Intercultural Understanding: Max Weber and Leo Strauss

Author(s): Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri

Source: International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society , Spring, 1988, Vol. 1, No.
3 (Spring, 1988), pp. 392-411
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20006861

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 Intercultural Understanding:
Max Weber and Leo Strauss

Ahmad Sadri, Mahmoud Sadri

Introduction

For much of human history intercultural understanding has been

precluded by fantastic folkloric and mythological conceptions
about inhabitants of exotic lands. What the contemporary academic
lexicon defines as xenophobia, ethnocentrism and prejudice have
often been the very basis of judgments about the ways of life and
belief in other societies. The western social sciences evolved in part
by serving or rebelling against such judgments in the course of
the last three centuries.1 They have sometimes fallen prey to pitfalls
of both extremes. But vacillating between these extremes, we
contend, has gradually enabled the social sciences to identify and
articulate the central problems involved in acquiring valid
knowledge of other societies.2 Thus, to ignore all the social sciences'
substantive, methodological and critical achievements3 concerning
the intricacies of intercultural understanding and research may
represent an unglamorous naivete in which problems and solutions
seem deceptively facile and final. Still, Leo Strauss' unhesitant
denunciation of the social scientific approach toward intercultural
understanding calls for a review of his intriguing invitation to
an alternative method of understanding other cultures and
societies. It also requires a reappraisal of the accomplishments
of the social sciences in this respect. The focus of the present
evaluation, therefore, is Strauss' criticism of social science in
general and his critique of Max Weber's methodology and sociology
in particular. An exegesis of the anthropological and sociological
implications of a Weberian theory of intercultural understanding
will conclude this essay.

1. Of Strauss

Leo Strauss considered modernity as narrowing, rather than as

an "enlargement of the horizon" of classical thought,4 and thus
Politics, Culture, and Society 392 ? 1988 Human Sciences Press
Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1988

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 393

regarded "enlightenment" as "obfuscation."5 Still, some Strauss

eans have insisted that the study of the modern social sciences,
an obvious progeny of the above currents, "constitutes an excellent
example of the cast of his mind and the way in which he
proceeded."6 They further assert that Strauss, despite his lack of
interest in the new social sciences as an important intellectual
movement, felt a "severe moral responsibility"* to study "almost
all of the literature"7 which they produced.
Judging from Strauss' works, however, one can not conclude that
he studied such disciplines as anthropology and the philosophy
of social science with any seriousness, or that he solved,
transcended, or successfully sidestepped issues raised and
discussed by the modern social sciences regarding intercultural
understanding and evaluation. An understanding of Strauss'
political philosophical orientation requires an appreciation of his
early intellectual interests and gravitations.
Without disregarding the Straussean dictum that we must
understand a writer "as he understood himself or desired to be
understood," we can establish that Strauss' project was motivated
by subtle paradoxical sensitivities sharpened by ethnic and historic
frictions and taxed by the catastrophic emergence of Fascism which
brought unprecedented enmity and violence to his refined native
culture. The existing consensus about the effects of Strauss'
background on his intellectual interests is authenticated by his
own recollections of himself as "a young Jew born and raised in
Germany who found himself in the grip of the theological-political
predicament."10 A sympathetic commentator underscores Strauss'
own assessment: "He was born a Jew in a country where Jews
cherished the greatest secular hopes and suffered the worst terrible
persecutions."11 Similarly, a critic maintains that "as a Jewish
thinker he experienced the conflict (between reason and religion)
within himself."12 Far from relativising the content of Strauss'

* One should bear in mind, however, that the morally outraged Strauss was neither
the first nor the only scholar to suspect the intent and the validity of social sciences
or to warn against dangers of their practice.8 However revolutionary Strauss'
teachings might have sounded to his American students who admittedly had until
then been exposed to nothing but liberal, modernist and abundantly tolerant
academic environments,9 his rhetoric strikes familiar chords for those who study
defensive postures of the intellectual elite of civilizations in crisis. In one such
instance with which the authors of this paper are intimately familiar (Iran of 1950's
to 1970's), a rising generation of scholars criticized the demoralizing effects of
skepticism, universalism, and the pure tolerance advocated by the western social
sciences. The rhetoric of these theologians, literary scholars and social philosophers
against relativism and historicism, and their belief in the knowability of absolute
truths, universal criteria of justice, and the validity of traditional and religious
heritage closely parallel the Straussean arguments.

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 394 Politics, Culture, and Society

ideas, these observations are meant to complement our compre?

hension of Strauss' thought in relation to a specific intellectual
and historical context.*13
Strauss' project of recovering the pristine principles of "reason
and faith," or of Greek "right thinking" and "Jewish right acting"
from dual fountainheads of intellect and morality located in Athens
and Jerusalem,14 represents an obviously simplified intellectual
geography.**15 The hypothetical assumption that such a bi-focal
tunnel vision may be the result of Strauss' belief in the existence
of "separate and discrete cultures" with "no actual relations with
one other," and that he, therefore, simply wished to "enter upon
possession of his own inheritance by reenacting the genesis of his
own civilization ... as a western man . . . minding his own
business"16 is plausible only if we ignore Strauss' conviction that
the Judeo-Greek heritage constitutes the sole repository of eternal
and universal notions of truth and justice. Indeed, it was on this
basis that he criticized the modern social sciences for their
"recognition of all civilizations as equally respectable," and for
their acceptance "as morality, religion, art, knowledge, state, etc.,
whatever claimed to be morality, religion, art, etc."17
Strauss' swift and sweeping judgments, which dismiss or doom
to inferiority (and worse) all that does not belong to or vacillate
between Athens and Jerusalem, must be understood as a
contribution to the polemarchian and ultimately Xenophonean
notion of justice: "justice does not consist in helping eve?
ryone . . . not even in . . . helping all good men" but only "in
helping one's friends, i.e., one's fellow citizens, and in hating [which
does not exclude "hurting"] one's enemies."18 Strauss seems to have
advanced this imperative beyond the sphere of international
politics to the world of intercultural and intercivilizational
understanding. "Transcending city," argued Strauss, "means
transcending justice."19 It is strange that Strauss would advocate
intercultural value judgments without recourse to a broader notion
of justice and without detailed and close knowledge of non-western
cultures. His understanding of the world outside the Occident

