Linguistic and Literary Styles of Social Theory

Marx’s Style

Paco Brito Núñez’s translation of El estilo literario de Marx by the Venezuelan poet and literary theorist Ludovica Silva, over 50 years after its original publication, marks both a return to and revival of interest in these formal, literary, theoretical, and empirical concerns. Alberto Toscano’s helpful introduction to this short volume reminds us that, early on, radical and activist scholars had seized on Karl Marx’s jarring use of similes, analogies, and metaphors, what Aristotle praised as the genius of “recognizing likenesses” (to homoion theorein). Already in the 1920s, Franz Mehring (1927) pointed out that literary figures are never mere ornaments for Marx’s work, but rather integral to its conceptual design and core features of its political ambitions. The Communist Manifesto, Marx’s most popular and influential joint-work with Friedrich Engels (arguably the more rhetorically flamboyant of the two), employs an impressive repertoire of literary tropes precisely with these multiple aims and audiences in mind (Kemple 2000; Martin). The famous crescendo of their encomium to the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie in history, for instance, virtually enacts and echoes the repetitive sounds of the heavy machinery of large-scale industry through its hissing alliteration (the device of sibilance): “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft”—“everything established and stable evaporates.” Or to recall the well-known translation, “all that is solid melts into air” because nearly everything feudal and fixed (Ständische und Stehende) can literally be utilized in an industrial economy running on the power of steam. The Manifesto is thus the great generative site for Marxist poetics as well as politics (Hartley, 3).

Silva emphasizes those works by Marx that were polished and published in his lifetime, often in several versions, on the assumption that literary experiments undertaken at the writing desk are necessarily raised to their highest form in anticipating their reception by a reading public. In the Postface to the second edition of Capital, Marx himself acknowledges the distinction between his mode of research (Forschungsweise), on the one hand, his way of analyzing documents in detail and of criticizing other scholars, and his mode of presentation (Darstellungsweise), on the other, including the division of the work into parts, chapters, and subsections. The second German edition of Capital and the French translation, which he collaborated on, gave him an opportunity to revise and refine this presentation: where the first edition featured six chapters, in the second edition these were further expanded and broken down into 25 chapters organized into 7 parts, while in the French translation the work is divided into 8 parts with 33 chapters distributed into 3 groupings of 11 chapters each (Parts I-III, IV-VI, VII-VIII; the English translations follow the French format; see Kemple 2022, 136–137). In this way, he envisions the book as an aesthetic whole in spite of its “stylistic disharmonies [décordances de style],” as he notes in a Postface to the translation, or rather, as a way of drawing attention to the work’s dissonances and asymmetries. Silva argues that we may treat “the scientific work as a work of art” to the extent that Marx’s “scientific system is supported by an expressive system” (1, 23). Just as Marx makes use of illustrative metaphors that are constitutive of his socio-economic explanations, so too is Silva’s commentary on the “architectonic structure and appearance” of Marx’s expressive-scientific system itself highly stylized. He remarks on “the moulding of its expressions, the beadwork of its phrasing, the firm curves of its verbal vaults in its metaphorical bas-relief, its conceptual pilasters and, in the end, its foundation in erudition” (25). For both author and critic, rhetorical figures and poetic flourishes are not merely decoration, ornamentation, wordplay, or illustration, but integral features of the intellectual, textual, and political work of theoretical communication and collective mobilization.

The contrast between modes of research and presentation is especially evident when we compare Marx’s rough notes of 1857–1858, the so-called Grundrisse, to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy published in 1859. In the influential Preface to the latter work, Marx arrives at “an appropriate metaphor or a fitting analogy” in the famous image that describes capitalist society in terms of an Überbau—superstructure, but also façade or scaffolding (and even édifice in the French translation)—resting on top of, over, in front of, or fixed upon a structure, foundation, or base (2–3, 46–53). Silva locates this figure within the broader web of tensions that make up the linguistic economy of this text, repeatedly reminding us that metaphorical expression is not theoretical explanation. He also places this image among a series of other analogies—the fetish, the camera obscura, the hidden god, and so on—which he calls “matrix-metaphors that encompass all of [Marx’s] other literary figures and that serve as their totality” (43). Silva’s argument thus does not only take the form of textual criticism but also serves as ideology-critique, with “ideology” understood as a form of surplus-value (what he elsewhere calls la plusvalía ideológica). Ideological surplus value is the expression (Ausdruck) of material conditions and of “reflexes,” “echoes,” “sublimates,” and “nebulous pictures [Nebelbildungen]” that justify, affirm, distort, deny and exploit such conditions (53–55).

