Max Weber and the Culture of Anarchy

256 Pages·1999·29.92 MB·English

by  Sam Whimster (eds.)

MAX WEBER AND THE CULTURE OF ANARCHY
Also by Sam Whimster
ALDGATE PAPERS IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL THEORY (editor)
THE ESSENTIAL WEBER
Max Weber and the
Culture of Anarchy
Edited by
Sam Whimster
Reader in Sociology
London Guildhall University
London
First published in Great Britain 1999 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-333-73021-8 ISBN 978-1-349-27030-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-27030-9
First published in the United States of America 1999 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-21302-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Max Weber and the culture of anarchy I edited by Sam Whimster.
p. cm.
Includes letters in German.
Includes bibliographical References and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21302-2 (cloth)
l. Weber, Max, 1864-1920--Views on anarchism. 2. Anarchism
-History. 3. Political culture. I. Whimster, Sam, 1947-
HX828.M34 1998
320.5'7'095-dc21 97-42334
CIP
Selection and editorial matter © Sam Whimster 1999
Text © Macmillan Press Ltd 1999
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without written permission.
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
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accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
Contents
List of Plates vii
Preface viii
Notes on the Contributors x
Editions and Abbreviations of Weber Texts xii
Introduction to Weber, Ascona and Anarchism
Sam Whimster 1
2 Letters from Ascona
Max Weber 41
3 Weber and Lawrence and Anarchism
Martin Green 72
4 Max Weber, Anarchism and Libertarian Culture:
Personality and Power Politics
Carl Levy 83
5 Max Weber: a German Intellectual and the Question
of War Guilt after the Great War
Karl-Ludwig Ay 110
6 Sexual Revolution and Anarchism: Erich Miihsam
Ulrich Linse 129
7 Max Weber, Leo Tolstoy and the Mountain of Truth
Edith Hanke 144
8 Weber and Dostoyevsky on Church, Sect and
Democracy
Charles Turner 162
9 The 'Science of Reality' of Music History: on the
Historical Background to MaxWeber's Study of
Music
Christoph Braun 176
v
vi Contents
10 Love and Death. Weber, Wagner and Max Klinger
David Chalcraft 196
11 Max Weber and German Expressionism
Mary Shields 214
Index 232
List of Plates
All plates are taken from Graphic Works of Max Klinger, by 1. K. Vamedoe
and E. Streicher (New York: Dover Publications, 1977).
l. Eve and the Future: Eve
2. Eve and the Future: First Future
3. Eve and the Future: The Serpent
4. Eve and the Future: Second Future
5. Eve and the Future: Adam
6. Eve and the Future: Third Future
7. A Love: Happiness
8. On Death, Part I: Death as Saviour
VlI
Preface
This volume of essays was triggered by a visit I made in the summer of
1992 to the Prussian Secret State Archive in Merseburg outside Leipzig
where I was a guest lecturer for the semester. I decided to pay the archive
a visit as it was known to contain Max Weber's Nachlass. With no parti
cular plan in mind I looked at some of the files and came across three
marked 'Max Weber an Frieda Gross'. The correspondence and docu
ments seemed mostly legal - wills and court cases - and belonging to
long-forgotten private lives. Then another file revealed letters by Max
Weber, written in Ascona to his wife Marianne. Frieda Gross was the wife
of the infamous Otto. Ascona was, of course, 'The Mountain of Truth'
well known from the books by Martin Green and Harald Szeemann. Not
only had Max Weber stayed in Ascona for over six weeks, he had sent
35 letters to Marianne, only a fraction of which she had published in her
biography.
The letters were circulated at the 1995 Max Weber Study Group confer
ence on 'Max Weber - Politics - Culture', which was supported by the
efforts of David Cha1craft and by the British Sociological Association.
There were many unexplained threads in the letters; private and public,
intellectual and political. This volume grew out of the conference. Not
only did the contributions bring an understanding of the issues that were
talked about in Ascona, but they also showed how the public and private,
and the cultural and the political, intertwined. Equally the world of per
sonal encounters interweaved with the textual Weber. Was Weber bring
ing his own sociological mindset to Ascona, or did this strange
incongruous world impact on his aloof intellectual cosmos? More the
latter than the former, is my conclusion.
My thanks are due to John Eidson, Harald Homann, and Johannes Weiss
for initital discussions back in Leipzig. Subsequent visits to Germany were
supported by the Department of Sociology, London Guildhall University,
and by the German Academic Exchange Service to whom I am most grate
ful. The road to Ascona passes through Munich's Schwabing, where I was
looked after by one of its resident spirits, Klaus Friedrich, to whom many
thanks are due. Dr Karl-Ludwig Ay provided unfailing support and advice
viii
Preface ix
at the Max Weber Arbeitstelle in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. In
Heidelberg the letters editor of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, Birgit
Rudhard was generous with her help and advice, and Professor Rainer
Lepsius was, as ever, courteous, humorous and helpful. James Joll, who is
greatly missed, read the Ascona letters and gave me much encouragement.
The publication of this small selection of letters was only possible through
the services of the Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, in
Merseburg, to whom I acknowledge my debt. A debt is also owed to the
staff seminar in the Sociology Department at London Guildhall
University, who had to experience the amateurish narrative at my first
attempts to work out what was happening in Weber's and the anarchists'
lives. I am also greatly indebted to Sven Eliaeson, Edith Hanke, Carl
Levy, Ulrich Linse, Ralph Schroeder, Mary Shields, Christopher Stanley
and Guenther Roth for numerous chats and letters. Martin Green has been
an unfailing source of information as well as communicating to me why
these people and the values they held matter.