Max Weber in America - Hardcover

Scaff, Lawrence A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691147795 ISBN 13: 9780691147796

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Max Weber, widely considered a founder of sociology and the modern social sciences, visited the United States in 1904 with his wife Marianne. The trip was a turning point in Weber's life and it played a pivotal role in shaping his ideas, yet until now virtually our only source of information about the trip was Marianne Weber's faithful but not always reliable 1926 biography of her husband.Max Weber in America carefully reconstructs this important episode in Weber's career, and shows how the subsequent critical reception of Weber's work was as American a story as the trip itself. Lawrence Scaff provides new details about Weber's visit to the United States--what he did, what he saw, whom he met and why, and how these experiences profoundly influenced Weber's thought on immigration, capitalism, science and culture, Romanticism, race, diversity, Protestantism, and modernity. Scaff traces Weber's impact on the development of the social sciences in the United States following his death in 1920, examining how Weber's ideas were interpreted, translated, and disseminated by American scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Frank Knight, and how the Weberian canon, codified in America, was reintroduced into Europe after World War II. A landmark work by a leading Weber scholar, Max Weber in America will fundamentally transform our understanding of this influential thinker and his place in the history of sociology and the social sciences.

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Lawrence A. Scaff is professor of political science and sociology at Wayne State University. He is the author of "Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber".

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"Students of Weber have long been waiting for a study of his 1904 visit to the United States. It is finally here, splendidly researched and beautifully written by one of the foremost experts on Weber. The reader gets to follow Weber roaming the streets of New York and Chicago, meeting with luminaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois and William James, and participating in the famous Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis, which occasioned the visit."--Richard Swedberg, Cornell University

"This is an outstanding and pioneering work. Scaff offers a vivid picture of Weber's American experience as it has never been written before, and his book is full of fresh insights. He possesses a deep and detailed knowledge of both the American scene and of Weber's German contexts and background--few Weberians combine both qualifications as excellently as Scaff does. Reading this book was pure pleasure."--Joachim Radkau, Bielefeld University, Germany

"Max Weber in America is a masterpiece. Scaff is recognized as a leading Weber scholar and social theorist, and here he demonstrates the intellectual significance of Weber's visit to the United States both for Weber's work and for its subsequent American reception. There is no comparable book."--Guenther Roth, professor emeritus, Columbia University

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"Students of Weber have long been waiting for a study of his 1904 visit to the United States. It is finally here, splendidly researched and beautifully written by one of the foremost experts on Weber. The reader gets to follow Weber roaming the streets of New York and Chicago, meeting with luminaries such as W.E.B. Du Bois and William James, and participating in the famous Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis, which occasioned the visit."--Richard Swedberg, Cornell University

"This is an outstanding and pioneering work. Scaff offers a vivid picture of Weber's American experience as it has never been written before, and his book is full of fresh insights. He possesses a deep and detailed knowledge of both the American scene and of Weber's German contexts and background--few Weberians combine both qualifications as excellently as Scaff does. Reading this book was pure pleasure."--Joachim Radkau, Bielefeld University, Germany

"Max Weber in America is a masterpiece. Scaff is recognized as a leading Weber scholar and social theorist, and here he demonstrates the intellectual significance of Weber's visit to the United States both for Weber's work and for its subsequent American reception. There is no comparable book."--Guenther Roth, professor emeritus, Columbia University

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MAX WEBER IN AMERICA

By Lawrence A. Scaff

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14779-6

Contents

List of Illustrations.....................................................................................ixPreface...................................................................................................xiIntroduction..............................................................................................1ONE Thoughts about America...............................................................................11TWO The Land of Immigrants...............................................................................25THREE Capitalism.........................................................................................39FOUR Science and World Culture...........................................................................54FIVE Remnants of Romanticism.............................................................................73SIX The Color Line.......................................................................................98SEVEN Different Ways of Life.............................................................................117EIGHT The Protestant Ethic...............................................................................137NINE American Modernity..................................................................................161TEN Interpretation of the Experience.....................................................................181ELEVEN The Discovery of the Author.......................................................................197TWELVE The Creation of the Sacred Text...................................................................211THIRTEEN The Invention of the Theory.....................................................................229Appendix 1: Max and Marianne Weber's Itinerary for the American Journey in 1904...........................253Appendix 2: Max Weber, Selected Correspondence with American Colleagues, 1904–5.....................257Archives and Collections Consulted........................................................................267Bibliographic Notes.......................................................................................269Index.....................................................................................................305

