Max Weber and His Contempories

Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Jurgen Osterhammel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135032296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Max Weber and His Contemporaries provides an unrivalled tour d'horizon of European intellectual life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and an assessment of the pivotal position within it occupied by Max Weber. Weber's many interests in and contributions to, such diverse fields as epistemology, political sociology, the sociology of religion and economic history are compared with and connected to those of his friends, pupils and antagonists and also of those contemporaries with whom he had neither a personal relationship nor any kind of scholoarly exchange. Several contributors also explore Weber's attitudes towards the most important political positions of his time (socialism, conservatism and anarchism) and his own involvement in German politics.

This volume contributes not only to a better understanding of one of the most eminent modern thinkers and social scientists, but also provides an intellectual biography of a remarkable generation.

This book was first published in 1987.

1 Introduction

Wolfgang J. Mommsen

In recent years there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in the work of Max Weber among scholars all over the world. More than ever before he is recognized as one of the great European thinkers of the turn of the century. After some delay, he has been granted a prominent place in European intellectual history, in company with Emile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto, as one of the founders of sociology as a scholarly discipline. Max Weber’s unique contribution was to conduct his empirical sociological research from a universal-historical vantage point. He was a historian before he became a social scientist and, eventually, in the narrow sense, a sociologist. As a social scientist, he continued to be particularly interested in historiography. And although the ideal-typical theorems in which Weber tried to encapsulate the culturally significant problems of his time as precisely as possible were expressed in ever more abstract terms he intended thereby to create important conceptual tools for historiography as well as for sociology. In his late work, Economy and Society, Weber tried to grasp social reality in systems of ‘pure types’, all of which were constructed only with regard to systematic factors, allowing the contingencies of historical time to retreat into the background. None the less, Weber’s conceptualization incorporated all that was known of the history of the Western world at his time. Also, in his classic studies on the sociology of world religion, a historical dimension is always evident. One reason for the present worldwide interest in Max Weber’s work is that he succeeded in posing sociological questions against a historical horizon of unusual breadth, whose relevance for our present situation is obvious.

In his own lifetime, Max Weber had only limited influence on the development of the social sciences, especially on the establishment of sociology as an intellectual discipline, although his role as a founder of the Deutsche Soziologische Gesellschaft and as an organizer of scholarly enterprises, and even more as someone who encouraged concrete empirical research, should not be underestimated. He did not found a ‘school’ in a narrow sense. Much of his scholarly work was published only in the last years of his life. Most of it appeared posthumously, and then not always in a very satisfactory form, like Economy and Society, for example. Nevertheless, the impact of his person and his work was far-reaching and lasting.

Contrary to a long-established myth, Max Weber was the most cited and the most influential sociologist in Germany during the Weimar Republic.¹ In the late 1920s, his writings on methodology were already the subject of detailed scholarly analysis. The impact of his substantive sociological works was more diffuse, but equally strong. However, Weber’s influence was not enough to lead German sociology out of the rut of an idealist, spiritual and sometimes organological approach.

Among historians, Weber’s work attracted attention from the start, although few took a serious interest in his methodology. Otto Hintze applied ideal-typical methods in his work on European constitutional history. Other historians – Friedrich Meinecke, for example – expressed admiration for Weber as a great thinker, without adopting his methods in their own work. Max Weber’s plea, before and during the First World War, for the ‘parlamentarization’ of the German constitution, and his energetic advocacy of a new democratic order between 1918 and 1920 were not forgotten. But, as German political culture drifted to the right, these factors no longer encouraged scholars to take a close interest in Weber, especially as the rigour of his thinking and the originality of his political ideas meant that he did not fit easily into any particular political camp. Historically, the strongest impact of Weber’s ideas is found in the work of Carl Schmitt where, of course, they appear in a form that is surely not in line with Weber’s original intentions.²

When the National Socialists came to power in Germany, interest in Weber’s work did not cease immediately, but it soon faded. Christoph Steding, who had already described Max Weber in 1932 from a fascist point of view as the anachronistic representative of a bourgeoisie condemned to decline, came to represent National Socialist ideology,³ while most social scientists working in the tradition of Max Weber had to leave Germany. The break was almost complete.

