Max Weber. Stationen und Impulse einer intellektuellen Biographie by Gangolf Hübinger (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews 269© Max Weber Studies 2021. Gangolf Hübinger, Max Weber. Stationen und Impulse einer intellektuellen Biographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019), xi + 419 pp. (hbk). ISBN 9783 -16-155724-8. €64.00. Can interpretive sociology interpret itself? In other words: if we apply Weber’s sociological concepts to Weber’s works, what do we get then? Weberforschung never gave a satisfactory answer to that question. The epistemic horizon of a hypothetical Weberian meta-sociology could never be limited to the specific case of its founding father. Succumbing to the idiographic ‘temptation’ would mean, here, to contradict itself. In any case, this paradox seems to have at least one exception. The historical sociology of intellectuals is perhaps the only branch of interpretive sociology in which Weber, so to speak, can become an object of himself. Although the German master did not elaborate a sociology of intellectuals stricto sensu, we find in his work the foundations of a sub-discipline whose importance has only grown in recent decades, and in which Gramsci, Schumpeter, Schelsky, and Bourdieu, to name a few, repeatedly looked to Weber for inspiration. Gangolf Hübinger places his new book on the path opened by this ‘exception’. Despite its title, what the reader has before his eyes is not a biography, but rather a detailed historical-sociological reconstruction. As a member of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe editorial board and one of the leading interpreters of Weber’s works, Hübinger grounds his approach on Reinhart Koselleck’s classic study on the relationship between great methodological innovations and the experience of pivotal historical transformations.1 It is a matter of re-reading Weber in a perspective that goes far beyond a traditional contextualization in the political and academic spheres. From a systemic and macrohistorical perspective, Weber’s space of experience coincides with what Hübinger considers to be the advent of a new cultural threshold (Kulturschwelle) that has its epicenter in Western Europe at the beginning of the last century (2). A moment in European history characterized by the affirmation of modern capitalism and democracy, by the so-called crisis of historicism, and by the experience of a civilization increasingly exposed to the urban environment, pluralism of worldviews, and conflicts of interests.2 It may be said that a necessary complement to the historical sociology of intellectuals, as Hübinger understands and practices it, is that same cultural history that Weber claimed for himself when The Protestant Ethic 1. Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten. Studien zur Historik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), pp. 27-77. 2. Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Max Weber e a história cultural da modernidade’, Tempo Social 24.1 (2012): 119-36 (121-22). 270 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2021. was published. A great connoisseur of the nineteenth-century liberal Protestant milieu that he studied in his Habilitationsschrift, Hübinger situates Weber in dialogue with the literary field of his time (from the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann to Robert Musil), with the history of the German publishing houses and large editorial projects, and with the flourishing universe of academic journals. The first part of the book is entitled ‘Bourgeois Conduct of Life and Scientific Orientation’. Hübinger revisits the early stages of Weber’s family and academic socialization as a member of the ‘literate bourgeoisie’ in Germany. His rapid academic ascent was interrupted, as we all know, by the continuous nervous crises that led him to withdraw from teaching in 1903. From that moment on, he became a Privatgelehrter, an ‘private scholar’. For Hübinger, it is precisely this condition that allowed Weber to move freely through fields as far apart from each other as the methodology of the human sciences, German agrarian structure, the genesis of capitalism’s spirit and the liberal revolution in Russia. Yet Weber was not a ‘pure’ type of Privatgelehrter (54). Maintaining an honorary professorship in Heidelberg, he was able to influence the choice of new professors. Most importantly, he participated as coeditor of the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, where he published some of his most important works, and directed the new edition of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik. His transition from a historical political economy to...