4 Constructivism 09

4
Hermeneutics, Weber,
Constructivism
The hermeneutic tradition we turn to in this chapter (from the Greek for
‘interpreter’) developed as a critique of a) the social atomism of the
English, empiricist tradition, b) Cartesian rationalism, and c) the
universalistic assumptions of Enlightenment thought, which radiated
from France across Europe in the 18th century. The epicentre of these three
lines of criticism was Germany, more particularly, German romanticism—
the nostalgic-conservative, yet theoretically often innovative search for
community, the exaltation of feeling over rational calculation, and of
closeness to nature against mechanisation.
The hermeneutic tradition too belongs to the subjectivist strand in social

thought in that the rational is seen as an attribute of the subject. However,
it consciously seeks to reinsert the subject into the social world, shortening
the distances between the human subject and his/her fellow beings both
ontologically and in its epistemology.
In contrast to the model of explanation developed in natural science, the

hermeneutic tradition rejects the positivist idea that there can exist a single
method for both the natural and social sciences. The social world is a
universe of meaning(s) which demands an approach specific to its object,
and hermeneutics seeks to gain insight into society by interpreting what
motivates others (introspection), ‘understanding’ in the sense of empathy
89 VAN DER PIJL: A SURVEY OF GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY
(German Verstehen)—something not possible when studying the moon or

the ocean floor.
1. HERMENEUTICS AND NEO-KANTIANISM

The starting point for all authors discussed in this chapter is the subjective
idealism of Immanuel KANT (1724-1804). Instead of Kant’s cosmopolit-
anism, however, their loyalties shifted to the (German) nation; for his
(qualified) empiricism they substituted the method of introspection.
Kant sought to achieve a synthesis between

British empiricism (which recommended
itself by its successes in natural science—
Newton—and of which David Hume at the
time was the most prominent representative,
cf. Kant’s critique of Hume) and the
rationalism of Descartes, the idea of an
inborn capacity to rationally understand
oneself and the world. His solution was to
argue that people are equipped with two
innate modes of perception (Anschauungs-
weisen, i.e., time and space) and twelve
categories (number, causality, etc.). These allow them to order empirical
phenomena. In addition, every human is born with three ‘transcendent
ideas’ (God exists, I exist, the world exists).
However, as soon as one probes beyond the empirical, phenomenal

aspect of reality and tries to penetrate the essence of things, all this
equipment is of little use, Kant argues, because the empirical reference
point (something is the case or not), is absent. The essence, what he calls
the ‘thing in itself’ (column 4 in Figure 1.2) remains out of reach for the
‘pure reason’ with which humans are equipped. On such fundamental
issues as whether humans are free or determined, whether time and space
are finite or infinite, etc., human reason cannot reach unequivocal
conclusions; it becomes mired in contradiction (Kant speaks of
‘antinomies’). Such questions are the province of morality and theology,
which in Kant’s view had an important role to play in bringing about a
good society.
HERMENEUTICS, WEBER, CONSTRUCTIVISM 90
By his transcendent ethics, Kantian subjectivism ‘embraced an idealist

metaphysic or a spiritualist view of nature, asserted a normative
conception of social action, and posited freedom and human dignity as the
highest moral view’ (Seidman, 1983: 162). In this respect it broke with the
egoistic utilitarianism and social atomism of the Lockean tradition. One
line of how Kant’s legacy was taken further, is the totalising, ‘objective
idealism’ of G.W.F. Hegel, to which we return in Chapter 8. The other,
which attacked the Enlightenment idea that all human qualities and
experiences are by nature universal, is hermeneutics.
Roots of Hermeneutics in Romanticism and Theology
Kant’s contemporary, the philosopher and theologian, Johann Gottfried

Herder (1744-1803), stands at the origin of the hermeneutic tradition. His
critique of the Enlightenment idea of universal human progress was laid
down in a series of sketches for an alternative philosophy of history,
beginning with Another Philosophy of History to Educate Humanity of 1774 (a
work published ten years later was actually subjected to a highly critical
review by Kant himself, cf. Irmscher in Herder, 1997: 159).
Herder does not deny the massive achievements of the Enlightenment.

However, he deplores that its philosophy created a cold, disenchanted
world in which humans had lost the ability to understand, feel, and enjoy
past forms of wisdom and virtue (Herder, 1997: 12). He cautions against
an overemphasis on ‘reasoning, if disseminated too carelessly, too
uselessly—as if it could not weaken, and really did weaken, inclination,
drive, the activity of life’ (ibid.: 63). What is needed is a return to feeling.
After all, to understand any action of a people (‘a nation’), one must
recreate the entire picture of its way of life, habits, needs and the
peculiarities of the land and the sky above it; one must sympathise with it.
To feel its all-embracing soul, Herder argues, don’t take its utterances at
face value, ‘don’t reply to the word straightaway!’
Enter into its epoch, into its region under the sky, its entire history, empathise with
everything [fühle dich in alles hinein]—Now you are on the way towards
understanding the word (Herder, 1997: 29).
The same applies to understanding a foreign language: one must be

familiar with the circumstances of the people speaking it. It requires an
extraordinary sharp mind ‘to penetrate into these circumstances and
needs, and modesty in equal measure to moderate when explaining
different epochs’ (Herder, 2001: 65). This sums up the hermeneutic
method—entering into the mental world of the society studied.
Friedrich SCHLEIERMACHER (1768-

