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A century after Auguste Comte, sociology continues to borrow its conceptual terminology from physics or biology. Is it not time to break away from this positivist tradition and to draw upon a spiritual and cultural heritage that is broader, richer in meaning and closer to the very texture of social facts? Why not use the vast semantic field of religions, myths, literature and even esoteric traditions to enrich the language of the social sciences? Did not Max Weber borrow the concept of ‘charisma’ from Christian theology, and Karl Mannheim that of ‘constellation’ from classical astrology?

This book is a study in elective affinity. The expression has taken an unusual path: it has gone from alchemy to sociology by way of Romantic literature. Its patrons have been Albertus Magnus (in the thirteenth century), Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Max Weber. In my own use of it, I have tried to integrate the various meanings that the term has acquired over the centuries. By ‘elective affinity’ I mean a very special kind of dialectical relationship that develops between two social or cultural configurations, one that cannot be reduced to direct casuality or to ‘influences’ in the traditional sense. Starting from a certain structural analogy, the relationship consists of a convergence, a mutual attraction, an active confluence, a combination that can go as far as a fusion. It would be interesting, in my opinion, to try to build on the methodological status of the concept as an interdisciplinary research tool which could enrich, qualify and make more dynamic the analysis of the relationship between economic, political, religious and cultural phenomena.

Let us begin by briefly reconstructing the strange spiritual itinerary of this expression, so as to capture all its accumulated richness of meaning. The idea that a visible or hidden analogy determines the predisposition of bodies to unite dates back to Greek Antiquity, notably to the Hippocratic formula ‘like draws to like’ (omoion erchetai pros to omoion; simile venit ad simile). However, the term affinity as an alchemical metaphor does not appear until the Middle Ages. Its first source is probably Albertus Magnus, according to whom if sulphur combines with metals, it is ‘because of its natural affinity’ for them (propter affinitatem naturae metalla adurit). This idea recurs in the works of Johannes Conradus Barchusen, the famous seventeenth-century German alchemist, who speaks of ‘mutual affinity’ (reciprocam affinitatem);¹ and most notably in the writings of Hermannus Boerhave, the eighteenth-century Dutch alchemist. In Elementa Chemiae [Basic Principles of Chemistry] (1724), Boerhave explains that the solvent particles and those that are dissolved gather into homogeneous bodies through the affinity of their own nature (‘particulae solventes et solutae se affinitate suae naturae colligunt in corpora homogenae’). Noting the relationship between gold and aqua regia in a container he asks:

Why does not gold, which is eighteen times heavier than aqua regia, collect at the bottom of the vessel containing the aqua regia? Can you not see clearly that, between each particle of gold and aqua regia, there is a force by virtue of which they seek out each other, are united and join each other?

Affinity is the force that makes these heterogeneous entities form a union, a kind of marriage or chemical wedding, arising more from love than from hate (‘magis ex amore quam ex odio’).²

The term ‘attractionis electivae’ (elective attraction) was first used by the Swedish chemist Torbern Olof Bergman. His work De attractionibus electivis (Uppsala, 1775), was translated into French as Traité des affinités chimiques ou attractions électives (1788) [Treatise on Chemical Affinities, or Elective Attractions]. Bergman explains his use of the term as follows: ‘Several people call affinity what we have named attraction. I would consequently use these two terms interchangeably, even though the former, being more metaphorical, seems less appropriate in a work on physics.’ In discussion with Bergman, Baron Guyton de Morveau, a contemporary French chemist, emphasized that affinity is a particular kind of attraction, distinguished by a specific intensity of attractive power, through which two or more entities ‘form a being whose properties are new and distinct from those that belonged to each prior to combining’.³ In the German translation of Bergman’s book (Frankfurt-am-Main, Verlag Tabor, 1782–90), the expression ‘elective attraction’ is rendered as Wahlverwandtschaft, elective affinity.

It was probably from this German version that Goethe drew the title of his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809), in which one of the characters mentions a work on chemistry ‘that dates back ten years’. Several passages describing the chemical phenomenon seem to be taken directly from Bergman – particularly the analysis of the reaction between AB and CD, which re-combine as AD and BC. Goethe’s transposition of a chemical concept onto the social terrain of human spirituality and feelings was all the easier because, for several alchemists (such as Boerhave), the expression was already heavily laden with social and erotic metaphors. For Goethe there was elective affinity when two beings or elements ‘seek each other out, attract each other and seize … each other, and then suddenly reappear again out of this intimate union, and come forward in fresh, unexpected form (Gestalt)’.⁴ The resemblance between this and Boerhave’s formula (two elements that ‘seek each other out, are united and join each other’) is striking, and the possibility that Goethe was also familiar with, and inspired by, the Dutch alchemist’s work cannot be ruled out.

