Abstract
Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. Yet it needs to be stressed that not all prominent German bourgeois writers endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national-cultural ‘protest at the West’. By 1918 an array of voices could come to discern another kind of salient work of contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg. The thesis defended in this article is that in sophisticated humanistic writing of the era, a German mood of antagonism with the West represents not a regressive ideology but the productive and intelligent outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about European world pictures and their claims to universal validity on the stage of world history. A range of statements are shown here to anticipate debates of the present day about ‘late’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘post-Eurocentric’ conditions of Western modernity.
The central thesis I want to develop in what follows is that any generic and unqualified charge of global epistemic myopia in classical European social thought needs to be rejected. While it remains the case that all modern European ideas of world history suffer from deficiencies of cultural reflexivity of various kinds – from ‘Eurocentrism’, as it is often known – it needs to be appreciated that not all do so to the same degree. Indeed, my claim is that some contexts of ideas from the high modern period may still number among our most fertile guides for an overcoming of the syndrome known as Eurocentrism in the present day. A plethora of intellectual idioms and movements from the early decades of the last century continue to indicate ways in which escape can be made today from the pitfalls of long-dominant European-centred structures of thought about human cultures and societies and their development through history.
Thinkers in Germany in particular at the beginning of the 20th century deployed a raft of equivalent concepts and phrases for Eurocentrism long before this term became a slogan of academic discourse from the 1990s onwards. 1 Especially in Germany but also to a growing extent in inter-war period Europe in general, the radicality of intellectual developments suggests ways in which contemporary post- or anti-Eurocentric thinking in the human sciences is anticipated in certain key respects. The Weimar experience of estrangement and fragmentation of the social body in the face of a sense of insuperable global complexity spawns an array of statements about relativity and conflict of worldviews that speak with an enormous directness to disputes of the present about European world pictures and their limits on the stage of global cultural difference and civilizational plurality. A sense of the shattering of European spiritual self-images would be felt probably more acutely in Germany than in any other national arena of the age, and this awareness left an unmistakable mark in the advanced intellectual culture of the period.
New waves of scholarship on early 20th-century German liberal-cosmopolitan social thought over the last 20 or 30 years have increasingly brought to light the relevance of a range of authors in these connections. 2 Renewed interest in broadly politically liberal or left-liberal as distinct from Marxist thinkers of the age has chimed with a general shift of attention in recent years in the social sciences toward comparative-historical models and global interpretive approaches, with an emphasis on civilizational difference and divergence and a move away from postulates of universal structures of class conflict as motors of world history. But while a sizable amount of biographical and philological scholarship has accumulated on these personalities, fewer attempts have been made to put the relevant sources to further theoretical use – to further analytical elaboration in contemporary social-science practices.
In what follows I first want to develop the preceding considerations on a general level and then, in a second step, to pursue them again from the starting-point of a series of lectures by Helmuth Plessner (dating originally from 1935) on Germany as the ‘delayed nation’ in modern European history, embroiled recurrently in an antagonistic relation to ‘the West’ (to France and Britain in the first instance) and to the Romanic Latinate cultures of the south, and consequently acutely conscious of an element of fracture and fissure in European civilizational heritage since the 16th century Protestant Reformation. A third section then considers how a range of motifs in writings by the two brothers Max and Alfred Weber, as well as by Ernst Troeltsch, Max Scheler, and Karl Jaspers, can be read as responses to perceptions of the same condition after the First World War. Here I urge in particular that these and other authors’ characteristic search for some kind of reconstructed stance of ‘universal history’ needs to be read not in terms of any kind of ideological reversion to the ‘hunger for wholeness’, but rather as the most rigorous attempt to reclaim some standpoint of reflective philosophical totality in world history – even in the face of inescapable division and disparity of worldviews on the plane of global claims to knowledge. A final section draws together some conclusions about the charge of Eurocentrism in classical sociology.
Germany and the West in Weimar thought
Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. In the writings of almost all prominent figures of the time, the plea could be heard for a war for the national Culture (Kultur), over against something perceived to be the decadent individualistic ‘civilization’ or Zivilisation of France, Britain and America. At the end of the war, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man would mark two of the most powerful iterations of this discourse for the best part of the following decade. In turn, the idea would emerge of a ‘Conservative Revolution’, affirming an emotional politics of revolt against Western Enlightenment traditions of political liberalism and constitutional democracy (Mohler 1950).
Yet it deserves underlining that despite the bitter and widespread sense of punitive reprisal exacted by the victorious powers at Versailles, significant sections of the German intelligentsia and population at large understood the situation in 1918–19 as giving cause for serious efforts in national ethical self-scrutiny. Not all writers, it needs to be emphasized, endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national cultural protest at the West, such as in the vein of Mann’s Reflections – which Mann in any case himself began to retract from around the summer of 1923 onwards, as is well-known. 3 By the end of the war and thereafter an array of voices could progressively come to discern another kind of salient ‘battle’ or contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg and recognized that Geist and Kultur constituted inherently anti-particularistic, anti-nationalistic signifiers. Significant voices existed that rejected polemics about the depredations of ‘capitalist spirit’ and the squalid hypocrisy of the English and fundamentally gave their assent to Weimar republican principles of constitutionalism and parliamentary democratization. For some authors, a consciousness of the crisis of Western civilization could be communicated without reliance on German-centred notions of approaching doom for the countries of the victorious powers of 1918.
It can be argued here that in some of the most perceptive and intellectually self-reflective commentators of the age, a mood of antagonism with ‘the West’ that predominates in German public cultural life during and after the war represents in some crucial respects not a merely regressive inward-looking ideology but rather the productive outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical sceptical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about relativity, contingency and fallibility of European world pictures on the stage of global history. By 1900 and in intensely amplified form by 1920, it is most clearly German contexts of thought that place Western visions of total order, direction and structure in human history in question and in this sense break with hegemonic Eurocentric global evolutionistic social theories of the 19th century. More explicitly than any other national intellectual arena, and in a way that needs to be disentangled from purely nationalistic commonplaces and platitudes of the time, German academic currents repudiate general theories of history that install the West at the forefront of the unfolding of the human race. More so than elsewhere at the turn of the century, it is German developments in social and historical thought that most deeply scrutinize the validity of notions of universal ‘steps’ or ‘stages’ of human cognitive evolution that purport to culminate in specifically Western European models of social and political organization. In the most advanced German intellectual idioms that gain prominence after 1900, these conceits are replaced by the emerging paradigms of phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, historicism and sociology of knowledge, all sponsoring a relativizing sensibility alert to historical discontinuity, contingency and perspectivity of knowledge claims.
To be sure, it should be important not to overstate the distinctiveness of the German national intellectual arena in these regards. Forms of historicizing scepticism about neat epistemic unities and time-honoured European Judaeo-Christian moral precepts also have their exemplars to a degree in Franco-British contexts and in American pragmatist thought. Conversely, German ideas of the later 19th century also display some unmistakable counterparts in evolutionistic, monistic and encrusted teleological ways of thinking. Alongside this also has to be set the enduring hegemony of the many rigidified variants of scholastic Neo-Kantian philosophy at German universities from the 1870s onwards, in many respects reflective of a rearguard action against perceived threats of moral and social decay and the jeopardizing of scientific rationality. Further, it is clear that, in some formulations, historicism in Germany could serve as a way of conveniently evading rather than fully confronting situations of epistemic conflict, where realizations of the remoteness and difference of other epochs and social worlds come to be absorbed under the figure of ‘diversity’ in a way that leaves deeper challenges of axiological rupture unaddressed. 4
But these qualifications notwithstanding, the claim can nonetheless be sustained, I contend that, by the 1920s at the latest, German-language sources surpass other comparable national academic arenas in the depth and complexity with which they probe the universality-claims of received European metaphysical world pictures. However extensive may have been the accumulation of empirical ethnological and archaeological research in Britain and France at the time, arguably only in Germany from the later 19th century onwards are the specifically philosophical and theological implications of the challenges of non-European belief-systems for Western self-understanding fully confronted. The key difference with other arenas remains that predominantly only in Germany does there arise a consciousness of the problem of the splintering of entire total systems of cognitive order of the world – a sense of the fragmentation and mutual incommensurability of epistemic structures as such, and not only individual contents of information about non-Western peoples. Only with the advent of the sophisticated historicist thinking of Droysen and Dilthey and their successors – and with the explosive legacy of Nietzsche’s teaching – is it possible to speak of the emergence in Europe of a sense of multiple competing claims over absolute, paramount or highest ontology on the stage of the world history of civilizations.
