On the Horribleness of Weber

There's something about Max Weber's brand of tedious, boring sociology that academics love. For those of you fortunate enough not to know, Weber is one of the canonical founders of sociology according to bourgeois apologist Talcott Parsons, alongside the far superior Karl Marx and, to a lesser degree, Emile Durkheim. 

Roughly speaking, Weber's thesis is that we can learn about society by comparing actual social phenomena to various "ideal types". Ideal types are theoretical descriptions of "ideal" social situations that don't exist in reality, but would occur if rational actors acted (rationally) in a given circumstance. His idea is that you can calculate the real event's deviation from the ideal event, thus exposing the unique and interesting things about the real social phenomenon.

Already anyone who's even a little familiar with the history of philosophy  can see how ludicrous this way of doing social science is. This is what academics are obsessed with? Old-fashioned metaphysical idealism? The lengths to which the bourgeois academy goes in order to conjure up foils to Marx are endless.

I'm really bad

But it's quite clear why the capitalist intellectual strata elevates Weber, consciously or not. His way of thinking serves their way of summating social change. Because, in reality, the actions of people are characterized by their class positions and class standing, and someone's experience of "rationality" is totally conditioned and instantiated by the given sociohistorical circumstance. Much like the ridiculous Rawlsian notion of the veil of ignorance, Weber's ideal types can easily launder the logic of capitalist social structures through an abstract "objective" rationality, even though the assessment of the ideal type is unreservedly subjective.

Another damaging issue with this way of thinking is its foreclosure of the possibility of change. Social phenomena are defined by their internal contradictions over time. Contradiction gives society and history its motion. All of Weber's case studies are sad, ossified abstractions of the really living situations he purports to study; religion transforms over time, organizations grow and decline quantitatively and correspondingly transform qualitatively. You can't capture a moment in the life of a social being without accounting for the dynamics it contains. What the Weberian does is compare a particular fiction to a more generalized fiction.

Only marxism really provides the substance needed to make sense of society, and indeed to import/subsume anything useful from the Weberian or Durkheimian trends.