john bendix and randall collins - comparison in the work of reinhard bendix

Comparison in the Work of Reinhard BendixAuthor(s): John Bendix and Randall CollinsSource: Sociological Theory, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Nov., 1998), pp. 298-301Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/202187 .Accessed: 20/06/2014 05:04

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Comparison in the Work of Reinhard Bendix

JOHN BENDIX

University of Pennsylvania

with an introduction by

RANDALL COLLINS

University of Pennsylvania

INTRODUCTION Reinhard Bendix was an important presence in the middle third of the century. He was a dominant (indeed, founding) figure at the Berkeley sociology department, which in the 1950s and 1960s set so much of the new direction of research, and trained so many of the leading sociologists of the next generation. It was a department of big names (Blumer, Goffman, Selznick, Lipset, Bendix, Lowenthal, Kingsley Davis, Smelser, Stinchcombe) and it figures in the history of twentieth-century American sociology like the great Chi- cago department of the 1910s-through-1930s (Park, Thomas, Znaniecki, Ogburn, plus Mead influentially nearby in the university); along with the "second Chicago school" of the 1940s and 1950s (Blumer, Wirth, Everett Hughes, Lloyd Warner, Janowitz, Shils), the Harvard of the 1930s-1960s (Sorokin, Parsons, Homans, Bales, Riesman, Harrison White, with Gordon Allport and Barrington Moore on the periphery), and the Columbia of the 1930s-1950s (Maclver, Lynd, Merton, Lazarsfeld, C. Wright Mills, Coser). Sociology, like other disciplines, is driven institutionally by collections of consciousness and contentious- ness of this sort, including their cabals of graduate students and their networks branching out to initiate new departmental centers with their own moments of intellectual energy. One could write a substantial sociology of sociology around these departments and a few others.

Bendix played a key role in shaping our sociological consciousness today, not so much because of his particular theories or research, but because he was as central as anyone in bringing to dominance an intellectual style. There are two ways to state this, two images of Reinhard Bendix: the first would be the dominant image of Bendix during his lifetime; the second is what his son, John Bendix, brings to our attention as the deeper, less obvious but more pervasive influence today.

As to the first: Why was Reinhard Bendix so central in the Berkeley department, in the midst of all the big names? Why was his a name that virtually every graduate student everywhere knew? In large part, because of two books: Class, Status and Power (1953), and Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1960). CSP, as the former was known, was only a pedagogical collection, a reader on stratification edited jointly with Seymour Martin Lipset, but "Bendix and Lipset" played the same role then as the reader edited by Park and Burgess in the 1920s, which defined the classical canon for sociology students of its day. CSP, the very title tells us, was organized around the three-dimensional Weberian scheme; along with the Gerth and Mills edition of selections From Max Weber a few years earlier (1946), it served to introduce Weber into American sociology, above all as a theorist of domination and conflict. Weber, of course, was already known, especially from The Prot-

Sociological Theory 16:3 November 1998 ? American Sociological Association. 1722 N Street NW, Washington, DC 20036


estant Ethic, translated and introduced by Talcott Parsons in the 1930s. But that was just the issue: Parsons and his allies had introduced a functionalist Weber, buttressing the theory of society as organized around a core value system. Bendix and Lipset, like Gerth and Mills, became spearheads for a rival research program, one which started with stratification as the central phenomenon.

It is ironic and anachronistic that Marx became introduced as a living intellectual presence into American sociology by piggy-backing on Weber. At the beginning of the 1960s (and a fortiori a decade earlier) there were still serious academics who could not even hear the word "class" without barking out "don't give me that conspiracy theory!" Anything smacking of leftist radicalism was in bad odor, and much of the functionalist camp seemed occupied with an exercise in euphemism, an effort to explain away stratification and conflict so that they weren't really conceptual threats to the functionally integrated and ulti- mately benign social system. The symbolic interactionists were off to the side of that issue, but they too offered no research program, no theoretical armament for taking stratification head-on, especially in its material and coercive aspects. Bendix and Lipset, even more than Gerth and Mills, were responsible for changing all that. CSP was the perfect shelter for a new conflict-oriented sociology, because it offered three dimensions, with value-integrated status groups alongside coercive power and economic class. It was in this reader that excerpts from The Communist Manifesto and The Eighteenth Brumaire became standard parts of the theoretical canon; it was here that serious discussion began around the relative weights that economic property, labor, and mobilizing resources play in the overall scheme of society. In one of those labels that are a bit loopy but revealing nevertheless, the Berke- ley department (even before the student demonstrations that set off a national trend in 1964) was sometimes referred to in more conservative departments as "those Marxists." This was quite inaccurate in the case of Bendix and Lipset (although the latter had been a Marxist in his student days in New York); what it revealed was the atmosphere in which even referring to Marx without ritual condemnation, treating Marxian ideas seriously and as continuous with those of Weber, was viewed as a breach of patriotism and intellectual etiquette.