Thus the main interest in Weber shifted to Western Europe and the USA. In 1935, Raymond Aron published La Sociologie allemande contemporaine,⁴ which contained a comprehensive appreciation of Weber. Talcott Parsons’s major work, The Structure of Social Action,⁵ was published in the USA in 1937. In Britain, interest in Weber concentrated mainly on his thesis about the relationship between Protestantism and ‘the spirit of capitalism’. It was received critically, but with interest, above all in the works of R. H. Tawney.⁶ In 1940, Carlo Antoni’s Dallo storicismo alla sociologia appeared.⁷ Although Antoni’s assessment of Weber’s political and sociological work was rather critical and reserved, Weber provided him with important evidence for his argument that German historical thinking was in the process of leaving behind the traditions of classical historicism (Historismus) and turning to sociological methods and approaches.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the tradition of Max Weber’s work was continued by Anglo-Saxon scholars, especially in the USA, whose interest was then communicated back to Europe, and to the Federal Republic of Germany in particular, stimulating scholars there to take a fresh look at Weber’s work. At that time, American scholars were interested primarily in Weber’s sociological work. Weber’s Kategorienlehre was the starting point for Talcott Parsons’s theory of structural functionalism. Other scholars built on Weber’s empirical research. Added to this was a newly awakened interest in political sociology and in Max Weber’s involvement in day-to-day politics. H. C. Gerth and C. Wright Mills made Weber’s writings widely available in their pioneering selection in English, From Max Weber. Essays in Sociology.⁸ Contemporaries of Max Weber, in particular Paul Honigsheim and Karl Löwenstein,⁹ also helped to interest English-speaking scholars in his work.

This upsurge of interest in Max Weber in Britain and the USA also had specific historical causes. Weber’s sociology was fundamentally individualistic, and critical of all attempts at a substantive reconstruction of history. It was appropriate, therefore, at a time when ‘holistic’ philosophies of history, as described by Karl Popper in The Poverty of Historicism, were suspect as potentially leading to totalitarian forms of government.¹⁰ In the era of neo-liberalism, when the principles of individualism and a free market, a liberal state and society, were held up against past and present totalitarian systems, Max Weber’s liberal theory of society was received favourably, as was his highly effective critique of ‘bureaucratic domination’. Further, his work offered, or at least so it seemed, a consistent and convincing alternative to socialism, which was seen as a political order that produced ever more governmental bureaucracies and human alienation. His analyses of the disadvantages of centrally directed socialist economies provided telling arguments against Marxism-Leninism with its inherent tendency to develop totalitarian forms of government.

Historiography was not affected to the same extent by contemporary issues such as these. Historians saw Weber as one of the thinkers who had intellectually prepared the break-through to a liberal society and a market-oriented industrial system in the West, and had pointed out its significance in scholarly analyses of a high standard. More than other German sociologists, Weber was receptive to social and political developments in the West. He incorporated Anglo-Saxon approaches into his sociological work, although in many ways his thinking remained indebted to the traditions of German idealism and historicism. This was also true of his political views.

Weber was among the thinkers who early distanced themselves from late nineteenth-century positivism and its naive belief in progress, without, however, succumbing to the opposite extreme of irrationalist theories of evolution, or organological theories of society. He represented the grand tradition of European enlightenment at the moment of its partial disenchantment by modern science. This, above all else, made him a key figure in the development of European thought in the early twentieth century. In 1958, H. Stuart Hughes published his book Consciousness and Society. The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930.¹¹ He attributed an unusually high degree of intellectual productivity to the generation of thinkers who began writing and teaching in the 1890s. Hughes saw in their work a force that contributed substantially to shaping our present world. Their main achievement was to raze the bastions of a degenerate positivism and of a formalized idealism that had made the grand ideals of the Enlightenment one-sidedly concrete, and had compromised them by reducing them to a naive idea of predominantly materialist progress. This cleared a space for a new beginning in European intellectual history. Hughes saw Max Weber and Sigmund Freud as particularly important in this process, and placed Benedetto Croce, Emile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto in respected but subordinate positions.

