In his Introduction Stephen Kalberg impresses on his readers the need for a ‘rigorous’ way of researching civilizations. Ideas of world society, a world culture, a globalizing economy homogenized to a common standard, has suppressed our intellectual capacity in the reconstruction of past civilizations, which are now reckoned at over a hundred in number. Presentist discourses of East versus West and the clash of civilizations produce superficial narratives. Kalberg asks whether civilizations have lost their ‘value-based and traditions-based identities amid wide-ranging diffusion processes’. He doubts this and argues instead that recent comparative-historical research fails to recognize ‘the full complexity, uniqueness and multi-dimensionality of each civilization’.

Max Weber himself is often accused of this with his ‘narrative’ of the rise of Western rationalism. Kalberg does not accept such an evolutionary process for the West and the emergence of modern capitalism. The rise of capitalism is too often reduced solely to economic factors whereas, for Weber, it was a complex interplay of varied forces, and his comparative research on other civilizations produced equally complex accounts. Civilizational conflicts cannot be ignored and they can be very consequential, but the ‘clash of civilizations’ only provides limited clarification. Whenever civilizations meet there will be sharp turns in trajectory or the disruption of a settled order. What is required is a conceptual framework for analysing how, for example, Babylonia overthrew the yoke of the Assyrian empire.

Reading solely Weber’s Protestant Ethic essay, which is a common experience in the teaching of a history or sociology syllabus, leaves the student with the impression that Weber was offering a religious interpretation to account for the break-through to modern capitalism. However, read more closely with sociological spectacles and a range of concepts is revealed: rationalism, rationalization, conduct of life, the hermeneutic of text and the actualisation of meaning in the everyday world, the modality through which salvation belief is internalised, the institutional differentiation between church and sect, the place of greed and that of regulated conduct and so on. Within this ensemble, outcomes are determined by various contingencies; for instance, why did Calvinism become decisive in the complex societal structuring of a particular geographical region, NW Europe and Britain?

Weber faced head-on how this complex of factors operated in other civilizational configurations – South Asia and China. Using the above concepts and many more, drawn from the extraordinary rich palate of Heidelberg’s pre-eminence in universal history and philological advances, Weber analysed the internal dynamics of China and India, just as he had done for the ancient societies of the Mediterranean world. ‘In sum, Weber offers an empirically based, model-based, and multi-causal sociology of civilizations that defines the internal dynamics of civilizations and the ways in which they remain the same or change.’

Kalberg argues that Weber’s investigative ability was based on a specific set of methods, which he developed co-terminously with his civilizational studies. What he did not supply was a prior book on methods, which is what Durkheim provided with his Rules of Sociological Method and then their subsequent application in Suicide. Instead, we have the essay on ‘Objectivity’, written at the same time as the Protestant Ethic essay (in 1904). Then his ‘Categories of interpretive Sociology’ appears in 1913, at a time when his comparative research was in full swing. Economy and Society is published in 1919/1920 very much as a handbook on how to do sociology and social-economics with a specific emphasis on correct methodology. But it is more than a handbook, its pedagogical style, and it also offers a cornucopia of social science theories which can be used heuristically in the investigation of empirical reality.

Kalberg successfully reconstructs this methodology and its application for the research of the sociology of civilizations. To this may be added a wealth of accompanying concepts. Kalberg gives a list that almost amount to the bric-à-brac of Weber’s writing desk: the message of prophets and their impact, the ingrained patterns of the village economy, the reach of clan associations in China, the difference between caste and tribe, the legitimation of charismatic kings through religion, the origins of occidental citizenship in cities both in Palestine and in medieval Italy, the limited role of Roman law in mercantile capitalism, the major role of natural law in European socialism, the origins of credit money and its major role in English banking and colonialism (this in the General Economic History), the expropriation of Roman public lands and the rise of a plutocracy, sultanism as the extreme form of patrimonialism, and so on. 