* The distinction between relationism and relativism first introduced by

Mannheim?and inspired by Scheler?may inform a nonreductionist sociology of
knowledge. Strauss himself engaged in this type of analysis when he described
the socio-psychological background of Max Weber's thought.

** Even within the confines of such projects the Straussean dualism is not the
only conceivable formula. Nikos Kazantzakis, the Bergsonian philosopher-poet, for
example, has introduced a "Cretan glance" overlooking the fateful convergence
of the Greek and the Indian worlds.

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 395

hardly exceeded Edmond Burke's pictograph of "the great map

of mankind" or Gibbon's image of a "world of barbarism and
savagery." In this respect Strauss was merely a consumer of what
Edward Said calls the "orientalist vision:" "A vision by no means
confined to the professional scholar, but rather the common
possession of all who have thought about orient in the west."20
It is not surprising, therefore, that Strauss' grasp of such
contemporary issues as "underdevelopment" hardly exceeds that
of a layman.21
As an alternative to the social scientific approach Strauss argued
for the logical possibility and utility of the knowledge of ultimate
truths concerning social and cultural phenomena. His noble
propositions, however, usually remain hypothetical. For example
Strauss bids at one point:

Let us assume that we had genuine knowledge of right and wrong,

or of the Ought, or of the true value system. That knowledge, while
not derived from empirical science, would legitimately direct all
empirical social science; it would be the foundation of all empirical
social science ... If there were genuine knowledge of the ends, that
knowledge would naturally guide all search for means. There would
be no reasons to delegate knowledge of the ends to social philosophy
and the search for the means to an independent social science. Based
on genuine knowledge of the true ends, social science would search
for the proper means to those ends; it would lead up to objective
and specific value judgments regarding policies. Social science would
be a truly policymaking, not to say architectonic, science rather than
a mere supplier of data for the real policymakers.22

While the knowledge of the "true value system" may not be

logically impossible to acquire, nowhere does Strauss provide an
explanation as to how it could actually be reached. The sequence
of "would be's" and "ifs" in Strauss' Athenina project, may well
deserve a Laconic retort: If!* Strauss does not always stop at the
consideration of a possibility. He would also argue for the
undemonstrability of an impossibility. Notice, for example, his
objection to Max Weber, whom he had dubbed "the greatest social
scientist of our century:"23 "He never proved that unassisted human
mind is incapable of arriving at objective norms or that the conflict

* The Laconians, also known as Spartans, had a flare for brevity of speech.
The proverbial Laconism of Spartans is exemplified in their one word reply to
their hostile neighbors. Locked in an inconclusive siege, the commander of the
Athenian army wrote a wastefully long letter, elaborating on the horrors that
awaited the Spartans if their city were captured. The Spartan response was truely
laconic: "If."

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396 Politics, Culture, and Society

between different this-worldly ethical doctrines is insoluble by

human reason."24
Strauss attempts to refute an assortment of (conveniently
summarized) "historieist" and "relativist" claims in a manner
consistent with the above strategies. He maintains, for example,
that the variety of notions of right does not prove the "nonexistence
of natural right or the conventional character of all right."25 The
history of ideas, he observes, simply demonstrates the succession
of ideas. "It does not teach us whether the change was sound or
whether the rejected view deserved to be rejected."26 Even Strauss'
more substantive arguments on the possibility, utility, and indeed,
necessity of arriving at universal and knowable criteria of truth,
justice and cultural excellence are wanting in substance: "All
human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned
with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental
problems, and therefore there exists an unchanging framework
which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts
and principles."27
Strauss' exegeses of political philosophy and modern social
science hark back to the Socratic question of "how man ought
to live," a question which in Strauss' view is "susceptible to a
final solution."28 Hence his critique of modernism, enlightenment,
the social sciences, conventionalism, relativism, historicism and
positivism. Strauss apparently thought his project for recovering
the absolute and unchangeable "principles of right of goodness"
could be achieved without venturing beyond the pale of Occidental
civilization. Yet he seemed to enjoy taking rhetorical shots at
whatever lay beyond. Strauss' intercultural frameworks consist of
such incriminating dichotomies as "superior and inferior,"
"genuine and spurious," "true and false," "just and unjust."
Understandably he keeps his distance from details that would blur
the starkness of his contrasts; nevertheless he makes his views
sufficiently clear by deploring the very practice of comparing "our
standards with theirs," and by conveniently identifying "ours"
as "civilized" and "theirs" as "cannibal" societies.29 The closer
Strauss comes to a concrete comparison of actually existing
instances, the easier it becomes to assess the empirical worth of
his arguments.
Despite his vituperatives against the social sciences' lax and
lazy relativistic attitude in intercultural studies, Strauss' advocacy
of the self-evidence of the superiority of western standards fails
to provide a viable and vigorous alternative. For self-righteous
claims to superiority of exponents of various cultures especially
when they are made at the expense of intellectual fairness, or when
they are informed by mere opinions and myths about other cultures,

