Abstract
This is a most unusual book, first because it claims by its title that Max Weber, the greatest macro-theorist in the classical tradition, produced a heretofore little noticed “theory of personality” of micro-dimensions; second, because the author is female, which in itself deviates from the norm among Weber specialists, nearly all of whom for decades have been male; and third, because Sara Farris is a native Italian who wrote the dissertation that became this book while she studied at La Sapienza University of Rome. A young professor, she now works at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, has spent a year in Princeton at the Institute, and publishes mostly in English. She is in the midst of a two-year Marie Curie grant to study “intersectionality” as it pertains to care work in Britain. By any measure, then, Farris’s book is the work of an unorthodox Weberian. The fact that Weber’s work can continue to inspire such a dynamic young scholar is grounds for joy among those who have propelled the Weber Industry in the past.
Farris’s substantial bibliography includes a unique article from 1978 by the political scientist Edward Portis, “Max Weber’s Theory of Personality.” Perusal of even the largest Weber bibliographies will reveal only a handful of contributions with the word “personality” in the title, whereas the more standard Weberian topics—charisma, bureaucracy, rationalization—occasion hundreds. Portis was concerned with to what extent the required personalities of the politician and the scholar conflicted, which is not Farris’s pursuit. Her interest lies elsewhere. Influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), she investigates Weber’s compendious sociology of religion to learn how he positioned the European/American Puritan in relation to Asian religious ideal-types. Not surprisingly, given today’s scholarly tastes, she finds that Weber’s understanding of Asian religious “personalities” does not hold up nearly so well as does his portrait of the European and American types. In fact, she claims that Weber suffered from the same “classist,” orientalist, and European blindness regarding those parts of the distant world in which he never traveled that seems to have afflicted so many white males of his generation. She comes to this conclusion after giving fairly lengthy treatment to Weber’s books on ancient Judaism, India, and China, in each case asking why and how Weber contrasted ideal-typical social action originating in these religious traditions when set beside the prototypical Protestant he made famous in his two 1904/05 essays.
More interestingly, she pursues Weber’s prolegomenal “theory of personality” by considering his debate over “irrationality” in Roscher and Knies, surely Weber’s least-read major work. Her commentary is very brief and therefore superficial, but she headed in the right direction when asking what Weber meant by an interpretable—that is, “rational”—personality, and why such a construct figured importantly in his comparative religious studies. Written as he came out of his life-threatening depression, Weber took on Eduard Meyer, Karl Knies, Benedetto Croce, and his close friend, Georg Simmel. He believed they gave too much credit to a “romantic” fallacy about the uninterpretable depth of the human personality. This got in the way of Weber’s penchant for rationalist understanding, of course. If Farris fails to prove that Weber’s analysis of religious types is as inaccurate as Said and others thought, her book remains a noble effort by a promising scholar. When she finishes her current work on intersectionality and domestic work, perhaps she can return to Weber with even more profound results.