Comparison in the Work of Reinhard Bendix

Author(s): John Bendix and Randall Collins

Source: Sociological Theory, Vol. 16, No. 3 (Nov., 1998), pp. 298-301
Published by: American Sociological Association
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Comparison in the Work of Reinhard Bendix

JOHN BENDIX

University of Pennsylvania

with an introductionby
RANDALL COLLINS

University of Pennsylvania

INTRODUCTION
ReinhardBendix was an importantpresence in the middle third of the century.He was a
dominant (indeed, founding) figure at the Berkeley sociology department,which in the
1950s and 1960s set so much of the new direction of research,and trainedso many of the
leading sociologists of the next generation. It was a departmentof big names (Blumer,
Goffman, Selznick, Lipset, Bendix, Lowenthal, Kingsley Davis, Smelser, Stinchcombe)
and it figures in the history of twentieth-centuryAmerican sociology like the great Chicago department of the 1910s-through-1930s (Park, Thomas, Znaniecki, Ogburn, plus
Mead influentially nearby in the university); along with the "second Chicago school" of
the 1940s and 1950s (Blumer, Wirth, Everett Hughes, Lloyd Warner,Janowitz, Shils), the
Harvardof the 1930s-1960s (Sorokin, Parsons, Homans, Bales, Riesman, HarrisonWhite,
with Gordon Allport and BarringtonMoore on the periphery), and the Columbia of the
1930s-1950s (Maclver, Lynd,Merton, Lazarsfeld,C. WrightMills, Coser). Sociology, like
other disciplines, is driven institutionallyby collections of consciousness and contentiousness of this sort, including their cabals of graduatestudents and their networks branching
out to initiate new departmentalcenters with their own moments of intellectual energy.
One could write a substantialsociology of sociology aroundthese departmentsand a few
others.
Bendix played a key role in shaping our sociological consciousness today, not so much
because of his particulartheories or research,but because he was as central as anyone in
bringingto dominance an intellectual style. There are two ways to state this, two images of
ReinhardBendix: the first would be the dominantimage of Bendix duringhis lifetime; the
second is what his son, John Bendix, brings to our attentionas the deeper, less obvious but
more pervasive influence today.
As to the first: Why was ReinhardBendix so centralin the Berkeley department,in the
midst of all the big names? Why was his a name that virtually every graduate student
everywhere knew? In large part, because of two books: Class, Status and Power (1953),
and Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (1960). CSP, as the former was known, was only

a pedagogical collection, a reader on stratificationedited jointly with Seymour Martin

Lipset, but "Bendix and Lipset"played the same role then as the readeredited by Parkand
Burgess in the 1920s, which defined the classical canon for sociology students of its day.
CSP, the very title tells us, was organizedaroundthe three-dimensionalWeberianscheme;
along with the Gerth and Mills edition of selections From Max Webera few years earlier
(1946), it served to introduce Weber into American sociology, above all as a theorist of
domination and conflict. Weber,of course, was alreadyknown, especially from The ProtSociological Theory 16:3 November 1998
? American Sociological Association. 1722 N Street NW, Washington,DC 20036

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299

INTRODUCTION

estant Ethic, translatedand introducedby Talcott Parsons in the 1930s. But that was just
the issue: Parsons and his allies had introduced a functionalist Weber, buttressing the
theory of society as organized arounda core value system. Bendix and Lipset, like Gerth
and Mills, became spearheadsfor a rival researchprogram,one which startedwith stratification as the central phenomenon.
It is ironic and anachronisticthat Marx became introducedas a living intellectual presence into American sociology by piggy-backing on Weber.At the beginning of the 1960s
(and a fortiori a decade earlier)there were still serious academics who could not even hear
the word "class" without barking out "don't give me that conspiracy theory!"Anything
smacking of leftist radicalismwas in bad odor, and much of the functionalistcamp seemed
occupied with an exercise in euphemism, an effort to explain away stratificationand conflict so that they weren't really conceptual threatsto the functionally integratedand ultimately benign social system. The symbolic interactionistswere off to the side of that issue,
but they too offered no researchprogram,no theoreticalarmamentfor taking stratification
head-on, especially in its materialand coercive aspects. Bendix and Lipset, even more than
Gerth and Mills, were responsible for changing all that. CSP was the perfect shelter for a
new conflict-orientedsociology, because it offered threedimensions, with value-integrated
status groups alongside coercive power and economic class. It was in this reader that
excerpts from The CommunistManifesto and The Eighteenth Brumairebecame standard
parts of the theoreticalcanon; it was here that serious discussion began aroundthe relative
weights that economic property,labor,and mobilizing resourcesplay in the overall scheme
of society. In one of those labels that are a bit loopy but revealing nevertheless, the Berkeley department (even before the student demonstrationsthat set off a national trend in
1964) was sometimes referredto in more conservative departmentsas "those Marxists."
This was quite inaccuratein the case of Bendix and Lipset (although the latterhad been a
Marxist in his student days in New York);what it revealed was the atmospherein which
even referringto Marx without ritual condemnation,treatingMarxianideas seriously and
as continuous with those of Weber,was viewed as a breach of patriotismand intellectual
etiquette.
As the sociological world got to know Bendix better, and as stratificationbecame the
favorite research programfor the discipline, a more complex picture emerged of what he
was about. Max Weber:An Intellectual Portrait was the first majorbook to presentWeber,
not as adjunct to another theoretical program (as Parsons had done with his synthetic
action theory and with functionalism),nor yet as a comparativesociologist of religion, but
above all as a political sociologist on a global scale. Bendix became known as the great
Weber scholar of his generation, not so much as a textual expert-the leadership there
passed to Bendix's former student, GuentherRoth, who finally broughtout the complete
translationof Economy and Society in 1968-but as the sociologist who made Weberian
work an active research tradition concerning the historical transformationof the state.
Weber,as multidimensionaltheorist,could be readwith very differentemphases;and what
might be called a translationwar and contest of interpretationswent on for over forty years
among those who saw religious value systems and otherculturalphenomena(status, legitimacy) as Weber's centralcontribution;those who foundWebera strategicdevice to reintroduce Marxian class conflict or to broaden it into a more elaborate conflict theory; and
those who saw Weber's most useful ideas in the crucial role of the state, with its core of
military coercion, its legitimizing doctrines, its shifts among patrimonialand bureaucratic
organization, and its octopus-like capacity to penetrate, mobilize, and transformevery
other aspect of societies. This last viewpoint-the state-centeredmodel of modernization
and of social change generally-has been the leading idea of the Golden Age of macrohistorical sociology we have been living throughin the last thirty-five years. And thus we