1834), a theologian and colleague of
Hegel’s at the University of Berlin, took
Herder’s insights further. He also shifted
the emphasis from romanticism to
theology. Schleiermacher argued that
religion, unlike science and art, was a
matter of revelation, which came about
through ‘intense listening’ and ‘being
captivated in childlike passivity’ (quoted
in Boer, 1991: 43).
Schleiermacher developed a systematic

method for the interpretation of canonical
and classical theological texts, which led to a procedure that can generally
be applied to written and oral language expressions. Interpretation is again
the key term. Conclusions cannot be drawn on the basis of observation (in
which subject and object are separated); the subject ‘enters’ the object by
situating him/herself within it. This process, called ‘divination’, is
composed of two steps: 1) ‘Placing oneself within’ (‘Sichhineinversetzen’)
and 2) ‘copying’ or ‘re-living’ (‘Nachbilden’, or ‘Nacherleben’).
What happens in this process is that the interpreter shares the inner
experience of the thinking, speaking or acting of the object, and once ‘inside’,
attempts to reconstruct how this speech or thought act or practical act
came about in terms of motivations, the creative path to it. Schleiermacher
was the first to develop this insight into an integral approach.
The divination process is complemented by comparison, and the method

as a whole consists in a constant back and forth between divination and
comparison (‘approximative oscillation’), without ever reaching complete

knowledge (Keulartz in Dilthey, 1994: 45). Note the differences with the
positivist concern about verification, acceptance/ rejection of a hypothesis,
etc.
• Knowledge is never ‘positive’, only an approximation, however

hard we try;
• to acquire knowledge is an inter-subjective process: we move from
our own mind into somebody else’s and back. There is a forensic
aspect involved that is absent from empiricism/positivism.
Even so hermeneutics remains firmly anchored in the subjectivist

epistemology on which all actor-oriented theories are based. Like other
subjectivist thinkers, Schleiermacher sees the subject as facing an ultimately
impenetrable world—hence the limits to our knowledge. As Boer writes in
a discussion of Schleiermacher (quoting the latter’s ‘On Religion’ of 1799),
The reality experienced by modern, bourgeois man, is a dark enigma; the unknown is
dangerous; nature and one’s fellow man are the enemies… The “feeling of infinity
and god-likeness” is a forced attempt to repress from consciousness the experience of
“his limitations…, of the overall coincidence of his form, of the inaudible disappearance of his
existence into the immeasurable” (Boer, 1991: 44, emphasis added).
Hermeneutics, then, centrally implies a separation of the human world

from the natural world; each requires its own, specific method. In the
second half of the 19th century, the theological aspect further receded from
academia, but the appreciation of a transcendent, collective mindset that
pervades both the social relations studied and the subject studying them,
remained. Towards the close of the century, these principles were further
developed by hermeneutic thinkers such as Dilthey. Another group of
thinkers, the neo-Kantians, synthesised the Enlightenment legacy of
Immanuel Kant with some of the insights of the romantic-hermeneutic
tradition. In their slipstream a number of authors combining aspects of
these two strands added further accents, notably Max Weber.
‘Meaning’ At Both Ends of the Interpretive Method
Whether they continued in the hermeneutic tradition, like Dilthey or

Heidegger, or pursued the neo-Kantian alternative with its greater stress
on rational individual judgment (Max Weber belongs to this strand), all
authors discussed in this chapter, albeit to different degrees, share the
notion of a collective mindset bound to time and place, which infuses social
reality with meaning and pervades the subject’s perception in turn.
Wilhelm DILTHEY (1833-1911), Schleiermacher’s biographer, rejects the

idea of an a priori rationality of the subject. A human being is not just an
intellectual being, but also a feeling and acting being who shares in the
collective mindset of his/her place and epoch
(Keulartz in Dilthey, 1994: 23). In one of his
early works, Dilthey argued that psychology is
not a science of explanation but one of
introspection and understanding.
Although both theology and metaphysics have

evacuated academia, Dilthey argues, in society
they remain operative as ‘a metaphysical mood
which cannot be suspended, which is at the root
of every attempt to provide evidence and which
will survive them all’ (Keulartz in Dilthey, 1994:
10; cf. Dilthey’s Introduction to the Human Sciences, 1883 (fragments). It is
this metaphysical mood that pervades the individual or group and which
must be taken into account when interpreting its utterances. So whilst
there is something objective and fixed in the human Ego which manifests
itself in all human actions and thought (the ‘anthropological’ Ego), it is
blended with elements that refer to the broader canvas of meaning which
is a product of an epoch and a particular society (Keulartz in Dilthey,
1994: 30). As we will see in Chapter 10, this comes close to Freud’s
distinction between, respectively, the ‘Id’ and the ‘Superego’.
One of Dilthey’s pupils, the American sociologist, George Herbert Mead,

developed the notion of interaction as the process through which meaning
is constructed (Keulartz in Dilthey, 1994: 35; cf. Mead’s Science and the
Objectivity of Perspectives, 1938). This would become one of the sources of

social constructivism (cf. below).
The neo-Kantians, active in the same period as Dilthey, were concerned

with salvaging the legacy of Enlightenment thought—notably the aspects
of individual rationality and moral individualism, and the notion of
responsibility. Otherwise they shared important insights with the
romantic-hermeneutic strand. The different accents in their work
produced two separate schools (Rehmann, 1997: 127):
• The Marburg School (Hermann Cohen, P. Natorp, E. Cassirer)

which built on Kant’s epistemology (the idea that the subject is born
with a priori categories in the mind allowing for the ordering of
sense perceptions, but not fit for penetrating ultimate truths) and
• The Heidelberg School (Wilhelm Windelband, H. Rickert, E. Lask)
which instead built on Kant’s practical philosophy and ethics. Here the
famous ‘categorical imperative’, a maxim of ethical behaviour (only
do such things that deserve being a general rule), is at the centre of
an attempt to construct an philosophy of values.
All of the neo-Kantians shared the position, inherent in hermeneutics,

that social (‘cultural-historical’) science is qualitatively different from
natural science and hence requires a different methodology. The subject in
each case faces a different object—another ‘subject’, or a real object that
cannot talk back. The generalising method of the natural sciences thus is
juxtaposed to the individualising method of the cultural-historical sciences.
In the terminology of Windelband,
• the natural sciences proceed nomothetically, by law-like

generalisation (from ‘nomos’, law; as in positivism);
• the social, or rather ‘cultural-historical’ sciences on the other hand

proceed ideographically, by individualisation.
In the context of the belated German unification in 1870, realised by war

