Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691150840
- eISBN:
- 9781400844746
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691150840.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Theory
This chapter examines the intellectual prehistory and history of the First World War. Toward the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, German social scientists in particular had ...
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This chapter examines the intellectual prehistory and history of the First World War. Toward the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, German social scientists in particular had already attempted to theorize the connection between war and capitalism, or war and democracy, with authors such as Werner Sombart and Otto Hintze leading the way. Many European and American intellectuals, including most of the classical figures of sociology, did feel called to give their views on the question of war. In many cases, however, their writings did them little credit. How easily social theory can be led astray is plain for all to see in many of the statements made at the time, in that the bellicist arguments already to be found in the nineteenth century were often shamelessly deployed to denounce the enemy.Less
This chapter examines the intellectual prehistory and history of the First World War. Toward the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, German social scientists in particular had already attempted to theorize the connection between war and capitalism, or war and democracy, with authors such as Werner Sombart and Otto Hintze leading the way. Many European and American intellectuals, including most of the classical figures of sociology, did feel called to give their views on the question of war. In many cases, however, their writings did them little credit. How easily social theory can be led astray is plain for all to see in many of the statements made at the time, in that the bellicist arguments already to be found in the nineteenth century were often shamelessly deployed to denounce the enemy.
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780853237990
- eISBN:
- 9781781380734
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9780853237990.003.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
The introduction looks at the emergence of sociology and presents a brief biography of the five main key speakers whose works are collected in this book to trace their relevance in how the science of ...
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The introduction looks at the emergence of sociology and presents a brief biography of the five main key speakers whose works are collected in this book to trace their relevance in how the science of sociology came about. In the early 1900s, the science of sociology was still relatively new and there were signs of it appearing sporadically in research papers like the ones from social scientists such as Emile Durkheim and Dirk Käsler. Sociology gradually became recognized as a science. The introduction also provides a laconic biography of five speakers: George Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Ernst Troeltsch and looks at their importance to the beginnings of sociology.Less
The introduction looks at the emergence of sociology and presents a brief biography of the five main key speakers whose works are collected in this book to trace their relevance in how the science of sociology came about. In the early 1900s, the science of sociology was still relatively new and there were signs of it appearing sporadically in research papers like the ones from social scientists such as Emile Durkheim and Dirk Käsler. Sociology gradually became recognized as a science. The introduction also provides a laconic biography of five speakers: George Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Werner Sombart and Ernst Troeltsch and looks at their importance to the beginnings of sociology.
Christopher Adair-Toteff
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780853237990
- eISBN:
- 9781781380734
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/UPO9781846314100
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
This is a translated edition of five of the nine papers and the responses presented at the first conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) that was held in 1910. These are seminal ...
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This is a translated edition of five of the nine papers and the responses presented at the first conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) that was held in 1910. These are seminal contributions by some of the founders of classical German sociology and social theory, including Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Ernst Troeltsch and Werner Sombart. A substantial introduction discusses the lives and works of the five thinkers, placing them in the context of Germany in the early twentieth century and discussing their personal and societal connections. The works are a testament to the developing thought of key scholars. The year 1910 was a defining year for German sociology. There were still no sociology schools, departments or even professorships, but a significant number of important thinkers had published crucial sociological works. Through such publications Tönnies, Simmel, Weber, Troeltsch and Sombart had founded considerable reputations, and by 1909 the first three had banded together with other scholars to form the DGS. The works show German sociology at a decisive moment, when these thinkers were at their prime and were engaged in building a new society devoted to investigation of social reality based upon sound scholarly principles and free from biased social dogmatics. The topics continue to have relevance and the exchanges provide a lively dimension, one that is not found simply by reading the books of these five founders of sociological thinking.Less
This is a translated edition of five of the nine papers and the responses presented at the first conference of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (DGS) that was held in 1910. These are seminal contributions by some of the founders of classical German sociology and social theory, including Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Ernst Troeltsch and Werner Sombart. A substantial introduction discusses the lives and works of the five thinkers, placing them in the context of Germany in the early twentieth century and discussing their personal and societal connections. The works are a testament to the developing thought of key scholars. The year 1910 was a defining year for German sociology. There were still no sociology schools, departments or even professorships, but a significant number of important thinkers had published crucial sociological works. Through such publications Tönnies, Simmel, Weber, Troeltsch and Sombart had founded considerable reputations, and by 1909 the first three had banded together with other scholars to form the DGS. The works show German sociology at a decisive moment, when these thinkers were at their prime and were engaged in building a new society devoted to investigation of social reality based upon sound scholarly principles and free from biased social dogmatics. The topics continue to have relevance and the exchanges provide a lively dimension, one that is not found simply by reading the books of these five founders of sociological thinking.
Chad Alan Goldberg
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226460413
- eISBN:
- 9780226460697
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226460697.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology
Through a comparison of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, this chapter identifies two patterns in how they conceived the relationship between modern capitalism and the Jews. On ...
