Politics, Death, and the Devil: Self and Power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann - Hardcover

Goldman, Harvey

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520077504 ISBN 13: 9780520077508

Verlag: University of California Press, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

This sequel to Harvey Goldman's well-received Max Weber and Thomas Mann continues his rich exploration of the political and cultural critiques embodied in the more mature writings of these two authors. Combining social and political thought, intellectual history, and literary interpretation, Goldman examines in particular Weber's "Science as a Vocation" and "Politics as a Vocation" and Mann's The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus.

Goldman deals with the ways in which Weber and Mann sought an antidote to personal and cultural weakness through "practices" for generating strength, mastery, and power, drawing primarily on ascetic traditions at a time when the vitality of other German traditions was disappearing. Power and mastery concerned both Weber and Mann, especially as they tried to resolve problems of politics and culture in Germany. Although their resolutions of the problems they confronted seem inadequate, they show the significance of linking social and political thought to conceptions of self and active worldly practices.

Trenchant and illuminating, Goldman's book is essential reading for anyone interested in political theory, social thought, and the intellectual history of Germany.

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Harvey Goldman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self (California, 1988).

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Politics, Death, and the Devil: Self and Power in Max Weber and Thomas Mann

By Harvey Goldman

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Harvey Goldman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520077504


1
Self and Power, Self and Nation

What is good?—Everything that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
What is bad?—Everything that stems from weakness.
What is happiness?—The feeling that power increases, that a resistance is overcome.
Not contentment, but more power; not peace at all, but war; not virtue, but proficiency.
Nietzsche, The Antichrist

The discourse of European writers and thinkers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and also of the popular imagination—is riddled with professed fears of weakness and impotence, of loss of power as a product of biological decline, decadence, social decay, and disillusion. Ironically, however, that discourse views loss of power and proficiency not only as a consequence of decadence, but also as a product of the great achievements of civilization and rationalization.1 The symptoms of weakness seem to appear in deformed social relations and social roles, in overheated and morbid culture and individual creative life, and in the apparent helplessness and drift of politics. Indeed, "acquired" social weakness now seems to push the "inherited" natural weakness of certain classes and of the self to new extremes.

The onset of this obsession with weakness and powerlessness has many causes, among them the shaking of stable patterns of values and purposes through rapid and unwelcome social change; but once the fear takes hold, it works to prevent the emergence of renewed meaning and purpose, of a renewed significance for work within society as it presently exists. With Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as its philosophical chroniclers, one of its symptoms is even an "attack" on life itself and on all remaining forms of strength and power: a fetish is made of death in response to death's apparent meaninglessness and insignificance in modern civilization. In Germany, this is not only a turn-of-the-century phenomenon; it reappears in the longing for escape at the end of World War I and in

the culture of the 1920s. From the lack of strength described in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks to the willful embrace of illness in The Magic Mountain , from the political decadence diagnosed in Max Weber's "National State and Economic Policy" to the chastisements of escapism in "Science as a Vocation," Mann and Weber confront this decadence with calls for regeneration and renewal in an attempt to rescue the nation and the meaning of death and work from increasing powerlessness.

Weber's and Mann's discourse of strength and power is principally concerned with identity and mastery and their basis in ascetic service, but this discourse, as we will see, is also intimately bound up with what seems at first an altogether different problem—their obsession with death and devils. Death is central to Weber as the limiting experience that reveals the genuine helplessness of modern life, but it is also the field on which meaning and power must be conquered. Within Weber's program of recovery, the opposition of God and devil then becomes central, largely from Weber's belief in the enduring need to posit enemy, devilish values as an intimate part of positing one's own godly values, an act that, for him, is the foundation for positing one's self. But Weber also draws on the language of devils from his need to conceptualize the temptation and the danger latent in human ventures that he insists must be conceived in terms of serving "gods." This concern with death and devils is equally strong in Mann, though for him the situation is somewhat different because, as a protodecadent, he deals with death as a self-conscious toying with the negation of bourgeois life, which, ironically, may ultimately allow an opposite affirmation of life to appear. Further, Mann's preoccupation with devils seems more personal than Weber's, for the devil first materializes in Mann as a dark side of the self that must be "sublimated" into art, but it is later "split off," becoming the guiding value, though inverted, for a lost artist.

Concerned with the weakness of the times, Weber's theorizing reveals an implicit concern with what we can call the strengthening and "empowerment" of the self, which informs his interpretations of and programs for the crisis of modern society and politics in Germany. Mann's fictionalizing and political essays after World War I also show a form of empowerment, though of a rather different kind: in his case, aggrandizement and expansion of the self derive from identification with Germany, a view that underlies his interpretations of German culture and society and the new possibilities of art. Despite Weber's and Mann's concern with the self and its power, however, the self is rarely mentioned directly in their work. Instead they deal with "disciplines" of the self like the "calling" and charismatic education, with conceptions of the

transformed self like the "personality," and with the different "roles" that empowered selves occupy, whether they are shaped for these roles or by them. In Mann these roles include the artist (as opposed to the decadent), in Weber the entrepreneur, the scientist and politician with a calling, and the charismatic leader. "Practices of the self," to use Foucault's language, play a crucial role in the central metanarratives of their work.

In their concern with the self and the practices that fashion it, Weber and Mann carry forward a century of German cultural traditions. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, formal religious practice and Christian belief lost much of their appeal among the intellectual classes in Germany as sources of ideals and models for the shaping of identity and the guidance of action. This weakening, accentuated by a shifting balance of power between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, led to the generation of nonreligious "techniques" and codes for the shaping and legitimating of the self: Kantian conceptions of moral law and personality, the ethos of Bildung , or self-cultivation through scholarship, and the ideal of Kultur . In Norbert Elias's words, the German middle-class intelligentsia began to legitimize itself to itself through its possession of "das rein Geistige (the purely spiritual) . . . the inner enrichment [and] the intellectual formation (Bildung ) of the individual, primarily through the medium of books, in the personality."2

By the late nineteenth century, however, the new techniques and practices that had aided in shaping and equipping bourgeois individuals for lives and roles in nation, culture, and class were seriously weakened and persistently challenged by the pressures of a rapidly developing capitalist society. Complicating matters further, the model of the bourgeois family, the discipline of the traditional bourgeois calling, and the power of bourgeois class loyalty and identification were severely strained as vehicles of support for identity and as sources of practices for shaping the self.3 Although class practices and cultural ideals had helped hold the increasingly bourgeois social order together and guide individual life choices, these were now threatened by social and cultural changes: rising social mobility and the sharpening of class conflict, the intensification of capitalist competition, the pace of developments in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520077504
• ISBN 13: 9780520077508
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 350
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar