Max Weber

A Biography

Joachim Radkau

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745683423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Max Weber (1864-1920) is recognized throughout the world as the most important classic thinker in the social sciences – there is simply no one in the history of the social sciences who has been more influential. The affinity between capitalism and protestantism, the religious origins of the Western world, the force of charisma in religion as well as in politics, the all-embracing process of rationalization and the bureaucratic price of progress, the role of legitimacy and of violence as offsprings of leadership, the 'disenchantment' of the modern world together with the never-ending power of religion, the antagonistic relation between intellectualism and eroticism: all these are key concepts which attest to the enduring fascination of Weber's thinking.

The tremendous influence exerted by Max Weber was due not only to the power of his ideas but also to the fact that behind his theories one perceived a man with a marked character and a tragic destiny. However, for nearly 80 years, our understanding of the life of Max Weber was dominated by the biography published in 1926 by his widow, Marianne Weber. The lack of a great Weber biography was one of the strangest and most glaring gaps in the literature of the social sciences. For various reasons the task was difficult; time and again, attempts to write a new biography of Max Weber ended in failure.

When Joachim Radkau's biography appeared in Germany in 2005 it caused a sensation. Based on an abundance of previously unknown sources and richly embedded in the German history of the time, this is the first fully comprehensive biography of Max Weber ever to appear. Radkau brings out, in a way that no one has ever done before, the intimate interrelations between Weber's thought and his life experience. He presents detailed revelations about the great enigmas of Weber's life: his suffering and erotic experiences, his fears and his desires, his creative power and his methods of work as well as his religious experience and his relation to nature and to death. By understanding the great drama of his life, we discover a new Max Weber, until now unknown in many respects, and, at the same time, we gain a new appreciation of his work.

Joachim Radkau, born in 1943, is Professor of Modern History at the Bielefeld University, Germany. His interest in Max Weber dates back nearly forty years when he worked together with the German-American historian George W. F. Hallgarten (Washington), a refugee who left Germany in 1933 and who, as a student, listened to Weber's last lecture in summer 1920. Radkau's main works include Die deutsche Emigration in den USA (1971); Deutsche Industrie und Politik (together with G. W. F. Hallgarten, 1974), Aufstieg und Krise der deutschen Atomwirtschaft (1983), Technik in Deutschland (1989), Das Zeitalter der Nervosität (1998), Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (2000).

Part I

The Violation of Nature

Max Weber was born on 21 April 1864 in Erfurt, the first of eight children. His brother Alfred, with whom he repeatedly argued throughout his life, was four years younger. In 1869 the Weber family moved to Charlottenburg, when the Berlin city council appointed the father, Max Weber, senior, as a paid councillor. At the age of two Max Weber, junior, fell ill with meningitis; it took several painful years for him to be cured of it. His father pursued a dual career, as head of the Berlin building department and as a National Liberal representative in the Reichstag and the Prussian parliament, while his mother Helene did voluntary work for relief of the poor. At that time a number of leading academics and National Liberals used to meet in the Weber home. In 1882 Max Weber passed his Abitur and went to study in Heidelberg, then in 1884 switched to law and economics in Berlin. In between he performed his military service in Alsace. In 1889 he gained his doctorate with a thesis in the history of law, concerning North Italian trading companies in the Middle Ages. In 1891 he qualified as a university lecturer with a work on Roman agrarian history. Having joined the influential Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1888, he was commissioned by it in 1890 to evaluate the material on the German territories east of the Elbe contained in a country-wide survey of farm-workers; this resulted in 1892 in his first major work, which immediately made a name for him. On 20 September 1893 he married his second cousin Marianne Schnitger (b. 1870). In 1894 he accepted the offer of a chair in economics at Freiburg, where his inaugural address, ‘The Nation State and Economic Policy’ (13 May 1895), attracted attention because of its combination of brusque nationalism and attacks on the big landlords east of the Elbe. In 1897 he accepted an offer in Heidelberg. On 14 June 1897 he provoked a violent quarrel with his father by accusing him of making demands on the mother for his own sel fish reasons. When the father died on 10 August 1897, there had been no reconciliation. In the summer of 1898 ‘nervous’ disorders made Max Weber increasingly incapable of work, and in 1899 he was excused from further teaching duties. In 1903, at his own request, he was released from academic service.