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 397

constitute the very problem of intercultural understanding and not

its solution. The appeal of Strauss' naive relegation of non
Occidental cultures and civilizations, lies in its nostalgic
ethnocentrism which offers soothing comfort and self-confirmation
to those who are weary of encountering the vortex of intercultural
understanding. By rejecting the Kantian separation of facts and
values, of scientific investigation and judgmental evaluations
Strauss collapses the Weberian distinction between the empirical
sciences of action, such as sociology, anthropology and history,
and the dogmatic disciplines such as jurisprudence, ethics and
aesthetics.30
Thus, the attitude of Straussean anthropologist is that of a judge
in a "Tribunal"?an allegory of which Strauss is extremely fond.
Possible uneasiness about this dubious promotion, however, is
dissipated as the Straussean judge finds out that he will preside
over imaginary cases which are already trimmed of all of their
complexities and reduced to a series of dichotomous antinomies.
Perfect mythological symmetries reduce the dimensions of the
cultural world to a dualistic projection. Surely, "humanity and
barbarism," "knowledge and notorious nonsense," "civilization
and cannibalism" cannot be equated.*31 Given the nature of these
cases, the task of the anthropologist/judge could not be a difficult
one, unless, of course, the judge happens to be a "generous liberal"
who thinks good is equivalent to evil. For those who fail to see
the differences in such black and white terms, Strauss points out
where to look for the crucial differences:

The sociologist of religion cannot help noting the difference between

those who try to gain the favor of their gods by flattering and bribing
them and those who try to gain it by a change of heart. Can he
see this difference without seeing at the same time the difference
of rank which it implies, the difference between a mercenary and
a nonmercenary attitude? Is he not forced to realize that to attempt
to bribe the gods is tantamount to trying to be the lord or employer
of the gods and that there is a fundamental incongruity between
such attempts and what men divine when speaking of such gods?"**32

* The common mythologically imbued and ideologically charged lexicon of

Western man is constitutive of Strauss' world view, with respect to the charge
of Barbarism we shall not belabor the obvious. Cannibalism, as W. Arens has
demonstrated in his ground-breaking work "The Man-Eating Myth," is a persistent
and rarely challenged racial slur that is invented and used in the frontiers of many
cultures and civilizations.

** The intrinsic religious value of a "devotional offering,, unless it is

unceremoniously characterized as "bribing the gods," cannot be judged to be inferior
to a dispassionate Deist "religion of reason" which is espoused by Strauss' revered
master Herman Cohen and his disciples.

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 398 Politics, Culture, and Society

The Straussean judge thus reserves for himself the privilege of

deciding in what respect the contending cultures must be
compared.* Besides, by mislabelling devotional offerings as
"bribing," Strauss denies the native the chance to be understood
as he understands himself or wishes to be understood.33 This, as
we have seen, is a courtesy that Strauss readily extends to the
sages of his own culture. To relate Xenephone's thought to its
"historical situation," Strauss maintained, "is not the natural way
of reading the work of a wise man." This use of a double standard
in the service of ethnocentrism comes so naturally to Strauss that
he assumes its self-evidence.34 He thus explains the reluctance of
the Occidental social sciences to declare the superiority of the West
as a childish game in which the participants refrain from saying
a certain word despite their inner certainty and urge to appro?
priately do so.35 This is the Straussean "spade." He assumes that
everyone sees it as clearly as he does but only a few have the
courage to jettison the conventional niceties of the liberal social
sciences and call it by its proper name.
Yet, Strauss' rejection of the social sciences is not categorical.
The historicizing, relativizing and reductionist effects of certain
social scientific methods and theories seem to annoy Strauss only
when they are applied to the Occidental intellectual legacy. When
talking about Hinduism, for example, he apparently has no
compunctions about espousing the most overt type of functionalist
reductionism: "Why do Hindus believe in their karma doctrine if
not because they know that otherwise their caste system would
be indefensible?"36
In this case, Strauss must not have cared, for he must have known
that this sort of approach has been used by the vulgarizers of a
school of thought that even in its original form aroused his indigent
rejection, namely Marxism. The obvious implication of Strauss'
interpretation of karma doctrine is that he understands the
classical Indian thinkers better than they understood themselves.
Had these classical thinkers been Greek, however, Strauss would
emphatically dismiss such an interpretation. In fact he did
explicitly reject the implication that we are better judges of the
situation in which a given Greek classical thinker thought:

* In the contentious sphere of religious disagreements this is a tremendous

advantage to grant oneself indeed. If one were to grant the same advantage to
a Moslem scholar dedicated to the cause of absolute monotheism we would find
both Judaism and Christianity (not to mention Hinduism) relegated to various
levels of inferiority because of their common theological weakness: belief in
anthropomorphic Gods.

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 399

We cannot be better judges of that situation if we do not have a

clearer grasp than he had of the principles in whose light historical
situations reveal their meaning.37

Strauss disputes the validity of the historicists' claim to a better

overview all the more decisively when such claims are based on
perfunctory treatment of these classical texts.

