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ABSTRACT
Starting out from the proposition that modern antisemitism is a grotesque form of social theory that provides in its notion of ‘Jewification’ a critique of processes of capitalist modernization, Stoetzler points to the shared ground between classical sociological theory and modern antisemitism, and examines how their conceptual overlap influenced the ways in which sociologists responded to antisemitism or to the phenomena to which antisemitism also spoke. His argument is built around analyses of ‘L'individualisme et les intellectuels’, Émile Durkheim's intervention in the Dreyfus affair, and passages from Max Weber's Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, which are placed in the context of ‘classical’ and ‘early’ sociology, including positivism, early French socialism and German Katheder-socialism (academic socialism). He argues that sociologists developed a discourse that aimed to defend liberal society and modernization and, at the same time, attack a caricature of ‘egotistical utilitarianism’, which they blamed for the dismal aspects of the emerging new form of society. In doing so they offered an alternative to the antisemites but also mimicked their discourse even when—as in the case of Durkheim—they explicitly opposed antisemitism. Stoetzler argues that this was an intrinsic characteristic of classical sociology that weakened its ability to oppose antisemitism and fascism.
Acknowledgements
The writing of this essay was made possible by a Simon Fellowship at the School of Arts, Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester, which I gratefully acknowledge. I am also grateful to those who listened to, and commented on, earlier versions of the paper read out at sessions of the European Sociological Association Conference in Glasgow, September 2007, the International Sociological Association Research Council on the History of Sociology Interim Conference, Perspectives from the Periphery, in Umeå, August 2008, and the International Conference on Antisemitism and the Emergence of Sociological Theory in Manchester, November 2008.
Notes
2Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 34. See also Stephen P. Turner, ‘Sociology and fascism in the interwar period, the myth and its frame’, in Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Käsler (eds), Sociology Responds to Fascism (London and New York: Routledge 1992). While Tönnies seems to have held (in private) antisemitic and anti-modernist views in his early twenties, an impulse that lived on in his main work (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887 when he was thirty-two), he was also vehemently opposed to the anti-socialist laws, supported the labour movement and, finally, in 1930, actually joined the Social Democratic Party; Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870–1923 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988), 16. While ‘Tönnies integrated Hobbesian theory and utilitarianism into a postliberal dialectic’ (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 21), the early formation of the concept of the Gemeinschaft was inspired by Nietzsche's notion of ‘Dionysian oneness’, Hobbes's and Schopenhauer's emphasis on ‘the will’ and the historical research by Morgan, Bachofen and von Gierke. Liebersohn argues that Tönnies ‘spotted the subversive potential of their research’ (they were conservatives) but also presents Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft as ‘implicitly’ antisemitic (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 24, 26, 33, 34). Tönnies's actual politics were ‘restrained patriotism and support for social reform’ (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 38).
1Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 16–34 (33–4). Ranulf was primarily a sociologist of law; for his main works, see Jack Barbalet, ‘Moral indignation, class inequality and justice: an exploration and revision of Ranulf’, Theoretical Criminology, vol. 6, no. 3, 2002, 279–97. According to Barbalet, the failure of Ranulf's work to have a significant impact on the sociological tradition may primarily be due to the lack of an institutional environment for sociology in Denmark before the 1980s
10In one particular Weber the Protestant would have agreed with Comte the ‘secular Catholic’: the especially harsh critique of ‘the plainly immoral doctrine of Luther that a man can be saved by faith irrespective of what his works may be’, in Ranulf's paraphrase of Comte (Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 31.
3Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 26. Ranulf's intervention is particularly interesting because he was not a Marxist; his work on the concept of ‘right’ was actually to a large extent Durkheimian. For a Marxist argument that links positivism to fascism, see Terence Ball, ‘Marxian science and positivist politics’, in Terence Ball and James Farr (eds.), After Marx (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1984), 235–60. In the 1930s, Ranulf was not the only one who indicted Durkheim as a ‘forerunner of fascism’. Alexandre Koyré, for example, made the same point in a 1936 review article on French sociology in the Frankfurt School's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung; see Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, ‘A left sacred or a sacred left? The Collège de Sociologie, fascism, and political culture in interwar France’, South Central Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 2006, 40–54 (43). Adorno later wrote a critical but sympathetic introduction to the German edition of Durkheim's Sociologie et Philosophie: Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Einleitung zu Emile Durkheim, Soziologie und Philosophie’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8, Soziologische Schriften (Frankfurt-on-Main: Suhrkamp 1996), 245–78. He challenges the authoritarian character of a theory that hypostatizes the ‘spirit’ of a society as its essence as it obstructs the possibility of distinguishing between right and wrong consciousness of that society itself, its self-reflection (which should be its ‘spirit’, but as social critique), but credits Durkheim for acknowledging, as a fact, the thingness of society as it stands opposed to individuals. Philippe Burrin, however, points to Durkheim's influence on Marcel Déat, one of those socialists who ‘drifted’ towards fascism; Philippe Burrin, La Dérive fasciste, Doriot, Déat, Bergery 1933–1945 (Paris: Editions du Seuil 1986), 41. The conception of socialism that allowed this ‘drift’ to take place was Durkheim's, who continued in this respect ‘la pensée de Saint-Simon et de Proudhon, celle de tout le vieux socialisme français’ (Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 34. See also Stephen P. Turner, ‘Sociology and fascism in the interwar period, the myth and its frame’, in Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Käsler (eds), Sociology Responds to Fascism (London and New York: Routledge 1992). While Tönnies seems to have held (in private) antisemitic and anti-modernist views in his early twenties, an impulse that lived on in his main work (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887 when he was thirty-two), he was also vehemently opposed to the anti-socialist laws, supported the labour movement and, finally, in 1930, actually joined the Social Democratic Party; Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870–1923 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988), 16. While ‘Tönnies integrated Hobbesian theory and utilitarianism into a postliberal dialectic’ (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 21), the early formation of the concept of the Gemeinschaft was inspired by Nietzsche's notion of ‘Dionysian oneness’, Hobbes's and Schopenhauer's emphasis on ‘the will’ and the historical research by Morgan, Bachofen and von Gierke. Liebersohn argues that Tönnies ‘spotted the subversive potential of their research’ (they were conservatives) but also presents Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft as ‘implicitly’ antisemitic (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 24, 26, 33, 34). Tönnies's actual politics were ‘restrained patriotism and support for social reform’ (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 38)). Burrin sums up Durkheim's ambivalence succinctly: ‘Rationaliste et républicain, mais préoccupé par la désagrégation social produite par le capitalisme libéral, Durkheim avait vu dans les groupements professionels le moyen de donner moralité et solidarité à une societé menacée d'anomie’ (Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 34. See also Stephen P. Turner, ‘Sociology and fascism in the interwar period, the myth and its frame’, in Stephen P. Turner and Dirk Käsler (eds), Sociology Responds to Fascism (London and New York: Routledge 1992). While Tönnies seems to have held (in private) antisemitic and anti-modernist views in his early twenties, an impulse that lived on in his main work (Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, published in 1887 when he was thirty-two), he was also vehemently opposed to the anti-socialist laws, supported the labour movement and, finally, in 1930, actually joined the Social Democratic Party; Harry Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 1870–1923 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988), 16. While ‘Tönnies integrated Hobbesian theory and utilitarianism into a postliberal dialectic’ (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 21), the early formation of the concept of the Gemeinschaft was inspired by Nietzsche's notion of ‘Dionysian oneness’, Hobbes's and Schopenhauer's emphasis on ‘the will’ and the historical research by Morgan, Bachofen and von Gierke. Liebersohn argues that Tönnies ‘spotted the subversive potential of their research’ (they were conservatives) but also presents Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft as ‘implicitly’ antisemitic (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 24, 26, 33, 34). Tönnies's actual politics were ‘restrained patriotism and support for social reform’ (Svend Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, Ethics, vol. 50, no. 1, 1939, 38)).
4Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 19.
5Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 20.
6Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 21.
7In one particular Weber the Protestant would have agreed with Comte the ‘secular Catholic’: the especially harsh critique of ‘the plainly immoral doctrine of Luther that a man can be saved by faith irrespective of what his works may be’, in Ranulf's paraphrase of Comte (Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 21).
8In one particular Weber the Protestant would have agreed with Comte the ‘secular Catholic’: the especially harsh critique of ‘the plainly immoral doctrine of Luther that a man can be saved by faith irrespective of what his works may be’, in Ranulf's paraphrase of Comte (Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 22.
9In one particular Weber the Protestant would have agreed with Comte the ‘secular Catholic’: the especially harsh critique of ‘the plainly immoral doctrine of Luther that a man can be saved by faith irrespective of what his works may be’, in Ranulf's paraphrase of Comte (Ranulf, ‘Scholarly forerunners of fascism’, 26.
11See Uta Gerhardt (ed.), Talcott Parsons on National Socialism (New York: Aldine de Gruyter 1993). It is not surprising that liberals and democrats are scandalized by the suggestion that Parsonian democratic, anti-fascist modernization theory could share, through Comtean positivism, some of its roots with its hot and cold war enemy ‘totalitarianism’; after all, it was developed, complete with its notion of western ‘political’, i.e. allegedly non-‘ethnic’ nationalism, first against Hitlerism and then further deployed as an alternative to Leninist-Stalinist modernization theory and praxis.
12The argument that the formation of classical sociology and modern antisemitism were interrelated processes can also be made the other way round: antisemites were fully aware, and also part, of the emerging new way of talking and thinking about the new society, as Edouard Drumont testifies in the following statement, taken from a text of 1886 that dealt with reactions to his La France juive (published in the same year): ‘Without rancor or hatred, in the spirit of sociology and psychology, I seek to examine the debased condition into which France has fallen.… mission as a sociologist is to show people as they are’; quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang 2000, 106.
13Comte was Saint-Simon's secretary and collaborator from 1817 to 1824 when he was fired in a bitter argument over the authorship of a seminal essay; Mary Pickering, ‘Auguste Comte and the Saint-Simonians’, French Historical Studies, vol. 18, 1, 1993, 211–36 (213). After Saint-Simon's death in 1825, Comte began publishing in a new journal founded by Saint-Simon's disciples, including Olinde Rodrigues and Prosper Enfantin, called Le Producteur that was not, however, advertised as following Saint-Simon's ideas, and indeed did not reflect the increased interest in religion of Saint-Simon's last book Nouveau Christianisme. In this formative period of Saint-Simonianism Comte's influence on the group (of which he had no high opinion) was paramount (The argument that the formation of classical sociology and modern antisemitism were interrelated processes can also be made the other way round: antisemites were fully aware, and also part, of the emerging new way of talking and thinking about the new society, as Edouard Drumont testifies in the following statement, taken from a text of 1886 that dealt with reactions to his La France juive (published in the same year): ‘Without rancor or hatred, in the spirit of sociology and psychology, I seek to examine the debased condition into which France has fallen.… mission as a sociologist is to show people as they are’; quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang 2000, 216). From 1826 to 1828 Comte suffered from a mental illness (apparently triggered by his wife's affair with the editor of Le Producteur who was then fired), during which period the journal also went bankrupt. By the time Comte re-emerged, the Saint-Simonians (chiefly Eugène and Olinde Rodrigues, Enfantin and Saint-Amand Bazard) were in the process of changing direction, emphasizing that philosophy, science and industry were to serve the new religion of love, following the late Saint-Simon. Pickering suggests that this change of direction was deliberately devised in order to exclude Comte who remained aloof from what was now effectively a sect or ‘church’ (The argument that the formation of classical sociology and modern antisemitism were interrelated processes can also be made the other way round: antisemites were fully aware, and also part, of the emerging new way of talking and thinking about the new society, as Edouard Drumont testifies in the following statement, taken from a text of 1886 that dealt with reactions to his La France juive (published in the same year): ‘Without rancor or hatred, in the spirit of sociology and psychology, I seek to examine the debased condition into which France has fallen.… mission as a sociologist is to show people as they are’; quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang 2000, 218). Comte was excluded on the basis of Saint-Simon's earlier denunciation of him as indifferent to the emotions and religion. By 1829, and quite unfairly, Comte's thinking was represented by the Saint-Simonians as ‘the “glacial” scientism’ they now rejected (The argument that the formation of classical sociology and modern antisemitism were interrelated processes can also be made the other way round: antisemites were fully aware, and also part, of the emerging new way of talking and thinking about the new society, as Edouard Drumont testifies in the following statement, taken from a text of 1886 that dealt with reactions to his La France juive (published in the same year): ‘Without rancor or hatred, in the spirit of sociology and psychology, I seek to examine the debased condition into which France has fallen.… mission as a sociologist is to show people as they are’; quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang 2000, 220). Out of this process of distancing themselves from Saint-Simon's most famous disciple, the group developed the 1829 manifesto of Saint-Simonianism, Doctrine de Saint-Simon, which was also a critique of positivism (The argument that the formation of classical sociology and modern antisemitism were interrelated processes can also be made the other way round: antisemites were fully aware, and also part, of the emerging new way of talking and thinking about the new society, as Edouard Drumont testifies in the following statement, taken from a text of 1886 that dealt with reactions to his La France juive (published in the same year): ‘Without rancor or hatred, in the spirit of sociology and psychology, I seek to examine the debased condition into which France has fallen.… mission as a sociologist is to show people as they are’; quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang 2000, 222) and a crucial inspiration for subsequent socialist and communist traditions. The sect was briefly—around the time of the revolution of 1830—very successful before it split and disintegrated in 1831, partly over the question of the emancipation and the role of women (The argument that the formation of classical sociology and modern antisemitism were interrelated processes can also be made the other way round: antisemites were fully aware, and also part, of the emerging new way of talking and thinking about the new society, as Edouard Drumont testifies in the following statement, taken from a text of 1886 that dealt with reactions to his La France juive (published in the same year): ‘Without rancor or hatred, in the spirit of sociology and psychology, I seek to examine the debased condition into which France has fallen.… mission as a sociologist is to show people as they are’; quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang 2000, 228). Pickering argues that the Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42) constituted Comte's ongoing ‘discourse with the Saint-Simonians, who remained unnamed’, emphasizing the necessary priority of science. Ironically, from 1838, when he started work on volume four, which introduced sociology, ‘Comte began to absorb different aspects of the Saint-Simonians’ philosophy’, on the emotions, the arts, imagination, religion, i.e. aspects also of Saint-Simon's and his own earliest work that he had suppressed in the preceding nearly two decades. From the failure of the 1848 revolution to usher in the kind of transformation he considered necessary, he concluded that positivism ought to enter the battle of doctrines in a more robust manner, and henceforth presented it with the Saint-Simonian term ‘Religion of Humanity’ (The argument that the formation of classical sociology and modern antisemitism were interrelated processes can also be made the other way round: antisemites were fully aware, and also part, of the emerging new way of talking and thinking about the new society, as Edouard Drumont testifies in the following statement, taken from a text of 1886 that dealt with reactions to his La France juive (published in the same year): ‘Without rancor or hatred, in the spirit of sociology and psychology, I seek to examine the debased condition into which France has fallen.… mission as a sociologist is to show people as they are’; quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang 2000), 233), detailed in the Système de politique positive (1851–4), increasingly mimicking the doctrine of the Saint-Simonians. ‘The irony was that just as he lost interest in the sciences and opened himself up to ridicule because of his outlandish religion … former Saint-Simonians who had turned their back on their religion became important in the development of industrial capitalism in France’ (The argument that the formation of classical sociology and modern antisemitism were interrelated processes can also be made the other way round: antisemites were fully aware, and also part, of the emerging new way of talking and thinking about the new society, as Edouard Drumont testifies in the following statement, taken from a text of 1886 that dealt with reactions to his La France juive (published in the same year): ‘Without rancor or hatred, in the spirit of sociology and psychology, I seek to examine the debased condition into which France has fallen.… mission as a sociologist is to show people as they are’; quoted in Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies, Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, trans. from the French by Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Hill and Wang 2000, 236). See also Frank Edward Manuel, The Prophets of Paris (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1962), and Keith Michael Baker, ‘Closing the French Revolution: Saint-Simon and Comte’, in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Vol. 3: The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848 (Oxford: Pergamon 1989).
14Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (New York: New Press 1995).
15Iggers speaks of Saint-Simonianism as ‘secular Catholicism’; Georg G. Iggers, ‘Introduction’, in The Doctrine of Saint-Simon, An Exposition, trans. from the French by Georg G. Iggers (New York: Schocken 1972), ix–xlvii (xlii). The Doctrine, predominantly written by Saint-Amand Bazard, nevertheless seems to have been the highpoint of the Saint-Simonian tradition from the perspective of the development of socialism; Marcuse writes that Bazard turned Saint-Simon's positivism ‘into its opposite’, namely, a negative, critical theory of industrial society; Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory [1941] (Boston: Beacon Press 1960), 334.
16Zosa Szajkowski, ‘The Jewish Saint-Simonians and socialist antisemites in France’, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 9, 1947, 33–60; Edmund Silberner, ‘Pierre Leroux's ideas on the Jewish people’, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 12, 1950, 367–84; Bärbel Kuhn, Pierre Leroux: Sozialismus zwischen analytischer Gesellschaftskritik und sozialphilosophischer Synthese (Frankfurt-on-Main: Peter Lang 1988). Anita Haimon-Weitzman mentions that, in one of his main works, Malthus (1845–6), Leroux also attacked the esprit juif. Interestingly, having been exiled to Jersey in 1851, Leroux wrote an adaptation of the Book of Job in the 1860s. He was fascinated by it because of what were, to many, its socialist undertones as well as its proposal of the perfectibility of mankind. In this context, Leroux explicitly attacked Renan: ‘Leroux rejects Renan's racist ideas, and affirms his own belief in the unity of mankind’; Anita Haimon-Weitzman, ‘Pierre Leroux and the Book of Job’, in Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (eds), Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London: Peter Halban 1988), 369–77 (376).
17Alphonse Toussenel, Les Juif, rois de l’époque: histoire de la féodalité financière (Paris: La Librairie de l'Ecole sociétaire 1845). This first publication by the Fourierist publishing house was prefaced by a three-page editorial statement that alerted readers to the fact that it was not to be seen as an official statement of the school's doctrine. (‘Le titre de l'ouvrage, qui consacre une signification fâcheuse donnée au nom de tout un grand peuple, suffirait à lui seul pour motiver une réserve de notre part’ (Zosa Szajkowski, ‘The Jewish Saint-Simonians and socialist antisemites in France’, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 9, 1947, 33–60; Edmund Silberner, ‘Pierre Leroux's ideas on the Jewish people’, Jewish Social Studies, vol. 12, 1950, 367–84; Bärbel Kuhn, Pierre Leroux: Sozialismus zwischen analytischer Gesellschaftskritik und sozialphilosophischer Synthese (Frankfurt-on-Main: Peter Lang 1988). Anita Haimon-Weitzman mentions that, in one of his main works, Malthus (1845–6), Leroux also attacked the esprit juif. Interestingly, having been exiled to Jersey in 1851, Leroux wrote an adaptation of the Book of Job in the 1860s. He was fascinated by it because of what were, to many, its socialist undertones as well as its proposal of the perfectibility of mankind. In this context, Leroux explicitly attacked Renan: ‘Leroux rejects Renan's racist ideas, and affirms his own belief in the unity of mankind’; Anita Haimon-Weitzman, ‘Pierre Leroux and the Book of Job’, in Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (eds), Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky (London: Peter Halban 1988), vii).) The book was republished, in two volumes, slightly extended and significantly more violent in its antisemitic language, by another publisher in 1847 and went through several editions. Significantly, this edition contained a new chapter, ‘Saint-Simon et Juda’, an antisemitic polemic against the Saint-Simonians as being ‘Jewish’. A German edition appeared in 1851. Ceri Crossley emphasizes Toussenel's patriotism and points to his friendship with Jules Michelet; Ceri Crossley, ‘Anglophobia and anti-Semitism: the case of Alphonse Toussenel (1803–1885)’, Modern and Contemporary France, vol. 12, no. 4, 2004, 459–72. On Proudhon, Fourier, Toussenel and others, see also ch. 10 of Léon Poliakov, The History of Antisemitism. Volume III: From Voltaire to Wagner [1968], trans. from the French by Miriam Kochan (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1975).
18Kuhn, Pierre Leroux, 204.
19A precise analysis of how and why antisemitism entered the equation at this crucial point still needs to be done. The Fourierist school seems to have been able to absorb a large number of dispersed former Saint-Simonians; there must have been a significant element of continuity between the two doctrines that allowed the antisemitism of the new doctrine to connect to the older doctrine. This connection seems to be the concept of productivity (see below). The concept of exploitation, as formulated by the Saint-Simonians, was also potentially a bridge between the two, as it implied the idea of the ‘parasite’. The wage contract was considered ‘exploitative’ because it ‘violated the principle of remuneration according to work’: ‘owners were remunerated without working by not fully remunerating those who did’; John Cunliffe and Andrew Reeve, ‘Exploitation: the original Saint Simonian account’, Capital and Class, vol. 59, 1996, 61–80 (71). The critique of capitalist exploitation properly speaking begins only with Marx's introduction of the concept of surplus value, which makes obsolete the ideas of the parasite and of remuneration as incomplete and fraudulent. On the transformation of Fourierism after 1830, see Pamela Pilbeam, ‘Fourier and the Fourierists: a case of mistaken identity?’, French History and Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar, vol. 1, 2005, 186–96. Many of the former Saint-Simonians were ‘practical men, government engineers and doctors, looking for achievable social reform’, under whose influence Fourierism ‘became state-orientated reformism’ (Kuhn, Pierre Leroux, 193). Later, Louis-Napoleon enlisted ‘former Fourierists/Saint-Simonians in his economic policies’ (Kuhn, Pierre Leroux, 195). As a rule of thumb, it seems that forms of socialism become more antisemitic the more they resemble authoritarian, elitist, positivist blueprints for the top-down, (nation–)state-centric, productivist reorganization of society.
23Quoted in Wilson, Ideology and Experience, 422. The same quotation (from Maurras, ‘La guerre religieuse’, Gazette de France, 23 March 1898), is given in a slightly different translation in Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1982), 18.
20Hawthorn called Comte a ‘Catholic atheist’, which is also what Maurras was; Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A History of Social Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1987), 85.
21Quoted in Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/London: Associated University Presses 1982), 461.
22On Renan's antisemitism, see Shmuel Almog, ‘The racial motif in Renan's attitude to Jews and Judaism’, in Almog, Shmuel (ed.), Antisemitism through the Ages (Oxford and New York: Pergamon 1988), 255–78.
27Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 18–19. It would be perfectly possible, of course, to construct—in keeping with Luther and Kant, though probably less so with Rousseau—exactly the opposite argument, namely, that monotheism strengthens ‘the respect that the conscience owes to its visible and near masters’; this would be the line of reasoning to be expected in a romantic-nationalist context, which Maurras rejected in theory, although, in practice, romantic and integral, classicist nationalism were allied and intertwined. Moreover, this second line of argument would also be compatible with Durkheim's republican, anti-antisemitic nationalism, which indeed invokes both Comte and Kant, the French revolutionary tradition, the positivist, the post-revolutionary, and the German idealist and romantic traditions.
24Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 1.
25Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 4–5, Maurras quoted 29.
26Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 13–14.
30Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 23.
28Andrew Wernick's account confirms that Comte indeed held this view. He writes that Comte described monotheism, via the idea of ‘personal salvation’, as the fount of egoism. Comte detected a contradiction in Catholicism between an egoistic and abstract theology, and a love-engendering cultic practice and organizational structure. Positivism would replace the former and thereby salvage the latter; Andrew Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity: The Post-Theistic Program of French Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001), 110–11.
29Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 21.
31Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 24, 26.
32Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 26.
33This very fact, the positivity of ‘the wrong state of things’ (Adorno), is of course the main reason that one should not be a positivist. Maurras accuses Comte of being slightly utopian in other respects as well (his prophetic-millenarian tendencies, dedication to progress, femininity, love and tenderness) (Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 34). Against all this (i.e. against all that is interesting in Comte, despite himself), Maurras asserts that ‘from Aristotle and Xenophon to Dante as well as to Thomas of Aquinas … there is a positive politics that the classical spirit encourages and teaches faithfully over the centuries’ (quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 33). In other words, Maurras's classicist proto-fascism equals positivism minus its (few) transcendental, as it were feminine, aspects. Likewise, for Maurras, romantic love is just narcissism and wreaks havoc on social and family life; pity is individualistic, hence barbaric (Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 36).
34Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 34). Against all this (i.e. against all that is interesting in Comte, despite himself), Maurras asserts that ‘from Aristotle and Xenophon to Dante as well as to Thomas of Aquinas … there is a positive politics that the classical spirit encourages and teaches faithfully over the centuries’ (quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 33). In other words, Maurras's classicist proto-fascism equals positivism minus its (few) transcendental, as it were feminine, aspects. Likewise, for Maurras, romantic love is just narcissism and wreaks havoc on social and family life; pity is individualistic, hence barbaric (Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 37.
35Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 34). Against all this (i.e. against all that is interesting in Comte, despite himself), Maurras asserts that ‘from Aristotle and Xenophon to Dante as well as to Thomas of Aquinas … there is a positive politics that the classical spirit encourages and teaches faithfully over the centuries’ (quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 33). In other words, Maurras's classicist proto-fascism equals positivism minus its (few) transcendental, as it were feminine, aspects. Likewise, for Maurras, romantic love is just narcissism and wreaks havoc on social and family life; pity is individualistic, hence barbaric (Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 38.
36Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 34). Against all this (i.e. against all that is interesting in Comte, despite himself), Maurras asserts that ‘from Aristotle and Xenophon to Dante as well as to Thomas of Aquinas … there is a positive politics that the classical spirit encourages and teaches faithfully over the centuries’ (quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 33). In other words, Maurras's classicist proto-fascism equals positivism minus its (few) transcendental, as it were feminine, aspects. Likewise, for Maurras, romantic love is just narcissism and wreaks havoc on social and family life; pity is individualistic, hence barbaric (Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 45. The technical term borrowed by Maurras from Comte is ‘subjective synthesis’, denoting the idea that ‘thought and action can be made properly coherent through their being ordered in the service of a collective “Great Being” in which the subject incorporates himself through sentimental (or existential) choice’ (Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 34). Against all this (i.e. against all that is interesting in Comte, despite himself), Maurras asserts that ‘from Aristotle and Xenophon to Dante as well as to Thomas of Aquinas … there is a positive politics that the classical spirit encourages and teaches faithfully over the centuries’ (quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism, 33). In other words, Maurras's classicist proto-fascism equals positivism minus its (few) transcendental, as it were feminine, aspects. Likewise, for Maurras, romantic love is just narcissism and wreaks havoc on social and family life; pity is individualistic, hence barbaric (Quoted in Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism., 241). This conception vouches for the modernity of Maurras's nationalism.
37Marion Mitchell argued in 1931 that Durkheim partially ‘foreshadowed’ Maurras's nationalism. She wrote that Durkheim ‘sought to reconcile the cosmopolitan ideal in a spiritualized patriotism’; while ‘retaining humanity as a god, he recognized the divinity of the nation’, ‘the most exalted “collective being” in actual existence’. Aiming to achieve ‘the closer integration of France by means of national professional groups, meetings and symbols, and a national system of education’, securing the continued existence of ‘national personality’, ‘Durkheim foreshadowed what Charles Maurras has been pleased to call “integral nationalism”. It is not a far step from a conception of the nation as the supreme reality, and humanity as the highest ideal, to one in which the nation fulfils the requirements of both. Where Durkheim clung to the vestiges of humanitarian pacifism and abhorred violent upheaval, his successors openly discarded the Positivist religion and replaced it by the religion of nationalism’; Marion Mitchell, ‘Emile Durkheim and the philosophy of nationalism’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 1, 1931, 87–106 (106).
38Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1930], trans. from the German by Talcott Parsons (London: Allen and Unwin 1978); Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Erfstadt: Area Verlag [1920] 2006).
39Unlike many scholars (and available translations) Peter Ghosh pays full attention to the differences between the significantly revised 1920 edition and the original 1904/5 edition of Die protestantische Ethik. It appears Weber developed the notions of the ‘pariah-people’ and ‘pariah-capitalism’ in the course of his ongoing exchange with Werner Sombart; Peter Ghosh, ‘The place of Judaism in Max Weber's Protestant Ethic’, Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte/ Journal for the History of Modern Theology, vol. 12, no. 2, 2006, 208–61.
40These formulations are from the famous and inspirational last few pages of Die protestantische Ethik. On the problem of how to translate ‘stahlhartes Gehäuse’, see Peter Baehr, ‘The “iron cage” and “shell as hard as steel”: Parsons, Weber, and the stahlhartes Gehäuse metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’, History and Theory, vol. 40, no. 2, 2001, 153–69.
41‘The religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness’ (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 176). A similar formulation can be found on p. 177.
42Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 37; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 27. I am not aware of evidence that Weber was influenced by Carlyle beyond using some of his works as sources for his research on the English Revolution, but there are strong parallels that make Weber seem rather akin to Carlyle. Carlyle, a Scottish Puritan, had hoped, indeed like Weber, to infuse an unheroic present with some of the spirit of the English Revolution by, among other things, editing Cromwell's writings; Brian W. Young, The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 22. There he praised English Puritanism as ‘a practical world based on belief in God’ (quoted ‘The religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness’ (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 176). A similar formulation can be found on p. 177.). In his last work (six volumes on the history of Frederick the Great, 1858–65), Carlyle found in Prussian history praiseworthy virtues such as (Puritan-inspired) thrift (‘The religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness’ (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 176). A similar formulation can be found, 18) and ‘Reformation sobriety’ (‘The religious roots died out slowly, giving way to utilitarian worldliness’ (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 176). A similar formulation can be found, 37). Carlyle's crucial suggestion in ‘Signs of the Times’ (1829) that the modern world is an age of machinery, ‘in every outward and inward sense of that word’, in which the individual cannot anymore accomplish anything individually but only as a part of various ‘machineries’ and institutions and with the help of mechanical aids, comes very close to Weber's view (as well as Georg Simmel's); quoted in Ella M. Murphy, ‘Carlyle and the Saint-Simonians’, Studies in Philology, vol. 33, 1936, 93–118 (101). Furthermore, the contrast between Carlyle and Saint-Simon (especially on the issue of the latter's enthusiasm for modernization, and the deliberate inventing of a new religion) and in spite of some overlap (recognition of the ‘social question’, the need for the ‘organization of labour’) seems to anticipate aspects of the contrast between Weber and Durkheim, with Simmel and Tönnies perhaps in between.
43Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 191n23, 280n96; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 169n28, 268n379.
44Although this seems to be Weber's own formulation he put it in inverted commas as if it was an unreferenced quotation; it might also be an actual quotation that he assumed contemporaries would recognize. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 182; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 161.
45Ferdinand Kürnberger, Der Amerikamüde: Amerikanisches Kulturbild [1855] (Frankfurt-on-Main: Insel 1986).
49Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 192n3; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 170n31. The main thrust of Weber's argument is indeed not a defence of Protestant against, as one might have expected, Catholic ‘spirits’ but Anglo-Saxon Calvinist v. German-Lutheran and Catholic ‘spirits’. Weber surely saw the Calvinist spirit alive in Germany, and strengthening it for the better of the German nation was the whole point of the book. Weber's mother Helene was a Calvinist of (on the maternal line) Huguenot background; Liebersohn, Fate and Utopia in German Sociology, 83.
46The passage Weber uses is in Book I, chap. 1 of the novel.
47Dr Moorfeld soon flees New York's appalling Mammonism and goes to Pennsylvania. However, the backwoods also disappoint him: they turn out to be neither pleasant nor romantic, i.e. quite different from German forests. Dr Moorfeld finds that the farmers are dependent on bankers and speculators in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
48Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 48–54; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 37–42.
50Weber's point of departure for his exploration of the ‘Protestant ethic’ was his observation made during a 1904 visit to the United States that in certain Puritan sects ‘in the midst of modern capitalism the personal ethic of individual responsibility … had survived and was the basis for social action’, and he contrasted the American sects with ‘the bureaucratic structure of the European “church”, which offered no hope for the future’; Colin Loader, ‘Puritans and Jews: Weber, Sombart and the transvaluators of modern society’, Canadian Journal of Sociology/ Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, vol. 26, no. 4, 2001, 635–53 (639).
51Weber criticizes ‘the illusions of modern romanticists’, and discusses the contrast between the German and the Anglo-Saxon spirit; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 56, 127–8; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 44, 109.
52Barbalet suggests that Weber aimed to answer in Die protestantische Ethik questions that he had raised in his 1895 inaugural lecture about the German middle class's ability to satisfy national aspirations; Jack Barbalet, Weber, Passion and Profits: ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008), 19. Die protestantische Ethik was in this sense ‘an instrument of political education’ (Weber criticizes ‘the illusions of modern romanticists’, and discusses the contrast between the German and the Anglo-Saxon spirit; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 56, 127–8; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 25). Weber complained in the 1895 lecture about ‘the hackneyed yelping of the ever-growing chorus of amateur politicians … [who] believe it is possible to replace “political” with “ethical” ideas’ (Weber criticizes ‘the illusions of modern romanticists’, and discusses the contrast between the German and the Anglo-Saxon spirit; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 56, 127–8; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 27), and subsequently fail to do what needs to be done in terms of Realpolitik; Die protestantische Ethik seems to suggest a type of ethics that makes amateurish, hackneyed, moralistic yelping unnecessary.
53Weber grants that Franklin's discourse is indeed ‘already’ over-determined by utilitarianism; the ideal-type has to be constructed by mindful exegesis out of a less than ideal-typical empirical reality (the actual Franklin who, though still a carrier of the genuine Puritan spirit, had already been affected by its degeneration); Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 52; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 40.
54I have developed this problem in my The State, the Nation and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck's Germany (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press 2008), and in ‘Cultural difference in the national state: from trouser-selling Jews to unbridled multiculturalism’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, 245–79. Kürnberger's ‘anti-Yankeeism’ does not seem to contain any explicitly antisemitic elements (at least not judging from a quick look through its 600 rather dull pages), but its general conception is in line with, for example, Gustav Freytag's novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), also published in 1855; see Christine Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben: Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann 2007). German-Christian moral values and, indeed, German ways of doing business could provide a socially sustainable form of capitalism that is contrasted to its rapacious and pathological (American, English, Jewish) forms. This liberal anti-capitalism is quite different from, for example, Richard Wagner's antisemitism but both discourses bear a family resemblance.
55The connection to antisemitic ‘anti-capitalism’ is hinted at when Weber notes that asceticism condemned ‘covetousness, Mammonism, etc.’; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 172. Weber also mentions Dutch synods that excluded usurers (I have developed this problem in my The State, the Nation and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck's Germany (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press 2008), and in ‘Cultural difference in the national state: from trouser-selling Jews to unbridled multiculturalism’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, 245–79. Kürnberger's ‘anti-Yankeeism’ does not seem to contain any explicitly antisemitic elements (at least not judging from a quick look through its 600 rather dull pages), but its general conception is in line with, for example, Gustav Freytag's novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), also published in 1855; see Christine Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben: Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann 2007). German-Christian moral values and, indeed, German ways of doing business could provide a socially sustainable form of capitalism that is contrasted to its rapacious and pathological (American, English, Jewish) forms. This liberal anti-capitalism is quite different from, for example, Richard Wagner's antisemitism but both discourses bear a family resemblance, 260n7). Simmel, who was friends with Weber, likewise legitimated attacks on ‘Mammonism’ as obsessive and single-minded money-making; Georg Simmel, ‘Mammonismus’, a section from his speech ‘Deutschland's innere Wandlung’ (1914), in Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes: Aufsätze und Materialien, ed. Otthein Rammstedt, Christian Papilloud, Natàlia Cantó i Milà and Cécile Rol (Frankfurt-on-Main: Suhrkamp 2003), 312–13. Weber also finds support for his own agenda when he discovers that ‘Calvinism opposed organic social organization in the fiscal-monopolistic form which it assumed in Anglicanism under the Stuarts’; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 179. Weber similarly opposed the state-centric schemes of the Katheder-socialist conceptions of leading members of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, such as Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner. Durkheim too thought society rather than the state should bring about benign capitalism, although with the help of the state. Arguments about whether the state or society ought to be the principal agent of reform, capitalist development and modernization still continue today in the framework of ‘institutionalist economics’ that originates in this context.
56Giddens suggests that Durkheim synthesizes what appear to be the opposing positions of Saint-Simon and Comte: according to Durkheim, according to Giddens, ‘Comte was mistaken in supposing that the condition of unity in traditional societies, the existence of a strongly formed conscience collective, is necessary to the modern type of society’, while Saint-Simon went too far when he suggested authority in modern society merely needed to be the ‘administration of things’; Anthony Giddens, Studies in Social and Political Theory (London: Hutchinson 1977), 239. However, Durkheim did not need to synthesize such a dichotomy as neither Saint-Simon nor Comte held the respective views in such a one-sided form. Andrew Wernick also writes that Comte ‘had no confidence whatever in the possibility that the cross-national and even intranational social ties necessary to cement the highly differentiated and specialized activity of industrial society would spontaneously emerge’: ‘The “social humanity” or “voluntary cooperation” that would spring forth once industrial society had been properly reorganized has to be reproduced at every moment … because it rests on an (unnatural) preponderance of “sociability over personality” and on a subjective consensus of mind, heart and body which likewise requires a reproductive—in Comte's terminology, “rebinding”, i.e. religious—practice’; Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity, 215. Only in De la division du travail social did Durkheim argue against and beyond Comte and Spencer that the developed, modern division of labour gave rise to strong (‘organic’) solidarity that made remaining elements of ‘mechanical solidarity’, based on likeness, less relevant and necessary. As Wernick points out, though, Durkheim never came back to this rather optimistic position and reverted to the less ‘confident’ position taken by Comte (The connection to antisemitic ‘anti-capitalism’ is hinted at when Weber notes that asceticism condemned ‘covetousness, Mammonism, etc.’; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 172. Weber also mentions Dutch synods that excluded usurers (I have developed this problem in my The State, the Nation and the Jews: Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck's Germany (Lincoln and London: Nebraska University Press 2008), and in ‘Cultural difference in the national state: from trouser-selling Jews to unbridled multiculturalism’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 42, no. 3, 2008, 245–79. Kürnberger's ‘anti-Yankeeism’ does not seem to contain any explicitly antisemitic elements (at least not judging from a quick look through its 600 rather dull pages), but its general conception is in line with, for example, Gustav Freytag's novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), also published in 1855; see Christine Achinger, Gespaltene Moderne. Gustav Freytags Soll und Haben: Nation, Geschlecht und Judenbild (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann 2007). German-Christian moral values and, indeed, German ways of doing business could provide a socially sustainable form of capitalism that is contrasted to its rapacious and pathological (American, English, Jewish) forms. This liberal anti-capitalism is quite different from, for example, Richard Wagner's antisemitism but both discourses bear a family resemblance, 260n7). Simmel, who was friends with Weber, likewise legitimated attacks on ‘Mammonism’ as obsessive and single-minded money-making; Georg Simmel, ‘Mammonismus’, a section from his speech ‘Deutschland's innere Wandlung’ (1914), in Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes: Aufsätze und Materialien, ed. Otthein Rammstedt, Christian Papilloud, Natàlia Cantó i Milà and Cécile Rol (Frankfurt-on-Main: Suhrkamp 2003), 312–13. Weber also finds support for his own agenda when he discovers that ‘Calvinism opposed organic social organization in the fiscal-monopolistic form which it assumed in Anglicanism under the Stuarts’; Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 179. Weber similarly opposed the state-centric schemes of the Katheder-socialist conceptions of leading members of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, such as Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner. Durkheim too thought society rather than the state should bring about benign capitalism, although with the help of the state. Arguments about whether the state or society ought to be the principal agent of reform, capitalist development and modernization still continue today in the framework of ‘institutionalist economics’ that originates in this context., 215–16). Jack Barbalet (in the context of his critical discussion of Weber) points to a much stronger alternative: Adam Smith indeed based the capitalist spirit in ‘social processes rather than religious doctrinal subscription’, which makes Smith more look like a sociologist than the ‘classical’ sociologists; Barbalet, Weber, Passion and Profits, 12.
57Stoetzler, The State, the Nation and the Jews, ch. 9; Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalism in Germany, trans. from the German by Christiane Banerji (Basingstoke: Macmillan 2000).
58See David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (London and New York: Routledge 1998).
59On Bataille and Caillois, see Falasca-Zamponi, ‘A left sacred or a sacred left?’; Dan Stone, ‘Georges Bataille and the interpretation of the Holocaust’, in Dan Stone (ed.), Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi 2001), 79–101; Michael Weingrad, ‘The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research’, New German Critique, vol. 84, 2001, 129–61; and Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2004). Bataille and Caillois also started out on their exploration of ‘the sacred’ as constitutive of politics as part of an effort to understand and fight fascism, but the solutions they came to recommend were so vehemently and undialectically opposed to ‘utilitarianism’ and democracy that they ended up in the vicinity of the left wing of fascism (at least temporarily and without ever thereafter having been able to take account of the problem satisfactorily). The fact that radical but undialectical rejections of democracy and ‘utilitarianism’ remain the principal inroad for fascism into left-wing anti-hegemonic movements is what lends urgency and contemporary relevance to the otherwise ‘academic’ discussion of whether it was wise for Durkheim and his students to join in the reactionaries’ polemics against ‘Spencer and the economists’. What is at stake here is the old question of whether ‘the left’ can afford even the slightest ambiguity in its stance towards ‘the right’ while struggling against liberalism. I think it cannot.
60Émile Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, in Émile Durkheim, On Morality and Society, ed. Robert N. Bellah (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1973), 43–57; for an alternative (sometimes superior) translation with a useful introduction, see Steven Lukes, ‘Durkheim's “Individualism and the Intellectuals”’, Political Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 1969, 14–30. On the context, see Chad Alan Goldberg, ‘Introduction to Emile Durkheim's “Anti-Semitism and Social Crisis”’, Sociological Theory, vol. 26, no. 4, 2008, 299–323.
61Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, 47.
62Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, 48.
63Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, 45, 47. For the present context, the point in, as it were, ‘rehabilitating’ Spencer—whose thought occupies the grey area between liberalism and positivism that is also, for example, Durkheim's—is that Durkheim, like many other liberal reformists, seems to have been driven to misread and demonize Spencer by the same impulse that drove the antisemites to do the same, if differently. A recent, revisionist work on Spencer is Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2007). For a reliable restatement of utilitarianism from within sociology, see Charles Camic, ‘The utilitarians revisited’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 85, no. 3, 1979, 516–50.
64Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, 51.
65Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, 51.
66Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, 51.
67Further down, Durkheim added, as if he wanted to reach out to his deluded Christian fellow citizens, that Christianity was already just another, somewhat disguised form of individualism anyway (Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, 53).
68Further down, Durkheim added, as if he wanted to reach out to his deluded Christian fellow citizens, that Christianity was already just another, somewhat disguised form of individualism anyway (Durkheim, ‘Individualism and the intellectuals’, 52.
69Perrin has written on Durkheim's relation to Spencer: ‘While Durkheim misinterprets or misrenders much of Spencer's theory, he appropriates, with little or no acknowledgement, many of its essential features’; Robert G. Perrin, ‘Émile Durkheim's Division of Labor and the shadow of Herbert Spencer’, Sociological Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, 1995, 791–808 (793). What Spencer, perhaps unhelpfully, calls the ‘organic’ conception of society meant that society ‘naturally’ evolves towards a state of minimal government and maximal extent of communal life and voluntary co-operation, thereby performing ‘a change from an incoherent homogeneity to a coherent heterogeneity’, the latter denoting a synthesis of community and individuality; Richard P. Hiskes, ‘Spencer and the liberal idea of community’, Review of Politics, vol. 45, no. 4, 1983, 595–609 (600–1). All this is in a register of liberalism not far from Durkheim's.
70Émile Durkheim, ‘La Science positive de la morale en Allemagne’, Revue Philosophique, no. 24, 1887, 33–284 passim; Robert Alun Jones, ‘The positive science of ethics in France: German influences on De la division du travail social’, Sociological Forum, vol. 9, no. 1, 1994, 37–57.
71My argument implies that Spencer and utilitarianism are to be defended against not any critique but certainly against the wrong kind of critique. The point is that nineteenth-century antisemites, but also liberal opponents of antisemitism like Durkheim, hardly give ‘Spencer and the economists’ a fair hearing; they attack a straw man, while at the same time reproducing many of the basic assumptions they pretend to challenge. The relentless critique of false critiques is, though, the precondition of serious, emancipatory critique. The latter must undertake to salvage and develop the Enlightenment elements of the doctrines of ‘Spencer and the economists’.
72See, for example, Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2000); Loader, ‘Puritans and Jews’; Irmela Gorges, Sozialforschung in Deutschland 1872–1914: Gesellschaftliche Einflüsse auf Themen- und Methodenwahl des Vereins für Sozialpolitik (Königstein im Taunus: Anton Hain 1980); Rüdiger vom Bruch, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Gangold Hübinger (eds), Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900: Krise der Moderne und Glaube an die Wissenschaft (Stuttgart: Steiner 1989); Dieter Lindenlaub, Richtungskaämpfe im Verein fuür Sozialpolitik: Wissenschaft und Sozialpolitik im Kaiserreich vornehmlich vom Beginn des ‘Neuen Kurses’ bis zum Ausbruch des 1. Weltkrieges (1890–1914), 2 vols (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner 1967); Eric Grimmer-Solem, The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2003).
73Erik Grimmer-Solem, ‘“Every true friend of the Fatherland”: Gustav Schmoller and the “Jewish question” 1916–1917’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, vol. 52, no. 1, 2007, 149–63.
74Massimo Ferrari Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des Bösen: Gründerjahre des Antisemitismus: Von der Bismarckzeit zu Hitler, trans. from the Italian (Frankfurt-on-Main: Klostermann 2003), 157–8. Wagner seems to have become more distanced from party-political antisemitism in the course of the 1890s. For a comprehensive portrayal of Wagner, see Evelyn A. Clark, ‘Adolf Wagner: from national economist to National Socialist’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 55, no. 3, 1940, 378–411.
75In his ‘La Science positive de la morale en Allemagne’, Durkheim reviewed Wagner's work rather favourably and without mentioning his antisemitism.
76The postulate of Wertfreiheit, Weber's take on the problem of objectivity in the social sciences, means that true Wissenschaft ought to be free of ‘extra-scientific’ value judgements (Werturteile). This was Weber's position in the Werturteilsstreit.
77Lindenlaub, Richtungskaämpfe im Verein fuür Sozialpolitik; Gorges, Sozialforschung in Deutschland 1872–1914 , 177–82, discusses the debate on the 1888 report, especially the critique by the eminent statistician Gottlieb Schnapper-Arndt, Zur Methodologie sozialer Enquêten (Frankfurt-on-Main: Auffarth 1888), in which the connection between debates on methodology and the debate about antisemitism becomes clear.
78Gary A. Abraham, Max Weber and the Jewish Question: A Study of the Social Outlook of His Sociology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1992), 100.
79While Silberner (‘Pierre Leroux's ideas on the Jewish people’, 375–6) states that Saint-Simon did not show any hostility to or contempt of Jews in his writings, Szajkowski (‘The Jewish Saint-Simonians and socialist antisemites in France’, 34) writes that Saint-Simon had an ‘unfavourable opinion of the Jews’, in spite of his doctrine's ‘philosemitism’ that was based on his positive view of the role of banking. Fourierists and, later, Proudhonists considered Saint-Simonianism ‘a Jewish venture’ (Gary A. Abraham, Max Weber and the Jewish Question: A Study of the Social Outlook of His Sociology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1992), 38); their antisemitism and their opposition to Saint-Simonianism seem to have reinforced each other. But ‘anti-Jewish feeling’ and expressions of antisemitism can also be found among the adherents of Saint-Simonianism apparently from the mid-1840s onwards (Gary A. Abraham, Max Weber and the Jewish Question: A Study of the Social Outlook of His Sociology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1992), 41). Many also embraced Catholicism at the time, as Fourierists did, Toussenel being an example. ‘Under the July monarchy, the Fourierists had led French socialism into the antisemitic camp. In the period of the Second Empire Proudhon and his friends played this role’ (Gary A. Abraham, Max Weber and the Jewish Question: A Study of the Social Outlook of His Sociology (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1992), 55).
80Detlev Claussen, Grenzen der Aufklärung: Die gesellschaftliche Genese des modernen Antisemitismus (Frankfurt-on-Main: Fischer 1994), 127.
81Far from actually dismissing sociology as such, the Nazis developed a ‘non-Jewish sociology’, an engagement that meant in some of its aspects a modernization of sociology; Carsten Klingemann, ‘Social-scientific experts—no ideologues: sociology and social research in the Third Reich’, in Turner and Käsler (eds), Sociology Responds to Fascism, 127–54. Interpreting and rationalizing his own antisemitism, Hitler states in Mein Kampf (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. Zwei Bände in einem Band. Ungekürzte Ausgabe [1925/7] (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher 1934), 107–11, 54–70 (the last third of ch. 2)) that he found his attempts to mobilize workers to struggle for their own interests thwarted by their being confounded by Jews, namely Marxist, internationalist Social Democrats. They spoiled the workers’ spontaneous nationalism and made them disregard their own interests, which Hitler argued lay in defending the German national and welfare state and its specific social ethics from Jewish cosmopolitanism. Although we cannot pick Hitler's brain it seems that he genuinely thought of himself as a defender of the national-social welfare state against what most people nowadays would call ‘globalization’. In assuming that workers naturally gravitated towards defending their stake in the national economy and could adopt internationalist, socialist-democratic positions only thanks to persuasion by intellectuals, he merely replicated the elitist and anti-democratic attitudes of socialist intellectuals themselves, from Wilhelm Weitling to Lenin. On both counts Hitler strategically exploited socialist weaknesses: a doctrine that attempts to propagate internationalism as an idea, but simultaneously the national state as the quasi-natural framework of its actual politics, will turn its adherents towards the latter. In the process, they may experience Hitlerite propaganda as empowering, liberating them from being patronized by intellectuals and removing an awkward doctrinal cognitive dissonance.
82On bürgerliche Sozialreform, see Rüdiger vom Bruch (ed.), Weder Kommunismus noch Kapitalismus: bürgerliche Sozialreform in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Ära Adenauer (Munich: Beck 1985).
83Georg Simmel, ‘Money in modern culture’ [1896], in Georg Simmel, Simmel on Culture. Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage 1997), 243–55; Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money [1900], 3rd revd edn, ed. David Frisby, trans. from the German by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby from a first draft by Kaethe Mengelberg (London and New York: Routledge 2004); Donald N. Levine, ‘Simmel as educator: on individuality and modern culture’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 8, no. 3, 1991, 99–117.
84Although the Saint-Simonian movement led by Enfantin opposed Comte's positivism for being too rationalistic, the use of the term ‘positive’ goes back to Saint-Simon himself. By ‘authoritarian’ or ‘illiberal liberalism’, I mean an ideology that embraces the basic social-economic programme of liberalism—modernization guided by bourgeois, anti-feudal values—but not all the finer points of its politics, such as the separation of powers, individual liberties, human rights, jusnaturalism, which positivism, not completely without reason, dismisses as metaphysical niceties. On the concept of liberalism, see Stoetzler, The State, the Nation and the Jews, ch. 9. The formulation ‘anti-liberal liberalism’ stems from Eleonore Sterling, Judenhass: Die Anfänge des politischen Antisemitismus in Deutschland 1815–1850 [1956] (Frankfurt-on-Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt 1969).
85True to the tradition of moral reform of the economy, every now and again these discourses come adorned with mostly perfumed forms of antisemitism. Such antisemitic undertones are, in a western context, usually retrieved from the cast-offs of democratic populism's struggle for the phantom of benign ‘simple commodity production’, uncorrupted by ‘Wall Street’ etc. On populism, see David Peal, ‘The politics of populism: Germany and the American South in the 1890s’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 31, no. 2, 1989, 340–62.
86Mike Gane, August Comte (London and New York: Routledge 2006), 5.
87Hermann Beck, ‘Conservatives and the social question in nineteenth-century Prussia’, in Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack (eds), Between Reform, Reaction, and Resistance: Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (Providence, RI and Oxford: Berg 1993), 61–94; Heino Heinrich Nau, ‘Gustav Schmoller's Historico-Ethical Political Economy: ethics, politics and economics in the younger German Historical School, 1860–1917’, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, vol. 7, no. 4, 2000, 507–31; Heino Heinrich Nau and Philippe Steiner, ‘Schmoller, Durkheim, and old European institutionalist economics’, Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, 1005–24. See also the references in note 70 above.
88It is hardly surprising that those who, openly or secretly, advocate versions of quasi-Stalinist regimes are in cahoots with those who advocate, for instance, some version of Khomeinist populism (and, before this became a plausible option in the minds of metropolitan anti-imperialists, defended, for example, the corporatist-nationalist socialism of Saddam Hussein, who admired more than Stalin's moustache). On Stalinism and Comte, see Régis Debray, Critique of Political Reason, trans. from the French by David Macey (London: New Left Books 1983), 228–33; on Khomeinism, see Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993).
89Stoetzler, The State, the Nation and the Jews, ch. 8.
90Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr, ‘Why is Werner Sombart not part of the core of classical sociology? From fame to (near) oblivion’, Journal of Classical Sociology, vol. 1, no. 2, 2001, 257–87 (262).
91Quoted in Reiner Grundmann and Nico Stehr, ‘Why is Werner Sombart not part of the core of classical sociology? From fame to (near) oblivion’, Journal of Classical Sociology, vol. 1, no. 2, 2001, 257–87 (262).
92Derek J. Penslar, Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press 2001), 162.
93Simmel and Weber addressed what Marx implied by the concept of ‘real subsumption’; Moishe Postone, Time. Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 1996), 182. This is the ground on which some in the Marxist tradition, such as Derek Sayer, Capitalism and Modernity: An Excursus on Marx and Weber (London and New York: Routledge 1991), have aligned Marx and Weber. Sayer's very inspiring discourse on how Weber (and Simmel, Durkheim and Tönnies) fleshed out aspects of Marx's account of ‘capitalism and modernity’ presupposes, however, his completely bracketing out Weber's politics.
94Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 270–1n58; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 257–8n342.
95Jack Barbalet points to the ambiguity in Weber's attitude towards ‘the Jews’ and antisemitism in these terms: ‘Weber's failure to contribute to a sociology of anti-Semitism is a significant omission … because he was aware of anti-Semitism and opposed to it when it touched him.’ Weber was aware of antisemitism's ‘consequences on Jewish opportunities and aspirations. However, in his sociological treatment of the Jews he regards the pariah concept and its corollaries as not only necessary but sufficient in explaining Jewish economic marginalization. That is to say, in Weber's view, the conditions of the Jews are to be explained only by reference to the particulars and peculiarities of their religious beliefs’; Barbalet, Weber, Passion and Profits, 196. Weber constructs his ideal-types of Jews, Puritans and others out of his ‘philosophical presuppositions’ (in other words, prejudices) rather than coherent, empirically backed analysis (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 270–1n58; Weber, Die protestantische Ethik, 202).
96Loader, ‘Puritans and Jews’, 644.
97Weber might have adopted this idea from the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz; Ghosh, ‘The place of Judaism in Max Weber's Protestant Ethic’, 242. Weber's argument reflects here, as in many other contexts, nineteenth-century National Liberalism, which tended to defend Jews only when it could be instrumentalized for the apologetics of market capitalism. This is what prompted socialists like Franz Mehring to equate all forms of defence of Jewish emancipation—what Mehring calls ‘philosemitism’—with the defence of capitalism and liberalism. In reality, of course, neither most Jews nor all defenders of Jews were particularly pro-capitalist. On Mehring, see Lars Fischer, The Socialist Response to Antisemitism in Imperial Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press 2007).
98Quoted in Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany (New York: Knopf 1973), 86–7.
99Reinhard Rürup, Emanzipation und Antisemitismus: Studien zur ‘Judenfrage’ der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt-on-Main: Fischer 1987), 115 (translation by the author).
100Central to this process in Germany was the positivist reformulation of the concept of the Volksgeist, which thereby became a positive entity, such as in Herbart or Lazarus (Simmel's teacher) in social science, but also in nationalist and racist ideologies; Ingrid Belke, ‘Einleitung’, in Ingrid Belke (ed.), Moritz Lazarus und Heymann Steinthal: Die Begründer der Völkerpsychologie in ihren Briefen (Tübingen: Mohr 1971), xiii–cxxxviii.
101The enmity is only relative as the Nazis successfully developed a ‘de-Jewified’ positivist sociology; see Klingemann, ‘Social-scientific experts—no ideologues’.
102Enfantin in 1832, quoted in Silberner, ‘Pierre Leroux's ideas on the Jewish people’, 378.
103Enfantin in 1832, quoted in Silberner, ‘Pierre Leroux's ideas on the Jewish people’, 378. Apparently the same text is translated differently in Szajkowski, ‘The Jewish Saint-Simonians’, 41; here the Jews are the ‘bankers of the angels’.
104See note 83 above.
105Iggers, ‘Introduction’, xxi.
106The notion that the nobility are a warrior caste, i.e. savages (as in Sieyès, who wanted to send them back into the Frankish forests), is mirrored by the complementary idea that savages are noble (as in Herder).
107The discussion of the dialectic between sociology and antisemitism may help explain why sociology throughout the last century has had so little to say on the subject of antisemitism: perhaps sociologists have been reluctant to address antisemitism (like fascism) directly for fear of finding distorted mirror images of their own discipline. (This notion was raised by Nicole Asquith, University of Tasmania, in the discussion of a version of this paper at the European Sociological Association conference in Glasgow, 2007.)
108Strictly speaking, it would not be necessary to ‘have’ such a ‘right’ if no one ever considered taking it away. The concept of an ‘inalienable right’ is only meaningful (as a demand) in a society that denies that right. That is, it is not a positive right; it exists only in its negation.