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SOCIOLOGICALTHEORY

could say thatBendix was instrumentalin usheringin a dominanttheme of one majorwing

of contemporaryscholarship.
ReinhardBendix, in this version of his career,was the greatAmericanWeberianbecause
he showed us what could be done with Weber, opening up a whole field of historical
sociology that had scarcely existed before on this continent. Those who knew Reinhard
knew that he was uneasy with the label "Weberian,"that he strived in his own works to
bring about a wider transmission of classic European ideas, a continuation of a way of
doing scholarship that he regarded as crucial to keeping civilized culture alive. It is the
meritof JohnBendix's presentarticle to bringout what this traditionwas. A clue is pointed
out to us as John describes the family lineage: Reinhard's father Ludwig was himself a
distinguished legal scholar (we are treated to the image of the fifteen-year-old Reinhard
being directedby his fatherto read Marx and Mannheim-how many conservative parents
today would try that on their teenagers!). Ludwig was a scholar in the broad German
traditionof Geisteswissenschaft, a term that is difficult to translatebut implies a contrast
with Naturwissenschaft,between the realms of human culture and the generalizing sciences of the nonhumanworld of matter.A vigorous arrayof neo-Kantianphilosophers in
the last third of the nineteenthcentury and the early decades of the twentieth century had
worked on various ways of construingthis divide. It is revealing that Ludwig Bendix (like
Max Weber and Georg Simmel) was a pupil of Wilhelm Dilthey, who worked out some of
the most importantformulationsof this contrastwith all its resonances into differing epistemologies, ontologies of being, and ethical realms. We are more used to hearing how
Weber was influenced by another neo-Kantian, Rickert (who, incidentally, was also the
early teacher of Heidegger), and how Weber's strategy of ideal types was a neo-Kantian
variant of that typical early-twentieth-centuryconcern for bridging and balancing Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft,The point I wish to bring out is that Max Weber
and Reinhard Bendix are not so much master and pupil, influence and transmitter,but
rathernetwork cousins in that closely connected family of the Germanacademic aristocracy. Bendix seems like a Weberianbecause they share a family resemblance. They are
both building upon the heritage of neo-Kantianism, a body of ideas that is one of the
defining sensibilities of the entire twentieth century.
EarlierI suggested that our older image of ReinhardBendix, the greatAmericanWeberian, is that of figurehead for a movement that opened up the sociology of multidimensional conflict, of macrohistoricalresearch,of the state as the leading edge of social change.
John Bendix's essay shows how he can be seen as a leading introducerof historical selfconsciousness about a larger,more subtly pervasive influence: the programof Geisteswissenschaft. We live in an era in which research programsare built aroundthe primacy of
culturalsensibilities and meaning systems; in the Russo-Frenchversion of the tradition,of
symbolic structures and semiotic codes. The postmodernist variant, which relentlessly
historicizes meaning systems, would not have seemed alien to Dilthey and Rickert; it is a
descendent of their own ideas. The rejectionof "positivism,"which has set so many battle
lines in recent decades, is a militant reiterationof the divide between Geisteswissenschaft
and Naturwissenschaft.
What John Bendix reminds us concerning the works of his father is that this neoKantiantraditionhas room in it for more nuanced positions than the polemical extremes.
Reinhard Bendix was working out the same problem in American intellectual life for
which Max Weber had proposed his own solution in the German context of an earlier
generation.We live within a renewedblossoming of the Geisteswissenschaften;theirunderlying commonalities are more alive than ever in the broad movements of literary theory
and social science of cultureat the end of the twentiethcentury;our ideologies are shaped,
to a degree that we scarcely realize, by the appropriationof the Geisteswissenschaftstand-

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INTRODUCTION

301

point by the theorists of militant feminism and ethnic insurgencies.We also live in a time
of militantunifying movements from the other side, the contemporarynaturwissenschaftliche programsof economistic rationalchoice, of evolutionary genetics, and brain physiology. What ReinhardBendix tried to find was a mediatingpathway,a strategythat would
allow both of these grand enterprisesof intellectual life to carry on, in fruitful contention
and even perhaps in occasional mutual illumination. These intellectual battles have been
fought out before, Bendix seeks to remindus. Understandingour own historicallineages is
the most fruitful way to take them creatively into the future.
Randall Collins

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