612.1
The Concept of Nation in Max Weber: Back to Gemeinschaft?
The paper will be centered in Max Weber’s concept of Nation and, more specifically, it will try to focus on it through the categories posed by Tönnies and, in his own way, used by Weber: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. The different uses of these concepts by Weber in both parts of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft have been sufficiently explained, as well as the turn to Gemeinschaft while referring to the relations established in the battlefield, as it is mainly developed in the famous “Zwischenbetrachtung” of his sociology of religion. While in the historical frame of the First World War there are deep coincidences between Weber and Tönnies on the national issues, many differences can be found in the way the latter’s referred to the relation of Nation and modern societies in his most famous work of 1887.
Our aim will be to depart from these differences to develop in which senses Weber’s much more deeper and longstanding commitment to the German Nation –in comparison with Tönnies- can be read in terms of Gemeinschaft (the national Gemeinschaft is one of the examples provided by Weber’s “Soziologische Grundbegriffe”), as well as to put forward a relationship between his emphasis in the Nation and his desperate intention to sustain a communitarian feeling against the historical-universal tendency -in an ideal-typical sense- towards the bureaucratization of societies.
That will lead us to analyse Weber’s use of Tönnies’ categories, in order to be able to tackle from this standpoint his political positions in relation with the Nation, which are boldly stated from his early studies on East-Prussia onwards. The tensions between Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft will be confronted with this author’s prospective on the rationalization process, and his positions on the Nation looked through this prism.