and revolution from above, and hence lacking France’s powerful
democratic tradition or English liberalism, the neo-Kantians developed
the idea that subjects are or at least should be guided by moral

imperatives that cannot be reduced to individual rationality. Positivism,
materialism, Hegelianism and Marxism on the other hand were all ruled
out on the grounds of either the specificity of the ‘social’, or because they
failed to take into account the axiom of individual responsibility. The neo-
Kantian alternative thus is a subjectivist approach, no doubt with a critical
undercurrent, but without a historicising perspective (Seidman, 1983: 204-
5). An example would be Max Weber’s analysis of why German society
lacked the right ‘mix’ of individualism and frugality that Calvinism
provided in the development of capitalism in England (cf. below).
With Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the hermeneutic tradition returns to

its starting point in romanticism, albeit with a reactionary inflexion that
eventually brought the philosopher into the force-field of Nazism
(Rehmann, 1997: 167; Benewick and Green, 1992: 95-6). Ever since Herder,
the appreciation that society is held together by bonds that make the
community and its way of life meaningful to its members, had had
romantic connotations. Romanticism always hesitates between modernity
and a subliminal longing for a past age of organic bonds and assured
community (Seidman, 1983: 42); in the aftermath of German unification,
the ‘nation’ imposed itself as a framework of meaning and the focus of
romantic sentiment—also in response to the socialism of the labour
movement, the obvious alternative.
Heidegger had been a doctoral student of Rickert’s, but turned away

from neo-Kantianism after the First World War. Via phenomenology (the
approach developed by Edmund Husserl to provide a method for
interpreting ‘natural’, naïve perception in terms of a system of meaning),
he turned to hermeneutics, but with the specific aim to uncover the deeper
‘Being’. Heidegger’s starting point therefore is not epistemological, but
ontological; he wants to recover the true humanity in its existence, ‘being
there’ (‘Dasein’, a term of Hegel’s to denote ‘determined being’). In Sein
und Zeit (‘Being and Time’) of 1927. Heidegger conceptualises this as
everyday life, humans engaged in their practical activities (‘facticity’, a term
borrowed from the neo-Kantians), which only under certain conditions
requires theoretical reflection. Compressing the subject into the world of
other subjects to the point of eliminating the ‘objective’ altogether,
Heidegger thus arrives at a theory in which human existence itself is

‘interpretive’ of the life around him/her as it flows by in time. Interpretive
thought too is an aspect of existence; in the complex terminology of Sein
und Zeit, a ‘non-objective option of a more indicative and intentional
universal stemming directly from the very temporal intentional
movement of finding oneself experiencing experience’ (quoted in
Odysseos, 2007: 41-2; see Heidegger’s Existence and Being, 1949)
After the war, Heidegger chose to remain silent about his role in the
Hitler era. His ideas about daily life as the medium of collective social
being however were given a new lease on life in France by Merleau-
Ponty’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism.
In post-war West Germany, hermeneutics was further developed by

Hans-Georg Gadamer (Wahrheit und Methode, ‘Truth and Method’, of 1960;
cf. ‘The Idea of Hegel’s Logic’, 1971). In contrast to Dilthey, who assumes
an objective reference outside the subject, in Heidegger and Gadamer this
external reference point is absorbed into subjective experience. A student
of Gadamer’s, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), returned to the Dilthey-Mead
lineage (he was also associated with the Frankfurt School, cf. Chapter 10)
with his concept of a normative structure constituted by communication
and interaction. Habermas claims that this normative structure and the
life-world of the citizens is being ‘colonised’ and subverted by
technologies applied by capitalism, impoverishing the complexity of
human beings (see Habermas Archive).
Summing up, the subjectivism of both the (neo-)Kantian and the

hermeneutic approaches implies that the deeper reality remains shrouded
in darkness, so whatever insight we gain accumulates at ‘our’ end, in the
subject’s mind. In the case of hermeneutics, we may make informed
inferences about the inner drives of the people, communities, cultures that
we study. Since we are observing human beings who are, like us,
intuitive, experiential, impressionable, etc., we may not be able to
penetrate the ‘object’ entirely; yet as fellow humans, they must be
expected to be motivated by driving forces which we can recognise or
reconstruct if we properly assimilate their particular starting point, their
mindset, and culture. No universalism here, but rather a tendency to
relativism, seeing the ‘others’ in their specific circumstances of time and

place, as Herder had urged in the 1770s already.
The key points to retain about the hermeneutic (H) and neo-Kantian (K)
perspectives are,
• The separation of social (cultural-historical) from natural science

(both H & K);
• The aim of overcoming the subject/object divide (H);
• Introspection/interpretation as method (H);
• ‘Values’ as subjective emotive/reasoned valuations deriving from a
system of meaning bound to time and place (in contrast to the
universal ‘utilities’ of rational choice/game theory) (H & K) .
In Figure 4.1, the ontology and epistemology of society and the

ideographic investigative method proper to it are schematically
represented. Whilst the essence of the objective world remains shrouded
in darkness, concrete human groups uphold a framework of meaning and
action, which renders their (socially constructed) social reality meaningful.
Epistemologically speaking, however, this is not something we can really
know.
Figure 4.1. Value-Relativistic Ontology and Hermeneutic Epistemology

________________________________________________________________________
O N T O L O G Y
Humans Historical societies
acting rationally held together by … Socially
(according to Constructed
Reality/-ies
criteria derived time- and space-specific
from ) frameworks of meaning
______________________________________________________________________
approximate, Interpretation, Actions/utterances
‘value-free’ introspection in specific contexts
knowledge
E P I S T E M O L O G Y
________________________________________________________________________
We can now turn to the approach developed by Max Weber.

2. WEBERIAN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY
With Max WEBER (1864-1920), we return to political economy proper.

