Gerth, mills, and shils: The origins of from max weber

International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 399-433

  Oakes, Guy ^a   Vidich, Arthur J ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0242692264     PISSN: 08914486     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1025920914039     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Mills's diploma from Dallas Technical High School in 1934 identifies him as Charles Mills. By 1939, he had become "C. Wright Mills," as on his University of Texas degree. On Mills's years at the University of Texas, see his letters to his parents in MP, 4B453.
2. C. Wright Mills, "Language, Logic, and Culture," American Sociological Review IV (1939), pp. 670-680 and "Methodological Consequences of the Sociology of Knowledge," American Journal of Sociology XLVI (1940), pp. 316-330.
3. MP, 4B453, Mills to Mother and Father, draft, April 3, 1939.
4. Don Martindale, The Monologue: Hans Gerth (1908-1978) A Memoir (Ghaziabad, India: Intercontinental Press, 1982), p. 2. Mills's first reference to Gerth in correspondence was a letter to his parents written during Gerth's first semester at Madison and remarking that he occasionally spent evenings with the new refugee professor and his wife. MP, 4B353, draft, n.d. [autumn 1940].
5. 5. By his midsixties, some thirty-five years after his immigration to the United States, Gerth's memory of his departure from Germany was wavering. Sometimes he placed it in 1937, on other occasions in 1938. On July 27, 1937, Mannheim wrote Walter Adams of the Academic Assistance Council of the Royal Society, recommending Gerth for funds to support a brief stay in England, following which he would emigrate to the United States. To secure authorization from the American consulate in London for Gerth's admission to the United States, Mannheim wrote Louis Wirth at the University of Chicago, his principal American contact and sponsor, on November 4, 1937, asking him to arrange "immediately for an official personal invitation" for Gerth to speak at the Christmas meetings of the American Sociological Society in Atlantic City (emphasis in original). In December 1937, Gerth attended the American Sociological Society meetings in Atlantic City, speaking in a session on the sociology of knowledge organized by Talcott Parsons. With Mannheim's imprimatur, he responded to a critique of Ideology and Utopia by Hans Speier. See Mannheim's letters to Adams and Wirth in Eva Gabor (ed.), Mannheim Károly: levelezése 1911-1946 (Budapest: MTA Luká;cs Archívum, 1996), pp. 126,128. See also David Kettler and Volker Meja, '"That typically German kind of sociology that verges towards philosophy': The Dispute about Ideology and Utopia in the United States," Sociological Theory 12 (1994), pp. 279-303. The contributions to this session by Gerth and Speier were finally published in 1985: Hans Speier, "Review of Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia," State, Culture, and Society 1 (1985), pp. 183-97; Hans Gerth, "Speier's Critique of Karl Mannheim," State, Culture, and Society 1 (1985), pp. 198-207. In the winter and spring of 1938, Gerth worked at Harvard as Carl Friedrich's assistant and conducted a seminar for a group of Harvard instructors in sociology who were preparing for their Ph.D. language examination in German, using as his text Weber's essay "The Meaning of 'Ethical Neutrality' in Sociology and Economics" (NGC, Gerth to Hans Speier, draft, May 31, 1938; NGC, Gerth to Richard Gillam, draft, October 9, 1973; NGC, Gerth to Richard Gillam, draft, January 1, 1974).
6. '"As in the Book of Fairy Tales: All Alone ..." A Conversation with Hans Gerth," p. 22 in Joseph Bensman, Arthur J. Vidich, and Nobuko Gerth (eds.), Politics, Character, and Culture: Perspectives from Hans Gerth (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982). This is a translation by Jeffrey Herf of '"Wie im Märchenbuch: ganz allein . . .' Gespräch mit Hans Gerth, pp. 59-95 in Matthias Greffrath (ed.), Die Zerstörung einer Zukunft: Gespräche mit emigrierten Sozialwissenschaftlern (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1979). As early as October 6, 1933, Mannheim had applied to the Academic Assistance Council of the Royal Society for funds to arrange a position for Gerth at the London School of Economics, where Mannheim had been appointed to a lectureship in sociology only a few months earlier. Gerth, Mannheim wrote, was "the most gifted of all my former students" and had "the first claim among the rising generation of German sociologists to study in England." Mannheim renewed his support with another letter to the Council on December 19,1934, describing Gerth's doctoral dissertation on the origins of German liberalism as the best work on the history of the intelligentsia. See Eva Gabor (ed.), Mannheim Károly: levelezése 1911-1946, pp. 68-69, 87.
7. NGC, Gerth to Hans Speier, draft, May 31,1938.
8. NGC, Hans Speier to Gerth, June 5, 1938. For a bibliography of Gerth's work as a journalist in 1934-37, see Joseph Bensman, Arthur J. Vidich, and Nobuko Gerth (eds.), Politics, Character and Culture: Perspectives from Harts Gerth, pp. 279-88.
9. NGC, Gerth to Hans Speier, draft, May 31, 1938. See also George Orwell, Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1962). On Gerth and the Berliner Tageblatt, see Margret Boveri, Wir Lügen Alle: Eine Hauptstadt Zeitung unter Hitler (Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1965). Boveri was a Journalist on the editorial staff of the Berliner Tageblatt from 1934 to the beginning of 1937 and a colleague of Gerth. The Berliner Tageblatt was one of the more important liberal newspapers of the Weimar period, featuring contributions by leading writers of the time such as Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig. Boveri provides an account, amusing and at the same time terrifying, of the adjustments, compromises, and surrenders made by the paper in a futile attempt to maintain its autonomy during the first five years of Nazi rule, as the new government gradually tightened its control over the press. Gerth's work at the Berliner Tageblatt falls in the domain of heterodox writing published under the restrictions of censorship and official intolerance of deviation from the truths of state propaganda. For a preliminary discussion of this genre, see Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1952). See also Anabel Paterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) and Fables of Power: Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). For an extreme case, the composition of Osip Mandelstam's ode to Stalin, see Clarence Brown, "Into the Heart of Darkness: Mandelstam's Ode to Stalin," Slavic Review 26 (1967), pp. 583-604 and J. M. Coetzee, "Osip Mandelstam and the Stalin Ode," pp. 104-116 in Giving Offense: Essays on Censorship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
10. Agnes Erdelyi, Max Weber in Amerika (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1992), pp. 100-101; Max Weber, General Economic History, tr. F. H. Knight (London: Alien & Unwin, 1927); Max Weber The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (London: Alien & Unwin, 1930). Early sales of the English translation of The Protestant Ethic were not impressive: barely 1000 copies by the end of 1933. Writing in July 1934 to Weber's German publisher, the managing director of Alien & Unwin noted the modest demand for the book and voiced his doubt that sales would ever reach 2500 copies. See Guenther Roth, "Max Weber at Home and in Japan: On the Troubled Genesis and Successful Reception of His Work," International journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 11 (1999).
11. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937).
12. '"As in the Book of Fairy Tales: All Alone. . .' A Conversation with Hans Gerth," p. 37.
13. MP, 4B369, Mills to Cleanth Brooks, draft, June 27, 1941; MP, 4B369, Cleanth Brooks to Mills, July 25, 1941; MP, 4B369, William Jay Gold [managing editor of The Virginia Quarterly] to Mills, August 25,1941; MP, 4B369, Mills to Charner Perry, draft, September 11,1941; MP, 4B369, Mills to Gerth, draft, October 11,1941. "A Marx for the Managers" was published in Ethics 52 (1942), pp. 200-215.
14. NGC, Mills to Gerth, February 6,1942.
15. NGC, Mills to Gerth, March 2,1942. For Macdonald's review of The Managerial Revolution, see "The Burnhamian Revolution," Partisan Review 9 (Jan.-Feb., 1942), pp. 76-77, 80, 84. On Macdonald and politics, see Stephen J. Whitfield, A Critical American: The Politics of Dwight Macdonald (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1984) and Gregory D. Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the politics Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
16. NGC, Mills to Gerth, n.d. [between October 16,1943 and December 7,1943].
17. C. Wright Mills, "The Powerless People: The Role of the Intellectual in Society," politics I (April 1944), pp. 68-72.
