Max Weber's Approach to Religion       Moriyuki Abukuma

Max Weber's (1864-1920) sociology is the foundation of scientific sociology of religion in a sense of typological and objective understanding. Rejecting Karl Marx's evolutionary law of class society, or Emile Durkheim's sustained law of moral society, Weber established the understanding sociology of the subjective meaning of religious action or inaction. To make such knowledge of the understanding objective, he founded the methodology of the ideal type and the elective affinity of causal relationships. Weber "elaborated a set of categories, such as types of prophecy, the idea of charisma (spiritual power), routinization, and other categories, which became tools to deal with the comparative material; he was thus the real founder of comparative sociology." ¹ Weber holds that there is no universal law of society as supposed in natural science, or the law of history which determines the course of the dynamic mechanically. The goal of Weber's sociology of religion is to understand religious action from the subjective meaning of the actor rationally and also emphatically; it is not to establish the laws of religion and society, or to extract the essence of religious action. Or the goal is not even to formulate and evaluate the social function of religion as Marx did that religion was the opium of the mass or as Durkheim did that religion was what made moral society hold together.

Typological and comparative understanding of religious action depends on the theoretical construction of the ideal type through thinking or empathic experiments. Objective understanding of religious action, on the other hand, depends on the value-judgement free analysis of the subjective meaning of social action from the viewpoint of ideas as well as material and mental interests. To avoid the injunction of value-judgments, one has to distinguish the empirical recognition of "what is" from the normative judgment of "what should be." The validity of an ethical claim is not the matter of social analysis, but the matter of conscience and belief. The criteria of value-judgment is imperative, and does not depend on empirical reality. The understanding of "what is," on the other hand, involves not just empirical facts of social action, but also the subjective meaning of the social action. Social action is not mechanical reaction of the law of material interests, but the dynamic of ideas and interests which give the actor the conscious or unconscious meaning of life and the world. In order to understand sociological reality of religion, Weber holds the importance of religious idea which cannot be reduced to the component of material interests (Marx) or to the social nexus and function (Durkheim). Weber says:

Not ideas, but material and ideal [ideological] interests, directly govern men's conduct. Yet very frequently the world images that have been created by ideas, like a switchman, have determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. ²

1. Ninian Smart. "The Study and Classification of Religions," in Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed.

2. Weber, Max. Sociology of World Religions: Introduction (1920).