Weber , the Marx of the bourgeoisie, or according to others, the Marx of
the managerial class, combines an ontology of a society in which subjects
are motivated by a combination of ‘value rationality’ (Wertrationalität,
derived from a specific system of meaning) and ‘instrumental rationality’
(Zweckrationalität), with an epistemology of interpretive ‘Verstehen’. In his
theory of knowledge Weber is so concerned about ‘value-free’ scholarship
because he recognises that everybody is motivated by values, not all of
which are compatible with scholarly ‘objectivity’.
Weber initially adopted a materialist

perspective, analysing the German social
structure in terms of the contradictory
combination of conservative landowner-
ship and modernising industry. As the
labour movement became more
prominent and radical, he shifted from an
analysis of economic forces to the political
question why the bourgeoisie in Germany
had failed to overcome its conservative
leanings (Seidman, 1983: 212-6).
Weber’s study of the Protestant Ethic

(1905) aims to provide the answer. The Calvinism as it developed in
Switzerland, Holland and England and other Anglophone countries,
Weber argued, stimulated initiative because of Calvin’s theorem of
predestination. True, no one can know what is in story for him or her, but
material success may be an indication of divine election, and thus offered
a way of overcoming existential uncertainty; in combination with practical
rules such as the legitimacy of a (modest) rate of interest, Calvin’s
doctrines thus assisted in creating a collective mindset favourable to
private enterprise. Lutheranism on the other hand is a mystical,
incomplete form of Protestantism. It clings to a pre-modern
understanding of social station and ‘calling’ (Beruf) and preached

passivity and resignation from the world (Weber, 1920: 65-77). Certainly
Weber sided with Bismarck and other (Lutheran) modernizers against the
Catholic lower classes. But a German liberalism in his view would require
a more thorough ideological renewal to match the Calvinist-Puritan value
system so beneficial for capitalist development (Seidman, 1983: 231;
Rehmann, 1997: 213).
It is not Weber’s claim that capitalism was ‘caused’ by Calvinism, as

sometimes assumed. Rather, Calvinism as a system of values generates a
collective mindset which happened to be supportive of parallel capitalist
development. To denote this relation he used the concept coined by the
poet (and friend of Herder’s), Goethe, in the title for a 1809 novel, ‘elective
affinity’ (Wahlverwandtschaft). The connection with the hermeneutic
tradition is obvious: there is an affinity between Calvinism and capitalism
which is in the nature of a mutual penetration, a spiritual closeness
between religious conviction and professional ethic premised on active
appreciation (not just ‘objective’ correlation) (Löwy, 2004: 98-9).
In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), his posthumous

magnum opus and one of the classic works of political economy, this is
elaborated into the analysis of how different values motivating ‘social
action’ are compounded. Instrumental, calculating rationality (typical of
modernity, not just capitalism but also the modern state) contributes to a
tendency towards socialisation (Vergesellschaftung, from Gesellschaft,
society), a concept from Hegel and Marx; but it will always be
accompanied by emotive-affective bonds, whether they are tribal-
traditional or based on a professional esprit de corps. This produces a
parallel ‘communitisation’ (Vergemeinschaftung, from Gemeinschaft)
(Weber, 1976: chapter 3).
Subjective Rationality, Irrational World
As he came to reject his earlier materialist view of history, Weber

developed a critique of Marxism. Here he obviously confused naturalistic
materialism (which holds that everything emanates from nature) with
historical materialism. Historical materialism is premised on the Hegelian
idea of the cultural development of historical humanity to ever-higher

levels of civilisation.
Weber’s critique that thinking is not a natural, ‘objective’ process

reflecting other natural processes, but a subjective one, is only valid
against naturalistic materialism. His subjective turn towards a neo-
Kantianism impregnated with hermeneutics ‘led him to repudiate the
notion that social science could reproduce history in its essentials or full
complexity. Conceptual analysis and historical explanation are always one-
sided, … by virtue of [their] embeddedness in the perspectives and problems of
the present’ (Seidman, 1983: 242, emphasis added). The relativism of
hermeneutics, the role of systems of meaning and the values derived from
them, are clearly evident here.
Weber’s ontology is one of ‘social action’ within specific normative

contexts, valid for one society but not necessarily for others. Social action
is motivated by a specific rationality that combines instrumental
rationality with normative commitments, the ‘value rationality’ referred to
above. This is one way of arriving at the conclusion that ultimately, reality
as such is unknowable. Rationality is subjective, although Weber
according to some interpreters rejected the notion of an inborn rationality
in favour of the idea that ‘rationality must be conceived in historical
terms—as the product of the interplay of interests and ideas, and therefore
multidimensional’ (Seidman, 1983: 254). Given how social processes come
about (as the result of specific combinations of values motivating action),
they can only be understood by interpretation (‘Verstehen’), i.e., by
applying the hermeneutic method (the subtitle of ‘Economy and Society’
is ‘Outline of an Interpretive Sociology’). Concepts for Weber are tools
which the rational mind has at its disposal to mentally grasp what is
empirically evident (Rehmann, 1997: 131).
Since rationality is an aspect of the subject, and society itself lacks an

inherent, knowable logic (one is only aware of the framework of meaning
from which value rationality is derived), the subject’s actions work to
imprint a rationality on the world. Rationalisation, making the world
conform to accounting principles, in Weber’s view was a phenomenon
that accompanies capitalist development. Here the interpretation of
Puritanism as a Protestantism of initiative and commitment influenced