In the following decades, almost no attempts were made to deal with Max Weber’s work within large-scale syntheses of the history of European ideas. Scholars turned instead to the sociological and epistemological aspects of Weber’s work, and only in this context was the question of Max Weber’s place in the intellectual life of his era pursued any further. Richard Bendix’s Max Weber. An Intellectual Portrait, published in 1960,¹² and numerous monographs on Weber’s methodological work, on his studies on the sociology of religion, and on his theory of bureaucracy, prepared the way for a new, more broadly based understanding of Max Weber, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. Criticism was also heard, in particular of Max Weber’s political views. (Much of this criticism was informed by Jakob Peter Mayer’s book, Max Weber in German Politics, published in 1944.¹³) On the whole, however, a pragmatic attitude prevailed among scholars convinced of the direct applicability of Max Weber’s sociological theories to further empirical research. The 1964 Soziologentag in Heidelberg was dedicated to the memory of Max Weber and represented the culmination of this feeling that a new era was beginning. Even here, however, distanced or overtly critical interpretations of Max Weber were heard. They included Raymond Aron’s well-considered paper on ‘Max Weber und die Machtpolitik’, and Herbert Marcuse’s paper ‘Industrialization and Capitalism’, in which he accused Weber of being an unreserved adherent of purely technocratic reason and thus an uncritical apologist of capitalism.¹⁴

During the following years there was a marked decrease of interest in Max Weber among social scientists. Empirical social research that was to lead to a new age marked by the ‘end of ideology’ (Daniel Bell) was in the ascendancy, making Weber’s macro-sociological method, with its historical dimension and its commitment to a fundamental plurality of values, seem less relevant. Only his precept that ‘science’ must avoid Werturteile (value-judgements) found wide acceptance, but it was often interpreted in a purely positivistic sense that neglected the dimension of Wertbeziehung (value-reference). The converse was true of neo-Marxist positions influenced by the ‘student revolution’ of the 1960s. To adherents of these views, Weber represented an upper middle class that belonged to the past. Behind his rational and conceptual language, tending towards objective statements, they thought they detected quintessentially bourgeois values. In the Marxist-Leninist camp, Lukács’s interpretation of Weber as a typical representative of the bourgeoisie’s irrationalist thinking in the era of imperialism long maintained canonical status.¹⁵

Among historians, there has been continual interest in Max Weber, first because his methodology provided a link, acceptable to both sides, between the social sciences and historiography, and secondly because the ideal type proved to be a suitable tool for comparative social history. The same applies to political science. British political scientists had not often looked to Europe, but they now began to take a stronger interest in Max Weber. Particular mention must be made of David Beetham’s book, Max Weber and the Theory of Modern Politics, which was the first full-scale assessment of Weber’s political sociology in the Anglo-Saxon world.¹⁶ John Rex and Anthony Giddens applied Weber’s sociological theories to the problem of social action;¹⁷ W. D. Runciman subjected Weber’s methodological position to a thorough critique.¹⁸ Moses I. Finley and Arnaldo Momigliano successfully applied Weber’s work on ancient history to the problem of writing a social history of Antiquity.¹⁹

In West Germany, interest was initially directed towards Max Weber’s theory of science. Dieter Henrich’s pioneering, if controversial, study, Die Einheit der Wissenschaftslehre Max Webers, was published in 1952.²⁰ It was followed some years later by Friedrich H. Tenbruck’s classic essay on the genesis of Weber’s methodology.²¹ From the mid 1960s, a rich stream of monographs appeared, nourished by Johannes Winckelmann’s attempts to have Max Weber’s main works republished in revised, corrected editions. In 1956 he had already published a reorganized and expanded fourth edition of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, which, however, was not free of editorial flaws.²² Wolfgang Schluchter, in Aspekte bürokratischer Herrschaft (1972), was one of those who alerted sociologists and historians to the significance of Max Weber’s work in interpreting Western society of our day.²³ Schluchter subsequently published several studies in which he systematically investigated Weber’s sociological work; his main theme was the rationalism of world domination (Weltbeherrschung).²⁴ Following the publication of my book, Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890–1920,²⁵ a controversy broke out, initially about Max Weber as a politician. Later it spread to the issue of Weber as a social theorist, placed between Marx and Nietzsche, and finally to that of Weber as a student of world history.²⁶

