ABSTRACT
Weber's relation to Nietzsche has recently come under closer scrutiny than social scientists had heretofore thought necessary. 1 This closer inspection has reopened questions that were widely believed (or wishfully thought) to be closed for good. Although Weber's teaching is inherently controversial, fundamental controversy, going to the roots of his thought, had almost disappeared from the social sciences. 2 My purpose in this chapter is to bring one topic from the renascent controversy about Weber's fundamental principles into clearer focus. 3
Social scientists and historians have been taught for several generations that Weber liberated their disciplines from historicism. 4 Secure in this knowledge, they may hastily dismiss - will probably misconstrue-the thesis that Weber followed Nietzsche on the path to his own distinctive historicism. 5 The diacritic point in this contention is that we must distinguish with greater care between fundamentally different forms of historicism. If many scholars have been inclined to ignore such distinctions, it is primarily because a major transformation within historicist thought was not adequately mapped by our received historiographies and philosophies of social science. 6 In particular, the most influential accounts of the origins of social science failed to chart the traverse initiated by Nietzsche, away from theoretical historicism towards a practical (or existentialist) historicism. 7 This failure was of some consequence. It blinded many scholars to a possibility now under scrutiny: that in liberating the disciplines of history and social science from Hegel (and from the residues of Hegel in Marx), Weber had adopted Nietzsche's critique of theoretical historicism, thereby introducing the Nietzschean traverse (with some modification) into contemporary social science and historiography. 8
'Our Virtues,' follows a discussion of 'We Scholars' and makes a transition from science in general to history and the Geisteswissenschaften in particular. 11 In it, Nietzsche is concerned with what Tocqueville called the influence of democracy upon the movement of the intellect, or with the interplay between science, public opinion and the republic of letters. That interplay is presently dominated by the rise of the historical sciences and historicism, according to Nietzsche. 12 In the twenty-seven aphorisms in Part 7, Nietzsche plays on the bad conscience of his age, by vivisecting two virtues that characterize our epoch as an age of historicism. 13
These contemporary virtues, 'the historical sense' and 'intellectual probity', stand high among the virtues Weber exemplified and stressed in his writings on method and ethics. 14 Curiously, Nietzsche argues that they are antithetical. Verstehende Soziologie or Historie forgives too much, because it understands indiscriminately. 15 It cannot comprehend what is remorseless and unforgiving in a closed and perfectionist culture; what it cannot understand is measure. 16 Devaluing the self-discipline that high art and human accomplishment demand, we who prize the historical sense shrink from each severe ranking of men and things. By contrast, intellectual honesty (Redlichkeit) is a ferocious virtue that must marshal a ranking of values and impose exacting selfdiscipline. 17 Thus, 'our virtues' contradict and misinterpret each other. From the standpoint of rigorous intellectual probity, the historical sense appears comically anti-historical: by mortifying our capacity to understand strict and noble standards of praise or blame, the historical sense compels us to misunderstand the peaks of past human accomplishment. 18 Paradoxically, a virtue prized by scientific historiography works against historical understanding. 19 Conversely, according to Nietzsche, steadfast intellectual honesty inevitably appears to votaries of the historical sense as immoralism and cruelty. 20 If Nietzsche is correct, these two virtues are antithetical and should cancel one another. 21
The pride of our contemporaries is accordingly volatile and prone to fluctuate into self-contempt: either virtue, taken seriously, puts the other to shame. 22 We cannot do justice to the most consequential differences between cultures without transcending Verstehen or the historical sense: intellectual probity ultimately requires that we treat Verstehen as a vice. 23 Nor can we overcome the moral relativism that accompanies our indiscriminately sympathetic understanding of many cultures, unless we become 'immoralists'. 24 Thus the tension between our virtues cannot be stabilized. It must set us in motion, toward downfall or ascent.