18. NGC, Mills to Gerth, June 1, 1944.
19. NGC, Mills to Gerth, June 1, 1944.
20. NGC, Mills to Gerth, n.d. [June or July 1944].
21. NGC, Mills to Gerth, June 1, 1944.
22. NGC, Mills to Gerth, "Tuesday Nite," n.d. [June or July 1944].
23. NGC, Mills to Gerth, n.d. [June or July 1944].
24. NGC, Mills to Gerth, n.d. [June or July 1944]; NGC, Mills to Gerth, "Thursday," n.d. [June or July 1944].
25. NGC, Mills to Gerth, n.d. [June or July 1944].
26. NGC, Mills to Gerth, October 10,1944; NGC, H. T. Hatcher to Mills, October 11,1944.
27. NGC, Edward A. Shils to Nobuko Gerth, June 6, 1987.
28. Eva Gabor (ed.), Mannheim Károly: levelezése 1911-1946, pp. 132-33, 137.
29. NGC, Shils to Gerth, "1938" [summer, before August 15).
30. H. H. Gerth, "The Nazi Party: Its Leadership and Composition," American Journal of Sociology 45 (1940), pp. 517-541. In Shils's letter to Nobuko Gerth, written nearly fifty years after the summer of 1938, he offered a considerably revised version of the publication of Gerth's first American article. In his reconstruction, Gerth showed Shils a confusing set of notes on the social composition of the Nazi Party, a manuscript that was not only unpublishable, but without structure, argument, analysis, or even a significant body of data. After examining these materials, Shils devised the thesis that the Nazi Party operated on both charismatic and bureaucratic principles of authority, wrote a paper supporting this thesis with Gerth's data, and had it published under Gerth's name in the American Journal of Sociology. Shils claimed that although Gerth asked him to include his own name on the article, he declined on the grounds that Gerth's interests would not be served by identifying himself with a relatively unknown co-author. In Shils's 1938 correspondence, he portrayed himself as the editor of an important study that was poorly organized and badly written. In his retrospective account, he became the ghostwriter of an essay credited to Gerth, whose only contribution was an insubstantial collection of data. See NGC, Edward A. Shils to Nobuko Gerth, June 6, 1987.
31. NGC, Shils to Gerth, October 28, 1944.
32. NGC, Gerth to Shils, draft, n.d. [first week of November 1944].
33. NGC, Gerth to Shils, draft, n.d. [first week of November 1944].
34. NGC, Shils to Gerth, n.d. [early November 1944],
35. NGC, Gerth to Mills, draft, n.d. [first week of November 1944]. Shils was forced into an unhappy choice: either give up his translation project altogether or reorient it to avoid overlap with the Oxford volume. The former course would entail the loss of years of effort. The latter would call for much more work. He chose the latter alternative, redefining his edition to concentrate on Weber's studies in the philosophy of the social sciences. Gerth's November 1944 list of Shils's translations includes only one of the writings he eventually published: "The Meaning of 'Ethical Neutrality' in Sociology and Economics." In reworking his edition as a collection of Weber's philosophical writings, Shils translated three new selections, each a substantial monograph, collectively amounting to some 150 pages of text. These materials imposed on the translator tasks more onerous than those presented by the sociological texts he had already completed. Shils's book was not published until 1949 and had a much more limited market than the Gerth-Mills volume. See Max Weber, Methodology of the Social Sciences, tr. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1949).
36. NGC, Mills to Gerth, "Thursday evening," n.d. [first week of November 1944].
37. NGC, Mills to Gerth, n.d. [first week of November 1944].
38. NGC, Mills to Gerth, "Thursday evening," n.d. [first week of November 1944].
39. NGC, Mills to Gerth, "Thursday evening," n.d. [first week of November 1944].
40. NGC, Gerth to Shils, draft, n.d. [November 1944].
41. NGC, Mills to Shils, n.d. [first week of November 1944]. This is a draft of a letter from Mills to Shils, sent to Gerth with the handwritten marginal note "proposed draft."
42. NGC, Mills to Shils, draft, n.d. [first week of November 1944].
43. NGC, Mills to Gerth, November 7, 1944.
44. NGC, Mills to Gerth, n.d. [ca. November 14, 1944].
45. NGC, Mills to Harry Hatcher, November 17, 1944; NGC, Mills to Gerth, November 18, 1944.
46. NGC, Shils to Gerth, January 4,1945.
47. NGC, Gerth to Shils, draft, January 15, 1945.
48. NGC, Gerth to Shils, draft, January 15, 1945.
49. NGC, Gerth to Shils, draft, January 15, 1945.
50. NGC, Gerth to Mannheim, draft, June 21, 1946.
51. NGC, Mills to Gerth, n.d. [shortly after November 18, 1944].
52. See Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 30-62 and
53. Joseph Bensman, "The Politics and Aesthetics of Footnoting," International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 1 (1988), pp. 443-70.
54. For a meticulously detailed account of a widely publicized contemporary case of scientific fraud and the damage suffered by the principals, see Daniel J. Kevles, The Baltimore Case: A Trial of Politics, Science, and Character (New York: Norton, 1998).