demon of the concrete . a note on Max Weber and contemporary sociology by Norman Birbaum . Max Weber , born in 1864 and died in 1920 , is generally regarded as the greatest of modern sociologists . this received opinion is piously affirmed , even by those whose command of the original texts and their sources in intellectual and social history is limited . but Weber &apos;s work has exerted little influence on the social sciences in this country . ( the situation in the USA is different . ) piety , apparently , has served as a substitute for comprehension . there is little point in re-animating those hobgobblins so familiar to all right-thinking left-wing social scientists : the lamentable ( if recent ) isolation of the British from continental thought , the philistine complacency of those for whom complex ideas constitute the moral equivalent of greasy cooking , the nervous patrol mounted on academic boundaries by minds of pop-gun calibre . the reasons for the deficiency are far more profound . they affect men of honesty , talent , and vision no less than that minority of pedants whose chief activity is the celebration of their own short-sightedness as a new form of omniscience . Max Weber &apos;s life work may be understood as a desperate encounter with Marxism , a system of values and explanation from which Weber dissented - and which he treated with the utmost seriousness and respect . in opposition to the Marxist theory of ideology , Weber insisted on the independent role of ideas in history . contradicting the Marxist notion of social classes , he held that status groupings were often more important . challenging the Marxist view of the state , he developed an original conception of bureaucracy . he studied the inter-relationship of society and religion in the protestant west , India , China , and ancient Judaism ; and brought a vast historical perspective to the analysis of the crisis of capitalist society . master of a thousand historical particulars , he used his immense learning to seek generalisation . endowed with a profound capacity for abstraction , he never used abstraction to annihilate the uniqueness of any specific historical situation . he moved with bewildering rapidity from methodological prescription , through the analysis of the language of the social sciences , into specific empirical studies , towards sociological generalisation , and - finally - transcended this to construct a philosophy of history . upon his death , a contemporary said : with Max Weber , our sciences reached their highest peak - and promptly fell from it . Weber attempted , indeed , a synthesis of the abstract and the concrete by juxtaposing the one and the other . trapped within the antitheses of a science resolutely positivistic , he sought to break out by showing the evaluative bias intrinsic to any approach to fact , and by insisting upon the inadequacy of any metaphysics when it confronted the irreducible data of history : power , conflict and anguish . it is now , perhaps , somewhat clearer why Weber is so difficult of assimilation to British social thought . his life work is not alone the product of genius , but of genius in a particular historical crisis : he united methodological scruple , and spiritual self-awareness with a pessimistic conviction of the political impotence of social science . the dilemmas of a self-consciously academic science , of political liberalism , of modern protestantism afflicted him in their German form . his work gave them a more universal expression . nothing like this coalescence of crises has occurred here - yet . we still await an end to empiricism . it can come only when ( as happened to Weber and his contemporaries ) the usual categories of analysis dissolve because the institutions to which they refer disintegrate . but we may understand Weber &apos;s work as a supreme instance of an intellectual effort to master a reality that seemed to defy practical human alteration . the understanding of Max Weber is not easy for someone raised in the English-speaking countries . his style is tortuous , and some of his most important works were until recently not available in translation . the secondary literature in English has tended to emphasize his methodological writings , and has at times treated these out of context . with the publication of Reinhard Bendix &apos;s admirable book on Weber &apos;s general sociology , however , we do have a reliable and ample guide to the full scope of his thought . Professor Bendix has grasped what is essential in Weber &apos;s work , the internal reasons for its alternation between abstraction and concrete description . given the depth , complexity , and sheer scope of Weber &apos;s writings , Professor Bendix can only be congratulated upon a remarkable feat of compression and synthesis . he has brought to the surface , further , much that is latent in the texts and he is everywhere , faithful to them . we might have hoped for a more systematic account of the relationship between the work and its political setting , but not everything can be done in one book . ( meanwhile , a young German scholar , Wolfgang Mommsen of Tuebingen , has given us just such an account in his Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik 1890-1920 ; a translation is much to be desired . ) theory vs research . the appearance of the Bendix volume , however , gives rise to some melancholy reflections on the present state of British sociology . I do n&apos;t refer to the plight of the subject in terms of university politics , to its difficulties of recruitment and expansion . I do refer to the curious intellectual atmosphere many of its practitioners breathe , to their penchant for universalising minor differences of emphasis and to their equally prominent aptitude for ignoring major ones . theory has been opposed to research , comparative and historical studies have been set against investigations of contemporary British social structure , pure science has been invoked against the applied sort . no formulation is too crude , no argument too tiresome , when these embattled knights arm themselves with cliches for their ( paper ) Armageddon . it would appear , to the mere outsider interested in knowledge of society , to be pointless - but an insider can tell him that it has a point , namely , it is all prophylactic - it prevents a rigorous and sustained criticism of the protagonists &apos; assumptions . the contending approaches I &apos;ve just cited ( I could add some more , extending to