Decisive for Germany was in turn the extraordinary degree of intellectual radicalization triggered by the cataclysm of the Great War and the consequences of defeat in November 1918. The massive experiences of displacement and disarray caused by the war and its legacy of revolution, insurrection, hyper-inflation and occupation by foreign powers would confront German writers and scholars and their educated middle-class readerships with an agonizing sense of unmitigated loss of organic order and substance of life. Following on the heels of four or five decades of industrial transformation at breakneck speed, the war and its aftermath would catapult German society in a multitude of directions, each marked by the emergence of basic stalemates between organized societal collectives and segmented social groups and their concomitant rival political parties and conceptions of normative historical meaning and purpose. In the advanced literary and academic milieus of the Weimar decade the result would be an unparalleled acuity of discussion about the presuppositions of Western civilization. Placing notions of unified culture fundamentally in question, the fragmentation of the German public sphere into seemingly irreconcilable segments would stimulate a unique culture of inquiry about the dissolution of ancient Judaeo-Christian world pictures – about the ‘transcendental homelessness’ of modern Western man, in Lukács’s famous phrase.
Although outside of the fairly rarefied ‘elite’ liberal intellectual circles at issue here, the very same experiences of fragmentation would see no less powerful and in the end catastrophically victorious calls for restored unity and substance of experience on the wider mass stage of German society at the time, the ultimate inability of Weimar as an experience of unparalleled modern cognitive complexity to sustain itself in the face of chronic socio-economic turmoil after 1929 still removes nothing from the enduring period-transcendent normative interest of these sources for current social-science debates.
I want shortly to turn to a range of ways in which strands of thinking such as these can be traced in work by the two brothers, Max and Alfred Weber, as well as by Ernst Troeltsch, Max Scheler and Karl Jaspers. But first I take another step toward a contextualization of the relevant ideas through a look at some decisive statements of Helmuth Plessner on German national intellectual self-understanding over the course of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.
Helmuth Plessner: Europe and the German experience of fractured civilization
In his series of lectures delivered originally in 1935 in the Netherlands at Groningen University, titled Die verspätete Nation: Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes [The Delayed Nation: On Political Seduction and the Bourgeois Mind], Plessner portrayed the experience of defeat in Germany in 1918 as precipitating a generalized sense of Western spiritual fracturing. 5 Germany after the war would be transformed into a ‘centre of scepticism in the European value-system’, and the very conditions of psychological and material insecurity and malaise that otherwise would fuel virulent nationalist currents would also be the conditions that in some ways lent to German ideas at this time a deeper quality of insight into the moral complexities of Western civilization under conditions of radical global modernity (Plessner 1935: 32).
I want to consider briefly here how Plessner’s reflections can be engaged to throw light on the emergence in Germany of something that can be described as an exemplary sensibility for Western spiritual de-centring on the plane of world history. Out of the crisis of German bourgeois intellectual culture and society, it can be suggested, arose something that transcends the immediate conditions of national ressentiment toward the Western powers after defeat and the Treaty of Versailles – namely, a body of arguments of special normative import for present consideration.