As the sociological world got to know Bendix better, and as stratification became the favorite research program for the discipline, a more complex picture emerged of what he was about. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait was the first major book to present Weber, not as adjunct to another theoretical program (as Parsons had done with his synthetic action theory and with functionalism), nor yet as a comparative sociologist of religion, but above all as a political sociologist on a global scale. Bendix became known as the great Weber scholar of his generation, not so much as a textual expert-the leadership there passed to Bendix's former student, Guenther Roth, who finally brought out the complete translation of Economy and Society in 1968-but as the sociologist who made Weberian work an active research tradition concerning the historical transformation of the state. Weber, as multidimensional theorist, could be read with very different emphases; and what might be called a translation war and contest of interpretations went on for over forty years among those who saw religious value systems and other cultural phenomena (status, legit- imacy) as Weber' s central contribution; those who found Weber a strategic device to reintro- duce Marxian class conflict or to broaden it into a more elaborate conflict theory; and those who saw Weber's most useful ideas in the crucial role of the state, with its core of military coercion, its legitimizing doctrines, its shifts among patrimonial and bureaucratic organization, and its octopus-like capacity to penetrate, mobilize, and transform every other aspect of societies. This last viewpoint-the state-centered model of modernization and of social change generally-has been the leading idea of the Golden Age of macrohistorical sociology we have been living through in the last thirty-five years. And thus we

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could say that Bendix was instrumental in ushering in a dominant theme of one major wing of contemporary scholarship.

Reinhard Bendix, in this version of his career, was the great American Weberian because he showed us what could be done with Weber, opening up a whole field of historical sociology that had scarcely existed before on this continent. Those who knew Reinhard knew that he was uneasy with the label "Weberian," that he strived in his own works to bring about a wider transmission of classic European ideas, a continuation of a way of doing scholarship that he regarded as crucial to keeping civilized culture alive. It is the merit of John Bendix's present article to bring out what this tradition was. A clue is pointed out to us as John describes the family lineage: Reinhard's father Ludwig was himself a distinguished legal scholar (we are treated to the image of the fifteen-year-old Reinhard being directed by his father to read Marx and Mannheim-how many conservative parents today would try that on their teenagers!). Ludwig was a scholar in the broad German tradition of Geisteswissenschaft, a term that is difficult to translate but implies a contrast with Naturwissenschaft, between the realms of human culture and the generalizing sci- ences of the nonhuman world of matter. A vigorous array of neo-Kantian philosophers in the last third of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century had worked on various ways of construing this divide. It is revealing that Ludwig Bendix (like Max Weber and Georg Simmel) was a pupil of Wilhelm Dilthey, who worked out some of the most important formulations of this contrast with all its resonances into differing epis- temologies, ontologies of being, and ethical realms. We are more used to hearing how Weber was influenced by another neo-Kantian, Rickert (who, incidentally, was also the early teacher of Heidegger), and how Weber's strategy of ideal types was a neo-Kantian variant of that typical early-twentieth-century concern for bridging and balancing Gei- steswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft, The point I wish to bring out is that Max Weber and Reinhard Bendix are not so much master and pupil, influence and transmitter, but rather network cousins in that closely connected family of the German academic aristoc- racy. Bendix seems like a Weberian because they share a family resemblance. They are both building upon the heritage of neo-Kantianism, a body of ideas that is one of the defining sensibilities of the entire twentieth century.

Earlier I suggested that our older image of Reinhard Bendix, the great American Webe- rian, is that of figurehead for a movement that opened up the sociology of multidimensional conflict, of macrohistorical research, of the state as the leading edge of social change. John Bendix's essay shows how he can be seen as a leading introducer of historical self- consciousness about a larger, more subtly pervasive influence: the program of Geisteswis- senschaft. We live in an era in which research programs are built around the primacy of cultural sensibilities and meaning systems; in the Russo-French version of the tradition, of symbolic structures and semiotic codes. The postmodernist variant, which relentlessly historicizes meaning systems, would not have seemed alien to Dilthey and Rickert; it is a descendent of their own ideas. The rejection of "positivism," which has set so many battle lines in recent decades, is a militant reiteration of the divide between Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft.

What John Bendix reminds us concerning the works of his father is that this neo- Kantian tradition has room in it for more nuanced positions than the polemical extremes. Reinhard Bendix was working out the same problem in American intellectual life for which Max Weber had proposed his own solution in the German context of an earlier generation. We live within a renewed blossoming of the Geisteswissenschaften; their under- lying commonalities are more alive than ever in the broad movements of literary theory and social science of culture at the end of the twentieth century; our ideologies are shaped, to a degree that we scarcely realize, by the appropriation of the Geisteswissenschaft stand-

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point by the theorists of militant feminism and ethnic insurgencies. We also live in a time of militant unifying movements from the other side, the contemporary naturwissenschaft- liche programs of economistic rational choice, of evolutionary genetics, and brain physi- ology. What Reinhard Bendix tried to find was a mediating pathway, a strategy that would allow both of these grand enterprises of intellectual life to carry on, in fruitful contention and even perhaps in occasional mutual illumination. These intellectual battles have been fought out before, Bendix seeks to remind us. Understanding our own historical lineages is the most fruitful way to take them creatively into the future.

Randall Collins


Article Contentsp. [298]p. 299p. 300p. 301

Issue Table of ContentsSociological Theory, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Nov., 1998), pp. 211-313Front MatterThe Paradox of Democratic Regimes: Fragility and Transformability [pp. 211 - 238]Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate "Means of Movement" [pp. 239 - 259]Georg Simmel as an Eidetic Social Scientist [pp. 260 - 281]Symposium on Hans Joas's The Creativity of ActionThe Creativity of Action [p. 282]Reconstructing the Theory of Action [pp. 283 - 291]Toward a Pragmatist Theory of Action [pp. 292 - 297]

Comparison in the Work of Reinhard Bendix [pp. 298 - 301]Comparison in the Work of Reinhard Bendix [pp. 302 - 312]Back Matter [pp. 313 - 313]

john bendix and randall collins - comparison in the work of reinhard bendix

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