And even if it were true that we could understand the classics better
than they understood themselves, we could become certain of our
superiority only after understanding them exactly as they understood
themselves. Otherwise we might mistake our superiority to our notion
of the classics for superiority to the classics.38

In the hasty judgment he passes against the karma doctrine,

Strauss seems to have fallen victim to the naivete he so eloquently
deplores here.*
That the karma doctrine preceded the caste system and is believed
in by non-Hindus who disdain the caste system does not enter
Strauss' exposition. He does not even entertain the possibility that
karma doctrine was linked to an oppressive social order by a
reinterpretation of its original meaning and that the two may be
conceived of as separate entities, as ideas and ideologies.
Strauss refuses to treat the doctrines that occur within his range
of thought, between Amos and Socrates, with the same unforgiving
harshness.39 In these cases he fails to warn against the possibility
of individual or group self-deceptions. Rather, one must understand
the masters as they understood themselves and practice exactly
what Strauss berates the social science for: "bow without a murmur
to their self interpretation."40
At this point the picture of the presiding judge in the tribunal
set up to examine the values and standards of other cultures fades
into that of a cringing student seeking an audience with the
masters. "Judging" is thus postponed indefinitely, because of the
graveness of the task of understanding. Also, the social implica?
tions and unintended consequences of an idea are sharply separated
from the idea itself. But Strauss' Xenophonean interpretation takes
him further. The analytical separation of the ideas from their social
functions, which he parsimoniously withheld from the aliens for

* Can we not dismiss this as an oversight of an accomplished classicist who

was not after all known for his mastery of the Indian civilization? No, because
Strauss himself makes swift intercultural judgments pivotal to his thought by
criticizing the circumlocutions and noncommittal language the social sciences use
in intercultural studies.

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400 Politics, Culture, and Society

fear of evincing excessive generosity is not even worthy of his

friends. What was too good for the goose turns out to be not good
enough for the gander. Let us illustrate by comparing the
aforementioned treatment of the idea of karma to Strauss' critique
of Weber's theory of Calvinism.
Strauss perceived an implied accusation (one which is not likely
to have been intended) in Max Weber's linking of the Protestant
ethic to the advent of capitalism. Of course, unlike Strauss, Weber
did not ask the rhetorical question: "Why do Calvinists believe
in 'predestination' if not because they know that otherwise their
capitalist system would be indefensible?" Rather Weber maintained
that it was a reinterpretation of Calvin's ideas which dovetailed
with the development of capitalism. But even this leaves something
to be desired from Strauss' point of view; Weber should have
explicitly condemned Calvinism by calling it a corruption of
Calvin's ideas. The Straussean observer ought to take sides. This
means that on the one hand he is expected to announce, with what
amounts to Feuerbachean determination, that the karma doctrine
is nothing but an ideological facade for the caste system. On the
other, he is expected not only to dissociate Calvin's ideas from
later Calvinism but also to go the extra mile and condemn
Calvinism as a regrettable degeneration of Calvin's intentions.41
In the Straussean view social sciences that do not partake in
this mode of partisan social philosophy stand accused of rudderless
relativism if not treason.* Strauss attempts to buttress his position
by attaching a hypothetical social scientific study of concentration
camps from which all allusions to cruelty would be carefully
deleted.42 But, one may wonder, if it comes to pondering the worst
scenarios, would the committed social philosophers fare any better
than the non-committed social scientists? If social scientists are
liable to stop at explaining and thereby to implicitly condone evil
and its social organization, would it not be only appropriate that

* Strauss elaborated a quaint intellectual conspiracy theory according to which

the Germans avenged their defeat by striking back in the academia of the United
States: "It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battle field
and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of
the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them a yoke of its own thought."
American social science stands accused of being vulnerable in this sinister scheme.
Allen Blooms's best selling "The Closing of the American Mind" while echoing
the master's view almost verbatim, assigns a more innocent role to the American
intellectuals from Arendt to Riesman as the unwitting pawns of a "German
Connection" singing "a song they do not understand translated from a German
original . . ." See, Leo Strauss, Natural Right History, op. cit., pp. 2, 4. Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind, (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987 p. 152).

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 401

the committed social thinkers, the engineers of the "natural order"

and the advisers of the state, tremble at the possibility of creating
or perpetuating the very evil that once organized would be
dispassionately studied by the hypothetical social scientists?

2, Of Weber

Before examining Weber's theory of intercultural understanding

it may be helpful to offer a brief, classificatory note on alternative
theories or assumptions that have informed the Western philosoph?
ical and social scientific investigation of other cultures. At the risk
of some simplifications and without claiming to either exhaust
the varieties or delineate the fine details of the controversy, we
deem the following dual taxonomy heuristically fit for the purposes
at hand.

1. Essentialism: The fundamental presupposition of this

category, which comprises empirical and rationalist genres is the
belief that what is worth knowing about a given culture that is,
the "truth" of that culture, exists independently of both the
intentionality of the natives and the cognitive orientation and value
relevant interests of the investigators. By sifting through the heap
of false or trivial opinions or data, essentialists hope to discover
the objective truth about a given cultural world. True science, they
contend, must be free of the value relevant (ideal) interests of its
practitioners as well as those of its subjects. Besides, they must
account for those cognitive preferences that are somehow linked
to the investigator's cultural world. The essentialists are wearily
aware of the former but do not perceive the latter as such. If we
define cognitive preferences as a set of guidelines which determine
how to select, organize and disseminate the important data once
the subject has been selected, the essentialists could not be said
to possess cognitive orientations. They are rather possessed by
them, for they conceive of themselves as selfless instruments of
a science that goes on to accumulate information about, or to correct
the image of the world according to its pristine principles. In this
process neither the investigator nor his subjects need to intervene
as the unimportant and the untrue are supposed to be automatically
and systematically eliminated by the turning wheel of deductive
reasonings or inductive generalizations. Whereas the empirical
essentialists generally seek to justify their criteria of "objective
truth" by emulating the generalizing ambitions of the natural

