ABSTRACT
Max Weber is a daunting figure for anyone interested in the project of comparative political theory or comparative ethics. It is now abundantly clear that Max Weber was not doing merely comparative sociology but comparative ethics as well. He was read, much too easily, as a forerunner of American style modernization theory rather than an heir to Schopenhauer and nietzsche, whose engagements with the ethical rationality of the world haunt Weber’s pages. Thanks to the work of Henis, Tenbruck, Scaff and Goldman, some of these mischaracterizations of Weber’s corpus have been cleared up and it is not my intention to talk about Weber’s larger project.1 But the insights generated by recent attention to Weber’s ethical interests have yet to be fully extended to our reading of his work on the religions of India and China which are still read primarily through old lenses. The revolution in Weber scholarship brought about by Wilhelm Tenbruck’s claim that theodicy was central to Weber’s enterprise has not yet been fully explored in this context. Tenbruck argued that,
Tenbruck was right in emphasizing the centrality of theodicy to the process of rationalization. But the development of this insight has been limited in two respects. First theodicy was central not only to Weber’s sociological enterprise; Weber’s work also represents an ethical response to the perceived failures of all attempts at a theodicy. In his forays into comparative religion Weber is interested not only in the range of theodicies on offer, or the different forms of rationalization produced
by different theodicies. He is equally interested in the ways in which theodicies – attempt to render the world ethically rational – break down in different ways and the responses generated by that breakdown. The cross-cultural question Weber is interested in is not simply why the occident generated capitalism and others didn’t. rather, it is how the fundamental facts of the ethical irrationality of the world are reckoned with in different contexts. It is, in other words, the same dialogue he is having with kant, nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Second – and equally important for our context, Tenbruck was wrong in assuming, as many Weber commentators still do, that only in the West did theodicy lead to disenchantment. It is indeed Weber’s central claim that each culture produces its own distinctive forms of disenchantment and to that extent we are all in the same boat.