In recent years, research on Max Weber has taken a wide range of directions. The literature on Weber has grown beyond measure. Rationalization and the related problem of bureaucratization have aroused particular interest. Weber’s studies on the sociology of religion have also attracted renewed attention. For a time, his sociology of religion had been considered outdated and irrelevant; Kurt Samuelsson, for example, sharply criticized Weber’s work on the Protestant ethic as empirically unsound.²⁷ Now a new and lively interest is being expressed in this aspect of Weber’s sociology, especially as it relates to the sources of rationalization in the West.²⁸ It is not yet possible to identify any clear trend in recent research; all disciplines within the social and human sciences, from jurisprudence to theology, have turned to Weber’s work with an overwhelming variety of approaches and methods.

For sociologists, the most recent upsurge of interest in Max Weber is related to the fact that the high-flown expectations harboured by empirical sociology in the 1950s and 1960s were disappointed. It had been hoped to achieve a new level of insight into society by means of an ahistorical, empirically based social science that strictly abstains from value-judgements and orients itself purely by instrumentais rational considerations. In response to this disappointment the need arose to proceed to new macro-sociological approaches; even though they could perhaps only be cast in hypothetical terms, such approaches could nevertheless provide guidelines for empirical research. At the same time a new interest has been awakened in the historical dimension of the social sciences. Weber’s sociology provides an obvious starting point for ventures of this kind, because it poses its questions against a universal-historical background, and explicitly takes the historical dimension into account. This seems to us to explain part of the attraction of Max Weber for today’s sociologists, although, as Ralf...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Max Weber and the Social Sciences at the Turn of the Century
• 2 A Science of Man: Max Weber and the Political Economy of the German Historical School
• 3 Gustav Schmoller and Max Weber
• 4 Max Weber and the Younger Generation in the Verein für Sozialpolitik
• 5 Max and Alfred Weber and the Verein für Sozialpolitik
• 6 Personal Conflict and Ideological Options in Sombart and Weber
• 7 Varieties of Social Economics: Joseph A. Schumpeter and Max Weber
• 8 Robert Michels and Max Weber: Moral Conviction Versus the Politics of Responsibility
• 9 Mosca, Pareto and Weber: A Historical Comparison
• 10 Georges Sorel and Max Weber
• 11 Mill and Weber on History, Freedom and Reason
• 12 Weber and Durkheim: Coincidence and Divergence
• Part II Max Weber's Relation to the Theologians and Historians
• 13 Max Weber and the Evangelical-Social Congress
• 14 Max Weber and the Lutherans
• 15 Friendship Between Experts: Notes on Weber and Troeltsch
• 16 Max Weber and Eduard Meyer
• 17 Karl Lamprecht and Max Weber: Historical Sociology within the Confines of a Historians' Controversy
• 18 Otto Hintze and Max Weber: Attempts at a Comparison
• Part III The Realm of Politics
• 19 Friedrich Naumann and Max Weber: Aspects of a Political Partnership
• 20 Max Weber and Walther Rathenau
• 21 Gustav Stresemann and Max Weber: Politics and Scholarship
• 22 Dietrich Schäfer and Max Weber
• 23 Eduard Bernstein and Max Weber
• 24 Max Weber, Karl Kautsky and German Social Democracy
• 25 Max Weber's Relation to Anarchism and Anarchists: The Case of Ernst Toller
• 26 Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci
• Part IV Max Weber and Philosophical Thought
• 27 Weber and Nietzsche: Questioning the Liberation of Social Science from Historicism
• 28 The Ambiguity of Modernity: Georg Simmel and Max Weber
• 29 Weber and the Southwest German School: The Genesis of the Concept of the Historical Individual
• 30 Max Weber and Benedetto Croce
• 31 Weber and Freud: Vocation and Self-Acknowledgement
• 32 Passion as a Mode of Life: Max Weber, the Otto Gross Circle and Eroticism
• 33 Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács in Max Weber's Heidelberg
• 34 Max Weber, Oswald Spengler, and a Biographical Surmise
• 35 Karl Jaspers: Thinking with Max Weber in Mind
• Part V Max Weber: the Enduring Contemporary
• 36 Max Weber and the World Since 1920
• 37 Max Weber and Modern Social Science
• Contributors
• Index