Through Goethe’s novel, the expression established itself within German culture to designate a special kind of bond between souls. Thus, it was in Germany that ‘elective affinity’ underwent its third metamorphosis: through the work of Max Weber, that great alchemist of the social sciences, it became a sociological concept. The connotation of mutual choice, attraction and combination is retained from its former meaning, but the aspect of newness seems to disappear. In Weber’s writings, the concept of Wahlverwandtschaft – as well as that of Sinnaffinitäten (affinities of meaning), which denotes something very similar – appears in three specific contexts.

First, it characterizes a precise mode of relationship between different religious forms; for example, between the mission of prophecy (in which the chosen feel like an instrument of God) and the concept of a personal, extra-worldly, irascible and powerful God there is ‘eine tiefe Wahlverwandtschaft’.⁵

Next, it defines the link between class interests and world-views. According to Weber, Weltanschauungen have their own autonomy, but an individual’s adherence to one world-view or another depends to a large extent on its Wahlverwandtschaft with his class interests.⁶

Finally – and this is the most important case – it serves to analyse the relationship between religious doctrines and forms of economic ethos. The locus classicus of this use of the concept is the following passage from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism:

In view of the tremendous confusion of interdependent influences between the material basis, the forms of social and political organization, and the ideas current in the time of the Reformation, we can only proceed by investigating whether and at what points certain correlations [i.e., elective affinities – Wahlverwandtschaften] between forms of religious belief and practical ethics can be worked out. At the same time we shall as far as possible clarify the manner and the general direction in which, by virtue of those relationships [Wahlverwandtschaften], the religious movements have influenced the development of material culture.⁷

We should note that the expression first appeared between quotation marks, as if Weber had wanted to apologize for the intrusion of a romantic and literary metaphor in a scientific analysis. But he subsequently dropped the quotation marks; the expression had become a concept.

It is not surprising that this expression was not understood in the positivist Anglo-American reception of Max Weber. One example bordering on caricature is Talcott Parsons’ English translation in 1930 of The Protestant Ethic from which we have just quoted. Here, Wahlverzvandtschaft is rendered first as ‘certain correlations’, and then as ‘those relationships’.⁸ Whereas the Weberian concept refers to a rich and meaningful internal relationship between two configurations, Parsons’ distorting translation replaces this with a banal, external and meaningless relation (or ‘correlation’). There could be no better illustration of the inseparability of the concept from its cultural context, from a tradition that gives it all its expressive and analytical force.

In these three Weberian modalities, then, elective affinity unites socio-cultural, economic and/or religious structures without forming a new substance or significantly modifying the initial components – even though the interaction has the effect of reinforcing the characteristic logic of each structure.

Max Weber never tried to examine the meaning of the concept closely, nor did he discuss its methodological implications or define its field of application. It appears here and there in German sociology, but no consideration is given to the conceptual implications of the term. Karl Mannheim, for example, in his remarkable study of conservative thought, writes:

In the confluence (Zusammenfliessen) of two streams of thought, the task of the sociology of knowledge is to find the moments within the two movements which, even before the synthesis, reveal an internal affinity (innere Verwandtschaft), and which, as a result, make unification possible.⁹

In the course of my study of the links between Jewish messianism and social utopia, the concept of elective affinity appeared to be the most appropriate and fertile tool with which to examine this relationship. Moreover, it seems to me that the concept could be applied to many other aspects of social reality. It enables us to understand (in the strong sense of verstehen) a certain kind of connection between seemingly disparate phenomena within the same cultural field (religion, philosophy, literature), or between distinct social spheres: religion and economy, mysticism and politics, among others. For example, the concept of Wahlverwandtschaft might throw considerable light upon the type of relationship that developed during the Middle Ages between the ethic of chivalry and Church doctrine;¹⁰ or, starting in the sixteenth century, between the cabbala and alchemy (see Gershom Scholem’s fine study ‘Alchemie und Kabbala’, Eranos Jahrbuch, no. 45, 1977); in the nineteenth century, between traditionalist conservatism and Romantic aesthetics (see the previously mentioned article by Mannheim), German Idealism and Judaism (cf. Habermas’s study), or Darwinism and Malthusianism; at the turn of the century, between Kantian moral philosophy and the positivist epistemology of the social sciences; and in the twentieth century, between psychoanalysis and Marxism, Surrealism and anarchism, etc. If we are to make systematic use of the concept, however, we need to be rather more precise in its definition. First of all, we must take into consideration that elective affinity has several levels or degrees:

(1) The first level is that of simple affinity: a spiritual relationship, a structural homology (a concept used in Lucien Goldmann’s sociology of literature), a correspondence (in the Baudelairean sense).