Weber’s own world-view (Seidman, 1983: 231, 244).
Weber followed the neo-Kantians in highlighting that reality as such

cannot be known, indeed that it is inherently irrational. Whereas Kant had
used the Thing in Itself (the objective essence of things) as a limiting
concept where the rational mind becomes entangled in contradiction, the
neo-Kantians speak of an ‘insurmountable opposition’ between the
subject’s rationality and the concrete world. Lask even speaks of the
‘doctrine of the irrationality of empirical reality’ and Weber follows this
(Rehmann, 1997: 133). This is the absolute opposite of Hegel, who as we
will see in Chapter 8, held that ‘the real is the rational’. Seidman speaks of
Weber’s idea ‘of the inherent meaninglessness and chaotic character of
noumenal reality’ (1983: 255; ‘noumenon’, ‘named item’). Or in the words
of Karl Löwith,
So-called “objectivity”—and Weber never speaks of objectivity except as “so-called”

and in quotation marks—“rests exclusively on the fact that the given reality is
ordered in categories, which are subjective in the specific sense that they constitute the
precondition of our knowledge and are contingent upon the presupposition of the
value of that particular truth which only empirical knowledge can give us” (quoted
in Bratsis, 2006: 15).
This again underlines Weber’s subjective rationality—it is the human

mind that brings order to an otherwise irrational world; it must do so in
order to vanquish meaninglessness (Seidman, 1983: 257). Hence the
meanings that are imprinted on the different life-worlds in different times
and places, are themselves different too.
Ideal-Types, Values and Action
Weber’s legacy may be brought under three headings: Methodology,

Value Community, and Theory of Action (cf. examples from Sociological
Writings, 1897).
First, Weber’s methodology. Here the notion of ideal-type occupies pride

of place. Remember that the knowing subject faces an irrational world, but
yet has to make sense of it; and that his/her ‘tools’, theoretical concepts,
are subjective constructs. The ideal-type, then, is a mental image which

unifies certain historical relations and events in a ‘non-contradictory
cosmos of thought [i.e. imagined] interconnections’ (quoted in Rehmann,
1997: 187). Its role is to bring to life, visualise, certain relations that have
been found or are being suspected to exist; the ideal-type then serves as a
limiting concept (Grenzbegriff) that highlights relevant aspects so that
experienced facts can be measured against it and compared with it.
In Economy and Society Weber famously distinguishes political authority

under three such ideal types: Traditional authority—Charismatic
authority—Rational-bureaucratic authority. These correspond to the society
he feels must be left behind (conservatism in Germany), the strong man
(with charisma) whom he saw as a necessity to break it but also to replace
the Liberal-Socialist alliance which he earlier believed, could do the job;
and the monopolistic combination of big capital and the strong state that
would result, but which he paradoxically also rejected as a danger to
liberalism (Seidman, 1983: 237).
Ideal-types are concepts in which some common element or aspect has

been raised one-sidedly to shed light on a situation or relation. There is no
claim that they capture an essence—that is an unknown that cannot be
uncovered. Here Weber goes back straight to Dilthey who claims that in
natural science, material relations between things can be established,
whereas in social science, the mental relations between problems constitute
the focus of the analysis (quoted in Rehmann, 1997: 188).
Secondly, the notion of the community of values. The neo-Kantians,

writing in the decades following German unification, criticised Kant’s
Enlightenment cosmopolitanism from a nationalist vantage point. All
Enlightenment thinking assumes a continuity between individual
aspirations and interest, the harmonious operation of the whole, the
collective interest. Kant took this furthest by claiming in his plan for a
universal peace treaty of 1795, that modern states, if properly cleansed of
aristocratic warmongers, would be able to reconcile their differences.
Rickert, one of the neo-Kantians, criticises this idea as poor in its concept
of humanity and failing to acknowledge the ‘most important of human
communities’, the nation (quoted in Rehmann, 1997: 157). This as we saw

had been part of the romantic-hermeneutic tradition ever since Herder.
Weber’s point of view on value communities is of importance as an

angle from which to understand Global Political Economy: by placing the
nation-state at the centre of the analysis as the most significant form of
human community, it reduces GPE again to International Political
Economy, that is, a subfield of IR, which as a predominantly state-centric
‘discipline’ enshrines the nation-state as the alpha and omega of world
affairs. Below we will see that E.H. Carr, one of the founders of modern
Anglo-American IR, developed his approach within the hermeneutic
tradition, and with the nation-state as the axiomatic point of departure.
Finally there is Weber’s actual sociology, his ‘theory of action’. This is

likewise subjectivist; it springs from the person, group, society that acts. It
is on this ontology that his epistemology is grafted: if one assumes that the
world is made up of subjectively motivated subjects acting on an
‘irrational’ objective world, the focus of one’s method and theory
automatically shifts to the domain of epistemology/theory of knowledge,
because it is the only reference point of rationality that remains.
Weber’s human subject is not determined by labour and reproductive

relations, and the rules of reciprocity and cooperation emanating from
them. The subject occupies a position from which action is undertaken on
the basis of certain ‘values’. Even so, subjects are not entirely free in their
choice of values because there are historically changing values which
direct each individual within their epoch (Rehmann, 1997: 173-4), in the
sense of a prevailing system of meaning. This is what Weber terms the
‘iron cage’ of internalised social values, so that e.g. in rational-bureaucratic
society, people are under a compulsion to act in this spirit . It may be that
there exists an incompatibility in Weber’s thinking between a subjectivist
epistemology grafted on an individualistic ontology (‘history as the
chaotic aggregate of subjectively intended individual acts (methodological
individualism)’; and what is in fact a philosophy of history, i.e. history ‘as
a universal process of rationalisation, locking individuals increasingly into
iron institutional structures’ (Teschke and Heine, 2002: 173). But then, it
was Weber’s original intention to establish what was needed to bring
German society to a level where it could match the dominant, English-

speaking world-economic powers; from this initial equation flows his
assumption that all societies have to go through processes of
rationalisation that are broadly identical in outcomes even if different in
the ways in which they are achieved. These after all are dependent on the
value systems of each.
3. FROM CARR TO CONSTRUCTIVISM
Hermeneutics and the Weberian paradigm prominently resonate in IR and

