Wolfgang J. Mommsen: A British Appreciation

Abstract

[MWS 5.1 (2005) 119-122] ISSN 1470-8078 Wolfgang J. Mommsen: A British Appreciation Sam Whimster It is difficult to explain how Wolfgang J. Mommsen came to exercise such an enormous influence within the academic world of the United Kingdom. To an extent his reputation came before him. Max Weber und die deutsche Politik had been published in 1959 and almost immediately he was designated the enfant terrible of German academia. As the ageing torchbearer of the German Gelehrter tradition Karl Jaspers wrote to Hannah Arendt, 'A young man from the Mommsen family recently wrote an important book about Max Weber's politics...characterising him as a representative of imperialism and, by virtue of his mode of thought, as someone who prepared the w^ for Hitler'. Mommsen's book did not say that. But that was its reputation first in Germany and also in Britain in the early 1970s, even though it was never translated into English until 1984, by which time its academic and political effect had already been somewhat discounted. In his doctoral research Mommsen unearthed a profuse letter trail that showed beyond question that Weber throughout his life had been a committed and uncompromising nationalist and, in Mommsen's formu lation, that the values and structures of the nation took precedence over those of democracy. In Germany Max Weber und die deutsche Politik was a deeply transgressive book. Mommsen had gone over the border to Merse burg in the German Democratic Republic, where the Prussian State Archive was located, and discovered a major part of the Weber 'Nach lass'. Mommsen later reported that his supervisor, Theodor Schieder, was at first disbelieving about the content of Weber's political letters. The book caused an enormous shock at a time when no less an eminence as Theodor Heuss, then President of Germany's Federal Republic, had written a preface to Winckelmann's edition of Weber's collected political writings. Heuss, like Winckelmann, had portrayed Weber as an untainted liberal, a figure whom present-day Germans could look upon without embarrassment. Inevitably Mommsen's book unleashed a huge contro versy and it is worth indicating just how multi-layered that controversy was. It was clearly a generational conflict: a father and son conflict© Max Weber Studies 2005, Department of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University, Old Castle Street, London El 7NT, UK. 120 Max Weber Studies fought out in the academic presses. It should also be recalled that the controversy played out in the wider student revolt against the ruling generation and its structures of power (and tolerance) with Mommsen's book becoming emblematic as a critique of power, violence, and the elder generation. The Heidelberg German Sociology conference of 1964 indicates a further layer in which Mommsen's work was caught up in a wider ideological conflict in the 'show-down' between Bendix and Parsons in the US and the Frankfurt School. Lastly it should be recalled that Max Weber und die deutsche Politik was a liberating book for the post-war generation, greatly admired for its style and scholarly verve and for breaking a taboo that allowed new voices and new themes to be vigorously pursued. Mommsen's influence in Germany on a whole stratum of progressive academics and teachers from the 1960s onwards was considerable. Mommsen's first English book publication (in 1974) was his set of essays The Age of Bureaucracy, written during a fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford. Prior to this Weber was already regarded as a cham pion of conflict theory and of the view of liberalism as the political mask of a dehumanizing capitalism. The Heidelberg conference of 1964 was published in English in 1971. At that time it looked as if Mommsen's radicalism had been co-opted by the massively fashionable Marcuse. Mommsen was seen to stand for the 'realist' Weber, the new Machiavelli of the social sciences who was deployed against the Parsonian obfusca tions of social integration and value-freedom. Although Mommsen was received in this way—and a Mommsen appearance would always pack a lecture hall, his Age of Bureaucracy in fact offered a more nuanced Weber. To the Weber of 'negative liberalism' and the...