scholastic disputes about which techniques ought to be applied in - entirely hypothetical - investigations ) of course contend mainly in the minds of the disputants . what makes so many of these debates so sterile is that the participants either can not or will not see that they occupy vantage points of a very restricted sort ; they seem to think that , like so many intellectual collossues , they straddle the globe . the more one looks at this , the more one feels that the thing which British sociologists need is to consider the implications of Weber &apos;s work for their own . one historical actuality . they might begin by noting that Weber was fascinated by what we may term the demon of the concrete . in every event , he saw the point at which many historical possibilities were transformed into one historical actuality - which in turn led to new possibilities . every event , further , was susceptible of interpretation in a variety of theoretical contexts . the interpretation chosen by the sociologists , then , depends upon his prior assumptions as much as upon the unique properties of the event . but only those unique properties were capable of altering theoretical assumptions , by suggesting new ones . put in this way , Weber &apos;s procedure sounds too much like the crude scientism advocated by many who see in the social sciences only a substitute for the ( alleged ) straight-forwardness of the natural sciences : hypothesis , deduction , induction , new hypothesis and so on ad infinitum . that is not what Weber meant . in the first place , he held that interpretation depended upon understanding - a seizure of the essentially human components of evaluation and motivation in social action . ( in this sense , Weber at times came close to the Marxist analysis of practise . ) more importantly , perhaps , Weber held that the manifold meaning attached to the event by the social scientist could alter his definition of the concrete event itself . Weber saw sociology and the social sciences in general as dialectically related to reality - even if he did not use the term , and even if the substance of his own sociology represented a challenge to historical materialism . and , in the last resort , Weber &apos;s efforts were directed to mastering concrete reality in all its fullness - a fullness which was demonic because of the human situation itself . exhausting reality . the placid and complacent way in which the ordinary British social investigator supposes that what he sees exhausts reality , is a striking commentary on his own deficiencies of imagination . the deficiency is no less painful because it happens to be common amongst a group of sociologists whose own social ideals are , on the whole , admirable . the new book by Young and Wilmott , written not for purposes of market research , but with a genuinely ameliorative bias , is a case in point . the book is , to begin with , curiously non-critical . it takes at face value , or very nearly so , the statements of the informants . by doing so ( by capitulating to one face of the concrete , in other words ) it tacitly conveys the impression , not alone that the subjects interviewed lack depth - but that their reactions , such as they are , exhaust the range of human possibilities in this society . this may be so - but then it ought to be stated as a judgement about this society , positive or negative . there is , further , an irreducible sentimentalism about the book - as if the authors suffered from guilt at possessing different values , different experiences , different horizons from both their middle-class and working-class subjects . yet that difference of perspective between authors and subjects is of course the pre-condition of their work , the point of departure for such social criticism as the book contains . in refusing to deal , explicitly , with the problem of their own perspectives the authors do lose their chance to criticise that of their subjects . for instance , they equate middle-class friendliness in the suburb to friendliness amongst the working-class , whereas their own data make it clear that we have to deal with two radically distinct psychological phenomena . as for their conclusion , that an informant &apos;s banalities about home and fireside represented no dangerous dissatisfaction with the social structure , it is difficult to see in it anything but an effort to give a restricted view of one aspect of contemporary Britain some long-term significance . not having worried explicitly about the significance of their findings , they do seem to accept highly conventional notions about it . ( when writing casually about the many householders who , partly as a refuge from the monotony of their own work , did a good deal of artisan work about the home they missed a serious opening for probing deeply into some of the hidden relationships and deprivations that affect us . ) for saying something like this some years ago about family and kinship in east London , I was relegated to outer darkness as a critic of the institute of community studies . I hope these remarks will not be taken as evidence of rejection of their enterprise , nor indeed of any lack of sympathy for a group of colleagues who are doing useful and challenging work . it does suggest that , like Max Weber , they might begin to use their heads . notebook . the new frontier . by Stuart Hall . there is now considerable discontent brewing about education . it arises from many different quarters - among teachers and administrators ( Cf the recent controversy in the observer between Mr Amis and his colleagues and Dr Petersen ) , academic authorities ( Cf the reports of several recent conferences ) , parents ( Cf the recent PEP pamphlet , parents &apos; views on education , 3 s 6 d ) and students ( see Oxford opinions below ) . only the labour party remains sweetly oblivious . the common thread which link these different aspects is the continuing existence of a two-tiered , two-class structure . luck , sweat , scholarships and grants may all provide ladders or switch-points , by means of which young men and women may , at some point in their education , shift from one stream to another . but these ameliorative measures can not disguise the central fact that , in secondary as in further education , there is a high-road and a back-door ; and the standards which apply or the resources which are set aside differ , depending upon which stream you are in , as sharply as they do in , say , our provision in old age . 