Prompted in part by the publication of a book in 1931 in France by Pierre Viénot, titled Incertitudes allemandes: La crise de la civilisation bourgeoise en Allemagne, Plessner’s lectures described a country of disrupted and conflicted memories, a nation weighed down by a consciousness of division and dispersion in its history. As the first to secede from the medieval Catholic ecumene in the 16th century, and in this sense as the first to spark fission in the spiritual self-consciousness of the Occident, Germany in Plessner’s portrait would become par excellence in European history a place of an anguish of diremption and lost wholeness.
Key to this portrait was a sense of how defeat confronted German-speaking peoples with a longstanding tension in their sense of identity: a tension between a long history of dispersed, multi-confessional territorial empire on the one hand and a more recent search for unified nationhood on the other. German history since the Thirty Years War in Plessner’s picture would be stamped by a series of polar tensions between South and North, Catholicism and Protestantism, Latinate humanism and introspective religiosity – between loose-knit Holy Roman empire on the one hand and close-knit Protestant German nationhood on the other. The entirety of modern German history in this sense would manifest a seemingly irresolvable alternation between tendencies to centralism and decentralism, centripetalism and centrifugalism, empire and provincialism, totality and fragmentation. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries the challenge would have been to resolve these polar oppositions into some figuration of constitutionally unified national statehood, but expansionary imperial Prussia, itself a mere fragment of German nationhood, sought to force a solution to the problem in the shape of Bismarck’s policies of anti-Catholic Kulturkampf and territorial annexation. As a result, Plessner considered, Germans by 1900 would languish in a condition of insoluble aporia, unable to return to any ancient pre-industrial structure of civilizational empire but also unable to unify nationally, politically and territorially without posing grave threats to the existing balance of power in continental Europe.
In these ways Plessner would write of Germany as a country of ‘traditionlessness’ and ‘lack’ (Plessner 1935: 72). Germany was ‘a country that cannot rest in its present moment, secure in a strong and constant tradition like the old Western nations’, but instead ‘forced consciously to make up for this lack, … compelled to fashion a raison d’être for itself solely from the sources of its becoming’ (Plessner 1935: 86). Germany was thus a nation that had to ‘become itself’ – and yet to ‘become’ anything at all meant to be no longer something, nor yet something else at any one moment. ‘Becoming’ was a condition of departing without ever fully arriving: a state of seemingly perpetual transition. It was in this sense, Plessner underlined, that Nietzsche had written of Germans as a people of the ‘day before yesterday’ and ‘a people of the day after tomorrow’, but ‘not yet a people of today’ – not pressed forth confidently into the future like the more psychologically and territorially unified states of the North Atlantic West, like France or Britain (Plessner 1935: 49, 83). 6
But precisely this sense of national uncertainty of self, Plessner would also go on to argue, lent to German intellectual life of the later 19th and early 20th centuries a distinct quality of sceptical insight into some of the reigning presumptions of dominant European self-images of the age. Not able to enjoy the same level of intellectual and psychological reassurance as the unified states of the West, German academic culture of the period would express a more hesitant relation to claims to universal validity in its thinking about world history and the mainstays of political and cognitive modernity. There was a sense for Plessner in which, more rapidly than other arenas, German philosophical self-consciousness could understand how processes of global transformation placed more and more countries into relations of material, political and axiological competition with the West (Plessner 1935: 31). Sooner than elsewhere, German thought understood the implications of processes of collective organizational self-awakening on the part of other world peoples as signs of an impending state of ‘relativization of European ideas of humanity and an unseating of Europe’s factual and ideal leadership of peoples’ (Plessner 1935: 32). It understood more acutely how Western claims over the ‘progress of humanity’ sustained themselves only to the extent that Christianity could repress the thought of its own relativity under the face of the cosmos (Plessner 1935: 31, 75).
