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Social Science and Political Commitments in the Young Max Weber

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

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In 1892 the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Association for Social Policy) published six studies of agricultural workers in Germany (1). Five of the six authors were Karl Kaerger, H. Losch, Kuno Frankenstein, Friedrich Grossman, and Otto Auhagen. The sixth author was Max Weber. He was only 28 years old. But his study of agricultural workers touched on many themes that he developed in his more mature scholarship, and on some of the dilemmas that he faced in his later political writings and political activities.

Type
Weber et Durkheim: le solitaire et le chef d'école
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1968

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References

(1) Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter in Deutschland, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Vols. LIII–LV (Berlin, Duncker und Humblot, 1892).Google Scholar The six studies are as follows: Kaerger, Karl, »Die ländlichen Arbeiterverhältnisse in Nordwestdeutschland«, Vol. LIII, pp. 1239Google Scholar; Losch, H., »Die ländlichen Arbeiterverhältnisse in Württemberg, Baden und in den Reichsländeer«, Vol. LIII, pp. 243440Google Scholar; Frankenstein, Kuno, »Die ländlichen Arbeiterverhältnisse in Hohenzollern, Reg. — Bez. Wiesbaden, Thüringen, Bayern, Grossherzogtum Hessen, Reg. — Bez. Kassel, Königreich Sachsen«, Vol. LIV, pp. 1400Google Scholar; Grossman, Friedrich, »Die ländlichen Arbeiterverhältnisse in der Provinz Schleswig — Holstein (exkl. Kreis Herzogtum Lauenburg) den Provinzen Sachsen (exkl. der Kreise Schleusingen und Ziegenruck und Hannover (südl. Teil), sowie den Herzogtümern Braunschweig und Anhalt«, Vol. LIV, pp. 401649Google Scholar; Auhagen, Otto, »Die ländlichen Arbeiterverhältnisse in der Rheinprovinz und im Oldenburgischen Fürstentum Birkenfeld«, Vol. LIV, pp. 651765Google Scholar; Weber, Max, »Die Verhältnisse der Landarbeiter im Ostelbischen Deutschland«, Vol. LV, pp. 1804.Google Scholar In the citations to these six works below only author and page numbers will be given.

(2) The questionnaires are reprinted in ibid. Vol. LIII, pp. XIV–XXIV. The 2 277 long questionnaires were about 72% of 3 180 that were distributed and the 291 shorter questionnaires were a return of about 52% of 562 that were distributed.

(3) Mommsen reports that when the Verein asked Weber to participate in the project on agricultural workers he “sought out for himself the most difficult, above all the politically most significant (politisch aktuellsten), and at the same time most controversial part” of the project, the East Elbian region. Mommsen, Wolfgang J., Max Weber und die Deutsche Politik: 1890–1920 (Tübingen, Mohr, 1959), p. 24.Google Scholar However, there seems to be no certain record on this point and we apparently cannot be certain whether Weber sought out the Eastern region, or the Verein assigned it to him with no initiative on his part.

(4) For a more detailed summary of these regional variations, and of Webers study, see Bendix, Reinhard, Max Weber, An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, Doubleday, 1960), pp. 1423.Google Scholar

(5) These purposes are, of course, only Chapsome of the several purposes to which the Verein's studies of agricultural workers, disserand other studies that the Verein sponsored and organized, might lend themselves. For a discussion of the studies of rural workers and other studies that the Verein sponsored from a methodological point worker of view, emphasizing their inadequacies when judged in the light of prevailing standards today, see Oberschall, Anthony R., Empirical Social Research in Germany, 1848–1914 (Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University, 1962), 3446.Google Scholar For the use of workersome of the Verein's studies as data for quantitative intellectual history, see Dibble, Vernon K., The Diffusion of the Bureaucratic Outlook: Some Lessons from the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University, 1961)Google Scholar, Chapsome ters V and VI. This paper is a considerably revised version of Chapter VII of that disserand tation.

