Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Decolonizing Weber
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
political economy of most of the world than did the crude racism of Ploetz or
Hitler. African Americans played a crucial role in the development of Webers
racial thought, and we shall return to Webers view of Blacks below.
II. The Verein fur Sozialpolitik before Weber: free labor as threat to the social
order
Weber began addressing the problem of free labor when he joined the Verein
fur Sozialpolitik, the organization of social scientists founded in 1872 by
Gustav Schmoller, Georg Friedrich Knapp, and Lujo Brentano. The Verein
had been founded, as Schmoller explained in his opening address to the
groups first meeting, to deal with the political and social dangers caused by
the rise of free labor and the end of feudalism in Germany. The vestiges of
what was at least widely regarded as feudalism persisted in Prussia until well
into the nineteenth century. Serfdom, a form of involuntary agricultural
servitude, was only formally abolished in Prussia in 1807. Still, impoverished
and landless farmers remained nearly as dependent on their former lords as
they had been prior to their liberation. An 1869 Prussian law abolished
criminal sanctions for contract breaking in factory work, thus providing
those poor peasants who left for industrial work in western areas
of the kingdom with an escape from the extra-economic coercion associated,
at least by the members of the Verein, with feudalism.17 In the years 1880 /
1893, millions of German farmers left eastern Prussia for better opportunities
in the United States and, to a lesser extent, western Germany.18 Germany also
became an important destination for Poles emigrating from Russian and
Austrian Poland, although far more went to the United States.19 In the 1890s,
Germany became a major industrial economy in Europe. Germanys
increasingly proletarianized labor force did, as many bourgeois observers
feared, turn increasingly to social democracy. After Bismarcks anti-socialist
laws were allowed to lapse, the social democrats got more seats in the German
Reichstag than any other party, with almost twenty percent of the vote in
1890. Germany, which had made such a late and rapid transition from
feudalism to capitalism, seemed on the brink of making an equally rapid
transition from capitalism to socialism.
The founders of the Verein had long worried that, as Schmoller put it at the
first meeting of the organization, free-market Manchester school economists
did not appreciate this threat of social revolution because of their optimistic
prophecies about the beneficial results of the freedom of trade and
profession [Gewerbefreiheit] and the abolition of the entire archaic medieval
labor regulation. Workers, Schmoller admitted, enjoyed this mobility of
profession, and it afforded many of them better standards of living than ever
before. However, free labor also introduced a growing division between
workers and the owning and educated classes, not just economically, but
even more so in ethics, education, views, and ideals. All higher cultures,
including the Greeks and the Romans, Schmoller warned, fell because of
similar social divisions. Rejecting the leveling proposed by socialists,
Schmoller spoke for the Verein in encouraging the state to develop policies
57
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
that would protect the middle classes by creating a society with gradual
gradations of income rather than sharp class divisions.20 Only their enemies,
who termed the group Kathedersozialisten (academic socialists), regarded
the Verein as having affinities with the political left. The members of the
Verein would indeed have agreed with Marx and Engels that capitalism may
improve the lot of the poor as compared to the way they had lived under
feudalism and, more importantly, that it produces the class conflict that
would ultimately lead to socialism. They were willing, however, to sacrifice
the well-being capitalism brought workers in order to avoid the socialism that
they, like Marxists, assumed it would also eventually bring.
The main proposals discussed in the Verein meetings to check the evils of
capitalism, especially the new freedoms enjoyed by workers, involved both
political intervention and social engineering. One of the earliest discussions
involved the states ability to punish workers who broke contracts with their
employers. Members agreed that the states powers to punish contract-
breaking workers did not need to be expanded, but that existing laws should
be enforced to fight a practice that produces and encourages moral
barbarization [Verwilderung] of the working class.21 The Verein did not
continue developing schemes for such frankly repressive measures* although
/
it also did not reject them* and by 1881 had turned to what would be its
/
major program for limiting class conflict in Germany: the preservation and
strengthening of the rural middle class. Soliciting contributions from local
experts, the Verein published a three-volume work, Rural Conditions in
Germany, which formed the basis of an 1884 discussion on the possible uses
of landownership as a bulwark against social democracy. The discussion was
also notable, in light of Max Webers later contribution, for the total absence
of any discussion of Polish, German, or any other ethnicity.22
Karl Kaerger, a Verein member and Privatdozent at the Royal Agricultural
Academy in Berlin, gave an especially optimistic account of the mobility of
free labor in his 1890 work on Sachsengangerei.23 Sachsengangerei, literally
going to Saxony, became a generic term for migrant agricultural labor in
Germany because so many workers from the eastern parts of Germany
traveled to work in the sugarbeet fields of Saxony. The term Sachsenganger
soon came to refer to workers in sugarbeet fields and in other areas of
agriculture outside of Saxony. The term also came to describe the seasonal
laborers from Russian Poland who replaced the Sachsenganger who had left
eastern Germany in the first place. Social scientists and state officials
generally assumed that Sachsenganger, from both in- and outside Germany,
were Polish, and discussions of Sachsengangerei often involved anxieties
about culture and ethnicity, and concerns about Polonization and Germani-
zation.
For Kaerger and many observers, the economy of sugarbeet determined the
character of free agricultural labor. Because sugarbeets were labor intensive
and required experienced technical oversight to farm and process, the
paternal relationship between lord and peasant was replaced by the
more impersonal relationship between manager and employee. Sugarbeets
required an enormous amount of labor during the planting, cultivating, and
58
DECOLONIZING WEBER
harvesting, but almost no work in the winter. Since seasonal workers left in
the winter, landlords did not have to concern themselves with supporting
them in the off season. Although the pay was low, the hours long, and the
housing terrible, many workers signed contracts every year for the same
estates. Women were hired more frequently than men. They were considered
better at all tasks other than pulling the fully grown beets, two at a time, from
the ground and knocking them together to dislodge soil. Also, women were
paid, on average, two-thirds of mens wages. Most of the Sachsenganger,
Kaerger found, were young people, who returned to live with their parents
when they were not away working. They saved much of the money they
earned during their labor contracts to buy clothing more luxurious than they
normally could afford or to otherwise enjoy higher standards of living.
Many commentators, according to Kaerger, worried that the Sachsengan-
ger had lower moral standards because of the long winters of unemployment,
their independence from their own families, and the absence of paternalistic
labor relations. Kaerger, by contrast, found that, on the whole, Sachsengan-
gerei improved Kultur. The separation from economically and culturally
backward homes, the supervision by proficient overseers, and the contact
with technologically advanced sugarbeet farming and with the culturally
advanced West had a beneficial influence. Travel broadened the minds of the
Sachsenganger, freeing them from old traditions and teaching them new
habits, such as, in the case of many girls, wearing shoes. The contact with the
West Germanized the Poles, by teaching them to speak German and to
identify with more homogeneously German areas. The migrants usually
settled down in their late twenties and started their own household, so that
Sachsengangerei did not, according to Kaerger, lead to a permanently
wandering population. The state, Kaerger concluded, should not forbid,
but rather further regulate, Sachsengangerei. He insisted especially on the
solution proposed in the previous decade in the Verein of increasing the
criminal penalties for breaking contracts, in order to prevent the legal ideas
of the rural population from permanently sinking back to the level of natural-
or half-cultured peoples.24
To a far greater extent than the Verein fur Sozialpolitik in the period before
Max Webers participation, the Prussian state addressed the question of free
agricultural labor in terms of ethnic and cultural conflict between Germans
and Poles. Prussia had expanded eastward for centuries, eventually divvying
up all of Poland with Russia and Austria in the eighteenth century. In the
eighteenth century, Frederick the Great had sent German, French, and other
colonists to the formerly Polish portions of Prussia. Such waves of what came
to be called internal colonization continued into the twentieth century,
although it was not until the more racist and nationalist period after German
unification that the Prussian state conceived of these settlements in explicitly
anti-Polish terms.25
In the second decade after German unification, Bismarck and others
created an anti-Polish panic in the east, turning against supposedly inferior
Polish nobles, farmers, and agricultural workers. An 1886 Prussian law gave
the Ministry of Agriculture 100 million marks to strengthen the German
59
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
Commission and expressed the desire that its work be expanded to all of
eastern Germany.34 Even as the Prussian government grew increasingly
paranoid about Polish anti-German agitation, the Verein remained focused
on the social-political task of settling German farmers to ward off the social
revolutionary consequences of capitalism.
III. Race, free labor, and political economy: Weber and the Poles
It was Max Webers unique achievement to synthesize, in a series of works
produced between 1892 and 1895, the conservative politics of the Verein fur
Sozialpolitik with the racist politics of the Prussian state. This first
sociological interest laid the groundwork for Webers later, more well-known
work on sociological method and economic sociology. Eastern Prussian
agriculture presented separate problems to the Verein fur Sozialpolitik and to
the Prussian state. To the Verein, free labor presented the principal problem
of the region, for as laborers freed themselves from paternal domination they
also became potential revolutionaries. To the Prussian state, the region
presented a problem of an increasing Polish population and a diminishing
German population. Both the Prussian state and the Verein fur Sozialpolitik
found common ground in the program of internal colonization. The Prussian
state favored the small farmers settled in the program because they were
ethnically German, while the Verein favored them because their landholding
would prevent their proletarianization.
Weber first encountered the Polish minority of East Elbian Prussia when
his reserve unit was transferred from Alsace to Posen in 1888. At the end of
his first period of service in that eastern province, Weber toured estates set up
by the Prussian Settlement Commission. From that time on, Marianne
recalled, he felt one of the most important political problems was the
winning of the East by a policy of settlement. Weber was repelled by much in
the east, complaining, for example, in a letter to Marianne from his 1894
reserve duty, of the old greasy barracks biped (whether he was Polish or not
Weber does not make clear), who, on Sundays, remembers that it is
human . . . and must therefore try to be distinguishable from an ordinary
pig, at least under a magnifying glass.35 One of Webers most important, if
least celebrated, contributions to the debates about agrarian labor in the
Verein fur Sozialpolitik (as well as in other political organizations to which he
belonged) was to bring the supposed inferiority of Poles and the cultural
degeneration of the Prussian East* often, as in the last-cited passage,
/
creation of rental agreements that would keep German settlers legally bound
to the land. While the Prussian state already pursued both of these programs,
Weber worried that this would turn out to be a case of too little, too late.41
Max Webers famous 1895 Freiburg inaugural address developed the
methodological tensions in his work on Polish seasonal labor in ways that not
only intensified the racist and imperialist aspects of his thought, but also
connected them to the question of values and science that has since become a
hallmark of Weberianism.42 This lecture used, as Weber explained, the
example of West Prussia to show the role played in the economic struggle for
existence by physical and mental race differences [Rassendifferenzen] between
nationalities.43 Going over phenomena already familiar from his studies of
Polish and German labor, Weber concluded that the economic differences
between the two groups resulted from differing abilities, based on physical
and mental racial qualities of the two nations to adapt.44 The Polish farmer
was winning the economic struggle with the German, Weber explained not
despite, but rather because of, his low physical and mental habits.45 Like
many Social Darwinists, Weber feared that society allowed biologically
inferior individuals to prevail over superior individuals, contrary to the rule
of the survival of the fittest. Social Darwinists, such as Ploetz, more
commonly blamed social welfare for allowing the unfit to prosper. Weber,
as we saw in his conflict with Ploetz, believed that social welfare might
actually preserve stronger individuals. He made his own peculiar twist on
Social Darwinism by blaming the market rather than social welfare for the
victory of inferior Poles over superior Germans.
