On Sombart

Abstract

Ladies and Gentlemen, Honored colleagues! May I first introduce myself as a now retired social scientist, who, due to an to an ex-vitation by the Nazis and unsolicited in-vitations by institutions of higher learning in this country, has spent more than half a century in the United States. Much of that time I devoted to what may be called bridge-building between American and German Catholic social thought and movements. Werner Sombart was one of my very first contacts with sociology and economics alongside with the teachings of Heinrich Pesch, S.J., known among historians of comparative economic systems for his five-volume Lehrbuch der Nationalokonomie (Textbook of Economics) and his socio-economic system of solidarism. I will, of course, today restrict myself to Werner Sombart, though my personal contacts with him did not have quite the scope of those I had with Pesch, whose work Sombart in his Die drei Nationalokonomien (Munich 1950, p. 36) characterized as bedeutend (i.e., significant). I began my economic studies in the Fall of 1919 at the Handelshochschule of Berlin, i.e. the Graduate School of Business Administration, established in 1906 by the Elders of the Merchants of Greater Berlin. Sombart, after sixteen years at the University of Breslau, accepted a call from the HHB (Handelshochschule Berlin), joining its faculty in the very first year of its foundation. When in 1919, the year of my matriculation, I caught sight of Sombart, and it is true, for the first time, he had already been teaching there for over a decade. It seems, however, that the nearby Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat of Berlin (now the Humboldt University) was in no hurry to call Sombart to an academic chair, probably because of his supposedly pink past. In view of the fact that Sombart had studied at the University of Berlin under such famous scholars as Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller who had been known as Socialists of the Chair or Professorial Socialists, it is hard to understand why the school of philosophy, which included the department of political economy did not even rush to offer Sombart a chair. If there was at that time a mis-interpretation of Sombart's socio-economic philosophy it may have been due to Sombart's disclaim of fellowship to any definite ideology, much less of some permanent discipleship. Be that as it may, I for one profited from this situation though I was still too much of an academic greenhorn to be aware of this advantage. If you keep in mind that all this was going on when I had barely left the stage of a teenager, you will understand that I am no longer sure of how I (in 1991 91 years of age) handled those early experiences. I must have read Werner Sombart's Der Bourgeois (Munich 1913) and read it with growing excitement, particularly the two introductory chapters and those that deal with the spiritual sources of the capitalist frame of mind. I was amazed for sure that Sombart, a non-Catholic, had such an astonishingly perfect knowledge of classical scholastic doctrine, especially, however, of the moral philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. To this day, however, I am dumbfounded by the fact that Sombart's dictum according to which the canonical prohibition of usury gave a mighty impetus to the expansion of the capitalist spirit, did not immensely stir the academic community, especially the sociologists. Likewise, it should have intrigued the lettered people. Sombart's thesis, it is to be admitted, does seem to be paradoxical. Members of the propertied classes at that time came to the conclusion that investment which was considered morally unobjectionable is easier on the conscience, they were likely to prefer the outlay of capital for profit to lending money at interest. Thus it is actually not so paradoxical as it appears to be at first sight, just as a Graduate School of Business Administration is not at all so removed from the idea of ethical investment banking. This seemed to me at least as intelligible as Max Weber's theory of the role of calvinism in the origin and development of capitalism. …