(6) Weber, , op. cit. p. 796.Google Scholar

(7) Auhagen, , op. cit. p. 743Google Scholar; Kaerger, , op. cit. p. 216.Google Scholar

(8) Kaerger's discussions of worker-employer relationships are almost always directly related to the problems of discipline (pp. 28, 55–56, 71, 100, 130, 175, 191). Auhagen notes that an inadequate labor supply makes the worker the “Herr der Situation” (p. 745).Google Scholar Discussions of workersome employer relationships in close connections with the problem of discipline are seen also in Frankenstein, (pp. 132, 227)Google Scholar and in Losch, (pp. 330331).Google Scholar

(9) Kaerger, , p. 216.Google Scholar

(10) Frankenstein, , pp. 114, 227Google Scholar; Grossmann, , pp. 520–21, 545Google Scholar; Auhagen, , p. 745.Google Scholar

(11) Frankenstein, , p. 114.Google Scholar

(12) Grossmann, , pp. 520–21.Google Scholar

(13) Weber, , p. 630, p. 780Google Scholar, et al. Compare these statements with, for example, that of Losch, , p. 331Google Scholar, or of Frankenstein, , p. 219.Google Scholar

(14) Weber, , p. 628, p. 790.Google Scholar

(15) Weber, , p. 639.Google Scholar

(16) This is the dominant theme of his concluding section, pp. 774–804.

(17) Kaerger, , pp. 131, 174Google Scholar; Frankenstein, , pp. 114, 227.Google Scholar

(18) Kaerger, , p. 117Google Scholar; Losch, , p. 329Google Scholar; Frankenstein, , pp. 11, 13, 17Google Scholar; Grossmann, , pp. 487, 530Google Scholar: Auhagen, , pp. 663–64, 738, 743.Google Scholar

(19) Kaerger, , p. 55Google Scholar; Losch, , p. 331Google Scholar; Frankenstein, , pp. 67, 82Google Scholar; Grossmann, , p. 479.Google Scholar

(20) Weber, , p. 764.Google Scholar

(21) Ibid. pp. 793–94.

(22) Ibid. p. 780.

(23) Ibid. p. 795.

(24) Weber, Marianne, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen, J. C. B. Mohr, 1926), pp. 2830, 4142.Google Scholar

(25) Antoni, Carlo, From History to Sociology: The Transition in German Historical Thinking, translated by White, Hayden V. (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1959), pp. 123124.Google Scholar

(26) Weber, , p. 795.Google Scholar

(27) Mommsen, (op. cit. p. 27)Google Scholar emphasizes the fact that Weber did not spell out his suggested reforms in detail and wrote that Mommthe answer to the question, what ought to happen, could not be expected from his study of East Elbian workers. Mommsen then goes on to write, “the objectivity of the scientist held back the politician in him” (i.e. in Weber). This is a debatable reading of Weber's text. Weber does outline some reforms. He does make explicit political judgments. And, at the meeting of the Verein in 1893Google Scholar, he entered into more detailed discussion of possible reforms (cf. Mommsen, , op. cit. pp. 3031).Google Scholar There seem to be no grounds for reading his later ideas about value-free social science back into this early work. Even if one could do so, however, Weber's ideas about value-free science were not so simplistic as to make him think that there is any important difference between a social scientist's making political proposals in writing and his making them in oral discussion, or that the scientific components of a text are any less scientific because some political proposals are bound between the same covers.

(28) For example, in Burke, “a true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it” but is, rather, “an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted […] without which there is no nation”. Bredvold, Louis I. and Ross, Ralph G. (eds.), The Philosophy of Edmund Burke (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 1011.Google Scholar Burke's description of the circumstances that create a “natural aristocracy” seems to say that a combination of commercial and landed classes is the bearer of the “great fundamental interest of the whole” (p. 114).Google Scholar “To be employed as an administrator of law and justice” and “to be habituated in armies to command and obey” probably refer, at least in part, to local gentry who served as Justices of the Peace and to the largely aristocratic officer corps. But another circumstance that forms a natural aristocracy is “to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigourous understand ings”.