Webers anti-Polish rhetoric was no passing mania but rather a central part
of his politics. Weber was not, it is eminently clear, merely a figure of his
times, simply mouthing a racism whose existence we are not, according to a
certain perverse historicism, allowed to acknowledge because it was part of a
supposed spirit of the age. Rather, Weber consistently agitated for firmer anti-
Polish politics within the major organizations of which he was a member. We
have already seen this in the case of the Verein fur Sozialpolitik, where he
alone saw internal colonization primarily as a fight against Poles rather than
against proletarianization. In 1896, at the founding meeting of the National
Social Party, a patriotic and religious alternative to the social democrats,
Weber attacked his friend Friedrich Naumann, the leader of the party, for his
insufficient hostility to Poles. Naumann should not speak, Weber claimed,
against those who would reduce the Poles to second-class citizens of
Germany. In fact, Weber maintained, the opposite is true: we were the first
to make the Poles into humans. Weber concluded his attack with a sentiment
that would become famous later in his lecture Politics as a Vocation.:
Politics is a tough business, and whoever wants to take up the responsibility of
grasping the spokes of the wheel of the political development of the fatherland must
have steady nerves and must not be too sentimental to carry out earthly politics.
The politician must recognize a fundamental fact: the irresolvable and
eternal struggle of man against man on the earth . . . .46 In 1899 Weber
resigned from the Pan-German League, explaining that, while he supported
63
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
the aims and leaders of the organization, he believed it did not work hard
enough against Poles in Germany, bowing to the interests of agrarian
capitalists in allowing cheap migrant labor into Germany.47 Near the end of
his life, in 1918, Weber offered to lead any student who had decided not to
make any grand speeches but silently to see to it that the first Polish official
who dares to enter Danzig is hit by a bullet. (Weber found no followers in this
endeavor, and Marianne Weber recalls that many listeners walked out on
him.)48 Throughout his life, Weber attempted to turn organizations to which
he belonged toward radical nationalist, anti-Polish sentiment and action, in
science and in politics alike.
In much of his work, Weber was faced with the problem of balancing a
commitment to social science with a commitment to German nationalism and
anti-Polish racism. In his Freiburg address, he first explicitly raised the
question of how an economist could advocate acting against labor
practices* the employment in agriculture of migrant laborers who happened
/
IV. Weber in the United States: African Americans and the reality of race
Webers trip to the United States in 1904 brought him into contact with what
had become, in German social science as in so many other discourses, a
paradigmatic case of the interrelation of race and free labor: emancipated
African Americans in the South.52 Webers experience with African Amer-
icans allowed him to develop his anti-Polish racism into a general political
economy of race and free labor. Georg Friedrich Knapp, a founder of the
Verein fur Sozialpolitik, whose studies of the end of serfdom in Prussia laid
the groundwork for practically all subsequent studies of German agriculture,
began drawing parallels between the end of slavery in the New World and free
labor in Prussian agriculture no later than 1888.53 For Knapp, however,
64
DECOLONIZING WEBER
questions of race in the New World simply disguised questions about class
and labor relations. The Negro question, Knapp explained, both in the New
World and in Germanys own African colonies, was the labor question for
the agricultural-industrial large enterprise of the plantation. The claim that
Negroes were inherently lazy, for Knapp, amounted to no more than the
complaint that they refused to work for white employers.54 Gustav Schmoller,
in his 1900 Grundri der allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslehre, differentiated his
own historical economics from the abstractions of earlier political economy
(as well, presumably, as the economic abstractions he had rejected in the first
Methodenstreit), in part because of his willingness to concretize abstract
humanity with concepts of race and national character. Schmoller offered a
survey of the economic properties of races, beginning with the lowest race,
the Negro of Africa and America. While Schmollers text by no means takes
race as its central category, it does make race a fundamental aspect of its
uniquely historical perspective and highlights the case of Blacks as a case
proving the importance of race.55
Webers scholarly interest in African Americans emerged during a 1904 trip
to the United States to give a lecture at a Congress of Arts and Letters at the St.