Chapter One

THOUGHTS ABOUT AMERICA

Traveling to Progressive America

Max Weber was an indefatigable and enthusiastic traveler. In the two decades between his marriage to Marianne Schnitger in 1893 and the outbreak of World War I he journeyed to England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, France, Spain, Switzerland, Corsica, Austria-Hungary, Holland, Belgium, the United States, and again and again to northern and southern Italy. These trips served different purposes: a honeymoon and tourism in the early travels with Marianne to the UK and France in 1893 and 1895; escape from the pressures of work and recovery from emotional turmoil in the many flights south into France and Italy after 1898; and now and then professional obligations, such as the lecture at the Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904, or the meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in Vienna in 1909. Whatever the purpose, these journeys helped renew his spirits and cultivate his historical imagination. Sometimes he seemed capable of his scholarly labors only with the prospect of these episodes of renewal beckoning like a muse on the horizon.

The associations among traveling, energizing the mind and the emotions, and acquiring knowledge based on observation of the new and unexpected is a well-known human experience. The ancient world captured these associations in the Greek verb theorein, a compound of thea, the view or look of something; horan, to see a thing attentively; and the noun theoros, the attentive observer or the emissary sent to observe foreign practices and to "theorize" about them—that is, to construct a rational explanation about the strange and unexpected. The discoveries of the great naturalists and ethnographers, figures like Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, or Bronislaw Malinowski would obviously have been inconceivable without experience in the field. But so too would have been the work of some of the keenest observers of political and social life, writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce. Their classic commentaries of the nineteenth century on American politics and society, Democracy in America and The American Commonwealth, respectively, could only have been written with the benefit of observations made in the United States. What of Max Weber? As another astute observer of American life, Gunnar Myrdal, has once suggested, does he in this regard belong in the same company as Tocqueville, Bryce, and their counterparts in the sciences?

Of all of Weber's travels, the nearly three months in the United States in 1904 stands out in certain ways. It was a trip he had long anticipated, having canceled a plan in 1893 to visit the Chicago World's Fair with his friend Paul Göhre in favor of his secret engagement and subsequent marriage to Marianne Schnitger—replacing, it might be added, Göhre in her affections. His foreknowledge of American conditions had been cultivated for years by his father's 1883 Northern Pacific Railroad trip from Minneapolis–St. Paul to Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, orchestrated by the financier and family friend Henry Villard and accompanied by Carl Schurz, James Bryce, and Georg Siemens, among others. In discussing this episode Guenther Roth has quite rightly emphasized the interests of the "cosmopolitan bourgeoisie" in sizing up investment opportunities in the developing North American market, and residues of this interest may well have carried over to the son's probing of economic conditions two decades later. But Max Weber junior was also a self-conscious scholar, and his occasional statements about the 1904 journey show a desire to broaden his intellectual horizons and assess for himself what others had observed and written about American conditions, from Bryce's text (first published in 1888) that he read with care, to the commentaries and engaging enthusiasms of Friedrich Kapp; the important 1848 émigré, author, German American abolitionist politician and former associate of Karl Marx, Moses Hess; and other left Hegelians in the Rhineland. During Max's youth, Kapp, having returned to a unified Germany, frequented the Weber home in Charlottenburg and became a political ally of Max Weber Sr., both men holding liberal seats in the Reichstag. Within the family circle the American connection was formed not only through Villard and Kapp but also by the reports, exchanges, and disputes involving the descendants of Georg Friedrich Fallenstein, Max's maternal grandfather—some of whom had settled in the New World where the Webers were to visit them.

Weber's American interests were long-standing and well-established. It was Kapp, for example, who gave the eleven-year-old Max a copy of Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography in translation. Inscribed "to his dear young friend Max Weber," Kapp's own laudatory introduction included the unusual recommendation that German fathers teach their sons Franklin's practical maxims. Occasionally the engagements glimmer through in the collection of Weber's youthful correspondence, the Jugendbriefe, that his wife published posthumously, notwithstanding her tendency to suppress anything related to Max Weber Sr. and to omit or avoid documenting some family issues. Thus, at age fifteen the young Max recorded having "recently engaged a lot with the history of the United States of North America, which is very interesting to me" (October 11, 1879). Five years later he acknowledged the powerful effect of the frequent contact with Friedrich Kapp and the magic worked by his formidable memory, original judgments, and mastery of the "art of conversation" (November 8, 1884). And in two letters to his cousin, Emmy Baumgarten, he discussed the American misadventures and marriage of their half-cousin, Laura Fallenstein, whom he was to visit in Massachusetts (July 5, 1887; July 14, 1889). As Guenther Roth has shown, a thorough excavation of the family correspondence reveals the extent of the disputation over the American branch of the Fallenstein clan, a preoccupation thoroughly familiar to the young Max and later to Marianne.