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402 Politics, Culture, and Society

sciences, the rationalists usually presuppose the possibility of

arriving at such criteria through the application of the methods
of "right thinking." Nevertheless, as a rule, an overt explication
of or justification for these objective criteria of truth remain implicit
in both types of essentialism. Apparently the strength of such
claims lies in not questioning their presumed self evidence.
It is ironic that before the rise of neo-rational essentialism
represented by Strauss, a vague but nearly ubiquitous empirical
essentialism had found expression in the social sciences, namely
in the early anthropological theories of the savage mind and in
the sociological theories of cultural evolution. Thus, the earlier
social sciences led the quest of Occidental culture to organize
cultural diversity into a universal hierarchical order or to transform
geo-cultural differences into rungs of an imaginary chronological
ladder of progress.

2. Relativism: We classify under this rubric all those theories

that reject the possibility or usefulness of arriving at universal
and objective criteria of truth, and supplant them instead with
a variety of context-dependent and often ultimately incommensu?
rable criteria of distinguishing the significant, the true and the
just from the unimportant, the false and the unjust. Here the
subjects of intercultural understanding become sovereigns in their
respective domains. They undertake to introduce, if not to initiate,
the empathizing investigator to the intricacies of their world by
defining and defending their fundamental concepts and systems
of thought and judgment. The duty of the investigator is to
"understand," i.e., to capture the prevailing sense rather than to
try to make sense out of the alien universe of discourse. By
recognizing the authenticity of the self understanding of the
natives, the relativists explode the unity of the essentialists'
objective world; parallel cultural universes are discovered as the
image of one real world confronting many delusional ones fades
away. At the same time relativism implodes the essentialists'
favorite universal duality of true and false; all shared beliefs,
insofar as they are anchored in their respective contexts, are seen
as equally rational. Rationality is redefined as "conforming to
norms."43
Contemporary anthropology and certain segments of modern
philosophy have recently reasserted relativism with new vigor,
provoking vitriolic rebuttals from the essentialist school.44 Without
trying to belittle their decisive methodological differences,
especially regarding the relevance of the "native's account" to a
scientific understanding of his own culture, we merely wish to point

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 403

out a common weakness in both of these camps, namely, their

underestimation of the importance of the investigator's value
relevant interests and, cognitive orientations. Essentialists elevate
their cognitive orientations to the level of epistemological truths
and, while marginally aware of the influence of value relevant
interests in their scientific work, view the latter as a minor
impediment to be overcome. The relativistic theories, however, are
widely unreflexive and even ventriloquisite insofar as the
investigator's ideal (value relevant) interests and cognitive
preferences are concerned. They often seem to view themselves
as the selfless curators of a cultural museum whose task is to record
and meticulously preserve the varieties of cultural universes of
discourse.
It is exactly this common blind spot in most of the essentialist
and relativist theories which sets them apart from the Weberian
project. Weber bridged this gap and laid the foundations of a unified
approach for the study of "distant peoples," i.e., those who lived
before or live apart from us. The potentialities of this approach,
however, are not fully developed. With respect to the historical
past Weber's solution finds expression today in Gadamerian
hermeneutics, but a Weberian theory of intercultural understanding
has not yet been exhaustively explored. It is symptomatic of this
one-sided development of Weberian methodology that Alfred Schutz
viewed only the study of the "world of predecessors" as problematic
(because of the lack of "the common core of knowledge" available
to the world of contemporaries).45 He presupposed the understand
ability and thus the homogeneity of "contemporary civilization."
It is of course by no means self-evident that the "common core
of knowledge" belonging to the medieval European burger would
be more accessible to the contemporary Occidental man than that
of Indian yogis, Siberian shamans, Japanese Zen masters or
Ghaderi sufis.
Instead of neglecting or attempting to eliminate or circumvent
the historical and geo-cultural distances, Weber recognized them
as instruments of, rather than as obstacles in the way of,
understanding. Just as a hermeneutical consciousness of our
rootedness in time renders destructive prejudice into constructive
historical insight, an awareness of our defined presence in geo
cultural space can turn cultural distance into intellectual leverage
for understanding. In studying distant peoples, therefore, the
human interests of the investigator present a Janus face: their
denial or their self-righteous assertion impedes understanding but
an awareness of them turns this blind spot into a lens which allows
the discriminating gaze of inquiry to focus on issues of importance.

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404 Politics, Culture, and Society

Neither the embedded ethnocentrism of rational essentialism nor

that of early anthropological and sociological studies affects
Weber's theory of intercultural understanding. Weber's is a new
"ethnocentrism," one which instead of echoing the self-righteous
claims of a dominant culture, testifies to the conscious adaptation
of the science of man to the spacio-temporal limits of human
knowledge. Without the advantage of such an Archimedean point,
i.e., a particular value-relevant and scientific interest, it becomes
impossible for us to scientifically study the distant worlds of our
predecessors or those of our "alien" contemporaries. Against the
essentialist denial and the relativist neglect of the presuppositions
of the social sciences Weber stated: "The question as to what should
be the object of universal conceptualization cannot be decided
'presuppositionlessly.' "46 Even within contemporaries of a given
dominant cultural world the development of new ideas depend on
a certain cultural distance: the quasi-proletarian intellectuality and
the intellectuality of the peripheral regions of greater cultural
centers, Weber observed, are better poised to utilize this Archime?
dean advantage and to revolutionize the dominant systems of
thought. Freedom from certain binding social conventions seems
to unleash the creative impulse that can overturn overarching
cultural world views.47 "The possibility of questioning the meaning
of the world presupposes the capacity to be astonished about the
course of events."48 In intercultural studies an even more radical
"freedom" from the conventions and opinions is available to the
investigator. The geo-cultural distance can be scientifically reduced
to the differences in cognitive orientations and value-relevant
interests.
Thus, a Weberian anthropologist would not set himself the goal
of achieving an empathie appreciation of the culture as experienced
by its natives. Indeed apart from his doubts about accessibility
and verifiability of such a knowledge49 Weber shared Strauss'
concern over the individual or group self-deceptions of the subjects:

