Abstract
Most sociological theorists would view the years from 1890 to 1930 as the seminal period of their discipline. There were individual great social thinkers such as Karl Marx who preceded that era, but they were not part of a “cluster of genius”1 matching the collective brilliance of their successors. Germany, where sociology emerged as a significant intellectual (if not institutional) force during the period, made an important contribution to this cluster. The voluminous literature on Max Weber and Georg Simmel gives testimony to their inclusion in almost every history of the human sciences. Many would add Karl Mannheim as a junior partner of the duo. Although these thinkers often have been treated abstractly in isolation as theorists (with varying results), most interpreters understand that they were part of their own historical ecosystem consisting of political, social, economic, and cultural institutions, as well as a second tier of “sociologists” who tackled the same issues.2 While some might deny the importance of this context in understanding the work of its greatest participants, I concur with Wilhelm Hennis, who, in 1983, wrote about Max Weber:
Not only does the socio-cultural background of his generation await study, but the Weltanschauung and the scientific problems in which Weber’s generation so passionately engaged are even further removed from us. We know far too little about these factors, or at any rate not enough for an understanding of Weber’s work in this context.3
Since (and even before4) Hennis penned his lament, steps have been taken to remove this lacuna. This book can be viewed as one of those steps.
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Notes
H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society (New York: Vintage, 1961), 17. Hughes attributes the term to A.L. Kroeber.
Wilhelm Hennis, Max Weber: Essays in Reconstruction, trans. Keith Tribe (London: Allen & Unwin, 1988), 22.
More than two decades before Hennis, Friedrich H. Tenbruck had lodged a similar complaint. Tenbruck, “Die Genesis der Methodologie Max Webers,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 11 (1959), 573–630.
The importance of Fritz K. Ringer’s The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969) must be acknowledged.
Wolfgang Schluchter, “Max und Alfred Weber—zwei ungleiche Brüder,” 1–7, http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/uni/presse/rc7/5.html (last accessed April 10, 2012). Christian Jansen notes that from early on Alfred was referred to as “mini-Max.”
Jansen, “Neues von der deutschen Gelehrtenpolitik,” Neue politische Literatur 51 (2006), 17.
Bernd Widdig, Culture and Inflation in Weimar Germany (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 183.
Robert Michels, Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Free Press, [1911] 1968), 191.
A ten-volume edition of his collected works (cited here as AWG) appeared from 1997 to 2003. A two-volume biography and a number of other volumes on him have been published in the last two decades. See Reinhard Blomert, Intellektuelle im Aufbruch: Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber, Norbert Elias und die Heidelberger Sozialwissenschaften der Zwischenkriegszeit (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1999);
Reinhard Blomert, Hans Ulrich Eßlinger, Norbert Giovannini (eds.) Heidelberger Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften; Das Institut für Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften zwischen1918 und 1958 (Marburg, Germany: Metropolis, 1997);
Eberhard Demm, “Alfred Weber und sein Bruder Max,” Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 35 (1983), 1–28;
Eberhard Demm (ed.), Alfred Weber als Politiker und Gelehrter (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1986);
Eberhard Demm, “Max and Alfred Weber in the Verein für Sozialpolitik,” trans. Caroline Dyer, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 8–105;
Eberhard Demm, Ein Liberaler in Kaiserreich und Republik. Der politische Weg Alfred Webers bis 1920 (Boppard, Germany: Harald Boldt, 1990);
Eberhard Demm, Von der Weimarer Republik zur Bundesrepublik. Der politische Weg Alfred Webers 1920–1958 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1999);
Eberhard Demm, Geist und Politik im 20. Jahrhundert. Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Alfred Weber (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2000);
Eberhard Demm (ed.), Alfred Weber zum Gedächtnis: Selbstzeugnisse und Erinnerungen von Zeitgenossen (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2000);
Volker Kruse, Soziologie und “Gegenwartskrise.” Die Zeitdiagnosen Franz Oppenheimers und Alfred Webers (Wiesbaden, Germany: DUV, 1990);
Hans G. Nutzinger (ed.), Zwischen Nationalökonomie und Universalgeschichte. Alfred Webers Entwurf einer umfassenden Sozialwissenschaft in heutiger Sicht (Marburg, Germany: Metropolis, 1995).
Two articles are representative of those in the English language that cite Alfred Weber at all. Lawrence Scaff briefly acknowledges Weber’s contribution but is more interested in the development of his work by his colleague Emil Lederer. See Scaff, “Modernity and the tasks of a sociology of culture,” History of the Human Sciences, 3 (1990), 85–100. Josef Bleicher not only ignores Weber in favor of his “student,” Norbert Elias, but also goes on to say that Weber is to be avoided because of his association with the old mandarin ideal. See
Bleicher, “Struggling with Kultur,” Theory, Culture & Society, 7 (1990), 97–106. French sociologist Raymond Aron, whose short treatment of Alfred Weber was one of the very few available in English, drew a similar conclusion writing that Weber’s cultural sociology “is the product of a revolt against civilization.” See
Aron, German Sociology, trans. Mary and Thomas Bottomore (New York: Free Press, 1964). More representative is Ralph Schroeder’s study of Max Weber and the sociology of culture, which mentions Alfred only once, in a note. See
Schroeder, Max Weber and the Sociology of Culture (London: Sage, 1992).
For a discussion of my earlier methodology, see Colin Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl Mannheim (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1–9, 178–89. 12.
Peter Wagner, Sozialwissenschaften und Staat. Frankreich, Italien, Deutschland 1870–1980 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1990). Erhart Stölting has devised a similar concept, “conceptual configuration,” but I have chosen Wagner’s because it emphasizes the reciprocity of science and other institutions.
See Stölting, Akademische Soziologie in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986), 33–37.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field,” trans. Richard Terdiman, The Hastings Law Journal, 38 (1987): 814–53;
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995);
Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus, trans. Peter Collier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988);
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 460–61.
For a similar discussion, see Seymour Chatman’s structuralist narrative theory in Story and Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), 19.
Georg Lukács, “Zum Wesen und zur Methode der Kultursoziologie,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 39 (1915), 217.
Alfred Weber, “Der Beamte,” (1910), AWG 8: 98–117.
Weber, Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie (1935, 1950), AWG 1: 61.
For a harsher judgment, see Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s review of the first volume of the AWG, Kulturgeschichte als Kultursoziologie. Wehler, “Reiter- und Immerweitervölker. Alfred Weber hat den Aufgalopp zur modernen Kulturgeschichte verpaßt,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 238 (Oct. 14, 1997), L36. Volker Kruse, in an exercise in the sociology of knowledge, argues that the “failure” of Weber’s cultural sociology in the 1950s and after was due as much to its “receiver” (the prevailing empirical, quantitative sociology of the period) as to its “sender.”
Kruse, “Warum scheiterte Alfred Webers Kultursoziologie? Ein Interpretationsversuch,” in Demm and Chamba (eds.), Soziologie, Politik und Kultur (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2003), 219–29.
Wolf Lepennies, The Seduction of Culture in German History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 9. For an earlier version of this approach, see
Fritz Stern, “The Political Consequences of the Unpolitical German,” in History 3 (New York: Meridian, 1960), 104–34.
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Loader, C. (2012). Introduction. In: Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture, 1890–1933. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137031150_1
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