Louis Worlds Fair. In his lecture on The Relations of the Rural Community to
Other Branches of Social Science, Weber repeated the claim, by then standard
in the Verein, that capitalism destroyed rural communities by freeing peasants
to become workers, and often politically dangerous socialists. While the
United States did not, Weber allowed, yet see a situation similar to eastern
Germany, where less cultured Poles threatened to defeat the older and higher
culture of the Germans, it might someday. If African American farms
continued to expand, they could, in combination with an enormous
immigration of uncivilized elements from eastern Europe, become a rural
population . . . which could not be assimilated by the historically transmitted
culture of the United States, namely, the Anglo-Saxon spirit. Whether and
how the United States would eventually encounter the problems that now faced
Germans would, Weber concluded, determine the character of the future
culture of this continent.56 While in America, Weber met with Booker T
Washington and W E B Du Bois, persuading the latter to contribute an article
on The Negro Question in the United States to the Archiv fur Sozialwis-
senschaft und Sozialpolitik, the journal of the Verein.57 Du Bois had already
begun work on this project when he had been a graduate student under
Schmoller in Berlin.58 Perhaps at first simply to interest his St. Louis audience
in a lecture on a topic that Weber himself saw as peculiarly German, he began to
develop his anti-Polish racism into a general theory of race and labor that could
also be applied to the United States. This American mediation helped
transform his racist nationalism into a political economy of race and culture.
V. From the political economy of race and culture to a global study of culture
and economics
Webers interest in political, economic, and cultural conflict with minorities
in Germany and the United States did not lead him to become a vocal
65
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
Weber set himself the task in his religious studies of pursuing the inhibiting
and enabling roles played by these magically or religiously rooted imaginary
obligations in the development of economic rationality. The irrational, the
ethical, had moved from the position external to rationality that it had
occupied in the 1895 inaugural lecture to a position inside of rationality itself.
One no longer, for Weber, had to strike a balance between norms and reason;
reason itself depended upon norms, and specifically culturally bound norms
that were religious in origin. Rather than nationalism guiding economics
from the outside, the ethical consequences of the ideas of the bearers of
civilization [Kulturtrager] would shape economic and other rationalities from
the inside.
The Collected Essays on the Sociology of Religion answered questions
about the cultural determination of labor that Weber had been asking since
his work on Polish migrant laborers and his projected study of the
psychophysics of industrial work. In perhaps his only piece of microeco-
nomic theorizing, Weber proposed a cultural, rather than wage-determined,
theory of labor productivity. Raising wages, Weber pointed out, has the
paradoxical effect of decreasing the productivity of workers who are
motivated solely by economic gain, for they will quickly realize they can
work less to achieve the standard of living to which they are accustomed.
Lowering wages is an effective means to achieve increased productivity
69
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
among such workers for a brief period, for they will have to work harder to
maintain their standard of living. However, such a strategy begins to reduce
productivity as the wages become physiologically insufficient and poor
nutrition undermines productivity. The low productivity of Poles, Weber
explained, illustrated this outcome. Economics could not, by itself, increase
the productivity of workers, for only a feeling of responsibility within the
workers themselves could lead them to stop asking how to get a job done with
the maximum of comfort and a minimum of achievement and to begin to
pursue work as if it were an absolute end in itself [Sebstzweck]* that is, a
/
released until the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed and the material
apparatus of capitalism has collapsed.81 The Verein had considered criminal
punishments for contract breaking, and supported state-sponsored programs
70
DECOLONIZING WEBER
ship was one of the factors driving him to develop his theory* scholars /
74
DECOLONIZING WEBER
Notes
1
W J Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890 /1920 , M S Steinberg (trans.), Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984. See also G A Abraham, Max Weber: Modernist Anti-Pluralism and
the Polish Question, New German Critique 53, 1991, pp 33 /66. Webers nationalism and racism has,
nonetheless, been repeatedly minimized, most recently in F Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual
Biography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.
2
A striking symptomatic slip of this repressed material occurs when Harry Zohn places a sic after M
Webers account of her husband entertaining his American relatives with Nigger-English. Zohn
explains, The author presumably meant that Webers English was primitive and perhaps even exotic
and droll. See M Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, H Zohn (trans.), New York: John Wiley & Sons,
1975, p 299 /28.
3
E Balibar, Is There a Neo-Racism?, in E Balibar and I Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
Identities, Chris Turner (trans.), London: Verso, 1999, pp 17 /28, p 22.
4
See especially the section on Imperial Racism in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp 190 /195.
5
Imperialism, the control of one region by an external state, and colonialism, the occupation or settling
of one region by inhabitants of another, have been historically linked. See G Steinmetz, Return to
Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Comparative-Historical Perspective, Sociological Theory 23(4),
2005, forthcoming.
6
See D Harvey, The Limits to Capital , 2nd ed., London: Verso, 1999, esp. ch. 13, Crises in the Space
Economy of Capitalism: The Dialectics of Imperialism, pp 413 /445.
7
A Zimmerman, A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the
Transnational Origins of African Cotton Growers, American Historical Review 110, December, 2005,
forthcoming.
8
See L Olsson, Labor Migration as a Prelude to World War I, International Migration Review 30, 1996,
pp 875 /900.
9
L E Harrison and S P Huntington (eds), Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, New
York: Basic Books, 2000. An equally important exemplar of right-wing Weberianism is the work of
Samuel Huntington. See especially S P Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations?, Foreign Affairs 72(3),
1993, pp 22 /49; S P Huntington, The West Unique, Not Universal, Foreign Affairs 75(6), 1996, pp
28 /46.
10
D Landes, Culture Makes Almost All the Difference, in Harrison and Huntington, Culture Matters,
pp 2 /13, pp 2, 5.
11
Weber as a theorist of values was first emphasized in T Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study
in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers, New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1937. F H Tenbruck, The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber, in K Tribe
(ed.), Reading Weber, London: Routledge, 1989, pp 42 /84, argues that Weber turned to rationalism
late, only with the Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie. He attributes the attention to Webers
view of rationalization to R Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait , London: Routledge, 1998. See
also W Schluchter, The Rise of Western Rationalism: Max Webers Developmental History, Guenther
Roth (trans.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.