. . . the 'conscious motives' may well, even, to the actor himself,

conceal the various 'motives' and 'repressions' which constitute the
real driving force of his action. Thus in such cases even subjectively
honest self-analysis has only a relative value. Then it is the task
of the sociologist to be aware of this motivational situation and to
describe and analyze it, even though it has not actually been
concretely part of the conscious intention of the actor; possibly not
at all, at least not fully.50

It is obvious that in his studies of alien civilizations Weber did

not hesitate to use the familiar categories of the Occidental
civilization. He freely spoke of "confessional relationships" of

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 405

Hindus to their gurus51 and of "knighthood" in medieval Japan.52

He elaborated on the "petit-bourgeois"53 strata in ancient China
and on the "welfare state" and "democratic religions" in India.54
Weber observed cross-cultural parallels between the continental
influences of France and Hellenic cultures in Europe and those
of China and India in Asia.55 He underscored the similarities of
Confucian and Greek philosophies,56 liberally quoted the
Communist Manifesto to describe the plight of Hindu lower castes57
and compared the Quaker silent meditations to the apathetic
ecstasy of yogis.58*
It would appear from these considerations that Weber was more
interested in asking his own questions about the particular
developments of alien civilizations than in trying to attain an
empathie understanding of them. This tendency characterizes
Weber's agenda in contra-distinction to that of the relativist school.
Unlike some rational essentialists, like Strauss, Weber excludes
normative evaluations from his social scientific investigations.
Therefore, those who wish to substantiate the superiority of their
own standards through the study of other cultures will find Weber's
principle of "value neutrality" unconducive. Weber seems to have
assumed that the inevitable distortions imposed on the alien culture
due to the geo-cultural distance between the subject and object
remain relatively benign as long as they are not compounded by
evaluative judgments. It should of course be stressed that for Weber,
opting to pursue "a science as a vocation" does not deprive the
social scientist from his or her right to pass value judgments on
moral and ideological issues as long as he refrains from tracing
the genealogy of his moral judgments back to a dispassionate and
scientific study of facts.
At any rate the predominance of the observer's cognitive
orientation in the study of the alien culture remains problematic
as it may perpetuate the unfair advantage of the observer over
the observed. The problem of onesidedness of the intercultural
studies has been the central theme of a prolonged debate between
the relativist and the essentialist camps, with little gain on either
side. Despite their attempts either to justify the Occidental scientific
bent for logical discourse, or to discover parallel logical universes,
they never transcend the direction of the inquiring gaze which

* Some of these cross cultural references are pedagogical; others bear a tinge
of irony, and, of course, a small fraction are redolent with Weber's fascination
with the developments of the modern Occidental sciences. Indeed, Weber was very
nearly reductionist when he attempted to explain religious experiences with the
help of the pathological lexicon of modern psychology59 or when he hoped that
one day the dissimilarities of Occidental and Oriental rationalism would be
accounted for by the sciences of comparative neurology and physiology.60

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406 Politics, Culture, and Society

invariably originates in the West. As to the fairness of their

respective arguments, one can hardly decide which of the two would
be more offensive to the "natives:" the ostensibly more charitable
exegeses which reduce natives' worlds to flat logically closed
universes or insistent accusations that their universes of discourse
are not logical enough.
The present reconstruction of Weber's anthropological method?
ology suggests that instead of trying to dissolve the qualitative
differences between cultures into one universal ranking system,
or to create a Gulliverian world of many cultural islands, the
investigator must recognize not only his own right but also that
of any culture to construct images of other cultures on the basis
of its own cognitive approach and ideal interests. The result would
be an irreducible variety of cultural images that reflect one another
and know each other not despite but because of their differences.
Only through this mutual recognition can they look at one another
through the prisms of their cognitive orientations and value
relevant interests. These mutually reflective cultures, thus, would
enter into a crescendo of ever-changing and ever-enhancing
knowledge of each other.* Instead of denying to themselves the
benefits of geo-cultural distance, the Occidental scientists must
recognize it as such and reserve the right of the others to do unto
their culture as they do unto others. This would make the process
of intercultural understanding a reversible one. Once the current
reification of cognitive orientations and ideal interests is dissolved,
all would regain a right to their interests which at once distort
and make accessible the "relevant" portions of the other culture.
This shows that the relativists' quest for the unification of subject
and object, even if possible, would not be conducive to intercultural
understanding, which occurs only when the investigator strikes
a tenuous balance bestriding the intercultural seesaw. Those who
assimilate an alien culture so well that they "go native" may only
achieve intercultural intuition, not systematic intercultural
knowledge. A native Bushman who studies Western medicine and
a European who masters Acupuncture return to their respective
native lands as practitioners of, and believers in, an exotic art
of healing. Indeed, these cultural converts may at certain points
ponder their internal conflict in terms of a quasi-essentialist
partiality toward one culture or a stoic existence in the relativized

* Professor Arthur Vidich, who has provided the authors with the benefit of his
insights, has suggested a less optimistic trajectory than that envisioned by the
authors: "the 'cressendo' is one possible outcome of the process of mutual recognition
you describe, but it strikes me as an optimistic outcome. Why is a cacophony not
an equally possible outcome, at least for all but the 'scientists' and investigators."

