A Life in Troubled Times—Cut Short, Fulfilled: Review essay of "Max Weber Briefe 1918-1920"

Abstract

[MVS 13.1 (2013) 111-125] ISSN 1470-8078 A Life in Troubled Times—Cut Short, Fulfilled: Review essay of Max Weber Briefe 1918-1920 Uta Gerhardt Max Weber-Briefe 1918-1920, edited by Gerd Krumeich and M. Rainer Lepsius together with Uta Hinz, Sybille Qßwald-Bargende and Man fred Schön, 2 Halbbände (two volumes), Max Weber Gesamtausgabe— im Auftrag der Kommission für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Section II, Correspon dence, vol. 10; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2012, pp. xxxiii +1218. ISBN 978-3-16-150895-0. €508.00. The two volumes of Max Weber's correspondence between Janu ary 1918 and May 1920, the last two and a half years of his life, are an impressive collection of over four hundred letters, crowning the series in section II of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe. This collection is the most welcome Fundgrube for scholars who feel that the picture previously drawn from the correspondence is in need of urgent revi sion, and that this is a matter that concerns not Weber alone but also the connection between his oeuvre and personal life, even psyche. The full material presented here puts the record straight, document ing as it does from the (original) letters written by Weber himself, that his sociology was neither a spill-over from his concern for the future of Germany nor was it a fallout of his personal and love life. Indeed, Weber7 s last two years of life were an era of crisis in Ger many, when he first engaged in and later withdrew from active pol itics, whereas his personal life provided some kind of cantus firmus undergirding his thoughts and feelings as he moved in and out of— or, out from and into again—the worlds of academia, politics, and sociology. In the troubled times of Germany's dramatic transition from Monarchy to Republic, in the wake of defeat in the War, he fell in love with the woman whom he was to worship ever after, Else Jaffé, née von Richthofen, whom he had known for some twenty© Max Weber Studies 2013, Clifton House, 17 Malvern Road, London, E8 3LP. 112 Max Weber Studies years but made his 'golden angel' only at this point. Their corre spondence witnesses how passionate the relationship was that gave him strength, perseverance, and courage, as he became politically influential, returned to an academic post, and produced some works unparalleled as classics to this day. Weber's letters from the period of 1918-1920, place him in his times when his opus major took shape, a torso that made him world famous as sociologist. In a matter of months, he re-wrote previous work, the chapters on sociology of authority in Die Wirtschaft und die gesellschaftlichen Ordnungen und Mächte that now became Chap ter 3 of the new work, whose chapter 1 tackled the methodologi cal groundwork and chapter 2 the theory of economic action. The emergent book carried the working title, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. To make a long story short, the newly added chapters became the opening section of Economy and Society, the posthumous work rec onciling the earlier writings and the unfinished textbook, under the editorship of Marianne Weber and Johannes Winckelmann. At the time, he revised and finalized also the Sociology of Religion published earlier in long articles in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, the journal whose editor he had been since 1904. The correspondence highlights also Weber's role in the planning of the Constitution of the Weimar Republic as well as his sojourn at Ver sailles as a member of the delegation at the Peace Conference where he hoped he could influence the unfortunate conditions that Ger many was made to accept subsequently. All this happened while he resumed his professorship, after nearly fifteen years outside aca demia. First in Vienna in the summer of 1918, and from the summer of 1919 onward in Munich, he returned to the lectern—an achieve ment that he himself commented on, as somewhat unbelievable, to his Heidelberg confidante Mina Tobler: 'A strange "adventure", in a way, the thing here has become nearly unreal and ghostly, espe cially against...