Wendy Brown, Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber

Abstract

Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber is a work that discusses what nihilism is and offers a possible means for overcoming it. Wendy Brown uses Nietzsche as the expert on nihilism and Max Weber as the thinker who offers a possible way to fight it. Brown references many of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings, but she focuses mainly on Weber’s two ‘Vocation’ lectures: ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf’ and ‘Politik als Beruf’; actually, she uses the translations ‘Science as Vocation’ and ‘Politics as Vocation’. This book is a revised and expanded version of the Tanner Lectures that she gave during November 2019. It is highly successful when read as a political work, but if read as a piece of scholarship, it is less successful. The book has four sections: ‘Introduction’, ‘Politics’, ‘Knowledge’, and ‘Afterword’. In the ‘Introduction’, Brown explains that the focus of the Tanner Lectures is to discuss values, and it has a goal to bring together values and knowledge which the Enlightenment had separated. Brown emphasizes that merging them now is critical, given the plethora of problems confronting humanity. She notes that it may seem counterintuitive to invoke Max Weber because he not only embraced the distinction between facts and values; he also seemed complicit with ‘some of the most sinister forces contouring our present’. Furthermore, Brown insists ‘Weber was a dark thinker’ (p. 7) and certainly he had a reputation as being volcanic. But he was realistic and that provides Brown with the first of three reasons to ‘think’ with Weber. The second was his willingness to confront the crises of liberalism. The third one which animates these essays was ‘his deep confrontation with the intellectual and political predicaments of our nihilistic epoch’ (pp. 7–10). Brown does not mean that all values have vanished nor does she suggest Weber thought the world lacked all meaning. However, she does insist that the world lost much of the basis for values when science replaced religion. She also insists that 1194135 ISS0010.1177/02685809231194135International SociologyReviews: Sociology and Sociologists review-article2023