GPE—from classical IR realism to the currently influential constructivism.
On the one hand, there is the notion of the state as an independent,
autonomous actor, which is taken from Weber. On the other, there is the
notion that it is the subject, ontologically speaking (whether an individual,
group, or an entire society), which imparts logic (rationality, order) to the
world around it.
Neo-Weberian Aspects of Classical Realism
‘All state theory’, Bratsis writes (2006: 9), ‘proceeds “as if” the state was
…a universal a priori predicate to our social existence rather that a
product of our social existence. This ….endows the state with ontological
qualities not its own and abstracts its existence from the realm of social
relations.’ In other words, we assume a ‘thing’ called the state as being in
place independent of how society is organised into the unity that we call
state.
In its neo-Weberian form, the state-as-subject conceptualization considers the state to

be a distinct actor by virtue of the bureaucratic rationality that unites its members
and that provides a socially autonomous set of interests such members act to
maximise… Unlike its Leninist counterpart, such theories posit the autonomy of the
state from society, since the subjectivity that unites its members is state specific and
does not originate within society, state managers have a subjectivity that is all their
own (Bratsis, 2006: 11).
The more sophisticated interpretation of the autonomy of the state,

complete with a hermeneutic epistemology and (proto-) constructivist
ontology, can be found in the work of Edward Hallett CARR (1892-1982),

the founder of modern Anglophone IR, and the historian of the Russian
Revolution.
Carr argues that even if one must recognise

the mental driving forces, ideals and emotions,
of social actors, one cannot jump over reality.
In The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939, Carr
synthesises the idea of subjective interest and
objective structure.
A theory of world politics, he argues, cannot

be built on the foundation of the good
intentions of states (people who did so he
called ‘idealists’ or ‘utopians’—this would
refer to the lineage that reaches back to the
enlightenment theory of international politics
of which Kant is the main representative. But neither can a theory of IR be
built on the idea that world politics consists of a succession of phenomena
governed by mechanical causal laws—hence ‘realism’ (Carr, 1964: 13).
A true theory and practice of IR therefore must synthesise the element of

the utopian quest for a just world order, and the reality of a world of
states forced to mechanically pursue their national interests only.
In a discussion of Carr’s method, Keith Jenkins writes that Carr does not
deny that history, as ‘events of the past’, has really happened. But ‘[Carr]
thinks that the insertion of variously authenticated facts into a historical
account and their significance/meaning relative to other
selected/dismissed facts, depends not on something intrinsic to the facts...
but on the reading of events the historian chooses to give’ (Jenkins, 2000:
308). Indeed in Carr’s own words, ‘[The] status as a historical fact will
turn on a question of interpretation. This element of interpretation enters
into every fact of history (quoted in Ibid.: 309). Carr’s approach, therefore,
is not positivist or Rational Choice, but a more subtle, hermeneutic
approach.
However, as Jenkins adds, this is not really articulated in Carr’s

writings. It is from scarce remarks like the one quoted and which,
‘contain, in fact, the substance of Carr’s (extremely slight) epistemological
argument, which he nowhere “deepens”,’ that we must reconstruct his
method.
In The Nation-State and Violence, Anthony Giddens offers a recent

example of an IR elaboration of the neo-Weberian line of thought. It builds
on an agent/structure theory which again reverts to subjective rationality
to which it attaches a structural component (compare e.g. Weber’s idea
that the subject’s values are inscribed in a larger historical set of values,
and operate through a particular community of values which is the
nation). The agent, always alone, enters into relations which then
constrain his/her action. Ultimately, the world out there remains
fundamentally impenetrable; it is at best (re-)constructed on the basis of
our own assumptions and predilections.
This takes us to Constructivism.
Constructivism
The constructivist approach today has become the most salient alternative
to the dominant ontology of the sovereign subject (individual or social
unit) making choices, and the parallel methodology (epistemology) of
empiricism. We saw in the previous chapters that these two have quite
different backgrounds, both philosophically and in terms of the sociology
of knowledge, but that need not concern us here. In fact, the recognised
alternative within the mainstream neoclassical economics, is rather the
institutionalism we discuss in Chapter 5. In international studies,
however, ‘her majesty’s opposition’ without any doubt is constituted
today by constructivism. In their work on the theories of knowledge of IR,
Hollis and Smith (1991) contrast positivist ‘explaining’, which they claim
underpins (neo-)realist IR, with interpretive understanding.
Constructivism brings together all the key theses discussed so far in this
chapter
• the idea of the immersion of the subject, ‘actor’, in the social

world;
• the inter-subjective constitution of this social world via ideational
interaction, placing any ‘reality’ behind a screen of shared
meanings, or even replacing it by an imagined reality;
• and in terms of epistemology, the interpretive method, using
introspection, empathy, to arrive at a reconstructed
understanding of the reasons behind an actor’s actions or
utterances.
Hence, as so often in ‘new’ social science approaches, constructivism it is

not so original as many believe (Cf. Guzzini, 2000). Berger and
Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality, originally of 1966, played an
important role in bringing back the hermeneutic tradition into mainstream
sociology. Step by step, the claim that any characteristic of a society is
‘socially constructed’ (say, democracy, nationality, market economy…),
rather than an empirically observable fact, has made headway.
Helmut Plessner in the foreword to the recent German edition of Berger

and Luckman’s book sums up the subjectivist ontology of constructivism
as follows:
The reflective consciousness invests the institutional order with its own logic. The
objectified social world is placed on a logical fundament by language... The ‘logic’
with which the institutional order is in this way equipped, constitutes a part of the
socially accessible stock of knowledge and is therefore taken as a certainty.. a
properly socialised individual knows that his social world is a consistent one
(Plessner in Berger and Luckmann, 2001: x)
Note the terms used: ‘reflective consciousness’ … ‘invests with its own
logic’ (the institutional order is society) … society is ‘equipped’ with this
logic (or ‘rationality’) … ‘the properly socialised individual’ therefore
knows that the world (society) is logical (rational). This establishes the
circular, affirming nature of the world we perceive as consonant with the
world we have been socialised into. There is a reference to the reality on
which the inter-subjective construction of it rests; but that reality itself is
not accessible directly. How we think (socially) that the world is
constituted, has its source in our collective thinking, and constitutes ‘the
socially accessible stock of knowledge’. So when we think we access

