Alexander Behrens

Alexander Behrens, historian, editor at the publishing house J. H. W. Dietz Nachfahren

Discarding old convictions with good reason

The young Max Weber and German social democracy – The ‘labour question’ and the genesis of social theory in imperial Germany (1884-1899)
Victor Strazzeri. Chicago, 2023

“Weber? Weber? Wasn’t that the guy who could explain everything a bit better than Marx?” This sentence comes to mind every time I hear the name Max Weber. My former history professor in Tübingen spoke these words in front of the Mohr Siebeck Verlag – Weber’s publishing house. He grinned broadly and was delighted with his dig at the author of the Communist Manifesto. My professor had a few things in common with Weber when it came to lifestyle, status thinking and questions of ownership: one, Weber, was a descendant of Huguenots; the other was a Württemberg pastor’s son. Both were pretty conservative. Bourgeois – but liberal in their essential attitude and with a big heart for the proletariat. “Class-conscious bourgeois”, as Wolfgang J. Mommsen said, who once coined this wonderful term for Weber, brilliantly describing his social position. 

However, Weber was politically even a little more right-wing than my professor, to use this modern way of defining his position. Weber’s father had been a member of the Reichstag for the National Liberal Party. His son became a supporter of Friedrich Naumann’s Liberal Party. Max Weber joined the All-German Association in 1893 and fervently advocated German imperialist fantasies of world conquest. In 1899, he even left the All-Germans with great fanfare because he thought that too many Poles were being allowed to cross the borders into Germany and were taking jobs away from the Germans. Weber is also credited with quotes such as: (Karl) “Liebknecht belongs in a lunatic asylum and Rosa Luxemburg in a zoo”. Or: “Liebknecht was undoubtedly an honest man. He called on the street to fight – the street killed him”.

Seen from the outside, there seems to be a clash between origin, milieu and Max Weber’s work. A conservative who is considered a ‘bourgeois Marx’? Why? How did that come about? How could that be? Put simply, this irritation was the starting point for Victor Strazzeri’s book The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy. In fact, Max Weber recognised the revolutionary political power and socially formative significance of the working class early on. He approved of their political representation, the Social Democratic Party. And what is more, among the German conservative nationalists, he was one of the few who saw the social or labour question as “a life-and-death decision”, as Pankaj Mishra stated in 2020. Weber even saw a possible political alliance between the bourgeoisie and the rising strata of the working class. Strazzeri describes very clearly how the young Weber made this ideological ‘twist’ and developed his positions in the Germany of the last emperors. The declared aim is to show how the social question and its various ‘refractions’ influenced Weber’s development as an intellectual, from his time as a law student in 1884 to 1898/99. Strazzeri does this excellently, with many details and analyses of Weber’s correspondence and early work, which has been little received compared to his major writings. 

The book begins with an anecdote about Weber’s family. As Max’s mother was too exhausted to breastfeed him after his birth, the wife of a Socialist-minded carpenter came to the house. Whenever the boy later opposed his father and uncle, Hermann Baumgarten, with social and democratic positions, they consoled themselves by saying that he had absorbed his political views with his nurse’s milk. 

Strazzeri’s book is divided into two large parts, and it is a thoroughly challenging read for people who have no in-depth knowledge of Marxist theory but are interested in the history of culture and ideas (like me). But worry not, we Marxist pedestrians will also get our money’s worth from Strazzeri, who is himself a historian. 

In Part 1, he traces some of Weber’s family history, the views of the young student, the historical circumstances in which Max broke with the liberal-conservative milieu of his forefathers, and the external social circumstances that changed his thinking. Strazzeri’s main thesis is that Social Democracy and its influence in the German empire played a decisive role in this break along the lines of the ‘social question’. To put it crudely, the power of the SPD as a political interest group opened Weber’s eyes to the lower classes.

