Abstract
We are approaching the one hundredth anniversary of the death of Max Weber, but we are still waiting for the definitive biography of him. There have been several books which were devoted to his intellectual biography (Baumgarten, Bendix, Käsler, Ringer) and some which focused on his psyche (Mitzman, Radkau), but none that placed the man within his cultural environment. That has now changed with Jürgen Kaube’s Max Weber: Ein Leben zwischen den Epochen. As the subtitle indicates, Kaube seeks to locate Weber’s life between two epochs—the transformation of Germany from a rural and traditional “country” into a modern and capitalist nation.
Kaube is at his best when he writes as an intellectual historian and provides the various contexts for Weber’s life. Weber was a citizen of two worlds; he was a child and a young adult in the early years of Germany’s unification and he died in the revolutionary aftermath of Germany’s defeat. Weber was born in Erfurt but he grew up in Charlottenburg. Kaube reminds us that Charlottenburg was not Berlin; when Weber was seven years old the town had twenty thousand inhabitants. When he moved from his parents’ house in 1893 it had more than 120,000 people (pp. 47–56). In 1871, the year of the founding of Germany, two-thirds of the population lived in towns of fewer than 2,000 people. In that year 8.5 million worked on the land; by 1914 that shrank to 7 million (pp. 99–100). This context may help explain why Weber engaged in agrarian studies and why he included some of those results in his Freiburg address (pp. 115–116).
Kaube’s discussion of Weber’s responses to the “Kulturkampf” is also very helpful. He writes objectively of the Catholic position and he explains how Bismarck used it as a pretext to ensure the cultural unification of Germany, at least until he found a new enemy—the socialists. He uses this as a partial context so that readers would have a better understanding of the background for The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (pp. 138–144).
Kaube is quite successful in describing Weber’s life in Heidelberg, including the Weber house and garden, and specifically the sense of “the beautiful life” (pp. 284–286). He also underscores how often Weber traveled—the time during which he tried to recover from his illness, the two and a half month-long trip to America, and the frequent trips to conferences and to present papers. Kaube describes how Weber was a solitary figure and one who was reluctant to undergo the unpleasantness of travel, but was frequently away from home and when he was, constantly received visitors (pp. 190–209). He is especially good at conveying the context of the conference at Burg Lauenstein where Weber gave “Wissenschaft als Beruf.” Weber intended to counteract all of the “romantic” notions of so many of the participants (pp. 366–374).
Kaube is also highly successful in describing Weber’s last years. He notes how often Weber traveled to give politically-themed lectures, and he provides an illuminating account of Weber’s meeting with Schumpeter in Vienna. This occurred shortly after the Russian Revolution, and Schumpeter observed that socialism was no longer an abstract theory but would be tested in the laboratory. Weber reacted furiously; Kaube notes that this was not merely Weber’s famous volcanic temper, but that Weber was immensely outraged by Schumpeter’s callous disregard for human life. To bolster his case Kaube reminds us of Weber’s objections to the increased submarine warfare because it would lead to even deadlier consequences (pp. 363, 378–382).
However, Kaube is less successful in describing some of Weber’s personal interactions. While he recounts Weber’s early years and the marriage with Marianne, we do not get much of a real sense of the problems that the Weber family had and the difficulties that Max and Marianne faced. The chapter devoted to Max and his brother Alfred seems almost irrelevant; it is more about Alfred and Franz Kafka than about the brothers (pp. 244–262). And Kaube’s discussions of Mina Tobler and especially Else von Richthofen do not seem to add much to what we already know about Weber’s relationships with these two women. However, it is to Kaube’s credit that he does not engage in psychological speculation (like Radkau), and he acknowledges the difficulty of knowing what really happened (pp. 270–290). Kaube’s exploration of Weber’s relationships with his “antipodes” is good—he gives us a real sense of why Weber disapproved of Werner Sombart and why he valued Georg Simmel. The former was too preoccupied with seeking fame while the latter was a genuine thinker who was denied his proper place in scholarly circles (pp. 159–173). But, some of Weber’s closest friends and colleagues are rather neglected: Georg Jellinek gets three mentions, Heinrich Rickert receives five, and Ernst Troeltsch gets ten, many of which are connected to the trip to America. Yet, each of these scholars made a great impact on Weber’s thinking: Jellinek was indispensible for understanding Weber’s legal writings, Rickert provided much of the epistemological background for Weber’s methodology, and Troeltsch was Weber’s co-founder for the sociology of religion.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment of Kaube’s book is the lack of detailed discussions of Weber’s works. With the exception of The Protestant Ethic, Kaube tends to pass over Weber’s sociological and economic writings. Weber’s methodological writings are summarily treated in a couple of pages, while the writings on the economic ethics of the world religions are discussed in just over ten pages (pp. 146–148, 156–157, and 336–347). Weber devoted over ten years of his life to writing Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, but one gets no sense of its importance from Kaube’s book. He does discuss ideal types and charisma, but the discussions are neither full nor accurate. But, in his defense, Kaube did not write the typical “Leben und Werk” book, but a biography.
Kaube’s Max Weber is not so much a book about Weber’s “life between the epochs” as it is a long series of often brilliant sketches of Weber’s life between the year of his birth and the year of his death. As such, it is one of the best “Zeitgeist” works that I have ever read. We will still have to wait for the definitive biography of Max Weber—but anyone seeking to understand Max Weber within the context of his epochs needs to read Kaube’s Max Weber.