This last set of figures, taken from the so-called The German Ideology which Marx drafted with Engels but left unpublished (and untitled) in their lifetime, suggests how Marx was constantly crafting his metaphors at each stage of literary production. To demonstrate this point, Silva takes us step-by-step through Marx’s use of the surprising oppositions, inversions, and catachreses built into a single passage of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (35–39). Answering the question “What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour [Worin besteht nun die Entäusserung der Arbeit?],” Marx personalizes the impersonal character of capitalist production insofar as it is a product which is “external [äusserlich]” to rather than part of the worker; an activity through which the worker denies rather than affirms him- or herself; and a process that leaves workers miserable rather than satisfied. If dialectic is the logic of his thought, then “Marx’s language is the theatre of his dialectic,” just as his politics takes on a theatrical character (42). Alienation is the capitalist metaphor par excellence insofar as it articulates the transference of meanings into spectral images and monstrous figures of dehumanization, where the animal becomes human and the human becomes animal (39; see also Neocleous, 684).

If Marx’s metaphors have their own internal “economy,” they also constitute the larger narrative structure of his work in how they relate to other rhetorical figures. In a study that first appeared around the time of Silva’s, Hayden White highlights what he calls Marx’s “metonymical mode” of stringing together contiguous series of apparently unconnected events, objects, and ideas before ordering them within a larger system. In the opening chapters of Capital, for example, Marx presents the commodity as undergoing a metamorphosis (Verwandlung) from liquid to gelatinous (Gallertin) states, and from larval through fully developed organic phases (metaphor), in the course of analyzing a series of discrete exchanges of supposedly miscellaneous objects (metonymy), such as coats and linen for bibles and brandy (see also Stallybrass). White examines how these and other master tropes inform the whole of Marx’s oeuvre while also projecting a philosophy of history: “from Metaphorical, to Metonymical, to Synechdochic consciousness—these are the phases through which humanity passes by dialectical transformation of the ways it relates itself to its contexts (natural and social) in its passage from savage to advanced civilized consciousness” (White, 129). A certain tragic irony characterizes the unforeseen changeover in the leading roles of history from the bourgeoise to the proletariat under conditions of scarcity combined with affluence and of poverty in the midst of plenty; and yet a comic resolution of these paradoxes is prefigured in the reversal of these oppositions and their eventual synthesis within a larger whole (see also Wolff).

Marx’s mature style may be traced to the early failed poetical experiments and playful philosophical musings that drove his youthful literary ambitions. Among them, the 1837 poem “On Hegel” features aphoristic couplets like this: “The poet perceives what he thinks, and thinks what he feels [Und was er sinnet, erkennt, und was er fühlet, ersinnt]” (19). The distinctive style Marx began cultivating in these early writings were then rehearsed in “the long career of his incomplete works” with their characteristic opacity and imprecision, and later refined and performed in his journalistic writings, such as The Class Struggles in France (1850) which includes this pithy sentence: ‘The mortgage the peasant has on heavenly possessions guarantees the mortgage the bourgeois has on peasant possessions’ (93). As the melodrama of class struggle in the early writings eventually gave way to the epic drama of systemic antagonisms in Capital, Marx increasingly turned to his favourite models of stylistic virtuosity in the writings Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Balzac, and Goethe (Hyman 146; Kemple 2023, 140–141; Prawer; Roberts). An enthusiast of “world literature” with decidedly elevated ambitions and classical aesthetic tastes, Marx hoped that his own critical, analytical, and empirical masterpiece would be placed alongside other great artworks. Fighting his fellow philosophers and political economists while appropriating their own rhetorical weapons and inventing a few tricks of his own, Marx struggles to keep language under control even as his own language ultimately exceeds itself (84).