Part 2 is a meticulous and complex analysis of early works and those from the middle creative period in which Weber dealt with agricultural labourers, the working class as a whole and the social phenomena of his time. Weber’s association activities are also addressed, for example, in connection with the major empirical study Die Lage der Landarbeiter im ostelbischen Deutschland [‘The situation of agricultural labourers in East Elbe Germany’] of 1892 or his involvement in the Evangelical Social Congress. Strazzeri concludes that Weber’s analytical key, his in-depth study of the workers’ point of view, and his desire to understand their driving forces and motivations were directly related to their recognition as legitimate political actors. This not only enabled him to draw far-reaching conclusions about the significance of the labour question but also marked a break with the deeply ingrained patriarchal attitudes towards workers that were prevalent among the German upper classes.

Beyond these and many other fascinating individual aspects, perhaps the most interesting, even impressive, thing about Strazzeri’s work is how he shows the ‘maturation’ of an intellectual, which we can observe in detail. And no, it is not easy to explain. If Max Weber was not already so well known that he is reflexively quoted in every historical or sociological proseminar paper with Friederich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin and Aristotle – one could almost rub one’s eyes when reading Strazzeri’s book: a conservative scion who ends up with completely different political positions from those with which he started. He also provides scientific justifications for Weber’s development that allow the political challenger of his ancestors, Marxism, to get away largely unscathed. 

Weber regarded his society at the time as a regulative whole. The force that drove the flywheel was “modern capitalism as the most fateful force of modernity”. And he saw the milieu from which he, Weber, came as just one of many social players – no longer necessarily as the privileged upper level of society, as his father had done. Weber recognised that the social question would almost inevitably lead to a fight against his own milieu of origin. He understood and justified as necessary the emergence of Social Democracy as an organised force that brazenly defied the liberal-conservative camp. Of course, it was the result of blatant social and economic grievances. But what conservative thinker in the German Empire would ever have been interested in that? 

Summarising Strazzeri somewhat roughly, Weber was no longer an inner conservative after these insights. The phenomenon of the social question led him to break with his milieu of origin. Of course, this was much more complicated than I have described here, but in essence, this is precisely what is shown in the analysis of Max Weber’s lesser-known writings, which Strazzeri analyses in the second part of his work in order to support his historical interpretation in the first part. Strazzeri already hints at this at the beginning of his book. You remember: Max Weber absorbed his empathy for the working class with his nurse’s milk. His later elaborations on this were – in Marxist terms – superstructure. By virtue of his great analytical talent, this bourgeois Marxist, this left-wing national liberal, this conservative dyed in communist wool, thought beyond his time. For Weber, the reason for the power of the social question lay in the failure of liberalism and its economic-ideological conception of man. Bingo! As a contemporary, that is a lot of clarity and acumen to muster!

There is much to learn from Weber-Strazzeri. With grandezza, Max Weber gives us an example of what an intellectual must be able to do and be today, even in times of ‘turning points’: open, insightful, unprejudiced and ready to discard old convictions with good reason, without immediately throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Weber’s development could be a good background for many of today’s discussions. What is more, it can serve as a lesson against the irreconcilability of today’s debates. The ‘moral’ is that rethinking is always possible but we need to take the results of our analyses seriously enough. Just as the time has finally come – for example – to chase away neoliberal doctrines of conservative provenance, which do not give a damn about the common good, we on the left must today begin to question this very devil with regard to certain forms of an elitist, disintegrative individualism with a strong sense of entitlement, which also do not care about social coexistence.

Strazzeri’s book on Weber’s transformation is an excellent academic study. But if we consider its results, it is even more than this. It makes us realise that we must never forget to see society as a whole and the groups of people who populate it as powerful players. We must never underestimate their social and political power – especially when we are not planning revolutions or want to avoid them. We should always ask ourselves what legitimate demands people will make of politics and our social life tomorrow and what interests and power relations will ultimately emerge. If we could always succeed in doing that – it would be quite something, would it not?