The first systematic formulation of the theory of correspondences was Swedenborg’s mystical doctrine which postulated a one-to-one correspondence between heaven and earth and between spiritual and natural things. Baudelaire referred several times to Swedenborg as the person who had taught him ‘that everything, form, movement, number, colour, scent, spiritually as well as naturally, is meaningful, reciprocal, converse, correspondent’. In Baudelaire, however, the concept loses its original mystical connotations and designates the system of mutual analogies in the universe, ‘the intimate and secret relations of things’.¹¹

It is important to emphasize that correspondence (or affinity) is an analogy that remains static; it creates the possibility, but not the necessity, of active convergence or attractio electiva. (I am here taking into account Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s criticism that I used the term too imprecisely in my 1981 article on messianism and utopia.)¹² Transforming potentiality into activity, making the analogy dynamic, having it evolve towards active interaction – this depends upon concrete historical circumstances such as economic transformation, the reactions of classes and social categories, cultural movements or political events.

(2) The election, reciprocal attraction and active mutual choice of the two socio-cultural configurations lead to certain forms of interaction, mutual stimulation and convergence. Here the analogies and correspondences start to become dynamic, but the two structures remain separate.

It is at this level (or at the transition between it and the next) that Weber’s Wahlverwandtschaft occurs between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

(3) The articulation, combination or ‘alloying’ of partners can result in various modalities of union: (a) what might be called ‘cultural symbiosis’, in which the two figures remain distinct but are organically associated; (b) partial fusion; and (c) total fusion (Boerhave’s ‘chemical wedding’).

(4) A new figure may be created through the fusion of the component elements. This possibility, suggested by the ‘Goethian’ meaning of the term, is absent from Weber’s analyses. It is not easy to distinguish between levels three and four: for example, is Freudo-Marxism the articulation of two component parts or a new mode of thought, as distinct from psychoanalysis as it is from historical materialism?

In order to grasp the specificity, and possible interest, of the concept, it is useful to compare it with other categories or expressions that are commonly employed in analysing the relationship between meaningful structures. Elective affinity, as I have defined it here, is not the ideological affinity inherent in different variants of the same social and cultural current (for example, between economic and political liberalism, or between socialism and egalitarianism). The election, the mutual choice, implies a prior distance, a spiritual gap that must be filled, a certain ideological heterogeneity. On the other hand, Wahlverwandtschaft is not at all the same as ‘correlation’, a vague term that merely denotes a link between two distinct phenomena. Wahlverwandtschaft implies a specific type of significant relationship, which has nothing in common with (for example) the statistical correlation between economic growth and demographic decline. Nor is elective affinity synonymous with ‘influence’, for it entails a much more active relationship and a mutual articulation (that can even go as far as fusion). The concept allows us to understand processes of interaction which arise neither from direct causality nor from the ‘expressive’ relationship between form and content (where, for example, the religious form is the ‘expression’ of a political or social content). Without claiming to be a substitute for other paradigms of analysis, explanation and comprehension, the concept may provide a new angle of approach, little explored until now, in the field of the sociology of culture. It is surprising that, since Max Weber, so few attempts have been made to re-examine it and to use it in real research.

Of course, elective affinity occurs neither in a vacuum nor in the azure of pure spirituality; it is encouraged (or discouraged) by historical and social conditions. Whereas the analogy or likeness as such derives only from the spiritual content of the relevant structures of meaning, their contact and active interaction depend on specific socio-economic, political and cultural circumstances. In this sense, an analysis in terms of elective affinity is perfectly compatible with a recognition of the determining role of economic and social conditions. Contrary to a common belief, this also applies to the classic Weberian analysis of the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism – an analysis which, apart from a few polemical digressions, seeks less to define a ‘spiritualistic’ causal relationship than to grasp the Wahlverwandtschaft between religious doctrine and economic ethos. Let it be said in passing that, in a passage from the Grundrisse – a work unknown to Max Weber, as it was first published in 1939 – Marx himself refers to the relationship (Zusammenhang) between English or Dutch Protestantism and the accumulation of money-capital.¹³