Weber’s Language

No other writer in the classical sociological canon can compare with the breadth of Marx’s rhetorical repertoire or the acumen of his stylistic brilliance. The lyrical strains of W. E. B. Du Bois or the caustic wit of Thorstein Veblen might be considered contenders, but the dry abstractions of Max Weber’s scholarly prose are typically assumed to be devoid of rhetorical appeal. And yet to write off Weber as dull and dreary would mean ignoring the shattering passages he wrote in “Politics as a Vocation” on the future of Europe after the first World War as “a polar night of icy darkness and hardness,” or skimming over his heroic-tragic depiction of “the disenchantment of the world” in “Science as a Vocation” (Hübinger, 83). And no reader can forget the terrifying image in the closing pages of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism where Weber describes how fate has allowed “the lightweight coat” of the Puritan saints to become “a steel-hard casting [ein stahlhartes Gehäuse]” forged by capitalist industry (perhaps drawing from Marx’s dramatic descriptions of heavy machinery in Capital; see Baehr; Kemple 2023, 61–63). Whatever his popularity among contemporaries or posthumous reputation, Weber devoted his academic career to crafting a compelling history of modernity and a convincing account of the present through the use of both well-defined concepts and striking metaphorical images.

As editor of and collaborator on the collected works of Max Weber, Edith Hanke is well situated to provide both a comprehensive portrait and valuable new insights (neue Einblicke) into his sometimes peculiar and often eclectic way with language. The examples just highlighted demonstrate how dramatic figures depicting the tumultuous and conflictual character of the modern world can unexpectedly burst forth from his somber scholarly prose. To be sure, Weber’s primary intellectual aim was to develop clearly differentiated categorical formulations, living as he did in “the age of well-organized handbook knowledge” (in the words of Gundolf Hübinger, 6, a fellow editor of the collected works whom Hanke acknowledges as inspiration for her study). Nowhere is this ambition more graphically displayed than in the 17 numbered paragraphs that make up the “Basic Sociological Concepts,” the first chapter of the revised version of Economy and Society that Weber was still working on when he died. Informed by years of legal training, Weber’s aim to transform the language of life, common sense, and social thought into a science of reality (Wirklichkeitswissenschaft) here finds pedantic expression in the abstract casuistry of discretely ordered “ideal types” (Green, 236–246). These heuristic devices are crafted for the interpretive and explanatory use of social researchers in the form of terse definitions of everyday terms such as “social relationship,” “custom,” “association,” and “institution.” In redrawing the boundaries between ordinary speech and scholarly terminology, Weber treats language less as means of emotional expression or political persuasion than as a rational tool and conceptual instrument for refining scientific thought.

Loosely following the three-part division of the Max-Weber Gesamtausgabe, Hanke’s study offers a kind of guide to Weber’s published writings and speeches (chapters 1–4), letters (chapter 5), and university lectures, as documented in his own handwritten outlines and student course-notes (chapter 6). In his published writing, Weber’s idiosyncratic use of dashes, exclamation points, quotation marks, and spacing or italics function as devices for emphasizing phrases or distancing words from their ordinary meanings, such as his ironic references to “democracy” or damning remarks on the “literati.” Politically inflected or polemically charged words from public discourse are often translated into awkward if conceptually tight phrases, such as his definition of “capitalism” as “a modern commercial and money economy for the satisfaction of needs” (2). In methodological, historical, sociological, and cultural treatises, as well as in newspaper editorials, popular articles, and political writings, Weber’s erudition, interdisciplinary education, and multilingual competence are constantly on display. By contrast, in his more argumentative and polemical pieces, he tends to employ the less indirect and more “manly” vocabulary of war, duelling, sports, and club culture, often with brutal, bitter, mocking, or insulting effects, as in the notorious “Freiburg Inaugural Address” (1895) and his shocking remarks on “The Arco-Affair” (1919) (43–57). On these and other occasions, Weber’s discourse is less restrained and his rhetoric more outwardly aggressive, such as when he calls government officials “a band of thieves,” “barbarians,” “scoundrels,” and “crazies,” or when he maligns intellectuals as “illiterates,” “heathens,” “phrasemongers,” and “timewasters” (Bruhns, 172–175). Hanke’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Weberian corpus yields many surprising discoveries, especially regarding his artful use of subtle wit, self-irony, wordplay, and biting humour in his attempts to address multiple audiences for various purposes and in different contexts.