12
A Ploetz, Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft und einige damit zusammenhangende Probleme, 21
October 1910, in Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 19. /22. Oktober 1910 in
Frankfurt a.M ., Tubingen: J C B Mohr, 1911, pp 111 /136.
13
Discussion of A Ploetz, Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft, pp 137 /165.
14
For a less laudatory, more accurate account of Weber on race, see E M Manasse, Max Weber on Race,
Social Research 14, 1947, pp 191 /221, or, indeed, Marianne Webers biography of her late husband,
Max Weber: A Biography.
15
Discussion of A Ploetz, Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft. Max Webers contributions to this
discussion are reprinted in M Weber, Diskussionsrede dortselbst zu dem Vortrag von A. Ploetz uber
Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft, in Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik ,
Tubingen: J C B Mohr, 1924, pp 456 /462. For English translations of Max Webers remarks, see B
Nelson, Max Weber on Race and Society, Social Research 38, 1971, pp 30 /41, and B Nelson, Max
Weber, Dr. Alfred Ploetz and W.E.B. Du Bois, Sociological Analysis 34, 1973, pp 308 /312.
16
Max Weber (Asheville, NC) to his mother, 13 October 1904, GStA, VI HA, NL Weber, Nr. 6, Bl. 52 /55.
Quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, p 296.
17
For an excellent comparative account of free labor, see R J Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free
Labor in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
75
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
18
K J Bade, German Emigration to the United States and Continental Immigration to Germany in the
Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Central European History 13, 1980, pp 348 /377.
19
J Zubrzycki, Emigration from Poland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Population Studies
6, 1953, pp 248 /272.
20
G Schmoller, Eroffnungsrede, Verhandlungen der Eisenacher Versammlung zur Besprechung der socialen
Frage am 6. und 7. October 1872 , Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1873, pp 1 /6.
21
A Held, Die Bestrafung des Arbeitscontractbruchs, Verhandlungen der zweiten Generalversammlung
des Vereins fur Socialpolitik am 11. und 12. October 1874 , Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik , vol. 9,
Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1875, pp 5 /25, p 13. Of special concern was the 1869 Prussian law that
ended the control of masters over apprentices. See L Brentano, Gutachten, in Verein fur Socialpolitik,
Die Reform des Lehrlingswesens: Sechszehn Gutachten und Berichte, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot,
1875, pp 49 /71.
22
Verein fur Socialpolitik, Ba uerliche Zusta
nde in Deutschland , 3 vols., Schriften des Vereins fur
Socialpolitik , vols. 21 /24, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1883. Preservation and strengthening: vol.
1, p v. The discussion is in Massregeln der Gesetzgebung und Verwaltung zur Erhaltung des
bauerlichen Grundbesitzes, in Verhandlungen 6. und 7. October 1884 abgehaltenen Generalversammlung
des Vereins fur Socialpolitik , Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik , vol. 28, Leipzig: Duncker &
Humblot, 1884, pp 1 /76.
23
K Kaerger, Die Sachsenga ngerei: Auf Grund personlicher Ermittlungen und statistischer Erhebungen ,
Berlin: Paul Parey, 1890. What follows on Sachsenganger comes largely from this book. For a recent
account of migrant labor in Germany see U Herbert, A History of Foreign Labor in Germany, 1880 /
1980: Seasonal Workers/Forced Laborers, Guest Workers, William Templer (trans.), Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1990.
24
K Kaerger, Sachsenga ngerei , p 214. See Kaergers similar arguments in Die landlichen Arbeiterver-
haltnisse in Nordwestdeutschland, Die Verha ltnisse der Landarbeiter, vol. 1, Schriften des Vereins fur
Socialpolitik , vol. 53, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1892, pp 1 /239, and Die Arbeiterpacht: Ein Mittel
zur Losung der landlichen Arbeiterfrage, Berlin: Gergonne, 1893.
25
On Prussian anti-Polish efforts, see R Blanke, Prussian Poland in the German Empire (1871 /1900) ,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1981, and W W Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews: The
Nationality Conflict in the Prussian East, 1772 /1914 , Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
26
Quoted in G F Knapp, Landarbeiter und innere Kolonisation (1893), in G F Knapp, Einfuhrung in
einige Hauptgebiete der Nationalokonomie: Siebenundzwanzig Beitra ge zur Sozialwissenschaft , Munich:
Duncker & Humblot, 1925, pp 124 /142, p 138. A second 100 million was budgeted to the commission
in 1898. See W W Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews.
27
Vertrauliche Besprechung des Koniglichen Staatsministeriums, 10 January 1886; Bismarck, Staats-
Ministerium, to Honmeyer, Unterstaatsekretaer im Staastministerium, 11 January 1886, Vertrauliche
Besprechung des Koniglichen Staatsministeriums, 24 January 1886, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 90 A, Nr.
3742, Bl. 1 /2, 70 /72.
28
On this and other anti-Polish measures taken up by Prussia, see W W Hagen, Germans, Poles, and Jews.
29
See, for example, Regierungs-Prasident [Tiedmann], Bromberg, Denkschrift betreffend einige Massre-
geln zur Germanisierung der Provinz Posen, 6 January 1886, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 90 A, Nr. 3742, Bl.
