Lukacs on German Sociology in the Imperialist Period

Chapter 6 of The Destruction of Reason by Georg Lukacs, Merlin Press, London 1980.


1. The Origins of Sociology

Sociology as an independent discipline arose in England and France after the dissolution of classical political economy and utopian socialism. Both these, each in its own way, were comprehensive doctrines of social life and therefore treated all important problems of society in connection with the economic questions dictating them. Sociology as an independent discipline came about in such a way that its treatment of a social problem did not consider the economic basis; the supposed independence of social questions from economic ones formed the methodological starting-point of sociology.

This separation is linked with profound crises in bourgeois economics that clearly express the social basis of sociology. One crisis was the dissolution of the Ricardo school in Britain, which prompted the drawing of socialist consequences from the classic authors' theory of labour value, and another was the disintegration of utopian socialism in France, which began with a tentative quest for that social path to socialism which Saint-Simon and Fourier had left unexplored.

These twin crises, and more especially the solving of both through the appearance of historical materialism and Marxist political economy, terminated bourgeois economics in the classical sense, as a discipline fundamental to the knowledge of society. There arose at the one pole bourgeois 'vulgar economics', later so-called subjective economics, a specialist discipline confined to a narrow range of objects. This refrained from the start from explaining social manifestations and regarded it as its chief task to banish the question of surplus value from economics. And at the other pole there sprang up sociology, a humanistic discipline divorced from economics.

Certainly it is true to say that initially, sociology also claimed to be a universal science of society (Comte, Herbert Spencer). For that reason it was trying to find a basis in natural science that would replace an economic basis. This again was closely linked with the - socially dictated -development of economics. Hegel, though he was scarcely understood at the time, had already discovered the principle of contradiction in the economic categories; with Fourier, the internal contradictoriness of capitalist economics was already openly manifest; with the dissolution of the Ricardo school, as with Proudhon, it appeared as nothing less than the central problem of economics, whatever the falsity of the individual answers to it. It was the Marxist doctrine whichfirst discovered the correct dialectical framework in economics.

The natural-scientific underpinning of sociology as a universal science was meant to exclude from its doctrine not only economics but the very contradictoriness of social Being, i.e., a thorough critique of the capitalist system. Admittedly to start with, in the case of its founders particularly, sociology adhered to the standpoint of social progress; indeed it was one of its main aims to demonstrate this scientifically.

But it was a version of progress tailored to a bourgeoisie about to enter an ideological decline, a progress leading to an idealized capitalist society as the culmination of man's development. Already in Comte's time, not to say that of Spencer, the proof of this progress could no longer be furnished with the tools of economics. Hence a natural science - applied by analogy to society and in this way more or less mythologized - was sought as the sole foundation.

But just because of this bond with the idea of progress, sociology could not last as a universal science for long. Soon the natural-scientific, primarily biological argumentation was to lapse - in accordance with the bourgeoisie's general politico-economic development - into anti-progressive, often reactionary ideology and methodology. Most sociologists turned to specialist investigations. Sociology became a pure, detached branch of learning which barely touched on the major questions of the structure and development of society.

No longer, therefore, could it fulfil its original task of portraying the - economically no longer arguable – progressive character of bourgeois society and defend it, ideologically, against feudal reaction and socialism alike. As sociology, exactly like economics, etc., grew into this strictly specialized branch of learning, there sprang from it, as from the other divided social sciences, tasks dictated by t!te capitalist division of labour. Prominent among these was one that arose of its own accord and never became a conscious part of bourgeois methodology: namely, the task of transferring the cardinal problems of social life from a specialist discipline incompetent as such to solve them to the authority of another discipline. Then this second specialist discipline would, with equal logic, declare its own incompetency.

Naturally it always involved cardinal social questions, for the declining bourgeoisie was increasingly interested in preventing them from being clearly raised and indeed answered. Social agnosticism, as a form of defending ideologically hopeless positions, thereby acquired an – unconsciously functioning - methodological organ. The process much resembles the behaviour of the capitalist or selfcapitalizing, semi-feudal absolutist bureaucracy, which 'solved' awkward questions by perpetually passing the relevant documents from one office to another, with none of them pronouncing itself competent to make an objective decision.

2. The Beginnings of German Sociology

(Schmoller, Wagner and Others) But there was a stark difference between Germany's situation and that of the Western, capitalistic ally more advanced countries with a long bourgeois- democratic development behind them. Germany lacked above all any original scientific' study of economics. In 1875 Marx characterized the situation as follows:

In Germany, political economy has remained a foreign science up to this day. . . It was imported ready-made from England and France; its German professors stayed pupils. In their hands, the theoretical expression of an alien reality changed into a collection of dogmas which they interpreted in the spirit of the petty-bourgeois world about them, and therefore misinterpreted... Capitalist production has developed rapidly in Germany since 1848, and nowadays it is already bearing its spurious fruit. But fate remained unkind to our experts. All the while that they were pursuing political economy in peace and quiet, modern economic conditions were absent from the German reality. As soon as those conditions became operative in real life, they did so in circumstances which no longer permitted of their unrestricted study within the realm of bourgeois thinking.

It was German minds, moreover, which gave birth to scientific socialism, and inevitably it was precisely on German soil that this first began to exert a wide literary influence. And finally, the situation of German sociology at its birth was complicated by the fact that in Germany, the bourgeoisie did not seize power as a political class in a democratic revolution, as had happened in France. Instead, the bourgeoisie reached a compromise with feudal absolutism and the Junkerclass under Bismarck. Thus the birth of German sociology took place within the context of the apologetics of this compromise; and these apologetics determined the tasks of German economics and social science.

Such a situation obstructed the origin of a sociology in the Anglo-French sense. The 'social doctrine' put forward by the epigones of the Hegelian distinction between State and Society (L. von Stein, R. von Mohl) , along with the reactionary 'idyllist' (Riehl), represents the first tentative attempts at a German bourgeois theory of society. At first this met with great resistance. The National-Liberal Treitschke, the later notorious historian of Prussianism, published a pamphlet attacking these attempts under the title of Social Doctrine (Gesellschaftslehre, 1859). In this he advanced the view that all social problems were merely political and juridicial ones; thus if all was well with political science, then no particular social science was needed at all. Social science, he maintained, had no object of its own; in reality everything which appeared to be an object of sociology could be settled by constitutional or civil law. Economics Treitschke considered from the viewpoint of popular liberal harmonism; the worker question was, for him, purely a police question.

After 1870-1 this rough and summary dismissal of all sociology had become untenable. The great upsurge of capitalism, the exacerbation of the class conflicts and Bismarck's battle against social democracy in connection with his 'social policy' changed the German bourgeoisie's attitude to these problems. Another factor was the divergence of Bismarck, taking large sections of the German bourgeoisie with him, from the popular dogma of free trade. In this new situation, a group of German economists attempted to expand popular economic doctrine into a social science (Brentano, Schmoller, Wagner, etc.). They planned to create a purely a-theoretical, empirical, historical and at. The same time 'ethical' political economy which rejected classical economics and would additionally be capable of comprehending the problems of society. This eclectic pseudo-science grew out of the reactionary historical school of jurisprudence (Savigny) and older German economics (Roscher, Knies, etc.).

Methodologically totally without principles, it was the ideology of those bourgeois circles which thought that Bismarck's 'social policy' could offer a solution to the class conflicts. In common with the older generation of German economists they did battle against classical economics, in close association with the struggle against Marxism. In accomplishing a radical subjectification of economics, these circles wholly failed to see the objective economic problems of the classical thinkers, and merely polemicized against an allegedly narrow psychology that perceived in economic self-seeking the sole driving motive of economic behaviour. The intention was now to 'deepen' this psychology and also to give it an ethical character. According to Schmoller, the various theories of economics 'mainly furnished various ideals for the morality of economics? Or, to take a specific example, the whole problem of demand was 'nothing else than a slice of concrete ethical history related to a definite time and a definite nation'.3 Hence these economists opposed all 'abstraction' and 'deduction', i.e., theory of any kind; they were pure historical empiricists and relativists. For that reason it was no accident that the positivistic neo-Kantianism then in the ascendant encouraged their views to drift in the direction of an empirical agnosticism.

The social systems of an 'organic' kind which were simultaneously springing up also set out to refute socialism. They sought to justify intellectually the connection between Bismarck's empire and the old semi-feudal, semi-absolutist Germany and so to find a seasonable theory for what the German bourgeoisie of the time called progress. This first German sociology also stemmed from reactionary Romantic philosophy and the 'historical school of law' (Schiiffle, Lilienthal, etc.).

But even such a sociology-substitute evoked a sharp rejection of sociology as a scientific discipline on the part of the philosophical doctrine of science that was currently dominant. Most typical of the attitude of German philosophy to the nascent sociology is the critique we find in Dilthey's Introduction to the Humanistic Sciences (Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, 1883). Dilthey, to be sure, was primarily combating the Anglo-French sociology of Comte, Spencer, and so on. He dismissed a limine its claim to comprehend historical processes in a unified way with the aid ofsociological categories.4 His standpoint was radically empirical, specialist and relativist. He saw in the new sociology, not mistakenly, a successor to the old philosophy of history, but contested them both as being a kind of pseudo-scientific alchemy. Reality, he thought, could only be grasped through strictly specialized branches of science. Both the philosophy of history and sociology, on the other hand, were dealing with metaphysical principles.

Dilthey observed fairly clearly the consequences of Western sociology's methodology, namely the emergence of claims to a universal philosophy of history which had no foundation in the basic historical facts. But, since he understood even less (if that were possible) of this remoteness from reality and abstractness of sociology than its founders did, his critique remained completely fruitless. A large proportion of Western European sociologists set out on the road to establishing a strictly specialized single branch of science. But, in so doing, they renounced the very purpose of sociology; this course adopted by sociology was not a science, but its abdication. Dilthey's critique was therefore nothing beyond a phenomenon -one whose methodology was defined by German conditions -running parallel to the decline of sociology generally. Sociology was renouncing more and more a bourgeois argumentation of progress, and to an equal degree a unified theory of progress was, from Dilthey's standpoint, scientifically impossible.

3. Ferdinand Toennies and the Founding of the New School of German Sociology

The rapid capitalization of Germany rendered such a theor¬etical rejection of sociology as we have just described unten¬able in the long run. (Dilthey's later attitude to Simmel and other sociologists of the imperialist period also changed totally; indeed his own view of history, as it developed in the course of time, became a co-determining factor in later German sociology.) A certain degree, a specific form of theoretical comprehension of social phenomena had become a matter of growing urgency, although it naturally remained, in essence, within the aforementioned politico-ideological compromise which the German bourgeoisie made with the Hohenzollern regime. But as the Junker class too turned increasingly capitalist, and as the country grew into the imperialist stage of its development (not by chance did Bismarck's downfall occur on the eve of it), all these ques¬tions had to be formulated anew. The irresistible growth of the social democrat labour movement also made new proposi¬tions obligatory: neither the. police measures demanded by Treitschke and administered by Bismarck nor the unctuous sermons of Schmoller and Wagner were sufficient. A new form of anti-Marxist polemics was needed.

The chief upshot of these needs was a new economic doctrine which claimed to answer 'theoretically' the bour¬geoisie's current economic problems and thereby to 'surmount' even Marxism in the economic field. It was at the same time so abstract and subjectivist that from the outset -if only for methodological reasons -it had to suppress any claim to lay the basis for a sociology. Thus from now on, the Western European separation of economics from sociology and prevalent coexistence of the two held good for Germany as well. We are referring now to the 'Austrian school' of Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, etc., which was just as radically subjectivist as the 'historical school'. Only, the blurred, unctuous moralizing was replaced by a purely psychological approach: the dissolution of all objective economic categories in the casuistry of the abstract anti¬thesis of inclination and disinclination. So pseudo-theories arose which sought their sole object in the surface mani¬festations of economic life (offer, demand, production costs, distribution) and set up pseudo-laws of subjective reactions to these phenomena marginal utility). The 'Austrian school' thought of itself as having overcome the 'teething troubles' of the classic thinkers (Bohm-Bawerk), and hence of Marxism, on the one hand, and those of the 'historical school' on the other. Thereby the new popular economics arising from this cleared the way -as in Western Europe -for a separate science of sociology which was divorced from economics and 'complemented' it. In their economic views, the most important representatives of sociology in imperialist Germany belonged to this school either explicitly or tacitly. The methodological discussion between the two economic orientations associated with the works of Karl Menger is no longer of any interest. For us its only historical significance is that it opened up an avenue for the new sociology.

Seemingly linked only loosely with these struggles is what was for a long time the most influential publication of the new German sociology: Community and Association by Ferdinand Toennies (1887). This book occupies a special place in the development of German sociology. Above all, its author's ideological link with the classic German traditions was stronger than that of the later sociologists. Accordingly he had a closer relationship with the progressive scientific learning of Western Europe. (Later he wrote a biography of Hobbes which gained international renown, etc.) Moreover he was the first German thinker to appropriate research results concerning primitive society, primarily Lewis Henry Morgan's, and at the same time the first German sociologist who did not dismiss Marx out of hand but tried to rework him and render him of use to his bourgeois purposes. Thus Toennies expressly stood for the theory of labour value, and he rejected the claim of bourgeois criticism to have exposed insoluble contradictions between the first and third volumes of Capital. That, to be sure, was by no means tantamount to understanding Marxism and recognizing it. 'I have never', Toennies said, 'acknowledged as correct the Ricardo-Rodbertus-Marxian theory of value in the form propounded, but recognize all the more its core and basic idea.'5 This state¬ment, with its identification of Marx and Ricardo and Rodbertus, shows just how little Toennies understood Marxism.

Nevertheless, the influence of Marx and Morgan on Toennies went deeper than is apparent from his explicit references to them in his book. It was the antithesis between the old classless primitive society and the capitalism that had come about in the course of socio-economic developments that formed the basis of his sociology. To be sure, Toennies radically reworked the basic ideas of his sources. Firstly, he banished all concrete economics, albeit less radically than later German sociologists. Secondly, he volatilized concretely historical social formations into supra-historical 'essences'. Thirdly, here again the objective economic basis of the social structure was replaced by a subjective prin¬ciple -the will. And fourthly, socio-economic objectivity gave way to a Romantic anti-capitalism. Hence the findings of Morgan and Marx gave rise in Toennies's work to that contrast between 'community' and 'society' which continued to influence the whole of later German sociology. The process of subjectification was achieved through mysticized will-concepts. 'For it emerges from all this how the essential community will carries the preconditions within itself, whereas arbitrary will brings about society.'6 Toennies presented these two mysticized concepts of will as the creators of the two formations.

'Society' is capitalism -as seen through the eyes of Romantic anti-capitalism. Admittedly, if we compare Toennies with the older Romantic anti-capitalists, we will notice the particular and subsequently important nuance that he was not voicing a desire to revert to social conditions now sur¬. mounted, and certainly not to feudalism. Toennies was a liberal. His position provided the basis for a cultural critique which strongly emphasized the problematic, negative features of capitalist culture, but which also underlined that capitalism was ineluctable and a product of fate.

The antithetical type of the 'community' now determined the character of this critique. It was the antithesis between what was dead, mechanical and machine-like about 'society' and the organic nature of the 'community'. 'As an artificial implement or a machine designed for specific purposes is related to the organ-systems and individual organs of an animal body, so a will-aggregate of this kind -a form of arbitrary will -is related to the other kind -a form of essential will.'7 This contrast was by no means original, but it became of methodological significance because Toennies proceeded from it to that contrast between 'civilization' and 'culture' which later became of crucial importance to German sociology.

This antithesis arose spontaneously out of the bourgeois intelligentsia's feeling of discontent with capitalist, and especially imperialist, cultural development. The theoretical problem which objectively existed behind this feeling was Marx's well-known discovery that capitalism in general has an unfavourable effect on the evolution of art (and culture as a whole). Now a real understanding of this problem -if really grasped and thought all the way through -would have turned any intellectual sincerely concerned about culture into an adversary of capitalism. But materially, a great many threads tied the majority of the intellectuals to the capitalist basis of their existence (or at least they thought that to sever those threads would mortally endanger their livelihood). They were, moreover, influenced by the bourgeois ideology of their time, which means that they had no inkling of the socio-economic foundations of their own livelihood.