With no surviving audio or video recordings of Weber, and only a few photographs and first-hand reports by others (especially his wife’s monumental biography), his written words are the best available resource we have of getting closer to the person and his world. Hanke characterizes his extensive private and professional correspondence as expressing a kind of “metaphorics of feeling,” using language in ways that otherwise eluded his factual scholarly prose. In vibrant letters to friends and relatives from abroad, for example, he demonstrates considerable skill as a travel-writer and ethnographer, while the letters he struggled to write during his psycho-somatic illness document his excruciating efforts to “express the inexpressible” (118–127). In contrast to the almost inexhaustible work ethic that drove Weber constantly to write countless letters to colleagues, publishers, and political officials, his occasional love letters to his wife and mistresses showcase a more intimate side of his vulnerable personality and volatile sense of humour (127–141). Here too he draws on a massive repertoire of images and an impressive stock of literary references taken from fiction, drama, and opera, at times projecting “a fireworks display of pictures, musical citations, and metaphors” taken from Dante, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Goethe, Wagner, and others (135). As astonishing as these relatively unknown or unnoticed dimensions of Weber’s writing are, so too is Hanke’s account of the range of writing materials he used—postcards, telegrams, and stationary used many times over—equally fascinating. Together these features of the archive she draws from measure the distance between the transmission of ideas and emotions between his time and ours.

A vivid portrait of Weber as a public figure emerges above all from his spoken utterances, especially as they are inscribed in political speeches reported by the press, written up and published as essays, or preserved in transcriptions of improvised interventions in scholarly forums, where he often expressed himself forcefully and without inhibition or fear. By all accounts, Weber was a charismatic performer on the podium and an enchanting speaker in the lecture hall whose words could often be “triggering, moving, polarizing” (79; Kalinowski, 241–268). Without abandoning his scholarly persona or intellectual standpoint, he could adapt the rhetorical techniques of the courtroom, parliament, or political debate for his own purposes on occasions with as many as 550 people in attendance (Palonen 2004; 2010). Hanke examines the famous public lectures, “Science as a Vocation” and “Politics as a Vocation,” published as essays in 1919, as “rhetorical masterpieces” animated by the techniques of direct address, punctuated with topical and temporal references, and enlivened by fictional dialogues, popular aphorisms, colloquialisms, foreign expressions, and other oratorial flourishes (94–105; Kemple 2014). Especially challenging for editors and scholars of Weber’s collected works are the keyword-manuscripts of his courses in Berlin and Freiberg (1894–1899) and the notes taken by students from his lectures in Munich (1919–1920). Making sense of these traces of his teaching is like listening to half of a conversation or deciphering hieroglyphs, but their value lies in tracking his thought process and providing us with a “treasure trove for the archaeology of the work” (166).

In contrast to Silva’s efforts to discern the overall style of Marx’s oeuvre through his use of metaphors and other literary devices, Hanke is more concerned with classifying and cataloguing the variety of words, phrases, references, and genres that Weber employs in his determination to reach his readers and listeners. Each tends to reduce “literature” and “style” to figurative language—such as tropes, narrative, and plot—without much consideration of focalization, voice, and tense, or of tone, mood, and pacing. Where Silva mostly leaves aside a consideration of Marx’s obsession with literary giants like Goethe, for example, Hanke pays relatively little attention to writers who served as models for Weber and his contemporaries, such as the moral and fictional works of Tolstoy, as she does elsewhere (Hanke 1991). Still, she points out that his early course lectures in particular outline a historical “narrative” of modern economic development as a history of liberal freedoms (160). They therefore lay the foundation for The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which establishes the story-arc of Weber’s larger project on the economic ethics of the world religions. As the philosopher and literary critic Fredric Jameson points out in an early article largely ignored by most commentators, Weber cultivated a tragic mode of historiographical writing and an ironic style of sociological storytelling: “The sociological treatises of Max Weber form a corpus of narratives peculiarly suited to analytical techniques developed in the study of myths and other types of imaginative literature” (Jameson, 3; Kemple 2014, 93–98). Jameson’s focus is on how certain “vanishing mediators”—what Weber calls “historical individuals,” “social types,” and “culture-carriers”—establish the plot-line of Weber’s comparative and historical studies. The “other-worldly ascetic ethic” of the medieval monk, for example, is generalized through the “this-worldly asceticism” of the Protestant penitent, which in turn is replaced by the compulsory work ethic of the modern entrepreneur, if not by the leisure aesthetic of the modern consumer in later periods. Thus, the broad themes of “rationalization and disenchantment” are not simply glosses on large-scale transformations insofar as they form the general discursive framework Weber uses for tracing in detail the appearance and disappearance of pivotal figures in the narrative of world history.

