Max Weber's Articles on German Agriculture and Industry in the "Encyclopedia Americana" (1906/1907) and their Political Context

Abstract

Recently two lengthy entries by Max Weber on German agriculture and industry were discovered in the Encyclopedia Americana of 1906/1907. They appear to be the only articles Weber wrote for a broad anglophone readership, apart from the poorly translated lecture at the Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis in 1904. As economic experts Hugo Muensterberg, the organizer of the 23 contributions on Germany, chose two leading advocates of imperialist Weltpolitik, Weber and Ernst von Halle, Admiral Tirpitz's propaganda chief for Imperial Germany's ambitious naval expansion. The proximity of Weber's combative but somber 'social imperialism' to Halle's was recognized in the 1920s by the anti-establishment historian Eckart Kehr, but in recent decades has been overlooked in the Weber literature. Pursuing Weltpolitik in a lower key, Weber restates his long-held view, shared by Halle, that the fast growing German Industriestaat should be integrated into the world economy by a policy of moderate tariffs and trade treaties, in opposition to the conservative policies of high tariffs and autarky and, more recently, to Joseph Chamberlain's Imperial tariff movement. Backed by plenty of statistics, his own and Halle's, he enables the reader to compare the agricultural and industrial developments of Germany and the United States and to some extent also those of England and France. Considering American and German trade barriers ultimately surmountable, he warns of increasing Anglo-German tensions. His line of reasoning fitted Muensterberg's overarching cultural agenda, which aimed at a rapprochement between Germany and the United States by promoting Deutschtum and reducing 'Anglo-Saxon hegemony'. The political context of the Americana story involves the prehistory of the First World War.