Max Weber: Family history, economic policy, exchange reform

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society

Volumn 15, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 509-520

  Roth, Guenther ^a  

^a Columbia University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

Cosmopolitan nationalism; Exchange reform; International family capitalism; Max Weber

Indexed keywords

EID: 0041312859     PISSN: 08914486     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1014032610925     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. See my essay "The Young Max Weber: Anglo-American Religious Influences and Protestant Social Reform in Germany," in this journal, 10:4 (Summer 1997): 659-671.
2. For this self-identification in the 1895 Freiburg inaugural lecture, see Max Weber Gesamtausgabe (abbr. MWG), 1/4: 565 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1993).
3. There is a large international literature on Weber as a spokesman for nationalist power politics and a democrat at most on the level of instrumental and procedural, not of value rationality. Much of this literature draws on Wolfgang Mommsen's famous first book, Max Weber and German Politics 1890-1920, a political biography by now more than four decades old (Engl. ed. U. of Chicago Press, 1984, tr. Michael Steinberg);
4. it appeared about the same time as Reinhard Bendix's pathbreaking Max Weber. An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960).
5. Beyond political and intellectual biography there has in recent years been increasing interest in the genre of personal biography and autobiography even in the social sciences, both in Germany and the US. There is a need for a comprehensive biography of Max Weber at a time when biographies of Werner Sombart, Levin Goldschmidt and the Jellineks have appeared; see Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart 1863-1941 (Munich: Beck 1994),
6. Lothar Weyhe, Levin Goldschmidt. Ein Gelehrtenleben in Deutschland. Grundfragen des Handelsrechts und der Zivilrechtswissenschaften in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995),
7. Klaus Kempter, Die Jellineks 1820-1955. Eine familienbiographische Studie zum deutsch-judischen Bildungsbürgertum (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998).
8. At a session of the Research Committee on the History of Sociology in Thorun (Poland) in June 2000 Dirk Kaesler spoke about "How to write a socio-biography of Max Weber" and Sam Whimster about "The biographer's biography: The case of Marianne Weber." See also D. Kaesler, "Max Weber: Ein Forscherleben zwischen Geld und Geist," in Matthias Dörries et al., eds., Wissenschaft zwischen Geld und Geist (Berlin: Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, 2001), 29-45. Currently the historian Fritz Ringer is working on a Weber biography (in English).
9. See my German study, Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte 1800-1950 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001).
10. For earlier English treatments see my essays "Marianne Weber and Her Circle," Introduction to the Transaction edition of Marianne Weber, Max Weber. A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988), xv-lx;
11. see also "Weber the Would-Be Englishman: Anglophilia and Family History," in Hartmut Lehmann and myself, eds., Weber's Protestant Ethic. Origins, Evidence Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 83-121;
12. "Global Capitalism and Multi-Ethnicity: Max Weber Then and Now," in Stephen Turner, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117-130.
13. Knut Borchardt, with Cornelia Meyer-Stoll, eds., Börsenwesen. Schriften und Reden 1893-1898. MWG, 1/5 (1999), 2 vols., 1,150 pp.
14. In its policy aspects the volume is closely related to MWG, I/4 (1993), Landarbeiterfrage, Nationalstaat und Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Schriften und Reden 1892-1899, ed. by Wolfgang Mommsen with Rita Aldenhoff.
15. This completes the critical edition of all writings, speeches (as reported in newspapers) and statements by Weber in the eighteen nineties. Borchardt's hundred-page introduction and the editorial reports to each item make indispensable reading for interested social scientists who are not familiar with the highly technical subject matter. Borchardt provides a concise overview of the rise of securities and commodity exchanges in the 19th century and parallel developments in commercial jurisprudence and legislation. He gives proper attention to Weber's teacher Levin Goldschmidt, one of the founders of the academic field of commercial law. Goldschmidt, author of a famous Universalgeschichte des Handelsrechts, traced the rise of commercial law out of the practices of merchants who were mainly Italian. He tried to preserve the "law of merchants for merchants" as long as possible against the increasing invention of the state-a view that influenced Weber's judgment. See also Borchardt, "Max Webers Borsenschriften: Rätsel um ein übersehenes Werk (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2000), Heft 4, 43 pp.
16. Weber's two popular essays on the exchange, written for Friedrich Naumann's "Göttinger Arbeiterbibliothek," are now available in a translation by Steven Lestition, whose introduction is heavily indebted to Borchardt. See Theory and Society, 29 (June 2000):
17. Steven Lestition, "Historical Preface," 289-304;
18. Weber "Stock and Commodity Exchanges [Die Börse]," 305-338;
19. Weber, "Commerce on the Stock and Commodity Exchanges [Der Börsenverkehr]," 339-371;
20. Richard Swedberg, "Afterword: The Role of the Market in Max Weber's Work," 373-384. The translation has many errors, which at crucial points reverse the meaning of many sentences. For instance, the translation reverses Weber's key argument that regulating the exchange should be left as far as possible to exchange traders themselves.
