Briefe 1903–1905 by Max Weber (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 309© Max Weber Studies 2017. motivates the book. It was not enough for him to write an ‘intellectual history’, rather, he wanted it to become a ‘historically informed normative social theory’ (11). In a critique of Ulrich Beck, whose idea of ‘cosmopolitan Europe’ appears too abstract to him, Harrington prepares a third point: The ‘reflexive modernity’, in which industrial societies self-critically examine their way of living, did not first emerge in the 1970s in the aftermath of the postwar economic boom. A reflexive ‘protesting the West’, sensitive to European provincialization in the global new order after 1918 and distinct from anti-Western nationalism, commenced after the First World War. The debates of these liberal Weimar social scientists can thus serve as a touchstone for contemporary debates about the eroding and estranged West (351-58). Harrington is not particularly interested in the socioeconomic dimension of his topic, and he tends to neglect controversies about the expansion or restraint of capitalism. As a result, the social philosophical aspect comes to fore. Karl Jaspers has the last word: ‘any collective individuality should be understood as becoming, or needing to become “individual not against the general but through the general”’ (373). With Jaspers, Harrington comes to the concluding point of the matter. Cosmopolitan thinking requires thinking about cultural difference. His protagonists correspondingly fight on two fronts. Against an evolutionary narrative of Western civilization, they defend the cultural difference of national traditions. But even more they attack the cultural nationalism that would suggest the possibility of withdrawing from the interconnections of the modern world. In his valuable study, Austin Harrington shows us just how rewarding the engagement with the voices of Weimar can be. Gangolf Hübinger Frankfurt (Oder) Max Weber, Briefe 1903–1905, edited by Gangolf Hübinger and M. Rainer Lepsius, together with Thomas Gerhards and Sybille Oßwald-Bargende (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe II/4; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), xxii + 750pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-153428-7. €294.00. One of the most significant contributions of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe , perhaps the definitive contribution, has been the publication of Max Weber’s correspondence. The letters and related 310 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2017. commentary have opened a window not only onto Weber’s life and work, but also onto the culture and politics of Imperial Germany and the Wilhelmine era, the Great War, and the beginnings of the Weimar Republic. All published volumes of the correspondence are important in their own ways. But the fourth volume that is under review, comprising the crucial years 1903 through 1905, seems especially noteworthy, for it covers Weber’s emergence from illness and return to scholarship, the launching of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, the composition and publication in its pages of The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism, the Webers’ journey to the United States, and Weber’s reentry into the always hypercharged debates in the Verein für Sozialpolitik. Along the way there are reports from numerous other travels—six alone in 1903 to the Italian Riviera, Rome, Scheveningen twice, Ostende, Hamburg, and Helgoland—and, of course, correspondence with family and colleagues , including examples of Weber’s proficiency in written Italian and English. In 1903, Max Weber chose the relative freedom of the life of a private scholar, resigning officially from his Heidelberg professorship and service to the state of Baden, and foregoing his salary. The change was agonizing and discussed at length, resisted by Marianne, but made possible by her impending inheritance, which according to Max’s calculations would provide an annual budget of at least 4,000 Marks. Enjoying the ‘miserable existence’ (Max’s words) of a rentier, he remained a stranger to the university lecture hall for the next fifteen years. The first sign of Weber’s return to intellectual life was the publication in Gustav Schmoller’s Jahrbuch of his painfully labored first essay on ‘Roscher and Knies and the Logical Problems of Historical Economics ’ in October 1903. By then discussions had already begun for Edgar Jaffé to purchase Heinrich Braun’s Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik for the sum of 60,000 Marks, an amount Weber considered a...