Abstract
Alfred Weber’s career began in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a period of dramatic change in Germany. In a brief autobiographical sketch he described his family background, which has been well documented in studies of his brother Max.1 He emphasized the sense of political and intellectual engagement that his father, a National Liberal politician, and his brothers imparted to him.
Political interests and, as far as could be accomplished, political activity went without saying for him and his brother (Max Weber, died 1920). However, both realized that, since the disempowerment of parliament after 1878, a political career was meaningless given the current dominant pseudo-constitutionalism. They restricted themselves, therefore, to public criticism in the press, to speeches and constructively performed activity in attempts at economic and social reform.2
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Notes
Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Wiley, 1975);
Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969);
Lawrence A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). for Alfred’s own personal experience, see
Eberhard Demm, Ein Liberaler in Kaiserreich und Republik. Der politische Weg Alfred Webers bis 1920 (Boppard, Germany: Harald Boldt, 1990), 5–27.
Alfred Weber, “Professor Alfred Weber, Heidelberg,” in Eberhard Demm, (ed.), Alfred Weber zum Gedächtnis: Selbstzeugnisse und Erinnerungen von Zeitgenossen (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 21–23.
Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 19–29, 227.
Peter Wagner, Sozialwissenschaften und Staat. Frankreich, Itlaien, Deutschland 1870–1980 (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 1990), 23–57.
Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
This discussion follows the typology of Volker Kruse, Soziologie und “Gegenwartskrise.” Die Zeitdiagnosen Franz Oppenheimers und Alfred Webers (Wiesbaden, Germany: Deutscher Universitäts Verlag, 1990), 31–34. Kruse actually used the term “sociologists,” because his work points ahead to the Weimar Republic, when sociology made inroads as an established discipline at German universities.
Raymond Geuss, “Kultur, Bildung, Geist,” History and Theory 35 (1996): 153.
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). I stress that these are ideal types. Many, if not most, thinkers during this time wanted some combination of the two institutional forms. But while both might be advocated, one was privileged over the other.
Reinhard Kosselleck, “Einleitung: Zur anthropologischen und semantischen Struktur der Bildung,” in Reinhard Kosselleck (ed.), Bildingsgüter und Bildungswissen (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990);
Klaus Vondung, “Zur Lage der Gebildeten in der wilhelminische Zeit,” in Vondung (ed.), Das wilhelminischen Bildungsbürgertum: Zur Sozialgeschichte seiner Ideen (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1976);
Rüdiger vom Bruch, Wissenschaft, Politik und öffentliche Meinung: Gelehrtenpolitik im wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890–1914 (Husum, Germany: Matthiesen, 1980).
Louis Miller, “Between Kulturnation and Nationalstaat: The German Liberal Professoriate, 1848–1870,” German Studies Review, Special Issue (1992): 33–54.
Christian Simon, Staat und Geschichtswissenschaft in Deutschland und Frankreich 1871–1914 (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 1988), I, 6;
Manfred Riedel, “Der Staatsbegriff der deutschen Geschichtsschreibung des 19. Jahrhunderts in seinem Verhältnis zur klassisch-politischen Philosophie,” Der Staat 2 (1963): 49.
Charles McClelland, The German Historians and England: A Study in Nineteenth Century Views (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 6;
Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Historiker und Nationalökonomen in wilhelminischen Deutschland,” in Klaus Schwabe (ed.), Deutsche Hochschullehrer als Elite 1815–1945 (Boppard, Germany: Harald Boldt, 1988), 150;
Dieter Lindenlaub, Richtungskämpfe im Verein für Sozialpolitik: Wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik vom Beginn des “neuen Kurses” biz zum Ausbruch des ersten Weltkrieges1890–1914 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1967), 15.
Harald Winkel, Die deutsche Nationalökonomie im 19.Jahrhundert (Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1977), 84–88.
Gustav Schmoller, Über einige Grundfragen der Socialpolitik und der Volkswirtschaftslehre (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1898), 324–25.
Samuel Bostaph, “The Methodological Debate between Carl Menger and the German Historicists,” in Mark Blaug (ed.), Carl Menger (1840–1921) (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1992), 137–50.
Schmoller, “Rede zur Eröffnung der Besprechung über die sociale Frage in Eisenach den 6. Oktober 1872,” in Gustav Schmoller, Zur Social- und Gewerbepolitik der Gegenwart: Rede und Aufsätze (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1890), 9;
Albert Müssiggang, Die soziale Frage in der historischen Schule fer deutschen Nationalökonomie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1968), 225–27. The water metaphor was important to Historical School during this period as an expression of their opposition to the rigidity of classical national economy and Marxism. Even as he moved away from Schmoller’s position, Alfred Weber would continue to use this metaphor with terms such as stream, current, and waves.
Schmoller, Einige Grundfragen, 218. Pierangelo Schiera notes that England, France, and Italy did not have a corresponding concept to “German science.” In proclaiming a national science, German economists demarcated their “system” from the “environment” of foreign science. The economic field without the spiritual guidance was derogated as “Manchesterism.” Schiera, Laboratorium der bürgerlichen Welt: Deutsche Wissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, trans. Klaus-Peter Tieck (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 10.
