Hermeneutics of the State

Abstract

If Max Weber defines Sociology as a science “that seeks interpretative understanding of social action, and hence causal explanation of the course and effects of such action”,² it has to be asked whether the state can be described in terms of the action-oriented perspective of a hermeneutic sociology of Verstehen; and if so, what might such a description look like? The category of action that is elaborated with such virtuosity in the chapter on “Basic Sociological Concepts” is central to the registration, definition and explanation of sociological phenomena. That is also true for the phenomena of power and rulership, state and politics: here for Weber everything can be reduced to “action.” When formulating programmatically his conception of action, he puts forward the decisive premise that “Action, in the sense of meaningfully understandable orientation of one’s own behaviour, is for us always understood as the behaviour of one or more individual persons,” since for the interpretative understanding of action by means of sociology individual persons are the sole understandable agents “of meaning-related behaviour”.³

German thinkers have credulously deepened the ideology of the state, driving it to the point of idolatry and seeing in it both an institution for the perfection of human nature and a kind of spiritual superperson. One must, therefore, point out very forcefully that this is false.

(Robert Musil, “Anschluss with Germany”)¹