ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1904, Weber travelled for ten weeks throughout the American Midwest, the South, the Atlantic seaboard, and New England. Part III’s chapters define major aspects of his interpretation of the American political culture. At the forefront stands the question of whether this component of American society will continue to cultivate a vibrant civic sphere. If so, on what wide-ranging foundation?
The friendliness and humor of the Americans impressed Weber deeply, as did their high energy. He frequently compared the United States favorably to its more stratified, bureaucratized, and closed European counterparts. Weber also appreciated its long-term democracy as well as, following Tocqueville, its rare capacity to produce innumerable civil associations “between” the distant and impersonal state and the isolated individual.
However, unlike Tocqueville, Weber traced the unusual density of these associations on American soil back to the Protestant sects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see “Sects I” and “Sects II” at “Abbreviations”). Moreover, he refused to embrace the French theorist’s central thesis: democracies imply a dangerous “tyranny of the majority.” The “world-mastery individualism” indigenous to the Puritan legacy significantly ameliorated this possibility, Weber held (see Chapters 7 and 8). His concern is otherwise: he fears that urban and industrial societies will become stagnant and devoid of dynamism.
Chapters 7–9 identify several further characteristics of the American political culture. On the one hand, its singular origins and particular contours are explored, as are the strengths and longevity of this nation’s civic sphere; on the other hand, the several ways in which Weber foresees the possibility of an “iron cage” society devoid of a viable civic sphere are investigated.
In sum, Weber possessed a lifelong interest in the ways in which the United States anchored its unique political culture. It did so first with the support of ascetic Protestantism’s specific cluster of values. It then did so in reference to their multiple – and long term – secular manifestations pivotal to its vibrant civic sphere.