Any survey of the characteristic idioms of early 20th-century German movements compared with their North Atlantic counterparts arguably tends to confirm this portrait of Plessner’s. Even though the same rising sense of global moral dispersion described by Plessner could equally manifest itself after 1918 in overwhelming demands for restored cognitive order and univocity of moral meaning on the scene of mass public movements, the beckoning sense of universal relativity of values could also be the spur for some of the most searching efforts of European self-interrogation in German intellectual spokesmen of the age. Even as feelings of global disarticulation and disaggregation could just as well unleash an insatiable ‘hunger for wholeness’ that eventually would rise triumphant in 1933, the concern of many of Weimar Germany’s most sophisticated social and historical thinkers on the liberal-cosmopolitan political centre would be to face up to the experience of relativity and to embrace the condition constructively and responsibly. 7 For these voices, the sense of splintering was something to be affirmed courageously as a modality of the essential ‘world-openness’ 8 of modern human subjects, able in principle to live in a multiplicity of potentially mutually incommensurable worlds of cognition.
‘Universal history’ revisited
One way in which these sensibilities can be charted, I now want to suggest, is through the trajectory of the figure of ‘universal history’ in German interpretive social thought of the Weimar and late Wilhelmine years. This time-honoured figure of German letters since Lessing, Herder and Kant, I argue, can be read as recurring in the early 20th century in the form of an axial ‘hinge’ of European thought’s own work of reflexive self-examination. Through its reentry in comparative historical-sociological scholarship of the age, including most famously in Max Weber’s Preface to his series of studies on the ‘Economic Ethics of the World Religions’, universal history stands as a medium by which European philosophico-normative narratives of world history aspire to find a more truthful sense of their own essential cultural specificity on the ever wider stage of global civilizations. Universal history becomes in this way an always higher instance of validity than any particular claim that European thought may make over it. In the shadow of the Great War it becomes, in a sense, Schiller’s ‘world court of world history’ – a court in which European civilization finds itself on trial. 9
My concentration in the following turns primarily to several relatively less well appreciated statements in writings by Troeltsch, Scheler, Jaspers and the younger Alfred Weber. But first, a few passing words on Max Weber’s legacy.
‘A product of modern European civilization studying the problem of universal history’, wrote Weber famously in 1920, ‘is bound to ask himself, and rightly so, to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie on a line of development having universal significance and validity’ (Weber 1930 [1920]: 13).
A reading can be made of this famous passage of Weber that obviates any implication of Western historical experiences as a normatively prescriptive developmental model for all other societies – such as in the sense of mid-20th-century classical modernization theory. A semantic value can be given to Weber’s predicate ‘universal’ that makes this a ‘concrete’, ‘particularized’ universal, rather than an abstract subsumptive universal, valid indifferently for an indefinite number of given cases. On Weber’s understanding, whatever the universality claims of modern occidental rational civilization may be, the validity of these claims holds contingently, in a definite culture-bound, historically conditioned situation. The aspect of universality holds in this sense in historical particularity, rather than over and above such particularity.
As Wolfgang Mommsen emphasized in an essay from the early 1970s, the thrust of Weber’s thinking about historical dynamics, from his earliest methodological writings of the turn of the century to his last great works, would always be to question Western-centred ‘monological’ conceptions of world history that ignore or paper over contingencies and divergences of developmental paths traced by different world cultures and civilizations (Mommsen 1974). All positivistic utilitarian ideologies of progress from Comte, Saint-Simon and Spencer to ‘scientific socialism’ rested on thoroughly dubious unilinear evolutionary constructions in Weber’s perception. Eschewing every overarching ontology of historical reality or postulate of world history as a meaningfully integrated ethical whole, whether secular or religious in coloration, Weber would refrain from ordering human societies into any definite total scheme of unfolding. It was for this reason that he criticized classical British and French political economy and Marxian materialist historical theory, and it was in this sense that he would speak famously in ‘The Economic Ethics of the World Religions’ of the diverse ‘world images’ that ‘like switchmen [have] determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest’ (Weber 1948 [1920]: 280). Ancient normative visions conditioned the directions of development traced by different world cultures in an always contingent, open-ended, non-totalizable plurality of ways.
