Sombart’s war against the cultural decay of a capitalist world

Abstract

By 1914 Sombart was well known world-wide as a historian of modern capitalism and a knowledgeable sympathizer of the socialist labor movement. He had, however, already begun to rewrite his analysis of capitalism as a cultural critique of the modern world. The article analyses how this cultural critique lent itself to the translation into chauvinist hate speech when World War I broke out. The resulting pamphlet on “Merchants and Heroes” was gross even by the standards of the time which helps explaining why Sombart was increasingly isolated from his colleagues most of whom were like Weber fierce nationalists themselves. The article investigates the various dimensions of this isolation and asks to what degree Sombart regained a more scholarly stance after 1918. While the final volume of his “Modern Capitalism” when it appeared in 1927 was well received even by a socialist reviewer like Rudolf Hilferding it has to be said that antisemitic and misogynist resentments characterized his postwar work throughout—a sad culmination being Sombart’s reduction of Rosa Luxemburg’s politics to the fourfold stigmatization of being Polish, Jewish, female and physically handicapped. In his case World War I radicalized positions already present before and this radicalization impregnated the postwar work for good.