From this welter of concepts how is the sociologist of civilizations to be guided by Weber’s methodology? The first step is for the researcher to interpret the social action of individuals and groups: is there a meaningful orientation towards some object, which could be either material or value-based? This is more than individual motive, which places a gross limitation on sociological investigation; rather, it is the substance of social interaction and how jointly held beliefs generate determining orientations in people’s behaviour. Weber holds values and material interests as methodologically equal, and he uses a terminology of value-interests and salvation goods (Heilsgüter). In actuality, he sees value-interests as a more powerful force in civilizations than material interests, because values are far more susceptible to a developmental logic, which he terms rationalization. He takes the economic sense of rationalization and applies it to the field of values. Out of this come powerful and different developmental logics in certain religions – most prominently Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, whereas other religions remain far more static, for instance (until recently) Jainism, and Daoism. 

A researcher of contemporary American civilization, to give a workable example, would seek to interpret the beliefs and group orientation of evangelical Christians, who are in the process of moving from church-type associations to sect formation. What, many of us want to know, is the inner dynamic that drives the evangelicals towards a fundamentalist conviction ethic? How is it that this salvation ethic fixates on the worldly figure of President Trump? American populism since the nineteenth century has been governed by the changing forms of evangelical Christianity and has had a determining influence on American politics and society.

The typology of purposive rationality, value-rationality, affectual action and traditional action is both an aid to classification and to heuristic understanding. Weber elaborates the category of rational action into formal, substantive, practical, and theoretical forms; rationality turns out to be a fractal. In terms of group aggregation Weber offers definitions of class, status, association, community and the process of societal formation. Weber also works, though less explicitly, with a suite of societal domains. Kalberg brings these to the fore: the domains of rulership, law, religion, and economy. Modern civilization, for example, is consumed by the domain of the economy; China by the domain of magic (rather than religion); medieval South Asia by the domain of rulership with Brahmins supplying legitimation. Each of these domains, in a Marxian vein, could be described as a determining instance. This could be exploitative capitalism – and Weber saw capitalism as nothing less – but equally it could be another domain. The rule of Pharaohs in ancient Egypt turned on their godlike status in the Old Kingdom and then, subsequently, on the priesthood in the state religion of Osiris and so altering the hierarchy and legitimacy of rulership. Hence there is no overarching logic to civilizations and it is a mistake to search for one. Instead, the researcher has to locate dominant forms of social action and the configuration of domains.

Kalberg has done an inestimable service in pulling together Weber’s disparate texts and providing an integrated account of how civilizations can be analysed. This does not, however, exhaust the subject, despite his book being one of the most complete accounts of Weber’s procedures. While we are offered Weber’s conceptual matrix, we also need to grasp Weber’s comparative method. Weber’s greatness lies in his ability to hold both a conceptual matrix and the empirical details of more than one civilization in his head, and then work out and set down a series of juxtapositions. In the early modernity of North West Europe, money credit, merchants, and science applied to navigation led to the colonisation of the world with the full backing of monarchs, whereas China despite superior technology remained an inward looking civilization where merchants had an inferior status, cities were bastions under military commanders, the silk roads were operated by Persians, and the efforts of succeeding dynasties were directed to the integration of the different ecologies of the wetlands in the south and the drier northern kingdoms and the consequent vast hydro-engineering schemes. One could even say that China was an infrastructure civilization, period. The high-level concepts of magic versus a transcendental god reveal something fundamental, but the way institutions, classes and rulership were configured in relation to very different landscapes give the researcher direct inroads into a civilization.

Max Weber sought to dig as far as he could into the empirical facts of any situation. His post-doctoral thesis on Roman agrarian history built a far-reaching theory on the basis of recently discovered (in 1888) stone field markers of settler colonisation (in today’s Orange in France). He correctly interpreted the style of lettering of the inscription as belonging to the early empire. The stones recorded, as Weber thought, tax liabilities. This showed that state lands were being farmed out for tax by the plutocracy in Rome reducing the farmer to a serf. Whereas in the colonial settlements of the republic, in Italy, the farmer remained a free citizen whose only obligation was unpaid military service. On such vestigial evidence is indicated the shift in a civilization from citizenry to imperial serfdom. Weber always acknowledged the difficulty of interpretation, saying of the field marker: ‘Indeed, everything just said about its interpretation is open to doubt’.