6 /36; Freiherr von Wilamowitz-Mollendorf, Ober-Prasident der Provinz-Posen, Denkschrift betref-
fend die Grundsatze fur das Verhalten der Staatsregierung gegenuber den Staatsgehorigen polnischer
Muttersprache in der Provinz Posen, 23 November 1895, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 90 A, Nr. 3743, Bl.
114 /125; Sitzung des Kgl. Staatsministeriums, 9 October 1900, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 87ZB, Nr. 176,
Bl. 84 /94.
30
Meeting of all Prussian Government Ministries, 13 February 1906, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 87ZB, Nr.
178, Bl. 244 /249.
31
The Vereins general lack of interest in the nationalist politics of Prussian colonization is especially clear
in Knapp, Landarbeiter und innere Kolonisation, p 138.
32
G Schmoller, Die preuische Kolonisation des 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, in Verein fur Socialpolitik,
Zur Inneren Kolonisation in Deutschland: Erfahrungen und Vorschla ge, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot,
1886, pp 1 /43, pp 1 /2.
33
See Zur Inneren Kolonisation in Deutschland , pp 44 /229.
34
Ueber innere Kolonisation mit Rucksicht auf die Erhaltung und Vermehrung des mittleren und
kleineren landlichen Grundbesitzes, Verhandlungen der zweiten Generalversammlung des Vereins fu r
Socialpolitik am 24. und 25. September 1886 , Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik , vol. 33, Leipzig:
Duncker & Humblot, 1887, pp 77 /138.
35
Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, pp 146 /147, p 93.
76
DECOLONIZING WEBER
36
M Weber, Die Verhaltnisse der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland , Schriften des Vereins fur
Socialpolitik , vol. 55, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1892.
37
M Weber, Die Verhaltnisse der Landarbeiter, p 793.
38
M Weber, Die Verhaltnisse der Landarbeiter, pp 795, 803 /804.
39
M Weber, Die landliche Arbeitsverfassung (1893), in Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Tubingen: J C B Mohr, 1924, pp 444 /469, p 448. For similar arguments, see
also M Weber, Entwicklungstendenz in der Lage der ostelbischen Landarbeiter (1894), in Gesammelte
Aufsatze zur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, pp 470 /507. Translated as M Weber, Developmental
Tendencies in the Situation of East Elbian Rural Labourers, Economy and Society 8, 1979, pp 177 /205.
40
M Weber, Die landliche Arbeitsverfassung, pp 456 /457.
41
M Weber, Die landliche Arbeitsverfassung, pp 466 /469.
42
M Weber, Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik (1895), in J Winckelmann (ed.),
Gesammelte Politische Schriften , 3rd ed., Tubingen: J C B Mohr, 1971, pp 1 /25, p 14. For English
translations, see The Nation State and Economic Policy (1895), in M Weber, Political Writings, P
Lassman and R Speirs (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 1 /28, or The National
State and Economic Policy, in Tribe, Reading Weber, pp 188 /209. Marianne Weber was the first, and
perhaps the last, to identify the methodological importance of this lecture, which must otherwise appear
so distasteful to Webers liberal and leftist admirers. See Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, pp
216 /217.
43
M Weber, Der Nationalstaat, p 2.
44
M Weber, Der Nationalstaat, p 4.
45
M Weber, Der Nationalstaat, p 8.
46
M Weber, Zur Grundung einer National-Sozialen Partei (1896), in Winckelmann, Gesammelte
Politische Schriften , pp 26 /29, pp 28 /29. See also P Theiner, Friedrich Naumann and Max Weber:
Aspects of a Political Partnership, in W J Mommsen and J Osterhammel (eds.), Max Weber and his
Contemporaries, London and Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987, pp 299 /310.
47
Max Weber to the Pan-German League, 22 April 1899, cited in Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A
Biography, pp 224 /225.
48
Quoted in Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, pp 631 /632.
49
M Weber, Der Nationalstaat, p 12.
50
M Weber, Der Nationalstaat, p 14.
51
M Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf, in J Winckelmann (ed.), Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Wissenschaft-
slehre, 2nd ed., Tubingen: J C B Mohr, 1951, pp 566 /597.
52
See L Scaff, Max Webers Amerikabild and the African American Experience, in D McBride et al .
(eds.), Crosscurrents: African Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World , Columbia, SC:
Camden House, 1998, pp 82 /94.
53
Georg Friedrich Knapp, Library slips, 12 May 1888 /15 November 1888, GStA VI. HA Nachlass
Knapp, K. II, Bl. 192a /i, 194.
54
Georg Friedrich Knapp, Der Ursprung der Sklaverei in den Kolonieen (1890), in Die Landarbeiter in
Knechtschaft und Freiheit: Vier Vortrage, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1891, pp 1 /20.
55
Gustav Schmoller, Grundri der allgemeinen Volkswirtschaftslehre, vol. 1, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot,
1900, pp 144, 149 /150.
56
Max Weber, The Relations of the Rural Community to Other Branches of Social Science, Charles W.
Seidenadel (trans.), in Howard J Roger (ed.), Congress of Arts and Science: Universal Exposition, St.
Louis, 1904 , vol. 7, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1906, pp 725 /746, pp 744 /746.
57
W E B Du Bois, Die Negerfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten, Archiv fu r Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik 22, 1906, pp 31 /79, p 43.