(29) Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, The Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar, illustrates the procedural emphasis of democratic pluralists and their relative lack of explicit concern with the concrete substance of political goals. For example, and among many other possible citations, “the difference between liberal democracy and populist democracy, then, does not concern who shall have access to power […]; rather, it concerns how power shall be sought, the mode of access” (p. 131). For an argument that it is not possible to have a conception of the common good within the framework of democratic pluralist ideology, see Wolff's critique of democratic pluralism in Wolff, Robert Paul, Moore, Barrington and Marcuse, Herbert, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, Beacon Press, 1965), pp. 352.Google Scholar

(30) The Federalist, (New York, Random House, 1937), p. 54.Google Scholar The quotations that follow are from various passages in The Federalist No. 10, pp. 5363.Google Scholar

(31) Weber tried to find groups or movemerits that would support his ideas. For example, in 1893 he joined the conservative, nationalist Pan-German League, principally, according to Mommsen, in hopes of finding support for his views about East Elbian agriculture, including his proposal to keep out Polish workers. At first he found encouragement; but the League, in deference to the large landowners among its members, did not push this program; and in 1899 Weber resigned (cf. Mommsen, , op. cit. pp. 6263).Google Scholar The German middle class and proletarian politics offered no more hope to Weber than large landowners did (ibid. pp. 96–100).

(32) Weber, Max, Parlament und Regierung im neugeordneten DeutschlandGoogle Scholar, first published in 1918 and reprinted in Gesammelte Politische Schriften, second edition edited by Winckelmann, Johannes (Tübingen, Mohr, 1958), pp. 294431.Google Scholar

(33) Ibid. pp. 341 sq. See also Bendix, , op. cit. 438457Google Scholar for a more detailed presentation and discussion of Weber's views on these issues. On the same points, and for the connections between Weber's belief in Parliamentarism and his support of German imperialism, see Mommsen, , op. cit.Google Scholar chapter VI, “Aussenpolitik und innere Verfassungsstruktur”.

(34) Ibid. p. 304.

(35) Ibid. p. 299.

(36) Antoni, , op. cit. p. 124.Google Scholar The words quoted are Antoni's not Weber's.

(37) On some of these points, see Eisermann, Gottfried, Die Grundlagen des Historismus in der Deutschen Nationaloekonomie (Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1956).Google Scholar

(38) Quoted in Boese, Franz, Geschichte des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik, Vol. 188 (Berlin, Duncker und Humblot, 1939), p. 8.Google Scholar

(39) Weber, Marianne, op. cit. pp. 122129, 131135.Google Scholar

(40) Weber, , p. 796.Google Scholar

(41) Weber, , p. 804.Google Scholar Weber had no illusions, of course, about the extent of nationalunity that such appeals could evoke. On this point, see the quotation from his talk at the 1893 meeting of the Verein in Mommsen, , op. cit. p. 35.Google Scholar

(42) In this connection see the appendix entitled “Max Weber et la politique de puissance” in Aron, Raymond, Les étapes de la petisée sociologique (Gallimard, 1967).Google Scholar See especially Aron's discussion (p. 648 sq.) of the Darwinian, Nietzchean, economic-scarcity, Marxist, and nationalist components in Weber, 's Weltanschauung.Google Scholar See also Mommsen, , op. cit. pp. 4554Google Scholar, for a discussion of Weber's view of the unrelentthis less nature of struggles for power.

(43) Weber, Max, Science as a Vocation, in Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, Oxford University Press, 1946).Google Scholar The quotation is from page 152.

(44) Meinecke, Friedrich, one of Weber's associates, states this theme explicitly in the foreward to his book, Staat und Persönlichkeit (Berlin, E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1933).Google Scholar The statement of this theme reads as if the author were summing up Weber's biography. Meinecke wrote that he sees

das Ideal historischer Erkenntnis darin, die Doppelpoligkeit alles historischen Geschehens zu begreifen und die schöpferische Persönlichkeit als die Kraft zu erfassen, die letzten Endes auch alien überindividuellen Gewalten, dem Staate wie den gesellschaftlichen und wirtschaftlichen Mächten, als innerer Springquell innewohnen muss, urn sie historisch weiter zu entwickeln. Mit der bloß ästhetisierenden Freude an der Persönlichkeit ist es dabei nicht getan. Denn wie der Staat nur durch die spontan schaffende Persönlichkeit, so kann auch die Persönlichkeit nur durch ihr hartes, schmerzliches und oft tragisches Ringen mit den überindividuellen Gewalten zur Höhe ihrer geschichtlichen Leistung gelangen. Keiner kann des anderen entbehren.

For a related discussion of “the power orientation of the educated blended with the humanistic orientation of the powerful” in German middle class liberalism, see Bendix, , op. cit. pp. 3133.Google Scholar

(45) Weber, , op. cit. p. 139, pp. 150151.Google Scholar