1

Great Mother and Harsh Nature: A Precocious Youth on the Margins of Berlin

‘Family communism’: the primal form of society

The family, which in traditional conceptions is part of the natural order but for modern social science only appears to be so, remained Weber’s most stable lifeworld, although shortly before his own breakdown he wrecked his parents’ marriage in a violent rage. All other communities – academic faculties, political parties, civil associations – detained him only for a time. This fundamental experience marked his thinking. The historian Friedrich Meinecke, who knew Weber well, already pointed out that he ‘could be thoroughly understood only on the ground of his family’ (WzG 143f.). The microcosm of the family was all the more significant for him precisely because the wider macrocosm was brimming with irreconcilable struggle and coldly rational calculation; it remained a source of great warmth and trust, whatever the tensions and quarrels, and offered many gifts in which there was no thought of anything in return.

For Weber, then, ‘domestic’ or ‘family’ communism had something primeval and homely that distinguished it from political communism. ‘Society’, in the sense of a specific gathering of people crystallized in the family (independent of state institutions), was a primary experience – although, to be sure, it was not only natural instincts but also capital that held the family together. ‘A domestic community binds only if it is geared to indisputably common tasks’, Weber taught the young Arthur Salz in 1912 (MWG II/7–1, 428). Yet for Weber the family never had the mere function of an economic system; it always preserved a vitality of its own. Which was not at all to say that it was a harmonious idyll, as it showed its strength precisely in the midst of a quarrel.

With an eye to the slave barracks of ancient Rome, the 32-year-old Weber let slip a phrase that could have come from an instructor in Catholic social thinking: ‘Man can develop only in the bosom of the family’ (K 57). This sounds like a wise aphorism or a well-known and generally applicable law of nature. But Weber’s own parental home was not exactly a bed of roses: his mother did not think twice about interfering in the affairs of her grown-up children, nor they in hers, and letters were routinely passed around – even the ‘thoroughly intimate correspondence’ that Max exchanged with Marianne and Helene when he was staying in a sanatorium (MWG II/6, 575). In any event, whereas the young Werner Sombart complained that his parents did not understand him, and that even their goodness made him feel unhappy (‘I felt at ease only with others of my age’),¹ Weber’s experience of life as a young man sharply differed from that of his nearest contemporaries in the world of social science, and this difference affected his whole intellectual-spiritual bearing. The ‘crisis of the family’ – a favourite theme of the early sociologists, especially the French² – was for Weber neither a major sociological issue nor a personal experience.

‘Family’ and its various compounds appear 786 times on the German CD-ROM edition of Weber’s works, and ‘kinship group’ [Sippe] 736 times. Sometimes in his writings he explicitly refers to his own family experiences. Lujo Brentano, who knew from his own merchant family of Italian origin that Catholicism and capitalism can at best only tolerate each other, once remarked with a touch of derision: ‘If Max Weber, to prove the correctness of his views, can adduce observations from the business circle close to him, then perhaps I may be allowed to do the same’ (R 65). Weber’s notes to the later edition of The Protestant Ethic reveal how much this criticism wounded him, although the brilliant Brentano was one of the colleagues with whom he restrained his quarrelsome proclivities.

In the web of an extended family

In a popular romantic view of society, the old extended family including grandparents and relations has shrunk in modern times to the nuclear family consisting only of parents and children. On closer inspection, we can see that the nuclear family was also a normal phenomenon in earlier times. Max Weber, however, experienced the intense (and often tense) cohesion of an extended family, of that whole web of kinship relations which is so confusing for anyone outside it.

Even his loves remained within the family circle. The first love of his youth was ‘Klärchen’, his sister Klara, whom he sometimes tenderly called ‘Kätzchen’ (kitten) and used to kiss on the mouth; their mother, feeling unmoved at Max’s wedding, poked fun at Klara’s weakness for her eldest brother by performing a sketch in which she despairingly sang: ‘Abandoned, abandoned, oh abandoned am I – such must be my grief as the “ first woman” I once was …’³ A certain brutal candour was part of the Weber family style. Max’s first semi-fiancée, Emmy (‘Emmerling’) Baumgarten, was his cousin; Marianne was his second cousin. Indeed, when he fell in love with Else Jaffé, she was already family in the wider sense, as Marianne’s close friend for many years and Alfred Weber’s companion in life – which did not exactly make the situation easier. And Mina Tobler had for a long time been in and out of the house when she and Max became physically close: she figures in Marianne’s letters as ‘Tobelchen’. Family intimacy was part of love for Max Weber, and in his writings the erotic appeal of the exotic is at most reflected through the Eastern religions. He is the best illustration of Freud’s idea that the libido is originally incestuous.

