Die Entstehung der Kapitalismustheorie in der Gründungsphase der deutschen Soziologie: Von der historischen Nationalökonomie zur historischen Soziologie Werner Sombarts und Max Webers by Shiro Takebayashi (review)

Abstract

270 Max Weber Studies the impact of a sense of Christian community on the one hand, and the national com munity of the Volk on the other, that provide two of the main arenas within which Toews locates his discussion. He provides excellent and sophisticated reasons for combining the intellectual milieux of such figures as Schinkel and Schelling, Grimm, Ranke and Savigny, in an age that has, to be fair, been quite marginalized in terms of its importance to the more exciting bits of nineteenth-century German history by many. The intellectual excitement and adventure of the pre-1848 era is here illus trated by Toews, and the impact of historicism on early nineteenth-century German thinking given full expression, focusing on contexts of Savigny's development that update thinking in this area, and observing Stahl's conservative movement away from his account (see, e.g., pp. 292-305). Lord Acton had noted the importance of all of this in his early review in the first edition of the English Historical Review of Wegele's Deutsche Historiographie. After all that time, Toews has updated the connec tions drawn therein, in his ambitious attempt to offer a portrait of the spirit of an age, almost, in line with the developments in intellectual history of the last half century, coming to terms with writers such as Koselleck and Foucault in particular. Charting the attempt to think through questions of identity and selfhood historically was, of course, a pre-eminent theme in Weber7s oeuvre, in his attempt to trace particularly the nature and type of requirements that coexisted with particular spheres of life. These were both historical and normative limitations and only persons willing and able to shape their character to fit a particular course could be called true individuals. If Weber's concern was with their fate, then Toews and Wahrman in different ways are concerned with their origins and their capacities to think of themselves as 'selves' in the first place. This would be reason enough to recommend their books to readers of this journal. I hope that even in such a short review as this, which necessarily leaves out most of the wide-ranging detail and sophistication of these studies, it will be apparent that this is more than reason enough for historically-minded Weber scholars to take notice of their work. Duncan Kelly University of Cambridge Shiro Takebayashi, Die Entstehung der Kapitalismustheorie in der Gründungsphase der deutschen Soziologie: Von der historischen Nationalökonomie zur historischen Soziologie Werner Sombarts und Max Webers (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2003), pp. 546. ISBN 3-428-10638-5. €84.00. This work is a revised version of a dissertation originally presented to Bielefeld Faculty of Sociology during the Winter Semester 2000/2001, and bears all the usual marks of such writing: lengthy footnotes, an extensive bibliography (over fifty pages), deficient integration of the various parts into a coherent whole, and no clear conclusion. That said, it is also the best account of the 'German historical school of economics' to have been published, especially as regards the development of the 'school' during the 1880s and 1890s. The axis of Takebayashi's account is the publi cation of Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus in 1902, its reception among historians and economists, and its impact upon Max Weber. It is a book of two unequal halves: the genesis from the early 1880s of the material and the framework that Sombart deploys is brilliantly illuminating of what 'historical economics' was understood by© Max Weber Studies 2008. Book Reviews 271 its contemporaries to involve. By contrast, the attempt to link Sombart's historical account of modern capitalism to Max Weber's methodology and thence to a new German sociology is distinctly scrappy and unconvincing, even though the relent lessness of detail continues unabated to the end. In particular, the idea that what united Weber and Sombart was some affiliation to a 'historical sociology' remains an unsustainable claim. The 'Younger German School of Historical Economics' certainly did exist during the 1890s4—for one thing, Weber declared his membership in his Freiburg Inaugural address, and from time to time during the following two decades referred to himself as 'an economist', and...