58
Du Bois details his German education in a letter to D C Gilman, 28 October 1892, in Herbert Aptheker
(ed.), The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, vol. 1, Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1973,
pp 20 /21. On Du Boiss seminar paper, see David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a
Race, New York: Henry Holt, 1993, pp 137 /143. On the importance of Du Boiss study in Germany for
the development of his social science, see Francis L Broderick, German Influence on the Scholarship of
W.E.B. Du Bois, Phylon Quarterly 19, 1958, pp 367 /371, and Barrington Steven Edwards, W.E.B. Du
Bois, Empirical Social Research, and the Challenge to Race, 1868 /1910 (Ph.D. Diss., Harvard
University, 2001), esp. pp 111 /146.
59
See Gustav Schmollers intervention in Freiherr von Herman, Plantagen und Eingeborenen-Kulturen
in den Kolonien, Verhandlungen des Deutschen Kolonialkongresses 1902 zu Berlin am 10. und 11.
Oktober 1902 , Berlin, 1902, pp 507 /517. On Schmollers colonial politics, see Erik Grimmer-Solem,
Imperialist Socialism of the Chair: Gustav Schmoller and German Weltpolitik, 1897 /1905, in Geoff
77
ANDREW ZIMMERMAN
Eley and James Retallack (eds.), Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and
the Meanings of Reform, 1890 /1930 , New York, Berghahn Books, 2003, pp 106 /122.
60
See Gustav Schmoller, Bernhard Dernburg, Walter Delbruck, et al ., Reichstagsauflosung und
Kolonialpolitik. Offener stenographische Bericht uber die Versammlung in der Berliner Hochschule fur
Musik am 8. Januar 1907 , Berlin: Wedekind, 1907.
61
Friedrich Naumann, Patria, Patria: Jahrbuch der Hilfe [1] (1901), pp iii /vi, p iii.
62
For an especially strong criticism of Prussian anti-Polish politics as uncivilized, see Georg Gothein, Die
preuische Polenpolitik, Patria: Jarbuch der Hilfe [9] (1909), pp 47 /84.
63
Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft: Kulturpolitische Grundsatze fur die Rassen- und Missions-
fragen , Berlin: Buchverlag der Hilfe, 1909, p 44. See also Rohrbach, Sudwest-Afrika , Berlin: Buchverlag
der Hilfe, 1907, and Rohrbach, Das Deutsche Kolonialwesen , Leipzig: G A Gloeckner, 1911.
64
Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft , p 8
65
Gustav Schmoller, Die preuische Kolonisation des 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, in Verein fur
Socialpolitik, Zur Inneren Kolonisation in Deutschland , pp 1 /43, pp 1 /2, 42.
66
Max Weber, Methodologische Einleitung fur die Erhebungen des Vereins fur Sozialpolitik uber Auslese
und Anpassung (Berufswahlen und Berufsschicksal) der Arbeiterschaft der geschlossenen
Groindustrie (1908), in Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik , pp 1 /60, pp 1, 27 /28.
67
Max Weber, Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit (1908 /1909), in Gesammelte Aufsatze zur
Soziologie und Sozialpolitik , pp 61 /255, pp 68, 123, 125 /126.
68
Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit, p 125. See also Methodologische Einleitung, pp 27 /28.
69
Zur Psychophysik der industriellen Arbeit, pp 247 /252.
70
For the results, see Untersuchungen uber Auslese und Anpassung (Berufswahl und Berufsschicksal) der
Arbeiter in den verschiedenen Zweigen der Grossindustrie, Schriften des Vereins fur Socialpolitik , vols.
133 /135, Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1910 /1912. See also Anthony Oberschall, Max Weber and the
Problem of Industrial Work, ch. 6 in Empirical Social Research in Germany 1848 /1914 , Paris: Mouton
& Co., 1965, pp 111 /136.
71
Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (1920), Tubingen: J C B
Mohr, 1922. I have chosen to treat only the 1920 version of this work, since it contains Webers most
developed formulations.
72
Weber, Der Nationalstaat, pp 2 /3.
73
Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur
Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, pp 17 /206, p 19.
74
Weber, Vorbemerkung, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, pp 1 /16, pp 12, 14 /15.
See Balibar, Is There a Neo-Racism?, p 26.
75
Weber, Vorbemerkung, pp 3 /4.
76
Weber, Vorbemerkung, p 12.
77
Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, p 7. Jurgen Kocka, Unternehmensverwaltung und Angestelltenschaft
am Beispiel Siemens 1894 /1914: Zum Verhaltnis von Kapitalismus und Burokratie in der deutsche
Industrialisierung , Stuttgart, Ernst Klett, 1969. An excerpt of this work is translated as White-Collar
Employees and Industrial Society in Imperial Germany, in George G. Iggers (ed.), The Social History
of Politics: Critical Perspectives in West German Historical Writing Since 1945 , Dover, Berg, 1985,
pp 113 /136.
78
Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, p 62.
79
Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, p 20.
80
Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, pp 44 /46.
81
Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, pp 202 /204.
82
Francis Fukuyama similarly wondered recently whether living in the iron cage of modern rationalism is
such a terrible thing after all, in The Calvinist Manifesto, New York Times Sunday Book Review, 13
March 2005. See also Ronald T Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America ,
revised ed. (1979), New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. For a psychological interpretation of
Webers ambivalence about the iron cage, see Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical
Interpretation of Max Weber (1969), New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1985.
83
Max Weber, Deutschland unter den europaischen Weltmachten, Die Hilfe 22, 9 November 1916, pp
735 /741, p 739.