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 407

twilight between the two, but their solutions remain private and
unsystematic* The worlds of Occidental social science fiction (e.g.,
Carlos Casteneda's works) and literature (e.g., Conrad's Heart of
Darkness) are replete with the theme of travelers or social scientists
who indulged the temptation of "going native." The social scientists
of the third world who have considered the matter from their side
of the fence and with a more serious tone, have dubbed it
"Occidentosis," "brain drain," etc. In either case cultural
conversion of individuals contributes little to intercultural
understanding, which is a matter of collective confrontation of
different ideal interests and cognitive orientations.
Having briefly outlined the anthropological aspects of intercul?
tural understanding, let us turn to the sociological domain. Here
the value-relevant interests of the investigator in conjunction with
his cognitive predilections play a significant role in the selection
of the subject matter and in the formation of appropriate ideal
types. This is most apparent in social history and comparative
sociology. The recognition of the investigator's ideal interests does
not diminish science to the private tale of the individuals for these
interests are themselves shaped by the socio-historical circumstan?
ces. Neither does Weber's method of studying distant peoples turn
the social sciences into a civilizationally determined utilitarian
enterprise. Weber had already attempted to correct a different
version of this misunderstanding in his critique of Eduard Meyer's
limited definition of historical interests. The latter restricted the
scope of historically relevant facts to those elements that have
been "causally effective" in bringing about the "Present." Weber
responded to this by broadening the concept of ideal interests to
encompass much more than what is deemed to be causally effective
from a particular historical point of view. Even the study of alien
and vanquished civilizations, such as those of Aztecs and Incas,
can become the subject of our value relevant interests. Such a study
can, to say the least, function as a heuristic device for the study
of analogous cultural developments.

This knowledge may function positively to supply an illustration,

individualized and specific, in the formation of the concept of
feudalism or negatively, to delimit certain concepts with which we
operate in the study of European cultural history from the quite

* Dilemmas of self-understanding as well as those concerning the social image

of the cultural converts have been explored by Georg Simmel and Robert E. Park
in their conceptualizations of "the stranger" and the "marginal man," and by
Thorstein Veblen's discussion of "the intellectual preeminence of Jews in modern
Europe."

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408 Politics, Culture, and Society

different cultural traits of the Incas and Aztecs; this latter function
enables us to make a clearer genetic comparison of the historical
uniqueness of European cultural development.61

The Weberian social scientist no longer needs to conceal or neglect

the fact that he, like his subjects, is also a finite human being
who is bound to his own historical and geo-cultural time and space.
An examination of Weber's studies in the field of comparative
sociology bears out the above conclusions. He viewed alien
civilizations from an Occidental Archimedean point and organized
his empirical data around the nuclei of his value relevant interests.
Weber's most important value relevant interest concerned the
reasons behind the nonemergence of modern capitalism in the
Orient.
It is a well known fact that Weber's interest in the development
of Occidental capitalism led him to perceive non-Western societies
as a "set of gaps and absences"62 which ranged from autocephal
eous cities, particular political, religious and legal structures, and
voluntary associations, to such epiphenomena as gothic vaults,
spatial perspective in painting and harmonic music.63 What is less
known is that Weber followed the same "Eurocentric" approach
in his studies of American society, underscoring the lack of mass
party system, strong church organizations, labor movements and
other distinctly European institutions. Weber's solution seems to
elude essentialism but it is equally averse to relativism. His
approach is more comparable to a theory of social scientific
relativity in the domain of intercultural studies.
Both Weber and Strauss inherited and?for different purposes?
utilized the "discursive currency" of the Western Orientalism.64
The important difference, however, is that Weber acknowledged
the existence of the dilemma, tried to assess and minimize its impact
on intercultural research, and even devised a method to use the
distorted foci of the anthropological hermeneutics to the advantage
of a non "presuppositionless" social science. Leo Strauss, on the
other hand, categorically rejected the Weberian?or any other social
scientific?solution, reverted back to the apparent objectivity of
an "orientalist vision," and tried to lend credence to what Levi
Strauss has called "a primitive science of the concrete" and the
patently discredited discourse it represents.