Taken together with the work of other figures such as Troeltsch, Scheler and Jaspers, the true register of Weber’s programme as a statement of broadly liberal-cosmopolitan German thought of the Weimar years has to do, I want to urge, with an exercise in Western critical philosophical self-examination on the stage of the world history of cosmologies – and not with any simply narcissistic thesis of Western Promethian entelechy thrusting inexorably upwards to preeminence in global history.
Notably Troeltsch, in the last five years of his life, from 1918 to February 1923, would also underscore this kind of project of critical European self-understanding. ‘We no longer theorize and construe under the protection of an all-bearing order’, wrote Troeltsch in 1922, ‘but in the storm of a newly forming world. … The ground trembles under our feet and the most disparate possibilities of being dance their dance around us – most drastically of course after this cataclysm of the World War’ (Troeltsch 2008 [1922]: 173). The fundaments of European civilization had been turned upside down, Troeltsch insisted, and in any truthful reckoning with the challenges of the present ‘things great and dear’ would have to be sacrificed (2008 [1922]: 1093).
As a Christian (Protestant) theologian, Troeltsch would be driven by an interest in determining the wholeness of world-historical life as an ideal postulate of divine creation, but would nevertheless reiterate that any sense of the absolute in history could only be understood as subsisting in relativity, in multiple relations of historical communities to concurrent life outside of themselves. Ambitions of total metaphysical inclusion of historical contingencies in European philosophies of history since Hegel collapsed in the face of insuperable transience and divergence of structures of mind across global cultural space. Once seemingly impregnable developmental visions disintegrated into fragments of mutability. Emphatically, Troeltsch underlined how historicism undermined every unreflective European claim to universally valid knowledge through the ages and across the globe. Philosophical-historical reflexion, insofar as it was conducted in Europe, was not entitled to posit a world history of humanity tout court but only a ‘world history of Europeanism’. Repeatedly Troeltsch cautioned against habits of ‘European arrogance’ and ‘overextensions of the European feeling of self’ on the stage of philosophy and the human sciences (Troeltsch 2008 [1922]: 703, 705). Behind all recent European generalizing evolutionary constructs, he warned, lurked ‘always a presence of the conqueror, the colonizer and the missionary’ (Troeltsch 2008 [1922]). The lesson was that ‘we must be resolved to reject all overprojections of the European self-image and all forcible monism of a way of thinking that makes everything converge on one point’. The‘constant temptation’ was to ‘unify and spiritually to penetrate all the other communities and their values from the starting-point of our sense of being the centre’ (Troeltsch 2002 [1922]: 566).
If Troeltsch’s inspection of absoluteness-claims in European thought and religious consciousness stands as one parallel to Weber’s work in comparative historical sociology, further counterparts can also be followed in the development of ideas in Germany about the concept of ‘worldviews’ (Weltanschauungen) and in these ideas’ impact on the formation of Kultursoziologie or ‘sociology of civilizations’ in the 1920s. The particular contemporary relevance of these ideas, I claim, lies in an insistence of several writers that modern Western evolutionistic schemes foundered not only along a temporal dimension of historical flux but along a more spatial axis of global cultural simultaneity. In a different way from popular neo-romantic, vitalist, esoteric or proto-irrationalist trends of the early 1900s, these ideas give rigorous non-superficial expression to the thought that Western intellectual life in toto might represent only one culturally specific total structure of cognition among others.
In 1922 a collection of Wilhelm Dilthey’s writings on the ‘theory of worldviews’ (Weltanschauungslehre) appeared in a volume edited by the Francophile German scholar Bernard Groethuysen, bringing together the bundle of sketches on the topic on which the philosopher had been working shortly before his death in 1911. Ineradicable mental discontinuity in both Western and non-Western cultural history, Dilthey had emphasized, made it impossible to posit ‘any system aiming to generate unified objective knowledge (Erkenntnis) from the plenitude of existing ways of knowing (Wissen)’ (Dilthey 1922: 5ff.). ‘From a viewpoint that spans the earth and all past occurrences’, Dilthey continued, ‘the absolute validity of any individual form of life, political constitution, religion or philosophy vanishes’, for ‘the rise of historical consciousness itself destroys belief in universal validity among any of the philosophies that have sought to demonstrate life’s global unity through a compelling system of concepts’ (Dilthey 1922: 78).