It was possible for the false antithesis of culture and civilization to spring from this soil of its own accord. Con¬ceptually formulated, the antithesis acquired the following ¬factually wrong and misleading -form: promoted by capi¬talism, civilization, i.e., techno-economic development, was constantly ascending, but its evolution put culture (art, philosophy, man's inner life) at an increasing disadvantage; . the conflict of the two would be intensified to the point of a tragic, unbearable tension. Here we see how the case-facts of capitalist development ascertained by Marx were being distorted in a Romantically anti-capitalist, subjectively irrational way. That we are dealing with the irrationalist distortion of a set of historio-social facts is indicated by the simple consideration that culture and civilization-properly understood -cannot be antithetical concepts at all. Culture, after all, encompasses all the activities through which man overcomes in nature, in society and in himself the original personal characteristics bestowed by nature. (For instance, we rightly speak of the cultivation of work, of human beha¬viour, and so on.) Civilization, on the other hand, is a com¬prehensive, periodicizing expression of man's history after his emergence from barbarity; it embraces culture, but along with it the whole of man's life in society. To pose such a conceptual antithesis, and to invent the myth of these counter-active forces, entities, etc., was thus simply an abstracting and also irrationalist distortion of culture's real contradictory nature in capitalist life. (This real contradic¬toriness applies also to the material productive forces; think of their destruction in a time of crisis, the contradictions of the machine in capitalist life in relation to human labour as portrayed by Marx, and so forth.)

The irrationalist distortion of the original facts of the matter derived spontaneously from the intellectuals' social situation in capitalism. This distortion, which on account of its spontaneity was continually self-reproducing, was extended in breadth and depth by the ideologists of capitalism. .They did so partly in order to channel into an innocuous cultural critique the potentially rebellious tendencies of Romantic anti-capitalism, and partly because, to many intellectuals, to absolutize the false antithesis of culture and civilization seemed to be an effective weapon against socialism. For since socialism was developing further the material forces of produc¬tion (mechanization, etc.), it too was unable to solve the con¬flict between culture and civilization. It was rather perpetuating the conflict -consequently, the argument ran, the intelligentsia afflicted by this dichotomy would be wasting its time by contesting capitalism for the sake of socialism.

Depicting society in the colours of Hobbes's philosophy of law, Toennies described it as a condition in which all men were enemies and only the law preserved an external order. And he went on: 'This is . . . the condition of social civilization, in which convention and the mutual fear expressed in it maintain peace and social intercourse, and which the State protects and extends through legislation and politics; scientific learning and public opinion partly seek to comprehend it as necessary and permanent, partly glorify it as advancing towards perfection. But it is far rather the communal life¬styles and rules in which popular life (V olkstum) and its culture find sustenance...'8 Here Toennies's Romantic anti-capitalism is patent.

Morgan and Engels too contrasted primitive communism with the later class societies and indicated -for all the socio-economic necessity and progressiveness of its abolition -the moral decay, the ethical degradation ineluctably linked with this step forward. And in Marxism the contrast was by no means confined to the antithesis of primitive communism and the class-divided society. The idea of irregular develop¬ment inevitably meant that the heights attained in specific cultural fields, in specific branches of art and philosophy for instance, and indeed the general cultural level in class societies very often failed to tally with the level of development reached by the material forces of production. Marx pointed out with regard to epic poetry, and Engels with regard to the golden ages of modern philosophy in the various leading nations, that under specific circumstances, the less advanced conditions more greatly favoured a partial cultural flowering of this nature than did more advanced conditions.9 The confirmation of such connections as consequences of an irregular development was, however, always of a concretely historical character. To reveal the social principles which found expression herein did not permit of any simple and immediate application to the whole of culture.

With capitalist culture the position was different. Marx repeatedly pointed out that the development of capitalist economics usually had unfavourable consequences for specific branches of culture (he was speaking of art and poetry).10 And here we have the concrete starting-point of such Romantic anti-capitalist accounts as we have just found in Toennies. As we have seen, the striking contrast between the rapid develop¬ment of material productive forces and, simultaneously, decadent tendencies in the fields of art, literature, philo¬sophy, morality, etc,., caused many thinkers to split in two the inherently unified and organically coherent domain of human culture. Those parts of it which capitalism had brought to a high level they contrasted as civilization with those of culture (in a narrower, special sense) in jeopardy; indeed they saw in this opposition the essential hallmark of the epoch, and even of the whole of mankind's development. Here again we can see that the point of departure behind this false proposition was a real set of social facts. But because of false, unhistorical generalizing, the directly and subjectively justified question was bound to give rise to a false proposi¬tion and a thoroughly erroneous answer. The falsity of these -and also their connection with the general reactionary-oriented philosophical trends of the time -is primarily manifested in the fact that such an opposition of culture and civilization was necessarily backward-looking, that it had to proceed in an anti-progressive direction. We can already observe this with Toennies, although he was very chary of drawing inferences. The more strongly that vitalistic tenden¬cies, especially Nietzsche's, took hold of sociology and social studies in general, the stronger the emphasis became on the contrast between culture and civilization, the more energetic the turning to the past, and the more unhistorical, anti-historical the propositions. And the internal dialectic of ideological developments after the war inevitably meant that the dismissive attitude was extended more and more to cul¬ture as well. Culture and civilization alike were rejected in the name of the 'soul' (Klages), of 'authentic existence' (Heidegger), and so on. .

It is only the start of this development that we find in Toennies. But from the results of Morgan's investigations he was already making a -permanent -structure of supra-historical duration and forming in substance a permanent contrast to the structure of society. So Toennies not only placed in opposition to one another family and contract (abstract right); with him the antitheses of man and woman, youth and old age, the common people and educated people also mirrored the contrast between community and society. There thus arose a whole system of abstractly inflated, contrasting subject-concepts which we do not need to set out in detail.

This anti-historical exaggeration of concepts originally obtained from concrete analyses of concrete social forma¬tions not only diluted these concepts (and rendered them, for that very reason, highly influential in German bourgeois sociology). It also reinforced their Romantic anti-capitalist character. Community thus became a category covering everything pre-capitalist and a glorification of primitive, 'organic' conditions as well as a slogan to combat the mech¬anizing, anti-cultural effects of capitalism. This cultural' critique of capitalism -characteristically for the next phase in German sociology -henceforth occupied the centre of interest and succeeded the vague ethical utopianism of the preceding phase. The change matched the growth of capitalism in Germany. It came a good way towards meeting widespread intellectual discontent with the increasingly palpable contra¬dictions of the present, and it also diverted attention from the real and decisive economic and social problems of imperialist capitalism. The diversionary trend did not neces¬sarily have to be a conscious trend. On the one hand, how¬ever, concrete social data deriving from the economic character of a particular social formation were being detached from their social roots as a result of the philosophical 'profundity' according to which an autonomous entity found expression in them. And, on the other hand, they were being totally de-historicized by this same abstracting process. This neces¬sarily entailed the disappearance of the object of that protest and struggle which the concrete phenomenpn, historically viewed, could and would indeed have to evoke. (We already found advanced forms of this diversion through 'deepening' in Simmel.)

With Toennies himself, admittedly, all these tendencies were only latent. He emphasized the progressive factor more strongly than his successors did. The later, purely apologetic form taken by criticisms of capitalist culture, namely the 'proof' that Germany -because of its unique political development -ranked higher than the Western democracies socially and ideologically, is lacking in Toennies. Also, as yet the vitalist-irrationalist element was barely present in his work, at least in his conscious methodology latently, to be sure, it was there already. The primitive 'organism' con¬cept used by the 'historical school' and early German socio¬logy was no longer adequate to the needs of this phase. It was only to make a comeback in the fascists' racial theory. But 'as we have noted, the new antithesis of the 'living' and 'mechanized' ('constructed') already constituted the centre of Toennies's sociological conception, although he did not imitate Nietzsche, his contemporary, in linking it with vitalistic lines of thought.

Granted, in Toennies too we find not a few hints and signs of this. As when, for instance, he sees in the develop¬ment of Roman law a process whose reverse side is the 'decay of life'Y And where he discusses the life-destroying effects of the metropolis it is even more marked. We shall quote this passage because it clearly expresses Toennies's attitude to socialism. He wrote: 'So the metropolis and the condition of society in general spell the ruin and death of the common people vainly striving to attain power by virtue of their numbers and able, to their own way of thinking, to use their power only in the cause of rebellion if they want to cast off their misfortune. . . The ascent is from class con¬sciousness to the class struggle. The class struggle destroys that society and State which it plans to reshape. And since the whole of culture has changed into a civilized society and State, culture itself in this altered form will come to an end. . .'12

We likewise find in Toennies the beginnings of the 'internalization' and 'deepening' of economic categories by the historian of culture -a line of development that was to culminate in Simmel. With the concept of money, Toennies was already pursuing analogies whose effects were to extend as far as the post-war vogue for a 'sociology of knowledge'. Thus he wrote on occasion of science and money: ' And consequently, scientific concepts which, in their usual origin and real disposition, are judgements which bestow names on affective complexes behave within science like goods within society. They combine in the system like goods on the market. The uppermost scientific concept, which no longer contains the name of anything concrete, resembles money, e.g., the concept of the atom or energy.'13 Equally, Toennies anticipated the later sociology in exploiting his cultural critique as an ideological prop for reformism in the labour movement ¬as when, for example, he perceived in the building societies a victory of the community principle within capitalist society.

4. German Sociology in the Wilhelmine Age (Max Weber)

Toennies's book took a long time to attain influence. Similarly, the new sociology as a whole had to fight unceasingly for scientific recognition in the decades before the First World War. But the conditions and character of this struggle were altered. Above all, sociology in the imperial age increasingly desisted -on an international scale -from taking over the legacy of the philosophy of history or philosophy in general as a universal science. It changed, in connection with the general victory of philosophical agnosticism, more and more consciously into one limited specialist discipline among others.

In Germany, this development had the particular nuance that sociology showed a great rapprochement with Romantic-irrationalist history conceptions in the Ranke tradition. Accor¬dingly, the scientific doctrine of the prevalent Kantianism was increasingly willing to allow it a modest niche in the classification of the sciences. It is instructive to compare Rickert's critique of sociology with that of Dilthey. Rickert thought that from a logico-methodological angle, there was nothing contradictory in pursuing natural-scientific 'general¬izing' studies of social phenomena, and that such a sociology was therefore eminently possible. We had just to contest the idea 'that this science might tell us how the life of mankind has really shaped itself in its unique individual course'. !4 Therefore a sociology was possible, but it could never take history's place.

This saved the methodological 'honour' of sociology. And the sociologists themselves (especially Max Weber) underlined the fact that they were not claiming to reveal the universal meaning of historical development, that sociology was rather merely a kind of ancillary study to that of history in the Dilthey-Rickert sense. Simmel's standpoint was typical in this respect. On the one hand, he stood with the most extreme vehemence for the possibility of an independent, strictly formalistic sociology, while on the other, he went just as far in his works dealing with the theory of history in abiding by the standpoint of the irrationalist 'singularity' and 'unique¬ness' of historical objects.

This friendly, neighbourly relationship between sociology and history was also encouraged by the development of the latter. Even under pre-war imperialism, historical accounts went beyond the coarse forms of apologetics we find in Treitschke. With Lamprecht there were even definite tenden¬cies, if also very inadequate ones, towards a 'sociologization' of historical studies. Although the majority of German historians rejected this project, it is still indubitable that many of them began ascribing greater importance than before to social categories (seen most distinctly in Delbriick's history of the war). This again was closely bound up with the development of capitalism in Germany: from now on it was absolutely imperative to come to intellectual terms with the origin, character and perspective of capitalism (imperialist capitalism). The attitude to Marxism now changed as well: a straightforward total ignorance or a coarsely apodictic rejection of it appeared behind the times, not least because of the constantly growing might of the labour movement. A 'subtler' way of 'refuting' Marxism was called for. This went hand in hand with the equally necessary receptiveness to those of its elements which -in a distorted form, to be sure -seemed acceptable to bourgeois ideology in this period.

That such an attitude could emerge at all was caused by the growing strength of the reformist movement in social democracy, by theoretical and practical revisionism. As we know, the leading revisionist theoretician, Bernstein, wanted to eliminate everything revolutionary from the labour move¬ment (materialism and dialectics from philosophy, dictator¬ship of the proletariat from political theory, and so on). Capitalism was to 'grow into' socialism in a peaceable way. Where the strategy and tactics of the labour movement were concerned, this meant that the labour organizations should ¬for the purpose of reforms viewed as stages in this 'growing-in' process -collaborate with the liberal bourgeoisie and form coalitions with it. Here we are dealing with an international trend caused by the influence on the labour elite and bureau¬cracy of the imperial economy's parasitical nature. In France it led to the admission of social democrat ministers into bourgeois cabinets (Millerand), etc.

This liquidation in both theory and practice of the class struggle, the proclamation of class co-operation between bourgeoisie and proletariat exerted a great influence on the bourgeois sociologists. For them too, revisionism offered a platform of collaboration; it seemed to them that Marxism ¬which they had so far tried to hush up or to refute as a universal system -might be fragmented on the revisionist model so as to incorporate into sociology those parts of it which were serviceable for the bourgeoisie.

We shall pick out only several principal elements of the change now occurring. Above all the struggle against materialism was waged just as resolutely as earlier -and that meant, in the sociological sphere, a struggle against the priority of social being and the determining role played by the development of the forces of production. But the relativistic methodologism arising on the basis of neo-Kantianism and Machism made it possible to absorb into bourgeois sociology definite, abstract forms of the interaction between basis and super¬structure. This we have seen very clearly in Simmel's Philosophy of Money. The same applies to Max Weber. In investigating the interaction between economic formations and religions, he sharply rejected the priority of economics: 'An ethic of economics is no simple "function" of economic forms of organization, no more than these ethics, conversely, unequivocally stamp their intrinsic character on these forms . .. However far-reaching the economically and politically conditioned social influences on religious ethics in individual cases -these ethics still acquired their hallmark primarily
from religious sources. '15

Here Max Weber started out from the interaction of material motives and ideology. He challenged historical materialism because this, in a way he alleged to be scientific¬ally inadmissible, established the priority of the economic factor. (He left unsaid that historical materialism too ascer¬tains complicated reciprocal influences in the concrete reality of society; the economic grounds have, in Engels's words, a determining effect only in the last instance.) But this struc¬ture of reciprocal influences, which highly suited modern relativism, was not retained j it was only a polemical pro¬legomenon attacking historical materialism. Weber's line of thought continually led him into ascribing to ideological (religious) phenomena, more and more strongly, an 'imman¬ent' development arising out of the phenomena themselves. Then this tendency was always so reversed that the pheno¬mena received causal priority in respect of the entire process. This was already patent in the aforestated remarks of Weber. In the same context he stated further: 'Interests (material and idea!), and not ideas, directly govern the actions of men. But the "pictures of the world" created through ideas have, by changing the points as it were, very often determined the lines along which the dynamic of interests drove those actions.'16 Thus with Weber also, sociology switched to the lines of humanistic studies in general and a humanistic, idealistic interpretation of history. Nor was the irrationalist nuance absent, although Max Weber was opposed to irrationalism in his conscious aims. Precisely this sociology was intended to demonstrate that an irrationalism would necessarily arise on the basis of capitalist rationalism, indeed that it actually lay at the bottom of the whole movement. If we examine closely Weber's afore stated genesis of capitalism (the capitalist mentality), we find a particular significance in his wedding of modern rationalism to the idea that with it, reli¬gion was 'shifted into the domain of the irrational'. Troeltsch and others occupied a similar position, except that they stood nearer still to the irrationalist humanistic sciences.

This new, 'refined' form of criticism of historical material¬ism was, as we have noted, connected also with a change of attitude towards the labour movement. The elementary illusions that Bismarck's 'carrot and stick' could put an end to the proletarian class organizations had collapsed with the downfall of Bismarck and his anti-socialist laws. To be sure, experiments were repeatedly made to divert the labour movement from the road of class struggle (Stacker, later Gahre and Naumann; in many cases the German sociologists supported these efforts). Later, however, it became of mounting importance for German sociology to lend ideo¬logical support to the reformist trends in social democracy. They included the aim of proving scientifically the necessity and usefulness of the trade union movement's independence of social democracy. Here Werner Sombart played the leading part.

For German sociology, the central problem in pre-war imperialism was to find a theory for the origin and nature of capitalism and to 'overcome' historical materialism in this sphere through a theoretical interpretation of its own. What constituted the real bone of contention was the original accumulation, the forcible separation of the employed from the means of production. (As adherents to the marginal utility theory, the majority of German sociologists regarded the doctrine of surplus value as settled scientifically.) New hypotheses and theories were set up by the dozen as a sociological substitute for original accumulation. Sombart in particular developed a feverish activity in this field. He furnished a whole series of explanations for the origin of capitalism: the Jews, the war, luxury, city ground-rents, etc. With regard to later developments, however, Max Weber's conception became the most influential. Weber, as we have seen, started out from the interaction between the economic ethics of religions and economic formations, whereby he asserted the effective priority of the religious motive. His problem was to explain why capitalism had come about only in Europe. In contrast to the earlier view of capitalism as any accumulation of wealth, Weber was at pains to grasp the specific character of modern capitalism and to relate its European origin to the difference between ethico-religious development in the East and West. To achieve this his prin¬cipal step was to de-economize and 'spiritualize' the nature of capitalism. This he presented as a rationalizing of socio¬economic life, the rational calculability of all phenomena. Weber now devised a universal history of religion in order to show that all oriental and ancient religions produced economic codes constituting inhibiting factors in the rationalization of everyday life. Only Protestantism (and within Protestantism, chiefly the dissident sects) possessed an ideology agreeable >¬to this rationalization and encouraging it. Time and again Weber declined to see in the economic codes a consequence of the esonomic structures. Of China, for example, he wrote: 'But here this lack of an ethically rational religiosity is the primary factor and seems, for its own part, to have influenced the constantly striking limitation in the rationalism of her technology. '17 And in consequence of his identification of technology and economics -a vulgarizing simplication that acknowledged only mechanized capitalism as the authentic variety -Weber then arrived at the 'decisive' historical 'argument' that the Protestant economic ethos which speeded up and fostered capitalist development was already there 'before the "capitalist development" '.18 In this he saw a refutation of historical materialism.

These few examples suffice to illuminate the German sociologists' methodology: an apparent comprehension of the essence of capitalism without having to go into its real economic problems (above all the question of surplus value and exploitation). Certainly they recognized the fact of the workers' separation from the means of production and free labour, and it played an important part in the sociology of Max Weber especially. But the cardinal distinguishing feature of capitalism remained rationality, calculability. There we see the sequel to Toennies's concept of society, albeit with many divergences in points of detail. This concept necessarily entailed standing the capitalist economy on its head, in that the popularized surface phenomena took priority over the problems of the productive forces' development. This abstract¬ing distortion also enabled the German sociologists to ascribe to ideological forms, particularly justice and religion, a causal role equivalent and indeed superior to economics. That, in turn, now entailed an ever-increasing methodological substitution of analogies for causal connections. For instance, Max Weber saw a strong resemblance between the modern State and a capitalist industrial works. But since he dismissed on agnostic-relativist grounds the problem of primary causa¬tion, he stuck to description with the aid of analogies. These came to form the broad basis of a cultural critique which never got down to the fundamental questions of capitalism. Although giving free play to expressions of discontent with capitalist culture, it viewed the capitalist rationalizing process as the workings of 'destiny' (Rathenau) and thus, for all its criticisms, showed capitalism to be necessary and inevitable.

This thinking always culminated in proof of the economic and social impossibility of socialism. The seeming historicity of sociological studies was aimed -but never explicitly -at arguing the case for capitalism as a necessary, no longer essentially changeable system and at exposing the purported internal economic and social contradictions which, it was claimed, made the realization of socialism impossible in theory as in practice. Here it is not worth examining the argument put forward in more detail. Since the German sociologists adhered, economically, to the standpoint of the new and subjectivist popular economics, they could neither know nor understand Marxian economics, let alone polemicize against them objectively. As bourgeois ideologists of the imperialist age, they merely drew all the conclusions of revisionism more rigorously than its spokesmen were capable of doing -out of tactical considerations in respect of their position in the labour movement.

The resulting cultural critique took on, in Germany, a particular nuance. Here pre-war sociology was the successor to earlier trends, in an altered form to be sure. It attempted to prove the superiority of the German political form and social structure over the Western democracies. Here again the change signified only an up-dating of methods. As we know, the contradictions in bourgeois democracy were becoming sharply apparent in the West at this time, and they found a strong literary echo not only in reactionary, anti-democratic sociological writings, but also in the theory of a part of the Western labour movement (syndicalism). The German socio¬logy of the age now absorbed all the findings of this critique of democracy and lent to them a philosophically and socio¬logically 'deepened' form. Henceforth democracy was pre¬sented as the inevitable form of the mechanical violation of 'life', of liberty, of individuality, chiefly because of its mass character. The special development and the condition of Germany were then played off against it as an organic order compared with mechanical anarchy, as a rule of responsibly-minded and competent leaders compared with the irrespons¬ibility of leadership through democratic 'demagogy'. Such influential sociological works as Hasbach's Modern Democracy were nothing more than scientifically puffed-up pamphlets attacking democracy. Just as earlier, the 'historical school' of German economics had glorified the Bismarck regime as a superior political and social form, so now German sociology was writing apologetics for Wilhelmine imperialism.

Max Weber occupied a special position in this develop¬ment. Admittedly, his methodological foundations were very similar to those of his contemporaries; he too adopted the Western sociological criticisms of modern democracy. But his attitude to it was totally reversed: despite all the criticism, he regarded democracy as the form most suited to the imperialist expansion of a major modern power.. He saw the weakness of German imperialism as lying in its lack of internal demo¬cratic development. 'Only a politically mature people is a "master race" . . . Only master races are called upon to inter¬vene in the course of global developments. If nations attempt it without possessing this quality, then not only will the safe instinct of the other nations protest, but they will also come to grief in the attempt internally. . . The will to powerless¬ness in home affairs that the writers preach is irreconcilable with the "will to power" abroad which has been so noisily trumpeted.'19

Here the social derivation of Max Weber's democratism can be readily grasped. He shared with the other German imperialists the view of the world -political (colonizing) mission of the 'master races'. But he differed from them in that he not only failed to idealize German conditions under specious parliamentary government, but criticized them violently and passionately. Like the English or French, he thought, the Germans could become a 'master race' only in a democracy. Hence for the sake of attaining Germany's imperialist aims, a democratization had to take place inter¬nally and go as far as was indispensable to the realization of these aims. This Weberian standpoint implied a sharp rejec¬tion of the 'personal regime' of the Hohenzollern dynasty and the bureaucratic power closely connected with it. Not only on the political plane did Weber continually challenge this regime; in his sociology, too, he constantly portrayed it as a gloomy prospect. Here he was turning the tables: he showed that a regime like the German one by no means meant 'organic freedom' but the opposite -a bureaucratic, mechanized cramping of all freedom and individuality. (We may note in passing that he also used the same prospect as a warning against socialism, which he interpreted as a total bureaucratization of life.) Weber criticized the inferiority of German foreign policy, which he believed to lie in the system and not the mistakes of individuals, and he stoutly affirmed the view that a proper choice of leader could only come about through a powerful parliament, and through democrat¬ization. Because of its imperialist basis this Weberian demo¬cratism had, to be sure, very curious nuances. Weber, accord¬ing to his wife's notes, expressed himself as follows in a conversation with Ludendorff after the war: 'In a democracy the people elects as its leader a man it trusts. Then the man elected says, "Now hold your tongues and obey!" Neither the people nor the parties may contradict him . . . Afterwards it is for the people to judge -if the leader has erred, then away to the gallows with him!' It is not surprising that Ludendorff said to this: 'I like the sound of such a demo¬cracy! '20 Thus Weber's idea of democracy lapsed into a Bonapartist Caesarism.

This concrete political basis of sociological critiques of culture shows even in their most opposed manifestations the deep affinity with the contemporary philosophy of the imperialist age, with the particular forms of neo-Kantianism and the burgeoning vitalism. In sociology too we find an extreme formalism in methodology, and an extreme rela¬tivism and agnosticism in its epistemology which now degenerated into an irrationalist mysticism. Sociology, as we have noted, went through the motions of being a specialist discipline, and indeed nothing other than an ancillary discip¬line to history. Its very formalism, however, removed all possibility of concrete historical elucidation. In this respect the lines along which the different disciplines developed again ran parallel, becoming more and more formalistic, each creating for itself an immanent formal casuistry, and thereby passing from one to another the essential problems of con¬tent and origin. Thus Jellinek -to take jurisprudence as an example -regarded the substantive problems of justice as 'meta-legal' questions; thus Kelsen wrote of the origin of justice: 'It is the great mystery play of Justice and State which is performed in the legislative act. . .'21; thus Preuss stated: 'The content of legal institutions is, however, never of a juristic but always of a political, economic nature.'22

In appearance, sociology thereby acquired the important function of explaining, for its own part, these contents and processes of derivation in concrete terms. But that was only apparently the case. What did it really achieve? Instead of causal explanations, its equally formalistic sublimations yielded purely formal analogies. With Simmel this formalism sometimes amounted to a journalistic jeu d'esprit, as when he was discussing the possibility of identical social forms with completely different contents and discovered analogies between religious associations and bands of outlaws. This is concrete evidence of what we stressed in our introductory remarks, namely that the practice of the specialist branches of social theory meant postponing a resolution of the prob¬lems. In that they passed them round among themselves, their method bore a striking resemblance to the document transfers of bureaucratic authorities.

Although Max Weber occasionally polemicized against Simmel's exaggerated formalism, his own sociology was like¬wise full of such formalistic analogies. Thus he formally equated, for instance, ancient Egyptian bureaucracy with socialism, councillors (Rcite) and estates (Stiinde); thus in speaking of the irrational vocation of leader (charisma), he drew an analogy between a Siberian shaman and the social democrat leader Kurt Eisner, etc..As a result of its formalism, subjectivism and agnosticism, sociology, like contemporary philosophy, did no more than to construct specified types, set up typologies and arrange historical phenomena in this typology. (Here Dilthey's later philosophy had acquired 'a decisive influence on German sociology. Its real blossoming -after Spengler -we can witness in the post-war period.)

With Max Weber this problem of types became the central methodological question. The setting up of purely con¬structed 'ideal types' Weber regarded as a question central to the tasks of sociology. According to him a sociological analysis was only possible if it proceeded from these types. But this analysis did not produce a line of development, but only a juxtaposition of ideal types selected and arranged casuistically. The course of society itself, comprehended in its uniqueness on Rickertian lines and not following a regular pattern, had an irremediably irrationalistic character, although for the rational casuistry of the ideal type the irrational was the 'disruptive' element, the 'deviation'.

The ultimately subjective nature of Weber's sociology is best expressed in its concept of law. With regard to the categories of an 'understanding sociology' Weber specifically stressed that: 'the manner in which sociological concepts are formed is always largely a question of practicality. We are by no means obliged to form all . . . the categories set forth below.'23 In accordance with this pragmatically oriented epistemology he wrote: 'The "laws" -our customary designa¬tion for a number of precepts in the "understanding socio¬logy" -. . . are typical chances, hardened by observation, of a course of social action to be actualized in the presence of certain data, chances which are understandable from typical motives and the typically viewed mentality of the agents.'24 This not only suspended subjectivistically the whole of objective social reality; the social data thereby took on a seemingly exact but in reality extremely blurred complexity. For instance Weber described the 'labour contract' in such a way that after enumerating the workers' obligations he wrote: '. . . that if he does all this, he (i.e., the worker, G.L.) moreover has the chance to receive at intervals certain specifically shaped metal discs or pieces of paper which, when placed in the hands of others, enable him to acquire bread, coal, trousers, etc. And the upshot of it is that if somebody then wanted to take these articles away from him again, men in helmets would, wi~h a certain degree of likeli¬hood, appear at his bidding and help to restore them to him etc., etc.'25

It is evident from this that Weber's sociological categories -he defined as 'chance' the most diverse social formations such as might, justice, the State and so on -will yield simply the abstractly formulated psychology of the calculating individual agent of capitalism. Even here, with the German scholar who, in his subjective aims, made the most honest and rigorous effort to pursu~ his discipline purely objectively, to found and to translate into praxis a methodology of pure objectivity, the imperialist tendencies of pseudo-objectivity proved stronger. For Weber's conception of 'chance' was, on the one hand, modelled on the Machist interpretation of natural phenomena. And on the other, it was conditioned by the psychological subjectivism of the 'marginal utility theory'; it converted the objective forms, transmutations, happenings, etc., of social life into a tangled web of -fulfilled or unful¬filled -'expectations', and its regular principles into more or less probable 'chances' of the fulfilment of such expecta¬tions. It is likewise evident that a sociology operating in this direction could go no further than abstract analogies in its generalizations.

Imperialist sociology, however, not only set itself the tasks we have outlined above. It also attempted to satisfy those 'needs for a world-view' evoked at this time by 'vitalism', the Hegel revival, the Romantic revival, etc., which were all bound in the direction of a mystical irrationalism. These tendencies took various forms in German sociology. Some¬times they expressed themselves quite directly, as when Rathenau was speaking of the irrational revolt of the 'soul' against the mechanical apparatus of capitalism (similarly in the Stefan George school, etc.). Simmel presented the dualism of formalistic sociology and irrationalistic 'vitalism' in a more complex fashion in the problem of the 'tragedy of culture'.

Here too we must emphasize the special position of Max Weber, principally because in struggling against this irration¬alism, it provided a bridge to a higher stage of it. Whilst Weber repeatedly defended himself against the charge of relativism, he considered his agnostic-formalistic method to be the only scientific one, since it prohibited the introduc¬tion into sociology of anything that was not exactly verifi¬able. In his opinion, sociology was able only to offer a technical critique, i.e., to investigate 'which means are apt to lead to an envisaged end', and, on the other hand, 'to ascertain the consequences which the application of the required means would have. . . besides the achieving of the purpose intended'.26 Everything else, according to Weber, lay outside the domain of science; it was an object of faith and therefore irrational.

Thus Max Weber's 'value-freedom' for sociology, its apparent purging of all irrational elements, finally amounted to a still greater irrationalizing of socio-historical events. Weber himself, although he certainly failed to see that this was to take away the whole rationality of his scientific methodology, had to accept that the irrational basis of 'value judgements' was deeply anchored in social reality itself. He wrote: 'The impossibility of a "scientific" presentation of practical standpoints adopted... follows for much pro-founder reasons. There is in principle no sense in it because the world's various orders of value are inseparably locked in mutual conflict.'27 Here Weber ran up against the problem of the Communist Manifesto, the problem that history is a history of class struggles. But because of his world-outlook, he could and would not acknowledge these facts. Since, as a result, he was neither able nor willing to draw in his mind dialectical conclusions from this dialectical structure of social reality, he was forced to seek refuge in irrationalism. Here it is very evident how imperialist irrationalism arose out of false answers to questions that were justified, because posed by reality itself. The situation was that reality itself was, with great and increasing force, confronting the ideolo¬gists with dialectical questions which -for social and hence methodological reasons -they could not possibly answer dialectically. Irrationalism was the form taken by the result¬ing flight from a dialectical answer to the dialectical question. So in truth this apparently scientific character and strict 'value-freedom' of sociology marked the highest stage of irrationalism hitherto reached. As a result of Max Weber's intellectual rigour, these irrationalist consequences emerged from his writings more clearly than from imperialist neo-Kantianism.

At the same time, Weber energetically opposed the conven¬tional German irrationalism which held sway earlier and was continuing to do so. He observed perfectly clearly that some¬thing can be irrational only in relation to something else, and therefore only relatively irrational. He was contemptuous of the experiential irrationalism of his contemporaries: 'Anyone who wants "vision" (Schau) can go to the cinema.'28 Cer¬tainly it is worth noting that he expressly exonerated from this charge the later leading lights of existential philosophy, Jaspers and also Klages. Thus his critical dismissal was only aimed against the outmoded and popular forms of irration¬alism. Weber's own methodology was shot through with irrationalist tendencies which had arisen out of specifically imperialist motives and become insuperable for him, and which stemmed from the inner contradictoriness of his own position regarding German imperialism and the democratizing of Germany. Hence he was obliged to recognize the new, refined forms of irrationalism -forms determined in part by his own equivocal methodology. That he would certainly have repudiated them in their advanced pre-fascist or actual fascist form does not disprove in the least this historio¬-methodological connection. With regard to fascism Weber would -mutatis mutandis -have landed himself in a situa¬tion similar to that later occupied by Stefan George or Spengler.

Max Weber contested the outmoded irrationalism of German sociology as represented by Roscher, Knies and Treitschke. He challenged the more modern, but epistemo¬logically still naive irrationalism of Meinecke and jeeringly wrote: 'So human actions would find their specific meaning in the fact that they are inexplicable and hence beyond understanding.'29 He spoke just as ironically of the personal¬ity concept of Romantic irrationality 'which, after all, altogether shares the "person" with the animal'.3O But this lively and just polemic against the vulgar irrationalism pre¬valent at that time does not cancel out the irrational core of Max Weber's method and outlook. Although Weber sought to rescue the scientific character of sociology through its 'value-freedom', he was only shifting all irrationality to the value judgements, the standpoints adopted. (Let us recall his historio-sociological statement about the rationality of economics and irrationality of religion.) Weber summed up his viewpoint thus: a scientific presentation of practical attitudes adopted is impossible.

It is meaningless in principle because the world's various orders of value are inseparably locked in mutual conflict . . . if anything, we know again tuday that something can be holy not only although it is not beautiful, but because and insofar as it is not beautiful. . . and that something can be beautiful not only although, but in that it is not good. We have know this again since Nietzsche, and we find it previously in the Fleurs du Mal, as Baudelaire called his cycle of poems, -and it is a platitude to say that something can be true although and whilst it is not beauti¬ful, not holy and not good. . . It is precisely here that even various gods are at loggerheads, and always will be . . . Depending on the latest view adopted, one thing is the Devil and the other God as far as the individual is con¬cerned, and the individual must decide which, for him, is God and which the Devil. And this is so throughout the orders of life. . . The gods of ancient polytheism, bereft of their magic and hence appearing as impersonal powers, are climbing out of their tombs, striving for command over our lives and renewing their eternal battles with each other. 31

According to Weber, this irrationality in the views which men will adopt -and precisely in respect of their cardinal praxis -is a supra-historical fundamental fact of social life. But his account bestowed on it some specific features of the present. Above all he put the stress on withdrawing from public life and thus raised the consciousness of the solitary individual to the status of an inappellable arbitrator; and by thus denying even the possibility of an objective authority, he further underlined the irrational character of the judge¬ment. With Max Weber this universal condition was also connected with the world's 'disenchantment' and the origin of modern prose, in which the mythical figures of the warring gods have lost their mythical-religious-sensuous forms and are present only in their abstract antinomies (and the irrational¬ity of their existence as well as of subjective reactions to them).

At this point Max Weber's outlook merged with the 'religious atheism' of the imperialist period. The disenchant¬ing godlessness and god-forsakenness of life was presented as the historical face of the times. And whilst it had to be accepted as historical fact, it was bound to evoke a profound mourning, a profound yearning for the old, not yet 'disen¬chanted' ages. With Weber this attitude was less overtly romantic than with most of the 'religious atheists' among his contemporaries. In his work, the lack of socio-historical perspectives emerges all the more graphically as the real basis of 'religious atheism'. As always, he tackled this matter more cautiously than the later critics of culture who repre¬sented this standpoint, and was far more concerned not to lose touch with scientific thinking. So for him, the lack of perspectives did not rule out a limine and a priori the possi¬bility of a perspective. It merely denied the present age this possibility and made this denial a hallmark of intellectual integrity. Considering those views of Weber that we have expounded so far, this attitude may be readily understood. For even were everything that he wished for Germany to be realized, the realization could not decisively alter in any respect his basic assessment of the social reality. In his eyes, after all, the democratizing of Germany was only a technical step towards a better functioning imperialism, only an align¬ment of Germany's social structure with that of the Western European democracies. And these, he perceived dearly, were equally subject to the problems of 'disenchantment', etc., in respect of their essential social life. Hence when he began looking at the essence of the life of society, he saw nothing but general gloom all around. This universal condition he described most impressively: the scholars' highest virtue was, Weber wrote,

simple intellectual honesty. .. But it commands us to . state that for all the many people today who are awaiting new prophets and saviours, the situation is the same as that voiced in the beautiful song of the Edomite guards in exile, as recorded in the prophecies of Isaiah: 'The sum¬mons comes from Seir in Edom: dawn is breaking, but night lingers on. If you would ask, return another time.' The race to whom that was spoken had asked and waited for more than two thousand years, and we know its grievous fate. Let us draw a moral from it -that longing and waiting are not sufficient. Let us act differently, let us go to our work and satisfy the 'demand of the day' ¬on the human as much as the professional level. That demand, however, is plain and simple if each of us finds and obeys the daimon holding the threads of his life.32

Here Max Weber quite evidently carried 'religious atheism's' lack of perspectives resolutely beyond Dilthey and even Simmel. The existentialists' nihilism could now be directly linked to it, as indeed happened in the case of Jaspers.

So Max Weber banished irrationalism from his methodology and analysis of isolated facts only in order to introduce it as the philosophical basis of his world-picture with a firmness hitherto unknown in Germany. Granted, even this elimina¬tion of irrationalism from the methodology was not total. Just as Weber relativized everything in sociology into rational types, so likewise his type of the non-hereditary leader who attains office as a result of his 'charisma' was purely irration¬alistic. That aside, however, imperialist neo-Kantianism really crossed the bridge into irrationalist existentialism for the first time in the lines quoted above. For that reason it was no coincidence that Jaspers saw in Weber a new type of philosopher. How strongly Weber was here expressing the general tendency of the most cultivated (and politically Left-oriented) German intellectuals of the imperialist period, how much his strictly scientific approach was only a path to the definitive establishing of irrationalism in men's out¬look, and thus how helpless the best German minds were in the face of the irrationalist onslaught, is indicated -to quote just one example -in the following comment by Walther Rathenau: 'Let us press on with the language and images of the intellect as far as the gates of eternity; not in order to break them down, but in order to put paid to the intellect by securing its fulfilment.'33 From here it was only a single step to the absolute predominance of irrationalism; only a firm renunciation of this 'detour' via the intellect and scienti¬fic thinking was needed. This step was not long coming. At bottom Spengler constructed in a merely amateurish and overtly mythologizing fashion the same bridge from extreme relativism to irrationalist mysticism which Weber expounded in the form of a credo as he crossed from scientific exactitude into the realm of world-outlook.

5. The Defencelessness of Liberal Sociology (Alfred Weber, Mannheim)

Max Weber's conception of society was permeated, as we have seen, by a profound dichotomy. Against Prussian junker reaction, on the one hand, he affirmed the need for demo¬cratic development in Germany, albeit in the service of a more alert German imperialism. He took, on the other hand, a critical view of modern democracy and capitalist culture in general, and entertained a deep-seated pessimism about them. Hence his prognoses and perspectives were bound to be equivocal. We have observed his reactionary utopia of a democratic Caesarism. At the same time, after Germany's defeat in the First World War he was of the pronounced opinion that the possibilities of a German imperialism had been exhausted for a long time to come, and that the German people would have to reckon with this situation. Democracy he presented in this context as the political form of such an accommodation and also as the most effective safeguard against the revolutionary labour movement. We have just noted the same dichotomy in methodology and world-outlook in the matter of irrationalism.

Post-war German sociology took over this dichotomy as a legacy from him, as far as it was supported by the least vestige of a democratic idea. The most outstanding repre¬sentative of this transitional form was Weber's younger brother, Alfred. With the latter, however, the dualism of rationalism and irrationalism assumed different proportions from the start (and already before the war). Alfred Weber was strongly influenced by Bergson and other vitalistic irrationalists. That is to say, he was more radical than Max Weber in grasping everything rational and scientific in a purely technical, pragmatic-agnosticist light, as merely external technical aids, since there could be only one entrance to the dead 'shell' of the external aspects of Being. For him, this entrance to 'life' was formed by the element of direct 'experience' in its irrationality. But Alfred Weber did not therefore make a radical break with all science in the name of experience, as Stefan George's pupils had done before the war. Nor did he follow his brother in shifting the problem of irrationality to an extra-scientific philosophical plane. He attempted a 'synthesis', an intellectual 'illumination' of the irrational but without rationalizing it, a scientific approach which was intrinsically anti-scientific. So here Max Weber's dichotomy was reproduced at a higher stage.

This was not simply a difference of personal mentality. Before the war Alfred Weber's position was that of a lone wolf. The class struggles were gaining in intensity, the bour¬geoisie was in a critical state, consciously revolutionary ten¬dencies in the labour movement throughout the world were becoming stronger, while in the Soviet Union there existed a growing socialist society which was becoming increasingly established. And as we have noted in analysing Spengler's philosophy of history, the reaction of the bourgeois ideo¬logies to all these events opened up the way to a new, full-blown irrationalist study of sociological problems. On the one hand, there arose an irrationalist 'method' in the social and historical sciences, with the typology of Dilthey and Max Weber branching out into a socio-philosophical 'mor¬phology' and 'doctrine of forms'. In the vigorous class struggles over the new republic starting at the end of the war, on the other hand, irrationalism became to a mounting extent the ideological banner of entrenched reaction. Now since Alfred Weber's methodology sided with the tendencies of post-war reaction on the irrationalism question, but aimed at turning them into a sociological argumentation for a new democratic movement, his vague and vacillating eclecticism temporarily took on a wider importance.

Alfred Weber shared his brother's estimation of Germany in comparison with the Western democracies, thereby sharply dissociating himself from entrenched reaction, which idealized the German conditions. On this question he kept his distance from mythologies of history. He saw the difference as lying not in the national character but in the historical destinies of the nations. He saw how the Western cultures had profited by the fact that their attainment to national status was linked with major revolutionary movements, whereas 'establishment as a political nation was handed to us on a plate'.34 This implies a more or less firm rejection of the reactionary theories of history. But this rejection, which stemmed from Alfred Weber's liberal views, he promptly retracted and twisted into a reactionary direction. For he was also influ¬enced very strongly by the Western criticism of modern bourgeois democracy, a criticism always connected with irrationalism. (Note Sorel's relationship to Bergson.) This criticism shows very dearly the reactionary decay of liberal¬ism. Out of a fear of the socialist possibilities of a democracy carried all the way through, the oft-heralded democratic spirit was despicably betrayed. Here Alfred Weber allied himself with those critics of democracy who, following the general imperialist vogue, traced its problems back to its mass form. Thus instead of criticizing firmly the bourgeois, capitalist fetters of contemporary democracy -the real problem which life was posing -he flinched from the socialist consequences of such a critique and began to attack demo¬cracy's mass character, whereupon his criticism -for all its reservations -was bound to join the general trend of reac¬tion. This steered him back to positions which, as we have seen, he was endeavouring to reject: to the world mission associated with Germany's social backwardness. And he now thought that Germany had the chance of finding a new road for which all mankind was looking.

Here we see the persistence of that reactionary German tradition which, taking its cue from Bismarck's solution for unifying the German nation, reached a temporary climax at the time of the First World War in the slogan, Am deutscben Wesen soil die Welt genesen (The essence of Germany will set the world to rights). It was, this tradition asserted, pre¬cisely the backward sides of the German people in compari¬son with Western democratic developments that constituted the, source of its international superiority, its vocation for international leadership. Max Weber's specific position was anchored not least in the fact that he was free from this chauvinistic prejudice. Alfred Weber (who, as we have remarked, was essentially in agreement with his brother in his assessment of German history) strayed from the road of sober judgement just where he was required to draw decisive consequences. He capitulated to the reactionary chauvinist view, to which he made major concessions. This surrender clearly illustrates his inconsistent, wavering position, which was connected socially with the weakness of democracy in the Weimar Republic and methodologically with his eclectic, undirected irrationalism.

That defines for us the task of Alfred Weber's sociology. It proceeded from the thesis that we find ourselves in a com¬pletely new world-situation. There were, Alfred Weber contended, three periods in the history of thought, and the present age marked the beginning of the third. Hence he deemed it necessary to make a clean break with the classical traditions. Philosophically, he allied himself with that cam¬paign against Descartes and the rationalism derived from him which we have already analysed, a tradition which began with the older Schelling and ended in fascism. He saw the culture of the future in the emergence of a 'post-Cartesian period'. Here his reasoning is not without interest. He said of the legacy of German idealism: 'But this, paradoxical though it is, leads to the shaping of materialist propositions and to con¬tinued compromises with historical materialism. '35 He vigor¬ously reproached Troeltsch for making such compromises.

Here again Alfred Weber's conception of history came very close to that of extreme reaction. We noted in the Hegel dispute that such a rejection of the classical period ran from Lagarde to Baeumler. Now the nearer this line came to Hitlerism, the more important the discovery became that, intellectually, historical materialism had a profound link with the ideology of Germany'~ classical period; Rosenberg made this plain with regard to the link between Hegel and Marx.

This question is of such significance for the development of German culture that we must dwell on it for a moment.. From the outset all anti-democratic reaction had tended to exclude Marx and Marxism from German culture, although it must have been clear to any student the least bit open-minded how profound the connection was between Marxism and the ideology of the golden age of German culture, the period from Lessing to Heine and from Kant to Hegel and Feuerbach. For a long time it was possible to employ the cliche that Marxism was 'un-German'. The aggravation of the class struggles, and in particular the inevitable first encounter in theory and praxis with the problems of democracy and socialism imposed by the loss of the First World War, now created a new situation, of which Alfred Weber's aforestated standpoint may be termed the ideological expression. The objective development of society wrested from him an insight into this link between the classical age and Marxism; for social democrat literature dealt with this question not at all or very feebly -with the sole exception of Franz Mehring. From both the methodological and the social angle, it is highly remarkable that Alfred Weber countered this correct definition of the concrete connection by dismissing the whole classical period. Methodologically, he drew his conclu¬sions from the basic irrationalistic position; if the future of culture depended on the emergence of a 'post-Cartesian period', then it was only logical to discard the Lessing-Heine period and to see in Marx the -equally dispensable -final realization of this 'Cartesian' development. The struggle against Marxism made obligatory this very break with the greatest traditions of German culture. (That fascist demagogy laid down some exceptions:-chiefly Holderlin, and portions of Goethe -did not materially affect the principal line.)

In this methodology we can also observe once more how, in the imperialist age, points of departure that were correct in themselves -here, the connection between classical times and Marx -could lead to the most false and portentous conclusions -here, a rejection of the classical period. The class struggles in the Weimar Republic formed the objective basis for this. It became more and more evident in the course of these struggles that a concrete maintenance and expansion of democracy, which would necessarily lead in the direction of socialism, was only possibl~ with the support of the revolutionary working class. That so-called democracy which was being defended from this onslaught could, in turn, only be preserved with the aid of the extreme reactionaries. Under these conditions the social scope afforded to a purely Western democracy (of the British type) was growing narrower and narrower. So for these liberal middle-of-the road ideologists, of whom Alfred Weber was one, the task became that of saving their liberal conception of democracy. And this, for them, was only possible if they were in the most intimate touch with reaction, and through a resolute battle against the Left, allied to an -inevitably more than lame -resistance to the radical demands of the extreme reactionaries. The latter principle finds clear expression in Alfred Weber's irrationalist sociology. The energetic struggle against the Left and the true forces of democracy led him to associate Lagarde's rejection and Nietzsche's critique of the classical period with the attempt to destroy Marxism. That just this step cleared the way for fascist ideology, and for the theories of history and culture advanced by Baeumler and Rosenberg, is among the not uncommon facts of the development whereby convinced liberals, precisely because of their liberal ideology, have become pioneers of the ideology of extreme reaction in times of crisis.

Thus Alfred Weber's dismissal of historical materialism was more vehement and impassioned than that of Max Weber and Troeltsch. Like his brother, but more radically, more strongly detached still from all economic considerations, indeed, repudiating economics in radical fashion, he saw the basic character of contemporary society as lying in the general rationalizing process. But that it was precisely capital¬ism which had achieved this rationalization was, in his eyes, a 'historical coincidence -it could equally well have been. .. the State which carried out the general rationalization'.36 (This radical belittlement of economic life and economic motives again expresses the point that, to him, the real adversary was socialism and Marxism. And here too Alfred Weber was doing preliminary work on behalf of fascist ideology.)

For these reasons he called for entirely new forms of sociology: a new method of intuitive sociology of culture. This rested on the thesis that the world was split into three areas with 'different trends of movement': the social process, the process of civilization, and the cultural movement. We can see the significance now acquired by the false antithesis, which first became central with Toennies, between culture and civilization. But we see also how much farther this anti¬thesis had been developed in a reactionary irrationalist direction since Toennies's day. The Romantic anti-capitalist critique of contemporary culture had petrified into a starkly mechanical opposition of culture and socio-economic life. It had become an assertion of the total other-ness of culture to all the rest of mankind's tendencies and forces of develop¬ment: a mysticized fetish for decadent intellectuals who were timidly and artificially cutting themselves off from the public life of society.

When analysed the process of civilization showed, accord¬ing to Alfred Weber, only a continuation of the biological stages of man's evolution 'through which, however, we pre¬serve and extend only our natural existence? 7 On the one hand, this evolution had, in principle, nothing to do with culture; culture no longer stemmed from human evolution as its finest flower, but was deemed radically independent of man's physical and social existence. On the other hand, the character of culture, as representing the peak of the human condition, was polemic ally contrasted to all other expressions of life. It was quite logical for Alfred Weber to recognize only works of art and ideas as forms of culture, and artists and prophets as its only transmitters. In its actual content, this sociology of culture was bound to proclaim a complete abstention from social action, which in any case can never touch on essential matters. But since this sociology was, as we shall see, still turning its attention to the social sphere, there arose an important intellectual link between Alfred Weber, the Stefan George school and Hitlerism. Hitler and Rosenberg had only to invest the 'prophet' with a plainly reactionary content in order to complete this development of the irrationalist social doctrine in the fascist spirit. (There is a similarity here to the connection between Max Weber's 'charismatic leader' and the blind worship of the Fiihrer demanded by Hitler.)

With Alfred Weber this antithesis of culture and civiliza¬tion coincided with that of emotion and intellect, irrational¬istic intuition and rationalism. All evolution was rationalistic and had a methodological import only outside the cultural sphere; in culture there was no development, no progress, but only a 'live stream' -a true Bergsonian expression. Here Alfred Weber repudiated all perspectives, all 'cultural prog¬noses' of the future; the future was -so irrationalist logic would have it -of necessity a secret. What he wished to achieve was a 'mere orientation in the present'.38 It is striking from a logical viewpoint, but not surprising from that of Alfred Weber's hypotheses, that he did not so much as notice the contradiction occurring here. For if, as he himself repeat¬edly stressed, culture is -as Bergson would have it -a 'stream', then how can we orient ourselves in it without having investigated the direction of the stream (a question involving the matter of perspective)? According to Weber it was sociology's task precisely to attain to a vision of this 'stream' and to express it in 'affective symbols'. On such a basis it could provide an answer to the quest.ion of where we stand. Thus while consciously renouncing the scientific 'dignity' of sociology, Alfred Weber believed that a definite synthesis and analysis resting on intuition would still be possible on this basis, though they would have nothing to do with a causal explanation. It is perhaps superfluous to remark how close this new sociology comes to the existentialism of Heidegger and Jaspers.

So let us now take the concrete central question of Alfred Weber's sociology -the respective positions of present things, our present position in history. To a large extent his diagnosis of this tallied with that of Max Weber: the mechanization, technical trappings and mass quality of existence, accom¬panied by a prognosis of the ineluctability of these social manifestations. Democracy too was, in Alfred Weber's eyes, part of this process of civilization. Already going beyond his brother at this point, he characterized democracy as the 'subjugation of the State's political will to mindless economic forces'.39 Naturally this was closely connected with his rejec¬tion of the 'mass quality of existence' in democracy. It was however this diagnosis that gave rise to the particular perspec¬tive of Alfred Weber's sociology. Weber stated, with regard to the fate of democracy and of our tasks in its formation, that one had to penetrate to a deeper level; it was there that the authentic problem first originated. 'We must separate those parts of the democratic idea which follow simply from the development of man's self-consciousness from those which have sprung from the rational mediating apparatus of civilized thinking and contemplation.'4O One must therefore begin to contemplate the 'primal facts of life'. In concrete terms that means: the manifestation is civilization, but the primal facts are the processes of 'leading' and of 'being led'. Thus the central problem of democracy is the creation of a new leader caste.

Here there is still a glimmer of a proper democratic instinct in Alfred Weber, inasmuch as he criticized the fact about the German development that the lower classes could not attain to leadership. But all that he could do positively was to set up completely vague reactionary utopias. This was not a matter of chance but the inevitable upshot of his proposition and its social foundation. It was, indeed, again not by chance that the leader problem was raised precisely by sociologists of those countries where there was no really advanced bourgeois democracy (Max Weber in Germany, Pareto in Italy). Max Weber also saw clearly -in his concrete analyses-that pre¬cisely Germany's undemocratic, quasi-parliamentary develop¬ment was bound to entail a defective and fateful choice of leader. Politically he called for the democratizing, the parlia¬mentarization of Germany in view of this very point. But when he summed up his views theoretically, he again drifted into an irrationalist mysticism. As is well known, Max Weber in his sociology regarded the chosen state of the democratic leader in particular as 'charisma', a term already expressing the conceptually unfathomable and incomprehensible irra¬tional character of leadership. For Max Weber this was not to be avoided. For if -following the Rickertian methodology of history, which only recognizes individual phenomena -we ask why it was that Pericles or Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell or Marat became leaders and try to find a sociological generalization covering the separate historical answers, there will arise the concept of 'charisma', which roughly pins down in. a pseudo-concept our ignorant amazement, i.e., something irrational. When, on the other hand, Hegel spoke of the -'world-historical individual', he was proceeding not from the individual but from the historically allotted task of an age, a nation, and regarded as 'world -historical' that individual who could solve this task. Hegel well knew that the question of whether, among those with the potential awareness and capacity for action needed in this situation, it is the indivi¬dual X or Y who does in fact become 'world-historical' conceals within it an element of irreducible chance. Max Weber posed the question precisely from the angle of this unavoidable chance element and sought an 'explanation' for it. Hence he was sure to land up with the partly abstract, partly mystical and irrational pseudo-concept of 'charisma'.

Meanwhile the problem itself had been clarified in histori¬cal materialism far beyond the insight accessible to Hegel. The very analysis of the class struggles, and of the varying composition and structure of classes, further diversified according to historical periods, countries and evolutionary stages, offered the methodological possibility of posing and
solving in full clarity that which was truly and scientifically soluble in this question. It did so by establishing that the economic and political struggle of a class was always linked with the training of a leader caste. And the nature, composi¬tion, selection, etc., of this caste could be elucidated scien¬tifically from the conditions 'of the class struggle, the com¬position, evolutionary stage and so forth of the class, and the reciprocal relationship between the mass and its leaders etc. In content and methodology Lenin's What Is To Be Done? was the model of such an analysis. To bourgeois sociology, the findings and the methods of a scientific proposition of this kind were automatically inaccessible. This was not only because of its repudiaiion in principle of the class struggle (in spite of this stance, it could still have attained at least a Hegelian clarity). It was because bourgeois sociology posed the question -more or less consciously -as a challenge to the democratic upsurge and because, from the very start, the problem's methodological basis was not the interaction of leadership and masses, but -more or less -the antithetical enmity between them. Such class reasons gave rise to a proposition that was at once abstract and irrationalist: a reduction of the problem of democracy to the leader ques¬tion. Only distortedly irrationalist, anti-democratic answers could be given to so limited and distorted a question. This is best seen in Robert Michels's book on the sociology of party political life. In order to degrade democracy and especially labour democracy, the phenomena which reformism had produced in the social democrat parties and in the trade unions they influenced were elevated to 'sociological laws'. From a specific phenomenon of one part of the labour move¬ment in the imperialist age, Michels deduced the 'law' that it was impossible for the masses to evolve an appropriate leader caste from within their own ranks.

We have illustrated the contrast, in Max Weber, between concrete politico-historical criticism where he proved the incapacity, with regard to Wilhelmine Germany, of quasi-parliamentary absolutism to evolve a caste of leaders on the one hand, and his irrational mystical 'charisma' sociology on the other. There is also a similar internal inconsistency in his brother. But with the latter, the criticism of Germany's democratic backwardness was merely episodic, whereas irrationalist mysticism embraced not only the choice of leader but the whole problem of democracy and leadership. Alfred Weber appealed to the country's youth, demanded a separation of personal criterion from party opinion in select¬ing a leader, and called for the working out of 'an intellec¬tually aristocratic norm filled with substance, delineated in character'.41 Of course he was unable to say what the sub¬stance of such a norm might be, for according to his theory the substance was not definable, only 'experience'. Thus the ambitious launching of his new sociology ended with the wholly unsubstantiated, suggested vision of a new change of direction, with vague hints of a total upheaval in terms of world-outlook, and with an appeal to a 'generation unthink¬able without Nietzsche, its master',42 albeit a Nietzsche minus the 'blond beast'. It was on this 'basis' that the new men were supposed to procure peaceful co-operation between nations.

Confused though these studies are, and despite the inevit¬able meagreness and eclecticism of their intellectual results, we must not underestimate the importance of such essays of a sociology of leadership in creating a mental climate favourable to the acceptance of the Nazi mystique of the Fuhrer. A methodological foundation was now ach1eved inasmuch as the whole problem-complex was made the necessarily irrational object of subjective experiences. Lack¬ing such a climate, the fascist theory of the Fuhrer could never have gained credence among the intelligentsia. The experiential, irrationalist character of the choice of leader in the Hitler movement was only a facade for the corruption and tyranny which characterized this movement, and it had its own very clear-cut, rational principles of selection (trust¬worthiness in the eyes of monopoly capitalism accompanied by the most barbaric of means). These latter motives were very far from the thoughts of Max and Alfred Weber. But none of this at all affects the objective connection in the development of German ideology towards fascism.

This mixture of distinctly reactionary philosophy and indistinctly liberal sociological conclusions and pseudo-democratic utopian perspectives is a clear reflection of the ideology of the Weimar 'republic without republicans'. The incoherent and eclectic character of this sociology reflects not just Alfred Weber's personal qualities, but also the changes taking place at the time t~at these views originated. Dating from before the war, the original conception had survived the war period and the tide of revolution to receive its literary form at the time of 'relative stabilization'. At this time the greatest of hopes and illusions were being cherished by that moderate German intelligentsia which, while going along with the reactionary trends of 'vitalism' all the way in the philosophical sphere, recoiled from the politico-social conclusions of its extreme representatives, especially the fascists. This phase of development was the time most favourable to such hazy utopias. These intellectuals were in no position -not even on an ideological basis -to enter into a real struggle against the reactionaries. They resorted, therefore, to daydreams of the permanance of 'relative stabilization' (and after this collapsed, of its return). And they accordingly adjusted their social theories with a view to absorbing as much as possible of vitalism and existen¬tialism, while also salving something of sociology's scientific character. Simultaneously this rescue operation implied, as we have noted in Alfred Weber's case, an energetic struggle against the Left, and above all against historical materialism. And it was also intended to substantiate in theory the social importance, the leading social role of this 'floating' intelligentsia.

Of the younger generation of German sociologists, Karl Mannheim was the outstanding representative of this orienta¬tion. The effects of 'relative stabilization' played an even more decisive role in shaping his views than with the older Alfred Weber. Hence the latter's overtly mystical, intuitionist sociology of culture was supplanted, in Mannheim, by a sceptically relativistic 'sociology of knowledge' which carried on a flirtation with existentialism. (This phase in the develop¬ment of German sociology is, as we have shown in Chapter IV, represented also in the contemporaneous works of the philosopher Max Scheler.)

Like all agnosticists and relativists of the imperial period, Mannheim protested against the accusation of relativism. He solved the question with a new term and called himself a relationist. The difference between relativism and relationism is about the--'same as that between the yellow and the green devil in Lenin's letter to Gorky.43 For Mannheim 'overcame' relativism by pronouncing obsolete and discarding the old epistemology, which at least put forward the demand for objective truth and termed the denial of it relativism. Modern epistemology, on the other hand, was to 'proceed from the thesis that there are areas of thought where uncom¬mitted, unrelated cognition is quite unimaginable'.44 Or, more radically as regards the realm of social knowledge: 'But primarily, each of us gets to see that aspect of the social whole to which he is oriented in terms of the will.'45Here Mannheim's source is obvious: it was historical materialism's theory of ideologies. But, like all the popularizers and popular opponents of this doctrine, he failed to observe that in it, the relative and absolute mesh in a dialectical reciprocal rela¬tionship, and that this gives rise to the approximati.ve charac¬ter of human knowledge, for which objective truth (the correct reflection of objective reality) is always an inherent element and criterion. Thus the theory involved a 'false consciousness' as a complementary pole to correct conscious¬ness, whereas Mannheim conceived his relationism as the typification and systematizing of every possible kind of false consciousness.

But it was just through this that Mannheim intended to disprove historical materialism. After bourgeois epistemology and sociology had desperately staved off the idea that social Being determines consciousness, it was forced to give in to historical materialism on this question. But this capitulation was, on the one hand, as we have just noted, a relativistic caricature in which, and by the agency of which, any objec¬tivity of knowledge was repudiated. On the other hand, this capitulation to Marxism was to be instantly converted into an -avowedly irrefutable -argument against historical materialism. For to be consistent, one would have to apply the latter to itself; i.e., if the theory of ideologies was correct, then it would also apply to the ideollJgy of the proletariat, to Marxism; if all ideologies had only a relative degree of truth in them, then Marxism too could not claim more. This 'irrefutable' reasoning was the result of simply eliminating both the dialectic of the absolute and relative, and historical development and its concrete facts, which always clearly illustrate how this dialectic of the absolute and relative works out in any given case. Thus arrived what we know as the night of thorough-going relativism, in which all cats looked grey and all perceptions relative. 50 this refutation of Marxism offers us only a sociological variation on the 5penglerian theory of culture cycles. Although the question of ascertaining truth did crop up again in Mannheim's book, it did so only in the form: 'which standpoint provides the biggest chances of an optimum of truth. . .'46And with that, according to Mannheim, the problem of relativism fell into
obsolescence.

Here the connection with Max Weber is clearly visible. Only, Rickert's neo-Kantianism gave way to a sociologized existentialism a la Jasper,s and Heidegger in that, as we have seen, each social perception was presented in principle as 'situation-bound' and the current crisis of thinking was made the epistemological starting-point and a basis for dismissing the obsolete demand for objectivity. Mannheim formulated his epistemological position as follows: 'There is no "thinking in general"; on the contrary a living being of a specific type thinks in a world of a specific type in order to fulfil a speci¬fied function in life.'47Mannheim even went so far as to see in the call for absolute truth in thinking only an -inferior ¬speculation on a 'need of security'.

Mannheim thereby put himself in a somewhat awkward situation with regard to historical materialism. It was very easy for Heidegger or Jaspers to answer the Kierkegaard¬influenced appeal to the 'existing man' because they saw in all social categories only a profoundly unreal 'shell'. But Mannheim was a sociologist, and a thinking bound up with Being logically meant, in his case, that social Being defines consciousness. He found "an escape route by cultivating a formalistic and relativistic sophistry, by projecting irration¬
alism into historical materialism and -in close connection with all this -by a radical elimination of economics from sociology. Let us begin with the last of these. Mannheim stated in his later work that competition and controls were not economic but 'general sociological principles, which we just happened to locate and observe first in economics'.48 By thus abstractly generalizing away from all concrete objective¬ness and clearly defined objectivity, Mannheim enabled himself to define any economic or social category just as he pleased and to propound any amount of analyses and con¬trasts between such vacuous and abstract concepts. Only by this abstract distancing from objective socio-economic reality did it become possible to reveal the 'irrational' motives in historical materialism. Consequently, Mannheim regarded the method of historical materialism as a 'synthesis between intuitionism and an extreme rationalizing desire'. 49 The revolutionary situation, or as Mannheim pu"t it, the 'passing moment' (Augenblick), was viewed as an irrational 'gap'. (Here the results of the neo-Hegelian corruption of the dialectic and the equation by Kroner and Glockner of dialec¬tics and irrationalism had their sociological repercussions. To the dialectic of revolution so concrete in Marxism, Mannheim gave as strong a Kierkegaardian twist as the neo-Hegelians had given to dial~ctics as a whole.)

Historical materialism in this interpretation -i.e., adjusted in accordance with extreme relativism, and rendered vitalistically irrational -had great merits in Mannheim's opinion. But it also made the mistake of 'absolutizing' the socio-economic structure of society. Moreover, as already shown, it failed to see that its unmasking of ideologies was -yet another ideology. Now we can see for what purpose Mannheim needed to reshape historical materialism as indi¬cated above. With the disappearance of economics and the irrationalizing of the social process, a general 'situation¬bound state' of thought and cognition supplanted the con¬stantly historically concrete relation between economic foundation and ideology. So it now seemed illogical for historical materialism to distinguish between true and false consciousness. In short, it did not come up to the mark of the 'modern epistemology', relationalism. Thus historical materialism's theory of ideologies was not formulated in a sufficiently general way. This universality, Mannheim argued, could only be reached if the 'relationalistic situation-bound state' of thought was correspondingly generalized, i.e., if the relativity of all thinking was corrected by dissolving all objectivity. Then we would have that interpenetration of the various styles of thinking indispensable to a sociology of knowledge. Historical materialism would then form one of the many particularities with regard to this universality and totality.

Mannheim now went on from here to moot the problems of ideological and utopian thinking, of the possibility of scientific politics, of governmental planning, etc. The fruits of these inquiries were extremely scanty. Mannheim was abiding by an extremely formalistic standpoint from which he could obtain only a fully abstract typology of the posi¬tions possible in each event, without 'being able to make a factually important statement about them. Mannheim's typo¬logizing was so abstract that his separate types embraced the most diverse and inherently contradictory directions, just in order for him to produce a synoptical, limited number of types in socio-historical reality. Thus he identified as uniform types social democracy and communism on the one hand, liberalism and democracy on the other. In this, as we shall see, the overtly reactionary Carl Schmitt was far superior to him. Schmitt perceived in the antithesis of liberalism and democracy an important present-day problem.

The result of the 'Mannheimian sociology of knowledge' was not much more than an actualization of Max Weber's doctrine of the 'ideal type'. And Mannheim was logically
obliged to adhere to a scientific agnosticism, leaving all decision to the intuition, the experience, the 'charisma' of the individual. But this is where the illusions of 'relative
stabilization' set in. To the 'floating' intelligentsia was imputed the chance and the role of ascertaining the truth that met the present situation from the totality of stand¬points and attitudes linked to these standpoints; This intelli¬gentsia, according to Mannheim, stood outside social class: 'It forms a centre, but not a centre in terms of class.' Now why the thinking of the 'floating intelligentsia' was no longer 'situation-bound', and why relationalism did not now apply its own tenet to itself, as it was asking historical materialism to do, is known only to the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim asserted of this social group that it possessed a social sensi¬bility enabling it to 'share the feelings of the dynamically conflicting forces', but that was a hollow claim without proof. That this group had the delusion that it was standing above social class and the class struggles is a well-known fact. Historical materialism not only repeatedly described it, but also deduced it from the social Being of this group. Here it was Mannheim's duty to point out that the bond with social Being, with the 'situation' which, in his new epistemology, defined the thinking of every man living in society was absent from this group or present in a modified way. But he did not even attempt to show this, and simply had recourse to the 'floating intelligentsia's' illusions about itself. Its situation as propounded by Mannheim now gave rise to its calling 'to locate in each event the point from which a total orientation in what is happening can be undertaken, and to act as watch¬men in an otherwise all too murky night'.5O Since, in view of his methodological hypotheses, Mannheim could not draw upon Alfred Weber's 'vision', he was of course unable to tell us anything at all about the content of this 'total orientation'.

His experiences under Hitler's regime did not alter Mannheim's basic conception. Certainly this experience did not leave him unmarked, for his views became more decided: 'The fundamental evil of modern society does not lie in the great number but in the fact that the liberal framework has not yet succeeded in bringing about the organic structure needed for a large-scale society. '51 The reason for this, in Mannheim's opinion, was that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had effected a 'fundamental democratization' making it possible for the irrationalisms to function incor¬rectly. 'That is the condition of a mass society in which those irrationalisms as yet unformed and uncoordinated in the social framework are pressed into politics. This condition is a dangerous one because democracy's mass apparatus brings irrationality into places where rational guidance is needed. '52 From this it would follow that a surplus of democracy, and not the lack of democracy, democratic experience and tradi¬tion, was the main cause of the fascist development in Germany. Here Mannheim was doing the same as a great many spokesmen for anti-democratic, imperialistically corrupt liberalism. Since they had always contested demo¬cracy out of a fear of its social consequences, they seized.on the case of Hitler with delight and satisfaction in order to camouflage their old, unchanged rebuttal of democracy as a battle against the Right and reaction. And in so doing, they used wholly uncritically the demagogic social democrat equation of fascism and bolshevism as the collective enemy of 'true' (i.e., liberalist) democracy.

The central problem of the times, according to Mannheim, was this: we have entered the epoch of social planning, but our thinking, morality and so forth are still at more rudi¬mentary stages of development. It was the task of sociology and of the psychology linked with it to put right this discre¬pancy between men and their tasks. Sociology, Mannheim wrote, 'will pursue principles that will redirect militant energies and guide them to a sublimation'. 53 Hence there were three progressive tendencies in present-day psychology: pragmatism, behaviourism and 'depth-psychology' (Freud and Adler). 'Pioneer types' were to be trained with the assist¬ance of these, since the role of advance parties, of elites in social events was of crucial importance. So Mannheim was reviving once more the old problem of leader selection. Alfred Weber's overt irrationalism had now vanished, but the problem had by no means become more concrete. In a society whose economic basis and social structure continued to depend on monopoly capitalism, and whose development was therefore bound to be an imperialist one as long as this basis remained unaltered, Mannheim was seeking to create an anti-imperialist leader caste through education, through the psychological sublimation of irrationalism. And such a utopia, if it were not to represent pure empty demagogy in the imperialist interest, could only be created by radically eliminating all objective categories of the life of society. Mannheim then discussed in great detail some problems of the education, morality, etc., of the new elite, its relation to the old elite, etc. But he did not make the politico-social substance of this new elite any more concrete than Alfred Weber had done.

On one point only did Mannheim visibly adopt a clearer stance. He repudiated any social solution through the use of violence, through dictatorship. And here, in a truly formalistic manner, he again treated as equivalents fascist dictatorship and the dictatorship of the proletariat, revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence. For this is always the case with the ideologists who fear a radical democratic trans¬formation of society, a real defusing and short-circuiting of the imperialist forces of monopoly capitalism far more than a recurrence and resurgence of fascism.

There was only one point on which Mannheim transcended pure formalism and developed something akin to a personal standpoint. That was his hope of a compromise between the embattled parties of the individual states, between the embattled powers on an international scale. 'But such a change of mentality would be a true revolution in the history of the world. . .' To illustrate the possibility of such an answer, Mannheim suggested that an attack by the inhabi¬tants of Mars might bring the hostile groups into agreement. Of course he himself admitted that this was impossible. He thought, however, that the annihilating character of modern warfare was becoming increasingly clear. 'Fears of a future war with its dreadful powers of destruction could increase to such an extent that they would have the same effect as fear of a concrete enemy. In this event, men would decide on compromise solutions for fear of impending general annihila¬tion, and would submit to a central umbrella organization which would administer social planning for all.'s4 As usual with Mannheim, this lacks any indication of what economic and social character such an 'umbrella organization' might have, and of what difference the socio-economic character of such organizations would make. Obviously Mannheim regarded Anglo-Saxon imperialism -as dogmatically as he had previously regarded the intelligentsia -as 'floating' and above social conflicts and 'situation-bound' thinking. In this he becomes one of numerous forerunners of the imperialist reaction after Hitler's downfall.

The sociological movement emanating from Max Weber was profoundly sterile. Its sterility is evident from a pro¬gramme of this sort for those bourgeois intellectuals who were reluctant to give in to reactionary fascist irrationalism without a struggle, but who were wholly unable to counter it with a clear and decisive democratic programme. Not to mention the fact that in their epistemological and socio¬logical views, they were deeply implicated in those reaction¬ary tendencies from which fascis!ll ultimately derived on the ideological level. Their inconsistency left this part of the anti-fascist intelligentsia weak and indeed ideologically defenceless in the face of fascist demagogy. And as the example of Mannheim shows, experience of fascism did not help to overcome this vulnerability. His views as set out in this book are as much of an ideology of helpless surrender to a reactionary wave in post-war times as his sociology of knowledge before the war.


6. Pre-Fascist and Fascist Sociology (Spann, Freyer, Carl Schmitt)

In accordance with the character and outcome of the German class struggles during the Weimar Republic, a thoroughly reactionary direction became dominant in German sociology. We have seen how Max Weber -involuntarily -paved a way for the new irrationalism methodologically, and how Alfred Weber went a long way towards existentialism, etc. But to put forward a plain and simple reactionary content, a plain and simple reactionary methodology of some sort did not suffice in this period. The outcome of the class struggles indicates the failure of all essays in established Prussian reac¬
tion (with or without the Hohenzollerns). The winner was a new barbaric form of reaction, Hitlerian 'National Socialism'. Correspondingly, it was those sociologists becoming ¬whether or not they were aware of this from the outset ¬allies of the tendencies assisting the fascist victory in advance who also gained the upper hand ideologically.

Characteristic of this situation was the episodic role .which so pronounced a reactionary as Othmar Spann played in German sociology. Long before Hitler's seizure of power, Spann shared most of the social views of fascism. He saw his main enemies partly in the liberal ideas of 1789, but above all in the Marxist ideas of 1917. He anticipated those national socialist demagogics which charged with Marxism everyone who was not an avowed reactionary; Spann even levelled this charge against the German economic leaders and especially sharply against Max Weber. In anticipation of fascism he removed 'self-interest' from the 'comprehensive economy' and turned the capitalists into 'economic leaders', the workers a 'band of followers' and a new class, 55 etc.

As will be already clear from these few indications, Spann achieved a very large measure of agreement with the subse¬quent national socialism; were it worth our while to go into more details, the affinity would emerge more clearly still. Nevertheless Rosenberg rejected the figure of Spann as a whole.s6 Now why was this? It was because Spann developed all his views from a philosophico-sociological system that was certainly extremely reactionary, but in a Catholic and scholastic sense (adapted to Austrian clerical fascism). It was therefore irreconcilable with the most important prin¬ciples of German fascism's social demagogy. Like all the learned reactionaries of the post-war period, Spann too dismissed the category of causality, not however in order to supplant it with irrationalist myth, but to establish a static and inflexible scholastic doctrine of totality and component parts. Thus Spann originated a system of an a priori stable classification. While challenging all progressive scientific thinking in the same way as fascism, this 'comprehensive' study created a system analogous to medieval Catholic scholasticism. And accordingly, it had to be anchored in an ancient, hereditary, traditional authority. Spann's debt to Catholicism was therefore not fortuitous, and therein lies one of the most important reasons why he, like everything Catholic, was repudiated by the National Socialists. Moreover Spann's theory rejected every form of revolution and violent upheaval -a view which National Socialism could not afford to tolerate before its seizure of power. Spann polemicized against Hegel, for instance, because the latter's categories went from the bottom upwards and not the reverse, and because his philosophy was constructed upon the idea of progress: this the 'National Socialist world-view' could still accept. When, however, Spann replaced Hegel's 'suspension' (Aufhebung) with the purely conservative category of the 'preservation of innocence',S? i.e., sought an authoritarian maintenance of the status quo, he was transgressing against the needs of the social demagogy of National Socialism. Therefore the fascist ideologists who were polemicizing against the 'Red Front and reaction' on behalf of their social demagogy turned against Spann as much as Spengler. And finally, Spann's scholastic, Catholic hierarchy had room neither for racial theory nor for the irrationalist mystique of the Fiihrer. Because of his general reactionary tendencies, Spann was very much in fashion among all the German obscurantists for a while, but Hitlerian fascism then swept him aside.

More important as regards the transition to fascism are Hans Freyer and Carl Schmitt. Freyer's initial work consisted partly of historical, specialist investigations, and partly of a dithyrambic, mystical philosophy. Directly after this he attempted to construct a new, up-to-date sociology out of German .sociology's previous traditions chiefly by synthesiz¬ing Max Weber's typological casuistry and Dilthey's experien¬tial philosophy. From the outset this had a strong vitalistic, indeed existentialist orientation, but with a long-lasting tendency to seek a synthesis between 'intellect' and 'life'. Hence the State stood at the centre of these treatises. In his Prometheus Freyer outlined a downright Leviathan-like picture of the State's irresistible violence and the intellect's total impotence in the face of power. But that was only his preamble. He sought, on the contrary, to demonstrate their reliance upon each other: 'The history of power is its dialec¬tic; the intellect has need of power to win real recognition on Earth among men. Considered intrinsically, however, power has a still more urgent need of the intellect if it is to emerge as a real force out of a mangled and downtrodden mass of possibilities. '58 Freyer now expounded this inter¬action in more detail in his book on the State. Here he indicated two dialectical paths. One of them was, in his view, concretely historical: that leading from the intellect to the State. The second, on the other hand, signified 'the timeless law of the State structure', 59the path from the State to the intellect. But the stages along this second path (might, law, form), Freyer claimed, were only intellectual reiterations of the real stages along the first path (faith, style, State). Both these paths represent a vitalist caricature of the Phenomenology of the Mind, drawing heavily on all the 'achievements' of German sociology from Toennies to Max Weber.

As for the individual stages of these 'phenomenological' paths, Freyer's stage of faith was nothing more than Toennies's community concept. Its forms were myth, cult and language. The next stage, that of style, appears more complicated and contradictory. According to Freyer it was a 'necessary epi¬sode of the intellect'. This stage differs from the preceding one in that the concrete form is now the 'it', whereas it was previously the 'you'. In this case the forms are science, art and justice. In all, this stage was a caricature of Hegel's 'absolute intellect' in the spirit of pre-fascist anti-intellectuality, depicting it as a sphere of dehumanization and also ¬in contrast to Hegel -as a transition to what the latter called 'objective mind'. Style, with Freyer, not only tears the community apart but also exhibits distinctly decadent features: 'The genius is the social world's most negative phenomenon. Genius needs the community as the Devil needs the Godhead: in order to deny it. '60(This was a season¬able variation of Max Weber's 'battle of the gods'.)

More important to Freyer's system was the concrete path to the dissolution of the community. It was expressed in the problem of rule. Here the fascist aspects of Freyer's sociology are already fairly visible. 'One is a master through birth. . . one is a bond servant by nature, not by misfortune.'61 The replacing of ranks or stations by classes was also, for Freyer, a sign of the decay accompanying a time of transition. The history of any decline was 'the history of economization . . . When a style comes to an end, the saying comes true that world-history is the history of class struggles.'62 This state¬ment, as we shall see later in a more concrete form, contains a -negatively slanted -acknowledgement of historical materialism. To be sure, even this acknowledgement contains an abundance of Spenglerian motifs. For the view of the conversion of ranks into classes as a sign of decline was modelled on the epoch of Caesars and plebeians from the Decline of the West. There was, though, a difference signifi¬cant to the course taken by the fascist infiltration of German ideology, namely that Spengler's reactionary fatalism lost ground in Freyer and was supplanted by a counter¬revolutionary activism.

The apparent recognition of historical materialism was only a means of criticizing it in an 'original' way. Above all, Freyer tackled the de-economizing of sociology far more radically than his predecessors. Carrying on the theory which Max Weber had cautiously expressed in the form of a pre¬ponderant interaction, Freyer reduced the whole genesis of capitalism to purely ideological motives. 'As we know, the theory of capitalism and its development harks back very successfully to philosophical elements... the innermost substance of the capitalist form of life is composed of a particular morality, metaphysic and doctrine of life. '63 Drawing a parallel between Marx and Nietzsche, Freyer's pupil Hugo Fischer voiced the same idea even more vividly: 'The category of capital is a specification of the rampant category of decadence in the philosophy of culture, meta¬physics and sociology. Capital is the form of economic life representing its decadence. The basic error committed by Marxism and Marx himself was to regard decadence as a form of capitalism instead of capitalism as a type of decadence. '64

This 'critical' position left Freyer with manifold advan¬tages. Firstly, it enabled him to adapt for his own purposes what he called the dynamics of Marxism. He could introduce into sociology a radical, and radically subjectivist existen¬tialism without -to all outward appearances -invalidating its social objectivity, but also without being bound to the real objective dialectic of the economic process. Freyer too gave rise to a pseudo-objectivity, an irrationalist quasi-dialectic, but his way of 'accepting' Marxism into his thought more strongly reinforced the semblance of dialectics and objectivity than was the case with his predecessors. Thus he was in a position even to acknowledge the fact of the class struggle, for in the activist abstraction through which he viewed it, the class struggle had ceased to be dangerous. To Freyer it meant 'a tension with regard to ruling power between heterogeneous party groups'.6S This is such an abstract concept of the internal social struggle that any groupings and strategies could be redesignated 'revolutionary struggle' if the exterior form of the revolutionary forces was preserved. We shall note a similar tendency in Carl Schmitt, and this was no coincid¬ence. As fascism increasingly. armed itself for the 'revolu¬tionary' seizure of power, there arose the need both to present this as authentic revolution and to conceal the monopoly-capitalist character of the whole movement.

A further point is that this onset of fascism occurred during a period when the economic pressure on the masses (intellectuals included) was becoming increasingly unbearable. Fascism had need of the resulting despair and bitterness, the inclination towards resistance and rebellion. In utilizing the anti-capitalist feelings the situation gave rise to, it only sought to prevent the resulting tensions and indeed explo¬sions from being vented against capitalism, which it wanted, rather, to provide with the terrorist instrument of rule. Here pre-fascist sociology performed important preliminary work. In devaluing, in terms of world-oudook, the whole domain of economics, it was on the surface more radical than Marxism. For whereas the latter was directed only against a 'superficial' phenomenon, capitalism, this pre-fascist or fascist sociology was demanding a 'total' upheaval -without affecting the sway of monopoly capitalism in the slightest. But at the same time, it could cater for the immediate longing of the broad masses, especially the petty bourgeoisie, by having a period 'without economics' succeed the 'age of economics' and by devising a perspective of the 'taming of economics' through the intellect, State, etc. Freyer described economics (which, like most popularizers, he identified with technology) 'as the true anarchist opposing the totality of the State', and as a force which for all its apparent power was completely with¬out influence at bottom: 'the boundless world of mere ways and means does hold within itself the power of limitless progress, but not the power to form self-contained areas for the workings of destiny through the intellect'. Hence a dictatorship of the State over economics was needed. 'The economy is recalcitrant and must be taken more strongly in hand.'66

Accordingly, historical materialism, in Freyer's sociology, amounted to a mentally adequate expression of the 'age of economics', the period of decadence. Historical materialism as an intellectual expression of a decline was only capable of comprehending the decline, and not the positive side. 'A style perishes in class struggles, but it does not arise out of them. It arises out of the tension between dominant and subject races ordained by nature.'67 In each historical instance, these class struggles now gave rise to the State. But this process seemed as yet far from complete: 'Perhaps the political change of mind in the history of mankind generally has not been accomplished in a way enabling its full meaning to come to light.'68 This change was reserved for Hitler later. The State now developed into the Reich, in which all previous forms were superseded.

The reverse path leading from the State to the intellect was, as indicated, an intellectual reiteration of the concrete path. We shall pick out only the most important elements in
Freyer's lines of approach. In treating of power he naturally arrived at a glorification of war and conquest: 'Not merely in accordance with reality. . . but by definition, the State is founded upon war and has its beginning in it.' The State 'must conquer in order to be'.69 To this was added the glori¬fication of race: 'Racial blood is the sacred stuff from which a people is formed.' Hence the most important task of political power was to 'hold sacred the race'.70 The next stage, law, correspondingly dealt chiefly with the subjugation under the State of economics, which Freyer always identified with technology and repudiated as being an anarchic principle and a mechanization of life. The dissolution of social classes also belonged to this process. In the last stage, in form, the leader finally appeared. The leader created 'the single class¬less but multi-layered, untyrannical but strictly interlocking formation of the people. To be a people means to become a people, under the guidance of the leader.'7. Here again already, we can see how Freyer was building a fascist doc¬trinal system out of the elements of.German sociology up to that time.

Freyer's further development amounted to a still greater reinforcement of his existential, irrationalist tendencies. His theoretical magnum opus, Sociology as the Science of Reality, was an attempt to create a theoretical basis for such tenden¬cies. He offered a detailed critique of sociology to date, strongly emphasizing the merits of Dilthey, Toennies, Simmel and the Weber brothers, in order to demonstrate that if sociology remained a mere 'logos science', i.e., a theoretical science in the neo-Kantian sense, it would inevitably become formalistic and unhistorical, a mere 'morphology of the social world'. And this dismissal of formal sociology he underlined also in terms of political world-outlook by stres¬sing that, consciously or unconsciously, 'the typically liberal view>72lay behind such a sociology. Real sociology was, Freyer believed, an 'ethos science'. Its epistemology was built on the Heidegger-J aspers concept of existence. 'A live reality perceives itself.' The constructions of sociology were 'the existential situation of man'.73 Hence Freyer rejected socio¬logy's 'value-freedom'. He sought to lift sociology out of the condition of a specialist science: 'Even if unconsciously and involuntarily, every sociological system must carry within itself a historio-philosophical substance.'74 It was its task intellectually to pave the way for a decision and to render it a necessary one.

There is a patent affinity between this sociology and the existentialism of Heidegger and Jaspers, but the basis of it was consciously transferred from the solitary individual into the social domain. This methodological change meant a concomitant shifting of emphasis. With the existentialists, the essential point was a nihilistic destruction of objectivity, a devaluation of every 'shell', and the 'decision' remained ¬pure Kierkegaard, this -with the solitary individual. Freyer, on the other hand, instigated a struggle against what was 'dead' and 'mechanical' about economics, on behalf of the 'living life' of State, Reich and people. So whereas the existentialists went only so far as to destroy ideologically all the bourgeois class' intellectual defences against the impend¬ing fascism, Freyer was already constructing out of these elements the positive road to fascism. Hence he formulated the essence of sociology's 'situation' as follows: 'Sociology originates as the scientific self-consciouness of a bourgeois society which senses itself as marking a critical phase. Hence it arises as a science of the present day from the very outset . . .' We study the past, according to Freyer, 'not in order to invoke the past, but in order to deepen our perception of present reality and present decisions through an insight into their preconditions.' And he continued: 'A reality of unequi¬vocal historical situation-value, a society which has decom¬posed with the State and grown self-legitimizing becomes the dialectical centre of the system. '75 The flaw in previous interpretations of bourgeois society, above all those of Hegel and Toennies, lay in their static nature. Freyer wanted to introduce a dynamic into sociology, and in connection with this, he recognized the historical necessity of revolutions. The present world, in his opinion, was on the brink of one such revolution. The 'peripeteia' of society was, he stated, 'the existential situation in which sociology is anchored'. 76

Freyer now drew the concrete inferences from this argu¬mentation of sociology in individual polemical pamphlets like Rule and Planning and, above all, Revolution from the Right. Here he provided a historio-philosophical survey of European development since the French Revolution. He saw the period as one of permanent revolution, and always a revolution 'from the Left'. Summing up the nineteenth century, he wrote: 'Its states of equilibrium are specious, its nations class struggles. .. its economy built upon crises. This epoch is sheer dialectics: dialectical materialism becomes the doctrine that has understood its law of motion the most profoundly.' Materialist philosophy, although it was 'a wild myth' and a 'wild sort of chiliasm', had 'fully grasped for the first time the revolution from the Left'. But the revolution had not occurred. The nineteenth century 'liquidates itself'.77 Reformism, in Freyer's eyes, had brought about the great change. The change began with the emergence of social policies, but without the active participation of the prolet¬ariat this was a 'feeble conciliatory idea'. Only the victory of reformism within the labour movement had enabled the socialist movement to become a historically decisive power; for when it arrived, the nineteenth century renounced its revolution.

These polemical thoughts of Freyer contain a repudiation of historical materialism which was, in fact, 'original'. In themselves they were still relatively lucid, although in essence they were making of the nineteenth century and its history a Spenglerian 'culture cycle' with solipsistically autonomous principles. Only in the positive part does irrational obscurity set in. The proletariat's turn to reformism cleared the way, Freyer thought, for 'revolution from the Right'. The bearer of this revolution was the people, 'which is not society, not class, not interest and therefore not appeasable, but revolu¬tionary to the roots'. The people 'is a new formation with its' own will and own justice. . . it is the adversary of the indus¬trial society'.78 Now here Freyer was already giving tongue to a purely mystical irrationalism. One could, he argued, make no comment about popular forces: 'For the rest, one cannot measure a nothing -or an everything.' And with Heidegger's nullifying Nothing now coming into its own, Freyer refused also to comment with regard to the future, the new State that was coming into being, and the rule of the 'people'. The State that was to emerge out of the 'revolution from the Right' was, according to Freyer, the 'concentrated will of the people: not a stasis but a tension, a constructive formation of lines of energy. . . The revolutionary principle which informs an epoch is not, in essence, a structure, order or edifice, but pure energy, pure eruption, pure protest. . . For it hinges precisely on the fact that the new principle dares to remain the active nil in the dialectic of the present, and therefore pure political energy; otherwise it will be built in overnight and never come to act. '79 Freyer concluded his other pam¬phlet in an equally obscure, mystical-irrationalist manner: 'Here again (i.e., in political ethics) the only true imperative is to make the correct decision, not to know that it is correct or why.'8O

This obscurity has, however, a meaning which is easy to scrutinize. Freyer sought to have the 'revolution from the Right' accomplished in such a way that it could give rise to the boundless, completely unrestricted dictatorship of Hitler. The 'revolution from the Right' was thus intended to cast a deliberate darkness upon the awareness of the people enacting it, a political activity aimed against the Weimar system without a fixed objective or commitment to a pro¬gramme. (We recall the earlier discussion of economics and 'freedom from economics'.) To this end Freyer had, in earlier works, already revived in an up-to-date form Max Weber's theory of the charismatic leader. There already, he set the leader the task 'of forming the nation such that its Reich is its destiny' ,81i.e., of binding the broad masses of the German people to the imperialist objective of German mono¬poly capitalism come what may. Freyer saw also the ambi¬tiousness of the leader that was inevitably linked with this. But he wanted to give just this ambitiousness, the striving for German global power, a philosophico-sociological sanc¬tion. 'The statesman does not take his bearings from the hazards but from the timetable. He does not make the possible a reality, but what is necessary a possibility.' And here, in the philosophical transfiguring of the irreality of German imperialist aggression, existentialism's obscurity recurred as a matter of course: these objectives were ones 'transcending human logic and ethics'. The irrationalist darkness had fallen, but the meaning is plain to behold.

Even more decided, if that were possible, was the contri¬bution of German sociology to fascism in the work of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was a lawyer or, more accurately, a philo¬sopher and sociologist of law. In this capacity he began by extending the programmatic ideas of Dilthey's humani~tic (social) science and Max Weber's sociology. He used Max Weber's 'neutrality' to combat social causation and, like Weber, employed it as a weapon against historical materialism. 'Whether the ideal matter of radical abstraction is here the reflection of a sociological reality, or whether social reality is viewed as the result of a particular mode of thinking and hence also of acting, does not come into consideration. '82 Sociology's task was limited, he believed, to finding parallels, analogies and so on between the various social and ideo¬logical forms. Schmitt's basic reactionary tendencies were always clearly explicit and closely related to vitalism and existentialism, but his conception had special nuances to it right from the start.

We should stress above all that Schmitt dismissed all 'restoration' ideology. And in connection with this, he had only a withering contempt for the fashionable glorify¬ing of the Romantic thinkers; in particular he derided a man held in great esteem by Spann and others, Adam Muller. Schmitt wrote a book of his own about 'Political Romanticism' in order to prove the hollowness of this approach. Romanticism was, in his eyes, 'only the aesthetic realm's intermediate step between the moralism of the eighteenth century and the economism of the nineteenth'.83 The starting-point of this polemic was that the reactionary core of Romantic thought was, to Schmitt's mind, outmoded, and that a new reactionary ideology was needed at present. His decidedly pre-fascist attitude is already manifest in the fact that he repudiated every outmoded and obsolete form of reaction, and that his interest was focused solely on the working out of a reactionary ideology to suit the times. Hence he discovered the significance 'for the history of the mind' of the mid-nineteenth-century Spanish reactionary, Donoso Cortes. Cortes was important because he achieved a break with 'restoration' ideology and grasped that since there were no longer any kings, there was also no legitimacy in the traditional sense. For this reason he called outright for a dictatorship to oppose the revolutionary forces. Schmitt also quoted with approval Cortes's statement that the bourgeoisie was a 'debating class'. His sole criticism of his favourite was that Cortes aimed his polemics against Proudhon, although elements of his later confederacy were present in the latter, and failed to observe the real enemy, namely Marx.84

At the same time, Schmitt conducted a violent polemic against neo-Kantian jurisprudence and its idea of the norm, which transformed the whole State into a network of hollow formal relations and regarded the State as just a kind of 'accounting point'. He wrote in opposition to neo-Kantianism in law philosophy: 'All important ideas of man's intellectual sphere are existential and not normative.' In law philosophy neo-Kantianism overlooked 'the simple jurisprudential truth that norms only apply to normal situations and the hypo¬thetical normality of the situation is a statutory component of its "validity" '.85 This was an extension of Max Weber's conception of power on the one hand, and a criticism of the Jellinek-Kelsen 'meta-juristic' concept on the other. Here Schmitt was endeavouring to recognize as the real, authentic problem of law philosophy precisely what neo-Kantianism excluded from its domain: namely, through what power justice is laid down and revoked respectively. And here he was entirely in the right against liberal neo-Kantianism, as indeed he was in his sometimes ingenious polemic against liberal sociology. From the standpoint of a demagogic, monopoly-capitalist dictatorship he often saw clean through the unsubstantiated dogmatism masquerading as strict epistemology by which neo-Kantianism converted justice into an autonomous, self-legitimizing area, on the pattern of its epistemology or aesthetics. The neo-Kantian detaching of the validity of the 'symbolic forms' from the process of their social genesis was also completely untenable on the epistemological and aesthetic planes. But what was truly far-fetched was the dogmatic drawing of analogies between the validity of legal precepts and this area, since they always apply in a concrete, socially determined way. That two and two make four is a truth independent of consciousness. But the laying down of five or ten years' imprisonment for some crime or other does not depend on the inner substance of the legal precept. It depends on whether the competent political authority has decided it thus or otherwise; but the character, composition, etc., of that authority are pre-determined by politico-social and ultimately economic factors.

The same difference obtains for the revocation of validity: on the one hand, proof of non-agreement with a reality existing independently of consciousness, on the other a corrective law, an amendment, and so on. Now since the neo-Kantians divorced the 'validity' of legal precepts from all social issues (sociology and jurisprudence; Being and Owing in Kelsen's terms), they could provide at best an immanent interpretation of the legal precepts applying in each instance, and never a scientific explanation of their contents, genesis and expiration. Jellinek's 'meta-juristic' conception lay precisely therein. Schmitt quoted, with justified irony, Anschiitz's remarks on the budget-less condition as a 'gap in the law': 'here constitutional law ceases'.86 He was also right to put the chief stress on the real continuity of socio-political life and to treat formal justice as only part of it.

For these methodological reasons in themselves, his interest centred on the analysis of juristic exceptions. It lay in the nature of these, he said, 'that the State stands firm, whereas justice retreats'; there 'still remains an order in the juristic sense, even in the absence of law and order'.87 In investigating this unity -no matter, for the time being, for what motives -he went decidedly beyond the liberalism of the neo-Kantians. 'The exceptional case is more interesting than the normal one. . . in the exception, the force of real life pene¬trates the crust of a mechanism stiffened by repetition.' And he summed up his argument as follows: 'He is sovereign who has power of decision over_the exceptional condition. '88

With Schmitt, this methodological approach and this passionate interest in the theory of dictatorship were linked with the fact that he was irreconcilably hostile to the Weimar system from the outset. Initially, this hostility manifested itself as a scientific critique, as an account of the crisis of liberal ideology and, in connection with it, the crisis of the parliamentary system. In contrast to Karl Mannheim who, as we have noted, simply identified liberalism and democracy, Schmitt absorbed all the nineteenth-century anti-democratic polemics in his system in order to prove the irreconcilable antithesis of liberalism and democracy and to show the inevitable growth of mass democracy into dictatorship. Above all, Schmitt subjected the parliamentary system to a sociological analysis. He regarded social homogeneity as the precondition of parliamentary government: 'The method of establishing a will by simply ascertaining the majority view is sensible and acceptable if we can assume a substantial homo¬geneity of the whole people. '89

Naturally such a homogeneity never existed in the class societies. Schmitt was overlooking the fact that while the functioning of liberal parliamentarism he had described did, as he stated, depend on a certain parity of interests, this went only for the ruling classes, and not the people as a whole. It presupposed, moreover, the powerlessness of the rest of the people, and this was a point he ignored. Hence he could define this system's dissipative tendencies only in very abstract terms: 'As soon as the hypothesis belonging to the legality of this system of a validity equally legal on both sides ceases, there is no longer a way out. '90That is only the description of an external symptom, not an explanation of the matter itself which, to be sure, is only possible on the basis of concrete class analyses. In reality there corresponded to this condition as described by Schmitt a long period of English parliamentary government, Guizot's period of the juste milieu, which he too cited as a model example. Here one might, with major reservations, interpret public hearings and discussion, truth arising out of exchanges of view, as ideological symptoms but not, as Schmitt did, as the intellec¬tual foundations of the parliamentary system.

For Schmitt, this whole analysis had the purpose of proving the impossibility of the Weimar Republic's parlia¬mentary rule, so as to demonstrate the necessity of going over to dictatorship. In it, he offered occasionally correct, albeit always largely ideological examinations of the past and of the behaviour of the liberal bourgeoisie. 'Hatred of king¬ship and aristocracy drives the liberal bourgeois to the Left j fears for his property when threatened by radical democracy and socialism drives him back to the Right to a powerful monarchy whose army can protect him; so he vacillates between both enemies, both of whom he would like to outwit. '91 More important is the realization which dawned on him now and again that 'economy' (i.e., capitalism, G.L.) was 'no longer eo ipso liberty' (since Schmitt failed to see that it had never been so, he could only surmise the change in 'liberty' under imperialism, not grasp it precisely), and that the development of the forces of production revealed its contradictory nature92 (here, naturally, Schmitt was referring only to technology). Schmitt used all these statements solely in order to disparage democratic parliamentary government, to stress its proneness to crises, its historical obsolescence and above all its incompatibility with mass democracy. (Let us recall at this point Max Weber's Caesaristic fits and the views of mass democracy held by Alfred Weber and Mannheim!) In Schmitt's view, mass democracy exploded that homogeneous basis of fundamentally aligned interests which had been the bedrock of liberal ideas in, for instance, the English parliamentary system.

Mass democracy, he argued, had left these idyllic states behind. But the effect of democracy was, to his way of think¬ing, purely negative and inherently subject to crises. Demo¬cracy today, Schmitt wrote, 'leads immediately to a crisis of democracy itself, because the general principle of human equality cannot answer the problem of the substantive equality and homogeneity necessary to a democracy. It leads further to a crisis of parliamentarism which must be distin¬guished from the democratic crisis.' Schmitt also pointed out 'that a democracy of the masses, of man, is incapable of realizing any political form, even the democratic State'.93 And in consequence of the democratic parties of the masses, democracy itself was turning into a mere mirage. Even the election process, in Schmitt's opinion, no longer existed. 'There appear five party lists, originating in a highly occult, clandestine way and dictated by five organizations. The masses proceed into five sheep-pens awaiting them, as it were, and the statistical record of this process is called an "elec¬tion".' This meant that under these circumstances the will of the people could never, from now on, 'merge in a single concourse,.94 Thus it now appeared the sole task of parlia¬ment 'to preserve an absurd status quO'.95 On the parlia¬mentary question, Schmitt summed up by saying that par¬liament was becoming 'the scene of a pluralistic division of the organized social powers'.96 It signified a breaking up of the State as much as the growing might of the Princes had once meant the breaking up of the old German Empire. This state of decay and permanent crisis was engendering the necessity for exceptional measures, for the dictatorship of the Reichsprasident. Schmitt's pre-Hitlerian political activity centred mainly on this question, the justification for a dictatorship of the Reichspasident.

Here we observe, despite the apparent contrast, Schmitt's fundamental affinity with the reactionary ideologists of the Bismarckian and Wilhelmine empire. Whereas these ideo¬logists defended the status quo of their time through thick and thin, Schmitt was passionately opposed to that of his age. Hence the contrasts in terms of form and 'history of the mind'. In reality both sides contested democracy with equal vehemence in different circumstances: the despised status quo was that of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. Schmitt was challenging the status quo as a reactionary imperialist just as his forerunners had defended theirs as reactionary imperialists.

In spite of the existentialist trimmings, the ceaseless flirt¬ing with 'life' and so-called historical concreteness, the posi¬tive core of Schmitt's sociology of law behind all these polemics was a very threadbare design. It was the reduction of all political and hence legal and State relations to terms of friend and foe. In line with his thinking's existentialist foundations, Schmitt eliminated from this basic schema all rationality and with it all concrete content. He stated: '...no programme, no ideal, no norm and no purpose confers authority over the physical life of other men. . . War, fighting men's readiness for death, the physical slaughter of fellow-men who stand on the enemy side -all that does not have a normative but only an existential sense. And it does so in the reality of a situation of real battle with a real enemy, not in any kind of ideals, programmes and norma¬tivities ... If there really are enemies in the ontological meaning of the word, to which we are here referring, then it makes sense, but only political sense, to repulse them physically where necessary and to join battle with them. '97

From such thoughts Schmitt derived the essence of his political concept: 'Political thinking and political instinct are proved. . . in theory and practice by the capacity to distin¬guish between friend and foe.' The State's political. existence rested upon 'determining itself the distinction between friend and foe'.98 In these central concepts of law philosophy as formulated by Schmitt, we can see plainly where the existen¬tialist conception was leading: to the union of an extremely scanty and insubstantial abstractness on the one hand and an irrationalist arbitrariness on the other. It was precisely by claiming to solve all the problems of social life that Schmitt's antithetical pairing of 'friend and. enemy' revealed its hollow and arbitrary character. But this claim made it highly influ¬ential during the period of the fascist takeover of German ideology: as a methodological, abstract, purportedly scientific prolegomenon to the racial antithesis construed by Hitler and Rosenberg. In particular the arbitrariness which was of the, essence of this conceptualizing provided a 'scientific' bridge to the 'National-Socialist world -view'.

Liberalism, Schmitt explained, was systematically under¬mining this political foundation and the basis of the State. The nineteenth century was an age of neutralization and de-politicizing in the name of culture. It placed culture, progress, education and non-political science in this false antithesis to politics. And Schmitt saw in this tendency a hostility towards a 'strong Germany'. The centres of this ideology were, in his view, the small neutral states, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Scandinavia. But this orientation also had influential representatives in Germany in the persons of Jakob Burckhardt, Stefan George, Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, etc.

Schmitt now considered from this standpoint the history of Germany. In stark contrast to Max Weber he saw in the origin of constitutional rule and the road to parliamentary government the degradation of this 'strong Germany'. So his analysis of the crisis of the parliamentary system and his concept of friend and enemy -which was based on the desire to renew German imperialism -led him to uncondi¬tional approval of Hitler. Already, his earlier critique of liberalism and democracy had included the 'original' thesis that fascism did not contradict democracy. And before Hitler's seizure of power, Schmitt was already describing Italian fascism with enthusiasm as a 'heroic attempt to preserve and assert the dignity of the State and national -unity against the pluralism of economic interests'. 99 Like¬wise, even before Hitler's time he pointed out that 'the stronger myth lies in the national sphere', and that socialism possessed a relatively 'inferior mythology'. 100

It is no wonder that with these hypotheses, Schmitt became an ardent supporter of Hitler and found for all his atrocities a suitable theory from 'law philosophy'. Thus after the massacre of the supporters of the 'second revolu¬tion' (1934), Schmitt wrote an essay bearing the title: 'The Fiihrer Protects Justice'. In it he defended the crassest form of arbitrary fascist justice and most firmly upheld the view that the Fiihrer had the sole right

to distinguish between friend and foe. . . The Fiihrer is in earnest over the warnings of German history. That affords him the right and the power to found a new State and a new order. . . The Fiihrer is protecting justice from the vilest misuse when, in the hour 'of danger, he creates justice directly as the supreme authority by virtue of his leader's office. . . The office of judge emanates from that of Fiihrer. Anyone... wishing to separate the two is seeking to put the State out of joint with the aid of justice. .. The Fiihrer himself determines the content and scope of a transgression against the law. 101

After these statements it will not surprise us that Schmitt revived for the age of Hitler the old theme of pre-war anti¬democratic propaganda, namely Germany's ideological superiority over the democratic states. 'In the Western democracies today, major twentieth-century problems are still being treated in terms of propositions from the times of Talleyrand and Louis-Philippe, and answered accordingly. In German law studies, the exposition of such problems is a relatively long way ahead. We have gained this lead through experience that was often hard and bitter, but it cannot be disputed. '102This superiority was that of predatory imperial¬ism. Schmitt -expanding his old antithesis of friend and enemy in terms of global politics -now proceeded to argue the Hitlerian State philosophically as follows: 'The core of the matter is found in war. The character of total war deter¬mines the character and shape of the State's totality. But total war receives its meaning through the total enemy.'103

Schmitt not only supported Hitler's bestial dictatorship in home affairs. Already before the outbreak of the Second World War, during the preparations for it, he became the leading law ideologist of Hitlerian Germany's plans to conquer the world. He resisted the 'universalist' claims of the League of Nations and called instead for the application of the Monroe doctrine to Germany and territory in which she had interests. He quoted a statement by Hitler on this subject and commented: 'That expresses the idea of a peacefully arbitrated (schiedlich-friedlich) demarcation of the major territories in the simplest business-like terms. It eliminates the confusion that an economic imperialism created around the Monroe doctrine by twisting its reasonable idea of territorial demarcation into an ideological claim to global intervention.'104 This theory too rested on the fascist dogma of the 'Reich'. 'Empires in this sense are the leading and supporting powers whose political idea is radiated over a specified major territory and which fundamentally exclude the intervention of extra-territorial powers with regard to this territory.'lOS Such a division of the world, which would guarantee the appropriate 'major territories' for Germany and Japan, would, in Schmitt's view, mark the start of a new and higher condition of international justice. There would no longer be nation-states, as before, but only 'empires'. The concrete consequences of this Schmitt spelled out in another essay bearing the significant title 'Woe to the Neutrals!' Here it was argued that the concept of major territories implied the abolition of neutrality. So in 1938, Schmitt had penned in advance the 'international' apologia for Hitlerian aggression and the fascist rape of the nations. Thus German sociology contributed to the propaganda for Hitler's bestial imperialism. The German professors used to be called the intellectual bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns. Now they were the intellectual S.A. and S.S.

NOTES

1 Marx: Capital, Vol. I, Afterword to the 2nd edition.
2 Schmoller: Uber einige Grundfragen der Sozialpolitik und Volkswirtschaftslehre, 2nd edition, Leipzig 1904, p. 292.
3 Ibid., p. 50.
4 Dilthey: Introduction to the Humanistic Sciences.
5 Toennies: Community and Association.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Marx: Introduction to the Grundrisse and Engels to C. Schmidt on 27.10.1890, Marx-Engels: Ausgewiihlte Briefe, Berlin 1953,
p.504.
10 Marx: Theorien iiber den Mehrwert, Vol. I, Stuttgart 1919, p.382.
11 Toennies: Op. cit.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Rickert: Science and History.
15 Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Religionssoziologie, Tiibingen 1920, Vol. I, pp. 238 and 240.
16 Ibid., pp. 252f.
17 Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tiibingen 1922, p. 277.
18 Max Weber: Religionssoziologie, p. 37.
19 Max Weber: Collected Political Works, Munich 1921, pp. 258f.
20 MarianneWeber: Max Weber, Tiibingen 1926, p. 665.
21 Kelsen: Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre, Tiibingen 1911,
p.411.
22 Preuss: Zur Methode der juristischen Begriffsbildung, Schmoller's Yearbook, 1900, p. 370.
23 Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, Tiibingen 1922, p. 403.
24 Max Weber: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, p. 9.
25 Max Weber: Wissenschaftslehre, op. cit., p. 325.
26 Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, pp.
149f.
27 Ibid., p. 545.
28 Max Weber: Religionssoziologie, p. 14.
29 Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur Wissenschaftslehre, p. 46.
30 Ibid., p. 132.
31 Ibid., pp. 545f.
32 Ibid., p. 555.
33 Walther Rathenau: Letters, Dresden 1927, p. 186.
34 Alfred Weber: Ideen zur Staats-und Kultursoziologie, Karlsruhe 1927, p. 120.
35 Ibid., p. 23.
36 Ibid., p. 84.
37 Ibid., pp. 38ff.
38 Ibid., p. 9.
39 Ibid., pp. 126 and 104.
40 Ibid., p. 113.
41 Ibid., p. 130.
42 Ibid., p. 141.
43 Lenin: Letters, 14.11.1913.
44 Mannheim: Ideology and Utopia.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid.
47 Mannheim: Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction.
48 Ibid.
49 Mannheim: Ideology and Utopia.
50 Ibid.
51 Mannheim: Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid.
55 Spann: Kiimpfende Wissenschaft, Jena 1934, pp. 9f.
56 Rosenberg: The Myth of the Twentieth Century.
57 Spann: Geschichtsphilosophie, Jena 1932, pp. 138f.
58 Freyer: Prometheus, Jena 1923, p. 25.
59 Freyer: Der Staat, Leipzig 1925, p. 131.
60 Ibid., p. 92
61 Ibid., p. 86.
62 Ibid., p. 88.
63 Freyer: Theorie des objektiven Geistes, Leipzig 1928, p. 39.
64 Hugo Fischer: Marx, Jena 1932, p. 31.
65 Preyer: Sociology as the Science of Reality.
66 Freyer: Der Staat, p. 177.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., p. 96.
69 Ibid., p. 146.
70 Ibid., p. 153.
71 Ibid., p. 199.
72 Freyer: Sociology as the Science of Reality.
73 Ibid.
74 Ibid.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Freyer: Revolution from the Right.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 Freyer: Rule and Planning.
81 Freyer: Der Staat, pp. 119 and 202f.
82 Schmitt: Politische Theologie, 2nd impression, Munich/Leipzig
1934, pp. 58ff.
83 Schmitt: Der Begriff des Politischen, Munich/Leipzig 1932, p.70.
84 Schmitt: Positionen und Begriffe, Hamburg 1940, pp. 118f.
85 Ibid., p. 124.
86 Schmitt: Politische Theologie, p. 22.
87 Ibid., pp. 18f.
88 Ibid., pp. 11 and 22.
89 Schmitt: Legalitat und Legitimitat, Munich/Leipzig 1932, p. 31.
90 Ibid.
91 Schmitt: PoZitische TheoZogie, p. 77.
92 Schmitt: Der Begriff des PoZitischen, p. 62.
93 Schmitt: Die geistesgeschichtZiche Lage des Parlementarismus, 2nd impression, Munich/Leipzig 1926, pp. 21£.
94 Schmitt: Positionen und Begriffe, p. 188.
95 Ibid., p. 185.
96 Ibid., p. 156.
97 Schmitt: Der Begriff des Politischen, p. 37.
98 Ibid., pp. 54 and 38.
99 Schmitt: Position en und Begriffe, p. 110.
100 Schmitt: Die geistesgeschichtliche Lage des Parlementarismus, pp. 86f.
101 Schmitt: Positionen und Begriffe, pp. 200ff.
102 Ibid., p. 5.
103 Ibid., p. 236.
104 Ibid., p. 302.
105 Ibid., p. 303.