Sociology,Culture and Energy: The Case of Wilhelm Ostwald’s ‘Sociological Energetics’ – A Translation and Exposition of a Classic Text

In 1908, Wilhelm Ostwald, a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist who had been appointed 20 years earlier to Germany’s first chair in physical chemistry, published Die Energie (Energy), in which he sought to offer the general reading public a concise and accessible account of the significance of energy, a concept in which, he claimed, ‘the real is embodied’ (Ostwald, 1908a: 5). ¹ Spanning 12 chapters, Die Energie encompasses the place of energy in ancient history (drawing on Aristotle, but also Lucretius and Democritus), 19th-century thinking on thermodynamics and energetics (Clausius, Carnot and Helmholtz are mentioned in respect of the former, while Mayer is named as the first ‘energeticist’) and socio-cultural aspects of ‘energetic thought’. In the final chapter, which is translated here, Ostwald developed his theory of ‘sociological energetics’, providing him with a point of departure for his full-length study of Energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft (The Energetical Foundations of the Cultural Sciences) that was published the following year (1909a), and for subsequent works in which he refined these ideas further, including: Der energetische Imperativ (The Energetical Imperative) (1912); Die Forderung des Tages (Today’s challenges) (1910); and Die Philosophie der Werte (The Philosophy of Values) (1913).

In this body of work, Ostwald put forward a particular understanding of culture as the way in which humans influence nature’s raw energies for their own purposes (1908a: 160). From this basis, he was able to develop an argument that looks at both human and non-human uses of energy, concluding that cultural and economic organizations are designed primarily to gain and transform different kinds of energy. The task of culture, as he saw it, is to carry out energy transformations as efficiently as possible, which is both an economic and an ethical imperative. In positing the cultural nature of energy Ostwald was, of course, as Gaston Bachelard (1953) recognized, offering a position of ‘energetic materialism’ related to that which would later be advanced by Bataille and others. Ostwald’s strong claim, which carries through all his ‘sociological’ writings, is that ‘sociology cannot afford to ignore the task of examining its problems from the point of view of energetics’ (Ostwald, 1909a: 3).

While Ostwald’s inaugural address at Leipzig in 1887 was on the theme of ‘Energy and its Transformations’, it was not until 1895 that his philosophical interest in energy found expression. In a paper delivered to a meeting of the German Society of Scientists and Physicians that year, Ostwald outlined his position on ‘Overcoming Scientific Materialism’, promoting energeticism as a basis for a unified scientific worldview that would succeed where mechanics failed (Dohmke and Hansel, 2000: 50–2). His ideas initially caught the imagination of leading thinkers such as Max Planck and Ludwig Boltzmann, but after some debate they and others rejected Ostwald’s claims, criticizing the flawed mathematical reasoning upon which they were based (Hakfoort, 1992: 530–1). Ostwald, however, continued to defend energeticism and was able to refine his ideas in interdisciplinary dialogue with members of the Leipzig School of Cultural Sciences (Kulturwissenschaft), which included the historian Karl Lamprecht, the geographer Friedrich Ratzel, and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, all of whom were interested, as was Ostwald, in establishing a ‘unified field of natural and cultural sciences’ (Kim, 2009: 583). These discussions drew him away from his own field of physical chemistry and towards a more general theory of energetics.

In developing that general theory, Ostwald turned to sociology. In his autobiography, Ostwald (1927: 317) credits an extended chance encounter with Ferdinand Tönnies with awakening his interest in sociology. ² In 1904, Ostwald and Tönnies were both part of the German delegation to the St Louis World’s Fair and found themselves travelling together to the US. ³ Elsewhere, however, the Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid claimed for himself the distinction of having introduced Ostwald to sociological thought. ⁴ Goldscheid initiated contact with Ostwald in 1904 (Hansel, 2004: 10), heralding a long period of professional acquaintance between the two that saw Goldscheid facilitating Ostwald’s largely positive reception by the nascent Austrian Sociological Society (Hansel, 2004: 13; Neef, 2012: 125–7). In return, Goldscheid worked closely with Ostwald in producing and editing Ostwald’s influential journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie (Stekeler-Weithofer et al., 2011; Witrisal, 2004: 98). Both men were leading figures in the Monist Alliance, founded by Ernst Haeckel in 1906; both men sought to develop their own understanding of monism, drawing on energetics to do so (Jacobsen, 2005: 191–7; Neef, 2012: 134–7; Witrisal, 2004: 97–9).

