Max Weber: Selections in Translation

MEMBERSHIP OF A ‘RACE’

A much more problematic source of communal action than what has been mentioned so far is ‘membership of a race’, or in other words the possession, resulting from actual common descent, of similar inherited or heritable characteristics. Naturally, such common descent only expresses itself in the form of a ‘community’ when the individuals concerned have a subjective feeling of their common identity; and this in turn only develops when people of different races, living in close proximity to each other or associated together in some other way, are involved in some common activity (usually of a political nature), or alternatively when racially similar people share a common fate in virtue of their shared opposition to other groups who are markedly different from them. When communal action results in such a situation, it generally takes a purely negative form: those who feel themselves to have a common identity mark themselves off from the noticeably different group and despise them, or sometimes, on the contrary, regard them with superstitious awe. Someone who is foreign in his external appearance, however he may ‘act’ or whatever he may ‘be’, is despised simply as such; or, on the contrary, if he remains in a superior position over a period of time, is regarded with superstitious veneration. Rejection is thus the primary and normal response.