The Rhetoric of Classical Social Theory and Its Futures

Hanke’s careful philological examination of Weber’s speeches, writings, letters, and lecture notes would have been impossible without 47-volume Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (MWG) completed under her direction in 2020, a century after his death. Considered in this light, Silva’s neglected essay is all the more remarkable for having appeared before the renewed efforts in the late 1960s to publish the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) in over one hundred volumes. Just over half these have appeared to date, including published writings, articles, unpublished drafts, correspondence, excerpts, notes, and marginalia. Just as The Protestant Ethic in its various iterations provides the centrepiece of the MWG, so do the drafts and editions of Capital, including English and French editions published in Marx’s or Engels’ lifetime, serve as the foundation of MEGA. In part, the time-lag between these two colossal editing projects can be attributed to the generational gap between these thinkers, with Weber often read as an extension of and corrective to “Marxism,” “socialism,” and “historical materialism.” In part, the disconnect is also due to political forces and historical contingencies, since many of the key manuscripts by all three writers were stored for decades in largely inaccessible archives located in the German Democratic Republic. As Hanke notes in her final chapter on the linguistic and cultural transfer of Weber’s works over the past century, “the Marx-Weber controversy figures as a kind of ideologically laden background music of the Cold War, at times played softly and at times loudly” (181). Today such debates tend to turn as much on the political or theoretical content of the works of these writers as on the medium through which their ideas are transmitted—digital or print?, platform or paper?—and often these transpositions cross borders between worldviews and ideological camps. For example, since electronic texts typically travel more easily and speedily than books, they tend to circulate over national jurisdictions, beyond university campuses, and beneath library privileges. In any case, these twin Gesamtausgaben can be viewed not just as symptoms of a bygone pathological pedantry but as ruined monuments that mark both continuity with the past and distance from present ways of thinking, reading, and writing. Accessing these works through the new media should remind us that the written word may be transformed but is never fully erased without a trace in its path from the printing press to the digital platform.

The reception of the ideas of Marx and Weber often tends to play out like a game of telephone tag, what the Germans call “Stille-Post-Spiel,” where what one person says or reads is in subtle or dramatic ways altered over the course of being heard or repeated. Lack of proficiency among scholars in “the language of Goethe” or who work in monolingual academic contexts dominated by English is partly to blame, but so too is the prevalence of translations and translations-of-translations, where excerpts often appear without references or stripped of their original context. Hanke’s illuminating discussion of the global spread of translations of Weber’s Protestant Ethic over the past hundred years—from Hungarian, Russian, and English to Vietnamese, Azerbaijani, and Thai (174–180)—will soon find its complement in a forthcoming volume on the translation, dissemination, and reception of Capital (Musto and Amini). We can also expect that an English translation of The Protestant Ethic showing the many subtle changes Weber made to the 1904–1905 edition in 1920 may be imminent (186). Likewise, there has been some talk lately that a definitive edition of Capital, Volume I in English will appear in the near future, based on the second German edition and perhaps noting Marx’s revisions in French as well as the changes he communicated for future editions.

What is certain is that sooner or later all these works will eventually be made available online, travelling across national borders and circulating over academic firewalls. Section IV of MEGA (marginalia and books owned by Marx and Engels), and division III of the MWG (lecture notes), along with electronic versions of Weber’s private library, will be more useable when accessed through keyword searches of CD-Roms, USBs, and online digital texts, undoubtedly yielding new surprises and expanding traditional horizons of thought in unexpected ways. Hanke’s observation about the editorial and publishing decisions that shaped the MWG in the 1980s can be applied to those that guided MEGA in the 1960s: “What was important in 1984 [for Weber, or in 1972 for Marx] is no longer so in 2020 [or 2024]. What we would like to know about Weber [and Marx] and what questions we bring to their work are subject to change” (171). When the “light of the great cultural problems moves on,” as Weber once remarked borrowing a phrase from Goethe’s Faust, readers and writers must not only change their standpoint and conceptual apparatus; they must also alter their message and medium of communication.

Thomas Kemple is Professor of Classical Social Science and European Sociology in the department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia. His recent books include Simmel (Polity, 2018), Writing the Body Politic: A John O’Neill Reader (co-edited with Mark Featherstone, Routledge, 2020), and Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

Works Cited

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