Intellectual and economic bourgeois combined

Marianne Weber the idealist was fond of presenting her husband as a scion of the German Bildungsbürgertum. In reality, however, Max Weber was at least as much an offspring of the economic bourgeoisie, and this origin also left its mark on his consciousness. He developed a positive revulsion from the world of officialdom and was always aware that the material foundation for most of his adult life was not a state income but an annual yield on capital. The professorships he held were all in economics, and he liked to make use of his family’s insider knowledge on economic issues. As Marianne emphasizes, he left no doubt ‘that he valued the qualities of the successful businessman and merchant at least as highly as those of the academic and littérateur’.⁴ He liked to demonstrate that he had not developed any prejudices towards business people.

It was actually a characteristic feature of the Weber family that it combined elements of the Bildungsbürgertum and the economic bourgeoisie. The Fallenstein grandfather, son of a headmaster who fell on hard times, had already improved his finances by marrying the wealthy heiress Emilie Souchay and built that spacious villa on the Neckar, with its magnificent views over the ruins of Heidelberg Castle, which became Max’s and Marianne’s home in 1910, replete with memories of the family history. Max knew that ‘nine-tenths’ of his parents’ fortune came from ‘Mother’s side’ (B 629); her power was based on that fact. Helene Weber was one of the inheritors of the Huguenot Souchay dynasty, which had grown rich through commerce, a global family network stretching as far as Canada, South Africa and Indonesia.⁵ In Max Weber’s time, Carl David Weber – the elder brother of Max Weber, senior and head of the Oerlinghausen textile company – was the richest man in the family, but his wealth was mostly self-acquired and did not derive from the family legacy to which Max’s father also had an entitlement. Only through Marianne, the granddaughter of the company head, did Max gain a share of the assets after the latter’s death.

A cerebral childhood

When he was two Weber fell ill with meningitis, and it was several years before his health was reasonably well restored. At the age of thirty, he wrote to his mother recalling ‘the long years in which I was part physically, part mentally your problem child’.⁶ In those days, the brain infection was especially dangerous for children, with a death rate between 70 and 100 per cent; the aetiology was unknown and medicine could offer no help. Even when the cause was discovered in 1887, it took another fifty years for a successful treatment to be developed. Attitudes influenced by bacteriology identified meningitis as the ‘classical secondary illness’, supposedly resulting from a tubercular lung infection or parental syphilis. And, as the second of these factors was long regarded as the main culprit, Max’s illness was a reason for suspicion about his father’s widely reputed ‘lust for life’. As late as 1923 a standard medical textbook offered a ‘grave’ prognosis for chronic meningitis and suggested that most children succumb to hydrocephalus: water on the brain.⁷ Still today one reads that, ‘even with immediate treatment … it is difficult to avoid residual symptoms such as reduced emotional-intellectual agility and affectivity, behavioural phenomena or impulsive disorders.’⁸ In the early stages, often before the disease is diagnosed, considerable damage to the central nervous system may become apparent.⁹

In the late nineteenth century, it was feared that a child would be left feeble-minded if he or she survived meningitis. Moreover, Weber already had an ‘over-large’ head at birth, and during the illness it grew ‘noticeably, while the limbs remained girlishly small’. Later, he thought he could remember his head wobbling like an old man’s, ‘too heavy for the child’s delicate stem’.¹⁰ ‘The doctor predicted either hydrocephalus or room for a great many things under the arching cranium’ (WB 33). Such contrary prognoses from the boy’s physical proportions! One way or another, anxiously or hopefully, all the attention was focused on Weber’s head.

The child must have sensed the mother’s fear that he would be left mentally deficient. This gave him a strong impetus to demonstrate his normality, and it must have been a huge relief when he began to feel that he was mentally superior to many others of his age and was able, without much effort, to excel at the demands made of him at school. On the other hand, there is no mention in Weber of the typical boyish pranks that men recall in later life with a broad grin on their face.¹¹ As a twenty-year-old, he assured his mother that he had done ‘some very light-minded things’ – like many students, he lived beyond his means – ‘but no wicked pranks’, for the reason that ‘I was thinking of you’ (JB 115). But in 1919 he wrote to Else that he had been living a ‘second youth’ with her – ‘and where did I ever have a “ first” one?’¹² So, we have to doubt whether the adult Weber still felt his virtuous youth to have been such a merit. Later he wanted so much to be a fighter, but he recognized that not too many upright men prove to be war heroes. ‘In cases of war, for example, boys who were once punished for fighting or locked up for alcohol abuse or striking a non-commissioned officer are usually considerably more astute and, when the enemy is breathing down their neck, more useful and intrepid than moral cowards who … have behaved respectably for a couple of years’ (JB 105).