21. Marianne Weber, Max Weber, 51.
22. Letter of Jan. 3, 1891 to Hermann Baumgarten, Jugendbriefe (Tübingen: Mohr, 1936), 326.
23. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, "Rationales Handeln als grossbü rgerliches Aktionsmodell," Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 31:2 (1979): 199-236.
24. Sometimes Weber referred to relatives as cousins that were one or two steps removed. This made it easier for him to remind an audience of his family connections. Thus, when he opposed the close cooperation of government and big business cartels at the meetings of the Verein für Sozialpolitik in 1905, he mentioned his "esteemed cousin [Theodor] Möller" (MWG, I/8: 273), the Prussian minister of trade, who was just at the point of moving his aniline factories to England under pressure from the Kirdorf cartel, which denied him access to his coal supplies.
25. See Friedrich Kapp, "Benjamin Franklin," reprinted in Aus und über Amerika (Berlin: Springer, 1876), 89 and 46.
26. See my elaboration in "The Young Max Weber...", 659ff.
27. Long before Bryce wrote his famous account of the bosses and machines (vol. III of The American Comonwealth), Kapp described the corrupt operations of the New York City administration (1871);
28. see Aus und über Amerika, vol. II, 3-43.
29. In her biography Marianne Weber did not mention this visit or a meeting with a cousin of Max's who worked in the German Wall Street firm Amsinck; she also did not identify their main host, the Columbia economist Edwin R. A. Seligman, son of the German-born banker and co-founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, Joseph Seligman. Edwin Seligmann and Weber corresponded as early as 1897; see Weber's letter, dictated to Marianne, of March 22, 1897 (Columbia U. Libraries, Special Collections).
30. Marianne also never mentioned Max sen.'s America trip and eliminated a reference to it in the son's Jugendbriefe (1936). In line with her own interests, she recalled meeting Florence Kelley in New York and Jane Addams in Chicago.
31. The facts, which Weber no longer remembered correctly, do not make Villard's 'blind pool' a convincing example of entrepreneurial charisma. The dichotomy of modern bureaucratized capitalism (Alltagskapitalismus) and grandiose booty capitalism makes it hard to recognize that Villard's railroad firm was a rational and efficiently organized enterprise that still could not be profitable-no English or American railroad company ever was in the long run. It is intriguing to notice that the event stayed magnified in Weber's mind and that he exaggerated the number. Only eight million dollars were raised 'blindly'; fifty million dollars (not pounds) was the final pool. Investors did not act irrationally. Villard's Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company paid good dividends and the purpose of his "blind pool" could be guessed. See my essay "Global Capitalism and Multi-Ethnicity," 121f;
32. and Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte, chapt. 15:1.
33. Reinhard Bendix may have been the first to call wider attention to Weber's treatment of the exchange; see his Max Weber (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), 47-59;
34. sec. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977, 23-36.
35. Weber's insistence that the forms of exchange are not in themselves ethical or unethical, but only the people involved, remains pertinent today. His plutocratic remedy, however, is less feasible than ever before. He would have wanted to exclude the mass of people without substantial means who today trade on their own, especially the day traders, as an inappropriate exercise of commercial democratization.
36. There is some confusion in the literature about which family member and which branch hyphenated the name Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
37. Lawrence Scaff first gave sustained attention to this issue; see his "Weber before Weberian Sociology," British Journal of Sociology, 35 (1984): 190-215;
38. see also Fleeing the Iron Cage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
39. In the so-called professors' memorandum at the Versailles Peace Conference, Weber, together with Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Hans Delbrück and Max Graf Montgelas, stated on May 27, 1919: "Is is very regrettable that the theory, which is completely erroneous in our view, of the alleged inescapability (Naturnotwendigkeit) of trade wars was given strong support by a very accomplished American writer (Veblen, Theory of Business Enterprise 1904)." See "Bemerkungen zum Bericht der alliierten und assoziierten Regierungen über die Verantwortlichkeit der Urheber des Krieges," MWG, I/16: 349.
40. See Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, The War and German Society. The Testament of a Liberal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937)
41. and Arthur Salz, "Der Sinn der kapitalistischen Wirtschaftsordnung, " Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 52:3 (1924), 577-622.
42. A third exile who remained close to Weber's views was the liberal economist Moritz Julius Bonn. See his autobiography, Wandering Scholar (New York: John Day, 1948).
43. See Niall Ferguson, The Cash Nexus (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 290f.
44. For an elaboration, see my essay "Global Capitalism and Multi-Ethnicity: Max Weber Then and Now" (cf. n. 3 above);
45. see also "Max Weber und der globale Kapitalismus damals und heute," in Gert Schmidt und Rainer Trinczek, eds., Globalisierung. Ökonomische und soziale Herausforderungen am Ende des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), 29-39.