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Through a comparison of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, this chapter identifies two patterns in how they conceived the relationship between modern capitalism and the Jews. On the one hand, modern economic life is described as the universalization of a Jewish spirit. On the other hand, modern capitalism is described as superseding Jewish contributions that made it possible. These two patterns, it is argued, reproduce in secularized form cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. The chapter suggests that cultural schemas derived from Christian theology shaped the thinking of Marx, Simmel, Sombart, and Weber by way of their religious backgrounds, formal schooling, and/or the philosophical tradition of German idealism. The chapter concludes that contemporary scholars should not abandon historical inquiry into the social carriers of capitalist rationality in favor of an ahistorical approach to economic life. Instead, social scientists must become more historical in a double sense: in regard to the groups they study, so as to avoid essentializing them, and in regard to themselves, so as to become more attentive to how the social scientist’s own internalized history shapes his or her vision and division of the social world.Less
Through a comparison of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber, this chapter identifies two patterns in how they conceived the relationship between modern capitalism and the Jews. On the one hand, modern economic life is described as the universalization of a Jewish spirit. On the other hand, modern capitalism is described as superseding Jewish contributions that made it possible. These two patterns, it is argued, reproduce in secularized form cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. The chapter suggests that cultural schemas derived from Christian theology shaped the thinking of Marx, Simmel, Sombart, and Weber by way of their religious backgrounds, formal schooling, and/or the philosophical tradition of German idealism. The chapter concludes that contemporary scholars should not abandon historical inquiry into the social carriers of capitalist rationality in favor of an ahistorical approach to economic life. Instead, social scientists must become more historical in a double sense: in regard to the groups they study, so as to avoid essentializing them, and in regard to themselves, so as to become more attentive to how the social scientist’s own internalized history shapes his or her vision and division of the social world.
Francesca Trivellato
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780691178592
- eISBN:
- 9780691185378
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691178592.003.0009
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Finance, Accounting, and Banking
This chapter focuses on three giants of modern social thought: Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart. In their efforts to define what constituted modern capitalism and how it came into being, each ...
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This chapter focuses on three giants of modern social thought: Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart. In their efforts to define what constituted modern capitalism and how it came into being, each proposed a different role for Jews. Although only Sombart transformed Jews into key actors in the genesis of Western capitalism, all three thinkers appealed to Jews to define how modern capitalism differed from earlier forms of commercialization. As part of this quest, Sombart proposed yet another version of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange, which figured front and center in his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Economic Life), a text that most economic historians justly dismiss but that has exerted an enormous, troubling, and—as of late—contradictory influence on the field of Jewish history.Less
This chapter focuses on three giants of modern social thought: Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Werner Sombart. In their efforts to define what constituted modern capitalism and how it came into being, each proposed a different role for Jews. Although only Sombart transformed Jews into key actors in the genesis of Western capitalism, all three thinkers appealed to Jews to define how modern capitalism differed from earlier forms of commercialization. As part of this quest, Sombart proposed yet another version of the legend of the Jewish invention of bills of exchange, which figured front and center in his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (The Jews and Economic Life), a text that most economic historians justly dismiss but that has exerted an enormous, troubling, and—as of late—contradictory influence on the field of Jewish history.
Eric Schatzberg
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226583839
- eISBN:
- 9780226584027
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226584027.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
In German-speaking countries during the nineteenth century, engineers embraced the new concept of Technik to replace both the medieval category of mechanical arts and the Cameralist discourse of ...
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In German-speaking countries during the nineteenth century, engineers embraced the new concept of Technik to replace both the medieval category of mechanical arts and the Cameralist discourse of Technologie. These engineers adopted Technik as a core part of their professional identity. They used the term to claim all the arts of material production as the province of the engineer. German-speaking engineers produced theoretical writings about Technik as a defense of their social status against perceived hostility from humanist intellectuals. These engineers did so by developing an explicitly cultural understanding of technology, framed in terms of a relationship between Technik and Kultur. Later in the century, this concept was adopted by humanist intellectuals, especially in the emerging field of sociology.Less
In German-speaking countries during the nineteenth century, engineers embraced the new concept of Technik to replace both the medieval category of mechanical arts and the Cameralist discourse of Technologie. These engineers adopted Technik as a core part of their professional identity. They used the term to claim all the arts of material production as the province of the engineer. German-speaking engineers produced theoretical writings about Technik as a defense of their social status against perceived hostility from humanist intellectuals. These engineers did so by developing an explicitly cultural understanding of technology, framed in terms of a relationship between Technik and Kultur. Later in the century, this concept was adopted by humanist intellectuals, especially in the emerging field of sociology.
Chad Alan Goldberg
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780226460413
- eISBN:
- 9780226460697
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226460697.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Comparative and Historical Sociology
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they ...