The American journey was timely for another essential reason. It came just as Weber had turned his attention to the problems of his most famous work: the theme of the relationships among economic action, economic development, and the moral order of society, explored in the two-part essay he titled The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism. In view of this new project, whose publication and completion spanned the months in the United States, he was primed to search for those aspects of social life highlighted by his own thesis about the affinity between an ascetic religious ethos and economic activity. "My questioning," as he explained, "deals with the origins of the ethical 'style of life' that was spiritually 'adequate' for the economic stage of 'capitalism' and signified its victory in the human 'soul.'" It was a questioning that Weber carried with him during his travels. The possibility of connections among belief systems, with an emphasis placed on the voluntaristic Protestant sects and important features of social and economic activity—especially the aspect Weber called modern vocational culture—was never far from his thoughts.

In addition, it is important to emphasize that the months in America offered an opportunity to inquire more generally into economic and social conditions in the New World. As social historians have pointed out, the context of such an inquiry was shaped by two features of the fin-de-siècle intellectual world in North America; parts of the European continent, particularly Germany and Scandinavia; and Great Britain: the shared intellectual culture transmitted through the upper middle class or cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, promoted by educational exchange and the special attraction of studying at German universities; and the cosmopolitan "progressive" social and political outlook widely shared in professional circles, notwithstanding national differences and competition among the great powers. Both were important in Weber's travels.

In some ways the journey became a touchstone for a number of Weber's later reflections. The focus of his interests even reads like a list of leading issues on the agenda of American Progressivism: immigration and immigrant communities, class and status groups, race and ethnicity, gender and family life, education and the colleges, religion and the sects, democracy and electoral politics, political leadership versus administrative rule, the political economy of work and vocation, the politics of land tenure and rural life, the problems of the cities, the built environment, and the cultural problems of capitalism. The breadth of the subject matter gives credence to James Kloppenberg's view of Weber in the American context as "a progressive manqué" who differed from the other theorists of Progressivism primarily in mood while sharing "their philosophical perspective and their political ideals." Both Max and Marianne Weber devoted considerable effort to seeking out the areas of social policy and those social institutions that would speak to the need for reform. Max pursued his long-standing interests in social and economic organization, labor relations, agrarian society, religion, the social sciences, and university life. Among his professional contacts, nearly all had studied in Germany or had German connections. But he also met an astonishing array of people from different walks of life, so to speak—from land speculators in the Indian Territory to William James in Cambridge. He made a point of seeing different regions and a remarkably diverse cross-section of American society, from New England to the Deep South, from urban settlement houses to country life in rural Appalachia, from native and African American communities to German immigrant townships. At every opportunity he visited educational institutions, searched library holdings for material bearing on his work, and observed religious services—a long list of encounters that included Columbia University, Northwestern University, the new University of Chicago, the Tuskegee Institute, perhaps the University of Tennessee, Haver ford College, the Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and Brown University (and for Marianne, Bryn Mawr and Wellesley Colleges). The services included numerous Protestant sects: principally Methodist, Baptist, African American Baptist, Quaker, Presbyterian, and Christian Scientist.

