weber contended, could no longer summon “mysterious incalculable forces” as explanans, as was the case with the “magical means” utilized by the “savage”. When it came to the European scientist, there existed instead only a possibility to “master all things by calculation”.

Weber was at pains to demonstrate that this disenchanted disposition was unique to the scientific tradition of occidental Europe. He thus narrated the instantiation of European disenchantment in Platonic thought, then Renaissance thought, through to the contemporary era wherein the illusions that science might reveal the way to “true being” or “true nature” or “the true god” were dispensed with. For these reasons, Weber contended that the European scientist could no longer provide answers to categorical imperatives such as “what shall we do and how shall we live”; rather, by constructing rules of logic and method, science could only present hypothetical imperatives: e.g. if A in conditions of B, then C.

Tellingly, Weber used politics to demonstrate the difference between categorical and hypothetical imperatives: “to take a practical political stand is one thing, and to analyze political structures and party positions is another”. With this distinction made, Weber then claimed that the primary purpose of the university teacher was not to “plead for practical and interested stands”, but rather to help the student through social scientific inquiry to recognize facts that were “inconvenient” to their own “party opinion”. Here was where the national framing of Weber’s argument intersected with the civilizational. Weber inferred that the value neutrality of occidental science alone enabled a competent understanding of the geopolitical milieu that Germany found itself within. Instead of the “backward” cosmopolitan pretense that Europeans shared a collective unity, Weber presented national cultures – e.g. the relationship between French and German culture – in a disenchanted light as “different gods [struggling] with one another, now and for all times to come”. .

Interestingly, though, as soon as Weber invoked the struggle between nations he then introduced a quixotic yet telling comparison. In discussing the gods of the ancient city, Weber implied that even in occidental Europe the nation retained an enchanted aura. That is, the nation provided for its population an intrinsic value that had, through disenchantment, been lost in those objects studied by philosophy, natural science and theology. Nonetheless, Weber quickly returned to his previous line of argument by warning that this intrinsic value should not be mistaken for the generalized phenomenon of nationalism per se, i.e. a value system intrinsically shared across humanity. Nationalism manifested – and could only manifest for his students – in terms of the German nation. Indeed, the singularly intrinsic value of the German nation could not be ethically disputed or affirmed by scientific method. The educated class could only – and were compelled to – help the public “understand what the godhead is in the one order or in the other”, that is, clarify the consequences of acting for the interest of the German nation.   

By these logics, Weber’s lecture sought to convince the children of the educated class (Bildungsbürgertum) that they must accept the loss of intrinsic meaning to science that came with disenchantment. He especially wished to dispense with any backward fascination for a romantic humanism that worshipped unmediated universalism or enchanted heritages. Disenchantment revealed the cold truth that humanity was irreconcilably divided between occident and orient, between occident and the orient-within-Europe represented by e.g. Poles, as well as between different occidental national interests. Romantic universalism foreclosed any progressive engagement with humanity’s disenchanted condition and opened the door to both external and internal cultural degeneration. The thin path for humanity’s progress could lie only in choosing which god to serve with full knowledge of the partiality of that choice, and that only a particular class of a particular nation of a particular species of humanity could save the human condition.

Indeed, one year before the lecture, Weber, in an open letter, proclaimed that the duty of a Machtstaat (great power) was to determine the cultural character of the future of humanity. Weber effectively tasked the educated class (Bildungsbürgertum) with pursuing a political education adequate to the task of defending civilized humanity, which primarily required a clarification of the interests of the German nation for those who would pursue them. Weber considered the clarification of these divisions to be the prime task of the educating class whose cognitive competency might engineer a national redemption through which civilized humanity could subsequently be saved from a “polar night” of delusion and meaningless.

At the beginning I raised to propositions: 1) that impartiality and critical inquiry are the unique possession of Western Civilization; or, 2) that an impartial and critical inquiry of Western civilization is possible and desirable. I hope that it is clear by now that for Weber both propositions are necessarily co-constitutive. This being said, what would have been Weber’s opinion of the Ramsay Centre?

Well, he certainly would have been no supporter of a romanticist return to a “Judeo-Christian” heritage such as that currently espoused by John Howard. Yet Weber would not have dismissed a certain nationalist attachment that these days so often accompanies the alt-right invocation of “cultural Christianity”. He would, though, have wished an academic centre to channel such a nationalist attachment via an impartial and critical inquiry of Western civilization. And part of the purpose of that centre would be to produce a nativist cadre of sober intellectuals who would understand themselves as Australians to be defending a racialized humanity from internal degeneration and external barbarity.

We are not all Weberians. But Weber’s work alerts us to a deep-seated intellectual danger. Academic inquiry presents western civilization not as “specific” but as sui generis – as unique. Close your eyes: can you honestly glean a thing called “Western civilization” without apprehending some kind of uniqueness? If one begins with the premise that Western civilization is unique (regardless of any subsequent moral judgment on its content or consequences) then it is difficult not to undertake critical and impartial inquiry except as a defense of that uniqueness.

I am not only implicating “easy targets” such as liberal theorists; for example, some Marxist and postcolonial scholars fall into this defense too: one might laud Western civilization to the heavens or damn it to hell, but what one must do on all occasions is defend its uniqueness. I would like the 21^st century to witness the return to humanity of those peoples who claim – or who are claimed by –Western civilization. It must be a pressing burden to have to consistently justify one’s raison d’être by virtue of one’s singularity. It is certainly a crushing burden to be the matter against which such singularity is consistently tested.