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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions, emphasized different features of modern society, and disagreed about whether Jews were synonymous with or antithetical to those features, they repeatedly invoked the Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity. In France, Émile Durkheim challenged antisemitic depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. In Germany, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, reproducing in secularized form cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles were invoked to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of the wider society. The book proposes a novel explanation for why Jews became a pivotal cultural reference point yet signified such varied and inconsistent meanings; it rethinks previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America; and it shows that history extends into the present with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.Less
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social thinkers in France, Germany, and the United States sought to understand the modern world taking shape around them. Although they worked in different national traditions, emphasized different features of modern society, and disagreed about whether Jews were synonymous with or antithetical to those features, they repeatedly invoked the Jews as a touchstone for defining modernity and national identity. In France, Émile Durkheim challenged antisemitic depictions of Jews as agents of revolutionary subversion or counterrevolutionary reaction. In Germany, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, Werner Sombart, and Max Weber debated the relationship of the Jews to modern industrial capitalism, reproducing in secularized form cultural assumptions derived from Christian theology. In the United States, William Thomas, Robert Park, and their students conceived the modern city in part by reference to the Jewish immigrants concentrating there. In all three countries, real or purported differences between Jews and gentiles were invoked to elucidate key dualisms of modern social thought. The Jews thus became an intermediary through which social thinkers discerned in a roundabout fashion the nature, problems, and trajectory of the wider society. The book proposes a novel explanation for why Jews became a pivotal cultural reference point yet signified such varied and inconsistent meanings; it rethinks previous scholarship on Orientalism, Occidentalism, and European perceptions of America; and it shows that history extends into the present with the Jews—and now the Jewish state—continuing to serve as an intermediary for self-reflection in the twenty-first century.
Irving Howe
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780300203660
- eISBN:
- 9780300210583
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300203660.003.0018
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1985 essay “Why Has Socialism Failed in America?” in which he examines the various reasons for socialism's failure in America. Howe begins by focusing on Karl Marx ...
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This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1985 essay “Why Has Socialism Failed in America?” in which he examines the various reasons for socialism's failure in America. Howe begins by focusing on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, arguing that they anticipated many of the major themes in the discussions about the failure of socialism in the United States. He then turns to Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? and the reasons he put forward to explain the failure of American socialism.Less
This chapter presents Irving Howe's 1985 essay “Why Has Socialism Failed in America?” in which he examines the various reasons for socialism's failure in America. Howe begins by focusing on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, arguing that they anticipated many of the major themes in the discussions about the failure of socialism in the United States. He then turns to Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? and the reasons he put forward to explain the failure of American socialism.
Zosia Halina Archibald
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199682119
- eISBN:
- 9780191762727
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199682119.003.0003
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Archaeology: Classical
This chapter explores the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of the discourse on ancient economies, and seeks to apply recent models and concepts to the north Aegean area. Twentieth-century ...
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This chapter explores the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of the discourse on ancient economies, and seeks to apply recent models and concepts to the north Aegean area. Twentieth-century historians of antiquity have followed their nineteenth-century forebears in emphasizing the close connection between the social and the economic. The connection is explored in terms of market relations, focusing particularly on the demand for markets, whether among Xenophon's ‘Cyrean’ mercenaries, trying to get across north-west Asia Minor and serving in south-eastern Thrace; or in terms of the regulations for selling or purchasing slaves and pack animals at Abdera. The demand for particular commodities was driven by social expectations which, in the northern Aegean, were led by the high-ranking followers and associates of the ruling dynasties. Evidence within the north Aegean region suggests a different set of social emphases from the impressions given by Athenian drama and forensic oratory.Less
This chapter explores the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of the discourse on ancient economies, and seeks to apply recent models and concepts to the north Aegean area. Twentieth-century historians of antiquity have followed their nineteenth-century forebears in emphasizing the close connection between the social and the economic. The connection is explored in terms of market relations, focusing particularly on the demand for markets, whether among Xenophon's ‘Cyrean’ mercenaries, trying to get across north-west Asia Minor and serving in south-eastern Thrace; or in terms of the regulations for selling or purchasing slaves and pack animals at Abdera. The demand for particular commodities was driven by social expectations which, in the northern Aegean, were led by the high-ranking followers and associates of the ruling dynasties. Evidence within the north Aegean region suggests a different set of social emphases from the impressions given by Athenian drama and forensic oratory.
Vike Martina Plock
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474427418
- eISBN:
- 9781474434607
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474427418.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It ...
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The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It introduces subsequent chapters and situates the argument of the book in the context of existing scholarship on modernism and fashion.Less
The introduction examines how theorists at the turn of the twentieth century conceptualised fashion and began to associate it with such concepts as ‘novelty’, ‘standardization’ and ‘capitalism’. It introduces subsequent chapters and situates the argument of the book in the context of existing scholarship on modernism and fashion.