Keen to build upon his connections with Tönnies and Goldscheid, and to further develop the sociological angle of his energetics, Ostwald sought out connections to a number of other European sociological associations and institutions, including the International Institute for Sociology, established by René Worms in Paris in 1893, and the Solvay-Institute in Brussels, which, under its then director Emile Waxweiler, continued to further the interest in energetics of its founder and benefactor, Ernst Solvay (Rabinbach, 1992: 181). Through his connections with Goldscheid, Ostwald also became involved in moves to establish the German Sociological Society from 1907. He was one of the signatories on an open letter calling for the constitution of the German Sociological Society, circulating in 1908, and appears to have attended the first formal planning meeting held in Berlin on 7 March 1909 as a member of the steering committee (Ausschuss) (Simmel, 2004: 165–73).

By no means, however, was Ostwald universally accepted in sociological circles. In early 1909, Max Weber published an acerbic review of Die Energie in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik (2012 [1909]), to which contemporary sociology’s lack of engagement with Ostwald can be attributed. In private, Weber was even less complimentary about Ostwald’s claims, remarking in a letter to Heinrich Herkner of 8 May 1909 discussing organizational matters relating to the German Sociological Society: ‘I have a fear and horror of Ostwald’s “energetic sociology” – but if he wants to talk, then one would have to let him do so, in order to prevent resentment’ (Weber, 1994: 116). In part at least because of Weber’s critical review, Ostwald did not attend the first conference of the German Society for Sociology held in Frankfurt am Main in October 1910. Reference was, however, made to his work in the course of the meeting. As part of his response to Werner Sombart’s address on ‘Technology und Culture’, Weber reiterated some of the main points of his review, taking Ostwald to task for his scientism and, in particular, his reliance on the Comtean hierarchy of disciplines. He then proceeded to criticize Ostwald’s attempt to define energy as the foundation of social life, with reference to his own anti-foundational thinking. ⁵ Finally, he also voiced concern about Ostwald’s inability to understand the nature of his own imbrication in capitalist relations of production (Weber 2005 [1910]). ⁶

Weber’s rejection of Ostwald’s work was not, however, absolute. Although he was fiercely critical of Ostwald’s claims about ‘sociological energetics’, he also advocated cautious recognition of the potential value of Ostwald’s thinking, maintaining that:

Ostwald is and will remain a thinker whose refreshing enthusiasm, as well as his sensitivity to modern problems, must make it a pleasure for anyone to work together with him on the widespread problems connected with ‘technology and culture’. (Weber 2012 [1909]: 268)

More specifically, Weber identified ‘energetics’ as a legitimate subject of enquiry for sociology:

In particular, his [Ostwald’s] general remark that it is necessary to establish all the particular propositions that can be derived from the application of laws of energy to social phenomena deserves our unreserved agreement. (2012 [1909]: 267).

Weber was not the only German sociologist in this period to recognize the importance of energetics for sociological analysis. Those who can be added to the list include not only lesser-known figures such as Rudolf Goldscheid and Ludwig Stein, but also sociologists of the stature of Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Tönnies. ⁷ Of these, Goldscheid is perhaps closest to Ostwald in seeking to employ the concept of energy – and in particular, kinetic energy – to ground his ‘sociological lamarckism’, which enabled him to construct a critical response to social Darwinism (Witrisal, 2004). Like Herbert Spencer before him, Goldscheid’s work, then, was indebted to thermodynamics, as well as biology. ⁸ Meanwhile, Stein, a Hungarian philosopher who taught sociology in Bern and was elected president of the International Society for Sociology in 1909, sought to trace the historical and philosophical basis for energetics (Ostwald, 1927: 327–8). From 1900 onwards, Stein supervised dissertations and taught courses in this field, drawing upon energetics to ground his deliberations on ‘social optimism’ (Stein, 1905). ⁹ Stein invited Ostwald to address the meeting of the International Society for Sociology held in Bern in July 1909, and the pair subsequently outlined plans for an ‘energetic-social cultural movement’, which, however, did not materialize, due, apparently, to the outbreak of the First World War (Ostwald, 1927: 328). While Stein and Goldscheid were clearly drawing upon Ostwald’s energetics to underpin their own sociological interests, the nature of the relationship between Simmel and Ostwald is less clear. Simmel’s (1978 [1905]) Philosophy of Money uses the analogy of the exchange of energy in the physical world to describe the exchange of money in the economy (Wegener, 2010: 149). Although there is no direct evidence of sustained contact between Simmel and Ostwald beyond their involvement in the inception of the German Sociological Society in 1908–9 (Rammstedt, 2012), Ostwald’s later writings develop the analogy used by Simmel into a ‘full-blown theory of the economy’ (Wegener, 2010: 149).