Gustav Schmoller, “The Origin and Nature of German Institutions,” in Otto Hintze et. al., Modern Germany in Relation to the Great War, trans. William Wallace Whitelock (New York, 1916), 193, 213;
Manfred Schön, “Gustav Schmoller and Max Weber,” trans. Elizabeth King, in Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Max Weber and His Contemporaries (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), 65;
Lindenlaub, Richtungskämpfe, 24; Irmela Gorges, Sozialforschung in Deutschland 1872–1914: Gesellschaftliche Einflüsse auf Themen- und Methodenwahl des Vereins für Sozialpolitik (Königstein/Ts: Anton Hain, 1980), 330; Müssiggang, Soziale Frage, 156, 209.
Gustav Schmoller, “Ueber Zweck und Ziele des Jahrbuchs,” [Schmollers] Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich, 1 (1881): 8–9; Schmoller, Einige Grundfragen, 340–42.
Schmoller, Einige Grundfragen, 337–38; Müssiggang, Soziale Frage, 95–98; Riedel, “Staatsbegriff,” 43. Bruno Hildebrand and Johannes Conrad reported that at the first meeting of the Social Policy Association, Rudolf von Gneist was alone in claiming that economics and morality were opposites that could not be combined. And they qualified his position by noting that Gneist was a jurist, not a national economist. Bruno Hildebrand and Johannes Conrad, “Die Eisenacher Versammlung zur Besprechung der soziale Frage und Schmollers Eröffnungsrede,” Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, 20 (1873): 1.
Eckart Pankoke, Sociale Bewegung—Sociale Frage—Sociale Politik: Grundfragen der deutschen “Sozialwissenschaft” im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1970), 167; Wagner, Sozialwissenschaften, 87; Müssiggang, Soziale Frage, 11.
David F. Lindenfeld, The Practical Imagination: German Sciences of State in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 295.
This is not to say that the academics of the Historical School were in complete agreement with one another or with specific policies of the state. Within the “universe of discourse” established by the coalition, Adolf Wagner challenged Schmoller from the right, while Lujo Brentano challenged him from the left. See Kenneth D. Barkin, The Controversy over German Industrialization, 1890–1902 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970);
James J. Sheehan, The Career of Lujo Brentano: A Study of Liberalism and Social Reform in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Although there were differences in goals and methods, the centrality of the state-civil society dualism was not challenged, Wagner wanted an even stronger role for the state, while Brentano offered no viable political alternative to the bureaucratic state.
Kruse, “Von der historischen Nationalökonomie zur historischen Soziologie; Ein Paradigmenwechsel in den deutschen Sozialwissenschaften um 1900,” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 19 (1990), 149–65.
Gunter Scholtz, Zwischen Wissenschaftsanspruch und Orientierungsbedürfnis: Zu Grundlage und Wandel der Geisteswissenschaften (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 10, 31, 38–39, 47–48, 51:
Erhart Stölting, Akademische Soziologie in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1986), 25–26, 33.
Max Weber, “Developmental Tendencies in the Situation of East Elbian Rural Labourers,” in Keith Tribe (ed.), Reading Weber (London: Routledge, 1989), 158–87.
David Blackbourn, “The Politics of Demagogy,” Past and Present 113 (1986): 152–84.
Helmuth Schuster, Industrie und Sozialwissenschaften: Eine Praxisgeschichte der Arbeits- und Industrieforschung in Deutschland (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1987), 61–99; Habermas, Structural Transformation, 151; Dieter Krüger, “Max Weber and the ‘Younger’ Generation in the Verein für Sozialpolitik, in Mommsen and Osterhammel, Max Weber, 71–72.
Schuster, Industrie, 84–85; Geuss, “Kultur”: 157; Bruch et. al. (eds.), Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900. Krise der Moderne und Glaube an die Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989), 11–12;
Klaus Lichtblau, Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Zur Genealogie der Kultursoziologie in Deutschland (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 17–19;
Woodruff D. Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 201.
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Garden City: Anchor Books, NY, 1965);
Stephen E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992);
Hans-Joachim Lieber, Kulturkritik und Lebensphilosophie: Studien zur deutschen Philosophie der Hundertwende (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974); Lichtblau, Kulturkrise, 35. Kevin Repp notes the importance of various biological theories, especially vitalism, for this generation. These theories were often tied to issues of social reform. Kevin Repp, Reformers, 39–48.
Here I find myself in direct disagreement with Dirk Käsler, who also sees the themes of early German sociology as essentially dualistic with no discrepancy between the dualisms. Among the dualisms he lists as the dominant themes of the discipline are Gemeinschaft-Gesellschaft, irrationality-rationality, culture-civilization and state-society. See Käsler, Die frühe deutsche Soziologie und ihre Entstheungs-Milieus 1909 bis 1934 (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984), 311.
Georg Lukács called Alfred Weber “the most outstanding representative of this transitional form.” Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980), 620.
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© 2012 Colin Loader
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Loader, C. (2012). The Context of Alfred Weber’s Early Work. 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_2
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