‘reality’ we access the part of that stock that is labelled ‘reality’.
Hence there is no doubt that we are looking at a subjective ontology, in

which agents construct their own world (which is more or less ‘imagined’
depending on whether a reference outside the mind is recognised or not);
and in which any rationality that the world reveals, must be traced to the
agents investing it with. As Odysseos writes (2007: 15), constructivism
‘must be understood in part as a call to place selfhood or subjectivity as
the bedrock of international politics’ (‘regimes’ and ‘epistemic
communities—our Chapter 6—are ‘constructed’ in this sense, Elkins and
Simmons, 2005).
As in the Rational Choice approach discussed in Chapter 2,

constructivists of course will not deny that the world consists of many
separate subjects which somehow interact. What they deny is that this
interactive field itself obeys principles or rules that can be known, and
hence would be ‘objective’; any rationality it reveals, must therefore be
traceable to subjective rationality (cf. for an attempt to bridge the divide,
Checkel, 1997). Like Weber, constructivists assume a value-driven social
action that presupposes different frameworks of meaning for different
(collective) subjects, so the recognition of the interactive field must take
recourse to a method of abstraction in order to represent social interaction.
After all, if action is constructed from the subjective vantage point and its
intentions, motives and meaning are different for the different parties in
inter-action; and the objective social constraint, the material pattern of
how different social forces collide or collaborate, is unknowable, how do
we analyse the undeniable fact that subjects do not act in a void?
In the case of Rational Choice, the conflict/cooperation dilemma is

solved with the help of game theory, in which utility-maximising subjects
arrive at positions which are the optimum that from their point of view
can be obtained. The utilities assigned to any alternative strategy derive
from subjective valuations. In the case of constructivism, ‘outcomes’ from
interaction are likewise traceable to subjective valuations, albeit not
numerical ones. Rather, what the subjects collectively establish among
themselves (inter-subjectively), are arrangements that reflect the (majority)
appreciation of states of affairs, which in turn then constitute the grounds

for action.
‘The core constructivist claim’, Teschke and Heine argue,
is that historically varying forms of conflict and cooperation are predicated on inter-
subjectively constructed institutions. These institutions lay down the “rules of the game”
… Constitutive rules provide systems of meaning that act as frames of reference for
collectively binding and norm-governed action (Teschke and Heine, 2002: 166, emphasis
added).
History thus becomes an institutional trajectory bound up with

underlying value communities. The authors then criticise John Ruggie’s
analysis of globalisation, which is not explained (as positivist neo-realism
or Hegemonic Stability Theory would) by shifts in power capacities, but
by a shifting ‘social purpose’. The post-war, consensual ‘embedded
liberalism’ is transformed from the inter-subjective positive appreciation
of the welfare state, to an ethos of liberalism. The use of the term
‘institutions’ for these ‘imagined realities’, might lead to confusion with
institutionalism, which we discuss in the next chapter. Institutionalism
however starts from the practical activities of subjects, which congeal into
habits; constructivism is a matter of ideational, mental constructions
which are ‘institutionalised’ because and to the extent they are shared.
The axiomatic, universalistic assumptions of Rational Choice (everybody

is a utility-maximising, social atom), in constructivism are replaced by
relativism, in recognition of the separate mental universes of different
communities, and subjects are immersed in them. But at no point does
constructivism allow these community contexts to become objective,
knowable entities obeying a logic of their own. They remain constituted
from the subjectivist starting point. Weber solved the fact that action is
always compounded by the action of others at cross-purposes by using a
probabilistic language, speaking in terms of ‘the chance that’. Compared
to that constructivism is less abstract and more substantive, as we look at
real people with complex, individualised understandings that can be
communicated and shared (or not). But ‘the central constructivist problem
is that cognitive shifts have no apparent external referent, but recursively
“invent” the new socio-material reality out of themselves’ (Teschke and

Heine, 2002: 170; for a comprehensive evaluation, Palan, 2000)
Applying the Method
In terms of epistemology and method, hermeneutic researchers have to

interpret, not ‘observe’, their object: they must seek interpretive access to
their object-domain, ‘since their area of research is not objectively given,
but pre-constituted by a consciousness-driven and communicatively
mediated process of the collective construction of social reality’ (Teschke
and Heine, 2002: 166). The subjective method implies that it is the
researcher who brings ‘logic’ to the outside world, and hence to any object
(other subjects) s/he investigates.
The work of the researcher simultaneously has to question this accepted

inter-subjective construction. It is not in itself an acceptable result of any
investigation to say that something is socially constructed, because by the
definitions used in this tradition, everything is. The task is to see how we
can become aware of our complicity to the prevailing inter-subjective
construction; where the fractures between different social ‘realities’ within
any one ‘imagined reality’ are hidden, etc.
This is done through a critical investigation of the language used. As

Plessner writes, the question is, what is the common sense meaning of a
word (what does it refer to in everyday life); which state of affairs is it,
that is expressed by its use; and within which inter-subjective
understanding of the life-world is it contained. Which separate life-worlds
coexist at the global, regional, national etc. levels. There is never a life-
world which is not itself enclosed in a normative system expressed
through an everyday language.
Language therefore is the key to the hermeneutic method, which is not

surprising given that hermeneus, as we saw, means ‘interpreter’. But it is
not the formalised linguistics of the positivists, but a sociological-cultural
understanding of language that is at issue here (Wittgenstein’s eventual
conclusions about language games would fit nicely into this hermeneutic
understanding of language).
The interpretation of actions/events, then, proceeds by deriving their

presupposed meaning from the inter-subjective world of norms and ideas,
through which we construct our reality. So why somebody (or a collective
like a social group or a state) acts, is understood from the normative
system in which the agency operates. Say, starting a war in our days will
adorn itself preferable with some notion of humanitarian intervention
because our life-world is saturated with notions of human rights and the
globalisation of responsibilities; in other eras, wars were waged more
openly for territory, living space, or the like.
This then leads to a critique of ideology. The researcher tries to make