In similar terms, Max Scheler would go on to reiterate in 1925 that any serious consideration of the concept of worldviews made preposterous ‘the peculiar positivist habit of judging the cognitive development of the entire species of humanity by a small fold in the development of the modern European West’ (Scheler 1925: 146). The claims of European post-18th-century Enlightenment culture might have been universalistic in aspiration, but, again and again, the real contents of these claims showed themselves to be ‘in practice merely European’ (Scheler 1915: 158). Even Goethe’s hope for a ‘World Literature’, Scheler added, ‘remained, at least in its categories of selection, even if not in its content, thoroughly European. Here too, the “cosmopolitanism” of the age amounted only to a vague and indeterminate Europeanism’ (Scheler 1915: 177). Above all, Scheler urged, the developmentalist postulates of Marxian historical materialist theory rested on some ‘very contingently European’ premises, on a ‘hidden metaphysics of values’ (Scheler 1925: 153). The value-posits and spiritual self-orientations of cultural collectivities in particular epochs and regional situations remained inexpungeable constituents of the textures of historical ontology, irreducible to social class relations and inexplicable in terms of any putatively law-like theory of global class conflict.
As director of the Institut für Sozial- und Staatswissenschaften at Heidelberg in the 1920s, Alfred Weber, also in very parallel terms to Scheler and others, would consider how the project of Kultursoziologie initiated by his brother needed to formulate a non-Eurocentric general account of global developmental particularities and contingencies (Alfred Weber 2000a, 2000b). The two ideas of Zivilisation and Kultur in German thought, he suggested, might be reworked for this project if they were to be redefined in operationally fruitful terms. Suitably stripped of ideological baggage, the one term might be understood as identifying an ideally invariant dimension of cognitive progress relevant to economic development and technical know-how, while the other would be seen as referring to always divergent situations of axiological self-articulation on the part of given cultural communities. But each term needed to be seen as dialectically criticizing and complementing the other. A distinction could then in turn be drawn between a concept of ‘civilizational process’ (Zivilisationsprozess) and a concept of ‘Europeanization’ (Europäisierung), where the first phrase kept open the possibility of entirely autochthonous regional contexts of organizational development, irreducible simply to the influence of Europe or the West. 10
The sense of the First World War as pointing to a profound displacement of the European ‘axis’ in world history would be made famous a generation later by Karl Jaspers in his celebrated book The Origin and Goal of History, of 1949. Yet it is worth noting that Jaspers’s influential conception would be only the echo of numerous earlier instances of loosely comparable language from the 1910s and 1920s in writings by authors from Simmel to Mannheim, Kracauer, Alfred Weber, Plessner and others. 11 In his early treatise Die Psychologie der Weltanschauungen of 1919 and again particularly in his diagnostic text of 1931, Die geistige Situation der Zeit, much of the substance of Jaspers’s thinking about ‘existence’, ‘transcendence’ and ‘limit-situations’ would be driven by a sense of the need to respond to generalized apprehensions in European societies about a turning of the axes of the age, possibly toward the abyss. But the purely pessimistic reading of this turning, Jaspers urged, was to be resisted (Jaspers 1931: 25). Popular nihilistic writers such as Spengler had done nothing but misrepresent a process of ever-increasing mutual entanglement of world civilizations in the modern age as the West’s Untergang. The meaning of the age was not decline or disintegration but perspectivity and plurality of knowledge claims and faiths. The requisite response to this condition was to rise to the challenge of living with multiple contending visions of truth and salvation, beyond either absolute resting-points of certainty or simplistic prophecies of doom. The predicament of contemporary European societies lay in the desuetude of any one metaphysically guaranteed world. Any will to grasp the whole of being now failed ‘in an ineluctable shattering of the totality into particular perspectives and constellations’ (Jaspers 1931: 28ff.). As compared with the past, wrote Jaspers, ‘man today has been uprooted’ and feels ‘as if the foundations of being had been shattered … For, now that the identity of thought and being … has ceased to exist for us, we … ponder how [life] is to be comprehended, doubting the validity of every interpretation… That is why we live in a movement, a flux, a process … The epochal consciousness has turned a somersault in the void’ (Jaspers 1931: 373–4).