One limitation on a Weberian sociology of civilization is whether there might be civilizations that are not accessible to interpretive meaning. Weber’s sociology of rulership is based not so much on the resources of power but on the legitimacy of the ruler who disposes over those powers. Political legitimacy assumes meanings are held in common or at least have that potentiality. So, for instance, the meaning attributed to the charismatic ruler is that he is favoured by some god-give grace or seen to have extra-human powers by his followers. A Chinese emperor is favoured by the Mandate of Heaven, that is everything under the sun and sky (but no god), which is a compelling narrative for a subject population; though an emperor can be got rid of by officials if they deem him unsuccessful in matters of geomancy, for instance climate disaster like floods or droughts. Everything turns on legitimacy and its empirical fluctuations.

But can there be action devoid of meaning? In Weber’s interpretive methodology this is ruled out. But could there be modes of political subjection where no meaning and so no legitimation is involved? The Inca empire of the fifteenth century (C.E.) stretched from Quito in the north to Santiago in the south subjecting some 80 different ethnic groups to its ruthlessly enforced system of tribute. Each new province added to the empire was comprehensively inventoried for population, crops, commodities, livestock and an amount was recorded for the local chief to deliver to the imperial store houses. Whole populations were removed and replaced with settlers from another region. The remarkable feature of this coercive extraction, enforced by the Inca armies, was that there was virtually no officialdom, indeed the Incas had no alphabet, relying instead on the quipu. This was a belt with strings dangling down and each string was knotted to indicate a number capable of decimal subdivision. It was the principal means of communication of recording inventories and ordering the amount of tribute. The Incas built thousands of kilometres of roads interlinking the four parts of the empire (known as Tahuantinsuya) along which runners relayed the necessary information. The wheel was unknown to the Incas. The empire met the requirements of command, control and communication but without an extensive imperial legitimacy. At the heart of the dynasty in Machu Picchu there was a priesthood, rites, and sun worship, but without the written word and without the possibility of superstitious revelation any form of ‘divine’ legitimation was denied. This remarkable Andean civilization came crashing down due to a succession rivalry between the brothers Huascar and Atahuallpa. It was brittle and lacked a capacity to record traditions and consolidate a cultural legacy, and it finally collapsed with very limited resistance to the Spanish invaders. (Laurent Binet in his novel Civilisations has a fictional, and amusing, counterfactual of Atahuallpa escaping to Spain and introducing sun worship in the midst of the inquisition, so disrupting the whole narrative of European history based on a word-of-god religion and its dynastic rulership.)

Weber, and even more his brother Alfred who was in fact the proponent of a cultural sociology, was well aware that government could reduce to mechanism. Hence their shrill critiques of modern bureaucracy as an impersonal machine. Modern bureaucracy derived its legitimacy from its legality and rationality which delivered beneficial outcomes. But both brothers saw in the German and Austrian empires, the danger of rule through officials dispensing with the democratic control of the state.

Max Weber as a prominent member of Heidelberg’s liberal tradition centred his sociology on shared meanings, and in his astonishingly rich ideal typology of patrimonial rulership he looked for the grounds of legitimacy despite the savagery of many of his case studies of exploitation and extermination. The comparator is the trajectory of western rationalism. But the alterity, which Weber recognises, of so many non-western case studies points to the peculiarity of the emergence of western modernity. This, as a concatenation of factors (religion, law, science, trade), is itself a singularity. In Weber’s view it had an unstoppable dynamic born out of a mentality that continuously sought confirmation through work and the external markers of success – wealth, power, influence. The Elon Musk-type hyper personality is not so much a titan of industry or technology but rather a person in search of affirmation by an absent and joyless god. Such is the tradition of Puritanism and its inherent instability. For a stable civilization Weber acknowledged the superiority of the Hindu social ethic and its thousands of years of existence.