world's greatest Ph.D.

So, only the Western civilization has had a line of development that is universally valid and significant -- and though I'm not a product of such civilization, I would like to know why Weber thinks so and what combination of circumstances he attributes this to. So please, as a product of modern European civilization yourself, Michael, can you shed some enlightenment over here?

It would actually jar my reletivist sensebilities really bad if I'd read this before fieldwork, but these days I hear enough of this line of argument (and from my Iranian informants too) to wanna know more about it before I react like a mad woman from the East. I was at a party the other night where this Iranian (actually, he said "I guess I'm Iranian just because my parents happened to be from there and I happened to be born there") NIH doctor said that the only valid and significant civilization in the world is the Western civilization and all else is crap. My informants said that, of course, they were not nearly as extreme and insensitive as him but that they did subscribe to a non-cultural reletivist line of argument that takes European classical thought masters (of enlightenment and modernity) as spokesmen of a universal value the rest of the world should not hesitate to join (instead of looking for native heros and culturally specific values); and they said that they are probably too politically incorrect for academic America today (:

Anyhow, I'm really interested in knowing more about Weber and the Assemblage story; I feel very "not in" because I don't know anything about it.

I'm not a sociologist or an anthropologist, but I did do my undergrad in English, and I'm pretty confident that "product" is the subject noun of the sentence, while "is bound" is the predicate verb. The phrase starting with "studying" is a participle functioning as an adjective. I wonder if this would be easier to parse in German, since infinitives, etc, are constructed differently.

I think what Weber is implying in the second half of the sentence is that some phenomena he examines are unique to Western Civ while other may be universal. I suspect, for his time, he was making a pretty strong relativist claim.

I had no idea anyone else was reading this! wonderful! thanks for the grammar help. i'll admit that even though i posted in half-jest, this explanation of the participle was enlightening for both our western and barbarous readers.

i must side with nahal on this and say that weber is being not relativist. however, he is also stating a peculiar fact of recent history. namely, that phenomena have emerged in the west which has been prone to circulation in a unique kind of way, the circulation of forms such as that which bruno latour calls an "immutable mobile" with the ability to be mobile and retain its shape and form. this works much better with technologies and bureaucratic techniques, much less so with ideologies and values. perhaps this could help explain nahal's difficulties with democracy in iran? then again, weber's problem - connecting the protestant ethic to its successor, the spirit of capitalism - also faces a great difficulty of form. i wonder what would happen if weber had tried to link the spirit of capitalism to a muslim ethic? or a muslim ethic to the spirit of democracy?

whether or not we agree with weber concerning what "should" be happening, i think that his point - and this is my enlightening section - has more to do with the fact that certain flows of phenomenon are only happening in a uni-directional manner. the only question is: will the west bring "democracy" to iran or not? the reverse question is either absurdist or simply not universal. we see the islamic world's politics - whether classified as a religious regime, fundamentalist, totalitarian or ? - as local, situational, and/or stationary, but not possibly universal.

Yeah, I'm a film department ditz, so I should stick to grammar and _Desperate Housewives_. :)

hey, no. it's an open discussion forum and i always appreciate comments.