Weimar thought after ‘Eurocentrism’
The sensitivities of German hermeneutic social theorists of the Weimar and late Wilhelmine years to diverse horizons of civilizational developmental self-articulation beyond European ideas of modernity have their place in the political context of German antagonism with Western Europe and the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. The frame in which essentially non-reactionary writers such as these understood Germany’s sense of discontent with hegemonic North Atlantic-centred models of global laissez-faire industrial modernity was the same frame in which they thought of the dignity of alternative civilizational pathways of societal development. It was not a contradiction or inconsistency of such writers to support a cause of European rapprochement on the plane of international diplomacy in the 1920s and still to argue for the principled integrity of expressions of ‘protest’ at the West on the plane of thought, mind or Geist.
Unjustly attacked by some commentators after 1945 on the left and right for collapsing into merely self-defeating forms of relativism or moral proto-nihilism, a great many strands of German historical thinking from the Weimar and late Wilhelmine years about relativity of claims to ultimate validity and authority in ethics and politics arguably show themselves to be some of the most fertile resources for discussion today about occidental self-understanding and its limits on the global stage. 12 Far from being a vice, German ideas from this time about contingency, indeterminacy and fragility of claims to universal value and validity were, and remain today, an intellectual virtue.
In this perspective, it can be argued, 19th and early 20th century German philosophical ‘brooding’, ‘introspection’ and ‘inwardness’ might not have signified simply a unique German national-cultural ‘illness’ or affliction but rather a deeper, more authentic quality of insight into the crises of European self-understanding in an age of global modern transformation. ‘Inwardness’ in this perspective could have been the very regimen of self-interrogation that examines every outward-looking attitude for the myopia and self-satisfaction it often conceals. Inwardness in this sense could have meant the light of self-knowledge that shines from within, from within the murky interior. 13 The culturally distant or remote or alien in this way could have been the strangeness within, the inner continent at home – the strange in the familiar, the uncanny in the homely. 14 In so many ways, it can be argued, the very ‘inwardness’ of German thought of the Weimar and Wilhelmine years could make it the most self-reflective and in this sense the least ‘Eurocentric’ of European national-intellectual cultures of the age.
The conclusion can be drawn that a sensitivity to problems of Eurocentrism in Western thought is not an exclusive achievement of such relatively recent academic fields as post-colonial studies or comparative empirical historical sociology. 15 Current debates about these issues in the social sciences and humanities ought not to overlook the earlier efforts of at least some European social theorists, philosophers and historians to self-relativize, to ‘self-provincialize’, to ‘transcend from within’. Discussions today about ‘multiple modernities’, or multiple civilizationally distinctive pathways to and through modernity, have a clear place in earlier 20th century contexts of European social thought that needs to be considered and engaged. 16 As with the term ‘methodological nationalism’, so also with the terms ‘globalization’, ‘Eurocentrism’, and ‘reflexive modernity’: one cannot assume that only from around the 1980s onwards are the salient challenges invoked by these terms properly addressed in Western social thought. Most generally, it is not self-evident that a ‘reflexive turn’ only begins to occur in Western conceptions of societal modernity in the last three decades of the 20th century or in the period of de-colonization after 1945, and not rather in the 1920s, in the shadow of the Great War. As with ‘postmodernity’, so with ‘reflexive modernity’: these designations need to be seen as denoting immanent ongoing cognitive moments of the Western experience of global transformation of the last 120 years, and not any definite phase or era of very recent times.