explicit the normative system from which agents distil their motivations.
At the same time, s/he will always try to uncover a deeper layer of
motivations, or a transformative effect: it is one thing to say that wars are
legitimated by humanitarian arguments because that is how neoliberalism
likes to think of itself, but quite another to deny that therefore, the
humanitarian aspect does not matter. In fact, once neoliberal states claim
humanitarian motives, that element moves into the foreground and
shapes the expectations of others too.
The steps to take in a research project in this tradition, would then be
• An assessment of the prevailing normative system, by collecting

samples of types of representations of everyday thought that are
available in ‘media’ (frequent themes in the press, soap operas,
political debates etc, etc.). This would provide a hypothetical
symbolic language in which the prevailing consensus expresses
itself.
• The identification of agents active in this setting, and samples of

language produced/used by them which demonstrate a continuity
or contradiction with the assumed normative system. This rests on
the assumption that no social action is undertaken which is not
(apart from being goal-rational in Weber’s sense) also ‘value-
rational’, i.e., conforms to the prevailing normative system, or code
of a given social unit (group, society)
• There can also occur attempts at taking a quantum leap by

reference to a higher, more remote life-world than the everyday:
this happens in the case of religious motivations. A suicide mission
in our days may be motivated, not by the inter-subjective,
normative conventions of the everyday, but on the contrary seek to
open these up, disrupt them by reference to a life-world further
removed (cf. Berger and Luckmann, 2001: 28)
• On the basis of our assessment of the everyday and the more

remote life-worlds that serve as references, we may then proceed to
design events and agents to types, in the sense of ideal-types, of
which we can then draw up an inventory of language and other
signs by which they manifest themselves. An example would again
be, that Western governments claim to wage war in the name of
humanitarian intervention. This would refer to a universalistic
individualism, consonant with a neoliberal economy; whilst the
governments targeted by those wars, usually defend their actions
by reference to state sovereignty. The same war can therefore have
a totally different meaning for each side, and the task of the
researcher is to step back and establish the types of actions, their
consonance with the professed system(s) of norms, and any
contradictions within them; whilst critically assessing his/her own
allegiance to either side so as to uphold the claim to unbiased
investigation.
• Content analysis, reading closely, reading between the lines, is the

key method used in the actual project; written documents provide
the sources. To contextualise such content, statements from
politicians advocating war presented as humanitarian intervention
may be systematised as such; this may yield certain phrases that
recur more than one would expect. One step further one can add
textual reference material, for instance, sources that are
representative of the particular mindset from which intervention is
argued as well.
• In all cases, agents are never understood in isolation from the set of
normative associations they embody. They always are organically
assimilated into, and have assimilated themselves, a social order
which is inter-subjectively reproduced over time.

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4

The hermeneutic tradition too belongs to the subjectivist strand in social

In contrast to the model of explanation developed in natural science, the

(German Verstehen)—something not possible when studying the moon or

1. HERMENEUTICS AND NEO-KANTIANISM

Kant sought to achieve a synthesis between

However, as soon as one probes beyond the empirical, phenomenal

By his transcendent ethics, Kantian subjectivism ‘embraced an idealist

Roots of Hermeneutics in Romanticism and Theology

Kant’s contemporary, the philosopher and theologian, Johann Gottfried

Herder does not deny the massive achievements of the Enlightenment.

The same applies to understanding a foreign language: one must be

Friedrich SCHLEIERMACHER (1768-

Schleiermacher developed a systematic

The divination process is complemented by comparison, and the method

comparison (‘approximative oscillation’), without ever reaching complete

• Knowledge is never ‘positive’, only an approximation, however

Even so hermeneutics remains firmly anchored in the subjectivist

Hermeneutics, then, centrally implies a separation of the human world

‘Meaning’ At Both Ends of the Interpretive Method

Whether they continued in the hermeneutic tradition, like Dilthey or

Wilhelm DILTHEY (1833-1911), Schleiermacher’s biographer, rejects the

Although both theology and metaphysics have

One of Dilthey’s pupils, the American sociologist, George Herbert Mead,

Objectivity of Perspectives, 1938). This would become one of the sources of

The neo-Kantians, active in the same period as Dilthey, were concerned

• The Marburg School (Hermann Cohen, P. Natorp, E. Cassirer)

All of the neo-Kantians shared the position, inherent in hermeneutics,

• the natural sciences proceed nomothetically, by law-like

• the social, or rather ‘cultural-historical’ sciences on the other hand

In the context of the belated German unification in 1870, realised by war

the idea that subjects are or at least should be guided by moral

With Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the hermeneutic tradition returns to

Heidegger had been a doctoral student of Rickert’s, but turned away

Heidegger thus arrives at a theory in which human existence itself is

In post-war West Germany, hermeneutics was further developed by

Summing up, the subjectivism of both the (neo-)Kantian and the

relativism, seeing the ‘others’ in their specific circumstances of time and

• The separation of social (cultural-historical) from natural science

In Figure 4.1, the ontology and epistemology of society and the

Figure 4.1. Value-Relativistic Ontology and Hermeneutic Epistemology

We can now turn to the approach developed by Max Weber.

2. WEBERIAN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY

With Max WEBER (1864-1920), we return to political economy proper.

Weber initially adopted a materialist

Weber’s study of the Protestant Ethic

understanding of social station and ‘calling’ (Beruf) and preached

It is not Weber’s claim that capitalism was ‘caused’ by Calvinism, as

In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), his posthumous

Subjective Rationality, Irrational World

As he came to reject his earlier materialist view of history, Weber

idea of the cultural development of historical humanity to ever-higher

Weber’s critique that thinking is not a natural, ‘objective’ process

Weber’s ontology is one of ‘social action’ within specific normative

Since rationality is an aspect of the subject, and society itself lacks an

Puritanism as a Protestantism of initiative and commitment influenced

Weber followed the neo-Kantians in highlighting that reality as such

So-called “objectivity”—and Weber never speaks of objectivity except as “so-called”

This again underlines Weber’s subjective rationality—it is the human