One typical long-term consequence of childhood meningitis is a weak capacity to remember the period of illness. Presumably this was also the case with Weber. Whereas many other self-aware people like to recall their earliest years, one is struck by the paucity of such memories in Weber; the popular practice of returning in the imagination to a childhood paradise was blocked for him. His recollections appear to take clear shape only with the beginning of his school years. Weber’s lifelong difficulties with his psyche may have something to do with an inability to hold early childhood experiences at a conscious level. Not infrequently, the ancient world in which he lived so intensely functioned as a substitute for the lost memory of childhood.

From the beginning Weber occupied a contradictory position in his family: the problem child, but also the ‘big boy’, the first in a series of eight children (six of whom reached adulthood). This status contained an opportunity for early self-confidence that the young Weber gladly seized. He particularly liked to shower his younger siblings with instructions and admonitions, and to extend an avuncular tenderness toward his sisters. For many years the illness left behind a susceptibility to headaches and cramps, but this was also an invitation to motherly love – especially when conjugal love faded away. ‘The young mother now tended her child constantly and never left the house without leaving word as to where she might be found’ (WB 32). It was thus one of Weber’s primal experiences that illness compels loving attention – most especially, attention to his poor head. The father and mother set examples of two different senses of self: the one, a hedonist’s absorption in himself; the other, a woman’s increasing preparedness to endure suffering. The young Weber would have liked to be as happy as any other child. But the other, maternal opportunity for self-confidence was presented to him at an early age, and for a long time it was the only one he had.

Weber’s angst

A child’s experiences of fear and pleasure leave their mark on the psyche. In many areas, it is not easy to separate fear and pleasure from each other. How did Weber cope with fear? ‘I’m no hypochondriac!’ he assured the ailing Emmy Baumgarten in 1887 (JB 279), but others did not always agree. Later, for all his complaints about his nerves, he cultivated a bearing of personal fearlessness. This led Ernst Nolte to the view that Weber had been immune from any kind of fascism, since the source of fascism is fear – fear of socialism and, more generally, of anything beyond the bounds of tradition.¹³ It is certainly true that Weber was free of the Wilhelmine-bourgeois fear of social democracy, but all the more was he haunted over the years by fear of the ‘demons’ within himself. His often pointless displays of aggression show that he must have experienced dread without any clear object, even less capable of controlling it because he did not acknowledge it. In 1943, when Eduard Baumgarten once had occasion to glimpse Hitler at close quarters and saw ‘the eyes of a startled animal in flight’, he thought he could remember that Weber’s eyes had been like that when he was in the grip of a blind rage.¹⁴ In The Protestant Ethic Weber descri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• TitlePage
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the English Edition
• Abbreviations
• At the Den of the Sick Lion
• Part I The Violation of Nature
• 1 Great Mother and Harsh Nature: A Precocious Youth on the Margins of Berlin
• 2 Max and Minimax: Blood Brothers and Drinking Companions – Surly Fraternity as a Primary Social Experience
• 3 From Father’s Boy to Mother’s Boy: A Comradely Marriage and the Day of Judgement for the Father
• 4 Antaeus, Antiquity and Agrarians: The Unshackling of Creativity through the Earthing of Culture
• 5 Eruptions from the Ice: Creativity as Natural Catastrophe
• 6 A ‘Gospel of Struggle’ and Old German Corpulence: From Lifestyle Crisis through Creativity Crisis to Existential Crisis
• Part II Nature’s Revenge
• 7 The Demons: The Wildness of Nature and the Riddle of Sexuality
• 8 ‘A Sort of Spiritualistic Construction of the Modern Economy’: The Protestant Ethic and the Vain Quest for Redemption through the Spirit
• 9 South – North – West – East: Changing Attempts at Spiritual Conquest of the World
• 10 From the ‘Essay of Sighs’ to ‘Psychophysics’: the Seven-Year Fight with Naturalism against Naturalism
• 11 From the Eranos Circle to the ‘Erotic Movement’: New Roots and New Milieux
• 12 Max Weber’s Love–Hate for the Germans
• Part III Salvation and Illumination
• 13 Value-Free Science, Love and Music
• 14 Charisma
• 15 The Naturalness of Community – The Disguised Naturalism in Economy and Society
• 16 From Deborah’s Song of Triumph to the ‘Titans of the Holy Curse’: Pacifist Herdsmen, Prophets and Pariahs – the Israelites
• 17 World War and Flight from the World
• 18 Great Speeches, the Great Love and Death
• 19 Epilogue: Powerplay and the Wrangling over Max Weber’s Spirit
• A Chronology of Max Weber’s Life
• Notes
• Index