Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture, 1890–1933

253 Pages·2012·1.51 MB·English

by  Colin Loader (auth.)

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Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture, 1890–1933
By Colin Loader
Alfred Weber and

the Crisis of Culture,
1890–1933
Colin Loader
ALFRED WEBER AND THE CRISIS OF CULTURE, 1890–1933
Copyright © Colin Loader, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-1-137-03114-3
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
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Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I Alfred Weber in the German Empire, 1890–1918
1 The Context of Alfred Weber’s Early Work 13
2 Early Economic Writings, 1897–1908 31
3 Heidelberg and the Empire, 1907–1917 47
4 The Question and Sociology of Culture 61
5 The Cultural Theory of Politics 81
Part II Alfred Weber in the Weimar Republic
6 The Weimar Republic and the End of
the Discursive Coalition 9 9
7 The Sociology of Culture in Weimar 115
8 Cultural Politics in Weimar 1 33
9 Epilogue: Alfred Weber After 1933 157
Appendix 1: A Note on the Translation 1 63
Appendix 2: Fundamentals of Cultural Sociology: Social Process,
Civilizational Process and Cultural Movement (1920) 1 65
Appendix 3: Cited Works of Alfred Weber 205
Notes 211
Index 2 43
vii
Acknowledgments
A number of people helped this book come to fruition. The late
Friedrich Tenbruck encouraged me to pursue the project. A sabbati-
cal leave from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a research
stipendium from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst in the
early 1990s gave me the opportunity to spend a year researching at
the University of Trier. Hans Braun sponsored my stay in the Faculty
for Economic and Social Sciences there, and has continued to offer
friendship and assistance with my return to UNLV. At Trier, I was able
to investigate the rich institutional literature on the social sciences
during the empire and republic by German scholars, which has largely
been ignored in this country. At that same time, there was a renewed
interest in Weber in Germany, led by Eberhard Demm. I was able to
benefit from that, and Demm in particular has been very helpful to
me in my studies, in addition to reading a draft of the manuscript.
David Kettler, while luring me away from Weber to other projects,
has been an inspiring collaborator and engaging discussion partner
over the years. Parts of the manuscript were presented in the UNLV
History Department’s faculty seminar, where I received helpful criti-
cism, especially from Paul Werth, Michelle Tusan, Kelly Mays, and
Mary Wammack. Mary and I have discussed our similar methodo-
logical approach despite our divergent interests, over the years and,
as she has done for so many others in our department, she proofread
the entire manuscript. Anonymous readers for the press have offered
useful suggestions that have improved the book. Editors Anthony La
Vopa and Chris Chappell provided the necessary support and guid-
ance; they made working with Palgrave Macmillan a pleasure. This
is not an all-inclusive list; there are others not mentioned here who
provided assistance, encouragement, and sometimes just a listening
ear. I thank them all. All faults in the book are entirely my own.
ix
Introduction
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 bril-
liance 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 lit-
erature 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 theo-
rists (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 fur-
ther 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 before 4 ) Hennis penned his lament, steps have been
taken to remove this lacuna. This book can be viewed as one of those
steps.
It examines the intellectual career of Alfred Weber, Max’s brother
and Mannheim’s sponsor. Max Weber and Simmel were somewhat
marginal institutional figures within academia, the former due to his
debilitating illness, the latter due to systemic anti-Semitism, as was
1
2 Alfred Weber and the Crisis of Culture
the academic discipline of sociology during their lifetimes. Neither
lived to witness sociology’s partial institutionalization in the suc-
ceeding Weimar Republic. Alfred Weber, in contrast, did. He played
a more important role within the university and engaged intellec-
tually with members of the next two generations of sociologists—
including Mannheim, Norbert Elias, and Hans Gerth—as well as
with intellectuals outside of academia.
Wolfgang Schluchter is correct that Alfred Weber never approached
the legacy of his older brother, 5 but Alfred was a pioneer in the estab-
lishment of two areas of investigation that have come to be associ-
ated with Max—cultural sociology and the critique of bureaucracy.
His formulations of cultural sociology, one of which is included as
an appendix, were among the first to attempt to define that subdis-
cipline. It has recently been argued that Alfred’s study of the cul-
tural impact of the German hyperinflation on intellectuals “echoes
the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu,”6 a claim I will address in
Chapter 8 below. His important address on officialdom (bureauc-
racy) not only preceded the famous study by Robert Michels, who
cited it the next year,7 but also inspired Franz Kafka’s novel T he Trial .
Weber’s seminar in Heidelberg was a center of cultural sociology in
the 1920s. That was where Mannheim began his path to the soci-
ology of knowledge. Mannheim’s answers to the cultural crisis of
Weimar might have received more attention than those of his men-
tor, but the questions raised were those of Weber. Whatever their
staying power, Weber’s works retain their importance as founding
documents of the discipline.
Weber’s role as a political actor has been thoroughly investigated
by Eberhard Demm, who led a resurgence of interest in Weber in
Germany during the last three decades.8 Nevertheless, he is largely a
forgotten figure in the United States, despite the enormous popularity
of his brother Max. 9 This book will attempt to remedy that neglect.
It will investigate not only his cultural sociology and (briefly) the
succeeding cultural-historical studies, but also the very different eco-
nomic writings that preceded it and the cultural-political program
that accompanied it. The emphasis will be historical, to place Weber
in his German context and to view his cultural sociology as an
attempt to diagnose and deal with the problems of that context. In a
sense this study is as much about that context as it is about Weber. 1 0
In focusing on the interaction of an individual with his larger
context, I have tried to negotiate between biography, the history of
ideas, and institutional studies. I have made use of all three of those
aspects, but the emphasis is on the interaction among them. I have