German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar by Austin Harrington (review)

Abstract

304 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2017. teacher’s, and journalist’s activity, an enabling exchange between those who act and those who are acted on.3 Kemple covers the issues implicit in this formulation but takes us much further than Simmel. The presentation of Weber in this work, flawed and misleading as it occasionally is, exemplifies a more general account of scholarship as performance. This is a perspective infrequently engaged but informative of an element of intellectual work illuminating of its process where the focus is typically on its product. This is an important consideration and it is what makes Kemple’s Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism an important book. Jack Barbalet Australian Catholic University, Melbourne Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), x + 439 pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-1-107-11091-5. £84.99. It might seem as if everything about the Weimar Republic and its intellectual friends and enemies had already been written. But in the run-up to the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the first German democracy, the deck has been reshuffled. The new study by Austin Harrington, a sociologist and philosopher at the University of Leeds, is among those offering new perspectives. There are nine ‘voices from Weimar’ which form a political choir in Harrington’s book. In the chronological order of the year of their death, which lie between the Kaiserreich and the Federal Republic, the voices are: Georg Simmel (1858–1918), Max Weber (1864–1920), Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), Max Scheler (1874–1928), Ferdinand Tönnies (1855– 1936), Karl Mannheim (1893–1947), Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), Alfred Weber (1868–1958), and Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). It is a choir of bourgeois and liberal social scientists and cultural philosophers. Harrington aggregates them as a specific intellectual milieu. What fascinates him are the texts produced by this milieu between 1914/18 and 1933, which he reads as a shared musical score. The basic idea of the book is original. Following the lead of postcolonial studies, which has now encouraged us to think about ‘provincializing Europe’ (Dipesh Chakrabarty) from a non-Western perspective, we might read German-speaking social thinkers as voices 3. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 86. Book Reviews 305© Max Weber Studies 2017. of intra-European criticism of the notion of a linear and evolutionary ‘long road West’. They stand for provincializing the West in the service of a cosmopolitan goal: ‘German cosmopolitan social thought of the Weimar years decentres, relativizes or “provincializes” European consciousness from a location immanent to European intellectual history’ (5). This thesis, applied to the ‘Western’ ordering ideas of democratic institutions, capitalist economy, and cultural individualism , has several implications for Harrington. First, there are diverse liberal traditions in Europa for thinking about capitalism as ‘the most fateful force of modern life’ (Max Weber). Working in the tradition of historicism and with the sociology of knowledge, German-speaking social scientists have developed a high capacity for reflecting on these matters. Their polemical writings during the First World War should not be read as an aggressive defense of an anti-Western Sonderweg; rather, their ‘protest at the West’ should be understood more as a plea for ‘cultural and civilizational plurality’, for distinct historical paths into European and ‘Western’ modernity. Second, these selected social scientists and intellectuals have engaged critically but constructively with narratives of ‘the West’ from a universal-historical perspective. They always defended ‘Western traditions’ with cosmopolitan intentions. Their traditions, which are shared in many interlocking ways, cannot be reduced to mere Eurocentrism. Their historical thinking directs our attention to the problems of the present, and to traditions that ‘essentially survive problems of “Eurocentrism” and continue to suggest ways in which these problems can be tackled directly in the present day’ (2). The nine protagonists fight on multiple fronts to provide Germans with new perspectives for their future. Their cosmopolitan worldview moves them to self-critically question the claims of Eurocentric hegemony. Their sensitivity to differences enables them to critically deconstruct evolutionary Whig histories of Western civilization, such as H. G. Wells’s bestseller The Outline...