Re: Max Weber's Genteel Racism

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

A possessive investor in Max Weber's stock is in deep denial:

> At 11:34 AM 12/7/00 -0500, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> > At 08:00 AM 12/7/00 -0500, Michael wrote:
> > > Perhaps.  The original question was whether or not he was a racist.  And
> >  >I'm arguing that no, theoretically he was not.
> >
> > But that question is irrelevant, at least outside cultish grouplets.
>
> not really.  yoshie wasn't just claiming that W had
> ethnocentric/eurocentric stereotypes but, rather, that his work was
> premised on, according to yoshie, a claim that europeans were
> rational while others were not.  of course, the point is that weber
> doesn't use rational to describe europe and irrational to describe
> others.

Max Weber wrote: "The highly developed historical scholarship of
China did not have the method of Thucydides.  Machiavelli, it is
true, had predecessors in India; but all Indian political thought was
lacking in a systematic method comparable to that of Aristotle, and,
indeed, in the possession of _rational_ concepts.  Not all the
anticipations in India (School of Mimamsa), nor the extensive
codification especially in the Near East, nor all the Indian and
other books of law, had the strictly systematic forms of thought, so
essential to a _rational_ jurisprudence, of the Roman law and of the
Western law under its influence.  A structure like the canon law is
known only to the West" (emphasis mine, Max Weber, _The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_, Trans. Talcott Parsons, London &
NY: Routledge, 1992, p. 14).

It mystifies me why you can't see the dichotomy that Weber makes
between the "rational West" and the "irrational Rest" extending all
the way back to the days of Thucydides.  It's plain as daylight.
What's the point of denial?  It's not as though your intellectual
portfolio would go down if the Max Weber stock went down due to the
proof that he was a Eurocentrist.  It's not that you would get paid
better if your Max Weber were proven not to be a Eurocentrist either.
I suppose that this type of intellectual investment in the Great Men
of the so-called "Western Civilization" is a superstructural vehicle
through which cultural racism gets reproduced.  The psychological
"wages of whiteness" that many scholars have come to analyze.

Yoshie

P.S.  No wonder that the late & lamented Jim M. Blaut was driven to
distraction by rage against the systematic investment in the idea of
the "West," so much so that he ended up committing the opposite
error.  Tragically dialectical.  R.I.P., my dear friend Jim.

P.P.S.  I'm claiming more than you attribute to me.  I'm saying that
Max Weber committed an intellectual crime of anachronism, akin to an
anachronistic argument that Socrates was "gay."