In national politics, the autumn of 1904 marked Theodore Roosevelt's presidential campaign, begun officially on September 12 with his appeal for "civic righteousness" and "national greatness." Roosevelt's open letter accepting the nomination for president and launching his campaign was printed in the Chicago Daily Tribune on that date when Weber was in Chicago. As a dedicated reader of newspapers, Weber would surely have read this text with its "pragmatic" characterization of Americans—"for fundamentally ours is a business people—manufac turers, merchants, farmers, wage workers, professional men, all alike"—and its call for a renewed national commitment to building civic "character." In style and substance the two months of campaigning became a landmark in the nationalization of the presidency and the creation of what Weber later called a truly "plebiscitary" executive office, underscored by the images of Teddy Roosevelt handshaking his way through the ethnic enclaves around Hull House. Social issues were everywhere: immigration, ethnicity, race, "the woman question," exploitation of labor, the plight of the cities, the crisis in education, trade policy, a growing gap between rich and poor. Questions persisted about what to do with a newly won overseas empire and the nation's new standing as a world power, celebrated as a theme at the St. Louis World's Fair in numerous ways, including most obviously a large Philippine exhibit. In addition, there were still questions to answer about the so-called "inland empire," the territories of the Southwest governed directly from Washington, D.C., and given prominent public display in the Indian Building at the Exposition.

The invitation to travel to the United States was itself a stroke of good fortune. At the urging of Weber's Heidelberg colleague Georg Jellinek, in July 1903 Hugo Münsterberg extended an invitation to Weber to attend the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science that was being planned in conjunction with the centennial celebration of the Louisiana Purchase. He was invited to present a paper in the economics section. Of course, Weber leaped at the opportunity, replying affirmatively within days. Münsterberg was then at Harvard University, enjoying an appointment in experimental psychology arranged by William James and serving as a point of contact among German and American scholars, politicians, and businessmen. Together with Albion Small, the University of Chicago sociologist, and Simon Newcomb, the well-known mathematician, Münsterberg had been appointed to the organizing committee responsible for recruiting Congress participants. Previously in the 1890s he had been associated with Weber and other junior faculty, such as Heinrich Rickert at the University of Freiburg. The earlier personal relationship was probably decisive for the invitation to St. Louis, for Weber was not well-known outside the circle of his German colleagues in economics, history, and law—unlike other invitees, such as the theologian Adolf von Harnack, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, or in the social sciences Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Werner Sombart. From this group only Simmel, whose essays had already been translated by Albion Small and published in the American Journal of Sociology, declined to attend. For Weber, in any case, his reputation was based not on recent work, but on accomplishments in the meteoric early years of his career.

Planning for the Congress of Arts and Science turned out to be a contentious affair, a not uncommon occurrence with academic assemblies. In the verbal imbroglio leading up to it, Weber even considered avoiding the Congress altogether, while following through with his travel plans in order to exchange views with colleagues and see the American cities, as he wrote directly to Hugo Münsterberg on June 21 and July 17, 1904. But tempers subsided, the threat was unnecessary, and the conference turned out to be surprisingly beneficial. Once there, reporting from St. Louis to Jellinek, he then commented, "Many things here are very different than the travel writers, Münsterberg included, depict them" (September 24; BAK). The reference was to Münsterberg's sprawling two-volume treatise The Americans (1904), published in German early in the year and surely read by Weber. (An abbreviated American edition appeared shortly afterward.) Intended as a mediation between stereotypical American and German points of view, it was a work having few affinities with Weber's thought. Neither Münsterberg's mythic interpretation of America as the land of the "spirit," "desire," or the "instinct for self-direction," nor his uncritical patriotic view of Germany would have been congenial to Weber's outlook.

The comment to Jellinek poses important questions for our inquiry: if Münsterberg and other authors of the travel literature were mistaken, then why and in what ways? What were the conditions that Weber thought he encountered? How and why did his perceptions differ from those of others? These turn out to be complicated questions, and an answer must begin with Weber's emergence after the turn of the century into a new period of intellectual engagement, which also involved a recovery and extension of some themes that were close to his heart.

New Horizons of Thought

Max Weber returned home to Heidelberg on his birthday, April 21, 1902, after an absence of nearly two years. He was thirty-eight. He would live only another eighteen years, and not merely some but all of the work that would establish his reputation as one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers lay in front of him. The question of his life still had to be answered: Did the return herald a rebirth of his capacities, or would he fade into oblivion?

The America journey falls at the beginning of these years of intensive mental labor and extraordinary accomplishment. The four years leading up to it might be described as the most crucial in Weber's life, for it was during these years that he found the resources, essentially on his own, to answer the question. Yet this period is veiled in silence. Very little is known about what Weber did, read, or thought, and most of what we know is transmitted through his wife Marianne, on whom for lengthy periods he was thoroughly dependent as his "only connection to the world," as he once acknowledged.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from MAX WEBER IN AMERICAby Lawrence A. Scaff Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691147795
• ISBN 13: 9780691147796
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar