Ethnos, race and nation: Werner Sombart, the Jews and classical German sociology

ABSTRACT

Bodemann addresses the problem of how classical German sociology in the early twentieth century dealt with the question of the Other, as well as with the questions of ethno-national solidarities and race. In contemporary debates the Jews constituted a central trope. Bodemann focuses in particular on Werner Sombart, one of the three central figures in sociology at the time, but he also looks at the early meetings of the German Sociological Society and writings by Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies. Despite the fact that, even in 1910, Germany was a multi-ethnic state replete with discussions of race and the role of the Jews in society—and in sharp contrast to early American sociology—German sociology (with the principal and important exception of Sombart, and some minor reflections by Weber, Simmel and Tönnies) took little interest in the social positioning of Jews and the disputes on antisemitism, and even the classics were concerned with these issues mostly in relation to contemporary race theories. This lack of interest, Bodemann argues, left sociology theoretically unprepared for the nationalist frenzy that was about to be unleashed with the outbreak of the First World War, or for the intensifying antisemitism and the rise of fascism that followed it.

Keywords:

• antisemitism
• classical sociology
• Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie
• ethnos
• German Sociological Society
• Jews
• nationalism
• race
• sociology
• Werner Sombart

Notes

¹Werner Sombart, Der proletarische Sozialismus, 2 vols (Jena: G. Fischer 1924), i.45 and passim.

²Robert Michels, ‘Zur historischen Analyse des Patriotismus’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, vol. 36, 1913, no. 1, 14–43 and no. 2, 394–449 (396).

³See George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig 1978), 79; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1966); and, in particular, Arthur Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart: Eine sozialwissenschaftliche Studie [1904] (Cologne and Leipzig: Jüdischer Verlag 1911).

⁴See Mosse, Toward the Final Solution, 156; and Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart.

⁵See Dan Diner, Verkehrte Welten: Antiamerikanismus in Deutschland. Ein historischer Essay (Frankfurt-on-Main: Eichborn 1993).

⁷ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author.

⁶Alfred Ploetz, ‘Die Begriffe Rasse und Gesellschaft und die davon abgeleiteten Disciplinen’, in Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 19. –22. Oktober 1910 in Frankfurt a. M. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr 1911), 111–47.

⁸ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 121.

⁹ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 149.

¹⁰ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 154.

¹¹ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 155.

¹³ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 160.

¹² Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 159.

¹⁴ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 164.

¹⁵ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 156.

¹⁶ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 164.

¹⁷ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 165.

¹⁸ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 148. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are by the author, 163.

¹⁹With some telling exceptions however. In the course of discussions at the second Soziologentag, Sombart made the following comment, directed at Franz Oppenheimer: ‘Oppenheimer simply seems to want to explain everything by the environment; he seems to believe any worker could head a large factory just as well as the capitalist entrepreneur who, with the help of the environment, has worked himself up into that position; that talent and predisposition might have contributed their part does not enter his mind’; Verhandlungen des Zweiten Deutschen Soziologentages vom 20.–22. Oktober 1912 in Berlin (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr 1913), 185.

²⁰ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 149, 160.

²¹See Sander L. Gilman, The Jew's Body (London and New York: Routledge 1991).

²²Since the sociologists discussed here only use the masculine pronoun, I have maintained that usage here. This is indeed a very male-centred discourse and the absence of any discussion of women and strangeness, or of Jewish women as strangers, is an additional weakness that would deserve a separate analysis.

²³Georg Simmel, ‘Exkurs über den Fremden’, in Georg Simmel, Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung [1908], ed. Ottheim Rammstedt (Frankfurt-on-Main: Suhrkamp 1992), 764–71. For an English translation, see Georg Simmel, ‘The Stranger’, in Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. from the German by Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press 1950), 402–8.

²⁴Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes [1900] (Frankfurt-on-Main: Suhrkamp 1989), 290. See also note 58.

²⁵Georg Simmel, ‘Das Grosstadt und das Geistesleben’, in Theodor Petermann (ed.), Die Grosstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung (Dresden: von Zahn und Jaensch 1903). For an English translation, see Georg Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life’, in Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 409–24.

²⁶Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes, 290. In Sombart, by contrast, the modernizing Stranger is the Jew tout court as opposed to modernizers who might also be Jews.

²⁷Simmel, ‘Exkurs über den Fremden’, 765. The idea of the ‘supernumerary’ is reminiscent of Sombart's ‘twentieth family’ in the United States; see Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot 1911), 44–5. See also note 58 below.

²⁸Simmel, ‘Exkurs über den Fremden’, 765. The idea of the ‘supernumerary’ is reminiscent of Sombart's ‘twentieth family’ in the United States; see Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot 1911), 44–5. See also note 58 below, 765, 767, 770.

²⁹Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 205.

³⁰Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 206.

³¹Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 283.

³²Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 282.

³³Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 282–3.

³⁴An example of Sombart's image of the Jew—the rootless Stranger who comes today and leaves tomorrow—is available in an episode that he relates in the context of characterizing Jews as anti-mystical and without any feeling for nature and the environment. One day, he notes, a Jewish student came to him in Breslau from Eastern Siberia with the sole purpose of studying the works of Karl Marx. ‘The long journey took him three weeks and, on the very day following his arrival, he visited me and asked to borrow one of Marx's works. A few days later, he returned, spoke to me about what he had read, returned the book and took a new one. This went on for a few months. Then he returned to his Eastern Siberian village. He had not taken notice of his environment, not met anyone, taken no walks at all, hardly knew where he had been staying. He passed through the world of Breslau without seeing it, just as he had gone through his previous world, and how in future years he would continue to go through the world, without having any sense of it, with only Marx in his head. A typical case? I think so’ (Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 317).

³⁷Ferdinand Tönnies, ‘Individuum und Welt in der Neuzeit’ [1913], in Ferdinand Tönnies, Fortschritt und Soziale Entwicklung (Karlsruhe: G. Braun 1926), 24.

³⁵Ferdinand Tönnies, ‘Individuum und Welt in der Neuzeit’ [1913], in Ferdinand Tönnies, Fortschritt und Soziale Entwicklung (Karlsruhe: G. Braun 1926), 5–35.

³⁶Ferdinand Tönnies, ‘Individuum und Welt in der Neuzeit’ [1913], in Ferdinand Tönnies, Fortschritt und Soziale Entwicklung (Karlsruhe: G. Braun 1926), 23–4.

³⁸Ferdinand Tönnies, ‘Individuum und Welt in der Neuzeit’ [1913], in Ferdinand Tönnies, Fortschritt und Soziale Entwicklung (Karlsruhe: G. Braun 1926), 24.

³⁹None of the three gives any sense of recognizing a Jewish community with its own internal Gemeinschaft structures.

⁴⁰Friedrich Lenger, Werner Sombart, 1863–1941: Eine Biographie (Munich: C. H. Beck 1994), 204.

⁴¹ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 112, 116.

⁴² Verhandlungen des Zweiten Deutschen Soziologentages, 186.

⁴³Quoted in Lenger, Werner Sombart, 204.

⁴⁴Simmel, quoted in Lenger, Werner Sombart, 204.

⁴⁵ Verhandlungen des Zweiten Deutschen Soziologentages, 185. To be fair, this comment was triggered in part by Oppenheimer's polemical and polarizing presentation that, to some degree, sought to distinguish German and Jewish positions. Oppenheimer ridiculed ‘Germanomania’, which he ‘thought was a term [he] had coined’ until he discovered that the German-Jewish writer Saul Ascher had already used it in 1815 (Simmel, quoted in Lenger, Werner Sombart, 100). Alluding to Houston Stewart Chamberlain's theory of different innate patterns of thought—what he called ‘plis de la pensée’—of Jews and Germans, and his other scientifically untenable theories, Oppenheimer remarked: ‘Luckily for me I find that serious critique … has arrived at the same result with astonishing consensus, that [Chamberlain's] Grundlagen [des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899)] are scientifically completely worthless. Otherwise I would have to ask myself if my own specific brain structure would stop me permanently from grasping the plis de la pensée of the pure Germanic man’ (Simmel, quoted in Lenger, Werner Sombart, 119). Moreover, Oppenheimer directly dismissed, if not ridiculed, Sombart's idea of the racial purity of the ancient Israelites. Oppenheimer's remark and Sombart's response give us a good sense of the antisemitic atmosphere at the time.

⁴⁶ Verhandlungen des Zweiten Deutschen Soziologentages, 185. To be fair, this comment was triggered in part by Oppenheimer's polemical and polarizing presentation that, to some degree, sought to distinguish German and Jewish positions. Oppenheimer ridiculed ‘Germanomania’, which he ‘thought was a term [he] had coined’ until he discovered that the German-Jewish writer Saul Ascher had already used it in 1815 (Simmel, quoted in Lenger, Werner Sombart, 100). Alluding to Houston Stewart Chamberlain's theory of different innate patterns of thought—what he called ‘plis de la pensée’—of Jews and Germans, and his other scientifically untenable theories, Oppenheimer remarked: ‘Luckily for me I find that serious critique … has arrived at the same result with astonishing consensus, that [Chamberlain's] Grundlagen [des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899)] are scientifically completely worthless. Otherwise I would have to ask myself if my own specific brain structure would stop me permanently from grasping the plis de la pensée of the pure Germanic man’ (Simmel, quoted in Lenger, Werner Sombart, 119). Moreover, Oppenheimer directly dismissed, if not ridiculed, Sombart's idea of the racial purity of the ancient Israelites. Oppenheimer's remark and Sombart's response give us a good sense of the antisemitic atmosphere at the time, 49.

⁴⁷ Verhandlungen des Ersten Deutschen Soziologentages, 149.

⁴⁸ Verhandlungen des Zweiten Deutschen Soziologentages, 72, 74.

⁴⁹ Verhandlungen des Zweiten Deutschen Soziologentages, 189.

⁵⁰Tönnies favoured discussing these themes but, in contrast to the others, resisted the influence of racial hygiene on sociology. He made use here of the commitment to value-free science in the charter of the DGS. See Lenger, Werner Sombart, 205.

⁵¹‘Der “Allgemeine Jüdische Arbeiterbund” zur Zeit der russischen Revolution (1904–1907)’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik, vol. 36, 1913, 823–60, and no. 37, 1913, 215–50.

⁵²Werner Sombart, ‘Elementarformen menschlichen Gesellschaftslebens’, in Alfred Vierkandt (ed.), Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke 1931).

⁵³Sombart took up the subject in similar fashion, even reproducing some passages verbatim, in his Deutscher Sozialismus (Charlottenburg: Buchholz und Weisswange 1934). The distinction between Volk and nation was, however, fairly commonplace in contemporary discussions; see, for example, Erhard Stölting, Akademische Soziologie in der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot 1986), 348; and Michels, ‘Zur historischen Analyse des Patriotismus’.

⁵⁴Sombart, ‘Elementarformen menschlichen Lebens’, 229.

⁵⁶Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, v. This work was translated into English by Mordechai Epstein, imprecisely, as The Jews and Modern Capitalism (London: Unwin 1913). The translation omits many sections and is inaccurate throughout. The redeeming value of the 1951 edition of Epstein's translation is the introduction by Bert F. Hoselitz, which cites a variety of critiques of this work, including the contemporary ones; Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press 1951).

⁵⁵Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, vol. 1 [1902], in Werner Sombart, Sombarts ‘Moderner Kapitalismus’: Materialien zur Kritik und Rezeption, ed. Bernhard vom Brocke (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch 1987).

⁵⁷Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 15.

⁶¹Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 44–5.

⁵⁸In Simmel's view, in contrast to that of Sombart, Jews are not inherently strangers; instead, their strangeness is explained by their structural position. In a brilliant passage in his Philosophie des Geldes that prefigured the ‘Exkurs über den Fremden’, Simmel wrote: ‘Scattered people that penetrate more or less closed cultural spheres can put down roots or find an available place in production only with difficulty. They are therefore at first dependent on intermediate trade that is far more flexible than primary production. Its space (Spielraum) can be almost limitlessly expanded by means of purely formal combinations and can therefore most easily absorb external elements that have not grown into the group from their roots. The deep trait of Jewish intellectuality that moves far more in logical-formal combinations than in substantive and productive production stands in an interdependent relationship with this situation of economic history’ (287).

⁵⁹Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 31.

⁶⁰Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben, 44.

⁶²Werner Sombart, Die Zukunft der Juden (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot 1912).

⁶³See George L. Mosse, Die Geschichte des Rassimus in Europa, trans. from the English by Elfriede Burau and Hans Günter Holl (Frankfurt-on-Main: Fischer 1990), 79.

⁶⁴See, for example, Sombart, Die Zukunft der Juden, 353. In language that is almost interchangeable with that of Sombart, Ruppin writes: ‘The mixing of Jews and non-Jews by means of baptism and mixed marriage must be considered detrimental from the point of view of maintaining the higher racial quality (Erhaltung ihrer hohen Rassebegabung). The demand that arises therefrom is to prevent this mixing and to maintain the Jews as a separate people (Sondervolk). This, however, is only possible once not only the mixing has been brought to an end, but when the entire process of assimilation as well has been halted; its beginning was denationalization, and its end the (racial) mixing. Combatting the mixing alone means dealing with the symptoms in the manner of a quack doctor (Kurpfuscher), instead of tackling the disease at its roots. Once the process of assimilation has set in and has proceeded to denationalization, that is, to the extinction of all Jewish characteristics, then the complete mixing and absorption of the Jews can no longer be stopped’; Ruppin, Die Juden der Gegenwart, 230.

⁶⁵Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinnungen (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot 1915).

⁶⁶Sombart, Deutscher Sozialismus, 194.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Y. Michal Bodemann

Y. Michal Bodemann is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto and Director of the European Office of the University of Toronto in Berlin. He is the author of In den Wogen der Erinnerung: Jüdische Existenz in Deutschland (DTV 2002) and A Jewish Family in Germany Today: An Intimate Portrait (Duke 2005). He is also the editor of three volumes with Gökce Yurdakul, Migration, Citizenship, Ethnos: Incorporation Regimes in Europe and North America (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), Citizenship and Immigrant Incorporation: Comparative Perspectives on North America and Western Europe (Palgrave Macmillan 2007), and Staatsbürgerschaft, Migration und Minderheiten: Inklusion und Ausgrenzungsstrategien im Vergleich (Verlag Sozialwissenschaften 2010), as well as The New German Jewry and the European Context: The Return of the European Jewish Diaspora (Palgrave Macmillan 2008)