Reference Notes

1. An example of such contentions could be found in the early European debates

concerning humanity and rationality of the American natives which emerged

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 409

in the wake of the Spanish conquests of the Americas. This presented the
Occident, for the first time since Rome, with the moral and practical dilemma
of justifying and perpetuating its domination over vanquished civilizations.
A rediscovery, modification and implementation of Aristotle's doctrine of
"natural slavery" epitomized the response of the era to this problem. The theory
was deemed applicable to "people less capable of using their reason," hence
the attribution of irrationality to the inhabitants of the newly invaded continent.
The controversy over the rationality of native Americans is best illustrated
in the debates between Jaun Gines Sepulveda, the Spanish Aristotlian who
strongly supported the application of the doctrine of natural slavery to the
"irrational" Indians on the one side and Done Bartolom? De las Casas, the
Spanish clergyman who tried to demonstrate that Indians were in fact "rational
people" who fulfilled all of Aristotle's requisites of the rational good life on
the other. See Mahmoud Sadri's Problem Areas of Rationality, State, Culture
and Society, (Fall 1985)), and M. T. Hodgen's Early Anthropology in the 16th
and 17th Centuries, (Philadelphia, Princeton University Press, 1984).
2. Clifford Geertz has recently formulated this problem as the attempt "to
understand how it is we understand understanding not our own." C. Geertz,
Local Knowledge (New York, Basic Books, 1983), p. 5.
3. As regards the critical history of the social scientific discourse this essay
acknowledges and presupposes the work of Foucault and Edward Said. See:
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, Pantheon books, 1970).
Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Pantheon books, 1978).
4. Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 228.
5. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, (Glenco: Free Press, 1958), p. 173.
6. Allan Bloom, "Leo Strauss," Political Theory, (Vol. 2, no. 4,1974), p. 37.
7. Ibid., p. 375.
8. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1953), pp. 1-8.
9. Dr. Werner J. Dannhauser describes himself before meeting Strauss as "a
relativist ill at ease in his relativism." See: W. Dannhauser, "Leo Strauss,
Becoming Naive Again," American Scholar, (Vol. 44, Autumn 1975), p. 637;
Also see: H. V. Jaffa's account of his pre-Straussian stage in New York Review
of Books, (Oct. 10,1985).
10. Leo Strauss, Spinoza's Critique of Religion, (New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 1.
11. Allan Bloom, op. cit., p. 373.
12. M. F. Burnyeat, "Sphinx Without a Secret," New York: Review of Books, (May
30,1985), p. 33.
13. Max Scheler, Problem of a Sociology of Knowledge, tr. M. S. Frings, ed. K.
W. Stikkers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980); Karl Mannheim,
Ideology and Utopia, (London, K. Paul Trench & Co., 1936); Leo Strauss, Natural
Right and History.
14. Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, pp. 147, 332.
15. Nikos Kazantzakis, Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, tr. k. Friar, (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1958), p. xviii.
16. Leo Strauss, "On Collingwood's Philosophy of History," Review of Metaphysics,
(Vol. v. no. 4, June 1952), p. 563.
17. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 5,55.
18. Leo Strauss, City and Man, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp.
72-3; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 150. We are indebted to Dr.
Burnyeat for drawing our attention to these quotations in his N.R.B. article.
19. Leo Strauss, Xenephon's Socratic Discourse: An Interpretation of Economics,
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 123.
20. P. J. Marshall and G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, (London: J. M.
Den and Sons, 1982), pp. 1, 3.
21. Strauss was apparently oblivious to the critical literature that exposed meaning,
origins and the future of underdevelopment when he offered his conjecture about
the meaning of the term: "The expression underdeveloped nations . . . implies

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 410 Politics, Culture, and Society

the resolve to develop them fully, i.e. to make them either Communist or
Western." See: Leo Strauss, City and Man, p. 6. Such judgments may be
consistent with the Xenophobian duty towards one's enemies only insofar as
the following Arabic proverb holds: "people are the enemies of that which they
do not understand," E. Said, Orientalism, op. cit. p. 69.
22. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 41.
23. Ibid., p. 36.
24. Ibid, p. 70.
25. Ibid, p. 10.
26. Ibid, p. 19.
27. Ibid, pp. 23-4.
28. Ibid, p. 36.
29. Ibid, p. 3.
30. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978), p. 4.
31. W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
32. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 50-51.
33. Ibid, p. 57.
34. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 24.
35. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 52.
36. Ibid, p. 130.
37. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, p. 195.
38. Idem.
39. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, p. 42.
40. Ibid, p. 55.
41. Ibid, pp. 59-62.
42. Ibid, p. 52.
43. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science, (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1970).
44. See: Rationality, ed. Bryan R. Wilson (Oxford: Basil Balckwell, 1979).
45. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and
F. Lehnert. (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 120.
46. Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. E. A. Shills and H. A.
Finch. (New York: Free Press, 1949), p. 48.
47. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1, p. 507.
48. Max Weber, Ancient Judaism, (New York: Free Press, 1952), p. 207.
49. Max Weber, Rosher and Knies, (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp. 179-80.
50. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 1, pp.. 9-10.
51. Max Weber, Religion of India, eds. Hans H. Gerth and P. Martindale (New
York: Free Press, 1958), p. 327.
52. Ibid, p. 333.
53. Ibid, p. 12.
54. Ibid, p. 142, 240.
55. Ibid, p. 329.
56. Max Weber, Religion of China, eds.: H. Gerth and P. Martindale (New York:
Free Press, 1957), p. 175.
57. Max Weber, Religion of India, eds. H. Gerth and P. Martindale (New York:
Free Press, 1957), p. 175.
58. Ibid, p. 163.
59. Ibid, p. 149, 303; Max Weber, "Social Psychology of World Religions," in From
Max Weber, eds. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946), pp. 245-46.
60. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930), p. 31.
61. Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, p. 156.
62. Bryan Turner, For Weber, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 276.
63. See especially the author's introduction in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism, pp. 13-31.

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 Ahmad Sadri and Mahmoud Sadri 411

64. That Weber and Strauss subscribed to an orientalist vision of the non western
world is substantiated in Weber's case, by Brian Turner and in Strauss' case
in the first part of this essay. See: Edward Said, Orientalism, op. cit. p. 72;
Claud Levi Strauss, The Savage Mind, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987); B. Turner, Weber and Islam: A Critical Study, (Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1974); B. Turner, For Weber, Essays on the Sociology of Fate, (Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1981).

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