84
On Webers attitudes toward the Polish Protectorate during the First World War, see Marianne Weber,
Max Weber: A Biography, pp 554 /555.
85
Max Weber, Zwischenbetrachtungen: Theorie der Stufen und Richtungen religioser Weltablehnung, in
Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, in Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 1, pp
536 /573, pp 547 /548.
78
DECOLONIZING WEBER
86
Staat ist diejenige menschliche Gemeinschaft, welche innerhalb eines bestimmten Gebietes */dies: das
Gebiet gehort zum Merkmal */ das Monopol legitimer physischer Gewaltsamkeit fur sich (mit Erfolg)
beansprucht. Max Weber, Politik als Beruf (1919), in Winckelmann (ed.), Gesammelte Politische
Schriften , pp 505 /560, p 506.
87
Weber writes of this universality: wie wenigstens wir uns gern vorstellen */as at least we like to
imagine. Weber, Vorbemerkung, p 1.
88
Max Weber, Resultat: Konfuzianismus und Puritanismus, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziolo-
gie, vol. 1, pp 512 /536.
89
Max Weber, Hinduismus und Buddhismus, in Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, Gesammelte
Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 2 (1920), Tubingen: J C B Mohr, 1972, p 372.
90
Max Weber, Das Antike Judentum, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Religionssoziologie, vol. 3, pp 1 /400, pp
233 /236.
91
Parsons, Structure of Social Action .
92
Max Weber, Soziologische Grundbegriffe, ch. 1 in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der
Verstehenden Soziologie, 5th ed., Johannes Winckelmann (ed.) (1921), Tubingen: J C B Mohr, 1972,
pp 1 /30.
93
Ralf Dahrendorf, Out of Utopia: Toward a Reorientation of Sociological Analysis, American Journal
of Sociology 64, 1958, pp 115 /127. It was in this article that Dahrendorf coined the phrase conflict
model of society.
94
Dennis H Wrong, The Oversocialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology (1961), in The
Oversocialized Conception of Man , New Brunswick: Transaction, 1999, pp 31 /46, p 38. See also
Maurice Stein, Psychoanalytic Thought and Sociological Inquiry, in Psychoanalysis and the Psycho-
analytic Review 49(2), 1962, pp 21 /29, and Parsonss response to Wrong: Talcott Parsons, Individual
Autonomy and Social Pressure: An Answer to Dennis H. Wrong, Psychoanalysis and the Psycho-
analytic Review 49(2), 1962, pp 70 /79. Also central to this critique of Parsonianism is Alvin W
Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, New York: Basic Books, 1970.
95
Whitney Pope, Jere Cohen, and Lawrence E Hazelrigg, On the Divergence of Weber and Durkheim: A
Critique of Parsons Convergence Thesis, American Sociological Review 40, 1975, pp 417 /427. Jere
Cohen, Lawrence E Hazelrigg, and Whitney Pope, De-Parsonizing Weber: A Critique of Parsons
Interpretation of Webers Sociology, American Sociological Review 40, 1975, pp 229 /241. Talcott
Parsons, Comments on De-Parsonizing Weber, American Sociological Review 40, 1975, pp 666 /670.
96
See, especially, Bryan S Turner, For Weber: Essays on the Sociology of Fate, Boston: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1981. Turner has even suggested that elements of Parsonian functionalism may be compatible
with Marxism. See his Introduction, in Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The Talcott Parsons Reader, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999, pp 1 /20.
97
See Otto Stammer (ed.), Max Weber and Sociology Today. Transactions of the Fifteenth German
Sociological Congress, Kathleen Morris (trans.) (1965), Oxford: Blackwell, 1971.
98
Herbert Marcuse, Industrialization and Capitalism, in Stammer, Max Weber and Sociology Today, pp
133 /151. Georg Lukacs makes a similar point about Weber in The Destruction of Reason , Peter Palmer
(trans.) (1962), Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1980, pp 601 /619.
99
See Marcuse, Industrialization and Capitalism, discussed above and Guenther Roth, Science, Values
and Politics in Max Webers Methodology, Contemporary Sociology 4, 1975, pp 366 /373, p 369. See
also Roths discussion of the meeting in Guenther Roth, Political Critiques of Max Weber: Some
Implications for Political Sociology, American Sociological Review 30, 1965, pp 213 /223, pp 222 /223.
100
Benjamin Nelson in Stammer, Max Weber and Sociology Today, pp 161 /171. In his comments, Nelson
repeats the argument he made in Sociology and Psychoanalysis on Trial, in Psychoanalysis and the
Psychoanalytic Review 49(2), 1962, pp 144 /160.
101
Bendix expanded these comments for his presidential address to the American Sociological Association
in 1970. See Reinhardt Bendix, Sociology and the Distrust of Reason, American Sociological Review
35, 1970, pp 831 /843. See also Bendix in Stammer, Max Weber and Sociology Today.
102
Roth, Political Critiques of Max Weber.
103
Norbert Eliass assessment of the German concept of culture, though part of a brilliant work, in fact
misses what Weber and so many other German thinkers meant by the term Kultur, which is equivalent
to the normative concept of civilization from which Elias, wrongly in my view, distinguishes it. See
Norbert Elias, Sociogenesis of the Difference between Kultur and Zivilisation in German Usage, part
one of The History of Manners, Edmund Jephcott (trans.) (1939), New York: Pantheon Books, 1978, pp
3 /50.
79