Combining Simmel’s desire to draw upon energy’s properties in order to investigate processes of social and monetary exchange with Goldscheid’s reworking of Spencer’s positivism and Stein’s work on the philosophical basis of energetics, Tönnies offers a suggestive approach to questions about the nature of the relationship between sociology and energetics. Tönnies, like Stein, became acquainted with Ostwald’s writings on ‘energetics’ before encountering Ostwald himself and prior to Ostwald’s work taking a decidedly sociological turn. In a prize-winning essay on ‘Philosophical Terminology’, which was first published in three parts in the leading philosophical journal Mind, Tönnies (1899–1900: 481–6) made reference to Ostwald’s work while describing energetics as part of the challenge to the mechanistic world-view – and therefore to the simplifying tendencies of ‘natural scientific reason’ – posed by a new ‘vitalistic impulse’. ¹⁰ Here energetics is posited as offering a challenge to the assumptions of positivism, which Tönnies sought to take up more generally in his rethinking of sociological positivism (Bond, 2009).

In his opening address to the first conference of the German Sociological Society in 1910, on ‘Ways and Goals of Sociology’, Tönnies drew upon the example of Julius Robert Mayer’s theory of energetics (which Ostwald cites as a source for his own thinking in Die Energie) to illustrate his argument that sociology cannot afford to be blind to contemporary theoretical questions drawn from other disciplines. ¹¹ In this case, he argues, sociology must be sensitive to the fact that:

The conservation of energy must penetrate appearances in an economy, as it must in law and in politics, and permeate cultural phenomena in the entire world of thought, and may be further recognizable as limitless entanglements and as dependencies. (Tönnies 2005 [1910]: 63)

Here, Tönnies draws attention to the importance he accords to ‘appearances’ as a way of thinking with philosophy, tying the study of appearances to particular spheres of social interaction in order to foreground the way in which an idea such as the ‘conservation of energy’ draws attention to the limitless connections – to the forms of relation – between these spheres, even as it also retains its specificity in each.

This idea of relationality, which, of course, lies at the core of much contemporary theory in the humanities and the social sciences, is entirely in line with Ostwald’s energetic thought, which was primarily concerned with energy and its transformations. In his reflections on the ‘energetische Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaft’, in which he expanded upon his work on ‘sociological energetics’, relationality is a central concept. His strong energetic argument, which owes more than a little to Ernst Mach’s theory of sensations, ¹² holds that we experience the world only in terms of ‘energy relations’ (Energieverhältnisse), which means, he maintains, that we can express all we know of the external world in terms of ‘energy relationships’ (Energiebeziehungen) (Ostwald, 1909a: 9–10). ¹³ This claim grounds Ostwald’s major contribution to our understanding of energy, which lies in his insistence – like that of Bataille after him – that culture is energy and that therefore culture can be grasped energetically.

Ostwald’s failing, however, is that he refused to recognize that his approach necessarily stands in relation to a different approach, one that seeks to understand energy culturally. In developing his theoretical model he attempted (entirely in line with his own ‘energetic imperative’ – ‘don’t waste energy, utilize it’ – Ostwald, 1910: 85) to eliminate friction as efficiently as possible, through insisting upon the possibility of perfectly subsuming socio-cultural explanation under rational scientific discourse. In their separate encounters with Ostwald and energetics, however, Weber, Tönnies and Simmel hint at a third way of imagining the relationship between sociology and energy, one which, rather than insisting on the primacy of either sociology or energy, draws upon Ostwald’s interest in associative relations to focus on the sociology/energy relation, valuing the friction between socio-cultural and scientific discourse. In this, they anticipate Michel Serres’s account of the productive dissonance between the hard sciences and the social sciences, which he casts as ‘an adventure to be had’ (Serres and Latour, 1995: 70). As Weber suggested, Ostwald’s work has much to offer in thinking productively about the relationship between technology and culture, in terms of developing studies that would pay due attention to the way in which the sciences, both cultural and natural, are determined by a complex constellation of ideal and material interests.